Akane has only one way to get back home: collect the 42 keys to parallel worlds. Eri and Ben are just trying to get through the summer before university. When a magical key turns up in an old spare set, all three are forced to change their plans and fast.
Guilded Age
T Campbell, John Waltrip, Florence Machina
Welcome to the saga of the working-class adventurer! Enjoy the complete story with new annotations daily!
Dumbing of Age
David M Willis
Joyce has been homeschooled her entire life until now, when she's suddenly a freshman in college! Things don't go well.
Hemlock
Josceline Fenton
A witch accidentally marries a monster, and now she and her familiar has to navigate life around her monstrous husband and her even more terrifying in-laws.
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Heh. Perhaps you should hover your mouse over the word “legs” in Ana’s post. (I have no idea how people do such a thing on mobile; I’m strictly a PC boy)
temples — the ‘official’ term for the pieces that extend back from the front of the glasses and hook over the wearer’s ears. So named, I’m guessing, because they rest against the user’s temples.
When I was a kid I’d go through a lot of them until my optician ordered up a pair of all-metal ones to replace the plastic ones (I didn’t want to go with wire-rims; not in 4th grade, anyway).
I’ve suffered from insomnia my entire life, and this honestly helps. Set the alarm for 6 every morning even though I don’t need to be up until 7, so it feels like I get an extra hour.
Tell me about it. I’ve got narcolepsy and insomnia, which constantly fucks with me and my energy levels. I didn’t even know it was possible to have both until I experienced it first-hand.
My insomnia is the opposite. If there’s ANY alarm set, my brain freaks out about how if I don’t fall asleep NOW, I won’t sleep enough before I’m woken up – instead of, you know, sleeping.
So I’ve become the person who goes to bed at like 9pm so I’ll wake up naturally before anything important happens XD
Since I retired, I don’t even worry about any kind of stinkin’ alarm. I go to bed, I sleep, and I get up whenever I wake up. Eight, nine, ten AM – ain’t no difference to me!
Whenever I worked earlier than my s.o. (that is, most of time), I used to prepare anything I need the day before in another room, so I don’t have to make light. Also I’m strongly in the “wake up before the alarm” club, so I get to stop the alarm before it rings. I prefer to respect that first wake bc I found out that if I try to sleep a bit more, I end up needing even more sleep. Also, a fat chance that I’ll worry about the alarm not functioning and won’t sleep again until the last minute, which is, well counterproductive.
I have about 20 alarms set on my phone, and at least a dozen on an old phone as a backup, and a ‘real’ alarm clock that goes off at crunch time.
When you start work hours before sunrise, you gotta do what you gotta do.
The worst part is taking an afternoon nap, waking up at 5 PM, and panicking because all you saw through your groggy haze was the 5 and you think you’re late for work the next day. (One time I almost made it to the highway, but there was a little league game at a school I drove by. My inner dialogue went “what kind of jackass would make little kids play baseball at… 5… AM…” like it was some kind of comedy movie, and I turned back around.)
I’ve done similar things, though not in a long while. On a more regular schedule now.
Tactic these days is to have the alarm across the room, so I actually have to get up to turn it off. Minimizes the chances of falling back asleep. Normally I’m awake first really and it just provides the motivation to get up and start moving.
I do remember one time long ago in high school when I had a alarm clock radio and lying there half asleep listening to it and hoping the alarm didn’t go off soon because I really liked the song that was playing …
I’m part of the ‘put the phone/alarm out of reach’ crew, too. I can’t guess at how many times I turned the alarm off on autopilot (instead of snooze). Best now to have the alarm far enough away that I have to wake up a little before interacting with it.
To be honest though, it only sort of works.
I get up to turn it off. Then I might as well go downstairs to pee. Then I’ll go check the internet rather than go back to bed. Then I’ll be late to work.
When I was a kid, I broke multiple pairs of glasses because I went to sleep with them on. Now I have a hard case to put them in right by my bed, and I generally wear contacts now.
Contacts are a great *idea*, but it squicks me out even thinking about putting something in my eye. Plus you have to keep them suckers CLEAN; my glasses don’t care if they get smudged or whatever.
Even dealing with eye drops was a nightmare for me.
Unfortunately it’s been a decade since the last time I got proper eye care and my eyesight has deteriorated to the point I’ll probably have to face the prospect of laser surgery again.
I used to be the same – the first time I tried contacts, it took TWO optometrist ladies pulling my eyes open and upwards of half an hour to get those things in. Bought them anyway because running in rain with glasses through forest trails is a bad idea. Went travelling, got my glasses stolen the first day (yeah I don’t get it), was forced to put in contacts every day – an somehow, a week in, it didn’t bother me anymore *at all*. Two weeks in, I could remove them without looking, just lying in bed.
Damned optometrist would not let me out of his dungeon till I could put them in and take them out on my own. Took me forever. Probably and hour, I guess.
I haven’t worn contacts for 20 years now (my eyes have too much everything, bad eyesight, too much astigmatism, what have you, so I don’t wear them anymore). To this day, I can squick OTHER people out by pushing on my eyeballs without an issue.
My ophtalmologist says I have great eyes for contacts, because they’re big. What it turns out I have is TERRIBLE eyes for contacts, because I have recurrent epithelial erosion, and things pressed up against my eyeball is a great way of making me basically allergic to light.
Fortunately, instance one only happened when I was already suffering the effects from instance two (did you know you could have ulcers in your cornea? Well, now you do), so I dodged the whole “stick shit to your eyeball” thing.
That sounds absolutely horrifying! I’m so sorry you have to deal with such afflictions. I am suddenly far more at peace with my severe nearsightedness, mild astigmatism, and occasional migraines.
Merely getting irritating smudges on the lenses is basically the best possible outcome of sleeping with one’s glasses on.
I have had glasses fall into near-impossible-to-recover nooks and crannies, scratched the lenses, popped them right out of the frames, bent the frames, outright broken the frames, and even injured myself thanks to sleeping with them pressed into my face for too long.
Once, I fell asleep reading in bed and at some point in the night my glasses wound up on the floor with the temple arms still open. Come morning, my glasses aren’t on my bedside table, so everything’s dimly-colored blobs. No sign of them anywhere in my bed, so I get up to start expanding the search – promptly stepping on said glasses, and thus hurting my foot, bending the frame between a hinge and the weld-point joining it to the lens holders (which is extremely difficult to bend back into place), scratched one lens on a grain of sand, popped the other lens out, and partially tearing one of the nose cushions.
Took me more than 45 minutes to jury-rig the damned things back into a wearable state, and it was days before I’d made enough tiny supplementary adjustments for them to both feel comfortable on my face again and not keep giving me headaches because they were subtly distorting my vision all the time. And I never quite got used to that scratch – it was big enough to be visible to me when I wore them, but far enough from the center of my field of view that I’d only actually notice it intermittently.
Was planning to pick some random line of dialogue from tonight’s strip and claim the first “Dumbing of Age Book X” comment, but there really isn’t anything but Joyce’s alarm clock so uh
…
Dumbing of Age Book Thirteen: Featuring Beep the Meep from the Beep May Meep series
I have slept with my glasses on many times without anything bad happening to them or me. But I have also, several times, woken to discover they’ve been damaged in the night (sometimes only a little, or in an easily-repaired way, others more significantly) – I once outright broke them and had to get them replaced, wearing an older prescription until the replacements were ready.
Good luck and sleep well! Unfortunately I don’t really have any useful advice (doing interviews in a second language sort of helps, because then you’re too focused on stringing words together competently to be nervous, but I that’s probably not applicable here).
That’s weird. Mildly impolite I can almost get, but outright offensive? It’s a body part that everyone has (barring mishaps), people don’t usually form cultural taboos against body pa- oh.
Anyway, she’s barely sticking it half an inch out of her mouth, in her own room, with the lights off. Doesn’t count.
I doubt it has anything to do with the pills. Birth control is once/day usually and it wouldn’t really make any sense to schedule that for middle of night/early morning.
Don’t have an Instagram account so can’t see what you linked to, Amós.
But if it’s the current XKCD strip on age milestones (https://m.xkcd.com/2661/), here’s another one that’s on point:
In 25 years, every business school in the country will be doing case studies about how a long defunct company known as “Google” once had an unbeatable lock on online information retrieval and then started doing shit like this.
Kit Jaspering @iamboneitis.bsky.social ⋅ 2m
tuck woodstock @tuck.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
The Screens of Pete and Pete @peteandpete.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
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great way to bend your legs
Never heard them called “legs”. I usually say “arms” myself, unless talking to the optometrist.
Temples?
Heh. Perhaps you should hover your mouse over the word “legs” in Ana’s post.
(I have no idea how people do such a thing on mobile; I’m strictly a PC boy)
Far as I can tell, it’s not doable without shenanigans. It’s just letters with dots under it, for all I know.
Oh. That’s a shame. On PC, if you hover over “legs” you get an ALT Text that says “ok the official name for those bits is ‘temples’ I GUESS”
temples — the ‘official’ term for the pieces that extend back from the front of the glasses and hook over the wearer’s ears. So named, I’m guessing, because they rest against the user’s temples.
When I was a kid I’d go through a lot of them until my optician ordered up a pair of all-metal ones to replace the plastic ones (I didn’t want to go with wire-rims; not in 4th grade, anyway).
blep
blep
bleep
Perfect strip for the start of a new Monday.
“… nah.”
Same
It me.
Monday mood
everyday mood, honestly
Panel 5 joyce is adorable
… and yet pitiful?
Joyce sticking out her tongue to the new day is pretty cute, and yet I worry for the safety of her glasses.
Finding Joyce adorable and at the same time worry about her is the usual Sarah experience
It’s becoming a Joe experience too.
I know it must only have been a day for Joyce but it’s rough to still see she’s in bad shape.
Glad to see I’m not the only one who has a hard time getting out of bed.
I’m part of the best club: “Wake up, set alarm for another hour and go back to sleep.”
I’ve suffered from insomnia my entire life, and this honestly helps. Set the alarm for 6 every morning even though I don’t need to be up until 7, so it feels like I get an extra hour.
Tell me about
Tell me about it. I’ve got narcolepsy and insomnia, which constantly fucks with me and my energy levels. I didn’t even know it was possible to have both until I experienced it first-hand.
I choose to believe the truncated first comment was due to an attack of narcolepsy.
My insomnia is the opposite. If there’s ANY alarm set, my brain freaks out about how if I don’t fall asleep NOW, I won’t sleep enough before I’m woken up – instead of, you know, sleeping.
So I’ve become the person who goes to bed at like 9pm so I’ll wake up naturally before anything important happens XD
Since I retired, I don’t even worry about any kind of stinkin’ alarm. I go to bed, I sleep, and I get up whenever I wake up. Eight, nine, ten AM – ain’t no difference to me!
Same here, BB. But I do have a spouse still working and I’m kinda obligated to get up and out of bed with her.
It’s hard to stay asleep when every light in the room and the clock radio are throttled up like space shuttle engines.
Whenever I worked earlier than my s.o. (that is, most of time), I used to prepare anything I need the day before in another room, so I don’t have to make light. Also I’m strongly in the “wake up before the alarm” club, so I get to stop the alarm before it rings. I prefer to respect that first wake bc I found out that if I try to sleep a bit more, I end up needing even more sleep. Also, a fat chance that I’ll worry about the alarm not functioning and won’t sleep again until the last minute, which is, well counterproductive.
I have about 20 alarms set on my phone, and at least a dozen on an old phone as a backup, and a ‘real’ alarm clock that goes off at crunch time.
When you start work hours before sunrise, you gotta do what you gotta do.
The worst part is taking an afternoon nap, waking up at 5 PM, and panicking because all you saw through your groggy haze was the 5 and you think you’re late for work the next day. (One time I almost made it to the highway, but there was a little league game at a school I drove by. My inner dialogue went “what kind of jackass would make little kids play baseball at… 5… AM…” like it was some kind of comedy movie, and I turned back around.)
I’ve done similar things, though not in a long while. On a more regular schedule now.
Tactic these days is to have the alarm across the room, so I actually have to get up to turn it off. Minimizes the chances of falling back asleep. Normally I’m awake first really and it just provides the motivation to get up and start moving.
I do remember one time long ago in high school when I had a alarm clock radio and lying there half asleep listening to it and hoping the alarm didn’t go off soon because I really liked the song that was playing …
I’m part of the ‘put the phone/alarm out of reach’ crew, too. I can’t guess at how many times I turned the alarm off on autopilot (instead of snooze). Best now to have the alarm far enough away that I have to wake up a little before interacting with it.
To be honest though, it only sort of works.
I get up to turn it off. Then I might as well go downstairs to pee. Then I’ll go check the internet rather than go back to bed. Then I’ll be late to work.
How late I am to work depends on how spicy the DoA comments are that morning.
Nooo Joyce it’s a slippery slope after you sleep with your glasses on for the first time.
I my experince it is a good way to lose or break your glasses
When I was a kid, I broke multiple pairs of glasses because I went to sleep with them on. Now I have a hard case to put them in right by my bed, and I generally wear contacts now.
Contacts are a great *idea*, but it squicks me out even thinking about putting something in my eye. Plus you have to keep them suckers CLEAN; my glasses don’t care if they get smudged or whatever.
Even dealing with eye drops was a nightmare for me.
Unfortunately it’s been a decade since the last time I got proper eye care and my eyesight has deteriorated to the point I’ll probably have to face the prospect of laser surgery again.
Good luck, Nono!
I used to be the same – the first time I tried contacts, it took TWO optometrist ladies pulling my eyes open and upwards of half an hour to get those things in. Bought them anyway because running in rain with glasses through forest trails is a bad idea. Went travelling, got my glasses stolen the first day (yeah I don’t get it), was forced to put in contacts every day – an somehow, a week in, it didn’t bother me anymore *at all*. Two weeks in, I could remove them without looking, just lying in bed.
Damned optometrist would not let me out of his dungeon till I could put them in and take them out on my own. Took me forever. Probably and hour, I guess.
I haven’t worn contacts for 20 years now (my eyes have too much everything, bad eyesight, too much astigmatism, what have you, so I don’t wear them anymore). To this day, I can squick OTHER people out by pushing on my eyeballs without an issue.
*shudder* You can squick me out just by describing doing that!
I was the same, but you get used to it after a week or so.
My ophtalmologist says I have great eyes for contacts, because they’re big. What it turns out I have is TERRIBLE eyes for contacts, because I have recurrent epithelial erosion, and things pressed up against my eyeball is a great way of making me basically allergic to light.
Fortunately, instance one only happened when I was already suffering the effects from instance two (did you know you could have ulcers in your cornea? Well, now you do), so I dodged the whole “stick shit to your eyeball” thing.
That sounds absolutely horrifying! I’m so sorry you have to deal with such afflictions. I am suddenly far more at peace with my severe nearsightedness, mild astigmatism, and occasional migraines.
Same. I’ll just wear glasses for the rest of my life, thanks.
Sleeping with your glasses on is a good way to get smudges on the lenses that are annoying to clean off. I would not recommend it.
Merely getting irritating smudges on the lenses is basically the best possible outcome of sleeping with one’s glasses on.
I have had glasses fall into near-impossible-to-recover nooks and crannies, scratched the lenses, popped them right out of the frames, bent the frames, outright broken the frames, and even injured myself thanks to sleeping with them pressed into my face for too long.
Once, I fell asleep reading in bed and at some point in the night my glasses wound up on the floor with the temple arms still open. Come morning, my glasses aren’t on my bedside table, so everything’s dimly-colored blobs. No sign of them anywhere in my bed, so I get up to start expanding the search – promptly stepping on said glasses, and thus hurting my foot, bending the frame between a hinge and the weld-point joining it to the lens holders (which is extremely difficult to bend back into place), scratched one lens on a grain of sand, popped the other lens out, and partially tearing one of the nose cushions.
Took me more than 45 minutes to jury-rig the damned things back into a wearable state, and it was days before I’d made enough tiny supplementary adjustments for them to both feel comfortable on my face again and not keep giving me headaches because they were subtly distorting my vision all the time. And I never quite got used to that scratch – it was big enough to be visible to me when I wore them, but far enough from the center of my field of view that I’d only actually notice it intermittently.
*plays “Wake Up Song” from Lazy Town on hacked muzak*
Since it’s the title of the strip, I was going to suggest Awaken by Dethklok.
…It actually makes a great wake up alarm.
I cry when angels deserves…
Heh. Now I’m hearing the Richard Cheese rendition of that song in my head, instead of the original.
I’m listening to “Levanta la Mano,” by Kinto Sol — need a little motivation to get up and do what needs to be done…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oq259zM8fyM&t=1814s
Was planning to pick some random line of dialogue from tonight’s strip and claim the first “Dumbing of Age Book X” comment, but there really isn’t anything but Joyce’s alarm clock so uh
…
Dumbing of Age Book Thirteen: Featuring Beep the Meep from the Beep May Meep series
Dumbing of Age Book 13: Meepbeep meepbeep meepbeep meepbee-
Dumbing of Age Book *blep*
Shiver in my bones just thinking…about the weather
A quiver in my voice–I might cry
I can never do this as my glasses would hurt my face and I’m also paranoid AF about bending them. Joyce living on the edge
I was super worried about that too when I first got glasses, but one day I accidentally fell asleep without taking them off and everything was fine.
I don’t want to acknowledge it, just in case that somehow causes the lucky streak to end…
I have slept with my glasses on many times without anything bad happening to them or me. But I have also, several times, woken to discover they’ve been damaged in the night (sometimes only a little, or in an easily-repaired way, others more significantly) – I once outright broke them and had to get them replaced, wearing an older prescription until the replacements were ready.
My Fall Semesters starts next week and this is what I am dreading most.
Mitochondrial Genetics I can handle. However, the sweet siren song of snooze button is, ironically, the stuff of nightmares.
Good luck, True Survivor!
Mood.
Hope she doesn’t toss and turn, good way to mess up your glasses.
Looks like someone has a case of the MONDAYS
Except I’m pretty sure it’s Tuesday for her.
I believe you’ll get your ass kicked saying something like that, man.
Maybe some more pieces of flair would make her feel better.
Wow, actual footage of me. XD Especially when it’s cold.
ngl mood/same
Panel 5 Joyce is a nearly perfect thing. The entire thrust of today’s strip, if not of all of human existence, is present in that face.
All Willis experience in his comic comes to this panel 5.
She mlems
♪ Wake me up (wake me up inside) ♪
♪ I can’t wake up (wake me up inside) ♫
I’ll give her 15 minutes. Always happens.
Wonder what shenanigans this arc will have?
She will discover the life drawing. It WILL have a lot of shenanigans …
Given what she started suffering from the day before, I suspect her insides’ level of wakefulness may well be the problem.
Giga mood
Panel 5… listening to Gorillaz…. doing her Noodle impression…..
Boo, no old faces. I want to hang out with Jennifer and all her new pals.
I thought “but she was fine yesterday!” and then remembered that the whole Halloween arc was a flashback
Relatable.
WAKE ME UP INSIDE
I am only disappointed that you beat me to it.
S’okay – Suet beat you both by nearly 2 hours. ;-P
Can’t . . . or WON’T??
I can feel her uterus pain from here
Wow. Joyce’s face in the 5th panel is funny and kinda adorable. I wonder if she’s still feeling terrible or if it’s a little better.
If anyone feels like sending luck-vibes and support for getting to sleep, I’ve got a job interview this afternoon.
Thank you friends.
Here you go
Thank you, Spriteless Aunty!
Good luck and sleep well! Unfortunately I don’t really have any useful advice (doing interviews in a second language sort of helps, because then you’re too focused on stringing words together competently to be nervous, but I that’s probably not applicable here).
Not for this interview, but it’s a good idea! Thank you!
You will gonna pass it and win this job!
Thank you, Amós!
Probably too late by now, but best of luck!
Thank you, JBento! Thank you everyone! Here’s hoping… fingers and toes crossed!
QC feels the nervousness…
https://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=4856
Joyce, showing your tongue is offensive in, like, a dozen of countries.
That’s weird. Mildly impolite I can almost get, but outright offensive? It’s a body part that everyone has (barring mishaps), people don’t usually form cultural taboos against body pa- oh.
Anyway, she’s barely sticking it half an inch out of her mouth, in her own room, with the lights off. Doesn’t count.
Sorry, I forgot to put *kappa* to show sacarsm.
Comment at 4AM is hard, ahahah
*Commenting at 4AM is hard
See? Even grammar is shit. 4AM is a place for nobody.
Agreed. Fuck 4:00 AM. Everyone I know hates 4 in the morning. The real villain of the strip is 4am
She’s doing the Charlie Brown’s confused face. It’s not offensive.
Adorable and relateable and almost forgot this is happening right on top of her period pains and the referral thing.
Hopefully those specs have spring hinges. I expect Dorothy would have seen to that.
Don’t do that.
i’ve lost many a pair of glasses like that.
Don’t put your glasses on until you are ready to start moving.
Most relatable comic strip ever.
EVER.
Everyone’s focused on the glasses, I assumed the alarm was for her pills.
wait, so did she refused to take medication?
Probably more she’s so tired it slipped her mind why she even set that alarm
It’s happened to me before
I doubt it has anything to do with the pills. Birth control is once/day usually and it wouldn’t really make any sense to schedule that for middle of night/early morning.
Maybe for Church still too?
Ooog, wearables. She’s a double cyborg now due to the future sliding norms
My addled brain conflated “wearables” with “edibles” and now I’m just left wondering what wearable pot would be. Candy bracelets?
So that’s how this storyline is gonna go.
Didn’t you get all happy when you’re living enough to reach a kind of milestone?
Don’t have an Instagram account so can’t see what you linked to, Amós.
But if it’s the current XKCD strip on age milestones (https://m.xkcd.com/2661/), here’s another one that’s on point:
https://m.xkcd.com/594/ (period)
Here’s an archived version
Cute!
WAKE ME UP INSIIIIIIIDE
This reminds me, I get glasses today! Hopefully it helps with my eyestrain and I’m able to look at screens without pain.
Wake up, Joyce! Kill! Eat!
Pretty sure that’s a video game reference, isn’t it?
Awaken
Awaken
Awaken
Awaken
Take the land that must be taken
Awaken
Awaken
Awaken
Awaken
Devour worlds
Smite forsaken
Wow I have not thought about this in a LONG time.
Careful with your glasses Joyce, thats how they get bent and suddenly they keep slipping off your nose.
Relatable Joyce is relatable. I do that a lot.
Then I remember I have a job. Fun…
Alt text: SAAAAAAVE ME!