Grrl Power Thread #2: The Most Common Super Power

[Traab]

Switzerland. At this point, we're just used to the fact that everything here costs up to twice as much as even just 50k away across the border, especially if there's service by actual people involved.

Also, yeah. What is minimal wage in the US, just to ask? I think it's 2000 dollars-ish around here for unskilled jobs, (though there's no formal minimal wage laws in a lot of industries), though that is seriously poor. 24 times that would be a seriously high wage, even around here.

I believe the current federal minimum wage is 7.25 an hour, though most jobs, even bottom rung type jobs, tend to pay more. Also, i think there has been talk to raise it to 10 an hour because thats just stupidly low. Even 10 an hour is incredibly low. I did the math, and if I wanted to live in a small but decent apartment and take care of everything myself, I would need to make at least 15 an hour without overtime, depending on how much in the way of extras I wanted to pay for, like cable tv and internet and a house phone and cellphone, etc.

As for business. My dad owned a car stereo shop back before I was born and years afterwards till it went under. (freaking stereo chain stores setting up literally all around him) Even a business that ISNT struggling will often have the owner taking home very little. Because a smart owner reinvests and expands as much as he can, so virtually all the profit from running the place goes back into making the place even better in hopes that it will bring in even more profit, etc etc etc. And while its different here, as the owners are the only employees (well till today at least) in dads business, the workers get paid, the bills get paid, and if anything is left over, he gets paid. If not? Then he doesnt get paid.

So this is awesome. Sydney not only never has to worry about bills again, she is free to invest some serious cash in their store if this business boom continues. It will obviously die down a lot once the initial frenzy is over, but I bet people coming in and buying something just to hear the latest stories will keep a solid trickle of new money coming in for the foreseeable future. Hell, even if it doesnt continue and they keep not making a profit, depending on how bad the not making a profit thing is, she could probably afford to keep it open herself and treat it as her enjoyable, if expensive, personal hobby.

[Calemyr]

Yeah, this is what I meant: it was failing, and now it definitely won't be.

Oh, well, I can't argue that. It's just not the point. Up until yesterday, it was failing and Sydney was co-owner of the shop. So her take-home from it may not have been very good for the last year. That was my point. Still, the birth of Halo has certainly turned the tides in her financial life, both as a business owner and an individual.

[Avilan the Grey]

You need to try a few more actually good restaurants.

High-quality ingredients freshly prepared by a really skilled chef.

Yes. It is amazing. However the treshold seems still to be somewhere between $20 and $30 (for a lunch, maybe 10 more for dinner) where you either start going for the extra special food (as in weird stuff) or just make less of it and put the asparagus in a 40 degree crossed angle and sprits the sauce around (and there isn't enough of it).

[Discus-Spinner]

I still say that even if she is making millions a year now, charging someone 40 bucks for lunch is gouging unless there is something special about it.

And there probably is. Archon will want this very expensive team in perpetual peak condition, so every dish may be assessed by professional dieticians. And the chefs could probably be running their own expensive restaurants uptown, if they hadn't been offered large paycheques of their own to take on the interesting challenge of keeping a bunch of semi-crazies with non-standard metabolisms interested and not all slipping out to the cheap-but-good franchise joints that we know are on the ground floor of the same building. And I bet they don't repeat a menu in any given month.

She ate some freaking pasta dishes. PASTA! The components of fettuccine alfredo probably ran 5 bucks for her portion of it.

Oh dear. There is considerably more to "pasta" than fettucine alfredo (nice though that can be). Penne with lemon and vodka, ravioli with lobster, tagliatelle with wild boar ragu... All to die for when they're done right, believe me. Though for that money, the pasta ought to be freshly hand-made, to be sure.

However the treshold seems still to be somewhere between $20 and $30 (for a lunch, maybe 10 more for dinner) where you either start going for the extra special food (as in weird stuff) or just make less of it and put the asparagus in a 40 degree crossed angle and sprits the sauce around (and there isn't enough of it).

"Weird" is a subjective term. So far as I'm concerned, very little rates as "weird" until you get into the Michelin-starred, three-figure-prices places. Now, gin-and-tonic-flavoured foam, or savoury doughnuts stuffed with slow-cooked ox cheek - those permit the word. Delicious, but ... idiosyncratic. But you'll probably be paying rather more than forty bucks for those meals.

Flashy presentation can be fun, too, although it can substitute for substance. But you won't get much of that with cefeteria service.

Now, the other question here is whether the non-super support staff in that building have to have a special food allowance to enable them to use the cafeteria.

[Traab]

Oh dear. There is considerably more to "pasta" than fettucine alfredo (nice though that can be). Penne with lemon and vodka, ravioli with lobster, tagliatelle with wild boar ragu... All to die for when they're done right, believe me. Though for that money, the pasta ought to be freshly hand-made, to be sure.

Yeah, but this is fettuchini alfredo and an antipasto. This isnt some super fancy meal, it doesnt have anything in it as named outside of pasta and cheese. Not even chicken! Speaking of which, I can buy a premade chicken fettuchini alfredo big enough to feed the whole family with leftovers from costco for 13 bucks. Thats a couple POUNDS of the stuff for nearly a third what she paid for herself. (its freaking delicious too) Im just saying that we went on a big tangent talking about steakhouses and such where expensive meals happen, and overlooked the fact that she didnt eat any big ticket items. She ate a couple dishes of pasta. Yeah its not exactly ragu poured over a dollar a pound box of boiled pasta, but its also not a 2 pound lobster served over a 18 ounce prime rib steak.

*EDIT* Also, dont forget, they were not wearing fancy dress or anything, so they clearly werent at any high falutin hoity toity restaurant either. Sydney peggy and brooke were in uniform, the guys were wearing their tshirts. And achilles was eating a damn burger.

[AvatarVecna]

*EDIT* Also, dont forget, they were not wearing fancy dress or anything, so they clearly werent at any high falutin hoity toity restaurant either. Sydney peggy and brooke were in uniform, the guys were wearing their tshirts. And achilles was eating a damn burger.

He was also using the phrase "mouth feel" and Sydney was the only one complaining; you'd think any restaurant worth it's snooty waiter would have something to say about that.

[Discus-Spinner]

Okay, it was specifically fettucini alfredo. (I'd still bet on freshly-made fettucini, though.) That wouldn't have been all the meal, though; antipasto was mentioned, and that's pretty well open-ended - cured meats, assorted Italian cheeses, artichoke hearts... And we don't know what Sydney had for dessert, but given her geeky and impulsive personality, and the options I'd expect in a good cafe... She may have had more than one. I'm kind of amazed she could walk afterwards.

As for burgers - there's burgers and burgers. The theoretical upper bound for the price is in four figures, which, yes, is just plain stupid and showing off, but doing something with optimal cuts of beef and stuff can turn a burger into something of a luxury dish with very little trouble.

Anyway, we don't know how much Achilles spent on that burger; it's entirely possible that Sydney's forty bucks was a little high. She does have eyes literally bigger than her stomach in some of the art...

[AvatarVecna]

Anyway, we don't know how much Achilles spent on that burger; it's entirely possible that Sydney's forty bucks was a little high. She does have eyes literally bigger than her stomach in some of the art...

While I won't deny that Sydney would definitely do something like that, I don't think she'd do something like that (splurge on a big meal) and then turn around and complain about how much it costs. Even Sydney's a bit too down-to-earth to do something like that; from what it looks like, she got was she thought was a normal meal, maybe with a good dessert, and was surprised that it turned out to be $40.

[Traab]

You know, I wonder if this will trigger the start of a bit of a timeskip soon? The standard "Main character gets a lot of money then proceeds to waste it doing stupid stuff and learns a valuable lesson" type story arcs. So a few panels showing sydney buying a car, getting fancy nerd memorabilia, maybe even moving to a bigger house or something. Then its two weeks later and she is moaning about not being able to afford the overly expensive lunches anymore because due to her getting an advance it will eb another week before she gets paid again. It would make sense, its pretty well known that a LOT of lotto winners and others who come into big money tend to waste it really fast due to lack of self control. At least she will be getting steady paychecks that are absurdly big money, so she wont become poor because she was stupid with her lump sum.

[Discus-Spinner]

That sounds a bit too prosaic for Sydney. I'm not saying that she won't do something dumb with the money - just that she's likely to do something differently dumb.

[Qwertystop]

You know, I wonder if this will trigger the start of a bit of a timeskip soon? The standard "Main character gets a lot of money then proceeds to waste it doing stupid stuff and learns a valuable lesson" type story arcs. So a few panels showing sydney buying a car, getting fancy nerd memorabilia, maybe even moving to a bigger house or something. Then its two weeks later and she is moaning about not being able to afford the overly expensive lunches anymore because due to her getting an advance it will eb another week before she gets paid again. It would make sense, its pretty well known that a LOT of lotto winners and others who come into big money tend to waste it really fast due to lack of self control. At least she will be getting steady paychecks that are absurdly big money, so she wont become poor because she was stupid with her lump sum.

It's a bit different in the case of a lotto winner - getting a single large lump-sum is very different from suddenly having a higher income. Improved general quality-of-life tends to be a sustained cost, so unless the lottery winnings are enough that you can get a significant gain from treating them as an endowment - that is, invest them in something safe and never touch them, only using the return from investment - it's not generally possible to do something that would actually improve your overall situation by a lot, except if perhaps you have debts (that you're actually trying to pay) and it would clear them. Often it's better just to use it to take a vacation, fix something that needs fixing, or otherwise do one-time things, because a lump-sum is not a long-term increase to income - if you can't sustain yourself on investing it, and you can't bootstrap it into a better income via it lasting long enough to pay you through schooling or an extended job-search or moving to somewhere with a better job market, you're not going to be able to make permanent improvements.

[Yuki Akuma]

So I read through the entire archive yesterday.

This comic only updates twice a week? Oh, God. Help. ;.;

[Traab]

So I read through the entire archive yesterday.

This comic only updates twice a week? Oh, God. Help. ;.;

It used to be once every week. For the first 4 YEARS it was once a week on updates. So at least it has doubled in production. But yeah, I wish he could go 3 times a week on this at least. But I get the feeling there is just too much art to draw to make it possible at this point.

[AvatarVecna]

So I read through the entire archive yesterday.

This comic only updates twice a week? Oh, God. Help. ;.;

There is a reason one potential title for this second thread was "And Now We Wait".

[Traab]

I think its truly frightening that the comic has been going for 5 years now and has barely passed 24 hours in universe. Just as terrifying that 5 years of comics amounts to like 2 hours of archive binging

[TheEmerged]

Also, there's simple supply and demand - the restuarants near Archon HQ have likely increased their prices to reflect the clientel showing up. Before you laugh, I remember too well the old Burger Chef across the street from one of the major employers in town when I was a child, and the prices there were sometimes 50 cents higher than the other Burger Chef on the other side of town. The same was true with the diner downtown when I was a teen, before a second diner opened up across the street...

Yes, I'm old enough to remember Burger Chef, stop laughing
I'm also old enough to remember major employers in town, ain't nobody laughing about that.

[Traab]

Ah well, at least now I can picture this.

"Hey Joel, dont worry, we can afford to hire olivia at a decent wage and even pay for health care now!"

"Uhh, why is that?"

"Ah, its just that now I make more in a month than the store makes in two years. I think I can swing covering that until we see if the store stays busy."

[Kantaki]

New comic.

I agree with Sydney, with that name the guy deserves powers. Unfortunatly this isn't a universe where your name has influence on your powers.

[AvatarVecna]

Unfortunatly this isn't a universe where your name has influence on your powers.

Which is now, due it coming up twice, starting to look suspiciously like a plot point.

[Traab]

I think the massive amount of money she just got handed may have broken her already weak levels of self control. Not that I blame her. If I got my annual salary handed to me in a single check and was told I will get these twice a month, I would likely be bouncing off the walls as well. Nothing like having your budget increased 24x over to shove some adrenaline into your system. Once he gets her to calm down a bit and focus, I think he might have fun with her situation. After all, she is a business owner, not just random joe super who needs to know the best way to handle being a future millionaire instead of a regular guy with a small checking account at webster bank. So he will be able to do all sorts of different things for her.

[Yuki Akuma]

I find the author's complaints about bizarrely appropriate superhero names to ring somewhat hollow when his protagonist is Sydney "Uses Mace As A Light Condiment" Scoville.

[Kantaki]

I find the author's complaints about bizarrely appropriate superhero names to ring somewhat hollow when his protagonist is Sydney "Uses Mace As A Light Condiment" Scoville.

Why that? Sydney doesn't have powers that are related to her name. If her powers were heat, fire or capscain related I would agree.
That someone with Sydney’s quirks would build up her resistance to hot food when her name relates to the scale of food hotness isn't that surprising.
I admit that it could be seen one of those „odd coincidence” names but it makes more sense than a guy whose name sounds like teleporter getting teleportation-powers.

[Eldan]

Yeah. If she was a comic book secondary character from the golden age, her name would be something like Spherula Septus or Olga Orbington.

[halfeye]

Why that? Sydney doesn't have powers that are related to her name. If her powers were heat, fire or capscain related I would agree.

Maybe not technically powers, but these pages are canon:

http://grrlpowercomic.com/archives/185

http://grrlpowercomic.com/archives/192

http://grrlpowercomic.com/archives/194

There is another strip where she gets some in her eye.

So that's four pages about Sydney eating very hot food, then her surname is Scoville? That's naming by characteristics.

[Traab]

Yeah. If she was a comic book secondary character from the golden age, her name would be something like Spherula Septus or Olga Orbington.

Or possibly they would get "clever" and name her Harriet Lowman. Sort of like Lance Alvers whose mutant name is Avalanche.

[Qwertystop]

Yeah, I could see Sydney actually thinking about her name as it relates to spiciness and thus deciding to eat lots of spicy food.

[Kantaki]

Or possibly they would get "clever" and name her Harriet Lowman. Sort of like Lance Alvers whose mutant name is Avalanche.

Häh? I'm not sure I get the wordplay behind Harriet Lowman. And I'm sure I will bang my head against the nearest wall if I get a explanation.
Still, could you explain it?

@ halfeye: That's a bit like complaining about a character named Winchester having a interest in guns. Sometimes a persons family name can spark interest in a topic that is related to it. Considering Sydney and the way she tends to act trying to eat the spiciest food possible because of her last name seems relative normal. It isn't even the worst reason to try this.

Yes I admit, her name is oddly fitting but it is a minor quirk and it can be explained. Unlike powers that fit their users name.

[Douglas]

Häh? I'm not sure I get the wordplay behind Harriet Lowman. And I'm sure I will bang my head against the nearest wall if I get a explanation.
Still, could you explain it?

Harriet Lowman = Halo. At least, that's what I think the point was.

[Traab]

Yep, that about covers it.

[Kantaki]

Harriet Lowman = Halo. At least, that's what I think the point was.

If that's the joke I was wrong - I don't want to bang my head against a wall.
Doing it to someone else would be much better.

Aunt Edith says: And it is the explanation. Well unfortunately for my desire to hurt someone I'm too tired and too peaceful to bang anyones head against a wall.