The Dumbing of Age Book 12 Kickstarter is live! 9 character magnets are unlocked so far, with more to come! The Ruth magnet will be unlocked soon, but right now you can already back stuff like the Halloween Dorothy/Joyce magnet pair and get your book doodled-in/autographed! Pledge today!
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Dina: I have released you from your social contract
Joe: *not sure how to feel about that*
Prof: anyway if you fail my test, it doesn’t matter bc you were preprogrammed for it, who cares, eat Arby’s
I gotta try one of the Arby’s But Better recipes one of these days.
Aaaah, good ol’ nihilist arby’s.
A classic. 5 stars.
(Unless that’s caring too much, in which case 2.5 stars.)
Joe is so light on Dina’s social batteries, their evident friendship is awesome!
The last Dina strip this story-line couldn’t have gone any better. She will always be my Autistic Resonance, my Rock and Roll. 🥰🦖🌈♾🧠🌌
Until next time, clever girl. 🥲
*plays “Seahorse Dreams” by Kubbi on hacked muzak*
Dina remains the best character by several orders of magnitude.
Agreed
So say we all
Well, no. Not all.
So say we most!
So say we a significant statistically significant group!
We all.🔫
And my axe?
100%
Definitely
Yeah Doctor, she’s amazing. 🥰
Hear hear!
Dina is my waifu for this comic.
Oh gawd, why did I post that? somebody please take it down!
>cringe<
What do you mean cringe? I think that’s awesome! 🥹
Dina and Joe are friends.
By the transitive property, that makes Sarah and Joe friends.
Too bad Sarah will pretend to be bad at math now.
That, or they will be the kind of friends who one gets beaten by a bat and the other does the beating.
I don’t think those credits transfer, likely according to Sarah herself. XD
Joe and Dina are friends, Joe and Sarah are not friends. Dina and Sarah are friends. If friendship were always transitive, Joe’s friendship with Dina would carry over to Sarah via Sarah’s friendship with Dina, contradicting one of our known axioms. Therefore, by contradiction, friendship is not always transitive.
But is it mostly quasi-transitive? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasitransitive_relation
Friends are associative, but they are not necessarily transitive
If friendship was transitive, then the entire world would be friendly.
Except for spider Georg who keeps eating his friends, but he’s an outlier
Maybe, we need to unambiguously define a friendship operation before we can be sure.
This is happening because Joe put in the effort to act outside the boundaries of his pre-programmed subroutines.
But arguably, only because he was programmed to do so.
Bah, fatalism! Fie!
Oh I see it now
this brings me indescribable joy. so happy for everyone involved… Friendship….!
aww that’s really sweet that she’ll be glad to see him.
Well that’s 2 of Joyce’s most protective friends that approve of Joe, now he must win over the most dangerous one, Sarah
My thought is more that it’s a good thing he doesn’t need to win her over. They just need to find a modus vivendi.
Sarah sees Joe and Joyce hand holding.
“Godspeed you Joey Tribbiani trainwreck.”
Well Hate sink has his way to comunicate with Sarah.
They’re CUTE.
Friendship! Flawless victory.
Omg that’s why this feeling was familiar you’re so right
Kitana hugging Mileena in her friendship finish gives the best vibes
Dina and Joe’s friendship makes me happy.
Oh, God, I think Joe is about to cry.
friendship level up!
Leveled up to one!
:clap: DOUBLE :clap: DATE :clap:
YES 😍 👏👏👏
joe rehabilitation arc going strong
Did the professor need rubber gloves to work Powerpoint?
The Professor is avoiding fingerprints
It’s only prudent.
We have never yet seen his hands without them
Good people. Forgiving Joe for his earlier douchery, appreciating his efforts to be better. Trusting him with the heart of Joyce!
Awww… Joe feeling acceptance.
OH MY ENTIRE HEART.
I want this double date, too.
Quadruple date, you mean?
Joyce x Joe, Becky x Dina, Walky x Lucy, Sal x Danny…
God, all of theme together would be chaos. Kinda hilarious, but chaos.
I thought this was an Intro to Biology class, so what is up with what the professor is saying in the first panel?? Seriously, huh?? That topic is more appropriate for an Intro to Philosophy class and it’s the sort of topic that starts a class discussion (or perhaps is an essay topic); not a conclusion.
While I’m talking about this professor and his bizarre methods, I still don’t understand why he made his students wear safety goggles to what seems to be a lecture instead of lab; though if it is a lab I am insanely curious as to what they could be doing that requires safety goggles so early in the semester
maybe he’s a good enough/tenured prof to do what he wants. i remember one of my art teachers quit because she couldn’t do a syllabus/agreed with what the school wanted (tho i mean it wasn’t rly that intense of a class to where she couldn’t have given us more info on top of the ‘basic’ stuff we were learning since most ppl took it as a blow off arts credit class as opposed to actually being interested but oh well)
I think there’s a reason we only see the beginning and end of classes. The middle is less entertaining since it’s mostly a normal bio class. As to the safety goggles, the two pairs have been referring to themselves as lab partners, so I guess Brock doesn’t punt at least one lab section to a TA. I guess he enjoys the additional opportunity to say weird shit to undergrads.
Well they aren’t wearing safety glasses this class, although they were in a previous class. It does appear to be a lab so the first question is why have a professor teach a lab? Usually at a big enough university professors will teach the lectures and have TA’s cover the lab.
Depending on the lab though, you could end up having to wear safety goggles pretty early in. It’s more of a mystery though on what they would be working on in a biology lab specifically that requires protective eye wear. Possibly counting fruit flies which require C02 to keep sedated, which you would get from dry ice which would require eye wear.
And as for a simulations lecture, I’m not sure why that would be a summation, as opposed to maybe answering a dumb question. Although I did watch “the Corporation” once in a Evolutionary Biology class, so who knows?
I had a couple profs teach lab because they wanted to teach lab. They still had a TA to help students set up and grade and the like, but the professors just enjoyed doing the actual walking around and teaching
i think it’s supposed to be a bit
Very possibly Professor Brock’s whole class is a bit. The punchline will be when people manage to learn some basics of biology in between the lectures on Most Edgy Nihilistic Philosophy and Why Having Fun is Morally Abhorrent.
punchline will be his home filled with canvases he’s painted and notebooks of poetry he’s written.
Each painting will contain a suspiciously familiar building and each poem will end with the line “Eat at Arby’s.”
abstract art, impressionist, landscapes, still life, just a wide range, showing his love of aesthetics and humanity and the whole world. Passionate poetry, exploring the full gamut of human experiences. Not just not-really-nihilism-but-people-call-it-nihlism-anyways.
I really recommend watching Dr Sapolsky’s Stanford lectures on Human Behavioural Biology on youtube. Very informative and even entertaining, and many of these kinds of topics are covered.
It’s because he’s Professor Doc, so he’s still doing Professor Doc things, even when he’s just a public uni teacher and not lead scientist for a secret governmental squad. Because it’s amusing. After the climax of the first semester, which was pretty much exclusively about this universe, it makes sense that in the first few books of the new semester, we return to more bits that tease at the original universe. And stuff like Anti-Joyce is allowed to take on a new context that makes sense entirely within the universe, whereas minor characters like Professor Doc are ported over and behave basically the same, regardless of the changed context.
aww
so wholesome omg
FRIENDS!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_t82ir4REQ
Awww! Friendship is the real magic! 😀
Okay, okay, stop giving me that look, Dina, it’s the real SCIENCE.
😁👍
LEVEL UP!
aww!!
also, Joe’s “…okay” is sending me.
That just warmed my heart. Dina is the best.
Becky has continued her slow roll of being genuinely decent! I am confused but pleased.
Of course, Becky does have a history of genuinely wanting happiness and success in Joyce’s love life, and of having standards the seem to consist of ‘are you as into Joyce as I feel any sane person should be? DO you think those are terrific, mind-meltingly awesome pants?’ Ethan failed, but Joe has clearly passed, so he gets the Becky thumbs-up.
Dina already mildly liked Joe, he has been pleasant, direct, non-judgemental of her and not mean to her. Upgrading him to friend based on his being significant other to her girlfriend’s best friend is no hardship. Particularly since she and Joyce have also reached a better, more respectful understanding of each other.
It’s very nice. And in good time, because now Dorothy is the one falling apart who will need strong supportive friends.
It’s almost like having some sort of stability is helpful in interacting with the world in the way you want to, and not just having to live every day on instinct.
On the one hand, this was very sweet and it’s great to see Joe get all this positive reinforcement now that he’s trying to take his life in a better direction.
On the other hand, I had already thought of Joe and Dina’s dynamic as pretty friendly with the ‘obligatory greetings’ being just a quirky thing between them. So their previous interactions are just a little tainted in retrospect by the fact that they apparently really were all obligatory.
Obligatory greetings and farewells exchanged without duress indicate acquaintance, what might be thought of as a “first level” friendship. (I’ve noticed that neurotypical people often tend not to differentiate amongst levels of friendship, save to note the difference between “friends” and “work friends”.) As Dina has indicated that greetings and farewells are no longer obligatory, that means that she engages in them for their own sake, as she has developed feelings of actual friendship toward Joe.
No, I get that. What I’m saying is that while it’s nice that Dina and Joe are becoming better friends, this also means that they weren’t as good friends as I thought they were to begin with. And that’s kinda sad.
It’s ok! The ‘obligatory greeting’ thing IS a quirk, and it WAS indicative of a better-than-baseline relationship. Dina was accommodated and her masking efforts acknowledged and set aside, Joe got to Be accommodating and have his efforts at accommodation acknowledged and accepted. That’s like someone giving up a seat on the train cos they’ve clocked your fatigue, and you smile at them as you sit down. You didn’t ask for it or need it but they’ve given it freely and you benefit and appreciate it. Good work we’ve all been kind and effective. It’s a friendly interaction. And repeated friendly interactions can constitute a friendship- even if no words are ever exchanged. Even if only Standard Obligatory Greetings are. One of the greatest romantic tales of our age grew on just only ‘as you wish’. Are Joe and dina better friends now that they are explicitly Informally Social Friends? Conversational Friends? Certainly that opens up new friendship frontiers, so that’s nice. But I don’t agree that it devalues their previous relationship 🙂
Maybe they were better friends earlier than this, it’s merely that Dina hadn’t fully processed that they’re closer friends until now.
The way I read it is that Dina wants to indicate that Joe dating Joyce has deepened the connection between them as part of the friend group, and dropping the “obligitory” — even if it was just a fun quirk rather than indicating an actual obligation — is a way of doing that.
But wait! That involves a use of non-literal language to indicate something other than her direct meaning. Well, yes. And if I thought of it, so can she.
I suppose I was taking it too literally. I didn’t before this update, but something about her making a big show of deciding to drop it made it feel more real to me than it had before. Maybe it’s just because I’m not really one to abandon a fun in-joke if I can help it.
It wasn’t an in-joke for Dina. It was just a straight-forward, clear interaction, unlike so many social interactions. Which was nice and definitely put her and Joe a step above her and most other people (and honestly, same for Joe). But now *Dina* is taking a step to elevate it even more, which is a big step for both her and Joe. I encourage you not to see this as the past having been less friendly, but just that this means a higher/deeper/stronger/better/faster relationship. And that for both Joe and Dina, clear relationship labels are honestly bigger steps and more important than maintaining an amusing bit.
My instinct was also to think maybe they weren’t as good as friends as I imagined before. They’d formalized a lot of their social interactions, which lead to them becoming friends. Dina is formally acknowledging their friendship. She’s shown that she considers him more than just an acquaintance before this.
Joe is on a roll.
Panel 1 is what I’ve been saying about free will for years. If we don’t have it, it doesn’t matter, because we can’t do anything about it.
That’s not what panel 1 is saying, though. Your stance is that the deterministic (or not) nature of the universe is meaningless. What Brock is saying is that the universe IS deterministic, regardless of whether we live in a simulation.
Free will, like consciousness, is an illusion, but since it’s an experienced one, it’s also a persistent one.
Your slave mind was programmed to say that.
It reduces freedom to an absolute: Either we have it and we can do whatever we want, or we don’t have it, and whether we will learn to want what we do doesn’t matter, we will do it anyway.
I prefer the idea that freedom is irrelevant precisely because it is not an absolute. Beyond violence or the threat of violence freedom doesn’t matter. If nobody is forcing you to do anything you’re effectively free. All other influences are not counter to freedom, they’re tangential.
Joe and Dina’s friendship gives me life
That IS being braggy, Becky. –3–
thatsthejoke.gif
I think she wants to brag, but not to be lording it over Joyce. If she feels like they are on equal footing, then she feels more comfortable bragging.
Wait, did Joyce teleport back yet?
She’s still busy doing laundry 😛
In my headcanon, she’s still clinging to the overhead light fixture.
I just noticed Dina is wearing Becky’s hoodie and that’s super cute
It’s really sweet, but also fun subversion for her to be giving that to Dina to wear considering what got her kicked out of Anderson in the first place.
The best revenge is living well.
Joe realizing lately that autistic girls are the BEST
I realised a long time ago that people who don’t believe in free will don’t mean the same thing by “free will” as I do.
I love Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen books, but Science of Discworld II is the weakest of the subseries, IMO, and one part of that is a chapter called “Free Won’t”, which essentially says that nobody really believes in free will, because if Fred does something we think of as “out of character”, we don’t say “Well, he was acting according to free will”, we look for a reason he felt compelled to do so.
And I immediately thought “flip it”. If Fred does something out of character, we don’t say “Well, a deterministic universe obviously required him to do this,” we look for a reason he’d have decided to do so. “Free will” doesn’t mean anybody might do anything at any moment, but that’s what its detractors seem to think.
(The Pratchett chapters more than made up for this, of course.)
Humans having pre-programmed subroutines would be a terrible simulation. You’d want to simulate physics and have all the stuff like biology emergent from that physics.
oops, not meat to be a reply.
Depends on what you’re trying to simulate. If you are trying to study the evolution of group dynamics, that level of detail might be perfectly fine.
Imagine, for example, a community of “embodied ” ChatGPTs each operating off a different initial scenario and character description.
ChatGPT is auto-complete and doesn’t have any physics simulation, and the world we live in has physics.
Just to save you some time, I haven’t found solipsism thought experiments interesting in a long long time.
Some free will proponents take it to unusual extremes, they seem to think any influence means not having freedom.
I’m with Skinner’s self-insert in Walden Two here: Let (the question of) freedom ring. It is not a relevant question beyond “violence = bad”. The only thing that matters is how you can make the world a better place non-violently. That’s all the freedom anybody needs.
The phrase “free will” is almost worthless because people usually have something else in mind when they say it, and you have to ask them what they actually mean (and a lot of the time what they usually mean isn’t internally consistent).
Idk about the probability of that dumb “simulation” meme, what bugs me about it is how viciously uninteresting it is. What if eggs were called bird spheres instead of eggs, there’s a more useful question for day-to-day life.
It would change geography if eggs were called bird spheres because then earth would be shaped like an egg.
Or something like that.
What’s geography done for me, lately? It’ll survive the birdening.
It would change borders, and probably result in an international incident claiming the lives of millions
This is the sweetest. I hope this isn’t gonna lead to Joe having a freakout about how everything is going good and therefore he’s liable to ruin it, therefore creating a self-fulfilling prophecy
Self-fulfilling prophecies are the most accurate prophecies.
Joe’s heart grew three sizes that day
But then the rest of the universe grew three sizes to compensate, so it was hard to tell,
But has Joe reached the “Hooray! It is Sarah!” level on the Dina scale?
I guess the only thing to ask is, How will Joe fuck this up? He’s got Sarah. Her friends accept him. There’s nowhere this can go but down.
I feel like Sarah is going to be a challenge, but it’s probable that the test of Joyce and Joe’s relationship is going to be stuff like her mom, maybe Joe’s mom’s baggage regarding Richard maybe cropping up in addition to his own, whenever Jacob comes back into the picture, stuff like that.
I could also see it being an issue that Joyce is more eager to escalate their relationship to the sexual than he is, if he’s still kind of wrapping his head around how to do that since he’s only had casual flings.
I guess it’s possible that we might have a “Joe tempted” kind of story, but I feel like we already did that with Sarah’s sister.
Seems like if we’re going to have a “Joe tempted” kind of story, it’ll likely be after they’re more serious and it’ll be aimed more at his fears of being like his dad.
I think the biggest worry is Sarah’s little sister saying something misleading about Joe, or appearing again in a dramatic way that can be misconstrued by Joyce, or something along those lines
This. I was kind of wondering what the Sword of Damocles-esque continuing threat of Sarah’s sister showing up again was doing narratively, since (if she really was on the run from a bad situation at school) it seems like it would be very close to Becky’s narrative arc. I also figured she hadn’t been introduced like that only to never appear again, or at least to not appear again for a very long time. But this makes a lot of sense, and we already know that Joyce is friends with Sarah’s sister on social media.
Did Joyce miss the entire Biology class? That’s probably like at least an hour.
Good friends don’t pressure friends into having sex.
Then we’re good here, because that’s not what happened. Joyce really does need to have “the talk”.
Uh? Becky just told Joe he needs to have sex with Joyce soon. How is that not pressuring Joe?
People will have sex at their own pace and people should not try to speed that up. Joyce also doesn’t need to have “the talk” right now— they just started holding hands, for goodness sake. I have held hands with plenty of people I didn’t have sex with. People don’t need to jump from I like you to penetration at any time frame other than their own, if at all.
It was a jokey comment between friends, Jesus fucking Christ.
Not only that, but Joe is, per Dina, sexually experienced, to the point that that’s all a lot of people even know about him. That suggests that sex is a pretty good topic to tease him about, because he doesn’t have shame over it and because Joe acknowledges that his libido has made a fool of him more than once. Plus I imagine it’s nice for Becky to be able to talk about sex casually, even if it isn’t with her best friend. This was a great joke and I do not understand why anyone would make it into a big serious faux-pas or attempt at control.
True friends must never joke, jape, cavort, frolic, tease, nudge, poke, prod, or otherwise engage in horseplay with one another. They must only stand a minimum of 2 meters apart, avoid looking at one another, and exchange only quiet, generalised compliments, such as “You’re performance at this task is quite adequate”. The Estate also advises against unsolicited compliments, greetings, or topics which have not been pre-approved. You don’t want to blindside your friends with a sudden discussion of their day-to-day events, as there’s no way they could handle something so emotionally stimulating. Nod at them in the hallway (a raised hand could hold a weapon), but no more than a single up-and-down motion or you’re putting extra pressure on them, and that’s bad friendship.
…pointing out spelling errors is also a form of pressure that must never be applied to others.
Now see, this is what people refer to as a “joke”. It’s said in jest, and not meant to apply any actual amount of pressure. This becomes especially clear when viewed in the context of Joe’s previous relationship habits, and how he’s trying to do things differently this time.
Ah, i knew someone was gonna find a way to be exhausting about this cute strip
Good friends make jokes with each other with the understanding that both parties understand it is a joke, allowing for a wider range of jokes than may be practiced between strangers
Good friends also know their friends weak spots and deliberately avoid them, thus being able say things that might be expected to hurt while knowing they won’t.
Good friends often counter-signal to each other. Messing with your world-view is the biggest sign of trust.
Dumbing of age book 13: “It doesn’t matter whether we live in a simulation — we cannot act outside the boundaries of our pre-programmed subroutines.”
Now, see, that would make me want to buy two copies, but I worry that would be outside the boundaries of my preprogrammed subroutines.
well would you look at all of this character development, it’s like he and the girls consider each other people and everything
Oh NO
Something terrible is going to happen to Joe. This is too much karma – the scales are going to come calling and it’s gonna be bad.
How do you mean something bad will happen? Didn’t he have a redemption ark, after all?
(could have irony)
I feel like he’s in the bounceback from a bunch of awful stuff having already happened to him, so he might be safe for now.
AWWW DINA ;_; SHE’S SO CUTE, THAT’S SO CUTE AAAA
I get the feeling Professor Doc’s brain isn’t doing so well in a universe when he doesn’t actually get access to rad sci-fi tools. He’s kind of a hands-on guy
There is an exception to it – If we are in a simulation as players. That said, we’re still limited by what our avatars can do, so more freedom, but as long as the simulation is programmed well, we likely can’t manage any exploits from inside the simulation
I hope they’re letting Joyce get to be comfortable with her sexuality before she’s socially pressured into doing something. No-sex-before-marriage doctrine is messy AF. And there’s no bigger buzzkill than feeling regret and shame after having sex. Joyce needs to stabilize her identity enough to handle that and be able to tell herself that everything is fine, no matter what she chooses to do with Joe.
Yaaas! JOE! JOE! JOE! JOE! Woooooo he’s emotionally leveling up and people are recognizing it. YAAAAAS!
n’awwwww, joe/dina friendship arc
(also i love becky’s eternal lesbian pride ✌️)
also the alt-text is v much my mood every time i think i’ve found a friend. more sparkles mb
The first panel just made me sad, I don’t know why.
simulation theory just seems like jaded bs but even so at least we can still enjoy the little things in life. (that said if it is a simulation be rly nice if someone could hack the america servers for better healthcare and less awful politicians /shot)
It kinda reminds me of the argument that free will is an illusion because if you were to rewind time and have to make a big decision again knowing only what you knew at the time, you will ALWAYS make the exact same decision, because nothing has changed and all of the factors that made you pick that decision (including even the slightest, most insignificant things right down to the temperature, the wind on your skin, what you had for breakfast that morning etc.) the first time around will make you pick the same decision again.
Man i had an absolutely *wild* dream about DoA last night, focused on Dorothy, first starting with her standing on a wall with like, suicidal vibes (and also Carla was there?) and then Jennifer showed up with the Posse and there was something about Jennifer being a four eyes (which Jennifer called herself??) and Dorothy saying “both sets are pretty” (????) and then some rando who has never existed in the comic before has like, a file of all of raidah’s evil plans (????) and just fucking… gives it to Dorothy (?????) who goes over it with Sarah and also something about Joe and Danny in space idk it starts deteriorating at that point. Dreams are fucking wild man.
Dina and Joe’s friendship is so cute.
I feel less weird about mentioning this. A couple of days after I pledged for book 12, I had a dream where one of the DoA cast members kissed me on the cheek. So I guess if anyone’s on the fence about pledging, Willis has some sort of dream invading machine and you have a week left.
It wasn’t who I’m getting the magnet of though.
Does anyone know in which strip the obligatory greetings started?
maybe around when liz came around? i don’t really remember dina interacting with joe much before then
The first we see is http://www.dumbingofage.com/lunchlunch (which is a week ago) but I got the impression that wasn’t the first time. Maybe I deceived myself because of the speed of the comic.