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I thought she had Cadbury Creme Eggs, in a bowl with milk, as if they were cereal, and called it cereal..? I didn’t realise that was an actual cereal over there!
Also kinda assumed she was having the mini ones and was impressed she spent the necessary time removing the foil/vaguely hoped she did/was glad she was a cartoon person and it didn’t matter if she didn’t!
Don’t wound what you can’t kill, that’s the real lesson. In the five years since that incident, Sal has grown and evolved into the ultimate gamer, and she doesn’t even want it. Amber is basically Vegeta, pissed off that a low-class warrior has surpassed her royal bloodline.
I know she was like 12 or something but it was a very poor execution. If you’re gonna stab someone’s hand at least do it well enough they can’t use it. Instead Amber arguably made Sal stronger in a way that only hurts her specifically. Incredibly shoddy work, honestly. I’d grade her about a “D” in hand stabbing.
She is now Dr. Victor Frankenstein, thinking about the Frankenstein she created.
(And for the record, anyone who tries to correct me that the monster’s name wasn’t Frankenstein, the closest thing the monster had to a parent was Doctor Frankenstein, meaning his family name would be Frankenstein, and since the Doctor never named him, he has no first name, meaning his only name is Frankenstein. In essence, calling the monster Frankenstein is acknowledging his personhood. )
Do note, this makes it obvious why later on he changed his last name to “Munster”, probably part of healing from that abusive relationship. I suspect he changed it around the same time he chose his first name, “Herman”, a bit of an on the nose name, “Her man”, to move on to his more treasured familial relationship with his wife, Lily.
I lost all interest in Questionable Content ages ago when all conflict disappeared and anything resembling conflict was inevitably resolved and everything turned out butterflies and rainbows. And then May and AgentBot/Yay had their characters neutered and all uniqueness and personality removed.
But I still read it, because Faye is the last of the original cast who hasn’t been relegated to secondary status and I want to witness it happen (though it looks like Jeph’s plan of putting Marten and Claire on a bus backfired and now Marten might start playing a bigger role again).
I love the low conflict QA. I feel like everyone is growing up. Also I love Claire and I love her chill relationship with Martin. It’s my first comic check every morning. It’s interesting even though they’re out of their messed up 20s. More interesting really because it’s not reliant on unnecessary drama. The one thing I do miss is Steve (?) eating cereal.
Questionable Content is such a weird comic because it’s arguably about nothing and there is little to no stakes, it has very interesting setting where humanity has reached an idealistic future where sentient AI has been fully integrated into society, but it doesn’t talk about it. Yet somehow it’s still one of the most accurate depictions of millennials coming of age and slowly transitioning to adults, while also nailing the sometimes monotonous and inconsequential lives of most people.
Just had to agree. QC is not without conflict, but the characters resolve it. The strip shows how people with high emotional intelligence deal with their problems.
Except of course for Liz!
I also love Claire but every time I look at her all I can think is “Famn it would be cool if there was a single webcomic that included a trans woman who actually looked like a trans woman”
I don’t disagree but for a cis person writing a trans person for the first time, erring on the side of caution in how she’s depicted is the better way to go imo. I definitely prefer that he made her just look like another female character as opposed to the yikes effect of if the first trans character we met leaned more into a stereotype. Plus Clinton shares her frame and overall appearance, which is cool.
I think I read three webcomics nowadays but I used to read more and I recall transfolk who look trans being out there but typically being written and drawn by trans folk, so… they’re out there, is all I have!
Oh. Wow, yeah. Tbh a variety of trans representation is best and while I can’t comment on the character at all I could love that design if it’s alongside a variety of other transfolk of more traditional builds. A woman could be built like that and love it and still be a woman! But as the only trans character, it would definitely be a bad look.
I’m trying to pinpoint the part where the conflict disappeared. Is it when Faye stopped drinking? That was the last time the stakes were literally life and death.
The characters Grew up and Matured, All the original main cast have found Love and either Own their own business or are soon to do so. Drama isn’t something they Create anymore, they are to busy, the stuff just happens around them and they gotta deal with it. Im Subscribed to his Patreon to get the comics a day ahead of time and I gotta say, the newest development could be the next major conflict if its not played for jokes, which would also be good.
The Story only really had 1 big conflict and it was Fay’s drinking problem, and that was solved YEARS ago, That story isn’t about Conflict, its about Growing up as Adults in their Late 20’s and early 30’s. People finish growing up and maturing around those points, most inner conflict is gonna be resolved.
Your life doesn’t become listless malaise just because you turn 30. There’s plenty of material to build an engaging story without apocalyptic conflict, if the comic could stop getting sidetracked with new characters and follow through on the plot threads it starts.
They seem happy! And busy! No malaise or listlessness. And like, this comic (DOA) isn’t going to end Freshman year any year soon… I’m not in a huge rush for Dora and Tai’s wedding. It’ll happen when it happens and there’s no need for artificial nonsense preventing it from happening just for dramas sake. (Jeph… if you’re reading, I LOVE what you’re doing and I’m glad it didn’t end up being a sitcom of how Martin can’t ever have a healthy relationship and perpetual will he or won’t he with Faye. That would have truly bored me eventually.)
I stopped reading months ago during The Party That Never Ended. It’s just boring at this point. Nothing interesting but the occasional fetish drawing happens.
I don’t think it’s a good representation of Millennials coasting off into the night, especially as canonically they’re still in their 20s. Claire is insufferable. May went from best girl to pudding. Characters I don’t know or chare about appear and disappear as Jeph gets bored. Cubetown makes no sense. It’s just. So. Boring. DoA has remained fresh and interesting for over 10 years, so has Gunnerkrigg Court (19), Freefall (good god, 30???) and Skin Horse (14 I think, it did end a few years ago but it was a fabulous ride). QC, no.
Hard disagree. Claire is wonderful. She still makes the best puns. She’s in an interesting situation where she’s above her head but also the only organized person so maybe she’ll make it work. I love her relationships with her mom and her brother.
Gunnerkrigg Court, otoh, used to be on my regular reads, but it got boring and completely lost me. (I think around when the two Annies got combined.)
Okay, so you’re just ignoring the 7-month-long Torture Saga, where Claire kept Pintsize in a steel cage and electrocuted him 24/7, gradually removed parts of him, ground those parts into metallic dust, fed them to Marten to give him metal poisoning so he’d be more docile for her, and then forcibly converted Pintsize to a more humanoid body so she could avoid doing her house chores. Great, real progressive.
I don’t even know what “The Party That Never Ended” refers to.
I enjoy QC as a generally low stakes, but often very funny comic with lots of fun ideas and characters to play with. I’m nowhere near as invested in it as I am here, but I enjoy it at least as much.
I’m honestly so happy that QC and DOA are so widely seen as sister comics that can just suddenly post a comment like this here, and immediately get dozens of strongly opinionated replies. Truly, this is a heartwarming moment of close-knit online community building!
Why are you bashing QC over here in the comments of DOA, rather than over there in the hater subreddit for QC, which apparently (still) exists solely for that purpose?
Oh no, reverse Dolly Zoom, Amber realizing she created her enemy, AND Amber realizing that the thing she cared so much about isn’t important to the person who did it?
I feel like Amber isn’t going to be a character for much longer.
I think I was thinking mental break again personally and then after I posted, I remembered the rubber room repeating copypasta thing.
Crazy? I was crazy once.
They put me in a room.
A rubber room.
A rubber room with rats.
They put me in a rubber room with rubber rats.
Rubber rats? I hate rubber rats.
They make me crazy.
Crazy? I was crazy once.
They put me in a room….
i’m so glad there’s a real in-universe explanation for this and not just Sal being Sal. instantly makes this mini arc and the impending events like ten times better & funnier
1: ^ This
2: Spasming my hand is the only reason I can beat all my friends at button mashing minigames. Sure, it hurts after a while, but the usual 30 seconds/1 minute or 100 times is usually not enough. So it checks out.
You forget, Amber’s terminally online, she’s seen it used unironically in horrible corners of the internet and is probably guilty of using it herself a time or two. (Or 3 or 4 now, counting these last few comics)
I genuinely think she would use it unironically because she’s still unlearning casual misogyny and homophobicish* patterns of thinking and behaving that plague online, and specifically chronic fandom spaces. Kids are sponges. Teens are super social sponges. Early adulthood is for ringing the nasties out of the sponge.
*Like the whole shipping men to the point she was projecting onto live people, of which I was guilty of in highschool.
“make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don’t want your damn lemons, what am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life’s manager. Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons. Do you know who I am? I’m the man who’s gonna burn your house down! With the lemons. I’m going to to get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down!”
I don’t remember Batman being that involved in any of his enemies backstory based on my very limited knowledge of Batman lore. Except maybe Two-Face and Red Hood? (Though that I gather that last is good now?)
It’s a common criticism of Batman that his presence escalated the criminal potency of Gotham as they transformed from gangster and corrupt elite to more flamboyant and overtly dangerous super criminals in response. Especially since most of his rogues are dark reflections of Batman in some way. It’s even mentioned at the end of Batman Begins.
It’s a bad take in my opinion that’s only interesting in a few scenarios. Much like prep time debates or him treating his sidekicks as soldiers and not family.
That’s kind of weird considering that flamboyant supervillains exist all over the DC universe without direct actions from anyone, so it would be likely they appeared in Gotham wherever Batman existed or not.
It’s always felt like one of those bad-faith arguments that writers wanting to force some moral ambiguity into Batman stories jump onto. Its always been a stupid argument, but when has that stopped the edgelords?
The funny thing is the Joker is a pretty good deconstruction of this argument and I don’t mean the Killing Joke. The way it was written in the 1930s, the Joker blamed Batman for making him.
…
Because otherwise he would have been ANOTHER costumed criminal committing player card themed crimes in the Red Hood.
Mostly it’s a meta argument built around there being so many weirdos in Gotham for Batman to fight. Why are they all there? Why hasn’t Batman been able to put a dent in Gotham’s troubles? Obviously the real answer is because the genre needs villains for the hero to fight, but attempts to build answers into the story get get weird.
It really applies to any long running superheroes, but Batman’s one of the biggest and most obvious examples.
Batman does get it a lot more obviously and textually than anyone else, and it’s never made sense to me. Like, Metropolis regularly has buildings wrecked or city blocks leveled because some alien wants to punch a Superman in the face, but nobody ever blames Superman for it. Central City has that plus time-based shenanigans because people want to dick-measure with the Flash, but no one blames the Flash for it.
But when some incel in Gotham City obsessed with a kid’s book makes mind-control hats, or someone decides to rob banks with twinned ketchup and mustard guns, or any given serial killer develops a creepy signature/MO, it’s all Batman’s fault.
((woo, a geek topic I can engage with))
I’m of the opinion that people make their own decisions but batty boy at least makes the problem worse. In the films there was Riddler (1995- Eddy rejected by Bruce, goes revengey), Joker (1989; fell into vat fighting batman, also joker killed Bruce’s parents so it goes both ways).
In comics: Red Hood (Jason?) was directly, Bane and a few others became fixated on “beating the bat” and so were specifically Gotham villains because of him, Joker in some iterations (and so potentially Harley), and some others were “created” by their contact with Wayne Enterprises (eg Ivy).
There’s also a couple of villains, at least one I remember who only become supervillains because they aren’t taken seriously as regular ol gansters.
It’s kinda like asking whether McDonalds/NRA/Cigarette cause childhood obesity/school shootings/lung cancer. No, but also kind of yes.
Pretty sure “do cigarettes cause lung cancer” is more just “yes”.
(Which doesn’t mean that everyone who smokes gets lung cancer. But it’s definitely a direct cause. Saying “Batman is responsible for Bane” is more like saying that the shop that sold me cigarettes is responsible for my lung cancer. Bane is responsible for Bane. Anything else is a bit like the Lex Luthor excuse of “I’d have cured all disease if Superman didn’t exist and keep distracting me”.)
I continue to maintain that Amber is the best damn thing the past three days, and that I love this story so, so, so much. Her poses. Her yelling. Her faces. All of it is peak.
Yeah, if this were framed in a way that would lead me to believe Sal is bothered/endangered or that it’s not meant to be humorous, I wouldn’t find it funny.
But like, this is framed as humorous so I find it funny lol.
Amber has always been peak, some people just take longer to recognize this truth. (Yes this includes the moment where she acts like a weirdo and a danger to herself and others. Especially then in fact!)
As a casual amber hater (stepped down from dedicated, I’m working on not caring enough to hate her like I do with much worse characters), this is funny as shit
I know Amber can be kind of competitive in areas of her competence, but records were meant to be broken. To have had it for any length of time is a feather in your cap.
Yeah, she was trying to match what was possible for a computer to do. She wasn’t even trying to beat the record, because it’s literally unbeatable. She was just trying to match it. Sal literally beat it. After learning the game for an hour. She beat the best computer in the world, by accident. That would be like picking up the game of chess, and an hour later, beating full-strength Stockfish. Some people genuinely don’t grasp how ludicrously improbable this is. It would be less absurd if Sal won the entire Olympics.
As someone who knows nothing about speedrunning, how much of the “it’s impossible” discourse is because of people also missing that? I get that it’s still hard to beat the top players in the world, but surely more plausible than beating a computer?
In this specific case, it’s probably less of a difference than the majority of other games that exist which are speed run. Super Mario Bros is probably the most heavily researched and run speed game of all time, and the run is so optimized, that the difference between a perfect human run, and a perfect TAS run, is probably closer than most games. That said, the differences between human-doable tricks, and the TAS-specific tricks, are that the TAS-specific tricks rely on stuff like pressing two opposite directional buttons on the exact same frame, which cannot physically be done with an actual NES controller. There’s no way to make both contacts press simultaneously, because they tilt in opposite directions from one another.
Also, because of this specific game being solved to death, the reality of Sal saving a frame by accident due to her injury is specifically out of pocket, because it is genuinely known what the current “perfect” human-possible run is, down to every single frame. So, her matching that record faster than Amber did, would be similarly improbable, but people could maybe digest it; but Sal somehow discovered new technology to save more frames than a manually calculated perfect run frame by frame, with all available data.
She didn’t beat the best players in the world; she beat an entire dedicated community with 30+ years experience in the pursuit, all of whom share knowledge on what the best (read: perfect) practices currently are. Sal’s 70 minute investment utterly destroyed the sum total of human investment into this one specific thing. It’s like she walked into the local cancer institute, read the cliff’s notes to Grey’s Anatomy, and then found a better cure for a specific type of cancer than all of human medical science has been able to achieve. We’re talking, she beat decades of human research and work, by herself, in 70 minutes of mild effort.
I’ve said it elsewhere, but if Willis hadn’t specifically chosen this specific game as his example, nearly nobody would have had a problem. He picked the single game that the largest number of people would know the most about, which is the most solved in our parallel reality, which the canon of the strip loosely mirrors. It’s actually got me wondering, if there’s a specific thematic reason that he deliberately chose Super Mario Bros Level 8-4, as a deliberate thematic statement, or parallel, or piece of symbolism which might become clearer later in the strip.
My impression is that Amber may be paying for college using streaming revenues and had gotten sponsors counting on her to break the record or at least remain unsurprised.
Mm, I’m not sure. Is Richard Joe’s dad? Joe offered for his father to pay for Amber’s college and she rebuffed him with, “Don’t worry. It’s being handled.” And then the streaming pops up.
I think Richard’s paying for Amber’s legal fees (the whole stabby-wabby thing with whats-his-face who roofied Joyce, last we heard his family was suing Amber/Amber’s mum)
I take it that Amber defines herself by her gaming and it’s “her” thing. Sal showing that it’s not actually something she can measure herself by and provide her self-worth against is something causing a breakdown because Amber doesn’t have much of that.
Basically, it’s like defining yourself by your knowledge of Star Wars then finding out that a guy with a good memory can utterly trounce you.
I was thinking more of a suppressed blind rage. She’s being thanked for her onw downfall, and being told it didn’t even matter to the person who broke her unbreakable record.
Also I think Sal is being sincere, she’s just thinking “I guess there’s technically one good thing that came out of that night, even if it is incredibly minor”
I mean, it was weird that anyone was in the first place. Honestly it was the most hilariously pointless discourse I seen in these comment sections, and that is saying something.
“It should be extra impossible because I stabbed her hand!” As in, “How dare this ex-‘thug’ whom I brutalized do something extraordinary? How dare she excel at what I thought was MY domain!? Doesn’t she know that victims should stay victims!? She deserves to remain hobbled by her injury, not to do something amazing with it!”
That’s how I’m reading it, and it’s ugly. It’s not kind. It’s a cruel thing to say, and it’s got a tinge of racism to it too.
No – it’s that with her damaged hand she shouldn’t physically be able to, as in not having the needed dexterity. From the phrasing, Amber has no issue with Sal as a person, just as someone (through inexperience plus the injury) shouldn’t have been able to achieve this feat. (And with any measure of reality, she’s right. But this is a comic strip.)
Willis noticed you complaining about your stubbed toe, so they kindly chose to help by breaking your nose. Congratulations! Now you’re hardly thinking about your stubbed toe at all, much less feeling hurt by it!
Amber herself has done about fifty things that are far more ludicrous, but there’s enough speedrunning fans on the internet that know the details, so Sal beating a record “feels” more ludicrous than Amber shooting a grappling hook from her wrist to fly to Toedad’s car
There were also people who complained about that, but I think some people also accepted it as working for the story who felt differently here. Now, it’s not yet totally clear what “the story” here will be, and it may feel more acceptable when looked at in a larger context. Getting a strip a day doesn’t allow for the full perspective that way.
Personally, I feel more ready to suspend disbelief in action scenes. I can also get behind it for a joke, but I guess the previous strips didn’t strike me as funny enough to really get onboard, and that’s obviously going to vary.
There are definitely some storylines that get a ton of discourse for the strip a day mechanic. Remember the comments devolving into name calling during the ‘Joyce might have autism’ storyline?
This is exactly it. Nobody on Earth has the exact, perfect receipts on precisely how improbable/impossible the generic superhero feats that several characters in this comic have managed, actually are. But there’s a huge portion of the readership who have spent hours learning, in detail, the precise details of what is necessary for Sal to have accomplished here, and precisely how and why it’s impossible.
You can hand-wave away action movie antics as a viewer, in a comic strip that has a superhero element directly embedded in its canon. It’s completely unbelievable in reality, but completely expected in a comic strip. This Mario thing, it’s like you played a schlocky popcorn action movie about space astronauts, for Neil deGrasse Tyson. He knows exactly, to the finest detail, everything that’s bullshit, about every wrong detail he sees, because its his life’s dedicated goal to understand all of that otherwise unimportant minutiae.
If they were even playing an obvious in-universe knock-off game, nobody’s suspension of disbelief would be broken, because it’s not “really” Mario. It would be an act that is, implicitly, equally impossible; I don’t think anybody would care, and may even find it really funny that Sal did it, because we know the implied achievement was impossible in our actual reality.
But, Willis chose to use something that literally exists in our actual reality, and in particular, he chose probably the singular option that the largest number of his readers would be deeply and intimately familiar with the real-life details of. So, I’m not shocked that it really took people out of immersion. The strip’s canon is a parallel to our reality, where certain impossible things regularly happen; but, the unrealistic things that happen, have up until now, been unrealistic in one consistent way. But this unrealism, actually references something objective, from our real reality; so, it should thus be seen as equally unrealistic, in the comic strip’s canon, because the setting is deliberately a parallel to our real world.
i mean, superhero stuff aside, if ur going to bring realism into it, there tech are ppl who have survived from ‘deadly’ bullet wounds even if sometimes it’s kinda miraculous so sal beating ambers record on the first try isn’t too bad , tho be interesting to see her equally as salty to ‘tie’ or just be like 5 seconds behind lol
I figured this would be the explanation for the “surpassing the human limit” part but this still doesn’t make any sense, because Sal would have to master the OTHER frame perfect and pixel perfect death defying tricks necessary to have a TAS-perfect 8-4. The “press left and right real fast at the start” bit that Sal’s spasm might hypothetically help with is only the FIRST step
Like, the backwards wall jump into the suspended pipe ALONE would be outrageous for a neophyte to pull off even once in the time span Sal had to do this and there’s so much more a record-setting 8-4 requires
This is the Rise of Skywalker of plot points, it’s freed me from having to care about Star Wars/wherever this part of the storyline is going by lieu of being so dang stupid
Actually you know what I take that back, this is more like Metal Gear Solid completely misunderstanding what “dominant and recessive genes” are and how they work: completely ridiculous but a funny sort of ridiculous that I can accept and giggle at
right now I reckon Amber is torn between her original “crying and shitting” plan, and trying to source a big knife and a willing assistant who doesn’t ask questions
Unfortunately, that’s shortsighted as a plan. Sal has had five years to acclimate to her hand’s quirks, and Amber probably knows that by the time she reaches the same level, Sal will have somehow invented the GameCube.
It’s getting stupider and stupider.
The “‘has to to hit two buttons at once'” is about reaching TAS levels, not about shaving a frame off the human record, which is in fact doable by speedrunning experts
A human hand spasming has nothing to do with the console not being able to accept two inputs at once.
Instead of Amber complaining that it’s impossible for a newbie to beat the human record, she’s claiming it “impossible” in generality
Someone referenced the actual strip where Amber told Sal about this, and Amber specified she was trying to match the TAS run of one specific level. Amber was, in fact, trying to find a way to match the TAS. She wanted to tie it. She had absolutely zero expectation of being able to beat it, because there is no logical reason to try, because she would need to discover brand new knowledge, that the entire TAS speed-running community for that game (probably the single most popular and well-researched speed-run game of all time!) didn’t already know.
Amber wanted to learn to do the level impossibly perfect, the way a perfectly programmed circuit-board could.
Sal did the level literally better than perfect. In an hour.
I can’t tell if this is progress or not for Amber’s rage issues. I guess she’s not smashing stuff or throwing chairs even if she wants to. There’s no real problem in clenching your fists and shouting at the air like a comic book villain. She should gather the infinity stones and reverse time to stop herself from stabbing Sal and prevent this dark future. That or fight Reed Richards.
Progress I think. No red panels, considerate of other people’s things. But smashing something of her own might make her feel better. Like a box of ceramic tiles.
OK, Amber’s sunk to some depressive lows, but I can 100% guarantee you that there’s no part of her brain that is thinking “video games don’t matter.”
There’s a far greater chance right now that the thought going through her mind is “Oh my god, she’s not lying, she really DOESN’T care, what’s wrong with her?”
Real quick: The issue isn’t with the human hand, its with the NES controller. If you created a perfect NES-playing-robot, it still wouldn’t be able to perform the tricks necessary. This is one of the reasons why speedruns are done with keyboards on PC (although not the primary reason).
Anyway, the whirlwind of emotion that Amber’s going through is the real aspect of this scene. I’m guessing its mostly guilt here? It’s not that “I hurt Sal so she can do this thing”, its “my hurting of Sal was even more serious of an injury than I thought it was”.
Like, Amber’s largely always known that Sal’s hand is messed up from the stabbening. But has she known to what extent? I wonder if its been a small comfort in her mind, “yes her hand’s a little messed up, but she’s clearly fine on the whole” given everything she’s done.
This info, as blase as it is for Sal, is new to Amber, and might be throwing more guilt onto a pile that she’s never been particularly good at dealing with.
Just holding that damn thing is a pain as it is. I get that Nintendo didn’t have ergonomics figured out yet, but were rounded corners too much to ask for?
As someone who once did five hours of research on the history of chimneys to know if I should describe a house as having smoke in it or not and has invented two conlangs that had to have different language roots, I am going to be very controversial here and give Willis a pass for not researching whether such a thing was possible on the NES controller. Or doing the research and ending up wrong.
I guess I should give people a pass as well for being so angry about this. I violently despise the movie Sully for making the NTSB the villain when they’re damn near the least corrupt government agency we have (the NTSB not the FAA).
alternate universe in which the feat has been established as possible. Amber is saying “impossible” because of her incorrect assumptions about Sal’s disability and also overreacting.
Oh, its 100% fine to give Willis a pass in my book here, its niche detail stuff that’s going on.
This was me trying to go more “interesting trivia” before segueing into actually important-to-the-story stuff. You know, rather than like 75% of the comments joking about self-harm to improve speedrunning scores (I’m not mad about that either, but its a weeeeeird tangent to go to when Amber’s got her “Sudden Trauma” face going).
That doesn’t really make sense either though. Its quite easy to press A+B simultaneously, the hard part for a human might be if you needed to press them almost together but not quite, in which case being just barely off from being able to do it perfectly together might work and the injury making it easier might make sense. Wait, did I just rationalize myself into buying that?? But Amber is complaining about needing to press SIMULTANEOUSLY, which would only apply to the D-Pad part.
Wonder if maybe despite her “thing that totally doesn’t matter to me”, Sal actually spent a few bored years in her ‘prison school’ trying to do this…
What about my comment made you think that this was a major issue I had with the strip? I brought it up as an aside, because I find it an interesting fact about the console and speedrun in question.
Anyone want to actually talk about the shit I spent most of my post talking about?
I dunno. I mean I get it if this like a special interest of yours, I guess I just a bit worn at lots of people around here being really angry over the past few strips because of Willis using artistic license to speedrunning more or less the same way he did for Sal’s motorcycling and stuff. Didn’t mean to lump you in with ’em bruh, sorry
I feel like a lot of people may have been misinterpreting how angry people actually were, vs people saying something because they were slightly annoyed, felt it didn’t work for them, or just wanted to share additional knowledge about the subject. Some people might have been legit pissed, but even then I feel less charitable towards those who decided to be rude/mocking/mean to people for having feelings about the strip than those who had feelings about the strip. (Though I know it gets blurred some with regular creator interaction, and some people feel defensive of Willis, and some people make their issues with things like this into personal attacks, but that wasn’t most of what I was seeing.)
I will say that if you were late to the first comment section when the record got broken (in comic) you missed the worst of it. Several comment threads ended up reported so hard they got deleted (I know because I went back to pull receipts when people said essentially what you’re saying). That tends to happen since we’ve got mods and a report feature now.
It set the tone for the other days, and it’ll probably happen again when the next thing happens in-world. Personally, I’m content at sharing my opinions at the same rate people who are angry at the comic do. Only seems fair!
For all we know, Amber’s repetitive attempts have primed the controller to short in just the right way to enable Sal’s spasms to break the record. flicks the nit he just picked
I love escalators because escalators can never break. They can only become stairs. “Escalator temporarily broken”? No. “Escalator temporarily stairs. We apologize for the convenience.”
Amber will now need cuddles. Cuddles with half-nekid frenemy/girl-crush and her boi-friend, who is Amber’s ex boi-friend, can only lead to second breakfast slipshine.
So is Amber gonna go and comment on the speedrun video with like “I deserve partial credit for injuring the record holder in such a way that it gave her a very situationally-useful disability”?
I feel like there would be less arguing in the comments if Sal had beaten Amber’s personal record rather than the world record. The first would still leave Amber pissed and insisting that it was impossible, but the second is a thing that could theoretically be possible in this world but isn’t remotely plausible.
I know that according to real life technology, and real life speedrunning Sal did the impossible. I understand that people are annoyed by this, however is this really the hill you want to die on?
Very few are really serious about it, they’re just pointing out that this is, in fact, not a very logical plot point, but that its a minor point in the scene.
More people seem enraged that people are pointing out a flaw in the scene than people actually enraged about the scene, to be honest.
Yeah, Willis could have avoided this by having Amber be speed-running even a completely obvious in-universe knock-off of the exact same game; but the problem is, this specific game is probably the single most well-known speed-running game of all time, with multiple great resources and edutainment videos freely available to anyone who goes on Youtube.
He just specifically chose to use the single real-world game that actually exists, where the highest number of people in his audience, would have in-depth knowledge as to how insanely impossible the feat he was writing about, actually was. I think it created some genuine break of immersion for a lot of readers, and it was avoidable.
Like, everybody knew when they read the one arc, how utterly insane it was for one college freshman to hang off of and surf a literal car, and then grab an extract a second student from a speeding car, and then have another student ramp a speed bike over something to catch both of them in mid-air. But, that’s the kind of thing that would just sorta happen in a super-hero comic or movie, which is a collection of tropes that those storylines, and this comic in general, deliberately play around with. Even though it’s crazy, it doesn’t completely wreck your suspension of disbelief, because that’s just what Amazi-Girl plots are like.
The difference is, nobody has ever released half a dozen hour long Youtube videos, about the exact physics and mechanics it would take to pull off that specific stunt, and exactly how and why it would be impossible, and what it would actually take to pull it off, and then served those videos to literally millions of nerds. But I bet like a third of the total readers of this strip, have probably seen at least one Summoning Salt video, and if they’ve seen one, then statistically, it was likely one of the NES Super Mario ones.
If Amber and Sal were both speed-running “Superb Barrio Brothers,” I don’t think dozens of people would have spent days arguing over whether or not it was fair of them to have some cognitive dissonance over an ultimately meaningless comic strip storyline.
Making it a Monkey Master game instead of Mario would have fixed this entire issue. it could have been one long donkey kong joke on top of everything else.
Once again product placement has soured the fanbase.
Enough people have stated how this breaks their suspension of disbelief in a not-good way that there’s probably some merit to it.
I don’t personally think it’s a comic-ending flub, but I’m not gonna deny people feeling what they feel, it IS suspension of disbelief and for some people that’s too much in this scenario.
Crazy for all the weird impossible shit that’s happened in this comic, -this- is what has people saying “No this is too improbable and my willing suspension of disbelief is shattered”.
I don’t think one is better or worse than the other.
For some people Amber breaking physics is fine because you have some suspension of disbelief already in place for superhero antics.
For some people Sal destroying a Mario Kart record effortlessly is fine because it’s a low stakes situation.
Both are fine, one doesn’t need to minimize either situation causing people not wanting to continue anymore. Because they both ARE suspensions of disbelief situations.
I think people take ‘wow this is such a minor thing, why so mad bro?’ because they don’t get why different things bother different people. I don’t watch some series because of gore, it doesn’t make me better or worse than people who don’t watch some series because they find jokes distasteful.
I’m more frustrated that people are assuming that “suspension of disbelief” is the be-all-end-all of aesthetic enjoyment. (Or that “suspension of disbelief” is even an accurate description of a reader or viewer’s relationship to fiction.)
I’m not sure this webcomic ever was focused on the technical accuracy of anything. It might be a bit more focused on characters and their development, with technical plot points (small or big, realistic or goofy) serving as setup for character interactions and the occasional joke.
In this case, it looks like the whole speedrunning thing is a setup for:
1. Provoking a crisis that forces Amber to move from her statis (using games and especially speedrunning as a refuge from self-hatred, anger and guilt; now having that refuge accidentally devalued and “broken” by the one person who pushes a lot of her self-esteem, anger and guilt buttons).
2. And as a bonus, a bit of a fourth wall punching, meta commentary/joke on the “Mary Sue” trope and how it may apply to this webcomic (with Joyce and possibly others having some “insert character” qualities).
(I’m not sure the Mary Sue joke lands for me, and I do prefer the psychological storyline here.)
Everyone is free to get stuck on the technical details of the setup, and to express that. But that personal hangup that doesn’t constitute interesting criticism of the work, so after a couple comments saying “FYI this is not technically possible” we probably should be giving it a rest.
Generally if there is a glitch or bug that can be used to get to the ending faster there will be a record for glitched runs, and a record for glitchless runs.
There are also categories within that. Such as 100% or any%, pacifist/violence, or other limitations/challenges; such as Super Metroid where you can save the animals on your way to the end, or ignore them so the run is faster.
Yeah, some games have major glitches, but the categories get run glitchless, because the glitch is boring, or inconsistent, or overall just not satisfying to try to achieve as a goal. Other games could be random, terrible games from the past, that suck to play normally, but some gamers realized they were loaded with fun glitches, that were satisfying to learn and execute, thus creating a fun speed-run game out of a game that originally had zero merit to play in the first place. The community ultimately welcomes and values both kinds of runs, because they can be fun for different reasons, or to different people; but, they’re all really impressive!
Amber probably deserved this L. I know they buried the hatchet on their incident, but she was getting a little self righteous on this considering the circumstance. Sal didn’t even want to play the game. She went for the ukulele first but can’t strum it for the same reason she can beat a Mario bros level fast.
Her brain has short circuited. Typically, what faculties she retains in this state involve some kind of depraved perversion, so I think it’s safe to say she’s gonna fuck Danny’s ukulele out of sheer mind-ruining fury.
All of this is very funny but Amber *is* being literally cartoonishly dreadful here. Cartoonishly as in, it’s a little more acceptable considering DoA’s cartoon logic, but man alive.
Thing is, Amber realized what she said was an incredible faux pas, but also a supposedly debilitating injury actually allowing Sal to do the impossible is the most Mary Sue thing about this entire situation.
Not really. Mary Sues are supposed to be flawless and perfect at everything, but that very same hand issue Sal has stopped her from playing Danny’s ukulele and given her motor control issues. The fact that her disability proved useful in this one specific scenario isn’t a Mary Sue trait, it’s a case of “This Looks like a Job for Aquaman”.https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThisLooksLikeAJobForAquaman
Also Mary Sues are supposed to be super impressive to both the audience and the other characters. It’s not just that they do impossible things, say, it’s the expectation that they receive praise in and out of character for doing so.
And while I can’t actually speak to Willis’ intentions for obvious reasons, I will say that one, the narrative is thus far not depicting Amber as unreasonable or villainous for her rage here. She is, perhaps, a bit in need of stepping away from the internet a bit and getting some perspective, but that’s nothing new.
And two, this feels much less about actually building up Sal in some way than it is about getting Amber to snap like a Twix bar.
It’s kind of hilarious that Amber, especially as Amazi-Girl, could be considered a Mary Sue of sorts, and then her own Tragic Background has contributed to rise of yet another Action Girl Mary Sue.
Tho other than like needing super long fingers or extra flexible, is it rly that ‘impossible’ or so unless the buttons also don’t ‘read’ /register it if you hit like 3 buttons at a time versus 4 b/c i feel like there’d be ppl out there that’d do a two person thing if not like have some ‘tool’ or so that extends a spot tho i guess that’d be cheating too
The directional buttons are all one piece, which I’m pretty sure tilts to hit the contact points (or whatever they’re called) on the inside of the controller. When people say it’s “physically impossible”, I assume that’s why, since it can’t very well tip in two directions at once without snapping.
No, you’ve sussed out the problem, exactly. The physical controller cannot accept the simultaneous inputs from physical operation of the buttons; for instance, you’d have multiple periods where you’d need to input left AND right, or up AND down, on the NES d-pad, which isn’t physically possible because it’s a single solid piece that doesn’t bend in the middle. These TAS-only tricks only work, because a computer cannot “play” the game with the controller itself, but only by interacting directly with the controller’s circuit board. So, the computer has no trouble saying “up AND down, on this frame exactly” because it skips the part where it has to push down a piece of plastic, and just shoots the electrical signal through the board, directly.
There’s simply no way for a human being to perform some of the necessary tricks/inputs that a TAS machine does, to ever be able to be as good at speed-running as the computer is. TAS runners are invaluable to actual human speed-runners, because they discover a lot of tech that humans, like Amber, will desperately try to find a way to replicate, and make usable for humans. But in terms of a whole run, TAS runs can accomplish so much more than a human runner, almost ubiquitously.
If anything, this Mario game in question, the TAS run probably beats the human run by way less time, than in most games, because it’s one of the absolute most speed-run games ever, it’s a very short run, and nearly every conceivable piece of tech has probably already been found. IIRC, The human world record is technically “perfect,” and cannot be beaten until new tech is found – only matched.
What Sal has done here is genuinely the most unrealistic single thing to ever happen in this comic, and I mean that in the literal sense.
Maybe nes controllers are different in the dumbiverse. Maybe Super Mario is different in the dumbiverse. Maybe this doesn’t matter at all because it’s a silly plot point in a comedy comic
We know the first two aren’t the case, because Amber describes exactly that when she explains why what she’s attempting is impossible but she’s trying to do it anyway.
As to the third – Good Godfrey, you’re right! All this time we’ve been discussing silly plot points in a comedy comic! If only someone had told us that before! Hey, Willis! Time to shut down the comments section; turns out it’s completely pointless!
Two things are important, 1) Amber, the expert of dumbiverse super mario brothers speedrunning, believes it may be technically possible, but extremely difficult to match the dumbiverse TAS record.
of lesser importance, 2) It has not yet been stated that Sal matched the TAS record, just that she broke the non-TAS record.
Well, she’s upset at the universe for not working like she thought it did and taking it out on Sal, but now I guess she’s misdirecting the anger at herself instead, so, better?
Not to defend what Amber said in the slightest, but “You deserve the thing you’re angry about because of what you said about it” is not a chain of causality I can get behind.
Causality and deserve are incompatible concepts anyway. You need free will to deserve things, and causality makes free will impossible. No, not even quantum will get you out of this. It is inherent to causality, not to specific particles.
If she said “it should be extra impossible because she has an injury,” would that be better? It seems like the meaning would be the same, except that Amber would be denying responsibility.
Anyone ever see the Power Puff Girls episode where Mojo Jojo is revealed to be the Professor’s long lost lab assistant and he was the one who shoved the professor into the Chemical X botle, causing it to fall into the vat of sugar, spice, and everything nice that the Professor had cooking to make the perfect girls? Amber has the EXACT same expression Mojo Jojo had when he realized he was directly responsible for the creation of his super powered nemeses.
Okay… armed with today’s known fact, this explains the strip from the other day when Sal had observable difficulty knocking a few notes out of Danny’s uke and had to switch hands. If Willis telegraphed that any harder, he’d have to change his name to Samuel Morse.
I didn’t read the Slipshine, but a spasming hand had to be fun for Danny during a h*ndj*b.
Sal could have avoided that last comment. I don’t like Amber’s look at the end. It scare me, I’m afraid she might do something that she’ll regret immediately afterwards.
Ya, definitely feels like she’s needling her. She’s not wrong, I think that’s what’s bothering Amber this much, not that someone else broke the record she was going for. The irreverence of it. She thinks it should be impossible for a non-devotee.
They’re both competitive, and even though Amber clocks it as fundamentally unfair, that’s not something Sal should be expected to agree with. So she needles Amber with it, JAH bordering on ESH.
I love how completely blasé Sal is about this. For her, it’s just a video game she was playing to fill the time until her cute boyfriend came back, and all this “speed running” stuff was just a little extra pepper to keep it interesting.
OK, I get a lot about this speedrun thing, but I absolutely do not get why it would be impossible to hit two buttons at once on an original NES controller. When people talking about it I assumed that was a limit on the hardware – that it couldn’t process input from the two D-Pad buttons at once, but I don’t see how a spasming hand would help with that. Can anyone explain this?
(Granted, I admit this whole thing somehow is way harder for my suspension of disbelief than catching a person falling off a truck on a motorcycle, but we’ll ignore that for now. )
Only thing I can think of, is opposite directions. Almost every Nintendo dpad has a raised point in the center, which the pad pivots on, similar to a teeter-totter. It’s so that you can hit left and down, or down and right, but not left and right. What Amber likely means, isn’t that left and right need to be pressed at the *same* time, but that within the space of one frame the button has to be pressed from left to right, which is why such types of speedruns have before only assumed to have been possible with the aid of a computer to make the precise input.
And by “almost every Nintendo dpad” I mean literally every directional pad in the last forty years that Nintendo made other than the Switch. The joy cons’ four circle buttons I’d forgive, but Nintendo apparently even forgot their own patent when it came to making their Pro controller.
Actually not. Players *want* there to be that pivot, because that’s how you crisply control Mario and can quickly whip back and forth. If you don’t have that, you’ll be pressing left and right actually at the same time, which would cancel out movement and make him feel much more slow and sluggish, or result in missed inputs (accidently hitting diagonal down-right instead of right, because you can’t feel as easily that you’re angling down on the d-pad). It’s a far better input system than the four separate buttons of the joycon or the PlayStation controller.
It only *really* matters for early games like Super Mario Bros, and *specifically* for Super Mario Bros, because of how the game loads levels and changes between screens, and how you can save a decent chunk of time by hitting a transition point at an exact point in time. It’s trying to do something that was never intended with the game, and is essentially impossible, in order to save less than a second on the game.
There’s a video essay on something similar for level 4-2, the “most infamous level” of Super Mario Bros. 20 minutes, good watch. You can search for it on YouTube.
The only thing that’s really *wrong* with this storyline, and which I would absolutely agree with Amber on, is that it’s simply not possible for someone who’s never played this before to sit down and beat the world record of the last level of Super Mario Bros in the span of a class period, magical hand twitching ability or no. That’s been speedrun for decades by thousands of obsessive nerds. In my opinion, that’s FAR less believable than catching a falling person with a motorcycle; it’s “a roomfull of monkeys with typewriters managing to put out Shakespeare” level of improbable.
Yeah, the most unrealistic thing isn’t “Sal twitched and saved a frame pressing too much”, it’s “Sal perfectly executed a hyper optimized single level speedrun within an hour of sitting down on a whim”. There’s multiple other super hard tricks to clearing 8-4 than just that one frame.
Season One Carrie Bradshaw (See in the City) is a mess but relatable. End of the show (and into the movies) Carrie Bradshaw is still a mess but (between flanderization and some “interesting” choices by the writers) she’s become an unsympathetic character and even the actor who had to play her felt uncomfortable about her. We have moved into similar territory with a handful of characters – including Amber
I just kind of miss the days where we’d have a beach episode and nobody screamed at anybody or got attacked by their supervillain stepdad. The comic feels like it’s lost its delicate balance between melodrama and slice of life. Every arc has to have something awful or ominous happen.
I don’t know, more recently it’s been people getting on medication that helps them, having a quiet night out, realising they are in a relationship already, deciding not to go to a different school, getting a new boyfriend, doing sports, playing a video game, breaking up… relatively little ominous stuff, although there’s still yelling
I don’t think yelling is that bad in social drama fiction
I mean those are also the days where Amber did shit like flip tables and Joyce was homophobic and Joe was at his slimiest. I’d love another beach episode (or winter equivalent) but I’m liking season 2 much more
I mean even in the beach storyline Jennifer was yelling that she wasn’t interested in Walky.
I think last storyline there wasn’t really a lot of conflict? The ‘Becky is mad at not getting invited’ was resolved in like four strips. Other than that it’s ‘Dorothy gets together with Walky again’ and ‘Sarah talks to Jacob’.
beach day was so Joyce wouldn’t be thinking about the attempted rape the night before. this is just amber overreacting to a video game. Maybe it feels ominous because of Amber’s reaction, I dunno, but this strikes me as pretty low stakes.
Except Asher’s as ominous as the sword of Damocles, but that’s my personal opinion.
This is LESS raving asshole than she used to be. She stabbed a girl, one who was already in custody. She beat the ever loving shit out of a dude a few months ago. She has full on dissociative episodes about how much of a raving asshole she is.
She’s Performing here (I say, totally not projecting). These people are safe. Ish. Safe enough to admit that the anger Exists. But there’s a deliberate element of the ridiculous that says not to take this seriously. Mary Sue is not a real insult when levelled at a real person- as Danny immediately notes. The stabbing issue is Resolved between Sal and Amber and is now just Spicy Banter.
Anyway I love this characterisation and just Wanted To Share
Man I love this like. Thing. On Amber.
Performative anger is Fun and also a pretty good coping alt to Actual Anger Issues.
She is for real angry, but she’s not out of control angry and there’s an element of I AM DELIBERATELY PERFORMING MY ANGER RATHER THAN LETTING MY ANGER PERFORM ME.
I really like this reading! I didn’t see it until I read your comments, but seeing it, this makes sense. It isn’t just the comic punchline making this zanier, this is actually Amber continuing to channel her anger into other channels. This is growth. No red panels! No origin stories! Just Amber going and trying to find another frame to shave off, because THAT’LL SHOW HER.
Also, it didn’t occur to me until you said this, but I try to make a point of only having enormously strong / definite / inflexible opinions about really silly things, and I wonder if that’s for related reasons.
I can’t think of any really good examples offhand, but nowadays, even “is it called soda, pop, or something else?” and “how many spaces should go after a period?” can have reasonable people disagreeing over the answers. “Is pineapple the best pizza topping, or merely one of the best?” is closer to the spirit of it.
Whereas in contrast, plenty of social issues have answers which (I believe) are obviously much more or less correct, and I feel strongly about that and can give reasons why that’s the case, but I don’t tend to treat those in the same way. Oh? You disagree? Well, why do you think that? …and then we can have a conversation.
So, as you said in another comment above, there’s “a deliberate element of the ridiculous” to this practice – and it’s definitely performative. I do it in part because I find it amusing, but I wonder if it’s also a coping strategy for me in some way.
I’m kind of hoping Linda Walkerton and/or Carol Brown and/or Clint Hughes show up again soon and put all this nonsensical fluff into perspective. I wonder how many will be wishing we could “just go back to that silly thing about Sal beating a Super Mario record or whatever” at that point.
If this is the direction it’s going (without the swerve I’m expecting), then everything about the situation is blatantly unrealistic. She’d at least care for the, what I presume are, bounties on the record. But honestly Sal’s way too calm, she’s got a prepared response. If it does go how would make sense for the setting, the only unrealistic thing is how overblown Amber’s reaction is, and even that sort of makes sense given how emotional she can be.
oh my god it’s like the rolling thing they started doing in classic NES Tetris that Summoning Salt covered. Sal singlehandedly responsible for the ‘spasm-button-press’ maneuver
I have a new perspective for Amber’s building reaction in the last 2 panels, that isn’t her flipping out in a rage, or something else.
I think she may be unable to cope with these revelations, and she may be heading for a genuine break from reality, where her reality can’t be real, because real life doesn’t have Mary Sues, so because Sal exists, her life cannot be real? This is real extreme stuff and I don’t think Willis would touch it, but on the other hand, it might be possible to keep it light enough that it can be temporarily played for laughs, and maybe end in Amber having to actually get some real help.
Aww, this is beautifully unbelievable. First of all, you’d have to know the route, you’d have to know how to do all the frame perfect tricks, bumping, wall jumps, and several other things.
Nobody makes a pass at that record without a *GRIND* that starts with intimate knowledge of the underpinnings of the game.
I figured she was gonna turn on Amber’s stream, be a stupidly hot girl playing games in her underwear, and x10 Amber’s audience. This is just…sorry Willis, you lost me a bit here.
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now imagine the record ROBIN would get
(…at consuming Cadbury Creme Eggs)
Except that Robin had Creme Egg cereal with milk, not just Cadbury Creme Eggs.
What a wimp.
The big hot dog eating competition in Coney Island allows you to have water. Whether Robin can have milk in her contest is up to rules makers.
I love the idea of “rules lawyering” for this subject.
I thought she had Cadbury Creme Eggs, in a bowl with milk, as if they were cereal, and called it cereal..? I didn’t realise that was an actual cereal over there!
Also kinda assumed she was having the mini ones and was impressed she spent the necessary time removing the foil/vaguely hoped she did/was glad she was a cartoon person and it didn’t matter if she didn’t!
Yeah, surely Creme Egg cereal is like Smarties cereal
lol.
Aw, jeez.
Amber’s impulse ten years ago backfired now. Bet she reallllly regrets doing that.
I mean, also because she like, stabbed a girl’s hand, but y’know, mostly losing the record.
See, Amber, this is why you shouldn’t stab people!
This is something we can all learn from.
Don’t wound what you can’t kill, that’s the real lesson. In the five years since that incident, Sal has grown and evolved into the ultimate gamer, and she doesn’t even want it. Amber is basically Vegeta, pissed off that a low-class warrior has surpassed her royal bloodline.
I know she was like 12 or something but it was a very poor execution. If you’re gonna stab someone’s hand at least do it well enough they can’t use it. Instead Amber arguably made Sal stronger in a way that only hurts her specifically. Incredibly shoddy work, honestly. I’d grade her about a “D” in hand stabbing.
Danny has given the D to both of those people
She is now Dr. Victor Frankenstein, thinking about the Frankenstein she created.
(And for the record, anyone who tries to correct me that the monster’s name wasn’t Frankenstein, the closest thing the monster had to a parent was Doctor Frankenstein, meaning his family name would be Frankenstein, and since the Doctor never named him, he has no first name, meaning his only name is Frankenstein. In essence, calling the monster Frankenstein is acknowledging his personhood. )
Do note, this makes it obvious why later on he changed his last name to “Munster”, probably part of healing from that abusive relationship. I suspect he changed it around the same time he chose his first name, “Herman”, a bit of an on the nose name, “Her man”, to move on to his more treasured familial relationship with his wife, Lily.
The best way Amber can revenge this offensive act is to pay surgery and treatment to heal Sal’s hand.
Given Sal’s painful experience in trying and failing to pay for a surgery, that actually would be revenge.
The comments today will be DELICIOUS.
Who else is leaving forever only to be back tomorrow?
I lost all interest in Questionable Content ages ago when all conflict disappeared and anything resembling conflict was inevitably resolved and everything turned out butterflies and rainbows. And then May and AgentBot/Yay had their characters neutered and all uniqueness and personality removed.
But I still read it, because Faye is the last of the original cast who hasn’t been relegated to secondary status and I want to witness it happen (though it looks like Jeph’s plan of putting Marten and Claire on a bus backfired and now Marten might start playing a bigger role again).
…What?
IIRC Cubetown was supposed to be a way to write Marten and Claire out of the comic.
Turns out writing stories about a research campus with unlimited resources at its disposal is fun, so it stays in addition to Northampton.
Umm, wrong comic …… ?
I think they’re trying to say that sometimes you quit some ongoing series emotionally but still keep checking in to see what happens.
I thought Martin getting a bigger role again was on purpose.
I love the low conflict QA. I feel like everyone is growing up. Also I love Claire and I love her chill relationship with Martin. It’s my first comic check every morning. It’s interesting even though they’re out of their messed up 20s. More interesting really because it’s not reliant on unnecessary drama. The one thing I do miss is Steve (?) eating cereal.
Questionable Content is such a weird comic because it’s arguably about nothing and there is little to no stakes, it has very interesting setting where humanity has reached an idealistic future where sentient AI has been fully integrated into society, but it doesn’t talk about it. Yet somehow it’s still one of the most accurate depictions of millennials coming of age and slowly transitioning to adults, while also nailing the sometimes monotonous and inconsequential lives of most people.
Just had to agree. QC is not without conflict, but the characters resolve it. The strip shows how people with high emotional intelligence deal with their problems.
Except of course for Liz!
I also love Claire but every time I look at her all I can think is “Famn it would be cool if there was a single webcomic that included a trans woman who actually looked like a trans woman”
I don’t disagree but for a cis person writing a trans person for the first time, erring on the side of caution in how she’s depicted is the better way to go imo. I definitely prefer that he made her just look like another female character as opposed to the yikes effect of if the first trans character we met leaned more into a stereotype. Plus Clinton shares her frame and overall appearance, which is cool.
I think I read three webcomics nowadays but I used to read more and I recall transfolk who look trans being out there but typically being written and drawn by trans folk, so… they’re out there, is all I have!
yeah, I think it’s too easy to stray into Sakura from Danganronpa if one isn’t careful
I like Claire the way she is
*googles*
Oh. Wow, yeah. Tbh a variety of trans representation is best and while I can’t comment on the character at all I could love that design if it’s alongside a variety of other transfolk of more traditional builds. A woman could be built like that and love it and still be a woman! But as the only trans character, it would definitely be a bad look.
I like Claire as she is too.
I’m confused. What do you think a trans woman should look like?
Not to mention feeling increasingly fetishistic.
I’m trying to pinpoint the part where the conflict disappeared. Is it when Faye stopped drinking? That was the last time the stakes were literally life and death.
I think the whole “underground robot fighting arena” storyline was the last time it followed a long arc through to a conclusion.
The characters Grew up and Matured, All the original main cast have found Love and either Own their own business or are soon to do so. Drama isn’t something they Create anymore, they are to busy, the stuff just happens around them and they gotta deal with it. Im Subscribed to his Patreon to get the comics a day ahead of time and I gotta say, the newest development could be the next major conflict if its not played for jokes, which would also be good.
The Story only really had 1 big conflict and it was Fay’s drinking problem, and that was solved YEARS ago, That story isn’t about Conflict, its about Growing up as Adults in their Late 20’s and early 30’s. People finish growing up and maturing around those points, most inner conflict is gonna be resolved.
Your life doesn’t become listless malaise just because you turn 30. There’s plenty of material to build an engaging story without apocalyptic conflict, if the comic could stop getting sidetracked with new characters and follow through on the plot threads it starts.
They seem happy! And busy! No malaise or listlessness. And like, this comic (DOA) isn’t going to end Freshman year any year soon… I’m not in a huge rush for Dora and Tai’s wedding. It’ll happen when it happens and there’s no need for artificial nonsense preventing it from happening just for dramas sake. (Jeph… if you’re reading, I LOVE what you’re doing and I’m glad it didn’t end up being a sitcom of how Martin can’t ever have a healthy relationship and perpetual will he or won’t he with Faye. That would have truly bored me eventually.)
I stopped reading months ago during The Party That Never Ended. It’s just boring at this point. Nothing interesting but the occasional fetish drawing happens.
I don’t think it’s a good representation of Millennials coasting off into the night, especially as canonically they’re still in their 20s. Claire is insufferable. May went from best girl to pudding. Characters I don’t know or chare about appear and disappear as Jeph gets bored. Cubetown makes no sense. It’s just. So. Boring. DoA has remained fresh and interesting for over 10 years, so has Gunnerkrigg Court (19), Freefall (good god, 30???) and Skin Horse (14 I think, it did end a few years ago but it was a fabulous ride). QC, no.
Hard disagree. Claire is wonderful. She still makes the best puns. She’s in an interesting situation where she’s above her head but also the only organized person so maybe she’ll make it work. I love her relationships with her mom and her brother.
Gunnerkrigg Court, otoh, used to be on my regular reads, but it got boring and completely lost me. (I think around when the two Annies got combined.)
Okay, so you’re just ignoring the 7-month-long Torture Saga, where Claire kept Pintsize in a steel cage and electrocuted him 24/7, gradually removed parts of him, ground those parts into metallic dust, fed them to Marten to give him metal poisoning so he’d be more docile for her, and then forcibly converted Pintsize to a more humanoid body so she could avoid doing her house chores. Great, real progressive.
You say that like Pintsize isn’t into that first part.
ROFL!
Was that before or after she poisoned the watering hole and destroyed all their crops??
I don’t even know what “The Party That Never Ended” refers to.
I enjoy QC as a generally low stakes, but often very funny comic with lots of fun ideas and characters to play with. I’m nowhere near as invested in it as I am here, but I enjoy it at least as much.
I mean… it’s a slice-of-life comedy, basically.
Not all genres resolve around conflict =)
revolve* ^^
I’m honestly so happy that QC and DOA are so widely seen as sister comics that can just suddenly post a comment like this here, and immediately get dozens of strongly opinionated replies. Truly, this is a heartwarming moment of close-knit online community building!
Why are you bashing QC over here in the comments of DOA, rather than over there in the hater subreddit for QC, which apparently (still) exists solely for that purpose?
At last, sweet revenge. Sal is cold mother-lover (though I think she might actually hate her mom a little bit too).
Hey, you never specific which mother. I bet there’s some mothers out there she could love.
Oh no, reverse Dolly Zoom, Amber realizing she created her enemy, AND Amber realizing that the thing she cared so much about isn’t important to the person who did it?
I feel like Amber isn’t going to be a character for much longer.
oh, because AmaziGirl is about to show herself?
I think I was thinking mental break again personally and then after I posted, I remembered the rubber room repeating copypasta thing.
Crazy? I was crazy once.
They put me in a room.
A rubber room.
A rubber room with rats.
They put me in a rubber room with rubber rats.
Rubber rats? I hate rubber rats.
They make me crazy.
Crazy? I was crazy once.
They put me in a room….
i’m so glad there’s a real in-universe explanation for this and not just Sal being Sal. instantly makes this mini arc and the impending events like ten times better & funnier
1: ^ This
2: Spasming my hand is the only reason I can beat all my friends at button mashing minigames. Sure, it hurts after a while, but the usual 30 seconds/1 minute or 100 times is usually not enough. So it checks out.
Amber . o O (it was me
it was me
it was me)
Thanks for reminding me about this. I enjoyed it
amber honey we haven’t used that phrase unironically in like a decade+
You forget, Amber’s terminally online, she’s seen it used unironically in horrible corners of the internet and is probably guilty of using it herself a time or two. (Or 3 or 4 now, counting these last few comics)
I genuinely think she would use it unironically because she’s still unlearning casual misogyny and homophobicish* patterns of thinking and behaving that plague online, and specifically chronic fandom spaces. Kids are sponges. Teens are super social sponges. Early adulthood is for ringing the nasties out of the sponge.
*Like the whole shipping men to the point she was projecting onto live people, of which I was guilty of in highschool.
How agonizingly ironic. Ah well, at least Amber’s misfortune can become somebody else’s fortune.
It’s that old earthling saying, “life gives you lemons…”
“… Squeeze it into your enemies eyes!!”
“make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don’t want your damn lemons, what am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life’s manager. Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons. Do you know who I am? I’m the man who’s gonna burn your house down! With the lemons. I’m going to to get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down!”
yes! yes! he says what we’re all thinking!
All you need now is enough copper and zinc strips to stick into maybe a million lemons, and you’d have enough electricity to do it.
“…make lemonade, and then throw it in the face of the person who gave you the lemons until they give you the oranges you originally asked for.”
Phil Hartman, of course.
“Time to make margaritas!”
Blue Screen of Death with the game-over theme of Super Mario Land playing.
Found it!
Amber created her worst enemy! Like everyone thinks Batman does!
I don’t remember Batman being that involved in any of his enemies backstory based on my very limited knowledge of Batman lore. Except maybe Two-Face and Red Hood? (Though that I gather that last is good now?)
sometimes the joker as well but that really depends on the version.
It’s a common criticism of Batman that his presence escalated the criminal potency of Gotham as they transformed from gangster and corrupt elite to more flamboyant and overtly dangerous super criminals in response. Especially since most of his rogues are dark reflections of Batman in some way. It’s even mentioned at the end of Batman Begins.
It’s a bad take in my opinion that’s only interesting in a few scenarios. Much like prep time debates or him treating his sidekicks as soldiers and not family.
That’s kind of weird considering that flamboyant supervillains exist all over the DC universe without direct actions from anyone, so it would be likely they appeared in Gotham wherever Batman existed or not.
It’s always felt like one of those bad-faith arguments that writers wanting to force some moral ambiguity into Batman stories jump onto. Its always been a stupid argument, but when has that stopped the edgelords?
But really; isnt that such an inward NYC thing ?
all thats left is to rename costume crusaders and flaboyant themed villains .
I’m sorry in Gotham we have Flamboyos, its Joker tier here, you wouldnt get it.
our prisons are literally a madhouse, you wouldnt get it.
I did like the “Trial” episode of Batman the Animated Series where the DA who thought that way was forced to defend him.
The funny thing is the Joker is a pretty good deconstruction of this argument and I don’t mean the Killing Joke. The way it was written in the 1930s, the Joker blamed Batman for making him.
…
Because otherwise he would have been ANOTHER costumed criminal committing player card themed crimes in the Red Hood.
Mostly it’s a meta argument built around there being so many weirdos in Gotham for Batman to fight. Why are they all there? Why hasn’t Batman been able to put a dent in Gotham’s troubles? Obviously the real answer is because the genre needs villains for the hero to fight, but attempts to build answers into the story get get weird.
It really applies to any long running superheroes, but Batman’s one of the biggest and most obvious examples.
Batman does get it a lot more obviously and textually than anyone else, and it’s never made sense to me. Like, Metropolis regularly has buildings wrecked or city blocks leveled because some alien wants to punch a Superman in the face, but nobody ever blames Superman for it. Central City has that plus time-based shenanigans because people want to dick-measure with the Flash, but no one blames the Flash for it.
But when some incel in Gotham City obsessed with a kid’s book makes mind-control hats, or someone decides to rob banks with twinned ketchup and mustard guns, or any given serial killer develops a creepy signature/MO, it’s all Batman’s fault.
Gotham is in Jersey, that’s should be explanation enough for most people.
((woo, a geek topic I can engage with))
I’m of the opinion that people make their own decisions but batty boy at least makes the problem worse. In the films there was Riddler (1995- Eddy rejected by Bruce, goes revengey), Joker (1989; fell into vat fighting batman, also joker killed Bruce’s parents so it goes both ways).
In comics: Red Hood (Jason?) was directly, Bane and a few others became fixated on “beating the bat” and so were specifically Gotham villains because of him, Joker in some iterations (and so potentially Harley), and some others were “created” by their contact with Wayne Enterprises (eg Ivy).
There’s also a couple of villains, at least one I remember who only become supervillains because they aren’t taken seriously as regular ol gansters.
It’s kinda like asking whether McDonalds/NRA/Cigarette cause childhood obesity/school shootings/lung cancer. No, but also kind of yes.
Pretty sure “do cigarettes cause lung cancer” is more just “yes”.
(Which doesn’t mean that everyone who smokes gets lung cancer. But it’s definitely a direct cause. Saying “Batman is responsible for Bane” is more like saying that the shop that sold me cigarettes is responsible for my lung cancer. Bane is responsible for Bane. Anything else is a bit like the Lex Luthor excuse of “I’d have cured all disease if Superman didn’t exist and keep distracting me”.)
The research (done by cigarette companies) is inconclusive (in that p>0% cigarettes do not cause cancer)
Amber face in the last pannel looks like that error aound you hear when your computer crashes.
Danny channeling Taffy in panel 2
I continue to maintain that Amber is the best damn thing the past three days, and that I love this story so, so, so much. Her poses. Her yelling. Her faces. All of it is peak.
Amber’s temper is funny when it’s about something like this, and not like, emotionally abusing Danny or torpedoing her life.
Yeah, if this were framed in a way that would lead me to believe Sal is bothered/endangered or that it’s not meant to be humorous, I wouldn’t find it funny.
But like, this is framed as humorous so I find it funny lol.
Amber has always been peak, some people just take longer to recognize this truth. (Yes this includes the moment where she acts like a weirdo and a danger to herself and others. Especially then in fact!)
I too love Amber here. Dramatic poses, big font
As a casual amber hater (stepped down from dedicated, I’m working on not caring enough to hate her like I do with much worse characters), this is funny as shit
The look on Amber’s face in last panel. Those realizations gotta sting
“Do you remember in Superman III when Superman turned evil because Richard Prior gave him some weird kryptonise?”
“No. Am I the kryptonite?”
“NO. You are RICHARD PRIOR.”
*plays “Kryptonite” by Three Doors Down on hacked muzak*
Thwarted by your own hand. So to speak.
Hoist with her own petard. So to speak.
I know Amber can be kind of competitive in areas of her competence, but records were meant to be broken. To have had it for any length of time is a feather in your cap.
I don’t think she ever had it. Or at least whether or not she had it hasn’t been stated.
Yeah, she was trying to match what was possible for a computer to do. She wasn’t even trying to beat the record, because it’s literally unbeatable. She was just trying to match it. Sal literally beat it. After learning the game for an hour. She beat the best computer in the world, by accident. That would be like picking up the game of chess, and an hour later, beating full-strength Stockfish. Some people genuinely don’t grasp how ludicrously improbable this is. It would be less absurd if Sal won the entire Olympics.
If you go back a few strips I believe it was specified that Sal beat the non-TAS record.
I think I missed that detail, thanks.
As someone who knows nothing about speedrunning, how much of the “it’s impossible” discourse is because of people also missing that? I get that it’s still hard to beat the top players in the world, but surely more plausible than beating a computer?
In this specific case, it’s probably less of a difference than the majority of other games that exist which are speed run. Super Mario Bros is probably the most heavily researched and run speed game of all time, and the run is so optimized, that the difference between a perfect human run, and a perfect TAS run, is probably closer than most games. That said, the differences between human-doable tricks, and the TAS-specific tricks, are that the TAS-specific tricks rely on stuff like pressing two opposite directional buttons on the exact same frame, which cannot physically be done with an actual NES controller. There’s no way to make both contacts press simultaneously, because they tilt in opposite directions from one another.
Also, because of this specific game being solved to death, the reality of Sal saving a frame by accident due to her injury is specifically out of pocket, because it is genuinely known what the current “perfect” human-possible run is, down to every single frame. So, her matching that record faster than Amber did, would be similarly improbable, but people could maybe digest it; but Sal somehow discovered new technology to save more frames than a manually calculated perfect run frame by frame, with all available data.
She didn’t beat the best players in the world; she beat an entire dedicated community with 30+ years experience in the pursuit, all of whom share knowledge on what the best (read: perfect) practices currently are. Sal’s 70 minute investment utterly destroyed the sum total of human investment into this one specific thing. It’s like she walked into the local cancer institute, read the cliff’s notes to Grey’s Anatomy, and then found a better cure for a specific type of cancer than all of human medical science has been able to achieve. We’re talking, she beat decades of human research and work, by herself, in 70 minutes of mild effort.
I’ve said it elsewhere, but if Willis hadn’t specifically chosen this specific game as his example, nearly nobody would have had a problem. He picked the single game that the largest number of people would know the most about, which is the most solved in our parallel reality, which the canon of the strip loosely mirrors. It’s actually got me wondering, if there’s a specific thematic reason that he deliberately chose Super Mario Bros Level 8-4, as a deliberate thematic statement, or parallel, or piece of symbolism which might become clearer later in the strip.
She was okay with records being broken. She was trying to do it in the first place.
What she didn’t like was somebody with practically zero experience waltzing in and effortlessly doing what she had spent weeks trying to do.
My impression is that Amber may be paying for college using streaming revenues and had gotten sponsors counting on her to break the record or at least remain unsurprised.
Plus this was her replacement for crimefighting.
Richard’s paying for college now I believe.
Mm, I’m not sure. Is Richard Joe’s dad? Joe offered for his father to pay for Amber’s college and she rebuffed him with, “Don’t worry. It’s being handled.” And then the streaming pops up.
I think Richard’s paying for Amber’s legal fees (the whole stabby-wabby thing with whats-his-face who roofied Joyce, last we heard his family was suing Amber/Amber’s mum)
Ah. Yes, thank you. That makes sense.
I take it that Amber defines herself by her gaming and it’s “her” thing. Sal showing that it’s not actually something she can measure herself by and provide her self-worth against is something causing a breakdown because Amber doesn’t have much of that.
Basically, it’s like defining yourself by your knowledge of Star Wars then finding out that a guy with a good memory can utterly trounce you.
The fatal error has occurred please reboot your Amber.
But she’s running multiple OSs. Do you want to reboot in AG mode or Amber mode? (there is no safe mode)
Linux. Suse vivo vixi victum reduco is ea id creatura absit decessus a facultas Linux! Dev root, dev root!
Im confused by Sal’s line when thinking Amber and I’m confused by Amber’s expression
Sal is most likely being sarcastic. And Amber face seems like a mix of guilt and incredulity. (Don’t quote me on that).
I was thinking more of a suppressed blind rage. She’s being thanked for her onw downfall, and being told it didn’t even matter to the person who broke her unbreakable record.
own*
Also I think Sal is being sincere, she’s just thinking “I guess there’s technically one good thing that came out of that night, even if it is incredibly minor”
That expression from the last panel…..Amber, calm down.
…
I am no longer upset about the speedrun thing.
I mean, it was weird that anyone was in the first place. Honestly it was the most hilariously pointless discourse I seen in these comment sections, and that is saying something.
I don’t really know how you can say what you are saying impolitely. Screaming it maybe? Doing vulgar gestures? Help me out here.
I’m subtly implying that there’s something I’m much more upset by that the original issue has become a non-issue.
Ah, okay yeah I completely missed that. Sorry.
The Mary Sue thing, I guess?
I’m pretty disturbed by panel 3.
“It should be extra impossible because I stabbed her hand!” As in, “How dare this ex-‘thug’ whom I brutalized do something extraordinary? How dare she excel at what I thought was MY domain!? Doesn’t she know that victims should stay victims!? She deserves to remain hobbled by her injury, not to do something amazing with it!”
That’s how I’m reading it, and it’s ugly. It’s not kind. It’s a cruel thing to say, and it’s got a tinge of racism to it too.
Just my $0.02
No – it’s that with her damaged hand she shouldn’t physically be able to, as in not having the needed dexterity. From the phrasing, Amber has no issue with Sal as a person, just as someone (through inexperience plus the injury) shouldn’t have been able to achieve this feat. (And with any measure of reality, she’s right. But this is a comic strip.)
Don’t read it that way then. Issue solved.
Good point. Thank you both.
Willis noticed you complaining about your stubbed toe, so they kindly chose to help by breaking your nose. Congratulations! Now you’re hardly thinking about your stubbed toe at all, much less feeling hurt by it!
Amber herself has done about fifty things that are far more ludicrous, but there’s enough speedrunning fans on the internet that know the details, so Sal beating a record “feels” more ludicrous than Amber shooting a grappling hook from her wrist to fly to Toedad’s car
There were also people who complained about that, but I think some people also accepted it as working for the story who felt differently here. Now, it’s not yet totally clear what “the story” here will be, and it may feel more acceptable when looked at in a larger context. Getting a strip a day doesn’t allow for the full perspective that way.
Personally, I feel more ready to suspend disbelief in action scenes. I can also get behind it for a joke, but I guess the previous strips didn’t strike me as funny enough to really get onboard, and that’s obviously going to vary.
There are definitely some storylines that get a ton of discourse for the strip a day mechanic. Remember the comments devolving into name calling during the ‘Joyce might have autism’ storyline?
This is exactly it. Nobody on Earth has the exact, perfect receipts on precisely how improbable/impossible the generic superhero feats that several characters in this comic have managed, actually are. But there’s a huge portion of the readership who have spent hours learning, in detail, the precise details of what is necessary for Sal to have accomplished here, and precisely how and why it’s impossible.
You can hand-wave away action movie antics as a viewer, in a comic strip that has a superhero element directly embedded in its canon. It’s completely unbelievable in reality, but completely expected in a comic strip. This Mario thing, it’s like you played a schlocky popcorn action movie about space astronauts, for Neil deGrasse Tyson. He knows exactly, to the finest detail, everything that’s bullshit, about every wrong detail he sees, because its his life’s dedicated goal to understand all of that otherwise unimportant minutiae.
If they were even playing an obvious in-universe knock-off game, nobody’s suspension of disbelief would be broken, because it’s not “really” Mario. It would be an act that is, implicitly, equally impossible; I don’t think anybody would care, and may even find it really funny that Sal did it, because we know the implied achievement was impossible in our actual reality.
But, Willis chose to use something that literally exists in our actual reality, and in particular, he chose probably the singular option that the largest number of his readers would be deeply and intimately familiar with the real-life details of. So, I’m not shocked that it really took people out of immersion. The strip’s canon is a parallel to our reality, where certain impossible things regularly happen; but, the unrealistic things that happen, have up until now, been unrealistic in one consistent way. But this unrealism, actually references something objective, from our real reality; so, it should thus be seen as equally unrealistic, in the comic strip’s canon, because the setting is deliberately a parallel to our real world.
i mean, superhero stuff aside, if ur going to bring realism into it, there tech are ppl who have survived from ‘deadly’ bullet wounds even if sometimes it’s kinda miraculous so sal beating ambers record on the first try isn’t too bad , tho be interesting to see her equally as salty to ‘tie’ or just be like 5 seconds behind lol
That’s ambiguous.
I figured this would be the explanation for the “surpassing the human limit” part but this still doesn’t make any sense, because Sal would have to master the OTHER frame perfect and pixel perfect death defying tricks necessary to have a TAS-perfect 8-4. The “press left and right real fast at the start” bit that Sal’s spasm might hypothetically help with is only the FIRST step
Like, the backwards wall jump into the suspended pipe ALONE would be outrageous for a neophyte to pull off even once in the time span Sal had to do this and there’s so much more a record-setting 8-4 requires
This is the Rise of Skywalker of plot points, it’s freed me from having to care about Star Wars/wherever this part of the storyline is going by lieu of being so dang stupid
Actually you know what I take that back, this is more like Metal Gear Solid completely misunderstanding what “dominant and recessive genes” are and how they work: completely ridiculous but a funny sort of ridiculous that I can accept and giggle at
right now I reckon Amber is torn between her original “crying and shitting” plan, and trying to source a big knife and a willing assistant who doesn’t ask questions
Unfortunately, that’s shortsighted as a plan. Sal has had five years to acclimate to her hand’s quirks, and Amber probably knows that by the time she reaches the same level, Sal will have somehow invented the GameCube.
Does Danny have toilet paper stuck to him
Think that’s Amber’s coat that she throw down in fury when entering the room.
It’s getting stupider and stupider.
The “‘has to to hit two buttons at once'” is about reaching TAS levels, not about shaving a frame off the human record, which is in fact doable by speedrunning experts
A human hand spasming has nothing to do with the console not being able to accept two inputs at once.
Instead of Amber complaining that it’s impossible for a newbie to beat the human record, she’s claiming it “impossible” in generality
Why don’t you do the dishes about it?
I don’t know what that means.
Probably mean to insult you by telling you to go do something productive instead of writing complains about a comic.
What’s even remotely insulting about “do the dishes”? If I wanted to insult them, I’d just do it like a normal person.
Apologize for misunderstanding you.
I’m sorry for misunderstanding me.
I mean to say that I apologize for misunderstanding you. (That is probably clear but just wanted to make sure)
Wait then what does ‘do the dishes about it’ mean
They should clean their dirty dishes, seems pretty self explanatory to me
Not so self-explanatory given the “about it” part.
(a) Do something humdrum to take focus away from the source of the anger.
(b) Burn the anger to fuel some useful activity.
Works for me.
When people are angry, something they often do is dishes. It’s one of the de facto “I’m raging” activities.
Funny. Doing the dishes makes me angry
I get that reference! I think. Wingnut Dishwashers Union?
I don’t know what that is, I was quoting a tweet. Might have been a picture of a Tumblr post, it’s honestly hard or keep track.
Someone referenced the actual strip where Amber told Sal about this, and Amber specified she was trying to match the TAS run of one specific level. Amber was, in fact, trying to find a way to match the TAS. She wanted to tie it. She had absolutely zero expectation of being able to beat it, because there is no logical reason to try, because she would need to discover brand new knowledge, that the entire TAS speed-running community for that game (probably the single most popular and well-researched speed-run game of all time!) didn’t already know.
Amber wanted to learn to do the level impossibly perfect, the way a perfectly programmed circuit-board could.
Sal did the level literally better than perfect. In an hour.
I believe the record that Sal beat was the non-TAS record, which is different from what Amber is trying to do.
I still think it’s all a ruse, goading Amber into breaking through the wall she’s been stuck at for a few days.
I think by this point you’re probably in denial.
I can’t tell if this is progress or not for Amber’s rage issues. I guess she’s not smashing stuff or throwing chairs even if she wants to. There’s no real problem in clenching your fists and shouting at the air like a comic book villain. She should gather the infinity stones and reverse time to stop herself from stabbing Sal and prevent this dark future. That or fight Reed Richards.
Progress I think. No red panels, considerate of other people’s things. But smashing something of her own might make her feel better. Like a box of ceramic tiles.
Look at that last panel. That looks to me like “I’ve been pouring my entire being into an accomplishment that doesn’t matter.”
OK, Amber’s sunk to some depressive lows, but I can 100% guarantee you that there’s no part of her brain that is thinking “video games don’t matter.”
There’s a far greater chance right now that the thought going through her mind is “Oh my god, she’s not lying, she really DOESN’T care, what’s wrong with her?”
Dumbing of Age Book 14: [no title, just a wide angle shot of Amber in the last panel]
Real quick: The issue isn’t with the human hand, its with the NES controller. If you created a perfect NES-playing-robot, it still wouldn’t be able to perform the tricks necessary. This is one of the reasons why speedruns are done with keyboards on PC (although not the primary reason).
Anyway, the whirlwind of emotion that Amber’s going through is the real aspect of this scene. I’m guessing its mostly guilt here? It’s not that “I hurt Sal so she can do this thing”, its “my hurting of Sal was even more serious of an injury than I thought it was”.
Like, Amber’s largely always known that Sal’s hand is messed up from the stabbening. But has she known to what extent? I wonder if its been a small comfort in her mind, “yes her hand’s a little messed up, but she’s clearly fine on the whole” given everything she’s done.
This info, as blase as it is for Sal, is new to Amber, and might be throwing more guilt onto a pile that she’s never been particularly good at dealing with.
Half the reason for game difficulty is the controller.
Just holding that damn thing is a pain as it is. I get that Nintendo didn’t have ergonomics figured out yet, but were rounded corners too much to ask for?
At least they figured it out for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Those controllers had some curves, lemme just say that.
As someone who once did five hours of research on the history of chimneys to know if I should describe a house as having smoke in it or not and has invented two conlangs that had to have different language roots, I am going to be very controversial here and give Willis a pass for not researching whether such a thing was possible on the NES controller. Or doing the research and ending up wrong.
I guess I should give people a pass as well for being so angry about this. I violently despise the movie Sully for making the NTSB the villain when they’re damn near the least corrupt government agency we have (the NTSB not the FAA).
alternate universe in which the feat has been established as possible. Amber is saying “impossible” because of her incorrect assumptions about Sal’s disability and also overreacting.
Oh, its 100% fine to give Willis a pass in my book here, its niche detail stuff that’s going on.
This was me trying to go more “interesting trivia” before segueing into actually important-to-the-story stuff. You know, rather than like 75% of the comments joking about self-harm to improve speedrunning scores (I’m not mad about that either, but its a weeeeeird tangent to go to when Amber’s got her “Sudden Trauma” face going).
Point of contention on giving Willis a pass
Sal’s injury is on her right hand. The right hand doesn’t use the D pad. which are the ones that can’t do the up+down or left+right.
Sal probably forced a faster A/B press then is normally possible at just the right instant to crack the game.
That doesn’t really make sense either though. Its quite easy to press A+B simultaneously, the hard part for a human might be if you needed to press them almost together but not quite, in which case being just barely off from being able to do it perfectly together might work and the injury making it easier might make sense. Wait, did I just rationalize myself into buying that??
But Amber is complaining about needing to press SIMULTANEOUSLY, which would only apply to the D-Pad part.
Wonder if maybe despite her “thing that totally doesn’t matter to me”, Sal actually spent a few bored years in her ‘prison school’ trying to do this…
“I am a cartoonist. If you follow my advice on safety around nuclear materials you probably deserve whatever happens to you.”
— Randall Munroe
What about my comment made you think that this was a major issue I had with the strip? I brought it up as an aside, because I find it an interesting fact about the console and speedrun in question.
Anyone want to actually talk about the shit I spent most of my post talking about?
I dunno. I mean I get it if this like a special interest of yours, I guess I just a bit worn at lots of people around here being really angry over the past few strips because of Willis using artistic license to speedrunning more or less the same way he did for Sal’s motorcycling and stuff. Didn’t mean to lump you in with ’em bruh, sorry
I feel like a lot of people may have been misinterpreting how angry people actually were, vs people saying something because they were slightly annoyed, felt it didn’t work for them, or just wanted to share additional knowledge about the subject. Some people might have been legit pissed, but even then I feel less charitable towards those who decided to be rude/mocking/mean to people for having feelings about the strip than those who had feelings about the strip. (Though I know it gets blurred some with regular creator interaction, and some people feel defensive of Willis, and some people make their issues with things like this into personal attacks, but that wasn’t most of what I was seeing.)
I will say that if you were late to the first comment section when the record got broken (in comic) you missed the worst of it. Several comment threads ended up reported so hard they got deleted (I know because I went back to pull receipts when people said essentially what you’re saying). That tends to happen since we’ve got mods and a report feature now.
It set the tone for the other days, and it’ll probably happen again when the next thing happens in-world. Personally, I’m content at sharing my opinions at the same rate people who are angry at the comic do. Only seems fair!
Mods? IIRC Willis is still the sole moderator of the comments section?
Okay so we have mod, doesn’t change what I said.
I didn’t say it did. I was there when the chaos happened too.
Er well, part there. My shark week warrented higher cannabis doses, but awe well.
Maybe Danny’s controller is broken, or he has a cheap USB knockoff.
I mean at his age he’d have to be dedicated to have an original. Unless it’s his brother’s hand-me-down, assuming he’s old enough
They’re reasonably cheap at resale shops. Not free, but they’re fairly doable. It’s the capture stuff that’s the real costly part.
Danny’s probably used to the Mad Catz grade little brother controllers, if he spent any substantial amount of time gaming with his brother and/or Joe.
For all we know, Amber’s repetitive attempts have primed the controller to short in just the right way to enable Sal’s spasms to break the record. flicks the nit he just picked
Amber’s repetitive attempts with Danny’s controller, yes, of course.
Oh no. Amber has realised that her misery is self-inflicted. It’s her fault she’s been bested.
Oh shiiiiiiiit
I guessed this (hand spasms) and now I’m upset that I never actually typed this prediction
No, Amber.
No.
Please don’t be this petty.
Escalators! Escalators!! ESCALATORS!!!
ESSCCAAAALLLAAAATTTOOORRRRS!!!!!
…eels ,
I love escalators because escalators can never break. They can only become stairs. “Escalator temporarily broken”? No. “Escalator temporarily stairs. We apologize for the convenience.”
– Mitch Hedberg, approximately
Until they break and turn into slides…
or the platform falls off and now you can fall into the gears.
Maybe you would fall into the gears. I would simply eat the gears before they could harm me.
Iron is good for you!
I don’t think she’s being petty. I think she’s gotten a splash of cold water right in her face about just how bad the injury to Sal’s hand is.
Oh….that Broke Amber.
Hoisted on her own petard.
Amber will now need cuddles. Cuddles with half-nekid frenemy/girl-crush and her boi-friend, who is Amber’s ex boi-friend, can only lead to second breakfast slipshine.
HULK WISHES TO SMASH BUT RESPECTS PROPERTY OF OTHERS!
Giggle
So is Amber gonna go and comment on the speedrun video with like “I deserve partial credit for injuring the record holder in such a way that it gave her a very situationally-useful disability”?
But once you recognize the secret reason for her exposure, you will feel ashamed of your words & deeds.
Oh damn she just made her rival even stronger.
I feel like there would be less arguing in the comments if Sal had beaten Amber’s personal record rather than the world record. The first would still leave Amber pissed and insisting that it was impossible, but the second is a thing that could theoretically be possible in this world but isn’t remotely plausible.
In this continuity, Amber’s personal record is (or was) the world record. Nobody but her has ever even played this particular video game.
Super Mario Brothers for the Nintendo Entertainment System???
. . . okay, that’s even less plausible.
I know that according to real life technology, and real life speedrunning Sal did the impossible. I understand that people are annoyed by this, however is this really the hill you want to die on?
Very few are really serious about it, they’re just pointing out that this is, in fact, not a very logical plot point, but that its a minor point in the scene.
More people seem enraged that people are pointing out a flaw in the scene than people actually enraged about the scene, to be honest.
Yeah, Willis could have avoided this by having Amber be speed-running even a completely obvious in-universe knock-off of the exact same game; but the problem is, this specific game is probably the single most well-known speed-running game of all time, with multiple great resources and edutainment videos freely available to anyone who goes on Youtube.
He just specifically chose to use the single real-world game that actually exists, where the highest number of people in his audience, would have in-depth knowledge as to how insanely impossible the feat he was writing about, actually was. I think it created some genuine break of immersion for a lot of readers, and it was avoidable.
Like, everybody knew when they read the one arc, how utterly insane it was for one college freshman to hang off of and surf a literal car, and then grab an extract a second student from a speeding car, and then have another student ramp a speed bike over something to catch both of them in mid-air. But, that’s the kind of thing that would just sorta happen in a super-hero comic or movie, which is a collection of tropes that those storylines, and this comic in general, deliberately play around with. Even though it’s crazy, it doesn’t completely wreck your suspension of disbelief, because that’s just what Amazi-Girl plots are like.
The difference is, nobody has ever released half a dozen hour long Youtube videos, about the exact physics and mechanics it would take to pull off that specific stunt, and exactly how and why it would be impossible, and what it would actually take to pull it off, and then served those videos to literally millions of nerds. But I bet like a third of the total readers of this strip, have probably seen at least one Summoning Salt video, and if they’ve seen one, then statistically, it was likely one of the NES Super Mario ones.
If Amber and Sal were both speed-running “Superb Barrio Brothers,” I don’t think dozens of people would have spent days arguing over whether or not it was fair of them to have some cognitive dissonance over an ultimately meaningless comic strip storyline.
Making it a Monkey Master game instead of Mario would have fixed this entire issue. it could have been one long donkey kong joke on top of everything else.
Once again product placement has soured the fanbase.
Enough people have stated how this breaks their suspension of disbelief in a not-good way that there’s probably some merit to it.
I don’t personally think it’s a comic-ending flub, but I’m not gonna deny people feeling what they feel, it IS suspension of disbelief and for some people that’s too much in this scenario.
Crazy for all the weird impossible shit that’s happened in this comic, -this- is what has people saying “No this is too improbable and my willing suspension of disbelief is shattered”.
I don’t think one is better or worse than the other.
For some people Amber breaking physics is fine because you have some suspension of disbelief already in place for superhero antics.
For some people Sal destroying a Mario Kart record effortlessly is fine because it’s a low stakes situation.
Both are fine, one doesn’t need to minimize either situation causing people not wanting to continue anymore. Because they both ARE suspensions of disbelief situations.
I think people take ‘wow this is such a minor thing, why so mad bro?’ because they don’t get why different things bother different people. I don’t watch some series because of gore, it doesn’t make me better or worse than people who don’t watch some series because they find jokes distasteful.
I’m more frustrated that people are assuming that “suspension of disbelief” is the be-all-end-all of aesthetic enjoyment. (Or that “suspension of disbelief” is even an accurate description of a reader or viewer’s relationship to fiction.)
I’m not sure this webcomic ever was focused on the technical accuracy of anything. It might be a bit more focused on characters and their development, with technical plot points (small or big, realistic or goofy) serving as setup for character interactions and the occasional joke.
In this case, it looks like the whole speedrunning thing is a setup for:
1. Provoking a crisis that forces Amber to move from her statis (using games and especially speedrunning as a refuge from self-hatred, anger and guilt; now having that refuge accidentally devalued and “broken” by the one person who pushes a lot of her self-esteem, anger and guilt buttons).
2. And as a bonus, a bit of a fourth wall punching, meta commentary/joke on the “Mary Sue” trope and how it may apply to this webcomic (with Joyce and possibly others having some “insert character” qualities).
(I’m not sure the Mary Sue joke lands for me, and I do prefer the psychological storyline here.)
Everyone is free to get stuck on the technical details of the setup, and to express that. But that personal hangup that doesn’t constitute interesting criticism of the work, so after a couple comments saying “FYI this is not technically possible” we probably should be giving it a rest.
You are describing the concept of suspension of disbelief.
i’m surprised ‘exploiting a bug/glitch’ versus some kinda short cut/in game speedup items wouldn’t count as cheating among speedrunners lol
Altho that one speedrun where you beat BOTW in like 30 mins is pretty funny
Generally if there is a glitch or bug that can be used to get to the ending faster there will be a record for glitched runs, and a record for glitchless runs.
There are also categories within that. Such as 100% or any%, pacifist/violence, or other limitations/challenges; such as Super Metroid where you can save the animals on your way to the end, or ignore them so the run is faster.
Yeah, some games have major glitches, but the categories get run glitchless, because the glitch is boring, or inconsistent, or overall just not satisfying to try to achieve as a goal. Other games could be random, terrible games from the past, that suck to play normally, but some gamers realized they were loaded with fun glitches, that were satisfying to learn and execute, thus creating a fun speed-run game out of a game that originally had zero merit to play in the first place. The community ultimately welcomes and values both kinds of runs, because they can be fun for different reasons, or to different people; but, they’re all really impressive!
Amber probably deserved this L. I know they buried the hatchet on their incident, but she was getting a little self righteous on this considering the circumstance. Sal didn’t even want to play the game. She went for the ukulele first but can’t strum it for the same reason she can beat a Mario bros level fast.
I just heard ‘hello darkness my old friend’.
Also, uh, is it me or is that last panel distinctively red-tinged?
Her brain has short circuited. Typically, what faculties she retains in this state involve some kind of depraved perversion, so I think it’s safe to say she’s gonna fuck Danny’s ukulele out of sheer mind-ruining fury.
I think she’s just supposed to be shadowed cause she’s horrified by what she just said/has done.
She should be. That was low.
No, it’s just Amber herself who is turning red because she’s so upset.
All of this is very funny but Amber *is* being literally cartoonishly dreadful here. Cartoonishly as in, it’s a little more acceptable considering DoA’s cartoon logic, but man alive.
Thing is, Amber realized what she said was an incredible faux pas, but also a supposedly debilitating injury actually allowing Sal to do the impossible is the most Mary Sue thing about this entire situation.
Not really. Mary Sues are supposed to be flawless and perfect at everything, but that very same hand issue Sal has stopped her from playing Danny’s ukulele and given her motor control issues. The fact that her disability proved useful in this one specific scenario isn’t a Mary Sue trait, it’s a case of “This Looks like a Job for Aquaman”.https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThisLooksLikeAJobForAquaman
Also Mary Sues are supposed to be super impressive to both the audience and the other characters. It’s not just that they do impossible things, say, it’s the expectation that they receive praise in and out of character for doing so.
And while I can’t actually speak to Willis’ intentions for obvious reasons, I will say that one, the narrative is thus far not depicting Amber as unreasonable or villainous for her rage here. She is, perhaps, a bit in need of stepping away from the internet a bit and getting some perspective, but that’s nothing new.
And two, this feels much less about actually building up Sal in some way than it is about getting Amber to snap like a Twix bar.
James, Sal IS super impressive to the audience and other characters.
I don’t view Amber as villainous. I would say she is literally stepping away in this strip.
Extremely solid comment.
Thank you, Imogen
Amber has some flexible wrists.
I personally can’t bend my wrists at that sharp an angle.
I can bend mine at an angle that looks like that – not 90°, but reasonably close.
Word of this somehow gets out, there’s an epidemic of speedrunners stabbing their own hands that people outside the community have no idea why
Probably should try a potassium deficiency first.
The one speed trick doctors DON’T want you to know about!
let’s hope she doesn’t stab her own hand in attempts to recreate it lol
Whoopsie!
Congratulations to those who predicted that the hand injury would help Sal break the record
does amber get blaine’s eyes in the last frame?
Uh oh Vegeta, looks like your rage broke.
Shut up ghost of Nappa!
Good Ol’ God Dammit Nappa.
Having recently watched a Summoning Salt video on the recent Tetris “completion”, the twitching would, in fact, help with an old NES controller.
i cant believe Sal invented ‘hyper-tapping’
BSOD moment.
And thus began Amber’s villain arc.
Her ultimate heel turn.
You get a participation trophy, Amber. You know, because you gave Sal a hand.
Everyone, let’s give her a big hand!
It’s kind of hilarious that Amber, especially as Amazi-Girl, could be considered a Mary Sue of sorts, and then her own Tragic Background has contributed to rise of yet another Action Girl Mary Sue.
It’s like the gamma radiation of origin stories.
Huh. I thought that gamma radiation was the gamma radiation of origin stories.
After The Immortal Hulk series, “gamma rays” are just a stand in for any number of out-of-this-world reality-breaking concepts.
Does anyone remember which comic exactly had Amber explain the record she was trying to beat?
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-12/02-ill-leave-you-a-phantom/getcherself/
In retrospect it’s amazing just how much this single page sets up for future developments.
“This thing ah don’t care about”: surely the deepest cut of all.
i wonder how much of her expression is actual guilt versus screaming at her self lol
And is that more or less than the percentage of her that’s hurt by Sal not actually caring about the speedrun?
Tho other than like needing super long fingers or extra flexible, is it rly that ‘impossible’ or so unless the buttons also don’t ‘read’ /register it if you hit like 3 buttons at a time versus 4 b/c i feel like there’d be ppl out there that’d do a two person thing if not like have some ‘tool’ or so that extends a spot tho i guess that’d be cheating too
The directional buttons are all one piece, which I’m pretty sure tilts to hit the contact points (or whatever they’re called) on the inside of the controller. When people say it’s “physically impossible”, I assume that’s why, since it can’t very well tip in two directions at once without snapping.
A lot of debris in the controller, Danny looks like he’s a neat freak, but he’s crumbier than Walky.
No, you’ve sussed out the problem, exactly. The physical controller cannot accept the simultaneous inputs from physical operation of the buttons; for instance, you’d have multiple periods where you’d need to input left AND right, or up AND down, on the NES d-pad, which isn’t physically possible because it’s a single solid piece that doesn’t bend in the middle. These TAS-only tricks only work, because a computer cannot “play” the game with the controller itself, but only by interacting directly with the controller’s circuit board. So, the computer has no trouble saying “up AND down, on this frame exactly” because it skips the part where it has to push down a piece of plastic, and just shoots the electrical signal through the board, directly.
There’s simply no way for a human being to perform some of the necessary tricks/inputs that a TAS machine does, to ever be able to be as good at speed-running as the computer is. TAS runners are invaluable to actual human speed-runners, because they discover a lot of tech that humans, like Amber, will desperately try to find a way to replicate, and make usable for humans. But in terms of a whole run, TAS runs can accomplish so much more than a human runner, almost ubiquitously.
If anything, this Mario game in question, the TAS run probably beats the human run by way less time, than in most games, because it’s one of the absolute most speed-run games ever, it’s a very short run, and nearly every conceivable piece of tech has probably already been found. IIRC, The human world record is technically “perfect,” and cannot be beaten until new tech is found – only matched.
What Sal has done here is genuinely the most unrealistic single thing to ever happen in this comic, and I mean that in the literal sense.
Maybe nes controllers are different in the dumbiverse. Maybe Super Mario is different in the dumbiverse. Maybe this doesn’t matter at all because it’s a silly plot point in a comedy comic
Now you’re just coping, come on. It’s not that serious.
Maybe Danny has one of those cheap third-party clone controllers.
We know the first two aren’t the case, because Amber describes exactly that when she explains why what she’s attempting is impossible but she’s trying to do it anyway.
As to the third – Good Godfrey, you’re right! All this time we’ve been discussing silly plot points in a comedy comic! If only someone had told us that before! Hey, Willis! Time to shut down the comments section; turns out it’s completely pointless!
Two things are important, 1) Amber, the expert of dumbiverse super mario brothers speedrunning, believes it may be technically possible, but extremely difficult to match the dumbiverse TAS record.
of lesser importance, 2) It has not yet been stated that Sal matched the TAS record, just that she broke the non-TAS record.
Suggestion: her twitching hand broke the directional pad.
Her Super Power origin story…
Amber continues to be wrong for being upset about this.
Well, she’s upset at the universe for not working like she thought it did and taking it out on Sal, but now I guess she’s misdirecting the anger at herself instead, so, better?
Take me home, Smithers. We’ll destroy something tasteful
Amber now on full TILT!!!
Are you good at Mario?
I’ll take a stab at it.
Watch out Amazi-Girl, Amber’s having a Joker moment, you might get a new roommate up there in her dome.
I am almost certain someone called it the other day,
the stabbing proving to be an advantage to the record.
And it’s kind of hilarious. lol
And you can have it allll / My record of dirt
I let myself down / By making that girl hurt
For the win!
Amber is Sal’s origin story for her streaming career.
I think it’s time for Amber to go to therapy once for all
Sal’s Heroine Story yadda yadda New Amazi-Girl yadda yadda yadda Video Games as Physical Therapy yadda yadda Amber’s Villain Story
Amber SMASH
Breakdown in: 5…4…3…2…1…
“It should be extra impossible because I stabbed her hand!”
Okay, you kinda deserve this a little for that comment, Amber.
Not to defend what Amber said in the slightest, but “You deserve the thing you’re angry about because of what you said about it” is not a chain of causality I can get behind.
Finally someone in here understands causality.
Causality and deserve are incompatible concepts anyway. You need free will to deserve things, and causality makes free will impossible. No, not even quantum will get you out of this. It is inherent to causality, not to specific particles.
> You need free will to deserve things,
Nope.
> and causality makes free will impossible.
Nope.
that’s just, like, your opinion, man
If she said “it should be extra impossible because she has an injury,” would that be better? It seems like the meaning would be the same, except that Amber would be denying responsibility.
This is a delightful irony, I like it
Awfu-girl origin story.
points at Amber You did this! You did this! You did this!
Anyone ever see the Power Puff Girls episode where Mojo Jojo is revealed to be the Professor’s long lost lab assistant and he was the one who shoved the professor into the Chemical X botle, causing it to fall into the vat of sugar, spice, and everything nice that the Professor had cooking to make the perfect girls? Amber has the EXACT same expression Mojo Jojo had when he realized he was directly responsible for the creation of his super powered nemeses.
“It was me… it was me… it was me…
Episode 7B, innit? “Mr. Mojo’s Rising”, one of the earliest.
Amber, you can smash Sal now. (for certain values of ‘smash’)
My slipshine needs demand it.
Come to think of it (for certain values of ‘think’), why not smash Danny and Sal at the same time?
Amber sticking Sal’s stabbed hand in her pants
Sal: So you want to fuck your nemesis, huh?
Okay… armed with today’s known fact, this explains the strip from the other day when Sal had observable difficulty knocking a few notes out of Danny’s uke and had to switch hands. If Willis telegraphed that any harder, he’d have to change his name to Samuel Morse.
I didn’t read the Slipshine, but a spasming hand had to be fun for Danny during a h*ndj*b.
I mean, the strip before that one also sets it up pretty well.
Hundjeb. Hindjab. Hondjib. Hendjub. Handjob.
Hindjabs don’t necessarily use the hand. It’s gotta be a hondjib.
See now she actually regrets it
…well, roughly as expected. oof.
That is the face of someone who wants to stab again
Nah, that’s the face of someone facing some difficult truths about herself.
“Here’s where Amber goes berserk”
This is just like that movie where the kid breaks his arm and it heals in the perfect wrong way to make him really good at pitching
Oh thank god someone else remembers that movie. I saw it exactly once as a kid and for years have been half-sure I hallucinated it.
Sal could have avoided that last comment. I don’t like Amber’s look at the end. It scare me, I’m afraid she might do something that she’ll regret immediately afterwards.
Ya, definitely feels like she’s needling her. She’s not wrong, I think that’s what’s bothering Amber this much, not that someone else broke the record she was going for. The irreverence of it. She thinks it should be impossible for a non-devotee.
They’re both competitive, and even though Amber clocks it as fundamentally unfair, that’s not something Sal should be expected to agree with. So she needles Amber with it, JAH bordering on ESH.
I love how completely blasé Sal is about this. For her, it’s just a video game she was playing to fill the time until her cute boyfriend came back, and all this “speed running” stuff was just a little extra pepper to keep it interesting.
Very funny to me that Willis essentially summoned a horde of ethans to his comments section
OK, I get a lot about this speedrun thing, but I absolutely do not get why it would be impossible to hit two buttons at once on an original NES controller. When people talking about it I assumed that was a limit on the hardware – that it couldn’t process input from the two D-Pad buttons at once, but I don’t see how a spasming hand would help with that. Can anyone explain this?
(Granted, I admit this whole thing somehow is way harder for my suspension of disbelief than catching a person falling off a truck on a motorcycle, but we’ll ignore that for now.
)
Only thing I can think of, is opposite directions. Almost every Nintendo dpad has a raised point in the center, which the pad pivots on, similar to a teeter-totter. It’s so that you can hit left and down, or down and right, but not left and right. What Amber likely means, isn’t that left and right need to be pressed at the *same* time, but that within the space of one frame the button has to be pressed from left to right, which is why such types of speedruns have before only assumed to have been possible with the aid of a computer to make the precise input.
And by “almost every Nintendo dpad” I mean literally every directional pad in the last forty years that Nintendo made other than the Switch. The joy cons’ four circle buttons I’d forgive, but Nintendo apparently even forgot their own patent when it came to making their Pro controller.
Thanks, that makes more sense, but that still sounds like a limitation on the hardware, not on the player. I don’t know why this is bugging me.
Actually not. Players *want* there to be that pivot, because that’s how you crisply control Mario and can quickly whip back and forth. If you don’t have that, you’ll be pressing left and right actually at the same time, which would cancel out movement and make him feel much more slow and sluggish, or result in missed inputs (accidently hitting diagonal down-right instead of right, because you can’t feel as easily that you’re angling down on the d-pad). It’s a far better input system than the four separate buttons of the joycon or the PlayStation controller.
It only *really* matters for early games like Super Mario Bros, and *specifically* for Super Mario Bros, because of how the game loads levels and changes between screens, and how you can save a decent chunk of time by hitting a transition point at an exact point in time. It’s trying to do something that was never intended with the game, and is essentially impossible, in order to save less than a second on the game.
There’s a video essay on something similar for level 4-2, the “most infamous level” of Super Mario Bros. 20 minutes, good watch. You can search for it on YouTube.
The only thing that’s really *wrong* with this storyline, and which I would absolutely agree with Amber on, is that it’s simply not possible for someone who’s never played this before to sit down and beat the world record of the last level of Super Mario Bros in the span of a class period, magical hand twitching ability or no. That’s been speedrun for decades by thousands of obsessive nerds. In my opinion, that’s FAR less believable than catching a falling person with a motorcycle; it’s “a roomfull of monkeys with typewriters managing to put out Shakespeare” level of improbable.
Yeah, the most unrealistic thing isn’t “Sal twitched and saved a frame pressing too much”, it’s “Sal perfectly executed a hyper optimized single level speedrun within an hour of sitting down on a whim”. There’s multiple other super hard tricks to clearing 8-4 than just that one frame.
Are the red panels coming back for Amber? ;p
Amber needs so much freaking therapy.
PLEASE tell me they’re all still live on twitch rn
I know and care nothing about speed running but here’s my particular point.
A petard is a bomb. One is hoisted by a petard (blown up by a bomb you placed yourself) and not hoisted on one. It’s a bomb not a ladder or crane.
See how silly all the discourse about speed running sounds?
Goddam it I am thirty to forty years old I do not need this. I am going to be telling people this all week now.
Y’know I always wondered what that was. I assumed it was like some old timey underpants or something
Claps cheerfully. Oh prizes to everyone who guessed it’d be a hand spasm issue. I’m SO delighted.
I dislike how so many previously relatable characters have become raving a-holes post time- skip
Amber’s always been this volatile, what do you mean?
Season One Carrie Bradshaw (See in the City) is a mess but relatable. End of the show (and into the movies) Carrie Bradshaw is still a mess but (between flanderization and some “interesting” choices by the writers) she’s become an unsympathetic character and even the actor who had to play her felt uncomfortable about her. We have moved into similar territory with a handful of characters – including Amber
I just kind of miss the days where we’d have a beach episode and nobody screamed at anybody or got attacked by their supervillain stepdad. The comic feels like it’s lost its delicate balance between melodrama and slice of life. Every arc has to have something awful or ominous happen.
I don’t know, more recently it’s been people getting on medication that helps them, having a quiet night out, realising they are in a relationship already, deciding not to go to a different school, getting a new boyfriend, doing sports, playing a video game, breaking up… relatively little ominous stuff, although there’s still yelling
I don’t think yelling is that bad in social drama fiction
I mean those are also the days where Amber did shit like flip tables and Joyce was homophobic and Joe was at his slimiest. I’d love another beach episode (or winter equivalent) but I’m liking season 2 much more
I mean even in the beach storyline Jennifer was yelling that she wasn’t interested in Walky.
I think last storyline there wasn’t really a lot of conflict? The ‘Becky is mad at not getting invited’ was resolved in like four strips. Other than that it’s ‘Dorothy gets together with Walky again’ and ‘Sarah talks to Jacob’.
But there was a lot of yelling in the comments. That’s where we get our conflict these days. (And back then as well really.)
beach day was so Joyce wouldn’t be thinking about the attempted rape the night before. this is just amber overreacting to a video game. Maybe it feels ominous because of Amber’s reaction, I dunno, but this strikes me as pretty low stakes.
Except Asher’s as ominous as the sword of Damocles, but that’s my personal opinion.
This is LESS raving asshole than she used to be. She stabbed a girl, one who was already in custody. She beat the ever loving shit out of a dude a few months ago. She has full on dissociative episodes about how much of a raving asshole she is.
She’s Performing here (I say, totally not projecting). These people are safe. Ish. Safe enough to admit that the anger Exists. But there’s a deliberate element of the ridiculous that says not to take this seriously. Mary Sue is not a real insult when levelled at a real person- as Danny immediately notes. The stabbing issue is Resolved between Sal and Amber and is now just Spicy Banter.
Anyway I love this characterisation and just Wanted To Share
Amber was literally always a raving asshole. It’s why I never liked her. This is much more in control and less violent than she used to be
And fade to black
*plays “Haitian Divorce” on the hacked Muzak
Weeeellll weeeellll weeeeelll
How the turntables
Man I love this like. Thing. On Amber.
Performative anger is Fun and also a pretty good coping alt to Actual Anger Issues.
She is for real angry, but she’s not out of control angry and there’s an element of I AM DELIBERATELY PERFORMING MY ANGER RATHER THAN LETTING MY ANGER PERFORM ME.
I really like this reading! I didn’t see it until I read your comments, but seeing it, this makes sense. It isn’t just the comic punchline making this zanier, this is actually Amber continuing to channel her anger into other channels. This is growth. No red panels! No origin stories! Just Amber going and trying to find another frame to shave off, because THAT’LL SHOW HER.
Also, it didn’t occur to me until you said this, but I try to make a point of only having enormously strong / definite / inflexible opinions about really silly things, and I wonder if that’s for related reasons.
I can’t think of any really good examples offhand, but nowadays, even “is it called soda, pop, or something else?” and “how many spaces should go after a period?” can have reasonable people disagreeing over the answers. “Is pineapple the best pizza topping, or merely one of the best?” is closer to the spirit of it.
Whereas in contrast, plenty of social issues have answers which (I believe) are obviously much more or less correct, and I feel strongly about that and can give reasons why that’s the case, but I don’t tend to treat those in the same way. Oh? You disagree? Well, why do you think that? …and then we can have a conversation.
So, as you said in another comment above, there’s “a deliberate element of the ridiculous” to this practice – and it’s definitely performative. I do it in part because I find it amusing, but I wonder if it’s also a coping strategy for me in some way.
PINEAPPLE DOESN’T BELONG ON PIZZA!!!!
(note: I have a massive bias because my spouse is allergic to pineapple)
When do we go to Leslie’s class, with Carla+Charlie, a plot development that everyone took very well?
I’m kind of hoping Linda Walkerton and/or Carol Brown and/or Clint Hughes show up again soon and put all this nonsensical fluff into perspective. I wonder how many will be wishing we could “just go back to that silly thing about Sal beating a Super Mario record or whatever” at that point.
Sal, you say you don’t care. But someone had to submit that you beat the record with some proof that you weren’t using some tool.
So it definitely feels like you care atleast alittle
If this is the direction it’s going (without the swerve I’m expecting), then everything about the situation is blatantly unrealistic. She’d at least care for the, what I presume are, bounties on the record. But honestly Sal’s way too calm, she’s got a prepared response. If it does go how would make sense for the setting, the only unrealistic thing is how overblown Amber’s reaction is, and even that sort of makes sense given how emotional she can be.
My God. Malaya was right all along!
Ok, the explanation was so dumb I kind of have to love it now.
Oh so its a Batman/Joker situation.
She created her nemesis
Uh oh… Sal just broke Amber’s brain… Again…
And just when Amber was starting to get the house of cards that is her psyche fully reassembled.
Why does Amber not simply also hit buttons simultaneously? Is she stupid?
It probably has to be simultaneous to within the sensing rate of the game, which seems to be considered not to be achievable by humans.
Amber has gone to the faraway place. Her body remains here, and by the time she returns, at least one other body will remain here.
Dan’s body. Because it’s his room and he will be sleeping.
If these last few strips taught me anything is that I generally be much happier just skipping over most of the really long comment chains.
Danny: “Can confirm. Her hand spasms when working things.”
She’s a professional player, jobs from her hands must feel like the best thing ever T_T <3
who needs tool assists when you have nerve damage? >:3c
I feel like Amber is either about to pop or just deflate. Some kind of balloon thing like that.
oh my god it’s like the rolling thing they started doing in classic NES Tetris that Summoning Salt covered. Sal singlehandedly responsible for the ‘spasm-button-press’ maneuver
I have a new perspective for Amber’s building reaction in the last 2 panels, that isn’t her flipping out in a rage, or something else.
I think she may be unable to cope with these revelations, and she may be heading for a genuine break from reality, where her reality can’t be real, because real life doesn’t have Mary Sues, so because Sal exists, her life cannot be real? This is real extreme stuff and I don’t think Willis would touch it, but on the other hand, it might be possible to keep it light enough that it can be temporarily played for laughs, and maybe end in Amber having to actually get some real help.
“Amber realizes she is a comic book character and shatters the fourth wall” isn’t the worst story idea I’ve heard.
Given the first panel I too assume she’s about to stab herself in the hand.
Damn. Karma played the long game on that one.
Aww, this is beautifully unbelievable. First of all, you’d have to know the route, you’d have to know how to do all the frame perfect tricks, bumping, wall jumps, and several other things.
Nobody makes a pass at that record without a *GRIND* that starts with intimate knowledge of the underpinnings of the game.
I figured she was gonna turn on Amber’s stream, be a stupidly hot girl playing games in her underwear, and x10 Amber’s audience. This is just…sorry Willis, you lost me a bit here.
this is so unbelievably funny