It’s perfectly okay for sarnothi to swim immediately after eating.
When I was a little kid I designed a superhero who manipulated surface tension and controlled water. He lived in Venice which is really the best possible city for a superhero like that, I think. His name was Captain H20. I was not good with names.
Regarding the comic: I like that we’re learning a bit more about Sarnoth culture each time we see the De’madiea (if I spelled this wrong, please let me know ^^;; ) family. Worldbuilding seems pretty complicated, but if done right we- the readers- get a glimpse of a culture unlike our own, even though it’s fictional. I look forward to seeing and learning more about Sarnoth as well as where the story goes; it’s so exciting! XD
Also Tai Li is flipping adorable! And I’m not just saying that just because she’s doing a little flip in the water. 😛 XD
Regarding the transcript: ‘Captain H20’ sounds like a pretty cool name for a superhero. 🙂
Do Sarnothi babies eat super super SUPER fast? Because this is the weirdest thing I’ve seen from them so far… unless it’s purely because they’re so very tiny compared to human babies.
It’s maybe three minutes since she started — and that’s being generous. Human babies need like half an hour, and if you don’t nurse for the full time, you don’t get to that fatty hindmilk that satisfies their tummies. Trying to stop them from feeding before they’re satisfied does not result in a cheerful baby leaving you alone so you can chat.
http://kellymom.com/bf/got-milk/basics/foremilk-hindmilk/
If Sarnothi milk is like other aquatic animals “milk” then for the size of the baby one or two good sucklings should do it (mmm, chunky cottage-cheesey milk-stuff) with how thick/fatty that stuff is.
Plus, being predatory in an environment where danger could come at you from any direction would lead to quick meals being the norm (yay evolution)
But yeah, if neither of those apply then it would be a really fast feeding.
Brand new newborn humans actually take only a 2-5 minutes to stay latched when they breastfeed. Tiny stomachs don’t take much time to fill. They tend to feed in clusters. It’s quite a bit different than what you see on television or from watching formula-fed babies.
I guess I was thinking less of newborns and more of babies a few months old. But definitely not formula-fed — Mom breast-fed the lot o’ us, and I vaguely recall “breast-feeding” my Jenny doll when I was little.
One of the weirdest things about human reactions: A lot of humans in modern Western cultures react negatively to the idea of a little girl breast-feeding a baby. Even though that is the natural function of breasts, there’s nothing sexual about it, and breast-feeding is better for the baby in a variety of ways (assuming a normal baby with adequate sucking reflex and no milk allergy and all that).
But people have gotten so used to thinking about breasts as sex organs that seeing them operate in their natural function is considered inappropriate and even disgusting. Go figure.
In the first couple days, moms don’t actually secrete breastmilk, they secrete colostrum, which is low-volume high-protein supermilk. The baby can’t take in that much when they are newborn (only a couple ounces at a time) so the baby gets thunderjuice (my wife’s term) until they can tolerate more.
Also, keep in mind that link you put up is for babies who have been nursing for a while—not brand new newborns. Human milk doesn’t usually come in for a couple days until after the baby is born—not in the sense that it’s “milky” (has fat). It is often clear at first as the breasts gear up for full production. Educated doctors usually will not even begin to diagnose a new mom with a milk deficiency for the first couple weeks, because it’s normal for the babies to lose the water weight from being in utero (which can be made even worse if mom was given intravenous fluids during the birth) and milk production takes a bit of time to gain momentum. So for this reason (and the fact a newborn babie’s tummy is the size of a walnut) new breast-fed babies are very often batch nursers—on for a few minutes and off for a while. Very normal—but a lot of new parents get worried/stressed at first.
I just skimmed the site; it was one of the first ones to pop up when I looked up “hind milk.”
I feel like I have learned things today that somehow didn’t get conveyed to me in all these years I’ve been hearing details about nursing. And I’ve heard and read enough about natural childbirth to know what meconium is.
If I remember correctly, female whales have muscles in their mammary gland that shoot out the milk under pressure so the calf gets it quicker and doesn’t even have to suck.
I just imagined Sai Fen having that and, uh…
Yeah, I need brain bleach now. ;P
Well, whales need those muscles because they don’t have nipples, they have slits. Babies CAN’T suckle. If Sarnothi were built like that, the mammaries would probably be internal and located somewhere around her naval.
hay Dave someday you could do a side comic about Sarnoth culture and some bag history stuff.
“…being predatory in a enviroment where danger could come at you from any direction…”
Like a wolf or a lion or a human being? THEY don’t eat that fast.
I will, however, agree with the “underwater dweller milk has the consistency of cream cheese, so it takes much less time to get a belly-full” theory.
That, and Tai Li’s size is MUCH smaller then that of a human newborn. She’s about the size of a small fish, so her stomach would naturally be much smaller as well.
Why is it “tensei”? I don’t speak “english”, I speak “English”.
Seems like the name of their language should also be capitalized.
Dave can make up some rules of semantics for his own made-up languages, methinks. I know I do.
But they are not speaking the made-up language. They are speaking English, which is why she told Selkie to say “please” in the made-up language. And by the rules of English, a “proper name” is capitalized.
That’s only in certain registers; for example, in texting you don’t capitalize very much because it takes extra keystrokes to do so and is a speed bump to typing.
Lemme see what my brain thinks: English muffin, the English language, the English people, say it in English…
I ate an english muffin, I spoke english with them for a bit, they’re irish, not english, say it in english.
Well, the red underlines think it’s wrong, but they’re often not caught up on modern writing. I think “They’re irish, not english” is definitely wrong; both should be capitalized.
“I spoke english with them for a bit” and “english muffin” seem acceptable variations, if you’re not writing a research paper or other official documents where a higher register is called for.
But this is just going off my reaction to these variations. I grew up a prescriptivist, but over time became a descriptivist, and I no longer have that filter that used to be spot-on even from a young age. My English is, however, quite good when I’m not overly tired 🙂
All of your uncapitalized examples look wrong to me. I’m currently see-sawing between prescriptivist and descriptivist myself…. Seems like both approaches are appropriate in different circumstances.
I hold strongly descriptivist views and always have, but the rules have their place (excepting the ones that people made up but basically nobody follows or that are overgeneralized, which isn’t what we’re talking about here) and this isn’t a casual chat with a friend. It’s a webcomic. Printed books are generally expected to follow the rules of standard written English other than for stylistic reasons (like Selkie’s speech or other accent or dialect indications, among other things) and, IMO, so should webcomics even if they’re technically less formal. And I don’t see a very good stylistic reason here unless they actually were speaking Tensei, which I don’t think they were.
In English, languages are capitalized, but in most other languages, they actually are not.
In English, we are reading either translated Tensei or English. Therefore, it should be capitalized.
Well apparently Dave agrees, so that’s all that need be debated about that 🙂
It makes sense that surface-tension-influencing magic-tech would be more of a priority for a land-dwelling member of an amphibious species than for those living in an underwater city-state, so possibly no one in Sarnoth thought to develop those cuffs.
So technology helped water bending. Cool. :3
When I was a kid I made a super hero called Super Tag, which was just my initials and he was a generic Superman clone.
I made up mine as The Orange Emumu. I put a mesh bag — the kind you get oranges in — over my head. My superpower was that people were unable to connect the real me to the superhero me, even if I took off my mask in plain sight right in front of them. I could literally rip the mask off and they’d be like “Where’d he go?!” and run off trying to find him.
Occasionally I find it funny that people are always going on about girls needing female role models, but I made up most of my characters as males and have always gravitated toward male characters in the stuff I watch, even when there are perfectly awesome female choices like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Lina Inverse.
Mine was Man-Spider. An ordinary spider, until he was bitten by a radioactive man and gained the proportional strength and reflexes of a human and the ability to walk only on floors.
Mine was “The Nap”, and all he could do was sleep, but in my young mind that solved everything.
So Basically Pohl fell asleep after watching The Last Airbender and got all sorts of ideas? Because with the name of their daughter and now the Water-Bender Bracers I’m all flavours of suspicious. 😛
Names of both his kids, actually. Suko = Zuko. (In early drafts Tai Li was named Asu La.)
I believe Sai Fen is also a Last Air Bender related name, so the name thing might just be an Author Quirk.
I could see Selkie becoming Captain H2O in later life … or possibly in a dream sequence.
If she becomes Captain H2O, there needs to be a cameo from Oxy Gene :3
http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20091030/NEWS01/710309890
Sai Fen is becoming my favorite character. I love her sense of humor. <3
Amsterdam would have also been a good choice. Or New Orleans, because it’s built like a giant toilet bowl… 😀
Was Captain H2O’s nemesis named “Doctor Dihydrogen Monoxide”?
Mouthleg, a giant mouth with legs who swallowed all the water Captain H2O threw at him, rendering the Captain effectively powerless.
That.. actually makes a weird amount of sense.
Hey Dave: Have you ever considered changing “transcript” to “director’s commentary” since thats what it is?
I would love to do that, but I can’t figure out the CSS needed to alter that element’s name.
not trying to sound stupid, as i don’t code at all… but couldn’t you just open up the css code in like a text editor and search for the word “transcript” then see what shows up, and where it is, then just change it to the appropriate wordage then save it again?
It’s been awhile since I tried it, but I think that when I tried that the page code didn’t actually have the word “transcript” show up when I ctrl-F’d the editor.
Im also just kind of worried about breaking the page code if I change the wrong thing. :\
had to alter the name of a certain scripting language below to keep the form from borking.
​↓ Transcript​​
From a quick and dirty look at the page source.
Dang it, it renders the HTML in comments, I should have known, lol. Take 2:
{a href=​”java$cript:​toggle_expander(‘transcript-content’)​;​” class=​”transcript-title”}​↓ Transcript​{/a}
I was reading this in black and white, went back a page, then was suddenly it was colored. That was cool.
Having read about the water in Venice, I feel sorry for Captain H2O’s adversaries. Yuck.
Hey, Captain H2O is a better name then Aquaman.
Oh my goodness yes! ^_^
https://selkiecomic.com/comic/selkie-halloween-2010/
Please tell Selkie she can borrow those for Halloween? Pleasepleasepleaseplease?