OOPs #112
Dec14
Beizel may have yanked that particular tail once or twice.
Raptie does character colors and shading!
Out-of-Placers
A story of inconvenient changes
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OOPs now has a Russian translation which updates shortly after the English pages are posted!
Now also in French:
And Ukranian:
Wow, what an amazing sky.
Now imagine it with a background noise of a yinglet squealing from having his tail pulled. Because it will happen. You are welcome for the mental imagery.
>: D
It’s actually just a bunch of celestial gases, crazily enough!
Funny enough whenever I’ve heard someone say Celestial Gases or Gas Cloud I’ve always imagined they where the result of God after he’d finished eating a cosmic burrito, then I’d remember where I was and try to pay attention to the preacher, until he said something else and my imagination would come up with other impious things.
Never ask a child what he is thinking about when he’s being bored to death by the local priest during a particular tedious sermon.
Come to think on it, they where all tedious and excessively boring. So very boring.
Pest control specialists hate it. With this simple trick you can significantly reduce amount of unwanted insects in your home in just one night…
Just eat them one by one.
Nicely done. Sounds just like one of those clickbait ads. Though I suppose it really wouldn’t be that hard to write one since they practically all follow the same formula.
As a side-note, insects really are a good food source once you get past the squick factor. They’re high in protein, low in fat, and as long as you avoid the parasites like ticks and mosquitoes, are unlikely to carry any diseases that will jump the species barrier. Crickets, cicadas, and mealworms are catching on in the U.S. Anyone for a slice of German chocolate cicada cake? (No, I’m not pulling your leg. There’s a recipe for it.)
They don’t taste good, is the problem. Every insect meal I’ve had has tasted like burnt toast. And they’re low fat but also low carb – you have to get your energy somewhere, you have only those two choices, protein unfortunately doesn’t cut the mustard that way. So they’re actually a terrible food source, they don’t feed you efficiently. If you want to lose weight eat insects, it’ll let you eat lots without fattening yourself. For underweight people like myself, or for feeding the starving millions, I’m sorry to say they’re garbage.
I’m referring mostly to things like replacing part of the flour in a recipe with “cricket flour” (also called hamen) or mealworm flour. You can’t replace all of it, especially in baked goods, because dough made entirely with cricket flour won’t rise.
However, it’s not a matter of if but when. Major snack food manufacturers are already including it in protein bars, and there’s a reason for this. Crickets are gram-for-gram one of the most efficient protein creators on the planet. By dry weight, a single cricket ranges between 65% – 70% pure protein. In contrast, beef is between 17% – 40% protein, with the rest being primarily fat content. It’s also packed with iron and vitamin B12. Gram for gram, you get almost twice as much iron as you do from spinach, and 10 times as much B12 as you do from salmon.
As for taste, it’s neutral enough that it can be used in almost anything. On its own, it tastes mildly nutty; or if you feed it a special diet, it tastes like whatever it’s been eating. (There’s a company in Canada that’s proud of its apple cinnamon crickets.) And finally, cricket flour is a lot more sustainable than cattle. It takes 1700 to 2500 gallons of water to get one pound of dry protein out of a cow. It takes one gallon of water to get a pound of dry protein from crickets. Overall, if a family of four ate one meal a week using insect protein instead of beef protein, they’d save 170,000 gallons of water.
I’m totally down to eat more insect food goods, there’s no reason not to once prepared properly or turned into something completely unrecognizable.
I totally agree. The same comment about “turned into something completely unrecognizable” also applies to ugly vegetables. You’d probably be shocked to find out how much perfectly edible produce is wasted because they’re too small, oddly shaped, hilariously oversized, etc.
In America, nearly $165 billion of produce is simply thrown away every year. One cucumber farmer said that nearly half his harvest never makes it to market, even though most of it is perfectly edible, because it isn’t up to the “appearance standards” of major supermarket chains. (A few chains are experimenting with selling ugly veg, and there’s a few nonprofits that have started up.)
The simple solution is to turn it into something unrecognizable. Once those ugly sweet potatoes are turned into pie, those ugly cucumbers are turned into tzatziki sauce, those ugly bananas are pureed and turned into baby food, and ugly carrots are turned into soup or stew… who cares what it used to look like?
BASICALLY
What if the wandering moon isn’t a real moon? Maybe it’s a (really) big starship that humans used to colonize this planet long time ago? Maybe something went really wrong and to fix this the AI of that starship created the actual yinglets? Someone is trying to guide the yinglets to a higher level for some reason. I don’t know what “zhat zhing” really was, but it was under the sea for long time. I believe that a long time ago a base was built on this planet and that for some reason it sank into the sea, or maybe a cargo ship crashed. More or less what happened in the Trigun anime, where many of the “project seeds” starships crashed into an arid and unsuitable planet for human life. Maybe some yinglet knows where that base/ship is.
If planet sized space ships are your thing look up the book Mutineer’s Moon by David Weber. I think you’ll like it.
Or find a copy of any of the Phantasy Star RPGs. Pretty sure they’re on archive . org somewhere.
Oooh a Trigun reference. I approve!
Or maybe
the yinglets ARE the ships
I could see shipping and Yinglets going together almost as if they were meant for each other.
Kattajak and Beizel obviously did not become patriarch’s because of their good looks (Unlike others who will remain nameless). They seem to have as good a grasp on Narklet’s character and motivations as they can get. Sometimes you forget not all Yinglets are idiots, then a you are reminded unexpectedly. Have to say I’m looking forward to future meetings between Kassiw and Kattajak. Heck! I’m even looking forward to her meeting more of Beizel and the other patriarch’s.
But they do have good looks too. Beizel is gorgeous and the orange one (I assume that is Kattajak) is the most handsome ‘manly’ looking Yinglet I’ve ever seen. Add in their intellect and… wow.
Yeah, I’ve been wanting to focus on this group for a while now.
Yinglets aren’t idiots, they just lack focus for the most part. Focus appears to be the one thing that sets the Yinglet elite apart, even more than intelligence. Also, most of the ones we’ve seen so far have seemed young, or at least immature. And since maturity is not a function of age they can be immature forever unless something grabs them by the scruff and makes them pay attention
Here we get yet another hint that the Yinglet are an uplifted species. I suspect some variant of zhat zing transformed them from lesser Yinglets in the not-too distant past. And the true struggle will be to control that power, or at least keep it from the humans.
Its possible that a group of lesser Yinglets developed greater intelligence while others did not–many species of hominid existed at the same time that homo sapiens appeared. Though of course that took hundreds of thousands of years, not the short time frame in the comic. Which definitely suggests outside intervention such as Uplift.
Or a Chaos God thought it would be funny to turn some humans into yinglets, who then became the progenitors of the greater yinglets.
I love seeing competent, intelligent yinglets. Almost as much as I love seeing the bat-guano insane weirdo ones.
The story and art just keep getting better as time goes on. I am so eager to keep reading this story that it’s almost painful to wait.
Just like humans, there’s both kinds.
I think Akismet is eating my comments. All I was gonna say is that the Patriarch of Farming seems popular, and it gives me ideas.
He gives lots of others ideas as well~
There’s a picture of all the Patriarchs on page 21. He *does* look kinda girly.
Also, interestingly, there’s question marks, suggesting that he’s only maybe the Patriarch of Farming?
I think the question marks are more like “yinglets farm?”. Like Kass is confused that they do anything remotely like farming.
Love how Kattajack is brash and always “punching up” whereas Beizel is the opposite and is more discreet and secretive. Pretty cool to see how the different characters interact while being opposites
It’s like being in charge of the military versus being in charge of intelligence operations. They both require a certain type of personality!
absolutely beautiful page. i love the sky, i love the development of the patriarchs, i never thought of them as enjoying eachother’s company and its really cute to think about.
Like many communal species, it’s better for the colony as a whole if the place isn’t a quarreling nest of rivalries.
After having to work on a Saturday for almost 9 hours this was a nice thing to wake up to.
One of the things I noticed was the Patriarch has a metal bladed knife. It shows him as having had human contact, and possibly the wealth to buy it, or having stolen it, or perhaps he used to be a city Yinglet at one point in his life. It would go a long ways to explain why he’s a patriarch in Vislet’s enclave. And also why he’s not been approached by Narklet, with him having abandoned traditional Yinglet stone bladed stabs in favor of a metal blade, and flaunting it around the enclave, it makes a statement that requires no words.
Why the ninja mask for the spy patriarch?
1) The average yinglet is not going to be able to recognize them due to the mask. They’re going to think “masked mystery guy” and that’s what they’ll remember.
2) Gotta cover up those pearly whites. Many yinglets have teeth that are larger than their lips, particularly the front one(s), so it could be a quite practical “I don’t want my teeth standing out on my black fur.”
3) It’s also probably a status symbol. He gets to be all cool and sneaky-looking with an outfit that looks professional and matches his fur color almost perfectly.
You dress for the job you want.
Damn, you can really tell why these two became patriarchs. I did not expect this level of intelligence and competence from anyone in the enclave except Vizlet. Sad to say, but at this point I think they’re actually better than a bunch of real life politicians. At least they seem like they’ll know and acknowledge when they don’t know something. And if not, at least they’ll actually be entertaining. Ratbirds for president!
Yeah, I was gonna say how weird it is that these two are showing more critical and psychological analysis than most people in our entire history.
Forget about the fantasy creatures or the transformation crystals, NOW I know this is fiction! XD
Hmmm.. so what is Beziel doing that HE thinks is right….
He Just got laid. That’s a good start.
Wow, Kattajak is a lot smarter than I had initially assumed upon his introduction. I owe him an apology now.
…also, can’t you make your recaptcha appear right away rather than already after I tried to post?
It probably depends on who you are, and what you try to post. Depending on those entries, additional checks might be required.
So which part of “Wow, Kattajak is a lot smarter than I had initially assumed upon his introduction. I owe him an apology now” made me look like a spam bot?
Okay
Now i want yabk that tail just to see what all the fuss is about.
Since no one has done it yet, I’d love to wish you guys a Merry Christmas and a Happy Holidays. Looking forward to more of this comic in the new year!
Whats with the lack of discussion?
Nevermind i can see the comments after posting
You too
Why hasnt page 113 been posted yet? It’s on val’s DA. Or is it a one off?