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(he/him)
⚧
New game! BOLTED 
step three: have sex with her!…almost
Jennifer: “Wait, does that mean I’m going to have sex with her, or are you?”
Joyce: “Yes.”
“The almost sex will be with me. That will cause the actual sex to be with Alice. See?”
“I didn’t say I wanted to have sex with her, I said I wanted to be friends with her again.”
“Yes, but you also said that friends could bang once.”
“Yeah. … um… kinda already hit my limit on that one.”
“But if you become friends with her again, that’s the start of a SECOND friendship with her, which means…”
“OMG JOYCE WE NEED TO ALMOST-BANG RIGHT NOW!”
*rubs chin thoughtfully
Yeah, now I want to see this almost-Slipshine.
Joyce continues to be shockingly good at information gathering, she’d make an excellent spy.
Is this not a normal autistic thing? I lose track.
People are occasionally surprised by how easily I can track them down in Final Fantasy XIV, even in large zones. As if it’s not blatantly obvious by my friends list showing they’re a level 87 Miner in Ultima Thule, meaning they’re likely at a specific set of rocks or turning in materials at the local trade hub.
I’m usually the go to to find the one guildy in Dungeons and Dragons Online who manages to get lost in literally a single room quest. I attribute that mostly to the fact that for 15 years I’ve had to literally run around nearly every map repeatedly looking for that same one guildy, who gets lost in the exact same spots over and over again.
It’s one of those things I consider an Autism Superpower, which in my head means all autistic people have it except me.
I mean autistic people very much have a diversity of superpowers,
some luckier in the draw than others (speaking from experience super hearing for instance is NOT something you want T_T)
I stopped doing it because people freak out, yell at me, and the start avoiding me.
No, wait, the freakouts had to do with me remembering things they personally told me and then forgot about telling me.
Honestly? Kind of a you problem if you do that.
cosigned (-_-)
I feel spies also need a degree of deceptive ability, coolness under pressure, and capacity to go unnoticed by not hyperventilating about their being extra foods in their food.
But think of how little anyone would suspect her.
Field agents, yes. Maybe she’s an intelligence analyst.
“Spying is waiting.” John Le Carre’.
Then again, I don’t know how good Joyce is at waiting.
So … basically Dina?
Except I think awareness and understanding of social cues is also useful.
…
…. wait, what am I talking about, I’ve never been in the espionage business, what do I know?
How soon we forget the escapades of the lesbian love sleuth.
Who was it who tried to find the whiteboard-dong-doodler?
I wonder if alice would be a footnote in billiefer’s ‘file’ that amazigirl might have on her/other charas
Me: “This just seems like pretty basic stuff.”
*comments about how this shows up as a trait in autistic people*
Me: “…huh.”
Is Joyce propositioning Jen to flirt with her? Probably not, but I’m gonna pretend she did.
Jennifer can’t keep track of who she’s almost slept with, but Joyce is there to help.
Joe, too. He has spreadsheet experience.
Oh, dang, I just re-read that and saw a horrible innuendo that I hadn’t seen at first.
Shh, just pretend it’s intentional, it lands.
@Steamweed actually that’s hilarious and actually made more so by it being unintentional
On an unrelated note, I like your avatar! Really digging the art style. I’m curious about who the artist is (assuming you didn’t draw it yourself).
I’m not getting the innuendo. Is it like “bedsheet experience”?
Spreading ’em in the sheets
Ah. Thank you for the clarification!
https://www.instagram.com/pawneeclips/reel/C5rIg9RPSGO/
(reminded me of this Parks & Rec clip)
I would honestly love to see Joyce’s social media theme since she kicked the Jesahol.
I bet it’s just super cute and wholesome, with occasional moments of crazy.
I would say the mix probably has a lot more of Joyce’s specific neuroses than just occasional.
It’s nothing but macaroni and cheese reviews.
I suddenly find myself imagining Joyce going wild over a macaroni and cheese recipe that suggests putting the macaroni and the cheese next to each other instead of mixed.
“The left bowl is for the macaroni, and the right bowl is for the cheese sauce. This style of mac ‘n cheese is eaten by threading a noodle over each prong of your fork, carefully dipping them in the sauce, doing two swirls, popping them into your mouth, extracting the noodles from the fork by closing your lips around the fork and pulling it free (don’t use your teeth for that (unless you hate teeth I guess?)), chewing to completion, and then repeating until finished. When you near the end of the noodle supply you may find yourself with a mismatch between the number of noodles and the prongs on your fork. I used to think that this was because Kraft are secretly in league with Satan, but it turns out he’s fake and this is just capitalism-induced sloppiness. Packaging macaroni in precise multiples of sixty to ensure integer forkfuls for three-pronged, four-pronged, and five-pronged forks doesn’t make enough impact on revenue to offset the cost, so they don’t bother. This means it will be up to you to cut the final noodles into an appropriate number of pieces so that you can finish consuming them without putting a gross, imbalanced fork in your mouth. You’ll need to perform (P-1) evenly spaced cuts per noodle where P is the number of prongs on your fork. This might result in very small noodles that are too cute to actually eat, so you might find it easier to count your remaining noodles while you’re still several forks away from finished and then simply cut (N/2) noodles in half where N is the least common multiple of P, 2, and the remainder after dividing your noodles by P. When you’ve finished eating the noodles you may have extra cheese sauce in the sauce bowl; this makes for a delicious drink. I recommend using a straw, but drinking directly from the bowl is fine as long as you were careful to keep track of which (if any) bits of the bowl’s lip you touched while handling it. And that concludes the best way to consume the best food on the best planet! Thanks for reading! I love you all (except the ones I don’t because I don’t have to do that anymore now that I know the Bible is a bunch of lies made up by genocidal maniacs to excuse their conquests and misogyny)! <3 <3 <3" — Joyce, probably
:chefkiss: Excellent fanfic. No notes.
“apolitical”? what’s that? XD
Answer: Posting pictures of puppies, kittens, and food. Like, no one could ever make a picture of a head of lettuce political, right?
If they did I’m sure that would be a very short-lived moment ^^
I Understood That Reference
Short-Lized, please.
Hey, I don’t, but it makes for a better joke if I say I do think that trussed-up lettuce picture looks really strong and stable, and not like a crazed pug with a coke habit…
OK, spoiler tags don’t work here…
Also too tired to remember that I either go with
Hey, [spoiler tags which don’t work] I don’t, but it makes for a better joke if I say I do [/spoiler] think that trussed-up lettuce picture looks really strong and stable
OR add the and not, which indicates my feelings about her already…
Actually, at the rate things are going, even posting pictures of sad puppies might soon be earning the ire of Homeland Security.
Time to break out the Winnie the Pooh.
Good thing they don’t live in China.
The winnie the pooh thing was made up by racist Americans to make china look bad and harass Chinese people. It isn’t real.
lolwut
In China, Xi is compared to Winnie the Pooh at every single occasion.
Better make it the public domain Pooh, just to be safe. No need to get the feds and the mouse on your case.
“Red shirt on bear? Copyright! Beware!
If nude be he, that Pooh is free.”
I love it!
Ok I’m making things worse, did you know the Sad Puppies are/were a reactionary right-wing sci-fi fan group? Full name was something like ‘the sad puppies think of the children’ and they were the equivalent of the anti-dei/anti-woke brigade.
*googles*
… I feel that I should be more surprised to learn that right-wingers have pre-ruined sad puppies.
I am annoyed I didn’t get to post that but I assumed it was a clever reference.
In Philly, the ATF and JTTF raided a group home inhabited by activists affiliated with the group “Hugs for Puppies”…
Many years ago…
It was a pretty surreal search warrant…
Sad Puppies was a conservative group influencing the Nebula Awards several years back, that overlapped with Gamergate.
So, that ship sailed.
Sad puppies was ruined and is undergoing repairs. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sad_Puppies
Or a can of soup, or Winnie the Pooh.
You are familiar with UK politics and short lived PMs?
“she’s very pretty” ^_^
yup, noticed that too.
(Joyce noticed it first!)
The “Dorothy realizes that she isn’t straight” chapter has had a lot of “Joyce probably isn’t straight either!” to go along with it.
Indeed she is.
Probably but it’s too late now!
When did Jennifer almost bang Joe? I don’t remember that one. Was it right before Danny?
It was after in this: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/01-if-the-shoes-split/billingsworth/
That is a follow up to https://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/02-choosing-my-religion/notsure/ and the next strip. So Joe can be referring to either.
If Joe is referring to either of these, his idea of “almost banging” is really flexible. What would he call, “actually made physical contact”? “Almost brought to orgasm”?
Wow that cheerleader had a pretty unique character design for an untagged nobody. What role could she hypothetically have?
She’s the secret final boss of the entire comic.
Maybe she’ll find out that Ruth was the one who stole her cheerleading uniform
That’s Martina. She’s a sex addict and sells vinyl decals on Etsy.
At a guess? Leading cheer.
“Hang on, this cheerleader wants to have sex with me.”
“Nope! Not with me!”
Once again, Joyce is unintentionally throwing shade.
Combing perfectly with “she’s very pretty”.
Surely Joyce’ feed is non-threatening and apolitical by now – she spent all that time scrubbing all of the nothing-offensive-because-she-never-said-anything-like-that-you-can’t-prove-anything off her social media
I mean we were just going over how she WANTS to like non-Christian music, but is having trouble because she also wants to just listen to the same handful of songs over and over.
Wanting to engage with apolitical culture isn’t the same thing as actively doing so.
I kinda think Joyce’s best bet would be filling her feed with Dexter / Head Alien content, but I don’t know that that would present her as someone Alice would wanna befriend.
Was referring to the offensive tweets
so, does expressing a desire to climb into someone’s cleavage and be safe and warm forever count as almost having sex with them?
… asking for a friend.
No, I don’t think “expressing desire” translates into “almost realized that desire”.
I would very much like to have a million dollars, but I have never even come close to actually having a million dollars.
I mean Joe is apparently counting a conversation with Jennifer that ended with him getting distracted by a different girl, so. We’re working with a loose definition of “almost”.
Slightly different because she wanted to fuck him and he rejected her.
I mean, first of all, you know you’re responding to a joke, right? StClair was joking.
I also think the difference between “expressing a sexual desire for someone” and “expressing desire to have sex with them” is… nnnnot that huge? I’d be much more sympathetic to the argument that Jennifer and Joe were mutually attracted to one another, while Jennifer has never seemed to find Joyce attractive.
But again: StClair was joking. This is all very silly, and Joe definitely did not almost have sex with Jennifer either, it’s just that saying it that way is funnier than “didn’t you hit on both me and my roommate”, and also the latter doesn’t really leave room for Joyce’s scandalized response, so this is where we are.
…rereading this and your comment and I’m honestly not even sure what I’m responding to here. I guess the idea that Jennifer being the instigator is more of an “almost had sex with them” than Joyce expressing confused sexual interest in Jennifer’s boobs? And sure, I’ll give you that. Silly thing to argue over, too. I’m tired, lol.
“the world is cold and hard, but tiddy is warm and soft”
-oglaf
Oglaf is a national treasure, and must be protected.
I miss Ivan
Oh, right, suddenly my “Joyce is straight and her autism is making her look bi when she’s not” theory has a big hole in the center.
At least she can climb into it and be warm and safe forever
Very pretty. Just saying. In a totally heterosexual way.
that’s one long way of saying “no homo” XD
I don’t think anyone has any illusions about how bi Joyce is, including Joyce. She did go into why she couldn’t make out with Dottie, due to being in an official relationship with Joe, and that would be cheating.
Wow Jennifer and Joe are only in 14 strips together
Joyce will one day gain full awareness of her bisexuality. In the meantine, she’s keeping us fed with the kind of casual girl-loving material Becky fell for.
….. Also, Joyce babe don’t assume apolitical is best. Maybe Alice sleeps with Das Kapital under her pillow. Maybe she’s reappearing with blue hair and pronouns next time we see her. Keep an open mind!
That’d be a quick dye job
In fairness, most people use pronouns. Just most people don’t think about their pronouns all that much, I think? (I think I genuinely don’t care but most people would feel odd calling the short, curvy, high-pitched person with non-feminine pronouns but if somebody asked if they could practice using a different set that don’t feel instinctive on me in a low stakes environment, I’d be completely OK with it, if I knew them and had no reason to think they were somehow being unkind..?)
I just wish all of these people who keep complaining about pronouns would actually stop using pronouns. It’d be hilarious.
John means John wishes all the people complaining about pronouns would stop using pronouns. John would find John’s proposed scenario hilarious.
One can craft fairly natural speech without personal pronouns, and even find it fun, but probably not in live conversation.
“One” is playing impersonal pronoun here.
Many years ago, when I taught my 9th grade English students the use of the “one” pronoun (as in, “Yes, one can craft such speech), it blew their texting-dependent minds. They’d never seen it before.
Indeed, Steamweed agrees with John.
Smallmoon wonders what it would sound like if
theythat group were to actually engage in the behaviouryouJohn Campbell requested. Probably liketheythat group suffers from a collective compulsion towards illeism.Note that I couldn’t even get through the thought without needing three (well, two, one of which was used twice) pronouns.
‘It’ is also a pronoun.
Pronouns are an inevitability in all languages I know of dskjgsld the “blue hair and pronouns” is just a meme. I use brightly colored hair and neopronouns :’33
Your open-mindedness despite any initial oddness is a good thing! It’s an hostile world out there.
japanese technically-kind-of-almost doesn’t have pronouns!
they use stuff like “the boy” or “the girl” a lot from what I’ve heard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pronouns
AFAIK they use degrees of formality, which give off the Gender Vibes (though they aren’t _explicitly_ so.) But oooh, thank you for the link! It’s really interesting how nouns used this indirectly end up working as pronouns! :33
I do feel like the “she’s very pretty” is meant toward Jennifer as a “your Totally Not Girlfriend is pretty” approval sort of thing. but also: Joyce, still not beating the bi allegations, lol~
how about food reviews for original flavor snacks?
The only ethical food review would blur out the product’s container and not refer to it by its brand name. Unfortunately, Joyce has used brand names in her reviews, making her an unpaid shill.
Some people might feel that a review without the brand name to identify just what you are reviewing is kind of useless.
Am I one of the some people?
Maybe.
I don’t read food reviews, but book reviews are just as bad. “Oh, you’re telling me the title, author, and publisher of this book you think I’d like? Seems sus.”
It’s ok, there’s no good reviews.
Instructions unclear, Alice will be friends with Jennifer again, but won’t befriend Joyce.
I presume Tristan is one of the reasons for step two…
“Normal”? SO over-rated. Abby is all the rage these days. Abby Normal. SO hot.
Alice: Eww, this girl prepares Kraft mac and cheese strictly according to the instructions, unfriended.
I’ve found pictures of cute animals to be mostly nonthreatening and apolitical.
ok this is already getting creepy loàl
While you’re at it, yes please remind ME of what is normal, I’ve been immersed in [waves hands around wildly] all THIS for the last god-knows-how-long
Saying “This is not normal” is the new normal.
There’s lots of precedence for saying these are unprecedented times.
Honestly the idea that these are well precedented times is probably worse
I forgot that I still had the css enabled that inserts the last two panels of yesterday’s strip when I opened this, and was caught off guard by Walky’s removal of pants at the end of the strip.
*snrk* oh my god
Why is a phantom hand rubbing Joe’s titty through his jacket?
Joyce psychically claiming her territory in front of Billie.
It’s not a phantom. It’s clearly coming from Joyce’s backpack. She’s testing a new system for Carla.
The pie magazine hasn’t been loaded yet.
it’s Mike
What you talking about? If you mean the panel 2 one that is very clearly Joe’s.
Joe has been in a long running game of ninja-style tag. It actually started way back in “Move-In Day.” If you crawl all the way back through the archive, you’ll occasionally see bits of it playing out. Joe is now it.
I cannot wait for this to blow up spectacularly in Jennifer’s face.
I hadn’t realized how few times Joe and Jennifer had interacted with each other.
We need Tristan to show up. Then reveal he has ChatGPT set up for his parents to read and is a gay punk rocker.
“didn’t you almost have sex with you and your roommate” is a weird statement to say in front of your girlfriend. Or it’s just accepted there, I don’t know…
It’s possible Joe was feeling a bit slighted by Jennifer not acknowledging that they’ve met. Or maybe he just wasn’t thinking. Either way, he did seem to quickly recognize it wasn’t the best thing to have said.
Unfortunately the drug of Dorothy’s feelings being confirmed have made every other strip an extension of that
There could be a strip that’s just Sal smoking a cigarette and I would see the connections
Yep. Like, it’s very true. I tried not to read into that fourth panel but I did anyway lmao.
Oh no I see it now, I’m in too deep
Otters people like and relate to otters.
Joyce continues to not beat the allegations.
i think at this point the allegations are beating joyce.
Well, now I really want to see what’s in Joyce’s feed.
I’m surprised she’d really have time to catch up/post anything significant if not like post recent pics of her and jocelyne tho idk if she’ d wanna risk their mom finding out that she’s trans too
this comic has been so fucking good recently
I guess I couldn’t do that. My social media feeds are full of very political content, and I doubt that’s gonna change anytime soon.
Seriously, I know this strip was probably drawn when Biden was still the presumptive nominee, but at this point in the fall of the republic, “apolitical” is hella sus. If you don’t have at least one reposted article shedding light on the regime’s latest crimes against humanity or informing vulnerable people of threats to their existence, how’m I gonna trust you?
Hell, even the social media app they’re posted on is political now. I mean, if the Nazi manchild hasn’t banned you from Twitter yet, what are you even doing with your life?
Hanging on Mastodon and posting one cute picture to Twitter each month to keep the account from being hijacked.
I post on Bluesky but keep my Twitter account.
I keep it to call out all the lies.
The .0001 Elon earns from me a month is worth me regularly calling him a lying monster, IMHO.
I keep my Twitter because I already follow people there, I don’t really post anything.
I’ve been posting political stuff on my social media accounts for a long time, going back several years on my old Facebook account, and more recently on Twitter and Bluesky. I would probably be happier if I could be less into political stuff, but I have a combination of political views that are very far to the left of the American mainstream, and I’m autistic with politics as one of my major special interests, so that’s not likely to happen.
I mean I’m very far left politically and hyperfixated on it too, which is ironically why I don’t use social media for political stuff anymore (or at all when I can help it)
The attention-seeking game of social media, that which calls itself “”debate”” in US Politic, it is not a game which can be won by progressives.
Progress rests on truth, about the facts about the complex natural and artificial systems which govern our lives, and let’s face it — facts are ultimately useless in the framework of a performative tweet and hour-long televised political debate.
Proper understanding of systemic bigotry, climate change, and other important issues which affect us inevitably take much longer than that.
I know for sure that social media has personally misled me when it comes to the details of several different politics conflicts, and some of the most compelling stories I’ve seen online had turned out to be complete fabrications. They just aren’t valid news sources and I hate it when one specific post or comment changes my worldview in some way …. Only for me to find out later it was a complete fabrication. A lie. I get tricked, and I’ve been tricked over and over online. I hate it.
If it’s any consolation, it’s not just you. The spread of misinformation is a direct consequence of the incentives platforms place on users to get attention for whatever cause.
There’s only so much 128 characters or a minute-long video can do to accurately capture the truth on complex issues which affect our lives.
Bad actors advance themselves on these kinda platforms with statements that are short, quippy and wrong, our allies all too often think the correct response are statements that are short, quippy, and correct, but here’s the conundrum:
There’s a limit to how simple the truth can be and still be the truth. Falsehoods don’t have that. There is no limit on how simple an idea can be when it doesn’t have to conform to the complex reality in which we live.
You play the game of “who’s got the simplest argument,” liars win every time. But if you can convince people that the world is complex, then simplistic explanations, across the board, become suspect.
TL;DR
for the sake of progressive causes, we’re better off staying off of Twitter and adjacent social media, thems literally the tobacco of the information age, and it’s made by the same crooked white people who’ve been growing it for centuries at our expense.
The difference being that in recent decades they ran out of land to colonize, so they basically started colonizing our MINDS
The problem isn’t even just with the various reasons artists and activists and who not stay on Twitter, but generally with how complacently everyone chooses to engage with technology these days, sliding into the techno-feudalist landscape of the current web.
My advice? Look into healthier alternatives:
– Find smaller sites and keep tabs on them through browser bookmarks.
– Curate RSS feeds. Always keep a local copy.
– Start your own personal website (and look into the Web Revival Movement).
– Instead of paying for Discord Nitro, use Catbox or an uguu instance.
generally, don’t let a handful of platforms control how you engage with the wider web
For a long time I honestly thought Willis was going to write Joyce straight. I no longer think that is the case. She’s very pretty.
Armed with her new terrible Jennifer advice, she can be straight and make out with Dorothy!
Opposite take, but kind of the same take at the heart of it. Joyce is probably some kind of bi, but, “She’s very pretty” is not an indication of it. Reminds me of insecure straight guys insisting they can’t tell if a guy is attractive or not because that would make them gay.
This is definitely a case where common male and female socialization is very different. Probably (hopefully) getting less so with time.
It’s not just refusing to say because it would make them gay, but just not thinking about other guys in those terms at all.
I agree and I don’t think that it, alone, is what tilts me that direction. It’s just the whole haystack of evidence. I was pretty staunchly in the ‘she’s definitely straight and a lot of her actions just look queer coded because she’s a lot more intimate with her friends than the average person’ camp for years. If she made this sort of comment a few years ago I’d probably make the same argument.
I’d imagine she wouldn’t make a (subconscious/unintentioanl) move on alice if she thinks she’s gonna ‘re-set’ her back pu with billiefer but i think it’d take a few more years if not her speedrunning her bi awakenning or so (and even then i imagine she wouldn’t necessarily rush into a relationship with another girl considering how thirsty she is for joe currently ulnless they’re willnig to be in a polycule lol)
This strip made me do a lot, ugly, creaking laugh. I cackled, like the word cackle. This is the best one I’ve read this month, no notes.
I guess some ppl are more casual about adding them or so, but i feel like unless alice doesn’t remember the interaction she’d prolly avoid friending someone, even online, of someone connected to billie
It seems like Joyce sends friend requests pretty freely, and so she might have several mutual friends with Alice. If Alice has blocked Jennifer (which seems likely), then she probably wouldn’t even know that that’s how Joyce knew her.
Many of my high school friends went to the same college and were in a certain group there. Someone I had never met was also in this group, I guess, and we had around ten mutual friends. Somehow I accidentally sent a friend request to him, which he accepted… and when I got the notification he had accepted, I was so confused, because who the hell was he?
i guess sarah did surprisingly have a handful of contacts before textign like 3-4 ppl ‘is this lucy’ lol
…It occurs to me that this is the exact sort of meddling that Joyce was trying to do with Sarah and Jacob last semester. It would be really funny if this went roughly the same way.
Is it really?
Big difference is that, as far as we know, Alice isn’t dating anyone and the motivation certainly isn’t breaking up a couple.