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Fantomestein
Beka Duke
Desperate for companionship, Frankenstein's Monster pretends to be the Opera Ghost. A grave mistake.
Blindsprings
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Paint the Town Red
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2 Slices
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After a case of mistaken identity, will awkward Daisuke find help from excitable Mamo, or will his love life be thrown completely off track?
Countdown to Countdown
Velinxi
Iris Black is a self-proclaimed inventor with the curious ability to bring his drawings to life, and yearns to find a space where he can use his powers freely.
Cyanide & Happiness
Explosm
Satire, dark humor and surreal humor.
The Otherknown
Lorian Merriman
Chandra is a 12-year-old accidental time traveler with a reluctant new dad, who happens to be a member of a feared galactic crime syndicate.
Slightly Damned
Chu
Rhea Snaketail returns from the dead, befriending a Demon who falls in love with an Angel. The afterlife ain't what it used to be!
Beeserker
TJ Cordes
This comic is about a robot powered by bees, but it's also about the kind of people who think filling a robot with bees is a good idea, and why they're wrong.
Dumbing of Age
David M Willis
Joyce has been homeschooled her entire life until now, when she's suddenly a freshman in college! Things don't go well.
Mac Hall
Matt Boyd
The legendary early-aughts webcomic that inspired a wave of webcomic creators.
Namesake
Isa, Meg
There's ghosts at your heels and fairy tale worlds ahead. What do you do? Jump down the rabbit hole!
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Hmm, I mean, I’m thinking that Joyce might not want to tell Becky. Keeping things as “low drama” as possible, for now, bearing in mind what Jocelyn told Joyce about keeping Becky within reach of access to resources via Joyce’s family. Also, given that Joyce’s developing religious views still form a sore spot between them.
I usually hear (and use) “passersby,” and that is not really the same situation. “Passive” and “aggressive” are both adjectives. Just as “aggressively” is a word, I see no issue with “passive-aggressively,” which is also the usage I usually hear and use.
“Passively-aggressive” sounds very wrong to me, like it’s a version of “passive-aggressive” where “passive” is modifying “agressive” rather than the whole thing being a composite word. It doesn’t sound like the whole thing is an adverb.
Also, it makes sense linguistically. “passive-aggressive” is a word. When heard, it is not analyzed as being made up of 2 separate words “passive” and “aggressive”: it is understood as its own concept. So the adverbial suffix is added to the whole thing, not its original constituents.
Liz as in Lizard I think. Cuz Dina’s into dinosaurs and I assume Lizards as a whole?
And I’m sure someone will come by and tell me that dinosaurs have more in common with modern day avians than lizards and I’ll say “Hey, Dina came up with it. Not me”.
I suspect they’re referring to the fact that if you found the common ancestor of everything we call a “fish” today, it’s descendants would contain a bunch of species we don’t consider to be fish.
It’s a category that’s made up of everything you have left after excluding the species that have a clear definition. Reptiles are every quadruped that’s neither an amphibian, a mammal or a bird. It’s a group that consists of smaller groups that are not closely related, unlike birds and the rest. The same goes for fish.
And then you find something like the platypus, which I can only assume was created by God late on the sixth day, when all he had left were spare parts from all the other critters.
Lizards and how they fit with reptiles is pretty straightforward I feel. It’s a subgroup nested within a bigger group. The broad strokes aren’t really contested or unclear except for how they relate to Snakes which isn’t really disputed either people just don’t like that Snakes are a type of derived lizard
Well, Sir Richard Owen came up with it actually. Because he’s the guy who first named them “Dinosaurs”, which pretty literally translates to terrible lizard
I think I’ll compromise and stick with Lizardwives. Lesbians or not, treating the eventual marriage of such a recent couple as a sure thing and getting all worked up over it… speaks of a culture in which people marry far too quickly.
Becky did announce that they were kind of engaged, and Dina has gone along with it, but that’s a weird “kind of engaged” wrapped up in the whole “only have sex with your spouse”, alongside “I love my girlfriend, we must be destined soulmates”.
Ironically, the most realistic thing would be for them to get into an irreconcilable fight and break up sometime later this semester, a true example of dumbing of age.
Or have the issue of one of them turning out to be waaaaaaay more into someone else. But, story-wise that can’t happen, since Dina’s the golden girl who can do no wrong, and Becky could get away with murder and be immediately forgiven by everyone. (Yea, she’s probably my least favorite character in the story, because she’s gotten away with a ton of shit without real consequences… And that just ain’t fun in real life.)
Okay so now you’re just outright fucking lying. Dina’s not “the golden girl who can do no wrong”, she literally got half the group killed when they tried to escape Blaine’s weird Airbnb murder basement. Or are we just erasing that scene when it’s convenient for us now?
It’s just gross how often people conveniently “forget” about that. Like, I get it, the guest author took some strange turns while Willis was in the hospital with Butts Disease (thank Gosh for modern medicine), but it’s still canon. Josh, Todd, Candice, Michelle, Sock, and Yukiko deserve to at least be remembered.
Okay, admittedly Todd was incredibly problematic as a character. Their abusive relationship with Michelle was probably the darkest this comic has ever gotten, and I can’t say it really added to the overall story in any way. The scene with the shower curtain still gives me bad dreams, I have to skip that whole chapter.
Everyone always says breaking up is more realistic, but I know tons of people including myself who married someone they met in high school, and marrying someone you started dating in college is even more common
Yeah, the idea isn’t exactly unrealistic vs realistic… breaking up in a high school or college relationship is more common, certainly, more statistically probable, but it’s not unrealistic for a relationship that starts at that age to last. I could understand people arguing that it might be unrealistic certain characters to last in a relationship because of x, y, z (though there’s almost always counterexamples, which can be part of the issue with arguing “unrealistic”).
I do agree that this level of “they will get married” at an early stage of a relationship between two young people– both from inside and outside the relationship (but all in the comic)– doesn’t seem great, especially considering the religious background of Becky ad Joyce.
It’d be interesting– and possibly connected to this story arc– if they talked about it and realized they had different ideas about what marriage is. The idea of “marriage is a promise between you, your partner, and God” (or something like that) is a common enough Christian sentiment. So that could be Becky, whereas Dina’s view might be more like, “Marriage is a legal contract that asserts the status of a relationship.”
And I do imagine there’s a large overlap between both of them in feelings of love and commitment as related to the idea of marriage, but there could still be those other differences. And it might also impact how binding they view marriage as being.
Joyce is a good actor. I noticed she didn’t mention mom selling the house to raise money for their old church, their church being broke post-Toedad or telling her mom she’s an atheist.
And Becky and Dina are very cute but everyone knows that.
Good catch! I think Joyce avoids mentioning those because they’re all upsetting for Becky. Her family’s hpuse was seized by the bank & the other two things are obvious.
Her house wasn’t seized by the bank – she decided to sell it after her dad died. She got the things she wanted (mostly clothes) and nothing else was there for her but ghosts.
I think I (mis)remember the episode where Becky couldn’t enter the house for some reason, which is either Police Line Do Not Cross or Frozen Assets. The point being that Becky doesn’t have a childhood home to go back to either.
It just struck me that Becky basically didn’t possess any of the basic tools that support independence. No key to her own home. No identity documents — didn’t even know her own Social Security number. No money to speak of. She sorta remarked on this, but it just hit me that her determination was the only asset she had in her own hands. Fortunately for her, she has that in abundance.
Yeah, I remember the comments section back in those days. Lots of “she should know her SSN from applying for jobs” and “why wouldn’t she still have a key to her house?”
People really had high hopes for that $20. She was somehow meant to get all her legal documents, food, a place to stay, clothes, toiletries, all that good stuff, but she irresponsibly got her hair cut instead of starting a new life.
They were separate? I started reading around the time Becky and Dina cut through the trees to escape Toedead, so the conversations got muddled together. It’s weird that there were multiple discussions about how the homeless gay kid should spend her fortune.
Maybe, though I think she is probably just saying it in a sense of “let’s not let that get in the way of our good time”, rather than any acrimony. She’s wanting to bask in her friends’ romantic situation.
“Dinosaur” can be literally translated as “terrible lizard”. (Apparently not a great translation, but that’s how it’s always written out.)
Lizards + lesbians = lizbians.
Terrible lizbians.
The problem is not with the translation, but that dinosaurs as lizards is a misnomer, as we now understand it. (Since they’re birds, obviously.) But “terrible lizard” is still an accurate translation for “deinos sauros”.
Then again the way scientific names are assigned is not meant to reflect current knowledge but rather serve as a marker of initial discovery. The aim is for everyone to agree on how we call a species or group, so it makes sense to stick with the earliest descriptor no matter how misguided it may turn out to be.
This principle is so strictly applied that calls for renaming the beetle Anophthalmus hitleri (and many other similar cases) have been rejected by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature.
(They’ve also refused to entertain the Turkish government’s demand that species endemic to Turkey with names referencing historically Armenian or Kurdish areas be renamed in accordance with Turkey’s imperialist-genocidal conception of its own history and geography. So you can at least see how their logic functions. Adhering to their principles allows them to make this sort of decision without reference to politics and to insist that they are a pure, ahistorical instance serving no other interest than that of global scientific communication. Which is, obviously, super debatable, but there is an element of dogged coherence to it.)
It’s not a simple problem, frankly. It’s an obvious fact that westerners, taking their Adamic mission to heart, have produced the large majority of the scientific nomenclature that is now touted for its convenient “universality”. But the universality, uh, is actually convenient. So how do we address this historic-epistemic injustice? So far, to my knowledge, by ignoring it.
Why don’t neonazis get a life ffs, like come the fuck on. Collection and poaching a rare bug because it has the name of their dipshit idol in it? Talk about a pack of losers, just real boneheads from start to finish.
yeah you would’ve thought, “ok so neonazis are horny for genocide and eugenics and dictatorship, so clearly not a stellar bunch. but surely they’re at least chill with motherfucking BEETLES.”
Wait my catholic brain hit me. How scandalous is a divorce in Joyce’s mom congregation? I mean, the fact that they divorced means that the church allows it, but how much will they be the ones who actually get divorced?
Can’t answer this, but I think since Hank left the church in disgust over their actions, the church will actually have Carol’s back. They’ll blame Hank who actually initiated the divorce, so that checks out. Maybe Carol sold her house to win back her standing in the community?
I imagine the response will be “Hank was weak and couldn’t perform his duty as a father to protect and provide for his family”
Similarly, I’m sure the divorce will be used as fuel to justify their condemnation of him but I reckon that is HIGHLY contextual
Dina’s saurian self-nickname for herself and Becky is “Terrible Lizbians”.
What would your saurian nickname be? That is to say, if you could pick any nickname for yourself that is related to dinosaurs, lizards, birds, paleontology, or related fields… what would it be?
Mine is in my comment handle, plus I guess Aptenodytes forsterious Imperi which is a riff on the scientific name for Emperor Penguins. Which I’m not because they can’t ride bicycles.
I figure I’d be either the Cyclosaurus Rex, or a Bicyclodon.
The second one gives me a chance to shout out “Dodosaurs: The Dinosaurs That Didn’t Make It” – a book of art by Rick Meyerowitz, who used to be with the National Lampoon (he’s the guy who did the art for the poster of ‘Delta House’ for the movie ‘Animal House’).
Actually, I’m thinking of a certain web animation where an episode gives “codenames” to five of the six possible pairings of the four main female characters, the unnamed one being half-sisters – that was unsubtle. (Although of the five, the fans came up with different names for two, two never really caught on at all, and the only one that kept its name wound up being canon, oh look, here’s an uncontroversial statement…)
All I know is that two of the three that are actually popular are not the same. (Checkmate/Monochrome, Whiterose/Iceflower). I would say I’m telling on myself, but as David Mitchell said, if for everything I knew I knew where I knew it from, I could only know half as much.
I’m assuming you mean RWBY, and Bumblebee may be canon now, but that doesn’t change that it was blatant queerbait for years. The only decent canon ship is Reader X Willow, anyway.
That settles the question whether they want to be respected or feared.
“Bina”? “Decky”? If anybody actually wants to check if the readers have said such ship names, be our guest, be our guest, put your services to the test
Somehow I’ve never thought about it, but yeah, I pronounce it closer to “nuptuals” as well.
Now I’m wondering about how to respond to kids who might arrive at the “correct” pronunciation when first reading the word. Like, “yes but no (but also yes)”? Man. Language.
English has plenty of relationship between sound and letter. It’s not as good as Spanish, say, but there’s definitely a lot.
If there were no relationship, then you would have no guess as to how to say ‘mukuwaddy’, a word I just made up. Yet you do have a guess. Maybe a few guesses, mostly based on the length of the ‘u’s.
Portmanteau relationship names are weird. And to the best of my recollection the trend kicked off when tabloids were invading the privacy of two famous people. Who subsequently called off their engagement and broke up because of it.
It technically comes from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, I believe, but the reference is wide enough now that people use it separate of the knowledge of where it’s from– “Two men enter, one man leaves.”
Realised that @damnyouwillis.bsky.social's characters might actually work really nicely with the River City Girls style, so until I make some more sprites here's Joyce telling Yoko that omigosh she also has a friend who likes hockey, and has she heard of this team called the 'Leafs'?
2010: My source of existential dread is climate change
2016: ... climate change! and fascism
2020: ... climate change!! and fascism and pandemics
2024: ... climate change!! and fascism!! and pandemics and AI
really not enjoying the direction this is going to be quite honest
yesterday i tried an "apple jack latte" at a local coffee place, seemed like an okay flavor to try, like, woo, brown cinnamon, whatever
but they put actual apple jack cereal on top of it
do you know what you're drinking now
soggy cheerios
For May's second bonus strip, let's discover where WALKY is! IS he working out? Read this bonus strip and hundreds of previous at the Dumbing of Age Patreon: www.patreon.com/posts/second...
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One of the best things about Posting is you never know what obscure preoccupations your followers have. There will be a guy who has followed you for years and never said anything but then one day you disparage applesauce and he activates like a sleeper agent and dedicates his life to destroying you
I'm thinking this Pride about how I've been able to make a whole bundle of pretty unusual life choices with basically no pushback because of people before me who were willing to be the weirdo.
What would be funnier, a Marvel Soundwave who’s blue, or Hasbro releasing a Marvel Soundwave who’s purple right after releasing a printing of the comics where he’s been “corrected” to blue?
Gwen @finalgwen.bsky.social ⋅ 1h
Michael P. Breen @mpbreen21.bsky.social ⋅ 1d
Katie C @spiffykt.bsky.social ⋅ 1d
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(Jim Lee Era)
⚧️Coming Out
Hailey Piper 
*gasp* …IT’S TRUE
Is that a smile in the last panel?
we are all partial to terrible lizbians
It’s an amazing nickname. Honestly, if they weren’t already together, they would be obligated to hook up just to use it.
I for one welcome our lizbian overladies.
We may prove useful to them by helping round up dissidents to toil in their underground sugar mines
Breakfast cereal mines, surely.
It’s the only way to stave off the Soggies.
oh my god, terrible lizbians. isn’t that a callback to an alt text on one of the very first strips where they interacted?
:O https://www.dumbingofage.com/safe-2
Damn, that was 8 years ago. I can’t even remember where I left my keys this morning.
“Everybody ****ing stay ****ing calm!”
If you can stay ****ing calm while you’re ****ing there’s a chance you might be doing it sub-optimally.
A perfectly calm **** seems kinda creepy, in a way.
Tantric always sounded weird to me.
Admittedly I know very little about that one. The term, mostly. I think it’s got a connection to yoga? Like 5% sure?
No mention of the house getting sold eh ?
you can only fit so much in one strip
Guessing that bombshell will come after a sec, since I imagine Becky’ll have a lot of feedback on that.
Hmm, I mean, I’m thinking that Joyce might not want to tell Becky. Keeping things as “low drama” as possible, for now, bearing in mind what Jocelyn told Joyce about keeping Becky within reach of access to resources via Joyce’s family. Also, given that Joyce’s developing religious views still form a sore spot between them.
Pretty sure Hank loves Becky enough to keep up with his support. After all, her mom would be proud of her.
I think it’s clear that her views are well developed.
well they do have a whole lunch to go to so i’m sure they’ll have all the details during that
No love for Dinasaurus Becks?
Ooohh I like that one too!
D-bex for short.
don’t you mean d. bex? :3
Oh, Becky is ROCKING the lesbian flag color scheme, delightful!!!
Oh, yeah… that IS nice!
Honestly surprised Joyce hasn’t called her dad to confirm this.
And Dad might have space for the totebins of childhood memorabilia.
She’s not exactly on speaking terms with anyone in her family at the moment, the only reason she interacted with her mom is her mom ambushed her
Well, she talks to Jocelyn, and Becky, but yeah, not likely to talk to John, and who knows with Jordan.
With Hank, it’s probably just awkward even if she has no major issue with him at the moment.
As far as we know she hasn’t talked to Jocelyn since the last time she saw her, we know Joyce is dodging her calls at the very least
She avoids Joss, she’s been rejecting her calls
Maybe she hasn’t had time and will do it later off strip. Or she’s putting it off
YEEEEEEEES!!!! Terrible Lizbians set sail!!!!
🥰🦖🦕
TWO SHIPS ENTER, ONE SHIP LEAVES!
Passive-aggressively?
Or passively-aggressively?
Maybe passively-aggressive?
Curse my discontinued keeping-up-with-linguistics.
I would personally bet that the first is common usage and the third is grammatically correct.
Like, the plural of ‘passerby’ that gets commonly used is ‘passerbys’ but grammatically it’s technically passersby.
I usually hear (and use) “passersby,” and that is not really the same situation. “Passive” and “aggressive” are both adjectives. Just as “aggressively” is a word, I see no issue with “passive-aggressively,” which is also the usage I usually hear and use.
“Passively-aggressive” sounds very wrong to me, like it’s a version of “passive-aggressive” where “passive” is modifying “agressive” rather than the whole thing being a composite word. It doesn’t sound like the whole thing is an adverb.
“passive-aggressively” is by far the more common usage.
Also, it makes sense linguistically. “passive-aggressive” is a word. When heard, it is not analyzed as being made up of 2 separate words “passive” and “aggressive”: it is understood as its own concept. So the adverbial suffix is added to the whole thing, not its original constituents.
Or such is my understanding anyway
futurewives marriage party/plans at a(n) accurate) jurrasic park? 8D
I don’t get the lizbian thing
I’m sure it’s a pun, but it’s escaping me
on a more nitpicky note couple nicknames are obnoxious and Dina and Becky are less likable for giving themselves one
Liz as in Lizard I think. Cuz Dina’s into dinosaurs and I assume Lizards as a whole?
And I’m sure someone will come by and tell me that dinosaurs have more in common with modern day avians than lizards and I’ll say “Hey, Dina came up with it. Not me”.
Dinosaur comes from the Greek for “terrible lizard.” (Sort of. It’s not a perfect translation, but that’s how it typically gets rendered in English.)
It’s because they’re closer related to birds, so that makes them terrible lizards.
I’ve also seen it translated as “terrible reptile” which is a more accurate description of the animals at least
Eh, if you get too into the weeds on what’s a lizard and what’s a reptile, you will not come out unscathed. Taxonomy is … a thing. A whole thing.
Also there is no such thing as a fish, even though we all know what a fish is.
As a dense sort of person in general, I’m gonna have to ask if you’re willing to clarify this.
I suspect they’re referring to the fact that if you found the common ancestor of everything we call a “fish” today, it’s descendants would contain a bunch of species we don’t consider to be fish.
It’s a category that’s made up of everything you have left after excluding the species that have a clear definition. Reptiles are every quadruped that’s neither an amphibian, a mammal or a bird. It’s a group that consists of smaller groups that are not closely related, unlike birds and the rest. The same goes for fish.
polyphyly’s fine actually. Not everything has to be a clade for every context.
Hear! Hear!
Yeah, but I like arguing that whales really are fish, just for different reasons.
And then you find something like the platypus, which I can only assume was created by God late on the sixth day, when all he had left were spare parts from all the other critters.
Pretty much.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqZlDYKE8Pk
I still prefer Robin Williams’s take: the platypus is proof that God occasionally did weed.
Lizards and how they fit with reptiles is pretty straightforward I feel. It’s a subgroup nested within a bigger group. The broad strokes aren’t really contested or unclear except for how they relate to Snakes which isn’t really disputed either people just don’t like that Snakes are a type of derived lizard
“saur” etymologically stands for lizard, if it had been reptile it would have been something
related to “herpeto”.
“Deino” for very bad, terrible, fearsome, etc.
So “terrible lizard” or “fearsome lizard” would be an okay translation. Not reptile though.
Well, Sir Richard Owen came up with it actually. Because he’s the guy who first named them “Dinosaurs”, which pretty literally translates to terrible lizard
I always thought it translated out to ‘thunder lizard’; and dictionary.com says it comes from the Greek for ‘monstrous lizard’.
I think it is “brontosaurus” that means “thunder lizard”.
Yep.
Well, birds are therapods and lizards, sauropods (obviously), so technically it’s a little muddled, but comedically It Works For Me. [giggle]
Lizbian is a portmanteau of lizard and lesbian. Terrible Lizbians is because Dinosaur can be translated as Terrible Lizard.
“Dinosaur” literally means “terrible lizard”.
It’s a pun that means Liz is making another appearance soon.
Wait, is she making up ship names for her own comic?
Futurewives is exactly as terrible a ship name as I’d expect from Joyce, too.
I think I’ll compromise and stick with Lizardwives. Lesbians or not, treating the eventual marriage of such a recent couple as a sure thing and getting all worked up over it… speaks of a culture in which people marry far too quickly.
It bothers me a bit too, but Becky did announce they were (kind of) engaged and Joyce is excited about that.
Becky did announce that they were kind of engaged, and Dina has gone along with it, but that’s a weird “kind of engaged” wrapped up in the whole “only have sex with your spouse”, alongside “I love my girlfriend, we must be destined soulmates”.
Ironically, the most realistic thing would be for them to get into an irreconcilable fight and break up sometime later this semester, a true example of dumbing of age.
Or have the issue of one of them turning out to be waaaaaaay more into someone else. But, story-wise that can’t happen, since Dina’s the golden girl who can do no wrong, and Becky could get away with murder and be immediately forgiven by everyone. (Yea, she’s probably my least favorite character in the story, because she’s gotten away with a ton of shit without real consequences… And that just ain’t fun in real life.)
Okay so now you’re just outright fucking lying. Dina’s not “the golden girl who can do no wrong”, she literally got half the group killed when they tried to escape Blaine’s weird Airbnb murder basement. Or are we just erasing that scene when it’s convenient for us now?
Never forget the lives lost in Operation Bird Wave.
It’s just gross how often people conveniently “forget” about that. Like, I get it, the guest author took some strange turns while Willis was in the hospital with Butts Disease (thank Gosh for modern medicine), but it’s still canon. Josh, Todd, Candice, Michelle, Sock, and Yukiko deserve to at least be remembered.
Fuck Todd, they know what they did.
Okay, admittedly Todd was incredibly problematic as a character. Their abusive relationship with Michelle was probably the darkest this comic has ever gotten, and I can’t say it really added to the overall story in any way. The scene with the shower curtain still gives me bad dreams, I have to skip that whole chapter.
Everyone always says breaking up is more realistic, but I know tons of people including myself who married someone they met in high school, and marrying someone you started dating in college is even more common
Yeah, the idea isn’t exactly unrealistic vs realistic… breaking up in a high school or college relationship is more common, certainly, more statistically probable, but it’s not unrealistic for a relationship that starts at that age to last. I could understand people arguing that it might be unrealistic certain characters to last in a relationship because of x, y, z (though there’s almost always counterexamples, which can be part of the issue with arguing “unrealistic”).
I do agree that this level of “they will get married” at an early stage of a relationship between two young people– both from inside and outside the relationship (but all in the comic)– doesn’t seem great, especially considering the religious background of Becky ad Joyce.
It’d be interesting– and possibly connected to this story arc– if they talked about it and realized they had different ideas about what marriage is. The idea of “marriage is a promise between you, your partner, and God” (or something like that) is a common enough Christian sentiment. So that could be Becky, whereas Dina’s view might be more like, “Marriage is a legal contract that asserts the status of a relationship.”
And I do imagine there’s a large overlap between both of them in feelings of love and commitment as related to the idea of marriage, but there could still be those other differences. And it might also impact how binding they view marriage as being.
Inevitable nuptials? How did I miss that conversation?
It’s when Becky was assuring Joyce being interested in or having sex didn’t make someone impure.
Becky and Dina discussed it in the immediate aftermath of their first time together: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2022/comic/book-12/03-trial-and-sarah/fivesecond-2/
Becky later relayed this information to Joyce when they were sorting out their ‘secrets’: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2023/comic/book-13/02-turning-saints-into-the-sea/kindasorta/ and the following strip
I love Sal’s “Why are all those dogs howlin’?” from that second link.
Joyce is a good actor. I noticed she didn’t mention mom selling the house to raise money for their old church, their church being broke post-Toedad or telling her mom she’s an atheist.
And Becky and Dina are very cute but everyone knows that.
Good catch! I think Joyce avoids mentioning those because they’re all upsetting for Becky. Her family’s hpuse was seized by the bank & the other two things are obvious.
Her house wasn’t seized by the bank – she decided to sell it after her dad died. She got the things she wanted (mostly clothes) and nothing else was there for her but ghosts.
I think I (mis)remember the episode where Becky couldn’t enter the house for some reason, which is either Police Line Do Not Cross or Frozen Assets. The point being that Becky doesn’t have a childhood home to go back to either.
Mostly it was just “didn’t have a key”.
It just struck me that Becky basically didn’t possess any of the basic tools that support independence. No key to her own home. No identity documents — didn’t even know her own Social Security number. No money to speak of. She sorta remarked on this, but it just hit me that her determination was the only asset she had in her own hands. Fortunately for her, she has that in abundance.
Yeah, I remember the comments section back in those days. Lots of “she should know her SSN from applying for jobs” and “why wouldn’t she still have a key to her house?”
My favourite was “It only costs $20 to get copies of her documents!”
People really had high hopes for that $20. She was somehow meant to get all her legal documents, food, a place to stay, clothes, toiletries, all that good stuff, but she irresponsibly got her hair cut instead of starting a new life.
Maybe if the comic took place in 1805.
That was a different conversation but good lord yes that one was everywhere too.
They were separate? I started reading around the time Becky and Dina cut through the trees to escape Toedead, so the conversations got muddled together. It’s weird that there were multiple discussions about how the homeless gay kid should spend her fortune.
I checked and the problem was that she couldn’t afford to live in it but it hadn’t foreclosed yet.
Those are all things she doesn’t want to think about right now.
I love Joyce’s enthusiasm.
R.I.P.* the U.S.S. Hankarol. It hit an iceberg that had a dinosaur in it.
Efforts to teach said dinosaur to ride a ball have thus far produced mixed results.
*what is the proper/official term for sending off a ship that sank, anyway?
I think you salute the sinking ship. “Heave-ho, overboard!” is strictly for people who died at sea.
I was sure there was something about “that day when the dead shall arise incorruptible.”
“Forget Dorothy”? I suspect that statement is going to come back and bite Joyce.
Maybe, though I think she is probably just saying it in a sense of “let’s not let that get in the way of our good time”, rather than any acrimony. She’s wanting to bask in her friends’ romantic situation.
What I was getting at was that Joyce automatically assumes Dorothy is fine because she always is.
Becky is basically just a giant lesbian flag today and that makes me smile.
I like it! We’ve never seen this look on her before, but I hope it becomes a mainstay.🪱
It is. She’s been dressed like this every time she’s outside since the timeskip.
You can’t prove that.
She’s had that jacket since the start of the semester. I think this is its first appearance: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-11/02-look-straight-ahead/blackboards/
Dang it, I just got the “bait” emoji.
Why, whatever could you mean?
Lezbosaurus Regina.
Ooh, I like that one!
Well Joyce recovered quick
Why “terrible lizbians”? I don’t get it
Because she’s a fan of “terrible lizards.”
“Dinosaur” can be literally translated as “terrible lizard”. (Apparently not a great translation, but that’s how it’s always written out.)
Lizards + lesbians = lizbians.
Terrible lizbians.
The problem is not with the translation, but that dinosaurs as lizards is a misnomer, as we now understand it. (Since they’re birds, obviously.) But “terrible lizard” is still an accurate translation for “deinos sauros”.
Then again the way scientific names are assigned is not meant to reflect current knowledge but rather serve as a marker of initial discovery. The aim is for everyone to agree on how we call a species or group, so it makes sense to stick with the earliest descriptor no matter how misguided it may turn out to be.
This principle is so strictly applied that calls for renaming the beetle Anophthalmus hitleri (and many other similar cases) have been rejected by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature.
(They’ve also refused to entertain the Turkish government’s demand that species endemic to Turkey with names referencing historically Armenian or Kurdish areas be renamed in accordance with Turkey’s imperialist-genocidal conception of its own history and geography. So you can at least see how their logic functions. Adhering to their principles allows them to make this sort of decision without reference to politics and to insist that they are a pure, ahistorical instance serving no other interest than that of global scientific communication. Which is, obviously, super debatable, but there is an element of dogged coherence to it.)
I don’t know, maybe a visually impaired cave dweller is exactly the right species to name after a fascist who ended up dead in a bunker.
It’s rude to the beetles.
It is rude to the beetles, plus neonazis have taken to poach, steal and trade specimens of this fairly rare insect, potentially endangering it.
Also as i hinted at, this is just one case. Many animals and plants bear the names of slave-owners or colonialists, for instance.
It’s not a simple problem, frankly. It’s an obvious fact that westerners, taking their Adamic mission to heart, have produced the large majority of the scientific nomenclature that is now touted for its convenient “universality”. But the universality, uh, is actually convenient. So how do we address this historic-epistemic injustice? So far, to my knowledge, by ignoring it.
Why don’t neonazis get a life ffs, like come the fuck on. Collection and poaching a rare bug because it has the name of their dipshit idol in it? Talk about a pack of losers, just real boneheads from start to finish.
yeah you would’ve thought, “ok so neonazis are horny for genocide and eugenics and dictatorship, so clearly not a stellar bunch. but surely they’re at least chill with motherfucking BEETLES.”
They probably think they’re really proving some kinda point too, which makes it even dumber.
Honestly, probably not. Even nazis are just dorks sometimes.
Why ya gotta insult dorks by associating us with that filth?
/joke
Apatosaurus go away! I want Brontosaurus back!
( why cant we have nice things )
no one can stop you from calling apatosaurus brontosaurus! be a rebel
Wait my catholic brain hit me. How scandalous is a divorce in Joyce’s mom congregation? I mean, the fact that they divorced means that the church allows it, but how much will they be the ones who actually get divorced?
Can’t answer this, but I think since Hank left the church in disgust over their actions, the church will actually have Carol’s back. They’ll blame Hank who actually initiated the divorce, so that checks out. Maybe Carol sold her house to win back her standing in the community?
I imagine the response will be “Hank was weak and couldn’t perform his duty as a father to protect and provide for his family”
Similarly, I’m sure the divorce will be used as fuel to justify their condemnation of him but I reckon that is HIGHLY contextual
Yup. Carol’s church is very clearly an Us vs. Them mentality (I mean, that’s the hallmark of any cult). Hank is very likely branded with a scarlet A.
Unevenly yoked is a thing for them. You don’t need to remain with an unbeliever since that might harm your faith journey.
…Would anyone be up for a question thread?
Dina’s saurian self-nickname for herself and Becky is “Terrible Lizbians”.
What would your saurian nickname be? That is to say, if you could pick any nickname for yourself that is related to dinosaurs, lizards, birds, paleontology, or related fields… what would it be?
My Saurian nickname would be “Healer Monster” (like a “Gila Monster,” only with an aspiration to promote public health)
Game Programmasaurolophus, on account that I program games?
Love it!
Okay, I’ll bite. My nickname would be Thomahawk, which refers both to a bird and uhm… a flint hand axe, which is also an archaeological find!
Very cool!
These days? Tardusraptor.
Ooh, I like it!
Mine is in my comment handle, plus I guess Aptenodytes forsterious Imperi which is a riff on the scientific name for Emperor Penguins. Which I’m not because they can’t ride bicycles.
PERFECT!
I figure I’d be either the Cyclosaurus Rex, or a Bicyclodon.
The second one gives me a chance to shout out “Dodosaurs: The Dinosaurs That Didn’t Make It” – a book of art by Rick Meyerowitz, who used to be with the National Lampoon (he’s the guy who did the art for the poster of ‘Delta House’ for the movie ‘Animal House’).
Both of those are better than Dicky.
Actually, I’m thinking of a certain web animation where an episode gives “codenames” to five of the six possible pairings of the four main female characters, the unnamed one being half-sisters – that was unsubtle. (Although of the five, the fans came up with different names for two, two never really caught on at all, and the only one that kept its name wound up being canon, oh look, here’s an uncontroversial statement…)
I thought they named some attacks/tactical maneouvers after the fan names for ships in that episode or am I thinking of a different web animation?
All I know is that two of the three that are actually popular are not the same. (Checkmate/Monochrome, Whiterose/Iceflower). I would say I’m telling on myself, but as David Mitchell said, if for everything I knew I knew where I knew it from, I could only know half as much.
I’m assuming you mean RWBY, and Bumblebee may be canon now, but that doesn’t change that it was blatant queerbait for years. The only decent canon ship is Reader X Willow, anyway.
That settles the question whether they want to be respected or feared.
“Bina”? “Decky”? If anybody actually wants to check if the readers have said such ship names, be our guest, be our guest, put your services to the test
I can’t imagine Dina “speaking” a typo so “nuptuals” is particularly disconcerting.
I had to look the word up to understand what you meant. I’ve only ever heard it pronounced “nuptials”, no matter who said it.
Really? Maybe it’s regional. Despite knowing the correct spelling, I always hear EVERYONE pronounce nuptials as “nuptuals.”
I checked and double checked that before I posted. It’s meant to say the U version. Nuptuals. U.
Somehow I’ve never thought about it, but yeah, I pronounce it closer to “nuptuals” as well.
Now I’m wondering about how to respond to kids who might arrive at the “correct” pronunciation when first reading the word. Like, “yes but no (but also yes)”? Man. Language.
Ahem. English specifically. Many languages have some kind of relationship between letters and sounds. English has none.
Uodtte awr yieau ptahceeng ubbowt?
Eh.
No, English has several. Take your pick.
Phonics was a thing when I was teaching my brother how to read, and when I was learning how to read, obviously.
English has plenty of relationship between sound and letter. It’s not as good as Spanish, say, but there’s definitely a lot.
If there were no relationship, then you would have no guess as to how to say ‘mukuwaddy’, a word I just made up. Yet you do have a guess. Maybe a few guesses, mostly based on the length of the ‘u’s.
Her English has been corrupted by spending too much time among folks who speak Hoosier.
(I’m a Hoosier, so I can say that.)
Panel five warms the Earth and makes flowers grow…
And panel two! Take that, hateful and less rad.
I agree that “Bina” and “Decky” should be off the table, but how about “Dinky”?
Portmanteau relationship names are weird. And to the best of my recollection the trend kicked off when tabloids were invading the privacy of two famous people. Who subsequently called off their engagement and broke up because of it.
Wait. Future wives is the name of a comedy trio. Very fitting for these three.
https://m.facebook.com/FutureWivesComedy
Oh, I get shit for linking to TV Tropes, but you can link to the website that killed humanity.
Hey, it seems like they’re also getting shit for linking to Facebook.
Now I feel like I should link to something. Uhhhh…… https://myspace.com/
You made that one up.
oh wow it’s still up??? incredible
and in the spirit of this thread, here’s a place where you can watch random youtube vids with zero views
Joyce continues to be lovable. Also Becky and Dina. Terrible Lizbians…. :3
🤍
🦓
I love Dina’s sense of humour.
Hehe. Humour?
A fan of Ruth, obviously.
Lucy, within earshot, “what’s passifagress mean?”
Joyce attempts ‘hide smile’.
It is not effective.
Becky really does know how to cheer up Joyce.
*cultural reference support needed* Is the ship thing a quotation? It sounds like a quotation.
It technically comes from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, I believe, but the reference is wide enough now that people use it separate of the knowledge of where it’s from– “Two men enter, one man leaves.”