Grrl Power #1366 - Ding dang dong

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

Lapha was indeed a guttersnipe at one point, in case you forgot.

I'm pretty sure I've mentioned the following before, but it's been years since whatever page that was, and it's relevant to this page, so I claim author's privilege.

Anyway, I have a distinct memory of a scene from an episode of Thundercats where Panthro finds a chunk of gold, not a vein or some scattered dust, but like a beachball sized boulder of the stuff just sitting on the ground, and he says something to the effect of "Stupid gold! So worthless! Bah!" and he kicks it off a cliff. 

Okay, first off, I know the Thundercats weren't human, and were generally stronger than Joe Sixpack, but if that boulder was half a cubic meter, it would have weighed about 10 tons. Second, gold is chemically very useful. It's an excellent conductor of heat and electricity, and is almost totally chemically inert, and would make a great radiation barrier if cost or weight wasn't a factor. It'd probably also be great to stick in the center of a projectile if you wanted to pack more mass into your shot. A straight-up gold bullet would probably be a bad idea and get jammed up in your barrel immediately, but if it was steel-jacketed, it'd probably be pretty effective. 

Even when I was 13 or however old when Thundercats came out, I was like "Geeze, did gold insult Panthro's mother or something?" It was just bad writing. Some sort of ham-fisted out of place anti-consumerist/capitalist message in a cartoon that was, like most other cartoons of its time, 30 minute long commercials for toys. (Huh, I just checked, Thundercats came out in 1985, so I was indeed 13 at the time.)

So it's not that gold doesn't have value in the wider Grrl-verse, it just doesn't have "it's valuable because we say it is" value. The fact that it's rarer than 90% of other elements on the periodic table is a factor, but once mining comets and fracking all the moons around your local gas giants becomes an option, you're still going to wind up with piles of the stuff. 

I'm not exactly sure what's going on in the background there with the table and the food. I guess I envisioned some sort of forest trail obstacle course there behind the Archon building, and there's catering? That doesn't seem very military-ish. I don't think the Army usually has a Kraft Services table set up outside the training area, but considering Harem can teleport while holding a plate of ding-dongs or a pan of enchiladas, and there's 5 of her, setting up a picnic buffet table would take her all of 14 seconds if she had the food ready. Actually the table itself would probably exceed her carry limit, as would a cooler full of ice and drinks. She's have to bring bags of ice separately, and maybe one 12-pack at a time. Yeah, she'd have to set up the table before hand, then she could pop the food on as soon as everyone had their backs turned.