David M Willis! @damnyouwillis.bsky.social ⋅ 15h
The Emotion Engine @emotion-engine.bsky.social ⋅ 9d
The Emotion Engine @emotion-engine.bsky.social ⋅ 13d
Vangelus @vangelus.bsky.social ⋅ 1d
FactPost @factpostnews.bsky.social ⋅ 1d
Frances “Poet Laureate of the Robot Alliance” Klein @fklein907.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
Aaron Fritschner @fritschner.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
Josh Johnson @joshjohnsoncomedy.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
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| TEAM FOSSILS
Rainbow Friends
Dr. Frizzle
she’s more than Robinough
Boooo
I hope she isn’t Robinough on anybody.
as endearing a comic dumbass Robin can be,
I sincerely hope she’s wise enough to just shut the fuck up around cops
I hope the tone of this arc is light enough that it doesn’t matter.
I don’t know if I’d bet on that.
bruh. the SNIPER. have we already forgotten about that?
yes we have – we’re too busy staring at butts
You say, on a strip that is notably lacking in butts.
“There’s no snipers here and there’s no police! I don’t know the guy in camouflage in the roof aiming an M21 at your friend’s forehead”
look man, this is america, there’s alwaysa sniper aimed at you when you;’re out in public, you just kinda learn to accept that.
I kind of feel like, with Robin pulling the Drama Tag in Shortpacked, it’d be somehow appropriate for the next round of Drama in Dumbing of Age to revolve around Robin being killed by police violence.
Someone on reddit told me that’s just normal at protests before so I guess it’s nbd
@tunasammich It may be no big deal by the standards of America, but some other countries may be looking askance at you.
they’re already kettling the place, i would not count on that
tbh I’m confused at how calm everyone is about the fact they are gonna be arrested. I thought you were supposed to try avoiding being arrested? Not only because it sucks but also because if you’re arrested it makes it harder to organize further protests?
Getting arrested intentionally was a tactic used in the 60’s. It’s of questionable use in the modern day and I’m not really sure it was a good idea then either.
It’s still used occasionally, I think, but mostly by high profile people. It can draw more attention.
Even in this case “professor and former Congressmember arrested at protest” is good publicity.
Reverend Martin Luther King wrote all about this in his letter from Birmingham Jail, on there being moral obligation to break laws when following them does not lead to justice,
it’s about breaking unjust laws so as to call attention to them and get the public to NOT ignore ongoing injustice,
a majority of his strategy was basically about using peaceful tactics to bait white people and authority into being violent so as to get them to disgrace themselves in the public eye and on national television
A lot of it was, but there was also a lot of more direct resistance: strikes and boycotts that cost the people discriminating against black people actual money, rather than just drawing attention.
And in that case of course, police/government brutality was a direct part of what he was opposing. That’s something that makes me question some of the strategy of these encampment protests when directed at issues like Gaza. Then initial protest certainly calls attention to the issue itself, but when it’s inevitably broken up violently, much of the focus shifts to police violence and the right to protest, which here is only loosely related to the genocide.
Why do you doubt how a tactic that allowed them to win was a good idea then ?
(whether it’s still a good idea these days is another question)
I feel like she’s teetering on insufferable for me here, if only because Leslie is just so not interested in her and she keeps pushing her luck.
It’s fun here and for me in general, so I let it go, but if the comic wanted to go in a more serious direction with the relationship with these two, Robin’s behavior is very easily fucking creepy.
Yeah it mostly follows ‘rule of comic funny’ like with Carla.
Unfortunately for me I think my personal patience has run out a lot for both Robin and Carla.
I think it basically works, in much the same way as the universe shitting on Danny in the early stages of the comic, as Willis jokingly rebuking their own work, in this case, how Robin could be so self-centered and clueless in Shortpacked, but Leslie tolerated it with only scattered exceptions.
Here, Robin is honestly hardly even doing anything some of the times Leslie’s patience meter runs dry (not this instance, this is obviously an example of Robin being inappropriate), yet Leslie’s type seems to be… kind of a huge mess in general, judging by the terrible dentist she dated/is dating still?
Robin hits a sweet spot of being a lot more competent than she seems, but still not quite competent enough. Like when she got extra security when Ross was out on bail.
She’s more street-smart than book-smart.
I can tell you now: she is not.
I mean her loud obnoxiousness might be enough to distract others to get away but her being a meat shield would be a sacrifice i’m fine with if someone has to get shot today
I remember when Robin repeatedly forced her way into Leslie’s home and slept on her couch for several days under the eye of national TV and Leslie didn’t dare call the cops. Might be time for some karmic payback.
Am I misremembering or is Robin latina? Because if she is, she might get more than she bargained for from this administration.
@pylgrim: her last name IS desanto…
Too late, Robin, Becky and Dina already “did it”.
A meal? A succulent Chinese meal???
Hmm?
Democracy manifest
I see you know your judo well
Ta ta and farewell!
took me long enough
Robin continues to basically be Daffy Duck in human form.
She used to be Speedy Gonzalez, for whom Daffy was an occasional antagonist.
Never actually knew who Speedy Gonzalez was… just went, “Yeah, that sure is somebody this lunch special is named after.” (I see this on menus around here a lot– at a certain level of Mexican chain restaurants, but not all part of the same chain. Like three or four different ones? Anyway, curious if people in other places see the same– I’m in Michigan.)
As a 53-year old, I would see Speedy Gonzalez cartoons on afternoon cartoon shows but as reruns. The cartoons were made in the 50s and 60s. He was just a very fast mouse, with all of the other mice being slow, which I did not realize as a child was a way of saying Mexicans were lazy siesta-takers. So, maybe not the best thing to look up.
Yeah, it’s…odd that multiple places have that on their menu.
Well, as with most things, it’s grey and open to interpretation as to how good a thing to look up. Cartoon Network took Speedy Gonzales off in 1999, and brought him back a few years later after a backlash about his removal from Hispanic groups.
I really, really don’t like american white people doing the thing where they get offended in place of a minority group that mostly doesn’t see a problem with (insert problematic issue here).
(Saying this as a mixed-race latino.)
Yeah kids, make sure you don’t look up information about anything that might have been offensive. Keep your google searches pure. Only learn about non-problematic things.
As a Hispanic friend said, “Speedy Gonzales is a national stereotype but he’s brave, fast, and hilarious. We also don’t forget that if you remove Speedy, then there’s no Spanish speaking Loony Toons.”
Unfortunately stereotypes + lack of representation work.
when I moved to LA i was surprised to be find the Open, Gracious, friendly Relaxed stereotype of Californians was almost entirely from Mexican Americans, and whites were pretty uptight.
and I had been lied to about Mexicans growing up by stuff like Speedy Gonzales cartoons.
After a lifetime this stuff adds up.
I don’t remember that aspect, though I haven’t seen a Speedy Gonzalez cartoon in decades. He was a super-fast mouse, the other mice were just normal speed, not especially slow – at least as I remember it.
He had a cousin, Slowpoke Rodriguez, “The Slowest Mouse in All Mexico”, who showed up in a few episodes, generally requiring Speedy to save him. But yeah, most of the mice were just not speedsters.
Clarification from an old fart: Slow Poke Rodriguez was assumed to be vulnerable but he carried a huge gun and could defend himself that way from cats.
probably why he doesn’t show up more.
I do remember Slowpoke Rodriguez and one of the cats chasing them going “I just remembered. Slowpoke Rodriguez, he pack a gun!”
I just looked him up, apparently slowpoke is smart, has mind control powers, and carries a giant gun.
Doctor doctor I require 5000% more of these divorced moms in this comic
Bertha and Ernesta
And… I accidentally flagged my own comment.
Own goal?
I literally do that all the time. Also to people that I try to reply to. This is a terrible format.
I’m sorry; smartphones have existed for almost twenty years. At some point when are we going to stop having a tiny a tiny five-letter link be the main form of chatting, especially when it’s one space away from a giant thirteen-letter link that basically says “Fuck this person, their comment shouldn’t exist.”
Lets make it more explicit like that
Huh? They have the same font size for me. The strange part is that it’s “Reply Report comment” without interruption.
Cops arresting a political apostate minority that threw the local election?
Can’t see why that would ever happen.
Oh, they should definitely meme their mugshots.
assuming cops aren’t pissy and would smack them from doing a dumb face (i mean other than bodycams or it being a public place where normal citizens could see/potentially record if they didn’t like have some high res flashlight to shine in their eyes as a form of harassment that they couldn’t take counter-legal action against)
You assume their body cams aren’t mysteriously turned off.
Don’t be ridiculous, we know that the police department who not only covered for Blaine but actively helped him commit crimes until he became a liability that they had to silence at the behest of local organized crime would never do anything morally questionable.
But clearly Blaine was bad and thus the cops were good – Some posters defending cops.
There is a difference between the mob having bribed one cop and the entire department helping Blaine.
Which isn’t to say the cops don’t do shady shit on systemic level, especially when it comes to protests and harassment.
What is this barbie/ken meme that they are referencing?
Also, please don’t let anyone die here. It took a long time to get over Mike, and he was an asshole. Losing someone we actually like will take far longer than it was to get over Mike.
It’s from the Barbie movie. Ken is in the mugshot with a gleeful, himbo smile and Barbe is genuinely upset.
Here ya go: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/barbie-and-ken-mugshot-redraws
omg LOL XD
thanks
There’s one of Becky and Dina around somewhere.
I love how Topical this comic strip is, even though it was made a while ago.
We did recently have a senator get dragged away by the cops just for disagreeing with a co-worker and trying to ask questions.
Are you referring to Senator Moore, who was banned for 10 months from the House floor for criticizing one of his recently-dead colleagues, the former Speaker of the House Ralston, in front of Ralston’s family during a memorial service on the House floor, and was then arrested for attempting to return to the house floor before the ban period was up?
Could be referring to Senator Padilla, who was detained under dubious legality but not arrested, or Rep. McIver, who is a Representative not a Senator, being arrested under even more dubious legality.
The moral of the story is that this kind of humor can literally always be topical if you look hard enough. … That’s kind of sad.
Normal cis democracy feelings.
“They can’t arrest me, I’m a senator,” I have no clue if Willis wrote that as is a year ago or if he made a recent edit but man is that some good meta humor…also it feels like Robin is going for the same Bernie Sanders hype bernie got when he was arrested for protesting back in his younger years.
Is that a little hint of a smile on Les’s face in panel four?
I may choose to think that’s a little hint of a smile on Leslie’s face in panel four.
I don’t see it– like, I kinda see how someone could see it, but I would very much say no. But you know what, live your bliss.
i want to believe
i mean i don’t even like robin but leslie needs a gf and they keep ending up back together sooooo
Doesn’t she already have a girlfriend? That one woman who makes mean comments
I thought they were together for like, one and half dates or something. But I could be misremembering.
Anna. The dentist who used to be Mindy’s crush.
I am very sorry but if you put a level in that mouth that little bubble would NOT move even a little.
nope nope nope that’s panel 3
panel 4, left side (her POV) tips up a bit
not a lot
but a little
it’s there
you cannot deny it
well you can but you’d be wrong
I am very sorry, that mouth is just as flat as the previous, it is just longer.
geometry disagrees!
Getting to look even closer at it make her looks even more done with Robin.
Oh, no. She’s definitely smiling. She’s just imagining Robin being shoved into the back of a cops car.
It only looks like a smile because Robin’s smile is so powerful that you can see its reflection in Leslie’s face.
Choose as you wish. Her mouth line is longer than in the previous panel and that happens to me when I compress my lips in a kinda doubting grimace…
Sometimes you need a good bit of Robin, and after the last few strips we definitely needed her.
Robin Desanto: Bringing levity to dramatic situations since [INSERT APPROPRIATE TIME STAMP HERE]
On the hand: Robin should move on and stop bothering Leslie because she already been through enough with her.
On the other hand: This is very entertaining and shoild continue for all eternity.
Robin the numbah one dumbass in da hood XD
Robin is going to murder Leslie with a knife, romantically.
Sure it’s not the other way around? lol i’d be fine for a leslie snapping moment
Appropriate gravatar is appropriate.
I’m glad Robin has a positive attitude about this, though that seems to mostly be because she has no idea what she’s doing.
They do say ignorance is bliss snd and Robin is a VERY blissful person.
They do say that, though they frequently forget to add the last part.
Yeeeeeessss *sparkles* more screen time for the best character!
The fact that this was written a year ago and not a week ago.
There were a lot of protests at college campuses last year.
I’m talking about the “they can’t arrest me I’m a senator” bit. Because I’d have assumed that was a reference to what just happened to Padilla if I didn’t know better.
Lol, gor distracted midway through typing my reply. Shoulda refreshed first.
That’s how you know it wasn’t just written.
I’m assuming Willis was thinking about the college campus protests last year when he made these strips, since those were the major protests happening back then.
Right, but I think Dawn means the “arrest a Senator” part. (Alex Padilla, unless there’s another one I’ve missed.)
We’ve had at-risk protests on university and college campuses since before 1970.
As covered already, Dawn wasn’t talking about the protest part.
Ahh. The political office thing. ‘Cept Robin isn’t employed that way anymore.
I will wonder if anyone will call for the mass murder of people with incorrect political opinions in today’s comments on a comic about university students and their relationship dramas?
ACAB
Undoubtedly – from both sides of the aisle
Only if we define incorrect political opinions as those different from mine.
Did someone call for a mass murder yesterday? I missed that, I guess.
It got removed/modded out, but yeah. It was a whole thing, now it’s not there anymore. I wouldn’t worry about it–not worth drudging up again.
Ooh, nice. I kinda like this Joe grav.
No, they didn’t. It’s another case of wild exaggeration.
I remember being called a cock-gargling Putin shill, obviously being paid to deny the “fact” that Russia kills its own people in Donbass and blames the poor innocent open neo-nazis in Ukraine, as all Russians do and must, being that we* stem from a homogenous, self-sacrificial Muscovy.
That said, I don’t remember anyone calling for mass murder.
*I am not Russian; this did not seem to matter.
A victim complex won’t clean your laundry for you, slob.
You had an easy top 5 most humiliating internet emotional breakdown because I mentioned 0.002% of the atrocities your country has carried out and you couldn’t handle it. You should sit this one out.
Keep living in your made-up reality where everyone is simultaneously attacking you at all times and unfathomably weak.
Then stop attacking me every time I post, and being unfathomably weak.
Nobody’s attacking you. Drink some water. Wipe down the counters, they probably need it even if they don’t look like it at first glance. Put your laundry away. Alphabetize your video tapes within their given genre. Eat a vegetable. Eat some fish and then do some cardio.
You were called that because yiu are. The fact you are not Russian only make it weirder.
Nobody said most of that nonsense. We talked about Putin and the Russian government, not about “all Russians do” or “a homogenous, self-sacrificial Muscovy”.
Well yeah, but the goal is to exhaust people with a constant barrage of baseless accusations that have nothing to do with what anyone said. Any excuse for them not to hydrate and stretch out their back muscles.
I personally hope they are dehydrated and full of back pain.
I’ve noticed that a lot of people can’t handle anyone having a different view on the Russia-Ukraine War than what US government propaganda wants them to believe. There were over 30 years of events that led up to that war going back to the end of the Cold War, but if you suggest that it wasn’t caused by Putin waking up on the wrong side of the bed one day and deciding to be evil by invading Ukraine, a whole bunch of people freak out and act like you’re a horrible monster.
LMAO, “can’t handle”, what a ridiculous framing
Putin absolutely did not wake up on the wrong side of bed one day and decide to be evil by invading Ukraine. It’s been a decades long project.
Dude is pretty on the record of believing that Ukraune is not a real country
But also with a long history of asserting control of former parts of the Soviet Union (or the old Russian Empire for that matter).
*Somebody* called for the execution of anyone that voted for Trump.
It was somebody in this very thread. Can you make a very obvious guess about who the culprit might be???
ooooh… I guess we are getting major developments on 2 main couples in this end of season storyline. :O
I am scared!
robin’s smile to die for. she can be so cool when she wants to be
panel 4 especially. let. her. cook.
But not cook food, because that is not going to go well.
No no, let her cook food too – we need the cadburry egg cereal so she ends up as president of a foreign country somehow
Alas, Robin, I don’t think genocide protesting is a “meet cute” event.
Also, what are the odds that Robin voted for packages of weapons to be sent to Bulmeria without any idea what they were used for?
i mean statistically there’s prolly a small handful of ppl who meet their partners at these kinda activism things , esp in college lol
Good thing she already meet the cute she wants to see datable for and is right besides doing the barbie mugshot meme.
Any event is a meet cute event if you’re brave enough.
can’t wait to see Robin yell “THIS IS DEMOCRACY MANIFEST!!!”
“WHAT IS THE CHARGE? EATING A MEAL? A SUCCULENT CHINESE MEAL?!”
“I SEE YOU KNOW YOUR JUDO!”
I do have one weird bit of confusion and it may be because I’m not familiar with Indiana’s protest.
But why are they protesting the university’s investments in weapons versus, you know, the genocide itself?
It seems like the latter is more important.
Because it is implicit?
Really? Because changing the university’s policy doesn’t seem like it would affect the issue versus trying to get a national response.
I think the logic is: (A) If we protest the war while on university grounds, the university _won’t_ do anything about it. (B) But if we protest the university’s actual involvement in the war, then the university _might_ do something about it. This is good, because every little bit helps in the bigger picture. (C) Therefore, we will protest the university’s involvement and do it on university grounds.
Because the weapons are the one that the University could actually, easily, do something about?
Getting the university to break their links to weapon tech is probably more accomplishable then getting the university to fund and man a direct military intervention against the genociding forces.
Also the weapons the university is funding are a large part of the current means being used to commit the genocide.
In the loosest of senses. The university is not “funding” weapons, it’s invested in the company. Any individual university’s investment is a tiny part of the value of any of the companies. And of course weapons used in this genocide are a small part of the profit for any of those companies.
Which isn’t to say pushing IU to divest isn’t a good goal, it’s just not going to have the direct and immediate effect of stopping anything.
Except university protests are usually against the larger issue.
Like the protestors against Vietnam are against Vietnam as a whole because the people they’re protesting to are not the university but the government and society as a whole.
Okay, well the IU encampment and many other encampment protests at universities around Gaza hav involved calls for divestment. At IU, the encampment was organized by the IU Divestment Coalition.
They are protesting the genocide as a whole, and their demands focus on one small part the institution they’re at plays in it. Having actionable goals as part of your protest is a good thing.
Gotcha, thanks for explaining.
/sincerity mode
….. because the weapons cause the genocide.
And presumably the weapons don’t need the university’s money to be made.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality
It acts as a smaller, achievable goal within a larger strategy. “Stop the genocide” involves stopping all the smaller machine resulting in the genocide, including the groups investing in the weapons being used. If this group stops this one campus from investing in those weapons, and a dozen other groups stop several other big investors, then suddenly the weapons manufacturers don’t have the money to make the weapons and they can’t be used in the genocide. Multiply that out to every cause, and that’s how you stop it (in theory).
Plus, just showing that there is a large group of people resisting the genocide, whether or not they’re doing it the most effective way possible, can both bring in additional people who oppose the genocide but wouldn’t be willing to resist it on their own. And it can be a threat to the people heading the various supporting machines, which might cause them to stop i.e. creating weapons.
Appreciate the explanation. That makes sense.
If nothing else, it’s worth protesting because a school has no business investing in military weapons. The money it’s wasting on weapons should be going to things that actually make sense for a place of learning, like maintenance or financial aid for student, not exploding foreigners.
This.
Not to say they should be investing in military companies, but that’s not how investing works.
They’re not wasting money, they’re making money by investing in companies that provide good returns. This gives them more money to spend on things like maintenance and financial aid in the long run.
If the protests pushed them to divest, they’d invest the money in other companies instead.
Gotta start somewhere, and i assume it’s a weekend but idk if the university can take much of a stance like “if you have atest scheduled on this day and walk out to protest we will fail you” or so tho i assume there’d still be legal backings if leslie’s not conflicted and being like “if i protest in this, i might lose my job” tho i imagine freedom to protest is a thing tho idk if it’d also turn into a ‘teacher strike’
I thought Hotbutton was in the Shire?
Your mom is in the Shire.
I am seriously confused by the love Robin gets in comments.
She’s still Leslie’s shitty stalker. Still a terrible person who treats the world like a game.
Because it is fun
Yea, IW! Robin had an earnestness that could also be explained by her powers and upbringing. There’s neither of those here so right now she’s kinda insufferable.
She’s not real, though. It’s okay to love characters who display traits you wouldn’t personally want to be around IRL. In Robin’s case, because she’s a little shit-stirrer and a wacky/silly presence in the comic, but also because she clearly likes Leslie a lot and is refusing to come to terms with it in a healthy way. That’s genuinely fun and interesting for some people.
I’m never sure what the confusion is about people enjoying a fictional character’s nonsense.
Also because it’s a reversal of their Shortpacked! dynamic. In the previous comic, Leslie was the one who was basically stalking and mooning around Robin for years despite Robin’s repeated insistence that she had no interest.
This, p much.
There are plenty of fictional characters I don’t enjoy for various reasons, but I am truly baffled by the recent trend of “I not only only like characters whose morality perfectly aligns with my own, I can’t grasp the concept of anyone else feeling differently”.
Yeah, the example I always use is Dr. House. He’s entertaining as hell to watch, but if I ever met someone like that in real life? I couldn’t stand to be in a room with them for five minutes.
So what you’re saying is… Robin is exactly what Carla would be, aged up ten years.
I like Robin because she’s fun and has a character arc.
What’s confusing about people enjoying a morally impure character?
Well her family is loaded so she’ll be fine… probably.
If Leslie isn’t going to punch Robin in the face, someone will
Getting a smash of reality via a riot shield?
Robin takin’ over the spotlight? Shirley, you can’t be Sirius!
Is Robin Leslie’s only adult “friend”? I don’t ever see Leslie hanging out with anyone else. It’s kinda side that the only peer spending time with her outside her romantic relationship is someone who forcefully intruded into her life and annoys her.
Robin’s just aching to be arrested, detained, and wrestled to the ground.
If only Republicans got some of that treatment in real life.
Only when they pay for it in only the right clubs.
definitely Leslie started to smirk
Sure she does little buddy.
She doesn’t always make that face, Robin. Only when you’re around.
SO generous of her! Always there for her gal pal Robin!
I really REALLY hope Leslie does not end up with Robin. She can do so much better.
can? absolutely. wants to? probably not. the siren call of the goofball is too strong for her to resist.
Damn those sirens!
What ever happened to Anna, anyway?
Also, Robin has progressed far enough that she’s not even trying to hide that dating is her end goal. Progress? Kind of?
She died. Tragic mercury tanker accident.
Pretty sure Anna was murdered by Mindy so she could be with Leslie, but then Mindy decided that was her assertive act for the year and so never took it any further.
Classic Mindy
For some reason the last panel made me think of this Community scene
https://youtu.be/eCLrGzuk4jA?si=GY_IO8f6cFv1CysF
https://www.tumblr.com/sirenofshadow/787432155069513728/reading-dumbing-of-age-and-then-reading-most-of?source=share
I felt this deserved to be shared.