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Peritale
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A fairy godmother with no magic tries her best to successfully fulfill a Fairytale and win the respect of her peers.
The Golden Boar
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A young woman joins a group of summoners who call forth Guardian Beasts to protect their isolated magical island. Unfortunately, her Guardian Beast is nothing like she'd imagined, and he's about to change her life, and everything she thought she knew about herself...
Dumbing of Age
David M Willis
Joyce has been homeschooled her entire life until now, when she's suddenly a freshman in college! Things don't go well.
Three Panel Soul
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It's a pretty rigid format but we keep the content loose, you know?
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Our heroes must navigate a hazardous dating scene, overcome personal anxieties, and wrangle unruly seafood in order to find love, peace of mind, and a paycheck.
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Ozzie the Vampire
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Augustine
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August and her ragtag group are just like everyone else, simply surviving in the treacherous Crater... When they stumble into what may be an artifact of the ancient past, their lives are thrown into a much bigger loop as they trifle with bounty hunters, monsters and gods.
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I was gonna comment that he’d get washed in a fight with anyone tougher than a raccoon, but actually as a Bartender he’s probably picked up a few tricks for dealing with rowdy drunks
Having a date with someone is a pretty good reason to have their number. It’s good protocol to let them know if you will be late or have to cancel, and you can get in touch if you need directions or something. Weird that they had each other’s numbers and were still exchanging info through Billie beforehand, though. Maybe they swapped numbers during the date.
Trouble is, once you’ve become an Apple user you’ve become part of a cult like the Moonies or MAGA or something like that. How else can you logically explain the way they have been able to sell the same phone – just add an additional camera or a bigger screen from time to time – to the same people since day one?
They have their own weird connector/charger that is completely incompatible with anything else, you still can’t add additional memory by inserting an SD card, and you NEVER could easily replace the battery. And their operating system – like the old, now-nonexistent Blackberries – is used by one and only one company on the entire freakin’ planet.
The point is, they can’t sell inferior products with pretty pictures forever and they certainly aren’t going to stop selling inferior products, and so logically their only choice is to drop the pretty pictures.
I find Ruth oddly adorable in general, really. Partially because I keep really, really hoping things will go well for her for once, and partially because… I just do, I guess?
I’m just hoping this isn’t the last time Ruth and Daisy interact with each other, because bad first date aside I think they have potential. Even if Ruth/Jennifer remains my OTP for now
Truck-kun was not kind to me, I came back to the same body as before with lots of damage to it… Truck-kun on the other hand was isekaied to another world unknown to us. Lucky Truck-kun.
Personally, I don’t particularly want Asher to die– but while Blaine’s death was probably a good thing overall, the fact of the matter is that Asher is willing to have people killed to protect his secrets, and is therefore inherently untrustworthy. I definitely don’t like him and Jennifer together for that reason.
Yeah, I’m with Rass on this one. It’s less a matter of who he had killed and more the fact that he’s untrustworthy and can have even high profile individuals killed with no trace linking back to him
My point (which i don’t think I conveyed well) was that I think giving the order to have a abusive narcissistic murderer killed is fairly easy to justify to yourself
I don’t know if being willing to kill Blaine would translate to a willingness to kill people who aren’t irredeemable bastards
I keep holding out hope that all the characters are dead and that the entirety of Dumbing of Age is a hallucination playing out in the mind of the dying Head Alien.
This, and also about Clint. Clint deserves to get No Regret’d by a semi.
Now, we know three things about Asher:
1- He screwed over Sal when they were little to protect his secrets
2- He let Walky hit him for it because it’s not like getting a punch from a wimp is actually a punishment befitting of the crime
3- He’s willing to kill to protect his secrets, AND use the mafia resources he’s so quick to point out he doesn’t want, to achieve this.
Like………. Look, yeah, he was a little shit when the Convenience Store (attempted) Robbery happened (like 12? 13? can’t remember atm); but it’s not like we’ve been given much to think he’s Actually Changed like he claims. The fact Blaine was the definition of petty, violent evil means a lot of us cheered for his death but the means?
Like. Uhm. Asher had zero trouble on doing the alarm pulling to screw over Blaine’s daughter, a person he could’ve fairly deduced was traumatized and who had been described to him as worse than shy. Throwing Amber (and her friends!) under the bus wasn’t a problem to him until Blaine went about it with the subtlety of an enraged mob, pardon the pun. Hell, knowing how high-profile was Toedad’s first kidnapping attempt (for Bloomington at least), do we know for sure he had no problem also throwing Becky under the bus?
(Not to mention that since it the Mob we’re talking about, them finding out he stole gramps’ money to pay for college could very easily – and literally – cost him his life.)
^ That. Asher will end up dead in a ditch if anyone finds out what happened with that money. That said…..Blaine was on the NEWS. There was no way that Blaine was walking out of that hospital. If Asher did ANYTHING, it was maybe SPEED UP THE TIME TABLE. Blaine was in deep enough to know cops on the mob’s take by name in a city he doesn’t live in. He was dead as soon as he got caught in such a public way. If nothing else, the mob’s cops had plenty of incentive to kill him to cover their own asses in case he got loose lips. There wasn’t a way out for Blaine, so that plus fiction means I don’t really care if Asher was involved in Blaine’s death. Especially because said phone call probably went something like this
Asher: You guys need to take out Blaine O’Malley.
Relative, probably Gramps: Well, DUH, kid. He got caught on at least state wide tv. He’ll be dealt with within 24 hours. We’ll put you on the notification list.
Agreed and seconded. Dude ended up in the news, knew the boss’s grandkid and out-of-his-city cops on sight (and Asher knew him on sight, too, so it wasn’t a matter of Facebook creeping or something, he genuinely was involved enough to recognize people,) and also critically? Was a FINANCIAL mob stooge, meaning that even if he didn’t flip to save his own ass – and he most likely would have, if he’d been smart enough to realize he’d become a liability to his employers more than ten seconds before it happened – he was still a discovery risk when someone in the investigation started wondering about how much money this whole scheme cost, particularly bailing Ross out. (Dude was a complete stranger whose bond was set very high, and it sounded like the church wasn’t even close to meeting it. Even assuming Blaine was intending for Ross to take the fall, that means he spent hundreds if not thousands of dollars on someone who may not have been malleable enough to even be as useful as Ross WAS.) Sure, one of the mob’s dirty cops could have tried to steer investigation away from that… but honestly, why bother? It’s easier, faster, and less risky to just kill Blaine, and he’s already demonstrated such utter failure to be discreet and cover his own ass that they’d probably have some questions about what he’s good for as a money launderer, too. (Used his own card for the scooters and his own name for the bail. Either got a rental for the kidnapping lair – probably also his own name given the other failures, likewise for the motel – or used a house his own company was renovating, inviting scrutiny. And as we know, a PRETEEN figured out he was a money launderer after being in his kitchen for like, an hour or two. So they wouldn’t have been wrong!)
Blaine was a dead man the moment he started putting this plan in action. At most, Asher gave advance notice that a stooge who knew too much was planning something unspeakably stupid, so they could have Lester ready to deal with it rather than arrange something once he was in jail or the like. (From what Asher was told in that meeting and what he actually did, he probably didn’t know exactly HOW stupid, but Blaine was trying to start a grudge match with the local curiosity CAMPUS SUPERHERO. Who the police were already looking into. This plan drawing too much attention was pretty much a given even from that.) No way anyone was going to act just on the boss’s 18-year-old grandson’s orders, especially when that grandson’s on the outs for trying to leave. (Gramps is already ‘disappointed,’ recall, without knowing about the stolen money.) No way Gramps didn’t give that order himself the moment he saw the name ‘Blaine O’Malley’ on a sitting member of Congress’s official Twitter, which was probably all over the morning news, for trying to kidnap his daughter and the very publicly-hired campaign manager of said sitting member of Congress.
how would her day job, of being a newspaper editor, and therefore critiquing such things as the quality of a photograph as a background process, affect this?
Except that it’s a deep-learning generated fake and not an actual photo of Alyson Hannigan.
You take a artificial neural network with many layers and many photos of Alyson, from many angles and under a great many lighting conditions, possibly from frames in the many shows she’s been in. You mess up Alyson’s face in the pictures in a variety of ways such as scratches, blurs, substitution of other peoples faces. Then you train the neural network to take a messed up picture and reproduce the original. Finally you give the trained neural network a picture of a nude and it corrects it to have Alyson’s face, giving you a faked picture that is difficult to detect from internal evidence, if it can be done at all. Now details of the body, such as the presence or absence of freckles might give the game away, but that’s another matter.
Software that can be used to do this kind of thing is freely available, but isn’t very user friendly. Which means that it’s current use is limited to people who know what they are doing – a set which is not completely identical to people who behave responsibly.
Deep learning really is going to be the “with great power comes great responsibility” tech of our time.
In this instance, since Ruth cropped the head off, I think she was using Alison deepfakes as a shortcut to finding noods of twenty-something women who are a close enough match to her general build and skin tone.
Could be worse. I didn’t know who she was, AND didn’t know what a deepfake was, so I image-searched Alyson Hannigan, and was like “oh, the person who played Willow, that’s cute” and then I added ‘deepfake’ to the search. Yep. I image-searched Alyson Hannigan Deepfake.
It’s been an educational evening.
For a brief minute there my wires crossed her with Allison Mack (Chloe Sullivan from Smallville, topic of a comic about Celebrity Lust in Shortpacked, fairly recently in the news for her serious involvement in a sex cult leading to criminal charges she pled guilty to,) which was… deeply concerning.
Not that this isn’t, but it doesn’t involve the phrase ‘sex cult’ so at least there’s that.
Finding out about the sex cult of personality stuff was a serious “… WHAT” moment. (You don’t have to look it up, just read her Wikipedia page.) That was really disappointing, I liked her TV work.
I think Ruth was just using “[actress who kind of looks like her] deepfake” as a shortcut to finding noods that could plausibly be hers. The existence of deepfake noods is a whole different can of worms though…
For a confused moment, I didn’t realize you’d switched gears to Allison Mark and was peering with confusion at Hannigan’s incredibly wholesome career + wikipedia page and going “WAT?”
Then I reread and read Mark’s Wiki page and things made much more sense. I mean, in so far as your comment goes.
I don’t think she had any bad intentions in doing so. Actually saying all that in person might be more than Ruth can currently handle. It’s similar to how it is easier to tell something to someone in text rather than a regular call.
I don’t know if Ruth deserves slack for this. Especially since I don’t think she would’ve handled this in this way if she hadn’t gotten drunk. Like she created the problem and then handled it poorly.
The sad part is it’s not the worst decision she’s made tonight, because that’s all on ‘getting drunk’.
But yeah, she was clearly taken aback by just how unprepared she was for a date with someone who is… not a mess in the specific way Ruth recognizes as a mess, who appears to genuinely like and be interested in her. At the same time, Ruth, this is definitely not the best way to handle this.
Though it does prevent her from recognizing you’re drunk in case she’s been warned to keep you from drinking… which if Ruth is thinking, I could see being on her mind on some level. (If nothing else, shame about being drunk is a strong possibility.)
i like to think there’s some lingering Alyson-Hannigan-y magic to the picture that will also speak to Daisy’s baby lesbian soul. I understand that Willow Rosenberg is on a par with Xena and Sailor Moon in early teenage cult worship among lesbians. (i’m not a lesbian and i thought she was awesome.) millenial lesbians, to be sure, so this might not be a reference that really works within the sliding time scale but eh
I mean, I didn’t know who Alyson Hannigan was, she has a lot of success to her name, and I don’t gobble up celebrity news, however, she seems nice and seems to stay out of the papers.
who could she have used though. I can’t think or… [15′ later] …find many famous redhead actresses with freckles, save for Julianne Moore (queen) but if Hannigan is the wrong generation, Julianne Moore (who is a queen) is an even wronger generation.
she might cover them up with makeup, or have freckles in other places–all that really matters is that the person who took the actual nude selfie has freckles.
What, precisely, the Valeyard was actually supposed to be is a massive clusterfuck largely because Robert Holmes died midway through writing the storyline in which the fact that he’s a version of the Doctor is revealed. The writer who was then supposed to finish it, Eric Saward, was allowed access to Holmes’ notes, but then got into a pissing match with producer John Nathan-Turner that ended with him quitting and refusing to allow his version of the script to be used. After that, the new new writers Pip and Jane Baker weren’t allowed to access Holmes’ notes because of concerns that Saward would sue over similarities between their script and his. Like I said, a clusterfuck.
In the episode, the Valeyard is described as “an amalgamation” of the Doctor’s dark side somewhere between their “Twelfth and Final incarnations.” The general consensus for a long time in fandom was that he would come between the Doctor’s Twelfth and Thirteenth incarnations, but given that the numbering nomenclature has pretty much been broken beyond repair at this point it’s anyone’s guess. I think one Big Finish audio suggested that he was created by a Time Lord black ops division?
In conclusion: Act with spurious morality, no catharsis.
Jason is far a better bartender than he ever was a TA, honestly. I was always fond of him but now I’m looking forward to these two being friends. NOW GET HER TO DOWN SOME WATER, JASON.
(No, I don’t think they’d bone. Not tonight, at least! Jason was SUPER upset when it turned out Sal was trying to use sex as a leverage for her grades. Should have he slept with her student? GOD, NOPE! But he did it out of genuine attraction at least.)
Deepfakes are nooooot that ethical either, Ruth. You oughta know by now 8′) Poor Daisy…
Well, sort of. The slip shine made it sound like he knew exactly what Sal wanted (his response in the preview to ‘Ah’m only being judged against my marks” was “That is NOT what I meant and you know it.”). He only got upset the next time she saw him AFTER they’d already screwed. That said, Jason walked Sal home when she was loaded and that’s all that happened. I don’t think Jason would take advantage of an intoxicated person.
So it is even worse than drunk Ruth wandering the street scenario, just plain fake and cheat.
This made me wondering a bit in what age this story is set up?
Don’t they have some LGBTQ related chats, sites, offline and online groups in that city so Daisy could easily find someone else who would not try to drunk cheat her up? Same for Ruth to find another person who hates herself enough to do such things?
If Billie or rather Jennifer now wanted really to help both she should help them making proper dating profiles and go from there then seeing how both are rather socially inapted for dating, one stress poops and other drinks for that reason.
Introverts like yours truly are usually super out of our depths in sites like those (from Tinder to OKCupid, though I’m showing my age there). What has worked for me is like…. Being part of a bigger community, LGBTQIA+ or fandom. But dating sites? Terrifying.
So I do buy this storyline. I’m just sad that these are the “””””solutions”””” Ruth picked (and drank) in the end.
Could you clarify what you mean by “cheat”? The only common uses I’m familiar with involve disregarding established rules, swindling a person, or romantic infidelity, nome of which seem to apply to this date.
While drunk and lonely one night Ruth started to make a profile online, but it was so embarrassingly offputting and self-deprecating she deleted it immediately and swore never to touch it again.
On the other hand Daisy had a profile on every site (paid!) and sent messages to every sapphic within 50km. The algorithm assumed she was a bot and banned her.
Cropping off the head is actually good practice even when you’re legitimately sending nudes of yourself, particularly to someone you don’t know well. You never know if they’re going to share it with friends and then it eventually ends up on the internet.
Why the hell wouldn’t he have pants on? He’s working. Are you insinuating Ruth is possibly blowing him behind the counter? Because he was literally advising HER about consent like ten seconds ago. He may be British, but I don’t think he’s a complete monster.
It’s actually common in Britain for bartenders to serve pantless. Hopefully Jason has acclimatised enough to America to know the social norm is different there.
Now, see. I thought it was that the bartenders in Britain weren’t paid enough to afford pants. I didn’t know it was one of those customs handed down from the Picts.
Optimus Prime broke down and cried on the set of "Transformers" (2007) due to the extensive use of green screen filming. He reportedly said, "This is not why I became an actor."
“I’m just going to say it, shame on any of us who throws a trans child under the bus for thinking they’re going to get elected. That child deserves our support. Don’t worry about the pollsters calling it distractions, because we need to be the party of human dignity.”
Minnesota Star Tribune@startribune.com ⋅ 1d
Gov. Tim Walz is doubling down on trans rights — and criticizing members of his party who are retreating — at a time when the issue has become a political lightning rod nationally and back home in Minnesota.
they managed to get the arms and thighs to be different grays, which I wasn't sure they'd be able to do, the way the mold's set up
though maybe they're just producing a lot of extra thighs and/or arms in the wrong colors and throwing those away, i dunno
Minnesota Star Tribune @startribune.com ⋅ 1d
preternia @preternia.com ⋅ 1d
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Vite Ramen has me trained to think she got an unsolicited noodle pic
I would honestly be thrilled to receive a noodle pic, just so I could joke about the sick noods I received
Here is an unsolicited noodles pic featuring three glory holes. [WARNING: SFW]
Because I always wanted to share one.
aka “2humans1cup”
Wheatspin.
WHEATSPIN!!!! You can’t just be that funny!
Jason is a good bartender.
He’s almost starting to rival his original universe counterpart in the competence department.
I was gonna comment that he’d get washed in a fight with anyone tougher than a raccoon, but actually as a Bartender he’s probably picked up a few tricks for dealing with rowdy drunks
Well, rowdy drunk college students, at least.
Also, don’t underestimate raccoons. They’re tougher than a LOT of humans.
And smarter.
Indeed, he knows when to cut his patrons off and is even decent enough to let one hide behind the bar.
He’s much better at being a bartender than he ever was as a TA.
Well. I guess they have each other’s phone numbers.
On ficticious universes people who have absolutely no freakin’ reason or business having someone else’s number ALWAYS have those people’s number.
Having a date with someone is a pretty good reason to have their number. It’s good protocol to let them know if you will be late or have to cancel, and you can get in touch if you need directions or something. Weird that they had each other’s numbers and were still exchanging info through Billie beforehand, though. Maybe they swapped numbers during the date.
It looks like a few of you were half right!
Well, in my defense, I thought I was joking.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-11/04-hompk/leftyou/#comment-1548586
On reflection, what do you mean ‘half right?’
even a joke clock winds up unwittingly right sometimes!
Wanders off to Google joke clock.
Oooh, what does google say??
The first one that I saw appeared to be right all the time by virtue of all the numbers being replaced by “now.”
Is it Now yet?
Well, it was,
I just wanna address how oddly adorable Ruth peeking through her the bar is
Dafuq?
How did my phone change “over the bar” to “through her the bar”? Did Apple jack up autocorrect somehow?
I dunno. But they can’t sell inferior products with pretty pictures forever.
They’ll have to get rid of the pretty pictures soon.
And why is that?
Because they can’t sell inferior products with pretty pictures forever.
Getting rid of pretty pictures isn’t gonna correct crappy code. I mean Androids are very reliable and their commercials are very enjoyable as well!
Trouble is, once you’ve become an Apple user you’ve become part of a cult like the Moonies or MAGA or something like that. How else can you logically explain the way they have been able to sell the same phone – just add an additional camera or a bigger screen from time to time – to the same people since day one?
They have their own weird connector/charger that is completely incompatible with anything else, you still can’t add additional memory by inserting an SD card, and you NEVER could easily replace the battery. And their operating system – like the old, now-nonexistent Blackberries – is used by one and only one company on the entire freakin’ planet.
The point is, they can’t sell inferior products with pretty pictures forever and they certainly aren’t going to stop selling inferior products, and so logically their only choice is to drop the pretty pictures.
oh no! this is turning into another battle in the age-old war between the Snarks and the Nerds!
Nerds! they think people could be a bit more serious about some things!!!
Snarks! they actually take their jokes very seriously!!!!
Nerds! they will stubbornly take you at your word and say “actually” a lot!!!!!
Snarks! they’ll keep amping up the silliness in retaliation!!!!!! …but if you see one of them explain a joke it means you have them on their knees.
score one for Nerds!
How do you score sparky needs?
Asking for a friend.
Snarky nerds, snarky nerds, snarky nerds.
Hmm. Three times and automangle finally gets it right. I guess third time really is a charm.
Clears throat. How do you score snarky nerds?
Snarky nerds are traitors to both causes and are to be strenuously shunned. I guess
Seems fair.
Snarky nerds have transcended mere labels.
At least the post went through! Most of mine don’t. They just sit indefinitely awaiting approval. I have no idea why! But I got what you meant!
Apple devices sure can wreck a nice beach well, can’t they.
My eyes got locked onto “apple jack” in that sentence and was trying to figure out how my little pony related to this
I find Ruth oddly adorable in general, really. Partially because I keep really, really hoping things will go well for her for once, and partially because… I just do, I guess?
I’m just hoping this isn’t the last time Ruth and Daisy interact with each other, because bad first date aside I think they have potential. Even if Ruth/Jennifer remains my OTP for now
I too hope that Ruth and Billie/Jennifer get back together. So if that means that Asher has to get hit by a truck, I won’t be too broken uo over it.
I’d be okay with them not getting back together as long as Asher is still hit by a truck
Hear that Truck-kun? We’re all waiting on your next visit.
Truck-kun was not kind to me, I came back to the same body as before with lots of damage to it…
Truck-kun on the other hand was isekaied to another world unknown to us. Lucky Truck-kun.
I think there’s at least one story where they summon the truck to defeat the demon lord with it.
Did Willis survive?
Oh wait, that was porn lord.
Defeating a porn lord with integrity and no regrets?
There’s a fanfic waiting here…
I ran across a manga where it is about the people who drive the truck and pick the people to isekai.
Personally, I don’t particularly want Asher to die– but while Blaine’s death was probably a good thing overall, the fact of the matter is that Asher is willing to have people killed to protect his secrets, and is therefore inherently untrustworthy. I definitely don’t like him and Jennifer together for that reason.
Now Clint dying, on the other hand, I am all for. Hit that bongo with all the trucks in the universe.
I mean the person whose death he was complicit in was a homicidal mob stooge.
That’s a murder that ain’t gonna weigh heavy on your heart
Yeah, I’m with Rass on this one. It’s less a matter of who he had killed and more the fact that he’s untrustworthy and can have even high profile individuals killed with no trace linking back to him
Asher is untrustworthy, that much is true
My point (which i don’t think I conveyed well) was that I think giving the order to have a abusive narcissistic murderer killed is fairly easy to justify to yourself
I don’t know if being willing to kill Blaine would translate to a willingness to kill people who aren’t irredeemable bastards
I keep holding out hope that all the characters are dead and that the entirety of Dumbing of Age is a hallucination playing out in the mind of the dying Head Alien.
@Clif
“You have no idea how alone you are, Dexter.”
This, and also about Clint. Clint deserves to get No Regret’d by a semi.
Now, we know three things about Asher:
1- He screwed over Sal when they were little to protect his secrets
2- He let Walky hit him for it because it’s not like getting a punch from a wimp is actually a punishment befitting of the crime
3- He’s willing to kill to protect his secrets, AND use the mafia resources he’s so quick to point out he doesn’t want, to achieve this.
Like………. Look, yeah, he was a little shit when the Convenience Store (attempted) Robbery happened (like 12? 13? can’t remember atm); but it’s not like we’ve been given much to think he’s Actually Changed like he claims. The fact Blaine was the definition of petty, violent evil means a lot of us cheered for his death but the means?
Like. Uhm. Asher had zero trouble on doing the alarm pulling to screw over Blaine’s daughter, a person he could’ve fairly deduced was traumatized and who had been described to him as worse than shy. Throwing Amber (and her friends!) under the bus wasn’t a problem to him until Blaine went about it with the subtlety of an enraged mob, pardon the pun. Hell, knowing how high-profile was Toedad’s first kidnapping attempt (for Bloomington at least), do we know for sure he had no problem also throwing Becky under the bus?
So no. No trust from me for that boy.
He informed on Sal just because he thought it would be funny. Not to protect anything.
You know, because he was a kid.
No, he openly admits to it also being a way of distracting the cops.
I think that’s a little too harsh. Guy is clearly sincerely remorseful, and wants to be a better person outside of his family’s influence
He’s still shifty as hell, but he’s a complicated character and that makes him interesting
“I want to be a better person” and “Kill him” don’t really blend well together.
I didn’t say he was succeeding. Complicated character, not a morally upstanding one
Eh, if Asher did get Blaine killed (as opposed to just being informed afterwards), it just makes me wanna buy him cookies and beer.
(Not to mention that since it the Mob we’re talking about, them finding out he stole gramps’ money to pay for college could very easily – and literally – cost him his life.)
^ That. Asher will end up dead in a ditch if anyone finds out what happened with that money. That said…..Blaine was on the NEWS. There was no way that Blaine was walking out of that hospital. If Asher did ANYTHING, it was maybe SPEED UP THE TIME TABLE. Blaine was in deep enough to know cops on the mob’s take by name in a city he doesn’t live in. He was dead as soon as he got caught in such a public way. If nothing else, the mob’s cops had plenty of incentive to kill him to cover their own asses in case he got loose lips. There wasn’t a way out for Blaine, so that plus fiction means I don’t really care if Asher was involved in Blaine’s death. Especially because said phone call probably went something like this
Asher: You guys need to take out Blaine O’Malley.
Relative, probably Gramps: Well, DUH, kid. He got caught on at least state wide tv. He’ll be dealt with within 24 hours. We’ll put you on the notification list.
Asher: Thank you.
Agreed and seconded. Dude ended up in the news, knew the boss’s grandkid and out-of-his-city cops on sight (and Asher knew him on sight, too, so it wasn’t a matter of Facebook creeping or something, he genuinely was involved enough to recognize people,) and also critically? Was a FINANCIAL mob stooge, meaning that even if he didn’t flip to save his own ass – and he most likely would have, if he’d been smart enough to realize he’d become a liability to his employers more than ten seconds before it happened – he was still a discovery risk when someone in the investigation started wondering about how much money this whole scheme cost, particularly bailing Ross out. (Dude was a complete stranger whose bond was set very high, and it sounded like the church wasn’t even close to meeting it. Even assuming Blaine was intending for Ross to take the fall, that means he spent hundreds if not thousands of dollars on someone who may not have been malleable enough to even be as useful as Ross WAS.) Sure, one of the mob’s dirty cops could have tried to steer investigation away from that… but honestly, why bother? It’s easier, faster, and less risky to just kill Blaine, and he’s already demonstrated such utter failure to be discreet and cover his own ass that they’d probably have some questions about what he’s good for as a money launderer, too. (Used his own card for the scooters and his own name for the bail. Either got a rental for the kidnapping lair – probably also his own name given the other failures, likewise for the motel – or used a house his own company was renovating, inviting scrutiny. And as we know, a PRETEEN figured out he was a money launderer after being in his kitchen for like, an hour or two. So they wouldn’t have been wrong!)
Blaine was a dead man the moment he started putting this plan in action. At most, Asher gave advance notice that a stooge who knew too much was planning something unspeakably stupid, so they could have Lester ready to deal with it rather than arrange something once he was in jail or the like. (From what Asher was told in that meeting and what he actually did, he probably didn’t know exactly HOW stupid, but Blaine was trying to start a grudge match with the local curiosity CAMPUS SUPERHERO. Who the police were already looking into. This plan drawing too much attention was pretty much a given even from that.) No way anyone was going to act just on the boss’s 18-year-old grandson’s orders, especially when that grandson’s on the outs for trying to leave. (Gramps is already ‘disappointed,’ recall, without knowing about the stolen money.) No way Gramps didn’t give that order himself the moment he saw the name ‘Blaine O’Malley’ on a sitting member of Congress’s official Twitter, which was probably all over the morning news, for trying to kidnap his daughter and the very publicly-hired campaign manager of said sitting member of Congress.
That’s a low bar to cross.
That’s a Level 3 boozle.
Just give Daisy her consolation prize.
Ah… memory impairment, the free prize at the bottom of every whiskey bottle!
yes why else does anyone drink but for the sweet bliss of not remembering a single goddamn thing the next day? LeoDiCaprioToasting.gif
That explains the first time. Thereafter, you have to drink to forget whatever it was that you can’t remember.
One of the main drawbacks to building a Leo Di Caprio toaster is that you would quickly run out of Leo Di Caprios.
I drink because I like the taste. And I can’t drink enough to get drunk because I am allergic to alcohol.
Ruth is misbehaving. Let us scold her for this.
Tsk. Tsk.
Isn’t that overly harsh?
yeah one Tsk was enough. You didn’t have to rub it in.
*wags finger at Ruth* SHAME!
Come back ‘ere! Stand still fer yer shamin’!
Kids ‘ese days don’ appreciate a propa shamin’…
I have an uncle who’s father’s father’s father’s mother’s father was a Cherokee shamin. I’m sure he was appreciated in his time.
No, it isn’t particularly relevant, but I’m probably never going to get the opportunity to mention it again.
Won’t she notice the difference from picture to reality, if they ever do decide to dance a horizontal tango?
Oh who am I kidding, she’ll probably be too horny to care at that point.
She’d probably just assume photoshoppery/filters, or not really think about it too much, on account of Ruth wearing her like earmuffs.
Makes sense to me, I too would not think about it in regards to the last part.
how would her day job, of being a newspaper editor, and therefore critiquing such things as the quality of a photograph as a background process, affect this?
She was promised a nood. Other details were left unspecified.
As long as the complexion in the photo is close enough to Ruth’s, Daisy probably won’t scrutinize too closely.
Classy, Ruth.
I had to look up who Alyson Hannigan was. Clearly my knowledge of pop culture is deficient at best
I have yet to look her up, so who is she?
Probably more known for Lily in How I Met Your Mother, though she was also Willow in Buffy and ‘This One Time, at Band Camp’ Girl in American Pie.
Ah, I see. Well a nude of her is acceptable since Jason wouldn’t let Ruth send a real one.
Except that it’s a deep-learning generated fake and not an actual photo of Alyson Hannigan.
You take a artificial neural network with many layers and many photos of Alyson, from many angles and under a great many lighting conditions, possibly from frames in the many shows she’s been in. You mess up Alyson’s face in the pictures in a variety of ways such as scratches, blurs, substitution of other peoples faces. Then you train the neural network to take a messed up picture and reproduce the original. Finally you give the trained neural network a picture of a nude and it corrects it to have Alyson’s face, giving you a faked picture that is difficult to detect from internal evidence, if it can be done at all. Now details of the body, such as the presence or absence of freckles might give the game away, but that’s another matter.
Software that can be used to do this kind of thing is freely available, but isn’t very user friendly. Which means that it’s current use is limited to people who know what they are doing – a set which is not completely identical to people who behave responsibly.
Instead of using pictures of Alyson, Mike could have used pictures of your mom. But then, why would he need to?
Deep learning really is going to be the “with great power comes great responsibility” tech of our time.
In this instance, since Ruth cropped the head off, I think she was using Alison deepfakes as a shortcut to finding noods of twenty-something women who are a close enough match to her general build and skin tone.
Alyson Hannigan is almost 50.
Internet perverts wld be more likely to make “Willow” deepfakes though. Buffy ran from 1997 to 2003, when she was in her twenties.
She played the dad in My Wife and Kids.
Same
….
*turns to dust and blows away*
I fucking know, right?
When did Alyson Hannigan stop being a household name for nerds?
The name was familiar to me, I just couldn’t put a face to it
Could be worse. I didn’t know who she was, AND didn’t know what a deepfake was, so I image-searched Alyson Hannigan, and was like “oh, the person who played Willow, that’s cute” and then I added ‘deepfake’ to the search. Yep. I image-searched Alyson Hannigan Deepfake.
It’s been an educational evening.
I mean, if you knew her by sight as Willow, that’s the important thing.
I know the characters she’s played! I’m just shit at recognizing actors, though I thought the name was familiar.
For a brief minute there my wires crossed her with Allison Mack (Chloe Sullivan from Smallville, topic of a comic about Celebrity Lust in Shortpacked, fairly recently in the news for her serious involvement in a sex cult leading to criminal charges she pled guilty to,) which was… deeply concerning.
Not that this isn’t, but it doesn’t involve the phrase ‘sex cult’ so at least there’s that.
Finding out about the sex cult of personality stuff was a serious “… WHAT” moment. (You don’t have to look it up, just read her Wikipedia page.) That was really disappointing, I liked her TV work.
I think Ruth was just using “[actress who kind of looks like her] deepfake” as a shortcut to finding noods that could plausibly be hers. The existence of deepfake noods is a whole different can of worms though…
For a confused moment, I didn’t realize you’d switched gears to Allison Mark and was peering with confusion at Hannigan’s incredibly wholesome career + wikipedia page and going “WAT?”
Then I reread and read Mark’s Wiki page and things made much more sense. I mean, in so far as your comment goes.
Yeah, there’s a reason why my brain short-circuited until I went ‘oh, HANNIGAN, Willow and redhead and NOT that one, phew.’
Seriously, not entirely sure why I misthought it in the first place besides maybe the Shortpacked Celebrity Lust comic.
I had no clue.
Ruth’s basically on a date with Jason at this point
She’s been on a date with Jason since she sat down at the bar. And it’s been a much better date.
This actually makes me a little upset. If Ruth was still in the bar she should’ve just told Daisy herself. Bad form drunk Ruth! Bad form!
I agree. Ruth absolutely should have told Daisy whose nude that really is.
She could be lying to Jason.
I don’t think she had any bad intentions in doing so. Actually saying all that in person might be more than Ruth can currently handle. It’s similar to how it is easier to tell something to someone in text rather than a regular call.
I don’t know if Ruth deserves slack for this. Especially since I don’t think she would’ve handled this in this way if she hadn’t gotten drunk. Like she created the problem and then handled it poorly.
That’s a fair point, I suppose she could have just said goodbye and said all the rest in a text, followed by the nude.
The sad part is it’s not the worst decision she’s made tonight, because that’s all on ‘getting drunk’.
But yeah, she was clearly taken aback by just how unprepared she was for a date with someone who is… not a mess in the specific way Ruth recognizes as a mess, who appears to genuinely like and be interested in her. At the same time, Ruth, this is definitely not the best way to handle this.
Though it does prevent her from recognizing you’re drunk in case she’s been warned to keep you from drinking… which if Ruth is thinking, I could see being on her mind on some level. (If nothing else, shame about being drunk is a strong possibility.)
Her worst mistake of the night is when she accidentally drunkenly texts her nood of Jennifer with her head cut off instead.
It’s the picture without Jennifer’s head, not Jennifer with blood gushing out her neck, just to clarify.
IT’S THE FRECKLES THAT MATTER YOU MORON.
I swear, Jason should get fired for even suggesting otherwise.
He could show her how to photoshop the freckles in before she sent it.
i like to think there’s some lingering Alyson-Hannigan-y magic to the picture that will also speak to Daisy’s baby lesbian soul. I understand that Willow Rosenberg is on a par with Xena and Sailor Moon in early teenage cult worship among lesbians. (i’m not a lesbian and i thought she was awesome.) millenial lesbians, to be sure, so this might not be a reference that really works within the sliding time scale but eh
Of course Daisy has a baby lesbian soul.
Since capturing it, she keeps it trapped in a bottle she hides under her bed.
But sometimes, when the stars are right, she takes it out and makes it wear chest windows.
THANK you!
I much prefer yours.
I mean, I didn’t know who Alyson Hannigan was, she has a lot of success to her name, and I don’t gobble up celebrity news, however, she seems nice and seems to stay out of the papers.
But she doesn’t look like she has freckles.
wait, that’s true.
Willis! what the what!
who could she have used though. I can’t think or… [15′ later] …find many famous redhead actresses with freckles, save for Julianne Moore (queen) but if Hannigan is the wrong generation, Julianne Moore (who is a queen) is an even wronger generation.
Freckles are Forever.
she might cover them up with makeup, or have freckles in other places–all that really matters is that the person who took the actual nude selfie has freckles.
For a sec I thought this was a fart joke
it’s never too late.
*plays “Dancing In The Nude” from THE BENNY HILL SHOW on the jukebox*
(It was performed by Eddie Buchanan and featured on the episode “Sale of the Half-Century”.)
Um, Jason, I was kind of assuming that it was Ruth who cropped the pic.
her planet needs her
THANK YOU for cutting her off, dude.
…or whatever the Bri’ish equivalent is.
I believe the British term is “Foreshadowing her as the Valeyard”.
That’s a Doctor Who reference right?
My imperfect memory is that the Valeyard was a evil reincarnation of the Doctor whose existence was hinted at in one Tom Baker episode.
Unless I’m confusing it with something else.
Wrong Baker (Colin). Or: Six, not Four.
What, precisely, the Valeyard was actually supposed to be is a massive clusterfuck largely because Robert Holmes died midway through writing the storyline in which the fact that he’s a version of the Doctor is revealed. The writer who was then supposed to finish it, Eric Saward, was allowed access to Holmes’ notes, but then got into a pissing match with producer John Nathan-Turner that ended with him quitting and refusing to allow his version of the script to be used. After that, the new new writers Pip and Jane Baker weren’t allowed to access Holmes’ notes because of concerns that Saward would sue over similarities between their script and his. Like I said, a clusterfuck.
In the episode, the Valeyard is described as “an amalgamation” of the Doctor’s dark side somewhere between their “Twelfth and Final incarnations.” The general consensus for a long time in fandom was that he would come between the Doctor’s Twelfth and Thirteenth incarnations, but given that the numbering nomenclature has pretty much been broken beyond repair at this point it’s anyone’s guess. I think one Big Finish audio suggested that he was created by a Time Lord black ops division?
In conclusion: Act with spurious morality, no catharsis.
Yes.
Jason is far a better bartender than he ever was a TA, honestly. I was always fond of him but now I’m looking forward to these two being friends. NOW GET HER TO DOWN SOME WATER, JASON.
(No, I don’t think they’d bone. Not tonight, at least! Jason was SUPER upset when it turned out Sal was trying to use sex as a leverage for her grades. Should have he slept with her student? GOD, NOPE! But he did it out of genuine attraction at least.)
Deepfakes are nooooot that ethical either, Ruth. You oughta know by now 8′) Poor Daisy…
Well, sort of. The slip shine made it sound like he knew exactly what Sal wanted (his response in the preview to ‘Ah’m only being judged against my marks” was “That is NOT what I meant and you know it.”). He only got upset the next time she saw him AFTER they’d already screwed. That said, Jason walked Sal home when she was loaded and that’s all that happened. I don’t think Jason would take advantage of an intoxicated person.
So it is even worse than drunk Ruth wandering the street scenario, just plain fake and cheat.
This made me wondering a bit in what age this story is set up?
Don’t they have some LGBTQ related chats, sites, offline and online groups in that city so Daisy could easily find someone else who would not try to drunk cheat her up? Same for Ruth to find another person who hates herself enough to do such things?
If Billie or rather Jennifer now wanted really to help both she should help them making proper dating profiles and go from there then seeing how both are rather socially inapted for dating, one stress poops and other drinks for that reason.
Introverts like yours truly are usually super out of our depths in sites like those (from Tinder to OKCupid, though I’m showing my age there). What has worked for me is like…. Being part of a bigger community, LGBTQIA+ or fandom. But dating sites? Terrifying.
So I do buy this storyline. I’m just sad that these are the “””””solutions”””” Ruth picked (and drank) in the end.
Daisy is clearly carrying some baggage as we heard from her speech to Ruth.
This disaster of a date is still probably the best date she’s ever had.
Could you clarify what you mean by “cheat”? The only common uses I’m familiar with involve disregarding established rules, swindling a person, or romantic infidelity, nome of which seem to apply to this date.
I suspect they meant “cheap.”
‘Cheap her up’ sounds less idiomatic than ‘cheer her up.’
It is so an idiom, imaginary critic. She isn’t actually going upwards.
the first cheat is “cheap” and the second cheat is “chat”
While drunk and lonely one night Ruth started to make a profile online, but it was so embarrassingly offputting and self-deprecating she deleted it immediately and swore never to touch it again.
On the other hand Daisy had a profile on every site (paid!) and sent messages to every sapphic within 50km. The algorithm assumed she was a bot and banned her.
Now, this makes sense.
That could have gone a lot worse
If Daisy were self aware, we mighta got:
“Ruth, I know you’re there behind the bar! This is a comic, I know my squeans, and I can see your drunk bubbles!”
Surely a nood is better than squean shot tho.
VERY PUNNY
Agree with milu here!
Some expert in cartoon and comics physical law can probably tell us if squeans actually show up on camera.
Ruth’s note didn’t say she was gonna text Daisy a nude of herself.
Also, I really didn’t expect Ruth to still be at the restaurant. I assumed she’d left.
Jason and Ruth continue to flirt.
Huh, didn’t even question the timing on that text.
Prepare yourself to fight, Jason.
I have no reason to fight Jason. At this point, his femers belong to Ruth.
But she needs to put his femurs in alcohol.
Cropping off the head is actually good practice even when you’re legitimately sending nudes of yourself, particularly to someone you don’t know well. You never know if they’re going to share it with friends and then it eventually ends up on the internet.
Chicken. Let’s hope they will have another possibility with a different end.
Please please have your pants on Jason
Why the hell wouldn’t he have pants on? He’s working. Are you insinuating Ruth is possibly blowing him behind the counter? Because he was literally advising HER about consent like ten seconds ago. He may be British, but I don’t think he’s a complete monster.
It’s actually common in Britain for bartenders to serve pantless. Hopefully Jason has acclimatised enough to America to know the social norm is different there.
Now, see. I thought it was that the bartenders in Britain weren’t paid enough to afford pants. I didn’t know it was one of those customs handed down from the Picts.
Not to be that guy, but you got a source for that?
I searched for it for hours on the Inter-Ijustmadeitup.net
Of course the Australians have their own twist.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2832243/Meet-Skimpies-Girls-earn-6k-night-serving-beer-underwear-thirsty-farmers-miners-outback.html
^^^^
The short simple answer is its a reference to my comment on yesterday’s comic when it looked like they could have been flirting.
Correction – the comic after the one where it could interpreted as them flirting
This is a bartender at a bar, not a Zoom meeting of bartending.
Plot twist: Once she’s down off her euphoric high, she recognizes the adult model whose photo was used as the base for the deepfake.
What a twist.
Double plot twist its Daisy’s EX.
Wow, Ruth is adapting
Panel 3 needs a Ka-Pweeng!
Tbh, Jason has been more sympathetic in the past few strips than he was in the entire comic up to now.
Bartending looks good on him, tbh.
Feels weird to suddenly like Dumbiverse Jason.