There's ghosts at your heels and fairy tale worlds ahead. What do you do? Jump down the rabbit hole!
The Otherknown
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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.
Blindsprings
Kadi Fedoruk
Tamaura, wrested into a world 300 years in the future, must find a way to save the magic fading from her country.
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!
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.
Cyanide & Happiness
Explosm
Satire, dark humor and surreal humor.
Fantomestein
Beka Duke
Desperate for companionship, Frankenstein's Monster pretends to be the Opera Ghost. A grave mistake.
2 Slices
RJ Morel
After a case of mistaken identity, will awkward Daisuke find help from excitable Mamo, or will his love life be thrown completely off track?
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.
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.
Mac Hall
Matt Boyd
The legendary early-aughts webcomic that inspired a wave of webcomic creators.
Paint the Town Red
Windy, Winter Jay Kiakas
Winona runs a werewolf shelter with partner in crime, Odile in the Gothic city of Merlot. One day they take in an injured vampire, and soon unravels many of the dark secrets of Merlot.
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Or Mary. She’s more likely to just barge in uninvited to see if she can snitch on anyone. I’m surprised to find that Raidha is actually less loathsome of a character to me, I can understand her box-checking social-climbing blind-loyalty-at-all-costs mob mentality better than I can sympathize with vengeful religious hypocrisy. But they are both desperate to be part of some privileged in-group.
Ruth, Jennifer, Raidah, Mary, Chloe, the dean, and all the partygoers’ parents (including the ghosts of Toedead and Bonnie) are going to bust down the door tomorrow. They’re pissed (that they weren’t invited).
Okay, it’s been a LONG time since we’ve seen Sarah with any expressions other than her customary heavy frown, or a forced-for-social-reasons smile. It’s weird seeing natural positive and neutral expressions from her.
yeah but that’s because it operates under a sort of “out of sight, out of mind” type deal. They do actually do stuff about it when people get *caught*. If, as other people point out, one of Sarah’s enemies tells authorities this could be a big deal.
Maybe it’s different at different colleges, but mine was like “got caught, security told you to dump it out” type of logic. They also had a no fault policy for hospitalizations – basically if you went to the hospital, no harm no foul (because they didn’t want people avoiding the hospital out of fear and dying).
BYU is probably different, but like just someone saying “oh I saw X drinking” would be like “yeah okay”. If they wanted to get her in trouble they should say she was handing out E or something.
it was enforced when it became medical. (I was on the emergency squad) if a student didn’t want to go to the medcenter for detox because their parents might find out, they were allowed to pass out, arrested for their own safety and taken to the hospital anyway, this time with an arrest record. If you are too drunk to sign your name, should you really be making decisions about your well-being?
Agree—this is not a flat “no,” at least. And I’m starting to ship this, on the grounds that Sarah is doing a lot of work for this & she deserves some joy. Jacob would (continue to) be a good influence on her. (As well as making her horny!)
Jacob might be right about body fat affecting the time it takes to get drunk, but he might actually have it backwards. In the one or 2 articles I found, body fat doesn’t absorb alcohol very well, but muscle does. (And when the muscles absorb alcohol, it lowers the level in the bloodstream making a person less drunk.)
Its possible that Jacob is just naturally a “light weight”. Or he over-estimates just how ‘drunk’ he really is. (i.e. “thinks he is really drunk when he is just a little tipsy.)
It’s legal at church. Your structure could imply the church service counts as illegal drinking, so I’d like to get ahead of the 6-hour YouTube takedown.
Might be. I’m not sure but I think at least one person said they were here from their parent’s GI bill. We know Becky’s basically sponsored by Robin which might be considered a scholarship in spirit even though Robin would likely never hold Becky to an academic performance standard. We know Amber was having her dad pay as part of his divorce settlement, now likely Richard. Perhaps the rest of the cast we know and love are actually just upper middle class, rich assholes. We know the Walkertons are.
Charles is confirmed to have an OnlyFans. Willis deleted 37 tweets about it, but I have them on my phone. It was a really unhinged thread, like he was going on some truly wild tangents involving New Line Films and frontal nudity, just a fever dream of the most bizarre tweets.
lol that sounds very Charles and would explain how off-the-wall and inappropriate he is. I hope it’s not actually cannon or at least that no kids in this comic ever see it.
My favorite only fans was made for a few weeks by a YouTuber who does Victorian fashion, specifically making it from scratch. She did romantic ankle-baring pinups, fully dressed in fabulous costumes and in her lovely antique-style apartment. They really looked quite old-fashioned and interesting.
There are basically no kids in the comic at all, so it’s unlikely Willis would rope one in for a porno plotline. The adults who are main and secondary characters in the comic though? They’d definitely be at risk.
I feel like Chuck and Linda both probably have well paying jobs.
Linda gives me consulting firm vibes, personally. Like she’s one of the people companies hire to come in and give them an excuse to fire a bunch of people.
Or they’re taking out huge loans like most college kids.
I don’t think we know what most of the parents do or how rich they are. Jennifer’s rich, well beyond the Walkertons. Carla’s far beyond her.
Joyce’s dad is a dentist, so they’re doing well (except for 5 kids and a stay at home mom and now a divorce). Joe’s is a bone doctor, so he’s got money.
We know about Asher’s money.
Danny? Dorothy? Malaya? Lucy? Jacob? Ethan?
That’s true. I will say most of them don’t act like they’re under the pressure of impending, crippling loan debt if they fail academically. Sarah is the one who brings it up the most. Maybe Dorothy and Jacob but that’s more because they’re naturally studious and might not indicate scholarship pressure or loans. Ethan though wasn’t going to class at all for a time so I’m not sure what that implies for his financial status. Would dropping out upset his parents? Leave him in debt? Who knows. Danny, Malaya, and Lucy are complete mysteries to me. I don’t even have enough there to start theorizing. I wish I knew more about the cast in this regard. It’s weird I kind of know more about Raidah than most of the cast academically.
Harrison is probably doing well now, but we don’t anything about their parents. I suppose he could be putting his brother through college, but that’s a lot for a relatively young lawyer (with a new baby.)
Dorothy’s track record might have gotten her a scholarship to IU but I don’t know if she’d have taken it if she was sure she was going to switch to Yale.
Meaning her past accomplishments. Which do include being the star of her high school’s cross-country team, but I think it was meant it more of a general sense.
As for scholarships, when I was applying for college, there were some that you could only get for that college if you listed it as your first choice, so if any of her possible scholarships were like that, she presumably missed them. There are also some you might just get after admission, but I think you have to accept the university admission first, and if she was still waiting on Yale, she might have missed her window.
Also, thank you for clarifying the Walkerton/Brown confusion, I kept looking at that comment like, “Okay, but even if you count Billie, who’s the fourth?”
Morality clauses are just…
It feels like it stops people from growing. Expecting them to already be fully grown.
But I do understand that they can’t be throwing money at people to just party.
But it’s also still a part of being a student.
But it’s still breaking the law.
…
It’s complicated.
I mean… there’s a lot of people who sure wish they could get a scholarship, it’s a special privilege to get one. If you’re gonna underage drink you could at least have the good taste to do it discreetly off-campus instead of in a big drunken party in the dorms (with stolen liquor).
Then again, the RA spent much of the first semester in a drunken stupor, so who’s even gonna do anything about this oh shit Mary
Actually wasn’t it pictures of Ryan Paul doing workouts that Mary liked so much? (I seem to remember that was a complaint Roz had, about all the Ryan pictures she put up.)
Are my memories of college really so far off from current reality?
Drinking and small parties in dorm rooms were far more common than we’ve seen here. More common than going to off-campus parties (or bars).
No one thought twice about getting in trouble for it unless things got really wild and probably not then. Like a floor party with a 100+ people in multiple rooms and spilling into the hallway might be some concern.
It comes down to discretion I guess, and the magnitude of tolerance the school has. I had friend who was constantly getting busted by the RA for just leaving loads of empty beer cans decrepitly rolling around on the floor in her dorm. (We had random inspections) She definitely got in trouble with the school because it kept happening, good thing she wasn’t trying to maintain a scholarship…
I basically never encountered dorm room parties (if someone has a place off campus, they’re hosting)– some did happen, in the bigger dorms on campus, but even those didn’t seem common. Actually, my friend was an Intercultural Aide in one of them, and she told me that there was a party in the dorm that a bunch of RAs were at, drinking with the residents, and a bunch lost their positions. And my school wasn’t even a dry campus like IU is, but some RAs and residents were underage.
In my 3rd year in college, my RA was found wasted in the communal bathroom and ended up losing her position as well.
It wasn’t uncommon for people to drink in dorms/on campus, underage or not, but if you had a position with the school, it was definitely at risk, and probably the same for major scholarships.
IU’s not that hardcore, is it? if one quiet booze party actually got you booted off an undergrad scholarship I would know literally no other college graduates from my era.
If they hear you mention alcohol in any context, they’ll expel you on the spot. Police will be called, rooms will be searched, and you’d better have a ride ready, because the campus is large and they will not be patient about you leaving. It happened to my cousin Louie just a few weeks ago, and they even shaved off his left eyebrow and basically corralled him into local gang territory, because the gang in that area has this thing where if your left eyebrow is shaved, it means you’re an Inuyasha fan, and they’ll beat you up.
Depends on where the scholarship is from? It may not be through the University. A private grantor could have any requirements that aren’t illegal. Imagine Joyce’s former church offering scholarships to its teen members.
Sarah could have a whole bundle of small scholarships from various places, the loss of any of which would make the difference between “I can afford this” and “I can’t quite afford this anymore.” Each with its own rules.
It absolutely could, in theory. That could quite easily be in the terms of the scholarship. Just like, in theory, they could all wind up with criminal charges from this.
It’s just that in practice, in a small scale college dorm room party, that’s not going to happen. They don’t even try to enforce the rules to crack down to that level. Unless things have changed a lot.
I find Jacob and Sarah’s dynamic very fun lately, but I do sometimes feel frustrated *for* her. Like, I do think he’s into her, a lot of what he’s said with her lately has a flirty, playful tone, but it does feel like he’s dangling a carrot to a degree rather than committing more to a statement on his feelings.
Of course, that’s probably kind of the idea. After how long she fought showing him her intimate side at all, he’s probably determined to see that she’s genuinely willing to commit to that for more than the long term. Not saying it’s fair, just, that if that’s what he’s doing, it makes some sense.
I think he is just genuinely flirting. No promises, no ulterior motives. I just hope she’s not going to be heartbroken if he also flirts with other girls and ends up engaged to someone else in two weeks.
“This could void my scholarship” and THERE it is. The innocuous comment I was waiting for that will inevitably have ramifications.
I’ve kept thinking about how Dorothy and Joyce posted online about them drinking in a bar, and I keep wondering how long it’d take for Raidah to find out and try to use this to her advantage as revenge on Joyce or Sarah. But this right here, I can only imagine she’ll find out eventually and what’ll happen from there.
Sara will panic, and no one of actual consequence will care.
Almost no one would have scholarships if they were that easy to lose. If the father used his connections to make a stink, the scandal would more likely ruin him than her.
Eh, Raidah had a chance to get Sarah in trouble for battery and didn’t. Minor crime in that case, but still a bigger deal than underage drinking. Raidah can be nasty, but it’s a different kind of nasty.
The thing is, Raidah doesn’t matter. She’s never going to matter. What’s she gonna say? “I heard Sarah drank a booze. No, I don’t have any evidence.” Like, anything she does is a non-starter because she’s just completely irrelevant to anyone else’s life at this point.
I think the main reason Jason was sacked despite the lack of evidence is because the very accusation itself is pretty damning. You don’t want to have a tutor instructing students who’s going to sleep with their charges. Plus, Jason didn’t seem to try and fight the accusation or plead his innocence, thus “proving” the accusation had merit in their eyes. I don’t know how employment works with someone with a work visa but I know several American states are ‘at will’ employment so the uncomfortable accusation is probably enough reason for them to terminate him just to be safe. Also, maybe Jason was shitty at his job LOL.
Being a student is different than being employed, since students pay to be at the college. They’re also given expectations to uphold, but I think accused crimes would likely need to be proven with evidence or otherwise just be refutable for the college to say “we’re expelling you, you’re not our kind of student”. There’s also a world of difference between being accused of having a couple drinks while underage, and being accused of sleeping with the students you are tutoring.
The big thing with Jason is that he went “yeah” and resigned rather than try to contest it. There’s an enormous chance if he’d tried to contest it and gone “what proof do you have” he’d still have his job.
But for all his faults, Jason does have a conscience, and did know that what he did was wrong, so he took the lumps.
It derives from British cooking, where the person who makes the custard is held responsible if it doesn’t come out smoothly, and must therefore “take the lumps”.
Was what he did wrong? Normally I would be like, yeah he’s being shitty, but Sal literally instigated the whole thing. I mean, she like, assumed that it was understood that this was for grades, but I don’t think that’s Jason’s fault. Am I off here.
In conclusion, having sex with Sal is kind of a grey area, and there would have been ways to do it better, but I wouldn’t hold him culpable.
What he did was shitty, yes, and beyond that, it was clearly against the rules of his position. Penny was fired for “boffing” students, and it doesn’t seem like Joe was doing it for the grade, so it was really the boffing that was the issue.
Having sex with a student is against the rules, precisely to avoid having to deal with claims like this. You ban the straightforward act so that people abusing their position can’t wiggle their way out of it.
Sexual/romantic relationships between teachers and students are always-always-always a problem. Even if the student initiated it for completely non-academic reasons (while we know Sal initiated for specifically academic reasons), the onus is still on the teacher to be above reproach and keep that air gap between student and teacher to, if nothing else, maintain credibility. A student and teacher can say they’re just boning, that nothing about their romantic relationship impacts their academic one, but the likelihood of that actually being true is not good.
To be clear, when Sal first propositioned Jason, his reaction should not have been to have sex with her but then still grade her fairly. It should have been to send her out of the office and immediately give her grading to the other TA.
I don’t think Raidah is that stupid, if word got out she was that openly petty and treacherous over something lots and lots of other students do, it would mean no one would trust her and it would really put the kibosh on her whole “social climbing” project. Narcing is specifically why she hates Sarah. Her plans are probably far more circuitous.
Mary, on the other hand, loves being petty and spiteful, and doesn’t care at all about being popular.
“Heard worse plans” is a pretty low bar, and can only go lower over time.
In my case, I THINK the worst plan I’ve ever heard is “destroy a hurricane before it makes landfall by detonating a really big nuke at its center”, but there might be a few even worse ones that I’m not recalling.
“After exhausting the OED, we started numbering them. When overlapping hurricanes formed at all points on the Earth’s surface, and our scheme was foiled by Cantor diagonalization, we just decided to name them all “Steve”. Your local forecast tomorrow is “Steve”. Good luck.”
The amount of energy needed to be released at the eye of an average hurricane to actually disperse the composite airborne moisture vectors that keep it spinning would probably cost more in funding and damage than if it had just been left alone to run its course :/
In Jacob’s case, he has specifically heard worse plans for dating him. Specifically Joyce’s regarding lying to his brother that she is already his girlfriend and ???
I actually kind of suspect he’s only playing along with Sarah’s constant overt hitting on him, in hopes that eventually she’ll get over it and realize that they would make better friends than lovers. It’s like some sort of inverted version of Nice Guy Syndrome, oddly enough.
Yeah, I think it’s just mass in general that makes the difference. (Along with a load of other factors). Maybe he just doesn’t fancy a drink and it’s just an excuse?
Actually, from what I just read muscular people can actually handle alcohol better, because muscle mass has more water than fat and so it dilutes the alcohol more. So if we were just going on that, Jacob could probably finish the “keg” and be fine.
I’m no doctor, but yeah, from what I heard it’s essentially just down to mass in general. The bigger you are, the more blood and cells the alcohol has to affect and so you can take in bigger amounts before it starts affecting you.
Jacob may actually have things backwards. From the 1 or 2 articles I saw, fat doesn’t absorb alcohol very well, but muscle tissue does. (So if Jacob drank, more of the alcohol would be absorbed by his muscles so less is available in the blood to affect the brain.)
(Now that was just a couple of minutes googling, so maybe the information I came across was wrong.)
So maybe Jacob is naturally a ‘light weight’. Or maybe he over-estimates the effect of alcohol (just gets a little light headed but assumes he’s completely hammered.)
I sense a lack of Jacob eyebrow.
In panels 2 and 3, there is no particular reason for Jacob to raise eyebrows, let alone an individual one, and yet his left eyebrow (right to the viewer) is decidedly AWOL.
Unrelated to this comic, but I’m planning to go to this webcomic event (even though the strip I know best I know from a physical newspaper): https://webcomicon.net/
I’m only really familiar with three of the strips listed– Sarah’s Scribbles, Cyanide and Happiness, and Pearls Before Swine. Anyone have any particular ones that they’d recommend checking out beforehand?
Jesus everyone in this comic just loves throwing away their opportunities for having a partner. Ruth didn’t even stay with Billie (which I’m still mad at) and then there’s Jason, and Dorothy kinda, but that’s more of a long list of reasons and character development, point is people really wanna get laid in this comic
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Frankly I’m not sure what I was expecting.
I think we are expecting Lucy to drunken-suplex Sarah out of the way
As it turns out, she’s just playing the patient game.
“for some reason, that was the first thing we learned in Lawyer Class”
“Pre-law? I thought you were Pre-med?”
Close.
Pretty sure law classes are part of the med curriculum, what with malpractice lawsuits being 25% of America’s GDP.
Isn’t our healthscare system the best? FREEDOM!
Hahaha, wonder how many readers got the “Animal House” reference? It’s kinda obscure some 40+ years down the road.
Not to some of use!
US damn autofix!
If drama were really the name of the game Raidah would see this and they’d all have to chase her down to stop her from snitching on Sarah.
Or Mary. She’s more likely to just barge in uninvited to see if she can snitch on anyone. I’m surprised to find that Raidha is actually less loathsome of a character to me, I can understand her box-checking social-climbing blind-loyalty-at-all-costs mob mentality better than I can sympathize with vengeful religious hypocrisy. But they are both desperate to be part of some privileged in-group.
How’s Raidah gonna see this? She doesn’t even live on this floor. Nobody invited her. Nobody wants her.
Thats like triple invitation
Ruth, Jennifer, Raidah, Mary, Chloe, the dean, and all the partygoers’ parents (including the ghosts of Toedead and Bonnie) are going to bust down the door tomorrow. They’re pissed (that they weren’t invited).
Okay, it’s been a LONG time since we’ve seen Sarah with any expressions other than her customary heavy frown, or a forced-for-social-reasons smile. It’s weird seeing natural positive and neutral expressions from her.
…not who i’d have picked for a Gravatar, but it fits the comment amazingly.
I don’t know if I’d call her panel 4/5 expressions neutral or positive. She seems uncertain and concerned.
There was a whole storyline about her being the reverse smile vampire. I’m not sure if that’s a natural smile or not.
It’s nice to see her more relaxed. Maybe she’s not exactly happy but she isn’t as unhappy. They are developing a nice friendship/flirtship.
Finally somebody pointing out how this could get them in serious trouble. (Somebody else could have pointed it out early on and I just forgot)
Drinking in college is normal. I understand why it’s illegal, but it’s the sort of law rarely enforced.
yeah but that’s because it operates under a sort of “out of sight, out of mind” type deal. They do actually do stuff about it when people get *caught*. If, as other people point out, one of Sarah’s enemies tells authorities this could be a big deal.
Maybe it’s different at different colleges, but mine was like “got caught, security told you to dump it out” type of logic. They also had a no fault policy for hospitalizations – basically if you went to the hospital, no harm no foul (because they didn’t want people avoiding the hospital out of fear and dying).
BYU is probably different, but like just someone saying “oh I saw X drinking” would be like “yeah okay”. If they wanted to get her in trouble they should say she was handing out E or something.
E as in Estrogen? If so I don’t think that’s even a controlled substance.
Or is it some sort of cannabis?
Ecstasy, though I could see Indiana pushing for legal consequences on those helping others get estrogen.
it was enforced when it became medical. (I was on the emergency squad) if a student didn’t want to go to the medcenter for detox because their parents might find out, they were allowed to pass out, arrested for their own safety and taken to the hospital anyway, this time with an arrest record. If you are too drunk to sign your name, should you really be making decisions about your well-being?
I’m not reading a “no” from Jacob.
“judge not, etc”. Jacob’s a good egg.
Agree—this is not a flat “no,” at least. And I’m starting to ship this, on the grounds that Sarah is doing a lot of work for this & she deserves some joy. Jacob would (continue to) be a good influence on her. (As well as making her horny!)
Look at Jacob humble bragging. “I’d drink, but I’m so incredibly ripped and attractive and tall that alcohol is actually more effective on me!”
As humblebrags go I’ve seen a lot worse.
Is that really a thing about alcohol absorption?
Body fat percentage is a factor, yes.
There’s a reason the funny fat guy who can put away a ton of booze is such a staple in comedies. Body fat absorbs a ton of toxins.
Suddenly my life makes more sense
I got curious about this so I did some googling.
Jacob might be right about body fat affecting the time it takes to get drunk, but he might actually have it backwards. In the one or 2 articles I found, body fat doesn’t absorb alcohol very well, but muscle does. (And when the muscles absorb alcohol, it lowers the level in the bloodstream making a person less drunk.)
Its possible that Jacob is just naturally a “light weight”. Or he over-estimates just how ‘drunk’ he really is. (i.e. “thinks he is really drunk when he is just a little tipsy.)
Or knows he is not illegally drinking outside of church services so he simply doesn’t have to worry about it.
It’s legal at church. Your structure could imply the church service counts as illegal drinking, so I’d like to get ahead of the 6-hour YouTube takedown.
It only voids the scholarship if somebody narcs. I don’t see no squealers around.
Amazi-Girl would be, but she respects rules, not authority.
aint nobody gettin hurt here,
aint nobody be snitchin
cuz snitches get stitches! >~<
Cue the awful Mary.
Are Sarah and Ruth the only ones here on a scholarship?
I think the only confirmed ones?
Becky too. She’s on some kind of poli-sci scholarship that Robyn arranged.
Might be. I’m not sure but I think at least one person said they were here from their parent’s GI bill. We know Becky’s basically sponsored by Robin which might be considered a scholarship in spirit even though Robin would likely never hold Becky to an academic performance standard. We know Amber was having her dad pay as part of his divorce settlement, now likely Richard. Perhaps the rest of the cast we know and love are actually just upper middle class, rich assholes. We know the Walkertons are.
Does anyone know what Charles’s actual job is? I get it he has money, but how? Or maybe Linda got a nice settlement from Dean McHenry?
Charles is confirmed to have an OnlyFans. Willis deleted 37 tweets about it, but I have them on my phone. It was a really unhinged thread, like he was going on some truly wild tangents involving New Line Films and frontal nudity, just a fever dream of the most bizarre tweets.
lol that sounds very Charles and would explain how off-the-wall and inappropriate he is. I hope it’s not actually cannon or at least that no kids in this comic ever see it.
My favorite only fans was made for a few weeks by a YouTuber who does Victorian fashion, specifically making it from scratch. She did romantic ankle-baring pinups, fully dressed in fabulous costumes and in her lovely antique-style apartment. They really looked quite old-fashioned and interesting.
There are basically no kids in the comic at all, so it’s unlikely Willis would rope one in for a porno plotline. The adults who are main and secondary characters in the comic though? They’d definitely be at risk.
I saw that! She’s so fun I love her series on how she made a corset despite her scoliosis.
I feel like Chuck and Linda both probably have well paying jobs.
Linda gives me consulting firm vibes, personally. Like she’s one of the people companies hire to come in and give them an excuse to fire a bunch of people.
Or they’re taking out huge loans like most college kids.
I don’t think we know what most of the parents do or how rich they are. Jennifer’s rich, well beyond the Walkertons. Carla’s far beyond her.
Joyce’s dad is a dentist, so they’re doing well (except for 5 kids and a stay at home mom and now a divorce). Joe’s is a bone doctor, so he’s got money.
We know about Asher’s money.
Danny? Dorothy? Malaya? Lucy? Jacob? Ethan?
That’s true. I will say most of them don’t act like they’re under the pressure of impending, crippling loan debt if they fail academically. Sarah is the one who brings it up the most. Maybe Dorothy and Jacob but that’s more because they’re naturally studious and might not indicate scholarship pressure or loans. Ethan though wasn’t going to class at all for a time so I’m not sure what that implies for his financial status. Would dropping out upset his parents? Leave him in debt? Who knows. Danny, Malaya, and Lucy are complete mysteries to me. I don’t even have enough there to start theorizing. I wish I knew more about the cast in this regard. It’s weird I kind of know more about Raidah than most of the cast academically.
If I remember, Jacob’s brother is a practicing lawyer (and a successful). So it wouldn’t be surprising if his family has a decent amount of money.
Raidah wanting Jacob as a connection also makes sense, she doesn’t go after lightweight targets.
Harrison is probably doing well now, but we don’t anything about their parents. I suppose he could be putting his brother through college, but that’s a lot for a relatively young lawyer (with a new baby.)
The Walkertons have 4 kids.
Dorothy’s track record might have gotten her a scholarship to IU but I don’t know if she’d have taken it if she was sure she was going to switch to Yale.
“track record”?
And the Walkertons have 2 kids, but you’re right, I misremembered. The Browns only have 4 in this universe.
Meaning her past accomplishments. Which do include being the star of her high school’s cross-country team, but I think it was meant it more of a general sense.
As for scholarships, when I was applying for college, there were some that you could only get for that college if you listed it as your first choice, so if any of her possible scholarships were like that, she presumably missed them. There are also some you might just get after admission, but I think you have to accept the university admission first, and if she was still waiting on Yale, she might have missed her window.
Also, thank you for clarifying the Walkerton/Brown confusion, I kept looking at that comment like, “Okay, but even if you count Billie, who’s the fourth?”
“Upper middle class assholes are people too”…could be the subtitle of the comic
Morality clauses are just…
It feels like it stops people from growing. Expecting them to already be fully grown.
But I do understand that they can’t be throwing money at people to just party.
But it’s also still a part of being a student.
But it’s still breaking the law.
…
It’s complicated.
I mean… there’s a lot of people who sure wish they could get a scholarship, it’s a special privilege to get one. If you’re gonna underage drink you could at least have the good taste to do it discreetly off-campus instead of in a big drunken party in the dorms (with stolen liquor).
Then again, the RA spent much of the first semester in a drunken stupor, so who’s even gonna do anything about this oh shit Mary
Mary’s too busy jackin’ off to pictures of guns.
Or to bad photoshops/AI “art” of previous Popes holding guns
Reagan with guns.
Pictures of Guns – https://www.itswalky.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/2019-03-27.png
Actually I think there was a pin-up of Guns at some point in time, but I have no idea where it was and my mind could easily be making that up.
*bites down on cigar, holds up clenched fist while hunching over desk”
GET ME PICTURES OF GUNS
Actually wasn’t it pictures of Ryan Paul doing workouts that Mary liked so much? (I seem to remember that was a complaint Roz had, about all the Ryan pictures she put up.)
Are my memories of college really so far off from current reality?
Drinking and small parties in dorm rooms were far more common than we’ve seen here. More common than going to off-campus parties (or bars).
No one thought twice about getting in trouble for it unless things got really wild and probably not then. Like a floor party with a 100+ people in multiple rooms and spilling into the hallway might be some concern.
It comes down to discretion I guess, and the magnitude of tolerance the school has. I had friend who was constantly getting busted by the RA for just leaving loads of empty beer cans decrepitly rolling around on the floor in her dorm. (We had random inspections) She definitely got in trouble with the school because it kept happening, good thing she wasn’t trying to maintain a scholarship…
I basically never encountered dorm room parties (if someone has a place off campus, they’re hosting)– some did happen, in the bigger dorms on campus, but even those didn’t seem common. Actually, my friend was an Intercultural Aide in one of them, and she told me that there was a party in the dorm that a bunch of RAs were at, drinking with the residents, and a bunch lost their positions. And my school wasn’t even a dry campus like IU is, but some RAs and residents were underage.
In my 3rd year in college, my RA was found wasted in the communal bathroom and ended up losing her position as well.
It wasn’t uncommon for people to drink in dorms/on campus, underage or not, but if you had a position with the school, it was definitely at risk, and probably the same for major scholarships.
Hi, panel 2 Sarah’s face. You’re trying so hard to be sly, and it’s adorable.
Agree, she looks quite adorable here and Jacob seems to be appreciative!
IU’s not that hardcore, is it? if one quiet booze party actually got you booted off an undergrad scholarship I would know literally no other college graduates from my era.
If they hear you mention alcohol in any context, they’ll expel you on the spot. Police will be called, rooms will be searched, and you’d better have a ride ready, because the campus is large and they will not be patient about you leaving. It happened to my cousin Louie just a few weeks ago, and they even shaved off his left eyebrow and basically corralled him into local gang territory, because the gang in that area has this thing where if your left eyebrow is shaved, it means you’re an Inuyasha fan, and they’ll beat you up.
He should shave the other eyebrow so they can’t get him.
Good thinking.
Depends on where the scholarship is from? It may not be through the University. A private grantor could have any requirements that aren’t illegal. Imagine Joyce’s former church offering scholarships to its teen members.
Sarah could have a whole bundle of small scholarships from various places, the loss of any of which would make the difference between “I can afford this” and “I can’t quite afford this anymore.” Each with its own rules.
It absolutely could, in theory. That could quite easily be in the terms of the scholarship. Just like, in theory, they could all wind up with criminal charges from this.
It’s just that in practice, in a small scale college dorm room party, that’s not going to happen. They don’t even try to enforce the rules to crack down to that level. Unless things have changed a lot.
So much simpler here in UK. Drinking age is 18 everywhere and no-one cares.
feels like the plan is still working without making jacob dumber, sarah
I find Jacob and Sarah’s dynamic very fun lately, but I do sometimes feel frustrated *for* her. Like, I do think he’s into her, a lot of what he’s said with her lately has a flirty, playful tone, but it does feel like he’s dangling a carrot to a degree rather than committing more to a statement on his feelings.
Of course, that’s probably kind of the idea. After how long she fought showing him her intimate side at all, he’s probably determined to see that she’s genuinely willing to commit to that for more than the long term. Not saying it’s fair, just, that if that’s what he’s doing, it makes some sense.
He’s not being remotely unfair to her. He sees her trying and is letting her go at her own pace.
I think he is just genuinely flirting. No promises, no ulterior motives. I just hope she’s not going to be heartbroken if he also flirts with other girls and ends up engaged to someone else in two weeks.
I don’t think it’s unfair, exactly, I just could see someone as seeing it as him making her jump through hoops.
He’s said before he wants a real relationship, not just a one fling. That is, obviously, very difficult for Sarah, who doesn’t expose vulnerability.
“This could void my scholarship” and THERE it is. The innocuous comment I was waiting for that will inevitably have ramifications.
I’ve kept thinking about how Dorothy and Joyce posted online about them drinking in a bar, and I keep wondering how long it’d take for Raidah to find out and try to use this to her advantage as revenge on Joyce or Sarah. But this right here, I can only imagine she’ll find out eventually and what’ll happen from there.
Sara will panic, and no one of actual consequence will care.
Almost no one would have scholarships if they were that easy to lose. If the father used his connections to make a stink, the scandal would more likely ruin him than her.
Eh, Raidah had a chance to get Sarah in trouble for battery and didn’t. Minor crime in that case, but still a bigger deal than underage drinking. Raidah can be nasty, but it’s a different kind of nasty.
The thing is, Raidah doesn’t matter. She’s never going to matter. What’s she gonna say? “I heard Sarah drank a booze. No, I don’t have any evidence.” Like, anything she does is a non-starter because she’s just completely irrelevant to anyone else’s life at this point.
Penny didn’t need any evidence to get Jason sacked. She didn’t even believe her own accusation.
I think the main reason Jason was sacked despite the lack of evidence is because the very accusation itself is pretty damning. You don’t want to have a tutor instructing students who’s going to sleep with their charges. Plus, Jason didn’t seem to try and fight the accusation or plead his innocence, thus “proving” the accusation had merit in their eyes. I don’t know how employment works with someone with a work visa but I know several American states are ‘at will’ employment so the uncomfortable accusation is probably enough reason for them to terminate him just to be safe. Also, maybe Jason was shitty at his job LOL.
Being a student is different than being employed, since students pay to be at the college. They’re also given expectations to uphold, but I think accused crimes would likely need to be proven with evidence or otherwise just be refutable for the college to say “we’re expelling you, you’re not our kind of student”. There’s also a world of difference between being accused of having a couple drinks while underage, and being accused of sleeping with the students you are tutoring.
The big thing with Jason is that he went “yeah” and resigned rather than try to contest it. There’s an enormous chance if he’d tried to contest it and gone “what proof do you have” he’d still have his job.
But for all his faults, Jason does have a conscience, and did know that what he did was wrong, so he took the lumps.
That’s such a weird phrase, “took the lumps”.
It derives from British cooking, where the person who makes the custard is held responsible if it doesn’t come out smoothly, and must therefore “take the lumps”.
(It’s possible I just made that up.)
I just can’t picture anyone but a 53-year-old Irish dock worker whose glory days are behind him saying it. From anyone else, it seems odd.
Was what he did wrong? Normally I would be like, yeah he’s being shitty, but Sal literally instigated the whole thing. I mean, she like, assumed that it was understood that this was for grades, but I don’t think that’s Jason’s fault. Am I off here.
In conclusion, having sex with Sal is kind of a grey area, and there would have been ways to do it better, but I wouldn’t hold him culpable.
What he did was shitty, yes, and beyond that, it was clearly against the rules of his position. Penny was fired for “boffing” students, and it doesn’t seem like Joe was doing it for the grade, so it was really the boffing that was the issue.
Having sex with a student is against the rules, precisely to avoid having to deal with claims like this. You ban the straightforward act so that people abusing their position can’t wiggle their way out of it.
Sexual/romantic relationships between teachers and students are always-always-always a problem. Even if the student initiated it for completely non-academic reasons (while we know Sal initiated for specifically academic reasons), the onus is still on the teacher to be above reproach and keep that air gap between student and teacher to, if nothing else, maintain credibility. A student and teacher can say they’re just boning, that nothing about their romantic relationship impacts their academic one, but the likelihood of that actually being true is not good.
To be clear, when Sal first propositioned Jason, his reaction should not have been to have sex with her but then still grade her fairly. It should have been to send her out of the office and immediately give her grading to the other TA.
I honestly just thought she mean the plan was so dumb that it practically lowered her grades.
Yup.
I don’t think Raidah is that stupid, if word got out she was that openly petty and treacherous over something lots and lots of other students do, it would mean no one would trust her and it would really put the kibosh on her whole “social climbing” project. Narcing is specifically why she hates Sarah. Her plans are probably far more circuitous.
Mary, on the other hand, loves being petty and spiteful, and doesn’t care at all about being popular.
OTOH, Mary’s more likely to save it up and use it for advantage later, rather than reporting it right away.
“Heard worse plans” is a pretty low bar, and can only go lower over time.
In my case, I THINK the worst plan I’ve ever heard is “destroy a hurricane before it makes landfall by detonating a really big nuke at its center”, but there might be a few even worse ones that I’m not recalling.
Blowing up a hurricane? What’s the worst that could happen?
It could separate it into many small hurricanes that would then grow in size and you would have a swarm of hurricanes.
And because they would be radioactive, you would have mutant hurricanes with super powers.
Good. That’s a good thing.
“After exhausting the OED, we started numbering them. When overlapping hurricanes formed at all points on the Earth’s surface, and our scheme was foiled by Cantor diagonalization, we just decided to name them all “Steve”. Your local forecast tomorrow is “Steve”. Good luck.”
XKCD- Hurricane Names
You’re saying Steve will have us for breakfast?
The amount of energy needed to be released at the eye of an average hurricane to actually disperse the composite airborne moisture vectors that keep it spinning would probably cost more in funding and damage than if it had just been left alone to run its course :/
“Heard worse” is usually understatement for “it’s not great, but it’s fine”. Like “better than being poked in the eye with a sharp stick”.
Yes, I know. I’m having fun with literalism.
In Jacob’s case, he has specifically heard worse plans for dating him. Specifically Joyce’s regarding lying to his brother that she is already his girlfriend and ???
I like Jacob, he’s good people, but honestly I am getting “I like you but not in that way” vibes here
I actually kind of suspect he’s only playing along with Sarah’s constant overt hitting on him, in hopes that eventually she’ll get over it and realize that they would make better friends than lovers. It’s like some sort of inverted version of Nice Guy Syndrome, oddly enough.
Dumbing of Age, Book 17: Maybe Now I’m More Likeable And Have Feelings
I see someone uses their numpad. But that aside.
Dumbing of Age Book 14: I’ve Heard Worse Plans
Can’t believe there’s only 8 strips left
My guess is that the final stretch of this is gonna be like, 69 (in-universe) seconds of HAVOK
Ah yes, horny, destroyer of rationality.
I wonder if we get “project x” level of party and drama from that
Is that…how it works? Body fat? I would have thought with Jacob being a unit of a guy, he’d be able to handle his alcohol.
A unit of guy is one Jacob?
Is that a metric Jacob or an Imperial Jacob?
Americans will measure with anything but metric! Though to be fair Jacob is a Very fine unit to measure things with.
Absolute amount of body fat is how it works (…partially).
Yeah, I think it’s just mass in general that makes the difference. (Along with a load of other factors). Maybe he just doesn’t fancy a drink and it’s just an excuse?
Actually, from what I just read muscular people can actually handle alcohol better, because muscle mass has more water than fat and so it dilutes the alcohol more. So if we were just going on that, Jacob could probably finish the “keg” and be fine.
I think he made mental shortcut. He posibly cut fat from his diet so no fat snacks during drinking. No fat snacks highway to heaven/hell and hangover
I’m no doctor, but yeah, from what I heard it’s essentially just down to mass in general. The bigger you are, the more blood and cells the alcohol has to affect and so you can take in bigger amounts before it starts affecting you.
Now that you commented that, I’m wonder why alchool hit me harder this year than last year, as I’ve lost 45 pounds in weight…
actually I got curious about that.
Jacob may actually have things backwards. From the 1 or 2 articles I saw, fat doesn’t absorb alcohol very well, but muscle tissue does. (So if Jacob drank, more of the alcohol would be absorbed by his muscles so less is available in the blood to affect the brain.)
(Now that was just a couple of minutes googling, so maybe the information I came across was wrong.)
So maybe Jacob is naturally a ‘light weight’. Or maybe he over-estimates the effect of alcohol (just gets a little light headed but assumes he’s completely hammered.)
Shit, I’m loving their dynamic so much. They are both hot, and Sarah’s doing great, now.
I sense a lack of Jacob eyebrow.
In panels 2 and 3, there is no particular reason for Jacob to raise eyebrows, let alone an individual one, and yet his left eyebrow (right to the viewer) is decidedly AWOL.
Yup. I ship them. They seems to have a good chemistry. But I also think Jacob is also interested in Lucy. This would be fun, or a massacre.
Wait. Did I miss Jacob meeting Lucy?
I used to know how to do a search for two people. Maybe it was just a matter of sticking in an &.
Hm. joyce&walky didn’t work so maybe not.
But searching back through Jacob works just fine.
Jacob meets Lucy – https://www.dumbingofage.com/2024/comic/book-14/03-trystin-in-the-wind/mundanelyoccurring/
it’s “+”, not “&”
Thank you.
Unrelated to this comic, but I’m planning to go to this webcomic event (even though the strip I know best I know from a physical newspaper): https://webcomicon.net/
I’m only really familiar with three of the strips listed– Sarah’s Scribbles, Cyanide and Happiness, and Pearls Before Swine. Anyone have any particular ones that they’d recommend checking out beforehand?
Depending on your taste, you may like “Up and Out” (by Julia Kaye). Her earlier comics are miscellaneous humour (like these https://www.juliakaye.com/upandout), and the recent ones are soft, autobiographical comics about the author’s transition (https://www.juliakaye.com/mylifeintransition).
Jesus everyone in this comic just loves throwing away their opportunities for having a partner. Ruth didn’t even stay with Billie (which I’m still mad at) and then there’s Jason, and Dorothy kinda, but that’s more of a long list of reasons and character development, point is people really wanna get laid in this comic
I’ve *enacted* stupider plans.
What the hell are they drinking, anyway?
LOL! Sarah is the stupid but still thoughtful drunk. This is a thing and very organic here. Love it.