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I feel like that’s a niche market and also the sort of dude willing to corner the market on being the Atheist Weird Al of Jesus Music is probably both bad at music and generally unpleasant.
yeah like, something I wonder is why there’s no attempt out there to provide guilt-free alternatives to nostalgia pieces which have, to put it simply, become milkshake ducks
Honestly I’m not sure there’s much profit in it. I’ve seen a few things get headwind as alternatives to canceled art, but that’s mostly an organic process and you’re only going to capture a small chunk of the audience.
Harry Potter is still a bigger franchise by orders of magnitude than anything that’s ever been passed around as a viable alternative, for example.
very much so, Little Witch Academia for instance, seems like a good Harry Potter substitute, although it popular among today’s youth, can’t have the same power because Harry Potter wasn’t just the films
there were the books, the sleepovers with the decorations, the events at school and blockbusters, the toys, the theme parks,
…the memories
why won’t Little Witch Academia get a theme park or toys, and fond memories be (re?)made with those?
the answer always seems to be money, one way or another, yay capitalism
(-_-)
What’s sad is the fact Harry Potter was just a lower-quality knockoff remix of multiple “school of witchcraft” books that came before, including…
Books of Magic (Young British boy with pet messenger owl learning to be a wizard),
Secret of Platform 13 (a magical train hidden at King’s Cross station in London with a “13” in its number and a magical child kept in a cupboard by his abusive family with adoptive parents that have a non-adopted son who is fat and rude),
The Worst Witch (attending a witching academy that has witches uniforms, and attends potions class taught by a harsh hook-nosed teacher who hates the protagonist, as well as attending charms class & broomstick flying lessons, and joins up with her friends to make an invisibility potion, and this popular blond kid gets off on the wrong foot with the protagonist on the first day and makes life hard for the protagonist, as they attend their castle-like school near magical woods after the protagonist escapes a family that gives them no knowledge of the magical world, but at least the headmaster has the protagonist’s back),
Discworld (Unseen University & Ponder Stibbons & broom-riding lessons vs Harry Potter & Hogwarts & broom riding lessons),
Lord of the Rings (Ring Wraiths vs Dementors),
Troll (The 1986 Horror Film’s Troll-fighting Harry Potter who has to worry about an evil wizard hiding his essence in someone close to him vs 1997 Harry Potter’s Troll-fighting Harry Potter who has to worry about an evil wizard hiding his essence in someone close to him)
D&D & Russian Folklore (Phylacteries borrowed from Koschei the Deathless vs Horcruxes)
That’s great for you that you think HP is “lower-quality”, but a lot of people grew up loving it and have a million fond memories of it. That doesn’t mean they suddenly have terrible literary taste just because we now know the author really sucks.
Art is always in part a remix of art that came before it, that’s how creativity and inspiration works. You can point out the influences, but simply having literary influences doesn’t make the result automatically low quality.
It’s almost as if you donknow the difference between “knock off” and “the extremely basic tropes one would use if one was to wrote a story about a magical boarding school”.
Ponder Stibbons is an influence on Harry Potter? Why? Because they both wear glasses?
You can dislike a person’s political views without talking absolute rot about their artistic work.
Veronica, didn’t you get the memo? If someone is one form of bad, they must, perforce, be assumed to be all forms of bad. So by virtue of being a GCF, JKR is also a racist colonialist homophobic classist anti-Semitic climate-denialist anti-vax plagiarist. It’s inconceivable that someone might have one or two points of difference with the overall position currently adopted by the left, without being entirely a creature of the far-right.
Not to be “I was unimpressed with it before that was cool”, but it was always mediocre, and not very creative with the sources it was “inspired” by. Millions of people having fond memories of it doesn’t mean people, especially kids, don’t ever like mid stuff. That doesn’t invalidate the feelings of betrayal and such you might have.
I kind of agree with it not being great literature, but I’m still unimpressed with the list of things it was a “knock-off remix of”.
What I’d say it was mostly is something not really on that list, which is a mix of basic British boarding school fiction and the wizard side. The other wizard school stuff doesn’t really draw that directly on that genre (Maybe the worst witch?)
Whatever its flaws it definitely did something to catch a generation of kids like little in the recent past and like nothing’s been able to replicate since. The marketing obviously helped once it got started, but if that was all there was, it could have been duplicated. I can’t really judge, since I encountered it as an adult.
It certainly is deeply flawed and awkward in many ways, one of which is that I suspect it really works best if you grow up along with it, since the early books and later ones aren’t really aimed at the same ages.
@Freemage When it comes to the books in question though, there actually is plenty of anti-semitic tropes and strong pro-slavery messaging which kind of undermines the point you’re trying to make there.
@Stormies/Veronica I agree that the one of the worst people in the world using the same tropes as books written by other authors doesn’t make their work automatically inferior. I’d also add that of the books I’ve read in Lilith’s list there’s not much common ground and they’re not at all trying to do the same thing as each other. (Some of the descriptions of books there that I haven’t read sound like they bear more of a similarity than just tropes, but I don’t feel like I can judge on that.)
In terms of whether or not the series is a low-grade knock-off or some kind of literary masterpiece exemplar of the genre, we’re getting into much more subjective realms here but personally I’d say it falls somewhere in-between, and much closer to knock-off than masterpiece. It’s certainly a deeply flawed work with little to nothing really inspired or very original about it. However, to give evil its due there are some things it does quite well. When I finally got around to reading the books I was struck by the writing style and how accessible and easy to read the prose was. From memory the pacing was quite good as well, particularly for the first few books. As far as the books themselves go and not contextual things like marketing budgets, the movie adaptations etc., I think it’s probably these two attributes that contributed the most to capturing that large reluctant reader market.
Personal opinions regarding writing quality aside, no other book series has ever had a similarly large cultural impact that endured for more than a few years after the release of the last book (or movie adaptation in some cases) the way it did with Harry Potter.
Twilight was a similar cultural phenomenon at the time, and had pretty terrible writing, but it immediately fell off to the point where people don’t really talk about it from the perspective of fans anymore and haven’t for like a decade. And after popularizing the paranormal romance genre and many of it’s tropes, all of the objectively better books that came after failed to come close to that level of popularity and as such the genre as a whole has kind of fallen off in the public consciousness and remains kind of niche (although not even close to as niche as it was before Twilight). I maintain that a large part of that comes from Twilight was (more or less) the first one to find a formula that resonated with the target audience, which caused it to catch the notice of the general public, and then when the target audience started finding better series to scratch the same itch they splintered into different fandoms as the genre grew and thus weren’t consolidated into one space and thus couldn’t become a cultural phenomenon. Also the controversy of the writing being bad enough for there to be a really solid contingent of vocal haters at the time further drove attention that way, furthering the spread, and that largely died down alongside the popularity.
Harry Potter, meanwhile, likely also became big for much the same reasons, it was the first (more or less) to collect the disparate tropes and genre conventions into a formula that really resonated with the target audience enough to achieve broader attention and appeal. But a very notable difference is that the fans did not dilute into various other fandoms of better books in the same genre, a large amount of people still continue talking about it today, and that has only really started to die down because of the author getting cancelled. There was enough of a draw for a broadway play sequel, a series of movie prequels, and even some successful video games and that draw has even persisted, partially, through the controversy. And, very notably, *at the time* there was not an especially large or vocal contingent of haters pointing out bad writing the way Twilight had. If the writing was really that bad, why is it only being discussed *now*? I mean, Twilight proves that if a bad product becomes popular the haters won’t be drowned out by the fans, largely because they have an actual point.
This leads me to conclude that the current claims of bad writing and supposedly blatant problematic messaging are likely more fueled by the current bandwagon of hate toward the author than actually reflective of the literary quality of the work, because nothing could possibly have been anywhere close to that popular for anywhere close to that long after completion if it was actually bad. If it was actually bad, the popularity should have quietly died off more or less immediately a long time ago the way it did for Twilight, and it didn’t. And if the problematic messaging was really so blatant, prevalent, and pervasive, it wouldn’t have only recently started being discussed seriously now when we have the benefit of hindsight and the additional context of the author’s views on certain issues. Not saying the messaging isn’t there, but rather if it is there it is FAR more subtle and non-obvious/blatant than people are currently giving it credit for. If these issues were really so clear and present within the works themselves, they would not only just now be entering the notice of the public consciousness. People’s eagerness to criticize, especially criticize popular things that they don’t like, is not new, it was absolutely already around when Harry Potter was first becoming popular, and with the internet growing alongside Harry Potter that is especially true as the internet used to be a lot more anonymous than it is now, meaning people were a lot more emboldened to post unpopular opinions at the time (especially since cancel culture largely developed later, at least in the form we know it in today).
That’s definitely an important point. If somebody’s starting point for making art is “I can capture a demographic with nostalgia for X but has issues with it now” that’s not really a place of genuine creativity.
I dunno, spite can be an excellent inspiration for creativity, the issue is that being blatantly driven by spite isn’t going to make you popular, even if you ultimately prove your point of “I can do that but better” is correct. Speaking from experience.
On the one hand, probably, on the other I have heard some fun polytheistic songs based on jesus ones. “Loki loves all the little children” “Loe ye scary great old ones” and the like. more comedic than maybe I’d prefer but stills…
Aw, that can backfire though. For eg, Tom Waits’ Way Down in the Hole is a savagely vicious parody of Christian music, while The Blind Boys of Alabama’s version of Tom Waits’ Way Down in the Hole has to be one of the greatest gospel recordings of all time.
You want farts from hell, try going to a big bike ride like the Hotter’n’Hell 100. After carb loading there is a surplus of food for the gut flora and fauna that produce digestive gas so the result is a cloud or noxious gas floating through the rooms where they are sleeping.
I feel personally hurt by your spelling. But at least you started your sentence with a capital letter and ended it with a period. And at least it was a readable and coherent sentence.
My daughter (on the spectrum) has an obsession with chicken tenders as well. Apropos of nothing, the best thing has been to ease her into other food items. Because of this she’s learned she really likes the taste and texture of cucumbers and raw onion, among a few other more ‘usual kid stuff’.
Texture has always been an issue for me, even now in my 30s. There are just some textures that I can’t handle without triggering the gag reflex. I have always found that I prefer the texture of raw vegetables over cooked, even with things like zucchini. With things like onion, I find that I am fine if it is minced small enough that it isn’t noticeable, but otherwise the cooked onion texture is a hard no. In college, I really liked the stir fries that the school would do, since the vegetables would still have that raw-like texture. They would also do both rice and pasta stir fries, so there was a lot of variety that you could have in between that and the sauces.
In some ways, a potluck or buffet is a good way to try different things and see what ones you like and don’t like because it isn’t a waste of a whole meal. I didn’t like experimenting too much in college since if it ended up being something I couldn’t handle, it would be a waste of money and a meal.
It also makes a difference in how things are cooked or made. For example, a lot of people season meat but they don’t season cooked vegetables. Seasoning doesn’t help with the texture but it can with flavor. I have also known people that haven’t liked tea, but then their only experience is things like bagged green tea made using boiling hot coffee temperatures (different teas need different temperatures, only black and herbal should be done at boiling). London fog (earl grey milk tea) or milk chais tend to be a lot more palatable to people, especially for an introduction into tea. Loose leaf also tends to have a lot better flavor than ‘who knows how old’ tea bags.
Doesn’t tend to have lyrics, but Two Steps From Hell is great. Trailer movie and score music (audiomachine, epic score, etc.) tends to have good variety between slow and fast paced music too.
You know, it’s too bad Joyce never got into some of the more, shall we say, liberal thinking Christian Metal groups. They would have made a lovely stepping stone for her. I’m very much non-Christian, but there are a couple of those I actively enjoy mixed in with my other music.
Nah, just a regular flavor boy band. You could make some of their sing christian if you imagine the “you” they’re singing about is Jesus, but it doesn’t work for all of them
Breaking any college student, much less Joyce, free of the breaded hold of chicken fingers is a tough sell – they were one of the few really good foods in my university’s cafeteria.
They also tend to be trustwothy in quality. Me dad would say that on mystery meat days in the navy, he would prefer peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Provided, he would get things like banana meatloaf in the navy, so it was understandable.
Would you want vaguely Jesus-y songs like American Pearl and Pedro The Lion, generic kid-friendly fare like Jim Valley, or a full descent into antitheist metal?
Lamb Of God sounds like one but is definitely the other.
I would suggest getting someone who knows music(ie not me) to listen to her 5 songs, categorize what they’re doing, and then find secular bands that are doing similar things in a non-awful way.
And then get Joyce to listen to those bands while drinking a veggie shake.
They’re probably all Christian Contemporary Music (CCM) which isn’t a very wide genre. A good starting place is probably non-romantic pop songs, dipping into light rock, and seeing if she gravitates to any particular artist.
Though my info is also probably a good decade or two out of date at this point…
My impression from twenty-odd years ago was a cottage industry of “The Christian [popular band name]” alternatives. For anything folksy or country… y… that almost seems like cheating.
I’d feel genuinely sorry for whichever sincere weirdos or desperate grifters tried being The Christian Sevendust.
Really powerful, very truthful, and although she’d have once called them Gateway Buddhists, that would assume she’d ever heard of them, or knew enough about Buddhism to pick up on the refrrences.
It’s impossible to search for Live online though, you have to search by album or song… XD incidentally, they’re from my larger neck of the woods, Southeast PA!
Switchfoot is decent. Just press skip when the lyrics get too explicitly religious. If we’re going antitheist metal my personal favorite is Behemoth’s The Satanist. Or I could be seriously missing the point of the album, but there are few wake-up drums like the intro to Amen.
Black Sabbath’s first few albums are actually a pretty good halfway point, lyrically. I’ve always thought it was funny that a band with so much religious content in their lyrics is considered Satanist.
10,000 Days by Tool worked on some of my church group as a kid, so there’s another example.
Yesss. It is the silliest goddamn thing and I love it.
Joyce should absolutely be twenty years late to an obsession with Dragonforce. Have some weirdly horny dreams about Rich Mullins riding through despoiled valleys on a horse that is exactly this size.
As an adult chicken finger enjoyer I will say you’re never too old for them. In fact most restaurants serve chicken fingers, tenders, strips, or whatever you call breaded and/or batter fried long cuts of chicken breasts or thighs in adult portions. Even more in fact gourmet chicken fingers are really fun because there’s essentially infinite creativity in how you prepare and serve. This would actually be a great first culinary project for are prospective chef.
cane’s is pretty good. tho recently got an ad for something with a similar name that was rhymed and the ad straight upl ooked like the same as the boxes we get , butapparently it is another local chain in tx, idkthe copyright on that but names aside guess you can’t really copyright making any kinda chicken dish
Tho i’d love a korean fried chicken take on their ‘tenders/fingers’ (i know some asian dishes literally do have chicken feet but seemslike ti’d be too chewy for me even if they remove the bones/nails lol)
Chicken feet actually aren’t really that chewy – you’re pretty much just slurping the meat/skin off the cartilage, most of the chewing motion I’ve found is basically disentangling the meat from the bones, assuming you don’t just decide to eat the cartilage directly which has a nice crunch to it. Mind you, I do say this as someone who regularly strips chicken wings clean by popping them whole or with one bone cut off in my mouth, flensing the lot there, and spitting out the freshly cleaned bone, so I might be a bit desensitized to whatever effort it requires to eat chicken feet.
Haha, I know which chain you mean. I have no interest in getting into a chicken finger fast food restaurant google rabbit hole, but I’m told Layne’s came before Cane’s. Personally, I think Layne’s sauce is better, but Cane’s chicken is better by a mile.
A favorite TX State Fair food is Fried Butter, a lump of butter dipped in batter and deep fried. done right it is lightly crisp, but tender in the middle, wad of dough.
I really think that it is hard to go wrong with anything that is fried or put into a pastry. It can be done, but humans generally seem to love those things. There are variations of fried dough across most, if not all, cultures too.
Fun fact: chickens actually have two notable muscles in their chests. The large pectoralis major is what’s usually referred to as a chicken breast. Chicken tenders are made from the smaller pectoralis minor. Fingers are pretty much any random strip of breast meat. Nuggets are minced, processed bits and pieces from any and all parts of the chicken. Many of these are usually just delivery systems for sauce, but with proper seasoning they can be pretty tasty on their own.
Thank you, hope you enjoyed today’s edition of “Cooking with the Wizard”.
This is one of the ways Joyce is, like, my actual polar opposite. My literal actual polar opposite.
Most Americans – and I say this with experience as both a radio professional and performing musician, both of which are jobs which care a lot about what music people listen to – mostly listen to the same shit they listened to in high school and maybe college, like, forever.
(So from that standpoint Joyce is not that far from the average. She just has a lot tighter focus on what that means.)
Whereas for me, that kind of repetition eventually feels like trying to grind down sandstone with my teeth. ngh.
It helps to grow up in a home with eclectic music taste. I grew up listening to everything from the Beatles to Depeche Mode to Mudvayne to Caramel to Linkin Park to Enrique Iglesias, constantly picking up new artists and groups to enjoy, so it’s always been odd to me encountering someone who only listens to one or two genres. Letting your kid grow up only listening to explicitly Christian music is child abuse.
Back when I had a dedicated MP3 player, you know, when dinosaurs were still on the radio, I prided myself on being able to listen for 12 hour workdays without a repeat. I bought new music, and dived into back catalogs.
Now, I hardly ever remember to even listen to music. I could have tunes playing as I’m typing this. And, I don’t.
A local classic rock station once did all of the songs in their collection from a to z. It was the best week for working since there was no repetition that whole week, unlike the “popular songs” radio station that would repetitively play a song about an umbrella.
Personally I find it difficult to have a musical preference. I like all kinds of music and run off vibes so just sticking with one genre feels boring. One of the best feelings to me is discovering a new song that sparks an emotion in you. I’m always waiting for it.
heck 90% of the gems I discover is through video game music, pieces from talent all over the world have left me stimming in place and crying at the keyboard
some of my favorite emotional pieces include “Tapha Niang” in Little Big Planet, “The Sea” from Machinarium, and “Maenam” from Braid
Video games songs contain some of the absolute best music in my opinion. I think that it is do to them being played for hours on end, so they want something that isn’t going to get annoying after a while. I love the songs from Journey and Ori and the Blind Forest, but I still remember songs from Baldur’s Gate and Magic and Mayhem (Celtic 2 for instance).
Even movies have some good soundtracks. The 2003 animated Sinbad has a nice ost, and the Kung Fu Panda series was nice to listen to.
My favourites are “For River (Johnny’s version)” from To the Moon, “Home is where you are remembered” from Night of the Rabbit and, oddly, “Terran Theme 04” from Starcraft 2. The first one still keeps making me cry.
When I was still young, I was the kind of person who had very specific music tastes, which I would listen in repeat constantly.
With the advent of growing older, plus having had a pretty big family growing up, and a slow introduction of other types of music due to genre blending musicians, I managed to break through my distastes.
Nowadays I mostly use spotifiy and random algorithmically chosen youtube music, so I constantly discover new groups within the genres I already like.
Aside from parents, of course, since they’ve got a responsibility to make sure their kid isn’t malnourished. Aside from them though, there aren’t a lot of exceptions.
I was made to eat food I was allergic to over and over again and it was enough on its own for me to develop CPTSD because I came close to dying because of it but didn’t white die over and over again.
As a relatively picky eater, yyyeah there’s a few wrong things with being picky. like 90% of it is the lack of all the nutrients you actually do need for your body to work at 100% efficiency, plus a lot of the food we picky eaters do eat easily is a bit uh…
Unhealthy. More than just a bit, in fact.
It’s not so much a privilege thing, sometimes. I’m an autistic woman and sometimes my brain just plain won’t let me eat whatever’s in the kitchen and needs eating (like the stuff that expires soon), even if it’s stuff I’m generally ok with and like, even if I’m so hungry it hurts. It’s either fall back on the limited “picky” selection or don’t eat.
I definitely feel you on this one, for me it’s a major sensory thing to the point that trying to swallow a pill is a gamble between “I have successfully swallowed the pill” or “mission failed, and lo, I have upchucked”. Certain food textures are similar. It’s a bit hard to try and eat certain foods when they do physically make one feel like vomiting.
I agree with both Marianne and Doopyboop, as someone who has dealt with both things. It doesn’t help that I don’t always feel hungry when I actually am (or just get hangry instead). I normally figure that any food is better than none, and it would literally be done if it was something that my brain/body decided that it didn’t want to eat. It isn’t something that you can rationalize your way out of, no matter what some people seem to think. Not that you can’t make improvements, as sometimes you can slowly get used to things and adjust. The key word in that is slowly.
You can also be a picky eater and separately have sensory issues with food, both of which can often (but not always) improve with time and effort.
While things like chia pudding and watery porridge still remind me of the texture of phlegm and I physically find it very difficult to swallow them, I can now enjoy so many more foods than I did twenty years ago. Which nutritionally, socially and just genrally fricking rocks.
The taste of seaweed and sea salt still remind me of post nasal drip. For me it is the raw dough or gummy/springy-ish like texture (not actual gummies, but I don’t know how else to explain it). I also had an overcooked lasagna once, that you could have squeezed the whole thing out of a toothpaste tube, that reached a texture that was horrible. Oddly enough, I don’t like instant oats, but find old fashioned or steel cut fine in oatmeal, provided you don’t cook it horribly long. I can do instand if I basically poor warm water in and eat it right away without letting it sit for long.
On a side note, I can’t have kielbasa because it was the meal that I had right before I got appendicitis, so my brain instincts blame it on that. I guess that is a common thing to happen.
I used to be seen as a picky eater, turns out I have a huge number of allergies. I actually eat a wide variety of foods now, including a lot of foods I didn’t grow up with.
Between cutting the foods I was allergic to out of my died and trying a lot of new foods, I got really into supplements. I don’t regret it, but these days supplements mostly just make me pee more and that’s it, so my supplement phase has ended. At the time it seriously improved my health, though. (I had to get some nutrients injected at the hospital, it was bad.) (I’m allergic to a lot of stuff.)
Have you tried making your own with regular corn? /joke
But seriously, have you tried making your own? I think you can make the meat-based slurry they use to make chicken nuggets with chicken, a blender, broth, and any thickening agent.
If it’s a severe enough corn allergy, you generally can’t have chicken (or eggs) if that chicken has been fed corn. That’s one of the ones that carries over. I think soy’s another. It can also screw you over with just the packaging if it’s bad enough, since so much of it’s corn-derived in the US.
So it’s less ‘can’t buy chicken nuggets because there’s corn in them’ and more ‘can’t buy chicken in general because there’s corn in it’.
There are producers that have safe meat, but that’s very very much a specialty item.
My sister is allergic to corn. It is pretty hard to navigate at times– there’s corn syrup in so much stuff, then there’s corn starch, and other things it may come up in that don’t include “corn” in the name– like food starch and maltodextrin. She also can’t do gluten. But! The corn isn’t severe enough that she has to worry about animals that were fed corn. At least currently. If I hear she’s having allergy symptoms again, I’ll bring it up.
I was just trying to joke a bit. I think this thread is actually pretty good discussion. It’s a better topic than most and a lot of the comments are just relatable. Good thread. You should be proud.
Friends and partners can definitely go to far, though I don’t think Joe’s anywhere near that point.
There’s also a big, if somewhat vague, distinction between people who actually struggle with some kind of issues around food and those who just take the opportunity to eat nothing but junk food when they get the chance.
We’ve definitely seen Joyce in the former category. She talks about wanting to try new things, but not being able to bring her self to do it – just like with the music she describes here.
Walky might be the latter. We constantly see him with nuggets or chips or pizza (or joking about how a salad messed up his digestion), but he hasn’t talked about any specific food issues.
Unsurprisingly, Joyce gets far more support in the comments than he does.
“This is the only thing that makes me happy, but it also makes me deeply unhappy, but the agonizing process of finding something that makes me happy without making me unhappy is too overwhelming to seriously contemplate” is a feel.
There are a few ways this could go, I suspect:
The first is that someone rewrites the songs to be less jesus-y
The second is Joyce finds an extremely similar genre that isn’t filled with Jesus lyrics as overtly
The third, and funniest option, is that Joyce becomes a hyperpop fan and starts wearing a Femtanyl t-shirt
Nah, the third funnies option is that she gets into Insane Clown Posse hard.
At one point ICP did say they were an evangelical band, so that should work. And they definitely don’t sing about god all that much, unless The Great Milenko counts.
I can just see Joyce rapping “I stab people”, freaking out certain other cast members for whom stabbing is a trauma.
It might not be that hard. The stuff I hear recently is indistinguishable from recent secular music except that they shove a “Jesus” in here and “Lord” in there.
That or jingoist stuff that basically does the same thing.
Ugh. My taste in churchy music basically starts with Gregory I and ends with Wesley.
I love Joe/Joyce so dearly but every day we don’t see Billie is a tragedy. I’m on the edge of my seat about her (and Ruth. pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease)
I could give her some recommendations from my 4 and 5 star list… which is only a few thousand long.
And again, the universe is reminding me that it’s long past time to do another Great Rippening of my CDs, this time into a lossless format. If I start now, I might get done before Christmas time… of 2026.
And I, Joe, think you should have this conversation after she’s had some chicken fingers, or something, so that her brain’s well-fed and she might be able to discuss things relatively calmly.
You probably mean that Nashville rock only comes from one country. Every nation has its own country music, much of it rather good. It just isn’t all twangy guitars and love songs to pickup trucks. I’ve got nice albums of Indian, Japanese and Afghan music that wasn’t blow-molded from polyethylene in a media company’s basement.
I could argue that Appalachian music (which is what I think of, when I think “country music”) comes from other countries and the US is just borrowing it.
Is country music defined as a specific genre with defining musical traits and characteristics or is it loosely defined as any music played by rural people anywhere throughout the world and history?
If the latter, is it distinct from folk in any meaningful way?
And don’t forget the pickups. And Momma! And trains!
In fact, always remember the Jasper Carrot Ultimate Country Song
“Since they took my momma
Off to prison,
Things ain’t been
The same around the farm.
But now they gone and let her
Out the ja-il house
She drove her goddam truck into a train “
1. Joyce decides to listen to Goth or metal to everyone’s confusion but actual former fundamentalist kids.
2. Joyce becomes a massive fan of ukulele music but only Dan’s covers.
She does have the benefit of the internet and the vast amount of music genres available for her to sample for free until she finds something she likes. She doesn’t have to hope that a local radio station will play a tune, or something similar, like they had to do before the internet. You even have electro mixes of old music, like betty boop (electro swing can be fun, like Little Lily Swing by Tri-Tachyon).
I suggest a little Caravan Palace, or Parov Stelar, or Post-Modern Jukebox if you like Electro Swing, or maybe some Doors, Stones, CCR, Grand Funk Railroad. For music from my childhood. Or maybe The Kings, BTO, Red Ryder, if you like your music naturally cold from the north of the border. Or maybe Kraftwerk, Mike Oldfield, Pink Floyd, If you want to close your eyes and watch your music on the insides of your eyelids. Or you could get YTM on your phone or computer, and search for Opus Fun Stuff playlist and not move for several days straight. I got all of the above, plus Infected Mushroom, Triumverat, and several hundred bands and solo artists I can’t remember.
None of which even claims to be metal? I mean, don’t get me wrong, they’re pretty heavy for rock, and Evanescence in particular fits in perfectly with a specific subgenre of metal (symphonic power metal, aka Nightwish/Sirenia/Epica and similar) but the bands themselves claim to be rock bands.
A couple months ago, I was talking to a friend from high school, and she was like, “Remember that time we listened to the three hour loop video of that song? xD” And my recently-diagnosed-self was like, oh, uh, I actually might have some information on why I decided we should do that.
Unfortunately between Rich Mullins being a christian musician and being dead, my favourite way of finding new music, “go to their show and get into the opening acts,” probably isn’t an option for Joyce.
Of course for the many years that I couldn’t find a show, there’s also Pandora or whatever the current equivalent is. (Pandora stopped working in Canada when I was a pre-teen iirc, so I fell off that)
Pandora still exists in the United States, but I think similar features in Spotify, YouTube Music, and Amazon Music outreach it by a bit. Probably Apple Music above the latter two as well.
People gripe about YouTube a lot, but I’ve found a ton of music on there that I wouldn’t have ever found in my own, all from recommendations it fed me. Lots of great and creative videos, too.
For sure. It might have been easier 10 years ago though. I lost some old favorites back before I had an account and had a computer die. There is also probably a reddit page or something somewhere where you can ask for suggestions for similar music.
Shorts are an actual blight on society. If everything that serves little bitty clips that can be endlessly swiped through just disappeared one day, nothing of any value would be lost. I genuinely want whoever introduced Shorts to YouTube dead, preferably in a painful way.
what’s the music programming on the college radio station there? Mine was pretty eclectic. That was before the general collapse of radio though. There was also the timeslot on MTV when they played the weird stuff that wasn’t on the top of the charts, but I wouldn’t guess they’ve started doing that again.
This feels weirdly topical for me. I had a friend text me earlier today asking if I’d be willing to sing at her wedding. Problem was, the specific song she wanted sung is God is Love, and I also get rationally angry about Jesus songs.
I nearly turned her down before managing a successful priority assessment to determine that, yes, I do care more about supporting my friend and her new wife than I dislike Jesus songs. But I think she and I both know it was weirdly close, me and Christianity did not part ways amicably.
to be pedantic, Joyce is not actually diagnosed as autistic, a clinic doctor merely suggested it and literally everyone including herself immediately assumed it was true.
Yeah, because the majority of her mannerisms and behaviors fit that conclusion. Dina knows she herself is autistic, she never got a diagnosis but that doesn’t mean it is not true.(Signed an autistic person)
Depends on whether you’re following medical prescriptivism or descriptivism. Does a diagnosis give you the medical tag or do you already have the medical tag and a diagnosis discovers it?
Not even touching on things that doctors don’t even know about or can figure out the cause. There was a while that people thought that psychological trauma and ptsd symptoms were all made up (WW1 being a notable example). Just because you don’t have a diagnosis doesn’t mean that the symptoms aren’t there and don’t have an effect on your everyday life. Having a name to a group of symptoms just helps in how you work on it or treat it and finding similar people. This is especially the case in anything dealing with the brain, as there is so much that we don’t know about the brain and it is extremely difficult to see what is going on with it while someone is using it. Even arthritis and joints can be variable since someone can have no cartilage left and not be in a lot of pain while someone can look relatively fine in the scans but have a lot of joint pain. We want things to be black and white when everything is actually different shades of color. There is variations on where people define the line between blue and green. So it is no surprise that there are variations in something a lot more complex, like whether someone is considered autistic or not.
Getting a diagnosis is not easy, cheap, or quick. Nor is it a diagnosis free of downsides once it’s attached to your medical record. It’s perfectly fine to accept and acknowledge that you are likely autistic without getting a diagnosis.
What’s important is finding coping methods and learning to understand and assist yourself with engaging in a world that isn’t made for people like you. And little teases from friends to point out autistic traits helps with that, because you can explore them and accept a little piece of yourself that you were maybe taught was weird or wrong.
Wasn’t that suggestion just a comic convenient way of informing us that Joyce is likely autistic and so is Dina, since the reality of the comic’s pacing means that the time it would take them to get properly diagnosed would be months or years for us? It’s for our benefit really. A diagnosis is likely but do we really want to spend 5 years waiting for the scene and saying “well she’s not officially diagnosed.” as Joyce continues to check every box on the autistic list anyway?
this comic has done things that break all realism in terms of pacing just for the sake of advancing the plot for convenience’s sake, so why not give her an official diagnosis? It wouldn’t be the most unbelievable thing that has happened.
Bruh – we don’t need an actual medical diagnosis from. Qualified professional. MD should happened to be on duty at the campus clinic on some random day who probably has no specialized training in the area and isn’t even qualified to make that sort of assessment? No worries. Good enough. It’s not like this is a complicated and nuanced subject and misdiagnosis can lead to other issues.
Joyce should definitely consider pursuing an actual medical diagnosis, though there can be drawbacks to having that on your record as well, so there might be reasons not to.
We, as the audience, do not have to continuously insist “But she hasn’t really been diagnosed”. In the best case, that won’t happen for years of our time and on narrative grounds it seems a really odd narrative fakeout for Willis to come back in 2032 with a “Psych, she’s not really autistic after all. Fooled you all!”
If I had been more comfortable with self-diagnosis, I probably would have gotten professionally diagnosed at least a year sooner and saved a fair amount of time and money.
I had been wondering if I was neurodiverse for a long time, but I wasn’t sure, so I didn’t want to say I was or might be a certain label. With difficulties I was having, my therapist at the time suggested I get assessed for ~something~, but they were sticking to “something to do with this symptom” (difficulty talking at times) because I don’t think they wanted to say something specific either. And even though I was having moments where internally I was like, “That was pretty autistic of me,” when I was filling out stuff for an assessment, I didn’t include a specific potential diagnosis, because maybe I’m just wrong.
So then I was on a waiting list from April until December where I spent a couple hundreds to do a bunch of tests (and this was at a place that was cheaper than most, which is part of why the wait was so long). But the tests they selected weren’t sufficient to diagnosis autism… so when I got my results in January, it was like, “Well, you definitely have anxiety.” (I know!) “Also, maybe seek further assessment for these things (including autism).”
When I shared the results with my therapist (different therapist than before, first one changed careers, and hadn’t been workingwith me when I first got on the wait list), she was like, “Hm, I kind of they were going to diagnosis you with autism. You know, because of the autism.”
And finally someone had said it and I could openly explore all the experiences I’ve had that line up with autism and start using that lens to help process things. And it wasn’t an official diagnosis, it was just her saying it seemed likely, and it helped so much. And I started to identify as autistic, even before I was able to get another assessment (which happened in June) and pay over a thousand dollars (luckily got more than half reimbursed, still a lot of money).
So someone brought up that Joyce might have autism, and it ultimately made sense to her. She/others don’t have to keep putting the word “possibly” in front of it until/unless she is able to get formally assessed. It’s helping her understand herself, and it would take a long time to get that conclusion if we had to wait for an assessment to happen. (Even if she somehow got one tomorrow, it takes at least a couple weeks to get the results back, which is a long, long time for us.)
people lie in fiction and real life all the time. Doctors are often wrong about initial assessments before the full diagnosis. in THIS case you’re right because we the audience know that Willis coding Joyce as autistic; but man that’s is a weaksauce argument. There are hundreds of reasons for a doctor to suggest a wrong diagnosis in fiction
I feel like the internal case is pretty weak
( which 100% might be the point;
or just the author spending all his autism on Dina )
but its been revealed years ago, and that the joyce is autobiographical.
It might be a more interesting story if shes not. and its also more interesting if joyce needs to unpack her upbringing a lt more to figure .
The flipside is that they refuse to ID obvious autism cases in fiction like Sheldon or Brennan in Bones. or even Elementary or House .
Fiction seems a lot of Not great autistic rep, or decent rep but refusing to ID the characters.
No Question joyce is autistic, instead i wonder if Willis was kidnapped, or has a Trans sibling
Stopped being Christian three and a half decades ago, still have Christian-song earworms. Some of them are really cringe.
…Heh, I’m reading a book now (Clockwork Boys) where a guy has a dead demon stuck in his soul, and its corpse still mutters at him when disturbed by ambient magic. Nghaa nakahlikahhha… eat his body, drink his blood… ghaka naggagh… to the death we follow Thee… ngha’aa, halikaliha!
Oh yes, still have three songs from church that I left in 1973 that pop up now and then. I was 8, I am now 60. They pop up I put in ear buds and cook them out.
Dandelions by Five Iron Frenzy occasionally just starts up in my head. Also literal worship music like Our God is an Awesome God gets rolling in there sometimes and I wish it wouldn’t.
…. okay, cards on the table here. I can’t tell if your pun was so subtle that I can’t find it, or if I’ve been too subtle with my puns from the moment I said and your antecedent mention of dealing with new things was meant to be taken on its face.
If christian music is a thing, surely there are also ‘ex-christian’ bands lol, i’m sure joyce owuld be able to relate to that
and depending on the breading/brand, ‘fingers’ can be fine but i’d expect even if joyce doesn’t go for super spice or a variety of dipping sauce there’d be some quality tenders to upgrade to since frozen tenders at a grocery store might be passable but other than the price i can imagine ppl appreciating better taste of a restaurant ver or for a ‘gourmet’ price. or unless it’d be too greasy or so , i bet a food truck that had a deep fryer and sold only chicken tenders would do well
I’m impressed, with the buffer and all, that this strip managed to post just five days after Chubbyemu did a medical video of a boy living of chicken nuggets
Her own, historical, Jesus.
Someone to hear her prayers.
Someone who cares.
Her own, historical, Jesus.
Someone to hear her prayers.
Someone who’s there.
It kind of would utterly undermine the story, which is her experiences of the journey out of religion.
I have a couple playlists and a soundtrack. The problem (not a problem) is I’ve been listening to Hadestown so much the last 3 years that I think even Spotify is worried about me. Hamilton was a 6 or 7 year obsession though before I started getting tired of it, so I figure Hadestown has a bit longer to run its course.
Solution: Try listening to music without the expectation that you are going to “like” it or want to “have” it. I suggest using “Stress” by Justice as a baseline – it’s actively sensorially unpleasant to listen to, on purpose, so you can probably experience that without feeling like you need to incorporate it in your identity and consequently reevaluate who you are. Try things until you find a song you like and play 5000 times until you “do” get tired of it and then realize that’s not the end of the world.
As another autistic person I definitely recommend broadening your music taste as much as you can, even if you have some favorites you can play over and over. I like a lot of different kinds of music, and I can’t really say I have a favorite genre.
Chicken fingers are awesome always and should never be given up.
Ooh, we’ve got a live one, featherweight icon Heroes let ‘im down so sleeps with the light on And there’s nothin’ left to do but kneel down and pray Sail away with Caesar if you’re a nonbeliever Everybody get high if you’re a diamond geezer It’s the devil that needs ya, so go out and play
Blame yourself, it’s easier There’s no need to trouble her You trouble her
Jesus in a camper van He said “sorry to leave ya, but I’ve done all I can” I suppose even the son of God gets it hard sometimes Especially when he goes around saying “I am the way”
The college radio station WIUX is a great resource as is WCCR at Purdue where a worked as a DJ with minimal training and fully access to their library. I got to explore SO many genre! Bluegrass, Classical, World music, Electronic , and on and on
I want to see Joyce dive headfirst into the forbidden fruit: Ozzy and Alice Cooper. (Reason being that they’re the shock rock of her parents’ youth, so they would’ve warned her against them).
I just want to see her “wait, that’s it?!” indignation once she actually listens to the lyrics to Crazy Train and finds out Alice is just a guy who thinks scary music is cool. She’ll probably be more outraged that he’s born-again.
Aren’tthere some Christian bands/musicians who also cater to secular folk? I swear I have heard of bands that started out as Christian/only playing covers of Christian music for the church before switching to secular themes and music to broaden their fanbase.
Could be a good way to ease into it with familiar artists.
Gummy vitamins were a game changer for me, the ones I had previously were huge and tasted like grass. Lawn not the fun type. Fun fact, unless directed by a doctor most people don’t actually need a daily vitamin and your body doesn’t hold onto extras of most types of vitamins. Just sends em out on the yellow waterslide. So if you then only take one a week or so to only supplement your diet you can really stretch out a bottle.
I’m sure she can fund plenty of Dulcimer players online with excellent skills.
I went through a long supplement phase during which every supplement I took initially made me feel way healthier but eventually just made me need to pee more and that’s it. Nowadays it’s just iron and collagen.
I wish I didn’t see the alt text… the mental picture of Joyce perched on the porcelain dropping a Bloomington Bomber is going to live in my head for the next 4 days.
Noo.
Ugh. Creed is actually worse than what she listens to. Even Jesus hates creed. It’s a step down from DC talk. She can go to Incubus or Linkin Park. Or Stone Temple Pilots.
Carrie Newcomer and Jill Phillips might help carry her from the Jesus songs to something semi-secular. Folkies who are Christian but nor evangelical. Catchy tunes and solid songs. But she might want to go full god-free. Folk is best then. Joan Baez. John mccutcheon does hammered dulcimer and has strong songs.
Video games? I’ve probably listened to variations of ‘His Theme’ from Undertale hundreds of times. And the rest of the soundtrack, plus the one from ‘Outer Wilds’.
Duck Tales Moon Theme, a Japanese singer named Aimer, sound tracks by Sawano Hiroyuki, sound track to The Flying Witch, The World in Colors, and Violet Evergarden. Daniel Ingram created over 80 songs for gen 4 of My Little Pony, which inspired a whole subculture of fan music. Rush Garcia, Annapantsu, Renaeriary, HoneyWorks…
I promise, Joyce, you can be liberated from evangelical earworms.
Chicken fingers are an environmentally friendly source of protein that is almost universally liked by even the pickiest of eaters…but yeah pair them with some vegetables, and no fries don’t count because they’re like 90% starch and may as well just be bread.
Every once in a while Joyce says something that reminds you why she and Walky are the original cosmic OTP and today it’s that their diet is hilariously unhealthy for vastly different reasons.
Alt Take : Musically DC Talk is good and ot would be easy to wean someone on it to Nirvana or Linkin Park.
It’s the words and manipulation that are trash. Just put on Stonr Temple pilots “Songs from the Vatican Gift shop ” or any early incubus album lime SCIENCE by.
In late 90s I only had a ztian themed music video channel and DC talk was one of the Tolerable listens.
For every Xtian band she likes there is genuine good pop music its copying the style from.
DC talk was trying hard to recruit 90s kids. DC talk Is better than Creed. From what I remember.
This comic continues to push me closer to getting evaluated for autism, like every therapist I’ve ever had has recommended, for years when I was smol the only band I would listen to was linkin park. I also subsist solely on chicken fingers.
Do talk to a doctor, do conduct your own research through reliable and professional resources, but Please please please be cautious about pre-assuming any specific condition, look into all the possibilities! The way you would carefully check the id of a mushroom before assuming it was edible when it’s known to have poisonous lookalikes. I only warn this so you won’t miss considering things like ARFID as Uly mentioned, or comorbid conditions that present similarly to autism.
A lot of us NDs fall prey to “affirming the consequent” where we believe that because WE have X condition, and WE have Y trait, it must mean Y trait always follows from X, when in truth many conditions can produce Y, and X does not ALWAYS present with Y in all peoples. 1000% worth looking into but don’t let anyone lead you away from evaluating multiple possible causes (including comorbid conditions)!
Stand your ground, Joyce! Don’t let people bully you into eating gross stuff because it’s supposedly ‘healthy.’ You can survive just fine on chicken fingers, plain pizza, mac’n’cheese, and disassembled tacos for at least another couple decades.
I feel like learning how to make soup could be really therapeutic for her. Like, start with water, salt, one other ingredient… And maybe eventually a second ingredient… Like work your way up over time. Give it a few months.
Right?? I exclusively enjoy music that I can connect to something else (whether it’s media I like or my own WIPs) in my head. I’m kinda relieved I’m not the only one
Just wanted to say this comic made me very happy. These two can be so incredibly adorable together. I love it when Joe tries to act as the voice of reason and not just treats Joyce like she might break into a thousand pieces any second.
Joyce, i give you permission to eat chicken fingers and only chicken fingers for the rest of your life if you choose to. You don’t have to change every single habit, and you don’t have to change your comfort food.
Let go of Jesus, keep the chicken fingers while you go through that scary process of things CHANGING.
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luckily there are only so many kinds of meat, so your chicken fingers are prolly safe
what about parody music set to the tune of the Jesus songs
I feel like that’s a niche market and also the sort of dude willing to corner the market on being the Atheist Weird Al of Jesus Music is probably both bad at music and generally unpleasant.
yeah like, something I wonder is why there’s no attempt out there to provide guilt-free alternatives to nostalgia pieces which have, to put it simply, become milkshake ducks
(at least none that I know of)
Honestly I’m not sure there’s much profit in it. I’ve seen a few things get headwind as alternatives to canceled art, but that’s mostly an organic process and you’re only going to capture a small chunk of the audience.
Harry Potter is still a bigger franchise by orders of magnitude than anything that’s ever been passed around as a viable alternative, for example.
very much so, Little Witch Academia for instance, seems like a good Harry Potter substitute, although it popular among today’s youth, can’t have the same power because Harry Potter wasn’t just the films
there were the books, the sleepovers with the decorations, the events at school and blockbusters, the toys, the theme parks,
…the memories
why won’t Little Witch Academia get a theme park or toys, and fond memories be (re?)made with those?
the answer always seems to be money, one way or another, yay capitalism
(-_-)
The Nevermoor Series by Jessica Townsend is a pretty good HP alternative that’s not written by a TERF. And the audio books are brilliant.
What’s sad is the fact Harry Potter was just a lower-quality knockoff remix of multiple “school of witchcraft” books that came before, including…
Books of Magic (Young British boy with pet messenger owl learning to be a wizard),
Secret of Platform 13 (a magical train hidden at King’s Cross station in London with a “13” in its number and a magical child kept in a cupboard by his abusive family with adoptive parents that have a non-adopted son who is fat and rude),
The Worst Witch (attending a witching academy that has witches uniforms, and attends potions class taught by a harsh hook-nosed teacher who hates the protagonist, as well as attending charms class & broomstick flying lessons, and joins up with her friends to make an invisibility potion, and this popular blond kid gets off on the wrong foot with the protagonist on the first day and makes life hard for the protagonist, as they attend their castle-like school near magical woods after the protagonist escapes a family that gives them no knowledge of the magical world, but at least the headmaster has the protagonist’s back),
Discworld (Unseen University & Ponder Stibbons & broom-riding lessons vs Harry Potter & Hogwarts & broom riding lessons),
Lord of the Rings (Ring Wraiths vs Dementors),
Troll (The 1986 Horror Film’s Troll-fighting Harry Potter who has to worry about an evil wizard hiding his essence in someone close to him vs 1997 Harry Potter’s Troll-fighting Harry Potter who has to worry about an evil wizard hiding his essence in someone close to him)
D&D & Russian Folklore (Phylacteries borrowed from Koschei the Deathless vs Horcruxes)
It goes on and on and on…
But hey, this is basically just a partial summary of this article: https://elftor.medium.com/harry-potter-and-the-possible-plagiarism-of-one-j-rowling-c19f1b05595c
Which goes into a lot more detail.
Wow, cool! Thank you for sharing that! Fascinating!
That’s great for you that you think HP is “lower-quality”, but a lot of people grew up loving it and have a million fond memories of it. That doesn’t mean they suddenly have terrible literary taste just because we now know the author really sucks.
Art is always in part a remix of art that came before it, that’s how creativity and inspiration works. You can point out the influences, but simply having literary influences doesn’t make the result automatically low quality.
It’s almost as if you donknow the difference between “knock off” and “the extremely basic tropes one would use if one was to wrote a story about a magical boarding school”.
Ponder Stibbons is an influence on Harry Potter? Why? Because they both wear glasses?
You can dislike a person’s political views without talking absolute rot about their artistic work.
Veronica, didn’t you get the memo? If someone is one form of bad, they must, perforce, be assumed to be all forms of bad. So by virtue of being a GCF, JKR is also a racist colonialist homophobic classist anti-Semitic climate-denialist anti-vax plagiarist. It’s inconceivable that someone might have one or two points of difference with the overall position currently adopted by the left, without being entirely a creature of the far-right.
Not to be “I was unimpressed with it before that was cool”, but it was always mediocre, and not very creative with the sources it was “inspired” by. Millions of people having fond memories of it doesn’t mean people, especially kids, don’t ever like mid stuff. That doesn’t invalidate the feelings of betrayal and such you might have.
I kind of agree with it not being great literature, but I’m still unimpressed with the list of things it was a “knock-off remix of”.
What I’d say it was mostly is something not really on that list, which is a mix of basic British boarding school fiction and the wizard side. The other wizard school stuff doesn’t really draw that directly on that genre (Maybe the worst witch?)
Whatever its flaws it definitely did something to catch a generation of kids like little in the recent past and like nothing’s been able to replicate since. The marketing obviously helped once it got started, but if that was all there was, it could have been duplicated. I can’t really judge, since I encountered it as an adult.
It certainly is deeply flawed and awkward in many ways, one of which is that I suspect it really works best if you grow up along with it, since the early books and later ones aren’t really aimed at the same ages.
@Freemage When it comes to the books in question though, there actually is plenty of anti-semitic tropes and strong pro-slavery messaging which kind of undermines the point you’re trying to make there.
@Stormies/Veronica I agree that the one of the worst people in the world using the same tropes as books written by other authors doesn’t make their work automatically inferior. I’d also add that of the books I’ve read in Lilith’s list there’s not much common ground and they’re not at all trying to do the same thing as each other. (Some of the descriptions of books there that I haven’t read sound like they bear more of a similarity than just tropes, but I don’t feel like I can judge on that.)
In terms of whether or not the series is a low-grade knock-off or some kind of literary masterpiece exemplar of the genre, we’re getting into much more subjective realms here but personally I’d say it falls somewhere in-between, and much closer to knock-off than masterpiece. It’s certainly a deeply flawed work with little to nothing really inspired or very original about it. However, to give evil its due there are some things it does quite well. When I finally got around to reading the books I was struck by the writing style and how accessible and easy to read the prose was. From memory the pacing was quite good as well, particularly for the first few books. As far as the books themselves go and not contextual things like marketing budgets, the movie adaptations etc., I think it’s probably these two attributes that contributed the most to capturing that large reluctant reader market.
@Freemage, a lot of that list can be drawn right out of the books and doesn’t rely just on a right wing parody of what the left thinks.
Personal opinions regarding writing quality aside, no other book series has ever had a similarly large cultural impact that endured for more than a few years after the release of the last book (or movie adaptation in some cases) the way it did with Harry Potter.
Twilight was a similar cultural phenomenon at the time, and had pretty terrible writing, but it immediately fell off to the point where people don’t really talk about it from the perspective of fans anymore and haven’t for like a decade. And after popularizing the paranormal romance genre and many of it’s tropes, all of the objectively better books that came after failed to come close to that level of popularity and as such the genre as a whole has kind of fallen off in the public consciousness and remains kind of niche (although not even close to as niche as it was before Twilight). I maintain that a large part of that comes from Twilight was (more or less) the first one to find a formula that resonated with the target audience, which caused it to catch the notice of the general public, and then when the target audience started finding better series to scratch the same itch they splintered into different fandoms as the genre grew and thus weren’t consolidated into one space and thus couldn’t become a cultural phenomenon. Also the controversy of the writing being bad enough for there to be a really solid contingent of vocal haters at the time further drove attention that way, furthering the spread, and that largely died down alongside the popularity.
Harry Potter, meanwhile, likely also became big for much the same reasons, it was the first (more or less) to collect the disparate tropes and genre conventions into a formula that really resonated with the target audience enough to achieve broader attention and appeal. But a very notable difference is that the fans did not dilute into various other fandoms of better books in the same genre, a large amount of people still continue talking about it today, and that has only really started to die down because of the author getting cancelled. There was enough of a draw for a broadway play sequel, a series of movie prequels, and even some successful video games and that draw has even persisted, partially, through the controversy. And, very notably, *at the time* there was not an especially large or vocal contingent of haters pointing out bad writing the way Twilight had. If the writing was really that bad, why is it only being discussed *now*? I mean, Twilight proves that if a bad product becomes popular the haters won’t be drowned out by the fans, largely because they have an actual point.
This leads me to conclude that the current claims of bad writing and supposedly blatant problematic messaging are likely more fueled by the current bandwagon of hate toward the author than actually reflective of the literary quality of the work, because nothing could possibly have been anywhere close to that popular for anywhere close to that long after completion if it was actually bad. If it was actually bad, the popularity should have quietly died off more or less immediately a long time ago the way it did for Twilight, and it didn’t. And if the problematic messaging was really so blatant, prevalent, and pervasive, it wouldn’t have only recently started being discussed seriously now when we have the benefit of hindsight and the additional context of the author’s views on certain issues. Not saying the messaging isn’t there, but rather if it is there it is FAR more subtle and non-obvious/blatant than people are currently giving it credit for. If these issues were really so clear and present within the works themselves, they would not only just now be entering the notice of the public consciousness. People’s eagerness to criticize, especially criticize popular things that they don’t like, is not new, it was absolutely already around when Harry Potter was first becoming popular, and with the internet growing alongside Harry Potter that is especially true as the internet used to be a lot more anonymous than it is now, meaning people were a lot more emboldened to post unpopular opinions at the time (especially since cancel culture largely developed later, at least in the form we know it in today).
Part of that is that the idea of “X, but without Y” is so creatively bankrupt that it’s doomed to suck.
That’s definitely an important point. If somebody’s starting point for making art is “I can capture a demographic with nostalgia for X but has issues with it now” that’s not really a place of genuine creativity.
I dunno, spite can be an excellent inspiration for creativity, the issue is that being blatantly driven by spite isn’t going to make you popular, even if you ultimately prove your point of “I can do that but better” is correct. Speaking from experience.
On the one hand, probably, on the other I have heard some fun polytheistic songs based on jesus ones. “Loki loves all the little children” “Loe ye scary great old ones” and the like. more comedic than maybe I’d prefer but stills…
Give me that old time religion!
And I mean REALLY old time…
https://www.paganlibrary.com/music_poetry/real_old_religion.php
Aw, that can backfire though. For eg, Tom Waits’ Way Down in the Hole is a savagely vicious parody of Christian music, while The Blind Boys of Alabama’s version of Tom Waits’ Way Down in the Hole has to be one of the greatest gospel recordings of all time.
Roland Barthes has regrets.
Dang, Man o Man, you are NOT kidding!
https://youtu.be/hFTtty3ajYo
https://youtu.be/ZlkXhKAVjJQ
Gut-tuggingly beautiful…
Oh HELLS yes
the album version, though, with the bass and vocals way way wayyyyy out front… *fans self*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4zZCuNAGRo
Amazing!
Joco and Weird Al have entered the chat…
Tim Minchin is a better example of “performer of funny antitheistic songs” (but not parodies).
(Though keep in mind that many of them are quite NSFW. “The Pope Song” contains over a hundred uses of the F bomb.)
I used to love Tim Minchin until he started getting a shade “not liking people because they follow JK Rowling on social media is laughable”.
Look up the Apologetix discography and listen to the originals instead?
Flamy Grant drag performance music is pretty AMAZING.
Also there’s plenty of good secular Amy Grant music out there.
That would let her edge into Filk. A veritable mine of wild and wonderful music
Bless Joe for thinking of the bigger picture lol. But baby steps, buddy. Baby steps.
He must of been thinking about her diets affect on her health for a while with that subject change.
She sleeps on her belly, the post chicken finger sleep farts have got to be as ungodly as Joyce herself now.
You want farts from hell, try going to a big bike ride like the Hotter’n’Hell 100. After carb loading there is a surplus of food for the gut flora and fauna that produce digestive gas so the result is a cloud or noxious gas floating through the rooms where they are sleeping.
I feel personally hurt by your spelling. But at least you started your sentence with a capital letter and ended it with a period. And at least it was a readable and coherent sentence.
“must have”
“effect”
…and “diet’s”
The spelling and grammar police! Thank goodness you came to carry your important and very necessary, not-at-all tedious work here.
“This is the kind of errant pedantry up with which I will not put!”
…Now I’m off to boldly split infinitives where no man has split before…
ACAB includes grammar police
I forgot they were in bed before i started 🤨 over them getting dressed
I know Joe is good for the weed gummy connection. Hook your girl up, Joeseph!
Those were also just multivitamins
Shhhh. Joyce doesn’t need to know that.
Agreed. Her path to adolescent rebellion is slower and more winding than the median, but she’s ready to travel it.
She’s trippin’ placeballs!
Vitamin W.
My daughter (on the spectrum) has an obsession with chicken tenders as well. Apropos of nothing, the best thing has been to ease her into other food items. Because of this she’s learned she really likes the taste and texture of cucumbers and raw onion, among a few other more ‘usual kid stuff’.
Texture has always been an issue for me, even now in my 30s. There are just some textures that I can’t handle without triggering the gag reflex. I have always found that I prefer the texture of raw vegetables over cooked, even with things like zucchini. With things like onion, I find that I am fine if it is minced small enough that it isn’t noticeable, but otherwise the cooked onion texture is a hard no. In college, I really liked the stir fries that the school would do, since the vegetables would still have that raw-like texture. They would also do both rice and pasta stir fries, so there was a lot of variety that you could have in between that and the sauces.
In some ways, a potluck or buffet is a good way to try different things and see what ones you like and don’t like because it isn’t a waste of a whole meal. I didn’t like experimenting too much in college since if it ended up being something I couldn’t handle, it would be a waste of money and a meal.
It also makes a difference in how things are cooked or made. For example, a lot of people season meat but they don’t season cooked vegetables. Seasoning doesn’t help with the texture but it can with flavor. I have also known people that haven’t liked tea, but then their only experience is things like bagged green tea made using boiling hot coffee temperatures (different teas need different temperatures, only black and herbal should be done at boiling). London fog (earl grey milk tea) or milk chais tend to be a lot more palatable to people, especially for an introduction into tea. Loose leaf also tends to have a lot better flavor than ‘who knows how old’ tea bags.
Stir fry really is cooking’s gift to those of us who don’t like to eat their vegetables.
It’s because they’re bland and predictable.
I wanted to make a joke about the sort of new music Joyce should get into but honestly my reference pools probably aren’t much deeper than hers.
Doesn’t tend to have lyrics, but Two Steps From Hell is great. Trailer movie and score music (audiomachine, epic score, etc.) tends to have good variety between slow and fast paced music too.
My meditation mix would be of help, if it didn’t blow her mind.
Bad Religion, maybe?
Or is that too on the nose?
She should get into prog rock, if only because I think it’s hilarious when people mangle the lyrics to Tempus Fugit by Yes.
Looking at the wide range of music on my iPod, I think she’d probably be more into Muppet soundtracks than Scottish folk music.
You know, it’s too bad Joyce never got into some of the more, shall we say, liberal thinking Christian Metal groups. They would have made a lovely stepping stone for her. I’m very much non-Christian, but there are a couple of those I actively enjoy mixed in with my other music.
Hey, I know from the second collection of Dumbing of Age that Joyce also likes One Direction.
(…they weren’t a Christian band, were they?)
I’m Tony now? Awesome! Y’know, I’ve been excited for him to make another appearance and I’m gonna count this
Pretty sure Zayn was Muslim, or at least from a practicing muslim family, so I don’t think so.
That’s perfectly possible, the Islam recognizes Christ as an important figure in their religion, so a Muslim wouldn’t mind singing about him.
Wasn’t it Harry Styles?
Nah, just a regular flavor boy band. You could make some of their sing christian if you imagine the “you” they’re singing about is Jesus, but it doesn’t work for all of them
Breaking any college student, much less Joyce, free of the breaded hold of chicken fingers is a tough sell – they were one of the few really good foods in my university’s cafeteria.
And it’s why they shouldn’t be. Chicken forever!
They also tend to be trustwothy in quality. Me dad would say that on mystery meat days in the navy, he would prefer peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Provided, he would get things like banana meatloaf in the navy, so it was understandable.
Would you want vaguely Jesus-y songs like American Pearl and Pedro The Lion, generic kid-friendly fare like Jim Valley, or a full descent into antitheist metal?
Lamb Of God sounds like one but is definitely the other.
I would suggest getting someone who knows music(ie not me) to listen to her 5 songs, categorize what they’re doing, and then find secular bands that are doing similar things in a non-awful way.
And then get Joyce to listen to those bands while drinking a veggie shake.
They’re probably all Christian Contemporary Music (CCM) which isn’t a very wide genre. A good starting place is probably non-romantic pop songs, dipping into light rock, and seeing if she gravitates to any particular artist.
Though my info is also probably a good decade or two out of date at this point…
My impression from twenty-odd years ago was a cottage industry of “The Christian [popular band name]” alternatives. For anything folksy or country… y… that almost seems like cheating.
I’d feel genuinely sorry for whichever sincere weirdos or desperate grifters tried being The Christian Sevendust.
… I’ve got it. She should try some vintage Live.
Really powerful, very truthful, and although she’d have once called them Gateway Buddhists, that would assume she’d ever heard of them, or knew enough about Buddhism to pick up on the refrrences.
I should listen to Throwing Copper.
Everyone should listen to Throwing Copper, it’s a great album. It helped me through a rough patch or two.
It’s impossible to search for Live online though, you have to search by album or song… XD incidentally, they’re from my larger neck of the woods, Southeast PA!
Switchfoot is decent. Just press skip when the lyrics get too explicitly religious. If we’re going antitheist metal my personal favorite is Behemoth’s The Satanist. Or I could be seriously missing the point of the album, but there are few wake-up drums like the intro to Amen.
Probably way too much, way too fast, but I’m suddenly imagining Joyce as the little girl from Ghost’s “Cirice” video.
Black Sabbath’s first few albums are actually a pretty good halfway point, lyrically. I’ve always thought it was funny that a band with so much religious content in their lyrics is considered Satanist.
10,000 Days by Tool worked on some of my church group as a kid, so there’s another example.
Moralizers get big mad at many catchy renditions of their actual beliefs. Like “South of Heaven.”
“10,000 Days” is definitely the most church-appropriate expression of Maynard’s grief about his mom. Unlike, say, A Perfect Circle’s “Judith.”
nice, also I would recommend Power Metal: easy music, full of fantasy and key change songs
Yesss. It is the silliest goddamn thing and I love it.
Joyce should absolutely be twenty years late to an obsession with Dragonforce. Have some weirdly horny dreams about Rich Mullins riding through despoiled valleys on a horse that is exactly this size.
As an adult chicken finger enjoyer I will say you’re never too old for them. In fact most restaurants serve chicken fingers, tenders, strips, or whatever you call breaded and/or batter fried long cuts of chicken breasts or thighs in adult portions. Even more in fact gourmet chicken fingers are really fun because there’s essentially infinite creativity in how you prepare and serve. This would actually be a great first culinary project for are prospective chef.
I had chicken strips today.
cane’s is pretty good. tho recently got an ad for something with a similar name that was rhymed and the ad straight upl ooked like the same as the boxes we get , butapparently it is another local chain in tx, idkthe copyright on that but names aside guess you can’t really copyright making any kinda chicken dish
Tho i’d love a korean fried chicken take on their ‘tenders/fingers’ (i know some asian dishes literally do have chicken feet but seemslike ti’d be too chewy for me even if they remove the bones/nails lol)
Chicken feet actually aren’t really that chewy – you’re pretty much just slurping the meat/skin off the cartilage, most of the chewing motion I’ve found is basically disentangling the meat from the bones, assuming you don’t just decide to eat the cartilage directly which has a nice crunch to it. Mind you, I do say this as someone who regularly strips chicken wings clean by popping them whole or with one bone cut off in my mouth, flensing the lot there, and spitting out the freshly cleaned bone, so I might be a bit desensitized to whatever effort it requires to eat chicken feet.
Haha, I know which chain you mean. I have no interest in getting into a chicken finger fast food restaurant google rabbit hole, but I’m told Layne’s came before Cane’s. Personally, I think Layne’s sauce is better, but Cane’s chicken is better by a mile.
Hard to go wrong with either fried chicken or fried bread.
A favorite TX State Fair food is Fried Butter, a lump of butter dipped in batter and deep fried. done right it is lightly crisp, but tender in the middle, wad of dough.
I really think that it is hard to go wrong with anything that is fried or put into a pastry. It can be done, but humans generally seem to love those things. There are variations of fried dough across most, if not all, cultures too.
Fun fact: chickens actually have two notable muscles in their chests. The large pectoralis major is what’s usually referred to as a chicken breast. Chicken tenders are made from the smaller pectoralis minor. Fingers are pretty much any random strip of breast meat. Nuggets are minced, processed bits and pieces from any and all parts of the chicken. Many of these are usually just delivery systems for sauce, but with proper seasoning they can be pretty tasty on their own.
Thank you, hope you enjoyed today’s edition of “Cooking with the Wizard”.
Real chicken tenders are so good dawg. Standard part of my Popeyes order
Judging from the context of Joe’s words, I think the issue is less “Joyce eats Chicken Fingers” and more “Joyce *only* eats Chicken Fingers”.
I love myself a good chicken tender too! But I also, you know, don’t enjoy developing scurvy >_>.
This is one of the ways Joyce is, like, my actual polar opposite. My literal actual polar opposite.
Most Americans – and I say this with experience as both a radio professional and performing musician, both of which are jobs which care a lot about what music people listen to – mostly listen to the same shit they listened to in high school and maybe college, like, forever.
(So from that standpoint Joyce is not that far from the average. She just has a lot tighter focus on what that means.)
Whereas for me, that kind of repetition eventually feels like trying to grind down sandstone with my teeth. ngh.
It helps to grow up in a home with eclectic music taste. I grew up listening to everything from the Beatles to Depeche Mode to Mudvayne to Caramel to Linkin Park to Enrique Iglesias, constantly picking up new artists and groups to enjoy, so it’s always been odd to me encountering someone who only listens to one or two genres. Letting your kid grow up only listening to explicitly Christian music is child abuse.
Back when I had a dedicated MP3 player, you know, when dinosaurs were still on the radio, I prided myself on being able to listen for 12 hour workdays without a repeat. I bought new music, and dived into back catalogs.
Now, I hardly ever remember to even listen to music. I could have tunes playing as I’m typing this. And, I don’t.
I still have a dedicated MP3 player, because that thing doesn’t interrupt me, unlike phones. I hate being interrupted when I am deep in though.
A local classic rock station once did all of the songs in their collection from a to z. It was the best week for working since there was no repetition that whole week, unlike the “popular songs” radio station that would repetitively play a song about an umbrella.
Personally I find it difficult to have a musical preference. I like all kinds of music and run off vibes so just sticking with one genre feels boring. One of the best feelings to me is discovering a new song that sparks an emotion in you. I’m always waiting for it.
same here!
heck 90% of the gems I discover is through video game music, pieces from talent all over the world have left me stimming in place and crying at the keyboard
some of my favorite emotional pieces include “Tapha Niang” in Little Big Planet, “The Sea” from Machinarium, and “Maenam” from Braid
Video games songs contain some of the absolute best music in my opinion. I think that it is do to them being played for hours on end, so they want something that isn’t going to get annoying after a while. I love the songs from Journey and Ori and the Blind Forest, but I still remember songs from Baldur’s Gate and Magic and Mayhem (Celtic 2 for instance).
Even movies have some good soundtracks. The 2003 animated Sinbad has a nice ost, and the Kung Fu Panda series was nice to listen to.
My favourites are “For River (Johnny’s version)” from To the Moon, “Home is where you are remembered” from Night of the Rabbit and, oddly, “Terran Theme 04” from Starcraft 2. The first one still keeps making me cry.
funny you mention StarCraft, I love the Zerg theme from the original, something about it is just PERFECT when I’m in hyperfocus on coding
I love it when you find good background music to your work that fits perfectly.
When I was still young, I was the kind of person who had very specific music tastes, which I would listen in repeat constantly.
With the advent of growing older, plus having had a pretty big family growing up, and a slow introduction of other types of music due to genre blending musicians, I managed to break through my distastes.
Nowadays I mostly use spotifiy and random algorithmically chosen youtube music, so I constantly discover new groups within the genres I already like.
Hoping people don’t start weird discourse about picky eaters.
I find picky eaters very weird with all their eating and stuff. Can you imagine having preferences for the food you ingest? Cringe.
There’s a difference between having a preference and refusing to even try other foods.
The trouble comes when the fixation food doesn’t lend itself to proper nutrition, I guess.
I think people should mind their own business regarding what others eat or not.
Aside from parents, of course, since they’ve got a responsibility to make sure their kid isn’t malnourished. Aside from them though, there aren’t a lot of exceptions.
Some parents should probably leave to mind their own business a bit too, I heard bad stories about some being real assholes about it.
Oh, for sure. Making your kid sit at the table until they eat the one thing they don’t like is nonsense and a waste of time.
I was made to eat food I was allergic to over and over again and it was enough on its own for me to develop CPTSD because I came close to dying because of it but didn’t white die over and over again.
And that difference is none of your business <3
Nothin’ wrong with bein’ picky, if you’ve got the privilege to.
As a relatively picky eater, yyyeah there’s a few wrong things with being picky. like 90% of it is the lack of all the nutrients you actually do need for your body to work at 100% efficiency, plus a lot of the food we picky eaters do eat easily is a bit uh…
Unhealthy. More than just a bit, in fact.
Nutrients are easy to add in pill form. Fiber, less so.
It’s not so much a privilege thing, sometimes. I’m an autistic woman and sometimes my brain just plain won’t let me eat whatever’s in the kitchen and needs eating (like the stuff that expires soon), even if it’s stuff I’m generally ok with and like, even if I’m so hungry it hurts. It’s either fall back on the limited “picky” selection or don’t eat.
I definitely feel you on this one, for me it’s a major sensory thing to the point that trying to swallow a pill is a gamble between “I have successfully swallowed the pill” or “mission failed, and lo, I have upchucked”. Certain food textures are similar. It’s a bit hard to try and eat certain foods when they do physically make one feel like vomiting.
I also meant to put this as a reply to Hazel DERP oh well
I agree with both Marianne and Doopyboop, as someone who has dealt with both things. It doesn’t help that I don’t always feel hungry when I actually am (or just get hangry instead). I normally figure that any food is better than none, and it would literally be done if it was something that my brain/body decided that it didn’t want to eat. It isn’t something that you can rationalize your way out of, no matter what some people seem to think. Not that you can’t make improvements, as sometimes you can slowly get used to things and adjust. The key word in that is slowly.
You can also be a picky eater and separately have sensory issues with food, both of which can often (but not always) improve with time and effort.
While things like chia pudding and watery porridge still remind me of the texture of phlegm and I physically find it very difficult to swallow them, I can now enjoy so many more foods than I did twenty years ago. Which nutritionally, socially and just genrally fricking rocks.
The taste of seaweed and sea salt still remind me of post nasal drip. For me it is the raw dough or gummy/springy-ish like texture (not actual gummies, but I don’t know how else to explain it). I also had an overcooked lasagna once, that you could have squeezed the whole thing out of a toothpaste tube, that reached a texture that was horrible. Oddly enough, I don’t like instant oats, but find old fashioned or steel cut fine in oatmeal, provided you don’t cook it horribly long. I can do instand if I basically poor warm water in and eat it right away without letting it sit for long.
On a side note, I can’t have kielbasa because it was the meal that I had right before I got appendicitis, so my brain instincts blame it on that. I guess that is a common thing to happen.
I used to be seen as a picky eater, turns out I have a huge number of allergies. I actually eat a wide variety of foods now, including a lot of foods I didn’t grow up with.
Between cutting the foods I was allergic to out of my died and trying a lot of new foods, I got really into supplements. I don’t regret it, but these days supplements mostly just make me pee more and that’s it, so my supplement phase has ended. At the time it seriously improved my health, though. (I had to get some nutrients injected at the hospital, it was bad.) (I’m allergic to a lot of stuff.)
Diet*** not died
….I think Joyce is very food allergy coded. Especially when it comes to oatmeal.
I fucking miss chicken nuggets I’m allergic to fucking Corn
Have you tried making your own with regular corn? /joke
But seriously, have you tried making your own? I think you can make the meat-based slurry they use to make chicken nuggets with chicken, a blender, broth, and any thickening agent.
If it’s a severe enough corn allergy, you generally can’t have chicken (or eggs) if that chicken has been fed corn. That’s one of the ones that carries over. I think soy’s another. It can also screw you over with just the packaging if it’s bad enough, since so much of it’s corn-derived in the US.
So it’s less ‘can’t buy chicken nuggets because there’s corn in them’ and more ‘can’t buy chicken in general because there’s corn in it’.
There are producers that have safe meat, but that’s very very much a specialty item.
I had a friend that is allergic to whey, and I have always thought that corn would be worse since it is basically in almost everything processed.
Oy vey, the difficulty of finding a good bagel sometimes.
My sister is allergic to corn. It is pretty hard to navigate at times– there’s corn syrup in so much stuff, then there’s corn starch, and other things it may come up in that don’t include “corn” in the name– like food starch and maltodextrin. She also can’t do gluten. But! The corn isn’t severe enough that she has to worry about animals that were fed corn. At least currently. If I hear she’s having allergy symptoms again, I’ll bring it up.
Honestly this is my bad I shouldn’t had mentioned it.
No Jeremiah, it’s your good.
I mean that I hoped there wouldn’t be weird discourse and yet by mentioning it I started it.
Don’t, assholes take any excuse to be themselves. They’d start a fight somewhere else if they hadn’t picked you.
Welcome to the Internet.
Have a look around
I was just trying to joke a bit. I think this thread is actually pretty good discussion. It’s a better topic than most and a lot of the comments are just relatable. Good thread. You should be proud.
should’ve known “I don’t want to start discourse on _” would summon discourse on _.
Counterpoint: people should eat at least vaguely healthy.
Multiple people have gotten frigging _scurvy_ when let loose in college.
That’s their problem, not ours.
Their friends and partners shouldn’t say anything like Joe is?
Friends and partners can definitely go to far, though I don’t think Joe’s anywhere near that point.
There’s also a big, if somewhat vague, distinction between people who actually struggle with some kind of issues around food and those who just take the opportunity to eat nothing but junk food when they get the chance.
We’ve definitely seen Joyce in the former category. She talks about wanting to try new things, but not being able to bring her self to do it – just like with the music she describes here.
Walky might be the latter. We constantly see him with nuggets or chips or pizza (or joking about how a salad messed up his digestion), but he hasn’t talked about any specific food issues.
Unsurprisingly, Joyce gets far more support in the comments than he does.
What do I care? I’m not the friend or partner of this nebulous “they”.
They will be so disappointed.
“This is the only thing that makes me happy, but it also makes me deeply unhappy, but the agonizing process of finding something that makes me happy without making me unhappy is too overwhelming to seriously contemplate” is a feel.
Even worse when you add to it that it is one of the only things that still makes you happy or that you use for stress relief (like a video game).
Yuuuup. :\
There are a few ways this could go, I suspect:
The first is that someone rewrites the songs to be less jesus-y
The second is Joyce finds an extremely similar genre that isn’t filled with Jesus lyrics as overtly
The third, and funniest option, is that Joyce becomes a hyperpop fan and starts wearing a Femtanyl t-shirt
Nah, the third funnies option is that she gets into Insane Clown Posse hard.
At one point ICP did say they were an evangelical band, so that should work. And they definitely don’t sing about god all that much, unless The Great Milenko counts.
I can just see Joyce rapping “I stab people”, freaking out certain other cast members for whom stabbing is a trauma.
It might not be that hard. The stuff I hear recently is indistinguishable from recent secular music except that they shove a “Jesus” in here and “Lord” in there.
That or jingoist stuff that basically does the same thing.
Ugh. My taste in churchy music basically starts with Gregory I and ends with Wesley.
I love Joe/Joyce so dearly but every day we don’t see Billie is a tragedy. I’m on the edge of my seat about her (and Ruth. pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease)
Ruth is going to date Alice for maximum Billie misery.
Sounds like a plan to me!
Ruth & Billie are the only real plot.
Every day we do see Billie is also a tragedy. She’s kinda stuck in tragedy mode at the moment.
Joyce it’s simple, you just need to start listening to songs about religious trauma. They sound just like the Jesus ones but better
Ooh, imagine if she started with Ethel Cain. Bet Jocelyne is a fan!
I could give her some recommendations from my 4 and 5 star list… which is only a few thousand long.
And again, the universe is reminding me that it’s long past time to do another Great Rippening of my CDs, this time into a lossless format. If I start now, I might get done before Christmas time… of 2026.
I’ve broken out of my limited eating habits as I’ve gotten older but the call of breaded strips of chicken is forever strong.
And judging from all the more “adult” rebrandings like “goujons” and “boneless wings” out there many people feel it too.
In my home country they never had the infantilizing name, they were just one of many “breaded chicken”s
Wait. You’re saying that they don’t actually use the fingers of chickens? I call that false advertising.
And I, Joe, think you should have this conversation after she’s had some chicken fingers, or something, so that her brain’s well-fed and she might be able to discuss things relatively calmly.
I mean I guess you can segue from Christian music to country.
“I hate it! It’s all about poverty and guns and breakups!”
If you’re really lucky it’s about all three!
My gun broke up with me because I couldn’t afford ammo this month.
Gotta keep your guns fed.
“My Gun Broke Up with Me.” Would be a sick song name or album title.
The little bitty teardrops, rolled down my cheekbones, and drip-dropped upon the sawdust floor, whilst they played the Cotton Eyed Joe.
It’s a classic.
But for full authenticity you have to sing it through your nose.
wait, I thought that was Bob Dylan?
My gun left me to be with my self-driving truck that drove away.
I swear that this could be a country song somewhere.
You’ve heard the one about what happens when you play country backwards?
how about country music from other countries then?
Uh… that’s not a thing.
Source: am from, and in, other country.
You probably mean that Nashville rock only comes from one country. Every nation has its own country music, much of it rather good. It just isn’t all twangy guitars and love songs to pickup trucks. I’ve got nice albums of Indian, Japanese and Afghan music that wasn’t blow-molded from polyethylene in a media company’s basement.
I could argue that Appalachian music (which is what I think of, when I think “country music”) comes from other countries and the US is just borrowing it.
Is country music defined as a specific genre with defining musical traits and characteristics or is it loosely defined as any music played by rural people anywhere throughout the world and history?
If the latter, is it distinct from folk in any meaningful way?
That’s just the “polka from the old country” albums cluttering up every thrift store across the country.
Shoji Tabuchi’s got ya covered.
And don’t forget the pickups. And Momma! And trains!
In fact, always remember the Jasper Carrot Ultimate Country Song
“Since they took my momma
Off to prison,
Things ain’t been
The same around the farm.
But now they gone and let her
Out the ja-il house
She drove her goddam truck into a train “
You forgot the beers. And Mama, pickup trucks, trains, and crying in the rain. Now I gotta go watch the Daytona 500.
Bo Burnham wrote the last bro country song the world needs.
There I Ruined It made one too. Think of that as the hidden track they didn’t list on the jacket.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CORANvT8l9A
This could go two ways:
1. Joyce decides to listen to Goth or metal to everyone’s confusion but actual former fundamentalist kids.
2. Joyce becomes a massive fan of ukulele music but only Dan’s covers.
She does have the benefit of the internet and the vast amount of music genres available for her to sample for free until she finds something she likes. She doesn’t have to hope that a local radio station will play a tune, or something similar, like they had to do before the internet. You even have electro mixes of old music, like betty boop (electro swing can be fun, like Little Lily Swing by Tri-Tachyon).
I suggest a little Caravan Palace, or Parov Stelar, or Post-Modern Jukebox if you like Electro Swing, or maybe some Doors, Stones, CCR, Grand Funk Railroad. For music from my childhood. Or maybe The Kings, BTO, Red Ryder, if you like your music naturally cold from the north of the border. Or maybe Kraftwerk, Mike Oldfield, Pink Floyd, If you want to close your eyes and watch your music on the insides of your eyelids. Or you could get YTM on your phone or computer, and search for Opus Fun Stuff playlist and not move for several days straight. I got all of the above, plus Infected Mushroom, Triumverat, and several hundred bands and solo artists I can’t remember.
Option #1 tracks. My first foray into non-Christian, non-classical music was 30 Seconds to Mars, Evanescence, Muse, Breaking Benjamin, and J-rock.
None of which even claims to be metal? I mean, don’t get me wrong, they’re pretty heavy for rock, and Evanescence in particular fits in perfectly with a specific subgenre of metal (symphonic power metal, aka Nightwish/Sirenia/Epica and similar) but the bands themselves claim to be rock bands.
Has Joyce ever listened to “Hey Jude”?
Joe offers her a multivitamin that somehow turns out to actually be a weed gummy.
“Why does this Flintstone chewable make me feel…relaxed?”
You may be onto something.
A couple months ago, I was talking to a friend from high school, and she was like, “Remember that time we listened to the three hour loop video of that song? xD” And my recently-diagnosed-self was like, oh, uh, I actually might have some information on why I decided we should do that.
Purple is a good color for him.
I never get tired of chicken, but yeah, she could certainly stand to pick up some more foods for the roster, I am sure.
Never give up chicken fingers. Never give up who you are inside.
If you are chicken fingers inside, you may have other problems.
there were times when, by the “you are what you eat” rubric, I was at least 10% chicken by volume.
by another measure, we’re all “bags of mostly water”.
“Ugly! Ugly bags of mostly water!”
Diogenes would be proud of you.
Unfortunately between Rich Mullins being a christian musician and being dead, my favourite way of finding new music, “go to their show and get into the opening acts,” probably isn’t an option for Joyce.
Of course for the many years that I couldn’t find a show, there’s also Pandora or whatever the current equivalent is. (Pandora stopped working in Canada when I was a pre-teen iirc, so I fell off that)
Pandora still exists in the United States, but I think similar features in Spotify, YouTube Music, and Amazon Music outreach it by a bit. Probably Apple Music above the latter two as well.
People gripe about YouTube a lot, but I’ve found a ton of music on there that I wouldn’t have ever found in my own, all from recommendations it fed me. Lots of great and creative videos, too.
For sure. It might have been easier 10 years ago though. I lost some old favorites back before I had an account and had a computer die. There is also probably a reddit page or something somewhere where you can ask for suggestions for similar music.
YouTube is maybe the greatest example on the internet of enshittification.
Shorts are an actual blight on society. If everything that serves little bitty clips that can be endlessly swiped through just disappeared one day, nothing of any value would be lost. I genuinely want whoever introduced Shorts to YouTube dead, preferably in a painful way.
what’s the music programming on the college radio station there? Mine was pretty eclectic. That was before the general collapse of radio though. There was also the timeslot on MTV when they played the weird stuff that wasn’t on the top of the charts, but I wouldn’t guess they’ve started doing that again.
Classical, jazz, NPR and local news, according to the WFIU website.
Well, you might not give up chicken fingers but you could still find some new things you like IN ADDITION to those chicken fingers.
Not, like, a sauce though because ew.
I swear, one day I’ll remember to do this.
You can do it.
This feels weirdly topical for me. I had a friend text me earlier today asking if I’d be willing to sing at her wedding. Problem was, the specific song she wanted sung is God is Love, and I also get rationally angry about Jesus songs.
I nearly turned her down before managing a successful priority assessment to determine that, yes, I do care more about supporting my friend and her new wife than I dislike Jesus songs. But I think she and I both know it was weirdly close, me and Christianity did not part ways amicably.
to be pedantic, Joyce is not actually diagnosed as autistic, a clinic doctor merely suggested it and literally everyone including herself immediately assumed it was true.
Yeah, because the majority of her mannerisms and behaviors fit that conclusion. Dina knows she herself is autistic, she never got a diagnosis but that doesn’t mean it is not true.(Signed an autistic person)
Depends on whether you’re following medical prescriptivism or descriptivism. Does a diagnosis give you the medical tag or do you already have the medical tag and a diagnosis discovers it?
If reality was prescriptivist, and you got arthritis, you’d only start having symptoms after testing positive, right?
Not even touching on things that doctors don’t even know about or can figure out the cause. There was a while that people thought that psychological trauma and ptsd symptoms were all made up (WW1 being a notable example). Just because you don’t have a diagnosis doesn’t mean that the symptoms aren’t there and don’t have an effect on your everyday life. Having a name to a group of symptoms just helps in how you work on it or treat it and finding similar people. This is especially the case in anything dealing with the brain, as there is so much that we don’t know about the brain and it is extremely difficult to see what is going on with it while someone is using it. Even arthritis and joints can be variable since someone can have no cartilage left and not be in a lot of pain while someone can look relatively fine in the scans but have a lot of joint pain. We want things to be black and white when everything is actually different shades of color. There is variations on where people define the line between blue and green. So it is no surprise that there are variations in something a lot more complex, like whether someone is considered autistic or not.
That’s nominalism vs. essentialism instead.
I never said she’s not autistic, I’m saying she’s never been officially diagnosed
Getting a diagnosis is not easy, cheap, or quick. Nor is it a diagnosis free of downsides once it’s attached to your medical record. It’s perfectly fine to accept and acknowledge that you are likely autistic without getting a diagnosis.
What’s important is finding coping methods and learning to understand and assist yourself with engaging in a world that isn’t made for people like you. And little teases from friends to point out autistic traits helps with that, because you can explore them and accept a little piece of yourself that you were maybe taught was weird or wrong.
Wasn’t that suggestion just a comic convenient way of informing us that Joyce is likely autistic and so is Dina, since the reality of the comic’s pacing means that the time it would take them to get properly diagnosed would be months or years for us? It’s for our benefit really. A diagnosis is likely but do we really want to spend 5 years waiting for the scene and saying “well she’s not officially diagnosed.” as Joyce continues to check every box on the autistic list anyway?
this comic has done things that break all realism in terms of pacing just for the sake of advancing the plot for convenience’s sake, so why not give her an official diagnosis? It wouldn’t be the most unbelievable thing that has happened.
Bruh – we don’t need an actual medical diagnosis from. Qualified professional. MD should happened to be on duty at the campus clinic on some random day who probably has no specialized training in the area and isn’t even qualified to make that sort of assessment? No worries. Good enough. It’s not like this is a complicated and nuanced subject and misdiagnosis can lead to other issues.
Joyce should definitely consider pursuing an actual medical diagnosis, though there can be drawbacks to having that on your record as well, so there might be reasons not to.
We, as the audience, do not have to continuously insist “But she hasn’t really been diagnosed”. In the best case, that won’t happen for years of our time and on narrative grounds it seems a really odd narrative fakeout for Willis to come back in 2032 with a “Psych, she’s not really autistic after all. Fooled you all!”
you just gave all the reasons against Joyce taking that doctor’s suggestion completely at face value
Yes, that was their point. I disagree with their stance, but the sarcasm is pretty clear.
If I had been more comfortable with self-diagnosis, I probably would have gotten professionally diagnosed at least a year sooner and saved a fair amount of time and money.
I had been wondering if I was neurodiverse for a long time, but I wasn’t sure, so I didn’t want to say I was or might be a certain label. With difficulties I was having, my therapist at the time suggested I get assessed for ~something~, but they were sticking to “something to do with this symptom” (difficulty talking at times) because I don’t think they wanted to say something specific either. And even though I was having moments where internally I was like, “That was pretty autistic of me,” when I was filling out stuff for an assessment, I didn’t include a specific potential diagnosis, because maybe I’m just wrong.
So then I was on a waiting list from April until December where I spent a couple hundreds to do a bunch of tests (and this was at a place that was cheaper than most, which is part of why the wait was so long). But the tests they selected weren’t sufficient to diagnosis autism… so when I got my results in January, it was like, “Well, you definitely have anxiety.” (I know!) “Also, maybe seek further assessment for these things (including autism).”
When I shared the results with my therapist (different therapist than before, first one changed careers, and hadn’t been workingwith me when I first got on the wait list), she was like, “Hm, I kind of they were going to diagnosis you with autism. You know, because of the autism.”
And finally someone had said it and I could openly explore all the experiences I’ve had that line up with autism and start using that lens to help process things. And it wasn’t an official diagnosis, it was just her saying it seemed likely, and it helped so much. And I started to identify as autistic, even before I was able to get another assessment (which happened in June) and pay over a thousand dollars (luckily got more than half reimbursed, still a lot of money).
So someone brought up that Joyce might have autism, and it ultimately made sense to her. She/others don’t have to keep putting the word “possibly” in front of it until/unless she is able to get formally assessed. It’s helping her understand herself, and it would take a long time to get that conclusion if we had to wait for an assessment to happen. (Even if she somehow got one tomorrow, it takes at least a couple weeks to get the results back, which is a long, long time for us.)
Yes, but there’s not much point in fiction for somebody to suggest it if it *isn’t* true.
people lie in fiction and real life all the time. Doctors are often wrong about initial assessments before the full diagnosis. in THIS case you’re right because we the audience know that Willis coding Joyce as autistic; but man that’s is a weaksauce argument. There are hundreds of reasons for a doctor to suggest a wrong diagnosis in fiction
But we’re talking about this fiction, so why do we have to hedge our bets with “but she hasn’t been officially diagnosed” every time it comes up?
I feel like the internal case is pretty weak
( which 100% might be the point;
or just the author spending all his autism on Dina )
but its been revealed years ago, and that the joyce is autobiographical.
It might be a more interesting story if shes not. and its also more interesting if joyce needs to unpack her upbringing a lt more to figure .
The flipside is that they refuse to ID obvious autism cases in fiction like Sheldon or Brennan in Bones. or even Elementary or House .
Fiction seems a lot of Not great autistic rep, or decent rep but refusing to ID the characters.
No Question joyce is autistic, instead i wonder if Willis was kidnapped, or has a Trans sibling
Joe is a way better fit for Joyce compared to Jacob.
I relate to Joyce on the music habits, I’ll sometimes hyperfixate on a song and it’ll be the only song I listen to for like 4 months
I forced myself to expand my music selection, and let my tism come out by listening to the same playlist a month straight
Stopped being Christian three and a half decades ago, still have Christian-song earworms. Some of them are really cringe.
…Heh, I’m reading a book now (Clockwork Boys) where a guy has a dead demon stuck in his soul, and its corpse still mutters at him when disturbed by ambient magic. Nghaa nakahlikahhha… eat his body, drink his blood… ghaka naggagh… to the death we follow Thee… ngha’aa, halikaliha!
Oh yes, still have three songs from church that I left in 1973 that pop up now and then. I was 8, I am now 60. They pop up I put in ear buds and cook them out.
Dandelions by Five Iron Frenzy occasionally just starts up in my head. Also literal worship music like Our God is an Awesome God gets rolling in there sometimes and I wish it wouldn’t.
Yeah, I get it Joyce. You got dealt a hand of all Christian songs and you want something else. It’s okay, the rules allow you to draw a Mullinsgan.
But she doesn’t want a new hand. New things are hard to deal with. Maybe she won’t like the new songs.
She wants new songs she’s already as attached too as the old ones.
New things may be hard to deal with, but she still wants to cut the regulars from her playlist.
Yes. That is exactly the problem.
She doesn’t want new things, she wants different old favorites.
…. okay, cards on the table here. I can’t tell if your pun was so subtle that I can’t find it, or if I’ve been too subtle with my puns from the moment I said and your antecedent mention of dealing with new things was meant to be taken on its face.
*moment I said Mullinsgan
And that’s why I don’t normally italicize puns.
And I screwed them up again. Mullinsgan.
If you get a new hand you would have three hands?
… and then you could use the fingers to make chicken fingers??
(never mind ignore me)
The third hand is for grasping chicken fingers.
If christian music is a thing, surely there are also ‘ex-christian’ bands lol, i’m sure joyce owuld be able to relate to that
and depending on the breading/brand, ‘fingers’ can be fine but i’d expect even if joyce doesn’t go for super spice or a variety of dipping sauce there’d be some quality tenders to upgrade to since frozen tenders at a grocery store might be passable but other than the price i can imagine ppl appreciating better taste of a restaurant ver or for a ‘gourmet’ price. or unless it’d be too greasy or so , i bet a food truck that had a deep fryer and sold only chicken tenders would do well
I’m impressed, with the buffer and all, that this strip managed to post just five days after Chubbyemu did a medical video of a boy living of chicken nuggets
at least Dina eats things other than cereal
that and cereal itself is required to be fortified with vitamins for a reason
Fiber? You mean weed, right? Of course you do.
No – The band Fiber. Just get her the “Best of” compilation
I really kinda like this new, domesticated Joe.
He’s come an exceptionally long way in this twenty-three minutes of DoA time.
Based on David Willis’s bluesky, Joyce is going to switch to listening to Duck Tales Moon Theme on repeat.
Joyce should ask to Sal about new music she could like.
Willis could introduce Historical Jesus and he’s just a short Jewish guy in DOA. Joyce could befriend him to work out some issues.
Joshua ben Joseph.
Maybe he has a sash.
Or he could not. I’d prefer Not.
What do you have against sashes?
Her own, historical, Jesus.
Someone to hear her prayers.
Someone who cares.
Her own, historical, Jesus.
Someone to hear her prayers.
Someone who’s there.
It kind of would utterly undermine the story, which is her experiences of the journey out of religion.
One would think it would be coming to terms with it, which is the understanding that it is corruption of everything that she thought she believed in.
Get Joyce an N95 mask full of gummies like Multivitamin Bane.
She will grow, after 50 years I now have five whole albums I listen to over and over again without ever getting tired of them!
I have a couple playlists and a soundtrack. The problem (not a problem) is I’ve been listening to Hadestown so much the last 3 years that I think even Spotify is worried about me. Hamilton was a 6 or 7 year obsession though before I started getting tired of it, so I figure Hadestown has a bit longer to run its course.
Mine is Yessongs By YES. I’ve heard it probably thousands of times.
Solution: Try listening to music without the expectation that you are going to “like” it or want to “have” it. I suggest using “Stress” by Justice as a baseline – it’s actively sensorially unpleasant to listen to, on purpose, so you can probably experience that without feeling like you need to incorporate it in your identity and consequently reevaluate who you are. Try things until you find a song you like and play 5000 times until you “do” get tired of it and then realize that’s not the end of the world.
As another autistic person I definitely recommend broadening your music taste as much as you can, even if you have some favorites you can play over and over. I like a lot of different kinds of music, and I can’t really say I have a favorite genre.
Chicken fingers are awesome always and should never be given up.
Aww… Joe being all sweet.
*ahem*
The college radio station WIUX is a great resource as is WCCR at Purdue where a worked as a DJ with minimal training and fully access to their library. I got to explore SO many genre! Bluegrass, Classical, World music, Electronic , and on and on
I want to see Joyce dive headfirst into the forbidden fruit: Ozzy and Alice Cooper. (Reason being that they’re the shock rock of her parents’ youth, so they would’ve warned her against them).
I just want to see her “wait, that’s it?!” indignation once she actually listens to the lyrics to Crazy Train and finds out Alice is just a guy who thinks scary music is cool. She’ll probably be more outraged that he’s born-again.
Aren’tthere some Christian bands/musicians who also cater to secular folk? I swear I have heard of bands that started out as Christian/only playing covers of Christian music for the church before switching to secular themes and music to broaden their fanbase.
Could be a good way to ease into it with familiar artists.
IIRC Amy Grant caught some flak for daring to also do secular music.
Gummy vitamins were a game changer for me, the ones I had previously were huge and tasted like grass. Lawn not the fun type. Fun fact, unless directed by a doctor most people don’t actually need a daily vitamin and your body doesn’t hold onto extras of most types of vitamins. Just sends em out on the yellow waterslide. So if you then only take one a week or so to only supplement your diet you can really stretch out a bottle.
I’m sure she can fund plenty of Dulcimer players online with excellent skills.
Agree about the game changer. It wasn’t the taste for me, but my stomach kept rejecting the solid vitamins. Gummies don’t make me nauseous.
I went through a long supplement phase during which every supplement I took initially made me feel way healthier but eventually just made me need to pee more and that’s it. Nowadays it’s just iron and collagen.
I wonder if those gummy vitamins are the same “edibles” he gave to Liz.
see I have a healthy rotation of like. 25 songs I like now. Sometimes I even listen to a whole album!
can I listen to the same song for like four hours? yes.
I wish I didn’t see the alt text… the mental picture of Joyce perched on the porcelain dropping a Bloomington Bomber is going to live in my head for the next 4 days.
nah screw it let’s have a joyce gets really really into kendrick lamar arc outta nowhere
Creed and Vertical Horizon, then we’ll go from there.
Late 1990s and 2000s music are sneaky like that
Noo.
Ugh. Creed is actually worse than what she listens to. Even Jesus hates creed. It’s a step down from DC talk. She can go to Incubus or Linkin Park. Or Stone Temple Pilots.
And for wholesome just go 311 and No Doubt.
Carrie Newcomer and Jill Phillips might help carry her from the Jesus songs to something semi-secular. Folkies who are Christian but nor evangelical. Catchy tunes and solid songs. But she might want to go full god-free. Folk is best then. Joan Baez. John mccutcheon does hammered dulcimer and has strong songs.
Video games? I’ve probably listened to variations of ‘His Theme’ from Undertale hundreds of times. And the rest of the soundtrack, plus the one from ‘Outer Wilds’.
Duck Tales Moon Theme, a Japanese singer named Aimer, sound tracks by Sawano Hiroyuki, sound track to The Flying Witch, The World in Colors, and Violet Evergarden. Daniel Ingram created over 80 songs for gen 4 of My Little Pony, which inspired a whole subculture of fan music. Rush Garcia, Annapantsu, Renaeriary, HoneyWorks…
I promise, Joyce, you can be liberated from evangelical earworms.
Not-so-fun fact, eating only chicken nuggets(or fingers) can lead to blindness.
warning: Chubbyemu vid incoming…
https://youtu.be/Q8REcF4MRjQ?feature=shared
And gummy vitamins are just one/day. Chubbyemu has done three or four different videos on them.
Chicken fingers are an environmentally friendly source of protein that is almost universally liked by even the pickiest of eaters…but yeah pair them with some vegetables, and no fries don’t count because they’re like 90% starch and may as well just be bread.
they’re environmentally good in terms of meat, but they’re still meat. soy products are even cleanner, and also ethically better.
But chickens are yummy, so it evens out.
But vegetables are gross.
With enough terriyaki sauce even broccoli is non-gross.
Vegetables? That’s what food eats.
I thought that way top till I hit my mid 30s and my body started telling me Veggies too or else!
Every once in a while Joyce says something that reminds you why she and Walky are the original cosmic OTP and today it’s that their diet is hilariously unhealthy for vastly different reasons.
Vastly different reasons?
Joyce is autistic. Walky is strongly suggested to be ADHD. Those are very similar reasons.
It’s also interesting how differently the commentariat reacts to their different diets.
I’m with Joyce here. You will get my chicken fingers when you pry them from my cold dead hands.
That makes an odd image….
Alt Take : Musically DC Talk is good and ot would be easy to wean someone on it to Nirvana or Linkin Park.
It’s the words and manipulation that are trash. Just put on Stonr Temple pilots “Songs from the Vatican Gift shop ” or any early incubus album lime SCIENCE by.
In late 90s I only had a ztian themed music video channel and DC talk was one of the Tolerable listens.
For every Xtian band she likes there is genuine good pop music its copying the style from.
DC talk was trying hard to recruit 90s kids. DC talk Is better than Creed. From what I remember.
Can someone not just play Joyce some Beatles tracks?
Or the Brandenburg Concertos.
Ode to Joy
This comic continues to push me closer to getting evaluated for autism, like every therapist I’ve ever had has recommended, for years when I was smol the only band I would listen to was linkin park. I also subsist solely on chicken fingers.
Good luck! Hope it helps!
You might also consider looking into diagnosis of and then treatment for ARFID, then.
Do talk to a doctor, do conduct your own research through reliable and professional resources, but Please please please be cautious about pre-assuming any specific condition, look into all the possibilities! The way you would carefully check the id of a mushroom before assuming it was edible when it’s known to have poisonous lookalikes. I only warn this so you won’t miss considering things like ARFID as Uly mentioned, or comorbid conditions that present similarly to autism.
A lot of us NDs fall prey to “affirming the consequent” where we believe that because WE have X condition, and WE have Y trait, it must mean Y trait always follows from X, when in truth many conditions can produce Y, and X does not ALWAYS present with Y in all peoples. 1000% worth looking into but don’t let anyone lead you away from evaluating multiple possible causes (including comorbid conditions)!
Now you are one step closer, but IN THE EeeeND , does it even matter?
That’s right, Joyce, don’t back down; chicken fingers, for life!
Poor Joyce needs nutritional advice.
Oops, how did I roll the gravatar roulette again…
wow, managed the same once >.<
Come on, something I can live with.
I could go an check the capitalisation on my tablet, but…
Stand your ground, Joyce! Don’t let people bully you into eating gross stuff because it’s supposedly ‘healthy.’ You can survive just fine on chicken fingers, plain pizza, mac’n’cheese, and disassembled tacos for at least another couple decades.
MMMM scurvy.
that’s what the vitamins are for, gummy or otherwise.
I feel like learning how to make soup could be really therapeutic for her. Like, start with water, salt, one other ingredient… And maybe eventually a second ingredient… Like work your way up over time. Give it a few months.
“That sounds like mixing foods! YUCK!”
Ah, the autistic fun of wanting a change but your brain saying no
No, the music is going to fix more now. Their bodies are still young, so they’ll be able to handle terrible diets for at least a few more years.
Oh god Joyce’s poops must be NASTY
Boyfriend of the year
I’m not religious, but this feels like how I can never feel a connection with a song unless I hear it in the soundtrack of something I like.
Right?? I exclusively enjoy music that I can connect to something else (whether it’s media I like or my own WIPs) in my head. I’m kinda relieved I’m not the only one
gotta slowly introduce the keto bread
over 100% of your dv of fiber in a single sandwich goes CRAZY
Chicken nuggets are my go-to pre-work snack… I’m not beating the ’tism allegations either, Joyce… ^_^’
i would be so screwed if it wasn’t for multivitamins lol
Just wanted to say this comic made me very happy. These two can be so incredibly adorable together. I love it when Joe tries to act as the voice of reason and not just treats Joyce like she might break into a thousand pieces any second.
Fiber? I barely know ‘er!
How the heck am I the first one to make this joke!?
I feel so fucking SEEN by this comic.
Autistic Apostate struggle is REAL.
Joyce, i give you permission to eat chicken fingers and only chicken fingers for the rest of your life if you choose to. You don’t have to change every single habit, and you don’t have to change your comfort food.
Let go of Jesus, keep the chicken fingers while you go through that scary process of things CHANGING.