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DAMN, phrased that way, Joyce is a MONSTER for crushing his dreams =C
…
ya know, lemme repost the anecdote I buried in the comments a few days back, seems to apply here, too, maybe better
I actually applied for a comic position, although it was for drawing for a script rather than whatever we felt like. It apparently was down to me and another person I knew, and while it wasn’t quite Joyce vs. Walky levels of difference, I’m p sure if you replaced “level of world building” with “willingness to draw backgrounds” then the comparison is spot on
but I don’t begrudge “my” Joyce for getting the part, since I learned I really can’t draw to somebody else’s guidelines unless I REALLY want to do it
the main thing was, it was my first serious effort at something, for potential pay, and I was so “I WANT TO DO THIS” but also “DANG THIS IS HARD, HOW CAN I DO THE LEAST AND GET IT DONE” that I’m really not surprised the other person got it
Not sure why. I guess you can read it to say “I haven’t stayed interested in Lucy”, but I think we’re dealing with different categories here.
He certainly stayed interested in Dorothy and Amber for more than 5 days, so it’s not really worth commenting on a lasting interest in Lucy. Staying interested in a project like the comic for that long is very different.
Sympathies. “My Joyce”, in this situation, not only easily beat me put for an internship, outside her major but inside mine, but was also a friend who essentially applied to see what would happen. It was tough remaining friends after that.
Well, at the time it was a bummer bc I was in this mindset that if it was going to work, I needed to be productive at X rate to finish Y pages to make Z dollars compared to even a minimum wage job, and I was freaking out about that plus doing a good job that people would actually pay money to see
so it’s actually for the best even though the job I now have isn’t remotely arty (though I only minimally have to care about quality of my work since currently I largely cut and paste answers and pays surprisingly well for it)
By the authority invested in me by King Daniel, I hereby define “ridiculous thing” to be a parenthetical remark which uses square brackets, and “here” to be our small insignificant suburb of cyberspace.
I mean, given that at least one character is smart-coded has said he “clearly has [it],” I think that means in-universe that he does. It doesn’t seem like Willis would float an idea like that if it wouldn’t pay off, especially because that’d probably be a little insensitive to neuro-divergents. By meta-gaming basic story-telling rules and social mores, I’m happy putting it to 99% certainty “Walky has ADHD” is an in-universe fact, no matter how it’s eventually addressed.
It’s so easy to label something ADHD. I’m in a position at 31 that for the first time in my life I put fairly consistent effort (an hour a day) in the same thing for like 20 days or so, and I am pretty damn proud even if it doesn’t pay the bills yet. It feels like an overwhelming amount of work done, and I’m struggling a lot to increase it. It’d be easy to say I’m simply incapable of paying attention. But no, the reason is a complex set of internalized beliefs and fears that I’m trying to untangle. Eg. Why do it if it won’t be perfect? You should learn to do it right before even trying. You can’t be seen as not clever at anything ever. What if doing something else instead is a more rational choice?
I took a cue from my 3rd Grade students and made myself a weekly star chart. We’re talking sparkly rainbow stickers, in various categories.
My current categories are writing my book, doing 30min+ of boring adult tasks, applying to jobs, and practicing driving. My fiancés chart has included exercising, physical therapy, producing his play, and reaching out to friends. Either of us can get a star for planning our wedding.
I don’t get all the stars possible each week, but I do get WAY more of those things done than I did before the chart. I actually look for ways to get stars each day.
(PS for my depressed pals, my star chart originally measured “I was out of bed and eating breakfast before 11am each day” and “I did 30min of a not-fun task”. I added categories over time.)
So wait, just to clarify – are you being dismissive of the internet diagnosing Walky with ADHD because you’re own described behavior is or is NOT ADHD?
Cuz I have ADHD, and you kinda sound like you’re reading my brain.
Also worth noting: I was only diagnosed 3 years ago, and I’m 42.
Yeah, once he put it like that I flashed back to a lot of memories of opportunities that meant a lot to me that people thought I put no effort into and I felt really bad. I’m still glad Joyce got it because I think she needs the outlet but I really hope that Walky can find something similar.
I actually do like coffee, though I understand why many don’t. My theory is that people that want cream and sugar in their coffee don’t actually like coffee.
Eh. It’s still liking coffee if you like it with cream and sugar, just like it’s still liking chocolate if you like it at 60% or 70% dark rather than 99% or 100% (it’s even still “liking chocolate” if you like milk chocolate, though in that case you should try GOOD European milk chocolate if you haven’t. It’s NOT liking chocolate if you only like white chocolate, but really, just liking the taste of cocoa butter is fine!)
Only a small percentage of coffee drinkers prefer it bitter and very intense–many more like it with at least a -little- sweetness or at least a -little- milk (personally, I can handdle it with either or both and have youu tried vietnamese iced coffee?) So setting the standards beyond “likes the taste” to “likes the pure thing at maximum heat” is a bit much IMO.
Also, personally dark coffee is A. intense and B. really, really sensitive to the beans and brewing conditions. So while I might start with coffee black for single origin stuff so I really taste it, it’s not worth it for most coffee.
I had someone ask me to give that a try. I couldn’t add enough to make it palatable. Ended up pouring it down the drain.
I like soda, I like juice (including hot cider, spiced or not), I like cocoa. I like coffee as a flavor (ice cream, etc), and I like chocolate-covered beenz. I don’t like tea.
In fairness, much more than coffee or chocolate, tea is really, really variable. I tolerated tea (never really -liked- it, was just willing to drink it when there wasn’t coffee available) until I had a good selection of different good teas and found some I really didn’t care for and some I really liked.
There’s no particularly strong reason to correlate liking, say, jasmine with liking English Breakfast, with liking Ceylon, with liking lapsang suchon, with liking pueh (I don’t) with liking genmai-cha, etc. Some “teas” don’t even contain tea.
I used to hate coffee, then I had really good quality coffee with cream and sugar and it’s good. And the caffeine helps my ADHD (usually by putting me to sleep). Unfortunately my ADHD also means I’m that bit less likely to go to the effort of making fresh coffee.
That’s called coffee milk, and you can only make it right if you knew how to pronounce “quahog” before hearing it spoken on Family Guy. (Or if you use Autocrat syrup, I guess.)
why, you do not look a day older than whichever relatively-younger age number you find flattering!!! i think your comments are very good. please keep making them.
This is why I wanted Walky to get the strip. He never shows interest in anything besides cartoons, fast food, and I guess smooching ladies now sometimex. It was refreshing to see him try.
Joyce put in more effort, Joyce had proof that she’d have a comic strip to submit every week and Joyces drawings (are comics considered drawings or art?) looked more professional
Joyce is the better choice because Joyce was the better candidate
Ok, I was one of the people who thought Walky wasn’t really that upset about losing and I’ll cop to being wrong, but we don’t actually know how much effort walky put in because Daisy never looked at it
That said neither Daisy nor Joyce had any way of knowing losing the comic spot would have such a demoralizing effect on Walky (in part because he was flippant about it in front of them with that “bullet dodged” comment)
Anyway it all comes back to Daisy is bad at her job and shouldn’t have it
Lets set aside the whole “Is your girlfriend bi” comic strip (in the real world would be a bit creepy, but we will assume it was just for laughs).
She didn’t read through all of Walky’s work, but Walky:
1) showed up late. I don’t know if there was a particular time of day that he had to submit his comic by, but since Daisy was getting ready to give the comic to Joyce when Walky came it, its possible that it was close to end-of-day (which is never a good situation for a job seeker..)
2) Daisy did see one page of Walky’s work (he was holding it up when she accosted him). It is possible that she was able to recognize “repetitive themes” in what she saw
3) When Daisy suggested splitting the work, Walky’s reaction was “Great, less work”, which could make a potential employer nervous. “Is this person going to be willing to put in the effort on even a reduced workload?
Yeah, I thought Daisy was an asshole…for about eight seconds. Then I remembered she was a grown adult running a legitimate enterprise that has a product to produce, and the person who gets the job will literally be employed by her and she will be responsible for their output. Her being fair to anybody is not a fucking factor, here. Walky is 17 employee red flags in a recently-licked shirt, no sane person would hire him for anything that would require him to be responsible for consistently outputting a product on a schedule.
There is other evidence about whether Daisy is good at her job than her handling of this issue with the comic strip. We have seen her manage Dorothy and Jennifer and the Amazi-Girl and Night-Guy stories.
I think the problem is, we as readers did not get details about what was required for the submission contest. However, there must have been some rules in place (otherwise Walky slipping them under the office door at 11:59 would be “submitting his work”).
So there must have been some rules in place (we know there were because Dorothy managed to find them out), and that might have involved a time-of-day deadline. (And the fact that Walky was running suggests he was late for it.)
That seems like an unfair reading given that Daisy’s comments on the Extremely Gay romance between Julia and Doris were that she liked it, and when Joyce made it clear it was completely unintentional Daisy just gave some frank advice that her audience might read into something that isn’t there to the point of feeling intentionally misled.
It’s almost like we’re seeing what Daisy is like when she’s not being one-note, in her second appearance after her date with Ruth, the only time in the comic she has ever indicated the slightest personality.
Daisy went on a date with Ruth where instead of trying to shove her face into her cooter they talked and got to know each other a bit and Daisy said outright she was scared and nervous but wanted to keep trying and then when Ruth started casually talking about her suicidal ideation Daisy got flatout protective of her, instinctively grabbing her hand to show support, and it only ended up in tears when Ruth propositioned her.
Like, maybe we’re seeing Daisy for who she actually is now when the camera focuses on her for reasons other than being horny.
It seemed pretty clear to me that Daisy was being professional with Joyce while discussing her comic and only reset back to her gag status once she caught a whiff of polyamorous bisexual girl saliva.
If she was giving Joyce the job because yuribait she’d probably make that clearer to us.
I think it’s very rare in this comic for anything to be “reset back to gag status”. Plenty of gags have come back seriously. Maybe not the outright superpowers, like Joyce teleporting, but nearly everything else.
He was supposed to be there that day. He didn’t have an assigned time.
And Walky’s strip is honestly a better choice for a college paper. A long-form story comic is fine for the web, mostly ok for a regular newspaper, but is a terrible choice for a college paper. 1/4 of the audience is going to be lost every year, because they’re going to graduate, and the new audience would have to make an effort to find back issues to start the story, and probably won’t bother. I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen maybe 3 or 4 issues of my college’s daily paper since 1993, and I live in the same town where I went to college. So for the most part the only people who will see the entire story are people in Joyce’s class.
Actually we don’t know for sure if he “showed up late”, because we don’t know the exact details of the contest (i.e. if there was stipulation “all submissions must be received by noon” or whatever.) But, the fact that he was running in order to get to Daisy’s office suggests that he was somehow rushed/behind schedule.
As for whether Walky’s comic would have been a better fit, I think it depends on the quality of the comic. A joke-a-day is better for casual readers, but only if the jokes are actually funny. Walky’s concept seemed to be extremely limited (i.e. lets do the same joke over and over), which probably isn’t a good formula for attracting readers, whereas a decent plot-driven comic might entice people to read the paper just to see what happens next.
As for the issue of losing readers to graduation/attracting new students… that problem can be minimized by carefully timing story lines so that they coincide with start/end of term, and providing occasional strips featuring exposition.
He explicitly says in an earlier strip that he wanted to beat Joyce there. That’s why he was hurrying.
There is no hint anywhere in any of these strips that there was a specific deadline or that he missed it. Even Joyce, when she’s claiming it’s already hers doesn’t say anything about him missing a deadline.
It’s absolutely possible that a good enough write could pull off a long term plot driven comic in a campus paper. I don’t think there’s any real evidence that Joyce is that writer. Yet, at least. Her emphasis on getting to the good part with the aliens and earlier on how to introduce all the characters she needs make me doubt it.
One could argue that these are both bad submissions, in different ways. Joyce’s too ambitious and Walky’s not ambitious enough. I’m not really arguing here that Walky’s is necessarily a better fit, just that it’s not nearly as clear cut as it might seem.
Joyce was definitely the better pick. Daisy made the right decision, it was just nice to see Walky apply effort to something. That’s like his major character flaw, he cruises through life expecting everything to be easy and working for nothing. That’s why a bad grade was so psychologically damaging to him last quarter. To see him actively pursue something was good character growth. But learning you can fail even when you try is als o a good lesson for him.
Of course for him to have success resulting from deliberate effort definitely wouldn’t hurt.
Yet again I see it coming up time and time again that most success is down to random chance.
You know what? I’m just gonna stop here and acknowledge that the question on who really deserved the job is a complicated issue with no easy answers before I go off on an over-analytical tangent that no-one’s gonna bother to read anyway.
Well, neither of them “deserved” it. It was something they both applied for and it was something nobody on Earth cared about, so Daisy flipped a coin.
I don’t think Daisy would have changed her mind if she saw it, either. She liked all the effort that Joyce put in and then Joyce going all or nothing made Daisy comment she wanted it more. The actual quality probably wasn’t up for debate.
And, in light of this strip, I think Daisy would see it as something Joyce is putting lots of herself into, versus the same joke with the same art by someone who showed up five minutes before deadline.
Sure, in universe that would be true, but on a character perspective, I too was excited to see potential for Walky’s character in the comic. That said, I also see potential in exploring this direction too, so I’m not as disappointed as I might have been otherwise.
In universe, yes, Daisy probably made the right decision – although she can’t really know that because she neither looked at his strips nor heard his pitch.
I mean…sure? In terms of literal things in the real world that have stakes? But we’re talking about the outcome of a plot arc in a webcomic which a person pointed out would have made them feel happy, for the character in question. I dunno if “which character would have clearly and objectively been more deserving in reality” has any bearing on a fan just wanting a character they like to have happy stuff happen to them, because it feels good to read that…
Same, it was nice to see Walky interested in something to the point that he actually put effort into it and wanted to succeed. Even though Joyce’s comic was almost certainly better, I really wanted him to get the job.
Or Lucy since she was actively helping, has skin in the game, and is the one with comic posters all over her wall. Lucy isn’t my fav, but I do like watching their flustered interactions and maybe she’s the right kind of goob for him… plus Linda would “love” that.
I do feel bad for Walky here. I know that Joyce put a lot more work into making her comics than Walky did but I still can’t help but be bummed for Walky.
Also, Walky’s “one joke per comic per newspaper, no continuity” idea would probably fit in more with a college newspaper than an elaborate years long story that requires reading the entire run. It’s why Garfield works.
Yeah, honestly I think Walky’s strip is probably a better college paper strip.
Joyce’s might be better than it seems, but it seems like most of the appeal is in the long term payoff and she’s going to spend at least the first semester doing set up stuff before she gets to what she’s interested in. It’s possible to do that well and keep people’s interest in daily gags while doing it, but it’s not clear she has the chops for it yet.
Her strip is definitely more ambitious, but that doesn’t mean it’s better. Early Roomies! at best, but with more focus on setting stuff up for It’s Walky and likely less on doing anything interesting in the short term.
*Barely put in effort. He was all excited that recycling most of the art every day would score him a few easy bucks once the job was handed to him by default.
Then, a wild competition appeared and ran circles around him.
Barely put in effort relative to the average person. Relative to the entire life experience of David Walkerton, he put in probably 15-20% of his total life’s effort expenditure, this week.
That’s a fair point. However, there’s no way Daisy would’ve known that. Just saying “sure, I want to do it” doesn’t instill confidence that he’ll commit to it long-term.
Walky wasn’t reinventing Dinosaur Comics, he literally had ONE strip he planned on minimally tweaking every day. He could have all the confidence in himself that he’d stick to it and maybe even come up with a second gag eventually, but to everyone else he looks like he’s either lazy or not taking the job seriously.
Given what was presented to her, it was only logical for Daisy to choose Joyce for the job (if only so she wouldn’t have to replace Walky if he got bored and flaked out on her after two weeks).
As an artist who has spent his entire life comparing himself to 16 year olds who’s art is and will always be better than his own, knowing you weren’t good enough stings extra hard. It sucks to fall short. And people say not to compare yourself to others, but guess what the people hiring you are gonna do.
As someone with bad brain I know that you can understand a message but still not apply it to yourself, believe it and embrace it. That said: unless you’re on deaths door, you have time. More time than you would have had at any previous point in history. There is plenty of room for art that is uniquely yours as that is still a contribution no one else can manage. Similarly your art doesn’t need to be the best of the best if the message/content resounds with people. Look at xkcd. Yes his info graphics are impressive as are his rare large compositions but most of it is just knowledgeable jokes with stick figures. Have a through line, pull a Willis and stock pile art so you can post at least a few days a week to keep an audience, promote and chase an audience like crazy and enjoy it enough it can sustain you’re happiness just by making even a limited audience happy. If you keep at it you have a better chance of catching some luck than giving up due to failing to live up to your own expectations… said the pot to the kettle. Just remember all the people who have supported your contributions here. And that’s a single Fandom.
No matter what you do, there is always going to be someone better than you. Accept it, understand it, and ignore it. All you can do is be the best that YOU can be, and always strive to do the next thing just a little bit better.
You don’t have to give up on your dreams, Walky! Draw those comics, print out dozens of copies, and staple them to bulletin boards all over campus! YOU CAN DO IT!
I can’t tell if you’re serious but you should look up Lutherlevy.com Plug due to being a family friend. She’s gone on to more serialized comics and hasn’t come back to this project but it’s time period, religion, philosophy, and occasionally leaning towards werewolfiness which would be more notable in her comic centered around vampires and the French revolution.
Okay, I know we dumpstered on Joyce for her behaviour in that chain of events. But the thing is, Walky is bummed not because Joyce got the job ‘unfairly’, but that he didn’t get it at all.
Walky isn’t owed the strip spot just because he actually had interest in something for once. Walky didn’t get a chance to properly show his strip off, but the thing is, he needs to be able to handle rejection. If he’d gotten a fair shot, and Joyce still got the spot (which is honestly likely, given that she’s put in more work)… Walky would still be in this soul sucking funk.
Rejection sucks, and this is coming from someone who’s still job hunting. The hardest part is picking yourself back up after failure again, and it can often feel unfair. But this is one of the most difficult lessons Walky’s gonna have to learn instead of sulking every time he gets the slightest resistance to something he wants.
Yeah it’s true. You’re not allowed to sulk at all when something you were eager from eludes your grasp. Just toughen up, loser.
Sorry but I feel like we should all be allowed some sulking time. This is IMMEDIATELY after. Literally the next thing we’ve seen Walky do after getting rejected. He’s permitted to sulk a bit.
I think there is a difference between “I am unhappy I didn’t get the job. I will pout for a few minutes/hours and then go back to my schoolwork, i.e. the whole reason I am here” (an understandable, mature reaction to rejection), and “I am totally devastated and I will never try to do anything ever again” (which is what Walky is going through).
Oh come on, it just happened. Surely he’s entitled to still be in the ‘Feeling super discouraged and wondering why I bother’ dramatic phase? Especially since he’s still a newbie adult?
Yes, it just happened. But we know that Walky has trouble dealing with adversity (witness how he shut down when he started to fail math rather than get help). And his comments about “never trying anymore” were troubling (and the type of thing you would expect from someone who had “given up”.)
It’s a really common issue in “gifted child” ADHDers. I don’t know if it was written that way on purpose or a happy accident but it’s dead on what a lot of us have experienced. We’re held to such high expectations as children, but when there’s something we struggle with we’re told we’re not trying hard enough. Even though we are, but the awful thing with ADHD is that actively trying (without using the right mental workarounds) actually causes the brain to shut down. “Gifted child” ADHDers typically learn that 1, any level of failure is a personal failing, and 2, if when you try your absolute hardest everybody berates you for not trying but when you don’t try at all sometimes you do incredibly well, why bother ever trying? It never ever works.
So yeah. Putting Walky’s issues in the lens of ADHD makes it very, very relatable and real to me. And kudos to DW for that, because assuming it’s not something he’s experienced he’s clearly listened enough to do it well. (Of course there’s also the possibility that it’s written from experience rather than from listening, or a combination.
Stop calling me out like that. I’ve just recently been able to go back to school and am attempting engineering although math was my try, struggle and go nowhere subject… I am concerned but my ultimate field is one I’m passionate about so I’m hoping that’s enough to carry me through. That and designated cry days.
Not really convinced ADHD is involved here. Walky is someone who just breezed through life and always gotten good marks, and whatever else he wanted. His problems with hitting a wall with his math and now this are typical of someone who has never had to work for anything before and then experiences failure.
We also all dumpstered on Walky because he obviously didn’t care about it and was just relieved not to have to do the work, so maybe we can keep in mind for a bit that even what characters claim about their motivations isn’t always true.
Of all the ways I thought I’d be consistently wrong about plot developments, I didn’t think my view of Walky as someone who constantly takes the path of least resistance out of choice was going to change in the face into depicting the lived reality of ADHD as a constant nightmare guilting yourself for being unable to apply yourself to things that your brain won’t let you or you exhaust yourself so much before trying that you can’t.
Literally the only reason I can stare from outside the box these days was because I described a constant behaviour on a forum that someone immediately pinged as hyperfocus.
Took about five/six months to get my diagnosis, then a train of meds that started with physically irritating my skin, not working at all, and then putting me into a state that when I told my doctor how I was behaving she described it as mania before she put me on something to get me off of that, now the adderall, which thank fucking god it works.
The worst thing about putting in effort is when it blows up in your face. People act as if you work hard enough or want it hard enough you’ll get it, but sometimes Bart gets an F.
Trying and failing was always worse than just not trying at all, that was a platitude that totally backfired on me. ‘Cause like, I can just fail and shrug my shoulders or I can try and study, not study at all because I can’t focus and I’m trying to pound words into my head, and then go in and say I did my best except my best was absolute garbage and also I’m garbage and I’ll never amount to anything.
because the one thing guaranteed to make Dina tear up is thinking about all those hard-at-work dinosaurs just getting blown up through no fault of their own 66 million years ago?
I know it’s a bummer Walky didn’t get the gig but I’m not feeling too bad for him. A quick review of his first week back from break shows:
1. He’s repaired and reaffirmed a more positive relationship with his sister
2. Got an objectively better roommate in Booster (because they own a Switch sorry Mike)
3. Became universally more attractive by officially obtaining the “hot” status having basically every heteroromantic girl and even our resident bisexual dude acknowledging it.
4. Almost immediately got a new girlfriend handed to him by his ex.
Dude is still winning pretty hard if you keep things in perspective.
That’s fine. He can feel bad about it. Most of us do. I’m just saying this isn’t that bad contextually. Overall it’s been a very good week for him. Compare his week to Becky’s and task me if him losing a comic strip gig is that big a deal? And I’m saying this as a major Walky supporter! He can comeback from this.
If your problem with Walky is “girls keep throwing themselves at him without any effort on his part”, may I suggest your have-probleming should be directed at the girls, not Walky?
“You are such a loser, good for you! It’s something a lot of people can’t do.
Trying is hard that’s why People don’t do it. Losing is hard, they can’t make it through it.
But not you. You are such a loser, so here’s to you.
Because you deserve a cheering section too”
-Garfunkel and Oates.
I checked Daisy’s appearances to see how long this 5 days was in real time: 10 months. Also, over half of her appearances (20 out of 38) are post-timeskip, I find that sort of thing interesting.
Daisy’s date with Ruth was an application for supporting character status.
Her assessment was contingent on that part where she says she’s weird and messed up but still wants to keep going, proving that she will get along with the rest of the cast like a house on fire.
ADHD focus issues can absolutely involve people. And the fact that Walky has had three girlfriends in uh… six months? Five? After not only having none at all but no interest or intent, well- I’m not saying his interest in any of them was purely due to ADHD but I do sense an element of it in the speed in which he got emotionally involved… and how quickly he “got over it”. (Which, I want to be absolutely clear, does not mean his feelings at any point were “fake” or less valid.)
It’s actually a good sign for him and Lucy from an ADHD perspective. It’s been a slow burn (entirely off panel admittedly) compared to Dorothy and Amber. Speaking as someone with ADHD it’s so much a thing for ADHDers to possibly go full-tilt 120% on someone… for a short time. Weeks, maybe months, and then not know where the magic is gone, feel guilty that it’s gone, feel desperate to get it back but be completely miserable because it HAS gone.
Obviously that’s not how Walky’s relationships have ended, but it very much is a thing some ADHD folk experience- often without knowing why. I’m hoping the gradual development of a romance with Lucy will work out well.
He first falls for her during “Uphill from Here”, which was August 30th DoA time. She officially breaks off their relationship during “Faz is Great”, which was October 12 DoA time. (This was after she put their relationship “on pause” the day before, during “This is the Way That We Love”.)
Though maybe he never really got over Dorothy, even through his brief fling with Amber and maybe over the skip. Either way, it was a lot longer than five days.
Yeah, I don’t think interest in people really counts, which is why I don’t think this any reflection on his relationship with Lucy, as some have suggested.
I replied above to DailyBrad but ADHD can absolutely impact a person’s feelings towards other people. To expand on my own relationships I recently had the someone overwhelming experience of how many times I’ve hyperfixated on a person only to feel like absolute garbage when the feelings disappeared and sometimes been completely unable to handle it from there. I had a very rapidly developing, very deep friendship develop early this year and then just… couldn’t make myself talk to her any more. I miss her and our conversations but I can’t do it. And I very nearly lost my relationship with my (now) husband when the hyperfixation dropped- thankfully we were able to take a break from each other and then build a proper relationship without it.
So yeah. It’s a thing. And it’s a thing with ADHD that isn’t talked about enough.
Also with ADHD adjusting to a “new normal” is incredibly rapid (albeit not necessarily healthy), but things being “in limbo” is incredibly difficult. Not massively relevant but it came into my head.
Shutting up now because I could talk for so long about ADHD it’s just absurd.
but surely indoors….? if this dorm is anything is like that recently-renovated student apartment building with central heating i lived in for a few months, it’s likely to be at least 22° or so. celsius, that is. 72°F, that is.
Man I really didn’t want Joyce to have it for this reason. Walky barely shows interest in pursuing things for his own sake instead of just not getting in trouble and she had to butt in and take something just so he wouldn’t have it and at the slightest inconvenience to her she took advantage of his kindness and stole what he wanted by throwing a tantrum then gloated over him. I can’t wait til stuff blows up in her petty little face.
Who said Joyce took the job just so Walky “wouldn’t have it”?
We have seen cases where Joyce has show creativity in the past (her doodles in her notes, her “LITERATURE” that is sort of the basis of the newspaper comic.) I think she’d be interested in doing the comic just because she wants to create.
And what “kindness” did Walky show here? He didn’t give Joyce details about the comic (Joyce got them from Dorothy.) And Walky certainly wasn’t holding back when it came preparing his bid.
He did NOT split it to be nice. He did it because it would be less work, He’da dropped it the moment he had to do the effort of filling out that paper work.
Note what he says right after that “I only said that to be nice”
You’re falling for the act that Walky put on, he didn’t want to admit he really cared, and use the work aspect to make as graceful of an exit as he could after he lost the position.
Walky spends a lot of time putting on an act of being childish or lazy or dumb to avoid his problems, but here we’re seeing him admit that he really does care, dropping the mask for a moment.
If he cared that much he coulda snapped back “ Well if she’s all or nothing then take my strip!” I dont buy he did squat to be nice to Joyce, he’s never nice to Joyce
It doesn’t really matter how much he cares if it doesn’t show in the work.
Joyce brought at least one binder with the story she wants to tell plotted out years in advance. (Granted, she has her literature to draw from, but she’s building a cohesive world out of it.)
Walky literally has a one-line elevator pitch and a couple strips: “every day, somebody different gets drop-kicked while a lawyer-looking dude laughs at them”. There’s nothing wrong with making a gag-a-day strip, but the same gag every day?
Let’s say Walky got to Daisy’s office first, and she still overcame her thirst for the saliva patch on his shirt in one DoA strip. After he gives his 15 second pitch, the inevitable follow-up would have been “okay, what else you got?” He’d have to come up with something on the spot, because he was banking on using his one gag every day. Once Joyce shows up with her series bible, assuming Daisy looks at it, it’s all over for him.
His best just wasn’t enough.
This ties in well with Walky’s overall “‘gifted kid’ goes to college and runs into the wall face-first” arc. When everything comes easy for you your whole life, and you can’t overcome your first real adversity even when you try your hardest, it’s devastating. Suddenly you’ve got a wicked case of imposter syndrome, doubting whether you actually achieved anything or if it was all just handed to you for reasons outside your control. Damn it hits home.
@Needfuldoer et al: constraint is the mother of invention though (or like, its aunt or something). (again, see Dinosaur Comics, for instance)
i don’t think it’s true that just because Walky made a show of satisfying his laziness by chosing a simple, repeatable setup, he wouldn’t have found an infinity of witty variations to keep it interesting given the chance. he’s funny, he’s creative, he just wants everyone to know that he’s a lazy underachiever by choice, so that’s why he’ll insist least-effort optimization is his fundamental drive always.
But Walky wasn’t reinventing Dinosaur Comics. He wasn’t limiting himself for artistic reasons, “[x] gets drop-kicked and laughed at” was literally his only idea and he planned on running it into the ground with a minimum of effort.
To the rest of the world, that looks irreverent at best and lazy at worst, and the charm would burn itself out in a week.
Again, it doesn’t matter how sincerely he believes in this idea himself if he can’t sell it. It’s not up to the rest of the world to accommodate his inattention, he has to learn how to manage it. Walky’s playing out the classic “gifted kid crash and burn”. Ask me how I know.
And from the production point of view, Joyce’s comic is basically the Walkyverse reworked for her perspective. (Roomies! and It’s Walky! in particular. Meanwhile, THIS is the source material for Walky’s cartooning endeavors: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2010/blog/lawsome/
Joyce’s comic was always going to be more persistent in the story, if only because it has years of material (and the author’s actual experiences) to draw from.
hey, i wouldn’t judge Daisy for turning him down based on his flimsy premise. and sure Lawsome is very dumb, but it’s 5 strips long. what i’m saying is, a silly, repetitive, limiting setup is not necessarily a bad idea. it can be a good starting point. as it happens, Dinosaur Comics started as a silly student project too. And the first few strips are not that great.
anyway, i read your comment superficially because i wanted to respond to that specific aspect for some reason, but i do really appreciate your broader point about this gifted-child syndrome being a consistent trajectory that this latest arc is a perfect example of, and the fact that he just expects people to favour him without having to put much of an effort or put up much of a fight.
so… did you eventually manage to move past that pattern? if that’s something you want to share. asking for a friend.
Okay here’s the thing with that.
Joyce’s comic is a better comic, yes, but Walky’s is better for the medium. A repetitive gag a day comic fits a college newspaper far more than some long haul story deep story driven work (no offense Willis from ~20 years ago). Daisy even pointed that out when she asked if Joyce was okay with releasing the strips out of order
I think Daisy’s primary concern is finding someone who will consistently hand in strips for her to run, so she doesn’t have to waste time finding another cartoonist. Content is secondary.
To that end, she had Joyce’s preparation vs Walky’s lack thereof to choose from.
Normally I’d agree that Joyce’s comic was better, but in this scenario, I gotta disagree. Daisy couldn’t have judged Joyce’s comic as better because she never even asked to see it or hear his pitch. Daisy was being a lazy editor here.
Yeah while it’s clear in this strip that doing the comic was actually way more important to him than he let on, I don’t think that means he was particularly altruistic to Joyce in that moment. I don’t think he would ever care to be for her.
And yet he’s showing now that he does care and he didn’t snap back at Joyce. Maybe he’s not as superficial as you seem to think. Maybe, like so many of these characters, the surface act isn’t everything there is.
It’s perfectly in character for Walky to disguise being nice behind his laziness, just like he disguised being upset over not getting the gig.
He fixed things between Joyce and Carol after Mike’s “Hail Satan” stunt, which is more than Joyce has ever done for him, which was mostly *checks notes* telling Dorothy shouldn’t date him.
Daisy had already given Joyce the job, the only reason Walky was in the running is because she let her horniness override her brain for a minute, he was never going to get it.
What lesson would Joyce have gotten if Wally had gotten the job? Sometimes you can be the better candidate but the unprepared boy who is probably going to be perpetually late in the job gets it with minimal effort anyway?
I mean that seems to be the lesson that everyone wants Dorothy to learn.
Yep. People really want the boy who was late, unprepared, had to have a girlfriend mommy him into dressing for the interview, and who really ought to be focusing on his school work to win that job because he wanted it super bad and saw it first.
Meanwhile Joyce is super prepared, dedicated, not flagging in school and has a multi-year plan for the story arc which encompasses more than “dude gets kicked every single day haha”. She also managed to be on time to a job interview despite some pretty dire personal situations at play.
Still not clear where people are getting this “late” thing from so consistently. All we know is that Daisy said to submit samples “By Friday”, and Walky showed up apparently 15-30 minutes after Joyce.
Because we as the readers don’t know the details of the comic competition, but it is reasonable to assume there were certain requirements (like time of day to submit, samples to provide, etc.) The fact that 1) Walky was seen running to get to Daisy’s office, and 2) Joyce was offered the job right after her pitch, suggested that there was a deadline that Walky was missing.
Daisy said on Friday. Walky made it on Friday – yeah, he was running but the paper closes at some point. Daisy said Joyce could have the job because she assumed nobody else was coming. That’s not indicative of a deadline.
He’s likely to put comic strips off to the last minute (and thus be late) because that’s his MO with most work things. He’s smart but not diligent. Most comic strip artists don’t have months of advance strips like Willis and Joyce here do. I love EGS and SP but they don’t happen every day because there’s no backlog.
There was no “late” or “on time”. The only thing that was said was “get me some samples by Friday”. It’s Friday. They’re both in before the deadline. Joyce showing up 5 minutes earlier doesn’t mean she was on-time and he was late.
There’s no indication anywhere in the strip that Walky was late. He wanted to get there before Joyce did, but not doing that doesn’t make him late.
ok sure, the “Walky was late” thing is a red herring.
But N&M & QM’s main point, being that Joyce is just way more together, and it would be kind of sad if that had gone unrecognized, i absolutely sympathize with.
…also i’m now wondering if the fact that “behind every Walky there’s an exhausted Lucy” was exactly what Daisy’s supernatural shirtlicking detection ability was meant to hint at?
(not saying Daisy did her job right; not saying Walky doesn’t have his own issues to contend with; not saying anything i’m not actually saying basically.)
My main point though is that people seem to want Walky to be the protagonist…they’re worried about his character development and his learning and see Joyce as just an instrument for that rather than the protagonist in her own story.
Pretty sure he’s the protagonist in a different comic strip.
It’s an ensemble cast, not a protagonist and a bunch of side characters. Joyce is certainly the main protagonist, but not by that much. Walky gets character development and plot arcs of his own. It’s not good writing if decisions are always made based on where in the hierarchy a character falls.
I don’t even really mind that Walky didn’t get it, I’m just kind of irritated that people are so against him getting it or even that there is any possible merit to him getting it that they have to misread his character and make up reasons why he shouldn’t have gotten it.
Yes, it is an ensemble cast, and Joyce is part of that ensemble. (Yes, technically It’s Walky is also ensemble, but his name is in the title! In Joyce and Walky they’re both protagonists!)
What it’s not is Walky’s story alone and just worrying about Walky’s character development and what he learns from this as if Joyce is only a McGuffin is… I dunno, maybe a little patriarchal?
I thought for sure they’d end up collaborating somehow. Maybe they used Joyce’s story but Walky would draw it or something. I know Joyce is the more autobiographical one, at least in this universe, but I think it makes more sense for both of them to be in on it. Then again, there’s still time for that to happen, I suppose.
It’s nice to see how Walky and Booster are friends. Booster’s series of questions would have bothered any person who just missed an opportunity, but Walky talks to them without a problem. I think Booster will suggest Walky to put his strip on the web.
Woof. I feel for Walky here, I really do, as a person with ADHD. But quite frankly I think Walky is better off this way. It can be extremely exciting to finally find something that holds your attention, that you really feel like you can DO and are MOTIVATED to, but…well, Walky clearly doesn’t have a lot of experience with figuring out how to navigate the way his brain works.
Having your first *serious* commitment be something as VERY LONG-TERM (like seriously, this was supposed to be a gig Walky would be expected to keep up for like, multiple years?) as this would have inevitably blown up in Walky’s face. Not because he is lazy and unmotivated, but because the sheer novelty of this new thing, which has allowed him to maintain focus on it, would fade probably sooner rather than later, and he would end up facing down an even worse situation with insane levels of stress from time pressure and self-hatred as he inevitably fell behind.
I think it’s better for Walky to get the hang of trying to apply himself to things in a way that is at ease with his own capacities with uh. Lower stakes?
That being said though. As rough as a gig like that would have been for someone with ADHD (meaning needing to be self-motivated to put out consistent work on schedule) perhaps there is something to be said for the fact that perhaps the structure of it might have been helpful in some way. It just doesn’t seem like…*enough* structure is all.
Also Walky is probably like me where structure is required to do fucking anything at all but the moment that structure becomes too rigid or invasive or if it feels judgemental, I bristle at it immediately.
The way I tend to put it is “Structure feels like a cage, but without it, it feels like I’m barely treading water. So my life is like constantly trying to choose between prison, or slowly drowning.”
Also the ocean you’re drowning in doesn’t even really go away, the structure just gives you something just tall enough to stand on so that you can more easily keep your head above water. But then you’re stuck standing on it no matter how uncomfortable it is. So either way having ADHD is just this constant feeling of have absolutely zero control over your life or surroundings, one way or another.
The only thing that really helps is learning lots of different techniques to give yourself like. Little flotation devices.
Although thus far in my experience they always deflate so then you gotta put in all the effort to do it again, and again, and again, blowing up these goddamn inner tubes that keep FUCKING POPPING–
At least meds, when you find the right one for you at the right dosage, are a relatively low-effort pair of water wings that you just gotta remember to put on every day and not lose ’em. Easier than constantly blowing up inner tubes that pop after a month or so.
If it’s something you feel has been impacting your life, it’s worth getting an assessment.
And I know that’s unprompted and pushy, but the person I am right now, the person who can do things without expending half my energy guilting myself for not starting sooner, who can pursue hobbies without either not being able to focus at all or focusing so hard the whole world slips away, and can watch a whole zoom conference with a fidget cube in hand to burn off some of that manic energy, exists because a complete stranger on a video game forum said “bro that’s hyperfocus, you’re describing hyperfocus.”
it’s hardly unprompted, i was kind of hoping you’d say that, probably ^w^
yeah, i’m already trying to find a psychiatrist for this other thing that’s been impacting my life, i might as well ask them about this while i’m there! thanks bro.
He probably just wanted to go home and stew for a bit, which sort of inevitably leads to Booster, since they live with him. And I’m always hesitant to use “instead of” when it comes to character conversations, since there’s no reason he couldn’t also go talk to somebody else afterwards. If you talk to multiple people separately, there’s gotta be an order, after all.
So is “Great”, since their surname (per the cast page) is “Sanchez”. They apparently are the sort of person to have two middle names. “Booster The Great Sanchez”.
I think Walky is actually less guarded around Booster than he is around his other friends. It seems odd to say that someone like Walky is guarded around anyone with the way that he acts, but he doesn’t really open up emotionally to most of them. He does to Booster, for whatever reason
Tbf I think this is one of the ways Willis is making Booster something other than Booster The Great. With more screen time comes more development and characterisation.
I also don’t think the student newspaper that was just using this to fill space is gonna be the ideal way for Joyce’s magnum opus to shine. Whereas a gag a day comic can be run whenever and however. Plus Walky having a thing he’s motivated to do and enjoys doing is something I feel like he needs right now.
Also meds. He probably needs to be on some sorta ADHD med.
Meds aren’t a cure-all for everyone. I was put on a couple different ones in middle school; one made me a lethargic zombie, the other helped a little but I felt like I was redlining in first gear.
I started anti-depressants in 2013, I think(?) they worked well enough for a few years as I added anti-anxieties, and then by 2019 they just stopped working and I was depressed and miserable all the time, but going off of them fucked me up and also my life was so fucked up I didn’t know what to think of it.
I’d go weeks without taking them and not really feel any different. Not on purpose, I just couldn’t remember to take them, or didn’t care to. Eventually in September 2020, over six months after I dropped out of college and failed to find work, I stopped. I could feel things again, and then right around the corner I got as low as I ever have in my life, that’s about the only way I can say it.
But after that? I was alive again. I could feel things. That darkest point was, in hindsight, necessary, because it gave me the perspective I lacked and the drive to never go through it again. I don’t think I’d be on my current meds (which also had a fun roulette of physical irritation and outright mania) if it wasn’t for what I did the previous year.
It’s a little fucked up to realize I’m only here now because I did the stupidest, riskiest thing you can do on meds. Maybe I should get into gambling.
Building up resistance is the WORST – I’ve been through several varieties over the years, and while we finally found a combo that seems to work longterm, it’s a fun game of managing the side effects for the meds with what actually works and only gets more fun when you throw several other chronic conditions into the mix. My sympathies.
I don’t know how to really put it, but I’m better off without them. It’s weird, I don’t get it. Like you’d think getting used to them would just put me in a neutral state right? But I was just bad on them and now I’m not. I was as miserable, but I could never be happy. The only negative is that if something hits me hard it hits me harder than when I was on my meds, except hitting that hard is why I got to get better. I hit rock bottom, I guess?
The idea of getting used to my adderall scares the hell out of me. I can’t go back to that weird, broken, scattered lump of meat I used to be.
I think the risk of him having something he likes to do (like drawing comics) might distract him from things he NEEDS to do (like improving his grades to keep from dropping out). “Should I study for my next test? Nah, I need to finish another comic.”
I dunno I kind of feel like as someone who is used to things coming easy and therefore not requiring effort, Walky needs to experience not getting what he wants all the time. Yeah he cared about this for 4 whole days, but him getting what he wanted the second he briefly cared about something for a few days would likely just reinforce that message of “yeah, life will give me what I want.”
I think Walky is experiencing for the first time ever this year that life is *not*always fair and easy (his sudden math struggles, his realizing his sister’s experience of race and treatment by their family being very different from his own, etc) and it’s a valuable lesson.
Not to say I think people need to suffer to learn. Just that, having seen this pattern before IRL, I know that sometimes when someone grows up kind of spoiled and has things come easy to them/gets their way a lot, when suddenly they encounter a challenge or obstacle, they can easily slip into a sort of entitled “why is the world against me??” eternal victim mentality, instead of realizing “oh maybe I actually do need to put effort into things to get what I want.”
I feel bad for Walky for not getting the job, but I’m happy for Joyce – she deserved the job. She has the commitment and is willing to put in a lot of effort to do the best she can.
Walky cares, sure, but not as much as Joyce, given how committed he was to NOT putting effort into his comic. And caring about getting a job and wanting it doesn’t automatically entitle you to having it.
I really hope (and believe) Lucy will be good for him – he has sort of a cynical, pessimistic attitude overall and I feel like she could help gently push him to put more effort into his endeavors. I might be somewhat biased, though, because I like Lucy very much and want her to be happy.
Yeeeeeaaaah… Still don’t care he didn’t get it, still glad Joyce did. Life ain’t fair, here’s lesson 20 continuing to prove said statement. But I happen to have a dislike of spoiled children, being one and trying to break said “I deserve this” reasoning.
Though I agree, he really needs an ADHD diagnosis so he can find ways to cope with the traits that harm him or put him at disadvantages. Not fond of the idea of medicine solutions, based on job profession though.
“But I happen to have a dislike of spoiled children, being one and trying to break said ‘I deserve this’ reasoning.”
Wasn’t Joyce’s main argument just a whine that ‘You were going to give it to me!’ There’s a lot of spoiled children around these parts, not sure why some people are so focused on just Walky.
(For the record, I’m fine with it: DoA has always been about growing up from being a spoiled child.)
I think her argument was more “you were about to offer it to me”. She’s not the one assuming she’ll get the job by default, by virtue pf being the only one who showed up.
Daisy still shouldn’t have offered either of them the job on the spot, though. If submissions are open until Friday, a decision shouldn’t be made until at least the following business day.
We as readers heard a vague “Submissions open to Friday”, but in-strip there were probably more detailed rules… Show up by X P.M., prepare a pitch with sample comics, etc. If those were the rules, Daisy probably had more than enough to go on after hearing Joyce’s pitch (and seeing a little of what Walky offered.)
There’s absolutely no indication that there was an ‘X PM’ deadline and assuming so just seems to be for fans to tilt the scales towards Joyce. Walky DID have samples though – Daisy just didn’t look at them. Or hear his pitch. She didn’t give any real fair consideration to Walky. Joyce was probably the right call but that doesn’t mean Daisy did her due diligence.
I don’t think it’s just that, I think Joyce’s objections weren’t that sharing with Walky was bad, it’s that sharing meant it would take her twice as long to get anywhere.
Those were her later (still whiny, imo) objections, after Daisy offers the fairly-reasonable compromise that they split time.
Joyce’s initial whine was just in response to the very possibility that Daisy would even consider Walky’s submission. “You were going to give it to me! You haven’t even looked at his!”
I mean yeah, she was literally about to get the job right there. That’s not Right or Wrong that’s just having an immediate reaction to having something taken away, like, say, what Walky’s feeling right now.
And the thing about splitting the comic, which Daisy also reminds the both of them that nobody cares about the newspaper and that this decision means nothing, is that:
A. Joyce objects on the grounds of how it’ll ruin the pacing of the comic since now it takes twice as long to get anywhere.
B. Daisy Solomon’d it because she wanted to see who wanted it more, because the actual job she’s hiring for is meaningless to her.
I don’t actually agree that splitting is reasonable, I think it’s the kind of middle ground that someone comes up with to get both people involved to shut up.
> Wasn’t Joyce’s main argument just a whine that ‘You were going to give it to me!’
I think the difference here is that Walky’s “Offer” was just a vague “There is a contest” with no guarantee of success (other than the fact that there were no competitors at the time). On the other hand, Joyce had a more firm “I have looked at your work and accepted it” commitment from Daisy.
Walky’s offer was to have his submission looked at if he got it in by Friday, something that Daisy explicitly failed to do, and in part because Joyce whined her way past Daisy’s hesitations.
But again, I’m not here to defend Walky, I just get annoyed when the commentariat majority picks one character to hate on, when it seems fairly obvious (at least to me) that there’s a lot of shitty behavior across all the characters.
As I mentioned before… we the readers only knew of “in by Friday”, but its likely there were more detailed requirements (what time of day to submit it, what to include in the “pitch”, etc.)
And keep in mind that while Daisy seemed to be rejecting Walky’s comic without properly evaluating it, she was also (at one point) planning on GIVING him at least part-time work, even without fully evaluating Walky’s comic. If Joyce is to be blamed for wanting the job that was offered to her, then Walky should also be blamed for being willing to accept the job without having his work evaluated.
It feels like you’re blaming Joyce here for Daisy’s incompetence. It was Daisy who gave Joyce the ok too early, giving her false hopes – Daisy who didn’t give Walky the same chance she gave Joyce to sit down and explain his concept – Daisy who made a weird sexual pass at Walky’s gf in favour of listening to him – Daisy who offered a compromise, but then made it a weird Salamone test.
To be fair, this is probably all plot convenience. Both Joyce’s and Walky’s comics are supposed to be a shitty, but also have potential. Joyce is supposed to get serialized. I think most readers expect Walky and Joyce to team up, or for Walky to publish online.
Walky came in literally as Daisy was telling Joyce she got the job. Daisy should have told Joyce that she’d call the next day if there were no other submissions but that would require he caring about this at all
I wonder if the same people would be saying the same thing if Walky had gotten there first and Daisy had done the same, “And honestly, no one else has applied, so …” before Joyce came bursting in.
And would Joyce and Walky have reacted the same way afterwards.
I suppose that’s contingent on how Walky composes himself in the interview and whether or not Joyce would say “half is fine, it’s less work” when given the option.
Walky if you’d shown you cared Daisy would have actually considered you. She literally chose Joyce because she cared more. Self sabotage thy name is Walky.
Granted this is the guy who once thought having more than one pair of shoes was an affront to masculinity.
(And I still don’t think Walky cared half as much anyway given the fact he kept going on about how to do less work but oh well).
Somehow I wonder despite having a boring comic premise which is low effort if Walky will post it online and have a meteoric rise in popularity as Joyce struggles. At least in the short term. Because honestly Joyce’s comic while better than Walky’s probably still needs work and sometimes shitty low effort things get popular out of pure luck.
Walky putting the bare minimum effort into something that attains him success, and then being unable to sustain that effort when it not only becomes an expectation of him, but he’s expected to improve?
In my experience, people who’ve historically had things come easy to them tend to get frustrated the fastest the second things *don’t* come easy to them. It definitely seems to be a pattern for Walky. See: his sudden avoidance of going to class as soon as math required effort instead of being an easy A.
Whereas people who have always struggled to prove themselves to achieve things tend to be extremely proactive and tenacious when they want something. It makes sense, Joyce coming from a family/environment that was big on judgement (I.e. her mom & church) might be more inclined to put in more effort as she probably has a history of feeling like she has to prove herself.
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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 ⋅ 1d
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
confirming that the reason there's been no Galaxy Version female characters in Blokees until now is that they felt they needed to make Round Lady Thighs For Ladies
preternia @preternia.com ⋅ 14h
Josh Gerstein @joshgerstein.bsky.social ⋅ 1d
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com ⋅ 2d
Pavel
@spavel.bsky.social ⋅ 11d
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DAMN, phrased that way, Joyce is a MONSTER for crushing his dreams =C
…
ya know, lemme repost the anecdote I buried in the comments a few days back, seems to apply here, too, maybe better
I actually applied for a comic position, although it was for drawing for a script rather than whatever we felt like. It apparently was down to me and another person I knew, and while it wasn’t quite Joyce vs. Walky levels of difference, I’m p sure if you replaced “level of world building” with “willingness to draw backgrounds” then the comparison is spot on
but I don’t begrudge “my” Joyce for getting the part, since I learned I really can’t draw to somebody else’s guidelines unless I REALLY want to do it
the main thing was, it was my first serious effort at something, for potential pay, and I was so “I WANT TO DO THIS” but also “DANG THIS IS HARD, HOW CAN I DO THE LEAST AND GET IT DONE” that I’m really not surprised the other person got it
The most insidious thing about having your dreams crushed is the one who crushes your dream isn’t always the bad guy.
Good lord this bodes poorly for Lucy. I mean, we pretty much all figured there was poor boding anyways, but damn.
Not sure why. I guess you can read it to say “I haven’t stayed interested in Lucy”, but I think we’re dealing with different categories here.
He certainly stayed interested in Dorothy and Amber for more than 5 days, so it’s not really worth commenting on a lasting interest in Lucy. Staying interested in a project like the comic for that long is very different.
I’m sure Lucy could point out: self published internet comics.
Sympathies. “My Joyce”, in this situation, not only easily beat me put for an internship, outside her major but inside mine, but was also a friend who essentially applied to see what would happen. It was tough remaining friends after that.
Well, at the time it was a bummer bc I was in this mindset that if it was going to work, I needed to be productive at X rate to finish Y pages to make Z dollars compared to even a minimum wage job, and I was freaking out about that plus doing a good job that people would actually pay money to see
so it’s actually for the best even though the job I now have isn’t remotely arty (though I only minimally have to care about quality of my work since currently I largely cut and paste answers and pays surprisingly well for it)
Five straight days. ADHD vibes increasing.
Damn you for a comment-ninjaing… comment… ninjaer…. wait, why should I be upset by this again?
At this point if Walky doesn’t actually have ADHD I’ll [insert ridiculous thing here].
Define “ridiculous thing” and “here”.
By the authority invested in me by King Daniel, I hereby define “ridiculous thing” to be a parenthetical remark which uses square brackets, and “here” to be our small insignificant suburb of cyberspace.
I mean, given that at least one character is smart-coded has said he “clearly has [it],” I think that means in-universe that he does. It doesn’t seem like Willis would float an idea like that if it wouldn’t pay off, especially because that’d probably be a little insensitive to neuro-divergents. By meta-gaming basic story-telling rules and social mores, I’m happy putting it to 99% certainty “Walky has ADHD” is an in-universe fact, no matter how it’s eventually addressed.
Whatever happens to be on your mind at the time [inserted then]?
It’s so easy to label something ADHD. I’m in a position at 31 that for the first time in my life I put fairly consistent effort (an hour a day) in the same thing for like 20 days or so, and I am pretty damn proud even if it doesn’t pay the bills yet. It feels like an overwhelming amount of work done, and I’m struggling a lot to increase it. It’d be easy to say I’m simply incapable of paying attention. But no, the reason is a complex set of internalized beliefs and fears that I’m trying to untangle. Eg. Why do it if it won’t be perfect? You should learn to do it right before even trying. You can’t be seen as not clever at anything ever. What if doing something else instead is a more rational choice?
By Everything that is holy; YOU! Get OUT OF Mah BRAIN –> And the worst part for me is – the drugs only help marginally.
At least they help a little?
Unfortunately, after diagnosis, I found myself to be in the 20% that are largely unresponsive to the drugs generally used for treating ADHD.
But yeah, managing the condition completely the hard way is not fun.
I mean I also do these exact things, as in those last four sentences are also mine, and I’ve got ADHD.
It can be both.
Oh hello, this is my life.
I took a cue from my 3rd Grade students and made myself a weekly star chart. We’re talking sparkly rainbow stickers, in various categories.
My current categories are writing my book, doing 30min+ of boring adult tasks, applying to jobs, and practicing driving. My fiancés chart has included exercising, physical therapy, producing his play, and reaching out to friends. Either of us can get a star for planning our wedding.
I don’t get all the stars possible each week, but I do get WAY more of those things done than I did before the chart. I actually look for ways to get stars each day.
(PS for my depressed pals, my star chart originally measured “I was out of bed and eating breakfast before 11am each day” and “I did 30min of a not-fun task”. I added categories over time.)
So wait, just to clarify – are you being dismissive of the internet diagnosing Walky with ADHD because you’re own described behavior is or is NOT ADHD?
Cuz I have ADHD, and you kinda sound like you’re reading my brain.
Also worth noting: I was only diagnosed 3 years ago, and I’m 42.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Walky does have ADHD.
I felt this one. A lot. I really wish I had insurance so I could get help.
Yeah, once he put it like that I flashed back to a lot of memories of opportunities that meant a lot to me that people thought I put no effort into and I felt really bad. I’m still glad Joyce got it because I think she needs the outlet but I really hope that Walky can find something similar.
I note that the thing he held an interest in for an extended time was NOT his schoolwork OR his new girlfriend.
ADHD vibes increasing.
Same face.
Same comment phrasing.
…
Soggies may rule.
Walky has extended interests for fast food, I’m sure.
You only need to be interested in the fast food until you’ve eaten it all.
The reason Walky likes fast food so much is because he can’t keep focused long enough for slow food.
If you put this this way ouch, but he always try to be better so i hope he only exaggerates
“WaLKy doEsN’T aCTuaLly cARe abOuT tHE CoMIc”
… is Booster going to suggest that Walky should do a webcomic?
And lo, on that day, Walky’s Internet Pitstop was born.
That was my thought too.
Awe don’t feel too sad, Walky. You tried, and that’s what matters! Treat yourself to a coffee or something.
Also, Booster, LOVE the belly-button shirt!
Coffee is gross. Have a chocolate milk, on me.
That’s good too, but don’t knock coffee till you’ve had it with at least 20% cream.
I have and I realized something.
I just like cream and sugar, not coffee. So I still don’t drink coffee.
Both of those are delicious, and the fact that you get all of your work done without caffeine just makes it all the more impressive!
Caffeine doesn’t even work on everyone.
I actually do like coffee, though I understand why many don’t. My theory is that people that want cream and sugar in their coffee don’t actually like coffee.
But, man, if coffee tasted as good as smells…
That is what I tell people when they ask me why I don’t drink coffee.
Eh. It’s still liking coffee if you like it with cream and sugar, just like it’s still liking chocolate if you like it at 60% or 70% dark rather than 99% or 100% (it’s even still “liking chocolate” if you like milk chocolate, though in that case you should try GOOD European milk chocolate if you haven’t. It’s NOT liking chocolate if you only like white chocolate, but really, just liking the taste of cocoa butter is fine!)
Only a small percentage of coffee drinkers prefer it bitter and very intense–many more like it with at least a -little- sweetness or at least a -little- milk (personally, I can handdle it with either or both and have youu tried vietnamese iced coffee?) So setting the standards beyond “likes the taste” to “likes the pure thing at maximum heat” is a bit much IMO.
Also, personally dark coffee is A. intense and B. really, really sensitive to the beans and brewing conditions. So while I might start with coffee black for single origin stuff so I really taste it, it’s not worth it for most coffee.
chocolate is just another Booster
Have you tried black tea with that combination of contaminants? I liked it when I was a toddler/kid.
I had someone ask me to give that a try. I couldn’t add enough to make it palatable. Ended up pouring it down the drain.
I like soda, I like juice (including hot cider, spiced or not), I like cocoa. I like coffee as a flavor (ice cream, etc), and I like chocolate-covered beenz. I don’t like tea.
In fairness, much more than coffee or chocolate, tea is really, really variable. I tolerated tea (never really -liked- it, was just willing to drink it when there wasn’t coffee available) until I had a good selection of different good teas and found some I really didn’t care for and some I really liked.
There’s no particularly strong reason to correlate liking, say, jasmine with liking English Breakfast, with liking Ceylon, with liking lapsang suchon, with liking pueh (I don’t) with liking genmai-cha, etc. Some “teas” don’t even contain tea.
I used to hate coffee, then I had really good quality coffee with cream and sugar and it’s good. And the caffeine helps my ADHD (usually by putting me to sleep). Unfortunately my ADHD also means I’m that bit less likely to go to the effort of making fresh coffee.
I have found that making a batch of cold brew coffee every few days does wonders for making good coffee more accessible.
Interesting how that works.
One of my professors actually told me once that coffee made him sleepy too, and this held true for 5% of all people.
He didn’t seem to have ADHD though…..
That’s called coffee milk, and you can only make it right if you knew how to pronounce “quahog” before hearing it spoken on Family Guy. (Or if you use Autocrat syrup, I guess.)
bUt wALkY wAsN’t rEaLLy InTeReStEd aT aLL iN dOiNg a cOmIc
(happy quarter-century to me today, I guess)
Oh gods, they’re multiplying!
**runs screaming**
dang, comment-ninja’d on my own birthday
Please accept my full celebrations on your birthday in exchange for ninjaing you.
Oh! Happy birthday!
And now, back to my screaming.
**flees**
Happy birthday, hope you enjoy yourself and get to relax.
Have a birthday, young’un.
Accept my invisible up vote. Then get off my lawn.
If I recall correctly, you’re about 235% my age. So your lawn is safe. For now.
*joins Opus in shakin’ m’stick at them dang kids*
why, you do not look a day older than whichever relatively-younger age number you find flattering!!! i think your comments are very good. please keep making them.
Happy birthday! Long live the king!
The King has Birthday-ed! Long Live the King! Long may he Reign, our just and noble… Hey!! Plus there’s rain for the King’s birthday, no?
This is why I wanted Walky to get the strip. He never shows interest in anything besides cartoons, fast food, and I guess smooching ladies now sometimex. It was refreshing to see him try.
Thats a bad way to decide who gets something.
Joyce put in more effort, Joyce had proof that she’d have a comic strip to submit every week and Joyces drawings (are comics considered drawings or art?) looked more professional
Joyce is the better choice because Joyce was the better candidate
Ok, I was one of the people who thought Walky wasn’t really that upset about losing and I’ll cop to being wrong, but we don’t actually know how much effort walky put in because Daisy never looked at it
That said neither Daisy nor Joyce had any way of knowing losing the comic spot would have such a demoralizing effect on Walky (in part because he was flippant about it in front of them with that “bullet dodged” comment)
Anyway it all comes back to Daisy is bad at her job and shouldn’t have it
But if Daisy looked at both comics, and then still decided Joyce was better… Walky would still be bummed.
It sucks and Daisy was unprofessional, but Walky’s mental state hinging on the comic is not Daisy’s responsibility.
Is Daisy “bad at her job”?
Lets set aside the whole “Is your girlfriend bi” comic strip (in the real world would be a bit creepy, but we will assume it was just for laughs).
She didn’t read through all of Walky’s work, but Walky:
1) showed up late. I don’t know if there was a particular time of day that he had to submit his comic by, but since Daisy was getting ready to give the comic to Joyce when Walky came it, its possible that it was close to end-of-day (which is never a good situation for a job seeker..)
2) Daisy did see one page of Walky’s work (he was holding it up when she accosted him). It is possible that she was able to recognize “repetitive themes” in what she saw
3) When Daisy suggested splitting the work, Walky’s reaction was “Great, less work”, which could make a potential employer nervous. “Is this person going to be willing to put in the effort on even a reduced workload?
Yeah, I thought Daisy was an asshole…for about eight seconds. Then I remembered she was a grown adult running a legitimate enterprise that has a product to produce, and the person who gets the job will literally be employed by her and she will be responsible for their output. Her being fair to anybody is not a fucking factor, here. Walky is 17 employee red flags in a recently-licked shirt, no sane person would hire him for anything that would require him to be responsible for consistently outputting a product on a schedule.
There is other evidence about whether Daisy is good at her job than her handling of this issue with the comic strip. We have seen her manage Dorothy and Jennifer and the Amazi-Girl and Night-Guy stories.
Daisy told Walky that he had the job on condition of submitting samples on Friday. Daisy did not mention a competition. But Joyce showed up and…. Even though Joyce’s strip seems better for the paper than Walky’s, that is a dickish way to deal with free-lancers.
Walky’s haste to get the sauce off his shirt suggests that he got to Daisy’s office shortly after lunch, not at close-of-business.
The first thing Daisy says in that strip you linked is “We have a contest to replace a graduated cartoonist’s strip.”
!
Well, I don’t know how I missed that.
I think the problem is, we as readers did not get details about what was required for the submission contest. However, there must have been some rules in place (otherwise Walky slipping them under the office door at 11:59 would be “submitting his work”).
So there must have been some rules in place (we know there were because Dorothy managed to find them out), and that might have involved a time-of-day deadline. (And the fact that Walky was running suggests he was late for it.)
Walky said he wanted to hurry to get there before Joyce – which looks like it would have been a good idea. He was told “samples by Friday”.
I suspect there weren’t any formal rules in place or that Daisy would just ignore them anyways
Let’s be honest about Daisy.
She picked Joyce because she’s a girl writing a strip with lesbian romance potential. Everything else was incidental.
That seems like an unfair reading given that Daisy’s comments on the Extremely Gay romance between Julia and Doris were that she liked it, and when Joyce made it clear it was completely unintentional Daisy just gave some frank advice that her audience might read into something that isn’t there to the point of feeling intentionally misled.
Sure, if you can that one strip at face value while ignoring everything else ever established about Daisy.
It’s almost like we’re seeing what Daisy is like when she’s not being one-note, in her second appearance after her date with Ruth, the only time in the comic she has ever indicated the slightest personality.
Daisy went on a date with Ruth where instead of trying to shove her face into her cooter they talked and got to know each other a bit and Daisy said outright she was scared and nervous but wanted to keep trying and then when Ruth started casually talking about her suicidal ideation Daisy got flatout protective of her, instinctively grabbing her hand to show support, and it only ended up in tears when Ruth propositioned her.
Like, maybe we’re seeing Daisy for who she actually is now when the camera focuses on her for reasons other than being horny.
Maybe, but yet the horniness still shines through and her interests still line right up with her decision
It seemed pretty clear to me that Daisy was being professional with Joyce while discussing her comic and only reset back to her gag status once she caught a whiff of polyamorous bisexual girl saliva.
If she was giving Joyce the job because yuribait she’d probably make that clearer to us.
I think it’s very rare in this comic for anything to be “reset back to gag status”. Plenty of gags have come back seriously. Maybe not the outright superpowers, like Joyce teleporting, but nearly everything else.
Walky did not “show up late”.
He was supposed to be there that day. He didn’t have an assigned time.
And Walky’s strip is honestly a better choice for a college paper. A long-form story comic is fine for the web, mostly ok for a regular newspaper, but is a terrible choice for a college paper. 1/4 of the audience is going to be lost every year, because they’re going to graduate, and the new audience would have to make an effort to find back issues to start the story, and probably won’t bother. I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen maybe 3 or 4 issues of my college’s daily paper since 1993, and I live in the same town where I went to college. So for the most part the only people who will see the entire story are people in Joyce’s class.
Actually we don’t know for sure if he “showed up late”, because we don’t know the exact details of the contest (i.e. if there was stipulation “all submissions must be received by noon” or whatever.) But, the fact that he was running in order to get to Daisy’s office suggests that he was somehow rushed/behind schedule.
As for whether Walky’s comic would have been a better fit, I think it depends on the quality of the comic. A joke-a-day is better for casual readers, but only if the jokes are actually funny. Walky’s concept seemed to be extremely limited (i.e. lets do the same joke over and over), which probably isn’t a good formula for attracting readers, whereas a decent plot-driven comic might entice people to read the paper just to see what happens next.
As for the issue of losing readers to graduation/attracting new students… that problem can be minimized by carefully timing story lines so that they coincide with start/end of term, and providing occasional strips featuring exposition.
He explicitly says in an earlier strip that he wanted to beat Joyce there. That’s why he was hurrying.
There is no hint anywhere in any of these strips that there was a specific deadline or that he missed it. Even Joyce, when she’s claiming it’s already hers doesn’t say anything about him missing a deadline.
It’s absolutely possible that a good enough write could pull off a long term plot driven comic in a campus paper. I don’t think there’s any real evidence that Joyce is that writer. Yet, at least. Her emphasis on getting to the good part with the aliens and earlier on how to introduce all the characters she needs make me doubt it.
One could argue that these are both bad submissions, in different ways. Joyce’s too ambitious and Walky’s not ambitious enough. I’m not really arguing here that Walky’s is necessarily a better fit, just that it’s not nearly as clear cut as it might seem.
Joyce was definitely the better pick. Daisy made the right decision, it was just nice to see Walky apply effort to something. That’s like his major character flaw, he cruises through life expecting everything to be easy and working for nothing. That’s why a bad grade was so psychologically damaging to him last quarter. To see him actively pursue something was good character growth. But learning you can fail even when you try is als o a good lesson for him.
Of course for him to have success resulting from deliberate effort definitely wouldn’t hurt.
Yet again I see it coming up time and time again that most success is down to random chance.
You know what? I’m just gonna stop here and acknowledge that the question on who really deserved the job is a complicated issue with no easy answers before I go off on an over-analytical tangent that no-one’s gonna bother to read anyway.
Well, neither of them “deserved” it. It was something they both applied for and it was something nobody on Earth cared about, so Daisy flipped a coin.
I don’t think Daisy would have changed her mind if she saw it, either. She liked all the effort that Joyce put in and then Joyce going all or nothing made Daisy comment she wanted it more. The actual quality probably wasn’t up for debate.
And, in light of this strip, I think Daisy would see it as something Joyce is putting lots of herself into, versus the same joke with the same art by someone who showed up five minutes before deadline.
Like, how would Walky actually pitch this to her?
Random chance is almost always a major component of most success. So is effort, accumulated skill, and innate ability.
Sure, in universe that would be true, but on a character perspective, I too was excited to see potential for Walky’s character in the comic. That said, I also see potential in exploring this direction too, so I’m not as disappointed as I might have been otherwise.
In universe, yes, Daisy probably made the right decision – although she can’t really know that because she neither looked at his strips nor heard his pitch.
“Thats a bad way to decide who gets something.”
I mean…sure? In terms of literal things in the real world that have stakes? But we’re talking about the outcome of a plot arc in a webcomic which a person pointed out would have made them feel happy, for the character in question. I dunno if “which character would have clearly and objectively been more deserving in reality” has any bearing on a fan just wanting a character they like to have happy stuff happen to them, because it feels good to read that…
not to mention, characters making bad decisions is what propels this story forward =^
(…basically every story ever, really.)
Also real life.
Good decisions come from good judgment.
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad decisions.
“Drawings or art”???
https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/feldhase/1QHEnzUGYMDG_w
Same
Nitpick… until recently, Walky had an interest in WATCHING cartoons and fast food. And only certain cartoons. (Not, for example, Ultracar.)
You have to have watched Ultracar to know Monkey Master is better than Ultracar.
Same, it was nice to see Walky interested in something to the point that he actually put effort into it and wanted to succeed. Even though Joyce’s comic was almost certainly better, I really wanted him to get the job.
Oh, Walky.
There’s plenty of webcomic platforms to host on, my poor guy.
I suspect Booster may suggest doing just that to Walky
Or Lucy since she was actively helping, has skin in the game, and is the one with comic posters all over her wall. Lucy isn’t my fav, but I do like watching their flustered interactions and maybe she’s the right kind of goob for him… plus Linda would “love” that.
I do feel bad for Walky here. I know that Joyce put a lot more work into making her comics than Walky did but I still can’t help but be bummed for Walky.
Why is that?
I mean even if rationally you know that the other person was a better fit, it still sucks to get passed over.
Also, Walky’s “one joke per comic per newspaper, no continuity” idea would probably fit in more with a college newspaper than an elaborate years long story that requires reading the entire run. It’s why Garfield works.
Yeah, honestly I think Walky’s strip is probably a better college paper strip.
Joyce’s might be better than it seems, but it seems like most of the appeal is in the long term payoff and she’s going to spend at least the first semester doing set up stuff before she gets to what she’s interested in. It’s possible to do that well and keep people’s interest in daily gags while doing it, but it’s not clear she has the chops for it yet.
Her strip is definitely more ambitious, but that doesn’t mean it’s better. Early Roomies! at best, but with more focus on setting stuff up for It’s Walky and likely less on doing anything interesting in the short term.
Cause it sucks to watch someone put effort in something and fail. If Joyce had lost a lot of us would be feeling bad for her too.
*Barely put in effort. He was all excited that recycling most of the art every day would score him a few easy bucks once the job was handed to him by default.
Then, a wild competition appeared and ran circles around him.
Barely put in effort relative to the average person. Relative to the entire life experience of David Walkerton, he put in probably 15-20% of his total life’s effort expenditure, this week.
Yeah that’s something to think about to.
A gag a day that reuses the concept and art every time could be, at the moment, the most amount of work Walky can put into something.
That’s a fair point. However, there’s no way Daisy would’ve known that. Just saying “sure, I want to do it” doesn’t instill confidence that he’ll commit to it long-term.
Walky wasn’t reinventing Dinosaur Comics, he literally had ONE strip he planned on minimally tweaking every day. He could have all the confidence in himself that he’d stick to it and maybe even come up with a second gag eventually, but to everyone else he looks like he’s either lazy or not taking the job seriously.
Given what was presented to her, it was only logical for Daisy to choose Joyce for the job (if only so she wouldn’t have to replace Walky if he got bored and flaked out on her after two weeks).
OTOH, they could have accepted Daisy’s trick compromise offer and no one would have lost out completely.
Cause you know how it feels to try at something and still fail, and can sympathize, I imagine.
As an artist who has spent his entire life comparing himself to 16 year olds who’s art is and will always be better than his own, knowing you weren’t good enough stings extra hard. It sucks to fall short. And people say not to compare yourself to others, but guess what the people hiring you are gonna do.
They’re gonna exploit you, undervalue you, and try to crush your dreams.
Oh, and compare you to others, which is probably the point you were making, my bad, sorry.
If it makes you feel any better, I think you’re art is awesome, and it’s gotten me through some REALLY tough times!
*your art.
Brain not work. Please insert “cleaning disk”.
no no. There may be something to the “you are” art claim.
“Cleaning Disk?” How old Are you?
What, you never had a PS1?
Your skills of an artist are miles beyond anything I could hope to render.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ijEiwBLCXeo
Indeed.
While it’s true that there’s always someone better than you, it is also true that there are many, many more people who are worse.
As someone with bad brain I know that you can understand a message but still not apply it to yourself, believe it and embrace it. That said: unless you’re on deaths door, you have time. More time than you would have had at any previous point in history. There is plenty of room for art that is uniquely yours as that is still a contribution no one else can manage. Similarly your art doesn’t need to be the best of the best if the message/content resounds with people. Look at xkcd. Yes his info graphics are impressive as are his rare large compositions but most of it is just knowledgeable jokes with stick figures. Have a through line, pull a Willis and stock pile art so you can post at least a few days a week to keep an audience, promote and chase an audience like crazy and enjoy it enough it can sustain you’re happiness just by making even a limited audience happy. If you keep at it you have a better chance of catching some luck than giving up due to failing to live up to your own expectations… said the pot to the kettle. Just remember all the people who have supported your contributions here. And that’s a single Fandom.
No matter what you do, there is always going to be someone better than you. Accept it, understand it, and ignore it. All you can do is be the best that YOU can be, and always strive to do the next thing just a little bit better.
Did Walky go from getting his TV mouse gig to losing it in five days?
Nah, he still does that on weekends.
I think it was a one-off, so yeah probably.
He didn’t really have an interest in that, that was something his mum got him to do.
Yeah, he didn’t even remember doing it until he was confronted with it.
More accurately he probably blocked out the trauma of being a religious choire mouse. I would.
You don’t have to give up on your dreams, Walky! Draw those comics, print out dozens of copies, and staple them to bulletin boards all over campus! YOU CAN DO IT!
Martin Luther’s comic is 95 strips long.
I’ll indulge that.
I see what you did there and couldn’t do otherwise.
There’s a market for Reformation humor that needs to be met.
And here I thought you were going to Counter that.
I can’t tell if you’re serious but you should look up Lutherlevy.com Plug due to being a family friend. She’s gone on to more serialized comics and hasn’t come back to this project but it’s time period, religion, philosophy, and occasionally leaning towards werewolfiness which would be more notable in her comic centered around vampires and the French revolution.
Okay, I know we dumpstered on Joyce for her behaviour in that chain of events. But the thing is, Walky is bummed not because Joyce got the job ‘unfairly’, but that he didn’t get it at all.
Walky isn’t owed the strip spot just because he actually had interest in something for once. Walky didn’t get a chance to properly show his strip off, but the thing is, he needs to be able to handle rejection. If he’d gotten a fair shot, and Joyce still got the spot (which is honestly likely, given that she’s put in more work)… Walky would still be in this soul sucking funk.
Rejection sucks, and this is coming from someone who’s still job hunting. The hardest part is picking yourself back up after failure again, and it can often feel unfair. But this is one of the most difficult lessons Walky’s gonna have to learn instead of sulking every time he gets the slightest resistance to something he wants.
Yeah it’s true. You’re not allowed to sulk at all when something you were eager from eludes your grasp. Just toughen up, loser.
Sorry but I feel like we should all be allowed some sulking time. This is IMMEDIATELY after. Literally the next thing we’ve seen Walky do after getting rejected. He’s permitted to sulk a bit.
Oh nah, this is completely understandable. Walky’s totally allowed to sulk.
I’m hoping he can bounce back from this rather than ‘well everything sucks forever, time to just lie in bed and eat McNuggets’.
Well, sure, but I feel like bounce back time is AT LEAST a few hours post rejection at the minimum. Let him sulk for a little bit. He’ll be fine.
I’ll grant him the purchase and consumption of a 50 pack of McNuggets and two sauces during that sulk.
I think there is a difference between “I am unhappy I didn’t get the job. I will pout for a few minutes/hours and then go back to my schoolwork, i.e. the whole reason I am here” (an understandable, mature reaction to rejection), and “I am totally devastated and I will never try to do anything ever again” (which is what Walky is going through).
Oh come on, it just happened. Surely he’s entitled to still be in the ‘Feeling super discouraged and wondering why I bother’ dramatic phase? Especially since he’s still a newbie adult?
Yes, it just happened. But we know that Walky has trouble dealing with adversity (witness how he shut down when he started to fail math rather than get help). And his comments about “never trying anymore” were troubling (and the type of thing you would expect from someone who had “given up”.)
It’s a really common issue in “gifted child” ADHDers. I don’t know if it was written that way on purpose or a happy accident but it’s dead on what a lot of us have experienced. We’re held to such high expectations as children, but when there’s something we struggle with we’re told we’re not trying hard enough. Even though we are, but the awful thing with ADHD is that actively trying (without using the right mental workarounds) actually causes the brain to shut down. “Gifted child” ADHDers typically learn that 1, any level of failure is a personal failing, and 2, if when you try your absolute hardest everybody berates you for not trying but when you don’t try at all sometimes you do incredibly well, why bother ever trying? It never ever works.
So yeah. Putting Walky’s issues in the lens of ADHD makes it very, very relatable and real to me. And kudos to DW for that, because assuming it’s not something he’s experienced he’s clearly listened enough to do it well. (Of course there’s also the possibility that it’s written from experience rather than from listening, or a combination.
Stop calling me out like that. I’ve just recently been able to go back to school and am attempting engineering although math was my try, struggle and go nowhere subject… I am concerned but my ultimate field is one I’m passionate about so I’m hoping that’s enough to carry me through. That and designated cry days.
Not really convinced ADHD is involved here. Walky is someone who just breezed through life and always gotten good marks, and whatever else he wanted. His problems with hitting a wall with his math and now this are typical of someone who has never had to work for anything before and then experiences failure.
He’s been explicitly suggested to have ADHD in comic (by Amber or Mike, IIRC).
Walky’s issues with failing also were wrapped up in how his mother treats her children, so that’s not just an ‘I failed’ thing.
How about C all of the above?
As long as he doesn’t just wallow in the rejection abyss forever, he’ll be fine.
We also all dumpstered on Walky because he obviously didn’t care about it and was just relieved not to have to do the work, so maybe we can keep in mind for a bit that even what characters claim about their motivations isn’t always true.
Okay, let’s go for six!
Of all the ways I thought I’d be consistently wrong about plot developments, I didn’t think my view of Walky as someone who constantly takes the path of least resistance out of choice was going to change in the face into depicting the lived reality of ADHD as a constant nightmare guilting yourself for being unable to apply yourself to things that your brain won’t let you or you exhaust yourself so much before trying that you can’t.
I hate how relatable this stuff is for me.
Literally the only reason I can stare from outside the box these days was because I described a constant behaviour on a forum that someone immediately pinged as hyperfocus.
Took about five/six months to get my diagnosis, then a train of meds that started with physically irritating my skin, not working at all, and then putting me into a state that when I told my doctor how I was behaving she described it as mania before she put me on something to get me off of that, now the adderall, which thank fucking god it works.
Adderall – For The Win! Because it saved me from getting fired, twice! I could finally pay enough attention to do something, beginning to end!
Huh
Starting to think I have ADHD
Get assessed. If you think it’s possible, get assessed.
Because the person I’ve been for the last two weeks has never existed, not in the last decade, and I like being him a whole dang lot.
Glad to hear it, new Spencer
Might Be ADD. Don’t guess, get tested.
*Cries in ADHD*
That always sucks, but at least you can put your stuff online, Walky!
The worst thing about putting in effort is when it blows up in your face. People act as if you work hard enough or want it hard enough you’ll get it, but sometimes Bart gets an F.
Yeeeeep.
Trying and failing was always worse than just not trying at all, that was a platitude that totally backfired on me. ‘Cause like, I can just fail and shrug my shoulders or I can try and study, not study at all because I can’t focus and I’m trying to pound words into my head, and then go in and say I did my best except my best was absolute garbage and also I’m garbage and I’ll never amount to anything.
Few things are more painful than your life blowing up in your face when you did the best you could do.
I love post/Gravatar synergy.
because the one thing guaranteed to make Dina tear up is thinking about all those hard-at-work dinosaurs just getting blown up through no fault of their own 66 million years ago?
Someone got blown up, and it was sorta their fault.
milu: “I’m sorry. This was the best I could do.”
(MAJOR Walkyverse spoilers, just a fair warning)
ooooh ok. thanks for the spoiler warning, i’m still hoping to motivate myself to walk my way through that other verse eventually!
Man, fuck you for reminding me that strip exists.
Just my absolute favourite page of them all.
That episode was rough, as a Bright Kid.
I know it’s a bummer Walky didn’t get the gig but I’m not feeling too bad for him. A quick review of his first week back from break shows:
1. He’s repaired and reaffirmed a more positive relationship with his sister
2. Got an objectively better roommate in Booster (because they own a Switch sorry Mike)
3. Became universally more attractive by officially obtaining the “hot” status having basically every heteroromantic girl and even our resident bisexual dude acknowledging it.
4. Almost immediately got a new girlfriend handed to him by his ex.
Dude is still winning pretty hard if you keep things in perspective.
Only Sister thing is from him, other points are external. For once he wants do something himself, take initiative and he fail.
Ah yes, the one bit of reused art comic strip he was glad to not have to draw more art for the moment opportunity to do less work presented itself.
i mean, *gestures at Dinosaur Comics*
That’s fine. He can feel bad about it. Most of us do. I’m just saying this isn’t that bad contextually. Overall it’s been a very good week for him. Compare his week to Becky’s and task me if him losing a comic strip gig is that big a deal? And I’m saying this as a major Walky supporter! He can comeback from this.
Thats actually the main reason I don’t like Walky, aside from the cowardice, he gets everything so damn easy
To be fair the sister one probably wasn’t that easy since Linda’s their mom. The break probably wasn’t very fun but we didn’t see it.
Sorry I didn’t explain that very well. He gets girlfriends so damn easy, he not only doesn’t have to try, hes oblivious most of the time.
He doesn’t try even when he gets a girl anyways, and if he has to he whines about it Ugh
If your problem with Walky is “girls keep throwing themselves at him without any effort on his part”, may I suggest your have-probleming should be directed at the girls, not Walky?
I think it’s a valid problem to have with a character, in a way it wouldn’t be with real people. It’s a character trait of his, not really theirs.
Thats funny part. He knows that and dread moment when his luck will end. I only hate deus ex machina with math grades.
Way to think of the positives!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zS0chgBD8Rs
“You are such a loser, good for you! It’s something a lot of people can’t do.
Trying is hard that’s why People don’t do it. Losing is hard, they can’t make it through it.
But not you. You are such a loser, so here’s to you.
Because you deserve a cheering section too”
-Garfunkel and Oates.
Learning to deal with failure is important. Trust me, I’ve seen plenty of it.
“Why do we fall, sir? So that we can learn to pick ourselves up.”
I checked Daisy’s appearances to see how long this 5 days was in real time: 10 months. Also, over half of her appearances (20 out of 38) are post-timeskip, I find that sort of thing interesting.
Yeah, reminds me of the early days of the strip, when a week was about a year of real time.
These days, I think it’s often closer to a week being two years of real time.
Daisy’s date with Ruth was an application for supporting character status.
Her assessment was contingent on that part where she says she’s weird and messed up but still wants to keep going, proving that she will get along with the rest of the cast like a house on fire.
Or a garbage roof on fire.
Mmm. I think he was interested in Dorothy for more than 5 days. Probably Amber too.
Something =/= Someone, I’d figure.
ADHD focus issues can absolutely involve people. And the fact that Walky has had three girlfriends in uh… six months? Five? After not only having none at all but no interest or intent, well- I’m not saying his interest in any of them was purely due to ADHD but I do sense an element of it in the speed in which he got emotionally involved… and how quickly he “got over it”. (Which, I want to be absolutely clear, does not mean his feelings at any point were “fake” or less valid.)
It’s actually a good sign for him and Lucy from an ADHD perspective. It’s been a slow burn (entirely off panel admittedly) compared to Dorothy and Amber. Speaking as someone with ADHD it’s so much a thing for ADHDers to possibly go full-tilt 120% on someone… for a short time. Weeks, maybe months, and then not know where the magic is gone, feel guilty that it’s gone, feel desperate to get it back but be completely miserable because it HAS gone.
Obviously that’s not how Walky’s relationships have ended, but it very much is a thing some ADHD folk experience- often without knowing why. I’m hoping the gradual development of a romance with Lucy will work out well.
yes, but if he called either of them hobbies they might be offended
He first falls for her during “Uphill from Here”, which was August 30th DoA time. She officially breaks off their relationship during “Faz is Great”, which was October 12 DoA time. (This was after she put their relationship “on pause” the day before, during “This is the Way That We Love”.)
Though maybe he never really got over Dorothy, even through his brief fling with Amber and maybe over the skip. Either way, it was a lot longer than five days.
Yeah, I don’t think interest in people really counts, which is why I don’t think this any reflection on his relationship with Lucy, as some have suggested.
Yeah, OK. Good point.
I replied above to DailyBrad but ADHD can absolutely impact a person’s feelings towards other people. To expand on my own relationships I recently had the someone overwhelming experience of how many times I’ve hyperfixated on a person only to feel like absolute garbage when the feelings disappeared and sometimes been completely unable to handle it from there. I had a very rapidly developing, very deep friendship develop early this year and then just… couldn’t make myself talk to her any more. I miss her and our conversations but I can’t do it. And I very nearly lost my relationship with my (now) husband when the hyperfixation dropped- thankfully we were able to take a break from each other and then build a proper relationship without it.
So yeah. It’s a thing. And it’s a thing with ADHD that isn’t talked about enough.
Also with ADHD adjusting to a “new normal” is incredibly rapid (albeit not necessarily healthy), but things being “in limbo” is incredibly difficult. Not massively relevant but it came into my head.
Shutting up now because I could talk for so long about ADHD it’s just absurd.
Chase that dream, Walky
Liking the middriff, Booster.
I would like their outfit if it wasn’t really impractical to be wearing clothes that bare the midriff in the winter.
but surely indoors….? if this dorm is anything is like that recently-renovated student apartment building with central heating i lived in for a few months, it’s likely to be at least 22° or so. celsius, that is. 72°F, that is.
Man I really didn’t want Joyce to have it for this reason. Walky barely shows interest in pursuing things for his own sake instead of just not getting in trouble and she had to butt in and take something just so he wouldn’t have it and at the slightest inconvenience to her she took advantage of his kindness and stole what he wanted by throwing a tantrum then gloated over him. I can’t wait til stuff blows up in her petty little face.
Who said Joyce took the job just so Walky “wouldn’t have it”?
We have seen cases where Joyce has show creativity in the past (her doodles in her notes, her “LITERATURE” that is sort of the basis of the newspaper comic.) I think she’d be interested in doing the comic just because she wants to create.
And what “kindness” did Walky show here? He didn’t give Joyce details about the comic (Joyce got them from Dorothy.) And Walky certainly wasn’t holding back when it came preparing his bid.
What kindness? Walky is alwayd mocking and teasing Joyce, he deserves what he puts out. Minimal effort and snark.
he agreed to split the days to be nice, but Joyce’s tantrum proved she “cared more”
He did NOT split it to be nice. He did it because it would be less work, He’da dropped it the moment he had to do the effort of filling out that paper work.
Note what he says right after that “I only said that to be nice”
You’re falling for the act that Walky put on, he didn’t want to admit he really cared, and use the work aspect to make as graceful of an exit as he could after he lost the position.
Walky spends a lot of time putting on an act of being childish or lazy or dumb to avoid his problems, but here we’re seeing him admit that he really does care, dropping the mask for a moment.
If he cared that much he coulda snapped back “ Well if she’s all or nothing then take my strip!” I dont buy he did squat to be nice to Joyce, he’s never nice to Joyce
And Joyce would probably have split the days if she was competing against Dorothy or something.
I’m sure part of her pushback was because it was Walky.
It doesn’t really matter how much he cares if it doesn’t show in the work.
Joyce brought at least one binder with the story she wants to tell plotted out years in advance. (Granted, she has her literature to draw from, but she’s building a cohesive world out of it.)
Walky literally has a one-line elevator pitch and a couple strips: “every day, somebody different gets drop-kicked while a lawyer-looking dude laughs at them”. There’s nothing wrong with making a gag-a-day strip, but the same gag every day?
Let’s say Walky got to Daisy’s office first, and she still overcame her thirst for the saliva patch on his shirt in one DoA strip. After he gives his 15 second pitch, the inevitable follow-up would have been “okay, what else you got?” He’d have to come up with something on the spot, because he was banking on using his one gag every day. Once Joyce shows up with her series bible, assuming Daisy looks at it, it’s all over for him.
His best just wasn’t enough.
This ties in well with Walky’s overall “‘gifted kid’ goes to college and runs into the wall face-first” arc. When everything comes easy for you your whole life, and you can’t overcome your first real adversity even when you try your hardest, it’s devastating. Suddenly you’ve got a wicked case of imposter syndrome, doubting whether you actually achieved anything or if it was all just handed to you for reasons outside your control. Damn it hits home.
@Needfuldoer et al: constraint is the mother of invention though (or like, its aunt or something). (again, see Dinosaur Comics, for instance)
i don’t think it’s true that just because Walky made a show of satisfying his laziness by chosing a simple, repeatable setup, he wouldn’t have found an infinity of witty variations to keep it interesting given the chance. he’s funny, he’s creative, he just wants everyone to know that he’s a lazy underachiever by choice, so that’s why he’ll insist least-effort optimization is his fundamental drive always.
But Walky wasn’t reinventing Dinosaur Comics. He wasn’t limiting himself for artistic reasons, “[x] gets drop-kicked and laughed at” was literally his only idea and he planned on running it into the ground with a minimum of effort.
To the rest of the world, that looks irreverent at best and lazy at worst, and the charm would burn itself out in a week.
Again, it doesn’t matter how sincerely he believes in this idea himself if he can’t sell it. It’s not up to the rest of the world to accommodate his inattention, he has to learn how to manage it. Walky’s playing out the classic “gifted kid crash and burn”. Ask me how I know.
And from the production point of view, Joyce’s comic is basically the Walkyverse reworked for her perspective. (Roomies! and It’s Walky! in particular. Meanwhile, THIS is the source material for Walky’s cartooning endeavors:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2010/blog/lawsome/
Joyce’s comic was always going to be more persistent in the story, if only because it has years of material (and the author’s actual experiences) to draw from.
hey, i wouldn’t judge Daisy for turning him down based on his flimsy premise. and sure Lawsome is very dumb, but it’s 5 strips long. what i’m saying is, a silly, repetitive, limiting setup is not necessarily a bad idea. it can be a good starting point. as it happens, Dinosaur Comics started as a silly student project too. And the first few strips are not that great.
anyway, i read your comment superficially because i wanted to respond to that specific aspect for some reason, but i do really appreciate your broader point about this gifted-child syndrome being a consistent trajectory that this latest arc is a perfect example of, and the fact that he just expects people to favour him without having to put much of an effort or put up much of a fight.
so… did you eventually manage to move past that pattern? if that’s something you want to share. asking for a friend.
tl;dr It took a lot of failure, soul-searching, and servings of humble pie.
Walky’s still at the first stage: “Wait, I can’t just skate by anymore? Oh shit WUHDOIDO WUHDOIDO?!
Okay here’s the thing with that.
Joyce’s comic is a better comic, yes, but Walky’s is better for the medium. A repetitive gag a day comic fits a college newspaper far more than some long haul story deep story driven work (no offense Willis from ~20 years ago). Daisy even pointed that out when she asked if Joyce was okay with releasing the strips out of order
I think Daisy’s primary concern is finding someone who will consistently hand in strips for her to run, so she doesn’t have to waste time finding another cartoonist. Content is secondary.
To that end, she had Joyce’s preparation vs Walky’s lack thereof to choose from.
Normally I’d agree that Joyce’s comic was better, but in this scenario, I gotta disagree. Daisy couldn’t have judged Joyce’s comic as better because she never even asked to see it or hear his pitch. Daisy was being a lazy editor here.
Yeah while it’s clear in this strip that doing the comic was actually way more important to him than he let on, I don’t think that means he was particularly altruistic to Joyce in that moment. I don’t think he would ever care to be for her.
And yet he’s showing now that he does care and he didn’t snap back at Joyce. Maybe he’s not as superficial as you seem to think. Maybe, like so many of these characters, the surface act isn’t everything there is.
It’s perfectly in character for Walky to disguise being nice behind his laziness, just like he disguised being upset over not getting the gig.
YES yes thank you
Hey it’s obviously more important than I gave credit, Walky isn’t a character I think about much prior to now so I was taking his words at face value.
But the nicest thing Walky ever did for Joyce was stop himself from saying “gun to my head” on the same day she was almost shot.
He fixed things between Joyce and Carol after Mike’s “Hail Satan” stunt, which is more than Joyce has ever done for him, which was mostly *checks notes* telling Dorothy shouldn’t date him.
“telling Dorothy SHE shouldn’t date him”, damn the lack of an edit function.
Daisy had already given Joyce the job, the only reason Walky was in the running is because she let her horniness override her brain for a minute, he was never going to get it.
What lesson would Joyce have gotten if Wally had gotten the job? Sometimes you can be the better candidate but the unprepared boy who is probably going to be perpetually late in the job gets it with minimal effort anyway?
I mean that seems to be the lesson that everyone wants Dorothy to learn.
Yep. People really want the boy who was late, unprepared, had to have a girlfriend mommy him into dressing for the interview, and who really ought to be focusing on his school work to win that job because he wanted it super bad and saw it first.
Meanwhile Joyce is super prepared, dedicated, not flagging in school and has a multi-year plan for the story arc which encompasses more than “dude gets kicked every single day haha”. She also managed to be on time to a job interview despite some pretty dire personal situations at play.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Basically the same, right?
hah! well said! upvote!
Louder, for the people in the cheap seats!
Still not clear where people are getting this “late” thing from so consistently. All we know is that Daisy said to submit samples “By Friday”, and Walky showed up apparently 15-30 minutes after Joyce.
So…?
Because Walky must be blamed.
Because we as the readers don’t know the details of the comic competition, but it is reasonable to assume there were certain requirements (like time of day to submit, samples to provide, etc.) The fact that 1) Walky was seen running to get to Daisy’s office, and 2) Joyce was offered the job right after her pitch, suggested that there was a deadline that Walky was missing.
Daisy said on Friday. Walky made it on Friday – yeah, he was running but the paper closes at some point. Daisy said Joyce could have the job because she assumed nobody else was coming. That’s not indicative of a deadline.
I mean do we know when the paper’s offices close?
He’s likely to put comic strips off to the last minute (and thus be late) because that’s his MO with most work things. He’s smart but not diligent. Most comic strip artists don’t have months of advance strips like Willis and Joyce here do. I love EGS and SP but they don’t happen every day because there’s no backlog.
There was no “late” or “on time”. The only thing that was said was “get me some samples by Friday”. It’s Friday. They’re both in before the deadline. Joyce showing up 5 minutes earlier doesn’t mean she was on-time and he was late.
There’s no indication anywhere in the strip that Walky was late. He wanted to get there before Joyce did, but not doing that doesn’t make him late.
ok sure, the “Walky was late” thing is a red herring.
But N&M & QM’s main point, being that Joyce is just way more together, and it would be kind of sad if that had gone unrecognized, i absolutely sympathize with.
…also i’m now wondering if the fact that “behind every Walky there’s an exhausted Lucy” was exactly what Daisy’s supernatural shirtlicking detection ability was meant to hint at?
(not saying Daisy did her job right; not saying Walky doesn’t have his own issues to contend with; not saying anything i’m not actually saying basically.)
My main point though is that people seem to want Walky to be the protagonist…they’re worried about his character development and his learning and see Joyce as just an instrument for that rather than the protagonist in her own story.
Pretty sure he’s the protagonist in a different comic strip.
It’s an ensemble cast, not a protagonist and a bunch of side characters. Joyce is certainly the main protagonist, but not by that much. Walky gets character development and plot arcs of his own. It’s not good writing if decisions are always made based on where in the hierarchy a character falls.
I don’t even really mind that Walky didn’t get it, I’m just kind of irritated that people are so against him getting it or even that there is any possible merit to him getting it that they have to misread his character and make up reasons why he shouldn’t have gotten it.
Yes, it is an ensemble cast, and Joyce is part of that ensemble. (Yes, technically It’s Walky is also ensemble, but his name is in the title! In Joyce and Walky they’re both protagonists!)
What it’s not is Walky’s story alone and just worrying about Walky’s character development and what he learns from this as if Joyce is only a McGuffin is… I dunno, maybe a little patriarchal?
Yes. Exactly this.
I thought for sure they’d end up collaborating somehow. Maybe they used Joyce’s story but Walky would draw it or something. I know Joyce is the more autobiographical one, at least in this universe, but I think it makes more sense for both of them to be in on it. Then again, there’s still time for that to happen, I suppose.
It’s nice to see how Walky and Booster are friends. Booster’s series of questions would have bothered any person who just missed an opportunity, but Walky talks to them without a problem. I think Booster will suggest Walky to put his strip on the web.
Would be kind of funny if he did and it turned into a viral online success.
While Joyce’s languishes in obscurity until she decides to put it on the internet too
Five days? :O
That’s almost a year!
Comic time is weird.
It was last Christmas Daisy told him about it. Just over 10 months ago.
He’d have to keep focusing on these strips forever, but at least he’d get two months to make each one.
They both wanted the job, and both gave it their all, but she had more “all” to give.
“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness; that is life.”
– Captain Picard
Woof. I feel for Walky here, I really do, as a person with ADHD. But quite frankly I think Walky is better off this way. It can be extremely exciting to finally find something that holds your attention, that you really feel like you can DO and are MOTIVATED to, but…well, Walky clearly doesn’t have a lot of experience with figuring out how to navigate the way his brain works.
Having your first *serious* commitment be something as VERY LONG-TERM (like seriously, this was supposed to be a gig Walky would be expected to keep up for like, multiple years?) as this would have inevitably blown up in Walky’s face. Not because he is lazy and unmotivated, but because the sheer novelty of this new thing, which has allowed him to maintain focus on it, would fade probably sooner rather than later, and he would end up facing down an even worse situation with insane levels of stress from time pressure and self-hatred as he inevitably fell behind.
I think it’s better for Walky to get the hang of trying to apply himself to things in a way that is at ease with his own capacities with uh. Lower stakes?
That being said though. As rough as a gig like that would have been for someone with ADHD (meaning needing to be self-motivated to put out consistent work on schedule) perhaps there is something to be said for the fact that perhaps the structure of it might have been helpful in some way. It just doesn’t seem like…*enough* structure is all.
Also Walky is probably like me where structure is required to do fucking anything at all but the moment that structure becomes too rigid or invasive or if it feels judgemental, I bristle at it immediately.
I really do hate how well you’ve summarized the last 22 years of my life with those last two paragraphs. I should probably get tested or something.
The way I tend to put it is “Structure feels like a cage, but without it, it feels like I’m barely treading water. So my life is like constantly trying to choose between prison, or slowly drowning.”
Also the ocean you’re drowning in doesn’t even really go away, the structure just gives you something just tall enough to stand on so that you can more easily keep your head above water. But then you’re stuck standing on it no matter how uncomfortable it is. So either way having ADHD is just this constant feeling of have absolutely zero control over your life or surroundings, one way or another.
The only thing that really helps is learning lots of different techniques to give yourself like. Little flotation devices.
Although thus far in my experience they always deflate so then you gotta put in all the effort to do it again, and again, and again, blowing up these goddamn inner tubes that keep FUCKING POPPING–
At least meds, when you find the right one for you at the right dosage, are a relatively low-effort pair of water wings that you just gotta remember to put on every day and not lose ’em. Easier than constantly blowing up inner tubes that pop after a month or so.
what’s with everyone describing me and calling it ADHD today ¬_¬
If it’s something you feel has been impacting your life, it’s worth getting an assessment.
And I know that’s unprompted and pushy, but the person I am right now, the person who can do things without expending half my energy guilting myself for not starting sooner, who can pursue hobbies without either not being able to focus at all or focusing so hard the whole world slips away, and can watch a whole zoom conference with a fidget cube in hand to burn off some of that manic energy, exists because a complete stranger on a video game forum said “bro that’s hyperfocus, you’re describing hyperfocus.”
it’s hardly unprompted, i was kind of hoping you’d say that, probably ^w^
yeah, i’m already trying to find a psychiatrist for this other thing that’s been impacting my life, i might as well ask them about this while i’m there! thanks bro.
something something “either people with ADHD need to stop being relatable or I need to go see a doctor”
Wow, five whole days. That’s a lot of minutes
Walky runs on Namek time.
This is why you need to know your audience, Walky. You were pitching something to Daisy. You should’ve held interest for five lesbian days.
ayy lmao
What I want to know is why this conversation isn’t being had with someone who actually knows Walky instead of Booster the Great.
He probably just wanted to go home and stew for a bit, which sort of inevitably leads to Booster, since they live with him. And I’m always hesitant to use “instead of” when it comes to character conversations, since there’s no reason he couldn’t also go talk to somebody else afterwards. If you talk to multiple people separately, there’s gotta be an order, after all.
Excuse me, it’s Booster The Great.
‘The’ is their middle name.
So is “Great”, since their surname (per the cast page) is “Sanchez”. They apparently are the sort of person to have two middle names. “Booster The Great Sanchez”.
I mean Booster lives with Walky, its harder for Walky to mask his feelings around them because he’d have to do it all the time
I think Walky is actually less guarded around Booster than he is around his other friends. It seems odd to say that someone like Walky is guarded around anyone with the way that he acts, but he doesn’t really open up emotionally to most of them. He does to Booster, for whatever reason
Because Walky has gone to his room to sulk and it turns out that Booster lives there now
Tbf I think this is one of the ways Willis is making Booster something other than Booster The Great. With more screen time comes more development and characterisation.
Shit, Walk’s got a point.
Also I felt that.
That’s SUCH A CUTE HOODIE BOOSTER!!!!!
Aww, Booster is such a sweetie.
Awww, Walky, I was rootin’ for ya : (
I also don’t think the student newspaper that was just using this to fill space is gonna be the ideal way for Joyce’s magnum opus to shine. Whereas a gag a day comic can be run whenever and however. Plus Walky having a thing he’s motivated to do and enjoys doing is something I feel like he needs right now.
Also meds. He probably needs to be on some sorta ADHD med.
Meds aren’t a cure-all for everyone. I was put on a couple different ones in middle school; one made me a lethargic zombie, the other helped a little but I felt like I was redlining in first gear.
Yeah, it’s a roulette.
I started anti-depressants in 2013, I think(?) they worked well enough for a few years as I added anti-anxieties, and then by 2019 they just stopped working and I was depressed and miserable all the time, but going off of them fucked me up and also my life was so fucked up I didn’t know what to think of it.
I’d go weeks without taking them and not really feel any different. Not on purpose, I just couldn’t remember to take them, or didn’t care to. Eventually in September 2020, over six months after I dropped out of college and failed to find work, I stopped. I could feel things again, and then right around the corner I got as low as I ever have in my life, that’s about the only way I can say it.
But after that? I was alive again. I could feel things. That darkest point was, in hindsight, necessary, because it gave me the perspective I lacked and the drive to never go through it again. I don’t think I’d be on my current meds (which also had a fun roulette of physical irritation and outright mania) if it wasn’t for what I did the previous year.
It’s a little fucked up to realize I’m only here now because I did the stupidest, riskiest thing you can do on meds. Maybe I should get into gambling.
Building up resistance is the WORST – I’ve been through several varieties over the years, and while we finally found a combo that seems to work longterm, it’s a fun game of managing the side effects for the meds with what actually works and only gets more fun when you throw several other chronic conditions into the mix. My sympathies.
I don’t know how to really put it, but I’m better off without them. It’s weird, I don’t get it. Like you’d think getting used to them would just put me in a neutral state right? But I was just bad on them and now I’m not. I was as miserable, but I could never be happy. The only negative is that if something hits me hard it hits me harder than when I was on my meds, except hitting that hard is why I got to get better. I hit rock bottom, I guess?
The idea of getting used to my adderall scares the hell out of me. I can’t go back to that weird, broken, scattered lump of meat I used to be.
I think the risk of him having something he likes to do (like drawing comics) might distract him from things he NEEDS to do (like improving his grades to keep from dropping out). “Should I study for my next test? Nah, I need to finish another comic.”
Yeah, life sometimes sucks that way.
I agree, I think the last thing a borderline-failing student needs is another responsibility. He should focus on his classes.
I dunno I kind of feel like as someone who is used to things coming easy and therefore not requiring effort, Walky needs to experience not getting what he wants all the time. Yeah he cared about this for 4 whole days, but him getting what he wanted the second he briefly cared about something for a few days would likely just reinforce that message of “yeah, life will give me what I want.”
I think Walky is experiencing for the first time ever this year that life is *not*always fair and easy (his sudden math struggles, his realizing his sister’s experience of race and treatment by their family being very different from his own, etc) and it’s a valuable lesson.
Not to say I think people need to suffer to learn. Just that, having seen this pattern before IRL, I know that sometimes when someone grows up kind of spoiled and has things come easy to them/gets their way a lot, when suddenly they encounter a challenge or obstacle, they can easily slip into a sort of entitled “why is the world against me??” eternal victim mentality, instead of realizing “oh maybe I actually do need to put effort into things to get what I want.”
I feel bad for Walky for not getting the job, but I’m happy for Joyce – she deserved the job. She has the commitment and is willing to put in a lot of effort to do the best she can.
Walky cares, sure, but not as much as Joyce, given how committed he was to NOT putting effort into his comic. And caring about getting a job and wanting it doesn’t automatically entitle you to having it.
I really hope (and believe) Lucy will be good for him – he has sort of a cynical, pessimistic attitude overall and I feel like she could help gently push him to put more effort into his endeavors. I might be somewhat biased, though, because I like Lucy very much and want her to be happy.
Who knows, maybe Walky will discover something else (or the webcomic route) and maintain his attention for a whole year.
my boy needs a diagnosis
tbh, so does half the cast (for one thing or another).
Yeeeeeaaaah… Still don’t care he didn’t get it, still glad Joyce did. Life ain’t fair, here’s lesson 20 continuing to prove said statement. But I happen to have a dislike of spoiled children, being one and trying to break said “I deserve this” reasoning.
Though I agree, he really needs an ADHD diagnosis so he can find ways to cope with the traits that harm him or put him at disadvantages. Not fond of the idea of medicine solutions, based on job profession though.
“But I happen to have a dislike of spoiled children, being one and trying to break said ‘I deserve this’ reasoning.”
Wasn’t Joyce’s main argument just a whine that ‘You were going to give it to me!’ There’s a lot of spoiled children around these parts, not sure why some people are so focused on just Walky.
(For the record, I’m fine with it: DoA has always been about growing up from being a spoiled child.)
I think her argument was more “you were about to offer it to me”. She’s not the one assuming she’ll get the job by default, by virtue pf being the only one who showed up.
Daisy still shouldn’t have offered either of them the job on the spot, though. If submissions are open until Friday, a decision shouldn’t be made until at least the following business day.
We don’t know the details of the contest though.
We as readers heard a vague “Submissions open to Friday”, but in-strip there were probably more detailed rules… Show up by X P.M., prepare a pitch with sample comics, etc. If those were the rules, Daisy probably had more than enough to go on after hearing Joyce’s pitch (and seeing a little of what Walky offered.)
There’s absolutely no indication that there was an ‘X PM’ deadline and assuming so just seems to be for fans to tilt the scales towards Joyce. Walky DID have samples though – Daisy just didn’t look at them. Or hear his pitch. She didn’t give any real fair consideration to Walky. Joyce was probably the right call but that doesn’t mean Daisy did her due diligence.
I don’t think it’s just that, I think Joyce’s objections weren’t that sharing with Walky was bad, it’s that sharing meant it would take her twice as long to get anywhere.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-12/01-sister-christian/split/
Those were her later (still whiny, imo) objections, after Daisy offers the fairly-reasonable compromise that they split time.
Joyce’s initial whine was just in response to the very possibility that Daisy would even consider Walky’s submission. “You were going to give it to me! You haven’t even looked at his!”
I mean yeah, she was literally about to get the job right there. That’s not Right or Wrong that’s just having an immediate reaction to having something taken away, like, say, what Walky’s feeling right now.
And the thing about splitting the comic, which Daisy also reminds the both of them that nobody cares about the newspaper and that this decision means nothing, is that:
A. Joyce objects on the grounds of how it’ll ruin the pacing of the comic since now it takes twice as long to get anywhere.
B. Daisy Solomon’d it because she wanted to see who wanted it more, because the actual job she’s hiring for is meaningless to her.
I don’t actually agree that splitting is reasonable, I think it’s the kind of middle ground that someone comes up with to get both people involved to shut up.
> Wasn’t Joyce’s main argument just a whine that ‘You were going to give it to me!’
I think the difference here is that Walky’s “Offer” was just a vague “There is a contest” with no guarantee of success (other than the fact that there were no competitors at the time). On the other hand, Joyce had a more firm “I have looked at your work and accepted it” commitment from Daisy.
Walky’s offer was to have his submission looked at if he got it in by Friday, something that Daisy explicitly failed to do, and in part because Joyce whined her way past Daisy’s hesitations.
But again, I’m not here to defend Walky, I just get annoyed when the commentariat majority picks one character to hate on, when it seems fairly obvious (at least to me) that there’s a lot of shitty behavior across all the characters.
As I mentioned before… we the readers only knew of “in by Friday”, but its likely there were more detailed requirements (what time of day to submit it, what to include in the “pitch”, etc.)
And keep in mind that while Daisy seemed to be rejecting Walky’s comic without properly evaluating it, she was also (at one point) planning on GIVING him at least part-time work, even without fully evaluating Walky’s comic. If Joyce is to be blamed for wanting the job that was offered to her, then Walky should also be blamed for being willing to accept the job without having his work evaluated.
It feels like you’re blaming Joyce here for Daisy’s incompetence. It was Daisy who gave Joyce the ok too early, giving her false hopes – Daisy who didn’t give Walky the same chance she gave Joyce to sit down and explain his concept – Daisy who made a weird sexual pass at Walky’s gf in favour of listening to him – Daisy who offered a compromise, but then made it a weird Salamone test.
To be fair, this is probably all plot convenience. Both Joyce’s and Walky’s comics are supposed to be a shitty, but also have potential. Joyce is supposed to get serialized. I think most readers expect Walky and Joyce to team up, or for Walky to publish online.
I mean Joyce was right when she said that
Walky came in literally as Daisy was telling Joyce she got the job. Daisy should have told Joyce that she’d call the next day if there were no other submissions but that would require he caring about this at all
I wonder if the same people would be saying the same thing if Walky had gotten there first and Daisy had done the same, “And honestly, no one else has applied, so …” before Joyce came bursting in.
And would Joyce and Walky have reacted the same way afterwards.
I suppose that’s contingent on how Walky composes himself in the interview and whether or not Joyce would say “half is fine, it’s less work” when given the option.
Walky if you’d shown you cared Daisy would have actually considered you. She literally chose Joyce because she cared more. Self sabotage thy name is Walky.
Granted this is the guy who once thought having more than one pair of shoes was an affront to masculinity.
(And I still don’t think Walky cared half as much anyway given the fact he kept going on about how to do less work but oh well).
Somehow I wonder despite having a boring comic premise which is low effort if Walky will post it online and have a meteoric rise in popularity as Joyce struggles. At least in the short term. Because honestly Joyce’s comic while better than Walky’s probably still needs work and sometimes shitty low effort things get popular out of pure luck.
Walky tends to be pretty lucky.
Walky putting the bare minimum effort into something that attains him success, and then being unable to sustain that effort when it not only becomes an expectation of him, but he’s expected to improve?
pshaw that cant happen
In my experience, people who’ve historically had things come easy to them tend to get frustrated the fastest the second things *don’t* come easy to them. It definitely seems to be a pattern for Walky. See: his sudden avoidance of going to class as soon as math required effort instead of being an easy A.
Whereas people who have always struggled to prove themselves to achieve things tend to be extremely proactive and tenacious when they want something. It makes sense, Joyce coming from a family/environment that was big on judgement (I.e. her mom & church) might be more inclined to put in more effort as she probably has a history of feeling like she has to prove herself.
What if Walky became a stringer, who Daisy called up for a strip from time to time when the news hole was too big?
I’m starting to ship Booster and Walky.
Wooster? Balky?
Mister Wooster is a fine character, so I can work with that
As in Wooster and Jeeves?
Walky, through those five days of interest you drew the same three panels over and over, just featuring different guys getting kicked.
And?
Ultimately, even when he was “interested” in this job, he was still doing the absolute bare minimum of work required for it.
Aw, concerned Booster is sweet. I think this is their second consecutive appearance where I enjoyed them, so they’re definitely growing on me.
Dude, just publish them online or something
oh sweetie you and your undiagnosed adhd…