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Phil Lewis @phillewis.bsky.social ⋅ 5h
David M Willis! @damnyouwillis.bsky.social ⋅ 7d
David M Willis! @damnyouwillis.bsky.social ⋅ 7d
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg @theradr.bsky.social ⋅ 21d
Gwen Snyder is uncivil @gwensnyder.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
Ash Parrish @adashtra.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
Katie @katiestp.bsky.social ⋅ 3d
Hunter S Schafer @bolt451.bsky.social ⋅ 4d
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(he/him)
⚧
the most underachieving femur grab
Femurs
Nothing more than femurs
Trying to forget those
Femurs of mine
Does that fit the Star Wars theme?
♬ Femurs
Nothing but femurs
All of the femurs
Trophies of mine ♬
♫Millions of Femurs
Femurs for me
Millions of Femurs
Femurs for free♪
♫Femurs come in a thigh
They were put there by a guy
In a factory downtown…♫
I like big femurs and I cannot lie,
I like ’em when they come from the thigh…
♫ That ain’t working
That’s the way you do it
Femurs for nothing and the shoes for free ♫
♫ Suddenly Femurs
are no longer in side me
the don’t hold my legs up
I can’t understand
Suddenly Femurs
no longer provi-ide me
the power of sta-andi-i-ing
Femurs are banned! ♫
Ruth really is feeling better.
But I’m feeling much better now
See if that works.
Funny, I knew it would be that scene.
Undepressed Ruth is best Ruth.
Most people tend to be better when they’re not depressed
I love how he just left during the middle of lunch and followed Ruth all the way back to her room to look at his shoes. I mean, dude was bonding with his sister, and I would have preferred that continued, but I do love the absurdity of it.
Eh, based on his track record, he and Joyce would have been “bonding” in a broom closet in short order.
There’s not much that’s more on-brand for Walky than abandoning serious discussion in favor of shallow absurdity.
… Is there a blank template of Willis’s re-drawing of that “guy gawking at a lady nearly identical to his girlfriend” meme?
Honestly she’s probably following just not in the room.
Nah, she’s hanging out with her new bestie, Joyce.
And wishing she’d followed Walky and Ruth.
… Well that’s just weird.
Soon, Ruth will have a full second wardrobe without having to pay a dime!
Don’t give me no Second-Hand Shoes…
HAND-ME-DOWN shoes
Hang your head in shame, sir.
Or maybe he meant “Don’t give me second-hand shoes.” Or maybe he meant “Don’t give me no second-class shoes.”
It’s a song reference, to Hand Me Down World, by the Guess Who.
That is the most likely reference. But there are other possible matches. Secondhand Love by Pete Townshend is at least a strong contender. Second Class Love by Buju Banton is something I threw in mostly for fun, but it’s not entirely out of the running.
2012 was just weeks ago… If Avengers: Endgame has anything to say about it!
Well, if THAT ain’t a throwback.
This is nostalgia week apparently. I love it!
Honestly, I needed this. I am not a happy Canadian tonight so the laugh is appreciated.
The Leafs are in the Playoffs and are ahead in their series, why so down? It’s not like there is a picture of 3YO you standing on skates wearing a Leafs uniform.
Canada doesn’t revolve around Toronto. Winnipeg also won their game to tie their series. Calgary shit the bed but I hope it is a wake up call for them, they finished with the second best record this year, I would expect them to win their series.
I’m happy for the leafs! I just wish we could et our shit together when it comes to our fucking provincial elections because if we elect one more racist, homophobic prick I will not be responsible for anything I do in my fury.
Aw fuck. See, this is why I avoid the news, it’s all terrible these days.
Not knowing is worse for me, but I cannot blame you one bit for refraining from the news.
Why?
Why not?
Because!
Wow Ruth, so you’re making Billie look at a reminder of Wally every time she walks into the room?
I don’t think Ruth is talking to Billie right now.
That’s probably why she put it up.
A charm to ward off Billie.
Those have been up for a long time, though I don’t think we’ve had our attention directly called to them before. You can glimpse them in various shots of Ruth’s room.
For example, this one. Interestingly, the alt-text for that strip is “*shakes dice* c’mon, walky needs a new pair o’ shoes”, which didn’t make sense to me at the time. I just assumed it was because the strip mentioned gambling.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/03-the-thing-i-was-before/gamble/
What’s with Ruth and clothing trophies?
because she can’t mount heads without it getting awkward…
I ship it
Best in-laws
Jeez I was actually super confused until the alt text.
How does one do that on mobile? I’m still confused.
Tap the blank space under the comic to the right of the navigation buttons.
Or the left, for some reason I usually go for the left even though the right would be easier to reach with my thumb.
The callback boomerang flies long before making the return arc!
(Jeez! 2012?!)
Wow, who is this stranger that looks like Ruth, but is not Ruth?
This is Ruth! What we knew before was only half-Ruth, as her body was inhabited by Depression-Demon who was fighting her for conrrol of her movements.
This is not the Ruth you are looking for.
You can go about your business.
Move along.
Ruth is pushing Dina out of my top 3, oh no.
Well that’s something I never expected to come back.
. . . .I admit I have to applaud that vindictiveness of Ruth. Would that classify as a Lawful Evil act? To Mount a Prize like that?
ruth is doing so good! Is……is this what it’s like to be medicated? Is there actually hope after all? Maybe I should seriously think about it then. I was just starting high school when this webcomic started, and honestly seeing Ruth’s progression and watching her feel makes me wonder if going to therapy will be good after all
I can’t speak for therapy from personal experience bc I’ve never been (yet?) but I know it seemed to help my friend back when they went. And medication’s been helpful for me, for the most part. So I’d say there’s always hope.
I only have my own experience of antidepressant medication to go by, but that experience has been nothing like Ruth’s. The veil of grime doesn’t just vanish one day. It’s a long process (a month or two), it’s gradual, and there are hella side effects to worry about. It’s so gradual, in fact, that the first few times I didn’t actually notice that it was happening, and I said “fuck it”.
Given the replies below, I want to clarify: I hate talk therapy. It’s never done me any good and I don’t expect it ever will. It’s a hoop I have to jump through to get the drugs that keep me alive. I absolutely loathe every therapist I’ve ever met. Including the ones I’ve met socially.
I know talk therapy helps a lot of people, so I wanted this perspective to be the minority one if I was going to say it. Just be aware that if you end up hating the living hell out of therapy, you’re not alone.
I hate talk therapy, too, but cognitive therapy has been helpful. I had to quit a lot of therapists before I found one with a style suited to my problems/personality.
On a separate note, seeing Ruth do things for herself and others makes me look forward to getting better. I’ve been there before, and this reminds me that I’ll be there again.
in my case I didn’t notice anything had changed until one day several months later I was like “hold up, I haven’t been crushingly miserable in a long time”. kinda just,,, forgot I was sad and thought so little about sad memories that I barely remember them at all now. the only thing I can think to compare it to is when you have real bad hiccups, and then a few hours later you realize they went away and you didn’t even notice.
My experience is that meds just reduce the depth and frequency of the horribleness. I don’t feel good, but I feel much less bad.
personally therapy and medication were very helpful for me. it was expensive, and i had to go to a few different clinics before finding someone who was a good fit, but helpful.
a tip for anyone reading this and considering therapy: do a little research on a therapist before you see them. what insurances they take, they specialize in anything, are there any reviews or testimonies? i wasn’t able to do this because i was 14 and internet reviews weren’t a thing when i started going to therapy, but you might dodge a bullet! hope everything works out
Echoing the others to say that it was helpful for me. Getting on the right medication and having a therapist was like night and day for me and got me out of the hole where I just wanted to kill myself all the time.
I’ve fought depression since I was a teenager, with major depressive episodes thrown in just for grins. I never felt like talk therapy helped me very much, until the most recent episode. I don’t know what has changed – maybe just me? Maybe I’m just at a place in life where talking through things helped me put them into perspective and even resolve some long-standing feelings.
Getting on the right meds helps tremendously. Side effects aren’t fun, but it’s helping me. I don’t wholeheartedly endorse talk therapy, but it can be helpful if you’re in the right place for it, I think.
My depression went away nearly completely after they diagnosed and and medicamentated my thyroid condition, but I still needed behaviorial theraphy to get out of the bad patterns I developed in a decade of brain fog.
But yeah; together it made a world of a difference. In a year and half I went from apathic and unable to enjoy anything to, you know, being in geneal a happy person. The world has frigging colours now!
I still have to do more mental maintenance than „normal“ people, I still get depressive spells, especially if I forget my thyroid meds a day or two, but they’re a week or two of apathy instead of months and months of „lemme lay down and hope I die“.
My shrink compared growing up with depression like a healthy tree growing on a wind-battered cliff. The tree‘s healthy, doing all the tree things necessary, but the winds have changed its form and that needs to be taken in account. That really helped me dealing with that.
But yeah, better living through chemistry; even though I am sometimes grumpy my thyroid hormones are DLC. But hey, could be much, much worse.
Ketamine is the only instantaneous anti-depressant, however because of its recreational uses it had not been cleared for clinical trails until recently. Now, its possible to get a prescription, but like all trial drugs its insanely expensive. Also, it makes it hard to get work done for the first two hours, you feel too warm and fuzzy, but the drug has a long tail you come down form the high and then have full executive function for 22-34 hours. I have a pretty light depression that I just push off with herbal anti-depressants. They work and are easier to get, but take a while to work and are generally less potent (although they generally have few side affects). I’ve tried Ketamine once tho’ and the effects were immediate.
Never been on medication. Have been in therapy though. The effect was way less fast but effectively the same. But yeah, getting out of depression feels like that.
There are different approaches. Talk therapy. Behavioural therapy. Medication. Self-help groups. Books. And others. Find your way. Believe me, it is worth the trouble.
2012? What was that, two weeks ago in strip time?
A little over a month.
Dorothy and Walky were kicking his shoes down the hall during “Strange Beerfellows“, which was Sunday, September 12. Today is Saturday, October 16.
…is the implication here that Ruth is sneaky and that therefore she… uh, needs an easy way for someone to locate her?
I’m not getting the Lojack/sneakiness thing.
I think so. It looks like Walky had no idea she was inches away from his shoulder until she spoke.
For someone to be able to keep track of where she is instead of letting her sneak off, yeah. For instance, besides the vehicle thing, it’s apparently slang for ankle monitors.
LoJack is a pre-GPS commercial system for locating stolen cars, assuming the car thief is thoughtful enough to keep the stolen car with a few miles of appropriate transmitters and receivers. A car equipped with a LoJack transmitter sends out little radio chirps saying “Here I am! This is me!,” so if you have a LoJack receiver, you know when there’s a LoJacked car in your vicinity.
I’d have gone with “You need a bell on your neck,” but I am not modern and high-tech like Walky is.
Yeah, I was thinking the bell thing would have made more sense as a figure of speech.
I had no idea what Lojack was until I googled it after reading this strip. Apparently it’s a system for tracking stolen cars.
The last panel is just… adorable somehow. Maybe it’s seeing Ruth happy some more? But also… same, Walky. Same.
Hang up yer shoes Young Walky,
Hang up yer shoes up high.
Hang up yer shoes Young Walky
Poor boy yer shoes won’t fly.
(sung to the tune of Tom Dooley)
Damn it, now I want a po’ boy.
Yeah, I’m with them in the final panel. It IS awesome.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/06-strange-beerfellows/shoes/
Also seen here
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/03-the-thing-i-was-before/gamble/
and someone noticed them waay back in 2013: http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/03-answers-in-hennessy/pot-kettle/#comment-123282
Oooooh!
How the hell did I not notice Walky’s shoes in Ruth’s room in all those previous strips?
I have no idea but you are not alone as I didn’t notice either. Willis does some damn good misdirection to make us fail to notice a shoe trophy for like, 6-7 damn years.
To be fair it’s in a handful of strips over those 6-7 years, starting at least months after the scene with the shoes and often only partly visible.
And some did notice them. It’s been brought up in comments before.
I thought there was also a strip where someone (Joyce or Carla, maybe?) looked at Ruth’s wall and said in an aside “Are those shoes?”
But I can’t find such a strip, so maybe I Berenstein Bear’d myself
A wild Ruth appears!
…
She’s super effective!
I’m glad that Walky’s never just given Ruth a free pass for her bullshit and was still not fond of her, but I’m with him, that is pretty neat.
I like that this is a peace offering, given it’s still staying in her room and it isn’t like he’s getting anything out of it other than it existing as a trophy, which, I guess Walky can appreciate.
Well it was a peace offering in that she was willing to take it down and give him his shoes back. But he didn’t want them back because he finds it awesome so, now he knows of this thing he appreciates.
So… those resources, no one has thought to direct Walky to those before? Not Jason? Not Dorothy? He hasn’t dug them up on the campus homepage himself?
Do we really want a system when we relay on Ruth on won’t-murder-you-drugs to help those that have problems in class?
of course he didn’t dig them himself, that’d take efforts
That’s very fair.
When I was TAing for math, no one in the system gave me a list of resources to refer students to, except for the math center I was required to tutor at. Everything else I had to hunt down myself.
….Actually, that’s seems like the higher education I know and think should improve.
And granted, the person who SHOULD give them to Walky would be Jason, who was a not-very-good-TA with even worse bosses.
Do we really want a system when we relay on Ruth on won’t-murder-you-drugs to help those that have problems in class?
The better question is, why on earth wouldn’t we want that?
Most colleges and universities really suck at education and bitterly resent having to do it. “Teachers” are appointed with no training in teaching, and they are never told about the resources that the institution offers to students. Rees knows about getting remedial coaching from TAs because he used to be a TA himself and had to provide tutoring. He probably doesn’t know about anything else, because nobody told him.
Here’s the thing that you have to bear in mind about the university system: “Lecture” means “reading”. Lectures were originally invented as a process in which students chipped in cash to hire a person who had a copy of Aristotle to read it out line by line so that they could take it down as dictation. And even though printing was invented more than five hundred years ago, nobody ever re-engineered university teaching. Lectures persist because they are cheap and traditional and nobody gives a damn.
Another trophy for my wall
No, Ruth’s wall. Keep up.
As trophies go, that’s pretty pedestrian.
Hey, if you knock it, you first walk a mile in those shoes
Those shoes were made for walkin’
No, they were made for Walky. Keep up.
C’mon, Bagge, pace yourself. We have to sprint to keep up with you!
Better step up, then
I’m not sole’d on these puns. Keep your tongues in your heads.
When people talk about goody-two-shoes they… don’t talk about these shoes.
Shoes life. Shoes a job. Shoes a career. Shoes a family. Shoes a fucking big television. Shoes washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Shoes good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance.
Yeah, they’re pretty shoddy.
I’m sure it will get better. It looks unimpressive when it’s the sole portion, but I’m sure this is just the first step. And I guess second step? But you know what I mean, eventually there will be a lot more than just heels over her head.
Eh, judging by the amount of people who hadn’t noticed them until now, I’d say Ruth needs a less sneakier trophy. Not everything is a shoe-in to show off.
If by awesome they mean dumb then sure. I mean, it could be awesome if she’d done something cool to get them or they represented something cool. But they don’t.
They represented a reign of terror so absolute that Walky rather gave up on his only pair of shoes than said “sorry for being a stupid shit, can I have my shoes back now?”
I find this oddly lovely. I think it’s because it’s proof that New Ruth isn’t a whole new person, created entirely by badly-needed pharmaceuticals. She’s still Ruthless, but she can control herself now and only share this kind of thing with people who are cool with it. If Walky didn’t think this was “just awesome”, Ruth could get his shoes down (and replace them, if needed/possible) like a responsible person. Since he appreciates the trophy, they can both admire it instead.
That’s very true.
Anybody got a link to the 2012 comic?
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/06-strange-beerfellows/shoes/
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/06-strange-beerfellows/launch/
oh, and the one 3oranges posted is better
is this the shoe incident?
I clicked “random” and it was the first page i landed on!
It was a pretty sweet kick!
So, is this about Billie? On account of them being “siblings” and all?
I don’t think so. I’m thinking that Ruth has decided that, as she seems to be stuck as an RA for now, she’s going to start acting the part, especially as Billie probably won’t be interested in taking up her slack as she has in the past.
Undepressed Ruth is becoming one of my favorite characters.
Can we get a tag for the shoes?!
Not until we Tag The Cricket!
Tag Tag the Cricket!
How long do crickets live, anyways? Is it possible he’s still lurking in the building somewhere?
I think they live at least a few weeks, so Tag’s probably still around somewhere if he hasn’t been smooshed or eaten by Fuckface.
#tagtagthecricket
As Malaya said, iguanas are herbivores. (TBH that’s when I learned it.)
Now I want to see Cricket on top of Fuckface’s head.
I still can’t decide whether the cricket’s name should be Tag or Lettuce.
The meta joke or the in-world joke. I think we need another cricket.
#tagtagthelettuce
“Shoeless” David Walkerton
Maybe he should take up base-ball?
From our third-person perspective, we now see that the students of IU are weird all the way down!
Ruth’s mounted Walky’s walkies?
(Also another Claireface I want to add to my collection today but i’ve only got my mobile ‘til next week)
You mean the Claire face from today’s page?
I also vote for a Claire-vatar from her “violent” phase today.
Not gonna lie, I thought lojack meant something very different before I googled it.
I was guessing it was a movie reference.
The Legend of Billy Lojack.
Make that, The Legend of Billie Lojack.
I wasn’t expecting a Ruth and Walky bonding moment, but I’m sure not complaining either!
Also it’s me, I never noticed those dang shoes up there before now and this completely blew me away. Can’t handle all these dramatic revelations!
Not sure what I expected but totes sure I’m enjoyin’ it.
But Walky if you got them back, you’d have TWO pairs of shoes.
Why would a boy need two pairs of shoes?
Because if he has sex with another girl, he will then own one pair of shoes for each girl he has ever had sex with, just like Joe.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/01-if-the-shoes-split/manliness/
lmao my boss did this with a pair of flipflops a shoplifter lost in her haste to run away. they’re in the breakroom to this day.
Walky knows ‘awesome’ when he sees it!
