Welcome to the saga of the working-class adventurer! Enjoy the complete story with new annotations daily!
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Probability may have been one of the hardest courses I took as a math major, DoA-age. Quite possibly because it was calculus-heavy and calculus was not my strong suit.
Years later I took a course in discrete mathematics, which gave me a lot of the tools that would have made my probability course much more manageable — if discrete mathematics had been, y’know, invented back when I was DoA-age.
Considering the general consensus when I was doing my CS major (in the late ’90s), before I dropped out for money reasons, was that Probability and Statistics were the most difficult parts of the requisite Math curricula for those of us pushing for Math, Physics, Engineering and Computer Science majors, I’m unsurprised by that. That consensus included the grad students in our group, not just us undergrads.
So many people I hear saying statistics is hard, whereas in my university, statistics was the class you took for easy peasy math credit (I took intro calc because I took pre-calc in high school and BY GOD I WAS GONNA MAKE IT COUNT).
We had two semesters: probability first and statistics second. I was well in my twenties and experienced as a gambler, so probability was no problem. But I missed the first class in statistics, and when I came in for the second, I had no idea what was going on. I walked away. I could’ve dropped the class and got money, but I couldn’t be bothered. I took an F.
So what are you going to do now that you found him Walky? Clearly you have thought this all the way through. Though I can’t blame you for wanting to take off your pants and watch stuff on youtube, that is how I spend my weekends.
I just listened to RU, and I think my favorites list is: Not the Future, Seagulls, H.O.T.H. (yes it spells Hoth), Bushes of Love, It’s Not a Moon, Russian Unicorn. Don’t Stare at the Sun (a High School Musical BLR) would be after Seagulls.
There’s not really a lot to rein in yet, at any rate. Like, they haven’t really done anything too wild, just happen to walk near him. Of course, I’m sure it won’t *stay* like that for long.
Seeing as Asher hasn’t yet seen them, and they are apparently far enough from him that they could just slink away, that would be the obvious thing to do at this point. But impulse control has never been one of Walky’s strong suits, and it’s not like we’re going to get our dose of wacky hijinks from calm and rational behavior.
Yeah this whole adventure reeks of “look how cute and functional Walky and Amber are together, and clearly they should be together after all especially since Sal doesn’t even care.”
Vaarsuvius the wizard tells Elan the bard that the imp they’ve encountered is trying to summon a more powerful fiend. Elan is concerned, but Vaarsuvius assures him that it’s extremely unlikely the imp could successfully summon something dangerous to high-level characters like them.
Elan calms down. Like one in ten? No, far less likely than that. Elan flees.
As an incredibly powerful fiend is summoned, we get the two lines above: Elan explaining to Vaarsuvius that one in a million is a sure thing, and Vaarsuvius annoyed that probability doesn’t work properly in their world.
Mmmyeah. Honestly I still remember the conversation where most people seemed to assume Asher was Hispanic. It’s a thing that might be good to learn how to stylize more effectively in time.
How to draw a stylised cartoon character such that their ethnicity is always easily discernable while not going too far and turning into stereotype sounds like quite the challenge.
Yeah I agree. Especially for multiracial people, I think they actually *shouldn’t* be obviously of a certain ethnicity a lot of the time, or it is potentially indicative of stereotyping.
Depends on the character, I guess? Like, Dina is easy to tell, particularly given the last name, but I am not sure if Alice is Asian but inclined to think she is. Billie I guess would potentially stump me, but it’s been so long that I’ve known she was Asian, anyway, I can’t remember if there was any surprise there. Malaya, I knew wasn’t white, but didn’t know she was filipina until it came up in like an ask or something on Willis’ twitter.
FYI — The name Asher is a boy’s name of Hebrew origin meaning “fortunate, blessed, happy one”. In the Bible, Asher was one of the twelve sons of Jacob and the patriarch of one of the twelve tribes of Israel. So my first thought was that he might possibly be of middle-eastern (Israeli/Palestinian) descent.
My working assumption is that he is Middle Eastern, but for Walky that’s subsumed into the Asian category.
According to the 2010 Census, Evansville is 80% non-Hispanic white, 12% black, 3% Hispanic, less than 1% Asian. The kicker here is that as far as the Census is concerned, anyone whose origins are in the Middle East falls into the White category.
I draw “black dot” eye characters (like Hergé but without the talent and racism) and I always found it difficult to depict race, especially before I started using color. I even made one character’s race being incorrectly guessed a running gag.
The more stylized the art style, the more difficult it can be. We assume that Sarah is African American, but nothing about her design doesn’t read Afro Cuban, or straight up African.
In fact, same goes with nationality. We know Jason has a British accent because we are *told* he has one. Rachael could have a subtle Texan accent. Ruth could have a French Canadian accent.
Ruth was raised in Toronto, with one parent from the US…even if Mr Lessick was a Francophone, there was basically no chance of Ruth picking up a FC accent. If her father did have one, whatever traces would manage to make their way into hers would certainly have been obliterated by the other kids at school. (I’m not bitter…it’s been 20 years…I’m totally over it. >_> )
Ruth is from Kaladar. It’s a teeny tiny unincorporated area that’s part of a municipality of 2500 people give or take. It’s about two and a half hours away from Toronto.
If it’s any consolation, race is one of the hardest things to get across in webcomics.
Fo instance, I still can’t tell which of Jeph Jacques’ characters are black, which ones are Indian-as-in-from-the-subcontinent-of-India, and which ones are from South America.
Not just in the comics. I had a co-worker who was an immigrant from south Asia, but Latinx people would sometimes speak to him in Spanish because they assumed he was Mexican.
This whole conversation, but your comment in particular, reminds me of Trevor Noah’s shtick about wanting to come to the US to “be black,” and finally getting to Miami, and Latinx people assuming he was Latinx.
Complement him on having facial hair you will forever envy, and ask him if he can introduce Billy to weed as a safer alternative to alcohol. Then maybe ask him if he has anything he’d like to say to Sal ‘cause he was a stupid kid at the time, too.
Really, the lack of marijuana has been a little jarring given how much easier it is to get ahold of than alcohol. And how I smoke it with my grandma whenever I see her (which she’s taken up in place of prescription drug abuse) . Where’s the weed in this college?
That’s why I’m hoping that Walky and Amber play it cool and do their research first. 5 years is a long time, especially for a young person. They may have turned their life around (especially if they’re going to college), or otherwise “served their time” somehow. The flip side of the justice system is that we have to find ways to rehabilitate and re-integrate offenders back into society somehow; otherwise, we may as well just lock ’em up and throw away the key, and they wind up becoming huge financial burdens on the rest of society, or they get released and find that they have no other options except to turn back to crime.
I mean. The current for-profit system is very much incentivized not to rehabilitate literally anyone. The entire justice system is set up such that almost everyone, especially non-white people, who serves time are most likely going to end up back in jail over and over and over again. There’s also a reason that the ‘school to prison pipeline’ is a thing too, by the way.
This is the case from the fact that if you get sent to prison you are almost certainly going to lose literally everything you own, all your money, and be plunged into debt considering you are rarely allowed time to secure your assets beforehand and are not allowed to manage them while in prison. Add that onto the fact that once you are released, you not only still have your voting rights revoked for the rest of your life, but the ‘felon’ stamp on your back forever makes you prone to some of the worst job and renter’s discrimination–which is basically 100% legal, and makes the mere concept of reintegrating into society an uphill battle that many are completely unprepared for, especially if for example they have served 10 or more years–where the world has changed so drastically from what they remember they don’t even know how to navigate it anymore.
You can also imagine the suicide rate for released felons is pretty damn high. And the horrifically sad thing is that it is incredibly easy, and often the case, that people are set up to walk down this path in life basically from birth and are already in the system as children.
All pretty much true, but worth remembering that voting rights for ex-felons are by state. Some do restore automatically when the sentence is complete. Others require special application. And of course others don’t allow it at all.
Am I the only one who’s confused about WHY Walky and Amber are out doing this? This whole plot centered around checking on Sal’s old friends seems to have just come completely out of left field, and I don’t see what they’re hoping to accomplish if it’s obvious that Sal doesn’t hang out with them anymore.
I think that Walky is just being a well-intentioned idiot, and Amber is going along with it for some reason.
Short answer: I am in love, this comic holds fantastic stories, a great representation of a number of issues, and unique characters from multiple walks of life.
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Walky: bad at probability
I don’t he’s taken that class. ;p
Not with his math grades.
Probability may have been one of the hardest courses I took as a math major, DoA-age. Quite possibly because it was calculus-heavy and calculus was not my strong suit.
Years later I took a course in discrete mathematics, which gave me a lot of the tools that would have made my probability course much more manageable — if discrete mathematics had been, y’know, invented back when I was DoA-age.
Considering the general consensus when I was doing my CS major (in the late ’90s), before I dropped out for money reasons, was that Probability and Statistics were the most difficult parts of the requisite Math curricula for those of us pushing for Math, Physics, Engineering and Computer Science majors, I’m unsurprised by that. That consensus included the grad students in our group, not just us undergrads.
So many people I hear saying statistics is hard, whereas in my university, statistics was the class you took for easy peasy math credit (I took intro calc because I took pre-calc in high school and BY GOD I WAS GONNA MAKE IT COUNT).
As long as I’m not doing fourth-dimensional geometry or programming in binary, I’m amenable to learning more maths.
Statistics for math majors is a different thing. You derive all the formulas they teach in easy statistics.
We had two semesters: probability first and statistics second. I was well in my twenties and experienced as a gambler, so probability was no problem. But I missed the first class in statistics, and when I came in for the second, I had no idea what was going on. I walked away. I could’ve dropped the class and got money, but I couldn’t be bothered. I took an F.
Real world probability, he might’ve been right. Narrative probability, the odds jumped to 100% as soon as he said that.
I’m a Correllian, kid. Never tell me the odds.
Never underestimate how badly smokers need their fix
This is the part where being the pair of characters possibly closest linked to Cartoon Logic gets inconvenient.
Plus side: if they need to get away they can just paint a tunnel on the wall and walk through.
Too late, Walky! Willis says Sal backstory, so tough cookies.
Hi, Asher! You look weird with stubble.
So what are you going to do now that you found him Walky? Clearly you have thought this all the way through. Though I can’t blame you for wanting to take off your pants and watch stuff on youtube, that is how I spend my weekends.
Penny for your thoughts…
https://youtu.be/U9t-slLl30E
I hate Brenda!
Don’t fall asleep…..
Don’t. Fall. Asleep…..
I don’t know why I hadn’t heard of something this glorious until now.
I can easily watch Seagulls Stop It Now on infinite loop…
Gotta throw in “Not the Future”, “Hostiles On the Hill”, and “Bushes of Love” for the full effect, though.
It’s not a Moon and Russian Unicorn are my favorites
I just listened to RU, and I think my favorites list is: Not the Future, Seagulls, H.O.T.H. (yes it spells Hoth), Bushes of Love, It’s Not a Moon, Russian Unicorn. Don’t Stare at the Sun (a High School Musical BLR) would be after Seagulls.
I hope Amber reins this in.
That’s a weird thought, rooting for Amber to say “Okay, this is going too far,” but here we are.
There’s not really a lot to rein in yet, at any rate. Like, they haven’t really done anything too wild, just happen to walk near him. Of course, I’m sure it won’t *stay* like that for long.
Seeing as Asher hasn’t yet seen them, and they are apparently far enough from him that they could just slink away, that would be the obvious thing to do at this point. But impulse control has never been one of Walky’s strong suits, and it’s not like we’re going to get our dose of wacky hijinks from calm and rational behavior.
Normal Amber has even worse social anxiety than Walky, so sure
Amber: Go on
Amber is on board with both the youtube and the pants removal parts of this plan
Yeah this whole adventure reeks of “look how cute and functional Walky and Amber are together, and clearly they should be together after all especially since Sal doesn’t even care.”
Good, then Walky finds out that Amber changed his graded so they can go back and fix it.
Hey, look on the bright side. Now you won’t have to spend hours on stakeout duty!
“Now you won’t have to hang out with Amber!”…
Nicked by nicotine.
So now Walky needs to figure out if he’s still bad news. I wonder what kind of asherance he’s looking for.
Either way, Walky’s hopes of getting out of this easily are going up in smoke.
He’s not likely to sal-ly forth.
If he wanted to really get out of this he could fake a heart attack and call an amberlance
Maybe the next few strips will ansher that question.
“And once again, Probability proves itself willing to sneak into a back alley and service Drama as would a copper-piece harlot.”
One in ten is quite unlikely, but one in a million is a sure thing.
I’m assuming the quotes mean that this is a quote from something, what, pray tell?
TVTropes says it’s from Order of the Stick.
Yep, as is Svankensen’s.
Oh, thanks for that. I assumed it was from one of the Pratchett books.
Order of the Stick, but in the other order.
Vaarsuvius the wizard tells Elan the bard that the imp they’ve encountered is trying to summon a more powerful fiend. Elan is concerned, but Vaarsuvius assures him that it’s extremely unlikely the imp could successfully summon something dangerous to high-level characters like them.
Elan calms down. Like one in ten? No, far less likely than that. Elan flees.
As an incredibly powerful fiend is summoned, we get the two lines above: Elan explaining to Vaarsuvius that one in a million is a sure thing, and Vaarsuvius annoyed that probability doesn’t work properly in their world.
Given that Vaarsuvius acknowledges that’s true, it would be more logical to listen to Elan.
I can never tell whether Willis’s characters are Asian or just white people with black hair until it’s explicitly stated in the comic. Anyone else?
Mmmyeah. Honestly I still remember the conversation where most people seemed to assume Asher was Hispanic. It’s a thing that might be good to learn how to stylize more effectively in time.
How to draw a stylised cartoon character such that their ethnicity is always easily discernable while not going too far and turning into stereotype sounds like quite the challenge.
Yeah I agree. Especially for multiracial people, I think they actually *shouldn’t* be obviously of a certain ethnicity a lot of the time, or it is potentially indicative of stereotyping.
It also gets harder when everyone is basically wearing a shirt and jeans….
As half Asians, my siblings and I get confused for other ethnicities all the time.
Depends on the character, I guess? Like, Dina is easy to tell, particularly given the last name, but I am not sure if Alice is Asian but inclined to think she is. Billie I guess would potentially stump me, but it’s been so long that I’ve known she was Asian, anyway, I can’t remember if there was any surprise there. Malaya, I knew wasn’t white, but didn’t know she was filipina until it came up in like an ask or something on Willis’ twitter.
In the Walkyverse Billie was just Caucasian, but people misidentified her as (part) Asian so much that Willis just made her half-Chinese here, IIRC.
FYI — The name Asher is a boy’s name of Hebrew origin meaning “fortunate, blessed, happy one”. In the Bible, Asher was one of the twelve sons of Jacob and the patriarch of one of the twelve tribes of Israel. So my first thought was that he might possibly be of middle-eastern (Israeli/Palestinian) descent.
That was my take as well.
Asher is the first one I’ve been surprised they they were called Asian…and him I didn’t read as white…figured Middle Eastern, most likely.
My working assumption is that he is Middle Eastern, but for Walky that’s subsumed into the Asian category.
According to the 2010 Census, Evansville is 80% non-Hispanic white, 12% black, 3% Hispanic, less than 1% Asian. The kicker here is that as far as the Census is concerned, anyone whose origins are in the Middle East falls into the White category.
I mean, the Middle East is geographically Asia. Asia is really large.
(Using “Asian” to refer exclusively to East Asians is not correct.)
I draw “black dot” eye characters (like Hergé but without the talent and racism) and I always found it difficult to depict race, especially before I started using color. I even made one character’s race being incorrectly guessed a running gag.
The more stylized the art style, the more difficult it can be. We assume that Sarah is African American, but nothing about her design doesn’t read Afro Cuban, or straight up African.
In fact, same goes with nationality. We know Jason has a British accent because we are *told* he has one. Rachael could have a subtle Texan accent. Ruth could have a French Canadian accent.
Comicking is hard, yo.
Ruth was raised in Toronto, with one parent from the US…even if Mr Lessick was a Francophone, there was basically no chance of Ruth picking up a FC accent. If her father did have one, whatever traces would manage to make their way into hers would certainly have been obliterated by the other kids at school. (I’m not bitter…it’s been 20 years…I’m totally over it. >_> )
Ruth is from Kaladar. It’s a teeny tiny unincorporated area that’s part of a municipality of 2500 people give or take. It’s about two and a half hours away from Toronto.
And apparently everyone there is named Frank, even the girl.
If it’s any consolation, race is one of the hardest things to get across in webcomics.
Fo instance, I still can’t tell which of Jeph Jacques’ characters are black, which ones are Indian-as-in-from-the-subcontinent-of-India, and which ones are from South America.
Not just in the comics. I had a co-worker who was an immigrant from south Asia, but Latinx people would sometimes speak to him in Spanish because they assumed he was Mexican.
This whole conversation, but your comment in particular, reminds me of Trevor Noah’s shtick about wanting to come to the US to “be black,” and finally getting to Miami, and Latinx people assuming he was Latinx.
*Walky watches Seagulls Stop It Now on his laptop*
*Mike walks over*
*Mike shuts the laptop*
Mike: What? Yoda said stop it.
Asher’s cleaned up his act. Now, he reviews tate like Pop Stations and failed handheld gaming consoles.
He’s gotta get his tat from somewhere now that Poundland is the last variety shop standing… That sofa’s down to its last section too.
Fuck yeah, I love Seagulls Stop It Now
ROCKIN’
ROCKIN’ AND ROLLIN’
DOWN TO THE BEACH I’M STROLLIN’
Complement him on having facial hair you will forever envy, and ask him if he can introduce Billy to weed as a safer alternative to alcohol. Then maybe ask him if he has anything he’d like to say to Sal ‘cause he was a stupid kid at the time, too.
Really, the lack of marijuana has been a little jarring given how much easier it is to get ahold of than alcohol. And how I smoke it with my grandma whenever I see her (which she’s taken up in place of prescription drug abuse) . Where’s the weed in this college?
Meredith has cornered the market. It’s all under a shingle up on the roof.
We’ve seen Carla smoke it too, IIRC.
Yup. Sal took her joint when she was showing Carla her skating prowess.
Yeah, but Carla’s weed was foul. She couldn’t get the good stuff because Meredith has it all.
That does make me wonder if Sal just doesn’t like weed, or if Carla just had shitty weed.
Walky would watch the Integrivact commercial and then watch theories about that video where Ruth becomes crazy and tries to break femurs.
This is the first time in a while that Willis’s hover text gave me a big hearty laugh.
going back to his room and remove his pants… alone, or together ?
Sounds like a date!
He still kind of looks like astroboy to me for some reason.
Oh he totally looks like he’s the hero of a sentai or an old giant robot franchise (Grendizer, etc)
Like if Roger Smith were a hobo.
He’s definitely heading towards anime main character hair to me.
Thank you. That’s been bothering me for years. I knew he resembled a character from my distant past, and now you’ve solved it for me.
Huh. What Walky wishes to do, the missus and I are doing right now. Well played, Mr. Walkerton, well played.
Quite a shady guy.
In which Walky realises that his luck is either excellent or awful!
A blessing or a curse?
I kinda hope Asher got his shit together sometime in the last five years, and all this worry turns out to be for nothing.
That’s why I’m hoping that Walky and Amber play it cool and do their research first. 5 years is a long time, especially for a young person. They may have turned their life around (especially if they’re going to college), or otherwise “served their time” somehow. The flip side of the justice system is that we have to find ways to rehabilitate and re-integrate offenders back into society somehow; otherwise, we may as well just lock ’em up and throw away the key, and they wind up becoming huge financial burdens on the rest of society, or they get released and find that they have no other options except to turn back to crime.
I mean. The current for-profit system is very much incentivized not to rehabilitate literally anyone. The entire justice system is set up such that almost everyone, especially non-white people, who serves time are most likely going to end up back in jail over and over and over again. There’s also a reason that the ‘school to prison pipeline’ is a thing too, by the way.
This is the case from the fact that if you get sent to prison you are almost certainly going to lose literally everything you own, all your money, and be plunged into debt considering you are rarely allowed time to secure your assets beforehand and are not allowed to manage them while in prison. Add that onto the fact that once you are released, you not only still have your voting rights revoked for the rest of your life, but the ‘felon’ stamp on your back forever makes you prone to some of the worst job and renter’s discrimination–which is basically 100% legal, and makes the mere concept of reintegrating into society an uphill battle that many are completely unprepared for, especially if for example they have served 10 or more years–where the world has changed so drastically from what they remember they don’t even know how to navigate it anymore.
You can also imagine the suicide rate for released felons is pretty damn high. And the horrifically sad thing is that it is incredibly easy, and often the case, that people are set up to walk down this path in life basically from birth and are already in the system as children.
All pretty much true, but worth remembering that voting rights for ex-felons are by state. Some do restore automatically when the sentence is complete. Others require special application. And of course others don’t allow it at all.
I’m guessing that the tags are confiming that it is, in fact him? I mean, it looks like him with a few years on, but that’s not definite.
I love that he actually showed up behind a bush. A+ ironic statement fulfillment
Asher evolved into Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine. Maybe effective?
Am I the only one who’s confused about WHY Walky and Amber are out doing this? This whole plot centered around checking on Sal’s old friends seems to have just come completely out of left field, and I don’t see what they’re hoping to accomplish if it’s obvious that Sal doesn’t hang out with them anymore.
I think that Walky is just being a well-intentioned idiot, and Amber is going along with it for some reason.
I’m pretty sure you nailed it in the last sentence.
I like how Amber just hides with him just fine.
Also I quite hope this doesn’t lead to some weird surprise twist where Amber goes “s’couting” and ends up dating the guy or something atypical sitcom.
Nothin’ I could do but yell
When these birds attacked me
When I tried to run, I fell
And then these kids start laughin’…
I finally caught up on the entire comic.
Short answer: I am in love, this comic holds fantastic stories, a great representation of a number of issues, and unique characters from multiple walks of life.
Dude I got Marcie as an icon? Hell yeah! One of my faves ^_^
Welcome aboard!