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.
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Satire, dark humor and surreal humor.
No End
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A queer romance about people attempting to build lives in a cold, post-apocalyptic world ravaged by hordes of undead.
Paint the Town Red
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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.
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!
All Known Alternatives
Karolina 'Kajotko' Jankiewicz
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.
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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I’ve heard people claim Egypt isn’t in Africa and like…I’m no Geography major but I’m like….not sure how that’s possible. It’s still part of that continent! Sure it’s bordering Asia but like…Panama borders South America but it’s still North America I thought. (Ok some people call it Central America but I think that’s just semantics!)
(OK I just looked up Panama because up til this moment I legit thought Mexico bordered Columbia because I’m an uncultured moron so maybe my opinion on Geography isn’t the best).
Oh I’m absolutely uncultured I don’t know shit about fuck except cartoons and comics. My mind is like a wikipedia article of irrelevant knowledge. I’m just a Georgia hick with a tablet.
It’s tied to racism, basically. Anthropologically, race exists purely in a cultural context. White means something different in the US than it does in Europe, Russians/Arabic people/Indians are all Asian but not on a lot of census forms, etc.
Which means that when talking about ancient Egypt, there are various reasonable scholars who say things like “ancient Egyptians weren’t black”, by which they mean “it was 5,000 years ago, races were different then”, but which racists today co-opt to say that “all great civilizations were made by white people, nope, ancient egypt wasn’t black, here’s an out-of-context quote from a respected professor saying that”.
That argument tends to fall apart quickly because it’s nonsense, but now people have made “Ancient egyptians weren’t african” part of their identity, so they start denying the geography instead. This argument is ALSO nonsense, but it’s such confusing nonsense that it tends to last longer. And then other people run into the debate without any of that context, get confused, and start parroting parts of it.
Isn’t a worldwide method of communicating and sharing information just a great boon to everyone?
National Geographic once did an issue called “The Black Pharaohs,” about a period when Egypt and its southern neighbour, Kush, were united under Kushite rulers. Which was pretty interesting, but as several of the letters pointed out next issue, there really wasn’t a racial dividing line between Egypt and Kush back then.
Well in Antiquity, “Africa” used to refer to the land “south of the Mediterranean, and west of Egypt”. So Egypt wasn’t in Africa, just like Spain is not in Portugal. Carthage was in Africa, though.
Though the notions of geography changed with time. They didn’t have satellite maps of the world, and the very notion of continent would take a while to really crystallize.
Greeks don’t consider themselves part of Europe today, at least in the cultural sense. They will routinely say things such as “I went to Europe on holiday”. (really, they mean Western Europe.)
I’m not sure where your notion comes from though? per Wikipedia, in its earliest geographical sense “Europe” was north of the Mediterranean and west of the Aegean, so definitely included Greece.
Apparently the oldest known reference to “Europe” at least as a geographical term is in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, which refers to Europe, Peloponnesus and the islands – implying that the Peloponnesus (Greece) isn’t part of Europe.
The Pelopennese is far from being all of Greece, though. It’s the peninsula south of Corinth. Athens isn’t in the Pelopennese. Neither is Thebes. “Europa” in that hymn means what we now call “mainland Greece”.
Hair splitting: That definition was for inhabitants, not land. The “Afri” were originally all the peoples living “In the northern ‘Libyan’ continent and west of the Nile”, but in practice it included everyone living on the continent before it really became a place name.
In late antiquity there were provinces that were called Africa or “The African ” but those were smaller areas that had much better defined borders.
For example, Herodotus used “Libya” for what we call “Africa” now, except that he considered the Nile to be the boundary between Libya and Asia. I think he was only vaguely aware of the Red Sea.
It’s pretty amusing that Africa used to be roughly the area of modern Libya, and Libya used to be the African continent. There was a big nomenclature switcheroo there.
i think that many people in western countries seem to not remember that
a) India is in Asia
b) Egypt is in Africa
because the stereotypes we have for these countries differ from the stereotypes we have for the mashed up rest of each of these continents…
Well, it’s as they said: cultural germans aren’t germans in germany.
Also we better don’t start with what is german or dialectal, orr whatev, bc it becomes scary, to be frank or even frankish…
I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about, of course dee Amazon is a river in South America and nothing else, especially not a scary powerful global megaretailer with appalling labour practices,
Aside from Liz propositioning Joe, both of them being alone in Joe’s room, and (this may be important later) Danny being booted, sleeping awfully and not knowing “nothing” happened. Me thinks the dank dragon of drama is restless in its sleep.
This is probably about where Danny re-enters, so all he’ll know is he saw Liz with Joe at night, Liz with Joe (Liz all smiles) at breakfast, and Joe has no alibi.
Eh, she is eventually getting back to her own campus. Wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a semi-regular bus service.
I’m not even sure they’d fight, I think Liz would be like ‘Teach me your Smart Science Atheism Ways’ and Dina would be like ‘excellent, another pupil’ and it only becomes a problem once Becky inevitably shows up.
I just checked, and there does not appear to be a shuttle from IU to Ball State, one *could* take a shuttle to Indy and then another shuttle to Muncie, but there doesn’t appear to be a direct line. Also, the bus tickets are probably $20-50, and IIRC the Bloomington bus station is cash only for the shuttle lines (I could be remembering wrong, their card reader might have just been busted at the time, but they definitely made me pay in cash that one time). Granted, if you acquire the ticket online via Greyhound you can pay electronically, but for whatever reason I don’t see her thinking of doing that, like I fully expect she would go to the bus station, try to arrange a ticket on a shuttle, and then panic because she doesn’t carry that much cash on her.
My rule has always been that I will acknowledge that a new day has started only after the sun comes up. If I don’t manage to go to bed until after sunrise I have to acknowledge that I slept “this morning” and not “last night.” Until sunrise the day remains “today” regardless of what the clock and calendar say. One year in grad school I had one of those crazy housemates who would wake up at 5am. That’s the only time this system caused any confusion, but most of the time I was going to bed as he woke up and we were both solidly half asleep so we would just kinda grunt “g’morning” and “g’night” respectively as he walked to the kitchen and I to my bedroom. Then we usually didnt see each other again until after class and could agree what “today” meant at that point.
Ah jeez this is embarassing. And here I am thinking that it happened. Well isn’t there egg on my face. I’m so gullible. I really got tricked into thinking it happened. Well I’ll be. Happy Trails, Liz.
Honestly, significantly better than what I expected, which was Liz announcing to everyone that she TOTALLY HAD SEX WITH JOE ALL NIGHT YOU GUYS! WEED SEX!
I wonder if weed sex would be any fun. I doubt it, that drug seems to sorta conflict with the activity, but then again I’ve neither smoked weed or had sex so there’s no way to know.
Well, I guess they always feel really good in general, but having them on cannabis just takes it to a whole other level that I can’t even begin to describe!
I heard that orgasms feel amazing in lucid dreams too. If only the skill ceiling on those wasn’t so high.
Eh, I would describe them as “Decently fine” under normal circumstances, personally. Can’t speak to how they feel when under the influence of any sort of intoxicants, since I don’t partake, though.
Nobody should smoke weed. Sucking burning fumes of any kind into your lungs is really horribad for them.
If you want to get high, edibles are a much better route.
It’s pretty good; definitely a unique experience compared to sober sex. Like all kinds of sex while under the influence, in order to be a good time it requires a good deal of trust, communication, and both prior and in the moment consent.
If any of the above is missing, then it can be a VERY bad time. If all of the above are present AND neither of you are too stoned, then it’s like having everything bumped up to 11 with a bit of spacing out mixed in. Pretty fun.
That first one doesn’t even make any physical sense. The light in this scene is coming from the top right, and Dina’s hat is the first object that it touches, so it would actually be casting a shadow on Joe.
You’re right. Good eye. Maybe the original shadow was because her head was tilted more back and straight and in the last panel she tilts her head forward and down so the light hits the entire hat.
Not related to today’s strip but related to the current storyline: what would happen if Joyce read the Fountainhead and became an Ayn Rand flavour of insufferable atheist?
I don’t think it would be downfall of her character because lots of people (myself included) had a “libertarians are smart” phase that we grew out of the more we learned/reached maturity.
Heck, I’d like to know if Joyce has read anything by Richard Dawkins or is she not ready for THAT plunge?
Hard to say. Namely, I honestly can’t tell how much of Joyce’s core “people are fundamentally good” and “we should help other people as best we can” beliefs have actually shifted. (And part of why I can’t tell is because I want them to not have shifted.)
The Randian objectivists do, and I somewhat inaccurately conflated them with Libertarianism as a whole (they aren’t synonymous but there’s a lot of overlap)
Yeah please don’t do that. Radian Objectivists are a frickin CULT, and belief in limited government and “we should help people as best we can” are NOT mutually exclusive.
I have no thing to add to the actual topic of this conversation, I just want to think The Wellerman for reminding me that strip happened. Those last panels are just the best.
I like Dina’s eyes going back and forth, tracking the conversation. I think I like it more knowing that, absent further specific details from Joe (or Liz) she’s probably not making any assumptions about said conversation. Anyone but Dina, and I would be worried about mistranslations and gossip fuel, but Dina does not play that.
Honestly? I think Dina has literally figured it out. The only logical reason Joe would be having this conversation with a girl, and would be so shook, is if they almost had sex, but she called it off due to intense, internalized shame.
A situation that, at this point, Dina is possibly intimately familiar with.
Haha, nice, could be better, could be worse, I like this. It feels like a good antidote to Joe catastrophising Liz. She’s not ruined-she’s still Liz.
Which clears him up a bit to focus on the HIM specific reasons he feels like shit
Wait is Dina about to learn about the Joyce-Becky fallout? Because I bet to Liz this looks like Dina and Joe are an item, and if she says that and gets corrected…
isn’t Dina just perching on Joe’s shoulders (and Joe just totes accepting it) kind of the most adorable thing ever? I feel very strongly about how adorable it is in a very non-shipping way. the fact that it wouldn’t be a romance thing actually makes it way cuter (I feel I have to state that explicitly because “adorable” is a loaded word)
I absolutely ship their developing friendship. Joe seems to have a good amount of respect for Dina and how she engages with social situations, and Dina seems to feel very comfortable with Joe.
Obviously not in Joe’s room (platonically). And we didn’t see anything from the Joyce/dorothy conversation to suggest she stayed with her and sarah. And sleeping in the couch of a common room seems a little… Risky.
I kinda figure Liz is sticking around at least for a chunk of strips so she can get some resolution of her won.
It’d be weird to find out she has both major sexual hangups as well as getting torn between capitulating to her stepmom by pretending she’s still a devout Christian and her peers mocking her for that fake persona she puts on, and then she just goes home and we don’t see her again.
Yeah that’s why I was thinking Liz would have a good time with Joe, while Joe himself would have all this painful drama because sleeping with Not Joyce did nothing to assuage his feelings. If Liz gets sent off with some newfound confidence then she’s played her role and finished her arc in case we never see her again, but now that we’ve seen her previous behaviour comes from her stifling Christian upbringing causing her a lot of current grievances, we kinda have to get at least some idea of where she’s going now unless we see her again in a few years. She can’t just be even more panicked over her sexual hangups than before and saunter off to a status quo that’s causing her misery.
Oh gosh, that’s gotta be my favorite hover text ever. I’m so used to Star Wars references being peppered in where they don’t have any relevance that a genuine situationally appropriate reference took me by surprise.
Dina: Hello, Liz. You are currently making interesting faces. I am unfamiliar with the meaning behind these faces. I will remember them, and hopefully learn enough about them later to classify them properly. Until then, I will assume that the smile means you are happy. Please correct me if I am mistaken.
wow that’s really mean. dumping on fictional characters is fine but at some point it starts to feel uncomfortable to people who happen to like that character or identify with them, you know?
She’s the atheist Mary on account of being mean that one time to the most powerful cultural force in the country.
Much like Roz is the liberal Mary.
Which is weird to me because Mary was so homophobic she nudged Ruth into a depressive spiral that ended in her hospitalization, which is probably on a different moral level than being maybe sort of annoying at the religious and cultural institution you lie that you’re still believing in at the cost of your relationships at college because your stepmom has receipts, and is even weirder now because Mary morphed into Wile E. Coyote and it’s hilarious.
I wish Roz was still atheist Mary because that means we’d see Roz try and carve off the edge of a cliff and then the mass she’s standing on would suddenly fall.
She’s a hypocrite, because she’s still hiding her atheism yet pushes Joyce to burn bridges with friends who don’t know her new atheism.
She’s condescending for much the same reasons, plus the whole “insufferable new atheist who just HAS to dunk on religion to distance themselves from their past and show how kool and edgy they are”
And she’s repressed because… well, this. Tbh I don’t really care either way about her trying to reframe the failed one night stand to regain control, but it grates on me how people relate to her, I feel like we aren’t even reading the same comic.
But do go off and stand on your pedestals about how I’m obviously biased because of liking another character, if that makes you feel better.
I mean, yeah, there are definitely differing views flying around, in that I view the expression of her resentment against her upbringing as coming from a place of deep and personal pain where she doesn’t get the chance to express her feelings in ways that are healthy, and for that matter I don’t think dunking on the Christian church is unhealthy, but that’s in regards to cultural power structures as opposed to individual faith and a fairly complicated conversation in of itself.
But, you know, that’s cool too. Folks are gonna come away with different reads on these characters, let alone the value of the actions they take. It’s not a blemish on anyone involved that we come away with different reads on the actions and morality of the characters, and if that sounds like postulating on my part, don’t worry, I only figured it out two weeks ago.
There are those among us here who think Dorothy is neat. It’s genuinely terrifying to me.
The Dorothy hate is wild to me. She’s literally just a normal well adjusted human being. With the kinds of flaws that well adjusted overachiever types have.
Cannot agree. She is as “normal well adjusted human being” as many other members of the main cast (some of them are not currently well adjusted, e.g. Amber). She is one of us, she’s not on the other side. The Yale admission plot will be based on this (somewhere around 2030, I guess).
I like Dorothy. She’s a well-written Good Girl, with – as you say – some flaws. Believable flaws of the sort well-adjusted, healthy people tend to have. She’s a good foil for, well, most of the rest of the cast. They can’t ALL be lovable-yet-horribly-maladjusted nutjobs, as entertaining as that may be.
Don’t be too harsh on her. She’s a kid that just pushed herself way too far out of her comfort zone so she could prove something to herself and just barely pulled back in time. She’s all but hyperventilating and either fighting off or flat-out experiencing a panic attack.
The things she’s saying might be hurtful to Joe, but her reaction is very understandable.
Liz stayed another night? She only knows Joyce, Sarah and that circle of people. Who did she stay with? Did we miss her interactions with her sister “you are STILL HERE?!”
Joe: “Where did you sleep after you left last night?”
Liz: (Evasively) “Oh, you know… Around.”
Joe: O_O
Liz: (Innocently) “What?”
Joe: O_o
Dina: “I believe this situation calls for a ‘phrasing’.”
I was thinking she had stayed in Joe’s room, just not in bed with him, so either he slept in his desk chair or maybe she slept in Danny’s bed and Danny being Danny didn’t argue about it.
Alternatively she just found a couch to sleep on. It might not be important.
Hmmm, not liking the face Liz is making at Dina…gonna be interesting to see how this is gonna go. (I wonder if she thinks there’s something between Dina and Joe?)
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haha, we were talking with the folks about denial isn’t just a river in Africa
Rando: “IT’S NOT IN AFRICA”
Us: “lol whut, learn your geography”
I’ve heard people claim Egypt isn’t in Africa and like…I’m no Geography major but I’m like….not sure how that’s possible. It’s still part of that continent! Sure it’s bordering Asia but like…Panama borders South America but it’s still North America I thought. (Ok some people call it Central America but I think that’s just semantics!)
(OK I just looked up Panama because up til this moment I legit thought Mexico bordered Columbia because I’m an uncultured moron so maybe my opinion on Geography isn’t the best).
It’s also a stupid argument since the Nile river goes far beyond Egypt. It’s a really, really long river.
It’s one of the 1.618 longest rivers in the world!
Moron? Debatable.
Uncultured? From the looks of your art, definitely not!
Oh I’m absolutely uncultured
I don’t know shit about fuck except cartoons and comics. My mind is like a wikipedia article of irrelevant knowledge. I’m just a Georgia hick with a tablet.
All knowledge is contained in cartoons and comics.
non-cartoon/comics data is noise and is to be disregarded.
Oh trust me bruh, you’re cultured.
It’s tied to racism, basically. Anthropologically, race exists purely in a cultural context. White means something different in the US than it does in Europe, Russians/Arabic people/Indians are all Asian but not on a lot of census forms, etc.
Which means that when talking about ancient Egypt, there are various reasonable scholars who say things like “ancient Egyptians weren’t black”, by which they mean “it was 5,000 years ago, races were different then”, but which racists today co-opt to say that “all great civilizations were made by white people, nope, ancient egypt wasn’t black, here’s an out-of-context quote from a respected professor saying that”.
That argument tends to fall apart quickly because it’s nonsense, but now people have made “Ancient egyptians weren’t african” part of their identity, so they start denying the geography instead. This argument is ALSO nonsense, but it’s such confusing nonsense that it tends to last longer. And then other people run into the debate without any of that context, get confused, and start parroting parts of it.
Isn’t a worldwide method of communicating and sharing information just a great boon to everyone?
Also, what we would define as Ancient Egypt was around for like 30 centuries, which is a very long time, and it changed a lot over that span of time.
And for several of those centuries, it was definitely ruled by very definitely black people.
Yeah, “Cleopatra would be considered white” and “there were Pharoahs who would be considered black” are not actually contradictions!
National Geographic once did an issue called “The Black Pharaohs,” about a period when Egypt and its southern neighbour, Kush, were united under Kushite rulers. Which was pretty interesting, but as several of the letters pointed out next issue, there really wasn’t a racial dividing line between Egypt and Kush back then.
Well in Antiquity, “Africa” used to refer to the land “south of the Mediterranean, and west of Egypt”. So Egypt wasn’t in Africa, just like Spain is not in Portugal. Carthage was in Africa, though.
Though the notions of geography changed with time. They didn’t have satellite maps of the world, and the very notion of continent would take a while to really crystallize.
IIRC, the Greeks didn’t consider themselves part of “Europe”, which was their name for the barabarian lands immediately to the north of them.
Greeks don’t consider themselves part of Europe today, at least in the cultural sense. They will routinely say things such as “I went to Europe on holiday”. (really, they mean Western Europe.)
I’m not sure where your notion comes from though? per Wikipedia, in its earliest geographical sense “Europe” was north of the Mediterranean and west of the Aegean, so definitely included Greece.
Apparently the oldest known reference to “Europe” at least as a geographical term is in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, which refers to Europe, Peloponnesus and the islands – implying that the Peloponnesus (Greece) isn’t part of Europe.
oh ok! thanks.
The Pelopennese is far from being all of Greece, though. It’s the peninsula south of Corinth. Athens isn’t in the Pelopennese. Neither is Thebes. “Europa” in that hymn means what we now call “mainland Greece”.
Ah. Nice catch. I should have realized that.
Ooh a twist! That makes sense, Pelopponisos is just barely not an island. In fact the “nissos” part means island.
Hair splitting: That definition was for inhabitants, not land. The “Afri” were originally all the peoples living “In the northern ‘Libyan’ continent and west of the Nile”, but in practice it included everyone living on the continent before it really became a place name.
In late antiquity there were provinces that were called Africa or “The African ” but those were smaller areas that had much better defined borders.
For example, Herodotus used “Libya” for what we call “Africa” now, except that he considered the Nile to be the boundary between Libya and Asia. I think he was only vaguely aware of the Red Sea.
It’s pretty amusing that Africa used to be roughly the area of modern Libya, and Libya used to be the African continent. There was a big nomenclature switcheroo there.
i think that many people in western countries seem to not remember that
a) India is in Asia
b) Egypt is in Africa
because the stereotypes we have for these countries differ from the stereotypes we have for the mashed up rest of each of these continents…
There is to my knowledge, no actual African river called ‘Denial’, so they aren’t wrong.
I really fail to see how “the nile” could possibly ever be pronounced llike “denial”
There’s a lot of accents and dialects (and probably impediments) that tend to pronounce “th” as “d”. I have met many such people.
Some people pronounce “the” as “da” (pronounced like duh).
Many people also pronounce the ‘de’ in denial as ‘da’ (same as above)
Yeah so did my parents. Still not entirely sure I’m pronouncing it right.
Da Nile? Dat dere is a fine example uh da Mawaukee German accent, aina?
In Germany it would just be Nil.
Well, it’s as they said: cultural germans aren’t germans in germany.
Also we better don’t start with what is german or dialectal, orr whatev, bc it becomes scary, to be frank or even frankish…
You haven’t spent a lot of time in Chicago.
New rule: Retire the “river in Africa” joke. It wasn’t funny when it was new.
Yup. Stick it on the same interior pathway as Dina.
… maybe that’s too subtle. Stick it on the same small ocean-bound landmass as Dina?
That joke was too insular for most people, I’ll wager.
…yeah i didn’t get it.
will i contribute a geography pun regardless? shore.
(Dina-aisle and Dina-isle.)
ooooh well done. i hadn’t seen it atoll
And yet I penned it anyway.
Is this a western interior seaway joke?
It’s a good thing we can ignore that joke, dee amazon is not just a river in south america after all.
I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about, of course dee Amazon is a river in South America and nothing else, especially not a scary powerful global megaretailer with appalling labour practices,
Technically nothing happened so this isn’t denial.
And “technically not denial” doesn’t, technically, count as denial
Aside from Liz propositioning Joe, both of them being alone in Joe’s room, and (this may be important later) Danny being booted, sleeping awfully and not knowing “nothing” happened. Me thinks the dank dragon of drama is restless in its sleep.
This is probably about where Danny re-enters, so all he’ll know is he saw Liz with Joe at night, Liz with Joe (Liz all smiles) at breakfast, and Joe has no alibi.
… Well, good news, awkwardness prevented.
Bad news: Liz is clearly repressing everything.
Worse news: If she and Dina get into the Atheist Hootenanny I dearly want to occur here, she will miss her ride.
Y’know I’m actually starting to think there never was a ride. Let them fight.
Eh, she is eventually getting back to her own campus. Wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a semi-regular bus service.
I’m not even sure they’d fight, I think Liz would be like ‘Teach me your Smart Science Atheism Ways’ and Dina would be like ‘excellent, another pupil’ and it only becomes a problem once Becky inevitably shows up.
My senses are picking up on the Chaos Energy already.
Or that could just be my craving for another chili dog.
Either way is a win win.
I just checked, and there does not appear to be a shuttle from IU to Ball State, one *could* take a shuttle to Indy and then another shuttle to Muncie, but there doesn’t appear to be a direct line. Also, the bus tickets are probably $20-50, and IIRC the Bloomington bus station is cash only for the shuttle lines (I could be remembering wrong, their card reader might have just been busted at the time, but they definitely made me pay in cash that one time). Granted, if you acquire the ticket online via Greyhound you can pay electronically, but for whatever reason I don’t see her thinking of doing that, like I fully expect she would go to the bus station, try to arrange a ticket on a shuttle, and then panic because she doesn’t carry that much cash on her.
Joe was going to be the ride, but Liz canceled it.
wait I thought it only happened earlier today
It’s tommorow. So like if it was earlier today it was like…1am.
I am of the personal opinion that doesn’t start until I go to sleep and subsequently wake up.
i concur. Except on those rare days when I do not sleep.
Which come to think of it, has not happened since I was a graduate student.
I’ve done it a couple times since then but not as consistently and I usually still napped.
My rule has always been that I will acknowledge that a new day has started only after the sun comes up. If I don’t manage to go to bed until after sunrise I have to acknowledge that I slept “this morning” and not “last night.” Until sunrise the day remains “today” regardless of what the clock and calendar say. One year in grad school I had one of those crazy housemates who would wake up at 5am. That’s the only time this system caused any confusion, but most of the time I was going to bed as he woke up and we were both solidly half asleep so we would just kinda grunt “g’morning” and “g’night” respectively as he walked to the kitchen and I to my bedroom. Then we usually didnt see each other again until after class and could agree what “today” meant at that point.
So, I’ll have twice as many days in my life if I switch to a diurnal schedule?
Pretty sure it is today. It’s _always_ today. Even when it’s tomorrow, it’ll be today.
New chapters start at midnight.
On days ending in ‘y’.
Yikes, THAT’S a healthy coping mechanism…/s
I don’t know why the repetition in the final panel is so funny to me, but it very much is.
I like the extra grip Dina has on Joe’s shirt for better balance during the handshake.
“The cave”?
I don’t get it.
In Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Yoda says this line while riding in Luke Skywalker’s backpack.
Are you sure that wasn’t another episode?
’cause this clip from The Empire Strikes Back clearly shows Yoda on a tree, not on Luke.
It was definitely Empire, the Yoda-backpack part was just earlier.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=infZSKB5L9I
Man I haven’t seen Star Wars in a long time.
That Dina / Yoda correspondence though
Star Wars reference. Dina is riding Joe (that sounds so wrong) like Yoda.
Star Wars reference, Yoda says it to Luke in The Empire Strikes Back after he… fails in the cave
It might be a Star War
Ah jeez this is embarassing. And here I am thinking that it happened. Well isn’t there egg on my face. I’m so gullible. I really got tricked into thinking it happened. Well I’ll be. Happy Trails, Liz.
“Girl who is on top of me, meet girl who was previously on top of me.”
Shockingly, both experiences were uniquely uncomfortable.
Yesterday? I thought it just happened a few hours ago for them.
New storyline new day. It’s tommorow. Yesterday/Last Night was when they (nearly) slept together.
I’m looking around, and I’m pretty sure it’s today.
have you checked a newspaper yet. or perhaps the date on your phone/computer since newspapers are all but obsolete.
According to my sundial it’s definitely today.
Honestly, significantly better than what I expected, which was Liz announcing to everyone that she TOTALLY HAD SEX WITH JOE ALL NIGHT YOU GUYS! WEED SEX!
Though hey! I suppose there’s still time.
I wonder if weed sex would be any fun. I doubt it, that drug seems to sorta conflict with the activity, but then again I’ve neither smoked weed or had sex so there’s no way to know.
Well I’ve never had sex, I can tell you from personal experience that on cannabis, orgasms feel ABSOLUTELY AMAZING! 🤩
Well, yes, but they do anyway.
Unless you’re wired different and they don’t.
Well, I guess they always feel really good in general, but having them on cannabis just takes it to a whole other level that I can’t even begin to describe!
I heard that orgasms feel amazing in lucid dreams too. If only the skill ceiling on those wasn’t so high.
Eh, I would describe them as “Decently fine” under normal circumstances, personally. Can’t speak to how they feel when under the influence of any sort of intoxicants, since I don’t partake, though.
Weed sex is good.
Unfortunately, I can’t smoke weed. One toke is agony pain for a minute or more.
Nobody should smoke weed. Sucking burning fumes of any kind into your lungs is really horribad for them.
If you want to get high, edibles are a much better route.
It’s pretty good; definitely a unique experience compared to sober sex. Like all kinds of sex while under the influence, in order to be a good time it requires a good deal of trust, communication, and both prior and in the moment consent.
If any of the above is missing, then it can be a VERY bad time. If all of the above are present AND neither of you are too stoned, then it’s like having everything bumped up to 11 with a bit of spacing out mixed in. Pretty fun.
Seriously though 11 is low-balling it.
For me the orgasms are bumped up to at least level 25.
Or like 10× whatever level you can put on this:
https://www.shortpacked.com/comic/deadly-petty-blow
Yeah, that’s what I was bracing for too.
This might just be because I’m a theory-and-history-of-comics nerd but I love love love the pacing and structure of that final panel.
Repetition is funny, I don’t know why.
Rule of 3 baby.
ooh, what theory-and-history-of-comics is there to the last panel?
the crazy eyes in the 3rd panel are scary
Agreed. She looks like she’s been getting email from Charles Manson.
Also Dina’s really treating Joe as a tree (or a giant plushie) uh
That’s convenient because he’s known for having wood.
booo
*comedy drum cymbal*
But his last sexual encounter got trunkated.
It made it clear his intimacy issues are deeply rooted.
I guess you can say Liz was all Bark and no Bite.
Still, she had every right to choose to leaf.
summon RIVAL PR0NLORD
“oglaf.com/stamen”
It’s at least accurate dinosaur behavior, at least to my experience with living ones.
Joe is known to be kind of a big sexy no-feelings panda.
…he eats shoots and leaves
I mean, I suppose it didn’t. That’s the beauty of stopping when you want to/need to stop. No points awarded for partial completion.
3 Dina’s in one panel. love it.
Huh.
Why does Dina’s hat lack shading in that last panel though?
Ah shit, her hat’s a ghost now.
She moved her head so Joe is not casting a shadow on her hat. Her ear is still shadowed.
…or her hat’s a ghost now.
That first one doesn’t even make any physical sense. The light in this scene is coming from the top right, and Dina’s hat is the first object that it touches, so it would actually be casting a shadow on Joe.
You’re right. Good eye. Maybe the original shadow was because her head was tilted more back and straight and in the last panel she tilts her head forward and down so the light hits the entire hat.
…or her hat is definitely a ghost now.
Her hat is definitely a ghost now.
Not related to today’s strip but related to the current storyline: what would happen if Joyce read the Fountainhead and became an Ayn Rand flavour of insufferable atheist?
I don’t think it would be downfall of her character because lots of people (myself included) had a “libertarians are smart” phase that we grew out of the more we learned/reached maturity.
Heck, I’d like to know if Joyce has read anything by Richard Dawkins or is she not ready for THAT plunge?
the only thing she’s reading is batman fanfictions
Even if I didn’t believe in religion, I grew up rich and know that the idea they all are hardworking job creators is bullshit.
Hard to say. Namely, I honestly can’t tell how much of Joyce’s core “people are fundamentally good” and “we should help other people as best we can” beliefs have actually shifted. (And part of why I can’t tell is because I want them to not have shifted.)
I don’t think it’s shifted so far to fall into libertarianism.
Uhh… do “libertarians” actually believe the reverse of that by definition?
The Randian objectivists do, and I somewhat inaccurately conflated them with Libertarianism as a whole (they aren’t synonymous but there’s a lot of overlap)
Yeah please don’t do that. Radian Objectivists are a frickin CULT, and belief in limited government and “we should help people as best we can” are NOT mutually exclusive.
Same goes for “no victim, no crime”.
AYN RAND!?!?
Here’s what would happen to Joyce.
I have no thing to add to the actual topic of this conversation, I just want to think The Wellerman for reminding me that strip happened. Those last panels are just the best.
That’s a … very Joyce reaction.
WHO RUNS BARTERTOWN
Ha! My exact reaction.
I don’t understand your “cave” reference. Is it related to that movie Time Trap? That had a cave in it.
Check above.
It’s apparently a Star Wars reference.
Here Dina is supposed to be Yoda, and Joe is supposed to be Luke Skywalker. I think.
The quote can be found in this clip. The cave scene is here. There’s a nice StackExchange explanation here.
That third panel face looks a little bit manic….
Liz clearly wasn’t ready for sex yet and it’s good she didn’t force herself to go through it as a sign of “adulthood.”
Y’know, i didn’t want to hate Liz, but somehow this solidifies it
Definitely makes me like her sister a LOT more.
What? How?
I feel like there were plenty of reasonable moments to dislike her that don’t include now
Oh no, i agree, i was just holding out hope
DOA 12: Everything’s Fine
DOA 12: It Never Ever Happened
DOA 12: I Am Dina
It’s Walky.
That’s Dina.
DoA Book 12: Hello, Dina
I like Dina’s eyes going back and forth, tracking the conversation. I think I like it more knowing that, absent further specific details from Joe (or Liz) she’s probably not making any assumptions about said conversation. Anyone but Dina, and I would be worried about mistranslations and gossip fuel, but Dina does not play that.
I sure hope you’re right about Joe wearing Dina like a backpack in the following strips.
Honestly? I think Dina has literally figured it out. The only logical reason Joe would be having this conversation with a girl, and would be so shook, is if they almost had sex, but she called it off due to intense, internalized shame.
A situation that, at this point, Dina is possibly intimately familiar with.
Oooh good call.
Seeing Dina and Joe bonding about problems with girls with intense, internalised shame would be nice and unexpected.
Haha, nice, could be better, could be worse, I like this. It feels like a good antidote to Joe catastrophising Liz. She’s not ruined-she’s still Liz.
Which clears him up a bit to focus on the HIM specific reasons he feels like shit
I hope this is how it works!
Wait is Dina about to learn about the Joyce-Becky fallout? Because I bet to Liz this looks like Dina and Joe are an item, and if she says that and gets corrected…
Everything is fine! Nothing is the matter!
isn’t Dina just perching on Joe’s shoulders (and Joe just totes accepting it) kind of the most adorable thing ever? I feel very strongly about how adorable it is in a very non-shipping way. the fact that it wouldn’t be a romance thing actually makes it way cuter (I feel I have to state that explicitly because “adorable” is a loaded word)
I adore it
I absolutely ship their developing friendship. Joe seems to have a good amount of respect for Dina and how she engages with social situations, and Dina seems to feel very comfortable with Joe.
Ah the sweet power of Denial
So Liz is Walkyverse Joyce playing with a mind wiper. Ominous.
Joe’s screwed (heyoo!) once Anti-Liz finds him.
And then if Liz does not kill Anti-Liz, Joyce will do it.
So… Where DID liz spend the night?
Obviously not in Joe’s room (platonically). And we didn’t see anything from the Joyce/dorothy conversation to suggest she stayed with her and sarah. And sleeping in the couch of a common room seems a little… Risky.
It wouldn’t surprise me to find out she was up most of the night, and is currently running on caffeine and inertia.
And Dina has probably already understood everything. Nice to see her being formally introduced to Liz.
I kinda figure Liz is sticking around at least for a chunk of strips so she can get some resolution of her won.
It’d be weird to find out she has both major sexual hangups as well as getting torn between capitulating to her stepmom by pretending she’s still a devout Christian and her peers mocking her for that fake persona she puts on, and then she just goes home and we don’t see her again.
Yeah, I assumed she’d be a one-and-done guest character. Didn’t expect her to stick around and instigate Joe’s crisis.
Yeah that’s why I was thinking Liz would have a good time with Joe, while Joe himself would have all this painful drama because sleeping with Not Joyce did nothing to assuage his feelings. If Liz gets sent off with some newfound confidence then she’s played her role and finished her arc in case we never see her again, but now that we’ve seen her previous behaviour comes from her stifling Christian upbringing causing her a lot of current grievances, we kinda have to get at least some idea of where she’s going now unless we see her again in a few years. She can’t just be even more panicked over her sexual hangups than before and saunter off to a status quo that’s causing her misery.
Hello, Dina.
Dina is me, waiting for a moment to break the converse and join in a group.
Same here.
Oh gosh, that’s gotta be my favorite hover text ever. I’m so used to Star Wars references being peppered in where they don’t have any relevance that a genuine situationally appropriate reference took me by surprise.
Yes, because repeating that something never happened when it DID never happen is certainly not telling.
She seems so much like Joyce in that third panel. I want them to become long-term friends.
I wouldn’t have imagined Dina talking like Yoda until I read the hovertext.
Also, kinda funny that even when she’s literally on Joe’s shoulders, it looks like Liz didn’t notice Dina until she introduced herself.
I swear that look on Liz’s face in the last panel is her wondering if Joe had this growth (Dina) yesterday and if so, how did she miss it.
Tasha Yar said the same thing to Data. But Joe is human, and likely to take it kinda personally.
Dina: Hello, Liz. You are currently making interesting faces. I am unfamiliar with the meaning behind these faces. I will remember them, and hopefully learn enough about them later to classify them properly. Until then, I will assume that the smile means you are happy. Please correct me if I am mistaken.
Hello Liz, we were just talking about how Joe feels shameful but does not want to talk about it.
Joe and Dina vs Malaya and Fuckface. Make it happen!
hahaha fuck you Liz and the repressed, hypocritical, condescending horse you rode on. You can’t get out of the strip fast enough
wow that’s really mean. dumping on fictional characters is fine but at some point it starts to feel uncomfortable to people who happen to like that character or identify with them, you know?
agree
I never thought someone could mistake Liz for Mary.
She’s the atheist Mary on account of being mean that one time to the most powerful cultural force in the country.
Much like Roz is the liberal Mary.
Which is weird to me because Mary was so homophobic she nudged Ruth into a depressive spiral that ended in her hospitalization, which is probably on a different moral level than being maybe sort of annoying at the religious and cultural institution you lie that you’re still believing in at the cost of your relationships at college because your stepmom has receipts, and is even weirder now because Mary morphed into Wile E. Coyote and it’s hilarious.
I wish Roz was still atheist Mary because that means we’d see Roz try and carve off the edge of a cliff and then the mass she’s standing on would suddenly fall.
I didnt tho?
She’s a hypocrite, because she’s still hiding her atheism yet pushes Joyce to burn bridges with friends who don’t know her new atheism.
She’s condescending for much the same reasons, plus the whole “insufferable new atheist who just HAS to dunk on religion to distance themselves from their past and show how kool and edgy they are”
And she’s repressed because… well, this. Tbh I don’t really care either way about her trying to reframe the failed one night stand to regain control, but it grates on me how people relate to her, I feel like we aren’t even reading the same comic.
But do go off and stand on your pedestals about how I’m obviously biased because of liking another character, if that makes you feel better.
I mean, yeah, there are definitely differing views flying around, in that I view the expression of her resentment against her upbringing as coming from a place of deep and personal pain where she doesn’t get the chance to express her feelings in ways that are healthy, and for that matter I don’t think dunking on the Christian church is unhealthy, but that’s in regards to cultural power structures as opposed to individual faith and a fairly complicated conversation in of itself.
But, you know, that’s cool too. Folks are gonna come away with different reads on these characters, let alone the value of the actions they take. It’s not a blemish on anyone involved that we come away with different reads on the actions and morality of the characters, and if that sounds like postulating on my part, don’t worry, I only figured it out two weeks ago.
There are those among us here who think Dorothy is neat. It’s genuinely terrifying to me.
But…but…Dotty is neat! (as in habitually tidy, smart, or well organized).
The Dorothy hate is wild to me. She’s literally just a normal well adjusted human being. With the kinds of flaws that well adjusted overachiever types have.
She’s literally just a normal well adjusted human being.
Exactly.
It’s like going to Arkham Asylum to hang out with the Penguin.
Cannot agree. She is as “normal well adjusted human being” as many other members of the main cast (some of them are not currently well adjusted, e.g. Amber). She is one of us, she’s not on the other side. The Yale admission plot will be based on this (somewhere around 2030, I guess).
I like Dorothy. She’s a well-written Good Girl, with – as you say – some flaws. Believable flaws of the sort well-adjusted, healthy people tend to have. She’s a good foil for, well, most of the rest of the cast. They can’t ALL be lovable-yet-horribly-maladjusted nutjobs, as entertaining as that may be.
I prefer high horses to pedestals, but YMMV.
Damn bro, who hurt you
It’s funny because I like her more now that it’s clear she’s repressed and struggling than I did when all we could see was the pose.
Don’t be too harsh on her. She’s a kid that just pushed herself way too far out of her comfort zone so she could prove something to herself and just barely pulled back in time. She’s all but hyperventilating and either fighting off or flat-out experiencing a panic attack.
The things she’s saying might be hurtful to Joe, but her reaction is very understandable.
Liz stayed another night? She only knows Joyce, Sarah and that circle of people. Who did she stay with? Did we miss her interactions with her sister “you are STILL HERE?!”
Yesterday as in the previous night. Who knows where she ended up sleeping tho
Joe: “Where did you sleep after you left last night?”
Liz: (Evasively) “Oh, you know… Around.”
Joe: O_O
Liz: (Innocently) “What?”
Joe: O_o
Dina: “I believe this situation calls for a ‘phrasing’.”
I was thinking she had stayed in Joe’s room, just not in bed with him, so either he slept in his desk chair or maybe she slept in Danny’s bed and Danny being Danny didn’t argue about it.
Alternatively she just found a couch to sleep on. It might not be important.
Aww, she’s meeting her big sister’s best friend! How sweet.
Hmmm, not liking the face Liz is making at Dina…gonna be interesting to see how this is gonna go. (I wonder if she thinks there’s something between Dina and Joe?)
The legends are true! The ladies really are all over him!
Which face is that exactly?
By the way I must thank you again for showing your art site, it all looks fantastic!
Frown in the last panel.
I’ve shown a little bit of my art here, but I don’t remember showing my art site; you might be thinking of someone else?
I think just two strips ago you put your site with the URL on your name?
Is “Morning Coffee” one of your pieces?
Oh yeah! Thanks!
You’re welcome!
By the way, as an artist, would you care to give me a couple of pointers to my latest work?
https://www.newgrounds.com/art/view/thewellerman/super-amber-69
(NSFW Warning)
Also, are you sure there’s anything suspicious about that face? It just looks like a blank expression to me.
Yet again, I may be suckier at reading faces than I realize
Nah you’re not, she’s literally just acknowledging Dina’s existence. I think it can be read as a frown bc she has strong eyebrows
She probably just finds it odd that Dina’s scaling him.
Liz’s ride has been due any minute for like two days now.
My spidey sense is telling me that in fact it did happen and that everything is in fact not fine.
Dina is the best.
Yeah that’s probably a healthy way to deal with all that, Liz.
dina just amassing a small harem nbd