The legendary early-aughts webcomic that inspired a wave of webcomic creators.
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Explosm
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Tamaura, wrested into a world 300 years in the future, must find a way to save the magic fading from her country.
Namesake
Isa, Meg
There's ghosts at your heels and fairy tale worlds ahead. What do you do? Jump down the rabbit hole!
Paint the Town Red
Windy, Winter Jay Kiakas
Winona runs a werewolf shelter with partner in crime, Odile in the Gothic city of Merlot. One day they take in an injured vampire, and soon unravels many of the dark secrets of Merlot.
The Otherknown
Lorian Merriman
Chandra is a 12-year-old accidental time traveler with a reluctant new dad, who happens to be a member of a feared galactic crime syndicate.
Beeserker
TJ Cordes
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
T Campbell, John Waltrip, Florence Machina
Welcome to the saga of the working-class adventurer! Enjoy the complete story with new annotations daily!
2 Slices
RJ Morel
After a case of mistaken identity, will awkward Daisuke find help from excitable Mamo, or will his love life be thrown completely off track?
Countdown to Countdown
Velinxi
Iris Black is a self-proclaimed inventor with the curious ability to bring his drawings to life, and yearns to find a space where he can use his powers freely.
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.
Slightly Damned
Chu
Rhea Snaketail returns from the dead, befriending a Demon who falls in love with an Angel. The afterlife ain't what it used to be!
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So does it mean Sal has literal superpowers? Amber is Batman, and trains obsessively for this. Sal just does it with a damaged hand and no real gaming background? Seems literally impossible.
Sal is basically Longshot, a former member of the X-Men – he has an intuitive influence over probabilities. He can’t really USE it, per se, it just works to make him “lucky” when he does stuff that’s difficult but not impossible. Doesn’t affect anybody else, just his own personal success rate.
Once again your predictions prove correct, and so quickly, too.
Does the NG stand for Nostradamus Gaming? If so, I imagine the PZ stands for pizza, so tell me oh wise one – when shall the Domino fall?
Wait… domino falls… -> dominos are a kind of polyomino -> what game is all about falling polyminos, which broke and still holds the world record for most ports ever made of a video game? TETRIS!!!! -> where my brothaz, was tetris invented? USSR!!!!! this country was founded on desire to create a communist economy as detailed in the Kommunist Manifesto -> and what my brothas did Marx hold was the driving force behind all human history? CLASS STRUGGLE!!!!
when was the last strip to feature both “class” in the name and also some kind of struggle? 4/25/23!!! Titled “our class”, and Becky was struggling to communicate with someone -> the 4th, 25th and 23rd letter of the alphabet spell out what? DMW!
At this point in the story, I do feel like Amber is very close to participating in a threesome with somebody. Dorothy and Walky, Becky and Dina, Danny and Sal, Joe and Joyce, somebody.
Yeah, I was wondering how Sal would have even known to record her playing and to post it online. That shit isn’t automatic – there’s a complex process. And it takes weeks to confirm a run – there’s no way it could have happened since Danny and Sal stopped having sex.
Can’t be. It is an unavoidable temporal distortion caused by DYW’s excessive buffer size.
If the buffer ever gets to over a year it could cause a chain reaction that would unravel the very fabric of the space-time continuum and destroy the entire universe!
But wait! A chain reaction requires causality, which requires the space-time continuum! It’s a paradox which requires a paradox to paradox!
… I don’t know where I’m going with that, but if we’re going to be breaking the universe anyway I might as well enjoy breaking a few brains as a warmup.
I think they’re mad that the implication is that Sal accidentally broke a speedrun that Amber has been challenging through very advanced speedrun tactics that Sal lacks.
Thankfully, Amber has never done something as grievously unrealistic as accidentally being a speed runner, she’s just a car chase hopping superhero who got in a costumed flight with her super villain mob Dad.
Ah, thank you for the explanation. Either way, I don’t agree with them saying this is “lazy.” I’ve had to read some really lazy writing over the years, and this is not even close to being lazy. If anything this adds intrigue since Sal mentioned not having the same dexterity due to her injury, so if she found a way to do it despite her injury then it will be interesting to see where it goes.
I accidentally entered a Doom speedrun event at a PAX once and finished high enough to win a small prize even though I did not in fact realise it was a speedrun event, I was just farting around but
The last panel we saw of Sal was her casually picking up Danny’s controller, looking to kill some time before he came back to his room. The foreshadowing of her breaking the record without even knowing what she did was more obvious than if she was literally casting four shadows around her.
I wonder if Sal here would have stumbled on some accidental tech, like that guy who unknowingly made a huge breakthrough in speedrunning in Goldeneye due to misinterpreting the phrase “keep your nose to the grindstone” and looked down while running in levels. What this actually did was reduce objects needing to be loaded, essentially, and made the game run faster, which in turn made it to where you could finish levels more quickly.
I imagine that’s what the reasoning will be, or something like it, but its just so hard to imagine that being the case for something as heavily speedrun, explored, and analyzed as first Super Mario Bros.
Its like, someone finding a hidden cave no one’s ever stepped foot in before in the mountains of Montana would be surprising, but believable. Finding such a cave in Manhattan would beggar belief, though.
You say that, but I remember a year or two ago a random streamer stumbled into a glitch in metal gear solid 1 that cut 2.5 minutes off the speed run. That game is 25 years old.
Metal Gear Solid hasn’t been pounded at by speedrunners to nearly the same extent as SMB has.
Also, SMB is just a much shorter, simpler game. The speedrun record is less than five minutes long at this point, there’s only so much room for glitches to cut out of a game.
I am so looking forward to seeing how Willis explains how a total novice managed to match the TAS 8-4 run in the space of an hour. What have you got planned you merry trickster?
Don’t have time/energy to dig through the archives, but this was foreshadowed in a strip where Danny was complaining that Sal wasn’t staying on the track while racing. She kept jumping off the edges and landing ahead on the track. Which is the whole essence of speed running, finding the shortcuts other people don’t think to use.
Yes but this is a game that has been speedrun to death. A game that has existed long enough to be solved in ways most other games have yet to be solved. Even thinking outside the box, Sal didn’t have enough time to acquire the KNOWLEDGE she’d need to break any records. The choice to make this an established game like Mario 1 just makes this so much harder to believe.
This is my issue with it too- Track jumping is a well-established higher tier thing in Mario Kart as well, not something you need special ability to do, just to figure out how to do it.
Speedrunning a game that has been flipped around forwards,backwards and inside out and beating it is was beyond my suspension of disbelief.
I’m not even in speed runner culture and I still know that sal playing mario 1 on a ds/3ds/switch(??) out of boredom and breaking a speedrun record isn’t just incredibly unlikely, it’s also impossible unless Danny was also trying to break the speedrun record and had his game live capturing and uploading gameplay footage to the internet. Otherwise sure sal could “beat the record” but it would go absolutely nowhere, and amber would certainly not be finding out about it from a third party. I mean am I wrong? Does Nintendo auto record your finish time and post it to a public access site that the speedrun fandom would regularly check?
And I know, suspension of disbelief and everything, I am pedantic enough to get exasperated with doctor who for stuff like “I’ve made a concoction of every antidote for every disease, I’ll spray it on people and they’ll cure other people just by touching them.”
May 27th: Sal is in Danny’s room. She asks Danny “This Amber’s Stream?” Danny explains she ha been trying to beat a tool-assisted speedrun record. Sal is left alone in the room.
May 28th: Sal fools around with the ukele for for a bit, looks frustrated because of her hand.
June 5th: Amber and Danny are talking about the fact she is fiddling around with an NES controller. Amber explains she is mentally playing the game as she walks around. Sal is then shown with an NES controller from Amber’s stream set-up in hand. This is the last we have seen of her since.
Theory 1: Either Amber still has her stream going. Sal starts playing and people are watching, see the new record and report it with clips/downloaded footage
Theory 2: While Sal is fiddling with the game/set-up she accidentally makes the stream go live. Amber’s followers start milling in because of the going live notification and watch it. Notice the new record and submit it via clips/downloaded footage.
The only baffling thing to me is why people are saying it is Danny that beat it in those cases. And ues, it takes time to “confim” and “officiate” it for tracking websites but that doesn’t stop people who watched it live from saying it was beaten and sharing footage of it being beaten.
Why would Amber’s stream setup be in Danny’s room? That’s stupid. Unless Sal moved over to Amber’s room for absolutely no reason, she’s using Danny’s controller, not Amber’s.
And she explicitly says here it was Danny, so his controller.
So, watched Amber’s stream. Decided to try herself and started a stream to make it official. Being Sal, the universe bent in her favor and she either stumbled onto a new glitch or just played the perfect game Amber was aiming for.
There’s a track in Mario Kart 64 called Choco Mountain. Someone discovered a glitch purely by accident that had gone unnoticed for decades and shattered the speedrun record for it by like 20 seconds. So it’s within the realm of possibility that Sal discovered a previously unknown glitch.
Yes, I know IRL that it’s near impossible for possible unknown glitches to still exist in SMB 1, but that’s the beauty of fiction.
With a game that’s well known to be well known, I wonder how many people are still actively looking for new glitches, vs. trying to perfect the already known ways like Amber was. <- Honest question, I don't have a clue.
There are very few people actively looking for glitches because, frankly, they’ve already been through the game with a fine-toothed comb. With all the play, TASing, and even code analysis that have been thrown at the game, it’s almost certain there are no glitches left to discover. Add that on top of the fact that, even for a more typical game, glitch hunting is way less popular and glamorous than actually getting the records, most games skew heavily towards running rather than glitch hunting already.
People still will go for runs that utilize glitches though. There is a reason that there are catergories in speedrunning that specify “Glitchless” “100%” and “Any%”
Yeah, “Glitchless 100%” may be more desirable and worthy of props, but speedruns using glitches are still valid and things that people will go for.
Absolutely. I’m only referring to the people who are specifically playing in order to hunt for NEW glitches, with or without any real speed-running intent. Obviously once found glitches are heavily utilized in every non-glitchless category.
I’m gonna be real, I love Sal. She is by far one of my favorite characters.
This completely, 100% broke my suspension of disbelief in this comic. More than a SUPERHERO/SUPERVILLAIN KIDNAPPING DID.
I think it’s because those things felt… narratively like they had some kind of depth/reasoning? And made some amount of sense even if it was comic-sense.
This just feels really out of left field. We know Sal is good at racing games like Mario Kart, but doing something Amber has been trying to do, that is like statistically probably impossible for a real person to do, just on a whim feels…
IDK, but even as a sal-lover as a character, this doesn’t feel earned or realistic to the point it broke my suspension of disbelief.
I feel like you gotta judge a story by what it’s trying to say non literally. Of course Sal isn’t going to beat a speed run on her first try. It’s a way of showing her established personality traits of an extremely stubborn determinist who’s very talented in ways that are counterintuitive to traditional education.
Yeah, but It failed at doing that in my opinion. Everything else in this comic plot-point wise, tends to be grounded, or has groundwork laid for it in the story.
(Amazi-girl just being Amber who channeled her unhealthy coping into parkour/track and field/ learning to fight) to pretend to be a superhero, which leads into her whole plot with that stuff, beating up her dad AS amazi girl, and her dad turning up dressed as a supervillain bc of that encounter.
This clearly is meant to be a plot point. Sal has struggles with functionality in her hand because of amber, it’s referenced a few times as making some things hard.
Sal is good at Mario Kart, uses everything to her advantage (items)
It fails to actually tell us anything you’re trying to say it is.
We already know she’s stubborn and determined and has skills that aren’t aligned with traditional education. Hell, I feel like her and walky both struggling academically could give us an arc where we find out, counter to Walky who prob has combo adhd, she’s got inattentive type, or something similar.
But this? Doesn’t have any grounding in the actual story beyond ‘Sal cool and good at thing, even though her hand is fucked up’ which feels…. lazy?
Not just know what it is, but know things about it. I’ve heard of speedrunning but I wouldn’t realize how improbable this all is if it wasn’t for the other commenters.
Internal consistency is a cornerstone of worldbuilding. It doesn’t matter how semi-plausible pretend science works, as long as it works within its own rules.
Sometimes that means the deflector dish can do anything. Sometimes that means a flower can merge individuals into one being when they’re transported as a group.
True, but for those who know the real rules, it’s irritating when the fiction describes its pretend science as if it was real science. Or when they seem to be using real science, but screw it up.
With your warp drive and transporters, you just have to be consistent, but don’t screw up your orbital mechanics, because those are real and we know how they work.
There’s almost certainly an explanation coming that even though Sal lost motor control in her hand from the injury, her thumb can twitch faster and more reliably. I say that because it’s just enough logical stretching to make sense but also it’s a great way to underline that Amber just can’t do stuff sometimes and she needs to be okay with that.
Sal’s hand isn’t really the issue here. The issue is that we’re talking about pretty much the single most heavily analyzed game in existence for the purposes of speedrunning.
The current speedrunning record has so damn many techs and glitches and secrets and timings that you have to hit that even if Sal were to have somehow uncovered some massive glitch that somehow had bypassed all of the countless people who have bashed their head against the game, her time still would been several minutes behind the record.
Assuming that we don’t have a few levels of hijinks left to uncover (like Sal submitted a time to the wrong category or something), this just feels like an unforced error by Willis on the writing front. Its not horrible or anything, it mostly amounts to “if you know anything about the niche subject in question, you’ll cringe like crazy”, but it’s a niche that overlaps heavily with the webcomic’s niche.
I mean Willis’s cultural touchstones are largely from his childhood and they’re what go into the comic, which is why someone who ostensibly was born in 2004 is currently speedrunning a game that came out in 84. Same reason why Ethan is a huge fan of Beast Wars despite being just as old.
You gotta suspend a little disbelief to internalize that Sal could do it but it’s really not any more absurd than Amber and her being crimefighters or the high speed car chase against Amber’s dad.
To be fair, the original Super Mario Bros. has got to be one of the most well-understood, deeply analyzed games in speedrunning. It’s also been pretty consistently remade and rereleased ever since it came out. I’d find it less believable if a tech-savvy gamer like Amber, who probably downloaded many a ROM over the years (for fun and/or financial reasons) hadn’t played it before.
> Amber just can’t do stuff sometimes and she needs to be okay with that.
isn’t this ambers whole character? She is constantly Having To Be Okay with not doing stuff/succeeding/etc. Like she feels like a failure half the time bc she has so little sense of self, she compartmentalized all her ‘good’ into amazi-girl.
This felt like something she could sink her time into for a sense of satisfaction. I’m wondering what the plots gonna *be* here but while I love this comic, It’s not like it hasn’t let me down before.
We’ve gone over Amber’s self-loathing and her need to prove herself as Amazi-Girl, but since they’re a split personality and AG is her outlet, we’ve never actually gone into *Amber’s* specific Batman-inspired neurotic need to be good at things.
Or at least that’s what I assume the comic is going to be about. It seems pretty clear that her and Sal don’t really have much reason to interact, and if Sal accidentally knocked over a world record it at least gives them some animosity again and gives them something to do. I really like them both so I’m happy Willis figured out something for them to butt heads over, Ethan has largely exited the comic aside from facilitating Asher “cheating” (big airquotes) on Billie.
The plotline is that Amber is gonna get mad at Sal for being better than her for something that she’s been into her entire life smartass, show me how you’d portray this plotline to the reader and I might consider caring about this silly minutiae.
I mean, it is a plotline. The point is the plot line isn’t believable. And given the fact he had amber speed-running in the first place, and how much into nerd culture Willis is, it feels weird to assume he wouldn’t know some of the like… intro level stuff I know about Speedrunning/games.
Like I’m not super into it, I’ve never even had a hyperfixation on it to get all this info, it’s just like… tertiary knowledge I’ve gathered over time.
Like the game amber is playing is THE speedrunning game. It’s been focused on for so long for speedrunners its not even funny.
Like, yeah. The plot is that Amber gets mad that Sal is better at X thing she’s been doing her entire life. But what is the narrative point of this plot? It feels really random, cuz Sal’s always been the cool laid back whoever who has more depth than surface level nobody bothers to know.
It just feels weird for her to be able to beat THE record of THE game, and it doesn’t seem to serve any narrative purpose that makes sense to me as a writer.
Like… Amber doesn’t need to be Humbled At Videogames, She already has such a poor self esteem abt like everything else (even if she’s trying to better herself), Sal doesn’t need another thing to be good at and cool at. She seems to be good at basically everything she tries. And I say this as a fan of Sal.
Like, is it gonna be Sal and Amber Enemies pt. 2? But for less intense reasons this time? Is it just a random conflict that doesn’t serve either character? Are we gonna learn that Actually This Was Unhealthy for Amber to be focusing on, somehow?
idk, with the info we have my suspension of disbelief is broken, and I don’t see the *point* of the plot. Which hasn’t been the case with most other plots, even ones I don’t really ‘get’ I can still understand the trajectory its taking.
In fact, we have no choice in the matter. Even Patreon readers can only see one strip ahead. The level of entitled impatience in these comments is always a little funny to me. Like, it’s a daily comic. I read comics that update one, two, or maybe three times a week, with frequent hiatuses, so watching people melt down and fill their diapers over a measly 24 hours can feel pretty ridiculous.
I still think Willis is missing a Golden Opportunity of using his buffer to let Patreon readers see farther into the future, doubling the price for each day further ahead.
My guess for how this will turn out is one of the discoveries previously made from our perspective will wind up to have been discovered by Sal in universe. No idea which one, but some newbie finding some exploit is… more believable.
It amuses me greatly that in a comic book with a teenager who successfully fights several adults and one successful chase on the highway, the fact that a newcomer breaks a record in a video game is a break of disbelief.
ps1 I know the teenager has an instory explanation
ps2 it bothers me too
For me, it’s less “breaks a record in a video game” and much more “breaks THE record in THE video game”. If Amber were trying to break a speedrun record for some obscure (or fictional) NES title that she had a special affection for, that’d be fine.
Doing it for Super Mario Bros 1, the most popular video game to speedrun, and a high-profile speedrunning category? That’s… a different story.
Couple things. One, a lot of people had their suspension of disbelief broken by the car chase or by AG’s other exploits.
Two, I wonder if some of the rest of the difference is that we’re all used to unrealistic action scenes from superheroes and action movies.
It’s a little lopsided, isn’t it? She’s only (mostly?) been seen in one class, and she’s not even learning anything from it. By the time the comic is over, her entire academic career will have been spent being a vigilante and dealing with her brain problems, instead of learning.
But whats the problem? Amber still can beat world record its just somebody else and just happen she known new champion.
I call its arc where Amber learn she making circles and need some changes to methaphoricly break her own record
It’s an alternate universe. One without the level of analysis of a random game that our universe has. In their Universe the Head Alien is a cartoon. In our Universe he secretly runs everything, which is why stuff is so screwed up.
seconding the suspension of disbelief comments but also adding that amber herself said that the speedrun needed to be streamed in order to be verifiable? with the necessary takeaway being that for sal’s record to have been actually believed she would have needed to hop on stream in her underwear while casually playing this game, and to specifically stream in danny’s name instead of her own, and for this submission of a contested and prestigious and very easy to TAS speedrun from someone who was previously not at all a world record contender to not be at the very least held up in moderation if not dismissed outright as obviously fake?
i dunno, i’m willing to believe that An explanation is possible, but this feels incredibly contrived. like even if we had seen sal swim before she is not gonna break the 100m freestyle record at the local swimming pool
Sal was left alone in a room with Amber’s Stream Set-Up. It is feasible stream was left on with no webcam (because Amber is a shy introvert) or Sal accidentally turned on the stream while fiddlling with the computer to turn the game on.
And no one has actually said it has been officated yet. And it does not need to be officiated for news of it to spread on social media. all it takes is for someone who was watching the stream to see it and then go to a social media website with screenshots/clips/downloaded footage to post about how someone just beat the record and then it spreads from there. And that is a lot faster than it being declared official.
Oh noes a thing apparently happened in this fictional webcomic that supposedly can’t happen in real life might as well give up and delete the comic off the Internet I guess
And in the next page Dina beats Mike Tyson in a dragout bout and Walky Cures every known disease and then Jennifer performs open heart surgery on Ruth.
I dunno why being fictional means I can’t have issues with an impossible accomplishment. I can make concessions for certain action movie tropes, or certain things played for comedy, but this case just feels a big egregious. A speedrun record is kind of an impressive feat by its very definition.
You know, it’s possible to disagree without being gratuitously rude.
Now if you want to talk about impossible accomplishments, violating the speed of light on a routine basis without routinely dealing with the time paradoxes it sets up, because of Einstein, will do it. And yet I routinely enjoy Star Trek, Star Wars, and a jillion SF novels that include the physically impossible. The Dumbing Universe has been clearly established as having a different history. What’s the problem?
Come to think of it, the shear impossibility and elicited reaction might be a deliberate artistic choice that starts the reader sympathizing with Amber, who here is also shocked and flabbergasted.
You know, it’s funny how in a thread of people complaining about something silly that happened on a webcomic, your comment is somehow the most dramatic
When Raistlin Majere took the Test, he murdered his brother’s illusion out of jealousy. What caused him to do this? It was because the illusion displayed magical powers greater than his own and removed the one thing that Raistlin felt he was better than his brother at.
The question is….was Mario Kart the last strand of sanity for Amber?
Will Sal beating her score mean that Amazi-Girl will be the only one who remains?
OK, I found the Weirdest Ideas thread! Here’s mine: Sal is still plunking away at the game, doing okay but nothing special, while the new record was actually set by AmaziGirl and took this long to be verified.
On one hand I don’t disagree, on the other hand I think we just have a lot of readers here that know about speedrunning. Like how a medical innacuracy in a TV show doesn’t really matter to most viewers, but doctors, nurses, etc get taken out of it because to them it’s so obviously wrong, except a way higher percentage of viewers of this comic know speedrunning than viewers of tv shows know medicine.
That said, I don’t think this is that big of a deal, especially if the plot doesn’t suddenly pivot from Dumbing of Age to Sal Walkerton: Pro Speed Runner. 90 years from now, when the comic is over, someone will probably somehow have proven that, through some weird theoretical math, it IS possible to improve the record
Not caring about strangers’ suspension of disbelief in a comic about pretend people doing pretend things (in this case pretend-breaking a pretend speedrun record) is hardly low-empathy. That’s a super big reach.
Look, video games is Serious Business™. Anything can happen in any other category, but the moment a video games gets involved, it’s frothy McNuggets time. The chicken is on the floor now.
I know it is hard to believe that Sal could do this, but even as a gamer I don’t think it requires this much outrage.
Would it be incredibly difficult for Sal to do this? Yes.
Impossible? No; there are a few stories of someone discovering something by sheer luck, and then using it to break a record.
I get why people think it breaks the suspension of disbelief, but I don’t think it deserves all the hate it seems to be getting.
The major problem is that this game in particular is well-documented to be at its absolute limits in a way where there are almost certainly no new discoveries to luck into, and the only plausible way to beat the record is absolute perfection. If it was any other game, I don’t think people would care as much, but SMB1 is probably the worst game for people to suspend their disbelief on.
Of course, this doesn’t account for the fictional character discovering fictional new speedrunning tech in a fictionalized version of the game.
So far my theory is holding – there are a ton of people in this comment section who want to be upset at the comic. Every day. I don’t know why they want this, it sounds exhausting and not worthwhile, but here we are. If it’s not some pearl-clutching nonsense about an 18yo drinking under controlled circumstances with people she trusts, it’s everyone having deep emotional ties to an imaginary speedrun record.
I signed up for Patreon a few days ago, and when I saw this comic yesterday I thought “Wow, this might actually be a strip the comments struggle to have a meltdown about” and honestly, that’s on me lmao. I didn’t work hard enough.
Just because I’ve seen it alluded to once or twice and never when someone is actually saying what the main problem is – I don’t mind sal breaking a speedrun record. What I don’t believe is that sal, who is entirely separate from all of nerd culture outside of a narrow window Danny has shown to her and likely -only- knows of speedrunning in terms of anecdotes about what Amber is up to lately, would not as far as her character has been shown, engage in -any- of the extra bureaucracy to look into current records and then publish her own speedrun record, I’m not sure she even actually knows what that is? That’s what took me out of it. It would be like being told that Wally ran for president and won at 18, or that Joyce built a fully functional apollo 13 replica in her spare time. It’s still somehow more of a bugbear than either of those because those are comical instances of flouting established knowledge, whereas here it genuinely feels like the reason this plot point happened was because of near total ignorance of speedrunning.
Also, I see people labelling this as outrage, and some people may be here? But simply mentioning that this was an anti-immersive moment is feedback, not vitriol.
On the subject of Super Mario Bros speedruns, which might also provide some context for those not understanding why some are struggling with their suspension of disbelief with this comic, this is a great video I stumbled across a bit ago, showing someone’s every attempt at the SMB speedrun they did during lockdown, a total of 5,162 attempts, all overlaid with each other.
For games where the game speed is based on frames, the actual record is based on framecount. The translation into minutes and seconds at the standard framerate is just for convenience.
Yes, though doing so is generally prohibited by the rules for running any given game, and will be called out for cheating if caught. The same is previously true for higher speeds as well (contrary to Tan’s statement, counting the number of frames in a run is not a universal standard, exact timing rules vary wildly based on how a game functions and how the community chooses to handle it)
Emulators can cap the clock speed for the game to prevent any problems like that from happening. I’m not actually sure what happens if the clock speed is notably higher, though.
The thing about Speedruns is that while skills and reflexes are important the even more important bit is Knowledge. Someone who is new or inexperienced in a game is unlikely to beat a record because they don’t know a game in-and-out like a Speedrunners does. No knowledge of shortcuts, optimal approach etc.
I know that DoA doesn’t take place in our universe, so maybe in this one Super Mario Bros hasn’t been speedrun so extensively, but to me this is like if they said Sal had beaten the record for the 200 meter dash set by Usain Bolt in 2009.
I mean, we’ve seen people’s locations shift so quickly it can pretty much only be explained by teleportation already and that’s been acknowledged in-universe, so even that wouldn’t really be that much of a stretch tbh seeing as characters have already moved faster than that.
To me this is no worse than Dina’s explicitly supernatural-level abilities to avoid notice, sense people being incorrect about dinosaurs, and teleport (note this latter is not unique to her, other characters such as Joyce have also been observed displaying this behaviour). Sal’s previously been established as a savant at finding the quickest way to the end goal in video games (Mario Kart), so this is in keeping with that character trait, which is no more extreme than others we’ve seen.
Also consider you have to be the sort of person who is very very into this very specific niche within a niche within a niche to even know how much of a stretch this is – I certainly wouldn’t if not for the comments, and still can’t really bring myself to care, this is just not the sort of detail that would matter to me even if I was into the speedrunning thing (and I cannot stress enough how much I am not).
Alex is the teacher.
Buckets of Blood guy is the one that looks like a school shooter.
Norville is the one who looks like Norville “Shaggy” Rogers, from the world-famous Scooby-Doo! franchise.
I don’t care about speedruns. I don’t watch them, and I don’t do them. Speeding through a game instead of going at a measured pace stresses me out.
This is still really bad writing. It’s “what if a disabled teen decided to, for the first time in their life, try the most popular olympic sport in the world, and then won the olympic medal less than an hour later” level stupid.
… In a comic that has how tough it is to learn and accept new things as one of its most present themes.
I don’t care about speedruns. But I care about writing. And this writing sucks.
Except the Olympics require actual effort and ability, don’t they, whereas playing a video game fast requires sitting on your ass and pressing buttons quicker than other people. It’s a huge gap in scale and stakes.
It also requires a vast amount of knowledge about the game. Like I’ll even ignore the fact you are looking down on the skill necessary to pull it off. It also requires a lot of knowledge of Where and How to push those buttons.
Look, I’ve done a speedrun or twice in my life, and “vast” seems like a bit of an overplay. A couple days of effort is cool and all, but it’s not the huge undertaking people seem intent on painting it as.
Depends on what you mean by Speedrun. Doing the stuff you’ve seen and replicating it is different from working on finding out shortcuts and tricks, the latter requires quite a bit more work. Like with Hollow Knight you get Speedrun achievements for a run under 10 and under 5 hours. World record on the other hand is a some 31 minutes I believe?
If you’re playing a video game with the intent of beating it as quickly as possible, that’s a speedrun. A world record is neat and all, but we can’t just narrow the definition to that zone.
these things can last, like months of marathons iof just like playing the game for 15 hours per day, something that is not only super grating and skilled but also devastating when you fuck up partway through
Playing a video game fast may not be on the same level of physical activity as the actual literal olympics but it’s time consuming and it can be difficult. It’s a competition for a reason. It’s not even just about speed and reaction time. It’s about knowledge and predicting. It requires time and effort that I think deserves respect.
That’s not what I said at all, you’re being way too broad. You want to be upset with me so you’re making up extra things that aren’t there, and it’s really depressing.
Alright, sure. The comment you replied to with “I’m not underestimating it, I’m disparaging it.” said “you are vastly underestimating the effort it takes”, they didn’t explicitly mention skill. You only openly stated that you disparage effort. That’s fair, I’ll cop to that.
Your projecting emotions onto me is waaay off tho. Of course I’m not upset at you. I’m an honest person. I said that I don’t care about speed running, I care about writing, which was the truth.
You haven’t insulted writing, the thing I care about here, so of course I neither am upset nor particularly want to be.
You are right that depression is involved though! If you actually want to know why I chose to talk to you, it’s that I’ve had one of my worst depression days in ages today, and everything I like doing feels frustrating and empty. This way, by spending my bad depression day talking to you instead of doing something I’m normally passionate about, I’m at least not associating good things with this bad depression spot.
This isn’t me angry – this is me doing self-care, trying to keep myself awake until my bedtime, and wasting time on a thing I nothing about on a day I struggle to feel anything about anything anyway.
I do genuinely hope your day has been better than mine, though. People are neat, I don’t like when they are hurting.
Holy shit, if engaging in my disingenuous nonsense about speedrunning is your self-care, I’d hate to see a normal interaction. I’ve just been playing Tears of the Kingdom for self-care, but I guess everyone is different.
Ah, I see! I said something genuine about myself, so I get expletives and either an insult or a self-report that you hate seeing people healthy and happy? Of course.
And yes, it is. I am surprised how much better I feel right now writing this comment, than when I was writing that one. I am writing this with a little smile on my face. I’m now in headspace where I don’t mind going to bed.
And yes, everyone is indeed different. Quite right!
Yeah. That’s why speedrunning feats are super common and just done by anyone. It’s not challenging or difficult or time consuming. The community is just made of talentless chuds who are just wasting their time doing something literally anyone could do because pushing buttons is EASY.
You should be nicer to speed runners. All I said was it’s not on the same level as the Olympics, and now you’re calling them talentless chuds and saying all this other negative stuff that wasn’t anywhere in my post. It really isn’t such serious business, and it’s actually fine for me to downplay it a little bit.
See the problem with introducing a plot twist like this in a comic with a huge queer and trans following is that the entire readership are massive Summoning Salt fans and know just how much work grinding out a speedrunning record is, let alone THIS specific speedrunning record
The only thing more disbelief-shattering to our sensibilities would be if Sal discovered a new Fallout New Vegas skip in the course of an afternoon
I’m among the first two things you mention and I’ve never heard of whoever that is nor do I care about speedrunning beyond thinking it’s kinda cool
Someone in a comic falling into a videogame glitch isn’t gonna shatter my disbelief, no matter how allegedly impossible the glitch is
“glitch possible for rando to find by chance in comic” is an extremely minor change really
If you don’t get irate about a speedrun of a video game in an alternate universe, then you’re not actually queer. That’s what the red stripe is on the rainbow flag, it’s mario running real fast. you’re cishet now.
Sal broke the record at the same time Dina made a half mile round trip from the biology building to the village pantry. It actually took her like 7 minutes of subjective time, she was just inside the time bubble when it happened.
Willis knows how unlikely Sal’s record speedrun is. And he knows that we know. So there must be some narrative purpose in this. Let the man tell his story.
The comic updates one update at a time and we comment on what we’ve seen one day at a time. I’ll let him cook, of course, but that won’t stop me from giving my kneejerk reactions.
If anything I’ve been more inclined to argue about why it annoys me because of all the people going “It’s not a big deal why do you care?” and then I explain why it bothers me I get looked at like some pedantic weirdo.
Yes, I understand this comic has already had fantastic feats.
Yes, I understand that this universe’s version of SMB might not be the same as the real one.
Yes, I understand that maybe there’ll be a clarification on how this was possible later.
But what’s bugging me is how many people ARE just saying “Hey, I don’t get why them breaking the limits on a GAME is so difficult to believe.”
It’d be like if you listed your favorite Transformers and included GOBOTS.
It’d be like if you said your favorite He-Man character was Cheetara.
It’d be like if you said your favorite Marvel Character was The Amazing Atom.
Nerds are super protective of their communities and when you show disregard for them they tend to get vocal.
i dont mean to be entirely combative and defensive but my fascination with fucking stupid niche content means i now need to revolve my life around whoever the fuck Marvel’s ‘The Amazing Atom’ is. I’ve written fiction about ‘Team America’, I’ve got headcanons on ‘The Black Widow (the satan-worshipper one)’, and mark my words I’m bringing The Amazing Atom the FUCK back out of retirement
I, for one, am looking forward to the introduction of the elusive speedrunner extraordinaire, Fantasti-Girl, who is Definitely Not Amber in any way, shape, or form.
What gets me is two things: The first is that when this plot was first introduced, I thought the point was that Amber was trying to do something physically impossible, and she was gonna fail, because it wasn’t possible. Sal succeeding makes this an Amber’s-not-good-enough storyline instead of an Amber-has-unrealistic-expectations-for-herself, and that’s so different from the vibe at the start of the storyline that it’s confusing to me. This holds true even if this is a red herring and we’re about to find out someone besides Sal beat the record.
Secondly, the game didn’t have to be SMB1. There are few games less plausible for this version of the storyline than SMB1, and it doesn’t seem like there’s any narrative reason for it being this game instead of any other game. It could’ve been any other Nintendo game. It could’ve even been a Dexter and Monkey Master game, new or old. Sal even used to watch D&MM with Walky before she got sent to boarding school, she could’ve been like “oh I remember these characters!”
It’s just a little weird how this was written. I don’t get why Willis went with SM1, or why it was set up as impossible to start if the plotline wasn’t gonna be about that. I dunno.
I get why people are mad at this but are completely fine with the superhero stuff, but I still think it’s a bit silly. I do love that THIS is some of the most upset the community has been at Willis.
Also, 200 comments? That’s nothing. This comic locks non-current chapters from being commented on, but it’s had comics with over 1000 comments on them before.
Apropos of nothing, you’ve mentioned in other comments that you’ve been having a rough day, so I would like to let you know that you are seen, and offer Internet-stranger-hugs if you would like them.
If someone developed superpowers that would just be this being fiction.
But a newbie breaking a well-established speed record isn’t superpowers, it’s just utterly ridiculously unbelievable and I don’t see how this is remotely interesting or fun plot twist either. Ok, perhaps Sal next develops a quantum gravity theory and gets a Nobel prize in Physics by scribbling random doodles, whatever.
Eh, it’s totally possible that Sal discovered a new exploit that’s game-changing — this is something that happens occasionally. But if she provided the proof of a speedrun including the exploit, other people can rerun it and break her speedrun using the exploit…well, unless its’ got a huge execution requirement to do it reliably.
It’s really interesting how the only people defending this plot twist, are the type of fucking asshole bullies who call other people “dweebs” or “dorks” and think that such insults towards other people are a valid way to behave.
Congrats, Willis, you have a bunch of asshole highschool bullies on your side. Way to show that “dorks” and “dweeb” audience of yours,
Wow, really out here trying to hold Willis accountable for who reads his comic on a public website. You can see how that’s silly, right? Like, I guess he could put a sign up or something, but I don’t think that’s likely to work.
Anyway, have fun calling people assholes I guess. Glad to know the “valid way to behave” includes that!
Aelfwine is consistently hostile and holier-than-thou about literally everything, and has repeatedly encouraged real-world violence over mild disagreements. This is honestly tame for them.
And btw if I’d ever encouraged real-world violence I would have expected to be permabanned from the forum, and shame on David Willis if I ever did this and I wasn’t banned.
I don’t care about your assessment, I do care if I supposesly advocated real-world violence over minor disagreements and yet I fail to remember it. Did that actually happen or did you lie?
You care so little that you immediately started shitting yourself over it, so why don’t you tell me if it’s true or not? If I mistook you for someone else then fine, but it doesn’t make you less ridiculous.
I have already said that I don’t remember this ever happening.
It seems that you don’t remember it actually ever happening either. Good, we’ve finally reached the truth, and your words were merely slamder.
Your obsession about what I feel or what I don’t feel about your words is your own problem alone. I don’t care what you think. I don’t care whether you think that I care about what you think. I don’t even care whether you think I care about whether you think I care.
But I certainly wom’t reduce my hostile presence against fucking bullies who find pleasure out of hurting people, which they feel entitled to because the people who they are hurting are “dweebs”. You are a fucking sadistic asshole and you can go to hell.
My prediction for events: Amber finds out it was Sal who broke the record, freaks out. Danny lets Sal know how important it is to Amber, so Sal pretends it was a glitch– not an exploited glitch or something, but whatever was timing just messed up or whatever, and it’s not anything she could recreate. Amber is relieved and goes on about how she knew an amateur like Sal couldn’t have broke the record. She goes on about this a little too much. Sal grabs the control and breaks the record again right in front of Amber, slams the controller into her hands, and storms out.
I love this comment section here because its like what if in the middle of Summoning Salt’s Youtube video the angriest people in the comments section suddenly got to voice their opinions in the video too, like “Actually, this is impossible and sucks and FUCK YOU” and all just kinda talked over each other as S.S. continued to explain the speedrun.
Which doesn’t mean y’all aren’t correct, it’s just- Just the image that popped in my brain…
Me if I ever see Tony Hawk: Hey you’re Tony Hawk the famous skateboarder. That’s right I recognise you. Won’t be able to get any content out of this will you, you piece of shit
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 ⋅ 3d
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 ⋅ 3d
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?"
preternia @preternia.com ⋅ 2d
Josh Gerstein @joshgerstein.bsky.social ⋅ 3d
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com ⋅ 3d
Pavel
@spavel.bsky.social ⋅ 12d
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my guess is Sal literally punches it and, BAM!, record broken
or she really is Oono Akira (let’s see how many people get that)
In the meantime Danny needs to come up with a more plausible story.
So does it mean Sal has literal superpowers? Amber is Batman, and trains obsessively for this. Sal just does it with a damaged hand and no real gaming background? Seems literally impossible.
She’s been playing Mario Kart for months, learning the shortcuts quickly enough to horrify Danny and beat his records. She knows how to find illogical time-saves in a Mario game.
Sal has that ineffable coolness. It is enough.
Amber is Batman. Sal is Fonzie.
she’s a toon. she can do anything, but only if/when it would be funny.
She’s not bad, she’s just drawn that way.
This really doesn’t work for me. Amber’s perfectly reasonable frustration will be mine as well. Dammit.
Sal is basically Longshot, a former member of the X-Men – he has an intuitive influence over probabilities. He can’t really USE it, per se, it just works to make him “lucky” when he does stuff that’s difficult but not impossible. Doesn’t affect anybody else, just his own personal success rate.
Of course someone with a name that bad-ass is fictional. sigh
Totally fucking called it!!!!
WOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! OvO
*plays “Overdrive” by Taku Iwasaki on hacked muzak*
Well called!
Once again your predictions prove correct, and so quickly, too.
Does the NG stand for Nostradamus Gaming? If so, I imagine the PZ stands for pizza, so tell me oh wise one – when shall the Domino fall?
I dunno it stands for lots of stuff. Mainly it just looks cool as Graffiti.
Domino falls at the keg party. Be with popcorn for the event, and Kleenex for the aftermath.
Oh wow I wasn’t even trying to get the 69th comment this time LOL XD
Everyone worries about the aftermath, nobody ever worries about the beforemath.
Heresy! Nothing was beforemath.
May need more than Kleenex. Bring a roll of paper towels.
Is the kleenex for tears or… other emissions?
Wait… domino falls… -> dominos are a kind of polyomino -> what game is all about falling polyminos, which broke and still holds the world record for most ports ever made of a video game? TETRIS!!!! -> where my brothaz, was tetris invented? USSR!!!!! this country was founded on desire to create a communist economy as detailed in the Kommunist Manifesto -> and what my brothas did Marx hold was the driving force behind all human history? CLASS STRUGGLE!!!!
when was the last strip to feature both “class” in the name and also some kind of struggle? 4/25/23!!! Titled “our class”, and Becky was struggling to communicate with someone -> the 4th, 25th and 23rd letter of the alphabet spell out what? DMW!
add up all the digits in that date, you get 16 -> what my brothas, is the
pokemon is dex entry number 16? PIDGEY!!!! -> Pidgey, the SMALL BIRD was the first pokemon Walky parted with not too long before he broke up with Amber.
So what it’s actually saying is…
When the next domino falls during the keg party, Becky will struggle and part with a small bird!!!!
let’s see how many people whine about how unrealistic this is
Is that a challenge?
sal you absolute madwoman you did it
You realize this means war.
or threesome
Mmm.
At this point in the story, I do feel like Amber is very close to participating in a threesome with somebody. Dorothy and Walky, Becky and Dina, Danny and Sal, Joe and Joyce, somebody.
If you get it right, I can say I knew you when.
It’d be hilarious if alex and prof brock hooked up…if they aren’t already exes
Exes? I bet they’re currents.
Smh so unrealistic, Amber wouldn’t have the time to say “lockscreen” out loud before she had checked her feed.
It’s probably fine though, I somehow doubt Sal has video proof.
Well I would if it weren’t this comic
Amber currently hold the speed record for saying ‘lockscreen’ without tool assistance.
Yeah, I was wondering how Sal would have even known to record her playing and to post it online. That shit isn’t automatic – there’s a complex process. And it takes weeks to confirm a run – there’s no way it could have happened since Danny and Sal stopped having sex.
She was watching Amber’s feed, so maybe she asked how to do it.
You’re assuming Amber hasn’t automated it on her laptop.
Her laptop that’s inexplicably in Danny’s room right now?
Yes, that one.
Twitch got a DOA-exclusive update
So Amber no longer hates Sal for the convenience store incident.
She hates her for a Much More Important Reason.
Oh boy, Amber is in for quite the surprise when she finds out who did it.
Also, is the server drift ever going to be fixed?
Can’t be. It is an unavoidable temporal distortion caused by DYW’s excessive buffer size.
If the buffer ever gets to over a year it could cause a chain reaction that would unravel the very fabric of the space-time continuum and destroy the entire universe!
Temporal distortion? Just reverse the polarity of the main deflector.
And the buffer will be the alpha and the omega. Amen.
But wait! A chain reaction requires causality, which requires the space-time continuum! It’s a paradox which requires a paradox to paradox!
… I don’t know where I’m going with that, but if we’re going to be breaking the universe anyway I might as well enjoy breaking a few brains as a warmup.
It will be all at once like when the Vatican added 11 days the gregorian calendar.
Or it will drift so hard that it just comes full circle and is back to normal.
Why is Sal Neo in the third act of the matrix
She’s Cas Cain Batgirl.
Sal gave over the controller to Ros’ baby sister.
Sal is now the poster child for nekkid gamer girls…
is this a thing, or should I go stare at my photo of the Sistine Chapel?
Alex! 🩷
I just voted for her in the bonus strip poll. If I didn’t know David did these months in advance I’d think it was just for me.
And Buckets Of Blood Guy have now both appeared post-timeskip so are now eligible for the bonus strip…
if I could do likes, I would like this so fast
Sal vs Amber yet again
And it seems like it’s extremely personal now.
Sal….WOW
to what we are obviously supposed to infer happened: fuck off, that’s some lazy shit
to what might actually have happened: i am begging you to prove me wrong
What… might actually have happened?
I am very tired, and your comment confuses me; any way you can simplify it? Do you like today’s strip or are you hating it?
I think they’re mad that the implication is that Sal accidentally broke a speedrun that Amber has been challenging through very advanced speedrun tactics that Sal lacks.
Thankfully, Amber has never done something as grievously unrealistic as accidentally being a speed runner, she’s just a car chase hopping superhero who got in a costumed flight with her super villain mob Dad.
Okay when you put it like that
Ah, thank you for the explanation. Either way, I don’t agree with them saying this is “lazy.” I’ve had to read some really lazy writing over the years, and this is not even close to being lazy. If anything this adds intrigue since Sal mentioned not having the same dexterity due to her injury, so if she found a way to do it despite her injury then it will be interesting to see where it goes.
Yeah I also think she did it accidentally
I accidentally entered a Doom speedrun event at a PAX once and finished high enough to win a small prize even though I did not in fact realise it was a speedrun event, I was just farting around but
whelp
xD
Well, yes, obviously. Can’t you tell?
I think they think that the joke of a skilled record holder being beaten by a newbie who doesn’t know what they’re doing is a cliché.
What.
The last panel we saw of Sal was her casually picking up Danny’s controller, looking to kill some time before he came back to his room. The foreshadowing of her breaking the record without even knowing what she did was more obvious than if she was literally casting four shadows around her.
This.
I don’t think it matters if it was foreshadowed, since the strip with the foreshadowing had people basically saying “Fuck off, you better not.”
I wonder if Sal here would have stumbled on some accidental tech, like that guy who unknowingly made a huge breakthrough in speedrunning in Goldeneye due to misinterpreting the phrase “keep your nose to the grindstone” and looked down while running in levels. What this actually did was reduce objects needing to be loaded, essentially, and made the game run faster, which in turn made it to where you could finish levels more quickly.
possibly something akin to the cosmic ray glitch that set a .
Possibly something like the cosmic ray glitch that set the Mario 64 speedrun record on top of that.
I’m learning a lot of really interesting speedrunning lore today.
I imagine that’s what the reasoning will be, or something like it, but its just so hard to imagine that being the case for something as heavily speedrun, explored, and analyzed as first Super Mario Bros.
Its like, someone finding a hidden cave no one’s ever stepped foot in before in the mountains of Montana would be surprising, but believable. Finding such a cave in Manhattan would beggar belief, though.
You say that, but I remember a year or two ago a random streamer stumbled into a glitch in metal gear solid 1 that cut 2.5 minutes off the speed run. That game is 25 years old.
Metal Gear Solid hasn’t been pounded at by speedrunners to nearly the same extent as SMB has.
Also, SMB is just a much shorter, simpler game. The speedrun record is less than five minutes long at this point, there’s only so much room for glitches to cut out of a game.
I haven’t been pounded by speedrunners that much either, but I forget where this sentence was going.
BoB Guy and Norville!
[NEMESIS RESTORED]
This won’t end well.
it´s extremely personal now!!!
I’m on Amber’s side this time.
Of course you realize, this means war.
Do kids still watch the good cartoons or were they long ago censored for violence?
Haven’t seen the classics broadcast in a long time, but you can find them at the library.
threesome ! threesome !
Y’know, Buckets of Blood Guy deserves a name… It’s not like he pulled his buckets of blood schtick in the Dumbiverse that we know of.
No, you don’t understand. Buckets of Blood Guy is his legal name.
Bochamp OfBludd.
Bobby?
From the look on Amber”s face he may be about to see his ligelong dream finally realized.
His legal name is Robert Guy, but he goes by BoB.
He is BoB,
eager for fun.
He wears a smile,
everybody run.
He is French, Guy is pronounced Ghee.
Guy Seaux d’ Sang
I am so looking forward to seeing how Willis explains how a total novice managed to match the TAS 8-4 run in the space of an hour. What have you got planned you merry trickster?
Don’t have time/energy to dig through the archives, but this was foreshadowed in a strip where Danny was complaining that Sal wasn’t staying on the track while racing. She kept jumping off the edges and landing ahead on the track. Which is the whole essence of speed running, finding the shortcuts other people don’t think to use.
I lied. I did have time..
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-4/03-up-all-night-to-get-vengeance/recklessly/
Yes but this is a game that has been speedrun to death. A game that has existed long enough to be solved in ways most other games have yet to be solved. Even thinking outside the box, Sal didn’t have enough time to acquire the KNOWLEDGE she’d need to break any records. The choice to make this an established game like Mario 1 just makes this so much harder to believe.
This is my issue with it too- Track jumping is a well-established higher tier thing in Mario Kart as well, not something you need special ability to do, just to figure out how to do it.
Speedrunning a game that has been flipped around forwards,backwards and inside out and beating it is was beyond my suspension of disbelief.
Should have been Blast Corps from the start.
I’m not even in speed runner culture and I still know that sal playing mario 1 on a ds/3ds/switch(??) out of boredom and breaking a speedrun record isn’t just incredibly unlikely, it’s also impossible unless Danny was also trying to break the speedrun record and had his game live capturing and uploading gameplay footage to the internet. Otherwise sure sal could “beat the record” but it would go absolutely nowhere, and amber would certainly not be finding out about it from a third party. I mean am I wrong? Does Nintendo auto record your finish time and post it to a public access site that the speedrun fandom would regularly check?
And I know, suspension of disbelief and everything, I am pedantic enough to get exasperated with doctor who for stuff like “I’ve made a concoction of every antidote for every disease, I’ll spray it on people and they’ll cure other people just by touching them.”
May 27th: Sal is in Danny’s room. She asks Danny “This Amber’s Stream?” Danny explains she ha been trying to beat a tool-assisted speedrun record. Sal is left alone in the room.
May 28th: Sal fools around with the ukele for for a bit, looks frustrated because of her hand.
June 5th: Amber and Danny are talking about the fact she is fiddling around with an NES controller. Amber explains she is mentally playing the game as she walks around. Sal is then shown with an NES controller from Amber’s stream set-up in hand. This is the last we have seen of her since.
Theory 1: Either Amber still has her stream going. Sal starts playing and people are watching, see the new record and report it with clips/downloaded footage
Theory 2: While Sal is fiddling with the game/set-up she accidentally makes the stream go live. Amber’s followers start milling in because of the going live notification and watch it. Notice the new record and submit it via clips/downloaded footage.
The only baffling thing to me is why people are saying it is Danny that beat it in those cases. And ues, it takes time to “confim” and “officiate” it for tracking websites but that doesn’t stop people who watched it live from saying it was beaten and sharing footage of it being beaten.
Why would Amber’s stream setup be in Danny’s room? That’s stupid. Unless Sal moved over to Amber’s room for absolutely no reason, she’s using Danny’s controller, not Amber’s.
And she explicitly says here it was Danny, so his controller.
So, watched Amber’s stream. Decided to try herself and started a stream to make it official. Being Sal, the universe bent in her favor and she either stumbled onto a new glitch or just played the perfect game Amber was aiming for.
I like the idea that the most optimal path is just the most intuitive one for Sal, so she doesn’t even realize she’s doing anything special.
There’s a track in Mario Kart 64 called Choco Mountain. Someone discovered a glitch purely by accident that had gone unnoticed for decades and shattered the speedrun record for it by like 20 seconds. So it’s within the realm of possibility that Sal discovered a previously unknown glitch.
Yes, I know IRL that it’s near impossible for possible unknown glitches to still exist in SMB 1, but that’s the beauty of fiction.
With a game that’s well known to be well known, I wonder how many people are still actively looking for new glitches, vs. trying to perfect the already known ways like Amber was. <- Honest question, I don't have a clue.
There are very few people actively looking for glitches because, frankly, they’ve already been through the game with a fine-toothed comb. With all the play, TASing, and even code analysis that have been thrown at the game, it’s almost certain there are no glitches left to discover. Add that on top of the fact that, even for a more typical game, glitch hunting is way less popular and glamorous than actually getting the records, most games skew heavily towards running rather than glitch hunting already.
People still will go for runs that utilize glitches though. There is a reason that there are catergories in speedrunning that specify “Glitchless” “100%” and “Any%”
Yeah, “Glitchless 100%” may be more desirable and worthy of props, but speedruns using glitches are still valid and things that people will go for.
Absolutely. I’m only referring to the people who are specifically playing in order to hunt for NEW glitches, with or without any real speed-running intent. Obviously once found glitches are heavily utilized in every non-glitchless category.
Sal magic, that’s how.
Or maybe she accidentally stumbled on some kind of glitch in the game that’s forbidden in official speedruns.
I’m gonna be real, I love Sal. She is by far one of my favorite characters.
This completely, 100% broke my suspension of disbelief in this comic. More than a SUPERHERO/SUPERVILLAIN KIDNAPPING DID.
I think it’s because those things felt… narratively like they had some kind of depth/reasoning? And made some amount of sense even if it was comic-sense.
This just feels really out of left field. We know Sal is good at racing games like Mario Kart, but doing something Amber has been trying to do, that is like statistically probably impossible for a real person to do, just on a whim feels…
IDK, but even as a sal-lover as a character, this doesn’t feel earned or realistic to the point it broke my suspension of disbelief.
I feel like you gotta judge a story by what it’s trying to say non literally. Of course Sal isn’t going to beat a speed run on her first try. It’s a way of showing her established personality traits of an extremely stubborn determinist who’s very talented in ways that are counterintuitive to traditional education.
Yeah, but It failed at doing that in my opinion. Everything else in this comic plot-point wise, tends to be grounded, or has groundwork laid for it in the story.
(Amazi-girl just being Amber who channeled her unhealthy coping into parkour/track and field/ learning to fight) to pretend to be a superhero, which leads into her whole plot with that stuff, beating up her dad AS amazi girl, and her dad turning up dressed as a supervillain bc of that encounter.
This clearly is meant to be a plot point. Sal has struggles with functionality in her hand because of amber, it’s referenced a few times as making some things hard.
Sal is good at Mario Kart, uses everything to her advantage (items)
It fails to actually tell us anything you’re trying to say it is.
We already know she’s stubborn and determined and has skills that aren’t aligned with traditional education. Hell, I feel like her and walky both struggling academically could give us an arc where we find out, counter to Walky who prob has combo adhd, she’s got inattentive type, or something similar.
But this? Doesn’t have any grounding in the actual story beyond ‘Sal cool and good at thing, even though her hand is fucked up’ which feels…. lazy?
The issue here is that you know what speedrunning is. You’re the 0.1% of Star Trek watchers who know why the [[TECH]] is silly.
Not just know what it is, but know things about it. I’ve heard of speedrunning but I wouldn’t realize how improbable this all is if it wasn’t for the other commenters.
the classic Schlock Mercenary line, “they can’t make up the rules about custom pistols because I already know those rules”
Internal consistency is a cornerstone of worldbuilding. It doesn’t matter how semi-plausible pretend science works, as long as it works within its own rules.
Sometimes that means the deflector dish can do anything. Sometimes that means a flower can merge individuals into one being when they’re transported as a group.
True, but for those who know the real rules, it’s irritating when the fiction describes its pretend science as if it was real science. Or when they seem to be using real science, but screw it up.
With your warp drive and transporters, you just have to be consistent, but don’t screw up your orbital mechanics, because those are real and we know how they work.
There’s almost certainly an explanation coming that even though Sal lost motor control in her hand from the injury, her thumb can twitch faster and more reliably. I say that because it’s just enough logical stretching to make sense but also it’s a great way to underline that Amber just can’t do stuff sometimes and she needs to be okay with that.
Sal’s hand isn’t really the issue here. The issue is that we’re talking about pretty much the single most heavily analyzed game in existence for the purposes of speedrunning.
The current speedrunning record has so damn many techs and glitches and secrets and timings that you have to hit that even if Sal were to have somehow uncovered some massive glitch that somehow had bypassed all of the countless people who have bashed their head against the game, her time still would been several minutes behind the record.
Assuming that we don’t have a few levels of hijinks left to uncover (like Sal submitted a time to the wrong category or something), this just feels like an unforced error by Willis on the writing front. Its not horrible or anything, it mostly amounts to “if you know anything about the niche subject in question, you’ll cringe like crazy”, but it’s a niche that overlaps heavily with the webcomic’s niche.
I mean Willis’s cultural touchstones are largely from his childhood and they’re what go into the comic, which is why someone who ostensibly was born in 2004 is currently speedrunning a game that came out in 84. Same reason why Ethan is a huge fan of Beast Wars despite being just as old.
You gotta suspend a little disbelief to internalize that Sal could do it but it’s really not any more absurd than Amber and her being crimefighters or the high speed car chase against Amber’s dad.
To be fair, the original Super Mario Bros. has got to be one of the most well-understood, deeply analyzed games in speedrunning. It’s also been pretty consistently remade and rereleased ever since it came out. I’d find it less believable if a tech-savvy gamer like Amber, who probably downloaded many a ROM over the years (for fun and/or financial reasons) hadn’t played it before.
> Amber just can’t do stuff sometimes and she needs to be okay with that.
isn’t this ambers whole character? She is constantly Having To Be Okay with not doing stuff/succeeding/etc. Like she feels like a failure half the time bc she has so little sense of self, she compartmentalized all her ‘good’ into amazi-girl.
This felt like something she could sink her time into for a sense of satisfaction. I’m wondering what the plots gonna *be* here but while I love this comic, It’s not like it hasn’t let me down before.
We’ve gone over Amber’s self-loathing and her need to prove herself as Amazi-Girl, but since they’re a split personality and AG is her outlet, we’ve never actually gone into *Amber’s* specific Batman-inspired neurotic need to be good at things.
Or at least that’s what I assume the comic is going to be about. It seems pretty clear that her and Sal don’t really have much reason to interact, and if Sal accidentally knocked over a world record it at least gives them some animosity again and gives them something to do. I really like them both so I’m happy Willis figured out something for them to butt heads over, Ethan has largely exited the comic aside from facilitating Asher “cheating” (big airquotes) on Billie.
The plotline is that Amber is gonna get mad at Sal for being better than her for something that she’s been into her entire life smartass, show me how you’d portray this plotline to the reader and I might consider caring about this silly minutiae.
I mean, it is a plotline. The point is the plot line isn’t believable. And given the fact he had amber speed-running in the first place, and how much into nerd culture Willis is, it feels weird to assume he wouldn’t know some of the like… intro level stuff I know about Speedrunning/games.
Like I’m not super into it, I’ve never even had a hyperfixation on it to get all this info, it’s just like… tertiary knowledge I’ve gathered over time.
Like the game amber is playing is THE speedrunning game. It’s been focused on for so long for speedrunners its not even funny.
Like, yeah. The plot is that Amber gets mad that Sal is better at X thing she’s been doing her entire life. But what is the narrative point of this plot? It feels really random, cuz Sal’s always been the cool laid back whoever who has more depth than surface level nobody bothers to know.
It just feels weird for her to be able to beat THE record of THE game, and it doesn’t seem to serve any narrative purpose that makes sense to me as a writer.
Like… Amber doesn’t need to be Humbled At Videogames, She already has such a poor self esteem abt like everything else (even if she’s trying to better herself), Sal doesn’t need another thing to be good at and cool at. She seems to be good at basically everything she tries. And I say this as a fan of Sal.
Like, is it gonna be Sal and Amber Enemies pt. 2? But for less intense reasons this time? Is it just a random conflict that doesn’t serve either character? Are we gonna learn that Actually This Was Unhealthy for Amber to be focusing on, somehow?
idk, with the info we have my suspension of disbelief is broken, and I don’t see the *point* of the plot. Which hasn’t been the case with most other plots, even ones I don’t really ‘get’ I can still understand the trajectory its taking.
We could just…wait and see?
In fact, we have no choice in the matter. Even Patreon readers can only see one strip ahead. The level of entitled impatience in these comments is always a little funny to me. Like, it’s a daily comic. I read comics that update one, two, or maybe three times a week, with frequent hiatuses, so watching people melt down and fill their diapers over a measly 24 hours can feel pretty ridiculous.
I still think Willis is missing a Golden Opportunity of using his buffer to let Patreon readers see farther into the future, doubling the price for each day further ahead.
The Emperor is gonna run out of rice.
Long before Willis runs out of buffer.
Yes, thejeff. This!!!
I don’t wanna wait for the chapter to be over
I just want to read one at a time.
My guess for how this will turn out is one of the discoveries previously made from our perspective will wind up to have been discovered by Sal in universe. No idea which one, but some newbie finding some exploit is… more believable.
That’s literally impossible for a multitude of reasons.
THANK YOU
It amuses me greatly that in a comic book with a teenager who successfully fights several adults and one successful chase on the highway, the fact that a newcomer breaks a record in a video game is a break of disbelief.
ps1 I know the teenager has an instory explanation
ps2 it bothers me too
For me, it’s less “breaks a record in a video game” and much more “breaks THE record in THE video game”. If Amber were trying to break a speedrun record for some obscure (or fictional) NES title that she had a special affection for, that’d be fine.
Doing it for Super Mario Bros 1, the most popular video game to speedrun, and a high-profile speedrunning category? That’s… a different story.
Meh. That’s in our universe which had covid, not in the universe with Rutech Super Mario Bros 1.
Yes, a newcomer breaking this record is about a million times more implausible than the successful highway chase.
Couple things. One, a lot of people had their suspension of disbelief broken by the car chase or by AG’s other exploits.
Two, I wonder if some of the rest of the difference is that we’re all used to unrealistic action scenes from superheroes and action movies.
And yet it happened.
In this webcomic.
Which is fiction.
And I find it unbelievable in a way that I find frustrating.
In this webcomic.
Which is Fiction.
But it didn’t happen. Because it’s fiction. What, you can’t tell the difference between fiction and reality now?
“Sorry, Wonderbread, ah think your D-pad broke. Felt like it was letting me press left and right at the same time.”
Nawh, Sal’s just setting records in the new Cool-Assisted Speedrun category.
The noise I made when I saw this wasn’t human. I laughed so hard.
It was probably AG.
Amber: It’s far to impossible to pay attention in a computer SCI class
Danny: because it’s complicated and there a lot of information coming at you at once?
Amber: No because it’s all just simple amateur hour crap to me, I was so bored you couldn’t pay me to pay attention.
Why do I feel like Amber is going to be more screwed than Walky was when she hits advanced stuff she doesn’t know yet.
We haven’t actually seen her in any other classes, have we?
It’s a little lopsided, isn’t it? She’s only (mostly?) been seen in one class, and she’s not even learning anything from it. By the time the comic is over, her entire academic career will have been spent being a vigilante and dealing with her brain problems, instead of learning.
To be fair, she might be putting in effort in other classes and it’s just her one field that she has superheroic expertise in.
I’d kinda like to see those other classes, tbh. This one isn’t very interesting to me, and I’m curious what else Amber does.
I mean, that’s how I spent mine.
you know what? good for her. sal u really did that.
But whats the problem? Amber still can beat world record its just somebody else and just happen she known new champion.
I call its arc where Amber learn she making circles and need some changes to methaphoricly break her own record
Hope it isn’t what it was obviously foreshadowed to be. Suspension of disbelief gone in that case.
It’s an alternate universe. One without the level of analysis of a random game that our universe has. In their Universe the Head Alien is a cartoon. In our Universe he secretly runs everything, which is why stuff is so screwed up.
OMG! Sal just out-nerded Amber.
seconding the suspension of disbelief comments but also adding that amber herself said that the speedrun needed to be streamed in order to be verifiable? with the necessary takeaway being that for sal’s record to have been actually believed she would have needed to hop on stream in her underwear while casually playing this game, and to specifically stream in danny’s name instead of her own, and for this submission of a contested and prestigious and very easy to TAS speedrun from someone who was previously not at all a world record contender to not be at the very least held up in moderation if not dismissed outright as obviously fake?
i dunno, i’m willing to believe that An explanation is possible, but this feels incredibly contrived. like even if we had seen sal swim before she is not gonna break the 100m freestyle record at the local swimming pool
Sal was left alone in a room with Amber’s Stream Set-Up. It is feasible stream was left on with no webcam (because Amber is a shy introvert) or Sal accidentally turned on the stream while fiddlling with the computer to turn the game on.
And no one has actually said it has been officated yet. And it does not need to be officiated for news of it to spread on social media. all it takes is for someone who was watching the stream to see it and then go to a social media website with screenshots/clips/downloaded footage to post about how someone just beat the record and then it spreads from there. And that is a lot faster than it being declared official.
Oh noes a thing apparently happened in this fictional webcomic that supposedly can’t happen in real life might as well give up and delete the comic off the Internet I guess
And in the next page Dina beats Mike Tyson in a dragout bout and Walky Cures every known disease and then Jennifer performs open heart surgery on Ruth.
I dunno why being fictional means I can’t have issues with an impossible accomplishment. I can make concessions for certain action movie tropes, or certain things played for comedy, but this case just feels a big egregious. A speedrun record is kind of an impressive feat by its very definition.
Maybe to you, dork.
This is supposed to be the Willis comic without superpowers – with Badass Normals aplenty, but no superpowers (…apart from a bit of teleportation…).
You know, it’s possible to disagree without being gratuitously rude.
Now if you want to talk about impossible accomplishments, violating the speed of light on a routine basis without routinely dealing with the time paradoxes it sets up, because of Einstein, will do it. And yet I routinely enjoy Star Trek, Star Wars, and a jillion SF novels that include the physically impossible. The Dumbing Universe has been clearly established as having a different history. What’s the problem?
Sorry whatever. The gratuitously rude was directed at Bruno, not you or your comment which spontaneously appeared in between.
Dork.
Well, yes. But being occasionally accurate doesn’t help.
You are reading a webcomic while calling people “dorks”, do you somehow think that reading webcomics are an alpha male superchad activity?
Evidently not if you’re doing it. Dork.
Come to think of it, the shear impossibility and elicited reaction might be a deliberate artistic choice that starts the reader sympathizing with Amber, who here is also shocked and flabbergasted.
It could also be that Willis also took this opportunity to gain some sort of metric on just how many of his most avid readers know about speedrunning.
Hanma Dina sounds pretty cool
You know, it’s funny how in a thread of people complaining about something silly that happened on a webcomic, your comment is somehow the most dramatic
the lost media of PedanticJerkass’ deleted comic: ten years and 1000 pages gone forever…
I assume that Mario Kart is less played in this world.
When Raistlin Majere took the Test, he murdered his brother’s illusion out of jealousy. What caused him to do this? It was because the illusion displayed magical powers greater than his own and removed the one thing that Raistlin felt he was better than his brother at.
The question is….was Mario Kart the last strand of sanity for Amber?
Will Sal beating her score mean that Amazi-Girl will be the only one who remains?
The reaction to this is as much a part of the story as the story itself is to me now. I’m just gonna watch.
Honestly, super valid.
yeah, sure, whatever
Plot Twist: Blaine is alive and hacked Danny’s account.
But only because Mike is also still alive and told him how much it would piss Amber off.
Plot Twist: Mike has been living in Amber’s room pretending to be a hallucination. He hides in the closet.
I knew there had to be a rational explanation.
OK, I found the Weirdest Ideas thread! Here’s mine: Sal is still plunking away at the game, doing okay but nothing special, while the new record was actually set by AmaziGirl and took this long to be verified.
AG and Sal are hanging out taking turns playing.
I’m just irrationally joyful to see Alex again.
Y’all suspension of disbelief is weak as fuck if it breaks so easily.
TFW power level is so high Vegeta thinks the scouter is broken
On one hand I don’t disagree, on the other hand I think we just have a lot of readers here that know about speedrunning. Like how a medical innacuracy in a TV show doesn’t really matter to most viewers, but doctors, nurses, etc get taken out of it because to them it’s so obviously wrong, except a way higher percentage of viewers of this comic know speedrunning than viewers of tv shows know medicine.
That said, I don’t think this is that big of a deal, especially if the plot doesn’t suddenly pivot from Dumbing of Age to Sal Walkerton: Pro Speed Runner. 90 years from now, when the comic is over, someone will probably somehow have proven that, through some weird theoretical math, it IS possible to improve the record
Your empathy is weak as fuck
Not caring about strangers’ suspension of disbelief in a comic about pretend people doing pretend things (in this case pretend-breaking a pretend speedrun record) is hardly low-empathy. That’s a super big reach.
You have a weird definition of empathy.
Look, video games is Serious Business™. Anything can happen in any other category, but the moment a video games gets involved, it’s frothy McNuggets time. The chicken is on the floor now.
You realize I would read the comment section just for your comments.
Amateurs. My suspicion of disbelief was broken because if you look at background details, the layout of Read Hall is physically impossible.
Sal breaking speed run : Dumbiverse is an AU where there’s an undiscovered glitch she stumbled upon.
Read Hall layout : Dumbiverse is an AU with highly localized non-Euclidean space. “This Campus is an Escher Print” is not hyperbole.
It’s those crazy kids in the Physics department again!
wait youre telling me this is a work of fiction and not a stylized stream of real world events done Truman Show-style one minute at a time? oh GOD…
I know it is hard to believe that Sal could do this, but even as a gamer I don’t think it requires this much outrage.
Would it be incredibly difficult for Sal to do this? Yes.
Impossible? No; there are a few stories of someone discovering something by sheer luck, and then using it to break a record.
I get why people think it breaks the suspension of disbelief, but I don’t think it deserves all the hate it seems to be getting.
yeah this is a bit of a weird place for people to draw the line in the sand but at least the tide’s gonna wash it away
The major problem is that this game in particular is well-documented to be at its absolute limits in a way where there are almost certainly no new discoveries to luck into, and the only plausible way to beat the record is absolute perfection. If it was any other game, I don’t think people would care as much, but SMB1 is probably the worst game for people to suspend their disbelief on.
Of course, this doesn’t account for the fictional character discovering fictional new speedrunning tech in a fictionalized version of the game.
This is a good example of it being a weird place for people to draw the line.
So far my theory is holding – there are a ton of people in this comment section who want to be upset at the comic. Every day. I don’t know why they want this, it sounds exhausting and not worthwhile, but here we are. If it’s not some pearl-clutching nonsense about an 18yo drinking under controlled circumstances with people she trusts, it’s everyone having deep emotional ties to an imaginary speedrun record.
I signed up for Patreon a few days ago, and when I saw this comic yesterday I thought “Wow, this might actually be a strip the comments struggle to have a meltdown about” and honestly, that’s on me lmao. I didn’t work hard enough.
Yeah, people were having meltdowns about this the moment it was foreshadowed that it might happen, which probably tells you all you need to know… :/
Just because I’ve seen it alluded to once or twice and never when someone is actually saying what the main problem is – I don’t mind sal breaking a speedrun record. What I don’t believe is that sal, who is entirely separate from all of nerd culture outside of a narrow window Danny has shown to her and likely -only- knows of speedrunning in terms of anecdotes about what Amber is up to lately, would not as far as her character has been shown, engage in -any- of the extra bureaucracy to look into current records and then publish her own speedrun record, I’m not sure she even actually knows what that is? That’s what took me out of it. It would be like being told that Wally ran for president and won at 18, or that Joyce built a fully functional apollo 13 replica in her spare time. It’s still somehow more of a bugbear than either of those because those are comical instances of flouting established knowledge, whereas here it genuinely feels like the reason this plot point happened was because of near total ignorance of speedrunning.
Also, I see people labelling this as outrage, and some people may be here? But simply mentioning that this was an anti-immersive moment is feedback, not vitriol.
On the subject of Super Mario Bros speedruns, which might also provide some context for those not understanding why some are struggling with their suspension of disbelief with this comic, this is a great video I stumbled across a bit ago, showing someone’s every attempt at the SMB speedrun they did during lockdown, a total of 5,162 attempts, all overlaid with each other.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_eXSzyZudM
I’ll also note that their time is 4 seconds slower than the current world record. Which is where the world record was in 2011…
At of shear curiosity, what happens if someone runs the game on a faster computer with a faster clock speed?
For games where the game speed is based on frames, the actual record is based on framecount. The translation into minutes and seconds at the standard framerate is just for convenience.
Could you slow it down drastically to have more time to execute the perfect moves?
Yes, though doing so is generally prohibited by the rules for running any given game, and will be called out for cheating if caught. The same is previously true for higher speeds as well (contrary to Tan’s statement, counting the number of frames in a run is not a universal standard, exact timing rules vary wildly based on how a game functions and how the community chooses to handle it)
Emulators can cap the clock speed for the game to prevent any problems like that from happening. I’m not actually sure what happens if the clock speed is notably higher, though.
oh I understand why.
today strip is about stabbing
It’s like they never heard of the power booster rod.
I’ve also never heard of that, but if it can make people supernaturally good at a video game that doesn’t matter, I like it.
The PBR is from It’s Walky!. Q.v.
Turns out if you die five times in a row to the first goomba and throw the controller in a fit of rage it glitches to the end screen.
GASP
its really funny that a complex series of fuckery like this is literally how you speedrun Super Mario World
The thing about Speedruns is that while skills and reflexes are important the even more important bit is Knowledge. Someone who is new or inexperienced in a game is unlikely to beat a record because they don’t know a game in-and-out like a Speedrunners does. No knowledge of shortcuts, optimal approach etc.
I know that DoA doesn’t take place in our universe, so maybe in this one Super Mario Bros hasn’t been speedrun so extensively, but to me this is like if they said Sal had beaten the record for the 200 meter dash set by Usain Bolt in 2009.
She probably could do that too. Obvious explanation is that she’s magic.
yup.
I mean, we’ve seen people’s locations shift so quickly it can pretty much only be explained by teleportation already and that’s been acknowledged in-universe, so even that wouldn’t really be that much of a stretch tbh seeing as characters have already moved faster than that.
To me this is no worse than Dina’s explicitly supernatural-level abilities to avoid notice, sense people being incorrect about dinosaurs, and teleport (note this latter is not unique to her, other characters such as Joyce have also been observed displaying this behaviour). Sal’s previously been established as a savant at finding the quickest way to the end goal in video games (Mario Kart), so this is in keeping with that character trait, which is no more extreme than others we’ve seen.
Also consider you have to be the sort of person who is very very into this very specific niche within a niche within a niche to even know how much of a stretch this is – I certainly wouldn’t if not for the comments, and still can’t really bring myself to care, this is just not the sort of detail that would matter to me even if I was into the speedrunning thing (and I cannot stress enough how much I am not).
I’m not sure whose extracurricular comments I dislike more: Prof. Brock’s or these.
(Posted before reading: OK, is Alex also Norville? Their credits always appear together.)
We only see Norville when he’s in Alex’s class.
Thank you. Now I know which one is teaching the class. I only have to figure out which student is the other one.
Alex is the teacher.
Buckets of Blood guy is the one that looks like a school shooter.
Norville is the one who looks like Norville “Shaggy” Rogers, from the world-famous Scooby-Doo! franchise.
Norville is the green shirt we see the right shoulder of in panel 2. Buckets of Blood guy is the one whose face is mostly visible in the same panel.
Clearly it Sal’s day for fast and impersonal. She speedran Danny and then Mario.
Fast and Impersonal Super Mario Brothers was kind of a weird spin-off series but then again they’ve done weirder remember Doctor mario world
I don’t care about speedruns. I don’t watch them, and I don’t do them. Speeding through a game instead of going at a measured pace stresses me out.
This is still really bad writing. It’s “what if a disabled teen decided to, for the first time in their life, try the most popular olympic sport in the world, and then won the olympic medal less than an hour later” level stupid.
… In a comic that has how tough it is to learn and accept new things as one of its most present themes.
I don’t care about speedruns. But I care about writing. And this writing sucks.
Except the Olympics require actual effort and ability, don’t they, whereas playing a video game fast requires sitting on your ass and pressing buttons quicker than other people. It’s a huge gap in scale and stakes.
you are vastly underestimating the effort it takes to learn and perfect a speedrun in a highly contested game
I’m not underestimating it, I’m disparaging it.
You are vastly underestimating the physical implausibility of glitches in a 100 m distance.
Usain Bolt isn’t even that fast. I can backwards long jump at speeds that would give him panic attacks.
Fosbury flopping your way to world records in every track and field event.
It also requires a vast amount of knowledge about the game. Like I’ll even ignore the fact you are looking down on the skill necessary to pull it off. It also requires a lot of knowledge of Where and How to push those buttons.
Look, I’ve done a speedrun or twice in my life, and “vast” seems like a bit of an overplay. A couple days of effort is cool and all, but it’s not the huge undertaking people seem intent on painting it as.
Depends on what you mean by Speedrun. Doing the stuff you’ve seen and replicating it is different from working on finding out shortcuts and tricks, the latter requires quite a bit more work. Like with Hollow Knight you get Speedrun achievements for a run under 10 and under 5 hours. World record on the other hand is a some 31 minutes I believe?
If you’re playing a video game with the intent of beating it as quickly as possible, that’s a speedrun. A world record is neat and all, but we can’t just narrow the definition to that zone.
these things can last, like months of marathons iof just like playing the game for 15 hours per day, something that is not only super grating and skilled but also devastating when you fuck up partway through
And wherever could she ever find a stream to replay, to watch someone do those? A total mystery.
Except you are wrong. And rude.
No. Playing a video game fast is not on the same scale as competing in the Olympics. Your example sucks.
Playing a video game fast may not be on the same level of physical activity as the actual literal olympics but it’s time consuming and it can be difficult. It’s a competition for a reason. It’s not even just about speed and reaction time. It’s about knowledge and predicting. It requires time and effort that I think deserves respect.
Why do you care? You’ve openly stated that you disparage effort and skill.
That’s not what I said at all, you’re being way too broad. You want to be upset with me so you’re making up extra things that aren’t there, and it’s really depressing.
Alright, sure. The comment you replied to with “I’m not underestimating it, I’m disparaging it.” said “you are vastly underestimating the effort it takes”, they didn’t explicitly mention skill. You only openly stated that you disparage effort. That’s fair, I’ll cop to that.
Your projecting emotions onto me is waaay off tho. Of course I’m not upset at you. I’m an honest person. I said that I don’t care about speed running, I care about writing, which was the truth.
You haven’t insulted writing, the thing I care about here, so of course I neither am upset nor particularly want to be.
You are right that depression is involved though! If you actually want to know why I chose to talk to you, it’s that I’ve had one of my worst depression days in ages today, and everything I like doing feels frustrating and empty. This way, by spending my bad depression day talking to you instead of doing something I’m normally passionate about, I’m at least not associating good things with this bad depression spot.
This isn’t me angry – this is me doing self-care, trying to keep myself awake until my bedtime, and wasting time on a thing I nothing about on a day I struggle to feel anything about anything anyway.
I do genuinely hope your day has been better than mine, though. People are neat, I don’t like when they are hurting.
Holy shit, if engaging in my disingenuous nonsense about speedrunning is your self-care, I’d hate to see a normal interaction. I’ve just been playing Tears of the Kingdom for self-care, but I guess everyone is different.
Ah, I see! I said something genuine about myself, so I get expletives and either an insult or a self-report that you hate seeing people healthy and happy? Of course.
And yes, it is. I am surprised how much better I feel right now writing this comment, than when I was writing that one. I am writing this with a little smile on my face. I’m now in headspace where I don’t mind going to bed.
And yes, everyone is indeed different. Quite right!
Thank you, and good night. Hope you sleep well.
Yeah. That’s why speedrunning feats are super common and just done by anyone. It’s not challenging or difficult or time consuming. The community is just made of talentless chuds who are just wasting their time doing something literally anyone could do because pushing buttons is EASY.
Terrible.
You should be nicer to speed runners. All I said was it’s not on the same level as the Olympics, and now you’re calling them talentless chuds and saying all this other negative stuff that wasn’t anywhere in my post. It really isn’t such serious business, and it’s actually fine for me to downplay it a little bit.
that’s the spirit!
See the problem with introducing a plot twist like this in a comic with a huge queer and trans following is that the entire readership are massive Summoning Salt fans and know just how much work grinding out a speedrunning record is, let alone THIS specific speedrunning record
The only thing more disbelief-shattering to our sensibilities would be if Sal discovered a new Fallout New Vegas skip in the course of an afternoon
I’m among the first two things you mention and I’ve never heard of whoever that is nor do I care about speedrunning beyond thinking it’s kinda cool
Someone in a comic falling into a videogame glitch isn’t gonna shatter my disbelief, no matter how allegedly impossible the glitch is
“glitch possible for rando to find by chance in comic” is an extremely minor change really
If you don’t get irate about a speedrun of a video game in an alternate universe, then you’re not actually queer. That’s what the red stripe is on the rainbow flag, it’s mario running real fast. you’re cishet now.
Look all I’m saying is if Carla managed this no one would bat an eye
Last time the comment section was this outraged about something “literally impossible” happening was when Carla had a girlfriend.
God forbid women do anything around here
Ah jeez I’d forgotten about that mess :/
the green is for Green Mario
“You mean you could have [done that] at any time?!”
“No, not at any time. Only when it was funny.”
Sal broke the record at the same time Dina made a half mile round trip from the biology building to the village pantry. It actually took her like 7 minutes of subjective time, she was just inside the time bubble when it happened.
Sal continues to ruin Amber’s life through no awareness of her own
It occurs to me that Alex is actually giving us the world’s most half-hearted Mr. Bergstrom moment right here.
Willis knows how unlikely Sal’s record speedrun is. And he knows that we know. So there must be some narrative purpose in this. Let the man tell his story.
My money is on her jumping down a random hole and accidentally glitching through the whole level. A fictional glitch.
s-tier take
Oh look, common sense. Everyone run away or you’ll get it on you!!
The comic updates one update at a time and we comment on what we’ve seen one day at a time. I’ll let him cook, of course, but that won’t stop me from giving my kneejerk reactions.
If anything I’ve been more inclined to argue about why it annoys me because of all the people going “It’s not a big deal why do you care?” and then I explain why it bothers me I get looked at like some pedantic weirdo.
Yes, I understand this comic has already had fantastic feats.
Yes, I understand that this universe’s version of SMB might not be the same as the real one.
Yes, I understand that maybe there’ll be a clarification on how this was possible later.
But what’s bugging me is how many people ARE just saying “Hey, I don’t get why them breaking the limits on a GAME is so difficult to believe.”
It’d be like if you listed your favorite Transformers and included GOBOTS.
It’d be like if you said your favorite He-Man character was Cheetara.
It’d be like if you said your favorite Marvel Character was The Amazing Atom.
Nerds are super protective of their communities and when you show disregard for them they tend to get vocal.
This one here! All of this, especially the end.
What’s wrong with the Amazing Atom?
I suppose he might be DC instead of Marvel, but Disney is going to wind up owning them all anyway.
I think it’s probably coming from a place of feeling defensive over accusations of X character is a total Mary Sue. Old scars…
i dont mean to be entirely combative and defensive but my fascination with fucking stupid niche content means i now need to revolve my life around whoever the fuck Marvel’s ‘The Amazing Atom’ is. I’ve written fiction about ‘Team America’, I’ve got headcanons on ‘The Black Widow (the satan-worshipper one)’, and mark my words I’m bringing The Amazing Atom the FUCK back out of retirement
the narrative purpose is Wahoo Yippee Bing-Bong Yahoo
I, for one, am looking forward to the introduction of the elusive speedrunner extraordinaire, Fantasti-Girl, who is Definitely Not Amber in any way, shape, or form.
What gets me is two things: The first is that when this plot was first introduced, I thought the point was that Amber was trying to do something physically impossible, and she was gonna fail, because it wasn’t possible. Sal succeeding makes this an Amber’s-not-good-enough storyline instead of an Amber-has-unrealistic-expectations-for-herself, and that’s so different from the vibe at the start of the storyline that it’s confusing to me. This holds true even if this is a red herring and we’re about to find out someone besides Sal beat the record.
Secondly, the game didn’t have to be SMB1. There are few games less plausible for this version of the storyline than SMB1, and it doesn’t seem like there’s any narrative reason for it being this game instead of any other game. It could’ve been any other Nintendo game. It could’ve even been a Dexter and Monkey Master game, new or old. Sal even used to watch D&MM with Walky before she got sent to boarding school, she could’ve been like “oh I remember these characters!”
It’s just a little weird how this was written. I don’t get why Willis went with SM1, or why it was set up as impossible to start if the plotline wasn’t gonna be about that. I dunno.
An interesting reflection and analysis. I appreciate it. It is strange, I agree.
I get why people are mad at this but are completely fine with the superhero stuff, but I still think it’s a bit silly. I do love that THIS is some of the most upset the community has been at Willis.
It isn’t. You can tell because this comment page has not been locked, as it has on multiple occasions, when the hate and vitrol was an actual problem.
Also, 200 comments? That’s nothing. This comic locks non-current chapters from being commented on, but it’s had comics with over 1000 comments on them before.
Apropos of nothing, you’ve mentioned in other comments that you’ve been having a rough day, so I would like to let you know that you are seen, and offer Internet-stranger-hugs if you would like them.
Aww, that’s kind. Thank you. Yes, internet-stranger-hugs (ish?) appreciated.
If someone developed superpowers that would just be this being fiction.
But a newbie breaking a well-established speed record isn’t superpowers, it’s just utterly ridiculously unbelievable and I don’t see how this is remotely interesting or fun plot twist either. Ok, perhaps Sal next develops a quantum gravity theory and gets a Nobel prize in Physics by scribbling random doodles, whatever.
So, like Emily in QC.
I don’t read QC, if another webcomic did the same stupid thing I don’t see how this is relevant?
It’s a fucking comparison, you ass.
Why is the comparison needed, and how does it affect anything? You donkey.
Okay, now you’ve compared me to an ungulate. Get ready for a hurricane, motherfucker.
I have an umbrella, fatherlicker.
Come at me scrublord, I’m ripped
I only wish we got to see more Emily. Or more Dina for that matter. When’s the last time we had a crossover anyway?
Joyce in Dork Tower?
Eh, it’s totally possible that Sal discovered a new exploit that’s game-changing — this is something that happens occasionally. But if she provided the proof of a speedrun including the exploit, other people can rerun it and break her speedrun using the exploit…well, unless its’ got a huge execution requirement to do it reliably.
It’s really interesting how the only people defending this plot twist, are the type of fucking asshole bullies who call other people “dweebs” or “dorks” and think that such insults towards other people are a valid way to behave.
Congrats, Willis, you have a bunch of asshole highschool bullies on your side. Way to show that “dorks” and “dweeb” audience of yours,
Wow, really out here trying to hold Willis accountable for who reads his comic on a public website. You can see how that’s silly, right? Like, I guess he could put a sign up or something, but I don’t think that’s likely to work.
Anyway, have fun calling people assholes I guess. Glad to know the “valid way to behave” includes that!
Aelfwine is consistently hostile and holier-than-thou about literally everything, and has repeatedly encouraged real-world violence over mild disagreements. This is honestly tame for them.
Oh geez, good to know. I’ll just steer clear before they graduate to something as awful as saying the word “dork” amidst all that.
“geez, good to know”? You are going to just take their word for it, won’t you.
Because assholes never lie, you think. /s
And btw if I’d ever encouraged real-world violence I would have expected to be permabanned from the forum, and shame on David Willis if I ever did this and I wasn’t banned.
I wonder when I encouraged “real-world violence over mild disagreements”
But you have deliberately taken pleasure in being an asshole so I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re also a liar.
Dang, my assessment of you seems to matter an awful lot. Maybe you should be less of a hostile presence, if you’re so bothered by it.
I don’t care about your assessment, I do care if I supposesly advocated real-world violence over minor disagreements and yet I fail to remember it. Did that actually happen or did you lie?
You care so little that you immediately started shitting yourself over it, so why don’t you tell me if it’s true or not? If I mistook you for someone else then fine, but it doesn’t make you less ridiculous.
I have already said that I don’t remember this ever happening.
It seems that you don’t remember it actually ever happening either. Good, we’ve finally reached the truth, and your words were merely slamder.
Your obsession about what I feel or what I don’t feel about your words is your own problem alone. I don’t care what you think. I don’t care whether you think that I care about what you think. I don’t even care whether you think I care about whether you think I care.
But I certainly wom’t reduce my hostile presence against fucking bullies who find pleasure out of hurting people, which they feel entitled to because the people who they are hurting are “dweebs”. You are a fucking sadistic asshole and you can go to hell.
not a plot twist.
the twist is that dina broke it
Dina committed identity theft on Danny. A victimless crime in this instance, but it sets a dangerous precedent.
Yeah, nobody could have seen this coming (everyone saw it coming).
The question is, is there any justification for -how- Sal was able to break the speedrun record.
So, Sal is just some video game savant or something, huh?
Everyone stop everything, this is serious.
A feat this impossible can only mean one thing:
Somebody has pulled the DRAMA TAG 0-0
not ment to be a reply, but oh well
My prediction for events: Amber finds out it was Sal who broke the record, freaks out. Danny lets Sal know how important it is to Amber, so Sal pretends it was a glitch– not an exploited glitch or something, but whatever was timing just messed up or whatever, and it’s not anything she could recreate. Amber is relieved and goes on about how she knew an amateur like Sal couldn’t have broke the record. She goes on about this a little too much. Sal grabs the control and breaks the record again right in front of Amber, slams the controller into her hands, and storms out.
The way this comic is going, Amber and Sal gonna be fucking
I love this comment section here because its like what if in the middle of Summoning Salt’s Youtube video the angriest people in the comments section suddenly got to voice their opinions in the video too, like “Actually, this is impossible and sucks and FUCK YOU” and all just kinda talked over each other as S.S. continued to explain the speedrun.
Which doesn’t mean y’all aren’t correct, it’s just- Just the image that popped in my brain…
I guess I also just don’t go to this comic with any suspension of belief? I just, don’t, I dunno