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NEANDERTHAL FINGERPRINT! NEANDERTHAL FINGERPRINT! NEANDERTHAL FINGERPRINT! NEANDERTHAL FINGERPRINT! NEANDERTHAL FINGERPRINT! NEANDERTHAL FINGERPRINT! NEANDERTHAL FINGERPRINT! NEANDERTHAL FINGERPRINT! NEANDERTHAL FINGERPRINT! NEANDERTHAL FINGERPRINT! 🤯
www.theguardian.com/science/2025...
Patrick Willems @patrickhwillems.bsky.social ⋅ 1m
The Verge @theverge.com ⋅ 2d
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️𝓝𝓪𝓷𝓲 
I would say there’s also a custodial closet but he prolly pissed off the cleaning crew, too
that and he can’t fit himself and Danny in it. :p
Joe fits inside just fine, but Danny can’t… quite… seem to get the door to close and latch. No matter how he tries.
butterfingers baby
Surely the one safe place from all the ladies on campus won’t be in the guy’s bathroom? lool Ô_o
Slipshine spoiler: That has already been… used.
Well, they probably don’t like their ratings.
I’m the person in the last panel who’s not here for Joe and his bullshit.
Man, that’s a sweet gig! How’d you get Willis to put you in the comic?
I just inserted myself into all the depictions of the future building and then hung around the construction site enough that everyone assumed I was a building feature.
Be more specific.
The one with the hat
Wait
We must be twins then, Yumi! I was just about to make this comment myself. That person definitely has my style. And my disdain for people like Joe.
…isn’t Amber a CS major…?
Yeah, but it’s not like Joe needs to hide from HER, right? She’s not scary at aaaalllll….
She already knows about the list and has decided it doesn’t bother her.
How do I know? She’s interacted with Joe for longer than 30 seconds.
Eyup.
I have a feeling she’s not attending class today
Or possibly ever again on that campus. You know, depending on how badly she murdered that kid. ‘Cause if she murdered him a lot, not looking good for her.
He *did* come at her with a knife and there was at least one witness to this. A self-defence defence would likely save Amber’s bacon. In several states, you don’t even have to have a duty to retreat in order for the self-defence law to activate. I know here in Colorado, you don’t have to retreat and we don’t even have a “stand your ground” law, unlike Indiana.
However, if that rapist tried to retreat and she attacked anyway, the self-defence argument starts to get diluted. But that didn’t seem to stop Zimmerman from walking away from outright murder scot-free.
TL;DR: If the rapist attempted to retreat, Amber might be pretty F’d in the A. If not, she’ll walk.
Since Amber isn’t going to written out of the cast (or kept isolated off campus) for the rest of the comic or even for years of real time, whatever happened isn’t going to lead to those consequences.
I dunno, it’s already been over a month since we last saw her . . . I could see it being a real-time year before things get somewhat settled.
Probably because it’s Saturday.
Isn’t Danny a CS major?
Sad AND true.
Well, at least mostly. So far. But, it’s changing slowly, and that’s good.
I went through engineering some years ago. It was swinging even then, but there was a, hmn, continuum. Mech was actually majority women, if I recall right, but electrical was one in three or so. Comp. sci. actually had more women than EE did even.
I was shocked to discover that, to my parents, “fem eng” was a name for the Women in Engineering group, and not a nickname reflecting the fact that chemical (i.e. chem) engineering was 50+% women. Software engineering (a joint programme between the faculty of engineering and faculty of math which is home to computer science) my year, however, had no women at all.
Heh, funny thing is, I have been guessing for years that this is about to change dramatically, with the balance shifting quickly to almost all women sometime around 2025. Why? Because the primary skill in serious software development is interpersonal communication, the very thing the that the stereotypical hacker types (hacker in the classic sense, not cracker sense) were fleeing into the Net to get away from. Wanna know why software is such a mess? That’s it in a nutshell – people who had communicating with other human beings working in a field where communicating with other human beings is 80% of the job. However, if the rolls for CS – especially outside of the US – are any indication, the shift from Nerd Ghetto to Pink Ghetto is already beginning.
‘hate’, not ‘had’.
‘CS student rolls’.
And no, I am no saying it will be better; sadly, it will lead to precisely the same sort of degradation of the field in prestige and pay, in part because “women’s work” is never properly respected, but mostly because the main reason it is so in demand now is because we are all so bad at it. if people – regardless of sex or gender – started coming into CS as something other than an escape from socialization, a way to get paid for intellectual play, or to make a quick buck (the primary motives of different CS majors today), people who actually have the skills the job really needs, the ‘software crisis’ that has plagued us since the 1960s will simply evaporate.
Seriously, it is really hard to get through the thick skulls of most IT people – including myself at times – that writing code is the easy part of the job. The hard part is talking to people to know what they think needs to be done, using that to figure out what actually needs to be done, and keeping those line of communication open so that there is enough feedback to detect problems and keep the whole thing going. Writing code is probably less than 10% of the job in programming; debugging it is maybe another 10%; but to do the job right, then 80% has got to be talking to people, otherwise its going to be a mess and remain a mess.
No.
Talking to people about specs is easy… well, it’s easy provided the programmer is talking to a coworker, someone they know, work with every day. Someone in sales or support not the customer themselves. That’s how it is really likely to happen in a company of > 5 people so…
Writing code.. not terribly challenging.
The real challenge in computer programming is reading the shitty code the last guy wrote when you are tasked with revisiting it for new features or bug fixes.
People don’t respect that about programming. Sure.. anybody can read a tutorial on app development or php or something and bash out a working program. You don’t just put out a project and hang up the keyboard though. You have to continuously improve your product in order to stay relevant. Structuring things in such a way that it can easily be modified by the next programmer or even by yourself a few weeks later when you have forgotten exactly what was on your mind that day… That takes knowledge, experience and talent! Otherwise you end up with crappy code that every time you try to change anything takes 10 times longer than it should plus introduces bugs.
Anyway.. communication IS a valid skill but so is programming. You really should have people who specialize in each, it is worth it.
Writing comprehensible code and and usable documentation is part of the communication issue I was talking about actually. Not the main part – I was mostly talking about speaking to non-IT stakeholders – but a part nonetheless.
Still, you have a real point there.
“Any fool can write code. And often they do.”
–Philippe Kahn, one of the founders of Borland
THIS IS SO TRUE. I have never commented before but I have got to chime in on this.
Nobody freaking documents anything in my office and our supervisors didn’t see the merit in giving us any time or even a repository to keep technical specs. Then we had a reorg and our branch inherited a ton of applications none of us had ever worked on before.
I’ve looked at the code of the app I inherited production support and it makes me twitch uncontrollably. I pray that we don’t actually get any production tickets for it…
At least when I write code I try to comment the heck out of it in the hopes that whatever sucker has to update it when I’m gone has a chance of understanding it. Still, considering some of the ridiculous crap I’ve had to code to make something work without being allowed to upgrade to something that could do it easily, I’m not sure that’s going to be enough.
(Also, where I work, the customer sometimes sees fit to bypass project managers, team leads and the chain of command to contact the lead programmer directly. I have to be VERY CAREFUL with my words when I steer them back to the PM to make sure I don’t even imply that we can or can’t implement their latest brainstorm by the already-tight release date.)
@Mandolin – Documentation? Comments? I dare not even dream of such things. I just want to see fewer ‘magic’ globals and no more variables named ‘hoohah’ and the like!
I don’t know if ‘self documenting code’ can actually be realized in reality but if people just tried the result would be a whole lot more readable then a lot of the stuff I see now!
Sorry to correct myself again, but: ‘the sort of… that CGG says that older CS educators were trying to avoid’.
Anyway, such a shift will be hard for some people, especially – surprise, surprise – the trans community. One thing that most people don’t realize is that IT – especially academic CS, electronic engineering, and games development – has been something of a safe haven for trans folk for decades. I have seen statistics that say that as much as 2% of IT people identify as non-cis, which is roughly an order of magnitude found in the general population. Figures like Dani Berry, Sophie Wilson, and Alexia Massalin have been able to make solid careers for themselves, despite a severely homophobic and transphobic undercurrent throughout the field, because they can use the isolation of the community as a buffer. If that goes away, that’s a problem.
Still messing up: ‘order of magnitude higher than’.
Also, if correct, then that figure is staggering – it would mean that am overwhelming majority of trans folk are in some area of IT, and no one has noticed.
Writing good, large scale code is not quite so trivial as you make it sound.
Beyond that, the tasks aren’t necessarily the same. System design, requirements gathering, requirements writing and actual coding are all different specialties and different skills.
I’ve worked in software development for ten years, and the majority of bad code I’ve encountered was bad because written either under an unreasonable deadline, with too few people, or by people trying to do things they only barely have the skill to handle, or they’re just bad at it.
And then there’s managers who don’t think maintainability is important. Which is why I’ve learned to refuse to rush on new projects. If they’re not gonna give you time to do things right the first time, you’ll never get time to go back and clean things up once it’s mostly working. That’s how you get horrifying nightmare spaghetti code.
Many programmers might be social awkward and/or shy, but I’ve rarely encountered one who couldn’t even communicate about code with other programmers. Especially by the time they’ve finished college and entered the workforce
(That women will rise to prominence in CS because of communication skillz) seems very plausible given interactions I’ve had with developers. I must add that it isn’t just communicating with others inside the project. Communicating with non-technical people – users and decision-makers – is front and center of the issue. Yes, you have to “speak the user’s language” but it is a language you can only learn by listening a lot more than you speak.
no, it’s not all about communication. communication is a big part of it, but you also need people who can do precise thinking all day – if their brains tend to turn 96 into 69 when they’re not looking, they’re gonna have a bad time. Being able to glance at code and effortlessly notice things like “wait, that if statement will always be false, wtf?” is a pretty useful skill when debugging, and debugging was waaay more than 10% of my time (probably more like 70% at my last job, despite having a new project every few months) .
(now that I think about it, communication was a part of debugging too, though. sometimes it’s hard enough just figuring out whose code is causing the problem, and if it’s someone outside the company that adds a whole extra political layer…)
anyways, I’m really skeptical that any of those skills are significantly gendered – I suspect it’s more about how boys and girls are socialised. I was barely able to communicate facts in high school, let alone anything ambiguous, but being The Girl there were always opportunities to practice talking (once I had spaces I felt safe to), and I’m kinda surprised how much my brain’s improved on that front.
I agree that it isn’t a gender issue, per se. My real point is the opposite, really, – that if it became clear to more people that communication skills were significant in programming, the dominant group in the field now (which includes myself, as I am terrible at interpersonal communication) will drop away, while the men who now shun it as ‘geeky’ such as Joe would then shun it as ‘touchy-feely’, meaning that it would indeed be ghettoized again as “women’s work”.
I will admit that I have oversold the point, but then again, isn’t expressing an algorithm, logical analysis, or data structure (whether to the compiler or to another person) in a clear manner still communication?
Oh, never mind, I was really stretching there.
yeah, it’s the “almost all women” and “that’s it in a nutshell” that’s being objected to, I think
you saw a trend and then projected it a wee bit far 
there’s also things like the halting problem that guarantee, mathematically, complex systems like software has become will always be something of a mess. (look at me using absolutes here right after discouraging them… but, like, there is actual hard math behind this. improvements are possible, perfection is not.)
and now you’ve got me thinking about the parallels between programming and translation… like, if you have a magical perfect spec it’s mostly a matter of translating that into some language a computer will understand as it’s intended (and working around the limitations of that language)… but the design side is more about translating people’s *thoughts* into a spec, and in the process you discover just how ambiguous, vague and contradictory thoughts (and human languages) can be.
The reason there aren’t more women in tech is even sadder: in the 70s and 80s, male comp sci faculty realized that wages for a job go down when women enter the field (something that has been illustrated in sociological studies for decades), so if they wanted their field to be respected and well-paid, the key was to push all the women out of it.
They created personality tests for “programming aptitude” that were biased against women. Then the answers to those tests were circulated to fraternities, but not to organizations that admitted women. The current gender ratios in tech were deliberately designed.
https://timeline.com/women-pioneered-computer-programming-then-men-took-their-industry-over-c2959b822523
That sucks.
Wow. I went to an especially feminist (well, as feminist as anything *can* be in the patriarchy) school with plenty of feminist programs, some of which I participated in, and my favorite teacher happened to be one of the main faculty pushing for more women in the field, and yet I never knew about this part of Comp Sci history. This really sucks.
Before the invention of the compiler by Grace Hopper, hardware was considered to be the important, prestigious concern of computing, and software & programing was considered to be less important busywork relegated to women, including even black women in the united states, and this was during and even just before the civil rights era, so if a job was considered appropriate for black women that should tell you something about the lack of social prestige associated with it. The gender role stereotype in particular goes all the way back to Babbage and Lovelace.
With the invention of the compiler (again, by Grace Hopper, a woman, and one of the most important figures in computer science history, even if for some mysterious reaso , you rarely see her mentioned alongside Babbage, Turing, and the like), allowing instruction sets to be written in universal languages that can then run on any machine, instead of having to be written in the specific machine code of each individual computer, software engineering and algorithm design became the most important subfields of computer science practically overnight, and the push to rebrand programming as “(white) men’s work” was swift, deliberate, and utterly shameless.
Nope.. having been through the education system already, when I think about Babbage I don’t immediately think about Grace Hopper. I do immediately think about Ada Lovelace though so what is your point?!?
I wouldn’t expect to talk about Grace Hopper when talking about Babbage because a conversation about Babbage is a conversation about mechanical computers and the steam punk world that might have been.
Turing does come closer to Hopper but still not quite. It’s hard to think about Turing and not think about WWII, code breaking and espionage. That wasn’t Grace Hopper’s thing.
We certainly did talk about Grace Hopper in my classes though! She was instrumental in creating the first compilers. That’s huge! She also invented the word ‘bug’ or so the story goes. I bet that one lives on long after Babbage and Turing are both forgotten.
Crediting Grace Hopper is a general symptom of great man history and crediting the top manager for the result of a team effort though. She wrote what we would now consider a linker and coined the word compiler, and she ended up leading the team that developed compilers for the FLOW-MATIC/COBOL family.
But overall the development of the first compilers was the work of fairly large teams which developed what we would now consider a compiler independently from each other. There were at least four independent efforts that led to the fortran, algol, lisp, and cobol families. Cobol ended up being fairly widespread, but it had a number of issues due to being “what the customer wanted” (verbose and reliant on goto & global variables in order to supposedly make programs readable for managers, with the end result of leading to spaghetti code unreadable to programmers) instead of “what the customer needed” which, in hindsight, was structured programming. Hence, Cobol ended up being the least influential of the four in the long run even though it was the most widespread over the first few decades.
“Crediting Grace Hopper is a general symptom of great man history and crediting the top manager for the result of a team effort ”
Yes, that too!
“instead of “what the customer needed” which, in hindsight, was structured programming. Hence, Cobol ended up being the least influential of the four”
Are you sure? I still get stuck having to maintain spaghetti code all the time!
Do you need sociological studies to prove that? It’s basic supply and demand…
Social reality isn’t monocausal in that way. Male overrepresentation in tech subjects is an international phenomenon, whereas you are describing something that took place in America specifically.
@CulturalGeekGirl
Peronality tests to keep girls out of comp sci?
So.. were they so blatant about it that they only gave the tests to women? I’m a man but I didn’t have to take some personality test to prove my masculinity before I could get my computer science degree.
Or.. you mentioned frats… were the tests only applied to frat/sorority members? What percentage of college grads are in a frat/sorority anyway? I graduated just fine without ever rushing!
How many schools did this happen at? It would take the faculties of quite a lot of schools to have the very same idea or else a really big conspiracy to explain the numbers industry wide don’t you think?!?
Um, what’s that on your profile pic? I kinda reminds me of some sort of diseased butthole.
Isn’t the new professor for the computer science class a woman? And Amber waS in that class too, she can’t be the only girl there
Yes, she is. Whether Joe accepts that she a woman is another story – and I say that not just because Alex is a transwoman, but because Joe is the sort to assume that any older women in CS is a guy in drag (that is, not a transgender person, but a male-identifying crossdresser).
Disturbimgly, the assumption wouldn’t even be mean-spirited (in Joe’s own mind, that is), nor even wholly a matter of being clueless, but as a way of him to accept it without stepping out of his intellectual comfort zone.
He really needs a good push out of said comfort zone, though. Again. I suspect that this is going to be something of a cyclical thing for him.
I love the girl in the last panel foreshadowing Joe’s wrongness here.
Her stinkeye
It’s gold.
Stinkeye so hard, she dislodged her eyeball.
Yup. “Seconds before Joe is proven wrong. One… Tw… wow, that was fast.”
So everyone across campus has seen Danny walking alongside Joe to reassure him. Those who were thinking that just being around him would result in taint by association might soon see whether or not they’re right.
But that Danny is supposed to be a good egg…
It’s a building FROM THE FUTURE
Fun fact: My dad (who teaches IT security online at a couple different universities) once received a textbook for a class whose publication date hadn’t happened yet.
By the time they leave the building it will probably be there.
This building exists in the far flung future year of 2018!
which exactly when we’ll find out what happened to Amber, Ethen, and Ryan.
crap i picked the wrong option in the poll because i mixed anna and mindy’s names up
not related to the strip at all but w/e
That IS a pretty hilarious reason to ship someone
It is pretty much what happened in the strip too, so as far as I can tell, Sporky is Leslie.
(Looks to get in a positive comment before the avalanche of Joe-hating begins)
In the second panel Joe realises whats he done by saying hes earned the ire which means hes not trying to pass the blame onto someone else
Its improvement I tells ya
I always thought of joe more as “knows better but doesn’t care”
He is definitely one of the more mature cast mates but, I think, his perceptions of females and appropriate behaviour has been skewed by his Fathers actions and by his parents divorce
I see a lot of potential in the guy so I hope this is the arc where he understands what hes doing, why hes doing it and why its inappropriate
I hope so too! I really want some Joe Character Development™ in this arc. Or at least EVENTUALLY.
Joe can be a good guy AND still be hyper sexual, he just… isn’t there yet. I hope this is his wake-up call. ;~;
I do too yet theres a part of me that’s kinda enjoying the reactions hes causing on this message board
He might just be using it because he knows it’s a relevant expression, but I do hope you’re right.
Pretty much most of predictions have turned out to be wrong, I mean I hope I’m right as well but the odds are not in my favour
“female”
nah
He understands he’s done something but he keeps on doing shitty things anyway so I’m not giving him any credit for character development here.
Search your feelings, you know it to be true
No. I will acknowledge character development when he starts developing a goddamn character.
[heart]
Yeah, there needs to be actual remorse to count as character growth, or even learning. Right now he hasn’t even accepted that he’s done anything wrong. Only that he’s made people mad.
He might have character growth, but right now he’s throwing ever barrier down he can between himself and it to try and dodge it.
He don’t want to grow up. He’s the objectify-kid.
Recognizing that every woman on campus is angry at him doesn’t mean he thinks he did anything wrong.
Don’t be silly Joe, computer scientists don’t walk.
God damnit Joe…
Fuck you, Joe.
Isn’t that what got him into this in the first place?
Nah, that was an ‘I want’ list. He hasn’t had sex with everyone.
And I’m SURE whoever was tech savvy enough to hack your list (unsecured as it might have been) wouldn’t be in the Computer Science building! Boy howdy Joe you’ve thought of everything
Holy shit how do those stairs work, what marvel of engineering is this
Joe runs into a room, Alex slowly turns in her chair and stares at him. “Let us talk of your list and the foolishness of RSS feeds”.
So, who are the people who would get a benefit out of his list getting out. Right now it’s down to danny and roz.
Danny – joe almost regularly according to the comic in some manner, “gets it on” and Danny as his roommate would have to deal with the constant acts going on in the room physically or after the fact and by leaking the list to everyone he could make the girls angry and end these visits with one fowl swoop.
Roz: (basicly a female joe) we don’t know her major and is always wanting to get it on and likes joe for the quick fix. If she’s leaked his list it would mean she has a guaranteed Go with joe at anytime as he has no other girls to be preoccupied with. (this kind of assumes roz doesn’t like sharing as I think joe may actually welcome the idea of a threeway)
Roz is a gender studies major and also has said she’s been able to line Joe up when SHE can’t get anybody else. So definitely a ‘we’re not busy, so let’s mingle’
Someone associated with Ryangate, trying to undermine Dorothy by giving publicity to her sleazeball friend?
How do we know it’s not Raidah? He’s told her about the list too.
I can’t like your comment so I have to reply just to point out I went, “BWHA” after reading it.
I foresee no complications whatsoever!
Glad to see he’s excepting his new role.
If that woman in the background of the last panel is any kind of indicator, Joe has nowhere to hide.
Honestly? I now want her to be a recurring secondary or tertiary character. I don’t know why, but I do.
The rest of her day will involve running into Joe and overhearing his bullshit. She will be more and more annoyed.
And then she will appear in a Slipshine, masturbating at the thought of some sexy Perl code* or whatever.
Or even better, she’ll be wearing a necklace with some Perl code** written on it.
*Disclaimer: No idea if “code” is the right way to describe Perl. I’m sure you know what I mean.
**Still the same disclaimer.
Why not Ruby?
Because Perl makes a funnier necklace.
YES! THANK YOU! SOMEBODY GOT IT!
Found the Joe roleplayer.
(Seriously, do you not at all find it skeevy that your first response to a female character is to objectify her?)
Friggin’ sexuals. My first response to a female character is to imagine what kind of successful small business they would run.
This character would sell sexy Perl necklaces on Etsy.
OK… So here’s the thing. What I really wanted to do was a “Perl necklace” joke. Because of pearl necklaces (if you do not know or cannot figure out from the context of this comic what that is, I will for once suggest you search for it, as I’m not going to explain that here).
To help this pun along, I suggested putting a character in a Slipshine, because while the characters used in Slipshine are certainly sexualised, I would not call them objectified. Willis has a long-standing policy on Slipshine characters that they need to stay true to character. Which is why we’ll never see Joyce in the center of a mass orgy, for example. What happens in there are what the characters would actually be likely to do.
And sure, I could have chosen an alternate route, such as selling Perl necklaces on Etsy (good one, Pablo360)… Slipshine just occured to me first, most likely because I get reminded about it every time I read this comic.
So yeah, it was a cheap pun, probably born out of watching too much of RuPaul Drag Race, where they get raunchy to each other all the damn time (and certainly they mention pearl necklaces a lot). And that’s all I have to say about that.
Return of the Unimpressed Co-ed!
honestly I would not mind having classes there, as it seems like an open and modernist place (and I like most things with enough windows). if it existed right now. XD
Yeah, boyfriend’s reaction was “That’s a fucking amazing computer science building, we usually get a floor in the business building if we’re lucky”
When my brother started college, the computer science dept had one computer “lab” that was basically a storage closet. Located off of a hallway from the tunnel that connects two of the buildings.
Like, literally a closet. As in that’s what it is now that there’s a proper computer lab in the science building.
The Engineering & Comp Sci faculty I attended was a converted warehouse
The internal rooms had no windows.
How on Earth does working in a converted warehouse teach you how to work for the hottest tech startups?
….. oh, wait, that’s right. Garages are so last-century.
It depends on the university. At a tech school (even one that’s more engineering specialized) computer science might very well get their own building much like the one depicted. They do at my school, and it’s a state college.
We have a building like that, and CS has parts of it. This is also the building that started having HVAC issues almost immediately. As a building science person, never trust the all-glass buildings. They’re almost always built to look cool as a first priority. And climate control is almost impossible because there’s practically no insulation or shade.
The college I went to had computer science classes scattered among different science buildings. Having our own building, even if it wasn’t fancy, would have been nice.
How about your own dorm room, Joe.
The one place on campus that is definitely devoid of women.
Ouch
Unless Sarah saw her rating and hasn’t misplaced her baseball bat.
Other than Amber hiding under Danny’s bed from the cops.
Captain Garth (Charlton Heston): Can I ask you something personal? Very personal?
Commander Rochefort (Hal Holbrook): Sure.
Garth: You know, it really stinks down here. How often do some of your people take a bath?
Rochefort: Bath? Hell, I don’t know. What *day* is it?
—MIDWAY
Rochefort – IIRC – cracked the Japanese Purple codes. I’ll give him a pass on personal hygiene:))
Is there a way we could magically give Danny a roll of duct tape so he could help Joe not say really stupid things?
Danny still got his ukulele. He can just play over him every time Joe says something stupid.
Wow. Danny’s going to need a huge amp and Carla’s help in turning his acoustic ukulele into an electric ukulele if he wants to pull that off. And now I really want to see that happen.
I’d read a whole month of comics just about how they make that happen
…………
Yeah sure, Joe, there’s no such thing as women who work with computers. Unpossible. Imaginary.
Jesus fuck, how does he keep making me angrier??? Surely there has to be a plateau SOMEWHERE.
And CERTAINLY you’re not going to run into a PARTICULARLY angry female comp geek who cracked, mirrored, and linked your list, Joe.
…. also, I’m hoping for a peak, followed by a cliff.
Question: is the cliff metaphorical or literal? Because I’m fine either way.
Metaphorical. A literal cliff might garner him sympathy.
Also it would be weird to have on a college campus.
…. clearly you didn’t go to the same college that I did.
Man, that’d be cathartic. Has Rachel’s major been established? Maybe he’ll run into her here. (I’m still convinced she was the distributor)
Probably advanced engineering of some sort, if she’s anything like her Walkyverse counterpart.
Unfortunately, the level of anger Joe can inspire is like our current trend of temperature: always rising, with no way of coming back down if something doesn’t happen soon.
Phi Sigma Rho & Alpha Omega Epsilon would GREATLY disagree with you sir.
In the last panel, Danny sort of looks and sounds like Rorschach.
Joe, that woman in the background of panel 4 has half a mind to come over and slap you for that list. The other half wants to slap you for saying women aren’t involved in computer sciences.
So, she 100% wants to slap him. Seems accurate.
I endeavor to be as precise as possible at all times.
Quick, Willis! Write a spin-off while she has a cult-like following!
…
…
…
Oh, fine I’ll settle for fanfiction.
Amazigirl rises from the bushes, her thirst for blood only stronger
Joe is in for a rude awakening.
Holy shit that’s a big building.
How many students–? Okay, close to 50,000, about 50% more than Western University.
Still pretty big.
My college had lIke 2,600, including the conservatory students. This place is humongous to me.
I feel like Joe is very close to annoying Danny to the point where he ditches him.
It almost like Joe can troll the entire message board with his presence alone
It’s 20-fucking-17, we are long past the era of deliberately antagonizing people to get a reaction being cute or novel or engaging.
that would be ideal, anyway
Honestly, after “troll” culture has literally given us a fascist president and the return of a literal thriving neo-nazi movement, I think the whole “lol I can piss people off” shit can take a flying leap onto a bed of sharp spikes.
Like, fucking hell, our country is being actively dismantled by a bunch of fucks who think “lol, kidding” is their get out of jail free card for being reprehensible shitheads.
Yep. Recently the boyfriend’s taken on ownership of a Discord server and has mentioned the prevalence of dumbasses who think “being a troll” is a hilarious and endearing personality trait, and all I can think is…we’re too goddamn old for this shit, why does anyone put up with it these days?
(Granted, said dumbasses do seem to mostly be teenagers, so that explains that, but still.)
“Doing it for the lulz” passed it’s sell-by date a loooong time ago.
Most of us are past that, but you did just describe the precedent of the United States.
Is that a wonderful typo, or the best pun?
The only time trolls are funny nowadays is when it’s shit like ‘communicates entirely in chat speak, gifs, or cat pictures’ or ‘inserts (non-triggery, non-bigoted) spam’. Basically, when the worst thing they can possibly cause is mild inconvenience and irritation. That isn’t what most trolls are anymore.
I feel like someone should tell joe it’s not 2007. More than half the comp sci majors I know right now are girls. Like, 70% at least.
So now its also set in the future. That sliding timeline sure is powerful.
Next month in-universe the building will be due for renovations.
ngl whenever I see someone using “females” to refer to human women I get the heebie jeebies
(also, ayyy, computer science major gal here)
It’s positively Ferengi-like, isn’t it?
it’s The Biggest MRA/TERF Red Flag and it makes my skin crab*
*that was supposed to say “crawl” but autocorrect had different plans. What is it trying to tell me???
That your skin has decided to turn into a carapace, preferably with large scissor like claws at the ends of your arms that you can defend yourself with, like some sort of Sentai/Power Rangers monster of the week?
Except…like a justice crab or something instead of an evil monster I guess?
You may have been joking a bit, but there have been a few crab-themed monsters in both Super Sentai and Power Rangers. For example, Crab Evo from Kagaku Sentai Dynaman, Crab Nezilar from Denji Sentai Megaranger/Gekisou Sentai Carranger, and Crab Monger from Taiyo Sentai Sun Vulcan.
Your skin is going to develop a tough exoskeleton to protect you from dangerous threats. It will unfortunately be heavy.
Yup, it’s one of those major creepy red flags that tend to make me immediately nope out of the conversation.
And that’s before the transphobia part of it or the open ignorance of biology.
Wait… really? I seen someone mention being called female as a negative thing on here earlier, but I just blew it off. It really is a bad thing? How so? Is it a regional thing or all over the US? I always thought it was just another word for girl.
Also, I’m… one of those (seriously had to backspace because I typed “female”). I’m legitimately curious and confused.
Female as an adjective is fine. But a lot of unpleasant types use it as a noun (“a female”) and it gets way dehumanizing.
Basically, it’s been a thing where it’s a common noun used by MRAs because it’s more “sciencey” and allows them to essentially pretend women are a separate species to men so it’s a red flag that way in usage.
On top of that “female” as a way to describe women tends to be transphobic because of the simple fact that sex is not gender and so not all those who have F on their driver’s licenses will be women and similarly it cuts out a lot of trans women and subtly argues that they are not “real” women.
And a lot of MRA types tend to treat it as a more “solid” means of describing women that isn’t plagued by social science cooties ignoring that there’s a lot of variability and social factors that go into why one is assigned male at birth or female at birth.
Holy crap. All this is news to me. I had no idea it could be used in that way. Also, they are idiots because there are plenty transwomen who discover they are partially or totally genetically female and seeing as our study of genetics and the brain is in its infancy, the fact that we have already found a correlation between some of our genetics and gender identity strongly points towards gender being something you are born with regardless of physical configuration. By using the term female, they are practically shooting themselves in the foot if their goal was in fact to separate transwomen from cis women. Then again, they never seemed the type to be able to find their ass with both hands.
I had a bit of a crisis myself last year in that I reflected on myself and what I was. More often than not I feel kind of in the middle between male and female leaning a little towards female. I can have days where I’m very feminine and others where the ways I act, talk, and dress leans masculine. I keep my hair short in a pixie and it drives me crazy if it gets halfway down my ears. As a kid I had to remind myself laying in the bed at night that I was a girl. I confided in my therapist who simply told me no I wasn’t and that I had never shown a single sign. I tried to talk further, but she dismissed it. So I threw my hands up and said screw it I’m just me and female is close enough. Short hair, tshirts (many of which bought in men’s), jeans, flat sandals, no makeup, no frills, and plenty of cuss words. Not the most poetic ending of a gender crisis, but there it is. I wish everyone experienced it on some level so we as a society could stop being so transphobic and misogynistic.
*Supports you with massive offered hug*
As I like to put it – MRAs and TERFs ruin everything.
Using it to describe yourself or something else should be fine (although be ready to clarify if people get concerned). I remember when I found out TERFs were using it thusly and I was like ‘HOW? Trans women ARE women, plenty of them CALL themselves female, what even?’
Cerb: Gladly accepted. I feel as if every other time I post on here, I end up talking about something depressing that didn’t seem depressing when I first thought of it. I’ve had an odd life so far.
Random question, but are you still doing the support group for trans youth? I always thought that was pretty cool of you.
BBCC: Yes. It seems so the more I read. The men’s rights activists make me the most sad. There is a lot of good that they could be doing like promoting a healthy idea of what it means to be male, breaking down barriers and stereotypes, fighting against bullying, helping men who work in a predominantly female field or are a stay at home parent, help with child custody, educate on what it means to be a non straight man, and on and on. Instead, they squander it.
Bluewind- Yup! And I got permission from my new employer to set up a version at my new school so that was super exciting.
And yeah, a real men’s group fighting against the way the patriarchy hurts men would be really awesome. I’ve seen a few, but it would be nice to see more.
*agos*
Bluewind, that sounds… kinda like me. I used to have this fear I’d walk into the wrong bathroom, since being a programmer everything around me assumed I was a guy. (then it happened, I blamed it on the alcohol and it was just a mildly embarrassing memory.)
If I’d had any idea what trans really meant when I was in school, I’m really not sure what path I’d have taken…
I like the “I’m just me”
oh, and there’s a ferengi meme making fun of the “females” thing, but I can’t find any decent links about it… I did find one with a longer version of what Cerberus already said. http://jezebel.com/the-problem-with-calling-women-females-1683808274
Cerberus: omg that is awesome
your new job sounds great
Oh my god Cerb! I’m so excited for you and this time you have a boss supporting you instead of fighting against every step of the way. You are gonna be able to do so much more good than you use to ^_^
Oh I definitely agree. There is so much wasted potential.
Okay, example of recent thing I did that turned into something more depressing and focused on me than intended. The YouTuber Markiplier recently had a birthday and asked as a gift for people to share their favorite video of his. He didn’t do it to get more views or anything; he had just been looking to the past when his channel was so small and wanted to ask for shares like he use to so he could see which ones meant the most to us. I ended up choosing a video called “Lost a Friend” which was a vlog about his friend who died of suicide. After sharing the link to it a few places, I ended up making this long post about how it saved my life one night when I was in a really bad place and me being me of course wrote a freaking book about it ending saying thank you to him because even though I was just a stranger, he saved my life. I submitted not expecting anyone to read such a long post. It currently has over a dozen likes and 2 kind comments which honestly made my heart meant, but at the same time made me feel bad because I did it to highlight the impact he had on me and not the hell I went though… but my comment could have helped someone else in a bad place thus continuing the pattern and… god sometimes I hate my OCD brain.
brains, how do they work
I think you did a good thing. There’s still a lot of stigma around such things, and too much silence. Better to err on the side of sharing
Cerb: WAIT I MISSED SOMETHING.
You have a new school? Congrats! (May you continue to contribute to the downfall of the shithead that ran your old school, however.)
Felgraf- I did!
He was ignobly shitcanned and the incoming boss basically asked me for a “how not to be that guy” list as I was on my way out. It was pretty awesome.
Bluewind- It’s good sometimes to note those things and in my experience can help others struggling with mental health feel less broken and alone. So *supportive hugs*
Halpful: Cool. Are you still a programmer? What kind of projects do/did you work on?
Yeah. I’m well aware of the issue with sharing. The current way of doing things helps no one and hurts so many from those who suffer with it to their loved ones to the community as a whole. And thanks.
Cerb: Woot! I didn’t know he got fired too XD
Thanks hun. It would be really cool if my long post ended up helping someone, even if it was just for a moment
nah, I’m sick. once in a while I can get away with a tiny bit of work on some personal projects (thank goodness my android app hasn’t broken). I’ve done all sorts of stuff, though; I still hadn’t quite found my place when the Migraine of Doom began.
Your skin is telling you to run away sideways.
That you need to open a burger restaurant.
Your skin is telling you that THE VOID CRABS ARE COMING
Did anyone else think at first that Danny was holding a wand in the first panel? I thought maybe he’d chosen to become Joe’s fairy godfather.
That was indeed my first thought, too. Almost like Joe’s bullshit unlocked Danny’s magic powers.
Wait… ukuleles aren’t magic wands? I think I’ve been playing my bard wrong.
Heh, when he wants to, Joe can be as melodramatic as Walky.
Joe doesn’t know Amber’s a computer science major, does he?
He knows she’s in Danny’s computer science class – there was a strip where he said (paraphrased) “You can’t expect to hook up with the only girl majoring in computer science, every other gross nerd dude is gonna want to date her too”
And Danny succeeded anyway. Good thing Danny didn’t take up Joe’s offer of wingmanning. I don’t know how much help Joe would be to a Danny or any of the guys in the group.
(i don’t mean hookups, just socializing. If I had a friend like Joe I wouldn’t wanna double date with him. Actually, I wouldn’t have a friend like Joe unless we played in a sandbox together.)
Joe is doing everything he can to lose reader sympathy
That depends how sympathetic any given reader is to CS majors. CS majors have already done everything they can to lose some readers’ sympathy.
…I’m a CS major
1) Danny is holding Joe’s arm in a fairly intimate way. Neither of them seems to be aware of that?
2) Back in the days of PDP-11s I spent a lot of my time in a computer lab that was overwhelmingly male, but even as a daily-morning-showerer, I did not detect any particular unshowered-male-odor from my labmates. Have things changed?
3) I know she’s busy with like life and all, but it would be really interesting to find out what Angela Melick thinks about this strip.
The difference between now and the days of the PDP-11? You don’t need to go to the lab to do your programming, because these days your phone has more processing power than a PDP-11…
Seriously, how many comp-sci folks did their coding in the computer lab? That was a decent place to meet up and kill time between classes, sure, but coding is what laptops and dorm rooms are for.
I’m fairly sure my refrigerator has more processing power than a PDP-11.
Back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth (and, according to Joyce, humans rode on them) you had to go to the computer lab just to type on your ADM-3A terminal, itself an immense improvement over the DecWriters you had to use back when you were a freshman.
Sometimes you had to cradle an actual phone into an acoustic coupler to connect at a screaming 300 baud. The elders in the lab (i.e. the juniors) had once had to use the punch card machine that still sat in the corner, the poor bastards.
And I had to send my data upstream both ways in the line noise. You kids have no idea how good you have it now.
I would regale you with tales of the S-100 bus, but Grandpa needs his nap now.
One thing I remember from my initial college tour of my school? The tour guide noted that the main Computer Science building had been built with hinges on the outer walls, so that walls could open up for the sake of bringing in the giant computers…
…drew a few chuckles, given that the tour was happening in the early 2000’s :D.
I probably should have used this strip. Still looking for the one about her women’s engineering sorority but I’m crashing for the night.
………okay. Let’s sum up the ways Joe is an idiot.
1: There are a number of women in computer science. Sure, it’s one of the more imbalanced fields in college, but even if it’s as low as 20%, if there’s 100 people around, 20 of them will be women, so Joe’s still going to get a kicking.
2: Not everyone that takes comp-sci classes are comp-sci majors. Whole lotta electives you gotta deal with, after all.
3: The computer lab, one of the main features in a comp-sci section of the campus, is not restricted to comp-sci majors only, and would be available to students who need the computers for work.
4: If anything, the computer lab would have a lot of non-comp-sci students in it, because comp-sci students tend to have their own computers they can do work on, and would rather do it in their dorm room/apartment, where they can code in various stages of undress (the best way to code!).
And probably some other ways too.
*smacks Joe upside the head* “Maybe he’ll grow out of it” misogyny is something I can tolerate to a point, but don’t be a goddamn moron, damn it.
Oh, and don’t call women “females” either. Seriously, dude, flag on the field for that one too.
(oh and also Amber is a comp-sci major maybe we’ll get the illusive sighting of the Amber oooooo)
women even created computer science as a field
…not really?
Many of the initial pioneers in electronic computing were women, yes, but that’s not exactly the same thing. For every Ada Lovelace there was a Charles Babbage, if not more due to the, well, sexist leanings of higher education.
Even during WW2, when the first electronic computers were made to crack the Enigma code, while most of the operators were women, the people in charge of the project were men because… well, again, higher education has always suffered from institutional sexism.
We need more women in computer science, tech-bros need to cut it the fuck out, but the history of gender and computer science isn’t anywhere as simple as “X people created scomputer science.”
How does that interact with this stuff?
https://timeline.com/women-pioneered-computer-programming-then-men-took-their-industry-over-c2959b822523
Well, this quote from the article, for one?: “Between 30 and 50 percent of programmers were women in the 1950s.”
Also the list of leads for creating the early computers were either all-male or male-dominated.
Women had a huge, huge, HUGE part in the early days of electronic computing. The suppression of female programmers and software engineers as the industry grew post-WW2 is a travesty. I cannot stress that enough. If you did a survey of comp-sci college students and ask them what the gender of the person that invented COBOL was, I bet at least 75% would say “oh, it was probably a guy”.
But it’s not as simple as saying “Women created computer science as a field”, because… there was so much of it being created, so many brilliant minds doing fantastic work all over the world.
Let’s be fair, a gay British cryptanalyst created computer science as a field
But it was a British woman a century prior who created computer programming, I’ll grant
Look, it’s erroneous to credit only a single person, or even a single group, with the creation of computer science, or even computer programming, as a whole. Electronic computing can *kinda* be stated to have started with the Colossus during WW2, but there were innovations and inventions happening all over, and once the war ended, things just started exploding in terms of development.
Women had a massive role in the early days of electronic computing, an industry and science that they helped create and grow into arguably the most important industry in the world… and slowly got the shaft as sexist fucktards wanted to only allow men do the work. Quibbles about semantics aside, that’s the thing we need to remember.
Also if Danny is in that field he just insulted him.
Danny, leave him. Just leave him there and go.
Sure Joe. Insult the major of the one person still in your corner. Extra points since he and his ex are both counter examples to your broad generalizations.
Comic Reactions:
Oh Joe… Buddy, pal, I know you’re desperate to escape the idea that you could ever face consequences for your behavior, but it’s time to stop digging down.
Like, no joke, there’s a common theme of self-destruction between him and Walky where both are struggling with a situation of their own making that they are kind of self-destructing in the recovery from. But Walky’s is relatively benign, if not a bit unfortunate for Jason and for his own academic advancement.
Joe’s? It’s kinda alienating everyone who still hangs out with him. Like, everyone who hanged out with him. He’s been pushing Danny away and is super antagonizing him here. He’s pulled on some of Dorothy’s last nerves with him and may have torched that relative friendship. He’s definitely thrown a few molotovs on the fuckbuddy relationship with Roz and he’s definitely not meshing with Jacob.
On his current path, he’s set to be alone.
And that’s the central tragedy of this poisonous ideology. It trains folks in a toxic masculinity that makes you absolutely insufferable to anyone who doesn’t buy into the system, so you either end up alienating everyone who put up with you or you build a friend network that will turn on you at the slightest hint of femininity or romantic love.
And I feel this is narrowing in on his crossroads moment. Where he can choose to keep doubling down on an ideology that just makes him less and less tolerable to those around him or he can begin recovering from it and start building a Joe identity that can be genuinely attractive (like, there’s so many good models of hypersexual, but super good on consent and partner satisfaction he could be emulating that isn’t his creeper and failure of a dad).
But he’s so resistant to it.
Some of it is likely fear. Like Walky with regards to being “naturally smart”, he’s built his whole personality for years on being a PUA. So confronting that he’s not going to be able to coast on that going forward and will need to adjust that is going to be hard and scary.
And it is human to balk at that and run screaming.
But I also can’t respect it. If your ideology is hurting others, it needs to change and clinging to it simply because you fear change can be somewhat intensely selfish. Especially speaking as someone who’s been through far harder changes and experiences than having to rethink their central ideology.
So yeah, I hope Joe gets his shit together cause this? This is just him self-destructing as brightly as he can.
that is a really good catch re: Amber!
if. if she’s out of whatever happened. yikes.
and. yeah. all the rest of this.
that is…a gorgeous building
Joe may have another thing coming. Not only I’m sure that there are female computer scientists, but also is the era of the “unwashed, unfit nerd” long over – if it ever did truly exist. I mean, I never went to university, but at the software company I work at most people look pretty average, and especially among the young software folks there are a lot that are very interested in excercise and health matters – myself among them.
Panel 1: Ugh, this is so awful of Joe. He’s pressed on Danny’s good will and he keeps taking advantage of it. Like, he’s basically had him walk him all over campus looking for “safety” and in so doing, continue to rope Danny into his shit.
And continue taking advantage of him like Danny is garbage, all to avoid dealing with the incredibly minor consequences of something that is entirely his fault. (Oh no, you’re getting some nasty stares for something fucked up you did that hurt people. I get that much just going to the fucking grocery store and you’re not even getting the veiled threats, muttered comments, and other bullshit microaggressions that accompany that shit for me).
I want to sympathize. He’s obviously scared and unused to facing any real consequences for his actions. But well, I can’t. It’s just the same overprivileged martyr act I see from asshole guys over and over again whining about how the friendzone is an act of genocide against them or how being mildly rebuked by a woman is a personal slight.
Not only that, but this is so cruel to Danny who is being so unnecessarily nice here. Like, it really is starting to feel like Joe is unintentionally trying to keep Danny in a doormat personality so as to serve as his security blanket in situations like this. Someone without a spine to tell him to fuck off. And it colors his earlier flipping out at Danny developing new interests and presentation and confidence as a supremely selfish act of sabotage against his closest friend.
It might be reading too much into it, but any which way you slice it, he’s not being very nice to Danny this comic.
Panel 2: Ugh, it’s really hard to deal with overprivileged martyr acts. Especially lately as there’s been so many articles of Trump voters selling their sob stories of how supposedly someone once telling them no turned them into raging fascists who want all liberals to die. And especially now that the fucking anti-gay bakery case is shooting up to the Supreme Court and may fuck over the queer community in horrifying ways.
Like, he doesn’t need to hide. He’s not in any real danger from women knowing he’s wronged them. The worst that has happened to him is one girl he went creeper on yelled at him once and stormed away. He’s receiving the minimum of consequences for his shitty actions possible.
But he’s so full of himself and his self-pitying narrative, that he needs to sell and build it up as this huge thing where he must flee and hide instead of… going about his day? Apologizing to folks? Actively doing something to fix his creepy near-doxxing list of “fuckability” stats?
Like, yeah, it sucks getting nasty stares, but that’s not going to be all the time and there’s nothing stopping you just going to your room and just not actively going into the Women’s Dorms like a predator. Like, women are not zombies, they aren’t going to bust down your door and drag you out.
You will face no real consequence for your fuckery whatsoever so fucking stop milking it and start dealing.
Speaking of “reading too much into this”:
Danny’s “You feel safe yet?”
Is Danny half-mocking Joe? I take this as a comment at every MRA and right winger who thinks the need for safe spaces is an endless fount of satire (while that group simultaneously think white Christian bigots are the real threatened people.)
… I hope you’re exaggerating. Please be exaggerating…
I wish I was. :c
Joe is not quite up to date with his ideas about lower life forms (as he thinks of both of nerds and women).
I’m older than most of the folks here. (Not onion-on-my-belt yet, I hope.)
So: When I was in an engineering college, videogames were things you plunked quarters into. “The Mythical Man Month” idea was just being studied (and its archaic gender term wasn’t even noticed). I knew by name or face every female in my freshman engineering classes and advanced / elective classes after that.
Joe is waaaay behind the times.
feeeeeemaaaaales
That girl in the background is Lith.
http://www.itswalky.com/character/lith/
Panel 3: Okay, this is awful on so many layers. Like, yes, at the base level, it’s assuming the computer sciences have no women in them which is disproved by the very next panel.
But the worse layer is why he assumes that. Part of it is the feminization of the male nerd (which is why you get so much toxic masculinity in nerd culture, because they feel defensive about how their hobbies are deemed “feminine” by the overall culture and are desperate to render them “masculine” by actively driving women away).
But a larger part is why Comp Sci tends to be low on women. And that’s because there’s notorious amounts of sexism and harassment that face women in the field. To the point where I don’t know a Comp Sci woman who spent a time majoring in Comp Sci who didn’t have a story about the professor actively arguing that they didn’t belong in the major simply because of their gender or dealing with sexual assault, verbal abuse, and so on.
It’s a thing that has been well documented and is responsible for a lot of women deciding that it’s not worth the toll on their mental health to stick with it.
And the sick part is it’s largely intentional. Comp Sci used to be “women’s work” and so the most brilliant minds in computing were mostly women for a time. But certain men in the field were tired of receiving secretary level wages and reputation and so actively created societies and organizations intended to push women out of the field so it would be actually respected.
And now, it’s gotten even worse as a certain segment of toxic insecure geek have felt women in the field are interlopers “ruining” it who must be pushed out or “put in their place”.
And Joe is casually taking advantage of that, because hey “no women”.
Again, I don’t think he intends to be invoking that, but he nonetheless is.
Panel 4: And it’s not only shitty on that level, but it’s also a bullshit swipe at his best friend who is currently doing him a major favor. Like, Danny is a Comp Sci major and Joe is going on a long rant about how those like him are unwashed cretins who actively repulse women and drive them away.
And like that’s kind of a shitty way to repay a friend who’s helping you out. Especially since you had to strong-arm him into doing it. Like, sure, have bad opinions against Comp Sci if you want, but don’t retreat there then and certainly don’t spill it on the person who actually has that identity.
And that face on Danny is telling. He’s starting to doubt doing all this for Joe. What he’s getting in return. And he should. Because Joe is continuously tripping into just being really crappy to Danny and pushing him around and he needs to stop before Danny throws up his hands and gives up trying to preserve this friendship.
This situation of his making is salvageable. But he needs to want to do it. And I’m not sure he’s quite there yet to take that plunge.
“which is why you get so much toxic masculinity in nerd culture, because they feel defensive about how their hobbies are deemed “feminine” by the overall culture and are desperate to render them “masculine” by actively driving women away).”
This is interesting. I have always wondered why male comic book readers are so hostile to female comic book readers. Personally, I would have liked to have had a few more girls in the comic book shop when I was a teenager.
Yup, growing up in a lot of geeky communities, I’ve seen the insecurity and the panic too many times and so often the hostility to women in all of them follows the same unfortunate patterns and for much the same reasons.
Insecure toxic masculinity fucks up way too many things in life.
Random two cents, but when I was a teenage girl in nerd spaces, it felt like I was accepted as long as I was willing to be 1.) sexualized and 2.) less competent or adept at the hobby than the boys, but as soon as I either got good at it, stopped letting them condescend to me, or tried to be more than a decoration, I got pushed out and accused of ruining the hobby.
I’m not convinced that the derision nerds face from jocks for not being manly enough is the main reason for toxic masculinity in swathes of computer-related culture. Nerds absorb ideas of manliness from existing culture just like anyone else, but those ideas work even worse in electronic settings than they do in real life. Anonymity over the internet means they can’t assert their ideas on others as easily, but can hurl insults without much consequence. A toxically masculine jock still typically lives in a world with lots of face to face interaction which trains their social queues. A toxically masculine nerd typically focuses less on this, and they come off socially worse for it.
It’s interesting, because I’ve been a nerd and online from the earliest days of the Web (before the start of the Eternal September) and in the RPG, SF/F comic nerd communities at least around the edges about as long and that kind of toxic has never really been part of my experience. Partly because I’ve usually stuck to the edges, I expect.
But still, the online stuff especially seemed to get much nastier over time, even as the Web got less geeky and more mainstream. Which might be nerds being able to spend more time on line with less live interaction, but might also be less nerdy types getting the action.
Spending time online, by itself, isn’t really particularly nerdy these days.
I think… it used to be a much more subtle type of toxic, more just-so stories and assumptions. at least in the corners of the internet I grew up in. Nobody could really be sure of your gender anyways unless you were one of the few people with a webcam or microphone (and sound card that could actually record properly).
the communities I stuck around in valued politeness… they could get pretty mean to trolls, and there were some nasty incidents of in-fighting, but one did not casually throw insults about.
As someone of similar vintage, I think some of it is things getting worse and some is just us becoming older, more aware, and less patient with the kind of shit that those who were once our peer group do without thinking.
true; ignorance is bliss. there was so much that didn’t hurt me only because it went straight over my head. these days, it seems like ignorance is a lot less safe, although… how safe was I, really, and how much was just luck? :/
I don’t necessarily think it’s from actual derision but the mythology of derision and hobbies like video games and comics being viewed as things for kids. Like, it allows this kind of self-pitying hostility to the world and a desire to be seen as grown-up and masculine by going even more overboard on the sexist awfulness to try and compensate.
There was an interesting blog post a while ago talking about nerd myths and how they can end up entrenching toxic people and communities.
Quite a few people seem to be labeling Joe a PUA, and I think that’s kind of excessive. Joe is nowhere near PUA level yet. I know some PUAs in real life, and they’re the kind of people that make you ask yourself questions like, “Hmm, I wonder how much of a man code violation it would be to call up this lupus erythematosus support group and warn them that their newest member does not actually have SLE, and is merely faking it because the Internet told him that the majority of SLE sufferers are young women and he figured it would be a great place to score some sympathy sex?”
True, he’s not gone full PUA yet, but he’s definitely echoing a lot of their rhetoric and some of their behavior and is definitely uncomfortably PUA adjacent.
The thing is, he absolutely is using tactics from the PUA playbook. Soliciting every woman you encounter on the off chance that one will eventually say yes, repeatedly badgering women to “wear them down”, and rating women on their fuckability are all PUA things. We’re calling a spade a spade.
Who cares if it’s a “man code” violation? I’d violate the hell out of a code that would prohibit me from preventing sexual harassment.
Joe is Old School PUA back before negging and such. Shiro describes him perfectly. He does accept no (eventually) and does get consent. That is better than many of the PUAs today who believe “F*** OFF!” means you try a different approach and consent is something you convince them they gave you.
It’s never lupus.
First: yeah, screw you Joe.
Second: what are the odds that the arc title has a double meaning? Say, the Do List refers to Joe’s list and a list of instructions Amber put together for Danny/Dorothy/Ethan/Dina/Sal/Whathaveyou in the event something happened to her?
Third: I politely reject the poll options. Mostly because I want Leslie’s life to turn into a lesbian harem anime. More than it already is, I mean.
Okay, but you can have a harem anime that you support the idea of being that way and still focus on one ship. Like, Tamaki/Kyoya, as a “random” example obviously from my personal opinions.
Very true. But personally, I feel that I haven’t spent enough time with Mindy or Anna to form an opinion on them, let alone their ships.
I am typically a ship-neutral person. I am a neutral shipping port. Ships can come to me without fear as long as they play nice.
Um, Joe? You’ve met Amber, right? The woman who put a serial rapist into the ICU? You do know that she’s a computer science student too, right?
who’s amber
I think she’s the dinosaur girl’s roommate.
Are you sure you aren’t thinking of Jurassic Park, where all the dinosaur girls’ DNA came from amber?
Assuming the dude isn’t dead, of course.
I would obey if he’s dead. From a storytelling point of view of course.
At this point I just want Joe to hit his peak, fall off the other side, and reach a road of recovery, because he seriously needs some character development here.
And I’m in the group that actually LIKES Joe. Not what he DOES or SAYS but as to what the character COULD be.
I do love the girl in the background. It’s amazing how you can be dismissed to your face. Like people who say ‘there are no girls in maths’ to me.
A girl.
In maths.
It’s like ‘nobody drives in New York cuz there’s too much traffic’
While Joe’s royal misogyny (Girls don’t like computers) is on display, the fact he assumes all computer science majors (LIKE DANNY) are unwashed disgusting slobs also deserves notation.
It’s a nice blend of misogyny and misandry isn’t it?
Wait. Did I say nice? No there’s some other word for it. Awful.
Yeah it does.
He really has no problem insulting people right to their face.
For people who like to find IU locations, the building depicted, as Willis has remarked on Twitter, is not yet built. It’s the upcoming Luddy Hall for the School of Informatics, and will be located north of the School’s current buildings, in the previously vacant block at Woodlawn and Cottage Grove. It is indeed “across campus” from Read Hall.
“School of Informatics”????
You gotta be kiddin’ me.
Is there something wrong with that?
My current job is in medical informatics.
The English, it changes.
My masters was in Bioinformatics.
It’s not a previously vacant block. It’s where Brown and Green (part of Collins) used to be. I lived there.
Okay. I’ve got…. not so much a prediction here, but a worse-case scenario
(Because there isn’t actually a WORST-case scenario.)
Joe will find himself alienated from his friends and shunnned by women all across campus. He will start feeling targeted, persecuted, and unfairly denied by women.
And he will fall in with a crowd of others who feel similarly persecuted, because he wants friends and esteem.
One of his new friends will have fresh scars.
Are you suggesting Joe might fall in with the incel community?
I have a worse one. Joe is tall, attractive, reasonably intelligent and in good shape, if he really did lose all sense of his moral compass he could hurt a lot of women.
He could become a legit PUA, he could emotionally hurt a lot of women (physically if he really wanted to) he could become a really bad person, the type of person most of the message boards think he already is but he’d be able to charm his way into a lot of womens lives and he could do this for many decades to come (like his father presumably has)
I don’t want him to go that way (I don’t want any guy to go that way) so I’m hoping this is his redemption arc.
Hes seen that his actions have caused a negative reaction, he knows he pissed off his friends, he knows theres something there with Joyce that hes ashamed of so he now needs to get his head down and process whats happened, why its happened and what his actions have led to and could lead to
I think that due to interactions with Joyce he has the potential to be a decent guy and that, coupled with the unease he showed at his fathers actions, will hopefully lead him to realize that hes currently leading a shallow, unfulfilling life
However he still needs to see what his actions have done, he needs to understand the hurt hes caused and he has to apoligise once he gets all that but hes also going to have suffer for actions as well
Oof, yeah, he could do a lot of damage if he was to go from flirting with PUA ideology to all in.
Honestly, I’d be surprised if he hadn’t done a lot already. Hard to say, since we haven’t really seen him try his shtick anywhere he wasn’t either eagerly excepted or vehemently opposed. It doesn’t really make sense that some of the off screen hookups, like the alcohol fueled threesome(s?), haven’t led to some of that damage already.
I do hope for and expect a redemption arc. I hope it’ll go a little farther into problems he’s caused than just the do list. Ugly as that is.
Actually, I was thinking a PUA/MRA fusion.
You remember Joe is a main character right? Darkest Universe stuff really only works for fanfiction. My money is similar steps to his alt universe development.
Dumbing of Age is typically about loss of self-righteousness. I have hope for Joe.
and I bet Joe votes republican as well!
stink eye in the last panel~~
Oh my fucking gods Joe.
I guess the woman in the last panel didn’t earn a tag.
Sure, keep solving problems with erroneous knowledge from antiquated college movies, Joe.
It won’t work, but it’s very entertaining comeuppance anyway.
At the rate Joe is digging himself deeper he’ll be able to hide in China before long…
The moment he pops out of that hole, there’ll be Chinese women glaring at him.
Only hope is running away to Antarctica and hoping that penguins do not know about him.
Pretty sure there’s at least one woman scientist at the base there, IIRC from that This Is What An Engineer Looks Like thing on Twitter some months back.
Major props to Willis for how that building is rendered!
Yes, nicely done.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the computer science building was rendered.
Joe, you arrived at this “temple to maledom” with a boy holding your arm.
I have only posted once before on a comic, but I read the comments a lot. I don’t know what about today’s strip made me think of this, but are there any thoughts that perhaps Amber committed self-harm during Ryan’s attack? Like she realized what she was about to do, didn’t like it, and took drastic action against herself?
I feel the need to point out that I have zero experience with self-harm, and know next to nothing about mental health struggles. I don’t mean to be insensitive, I know these topics are very real for a lot of people. I’ve seen a lot of theories involving Ryan getting mutilated and wondered if anyone had discussed something along these lines.
Sorry for the word-vomit. Like I said, I don’t post much so I’m actually a bit scared
*hugs* No worries, you’re all good.
As to your question, it’s possible as extreme distress can cause panicked responses.
I’m not sure it’ll be the case here simply because I doubt that would have stopped Ryan and because Walky said that “he got what was coming to him” which seems to imply that something was done to him.
But there’s no way to know for certain until we see what happens, so I’m right there in anticipation with you.
Per the alt text of the strip with the knife, Ryan was being tagged with his blood. So Amber wasn’t self harming and was most likely beating the ever loving shit out of him.
Amber’s also never really shown self harm tendencies.
unless you count emotional abuse. which I’m starting to think *should* count, because it’s really fucking harmful and she doesn’t deserve that
otoh, my tiny bit of knowledge about self-harm is reminding me that physical pain is easier to process than emotional pain, so maybe it doesn’t make sense to classify emotional harm as self-harm when self-harm is a response to emotional pain… or maybe that just makes it a feedback loop of doom :/
Well you’re right that she emotionally abuses herself, which is at the root of her issues.
or a symptom of them. (or whynotboth)
I think the “root” involves her dad, and the fucked up ideas he planted in her head. one of them being that emotional abuse is totally fine and normal and not abuse. :/
Thinking about the trouble Joe got himself into I’m thinking in the real world it wouldn’t work out so bad for him. I’m reminded of someone I met when I was in school.
This guy, I’ll call him Bob (not his name) was constantly asking girls to have sex with him. Don’t get me wrong, he accepted the word no and just moved on, he wasn’t exactly pestering anyone. But.. he had absolutely no shame. He would actually go door to door in the dorms. One day he even showed up on my floor. It was a male-only floor! I told him this, he pointed out some girls walking down the hall. I told him if they are here they are here to visit some other guy and he is risking provoking a fight. He told me he didn’t care, they might prefer him. Leave no stone un-turned was his philosophy I guess.
Anyway.. Bob was not exactly the same as Joe but as you might imagine a lot of people, especially women did not like him. But.. statistics. Ask enough and someone is bound to say yes. He got a lot of girls this way.
So.. anyway… yeah, a real life Joe would be in for a lot of stink-eye and hate. Also.. we haven’t seen this yet but do any of these women have boyfriends? What’s their response? But… there is going to be a certain percentage that says.. hey, he wants this… and I’ll take that… let’s go!
I could see Joe counting that as a win.
As an acquaintance who did something similar put it, “You get slapped a lot but you get ****ed a lot too.”
But yes, I honestly think that would be LESS offensive than Joe’s take.
Your friend sounds like Boomhower (sp?) from King of the Hill.
If you haven’t seen it, there’s a episode where he takes Bobby to the mall to teach him how to get women. He finds a spot where a lot of women are walking by and proceeds to hit on *all* of them, or at least as many as he can before they pass by.
@rectilinearpropagation – Friend? I don’t think I said that!
I was aware of who the guy was because he introduced himself on a different occasion. He came by a friend’s dorm room who at the time didn’t have a roommate and offered him $500 to take his roommate off his hands. My friend considered it but refused. Funny thing, about a month later the roomate couldn’t take the guy anymore, requested a move and the school put him in my friend’s room anyway! LOL, should have taken the cash!
Anyway.. when ‘bob’ showed up looking for girls… what I really wanted to do was just let him go and watch the show. My room was only the second from the elevator so I knew he still had lots of opportunity to get into trouble before he reached the other end. I kind of felt bad about that though, I thought letting him go without warning would make me kind of a bad person. When he said he didn’t care and was going anyway… I set up a chair in the hallway so I could watch the show and asked him to wait a second so I could make popcorn. He declined.
I don’t remember any other interactions with him although I do remember noticing him propositioning girls in the dining commons and around campus on several occasions.
Careful Joe or you’ll face the…REVENGE OF THE NERDS!!!
So, someone asked me yesterday what my book’s title was – unfortunately, I no longer have the time to follow the comments section except on the weekends (I’m holding on to a comic-unrelated question until then, so I hope the comics are light those days), so here it is now. It’s called “À Vista Armada”, a spiritual translation of which would be “In Unplain Sight”.
It’s here http://fly-books.weebly.com/a-vista-armada.html and also on Amazon, it seems.
I’m on AMAZON.
…
That may be the weirdest-feeling thing I’ve ever written. O_o
Ooh congratulations, I’ll have to check that out!
Joe, you know your treatment of women was just to cover up you could never confess your feelings to Danny.
The two of you were meant to be together!
Is that the CompSci building Where they are holding a conference on women in IT?
Although a minority, there’s definitely women in comp-sci.
That said, they’re likely a lot less likely to be offended by your list. In fact, a number will probably look at it and be like, “Hmm… good beginning concept idea, but your implementation is horrible by only using your own opinoin. Let me help…”
Then, before long, him and her have a “get rated on your looks and how to improve” site that’s popular with everyone trying to get a date.
Turn it into a “Rate your Pick Up Artist” app.
No, no, Joe…that’s a curse on THEM.
Is the character in the last panel supposed to be Lith from It’s Walky?
okay, I feel like I should be able to figure this out but I can’t: how do I use character tags? like, my current goal is to find comics that include a certain character, but today I can’t even figure out who’s tagged in today’s comic or anything… I just can’t see anything to click. the one thing that says “tag page” is really some kind of bookmark feature.
…ha, now I can see the tags for this comic. and from there I edited the url. but is there a better way to search than http://www.dumbingofage.com/tag/$name/ ?
also I stumbled on this comic and omg, the irony of walky here: http://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/03-when-god-closes-the-door/super-human/
Not really.
Though you can also do “tag/name+name”, which is often very useful.
ooh, yes, that does sound useful
thanks
No, young background woman! NO! DON’T YOU KNOW THERE IS MATH AND MACHINERY INSIDE!
Psst! CT! The entire internet is little more than math and machinery!
Computer Science? So will we see Amber then?
So how did David know there’d be a bunch of tech dudes “apologizing” for being sexist sexual harassers when this comic was published? Or were there also a bunch of tech dues “apologizing” at the time he wrote it?
Because this does seem to turn into a thing every few months where allegations go public, women point out this is common place, men act surprised, the accused pretend they intend to change things and then nothing changes.
Computer Science: Definitely a safe place for sexist jerks.
It’s one of those perennial things that you can always count on being current.
Like mass shootings in the US.
Too soon, StClair.
Always too soon, really.