The low stakes adventures of an assorted group of 20 somethings trapped in the declining years of American retail. They are naughty and say lots of swears.
Girl Genius
Phil Foglio, Kaja Foglio
In a time when the Industrial Revolution has become an all-out war, Mad Science rules the World...with mixed success.
Kiwi Blitz
Mary Cagle (Cube Watermelon)
Steffi thinks she can use her kiwi mech to become a superhero. This idea turns out to be very stupid.
Astral Aves
Moon Cabal
A fantasy coming-of-age following the adventures of Astra The Black and friends, as they navigate the mysterious world around them. It's politics, adventure, and the supernatural; oh, and crazy hair.
Lighter Than Heir
Melissa Albino
A young Volant woman joins the military in an effort to upstage her war-hero father.
This is Not Fiction
Nicole Mannino
What do you do when the person you're in-love with is an anonymous romance novelist? Get your best friend to hire your worst enemy for help!
Fireweeds Moors
Gato Iberico
A cat-headed man and a girl with a sandwich hankering accidentally end up in a myth-infused country where magic chalices are a really big thing.
Star Trip
Gisele Weaver
Jas is a human taken from her home planet on a trip across the galaxy she will never forget.
Jailbird
Charlie Davis
An all-ages comic about a recently escaped prisoner's struggle to understand the outside world, and vice-versa. Also, a magic cape!
Cyanide & Happiness
Explosm
Satire, dark humor and surreal humor.
Alice and the Nightmare
Misha Krivanek
Alice finally attends University to learn to collect the dreams of humans, meet new friends, and deal with a pesky reflection along the way.
Goodbye to Halos
Valerie Halla
Cuddles, gay flirting, weird feelings, and magic-fueled knife fights - it's an adventure across the queer multiverse!
Cut Time
Juby
Rel and her trusty avian friend Fugue are on a quest to save a world that's lost track of time. Follow them and their new recruits, in a story written with help from the stars.
Starhammer
J.N. Monk, Harry Bogosian
A teen girl inherits a powerful alien artifact and proceeds to make a series of increasingly poor decisions
Sufficiently Remarkable
Maki Naro
Two young women living in Brooklyn discover that you're always coming of age.
Whomp!
Ronnie
A depressed, portly, hirsute anime fan stumbles through life in the ever-pursuit of chicken nuggets and other life-shortening indulgences.
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.
Caramel Corn
Potchimew
Sarah is the only human left in a world full of mythical creatures and monsters. All she wants to do is live a quiet life, but everything changes when she meets her guardian angel, Jacob.
Knights Errant
J.R. Doyle
Wilfrid's humble quest for revenge becomes bigger and bloodier by the day.
The Sanity Circus
Windy
Magic, monsters and mysteries await in the odd city of Sanity. It's up to Attley and a colorful group of characters to find out just what is going on.
The End
August Brown, Cory Brown
Two aliens crash a sci-fi convention and accidentally take seven nerds on an adventure that spans the galaxy!
[un]Divine
Ayme
A highschool senior thought giving up his soul for a demon was a good idea. It wasn't.
The Automan's Daughter
Mike Stamm
Aisha Osman and her uncle Siddig outwit bikers, spies and kidnappers while gearing up for a showdown with the formidable Widowmaker mecha.
El Goonish Shive
Dan Shive
WARNING: This comic often ignores the Laws of Physics
Devil's Candy
Rem, Bikkuri
A lush fantasy about boy genius Kazu Decker, the girl he constructed for his 9th grade science project, and the world of devils and monsters they live in.
Wilde Life
Pascalle Lepas
Oscar decided to rent an old haunted house, and that's when things got weird...
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!
Sam & Fuzzy
Sam Logan
Troubled by gangster rodents, lovesick vampire stalkers, or confused ninja assassins? Don't panic! Sam and Fuzzy are here to help. (For a reasonable fee.)
Kochab
Sarah Webb
A YA F/F fantasy comic about Sonya, a lost skier trying to survive a snowy wilderness and find her way back to her village; and Kyra - a fire spirit trying to fix the home that she let fall apart around her.
Monsterkind
Taylor C
Wallace Foster, a young, bright-eyed human social worker, has his entire world view rocked when he's suddenly relocated into a city primarily inhabited by monsters.
Nerf Now!!
Josué Pereira
A cute webcomic about fanservice, video games, and... love. Mostly video games, though.
The Lonely Vincent Bellingham
Diana Huh
Vincent is an unkind man looking to disappear, and finds himself in the care of a vampire and her two wicked children.
Demon's Mirror
Harry Bogosian
Based loosely off of "The Snow Queen", a story by Hans Christian Andersen, we see things take a different turn as the demons become central characters, and the side characters stick around. Yup, that's the only differences. Enjoy!
Go Get a Roomie
Clover
Experience the queer journey of an upbeat hippie and the friendships she makes along the way! A tale of self-discovery and love of many forms.
Never Satisfied
Taylor Robin
Lucy Marlowe, a magician's apprentice, competes against other apprentices for an important, magical, Goverment Job.
Lilith's Word
inkPangur
If you had the power to make any wish come true using just one word, what would you say?
Wychwood
Varethane
When Tiara's pyrokinesis is finally noticed, she is captured by a magical research organization for study. If she cooperates, she could be helping to save humanity from a dire threat - but can she trust them?
Real Science Adventures
Brian Clevinger
Spin off stories and other adventures from the world of Atomic Robo!
Star Impact
Jack McGee
A young, energetic woman fights her way up in the world of super-powered boxing after discovering the mighty gloves of her missing idol!
Love Not Found
Gina Biggs
Abeille is on a quest to find someone who wants to do it the old-fashioned way in a time when touching has become outdated.
Widdershins
Kate Ashwin
A series of light-hearted Victorian-era adventure stories featuring grumpy bounty hunters, accidental thiefkings, and more, in England's magical capital city Widdershins!
Tigress Queen
Allison Shaw
A barbarian warlord and a pampered prince try to avoid a marriage alliance that could end decades of violence.
Monster Pulse
Magnolia Porter Siddell
Four kids run afoul of a creepy secret organization's experiments, which turn their body parts into fighting monsters. Part sentimental coming-of-age story, part monster-training shonen manga, with just a bit of sci-fi body horror.
Sister Claire
Yamino
In the troubled aftermath of a great war between Witches and her fellow Nuns, novice Sister Claire just wants a purpose.
Ghost Junk Sickness
Studio CARTRIDGE, Laura Lee
Two hunters try to survive and end up being pushed to pursue a deadly bounty dubbed "The Ghost".
Paranatural
Zack Morrison
Superpowered middle schoolers fight evil spirits in their rural hometown. Come for the jokes, stay for the cast, the creatures, and the mystery that ties them all together!
Cassiopeia Quinn
Gunwild, Psudonym
A cute, pantsless thief is pursued across the stars by a buttoned-up military officer in the spacey, laser-filled future.
Anarchy Dreamers
Emily Ree
Sparkly undead kids fight society's worst Nightmares in this pastel-punk urban fantasy coming-of-age!
Hazy London
Scotty
A story about messy relationships. From friendly foes to crazy families. Nothing is black and white, just full of color. But, all colors can get a little hazy...
Stand Still, Stay Silent
Minna Sundberg
A few generations after the end of the world, a small, poorly financed research crew is sent out to rediscover whatever is left of the forbidden old world in the south.
The Witch Door
Anni K.
Katariina Lehto discovers her neighbor is a witch called Jousia Muotka. Jousia introduces Katariina to the strange people and places beyond the witch door...
Empowered
Adam Warren
A sexy superhero comedy (except when it isn't) about the never-ending struggles of a plucky but very unlucky young superheroine.
Godslave
Meaghan Carter
Edith has been thrown into the dangerous world of modern-day Egyptian mythology. Fighting monsters and dealing with family drama of godly proportions.
Awaken
Koti Saavedra/Flipfloppery
Superpowers, monsters and conspiracies. Piras, the spoiled Dameschi heir, fights to recover his identity after becoming a terrorist!
Atomic Robo
Brian Clevinger, Scott Wegener
The robot punches monsters and bad robots and one time he was a cowboy.
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Yeah, she’s got the fancy pack where you click it to the right day and push that pill out. A lot of them are just blister packs with the days of the week on the top, but that’s hardly the only kind and it varies based on the type of pill.
I was about to say “who the hell uses ounces to measure liquids?” but stopped myself when I remembered that Fluid Ounces are a thing too. xD
Though in my defence, we (in the UK) use litres and millilitres for drinks (500ml is a common bottle size for individual soft drinks, or 2 or 3 litre bottles for quantity). Even the peeps who still use Imperial measures would tend to use pints instead.
Yeah, the U.S. played with metric for like, a week, then went back to being all “INDIVIDUALISM!!!” and using arbitrary things and making things “traditional” that started in like the 1950s
a single serving of Chick-fil-A (first result on google) Lemonade is 410g (14.5 oz) and has 55 grams of sugar. A 20 oz (556g) of sprite has 44 grams of sugar. Just to put those numbers in a kind of context, a single doughnut has about 15 grams of sugar in it.
My wife liked tea. Hot or iced. She enjoyed going to places which served the latter as brewed real tea, with simple syrup so she could make it juuuuust a touch sweet.
I would certainly consider trying a restaurant which does this with lemonade.
Erithrytol’s not so bad. At least that’s what I tell myself. I like xylitol. You just take some yogurt or probiotics with it, it all, to mitigate (or enhance!) the digestive effects.
I like monkfruit. Reports on stevia are mixed (some folks say it causes liver cancer and reproductive effects) but it’ll do in a pinch. Allulose is pretty darn good. I used to use D-Mannose, but it’s got some side effects, maybe not too smart. Some folks stir L-Serine into coffee as a sweetener, although it’s got some risks and benefits too. I like wildflower honey as a sweetener and to calm down allergies and asthma. And molasses is good for anemia. So there’s lots of non-sugar sweeteners that can actually have beneficial health effects when used in moderation.
Honey and molasses are just standard sugar with some extra good stuff mixed in though. (not that that makes them bad, in moderation, but my inner jackal felt like throwing that out XD)
And a lot of the others are actually also sugars, just different ones that we can’t digest. Our gut bacteria, however, can. And we don’t really understand the consequences of that, yet. So still a good idea to not get used to high doses of those.
Yeah, you’re right. That’s why I take the yogurt or probiotic foods when I have foods containing sugar alcohols or other resistant sugars. I figure the resistant sugars are just prebiotic food for the good bugs. “Eat up, little buggies!”
I can’t do stevia. It leaves a very nasty aftertaste even if there’s just a little bit of it in there. I never hear other people complain about it, so it’s probably just some weird thing in my tongue.
And too much xylitol can give a lot of people the shits, which is why people sometimes have theorized the gum in army rations is a laxative. (It isn’t, but it does have xylitol in it, I believe, so yeah, overdoing it can lead to a bad time.)
And then there is the addiction issue: You’re not addicted to sugar, you’re addicted to sweet tastes. In that sense all sweeteners are bad for you: They form the habit of eating and drinking everything as sweet as possible.
The biochemistry behind them is fascinating though. I also find the mere idea of artificial sweeteners sort of inspiring. It means that as a civilization we are at the point were we can not only design and mass manufacture artificial molecules, but that we have so much food that we have to come up with ways to stop ourselves from over indulging to death. Now if only those of us at the middle and top could stop stuffing our faces long enough to get those conditions to apply to all of America and the world.
That’s funny, since my calcium is actually so high that there were calcite crystals growing inside the Gamma Nail when the removed it to keep me from setting off metal detectors at the courthouse and airports. They were the cutest things coming up from the bone deposits inside the metal holes. Now I have to worry about atypical kidney stones about the size and shape of TicTacs, only brown. The only way I know I passed one is I feel pressure inside and it makes a clink against the inside of the toilet or urinal. Otherwise I have no dietary restrictions until they start hurting to pass, then it’s bye-bye to dairy.
As a lifelong soda drinker, I found it easier to switch to water than diet soda. If you’re really acclimated to sugar, I can guarantee that the aftertaste of diet sweeteners is akin to having a dead rodent curled up on your tongue.
i try to cut back on sodas for weight and teeth reason, if more sodas tasted like diet, easier to do so because the after taste was always weird, zero sugar is a bit better tho i’m sure there’s artificial stuff in there
A lot of the internet tends to meme on/hate sparkling water but there is one brand of it i like (sparkling ICE), tho we don’t buy it in bulk/always have the flavors i usually get but it’s pretty decent and the serving size is good too, but i do also like the carbonation sometimes/helps settle stomach versus just flat water
Stop you’re giving me flash backs to the Glycolysis pathway and Citric Acid cycle in Biochemistry. Its the one part of that course I did not do well in and it haunts me. Also, why do we need to memorize one pathway? I mean a map of the metabolism of humans alone looks like MC Escher spent 100 years designing a nightmare city while on acid. Memorizing one pathway won’t help with that – learning from one example pathway how metabolism works will.
I studied the simplified Krebs Citric Acid Cycle in fundamental biology and in detail in more advanced classes, and also the adenosine diphosphate-adenosine triphospate cascade in detail, but no one ever asked me to memorize them. I thought it was just to give me an appreciation of how complex biological chemical processes are.
Is this the part where she expects praise and adulation for a completely normal thing she’s doing because she’s breaking free of another fundie boundary?
No i think this is the part where she’s just happy because she’s breaking free of an irrational fear drilled into her by a cult and is taking big steps forward for both her mental and physical health
But both can be caused by a high sugar intake.
Is really interesting actually – sugar spikes insulin, which essentially is a signal to all cells to take in and store energy, both in form of fat and sugars. Which makes it easier to store fat in your fat cells (that’s the reason you shouldn’t eat carbs and fat together if you want to lose weight) and sugar in muscles and liver and other cells. But, if a cell’s storage is full of sugar already, taking in more would be toxic – so the cell refuses by becoming more insulin resistant. Keep doing that for a couple years, bang, you got diabetes.
Fascinating! Now what I want to know is, just how much sugar and how frequent of an intake is needed to significantly increase risk of developing the disease. Sources optional but appreciated!
I think the WHO recommendation for ‘daily added sugar intake that probably won’t give you diabetes’ is 20g per day. Not sure what cutoff probabilites they used (if they go too low in their recommendations nobody will listen, so I suspect this is the high end).
After I learned that, I spent a good amount of time checking all the beverages in our local convenience stores, and came to the conclusion that none of those even count as beverages ><
Oh, for sure, I’m not arguing that Type-II and weight gain aren’t linked at all, just they’re not *intrinsic*. You can be fat and non-diabetic; you can be diabetic and non-fat; you can be both.
(All of these cases are people who should have your empathy, they’re not gross weirdos, please be kind. Not that people here are being unkind but like.)
It’s not directly linked, as others have said, but people think it is, so if she does gain a lot of weight they won’t be saying “she’s too young”, but “because she’s fat”.
Even though both would be wrong.
I think the diabetes and the weight gain here would both correlate to drinking a whole 2 liter of soda every single day (which is a wild assumption for me to make, but if she’s just taking a huge swig then I don’t see why a little bottle would matter).
Also, being overweight and type two diabetes *are* correlated. You don’t need the former to have the latter, but having the former over a long period of time affects insulin resistance and can lead to the latter. There’s a strong genetic component in my family (on my dad’s side everyone has diabetes either type one or two), but the general consensus is that our larger figures isn’t helping, considering everyone who is overweight got it in their 40’s and everyone who is not developed it in their 60’s (or has type one which they’ve had since childhood).
I would strongly suspect that it’s more “a diet which causes many people to gain weight also contributes to type II diabetes”. That’s the case for a lot of illnesses that are blamed on weight- conditions that can cause them (i.e. a high-fat diet and not much exercise = heart disease) can also cause people to gain weight.
The funny thing about this article you linked is that it says both. Type 2 can be caused by weight gain and also by drinking sugary beverages like soda even if you don’t gain weight. I only know this cause my grandma had type 2 and she only weighed like 120lbs at her heaviest. She was a very small woman and the doctors were just like “whelp, change your diet I guess.”
At least in some circumstances. I recall some ghastly thing about a variant on eating disorders where diabetics skip their insulin so they pee out their sugar and thus lose weight, or at least not gain it.
Which is BAD, but hey, being thin is more important than your health, right?
Not really. The thing that makes sugar a big thing for weight gain is that it’s water soluble, so if you’re storing energy in the form of sugar (instead of fat) you’re ALSO storing high amounts of extra water. If you’re peeing all that sugar, provided you’re also intaking high amounts of water, it shouldn’t really have much impact on the urinary tract. It just fucks up a lot of other stuff, including your brain (which can ONLY run on sugar, because fats can’t get to it).
Being overweight can cause type two diabetes because larger fat deposits can mess with hormone production which can create conditions which encourage insulin resistance. This then creates a circular issue where it’s hard to lose weight because of insulin resistance, but the insulin resistance exists because of the original conditions that allowed it to form.
I’ve never understood why people have trouble with swallowing pills, unless they are large which is true for some. Can someone explain it to me? Is it a reaction to it not being chewed? Or is it a mental hurdle?
Your gag reflex can be triggered by all kinds of things, including unconscious anxieties. For some people it’s also a taste thing, whether because it’s a specific pill that’s strong-tasting or they have a good sense of taste, and for some people it’s even just picking up the feeling of something very dry on their tongue out in the air and their brain thinking “this will get stuck in my throat!” too quickly to get fluids in.
This is to say nothing of the pills that MUST go down in liquids as soon as possible. One such medication, I thought I could just take without a drink and it started to literally burn my throat. I don’t take chances anymore with pills.
For me it’s definitely a sensory thing. I’m very sensitive to textures in my mouth and sometimes when I’m taking a pill it’s like my brain goes DANGER DANGER FOREIGN OBJECT IN MOUTH EJECT EJECT. The body… can be very stupid sometimes.
I’ve always had trouble with pills, and it’s partially a mental hurdle and partially an over active gag reflex. As a child I would often eat too fast or try to talk while eating and would end up choking(not in a life-threatening way).
Nowadays, feeling something hard like pill even touch the roof of my mouth or my throat triggers the “oh god you’re gonna choke” reflex.
I don’t think fellow inmates are able to send people to horny jail. As I type, I’m doing heinous things in Final Fantasy, so I’ve got no room to judge whatsoever.
Who drinks water in college?
I might not have been a soda jockey, but I drank a crapload of iced tea for the first 3 years.
Finally switched to water senior year. That was weird.
I think it was uni where I took to carrying a water bottle around with me because I got thirsty quickly when I had to run from one lecture to another, and I figured this was probably better than buying a Coke or Irn Bru every couple of hours.
Actually coffee or chocolate milk might be healthier alternatives. There’s plenty of options depending on if this is a taste issue or a volume issue. Joyce can sneak a pill into a morning Yoo-hoo and solve this without having to be on insulin in her 30’s.
That’s if it’s a volume issue. If Joyce was drinking a 12 oz of Sprite every morning instead of a full 2 liter bottle this wouldn’t be a problem. That’s why I said it depends on if it’s a volume issue or a taste issue. Or it could be both? The goal is to mask the pill, you don’t need a 2 liter bottle of anything to do that. But based on the alt text I think Joyce is just using this as an excuse to drink soda in the morning. I’m pretty sure she knows she can take it with less but just wants to justify drinking a lot of Sprite.
Personally, I recommend the Walmart “Clear American” brand flavored carbonated water … zero caffeine, zero sodium, zero calories (it does contain aspartame), 4% the RDA of potassium, and the flavors are so much better (read: stronger) than Bubly or La Croix or any of the other name-brand waters.
I’ve lived in the San Francisco Bay area and in New York City, and in those places I have only very rarely seen 8oz cans available, and even then usually only at big chain type stores like Target.
This isn’t just a UK thing? I get 24-packs of cans to take to work, but if I’m in town and want to buy a fizzy drink with my magazines or whatever, it’s all 500ml bottles. There were two indy newsagents who sold 330ml cans, but they’re both out of business.
(The big supermarket sells 250ml cans in the mixers aisle, but that’s barely even enough to taste.)
(BTW, since I’m usually the “Americans don’t realise just how much Britain isn’t on the metric system” guy, yes, fizzy drinks are one of the things were we use litres, I assume because otherwise we’d need to use different cans and bottles from the rest of Europe and it’s not economically viable. Although I’m sure there’s a Brexiter out there somewhere insisting that British soft drinks should be sold in pint cans and gallon bottles and nothing else.)
Even the US is weird here. You can get 20oz bottles, but also the big 2 liters. One of the few things regularly sold using the metric system, but only for some sizes.
You are absolutely correct, this is a one way ticket to getting fat and getting diabetes.
I shouldn’t talk since I know I eat way too much sugar in my day but here I am anyway.
As someone at risk of diabete : for the love of anything holy, switch to diet soda or something. It’s still full of crap but at least it won’t overload your insulin.
I imagine David thinking I had her drink Sierra Mist? I dated this strip and didn’t realize it! Too late to learn the design for Starry–she’s just gonna have to get Sprite from here on! *fixes the artwork, then reloads the page to buffer*
So has Joyce decided she does not want to be a mother? I know she originally went to college to with the idea she was supposed to find a husband and chose education as a major so she could homeschool her future kids. While I am very glad that she chose to reject that whole mysoginstic expectation, I am curious if it turned her off the idea of having kids all together.
Or she might be speaking casually, as people often do, rather than:
“And one of these for the rest of my life except when I am trying to get pregnant, or have some other medical condition that makes them contraindicated*, or if some better method of controlling my menstrual problems is developed, or they become unobtainable due to political or economic changes, until menopause, unless I decide in consultation with my doctor to keep taking them to avoid osteoporosis or other disease, in which case I may continue on after that.”
One of the eternal mysteries of the Internet is why so many commenters insist that everything anyone ever says has to be the exact truth with every possible exception or contingency listed. And if they actually practice this in their everyday lives.
* I am not a doctor, I don’t know if such conditions exist or not, but I doubt Joyce has researched it either.
Hell, it’s not impossible that whatever is making her periods whacked out would make it a lot harder or impossible for her to get pregnant, depending on what it is. I doubt she’d know that if it was, though, since it’s not something she’s mentioned.
She’d need, bare minimum a physical exam and possibly even diagnostic surgery to know that, so who even knows?
And yes, Slartibeast, there’s definitely conditions that make birth control contraindicated. Breast cancer is a big one because most of these pills work with estrogen.
My guess is that Joyce’s joke here is fueled in part from breaking away from the rule of “saving yourself for marriage” and “masturbation is sinful” that’s been forced down her throat her whole life. Given how Joyce’s still undergoing her religious deconstruction process, she very likely will be reexamining those goals. I don’t think the past couple months have been enough to get rid of her baby love, so she might just opt to wait until she’s older and more stable to have kids.
(She’s probably also trying to ride the masturbation euphoria high as long as she can before her anxiety starts to kick in)
well even with the mention of menopause, i don’t think joyce is thinking too far ahead where she’d consider children (tho if her periods were that bad i can’t imagine childbirth, if she doesn’t do adoption/a surrogate)
or she’s just distancing herself away from her ‘idealized christian marriage/family’ even if she and becky still wanna be neighbors in their 40s-50s and beyond
I’m no kid but I can still eat and drink like one. Age 64 and I drink 4, 2 liter diet sodas a week plus a cup of tea every morning for that caffeine boost to kickstart my metabolism.
Maybe it’s because I’m feeling *very* goofy right now, but something about seeing Joyce just chug down that Sprite like it’s nothing makes me want to know what her thoughts and feelings on the whole Sierra Mist/Starry rebrand might possibly be. Like i know canonically she doesn’t like Sierra Mist ( the strip on 09/26/2011 bc i still can’t figure out how linking works) but did Pepsico not saying shit about Starry successfully plant it as like, a separate lemon-lime soda from Sierra Mist in her head or does it’s unremarkable taste still keep it as a perpetual unfavorite in the Joyce food pantheon.
Sierra Mist with real sugar was okay, but if you drank it expecting Sprite you’d be disappointed.
I’m still pissed I can’t find Pepsi and Mountain Dew Throwback in 2-liter bottles anymore. (Mountain Dew Throwback actually tastes like a beverage, not a cocktail of corn syrup and cleaning products.)
Now I need to see a strip about Becky noticing the soda fountain is just labeled things like “Galasso-Cola” and “LORD GALASSO’S, NOT DAD’S, ROOT BEER (Unless You Are My Daughter, Conquest, In Which Case Disregard)”
Pretty sure dissolving your pill into a carbon dioxide and sugar renders it ineffective. You’re not supposed to dissolve your pills at all, even in water, otherwise they’d sell contraceptives in drinkable form.
It will be interesting when Joyce has that conversation with her doctor or pharmacist.
Depends on what you’re taking. It’s not a contraceptive, but I took magnesium to make my cramps less painful and I took it in super hot water to make it dissolve because the pills were too big for me to swallow. It still worked.
Like you said: it really depends on what medication we’re talking about. There’s tons of pills out there that are specifically designed to stay in one piece until they get to your stomach/intestine and then get absorbed. Dissolving them before they’re even in your mouth means they’re not being absorbed where they should, and they won’t have the desired effect.
Anecdotally, I know of more medication that can’t/shouldn’t be ever dissolved than the other way around
I don’t think she’s dissolving the pill in the drink, though. I think she’s dropping it in and then quickly chugging the soda. Chugging the drink opens your throat so she doesn’t even notice the pill going down.
It’s not a very good bit in the first place, but I can’t tell if you’re playing along with it or if you think I’m genuinely correcting Wereg about the container.
If it’s the first: What’s a bottle but a cup with extra steps?
Thanks for the measurement conversion. I’ll have to keep it in mind next time I need to divvy up a 2-liter between 8 and a half people.
There’s always that one person who thinks they want an entire cup and then waste half of it, and there’s always another person who’d love just half a cup more.
I’m… not sure what the joke here is supposed to be? Homeschoolers don’t know how to take pills? That’s been very, very, VERY far from my, to coin a phrase, “lived experience.”
Well, besides the fact that she dumping the pill into a liquid like someone hiding medicine for a dog inside of a Scooby Snack, she’s also chugging a two-liter bottle of Sprite (which is basically fizzy sugar water) in order to take that one pill. Take yer pick.
wasn’t it just more of a joyce thing if ‘her brothers had to hold her down’ and as far as we’ve seen, no issues of her other siblings having similar ‘issues’ but probably also being homeschooled , and her other ‘food neurosis’
i have a hard time keeping my eyes open for eyedrops but it helps if my eyes are closed and do it directly and then blink instead of forcing my eyes open
While I don’t think this is “the joke,” what’s more likely at issue than homeschooling is that autistics are often sensitive to sensory inputs, and swallowing a physical pill can be supremely uncomfortable for some. Dissolving that pill into soda removes the sensory discomfort.
Even before Joyce learned she may be autistic, similar traits have been fairly consistent for her.
Everyone needs different conditions to get a pill down. For me, I can’t do it WITH liquid. I’ll just swallow the liquid. I dry swallow (and then drink water right after to help ease any resulting throat scratches). I’m also wondering if I have dysphagia, to be fair. For my sister, who has EDS and a few other chronic things, she has more pills to take than I do. To swallow, her accompanying liquid needs to be carbonated. The bubbles help with swallowing. If drinking the sprite helps Joyce, that’s all that matters.
Is it funnier if 20 ounces is more or less than whatever Joyce’s bottle there is? I have no frame of reference for these volumes. Looks to be somewhere between 0.8 and 2 liters.
Although as someone who usually goes through at least 1.5 liters of pepsi max a day I gotta say, that’s a ridiculous amount of any drink to chug in one go and I hope these aren’t pills you need to swallow whole for them to have any effect or Joyce may be forced to touch them with her hands or even the inside of her mouth.
That looks like a 2 liter bottle, the most common multiple-serving size bottle sodas are sold in in the States. (3 liter bottles exist, but they’re usually “party size” cheapo no-name stuff.)
20 ounces is .59 liters. That’s the common, single serving size sold in vending machines. The next common size down from that is the aluminum can, which is .33 liters or 11 ounces.
Yep, Needfuldoer has it right. Or in otherwords, Too much for a single sitting, and will get warm by the time you’re done. Just right for a single sitting, until you need to go get another one. And too small, it’s gone and you end up wondering when that happened.
12 oz is probably more my preference if I was just drinking it. 8 is a little small.
Just about right for mixing a drink though. And a lot less waste if I don’t want even that much for the drink and probably won’t have another one before it’s flat and gross.
I rarely can drink more than a single aluminum can of pop in one sitting, sometimes not even that. I’m amazed that Joyce can down a full 2 liter bottle in one go, even for the purpose of swallowing her pills.
Quite a few people are talking about Sprite. She didn’t drink Sprite. Willis was careful, although I don’t know if Sprite’s parent company would care that he was, if they decided to care at all. She drank Sp… then she drank rite. She never drank Sprite.
So I know the pill system here isn’t great, and that’s the obvious focus… but I’m also wondering if there’s an indication of Joyce’s family planning in here. I know she’s taking the pills for reasons besides pregnancy prevention, but obviously they do that too, so if she ever wanted to have kids, she’d stop for a while (versus “probably every day until menopause”)… it’s entirely possible she’s just not thinking about it, but I think it’d be very interesting if Joyce is thinking she doesn’t want to have kids, considering how I’m sure that was very much the expectation of her growing up.
Yeah, when I got my IUD, it was a very much of a mindset shift, like, “OK, I guess this is it until menopause. No more chance of having babies. My family is enough.”
She’s in a very different situation and stage of life, of course, but it is still a bit of a shock to realize, “You mean, I can just …*choose* not to be fertile?”
Yes. After thousands, if not millions, of years of having to submit to the evolved purpose of their reproductive systems and all the pains that came with it, AFAB humans can simply choose to cancel it out entirely, with the Power of Science. It’s so wonderful!!! 🥹
When she was at the doctor she was told that it probably would not work as birth control because of her other issues, so she should pick another method of contraception.
I didn’t catch that this was about meds. I thought she was rehydrating after sleeping off her affair with the dryer. Thought she was vowing to repeat that daily. I was unsure why she would need to suck down a whole bottle of fluid. I am reassured after a second reading
Joyce can teleport.
Dina has the power of invisibility.
Becky has super hearing (but only if the topic involves lesbians)
Sarah has the power of the baseball bat
I’m tickled by this because I’m pretty sure Joyce is taking placebos, so she is literally dissolving sugar pills in soda.
I wonder when someone is going to suggest taking the pills with food. Given the number of people who have recognized Joyce needs help, I find it odd how few actual suggestions they’ve given.
She might not be. People who take birth control to help with cramps often take it without a placebo week, as the placebo week isn’t actually needed- it was an effort to get the pope to approve of birth control when it was being invented. Taking birth control without the placebo week can often stop someone’s periods from happening entirely, if they take it on a consistent schedule.
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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 ⋅ 15h
Josh Gerstein @joshgerstein.bsky.social ⋅ 1d
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com ⋅ 2d
Pavel
@spavel.bsky.social ⋅ 11d
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half-surprised the whole thing of pills doesn’t tip in
(I used to use the kind you punch out of the cardboard backing)
I think it twists so the arrow points to the right day, then one pill comes out?
Yeah, she’s got the fancy pack where you click it to the right day and push that pill out. A lot of them are just blister packs with the days of the week on the top, but that’s hardly the only kind and it varies based on the type of pill.
Huh. I was wondering how Robin “refilled” the pack
(CW: alt-universe)
I was about to say “who the hell uses ounces to measure liquids?” but stopped myself when I remembered that Fluid Ounces are a thing too. xD
Though in my defence, we (in the UK) use litres and millilitres for drinks (500ml is a common bottle size for individual soft drinks, or 2 or 3 litre bottles for quantity). Even the peeps who still use Imperial measures would tend to use pints instead.
Yeah, the U.S. played with metric for like, a week, then went back to being all “INDIVIDUALISM!!!” and using arbitrary things and making things “traditional” that started in like the 1950s
‘Murika
I guess a little too much sugar is a fair price to pay for two big steps in the right direction. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(now if only she can switch in a Diet Sprite at least every other morning)
fake sugar isn’t great for you either!
Yeah you’re right. You think she’d be able to stomach bottled lemonade?
Since it might be the carbonation that helps, maybe not?
Conclusion — Joyce should invest in a Soda Stream!
An ExplodaStream? Jim Starlin was nearly killed by one of those things….
La Croix
a single serving of Chick-fil-A (first result on google) Lemonade is 410g (14.5 oz) and has 55 grams of sugar. A 20 oz (556g) of sprite has 44 grams of sugar. Just to put those numbers in a kind of context, a single doughnut has about 15 grams of sugar in it.
i should specify that its a glazed doughnut, not one of those sad unfrosted ones.
https://www.carbmanager.com/food-detail/md:f4f78d830e6520903cc20b42c7d76281/minute-maid-lemonade-20-fl-oz-bottle
Hence why i said bottled lemonade.
My wife liked tea. Hot or iced. She enjoyed going to places which served the latter as brewed real tea, with simple syrup so she could make it juuuuust a touch sweet.
I would certainly consider trying a restaurant which does this with lemonade.
don’t you take diet soda away from me
the ultimate damn you, willis
Erithrytol’s not so bad. At least that’s what I tell myself. I like xylitol. You just take some yogurt or probiotics with it, it all, to mitigate (or enhance!) the digestive effects.
I like monkfruit. Reports on stevia are mixed (some folks say it causes liver cancer and reproductive effects) but it’ll do in a pinch. Allulose is pretty darn good. I used to use D-Mannose, but it’s got some side effects, maybe not too smart. Some folks stir L-Serine into coffee as a sweetener, although it’s got some risks and benefits too. I like wildflower honey as a sweetener and to calm down allergies and asthma. And molasses is good for anemia. So there’s lots of non-sugar sweeteners that can actually have beneficial health effects when used in moderation.
(:o) Molasses is good for anemia? Source please?
1 Tblsp of molasses contains 20% of your US RDA of iron.
https://www.healthline.com/health/food-nutrition/benefits-blackstrap-molasses
I have an iron deficiency so I try to get iron however I can.
Hey me too! Thanks so much, now I have reason to start cooking more breakfast foods!
Other high-iron foods:
https://www.healthline.com/health/food-nutrition/foods-high-in-iron
I like the ready-to-drink Orgain plant shakes. Those have about 50% of your USRDA of iron per little drink.
I think cooking in cast iron pans has helped me get enough iron.
Great idea! I have to start doing that too. Thanks!
Some of those, xylitol especially, can be fatal or harmful for dogs though. (Not sure about cats.) FYI.
True. Ya gotta be careful.
Good point. I’ll try not to be a dog next time I drink a diet soda.
Goddamn inconvenient curse of lycanthropy
Honey and molasses are just standard sugar with some extra good stuff mixed in though. (not that that makes them bad, in moderation, but my inner jackal felt like throwing that out XD)
And a lot of the others are actually also sugars, just different ones that we can’t digest. Our gut bacteria, however, can. And we don’t really understand the consequences of that, yet. So still a good idea to not get used to high doses of those.
Yeah, you’re right. That’s why I take the yogurt or probiotic foods when I have foods containing sugar alcohols or other resistant sugars. I figure the resistant sugars are just prebiotic food for the good bugs. “Eat up, little buggies!”
I can’t do stevia. It leaves a very nasty aftertaste even if there’s just a little bit of it in there. I never hear other people complain about it, so it’s probably just some weird thing in my tongue.
Some fake sugar is worse than others for some people, too… Aspartame actually sends me into a crash spiral most of the time.
And too much xylitol can give a lot of people the shits, which is why people sometimes have theorized the gum in army rations is a laxative. (It isn’t, but it does have xylitol in it, I believe, so yeah, overdoing it can lead to a bad time.)
And then there is the addiction issue: You’re not addicted to sugar, you’re addicted to sweet tastes. In that sense all sweeteners are bad for you: They form the habit of eating and drinking everything as sweet as possible.
Salt is similarly habit-forming, FYI.
well we can’t replace it with *shudders* LaCroix!
but what do I know, Joyce’s peppy energy is powered by 38 grams of sugar!
The biochemistry behind them is fascinating though. I also find the mere idea of artificial sweeteners sort of inspiring. It means that as a civilization we are at the point were we can not only design and mass manufacture artificial molecules, but that we have so much food that we have to come up with ways to stop ourselves from over indulging to death. Now if only those of us at the middle and top could stop stuffing our faces long enough to get those conditions to apply to all of America and the world.
Fake sugars are the most researched food additives ever. They won’t hurt you. The acidity of soda pop isn’t good for you, though, in any quantity.
All that phosphoric acid and I’d be growing crystals.
That’s funny, since my calcium is actually so high that there were calcite crystals growing inside the Gamma Nail when the removed it to keep me from setting off metal detectors at the courthouse and airports. They were the cutest things coming up from the bone deposits inside the metal holes. Now I have to worry about atypical kidney stones about the size and shape of TicTacs, only brown. The only way I know I passed one is I feel pressure inside and it makes a clink against the inside of the toilet or urinal. Otherwise I have no dietary restrictions until they start hurting to pass, then it’s bye-bye to dairy.
When I was diagnosed as diabetic I was told the best thing is to just avoid carbonation altogether, the CO2 is bad for your pancreas or something.
As a lifelong soda drinker, I found it easier to switch to water than diet soda. If you’re really acclimated to sugar, I can guarantee that the aftertaste of diet sweeteners is akin to having a dead rodent curled up on your tongue.
i try to cut back on sodas for weight and teeth reason, if more sodas tasted like diet, easier to do so because the after taste was always weird, zero sugar is a bit better tho i’m sure there’s artificial stuff in there
A lot of the internet tends to meme on/hate sparkling water but there is one brand of it i like (sparkling ICE), tho we don’t buy it in bulk/always have the flavors i usually get but it’s pretty decent and the serving size is good too, but i do also like the carbonation sometimes/helps settle stomach versus just flat water
Stop you’re giving me flash backs to the Glycolysis pathway and Citric Acid cycle in Biochemistry. Its the one part of that course I did not do well in and it haunts me. Also, why do we need to memorize one pathway? I mean a map of the metabolism of humans alone looks like MC Escher spent 100 years designing a nightmare city while on acid. Memorizing one pathway won’t help with that – learning from one example pathway how metabolism works will.
I studied the simplified Krebs Citric Acid Cycle in fundamental biology and in detail in more advanced classes, and also the adenosine diphosphate-adenosine triphospate cascade in detail, but no one ever asked me to memorize them. I thought it was just to give me an appreciation of how complex biological chemical processes are.
Is this the part where she expects praise and adulation for a completely normal thing she’s doing because she’s breaking free of another fundie boundary?
No Nono. No, some people can actually just share in each other’s days without it being emotionally manipulative toxic abuse.
And right now she’s high on endorphins.
No i think this is the part where she’s just happy because she’s breaking free of an irrational fear drilled into her by a cult and is taking big steps forward for both her mental and physical health
Hey, I wanted some of that! Someone praising me for drinking, going for parties and stuff…
Joyce is too young to get diabetes….is what everyone will say when it happens.
Depends on how much weight she manages to gain from all that extra sugar.
Diabetes doesn’t correlate to weight gain, though??
But both can be caused by a high sugar intake.
Is really interesting actually – sugar spikes insulin, which essentially is a signal to all cells to take in and store energy, both in form of fat and sugars. Which makes it easier to store fat in your fat cells (that’s the reason you shouldn’t eat carbs and fat together if you want to lose weight) and sugar in muscles and liver and other cells. But, if a cell’s storage is full of sugar already, taking in more would be toxic – so the cell refuses by becoming more insulin resistant. Keep doing that for a couple years, bang, you got diabetes.
Fascinating! Now what I want to know is, just how much sugar and how frequent of an intake is needed to significantly increase risk of developing the disease. Sources optional but appreciated!
I think the WHO recommendation for ‘daily added sugar intake that probably won’t give you diabetes’ is 20g per day. Not sure what cutoff probabilites they used (if they go too low in their recommendations nobody will listen, so I suspect this is the high end).
After I learned that, I spent a good amount of time checking all the beverages in our local convenience stores, and came to the conclusion that none of those even count as beverages ><
Oh, for sure, I’m not arguing that Type-II and weight gain aren’t linked at all, just they’re not *intrinsic*. You can be fat and non-diabetic; you can be diabetic and non-fat; you can be both.
(All of these cases are people who should have your empathy, they’re not gross weirdos, please be kind. Not that people here are being unkind but like.)
It’s not directly linked, as others have said, but people think it is, so if she does gain a lot of weight they won’t be saying “she’s too young”, but “because she’s fat”.
Even though both would be wrong.
I think the diabetes and the weight gain here would both correlate to drinking a whole 2 liter of soda every single day (which is a wild assumption for me to make, but if she’s just taking a huge swig then I don’t see why a little bottle would matter).
Also, being overweight and type two diabetes *are* correlated. You don’t need the former to have the latter, but having the former over a long period of time affects insulin resistance and can lead to the latter. There’s a strong genetic component in my family (on my dad’s side everyone has diabetes either type one or two), but the general consensus is that our larger figures isn’t helping, considering everyone who is overweight got it in their 40’s and everyone who is not developed it in their 60’s (or has type one which they’ve had since childhood).
She is chugging the whole bottle–she has to, because she’s dissolving the pill in it.
Diabetes isn’t necessarily caused by weight gain. You can still get it if you’re thin. There are multiple types and it depends on the human.
AFAIK Type I diabetes is caused by genetics, Type II isn’t caused directly by too much sugar but you’re more likely to get it if you’re overweight.
I would strongly suspect that it’s more “a diet which causes many people to gain weight also contributes to type II diabetes”. That’s the case for a lot of illnesses that are blamed on weight- conditions that can cause them (i.e. a high-fat diet and not much exercise = heart disease) can also cause people to gain weight.
The funny thing about this article you linked is that it says both. Type 2 can be caused by weight gain and also by drinking sugary beverages like soda even if you don’t gain weight. I only know this cause my grandma had type 2 and she only weighed like 120lbs at her heaviest. She was a very small woman and the doctors were just like “whelp, change your diet I guess.”
I’m pretty sure current science is that diabetes can cause you to gain weight, not the other way around as people assumed, but…
I’m pretty sure diabetes can cause sudden weight loss too?
At least in some circumstances. I recall some ghastly thing about a variant on eating disorders where diabetics skip their insulin so they pee out their sugar and thus lose weight, or at least not gain it.
Which is BAD, but hey, being thin is more important than your health, right?
Not really. The thing that makes sugar a big thing for weight gain is that it’s water soluble, so if you’re storing energy in the form of sugar (instead of fat) you’re ALSO storing high amounts of extra water. If you’re peeing all that sugar, provided you’re also intaking high amounts of water, it shouldn’t really have much impact on the urinary tract. It just fucks up a lot of other stuff, including your brain (which can ONLY run on sugar, because fats can’t get to it).
The brain can also run on ketones.
Being overweight can cause type two diabetes because larger fat deposits can mess with hormone production which can create conditions which encourage insulin resistance. This then creates a circular issue where it’s hard to lose weight because of insulin resistance, but the insulin resistance exists because of the original conditions that allowed it to form.
“One Flew Over The Sucrose Nest”!
…or… “Come A-1-C With Me!”
I’ve never understood why people have trouble with swallowing pills, unless they are large which is true for some. Can someone explain it to me? Is it a reaction to it not being chewed? Or is it a mental hurdle?
Your gag reflex can be triggered by all kinds of things, including unconscious anxieties. For some people it’s also a taste thing, whether because it’s a specific pill that’s strong-tasting or they have a good sense of taste, and for some people it’s even just picking up the feeling of something very dry on their tongue out in the air and their brain thinking “this will get stuck in my throat!” too quickly to get fluids in.
Also, some pills start dissolving fast and if they’re ones that have any flavor at all that can quickly become unpleasant.
That makes sense. I can say most pills taste bad as someone who has accidentally let them sit on my tongue too long and they start to dissolve.
This is to say nothing of the pills that MUST go down in liquids as soon as possible. One such medication, I thought I could just take without a drink and it started to literally burn my throat. I don’t take chances anymore with pills.
For me it’s definitely a sensory thing. I’m very sensitive to textures in my mouth and sometimes when I’m taking a pill it’s like my brain goes DANGER DANGER FOREIGN OBJECT IN MOUTH EJECT EJECT. The body… can be very stupid sometimes.
I’ve always had trouble with pills, and it’s partially a mental hurdle and partially an over active gag reflex. As a child I would often eat too fast or try to talk while eating and would end up choking(not in a life-threatening way).
Nowadays, feeling something hard like pill even touch the roof of my mouth or my throat triggers the “oh god you’re gonna choke” reflex.
Somewhere between panels 3 and 4, Joe got the boner of his lifetime and he doesn’t know why
(Yet.)
I don’t know why either.
something something Joyce hot something something swallowing 🥵
…look I *know*, horny jail, I’m always in it
I don’t think fellow inmates are able to send people to horny jail. As I type, I’m doing heinous things in Final Fantasy, so I’ve got no room to judge whatsoever.
Oh do tell! I love to partake of demon energy!
A lady doesn’t
and tell.
Tokyo Tower? Do we even wanna know what that’s a euphemism for?
are you murdering people and dragging them to the top of kugane
No, but that is a valid strat to get up there, which is hilarious.
Who drinks water in college?
I might not have been a soda jockey, but I drank a crapload of iced tea for the first 3 years.
Finally switched to water senior year. That was weird.
Strangely, I never drank more water than when I was at college (at least on a per meal basis as I was bad with getting more than two meals a day).
At least two full glasses with most meals.
I think it was uni where I took to carrying a water bottle around with me because I got thirsty quickly when I had to run from one lecture to another, and I figured this was probably better than buying a Coke or Irn Bru every couple of hours.
I’ve only had water since high school, I can’t have more than like 2 oz of anything carbonated at a time. Gives me a stomachache lol.
Joyce could switch to seltzer water….or just water.
Clearly you missed the alt-text.
WATER??? WITH PILLS???
SECULAR HERESY??????
Actually coffee or chocolate milk might be healthier alternatives. There’s plenty of options depending on if this is a taste issue or a volume issue. Joyce can sneak a pill into a morning Yoo-hoo and solve this without having to be on insulin in her 30’s.
I hate to break it to you, but Yoo-hoo has more sugar than Sprite. Like, a decent amount more.
12 oz of Sprite has 33g of sugar, and 12 oz of Yoo-hoo has 47g of sugar. That’s almost 50% more sugar.
That’s if it’s a volume issue. If Joyce was drinking a 12 oz of Sprite every morning instead of a full 2 liter bottle this wouldn’t be a problem. That’s why I said it depends on if it’s a volume issue or a taste issue. Or it could be both? The goal is to mask the pill, you don’t need a 2 liter bottle of anything to do that. But based on the alt text I think Joyce is just using this as an excuse to drink soda in the morning. I’m pretty sure she knows she can take it with less but just wants to justify drinking a lot of Sprite.
Personally, I recommend the Walmart “Clear American” brand flavored carbonated water … zero caffeine, zero sodium, zero calories (it does contain aspartame), 4% the RDA of potassium, and the flavors are so much better (read: stronger) than Bubly or La Croix or any of the other name-brand waters.
Or until they discontinue that soda, like SIERRA MIST
591 mL? what if we switch to 12 fl oz (355 mL) cans? or Arizona Iced Teas?
I’d certainly drink less soda if 12 oz cans were as easy to find as 20 oz bottles.
Do they not sell 12-packs where you’re at?
Here in Central Florida I can get 8 oz. bottles of Diet Coke at the grocery store.
Yeah, but the rest of us would have to take a quest to (and survive in) Florida to get to that grocery store.
Those size can are also readily available in Georgia grocery stores, too. It’d be weird if it was exclusively a southern thing.
I’ve lived in the San Francisco Bay area and in New York City, and in those places I have only very rarely seen 8oz cans available, and even then usually only at big chain type stores like Target.
This isn’t just a UK thing? I get 24-packs of cans to take to work, but if I’m in town and want to buy a fizzy drink with my magazines or whatever, it’s all 500ml bottles. There were two indy newsagents who sold 330ml cans, but they’re both out of business.
(The big supermarket sells 250ml cans in the mixers aisle, but that’s barely even enough to taste.)
(BTW, since I’m usually the “Americans don’t realise just how much Britain isn’t on the metric system” guy, yes, fizzy drinks are one of the things were we use litres, I assume because otherwise we’d need to use different cans and bottles from the rest of Europe and it’s not economically viable. Although I’m sure there’s a Brexiter out there somewhere insisting that British soft drinks should be sold in pint cans and gallon bottles and nothing else.)
Even the US is weird here. You can get 20oz bottles, but also the big 2 liters. One of the few things regularly sold using the metric system, but only for some sizes.
this absolutely cannot be healthy
You are absolutely correct, this is a one way ticket to getting fat and getting diabetes.
I shouldn’t talk since I know I eat way too much sugar in my day but here I am anyway.
[Wilford Brimley intensifies]
Interestingly enough Wilford died from kidney failure unrelated to diabetes (maybe not ENTIRELY unrelated, but mostly)
As someone at risk of diabete : for the love of anything holy, switch to diet soda or something. It’s still full of crap but at least it won’t overload your insulin.
As a diabetic: agreed, soda is a Sometimes Drink, Joyce, please
If you go down this road you’ll have to take even larger pills!! birth control pills are baby mode compared to metformin tablets!
Wait until you get to multiple pills … I’m taking five at a time in the AM, and three in the PM.
I imagine David thinking I had her drink Sierra Mist? I dated this strip and didn’t realize it! Too late to learn the design for Starry–she’s just gonna have to get Sprite from here on! *fixes the artwork, then reloads the page to buffer*
Drinking Sierra… LOL XD
new ship unlocked
This creates new layers to “I needed to leave”.
Good thing she already prefers Sprite (the superior lemon-lime sugar water).
Eh, coulda been Fresca, they still make it, but only in alternate months apparently.
Gah, Joyce, please, swap to juice or something! Water! At LEAST just a little sip or two, not a big huge bottle!
A 7.5 ounce mini can or 8 ounce bottle per pill would be ok, depending on how many pills per day
So has Joyce decided she does not want to be a mother? I know she originally went to college to with the idea she was supposed to find a husband and chose education as a major so she could homeschool her future kids. While I am very glad that she chose to reject that whole mysoginstic expectation, I am curious if it turned her off the idea of having kids all together.
The pills are for bad periods, not birth control. Though I suspect we may see it get more complicated than a simple either/or.
Oh, I see where you were coming from. Until menopause.
But the pills _are_ birth control. Joyce just has non-birth reasons for taking them.
Why, you tryin’ to get with her and have some babies?
Or she might be speaking casually, as people often do, rather than:
“And one of these for the rest of my life except when I am trying to get pregnant, or have some other medical condition that makes them contraindicated*, or if some better method of controlling my menstrual problems is developed, or they become unobtainable due to political or economic changes, until menopause, unless I decide in consultation with my doctor to keep taking them to avoid osteoporosis or other disease, in which case I may continue on after that.”
One of the eternal mysteries of the Internet is why so many commenters insist that everything anyone ever says has to be the exact truth with every possible exception or contingency listed. And if they actually practice this in their everyday lives.
* I am not a doctor, I don’t know if such conditions exist or not, but I doubt Joyce has researched it either.
Hell, it’s not impossible that whatever is making her periods whacked out would make it a lot harder or impossible for her to get pregnant, depending on what it is. I doubt she’d know that if it was, though, since it’s not something she’s mentioned.
She’d need, bare minimum a physical exam and possibly even diagnostic surgery to know that, so who even knows?
And yes, Slartibeast, there’s definitely conditions that make birth control contraindicated. Breast cancer is a big one because most of these pills work with estrogen.
My guess is that Joyce’s joke here is fueled in part from breaking away from the rule of “saving yourself for marriage” and “masturbation is sinful” that’s been forced down her throat her whole life. Given how Joyce’s still undergoing her religious deconstruction process, she very likely will be reexamining those goals. I don’t think the past couple months have been enough to get rid of her baby love, so she might just opt to wait until she’s older and more stable to have kids.
(She’s probably also trying to ride the masturbation euphoria high as long as she can before her anxiety starts to kick in)
well even with the mention of menopause, i don’t think joyce is thinking too far ahead where she’d consider children (tho if her periods were that bad i can’t imagine childbirth, if she doesn’t do adoption/a surrogate)
or she’s just distancing herself away from her ‘idealized christian marriage/family’ even if she and becky still wanna be neighbors in their 40s-50s and beyond
I’m cool with swallowing pills, but I’d never be able to down a giant bottle of bubbly beverage like that o.o
I don’t know how she doesn’t have the burps from that, or heartburn. These college kids have it too easy.
Over in “Questionable Content”, Marigold Farmer can burp all her WoW characters’ names, but it takes 10 minutes and a two-liter of Coke.
Goddamn kids and their goddamn resilient GI tracts
I’m no kid but I can still eat and drink like one. Age 64 and I drink 4, 2 liter diet sodas a week plus a cup of tea every morning for that caffeine boost to kickstart my metabolism.
Same, I’d have much more trouble trying to drink that much pop in one go than swallowing pills.
Maybe it’s because I’m feeling *very* goofy right now, but something about seeing Joyce just chug down that Sprite like it’s nothing makes me want to know what her thoughts and feelings on the whole Sierra Mist/Starry rebrand might possibly be. Like i know canonically she doesn’t like Sierra Mist ( the strip on 09/26/2011 bc i still can’t figure out how linking works) but did Pepsico not saying shit about Starry successfully plant it as like, a separate lemon-lime soda from Sierra Mist in her head or does it’s unremarkable taste still keep it as a perpetual unfavorite in the Joyce food pantheon.
Man, I’m either going to wake up feeling incredibly embarrassed about this or feeling like the i’m funniest motherfucker in the world.
I guess this is how I learn a sodas name got changed.
Sierra Mist with real sugar was okay, but if you drank it expecting Sprite you’d be disappointed.
I’m still pissed I can’t find Pepsi and Mountain Dew Throwback in 2-liter bottles anymore. (Mountain Dew Throwback actually tastes like a beverage, not a cocktail of corn syrup and cleaning products.)
I recently learned Mountain Dew Throwback is illegal in Europe. One of the additives that modern Mtn Dew has ditched.
Speaking of which do we know if Galasso’s sells Coke or Pepsi products along with their pizza (and subs)?
Galasso’s sells Galasso’s’s products. Those other guys don’t know how to get their foot in the door.
Now I need to see a strip about Becky noticing the soda fountain is just labeled things like “Galasso-Cola” and “LORD GALASSO’S, NOT DAD’S, ROOT BEER (Unless You Are My Daughter, Conquest, In Which Case Disregard)”
The idea of Gallasso”s having its own soda makes me want a Mingus Dew.
Pretty sure dissolving your pill into a carbon dioxide and sugar renders it ineffective. You’re not supposed to dissolve your pills at all, even in water, otherwise they’d sell contraceptives in drinkable form.
It will be interesting when Joyce has that conversation with her doctor or pharmacist.
Aren’t these still the placebos? She’s got plenty of time to work up to it.
A hilarious conversation ahead.
Depends on what you’re taking. It’s not a contraceptive, but I took magnesium to make my cramps less painful and I took it in super hot water to make it dissolve because the pills were too big for me to swallow. It still worked.
Like you said: it really depends on what medication we’re talking about. There’s tons of pills out there that are specifically designed to stay in one piece until they get to your stomach/intestine and then get absorbed. Dissolving them before they’re even in your mouth means they’re not being absorbed where they should, and they won’t have the desired effect.
Anecdotally, I know of more medication that can’t/shouldn’t be ever dissolved than the other way around
I don’t think she’s dissolving the pill in the drink, though. I think she’s dropping it in and then quickly chugging the soda. Chugging the drink opens your throat so she doesn’t even notice the pill going down.
Can she genuinely chug TWO LITRES of soda before the pill dissolves in it?
I’ve got no idea how long it would take for the pill to dissolve. Seconds? Minutes?
Joyce, cheerily placid and well on her way to her new status as her dorm’s resident weird sugar-fueled gremlin. Magnificent
Only like a cup or so is for helping swallow the pill. The rest of the bottle is her reward.
That’s a bottle, not a cup.
pretty sure they meant ‘cup’ as in the amount drank/measurement, since they did call it a bottle again
It’s not a very good bit in the first place, but I can’t tell if you’re playing along with it or if you think I’m genuinely correcting Wereg about the container.
If it’s the first: What’s a bottle but a cup with extra steps?
If it’s the second: I’m doing a mediocre bit.
What is a cup but a small bottle?
A miserable pile of secrets.
A cup is a unit of measure equal to approximately 237ml. There are about 8 and a half cups in a 2-liter bottle.
Thanks for the measurement conversion. I’ll have to keep it in mind next time I need to divvy up a 2-liter between 8 and a half people.
There’s always that one person who thinks they want an entire cup and then waste half of it, and there’s always another person who’d love just half a cup more.
well zero sugar sodas are a thing (IDK howm uch they help in the long run but for me at least it gives me the illusion of trying 8D)
She should ask Robin for some advice on how to rapidly metabolize ludicrous amounts of sugar.
Or acquire symbiotic assistance from an alien parasite like me!
I’d gladly be her Venom!
why are you calling me out like this
I’m… not sure what the joke here is supposed to be? Homeschoolers don’t know how to take pills? That’s been very, very, VERY far from my, to coin a phrase, “lived experience.”
Well, besides the fact that she dumping the pill into a liquid like someone hiding medicine for a dog inside of a Scooby Snack, she’s also chugging a two-liter bottle of Sprite (which is basically fizzy sugar water) in order to take that one pill. Take yer pick.
The joke is the American healthcare system. Laugh.
But doctor, I am Pagliacci.
Eh, some people are just squeamish about it I guess.
wasn’t it just more of a joyce thing if ‘her brothers had to hold her down’ and as far as we’ve seen, no issues of her other siblings having similar ‘issues’ but probably also being homeschooled , and her other ‘food neurosis’
i have a hard time keeping my eyes open for eyedrops but it helps if my eyes are closed and do it directly and then blink instead of forcing my eyes open
While I don’t think this is “the joke,” what’s more likely at issue than homeschooling is that autistics are often sensitive to sensory inputs, and swallowing a physical pill can be supremely uncomfortable for some. Dissolving that pill into soda removes the sensory discomfort.
Even before Joyce learned she may be autistic, similar traits have been fairly consistent for her.
I enjoy this
This form of Joyce is different.
She’s all naughty and flamboyant. Her eyes…
Totally like when she left washing room.
I used to be an incredibly high strung person. Then I discovered the joys of vibrating objects. Joyce’s path seems much the same.
Everyone needs different conditions to get a pill down. For me, I can’t do it WITH liquid. I’ll just swallow the liquid. I dry swallow (and then drink water right after to help ease any resulting throat scratches). I’m also wondering if I have dysphagia, to be fair. For my sister, who has EDS and a few other chronic things, she has more pills to take than I do. To swallow, her accompanying liquid needs to be carbonated. The bubbles help with swallowing. If drinking the sprite helps Joyce, that’s all that matters.
Some carbonated liquid is fine, but she’s drinking an entire 2 liter bottle.
She could at least cut back to a couple swigs, or switch to seltzer water or something.
(Hit “post” too soon, dangit.)
Is it funnier if 20 ounces is more or less than whatever Joyce’s bottle there is? I have no frame of reference for these volumes. Looks to be somewhere between 0.8 and 2 liters.
Although as someone who usually goes through at least 1.5 liters of pepsi max a day I gotta say, that’s a ridiculous amount of any drink to chug in one go and I hope these aren’t pills you need to swallow whole for them to have any effect or Joyce may be forced to touch them with her hands or even the inside of her mouth.
That looks like a 2 liter bottle, the most common multiple-serving size bottle sodas are sold in in the States. (3 liter bottles exist, but they’re usually “party size” cheapo no-name stuff.)
20 ounces is .59 liters. That’s the common, single serving size sold in vending machines. The next common size down from that is the aluminum can, which is .33 liters or 11 ounces.
Yep, Needfuldoer has it right. Or in otherwords, Too much for a single sitting, and will get warm by the time you’re done. Just right for a single sitting, until you need to go get another one. And too small, it’s gone and you end up wondering when that happened.
8 oz cans are becoming more common as well.
I don’t drink a lot of soda, but I keep some of those around for mixing drinks.
Yeah, maybe it’s because I’m getting old, but the 20 oz bottles are still a lot of soda for one sitting. 8 oz cans are way more manageable.
12 oz is probably more my preference if I was just drinking it. 8 is a little small.
Just about right for mixing a drink though. And a lot less waste if I don’t want even that much for the drink and probably won’t have another one before it’s flat and gross.
I rarely can drink more than a single aluminum can of pop in one sitting, sometimes not even that. I’m amazed that Joyce can down a full 2 liter bottle in one go, even for the purpose of swallowing her pills.
That looks like 2l to me, so 20oz. would be less than a third as much. 2l = 68oz. rounded up.
So yes, Joyce, please switch to the 20oz. bottles…as a first step.
If Sarah keeps focusing on Joyce:s Sprite consumption she may not pick up on the cheerful (even for Joyce) greeting.
This strip would take on a whole new tempo if Jolt Cola is available in Bloomington.
I tried the first batch in 1985. I could *hear* my heartbeat.
Quite a few people are talking about Sprite. She didn’t drink Sprite. Willis was careful, although I don’t know if Sprite’s parent company would care that he was, if they decided to care at all. She drank Sp… then she drank rite. She never drank Sprite.
So she is drinking FOUR liters every morning, of two different brands?
So I know the pill system here isn’t great, and that’s the obvious focus… but I’m also wondering if there’s an indication of Joyce’s family planning in here. I know she’s taking the pills for reasons besides pregnancy prevention, but obviously they do that too, so if she ever wanted to have kids, she’d stop for a while (versus “probably every day until menopause”)… it’s entirely possible she’s just not thinking about it, but I think it’d be very interesting if Joyce is thinking she doesn’t want to have kids, considering how I’m sure that was very much the expectation of her growing up.
Yeah, when I got my IUD, it was a very much of a mindset shift, like, “OK, I guess this is it until menopause. No more chance of having babies. My family is enough.”
She’s in a very different situation and stage of life, of course, but it is still a bit of a shock to realize, “You mean, I can just …*choose* not to be fertile?”
Yes. After thousands, if not millions, of years of having to submit to the evolved purpose of their reproductive systems and all the pains that came with it, AFAB humans can simply choose to cancel it out entirely, with the Power of Science. It’s so wonderful!!!
🥹
When she was at the doctor she was told that it probably would not work as birth control because of her other issues, so she should pick another method of contraception.
When was this mentioned? It’s ringing zero bells (and also doesn’t seem like it’d make much sense, but).
Ah, so begins day 1 of Joyce not making bad decisions due to being distracted by horny. I can’t wait to see how it unfolds.
I didn’t catch that this was about meds. I thought she was rehydrating after sleeping off her affair with the dryer. Thought she was vowing to repeat that daily. I was unsure why she would need to suck down a whole bottle of fluid. I am reassured after a second reading
She just chugged a 2 liter bottle and didn’t belch for a minute fter? Looks like Amber isn’t the only person in the dorm with superhuman abilities.
She’s saving it for later.
We’ve already seen that Joyce can teleport. Who knows what other superpowers she has.
Joyce can teleport.
Dina has the power of invisibility.
Becky has super hearing (but only if the topic involves lesbians)
Sarah has the power of the baseball bat
The bat gives her gravitas.
Mike had insult powers, and seduction powers (mothers only).
Just the sight of Joyce chugging an entire 1 ltr without pause made my bladder ache…
Just imagine if Jennifer had seen it.
Becky and Walky don’t know it but Joyce is preparing to win the next contest.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-5/01-when-somebody-loved-me/belchin/
Chill, people sometimes take some time to get hid of their trauma, or things brain can’t deal with.
(good times I could still metabolize 1 liter of Coca-cola.
I appreciate that the entire “Sprite” logo is never in one image so there’s always plausible deniability.
Can I get uhhhhhhhhhh SPRI
uhh a S
SPI
SP
uhhh a RITE
RIT
I’m tickled by this because I’m pretty sure Joyce is taking placebos, so she is literally dissolving sugar pills in soda.
I wonder when someone is going to suggest taking the pills with food. Given the number of people who have recognized Joyce needs help, I find it odd how few actual suggestions they’ve given.
She does separate food, so I doubt she could bring herself to hiding it in food
She might not be. People who take birth control to help with cramps often take it without a placebo week, as the placebo week isn’t actually needed- it was an effort to get the pope to approve of birth control when it was being invented. Taking birth control without the placebo week can often stop someone’s periods from happening entirely, if they take it on a consistent schedule.
Go smaller Joyce, like 12 oz at most.
“The solution to your problems keep becoming new problems.”
“That’s okay, we can fix that with more solutions!”
Two sentences that concisely sum up the last 5000 years of Homo sapien life! XD
Just for someone who only uses metric, is 20 ounces bigger or smaller than the one Joyce is currently drinking from?
Way late to the reply, but 2 liters is 68 ounces. That’s a 2 liter bottle, or about triple a ‘Murica single-serving bottle.