Properly Grounded

Mari San

Well she IS more grounded now isn't she?

Silentarrow

That sounds like a way to cross her mental wires. Recovery from a bad time disassociating by getting horny? No thank you!

The World Famous Chocomerican

She should have found some fresh baked bread. Probably would have worked better.

Darla Donahue

For the same reason she has a fully humanoid body, bodily orifices, breasts and a face, to better fit into the existing mostly human created society and participate in it's rituals.

Darla Donahue

Yes the strong smell definitely connected Roku to her senses and grounded her in the moment. Lemmon said it'd be grounding, not pleasant. lol. You want Pleasant? Go buy a nice tea to sniff.

Rhian Hibner

The smell does seem to have ended the dissociative episode.

Rhian Hibner

Considering that a robotic olfactory sensor wouldn't even vaguely resemble a human one, why would she need a nose?

Trigon Manthree

"My dog has no nose." "How does he smell?" "Awful!"

Tim Keating

Wait a sec, how the hell does beeps smell anything? She doesn't have a NOSE. Does she smell through her EYES?

Tim Keating

If only she had had bread.

Tim Keating

Oooh, so close, Lemon.

Da Nargh!!

Pretty sure its the same thing the local newspaper does to their colour printer

Mooster

I wish I could make my hair stand out like that when I am startled. :-)

Shane Wegner

Only comes out when she's exceedingly and emotionally angry.

James Dore

Brilliant.

Sleepy John

“Turn off everything? But I’m bingeing on puppies on Animal Planet!”

Sleepy John

Maybe that from was a leak in May’s old body in the dumpster.

Gary Walker

Has Roko lost her accent? I'd have expected "faak" instead.

MrFrenchFries

When consciousness gives you lemons...

Lightsabr2

"gimme that sweet stank"

OldGoat

Noseless Beeps wants a whiff?

jimfromtx

Wait...shouldn't she have reverted to the "Fahk off!" accent that she normally does when surprised/scared/startled? Glad she's feeling better though. I can't imagine a disassociative episode would be too good for her. I'm very glad that she has friends to help her through it. Support can be an amazing thing.

Chris Crowther

I note she *is* no longer blurry...so I guess it worked?

Hey Jeff - I was wondering if you could put a tag up for when you do this cool but disorienting visual effect on Roko? I'm sure I'm not the only visually-impaired reader and this effect gives me concerns my eyes are off or I'm experiencing a migraine aura. It's super effective at communicating depersonalization though!

Evylon

Just to answer one question, you cannot copy qubits. That's the whole point of quantum computing. If you could you would have major problems with physics

Mark

The assam? https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=3427

Mark

From a weird dog?

Pejo

I believe Lemon's techniques are more accepted by IRL psychotherapy, & less self-destructive/hair of the dog. Less "Irish" as it were lol

Pejo

Extremely this. So much of what Lemon walked her through are grounding techniques for panic attacks, & to a degree for anxiety too. Name out loud 5 things you can see, 3 things you can hear, & in this case, at least one thing your skilled but goofy friend scraped out of a dumpster. Jeph knows what he's talking about & shit like this makes the comic so much more personal & meaningful for a lot of people.

Shane Wegner

I've been trying to put in words how the Fruit (and Vegetable) Sisters are a little "off", it's a fine line. Odd? Eccentric? They're pretty clearly Turing-passing, but why are they ever so slightly vaguely weird and inappropriate? I say that as someone who more or less appreciates weirdness. I haven't been able to describe the feeling without being really ableist and coming off negative about mental illness (which I myself also have), but there's something very slightly different about them. "Crazy" is much too strong and mean. It shows how subtle something like Turing is to test. "I'll know it when I feel it." My headcanon ended up with some explanation that asks interesting questions about AI reproduction. If you like a particular AI, and AIs have specific memory addresses and hard drive bits, what's to say you can't just make an exact copy of every bit in their memory and have two of that AI? Copying a trained AI you already sent through robot college is a lot faster than, well, sending them through robot college. Like Bubbles, your combat AI trained in Law of Warfare and has muscle memory proficient in every weapon and martial art? Why not get ten combat chassis and Copy and Paste, my friend? If an AI dies, why not just load them up from backup? Takes most of the risk out of it. Makes AI life a lot less precious. My headcanon answer was that things are that much more interesting if there is an inherent Uncopyability to AI. Something about the qubits used in their quantum hardware are simply resistant to being exactly copied without collapsing. Copy and Paste is exactly what was tried with the Fruit (AV) Sisters, and the result was... how they came out. Sapient, but... eccentric. It has interesting implications for the uniqueness and aliveness of AIs, and by extension, humans. It might be anthropomorphizing to call it a "soul", but if this explanation is correct, there is something unique, alive, and irreplaceable about each AI (and human, which we in theory "knew" but seem to forget often enough.) I extrapolated from there to the origin of AIs. The AI mythology says a human humped a computer. I instead headcanoned that the Ellicot-Chathams were wired up the scanners in the lab and had a, er, passionate moment strong enough that the scanners got a very strong read, which became initial seed for all EC AIs. It's anthropomorphizing again, but that was my explanation for how AIs would have things like libido, something the code in the silicon need not have. "I swear none of my code references human-like attraction!" It's a little sci fi, but I enjoy thinking that something stored in the original qubits reflects the "souls" of John and Beatrice Ellicot-Chatham. If THAT were somehow true, the next interesting implication is... that AIs could "reproduce" if they could scan a quantum imprint as strong as the original EC one. They'd generate a new waveform storing information unique to the two (or heck, more, although presumably complexity would increase untenably). AND... I don't see a reason why humans and AIs couldn't do the same. SO, some sentients, Faye and Bubbles for example, might be operating on basic unconscious assumptions that they couldn't reproduce, and thus have a gulf of distance between them that is greater than if they were a biological male and female who could directly biologically reproduce. (Adoption is always a possible thing in many variations of romantic relationships of course.) In that case, if they had a strong enough signal for each other (feelings, say), and were wired up to EC qubit scanners, they could generate a new waveform seed and become "parents" to any AIs creched off that seed. I'm sure proving that humans and AIs can combine in this way would send the anti-AI terrorists into a froth. But I find it poignant. But if Waveform Scanning could make a new qubit seed if it gets a strong enough read (Which we could anthropomorphize as "being in love enough"), then... humans and AIs _could_ have offspring that represent something fundamental about themselves. And make new and stronger offspring. Which I enjoy thinking was the missing factor in the FruitAV Sisters. "You got all that from a yellow AI sniffing garbage juice?" "You didn't?" For some reason I wrote a 25 page screenplay of blatant fan fiction about this. EDIT- Which is right here if anyone is that curious: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hfZHnwKWfc_RMOIeyIyFpkgli74J3zIF/view?usp=sharing

John Peterson

LOL!

Nicolas Demers

They were able to jump in Bubbles' mind to look at the empty room where her memories used to be, so I think they're not exaggerating at all

Buck Caldwell

This is actually a really helpful technique. When I was young and inexperienced, I got *stupidly* over-stoned one evening, and my host sat me down, had me close my eyes, put a shot of sipping whiskey in my hand, and told me to toss it back. INSTANTLY I felt better and wasn't completely without control anymore. He called it "an Irish Grounding".

Bagge

She is not dissociating right now it seems. Lemon's methods are unorthodox, but you can't argue with results

Simon Green

You might say it smelled ... vial.

Minzoku Bokumetsu

Shock treatment, then

Summer Sudbrink

It’s a fragment of Elliot’s skunked clothes. It’s been lingering at the bottom of the dumpster, soaking in whatever other juices glowed down.

Sandrock

Mostly accurate usage of grounding techniques. Name one thing you see, smell, feel, taste, and hear. Boxed breathing can help too, breath in 4 seconds, hold breath 4 seconds, and exhale 4 seconds. Repeat exercises as many times as necessary

Carl Fink

Pretty sure they don't have any semiliquid stuff in their torsoes, unless they're Pintsize, who has a history of pouring cake batter into his chassis (and ruining it). He seems to be the opposite of Roko, completely detached from his body (while still perfectly capable of using it).

Hawkeye

Lemon is totally chaotic good.

MrSinn

A bit like metal and plastics I would assume.

Adam Koslin

Combination gas chromatograph and mass-spectrometer in her left shoulder.

Yonatan Zunger

Wait, Beeps has no nose. How does she smell?

Hugh Eckert

Mindfulness meditation for AIs. Neat.

KCkittysnores

I ONCE scared a friend out of her hiccups. It worked! But she was a very good friend, who trusted that I had her best interests at heart. (I did. I don’t like upsetting people. But we were both sooooo sick of the hiccups.)

Pete

Roko needs to visit Hannelore and discuss tea.

Matt Grayson

This is something I wondered about with Yay. They won't, for good reasons, mess around inside someone's head, but they'd certainly be able to do good therapy. Or does "knowing what to say" constitute meddling with consciousness? It's a tricky question as to where the boundary is. The recent novel "The Last Human" is largely concerned with the means by which more intelligent beings manipulate the lesser, but in ways that seem to be giving the lower beings exactly what they want. Of course, Yay may be exaggerating their powers of penetration, relying so much, as they are, on intercepting communication and breaking encryption. They were certainly awkward establishing friendship with Roko. Fascinating characters!

Ashley Thomas

can they vomit? probably not. cuz thatll ground you to your body real fast.

Thisguy

See Lemon is good at her job (never doubted her, A lot of psychology Is just suggesting strategies and seeing what works.)

sjlxndr

Grounded af

Pete Hanson

Can Beepatrice smell things without a nose?

Todd Ellner

She seems back in her body and able to interact with the physical world again

red sands

Good trick lol

Samantha

This is very similar to a lot of anti-anxiety exercises I do

Mark P.

Sometimes that enhanced sensorium package isn’t always a positive.

Merle Blue

Doesn't have to be pleasant to be effective!

Daniel Rydberg

Haha, now I imagine Lemon plugging her into an old 5,25” disk drive or something.

Daniel Rydberg

I honestly don’t think that skunk is the most strange thing Melon has smelled.

Nicholas A Wagner

In humans, smells have such a deep impact is because it's such a primal sense, it reaches into the most primitive parts of the brain. I would think in robots it would be i don't know, serial ports? Terminal commands? Humm, ...

Daniel Rydberg

They will be featured right next to Gwyneth Paltrows “This Smells Like My Vagina” candles.

Stuart Telfer

Love the mix of recognisable therapeutic technique and dumpster goo

Okay, that was the first big LOL I've had from QC in a long time. Bravo.

Ardent Slacker

Also matters what the input is, and what you're focusing on. Closing your eyes and just feeling is a grounding technique for humans... and Roko is, in her responses, extremely human.

Thomas Halpin

That Family Resemblance is starting to show

MiaKitty

Lemon isn't failing to deliver!

C-Cubed

Oh right, she's still Melon's sister.

Jp

Bwa ha ha. That was good.

gn0w1

This is legitimately the first hearty laugh I’ve had from QC in forever. Fart jokes are best jokes. Bad smell jokes are a very close second.

Daniel Burnett

So I really care about all the cute ai buddies. But I am more interested in the buy makeouts I’ve been promised

Michael Boettger

Nicholas Cage

Richard

Is Beeps wearing Kevin Smith's jorts?

Ellie Hanna

awwwww

Matt Grayson

I retract anything negative I ever said about Lemon. She's really good.

Wolfger

Next, she needs to work on acceptance. Don't judge the smell of the goo as good or bad, just acknowledge it for what it is.

Shawn K. Younkin

What is it with Melon and Lemon and smells??? Melon wanted to rub all over Elliot when he got sprayed by a skunk and now Lemon is carrying around weird dumpster goo!!!

Alacrity Fitzhugh

I'm reminded of Cher shouting "Snap out of it!" then smacking some guy.

Wynn Donivan

S T A N K

David Browne

Weird Dumpster Goo is the name of my Gwar cover band

Ted Van Roekel

Lemon is actually quite good at her job. Unorthodox, but good.

Michael Boettger

Interesting. The diffraction that we see when Roko disassociates seems to disappear between panels 1 and 4. Maybe excessive input is part of the problem.

Dumpster Goo candles coming to stores near you in Normal, Weird, and Esoteric varieties

awgiedawgie

No question that Lemon and Melon are sisters.

Douglas E. Smith

I want to see what they saw when they smelled it! The olfactory synesthesia strips are my favorite...:)

jimbo

weird shit doesn't fake beeps!

Matt Grayson

"Normal Dumpster Goo" is the name of my new... damn... I don't have a band.

William Davy

Actually yes. The last bonus comic. But they would have you believe they're both melon.

Abhayakara

Surprisingly good advice for dissociative states even if you are not an AI.

Alacrity Fitzhugh

mmm dumpster goo...

fluffy

That's certainly one way to practice mindfulness.

Seth Aaron Hershman has they she pronouns

Lemon is more of an Oscar Vibenius than a Napoleon LeNez, seems like.

Michael

Should of gone for the tea at Coffee of Doom

Miyaa

Teach me your ways, Sensei Lemón!

Magic Chopstick Games

have we ever seen Lemon and Melon in the same room tho

Kurt Lewis

where do you think Lemon got it from?

Michael Boettger

Seems to be working.

Kurt Lewis

beeps no

W E I R D G O O

Nulgar

Is that similar to scaring a human to cure a hiccup?

Jennifer Doyle

Well, Lemon's not *wrong*...

Lord Crusade

Oh god, don’t let Melon smell it.

Alexander W Couzens

Lemon is surprisingly helpful!

Ting

Smelling salt, but it's Melon's cooking experiment 20149-B

Smelling Goo

Matt Grayson

:-) Excellent technique!