Fun Fact: Our high school “Journalism” class consisted of Yearbook and, as a break from that, presenting our own recordings of talk shows so we could dissect them.
I presented “Squirt TV” (since I figured no one else would) and don’t remember what the commentary was.
Also, our teacher was convinced that typing stuff for the yearbook was SO MUCH WORK that I was allowed to do only that for all of the class, learning barely anything else about yearbook production. Also, not much typing since everyone turned their copy in late and the editors took over after class was over.
Yup. Along with chain-smoking and that fedora to wear tilted back on your head whilst sitting at the typewriter. Typewriter. … Hmmmm. Much has changed since I was in J-School.
And by “not allowed” we mean the local liqour stores (or wherever you buy booze in Indiana) do a brisk business and no one has any idea where all the alcohol is going. Billie isn’t the only one drinking on campus, even though it’s not allowed.
Yes. But to be slightly fair to her, it has been heavily implied that she’s been holed up all week with a massive depressive episode, so she’s probably not been paying the most attention to much of anything, much less the news.
Yeah, I don’t blame her, it’s just… was there no vetting process? Did no one anywhere along the line think, “Hey, this person suffering from massive depression and anger management problems probably wouldn’t make that great an RA?” Or is she really just that good at hiding it?
I had depression last year and was holed up in my room for months at a time (only left to get food or use the can). The odd thing is that nobody seemed to notice. Anxiety disorders, alcoholism and depression form the unholy trinity of Invisible Disabilities; the person who has them won’t notice they have any of these, they’ll likely only be seen by others when they’re at their highest functioning so those people won’t notice, and the rest of the time they’ll seclude themselves.
Hiding it ain’t easy. Nobody wants to deal with this kind of bullshit, and you need to be *very* aggressive in looking for it to find it.
Seriously, when I was depressed and suicidal, I was showing all of the warning signs. Literally nobody noticed. Then, when shit got outed (long story), people passive-aggressived at me about what a good actor I was.
I was expressing suicidal ideation explicitly several times a day. And I’m autistic. So. Yeah.
People are genuinely terrible at mental illness even when it’s right in front of them saying, “I hate those questions of where you see yourself in 10 years. Because I don’t.” And even more explicit expressions of suicidal ideation.
I feel ya m8. I mean, what do they want? Am I supposed to parade around in public weeping and tearing out my hair before they realize I’m deeply unhappy and anxious?
Pretty much. They don’t know what’s in your head, and there’s a lot of psychological pressure on them to assume that you’re okay, and a lot of psychological pressure on you to minimize how you feel. It sucks.
You have to walk up to somebody and say “Hi I feel REALLY depressed and panicky, like more than normal amounts, and I need help, please get me a therapist right away.” That has a good chance of working, but even that can depend on what person you pick.
You can also call a helpline, where they are actually trained to ask whether you’re feeling depressed and/or suicidal. (Untrained people are usually terrified to ask.) And then you have to be honest, which is hard.
Sorry to be so bossy, there. I’m coming from, I tend to isolate and minimize, and people didn’t realize I was depressed for a very long time, because I wasn’t sure of anything, and because I didn’t tell them. (The problem with saying that I’m okay is that people believe me.)
It sounds like ischemgeek *was* being honest and straightforward about it, but their people still didn’t pick up that they actually needed to do something about it. They may have even explained it away with ischemgeek’s autism, which is extra-sucky.
The best solution that I can see is to go get help yourself, so that you don’t have to convince anybody, but definitely not everyone is at the point where they can do that. The second best is to demand help, with a direct request for a specific action, from somebody who is likely to do it.
Not in quite so many words. Part of my autism is manifested in alexithymia, which is just a fancy word for “I have a hard time identifying and articulating what I’m feeling”.
So, I wasn’t able to say “I’m depressed.” Because I couldn’t tell what I was feeling, especially in the heat of the moment. It’s not that I don’t have emotions, but I can’t recognize them in real time. Plus add.in depression-brain judgement issues and plus the fact that many autistic people with depression exhibit it in a weird way – we tend to do less of the cries in bed all day stuff and more of the over-the-top fatalism type stuff. Think Eeyore crossed with stereotypical over-analytical nerd with a heap of bitterness thrown on top (YMMV. Every autistic person is different, and while many of us are like this when depressed, not all are. I Definitely was though) . Plus, there is the fact that the ways autistic people beat ourselves up are either supported by society (read some of how we’re talked about in the news or in autism parent support groups and pretend it was about you if you want to understand what I mean here) or are written off as part of our autism (I have heard some pros claim that all “truly” autistic teens and adults either hate themselves or are too low- functioning to realize how different we are, frex. Self-hatred is not on any diagnostic criteria. Functional impairment, yes. Difficulty socializing, sure. Sensory trouble, definitely. Self-loathing, no. Self-loathing is an abuse victim and/or comorbid mental illness thing more than an autism thing – and autistic folk are WAY more likely than the general population to have both).
Coming outright and saying it was hard, getting taken seriously when I did find the words was harder, and ppl looking for a “normal” expression of it were ill-equipped to recognize it in me.
No shit. I’ve been having a really bad time, isolating and finding it harder to function. My mom and aunt visited and mentioned that my place looked nice and clean. “Thanks mom I’ve been trying to stay ahead on things, I wish I could have gotten more done before you guys came down.”
The next morning after they’d left I went out to the kitchen to find an elaborate ‘choose your own adventure of chores’ in several envelopes with different envelopes for tasks and ‘Rewards’. Example reward: hang the curtains in my room.
Because sitting down and inventing a game that would be considered childish for a 12 year old (much less a 32 year old) is still easier for them than asking me if I’m fucking ok and talking to me like a FUCKING ADULT and acting with ACTUAL CONCERN.
They really don’t send all their prospective RAs for a serious psychiatric evaluation. Any more than you’d get one for damn near any other job.
Short of that, if there isn’t anything damning in your file and you give a decent interview you’re probably fine.
Even if she’d been to the health center for counseling or something, that would hopefully be confidential and not able to be used.
I’m starting to wonder whether, as was implied at the start of this chapter, Billie has basically been doing Ruth’s legwork for her and rolling her out of the room occasionally to be seen putting in place the things Billie had already arranged.
Billie as a new RA? There are worse choices, I suppose… :-S
…Well, a person could say Danny NAILED it, if he hadn’t decided to be Danny. I won’t say he Danned it up, because even though he thought he did at the time, it worked out for the best for everyone.
Oh now I remember. It’s the one where Danny acts like he’s a shining knight for not having sex with Billie, but Joe calls him out on it because really he has this weird thought process that even a sober, calm woman knows less about what she wants than Danny does.
You’ve probably got examples, but at the moment I can’t think of any times that Joe has stated or acted like he’s known more or knows what women want.
If anything he’s kinda’ gone against the stereotype of what guys like him usually act like. He calls Danny and Walky out on being uncomfortable with themselves on occasions, like the shoe incident or the one with Danny mentioned above.
Plus he brought up the Miss Pigg/Kermit debate when everybody else was too frightened to.
Also Joe has been super consistent about consent being fundamental to responsible sex. The only time he really isn’t a gentleman is when he’s showboating or assuming that everyone is or should be as DTF as he is.
I may be wrong but I don’t read Joe as thinking he knows better than women so much as that he thinks he knows something most people don’t: that sex is awesome. The fact that Joe feels that both men and women fail to appreciate the greatness of sex makes his perspective mostly non-sexist. Which is better than we can say for our poor friend Danny.
Well, besides all the times he’s continued to pester a person whose made it clear in no uncertain terms that she has no interest in him or his shit with sexual innuendos and come-ons, there’s:
Okay, I’m not going to have many examples of all the times he’s harassed Joyce with come-ons when she’s more than made clear her disinterest, but this is extra gross because he clearly heard what she said in the previous statement and in what tone it was and yet he felt it was appropriate to say that. From behind. And then berate her to tell her friend he’s not a rapist. So not cool, so not good consent practices: http://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/01-pajama-jeans/full/
When learning that his target. A target he knows is sexually inexperienced and conservative. A target he wants to “break in”. That she needs a chaperone to fully feel safe on a date, he tries to bribe him to leave them alone in a way that she wouldn’t be able to get a replacement (aka treating boundaries as something to navigate around (yes, it’s a stupid boundary, but you have to respect a person you want to be intimate with’s sexual boundaries no matter what, the correct decision here would have been to end the date rather than try and work around Joyce’s known sexual beliefs)): http://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/03-men-are-from-beck-women-are-from-clark/fifty/
Oh, and the crowning level of awful? “Fixing” sexually inexperienced individuals. This especially galls me, because pressuring “inexperienced” types to help “fix” their dysfunctions is a major means asexuals like me are targeted for predation at best and corrective rape at worse, so this language is genuinely unsettling and skeevy to me: http://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/03-men-are-from-beck-women-are-from-clark/penis/
Overall, he’s consistently been painted to be an individual who respects that no means no, but he doesn’t seem to understand yes means yes and seems to believe that any means of manipulation of the situation is fair game so long as the “target” doesn’t directly say no. While that view is sadly above that of a lot of boys his age, it is nonetheless a dangerous and predatory worldview, especially when combined with his total lack of respect for people’s reasons to want to not have sex or not face sexual harassment.
So yeah, kid doesn’t really get “consent” other than a watered down inaccurate worldview he is consistently shown to try and weasel around up to the point where the person he is targeting has to straight up threaten him to get him to stop… temporarily. That Sarah comic? He had at least 4 comics before that where she had shown him incredibly negative body language that screams disgust and yet he still hunted her because “that anger must mean she’s great in the sack”.
That’s not consent culture. That’s creepy PUA shit.
You’re right, he does call out toxic masculinity. That has no bearing on how he does with consent, which as mentioned, leaves somewhat to be desired. Also of note is how he’s talked about lubricating sexual situations with alcohol, which…no.
Guess you don’t notice it all that much considering he doesn’t show up that much. Kinda’ disappointed now since I thought he was just the person who was comfortable with themselves, their sexuality, and everything else.
Also to Shiro, I agree about the alcohol and sex. Never a good idea.
Which is why Billie and Ruth need to separate and get sober or just…not be together.
We know that consent is important to Joe because word of God (aka Willis) has said so. But so far it’s been a lot of tell, don’t show based on Joe’s behaviour. Implying either that Willis forgot early on or, perhaps more accurately, that being big on consent isn’t a good thing by default if you don’t have a clear understanding of what consent is.
Word of God is good and all, but doesn’t count for much if it’s the only evidence.
Honestly, there’s nothing wrong with alcohol and sex. It’s the using alcohol to get sex that wouldn’t have happened without it that’s problematic. “alcohol really helps facilitate the threesomes” as Joe said. That’s a problem.
Billie & Ruth’s problem with alcohol and sex is more that they pass out before finishing the sex than anything else. They certainly need to stop drinking, but that’s the “trying to drink myself to death” part and has nothing to do with the sex.
Being “big on consent” is a basic standard of human decency. Praising Joe for that is like saying “Danny’s big on romantic loyalty, thankfully he hasn’t carved up any of his ex girlfriends and made himself a woman suit.”
Yeah, that’s the other big part of why I can’t get on board with “Joe practices good consent”. There’s been a number of times when he’s viewed alcohol as a means to get sex that would not occur when people are sober. The “alcohol facilitates threesomes” thing. There was the time he said that a drunker version of Joyce would totally be all up on him (extra fucked up because while he doesn’t know, she’s actually had a drink spiked in the past for the purpose of a rape). And so on.
And as you say, that’s a lot different than just being a person who likes alcohol and sex independently.
He’s got no means no down, but beyond that, any means to an end seems to rule the day and he hasn’t seemed to realize that coercion, wearing down defenses, or working around sober boundaries aren’t consent.
That’s probably not the best example of Joe’s sex positivity. He was right to call Danny out on his bullshit, but even before that he was angry that Danny didn’t want to have sex, period, and when Danny explained his actual reasoning, that he wasn’t ready to have sex with someone after breaking up with Dorothy, he just skipped out of the room.
Frankly, the approach Billie took there would have skeeved me out big time. From ‘How dare you hit on me?’ to ripping off clothes in about 30 seconds. Screams serious issues to me. Not something I’d want to get involved with. And who knows how she’d react afterwards.
Mind you, that’s all with distance and I’m not 18 and hormone-driven anymore. Who knows how I’d actually have reacted in that situation.
like what’s important isn’t so much that billie hypothetically would’ve regretted it, it’s that danny was regretting it and then he made his decision about hypothetical billie.
He admitted in the next page that he was bullshitting and that his real reason was that he wasn’t ready to actually sleep with someone after Dorothy broke up with him, and later we find out that he told Billie he didn’t want to because he was interested in someone else.
Billie rapidly switching from “how dare you hit on me” to literally climbing on top of him seems like a pretty solid reason to get weirded out, but it wasn’t actually a factor in why Danny didn’t want to.
True, but it might well have played into his excuse of “didn’t want to take advantage”, even if he didn’t quite articulate that – making Joe’s “Was she underage, drunk or crying” list of acceptable reasons for not doing so even weaker.
If she did a 180 right before sex, I’d be worried about one right after.
I feel that’s where a lot of the issue of Joe slamming Danny on it comes from, since the aftermath of Joe ripping on Danny for saying dumb sexist shit never addresses that “I didn’t want to take advantage of her” makes a startling amount of sense specifically because Billie pulled that 180.
Ultimately, that wasn’t the point that was supposed to be conveyed. Billie is supposed to come off as 100% eager about it to him, Danny is originally meant to come off as white knighting so Joe can tell him off (and give Joe a character moment that proves he’s not quite the machismo driven horndog that we assume he is, while also establishing that Danny’s white knighting brand of sexism is just as harmful), and then he reveals that his real reason is actually good, insofar as you don’t really need a reason not to have sex with somebody if you don’t want to.
It’s kind of like how my initial impression of the Walky/Dorothy pajama jeans feud was “Walky is not allowed agency in his relationships and being told to strip for someone he was just harassed into dating again is okay”, rather than it just being a dumb, immature argument with no actual significant weight to how we were meant to perceive their relationship.
Yeah, part of my problem with Joe’s overall portrayal is that I think Willis intends it to be much more positive than it comes across, at least to me. Especially early on, but even through some of his more recent appearances.
As far as the “Walky/Dorothy pajama jeans feud” one character thing that did was establish, mostly to Dorothy, that Walky wouldn’t just roll over for her, like Danny had. And to the rest of us, that Dorothy was used to that.
The stripping bit was painful though. If kind of funny at the same time.
Come to think of it, has Walky worn the pajama jeans since? Have they even been mentioned? Maybe he did roll over more than I thought he had.
Not to mention Billie ordered Danny to “Shut up before I change my mind.” So he’s not assuming she’ll regret it, she just told him she’s halfway to regretting it before they even have sex. Which combined with the previous 180 you guys mentioned gives him plenty of solid evidence to believe she would regret having sex immediately after.
Maybe it was just me but when she said the line “Now shut up before I change my mind” I read her saying two things to Danny.
1. The sex we are about to have is a mistake.
2. But we need to have it now before this intentional lapse of judgment passes.
So wouldn’t having sex with someone(regardless of their gender) after being told those two things(in not so many words) be taking advantage of them? If it’s wrong to pump someone full of alcohol so they’d have sex with you that you know would not happen without an alcohol induced lapse of judgment, wouldn’t it be just as wrong to have sex right after being told that it was only happening due to a lapse of judgement? Well not on the same level criminally, but morally just as bad.
I ask because as someone with no sexual or dating experience, asexual here, I might be reading things the wrong way. But it always bugged me how people accused Danny of putting words in Billies mouth when it always seemed to me that he was responding to what she told him.
The gist of things is that we weren’t supposed to take anything Billie said or did as her being against having sex. As far as Danny was concerned, she was super into it from the word ‘go’, and he told Joe “I didn’t want to take advantage of her” not because Billie literally says she might change her mind, but because he was trying to white knight for her (whereupon the actual, legit reason out comes out).
That could have been conveyed better, admittedly, and it’s why I used to hate the sequence before I realized it was less “Danny is the EVIL WHITE KNIGHT who needs to be knocked down a peg by sex positive Joe” and more “Danny just didn’t want to have sex and came up with a reason rooted in his ideas of toxic masculinity to justify it because telling Joe ‘I don’t want casual sex because I’m sad about my girlfriend’ probably wasn’t going to go well.”
And it’s this point in the conversation that my wife says “… it’s on top of your head, but you have a point.” Which kinda hurts, because it’s my near-perfectly spherical skull that was instrumental in surviving getting hit by that truck, that and bones about the density of reinforced concrete.
Did Bille tell her journalism professor that she was holed up in her room trying to drink herself to death, or just that she didn’t need to watch CNN (for other unspecified reasons)?
I married a journalism major/professional journalist. Drinking oneself to death comes with the career.
Have I mentioned lately that Billie and Ruth remind me eerily of myself and my wife? Because this is one of those comics where I seriously feel like I should search my house for spy devices planted by Willis.
To be fair, I barely follow the local news either. If it’s not big enough for twitter, it’s not need to know for me. Billie shoulda led with “the daughter of that shooter from a week ago.”
The sad thing is she’s probably perfect for a future writing Gawker or Buzzfeed articles and so better positioned for a future career than the rest of her class.
Live 24 hour internet talk radio. (Apparently, the more extreme you get, the less sleep you need.) Seriously, there are some very scary people doing that with frighteningly large audiences.
Speaking as a Centrist who’s considered a Conservative by all his hippie #BernieOfBorg friends, and a Liberal by all his #TrumpsZombieToupee friends, what Smiling Cat said.
Speaking as a moderate so do I.
Funny thing, my nephew was conservative just for the stated ethics when his progressive government teacher pointed out that they had the same ethical view. My nephew is now a Democrat.
Ruth, you have to give a speech about the shooter tonight at 8 pm. The least you could do is find out the assailant’s name. It’s pretty much the bare minimum you could have done. At this point, it’s hard to imagine anyone’s worse at their job than Ruth.
All she has to say is “the alleged shooter” honestly. I mean, tell me you remember off the top of your head the name of the guy who shot up that Oregon college a little while back. Or maybe she has it written down somewhere and was going to brief it before making her speech. We don’t know.
I dunno, I have difficulty remembering names myself, and just because the audience knows Toedad’s name doesn’t mean Ruth necessarily will.
I mean sure, I can’t remember the name of the Oregon Shooter, but that’s because it didn’t happen on Monday at MY SCHOOL. Especially assuming I’m in a position of authority, maybe a quick google search would be something I’d do if I don’t have all the info.
As someone who works in Oregon, and was literally watching the up to the minute news on that story, I could not tell you who that shooter was. Because there’s really no relevance with a person’s name when they’re performing acts of terrorism. Knowing that a random guy shot up a place doesn’t mean less than knowing that Steven Pines shot up a place.
And I say this as someone who has multiple family members that work in the local school districts, and used to do substitute work himself.
I guess we’re just very different people. I’m not gonna act like I’d retain that knowledge forever. But I’d most certainly be interested in the person responsible.
I’m kind of of two minds here. On the one, you’ve got a point. On the other, the names of individual criminals are, if anything, bandied about too much. They’re usually not relevant, and it immortalizes them and gives them fame (A motivation for a non-trivial number of shooters)
That and she pretty much had written off the task as a bunch of meaningless fluff. So the name wouldn’t have felt important given she was probably planning to give a general speech about how anyone can come to her if they need support in this difficult time and how we’re pulling together as a community to heal, etc…
Now? Who knows? Maybe she’ll actually take it seriously now that she’s been hit with homophobia herself and has seen some of the uglier side of it.
Now that Ruth has the facts she needs to act with integrity, will she dive into the way of the Mary truck or will she find another way to disarm that runaway tanker?
I’ve been pretty sure that when and if Ruth found out why Becky was there, she would not kick her out. I hope she takes her to maybe Leslie, who can get the wheels in motion to get Becky helped.
Wonder what exactly Billie told her journalism teacher?
Wait, you’ll use a weaker word in place of the F-word, but in the same breath you’re using “A-Hole” in full force? I mean, the latter seems more offensive, considering “Fuck!” can be directed at nobody, but “Asshole!” implies a target…
Ah, given your background I think most higher beings wood give you a free pass on that one. Except maybe Cthulhu. Or Yog-Soggoth. They don’t really give anyone a free pass…
I am having a vision of the floor meeting where everyone is texting each other about how ALL of Ruth’s facts are wrong and asking if this is an Onion story.
Yeeeah, I’ve worked for a major news network, and it was probably one of the worst things I’ve had to do in my entire life. One of my professors when I was studying joked about murder and suicide with astonishing regularity just because that was his entire life when he worked in the news, and gallows humour is the only way to survive it.
Breaking news from CNN: We’ve just learned that a small group of radicals has occupied the R.A.’s room of a dorm on the Indiana University campus … for the past week … and no one noticed … There may be hostages. We understand they are demanding removal of certain religious extremist residents.
SWAT teams are planning on ramming their way in with a truck … wait, on the third floor?
It would be kinda funny if someone else found out that Mary had said bigoted stuff to Carla, and immediately reported her to the main office. No one else gives a flying fuck about Ruth’s and Billie’s relationship and Ruth hasn’t exactly made herself a lot of friends. My guess is they’ll all sink in the end (except for Carla, because she is innocent, and I guess Billie will be okay) sooo two will sink.
So has Becky been all over the news, too? Like, photos of her? Interviews? There’s gotta be an outpouring of support for her, right? A Kickstarter so she can get some cash together for a life without her dad? I’d totally back that. You know, if this were real life.
The identity of the victim is usually kept confidential, especially if that person is still a minor — and Becky could be a minor. It is entirely possible to be a 1st-semester freshman in college and still be 17; I myself started college at 17 and didn’t turn 18 until Thanksgiving break.
Pointing guns at your children to scare the gay out of ’em is an american christian’s god-given constitutional right! God needs you to donate to this man’s crowdfunding campaign! Send forth small seeds and you will reap a godly harvest!
Wait. He was arrested in what was AT LEAST statewide news, and NOBODY has figured out where Becky is yet? Or even apparently come looking in the last place where she was? I realize we’re not going to get a totally realistic police investigation into an active shooter situation, which would probably be both boring and definitely not what DOA does, but I mean, this is relevant to them hiding her.
He’s in custody. She left a detailed police report and left her contact information (prolly Joyce’s phone). So as far as the police are concerned, she’s taken care of and the case is solved up until arraignment. And it’s not illegal to be homeless once you’re 18.
As for the people from home, the Browns already know where she is Anderson’s probably don’t want to draw attention to themselves and how they handed over an 18-year-old to a gunman, and the church, if they care, are most likely to try to contact her through the Browns.
As for IU, yeah they SHOULD be interested in who was the target of a toeshaped gunman. My guess is that the Dean has a headache about it right now.
Anderson probably are hiding behind a firm wall of ‘no comment out of respect to the victim’. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, a snipe hunt is underway to identify a scapegoat for not offering some kind of counselling support or intervention after Ross started displaying violent behaviour when he came to collect Becky.
I think that it’s more of a case of not really caring where she is beyond ‘safe’ at the moment. Throwing her out of the dorm would be a PR nightmare for IU so they’re likely looking the other way (I can’t see it being possible that they don’t know, what with Becky attending classes with Dina).
I’ve got a real feeling that Ruth is quite literally the last person in the United States of America to work out that Becky McIntyre, the daughter and victim of crazed gunman Ross McIntyre, is currently resident somewhere at Indiana University.
I don’t know how Indiana University is, but my experience at university is that the professor is far too focused on the lecture to know whether every single person attending it is a student or not. That is, when the classes are large (like 1st year courses), people drop out, some miss lectures, and there’s hundreds of new faces every year.
Unless actual pictures of Becky made the news, I doubt most people would pick up on it. Dina’s professors may have noticed the new face, but they’d have no reason to attach that to the news story or to pass it up to IU administration.
Leslie’s figured it out and that meeting will have to happen eventually, but Leslie’s also not going to go to the admin with her speculation.
Yeah, plus freshman science classes tend to be giant auditorium size. No professor is going to remember all the faces or know the difference between a student who realized halfway through the year that they need to actually attend class and someone auditing.
So yeah, very easy for her to get lost in the shuffle. An RA really would be the likely first person to find out, because that’s a much smaller group of people to keep an eye on.
Or Leslie. If she’d just go to class with Joyce for once!
But that would solve too many problems too simply.
And even the RA without some personal knowledge or someone telling them isn’t likely to know that the girl in her dorm all the time is actually the one the gunman was after.
Or even that she’s staying there full-time unless she starts running into her in the shower regularly. It’s a college dorm, people visit, people keep weird hours, no one thinks much of it.
And even then, it’s more likely to be a girlfriend or someone with roommate problems in their own dorm rather than a homeless non-student.
Well, I think she got the initial introduction of “This is Becky, she’s visiting me” before Joyce knew what was up.
And Mary snoops around and listens to people. Much like she learned about Billie & Ruth. And how she learned about Carla.
Becky was introduced to Mary last Thursday when she showed up – not explicitly as a visitor, but she was wearing her Anderson sweatshirt.
Mary was there when Becky invited Roz to Joyce’s party on Saturday.
That was the last time they were in the same strip, but we can assume that Mary was aware enough of the news to have not missed what Ruth did when the whole “butthole’s got a gun” thing went down on Monday – by which time Becky was already past her three-day-max visiting limit.
We didn’t actually see anything of the days between that Monday and this Friday, but Becky is still around (or was until just a little while ago when she went home with Joyce), living in the dorm. We don’t know that Mary’s seen Becky around the last few days, but Becky hasn’t been exactly unobtrusive (I’m not sure she’s constitutionally able to be), and Mary pays attention to what’s going on around her, so she can collect dirt on everybody.
Pretty sure Mary was initially keeping an eye out assuming that she was banging Joyce and found out more of the full story while snooping. She kinda feels like a curtain-twitcher just waiting to happen.
Thing is, she would be pretty good at it if she actually could ass herself to do it (and got the drinking under control). She would write the sort of gossipy, self-entitled opinion-mongering that would drive Dorothy nutts, but bring in clicks.
That, by the way, is coming from a guy whp worked for 25 years at a small daily paper, making myself unpopular with a succession of management-by-fad managing editors who became obsessed with imitating local-market TV and then the local bloggers, as every good thing I learned in J-school (sticking to facts, supporting with more facts, objectivity except on the opinion page, etc. …) became unfashionable and then “wrong.” You’re forgiven for interpreting this comment as “bitter.”
It’s not the drinking that’s the problem, it’s the fact that she cares more about who she can control then the safety or well being of her residents. It takes someone making slurs for her to realize, holy shit! I have a job!
So outsiders are squatting in the dorms, and a guy with a rifle was terrorizing the students, and Ruth was too busy being a drunk to keep up on things. Nice.
Terrible problems preventing her from doing her job properly. Ruth should really priorities her responsibilities. She either really needs to focus on her RA job and be responsible for the students on her floor, or quit and work out her own issues.
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You mean the All Trump
DumpNetwork?#burn
#bern?
*plays some Deep Purple on the hacked Muzak*
Fun Fact: Our high school “Journalism” class consisted of Yearbook and, as a break from that, presenting our own recordings of talk shows so we could dissect them.
I presented “Squirt TV” (since I figured no one else would) and don’t remember what the commentary was.
Also, our teacher was convinced that typing stuff for the yearbook was SO MUCH WORK that I was allowed to do only that for all of the class, learning barely anything else about yearbook production. Also, not much typing since everyone turned their copy in late and the editors took over after class was over.
billie probably shouldnt be telling her teachers shes an alcoholic, all things considered
hey, she’s 2 d–months sober! 2 months sober
…yup
might as well be 2 YEARS in DoA time! =p
for billie, ‘doa time’ is ‘drunk on arrival’
shes probably not 2 days sober
Or even two hours sober.
In fact, she’s probably not even two panels sober, just sneaking in sips between frames
those are in fact not enormous breasts but a bra-shaped beer hat
She’s in Journalism.
It’s practically required.
Yup. Along with chain-smoking and that fedora to wear tilted back on your head whilst sitting at the typewriter. Typewriter. … Hmmmm. Much has changed since I was in J-School.
Typewriter… That’s like a mechanical laptop, right?
Sure…if they were invented back in the 1860’s.
I dunno, it doesn’t look very realistic. Maybe if we randomly glued some gears on it.
I hear that’s the fashion nowadays.
But if the gears are glued on, how are they supposed to tur-ohhhhh.
They already know
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2010/comic/book-1/01-move-in-day/reputation/
they dont know shes currently drinking, or has alcohol on campus.
which is not allowed.
And by “not allowed” we mean the local liqour stores (or wherever you buy booze in Indiana) do a brisk business and no one has any idea where all the alcohol is going. Billie isn’t the only one drinking on campus, even though it’s not allowed.
ok great, shed still probably get in trouble for it though?
Not over a quip in a laid-back classroom environment. By now I’m sure she knows what kind of teachers will put up with it and which won’t.
Geez, Ruth. You really are kind of a shitty RA.
Yes. But to be slightly fair to her, it has been heavily implied that she’s been holed up all week with a massive depressive episode, so she’s probably not been paying the most attention to much of anything, much less the news.
Yeah, I don’t blame her, it’s just… was there no vetting process? Did no one anywhere along the line think, “Hey, this person suffering from massive depression and anger management problems probably wouldn’t make that great an RA?” Or is she really just that good at hiding it?
I had depression last year and was holed up in my room for months at a time (only left to get food or use the can). The odd thing is that nobody seemed to notice. Anxiety disorders, alcoholism and depression form the unholy trinity of Invisible Disabilities; the person who has them won’t notice they have any of these, they’ll likely only be seen by others when they’re at their highest functioning so those people won’t notice, and the rest of the time they’ll seclude themselves.
Hiding it ain’t easy. Nobody wants to deal with this kind of bullshit, and you need to be *very* aggressive in looking for it to find it.
did you mean “hiding it is easy”? because that’s been my experience.
also people only seeing what they want to see when it comes to their loved ones can factor into how easily detected any of this stuff is.
Seriously, when I was depressed and suicidal, I was showing all of the warning signs. Literally nobody noticed. Then, when shit got outed (long story), people passive-aggressived at me about what a good actor I was.
I was expressing suicidal ideation explicitly several times a day. And I’m autistic. So. Yeah.
People are genuinely terrible at mental illness even when it’s right in front of them saying, “I hate those questions of where you see yourself in 10 years. Because I don’t.” And even more explicit expressions of suicidal ideation.
I feel ya m8. I mean, what do they want? Am I supposed to parade around in public weeping and tearing out my hair before they realize I’m deeply unhappy and anxious?
Pretty much. They don’t know what’s in your head, and there’s a lot of psychological pressure on them to assume that you’re okay, and a lot of psychological pressure on you to minimize how you feel. It sucks.
You have to walk up to somebody and say “Hi I feel REALLY depressed and panicky, like more than normal amounts, and I need help, please get me a therapist right away.” That has a good chance of working, but even that can depend on what person you pick.
You can also call a helpline, where they are actually trained to ask whether you’re feeling depressed and/or suicidal. (Untrained people are usually terrified to ask.) And then you have to be honest, which is hard.
Sorry to be so bossy, there. I’m coming from, I tend to isolate and minimize, and people didn’t realize I was depressed for a very long time, because I wasn’t sure of anything, and because I didn’t tell them. (The problem with saying that I’m okay is that people believe me.)
It sounds like ischemgeek *was* being honest and straightforward about it, but their people still didn’t pick up that they actually needed to do something about it. They may have even explained it away with ischemgeek’s autism, which is extra-sucky.
The best solution that I can see is to go get help yourself, so that you don’t have to convince anybody, but definitely not everyone is at the point where they can do that. The second best is to demand help, with a direct request for a specific action, from somebody who is likely to do it.
Not in quite so many words. Part of my autism is manifested in alexithymia, which is just a fancy word for “I have a hard time identifying and articulating what I’m feeling”.
So, I wasn’t able to say “I’m depressed.” Because I couldn’t tell what I was feeling, especially in the heat of the moment. It’s not that I don’t have emotions, but I can’t recognize them in real time. Plus add.in depression-brain judgement issues and plus the fact that many autistic people with depression exhibit it in a weird way – we tend to do less of the cries in bed all day stuff and more of the over-the-top fatalism type stuff. Think Eeyore crossed with stereotypical over-analytical nerd with a heap of bitterness thrown on top (YMMV. Every autistic person is different, and while many of us are like this when depressed, not all are. I Definitely was though) . Plus, there is the fact that the ways autistic people beat ourselves up are either supported by society (read some of how we’re talked about in the news or in autism parent support groups and pretend it was about you if you want to understand what I mean here) or are written off as part of our autism (I have heard some pros claim that all “truly” autistic teens and adults either hate themselves or are too low- functioning to realize how different we are, frex. Self-hatred is not on any diagnostic criteria. Functional impairment, yes. Difficulty socializing, sure. Sensory trouble, definitely. Self-loathing, no. Self-loathing is an abuse victim and/or comorbid mental illness thing more than an autism thing – and autistic folk are WAY more likely than the general population to have both).
Coming outright and saying it was hard, getting taken seriously when I did find the words was harder, and ppl looking for a “normal” expression of it were ill-equipped to recognize it in me.
“all the other candidates were worse”
I think her depression has gotten dramatically worse this year and it was implied she did a good job last year at least in her bosses eyes
You would be AMAZED the lengths people are willing to go to so they can ignore symptoms of depression. I doubt they know a damn thing about it.
No shit. I’ve been having a really bad time, isolating and finding it harder to function. My mom and aunt visited and mentioned that my place looked nice and clean. “Thanks mom I’ve been trying to stay ahead on things, I wish I could have gotten more done before you guys came down.”
The next morning after they’d left I went out to the kitchen to find an elaborate ‘choose your own adventure of chores’ in several envelopes with different envelopes for tasks and ‘Rewards’. Example reward: hang the curtains in my room.
Because sitting down and inventing a game that would be considered childish for a 12 year old (much less a 32 year old) is still easier for them than asking me if I’m fucking ok and talking to me like a FUCKING ADULT and acting with ACTUAL CONCERN.
They really don’t send all their prospective RAs for a serious psychiatric evaluation. Any more than you’d get one for damn near any other job.
Short of that, if there isn’t anything damning in your file and you give a decent interview you’re probably fine.
Even if she’d been to the health center for counseling or something, that would hopefully be confidential and not able to be used.
Cartoon.
I’m starting to wonder whether, as was implied at the start of this chapter, Billie has basically been doing Ruth’s legwork for her and rolling her out of the room occasionally to be seen putting in place the things Billie had already arranged.
Billie as a new RA? There are worse choices, I suppose… :-S
PROBLEM SOLVER!
I mean, to be fair, its been like a week…
I’m sure I could get away with much worse if I only had to get away with it for a week.
Cosimo Galluzzi ^^ I approve of this avatar.
I know right?? I basically fell in love with this image the moment I saw it. It’s easily my favorite work of his by far.
Her dorm ran like clockwork until a bunch of webcomic characters moved in. Now it’s “drama, drama, drams all the time”
It’s always been drams all the time with Ruth.
I can honestly say she probably better then 7/10 of any of the RA I had over the 4 years at my college
And girlfriend!
Although, really, they’re both terrible girlfriends.
Wait Billie majors in Journalism?
She majors in Journalism?
As in she is going for a major….
In Journalism?
Well she wants to major in journalism, but so far she didn’t do a good job. For example she tried to take an interview from Danny.
The fact that I can’t remember it must mean it was a riveting interview.
…Well, a person could say Danny NAILED it, if he hadn’t decided to be Danny. I won’t say he Danned it up, because even though he thought he did at the time, it worked out for the best for everyone.
Oh now I remember. It’s the one where Danny acts like he’s a shining knight for not having sex with Billie, but Joe calls him out on it because really he has this weird thought process that even a sober, calm woman knows less about what she wants than Danny does.
This comic needs more Joe.
Joe doesn’t really have room to talk, as he apparently thinks he also knows better than many women about what they want.
You’ve probably got examples, but at the moment I can’t think of any times that Joe has stated or acted like he’s known more or knows what women want.
If anything he’s kinda’ gone against the stereotype of what guys like him usually act like. He calls Danny and Walky out on being uncomfortable with themselves on occasions, like the shoe incident or the one with Danny mentioned above.
Plus he brought up the Miss Pigg/Kermit debate when everybody else was too frightened to.
Also Joe has been super consistent about consent being fundamental to responsible sex. The only time he really isn’t a gentleman is when he’s showboating or assuming that everyone is or should be as DTF as he is.
I may be wrong but I don’t read Joe as thinking he knows better than women so much as that he thinks he knows something most people don’t: that sex is awesome. The fact that Joe feels that both men and women fail to appreciate the greatness of sex makes his perspective mostly non-sexist. Which is better than we can say for our poor friend Danny.
Well, besides all the times he’s continued to pester a person whose made it clear in no uncertain terms that she has no interest in him or his shit with sexual innuendos and come-ons, there’s:
Deliberate ignorance of negative body language requiring people to actively say no to get him to stop harassing them:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-4/01-the-only-dope-for-me-is-you/sitnext/
Unwanted intimate touch, again, ignoring negative body language, approaching from behind so individuals didn’t have chance to say no:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/05-saturdays-all-right-for-slighting/no/
Okay, I’m not going to have many examples of all the times he’s harassed Joyce with come-ons when she’s more than made clear her disinterest, but this is extra gross because he clearly heard what she said in the previous statement and in what tone it was and yet he felt it was appropriate to say that. From behind. And then berate her to tell her friend he’s not a rapist. So not cool, so not good consent practices:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/01-pajama-jeans/full/
Treating women like numbers, putting his targets online with said numbers and asking others to subscribe to his RSS feed:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2010/comic/book-1/01-move-in-day/prediction/
When learning that his target. A target he knows is sexually inexperienced and conservative. A target he wants to “break in”. That she needs a chaperone to fully feel safe on a date, he tries to bribe him to leave them alone in a way that she wouldn’t be able to get a replacement (aka treating boundaries as something to navigate around (yes, it’s a stupid boundary, but you have to respect a person you want to be intimate with’s sexual boundaries no matter what, the correct decision here would have been to end the date rather than try and work around Joyce’s known sexual beliefs)):
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/03-men-are-from-beck-women-are-from-clark/fifty/
Oh, and the crowning level of awful? “Fixing” sexually inexperienced individuals. This especially galls me, because pressuring “inexperienced” types to help “fix” their dysfunctions is a major means asexuals like me are targeted for predation at best and corrective rape at worse, so this language is genuinely unsettling and skeevy to me:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/03-men-are-from-beck-women-are-from-clark/penis/
Overall, he’s consistently been painted to be an individual who respects that no means no, but he doesn’t seem to understand yes means yes and seems to believe that any means of manipulation of the situation is fair game so long as the “target” doesn’t directly say no. While that view is sadly above that of a lot of boys his age, it is nonetheless a dangerous and predatory worldview, especially when combined with his total lack of respect for people’s reasons to want to not have sex or not face sexual harassment.
Also, totally unrelated to the topic, but his fetishization of lesbians, repeatedly, during class time, is gross as all hell and made grosser by the fact that his teacher is an out lesbian:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-5/02-threes-a-crowd/sweetlesbianfacts/
So yeah, kid doesn’t really get “consent” other than a watered down inaccurate worldview he is consistently shown to try and weasel around up to the point where the person he is targeting has to straight up threaten him to get him to stop… temporarily. That Sarah comic? He had at least 4 comics before that where she had shown him incredibly negative body language that screams disgust and yet he still hunted her because “that anger must mean she’s great in the sack”.
That’s not consent culture. That’s creepy PUA shit.
The closest I can think of would be this page.
Once you get a definite no, stop. If they change their mind later, they know you’re interested and where to find you.
(Indefinite “no”s convert to definite ones at 3:1)
(Besides the whole “not being a creepy jerk” benefit there is also the “not wasting time, energy, and hope on futile efforts” thing.)
You’re right, he does call out toxic masculinity. That has no bearing on how he does with consent, which as mentioned, leaves somewhat to be desired. Also of note is how he’s talked about lubricating sexual situations with alcohol, which…no.
Guess you don’t notice it all that much considering he doesn’t show up that much. Kinda’ disappointed now since I thought he was just the person who was comfortable with themselves, their sexuality, and everything else.
Also to Shiro, I agree about the alcohol and sex. Never a good idea.
Which is why Billie and Ruth need to separate and get sober or just…not be together.
We know that consent is important to Joe because word of God (aka Willis) has said so. But so far it’s been a lot of tell, don’t show based on Joe’s behaviour. Implying either that Willis forgot early on or, perhaps more accurately, that being big on consent isn’t a good thing by default if you don’t have a clear understanding of what consent is.
Word of God is good and all, but doesn’t count for much if it’s the only evidence.
Honestly, there’s nothing wrong with alcohol and sex. It’s the using alcohol to get sex that wouldn’t have happened without it that’s problematic. “alcohol really helps facilitate the threesomes” as Joe said. That’s a problem.
Billie & Ruth’s problem with alcohol and sex is more that they pass out before finishing the sex than anything else. They certainly need to stop drinking, but that’s the “trying to drink myself to death” part and has nothing to do with the sex.
What Trolldrool said.
Being “big on consent” is a basic standard of human decency. Praising Joe for that is like saying “Danny’s big on romantic loyalty, thankfully he hasn’t carved up any of his ex girlfriends and made himself a woman suit.”
thejeff-
Yeah, that’s the other big part of why I can’t get on board with “Joe practices good consent”. There’s been a number of times when he’s viewed alcohol as a means to get sex that would not occur when people are sober. The “alcohol facilitates threesomes” thing. There was the time he said that a drunker version of Joyce would totally be all up on him (extra fucked up because while he doesn’t know, she’s actually had a drink spiked in the past for the purpose of a rape). And so on.
And as you say, that’s a lot different than just being a person who likes alcohol and sex independently.
He’s got no means no down, but beyond that, any means to an end seems to rule the day and he hasn’t seemed to realize that coercion, wearing down defenses, or working around sober boundaries aren’t consent.
That’s probably not the best example of Joe’s sex positivity. He was right to call Danny out on his bullshit, but even before that he was angry that Danny didn’t want to have sex, period, and when Danny explained his actual reasoning, that he wasn’t ready to have sex with someone after breaking up with Dorothy, he just skipped out of the room.
Frankly, the approach Billie took there would have skeeved me out big time. From ‘How dare you hit on me?’ to ripping off clothes in about 30 seconds. Screams serious issues to me. Not something I’d want to get involved with. And who knows how she’d react afterwards.
Mind you, that’s all with distance and I’m not 18 and hormone-driven anymore. Who knows how I’d actually have reacted in that situation.
A friend of mine had that happen to him. He was pretty skeeved out.
like what’s important isn’t so much that billie hypothetically would’ve regretted it, it’s that danny was regretting it and then he made his decision about hypothetical billie.
He admitted in the next page that he was bullshitting and that his real reason was that he wasn’t ready to actually sleep with someone after Dorothy broke up with him, and later we find out that he told Billie he didn’t want to because he was interested in someone else.
Billie rapidly switching from “how dare you hit on me” to literally climbing on top of him seems like a pretty solid reason to get weirded out, but it wasn’t actually a factor in why Danny didn’t want to.
True, but it might well have played into his excuse of “didn’t want to take advantage”, even if he didn’t quite articulate that – making Joe’s “Was she underage, drunk or crying” list of acceptable reasons for not doing so even weaker.
If she did a 180 right before sex, I’d be worried about one right after.
I feel that’s where a lot of the issue of Joe slamming Danny on it comes from, since the aftermath of Joe ripping on Danny for saying dumb sexist shit never addresses that “I didn’t want to take advantage of her” makes a startling amount of sense specifically because Billie pulled that 180.
Ultimately, that wasn’t the point that was supposed to be conveyed. Billie is supposed to come off as 100% eager about it to him, Danny is originally meant to come off as white knighting so Joe can tell him off (and give Joe a character moment that proves he’s not quite the machismo driven horndog that we assume he is, while also establishing that Danny’s white knighting brand of sexism is just as harmful), and then he reveals that his real reason is actually good, insofar as you don’t really need a reason not to have sex with somebody if you don’t want to.
It’s kind of like how my initial impression of the Walky/Dorothy pajama jeans feud was “Walky is not allowed agency in his relationships and being told to strip for someone he was just harassed into dating again is okay”, rather than it just being a dumb, immature argument with no actual significant weight to how we were meant to perceive their relationship.
Yeah, part of my problem with Joe’s overall portrayal is that I think Willis intends it to be much more positive than it comes across, at least to me. Especially early on, but even through some of his more recent appearances.
As far as the “Walky/Dorothy pajama jeans feud” one character thing that did was establish, mostly to Dorothy, that Walky wouldn’t just roll over for her, like Danny had. And to the rest of us, that Dorothy was used to that.
The stripping bit was painful though. If kind of funny at the same time.
Come to think of it, has Walky worn the pajama jeans since? Have they even been mentioned? Maybe he did roll over more than I thought he had.
Not to mention Billie ordered Danny to “Shut up before I change my mind.” So he’s not assuming she’ll regret it, she just told him she’s halfway to regretting it before they even have sex. Which combined with the previous 180 you guys mentioned gives him plenty of solid evidence to believe she would regret having sex immediately after.
Maybe it was just me but when she said the line “Now shut up before I change my mind” I read her saying two things to Danny.
1. The sex we are about to have is a mistake.
2. But we need to have it now before this intentional lapse of judgment passes.
So wouldn’t having sex with someone(regardless of their gender) after being told those two things(in not so many words) be taking advantage of them? If it’s wrong to pump someone full of alcohol so they’d have sex with you that you know would not happen without an alcohol induced lapse of judgment, wouldn’t it be just as wrong to have sex right after being told that it was only happening due to a lapse of judgement? Well not on the same level criminally, but morally just as bad.
I ask because as someone with no sexual or dating experience, asexual here, I might be reading things the wrong way. But it always bugged me how people accused Danny of putting words in Billies mouth when it always seemed to me that he was responding to what she told him.
The gist of things is that we weren’t supposed to take anything Billie said or did as her being against having sex. As far as Danny was concerned, she was super into it from the word ‘go’, and he told Joe “I didn’t want to take advantage of her” not because Billie literally says she might change her mind, but because he was trying to white knight for her (whereupon the actual, legit reason out comes out).
That could have been conveyed better, admittedly, and it’s why I used to hate the sequence before I realized it was less “Danny is the EVIL WHITE KNIGHT who needs to be knocked down a peg by sex positive Joe” and more “Danny just didn’t want to have sex and came up with a reason rooted in his ideas of toxic masculinity to justify it because telling Joe ‘I don’t want casual sex because I’m sad about my girlfriend’ probably wasn’t going to go well.”
She tried to have sex with him, he rejected her.
Yes, “journalism“.
She just does it to tease her editor.
You know, Billie’s got a point.
And a few curves.
And it’s this point in the conversation that my wife says “… it’s on top of your head, but you have a point.” Which kinda hurts, because it’s my near-perfectly spherical skull that was instrumental in surviving getting hit by that truck, that and bones about the density of reinforced concrete.
*Professor laugh*
“Ooooh, I made myself sad.”
DARTH VADER: This is CNN.
damn, I was gonna link to Mufasa: “This is CNN” but it got a DMCA takedown =(
There was a different one I was thinking of, but this works too.
https://youtu.be/YOOb_o06adA?t=10s
Best I could do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cG25vX2VZM
“You know, the guy who caused a campus wide panic and assaulted one of your residents?”
“…”
“Got the entire school shut down for a day?”
“…”
“Witnesses say he had a battle with a superhero on a moving car?”
“…”
“…sigh. He looks like a big toe.”
“OH, THAT ASSHOLE!”
*slow clap*
“Also he has no neck.”
“This guy sounds more threatening than me.”
“And short, stubby legs – almost like he has no… femurs.”
“Hrm… maybe I HAVE met him before…”
“He made you have to schedule a dorm meeting?”
“THAT FUCK”
“… Wait, that was you.”
“The abusive dad you DIDN’T get to punch.”
“THAT fucker is on my list”
Ruth would have been perfect for the jury pool if someone wasn’t messing things up.
Shouldn’t Ruth be cramming for tonight’s meeting, anyway?
Apparently far more than she knew.
Now she may have to mention Becky at that meeting, incidentally.
Eesh, yeah, you say it like that and you realize that journalism seriously needs some kind of real reboot.
I don’t keep a S-bomb count, Ruth. You don’t get extra points for that.
Wait.
Did Bille tell her journalism professor that she was holed up in her room trying to drink herself to death, or just that she didn’t need to watch CNN (for other unspecified reasons)?
Maybe both.
Unrelated, but twinsies!
She’s a journalism major, so drinking herself to death is part of the curriculum. Fail at it and you get to graduate!
I married a journalism major/professional journalist. Drinking oneself to death comes with the career.
Have I mentioned lately that Billie and Ruth remind me eerily of myself and my wife? Because this is one of those comics where I seriously feel like I should search my house for spy devices planted by Willis.
To be fair, I barely follow the local news either. If it’s not big enough for twitter, it’s not need to know for me. Billie shoulda led with “the daughter of that shooter from a week ago.”
Congrats to Ross MacIntyre for his win in New Hampshire tonight
There is so much Ruth in the comments section tonight.
ruth may rule
Not if Spider-Man and Cap’n Crunch have anything to say about it!
Ruth WILL rule!
… I approve.
I used to be a Ruth before I adopted my waffles, so posting in support. Ruths will rule!
you know, the toedad gunman who was chasing his gay daughter who is also this person we are talking about. ~<3
Is Billie is majoring in Journalism or “Journalism”?
Yes.
Yes.
The sad thing is she’s probably perfect for a future writing Gawker or Buzzfeed articles and so better positioned for a future career than the rest of her class.
I think not having a journalism major is a requirement to work on those sites. :p
Or whatever it is they do.
There is literally no distinction between those two things. Just ask Raoul Duke. Or Hunter S. Thompson.
Her journalism professor laughed because, well…
…this is CNN we’re talking about…
Not to mention Fox News.
True Conservatives see as leftie bollocks for old people.
EDIT: True Conservatives see Fox News as leftie bollocks for old people.
Where do they get the real deal from, then?
Talk radio probably
Live 24 hour internet talk radio. (Apparently, the more extreme you get, the less sleep you need.) Seriously, there are some very scary people doing that with frighteningly large audiences.
Alex Jones.
And if you don’t know who that is, don’t google it.
“Don’t google it.”
I should have listened.
Perhaps this guy would benefit from the torments True Capitalist Radio enjoys.
Coast to Coast or TalkAM? Let’s see….
Neither. But he /was/ on Coast to Coast. I can pretty much write him off for this reason alone.
Speaking as a conservative, I draw my news from multiple sources, because I don’t trust any of them.
Speaking as a Centrist who’s considered a Conservative by all his hippie #BernieOfBorg friends, and a Liberal by all his #TrumpsZombieToupee friends, what Smiling Cat said.
Speaking as a flamingly liberal person, so do I. Go figure!
Well to be honest, it is a practice common to well reasoned folk of any political stripe.
(though full disclosure, my conservative fox watching dad has referred to me as the Lunatic Center)
Speaking as a moderate so do I.
Funny thing, my nephew was conservative just for the stated ethics when his progressive government teacher pointed out that they had the same ethical view. My nephew is now a Democrat.
Billie’s journalism professor cried because, well…
“They chose Don Lemon over me?!“
Poor journalism professor
Dude was probably like “Hah! Been there!”
Before long the journalism professor is going to be about as relevant as the typing teacher or the Latin instructor.
dat shrug, yo. ruth can make an awesome gravatar even when she’s not being all rage-splodey
Yes, yes she can.
Ruth, you have to give a speech about the shooter tonight at 8 pm. The least you could do is find out the assailant’s name. It’s pretty much the bare minimum you could have done. At this point, it’s hard to imagine anyone’s worse at their job than Ruth.
…Two Ruths?
Sobriety does seem to be a foreign concept to Billie.
I feel like her learning this new information about the whole situation is definitely going to put a different spin on the floor meeting.
Additionally, I wonder if most of the girls actually know Becky’s story, or if they just like her anyway.
Honestly I wish Willis would just do two weeks worth of strips following the lesser characters, because we know barely anything about them.
future Patreon milestone goalAll she has to say is “the alleged shooter” honestly. I mean, tell me you remember off the top of your head the name of the guy who shot up that Oregon college a little while back. Or maybe she has it written down somewhere and was going to brief it before making her speech. We don’t know.
I dunno, I have difficulty remembering names myself, and just because the audience knows Toedad’s name doesn’t mean Ruth necessarily will.
I mean sure, I can’t remember the name of the Oregon Shooter, but that’s because it didn’t happen on Monday at MY SCHOOL. Especially assuming I’m in a position of authority, maybe a quick google search would be something I’d do if I don’t have all the info.
What Yotomoe said.
As someone who works in Oregon, and was literally watching the up to the minute news on that story, I could not tell you who that shooter was. Because there’s really no relevance with a person’s name when they’re performing acts of terrorism. Knowing that a random guy shot up a place doesn’t mean less than knowing that Steven Pines shot up a place.
And I say this as someone who has multiple family members that work in the local school districts, and used to do substitute work himself.
I guess we’re just very different people. I’m not gonna act like I’d retain that knowledge forever. But I’d most certainly be interested in the person responsible.
I’m kind of of two minds here. On the one, you’ve got a point. On the other, the names of individual criminals are, if anything, bandied about too much. They’re usually not relevant, and it immortalizes them and gives them fame (A motivation for a non-trivial number of shooters)
That and she pretty much had written off the task as a bunch of meaningless fluff. So the name wouldn’t have felt important given she was probably planning to give a general speech about how anyone can come to her if they need support in this difficult time and how we’re pulling together as a community to heal, etc…
Now? Who knows? Maybe she’ll actually take it seriously now that she’s been hit with homophobia herself and has seen some of the uglier side of it.
CNN: your one stop network for ideas and opinions that haven’t been relevant or helpful since the turn of the 20th century!
You know you’ve lost when no one knows your name.
easy, voltron
And believe me, Voltron certainly is.
I hear he’s had five people inside him at the same time.
And ALL of them had lion suits on! Oh, the scandal~
Stop being mean to Gigantor.
And Ross’ 15 minutes ended 3 days ago.
Sometimes you have to go where everybody knows your name.
As long as your name is Norm.
But have they given him a number yet?
Maybe a prison number.
you’re peter griffons daughter.
Guess Ruth doesn’t have super-RA psychic powers after all…
The laser eyes, they do nothing!
Billie is her kryptonite.
Now that Ruth has the facts she needs to act with integrity, will she dive into the way of the Mary truck or will she find another way to disarm that runaway tanker?
Can’t wait for May 5th.
I love how they are talking this out instead of omega sadness. Woohoo
I’ve been pretty sure that when and if Ruth found out why Becky was there, she would not kick her out. I hope she takes her to maybe Leslie, who can get the wheels in motion to get Becky helped.
Wonder what exactly Billie told her journalism teacher?
Genuine belly crylaugh at the last panel. Great character strip, great billie/ruth strip. AHHHHH I LOVE THEM AAHHHHH
I can understand Billie’s logic, I mean journalism and news have very little to do with each other anymore.
I dunno. William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer would be fairly well at home at Fox News these days.
Great! Now all I hear in my head is the voice of James Earl Jones! Thanks David!
New drinking game: every time you hear Ross MacIntyre’s name, you take a shot.
Ross MacIntyre.
Ross Macintyre
Yeah…unless someone is having the comments read aloud to them, I think were safe
FUDGE YOU, ASSHOLE!!!
Wait, you’ll use a weaker word in place of the F-word, but in the same breath you’re using “A-Hole” in full force? I mean, the latter seems more offensive, considering “Fuck!” can be directed at nobody, but “Asshole!” implies a target…
Joyce recent update in her use of language has completely thrown me off track.
Her new language pack may cause interface problems with the legacy systems back home. Or maybe not, per Hank.
She’s backwards-compatible.
FUDGE!
Ammunition is expensive. And what are we using for targets?
… it’s taking all of my power not to say “queer youth” here… yes, I know I have an express ticket to Hell.
Ah, given your background I think most higher beings wood give you a free pass on that one. Except maybe Cthulhu. Or Yog-Soggoth. They don’t really give anyone a free pass…
*would not wood. I swear my mobile device hates me.
People who take care of cephalopods for a living, maybe?
Yog-Sothoth, not Yog-Soggoth…though that seems to be a common mistake…probably conflating him with the Shoggoths.
It’s a questionable transliteration of sounds not meant to be made by human throats. Hardly surprising the spelling isn’t consistent.
Oh no, you’re supposed to make an Elder Sign before you spell that name correctly. The gates are opened. We’re all doomed.
Well, they do need their guard dog back.
Yeah all kinds of riff-raff have been getting in lately, bringing property values down and all….
FUDGE
yeah…Ruth is kinda a shitty R.A, at this point I’m just rooting for Carla.
Ruth’s logic is flawless. Sadly.
Here. Have a crappy early-morning 5-minute Billie.
http://imgur.com/tNLqvi1
Pretty darn good! I like the colors.
Thanks!
It’d look WAY better normally, but new tablet + tired as fuck + I’m a bit rusty = You get the point.
Glad you like it, though!
Awesome!
Wow, sketchers everywhere. At this rate I’m gonna have to try my hand pretty soon.
Do it!!!
YAAAAS. I don’t even drink anymore, and drinking is more appealing than watching the Can’t News Network. XP
It’s kinda like how MTV doesn’t do music videos anymore, and AMC doesn’t do classic movies anymore. CNN just kinda ‘evolved’ its way out of news.
I am having a vision of the floor meeting where everyone is texting each other about how ALL of Ruth’s facts are wrong and asking if this is an Onion story.
Ooooh, looks like Ruthless is showing a bit of heart? Maybe this is a good sign.
Yeeeah, I’ve worked for a major news network, and it was probably one of the worst things I’ve had to do in my entire life. One of my professors when I was studying joked about murder and suicide with astonishing regularity just because that was his entire life when he worked in the news, and gallows humour is the only way to survive it.
Being in news sucks.
Breaking news from CNN: We’ve just learned that a small group of radicals has occupied the R.A.’s room of a dorm on the Indiana University campus … for the past week … and no one noticed … There may be hostages. We understand they are demanding removal of certain religious extremist residents.
SWAT teams are planning on ramming their way in with a truck … wait, on the third floor?
Stay tuned to CNN for further developments.
See, this is why I get all of my news from the Daily Show and the Nightly Show.
We’re not gonna see actual Trump references until he’s out of office, are we?
It would be kinda funny if someone else found out that Mary had said bigoted stuff to Carla, and immediately reported her to the main office. No one else gives a flying fuck about Ruth’s and Billie’s relationship and Ruth hasn’t exactly made herself a lot of friends. My guess is they’ll all sink in the end (except for Carla, because she is innocent, and I guess Billie will be okay) sooo two will sink.
Random: Everyone’s cheeks seem really on point to me lately. I don’t know why because I also figure they’re the same way the cheeks are usually drawn.
hopefully their other cheeks are also on point.
Heh, sure, but those aren’t in frame.
#CheeksOnFleek
So has Becky been all over the news, too? Like, photos of her? Interviews? There’s gotta be an outpouring of support for her, right? A Kickstarter so she can get some cash together for a life without her dad? I’d totally back that. You know, if this were real life.
The identity of the victim is usually kept confidential, especially if that person is still a minor — and Becky could be a minor. It is entirely possible to be a 1st-semester freshman in college and still be 17; I myself started college at 17 and didn’t turn 18 until Thanksgiving break.
I thought her and Joyce were the same age?
Notnto disagree with your reasoning, but Becky has stated that she’s 18.
Totes. Toedad’s legal defense has a very successful kickstarter among the various churches in the region and-
Oh, you didn’t mean like that… whoops.
Pointing guns at your children to scare the gay out of ’em is an american christian’s god-given constitutional right! God needs you to donate to this man’s crowdfunding campaign! Send forth small seeds and you will reap a godly harvest!
Hallelujah!
PRAISE JEBUS
Wait. He was arrested in what was AT LEAST statewide news, and NOBODY has figured out where Becky is yet? Or even apparently come looking in the last place where she was? I realize we’re not going to get a totally realistic police investigation into an active shooter situation, which would probably be both boring and definitely not what DOA does, but I mean, this is relevant to them hiding her.
He’s in custody. She left a detailed police report and left her contact information (prolly Joyce’s phone). So as far as the police are concerned, she’s taken care of and the case is solved up until arraignment. And it’s not illegal to be homeless once you’re 18.
All the effort is going into finding Amazi-Girl and Sal.
As for the people from home, the Browns already know where she is Anderson’s probably don’t want to draw attention to themselves and how they handed over an 18-year-old to a gunman, and the church, if they care, are most likely to try to contact her through the Browns.
As for IU, yeah they SHOULD be interested in who was the target of a toeshaped gunman. My guess is that the Dean has a headache about it right now.
That’s true. IU would have a vested interest in tracking down the main victim if only to issue an official apologize.
Anderson probably are hiding behind a firm wall of ‘no comment out of respect to the victim’. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, a snipe hunt is underway to identify a scapegoat for not offering some kind of counselling support or intervention after Ross started displaying violent behaviour when he came to collect Becky.
I think that it’s more of a case of not really caring where she is beyond ‘safe’ at the moment. Throwing her out of the dorm would be a PR nightmare for IU so they’re likely looking the other way (I can’t see it being possible that they don’t know, what with Becky attending classes with Dina).
I’ve got a real feeling that Ruth is quite literally the last person in the United States of America to work out that Becky McIntyre, the daughter and victim of crazed gunman Ross McIntyre, is currently resident somewhere at Indiana University.
I don’t know how Indiana University is, but my experience at university is that the professor is far too focused on the lecture to know whether every single person attending it is a student or not. That is, when the classes are large (like 1st year courses), people drop out, some miss lectures, and there’s hundreds of new faces every year.
Unless actual pictures of Becky made the news, I doubt most people would pick up on it. Dina’s professors may have noticed the new face, but they’d have no reason to attach that to the news story or to pass it up to IU administration.
Leslie’s figured it out and that meeting will have to happen eventually, but Leslie’s also not going to go to the admin with her speculation.
Yeah, plus freshman science classes tend to be giant auditorium size. No professor is going to remember all the faces or know the difference between a student who realized halfway through the year that they need to actually attend class and someone auditing.
So yeah, very easy for her to get lost in the shuffle. An RA really would be the likely first person to find out, because that’s a much smaller group of people to keep an eye on.
Or Leslie. If she’d just go to class with Joyce for once!
But that would solve too many problems too simply.
And even the RA without some personal knowledge or someone telling them isn’t likely to know that the girl in her dorm all the time is actually the one the gunman was after.
Or even that she’s staying there full-time unless she starts running into her in the shower regularly. It’s a college dorm, people visit, people keep weird hours, no one thinks much of it.
And even then, it’s more likely to be a girlfriend or someone with roommate problems in their own dorm rather than a homeless non-student.
> And even then, it’s more likely to be a girlfriend or someone with roommate problems in their own dorm rather than a homeless non-student.
Which makes me wonder how Mary knew.
Well, I think she got the initial introduction of “This is Becky, she’s visiting me” before Joyce knew what was up.
And Mary snoops around and listens to people. Much like she learned about Billie & Ruth. And how she learned about Carla.
Becky was introduced to Mary last Thursday when she showed up – not explicitly as a visitor, but she was wearing her Anderson sweatshirt.
Mary was there when Becky invited Roz to Joyce’s party on Saturday.
That was the last time they were in the same strip, but we can assume that Mary was aware enough of the news to have not missed what Ruth did when the whole “butthole’s got a gun” thing went down on Monday – by which time Becky was already past her three-day-max visiting limit.
We didn’t actually see anything of the days between that Monday and this Friday, but Becky is still around (or was until just a little while ago when she went home with Joyce), living in the dorm. We don’t know that Mary’s seen Becky around the last few days, but Becky hasn’t been exactly unobtrusive (I’m not sure she’s constitutionally able to be), and Mary pays attention to what’s going on around her, so she can collect dirt on everybody.
Pretty sure Mary was initially keeping an eye out assuming that she was banging Joyce and found out more of the full story while snooping. She kinda feels like a curtain-twitcher just waiting to happen.
Freshmen classes, like the stuff dina is taking probably, tend to be the very largest of sizes too.
Pay attention to the drama, Ruth.
You should try Fox, girls! Then you’ll find that reality is pretty much subjective to some folks!
Fox is also the best in Melee, unless we’re talking about a different kind of Fox.
I like Billie as a journalism major.
Thing is, she would be pretty good at it if she actually could ass herself to do it (and got the drinking under control). She would write the sort of gossipy, self-entitled opinion-mongering that would drive Dorothy nutts, but bring in clicks.
Self-absorbed opinion mongering IS journalism these days.
Take that, Dotty.
That, by the way, is coming from a guy whp worked for 25 years at a small daily paper, making myself unpopular with a succession of management-by-fad managing editors who became obsessed with imitating local-market TV and then the local bloggers, as every good thing I learned in J-school (sticking to facts, supporting with more facts, objectivity except on the opinion page, etc. …) became unfashionable and then “wrong.” You’re forgiven for interpreting this comment as “bitter.”
Ruth is a raging b and incapable of being a sympathetic character: chapter 851.
Funny you should say that. To me, she is the most sympathetic character.
Of course, that’s probably because I am also busily drinking myself to death.
It’s not the drinking that’s the problem, it’s the fact that she cares more about who she can control then the safety or well being of her residents. It takes someone making slurs for her to realize, holy shit! I have a job!
I said sympathetic, not healthy, competent, or even necessarily decent.
He laughs until he cries, then he dies, then he dies. Come and see the show!
Fuckshit? She has a poop fetish?
Nobody NEEDS to watch CNN. (chrome)
*curls into a ball, thinks about JMC degree, and weeps*
They should watch Fox News, it’s better comedy.
Was really hoping for the ‘brain bulb fizzles into life’ moment. Feh.
So outsiders are squatting in the dorms, and a guy with a rifle was terrorizing the students, and Ruth was too busy being a drunk to keep up on things. Nice.
Yeah, it’s almost like she has terrible problems!
Terrible problems preventing her from doing her job properly. Ruth should really priorities her responsibilities. She either really needs to focus on her RA job and be responsible for the students on her floor, or quit and work out her own issues.