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www.theguardian.com/science/2025...
Patrick Willems @patrickhwillems.bsky.social ⋅ 1m
The Verge @theverge.com ⋅ 3d
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️𝓝𝓪𝓷𝓲 
so was the whole planet misaligned by several minutes or
There was a great disturbance in the force. As if milliseconds were screaming out in error.
As Robyn Hitchcock famously observed, time is round and space is curved.
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime, doubly so.
Very deep. You should send that into the Reader’s Digest, they’ve got a page for people like you.
Readers Digest has their 27 quote-able quotes and are just fine with reprinting what they have into perpetuity since their subscribers have zero long term memory.
How dare you smear the good name of Douglas Adams by suggesting one of his wonderful lines* should be sent to The Publication That Shall Not Be Named?
*Granted, people do tend to put it up without proper context for full effect; something he lamented that people would do to P.G. Wodehouse far too often.
Um, you ARE aware that the response to the quote is actually IN DNA’s book?
And as Douglas Adams postulated:
“…General and his Special Theories of Disaster Area Tax Returns, in which he proves that the whole fabric of the space-time continuum is not merely curved, it is in fact totally bent. ”
Dorothy may count as a Disaster Area, at this point.
Didn’t she have to meet with a counselor or something? Or was that a different in-comic day? Maybe it dragged out a bit.
And everyone lived happily ever after
“You threw a toy at another girl’s head, didn’t you? Didn’t you?! I thought what we had was special!”
“It wasn’t Monkey-Master!”
“…. okay. Okay, I suppose I can live with tha-”
“It was Chef Dexter.”
“HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME?”
It’s the beginning of the end for Dorothy, no doubt…
Maybe, AN end, anyway. She needs to learn her limits, and that isn’t always a bad thing.
I don’t want to watch her burn…
My heart is breaking for her—nothing crashes and burns quite as explosively as a type-A perfectionist on their first failure . . . .
“no, no, we can’t start the lesson ! My girlfriend isn’t there yet”
This really looks like my browser just isn’t scrolling all the way to the right.
Poor Walky. It’s not your fault, dude. You’re supposed to have roadblocks if you’re trying something ambitious but cutting out your support isn’t going to help.
This sounds like some sort of bridge metaphor.
Oh, nm. That’s dumb, Dorothy.
This is indeed a very happy comic if you look at it upside down.
It seems Dorothy is also going to break up with Walky. The storm of tears is going to wreck this ship. Noooooooo.
Are we going to get the minor-key reprise of Elliot and Sarah’s mutual breakup from El Goonish Shive?
OH SHIT SPOILERS FOR EGS I DIDN’T THINK BEFORE POSTING I’M SO SO SORRY
I mean I have a sneaking suspicion that a nonnegligible portion of DoA readers are already intimately familiar with EGS but it’s the lack of thought that counts against me
I am also a latecomer to EGS, and i’m up to 2011 in the archives.
It’s early enough in the morning that I’ll fall back to sleep and forget whatever.
Considering that was like, nearly 5 years ago, and all the cool people are already reading EGS, I have trouble considering that to be a spoiler.
Not really. If a mutual breakup were to occur here, it would be on the shared understanding that Dorothy’s in trouble and it’s Walky’s fault. So, you know, much shittier.
*Still sailing under a Joyce/Dorothy flag.* Ya gotta have sturdier stuff than tha’ ta sail these waters, landlubber!
Arr, I may’ve lean’d a bit harrd on this here ship joke…
Dorothy isn’t going to break up with Walky. Walky is going to try to break up with Dorothy.
Here’s a lesson that I hope you learn
If you Push It it might not return–L’Trimm, “Grab It”
it might “go Boom”!
The hovertext seems to parallel the song title from which the current storyline comes.
Hearing the rest of it again, I’m already in dread of where the story may go.
Well it’s some manner of emotion strip.
We need more Riley, her cereal based antics can only improve the mood.
*Riley, eating cereal in the back of the class with no explanation*
It will just be a carbon copy of the old “Steve Eating Cereal” strips from Questionable Content, just with Riley.
It’s best we don’t see more of Riley. Long-term presence in the comic would guarantee a character arc filled with suffering.
Like the cafeteria running out of her favorite cereal.
EVERY cereal is her favorite cere-…
…. oh.
Think of it this way Dorothy, you’re better than me. If I wind up being a certain amount of minutes late to class, as in ‘noticeable enough that everyone will look at me when I walk in’, I gave up and went back home. Didn’t happen OFTEN but there were a handful of times…
I can’t recall ever doing this, but that’s because I’d get to class up to ridiculously early to avoid that happening. I totally would just turn around if I was late, though…
Oh, one time I overslept and realized I’d be late, and I just went back to bed. But it was an 8am that we were allowed to make up missed sessions for, so.
Even in college I don’t think I ever completely skipped classes. I was late sometimes, but I still walked to class even if I was already late a few minutes. There was one day where I missed over half a class because my computer was having problems, but I still went for last part of it anyway.
One time I overslept for an exam. By the time I woke up, class had been started for 12 minutes and the Professor wouldn’t have let me in late for the test. Gave me a heart attack and I did major crunching to calculate if I was gonna lose my scholarship or not. And it irked me because I went to bed earlier, only to spend 5 hours tossing and turning in bed, hence oversleeping!
Oh, that’s bad, and really mean – we sometimes had people show up late to exams too (for, let’s say a bunch of minutes), and they were allowed to take the test (in e.g. seminars with attendance lists), because the whole semester would be wasted. Most of the professors took their time explaining parts of the test the first minutes anyway, and even though people being late was frowned upon, though they did encourage to plan in traffic incidents or busses being late. With lecture exams without compulsory attendance it was a different matter, because you’d get four different dates to try the test anyway, so if you were more than 10 minutes late (which usually was the time it took to greet us, explain how many questions there are, or other organisational tasks such as distributing the test sheets), then you weren’t allowed in and had to wait for the next exam date (usually about a month later).
Oversleeping a test never happened to me, because of that exact fear, I’m always using at least two different alarm clocks (for my early shift at work, I use four different ones, because I’m not an early bird and thus am scared about possibly sleeping in – it’s not a job you can be late, early in the morning) – I know it’s excessive, but I normally just snooze my phone when my alarm rings, so I need to take counter measures
I overslept for an exam once. At this school, the exam hall closed to newcomers 30min after the exam began. I got there 29min. Prof thankfully let me in.
And then the exam was weirdly, freakishly easy (and no it wasn’t a bird course, FYI – heat transfer physics). I finished it in 30min. All of his other exams were the kind of exam where even the freaky overachiever types like me used almost every minute of available time.
I actually went up to him and triple-checked that I was not, in fact, missing a page. When I handed it in, he asked if I was giving up and told me I was too good a student to give up just because I overslept. “No, I’m done.”
… I left with the absolute knowledge that I either got a perfect mark or failed so bad I had no idea how bad I actually failed. In the end, I did get a perfect mark (first and only time getting 100% on a final), but it was the most surreal and unnerving exam experience I’ve ever had.
Everyone else in the course had the same experience with it – general consensus was the class average must’ve been too low for the department so he nerfed the final.
I had a similar experience with my Calculus I final. I wasn’t late, but I was deathly ill. I took the test anyway and found it ridiculously easy (like you, I aced it — 198 on a 200-point exam). It was a common final exam given to all sections of that course. My prof was one of the best teachers, and her earlier tests had been pretty tough, which probably explains why the final didn’t seem so bad.
As soon as I handed in that test I walked over to the health services. Turned out I had pneumonia affecting three of the four lobes of my lungs. In retrospect I was foolish to fight through it for the sake of that test.
I’m digging all of these college stories, a lot of you guys are major badasses! At the same time, it feels like swapping war stories. You especially DonDueed, damn. I’m glad you recovered from that terrible bout of pneumonia! I have a similar-ish story, in that I got really bad food poisoning the night/morning before a test and still had to go take it. I barely slept, threw up to the point that my throat was raw and potentially ripped (the last couple of times I threw up saw me hacking little bits of blood) and just felt like absolute crap. But trying to get the make-up exam would have been a chore and a half so I struggled through it and got an A despite my studying being interrupted by vomit.
All this reading about ‘fighting’ to and basically for exams through oversleeping and illnesses kinda wants me to first say: Congratulations on all your good marks!!
But also: Please take care of yourselves XD Especially you, DonDueed!
(I thankfully never had to take a test with something as extreme, just migraine – which can be bad – and I once had to do a presentation on set phrases in one of my linguistic seminars after having woken up with pretty high fever but using pills and pain killers to cut it down a little. Before the class ensued, I told the professor that I was sick but still came, because I knew we had little time available for all the presentations that still needed to be presented and so not to eff up his schedule – plus I was in a group of two, and my colleague had already prepared for it. I also told him that I did hope that what I said during the presentation seemed logical. He was pretty happy that I still came in, because three other people with presentations called in sick, so I could actually take my time talking. Right off the bat, I went blank on an example for a set phrase – He even helped me out, and after that, I brought it behind me with pretty good feedback from him)
Once I had a student turn up for a final exam while very sick. He dripped all kinds of bodily fluids on his paper. I actually put on latex gloves to grade it. He failed miserably, but thankfully didn’t infect me.
A truck broke down on the bridge into town. The bridge. I had to go the non-back way, through actual rush hour traffic. Then when I was cycling from the carpark to the exam venue, I missed a pedal crossing the road and stacked right in front of an oncoming four wheel drive. I road my damaged bike with my damaged body the rest of the way, got there about 10 minutes in with breathing difficulty and when my lecturer came out and acknowledged my existed I burst into heaving sobs.
I sat the exam, got 10 min makeup time at the end, and filled in a ‘special consideration’ (or something) form. Not so bad in the end, but still my worst exam experience
I probably went to 20% of my lectures (due to severe anxiety rather than cause I was lazy) I did okay anyway (unlike the rest of you over achievers “I went to a test eventhough I had ebola and got 95%!”,
my partner did exams ill and failed that year which I feel is the more realistic outcome :S ).
The thing I hate is compulsory attendance. I got decent grades and when I did got to class I barely learned anything because I was so stressed. I would have been kicked out of a uni that enforced compulsory attendance, a lot of UK unis are starting to do this, even though I never failed a single exam.
On a more shameful note I once burst into an exam 20 minutes late hungover and my neck was covered in hickies. That was classy *face palm*. I never repeated that incident
Don’t do it, Walky.
Is she late?
By several minutes, yes.
Yes, so she stopped at the pharmacy for a pregnancy test on the way to class.
Unlikely. Unless she and Walky both turned a key at the same time.
Yes Walky, a breakup is exactly what Dorothy needs to stabilize her downward spiral!
This aspect has been getting to me since the rooftop. I honestly wonder if he’s just going to “nobly” spring the break-up on her without lead-up discussion or a chance for her to argue/refute/otherwise respond… or if he’d actually be ready to allow for her own feelings/thoughts to chime in alongside his.
Because Lord knows, I have seen way too many examples of the former kind of break-up to count on one hand… Or on other not-so-great days, on a few severed hands…
And also because holy eff, this girl does not need this shit right now.
It’s Walky, so yes he’s probably going to handle this in the most graceless and thoughtless manner possible. I mean it’s already a super presumptuous and thoughtless thing to do so why not go all in.
that’s not very nice. Walky thinks it’s the best thing to do, he’s totally wrong. But it’s not thoughtless, he’s worried about someone he cares about breaking down for having too much on their plate so he thinks taking himself off that plate will alleviate pressure
Assuming you can decide what’s best for someone else without their input is absolutely thoughtless.
People make decisions that aren’t in their own best interests all the time, Dorothy here being case in point. Walky’s being about as thoughtful and considerate as he’s ever been in his life. Very dumb and naive and would totally make things way worse, but he’s putting not thinking about breaking up with Dorothy for anything but her benefit. Not having the correct thoughts =/= thoughtless.
Dorothy doesn’t look stressed out at all.
Well, this certainly isn’t foreshadowing this year’s Valentine’s Day strip. Nope. No sirree. Not foreshadowing at all.
Yeah, I’m calling it (in addition to those who have already called it). Break up on Valentines.
Multiple break-ups on Valentine’s. It’s a montage.
I don’t feel Willis would rip off the band-aid that quickly.
Have you been following this comic much? When it comes to fictional human misery, there are no limits
Well, yes, that’s precisely why he wouldn’t rip off the band-aid that quickly, an expression that refers to doing something painfully quickly and all at once. You know, as opposed to more prolonged suffering.
Though my favorite take on the saying come from Phoebe from Friends: “It’s just like pulling off a Band-aid. Just do it really fast, and then the wound is exposed.”
I don’t feel Willis would rip off the band-aid that quickly.
We invented the phrase “Damn you, Willis” because of this sort of thing. That is, we the readers of his comic, that is… not trying to personally claim any of the credit for that.
Please don’t say that with Ruth as your avatar.
Let at least Ruth be happy, at least for a while..
Then again, Becky and Dina breaking up would be even more disheartening.
How about Anna and Leslie? I think near everyone’d be okay with that break-up. And then we can have two positive arcs to the four-panel montage, like one with Eef- I mean, Ethan- and Danny getting together.
I love how inappropriate your avatar is
Becky is crying on the inside.
I mean, no Debby Downer and all that.
Today-Dorothy is a malfunctioning pod-people who was supposed to be a Walky clone (their expressions in panel 5 & 6 are exactly the same) but since he had some Dorothy DNA on him when the pod made contact …. Mistakes Were Made.
Well, see? Dorothy got here before the lesson started. No problem! Everything’s…. fine.
Everything is fine, nothing is the matter!
It’s not like she’s a SCHOOL MISSER or anything
Oh Dorothy! Walky needs to do something but the question is, does he believe in himself enough to do so?
The question is more, what can he or should he do?
What’s on his mind will be disastrous for both of them, but I’m not sure what else he can do to help.
Finally having made it to class, Dorothy realized she brought the wrong book…
Quite possibly. It is even possible that she’s so wiped out that she isn’t sure what class she’s in!
Or worse yet, she’s not prepared for class. It is gender studies after all. If you had a limited number of study time points to spend, this class might well be your designated dump stat.
Tbh reading the comments, I find the phrase ‘rip the band-aid off’ weird because it is like… if you gently soak it in water, it will come off easier, with far less pain, and not reopen the wound it was hiding in the first place.
Which isn’t particularly relevant for this strip in particular, but like, it means I imagine that when anyone says it, they should be saying it with great offense like ‘rip the band-aid off why don’t you!’ for a lack of compassion/care.
Well, sure, but it’s not like sayings always make the most sense.
This isn’t Walky’s fault. But he could certainly alleviate some of her pressure if he tried to learn his course.
S.O.S.: Recently joined Reddit. Found a few good subs. Others not so pleasant; trying to dodge anti-cop conscription, blackpills. Please advise?
Honestly, 80% of that site is fine. The assholes mostly stick to their own subs where they don’t risk encountering anyone who will call them on their bullshit.
Just look for subs that match your interests, and read a few threads before you subscribe to feel out the general tone.
Game subs tend to be okay. Look for your interests, and there are a lot of subs with “-p*ssy” in them that are all cute cat pictures. But there are odd switcheroos and in-jokes. For example /r/trees is marijuana, so the tree enthusiasts took over /r/MarijuanaEnthusiasts.
Dare I ask what blackpills are?
What is this strange college where professors know their students like it’s high school
I am currently in college and have weird nicknames for my favorite professors as well as inside jokes. I go to a small school so i tend to have the same teacher multiple times so at this point I’m just like “sup Jennifer how are the kids?”and “Yo Dr. G-Money how’s it hanging” They definitely know me. If they don’t…they haven’t said anything yet and thats awkward.
I mean, it looks like a smallish seminar class, so it makes perfect sense. I was permitted to skip GRs myself in college and therefore had a pretty high ratio of small classes (small relative to the “100+ students in an auditorium” size, I mean). Even with the foreign language classes, which were typically structured to have a larger lecture with a professor and a smaller discussion with a TA, one of the professors knew most or all of us by name, if nothing else.
Gosh, now I’m having flashbacks to the persnickety TA who chewed me out for being “disrespectful” because I doodled some curlicues on the back of a quiz once.
It’s a smaller class. I went to a big school, but some of my teachers in my non-lecture hall classes were like this. Plus, it’s a good (and frequently recommended) idea to get to know your professors, so it makes sense that Dorothy would have some recognition with Leslie.
I went to a university where that was the case. Most seminars had no more than 20-30 people. Lectures with over 100 attendants did exist, but were relatively rare. Our docents knew pretty much all their students by name.
I went to a private university where a lot of my classes had 20 students or fewer (my major classes sometimes only had 5 or 6 students). The profs would invite us over for dinner and, having grown up in the town, I actually knew many of my profs’ children from high school. It just depends on the school.
Actually, my best friend (who did not grow up in the town) loves to tell the story of when he first understood that the father of his girlfriend (now wife) was the dean of his college. Abject terror. Best. Gotta love small colleges.
I just checked the IU Bloomington course registration site, and as of Fall 2017, Gender Studies 101 courses were capped at 25 students.
A lot of the classes at IU — e.g., the in-universe Calculus classes — are much larger. I’d guess that the Gender Studies class is limited because discussion is such a large part of the class.
(sad puppy noises intensify)
ref the alt text. I don’t consider it a happy strip, there is no Ana.
I read this on an iPad. I’ve alway been able to read the alt text by tapping just to the right of the “latest” button, but this hasn’t worked for a week or two now. I checked old strips I’ve read alt text for in the past, and the same problem holds true for those as well. Has anyone else had a similar problem on mobile devices? Any suggestions on how to fix the problem?
I always pressed to the left of the first button. Still works for me
I just tried that and neither works for me, but thank you for the suggestion.
WELCOME TO THE LAND OF NO SMILES EVERYONE
Mmm, grade angst.