Sarah is the only human left in a world full of mythical creatures and monsters. All she wants to do is live a quiet life, but everything changes when she meets her guardian angel, Jacob.
Devil's Candy
Rem, Bikkuri
A lush fantasy about boy genius Kazu Decker, the girl he constructed for his 9th grade science project, and the world of devils and monsters they live in.
Kochab
Sarah Webb
A YA F/F fantasy comic about Sonya, a lost skier trying to survive a snowy wilderness and find her way back to her village; and Kyra - a fire spirit trying to fix the home that she let fall apart around her.
Awaken
Koti Saavedra/Flipfloppery
Superpowers, monsters and conspiracies. Piras, the spoiled Dameschi heir, fights to recover his identity after becoming a terrorist!
Star Impact
Jack McGee
A young, energetic woman fights her way up in the world of super-powered boxing after discovering the mighty gloves of her missing idol!
Wilde Life
Pascalle Lepas
Oscar decided to rent an old haunted house, and that's when things got weird...
Fireweeds Moors
Gato Iberico
A cat-headed man and a girl with a sandwich hankering accidentally end up in a myth-infused country where magic chalices are a really big thing.
Between Failures
Jackie Wohlenhaus
The low stakes adventures of an assorted group of 20 somethings trapped in the declining years of American retail. They are naughty and say lots of swears.
Go Get a Roomie
Clover
Experience the queer journey of an upbeat hippie and the friendships she makes along the way! A tale of self-discovery and love of many forms.
The Automan's Daughter
Mike Stamm
Aisha Osman and her uncle Siddig outwit bikers, spies and kidnappers while gearing up for a showdown with the formidable Widowmaker mecha.
Monsterkind
Taylor C
Wallace Foster, a young, bright-eyed human social worker, has his entire world view rocked when he's suddenly relocated into a city primarily inhabited by monsters.
Real Science Adventures
Brian Clevinger
Spin off stories and other adventures from the world of Atomic Robo!
Girl Genius
Phil Foglio, Kaja Foglio
In a time when the Industrial Revolution has become an all-out war, Mad Science rules the World...with mixed success.
El Goonish Shive
Dan Shive
WARNING: This comic often ignores the Laws of Physics
The Sanity Circus
Windy
Magic, monsters and mysteries await in the odd city of Sanity. It's up to Attley and a colorful group of characters to find out just what is going on.
Guilded Age
T Campbell, John Waltrip, Florence Machina
Welcome to the saga of the working-class adventurer! Enjoy the complete story with new annotations daily!
Starhammer
J.N. Monk, Harry Bogosian
A teen girl inherits a powerful alien artifact and proceeds to make a series of increasingly poor decisions
Wychwood
Varethane
When Tiara's pyrokinesis is finally noticed, she is captured by a magical research organization for study. If she cooperates, she could be helping to save humanity from a dire threat - but can she trust them?
Widdershins
Kate Ashwin
A series of light-hearted Victorian-era adventure stories featuring grumpy bounty hunters, accidental thiefkings, and more, in England's magical capital city Widdershins!
Love Not Found
Gina Biggs
Abeille is on a quest to find someone who wants to do it the old-fashioned way in a time when touching has become outdated.
[un]Divine
Ayme
A highschool senior thought giving up his soul for a demon was a good idea. It wasn't.
Sam & Fuzzy
Sam Logan
Troubled by gangster rodents, lovesick vampire stalkers, or confused ninja assassins? Don't panic! Sam and Fuzzy are here to help. (For a reasonable fee.)
Tigress Queen
Allison Shaw
A barbarian warlord and a pampered prince try to avoid a marriage alliance that could end decades of violence.
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.
Cyanide & Happiness
Explosm
Satire, dark humor and surreal humor.
Astral Aves
Moon Cabal
A fantasy coming-of-age following the adventures of Astra The Black and friends, as they navigate the mysterious world around them. It's politics, adventure, and the supernatural; oh, and crazy hair.
The End
August Brown, Cory Brown
Two aliens crash a sci-fi convention and accidentally take seven nerds on an adventure that spans the galaxy!
Knights Errant
J.R. Doyle
Wilfrid's humble quest for revenge becomes bigger and bloodier by the day.
Lilith's Word
inkPangur
If you had the power to make any wish come true using just one word, what would you say?
Sister Claire
Yamino
In the troubled aftermath of a great war between Witches and her fellow Nuns, novice Sister Claire just wants a purpose.
Jailbird
Charlie Davis
An all-ages comic about a recently escaped prisoner's struggle to understand the outside world, and vice-versa. Also, a magic cape!
Lighter Than Heir
Melissa Albino
A young Volant woman joins the military in an effort to upstage her war-hero father.
Never Satisfied
Taylor Robin
Lucy Marlowe, a magician's apprentice, competes against other apprentices for an important, magical, Goverment Job.
Hazy London
Scotty
A story about messy relationships. From friendly foes to crazy families. Nothing is black and white, just full of color. But, all colors can get a little hazy...
Sufficiently Remarkable
Maki Naro
Two young women living in Brooklyn discover that you're always coming of age.
Godslave
Meaghan Carter
Edith has been thrown into the dangerous world of modern-day Egyptian mythology. Fighting monsters and dealing with family drama of godly proportions.
Alice and the Nightmare
Misha Krivanek
Alice finally attends University to learn to collect the dreams of humans, meet new friends, and deal with a pesky reflection along the way.
Whomp!
Ronnie
A depressed, portly, hirsute anime fan stumbles through life in the ever-pursuit of chicken nuggets and other life-shortening indulgences.
Ghost Junk Sickness
Studio CARTRIDGE, Laura Lee
Two hunters try to survive and end up being pushed to pursue a deadly bounty dubbed "The Ghost".
Monster Pulse
Magnolia Porter Siddell
Four kids run afoul of a creepy secret organization's experiments, which turn their body parts into fighting monsters. Part sentimental coming-of-age story, part monster-training shonen manga, with just a bit of sci-fi body horror.
The Witch Door
Anni K.
Katariina Lehto discovers her neighbor is a witch called Jousia Muotka. Jousia introduces Katariina to the strange people and places beyond the witch door...
Atomic Robo
Brian Clevinger, Scott Wegener
The robot punches monsters and bad robots and one time he was a cowboy.
Nerf Now!!
Josué Pereira
A cute webcomic about fanservice, video games, and... love. Mostly video games, though.
Empowered
Adam Warren
A sexy superhero comedy (except when it isn't) about the never-ending struggles of a plucky but very unlucky young superheroine.
Anarchy Dreamers
Emily Ree
Sparkly undead kids fight society's worst Nightmares in this pastel-punk urban fantasy coming-of-age!
Star Trip
Gisele Weaver
Jas is a human taken from her home planet on a trip across the galaxy she will never forget.
Cassiopeia Quinn
Gunwild, Psudonym
A cute, pantsless thief is pursued across the stars by a buttoned-up military officer in the spacey, laser-filled future.
Paranatural
Zack Morrison
Superpowered middle schoolers fight evil spirits in their rural hometown. Come for the jokes, stay for the cast, the creatures, and the mystery that ties them all together!
Cut Time
Juby
Rel and her trusty avian friend Fugue are on a quest to save a world that's lost track of time. Follow them and their new recruits, in a story written with help from the stars.
Kiwi Blitz
Mary Cagle (Cube Watermelon)
Steffi thinks she can use her kiwi mech to become a superhero. This idea turns out to be very stupid.
Demon's Mirror
Harry Bogosian
Based loosely off of "The Snow Queen", a story by Hans Christian Andersen, we see things take a different turn as the demons become central characters, and the side characters stick around. Yup, that's the only differences. Enjoy!
The Lonely Vincent Bellingham
Diana Huh
Vincent is an unkind man looking to disappear, and finds himself in the care of a vampire and her two wicked children.
Stand Still, Stay Silent
Minna Sundberg
A few generations after the end of the world, a small, poorly financed research crew is sent out to rediscover whatever is left of the forbidden old world in the south.
Goodbye to Halos
Valerie Halla
Cuddles, gay flirting, weird feelings, and magic-fueled knife fights - it's an adventure across the queer multiverse!
BOOKMARK Click "Tag Page" to bookmark a page. When you return to the site, click "Goto Tag" to continue where you left off.
BUFFER WATCH
Comics are currently drawn and uploaded through:
Dorothy, I’m a game programmer who honors Newton all the time!!! His OG equations of motion are an essential model off which all kinds of video game physics are based LMAO
Funny thing is, even if it doesn’t *actually* speed you up, drifting does help you maintain speed around corners, making it feel like you effectively speed up compared to other karts.
Also, Admins, I accidentally hit ‘flag’ instead of ‘reply’ (they’re so tiny!) the first time, please ignore the flag!
While we’re talking about misconceptions of physics, it turns out the orbital drop weapon idea can’t work. We forgot that things move like 8 km/s or more to stay in orbit and your drop rods would have to accelerate that much in the other direction in order to go down. The need for a power source and incredibly precise calculations make it much more feasible to just lob missiles in the usual way.
It’s actually a lot easier to get orbital drop weapons to work than you imagine. You just need to give them enough of a kick to get them to enter the atmosphere and let the atmosphere do the breaking. It’s why you use something like tungsten which can take the heat.
Does this make them feasible? Hockey sticks no. That’s still a lot of acceleration that you need, *and* now we’ve replaced some of the power problem with a giant upsurge in the difficulty of aiming them. Also, they’re no longer instant death from above, as people can see the shooting star for quite a while before it slows enough to actually land. It’s just not as clear about where it’s going to land, especially if it’s shaped to do interesting things to make that aiming even more fiendishly difficult to obfuscate where it’s going ot land (but the person firing the shot has the advantage as they can figure out how long it’ll take them to do the math and then do it for where they’ll be at that time. But once it’s in motion, the target only has a fixed amount of time to figure it out and move before it lands.)
There’s also the possibility of reducing the energy it takes to fire at the ground by doing a bank shot off of a satellite you want destroyed. If you’re lucky, you can even work out that math so that the satellite bits take an elliptical orbit that ends up landing on something else you want destroyed. Of course, this makes the shot take even longer to hit the eventual target on the ground. It’s very much not a weapon that you can use on a mobile target.
It works much better as a weapon in a world where one can magic the rod’s orbital momentum away than it does in a world where you have to deal with that momentum for real.
Even before factoring in atmosphere, you’d only have to make a small change to speed to drop out of a low orbit. For example, a circular orbit with an altitude of 200 km would entail a speed of 7.8 km/s, but you’d only have to decelerate your payload by 61 m/s to have it hit the ground. That’s not even a one-percent reduction in speed. It’d take 43 minutes for the rod to actually strike, so it’s not exactly rapid, but rapidity isn’t needed if the objective is simply for Willis to obliterate the homes of spammers.
Well, if we can resort to “sufficiently advanced technology”, we can magic away the relevance of the weapon’s orbital momentum. Enough delta-V will get you from orbit to ground in a fraction of a second, like David Weber imagined in one of his novels. The weapon will be a blob of plasma by the time it arrives, but it still has its mass….
(Estimating in my head, I think time-of-flight was about 3 milliseconds.)
Drifting in Mario Kart grants you a spontaneous turbo boost if you meet certain conditions. Drifting maintains speed, but drifting correctly according to Video Game Logic will cause the vehicle to actually gain speed. That might be what Dorothy is mad about right now.
I wonder if she’d still manage to enjoy Dexter And Monkey Master in her current extremely square mindset.
Dexter and Monkey Master is granted a special dispensation on the grounds of childhood nostalgia, of course. The stuff we enjoyed when we were kids is always excused from having to meet our adult standards for suspension of disbelief.
Yeah, albeit Newton’s laws are always an essential starting point, it’s a whole other thing to tweak them into something what makes a game feel good to play, be it controlling jump height with gravity to essential forgiveness mechanics like input buffering, coyote time, hitbox pinching etc.
Coyote time is when you’re gonna jump off a ledge but you already walked off it a lil bit, the game still lets you jump despite you not exactly touching ground anymore.
This is incredibly handy for games with uneven terrain where you gotta jump off a rock or something, but walking forward disconnects your feet from the crappy rocky floor just enough to fail that jump.
Input buffering is self-explanatory to me, but just in case, it means it’ll store your repeated clicks on buttons and keys, and play them as soon as possible. Imo it’s kind of a hindrance in some shooter games where you fire unintended shots cause you panic-clicked a couple times but only intended to fire once.
I appreciate when games do this. I’ve always hated games that require a ton of very carefully timed platform jumping because I suck at it no matter how much I practice.
Finally discovered a year ago that my brain literally has delayed processing speed – did that ADHD test where you click a button as soon as a box appears, and I swore I clicked it immediately every time but apparently I did not! It was *fascinating* and kind of unnerving to discover my brain essentially “lags.” But finally explained my inability to time jumps in games. Though it also might explain why I’m less bothered by/aware of minute differences in FPS as long as it’s not *terrible*. I wonder if slower fps or the occasional lag essentially compensates for my brain lag. XD
Tbh it makes me wish games in general had an accessibility option one could adjust to accommodate that issue. Like a slider or something that could be set to match one’s reaction time.
Input buffering is what allows for a player input (such as jumping in a platformer game) to be recognized as valid even when it’s a bit too early. Like for instance, if the player wants to jump the moment they hit the ground, input buffering makes it so that they don’t have to be absolutely perfect with their timing of hitting the right button.
Same basic idea with coyote time, named after Wil. E. Coyote and his gag where he can walk or run off a cliff and gravity doesn’t affect him until he realizes it does. Coyote time in a platformer game is what allows the player to run and off the edge of a platform without being too perfect – there’s a very small window of time after leaving the edge where jump input will still register.
Hitbox pinching is what allows for the player to jump and squeeze sideways into tunnels just big enough to fit them without having to be too precise in when they aim with their jump arc.
In also the most simplest terms Coyote Time is in direct reference to the loony tunes, where the Coyote would be tricked to running off a ledge by the roadrunner but he would hover for a second before falling. https://youtu.be/Gq_bjaI0NTo?si=IsG1D8_x5Z1WFkgu
Input buffering is when the floor buffer is on your inputs to make the game play faster (good for grinding). Coyote Time is another name for Central Time (sometimes also called Central Daylight Time or Central Standard Time), due to the unusually high concentration of coyote spores in the affected regions. Hitbox pinching is a banned move in several martial arts (including Shōtōkan, Wadō-ryū, Taekwondo, Judo, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Muay Thai, Wing Chun, Jeet Kune Do, and Aikido), and involves pinching an opponent’s tonsils with one’s thumb and ring finger.
Wow, that ended up further away from the source than I expected. For context, I was referring to “not being able to change direction mid-jump would suck the fun right out of most platformers” by referring to one of my favorite series of platformers that did just that.
… Until Symphony of the Night came around and messed that part up.
*If* the platformer allowed one the same fine grain control over your launch that we have in real life, it’s possible it could be OK to play without mid air direction changes. However, there isn’t that fine grain control.
To be clear, we have a lot more of it than when I started with computing, using a computer for which we got classic Atari joysticks – except they weren’t called classic because that was the only kind of Atari joysticks that were made at the time. However, in real life, we have so many different ways we can adjust the jump before we actually leave the ground I am pretty sure I don’t even have words for all of them.
i feel dorothy is more one of those types to get into heavy realistic world building games lol. maybe switch to dnd for now? XD
a touch of realism but i imagine most ppl play vid games /because/ you can do the impossible lol (like in the sims where you can afford a car and a house without being miserably in debt 8D)
tho cool to test the limitatinos of physics like ppl whose job it is to search for glitches and stuff. or like “understand it/put it in/knowing the rules /so/ you can break them”
Ask Carla, but phrase it as a challenge. “The “Official” one isn’t authentic enough” or something to that effect. She’d probably be able to build a full-dive simulator rig that would fit under the dorm bed.
Wait … is there a way to play it without the proper controller? Secondary question: Why on earth would anyone want to? The controller is 90% of the appeal.
I remember reading about Steel Battalion years ago and always wanted that controller. Armored Core 6 is wonderful on MKB, but I’d go to therapy for a full rig like SB had.
Get her playing Oxygen not included, I bet she would love managing all the llittle clones runing aroung inside an asteroid trying to live their best lives.
You wake up in the center of an unknown asteroid. (“you” apparently being a sentient Printing Pod, that can print Dupes (duplicants) who will build your colony for you and discover the mysteries of this place, eventually building a rocket ship and exploring breaching the temporal tear (or whatever it’s called)
It’s fun & fairly easy in the early game, but I usually sputter around the mid-game, getting overwhelmed by all the myriad dependencies and inter relations to get create the materials you need to build stuff (food farms/ranches, water, oxygen, heat management, refining raw materials into steel, plastic, etc.)
There are a TON of YouTube videos about it. They usually abbreviate the name to “ONI”.
had an uncle who commented (back in the ’90s) that the people who are best at driving and the people who are best at driving games don’t have that much overlap
dunno if there’s more accurate simulators these days but i suppose it would be amusing to see racecar drivers also doing mario kart and seeing how they adjust
I am excellent at driving games yet terrible at driving, so, can confirm. Probably helps that games are more forgiving of errors and delayed reaction time (I have an issue with the latter thanks to ADHD) and don’t induce the same level of anxiety as being behind the wheel of a fast moving box of metal.
Maybe this explains how I once beat several members of a high school golf team on a golf simulator, when I’ve never played a real round of golf in my life.
I have a visual-spatial learning disability and could never play it… I always got the “wrong way” cloud, which my partner only ever saw for the first time when playing with me :'(
I sympathize, I don’t have this particular issue but finally discovered recently (via testing) that I have significantly delayed processing time.
Basically my brain lags, and I can’t tell, so I’ll think I’ve reacted to something immediately when I haven’t. Makes any sort of game where you have to jump or move at *just* the right time very frustrating.
Now I want to try this test. I’m also really terrible at jumping and mario kart etc (like, I’ve probably died the most of any game I’ve played in that first small jump on mario bros). I blamed my parents for not letting me have a nintendo as a kid, but maybe I should be blaming them for genetics instead?
I love video games, but I find racing games so boring. You just try to drive fast and time turns. Where’s the strategy! ‘Where’s the puzzle! Take me back to starcraft!
See I love both! I love literal jigsaw puzzles and puzzle games (as long as they don’t involve much math – logic is fine) but sometimes it’s nice to have a game where you just gotta go fast.
For me the challenge is learning to NOT crash into things or run/drive off the road at breakneck speeds.
But there are definitely times I’d rather sit in a game like Myst, listening to pretty music, spending hours stubbornly trying to solve something.
Are you sure you haven’t mixed up the cause and effect there? I don’t like them, so I don’t generally play them. Thus, when someone badgers me into doing so, I have no experience, so I suck a fat one.
Amber is in her underwear because this is her room and she woke up like that. There isn’t a reason for Dorothy to put on pants and then take them off again.
I am being facetious due to Amber and Dina being in theirs, also as a callback to when Walky encouraging Joyce to relax got Joyce to take her pants off.
Okay, I’m seeing a little more how Dorothy and Danny were together at the start of the comic. Pretty sure if Sal came over to play a round or three Dot would explode.
Drifting is especially important in the Leaf Cup, assuming this is MK8 we’re talking about. Music Park is, like, nothing but curved road, and Wario Stadium is full of 90-degree turns.
I read this book about cats when I was a pre-teen that had this weird unhinged Alchemist villain and I re-read it a few years ago and suddenly realized it’s supposed to be Issac Newton. It was a wild realization.
For a golden moment, Newton thought he had found the Philosopher’s Stone. When disappointment hit, he suffered what we today would call a nervous breakdown. It took him a couple of years to recover.
The only Mario Kart games I know of that have drifting on the brake are the arcade games. (Dang it, Bandai Namco, make another one and add Banapass support to the Western version. I don’t wanna have just randomized items.)
maybe she should settle for being mayors, i’m sure there’s some ‘sleazy’ mayor scandals but it wouldn’t be as bad as the very top
tho i do wonder about the ‘dog/cat’ mayor cities. XD wouldn’t be surprised if it was a ‘tactic’ to trick locals so that the mayor can ‘sign’ stuff without the public knowing and passing off certain laws and such lol
I hate this. Mostly because drifting is an actual thing actual street racers actually do drift around corners for a multitude of reasons. If you accept that then can’t you accept that in the world of mario, a world in which you play as many fantasy creatures in made up vehicles made from random miscellaneous parts glued together by magic that one of the features of these non-existent karts is that the boost engine fills with energy based on your kart drifting.
Like you can play the game and accept that one of the racers is a sentient worm, a yoshi or a ghost but you cannot believe that a built in feature of these karts is literally “IT BUILDS BOOST WHEN YOU DRIFT”
This is beyond pedantic. This is OBNOXIOUS and I would slap my switch out of her hands and tell her to leave my room and never return.
My first Mario Kart game was Mario Kart Wii, which had the option to drift automatically, so I never actually learned how to do it and proceeded to suck at all subsequent games.
If it’s any consolation, I didn’t even know drifting was a thing. The only Mario Kart game I ever played with any regularity was 64 and I have no idea if drifting was possible in it but I managed to be excellent at it regardless so I guess it wasn’t necessary? (Unless I was doing it without realizing?)
If it’s required to be good in later games though, yeah, I have no idea. I’ve only played the Switch version once and my opponent at the time was my (then) 5 year old, so couldn’t really get a good sense of whether my 64 skills transferred. XD
It may be an “old” game for her generation, but someone should introduce her to Goldeneye 64. Caves level with proximity mines is a control freak’s dream (I speak from experience).
It got to the point where my brother would refuse to play with me unless we banned that level and/or mines, because instead of running around hunting each other down, I would pick a nook in the caves and line the entire entrance with mines, and just…wait. If I picked the right spot and set my mines properly, he basically couldn’t get to me without blowing himself up.
Actually in Mario Kart 64 battle mode, you can do something similar with the Block Fort level. Go to the top of a pillar and park yourself on an item box and just keep launching the items as you get them (the box will respawn continuously). Except whenever you get bananas or fake item boxes, drop them at the end of the ramp up the pillar. It safely barricades you at the top of the pillar while turning everything below into a death trap (shells just bounce around the walls down below).
If Dorothy’s into games, I can see her like an insufferable Gran Turismo player: “Ugh, these gear ratio on this Nissan Skyline 98 is so unrelated. Still 97 still is the best one”
Oh, Dorothy, if you think Mario Kart has realistic physics if you refuse to use drifting, I have some bad news for you.
The good news, though, is that you can play Kerbal Space Program! It’s awesome! Also, every space-exploration enthusiast ever will vote for you when they find out that a KSP player is running for president. Especially if they learn that you inspired a main character in Julia Gray, Space Commander!
I laughed way harder then i should have, but Didn’t Issac Newton die by drinking mercury? I mean dotty maybe gain the respect of Liebnez beacuse he seems like a dude who could strategically break in to second place when the blue shell is active.
Wait… In which Mario Kart game do you drift with the brake button? Hearing it gives me a sense of familiarity, but the standard has always been that it’s the jump button (which was just the powerslide button in Double Dash).
I feel like Newton would side with Amber. Assuming a Newton already adapted to the modern world, I would expect his response to be “The world contained within your device does not follow the rules of our own. How not, as it is fiction, devised by humankind who have not fully discovered the rules of our own world! No, take it as a blessing that you can know and predict the rules of that tiny world. To fight them is illogical, and a waste of time besides!”
To obtain Sir Isaac Newton’s esteem you must journey to the Mystic Valley and uncover the secret knowledge of the Atlanteans that allowed them to bend reality to their will.
…but like, dorothy *likes* cartoons. surely dexter and monkey master broke a few physical laws here and there.
idk, this feels…odd. has dorothy become way more flanderized over the last year or two, or is it only because she’s already so on edge that these things are bothering her when they wouldn’t normally? it’s like she’s LOOKING for something complain about.
Breakdowns can push people into latching onto smaller and smaller parts of themselves in a desperate bid for control. Whether or not she’ll admit it, she’s been through Too Much and doesn’t know how to move forward.
When I start to burn out like that, it can feel like my world grows tighter and more claustrophobic with each passing day, or hour…And clutching at my idea of how things *should* be feels like a desperate attempt to push out at the strangling bubble to try to make enough room to breathe.
I kinda get that vibe here with Dorothy.
This is the same girl that – while in a better place – encouraged Joyce’s “I could be a fighter pilot and a mom and make macaroni and cheese and own a stable full of horses” (or whatever) dreams, rather than crush and of those with the challenges they may pose.
It may also be that so many rules and authority figures have been challenged for her in the past few months that she’s desperate for something she can adhere to without being challenged (and physics doesn’t come with much moral grayness)
She’s playing violent video game (cars are violence), which means she’ll are gonna be becomes violent in turn herself. It’s been has been they proved it like twenty thirty forty years ago in the past so many times and there’s evidence she’ll do it. She’s saw the when Amber stabbed Rape Guy on purpose (also plays games hint hint), she beat Ross in the skull with the hammer she brought, and then Blaine was she saw him get shot with her ears because that’s hearing it, back wham that happened again. She also Dorothy was there when Joyce was telling her about Becky told her she was in the car when Ross and punched him across the street, so that’s all it’s all of it’s just evidence on evidence and you can’t honestly say she’s not Dorothy isn’t won’t become just as killer as much of a violent murderist as the other villains. It’s in there, all the clues, you weren’t listening the first time but now she’s spelling it out.
Holy bejeezus Taff. Reads like you took the comments of three different people, all of whom were out of their minds, put them in a burlap sack and threw them in a tumble dryer.
Funny because this right here is the most relatable she’s ever been to me. Hung up on some irrelevant detail to the point of making everything worse for herself and ruining her own enjoyment.
Yeah. I’ve never got the Dorothy hate – she’d annoy me, but the level of disgust/taking everything she does in the worst possible faith is just bizarre to my POV.
And, uh, yeah, being a big old weirdo who fixates on dumb things is indeed relateable content.
Oh Dorothy… You just need to recontextualize it better. The Mushroom Kingdom is clearly not set on Earth; why would their rules of gravity or physics be identical to ours? (In fact, Mario, an ordinary human, can be clearly seen jumping up to 5 times his height in the original game. That is CLEARLY not possible in Earth’s gravity, so the only logical conclusion is that gravity works differently in the Mushroom Kingdom.)
Maybe Dorothy would like the original Super Mario Kart. In that game, if you drive well, you never let go of the accelerator, let alone touch the reverse.
Instead you jump your go-kart and turn in the air to put your wheels in a new direction to start a turn without losing momentum. If you know so little about how cars works that slowing down to make a turn offends your concept of racing, SMK’s purely fictional physics probably feel more right.
Heh, my stepdad was a professional mechanic and driver, and he was the worst at Mario Kart. (He may still be, we just don’t talk.) He drove so realistically, for example he’d never use the feather item, just let it occupy the item slot for the rest of the race.
He probably would’ve liked Gran Turismo and Forza Motorsport.
I had that kind of trouble playing any of the Need for Speed Underground games, because they’d automatically drift the car when you turned. No matter how I tried, I instinctually tried to countersteer into the turn when the back end of the car came around, which just turns you the other direction.
What interests me here is that this shows the effect of deciding for yourself which set of rules is The Rules. Sometimes the decision isn’t yours to make.
Drift and powerslide a scooter, somehow gaining speed, with a ring of three turtle shells orbiting you, off a jump that somehow works while you’re upside-down.
That last bit reminds me of an idea I had for a game or mod that makes only your protagonist’s model upside-down, with no other effect on the gameplay. Everything would still function the exact same, though.
The hop-powerslide-boost mechanic makes more sense than Mario Kart’s drifting.
I was so disappointed they didn’t release Crash Team Racing Nitro Fueled on PC that I bought a Switch just to play it. (Then, much later, a secondhand Xbox One because it turns out the Switch port isn’t the greatest.)
Some other people have pointed out in the comments that you do not use the brake button, but a specific jump/drift button, and I know Willis has Mario Kart.
I demand answers! You should have thoroughly researched the mechanics for this long before writing this, what gives?
I could be being too pedantic on this, Amber probably knows the difference and is just following Dorothy’s terminology instead of turning this arc into a Mario Kart encyclopedia.
That’s the Watsonian explanation. I think the Doylian explanation is it’s a metaphor, for Dorothy overworking herself into burnout, and figuratively braking would give her better results.
Thousand Maws of Toto-Rak (Ultimate): Dorothy is playing a Paladin because it’s the only one with a shield, and she can’t understand how the other tanks could possibly block. She’s pulling small, which is fine in and if itself, but she won’t stance up or use AoE and keeps insisting the Scholar focus on the DPS because she has a self-heal, forgetting it doesn’t actually work until later levels and they went in synced. She also keeps talking in /say, which isn’t too big of a deal except that it distracts the rest of the team, who are all using /party and have to keep tabbing back and forth mid-fight.
Have we considered the possibility that Dorothy might be on the spectrum herself? Her refusal to accept the game “breaking the rules” is a very on point thing.
There was a really exhausting discourse about it around the time Joyce got a referral about the ’tism and Sarah was like “Hey Dorothy, maybe you’re autistic, ya socially clueless dipshit?” and Dorothy was all “I understand people, Sarah.”
…but drift racing is a thing? There are actual racers that do that in real life. Besides, it’s MARIO, does she play the regular games without jumping more than 2 vertical feet or does she really think there are people who can leap 5 times their body height from a cold start?
Loading ...
Dorothy, I’m a game programmer who honors Newton all the time!!! His OG equations of motion are an essential model off which all kinds of video game physics are based LMAO
Maybe she’d rather be playing your games than Mario Kart…
Funny thing is, even if it doesn’t *actually* speed you up, drifting does help you maintain speed around corners, making it feel like you effectively speed up compared to other karts.
Also, Admins, I accidentally hit ‘flag’ instead of ‘reply’ (they’re so tiny!) the first time, please ignore the flag!
Which we’ve all done at one time or another. Willis seems to have it set so that multiple people have to flag it to have any effect.
There are no admins (plural), and the only penalty for flagging is a tungsten rod dropped on the OP’s house from orbit.
While we’re talking about misconceptions of physics, it turns out the orbital drop weapon idea can’t work. We forgot that things move like 8 km/s or more to stay in orbit and your drop rods would have to accelerate that much in the other direction in order to go down. The need for a power source and incredibly precise calculations make it much more feasible to just lob missiles in the usual way.
They would work on a hold-the-whole-world hostage (ala SPECTER from the Bond universe) but not so much Country A keeping Country X under control.
It’s actually a lot easier to get orbital drop weapons to work than you imagine. You just need to give them enough of a kick to get them to enter the atmosphere and let the atmosphere do the breaking. It’s why you use something like tungsten which can take the heat.
Does this make them feasible? Hockey sticks no. That’s still a lot of acceleration that you need, *and* now we’ve replaced some of the power problem with a giant upsurge in the difficulty of aiming them. Also, they’re no longer instant death from above, as people can see the shooting star for quite a while before it slows enough to actually land. It’s just not as clear about where it’s going to land, especially if it’s shaped to do interesting things to make that aiming even more fiendishly difficult to obfuscate where it’s going ot land (but the person firing the shot has the advantage as they can figure out how long it’ll take them to do the math and then do it for where they’ll be at that time. But once it’s in motion, the target only has a fixed amount of time to figure it out and move before it lands.)
There’s also the possibility of reducing the energy it takes to fire at the ground by doing a bank shot off of a satellite you want destroyed. If you’re lucky, you can even work out that math so that the satellite bits take an elliptical orbit that ends up landing on something else you want destroyed. Of course, this makes the shot take even longer to hit the eventual target on the ground. It’s very much not a weapon that you can use on a mobile target.
It works much better as a weapon in a world where one can magic the rod’s orbital momentum away than it does in a world where you have to deal with that momentum for real.
Even before factoring in atmosphere, you’d only have to make a small change to speed to drop out of a low orbit. For example, a circular orbit with an altitude of 200 km would entail a speed of 7.8 km/s, but you’d only have to decelerate your payload by 61 m/s to have it hit the ground. That’s not even a one-percent reduction in speed. It’d take 43 minutes for the rod to actually strike, so it’s not exactly rapid, but rapidity isn’t needed if the objective is simply for Willis to obliterate the homes of spammers.
Well, if we can resort to “sufficiently advanced technology”, we can magic away the relevance of the weapon’s orbital momentum. Enough delta-V will get you from orbit to ground in a fraction of a second, like David Weber imagined in one of his novels. The weapon will be a blob of plasma by the time it arrives, but it still has its mass….
(Estimating in my head, I think time-of-flight was about 3 milliseconds.)
Drifting in Mario Kart grants you a spontaneous turbo boost if you meet certain conditions. Drifting maintains speed, but drifting correctly according to Video Game Logic will cause the vehicle to actually gain speed. That might be what Dorothy is mad about right now.
I wonder if she’d still manage to enjoy Dexter And Monkey Master in her current extremely square mindset.
Dexter and Monkey Master is granted a special dispensation on the grounds of childhood nostalgia, of course. The stuff we enjoyed when we were kids is always excused from having to meet our adult standards for suspension of disbelief.
On the other hand, not being able to change direction mid jump would suck the fun right out of most platformers.
Yeah, albeit Newton’s laws are always an essential starting point, it’s a whole other thing to tweak them into something what makes a game feel good to play, be it controlling jump height with gravity to essential forgiveness mechanics like input buffering, coyote time, hitbox pinching etc.
You lost me with everything after “gravity”.
What do those terms mean?
Coyote time is when you’re gonna jump off a ledge but you already walked off it a lil bit, the game still lets you jump despite you not exactly touching ground anymore.
This is incredibly handy for games with uneven terrain where you gotta jump off a rock or something, but walking forward disconnects your feet from the crappy rocky floor just enough to fail that jump.
Input buffering is self-explanatory to me, but just in case, it means it’ll store your repeated clicks on buttons and keys, and play them as soon as possible. Imo it’s kind of a hindrance in some shooter games where you fire unintended shots cause you panic-clicked a couple times but only intended to fire once.
I appreciate when games do this. I’ve always hated games that require a ton of very carefully timed platform jumping because I suck at it no matter how much I practice.
Finally discovered a year ago that my brain literally has delayed processing speed – did that ADHD test where you click a button as soon as a box appears, and I swore I clicked it immediately every time but apparently I did not! It was *fascinating* and kind of unnerving to discover my brain essentially “lags.” But finally explained my inability to time jumps in games. Though it also might explain why I’m less bothered by/aware of minute differences in FPS as long as it’s not *terrible*. I wonder if slower fps or the occasional lag essentially compensates for my brain lag. XD
Tbh it makes me wish games in general had an accessibility option one could adjust to accommodate that issue. Like a slider or something that could be set to match one’s reaction time.
Input buffering is what allows for a player input (such as jumping in a platformer game) to be recognized as valid even when it’s a bit too early. Like for instance, if the player wants to jump the moment they hit the ground, input buffering makes it so that they don’t have to be absolutely perfect with their timing of hitting the right button.
Same basic idea with coyote time, named after Wil. E. Coyote and his gag where he can walk or run off a cliff and gravity doesn’t affect him until he realizes it does. Coyote time in a platformer game is what allows the player to run and off the edge of a platform without being too perfect – there’s a very small window of time after leaving the edge where jump input will still register.
Hitbox pinching is what allows for the player to jump and squeeze sideways into tunnels just big enough to fit them without having to be too precise in when they aim with their jump arc.
In also the most simplest terms Coyote Time is in direct reference to the loony tunes, where the Coyote would be tricked to running off a ledge by the roadrunner but he would hover for a second before falling. https://youtu.be/Gq_bjaI0NTo?si=IsG1D8_x5Z1WFkgu
Input buffering is when the floor buffer is on your inputs to make the game play faster (good for grinding). Coyote Time is another name for Central Time (sometimes also called Central Daylight Time or Central Standard Time), due to the unusually high concentration of coyote spores in the affected regions. Hitbox pinching is a banned move in several martial arts (including Shōtōkan, Wadō-ryū, Taekwondo, Judo, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Muay Thai, Wing Chun, Jeet Kune Do, and Aikido), and involves pinching an opponent’s tonsils with one’s thumb and ring finger.
I had never beheld the term “Coyote Time” before, but I instantly grokked what it meant.
It’s less Newton’s laws and more Newton’s suggestions.
Worked just fine in Castlevania. The game just has to be designed with that in mind.
Wow, that ended up further away from the source than I expected. For context, I was referring to “not being able to change direction mid-jump would suck the fun right out of most platformers” by referring to one of my favorite series of platformers that did just that.
… Until Symphony of the Night came around and messed that part up.
Simon Belmont’s greatest enemy was not Dracula.
It was stairs.
*If* the platformer allowed one the same fine grain control over your launch that we have in real life, it’s possible it could be OK to play without mid air direction changes. However, there isn’t that fine grain control.
To be clear, we have a lot more of it than when I started with computing, using a computer for which we got classic Atari joysticks – except they weren’t called classic because that was the only kind of Atari joysticks that were made at the time. However, in real life, we have so many different ways we can adjust the jump before we actually leave the ground I am pretty sure I don’t even have words for all of them.
i feel dorothy is more one of those types to get into heavy realistic world building games lol. maybe switch to dnd for now? XD
a touch of realism but i imagine most ppl play vid games /because/ you can do the impossible lol (like in the sims where you can afford a car and a house without being miserably in debt 8D)
tho cool to test the limitatinos of physics like ppl whose job it is to search for glitches and stuff. or like “understand it/put it in/knowing the rules /so/ you can break them”
She’s the type who would refuse to play Steel Battalion without the full control rig, once she finds out it exists.
FYI: The Steel Battalion controls look like this:
https://gamingbolt.com/14-unusual-video-game-accessories-that-you-totally-bought/3
I think I’ll stick to the Warthog HOTAS
I don’t know if she’s technically minded enough to build her own, but I could see her buying a control panel for Kerbal Space Program
Ask Carla, but phrase it as a challenge. “The “Official” one isn’t authentic enough” or something to that effect. She’d probably be able to build a full-dive simulator rig that would fit under the dorm bed.
Wait … is there a way to play it without the proper controller? Secondary question: Why on earth would anyone want to? The controller is 90% of the appeal.
I remember reading about Steel Battalion years ago and always wanted that controller. Armored Core 6 is wonderful on MKB, but I’d go to therapy for a full rig like SB had.
You can afford a house and car in Sims??
I’m playing games wrong =(
Get her playing Oxygen not included, I bet she would love managing all the llittle clones runing aroung inside an asteroid trying to live their best lives.
I have never heard of this but it sounds intriguing so thank you! Is it some sort of virtual life sim or civilization management game?
Some of my favorite games ever are things like the Creatures series and Sim Park. Love those sorts of “playing micromanaging god” games.
You wake up in the center of an unknown asteroid. (“you” apparently being a sentient Printing Pod, that can print Dupes (duplicants) who will build your colony for you and discover the mysteries of this place, eventually building a rocket ship and exploring breaching the temporal tear (or whatever it’s called)
It’s fun & fairly easy in the early game, but I usually sputter around the mid-game, getting overwhelmed by all the myriad dependencies and inter relations to get create the materials you need to build stuff (food farms/ranches, water, oxygen, heat management, refining raw materials into steel, plastic, etc.)
There are a TON of YouTube videos about it. They usually abbreviate the name to “ONI”.
Speaking as someone who plays both Creatures and ONI, I’d strongly recommend the latter. The micromanagement seems like it’d be a plus.
screw Newton, fake all physics with springs.
had an uncle who commented (back in the ’90s) that the people who are best at driving and the people who are best at driving games don’t have that much overlap
also, I bet Dotty would be fun with Mario Party
There’s a big difference between a racing sim like Forza or Gran Turismo and a kart racer like Mario Kart.
OTOH, I agree with Dot, you shouldn’t go faster by braking and sliding. Also, I’m not very good at it.
dunno if there’s more accurate simulators these days but i suppose it would be amusing to see racecar drivers also doing mario kart and seeing how they adjust
There sure are! Just look at iRacing; its fans think Gran Turismo and Forza are too arcade-y.
In fact…yes, the minigames it has would be more appropriate for her.
I am excellent at driving games yet terrible at driving, so, can confirm. Probably helps that games are more forgiving of errors and delayed reaction time (I have an issue with the latter thanks to ADHD) and don’t induce the same level of anxiety as being behind the wheel of a fast moving box of metal.
I’m wondering what you would make of Graph Racers, which eliminates the time pressure.
Maybe this explains how I once beat several members of a high school golf team on a golf simulator, when I’ve never played a real round of golf in my life.
IIRC several Actual Car Racing Drivers made the leap to a Racing Simulator Tourney during the High Pandemic era.
*plays “Speeding” by The Go-Gos on the hacked Muzak*
is isaac newton a dlc racer i don’t have him yet
He can be, if you make a Mii of him.
no he’s a kawaii anime girl
https://www.reddit.com/r/houkai3rd/comments/hl10bk/issac_newton/
This is the last place i expected to see anyone reference honkai impact.
I thought hewas the Zaibach Emperor?
I really shouldn’t be surprised, after King Arthur
Don’t drink mercury, kids.
However, it is pretty heavy metal.
Came to say this. Don’t mainline it either.
Newton probably came into contact with mercury during his alchemical researches and in his job as Master of the Mint.
Newton is like FRESHMAN physics. The minute you start getting into equations involving imaginary numbers? She’d Withdraw While Failing.
…just over the principle of the thing.
dorothy i likeher so much
Dorothy may be one of the few people (without motion sickness) who’s not having fun playing Mario Kart.
i never got into it either but i can see the appeal of it in a friend group during lunch break
I have a visual-spatial learning disability and could never play it… I always got the “wrong way” cloud, which my partner only ever saw for the first time when playing with me :'(
I sympathize, I don’t have this particular issue but finally discovered recently (via testing) that I have significantly delayed processing time.
Basically my brain lags, and I can’t tell, so I’ll think I’ve reacted to something immediately when I haven’t. Makes any sort of game where you have to jump or move at *just* the right time very frustrating.
Wait, like that one Awkward Zombie strip?
https://www.awkwardzombie.com/comics/comic127.jpg
Now I want to try this test. I’m also really terrible at jumping and mario kart etc (like, I’ve probably died the most of any game I’ve played in that first small jump on mario bros). I blamed my parents for not letting me have a nintendo as a kid, but maybe I should be blaming them for genetics instead?
I love video games, but I find racing games so boring. You just try to drive fast and time turns. Where’s the strategy! ‘Where’s the puzzle! Take me back to starcraft!
The strategy is go faster than other racers. The puzzle is why you’re aren’t fastest than race others ones.
The strategy in Mario Kart is “Do I throw the blue shell now or wait until my opponent is in the lead rather than an NPC?”
(Showing just how bad I am at strategy, I am the only person I know who has thrown a blue shell when I’m in the lead. More than once.)
Throw that shell the fuck away to make room for funnier power ups like an oil slick or something.
See I love both! I love literal jigsaw puzzles and puzzle games (as long as they don’t involve much math – logic is fine) but sometimes it’s nice to have a game where you just gotta go fast.
For me the challenge is learning to NOT crash into things or run/drive off the road at breakneck speeds.
But there are definitely times I’d rather sit in a game like Myst, listening to pretty music, spending hours stubbornly trying to solve something.
I’ve never had any fun with Mario Kart. Or any other kind of racing game. I just can’t fathom the appeal.
I’m shit at racing games so I don’t enjoy it much either
Are you sure you haven’t mixed up the cause and effect there? I don’t like them, so I don’t generally play them. Thus, when someone badgers me into doing so, I have no experience, so I suck a fat one.
She can turn on that automatic turning mode for the turns but technically drifting isn’t braking. It’s 2 separate buttons.
I’m gonna be honest, every time I accidentally turn that mode on I just do worse at the game, not better.
Part of me is surprised Dorothy’s not also in her panties. (Yet?)
“When in Rome” is a rule, too, right?
Amber is in her underwear because this is her room and she woke up like that. There isn’t a reason for Dorothy to put on pants and then take them off again.
But we can dream
I am being facetious due to Amber and Dina being in theirs, also as a callback to when Walky encouraging Joyce to relax got Joyce to take her pants off.
I read this at first to mean Dorothy being in AMBER’S panties. “Whoa, bit of a leap there, but ok… !”
This may actually be one of the few interactions where Amber is the cool one.
Indeed, it is strange to see, but refreshing
Okay, I’m seeing a little more how Dorothy and Danny were together at the start of the comic. Pretty sure if Sal came over to play a round or three Dot would explode.
And get her a copy of Minecraft, not Mario Kart. https://xkcd.com/861/
Yep, I see it now, too.
Drifting is especially important in the Leaf Cup, assuming this is MK8 we’re talking about. Music Park is, like, nothing but curved road, and Wario Stadium is full of 90-degree turns.
It’s not the destination it is how you get there.
And Dorothy is getting there the wrong way.
Me: Isaac Newton was a literal wizard, Dorothy. He practiced alchemical magic and belonged to several lodges of sorcerers.
I read this book about cats when I was a pre-teen that had this weird unhinged Alchemist villain and I re-read it a few years ago and suddenly realized it’s supposed to be Issac Newton. It was a wild realization.
Well, yes, but he did so HONORABLY. Also, he worked for years to hunt down and prosecute counterfeiters. Very rules-oriented guy, on the whole.
For a golden moment, Newton thought he had found the Philosopher’s Stone. When disappointment hit, he suffered what we today would call a nervous breakdown. It took him a couple of years to recover.
Dorothy would probably kill it at Pikmin.
Dorothy would probably kill all the Pokemon.
Is that how that works in Mario Kart, or is it just relaxed drifting physics?
Ever since 64 if you bank a turn really well with shoulder buttons you get a boost.
The only Mario Kart games I know of that have drifting on the brake are the arcade games. (Dang it, Bandai Namco, make another one and add Banapass support to the Western version. I don’t wanna have just randomized items.)
Theory:
Dorothy losing at Mario Kart because she wants to play honest and by the rule is why she’d be a terrible politician.
Can’t see it in another way.
It is almost certainly going to end up being a metaphor for her concept of self-imposed rules and her rigid morality being incompatible with politics.
Honestly, they should decide the Speakership via Mario Kart. It would be easier for everyone.
maybe she should settle for being mayors, i’m sure there’s some ‘sleazy’ mayor scandals but it wouldn’t be as bad as the very top
tho i do wonder about the ‘dog/cat’ mayor cities. XD wouldn’t be surprised if it was a ‘tactic’ to trick locals so that the mayor can ‘sign’ stuff without the public knowing and passing off certain laws and such lol
Git gud scrub
I hate this. Mostly because drifting is an actual thing actual street racers actually do drift around corners for a multitude of reasons. If you accept that then can’t you accept that in the world of mario, a world in which you play as many fantasy creatures in made up vehicles made from random miscellaneous parts glued together by magic that one of the features of these non-existent karts is that the boost engine fills with energy based on your kart drifting.
Like you can play the game and accept that one of the racers is a sentient worm, a yoshi or a ghost but you cannot believe that a built in feature of these karts is literally “IT BUILDS BOOST WHEN YOU DRIFT”
This is beyond pedantic. This is OBNOXIOUS and I would slap my switch out of her hands and tell her to leave my room and never return.
Banished to the goddamn Shadow Realm for playing video games the stupid way. T’way with her.
Imo her pedanticness could be “just” a symptom of her combined tigh-woundness in combination with her starting burn out
*pedantry
YUSS! THIS! Thanks Yoto!
My first Mario Kart game was Mario Kart Wii, which had the option to drift automatically, so I never actually learned how to do it and proceeded to suck at all subsequent games.
If it’s any consolation, I didn’t even know drifting was a thing. The only Mario Kart game I ever played with any regularity was 64 and I have no idea if drifting was possible in it but I managed to be excellent at it regardless so I guess it wasn’t necessary? (Unless I was doing it without realizing?)
If it’s required to be good in later games though, yeah, I have no idea. I’ve only played the Switch version once and my opponent at the time was my (then) 5 year old, so couldn’t really get a good sense of whether my 64 skills transferred. XD
It’s nice to see Dorothy relax, but it seems like she’s more suited to strategic type games.
It would very much be nice to see Dorothy relax. I hope we do some time.
In my opinion, it’s just the begin, step by step.
It may be an “old” game for her generation, but someone should introduce her to Goldeneye 64. Caves level with proximity mines is a control freak’s dream (I speak from experience).
It got to the point where my brother would refuse to play with me unless we banned that level and/or mines, because instead of running around hunting each other down, I would pick a nook in the caves and line the entire entrance with mines, and just…wait. If I picked the right spot and set my mines properly, he basically couldn’t get to me without blowing himself up.
Actually in Mario Kart 64 battle mode, you can do something similar with the Block Fort level. Go to the top of a pillar and park yourself on an item box and just keep launching the items as you get them (the box will respawn continuously). Except whenever you get bananas or fake item boxes, drop them at the end of the ramp up the pillar. It safely barricades you at the top of the pillar while turning everything below into a death trap (shells just bounce around the walls down below).
If Dorothy’s into games, I can see her like an insufferable Gran Turismo player: “Ugh, these gear ratio on this Nissan Skyline 98 is so unrelated. Still 97 still is the best one”
Oh, Dorothy, if you think Mario Kart has realistic physics if you refuse to use drifting, I have some bad news for you.
The good news, though, is that you can play Kerbal Space Program! It’s awesome! Also, every space-exploration enthusiast ever will vote for you when they find out that a KSP player is running for president. Especially if they learn that you inspired a main character in Julia Gray, Space Commander!
I was thinking that there must be some rule-based game she could enjoy.
But… Drifting in Mario Kart has nothing to do with the brakes.
Yeah, I was about to comment this too. Even if she’s hung up on ‘well in real life you’re braking,’ that’s not always true either.
I came looking for this comment! I feel like the comic just makes no sense.
I suspect its a metaphor, she’s overworking herself and making it less likely she’ll have a career in government.
I laughed way harder then i should have, but Didn’t Issac Newton die by drinking mercury? I mean dotty maybe gain the respect of Liebnez beacuse he seems like a dude who could strategically break in to second place when the blue shell is active.
Wait… In which Mario Kart game do you drift with the brake button? Hearing it gives me a sense of familiarity, but the standard has always been that it’s the jump button (which was just the powerslide button in Double Dash).
Oof, You know someone isn’t in a good place mentally when AMBER is being the voice of reason.
Word for word what I came here to say.
She needs to play Chants of Sennar, or some other logic puzzle game.
Yeah, she really looks like she’s having fun, “following the rules” and all. Sure seems like a Six Flags time.
Dumbass.
Agreed. Someone should tell her she’s a fictional character; she’d spontaneously combust and instantly become 6000% more interesting.
Oh nice, they can still hook up
Dorothy and Amber? I like that idea.
Maybe Dorothy and Zachy Newdog?
Not much what’s new with you.
Hahaha
But no, Dottie needs a gay experience just to make sure. Then she can realize she’s in love with Joyce
once Dina leaves:
“so I hear you like to, uh, masturbate in public. wanna … [tilts head at door]”
He also died a virgin so he may be salty at you
Meanwhile, Chad Tesla…
I feel like Newton would side with Amber. Assuming a Newton already adapted to the modern world, I would expect his response to be “The world contained within your device does not follow the rules of our own. How not, as it is fiction, devised by humankind who have not fully discovered the rules of our own world! No, take it as a blessing that you can know and predict the rules of that tiny world. To fight them is illogical, and a waste of time besides!”
She seems fine.
Wow, Dorothy.
Just… wow.
I do hope that a posterior stickectomy will someday be possible for the poor girl before her condition becomes terminal.
It’s adorable that you want Sir Isaac Newton’s respect. I sure as hell don’t.
Right??
In today’s world, Ike would be making pipe bombs someplace off-grid.
To obtain Sir Isaac Newton’s esteem you must journey to the Mystic Valley and uncover the secret knowledge of the Atlanteans that allowed them to bend reality to their will.
…but like, dorothy *likes* cartoons. surely dexter and monkey master broke a few physical laws here and there.
idk, this feels…odd. has dorothy become way more flanderized over the last year or two, or is it only because she’s already so on edge that these things are bothering her when they wouldn’t normally? it’s like she’s LOOKING for something complain about.
Could also be that watching others do it is different than her actively taking part in the act
Yeah, that’s how I’m reading it. It seems like following her “moment of weakness”, Dorothy has decided to be extra Dorothy to make up for it.
Breakdowns can push people into latching onto smaller and smaller parts of themselves in a desperate bid for control. Whether or not she’ll admit it, she’s been through Too Much and doesn’t know how to move forward.
When I start to burn out like that, it can feel like my world grows tighter and more claustrophobic with each passing day, or hour…And clutching at my idea of how things *should* be feels like a desperate attempt to push out at the strangling bubble to try to make enough room to breathe.
I kinda get that vibe here with Dorothy.
This is the same girl that – while in a better place – encouraged Joyce’s “I could be a fighter pilot and a mom and make macaroni and cheese and own a stable full of horses” (or whatever) dreams, rather than crush and of those with the challenges they may pose.
She’s in a different pave right now.
I need to remember this image. Thank you.
Now imagine a large group of people feeling like that all together. Welcome to politics.
It may also be that so many rules and authority figures have been challenged for her in the past few months that she’s desperate for something she can adhere to without being challenged (and physics doesn’t come with much moral grayness)
Newton was a bit of a mess iIrc. Not someone you want to emulat, Dot.
I know right? Experimenting on catgirls and replacing their blood with experimental luck juice is not cool.
…what?
Can you tell me how to get to whatever timeline you come from?
She’s playing violent video game (cars are violence), which means she’ll are gonna be becomes violent in turn herself. It’s been has been they proved it like twenty thirty forty years ago in the past so many times and there’s evidence she’ll do it. She’s saw the when Amber stabbed Rape Guy on purpose (also plays games hint hint), she beat Ross in the skull with the hammer she brought, and then Blaine was she saw him get shot with her ears because that’s hearing it, back wham that happened again. She also Dorothy was there when Joyce was telling her about Becky told her she was in the car when Ross and punched him across the street, so that’s all it’s all of it’s just evidence on evidence and you can’t honestly say she’s not Dorothy isn’t won’t become just as killer as much of a violent murderist as the other villains. It’s in there, all the clues, you weren’t listening the first time but now she’s spelling it out.
It’s just good writing.
…are you okay
It’s a joke… I’m 90% sure…
Holy bejeezus Taff. Reads like you took the comments of three different people, all of whom were out of their minds, put them in a burlap sack and threw them in a tumble dryer.
Not a complaint, mind you.
I’ve never been a big Dorothy fan, but this right here? Miss Party Pooper? She can just go get bent. People like her are so annoying.
Funny because this right here is the most relatable she’s ever been to me. Hung up on some irrelevant detail to the point of making everything worse for herself and ruining her own enjoyment.
…along with everyone else’s.
Girl is a joysuck.
You kidding? This would be HILARIOUS to see irl! I’d be feeding her more and more on the nonsense of the world to see where her limits lie
Yeah. I’ve never got the Dorothy hate – she’d annoy me, but the level of disgust/taking everything she does in the worst possible faith is just bizarre to my POV.
And, uh, yeah, being a big old weirdo who fixates on dumb things is indeed relateable content.
Oh Dorothy… You just need to recontextualize it better.
The Mushroom Kingdom is clearly not set on Earth; why would their rules of gravity or physics be identical to ours? (In fact, Mario, an ordinary human, can be clearly seen jumping up to 5 times his height in the original game. That is CLEARLY not possible in Earth’s gravity, so the only logical conclusion is that gravity works differently in the Mushroom Kingdom.)
Is this the start of the Dorothy’s “woman in STEM” era?
Would be better for her, she is just not well equipped for the political scene.
Maybe Dorothy would like the original Super Mario Kart. In that game, if you drive well, you never let go of the accelerator, let alone touch the reverse.
Instead you jump your go-kart and turn in the air to put your wheels in a new direction to start a turn without losing momentum. If you know so little about how cars works that slowing down to make a turn offends your concept of racing, SMK’s purely fictional physics probably feel more right.
Heh, my stepdad was a professional mechanic and driver, and he was the worst at Mario Kart. (He may still be, we just don’t talk.) He drove so realistically, for example he’d never use the feather item, just let it occupy the item slot for the rest of the race.
He probably would’ve liked Gran Turismo and Forza Motorsport.
I had that kind of trouble playing any of the Need for Speed Underground games, because they’d automatically drift the car when you turned. No matter how I tried, I instinctually tried to countersteer into the turn when the back end of the car came around, which just turns you the other direction.
dorothy this is becoming distressing
Maybe she should play some Mass Effect, they show Sir Isaac Newton proper respect there.
The last racing video game I played was NFS II from two decades ago. Its physics seemed pretty legit.
If it weren’t for this strip I would know Mario Kart and Newton were at loggerheads.
What interests me here is that this shows the effect of deciding for yourself which set of rules is The Rules. Sometimes the decision isn’t yours to make.
And that’s her whole problem! xD
You can do what in mario kart
Drift and powerslide a scooter, somehow gaining speed, with a ring of three turtle shells orbiting you, off a jump that somehow works while you’re upside-down.
That last bit reminds me of an idea I had for a game or mod that makes only your protagonist’s model upside-down, with no other effect on the gameplay. Everything would still function the exact same, though.
CTR > Mario Kart
#JustSaying
Fuck yeah!
The hop-powerslide-boost mechanic makes more sense than Mario Kart’s drifting.
I was so disappointed they didn’t release Crash Team Racing Nitro Fueled on PC that I bought a Switch just to play it. (Then, much later, a secondhand Xbox One because it turns out the Switch port isn’t the greatest.)
Now kiss.
“Ok, but I’ll be over here in the corner with Alan Turing pointing at you and laughing”
Some other people have pointed out in the comments that you do not use the brake button, but a specific jump/drift button, and I know Willis has Mario Kart.
I demand answers! You should have thoroughly researched the mechanics for this long before writing this, what gives?
I could be being too pedantic on this, Amber probably knows the difference and is just following Dorothy’s terminology instead of turning this arc into a Mario Kart encyclopedia.
Man, now I want a Mario Kart encyclopedia.
Scratch that *being*, I’m still waking up.
That’s the Watsonian explanation. I think the Doylian explanation is it’s a metaphor, for Dorothy overworking herself into burnout, and figuratively braking would give her better results.
Remind me NEVER to run FFXIV with this bongo.
She’d insist on running the Tank, and wipe us all for refusing to use any tactics that can’t be replicated in real life.
*motion to kick*
Thousand Maws of Toto-Rak (Ultimate): Dorothy is playing a Paladin because it’s the only one with a shield, and she can’t understand how the other tanks could possibly block. She’s pulling small, which is fine in and if itself, but she won’t stance up or use AoE and keeps insisting the Scholar focus on the DPS because she has a self-heal, forgetting it doesn’t actually work until later levels and they went in synced. She also keeps talking in /say, which isn’t too big of a deal except that it distracts the rest of the team, who are all using /party and have to keep tabbing back and forth mid-fight.
…The other tanks can block? Was this added in Endwalker?
I could be wrong but I think an LB3 provides a partywide shield AOE.
They got mitis, ain’t they?
wow, she stayed to play. I’m… impressed. baby steps, but impressed.
For some values of the term ‘play’, I suppose.
I feel Dorothy’s pain
Creating your own challenges and overcoming them? Seems like Dorothy is great at video games
Have we considered the possibility that Dorothy might be on the spectrum herself? Her refusal to accept the game “breaking the rules” is a very on point thing.
There was a really exhausting discourse about it around the time Joyce got a referral about the ’tism and Sarah was like “Hey Dorothy, maybe you’re autistic, ya socially clueless dipshit?” and Dorothy was all “I understand people, Sarah.”
Yup, she evidently gotz internalized ableism which i hope is addressed in the coming storylines 🥺
Her breakdown in Ruth’s murder cave makes me suspect she’s worried she might be.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2023/comic/book-13/03-joementum/inwithyou/
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2022/comic/book-12/04-dont-stop-billie-ving/sunlight/
Pretty sure the majority of the cast is autistic, ADHD or both.
…but drift racing is a thing? There are actual racers that do that in real life. Besides, it’s MARIO, does she play the regular games without jumping more than 2 vertical feet or does she really think there are people who can leap 5 times their body height from a cold start?
Sometimes you gotta slow down to go faster. Dorothy wouldn’t be a very good race car driver.
How ironic, that Dorothy needs someone to teach her the value of jerking
Amber grabs Dorothy by the hand. “I’m going to teach you how to race.”
I assume she doesn’t play ANY game that has “double jumping” in it!
are we SURE dorothy isnt also on the spectrum ?
Someone needs to show Dorothy some Formula D footage.