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Grrl Power #1495 - Motivation (Patreon)

Published:
2026-09-14 10:00:16
Imported:
2026-09

Content

Thank you so much for the support! You guys and grrls are awesome!

Yes, you can level up your superpowers by using them. Mostly though, you're just getting better at using them, learning all the tricks and power stunts you can pull off, and well as learning finer control. But the actual power output, in the cases where such a thing can be measured, can be improved as well. That doesn't mean in a decade or two, the whole team will be as powerful as Maxima, but they will be more powerful than they are now. But at some point, age will start to erode that fine control, and pushing their powers to their limits will cause their sciatica to flare up more and more. Super powers don't stop aging. Well, unless your particular suite of powers actually does do that. 

Hiro isn't emasculated by having a woman boss, or by the fact that she's a fair bit stronger than him. I mean, that's what he tells himself, and he almost totally believes it. All his actions support that. He doesn't go sulk in his room or make snippy comments or anything of the sort. That doesn't mean he wouldn't mind beating Max at arm wrestling one day. Those hormonally motivated imperatives are hard to resist. Guys don't mind carrying in the 40 pound bag of dog food or cat litter while the wife/girlfriend carries in the bag with the crackers and instant ramen, and we don't mind getting tasked with getting down something from the high shelf in the kitchen, because all the testosterone swirling around in our brains is whispering to us, "This makes you a man..." So yeah, Hiro would like to be stronger than... well, anyone, if he could swing it. He just doesn't scuff his feet and pout when Max does something out of his tier. 

Speaking of FTL communication, I had 4 paragraphs written suggesting that FTL travel or communication might break something fundamental about the universe, as you'd be violating the physical limits of the rate of information propagation, but... I started posting too late and couldn't articulate why I thought that might screw things up. Not that I'm remotely qualified to lecture meaningfully about advanced physics. It was just a thought I've been kicking around for a while, but I don't think what I was writing was making enough sense to spark any sensible discussion. I'll have to noodle on it and see if I can make it make sense. So in the meantime, just enjoy the page. 

Files

Comments

TrixieTurner

I don’t know about being nettles because max is stronger and a girl but I could certainly see being nettled by the fact she got performance enhancing space goo. The idea it doesn’t matter how naturally talented you are or how hard you work, if someone can just one up you with a spritz from magic space rock.

TrixieTurner

Damn too bad we won’t get that sweaty montage, would have been one of the few highlights this arc.

Fogel

FTL travel of all kinds breaks causality and allows you to cause paradoxes that are effectively time travel. It's best not to think too hard about the hard sci-fi implications of FTL. The simplest example is that a message can arrive before it was sent.

He Who Must Drink Some Coffee

That's exactly why the knights and samurai of old despised crossbows and firearms (to the point that one knight had crossbowmen killed out of hand if they were captured). What's the point of training your entire life if mere technology in the hands of some mercenary swine can kill you? (For that matter, it's why old people like me often despise AI writing. We spent years in libraries and slaving over a hot Selectric to write our dissertations, and now comes something that will write it for you in seconds...)

Michael Obert

Good thing for the hot dog Dabbler's holding that we are skipping the sweaty workout montage.

He Who Must Drink Some Coffee

I'm clearly playing too much Baldur's Gate, since one of the voices in that last exchange hits my brain sounding like Lae'zel. I'll let you guess which one.

Fogel

That's not why people dislike AI. People dislike AI because of its effect on the climate, industrial levels of plagiarism, and the fact that it is frequently wrong, yet people will happily give up their own brain power to it.

Jonathan Charnas

Don't these paradoxes anyway exist in space now? Like, photons going around a black hole, versus those going through a deeper part of its gravity well, if they were emitted at the me time, come out not just red shifted but in theory also delayed, no?

Killianti

Order-of-event contradictions happen IRL, but causality paradoxes do not

Andrew Denton

Now, now, there are enough reasons to dislike AI for everyone to have some.

Phoenix

"Such I hold to be the genuine use of Gunpowder: that it makes all men tall," - Thomas Carlyle in 1834

Greg Morrow

There's something called the "light cone", which is defined as distance^2 equals (ct^2) -- i.e., the parts of space-time that light from the origin will reach. Causality is limited to the surface and interior of the light cone; an event at the origin can affect only other events that are inside the light cone. FTL takes you outside the light cone, so it violates causality. As Fogel says, FTL is cosmologically equivalent to time travel. This equivalence is ultimately a consequence of saying that we don't have space and time independently, we have space-time.

Richard Riley

Any minute now, Math is going to offer to help with that spot of mustard...

Phoenix

Two observers, each in inertial reference frames, can, do, and will disagree on the observed 'time' of an event. Up to and including perceiving a super nova happen twice and other fun things. These are Killanti and Jon's points and astrophysicist have observed out-of-order 'errors' in real life (at least in Earth's frame of reference). The spooky stuff starts to happen when you have two way communication, which passively gathering electromagnetic radiation in an observatory is not. Newton defined for us what an inertial reference frame is, Einstein required as a postulate of (special) relativity that physics works the same regardless of what inertial reference frame you are in, and the logical consequence of these theories is that faster than light two way information exchange will inevitably lead to true causality violations, not just order-of-event disagreements. The classic example is sending "don't do x" back to someone who had sent you "i just did x", and the math mathing out to you being observed receiving the warning before you are observed performing the action. All of this is well accepted and is supported by an abundance of rigorous experimentation and observation. While closed time-like loops are common sense examples of causality violations, causality itself is an assumption of... well the scientific method as a whole, really. Quantum based theories and observations of extremely distant space-time phenomena appear to indicate that the Laws of Physics Don't Care About Your Tidy Cause And Effect, and physicists' freely admit We Don't Know Everything Because Why Would We Have A Job Otherwise. For Newton and his successors, the infinitely large and infinitely small alike broke minds, incited violence, and was directly responsible for deaths (Cantor, Godel, etc). Today we teach it to 18 year-old freshmen. Now, it is our turn to face the memetic cognito-hazards of science and stare bravely into the abyss. Caution in this endeavor is perhaps warranted, for the abyss returns even the boldest gaze.

Mark Magagna

Yes, but they still obey causation, i.e. effects come afterwards. FTL would break that. Pretty much every FTL method can be used for time travel, at least according to our current understanding of how things work. And if our understanding is wrong, it's wrong "at the margins", in the sense that any new theory has to account for an awful lot of observations we've already made. There's not much room for new physics.

Stephen Gilberg

"Do superpowers work like that?" You just saw for yourself.

Town Crier

I am of the opinion that Dabbler would be eating a hotdog with lots of mayo on it.

Phoenix

I have to say it, apologies in advance. The statement that there isn't much room for new physics would come as a shock to most physicists. The sentiment of your overall post however is not controversial. Physics definitely wants to avoid going backwards and retain the consistency we have earned through previous experiments and observations. I only object to the concept that we have mapped out some vast majority of the field with only the 'here there be dragons' at the edges left to define. More like the exact opposite of that. 😂

Otoger

i think FTL comms might be possible with Quantum entanglement, currently we would have an issue with getting the other pair to the destination without breaking them ...

Hugh Eckert

Speak for yourself. I know plenty of women with more upper-body strength than I, and I only get things down from top shelves because I'm taller than most people I know. ;-)

Anton Schleef

I don't have the time to fully debate this right now, but the basic concept of FTL travel _*DOES NOT*_ enable time travel. The simple answer is this: While the traveler is traveling through the universe _time_ is still passing for the universe itself, and thus the traveler will always arrive _after_ they departed in any absolute calculation. The same is for any messages sent at FTL speeds, mostly because speed is factor of distance traveled over time passed, and to calculate the time passed time has to pass for the entire universe as well. Time travel, where a message can be received before it was sent, or a reply received before the original message was sent, _*explicitly*_ requires you to travel _outside_ of the universe itself so that time for you exists in a purely independent manner from the universe, rather than in some dilated relative manner.

Anton Schleef

I found the comments by the two in the back the most humorous, even if I prefer the petanko gals to the kyonyuu gals.

Eric Loken

I had women bosses for most of my career, never bother me at all, heck my immediate superior for a long time is one of my best friends. I also know there are plenty of women stronger than me, and even more men, I almost never think about it. I think guys that do worry about such things have insecurity problems.

JasonAW3

FTL communications and temporal issues. There are those that contend that ANY form of Faster Than Light communications would violate Causality. (In short, something happens after something causes it, which is essentially the definitionof Causality). In other words, if you sent a message out to Cygnus, there should be a time delay between when you sent the message and when the other end receives it. Pretty much a simple concept. However; there are those that argue, "the speed of light limits how fast a message can go from point A to point B. Andover terrestrial distances, this pretty much is the case. BUT, when you include the concept of Quantum Tunneling particals, this gets a bit fuzzy. Not too long ago an experiment was done using Quantum Tunneling to send a particle over a significant distance, which, at the time, was considered instantaneous. Turns out it isn't. It took the particle, an electron emitted from hydrogen 1.8 attoseconds to travel the distance. FYI; 1.8 Attoseconds is roughly 18 to the negative 26 seconds. Way faster than one would expect, and infact, essentially faster than light. But, as the electron was detected AFTER it was sent, no matter how minut the time it took, it was a cause that was followed by a result. So, in short, distance for Quantum Tunneling may actually cause a delay in communications, and distance may affect the delay between the sending and reception of a communication, the message WILL BE received AFTER it was transmitted, not before. Unless black holes are involved, in which case you may get A message before it was sent, but more likely, the message will be scrambled, or possibly from an alternative reality. This also makes the possibility of Faster Than Light travel, relative to both points 'possible', but requires a significant amount of mathematical prestodigitation, that we currently are trying to find out.

Phoenix

Respecting your desire to not fully debate the topic, but responding because you appear to be interested in the topic of special and general relativity. You might find the book "Einstein Explained: Special & General Relativity for the Masses" by Amy Louise Johnson (Author), Christopher Olaf Johnson (Author), Kieran Aaker (Illustrator) worthwhile. It is written to be accessible but the basic concepts and the science is still sound. In particular, the very difficult concept that blew more than a few minds when Einstein first proposed it- that there is no such thing as an 'absolute' or 'universal' reference frame / time clock ticking away and therefore referenceable. Hence the name 'Relativity'. Just a thought!

Matthew Paulin

You could get around this by saying that the communication is not FTL. It just uses some tech that can bridge vast distances in space such as wormholes, portals, quantum entanglement etc. The info is moving at normal speed, but jumping the distance.

eddi_TBH

The B-cup Brigade gets a word in edgewise.

eddi_TBH

In my whole career I had only one woman boss. Government operation. She was the best boss I ever had. Sadly my last. She was getting our department everything we had needed for years, so I retired sure things would be better. A year later I went back to say hi. Not only better, but business had never been so good.

eddi_TBH

"Col. Colt made all men equal."

LucasTheLost

Hey now... Max punching a mountain in half was pretty epic... as was crazy space hat guy laughing at something Sydney said (then noping out when he/she/pomegranate saw Max).

Eric Loken

Hm, apparently I said something that hurt some snowflake's tender little feelings. I do enjoy how the same guys that yell "f*** your feelings!" are very easily butt hurt by someone else expressing their opinion.