![[0919] Cutie Pie](/comics/2017-09-11-0919-cutie-pie.png "[0919] Cutie Pie")
I have posted the top 12 of this year’s artwork contest:
- Sandra: My photos are terrible! And my drawings are even worse! I’m the world’s worst artist!
- Larisa: Don’t be so hard to yourself. This seven-year-old boy from Guatemala is clearly worse.
- Larisa: Besides, you’re really smart!
- Sandra: Not as smart as Landon.
- Larisa: And pretty!
- Sandra: Not as pretty as you.
- Larisa: And reliable!
- Sandra: Not as reliable as Samweis Gamgee.
- Larisa: And the most adorable cutie pie in the whole world!
- Sandra: I don’t know how to feel about this!
- Larisa: Your dad needs to be locked up for giving you an X chromosome!
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At least with Larisa you never have to worry about needing to read between the lines!
FYI: Samweis Gamdschie is the German name of Samwise Gamgee. And, yes, I agree he is a good example of reliability, even more than the Old Faithful 😀 .
Well this was unexpected, I didn’t know Larisa swung that way. Of course their is that strip where Larisa kisses Sandra and says, “I kissed a girl and I liked it.” Too bad for Landon.
Actually I doubt that Landon has anything to worry about.
Question: When did Landon find out about the Wolfram Syndrome? Or does he know not?
Too relatable…
@ ajgelado:
I suppose Novil forgot to re-translate the name back to English for the English version of the comic.
I think that’s supposed to be a Y chromosome in the last panel.
@ Walter:
Larissa does not swing that way, hence why she wishes Sandra had a Y chromosome.
… Larissa must never obtain any tech/magic from the webcomic El Goonish Shive.
@ Discord:
Wait, nevermind.
Me neither, Sandra, me neither.
@ Thisguy:No She must not
If you always compare yourself to the best in each category, you’re doomed to a lot of disappointments … particularly if you’re prepared to look as far afield as Samwise Gangee, who is not only not from around there, but not even real.
– Honestly, if you have to look as far as Samwise to find someone more reliable, you’re a star in your own right.
There are something like 9 billion people in this world. It is almost impossible to be the best in the world at anything – we hear how hard Olympic Athletes work for their victories.
But you’re the person that’s there where you are. You’re the one that your friends and family have. You don’t need to be the world’s best – it is enough to be good. Smart enough to avoid most stupid mistakes and learn from the rest, pretty enough to avoid being repulsive, caring enough to lend a hand when they need you, reliable enough to earn trust.
We all have our down days … you don’t have to be perfect. Just try to be good.
@ dragonsister:
There are only Seven and a Half Million at the moment
I don’t think we are ready for an extra Billion People…
…unless we can send them to colonize Outer Space
@ Discord:
Men are XY Women are XX. Which is why Color Blindness being a Recessive Gene on the X chromosome makes men more likely to be color blind.
Reminds me of Lugh of the Tuatha De Dannan. He went to the hall of Nuada the king of the Irish gods, but was told that only those who showed perfection in a skill or craft would be allowed admittance. Lugh is a warrior, craftsman, historian, poet, smith, and harper demonstrated his great talent, but was refused because the hall already gods who could do these things. Then he asked the door keeper if there were those who could do all of these things and the door keeper admitted that there were none and so Lugh was granted admittance.
Anyway long story short. Sandra shouldn’t doubt her ability to do all of these things even if she is not the pinnacle of them.
@ Christian Dauz: Ehh, it depends on where they all go. Europe would be swamped, America might be able to take it if we doubled the number of cities and greatly increased the density of our existing ones, Asia would cry, Oceania would be overflowing into the ocean, Antartica would just kill them all, South America could, but not without significant ecological degradation, but Africa has the capabilities to support the next billion people, though much of (especially central) Africa still doesn’t have the government or economic stability yet to really manage that kind of influx of people, but according to forecasts they’re going to need to get there in about the next quarter of a century.
I’m surprised Larisa hasn’t become bi-curious yet.
Sandra’s look in the last panel…
😀
Nah, this ship won’t sail. Not enough dicks involved for Larisa’s taste ^^
@ Regis Earsquake:
Thus, Larisa’s comment on the unfortunate surplus of X chromosomes….
Regis Earsquake wrote:
I mean, you don’t know…
@ ajgelado:
I was trying to figure this out. I was thinking it was some cheesy attempt to not violate a copyright and I was coming here to say you don’t need to do that, you can refer to a fictional character in other works. Glad to learn the truth!
I’m pretty sure Cloud love the fact Sandra has two x chromosomes.
Genetics is probably not Larisa’s strong point.
Shouldn’t the last line be “Your dad needs to be locked up for not giving you a Y chromosome!”? Because she’d get an X either–wait no I get it now. This does make sense.
The point of ideal objects are that they’re perfect as a thought concept only, and don’t actually exist in reality. So for any one person to actually be completely perfect at anything is physically impossible. So while you may not be perfect at something, it’s important to realize that no one else is, either.
Christian Dauz wrote:
We are not ready for the number of people we have now; we have been exhausting the resources of our spaceship for generations. Back when I was a boy scout, there was alarm that the American breadbasket was losing soil at a perilous rate. We are still punching ourselves in the breadbasket.
This will not end well.
@ knite:
Regis Earsquake wrote:
A package FexEx wouldn’t ship.
Clarification for non-english readers: Samwise Gamgee is that hobbit who travelled beside Frodo in Lord of the Rings.
(you guys have no idea how many variations of his name we’ve seen in those poor attempts to translate it to Russian)
You fools! The shippers will destroy us all!
@ LeftAnswer:
As they do with every fandom.
@ Walter:
The technology of even half a century ago couldn’t support the current population, but science progressed to fill the need. And it continues to do so.
I wonder what Cloud would think of those last two panels.
WHY MY FIRST REACTION WAS THAT LARISSA WANTS TO SEE SANDER x CLOUD YAOI?
Fujoshi have corrupted me. I’m done.
Sandra’s face on the last panel is one of the best you’ve ever done Powree
Nonsens wrote:
Specifically, it was his gardener (to not confuse him with Merry or Pippin).
@ Walter:
As far as I can recall she hasn’t told him ‘on camera’ yet.
erejnion wrote:
That sounds very Larisa.
HMRC4EVR wrote:
And we haven’t seen any reaction from the other characters or himself that he knows.
@ erejnion:
Nothing to do now but commit Sudoku, I would assume.
Yes, I meant the puzzle game, it’s a joke.
@ Discord:
No, it’s supposed to be X. Re-read it. Gender of human babies is determined by which chromosome the father passes to his child of his pair, presumably an X & a Y, where the Y is responsible for testosterone production that results in the fetus developing into a boy, and subsequently a man. The LACK of a Y chromosome under normal circumstances, (better than 99% of the time, as I understand it,) causes the fetus NOT to be exposed to the ‘masculinizing hormone’ testosterone, and subsequently develop into a girl. (Also better than 99% of the time; it is possible for a fetus with an XX pair of ‘sex-chromosomes,’ if exposed to the right amount of masculinizing hormones, or chemicals that mimic their effects sufficiently well, at key points in development, to develop into a boy, phenotypically, and subsequently develop into a man, I think, without a single Y chromosome in their bodies.*
Sandra plainly has two X chromosomes (as she’s a girl,) and Larisa’s remark, “Your dad needs to be locked up for giving you an x chromosome!” expresses her wish that he’d donated to Sandra a Y chromosome instead, which would (unless she also happened to be immune to testosterone, a very rare condition that causes GENOTYPICALLY male babies to be born PHENOTYPICALLY female, despite their tiny developing bodies to be producing testosterone, their bodies ignore it, and develop into girls and women whose only outwardly unusual traits are that they are exceedingly female, as testosterone has no effect on them,) made her a BOY, and *he’d* now be developing into a man.
As for Larisa “swinging that way,” in other remarks, um, no… whether or not she does, expressing a fondness for a friend, wishing he/she had different, more let’s say compatible or complementary plumbing, for the purposes of, for example, recreational reproductive efforts, or perhaps for other reasons, does not make Larisa a lesbian, not that there’d be anything wrong with that.
Besides, maybe it isn’t just attraction, maybe she’s wishing Sandra had a penis that Larisa could use, in conjunction with any one or more of her orifices, to distract her/him or whatever, from feeling bad about lacking photographic or artistic talent.
(By contrast, if Larisa suggested Woo go hang out in the woods for a while, and decided to console Sandra with her tongue and/or fingers… then you’d maybe have an argument in that direction, but… unless the whole thing where Larisa became a succubus was one of those lark, throw-away, non-canon story arcs, it begs the question: do the normal ways of human sexuality and attraction even APPLY to them, or her?)
Anyway… I digress.
*(SINCE the genes contain the code to make you into EITHER a boy or a girl, where the DNA specifies the precursor structures to such things as penis, scrotum, and testes, or alternatively the clitoris, labia, and ovaries, the individual cells and tissues IN those precursor structures (which we all have, and which are indistinguishable as to sex very early in development,) the body uses chemical messengers, hormones, to direct how they develop, that is, WHICH parts of the code to use, later, to adapt those precursor structures into the appropriate parts that will be needed, years… decades, usually, actually, down the line, for the purpose of making the next generation of humans.
The reason it’s so important, in humans, and more broadly mammals, and also probably even more broadly in vertebrates, that GENOTYPICALLY male fertilized eggs eventually become phenotypically male adults, and the same for the female ones, is that the X chromosome has certain bits of genetic code LOST somewhere along the way, that used to live on the Y, perhaps… and which cells and ultimately tissues, and organs, and the body, can’t live well, or at all, withOUT, and if you HAVE a lot of XY females running around, they are going to be carrying some ova (egg cells) that contain a Y chromosome, which in the event the father (GT XY and PT XY) passes an X, probably nothing goes wrong, and the result is (or should be, according to its genes,) a perfectly normal boy, (GT XY) BUT if the (GT XY & PT XX) mother passes a Y, and the father (GT XY & PT XY) BOTH pass a Y, the result is a “supermale” baby, who is genotypically YY, and lacking an X, either ends up stillborn, or dies shortly after birth, or so I’ve heard, I’m no geneticist. That child could be immune to testosterone, and I don’t think that would help, as the issue here is that he would be deprived of the ability to manufacturer key chemicals his body would need to be able to live for any real, meaningful length of time. No, being YY doesn’t give the baby in question a ripped, buff, chiseled physique, nor a giant phallus. It just makes him dead. The term “supermale” is a bit of a misnomer, when you think about it. A quick doublecheck of my facts turned up a lot of results implying that supermale means the baby would be XXY, rather than YY, but that’s probably because fetuses that are YY end up spontaneously being aborted by the body or suffer fetal-demise, (the fetus dies and starts rotting in the womb… a tragic, and kind of gross thing to think about…) but now I’ve REALLY digressed. Sorry. I do that.
@ Regis Earsquake:
Wait, what’s Larisa’s opinion on strap-ons?
@ genebko:
I picture his reaction as pure confusion–a mix of jealousy, anger, envy, betrayal, sadness, and embarrassment, lastly, at crying piteously while having a raging erection.
I guess it would depend on whether someone showed him pics, or whether he were secretly watching from/hiding in her closet.
If he’s hiding in her closet of course, he’s got no one but himself to blame.
You know someone’s determined to mope when they start comparing themselves to fictional characters.
@ MidoriLuna:
The thing people miss out on in discussions of this is that there IS in fact an upper bound to how many humans the Earth could support. It’s ENORMOUS, and VASTLY higher than the current population, and sadly, this means likely that the human population will continue to increase. Therein lies the problem. THAT increase will unavoidably come at the cost of Earth’s ability to support all the animals we compete with for food, air, water, and space resources, (by which I mean territory, not floating around ‘space’) We will likely continue eating into THAT before meaningfully increasing the percent of the theoretical maximum because that’s easier.
The theoretical maximum is simply the sum, total amount of solar radiation striking the Earth’s surface, divided by the minimum amount of energy required by the average human. If S is the sum total power, in luminous energy striking the Earth, (expressed in or converted to kilocalories, or kC) and R is the average daily caloric requirement of a human being, (which we know is somewhere around 2000 kC/day,) and P is the size of the human population, then…
Pmax = S / R
… for any meaningful length of time. Now… to GET to that, you understand, you have to have humans adapted to eating nothing but fruits, nuts, vegetables, roots, etc., because if you STILL have intermediary consumers, cows, sheep, chickens, pigs, fish, and the like, SOME of that solar energy is effectively wasted (see “the rule of ten”) making animals who do not contribute directly, in terms of their numbers, to the end-strength, as it were, of the human race.
Now, what about cannibalism, you ask? Whatever other human you might feast upon, (assuming you don’t mean metaphorically,) had to get the energy he or she used to build his/her body from somewhere, and the rule of ten basically states that for each pound of one sort of animal, it takes ten of whatever it was eating to make it. This means in effect, considered the other way around, that if you eat ten pounds of your friend’s corpse, you get at most, one additional pound of you produced. The effect is NEGLIGIBLE, and would only help increase the population SLIGHTLY, and besides that’s gross, of course, maybe I just think that because I am privileged to live in a time and place where food is abundant and available and so resorting to cannibalism doesn’t ever even enter my mind, and you’d be almost right. (Almost, because, no lie, I was thinking about cannibalism earlier this VERY DAY. I was out shopping for groceries, and saw this woman in a tight pair of jeans, and I found myself thinking how very, VERY much I’d like to sink my teeth into her bottom… and to suck on her breasts… (okay, not technically cannibalism, as the kind of eating I wanted to do is generally non-destructive,) I wouldn’t have, just to be clear, bitten her pert, perfectly shaped posterior hard… just hard enough to ensure she knows she’s appreciated… but I’ve digressed again. Sorry. I do that.)
Getting back to human overpopulation though… “S” isn’t changing meaningfully over spans of time we need to worry about, as neither the sun’s luminous output, nor the Earth’s surface area, is changing meaningfully with respect to human timespans. R is unlikely to change unless we made a point of selectively breeding or genetically engineering ourselves into smaller, lighter, less-calorie demanding forms, longer incubation periods between generations, (which is a bad idea for other reasons,) We only have the power to change P, as I have done today.
My contribution to NOT making things worse was that instead of approaching the beautiful, voluptuous woman in the tight bluejeans, trying to obtain her phone number, in the hope of taking her home and inseminating her, (preferably repeatedly) I instead thought about her when I got home, alone, and inseminated a wad of paper toilet tissue, which ultimately took far, far, FAR fewer calories than it might have. I estimate it was maybe 10 or 15 minutes of marginally vigorous activity, burning at most a dozen or so calories, and that’s being generous, versus, assuming any potential offspring left none of their own, by my estimation, I saved the Earth the burden of having to support about fifty two million, five hundred fifty nine thousand, nine hundred seventy or maybe nine hundred eighty kilocalories of additional human caloric consumption.
(Based on 365 days per year, times an average livespan of 72 years, times approximately 2000 (kilo)calories required on balance each day = 52,560,000 kilocalories.)
You’re welcome Earth. I am of course ignoring the likelihood that such efforts on my part would be fruitless, no pun intended, but statistically, most of us who make it to adulthood end up being able to get laid occasionally, no matter how monstrously ugly or socially awkward we are, or how much time we spend writing comments on webcomic pages.
Walter wrote:
Yeap — for our current level of technology we’ve far exceeded the planet’s carrying capacity — we need to be far more efficient to maintain even the number of people we have now for the long term, let alone any more.
Eman wrote:
Also not true, as there’s no functional ecosystem without a full array/variety of animals and plants, and that’s not possible with the entire planet turned into farms and housing.
Something else to consider is that the population boom is largely due to the industrialization and modernization of most nations, which then decreases child mortality and raises both longevity and quality of life. Such as the case with both China and India. But historically, after that modernization, the population tends towards actually leveling out as society adapts. In fact, both China and Indias birth rates have been steadily trending downwards since the 1960s, as more and more of the younger generations begin to realize you don’t need to have ten children to assure that some of them would survive to adulthood and pass on the family lineage. In fact, there’s some speculation that further modernization will end up creating a situation where the population begins to dwindle and you end up with an aging population without a workforce to economically support them, as with the generational situation in Japan.
*facepalm*
This place got weird again…
Little too far IMO with the graphic descriptions, Eman.
TvTropesgotmehooked
Little too far IMO with the graphic descriptions, Eman.
What? One teenage girl half-hugging the other is too much?
Have you ever looked at the one with Woo and his wife on the dining table… 😉
Anyway: Thanks for making something funny out of last comics not-so-successful-joke. Larisa is hilarious with Sandra! 😀
@ Nobody:
You screwed that response up, didn’t ya.
Much like Woo on the table… 😉
Comic is great.
@ HMRC4EVR:
There’s no room for any subtext!
@ oledakaajel:
…But girls don’t have penises!”