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Kevin Buist @kevinbuist.com ⋅ 20h
Ferric Fang @fangferric.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
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David M Willis! @damnyouwillis.bsky.social ⋅ 3d
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“I’m here to learn”?!
And with that, Joyce decides to temporarily convert to Catholicism so she can request an exorcism.
Oh, there are Protestant exorcists, no worries there.
“Spirit of heterodoxy, come out of him in the name of Jesus, I command you!”
I’m not exaggerating. Doesn’t even take special training, just a belief in demons and in a Christian’s power over them. And yes, heterodoxy. The opposite of orthodoxy, you know. Potentially demonic. I wish I was exaggerating.
RED FLAG O METER
learning?? wtf
Who is this person and what has he done with Walky?
First encounter with Shattered Glass Walky?
Piccolo: Red flag!
*a few minutes later*
Goku: Is that a red flag?
Piccolo: Crimson.
Walky is the safest boy I know
Not if he gets Joyce into Dorothy defense mode.
“I say Good Day!”
I love Dina; I have her magnet on my car.
I do think she could reflect on her screening process some.
No it is perfectly valid. Walky should get another go tho. I would argue with Dina that it was Joyce that barred me entry, if I were him. Then explain that my favourite dinosaur was a terrorbird due to its feet.
Or even the modern day chicken then when she looks at me funny tell her to google the lifecycle of the chicken embyro.
I had to add “dinosaurs” to that search, but that’s pretty cool.
Give the guy a break he’s nust really trying to buckle down on his math class… and maybe also give his new secret girlfriend a good morning smooch.
You know, for someone who professes to really not like Walky, she sure can pick up on him being out of character. *cough*
She’s a Mom in training. She has an acute bullshit detector for certain sorts of bullshit, namely the sort of bullshit kids try. And since Walky is an overgrown child…
Well, sometimes. Joyce is quite capable of plenty of childish bullshit herself.
Part of the Christian Mom Training ™ is to be impervious to own bullshit. Do as i say, not as i do!
Sounds like a few of the crappy moms in this cast.
Joyce would be a way better mom than the majority of them, thankfully.
That just means she knows WHY she doesn’t like him.
Also, I guess I should ship Joyce <3< Walky.
You can know when someone you don’t like is acting out of character. Everyone was able to tell Mary was acting out of character when she was being overly nice. And with Walky it is really obvious because he is actually acting against his usual bad habits.
Now he’s with Amber, WALKY has to be the responsible one
That is TERRIFYING.
And having to be responsible for the sake of the one he loves worked out so well for him before, too.
Well he….I hadn’t thought about it like that.
Oh sweet baby Jesus.
Merry Christmas.
Joyce knows there’s a plot afoot
Maybe she is a Patreon member.
Aww, Joyce seems kinda disappointed that Dina doesn’t like her Creationist Fact!
Also, these are definitely two characters well-suited to debating the merits of learning. Mhmm.
Don’ t let on to Joyce that Leviathan is the Ugaritic sea monster Lôtān, one of the servants of the sea god Yammu defeated by Hadad in the Baal Cycle. Or that the story of Job is taken from the Akkadian Ludlul bēl nēmeqi.
My favorite dinosaur is the ruby-throated hummingbird, Archilochus colubris.
Nonsense. I’ve read the Job, and the beast described is very clearly and unambiguously Godzilla (or perhaps an identical creature born from the nuclear detonation at Sodom).
Oh, Walky, honey. Just say you’re failing math (which as far as both of you know, it’s true), and you need to set tutoring up with the new TA (because as far as Joyce knows, you actually were trying to effectively study with Jason).
Yeah you go Dina
Does…does Joyce assume Dina is Christian? Because how else would Dina know about Leviathan or why it’s assumed to be relevant?
Christians like this assume everybody is both familiar with the base assumptions of their religion and, on some level, agrees with it unless it’s been shown otherwise. It’s not at all uncommon for them to assume everybody believes in Religious Jesus even if they don’t worship him or that “The Bible says right here….” is a compelling argument to all people.
Conversely, that if you’re an atheist you only have a passing familiarity with Christianity or any Biblical tropes, even if you grew up in an ostensibly Christian country.
Well, yeah, clearly if you’re NOT some denomination of Christianity (even ‘heretical’ ones like Catholic), it’s just because you’re not familiar with Christianity.
This is why I used to love to sit down and have conversations with people who take those assumptions to heart. My own beliefs*, though nominally Christian, are so far removed from the normalized ones that most from Joyce’s background lump me into the same category as “atheists”** and those from The Satanic Temple and The Church of Satan (ie actively malicious to their beliefs and way of life)… which is why I had to give up having those conversations since it’s not compatible with living and working as a functioning adult in the US.
*I self describe as an areligious, animist, apatheistic, pantheistic Catholic-Buddhist with some additional influences from other spiritual paths I’ve walked in the past.
**I scare quote atheists here because it’s a use of the fundie understanding of the term, which is more akin to antitheists, rather than the wider understanding.
Religion aside, the Bible is one of the most influential literary works of all time. Anyone should be able to pick up a Leviathan allusion; it also appears in the works of Thomas Hobbes
And now I’m imagining Hobbes arguing that society needs the firm rule of fire-breathing dinosaurs.
Nah, that’s more Calvin’s viewpoint.
I think Calvin has been a fire breathing dinosaurish city destroyer.
For those of basically totally areligious at home, it was also featured on Yu-gi-Oh.
My first exposure to Leviathan was in Disney”s Atlantis.
I grew up non-denominational Christian and the only references to Leviathan I was aware of until I looked it up recently were from video games and Supernatural…and now I think I better understand what people mean by Christian-lite.
which also requires some degree of elitism to read ^^ i guess the Yu-gi-Oh reference is more accessible ^^
Was raised without any religion and no, that’s not true. I’ve heard the word (mostly on Farscape) and knew it was some biblical thing, but I was under the impression that it was some kind of mythical whale.
It is in fact a bit weird just how much Christians tend to take it for granted that everyone around them will be familiar with all the same the weird fiddly bits of lore from their Jesus fandom that they are
I didn’t even know who Jesus was until I was in 7th grade. I’d only heard his name as a expletive – ex. “Jesus Christ, that was loud!”
We were reading and a reference to him being nailed to a cross for suggesting people be nice to each other. My teacher said “We all know who that’s a reference to right? Jesus.”
1. I find that refreshing to hear! Although surprising in our culture.
2. Were you reading Pratchett!?
My money is on Douglas Adams’ Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
That’s where I’d heard that expression.
I live in Canada, so a bit less of an outwardly religious culture (too much talk about religion can be considered rude her). I find it interesting it was my secular seventh grade that assumed everyone would get the reference and not my Catholic high school which explained every frigging biblical reference everybody ever made.
And yeah, my class was divided by reading level. Lower reading level got to read Holes and higher reading level got stuck with Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I say ‘stuck with’ because no matter how much our teacher tried and showed us the movie, it bored the whole group to tears. Finally, the teacher said screw it and just let us all read Holes. Which, in practice, meant he read Holes to us.
Wait, you found Hitchhiker’s boring? How is that possible.
I guess being 12 or 13 and not quite getting the humour? We barely made it past the earth being destroyed because we hated it.
Have you tried it again now that you are older? Please say you gave it another chance.
I find it weirder that Leviathan of all things is being called a ‘weird fiddly bit of lore’. The actual description of it, yes. The exact origin of it, yes.
But Leviathan shows up in so many non-religious contexts – ultimately referencing the religious context, yes, but not in a religious context, and occasionally a couple steps removed, due to directly referencing one of the other non-religious contexts.
Most of which would make Joyce’s attempt to use it, here, actually more baffling than simply not having heard of Leviathan before would have. ‘She’s talking about some Bible thing…why does she think that would change my mind?’ vs ‘Why is she talking about sea serpents to justify firebreathing dinosaurs?’ or ‘What does the god of the Cenobites have to do with this?’
So, yes, in this context, Joyce is totally assuming Dina accepts a biblical story as true, but no, Leviathan isn’t a word you could only expect the biblically literate to encounter.
But we’re talking about Leviathan in a religious context not as a general word. Like, my understanding of a leviathan is a big sea monster which does not track with her comparison to a fire-breathing terrestrial dinosaur at all so something is clearly being lost in translation. Like I have no fucking clue what she’s talking about especially since parasaurolophus is nowhere near big enough to qualify as a leviathan to my understanding of one.
No, we’re not talking about the religious context. This subthread was started by someone pointing out that ‘leviathan’ is used in non-religious contexts, and then somebody denying that. (Context is important here, too!)
That the religious context is the one that Joyce brought up does not make the claim that Leviathan is ‘a fiddly bit of lore’ that you could only be expected to know at least the basics of (some combination of massive, aquatic, serpentine and evil) if you were religious true.
Ah, so you’re just nitpicking semantics gotcha.
You enter a conversation, make a post that has literally nothing to do with the conversation at hand, and then accuse somebody responding to the actual topic of the conversation of nitpicking?
And my reply to the thread was indicating how the word being used in non-religious contexts did not actually mean I understood how Joyce was using it
This makes you pointing out that it isn’t ONLY used in a religious context seem like nitpicking
All because it’s all the hotel rooms, doesn’t mean it’s “influential”.
Well some parts of the Bible are well known enough that most or all of the general public are at least aware about it even if they ain’t religious. Anyways I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s at least some species of dinosaur named after the Leviathan and that that’s how Dina would be aware about it.
I think some Christians in this country don’t realize that to non-Christians the Bible is just another book of fictional stories.
And a badly written one at that. I’ve tried to read the Bible and it is an interminable slog.
I think I got up to Exodus before I quit.
The Song of Solomon has some good bits.
Lots of Christians relate mostly to the New Testament and don’t now much about the old.
(It would probably shock Joyce to learn that Leviathan was based on existing God myths of pre Jewish times. Oh, right, do creationists believe in pre Jewish times?)
Assuming Adam was Jewish, you have a solid week of pre
Jewish times.
I learned about the Leviathan through an old picture book about dragon myths and Yu-Gi-Oh!. No Bible needed.
I learned about it from Final Fantasy games.
I first heard of it in the context of Hobbes’ theory of the state monopoly of force. Political science.
Dina, I would not have been able to show much-to-any knowledge of dinosaurs in my answer. I may not have been allowed into your room.
But…
You did right, Dina. You did right.
And just like that Inspector Joyce is on the case.
Maybe she should bring Jamie the Romance Detective in as well to help.
Oh, Christ on his cross, I used to believe the same shit Joyce does. Why oh why was science ever my enemy?
FFS, Walky, just go to class! Either it’s on or it’s not, you’ll find out when you get there.
(Unless he’s got some ulterior motive for continuing to try to meet up with Amber, I guess.)
Yeah, go to class, wait fifteen minutes and leave if the prof’s not there.
Exactly. Since Walky is already UP, he can just go… but i guess that doesn’t occur to him at all
But if he does go, and there is no class, then Mike wins.
From the point Walky considered Mike might be trying to deceive him, Mike had already won.
Her busybody senses have activated!
“there’s no I in ‘effort’ “
The poll has been unchanged for so long, it’s finally relevant again. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
Literally no part of effort is in Walky. Unless he uses his full name, in which case he’s got most of it, but it’s still incomplete and weird. Eort.
So… no Fs.
Oh, I’m sure he’ll be getting those soon enough.
My favorite dinosaur is the puffin—I mean, Dina would have to accept it, right? Birds bein’ evolved dinosaurs and all.
And puffins are just plain awesome.
If we’re going with living dinosaurs, mine would probably be F. peregrinus. Though I agree, puffins are totes cool.
Mine’s the Balearica regulorum gibbericeps
Solid faves, tbh. I’m also partial to psittacines.
This was a helpful way to think about how I would answer Dina’s question because I don’t really have a favorite dinosaur, but I literally posted on Facebook about my favorite bird earlier today.
This kind of thing is always in my mind! In summer I like to watch the hummingbirds zoom around my feeder and my internal monologue tends to go something like, “There are dinosaurs at my window. I am helping to feed three-inch DINOSAURS who are RIGHT NEXT TO ME and aaaaaa I love birds”
Puffins have fluorescent beaks because they are awesome!
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/puffin-beaks-fluorescent-hidden-attract-opposite-sex-seabirds-uv-a8293701.html
“To shield their puffin subjects’ eyes from bright UV light, Mr Dunning had sunglasses made.”
And they look adorable.
Yeah….
I’m just worried those puffins with sunglasses are cooler than me.
They work so hard to fly! They manage it, but it’s so much effort! The terns laugh at them in their secret bird language.
I used to have a movie about a puffin. They are SO CUTE <3
There’s a movie about a puffin?!?! Please hook me up!
It was called The First Snow of Winter. Technically, it was more about a duckling, but the puffin was his best friend and played a prominent role!
It lives on youtube nowadays.
Thanks, now I know what I’m watching tomorrow night! (I wish there was a puffin emoji)
It’s adorable!
I dunno if it’s helpful or realistic for you but check out my reply to Yumi just slightly below.
I went to Iceland back in May, and we went on a puffin watching boat tour. One of the islands that the puffins lived on for certain months out of the year had this man made structure that had kind of broken down, but was still like a higher point, so the puffins would climb their way up it and jump to get a better start on flying. And the puffins would get in line to do their jump and then fly for like a minute.
A lot of mid-Coast Maine has puffins in late spring/early summer as part of their migration, which may or may not be easier and more affordable than Iceland, depending. The Acadia National Park region is what you’re generally looking for.
And Acadia is gorgeous and worth going to even without puffins. Go in blueberry season.
Fortunately there’s some pretty good overlap between blueberries and puffins in June!
Blueberry season would also make it bear season.
I was also thinking what my response to this would be and I reached the conclusion I would probably be all like: “Amber, can I come in?” and then decide just ask Dina to step aside if she says yes or walk away if she says no.
But this is why I don’t hijinks-based comics.
Really, Joyce, all you have to do is look up the name of a dinosaur and like one fact about it.
On a website that’s not from a Creationist standpoint.
Okay, I see the problem here.
“They lived 30 million years ago” “UNFOLLOWED. BLOCKED. REPORTED.”
Not to mention that in this scenario, you apparently picked a Palaeogene bird, which Joyce is unlikely to accept as a dinosaur.
Evidentially, I am NOT a palaeontologist. Feel free to adjust the number as appropriate.
“I’m here to learn”
WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT DID YOU DO WITH WALKY?
“In university”?
Who are you, strange British guy, and what did you do with Walky?
It’s the return of Reginald, Duke of Thingeley.
The poms are “at university”, not “in”.
Guys, it literally doesn’t matter if you go to the class or not. Worst case scenario you waste a ten minute walk or lose 2 participation points and have to catch up on some lecture slides.
A) That assumes the prof uses or posts slides.
B) …How would one get participation points in a class that size anyways?
Also, if Walky’s doing as poorly as Jason said (which I doubt, but fine), he needs all the points he can get.
By turning in your notes to the new TA, remember?
I guess. Does just showing up count as participation? It doesn’t at my school, for the most part.
Then again, most lecture only classes don’t GIVE participation points in my school and classes as large as their math class certainly don’t bother with attendance.
They have to turn in their notes each class day, so that’s how they keep track. Another possibility for large classes that hasn’t been depicted in this comic are clickers, which are remote controls with several buttons on them that can be used to respond to multiple choice questions at various points in the lecture. Everyone would get assigned a specific numbered remote at the beginning of the semester, and TAs would watch to make certain no one grabbed multiple clickers to cover for a friend’s absence. Clickers are super popular for large physics lectures.
Again, I guess my slip is in the fact just showing up doesn’t count as participation most of the time in my school and we don’t use clickers.
“I’m here to learn”?
That’s news to us Walky.
“I’m here to learn how to avoid learning. I’m going to put so much goddamn effort into not learning that you’re gonna be amazed.”
“So…. like thirty seconds of effort?”
To be specific, he’s here to absorb knowledge through osmosis, without any actual work on his part.
Thus showing off how smart he is.
He is starting to realize the flaws in this plan though.
That’s our Joyce: incredibly naïve on certain topics, astonishingly perceptive on others.
Cuties
Walky, your last attempt at being on the same level as Dina involved saying the worst fictional dinosaur ever. Even the genitically engineered velociraptor from Fallen Kingdom was cooler! Jegus, this is why Walky and Joyce fit perfectly in the original continuity: One thinks science is boring and the other thinks science and creationism are compatible.
I’ve not seen Fallen Kingdom yet but I’ve seen the Honest Trailers of it. That Indoraptor is an Indominus Rex mixed with Velociraptor but Indominus Rex is already part Velociraptor…
I disagree whole heartedly.
That Franken-raptor was weak and it objectively did less than the t-rex 2.0.
It was also a weird mix of looney tunes character and slasher movie villain, which, admittedly, does have a certain entertainment value in that regard.
Still, it was just a noticeably bigger raptor with less built in option than the thing it was cloned from.
Yes, but it felt like an evil raptor instead of the t rex sized raptor, and his wacky personality was funny to watch.
I have no idea what the heck you guys are talking about, and now I have to do some research.
‘The mouse’ was shifty, which meant I was on the right track. ‘The hamster’ was still out of reach – I had not counted on her bringing in’the dinosaur’ as muscles. Well, two can play that game, and I knew a dinosaur chick of my own that could even the odds. But first I had to figure out this new connection.
It was a tough job, but then, I’m a tough gal. I can swear. I can eat things that touch other things. No case is too big for Joyce Brown: Lesbian Love Sleuth
My goodness, is this a new story in the vein of Jocelyne Noir? Please tell me I haven’t missed any entries.
And then they start a sisters detective agency.
YES!
They complement each other well! You’ve got your Brains and your Brawn. Logic and Passion. Living away from campus and, uh, actually knowing most of the cast. They’ll be unstoppable together!
Heh, nothing that organised. But I did dot down a few lines last time we saw Joyce Brown: Lesbian Love Sleuth. And given that I take any excuse to write Noir parodies, we might see her again…
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/04-the-do-list/creeeaaation/#comment-1259829
As I said above, definitely need to bring in Jamie the Romance Detective.
Ooooooh! That has clear potential.
…although, I’m not sure Noir is the genera that makes her best.
These people are so much more patient than I am. I know that mentally I’d be like: I DON’T HAVE TIME TO INDULGE YOUR HERP FETISH RIGHT NOW, DINA, PISS OFF
I mean it’s her room and Amber has expressly given Dina permission to only let in people that can be trusted. And this is Dina’s system for that. So… yeah, I think she’d be the one saying “piss off”, metaphorically?
It is literally her room. Dina is allowed to deny people entry especially because Amber asked her to.
So am I the only one that finds Dina’s actions here simply rude? I personally would find it quite problematic if my roommate would send visitors away without asking me. Besides: Dina is right about the stupidity of Creationism, sure. But it wasn’t Joyce who brought up the subject. Joyce did give an honest answer. I just don’t get all the symphaty forDina here.
Perhaps. On the other hand, Amber ought to answer the door herself sometimes, instead of leaving it to Dina all the time.
But Amber gave Dina the task of screening who gets in because she doesn’t want just anybody seeing her.
I don’t think it was fair of Amber to ask that of Dina.
Dina is being rude, but Amber has given her permission to turn away people on her behalf, and since it is also Dina’s room, there’s no requirement for her to be polite.
I’ve kicked my dormmate’s guest out of my room back in college when they offended me. In my case, they had purposely insulted me, but they still weren’t my guest, so it was rude of me to kick them out.
That’s not rude. If they purposely insulted you in your own space, the rude ones were them.
It was rude to my roommate because it wasn’t my guest. i cut short their time together, or at least their time together in the room.
Actually, it was rude of your roommate to not kick them out themselves for insulting you (or bringing someone to your room that would insult you in the first place, if that was an expected outcome).
this.
You were not the rude one.
I’m actually with you on that.
If it was visitors for herself, she may choose who gets to come in by her dinosaur questioning, as that’s how she mostly picks her friends somehow ^^
I think Amber has different standards for who to hang out with, and Dina is not taking that into consideration.
Even if she weren’t screening this for Amber, this isn’t only Amber’s room. Dina also has a veto on who is or isn’t allowed inside.
But in that case Amber has a veto as well. And (although it ended quite well) I’m pretty sure that she didn’t want Sal to come in, no matter how great her answer was to a dinosaur question.
No, your desire to not have strangers in your living space is more important than your roommate’s desire for the opposite. Your roommate can find somewhere else for them to meet whereas there’s no real viable alternative for “not having strangers in my room.”
Damn I misunderstood. And it’s not really Dina’s fault that Amber doesn’t specifically communicate who she wants kept out.
Dina offered to remove her if she was bothering Amber. She just asked Amber if she could talk dinosaurs with her first, and Sal managed to metaphor that into Amber being willing to talk.
I think it’s safe to assume Dina is doing this on Amber’s request. It’s a small room, she could just be like “Dina, let them in.”
Amber LITERALLY asked her to do this and clearly knows she does it. She can no doubt even hear who it is at the door.
If she wants Dina to change her screening methods or just stop, she needs to actually tell Dina
Also, even if this weren’t for Amber, this is Dina’s room too. She can set whatever criteria she wants for who’s allowed inside.
For those who still don’t think Amber knows about this though, we’ve seen how she handles it when it’s someone she wants to come in – she texts them a correct answer.
Dina is now the most problematic character in this webcomic
Dina’s long been aware that she’s Becky’s “rebound girl” and likely doesn’t want to be reminded of it by Joyce’s presence.
Their feuding about dinosaurs and evolution goes back before Dina met Becky.
Only if you’re a fundie.
Also no Joyce, no she would not have.
Is Walky taller than he was at the beginning of the semester?
I LOVE seeing these two interact
Which is the better face, Dina in panel 1 or Joyce in panel 6?
I’mma say Dina in panel 7 from yesterday. That’s what a red panel looks like from the outside, right there.
Can you really spell ‘effort’ without ‘Walky’? I don’t feel like checking.
Easily. They share no common letters.
Walky’s already used the shared half-bath in one direction
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/04-it-all-returns/indominus/
so it might occur to him to try it the other way. If he can get past Sierra, and if Sal is still there, it could set up a scene where he faces EVERY SINGLE WOMAN he’s had any meaningful contact with since the start of term.
I had a dream about this comment section last night (though in the dream, it was formatted like the QC forums).
It was stressful.
Job is one of my favorite bible fable (my absolute favorite is Jonah and the whale).
This guy just wants to live his life, but God says “Nah, I got a bet going on with Satan and you gotta suffer because we gotta have our entertainment because you jackass humans haven’t invented sitcoms yet.”
So all 10 of his kids die in various horrible ways, he is financially ruined, he is afflicted with diseases, and worst of all he tries to become a philosopher. In the end God wins the bet of course, because God is all powerful and all knowing (it says so in the bible, see what I did there?) and Satan was a fool to bet against that kind of mojo. Job then gets his wealth and health back and has new kids, and goes on with his life all happy again. Because fuck those old kids, they are all dead now so who needs them? Mourning your dead kids is for pussies.
I always imagined it as:
Job: Why are you doing this to me, G_d?
God: Punk’d!
Job: Oh, wow! Good one, Lord! You really had me going when you killed my family.
Yeah, the Job story is kinda messed up.
*claps*
Really reading Job for the first time as a young Catholic was basically what started me on the road to atheism.
I think everyone who reads Job more or less misses the point. I include most Christians. The point of the damned thing is, “Good things will not happen to good people because that’s not how life f***ing works. Instead, you should be a good person because life is a struggle, not in spite of it.”
And yes, you get a reward (Heaven) in the end but that’s never been the point.
Loses a significant amount of meaning when the bad things happening are specifically god doing terrible things or allowing terrible things to happen to someone so he can win a bet.
Yeah, the whole framing device ruins that message. If it was just a story about a guy named Job who kept his faith despite having horrible things happen to him, then sure, it’s an inspiring and comforting message about staying in there and bearing with unbearable sorrow. But when the whole thing’s just a pissing match, it just makes Old Testament God look petty and unworthy of worship.
Maybe I’m missing some sort of nuance here – I’m not a believer and I didn’t learn Job in Catholic school. But, to me, ‘life’s hard – be kind’ only works when dealing with random events that could happen to anyone. When an entity is making things hard or doing terrible things (or, allowing said terrible things) then that entity needs to knock it off.
It’s an early attempt to address the basic problem of evil in a culture where God was understood to directly control everything. And yeah, it completely falls apart for me. “I’m God, don’t question me” doesn’t work for me, especially when it’s been set up as something as dumb as a bet with Satan.
And, as I think we talked about here a little while back, it’s just made worse by giving him a new family, even better than his old family.
I laugh SO hard that people say shit like than and expect to be taken seriously. Then again it’s STILL more respectable than the mormons and jehovas witnesses that believe magic is actually real and Harry Potter is a bad influence.
That’s a fundie thing too. Probably more than the Mormons.
Joyce’s mentioned Chick Tracts before and they’re all over that kind of thing. Harry Potter comes up, though I think he was winding down by the time they were at their peak.
HP is a TERRIBLE influence! They are restricted to physical foci, use broken/pidgien latin, and give only a brief overview of how to safely (or effectively) practice the art! It’s just as dangerous as the (edited) Anarchists’ Cookbook that got released on the web back in the early 90’s! *
* back in the early days of the web, in an effort to cut down on teenagers learning how to make TNT at home, the book was edited to remove key processes in many recipes. This either made the results complete failures, or would cause injury to the maker. It achieved the intended effect of “that book is useless!”
I think the crappy recipes may have always been in there. The early Internet (pre-Web!) copies at least were just text files, copied out and uploaded by random people who had copies. Mixed in with other random crap typed out by other random people and distributed under the famous name to attract attention.
The actual book was an amateur 60s effort. The author put some actual research into it, but still got a lot of stuff or oversimplified. You can still get the hard copy book in various editions. There are common complaints about how it isn’t the “real” one, but I can’t see anything substantiated beyond “this doesn’t work” or “This isn’t what I remember from decades ago”.
Many of the failures in it go back to hippie lore: like the one for making psychadelics from banana peels, copied from a gag article apparently seriously.
Did Joyce’s hair grow?
THEY’RE ALREADY HERE! YOU’RE NEXT! YOU’RE NEXT!