This comic is about a robot powered by bees, but it's also about the kind of people who think filling a robot with bees is a good idea, and why they're wrong.
Guilded Age
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Cyanide & Happiness
Explosm
Satire, dark humor and surreal humor.
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Look, if I hand in work I might get told that I’m not the smartest boy in the room, but no one can judge me on anything if I don’t hand in any of it at all
Same. My teachers are told in advance as part of my student disability access plan so we can work out tactics (usually having additional due dates and alternative exam arrangements).
Funnily enough, even in Michael Crichton’s “The Lost World” he went out of his way to show that Jurassic Park was completely wrong about T. rex’s vision, by having the guy who wrote the paper GET EATEN for it. Turns out, the only reason it didn’t eat Grant and the kids in the first book was because it just wasn’t hungry.
How hungry is Walky’s mum? Should Amber have at least waited until after the pizza arrived?
I haven’t read the book in ages but isn’t there a moment in the first book where Grant begins to question the vision thing before he gets knocked out by the dinosaur hitting him or the car into him?
Doesn’t the dinosaur-shaped chimeric monstrosity then follow Grant and the kids forever, including running ahead of them so it can wait at the bottom of a waterfall with its mouth open? Was that meant to be some sort of pseudo-avian bloodsport?
I always assumed someone corrected Crichton, and he went “well shit” and threw it in the sequel to cover his ass, without really thinking about how it makes the T. rex’s motivation for chasing Grant completely nonsensical.
Crichton was…a mixed bag, as other responders have outlined.
That sounds entirely plausible for a man who wrote a team of the nerdiest nerds to ever nerd that also had apparently never heard of Grey Goo despite working in nanotechnology
I’ve never read the books. Did he ever address the Velociraptor = Deinonychus thing? I mean, he was basically calling one dinosaur by the name of another.
Although Crichton didn’t cite his sources, that must be taken from G. S. Paul’s Predatory Dinosaurs of the World (1988), a scientific book for a wider audience. Paul is a bit of a lumper and sunk Velociraptor into the quite similar Deinonychus in that book. Nobody followed. Meanwhile they’ve turned out to be a bit more different and not each other’s closest relatives.
I’m aware of Greg Paul’s having done that (though nowadays calling him a lumper is a bit funny, considering his recent attempt to split Tyrannosaurus rex into multiple species). My understanding, though, is that Crichton mostly went with the “Velociraptor” name because he liked the name. I was just wondering if it had been addressed anywhere in the actual books.
Crichton always made science and scientists the villains, and in one book named a minor character after a journalist who had written an article about Crichton’s climate denialism. The character was a child rapist.
Crichton did Dan Brown levels of research, which is to say, he didn’t really do much but he liked people to think he did. He wrote pulp, some of it entertaining, some of it made good movies (because that was his goal after Andromeda Strain). Still pulp.
I think she just means that he was a better student than Sal. Probably due to environment rather than intelligence. I mean Sal’s school was basically a form of exile so she didn’t have the strongest incentive to do well.
To be fair, they got into the same school and were placed into the same math class. It’s very possible their grades were essentially the same but how they were perceived by teachers was not.
You’ve got the modifiers attached wrong. Walky got “good grades” and Sal “bad” ones*, therefore he was the “good student”. Whereas what we’ve seen suggests he was never actually good at studying, just smart enough to coast through school until now.
* also, I suspect that whatever grades Sal got were looked at in the worst possible light.
Y’know, I’d be willing to bet both Walkerton kids have ADHD(it oftentimes runs in families after all). Walky has the more overt hyperactive type while Sal has the inattentive type, which necessitates a different learning style.
It was established that Walky got good grades in school without having to make an effort. As he missed out on learning how to learn things that don’t come easy, he fell on his face with the first test.
Can relate, exactly my maths experience.
I think it’s more to do with her seeing Walky doing well academically as evidence that she did a good job as a parent. She can then treat Sal as an aberration.
If Walky is also having trouble, then maybe she’s the problem.
It can be, tangentially. I kinda had to write a thing about locus of control and how kids develop it; basically telling kids they’re smart from a a young age asks good bc “smart” (as our academically obsessed society sees it) is something youre born with. You more or less have natural acuity for grade school subjects. If you tell a kid who’s naturally good at school that they’re smart without ever putting emphasis on effort, there’s no need to learn how to put that effort in. So they coast through school on untrained inherent talent which can only take you so far, and hit a wall when they reach higher education. This is really bad for ND kids like walky (and me) bc by 18 it feels impossible to learn. At least if it was something practiced from a you age, they could’ve found a way to study that works with their specific needs and been okay.
TL; DR stop praising kids for being “”””smart”””” and start praising them for the amount of effort they put it. Ones an inherent trait you cant take ownership of and that will only take you so far, the others an extremely valuable skill
There’s definitely something to that, but there’s something deeper as well. If it really does all come basically effortlessly, “putting in effort” is just busy-work. Praising kids for putting in time on repetitive work that they already get isn’t really better.
And it still doesn’t teach you actual studying. You still don’t learn how to learn. How do you really put in effort at something that’s trivially easy for you?
You need more challenge. Enough to make you need to put in effort. But that’s really hard to gauge and even harder to do for every kid in a large class.
Probably too late for anyone to see this since the next strip is up but while you’re right about that there is also a very real phenomenon of parents, including and perhaps especially white ones like Linda, flat out refusing to get their kids tested despite them displaying obvious symptoms.
Like my sister in law who complains about my nephew doing things I’ve pointed out are symptomatic of ADHD. ADHD does run in her family too, my wife relatively recently got an adult diagnosis of ADHD.
And don’t get me started on how my niece was very upset one visit and my sister in law just said “Oh it’s fine. She just gets like that when her routine is violated.
Oh really, you mean a major indicator of autism. And not the only one she has. Autism which children born as prematurely as she was are more prone to than children who were carried to full term.
As someone who knows what it’s like to grow up as someone who’s ADHD and Autism didn’t get diagnosed until adulthood and how not being given the tools to do what people are demanding of you because no one will acknowledge you have a problem besides being lazy and maybe stupid will fuck your ass up her refusal to look at reality bothers me.
For mentally/maturity-wise better off parents, they’d get this was a case of a gifted kid, now past the K-12 stuff that they could breeze through, have to actually learn how to study like everyone else, often getting failing grades for the first time before they learn that.
Not for Linda Walkerton, because brother, this is ALL about HER…
Why I always thought that smart students should be challenged earlier on in life so that they would learn how to cope with failure and how to study. Hard to do with mixed, large classes though.
I completely froze at that point for a bit… Also, if I didn’t try, then I was failing because I wasn’t trying, and not because everyone was wrong and I was really not actually smart after all…
Heh. I was considered ‘gifted’ back in those days, too. Which meant I was ‘smart’ enough to look over the class syllabus (which invariably had the formula for calculating grades) at the beginning of the year, and calculate how much homework I actually had to turn in to be able to pass if I was acing my tests.
Yuuuup. Also meant that I could calculate the lowest and highest possible grades I could get in a class when it came down to the last few scores. If I couldn’t get any higher than an 89 in a class, but could potentially eke out a 90+ in another class, I’d cram-memorize way harder on the latter than the former to maximize GPA averaging.
I’m pretty sure before this conversation is over, Linda will have switched to Sal being the “good” one. I predict a non-zero chance that Sal will be so disgusted by more favoritism that she’ll admit she tried boning a TA for grades just to even things out.
But Linda is into that as part of her play book and will commend her for it, especially if the TA in question is still picking up shifts at Glasso’s so Linda can see him and thus instantly judge him as being good or bad for Sal.
This was all caused by Allan, the Head of the department, targeting her children as a way to punish her for actions when she was in college. He’s about to come in and gloat.
Luckily Walky’s speaking of a paleontology “fact” has signaled Dina, who is charging in the direction of Galasso’s as we speak, and her arrival will surely cause a distraction.
(She’s several miles away. T-Rex’s vision is not based on movement, but Dina’s hearing IS based on dinosaur mistruths)
found it, second Dec 2015 bonus strip. and I misremembered, she’s not even summoned in it. sorry, I flubbed the reference and just ended up grammar police.
Haha, this is exactly what Walky deserves for setting up Amber to be verbally abused by his mother. Turns out that Amber isn’t as defenseless and meek as he assumed! Too bad Lucy isn’t here to also suffer just desserts.
Technically, we could say that she had an advantage to offer in this plan and Lucy and Walky took that advantage. That’s kind of twisting words though.
Amber was supposed to bother his parents with her presence and behavior.
No one suggested she would be insulted or abused when planning this, so, no, he didn’t set her up to be verbally abused, and I doubt Walky ever thought the vigilante superhero who plays roller derby to help with her anger issues was defenseless and meek.
This is a weird take for some of us readers to have.
The word maths bothers me *so* much. Many of my closest friends are Brittish and I don’t understand why they pluralize an already plural word … math, doesn’t need a friggin s at the end. Grrrrrr
Mathematics is actually singular – it’s the study of a field. The ‘s’ turns it from an adjective (‘mathematic’, or the common adjective form, ‘mathematical’), into a noun (‘mathematics’).
Dunno. On the basis of nothing, I always assumed that they used maths as short for mathematics. Regardless, I’m pretty sure that they aren’t going to change their usage for our benefit.
Τhe greek word that it comes from “μαθηματικά” is in plural form (and used as such), which I’m guessing why “mathematics” in english looks like it’s in plural form even though it’s treated as if it’s singular.
The LEGO Corporation says that they’re not Lego Pieces, or Legos – the collective noun apparently is LEGO, like the singular. So you can have a LEGO, or a bag of LEGO. They also really want that capitalization. No, I don’t know why.
It feels like a generally good move to not talk how a corporation wants you to talk? Especially about their product, which is very much a form of propaganda?
This might be a little bit of a #FirstWorldProblem, but I’m a huge fan of Kingdom Hearts, and the lack of even a single item from it in Final Fantasy 14 has irrationally annoyed me for years. I looked into it early on (hadn’t even gotten to Heavensward yet), and apparently the main reason was that Yoshi-P and the gang didn’t want to bother with the headache that is The Mouse’s legal team. Since Kingdom Hearts is a Disney property developed by Square Enix, you’d think they could simply borrow the Keyblade and an outfit or two, maybe a Shadow Heartless minion or Gummi Ship mount, but nooooo.
different linguistic structure: apocope vs proper noun.
In my own language we have a rule that apocopes aren’t pluralized and neither do proper nouns. Neither is usually observed.
Is the distinction for “maths” making it plural though? Near as I can tell it’s just a word with an ‘s’ on the end, probably because mathematics has one.
i could be an immortal vampire and still not rly understand math after a century tho i’d prolly still struggle dealing with bills and such unless we found an amazing house/base that we didn’t have to worry about the water bills/elec/ect or just take the wallet of ppl i drink from /shot XD
i mean, counting rice one grain at a time would be time consuming tho i am asian so we have a lot (‘rice is good if you’re hungry and want 2000’ of something lol)
But i think there’s a diff between that and like algebra/geometry i gave up with letters were introduced i’m surprised i graduated but it was a public school so i guess i did well enough/had enough credits
Can’t even really put my feelings into words. Just, like, that impulse of a parent to shout their child into the ground like that will do anything other than make them hide their problems more, rather than thinking about how to help… Just… I am familiar and it sucks very much.
I feel for Walky because he’s a product of what he grew up in. It’s pretty apparent he likely has untreated ADHD, and it’s not like he could ever go to his parents for any kind of help learning anything growing up (educational or emotional) because he was just supposed to be “the good one.” And yeah, he’s getting a harsh learning curve now that he’s away from his parents more, and he’s made some really bad choices, but that doesn’t make him unsympathetic here. Both Sal and Walky were screwed by their parents.
Had a bit of time to cool off, and I’ll agree with you to a point.
But I’ve had to deal with people who pull emotionally manipulative stunts like this before. One of whom *really* messed up my cousin for a while (who I’m as close to as a brother). So it’s a bit of a sore spot.
So, sure. Walky has some reasons for acting like this. They still don’t justify them. And if he gets in the habit, he’ll end up hurting other people.
All in a theoretical sense, mind. As this is fiction and the author can write future plot lines as his discretion. But I’m invested in the story by this point, which is why it can touch a nerve.
And thanks for providing an alternate take that is…. civil.
because college is completely different than high school and it is entirely possible, even frequent enough to be a cliche, for students to do well in high school and then hit a wall and freeze up in college, come on Linda you should know this
As a “gifted” student all through grade school and high school and then someone who failed my way out of and then eventually dropping out of university, I know this all too well lmao
There’s even a subreddit about it (r/aftergifted, I think). Too many gifted kids don’t learn how to study when they’re young, nor are they taught how to fight through the stress of not being able to instantly grasp something. And it can be hard to reach out to a support system who views you as an automatic failure for not being a genius who is supposed to just *get* it, because you’ve gotten things so easily in the past. That’s why it’s a cliche, because then people freeze up and fail and feel lost. Parents like Linda never teach their children how to fail and get back up. They just automatically sort them into “success” and “failure” boxes, and that’s a lot of pressure.
My dad would assume I was being stupid on purpose when not instantly understanding the mathematical concepts he was randomly trying to explain to me at 2AM (awake because insomnia). This… Did not do wonders for helping me to truly believe it was OK to need help, even when I understood this as an abstract and appreciated it applied to other people.
Oh, I know this because he’d tell me to stop being stupid.
My parents mean well and are loving and do still do a lot for us… But there have also been times they have triggered full-on Mama-Bear rage in me as a parent and been shocked by this, and then afterwards I’ve looked back at my own childhood and said to my husband things like “I possibly wasn’t being oversensitive about hating being shouted at to the point where it made me cry til I threw up as a child if THAT’S what was happening to me” (literally getting in a 6/7 year old’s face to shout at her – he meant to get down to her level to talk to her better apparently but got the volume and intensity all wrong for that so I shot between them and my husband yoinked him away from her because NO. This was basically pulling Linda’s face in panel 5 inches from her while roaring) with us in absolute agreement it is not acceptable or happening to our kids…
:0
Your Mama Bear Rage was right to activate. Glad your husband gets it, too. This internet stranger strongly validates that you two have the right ideas on not letting your dad scream at your children — well defended.
I’m still not 100% clear on whether or not this is “was considered normal parenting in the 80s – and is now mainly unambiguously recognised as dreadful” or if it was always considered abusive.
Like smacking your kids – not something we’d ever do, bar inadvertent side effect of trying to separate them ASAP from a potential serious danger e.g. stopping them from grabbing at a pan, but as a child would have been genuinely thrown if a kid had told me “my parents don’t believe in smacking us because teaching kids not to be violent by being violent is kinda messed up”… Or like when my littles were at the biting stage – at least the 3 year old mainly only goes for clothes rather than skin now – a few friends my parents’ and older generations have told me to bite them back to teach them… Which I’m not biting a baby under a year old, even if they are using their teeth on my flesh to help them stand up hard enough to bruise, and I am probably “only” being told to bite them back hard enough to cause mild discomfort and concern, rather than with the same force!!! Like, a baby zombie movie would be terrifyingly believable, but they were literally too young to fully comprehend I was a being independent of them, let alone that, as a fellow human, I can feel pain and that their actions can cause this..! I am an adult, understand these things, and am not a monster. Teaching them with “no”s, extricating them and giving them a little (at that age about 30 seconds but typically about a minute/year) time out, and repeating, until it sinks in that actions have consequences – while also understanding that the part of the brain that gets this doesn’t fully mature until people are about 24… Norms change.
Unrelated or maybe it is, we need to start treating college the way we treat all alternative forms of tertiary education. You’re not gonna learn welding, or hair, or animation if that’s not your thing. Academia shouldn’t be any different
That happened to me. I was valedictorian of my high school (which had some pretty smart cookies in it, I do say so myself), but failed two classes and barely passed a third during one semester at college when my mental health took a real nose dive. Still, I got my sheepskin and a pretty good final GPA.
This, i know many friends who fell into this spiral with no way out, without any background how to learn and the pressure of the environment that “you” can’t have trouble learning
yeah even if walky did decently enough to pass high school i can’t imagine him willingly signing up for AP/IB classes and being valedictorian or so, maybe he got away with lazing around on the weekends stuffing down mcnuggets with Straight A’s in ‘regular’ classes so they ‘rewarded’ him by not forcing him to join any other clubs nad stuff
Or you do well in college but hit a wall if you have to do an unstructured type of job. I got a really good GPA in undergrad despite the work being harder but hit a wall the second half of med school when the learning doesn’t involve sitting in a class and memorizing stuff. Got diagnosed with ADHD now in my 40s and my struggles with getting shit done when I don’t have a clear structure make a lot more sense.
I’m here with you! College was fine, but one specific task in grad school was too hard for my failing memory. (Writing verbatims.) Now I’m glad that I didn’t become a Social Worker, but damn, that was a rough few years.
Yeah, like we know that in school, he performed well. That’s probably part of why college has been a struggle for him, in addition to distractions. He didn’t really develop great study habits or discipline because he hadn’t really needed to exert himself, and now, he’s floundered with mathematics. (I don’t really recall other subjects giving him trouble, it may just be the one class.)
As far as we know, Walky found school easy up through high school. Something about college changed that (maybe difficulty got higher? Maybe there were more distractions? Maybe he needed a parent breathing down his neck?) and school is no longer easy for him. He never developed any skills regarding studying or putting effort into school to get *better* at something, so he continued flunking.
Which annoys me a little and I think confuses the issue.
It reinforces the “math is hard” thing and pushes people to think the solution for Walky is just to drop math or take an easier version. Which isn’t great, when the problem is him not knowing how to study. (+ADHD)
Also, even if math is hard, it’s easy to study for. You just do the math problems. Which I suppose is how his fix worked. He didn’t really need to learn any studying techniques, just to trick his brain into doing it.
I think the similarities with Sal in this regard – both had trouble with math, both had someone helping them with what were probably common study methods, both still struggled despite that – imply that he does actually need a studying technique that works for him since she found one that works for her and is no longer struggling while he, despite no longer outright failing, seems to still struggle.
Also, I’m pretty sure Danny said recently that Sal’s problem was the rules for solving the math and not solving the math itself.
And if I remember correctly, Jason telling her to just do the math problems was part of the reason he couldn’t help her.
Thejeff, mathematics is easy, but developing conceptual confusions about parts of mathematics is also very easy. Just doing the math problems (probably wrong) while the conceptual confusion remains isn’t really helpful. There are people who are incapable of doing college level math, but the odds are really high that those people never made it into college in the first place. Math is one of those places where individualized tutoring where someone can have you work through problems, discussing them as you go, so they can identify where your confusions are, can be extremely valuable.
I apparently put this badly. Two separate ideas. First, I dislike the general framing that “math is hard”, since it contributes to the problem. It makes people think that math is something they should struggle with. In this case, it distracts from understanding that Walky’s real problem is learning to study and leads to suggestions like just dropping the high level math classes, rather than trying to learn to study.
2) Obviously some people learn differently and need different techniques to learn math (or other things for that matter). Like Sal needed Danny’s approach. But the evidence is that wasn’t Walky’s problem. His problem was that he never learned to study and now that he needed to, he couldn’t. He didn’t need a different approach to math to figure it out, he just needed to put the work in.
With math, just putting the work in isn’t conceptually hard. With other topics, if you never learned how to study a text and just reading through it once like you used to do in high school doesn’t work anymore, you need to have a new method that you never learned.
Aggressively and loudly disappointed in a public place where people are trying to enjoy their meals, but never angry. Don’t tell the news she was angry.
I didn’t even raise my voice, Officer. I listened to my son calmly, and then he suddenly became very upset and started stabbing himself with the cutlery in my hand. I didn’t do anything!
It’s because they both have righteous anger based on belief.
It’s just that we’ve seen Joyce’s anger multiple times, she’s a likable member of the main cast if not the outright main character, and it’s usually justified (even before her beliefs changed).
This is the first time we’ve seen Linda’s anger, she’s a barely recurring character who isn’t well liked, and her anger isn’t justified, so noticing the similarity feels weird.
Look, Linda. You said that if you were struggling in Math you would bang one of the TA’s to artificially boost your grades. Walky’s TA was straight (I think) so he banged a hacker to artificially boost his grades. He took your style and improved it. You should be proud.
My dog got run over by my school bus while I was on it. And they wouldn’t let me get off the bus once I got on despite the fact that we were still at my bus stop.
And also y’know the whole “my dog just died” part. Just took me to school.
Sure. She was actually kinda old already to be fair. She was a Beagle named Lady. Super mild mannered. We usually let her wander the neighborhood when we were out of the house and she’d always come back.at the end of the day. Can’t say I remember much more than that. I was 14 when she died…so 15 years ago.
That bus driver was brutal. Did your parents complain? Did your school call them to let them know what happened/let them collect you when you got there?
Ouch. If we’re sharing childhood traumatic dog stories. I once saw my childhood friends dog get torn apart by a much larger dog the owner was just letting walk around off leash. I was in like 4th grade, and it was the 90’s. We were walking home from 7/11. The dog survived, but died a year or so later. I still remember running home with one of my hands splattered with dog blood.
This dog was like a pit Bull mix or something. I just know friends dog was a ting lap dog. One of the really fluffy ones. I think a Pomeranian or Bichon Frise. I remember my older brother kicked the big dog in the mouth and the owner yelled at us. I never learned what happened after, like if the owner got sued or something.
He actually said the opposite. That it wasn’t legal for him to let me off of the bus once I had gotten on it. But he coulda made an exception…considering.
I think it is a serious liability thing though. Unless Yoto’s parents were there getting off the bus can get the driver in even more trouble than running over the dog. That’s a really shitty situation Yoto. Sorry it happened to you.
Like, really. Maybe it’s just me but I’m feeling like there’s been more bad moms than bad dads lately? Like, Amber’s dad and Becky’s dad are dead, and Hank is more “trying to do better”, and now Charles is looking like he might turn out to be pretty chill. I can’t remember when there’s been a decent mom on here that’s been around for more than a panel.
Flunking one class, lady. One class. Like we can put things in perspective a little. What’s matter if he still graduates. They really gonna hold the one class you flunked the first semester of freshman year against you?
Why not? They’ve held shit against Sal since she was little and held ‘being brown and poor’ against Marcie since she was five years old. Walky’s not being what Linda wanted so she’ll absolutely hold it against him.
I was wondering when the other shoe was going to drop and destroy their friendship. But damn Amber you really just threw Walky under the Bus, didn’t you?
And Linda is still the worst. Good to know. “My good student”. Does she only care about her kids based on performance?
She definitely doesn’t know how, but she is responsible for figuring it out. Nobody says being a parent is easy, it’s still not cool to terrorize your children.
She could take some therapy. Read books. Humbly do her best, and apologize when she screws it up.
Learning parenting is super hard, especially if she had bad models herself! but it’s the job we sign up for when we become parents.
Yeah, Amber wanted to spite Linda enough to where, even for her, this was rather thoughtless. Not like I am holding it against Amber that much, but I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if she is remorseful about it later, because fucking yikes.
Amber will hate herself even more for this, mores the pity, because Walky threw her under the parent bus first. He expected her to just sit there and let his parents browbeat her and insult her so Lucy could enjoy being comparatively OK.
Eh, I think Walky just expected passive-aggressive behavior from his parents and not this aggressive-aggressive behavior. I don’t think anyone was expecting Linda to be this blunt and just straight rude. Once Linda did start dishing out insults Walky tried to defend Amber.
Walky expected Amber’s presence and behavior to bother his parents.
At no time did anyone suggest Linda or Charles (but let’s be real, it would only be Linda) would just start insulting Amber repeatedly.
The fact that Walky actually came to Amber’s defence, which kind of goes against the idea of the plan, suggests he didn’t think Linda was gonna go as Aggro as she had. he probably expected the thing to be awkward and uncomfortable. I don’t think he’d have gone with this plan if he knew that Linda would be that intense in her disapproval.
I agree. He’s surprised and terrified by this screaming mom of hair-spikes.
They’d thought it would be awkward, and that Amber would easily chill out on her phone and utterly ignore an uncomfortable passive-aggressive Linda. This is all *way* worse than Walky imagined.
And then she internalizes those consequences as why she’s a monster and the worst person ever.
She got at least some insight into that cycle from Ethan. It’ll be interesting to see if she can apply it after this.
Well I’m…Happy that this idea blew up spectacularly in Wally’s face but the blowback of how this is gonna change the family dynamic might fuck Sal up a little bit.
Sal is now their golden child /unironically/. Even in spite of how she was treated growing up. Also happy Danny could finally see Walky get a clapback for once.
If we are to go by Jennifer’s assessment she is still the golden child (the fact that she gets more cookies then Sal despite crashing while drunk supports this) and Sal is now in second place, this can be taken away if she breaks up with Danny.
From Danny’s PoV, Walky’s been particularly crappy TO HIM, though that’s eschewed because he doesn’t know that’s just Walky being himself to everyone, he just happened to prod Danny’s issues in particular.
I think this might get Danny to move Walky from “feral child that victimizes me in particular” and into “general screw-up with a messed up family dynamic”
Do we even know what T-Rex vision was really based on? Like do we got intact T-Rex eye tissue or is science just educated guessing based on old bone rocks and modern animal equivalents?
Weeeeell, you could argue that the “modern cowboy” look that many paleontologists like to sport in the field is one of the typical looks of butch lesbians, but I don’t see all lesbians vibing with Alan Grant’s wardrobe
Seems like a moment where we should cut to Dina and Becky in the dorms and Dina to explains it to the audience. Then cut back to the carnage unfolding.
The “vision based on movement” thing is something Michael Crichton misinterpreted from a study done on frogs (he retcons this in the sequel).
When it comes to T. rex’s vision irl, there isn’t a fossilized dinosaur eye, but we can infer a couple of things from the skull’s anatomy. For example, from all the non-avian dinosaurs (all those that aren’t birds), T. rex is one of the if not the one with the most forward facing eyes, just on par with modern eagles. Suggesting that it REALLY depended on its eyes to spot prey, possibly from very, very far.
There might have been a study done on its braincase that might support this, but I don’t remember off the top of my head.
Who is it logical to be upset with in this situation. I’m pissed you were flunking one class like six months ago while you’re still clearly enrolled in school with no apparent fallout. This is pretty illogical already. My mom would probably congratulate me for getting away with some bullshit over this.
His interests are irrelevant, he should know he’s meant to be a doctor because that’s a good career that will make his parents (re: Linda) proud and increase his socio-economical standing! (big, BIG /S here)
My good student, singular. Like, christ, lady. The favoritism is absolutely dripping.
Of course, being the exalted by the family has its downsides, and we’re seeing it. Linda gave Sal a lot of the cold shoulder, but I wonder how often she got outright screamed at like this, much less in public.
man it was never this bad in terms of reaction but honestly so triggering to me being in middle school and basically failing math every year despite being a “smart child”.
..can’t wait for someone to put linda in her place…? maybe?
(I flunked math my junior year of high school. Or was it senior? I forget. Had to switch classes. Struggled with it in college, too. Finally realized: I don’t EVER have to take math again! …Still have math class nightmares, though. Decades later.)
You know what actually helped me figure out math in the end, though? Carpentry. It was only after a year of working in construction that I could actually develop the mental discipline to really slog through math. Something about the repetition of it.
Yeah I truly think it’s just everyone needs their own ways to figure out how to make it click, and some shit just doesn’t make sense until then. Very relieved to know I’m in good company of my fellow math flunkers!
Finishing my last Math course in college (liberal arts math, the lowest level of math possible) was truly one of the best days of my lifeeee.
It’s hard because it’s so standardised and nobody is ever willing to help a struggling person learn it in a way that clicks, because that takes effort uwu.
Over time, I realized that everyone sees math differently and even if someone tries to explain math to someone, it ends up like trying to describe a color that the other person can’t see, which can end up in frustration and the classic “why can’t you see it”
It’s the most unnatural thing you will ever do with your brain. Every single piece of mathematics requires hard work to understand it. We forget how hard the early stuff was because it was so early in our lives, I think. Also the early stuff is more mechanical, less creative.
I think the Core Curriculum might’ve been way better for us! The way math used to be taught was way more convenient for teachers of large classrooms, and for people who were good at learning math in that specific way. If you weren’t either of those types of people, though, you were pretty left out — like apparently a whole lot of us in this comments section.
I’m really curious to learn if Common Core works better for me someday, along with my kiddo(s).
lol has she even gotten to take a bite of the pizza yet?
i imagine she’d either stick around long enough to make sure the bridges isn’t 100% burned for walky’s sake or take off when he or sal say that she should take off
well, sydney showed up and asked ‘is pepsi ok’ so i imagine they had some kinda interaction because other than being thirsty or having a ‘usual’ i feel like ppl order the food order first before a drink unless they bring a drink first, tho usually at a ‘pizza buffet’ you’d just get cups and go to a fountain yourself
(sorry didn’t mean to flag, if the mod is reading this!)
“I was flunking because the class schedules of college are not conducive to my learning style which requires a more regular schedule of homework, class time, and allows me time to digest and formulate what I am learning.”
“Being a gifted student meant I never had to study or pay too much attention and the drip feed of content day after day was easy to absorb, but here? 3 hours a week and then I have to motivate myself to do the reading? I can’t do it.”
This is the same rug pull I experienced entering college, grad school, and now my doctorate program.
I was actually a pretty good student until I started grad school. That’s when I discovered cramming for exams. I also discovered that people running grad programs don’t care about grades quite as much as things like being self-motivated and/or well adjusted.
It’s a shame more teachers aren’t equipped to handle ‘gifted’ students, some are just advanced but idk how many ppl who were called gifted/the top of one class necessarily skipped up a grade or so, other than a ‘gifted program’ but i imagine that’s still more education/learning ahead of some students rather than a variety of other ‘life skills’
Like, someone could make a perfect score in math but still need extra help with hand eye coordination (like you don’t have to be amazing at sports but being healthy and able to burn off more energy as a young kid might build good habits for the future), or need more help with some logical stuff or social skills (i’ve heard about some like ppl as young as like 14 ‘smart enough to get into college class’ but it’d be hard to make peers, even if you’re as smart as them and there’s no ill intent, i can imagine it be hard for some one in their 20s to befriend a minor that young)
Honestly this strip fully triggered me, straight into shortness of breath and adrenaline spike because it fully captured the experience of staring into the rage on my parent’s face as they demanded answers for my plummeting grades. (Executive function died, but I didn’t know that.) The freezing up and being unable to answer. Linda’s face going from surprised, to angry, to LIVID. This strip just hit me really hard, it’s very well executed and emotionally spot on.
My mom is a lot more like Carol. Manipulative, passive-aggressive and guilt-trippy.
My *dad* is a cross of Linda and Toedad. All the narcissistic and self-righteous fury matched with violence so casual that it didn’t feel like a big deal to get hit unless the was threatening my death. Like Linda he’d be set off by stuff he thought made him look bad, and like Toedad, he demanded total and immediate compliance.
Linda, go get hit by a bus. Unironically go and get hit by a bus. You are part of why Walky struggled. He is afraid of failure because he expected a reaction like this, so instead of working on it, he froze up and hid it
It absolutely is, trust me. It means walking on eggshells all the time, and the unfortunately relevant quote of “Admiration is the furthest thing from understanding” coming in handy here. It means they don’t really know you, and you can’t let them know you because of the scrutiny it will bring.
(Not a golden child myself, trust me, but my best friend experienced a lot of this.)
I’m the closest thing my family had to a Golden Child, so I understand it all too well. The thing about Walky sort of neglecting Sal is also pretty familiar, which is why I don’t defend myself when my little brother lays into me more harshly than I’d tolerate from anyone else.
Strongly agree. Kids are wired to need the love of their parents, it means survival. A golden child gets to see that this love is completely conditional. They also get a front-row view of what happens if they lose that favor.
Conflict and failure become deeply, existentially threatening on a deep level.
For example, remember how Walky thought Dorothy would instantly dump him because he wasn’t automatically good at calculus? Linda is definitely where that idea came from.
I agree tgst Walky was at least emotionally neglected to the same degree as Sal even if treated better. Linda doesn’t know her son any better then her daughter. She never cared how Walky learned just what his report card said.
Oh, for sure. My friend’s the scapegoat to her brother’s golden child, and the way their parents treat them both is ridiculous. The parents have literally followed him around the country as he has gone to school. “Oh, you’re going to undergrad in Tennessee? We will also move to Tennessee.” “Oh, you’re going to move back to Michigan for your next level of schooling? We’ve been missing Michigan as well.”
Not to mention last I heard, his plans were to become a doctor, and he was pushing himself through medical school even though he has a FEAR OF BLOOD. Like, my friend once told me his plan was to get into a specialization that didn’t deal as much with blood, and I was like, okay, but that’s gonna come up in med school, right?
So sorry, I hit the “flag” when I was trying to hit reply and can’t figure out how to undo it.
I was going to say that there are rotations in med school where you have to do procedures like drawing blood or doing spinal taps or sit in on a surgery, but if he were able to muscle through that, there are plenty of specialties to go into that don’t involve much exposure to blood.
Being a golden child can sometimes be a precarious position you can easily topple from. I think similar issues can result from well off kids who can be paid for college but have to toe the line precisely or they lose it all. And if you’re raised all your life that not getting a degree (and wasted loans if you try it by yourself) will ruin the rest of your life you’ll do that. Or at least try your best to be perceived as doing that.
Also as Walky has become more aware of the unfairness of it (he used to think it was purely based on Sal fucking to like with holding up a store) the idea of it would chafe more probably. His parents are not reasonable people or at least his mother isn’t and his father at best spineless.
Not only is it precarious, it’s a burden because of that. Nobody wants to be treated terribly, and a parent who’ll deliberately treat one child worse than the other can’t be trusted not to just treat them both like garbage if the Golden Child stops being so golden. And then you’ve got the scenarios where they’ll pit the kids against each other to deflect attention from their own shittiness, so it adds to the burden. The Unfavorite will start to hold that status against the Favorite, build resentment, and if the Favorite isn’t drinking the Kool-Aid they’ll feel even worse from that but be unable to break out of it.
My sibling and I traded GC status a few times growing up but it was usually her since she was cuter and more socially adept, where I was goofy-looking with a giant overbite and teeth too big for my face and socially awkward. But I was the “well-behaved” and “smart” one.
It’s just, my parents were both younger siblings of GC older siblings so unless my sister really screwed up I was doomed to not be the favorite. My parents also did do a lot of fucked up things to put us siblings against each other, like punishing me when my sister screwed up or forcing us into doing all the same activities and then lying to each of us on why. She told me they only had time for one activity and as the oldest she needed me to “be responsible” and give up stuff I actually enjoyed for my sister, and she told my sister that I would be too lonely in another activity and to help me make friends. But like she did that in a way to fan our resentment of each other. Or our parents didn’t want to bother throwing two birthday parties so they’d cancel mine on the excuse a summer party is too hard to schedule and then they’d fold mine in with my sister’s party – but then because it was hers I was only allowed to bring a single friend. Then my sister was pissed because her party wasn’t entirely hers, and I was pissed because at least she got a party and got to do what she wanted with it.
Anyway from my few brief experiences in the role I can say with confidence: The GC absolutely knows their status is conditional. If your parents haven’t swapped you into the SG role it’s scariest because you don’t know you can survive it – but if they have swapped you through that role you then have a huge amount of toxic shame built up because your parents don’t love you, they love whatever role you take on as the GC.
Being the Golden Child outwardly may look AMAZING to the Scapegoat as they are pitted against each other. But the Scapegoat usually eventually gets out – they leave, they don’t look back, they’re free, they recover, they learn to live a good life and make the most of it even if the first couple of decades of their life sucked.
While The Golden Child’s life is usually ruined or essentially under their parent’s control forever as they have often very few to no resources to leave even if they come to their senses eventually.
Neither is raised with the intention of helping them become functional adults with life skills, social skills etc. to survive and handle life on their own.
It is even worse when the roles are not even fixed to people but may both apply to one person (A = Golden Child, less than A = Scapegoat), or be swapped between people depending on the mood, as that can make home life and the dynamics in it, unpredictable and unstable 24/7.
Even if the kid is oblivious enough not to consciously realize they’re not inherently better than their sibling (see Walky or for that matter, my sister when we were kids), you get a lot of pressure from your parents to maintain the role. Walky’s role is genius goofball.
And, subconsciously, you know your parents don’t love you, they love your role and what it does for them.
Why is Linda so upset?
She was implicitly bragging about sleeping her way through college a few pages ago.
Technically, Walky is doing the same thing.
She slept with a TA. Walky slept with a girl who is skilled at computer s and breaking and entering.
Oh, I see. Look at the rage. That’s betrayal. Linda whole parenting style is living vicariously through her children. And Walky is failing in his role of doing everything right.
If I continue this theory. It implies that Linda’s problem with Sal, at least in part, is that she’s herself in Sal.
Yeah, absolutely Linda probably knows Sal is much more like her than Walky is. Thankfully Sal does not take after her in all things, but there are definitely shared traits, such as self-righteousness. (Sal thankfully is nowhere near as toxic, but we’ve definitely seen this from her many times.)
If you’re a bigoted abusive mother with savior syndrome whose animating force is spiting others and making scapegoats and golden children for that purpose, consistent personal values are a hindrance.
Not that I think she’d be doing that great anyway but she is already in a terrible mode because *gestures at the last half dozen strips* and THEN this bombshell got dropped
Do we actually know for sure that Linda did bang her TAs for grades?
Yeah she joked about it, but it may be more along the lines of someone asking “who do I have to kill to get some service around here?” (I.e. some exaggeration done for comedic purposes).
This doesn’t mean Linda isn’t a bad person, just that in this one situation she may not be guilty.
Honestly wondering what Sal and Danny’s reaction to this is. Danny knows a thing or two about shitty parents, and Walky is being dethroned as the golden son as we speak.
Wait a second, this is her kid that was kidnapped in an event that left at least three people murdered, one of which was his roommate! She knows all of this and she’s going off on him for flunking?! I know it didn’t have anything to do with that, but LINDA doesn’t! Someone could be easily expected to take a gap year after a traumatic event like that!
Some people are completely incapable of empathy, it seems. Everything is always happening to them, nothing that other people experience matters. And they’re always the ones getting high and mighty about it when anyone else does anything they didn’t specifically request.
Yeah, Linda only feigns empathy when she can use it to spite and garner self-righteousness and social credit points. Walky now comes face to face with the fact on just how conditional her love is.
Walky already knew how she viewed him depended on him being the golden child.
He said as much to Amber which led to the hacking (attempt, he thought) of his grades.
It seems that what he was blind about regarding Linda was the racism, not how she feels regarding appearance and her expectations of him.
Oh Walky always knew it was conditional. He’s seen what happens when his mom is disappointed and he knows what’s important to her. From his perspective, if he messes up badly enough, Linda won’t hesitate to withdraw all support and fully emotionally abandon him the way she did to Sal. And he may not be wrong. I guess we’ll find out.
Did you homeschool Walky Linda? No, then he was never ‘your student.’ Such an irritating and possesive choice of words, if she put any effort into learning how her son processes information she would already have a good idea how university courses could be a struggle to him.
well she hooked up with the dean previously so maybe she had some influence on some educational stuff or rly pushed the kids to go above and beyond in studying growing up (tho i can’t rly see walky like that)
And yet, nobody has ever bothered to try helping that kid in any way, instead of discarding them at the slightest sign of “weakness”. Kinda messed up and cringe of society, I think.
I do the same thing when I’m stressed. It’s an automatic defense mechanism, not remotely voluntary. Put me in a frightening scenario and I’ll start gibbering like a character in a Joss Whedon production.
It’s not especially useful, no. I don’t think there’s been a single instance in my life of an adult screaming in my face, me cracking a joke, and them doing anything but getting angrier and louder.
You know, if Walky didn’t freeze, and Linda didn’t have a short temper, his truthful explanation is a reasonable one. He was struggling, he was tutored by the TA, and since his grades got better, he thought he got it understood.
There it is! Her real face! The reason why Walky has been stuck at six years old in terms of emotional maturity before coming to college! This is a great strip, I’m feeling very SOMETHING about it. Keep winning Willis.
Also having been the “good student” compared to my sibling, I can guess what the impact was on Linda’s life :
– homework didn’t have to be monitored (more free time for the parents!)
– no need to pay a neighbor’s kid or a tutoring agency to tutor your own (more money that can be invested in something more fun like piano lessons for your kid!)
– you get to humble brag about your kid being good in school (“and I’m even helping lol it’s just those big brains genes that we passed down”), thus having a bright future in front of them, for free (more social status for you!)
He’s HER good student because she has benefited from the fact he’s a good student at school and was less of a problem child compared to his sister. And until college he was happy to mold himself into this tiny, tiny family position, projecting a lot of his inner life in cartoons, because TV allowed him to go on adventures (what he wanted) without moving an inch (what his mother wanted).
(Oops, this is not in the strip, this is 100% pure projection, my bad)
i guess that we will find out, but we know that Walky has never used comunal showers before college, he and Jeniffer only shared grade school, and that he has trusted on his charisma for grades, also that he was surprised by his actual grades. Which is weird, because if you do a math test really bad, you should know that you did it bad when you dont get to the answers. If you are shocked by the results, something funny is happening. I have suspected for a while that he was homescholed after the stabbing incident.
I think he mentioned being shoved into lockers by Jennifer, and recognized Alice, who was Jen’s high school besty/sorta girlfriend at sight. Granted he could have just seen her with Jennifer around the neighborhood, but the vibe implied that he knew her from school, where he was seen as being a weirdo dork. Plus, the overall vibe with his friendship with Jennifer seems to be “they were close in grade school but when they got to high school Jennifer got close with the popular kids and Walky didn’t”.
Not a single person at my high school used the showers, you frankly didn’t have TIME with how quickly you had to get to the next class after gym. To my knowledge nobody in sports used them either, definitely no one in the sports I was in did (cross country and track)
Walky went to high school with Jennifer.
They said so.
He knows about her high school activities of cheerleading and being the newspaper editor.
He recognized Alice and was recognized by Alice that time she told off Jennifer in the cafeteria (though she didn’t remember his name).
He knew Jennifer was a drunk and had a car accident.
Both he and Jennifer mentioned that they stopped being close in high school and that she used to shove him into lockers.
Also, Walky didn’t coast on his charisma for good grades (I don’t even know what you mean with that) as he legitimately got good grades and even now has only been stated to struggling with math.
As for communal showers, I played football all four years and wrestled two years of high school and none of us showered at school.
You know I can almost understand Linda. Not in the rage, but in where it comes from. The expectation she’s unreasonably placed on Walky. Dude seems kind of directionless in his life, things came easy to him so he was never challenged to figure out what he wants. Sal was a “problem child” but she’s a motivated problem that can take care of herself if her shortsighted righteousness didn’t land her in jail. I have no idea what Walky wants from life. The comic contest was the first time he was actually interested in something for himself that wasn’t fast food or a girl. Even then Joyce the winner of the contest is sitting in on art classes and planning out novels worth of stories. What is Walky doing? Flunky would send me into a small panic, cause like what is this boy gonna do with his life? I don’t agree with Linda at all, but I can almost understand it, being generous that this isn’t some vicarious expectation thing and that she actually cares about her kids beyond how well they reflect on her.
Dude he’s a freshman. Lots of people don’t know what they want to do with their lives yet. And at least he has a major declared. Electives in college help a lot of people find what they’re passionate about.
I think his is something he has in common with Danny actually. Another similarity that maybe explains their taste in women. They both seem attracted to girls that are more independent, tough, smart, and motivated. Qualities they don’t really have on the surface.
He wants to not be pre-med, but his mom wants to push and pressure him into it. That is a big enough problem that it probably takes up his entire brain space and makes finding his own purpose and path daunting and impossible. Imagine his brain freezing the same way his body is doing in this comic when confronted with choices and commitment. He says it himself, he’s got no other survival mechanisms. I’d add that he has nothing other than freezing because no one, certainly not his parents, taught him any survival skills.
Being a gifted child is basically being Luisa from “Encanto” but for mental strength instead of physical strength and it’s no wonder so many of us are messed up in the head.
Honest to Satan it’s also one of the most exhausting interpersonal aspects of growing up autistic — it’s either a superpower or you’re a diseased creature T_T
Reminds me that one Tumblr post that went something like “Being different from others is to be shunned unless it can be exploited.” in reference to Rudolph the red nosed reindeer.
Linda has unlocked a new Shitty Mode: LOUD and Shitty. Exciting development!
No, for real. Linda’s been keeping her cool this whole time and it will be interesting to see the lid come off here – not good for Walky of course, but definitely interesting.
Well mom, it turns out when you’re “the good student” and everyone expects effortless genius from you including yourself, you don’t have any tools to deal with failure, being challenged, needing effort or basically deal with school on any level beyond “very easy,” and I had an extended episode of severe denial. Heck, Dorothy had to go out of her way to try and help me learn “how to study” because nobody else thought that was something the good student should have to know.
And meanwhile. I did think the hacking would fail to get Amber in trouble since a) Linda wouldn’t care to make trouble for Amber that would certainly also help Walky look bad, b) she would figure she probably couldn’t prove anything, and c) she couldn’t prove it was Amber at any rate. So that’s funny how quickly and completely it fell aside.
Walky changed his mind at the last moment and told Amber not to change his grades.
She then told him she had already done it before he finished speaking.
To which he asked her to change them back as it was his mess and he’d just have to suffer the consequences.
She said she would, then only made them ok grades because she liked him and didn’t want him to leave college.
So as far as he knew, Amber restored his bad grades in math and things simply weren’t as bad as he feared they were.
You know it’s every parent’s right to flip the fuck out and beat the piss out of their adult child in a pizzeria. Linda could probably do it too. She’s taller than Walky and he’s no fighter.
An attempt at it. I keep seeing these needlessly violent takes from people with cake batter leaking out of their ears, stuff like “somebody punch Walky”, and I wanted to escalate it for fun.
Okay, and I’m not paying $300 to get one comment published in paperback, so you’re gonna have to use your imagination a little bit. Stop expecting me to do all of the emotional labor here.
I think Oracle is attempting either sarcasm or an imitation Taffy. If it’s the latter, your recipe is gonna need a bit more weed, but even then you’re probably not gonna be able to replicate their particular flavor of autism
No but in all seriousness, it’d be hilarious if Linda got so angry she had an aneurysm right as the pizza showed up, so she could die face down in the pizza.
This triggered my timbers as an AuDHD “gifted student” turned struggling uni student. I have Walkys freeze response to criticism and it kills me for days. Thank fuck my mum is the Anti-Linda.
LADY, you are disturbing the peace of the temple of pizza that is at Gallaso please turn down your voice or I will force you to leave the establishment
On the one hand, I feel for Walky, since he looks like he’s about to have a panic attack, and it’s likely only going to get worse.
On the OTHER hand, you brought Amber here specifically to turn this into a train wreck and upset your psycho mom as part of your terrible plan. How did you think this was gonna go, my dude?
I guess he wanted amber to start a small fire and she came in with a bomb(shell) /shrug
dunno if lucy will be a worry anymore but i can imagine it’d be like “Well, lunch was a disaster” “oh?” “Yeah, so bad that there’s no point bothering going to dinner together”
Here we go again. It’s dinner if you’re one of those dangerous weirdos from Connecticut who call lunch dinner. It’s not dinner if you’re a normal, well-adjusted human being who says both dinner and supper to refer to an evening meal instead of a midday one.
I live in CT and I’ve never heard anyone here use it that way.
That said, the confusion here is understandable since there was talk of meeting for lunch which Linda changed to dinner in hopes Lucy would have other plans. I’m not sure it’s been made clear if this is dinner or if they all showed up for lunch anyway.
Connecticut was a random location I picked on a whim, as shorthand for “not where I’m from”. I don’t know or claim to know anything about your weird foreign slang.
On the positive side I guess Walky no longer needs to worry about what his Mom thinks of Lucy because at this point he might as well no longer exist for her.
Does linda have a degree in education? or were they temp homeschooled because ‘you were my good student’ sounds a bit awkward versus “you’re supposed to be the *smart* kid”
His importance to her wasn’t as her child – it was as The Good Student that she could point to in contrast to The Bad Kid, Sal. Then Walky went and disappointed her by being a human, not the icon whose niche she could point to whenever she wanted to prove she was a Good Mom.
Basically these aren’t children to her, not in the sense most of us would hold – they’re tokens of how well she did. Sal caught shit not just because she’s visibly darker than Walky, but also because she became the Bad Kid after making the Wrong Friends as a child. Now Walky’s not a Good Token because he did something wrong, which is not permissible in Linda’s eyes.
She views them as extensions of herself into the world, like Doc Ock tentacles, for her to manipulate as extra limbs, not independent thinking and feeling beings.
“What, you thought i was stupid?” Dorothy: “you threw a toy at my head!”
(don’t have the exact comic on hand to link. idk how ‘good’ his public school education , someone in my english class showed up high practically everyday and he was hardly struggling tho i went to school in the ‘ghetto’ part of the city/south lol) maybe walky just coasted hid way through school w/o rly trying and only struggled when he first got into college
i imagine there’s an uptick in difficulty, even if iwas magically 18-21 again and the debt-free college happened overnight idk if i’d still rly go back for full experience versus taking a few classes here nad there like culinary arts
Walky was an honor roll student who never had to study.
And even now, the only class he’s ever said on screen to struggle with is math.
So one problem is he doesn’t know a reliable method to study.
On top of that, a lot of readers think he has undiagnosed adhd and/or something else that makes it hard for him to study “the normal way”.
But we know it’s not as simple as STARTING to study with him because Dorothy was studying with him and it didn’t help.
That tells us that he probably also needs a method of study that works for him.
This is further implied with Sal who not only found a method of study that works for her, but also, as confirmed by Walky at the Raidah Breakfast, gets better grades than him.
Both had a problem with math.
Both had someone helping them study in what could be assumed to be a common method (Jason and Dorothy).
Both still struggled despite that help.
Sal finding what works for her doesn’t make it a given that Walky needs to find a method for himself (vs some other solution like being diagnosed with whatever he seems to present as), but, given the other similarities with Sal in this juncture, it seems the most likely solution to his math problem (no pun intended).
But he has. There’s no indication he’s still struggling in math or anywhere else. Amber only changed his pre-midterm grades last semester and he’s still in the same math class as the others this semester, so he obviously passed.
There was a reference at one point, which I can’t find with a quick search, to Amber getting him an app that would poke his brain about studying.
No.
He’s not failing, but he’s still struggling.
By which I mean it’s not effortless AND he has shown concern about his grades, but managed to still pass the quizzes and tests in this semester.
He feels no security as there’s a difference between believing you’ll get a C and worrying you’ll fail.
Walky I still worried he’ll fail and simply hasn’t, yet.
I’ll try to find the strip I’m referring to.
LOL growing up if you got good grades and wore your uniform enough you’d get a pizza party every other week so i imagine that’d motivate walky in elementary school (tho ‘honor roll’ doesn’t mean as much in elementary unless it’s a particularly advanced school/known for having good education versus just the basics/bare minimum needed to move up or so)
I imagine Walky is one of those gifted students who coasted on their intelligence through out the basic education. Never really having to put in the effort.
Then College happened and he actually needed to study but he never had to so he never developed the work ethic, the studying mechanisms and that other stuff the less gifted students needed to succeed. And well… he was shit out of luck.
It’s not even the work ethic man. I was that student. It wasn’t even that I hadn’t developed a work ethic, I absolutely had, I even had a 40h/w job at the time. It wasn’t about the work ethic, I’d just never practiced studying, so doing it was really hard for around 5 years as I had to learn how to study.
And that isn’t to say there weren’t college courses I still breezed through. I learned how to write well and aced every literary arts class I took. Hell, arguably college did wonders for my GPA generally speaking since any class I already understood was a free 2-4 tests show up only when you need to show up, ace everything.
But the math… I retook algebra one time in 9th grade and then on that foundation breezed through the rest of the HS math I took. The point is, when my degree I was aiming for required Calc 1, 2, 3, Linear Algebra, and Differential Equations, I had to spend 2 full years learning how to learn math. I took Calc 1 and 2 twice each, the 2nd time because after the first I guess I hadn’t learnt my lesson. I breezed through the rest of school after that with my newfound studying powers.
My problem was that I only really hit that wall with Diff Eq. Too late in the process to retake anything and figure it out. Managed to pass, but knew I didn’t get it well enough to handle the next year’s classes that built on it. And didn’t have time to retake it and “learn how to learn math”.
I was in college just as long as I was in grade school just to get a Bachelor’s. So I had time. I was working the whole time and graduated with 0 debt. Unfortunately it took like 13 years to do everything, though close to half the credits came in the last 2 when I went to get my degree haha.
I think walky might’ve been ‘casual’ but he wasn’t a super slacker
Tho he only missed class once with dorothy when she freaked out and like “no one’s hear to yell at me, i’m a living god!” or so at least he didn’t have a habit on skipping out of other classes
Nah, I can’t see him doing that to her, especially after he realized their parents were racist. I actually think Danny will come to Walky’s defense. And maybe point out that, like… He was kidnapped and his roommate just was *murdered.* (He and Linda don’t know that’s why Walky has been struggling and it’s a safe assumption). I think Sal and Charles will be too frozen by the yelling to get involved, and Amber will have retreated back into her phone because she f-ed up.
And then I predict Lucy will come and take Walky to freedom. Or yell at Linda a lot. I really hope its the second.
I’m not saying he’d do it CONSCIOUSLY but it seems like the kind of thing he’d do, esp as a golden child unused to direct negative attention from his parents
Every 300,000 years, magnetic forces wane, and reverse, causing a pole shift to make North go South, and South point North. This is just the family sized version of that.
It’s kinda telling that Walky’s reaction has been entirely focused on Linda. Not “I thought you didn’t do that in the end?” Not “were you ever planning on telling me you did that?” Not “what did I actually earn?” Not “I told you I didn’t want you to do that after all – you said you’d changed them back”.
His mother. His mother’s rage, his mother’s response to his perceived failure, were and are his sole focus. She and her emotions takes up more headspace in HIS OWN HEAD than he’s allowed to…
And that’s the kid Linda treated “better” Sal’s probably lucky she got some distance sooner.
Sal’s friend also, you know, stayed a friend, allowing her to have support from her chosen family despite lacking it from her blood family (including Walky, tho he’s trying to make up for lost time).
Walky’s friend pretty much abandoned him for popularity in hs, so he’d only have the parents (at least this is what we know until we some other actual friends from back then).
Maybe really was smart enough to realize that, even though he told amber to “undo” her hacking, she still might have altered his grades. (After all he had a string of failed tests but still passed… Something in his brain may be thinking “this doesn’t add up”…)
But, he didn’t have the proof, and didn’t want to confront amber about it and cause more problems.
This is painful to see. Even if you don’t like Walky the way Linda is yelling at him is scary. Their relationship has changed forever. I wonder what Danny and Sal are feeling watching this scene. I hope Sal is not going to shut up to seeing her brother insult like that and I’m really afraid of Amber’s panic reaction.
You know that reaction image of a guy walking into an apartment with pizzas and the place is on fire and multiple people are hurt? That’s going to be Lucy if she decides to come here and have a look how the things are going.
Not a rare occurrence at any eatery in any college town. Public parental flip-outs and confrontations in the course of a meal are as common as hydrants.
Speaking from experience, college work is on a whole different level compared to high school. I couldn’t just one-and-done it like Walky did in HS, it was a beast.
I’ve been struck this whole time by how socially awkward and rude Wally’s parents are. I know it’s all intentional and abusive, but the lack of any skill or subtlety makes me think that Linda and Charles had no social skills in the first place to teach Walky. Their attempt to ditch a lunch with Lucy was so blatant and rude. And they kept talking about Sal and Danny where they both can hear them. Linda believing Amber, who she hates, at the drop of a hat and shouting at Walky for his grades…I can see where Walky gets his ability to annoy people and also say the worst things at a Halloween party.
Maybe I just expected his parents to be more waspish, rather than full on Karen. But maybe that’s on me.
Hey being ND runs in the family babeyyy. Except in older generations it’s just “how they are”. Combine that with the completely separate fact of them being terrible people, you get this unabashedly rude and awful behavior
Wonder if Mike’s parents could be counted as “good”. His mom at least seemed very friendly in the strip(s) she was in. (She did raise a malcontent though…)
I know Tisha B’av is coming up, and that can be a triggering, tough time for folks. And this strip gets very triggering, too. For me, it’s the anniversary of something very bad happening in my life. I just…
Be gentle with yourselves, ‘K? Drink some hot tea with honey in it. Or take a safe nap. Or cuddle with something or someone soft (dog, cat, human, inanimate object…). Or take a warm shower. Just…
…please take care of YOU this week. The heat dome and other environmental disasters make everything harder. Don’t worry if you need or want to take a break from this strip or its comments. Those you enjoy still be here with bells on when you return.
Just sending caring and appreciation and SO MUCH RESPECT to each and every one here.
Whatever is going on with you, we can get through this. You can.
Ah, brings back memories! Granted my mom was a lot more weep than scream but…
Now how do we make it worse? Jason comes in for his last check? Ethan (drama with Sal, Amber, and Danny) and Asher (tertiary villan of the convenience store stabbing, Walky punched him) walk in for pizza? Marcie um. .. skate boards on Linda’s face?
I sympathize with Walky somewhat, I was an easy A-B student for most of my subjects (except spanish) straight through High School, but my performance dropped in college because I really didn’t have very good study habits. You can only coast on natural talent so far before you hit a wall with how hard college level material can be. In fact I had to get a special waiver for my spanish requirement because I couldn’t pass even the most basic level even after two tries, it was pretty humiliating.
Had a similar thing growing up. Not to this degree, but I was the kid my parents would repeatedly say they “didn’t have to worry about.” Which meant when I *was* struggling, the best response was to hide it.
Thank god my parents’ response when it all did come tumbling down (at Walky’s age no less) wasn’t this. She’s showing so much of herself with “you were my good student (kid).”
Linda’s children have never been their own people. They’re just reflections of her, and any time they don’t fit what she wants them to be, she gets angry.
In a more serious note, time to run Walky. I know you’re frozen. But if you keep sitting there in striking range… At the very least, don’t go anywhere private with Linda.
It was a revelation when I first heard about the “freeze and fawn” bits. All those years of being lectured about “flight or flight” and me going “But I don’t do either of those things.” “Yes you do.” “Nope.”
Can we just have Walky get pulled out of IU Bloomington and transfer to a community college? He clearly doesn’t have the study skills to even deal with 101 level courses – and community colleges are more inclined to help struggling freshmen. I know there’s a bunch of dangling plot threads – but maybe we could put DOA on hiatus while Walky is away and start Shortpacked back up. Or have Walky in wacky gag-a-day hijinks at his community college.
Yeah – but if we get Walky as the fun slacker who runs the AV club at IU extension close to his home and works at the local comic shop on weekends – we can do fun hijinks more often. Gags. Shenanigans. Monkeyshines. Pop culture references that don’t have to be vague to fit into a sliding timeline! Remember the fun hijinks? Pepperidge Farm remembers…
Instead of long soap opera arcs that take half a decade to come to fruition. (Amber hacked his grades sometime in or before 2018.)
The die-hards aren’t going to leave. But – to keep them happy, he could come back to IU Bloomington for his junior year and we could see where all the soap opera plot lines had advanced in that time jump: Ruth and Billie are still being terrible. Joyce and Joe are in a polycule with Dina and Becky. Asher and Ethan are a power couple that run the southern Indiana mafia. Or whatever.
Ah boi this hits close to home…
At least i ripped off the first “flunking math” bandaid in 7th grade. After getting a 99 the year before the transition from primary school to highschool here is brutal
Been priming my mom for the possibility of flunking out for like a year so, at least this won’t be the conversation
That was the high school to college transition for me. I think it comes down to when students like Walky (often ones who are put into “gifted” programs) have to relearn (or learn for the first time!) how to actually study, something they may have not done in ages. Some stick with the foolish mindset that no no no it’ll definitely all click with me eventually, I don’t have to change my schedule of screwing around, while others learn their lesson and change their ways.
I was one of those students, although in my case I was very very dedicated to studying until I experienced several sexual assault attempts off campus. I also experienced hate crime harassment on campus. (No arrests since the perpetrator was a minor!) I swiftly veered into mental breakdown territory. I was sobbing, on average, 3 hours a day… I would have spent that time studying.
A lot of people of whom I didn’t share all this with assumed that I had that mindset that you described, with regards to, “Screwing around;” the phrasing really brought these memories up for me! (Not yet having good studying skills had meant that studying was extra hard for me. It wasn’t something that I could throw myself into, in order to cope, since I had to use more mental resources to study, back then, compared to now.)
Boy, I knew this gambit would backfire but I did not expect how badly. I mean at this point the only way to get worse is for Sal to reveal she screwed Jason or for Linda to legit drop an n-bomb. And with this comic I would not rule out either.
I mean there are plenty of safe ways to write offensive dialogue without actually writing it. Black boxes, the old comic trick of just putting gibberish symbols in place of the offensive material, etc. I will agree that the odds are low on that one, regardless.
Plus Linda doesn’t seem like the type to take that as a good reason. “That’s no excuse, David!! Did Mike help you study? Does Mike not being there somehow keep you from studying?!”
“W-well, mom, w-what about the trauma-”
“TRAUMA SCHAMA, YOU NEED TO WORK ON BECOMING A DOCTOR, DAVID!!!”
How to read all 28 issues of my Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane run on Marvel Unlimited:
1: The first four issues were published as the miniseries "Mary Jane."
www.marvel.com/comics/serie...
today in #9chickweedlane i learned we have to be shown children learning and relearning what sex is, for Reasons, even though they already clearly know and have prepared nuanced questions about it!
also that Gran must hate, if she's still alive, how Old Juliette is the same but with gray hair
one of my favorite things is when a commenter explodes WHEN DO THESE CHARACTERS GET THERAPY but directed towards a character who canonically has a regular therapist
Hot Toys Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith 1/6 Scale Darth Vader Deluxe ($495) & Standard ($315) is up for preorder at Sideshow - shrsl.com/4wcx6 #ad
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btw if you're one of those rando bluesky weirdos who doesn't know me but sees me in the wild being sarcastic and don't know i'm being sarcastic because you haven't taken like 30 seconds to, like, maybe look at my user profile or something, keep walking, you're not going to score internet points here
Here's an entertaining cite at the bottom of the first page
Josh Gerstein@joshgerstein.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
JUST IN: Milwaukee Judge Hannah Dugan moves to dismiss federal criminal case against her for allegedly helping immigrant hide from ICE. Her lawyers say she's protected by official acts & judicial immunity and 10th Amendment. Doc: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
Where did Hollywood go so wrong? I thought movies were supposed to be an escape from reality, a chance to put your worries aside and not have to think about any underlying ideas or concepts. Well, not anymore.
theonion.com/you-can...
It's not a new argument, of course, but Chesterton dismissed it effectively in 1908.
"You will hear everlastingly... this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man."
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com ⋅ 2d
Hawley dismisses Trump lining his pockets with his memecoin: "Listen, I think nobody believes that Donald Trump can be bought. I mean, what does Donald Trump need more money for?"
wilbur, savvy enough to know he's in a comic strip but still not a great actor, awkwardly lifts a muffin up into frame so that we, the audience, understand that he has a muffin right now, which is very important narratively, but he's not really selling it well as an organic, human action
preternia @preternia.com ⋅ 1d
Josh Gerstein @joshgerstein.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com ⋅ 2d
Pavel
@spavel.bsky.social ⋅ 11d
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What if you flunked because you were frozen
That’s happened to me. Several times.
…actually, it’s what’s currently happening in my job… D-8
Thanks, NG.
The freeze survival mechanism do be tanking my grades (for all of college) smh.
Look, if I hand in work I might get told that I’m not the smartest boy in the room, but no one can judge me on anything if I don’t hand in any of it at all
Same. My teachers are told in advance as part of my student disability access plan so we can work out tactics (usually having additional due dates and alternative exam arrangements).
This is the way. Seriously, accommodations like that are the only way for some of us to succeed.
Contact an employment lawyer. NOT kidding. Offer them like 80%+, who cares? It fixes the problem and gets you paid anything in emotional damages.
Thank you, Bajj.
I went on disability leave from work cause that’s happening with me at my job, too. I feel you so hard :'(
Thank you, Jo_cubstar. I’m sending healing vibes your way. I hope your stress eases up and the obstacles dislodge for you. Take good care of YOU.
Perhaps he should . . . Let It Go?
A+
Or maybe he should run away…Into The Unknoooooooooooooown!
Narcissistic rage freezing is pretty intense
A normal T-rex’s isn’t but that frog DNA they used as filler fucked shit up.
Funnily enough, even in Michael Crichton’s “The Lost World” he went out of his way to show that Jurassic Park was completely wrong about T. rex’s vision, by having the guy who wrote the paper GET EATEN for it. Turns out, the only reason it didn’t eat Grant and the kids in the first book was because it just wasn’t hungry.
How hungry is Walky’s mum? Should Amber have at least waited until after the pizza arrived?
I haven’t read the book in ages but isn’t there a moment in the first book where Grant begins to question the vision thing before he gets knocked out by the dinosaur hitting him or the car into him?
Doesn’t the dinosaur-shaped chimeric monstrosity then follow Grant and the kids forever, including running ahead of them so it can wait at the bottom of a waterfall with its mouth open? Was that meant to be some sort of pseudo-avian bloodsport?
I always assumed someone corrected Crichton, and he went “well shit” and threw it in the sequel to cover his ass, without really thinking about how it makes the T. rex’s motivation for chasing Grant completely nonsensical.
Crichton was…a mixed bag, as other responders have outlined.
That sounds entirely plausible for a man who wrote a team of the nerdiest nerds to ever nerd that also had apparently never heard of Grey Goo despite working in nanotechnology
I’ve never read the books. Did he ever address the Velociraptor = Deinonychus thing? I mean, he was basically calling one dinosaur by the name of another.
Although Crichton didn’t cite his sources, that must be taken from G. S. Paul’s Predatory Dinosaurs of the World (1988), a scientific book for a wider audience. Paul is a bit of a lumper and sunk Velociraptor into the quite similar Deinonychus in that book. Nobody followed. Meanwhile they’ve turned out to be a bit more different and not each other’s closest relatives.
I’m aware of Greg Paul’s having done that (though nowadays calling him a lumper is a bit funny, considering his recent attempt to split Tyrannosaurus rex into multiple species). My understanding, though, is that Crichton mostly went with the “Velociraptor” name because he liked the name. I was just wondering if it had been addressed anywhere in the actual books.
Crichton always made science and scientists the villains, and in one book named a minor character after a journalist who had written an article about Crichton’s climate denialism. The character was a child rapist.
Crichton did Dan Brown levels of research, which is to say, he didn’t really do much but he liked people to think he did. He wrote pulp, some of it entertaining, some of it made good movies (because that was his goal after Andromeda Strain). Still pulp.
correction, sometimes the villain wasn’t science, it could be feminism or the Japanese, that sort of thing.
Science, feminism, Japanese. That sort of thing.
Sorry, I’m not seeing the common thread.
Michael Crichton would have hated Dina, and I assume the feeling would be mutual.
ooooooooh here we gooooooo 0_0
*plays “Shout!” by The Isley Brothers on Galasso’s Jukebox*
FX: *JP T. rex roar*
…her good “student”?
Was Linda teaching Walky at some point? Is she a teacher?
Nah, more like he got good grades and she expected him to keep getting good grades.
I think she just means that he was a better student than Sal. Probably due to environment rather than intelligence. I mean Sal’s school was basically a form of exile so she didn’t have the strongest incentive to do well.
Phrasing it as “good student” is super loaded.
“My good student”!
That adds some possessiveness and guilt to the mix.
To be fair, they got into the same school and were placed into the same math class. It’s very possible their grades were essentially the same but how they were perceived by teachers was not.
You’ve got the modifiers attached wrong. Walky got “good grades” and Sal “bad” ones*, therefore he was the “good student”. Whereas what we’ve seen suggests he was never actually good at studying, just smart enough to coast through school until now.
* also, I suspect that whatever grades Sal got were looked at in the worst possible light.
And like Danny said, Sal needs teachers who are able to work with her style of learning, which she probably hasn’t had a lot of.
I wonder if she even needs help anymore.
She needed Danny to “explain the rules” to her (at least in math) but she might have a good enough grounding now that she could succeed on her own
Y’know, I’d be willing to bet both Walkerton kids have ADHD(it oftentimes runs in families after all). Walky has the more overt hyperactive type while Sal has the inattentive type, which necessitates a different learning style.
I would bet that too.
Given family trends, and given conditions like ADHD get underdiagnosed in girls… Yeah, that’d make a lot of sense…
Agreed.
This seems highly likely, yeah
It was established that Walky got good grades in school without having to make an effort. As he missed out on learning how to learn things that don’t come easy, he fell on his face with the first test.
Can relate, exactly my maths experience.
I think it’s more to do with her seeing Walky doing well academically as evidence that she did a good job as a parent. She can then treat Sal as an aberration.
If Walky is also having trouble, then maybe she’s the problem.
That seems likely. Although ironically, this one particular thing probably isn’t directly her fault.
It can be, tangentially. I kinda had to write a thing about locus of control and how kids develop it; basically telling kids they’re smart from a a young age asks good bc “smart” (as our academically obsessed society sees it) is something youre born with. You more or less have natural acuity for grade school subjects. If you tell a kid who’s naturally good at school that they’re smart without ever putting emphasis on effort, there’s no need to learn how to put that effort in. So they coast through school on untrained inherent talent which can only take you so far, and hit a wall when they reach higher education. This is really bad for ND kids like walky (and me) bc by 18 it feels impossible to learn. At least if it was something practiced from a you age, they could’ve found a way to study that works with their specific needs and been okay.
TL; DR stop praising kids for being “”””smart”””” and start praising them for the amount of effort they put it. Ones an inherent trait you cant take ownership of and that will only take you so far, the others an extremely valuable skill
There’s definitely something to that, but there’s something deeper as well. If it really does all come basically effortlessly, “putting in effort” is just busy-work. Praising kids for putting in time on repetitive work that they already get isn’t really better.
And it still doesn’t teach you actual studying. You still don’t learn how to learn. How do you really put in effort at something that’s trivially easy for you?
You need more challenge. Enough to make you need to put in effort. But that’s really hard to gauge and even harder to do for every kid in a large class.
I would also say that, like, not getting her kid tested for ADHD is maybe a little bit her fault
Do note that it is no coincidence that POC tend to get under-diagnosed for both ADHD and autism.
Probably too late for anyone to see this since the next strip is up but while you’re right about that there is also a very real phenomenon of parents, including and perhaps especially white ones like Linda, flat out refusing to get their kids tested despite them displaying obvious symptoms.
Like my sister in law who complains about my nephew doing things I’ve pointed out are symptomatic of ADHD. ADHD does run in her family too, my wife relatively recently got an adult diagnosis of ADHD.
And don’t get me started on how my niece was very upset one visit and my sister in law just said “Oh it’s fine. She just gets like that when her routine is violated.
Oh really, you mean a major indicator of autism. And not the only one she has. Autism which children born as prematurely as she was are more prone to than children who were carried to full term.
As someone who knows what it’s like to grow up as someone who’s ADHD and Autism didn’t get diagnosed until adulthood and how not being given the tools to do what people are demanding of you because no one will acknowledge you have a problem besides being lazy and maybe stupid will fuck your ass up her refusal to look at reality bothers me.
Note her reveling use of the possessive.
“MY good student”, not “A good student”.
*revealing, even.
It hasn’t exactly been subtle for a while, now….
For mentally/maturity-wise better off parents, they’d get this was a case of a gifted kid, now past the K-12 stuff that they could breeze through, have to actually learn how to study like everyone else, often getting failing grades for the first time before they learn that.
Not for Linda Walkerton, because brother, this is ALL about HER…
Why I always thought that smart students should be challenged earlier on in life so that they would learn how to cope with failure and how to study. Hard to do with mixed, large classes though.
I completely froze at that point for a bit… Also, if I didn’t try, then I was failing because I wasn’t trying, and not because everyone was wrong and I was really not actually smart after all…
Heh. I was considered ‘gifted’ back in those days, too. Which meant I was ‘smart’ enough to look over the class syllabus (which invariably had the formula for calculating grades) at the beginning of the year, and calculate how much homework I actually had to turn in to be able to pass if I was acing my tests.
Yuuuup. Also meant that I could calculate the lowest and highest possible grades I could get in a class when it came down to the last few scores. If I couldn’t get any higher than an 89 in a class, but could potentially eke out a 90+ in another class, I’d cram-memorize way harder on the latter than the former to maximize GPA averaging.
(I almost always turned in the homework though because free grades. Testing was always rougher on me.)
Aaah true even more yikes
I’m pretty sure before this conversation is over, Linda will have switched to Sal being the “good” one. I predict a non-zero chance that Sal will be so disgusted by more favoritism that she’ll admit she tried boning a TA for grades just to even things out.
But Linda is into that as part of her play book and will commend her for it, especially if the TA in question is still picking up shifts at Glasso’s so Linda can see him and thus instantly judge him as being good or bad for Sal.
A mother just knows.
Idk whats worse, this or martian invasion
Well Walkyverse Linda knew all about being martian invaded, heyooo
This was all caused by Allan, the Head of the department, targeting her children as a way to punish her for actions when she was in college. He’s about to come in and gloat.
Luckily Walky’s speaking of a paleontology “fact” has signaled Dina, who is charging in the direction of Galasso’s as we speak, and her arrival will surely cause a distraction.
(She’s several miles away. T-Rex’s vision is not based on movement, but Dina’s hearing IS based on dinosaur mistruths)
Ooooooh yeaaaaaaaaaah!!!!
🦖
*plays “M-1412 Chase” from Dragon Ball Z OST*
At this point this may be the only hope for things to end without violence.
“without violence”? If Dina is summoned by dinosaur mistruth? It’s possible I suppose.
I am HERE for Dina pouncing on Linda!
With Linda’s face I 100% see Dina roaring back
Walky didn’t mention any dinosaurs, though. In fact, frogs‘ vision is based on movement.
Yeah, the T-Rex vision was better than that of an eagle, apparently.
Now if only Walky had the moxy to summon Dina right now. That’d be a real treat.
Maybe Amber will take pity on him and do it.
For all we know, Dina could be behind a door RIGHT NOW!
speaking of summoning Dina, I would swear there’s a strip about that hyphen.
There is, and it’s a bonus strip. Please excuse my error :/
To be fair, everyone’s got to be at least a little wrong if only to avoid trying to grapple with HTML tags to properly italicise the binomial
laughs in constant italics
I’m only being pedantic in the context of summoning Dina. Whom I couldn’t even summon because bonus strips aren’t tagged as well, so I didn’t find it.
found it, second Dec 2015 bonus strip. and I misremembered, she’s not even summoned in it. sorry, I flubbed the reference and just ended up grammar police.
RELEASE THE KAREN
I somehow managed to read this as both “kraken” and “Karen” at the same time.
Krakaren?
Haha, this is exactly what Walky deserves for setting up Amber to be verbally abused by his mother. Turns out that Amber isn’t as defenseless and meek as he assumed! Too bad Lucy isn’t here to also suffer just desserts.
If all you want is to see people suffer, then this is definitely the scene for you.
Amber wasn’t taken advantage of to get her here.
Technically, we could say that she had an advantage to offer in this plan and Lucy and Walky took that advantage. That’s kind of twisting words though.
She was promised pizza. Whether pizza will be forthcoming remains to be seen.
Amber was supposed to bother his parents with her presence and behavior.
No one suggested she would be insulted or abused when planning this, so, no, he didn’t set her up to be verbally abused, and I doubt Walky ever thought the vigilante superhero who plays roller derby to help with her anger issues was defenseless and meek.
This is a weird take for some of us readers to have.
We often have weird takes. Why some of us doubt that Mike is still alive.
beautiful <3
SECONDED
MATHS IS HARD.
The word maths bothers me *so* much. Many of my closest friends are Brittish and I don’t understand why they pluralize an already plural word
… math, doesn’t need a friggin s at the end. Grrrrrr
It actually makes more sense because there are different categories of mathematics – calculus, algebra, etc.
So it’s like the difference between fish and fishes.
I think it’s short for “mathematics”
Sometimes wrong words is funny.
That’s what I mean, it’s already plural, even without the s, so it accounts for the various kinds of math, and yes it’s short for mathematics
Mathematics is actually singular – it’s the study of a field. The ‘s’ turns it from an adjective (‘mathematic’, or the common adjective form, ‘mathematical’), into a noun (‘mathematics’).
Dunno. On the basis of nothing, I always assumed that they used maths as short for mathematics. Regardless, I’m pretty sure that they aren’t going to change their usage for our benefit.
Τhe greek word that it comes from “μαθηματικά” is in plural form (and used as such), which I’m guessing why “mathematics” in english looks like it’s in plural form even though it’s treated as if it’s singular.
Math can’t be plural, it’s not even a word
It’s in the Oxford dictionary.
Since when did the Oxford dictionary define words?
You’re not a word.
Oh no you found me out!
But you know what is?
Antidisestablishmentarianism.
Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.
(My science teacher had it printed out on dot matrix printer paper. It spanned the classroom.)
Mathematicses
isare hard.We, the British, prefer ‘maths’, but are willing to compromise if Americans accept ‘Lego pieces’ instead of ‘Legos’
The LEGO Corporation says that they’re not Lego Pieces, or Legos – the collective noun apparently is LEGO, like the singular. So you can have a LEGO, or a bag of LEGO. They also really want that capitalization. No, I don’t know why.
Works for me. Are you empowered to speak for America – we can get this sorted easy then?
I read that as an angry should to let go, as in a person has been grabbed… Although really that should have two ‘g’s…
It feels like a generally good move to not talk how a corporation wants you to talk? Especially about their product, which is very much a form of propaganda?
Propaganda is our most important product. Ask Disney, a legal firm that sometimes makes movies.
This might be a little bit of a #FirstWorldProblem, but I’m a huge fan of Kingdom Hearts, and the lack of even a single item from it in Final Fantasy 14 has irrationally annoyed me for years. I looked into it early on (hadn’t even gotten to Heavensward yet), and apparently the main reason was that Yoshi-P and the gang didn’t want to bother with the headache that is The Mouse’s legal team. Since Kingdom Hearts is a Disney property developed by Square Enix, you’d think they could simply borrow the Keyblade and an outfit or two, maybe a Shadow Heartless minion or Gummi Ship mount, but nooooo.
different linguistic structure: apocope vs proper noun.
In my own language we have a rule that apocopes aren’t pluralized and neither do proper nouns. Neither is usually observed.
Americans can apocope and seethe about the S.
Wait. Apocopes isn’t plural? My entire world view has been altered.
It might be? I’ve never even seen the word before today. I should have clarified I meant the S in maths.
Mathematicses*.
Precious mathematicses
Is the distinction for “maths” making it plural though? Near as I can tell it’s just a word with an ‘s’ on the end, probably because mathematics has one.
i could be an immortal vampire and still not rly understand math after a century tho i’d prolly still struggle dealing with bills and such unless we found an amazing house/base that we didn’t have to worry about the water bills/elec/ect or just take the wallet of ppl i drink from /shot XD
Depending on your flavor of vampire, you’d be compelled to count stuff.
That would suck for a vampire that also sucked at math.
i mean, counting rice one grain at a time would be time consuming tho i am asian so we have a lot (‘rice is good if you’re hungry and want 2000’ of something lol)
But i think there’s a diff between that and like algebra/geometry i gave up with letters were introduced i’m surprised i graduated but it was a public school so i guess i did well enough/had enough credits
Aaaaah yikes I feel for Walky.
Can’t even really put my feelings into words. Just, like, that impulse of a parent to shout their child into the ground like that will do anything other than make them hide their problems more, rather than thinking about how to help… Just… I am familiar and it sucks very much.
Yeah.
Unfortunately, it has the same effect on a spouse.
We can predict Walky’s dad to be completely useless here when he is most needed.
Chances are he’s the target for this treatment when the kids aren’t around. And can expect more of it if he defends them now.
If your spouse is shouting you into the ground, it’s time to find a new spouse.
Unless you’re into that kind of thing.
Yep, this whole page is hard to read because I’m getting flashbacks.
Maybe take a break if it gets too much…
I don’t feel for Walky. This is karma.
This sort of manipulative shenanigans is bullshit, and he should get burned for it.
Maybe that way he’ll learn. If not, he’ll keep doing toxic shit.
Think I’ll take a couple weeks off from reading until this plotline’s done. It pisses me off.
I feel for Walky because he’s a product of what he grew up in. It’s pretty apparent he likely has untreated ADHD, and it’s not like he could ever go to his parents for any kind of help learning anything growing up (educational or emotional) because he was just supposed to be “the good one.” And yeah, he’s getting a harsh learning curve now that he’s away from his parents more, and he’s made some really bad choices, but that doesn’t make him unsympathetic here. Both Sal and Walky were screwed by their parents.
Had a bit of time to cool off, and I’ll agree with you to a point.
But I’ve had to deal with people who pull emotionally manipulative stunts like this before. One of whom *really* messed up my cousin for a while (who I’m as close to as a brother). So it’s a bit of a sore spot.
So, sure. Walky has some reasons for acting like this. They still don’t justify them. And if he gets in the habit, he’ll end up hurting other people.
All in a theoretical sense, mind. As this is fiction and the author can write future plot lines as his discretion. But I’m invested in the story by this point, which is why it can touch a nerve.
And thanks for providing an alternate take that is…. civil.
Do not ever procreate, and if you ever fuck up badly enough to do so, give your offspring to someone who won’t fuck them up.
That’s an extremely dick thing to say to someone.
Ummmm… yeah. Huh. Wow.
You don’t think that’s a little bit disproportionate as a response to a dopey webcomic hot take?
Of course not. We can’t have someone being wrong on the Internet.
…I’ll take that under advisement.
Parents yelling always has this way of making you feel small, even when you’re furious enough to yell back.
It’s probably a psychology thing.
Kudos for having this predictable shitshow blow up in a completely different way than any of us were expecting
because college is completely different than high school and it is entirely possible, even frequent enough to be a cliche, for students to do well in high school and then hit a wall and freeze up in college, come on Linda you should know this
But not David! He’s special!
Why would she? She could just boink a TA to fix her grades, according to her.
As a “gifted” student all through grade school and high school and then someone who failed my way out of and then eventually dropping out of university, I know this all too well lmao
Yes, the same here. It’s very normal.
There are dozens of us! (ok, not so far, but I’m sure some will show up later (maths wasn’t what I failed (or was it?)))
There’s even a subreddit about it (r/aftergifted, I think). Too many gifted kids don’t learn how to study when they’re young, nor are they taught how to fight through the stress of not being able to instantly grasp something. And it can be hard to reach out to a support system who views you as an automatic failure for not being a genius who is supposed to just *get* it, because you’ve gotten things so easily in the past. That’s why it’s a cliche, because then people freeze up and fail and feel lost. Parents like Linda never teach their children how to fail and get back up. They just automatically sort them into “success” and “failure” boxes, and that’s a lot of pressure.
My dad would assume I was being stupid on purpose when not instantly understanding the mathematical concepts he was randomly trying to explain to me at 2AM (awake because insomnia). This… Did not do wonders for helping me to truly believe it was OK to need help, even when I understood this as an abstract and appreciated it applied to other people.
Oh, I know this because he’d tell me to stop being stupid.
My parents mean well and are loving and do still do a lot for us… But there have also been times they have triggered full-on Mama-Bear rage in me as a parent and been shocked by this, and then afterwards I’ve looked back at my own childhood and said to my husband things like “I possibly wasn’t being oversensitive about hating being shouted at to the point where it made me cry til I threw up as a child if THAT’S what was happening to me” (literally getting in a 6/7 year old’s face to shout at her – he meant to get down to her level to talk to her better apparently but got the volume and intensity all wrong for that so I shot between them and my husband yoinked him away from her because NO. This was basically pulling Linda’s face in panel 5 inches from her while roaring) with us in absolute agreement it is not acceptable or happening to our kids…
:0
Your Mama Bear Rage was right to activate. Glad your husband gets it, too. This internet stranger strongly validates that you two have the right ideas on not letting your dad scream at your children — well defended.
I’m still not 100% clear on whether or not this is “was considered normal parenting in the 80s – and is now mainly unambiguously recognised as dreadful” or if it was always considered abusive.
Like smacking your kids – not something we’d ever do, bar inadvertent side effect of trying to separate them ASAP from a potential serious danger e.g. stopping them from grabbing at a pan, but as a child would have been genuinely thrown if a kid had told me “my parents don’t believe in smacking us because teaching kids not to be violent by being violent is kinda messed up”… Or like when my littles were at the biting stage – at least the 3 year old mainly only goes for clothes rather than skin now – a few friends my parents’ and older generations have told me to bite them back to teach them… Which
I’m not biting a baby under a year old, even if they are using their teeth on my flesh to help them stand up hard enough to bruise, and I am probably “only” being told to bite them back hard enough to cause mild discomfort and concern, rather than with the same force!!! Like, a baby zombie movie would be terrifyingly believable, but they were literally too young to fully comprehend I was a being independent of them, let alone that, as a fellow human, I can feel pain and that their actions can cause this..! I am an adult, understand these things, and am not a monster. Teaching them with “no”s, extricating them and giving them a little (at that age about 30 seconds but typically about a minute/year) time out, and repeating, until it sinks in that actions have consequences – while also understanding that the part of the brain that gets this doesn’t fully mature until people are about 24… Norms change.
So you know my mother
Unrelated or maybe it is, we need to start treating college the way we treat all alternative forms of tertiary education. You’re not gonna learn welding, or hair, or animation if that’s not your thing. Academia shouldn’t be any different
That happened to me. I was valedictorian of my high school (which had some pretty smart cookies in it, I do say so myself), but failed two classes and barely passed a third during one semester at college when my mental health took a real nose dive. Still, I got my sheepskin and a pretty good final GPA.
This, i know many friends who fell into this spiral with no way out, without any background how to learn and the pressure of the environment that “you” can’t have trouble learning
yeah even if walky did decently enough to pass high school i can’t imagine him willingly signing up for AP/IB classes and being valedictorian or so, maybe he got away with lazing around on the weekends stuffing down mcnuggets with Straight A’s in ‘regular’ classes so they ‘rewarded’ him by not forcing him to join any other clubs nad stuff
Or you do well in college but hit a wall if you have to do an unstructured type of job. I got a really good GPA in undergrad despite the work being harder but hit a wall the second half of med school when the learning doesn’t involve sitting in a class and memorizing stuff. Got diagnosed with ADHD now in my 40s and my struggles with getting shit done when I don’t have a clear structure make a lot more sense.
I’m here with you! College was fine, but one specific task in grad school was too hard for my failing memory. (Writing verbatims.) Now I’m glad that I didn’t become a Social Worker, but damn, that was a rough few years.
Wait, they weren’t homeschooled, right?
Is this just Linda’s perception of Walky for having good grades before?
Yeah, like we know that in school, he performed well. That’s probably part of why college has been a struggle for him, in addition to distractions. He didn’t really develop great study habits or discipline because he hadn’t really needed to exert himself, and now, he’s floundered with mathematics. (I don’t really recall other subjects giving him trouble, it may just be the one class.)
No and yes, I believe.
As far as we know, Walky found school easy up through high school. Something about college changed that (maybe difficulty got higher? Maybe there were more distractions? Maybe he needed a parent breathing down his neck?) and school is no longer easy for him. He never developed any skills regarding studying or putting effort into school to get *better* at something, so he continued flunking.
He was not homeschooled.
He legitimately got good grades without studying.
He has only been stated to have trouble with math.
Which annoys me a little and I think confuses the issue.
It reinforces the “math is hard” thing and pushes people to think the solution for Walky is just to drop math or take an easier version. Which isn’t great, when the problem is him not knowing how to study. (+ADHD)
Also, even if math is hard, it’s easy to study for. You just do the math problems.
Which I suppose is how his fix worked. He didn’t really need to learn any studying techniques, just to trick his brain into doing it.
I think the similarities with Sal in this regard – both had trouble with math, both had someone helping them with what were probably common study methods, both still struggled despite that – imply that he does actually need a studying technique that works for him since she found one that works for her and is no longer struggling while he, despite no longer outright failing, seems to still struggle.
Also, I’m pretty sure Danny said recently that Sal’s problem was the rules for solving the math and not solving the math itself.
And if I remember correctly, Jason telling her to just do the math problems was part of the reason he couldn’t help her.
Thejeff, mathematics is easy, but developing conceptual confusions about parts of mathematics is also very easy. Just doing the math problems (probably wrong) while the conceptual confusion remains isn’t really helpful. There are people who are incapable of doing college level math, but the odds are really high that those people never made it into college in the first place. Math is one of those places where individualized tutoring where someone can have you work through problems, discussing them as you go, so they can identify where your confusions are, can be extremely valuable.
I apparently put this badly. Two separate ideas. First, I dislike the general framing that “math is hard”, since it contributes to the problem. It makes people think that math is something they should struggle with. In this case, it distracts from understanding that Walky’s real problem is learning to study and leads to suggestions like just dropping the high level math classes, rather than trying to learn to study.
2) Obviously some people learn differently and need different techniques to learn math (or other things for that matter). Like Sal needed Danny’s approach. But the evidence is that wasn’t Walky’s problem. His problem was that he never learned to study and now that he needed to, he couldn’t. He didn’t need a different approach to math to figure it out, he just needed to put the work in.
With math, just putting the work in isn’t conceptually hard. With other topics, if you never learned how to study a text and just reading through it once like you used to do in high school doesn’t work anymore, you need to have a new method that you never learned.
I suppose not having a Martian race to exterminate en masse would deprive Linda of an outlet for her rage.
The upside is she’s no longer committing war crimes.
…The downside is that she’s no longer committing war crimes.
Not angry, just disappointed.
She’s definitely both right now.
Aggressively and loudly disappointed in a public place where people are trying to enjoy their meals, but never angry. Don’t tell the news she was angry.
loudly? she didn’t even raise her voice.
She’s frothing at the mouth like a rabid dog and some of her words are in massive letters. Are you takin’ the mickey?
IMO, HSL is saying what Linda would claim if asked. And expect everyone else to back her up/cover for her.
I didn’t even raise my voice, Officer. I listened to my son calmly, and then he suddenly became very upset and started stabbing himself with the cutlery in my hand. I didn’t do anything!
There you go.
I read “in his hand”. Made sense somehow.
“He ran into my knife. He ran into my knife 10 times.
He had it coming 
Life isn’t fair. Sometimes you run into a knife a lot, nothing anybody else can do anything about.
The worst part of fearing the worst about your parents is when you’re proven right.
…I’m not sure how it hit me, but Linda’s rage reminds me of Joyce.
It’s because they both have righteous anger based on belief.
It’s just that we’ve seen Joyce’s anger multiple times, she’s a likable member of the main cast if not the outright main character, and it’s usually justified (even before her beliefs changed).
This is the first time we’ve seen Linda’s anger, she’s a barely recurring character who isn’t well liked, and her anger isn’t justified, so noticing the similarity feels weird.
Look, Linda. You said that if you were struggling in Math you would bang one of the TA’s to artificially boost your grades. Walky’s TA was straight (I think) so he banged a hacker to artificially boost his grades. He took your style and improved it. You should be proud.
No, she wanted Walky to bang a British TA.
Fun fact, I flunked math in 9th grade. The worst year of my life.
Though flunking math isn’t near the worst thing that happened to me that year.
Do you want to tell us what was the worst thing that happened? I don’t want to pry, but if you want to talk about it you can.
My dog got run over by my school bus while I was on it. And they wouldn’t let me get off the bus once I got on despite the fact that we were still at my bus stop.
And also y’know the whole “my dog just died” part. Just took me to school.
Jesus Christ that’s awful
I am so sorry. That might be the worst thing I’ve ever heard. Do you want to tell us about you dog?
Sure. She was actually kinda old already to be fair. She was a Beagle named Lady. Super mild mannered. We usually let her wander the neighborhood when we were out of the house and she’d always come back.at the end of the day. Can’t say I remember much more than that. I was 14 when she died…so 15 years ago.
I’m so sorry
Poor Lady.
That bus driver was brutal. Did your parents complain? Did your school call them to let them know what happened/let them collect you when you got there?
My mom brought it up in one of the teacher meetings among other things.
So sorry this happened. Rest in peace, Lady. </3
Pressing F to pay respects.
o7
Ouch. If we’re sharing childhood traumatic dog stories. I once saw my childhood friends dog get torn apart by a much larger dog the owner was just letting walk around off leash. I was in like 4th grade, and it was the 90’s. We were walking home from 7/11. The dog survived, but died a year or so later. I still remember running home with one of my hands splattered with dog blood.
Damn sucks to hear! I definitely was guilty of letting my dog wander around off her leash. She was a beagle.
This dog was like a pit Bull mix or something. I just know friends dog was a ting lap dog. One of the really fluffy ones. I think a Pomeranian or Bichon Frise. I remember my older brother kicked the big dog in the mouth and the owner yelled at us. I never learned what happened after, like if the owner got sued or something.
Yeah my mom was attacked by a pitbull a while back and like…the owner was this little old lady who couldn’t possibly call it off and It’s like….why?
O. M. F. G.
D-X
Oh, Yoto, there are just no words….
I am so sorry that happened to you.
Sorry that happened Yotomoe.
Pretty sure what they did there isn’t even LEGAL
He actually said the opposite. That it wasn’t legal for him to let me off of the bus once I had gotten on it. But he coulda made an exception…considering.
And it wasn’t any less illegal for him to basically do hit and run? He shoulda gone to jail after that.
I think it is a serious liability thing though. Unless Yoto’s parents were there getting off the bus can get the driver in even more trouble than running over the dog. That’s a really shitty situation Yoto. Sorry it happened to you.
Ironically my mom was there. She was late for work that day so she saw the whole thing. So honestly he had an excuse. (She was hysteric by the way)
The bus driver was telling the truth, but dang, I think he should’ve broken the law for you to go to your dog. I’m so sorry.
Wow, an abusive mom in Dumbing of Age. Let me pretend to be surprised. Hang on, it’s gonna take a few minutes.
Like, really. Maybe it’s just me but I’m feeling like there’s been more bad moms than bad dads lately? Like, Amber’s dad and Becky’s dad are dead, and Hank is more “trying to do better”, and now Charles is looking like he might turn out to be pretty chill. I can’t remember when there’s been a decent mom on here that’s been around for more than a panel.
The imbalance is caused by a higher mortality rate among bad dads. In this paper, we will discuss ways to remedy the imbalance …
Dorothy, Dina, Sierra, and Amber all have decent-to-good mothers.
Charles is less “chill”, more “passive and agreeable to keep the peace”.
He’s a professional boat-steadier.
Flunking one class, lady. One class. Like we can put things in perspective a little. What’s matter if he still graduates. They really gonna hold the one class you flunked the first semester of freshman year against you?
Why not? They’ve held shit against Sal since she was little and held ‘being brown and poor’ against Marcie since she was five years old. Walky’s not being what Linda wanted so she’ll absolutely hold it against him.
I was more talking about the academia. I fully expect Linda to hold that against him even if it’s a pretty irrational expectation.
Ohhhh my bad.
First semester is a great time to learn about incompletes and how important it is to know the last day you can drop classes.
That’s not what Amber told her though
One entire class!
Walky may as well have set the school on fire.
And that’s all that ever mattered to you, huh Linda?
No wonder Walky panicked when he was failing quizzes. Poor kid. He knew she’d be like this.
I was wondering when the other shoe was going to drop and destroy their friendship. But damn Amber you really just threw Walky under the Bus, didn’t you?
And Linda is still the worst. Good to know. “My good student”. Does she only care about her kids based on performance?
The bus was much bigger than she might have thought, it seems.
To answer your last question – yes. She cares about being seen as a good mother more than actually BEING a good mother. Always has.
Maybe she doesn’t know how.
She definitely doesn’t know how, but she is responsible for figuring it out. Nobody says being a parent is easy, it’s still not cool to terrorize your children.
She could take some therapy. Read books. Humbly do her best, and apologize when she screws it up.
Learning parenting is super hard, especially if she had bad models herself! but it’s the job we sign up for when we become parents.
“Humbly”
Found a problem with the plan, right there.
Yepppp. Her overconfidence is all bluster, but that doesn’t help when she leans so hard into it.
Yeah, Amber wanted to spite Linda enough to where, even for her, this was rather thoughtless. Not like I am holding it against Amber that much, but I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if she is remorseful about it later, because fucking yikes.
Amber will hate herself even more for this, mores the pity, because Walky threw her under the parent bus first. He expected her to just sit there and let his parents browbeat her and insult her so Lucy could enjoy being comparatively OK.
So she will be a 9.3 instead of a 9 on the self loathing scale?
Depends on whether that scale is linear or logarithmic.
Eh, I think Walky just expected passive-aggressive behavior from his parents and not this aggressive-aggressive behavior. I don’t think anyone was expecting Linda to be this blunt and just straight rude. Once Linda did start dishing out insults Walky tried to defend Amber.
Walky expected Amber’s presence and behavior to bother his parents.
At no time did anyone suggest Linda or Charles (but let’s be real, it would only be Linda) would just start insulting Amber repeatedly.
I don’t think that’s what Walky expected at all. He 100% expected Amber to be a shitshow and say and do weird things and that was the entire point.
But I think he thought it would peak at Transforms porn rather than go supernova from there…
The fact that Walky actually came to Amber’s defence, which kind of goes against the idea of the plan, suggests he didn’t think Linda was gonna go as Aggro as she had. he probably expected the thing to be awkward and uncomfortable. I don’t think he’d have gone with this plan if he knew that Linda would be that intense in her disapproval.
I agree. He’s surprised and terrified by this screaming mom of hair-spikes.
They’d thought it would be awkward, and that Amber would easily chill out on her phone and utterly ignore an uncomfortable passive-aggressive Linda. This is all *way* worse than Walky imagined.
Amber is basically meek and socially awkward until she gets angry and does some destructive shit without thinking about the consequences.
And then she internalizes those consequences as why she’s a monster and the worst person ever.
She got at least some insight into that cycle from Ethan. It’ll be interesting to see if she can apply it after this.
Well I’m…Happy that this idea blew up spectacularly in Wally’s face but the blowback of how this is gonna change the family dynamic might fuck Sal up a little bit.
Sal is now their golden child /unironically/. Even in spite of how she was treated growing up. Also happy Danny could finally see Walky get a clapback for once.
If we are to go by Jennifer’s assessment she is still the golden child (the fact that she gets more cookies then Sal despite crashing while drunk supports this) and Sal is now in second place, this can be taken away if she breaks up with Danny.
Good ol’ provisional love!
I wonder if this might actually cause Danny to have some sympathy for walky.
I know Danny can be quite… Oblivious… sometimes and he is not on good terms with walky, but he can be empathetic.
From Danny’s PoV, Walky’s been particularly crappy TO HIM, though that’s eschewed because he doesn’t know that’s just Walky being himself to everyone, he just happened to prod Danny’s issues in particular.
I think this might get Danny to move Walky from “feral child that victimizes me in particular” and into “general screw-up with a messed up family dynamic”
Ever get so mad you call your son your “student” instead? Ever been a bad mom? Maybe consider *NOT* doing either of those things!
Do we even know what T-Rex vision was really based on? Like do we got intact T-Rex eye tissue or is science just educated guessing based on old bone rocks and modern animal equivalents?
A man dressed like a lesbian in the 90s told us this truth, and who are we to doubt him?
…Hmm?
THEY SAID, A MAN DRESSED LIKE A LESBIAN this bit isn’t funny.
It might have been Mike. Then it would be funny.
Weeeeell, you could argue that the “modern cowboy” look that many paleontologists like to sport in the field is one of the typical looks of butch lesbians, but I don’t see all lesbians vibing with Alan Grant’s wardrobe
That reminds me of a song, for some reason.
Let’s play cowboy
Seven-inch toy
At your belt
big iron on his hiiiiiip
I don’t think Marty Robbins was songin’ about pegging.
I also don’t think it’s probably a good idea to make a strap-on out of iron.
You’re probably right. On both counts.
Like, I don’t wanna come across as judgemental, I just don’t think Old Rusty, the family heirloom, is probably very safe.
Seems like a moment where we should cut to Dina and Becky in the dorms and Dina to explains it to the audience. Then cut back to the carnage unfolding.
The “vision based on movement” thing is something Michael Crichton misinterpreted from a study done on frogs (he retcons this in the sequel).
When it comes to T. rex’s vision irl, there isn’t a fossilized dinosaur eye, but we can infer a couple of things from the skull’s anatomy. For example, from all the non-avian dinosaurs (all those that aren’t birds), T. rex is one of the if not the one with the most forward facing eyes, just on par with modern eagles. Suggesting that it REALLY depended on its eyes to spot prey, possibly from very, very far.
There might have been a study done on its braincase that might support this, but I don’t remember off the top of my head.
Maybe he’s hoping Dina will fly through a window and tear his throat out for spreading misinformation, or flight his mom Godzilla vs Kong style
No intact tissue, just interpolating from birds and crocodiles (both of which see unmoving objects just fine).
Linda’s got this condition where she’s never mad at the person it’s most logical to be upset with.
Who is it logical to be upset with in this situation. I’m pissed you were flunking one class like six months ago while you’re still clearly enrolled in school with no apparent fallout. This is pretty illogical already. My mom would probably congratulate me for getting away with some bullshit over this.
She’s probably angry because if Walky can’t pass intro courses she can’t keep fantasizeing about being a doctors mom.
Heck from the way she offhandly mentioned it to Dorothy’s mon she’s probably already told people that her son was preparing for medical school.
I guess Linda does think Walky’s getting a medical education.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/04-just-hangin-out-with-my-family/footforward/
LOL. Dude has not expressed even the slightest interest in medicine!
His interests are irrelevant, he should know he’s meant to be a doctor because that’s a good career that will make his parents (re: Linda) proud and increase his socio-economical standing! (big, BIG /S here)
Walky can always marry a doctor. He’s got a certain animal magnetism.
What’s Lucy’s major? This can workout for everyone!
Lol telecommunications like Walky. But that would have been a good thought.
Shouldn’t he marry a veterinarian then?
My good student, singular. Like, christ, lady. The favoritism is absolutely dripping.
Of course, being the exalted by the family has its downsides, and we’re seeing it. Linda gave Sal a lot of the cold shoulder, but I wonder how often she got outright screamed at like this, much less in public.
man it was never this bad in terms of reaction but honestly so triggering to me being in middle school and basically failing math every year despite being a “smart child”.
..can’t wait for someone to put linda in her place…? maybe?
Dude, what is it about math?! Why is it so hard?!
(I flunked math my junior year of high school. Or was it senior? I forget. Had to switch classes. Struggled with it in college, too. Finally realized: I don’t EVER have to take math again! …Still have math class nightmares, though. Decades later.)
You know what actually helped me figure out math in the end, though? Carpentry. It was only after a year of working in construction that I could actually develop the mental discipline to really slog through math. Something about the repetition of it.
Yeah I truly think it’s just everyone needs their own ways to figure out how to make it click, and some shit just doesn’t make sense until then. Very relieved to know I’m in good company of my fellow math flunkers!
Finishing my last Math course in college (liberal arts math, the lowest level of math possible) was truly one of the best days of my lifeeee.
It’s hard because it’s so standardised and nobody is ever willing to help a struggling person learn it in a way that clicks, because that takes effort uwu.
It’s also abstract, when it’s just numbers, squiggles, and Greek letters on a page.
Over time, I realized that everyone sees math differently and even if someone tries to explain math to someone, it ends up like trying to describe a color that the other person can’t see, which can end up in frustration and the classic “why can’t you see it”
It’s the most unnatural thing you will ever do with your brain. Every single piece of mathematics requires hard work to understand it. We forget how hard the early stuff was because it was so early in our lives, I think. Also the early stuff is more mechanical, less creative.
I think the Core Curriculum might’ve been way better for us! The way math used to be taught was way more convenient for teachers of large classrooms, and for people who were good at learning math in that specific way. If you weren’t either of those types of people, though, you were pretty left out — like apparently a whole lot of us in this comments section.
I’m really curious to learn if Common Core works better for me someday, along with my kiddo(s).
What do you mean they changed math? Math is math!
same here! I did well until high school then math just tore me apart. then in college chem ate me alive. it was awful
I doubt Amber bailed but it wouldn’t shock me I’d she did.
I feel like she wouldn’t because she probably wouldn’t do that unless she was sure this wasn’t going to like, escalate.
Amber wouldn’t bail on a mess she made.
depends after time skip how much Amber is afraid of escalation and her own aggression and if she feels it’s punch-oclock she may choose to run away
lol has she even gotten to take a bite of the pizza yet?
i imagine she’d either stick around long enough to make sure the bridges isn’t 100% burned for walky’s sake or take off when he or sal say that she should take off
I don’t think they’ve even ordered a pizza yet.
well, sydney showed up and asked ‘is pepsi ok’ so i imagine they had some kinda interaction because other than being thirsty or having a ‘usual’ i feel like ppl order the food order first before a drink unless they bring a drink first, tho usually at a ‘pizza buffet’ you’d just get cups and go to a fountain yourself
(sorry didn’t mean to flag, if the mod is reading this!)
“I was flunking because the class schedules of college are not conducive to my learning style which requires a more regular schedule of homework, class time, and allows me time to digest and formulate what I am learning.”
“Being a gifted student meant I never had to study or pay too much attention and the drip feed of content day after day was easy to absorb, but here? 3 hours a week and then I have to motivate myself to do the reading? I can’t do it.”
This is the same rug pull I experienced entering college, grad school, and now my doctorate program.
I was actually a pretty good student until I started grad school. That’s when I discovered cramming for exams. I also discovered that people running grad programs don’t care about grades quite as much as things like being self-motivated and/or well adjusted.
I have met so many well adjusted and self motivated dummies who have a much easier time in life than I do.
Quite rude of you to just write out my life story in the comments like this
It’s a shame more teachers aren’t equipped to handle ‘gifted’ students, some are just advanced but idk how many ppl who were called gifted/the top of one class necessarily skipped up a grade or so, other than a ‘gifted program’ but i imagine that’s still more education/learning ahead of some students rather than a variety of other ‘life skills’
Like, someone could make a perfect score in math but still need extra help with hand eye coordination (like you don’t have to be amazing at sports but being healthy and able to burn off more energy as a young kid might build good habits for the future), or need more help with some logical stuff or social skills (i’ve heard about some like ppl as young as like 14 ‘smart enough to get into college class’ but it’d be hard to make peers, even if you’re as smart as them and there’s no ill intent, i can imagine it be hard for some one in their 20s to befriend a minor that young)
Ecch, why are all calculus classes scheduled for 0730?
Why? Fuck you.
I have been privileged to not see any of my specific traumas in this comic until today
YOU WERE THE CHOSEN ONE!
The “I hate you!” would be warranted here
Linda absolutely hates her children.
Oh boy more abusive parents
Honestly this strip fully triggered me, straight into shortness of breath and adrenaline spike because it fully captured the experience of staring into the rage on my parent’s face as they demanded answers for my plummeting grades. (Executive function died, but I didn’t know that.) The freezing up and being unable to answer. Linda’s face going from surprised, to angry, to LIVID. This strip just hit me really hard, it’s very well executed and emotionally spot on.
Oh, same. This is dragging some 20+ year old PTSD out of the ol’ memory hole.
I experienced that once, but I wasn’t triggered by this strip. Maybe because it wasn’t my mother that did the yelling.
Same.
My mom is a lot more like Carol. Manipulative, passive-aggressive and guilt-trippy.
My *dad* is a cross of Linda and Toedad. All the narcissistic and self-righteous fury matched with violence so casual that it didn’t feel like a big deal to get hit unless the was threatening my death. Like Linda he’d be set off by stuff he thought made him look bad, and like Toedad, he demanded total and immediate compliance.
Linda, go get hit by a bus. Unironically go and get hit by a bus. You are part of why Walky struggled. He is afraid of failure because he expected a reaction like this, so instead of working on it, he froze up and hid it
*high-fives Walky in “freezes when faced with a threat, even when doing so is not beneficial to the situation” solidarity*
Ooof. Feels.
Yup.
Ruth does it, too.
I’m starting to think that making one of your kids The Golden Child is a form of abuse as well, and probably neglect in some way.
I dunno, I’m in too shitty of a mood to articulate all the reasons why I think this.
It absolutely is, trust me. It means walking on eggshells all the time, and the unfortunately relevant quote of “Admiration is the furthest thing from understanding” coming in handy here. It means they don’t really know you, and you can’t let them know you because of the scrutiny it will bring.
(Not a golden child myself, trust me, but my best friend experienced a lot of this.)
I’m the closest thing my family had to a Golden Child, so I understand it all too well. The thing about Walky sort of neglecting Sal is also pretty familiar, which is why I don’t defend myself when my little brother lays into me more harshly than I’d tolerate from anyone else.
Ughh, walking in eggshells is really a thing. That has changed how to read the page of today.
Yes, I’m pretty scary my parents discover things that they will figure mu mistakes.
Thanks.
Strongly agree. Kids are wired to need the love of their parents, it means survival. A golden child gets to see that this love is completely conditional. They also get a front-row view of what happens if they lose that favor.
Conflict and failure become deeply, existentially threatening on a deep level.
For example, remember how Walky thought Dorothy would instantly dump him because he wasn’t automatically good at calculus? Linda is definitely where that idea came from.
I agree tgst Walky was at least emotionally neglected to the same degree as Sal even if treated better. Linda doesn’t know her son any better then her daughter. She never cared how Walky learned just what his report card said.
Oh, for sure. My friend’s the scapegoat to her brother’s golden child, and the way their parents treat them both is ridiculous. The parents have literally followed him around the country as he has gone to school. “Oh, you’re going to undergrad in Tennessee? We will also move to Tennessee.” “Oh, you’re going to move back to Michigan for your next level of schooling? We’ve been missing Michigan as well.”
Not to mention last I heard, his plans were to become a doctor, and he was pushing himself through medical school even though he has a FEAR OF BLOOD. Like, my friend once told me his plan was to get into a specialization that didn’t deal as much with blood, and I was like, okay, but that’s gonna come up in med school, right?
So sorry, I hit the “flag” when I was trying to hit reply and can’t figure out how to undo it.
I was going to say that there are rotations in med school where you have to do procedures like drawing blood or doing spinal taps or sit in on a surgery, but if he were able to muscle through that, there are plenty of specialties to go into that don’t involve much exposure to blood.
Yeah, I know, that just seems like a lot to put yourself through because your parents want you to be a doctor.
Being a golden child can sometimes be a precarious position you can easily topple from. I think similar issues can result from well off kids who can be paid for college but have to toe the line precisely or they lose it all. And if you’re raised all your life that not getting a degree (and wasted loans if you try it by yourself) will ruin the rest of your life you’ll do that. Or at least try your best to be perceived as doing that.
Also as Walky has become more aware of the unfairness of it (he used to think it was purely based on Sal fucking to like with holding up a store) the idea of it would chafe more probably. His parents are not reasonable people or at least his mother isn’t and his father at best spineless.
Not only is it precarious, it’s a burden because of that. Nobody wants to be treated terribly, and a parent who’ll deliberately treat one child worse than the other can’t be trusted not to just treat them both like garbage if the Golden Child stops being so golden. And then you’ve got the scenarios where they’ll pit the kids against each other to deflect attention from their own shittiness, so it adds to the burden. The Unfavorite will start to hold that status against the Favorite, build resentment, and if the Favorite isn’t drinking the Kool-Aid they’ll feel even worse from that but be unable to break out of it.
Yup. All of which we have seen and are seeing right here.
My sibling and I traded GC status a few times growing up but it was usually her since she was cuter and more socially adept, where I was goofy-looking with a giant overbite and teeth too big for my face and socially awkward. But I was the “well-behaved” and “smart” one.
It’s just, my parents were both younger siblings of GC older siblings so unless my sister really screwed up I was doomed to not be the favorite. My parents also did do a lot of fucked up things to put us siblings against each other, like punishing me when my sister screwed up or forcing us into doing all the same activities and then lying to each of us on why. She told me they only had time for one activity and as the oldest she needed me to “be responsible” and give up stuff I actually enjoyed for my sister, and she told my sister that I would be too lonely in another activity and to help me make friends. But like she did that in a way to fan our resentment of each other. Or our parents didn’t want to bother throwing two birthday parties so they’d cancel mine on the excuse a summer party is too hard to schedule and then they’d fold mine in with my sister’s party – but then because it was hers I was only allowed to bring a single friend. Then my sister was pissed because her party wasn’t entirely hers, and I was pissed because at least she got a party and got to do what she wanted with it.
Anyway from my few brief experiences in the role I can say with confidence: The GC absolutely knows their status is conditional. If your parents haven’t swapped you into the SG role it’s scariest because you don’t know you can survive it – but if they have swapped you through that role you then have a huge amount of toxic shame built up because your parents don’t love you, they love whatever role you take on as the GC.
It absolutely is.
Being the Golden Child outwardly may look AMAZING to the Scapegoat as they are pitted against each other. But the Scapegoat usually eventually gets out – they leave, they don’t look back, they’re free, they recover, they learn to live a good life and make the most of it even if the first couple of decades of their life sucked.
While The Golden Child’s life is usually ruined or essentially under their parent’s control forever as they have often very few to no resources to leave even if they come to their senses eventually.
Neither is raised with the intention of helping them become functional adults with life skills, social skills etc. to survive and handle life on their own.
It is even worse when the roles are not even fixed to people but may both apply to one person (A = Golden Child, less than A = Scapegoat), or be swapped between people depending on the mood, as that can make home life and the dynamics in it, unpredictable and unstable 24/7.
So well said
It absolutely is.
Even if the kid is oblivious enough not to consciously realize they’re not inherently better than their sibling (see Walky or for that matter, my sister when we were kids), you get a lot of pressure from your parents to maintain the role. Walky’s role is genius goofball.
And, subconsciously, you know your parents don’t love you, they love your role and what it does for them.
Why is Linda so upset?
She was implicitly bragging about sleeping her way through college a few pages ago.
Technically, Walky is doing the same thing.
She slept with a TA. Walky slept with a girl who is skilled at computer s and breaking and entering.
Oh, I see. Look at the rage. That’s betrayal. Linda whole parenting style is living vicariously through her children. And Walky is failing in his role of doing everything right.
If I continue this theory. It implies that Linda’s problem with Sal, at least in part, is that she’s herself in Sal.
Yeah, absolutely Linda probably knows Sal is much more like her than Walky is. Thankfully Sal does not take after her in all things, but there are definitely shared traits, such as self-righteousness. (Sal thankfully is nowhere near as toxic, but we’ve definitely seen this from her many times.)
I like to think that’s part of the reason Linda came down harder on Sal from the beginning; because she sees a lot of herself in her.
If you’re a bigoted abusive mother with savior syndrome whose animating force is spiting others and making scapegoats and golden children for that purpose, consistent personal values are a hindrance.
Not that I think she’d be doing that great anyway but she is already in a terrible mode because *gestures at the last half dozen strips* and THEN this bombshell got dropped
Do we actually know for sure that Linda did bang her TAs for grades?
Yeah she joked about it, but it may be more along the lines of someone asking “who do I have to kill to get some service around here?” (I.e. some exaggeration done for comedic purposes).
This doesn’t mean Linda isn’t a bad person, just that in this one situation she may not be guilty.
Honestly wondering what Sal and Danny’s reaction to this is. Danny knows a thing or two about shitty parents, and Walky is being dethroned as the golden son as we speak.
Walkyyyyyy :<
and there it is! He was the “(one of the) good one(s)”.
His girlfriend stabbed Sal.
🤬
🤬
Linda:
He got bad grades.
Linda:
Your girlfriend may have blinded the basilisk, but she can still hear you!
Wait a second, this is her kid that was kidnapped in an event that left at least three people murdered, one of which was his roommate! She knows all of this and she’s going off on him for flunking?! I know it didn’t have anything to do with that, but LINDA doesn’t! Someone could be easily expected to take a gap year after a traumatic event like that!
Some people are completely incapable of empathy, it seems. Everything is always happening to them, nothing that other people experience matters. And they’re always the ones getting high and mighty about it when anyone else does anything they didn’t specifically request.
Yeah, Linda only feigns empathy when she can use it to spite and garner self-righteousness and social credit points. Walky now comes face to face with the fact on just how conditional her love is.
Walky already knew how she viewed him depended on him being the golden child.
He said as much to Amber which led to the hacking (attempt, he thought) of his grades.
It seems that what he was blind about regarding Linda was the racism, not how she feels regarding appearance and her expectations of him.
Oh Walky always knew it was conditional. He’s seen what happens when his mom is disappointed and he knows what’s important to her. From his perspective, if he messes up badly enough, Linda won’t hesitate to withdraw all support and fully emotionally abandon him the way she did to Sal. And he may not be wrong. I guess we’ll find out.
But the dual threats of anger and shame worked so well at keeping him in line for so long!
/s
Did you homeschool Walky Linda? No, then he was never ‘your student.’ Such an irritating and possesive choice of words, if she put any effort into learning how her son processes information she would already have a good idea how university courses could be a struggle to him.
well she hooked up with the dean previously so maybe she had some influence on some educational stuff or rly pushed the kids to go above and beyond in studying growing up (tho i can’t rly see walky like that)
Walky told Dorothy he never had to study because he was naturally good at school.
Ah, the “gifted kid” who never needed to study.
Until they did, and they had no idea how because they’re used to everything just naturally falling into place.
Tale as old as time.
And yet, nobody has ever bothered to try helping that kid in any way, instead of discarding them at the slightest sign of “weakness”. Kinda messed up and cringe of society, I think.
Jason did. He noticed Walky’s grades tanked once they stopped doing review stuff and approached him. Walky pushed him away.
You can lead a horse to water…
That would mean accepting his failing, and that’s unacceptable.
“My” as in “my child, who was a good student, who made me proud.” The number of people taking “my…student” literally is astonishing to me.
Personally, I’m impressed that Walkie can keep up a monolog of snark under these circumstances.
I do the same thing when I’m stressed. It’s an automatic defense mechanism, not remotely voluntary. Put me in a frightening scenario and I’ll start gibbering like a character in a Joss Whedon production.
“Some defense mechanism. If I were the killer, I would kill YOU next.” – Colonel Mustard.
It’s not especially useful, no. I don’t think there’s been a single instance in my life of an adult screaming in my face, me cracking a joke, and them doing anything but getting angrier and louder.
I wasn’t getting down on you or your defense mechanism.
I just rarely pass up an opportunity to quote Clue.
I figured as much, don’t worry.
“I refused to be traumatized by this”
Sometimes snarky quips is all he has lol
I suspect this is exactly what he was doing for years watching Sal receive the same treatment and hoping the anger wouldn’t spill over onto him
“MY good student. Alongside my great scholar sitting to my left”
You know, if Walky didn’t freeze, and Linda didn’t have a short temper, his truthful explanation is a reasonable one. He was struggling, he was tutored by the TA, and since his grades got better, he thought he got it understood.
There it is! Her real face! The reason why Walky has been stuck at six years old in terms of emotional maturity before coming to college! This is a great strip, I’m feeling very SOMETHING about it. Keep winning Willis.
Also having been the “good student” compared to my sibling, I can guess what the impact was on Linda’s life :
– homework didn’t have to be monitored (more free time for the parents!)
– no need to pay a neighbor’s kid or a tutoring agency to tutor your own (more money that can be invested in something more fun like piano lessons for your kid!)
– you get to humble brag about your kid being good in school (“and I’m even helping lol it’s just those big brains genes that we passed down”), thus having a bright future in front of them, for free (more social status for you!)
He’s HER good student because she has benefited from the fact he’s a good student at school and was less of a problem child compared to his sister. And until college he was happy to mold himself into this tiny, tiny family position, projecting a lot of his inner life in cartoons, because TV allowed him to go on adventures (what he wanted) without moving an inch (what his mother wanted).
(Oops, this is not in the strip, this is 100% pure projection, my bad)
i guess that we will find out, but we know that Walky has never used comunal showers before college, he and Jeniffer only shared grade school, and that he has trusted on his charisma for grades, also that he was surprised by his actual grades. Which is weird, because if you do a math test really bad, you should know that you did it bad when you dont get to the answers. If you are shocked by the results, something funny is happening. I have suspected for a while that he was homescholed after the stabbing incident.
I think he mentioned being shoved into lockers by Jennifer, and recognized Alice, who was Jen’s high school besty/sorta girlfriend at sight. Granted he could have just seen her with Jennifer around the neighborhood, but the vibe implied that he knew her from school, where he was seen as being a weirdo dork. Plus, the overall vibe with his friendship with Jennifer seems to be “they were close in grade school but when they got to high school Jennifer got close with the popular kids and Walky didn’t”.
Huh. Maybe so. How do we know he didn’t attend high school with Billie?
He did attend high school with Jennifer. She and her friends used to shove him into lockers.
Not a single person at my high school used the showers, you frankly didn’t have TIME with how quickly you had to get to the next class after gym. To my knowledge nobody in sports used them either, definitely no one in the sports I was in did (cross country and track)
Walky went to high school with Jennifer.
They said so.
He knows about her high school activities of cheerleading and being the newspaper editor.
He recognized Alice and was recognized by Alice that time she told off Jennifer in the cafeteria (though she didn’t remember his name).
He knew Jennifer was a drunk and had a car accident.
Both he and Jennifer mentioned that they stopped being close in high school and that she used to shove him into lockers.
Also, Walky didn’t coast on his charisma for good grades (I don’t even know what you mean with that) as he legitimately got good grades and even now has only been stated to struggling with math.
As for communal showers, I played football all four years and wrestled two years of high school and none of us showered at school.
He was not homeschooled. “My good student” does not imply she was the teacher. “My good student” is because Linda has always judged Sal against him.
Does Galasso’s have security? Non-lethal security? I think it’s time to call security.
Ruth, sitting at the bar waiting for her bottom to finish work, missing the days of physical violence in the name of protecting her nerds.
“bottom” is an autocorrect fail but it still works.
I honestly thought that was what you meant to type, because hooo boy.
I meant to write boy toy but bottom is still probably more accurate
You know I can almost understand Linda. Not in the rage, but in where it comes from. The expectation she’s unreasonably placed on Walky. Dude seems kind of directionless in his life, things came easy to him so he was never challenged to figure out what he wants. Sal was a “problem child” but she’s a motivated problem that can take care of herself if her shortsighted righteousness didn’t land her in jail. I have no idea what Walky wants from life. The comic contest was the first time he was actually interested in something for himself that wasn’t fast food or a girl. Even then Joyce the winner of the contest is sitting in on art classes and planning out novels worth of stories. What is Walky doing? Flunky would send me into a small panic, cause like what is this boy gonna do with his life? I don’t agree with Linda at all, but I can almost understand it, being generous that this isn’t some vicarious expectation thing and that she actually cares about her kids beyond how well they reflect on her.
What’s Walky doing?
He’s setting up his comic on twitter per Booster’s suggestion (though he’s only designed the merch so far).
Not Twitter, it’s called “X” now
Yeah, cuz that’s gonna last more than a month
The name, or the site itself?
Honestly, it’s a coin flip at this point.
Dude he’s a freshman. Lots of people don’t know what they want to do with their lives yet. And at least he has a major declared. Electives in college help a lot of people find what they’re passionate about.
I think his is something he has in common with Danny actually. Another similarity that maybe explains their taste in women. They both seem attracted to girls that are more independent, tough, smart, and motivated. Qualities they don’t really have on the surface.
He wants to not be pre-med, but his mom wants to push and pressure him into it. That is a big enough problem that it probably takes up his entire brain space and makes finding his own purpose and path daunting and impossible. Imagine his brain freezing the same way his body is doing in this comic when confronted with choices and commitment. He says it himself, he’s got no other survival mechanisms. I’d add that he has nothing other than freezing because no one, certainly not his parents, taught him any survival skills.
Also, she’s not like this to him because he’s directionless in life. He’s directionless in life because she’s like this to him.
She’s been like this since he was a little kid.
Being a gifted child is basically being Luisa from “Encanto” but for mental strength instead of physical strength and it’s no wonder so many of us are messed up in the head.
Honest to Satan it’s also one of the most exhausting interpersonal aspects of growing up autistic — it’s either a superpower or you’re a diseased creature T_T
Reminds me that one Tumblr post that went something like “Being different from others is to be shunned unless it can be exploited.” in reference to Rudolph the red nosed reindeer.
This. Fetishization / exploitation is not the same as appreciation or respect.
Linda has unlocked a new Shitty Mode: LOUD and Shitty. Exciting development!
No, for real. Linda’s been keeping her cool this whole time and it will be interesting to see the lid come off here – not good for Walky of course, but definitely interesting.
Well mom, it turns out when you’re “the good student” and everyone expects effortless genius from you including yourself, you don’t have any tools to deal with failure, being challenged, needing effort or basically deal with school on any level beyond “very easy,” and I had an extended episode of severe denial. Heck, Dorothy had to go out of her way to try and help me learn “how to study” because nobody else thought that was something the good student should have to know.
And meanwhile. I did think the hacking would fail to get Amber in trouble since a) Linda wouldn’t care to make trouble for Amber that would certainly also help Walky look bad, b) she would figure she probably couldn’t prove anything, and c) she couldn’t prove it was Amber at any rate. So that’s funny how quickly and completely it fell aside.
Walky changed his mind at the last moment and told Amber not to change his grades.
She then told him she had already done it before he finished speaking.
To which he asked her to change them back as it was his mess and he’d just have to suffer the consequences.
She said she would, then only made them ok grades because she liked him and didn’t want him to leave college.
So as far as he knew, Amber restored his bad grades in math and things simply weren’t as bad as he feared they were.
Linda should beat the shit out of Walky in front of everyone. He deserves it for doing a sitcom shenanigan.
Was that sarcasm?
You know it’s every parent’s right to flip the fuck out and beat the piss out of their adult child in a pizzeria. Linda could probably do it too. She’s taller than Walky and he’s no fighter.
It’s in the Constitution. Specifically the seventh amendment.
An attempt at it. I keep seeing these needlessly violent takes from people with cake batter leaking out of their ears, stuff like “somebody punch Walky”, and I wanted to escalate it for fun.
thanks for clarifying. yeah i don’t think threatening violence against Walky here is that much of a flex?
A tone indicator would have been welcome here.
I didn’t want to be bossy about how people should read my post.
It’s not “being bossy” to inform the reader of your intended tone.
Yeah, i think of it as more like an accessiblity feature
I thought we were all about Death of the Author here, so I also figure my intended tone doesn’t matter anyway.
This is a conversation, not a published work.
Okay, and I’m not paying $300 to get one comment published in paperback, so you’re gonna have to use your imagination a little bit. Stop expecting me to do all of the emotional labor here.
Adding “/s” is not nearly as taxing as whatever it is you’re doing now.
An /s killed my father.
I think Oracle is attempting either sarcasm or an imitation Taffy. If it’s the latter, your recipe is gonna need a bit more weed, but even then you’re probably not gonna be able to replicate their particular flavor of autism
As an autistic person myself this has been incredibly stressful and I’m leaving now.
🥺
We have Taffy at home.
The Taffy at home:
Ironically, it seems I’ve failed to read the tone of the conversation. I thought we were joking around. Sorry for the stress, really.
That would be one helluva a panel
Oh hey, it’s Mokap, here to be enthusiastic about violence once more.
No I don’t think so, you’re doing well enough on your own you don’t need my help
Fine, here’s your daily allotment of attention, you fucking pest.
Probably should let people know when you’re not serious, like maybe use sarc tag or something
Bruh, just don’t. Alternatively, click the button next to “reply”
You’re right, of course. Thanks for the reality check.
It’s a handy button, and sometimes I feel ungrateful to Willis for not using it more.
No but in all seriousness, it’d be hilarious if Linda got so angry she had an aneurysm right as the pizza showed up, so she could die face down in the pizza.
Now that would be a splendid resolution! Let us hope that Galasso’s warning at the front was in fact ominous foreshadowing.
would be nice if she got sick enough they had to cut the trip early and the siblings are ‘off the hook’ for now
Noooo that would ruin the pizza
And probably put the kids off their meal even further…
Couldn’t they just pick around the more corpse-y parts?
Still much waste!
This triggered my timbers as an AuDHD “gifted student” turned struggling uni student. I have Walkys freeze response to criticism and it kills me for days. Thank fuck my mum is the Anti-Linda.
LADY, you are disturbing the peace of the temple of pizza that is at Gallaso please turn down your voice or I will force you to leave the establishment
We need this, Walky needs this
Well this was not the exact flavor of terrible I expected this plan to go, but hey, I’m here for it lol
On the one hand, I feel for Walky, since he looks like he’s about to have a panic attack, and it’s likely only going to get worse.
On the OTHER hand, you brought Amber here specifically to turn this into a train wreck and upset your psycho mom as part of your terrible plan. How did you think this was gonna go, my dude?
I guess he wanted amber to start a small fire and she came in with a bomb(shell) /shrug
dunno if lucy will be a worry anymore but i can imagine it’d be like “Well, lunch was a disaster” “oh?” “Yeah, so bad that there’s no point bothering going to dinner together”
I thought this was Dinner
Here we go again. It’s dinner if you’re one of those dangerous weirdos from Connecticut who call lunch dinner. It’s not dinner if you’re a normal, well-adjusted human being who says both dinner and supper to refer to an evening meal instead of a midday one.
I live in CT and I’ve never heard anyone here use it that way.
That said, the confusion here is understandable since there was talk of meeting for lunch which Linda changed to dinner in hopes Lucy would have other plans. I’m not sure it’s been made clear if this is dinner or if they all showed up for lunch anyway.
Connecticut was a random location I picked on a whim, as shorthand for “not where I’m from”. I don’t know or claim to know anything about your weird foreign slang.
On the positive side I guess Walky no longer needs to worry about what his Mom thinks of Lucy because at this point he might as well no longer exist for her.
He expected a sitcom shenanigan, not this. This is way too real.
Does linda have a degree in education? or were they temp homeschooled because ‘you were my good student’ sounds a bit awkward versus “you’re supposed to be the *smart* kid”
His importance to her wasn’t as her child – it was as The Good Student that she could point to in contrast to The Bad Kid, Sal. Then Walky went and disappointed her by being a human, not the icon whose niche she could point to whenever she wanted to prove she was a Good Mom.
Basically these aren’t children to her, not in the sense most of us would hold – they’re tokens of how well she did. Sal caught shit not just because she’s visibly darker than Walky, but also because she became the Bad Kid after making the Wrong Friends as a child. Now Walky’s not a Good Token because he did something wrong, which is not permissible in Linda’s eyes.
Meanwhile Sal picked a Good White Boy as her Boyfriend. Sal is about to get an emotional whiplash of suddenly being the Golden Child.
She views them as extensions of herself into the world, like Doc Ock tentacles, for her to manipulate as extra limbs, not independent thinking and feeling beings.
when was he ?
“What, you thought i was stupid?” Dorothy: “you threw a toy at my head!”
(don’t have the exact comic on hand to link. idk how ‘good’ his public school education , someone in my english class showed up high practically everyday and he was hardly struggling tho i went to school in the ‘ghetto’ part of the city/south lol) maybe walky just coasted hid way through school w/o rly trying and only struggled when he first got into college
i imagine there’s an uptick in difficulty, even if iwas magically 18-21 again and the debt-free college happened overnight idk if i’d still rly go back for full experience versus taking a few classes here nad there like culinary arts
Walky was an honor roll student who never had to study.
And even now, the only class he’s ever said on screen to struggle with is math.
So one problem is he doesn’t know a reliable method to study.
On top of that, a lot of readers think he has undiagnosed adhd and/or something else that makes it hard for him to study “the normal way”.
it’s really hard to start “studying” when you haven’t needed to your whole life, AHDH or whatever or not
hmm sorry, that came out kinda abrasive.
But we know it’s not as simple as STARTING to study with him because Dorothy was studying with him and it didn’t help.
That tells us that he probably also needs a method of study that works for him.
This is further implied with Sal who not only found a method of study that works for her, but also, as confirmed by Walky at the Raidah Breakfast, gets better grades than him.
Both had a problem with math.
Both had someone helping them study in what could be assumed to be a common method (Jason and Dorothy).
Both still struggled despite that help.
Sal finding what works for her doesn’t make it a given that Walky needs to find a method for himself (vs some other solution like being diagnosed with whatever he seems to present as), but, given the other similarities with Sal in this juncture, it seems the most likely solution to his math problem (no pun intended).
But he has. There’s no indication he’s still struggling in math or anywhere else. Amber only changed his pre-midterm grades last semester and he’s still in the same math class as the others this semester, so he obviously passed.
There was a reference at one point, which I can’t find with a quick search, to Amber getting him an app that would poke his brain about studying.
No.
He’s not failing, but he’s still struggling.
By which I mean it’s not effortless AND he has shown concern about his grades, but managed to still pass the quizzes and tests in this semester.
He feels no security as there’s a difference between believing you’ll get a C and worrying you’ll fail.
Walky I still worried he’ll fail and simply hasn’t, yet.
I’ll try to find the strip I’m referring to.
Here’s the only strip I found, but it does show that Walky isn’t confident in math.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-11/04-hompk/grumble-2/
LOL growing up if you got good grades and wore your uniform enough you’d get a pizza party every other week so i imagine that’d motivate walky in elementary school (tho ‘honor roll’ doesn’t mean as much in elementary unless it’s a particularly advanced school/known for having good education versus just the basics/bare minimum needed to move up or so)
Before he went to College.
I imagine Walky is one of those gifted students who coasted on their intelligence through out the basic education. Never really having to put in the effort.
Then College happened and he actually needed to study but he never had to so he never developed the work ethic, the studying mechanisms and that other stuff the less gifted students needed to succeed. And well… he was shit out of luck.
It’s not even the work ethic man. I was that student. It wasn’t even that I hadn’t developed a work ethic, I absolutely had, I even had a 40h/w job at the time. It wasn’t about the work ethic, I’d just never practiced studying, so doing it was really hard for around 5 years as I had to learn how to study.
And that isn’t to say there weren’t college courses I still breezed through. I learned how to write well and aced every literary arts class I took. Hell, arguably college did wonders for my GPA generally speaking since any class I already understood was a free 2-4 tests show up only when you need to show up, ace everything.
But the math… I retook algebra one time in 9th grade and then on that foundation breezed through the rest of the HS math I took. The point is, when my degree I was aiming for required Calc 1, 2, 3, Linear Algebra, and Differential Equations, I had to spend 2 full years learning how to learn math. I took Calc 1 and 2 twice each, the 2nd time because after the first I guess I hadn’t learnt my lesson. I breezed through the rest of school after that with my newfound studying powers.
My problem was that I only really hit that wall with Diff Eq. Too late in the process to retake anything and figure it out. Managed to pass, but knew I didn’t get it well enough to handle the next year’s classes that built on it. And didn’t have time to retake it and “learn how to learn math”.
I was in college just as long as I was in grade school just to get a Bachelor’s. So I had time. I was working the whole time and graduated with 0 debt. Unfortunately it took like 13 years to do everything, though close to half the credits came in the last 2 when I went to get my degree haha.
Wow, that was really determined of you, well done
I think walky might’ve been ‘casual’ but he wasn’t a super slacker
Tho he only missed class once with dorothy when she freaked out and like “no one’s hear to yell at me, i’m a living god!” or so at least he didn’t have a habit on skipping out of other classes
Aaaaaaaaand suddenly Sal is the top kid.
How things change in just a lunch time.
My, my. How the turntables.
On the other hand, Lucy’s unhacked grades are pretty good (I guess).
95% probability that next strip Walky panics and says something to incriminate Sal in order to deflect
Sweet, relevant Gravatar
Nah, I can’t see him doing that to her, especially after he realized their parents were racist. I actually think Danny will come to Walky’s defense. And maybe point out that, like… He was kidnapped and his roommate just was *murdered.* (He and Linda don’t know that’s why Walky has been struggling and it’s a safe assumption). I think Sal and Charles will be too frozen by the yelling to get involved, and Amber will have retreated back into her phone because she f-ed up.
And then I predict Lucy will come and take Walky to freedom. Or yell at Linda a lot. I really hope its the second.
I’m not saying he’d do it CONSCIOUSLY but it seems like the kind of thing he’d do, esp as a golden child unused to direct negative attention from his parents
Willis,
I can’t help wondering if this page ( Linda text) is Fully autobiographical.
Is it?
We are entering a bizarro world where Sal is the Golden Child and Walky becomes the scapegoat.
Every 300,000 years, magnetic forces wane, and reverse, causing a pole shift to make North go South, and South point North. This is just the family sized version of that.
I think the plan is working wonderfully!
Walky DID want Amber to start a shitshow. 100% success, no notes.
It’s kinda telling that Walky’s reaction has been entirely focused on Linda. Not “I thought you didn’t do that in the end?” Not “were you ever planning on telling me you did that?” Not “what did I actually earn?” Not “I told you I didn’t want you to do that after all – you said you’d changed them back”.
His mother. His mother’s rage, his mother’s response to his perceived failure, were and are his sole focus. She and her emotions takes up more headspace in HIS OWN HEAD than he’s allowed to…
And that’s the kid Linda treated “better”
Sal’s probably lucky she got some distance sooner.
Sal’s friend also, you know, stayed a friend, allowing her to have support from her chosen family despite lacking it from her blood family (including Walky, tho he’s trying to make up for lost time).
Walky’s friend pretty much abandoned him for popularity in hs, so he’d only have the parents (at least this is what we know until we some other actual friends from back then).
Maybe really was smart enough to realize that, even though he told amber to “undo” her hacking, she still might have altered his grades. (After all he had a string of failed tests but still passed… Something in his brain may be thinking “this doesn’t add up”…)
But, he didn’t have the proof, and didn’t want to confront amber about it and cause more problems.
It might come up again with Amber, but right now his mom’s yelling and he’s in full panic mode.
Ah, it appears I was mistaken from yesterday. It looks like Linda won’t just be hating Amber after tonight.
This is painful to see. Even if you don’t like Walky the way Linda is yelling at him is scary. Their relationship has changed forever. I wonder what Danny and Sal are feeling watching this scene. I hope Sal is not going to shut up to seeing her brother insult like that and I’m really afraid of Amber’s panic reaction.
You know that reaction image of a guy walking into an apartment with pizzas and the place is on fire and multiple people are hurt? That’s going to be Lucy if she decides to come here and have a look how the things are going.
“Roxaaaaaaanne!”
Not a rare occurrence at any eatery in any college town. Public parental flip-outs and confrontations in the course of a meal are as common as hydrants.
At least she’s not slinging a weapon.
Yet
I wonder if they’re regretting this decision yet
Speaking from experience, college work is on a whole different level compared to high school. I couldn’t just one-and-done it like Walky did in HS, it was a beast.
I’ve been struck this whole time by how socially awkward and rude Wally’s parents are. I know it’s all intentional and abusive, but the lack of any skill or subtlety makes me think that Linda and Charles had no social skills in the first place to teach Walky. Their attempt to ditch a lunch with Lucy was so blatant and rude. And they kept talking about Sal and Danny where they both can hear them. Linda believing Amber, who she hates, at the drop of a hat and shouting at Walky for his grades…I can see where Walky gets his ability to annoy people and also say the worst things at a Halloween party.
Maybe I just expected his parents to be more waspish, rather than full on Karen. But maybe that’s on me.
This is a good observation. And a unique one. I haven’t seen anybody else mention it.
I think I’ll keep an eye out for more evidence in the future.
Hey being ND runs in the family babeyyy. Except in older generations it’s just “how they are”. Combine that with the completely separate fact of them being terrible people, you get this unabashedly rude and awful behavior
Are Sarah and Dina the only ones with good parents
Dorothy and Sierra also got good ones.
Wonder if Mike’s parents could be counted as “good”. His mom at least seemed very friendly in the strip(s) she was in. (She did raise a malcontent though…)
Carla at least likes her parents. They’re prolly good parents, even if they’re also billionaires
Carla has AWESOME parents.
…Hey.
I know Tisha B’av is coming up, and that can be a triggering, tough time for folks. And this strip gets very triggering, too. For me, it’s the anniversary of something very bad happening in my life. I just…
Be gentle with yourselves, ‘K? Drink some hot tea with honey in it. Or take a safe nap. Or cuddle with something or someone soft (dog, cat, human, inanimate object…). Or take a warm shower. Just…
…please take care of YOU this week. The heat dome and other environmental disasters make everything harder. Don’t worry if you need or want to take a break from this strip or its comments. Those you enjoy still be here with bells on when you return.
Just sending caring and appreciation and SO MUCH RESPECT to each and every one here.
Whatever is going on with you, we can get through this. You can.
Ah, brings back memories! Granted my mom was a lot more weep than scream but…
Now how do we make it worse? Jason comes in for his last check? Ethan (drama with Sal, Amber, and Danny) and Asher (tertiary villan of the convenience store stabbing, Walky punched him) walk in for pizza? Marcie um. .. skate boards on Linda’s face?
Shit, where’d Walky go? I can’t even see him!
And just like that, Walky’s gifted-kid burnout is exposed.
Sal: “Look at me. I am the
captaingolden child now.”I sympathize with Walky somewhat, I was an easy A-B student for most of my subjects (except spanish) straight through High School, but my performance dropped in college because I really didn’t have very good study habits. You can only coast on natural talent so far before you hit a wall with how hard college level material can be. In fact I had to get a special waiver for my spanish requirement because I couldn’t pass even the most basic level even after two tries, it was pretty humiliating.
Had a similar thing growing up. Not to this degree, but I was the kid my parents would repeatedly say they “didn’t have to worry about.” Which meant when I *was* struggling, the best response was to hide it.
Thank god my parents’ response when it all did come tumbling down (at Walky’s age no less) wasn’t this. She’s showing so much of herself with “you were my good student (kid).”
Linda’s children have never been their own people. They’re just reflections of her, and any time they don’t fit what she wants them to be, she gets angry.
Man, this is giving me flashbacks to my mum. Cs (I’m American) were failing in our house.
I almost actually failed a math class and was grounded and forced to study every waking moment my senior year of high school.
Many years later my mum found that report card and was like “wow I don’t remember you almost failing this class” and I was like “I DO.”
Poor Walky. I feel you, man.
The axe forgets, the tree remembers
Man, that statement sums this up perfectly. Thank you. ♥
oh fuck off linda
maybe be a good parent instead of trying to look like one
Every time I get up this arc presents a new sucker punch
Mother who’s fault this is says whaaaaaaat?
The Dorito chin is strong in Linda today.
In a more serious note, time to run Walky. I know you’re frozen. But if you keep sitting there in striking range… At the very least, don’t go anywhere private with Linda.
Someone arrest this woman for indecent exposure, her “conga” is showing in public
You’ve heard of “Fight or Flight”, now try “Freeze or Appease”!
Fight, flight, freeze, fawn, feed, f***, tend and befriend.
Various responses to extreme threat.
It was a revelation when I first heard about the “freeze and fawn” bits. All those years of being lectured about “flight or flight” and me going “But I don’t do either of those things.” “Yes you do.” “Nope.”
Can we just have Walky get pulled out of IU Bloomington and transfer to a community college? He clearly doesn’t have the study skills to even deal with 101 level courses – and community colleges are more inclined to help struggling freshmen. I know there’s a bunch of dangling plot threads – but maybe we could put DOA on hiatus while Walky is away and start Shortpacked back up. Or have Walky in wacky gag-a-day hijinks at his community college.
Research universities are bullshit!! Why are they prioritized so highly!!!!
He is only struggling with math.
He’s not even struggling with math anymore.
Yeah – but if we get Walky as the fun slacker who runs the AV club at IU extension close to his home and works at the local comic shop on weekends – we can do fun hijinks more often. Gags. Shenanigans. Monkeyshines. Pop culture references that don’t have to be vague to fit into a sliding timeline! Remember the fun hijinks? Pepperidge Farm remembers…
Instead of long soap opera arcs that take half a decade to come to fruition. (Amber hacked his grades sometime in or before 2018.)
The die-hards aren’t going to leave. But – to keep them happy, he could come back to IU Bloomington for his junior year and we could see where all the soap opera plot lines had advanced in that time jump: Ruth and Billie are still being terrible. Joyce and Joe are in a polycule with Dina and Becky. Asher and Ethan are a power couple that run the southern Indiana mafia. Or whatever.
Ah boi this hits close to home…
the transition from primary school to highschool here is brutal
At least i ripped off the first “flunking math” bandaid in 7th grade. After getting a 99 the year before
Been priming my mom for the possibility of flunking out for like a year so, at least this won’t be the conversation
That was the high school to college transition for me. I think it comes down to when students like Walky (often ones who are put into “gifted” programs) have to relearn (or learn for the first time!) how to actually study, something they may have not done in ages. Some stick with the foolish mindset that no no no it’ll definitely all click with me eventually, I don’t have to change my schedule of screwing around, while others learn their lesson and change their ways.
I was one of those students, although in my case I was very very dedicated to studying until I experienced several sexual assault attempts off campus. I also experienced hate crime harassment on campus. (No arrests since the perpetrator was a minor!) I swiftly veered into mental breakdown territory. I was sobbing, on average, 3 hours a day… I would have spent that time studying.
A lot of people of whom I didn’t share all this with assumed that I had that mindset that you described, with regards to, “Screwing around;” the phrasing really brought these memories up for me! (Not yet having good studying skills had meant that studying was extra hard for me. It wasn’t something that I could throw myself into, in order to cope, since I had to use more mental resources to study, back then, compared to now.)
Boy, I knew this gambit would backfire but I did not expect how badly. I mean at this point the only way to get worse is for Sal to reveal she screwed Jason or for Linda to legit drop an n-bomb. And with this comic I would not rule out either.
I somehow doubt Willis is gonna write that word out and publish it on this Internet website for all to see.
I mean there are plenty of safe ways to write offensive dialogue without actually writing it. Black boxes, the old comic trick of just putting gibberish symbols in place of the offensive material, etc. I will agree that the odds are low on that one, regardless.
This backfired so spectacularly that the exhaust valve is bent, the muffler split in two, and someone stole the catalytic converter.
And the Joker got away.
Well, she’s shouting at Galasso’s, making a scene….I think it’s time we deployed Ninja Rick to silence her. It’s the only way to salvage this now.
Is Walky not going to use the whole “my roommate was killed” excuse here?
he’s a deer in the headlights of an oncoming truck.
the only thing keeping him alive is the fact that a heartbeat is an involuntary action.
Plus Linda doesn’t seem like the type to take that as a good reason. “That’s no excuse, David!! Did Mike help you study? Does Mike not being there somehow keep you from studying?!”
“W-well, mom, w-what about the trauma-”
“TRAUMA SCHAMA, YOU NEED TO WORK ON BECOMING A DOCTOR, DAVID!!!”
She is so not used to being rebuffed in an argument, huh?
“You were my GOOD student.”
In only one sentence, Linda managed to dehumanize Walky, show no support for him, and insult Sal. Impressive.
A serial abuser serial abuses. WHO COULD HAVE EVER PREDICTED?
Anyone have a tl:dr for the 526 comments? (Work has been busy.)
Are there any parents in this strip who aren’t complete crap?
Dorothy’s, Dina’s, Hank Brown is at least someone redeemable, and we know Carla loves her parents, they seem fine.
11th hour realization Linda’s hair looks like scorpion claws
Fuck, I can’t unsee it. Make me unsee it, now!