Well, Joyce could have assumed a story a story about one dead grandmother was referring to another still alive grandmother. Most people have two grandmothers
I love it when you expect a character to do something, but then they do the exact opposite thing because that’s even more in character for them to do. It’s always obvious in hindsight, but never the first thing that you’d assume.
Nah, I noticed that the internet was supposed to make information travel as fast as possible to the people who need it.
But I guess there’s no reason not to suspect that fundamentalists would try both direct and indirect means of getting family members to socialize without consent.
The tradition of deciding who actually needs any given piece of information based on one’s self-interest or machinations far predates the information age.
What the internet actually does (and really has always done) is facilitate information traveling to those the information holders want to have it. Need is a very subjective and nebulous concept.
And the information age hasn’t been about that for a long time. See paywalls. Your picture of the information age is over-idealized and not reflective of the actual state of information flow. Joyce hasn’t defeated anything here, she’s participating in the standard operating model of information distribution.
I’ll admit, I was expecting some drama over who is the real little sister to Sarah. This is way better, especially with Sarah getting her best Judge Dread frown/grimace on.
In case you haven’t seen it, it’s an hour long documentary of a two-man fact-finding mission to Indiana to recover pre-Garfield art by Jim Davis, including a short-lived Garfield prototype that only ran in a few local papers and hadn’t seen the light of day for 40+ years. He finds what is basically a Garfield museum/shrine and visits some nearly forgotten Garfield statues along the way. Definitely worth a watch in its entirety if you have the time, but for the meat of it you can just watch the newspaper and microfilm library parts. There are also PDFs in the description.
OK, two things:
I forgot to say this yesterday but I really like Sarah’s shirt and Liz’s hair.
Do I need to update my avatar already?! I feel like it’s too soon and the speech balloon is kind of in the way but that last panel face is so good!
There is the matter that Joyce and Liz are free to associate with each other. And certainly the convention on facebook is to encourage associates of friends to connect. I don’t know that it makes this right, but it’s not exactly wrong either.
I think the only real transgression here is hiding the information that Liz was coming to visit. Everything else is just built into how social media is set up to work and it isn’t really fair to hold that against Joyce.
Oh man. Welp you’ve done it. You were wrong on the internet. Time to turn in your card and punch out man. It’s just not worth going on any further.
(n.b. for those who may truly feel bad about themselves, this is satirical and not intended to actually encourage negative self talk. You are loved and deserve to feel loved, just for being you, even when you fail to check the strip dialogue before posting. maybe even especially then.)
Are you saying that “Friendship is Magic” should be “Friendship is Sufficiently Advanced Technology”? Somehow that doesn’t roll off the casual tongue quite so well. 😛
Hopefully, the definition and usage of “magic” will change over time to lose any connotation it has with the supernatural, and just come to mean “great things happening when we work together” and “super advanced tech”.
But then again, how would we keep the bad connotations of “magical thinking”?
Damn, English has got to be among the worse lingua franca in history!
This is silly. Magic can be fun and not detrimental to anything. Hoping for a lexical change that will literally happen because there’s a major literary genre practically dedicated to it is a weird goal. People looking to science instead of magic in their day-to-day life is a much more reasonable goal.
I don’t really want magic to lose connotation with the supernatural, it’s a useful word to describe it, and the supernatural as a concept isn’t going anywhere if for no other reason than it’s baked into most regions’ cultural history. This isn’t a good hope that you have.
It’s OK to have an active fantasy life. The only problem comes when they can’t distinguish it from reality.
But once we get sufficiently advanced technology indistinguishable from magic, what happens to “magic” as a concept?
Honestly by the time that happens, the word “magic” may no longer exist. At that point in the far future, the English you and I are speaking right now may very well become an archaic language only to split into others, just as the Latin once spoken centuries ago split into the branches leading to modern Western languages we know today.
People’s imaginations will always outstrip the technological level of the time, that’s how we keep moving forwards, but the fantasy genre, which is distinct from personal fantasies, isn’t restricted to such petty rules as the laws of physics. This isn’t like sci-fi in which technological advancement will by necessity make it obsolete.
The last time something like this happened, the random visitor turned out to be on the run after getting caught coming out of the closet. I wonder what the drama will be this time.
If she found her on Sarah’s Facebook, that means Sarah’s Facebook is publicly available and not behind any permissions. That’s Sarah saying it’s okay for people to see that stuff. That’s on Sarah if she didn’t want anyone to see it.
Joyce looking up her roommate on social media and looking at publicly listed information to see if they’ll get along and check for red flags or bad signs isn’t stalking.
Better to be well-rounded and stick with ellipses — you know, keeping things real — rather than being an eccentric and flying off into an imaginary and hyperbolic escapism.
The idea of social media trawling being likened to stalking is absolutely wild to me. Anything you put up on the internet publicly is fair game for anyone to look through. You have actively put that information out for the world to see. There have been privacy settings to restrict that for as long as there’s been social media. If you don’t want it to be seen by potentially everybody, don’t post it publicly. Even better, don’t post it at all. Private/secure information doesn’t belong on the internet.
I’ve heard “Facebook stalking” used to describe studying the social media of a person you’ve never met. It’s not actually stalking, and the phrase is used without the same negative connotation as stalking, but it’s still trying to get to know a person by monitoring their activity without their knowledge. As Thag linked, Joyce uses this in her first interaction with Malaya.
That said, that’s not what this is. For two people to become friends on Facebook, one person needs to send a request and the other person needs to accept. Both people know this is happening and explicitly consent.
There’s this sense — not really a rule or a social convention, but more like an inaccurate but unquestioned assumption — that the online world is separate from the real world. (Hence how IRL, “in real life”, excludes the online.) In that mindset, someone you know from meatspace checking your friends list and making contacts there can feel like someone from one part of your life invading the other parts.
I mean, to be honest, I’d be just as freaked out, if not more, if a friend in real life sought out my other real life friends and started hanging out with them without letting me know.
Okay, I do wish that this had been hinted in some way before. Liz’s relationship with Sarah didn’t need to be mentioned but at least mention her as an online friend of Joyce’s a few times so she seems less of a sudden plot contrivance.
We did just have a months-long timeskip that just on its own lasted longer than the entire rest of the comic up to that point, I can easily imagine this sort of thing being something that happened during that time.
No, unless I misread, this strip confirms that Joyce and Liz have been in some kind of correspondence since the start of DoA. Yet not even a mention to Becky or Joe about ‘oh one of my Facebook contacts mentioned…” or something like that?
I can see it being a case of ‘we comment back and forth to each other publicly on Facebook all the time, how didn’t you know?’/‘bold of you to assume I use Facebook’ and only the visit was really kept private. We’ll have to see Sarah’s reaction.
Like when Amber and Walky were messaging each other on Twitter and it was later revealed that they were actually tweeting, publicly, at each other for an entire afternoon and so everyone already knew about their budding relationship – but on Facebook instead of Twitter? I could see that.
But that was an afternoon, while this has been 4 months with neither Liz nor Joyce ever mentioning anything about it. Not necessarily an announcement, but some comment to Sarah about something Liz had told her. Or the other way around, especially when Sarah was home over Christmas.
Yep. Liz is unlikely to be TOO major a character – none of the siblings who aren’t currently at IU are, with Jocelyne appearing the most consistently at approximately once every three years. (Faz went five years between first and second appearances, then two years between Faz Is Great and the kidnapping/aftermath storylines. Howard appears in 2013 and 2017.) It’s a fairly similar timeline for parents. So she’s here for one storyline and will then be back to not showing up, except on Patreon where I already anticipate she’ll be a regular voting presence (especially since Jocelyne’s off-limits until she reappears in the strip proper.) We could do this story with the predictable Joyce is Jealous storyline… or we could sidestep that with the slightly-less-predictable, but perfectly in-character, Joyce and Liz have been friends for months and go straight to Joyce and Liz tormenting Sarah with Dual Little Sister Action.
The justifiability seriously hinges on exactly what she’s angry about. Not being told by either Liz or Joyce that Liz was coming? Yeah, pretty justifiable. Liz coming at all? Shakier ground, but maybe, depends on what we learn going forward. Anything else is a tough sell.
Not inherently, no. Joyce is in fact, entitled to privacy, and that does include not having to share every friend you have, even if it is the person’s sibling. Which is a bit of an obtuse thing to hide or not mention, but it isn’t wrong. I’d say that’s more confusing than infuriating, but it makes sense if Sarah isn’t known to get along with Liz in particular that Joyce wouldn’t bring it up to her.
I think it is a stretch to say Joyce hid this information. Sarah doesn’t like talking about her family, and this introduction feels like it is the first time Sarah is mentioning Liz to Joyce. In response, Joyce is freely volunteering that they are Facebook friends. Also, Facebook friendship is publicly-available information, and Joyce most likely found Liz’s Facebook through Sarah’s Facebook, with Sarah being friends with both Joyce and Liz.
It’s also worth noting that you do not need to be close friends or talk regularly to be friends on Facebook.
Heck, I doubt this visit involved Joyce and Liz colluding behind Sarah’s back. Liz probably posted a publicly-visible post, Joyce probably saw it and posted a publicly-visible response, and Sarah happened to not see it. (In this case, “publicly” could also mean “visible to all Facebook friends,” which would still include Sarah.)
That’s true. “Facebook friends” could be a fairly low level of contact.
That’s not how I read the strip, but it could be.
Though, asking if Joyce told Sarah implies Liz at least expected Joyce to know she was coming and Sarah to not know. If it was just a public message, she was relying on Sarah not checking Facebook.
It’s…probably pretty public knowledge. Facebook actively attempts to make connections through people who are connected via other people. These characters are of an age where they should be savvy enough with social media to know and expect that.
I strongly disagree. I don’t think you are obligated to reveal friendship with someone’s relatives or really anybody on the basis that someone ‘might’ want to vent to you about them or know about it; don’t say stuff you would never want repeated about someone then, especially when it is about someone that could plausibly turn up!
There’s no etiquette that requires you to inform someone that you know their family members. A lot of people can and do without thinking when they know relatives, but that doesn’t mean it is inherently wrong or rude to not mention it. Sarah is not in fact entitled to know if you are mutual friends with her sister. That’s not a thing or a rule.
It is still WEIRD that Joyce didn’t mention it all. But they’re also friends on FACEBOOK which is generally public, so if Sarah ever bothered to look at Facebook, it was probably perfectly accessible information the whole time. It’s not some deeply guarded secret. And even if it was. That would be more bizarre than anything considering how open Joyce tends to be about stuff. Not mentioning it isn’t some kind of social crime, it’s just odd.
I would say it’s sufficiently weird that it would seem like she was deliberately hiding it. You’d think a “Liz said …” (or a “Joyce said …” while Sarah was home over break) would have just naturally come up in the months since the start of school.
I don’t know, my partner of 10 years and my brother are Facebook friends and have been for several years, both are WAY more social-media active than me (which is a low bar because my social media presence is basically nil) and neither one has ever mentioned their Facebook interactions even in passing. I don’t find it weird.
It doesn’t matter whether they specifically mention “on Facebook” or even that they’re Facebook friends. It’s that Sarah isn’t aware they have any connection at all.
Yay! Twenty years ago at 0119 CDT I was murdered by a drunk driver and as they were scraping me off the road I regained enough consciousness to tell the guy next to my head to be careful of my broken femur, which caused a jostle as the “dead guy” told him off.
I’m sort of looking forward to Sarah’s realisation that the reason she reacts so strongly to Joyce is because she’s basically Liz but more sweetly naive.
Right now I’m still not sure where we are on DoA’s calendar, or which year it’s following. Maybe it isn’t even pegged to reality aside from “uses the Gregorian calendar”, who knows? The time skip was long and vague enough to completely detach the two ‘seasons’ from each other.
Reader-Generated Poll
Please put your response by putting the number of the option in a reply
You want Liz to be:
(1) Just Joyce’s new behavioural duplicate best friend/co-conspirator
(2) Joyce’s girlfriend (but they don’t know it yet)
(3) Just another in a long list of people who annoy Sarah by being happy and tactile with her
(4) Someone Becky and Dorothy can bond over by not liking at all
(5) Someone who somehow knows everyone in Read Hall without Sarah knowing that this was the case
(6) Other (specify in comments)
Seconded on six, but Alex has a good point about four, so I’d like to third four after someone else seconds it. 1,2,3 are already done enough, so I’ll pass on them, and 5 seems to already be in play to some extent.
I’m torn between 1 and 5. Maybe 5 through mildly nefarious little sister plotting for this exaxt day, but that seems a bit elaborate for someone we don’t actually know.
I found this comic (as a reference from another web-comic) last Saturday.
Took me three days, but I have read all of it up to this point.
Now, I’m going to go back and read it again with the comments.
I suspect the comments will take much, MUCH longer then the featured comic did/does.
I have to admit, I like this comic better than some of the others I read.
My favorite character (and it is hard to actually decide on JUST one) is Joyce.
All the characters (well, most) are well-fleshed out and the story-line flows quite smoothly.
A very well thought-out feature.
It’s a favorite of mine too. I confess sometimes when I’m bored I hit random so I’ve probably reread the whole thing several times, if not exactly in order.
I had to look up where Sarah’s family lives, and if they still live in Fort Wayne, yikes. That’s an even bigger day trip than when I was going from Indianapolis to Ball State to see my friend who hadn’t graduated yet. She probably drove through Muncie to get to Bloomington.
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Facebake, where many a relationship has gone to die, even for those not on there
Okay. You got me. I had to go back and look to see what Joyce said.
Joyce is also online friends with Sarah’s mother, cousins, and postman.
And formally her nana, but she dropped that after she offered to send her a birthday present…
I get the joke, but didn’t Sarah imply that her grandmother was dead in that same strip?
Maybe? I mean, I guess the implication is that Joyce’s grandma is dead, but not necessarily Sarah’s.
…Gosh, I hope that wasn’t left to Sarah in her will.
Well, Joyce could have assumed a story a story about one dead grandmother was referring to another still alive grandmother. Most people have two grandmothers
Joyce seems like the type of person that could accidentally attract grandmothers and winds up having some additional ones.
Oh right, Joyce is aggressively friendly
It’s worse than that the Sarah told Liz about Joyce and Liz reached out to Joyce
…I was expecting a competition for the “little sister” title.
…I like this way better than what I was expecting, because I am currently laughing out loud.
It’s kinda obvious in hindsight, isn’t it.
I love it when you expect a character to do something, but then they do the exact opposite thing because that’s even more in character for them to do. It’s always obvious in hindsight, but never the first thing that you’d assume.
Yes!!! I did not see this coming, and I love everything about it! 😀
Poor Liz 🙁
Oh, sweet betrayal.
sudden but inevitable.
Is it still too soon for Firefly jokes? I feel it’ll always be too soon but somehow at the same time always apropriate because of comisery.
How do Reavers clean their harpoons?
they don’t
TWO LIL SIS!
AH! AH! AH!
Congratulations, Joyce.
By keeping Sarah from that essential information you gleamed from the internet, you have managed to defeat the entire purpose of the information age.
Oh, so you noticed she’s a fundie. 😛
Nah, I noticed that the internet was supposed to make information travel as fast as possible to the people who need it.
But I guess there’s no reason not to suspect that fundamentalists would try both direct and indirect means of getting family members to socialize without consent.
The tradition of deciding who actually needs any given piece of information based on one’s self-interest or machinations far predates the information age.
What the internet actually does (and really has always done) is facilitate information traveling to those the information holders want to have it. Need is a very subjective and nebulous concept.
I see that you are rather fascinated with economic science, or at least one of its central tenets.
But when I stated “need it”, it was really short for “need it to fulfill their goals” or “need it to make more informed decisions”.
And the information age hasn’t been about that for a long time. See paywalls. Your picture of the information age is over-idealized and not reflective of the actual state of information flow. Joyce hasn’t defeated anything here, she’s participating in the standard operating model of information distribution.
Well regardless of how much the internet meets that ideal now, there are people all over the world constantly working to help it.
Speaking of which, do you need access to academic papers that are apparently hidden behind paywalls thanks to Google?
Appreciate the offer, but I’m all set.
Wow, she’s powerful! She defeated the entire purpose of the information age all by herself!
Seems like a nerve has been hit here.
Wait. How did she keep FB from making money?
Exactly. The information age hasn’t been about distributing information without consideration of one’s own agenda/interests for a long time, if ever.
I’ll admit, I was expecting some drama over who is the real little sister to Sarah. This is way better, especially with Sarah getting her best Judge Dread frown/grimace on.
Frown any harder and her chin will fall off.
Sarah pioneers Extreme Frowning, next Olympic event
My knowledge of Muncie just expanded dramatically. Before this, it was all about Jerry/Garry Gergich’s timeshare.
I mostly know it as “That Place Where the Garfield Guy Lived”, thanks to Quinton Reviews.
An admirable amount of dedication went into that video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxiwjaUSYJM
In case you haven’t seen it, it’s an hour long documentary of a two-man fact-finding mission to Indiana to recover pre-Garfield art by Jim Davis, including a short-lived Garfield prototype that only ran in a few local papers and hadn’t seen the light of day for 40+ years. He finds what is basically a Garfield museum/shrine and visits some nearly forgotten Garfield statues along the way. Definitely worth a watch in its entirety if you have the time, but for the meat of it you can just watch the newspaper and microfilm library parts. There are also PDFs in the description.
Over here in UK land I only know it as the place Bob Ross’ Joy of Painting was filmed.
I have no idea what a Muncie is
It’s like an Aype but with a tail.
It’s like a broiler/toaster oven with no door.
Wasn’t Tim Robbins’ protagonist in The Hudsucker Proxy from Muncie?
I think it’s sorta like Peoria but without the big city metropolitan. glitz.
I always thought it was a transmission.
I know it as a very rugged 4-speed transmission built by GM.
Loving Sarah’s face in that last panel.
OK, two things:
I forgot to say this yesterday but I really like Sarah’s shirt and Liz’s hair.
Do I need to update my avatar already?! I feel like it’s too soon and the speech balloon is kind of in the way but that last panel face is so good!
Half-and-half?
Oh, now there’s an idea. I might play around with that when I get time.
BETRAYAL!
Dang it, who was Sarah on the happiness inversion with? They must be exploding with euphoria right now.
That would be…Joyce.
Hovertext: But which is Liz? The master, or the apprentice?
The apprentice has become the master… and the master does not approve.
I’d say Joyce has stepped up her game in the “crossing personal matters area” but then I realized she said she did this back in freshman orientation.
There is the matter that Joyce and Liz are free to associate with each other. And certainly the convention on facebook is to encourage associates of friends to connect. I don’t know that it makes this right, but it’s not exactly wrong either.
I think the only real transgression here is hiding the information that Liz was coming to visit. Everything else is just built into how social media is set up to work and it isn’t really fair to hold that against Joyce.
That’s assuming Joyce even knew she was coming.
WOW, me, way to read the actual strip to check that. Can you tell I just got up? XD
Oh man. Welp you’ve done it. You were wrong on the internet. Time to turn in your card and punch out man. It’s just not worth going on any further.
(n.b. for those who may truly feel bad about themselves, this is satirical and not intended to actually encourage negative self talk. You are loved and deserve to feel loved, just for being you, even when you fail to check the strip dialogue before posting. maybe even especially then.)
Uh, you’ll have to take that up with the little sisters union. Pretty sure my employment is covered. 😛
SARAH’S FACE
I wonder if I should ask Jolly Roger Blackburn to add Liz to the cast of KNIGHTS OF THE DINNER TABLE. Maybe she does Zumba at Nitro’s gym?
I was expecting Joyce to be all Jealous at Liz being Sarah’s actual sister.
This is even better though.
Of course Joyce is friends with Liz already, she managed to befriend Sarah despite her best efforts. Joyce’s powers of Friendship know no boundaries
Almost like it’s magic . . .
Just because you don’t understand something doesn’t make it magic.
Joyce is charismatic, empathetic, outgoing and surprisingly adept at surveillance. Of course she makes friends easily
I like your thinking!
Ironically, she might just stop doing that if it’s suggested that she’s “dabbling in sorcery”.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic?
Are you saying that “Friendship is Magic” should be “Friendship is Sufficiently Advanced Technology”? Somehow that doesn’t roll off the casual tongue quite so well. 😛
Maybe not, but it absolutely cracks me up.
Doesn’t explain flying ponies either.
Exactly!
Hopefully, the definition and usage of “magic” will change over time to lose any connotation it has with the supernatural, and just come to mean “great things happening when we work together” and “super advanced tech”.
But then again, how would we keep the bad connotations of “magical thinking”?
Damn, English has got to be among the worse lingua franca in history!
Ooooooh, someone doesn’t like the fantasy genre.
This is silly. Magic can be fun and not detrimental to anything. Hoping for a lexical change that will literally happen because there’s a major literary genre practically dedicated to it is a weird goal. People looking to science instead of magic in their day-to-day life is a much more reasonable goal.
I don’t really want magic to lose connotation with the supernatural, it’s a useful word to describe it, and the supernatural as a concept isn’t going anywhere if for no other reason than it’s baked into most regions’ cultural history. This isn’t a good hope that you have.
So I don’t like fantasy, huh?
It’s OK to have an active fantasy life. The only problem comes when they can’t distinguish it from reality.
But once we get sufficiently advanced technology indistinguishable from magic, what happens to “magic” as a concept?
Honestly by the time that happens, the word “magic” may no longer exist. At that point in the far future, the English you and I are speaking right now may very well become an archaic language only to split into others, just as the Latin once spoken centuries ago split into the branches leading to modern Western languages we know today.
People’s imaginations will always outstrip the technological level of the time, that’s how we keep moving forwards, but the fantasy genre, which is distinct from personal fantasies, isn’t restricted to such petty rules as the laws of physics. This isn’t like sci-fi in which technological advancement will by necessity make it obsolete.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
Now we’re cookin’ with gas!
Not yet. Our technology is still distinguishable. Though we’re getting closer.
I plan to dedicate my life to such an effort.
To get an idea of the things I plan to work on, could you imagine something even better than a computer?
@Wagstaff not everything has to be serious commentary. Lighten up a little. We’re just playing around a little.
I’m pretty sure He Who Abides was making a My Little Pony reference.
I STG, I didn’t see your comment before I hit “Post Comment”.
I was assuming that too.
MLP uses extremely advanced Friendship Technology.
I thought it was a My Little Pony joke?
I’m so jealous of Joyce here
Oh no… now there’s two adorable little sisters. However will Sarah survive?
Carefully monitored insulin injections and frequent blood sugar testing.
Sarah: God now there’s two of them.
Two of them.
Two of them.
OH NO
THE LITTLE SISTERS ARE UNIONIZING!
…Why wasn’t I invited?
You did win the thread, though.
That’s the frownest frown of them all.
Sarah is working on a full 360 degree frown. She’s making excellent progress.
She has to do something to counter the triangle smile.
And they say, Sarah’s frown grew three sizes that day.
The Secret Sister Society reveals itself at last. 😆🤣
They have bided their time, but finally they can reveal their true purpose.
Tormenting Big Sister, as only Little Sisters can.
It’s great, I love this.
Little brothers can do that too (he said from experience).
I wonder if they’ll ask Roz to join (she’d make a good Shop Steward for their Read Hall chapter)?
Panel Two Liz is giving me some strong Yvette Nicole Brown energy!
…..I’m now headcanoning Yvette Nicole brown as their mom
I want to ship Joyce and liz already I swear to god lol
They’ve clearly adopted each other as sisters, so that would be incest. 😆
And?
And it’s good to have these things labeled! And tagged when appropriate!
She frowns any harder and it’s going to collapse back in on itself.
The last time something like this happened, the random visitor turned out to be on the run after getting caught coming out of the closet. I wonder what the drama will be this time.
No, Faz wasn’t outta shit.
I think Liz’s visit is probably what it appears to be. What she might do is give us a glimpse into Sarah’s backstory
Gee, Sarah, it looks a little bit like you give a fuck, now!
I know it’s been awhile since we’ve seen the guy, but remember how Jacob decided his ideal woman was “Joyce But Not?”
Dude might be in luck.
Mr. Destiny has made a good play to Liz. She just need to know it.
The Facebook-friending on orientation day feels like stalking.
…
I’m pretty sure it ISN’T actually stalking, but it feels a bit like stalking.
They might have met in person, and Joyce is a frighteningly effective befriending machine
If she found her on Sarah’s Facebook, that means Sarah’s Facebook is publicly available and not behind any permissions. That’s Sarah saying it’s okay for people to see that stuff. That’s on Sarah if she didn’t want anyone to see it.
Joyce looking up her roommate on social media and looking at publicly listed information to see if they’ll get along and check for red flags or bad signs isn’t stalking.
Joyce has called it stalking in the past
She’s also really good at it. She’d make a good spy
That was very clearly used euphemistically. You don’t really believe Joyce thinks what she did was actual stalking, do you?
Given that she thought that Billie shouting FAAACE at her was hazing…
That’s a very dotted line you’ve drawn there. A stiff breeze might leave you with a bunch of ellipses.
Better to be well-rounded and stick with ellipses — you know, keeping things real — rather than being an eccentric and flying off into an imaginary and hyperbolic escapism.
No. It just feels like stalking
The idea of social media trawling being likened to stalking is absolutely wild to me. Anything you put up on the internet publicly is fair game for anyone to look through. You have actively put that information out for the world to see. There have been privacy settings to restrict that for as long as there’s been social media. If you don’t want it to be seen by potentially everybody, don’t post it publicly. Even better, don’t post it at all. Private/secure information doesn’t belong on the internet.
I’ve heard “Facebook stalking” used to describe studying the social media of a person you’ve never met. It’s not actually stalking, and the phrase is used without the same negative connotation as stalking, but it’s still trying to get to know a person by monitoring their activity without their knowledge. As Thag linked, Joyce uses this in her first interaction with Malaya.
That said, that’s not what this is. For two people to become friends on Facebook, one person needs to send a request and the other person needs to accept. Both people know this is happening and explicitly consent.
There’s this sense — not really a rule or a social convention, but more like an inaccurate but unquestioned assumption — that the online world is separate from the real world. (Hence how IRL, “in real life”, excludes the online.) In that mindset, someone you know from meatspace checking your friends list and making contacts there can feel like someone from one part of your life invading the other parts.
I mean, to be honest, I’d be just as freaked out, if not more, if a friend in real life sought out my other real life friends and started hanging out with them without letting me know.
Its possible that sarah doesn’t have facebook, and Joyce connected with Liz if they met each other during move-in.
Sorry Sarah… they are working in tandem… there is no escape now
Ok yeah yeah yeah I’ll have to draw her in the non to distant future.
Liz…got me feeling a certain way. She must be drawn.
Do it, you won’t.
Okay, I do wish that this had been hinted in some way before. Liz’s relationship with Sarah didn’t need to be mentioned but at least mention her as an online friend of Joyce’s a few times so she seems less of a sudden plot contrivance.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RememberTheNewGuy
So, the anti-Chuck Cunningham?
This doesn’t feel contrived to me.
Unexpected and unforeshadowed, sure, but it feels fairly natural to me
We did just have a months-long timeskip that just on its own lasted longer than the entire rest of the comic up to that point, I can easily imagine this sort of thing being something that happened during that time.
No, unless I misread, this strip confirms that Joyce and Liz have been in some kind of correspondence since the start of DoA. Yet not even a mention to Becky or Joe about ‘oh one of my Facebook contacts mentioned…” or something like that?
It does seem a bit odd it hadn’t come up talking to Sarah before. She was hiding not just the visit, but that she was talking to Liz at all.
I can see it being a case of ‘we comment back and forth to each other publicly on Facebook all the time, how didn’t you know?’/‘bold of you to assume I use Facebook’ and only the visit was really kept private. We’ll have to see Sarah’s reaction.
Like when Amber and Walky were messaging each other on Twitter and it was later revealed that they were actually tweeting, publicly, at each other for an entire afternoon and so everyone already knew about their budding relationship – but on Facebook instead of Twitter? I could see that.
But that was an afternoon, while this has been 4 months with neither Liz nor Joyce ever mentioning anything about it. Not necessarily an announcement, but some comment to Sarah about something Liz had told her. Or the other way around, especially when Sarah was home over Christmas.
The joke is that it’s a plot contrivance that’s in-character to Joyce, who would on her first day search up her roommate’s sister and make friends.
It didn’t need foreshadowing because it ain’t that deep.
Yeah, that sounds like something Joyce would’ve done early on after first meeting Sarah.
Yep. Liz is unlikely to be TOO major a character – none of the siblings who aren’t currently at IU are, with Jocelyne appearing the most consistently at approximately once every three years. (Faz went five years between first and second appearances, then two years between Faz Is Great and the kidnapping/aftermath storylines. Howard appears in 2013 and 2017.) It’s a fairly similar timeline for parents. So she’s here for one storyline and will then be back to not showing up, except on Patreon where I already anticipate she’ll be a regular voting presence (especially since Jocelyne’s off-limits until she reappears in the strip proper.) We could do this story with the predictable Joyce is Jealous storyline… or we could sidestep that with the slightly-less-predictable, but perfectly in-character, Joyce and Liz have been friends for months and go straight to Joyce and Liz tormenting Sarah with Dual Little Sister Action.
Sarah’s family got some good genetics! They’re both super pretty ♥
the amount of frown
Wouldn’t be surprised if Sarah gets, justifiably, angry about this
The justifiability seriously hinges on exactly what she’s angry about. Not being told by either Liz or Joyce that Liz was coming? Yeah, pretty justifiable. Liz coming at all? Shakier ground, but maybe, depends on what we learn going forward. Anything else is a tough sell.
You don’t think Joyce should have let Sarah know that she was friends with Sarahs sister?
Not inherently, no. Joyce is in fact, entitled to privacy, and that does include not having to share every friend you have, even if it is the person’s sibling. Which is a bit of an obtuse thing to hide or not mention, but it isn’t wrong. I’d say that’s more confusing than infuriating, but it makes sense if Sarah isn’t known to get along with Liz in particular that Joyce wouldn’t bring it up to her.
No.
Its bad manners to not disclose to someone that you’re friends (Facebook or otherwise) with their relatives
Imagine if Sarah vented about Liz to Joyce or Sarah inadvertently shared something with Joyce about Liz
So privacy yes in regards to friends but family members no
How about if Sarah was Facebook friends with Joyce’s mom (unlikely as that maybe) or Jocelyn and didn’t tell Joyce, how would Joyce feel
Your social rules seem strange to me.
But why would you hide it? For months.
I think it is a stretch to say Joyce hid this information. Sarah doesn’t like talking about her family, and this introduction feels like it is the first time Sarah is mentioning Liz to Joyce. In response, Joyce is freely volunteering that they are Facebook friends. Also, Facebook friendship is publicly-available information, and Joyce most likely found Liz’s Facebook through Sarah’s Facebook, with Sarah being friends with both Joyce and Liz.
It’s also worth noting that you do not need to be close friends or talk regularly to be friends on Facebook.
Heck, I doubt this visit involved Joyce and Liz colluding behind Sarah’s back. Liz probably posted a publicly-visible post, Joyce probably saw it and posted a publicly-visible response, and Sarah happened to not see it. (In this case, “publicly” could also mean “visible to all Facebook friends,” which would still include Sarah.)
That’s true. “Facebook friends” could be a fairly low level of contact.
That’s not how I read the strip, but it could be.
Though, asking if Joyce told Sarah implies Liz at least expected Joyce to know she was coming and Sarah to not know. If it was just a public message, she was relying on Sarah not checking Facebook.
It’s…probably pretty public knowledge. Facebook actively attempts to make connections through people who are connected via other people. These characters are of an age where they should be savvy enough with social media to know and expect that.
This rule of yours is archaic.
No it’s not, actually
I strongly disagree. I don’t think you are obligated to reveal friendship with someone’s relatives or really anybody on the basis that someone ‘might’ want to vent to you about them or know about it; don’t say stuff you would never want repeated about someone then, especially when it is about someone that could plausibly turn up!
There’s no etiquette that requires you to inform someone that you know their family members. A lot of people can and do without thinking when they know relatives, but that doesn’t mean it is inherently wrong or rude to not mention it. Sarah is not in fact entitled to know if you are mutual friends with her sister. That’s not a thing or a rule.
It is still WEIRD that Joyce didn’t mention it all. But they’re also friends on FACEBOOK which is generally public, so if Sarah ever bothered to look at Facebook, it was probably perfectly accessible information the whole time. It’s not some deeply guarded secret. And even if it was. That would be more bizarre than anything considering how open Joyce tends to be about stuff. Not mentioning it isn’t some kind of social crime, it’s just odd.
I would say it’s sufficiently weird that it would seem like she was deliberately hiding it. You’d think a “Liz said …” (or a “Joyce said …” while Sarah was home over break) would have just naturally come up in the months since the start of school.
I don’t know, my partner of 10 years and my brother are Facebook friends and have been for several years, both are WAY more social-media active than me (which is a low bar because my social media presence is basically nil) and neither one has ever mentioned their Facebook interactions even in passing. I don’t find it weird.
Do they ever mention each other at all?
It doesn’t matter whether they specifically mention “on Facebook” or even that they’re Facebook friends. It’s that Sarah isn’t aware they have any connection at all.
Eh, it’s only shakier ground if Liz is there to visit Joyce and not Sarah.
Who does liz look like?
Liz, mostly. Possibly Brun from Questionable Content in some superficial ways (hair floof and clothing, primarily). Goku, if you’re extremely high.
Brun, definitely.
Though if you’re THAT high, wouldn’t ANYONE look like Goku?
Sarah don’t looks happy at all. This alliance is against her!!!!
It’s more of a case of: “Oh no! Now there’s two of them!!!”
IT IS NOT POSSIBLE FOR ME TO FROWN ANY HARDER
Don’t challenge her!
Sarah got the 3rd place in last year’s International Frown showdown. she oly lost to the War For Cybertron Megatron game render and a Math function.
Sarah’s face in that last panel.
That is all.
Yay! Twenty years ago at 0119 CDT I was murdered by a drunk driver and as they were scraping me off the road I regained enough consciousness to tell the guy next to my head to be careful of my broken femur, which caused a jostle as the “dead guy” told him off.
Thus began my career as an unkillable badass.
I’m sure congratulations are in order? Congratulations!
Happy twentieth birthday!
Happy Undeathday!
YOU ARE RISEN!
OPUS IS RISEN INDEED
Cheers to not being dead!
Wow, twenty years? Happy Rebirthday, Opus!
Oh No, they know each other and are in cahoots XD
No, they are in their dorm room. And what is a cahoot anyway?
Gotta say, Joyce has become a lot more wily since that Fall orientation
I delivered a paper at Ball State once.
I don’t remember how I got into the city but I sure do remember that it looked like it had been bombed.
Streetview clearly indicates the situation has improved.
I’m sort of looking forward to Sarah’s realisation that the reason she reacts so strongly to Joyce is because she’s basically Liz but more sweetly naive.
Ooh, timeline details!
Ball State’s Spring 2021 semester begins on a Tuesday, but their Spring 2022 semester starts on Monday, January 10th.
https://www.bsu.edu/-/media/www/files/events/pdf/2021-22%20academic%20calendar%20umc.pdf
Problem is, it looks like IU Bloomington followed the same start dates?
https://registrar.indiana.edu/doc/beg-end-sem-dates.pdf
Right now I’m still not sure where we are on DoA’s calendar, or which year it’s following. Maybe it isn’t even pegged to reality aside from “uses the Gregorian calendar”, who knows? The time skip was long and vague enough to completely detach the two ‘seasons’ from each other.
This is the Sarah version of Joyce’s terror at Becky meeting Walky for the first time.
This explains so much in so few panels. Good work, Willis.
Reader-Generated Poll
Please put your response by putting the number of the option in a reply
You want Liz to be:
(1) Just Joyce’s new behavioural duplicate best friend/co-conspirator
(2) Joyce’s girlfriend (but they don’t know it yet)
(3) Just another in a long list of people who annoy Sarah by being happy and tactile with her
(4) Someone Becky and Dorothy can bond over by not liking at all
(5) Someone who somehow knows everyone in Read Hall without Sarah knowing that this was the case
(6) Other (specify in comments)
I choose 4 because I’m very tired of the frenemies bit.
6) The character has barely appeared so far, so I’m going to sit back and read the comic before preforming any head canon.
Seconded on six, but Alex has a good point about four, so I’d like to third four after someone else seconds it. 1,2,3 are already done enough, so I’ll pass on them, and 5 seems to already be in play to some extent.
I’m torn between 1 and 5. Maybe 5 through mildly nefarious little sister plotting for this exaxt day, but that seems a bit elaborate for someone we don’t actually know.
5 would be positively hilarious. That’s my vote. Second vote would be 3.
2 would be hilarious, but I’m betting its going to be a mix of 1 and 3.
3
Definitely 5. Liz even knows about Other Jacob.
2! 2!
I pick 2 because scandal in 2 dimensions, same sex relationship, and mixed race relationship.
Joyce and Liz. I’m sure they form a power couple.
*form a power team.
damn willis, enable the comment edition, pls.
No no, your first interpretation was great.
Joyce, where did all of your comics go?
Long time cryin’….
She set them down before answering the door….
She’s not the one who answered the door. Therefore, she ate the binders full of comic material.
They went the same place that Optimus Prime’s Trailer goes.
This is actually infinitely better than anything I predicted yesterday.
Now I have to wonder how jealous Becky will get that Joyce has yet another friend
I found this comic (as a reference from another web-comic) last Saturday.
Took me three days, but I have read all of it up to this point.
Now, I’m going to go back and read it again with the comments.
I suspect the comments will take much, MUCH longer then the featured comic did/does.
Then you can go back and read the comics that preceded this one.
See you in 2022
My sister was in Greencastle and I was in Richmond
I have to admit, I like this comic better than some of the others I read.
My favorite character (and it is hard to actually decide on JUST one) is Joyce.
All the characters (well, most) are well-fleshed out and the story-line flows quite smoothly.
A very well thought-out feature.
It’s a favorite of mine too. I confess sometimes when I’m bored I hit random so I’ve probably reread the whole thing several times, if not exactly in order.
There’s never been a character I’ve liked instantaneously until now. Hello, Liz!
… well played grav, well played.
Why am I not surprised Joyce haha The look on Sarah’s face is undefeated.
I had to look up where Sarah’s family lives, and if they still live in Fort Wayne, yikes. That’s an even bigger day trip than when I was going from Indianapolis to Ball State to see my friend who hadn’t graduated yet. She probably drove through Muncie to get to Bloomington.