Comic for Wednesday, January 29th, 2020
It’s a page!
I think I’ve perfected the art of posting a page for the week just as ya’ll reckon I’ll miss it and give up on me posting one 😀
I think it was noted back when Arkady was getting roughed up that he, like many Family mages, tends to be quite a bit more durable than most people. Most of the Family mages have some degree of natural talent to boost their physical durability (we also saw this with Camilla to a much greater extent).
I’ll leave you guys to imagine on how young!Naomi broke her arm, though we may hear more about the incident in the future, but I assure you it was as ridiculous as you expect.
Obviously, despite not being a Family mage, Naomi takes that to levels that even Family mages tend to find ridiculous, as she doesn’t even really seem to understand the idea of being injured beyond needing to take a nap occasionally. Sort of like Naomi only seems to have a vague grasp about how most people navigate around furniture instead of vaulting over it.
Sorry pages continue to be late… lot of things to tackle right now.
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Page probably won’t be up till tomorrow. Doesn’t look like good odds of getting it finished tonight, so figured I’d give an update. I will miss probably 1 update the week after next rate at this rate (due to travel and not having a buffer currently).
I blame this on Dave Howe, Just_IDD, the Democrats, Russia,, Candace Owens and Kaitlin Bennett.
…going to be one more day. Here’s the schedule as best I can estimate right now:
Tomorrow -> Page
Next Wesneday (12th) -> Page
Week after (19th) -> Page/25% chance missed (I have set aside time to draw this page ahead of time currently).
Week after -> Page will be late in week/50% chance missed (I plan to draw this page when I get back, but a lot of things might mess up that plan)
Last Month of Feb & March -> Light at the end of the tunnel and happy fun times all around with pages on time (this always happens as I predict, doesn’t it).
Long story short I will be travelling for 2 weeks in the middle of this month. This is an even I was largely prepared for that, but the world around me (particularly my work) was not prepared for it, and thus turmoil.
I’ll keep you updated… Eventually one of these lights at the end of the tunnel will be the real one where I quit my day job… not as far from that as I once was (mostly due to another hobby of mine).
I think I speak for Glider here, too, as I ask you to keep your ears open – if one of these lights at the end of the tunnel turns out to be a train, we want you to get off the track that train is on before it runs over you and we have to make up our own stories.
Write our own stories. Yeah. No one wants to see that happen. Watch out for trains!
And buses. At my work place, pushing people under buses is a popular pastime. Mostly metaphorical buses, but I’m getting closer….
Thanks for the update! The updates are often entertaining and certainly generate some entertaining responses. Hope you are going somewhere fun for two weeks.
@past, things happen when they happen. You STILL update more often than some of the other comics I read online. One updates twice a month usually, rarely 3 times and occasionally skips complete months.
… People don’t normally vault over furniture?!
*NOW* you tell me! I really could’ve used this information on Tuesday. Sigh.
Well, at least I have insurance.
(Just kidding. I mean, I *do* have insurance, but I totally did not hospitalize myself vaulting over furniture improperly. I mean, I’m 48. I should know by now how to vault over furniture properly. By that, I mean walk around it, because people glare at you if you just vault over furniture when you’re around people.)
It is easy to tell which furniture should be vaulted, and which should not.
If it is against a wall, it is not intended to be vaulted. Otherwise, jumping it is fair game.
….uh…I knew that!
(ow)
Five-wheeled office chairs are not wise to vault, regardless of their locations. I actually know this one from experience, no joke. I mean, technically, it was somebody else’s experience, but I was around to help them up and do my best to not laugh. (I failed the second part, but they took it well.)
Look they are perfectly okay to vault, if you can vault them without needing to use it for support. Like Naomi.
That was my thought as well. They’re not unvaultable, they merely require a large investment in the vaulting skill.
Also laughing at those who fail harmlessly while doing stupid things only helps them learn faster.
Ah. That does seem reasonable. The exact amount of weight applied to the chair was not actually obvious to me, since I was, as mentioned, a bystander for the spectacle rather than a participant.
Though, I feel the need to point out, that’s not vaulting you’re talking about, that’s jumping. Vaulting is specifically the act of using an object to translate some of your horizontal momentum into vertical momentum to get over an object. Maybe this is quibbling. I mean, I did talk about vaulting over chairs by walking around them, which is also technically not vaulting over them.
… I suppose I could use a vaulting pole, like they use in the Olympics. But the problem there is the chair back isn’t that high up, the ceiling is higher, but when I’m considering pole vaulting it suddenly doesn’t seem very high. Also, on the other side of said chair is, depending on ones position, a set of foam stairs for our handicapped cat, a garage/workshop cabinet, a computer, a monitor, a gaming console, a table with various partially disassembled technological things (this changes over time) and usually tools to disassemble or reassemble such things (this also changes over time but it’s a little more static), and another chair. None of these things seems like a really advisable landing spot.
I do appreciate your assistance, but I think I will continue to vault over these chairs by walking around them as I have been.
If you’re tall enough, you could try the Riker approach to chairs.
I took almost 20 seconds to realize what you were trying to convey there. I was taking the Riker approach to chairs since before there was a next generation of Star Trek. Admittedly, that series started while I was in high school, and that’s a bit trickier to pull off if you’re in a classroom where the chairs have desks attached to them, especially if the attachment point reaches all the way back to the back of the chair. I wasn’t tall enough to pull off the most extreme case of that.
Kids in junior high and elementary school may have a distinct advantage in using chairs like that, because many schools have scaled chairs for the kids (possibly per grade, even.) This enabled me to start doing that much earlier than I otherwise would’ve been able to. Also having a certain amount of bounce as well, though bouncing over the back of the chair tended to raise teacher ire if they noticed.
All of that having been said, sitting in a chair is very different from traversing through the space in which a chair resides. I note this, because there’s cats in my apartment, and they can be sitting in any chair, or lying anywhere on the floor, at any point in time. That having been said, they’re much less likely to react quickly if they’re in a chair, so you really have to be careful to not sit on them.
I always enjoy when Naomi shows up. “It does that sometimes”, and the flip over the bar… perfect.
Yeah, Naomi has an entertainingly dry wit when she isn’t causing pratfalls (or performing them, “…I fell through it…”), She’s my favourite change of pace from all the skullduggery. ^^
To expand on what i wrote on the last page, we do not know how Naomi got her extraordinary monstrous boost abilities. We assume that the gene modders hit the jackpot, and Naomi is a bit of a slacker.
But what if Naomi is not a slacker and was born with modest boosting ability. Then worked very very hard to train her boost ability and discovered that their was simply no limit to how much it could be trained.
The plates on the bar look to me #80 or #100lbs each and the bar is I think #20 for a total of #340 to #420lbs not enough to seriously strain Naomi’s bench press limit, but suppose she is doing endurance training, say 10 sets of 20 reps would be a workout worthy of a superhero.
I think it’s a bit a both. The reason I think Naomi was born with/naturally developed her powers to an absurd extent is sort of her attitude towards them. If I had to guess, she’s had them since she was very young. As pages like this and previous references indicate, she barely understands things like being injured, and has to struggle to not use her power.
I get the feeling that the reason she sometimes struggles in fights is because she’s so used to holding back. She can rip off arms and fling armor people around like toys when she is serious, but she’s more oriented toward sports where she actively avoids trying to hurt people.
I suspect she also works harder than her attitude might imply though, as she seems extremely competitive. There’s been some references that she was close to on top of the sporting world for some of their fictional sports… she met the Consul, and seems to know fairly important people. Not only did she meet the Consul, but the Consul instantly recognized her in a bloody shirt with black hair out of context.
I sort of suspect Naomi was a bit like Saitama from One Punch Man (though obviously a much less exaggerated case), with so much natural talent and such high competitiveness, she got to a point where no one could really compete with her and got bored, so decided to go save the world instead. That’s my best guess to her backstory anyway from the context clues so far.
The only other detail was that I think somewhere it was mentioned that Naomi has a little sister, so if we ever see her sister, we’d have a clue how genetic her power is.
I agree with this. It’s not that Naomi was born with ungodly boosting. She was born with innate boosting, but nowhere near to the level she’s trained it.
However, she’s been training it since before she knew how to say ‘Eidos’, so it’s a much more natural thing for her to boost than to do other magic. As a result, she has a very strong inclination to try to just boost through challenges rather than use other, less comfortable skills.
I’m unfamiliar with One Punch Man, as I didn’t hear of it until people started running around trying to knock people out on the street with one punch. I understand that it’s not reasonable for the author of that strip to have anticipated real world people would attempt to do in real life what they draw their characters doing.
Sigh. I need to run downstairs to get a delivery order. Pardon me while I boost enough to jump out the window and survive. Oh, wait, that’d be doing the same thing. Also I am not now, and have never been Naomi. At least, as far as I can remember.
Try growing your hair longer and dying it purple? This may improve your Naomi-ness.
This may work well for cosplay. I suspect it works less well for surviving falls and one punch challenges.
I’m pretty sure the bare dome would keep anyone from getting confused, including Reality.
Also, considering that I’m allergic to a bunch of stuff, including chlorinated water, and I have dark brown hair, I feel like dying my hair purple is likely not a great idea anyway.
I’m thinking purple spray on hair. That’s a thing. Probably.
I couldn’t find it online. But spray on hair is a thing, and spray on hair color is a thing, so?
And how are you going to get over your allergies unless you try?
Chlorinated water is good for you. It delivers plenty of vitamin Cl.
Pages are welcome whenever you get to them, so long as you *do* get to them!
I kind of thought she *did* answer at least one of the questions – she was there to check on Tyler (and got distracted after finding he was gone).
I hope you tackle more things than tackle you. Sympathies and commisserations.
I get the feeling that Arkady is perceptively noting that Naomi answered the literal parts of the question, but not the “why” part of the question. Technically, yes, her hair sometimes is black, but that doesn’t answer why it is sometimes black. Yes, coming to see Tyler would explain why she was at a hospital, but in the gym lifting weights, less so.
My guess is that Naomi is waiting for someone, or just got distracted and is larking about.
Seconded – Happy to see pages when they appear, the more the happier, of course, but worth waiting for regardless 🙂
Curious how boosting works for Naomi though; does she need to build up muscle because the boost is proportional to her actual strength,or at least to prevent her muscles getting shredded when she is boosting?