Akane has only one way to get back home: collect the 42 keys to parallel worlds. Eri and Ben are just trying to get through the summer before university. When a magical key turns up in an old spare set, all three are forced to change their plans and fast.
Guilded Age
T Campbell, John Waltrip, Florence Machina
Welcome to the saga of the working-class adventurer! Enjoy the complete story with new annotations daily!
No End
Erli, Kromi
A queer romance about people attempting to build lives in a cold, post-apocalyptic world ravaged by hordes of undead.
Hemlock
Josceline Fenton
A witch accidentally marries a monster, and now she and her familiar has to navigate life around her monstrous husband and her even more terrifying in-laws.
Cyanide & Happiness
Explosm
Satire, dark humor and surreal humor.
Paint the Town Red
Windy, Winter Jay Kiakas
Winona runs a werewolf shelter with partner in crime, Odile in the Gothic city of Merlot. One day they take in an injured vampire, and soon unravels many of the dark secrets of Merlot.
Dumbing of Age
David M Willis
Joyce has been homeschooled her entire life until now, when she's suddenly a freshman in college! Things don't go well.
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For multiple types of food, actually. Regular leather is fine for a sandwich like that, but the grease from pizza would ruin them, so for that she uses cheap polyester.
Now of course, with messy foods it’s important to color coordinate as well.
The interaction between undamaged skin, scar tissue, and anything else except clothing you’re used to wearing can be most annoying. It also limits the inevitable “OMG is that a scar? Tell me in embarrassing detail how you got it!” response from others.
It’s possible she didn’t outright break it. I fell off a porch and landed basically toe-first onto concrete. Whole toe turned purple, but it was just heavy bruising, and I somehow didn’t break it. It’s possible she lucked out, too.
This being DoA, though, I am expected us to forget and like a year from now, her toenail falls off to cap off a dramatic moment or as an epic brick joke.
Perhaps salty about the fact that some commenters actually suggested this (Sal and Walky getting each other’s homework and not realizing it) might happen, if I remember right.
I am a twin, people have said far stranger things apparently sincerely. “Do you ever get mixed up who’s who? No, not in photos, like you look at him and think he’s you.”
She’s trying to make Walky feel better without thinking enough steps ahead in the process. As Sal says, she’s a Pollyanna but that doesn’t require that she attach too much logic to her attempts to make everyone smile!
Sal may be a rebel, but she knows when to work hard, even if working hard can also involve illegal stuff. Walky’s passiveness on the other hand doomed him.
Walky fell into the same trap that’s caught so many other bright kids: he never learned how to study. School work came easy to him so he didn’t put in a lot of effort. Now he’s coasted straight into a brick wall and is too proud to accept help.
I was one of those who never learned to study. Oddly it didn’t impact me as much as you might think – in most classes I was still able to blast through, destroying curves left and right, just on what I picked up in classes and from doing homework. The related lack-of-skill of not being able to memorize did come back to bite me in the butt hardcore, though, when I ended up in a calculus class that was being taught as a no-math-at-all-just-memorization-and-pattern-matching class. (I was told later that the teacher was widely considered incompetent.) I went from straight A’s in math to -and I’m not exaggerating here- straight 0%s (except for the one chapter that was taught with actual math, in which I got straight 100%s) – the experience was downright traumatizing, let me tell you.
It looks a bit worse than that. It’s not just that he doesn’t know how to study – it’s that he considers himself smart, that intelligence is a core part of his self image, and if he has to study then that means he isn’t smart after all. It’s an easy trap to fall into given the right messaging, and kids read as bright can easily get the messaging involved.
Alt text: Well, Willis, you did establish Sal’s into at least the stuff she learned at the natural history museum and she’s either interested in or remembered enough to keep up in conversation with Dina about it. I still wanna see them ranking her dinosaurs sometime.
Seriously though, I thought if this silly theory was ever actually brought up in comic, it would be one of the Walkerton parents suggesting it because they don’t want to deal with the fact Walky’s actually struggling and is an anxious mess because of it. Or that Sal’s not the problem child who solely exists to make life hard for them. I mean, if either of those things were(n’t) true, that would mean the Walkertons are terrible, terrible parents and people and that CAN’T be right. Nah, Sal must just be a failure. Should probably call the Dean and have him fix it – and see what can be done about getting the TA who switched their grades kicked out of school too.
Now, onto the fun stuff – how the Walkerton twins learn!
…I’m supposed to be studying right now for an exam tomorrow afternoon, so here, have a copy-pasted comment of mine from patreon!
“Personally, Sal strikes me as someone who likes to figure out how things work and learn on her own and she has a hard time trusting authority figures already (thanks, in part, to teachers and school administrators who looked the other way when that infected pustule of a child, Leland, nearly killed Marcie the first time), plus it’s hard to be interested in things you don’t care about, plus educational racism on top of that – yeah, I can see Sal’s issues with the traditional educational system.
Meanwhile, Walky is really good at assimilating into predominant (white) American culture and is pretty good at absorbing information via listening and (hopefully) just doing his homework. And then he got cocky and started to coast on it so now he’s hit a wall, possibly partially because his parents are no longer there to breathe down his neck and make SURE he gets good grades.”
It’s really hard to learn to study and put in that work when you don’t need to. It’s not so much “got cocky and coasted” as “this has always worked”. Why do all the make work notes and outlining and whatever when it doesn’t help because you just pick it up in class and with graded homework?
Poor wording choice – “believed this would always work and so never put work into it’ is more accurate – though, yeah, he was pretty cocky when he talked about not needing to study, which in a world by Willis is just begging to hit a wall.
I can still see LINDA AND CHARLES getting into their heads that it would be “impossible” for Sal to get so good grades, and “impossible” for David to get so bad grades.
And won’t THAT be fun when they call the dean to put pressure on the math teachers to “fix” that little problem.
I wonder if she might try to “sell” there having been a switch that wasn’t brought to the teacher’s attention as her darling child David trying to help out his sister, even at his own expense.
Nah. Charles has never even remotely hinted he thinks Linda’s unfair. On the contrary, he seems to agree with her, generally. Looking sad one time when Sal was crying is not the same as disagreeing with Linda.
Yeah, I’m expected a quick, half hearted, ‘Oh good for you’ or ‘That’s nice, dear’ at best and a ‘Sally, stop bragging and help your brother’ at worst from the Walkerton parents.
Depending on her mood, she may not say anything – she didn’t last time she saw Sal.
In addition to all the other things to hate about that meeting, apparently the most painless Sal expects from her parents is her mom not speaking to her or acknowledging her presence at all and her dad insulting her. And she had to give herself a pep talk to go talk to them at all.
A wild Joyce appears… who seem to have been without human contact for more than 10 seconds and thus need to graft herself on a gathering of two or more people. Extroverts gotta extrovert
So, Joyce admits that, in some ways, she has difficulty telling Sal and Walky apart sometimes for some reason! XD Seriously, though, Walky and Sal are about to learn that there is something else that they have in common: A cute-but-strange girl who won’t leave them alone and, for some reason, they don’t want to leave them alone!
I’m just sayin’, if a big colorful mushroom flashed a pearly white triangle smile at me and asked me for my wallet in an adorable voice, there’s a nonzero chance I’d be down a wallet.
I know that they are two very different pairs of attractive mocha-skinned brother-sister characters, but I’m glad Sal and Walky are getting along enough to remind me of Katara and Sokka.
I’m still holding out hope for some sort of Awakening and Abductee powers coming into play e.g. DoA!Joyce can ‘teleport’. Joyce appeared BEHIND a box as it was set down when Malaya was moving in. Sarah pointed it out during the Fudgeface adventures.
Buuut that would be a bit wacky for DoA…. but it might also be on-brand since DoA is a re-imagining of “Roomies!”?
Possible outcome to this mini-arc:
Walky asks Sal to tutor him. Horror of horror, it actually works. The Walkerton parents’ heads explode when they hear of this.
Ooh, that’d be really cool! It would cement how Sal is doing better academically, would help Walky in a way that hopefully would let him feel better about the whole situation and move on, and it would just be a really nice bonding element between them. I like that idea a lot!
In Rees’ defence, only two of his students have expressed a struggle that we know of, but yeah, he’s not helpful – he just directs them to aforementioned worthless educator.
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*TWIST* Professor Rees is punking them by erasing their names and switching them
*DOUBLE SHYAMALAN* the new TA did the same, so the correct names are back
“We’re confusing the polarity!”
Is that like crossing the streams?
Somehow Walky’s scientifically-inaccurate dinosaur doodles were also transferred over.
….. aaaaand that’s why I should read the alt-text first.
Plot twist! Walky’s work is returned to Dina. Is Dina even in this class? Doesn’t matter, she gets them.
Dina did get Walky’s notes at least once, the T rex made her very happy.
You’re mind must be an interesting place to live. Is there room for one more?
We should give them numbers and take away their names.
“I am NOT a number!”
Why did you resign?
Who is Number One? You are, Number Six.
One is the loneliest number that you ever do.
Make it so, Number One!
Aimee Mann ref?
Sorry, never heard her version. Off to youtube now.
We are Number One?
…HEY.
Memory wipes to test security are a thing. Rewatch the series with this in mind.
Though on a rewatch I’m always struck by how quaint the futuristic technology seems.
So, does Sal have gloves just for eating?
For multiple types of food, actually. Regular leather is fine for a sandwich like that, but the grease from pizza would ruin them, so for that she uses cheap polyester.
Now of course, with messy foods it’s important to color coordinate as well.
I’m assuming Sal has many pairs of gloves for all occasions.
The interaction between undamaged skin, scar tissue, and anything else except clothing you’re used to wearing can be most annoying. It also limits the inevitable “OMG is that a scar? Tell me in embarrassing detail how you got it!” response from others.
Random thought: is Joyce’s toe still broken? Did she get over it? has the swelling gone down enough for her to wear regular shoes?
Yeah, that was a while ago.
but has the toenail fallen off
or did joyce staple it to her toe
And is she using it as a guitar pick!?
… these are two mental images I didn’t need.
Both were potential “solutions” brought up previously (by Joyce and Walky, respectively).
Nah. She gave it to Danny to use as a ukulele pick.
It’s possible she didn’t outright break it. I fell off a porch and landed basically toe-first onto concrete. Whole toe turned purple, but it was just heavy bruising, and I somehow didn’t break it. It’s possible she lucked out, too.
This being DoA, though, I am expected us to forget and like a year from now, her toenail falls off to cap off a dramatic moment or as an epic brick joke.
I don’t know why, but I get this weird feeling that Willis was feeling salty about something
As opposed to when?
Perhaps salty about the fact that some commenters actually suggested this (Sal and Walky getting each other’s homework and not realizing it) might happen, if I remember right.
I am a twin, people have said far stranger things apparently sincerely. “Do you ever get mixed up who’s who? No, not in photos, like you look at him and think he’s you.”
…the answer is no.
When did “salty” come to mean whatever it does now, and what does it mean?
It’s like the opposite of sweet – think like cranky, pissy, etc.
So is Joyce implying that Walky should be doing better in math than Sal?
Maybe she just wants a shenanigan to occur. It seems wasteful to have twins without shenanigans.
She was disappointed to learn their parents were still together, she had a whole “Parent Trap with Crossdressing” thing planned out.
However, since it ended with Walky dropping dead people on the Dean, it’s probably just as well that it didn’t happen.
Hey, we don’t know that Beef’s parents are dead in this ‘verse.
Hopefully Walky will clue her in on that whole ‘Telapathy’-thing
She’s trying to make Walky feel better without thinking enough steps ahead in the process. As Sal says, she’s a Pollyanna but that doesn’t require that she attach too much logic to her attempts to make everyone smile!
Yes. The sexist attitudes of her upbringing are habits that she will take time to identify and revise.
Noooooo, go back to the Becky / Robin plotline! I want more Robin :\
I kind of feel guilty that Robin is one of my favorite characters.
Robin was more fun in Shortpacked, when her antics didn’t have such wide-reaching consequences. She was still a selfish jerk, mind you.
Robin is one of my favorite characters in Shortpacked. I really don’t like the DoA version of her so far.
I Am, I Said…
Bloomington’s fine, but it ain’t home
La Porte’s home, but it ain’t mine no more
also that’s basically saying “hey Sal maybe you’re actually just dumb”
Joyce has been doing better wrt Sal but guess it takes time
Nah, Becky’s the one who was hoping Sal was dumb so there’d be something wrong with her.
I guess Becky will have to keep looking. I mean, there’s a few things, but she’s not really privy to them.
Sal may be a rebel, but she knows when to work hard, even if working hard can also involve illegal stuff. Walky’s passiveness on the other hand doomed him.
Walky fell into the same trap that’s caught so many other bright kids: he never learned how to study. School work came easy to him so he didn’t put in a lot of effort. Now he’s coasted straight into a brick wall and is too proud to accept help.
I was one of those who never learned to study. Oddly it didn’t impact me as much as you might think – in most classes I was still able to blast through, destroying curves left and right, just on what I picked up in classes and from doing homework. The related lack-of-skill of not being able to memorize did come back to bite me in the butt hardcore, though, when I ended up in a calculus class that was being taught as a no-math-at-all-just-memorization-and-pattern-matching class. (I was told later that the teacher was widely considered incompetent.) I went from straight A’s in math to -and I’m not exaggerating here- straight 0%s (except for the one chapter that was taught with actual math, in which I got straight 100%s) – the experience was downright traumatizing, let me tell you.
It looks a bit worse than that. It’s not just that he doesn’t know how to study – it’s that he considers himself smart, that intelligence is a core part of his self image, and if he has to study then that means he isn’t smart after all. It’s an easy trap to fall into given the right messaging, and kids read as bright can easily get the messaging involved.
I’ve been there. It’s not fun.
A+ in English, Walky
To live outside the law, you must be honest.
Supposed to be a reply to abysswatcher1993. Some funky things with this comment system but compared to the Patreon comment system, I can’t complain.
Funk, aside, I like this commenting system MUCH better than Discus, (which I despise with a hot hatred of one thousand suns).
Alt text: Well, Willis, you did establish Sal’s into at least the stuff she learned at the natural history museum and she’s either interested in or remembered enough to keep up in conversation with Dina about it. I still wanna see them ranking her dinosaurs sometime.
Seriously though, I thought if this silly theory was ever actually brought up in comic, it would be one of the Walkerton parents suggesting it because they don’t want to deal with the fact Walky’s actually struggling and is an anxious mess because of it. Or that Sal’s not the problem child who solely exists to make life hard for them. I mean, if either of those things were(n’t) true, that would mean the Walkertons are terrible, terrible parents and people and that CAN’T be right. Nah, Sal must just be a failure. Should probably call the Dean and have him fix it – and see what can be done about getting the TA who switched their grades kicked out of school too.
Now, onto the fun stuff – how the Walkerton twins learn!
…I’m supposed to be studying right now for an exam tomorrow afternoon, so here, have a copy-pasted comment of mine from patreon!
“Personally, Sal strikes me as someone who likes to figure out how things work and learn on her own and she has a hard time trusting authority figures already (thanks, in part, to teachers and school administrators who looked the other way when that infected pustule of a child, Leland, nearly killed Marcie the first time), plus it’s hard to be interested in things you don’t care about, plus educational racism on top of that – yeah, I can see Sal’s issues with the traditional educational system.
Meanwhile, Walky is really good at assimilating into predominant (white) American culture and is pretty good at absorbing information via listening and (hopefully) just doing his homework. And then he got cocky and started to coast on it so now he’s hit a wall, possibly partially because his parents are no longer there to breathe down his neck and make SURE he gets good grades.”
It’s really hard to learn to study and put in that work when you don’t need to. It’s not so much “got cocky and coasted” as “this has always worked”. Why do all the make work notes and outlining and whatever when it doesn’t help because you just pick it up in class and with graded homework?
Poor wording choice – “believed this would always work and so never put work into it’ is more accurate – though, yeah, he was pretty cocky when he talked about not needing to study, which in a world by Willis is just begging to hit a wall.
Your papers got hard to identify since you started eating them
That’s a fair point.
Lol
I can still see LINDA AND CHARLES getting into their heads that it would be “impossible” for Sal to get so good grades, and “impossible” for David to get so bad grades.
And won’t THAT be fun when they call the dean to put pressure on the math teachers to “fix” that little problem.
I think it would be mostly Linda.
I wonder if she might try to “sell” there having been a switch that wasn’t brought to the teacher’s attention as her darling child David trying to help out his sister, even at his own expense.
Charles might roll his eyes at that.
Nah. Charles has never even remotely hinted he thinks Linda’s unfair. On the contrary, he seems to agree with her, generally. Looking sad one time when Sal was crying is not the same as disagreeing with Linda.
At most I’d expect a half-hearted “hey, good job” out of him before he rejoins Linda’s fretting over Walky’s situation.
Yeah, I’m expected a quick, half hearted, ‘Oh good for you’ or ‘That’s nice, dear’ at best and a ‘Sally, stop bragging and help your brother’ at worst from the Walkerton parents.
Well, that last one’s almost a given from Linda…
Depending on her mood, she may not say anything – she didn’t last time she saw Sal.
In addition to all the other things to hate about that meeting, apparently the most painless Sal expects from her parents is her mom not speaking to her or acknowledging her presence at all and her dad insulting her. And she had to give herself a pep talk to go talk to them at all.
I fucking loathe the Walkertons.
I’m laughing really hard at this one. Like, I just love that Walky is just baffled at Joyce’s logic here.
A wild Joyce appears… who seem to have been without human contact for more than 10 seconds and thus need to graft herself on a gathering of two or more people. Extroverts gotta extrovert
So she has a loneliness bar that she has to keep from filling up?
Yup.
And Sarah pretty much have the opposite kind of bar.
Fun times
I LOVE how good communication Walky and Sal have about that whole sore issue of math score and to be or not to be a good student. They have come far.
Though I don’t think Walky has admitted to her how bad he’s doing.
That he even brought up math here is interesting.
So, Joyce admits that, in some ways, she has difficulty telling Sal and Walky apart sometimes for some reason! XD Seriously, though, Walky and Sal are about to learn that there is something else that they have in common: A cute-but-strange girl who won’t leave them alone and, for some reason, they don’t want to leave them alone!
Joyce has that effect. She grows on people.
She’s like a fungus!
… Yeah, a fungus with an adorable smile would be pretty darn dangerous!
It doesn’t have to be a DANGEROUS fungus.
I’m just sayin’, if a big colorful mushroom flashed a pearly white triangle smile at me and asked me for my wallet in an adorable voice, there’s a nonzero chance I’d be down a wallet.
I’d wonder if I’d suddenly slipped into Alice in Wonderland.
I know that they are two very different pairs of attractive mocha-skinned brother-sister characters, but I’m glad Sal and Walky are getting along enough to remind me of Katara and Sokka.
I’m still holding out hope for some sort of Awakening and Abductee powers coming into play e.g. DoA!Joyce can ‘teleport’. Joyce appeared BEHIND a box as it was set down when Malaya was moving in. Sarah pointed it out during the Fudgeface adventures.
Buuut that would be a bit wacky for DoA…. but it might also be on-brand since DoA is a re-imagining of “Roomies!”?
What’s under Walky’s elbow though?
That burrito’s wrapper paper?
No, the burrito is still in its wrapper. I think that it what he got his side order wrapped in – Potato wedges maybe?
Possible outcome to this mini-arc:
Walky asks Sal to tutor him. Horror of horror, it actually works. The Walkerton parents’ heads explode when they hear of this.
Ooh, that’d be really cool! It would cement how Sal is doing better academically, would help Walky in a way that hopefully would let him feel better about the whole situation and move on, and it would just be a really nice bonding element between them. I like that idea a lot!
I guess boinking the TA actually did help her learn.
Yeah, it helped her learn that Jason is useless as a teacher. Danny on the other hand…?
This. Jason was utterly worthless as an educator.
And the actual professor whose job is to teach the course doesn’t even try.
Ability at and qualifications in teaching weren’t even considered when he was appointed to his job.
In Rees’ defence, only two of his students have expressed a struggle that we know of, but yeah, he’s not helpful – he just directs them to aforementioned worthless educator.
Pissed her off enough she learned just to spite him?