It's a pretty rigid format but we keep the content loose, you know?
Nigh Heaven & Hell
Scotty
Heather Vodihn is on a simple mission: find her father. However she becomes entangled with two strangers with mysterious powers being stalked by a group with bizarre demands. Heather must learn to trust her new traveling companions, even if she is untrustworthy herself.
Freakshow
Scotty
A festival of broken people, blood flows in the center ring. Come one and come all, to the greatest show in all of Paris.
Monster's Garden
Ash G.
Champion pit fighter Kilo Monster was content to spend the rest of his days tending to his quiet garden alone... until he met a curious robot girl and her human family.
Edison Rex
Chris Roberson
The adventures of the world’s greatest villain who, after defeating his superheroic nemesis, decides that he’s the only one left to defend the world.
Stand Still, Stay Silent
Minna Sundberg
A few generations after the end of the world, a small, poorly financed research crew is sent out to rediscover whatever is left of the forbidden old world in the south.
Little Tiny Things
Clover
What are the little things that move us? The simple joys that warm our bodies and hearts? The micro life of insects that influence our world more than we think? The tiny steps we make everyday to have a happier tomorrow?
Angel's Orchard
Harry Bogosian
After the events in Demon's Mirror, Gerda has accepted her role as a Demon Hunter, and Cezar has traveled back to the Demon City. Demons have existed alongside humans for millennia, so things begin to return to normal. But an impossibly powerful Relic has been taken by one of the Demon Masters, and a silent war enters its final stages.
Namesake
Isa, Meg
There's ghosts at your heels and fairy tale worlds ahead. What do you do? Jump down the rabbit hole!
Barbarous
Ananth Hirsh, Yuko Ota
A crummy wizard and an anxious monster have to get over themselves and bring order to an apartment building full of misfits.
Lies Within
Lacey
Lysander's aimless and carefree life is turned upside down when he accidentally discovers that the cute boy next door, Simon, is a literal monster
ARISE, YE SKELETON KING
Brian Clevinger, Escher Cattle, Lee Black
A troupe of wandering "adventurers" down to their last silver "acquire" a map only to find the real treasure was the fiend they dug up along the way.
Novae
KaiJu
A historical romance with a touch magic and a dash of astronomy. It chronicles the romantic adventures of Sulvain, a sweet tempered necromancer and Raziol, a passionate 17th century astronomer.
Saint for Rent
Ru Xu
Saint Halliday runs an inn for Time Travelers. Unfortunately, he seems to attract other supernatural "guests," too.
Guilded Age
T Campbell, John Waltrip, Florence Machina
Welcome to the saga of the working-class adventurer! Enjoy the complete story with new annotations daily!
The Weave
Rennie Kingsley
A young woman pursued by bad luck is witness to the murder of the Fairy Queen of Summer. Can she get to the bottom of this mystery?
Sakana
Mad Rupert
Our heroes must navigate a hazardous dating scene, overcome personal anxieties, and wrangle unruly seafood in order to find love, peace of mind, and a paycheck.
Empowered
Adam Warren
A sexy superhero comedy (except when it isn't) about the never-ending struggles of a plucky but very unlucky young superheroine.
The Golden Boar
Magnolia Porter Siddell
A young woman joins a group of summoners who call forth Guardian Beasts to protect their isolated magical island. Unfortunately, her Guardian Beast is nothing like she'd imagined, and he's about to change her life, and everything she thought she knew about herself...
The Messenger
indui
In a ruin-abound town cursed with bad luck, Kai and Kalla--a young boy and a fledgling dragonbird spirit--take on a quest in hopes the reward will solve all of their problems.
Darkling Bright
Chris Hazelton
Kieran Bright is a college student home for the summer and roped into an online reunion with his old neighborhood friends in the most recent update of their favorite childhood MMORPG.
At least, he was, and that was the idea...
Join Kieran and his friends as they are pulled into another reality that may or may not be real and are forced to confront their own identities, the nature of simulated universes and reality itself.
Cyanide & Happiness
Explosm
Satire, dark humor and surreal humor.
Dumbing of Age
David M Willis
Joyce has been homeschooled her entire life until now, when she's suddenly a freshman in college! Things don't go well.
Nerf Now!!
Josué Pereira
A cute webcomic about fanservice, video games, and... love. Mostly video games, though.
Sister Claire
Yamino
In the troubled aftermath of a great war between Witches and her fellow Nuns, novice Sister Claire just wants a purpose.
Not Drunk Enough
Tess Stone
Logan Ibarra is possibly the unluckiest repairman in the world. A late night job should not have landed him in the middle of a mad scientist's squabble, but he soon finds himself surrounded by monsters and further madness with little tools to get out.
Blindsprings
Kadi Fedoruk
Tamaura, wrested into a world 300 years in the future, must find a way to save the magic fading from her country.
Augustine
Winter Jay Kiakas, Windy
August and her ragtag group are just like everyone else, simply surviving in the treacherous Crater... When they stumble into what may be an artifact of the ancient past, their lives are thrown into a much bigger loop as they trifle with bounty hunters, monsters and gods.
Heroes of Thantopolis
Izzy Strontium Hall
A living boy fights to save the City of the Dead.
Sleepless Domain
Mary Cagle (Cube Watermelon)
In a world where magical girls and their battles are commonplace, loss has become all too common as well.
Peritale
Mari Costa
A fairy godmother with no magic tries her best to successfully fulfill a Fairytale and win the respect of her peers.
Ozzie the Vampire
Eric Lide
Ozzie and her best friend Kimmy are your average everyday normal art students – except one is an immortal vampire with superpowers and the other possesses a magic talking grimoire. Also they have to save their town from a demonic invasion.
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Judas Iscariot gets a pile of coins. Peter, inverted cross. Thomas a monocle. Mary a condom. Jude (judas Greater) could have a question mark, as in, who is this guy?
I utterly refuse to believe that Young Joyce would know what a condom looks like.
I’d bet folding money Current Joyce doesn’t either. Roz handed them out once, but if Joyce (in the stage she was in at the time) saw that she either blocked it out or thought she was passing out weird moist towelettes.
I will be very disappointed if there isn’t a drawing of Joyce and Becky holding hands on the back of a giant pony, with the caption “Besties Forever” written at the top.
at this point it’s like the “what is the most evolved” trick question from a few years ago. Her fundamentalist upbringing gave her a structure for her life that she could adopt. She then autistically obsessed over it for her entire childhood. Asking which is doing this is like trying to separate soda water from concentrate after it’s become Sprite.
It tends to be in the fundamentalist sects more then other sects but fundamentalism regardless of religion trends towards racism, bigotry and fear of outsiders.
I mean, a lot of them don’t even know they’re doing it, is the scary part.
Like I said in an earlier post, a big trend in christian conservative coalitions and alt-right movements in the US is that a big part of it depends on members keeping themselves carefully ignorant of their own beliefs. For not only would it scare the SHIT out of them if they actually realized what they believe in, but knowing and being obliged to defend a coherent worldview would otherwise impair their ability to argue effectively.
Is socialism anti-God, or should we not take the Bible literally when it tells us that it’s impossible to serve both wealth and God? Is the Bible a defense for policy you don’t agree with, or isn’t it?
Should we defend gun-ownership rights because “what if we need to overthrow the government some day”, or should we take cops at their word when they shoot a POC for “looking like they might have a gun”? Should we distrust authority, or love cops and the troops?
Does the diversification of children’s TV show characters, clothing and school history texts entail “subliminal leftist brainwashing”, or is subconscious racism bullshit? Can ideologies be subconsciously embraced or can they not?
For the conservative, the answer is whatever wins the argument with a leftist at the given moment. And by “winning”, what that usually entails is what they interpret as a “forfeit”, which in actuality is the moment when we leave the conversation because we feel it’s unproductive or possibly even unsafe to continue.
The more “wins” they get like this picking up and throwing rhetoric the conservative christian media machines crank out and throwing it at leftists, the more they are convinced there must be something to it, the more superior they feel, and so on in this cycle.
The only true abiding principle for them is self-interest — all other principles and viewpoints are but tools to pick up and drop depending on their utility. From the high-schooler willing to defend the Japanese Interment camps of WWII and the “lost cause” of the confederacy just to feel superior to their peers, to the middle schooler rewarded for being able to believe one thing in science class and another in church service, much conservative culture encourages practical ignorance of their own beliefs at all stages.
Not to bring politics in this, but a minister recently called a bunch of Jesus’ beliefs weak and compared him unfavorably to Trump. The Prosperity Gospel and Southern Fundamentalist Christianity are basically antithetical to Christianity as it is taught with a massive number of beliefs designed to basically invert the faith regarding poverty, pacifism, and universal salvation.
A theology teacher of mine (I had a very interesting education) basically said that the extremist Christian ideologies of America are inherently tied two things:
1. Being descended from violent Protestant exiles from England.
2. Slavery
The 2# basically said that Christians in the 14th century knew slavery was evil but when the corrupt Borgias re-legalized it (it had already died out) for financial reasons, they paid extensive amounts of money to find various biblical justifications for it. The Southern baptists split with mainstream Baptism over it and more or less rewrote Christianity as a whole to justify slavery as an institution in Southern america.
Hence the racism isn’t a bug, it is the entire point.
I read an interview with Leonard Cohen or maybe someone else, wish I could remember exactly. He said something like the devil tempted Jesus at the high place with dominion over all peoples, and Jesus said no, but the church said yes.
Another subject that often seems relevant to people arguing in bad faith (even, perhaps, when they’re not aware they’re doing it) is implicature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicature
I’m probably too tired to summarise properly right now, but it’s generally about what’s implied (hence the name) versus what’s actually said. So, when certain people say “the Jews killed Jesus”, they can defend their words biblically by pointing to the verses in which a crowd of Jews called for the execution of Jesus, while glossing over how they’re using it as an excuse to hate Jews in general, never mind that Joe (for example) wouldn’t have been involved in the event in question, or that Jesus would’ve been a Jew himself… but, when raising their children to be as bigoted as they are, they take full example of the “hate all Jews except the ones we implicitly consider not to be Jews” implication.
Actually, come to think of it, that might be a better example of the motte-and-bailey fallacy. Too tired, as I mentioned; sorry.
The problem with not playing with such individuals is they regard the other side not playing as a win. If one gives up arguing with them, then that’s a win. If their troll logic somehow wins, that’s a win. Basically, unless the people doing the bad faith arguments are soundly confronted and out-argued, they feel like they win. Then they come back the next day with the exact same topics, arguments, and mindset, because they like the superior feeling when they ‘win’ against whomever they are arguing with.
I have personally watched conservatives adopt, discard, and re-adopt “deeply-held core beliefs” over the course of a single conversation. Any number of times.
The only thing that they appear to truly, consistently believe is “Us Good, Them Bad.”
I was thinking he was drawn either Middle Eastern or Black but weirdly it didn’t even occur to me he was drawn as a Jewish stereotype (but I suppose that’s cuz Joe said “non white” and I don’t consider myself and other Jews to not be white)
Racism’s one of those things where you don’t win regardless, you just lose a little less than everyone else. Jewish is white until it’s time to vilify them for all our problems because they secretly run the world or whatever the stereotype is. I’m sure Joe’s dealt with his share of bs too.
“white” is arbitrary and always interpretated in the way it benefits whatever agenda the elite is trying to promote. At some point the Irish weren’t considered white.
According to Ben Franklin, only the English (not the British, just the English specifically) and the Saxons are white. Every other European ethnicity is not white but “swarthy”.
I wonder if MLP was allowed at the Brown household. Joyce was probably the perfect age to grow up with the highly popular Lauren Faust series. Would the series be considered secular? They do worship an immortal deities that control the sun and moon among other things? I don’t know where it lands. Is the magic of friendship anti-bible?
She most definitely wasn’t allowed Harry Potter or Scooby Doo. I’m not sure about Star Wars – I seem to vaguely recall her saying she wasn’t allowed to watch it but I know Willis was.
Scooby Doo should absolutely not be judged fine by fundamentalist parents, so it tickles me that apparently it sometimes is? A show all about asking questions and finding answer for yourself and putting the screws to superstition? You’d think it would be so, so anathema.
All magic is demonic young lady. >:(
(Granted that’s not true. All prayer is magic. And Moses was magic too. But these people ain’t read their scripture.)
Pretty hard to imagine the Browns being OK with stories about The Princess of Friendship when her element symbol is “Magic”. Sounds really pagan to me.
Also the episodes where Starlight Glimmer founded a religious cult with her as leader… I don’t know, maybe they’d have liked that one. Hard to guess.
You know, I think in a world where her upbringing wasn’t a dumpster fire, Joyce would be a great archaeologist of Roman occupation Judaic lore. It’d be interesting to see her study things of the time period as an atheist. She wouldn’t even be the only one.
Sluggy Freelance is still goin strong, I still read it every week! I think Pete is getting pretty close to the conclusion after a whopping 26 years of telling one continuous story: https://sluggy.com/
I used to annoy my family with Doctor Who so much. 15ish years later, I’m still very into it, but I’ve learned how to not info dump without consent. Fandoms are my special interests, but this is definitely the one that best fits the prompt.
I was generally obsessed with Teen Titans and Avatar: the Last Airbender. There was a point where my sister and I sat down and listed out from memory every episode title of every season of both of those shows in order (Teen Titans had I think 5 seasons of 15-20 episodes each, and ATLA had 3 seasons of like 20 episodes each).
Not trying to, I memorised every line of both seasons of a British radio series called The Hitch-hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy. (My British cousins sent me tapes before it was broadcast here, and I played them for a lot of friends.)
Tolkien’s legendarium. Not just The Hobbit and <The Lord of the Rings but The Silmarillion, all of his son’s History of Middle-Earth etc.
When the Big Bang Theory characters find a One Ring from LOTR The Movie, I snicker at them: they can only recite from memory the translation of the inscription.
In the Amber series, clearly the shifting continuity of charactes’ past relationships with each other was deliberate signs that the Amberites even make shadows of each other. But uhh, after reading other works of Zelazny, I think he just came up with good ideas partway through, and used those good ideas where he could fit them in next, rather than trying to edit them into where they would make the most sense.
I was subscribed to Nintendo Power in the 90s, so I learned about Pokemon before it came out stateside. I got really, badly obsessed, just quivering with anticipation for when it would finally get released and I could play it. Because of this experience, gen1 was throughly seared into my brain (also got pretty burned out on the franchise) and I refused to learn a single thing about anything that followed, to this day I barely know anything about post-gen1 pokemon.
I don’t even remember anymore, but there have been. so many. Earliest memory is memorising every episode of I Love Lucy and relating how funny the chocolate conveyer belt scene was to my poor mother who was really just trying to rest after a long day.
The most awkward thing is that Jesus and all the Apostles were Jews… but somehow only Judas got the Evil Jew treatment… it takes some mental hooplas to work with this.
I think the argument is the distinction between the Jews who accepted Jesus as Messiah and those who rejected him. The Jews were given the first opportunity for salvation, but most of them rejected it.
It’s still bigotry, but if you buy into the basic Christian message, it’s a logical extrapolation.
When it was first written, by Jews and for Jews, claiming “the Jews killed Jesus”* would’ve been a claim of “oh nooo, we ourselves killed our own guy, we need to look inwards and reckon with that terrible mistake we made” (with a side of “see, Romans? we are going way out of our way to make these teachings very palatable to you. please don’t kill us.”)
But then, within a few hundred years, the early Christians split off and stopped being a sect of Judaism at all, so “the Jews killed Jesus” quickly became “oh dang, those sneaky badguys over there did it! Get ’em!!”
*the Jews did not in fact kill Jesus, historically.
Much faster than that. Christians are estimated to be mostly Gentile in origin by the end of the first century. By the time the Gospels were written, they saw themselves as distinct. I don’t see much “need to look inwards and reckon with that terrible mistake we made” in the texts. Even in Paul – where he does do that to an extent, it’s about his persecution of Christians before his conversion, not about Jews in general.
The Gospels, coming along later have a focus on Jews rejecting Jesus and Gentiles believing him (in addition to the blame for his execution), but that’s more a reflection of how the new religion was spreading in their day.
According to Wikipedia, Matthew and Mark have a disciple named Thaddeus where Luke and John have a different Judas; Mark and Luke have a tax collector called Levi, whose conversion is exactly the same as Matthew’s, but still call the apostle Matthew; and John has a Nathaniel who doesn’t get mentioned anywhere else, and doesn’t name most of the others at all (it’s believed that Nathaniel is the disciple the others call Bartholomew, but it’s disputed).
What seems to me likely is that Jesus had a bunch of followers, some of whom everyone agreed in later days were important and others who were less so.
But they needed a list of twelve to match the twelve tribes and the later traditions didn’t all agree on who they were. Matthew and Luke copied Mark’s list, but worked in a couple names they knew. John didn’t know Mark and doesn’t seem to have a list of his own.
Whether or not Jesus himself ever designated twelve or whether that only happened after his death isn’t really clear.
I don’t think Fudgeload is part of the Mane Five, Joyce. Unless they have different names over the course of the franchise. Maybe she’s the same one as Clusterflip?
As I understand it, they kind of do — the creator of Friendship is Magic based the main characters on the main ponies of past eras, but then learnt there were rights issues or something and gave them the names of less well-known ponies or completely original names. Maybe Fudgeload is the FiM version of Sodomuffin.
Also please tell me the sliding timescale hasn’t reached the point where Joyce grew up watching FiM, because if so I may just crumble into dust right now.
Classic character names they wanted to use were trade-marked by other companies. This is a frequent issue for Transformers as well. Remarkably, there’s no such problem with Saints in the Catholic Church.
I feel like I’m on the verge of an autistic meltdown right now, if any of you have like some tips, chill happy music or good vibes, I’d very much appreciate them
I don’t know the particulars of your sitch, but I do mostly listen to music that soothes my overactive brain. This chills me out every time, used to let it play on my earphones while I had to sit still for long ice treatments at PT. Recommend you play it softly cause it does build up over time: https://youtu.be/OxgVmpAk538?feature=shared
Not particularly new, but I find pretty much everything I’ve ever listened to by “Vienna Teng” delightful. If you want upbeat and happy “Level up” is spectacular — I would, however, avoid “The Hymn of Acxiom” (from the same album) if you’re not ready to be creeped/freaked out.
May your brain allow you to have a steadily improving night …
Yes she is — and seems to be a genuinely good person as well as breathtakingly talented. In addition to her original work, she’s done some amazing covers/mashups. She has recently started combining activism with touring so I have hope there will be more …
Tbh I’d like to see what they made Judas look like, cuz in the first Picture Bible result I found from a quick google search (Sergio Cariello), he just looked like The Spaniard from Pirates of the Caribbean.
Thanks. I was looking for that yesterday, but my google-fu was weak.
I wonder when Joyce drew these – she’d have to already have been a pretty decent artist to get the stereotype across. I was picturing mostly human shaped blobs with the mentioned beards and sashes to distinguish them.
I like how when he realized she felt hurt over her past actions because propaganda reasons, he deflected her attention onto something ridiculous to lighten the mood
Also as an autistic person, trying to iron out inconsistencies is a mood
Joyce doesn’t know about her autism diagnosis. She talked to a doctor about something else entirely, the doctor noticed her behaviors and recommended she look into getting assessed, and then she hasn’t followed up on that yet.
aside from the above…yes, he knows. his reaction was “neat” and assumed it was good news because his own mom had struggled to get one: https://www.dumbingofage.com/grist/ (here and the next page)
Please I want Joyce to canonically self-diagnose as autistic so bad. I don’t want her to see a psychologist about this. I just want her to be like okay yeah.
Your twenties are where you start to unlearn the stuff you were programmed, or rather… choose what you want to keep.
In a very literal sense, this is part of the process of growing up.
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
If you preorder make sure to hit the Exclusive versions since they include a commemorative plaque and cost the same.
btw if you're one of those rando bluesky weirdos who doesn't know me but sees me in the wild being sarcastic and don't know i'm being sarcastic because you haven't taken like 30 seconds to, like, maybe look at my user profile or something, keep walking, you're not going to score internet points here
Here's an entertaining cite at the bottom of the first page
Josh Gerstein@joshgerstein.bsky.social ⋅ 1d
JUST IN: Milwaukee Judge Hannah Dugan moves to dismiss federal criminal case against her for allegedly helping immigrant hide from ICE. Her lawyers say she's protected by official acts & judicial immunity and 10th Amendment. Doc: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
Where did Hollywood go so wrong? I thought movies were supposed to be an escape from reality, a chance to put your worries aside and not have to think about any underlying ideas or concepts. Well, not anymore.
theonion.com/you-can...
It's not a new argument, of course, but Chesterton dismissed it effectively in 1908.
"You will hear everlastingly... this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man."
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com ⋅ 1d
Hawley dismisses Trump lining his pockets with his memecoin: "Listen, I think nobody believes that Donald Trump can be bought. I mean, what does Donald Trump need more money for?"
wilbur, savvy enough to know he's in a comic strip but still not a great actor, awkwardly lifts a muffin up into frame so that we, the audience, understand that he has a muffin right now, which is very important narratively, but he's not really selling it well as an organic, human action
confirming that the reason there's been no Galaxy Version female characters in Blokees until now is that they felt they needed to make Round Lady Thighs For Ladies
preternia @preternia.com ⋅ 5h
Josh Gerstein @joshgerstein.bsky.social ⋅ 1d
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com ⋅ 1d
Pavel
@spavel.bsky.social ⋅ 10d
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I would say, shame if at least one of those isn’t the pony versions but I guess that’s a bridge too far for then-Joyce
Quick, what would the apostles cutie marks be?
Judas Iscariot gets a pile of coins. Peter, inverted cross. Thomas a monocle. Mary a condom. Jude (judas Greater) could have a question mark, as in, who is this guy?
Matthew gets a ledger.
John gets a heart.
James, son of Zebedee gets a fish.
(No, sorry, a scallop shell. D’oh!)
By your powers combined, I am CAPTAIN JESUS!
(Music) Captain Jesus, he’s our savior!
Gonna punish all that bad behavior!
His apostles are so white,
All of them, except that Judas guy~
CAPTAIN JESUS: The power is…Yeah, it’s kinda still mine.
I love you
Sauce: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1QYQpHdzpw
I utterly refuse to believe that Young Joyce would know what a condom looks like.
I’d bet folding money Current Joyce doesn’t either. Roz handed them out once, but if Joyce (in the stage she was in at the time) saw that she either blocked it out or thought she was passing out weird moist towelettes.
Mary could have a veil.
Didn’t Roz have Joyce help her distribute condoms with a comical dildo hat on her head? If she didn’t before, I’m sure she knew after that.
Peter could have a cornerstone.
Mary gets a dove since she was made pregnant by the Holy Spirit and that’s a common depiction of it.
P.S. Despite not being at the last supper, Paul should have a big dildo because he’s such a dick.
Didn’t expect to read answers to this question today.
Thomas’s mark would be a hole getting fingered.
I’m changing my vote from my suggestion to this. 100% Perfect christian symbolism.
You are hereby awarded +500 internetz. Pure brilliance!
One hell of a cathartic bonfire awaits!!! Speaking of which…
*stims out to “Charlie’s Inferno” by The Handsome Devil on hacked muzak*
Thanks, NG.
…In case anyone else is, like Joyce, and, like me, stressing out right now, here’s some more audiosoothe…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=techmgGVOhk
🥲 Oh thank you Laura, I’ll be honest here, I am on the verge of autistic meltdown and really need to take it easy
We’re here, hon’.
We can do this. Si, se puede.
(( <3 ))
How many ponies did Joyce share a ride on in these drawings
I will be very disappointed if there isn’t a drawing of Joyce and Becky holding hands on the back of a giant pony, with the caption “Besties Forever” written at the top.
That’s the next bonus strip for Willis to draw sorted I guess.
What I’d they were riding on the back of a giant Jesus instead?
When there were three sets of footprints…
Unpacking a lot while unboxing these memories, ain’t we.
Is it autism or her upbringing? What are the odds at?
It’s both, and we can’t unscramble that egg.
Nature AND nurture
Narture.
at this point it’s like the “what is the most evolved” trick question from a few years ago. Her fundamentalist upbringing gave her a structure for her life that she could adopt. She then autistically obsessed over it for her entire childhood. Asking which is doing this is like trying to separate soda water from concentrate after it’s become Sprite.
To separate soda water from concentrate, just drink the Sprite. In a few hours it’s all sorted.
I’m pretty sure reverse osmosis would work for that. There’s not going to be much in a beverage that has a molar weight lower than 18.
….How am *I* the one with the Dina avatar and *you’re* the one with Joe??
I wonder if her parents are a little autistic, making the structure of fundamentalism more appealing.
I hobestly wonder how much weird shit I internalized that I still haven’t figured out.
Is a fudgeload more or less than a brazilian?
I’ve seen a fudgeload cover a brazilian, so I’d wager it’s more. And if you mean the non-sexually euphemistic fudgeload, way more!
Personally I’ve been procrastinating my brazilian because it’s going to cost a fudgeload. 800 up front for 8 months of getting shot with lasers.
I worry that I understood that too quickly; I might need a break from the internet for a day or two.
Also if you meant a literal fudgeload on a Brazilian, that could be sexy. Hard to clean up, and only good for that night, but still worth it.
…Were the ponies also white?
All but one
More like they were all bright, primary and secondary colours but one.
Only best pony.
Also Celestia.
The lengths American Christians will go to indoctrinate their children into being racists never ceases to amaze me, it’s wild.
It tends to be in the fundamentalist sects more then other sects but fundamentalism regardless of religion trends towards racism, bigotry and fear of outsiders.
Yeah… that’s not limited to Americans or Christians.
I mean, a lot of them don’t even know they’re doing it, is the scary part.
Like I said in an earlier post, a big trend in christian conservative coalitions and alt-right movements in the US is that a big part of it depends on members keeping themselves carefully ignorant of their own beliefs. For not only would it scare the SHIT out of them if they actually realized what they believe in, but knowing and being obliged to defend a coherent worldview would otherwise impair their ability to argue effectively.
Is socialism anti-God, or should we not take the Bible literally when it tells us that it’s impossible to serve both wealth and God? Is the Bible a defense for policy you don’t agree with, or isn’t it?
Should we defend gun-ownership rights because “what if we need to overthrow the government some day”, or should we take cops at their word when they shoot a POC for “looking like they might have a gun”? Should we distrust authority, or love cops and the troops?
Does the diversification of children’s TV show characters, clothing and school history texts entail “subliminal leftist brainwashing”, or is subconscious racism bullshit? Can ideologies be subconsciously embraced or can they not?
For the conservative, the answer is whatever wins the argument with a leftist at the given moment. And by “winning”, what that usually entails is what they interpret as a “forfeit”, which in actuality is the moment when we leave the conversation because we feel it’s unproductive or possibly even unsafe to continue.
The more “wins” they get like this picking up and throwing rhetoric the conservative christian media machines crank out and throwing it at leftists, the more they are convinced there must be something to it, the more superior they feel, and so on in this cycle.
The only true abiding principle for them is self-interest — all other principles and viewpoints are but tools to pick up and drop depending on their utility. From the high-schooler willing to defend the Japanese Interment camps of WWII and the “lost cause” of the confederacy just to feel superior to their peers, to the middle schooler rewarded for being able to believe one thing in science class and another in church service, much conservative culture encourages practical ignorance of their own beliefs at all stages.
Honestly, that fucking terrifies me.
Aaaaand wow i haven’t made a mega post like that in a long time. Guess I needed a bit of catharsis as well, hehehe
Not to bring politics in this, but a minister recently called a bunch of Jesus’ beliefs weak and compared him unfavorably to Trump. The Prosperity Gospel and Southern Fundamentalist Christianity are basically antithetical to Christianity as it is taught with a massive number of beliefs designed to basically invert the faith regarding poverty, pacifism, and universal salvation.
A theology teacher of mine (I had a very interesting education) basically said that the extremist Christian ideologies of America are inherently tied two things:
1. Being descended from violent Protestant exiles from England.
2. Slavery
The 2# basically said that Christians in the 14th century knew slavery was evil but when the corrupt Borgias re-legalized it (it had already died out) for financial reasons, they paid extensive amounts of money to find various biblical justifications for it. The Southern baptists split with mainstream Baptism over it and more or less rewrote Christianity as a whole to justify slavery as an institution in Southern america.
Hence the racism isn’t a bug, it is the entire point.
I read an interview with Leonard Cohen or maybe someone else, wish I could remember exactly. He said something like the devil tempted Jesus at the high place with dominion over all peoples, and Jesus said no, but the church said yes.
The Bible is fascinating if you read it from an anarchist perspective (as I do being an anarchist comedy writer).
Everything Jesus hated about fundamentalists, the rich, and war is as relevant today as it was 2000 years ago.
In any case, props to Willis for so many fantastic jokes about a sensitive topic.
Another subject that often seems relevant to people arguing in bad faith (even, perhaps, when they’re not aware they’re doing it) is implicature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicature
I’m probably too tired to summarise properly right now, but it’s generally about what’s implied (hence the name) versus what’s actually said. So, when certain people say “the Jews killed Jesus”, they can defend their words biblically by pointing to the verses in which a crowd of Jews called for the execution of Jesus, while glossing over how they’re using it as an excuse to hate Jews in general, never mind that Joe (for example) wouldn’t have been involved in the event in question, or that Jesus would’ve been a Jew himself… but, when raising their children to be as bigoted as they are, they take full example of the “hate all Jews except the ones we implicitly consider not to be Jews” implication.
Actually, come to think of it, that might be a better example of the motte-and-bailey fallacy. Too tired, as I mentioned; sorry.
Sounds like WOPR was right: the only way to win is not to play.
The problem with not playing with such individuals is they regard the other side not playing as a win. If one gives up arguing with them, then that’s a win. If their troll logic somehow wins, that’s a win. Basically, unless the people doing the bad faith arguments are soundly confronted and out-argued, they feel like they win. Then they come back the next day with the exact same topics, arguments, and mindset, because they like the superior feeling when they ‘win’ against whomever they are arguing with.
I have personally watched conservatives adopt, discard, and re-adopt “deeply-held core beliefs” over the course of a single conversation. Any number of times.
The only thing that they appear to truly, consistently believe is “Us Good, Them Bad.”
She probably also drew the disciples on ponies.
*as ponies.
Meanwhile Jesus rode in on a donkey.
Ahhh, so Judas was drawn as a Jew. Which makes it more personally uncomfortable for Joe I’m sure
I was thinking he was drawn either Middle Eastern or Black but weirdly it didn’t even occur to me he was drawn as a Jewish stereotype (but I suppose that’s cuz Joe said “non white” and I don’t consider myself and other Jews to not be white)
Racism’s one of those things where you don’t win regardless, you just lose a little less than everyone else. Jewish is white until it’s time to vilify them for all our problems because they secretly run the world or whatever the stereotype is. I’m sure Joe’s dealt with his share of bs too.
100%
Exactly the same here – I had to dig up a Google Books pdf of the actual book to see what he’d actually been drawn as
“white” is arbitrary and always interpretated in the way it benefits whatever agenda the elite is trying to promote. At some point the Irish weren’t considered white.
Similar thing with Slavs, especially if Nazis were involved.
According to Ben Franklin, only the English (not the British, just the English specifically) and the Saxons are white. Every other European ethnicity is not white but “swarthy”.
I wonder if MLP was allowed at the Brown household. Joyce was probably the perfect age to grow up with the highly popular Lauren Faust series. Would the series be considered secular? They do worship an immortal deities that control the sun and moon among other things? I don’t know where it lands. Is the magic of friendship anti-bible?
If you’re fundie enough, literally any depiction of magic or special powers that aren’t explicitly proclaimed as a miracle from God is paganism.
The hypocrisy is great, though. Star Wars? Fine. Scooby Doo. Fine. Harry Potter? Satanic.
My wife explained the rules varied on how much the local church needed to make an example.
She most definitely wasn’t allowed Harry Potter or Scooby Doo. I’m not sure about Star Wars – I seem to vaguely recall her saying she wasn’t allowed to watch it but I know Willis was.
Okay I double checked and she was only allowed the parts of Star Wars about trade embargoes. So like….a tiny part of Episode I.
Willis did a great comic about that ages ago with Harry Potter and Aslan.
Scooby Doo should absolutely not be judged fine by fundamentalist parents, so it tickles me that apparently it sometimes is? A show all about asking questions and finding answer for yourself and putting the screws to superstition? You’d think it would be so, so anathema.
All magic is demonic young lady. >:(
(Granted that’s not true. All prayer is magic. And Moses was magic too. But these people ain’t read their scripture.)
Yeah, all magic that isn’t explicitly tied to the Christian God. If your movie has Christians getting a miracle, that’s fine.
Pretty hard to imagine the Browns being OK with stories about The Princess of Friendship when her element symbol is “Magic”. Sounds really pagan to me.
Also the episodes where Starlight Glimmer founded a religious cult with her as leader… I don’t know, maybe they’d have liked that one. Hard to guess.
Hello, made more silly &/or horny fanart, good night <3
You’re doing the good work milu. Sleep well.
Omg, the Proserpina reverse
Oh right haha. Glad you like it ^^
Neither the ponies or the propaganda depictions of Judas surprise me.
ponyganda
You know, I think in a world where her upbringing wasn’t a dumpster fire, Joyce would be a great archaeologist of Roman occupation Judaic lore. It’d be interesting to see her study things of the time period as an atheist. She wouldn’t even be the only one.
Hey y’all. What was an obsessive thing about a piece of media you wouldn’t let go of.
Trobed slash fic for the TV show “Community”. It is DEVOURING MY BRAIN these days!
…What about you, Yoto?
I was the anime kid. I injected anime words into my speech. I was a menace. Hate that kid. Glad he turned into me eventually.
I sure am glad, too!
For me: so many webcomics. Sluggy Freelancer, GPF, Sam and Fuzzy, Dead Winter, and obviously: Walkyverse.
And I be basic: DBZ. Like everyone else.
Ethan: Transformers
Amber: Nintendo
Sluggy Freelance is still goin strong, I still read it every week! I think Pete is getting pretty close to the conclusion after a whopping 26 years of telling one continuous story: https://sluggy.com/
I just can’t stop doing Teddy Bear the Porcupine impressions. Even when I’m not eating tiny raw pumpkins
Pokemon indigo league, Invader Zim, ClueFinders, Pajama Sam, Dragon Ball Z, SpongeBob Squarepants, and dozens of flash games, the list only goes on
🥰
oh man, ClueFinders and Humongous Entertainment games (my fave series were Pajama Sam and Spy Fox) were so good <3
I can still recite full episodes of spongebob from memory.
I went through phases, no one thing completely dominated, but Spongebob and Pokemon were probably the big two.
I used to annoy my family with Doctor Who so much. 15ish years later, I’m still very into it, but I’ve learned how to not info dump without consent. Fandoms are my special interests, but this is definitely the one that best fits the prompt.
Oh yeah! Dr. Who and Red Dwarf, all spoken in accent, of course!
Judas, do you have any conception of the penalty for describing the son of God as a smeghead?
It’s kind of unsettling how much Homestar Runner corrupted my vernacular.
It really did a good jorb of that on a lot of us
Sewiously.
(Straightens Death-on-Binky mousemat, sips from Clarecraft figure mug, glances at official Discworld calendar)
You know, I’m not sure there was one…
I was generally obsessed with Teen Titans and Avatar: the Last Airbender. There was a point where my sister and I sat down and listed out from memory every episode title of every season of both of those shows in order (Teen Titans had I think 5 seasons of 15-20 episodes each, and ATLA had 3 seasons of like 20 episodes each).
Not trying to, I memorised every line of both seasons of a British radio series called The Hitch-hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy. (My British cousins sent me tapes before it was broadcast here, and I played them for a lot of friends.)
Tolkien’s legendarium. Not just The Hobbit and <The Lord of the Rings but The Silmarillion, all of his son’s History of Middle-Earth etc.
When the Big Bang Theory characters find a One Ring from LOTR The Movie, I snicker at them: they can only recite from memory the translation of the inscription.
Ditto. Though the Histories weren’t out till I was older.
Memorized a bunch of the poems and drove my parents nuts reciting them at random moments.
In the Amber series, clearly the shifting continuity of charactes’ past relationships with each other was deliberate signs that the Amberites even make shadows of each other. But uhh, after reading other works of Zelazny, I think he just came up with good ideas partway through, and used those good ideas where he could fit them in next, rather than trying to edit them into where they would make the most sense.
I was subscribed to Nintendo Power in the 90s, so I learned about Pokemon before it came out stateside. I got really, badly obsessed, just quivering with anticipation for when it would finally get released and I could play it. Because of this experience, gen1 was throughly seared into my brain (also got pretty burned out on the franchise) and I refused to learn a single thing about anything that followed, to this day I barely know anything about post-gen1 pokemon.
Since I was pre-Internet, Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels. All 57 books, including the short stories.
I don’t even remember anymore, but there have been. so many. Earliest memory is memorising every episode of I Love Lucy and relating how funny the chocolate conveyer belt scene was to my poor mother who was really just trying to rest after a long day.
Which is the best Scooby Doo character, and WHY IS IT FRED.
Now I’m wondering if the Picture Bible was bigoted against Jews somehow.
Whaaat? Impossible!
The most awkward thing is that Jesus and all the Apostles were Jews… but somehow only Judas got the Evil Jew treatment… it takes some mental hooplas to work with this.
I really was expecting Judas to be black in Joyce’s drawing.
I think the argument is the distinction between the Jews who accepted Jesus as Messiah and those who rejected him. The Jews were given the first opportunity for salvation, but most of them rejected it.
It’s still bigotry, but if you buy into the basic Christian message, it’s a logical extrapolation.
I mean it depends what you consider the basic Christian message.
Not really?
I mean, Jews didn’t become Christian, however you want to define that. That’s why they’re still Jews.
When it was first written, by Jews and for Jews, claiming “the Jews killed Jesus”* would’ve been a claim of “oh nooo, we ourselves killed our own guy, we need to look inwards and reckon with that terrible mistake we made” (with a side of “see, Romans? we are going way out of our way to make these teachings very palatable to you. please don’t kill us.”)
But then, within a few hundred years, the early Christians split off and stopped being a sect of Judaism at all, so “the Jews killed Jesus” quickly became “oh dang, those sneaky badguys over there did it! Get ’em!!”
*the Jews did not in fact kill Jesus, historically.
Much faster than that. Christians are estimated to be mostly Gentile in origin by the end of the first century. By the time the Gospels were written, they saw themselves as distinct. I don’t see much “need to look inwards and reckon with that terrible mistake we made” in the texts. Even in Paul – where he does do that to an extent, it’s about his persecution of Christians before his conversion, not about Jews in general.
The Gospels, coming along later have a focus on Jews rejecting Jesus and Gentiles believing him (in addition to the blame for his execution), but that’s more a reflection of how the new religion was spreading in their day.
Panel 4; ummm… what? First time I’ve heard that, not sure that’s true…
According to Wikipedia, Matthew and Mark have a disciple named Thaddeus where Luke and John have a different Judas; Mark and Luke have a tax collector called Levi, whose conversion is exactly the same as Matthew’s, but still call the apostle Matthew; and John has a Nathaniel who doesn’t get mentioned anywhere else, and doesn’t name most of the others at all (it’s believed that Nathaniel is the disciple the others call Bartholomew, but it’s disputed).
I’m not surprised in hindsight (two gospels mention Joseph’s father by name, and the names are different), but I had no idea.
What seems to me likely is that Jesus had a bunch of followers, some of whom everyone agreed in later days were important and others who were less so.
But they needed a list of twelve to match the twelve tribes and the later traditions didn’t all agree on who they were. Matthew and Luke copied Mark’s list, but worked in a couple names they knew. John didn’t know Mark and doesn’t seem to have a list of his own.
Whether or not Jesus himself ever designated twelve or whether that only happened after his death isn’t really clear.
A document piecemealed together over hundreds of years depicting “events” thousands of years in the past is inconsistent?
No.
I don’t think Fudgeload is part of the Mane Five, Joyce. Unless they have different names over the course of the franchise. Maybe she’s the same one as Clusterflip?
As I understand it, they kind of do — the creator of Friendship is Magic based the main characters on the main ponies of past eras, but then learnt there were rights issues or something and gave them the names of less well-known ponies or completely original names. Maybe Fudgeload is the FiM version of Sodomuffin.
Also please tell me the sliding timescale hasn’t reached the point where Joyce grew up watching FiM, because if so I may just crumble into dust right now.
Thirteen years ago???
Classic character names they wanted to use were trade-marked by other companies. This is a frequent issue for Transformers as well. Remarkably, there’s no such problem with Saints in the Catholic Church.
That’s why we got Rainbow Dash instead of Serenity. I think the Sonic Rainboom is a lucky side effect!
I’d hate to see Fudgeload’s cutie mark
It’s a bowl of fudge candy. Not sure why you’d hate that.
Howzabout apostles on ponies? White, red, black and green ponies?
They really forced a stereotype onto him, eh? …Jew-das.
oh GOD he loves her so much.
“I was also preoccupied with pony-related inconsistencies. Don’t get me started.”
Sorry if this is still too early to ask, but…
I feel like I’m on the verge of an autistic meltdown right now, if any of you have like some tips, chill happy music or good vibes, I’d very much appreciate them
Not sure if this will be quite the vibe you’re going for, so I’ve also included a more energetic playlist:
Cozy Fantasy: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3f2jxdCOzIPssD0T7PHJDP?si=9-9qL3hxQg2QHDJWicVfLg
Motivational Songs: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6OrSusbDdTrpGxLSBYbBrY?si=l6G20mrvSuqGgHoRCg5WSQ
like Mushroom Jazz?
I mean sure. Anything that you’d play to reduce stress and heal yourself
Wintergatan is my neurodivergent music of choice. Somehow it’s like the same resonant frequency as my brain. Made with love from Sweden.
Might be late, but here’s some soft piano video game arrangements. https://hexrae.bandcamp.com/album/vulnerable
I don’t know the particulars of your sitch, but I do mostly listen to music that soothes my overactive brain. This chills me out every time, used to let it play on my earphones while I had to sit still for long ice treatments at PT. Recommend you play it softly cause it does build up over time:
https://youtu.be/OxgVmpAk538?feature=shared
Also, ambient, instrumental music (with added beach sounds) from Steven Universe is pretty dang cozy/relaxing:
https://youtu.be/N_kxpJBObLI?feature=shared
Good luck, take it easy
this is a bit melancholy perhaps but I like it a lot
it’s from the visual novel Ever 17
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6wrKtdUo2A
Not particularly new, but I find pretty much everything I’ve ever listened to by “Vienna Teng” delightful. If you want upbeat and happy “Level up” is spectacular — I would, however, avoid “The Hymn of Acxiom” (from the same album) if you’re not ready to be creeped/freaked out.
May your brain allow you to have a steadily improving night …
Wow, she’s kind of incredible! Thank you for sharing.
You’re very welcome!
Yes she is — and seems to be a genuinely good person as well as breathtakingly talented. In addition to her original work, she’s done some amazing covers/mashups. She has recently started combining activism with touring so I have hope there will be more …
Show us the poniiiiiies
“my mom didn’t bring those”
“oh”
I was wondering that too. Were the pony drawings lovingly preserved with the Jesus ones or tossed because they weren’t “worth” holding onto?
Key question, did she draw Apostles riding those ponies to far off lands to spread the Word of Christ?
Joyce made a gospel harmony, continuing a tradition that started right about when John’s ink was still drying.
Of course John is the clearshaved one. Even in movies, he’s the smaller and younger between the other disciples.
Tbh I’d like to see what they made Judas look like, cuz in the first Picture Bible result I found from a quick google search (Sergio Cariello), he just looked like The Spaniard from Pirates of the Caribbean.
I assume it’s this. At least, Peter and John match Joyce’s description:
https://viewcomiconline.com/the-picture-bible-tpb-part-7/
Thanks. I was looking for that yesterday, but my google-fu was weak.
I wonder when Joyce drew these – she’d have to already have been a pretty decent artist to get the stereotype across. I was picturing mostly human shaped blobs with the mentioned beards and sashes to distinguish them.
FWIW Sarah’s image is winking today.
But did she ever draw Jesus and Judas riding a unicorn?
I like how when he realized she felt hurt over her past actions because propaganda reasons, he deflected her attention onto something ridiculous to lighten the mood
Also as an autistic person, trying to iron out inconsistencies is a mood
Apostles, Joyce. Jesus had thousands of disciples, but only 12 Apostles. I THOUGHT YOU WERE FUNDAMENTALIST CHRISTIAN?!
The terms are used nearly interchangeably in the Gospels. Apostles becomes dominant in references to them after his death.
Did Joe already know about Joyce’s autism diagnosis? I doubt it would matter to him that much, but just curious.
Joyce doesn’t know about her autism diagnosis. She talked to a doctor about something else entirely, the doctor noticed her behaviors and recommended she look into getting assessed, and then she hasn’t followed up on that yet.
aside from the above…yes, he knows. his reaction was “neat” and assumed it was good news because his own mom had struggled to get one: https://www.dumbingofage.com/grist/ (here and the next page)
so re: the alt-text, is Joyce a sandy blonde, or would that be more of a dishwater kinda blonde… ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
I kinda resent the attempts by various brunettes to pass themselves off as sorta blondes. As if brunettes can’t be wonderful in their own ways…
I miss the days of looking like I’m from Midwich. Now I’m a weird kind of brunette with the prettiest red tones that get more noticeable in the summer
So this is something completely unrelated… but it makes me wonder if Carla is partially inspired by Ranma…
But she doesn’t turn into anything when she gets wet?
Of course she does. She turns into Really Annoyed Carla! Carla who swears vengeance!
i think carla was inspired by like a firetruck or something
Please I want Joyce to canonically self-diagnose as autistic so bad. I don’t want her to see a psychologist about this. I just want her to be like okay yeah.
So it’s because of her 700 Club-assed picture bible references? Understandable.
Your twenties are where you start to unlearn the stuff you were programmed, or rather… choose what you want to keep.
In a very literal sense, this is part of the process of growing up.
It never stops.