The low stakes adventures of an assorted group of 20 somethings trapped in the declining years of American retail. They are naughty and say lots of swears.
Star Impact
Jack McGee
A young, energetic woman fights her way up in the world of super-powered boxing after discovering the mighty gloves of her missing idol!
Sister Claire
Yamino
In the troubled aftermath of a great war between Witches and her fellow Nuns, novice Sister Claire just wants a purpose.
Kiwi Blitz
Mary Cagle (Cube Watermelon)
Steffi thinks she can use her kiwi mech to become a superhero. This idea turns out to be very stupid.
Hazy London
Scotty
A story about messy relationships. From friendly foes to crazy families. Nothing is black and white, just full of color. But, all colors can get a little hazy...
Caramel Corn
Potchimew
Sarah is the only human left in a world full of mythical creatures and monsters. All she wants to do is live a quiet life, but everything changes when she meets her guardian angel, Jacob.
This is Not Fiction
Nicole Mannino
What do you do when the person you're in-love with is an anonymous romance novelist? Get your best friend to hire your worst enemy for help!
Sufficiently Remarkable
Maki Naro
Two young women living in Brooklyn discover that you're always coming of age.
Cassiopeia Quinn
Gunwild, Psudonym
A cute, pantsless thief is pursued across the stars by a buttoned-up military officer in the spacey, laser-filled future.
Starhammer
J.N. Monk, Harry Bogosian
A teen girl inherits a powerful alien artifact and proceeds to make a series of increasingly poor decisions
Devil's Candy
Rem, Bikkuri
A lush fantasy about boy genius Kazu Decker, the girl he constructed for his 9th grade science project, and the world of devils and monsters they live in.
Alice and the Nightmare
Misha Krivanek
Alice finally attends University to learn to collect the dreams of humans, meet new friends, and deal with a pesky reflection along the way.
Cyanide & Happiness
Explosm
Satire, dark humor and surreal humor.
Girl Genius
Phil Foglio, Kaja Foglio
In a time when the Industrial Revolution has become an all-out war, Mad Science rules the World...with mixed success.
Lilith's Word
inkPangur
If you had the power to make any wish come true using just one word, what would you say?
Godslave
Meaghan Carter
Edith has been thrown into the dangerous world of modern-day Egyptian mythology. Fighting monsters and dealing with family drama of godly proportions.
Tigress Queen
Allison Shaw
A barbarian warlord and a pampered prince try to avoid a marriage alliance that could end decades of violence.
Astral Aves
Moon Cabal
A fantasy coming-of-age following the adventures of Astra The Black and friends, as they navigate the mysterious world around them. It's politics, adventure, and the supernatural; oh, and crazy hair.
Paranatural
Zack Morrison
Superpowered middle schoolers fight evil spirits in their rural hometown. Come for the jokes, stay for the cast, the creatures, and the mystery that ties them all together!
Dumbing of Age
David M Willis
Joyce has been homeschooled her entire life until now, when she's suddenly a freshman in college! Things don't go well.
Nerf Now!!
Josué Pereira
A cute webcomic about fanservice, video games, and... love. Mostly video games, though.
Wilde Life
Pascalle Lepas
Oscar decided to rent an old haunted house, and that's when things got weird...
Guilded Age
T Campbell, John Waltrip, Florence Machina
Welcome to the saga of the working-class adventurer! Enjoy the complete story with new annotations daily!
Jailbird
Charlie Davis
An all-ages comic about a recently escaped prisoner's struggle to understand the outside world, and vice-versa. Also, a magic cape!
Kochab
Sarah Webb
A YA F/F fantasy comic about Sonya, a lost skier trying to survive a snowy wilderness and find her way back to her village; and Kyra - a fire spirit trying to fix the home that she let fall apart around her.
Star Trip
Gisele Weaver
Jas is a human taken from her home planet on a trip across the galaxy she will never forget.
Never Satisfied
Taylor Robin
Lucy Marlowe, a magician's apprentice, competes against other apprentices for an important, magical, Goverment Job.
Anarchy Dreamers
Emily Ree
Sparkly undead kids fight society's worst Nightmares in this pastel-punk urban fantasy coming-of-age!
Real Science Adventures
Brian Clevinger
Spin off stories and other adventures from the world of Atomic Robo!
Monsterkind
Taylor C
Wallace Foster, a young, bright-eyed human social worker, has his entire world view rocked when he's suddenly relocated into a city primarily inhabited by monsters.
Goodbye to Halos
Valerie Halla
Cuddles, gay flirting, weird feelings, and magic-fueled knife fights - it's an adventure across the queer multiverse!
Demon's Mirror
Harry Bogosian
Based loosely off of "The Snow Queen", a story by Hans Christian Andersen, we see things take a different turn as the demons become central characters, and the side characters stick around. Yup, that's the only differences. Enjoy!
Awaken
Koti Saavedra/Flipfloppery
Superpowers, monsters and conspiracies. Piras, the spoiled Dameschi heir, fights to recover his identity after becoming a terrorist!
Ghost Junk Sickness
Studio CARTRIDGE, Laura Lee
Two hunters try to survive and end up being pushed to pursue a deadly bounty dubbed "The Ghost".
Love Not Found
Gina Biggs
Abeille is on a quest to find someone who wants to do it the old-fashioned way in a time when touching has become outdated.
Empowered
Adam Warren
A sexy superhero comedy (except when it isn't) about the never-ending struggles of a plucky but very unlucky young superheroine.
The Witch Door
Anni K.
Katariina Lehto discovers her neighbor is a witch called Jousia Muotka. Jousia introduces Katariina to the strange people and places beyond the witch door...
Sam & Fuzzy
Sam Logan
Troubled by gangster rodents, lovesick vampire stalkers, or confused ninja assassins? Don't panic! Sam and Fuzzy are here to help. (For a reasonable fee.)
The Lonely Vincent Bellingham
Diana Huh
Vincent is an unkind man looking to disappear, and finds himself in the care of a vampire and her two wicked children.
Cut Time
Juby
Rel and her trusty avian friend Fugue are on a quest to save a world that's lost track of time. Follow them and their new recruits, in a story written with help from the stars.
The End
August Brown, Cory Brown
Two aliens crash a sci-fi convention and accidentally take seven nerds on an adventure that spans the galaxy!
Fireweeds Moors
Gato Iberico
A cat-headed man and a girl with a sandwich hankering accidentally end up in a myth-infused country where magic chalices are a really big thing.
Widdershins
Kate Ashwin
A series of light-hearted Victorian-era adventure stories featuring grumpy bounty hunters, accidental thiefkings, and more, in England's magical capital city Widdershins!
Atomic Robo
Brian Clevinger, Scott Wegener
The robot punches monsters and bad robots and one time he was a cowboy.
Stand Still, Stay Silent
Minna Sundberg
A few generations after the end of the world, a small, poorly financed research crew is sent out to rediscover whatever is left of the forbidden old world in the south.
[un]Divine
Ayme
A highschool senior thought giving up his soul for a demon was a good idea. It wasn't.
The Sanity Circus
Windy
Magic, monsters and mysteries await in the odd city of Sanity. It's up to Attley and a colorful group of characters to find out just what is going on.
Whomp!
Ronnie
A depressed, portly, hirsute anime fan stumbles through life in the ever-pursuit of chicken nuggets and other life-shortening indulgences.
Monster Pulse
Magnolia Porter Siddell
Four kids run afoul of a creepy secret organization's experiments, which turn their body parts into fighting monsters. Part sentimental coming-of-age story, part monster-training shonen manga, with just a bit of sci-fi body horror.
Go Get a Roomie
Clover
Experience the queer journey of an upbeat hippie and the friendships she makes along the way! A tale of self-discovery and love of many forms.
Knights Errant
J.R. Doyle
Wilfrid's humble quest for revenge becomes bigger and bloodier by the day.
The Automan's Daughter
Mike Stamm
Aisha Osman and her uncle Siddig outwit bikers, spies and kidnappers while gearing up for a showdown with the formidable Widowmaker mecha.
Lighter Than Heir
Melissa Albino
A young Volant woman joins the military in an effort to upstage her war-hero father.
El Goonish Shive
Dan Shive
WARNING: This comic often ignores the Laws of Physics
Wychwood
Varethane
When Tiara's pyrokinesis is finally noticed, she is captured by a magical research organization for study. If she cooperates, she could be helping to save humanity from a dire threat - but can she trust them?
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If there wasn’t substantial precedent for armed fundy parents already this would be a light-hearted jape. The only thing that makes this unlikely is our fundy murderers are all of the other gender from Carol.
I’m an idiot so it literally took the “Imagine you earned $10,000 a minute since 10,000 BCE…” posts to get me to realize just how unjust billionaires are, but ever since then, probably around 2019 or 2020, just the thought of them makes my skin crawl. For all the good that Carla’s parents assuredly do, they’re still hurting people in amassing the wealth they have.
It was the prototype vehicle for a startup called Handsy, which was supposed to work like a combination of Angie’s List and Uber, but in practice was just litigation fodder.
I haven’t heard that one. I’ve heard the one about Christopher Columbus arriving in America, getting a job that pays 5,000$/day everyday without weekends or vacation and still not having a billion dollars today.
I imagine your story is similar, but I feel obligated to say that if you were paid 10,000$/minute, you’d be a billionaire after 70 days. It doesn’t really work. It’s a shame because I really like the image it conjures. A more realistic, and still impressive way to use that time frame would be to say that getting a job in 10,000 BCE that paid 80,000$/year you would still have less than a billion dollars in 2023.
Sheesh, if I got $5000/day I could live nicely for a month on the first day’s pay and invest the rest. Even so-so stocks’ dividends are 100x what the banks are paying on savings. And that ignores appreciation.
For perspective, imagine that Chris invested his entire pile in Coca Cola on the day they went public, held it until now, and reinvested the dividends. THAT is how billionaires are made.
It sounds like the one about Columbus assumes that he neither spends nor invests a dime. Kinda like the physicist who said he figured out why the chicken crossed the road, but it only works for spherical chickens in a vacuum.
The one I heard was if you give your wife a million dollars and shes allowed to spend it at $1000 a day she’ll be back in less that three years. Give her a billion dollars and she wont be back for 3000 years. Im available to test this theory.
Your math is wonky.$10,000 a month for 10,000 years is a billion with an extra couple of hundred million in spare change. There’s no need for the extra 2 thousand or so years you get by specifying BC. And going from once a month to once a minute is real overkill.
For perspective, there are about 8 trillion people on the planet. Invent something that improves lives enough that it’s worth a penny in profit to one out of every 7 and there’s you over 10 billion right there. But no, let’s all hate on the rich and ignore the fact that countries without the very wealthy tend not to do very well.
My fixed retirement income is the same whether Steve Jobs and Bill Gates exist or not. But the Gates foundation has funded the biological hack on photosynthesis that will take us from doing a bad job of feeding almost 8 trillion people to being able to do a bad job of feeding almost 64 trillion people. You can hate on the very rich if it makes you feel better about yourself, but I say that if there are people who can afford to do massively frivolous things with their money, good for them. And I’m rather fond of my computer and cell phone.
Mayor citation needed. As far as I can tell countries without very wealthy do consistently better if you correct for a few other factors. The USA golden age (at least economically speaking) was when taxes for the richest were 91%.
I don’t think you should be telling other people their math is wonky. And yes, billionaires are economic evil. It isn’t “hating rich people” to recognize there’s a difference between a wealthy person and an economic hoarder.
much as you enjoy your phone and laptop Clif (and so do i for that matter) the way these and much of the industrial goods of rich nations depend for their manufacture on a system of unaccountable neocolonial exploitation. and one way or the other, much of the wealth of the very wealthy in rich nations depends on that same internationale of misery and exploitation. Not to mention the dogma of economic growth that has greatly helped locked in2+°C global warming, at the very, very best.
regarding the agro research stuff, what the hell, seriously. publicly-funded research is just as competent, except they don’t reap profits from downstream IP. if commercial benefits weren’t so efficiently captured by the billionaire class, scientists would still be doing that same research.
like, no. there is no rational excuse for billionaires existing. And hating billionaires is fine, if it fuels the political project of expropriating them as soon as feasible.
“Invent something that improves lives enough that it’s worth a penny in profit to one out of every 7 and there’s you over 10 billion right there.”
glossing over the math glitch, this is such a silly sentiment. sorry Clif i like you but your politics are sooo terrible.
sure sounds great in the abstract, but in the real world, you know, where the planet is burning, and people die of hunger and so on? that’s not how anyone has ever made 10 billion bucks.
you can’t just invent, produce and sell a thing. you also need the support of a world power with a big army. Cos otherwise, say you did invent that clever thing. why would people just keep paying you for it forever? at some point they’d start producing it for themselves. you’d probably make a tidy sum regardless, but you need a powerful structure to ensure your “intellectual property” (a problematic concept to begin with) is respected for decades throughout the world. that’s not incidental. that’s an integral part of the business plan.
now, granted, most of the billionaires never did invent anything quite so fascinating, or anything at all. many of them just happened to have a lot of capital handed down to them, and didn’t let such boring quandaries as “not funding a dictator” and “not fucking up the atmosphere” stop them from making the smart investments.
Also, too…
Every invention may be attributed to someone, but if they weren’t around someone else would have invented that thing. The inventor is like an instrument of technological history. (Ref. the history of lawsuits surrounding most inventions – often multiple people were working on a thing)
After that, the invention, whatever it is, is still built and implemented by workers who produce the value in question.
Just out of curiosity, can anyone actually name an actual billionaire who invented something which Changed All Our Lives For The Better(tm)? Not who owns said invention or funded said invention or was the CEO of the company that made it, but personally with their own brain and hands invented such a thing?
I’m perversely impressed by the sheer gall of someone openly advocating theft calling someone else’s politics “terrible”. The idea that people can only get rich by stealing from the poor is some stupid-ass medieval zero-sum bullshit. The idea that centrally directed research and production could ever hope to be as productive as a free market is a proven delusion. Just look at the history of the 20th century. Socialism killed 100M and impoverished far more. Free markets lifted billions out of poverty. The global slide backwards toward authoritarianism is the biggest current threat to prosperity.
I’m not going to claim that our current system is perfect, but the biggest problems are usually the result of state interference. The idea that state power can somehow be harnessed to make things “fairer” is laughable once you realize that such efforts are routinely hijacked by those already in power to reinforce their power.
yeah, i’m impressed by the sheer bullshit of acting like “theft” is some sort of transcendant reality. property law, commercial law, IP law all of these are social constructs, they are absolutely not transcultural and ahistorical. they have been constructed and are enforced by people, and they can be changed by people. be serious.
and what? states bad? sure, i don’t like states either. but corporations are: bad too! they are: also “harnessed” by those “already in power to reinforce their power”! and they are even less accountable than states. ok bye
The global slide backwards into authoritarianism is mostly driven by those supporting the billionaire oligarchs. We’re not having a grand resurgence of socialist dictatorships anywhere outside the imaginations of some right wing conspiracy theorists.
While we’re on the subject of ignoring facts, shall we discuss how you’re ignoring the fact that imperialism led to the immense disparity in global wealth? Or that the reason widespread global poverty exists is because wealth was stolen from the global south and hoarded by the ruling class in the global north?
And the dumb just keeps coming. Imperialism was mostly a net loss for the conquerors. Those who gained the most from looting ended up coasting their way into irrelevance. The countries that were forced to actually produce something became far richer in the long run. Poverty is the natural state of humanity, so it’s hardly surprising. The amazing part is just how many people human ingenuity, enabled by greater freedom, has managed to lift out of poverty.
????
what strange alternate world you live in.
the US is an empire? it gained a whole lot from looting? so did france and britain and they are still among the leading world economies? what are you even talking about. switch off pragerU and read books by actual historians or something this is ridiculous
Oh, also, we’re only ‘doing a bad job’ of feeding 8 billion people because the dipshits who own the food for 12 billion people don’t see the profit in distributing it fairly
They also don’t see a profit in not making half again as much food as they need, thereby completely wasting about a third of the food for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
The triumph of “fairness” over freedom is the single biggest reason for poverty. Fetishizing some nebulous idea of fairness is an evolutionary hangover that has long since outlived its usefulness.
Let’s take a look at the nine kinds of passive income. How much of a jerk do you “necessarily” have to be to run a billion dollar tech company? There’s a possibility they only needed #1 – luck. Though usually these companies go at least all the way to #7, inventing something new and then holding a monopoly and deliberately squashing competitors by the time everyone wants it. It would certainly be almost impossible to get that kind of fortune if they were paying their employees the same kind of hourly wages as they get paid themselves.
But we don’t know. For all we know the Ruttens could pay ten times more than their competitors and throw money to charity as fast as they can. (Look at what MacKenzie Scott is doing.) I don’t think it’s fair to “assume” they’re not doing their best to redistribute this wealth as it grows beyond control after some unexpected successes.
I don’t know if MacKenzie Scott is a great example given her wealth is from Amazon, even if she is turning around and trying to do good with it. Part of Amazon’s “success” has been due to its exploitation of its workers, and while it’s great that someone is making the best of a bad situation they themselves cannot change, the Ruttens don’t have that excuse. It’s their company, they set policy (or are beholden to shareholders), and as the kind people above illustrated, billionaires cannot morally exist. Unless the economy of DoA’s world is very different, the Ruttens stepped on a lot of bodies to get where they are now.
Well then, what should they “do” to exist morally? If you make a billion dollars, is it too late for you to start doing better and you should just kill yourself?
To be clear, I’m not making excuses for rich people. I’m not saying our world wouldn’t be better off if any one of our 2640 billionaires took a dirt nap. I am saying it’s silly to judge someone’s character and intentions based entirely on one label society put on them. Even if it is a label that’s only applicable to about one out of 300 million people who ever lived. You don’t lose anything by giving them a chance.
One of my big frustrations is when people make wide sweeping statements about groups of people and how they’re bad. And in the money sense it’s like…usually to get that much money they did it by screwing the little guy or doing some sorta human rights violation. But like. I still feel REALLY uncomfortable when I see people say “this group of people is inherently bad”.
It’s just always in my nature to give people the benefit of the doubt.
See that’s a really kind perspective, but billionaire isn’t a label Society put on billionaires, it’s a label/state of wealth that billionaires actively sought and abused millions to get to. There’s no moral way to be a billionaire except to stop being a billionaire by giving your money away. Rich people are okay, millionaires are fine, multimillionaires are fine, it’s just billionaires that are flat-out immoral no questions asked. Because a billion is a truly absurd number of dollars to hoard, and there’s no way you could spend it within your lifetime.
For me, I’m just uncomfortable with anyone being “too” comfortable saying “all of ___ is bad”. I feel like that mindset is the very death of humanity. Even in times it’s justified I honestly feel like it’s a mindset I’m not a fan of. I feel like people tend to fall back on “us vs them” out of pattern recognition and it’s rare that anyone who does it with one thing doesn’t do it with a lot of other things.
But then again I don’t know shit about fuck. I’m just going off vibes.
That’s fair Yotomoe, so consider it this way. It’s not so much that billionaires are inherently bad as people – I’m sure many of them are lovely in one on one conversations and that some may have good intentions. However, they still do bad things or profit from bad things because that is how one becomes a billionaire – at some point down the line, either people or the environment have been exploited to get the money. That is not just and so, while people may not be inherently bad as a group, being part of certain groups still requires doing or gaining from bad things. Billionaires are one such case.
I mean most of them could make a really good start by instituting non-actively-malevolent working conditions and living wages within the various businesses they own, not throwing money at fascist and borderline-fascist politicians, and throwing their money around in ways that lessen structural inequality. A couple of them even sort of do that, hell some people have actually spent enough money to stop being billionaires.
Why is it that people treat “being a billionaire” as some sort of inherent quality? “What can they do, kill themselves”? Good lord. No, it’s like being a cop, you’re allowed to stop doing it at any time- though much like being a cop, you might have to worry about the other billionaires getting scared of you if you go against the system and trying to get you killed or at least discredited and jailed over it.
Oh boy, Clif showed up again. I wasn’t being rigorous with the math, no, but I assumed everyone would pick up on it being an approximation/substitution for the actual math done in the posts I mentioned. Some of you got that, and I’m proud of you.
ma’am, this is a comic strip about dumb late teen-agers, you do not need to start an ethical conversation about the existence of capitalism in the comment section
Sure, it seems like an inconvenience now, but can you imagine how the ability to summon parents at will is going to up NightGuy’s superhero game?
Imagine the terror in a mugger’s eyes when he suddenly realizes his mom is standing behind him, already wailing about how she raised him better than this.
I’m trying to remember exactly how Blaine got banned. Like, Ross discharged a fucking shotgun on campus, so that’s an easy ban right there, but was Blaine banned from campus just on Ruth’s word alone?
Be realistic. Unless the campus is has fences or walls with a single gate in and out, like a POW camp or a cloistered convent, there’s no way you can interdict anyone unless they’re actually trying to enter a specific dorm and the RA happens to spot them.
I agree that it’s difficult (if not impossible) to actually enforce a ban on an open campus with no ‘gate’. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the person ISN’T banned… it just means that if they are found to be violating the ban the repercussions might be worse.
Honestly, that makes it worse.
A shotgun round, fired into the air, is fairly harmless, so long as there’s not something immediately in its path. It’s why we use it for hunting birds.
A bullet, fired without regard for the backstop, can come down somewhere unexpected and still retain its killing force.
I have my doubts that a bullet fired straight up will be particularly dangerous as it comes straight down. There is such a thing as terminal velocity, so I have my doubts that it’d be any worse than just DROPPING the bullet, not the cartridge, just the bullet, off of a tall building. One fired at any angle, however, could come down somewhere while still traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of sound.
Was he actually banned? He still lurked about to get in contact with Asher. I just thought he was just avoiding Amber directly to allow his plot to scare her away from college to develop.
She looks all friendly and normal because she genuinely doesn’t believe that she’s done anything wrong. The fact that her actions re: bailing Ross out of prison directly led to people dying just straight-up doesn’t compute with her. She thinks she’s a perfectly innocent person.
It’s pretty similar to own Willis’s history: on his Tumblr, he tell her mom always came in caring and smiles, until love-bombing starts! “you know, I always can die for you ..” , and all the toxic behavior
Bad people look normal. Friendly. Nice. It’s their actions that make them bad people. And most bad people don’t think of themselves as bad. Everybody is the hero in their own story. She tried to help a member of her community. She probably doesn’t consider that a bad thing.
Yes, she’s been a poor parent lately and sure she’s put her cult above her family before, but … let’s see what she’s got in the box before we judge. It could be cookies. Joyce can always kick her out later. After cookies.
If there was a chance Carol could get shot, then she should stick around. I feel like Carol getting shot could only produce good things. Messy cleanup, but overall still a good thing.
That’s a good point. What if we just tie her up and drop her in the ocean? Fish get food, Carol finally does something objectively good for the world, and no cleanup.
Hmm, volcano? Is that still poluttion? If so I’d suggest launching her into the sun, but that is expensive and we should spend as little as possible on her death. No reason to waste money on someone who doesn’t deserve it.
If we throw her in a volcano the fumes that would create could cause some major pollution, like Smog x100, its why hell has a ceiling lol. We could Freeze her, break her into a million pieces, thaw out those pieces and turn them into the meat part of Spaghetti that we then feed to Walky’s mom.
Do we really want to take the risk that evil can concentrate in your system like mercury? Feed a bongo an even worse bongo and you could wind up with a whole damn conga line.
Hmm, volcano? Is that still pollution? If so I’d suggest launching her into the sun, but that is expensive and we should spend as little as possible on her death. No reason to waste money on someone who doesn’t deserve it.
Now see, this is magic thinking. The volcano is going to be there polluting whether you toss Carol in or not. The incremental opportunity cost is negligible.
The ocean? Do you know how much shipping costs per pound (I’m assuming we’re putting her in a box with or without air holes instead of buying her a ticket)”
No need to dump her in the ocean when the Great Lakes are right there.
Walky, why must you use your powers for evil? You could summon strippers, you could summon dogs, you could summon all kinds of nice things. Instead you summon fucking scumbags, and I want to know why. Why Walky?
So what are the odds that Joyce has a pleasant time with her mother? And what are the odds this ends in tears?
Considering she’s an atheist and is dating a Jewish atheist (I guess that should be Hebrew atheist since it’s my understanding that Jewish refers to the religion and Hebrew refers the ethnicity, though I could have that backwards), I think the chances of 2/3 of the Brown women having a pleasant time together is about 0% with tears being 90%.
I actually know at least one person who is a convert to Reform Judaism, and was an atheist at the start and at the end of that process, and also in the middle.
They are now a religiously observant Reform Jew. And also an atheist. This is probably different from secular humanists who are also Jews, but don’t quote me on that one.
It’s possible because Judaism doesn’t care what you believe, it cares what you do. Whether you keep kosher and all and everything is the only thing that counts. Orthopraxy, not orthodoxy.
Although not all Jews who consider themselves religiously observant consider that it’s important to, eg, keep kosher or observe work restrictions on the Sabbath.
That’s right. Religion = belief is a specifically-Christian invention.
To be Jewish, you were born that way, or you converted in (which is just as valid). You can’t stop being Jewish by believing non-Jewish things, nor by changing your mind about something (belief or faith).
You also can’t stop being Jewish by refraining from doing positive commandments — you’re still Jewish, you’re just a Jew who is doin’ it wrong (according to other Jews).
If converting to Judaism isn’t implying belief, then what does it mean? Is it accepting the philosophical aspects of Judaism, similar to Hinduism/Buddhism? Or is it, like, signing up for a club that protects you from being smited by Jewish God, should He turn out to exist? …OK, probably not that one.
I suspect that a ‘religiously observant Jewish atheist’ is akin to a ‘cultural Catholic’. You no longer have any faith in supernatural agencies, but you find comfort in the familiar and often elegant ceremonies, rites and even the rules of your religion. So despite being an atheist, the person would keep to Shabbat, and abide by the various rules of the faith in practice, just like someone who long ago stopped believing in the Bible might continue to attend Mass (especially the big, grandiose holiday masses at Xmas and Easter), or even ‘give something up for Lent’.
In the case of the ‘convert’, I suspect this means he’s engaging in these rituals and practices as an act of support for his spouse, so that she would be able to retain her faith while being married to him.
No, in the case of the convert this means that she’s engaging in those rituals and practices because they are meaningful to her. She’s not a “convert”, and she’s not doing it for the spouse she doesn’t have. She’s a convert, and she’s an atheist.
It’s ridiculously complex thing with Jews and ethnicity I keep reading different genetic studies and also it gets political and to be honest not a topic i would like to get into Judaism is a religion but has a a sort of cultural breakdown that I guess could be considered an ethnicitiy of Ashkanazi, Beta Israel, Mizrahim and Sephardic are the largest cultural groups. Ashkanazi being the largest Mizrahim being the second and Sephardic being the third Beta Israel probably being the fourth.
Mind you Judaism and ethnicity is a real sensitive topic
Also further note there are Jews from other groupings like the Kaifang Jewish community in China and Indian Jews not mention converts and Jews from mixed race and mixed faith marriages who have multiple ethnic identities.
And also, to be clear, we’re only talking about Rabbinical Jews here, there are still Karaites around, who… are very different in a lot of ways. Though if you live in the US you’ll probably never meet one in your life, and I only bring it up out of a sense of completeness.
And since I *have* brought it up, I guess here is our periodic reminder that Rabbinical Jews are the descendants of the Pharisees, so if you just wildly sub in the word “Pharisee” when you mean “Christian who is a hypocrite” you’re engaging in anti-Semitism. So if you don’t want to do that, just say “hypocrite”.
I completely forgot about the Karaites although I am not sure if I would classify Karaite Jews as their own ethnic group i would think they would be Mizrahim their belief structure is different than Rabnical Judaism so they have different cultural practices.
To paraphrase the comedian Lewis Black ” I promise you thi we Jews will take TIME out of their VERY JEWY, JEWY DAY, and interpret for you anything that you’re having trouble understanding”
Is Joe actually an atheist, rather than just not particularly religious? I only remember the interactions about young earth creationism, which he wouldn’t be expected to believe anyway.
Has Joyce told him she’s an atheist? If not, I hope there’s a scene where Joyce breaks the news and Joe goes “Oh, yeah, me too.” and Joyce’s brain explodes.
I just ate supper but now I want tacos. It is a good thing I can’t just walk to Taco Bell like when I lived in the city. If I could walk to Taco Bell I would more overweight than I already am.
Nope, or at least not the distance I had to walk when I lived in the city. It was like a 2-3 minute walk, and I tend to order a lot at Taco Bell so I can have some the next day without walking back.
Did you ever hear why the Not Just Bikes guy hates, Hates, HATES, Houston, TX with a passion? He was in a hotel there, he needed some new luggage, there was a store not too far away that sold it.
He walked. It wasn’t far. Less than a mile.
There were NO sidewalks. Not even to cross a ravine. He was nearly killed, in his estimation.
He took a taxi back to his hotel. Less than a mile away on foot.
For “more things in walking distance” to matter, walking has to be a viable option.
Then we get into the whole “only people with something wrong with them don’t drive” mentality. If you live in, or near, a small town, you’ve probably seen, or even internalized, a certain assumption that the guy riding the beat up old bike, with the milk crate on the front, only does so because he either can’t afford even a beater of a car, has been barred from driving a car, (what’s that you got in the milk crate? wine? whiskey?), is physically incapable of driving a car at any time, or a combination.
We need to get the Church Ladies, the Important Men, and the Officers of the City to walk and ride bikes, so everyone can see it as normal. Unfortunately, car dealerships, or car-adjacent businesses, are likely how those people made, or reinvested, their money, so there is a perverse incentive.
And we need traffic separation, densification, (mostly, turning parking lots back into stores and apartments), de-zoning, and a few other things.
I mean he could order better Tacos the only reason I goto Taco Bell any more is Baja Blast zero which if I had a power it would be the ability to create Baja Blast Zero that taste like normal Baja Blast.
She’s called that on the Walkypedia, but it doesn’t say where it’s from. It’s not on the tumblr post with her character model. No model for Mark her current S.O.
I think that’s some sort of Fanon. It’s not from Shortpacked and I don’t think she’s ever shown up here, so unless Willis said it somewhere else, that seems like Fanon.
I have an honest-to-god phobia of e-mails. I’m trying to work on it, but I’m kinda between therapists at the moment and everybody else just thinks I’m making it up.
I can definitely see that. All the time expectancy of a text, all the expectations of a letter, all arriving with the ever increasing avalanche of a swarm of locust. Though, that may not be why you are scared of them.
But completely typical. If she actually wanted to make sure he knew or ask if it was a good time to visit, she’d call. I bet she knows that Walky never reads his emails.
No, but sending an email to your son instead of a phone call or text to let him know you’re visiting for the weekend is a little weird, and given Linda’s extreme historical shittiness we’re erring on the side of “She’s being shitty about it.”
Although in this case she probably doesn’t realize that Walky has been dodging her. It’s likely he *did* read her emails – when he checked his email, that is – before he started to understand that she is not a good parent. And now that he does sorta understand that he’s not sure how to deal with it, and so he’s dealing with it the way he deals with everything. He’s avoiding it.
Also, sending an email to only one of your two children. It’s not even like a phone call where you would have to make another call. You just add an another address.
Sending multiple emails despite not getting any form of response, and making no effort at all to communicate with your other child (and then blaming that child for having other plans!) does.
I can’t read this. My brain only offers incoherent muttering and hissing. If somebody sent me a text that was written this way, I’d fucking block them and then call an ambulance.
Nothing wrong with it per se, it’s just a naturally evolved tonal indicator.
Most ppl leave off the period at the end of the final sentence on a text, because the text itself serves as a form of punctuation disambiguating where a sentence ends and a new one begins. Plus, a lot of texts (or chat messages, or similar) are not full sentences, in the same way a lot of speech isn’t full sentences (yeah, okay, lol, etc). That forns the baseline of communication in the mediun, so deviation from that can be ascribed meaning. In this case, adding the period to the end of the last sentence makes your text have a more formal register, which can feel aggressive in an otherwise v casual medium.
Other kinds of punctuation tends to be okay to put at the end of a text because a question mark/bang have more semantic meaning than a period. But, like, it’s 100% a per-person thing, if you put periods at the end of ur texts regularly, ur friends prolly aren’t taking meaning from that
It feels like the strip implied he saw her emails (probably with no subject line because that’s how parents roll) but didn’t open them and see the contents.
Shirts that are pop culture references but with weird religious substitutions. Books on “godly” dating. Possibly the dinosaur book that taught Joyce the absurd “facts” that Dina was horrified by.
I think Dina might be interested in reading the book. It would hold a horrifying fascination and give her some insight into her girlfriend’s upbringing.
This is my bet too. An old bible, some religious comics and DvDs, some things that will blow my mind with horror, cause I didn’t even know that kind of merch existed, etc.
. . . given that she thought her daughter’s kidnapper was doing the right thing, a combination of stupidity and loving her “faith” more than her daughter.
Yeah, but she also called Joyce to passively aggressively say “whatever happens, i love you”, so she knows what Ross was doing was at least somewhat wrong.
I do agree that she knew he was going to do something horribly illegal but my point is that she seemed entirely convinced that his actions would only be doing what he thought was right for his daughter.
If you’re not watching the commentary videos they’ve been putting up recently, I highly recommend them, but that clip was just featured on Taka’s VoD YouTube channel and I think my favorite aspect out of all the commentary videos so far has been all the (ridiculously talented) cast members (rightfully) fangasming over their (ridiculously talented) co-stars.
except for YEC Georg who lives in a cave and spits out 666 terrible blog posts a year insisting it’s actually 4,000 years ago. He is an outlier and should be disregarded.
Is Carol allowed back on campus after she got into a physical altercation with Ruth?
Or maybe the administration decided it looks bad that Ruth suplexed a woman twice (or more?) her age and told Carol they won’t sue if she doesn’t
If she is not on Joyce’s list, and if Joyce doesn’t want her there then she should not be allowed to see Joyce. Unfortunately while the dorm has a level of privacy, walking around on campus grounds doesn’t qualify for privacy. Which is why we keep getting demonstrators on campuses that no one wants.
Joyce is the youngest of four children, and her oldest sibling (John) has been out of the house “as long as she can remember”. If he’s 14 years older than Joyce (32), and was born the year after Carol graduated from college, Carol’s at least in her mid-fifties.
Joyce says Hank is 60. She could be rounding, but if not that puts Carol in her late fifties since we know she and Hank attended college together. (Although he could have been more than four years ahead of her at the time; since he’s a dentist he presumably has a DMD or DDS.)
They’re all legally adults – or legal-adult adjacent if they haven’t yet had their 18th birthdays – but I think Ruth is the only one who can drink legally. In social terms, most adults of this age can still be expected to be treated as a bit immature by their families. It’s not at all uncommon in our society to refer to young people who have just left high school and who are not yet supporting themselves or living independently as “kids” even though they are, of course, past the age of majority.
She’s surely trespassed from the dorms, but the university grounds (and other buildings) are a different matter. Dorm security issues won’t necessarily be escalated up to university-wide security. At a guess it’d come down to an administrator at Pudding Head’s level making the judgement that “this dorm fracas is also a threat to campus security, I can justify it to campus admins as such, and I’ve decided I can be bothered with the additional paperwork.”
Ah. Parental invasion. One thing I’ve been looking forward to since Sal and Danny started dating has actually been how she’ll react when she sees the way they treat/talk about him.
Given her own parental issues, I’m sure she’d have some choice words for people who act like the only value Danny ever had was that he once dated Dorothy.
I’ve never read It’s Walky! or the early parts of Shortpacked! so I can’t say for certain, but I definitely think a bit of Abed from Community has leaked into Walky since that show aired.
I am having six and a half times in the real world right now and still nothing could have prepared me for fucking Carol of all people to show up out of nowhere. I see she’s wearing glasses now??? It’s incredibly innocuous but both Willis and the real world have taught me to look for the worst in people who have proven themselves to be shitty, but I find it suuuuuper hard to believe she’s in contact with Joyce, so it can’t be that brand of manipulation right now, unless she’s known for years that Joyce needs glasses and has pushed back against it this entire time, which would be insane and horrific but she’s religious, so that’s par for the course.
I am not sober at all right now (fuck off, I’m fine), so I think I’ll need to attack this again in the morning.
I’m not entirely sure where you’re going with this but I would like to point out that Joyce said both her parents wear contacts when she was getting her glasses. It stands to reason that they would both also have a pair of glasses as well for late nights or when you simply can’t be bothered poking a bit of silicon into your eye
Probably, since their whole community probably sided with her in the split. He likely had to move his practice, since not only were a large percentage of his clients probably his fellow parishioners, but they likely poisoned the well, telling all THEIR friends not to give him THEIR custom, possibly going so far as to lie or repeat lies, including ones they knew were untrue but fit their narrative, on their way out.
That’s a lot of probablys, but I think it still holds together.
I’m amazed she had the money to spare for gas. Between the divorce and the fact that I’m pretty sure you don’t get the bail money back if the person you bailed out kills someone . . .
Yep! And to clarify my earlier comment, while it was both Blaine and the church, I’m pretty sure Carol contributed from her own pocket given how openly she supported the asshat.
The hopeful part of me thinks this will end with Joe standing up to her after seeing how stressed Joyce is. But I’ve been reading long enough not to expect a good ending.
I think it’s more likely that Joyce acts out trying to break away from her mom’s super conservative ways and this causes a conflict with Joe who’s trying not to be that guy anymore and have a real serious relationship with her.
who emails their kids, it’s not a business meeting
you’re doing this on purpose linda, I hate when people do “I messaged you on [one of fifty million different methods] didn’t you get it oh no how weird anyway you’re responsible for that even though I knew you wouldn’t get it”
people shouldn’t act like we haven’t had mobile phones that have built in text messaging since the 90s
I’m over the median age so that’s not THAT likely
and yes different strokes for different folks but the principle is that communication should take place through a consistent and convenient medium
for walky and sal (and me) that would be the phone that is almost always on their person
With Linda every scene with her family feels like a buisness meeting or interview. There’s always some underlying power play, as Sal notes, “it’s never about being nice with her”
I mean, it’s hard to beat Blaine for sheer awfulness. Linda sucks, but she’s never straight up berated Sal in the way Blaine regularly did to Amber. Also, you know, she never kidnapped/murdered her friends to prove a point.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Carol and Clint got together. A match made somewhere warm, and it’d certainly backfire on Carol, but they could do a lot of damage before the match imploded.
I see some of y’all asking if she’s aloud on campus.
I don’t know about your schools, but mine (and I assume most others) are open areas where people can easily walk or drive on.
Yeah, if she gets caught, she could be escorted off.
But there should be no checkpoint that she had to go through.
It’s similar to a restraining order (unfortunately).
I suspect emailing instead of calling or texting might have been deliberate. If walky really never reads or replies to emails it gives Linda room to claim she gave warning and show attention to her “important” child while knowing he wouldn’t actually know or give Sal warning. Cynical side wonders if this visit is an effort to remind her son whose started to pull away and side with his sister to keep following his mothers life plan for him. Ditto with Joyce’s mom randomly showing up to give her things she never asked for.
I would TXT if it has immediacy, like “I’m on my way” or “I’ve arrived at the restaurant.” It would never occur to me to do that for “We’re coming down to visit next weekend”; I’d send an email, because it’s not worth interrupting someone for something that is days away. If I were calling for some other reason I would probably mention it, but again it’s not worth interrupting just for mid-distant future plans.
Unless planning together is needed. Then I’d call. The interaction rate of written messages is too low for thinking together.
Carol is officially unwelcome in the dorm, but as far as we know she hasn’t been banned from the campus. I’ve been on the IU campus, and you can look at it on Google Street View or the equivalent. There are no checkpoints for excluding people.
What we need is for the Yolkians from Jimmy Neutron to come abduct them and feed them to their giant chicken. Except Dina’s parents of course. They cool.
My aunt and uncle who still consistently misgender my little sister have left me open invitations to holiday functions and the like, and I think I may metaphorically nuke them one day right before I leave town for good. Just really let them have it and tell them what hypocrites and monsters they are.
You know Carol, there is a UPS Store in La Porte who will be happy to pack and ship stuff for you if there isn’t a friend who can just take it to wherever your estranged husband is living now.
There’s a potential bright side to this story people: Linda and Carol might start fighting and drive each other off/take each other out.
They definitely didn’t get alone the last time they met.
Carol is a divorced woman who has already or is about to hit her sexual peak and (either in this continuity or the other one) had an active sexual interest (I believe she and her husband had a copy of the Karma Sutra), not to mention the 4 kids; she’s got to let people know she’s on the market, but is too prudish to be upfront about it.
She might also be running a little hot considering it’s winter, but her coat is open.
I would guess that Becky’s family home is still locked up while the estate oozes through Probate. Recall that they had to break in to look for her identity documents.
lol i guess a campus wouldn’t be super guarded/gated towards letting in cars for convenience but would’ve expected there to be some kinda visitor thing. we need to summon ruth haha
this whole thing is odd to me bc here in australia all uni campuses are public space. anyone can go in, i for walks at the local one all the time. but i guess we also don’t have members of the public carrying guns, and the whole vibe in general is super different here to what I see in DoA.
Most campuses in the USA are like that, too, but student residences are usually private. The ban on Blaine O’Malley being on campus was unusual, but before that Amber had already placed him on a list of people unwelcome in the dorm.
Some urban campuses, such as New York University, really just have buildings—no open spaces at all.
I live near a prominent private university, and I bike across the campus all the time as if it were a public park.
The dorms are only sort of technically private. We constantly see people just wandering in. Unwelcome guests can be removed, by security or suplex, but there’s no one checking and nothing keeping people from wandering in during the day.
either way i suppose joyce could file a restraining order for her mom, or be successful enough to move far away from her, though i imagine she’d still stay in touch with her other relatives and let them know that she’s cutting her off, if it’s something joyce is willing to do
College campuses in the US aren’t necessarily gated communities, especially older institutions in established cities. Individual buildings are generally either wide open or behind locked with badge access (usually the case with residence halls). The edges of campus kind of blend into the surrounding town or city.
IU Bloomington is a real place, you can look at it on Google Maps. Street View even visited Blowjob Cat a few times!
Old lady (thirty-something) here: I’ve made my mailbox 99% less scary by having one for business, one for pleasure, and subscribing to newsletters I’m actually interested in (there seems to be kind of a newsletter renaissance going on!). Don’t know if this can help someone.
I just can’t be bothered to keep up. Like lots of other forms of social interaction email has been made too easy so I am now constantly socially overloaded.
This whole “30 is old” mentality is part of why I’ve had to manually and gradually train my brain not to block off possible hobbies or career ideas because it’s Too Late®️. People where I’m from just completely give up on life if they’re not a skilled artist or engineer or whatever, and it’s a huge source of depression.
Dear Sal,
You don’t have to spend time with your parents if you don’t want to. Especially not if you’re mom’s a bongoface and chooses to treat you like crap. Go spend time with Danny instead. It’s far past time you two boned already.
She’s already made clear to Linda she won’t be spending time with them but their unexpected presence still has a negative emotional impact. Especially when they choose to show up at random times in the day advertising that they keep track of their schedules.
considering if it was that important, Jocelyne should’ve sent a follow up text like “heads up moms planning to bother you” or so or even tell their dad to pass on the message
Part of me knows that would be traumatic for everyone involved.
Part of me wants a scene of Joyce holding a bloody hammer over her concussed egg donor, declaring “then surely you’d agree THIS is God’s will too!” before swinging again.
Someone needs to go contact Asher. He’s so far 1 for 1 as far as dealing with terrible parents.
Feeling less judgmental of Walky knowing that his mother was emailing him though. I check that nonsense maybe once a month, and I can’t imagine he’s too thrilled to hear from her anymore.
Oh. So, maybe she switched to glasses when her finances took a hit.
Or, maybe her prescription no longer allows for simple contacts, and she now needs bi-tri-no-line-focals.
I know you were just switching words around, but THAT’D be a twist – the Billingsworths aren’t actually rich, they just have a bunch of scams going on that makes them look like they are. Like Theranos or Trump.
They call themselves “non denominational”, which is kind of a misnomer, since most American non denominationalist churches really form an informal denomination of their own, though with close ties to other fundamentalist Evangelicals.
The market for coding jobs is dreadful rn. It’s all shifty recruiters and shady third-party staffing companies. I gave up looking after 4 months and took a barista job at starbucks just so I could escape the nightmare and still have insurance. Hoping you find some properity soon
Could anyone link to the strip where Joyce’s parents get divorced? I read daily most of the time but I somehow missed this strip and just know from the comments
While Joyce is picking glasses she says she can’t afford a pair and Becky offers to call her dad to cover the difference. Joyce says “I don’t feel right taking advantage of the divorce” or something to that effect. I’m on mobile so I can’t easily go get the strip, tho.
What a weird excuse to see your kid who you know doesn’t want to see you. “Stuff from the house?” What stuff from the house would a college student want on campus (badly enough to see her murder-accomplice mother)?
It feels a bit Hail Mary doesn’t it? The last of the stuff before Joyce doesn’t ever have to come back, I’m thinking. So, one last excuse for talking to her.
As I pointed out in another comment, there is a good chance that Hank’s professional, and personal, life is through in their home town. There is a very good chance that, in the split, the whole church sided with her against him, and managed to starve him out of business. They possibly even drove their acquaintances from outside their congregation to quit going to him, too. And there’s a pretty good chance that he was their go-to dentist, as he was a member of their community, so just them leaving may have meant losing a majority of his business in one fell swoop, before accounting for the loss of friends of fellow parishioners.
If anyone had a better claim to the house, well, that doesn’t matter, unless it had been in his family for a while.
If anyone needed to move, to get away from a place where they were quite literally no longer welcome, even if just to be able to make ends meet, that’d be Hank, not Linda.
I suspect it is an aggression disguised as concern. What is really meant is “If you are going break all contact with me then you can’t store your stuff in my house!” But with a hypocritical “I am so concerned that you might need your childhood stuffed animals at this difficult time!”
Also there is being honest about stuff. Just because you are mad at someone doesn’t give you the right to destroy or throw out there stuff. Honesty and basic decency requires you to get their property back to them somehow. Yes, there are plenty of assholes who disagree and think someone doing things you don’t like entitles you to keep or dispose of things that belong to them that are under your control, but not everyone does.
What if if Carol came to give Joyce her favorite childhood Bible or something, and Joyce was just like, “Thanks, but I’m an atheist now” and walked away… I mean, it probably wouldn’t be safe, but it’d freak Carol out and possibly break her for a moment, and that’d be great to see.
The problem with billionaires is that it’s impossible for them to realistically spend all that money during not only their own lifetime but 2 or three generations after. It’s like going through a major drought just to find out your neighbour is hoarding a basement full of bottled water.
If even a fraction of that wealth was actually in the system, it could be used on health care, housing etc. Instead it’s all in one guy’s bank account where the likelihood of it getting spent is 0. Sure, people like Bill Gates and Dolly Parton exist, who spend masses of their fortune on charity but not every billionaire does so…
But billionaires spending cash on philanthropy are actually just as bad. They give so that we don’t think of them as ghouls who profited off a brutal system. No opinion on Dolly Parton but Bill Gates argued fighting a pandemic and saving millions of lives takes a backseat to Big Pharma’s IP profits. He’s a piece of shit. Don’t buy into hisphilanthropy PR
Plus on that scale, philanthropy winds up just distorting policy. The money’s great, but places that need it wind up doing what it takes to qualify for it.
Also – a lot of billionaires lose interest in donating when it doesn’t buy them a say in governing the thing. If they don’t get it, the money never materializes.
Money,…doesn’t really work that way. There is no direct, rigid, conversion from money into food, or shelter, or water. It’s more like hoarding a billion IOU’s from society as a whole.
Cash all those in at once, and all you manage to do is: A. not have the IOU’s any more, and B. raise the cost, in IOU’s everyone else needs to get anything.
About the only thing that much wealth CAN be used for, all at once, is to focus a good chunk of society in a positive direction. Maybe you raise the overall cost of construction, for everyone, at least for a little while, because you bought the labor that was available, outbidding all other uses for that labor, to build something (you think) everyone needs. A new park/playground/church/school/museum/theater, etc. If you do it often enough, for long enough, prices start to come down again, as more people move into the business of relieving you, and everyone else, of that money. Possibly more construction equipment and general contractors in the area, because mister Rich Bucks is always building something, somewhere.
And that all only applies to liquid funds. Much of a rich persons’ wealth is in valuation. Often saying this business they own is worth this much, because when they sell a fractional ownership of it, or some fractional ownership they sold years back does change hands, it’s for this much, and multiplied by how much of that fraction they still own, it’s this larger amount. That can’t be extracted without selling the business, or its assets.
Heck, much of a regular persons’ wealth is in valuation. Much of your valuation is in the resale value of your car and house, presuming you have either. Maybe your tools, if you have expensive tools.
God, what a dick move on Linda’s part. “I told David a dozen times.” No you didn’t, woman. You sent a dozen emails you *knew* he wouldn’t read. Clearly he never responded back. You knew, straight-up, that this was going to be a surprise and still had the temerity to act like your kids should have known.
That’s not even bad parenting, that’s bad people skills. If you don’t get confirmation from the other party that they know, you don’t act like they know. The only reason she can get away with this shit is because these are kids and she has power over them.
One of the problems in comment thread like this is that we don’t have complete information, so people add their own assumptions and speculations.
For instance do we know that Sal reads her emails every day? Why are we assuming that she does when Walky doesn’t? Maybe Linda did email Sal, but she never checks her email at all, while Walky checks it but doesn’t open emails from Linda?
I mean, I have to go with the text here. Linda explicitly mentioned that she “told David”. Which tracks in that she’s basically decided to write off any sort of attempt to have a positive interaction with Sal. Sal could be the world’s most dedicated email responder, but it doesn’t matter because Linda is never going to try and reach out to her because she thinks Sal is never going to be anything more than the “hoodlum” who held up a convenience store. But that’s not really my point.
To me, the point is that she never heard back from him. She never got confirmation from him. And instead of treating Walky with the respect he deserves and calling or texting- even just a “hey, check your email, I sent you something”- she decided that it was good enough warning and dropped in on her adult children. And she’s assuming that Walky didn’t have plans, or a big test to study for, or just wanted a weekend of peace and quiet. No doubt she’s also going to make impositions onto Sal’s time as well.
I’ve made comparisons between my mom and Linda before, and this situation is a perfect example of how Linda has elements of my mom but cranked to 11. When I was in college, I’d have times where I wouldn’t text or email my mom back for about a week. Now, mom wasn’t *happy* about that (which is perfectly reasonable, I absolutely should have been better about responding), but she always just…called. Or sent another message. She never *assumed* that she could impose on my life the way Linda has here.
Emails – old fashioned but you need to check them if you’re a student or you might miss class related information.
My kids have been gone for 20 years but I still have some of their stuff in closets. Buy if I was moving I would make sure they got it instead of throwing it out. That’s their call.
But my kids like to see me unlike Carol and Linda.
I teach in a business college, and routinely acknowledge the annoyance of emails to my students. While also noting that various kinds of teamware are slowly replacing it in companies. But not in one simple transition, and the result is a ragged mess of noncommunication.
Given everything else we know about Carol’s religious beliefs it would be stranger if she wasn’t antisemitic. It goes part and parcel with that type of Christian fundamentalist world view. I also recall early in the strip Joyce being a bit weird about Joe being Jewish.
I like emails… But then, I’m too longwinded for texts sometimes, and I had the ability to send/receive images blocked on my phone until this year (because my dad forgot he’d done it when I was getting my first phone). I guess I don’t use them too much, nowadays, but my now-wife and I communicated mainly through emails outside of in-person ’til the day we got married and moved in together, lol
Sucks to be in different timezones. If anyone who was replying to me in the convo about redemption (schpoonman? Thejeff?) is interested here’s my response.
Redemption is widely seen as some imaginary point you can reach or quality you can achieve. This is false. In my opinion, you just have to live with yourself and your past actions and move on, or “let go or be dragged” as some Buddhists I know tell me.
Characters in this comic learn and grow but do they “redeem?” Just look at everything that’s happened with Joe. He was a total dirt bag. He has to build back a lot of trust, not only with other characters like Dorothy but with the audience too. He had to radically change the way he perceived women, himself, and sex. And there are signs already that he is really going to struggle with this.
Now here comes Robyn. She’s changing too, and she’s a fan favorite, but redeemed? I don’t think so. She has a loooong way to go. Her actions as a politician have far reach effects. We can accept her growth as real, but can she really “redeem” after explicitly working against gay rights in congress?
You can call these stories “redemptive” but they are long and complicated journeys, and these characters’ pasts don’t just go away once they start being cool. Imagine if Linda started “redeeming” suddenly. Her actions aren’t going to be forgotten any time soon. Neither are Joe’s, Robyn’s, Mike’s etc…
Someone who has hurt you can change, and you can say okay, you seem to have understood what you’ve done was bad and it’s time to move on. But your relationship with that person is now fundamentally different. Can you really forget what they did, see them as a different person who has achieved some kind of magical “Redemption”?
I’ll tell you who does think so: fundies lol. And this comic is very anti fundamentalist.
like thejeff said yesterday, “redemption” is an unwieldy word precisely because it’s so loaded with christian associations. it’s often used loosely to describe an arc in storytelling, where a character goes from being portrayed negatively to positively, without necessarily undergoing some transcendant metamorphosis. i think Joe’s story fits that description.
i’m not sure you and thejeff actually have different views on the story, but i feel like you’re probably working with different definitions of the word “redemption”?
basically, if you ask of “redemption” to be “magical”, then you can’t use it to describe ostensibly realistic psychological narratives. i don’t know that you should, tbh, i’m kind of on your page as far as saying that’s a fundamentally christian concept.
then again, our culture is very christian, so it can also be interesting as a tool to address that. it’s very possible for a writer to be anti-fundamentalist in surface ways (and that’s still valuable and cool) and yet continue to unconsciously think and emote and produce stories that reproduce the categories they grew up with.
…or consciously, honestly. you pick your battles, you might realize you’re a product of your time and place without always needing to be deconstructing that. it’s Fine Actually, to an extent
Haha well when you define it so reasonably, then I have no choice but to accept that it is real! But even in the act of shifting a negative portrayal into a positive one, can it be done without acknowledging their misdeeds, which can never be taken back, and have potentially scarred others forever? Like I said, a character can certainly grow, but in order to depict this reasonably it must be shown that some people will never accept them. That is why I say redemption is ultimately an illusion.
i mean… there’s stories, and there’s real life.
i don’t think redemption is “real”, because like, it’s just a word.
but i feel like your argument is not about it being “real”? so much as saying that it’s a bad narrative device if it brushes aside or diminishes the harm that someone’s actions caused. and yes yes, in that case i agree. and i agree that willis is taking care to include that messiness, and is committed to portraying those emotional ripples of past damage in how they write characters moving to a better place morally.
Narrative redemption arcs are a thing. Those almost always require not merely change, but generally some kind of dramatic sacrifice to atone.
Reality rarely gives such neat closure. People can still change and grow better, but they don’t often get dramatic moments to prove it or to make up for what they did. It’s generally much more of a day by day process.
I know people who’ve made new relationships with formerly abusive parents after a decade or more with no or minimal contact. The parent did the work to change. The adult kid slowly came to trust and accept that. Is that “redemption”? I don’t know.
The other problem with the narrative version is that you sometimes do get the dramatic moments in real life, but they don’t always mean the problems are fixed. Often it’s easier to make the big redemptive sacrifice than to put in the day to day work. That’s a way the narrative version can trip us up.
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EVERYONE GET DOWN SHE MIGHT BE ARMED!
*bared-teeth grimacing emoji*
If there wasn’t substantial precedent for armed fundy parents already this would be a light-hearted jape. The only thing that makes this unlikely is our fundy murderers are all of the other gender from Carol.
Someone pulled the Parents Tag?
Maybe we could at least get a cool set of parents next? still haven’t really met Carla’s
If Joe’s dad looks like Joe,
And Ultra Car’s dad was Joe,
I want to believe Carla’s dad also looks like Joe.
No explanation.
Both of them Spider-Man pointing at each other in… how long is the buffer now? Six months? Around Christmas if they get a set-up.
I’m kinda waiting for a plotline where we reveal Joe and Carla are half siblings due to his dad’s sleeping around.
Extension of your idea: Joe Sr. was cheating on his wife, but the Ruttens weren’t; Carla was born from a threesome.
I’m an idiot so it literally took the “Imagine you earned $10,000 a minute since 10,000 BCE…” posts to get me to realize just how unjust billionaires are, but ever since then, probably around 2019 or 2020, just the thought of them makes my skin crawl. For all the good that Carla’s parents assuredly do, they’re still hurting people in amassing the wealth they have.
Carla’s parents are cool, not necessarily good
I’m picturing a more inclusive, trans-positive version of the Bluths from Arrested Development. Like, straight up Lucille Rutten.
“Oh, Carla, darling, it’s one banana. What could it cost, ten dollars?”
Wouldn’t they have been selling Carla’s banana, not buying her one?
What would be the backstory of everyone’s favorite character, the staircar?
It was the prototype vehicle for a startup called Handsy, which was supposed to work like a combination of Angie’s List and Uber, but in practice was just litigation fodder.
I haven’t heard that one. I’ve heard the one about Christopher Columbus arriving in America, getting a job that pays 5,000$/day everyday without weekends or vacation and still not having a billion dollars today.
I imagine your story is similar, but I feel obligated to say that if you were paid 10,000$/minute, you’d be a billionaire after 70 days. It doesn’t really work. It’s a shame because I really like the image it conjures. A more realistic, and still impressive way to use that time frame would be to say that getting a job in 10,000 BCE that paid 80,000$/year you would still have less than a billion dollars in 2023.
Sheesh, if I got $5000/day I could live nicely for a month on the first day’s pay and invest the rest. Even so-so stocks’ dividends are 100x what the banks are paying on savings. And that ignores appreciation.
For perspective, imagine that Chris invested his entire pile in Coca Cola on the day they went public, held it until now, and reinvested the dividends. THAT is how billionaires are made.
It sounds like the one about Columbus assumes that he neither spends nor invests a dime. Kinda like the physicist who said he figured out why the chicken crossed the road, but it only works for spherical chickens in a vacuum.
I believe it’s supposed to be $10,000 per month (after expenses) since 10,000 BC which makes you a (low-end) billionaire.
Of course to hit actual Bezos levels that needs to be more like $30,000 per day, every day including weekends.
The one I heard was if you give your wife a million dollars and shes allowed to spend it at $1000 a day she’ll be back in less that three years. Give her a billion dollars and she wont be back for 3000 years. Im available to test this theory.
How generous! I’d gladly accept your loan so you can conduct this experiment
Your math is wonky.$10,000 a month for 10,000 years is a billion with an extra couple of hundred million in spare change. There’s no need for the extra 2 thousand or so years you get by specifying BC. And going from once a month to once a minute is real overkill.
For perspective, there are about 8 trillion people on the planet. Invent something that improves lives enough that it’s worth a penny in profit to one out of every 7 and there’s you over 10 billion right there. But no, let’s all hate on the rich and ignore the fact that countries without the very wealthy tend not to do very well.
My fixed retirement income is the same whether Steve Jobs and Bill Gates exist or not. But the Gates foundation has funded the biological hack on photosynthesis that will take us from doing a bad job of feeding almost 8 trillion people to being able to do a bad job of feeding almost 64 trillion people. You can hate on the very rich if it makes you feel better about yourself, but I say that if there are people who can afford to do massively frivolous things with their money, good for them. And I’m rather fond of my computer and cell phone.
Mayor citation needed. As far as I can tell countries without very wealthy do consistently better if you correct for a few other factors. The USA golden age (at least economically speaking) was when taxes for the richest were 91%.
There are only eight billion people, not eight trillion.
I don’t think you should be telling other people their math is wonky. And yes, billionaires are economic evil. It isn’t “hating rich people” to recognize there’s a difference between a wealthy person and an economic hoarder.
Why not? The figure of 8 trillion simply is incorrect. Pointing out the correct figure doesn’t even undercut his point.
Being off by three orders of magnitude makes the audience doubt the calculations, even if they do turn out to be useful.
much as you enjoy your phone and laptop Clif (and so do i for that matter) the way these and much of the industrial goods of rich nations depend for their manufacture on a system of unaccountable neocolonial exploitation. and one way or the other, much of the wealth of the very wealthy in rich nations depends on that same internationale of misery and exploitation. Not to mention the dogma of economic growth that has greatly helped locked in2+°C global warming, at the very, very best.
regarding the agro research stuff, what the hell, seriously. publicly-funded research is just as competent, except they don’t reap profits from downstream IP. if commercial benefits weren’t so efficiently captured by the billionaire class, scientists would still be doing that same research.
like, no. there is no rational excuse for billionaires existing. And hating billionaires is fine, if it fuels the political project of expropriating them as soon as feasible.
also,
“Invent something that improves lives enough that it’s worth a penny in profit to one out of every 7 and there’s you over 10 billion right there.”
glossing over the math glitch, this is such a silly sentiment. sorry Clif i like you but your politics are sooo terrible.
sure sounds great in the abstract, but in the real world, you know, where the planet is burning, and people die of hunger and so on? that’s not how anyone has ever made 10 billion bucks.
you can’t just invent, produce and sell a thing. you also need the support of a world power with a big army. Cos otherwise, say you did invent that clever thing. why would people just keep paying you for it forever? at some point they’d start producing it for themselves. you’d probably make a tidy sum regardless, but you need a powerful structure to ensure your “intellectual property” (a problematic concept to begin with) is respected for decades throughout the world. that’s not incidental. that’s an integral part of the business plan.
now, granted, most of the billionaires never did invent anything quite so fascinating, or anything at all. many of them just happened to have a lot of capital handed down to them, and didn’t let such boring quandaries as “not funding a dictator” and “not fucking up the atmosphere” stop them from making the smart investments.
Also, too…
Every invention may be attributed to someone, but if they weren’t around someone else would have invented that thing. The inventor is like an instrument of technological history. (Ref. the history of lawsuits surrounding most inventions – often multiple people were working on a thing)
After that, the invention, whatever it is, is still built and implemented by workers who produce the value in question.
TL:DR – ideas are a dime a dozen.
Just out of curiosity, can anyone actually name an actual billionaire who invented something which Changed All Our Lives For The Better(tm)? Not who owns said invention or funded said invention or was the CEO of the company that made it, but personally with their own brain and hands invented such a thing?
I’m perversely impressed by the sheer gall of someone openly advocating theft calling someone else’s politics “terrible”. The idea that people can only get rich by stealing from the poor is some stupid-ass medieval zero-sum bullshit. The idea that centrally directed research and production could ever hope to be as productive as a free market is a proven delusion. Just look at the history of the 20th century. Socialism killed 100M and impoverished far more. Free markets lifted billions out of poverty. The global slide backwards toward authoritarianism is the biggest current threat to prosperity.
I’m not going to claim that our current system is perfect, but the biggest problems are usually the result of state interference. The idea that state power can somehow be harnessed to make things “fairer” is laughable once you realize that such efforts are routinely hijacked by those already in power to reinforce their power.
yeah, i’m impressed by the sheer bullshit of acting like “theft” is some sort of transcendant reality. property law, commercial law, IP law all of these are social constructs, they are absolutely not transcultural and ahistorical. they have been constructed and are enforced by people, and they can be changed by people. be serious.
and what? states bad? sure, i don’t like states either. but corporations are: bad too! they are: also “harnessed” by those “already in power to reinforce their power”! and they are even less accountable than states. ok bye
The global slide backwards into authoritarianism is mostly driven by those supporting the billionaire oligarchs. We’re not having a grand resurgence of socialist dictatorships anywhere outside the imaginations of some right wing conspiracy theorists.
lol
lmao
8 billion people, not trillion.
While we’re on the subject of ignoring facts, shall we discuss how you’re ignoring the fact that imperialism led to the immense disparity in global wealth? Or that the reason widespread global poverty exists is because wealth was stolen from the global south and hoarded by the ruling class in the global north?
And the dumb just keeps coming. Imperialism was mostly a net loss for the conquerors. Those who gained the most from looting ended up coasting their way into irrelevance. The countries that were forced to actually produce something became far richer in the long run. Poverty is the natural state of humanity, so it’s hardly surprising. The amazing part is just how many people human ingenuity, enabled by greater freedom, has managed to lift out of poverty.
????
what strange alternate world you live in.
the US is an empire? it gained a whole lot from looting? so did france and britain and they are still among the leading world economies? what are you even talking about. switch off pragerU and read books by actual historians or something this is ridiculous
I put it to you that capitalism is not an integral part of scientific endeavour
Oh, also, we’re only ‘doing a bad job’ of feeding 8 billion people because the dipshits who own the food for 12 billion people don’t see the profit in distributing it fairly
They also don’t see a profit in not making half again as much food as they need, thereby completely wasting about a third of the food for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
The triumph of “fairness” over freedom is the single biggest reason for poverty. Fetishizing some nebulous idea of fairness is an evolutionary hangover that has long since outlived its usefulness.
omg you are actually kind of fascinating.
The rich are mobile, so can pick and choose where to live. You’re kinda putting the cart before the horse here.
Let’s take a look at the nine kinds of passive income. How much of a jerk do you “necessarily” have to be to run a billion dollar tech company? There’s a possibility they only needed #1 – luck. Though usually these companies go at least all the way to #7, inventing something new and then holding a monopoly and deliberately squashing competitors by the time everyone wants it. It would certainly be almost impossible to get that kind of fortune if they were paying their employees the same kind of hourly wages as they get paid themselves.
But we don’t know. For all we know the Ruttens could pay ten times more than their competitors and throw money to charity as fast as they can. (Look at what MacKenzie Scott is doing.) I don’t think it’s fair to “assume” they’re not doing their best to redistribute this wealth as it grows beyond control after some unexpected successes.
I don’t know if MacKenzie Scott is a great example given her wealth is from Amazon, even if she is turning around and trying to do good with it. Part of Amazon’s “success” has been due to its exploitation of its workers, and while it’s great that someone is making the best of a bad situation they themselves cannot change, the Ruttens don’t have that excuse. It’s their company, they set policy (or are beholden to shareholders), and as the kind people above illustrated, billionaires cannot morally exist. Unless the economy of DoA’s world is very different, the Ruttens stepped on a lot of bodies to get where they are now.
Well then, what should they “do” to exist morally? If you make a billion dollars, is it too late for you to start doing better and you should just kill yourself?
To be clear, I’m not making excuses for rich people. I’m not saying our world wouldn’t be better off if any one of our 2640 billionaires took a dirt nap. I am saying it’s silly to judge someone’s character and intentions based entirely on one label society put on them. Even if it is a label that’s only applicable to about one out of 300 million people who ever lived. You don’t lose anything by giving them a chance.
One of my big frustrations is when people make wide sweeping statements about groups of people and how they’re bad. And in the money sense it’s like…usually to get that much money they did it by screwing the little guy or doing some sorta human rights violation. But like. I still feel REALLY uncomfortable when I see people say “this group of people is inherently bad”.
It’s just always in my nature to give people the benefit of the doubt.
See that’s a really kind perspective, but billionaire isn’t a label Society put on billionaires, it’s a label/state of wealth that billionaires actively sought and abused millions to get to. There’s no moral way to be a billionaire except to stop being a billionaire by giving your money away. Rich people are okay, millionaires are fine, multimillionaires are fine, it’s just billionaires that are flat-out immoral no questions asked. Because a billion is a truly absurd number of dollars to hoard, and there’s no way you could spend it within your lifetime.
For me, I’m just uncomfortable with anyone being “too” comfortable saying “all of ___ is bad”. I feel like that mindset is the very death of humanity. Even in times it’s justified I honestly feel like it’s a mindset I’m not a fan of. I feel like people tend to fall back on “us vs them” out of pattern recognition and it’s rare that anyone who does it with one thing doesn’t do it with a lot of other things.
But then again I don’t know shit about fuck. I’m just going off vibes.
That’s fair Yotomoe, so consider it this way. It’s not so much that billionaires are inherently bad as people – I’m sure many of them are lovely in one on one conversations and that some may have good intentions. However, they still do bad things or profit from bad things because that is how one becomes a billionaire – at some point down the line, either people or the environment have been exploited to get the money. That is not just and so, while people may not be inherently bad as a group, being part of certain groups still requires doing or gaining from bad things. Billionaires are one such case.
I dunno if that helps or not, but I hope it does.
I mean most of them could make a really good start by instituting non-actively-malevolent working conditions and living wages within the various businesses they own, not throwing money at fascist and borderline-fascist politicians, and throwing their money around in ways that lessen structural inequality. A couple of them even sort of do that, hell some people have actually spent enough money to stop being billionaires.
Why is it that people treat “being a billionaire” as some sort of inherent quality? “What can they do, kill themselves”? Good lord. No, it’s like being a cop, you’re allowed to stop doing it at any time- though much like being a cop, you might have to worry about the other billionaires getting scared of you if you go against the system and trying to get you killed or at least discredited and jailed over it.
Oh boy, Clif showed up again. I wasn’t being rigorous with the math, no, but I assumed everyone would pick up on it being an approximation/substitution for the actual math done in the posts I mentioned. Some of you got that, and I’m proud of you.
ma’am, this is a comic strip about dumb late teen-agers, you do not need to start an ethical conversation about the existence of capitalism in the comment section
Me: “Hm, haven’t read the comments in a while, maybe I will today”
Mistakes were made lol.
We haven’t met Carla’s but we know they’re billionaires which means that they’re assholes by default
Ayyy.
They’re Gig Industrialist Billionaires.
They might be great to Carla, but that’s definitely the exception, not the rule…
Carla’s narcissism has to come from somewhere. The only thing worse than a billionaire is an egomaniacal billionaire.
I remain firmly convinced of my headcanon that they are lovable, stupid, well-meaning assholes, as opposed to asshole jerks
They love Carla and want the best for her, even if they have never bought their own groceries and don’t know what a Red Robin or a “Tacos Belle” is
Oh, please let that be canon. The Walky freakout will be epic.
Wait until Linda and Carol team up.
Sure, it seems like an inconvenience now, but can you imagine how the ability to summon parents at will is going to up NightGuy’s superhero game?
Imagine the terror in a mugger’s eyes when he suddenly realizes his mom is standing behind him, already wailing about how she raised him better than this.
Lol! You talk as if Night Guy is still an active vigilante. His career lasted five minutes.
Imagine how terrifying it would be when the mom that’s summoned had passed the year before.
That is truly terrifying super power. Broken bones heal, the look of disappointment in your mother’s eyes burns the soul forever.
She’s not looking at you, she’s looking at Mike. The disappointment comes from knowing no nickles were summoned.
Well done! I loled.
I summon…. your Mom! Aiiigh! Not the guilt trip!
OH HELL TO THE NO
WHO LET HER ON CAMPUS
she got a new haircut
oh my gods. There’s a parents meeting isn’t there
I would have thought that Carol was banned from campus.
Well that’s the thing, iirc she called in the favor with you know who from the mafia, and they basically own cops.
I’m trying to remember exactly how Blaine got banned. Like, Ross discharged a fucking shotgun on campus, so that’s an easy ban right there, but was Blaine banned from campus just on Ruth’s word alone?
Well first of all Blaine was in the residence on family weekend, despite not being on the list of approved visitors.
Then he got into a physical altercation with Ruth.
Fighting a school employee (or a sort-of employee) while being in an area you do not have permission to be in might be reason enough to be banned.
Be realistic. Unless the campus is has fences or walls with a single gate in and out, like a POW camp or a cloistered convent, there’s no way you can interdict anyone unless they’re actually trying to enter a specific dorm and the RA happens to spot them.
I agree that it’s difficult (if not impossible) to actually enforce a ban on an open campus with no ‘gate’. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the person ISN’T banned… it just means that if they are found to be violating the ban the repercussions might be worse.
Blain was banned from a residential hall, not campus. There may also have been a restraining order from approaching Amber or her mom.
It was a small-calibre rifle, not a shotgun.
Honestly, that makes it worse.
A shotgun round, fired into the air, is fairly harmless, so long as there’s not something immediately in its path. It’s why we use it for hunting birds.
A bullet, fired without regard for the backstop, can come down somewhere unexpected and still retain its killing force.
I have my doubts that a bullet fired straight up will be particularly dangerous as it comes straight down. There is such a thing as terminal velocity, so I have my doubts that it’d be any worse than just DROPPING the bullet, not the cartridge, just the bullet, off of a tall building. One fired at any angle, however, could come down somewhere while still traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of sound.
Was he actually banned? He still lurked about to get in contact with Asher. I just thought he was just avoiding Amber directly to allow his plot to scare her away from college to develop.
I don’t think campus security is carding everyone who enters campus.
It’s an open campus. There is no security at that level.
well, ruth did ‘suplex’ her but i doubt any more paperwork was done to stop her from returning
why does she look friendly and normal fuck OFF all of these kids deserve better
Maybe she’s in denial or thinks if she’s kind enough she can conger memories of better times and get Joyce to spend time with her?
Well Joyce seemed to having a good run as of late. Might as well throw a little drama her way.
Actually that weird slinky dress is very inappropriate. For her age and her extreme Christianity, and for the weather too. It’s giving me the creeps.
I don’t believe it’s a dress she is wearing. It looks like an long trench style overcoat with her pink outfit underneath it.
She looks all friendly and normal because she genuinely doesn’t believe that she’s done anything wrong. The fact that her actions re: bailing Ross out of prison directly led to people dying just straight-up doesn’t compute with her. She thinks she’s a perfectly innocent person.
It’s pretty similar to own Willis’s history: on his Tumblr, he tell her mom always came in caring and smiles, until love-bombing starts! “you know, I always can die for you ..” , and all the toxic behavior
Bad people look normal. Friendly. Nice. It’s their actions that make them bad people. And most bad people don’t think of themselves as bad. Everybody is the hero in their own story. She tried to help a member of her community. She probably doesn’t consider that a bad thing.
Yep, if you think the act of helping is inherently good regardless of consequences, then in that ethical framework she did a good thing.
Shit like this is why I am a consequentialist.
“The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”
As a Catholic, I had that one drilled into me from a very young age. Good intentions don’t absolve you of responsibility for what comes next.
Thank you.
(A lot of people when they realize this think that means that beautiful people are all evil or untrustworthy, not actually true.)
Carol?!?!? Oh no no no no no no no this is REALLY bad.
*plays “The Operation Begins” from One Piece Strong World CD on nearby passing car’s mini TV*
Yes, she’s been a poor parent lately and sure she’s put her cult above her family before, but … let’s see what she’s got in the box before we judge. It could be cookies. Joyce can always kick her out later. After cookies.
“Thanks, mom, now get lost.”
this line is the story of my life lol
Drugged cookies so she can abduct Joyce and force her to leave this college in favor of a “Christian” one.
I hate this woman so much.
Yeah. Best she have the campus police inspect the contents of that box to make sure nothing’s amiss.
“What’s in the box?!?!?!?”
Cult shit from when Joyce was much younger to trigger her into forgiving her mom and going back “to the way things were”
I think elebenty was making a Se7en reference.
Sesevenen
That sounds like every autism mom lol
Or Blaine’s head for dinner. Those wacky
cannibalschristians.No! Judgment Now! Evidence is boring and takes forever.
….. are you serious right now?
Carol has been more than a poor parent. And id you actually “yeah but” a kidnapping-murder?
Judging by the bit about cookies, I assume they weren’t actually being serious.
*a passing car plays Tina Turner’s “Better Be Good To Me”*
Someone else who also deserved better.
Most certainly. 🥺
May she rest in peace.
I salute in Miami Vice Soundtrack.
Coulda sworn college didn’t have PTA.
They’ve got an alumni association. Memory suggests Joyce’s parents met on campus. Memory could be a big liar.
Yeah, that was what Joyce’s dad was saying after the big blow-up, when he snuck away to join Joyce for lunch
She might be visiting her ex at his office now that she’s a free woman, too.
Sal & Walky’s mom is the one who dated the dean, Mrs. Brown doesn’t have any past relationships that we know about.
That’s nice mom. Now could you leave before somebody gets shot?
If there was a chance Carol could get shot, then she should stick around. I feel like Carol getting shot could only produce good things. Messy cleanup, but overall still a good thing.
If it could happen away from Campus it would be even better. No need to make the Campus Janitors clean of pieces of bongo first thing in the morning.
That’s a good point. What if we just tie her up and drop her in the ocean? Fish get food, Carol finally does something objectively good for the world, and no cleanup.
Yeah but then there is a choice she is so toxic that it would count as Pollution, might also poison those fish…
Hmm, volcano? Is that still poluttion? If so I’d suggest launching her into the sun, but that is expensive and we should spend as little as possible on her death. No reason to waste money on someone who doesn’t deserve it.
If we throw her in a volcano the fumes that would create could cause some major pollution, like Smog x100, its why hell has a ceiling lol. We could Freeze her, break her into a million pieces, thaw out those pieces and turn them into the meat part of Spaghetti that we then feed to Walky’s mom.
Do we really want to take the risk that evil can concentrate in your system like mercury? Feed a bongo an even worse bongo and you could wind up with a whole damn conga line.
a bonga line
oh, is conga a censor word too? might be redundant then.
Hmm, volcano? Is that still pollution? If so I’d suggest launching her into the sun, but that is expensive and we should spend as little as possible on her death. No reason to waste money on someone who doesn’t deserve it.
Now see, this is magic thinking. The volcano is going to be there polluting whether you toss Carol in or not. The incremental opportunity cost is negligible.
The ocean? Do you know how much shipping costs per pound (I’m assuming we’re putting her in a box with or without air holes instead of buying her a ticket)”
No need to dump her in the ocean when the Great Lakes are right there.
I forgot this thing auto censors curse words lol.
Yeah, I could call Carol a conga, but the censor prevents me. Though I’m sure people can piece together what word I was using.
That’s actually a specific censor that iirc was about Roz because the commentariat got a little vocabulary-happy.
Nah they’d be alright. Gotta call in specialists for that. Unaliive humans are considered hazardous waste.
Especially if Joyce is the beneficiary of her life insurance policy. That’s about the only good she could do.
Walky, why must you use your powers for evil? You could summon strippers, you could summon dogs, you could summon all kinds of nice things. Instead you summon fucking scumbags, and I want to know why. Why Walky?
So what are the odds that Joyce has a pleasant time with her mother? And what are the odds this ends in tears?
Considering she’s an atheist and is dating a Jewish atheist (I guess that should be Hebrew atheist since it’s my understanding that Jewish refers to the religion and Hebrew refers the ethnicity, though I could have that backwards), I think the chances of 2/3 of the Brown women having a pleasant time together is about 0% with tears being 90%.
Jewish can refer to both the religion AND a Jewish ethnic identity. (There is more than one Jewish ethnicity.)
Also, you can be an atheist and also be a religiously observant Jew. There is no conflict there.
That last part seems contradictory, but I’ll take your word for it.
That said, I’m relatively sure Joe doesn’t observe Jewish holidays.
I actually know at least one person who is a convert to Reform Judaism, and was an atheist at the start and at the end of that process, and also in the middle.
They are now a religiously observant Reform Jew. And also an atheist. This is probably different from secular humanists who are also Jews, but don’t quote me on that one.
atheist or agnostic?
Atheist.
Didn’t Joe say though that he was disappointed that Amber showed no interest when he and his dad were introducing her and her mom to Hannukah?
It’s possible because Judaism doesn’t care what you believe, it cares what you do. Whether you keep kosher and all and everything is the only thing that counts. Orthopraxy, not orthodoxy.
Although not all Jews who consider themselves religiously observant consider that it’s important to, eg, keep kosher or observe work restrictions on the Sabbath.
That’s right. Religion = belief is a specifically-Christian invention.
To be Jewish, you were born that way, or you converted in (which is just as valid). You can’t stop being Jewish by believing non-Jewish things, nor by changing your mind about something (belief or faith).
You also can’t stop being Jewish by refraining from doing positive commandments — you’re still Jewish, you’re just a Jew who is doin’ it wrong (according to other Jews).
Love, a Jewish atheist.
If converting to Judaism isn’t implying belief, then what does it mean? Is it accepting the philosophical aspects of Judaism, similar to Hinduism/Buddhism? Or is it, like, signing up for a club that protects you from being smited by Jewish God, should He turn out to exist? …OK, probably not that one.
It basically just means you were committed enough to make it through the conversion process. The philosophical implications are mostly up to you.
Or that’s my take on it, anyway. As the saying goes, “ask two Jews, get three opinions.”
It can also be more about becoming part of a community rather than specific religious beliefs. As people have mentioned, it is also a culture.
I suspect that a ‘religiously observant Jewish atheist’ is akin to a ‘cultural Catholic’. You no longer have any faith in supernatural agencies, but you find comfort in the familiar and often elegant ceremonies, rites and even the rules of your religion. So despite being an atheist, the person would keep to Shabbat, and abide by the various rules of the faith in practice, just like someone who long ago stopped believing in the Bible might continue to attend Mass (especially the big, grandiose holiday masses at Xmas and Easter), or even ‘give something up for Lent’.
In the case of the ‘convert’, I suspect this means he’s engaging in these rituals and practices as an act of support for his spouse, so that she would be able to retain her faith while being married to him.
No, in the case of the convert this means that she’s engaging in those rituals and practices because they are meaningful to her. She’s not a “convert”, and she’s not doing it for the spouse she doesn’t have. She’s a convert, and she’s an atheist.
It’s quite certain either way that Carol will disapprove. Unless this Carol is desperate for grandkids!
It’s ridiculously complex thing with Jews and ethnicity I keep reading different genetic studies and also it gets political and to be honest not a topic i would like to get into Judaism is a religion but has a a sort of cultural breakdown that I guess could be considered an ethnicitiy of Ashkanazi, Beta Israel, Mizrahim and Sephardic are the largest cultural groups. Ashkanazi being the largest Mizrahim being the second and Sephardic being the third Beta Israel probably being the fourth.
Mind you Judaism and ethnicity is a real sensitive topic
I suppose here is the breakdown
Ashkanazi are European Jews (with the exception of Southern France Spain and Portugal)
Beta Israel are Jews from Ethopia
Mizrahim are Jews from the Middle East and North Africa (with the exception of Morocco) this also includes Jews from Iran
Sephardic Jews the group I come from are Jews from Southern France Spain Portugal and Morocco.
Also further note there are Jews from other groupings like the Kaifang Jewish community in China and Indian Jews not mention converts and Jews from mixed race and mixed faith marriages who have multiple ethnic identities.
And also, to be clear, we’re only talking about Rabbinical Jews here, there are still Karaites around, who… are very different in a lot of ways. Though if you live in the US you’ll probably never meet one in your life, and I only bring it up out of a sense of completeness.
And since I *have* brought it up, I guess here is our periodic reminder that Rabbinical Jews are the descendants of the Pharisees, so if you just wildly sub in the word “Pharisee” when you mean “Christian who is a hypocrite” you’re engaging in anti-Semitism. So if you don’t want to do that, just say “hypocrite”.
I completely forgot about the Karaites although I am not sure if I would classify Karaite Jews as their own ethnic group i would think they would be Mizrahim their belief structure is different than Rabnical Judaism so they have different cultural practices.
I’m not sure if I would classify them as one particular ethnic group either, but I would definitely go along with whatever they mostly agree on.
Huh. Interesting. Thanks for the explanation.
To paraphrase the comedian Lewis Black ” I promise you thi we Jews will take TIME out of their VERY JEWY, JEWY DAY, and interpret for you anything that you’re having trouble understanding”
Jew can mean religion, race, or culture.
And all three at once.
And it’s actually Islam and Christianity that’s the odd man out as this was historically the way it was done outside of them.
Is Joe actually an atheist, rather than just not particularly religious? I only remember the interactions about young earth creationism, which he wouldn’t be expected to believe anyway.
Has Joyce told him she’s an atheist? If not, I hope there’s a scene where Joyce breaks the news and Joe goes “Oh, yeah, me too.” and Joyce’s brain explodes.
I don’t think he got to choose that pretty sure if he could summon anything it would be tacos.
I just ate supper but now I want tacos. It is a good thing I can’t just walk to Taco Bell like when I lived in the city. If I could walk to Taco Bell I would more overweight than I already am.
The walking wouldn’t counterbalance it?
Nope, or at least not the distance I had to walk when I lived in the city. It was like a 2-3 minute walk, and I tend to order a lot at Taco Bell so I can have some the next day without walking back.
Ahh!
As a fat guy, that is also my modus operandi, minus the actual walking part.
Assuming that more things are in walking distance you would still be healthier because you’d be walking to many destinations and not just to get food.
Did you ever hear why the Not Just Bikes guy hates, Hates, HATES, Houston, TX with a passion? He was in a hotel there, he needed some new luggage, there was a store not too far away that sold it.
He walked. It wasn’t far. Less than a mile.
There were NO sidewalks. Not even to cross a ravine. He was nearly killed, in his estimation.
He took a taxi back to his hotel. Less than a mile away on foot.
For “more things in walking distance” to matter, walking has to be a viable option.
Then we get into the whole “only people with something wrong with them don’t drive” mentality. If you live in, or near, a small town, you’ve probably seen, or even internalized, a certain assumption that the guy riding the beat up old bike, with the milk crate on the front, only does so because he either can’t afford even a beater of a car, has been barred from driving a car, (what’s that you got in the milk crate? wine? whiskey?), is physically incapable of driving a car at any time, or a combination.
We need to get the Church Ladies, the Important Men, and the Officers of the City to walk and ride bikes, so everyone can see it as normal. Unfortunately, car dealerships, or car-adjacent businesses, are likely how those people made, or reinvested, their money, so there is a perverse incentive.
And we need traffic separation, densification, (mostly, turning parking lots back into stores and apartments), de-zoning, and a few other things.
Also significantly more broke, T-Bozzle’s gotten entirely too expensive the last few years.
I mean he could order better Tacos the only reason I goto Taco Bell any more is Baja Blast zero which if I had a power it would be the ability to create Baja Blast Zero that taste like normal Baja Blast.
Oops. Flagged you. Sorry. But, right, strippers. You shout, “Take it off!” but they’re wearing long johns.
Strippers in long johns? Hot.
Especially if they’re the ones with the butt flap, and the butt flap is down.
Like Joyce wouldn’t be extremely into that.
Who wouldn’t be into the butt flap? It is a ingenious idea for both sexy reasons and staying warm reasons.
Depends on the weather. If the temperatures low enough they could be quite chilly even in their long johns.
Joyce just acquired birth control pills. I can’t imagine that won’t somehow come up.
Chills. Like an icicle in the stomach.
100% agree
Hopefully not a very sharp icicle or it would quickly become an icicle /through/ the gut instead of just in it.
Oh Snap!
There’s an idea. We can get Thanatos to snap the parents.
Parents episode, oh noes…
C’mon Sarah’s parent next! We saw Lucy’s brother, no need to drag her parents into this.
moar parents! Karen Rosenthal, Carletta DeSanto, Adinah Jackson, Reno and Falyn Snow, Dargon Chesterfield. The Ruttens!
Wait, was “Carletta” established as her official name somewhere, or is that just a headcanon?
She’s called that on the Walkypedia, but it doesn’t say where it’s from. It’s not on the tumblr post with her character model. No model for Mark her current S.O.
I think that’s some sort of Fanon. It’s not from Shortpacked and I don’t think she’s ever shown up here, so unless Willis said it somewhere else, that seems like Fanon.
Riley’s Mom Desanto*
I want to meet Old Man Park and the Sanchez parents, too
Ok, so she emailed Walky.
I take back my previous day’s disappointment.
I don’t read emails either, Walky.
I have an honest-to-god phobia of e-mails. I’m trying to work on it, but I’m kinda between therapists at the moment and everybody else just thinks I’m making it up.
I believe you
🫂
I can definitely see that. All the time expectancy of a text, all the expectations of a letter, all arriving with the ever increasing avalanche of a swarm of locust. Though, that may not be why you are scared of them.
I have that with phone calls, and sometimes email when I haven’t checked them in a while, so, yeah, I get it.
Same, but it also extends to texts, which is fun all around
Also, it’s absurd for Linda to assume either of them gotten the message when Walky never replied to any of those emails.
But completely typical. If she actually wanted to make sure he knew or ask if it was a good time to visit, she’d call. I bet she knows that Walky never reads his emails.
Yep, she decided to come on over for a suprise check in but emailed to avoid getting called out on dropping by unannounced.
Or answers his phone hence not calling him.
This sort of thing is exactly why text messages exist, emails are for work
So is sending emails yet another thing that makes you a horrible person, like using punctuation in text messages?
No, but sending an email to your son instead of a phone call or text to let him know you’re visiting for the weekend is a little weird, and given Linda’s extreme historical shittiness we’re erring on the side of “She’s being shitty about it.”
Although in this case she probably doesn’t realize that Walky has been dodging her. It’s likely he *did* read her emails – when he checked his email, that is – before he started to understand that she is not a good parent. And now that he does sorta understand that he’s not sure how to deal with it, and so he’s dealing with it the way he deals with everything. He’s avoiding it.
I think you hit the nail on the head.
Then went, found a nail driver, and drove it through the board.
“Subject: Coming to visit you this weekend” might be considered a clue?
He does not answer her phone calls.
Also, sending an email to only one of your two children. It’s not even like a phone call where you would have to make another call. You just add an another address.
Sending multiple emails despite not getting any form of response, and making no effort at all to communicate with your other child (and then blaming that child for having other plans!) does.
Wait a second. What’s wrong with using punctuation in texts?
it sits the bar 2 hI
Ur suppsd 2 use few chars as pssble
S how U know who S 1 of us & who S outsidr
Man, that’s painful.
I can’t read this. My brain only offers incoherent muttering and hissing. If somebody sent me a text that was written this way, I’d fucking block them and then call an ambulance.
Nothing wrong with it per se, it’s just a naturally evolved tonal indicator.
Most ppl leave off the period at the end of the final sentence on a text, because the text itself serves as a form of punctuation disambiguating where a sentence ends and a new one begins. Plus, a lot of texts (or chat messages, or similar) are not full sentences, in the same way a lot of speech isn’t full sentences (yeah, okay, lol, etc). That forns the baseline of communication in the mediun, so deviation from that can be ascribed meaning. In this case, adding the period to the end of the last sentence makes your text have a more formal register, which can feel aggressive in an otherwise v casual medium.
Other kinds of punctuation tends to be okay to put at the end of a text because a question mark/bang have more semantic meaning than a period. But, like, it’s 100% a per-person thing, if you put periods at the end of ur texts regularly, ur friends prolly aren’t taking meaning from that
He’s guessing she emailed him. I bet she actually left voice mails on his dorm land line he never plugged a phone into.
It feels like the strip implied he saw her emails (probably with no subject line because that’s how parents roll) but didn’t open them and see the contents.
Caaaaaaaalled it.
Your powers of prognostication prove perpetually potent.
But are your prescient postulations predicated on perusing pixellated previews???
Perhaps.
Gonna put money down that Joyce’s mom is hoping to guilt Joyce back to innocence with some childhood things.
Carol having ulterior motives when visiting Joyce? I can’t even imagine it, she would never try to force her ideals on Joyce./s
Because that ALWAYS works.
90% chance of it all being religious stuff that makes Joyce realize just how extensively it seeped into every aspect of her childhood.
Ooh, a bunch of weird creepy stuff like a Jesus wedding band or chastity ring. Fond childhood memories that turn out to be hideous propaganda.
With the title of “But Don’t Give Yourself Away” involved? Yeah, I think you’re right on the money.
Shirts that are pop culture references but with weird religious substitutions. Books on “godly” dating. Possibly the dinosaur book that taught Joyce the absurd “facts” that Dina was horrified by.
I think Dina might be interested in reading the book. It would hold a horrifying fascination and give her some insight into her girlfriend’s upbringing.
Her complete collection of Hymmel the Humming Hymnal videos
I just got a flashback to every time my mom decried secular media with “It’s bad for your heart” and oops I think I’m now a full-tilt anti-natalist.
This is my bet too. An old bible, some religious comics and DvDs, some things that will blow my mind with horror, cause I didn’t even know that kind of merch existed, etc.
It couldn’t, of course, be because Carol has perceived that Hank is winning and wants to put in a bid for her daughter’s affection.
Yeah, there’s another shoe that is yet to drop.
But at the same time, is Carol THAT STUPID?
The last we saw of her, she was, at the very least, going to re-kidnap Joyce HOURS AFTER SHE GOT AWAY.
So she either thinks Joyce is incredibly stupid, or she is incredibly stupid.
. . . given that she thought her daughter’s kidnapper was doing the right thing, a combination of stupidity and loving her “faith” more than her daughter.
Yeah, but she also called Joyce to passively aggressively say “whatever happens, i love you”, so she knows what Ross was doing was at least somewhat wrong.
I do agree that she knew he was going to do something horribly illegal but my point is that she seemed entirely convinced that his actions would only be doing what he thought was right for his daughter.
Yeah, I just re-read Linda’s confrontation with Carol.
We saw her deny she ever curses barely a panel after she did it. The selective memory is strong with this one.
Aren’t we supposed to put away their childish things? Like, in Joyce’s case, her blind faith in her family and her religion?
The rest of them gotta call their folks for a location update
And Amazi-Girl better start checking her tracking system.
What is this freshman family weekend 2?
It is happening again.
It is happening, again.
I just said, “Oh no”, like Krillin does in DBZ: Abridged.
https://youtu.be/xgIQqr3E40g
If you’re not watching the commentary videos they’ve been putting up recently, I highly recommend them, but that clip was just featured on Taka’s VoD YouTube channel and I think my favorite aspect out of all the commentary videos so far has been all the (ridiculously talented) cast members (rightfully) fangasming over their (ridiculously talented) co-stars.
I am so looking forward to Saturday when we get all three of the guys together on the commentary video.
I am extremely excited for all three to be able to bounce their commentary off each other.
QUACK!
I would have really thought she’d be banned from campus, considering she’s:
a) not on the approved parents list.
b) been thrown out by Ruth.
Like.
This is SUPER concerning.
I mean, she may very well be, but unless the university is gated there’s nothing physically stopping her from getting on campus.
“Banned”: if you come, and someone complains, They can remove you, because they’ve done the proper paperwork.
Might also edge into “tresspassed”, in that if you’re caught on campus, you’re arrested.
GODDAMMIT WALKY.
On a serious note though, Jeez, it cannot be overstated how bad Sal’s parents are for her mental health.
DAMMIT one day I’ll remember to do roulette the first time.
You could always roulette 2 or 3 times a day until you find Sal.
How do you do the roulette? Is it a Patreon thing?
No, you simply change the capitalization of your email and it changes what gravatar you have.
Yeah. Given there are 29 avatars now that Lyle and Charlie are in, theres a 50% chance of getting any specific avatar after rolling the dice 20 times.
Oh okay, thanks ^_^
Changing the capitalization in your email changes your gravatar, unless you’ve got a custom/set one on their website.
Not knowing how it works is why I set up a custom one xD
May go back to random, I love Angry Jennifer but
Don’t be picky. Love Jennifer butt regardless of her mood.
I SAID BACK IN THE BOX, PARENTS.
Just had the realization that Freshman family weekend was exactly ten books ago
Yep. It’s the final storyline of the third book of the “season,” once again.
DINOSAUR JOKE
… fell behind, can’t keep up the bit
:sorrow:
*subbing in for milu*
Like that’s a long time? You’ve been dead for 65 million years!
Most scientists think it was 66 million years now, actually.
except for YEC Georg who lives in a cave and spits out 666 terrible blog posts a year insisting it’s actually 4,000 years ago. He is an outlier and should be disregarded.
Sidenote: baby ammonites are the cutest things I’ve ever seen.
whaaaaat nooooo cuter than baby isisaurs?!?!
argh i’ve started watching with a… friend, that is, …girlfriend??? um. status TBD. friend. who is girl. whomst i smoo—
HM SO AH THAT IS NEITHER HERe nor there, point is now i have to wait for her to watch the baby ammonites aaaaaah
How did she get on campus? Also Walky read your damn emails they go right to your Charles and Linda learn to text Carol fuck off!
Right to your Charles?
Punctuation saves lives.
No I missed a word which was ‘phone’ .Also punctuation doesn’t save lives edit buttons do
Punctuation saves lives when it comes to things like the difference between “Lets eat, grandma.” and “Let’s eat grandma.”
It’s in the middle of town. You just walk in.
Next will be Mrs. Siegel, a Ringwraith, and a newly announced crypto currency based on Dexter and Monkey Master.
Oh Joyce’s mom and Joe’s dad yelling at each other? Wait both Joe and Ethan are Jewish, Carol is going to leap to some weird conspiracy.
Dibs on the Ringwraith. You lot can suffer the rest.
Is Carol allowed back on campus after she got into a physical altercation with Ruth?
Or maybe the administration decided it looks bad that Ruth suplexed a woman twice (or more?) her age and told Carol they won’t sue if she doesn’t
If she is not on Joyce’s list, and if Joyce doesn’t want her there then she should not be allowed to see Joyce. Unfortunately while the dorm has a level of privacy, walking around on campus grounds doesn’t qualify for privacy. Which is why we keep getting demonstrators on campuses that no one wants.
Given that Joyce is Ruth’s age and Ruth is a kid, it would certainly be unusual if she isn’t at least several years more than twice Ruth’s age.
Enough to be a young adult.
Joyce is the youngest of four children, and her oldest sibling (John) has been out of the house “as long as she can remember”. If he’s 14 years older than Joyce (32), and was born the year after Carol graduated from college, Carol’s at least in her mid-fifties.
Joyce says Hank is 60. She could be rounding, but if not that puts Carol in her late fifties since we know she and Hank attended college together. (Although he could have been more than four years ahead of her at the time; since he’s a dentist he presumably has a DMD or DDS.)
https://www.dumbingofage.com/dozen/
Ruth isn’t a kid? She’s older than the rest of the main cast who are also adults.
They’re all legally adults – or legal-adult adjacent if they haven’t yet had their 18th birthdays – but I think Ruth is the only one who can drink legally. In social terms, most adults of this age can still be expected to be treated as a bit immature by their families. It’s not at all uncommon in our society to refer to young people who have just left high school and who are not yet supporting themselves or living independently as “kids” even though they are, of course, past the age of majority.
She’s surely trespassed from the dorms, but the university grounds (and other buildings) are a different matter. Dorm security issues won’t necessarily be escalated up to university-wide security. At a guess it’d come down to an administrator at Pudding Head’s level making the judgement that “this dorm fracas is also a threat to campus security, I can justify it to campus admins as such, and I’ve decided I can be bothered with the additional paperwork.”
As a result of a massive concentration of parent mass a parent singularity was formed, and Indiana U. Bloomington was sucked into a parent black hole.
Ah. Parental invasion. One thing I’ve been looking forward to since Sal and Danny started dating has actually been how she’ll react when she sees the way they treat/talk about him.
Given her own parental issues, I’m sure she’d have some choice words for people who act like the only value Danny ever had was that he once dated Dorothy.
Sarah, get the bat.
Wait a moment, is Walky 4th wall breaking? Or is he just pretending life is a tv show?
Tell us Willis, how deep does this rabbit hole go?
I’ve never read It’s Walky! or the early parts of Shortpacked! so I can’t say for certain, but I definitely think a bit of Abed from Community has leaked into Walky since that show aired.
It’s a reference to https://www.dumbingofage.com/2023/comic/book-13/04-but-dont-give-yourself-away/itscold/
I refer you to this video essay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mjv6CdQaseA&t=703s&ab_channel=InnuendoStudios
Parent Weekend 2:
Trauma Boogaloo
I just had a thought. No, it didn’t hurt.
When’s homecoming?
I am having six and a half times in the real world right now and still nothing could have prepared me for fucking Carol of all people to show up out of nowhere. I see she’s wearing glasses now??? It’s incredibly innocuous but both Willis and the real world have taught me to look for the worst in people who have proven themselves to be shitty, but I find it suuuuuper hard to believe she’s in contact with Joyce, so it can’t be that brand of manipulation right now, unless she’s known for years that Joyce needs glasses and has pushed back against it this entire time, which would be insane and horrific but she’s religious, so that’s par for the course.
I am not sober at all right now (fuck off, I’m fine), so I think I’ll need to attack this again in the morning.
Gee, I wonder who paid the optician’s bill?
I’m not entirely sure where you’re going with this but I would like to point out that Joyce said both her parents wear contacts when she was getting her glasses. It stands to reason that they would both also have a pair of glasses as well for late nights or when you simply can’t be bothered poking a bit of silicon into your eye
Ah, here comes the reason Linda even has a ‘not an accessory to murder’ card.
Don’t tell me Carol sent her e-mails to Walky too.
So does this mean Carol is getting the house in the divorce?
Might be that the house is being sold to split the assets and thus Joyce’s things need to go somewhere.
Probably, since their whole community probably sided with her in the split. He likely had to move his practice, since not only were a large percentage of his clients probably his fellow parishioners, but they likely poisoned the well, telling all THEIR friends not to give him THEIR custom, possibly going so far as to lie or repeat lies, including ones they knew were untrue but fit their narrative, on their way out.
That’s a lot of probablys, but I think it still holds together.
We haven’t seen some leaning of the fourth wall in awhile.
I’m amazed she had the money to spare for gas. Between the divorce and the fact that I’m pretty sure you don’t get the bail money back if the person you bailed out kills someone . . .
Didn’t Blaine put up the bail money?
I thought they convinced Carol’s church members to put up the money.
The church and it’s members gave all they had but it wasn’t enough so Blaine paid the difference.
Dang it, I didn’t refresh the page before commenting and I can’t delete it.
I thought it was from church funds
Oh, it was both Blaine and the church members:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-9-comic/03-sometimes-the-sky-was-so-far-away/bond/
Yep! And to clarify my earlier comment, while it was both Blaine and the church, I’m pretty sure Carol contributed from her own pocket given how openly she supported the asshat.
The hopeful part of me thinks this will end with Joe standing up to her after seeing how stressed Joyce is. But I’ve been reading long enough not to expect a good ending.
I think it’s more likely that Joyce acts out trying to break away from her mom’s super conservative ways and this causes a conflict with Joe who’s trying not to be that guy anymore and have a real serious relationship with her.
who emails their kids, it’s not a business meeting
you’re doing this on purpose linda, I hate when people do “I messaged you on [one of fifty million different methods] didn’t you get it oh no how weird anyway you’re responsible for that even though I knew you wouldn’t get it”
people shouldn’t act like we haven’t had mobile phones that have built in text messaging since the 90s
My mother emailed me all the time.
But I’m probably at least twice your age, and only got a mobile phone … five years ago.
I’m over the median age so that’s not THAT likely
and yes different strokes for different folks but the principle is that communication should take place through a consistent and convenient medium
for walky and sal (and me) that would be the phone that is almost always on their person
My phone came with GMail and is always begging me to install Outlook.
With Linda every scene with her family feels like a buisness meeting or interview. There’s always some underlying power play, as Sal notes, “it’s never about being nice with her”
She’s (arguably) the worst parent in the comic, including the dead ones.
I mean, it’s hard to beat Blaine for sheer awfulness. Linda sucks, but she’s never straight up berated Sal in the way Blaine regularly did to Amber. Also, you know, she never kidnapped/murdered her friends to prove a point.
Carrol’s standing right there. So far as we know Linda never hit either of her kids with a wooden spoon or bailed out anyone who kidnapped her kids.
I didn’t grow up in a place with a lot of evangelicals, so Linda is certainly far and away the most realistic bad parent to me in this comic.
Linda’s definitely an Olympic-level bad parent, but I don’t think she’s in medal contention at the moment.
Yeah, definitely second tier.
The dead ones are clearly first.
Carol and Clint are the worst living.
Sorry, maybe I’m an idiot; who’s Clint?
Ruth’s grandfather, I believe.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Carol and Clint got together. A match made somewhere warm, and it’d certainly backfire on Carol, but they could do a lot of damage before the match imploded.
I doubt he’s religious enough for her.
Hey, my kid emails me. And if I actually used Gmail, and he messaged me there, it would put up a notification just like SMS. Phones have email too.
I see some of y’all asking if she’s aloud on campus.
I don’t know about your schools, but mine (and I assume most others) are open areas where people can easily walk or drive on.
Yeah, if she gets caught, she could be escorted off.
But there should be no checkpoint that she had to go through.
It’s similar to a restraining order (unfortunately).
Silly Walky, you forgot to account for the B plot.
What kind of Kuchiyose no Jutsu is this?
Edo Tensei, clearly
thought we’d seen the last of carol
I suspect emailing instead of calling or texting might have been deliberate. If walky really never reads or replies to emails it gives Linda room to claim she gave warning and show attention to her “important” child while knowing he wouldn’t actually know or give Sal warning. Cynical side wonders if this visit is an effort to remind her son whose started to pull away and side with his sister to keep following his mothers life plan for him. Ditto with Joyce’s mom randomly showing up to give her things she never asked for.
I would TXT if it has immediacy, like “I’m on my way” or “I’ve arrived at the restaurant.” It would never occur to me to do that for “We’re coming down to visit next weekend”; I’d send an email, because it’s not worth interrupting someone for something that is days away. If I were calling for some other reason I would probably mention it, but again it’s not worth interrupting just for mid-distant future plans.
Unless planning together is needed. Then I’d call. The interaction rate of written messages is too low for thinking together.
Fit the medium to the message.
That’s Silly. A call or text is a way easier way to get information. It’s like never talking to someone but leaving messages on a corkboard.
I would generally assume coming to visit next weekend would be at least slightly collaborative.
I also didn’t think texts were super disruptive.
Need someone to build a parent trap. (Hayley Mills version specifically)
I’m thinking a parent trap Hōjō Satoko version. For Carol at least.
IT GOT WORSE
IT GOT SO MUCH WORSE
OH COME ON
Who the hell allowed Carol back on campus?!?
Carol is officially unwelcome in the dorm, but as far as we know she hasn’t been banned from the campus. I’ve been on the IU campus, and you can look at it on Google Street View or the equivalent. There are no checkpoints for excluding people.
ironsidessiren.mp3
NO.
NO MORE PARENTS.
ENOUGH PARENTS.
What we need is for the Yolkians from Jimmy Neutron to come abduct them and feed them to their giant chicken. Except Dina’s parents of course. They cool.
Hey! Poultra doesn’t deserve that level of indigestion!
Dorothy’s can also be spared.
Fuck right back off the way you came from, terrorist.
My aunt and uncle who still consistently misgender my little sister have left me open invitations to holiday functions and the like, and I think I may metaphorically nuke them one day right before I leave town for good. Just really let them have it and tell them what hypocrites and monsters they are.
*tears off a bigot-seeking parasite spore*
Here, give them this and tell them it was from me.
You know Carol, there is a UPS Store in La Porte who will be happy to pack and ship stuff for you if there isn’t a friend who can just take it to wherever your estranged husband is living now.
There’s a potential bright side to this story people: Linda and Carol might start fighting and drive each other off/take each other out.
They definitely didn’t get alone the last time they met.
That was my thought.
Throw Carol at Linda and run.
“Let them fight”
I have to ask, what the f is Carol the “good Christian mom” wearing? That’s a slinky little summer dress with a lot of pushed-up cleavage.
Carol is a divorced woman who has already or is about to hit her sexual peak and (either in this continuity or the other one) had an active sexual interest (I believe she and her husband had a copy of the Karma Sutra), not to mention the 4 kids; she’s got to let people know she’s on the market, but is too prudish to be upfront about it.
She might also be running a little hot considering it’s winter, but her coat is open.
…That’s kinda hot.
I think you’re seeing a black dress but it’s really a trench style coat on top of her clothing.
a BLACK dress??? nonsense! it’s very clearly yellow
NO
That’s it, that’s the comment section for this strip.
Walky, you fool! You know there’s always a B-plot!
walky’s might be the b plot
That honestly sounds like his life goals
oh shit yes
I was fully prepared to drop a whole bunch of derisive sneering on walky but Mom Walkerton Vs Mom Brown is the storyline I am always prepared for
Popcorn? check. Lawnchairs? Check. Those foam finger things? Hmm. Better go visit the bookstore. Be right back.
*BITING BITING BITING BITING BITING
Reminder that Joe is familiar with you the ‘parents are divorcing’ process. I think his mom even got him an xbox to try to win him over.
FRESHMAN FAMILY WEEKEND II: RELEASE THE KAREN!
RED ALERT
Do we know what Sal’s lunch plans are? What’s the chance she and Danny decides to go meet her parents instead, just to Show Them (up)?
Pretty sure Sal doesn’t know what her lunch plans are, other than “Not with parents”.
This is why we don’t invoke the fucking name.
Oh FUCK.
This deal’s getting worse all the time
Willis has altered the deal. Pray he doesn’t alter it any further.
When Joyce stayed with Becky for winter break, was it at her La Porte house, or was she still living in Robin’s Bloomingon house?
I would guess that Becky’s family home is still locked up while the estate oozes through Probate. Recall that they had to break in to look for her identity documents.
With Robin I think. Becky had decided by Halloween that she was selling it, so it’s probably either with the bank or sold by now.
lol i guess a campus wouldn’t be super guarded/gated towards letting in cars for convenience but would’ve expected there to be some kinda visitor thing. we need to summon ruth haha
this whole thing is odd to me bc here in australia all uni campuses are public space. anyone can go in, i for walks at the local one all the time. but i guess we also don’t have members of the public carrying guns, and the whole vibe in general is super different here to what I see in DoA.
Most campuses in the USA are like that, too, but student residences are usually private. The ban on Blaine O’Malley being on campus was unusual, but before that Amber had already placed him on a list of people unwelcome in the dorm.
Some urban campuses, such as New York University, really just have buildings—no open spaces at all.
I live near a prominent private university, and I bike across the campus all the time as if it were a public park.
The dorms are only sort of technically private. We constantly see people just wandering in. Unwelcome guests can be removed, by security or suplex, but there’s no one checking and nothing keeping people from wandering in during the day.
At night, the dorms are locked.
either way i suppose joyce could file a restraining order for her mom, or be successful enough to move far away from her, though i imagine she’d still stay in touch with her other relatives and let them know that she’s cutting her off, if it’s something joyce is willing to do
College campuses in the US aren’t necessarily gated communities, especially older institutions in established cities. Individual buildings are generally either wide open or behind locked with badge access (usually the case with residence halls). The edges of campus kind of blend into the surrounding town or city.
IU Bloomington is a real place, you can look at it on Google Maps. Street View even visited Blowjob Cat a few times!
When it rains it pours I suppose
Old lady (thirty-something) here: I’ve made my mailbox 99% less scary by having one for business, one for pleasure, and subscribing to newsletters I’m actually interested in (there seems to be kind of a newsletter renaissance going on!). Don’t know if this can help someone.
I just can’t be bothered to keep up. Like lots of other forms of social interaction email has been made too easy so I am now constantly socially overloaded.
This whole “30 is old” mentality is part of why I’ve had to manually and gradually train my brain not to block off possible hobbies or career ideas because it’s Too Late®️. People where I’m from just completely give up on life if they’re not a skilled artist or engineer or whatever, and it’s a huge source of depression.
Do Dina’s parents next, they’re nice.
Looks like the Poor Parenting Panel are back. Sheesh.
Somehow we downgraded when Linda walked away.
Dear Sal,
You don’t have to spend time with your parents if you don’t want to. Especially not if you’re mom’s a bongoface and chooses to treat you like crap. Go spend time with Danny instead. It’s far past time you two boned already.
She’s already made clear to Linda she won’t be spending time with them but their unexpected presence still has a negative emotional impact. Especially when they choose to show up at random times in the day advertising that they keep track of their schedules.
OH NO
…maybe that’s what Jocelyn’s phone call was about
Maybe. Good catch!
Do you remember where that is? We should probably link it here, but I don’t remember and have no hope of finding it on mobile…
hup
Aw dang, Jocelyne’s even tagged and everything.
Expected better of you tbh smh
<3
Hasn’t Carol been calling her too?
I was wondering the same thing. Oof.
considering if it was that important, Jocelyne should’ve sent a follow up text like “heads up moms planning to bother you” or so or even tell their dad to pass on the message
Yeah I’m gonna hate this storyline.
Look on the bright side, it might end with some parents dead or in jail.
This is promising. I guess as earthlings say, “every cloud has a silver lining”.
I don’t particularly want that either.
Part of me knows that would be traumatic for everyone involved.
Part of me wants a scene of Joyce holding a bloody hammer over her concussed egg donor, declaring “then surely you’d agree THIS is God’s will too!” before swinging again.
Someone needs to go contact Asher. He’s so far 1 for 1 as far as dealing with terrible parents.
Feeling less judgmental of Walky knowing that his mother was emailing him though. I check that nonsense maybe once a month, and I can’t imagine he’s too thrilled to hear from her anymore.
The plot twist is Asher is also part of this family weekend
Hello, Grandpa
Linda and Carol end up disrespecting Grandpa so much he has them Blaine’d, resulting in Grandpa being the best parental figure in the comic.
God, that would be hilarious
AAAAAAAaaah wait since when does Linda wear glasses
She doesn’t. That’s Carol.
Who also doesn’t wear glasses normally. I think it was mentioned she had contacts in Joyce’s glasses storyline.
Oh. So, maybe she switched to glasses when her finances took a hit.
Or, maybe her prescription no longer allows for simple contacts, and she now needs bi-tri-no-line-focals.
Sal, there is still time to grab Danny and abscond like the wind before his fucking treasure of a mom shows up to add to the parental pileup
Also, Willis, I desperately want to meet the Ruttens
Also I want to see the Billingsworths for like…confirmation they exist.
The alleged Billingsworths.
The Billings’ alleged worth.
I know you were just switching words around, but THAT’D be a twist – the Billingsworths aren’t actually rich, they just have a bunch of scams going on that makes them look like they are. Like Theranos or Trump.
Shit’s getting real. Let’s hope divorce mean some minimum of character development in the case of Carol.
Has Carol a new haircut? Is allowed a conservative christian to make a new haircut? (Yes, I know it’s.)
It’s strange to see her glow up, because she’s a traditionalist baptist. Comparing with my own mom, they are very strict with this hair or clothes.
For example, I never saw my mom with a new haircut. Never.
I thought they were Pentecostalists?
They call themselves “non denominational”, which is kind of a misnomer, since most American non denominationalist churches really form an informal denomination of their own, though with close ties to other fundamentalist Evangelicals.
“Non-denominational” just means baptist tbh
Like I need another reason to be on edge, I almost got scammed just now in my search for coding jobs.
Look on the bright side – you avoided getting scammed, and now you got the experience and are even more scam-proof. Looks like a win in my book!
I guess you’re right. Here, have a cookie.
The market for coding jobs is dreadful rn. It’s all shifty recruiters and shady third-party staffing companies. I gave up looking after 4 months and took a barista job at starbucks just so I could escape the nightmare and still have insurance. Hoping you find some properity soon
WTF Walky?!!!??
Stop doing this man!!!
Soon even Blaine will return from Hell…
Personally I’m hoping Becky’s mom instead. We can go full soap opera that way.
Or zombies…
Also sorry about accidentally hitting flag post. I have big fingers and a small phone
Could anyone link to the strip where Joyce’s parents get divorced? I read daily most of the time but I somehow missed this strip and just know from the comments
There isn’t one, but I believe someone (Becky maybe?) makes an offhanded remark about “your parents getting divorced over winter break” to Joyce
While Joyce is picking glasses she says she can’t afford a pair and Becky offers to call her dad to cover the difference. Joyce says “I don’t feel right taking advantage of the divorce” or something to that effect. I’m on mobile so I can’t easily go get the strip, tho.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-11/02-look-straight-ahead/eyeballs/
Thank you!!
What a weird excuse to see your kid who you know doesn’t want to see you. “Stuff from the house?” What stuff from the house would a college student want on campus (badly enough to see her murder-accomplice mother)?
It feels a bit Hail Mary doesn’t it? The last of the stuff before Joyce doesn’t ever have to come back, I’m thinking. So, one last excuse for talking to her.
Oh, yeah. Or it’s not even that and she’s actually just lowkey throwing her out???
Throwing her out of what, at this point? Carol’s the one who needs to go away, if anyone does.
idk maybe the house is hers? maybe not but Hank lets her keep it for story reasons?
As I pointed out in another comment, there is a good chance that Hank’s professional, and personal, life is through in their home town. There is a very good chance that, in the split, the whole church sided with her against him, and managed to starve him out of business. They possibly even drove their acquaintances from outside their congregation to quit going to him, too. And there’s a pretty good chance that he was their go-to dentist, as he was a member of their community, so just them leaving may have meant losing a majority of his business in one fell swoop, before accounting for the loss of friends of fellow parishioners.
If anyone had a better claim to the house, well, that doesn’t matter, unless it had been in his family for a while.
If anyone needed to move, to get away from a place where they were quite literally no longer welcome, even if just to be able to make ends meet, that’d be Hank, not Linda.
i am now imagining the entire congregation letting their mouths rot rather than be treated by a hellbound outcast and it makes me grin stupidly
I suspect it is an aggression disguised as concern. What is really meant is “If you are going break all contact with me then you can’t store your stuff in my house!” But with a hypocritical “I am so concerned that you might need your childhood stuffed animals at this difficult time!”
Also there is being honest about stuff. Just because you are mad at someone doesn’t give you the right to destroy or throw out there stuff. Honesty and basic decency requires you to get their property back to them somehow. Yes, there are plenty of assholes who disagree and think someone doing things you don’t like entitles you to keep or dispose of things that belong to them that are under your control, but not everyone does.
What if if Carol came to give Joyce her favorite childhood Bible or something, and Joyce was just like, “Thanks, but I’m an atheist now” and walked away… I mean, it probably wouldn’t be safe, but it’d freak Carol out and possibly break her for a moment, and that’d be great to see.
Dunno, it seems a lot of people would rather fight than win, and that’s a fighting move, not a winning one.
Oh, hi Carol. Thanks for the box. Now go make yourself useful and go on a snipe hunt on the other side of the planet.
This is the parents” gacha game. How many quarters until Hank pops out?
Oh no no no, it’s not that kind of gacha. This is more a Saint Quartz or a Primogems situation, and Hank is an SSR, and rate up is a lie.
Oh dear god no
The problem with billionaires is that it’s impossible for them to realistically spend all that money during not only their own lifetime but 2 or three generations after. It’s like going through a major drought just to find out your neighbour is hoarding a basement full of bottled water.
If even a fraction of that wealth was actually in the system, it could be used on health care, housing etc. Instead it’s all in one guy’s bank account where the likelihood of it getting spent is 0. Sure, people like Bill Gates and Dolly Parton exist, who spend masses of their fortune on charity but not every billionaire does so…
But billionaires spending cash on philanthropy are actually just as bad. They give so that we don’t think of them as ghouls who profited off a brutal system. No opinion on Dolly Parton but Bill Gates argued fighting a pandemic and saving millions of lives takes a backseat to Big Pharma’s IP profits. He’s a piece of shit. Don’t buy into hisphilanthropy PR
Plus on that scale, philanthropy winds up just distorting policy. The money’s great, but places that need it wind up doing what it takes to qualify for it.
Also – a lot of billionaires lose interest in donating when it doesn’t buy them a say in governing the thing. If they don’t get it, the money never materializes.
True for many, but even the well intentioned ones distort. Just by funding what they think are good approaches and worthy projects.
Myth of elites saving the world. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37506348-winners-take-all
Money,…doesn’t really work that way. There is no direct, rigid, conversion from money into food, or shelter, or water. It’s more like hoarding a billion IOU’s from society as a whole.
Cash all those in at once, and all you manage to do is: A. not have the IOU’s any more, and B. raise the cost, in IOU’s everyone else needs to get anything.
About the only thing that much wealth CAN be used for, all at once, is to focus a good chunk of society in a positive direction. Maybe you raise the overall cost of construction, for everyone, at least for a little while, because you bought the labor that was available, outbidding all other uses for that labor, to build something (you think) everyone needs. A new park/playground/church/school/museum/theater, etc. If you do it often enough, for long enough, prices start to come down again, as more people move into the business of relieving you, and everyone else, of that money. Possibly more construction equipment and general contractors in the area, because mister Rich Bucks is always building something, somewhere.
And that all only applies to liquid funds. Much of a rich persons’ wealth is in valuation. Often saying this business they own is worth this much, because when they sell a fractional ownership of it, or some fractional ownership they sold years back does change hands, it’s for this much, and multiplied by how much of that fraction they still own, it’s this larger amount. That can’t be extracted without selling the business, or its assets.
Heck, much of a regular persons’ wealth is in valuation. Much of your valuation is in the resale value of your car and house, presuming you have either. Maybe your tools, if you have expensive tools.
Run!
Dumbing of Age: All Evil Parents Attack!
God, what a dick move on Linda’s part. “I told David a dozen times.” No you didn’t, woman. You sent a dozen emails you *knew* he wouldn’t read. Clearly he never responded back. You knew, straight-up, that this was going to be a surprise and still had the temerity to act like your kids should have known.
That’s not even bad parenting, that’s bad people skills. If you don’t get confirmation from the other party that they know, you don’t act like they know. The only reason she can get away with this shit is because these are kids and she has power over them.
Jackass.
One of the problems in comment thread like this is that we don’t have complete information, so people add their own assumptions and speculations.
For instance do we know that Sal reads her emails every day? Why are we assuming that she does when Walky doesn’t? Maybe Linda did email Sal, but she never checks her email at all, while Walky checks it but doesn’t open emails from Linda?
I mean, I have to go with the text here. Linda explicitly mentioned that she “told David”. Which tracks in that she’s basically decided to write off any sort of attempt to have a positive interaction with Sal. Sal could be the world’s most dedicated email responder, but it doesn’t matter because Linda is never going to try and reach out to her because she thinks Sal is never going to be anything more than the “hoodlum” who held up a convenience store. But that’s not really my point.
To me, the point is that she never heard back from him. She never got confirmation from him. And instead of treating Walky with the respect he deserves and calling or texting- even just a “hey, check your email, I sent you something”- she decided that it was good enough warning and dropped in on her adult children. And she’s assuming that Walky didn’t have plans, or a big test to study for, or just wanted a weekend of peace and quiet. No doubt she’s also going to make impositions onto Sal’s time as well.
I’ve made comparisons between my mom and Linda before, and this situation is a perfect example of how Linda has elements of my mom but cranked to 11. When I was in college, I’d have times where I wouldn’t text or email my mom back for about a week. Now, mom wasn’t *happy* about that (which is perfectly reasonable, I absolutely should have been better about responding), but she always just…called. Or sent another message. She never *assumed* that she could impose on my life the way Linda has here.
He specifically says he treats phone like email here.
Emails – old fashioned but you need to check them if you’re a student or you might miss class related information.
My kids have been gone for 20 years but I still have some of their stuff in closets. Buy if I was moving I would make sure they got it instead of throwing it out. That’s their call.
But my kids like to see me unlike Carol and Linda.
I teach in a business college, and routinely acknowledge the annoyance of emails to my students. While also noting that various kinds of teamware are slowly replacing it in companies. But not in one simple transition, and the result is a ragged mess of noncommunication.
Don’t let this end in Joyce’s mom going full anti semite only to wind up sleeping with Joe’s dad (breaking Amber’s mom’s heart).
…for all her faults, I don’t remember that one.
Given everything else we know about Carol’s religious beliefs it would be stranger if she wasn’t antisemitic. It goes part and parcel with that type of Christian fundamentalist world view. I also recall early in the strip Joyce being a bit weird about Joe being Jewish.
Just immediately gets into the conversation she wants, completely ignores the fact that she’s been getting shunned by her daughter
I mean, it’s CAROL, but I honestly wonder if she and Joyce are talking.
Walky, as usual, is correct and did nothing wrong
Lucy’s parents show up for lunch. Mrs. Walkerton gets to be the only honkey at the table.
Oh nooooo.
Oh my Cheese I was expecting someone good like Jocelyn or a mixed bag, but not someone pure evil.
This could lead into Jocelyn.
Bets on how long until Jocelyn actually becomes a legit plot point?
A couple months or so.
In comic time.
Quick Walky use your abilities on Becky! Either she gets her mom back and we go full soap oper or we get a genre shift into zombie apocalypse.
Also are we gonna get to see her get suplexed this time?
I like emails… But then, I’m too longwinded for texts sometimes, and I had the ability to send/receive images blocked on my phone until this year (because my dad forgot he’d done it when I was getting my first phone). I guess I don’t use them too much, nowadays, but my now-wife and I communicated mainly through emails outside of in-person ’til the day we got married and moved in together, lol
So from now on anytime Linda appears or is mentioned we can say “But her emails!”
Sucks to be in different timezones. If anyone who was replying to me in the convo about redemption (schpoonman? Thejeff?) is interested here’s my response.
Redemption is widely seen as some imaginary point you can reach or quality you can achieve. This is false. In my opinion, you just have to live with yourself and your past actions and move on, or “let go or be dragged” as some Buddhists I know tell me.
Characters in this comic learn and grow but do they “redeem?” Just look at everything that’s happened with Joe. He was a total dirt bag. He has to build back a lot of trust, not only with other characters like Dorothy but with the audience too. He had to radically change the way he perceived women, himself, and sex. And there are signs already that he is really going to struggle with this.
Now here comes Robyn. She’s changing too, and she’s a fan favorite, but redeemed? I don’t think so. She has a loooong way to go. Her actions as a politician have far reach effects. We can accept her growth as real, but can she really “redeem” after explicitly working against gay rights in congress?
You can call these stories “redemptive” but they are long and complicated journeys, and these characters’ pasts don’t just go away once they start being cool. Imagine if Linda started “redeeming” suddenly. Her actions aren’t going to be forgotten any time soon. Neither are Joe’s, Robyn’s, Mike’s etc…
Someone who has hurt you can change, and you can say okay, you seem to have understood what you’ve done was bad and it’s time to move on. But your relationship with that person is now fundamentally different. Can you really forget what they did, see them as a different person who has achieved some kind of magical “Redemption”?
I’ll tell you who does think so: fundies lol. And this comic is very anti fundamentalist.
TL;DR redemption isn’t real but acceptance is. See: Mike, Robyn, Amber/Sal, Joe etc.
like thejeff said yesterday, “redemption” is an unwieldy word precisely because it’s so loaded with christian associations. it’s often used loosely to describe an arc in storytelling, where a character goes from being portrayed negatively to positively, without necessarily undergoing some transcendant metamorphosis. i think Joe’s story fits that description.
i’m not sure you and thejeff actually have different views on the story, but i feel like you’re probably working with different definitions of the word “redemption”?
basically, if you ask of “redemption” to be “magical”, then you can’t use it to describe ostensibly realistic psychological narratives. i don’t know that you should, tbh, i’m kind of on your page as far as saying that’s a fundamentally christian concept.
then again, our culture is very christian, so it can also be interesting as a tool to address that. it’s very possible for a writer to be anti-fundamentalist in surface ways (and that’s still valuable and cool) and yet continue to unconsciously think and emote and produce stories that reproduce the categories they grew up with.
…or consciously, honestly. you pick your battles, you might realize you’re a product of your time and place without always needing to be deconstructing that. it’s Fine Actually, to an extent
Haha well when you define it so reasonably, then I have no choice but to accept that it is real! But even in the act of shifting a negative portrayal into a positive one, can it be done without acknowledging their misdeeds, which can never be taken back, and have potentially scarred others forever? Like I said, a character can certainly grow, but in order to depict this reasonably it must be shown that some people will never accept them. That is why I say redemption is ultimately an illusion.
i mean… there’s stories, and there’s real life.
i don’t think redemption is “real”, because like, it’s just a word.
but i feel like your argument is not about it being “real”? so much as saying that it’s a bad narrative device if it brushes aside or diminishes the harm that someone’s actions caused. and yes yes, in that case i agree. and i agree that willis is taking care to include that messiness, and is committed to portraying those emotional ripples of past damage in how they write characters moving to a better place morally.
I’m arguing both points at the same time like a lunatic, because I am incapable of shooting straight.
And yeah, Willis handles it really well!
haha, or maybe i’m the one reframing your argument to make it more comfortable for me to engage with =D
Narrative redemption arcs are a thing. Those almost always require not merely change, but generally some kind of dramatic sacrifice to atone.
Reality rarely gives such neat closure. People can still change and grow better, but they don’t often get dramatic moments to prove it or to make up for what they did. It’s generally much more of a day by day process.
I know people who’ve made new relationships with formerly abusive parents after a decade or more with no or minimal contact. The parent did the work to change. The adult kid slowly came to trust and accept that. Is that “redemption”? I don’t know.
The other problem with the narrative version is that you sometimes do get the dramatic moments in real life, but they don’t always mean the problems are fixed. Often it’s easier to make the big redemptive sacrifice than to put in the day to day work. That’s a way the narrative version can trip us up.
>We can accept her growth as real, but can she really “redeem” after explicitly working against gay rights in congress?
You’ll have to define redemption. For me, redemption is when you aren’t a monster and you do good instead of evil.
Anyone else having trouble with the comments section of this page lately? Last night it made my phone crash twice
Not just chrome, my whole phone crashed and reset. Twice
Cue the Walkertons meeting Danny and switching favorite children.
Danny will become their new favorite child.
yeah i think this is likely too
really expected from narcissistic parents (and gods) who can quickly turn golden children into scapegoats and vice versa
Carol recovered nicely from being Suplexed by Ruthless!
«My mom does not appear out of bushes!»
True. That is something only G-d does.