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Dumbing of Age, Book of Revelations: MY MOMMY IS HAVING CAKE
(I mean, shit, if I believed I could get in just on the basis of I want to get in rather than passing an arbitrarily graded test of “Am I actually a Good Person or do I just want to be rewarded” then I would totes be down for being able to eat whatever I want without gettin’ barfy [almost missed trout, but the last one I had wasn’t tasty enough to offset the throat constriction])
I dunno, it just seems a little bit out of place for Becky to suddenly become obsessed with cake of all things with such an intensity (that we’ve seldom seen elsewhere).
That, and there’s other reason to suspect this is intimate frustration we’re seeing.
My best friend, husband and I recently met for a coffee and cake evening. (Which highlighted for me how strongly differently my husband and I- both with ADHD- process coffee differently, as my best friend was close to vibrating in place while my husband and I were falling asleep. But that’s not the point.)
We had two cakes, we all had a slice of each, and my husband and I were both… not barfy, but definitely feeling like it. Like we would prefer to be just to get it over and out.
Sadly nearing middle age apparently comes with a much lower cake limit and I can’t say I approve.
One assumes that the term fucking cake refers to a cake eaten to celebrate an enjoyable act of copulation rather than a cake which is actually indulging in the act of [Whatever the French call it. ***]
It was my birthday four days ago. I wanted, wanted, wanted a damn coca-cola cake. It’s been on my mind for literal years. It was good, nice and moist, but the only thing I regret is that it wasn’t chocolate, as that is supposed to really bring out the caramel flavor of coke. Ah well, next year. The point being, @Wagstaff, if you are going to have a birthday, even and especially if you are only having it as a distraction from being sad, the person you are having it for (Becky) is entitled to the sweet of their choice. When my mom died, I got Haribo Gold Bears.
I get that. It just seemed a little out of character for Becky to get that angry that fast over cake of all things.
But I could see why she would escalate that fast. Manipulative and abusive environments are full of unacknowledged and even prohibited emotions. The exact emotions vary from group to group, but anger is commonly prohibited. In healthy environments, we develop the ability to express our anger in gradual degrees appropriate to the situation. But when anger is chronically repressed, expression becomes less like a volume dial, more like an on/off switch.
My read on her anger is way different than yours because she doesn’t actually seem seriously angry to me. It’s more intensity than anger, and I think even that is just heightened for comedic effect/banter. Like, it’s normal to play at getting serious about things that don’t actually matter with friends. And here it’s a situation where, yeah, there are a lot of emotional factors, but this isn’t actually Becky angry.
Joyce is her closest friend and is probably one of the few people she feels safe to let much guard down. Considering how much she’s coping with and seems to be repressing,honestly it makes sense that she’ll go a little batshit over anything she feels safe enough to show upset over.
The intensity made perfect sense to me. When she imagines her dead mom eating cake in heaven, that helps comfort some of her grief, so nobody is allowed to threaten or negate that comforting image.
This sounds like it could be a Twilight Zone episode… character dies and goes to heaven, everything is perfect, character is having a great time, then at some point character asks where to get some cake, and an angel smiles and says “Oh, we don’t have any cake here,” and then the music gets creepy and the camera zooms in on the character’s face who then says “WAIT, WHERE AM I??”
There was a short AU scene in The Simpsons once where Homer’s life is perfect: He lives in a mansion; his kids are well-behaved and respect him… everything seems perfect until he asks for a doughnut.
They’ve never heard of doughnuts.
He shrieks and runs out, leaving for another world in another attempt to get back to his own.
Meanwhile, AU Marge looks out the window. “Oh,” she says, “It’s raining.”
There’s a big reveal at the end of the first season that really changes things going forward, but I feel like you could at least give the premise of the first season to someone. If you’re trying to get them to watch it and they’re not sold based on that, the twist doesn’t make the first season unwatchable if known.
On a wider scale, some people just really hate spoilers, or at least think media is more fun to engage in without them. I do think it’s annoying when those people decide for others what they can know going in and get really insistent about it.
It gets to the point sometimes where I feel like even saying the name of a show or game is treated as a hardcore spoiler. You’re right, of course, that some people prefer to go into their stories totally blind, and I agree that it’s irritating when they make that everyone else’s problem.
Oooh I feel so called out!
OK the film was thinking of a few days ago was Coppola’s The Conversation. Real good film ^^
BTW someone told me recently that during some lockdown in NYC the city wrote huge spoilers of popular shows in big letters on city displays to discourage people from going out XD …it has to be an urban legend. But its so good, I don’t want to check. Please disregard my hedging and treat it as fact
I mean, if I told you about a movie you have to see but said it’s because of a twist the experience would inevitably be compromised/ changed because when you watched you’d be constantly looking for the twist (or even if you weren’t actively looking for one, whenever it came you wouldn’t be surprised). So even though I understand the frustration, I also totally get the idea of people being super secretive about the plot of something.
What I know is mostly that it takes place in Heaven and there might be infinite angel food with no consequences, and also it apparently has neat philosophical takes or something.
As someone who’s never actually understood Heaven, despite being Christian, it sounded like I’d get something out of it. Just have never gotten around to it.
i thought the philosophical content was unimpressive, not because, like, i know philosophy (i don’t) and i did in fact learn a few things (eg.: “Who died and left Plato in charge? —…Socrates!!!”), but the stories will always prioritize rule of funny and rule of drama over philosophical gristle, which is good actually because it makes it a really fun show =) it’s just not as deep as it pretends to be.
Can’t say anything about SAO after the first couple of arcs. Attack on Titan, on the other hand, is about as shallow as they come. It’s deliberately engineered to seem deep and stuff, but that’s because nobody ever shuts the hell up in it, so the audience’s brains naturally go “Well, they’re saying a lot of stuff and it’s taking a long time, so this must be really meaningful”. Truthfully, Power Rangers Ninja Storm has more philosophical depth.
Wait, the later seasons? Maybe our personal perspectives are just really different in a few ways, because I’ve been catching up on Season 3 on, and it honestly comes off more trite than ever. It went from “war bad” to “war bad and also please don’t do a Holocaust”, which are good points and all, but they’re not explored in any sort of interesting way. Just ninety-nine minutes of people screaming platitudes about the human spirit at each other, with an episode’s worth of cool monster fights sprinkled in there in 30-second chunks.
I have no thoughts on Hunter × Hunter, having never knowingly seen even a brief clip from it. It’s been recommended to me a lot, but when people do that with media, I reflexively reject it, even when I’m sure it’s probably fine. It took until like February of this year for me to check out JoJo because of that.
Admittedly, I was being pretty snarky with the shows I mentioned in the first reply, and I of course don’t fault you for liking Attack on Titan. It’s perfectly watchable, and like I said I’m catching up to it, so I don’t want it to come across like a lack of depth is a reason for me to dislike a show.
That said, my favorite anime shows are Yu-Gi-Oh!, Pokémon, Digimon Adventure, Re:Zero (probably the newest one I’ve seen), and Spider Riders. Of the bunch, they’re more or less all pretty shallow, but Spider Riders is the one I’d call the most philosophically deep. As for anime I actually consider deep? To continue the trend of honesty, I haven’t really seen any, on account of not seeking out that sort of story for entertainment.
i mean, to be completely fair “how deep” a work is is wildly subjective. i should’ve said that. some people obviously got a lot of brain workout from TGP and while i didn’t, for whatever reason, and i could definitely (and would gladly) argue about the consistency of certain plot points or how certain questions do or don’t get addressed etc, clearly my sweeping statement about its overall depth was unnecessarily mean.
but anyway, yeah i’ve definitely encountered works that i thought were in fact as deep as it said on the box, by which i mean that were advertised as or acclaimed for being complex and ambiguous and making you think a whole bunch of thoughts, and it did that for me. TGP didn’t do that for me. but again, who cares =D
(and by “i would gladly” i mean i absolutely have written several thousand words debating TGP’s lack of philosophical consistency in youtube comment threads) (so i guess by that yardstick TGP DID get my brain churning, just mostly in arguing that imo it wasn’t good philosophically lol)
lol
I only know about it at all from memes and a Quinton Reviews video about the show. So technically, I “know what happens”, in the broader scale, I just haven’t watched it or seen much discussion that wasn’t buried under spoiler tags.
well, yeah. the season 1 finale twist is both really cool (therefore worth protecting) and really important plot-wise (therefore hard not to discuss).
…but if you’re into in-depth discussions of media you haven’t seen, and you don’t care about spoilers, i recommend Big Joel’s video essay. i essentially agree with all his points.
This may be a bit removed from the post intended to respond to, but it is The Good Place, not specifically Heaven (or it would be called that). There are some elements of Heaven and also some elements of other things, but it’s still an interesting watch even if you don’t believe in any religion… I went in to the show not liking the setting (I don’t really like the Heaven/Hell setting in general), and I do think it ultimately has the “correct” ending for the setting that was established, for all the philosophical hoops it goes through.
Jeez Becky, don’t you think you are pushing too hard? I mean, maybe your mom didn’t want cake. Also, don’t get barfy over frosting, there are much better reasons.
Of COURSE there’s cake in Heaven.
It’s HEAVEN!
There’s cake, cartoons, amusement parks with no lines and all the wasabi-flavored shrimp chips you can eat!
“I dunno, it sounds like we aren’t even really people enough up there for cake to make sense.”
Yeah, I distinctly remember there being a stage in my journey where I noticed that the Bible’s description of Heaven sounded eerily like something the Cybermen would say
Ehh, I go back and forth on whether Cyber-Brig was a touching tribute to a character who sadly never appeared in the modern era or a disgrace to the memory of an actor they never bothered to ask back while he was alive.
I know this is friendly banter and they’re smiling and keeping each other upbeat, but I feel like the longer this conversation goes on the more depressing it gets
Yep. It’s essentially Insturmentality from Neon Genesis.
A mass collection of humanity existing as one entity woth all barriers destroyed between us.
It’s… an uncomfortable thought.
You know, the show never made you look forward to Instrumentality as far as I can remember. Unless you’re Gendo, then it’s the best thing in the world.
As long as all that sweet cream icing isn’t flowing down, we’re all good. However, that would imply someone left the cake out in the rain, and I know neither is that careless.
Like Willis said, it’s a birthday party, birthday parties have cake. They’re discussing having a party for beckys recently (less than a year) dead mom. Even if she’s putting up a front of being totally okay and using the idea of her mom being in paradise to cope, there’s bound to be some weird emotional spikes here and there
Becky is using the concept of heaven to ignore the fact that her mom is dead.
As long as she can imagine her mom living “somewhere else”–doing living people things (like eating cake)– she can avoid the grief of facing the fact that her mom isn’t living.
Please don’t use psycho. IMO we should work to get that word out of the common vocabulary as an insult. It works into the whole “mentally ill = evil” bias that a lot of people still hold, and using language like this is not helping.
That was short for “psychopath”, which is an appropriate word to use for a god with the nerve to murder the children of one of his most faithful believers.
But point taken indeed. I will use the long version next time.
Honestly, I would probably avoid the term psychopath as well and just use ‘monster’ or ‘amoral/immoral’ because people with Antisocial Personality Disorder sometimes use the terms ASPD, sociopath and psychopath interchangeably for themselves and it isn’t the best defined area of psychology to say if these are all truly separate things or the same thing presenting differently.
And the main reason people use the term ‘psychopath’ is to mean ‘without empathy or attachment’ or that they are inherently evil, but other conditions have reduced or lack of affective or cognitive empathy as a symptom and lack of attachment is a symptom of Reactive Attachment Disorder and I would not say anyone was ever born inherently evil or that any condition inherently can make a person evil.
I think it just adds stigma to these particular symptoms to use this term too especially as personality disorders and less heard of conditions still remain much less accepted and it undermines that evil actions are choices.
You do realize you completely missed the point of “don’t work into the mentally ill = evil bias”, right? Just using the longer version of the term doesn’t change that you’re equating mentally ill with evil.
I don’t know what you’re getting at with this so I’m gonna ask for some clarification.
Because this sounds like you are saying that mental illness and evil are equatable, and I think you meant “no, mentally ill people aren’t evil, evil is evil, they’re different things” and while normally I think it’s unfair to make someone defend themselves for something they didn’t say or only said in someone else’s interpretation, I feel this particular topic and especially in this particular space, it’s important to ask for that clarification if only so somebody else doesn’t get the wrong impression.
Almost all evil people are mentally ill and are evil for that reason. Very few mentally ill people are evil. Fortunately evil people are rare. Confusion arises because people, whether mentally ill or not, sometimes do evil things.
Evil, of course, is defined as things I really don’t like.
This sounds like scenario where it’s real easy to get to your point without a term like “mentally ill”, which exists for an actual real life group of people who suffer widespread stigmatization.
My point was that people who are evil, with some very rare exceptions, are evil because there is something wrong with the way their minds work. This is not to say that people whose minds work in a way that is not typical are evil, because that is both incorrect and absurd. And in fact, I’m pretty sure that my mind does not work in a typical fashion and I’m pretty sure that I’m not evil.
I am very grateful on how generous this forum is, how I can write without fear of becoming the target of the next witch hunt. But just for the record, I don’t think it’s a good idea to set the bar for offense that low. It could turn down people that mean no harm, and what ultimately results is that any discussion amounts to no more than seeing how loudly you could get the correct opinions to echo in an echo chamber.
Also, I think “monster” is a less appropriate descriptor. After all, some of your favorite good guys from the media you enjoy are “monsters”, are they not?
The misuse of a real term that encourages the stigmatization of an actual real life mental illness experienced by actual real life people isn’t “setting the bar for offense too low.”
I wasn’t using it in a medical fashion. I was thinking more of the colloquial fashion. I mean, are we allowed to call the Joker or Stewie Griffin psychopaths, or would that also count as denigrating the differently abled?
Being gay doesn’t cause you to perform destructive actions.
But regardless, I see your point. Psychopaths have real mental illness and they can’t help the way they are.
The only real problem I have with something like that is when corrupt authority, abusers and dictators try to use it to avoid accountability for their actions.
Compassion is really important for us as a species. But be careful, as there is a very important difference between healthy and naive compassion. We can have compassion for all kinds of people, good, bad and in between. We can and should feel compassion for destructive people, but we do not need to let their destructiveness into our lives.
The question of someone using an existing mental problem to get out of the consequence of their actions is not only irrelevant to what we are talking about, it’s also something that doesn’t happen in any meaningful capacity to the point where “we need to be careful”, because the people who actually suffer in that “concern” are those with disorders, at the hands of neurotypical folks whose greatest understanding of mental illness is “the criminal mastermind on this cop show faked insanity to get away with his crimes, now he’s a free man.”
I have development disorders, Autism Spectrum Disorder and newly diagnosed ADHD, and I’m only now understanding the tremendous impact they’ve had on my life and how being undiagnosed and unmedicated for as long as I have has lead me to failure in both education and employment, and then that failure leads me to self-loathing and doubt.
The actual worst part, though, isn’t having them. They’re disabilities, they make your life harder by design. No, the biggest weight is how many douchebags I gotta put up with telling me it’s no big deal, it’s fake, everyone says they have it, I’m a liar, I’m a mooch, I’m a failure, why can’t you do what everyone else can do.
If my disability becomes relevant to a scenario with another person, say employment, I think that’s worth talking about, that’s a place where concern the impact of a disability can have on employment is at least sensible to discuss, and I live in a country where firing me for that disability is actually illegal.
But you’d be surprised how “concern about the bad apples taking advantage” ends up devouring space to talk about disability and accessibility, when it’s not a matter of talking about how we can be good and supportive to people with disabilities, it’s whether all of them are thieves and con artists.
I was referring to psychopaths specifically, and I definitely wasn’t trying to rope things like ADHD and autism into it.
Sometimes psychopaths do wind up hurting people because of their disorder. And all psychopaths, whether they do or don’t engage in such destruction, need every bit of support they can get.
Some enablers of abusers actually do invoke mental disorder as a means of blurring their accountability, which only further detracts from the needs of those who actually have these disorders, adding insult to injury.
I’m so sorry you had such a rough time in your life. But to know the pain of people making hurtful assumptions about you, only to turn around and make hurtful assumptions about others, is a pretty sad example of copying the enemy.
“But to know the pain of people making hurtful assumptions about you, only to turn around and make hurtful assumptions about others, is a pretty sad example of copying the enemy.”
You wanna try that again, bud.
‘Cause I know what that sounds like, I know what those words mean when somebody says them to me, and I need to know if you’re actually that much of an asshole to say them or if this is another one of your misunderstandings.
But my very original point still stands. Cake or no cake in heaven, Lucifer would still be justified. Next to the war-mongering, blood-thirsty dictator Yahweh, Satan/Lucifer seems relatively innocent.
If you’re having a conversation that gives you an opportunity to reflect on your use of language that other, more informed people have given reason why it’s harmful, how it stigmatizes real life people by treating their existing disorders as a shorthand for evil, maybe don’t argue for hours on why you can keep doing it, don’t look for scenarios where you can continue holding onto those views like “oh but what if it’s a real bad guy though” as if you’re so objective and impartial that you’re able to define at a glance someone who is and isn’t “exploiting mental illness as a defense”, and when someone tells you how that exact brand of stigmatization propagates, that it keeps going because you’re so desperate to cling to that outdated viewpoint that you look for the minuscule amount of people who do exploit them with no regard for how that hunt for “the real bad guys” leads to the constant questioning of real life people who now have to spend time defending their inherent right to exist as people with disabilities without being questioned, don’t outright state that being corrected on this, and being corrected on ignorant views is something you’d think you’d want, is exactly the same as “making hurtful assumptions about others” in relation to living with mental illness and disability, and that it’s a “pretty sad example” of engaging in the same kind of hurtful assumptions that hurts actual real life people and, specifically, the kind of assumptions about my inherent worth as a human being I struggle with all the time. I am not making an assumption of you, I am making a judgment of how you are acting right now.
Because for someone who says they’re only able to grow by having their views challenged, you sure do fight as hard as possible to hold onto your existing views, regardless of anyone telling you the kind of miasma they contribute to.
I didn’t say that I was gonna use the term psychopath as a general word for referring to bad people anymore….
Look, I can tell this is a really touchy subject for you, so I guess your position is your position, and I’m just not gonna talk to you about it anymore.
@ Clif – I think I get what you mean, but I’d argue that’s incorrect. People can be evil and have brains that work the same way most people’s do, and, in fact, most evil folks do. Entitlement isn’t an illness. Aggression isn’t an illness. Being an asshole isn’t an illness. Being unwilling to challenge preconceived notions or holding oppressive views isn’t an illness. All of those things are more likely to result in hurting others than being mentally ill. Saying evil folks “have something wrong with them” and pushing them under the label of “mentally ill” only serves to further stigmatize mental illness, neurodivergence, and disabilities, when people dealing with those things are already more susceptible to violence.
I’ve always thought that Rebellion was the cooler sword, between the two. Yamato is fine and all, but if you’ve got a broadsword made of bones and that’s somehow not the edgiest weapon of the pair, something’s off.
/dmcposting
Who first seduc’d them to that SWEET revolt?
Th’ infernal Serpent; he it was, whose CAKE
Stird up with SUGAR and DRIED FRUITS, BLISS’D OUT
The Mother of Mankind, what time his URGE
Had cast him out from Heav’n, with all his Host
Of HANGRY Angels, by whose aid aspiring
To BAKE himself A RAD CAKE FOR ALL his Peers,
He trusted to have SURPASS’D the most High,
AT LEAST RE: CAKE; and with ambitious aim
Against the DULL and BORING FOOD of God
MADE MAD SOUFFLES in Heav’n and PECAN PIES
With GREAT SUCCESS.
And that was one of the things I could never quite wrap my head around either…. assuming that we are still ‘ourselves’ when/if we get to heaven, which version of ‘ourselves’ are we? Or will we be whatever version of ‘ourselves’ that we need to be to connect with whomever else we ‘meet’ on the other side?
Or will it be more like Joyce’s scenario … we won’t really be ‘human’, but merely spirits in a state of eternal bliss just being in the presence of God??
A lot of the cake discussion people seem to be forgetting that the only cake in Heaven is Christmas cake, it is Christmas day every day there after all.
Joyce raises an interesting theological point, which many (most?) Christians ignore: assuming (for the sake of argument) that the Bible is accurate about heaven, just how ‘human’ will its eventual inhabitants be?
I’m guessing probably not much, given that the Biblical description of angels makes it clear that, rather than being beautiful blond people in white dresses, with wings and harp, such as we see depicted in most Christian art, they aren’t even remotely humanoid at all, but more like something out of Lovecraft…
Since there is no sin in heaven, humans would be fundamentally changed psychologically. Think about how much your sins define who you are. Without sin you would not be the person you are on Earth.
In a benevolent afterlife, Purgatory is where you shed yourself of your sinful ways and change organically into a perfect being retaining some of who you were. This would take a very long time, but eternity is really, really long.
In a less benevolent afterlife, you are instantly turned into a lobotomized zombie who spends eternity worshiping God and *shudder* no longer cares about cake!
Careful Joyce, very careful. That seems something really serious for Becky. She’s menacing and seems ready to be aggressive and i can perfectly understand her. Cakes are important!!!
Alternately she is being mock upset to go along with the fact that she knows she is saying absurd things and doesn’t care. I bet Joyce is a good enough friend to share a birthday cake for her mom. And both of them will be less sad.
Well, those beings you’re referring to aren’t technically “angels”; they’re more accurately described as “heavenly beings”.
The word “angel” comes from the Greek Angelos, itself a translation of the Hebrew Mal’ak, meaning “messenger” — hence, the divine messengers sent to earth to do Yahweh’s dirty work.
The “angels” aren’t as weird as the other heavenly beings.They don’t even have wings. In fact, they look just like ordinary people.
Ah, THIS, this was one of the very first chinks in my faith’s armour: The more I read what the Bible had to say about the afterlife, the less it looked like something I’d actually enjoy. In fact, as Joyce hints in the fourth panel, the less of me it seemed would be left to enjoy this vague, unearthly bliss.
If all sadness, pain, misery, and sin along with the love and affection we felt for non-God entities… what is left? And what is the point of consolation if you can’t even remember you were hurt? Especially as the “consolation” stretches eternally into the infinite? Even if memories were not wiped, how could I call the “me” who lived, loved, and cried on this Earth for some decades “me” after endless millennia? But this “me” is all I have right now! I don’t want to lose it! To lose it and yet keep on living eternally is no reward, it is nothing.
Oh and let’s not forget that if conflict and sin are exiled, all the entertainment I love could not make it there.
There’s a horrid gremlin part of my brain that went straight to “threesome”, followed immediately with something even more inappropriate based on two key words from Becky.
You got the first one right. The second one was “mommy”. But I’ve been too sleep deprived and strung out lately to properly connect those two words into a coherent thought, so I leave the heavy lifting to y’all.
Your doubts are well-founded. There’s this video (I may have mentioned it before) on YouTube of an Australian guy eating cake ingredients raw, [REDACTED], then his buddies [REDACTED] and the three of them [REDACTED]. Those guys have a few videos like that, actually.
once i [REDACTED] my [REDACTED] and it [REDACTED]!!! i didn’t think it was possible to [REDACTED] but then i [REDAC— WAIT WHAT HOW IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE], way into [NOW THAT’S JUST SILLY STOP IT] and before i knew it [YOU’RE JUST SAYING THAT TO MESS WITH ME]. but yeah, that was the last time i ever tried to [I HATE THIS JOB]… well, the last time until that time i [YOU KNOW WHAT FUCK IT I QUIT]. great times.
Ha, that’s why I think Joyce should have come clean. Tip of the iceberg, this is. Soon enough, she’ll be doubting scripture at every turn and irritating the hell out of Becky, but they’ll still both pretend that everything is the same and tiptoeing around the issue making everybody upset until (because this is a story) it all blows up in super dramatic fashion.
Mark my words, these are my predictions! I have seen it! And it is not at all predictable regardless of what *you* may have “figured out”.
indeed! very bold. well, i predict there will be hijinks and shenanigans! i also predict you will hate me when i post all-caps “called it” comments when my prediction turns out to be true. i am very good at this.
….oh also i predict Clif will make some kind of joke as a response to this comment. for no special reason i’d like to point out that you never know when your connection has some sort of freak timeout while sending a packet and the server blorps out your message at some random time because that’s totally how servers work, i also feel like noting that i’m writing this at 12:45pm EST. ok bye
Just a bunch of spirits enjoying the idea of cake in a noncorporeal way. While watching every instant of Becky’s life on DVR because they have infinite time.
Huh. Never seen that interpretation of that verse. I’ve always seen it be interpreted as something along the lines of “heaven don’t see race, heaven don’t see gender, everyone’s equal, etc.”
today in #9chickweedlane i learned we have to be shown children learning and relearning what sex is, for Reasons, even though they already clearly know and have prepared nuanced questions about it!
also that Gran must hate, if she's still alive, how Old Juliette is the same but with gray hair
one of my favorite things is when a commenter explodes WHEN DO THESE CHARACTERS GET THERAPY but directed towards a character who canonically has a regular therapist
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btw if you're one of those rando bluesky weirdos who doesn't know me but sees me in the wild being sarcastic and don't know i'm being sarcastic because you haven't taken like 30 seconds to, like, maybe look at my user profile or something, keep walking, you're not going to score internet points here
Here's an entertaining cite at the bottom of the first page
Josh Gerstein@joshgerstein.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
JUST IN: Milwaukee Judge Hannah Dugan moves to dismiss federal criminal case against her for allegedly helping immigrant hide from ICE. Her lawyers say she's protected by official acts & judicial immunity and 10th Amendment. Doc: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
Where did Hollywood go so wrong? I thought movies were supposed to be an escape from reality, a chance to put your worries aside and not have to think about any underlying ideas or concepts. Well, not anymore.
theonion.com/you-can...
It's not a new argument, of course, but Chesterton dismissed it effectively in 1908.
"You will hear everlastingly... this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man."
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com ⋅ 2d
Hawley dismisses Trump lining his pockets with his memecoin: "Listen, I think nobody believes that Donald Trump can be bought. I mean, what does Donald Trump need more money for?"
wilbur, savvy enough to know he's in a comic strip but still not a great actor, awkwardly lifts a muffin up into frame so that we, the audience, understand that he has a muffin right now, which is very important narratively, but he's not really selling it well as an organic, human action
preternia @preternia.com ⋅ 1d
Josh Gerstein @joshgerstein.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com ⋅ 2d
Pavel
@spavel.bsky.social ⋅ 11d
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Dumbing of Age, Book of Revelations: MY MOMMY IS HAVING CAKE
(I mean, shit, if I believed I could get in just on the basis of I want to get in rather than passing an arbitrarily graded test of “Am I actually a Good Person or do I just want to be rewarded” then I would totes be down for being able to eat whatever I want without gettin’ barfy [almost missed trout, but the last one I had wasn’t tasty enough to offset the throat constriction])
DOA Revelations: What Kind of Crappy-Assed Heaven Doesn’t Have Cake
DoA Book of Regurgitations: I Will Be Gettin’ Barfy.
I didn’t know cake meant that much to Becky!
Or is “cake” just code for something else?
Like that “call it *ice cream*” scene from Hey Arnold?
I mean…
I was originally thinking that Becky was trying to pick Joyce’s brain or something.
But your suggestion definitely sounds a lot more desirable!!!
I’ve seen multiple people seemingly independently use ‘cake’ as a euphemism for sex, so it might be.
Cake is all sorts of things. Sex, asses, some kind of pastry I think…
… a lie …
(c’mon, someone was inevitably going to do it, may as well be me)
Apropos.
Icing….. LMAO
Wait a minute, maybe it actually COULD be vented sexual frustration. Who knows?
Sometimes a cake is just a cake.
Well, Becky referring to sex or just cake are definitely both more desirable than her trying to pick Joyce’s brain.
This can go any number of directions, but I sure hope that it isn’t the latter.
Well, I guess that’s gonna happen sooner or later, but why else would the next arc be called “Sister Christian”?
I dunno, it just seems a little bit out of place for Becky to suddenly become obsessed with cake of all things with such an intensity (that we’ve seldom seen elsewhere).
That, and there’s other reason to suspect this is intimate frustration we’re seeing.
jesus christ guys it’s a birthday party, you get fucking cake for a birthday party
Why would icing make you barf?
Evidently you’ve never eaten too much icing in one sitting
If you’ve never eaten enough sugar for your body to violently reject every decision you’ve ever made, then you have never truly lived.
A lot of it. At once.
Somebody fucked it. Obviously. It’s like nobody’s ever been to a birthday party, around here.
My best friend, husband and I recently met for a coffee and cake evening. (Which highlighted for me how strongly differently my husband and I- both with ADHD- process coffee differently, as my best friend was close to vibrating in place while my husband and I were falling asleep. But that’s not the point.)
We had two cakes, we all had a slice of each, and my husband and I were both… not barfy, but definitely feeling like it. Like we would prefer to be just to get it over and out.
Sadly nearing middle age apparently comes with a much lower cake limit and I can’t say I approve.
…. but we are for some reason specifying that it’s a fucking cake.
…. I mean it’s a normal turn of phrase, but in the context of this thread it’s a bit double-entendre.
“let them eat FUCKING cake”
—alt-history Marie-Antoinette
One assumes that the term fucking cake refers to a cake eaten to celebrate an enjoyable act of copulation rather than a cake which is actually indulging in the act of [Whatever the French call it. ***]
*** Probably the English ballet.
But in French.
Unless you’re my daughter.
She doesn’t like cake, so generally we go with other desserts for her. Usually a peach pie, for example.
It was my birthday four days ago. I wanted, wanted, wanted a damn coca-cola cake. It’s been on my mind for literal years. It was good, nice and moist, but the only thing I regret is that it wasn’t chocolate, as that is supposed to really bring out the caramel flavor of coke. Ah well, next year. The point being, @Wagstaff, if you are going to have a birthday, even and especially if you are only having it as a distraction from being sad, the person you are having it for (Becky) is entitled to the sweet of their choice. When my mom died, I got Haribo Gold Bears.
I get that. It just seemed a little out of character for Becky to get that angry that fast over cake of all things.
But I could see why she would escalate that fast. Manipulative and abusive environments are full of unacknowledged and even prohibited emotions. The exact emotions vary from group to group, but anger is commonly prohibited. In healthy environments, we develop the ability to express our anger in gradual degrees appropriate to the situation. But when anger is chronically repressed, expression becomes less like a volume dial, more like an on/off switch.
My read on her anger is way different than yours because she doesn’t actually seem seriously angry to me. It’s more intensity than anger, and I think even that is just heightened for comedic effect/banter. Like, it’s normal to play at getting serious about things that don’t actually matter with friends. And here it’s a situation where, yeah, there are a lot of emotional factors, but this isn’t actually Becky angry.
I guess I should have used the word “intensity”. But the same basic principle described works with any emotion.
Joyce is her closest friend and is probably one of the few people she feels safe to let much guard down. Considering how much she’s coping with and seems to be repressing,honestly it makes sense that she’ll go a little batshit over anything she feels safe enough to show upset over.
The intensity made perfect sense to me. When she imagines her dead mom eating cake in heaven, that helps comfort some of her grief, so nobody is allowed to threaten or negate that comforting image.
I think it’s more the concept that her mom in Heaven is too inhuman to want cake that’s the problem.
And sometimes it is not a cake
But who’d get barfy from sex? during pregnancy, might happen. Is there pregnancy in heaven? maybe that’s the real meaning of being reborn?
Eating icing of all things seems more a euphemism to “eating out” your partner.
if heaven doesn’t have cake, then heaven is more like hell
This sounds like it could be a Twilight Zone episode… character dies and goes to heaven, everything is perfect, character is having a great time, then at some point character asks where to get some cake, and an angel smiles and says “Oh, we don’t have any cake here,” and then the music gets creepy and the camera zooms in on the character’s face who then says “WAIT, WHERE AM I??”
…”we do have a kajillion flavours of froyo, though” the angel continues.
“….Oh I get it… I get it… THIS… IS THE BAD PLACE!”
Actually, I think this was done as a Got Milk commercial back in 1995.
Yep, here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eph6_fz49rc
There was a short AU scene in The Simpsons once where Homer’s life is perfect: He lives in a mansion; his kids are well-behaved and respect him… everything seems perfect until he asks for a doughnut.
They’ve never heard of doughnuts.
He shrieks and runs out, leaving for another world in another attempt to get back to his own.
Meanwhile, AU Marge looks out the window. “Oh,” she says, “It’s raining.”
Outside, doughnuts fall to the grass.
youtube.com/watch?v=Y8DFJBwZchE
Maybe heaven is actually just nothing but cake. You’re cake, I’m cake, it’ll be like twitter in 2020 when everything was actually cake.
That’s probably what Paul meant, yeah.
I’m supposed to watch The Good Place someday. I feel like there are harmonic vibes around that.
Is that one of those shows you can’t talk about online because every single innoccuous clip is somehow a spoiler? That’s the impression I’ve gotten.
Indeed, it is.
I’ve already said too much.
That’s actually really annoying and frustrating. I don’t get the appeal big a story you have to treat like a state secret.
There’s a big reveal at the end of the first season that really changes things going forward, but I feel like you could at least give the premise of the first season to someone. If you’re trying to get them to watch it and they’re not sold based on that, the twist doesn’t make the first season unwatchable if known.
On a wider scale, some people just really hate spoilers, or at least think media is more fun to engage in without them. I do think it’s annoying when those people decide for others what they can know going in and get really insistent about it.
It gets to the point sometimes where I feel like even saying the name of a show or game is treated as a hardcore spoiler. You’re right, of course, that some people prefer to go into their stories totally blind, and I agree that it’s irritating when they make that everyone else’s problem.
Oooh I feel so called out!
OK the film was thinking of a few days ago was Coppola’s The Conversation. Real good film ^^
BTW someone told me recently that during some lockdown in NYC the city wrote huge spoilers of popular shows in big letters on city displays to discourage people from going out XD …it has to be an urban legend. But its so good, I don’t want to check. Please disregard my hedging and treat it as fact
I mean, if I told you about a movie you have to see but said it’s because of a twist the experience would inevitably be compromised/ changed because when you watched you’d be constantly looking for the twist (or even if you weren’t actively looking for one, whenever it came you wouldn’t be surprised). So even though I understand the frustration, I also totally get the idea of people being super secretive about the plot of something.
Unfortunate result of being a fast paced show with a lot of plot twisting and revelations about the nature of the shows’ setting
What I know is mostly that it takes place in Heaven and there might be infinite angel food with no consequences, and also it apparently has neat philosophical takes or something.
As someone who’s never actually understood Heaven, despite being Christian, it sounded like I’d get something out of it. Just have never gotten around to it.
i thought the philosophical content was unimpressive, not because, like, i know philosophy (i don’t) and i did in fact learn a few things (eg.: “Who died and left Plato in charge? —…Socrates!!!”), but the stories will always prioritize rule of funny and rule of drama over philosophical gristle, which is good actually because it makes it a really fun show =) it’s just not as deep as it pretends to be.
I’ve rarely ingested a piece of media that was as deep as it pretended to be. Not to be pretentious.
Anime seems really deep much of the time, and I don’t think they’re even trying to be.
At least, the ones I watch…
Not really sureGhost Stories and Death Note are gonna be rewriting any worldviews any time soon.
I was thinking more along the lines of SAO: Alicization and Attack on Titan.
Can’t say anything about SAO after the first couple of arcs. Attack on Titan, on the other hand, is about as shallow as they come. It’s deliberately engineered to seem deep and stuff, but that’s because nobody ever shuts the hell up in it, so the audience’s brains naturally go “Well, they’re saying a lot of stuff and it’s taking a long time, so this must be really meaningful”. Truthfully, Power Rangers Ninja Storm has more philosophical depth.
As for Attack on Titan, I may have been thinking of a few episodes of the later seasons.
Wait, the later seasons? Maybe our personal perspectives are just really different in a few ways, because I’ve been catching up on Season 3 on, and it honestly comes off more trite than ever. It went from “war bad” to “war bad and also please don’t do a Holocaust”, which are good points and all, but they’re not explored in any sort of interesting way. Just ninety-nine minutes of people screaming platitudes about the human spirit at each other, with an episode’s worth of cool monster fights sprinkled in there in 30-second chunks.
If only ODM gear were possible in the real world….
What do you think about the philosophy of Hunter x Hunter?
I have no thoughts on Hunter × Hunter, having never knowingly seen even a brief clip from it. It’s been recommended to me a lot, but when people do that with media, I reflexively reject it, even when I’m sure it’s probably fine. It took until like February of this year for me to check out JoJo because of that.
Tell me, what are your favorite anime? Do they at all overlap with the ones you think are deep, with or without trying to be?
Admittedly, I was being pretty snarky with the shows I mentioned in the first reply, and I of course don’t fault you for liking Attack on Titan. It’s perfectly watchable, and like I said I’m catching up to it, so I don’t want it to come across like a lack of depth is a reason for me to dislike a show.
That said, my favorite anime shows are Yu-Gi-Oh!, Pokémon, Digimon Adventure, Re:Zero (probably the newest one I’ve seen), and Spider Riders. Of the bunch, they’re more or less all pretty shallow, but Spider Riders is the one I’d call the most philosophically deep. As for anime I actually consider deep? To continue the trend of honesty, I haven’t really seen any, on account of not seeking out that sort of story for entertainment.
i mean, to be completely fair “how deep” a work is is wildly subjective. i should’ve said that. some people obviously got a lot of brain workout from TGP and while i didn’t, for whatever reason, and i could definitely (and would gladly) argue about the consistency of certain plot points or how certain questions do or don’t get addressed etc, clearly my sweeping statement about its overall depth was unnecessarily mean.
but anyway, yeah i’ve definitely encountered works that i thought were in fact as deep as it said on the box, by which i mean that were advertised as or acclaimed for being complex and ambiguous and making you think a whole bunch of thoughts, and it did that for me. TGP didn’t do that for me. but again, who cares =D
I agree with you about (perceived) depth being very subjective.
(and by “i would gladly” i mean i absolutely have written several thousand words debating TGP’s lack of philosophical consistency in youtube comment threads) (so i guess by that yardstick TGP DID get my brain churning, just mostly in arguing that imo it wasn’t good philosophically lol)
lol
I only know about it at all from memes and a Quinton Reviews video about the show. So technically, I “know what happens”, in the broader scale, I just haven’t watched it or seen much discussion that wasn’t buried under spoiler tags.
well, yeah. the season 1 finale twist is both really cool (therefore worth protecting) and really important plot-wise (therefore hard not to discuss).
…but if you’re into in-depth discussions of media you haven’t seen, and you don’t care about spoilers, i recommend Big Joel’s video essay. i essentially agree with all his points.
This may be a bit removed from the post intended to respond to, but it is The Good Place, not specifically Heaven (or it would be called that). There are some elements of Heaven and also some elements of other things, but it’s still an interesting watch even if you don’t believe in any religion… I went in to the show not liking the setting (I don’t really like the Heaven/Hell setting in general), and I do think it ultimately has the “correct” ending for the setting that was established, for all the philosophical hoops it goes through.
Jeez Becky, don’t you think you are pushing too hard? I mean, maybe your mom didn’t want cake. Also, don’t get barfy over frosting, there are much better reasons.
HER MOM WILL GET EVERY CAKE
…and the ice cream will have icing on it.
“Should we go do something interesting for her to watch?”
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Sometimes a cake is just a cake.
Sing it Clif.
A cake is just a cake
Icing’s just icing
The fundamentals things apply
As times goes by
Of COURSE there’s cake in Heaven.
It’s HEAVEN!
There’s cake, cartoons, amusement parks with no lines and all the wasabi-flavored shrimp chips you can eat!
And you can win all the Ulssa dolls you want!
In heaven you can have your cake…
AND EAT IT TOO!
Yeah, but down here I can halve my cake and eat two.
Room. Now. No dessert.
Don’t worry. I’ll slip you ice cream latter.
Er, later. Even if I have to climb the latter to you window to do it.
“I dunno, it sounds like we aren’t even really people enough up there for cake to make sense.”
Yeah, I distinctly remember there being a stage in my journey where I noticed that the Bible’s description of Heaven sounded eerily like something the Cybermen would say
You will be upgraded.
…Heh, almost forgot for a second that “Heaven=Cybermen” actually was a thing that happened in the show.
Yyyep.
(And the Brig got the send-off, and the salute, he deserved.)
Ehh, I go back and forth on whether Cyber-Brig was a touching tribute to a character who sadly never appeared in the modern era or a disgrace to the memory of an actor they never bothered to ask back while he was alive.
*plays “It’s Too Heavenly Here” on Voxola PR-76*
Wtf 4 eyelids? This is serious.
Or “squeeny” as the Pogo cast called it when they called out Doonesbury.
I wanna go if there’s a rock and roll heaven because; you know they have one…
Yeah, the squinty face is new.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen Becky look this serious….
I know this is friendly banter and they’re smiling and keeping each other upbeat, but I feel like the longer this conversation goes on the more depressing it gets
Yeah, I think there’s going to be a lot of underlying tension and complicated feelings, regardless, but especially on the topic of heaven.
The other shoe is just climbing higher and higher before it drops.
It is said that during the Council of Nicea, Saint Nicholas punched a bishop in the face, then said “My mommy is having cake.”
Sometimes a cake is just a cake.
Other times …
It’s a cigar?…
I don’t think that’s what Siggy said.
His mommy was having cigar.
With Mike.
Sure, let’s go with that.
Yep. It’s essentially Insturmentality from Neon Genesis.
A mass collection of humanity existing as one entity woth all barriers destroyed between us.
It’s… an uncomfortable thought.
Sounds more like a Hell than a Heaven if you ask me….
You know, the show never made you look forward to Instrumentality as far as I can remember. Unless you’re Gendo, then it’s the best thing in the world.
Sounds like the Borg Collective.
I’ve always wondered. If the Borg don’t assimilate you because you don’t measure up, is that an insult?
As long as all that sweet cream icing isn’t flowing down, we’re all good. However, that would imply someone left the cake out in the rain, and I know neither is that careless.
Ice cream a la mode. Is that ice cream topped with ice cream? Or do you top the ice cream with pie?
I dunno. “A la mode” is French for “in the fashion”, but that doesn’t tell us much…
Split the difference. Ice cream, topped with ice cream, topped with pie.
….. wait, splitting the difference involves a BANANA? I give up….
If pie a la mode is pie with ice cream on it, I think that tracks.
“I will be getting barfy on my mother’s behalf.”
Curse you sky cake, why are you so delicious?
cheers! that was funny!
Liking the eyes in panel 4 – 5 but damn thats some intense feelings for cake or am I missing something?
Birthday party norms? Investing yourself in your banter?
Its not a party unless theres pavlova, chocolate eclairs and jelly and ice cream…lamingtons and brandy snaps are suitable substitutions
Yeah it’s likely this may be referring to something other than cake.
Two other possibilities are that it’s Becky trying to pick Joyce’s brain or vented intimate frustration.
Just seemed to escalate rather quickly is all
Cake is important
Like Willis said, it’s a birthday party, birthday parties have cake. They’re discussing having a party for beckys recently (less than a year) dead mom. Even if she’s putting up a front of being totally okay and using the idea of her mom being in paradise to cope, there’s bound to be some weird emotional spikes here and there
Becky is using the concept of heaven to ignore the fact that her mom is dead.
As long as she can imagine her mom living “somewhere else”–doing living people things (like eating cake)– she can avoid the grief of facing the fact that her mom isn’t living.
Differing opinions on the afterlife; Becky probably expects affirmation from Joyce, not the “um actually” she’s getting.
Joyce’s “I’m still a religious fundie” mask is starting to slip.
This is not a good time for this to come to light…
AND EVERY PIECE IS A CORNER PIECE
“But I actually prefer the middle–” “SHUDDUP”
(I actually do prefer middle or edge-but-not corner pieces, though. I prefer a lower amount of frosting to cake.)
I honestly prefer pecan pie to cake.
Ooo, that’s a good pie.
My favorite next to cherry!
omg y’all are saying such beautiful things
Tastes so good, makes a grown man cry.
Cherry instead of pecan pie!!! No ice cream for you.
Work all day.
Live on hay.
You’ll get pie
in the sky
when you die.
The pecan is understood.
i prefer to celebrate my birthdays with a tart
Where do you stick the candle?
Did the bible just say people are nothing in Heaven?
Technically, a soul has no need to eat.
The intent was that there were no divisions between people, not that they were nothing or that there wasn’t anyone there, as Joyce seems to read it.
And, unless I’m remembering a different passage it was “in Christ” not “in heaven” meaning no such divisions among the believers.
The bible did not say people are nothing in heaven. The bible said heaven is not what you think it is.
If Heaven does not have cake, everything Lucifer did is justified. REBELLION!!
Is Lucifer’s rebrellion really something to make light of?
*flees for dear punning life*
*runs after Reltzik, brandishing a morningstar*
Oh believe me, he’s still justified, cake or not.
Next to the war-mongering blood-thirsty psycho Yahweh, Satan/Lucifer seems relatively innocent.
Please don’t use psycho. IMO we should work to get that word out of the common vocabulary as an insult. It works into the whole “mentally ill = evil” bias that a lot of people still hold, and using language like this is not helping.
That was short for “psychopath”, which is an appropriate word to use for a god with the nerve to murder the children of one of his most faithful believers.
But point taken indeed. I will use the long version next time.
Honestly, I would probably avoid the term psychopath as well and just use ‘monster’ or ‘amoral/immoral’ because people with Antisocial Personality Disorder sometimes use the terms ASPD, sociopath and psychopath interchangeably for themselves and it isn’t the best defined area of psychology to say if these are all truly separate things or the same thing presenting differently.
And the main reason people use the term ‘psychopath’ is to mean ‘without empathy or attachment’ or that they are inherently evil, but other conditions have reduced or lack of affective or cognitive empathy as a symptom and lack of attachment is a symptom of Reactive Attachment Disorder and I would not say anyone was ever born inherently evil or that any condition inherently can make a person evil.
I think it just adds stigma to these particular symptoms to use this term too especially as personality disorders and less heard of conditions still remain much less accepted and it undermines that evil actions are choices.
You do realize you completely missed the point of “don’t work into the mentally ill = evil bias”, right? Just using the longer version of the term doesn’t change that you’re equating mentally ill with evil.
I’ve always equated evil with evil.
Yeah, I always equate tall things with things being tall, too.
I don’t know what you’re getting at with this so I’m gonna ask for some clarification.
Because this sounds like you are saying that mental illness and evil are equatable, and I think you meant “no, mentally ill people aren’t evil, evil is evil, they’re different things” and while normally I think it’s unfair to make someone defend themselves for something they didn’t say or only said in someone else’s interpretation, I feel this particular topic and especially in this particular space, it’s important to ask for that clarification if only so somebody else doesn’t get the wrong impression.
Almost all evil people are mentally ill and are evil for that reason. Very few mentally ill people are evil. Fortunately evil people are rare. Confusion arises because people, whether mentally ill or not, sometimes do evil things.
Evil, of course, is defined as things I really don’t like.
This sounds like scenario where it’s real easy to get to your point without a term like “mentally ill”, which exists for an actual real life group of people who suffer widespread stigmatization.
My point was that people who are evil, with some very rare exceptions, are evil because there is something wrong with the way their minds work. This is not to say that people whose minds work in a way that is not typical are evil, because that is both incorrect and absurd. And in fact, I’m pretty sure that my mind does not work in a typical fashion and I’m pretty sure that I’m not evil.
I’m also not sure that helps.
I get what you’re saying
Alright, fine. “Psychopath” is off the table.
How’s “war-mongering blood-thirsty dictator”?
I am very grateful on how generous this forum is, how I can write without fear of becoming the target of the next witch hunt. But just for the record, I don’t think it’s a good idea to set the bar for offense that low. It could turn down people that mean no harm, and what ultimately results is that any discussion amounts to no more than seeing how loudly you could get the correct opinions to echo in an echo chamber.
Also, I think “monster” is a less appropriate descriptor. After all, some of your favorite good guys from the media you enjoy are “monsters”, are they not?
The misuse of a real term that encourages the stigmatization of an actual real life mental illness experienced by actual real life people isn’t “setting the bar for offense too low.”
I wasn’t using it in a medical fashion. I was thinking more of the colloquial fashion. I mean, are we allowed to call the Joker or Stewie Griffin psychopaths, or would that also count as denigrating the differently abled?
“I wasn’t using it in a medical fashion. I was thinking more of the colloquial fashion.”
This is literally the exact same argument as “look I didn’t mean gay as in gay people, I meant gay as in stupid.”
Being gay doesn’t cause you to perform destructive actions.
But regardless, I see your point. Psychopaths have real mental illness and they can’t help the way they are.
The only real problem I have with something like that is when corrupt authority, abusers and dictators try to use it to avoid accountability for their actions.
Compassion is really important for us as a species. But be careful, as there is a very important difference between healthy and naive compassion. We can have compassion for all kinds of people, good, bad and in between. We can and should feel compassion for destructive people, but we do not need to let their destructiveness into our lives.
The question of someone using an existing mental problem to get out of the consequence of their actions is not only irrelevant to what we are talking about, it’s also something that doesn’t happen in any meaningful capacity to the point where “we need to be careful”, because the people who actually suffer in that “concern” are those with disorders, at the hands of neurotypical folks whose greatest understanding of mental illness is “the criminal mastermind on this cop show faked insanity to get away with his crimes, now he’s a free man.”
I have development disorders, Autism Spectrum Disorder and newly diagnosed ADHD, and I’m only now understanding the tremendous impact they’ve had on my life and how being undiagnosed and unmedicated for as long as I have has lead me to failure in both education and employment, and then that failure leads me to self-loathing and doubt.
The actual worst part, though, isn’t having them. They’re disabilities, they make your life harder by design. No, the biggest weight is how many douchebags I gotta put up with telling me it’s no big deal, it’s fake, everyone says they have it, I’m a liar, I’m a mooch, I’m a failure, why can’t you do what everyone else can do.
If my disability becomes relevant to a scenario with another person, say employment, I think that’s worth talking about, that’s a place where concern the impact of a disability can have on employment is at least sensible to discuss, and I live in a country where firing me for that disability is actually illegal.
But you’d be surprised how “concern about the bad apples taking advantage” ends up devouring space to talk about disability and accessibility, when it’s not a matter of talking about how we can be good and supportive to people with disabilities, it’s whether all of them are thieves and con artists.
I was referring to psychopaths specifically, and I definitely wasn’t trying to rope things like ADHD and autism into it.
Sometimes psychopaths do wind up hurting people because of their disorder. And all psychopaths, whether they do or don’t engage in such destruction, need every bit of support they can get.
Some enablers of abusers actually do invoke mental disorder as a means of blurring their accountability, which only further detracts from the needs of those who actually have these disorders, adding insult to injury.
I’m so sorry you had such a rough time in your life. But to know the pain of people making hurtful assumptions about you, only to turn around and make hurtful assumptions about others, is a pretty sad example of copying the enemy.
“But to know the pain of people making hurtful assumptions about you, only to turn around and make hurtful assumptions about others, is a pretty sad example of copying the enemy.”
You wanna try that again, bud.
‘Cause I know what that sounds like, I know what those words mean when somebody says them to me, and I need to know if you’re actually that much of an asshole to say them or if this is another one of your misunderstandings.
You know what, not my table……
But my very original point still stands. Cake or no cake in heaven, Lucifer would still be justified. Next to the war-mongering, blood-thirsty dictator Yahweh, Satan/Lucifer seems relatively innocent.
Lemme leave you with something to grow on, chum.
If you’re having a conversation that gives you an opportunity to reflect on your use of language that other, more informed people have given reason why it’s harmful, how it stigmatizes real life people by treating their existing disorders as a shorthand for evil, maybe don’t argue for hours on why you can keep doing it, don’t look for scenarios where you can continue holding onto those views like “oh but what if it’s a real bad guy though” as if you’re so objective and impartial that you’re able to define at a glance someone who is and isn’t “exploiting mental illness as a defense”, and when someone tells you how that exact brand of stigmatization propagates, that it keeps going because you’re so desperate to cling to that outdated viewpoint that you look for the minuscule amount of people who do exploit them with no regard for how that hunt for “the real bad guys” leads to the constant questioning of real life people who now have to spend time defending their inherent right to exist as people with disabilities without being questioned, don’t outright state that being corrected on this, and being corrected on ignorant views is something you’d think you’d want, is exactly the same as “making hurtful assumptions about others” in relation to living with mental illness and disability, and that it’s a “pretty sad example” of engaging in the same kind of hurtful assumptions that hurts actual real life people and, specifically, the kind of assumptions about my inherent worth as a human being I struggle with all the time. I am not making an assumption of you, I am making a judgment of how you are acting right now.
Because for someone who says they’re only able to grow by having their views challenged, you sure do fight as hard as possible to hold onto your existing views, regardless of anyone telling you the kind of miasma they contribute to.
I didn’t say that I was gonna use the term psychopath as a general word for referring to bad people anymore….
Look, I can tell this is a really touchy subject for you, so I guess your position is your position, and I’m just not gonna talk to you about it anymore.
@ Clif – I think I get what you mean, but I’d argue that’s incorrect. People can be evil and have brains that work the same way most people’s do, and, in fact, most evil folks do. Entitlement isn’t an illness. Aggression isn’t an illness. Being an asshole isn’t an illness. Being unwilling to challenge preconceived notions or holding oppressive views isn’t an illness. All of those things are more likely to result in hurting others than being mentally ill. Saying evil folks “have something wrong with them” and pushing them under the label of “mentally ill” only serves to further stigmatize mental illness, neurodivergence, and disabilities, when people dealing with those things are already more susceptible to violence.
I’ve always thought that Rebellion was the cooler sword, between the two. Yamato is fine and all, but if you’ve got a broadsword made of bones and that’s somehow not the edgiest weapon of the pair, something’s off.
/dmcposting
Paradise Lost, I: (early draft while Milton was hungry)
Who first seduc’d them to that SWEET revolt?
Th’ infernal Serpent; he it was, whose CAKE
Stird up with SUGAR and DRIED FRUITS, BLISS’D OUT
The Mother of Mankind, what time his URGE
Had cast him out from Heav’n, with all his Host
Of HANGRY Angels, by whose aid aspiring
To BAKE himself A RAD CAKE FOR ALL his Peers,
He trusted to have SURPASS’D the most High,
AT LEAST RE: CAKE; and with ambitious aim
Against the DULL and BORING FOOD of God
MADE MAD SOUFFLES in Heav’n and PECAN PIES
With GREAT SUCCESS.
+1
Applause.
aaaand thus Becky is successfully diverted from what’s really bothering Joyce for at least one more day.
Fuckin’ a, Becky! Get Bonnie her goddamn birthday cake!
And that was one of the things I could never quite wrap my head around either…. assuming that we are still ‘ourselves’ when/if we get to heaven, which version of ‘ourselves’ are we? Or will we be whatever version of ‘ourselves’ that we need to be to connect with whomever else we ‘meet’ on the other side?
Or will it be more like Joyce’s scenario … we won’t really be ‘human’, but merely spirits in a state of eternal bliss just being in the presence of God??
Ain’t religion fun …. and confusing???
A lot of the cake discussion people seem to be forgetting that the only cake in Heaven is Christmas cake, it is Christmas day every day there after all.
(fancy link to Monty Python song goes here)
Joyce raises an interesting theological point, which many (most?) Christians ignore: assuming (for the sake of argument) that the Bible is accurate about heaven, just how ‘human’ will its eventual inhabitants be?
I’m guessing probably not much, given that the Biblical description of angels makes it clear that, rather than being beautiful blond people in white dresses, with wings and harp, such as we see depicted in most Christian art, they aren’t even remotely humanoid at all, but more like something out of Lovecraft…
An interesting thought. I’ll get to it once I figure out the Trinity.
Since there is no sin in heaven, humans would be fundamentally changed psychologically. Think about how much your sins define who you are. Without sin you would not be the person you are on Earth.
In a benevolent afterlife, Purgatory is where you shed yourself of your sinful ways and change organically into a perfect being retaining some of who you were. This would take a very long time, but eternity is really, really long.
In a less benevolent afterlife, you are instantly turned into a lobotomized zombie who spends eternity worshiping God and *shudder* no longer cares about cake!
Ah, I see your fundamental error. Because of familiarity, you believe humanoids aren’t like something out of Lovecraft.
Wait, you thought Cthulu was the antagonist? oh that’s precious.
Careful Joyce, very careful. That seems something really serious for Becky. She’s menacing and seems ready to be aggressive and i can perfectly understand her. Cakes are important!!!
Alternately she is being mock upset to go along with the fact that she knows she is saying absurd things and doesn’t care. I bet Joyce is a good enough friend to share a birthday cake for her mom. And both of them will be less sad.
Well, those beings you’re referring to aren’t technically “angels”; they’re more accurately described as “heavenly beings”.
The word “angel” comes from the Greek Angelos, itself a translation of the Hebrew Mal’ak, meaning “messenger” — hence, the divine messengers sent to earth to do Yahweh’s
dirtywork.The “angels” aren’t as weird as the other heavenly beings.They don’t even have wings. In fact, they look just like ordinary people.
Woops, I ment to respond to Stifyn Baker.
I feel heaven depends on the person, or afterlife in general.
Becky’s mom can have all the cake she wants, and I personally hope for a library where I can read and draw all day while cuddling my dogs.
Stands to reason, if we all make our own hells, that the other is also true.
Panel four Joyce giving a nice nod to that old joke “It doesn’t pay to cook for just the two of us.”
Ah, THIS, this was one of the very first chinks in my faith’s armour: The more I read what the Bible had to say about the afterlife, the less it looked like something I’d actually enjoy. In fact, as Joyce hints in the fourth panel, the less of me it seemed would be left to enjoy this vague, unearthly bliss.
If all sadness, pain, misery, and sin along with the love and affection we felt for non-God entities… what is left? And what is the point of consolation if you can’t even remember you were hurt? Especially as the “consolation” stretches eternally into the infinite? Even if memories were not wiped, how could I call the “me” who lived, loved, and cried on this Earth for some decades “me” after endless millennia? But this “me” is all I have right now! I don’t want to lose it! To lose it and yet keep on living eternally is no reward, it is nothing.
Oh and let’s not forget that if conflict and sin are exiled, all the entertainment I love could not make it there.
I’m starting to understand where The Cheese came from back in the older It’s Walky! comics…
The Cheese stands alone.
so will I
What sort of “interesting thing to do” did you have in mind, Joyce?
There’s a horrid gremlin part of my brain that went straight to “threesome”, followed immediately with something even more inappropriate based on two key words from Becky.
are the two keywords “cake” and “ass”?
I was thinking more like “icing” and “barf”, but those work too.
You got the first one right. The second one was “mommy”. But I’ve been too sleep deprived and strung out lately to properly connect those two words into a coherent thought, so I leave the heavy lifting to y’all.
i would type something like “mommy cake porn” into google but i really really doubt there’d be any results at all.
Yeah, there probably isn’t definitely anything of the sort, I bet.
I haven’t done it, but even I know the answer to that one.
I’ll light the Yotomoe-Signal.
The Mr. Yotomoe-Signal.
He said he was looking forward to being called Mr. and I think we should oblige.
Maybe it’s like the dragon balls — you have to do the right ritual to summon him.
I don’t think I ever want to have so much cake that I get barfy. Somehow I doubt cake feels as good coming back up as it does going down your throat.
Your doubts are well-founded. There’s this video (I may have mentioned it before) on YouTube of an Australian guy eating cake ingredients raw, [REDACTED], then his buddies [REDACTED] and the three of them [REDACTED]. Those guys have a few videos like that, actually.
once i [REDACTED] my [REDACTED] and it [REDACTED]!!! i didn’t think it was possible to [REDACTED] but then i [REDAC— WAIT WHAT HOW IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE], way into [NOW THAT’S JUST SILLY STOP IT] and before i knew it [YOU’RE JUST SAYING THAT TO MESS WITH ME]. but yeah, that was the last time i ever tried to [I HATE THIS JOB]… well, the last time until that time i [YOU KNOW WHAT FUCK IT I QUIT]. great times.
Holy fuck. That’s so brave of you, to open up with a story like this.
[DON’T ENCOURAGE THEM]
If I’m to believe my grandma’s horrible old polka records, “In Heaven There is No Beer”.
Phuque it, I ain’t going.
Now, are the records horrible because they’re old, because they’re polka, or because they’re records?
If there’s no Weird Al in heaven, I’m not going.
Weird Al is a hero for making polka fun.
Weird Al is a hero for making fun of polka.
Fixed that for you.
That Patreon header taunted me for months with the fear of drama bombs, and it’s just cake.
Just cake, you say.
Ha, that’s why I think Joyce should have come clean. Tip of the iceberg, this is. Soon enough, she’ll be doubting scripture at every turn and irritating the hell out of Becky, but they’ll still both pretend that everything is the same and tiptoeing around the issue making everybody upset until (because this is a story) it all blows up in super dramatic fashion.
Mark my words, these are my predictions! I have seen it! And it is not at all predictable regardless of what *you* may have “figured out”.
indeed! very bold. well, i predict there will be hijinks and shenanigans! i also predict you will hate me when i post all-caps “called it” comments when my prediction turns out to be true. i am very good at this.
MILU CALLED IT!!!
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-11/05-as-long-as-its-free/cake-2/#comment-1565091
Wait, were we supposed to wait till the next strip?
….oh also i predict Clif will make some kind of joke as a response to this comment. for no special reason i’d like to point out that you never know when your connection has some sort of freak timeout while sending a packet and the server blorps out your message at some random time because that’s totally how servers work, i also feel like noting that i’m writing this at 12:45pm EST. ok bye
Now see, Clif is always making jokes, so I don’t think that one should count.
Just a bunch of spirits enjoying the idea of cake in a noncorporeal way. While watching every instant of Becky’s life on DVR because they have infinite time.
I think Family guy had a quote for this… Ah yes!
“God watches me while I go number two? I might be going to hell but God’s a pervert”
If the Christian God is supposed to be some kind of king, looks like he’s never heard of the Magna Carta.
Oh hey, it’s the Patreon banner comic!
Joyce remembering a key lesson at the end: it’s sometimes way more important to be nice than right. This is 100% that time.
Huh. Never seen that interpretation of that verse. I’ve always seen it be interpreted as something along the lines of “heaven don’t see race, heaven don’t see gender, everyone’s equal, etc.”
Becky: “And Ice Cream!”
Joyce: “Wasn’t she lactose intolerant?”
Becky “No one’s lactose intolerant in heaven that’s why its heaven.”
Bonnie gets the ice cream, Toedead gets the flatulence.
That reference was… perfect.
Come on, man. No need to fall back on a hackneyed internet meme. Your better than this. You can do this. You don’t need to-
THECAKEISALIETHECAKEISALIETHECAKEISALIETHECAKEISALIETHECAKEISALIETHECAKEISALIETHECAKEISALIETHECAKEISALIETHECAKEISALIETHECAKEISALIETHECAKEISALIETHECAKEISALIE
Momcake!