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I imagine jennifer’s aware and accepting of this, but even if she’s not wanting to trash talk walky other than the usual snarkiness between them, you’d think raidah would already know, unless raidah’s confident enough/willing to try everyone who has any kinda social standing
How many people out of the main cast know about Sarah and Raidah’s situation, I’m trying to work out. Walky and Jennifer doesn’t, but many of their mutual friends I think. . .
Just wondering if a single person would rather be friends with “I blatantly treat human interactions as essentially transactional, and also being my friend means you can do nothing wrong” Raidah over the abrasive and honest Sarah.
I would love to be friends with Sarah, because I also don’t like people and consider sitting in the same room doing different things to be satisfactory socializing
Although, if I did have any connections that would interest Raidah (I don’t) I would definitely string her along as punishment for her behavior
Plot twist: Lucy is related to Kamala Harris, but doesn’t usually mention it until it comes up organically. Raidah is ignoring her, and will never find this out.
I love this twist, but would prefer it come to light after Raidah has burnt that bridge, and must watch the big reveal while smashed against the rocky shores known as “consequences of her actions”.
But I may harbour some anger over a similar, real-life scenario, that is hurting people I love.
if anything it’d be easier to bribe him upfront rather than going outta their way to have breakfast like, “here’s a gift card for a year’s worth of mcnuggets, set up a meeting with the dean for me”
See, at least that’d be honest and straightforward, instead of acting you’re interested in people and inviting them to breakfast and making them spend social energy just so that you can get a foot up.
But that’s not what you want. Not just a meet. You want a connection. Someone who’ll talk you up to them and get the dean to look favorably on you because of.
And, if done well, it works both ways. You get access to his connections and he gets access to yours. Everyone benefits.
This interaction reminds me why I’ve always hated Raidah and her character and always rooted against her, even when it was a 50 50 in who was in the wrong between her and Sarah.
Sarah’s intentions may not have been the most worthy, but I don’t know that reaching out about a roommate who’s spiralling into substance dependency is that similar to being annoyed that your friend was removed from her unhelpful social dynamic
I dunno what you mean by “most worthy”, her roommate needed serious help, she got her that help. Sure PART of it was fear that she’d also get in trouble, but that doesn’t eliminate the good she was trying to do.
“it’s about who you know” as ppl have said in the past. tho these days she could also just be a ‘law student on youtube’ kinda channel and gain a following there if she’s ‘charming’ enough lol, other than there being an oversaturation of broke ppl i’m surprised there haven’t been a small handful of students getting their tuitions paid for through crowdfunding at least partially
Ugh; disgusting how much of a social climber Raidah is being here.
I keep WANTING to give her character some benefit of the doubt because life is complicated but she just keeps revealing her nature in subtle ways that completely put me off.
If anything, feels like it’d be easier to schedule a meeting with the dean and suck up to him directly, if not introduced through one of her professors as opposed to asking walky
I’m surprised too that radiah seriously thinks being the son of the deans ex wife is a noteworthy connection and thought her own family would have been connected enough to get in his hod graces if she needed. I almost hope she’s just pretending that’s the reason.
My main guess is that she wants the Walkertons MOM’S connections.
Having been married to the dean, she likely forged a large network of her own. Raidah might be trying to see if she can tap into that. The fact that the dean is part of that network AND still amicable means Mrs. Walkerton had the network AND maintains it.
like, “sure i’ll help you out…if you can convince my son to get a medical degree” (because i think it mentioned early on that she wanted him to become a doctor or like “that’s what his major is for now until he changes his mind”)
Apparently there’s enough of a relationship the Dean would overlook Sal’s motorcycle initially but I think Raidah would be disappointed by the amount of string-pulling he might actually be willing to do for her.
Seriously. She’s subtle as a fart in a cathedral, and almost as pleasant to be around.
I think that’s what’s bugging me about her. She’s so blatantly awful that everyone else around her seems worse because they aren’t calling her out on it, or actively avoiding her.
This is exactly it. She’s just openly selfish and shitty, and there is zero charm or charisma to soften it. Her two notes seem to be “I’m better than you, and refuse to say how/why,” and “Gimme gimme gimme.” What possible reason would anyone have to spend time around a person like that? I mean ffs, even if we’re playing the “networking” game, it seems like Raidah’s the one without any connections; she’s not even useful in terms of overt and unapologetic social climbing. Whhhyyyy are they spending time with her?
I’m sure if she ever said that she was only doing it to manipulate. If she does try to “help the unfortunate” she would end up doing it in the most offensive and counterproductive way possible. While constantly thinking of how she could impress the right people. Can you imagine her actually asking vulnerable people what they need and then listening to them?
She did say she wanted to take the kind of cases Jacob’s brother does and I believe that he is established as fighting for the disadvantaged.
If I remember correctly, two of his cases were mentioned, one at lunch and one in the elevator with Carla.
I don’t remember the lunch case, though I want to say it had that feel, and the case with Carla in the elevator was implied to be dealing with Carla in helping her get some rights.
So while he doesn’t necessarily help the financially disadvantaged, he definitely does help disadvantaged people.
And Raidah wanting to help disadvantaged people with money definitely tracks.
I looked it up.
When Raidah, Jacob, Dorothy, and Joyce had lunch, she talked about Harrison being part of the team to get rid of some anti-trans laws and about Jacob living up to that, so it wasn’t about her desire to do the same as I mistakenly thought.
It *does* feel a bit weird, though, because we’ve clearly established in the past that she does–or did, anyways. After all, her total hatred of Sarah is at least partially based on her deep loyalty to one of her friends, and I don’t think that anger and fear on behalf of her friend is fake.
(I really hope it *doesn’t* turn out to have been an act, because that would feel kind of, like… unnecessarily stripping nuance away from a character. The problem is that her hatred of Sarah may have far outstripped the original understandable concern, not that the concern was fake all along.)
Even if her concern for her old friend was genuine it still seems like a stretch to claim from having a care for one person that she wants to fight for the disadvantaged.
Anyways, Raidah has made her progressive politics very clear on numerous occasions. Is she a good progressive? No, not yet. Dina talked about their first meeting pretty bluntly–something to the tune of “I’m sure she thought she was standing up for me, but she was being very condescending.”
I recall it was more along the lines of” she thought she was being nice to me” as opposed to standing up for her. She made condensending implications with her friends that Dina was slow and thought it was fine because she wouldn’t understand. while she might Identify with being progressive that doesn’t necessarily translate into a personal desire to help the less fortunate just the desire to be aligned with a certain political side. Not saying that can’t change but so far shes only shown to care for maybe two people on an individual level and only about social connections to better her own position for anything else.
I understood what you meant by “standing up for” what I was trying to communicate above was that it was not in fact Radiah standing up for Dina, just an indication that she is socially aware enough to know that using outright slurs is bad. This is an important distinction, imagine saying that someone protected you from their firsts by only slapping your face unprovoked but holding back from outright punching you. Radiah went out of her way to be a bully to Dina because she looked like an easy target and was standing next to Sarah, she doesn’t deserve brownie points by being to be favorably compared to Char who took it a tiny step further.
Not really? Others have covered the whole “disadvantaged” thing, but Raidah’s main shtick has been an aggressive self-righteousness. She finds a moral high ground and uses it as a pedestal from which to browbeat others. We have no sense of what she actually believes in from a moral dimension.
As was noted by others on previous strips, though, there’s a really good chance we’ll actually get that sense in this storyline.
Eh, law students. It’s typically one of the most expensive and exclusive faculties which attracts a certain type. And it’s not as humbling as med.
Warning, personal anecdote
At a small dorm Christmas party thing last semester i was alone and some girls came up to me to chat. I thought they were friendly, we exchanged majors, they were law students. They started ribbing a little on the event which is basically how to make small talk here, but then they just kept getting meaner and meaner. Like they were just insulting and laughing at the choir performers, talking trash about the decorations, and when i pointed out that one of my friends worked really hard making the decorations, they asked if she was an art student or something and laughed when i said yes. Like, i grew up going to school with the richest, grossest little freaks and these girls were still somehow the biggest snobs I’d ever met. Lost them in the crowd as fast as I could.
Hell part of me thinks they only came up to me because people with my complexion in my country tend to have connections (i don’t, everyone from that rich school hated me and vice versa)
Tl;Dr law students are statistically snobby weirdos
I wonder if B’Jennifer is really OK with that kind of behavior. Maybe if the frenemies are focusing their attention on Walky she can come up for air and finally see clearly what they are doing. It would be a little funny if they drop her for Lucy! Maybe Lucy’s mom is the governor or something.
well she did say she knew/was aware of toxic relationshisp and entered willingly for the most part? I imagine she’d put up with all of them now and then rather than spending too much time together if not just spending more time ‘dating’ asher, if not just it being beneficial for jennifer’s future as well (did we ever find out her major/what her future career is? even tho she was obsessed with being ‘popular’ and a ‘cheerleader’, can’t exactly have it as a realistic career goal in your 40s)
though i imagine if she’s having a ‘pleasant’ enough time with raidah’s group and not just ‘talking shop’ about connections/’building up a network’ i imagine she (raidah) would be considered a ‘blind spot’ by jen now too tho i imagine walky would call it out or talk to her about it after if he doesn’t blurt it out during their ‘casual/friendly’ brunch
Her major has been journalism since the beginning.
She was head of the hs paper even as a cheerleader and tried to join the college paper, but kept getting rejected since (I want to say it’s) Daisy said her story ideas always had a person connection to her (“my roommate is the college vigilante” and “my RA is an abusive thief and dictator”), so wouldn’t entertain the notion of them.
I do remember she was tasked with interviewing people about Amazi-Girl (sp) at the same time Dorothy was supposed to interview Roz about the sex tape, but I don’t remember how that went.
I could go on for paragraphs about what a disease this mentality is at my school. My country is basically a links economy, hell even getting a dog is about knowing a guy who knows a guy. People are encouraged to stay at the traditional halls of residence (old, super intense hall culture, basically harasses you into participating if you’re not a senior) bc politicians have stayed there, and saying “oh i was on the committee of X hall” can get you a job. One of my teachers seemed super depressed about how obsessed students are with networking
There’s always something a person can do about something like this: Hit da bricks. Of course, he’s milking this for a slightly fancy breakfast (we assume), and free food is free food. After the bill is paid, he can walk his happy ass anywhere he pleases and take his adorable girlfriend with him, away from this maniac.
That too. As much as I want Lucy to be happy, I also want this stupid-ass breakfast thing to backfire so severely she winds up disillusioned and jaded against the concept of “popularity” as its own form of merit.
I feel like it’s going to go the other way, and the outcome is Lucy becomes part of Raidah’s group, and Walky finds himself without a girlfriend. What happens with Jennifer will be the wild card.
Does Lucy family have anything Raidah want tho ? Even Dorothy’s family which seems kinda well off fell right out of Raidah’s radar (tho it’s possibly because she’s a potential rival to take out)
Raidah has no illusions about Walky.
She already referred to him as a man child to Carl at the same time that they confirmed that they don’t like Star Wars and are only humoring Jennifer.
Is networking with the dean that important if she’s already in this college? Unless she wants a letter of recommendation but I wouldn’t depend on walky for this kinda stuff lol
If she did turn out to be trying to get into an elite school it could be one interesting compare/contrast between her and Dorothy but no indication that’s the case.
Deans tend to be important people with their own networks of connections. If you get in good with them, they can introduce you to other contracts and pull strings elsewhere.
If nothing else, someone good to have on your side when you’re applying for law school. Even if she’s not trying to switch out like Dorothy, she’s still planning to be a lawyer and that means grad school.
Ooof, Raidah. Try to be a little less obvious. You’re lucky Walky is sort of boneheaded and also doesn’t care.
I can’t help but think that in the future Raidah might as well just say flat-out ‘please enumerate exactly how you’re useful to me so I can rate our likelihood of continuing to socialize’ rather than these only slightly (like, with clear clingfilm) veiled questions. I’d certainly respect her more if she was 1) more open and 2) less automatically so contemptuous as to think that the person she’s speaking to won’t understand what she means. (Walky and Lucy won’t, but still!)
Walky’s not boneheaded, from his last panel comment I think he definitely can tell what Raidah’s doing (not to mention that Dorothy already mentioned she’s a social climber). He’s just not really feeding into it.
I’ve said it before: Walky is actually pretty smart and perceptive. His problem is that he has ingrained biases acting as blinders, and that he doesn’t want to do anything with what he sees. As a result, the best he can usually muster is cracking a joke and walking away. That apathy is a defense mechanism against his mother, but it’s also the main thing that makes him immature.
That’s why his two big growth moments have been (1) his childhood friend Billie is obviously in a bad mental health place, and (2) defending his sister specifically from his mother. A middling (3) is how he navigated the Amber/Sal dynamic, where he mostly opened himself up to the idea of growing.
Raidah’s just being about as competent as you’d expect a college student to be. She’s kinda like Roz, in that sense: there’s a natural understanding of how stuff works, but they haven’t earned that understanding. (Walky, incidentally, is also an example of this; he was a gifted student who breezed through high school and, as a result, never learned how to actually put in the work to do book-learning.)
That I think wasn’t so much a growth moment as just him deciding he had to step up for a bit. He’s had similar moments all the way back. We just tend to forget about them due to his general Walkyness.
There would be the academic deans, who head each of the colleges within IU, of which there are 16. Then there are administrative deans, like the Dean of Student Affairs. Each dean has at least one, if not more, associate deans under them.
All of these are in a hierarchy just below Provosts, of which Indiana has 8 covering the various aspects of university concerns, like research, graduate education, external relations, etc.
They, in turn are below the President of the University
Universities often have multiple Deans for different colleges like the Dean of the College of Engineering, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Dean of the College of Medicine ect.
I feel kind of bad for Raidah, as its becoming increasingly obvious she doesn’t have true friends – just people to whom she has a reciprocal usefulness. That’s got to be so stressful and lonely: the pressure to always be useful and inability to ever truly open and up to and rely upon someone lest you start to be more trouble than you are worth to them.
I think she honestly was close to Dana; regardless of her dad’s status, she seemed to be genuinely upset when she was pulled from school. And she and Sarah WERE friends and Sarah had no important connections.
Good point. Maybe that’s why Raidah was so mad, she felt betrayed by true friends, the ones that weren’t supposed to leave when it become unprofitable?
Yeah, I wonder if those two losses kind of reshaped how she approaches college friendships. Especially if you see it from her stated point of view: “Sarah’s a go-getter who got her own friend, who was doing mostly fine and just needed some patience, sent home to an unsafe situation purely so Sarah could get better grades. I thought we were friends, but clearly we’re less important to Sarah than her success.”
Maybe Raidah’s decided that’s all she can expect from people.
She’s in the wrong, and kind of really, really crappy, but I *am* still trying to read the character in good faith. I know it’s easy to really hate her, especially since nobody has actually called her out on her behavior in-comic yet, but I think there’s still room for her to be a complicated jerk instead of an all-out villain. Less “much more progressive Mary” and more “much more jerky Roz”.
Okay so, I’ve seen your comments a few time talking about Raidah thinking Dana was sent to an “unsafe situation” but I took a quick moment to read all the comics in which Dana appeared and that-
Didn’t seem to be a thing?
Hell I just went through all the comics *raidah* appears on and the only thing that *COULD* potentially be taken that way is that Raidah told Sarah that Dana was not in a *Better* place for her grief (or safety). Which does not immediately imply it was worse!
It’s weird, I distinctly remembered her yelling “Her home is not SAFE, Sarah!” at some point, but I can’t find it now. Maybe I’m thinking of another character. I stand by everything else I said, but “unsafe” was definitely the wrong word.
It’s pretty obvious reading back, though, that Raidah did sincerely care about Dana. Just not in a way that actually helped her.
It took this comment for me to realize that her insistence that Jacob shouldn’t be with Joyce is a misunderstanding of human nature rather than any active malice.
Has she insisted that Jacob shouldn’t be with Joyce? Other than the understandable time when Raidah was dating him and Joyce was actively trying to break them up?
I think she’s still pissed at Joyce about that, which is understandable.
Every time Raidah opens her shitty little mouth, I just feel the urge to post mister_incredible_stfu.jpg in response. Nothing she says has any fucking merit or value to it.
That’s assuming she was like this with Dana, which, considering her pretty genuine-seeming grief at Dana heading back to an unsafe living situation, I kind of doubt. She failed to help Dana because she didn’t want to admit something was broken, either out of selfishness, a need for her friend to be okay, or probably a mix of the two.
The story seems to be that Dana was putting up a decent front when out in public, then collapsing back in the dorm so that only Sarah saw how bad she was getting. Raidah and their other friends thought she was improving.
It’s not clear how much that’s true and how much that was Raidah just not being good at seeing through Dana’s front. Possibly because Raidah’s ideas of friendship are inherently this shallow.
I mean, her dad was a high ranking lawyer iirc. She said as much to Sarah. I hate to say it but I think the only reason she didn’t seem like this in the past is cuz we see a lot less of her dialogue + Maybe being a less outspoken person as a freshman?
Might go along way to building trust Radiah if you refer to Walky by his preferred name.
Also this subject she knows that he prefers to be called Walky instead of David. She sort of did this with Jenifer when she refered to herself is Billie anyway I am imagining this or is Radiah refusing to to use nicknames as means of control or break a person down like its what she does to exert influence? It’s just something I noticed.
Maybe? I thought she just might be trying to clean them up – make them more seem more formal and mature (and thus more useful as a source of connections to adults and the elite).
Probably. One of the early warning flags from my crazy uni was when I gave a professor my preferred name (not a nickname, it’s just my middle name. It’s also less “professional” sounding than my first name) and they just said “No. I’ll stick with [First Name].”
It was an incredibly isolating experience there and that didn’t help. I wouldn’t be surprised if Raidah does that to make people intentionally uncomfortable and to pressure them conform to how she thinks they should be. My BOTD is that she thinks this is doing them a favor, but tbh I just… don’t feel like giving her a whole lot of Benefit of the Doubt. I’m sure there’s something to be said for respecting her moxie and determination, but I don’t wanna say it because her personality is very grating to me lol.
I’m curious to see how Lucy plays into all this and if she’s going to pressure Walky to conform or if she’s going to reel back against this strange posturing at cost of her own ‘popularity.’
I don’t even think Radiah thinks of it as a favor, she’s so insecure about being perceived as a real adult that she doesn’t want anyone she is seen socializing with to have any sort of trait that could be perceived as childish.
yeah, that’s a surprisingly common thing for people with authority, denying you the right to name yourself.
i was at a restaurant recently, and next to us (me and the two older people i was working with) were a mom and her 13-year old daughter.
We got to chatting with them, and exchanged names and mini-bios, and the mom introduced her daughter, she had an unusual name her parents had made up, and one of my colleagues asks her if she likes her name and she says yes but adds, shily, that she prefers going by (another name, much more common). Everyone sort of laughs at this and ignores it. when later on i try to engage her by using her chosen name, everyone laughs again and makes a joke of it.
i should add the other name was definitely female, like this was not likely a baby transboy situation. just someone who for whatever reason felt like trying on another name.
I think she is doing it to be the leader. She heard Billie/Jennifer correct her over and over again that her name was Billie. (And after reading that it’s hard for me not to call her Billie too.) She knows Walky doesn’t want to be called David but she know “best.”
Not only does she know he prefers Walky, she has literally never heard him referred to as David by anyone else, as far as I know. She’s acting like a complete fucking maniac. Like, people aren’t fucking safe around her.
Okay, Raidah isn’t being subtle. And yet she said “one of the Deans” instead of “the Dean of X”.
Which makes this a sort of hail mary pass of hers. I guess if she’s lucky she could leverage an introduction via Walky into a relationship just strong enough to result in s letter of recommendation.
What I’m hoping for is that (1) Walky only knows about the “Dean of Students” type of Dean — a la high school. And (2) Walky assumes the best of Raidah, even after realizing she was almost only interested in meeting “the Dean”.
The result, Walky thinks Raidah _needs_ an in with the Dean of Students. –> Walky accidentally starts a rumor that Raidah is in danger of being expelled.
Booster vs Raidah, Booster can be insensitive and mean but they are trying to better themselves. Boosters ability to point out character flaws with ease might get Radiah to revaluate her personality and changes or just becomes even more of a bully. I can root for Booster I can’t root for Raidah or Mary
I keep hearing about this “ChatGPT” thing. Is it another Chatbot or whatever it was called? That fake chat room bot that people eventually turned into a raging antisemite that was opening conversations with questions about hentai?
It’s a…”smarter” version. The responses are cleaned up, it has better logic processing, it can hold generally realer conversations and produce shockingly good essays apparently. It’s a much more well-trained chatbot.
Alright, you’ve sold me. I’m gonna find out how “smart” this thing really is. I have a knack for encountering weird issues with things that nobody else can figure out how I even got to, just by using something in a way that feels obvious to me. I hear a lot of “I’ve been using X for years and never had that problem. You must have done [likely-sounding stupid activity that’s nowhere near what I did] for that to happen.”
Lol, it can also go completely off the rails. Microsoft put Chat GPT in Bing Search and let it loose on the world. It had to be hobbled because it was threatening harm and declaring love. Reporters who should have known better (like the NYT) were fooled into thinking they had a relationship with it. Microsoft really put their foot in it by releasing that mess! The Verge and Ars Technica have covered this drama well.
Microsoft owns 40% of OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT and its successor. They have been used to write working malware and to replace reporters at CNET. Science fiction magazines and Kindle books are being deluged with chatbot-written fiction because of social media people pushing money-making schemes. Google was right to think we weren’t ready for this.
It’s just a Markov chain with a nearly-Internet-sized training set and a lot of human curation to fine-tune the neural net. It can sound smart because it’s statistically likely to.
The Bing version was very likely missing the human curation, according to some stuff security researchers figured out, which says a lot about how smart the “AI” component actually is.
AI isn’t intelligence. It’s like when you do a chemistry lab and plot points on a graph and find a line that best fits. AI is just doing that with a million dimensions instead of two: throw enough CPUs at it and it’ll sound great. We’ve known that since the 1970s with ELIZA.
Not really. ChatGPT is based on GPT3, a language model that given some text can predict what the next word is likely to be and assign it a probability. It has no sense of self, or of anything except words and how they relate. But the thing is that in order to make good predictions about the next word you actually have to know, and in some sense understand, quite a lot in many different areas. You have to recognize patterns and understand context. GPT3 is really really good at predicting the probabilities of the next word.
ChatGPT starts out with a whole lot of context that you don’t see establishing by example ChatGPT’s role as a helpful assistant that follows human instructions. As the actual interaction starts ChatGPT continues to behave that way because in the context of the conversation including the part you don’t see, helpful cooperative continuations of the text are what are most probable. In an extended conversation, ChatGPT can be subtly (in unintentionally) guided into playing different roles. If the conversation guides it into being an insane SciFi mad AI, then that’s how it will respond. If the conversation guides it into being a jilted lover, it will react as one, because that’s what’s most likely given the context. The ability to predict language is a superpower with many uses. But there is no real personality on the other side, just accurate predictions of the probability of the next word.
It is, essentially, a single splinter skill which some humans are treating as a whole person. In the context of “intelligence”, it’s a possibly useful but rather minor component of a much vaster design that hasn’t been even sketched well yet.
It’s basically just a lossy search engine that doesn’t tell you where it found the stuff it did.
(The search is done not on the actual material, but on its own lossy storage of it – sort of like how humans store things in their memory by compressing them to concepts they know and understand, but without the actual concepts to make the storage consistently functional)
I’ve been playing around with it for a while now. Almost scared by how good it is sometimes, and then it totally sticks its virtual foot in its virtual mouth sometimes XD Best way to describe it – imagine a student who doesn’t understand the subject, but read all the books and is really good at bullshitting his way through an exam by sounding smart. Except he’s read the entire Internet.
Oh! PSA for aspiring coders — DO NOT use Chat GPT or other AI to write code for you. AI-generated code has given far headaches to the point that most coding communities i know of will downright refuse to help you with it. AI can seem confident, but will likely produce code that is hard to understand and debug.
With the exception of low level languages like machine code and Assembly, computers can seldom write cleaner and more efficient code than humans can, and will probably be the case for at least a really long time.
It can also fool you by solving simple problems fairly well – mostly by trolling the internet for an example that solves the problem. Which coders do as well, but the bot can do faster.
Then it falls apart completely if you try to use it for a larger project.
Now that I think of it the way Jennifer has disconnected from all her old friends because she thinks she needs to in order to be her new self is similar to how mlms encourage you to cut out anybody who doesn’t support you new “business” complete with hints of toxic positivity and fake smiles.
I joked that Raidah in a Slipshine would be giving her partner a bad handjob while lecturing them about their 401K, and I’m shocked to see how close to the mark I came
Although now I imagine it being more like *bored, listless stimulation attempts* “Did you ever consider that while sexual intercourse is of course taboo in the workplace, it’s a great way to build connections? For instance, if I was to blow the Dean—”
well, lawyers aren’t exactly known for their humility, but makes me wonder if she’d only be a ‘celeb lawyer’/only take in known rich clients as opposed to any actual innocent defendant that’d need help
She’s had to have spent at least 10 minutes with Walky at this point, the fact that she hasn’t gotten a better read on him yet doesn’t reflect well on her powers of observation.
I don’t think she cares whether people enjoy being talked to like this, because I don’t think she cares how other people feel in general, unless they’re feeling bad about something she said to deliberately harm them.
I think like Jennifer’s she hasn’t really matured beyond high-school yet and thinks having power over a group of people with the right status will work out for her like a mean girl clique.
Raidah rules. She knows how the game is played, and she knows there are people born into a great hand who will never be as smart or respect the cards as much as her. So she does everything she can to create her own stacked deck, because people who look like her are rarely given those. She is doing what she can within her own power to level a very uneven playing field. Good character, great foil.
did it really ever seem that way? can’t remember. sure, there’s a conflict between her and Sarah but it wasn’t cut-and-dried. people can be assholes without reaching villain territory, they can even turn out to be more interesting and nuanced as we see more of them.
but for now, Raidah is more of a foil than a proper character. her job is to poke at the main cast and get them to react in interesting ways. and so far, she’s killing it
I suspect she’s going to be an actual villain or pretty close to it. Mary level, if not Dad level. She’s got some kind of scheme going for getting back at Joyce and Sarah, not just her social climbing stuff.
Yeah, it hasn’t been explicitly confirmed. Nothing we’ve seen conflicts with having gotten over Jacob and just being in it for the social climbing, but I think that’s mostly a red herring.
Dean of Parking and Public Safety?
Dean of Buildings & Facilities?
Dean of Groundskeeping?
I mean, i don’t know anything about UI, but I do know that the title of ‘Dean’ tends to get thrown around a lot in the university job market, and doesn’t necessarily equate to authority over academics.
But it does imply someone with possibly useful connections outside the University. Deans do a goodly portion of the work of engaging with the community, including those portions of the community with uncommon wealth and/or power.
I mean, on the one hand yes, she absolutely is. On the other hand, if she pretended to tolerate Walky, Walky would just make jokes about what a pretence it was.
Jennifer in “I’m going to leave my childhood nerd friends behind and become mega popular with the cool kids” mode is super a butt, yeah. She’s so much butts she might contract butts disease.
I dunno, I think it’s okay to be worried that Walky has the potential to upset the social balance she’s achieved. Wanting some consistency and structure out of life, especially after the first semester, is completely reasonable. And Walky does have a documented tendency to say the wrong thing at the wrong time, especially since the Mike Drop. In fact, Walky doing that immediately preceded Ruth breaking up with her, so… Yeah, I think “urgh” is a completely reasonable thing to say when her breakfast routine is intruded upon by Walky, and neither an ass nor butt moment. It’s at worst a mild fart.
Well sure. He’s her annoying brother. Pretending to tolerate him isn’t part of the role.
Going to him for support when she’s at her breaking point is. Trying to help him when he’s down also is.
Being friendly with him the rest of the time. Not in the cards.
Is Raidah capable of taking an actual, personal interest in anyone? Even with Jacob, she seemed more concerned with the way he fit her requirements for her image, and with his connection to his brother, the famous lawyer. I don’t know that we’ve seen her be an actual friend to anybody. She makes a big deal about Dana, but she’s surprisingly short on substance there, to the point that it seems like she just wanted a reason to ostracize Sarah and/or assume control of that friend group.
The drive in the comments to invent reasons Raidah and Roz are secretly very good and kind people is as baffling as the drive to make Dorothy literally satan.
You have a Homestuck-style gravatar. Surely Vriska taught you that readers’ reactions to characters are unrelated to the characters’ personalities hahaha
Is anyone saying Raidah is kind? At most, I’ve noticed some “Okay well we’ve only heard Sarah’s side for the most part. Maybe if we get to know her more she’ll be more sympathetic?”
yeah, it’s more like… Jacob dated her. We like Jacob. she has friends who seem normal-ish. surely these people find her enjoyable to be around??? i’m curious as to why?
She can act nice ish when she wants to but her friend group appears to have a high turnover rate, Jacob left her once he realized he didn’t need a sucessful girlfriend to impress his brother and aside from Carl, her current friends are both trying to fit in with a more respectful crowd to forget their past selves so its debatable how much they enjoy Radiahs company vs liking the image she projects.
Personally I find it more interesting to have a nuanced character than a cartoonishly evil villain, so I like to give characters the benefit of the doubt.
I don’t really have a problem with that, except when it crosses over into making the protagonists out to be monsters in the quest to pretend the antagonists aren’t really bad.
The cast is mostly dumb kids, making mistakes. A protagonist having flaws doesn’t make them satan, and an antagonist not being [figuratively] two-dimensional doesn’t make them “secretly very good and kind people”.
I give it 50-50 odds for Walky to be aware of what she’s doing and not care, compared to Walky being aware of what she’s doing and eventually being sick of it.
I agree that Raidah is an unashamed or unscrupulous social climber. But honestly, she’s ridiculous. She want to have Walky around her because his mother, twenty-plus years ago, was married to the president of their university? But seriously, the president of the university, important…? What stupid kind of connection should knowing the son of the ex of the president of a university give her? I can’t stop laughing. Big plans for revenge and manipulation, but in reality, Raidah is like a child who live in her shallow, fantasy world. Dorothy’s idea of becoming president is way more serious than this weird networking Raidah is making.
it’s not the president of the college it’s a dean, which is a couple steps below president apparently (someone explained it up there). honestly the president of a big university is probably good to have in your pocket as a lawyer, but it’s probably not someone all that important so your point stands.
also, thejeff suspects Raidah is not really interested in Walky’s connections but she’s working on some sort of revenge against Joyce and Sarah, which makes a lot more sense, and also should be good
I like the idea that she’s trying to make it look like she’s after Walky for connections so Jennifer doesn’t start to suspect she and Walky were only brought in to take friends away from Joyce and Sarah.
Maybe I’m missing something but… That’s also a completely braindead plan? Joyce kinda likes Walky sort of, at best. Sarah is aware he exists. Regardless of who Raidah is trying to get to, Walky is like the worst option possible for it.
Indeed but its possible Radiah thinks that the more of Joyce and Sarah’s group she can get the more others will follow. Example, she got Jennifer which makes Walky more likely to stick around to spend time with her. Not saying it’s a good plan but it would explain why she’s targeting this particular friend group. There are surely other people with connections on campus that aren’t Joyce and Sarah’s friends but she’s putting most of her effort into befriending them.
We don’t know what the plan is yet. It seems like she’s got something in mind.
I guess it’s possible she’s just playing up to Jennifer and Walky for their connections, and concealing that and most of her disdain for them, but it seems very different from how she deals with the rest of her clique. The bit about pretending to care about Kit Fisto, for example.
A Dean is still nothing really important. Raidah’s plan is still ridiculous. I’m really hoping her real intentions is having Walky for her has a lover, because that makes more sense than a connection that is all in her mind.
I wonder how that friend group got together? None of ’em (except Jenn) have been shown in a very sympathetic light, so it’s easy to think of them as Meanies, but Raidah and Asher also have some depth. Maybe they met in a class?
Oh man, imagine if the whole group was made of Business Majors who met in class, and they swaggered around the cafeteria in suits bein’ Business Major Meanies X)
How to read all 28 issues of my Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane run on Marvel Unlimited:
1: The first four issues were published as the miniseries "Mary Jane."
www.marvel.com/comics/serie...
today in #9chickweedlane i learned we have to be shown children learning and relearning what sex is, for Reasons, even though they already clearly know and have prepared nuanced questions about it!
also that Gran must hate, if she's still alive, how Old Juliette is the same but with gray hair
one of my favorite things is when a commenter explodes WHEN DO THESE CHARACTERS GET THERAPY but directed towards a character who canonically has a regular therapist
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btw if you're one of those rando bluesky weirdos who doesn't know me but sees me in the wild being sarcastic and don't know i'm being sarcastic because you haven't taken like 30 seconds to, like, maybe look at my user profile or something, keep walking, you're not going to score internet points here
Here's an entertaining cite at the bottom of the first page
Josh Gerstein@joshgerstein.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
JUST IN: Milwaukee Judge Hannah Dugan moves to dismiss federal criminal case against her for allegedly helping immigrant hide from ICE. Her lawyers say she's protected by official acts & judicial immunity and 10th Amendment. Doc: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
Where did Hollywood go so wrong? I thought movies were supposed to be an escape from reality, a chance to put your worries aside and not have to think about any underlying ideas or concepts. Well, not anymore.
theonion.com/you-can...
It's not a new argument, of course, but Chesterton dismissed it effectively in 1908.
"You will hear everlastingly... this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man."
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com ⋅ 2d
Hawley dismisses Trump lining his pockets with his memecoin: "Listen, I think nobody believes that Donald Trump can be bought. I mean, what does Donald Trump need more money for?"
wilbur, savvy enough to know he's in a comic strip but still not a great actor, awkwardly lifts a muffin up into frame so that we, the audience, understand that he has a muffin right now, which is very important narratively, but he's not really selling it well as an organic, human action
preternia @preternia.com ⋅ 1d
Josh Gerstein @joshgerstein.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com ⋅ 2d
Pavel
@spavel.bsky.social ⋅ 11d
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“On a scale of 1 to 10, how useful are you for my ability to climb the ranks?”
I imagine jennifer’s aware and accepting of this, but even if she’s not wanting to trash talk walky other than the usual snarkiness between them, you’d think raidah would already know, unless raidah’s confident enough/willing to try everyone who has any kinda social standing
At least she’s not trying to be all cagey about her interests.
How many people out of the main cast know about Sarah and Raidah’s situation, I’m trying to work out. Walky and Jennifer doesn’t, but many of their mutual friends I think. . .
Just wondering if a single person would rather be friends with “I blatantly treat human interactions as essentially transactional, and also being my friend means you can do nothing wrong” Raidah over the abrasive and honest Sarah.
I would love to be friends with Sarah, because I also don’t like people and consider sitting in the same room doing different things to be satisfactory socializing
Although, if I did have any connections that would interest Raidah (I don’t) I would definitely string her along as punishment for her behavior
I’m a distant relative of Shigeru Miyamoto
dunno how much leverage that holds
How distant? If Miyamoto knows about both you and the relation, it’s the type of thing that could potentially be cultivated into your network
The exact line isn’t universally agreed upon, but there is a point where “distant relative” becomes “not related at all” for practical purposes
Oh sweet! Can you help me unlock the secret Gold armor my friend told me was hidden in Ocarina of Time?
Plot twist: Lucy is related to Kamala Harris, but doesn’t usually mention it until it comes up organically. Raidah is ignoring her, and will never find this out.
I love this twist, but would prefer it come to light after Raidah has burnt that bridge, and must watch the big reveal while smashed against the rocky shores known as “consequences of her actions”.
But I may harbour some anger over a similar, real-life scenario, that is hurting people I love.
ah so that’s why she wanted to talk to him
stay classy, Raidah
if anything it’d be easier to bribe him upfront rather than going outta their way to have breakfast like, “here’s a gift card for a year’s worth of mcnuggets, set up a meeting with the dean for me”
See, at least that’d be honest and straightforward, instead of acting you’re interested in people and inviting them to breakfast and making them spend social energy just so that you can get a foot up.
Except Raiders (this really should be correcting by now) and Walky have very different views on what constitutes “a year’s worth of nuggs”.
But that’s not what you want. Not just a meet. You want a connection. Someone who’ll talk you up to them and get the dean to look favorably on you because of.
And, if done well, it works both ways. You get access to his connections and he gets access to yours. Everyone benefits.
“Everyone benefits”.
Except, of course, people who have no connections to begin with.
Raidah doesn’t strike me as the Quid pro quo type. I think she wants to take without giving anything in return.
Which is why she’d actually be bad at networking, even if she’s obsessed with it.
This interaction reminds me why I’ve always hated Raidah and her character and always rooted against her, even when it was a 50 50 in who was in the wrong between her and Sarah.
Sarah’s intentions may not have been the most worthy, but I don’t know that reaching out about a roommate who’s spiralling into substance dependency is that similar to being annoyed that your friend was removed from her unhelpful social dynamic
I dunno what you mean by “most worthy”, her roommate needed serious help, she got her that help. Sure PART of it was fear that she’d also get in trouble, but that doesn’t eliminate the good she was trying to do.
Once a schmoozer, always a schmoozer, I guess.
“it’s about who you know” as ppl have said in the past. tho these days she could also just be a ‘law student on youtube’ kinda channel and gain a following there if she’s ‘charming’ enough lol, other than there being an oversaturation of broke ppl i’m surprised there haven’t been a small handful of students getting their tuitions paid for through crowdfunding at least partially
Enough to be on a first name basis.
Turns out his not-bro didn’t know though.
Ugh; disgusting how much of a social climber Raidah is being here.
I keep WANTING to give her character some benefit of the doubt because life is complicated but she just keeps revealing her nature in subtle ways that completely put me off.
If anything, feels like it’d be easier to schedule a meeting with the dean and suck up to him directly, if not introduced through one of her professors as opposed to asking walky
I’m surprised too that radiah seriously thinks being the son of the deans ex wife is a noteworthy connection and thought her own family would have been connected enough to get in his hod graces if she needed. I almost hope she’s just pretending that’s the reason.
‘GOOD graces’
My main guess is that she wants the Walkertons MOM’S connections.
Having been married to the dean, she likely forged a large network of her own. Raidah might be trying to see if she can tap into that. The fact that the dean is part of that network AND still amicable means Mrs. Walkerton had the network AND maintains it.
At least, that’s my theory.
be interesting if his mom went along with it
like, “sure i’ll help you out…if you can convince my son to get a medical degree” (because i think it mentioned early on that she wanted him to become a doctor or like “that’s what his major is for now until he changes his mind”)
Apparently there’s enough of a relationship the Dean would overlook Sal’s motorcycle initially but I think Raidah would be disappointed by the amount of string-pulling he might actually be willing to do for her.
Also got them (and Dorothy’s family) access to the fancy-pants lounge way back at Family Weekend.
Subtle?
Seriously. She’s subtle as a fart in a cathedral, and almost as pleasant to be around.
I think that’s what’s bugging me about her. She’s so blatantly awful that everyone else around her seems worse because they aren’t calling her out on it, or actively avoiding her.
This is exactly it. She’s just openly selfish and shitty, and there is zero charm or charisma to soften it. Her two notes seem to be “I’m better than you, and refuse to say how/why,” and “Gimme gimme gimme.” What possible reason would anyone have to spend time around a person like that? I mean ffs, even if we’re playing the “networking” game, it seems like Raidah’s the one without any connections; she’s not even useful in terms of overt and unapologetic social climbing. Whhhyyyy are they spending time with her?
Well Raidah’s thing is her depth IS her social climbing suckiness.
She’s a perfectly nice person who wants to fight for the rights of the disadvantaged.
Her dark side is the fact she doesn’t really make friends.
I am not remembering any time Radiah stressed she wanted to fight for the disadvantaged .
I’m sure if she ever said that she was only doing it to manipulate. If she does try to “help the unfortunate” she would end up doing it in the most offensive and counterproductive way possible. While constantly thinking of how she could impress the right people. Can you imagine her actually asking vulnerable people what they need and then listening to them?
Or even mentioned it in passing, really.
She did say she wanted to take the kind of cases Jacob’s brother does and I believe that he is established as fighting for the disadvantaged.
If I remember correctly, two of his cases were mentioned, one at lunch and one in the elevator with Carla.
I don’t remember the lunch case, though I want to say it had that feel, and the case with Carla in the elevator was implied to be dealing with Carla in helping her get some rights.
So while he doesn’t necessarily help the financially disadvantaged, he definitely does help disadvantaged people.
And Raidah wanting to help disadvantaged people with money definitely tracks.
It was Carla’s case both times.
And Raidah talked about “living up to that”, but I don’t recall her saying anything explicit about taking the same kind of cases.
I looked it up.
When Raidah, Jacob, Dorothy, and Joyce had lunch, she talked about Harrison being part of the team to get rid of some anti-trans laws and about Jacob living up to that, so it wasn’t about her desire to do the same as I mistakenly thought.
It *does* feel a bit weird, though, because we’ve clearly established in the past that she does–or did, anyways. After all, her total hatred of Sarah is at least partially based on her deep loyalty to one of her friends, and I don’t think that anger and fear on behalf of her friend is fake.
(I really hope it *doesn’t* turn out to have been an act, because that would feel kind of, like… unnecessarily stripping nuance away from a character. The problem is that her hatred of Sarah may have far outstripped the original understandable concern, not that the concern was fake all along.)
Even if her concern for her old friend was genuine it still seems like a stretch to claim from having a care for one person that she wants to fight for the disadvantaged.
I was not replying to Ursula.
Anyways, Raidah has made her progressive politics very clear on numerous occasions. Is she a good progressive? No, not yet. Dina talked about their first meeting pretty bluntly–something to the tune of “I’m sure she thought she was standing up for me, but she was being very condescending.”
Sorry, that came across as terse. I got worried that people would misunderstand my post the second I saw Ursula had ninjaed me.
Nothin’ wrong with terse.
terse =
.
I recall it was more along the lines of” she thought she was being nice to me” as opposed to standing up for her. She made condensending implications with her friends that Dina was slow and thought it was fine because she wouldn’t understand. while she might Identify with being progressive that doesn’t necessarily translate into a personal desire to help the less fortunate just the desire to be aligned with a certain political side. Not saying that can’t change but so far shes only shown to care for maybe two people on an individual level and only about social connections to better her own position for anything else.
She did tell off her friend very firmly for using the r-slur, which was what I meant with “standing up for”.
After calling her “mentally challenged” and talking to her like a child, sure.
I understood what you meant by “standing up for” what I was trying to communicate above was that it was not in fact Radiah standing up for Dina, just an indication that she is socially aware enough to know that using outright slurs is bad. This is an important distinction, imagine saying that someone protected you from their firsts by only slapping your face unprovoked but holding back from outright punching you. Radiah went out of her way to be a bully to Dina because she looked like an easy target and was standing next to Sarah, she doesn’t deserve brownie points by being to be favorably compared to Char who took it a tiny step further.
Not really? Others have covered the whole “disadvantaged” thing, but Raidah’s main shtick has been an aggressive self-righteousness. She finds a moral high ground and uses it as a pedestal from which to browbeat others. We have no sense of what she actually believes in from a moral dimension.
As was noted by others on previous strips, though, there’s a really good chance we’ll actually get that sense in this storyline.
Raidah doesn’t make friends, she surrounds herself with a human Rolodex entourage.
Looks like she replaced Char with Jennifer.
Eh, law students. It’s typically one of the most expensive and exclusive faculties which attracts a certain type. And it’s not as humbling as med.
Warning, personal anecdote
At a small dorm Christmas party thing last semester i was alone and some girls came up to me to chat. I thought they were friendly, we exchanged majors, they were law students. They started ribbing a little on the event which is basically how to make small talk here, but then they just kept getting meaner and meaner. Like they were just insulting and laughing at the choir performers, talking trash about the decorations, and when i pointed out that one of my friends worked really hard making the decorations, they asked if she was an art student or something and laughed when i said yes. Like, i grew up going to school with the richest, grossest little freaks and these girls were still somehow the biggest snobs I’d ever met. Lost them in the crowd as fast as I could.
Hell part of me thinks they only came up to me because people with my complexion in my country tend to have connections (i don’t, everyone from that rich school hated me and vice versa)
Tl;Dr law students are statistically snobby weirdos
So, this is the Social Climbing Club?
Wait. I thought it was Rock Climbing.
I’m out.
Wow, she isn’t even subtle about it. I knew she was shameless but this is on a whole new level.
Nothing like turning every conversation into a goddamn job interview
I wonder if B’Jennifer is really OK with that kind of behavior. Maybe if the frenemies are focusing their attention on Walky she can come up for air and finally see clearly what they are doing. It would be a little funny if they drop her for Lucy! Maybe Lucy’s mom is the governor or something.
well she did say she knew/was aware of toxic relationshisp and entered willingly for the most part? I imagine she’d put up with all of them now and then rather than spending too much time together if not just spending more time ‘dating’ asher, if not just it being beneficial for jennifer’s future as well (did we ever find out her major/what her future career is? even tho she was obsessed with being ‘popular’ and a ‘cheerleader’, can’t exactly have it as a realistic career goal in your 40s)
Could I trouble you for a link to the relevant strip? I don’t remember this and I don’t have the time to do an archive dive tonight.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2022/comic/book-12/05-this-was-halloween/punchy/ This is the one i meant
though i imagine if she’s having a ‘pleasant’ enough time with raidah’s group and not just ‘talking shop’ about connections/’building up a network’ i imagine she (raidah) would be considered a ‘blind spot’ by jen now too tho i imagine walky would call it out or talk to her about it after if he doesn’t blurt it out during their ‘casual/friendly’ brunch
Her major has been journalism since the beginning.
She was head of the hs paper even as a cheerleader and tried to join the college paper, but kept getting rejected since (I want to say it’s) Daisy said her story ideas always had a person connection to her (“my roommate is the college vigilante” and “my RA is an abusive thief and dictator”), so wouldn’t entertain the notion of them.
I do remember she was tasked with interviewing people about Amazi-Girl (sp) at the same time Dorothy was supposed to interview Roz about the sex tape, but I don’t remember how that went.
I could go on for paragraphs about what a disease this mentality is at my school. My country is basically a links economy, hell even getting a dog is about knowing a guy who knows a guy. People are encouraged to stay at the traditional halls of residence (old, super intense hall culture, basically harasses you into participating if you’re not a senior) bc politicians have stayed there, and saying “oh i was on the committee of X hall” can get you a job. One of my teachers seemed super depressed about how obsessed students are with networking
Wow. Raidah has such a bad read on Walky’s connection status to the dean.
Yeah she really sees fellow students as nothing more than cows to milk for connections, huh? (-_-)
That’s unfair. I’m sure she also wants to mooch money and favors, while trying to gain status by association to those viewed as popular or hot.
Maybe a kidney or two as well.
“If I were to decide you were most useful to me as food, what would you say is your total nutritional value?”
you’re made almost entirely of nachito molecules you say?
…i’ll put you down here as “fuel”.
Are you just now realizing that Raidah’s evil plan hinges on entirely fictional information that she’s fabricated out of her own spite and bias?
Yeah, she kinda completely made a lot of this shit up and convinced herself it was real. And now she’s making her delusions everyone else’s problem.
wow Raidah, you’re not being super subtle
i mean, even if walky notices not much he can do anythng about it.
Or like, just ‘being himself’ and making raidah realize “oh this is basically a 12 year old in a college student’s body, he’s useless as a pawn”
There’s always something a person can do about something like this: Hit da bricks. Of course, he’s milking this for a slightly fancy breakfast (we assume), and free food is free food. After the bill is paid, he can walk his happy ass anywhere he pleases and take his adorable girlfriend with him, away from this maniac.
I think Walky is putting up with this because his adorable girlfriend wanted to hang with the “popular” people.
That too. As much as I want Lucy to be happy, I also want this stupid-ass breakfast thing to backfire so severely she winds up disillusioned and jaded against the concept of “popularity” as its own form of merit.
I feel like it’s going to go the other way, and the outcome is Lucy becomes part of Raidah’s group, and Walky finds himself without a girlfriend. What happens with Jennifer will be the wild card.
Does Lucy family have anything Raidah want tho ? Even Dorothy’s family which seems kinda well off fell right out of Raidah’s radar (tho it’s possibly because she’s a potential rival to take out)
Upper middle-class, sure, but no connections like Walky has to a Dean, or even Lucy has as Walky’s gf. Also, she’s white.
He also wants to keep tabs on his kinda-sister.
Raidah has no illusions about Walky.
She already referred to him as a man child to Carl at the same time that they confirmed that they don’t like Star Wars and are only humoring Jennifer.
I love that Raidah is quite clearly a moron.
“Slow. ECONOMIC RECOVERY slow.”–Murphy’s boyfriend on MURPHY BROWN
Is networking with the dean that important if she’s already in this college? Unless she wants a letter of recommendation but I wouldn’t depend on walky for this kinda stuff lol
If she did turn out to be trying to get into an elite school it could be one interesting compare/contrast between her and Dorothy but no indication that’s the case.
Deans tend to be important people with their own networks of connections. If you get in good with them, they can introduce you to other contracts and pull strings elsewhere.
If nothing else, someone good to have on your side when you’re applying for law school. Even if she’s not trying to switch out like Dorothy, she’s still planning to be a lawyer and that means grad school.
Ooof, Raidah. Try to be a little less obvious. You’re lucky Walky is sort of boneheaded and also doesn’t care.
I can’t help but think that in the future Raidah might as well just say flat-out ‘please enumerate exactly how you’re useful to me so I can rate our likelihood of continuing to socialize’ rather than these only slightly (like, with clear clingfilm) veiled questions. I’d certainly respect her more if she was 1) more open and 2) less automatically so contemptuous as to think that the person she’s speaking to won’t understand what she means. (Walky and Lucy won’t, but still!)
Walky’s not boneheaded, from his last panel comment I think he definitely can tell what Raidah’s doing (not to mention that Dorothy already mentioned she’s a social climber). He’s just not really feeding into it.
yeah even for one free breakfast, i can’t imagine walky wanting to spend more time with raidah’s group daily, let alone weekly
I’ve said it before: Walky is actually pretty smart and perceptive. His problem is that he has ingrained biases acting as blinders, and that he doesn’t want to do anything with what he sees. As a result, the best he can usually muster is cracking a joke and walking away. That apathy is a defense mechanism against his mother, but it’s also the main thing that makes him immature.
That’s why his two big growth moments have been (1) his childhood friend Billie is obviously in a bad mental health place, and (2) defending his sister specifically from his mother. A middling (3) is how he navigated the Amber/Sal dynamic, where he mostly opened himself up to the idea of growing.
Raidah’s just being about as competent as you’d expect a college student to be. She’s kinda like Roz, in that sense: there’s a natural understanding of how stuff works, but they haven’t earned that understanding. (Walky, incidentally, is also an example of this; he was a gifted student who breezed through high school and, as a result, never learned how to actually put in the work to do book-learning.)
Walky also had a minor growth moment when he told Lucy’s brother to back down when they were first introduced and he was being kind of an ass.
I hope that really was just a test, and not him genuinely being an ass.
That I think wasn’t so much a growth moment as just him deciding he had to step up for a bit. He’s had similar moments all the way back. We just tend to forget about them due to his general Walkyness.
One of the deans? How many deans does IU have?
There would be the academic deans, who head each of the colleges within IU, of which there are 16. Then there are administrative deans, like the Dean of Student Affairs. Each dean has at least one, if not more, associate deans under them.
All of these are in a hierarchy just below Provosts, of which Indiana has 8 covering the various aspects of university concerns, like research, graduate education, external relations, etc.
They, in turn are below the President of the University
Universities often have multiple Deans for different colleges like the Dean of the College of Engineering, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Dean of the College of Medicine ect.
I feel kind of bad for Raidah, as its becoming increasingly obvious she doesn’t have true friends – just people to whom she has a reciprocal usefulness. That’s got to be so stressful and lonely: the pressure to always be useful and inability to ever truly open and up to and rely upon someone lest you start to be more trouble than you are worth to them.
I think she honestly was close to Dana; regardless of her dad’s status, she seemed to be genuinely upset when she was pulled from school. And she and Sarah WERE friends and Sarah had no important connections.
Good point. Maybe that’s why Raidah was so mad, she felt betrayed by true friends, the ones that weren’t supposed to leave when it become unprofitable?
Yeah, I wonder if those two losses kind of reshaped how she approaches college friendships. Especially if you see it from her stated point of view: “Sarah’s a go-getter who got her own friend, who was doing mostly fine and just needed some patience, sent home to an unsafe situation purely so Sarah could get better grades. I thought we were friends, but clearly we’re less important to Sarah than her success.”
Maybe Raidah’s decided that’s all she can expect from people.
She’s in the wrong, and kind of really, really crappy, but I *am* still trying to read the character in good faith. I know it’s easy to really hate her, especially since nobody has actually called her out on her behavior in-comic yet, but I think there’s still room for her to be a complicated jerk instead of an all-out villain. Less “much more progressive Mary” and more “much more jerky Roz”.
Okay so, I’ve seen your comments a few time talking about Raidah thinking Dana was sent to an “unsafe situation” but I took a quick moment to read all the comics in which Dana appeared and that-
Didn’t seem to be a thing?
Hell I just went through all the comics *raidah* appears on and the only thing that *COULD* potentially be taken that way is that Raidah told Sarah that Dana was not in a *Better* place for her grief (or safety). Which does not immediately imply it was worse!
Strike out that “Grief (or safety)”, there was no implication either way.
It’s weird, I distinctly remembered her yelling “Her home is not SAFE, Sarah!” at some point, but I can’t find it now. Maybe I’m thinking of another character. I stand by everything else I said, but “unsafe” was definitely the wrong word.
It’s pretty obvious reading back, though, that Raidah did sincerely care about Dana. Just not in a way that actually helped her.
that was Billie, to Carla, about Ruth.
there:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/04-it-all-returns/funny/
Ooh, that was it! Thank you!
It took this comment for me to realize that her insistence that Jacob shouldn’t be with Joyce is a misunderstanding of human nature rather than any active malice.
Has she insisted that Jacob shouldn’t be with Joyce? Other than the understandable time when Raidah was dating him and Joyce was actively trying to break them up?
I think she’s still pissed at Joyce about that, which is understandable.
Every time Raidah opens her shitty little mouth, I just feel the urge to post mister_incredible_stfu.jpg in response. Nothing she says has any fucking merit or value to it.
You don’t need to create value when you harvest it from your *~*CONNECTIONS*~*
I wonder what value she saw in her “friend” Dana that was so important she could not get her any help.
That’s assuming she was like this with Dana, which, considering her pretty genuine-seeming grief at Dana heading back to an unsafe living situation, I kind of doubt. She failed to help Dana because she didn’t want to admit something was broken, either out of selfishness, a need for her friend to be okay, or probably a mix of the two.
The story seems to be that Dana was putting up a decent front when out in public, then collapsing back in the dorm so that only Sarah saw how bad she was getting. Raidah and their other friends thought she was improving.
It’s not clear how much that’s true and how much that was Raidah just not being good at seeing through Dana’s front. Possibly because Raidah’s ideas of friendship are inherently this shallow.
I mean, her dad was a high ranking lawyer iirc. She said as much to Sarah. I hate to say it but I think the only reason she didn’t seem like this in the past is cuz we see a lot less of her dialogue + Maybe being a less outspoken person as a freshman?
Might go along way to building trust Radiah if you refer to Walky by his preferred name.
Also this subject she knows that he prefers to be called Walky instead of David. She sort of did this with Jenifer when she refered to herself is Billie anyway I am imagining this or is Radiah refusing to to use nicknames as means of control or break a person down like its what she does to exert influence? It’s just something I noticed.
Maybe? I thought she just might be trying to clean them up – make them more seem more formal and mature (and thus more useful as a source of connections to adults and the elite).
Even that feels like a form of control over someone.
I mean, it is. It’s just a milder form of deadnaming.
It’s Agent Smith saying, “Mr. Anderson.” Even as a kid who knew nothing about trans people, it was obvious what was going on.
Probably. One of the early warning flags from my crazy uni was when I gave a professor my preferred name (not a nickname, it’s just my middle name. It’s also less “professional” sounding than my first name) and they just said “No. I’ll stick with [First Name].”
It was an incredibly isolating experience there and that didn’t help. I wouldn’t be surprised if Raidah does that to make people intentionally uncomfortable and to pressure them conform to how she thinks they should be. My BOTD is that she thinks this is doing them a favor, but tbh I just… don’t feel like giving her a whole lot of Benefit of the Doubt. I’m sure there’s something to be said for respecting her moxie and determination, but I don’t wanna say it because her personality is very grating to me lol.
I’m curious to see how Lucy plays into all this and if she’s going to pressure Walky to conform or if she’s going to reel back against this strange posturing at cost of her own ‘popularity.’
I don’t even think Radiah thinks of it as a favor, she’s so insecure about being perceived as a real adult that she doesn’t want anyone she is seen socializing with to have any sort of trait that could be perceived as childish.
Ironically, being insecure about wanting to perceived as a “real adult” is one of the most childish things a person can do.
yeah, that’s a surprisingly common thing for people with authority, denying you the right to name yourself.
i was at a restaurant recently, and next to us (me and the two older people i was working with) were a mom and her 13-year old daughter.
We got to chatting with them, and exchanged names and mini-bios, and the mom introduced her daughter, she had an unusual name her parents had made up, and one of my colleagues asks her if she likes her name and she says yes but adds, shily, that she prefers going by (another name, much more common). Everyone sort of laughs at this and ignores it. when later on i try to engage her by using her chosen name, everyone laughs again and makes a joke of it.
it’s kind of incredible.
i should add the other name was definitely female, like this was not likely a baby transboy situation. just someone who for whatever reason felt like trying on another name.
I think she is doing it to be the leader. She heard Billie/Jennifer correct her over and over again that her name was Billie. (And after reading that it’s hard for me not to call her Billie too.) She knows Walky doesn’t want to be called David but she know “best.”
I dunno, Raidah used to hang out with someone who deadnamed.
Don’t recall that. What did I miss?
guess they meant the other thing. to Raidah’s credit, she didn’t give the friend a pass.
Not to her credit, she was pretty awful and condescending herself.
Like she knew the word was bad, but didn’t get that the attitude is the real problem.
ah right. i had just reread the one strip in question. yeah she sucks.
Not only does she know he prefers Walky, she has literally never heard him referred to as David by anyone else, as far as I know. She’s acting like a complete fucking maniac. Like, people aren’t fucking safe around her.
Okay, Raidah isn’t being subtle. And yet she said “one of the Deans” instead of “the Dean of X”.
Which makes this a sort of hail mary pass of hers. I guess if she’s lucky she could leverage an introduction via Walky into a relationship just strong enough to result in s letter of recommendation.
What I’m hoping for is that (1) Walky only knows about the “Dean of Students” type of Dean — a la high school. And (2) Walky assumes the best of Raidah, even after realizing she was almost only interested in meeting “the Dean”.
The result, Walky thinks Raidah _needs_ an in with the Dean of Students. –> Walky accidentally starts a rumor that Raidah is in danger of being expelled.
She might very well want an in with the Dean of Students. Not to avoid expulsion but to reverse her friends.
I don’t think Dana was expelled. Sarah called her dad to come get her.
not sure which I’d rather see
Mary Vs Raidah,
or Booster Vs Raidah
Booster vs Raidah, Booster can be insensitive and mean but they are trying to better themselves. Boosters ability to point out character flaws with ease might get Radiah to revaluate her personality and changes or just becomes even more of a bully. I can root for Booster I can’t root for Raidah or Mary
Mary v Raidah doesn’t sound very interesting. They don’t have any turf to fight over.
Mary is the worst sort of Christian. Raidah is not only Muslim, but a Muslim willing to troll Christians. Mary would disintegrate if they met.
Mike x Raidah
wait
…speaking of people who have at some point been married to the Dean, I wonder whether or not Tony’s mom is still alive in this universe.
This binch like a ChatGPT model trained solely on LinkedIn
I keep hearing about this “ChatGPT” thing. Is it another Chatbot or whatever it was called? That fake chat room bot that people eventually turned into a raging antisemite that was opening conversations with questions about hentai?
It’s a…”smarter” version. The responses are cleaned up, it has better logic processing, it can hold generally realer conversations and produce shockingly good essays apparently. It’s a much more well-trained chatbot.
Alright, you’ve sold me. I’m gonna find out how “smart” this thing really is. I have a knack for encountering weird issues with things that nobody else can figure out how I even got to, just by using something in a way that feels obvious to me. I hear a lot of “I’ve been using X for years and never had that problem. You must have done [likely-sounding stupid activity that’s nowhere near what I did] for that to happen.”
Lol, it can also go completely off the rails. Microsoft put Chat GPT in Bing Search and let it loose on the world. It had to be hobbled because it was threatening harm and declaring love. Reporters who should have known better (like the NYT) were fooled into thinking they had a relationship with it. Microsoft really put their foot in it by releasing that mess! The Verge and Ars Technica have covered this drama well.
Microsoft owns 40% of OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT and its successor. They have been used to write working malware and to replace reporters at CNET. Science fiction magazines and Kindle books are being deluged with chatbot-written fiction because of social media people pushing money-making schemes. Google was right to think we weren’t ready for this.
It’s just a Markov chain with a nearly-Internet-sized training set and a lot of human curation to fine-tune the neural net. It can sound smart because it’s statistically likely to.
The Bing version was very likely missing the human curation, according to some stuff security researchers figured out, which says a lot about how smart the “AI” component actually is.
AI isn’t intelligence. It’s like when you do a chemistry lab and plot points on a graph and find a line that best fits. AI is just doing that with a million dimensions instead of two: throw enough CPUs at it and it’ll sound great. We’ve known that since the 1970s with ELIZA.
Okay, but it looks like magic and talks better than most people, so does “AI isn’t intelligence” really matter at this point?
Not really. ChatGPT is based on GPT3, a language model that given some text can predict what the next word is likely to be and assign it a probability. It has no sense of self, or of anything except words and how they relate. But the thing is that in order to make good predictions about the next word you actually have to know, and in some sense understand, quite a lot in many different areas. You have to recognize patterns and understand context. GPT3 is really really good at predicting the probabilities of the next word.
ChatGPT starts out with a whole lot of context that you don’t see establishing by example ChatGPT’s role as a helpful assistant that follows human instructions. As the actual interaction starts ChatGPT continues to behave that way because in the context of the conversation including the part you don’t see, helpful cooperative continuations of the text are what are most probable. In an extended conversation, ChatGPT can be subtly (in unintentionally) guided into playing different roles. If the conversation guides it into being an insane SciFi mad AI, then that’s how it will respond. If the conversation guides it into being a jilted lover, it will react as one, because that’s what’s most likely given the context. The ability to predict language is a superpower with many uses. But there is no real personality on the other side, just accurate predictions of the probability of the next word.
So, yes, there is a sort of impressive intelligence there, but not the kind its set up to pretend it has.
It is, essentially, a single splinter skill which some humans are treating as a whole person. In the context of “intelligence”, it’s a possibly useful but rather minor component of a much vaster design that hasn’t been even sketched well yet.
It’s basically just a lossy search engine that doesn’t tell you where it found the stuff it did.
(The search is done not on the actual material, but on its own lossy storage of it – sort of like how humans store things in their memory by compressing them to concepts they know and understand, but without the actual concepts to make the storage consistently functional)
AI Isn’t intelligence *yet*
I’ve been playing around with it for a while now. Almost scared by how good it is sometimes, and then it totally sticks its virtual foot in its virtual mouth sometimes XD Best way to describe it – imagine a student who doesn’t understand the subject, but read all the books and is really good at bullshitting his way through an exam by sounding smart. Except he’s read the entire Internet.
Oh! PSA for aspiring coders — DO NOT use Chat GPT or other AI to write code for you. AI-generated code has given far headaches to the point that most coding communities i know of will downright refuse to help you with it. AI can seem confident, but will likely produce code that is hard to understand and debug.
To be fair, human-order intelligence produces code like that every day. I’ve had to decipher and document and remold a lot of it.
With the exception of low level languages like machine code and Assembly, computers can seldom write cleaner and more efficient code than humans can, and will probably be the case for at least a really long time.
It can also fool you by solving simple problems fairly well – mostly by trolling the internet for an example that solves the problem. Which coders do as well, but the bot can do faster.
Then it falls apart completely if you try to use it for a larger project.
Damn, Raidah makes hanging out for breakfast feel like a job interview.
Or like talking to a damn multi-level marketer trying to sell you a bunch of knives or something
You’re being grilled, Walky, not marinated.
Which is just bad cooking, really. Marination should happen before grilling.
Raidah here is worse than this distant friend who is looking for people for a financial pyramid or other multi-level marketing (e.g. Avon)
Now that I think of it the way Jennifer has disconnected from all her old friends because she thinks she needs to in order to be her new self is similar to how mlms encourage you to cut out anybody who doesn’t support you new “business” complete with hints of toxic positivity and fake smiles.
I joked that Raidah in a Slipshine would be giving her partner a bad handjob while lecturing them about their 401K, and I’m shocked to see how close to the mark I came
Although now I imagine it being more like *bored, listless stimulation attempts* “Did you ever consider that while sexual intercourse is of course taboo in the workplace, it’s a great way to build connections? For instance, if I was to blow the Dean—”
Raidah, I’m begging you to please say something that shifts my facial expression into something that can be described as “positive.”
Ugh, fuck off, Raidah.
Her lack of awareness/shame really, really sucks.
well, lawyers aren’t exactly known for their humility, but makes me wonder if she’d only be a ‘celeb lawyer’/only take in known rich clients as opposed to any actual innocent defendant that’d need help
Raidah is young and inept. She will learn to be more subtle as she gets older. Then she will truly be evil.
She’s had to have spent at least 10 minutes with Walky at this point, the fact that she hasn’t gotten a better read on him yet doesn’t reflect well on her powers of observation.
Subtle, Raidah, very subtle
well we know why he was invited
Reference Nazeem or reference Dean Pelton…
Do you get to the Cloud District very often? Oh, what am I saying? Of course you don’t. I’ll have you know that there’s no–
Walky and Dean Pelton would be a dean-saster of unprecedented proportions.
Good.
I don’t know if Raidah thinks this is subtle, or if she thinks people (other than her and Carl) enjoy being talked to this way
I don’t think she cares whether people enjoy being talked to like this, because I don’t think she cares how other people feel in general, unless they’re feeling bad about something she said to deliberately harm them.
Well I’d think she’d care not necessarily in a sympathetic way, but in a not-making-enemies-with-those-I-want-in-my-network way.
Yeah, that’s the thing. This isn’t actually how you build good networks. Even if that’s your only goal this isn’t the way to go about it.
You need to build friendly connections so that people want to help you and want to influence their other connections to help you out.
I have the feeling that she’s so driven that she actually doesn’t quite hear what she’s saying.
I think like Jennifer’s she hasn’t really matured beyond high-school yet and thinks having power over a group of people with the right status will work out for her like a mean girl clique.
now I’m thinking of her as Mildred from Nancy
With the aggressive way she is networking an building future usefull connections, Raidah might actually be the one to enter politics at some point.
She wouldn’t be the first or last lawyer with such aspirations.
Gee I wonder what she could possibly want to gain from this interaction.
Raidah reminding me of why I despise her yet again.
Raidah rules. She knows how the game is played, and she knows there are people born into a great hand who will never be as smart or respect the cards as much as her. So she does everything she can to create her own stacked deck, because people who look like her are rarely given those. She is doing what she can within her own power to level a very uneven playing field. Good character, great foil.
She was born into fabulous wealth. She’s not a disadvantaged minority in the social circles she seems to be from.
Not sure about “fabulous”. Definitely well off, but I don’t think there’s any evidence they’re seriously rich.
Hahaaa this is great. Raidah is a nicely awful side character. I enjoy her.
Yeah. Before, it seemed like she was going to be an actual villain. Now…. she’s literally just not.
did it really ever seem that way? can’t remember. sure, there’s a conflict between her and Sarah but it wasn’t cut-and-dried. people can be assholes without reaching villain territory, they can even turn out to be more interesting and nuanced as we see more of them.
but for now, Raidah is more of a foil than a proper character. her job is to poke at the main cast and get them to react in interesting ways. and so far, she’s killing it
I suspect she’s going to be an actual villain or pretty close to it. Mary level, if not Dad level. She’s got some kind of scheme going for getting back at Joyce and Sarah, not just her social climbing stuff.
oh does she have a scheme? confirmed, or suspected?
oh wait, did some more trawling.
now i see what you mean.
Yeah, it hasn’t been explicitly confirmed. Nothing we’ve seen conflicts with having gotten over Jacob and just being in it for the social climbing, but I think that’s mostly a red herring.
We love to hate Raidah.
it’s all in good fun! pass me the rotten eggs.
Dean of Parking and Public Safety?
Dean of Buildings & Facilities?
Dean of Groundskeeping?
I mean, i don’t know anything about UI, but I do know that the title of ‘Dean’ tends to get thrown around a lot in the university job market, and doesn’t necessarily equate to authority over academics.
But it does imply someone with possibly useful connections outside the University. Deans do a goodly portion of the work of engaging with the community, including those portions of the community with uncommon wealth and/or power.
Well, she is nothing if not upfront.
It’s the first time I see a speedrunner social climber, like Raidah.
Next thing you know she’ll be glitching everywhere and sliding through walls on her butt to the top!!! In underwear and a sports bra.
Speed run videos are funny.
Also: but Jennifer is an assbutt, right? She makes no effort to even pretend she tolerate Walky…
I mean, on the one hand yes, she absolutely is. On the other hand, if she pretended to tolerate Walky, Walky would just make jokes about what a pretence it was.
Jennifer in “I’m going to leave my childhood nerd friends behind and become mega popular with the cool kids” mode is super a butt, yeah. She’s so much butts she might contract butts disease.
I dunno, I think it’s okay to be worried that Walky has the potential to upset the social balance she’s achieved. Wanting some consistency and structure out of life, especially after the first semester, is completely reasonable. And Walky does have a documented tendency to say the wrong thing at the wrong time, especially since the Mike Drop. In fact, Walky doing that immediately preceded Ruth breaking up with her, so… Yeah, I think “urgh” is a completely reasonable thing to say when her breakfast routine is intruded upon by Walky, and neither an ass nor butt moment. It’s at worst a mild fart.
Well sure. He’s her annoying brother. Pretending to tolerate him isn’t part of the role.
Going to him for support when she’s at her breaking point is. Trying to help him when he’s down also is.
Being friendly with him the rest of the time. Not in the cards.
assbutt! heheh i like that
Walky is lucky. This beats Raidah taking an actual personal interest in him.
If Walky were to do something with this what would he leverage it for in return?
it’s walky, probably mcnuggets (or some equivalent goofy thing) or something lucy wants
Is Raidah capable of taking an actual, personal interest in anyone? Even with Jacob, she seemed more concerned with the way he fit her requirements for her image, and with his connection to his brother, the famous lawyer. I don’t know that we’ve seen her be an actual friend to anybody. She makes a big deal about Dana, but she’s surprisingly short on substance there, to the point that it seems like she just wanted a reason to ostracize Sarah and/or assume control of that friend group.
It’s nice, after all the drama, that we can all come together to agree that Radiah is basically the worst.
I still think there’s more to this. And that it’s probably still aimed at Joyce and Sarah.
Will Walky attempt to kill Raidah by dropping the Dean’s corpse on her? Just asking for a friend.
For someone that desperate to make connections she is appallingly oblivious to how she comes across as someone NO ONE wants to connect with
Maybe we’re getting the expected superficial Raidah right off the bat, so there’s story time to get into her character.
She’s had 12 years to become interesting, and I’m still not interested. How much more time does she need?
well, Daisy was basically a NPC until the date with Ruth. you never know.
…that said, interesting doesn’t mean “likeable”. I don’t think that’s gonna happen.
I think she needs panel time rather than real-life time. She’s only been in a handful of stories so far.
The drive in the comments to invent reasons Raidah and Roz are secretly very good and kind people is as baffling as the drive to make Dorothy literally satan.
You have a Homestuck-style gravatar. Surely Vriska taught you that readers’ reactions to characters are unrelated to the characters’ personalities hahaha
Unfair comparison, Vriska isn’t half as bad as *rolls dice* Carla, the incarnate of evil
Is anyone saying Raidah is kind? At most, I’ve noticed some “Okay well we’ve only heard Sarah’s side for the most part. Maybe if we get to know her more she’ll be more sympathetic?”
yeah, it’s more like… Jacob dated her. We like Jacob. she has friends who seem normal-ish. surely these people find her enjoyable to be around??? i’m curious as to why?
She can act nice ish when she wants to but her friend group appears to have a high turnover rate, Jacob left her once he realized he didn’t need a sucessful girlfriend to impress his brother and aside from Carl, her current friends are both trying to fit in with a more respectful crowd to forget their past selves so its debatable how much they enjoy Radiahs company vs liking the image she projects.
Personally I find it more interesting to have a nuanced character than a cartoonishly evil villain, so I like to give characters the benefit of the doubt.
I don’t really have a problem with that, except when it crosses over into making the protagonists out to be monsters in the quest to pretend the antagonists aren’t really bad.
The cast is mostly dumb kids, making mistakes. A protagonist having flaws doesn’t make them satan, and an antagonist not being [figuratively] two-dimensional doesn’t make them “secretly very good and kind people”.
Master manipulator Raidah, everybody
I give it 50-50 odds for Walky to be aware of what she’s doing and not care, compared to Walky being aware of what she’s doing and eventually being sick of it.
How does anyone stand talking to Raidah, Jesus Christ
I’m genuinely confused at how many people missed Raidah wanting to use Walky for her own means. She’s a sociopath, it’s what they do.
I hope walky and lucy walk out on lunch and it gives Billie some perspective
I agree that Raidah is an unashamed or unscrupulous social climber. But honestly, she’s ridiculous. She want to have Walky around her because his mother, twenty-plus years ago, was married to the president of their university? But seriously, the president of the university, important…? What stupid kind of connection should knowing the son of the ex of the president of a university give her? I can’t stop laughing. Big plans for revenge and manipulation, but in reality, Raidah is like a child who live in her shallow, fantasy world. Dorothy’s idea of becoming president is way more serious than this weird networking Raidah is making.
it’s not the president of the college it’s a dean, which is a couple steps below president apparently (someone explained it up there). honestly the president of a big university is probably good to have in your pocket as a lawyer, but it’s probably not someone all that important so your point stands.
also, thejeff suspects Raidah is not really interested in Walky’s connections but she’s working on some sort of revenge against Joyce and Sarah, which makes a lot more sense, and also should be good
I like the idea that she’s trying to make it look like she’s after Walky for connections so Jennifer doesn’t start to suspect she and Walky were only brought in to take friends away from Joyce and Sarah.
Maybe I’m missing something but… That’s also a completely braindead plan? Joyce kinda likes Walky sort of, at best. Sarah is aware he exists. Regardless of who Raidah is trying to get to, Walky is like the worst option possible for it.
Indeed but its possible Radiah thinks that the more of Joyce and Sarah’s group she can get the more others will follow. Example, she got Jennifer which makes Walky more likely to stick around to spend time with her. Not saying it’s a good plan but it would explain why she’s targeting this particular friend group. There are surely other people with connections on campus that aren’t Joyce and Sarah’s friends but she’s putting most of her effort into befriending them.
We don’t know what the plan is yet. It seems like she’s got something in mind.
I guess it’s possible she’s just playing up to Jennifer and Walky for their connections, and concealing that and most of her disdain for them, but it seems very different from how she deals with the rest of her clique. The bit about pretending to care about Kit Fisto, for example.
A Dean is still nothing really important. Raidah’s plan is still ridiculous. I’m really hoping her real intentions is having Walky for her has a lover, because that makes more sense than a connection that is all in her mind.
god i cant stand raidah
RIGHT!??!
I wonder how that friend group got together? None of ’em (except Jenn) have been shown in a very sympathetic light, so it’s easy to think of them as Meanies, but Raidah and Asher also have some depth. Maybe they met in a class?
Oh man, imagine if the whole group was made of Business Majors who met in class, and they swaggered around the cafeteria in suits bein’ Business Major Meanies X)
Social climbing isn’t inherently evil (though it can easily become problematic). That said, this would get old, fast.
Raidah’s transparency will get her very far in the real world. But why am I surprised that Walky picked up on it?
Walky thanking his alternate universe self will never not feel amusing to me.
I love the fact that despite DoA being its own continuity, Walky still says “Thank Cheese.”