Fun fact: this genre of music is known in-universe as jizz music.
It was obviously a wordplay on jazz, but replacing the ‘a’ with an ‘i’ would prove, in hindsight, a bad idea, due to a slang term with the same spelling becoming mainstream quite a while later.
I mean, look at what happened with IRL brand names like Corona hard seltzer.
Naming choices that seem good at the present can unpredictably and inevitably become disreputable because of events that absolutely nobody could have anticipated.
There are two Star Wars days. May the Fourth, but also May 25th which is the day the first ever Star Wars movie came out.
Incidentally, it is ALSO Towel Day (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) and The Glorious 25th of May (Disc World), so i use it as my big nerd celebration day to walk around with a towel, a lilac sprig, and a star wars shirt.
Really, though, there are other ways they could have gone. A cloak can get you a lot of the way there on a generally low-effort costume. As it does here– I just don’t really like Kylo Ren.
People apologize for accidental reports a lot, like, multiple times every day. Are you able to add to the “Thank you for your feedback. We will look into it” message so that it also reassures people not to worry if they hit the button by accident? It’s a kindhearted and anxious crowd, maybe they can have one fewer thing to worry about, if you can and wish it so.
Ok, this may sound uncharitable and isn’t true for most people here, but sometimes people publicly apologize about making a mistake as a roundabout way of broadcasting an opinion about the change. It is an anxiety thing for sure, if you hit the button there’s an instinct to panic and go “that’s not me, that’s not what I wanted or who I am, I didn’t mean it.” Which, obvs the threshold is high now, so it won’t have consequences for the person accidentally flagged. But really, nothing will stop that feeling, no after-flag comment that would really stop someone from apologizing if they felt they must. Pushing responsibility for soothing that feeling onto Willis is, I think, unfair.
Wait hang on, no, Owen is Kylo’s step-great-uncle, isn’t he
…I was gonna joke about this being the reason they broke up, but now I’m genuinely wondering if the big reveal is that Ruth and Billie are secretly related. Or that one of them thinks they are, anyway.
1. We know Billie’s mom sleeps around a lot, partially because Billie’s dad is always away on business trips, meaning it’s entirely possible he isn’t her biological father
2. When Asshole Gramps met Billie, he said Ruth “really is her father’s daughter,” suggesting that Ruth’s dad slept with women who resemble Billie in some way
3. It’s not directly relevant, but in the old continuity Ruth once walked in on her dad with Billie’s mom
…I seriously doubt they’re actually going to be related, but I could maybe imagine Ruth thinking they are.
This feels less like some crackpot theory that Ruth might for whatever reason buy into, and more like some crackpot theory that Billie might for whatever reason buy into.
Whaaat? Jennifer doesn’t buy into any crackpot theories at all!
Now if you’ll excuse her, she’s off to gather further evidence to finally convince the Indiana Daily Student that Sal Walkerton was, in fact, Amazi-Girl.
More likely, Billie decides to go as Rey, and Ruth, upon realizing that Billie sees Reylo as genuinely romantic, becomes extremely worried about what that says about their relationship. (Granted, if we take Palpatine using the midichlorians to conceive Anakin as canon, then Reylo would also be incestuous.)
I interpreted the “You really are your father’s daughter” as “You, like your father, seem to be attracted to people who are crazy loose cannons.” I didn’t think it was about Billie’s physical appearance so much. But maybe!
En Route to North Africa, FDR Was Almost Killed by a Torpedo Fired By A US Navy Destroyer
Dec 22, 2015
“ There is truly no way to quantify who might be the worst crew in US Naval History, but the men of the USS William D. Porter circa 1943 deserve a fair shot at it. Mistakes happen in the chaos of war, and even the best have been known to make them. However, that typically doesn’t involve firing a live torpedo at the President of the United States as he traverses the Atlantic Ocean in the middle of a war.
It is certain that Hitler likely appreciated the help, but the President and Joint Chiefs on board the USS Iowa didn’t. Remarkably, this wasn’t the USS William D. Porter’s first mistake on this secretive voyage…”
Jennifer continually acts like one of the villains in an 80s comedy like Caddyshack or Revenge of the Nerds. The thing is, WHERE DID SHE LEARN TO? It’s been pretty mainstream to be a geek for even a non-timeshifted version of her character.
So her extreme reaction had to come from somewhere.
She’s been consistently focused on her social status in very rigidly defined roles and expectations, and given what little we know of her father, it wouldn’t surprise me if that came from him.
Agreed. I just assumed she picked it up from her high-school cheerleader clique.
I mean they have to differentiate themselves somehow. Skillfull routines flawlessly executed in relatively scantily clad outfits in the spotlight in front of the entire student body clearly isn’t going to do it.
What do you mean, it wasn’t the outfits that were scantily clad?
My fiancée has that sword. He got it while working at Target. He did morning stock, he put it on the shelf, and said if one was still here when he was off, it was coming home with him. Well, it was there. I think he was at least fair and left it on the shelf til he was off… It’s been a while, I can’t remember. We still have it, it’s leaning in the hallway.
Willis is getting a lot of mileage out of the meme in the hovertext—that’s, what, the second or third time it’s been used in as many weeks (and like the fourth time at least in the comic overall)?
As a nerd who hates Star Wars, Billie is right about Star Wars being mainstream. There’s nothing wrong with being mainstream, but let’s not pretend Star Wars is some little indie project.
well, nothing wrong with being mainstream, and it’d be a dick to be a gatekeeper but i bet there are prolly a handful of star wars fans that wish it was less obscure (other than collecting merch/enjoying all the new series that comes out)
Yes and no. Sure, Star Wars is mainstream, but it’s possible to be nerdy about something mainstream. Most people have seen some of it and are aware of the basic stories and concepts, but it’s not mainstream to run a fanfiction blog about a minor character.
Mainstream, eh? So how many Kylo Ren swords do you own?
Actually, growing up in the 50s/60s I still haven’t yet adapted to SF being mainstream. Parents and teachers alike solemnly assured me growing up that reading Science Fiction would rot my brain. And yet look at me today.
Maybe that isn’t as good an argument as I think it is.
Not just that she owns it. That could be explained by “I liked it when I was a kid”. She brought it to school with her.
Despite her pose of not being into that nerdy star wars stuff.
Subtle in the sense that instead of being a brute-force conqueror, Palpatine becomes emperor by corrupting systems from within and manipulating events to his own advantage.
When your potential political opponents include Jar Jar Binks, the galaxy is pretty much begging to be conquered for your extremely merchandise-friendly evil empire.
Honestly, these days sometimes it feels like you’re not allowed to be a nerd if what you’re into ISN’T the big popular multimillion-dollar media franchise and/or the hot new show everyone is talking about.
Of course I also feel dumb because I don’t single-handedly know everything about my interests in things like late 19c-early 20c period dramas, the Islamic Golden Age, fungi, or slightly obscure but not very if you’re in the wider fandom tabletop RPGs, so I guess I’m less a nerd and more just a weirdo.
Nobody asked me, but for the sake of spreading the love, my favorite tabletop system is Call of Cthulhu. It’s a nice and easy format to learn and there’s a lot of mileage for campiness if you play the Pulp version
Mine is yeast. Helping us make alcoholic drinks and pastries for thousands of years, now being modified to produce cannabis oils at outstanding efficiency, they’ve got to be some of the most useful fungi ever known.
But really, all fungi play a really important role in the environment and sometimes even endosymbiosis in other organisms.
No, I was talking more about the stuff you get from Four Sigmatic, MUD/WTR, Om mushrooms, teeccino… the powdered “smart” mushrooms you can add to your morning hot beverage as a supplement. Some of them, like Lion’s Mane and Chaga and Cordyceps, are supposed to be calming for ADHD and focus. Reishi and Turkey Tail are supposed to bolster the immune system. Your mileage may vary. I found Lion’s Mane especially made me irritable. I take a combination daily now that makes me calmer and helps me curb my impulse to overeat.
I used to go wild mushroom hunting up in the mountains, but that was many years ago, when I was very young.
I love so many mushrooms, though… shitaki and portabello and truffles… I just love them all. Even the little white buttons! Sautee them in butter with garlic and onions… *Mwah!*
Used to live there. Actually, I’ve lived a lot of places, been part of a lot of communities, have friends and family from all over the world, literally.
…I guess that’s why the whole “cultural appropriation” taboo around the use of accents and languages never really made much sense to me. To me, it’s all just friends and family. I guess you could say that languages and accents and folk culture are my “special interest.” And I always just wanted to learn as much as I could about them and use them as truly and respectfully as I could. Leaving other cultures alone and not participating in them, not wanting to learn them, that never felt particularly respectful to me.
…Now, that said, sometimes people do go overboard. That’s why I no longer use MUD/WTR mushrooms anymore: their website and company literature is just chockablock full of cheap exploitation of the references and terms of cultures that they have no part in preserving or caring for or engaging with. They just do it to look cool.
Om Mushrooms is a bit the same way, but much less so.
Kind of depends on how much the community owning the culture chooses to export its own values and ideals and trappings and terms, and how much the users of that culture lift up and support the original owners of that culture.
…Anyway, mushrooming can get appropriative, for sure, but you’ve just gotta be ecologically responsible, respectful of labor, and respectful of the plant itself.
…Speaking of cultural appropriation and Owen Lars’s farming robes, there’s a Wondermark cartoon on that very topic. I won’t link it here, because it gets rather horrible, but the gist is that the Jedi were basically just play-acting at being simple farmers.
Can you explain what you mean by “the whole “cultural appropriation” taboo around the use of accents and languages”? I can think of some instances where putting on another accent I’d think would be okay and don’t really see a taboo around. Then there are instances I encounter more frequently where yes, it is a problem. Like a student putting on an Indian accent to read aloud from a science textbook because doing so makes it “funny.” From what I’m thinking of, there’s pushback around the use of accents (and, I guess, out of context words from other languages?) because it often *isn’t* done respectfully. But I don’t really know what you’re thinking about in this regard.
yeah, the conversation about cultural appropriation is a good thing if it leads to white/western folks trying to be more aware of our position as culturally privileged, but it can be overemphasized and misused, i think.
calling any and all cultural curiosity and engagement with other cultures “appropriative” feels more like a punishment and a backlash than a respectful engagement with people affected by truly culturally exploitative behaviour.
Thanks for asking. I’m trying to figure out how to explain without revealing too many personal details. It’s a little tricky. I’m not sure how to do it.
Ok, well, let’s take an example that’s already been discussed here. I’m comfortable using words like “compa” and “otaku” because I participate with the source cultures through my friends and family and community. I don’t consider it appropriate either to use a non-English source word when that word is the best fit for the context. Language is like a river that many streams flow into, for me, and sorting out the words into just one language at a time sometimes feels like unnecessary effort.
Accents is a little trickier. I’m not talking about putting on a fake accent just for laughs. Although sometimes (for example, when telling a story about intervening in a dispute between two English-speakers who couldn’t understand each other because their accents were different) using the source accents for illustration can be essential to the story’s meaning.
My brain tends to mirror people almost unconsciously, but consciously too. I don’t know if that’s a trauma response or a learned people skill, but I spend a lot of time analyzing speech patterns and attempting to use the dominant speech pattern correctly. That means that, when I am talking to someone, I will automatically start to pick up their accent and dialect within a few minutes of the conversation starting. That’s my way of trying to be respectful to them, and I find it often improves communication.
I used to spend a lot of time listening to BBC and practicing “instantaneous echo,” or listening to foreign-language TV and practicing simultaneous translation. I have a few “home” regional dialects I default to, but certain local turns of phrase from other regions simply stick in my mind and become part of my standard vocabulary, simply because they are meaningful to me and because the people who first said them to me mean a lot to me.
When it comes to performing (storytelling, singing…) using an accent can be a way to distinguish between characters or personas, for example. It can also be for effect, or because the accent or dialect is relevant to the context. But it’s also a form of homage: “These were the people I learned this art form from. I’m going to imitate the way they do it, right down to the way they shape their vowels, for the purpose of this song or story, because I want everyone to know where this song or story came from, and how carefully I learned it from them.” To me, imitation is the most “natural” way to communicate. It feels forced and stilted to use anything other than the manner of speech originally suited to the piece of culture (story, song, poem…) being used.
Being someone whose work has brought me into many different communities, that “plasticity” helps me to blend in and better stand in solidarity to serve those communities. When a company adopts a cultural word (like “Sherpa,” for example) just to be hip and not out of any respect for that culture, then I do find it offensive.
I have to learn to walk that line. I recently watched an episode of The Andy Griffith Show where a stranger comes to town after having learned all about everyone in advance by reading the local paper, and his attempts to blend in really freak everyone out. (https://neogriffithism.wordpress.com/2017/07/12/stranger-in-town/) It illustrates the “uncanny valley” effect you get when someone tries too hard to “act natural”. (Actually, it’s a sympathetic portrayal of someone who constructs a personal identity around a obsessive interest in the minute details of a specific subculture, but is unaware of social boundaries and gets perceived as “creepy” or “weird” instead.)
But that’s what many immigrants do all the time: they read news, watch TV & movies, watch clothing trends, and do everything they can to assimilate and blend into the dominant culture as quickly as possible. Some even anglicize their names and train to “lose their accent”. So it seems only fair to attempt to adapt to various communities by speaking their language, adopting their speech mannerisms, gestures, and customs, when speaking to them or participating in their culture. To me, that’s only polite.
…But I do understand that cosmopolitanism and “plasticity” of speech is no longer considered polite. It harkens back to minstrelsy — where cultural imitation was used for mockery and oppression. American music is still struggling to wrap its head around its own heritage as a “melting pot” forged with layer upon layer of cross-cultural imitation and parody, back and forth.
The idea that one’s cultural presentation has to be baked into one’s DNA or the neighborhood where one first lived as a child is very sad to me. I have a hard time limiting myself to that, and — with family roots and ties from all over — it’s hard to pick just one to be the “true” “authentic” cultural identity. As Whitman said, “I am vast. I contain multitudes.”
…But that’s a particular problem. Maybe others are better at limiting their speech than I am. Maybe that’s a skill I need to learn now, and that’s how people want to be respected now. But it doesn’t feel homey to me.
Oh! I’m sorry, Yumi. Could you please rephrase your question so I can answer it more specifically? I’m not sure where my answer veered off from what you were asking.
Just watched an amazing video on Trevor Noah’s use of various accents and dialects: https://www.thesouthafrican.com/lifestyle/celeb-news/trevor-noah-master-of-accents-compilation-video-watch/
Of course, his use of AAVE (sometimes called “Blaccent”) has been criticized as mockery and cultural appropriation, too. And perhaps it is — I don’t know, not having the same firsthand experience of US folks descended from Africans who were enslaved in North America. And I know that not everything Trevor Noah does is acceptable coming from people who aren’t Trevor Noah (biracial South African, world traveler…).
But I do identify with many of his sentiments and struggles around the “plastic” (as in flexible and flowing) use of language.
Oh, OK, I see where I went wrong in answering you. Got it, now – sorry!
You were asking what I meant by a “cultural appropriation taboo.” I mean like the backlash against Awkwafina, for example, for being a Chinese American rapper and using her rap persona in her acting career. Or when Trevor Noah is called out for using AAVE. Or how someone like James Doohan (who was an absolute master of accents and a language nerd) might not be cast in a cross-cultural role today for fear of offending those whose accent he is using. And, more generally, how the art of learning accents and developing a world vocabulary is now looked down upon because of its relationship with colonialism.
I mean, those critiques are certainly important and valid! It’s important to lift up performers from source cultures and to push forward opportunities for them to shine. Like how “Siddig El Fadil / Alexander Siddig”, who is biracial and multicultural, found himself an “accidental Arab,” in his words, typecast in stereotypical Arab roles, but then grew to embrace it and use his platform to bring depth and nuance to people formerly made into caricatures in popular media.
So, what I mean is, it IS important to give first priority to the voices of speakers who authentically self identify their own roots as coming from the source cultures whose accents and words and arts get “borrowed” and incorporated into dominant culture. But some folks don’t fit into neat cultural boxes, and trying to cram all the “spaghetti” (ties every which way) into a single cultural identity “box” — for fear of offending others — feels unnatural and forced, to me.
Okay, that’s kind of what I was thinking. I guess I wasn’t sure about the use of “taboo” to describe those things, so I wasn’t sure if there was something else.
It’s an interesting conversation, and I thank you for sharing so much; I’m just not going to continue with it because, well, this isn’t the optimal setting for it (formatting-wise, dealing with popups-wise, time-limited-checking-wise, etc.)
I think of myself as a nerd and I don’t know anything about any superhero movie franchises, dont watch anime, dont play video games (too poor lol).
I do find that the nerd spaces I frequent tend to have a lot of references to these cultures, whatever other special interest i might share. So I get the feeling of relative exclusion. But I guess I’m used to being a loner when it comes to my weird obsessions, and I’m used to compartmentalising my interests (i can chat about feminist history all night with this one friend, this one online community is all about palaeontology, my brother wont shut up about philosophy and anarchism, another friend is a professional cinema editor and we will talk about movies incessantly, ummm I’m currently lacking a good outlet for my obsession with linguistics and language learning though)
yeah, good idea. there’s also subreddits and discords and whatnot, obviously =)
i kind of stumbled into the handful of online communities (such as this one) i’m a part of, i’ve never deliberately stepped into one with the intent of finding people to talk to and learn from. so i guess i’m a bit intimidated, i’m like “but how do you do it”. when actually, i realize there’s nothing complicated to it, you just start reading and posting or whatever =D
I definitely consider myself a nerd, and I’m into some things that are more popular like Star Wars and Star Trek, and other things that are either a bit more to a lot more obscure. Though I do get that feeling like I’m not as nerdy as I think I am sometimes when I remember I don’t know all there is to know about some obscure thing I’m into.
I gotta say Jennifer seems like a real Star Wars fan. As in not one of the many douche nerd bros that try to gatekeeper the fan base and bash anything new and different like a Jedi being black or a woman. I’m really interested in her opinion on the new Disney era films and Disney+ shows. What did she think of Star Wars Visions? I personally think is the best thing to come out of it so far along with the Mandolorian.
Damn ok so forget about being an everyday fan she’s deep in the fandom.
And here I’m thinking seeing 10 star wars movies and knowing the name of 4 alien races an 5 plantes and knowing the difference between star wars legends continuity lore and Disney continuity lore made me a fan.
It starts by watching one of the movies. Then maybe you play Jedi: Fallen Order or the Force Unleashed (Not Force Unleashed 2 though, it was kinda trash) Next thing you know you’ve watched all of Clone Wars including the Genndy Tartakovsky mini series, have played through both Kotors twice, and now stan Darth Revanchist.
I mean, I believe we first learned about her being into Star Wars when she revealed she created a fanfic blog dedicated to Kit Fisto. Just knowing that name makes you a huge Star Wars nerd (I don’t think he was ever named in the movies) and she wrote fanfics about him.
It is no surprise at all she is so deep into the fandom.
I really want to argue that knowing Kit Fisto just means you watched Clone Wars and that doesn’t make you a big fan but I fear that just comes off like Jennifer does in this very moment. Watching Clone Wars is actually a fairly substantial commitment to the franchise.
To be fair, it is less commitment than I originally assumed. I figured it was on the same level of obscure lore, where you needed to hunt comics or books to be aware of, I didn’t know he appeared in the cartoon. As it turns out, Wookipedia is surprisingly shit at giving you a simple answer like “where this character appeared” so I wasn’t aware.
It’s in this kind of scrolling box thing, near but not quite at the bottom – you kind of have to scroll though paragraph after paragraph of potential spoilers to reach it!
If you’re not using the mobile version of the site, you can just click the link to the Appearances section in the infomenu near the top of the article to skip right by all that.
Oh yeah, I literally completely forgot that Rogue One and Solo exist. I’ve seen both, they just apparently left such a small impression that my brain went to the Holiday Special before them.
VII? The Force Awakens is the only watchable part of the sequel trilogy. It’s an uninspired rehash, but it doesn’t hate Star Wars like The Last Jedi did and it’s not Rise of Skywalker. Also, Rogue One was trash and makes A New Hope worse just by its existence.
TFA was the only of the sequels I watched, because it left me ABSOLUTELY DO NOT WANT about wasting time watching the other two.
There’s literally one bad part in Rogue One, and it’s when they push a ship with a much smaller ship, which is absolutely bonkers stupid and I hate it.
You do realize that in space you can push a ship with a much smaller ship just fine on account of no friction. It even works to a certain extent on low friction surfaces like water. They even have these things called tugboats whose job it is to push much larger boats.
TFA isn’t just “an uninspired rewash” – it has no good antagonists (at least Palpatine was watchable in the prequels), it completely nullfies the protagonists achievements in the OT, and the bad Dragon is defeated by the heroes. I mean, why would I care about watching the next two, the heroes are already able to beat the Dragon!
Did they really beat Kylo in the first one, though? Chewie shot the fuck out of him, he nearly killed Finn, and Rey managed to survive him long enough to get off the exploding planet, but he recovered from the fight more or less immediately. I don’t think “scrambling not to die” counts as a defeat.
I thought TFA was a very interesting remix. From a thousand feet it looks like an uninspired rehash. You can make a list of similarities and check them off and walk away satisfied you understand it.
But if you look a bit deeper, the similarities seem more and more surface level. The same, or at least similar, elements are there, but they’re shuffled up. They don’t do what they’re supposed to, if it was just a rehash.
Using Kylo Ren as the example: On the surface, he’s just Darth Vader, but not as good at it. Except that’s the intent. That’s the point. He’s not Vader. He’s a Darth Vader wannabe. He’s not really the Dragon, as JBento puts it. It doesn’t matter that the heroes can beat him in the first movie, since that’s not really his role.
Of course, the real problem with the trilogy is that there was no planning. No one in overall control to make the damn thing coherent.
For what it’s worth, my problem with Rogue One and Solo, aside from the simple fact that I just didn’t find them memorable, is that they start from a place of answering questions no one was asking. No one was, in good faith, wondering why the Death Star had such a specific weakness. No one needs a backstory for Han Solo. Same reason I’m not planning on watching the Kenobi series. The best Star Wars stuff is always the stuff that pulls away from the plot of the main series and just tells its own stories within the world of Star Wars (e.g. The Mandalorian, Visions), because it’s a cool setting whose main strength is that you can kinda do whatever you want in it, and the more direct spin-offs don’t really take advantage of that.
Rogue One is great, I actually consider it better than some of the Sequel movies. And I don’t really get why some people didn’t like Solo, I thought it was a pretty decent Star Wars movie.
Solo leaned a bit too hard on hitting all the defining moments of Han Solo lore, but I liked it overall. It was pretty cool just as a heist movie in space.
Shame it didn’t do well. I was looking forward to seeing some of what it set up for a sequel.
You can absolutely be a nerd about something mainstream. I mean, there are sports nerds. Not superfans, mind you, though there is definitely overlap. Sports nerds are the kinds of people who can give you a full history of the sport from its inception to the present day from memory, to levels of detail varying from the general eras and a few quintessential players and moments to literally every game that’s ever been played professionally. They keep extensive spreadsheets of player and team stats. They don’t just have memorabilia, they COLLECT memorabilia; they’ve got display cases and binders and an appraiser on speed-dial. They’re not a fan of a team; they’re a fan of the game.
I would argue many fans are sports nerds and dorks.
Evidence:
1) Get really excited about matches and games the way I would about episodes of a show I love.
2) Tell everyone how excited they are about it and seek connections with other excited people.
3) Get very emotional when it goes well or badly due to investment.
4) Theorise about how things could go and get excited when predictions are right.
5) Collect cards or memorabillia related to the sport. Anything associated with it is considered worthwhile. Which is how I feel about my video game or anime or show interests.
6) No one that is even an iota invested can shut up about who their favourite player or team is or why they are the favourites.
(If anyone disagrees with the above distinction of terminology, please post said disagreement in a thought-out, coherent, grammatically-correct, and above all civil reply to the above. Responses will be fielded in a similarly thought-out, coherent, grammatically-correct, and above-all civil manner by those who disagree with the disagreement. Meanwhile, I will be fleeing for dear life from the scene of the crime like the flame-war arsonist that I am.)
…Okay, seriously: the linguistics student side of me says both are fine.
But as a writer, I find that “geeky” is more flexible. It seems to pattern more with the meaning “geekily interested in something particular,” whether or not that particular thing falls in the realm of traditionally “nerd” interests.
And perhaps there’s the issue of “nerd” being coded more negatively than “geek” in the recent past. (That’s only a guess and now I’m curious; what are your reasons for this distinction?)
“Geek Love” is an amazing and terribly sad book. Using the original meaning of “geek”: one who bites the heads off chickens for the amusement of carnival-goers.
I always think of a geek as someone who bites the heads off of chickens. I am a fount of useless knowledge so I never graduated to nerd/geek status in anything.
As Milhouse famously said: “I’m not a nerd. Nerds are smart.”
i like both words? there are slight connotative differences depending on context though.
nerds are bookish. when something catches their fancy they want to learn everything that has ever been written about it, for no other purpose than their intense desire to figure it out.
geeks are all about learning too, but their goal isn’t pure, gratuitous knowledge. They want to hack into the high school database, or solder together a device to prove their pesky little sister has been into their room while they were gone, or learn to pick locks because whatever, picking locks is cool. they’ll figure out what illegal thing they can do with that skill later.
In other contexts, a “nerd” is a shy, socially awkward personality, someone who thinks they have no charisma, but if you prove a kindred spirit, or just a curious enough listener, will positively light up and become wildly extroverted.
a “geek” is a quirkier, more self-aware and savvier type, one who knows they are a bit of a weirdo but decided long ago that made them cool, actually. Besides, being the person your friends call when they desperately need to crack a game or set up a sound system is primo social currency.
I definitely think you can be a nerd of something mainstream. As Billie demonstrates here, it’s the way you interact with that “multibillion dollar cultural phenomenon” that really brings out the nerd. Like, when I was in high school this “popular” (for whatever that means) girl in one of my classes was talking about how she had gone to see the latest Harry Potter movie. However, when she talked about it, she didn’t recall Dumbledore’s name; she described him as “that guy who died and then everyone was sad.” This was vastly different from way my nerd ass used to interact with Harry Potter.
Also, with Star Wars there’s this sense that “Star Wars is not that nerdy… Everyone’s seen it” and like… that’s not true. It’s popularity levels really shift a lot, and right now I think it’s more popular than when I was in high school. But, 2012, high school English class, we watched Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope. And like three kids in the class had seen it. I wasn’t even one of them, and honestly, if I hadn’t been shown it in that class, I would have gone on not seeing it. Also, a lot of kids in the class didn’t even know that much about Star Wars– like, they were actively expecting Luke and Leia to get together. (I at least knew about THAT.)
(Of the Skywalker Saga, I’ve seen four out of the nine.)
“That guy who died and then everyone was sad” describes, like, half the characters in Harry Potter. I swear, that series ended up having a higher named-character body count than Game of Thrones. (Also, it didn’t have a lot of women in it. Like, it gets a D on the Bechdel Test – technically a pass, but hardly a meritorious performance.)
It had several women in it, it’s just they were mostly adults that were barely on screen (Minerva, Molly, Tonks), evil (Bellatrix, Petunia, Draco’s mum, Umbridge) or dead (Lily) actually.
For teenage girls with personalities, you got Hermione, Ginny and Luna and that was basically it.
But pretty much every important character that gets significant screen time or does something pivotal except Hermione, Ginny or Luna is a guy. Whether it be Dumbledore, Lupin, Sirius, Hagrid, Snape etc..
It’s kind of like Naruto where a lot of female characters existed, but they were hardly the focus and you’ve forgotten half of them were there because of it.
I mean, Naruto’s problem is that it doesn’t actually have a lot of female characters, it has one female character that it’s copy-pasted and re-skinned like 15 times.
Tsunade, Sakura, Hinata, Ino, Ten-Ten, and Temari all had their unique differences and even good arcs when first introduced. But they all got sidelined later on and only had smaller parts in things.
Interesting! I knew about Star Wars as a kid because of Lego sets and colouring books, though I didn’t see the original trilogy until at least high school. In grade 10 (2003-04 for me), I went to an “artsy” school, and one day there was an informal debate, fairly class-wide, about whether people preferred Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings.
I don’t know how well people knew either (I’d read all of LOTR and watched the movies, but wasn’t as deep into the lore as my brother was), but I wonder how much “artsy” patterns with “nerdy”?
I mean, I used to be a nerd about James Joyce, but some people classify being geeky about literature as more “artsy” …and I noticed that I went for “geeky” instead of “nerdy” there; maybe Reltzik is right and “geeky” is better for to “knowing a lot of facts about and/or having a lot of interest in something particular”?
(anyway 2003 was when the LOTR movies were a big thing)
I think sometimes “geek/geeky” flows better than “nerd/nerdy,” but sometimes the reverse is true as well. I looked at both the Wikipedia articles earlier, and I think I can see “geek” a little bit more, but overall, there’s enough overlap that I’m not really pressed about it.
I think about how Marvel is incredibly mainstream and YET I still think I’m a nerd/geek because of how much I love the actual comics universe. Like, “I keep a spreadsheet of costume and team member changes dating from 1962- present” levels of love.
But there’s no men here, I think is the element that’s got me puzzled. And also neither of them mentioned Catholics. I think I’m just gonna have to Not Get It™ on this one, tbh, it seems like the kinda joke where you had to be there.
Okay, I know SOMEBODY in the comments “called” this. Maybe not exactly the Kylo Ren thing, but something about Jedi? At least the idea that Ruth might repurpose the robe!
I’d pay large sums of money for a gal like Billie to infodump cool lore at me. Star Wars, Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy, any of it. A smokin’-hot person explaining nerd shit is like the ideal scenario.
There’s a reason I’m not single and it’s cool women existing. Billie needs to start being cool like in Panel 4 and she’ll be absolutely drowning in suitors.
Looking at my own nerdy interests: Doctor Who was the biggest show in the UK for years. Star Trek was a revolution in television that is used as a cultural touchstone to the present day. Discworld regularly topped the best-selling lists and Sir Terry rejoiced in being “the most shoplifted author in Britain”. And while comics are still pretty niche, the characters created in them have basically taken over cinema and TV lately.
Most “nerdy” interests are kind of mainstream. The question is, are you a nerd about them? I definitely am, and so is J-Billz.
Another angle on the nerd thing is that Jennifer may be a past nerd. She talked before about running a Kit Fisto fanfiction site as a preteen. Lots of kids get really into something and then move on to other interests as they grow up. She obviously still remembers details from then, but is she really a Star Wars nerd now if she’s not paying attention to it anymore?
I don’t think that’s the intent here, given that this is Willis, but I’m not sure it’s ruled out.
Also, Star Wars lore is so weird because half of it is backfilled and often canonized fan ideas.
Obi-Wan and Owen wore the same robes in A New Hope because Obi-Wan was in hiding on Tatooine. We didn’t see any other Jedi or any talk about “Jedi robes”. Since he’s our only example, the outfit gets associated with Jedi in the audience’s mind and the filmmakers stick with it. First having his Force ghost show up looking the same way, then having Yoda wear something vaguely similar.
By the time of the prequels it’s deeply ingrained that those were “Jedi robes”, so we need an explanation for why Jedi wear farmer robes. (An explanation that also assumes farmers everywhere dress the way they do on the bit of Tatooine we see.)
I mean sure – given that the big trope of Star Wars is “Planet of Hats”. But why pick Tatooine as “what farmers dress like” when Jedi adopted the garb of the common farmer, as Jennifer puts it?
This is why I used to like Billie so much (not just because I look like her lol).
As she grew closer with Ruth she started caring less about her super powered cheerleader look and persona, and became more comfortable just being her own genuine self, finally opening up to the world but especially to Ruth.
Their relationship started toxic because that was the starting position of both of them just in regular life in general, and yeah it got worse for a time but then it got better, way way better, and life improved dramatically for them, and they’re in a better position in life even after their break up (yeah they both have issues but the severe depression and deep alcoholism is gone for them both and those are huge hurdles to overcome).
I don’t think it was inevitable that they would break up like some people here do, I think they could’ve worked for a while more in in world time, but I understand that it was both possible and made sense that it could happen in world, and also that after 10 years of this comic running, it made sense to change up the dynamics.
She justifies her insecurities to herself by projecting them onto the rest of the world. She’s forever spinning her wheels in the first stage of “fake it ‘till you make it”.
“I’m not a nerd! Everyone knows about Star Wars! It’s part of the mainstream cultural zeitgeist!”
“I’m not bisexual! Is that even really a thing? Everyone fools around a little with their friends!”
(Whoops, hit “Post Comment” before completing the thought.)
She’s desperate for social status and to be “normal”, therefore anything she’s proud of is “normal” in her world. Everyone else also has the same hangups as she does, but they’re all hiding them too.
What really amuses me is that i think this is almost word-for-word something Malaya said about Sal back in the day. Life imitates art, the fandom imitates the characters…
FFS. It’s not nerdom its fandom. Fandoms can have people from all walks of life. What year is it that this “nerd” stigma is so ingrained in billie’s psyche?
Nah, it was still plenty mainstream. People just generally didn’t enjoy those three movies as much, from what I can tell. Now, I don’t think that there’s a lot of actually iconic, reference-worthy scenes in ’em, but they really didn’t do anything to diminish how well-known the rest of the series is.
It’s really hard to tell. Especially as an older fan.
The discussion around the prequels was also overwhelmingly bad at the time. We’ll really have to wait until the people who saw these as kids grow up and we’ll see then how they really play out.
They weren’t made for fans. They weren’t made for adults. And that’s true for both the prequels and the Disney movies.
From what I’ve seen, the newer movies have definitely increased the familiarity with the rest of the series. Source: I’ve worked with kids before they were out, while they were coming out, and since they’ve been out.
Hardly. If you compare the initial release box office numbers for the films in each of the three trilogies, they all performed comparably comparably well. If you look at the viewership of the Disney+ series every new Star Wars show has thus far pulled between 20% and 25% of the then current US subscriber base for the platform which is similar to the Marvel shows. Disney largely hasn’t made The Fans™ happy, especially in theaters, but they have still maintained the general audience interest quite well and The Fans™ still pay to go see the movies in theaters anyway, regardless of how much they whine about them online afterward.
Poor Billie, she needs to spend more time around people who aren’t going to judge her for knowing things they don’t, I.E., anyone other than Raidah, Asher and who was the other one. . .
She made a joke about how she was going to Kit Fisto Jennifer that night and she took it as meaning Ruth would off her the same way Darth Sidious unceremoniously killed Kit Fisto
It’s ok Jennifer. I, too, own a Jedi robe from when I was Revan for a Halloween party 10 years ago. And don’t believe them when they say that temp black hair dye comes out with a hair wash. No…no it does not.
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idk if Kylo Ren is much of an improvement
maybe Emo Kylo Ren
Isn’t Emo Kylo Ren just Kylo Ren?
Isn’t Emo Kylo Ren just Ethan. Except without all the force powers.
As far as we know.
It’s not that Kylo Ren lost his force powers when he took the role Ethan. He just can’t work up the motivation to use them anymore. What’s the point?
If only this strip uploaded on Star Wars Day.
*plays “Star Wars Theme” on hacked muzak*
I would have used the Cantina song, but that’s just fine.
Ooooo! I’ll follow it up right now!
thanks!
*followed by “Cantina Band”*
If we’re gonna hack the muzak for the party, i think we should go full on disco
Fun fact: this genre of music is known in-universe as jizz music.
It was obviously a wordplay on jazz, but replacing the ‘a’ with an ‘i’ would prove, in hindsight, a bad idea, due to a slang term with the same spelling becoming mainstream quite a while later.
I mean, look at what happened with IRL brand names like Corona hard seltzer.
Naming choices that seem good at the present can unpredictably and inevitably become disreputable because of events that absolutely nobody could have anticipated.
The slang term dates back to WWII, at least.
what is star wars day?
May 4th
May the Fourth be with you.
(also I accidentally flagged your post when going for the reply button – whoever’s reviewing the flagged posts, I didn’t mean to flag it)
I KNEW I wasn’t the only one that happened to!
I did it twice in ten minutes the other day…
Judging by the number of people I’ve seen apologizing for it, you’re far from alone.
wasn’t may the 4rth a memory of Kent-State shootings?
I mean, yes, but at this point Star Wars is definitely more associated with May 4th for most people.
Isn’t it a bit of canceling then?
There are two Star Wars days. May the Fourth, but also May 25th which is the day the first ever Star Wars movie came out.
Incidentally, it is ALSO Towel Day (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) and The Glorious 25th of May (Disc World), so i use it as my big nerd celebration day to walk around with a towel, a lilac sprig, and a star wars shirt.
Where do you live that lilacs are in bloom on the 25th? That’s been an ongoing mystery to me
Hm. Kylo Ren. Personally, I’d prefer the Grim Reaper costume.
It’s a last second replacement and you take what you can get.
I mean, you can get the Grim Reaper.
The reasons this is off the table are already established.
*sigh*
Really, though, there are other ways they could have gone. A cloak can get you a lot of the way there on a generally low-effort costume. As it does here– I just don’t really like Kylo Ren.
Eh, not really Kylo Ren without the Helmet. But black robe screams “generic Sith” to me
True. Billie just declared her Kylo Ren in the first panel.
What about a demon of some kind?
Like the Dread Pirate Roberts, but they would’ve needed a wheelbarrow too.
Or they could have just lit her on fire.
Now that’s a costume.
What, like Denethor?
Just curious, why the reaper? Personally, I love that too!
Because that’s what she was dressed as in the first place.
Who do you think is most likely to come to the party dressed as a reaper just out of shear irony?
Mike, risen from the dead for a single night to do exactly that.
Alas, we can only dream.
All-around asshole edgelord. Mike would have approved.
…. of course, he would have approved of the reaper as well.
Guy who kills his father. Fitting.
Ruth’s father died to a drunk driver.
Right, yes. I was talking about the other dead dads in the series.
(“Dads! Why does it always have to be dads!”)
Not that any of them was actually killed by their own progeny. I was just talking about the proliferation of dead dads.
A proliferation of dead dads.
A jake of Jedi.
Supernatural collective nouns:
https://wondermark.com/566/
Ben Swolo Ruth
Ruth sounds enough like Darth, maybe they could do something with that.
Ruth Sideous.
Darth Ruthless
Very convincing Billie, no one suspects a thing. In other news the sky is green, and all the cows in the world now have pink and blue spots on them.
What a time to be alive.
Does it count as suspecting if they outright know?
I imagine it wouldn’t count as suspecting, since suspecting means you only know that something is going on.
Also, I fat fingered the report button. I apologize and hope Willis can fix it/ignore it.
Unless the report count reaches the total, which is very high, absolutely nothing happens. Nobody should worry about accidentally hitting it.
In case anyone is wondering, the exact threshold is 10.
It is higher than that. I raised it some time ago.
Ah. Thanks for letting us know.
People apologize for accidental reports a lot, like, multiple times every day. Are you able to add to the “Thank you for your feedback. We will look into it” message so that it also reassures people not to worry if they hit the button by accident? It’s a kindhearted and anxious crowd, maybe they can have one fewer thing to worry about, if you can and wish it so.
Ok, this may sound uncharitable and isn’t true for most people here, but sometimes people publicly apologize about making a mistake as a roundabout way of broadcasting an opinion about the change. It is an anxiety thing for sure, if you hit the button there’s an instinct to panic and go “that’s not me, that’s not what I wanted or who I am, I didn’t mean it.” Which, obvs the threshold is high now, so it won’t have consequences for the person accidentally flagged. But really, nothing will stop that feeling, no after-flag comment that would really stop someone from apologizing if they felt they must. Pushing responsibility for soothing that feeling onto Willis is, I think, unfair.
I too am not a nerd, just obsessively absorbing niche pop-culture knowledge.
I am a nerd. And, as Percy Blake says in “The Scarlet Pimpernel;” “And DAMNED proud of it!”
Owen Lars x Kylo Ren OTP
Wait hang on, no, Owen is Kylo’s step-great-uncle, isn’t he
…I was gonna joke about this being the reason they broke up, but now I’m genuinely wondering if the big reveal is that Ruth and Billie are secretly related. Or that one of them thinks they are, anyway.
1. We know Billie’s mom sleeps around a lot, partially because Billie’s dad is always away on business trips, meaning it’s entirely possible he isn’t her biological father
2. When Asshole Gramps met Billie, he said Ruth “really is her father’s daughter,” suggesting that Ruth’s dad slept with women who resemble Billie in some way
3. It’s not directly relevant, but in the old continuity Ruth once walked in on her dad with Billie’s mom
…I seriously doubt they’re actually going to be related, but I could maybe imagine Ruth thinking they are.
That would be a crazy twist. 100 million internet brownie points if this turns out to be correct.
[insert Luke and Leia joke here]
This feels less like some crackpot theory that Ruth might for whatever reason buy into, and more like some crackpot theory that Billie might for whatever reason buy into.
Whaaat? Jennifer doesn’t buy into any crackpot theories at all!
Now if you’ll excuse her, she’s off to gather further evidence to finally convince the Indiana Daily Student that Sal Walkerton was, in fact, Amazi-Girl.
It is a little crackpot, yes.
More likely, Billie decides to go as Rey, and Ruth, upon realizing that Billie sees Reylo as genuinely romantic, becomes extremely worried about what that says about their relationship. (Granted, if we take Palpatine using the midichlorians to conceive Anakin as canon, then Reylo would also be incestuous.)
I refuse to accept any plot point involving the word “midichlorians” as canon. And I LIKE the prequels.
I interpreted the “You really are your father’s daughter” as “You, like your father, seem to be attracted to people who are crazy loose cannons.” I didn’t think it was about Billie’s physical appearance so much. But maybe!
she’s got a point but then immediatly torpedoed it like it was FDR
Know when to stop talking.
[Confused Tim Allen grunt]?
What does this have to do with the 32nd president?
https://www.warhistoryonline.com/featured/fdr-torpedo-us-navy-destroyer.html
En Route to North Africa, FDR Was Almost Killed by a Torpedo Fired By A US Navy Destroyer
Dec 22, 2015
“ There is truly no way to quantify who might be the worst crew in US Naval History, but the men of the USS William D. Porter circa 1943 deserve a fair shot at it. Mistakes happen in the chaos of war, and even the best have been known to make them. However, that typically doesn’t involve firing a live torpedo at the President of the United States as he traverses the Atlantic Ocean in the middle of a war.
It is certain that Hitler likely appreciated the help, but the President and Joint Chiefs on board the USS Iowa didn’t. Remarkably, this wasn’t the USS William D. Porter’s first mistake on this secretive voyage…”
Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.
I hope they actually gave FDR a rubber ducky and toy battleship for his bathtub.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Iowa_(BB-61)#/media/File%3AUSS_Iowa_(BB-61)_bathtub_DN-ST-86-02543.JPG
That photos is ADORBS.
Still, that moment of self-realization where you realize you’re undermining your own argument and not even convincing yourself.
Priceless.
Jennifer continually acts like one of the villains in an 80s comedy like Caddyshack or Revenge of the Nerds. The thing is, WHERE DID SHE LEARN TO? It’s been pretty mainstream to be a geek for even a non-timeshifted version of her character.
So her extreme reaction had to come from somewhere.
She’s been consistently focused on her social status in very rigidly defined roles and expectations, and given what little we know of her father, it wouldn’t surprise me if that came from him.
I think the only thing she gets from her father is money.
Agreed. I just assumed she picked it up from her high-school cheerleader clique.
I mean they have to differentiate themselves somehow. Skillfull routines flawlessly executed in relatively scantily clad outfits in the spotlight in front of the entire student body clearly isn’t going to do it.
What do you mean, it wasn’t the outfits that were scantily clad?
yeeeeeah, that’s the ticket!
That look says that Ruth doesn’t know who Owen Lars is. Time to bail, Billie, she’s not on your level.
The real reason why they broke up.
Sadly, I don’t think Ruth knows who Bail is, either.
Look, Jennifer, you’re not helping yourself but you are also extremely relatable. So there’s that.
My fiancée has that sword. He got it while working at Target. He did morning stock, he put it on the shelf, and said if one was still here when he was off, it was coming home with him. Well, it was there. I think he was at least fair and left it on the shelf til he was off… It’s been a while, I can’t remember. We still have it, it’s leaning in the hallway.
That doesn’t say “Pride of Place” to me.
It IS Kylo Ren’s sword, there’s no pride in having one.
Exactly.
Willis is getting a lot of mileage out of the meme in the hovertext—that’s, what, the second or third time it’s been used in as many weeks (and like the fourth time at least in the comic overall)?
My “Questions Already Answered By My Shirt Joke 4ever” shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt
So, like, Do you all think Jennifer/Billie plays SWTOR when she’s sure nobody’s looking?
I would not be surprised if Billie has insane ideas like only nerds play video games.
As a nerd who hates Star Wars, Billie is right about Star Wars being mainstream. There’s nothing wrong with being mainstream, but let’s not pretend Star Wars is some little indie project.
well, nothing wrong with being mainstream, and it’d be a dick to be a gatekeeper but i bet there are prolly a handful of star wars fans that wish it was less obscure (other than collecting merch/enjoying all the new series that comes out)
Less obscure how?!
It could get slightly more inescapable, I bet.
Yes and no. Sure, Star Wars is mainstream, but it’s possible to be nerdy about something mainstream. Most people have seen some of it and are aware of the basic stories and concepts, but it’s not mainstream to run a fanfiction blog about a minor character.
Sure, but I never said you couldn’t be nerdy about a mainstream thing. I said Star Wars is mainstream. You’re arguing against something I never said.
Mainstream, eh? So how many Kylo Ren swords do you own?
Actually, growing up in the 50s/60s I still haven’t yet adapted to SF being mainstream. Parents and teachers alike solemnly assured me growing up that reading Science Fiction would rot my brain. And yet look at me today.
Maybe that isn’t as good an argument as I think it is.
i’d wager your teachers’ brain area good deal more rotten than yours at point.
hrm hrm. take two.
i’d wager your teachers’ brains are a good deal more rotten than yours at this point.
Not just that she owns it. That could be explained by “I liked it when I was a kid”. She brought it to school with her.
Despite her pose of not being into that nerdy star wars stuff.
I own zero Star Wars related things except I think someone gifted me KOTOR 2 on Steam many years ago.
The day I saw the word “Accio” being recognized by her is the day I saw her downfall in nerdiness.
As if Ruth isn’t better dressed up as a witchKylo? Nah, she’s more like Palpatine, but the Order 66 is breaking femurs
Ruth is not subtle enough to be a Palpatine.
So a Vader then?
My instinct was Maul, actually.
And not Tyranus, given her position of authority?
Nah, Ruth’s not calm and collected enough to be Dooku
Maul eventually attains a position of authority, and I feel like he’s a better match for her leadership style.
True, true. That’s definitely a point in favor.
Maul also has a younger brother who’s a colossal dork and an evil manipulative grandfather figure.
but it was Kenobi who stole his femurs. And Anakins. Maybe she should be Obi-wan Kenobi
Kenobi does have a habit of taking femurs and then the people coming after them for revenge, huh
Was Palatine subtle or was Anakin denser than Thor’s hammer?
A bit of both, really
Subtle in the sense that instead of being a brute-force conqueror, Palpatine becomes emperor by corrupting systems from within and manipulating events to his own advantage.
When your potential political opponents include Jar Jar Binks, the galaxy is pretty much begging to be conquered for your extremely merchandise-friendly evil empire.
Present-day real-life parallels a coincidence, but existent.
What’s the strip with the “Accio” reference?
All of them. Willis’s process is magical.
I mean, you don’t think a mere mortal could maintain that kind of buffer, do you?
Yeah he can’t maintain a buffer that’s currently until *checks notes* good gravy, New Year’s.
Anyways, sauced that reference up
Awesomesauce! Thank you!
Ruth is a sports fan. She may not have even Star Wars.
Sports nerd.
The particular Leafs jersey she wore (on her date, I think) is evidence.
(I also fat-finger reported you. I shouldn’t leave comments here via phone.)
I accidentally Star Wars, is that bad?
Believe it or not, there is a massive crossover with hockey culture and nerd pop culture.
The whole thing?
Honestly, these days sometimes it feels like you’re not allowed to be a nerd if what you’re into ISN’T the big popular multimillion-dollar media franchise and/or the hot new show everyone is talking about.
Of course I also feel dumb because I don’t single-handedly know everything about my interests in things like late 19c-early 20c period dramas, the Islamic Golden Age, fungi, or slightly obscure but not very if you’re in the wider fandom tabletop RPGs, so I guess I’m less a nerd and more just a weirdo.
Do you recommend any RPGs? What is your favorite fungus?
Nobody asked me, but for the sake of spreading the love, my favorite tabletop system is Call of Cthulhu. It’s a nice and easy format to learn and there’s a lot of mileage for campiness if you play the Pulp version
CoC is definitely one of the favorites I keep coming back to.
My favorite fungi are truffles.
Mine is yeast. Helping us make alcoholic drinks and pastries for thousands of years, now being modified to produce cannabis oils at outstanding efficiency, they’ve got to be some of the most useful fungi ever known.
But really, all fungi play a really important role in the environment and sometimes even endosymbiosis in other organisms.
You’re a nerd in my book.
do you know of any fungi that parasites frequent for food?
Some of the “functional” mushrooms are supposed to be good for ADHD, although I found that they just made me mean and irritable.
“nutriceuticals,” and all that jazz.
Wait, you mean you tried psyoglobin mushrooms before?
Like the iconic cap from Alice in Wonderland?
No, I was talking more about the stuff you get from Four Sigmatic, MUD/WTR, Om mushrooms, teeccino… the powdered “smart” mushrooms you can add to your morning hot beverage as a supplement. Some of them, like Lion’s Mane and Chaga and Cordyceps, are supposed to be calming for ADHD and focus. Reishi and Turkey Tail are supposed to bolster the immune system. Your mileage may vary. I found Lion’s Mane especially made me irritable. I take a combination daily now that makes me calmer and helps me curb my impulse to overeat.
I used to go wild mushroom hunting up in the mountains, but that was many years ago, when I was very young.
I love so many mushrooms, though… shitaki and portabello and truffles… I just love them all. Even the little white buttons! Sautee them in butter with garlic and onions… *Mwah!*
Mmm… you’re making me hungry for mushrooms!
Wild chanterelles and chestnuts and nettles are the reasons you will never go hungry in France. All you need grows wild.
Yeah ha ha now I’m hungry for em too
maybe sautéed with green or white onion sweetened with baking soda.
You’ve been to France? So cool!
Used to live there. Actually, I’ve lived a lot of places, been part of a lot of communities, have friends and family from all over the world, literally.
…I guess that’s why the whole “cultural appropriation” taboo around the use of accents and languages never really made much sense to me. To me, it’s all just friends and family. I guess you could say that languages and accents and folk culture are my “special interest.” And I always just wanted to learn as much as I could about them and use them as truly and respectfully as I could. Leaving other cultures alone and not participating in them, not wanting to learn them, that never felt particularly respectful to me.
…Now, that said, sometimes people do go overboard. That’s why I no longer use MUD/WTR mushrooms anymore: their website and company literature is just chockablock full of cheap exploitation of the references and terms of cultures that they have no part in preserving or caring for or engaging with. They just do it to look cool.
Om Mushrooms is a bit the same way, but much less so.
Kind of depends on how much the community owning the culture chooses to export its own values and ideals and trappings and terms, and how much the users of that culture lift up and support the original owners of that culture.
…Anyway, mushrooming can get appropriative, for sure, but you’ve just gotta be ecologically responsible, respectful of labor, and respectful of the plant itself.
…Sorry — hobby horse.
…Speaking of cultural appropriation and Owen Lars’s farming robes, there’s a Wondermark cartoon on that very topic. I won’t link it here, because it gets rather horrible, but the gist is that the Jedi were basically just play-acting at being simple farmers.
Can you explain what you mean by “the whole “cultural appropriation” taboo around the use of accents and languages”? I can think of some instances where putting on another accent I’d think would be okay and don’t really see a taboo around. Then there are instances I encounter more frequently where yes, it is a problem. Like a student putting on an Indian accent to read aloud from a science textbook because doing so makes it “funny.” From what I’m thinking of, there’s pushback around the use of accents (and, I guess, out of context words from other languages?) because it often *isn’t* done respectfully. But I don’t really know what you’re thinking about in this regard.
yeah, the conversation about cultural appropriation is a good thing if it leads to white/western folks trying to be more aware of our position as culturally privileged, but it can be overemphasized and misused, i think.
calling any and all cultural curiosity and engagement with other cultures “appropriative” feels more like a punishment and a backlash than a respectful engagement with people affected by truly culturally exploitative behaviour.
Thanks for asking. I’m trying to figure out how to explain without revealing too many personal details. It’s a little tricky. I’m not sure how to do it.
Ok, well, let’s take an example that’s already been discussed here. I’m comfortable using words like “compa” and “otaku” because I participate with the source cultures through my friends and family and community. I don’t consider it appropriate either to use a non-English source word when that word is the best fit for the context. Language is like a river that many streams flow into, for me, and sorting out the words into just one language at a time sometimes feels like unnecessary effort.
Accents is a little trickier. I’m not talking about putting on a fake accent just for laughs. Although sometimes (for example, when telling a story about intervening in a dispute between two English-speakers who couldn’t understand each other because their accents were different) using the source accents for illustration can be essential to the story’s meaning.
My brain tends to mirror people almost unconsciously, but consciously too. I don’t know if that’s a trauma response or a learned people skill, but I spend a lot of time analyzing speech patterns and attempting to use the dominant speech pattern correctly. That means that, when I am talking to someone, I will automatically start to pick up their accent and dialect within a few minutes of the conversation starting. That’s my way of trying to be respectful to them, and I find it often improves communication.
I used to spend a lot of time listening to BBC and practicing “instantaneous echo,” or listening to foreign-language TV and practicing simultaneous translation. I have a few “home” regional dialects I default to, but certain local turns of phrase from other regions simply stick in my mind and become part of my standard vocabulary, simply because they are meaningful to me and because the people who first said them to me mean a lot to me.
When it comes to performing (storytelling, singing…) using an accent can be a way to distinguish between characters or personas, for example. It can also be for effect, or because the accent or dialect is relevant to the context. But it’s also a form of homage: “These were the people I learned this art form from. I’m going to imitate the way they do it, right down to the way they shape their vowels, for the purpose of this song or story, because I want everyone to know where this song or story came from, and how carefully I learned it from them.” To me, imitation is the most “natural” way to communicate. It feels forced and stilted to use anything other than the manner of speech originally suited to the piece of culture (story, song, poem…) being used.
Being someone whose work has brought me into many different communities, that “plasticity” helps me to blend in and better stand in solidarity to serve those communities. When a company adopts a cultural word (like “Sherpa,” for example) just to be hip and not out of any respect for that culture, then I do find it offensive.
I have to learn to walk that line. I recently watched an episode of The Andy Griffith Show where a stranger comes to town after having learned all about everyone in advance by reading the local paper, and his attempts to blend in really freak everyone out. (https://neogriffithism.wordpress.com/2017/07/12/stranger-in-town/) It illustrates the “uncanny valley” effect you get when someone tries too hard to “act natural”. (Actually, it’s a sympathetic portrayal of someone who constructs a personal identity around a obsessive interest in the minute details of a specific subculture, but is unaware of social boundaries and gets perceived as “creepy” or “weird” instead.)
But that’s what many immigrants do all the time: they read news, watch TV & movies, watch clothing trends, and do everything they can to assimilate and blend into the dominant culture as quickly as possible. Some even anglicize their names and train to “lose their accent”. So it seems only fair to attempt to adapt to various communities by speaking their language, adopting their speech mannerisms, gestures, and customs, when speaking to them or participating in their culture. To me, that’s only polite.
…But I do understand that cosmopolitanism and “plasticity” of speech is no longer considered polite. It harkens back to minstrelsy — where cultural imitation was used for mockery and oppression. American music is still struggling to wrap its head around its own heritage as a “melting pot” forged with layer upon layer of cross-cultural imitation and parody, back and forth.
The idea that one’s cultural presentation has to be baked into one’s DNA or the neighborhood where one first lived as a child is very sad to me. I have a hard time limiting myself to that, and — with family roots and ties from all over — it’s hard to pick just one to be the “true” “authentic” cultural identity. As Whitman said, “I am vast. I contain multitudes.”
…But that’s a particular problem. Maybe others are better at limiting their speech than I am. Maybe that’s a skill I need to learn now, and that’s how people want to be respected now. But it doesn’t feel homey to me.
-*”…don’t consider it “inappropriate”, either.” Typo!
I don’t know that that addressed what my question was, but it was interesting to read, so thanks.
Oh! I’m sorry, Yumi. Could you please rephrase your question so I can answer it more specifically? I’m not sure where my answer veered off from what you were asking.
Just watched an amazing video on Trevor Noah’s use of various accents and dialects: https://www.thesouthafrican.com/lifestyle/celeb-news/trevor-noah-master-of-accents-compilation-video-watch/
Of course, his use of AAVE (sometimes called “Blaccent”) has been criticized as mockery and cultural appropriation, too. And perhaps it is — I don’t know, not having the same firsthand experience of US folks descended from Africans who were enslaved in North America. And I know that not everything Trevor Noah does is acceptable coming from people who aren’t Trevor Noah (biracial South African, world traveler…).
But I do identify with many of his sentiments and struggles around the “plastic” (as in flexible and flowing) use of language.
Oh, OK, I see where I went wrong in answering you. Got it, now – sorry!
You were asking what I meant by a “cultural appropriation taboo.” I mean like the backlash against Awkwafina, for example, for being a Chinese American rapper and using her rap persona in her acting career. Or when Trevor Noah is called out for using AAVE. Or how someone like James Doohan (who was an absolute master of accents and a language nerd) might not be cast in a cross-cultural role today for fear of offending those whose accent he is using. And, more generally, how the art of learning accents and developing a world vocabulary is now looked down upon because of its relationship with colonialism.
I mean, those critiques are certainly important and valid! It’s important to lift up performers from source cultures and to push forward opportunities for them to shine. Like how “Siddig El Fadil / Alexander Siddig”, who is biracial and multicultural, found himself an “accidental Arab,” in his words, typecast in stereotypical Arab roles, but then grew to embrace it and use his platform to bring depth and nuance to people formerly made into caricatures in popular media.
So, what I mean is, it IS important to give first priority to the voices of speakers who authentically self identify their own roots as coming from the source cultures whose accents and words and arts get “borrowed” and incorporated into dominant culture. But some folks don’t fit into neat cultural boxes, and trying to cram all the “spaghetti” (ties every which way) into a single cultural identity “box” — for fear of offending others — feels unnatural and forced, to me.
That’s just me, though. Your mileage may vary.
Okay, that’s kind of what I was thinking. I guess I wasn’t sure about the use of “taboo” to describe those things, so I wasn’t sure if there was something else.
It’s an interesting conversation, and I thank you for sharing so much; I’m just not going to continue with it because, well, this isn’t the optimal setting for it (formatting-wise, dealing with popups-wise, time-limited-checking-wise, etc.)
I find it very interesting as well!
So sorry you have to deal with those annoying pop-ups Yumi!
I always look at the comic through Brave Browser and never get any annoying ads, maybe it’ll work for you too?
Totally understood. Cool raoul.
Thank you, Yumi!
Thank you, NG!
Thank you, milu!
(So sorry to anyone wading through comments for the thread-jack!)
I think of myself as a nerd and I don’t know anything about any superhero movie franchises, dont watch anime, dont play video games (too poor lol).
I do find that the nerd spaces I frequent tend to have a lot of references to these cultures, whatever other special interest i might share. So I get the feeling of relative exclusion. But I guess I’m used to being a loner when it comes to my weird obsessions, and I’m used to compartmentalising my interests (i can chat about feminist history all night with this one friend, this one online community is all about palaeontology, my brother wont shut up about philosophy and anarchism, another friend is a professional cinema editor and we will talk about movies incessantly, ummm I’m currently lacking a good outlet for my obsession with linguistics and language learning though)
How about Wiktionary and the language/linguistics/word-reference substacks?
yeah, good idea. there’s also subreddits and discords and whatnot, obviously =)
i kind of stumbled into the handful of online communities (such as this one) i’m a part of, i’ve never deliberately stepped into one with the intent of finding people to talk to and learn from. so i guess i’m a bit intimidated, i’m like “but how do you do it”. when actually, i realize there’s nothing complicated to it, you just start reading and posting or whatever =D
Yeah. The interwebs are full of us language nerds!
I definitely consider myself a nerd, and I’m into some things that are more popular like Star Wars and Star Trek, and other things that are either a bit more to a lot more obscure. Though I do get that feeling like I’m not as nerdy as I think I am sometimes when I remember I don’t know all there is to know about some obscure thing I’m into.
I love this consistent aspect of Billie/Jennifer, like how she also loves Kit Fisto.
Yeah we don’t actually know that’s Kyla’s saber. It could just be a kit bash for Jennifer’s self insert grey Jedi fan character.
Billie is the one who connects it to Kylo Ren, but that could just be a deflection for what you said.
Auto corrected “Kylo” to “Kyla”! Effing a Cotton, effing a!
Kyla Ren Cries Cologne?
Let the nerd flow through you
I gotta say Jennifer seems like a real Star Wars fan. As in not one of the many douche nerd bros that try to gatekeeper the fan base and bash anything new and different like a Jedi being black or a woman. I’m really interested in her opinion on the new Disney era films and Disney+ shows. What did she think of Star Wars Visions? I personally think is the best thing to come out of it so far along with the Mandolorian.
Damn ok so forget about being an everyday fan she’s deep in the fandom.
And here I’m thinking seeing 10 star wars movies and knowing the name of 4 alien races an 5 plantes and knowing the difference between star wars legends continuity lore and Disney continuity lore made me a fan.
It starts by watching one of the movies. Then maybe you play Jedi: Fallen Order or the Force Unleashed (Not Force Unleashed 2 though, it was kinda trash) Next thing you know you’ve watched all of Clone Wars including the Genndy Tartakovsky mini series, have played through both Kotors twice, and now stan Darth Revanchist.
I mean, I believe we first learned about her being into Star Wars when she revealed she created a fanfic blog dedicated to Kit Fisto. Just knowing that name makes you a huge Star Wars nerd (I don’t think he was ever named in the movies) and she wrote fanfics about him.
It is no surprise at all she is so deep into the fandom.
He had a memorable showing in some of the cartoons, which were pretty popular with kids
I really want to argue that knowing Kit Fisto just means you watched Clone Wars and that doesn’t make you a big fan but I fear that just comes off like Jennifer does in this very moment. Watching Clone Wars is actually a fairly substantial commitment to the franchise.
To be fair, it is less commitment than I originally assumed. I figured it was on the same level of obscure lore, where you needed to hunt comics or books to be aware of, I didn’t know he appeared in the cartoon. As it turns out, Wookipedia is surprisingly shit at giving you a simple answer like “where this character appeared” so I wasn’t aware.
Hmm? Literally every Wookieepedia article on pretty much anything ends with a whole section dedicated solely to listing “where X appeared”.
It’s in this kind of scrolling box thing, near but not quite at the bottom – you kind of have to scroll though paragraph after paragraph of potential spoilers to reach it!
If you’re not using the mobile version of the site, you can just click the link to the Appearances section in the infomenu near the top of the article to skip right by all that.
Wait, what’s the 10th movie? The Clone Wars pilot? Please don’t tell me it’s the Holiday Special.
Rogue One.
Oh yeah, I literally completely forgot that Rogue One and Solo exist. I’ve seen both, they just apparently left such a small impression that my brain went to the Holiday Special before them.
That’s a terrible place to go to. You have my sympathy.
Rogue One was better than episodes I, II, III, and VII. Combined.
VII? The Force Awakens is the only watchable part of the sequel trilogy. It’s an uninspired rehash, but it doesn’t hate Star Wars like The Last Jedi did and it’s not Rise of Skywalker. Also, Rogue One was trash and makes A New Hope worse just by its existence.
TFA was the only of the sequels I watched, because it left me ABSOLUTELY DO NOT WANT about wasting time watching the other two.
There’s literally one bad part in Rogue One, and it’s when they push a ship with a much smaller ship, which is absolutely bonkers stupid and I hate it.
You do realize that in space you can push a ship with a much smaller ship just fine on account of no friction. It even works to a certain extent on low friction surfaces like water. They even have these things called tugboats whose job it is to push much larger boats.
TFA isn’t just “an uninspired rewash” – it has no good antagonists (at least Palpatine was watchable in the prequels), it completely nullfies the protagonists achievements in the OT, and the bad Dragon is defeated by the heroes. I mean, why would I care about watching the next two, the heroes are already able to beat the Dragon!
Did they really beat Kylo in the first one, though? Chewie shot the fuck out of him, he nearly killed Finn, and Rey managed to survive him long enough to get off the exploding planet, but he recovered from the fight more or less immediately. I don’t think “scrambling not to die” counts as a defeat.
Yeah, it’s weird how they expected us to be scared about Vader in Empire Strikes Back after Han took him out in one shot in A New Hope.
I thought TFA was a very interesting remix. From a thousand feet it looks like an uninspired rehash. You can make a list of similarities and check them off and walk away satisfied you understand it.
But if you look a bit deeper, the similarities seem more and more surface level. The same, or at least similar, elements are there, but they’re shuffled up. They don’t do what they’re supposed to, if it was just a rehash.
Using Kylo Ren as the example: On the surface, he’s just Darth Vader, but not as good at it. Except that’s the intent. That’s the point. He’s not Vader. He’s a Darth Vader wannabe. He’s not really the Dragon, as JBento puts it. It doesn’t matter that the heroes can beat him in the first movie, since that’s not really his role.
Of course, the real problem with the trilogy is that there was no planning. No one in overall control to make the damn thing coherent.
For what it’s worth, my problem with Rogue One and Solo, aside from the simple fact that I just didn’t find them memorable, is that they start from a place of answering questions no one was asking. No one was, in good faith, wondering why the Death Star had such a specific weakness. No one needs a backstory for Han Solo. Same reason I’m not planning on watching the Kenobi series. The best Star Wars stuff is always the stuff that pulls away from the plot of the main series and just tells its own stories within the world of Star Wars (e.g. The Mandalorian, Visions), because it’s a cool setting whose main strength is that you can kinda do whatever you want in it, and the more direct spin-offs don’t really take advantage of that.
I’d say that each of episodes 7, 8 and 9 were better than 7, 8 and 9 combined.
Rogue One is great, I actually consider it better than some of the Sequel movies. And I don’t really get why some people didn’t like Solo, I thought it was a pretty decent Star Wars movie.
Solo leaned a bit too hard on hitting all the defining moments of Han Solo lore, but I liked it overall. It was pretty cool just as a heist movie in space.
Shame it didn’t do well. I was looking forward to seeing some of what it set up for a sequel.
Same.
Be a dork Billie/Jennifer. All the top execs are.
You can absolutely be a nerd about something mainstream. I mean, there are sports nerds. Not superfans, mind you, though there is definitely overlap. Sports nerds are the kinds of people who can give you a full history of the sport from its inception to the present day from memory, to levels of detail varying from the general eras and a few quintessential players and moments to literally every game that’s ever been played professionally. They keep extensive spreadsheets of player and team stats. They don’t just have memorabilia, they COLLECT memorabilia; they’ve got display cases and binders and an appraiser on speed-dial. They’re not a fan of a team; they’re a fan of the game.
I would argue many fans are sports nerds and dorks.
Evidence:
1) Get really excited about matches and games the way I would about episodes of a show I love.
2) Tell everyone how excited they are about it and seek connections with other excited people.
3) Get very emotional when it goes well or badly due to investment.
4) Theorise about how things could go and get excited when predictions are right.
5) Collect cards or memorabillia related to the sport. Anything associated with it is considered worthwhile. Which is how I feel about my video game or anime or show interests.
6) No one that is even an iota invested can shut up about who their favourite player or team is or why they are the favourites.
Billie’s so cool. I want her to be unapologetically nerdy, she’d slay at it.
I completely, 100% agree, Billie.
You are absolutely, positively, totally, without a doubt, indubitably not a nerd.
And I too am absolutely, positively, totally, without a doubt, indubitably not a nerd.
…
The correct term is geek.
(If anyone disagrees with the above distinction of terminology, please post said disagreement in a thought-out, coherent, grammatically-correct, and above all civil reply to the above. Responses will be fielded in a similarly thought-out, coherent, grammatically-correct, and above-all civil manner by those who disagree with the disagreement. Meanwhile, I will be fleeing for dear life from the scene of the crime like the flame-war arsonist that I am.)
no how dare u!!! n3rdz 4ever!
…Okay, seriously: the linguistics student side of me says both are fine.
But as a writer, I find that “geeky” is more flexible. It seems to pattern more with the meaning “geekily interested in something particular,” whether or not that particular thing falls in the realm of traditionally “nerd” interests.
And perhaps there’s the issue of “nerd” being coded more negatively than “geek” in the recent past. (That’s only a guess and now I’m curious; what are your reasons for this distinction?)
I’d answer, but milu said it better than I could, so read their response.
“Geek Love” is an amazing and terribly sad book. Using the original meaning of “geek”: one who bites the heads off chickens for the amusement of carnival-goers.
I always think of a geek as someone who bites the heads off of chickens. I am a fount of useless knowledge so I never graduated to nerd/geek status in anything.
As Milhouse famously said: “I’m not a nerd. Nerds are smart.”
i like both words? there are slight connotative differences depending on context though.
nerds are bookish. when something catches their fancy they want to learn everything that has ever been written about it, for no other purpose than their intense desire to figure it out.
geeks are all about learning too, but their goal isn’t pure, gratuitous knowledge. They want to hack into the high school database, or solder together a device to prove their pesky little sister has been into their room while they were gone, or learn to pick locks because whatever, picking locks is cool. they’ll figure out what illegal thing they can do with that skill later.
In other contexts, a “nerd” is a shy, socially awkward personality, someone who thinks they have no charisma, but if you prove a kindred spirit, or just a curious enough listener, will positively light up and become wildly extroverted.
a “geek” is a quirkier, more self-aware and savvier type, one who knows they are a bit of a weirdo but decided long ago that made them cool, actually. Besides, being the person your friends call when they desperately need to crack a game or set up a sound system is primo social currency.
You said it perfectly, milu!
thanks haha =)
I definitely think you can be a nerd of something mainstream. As Billie demonstrates here, it’s the way you interact with that “multibillion dollar cultural phenomenon” that really brings out the nerd. Like, when I was in high school this “popular” (for whatever that means) girl in one of my classes was talking about how she had gone to see the latest Harry Potter movie. However, when she talked about it, she didn’t recall Dumbledore’s name; she described him as “that guy who died and then everyone was sad.” This was vastly different from way my nerd ass used to interact with Harry Potter.
Also, with Star Wars there’s this sense that “Star Wars is not that nerdy… Everyone’s seen it” and like… that’s not true. It’s popularity levels really shift a lot, and right now I think it’s more popular than when I was in high school. But, 2012, high school English class, we watched Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope. And like three kids in the class had seen it. I wasn’t even one of them, and honestly, if I hadn’t been shown it in that class, I would have gone on not seeing it. Also, a lot of kids in the class didn’t even know that much about Star Wars– like, they were actively expecting Luke and Leia to get together. (I at least knew about THAT.)
(Of the Skywalker Saga, I’ve seen four out of the nine.)
“That guy who died and then everyone was sad” describes, like, half the characters in Harry Potter. I swear, that series ended up having a higher named-character body count than Game of Thrones. (Also, it didn’t have a lot of women in it. Like, it gets a D on the Bechdel Test – technically a pass, but hardly a meritorious performance.)
It had several women in it, it’s just they were mostly adults that were barely on screen (Minerva, Molly, Tonks), evil (Bellatrix, Petunia, Draco’s mum, Umbridge) or dead (Lily) actually.
For teenage girls with personalities, you got Hermione, Ginny and Luna and that was basically it.
But pretty much every important character that gets significant screen time or does something pivotal except Hermione, Ginny or Luna is a guy. Whether it be Dumbledore, Lupin, Sirius, Hagrid, Snape etc..
It’s kind of like Naruto where a lot of female characters existed, but they were hardly the focus and you’ve forgotten half of them were there because of it.
I mean, Naruto’s problem is that it doesn’t actually have a lot of female characters, it has one female character that it’s copy-pasted and re-skinned like 15 times.
Tsunade, Sakura, Hinata, Ino, Ten-Ten, and Temari all had their unique differences and even good arcs when first introduced. But they all got sidelined later on and only had smaller parts in things.
Interesting! I knew about Star Wars as a kid because of Lego sets and colouring books, though I didn’t see the original trilogy until at least high school. In grade 10 (2003-04 for me), I went to an “artsy” school, and one day there was an informal debate, fairly class-wide, about whether people preferred Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings.
I don’t know how well people knew either (I’d read all of LOTR and watched the movies, but wasn’t as deep into the lore as my brother was), but I wonder how much “artsy” patterns with “nerdy”?
I mean, I used to be a nerd about James Joyce, but some people classify being geeky about literature as more “artsy” …and I noticed that I went for “geeky” instead of “nerdy” there; maybe Reltzik is right and “geeky” is better for to “knowing a lot of facts about and/or having a lot of interest in something particular”?
(anyway 2003 was when the LOTR movies were a big thing)
I think sometimes “geek/geeky” flows better than “nerd/nerdy,” but sometimes the reverse is true as well. I looked at both the Wikipedia articles earlier, and I think I can see “geek” a little bit more, but overall, there’s enough overlap that I’m not really pressed about it.
Regardless of which follows better, I find both nerd and geek as warm and welcome compliments
How about you?
*flows better
Could have sworn I wrote that right
I think about how Marvel is incredibly mainstream and YET I still think I’m a nerd/geek because of how much I love the actual comics universe. Like, “I keep a spreadsheet of costume and team member changes dating from 1962- present” levels of love.
yes, the pieces come together…
Billie’s Protestant, so she hasn’t grown up with men in dresses.
…what?
Geeky Protestant comment about the Catholic priesthood.
Catholic priests wear tunics.
Yes, I’m aware. I’m just confused what it has to do with anything either character has said in this strio, is all.
I think it’s the fact that they’re both wearing robes now. Robes, dresses, tunics. It’s an common bit of snark.
But there’s no men here, I think is the element that’s got me puzzled. And also neither of them mentioned Catholics. I think I’m just gonna have to Not Get It™ on this one, tbh, it seems like the kinda joke where you had to be there.
I know this is supposed to be funny, but given everything we know about how Billie views people, this is just sad.
Agreed, I hope Billie can someday be both unashamed of her nerdiness and around people who genuinely appreciate this side of her
Okay, I know SOMEBODY in the comments “called” this. Maybe not exactly the Kylo Ren thing, but something about Jedi? At least the idea that Ruth might repurpose the robe!
It came to me as a last minute idea, I completely forgot that Billie was such a Star Wars… “connoisseur”
Is there a prize?
Becky and Amber’s fathers were just killed, so instead of the grim reaper dress up as a character known for killing his father
To be fair, one is more obvious than the other and only one of the two would recognize that
okay but neither of them actually personally killed their fathers
this is less bad
So I actually called it
Congratulations!!! 🥳
I love whenever I start spouting off extensive knowledge about a mentioned topic and realize too late it was nerd shit.
Like recognizes like; I gotchu Jennifer.
Search your feelings, Billie. You know it to be true.
Oh no, are they going to break up over an argument sparked by Ruth calling her a nerd? (Which she is but will never admit to?)
Denial, thy name is Jennifer Yunru Billingsworth.
Billie is normal. Everything about her is perfectly normal. If you ever think otherwise, you are mistaken.
(normal)
And now we see why they broke up. I understand everything.
Whoops, gave yourself away there, didn’tcha?
I’d pay large sums of money for a gal like Billie to infodump cool lore at me. Star Wars, Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy, any of it. A smokin’-hot person explaining nerd shit is like the ideal scenario.
Nerd/geek gals are best gals, I agree.
There’s a reason I’m not single and it’s cool women existing. Billie needs to start being cool like in Panel 4 and she’ll be absolutely drowning in suitors.
“The odds are good, but the goods are odd.”
(I agree though. Shared interests = yes please.)
I myself would rather vie for a girl like Dina to infodump on dinosaurs and other science.
Looking at my own nerdy interests: Doctor Who was the biggest show in the UK for years. Star Trek was a revolution in television that is used as a cultural touchstone to the present day. Discworld regularly topped the best-selling lists and Sir Terry rejoiced in being “the most shoplifted author in Britain”. And while comics are still pretty niche, the characters created in them have basically taken over cinema and TV lately.
Most “nerdy” interests are kind of mainstream. The question is, are you a nerd about them? I definitely am, and so is J-Billz.
Another angle on the nerd thing is that Jennifer may be a past nerd. She talked before about running a Kit Fisto fanfiction site as a preteen. Lots of kids get really into something and then move on to other interests as they grow up. She obviously still remembers details from then, but is she really a Star Wars nerd now if she’s not paying attention to it anymore?
I don’t think that’s the intent here, given that this is Willis, but I’m not sure it’s ruled out.
Also, Star Wars lore is so weird because half of it is backfilled and often canonized fan ideas.
Obi-Wan and Owen wore the same robes in A New Hope because Obi-Wan was in hiding on Tatooine. We didn’t see any other Jedi or any talk about “Jedi robes”. Since he’s our only example, the outfit gets associated with Jedi in the audience’s mind and the filmmakers stick with it. First having his Force ghost show up looking the same way, then having Yoda wear something vaguely similar.
By the time of the prequels it’s deeply ingrained that those were “Jedi robes”, so we need an explanation for why Jedi wear farmer robes. (An explanation that also assumes farmers everywhere dress the way they do on the bit of Tatooine we see.)
The Tatooine farmers probably dress very similarly – it’s a very unfriendly biome, which is a pretty big conditioner to garments.
I mean sure – given that the big trope of Star Wars is “Planet of Hats”. But why pick Tatooine as “what farmers dress like” when Jedi adopted the garb of the common farmer, as Jennifer puts it?
Only Tatooine has farmers, obviously. Shai-hulud shit is the only fertiliser in Star Wars-verse, and they only live on sand planets.
aha, so that’s why they broke up.
This is totally me if I start talking about Star Trek or My Little Pony or She-Ra or…
This is why I used to like Billie so much (not just because I look like her lol).
As she grew closer with Ruth she started caring less about her super powered cheerleader look and persona, and became more comfortable just being her own genuine self, finally opening up to the world but especially to Ruth.
Their relationship started toxic because that was the starting position of both of them just in regular life in general, and yeah it got worse for a time but then it got better, way way better, and life improved dramatically for them, and they’re in a better position in life even after their break up (yeah they both have issues but the severe depression and deep alcoholism is gone for them both and those are huge hurdles to overcome).
I don’t think it was inevitable that they would break up like some people here do, I think they could’ve worked for a while more in in world time, but I understand that it was both possible and made sense that it could happen in world, and also that after 10 years of this comic running, it made sense to change up the dynamics.
I don’t want to give up on them. I want the manicures and backpacking across Europe.
Yeah, same.
She says she’s not a nerd, but when she says “Owen Lars,” I hear it in a Boston accent.
Everything about Billie is fake and condescending and I hate her
She justifies her insecurities to herself by projecting them onto the rest of the world. She’s forever spinning her wheels in the first stage of “fake it ‘till you make it”.
“I’m not a nerd! Everyone knows about Star Wars! It’s part of the mainstream cultural zeitgeist!”
“I’m not bisexual! Is that even really a thing? Everyone fools around a little with their friends!”
(Whoops, hit “Post Comment” before completing the thought.)
She’s desperate for social status and to be “normal”, therefore anything she’s proud of is “normal” in her world. Everyone else also has the same hangups as she does, but they’re all hiding them too.
♫ People forget
Forget they’re hiding
Behind an eminence front
Eminence front, it’s a put on ♫
Fack.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BfrUQA2tb6M
Yup.
What really amuses me is that i think this is almost word-for-word something Malaya said about Sal back in the day. Life imitates art, the fandom imitates the characters…
FFS. It’s not nerdom its fandom. Fandoms can have people from all walks of life. What year is it that this “nerd” stigma is so ingrained in billie’s psyche?
She was a Popular Girl, of course she loathes the Nerds.
Jocks are just nerds for sports though.
Also, Billie’s Midwestern, so she hasn’t grown up with rotaries.
One of these days I hope that Billie/Jennifer finally embraces the fact that she’s a nerd.
If anything Disney killed its mainstreamness…
Yeah, that’s why everyone and their mom was pissing themselves over Baby Yoda.
Finally surfacing to catch a breath after the New Trilogy XD
Nah, it was still plenty mainstream. People just generally didn’t enjoy those three movies as much, from what I can tell. Now, I don’t think that there’s a lot of actually iconic, reference-worthy scenes in ’em, but they really didn’t do anything to diminish how well-known the rest of the series is.
It’s really hard to tell. Especially as an older fan.
The discussion around the prequels was also overwhelmingly bad at the time. We’ll really have to wait until the people who saw these as kids grow up and we’ll see then how they really play out.
They weren’t made for fans. They weren’t made for adults. And that’s true for both the prequels and the Disney movies.
They weren’t made for anybody, far as I can tell.
From what I’ve seen, the newer movies have definitely increased the familiarity with the rest of the series. Source: I’ve worked with kids before they were out, while they were coming out, and since they’ve been out.
Hardly. If you compare the initial release box office numbers for the films in each of the three trilogies, they all performed comparably comparably well. If you look at the viewership of the Disney+ series every new Star Wars show has thus far pulled between 20% and 25% of the then current US subscriber base for the platform which is similar to the Marvel shows. Disney largely hasn’t made The Fans™ happy, especially in theaters, but they have still maintained the general audience interest quite well and The Fans™ still pay to go see the movies in theaters anyway, regardless of how much they whine about them online afterward.
While we’re at it, The Fans™ are fucking unpleasable anyway, so who gives one half of one meager dang darnit what they think?
and now she thinks she’s too cool for this. “Jennifer” is so fake.
Keep in mind that Jennifer’s new friends know she likes Kit Fisto.
So does Ruth and her dormmates.
Her new friends however only pretend not to despise her for it.
Poor Billie, she needs to spend more time around people who aren’t going to judge her for knowing things they don’t, I.E., anyone other than Raidah, Asher and who was the other one. . .
I think his name is Paul, but is may as well be Corno Breadskevicz.
So that is why they broke up. Sheer mortification from Billie about being outed as a Star Wars nerd drove her to become Jennifer instead.
She was already out to the Forest Quad gang.
This is all building up to Ruth making fun of Kit Fisto isn’t it?
Ah, so THAT’S why they broke up!
She made a joke about how she was going to Kit Fisto Jennifer that night and she took it as meaning Ruth would off her the same way Darth Sidious unceremoniously killed Kit Fisto
It’s ok Jennifer. I, too, own a Jedi robe from when I was Revan for a Halloween party 10 years ago. And don’t believe them when they say that temp black hair dye comes out with a hair wash. No…no it does not.
That face of realization at the end. sdjglfsjglkXD XD XD XD XD
I’m not a Star Wars nerd!
Suuuuuuuuuuuuuure you’re not.
Aaaaaaaand Outed.