Discussion (175) ¬
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Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net ⋅ 2h
Dorothy might just be a little doomed
David M Willis! SPX table F2 @damnyouwillis.bsky.social ⋅ 13h
John Kovalic @muskratjohn.bsky.social ⋅ 16h
Jay Edidin @edidin.bsky.social ⋅ 16h
Adam16bit @adam16bit.bsky.social ⋅ 20h
Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
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skaters gonna skate
God help me for this, but I can’t resist:
Skate, skate, skate.
Skate your BOooOOTEH!
Mischief Makers?
Here’s hoping for some epic skatesex.
WHERE’S THE SKATESHINE
oh man, if skatesex hasn’t been done, wow Smut Peddler 2016 ideas!
Boogie Nights.
How… would that work, exactly?
Not sure exactly but a great deal of flexibility and timing will be involved that I am sure.
Birds mate while in flight. Just saying…
SOME birds. Allegedly.
—Which birds, again?
The hornybill
Some hawks, seagulls, probably hummingbirds…
Well that’s kinda, sorta how it works, but you gotta rent the skating rink for the night, convince your significant other that skating with little to no clothes on can be fun. And for Chess sake, make sure all the doors, (except freebies) are LOCKED!
I could go into details, but to put it simply, the right music mix disk, the right lighting sequence, an attractive woman in a wrap around undress, and a guy in a kilt, can have a lot of fun on rollerblades, if you both know a bit about figureskating as well. Just be careful about those high speed opposing passes going around the rink.
Bare flesh let’s a LOT of traction on the polished wood old style skating rinks, and it HURTS!
#notallbirds
Do it standing up but while skating.
that sounds… hurty.
For once I feel like the not a perv for not going so graphic mentally and just thinking they wouldn’t bother taking off the skates as they got busy on the skate hall floor
I was just thinking that it would be very very easy to fall over and hurt yourself.
I was thinking the appearance of the women in this would be a good start , but then I watched it and realized they weren’t on skates. I guess my memory was fooled because they look sort of like they’re wearing roller derby gear. So I guess just imagine them on skates and go from there?
(NSFW, it’s the nude death chase scene from “Meaning of Life”)
It’s easy: get naked except for skates at opposite ends of a space, and then race towards each other at top speed. All there is to it.
There’s a reason they call it banging.
I can’t even skate but i want to try this
Skaters gonna mate?
Give it time, Carla. Give it time.
She replaces murderous rampages with an occasional pie to the face of someone she dislikes.
Sending people to the Amazon is, however, sadly beyond her capabilities. So instead she sends them unwanted things from Amazon.com
Who ships a bobcat?
What’s with the balloon’s tail in the first panel? It confuses me.
Seconding this; I think the “Oh, really?” may have been meant to point to Sal.
It looks fixed now, so I guess we’re good.
Carla is an otherkin?
Is wanting to be an android even covered in the otherkin spectrum??
If specific fictional characters are in the otherkin spectrum, I think androids are fair game.
Thing is though, otherkin are typified by believing they are, if only in part, already something other than human if only in a metaphysical or metaphorical sense. The alt for this comic states she wishes she were a robot, that is a significant distinction.
That plus the way she’s talking makes it obvious she just thinks people are stupid in general. And considering what the norm is, she’s not really wrong.
“Individual persons can be smart, but people are stupid” Men in Black
No, an individual person can be fairly stupid. Two people can be really stupid. A group of people can be deadly stupid.
Conversly a person can be fairly smart. Two people can be genius. A group of people still tends to be rather stupid.
Asimov’s psychohistory stated that people behaved somewhat like atoms do – individual behavior is almost impossible to predict, while the behavior of large groups follows simple rules that can be predicted fairly accurately. Since predictable behavior can be taken advantage of, it’s stupid to be predictable. Therefore, while individuals alone may behave intelligently, in a group, they can be quite stupid.
You started off attempting to contradict Opus, then ended up essentially restating what Opus said. How does that work?
For a start Opus misquoted. The MIB movie is: “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.”
For a second pay attetion to the middle parts of each statement. This is based on research about how people behave in groups, or more notably pairs, on projects. A pair of people tend to perform better than either solo or in larger groups. See Powers Of Two by Joshua Wolf Shenk.
Two people (plural) can be far smarter than one alone. Although “smart” and “good ideas” are very subjective. The things two people can mutually decide is a “good idea” can lead to Darwin awards.
Yeah, what K said is kinda bullshit, actually. Like, there’s a reason the best lifeline in Millionaire was, by a wide margin, ‘Ask the audience’. People aren’t as stupid as nerds tend to give them credit for; they just don’t necessarily have all the facts, because learning everything is hard.
Yeah, remembering some high school factoid isn’t really what makes you smart. Referring to people as a group negatively is fairly accurate, considering politics in general and the roots of social prejudice in particular (e.g. so you’re bullying that young black man because TV told you he is or would grow up to be a maladjusted delinquent? Gee, wonder how that’s gonna work out.) Which is something someone like Carla (probably a transgender gynophile, if her thing with Malaya in Shortpacked! carries over) would have A LOT of experience with.
Plus, back to the strip, she isn’t even talking about stupidity, just lying. From what we’ve seen so far she’s rather honest and open, which takes a lot of bravery from her part (remember, trans), so she’s totes in a place to critic that.
No matter how smart you are, if you are taught a crapload of garbage, you will still mostly know garbage. I didn’t say people weren’t jerks, and I didn’t say they grew up in an ideal, or even great, environment. I didn’t say they weren’t ignorant. I said they weren’t stupid, no matter how much we tell themselves they are stupid.
And no, Carla isn’t talking about stupidity. I was talking about K’s little bit from Men in Black, which is what I was like, Replying to. It’s the sort of thing nerds tell each other to feel better about themselves.
And since you want to make this about oppression, two things. First, the idea that the masses are stupid, but of course, you are seperate from that and speshul, should obviously strike you as a wedge that interferes with opposing hegemons. Second, a lot of is born from, you know, classism; the (poor) masses and their inferior tastes and lack of knowledge is totes because they’re dumb, amirite? Just because I’m not using all that language at a given time doesn’t make it less true.
I think the idea with K’s quote here is more that people, as a group, will tend to follow each other and do some really stupid things that they wouldn’t have done if they were talked to as individuals. This includes people who are otherwise very smart but get caught up in the hype or zietgeist and don’t think on it.
It’s not a comment on intelligence (I am smart and they are dumb) but peer pressure and culture (I will do stupid things if I am with friends that none of us would do individually).
I see what you’re trying to say here…. but no. The lines he uses to support it are based off of people’s incomplete knowledge (And gets it flatly wrong in the process, because of course he does). Even without that though? At that point you’re getting to “well people primarily do dumb things because other people influence them”. Brava for the deduction! It’s also the reason people do things like work together to build a society. It’s not like the smart things you do are something that you drew from a platonic cave while the dumb shit comes from other people (If that were the intent, you would get back to ‘you are better than all those other people’).
Maybe she’s a transhumanist, just waitin’ for the singularity.
She and Kimiko Ross need to talk
That would probably end with Carla being placed inside a disintegration chamber by a pissed-off Kimiko. By which I mean that yeas, they need to
nah, she’s saying “from MY species”. She’s just a misanthropist who doesn’t know otherkinship is a thing.
You mean Sal’s not automatically good at everything? Damn I lost my pool.
You already lost it, last time I checked she suck at math…and sex apparently.
Math doesn’t count. Only nerds are good at math, and I thought everyone agreed the sex thing was the product of a broken educational system you can’t count that either..maybe.
You got that backwards. The math thing was the product of a broken educational system, and only nerds are good at sex.
I’m a nerd, I would know.
I can vouch for this, we nerds are amazing at sex.
I bake that sex so well, you don’t even know.
Years of studying it online helps.
Finding and reading ladyporn helps a lot more than you would think. Also ladyporn is hotter than the visual stuff they make for us guys.
seconded
Thirded. Fanfic helped my sex life way more than anything else in my life. (the GOOD stuff, that is, not the mediocre or “i don’t think that’s physically POSSIBLE” stuff)
Damn right.
Fourthed. For me, Curvy was the first time I saw a portrayal of sex that made sense. I’m looking forward to checking out the DoA slipshines, too.
Actually, it looks like she sucked at math only because she thought she ought to suck at math. Once she thought she had an ‘in,’ so it wouldn’t matter, suddenly she didn’t suck any more.
Walky’s not the only one who thinks Walky is the only smart one, you know…
Skatefailing liar is definitely going to be used conversationally today
Concur. Now I just need to engineer a conversation with someone who is either skatefailing or a liar.
Just ask if they’re a skatefailer. When they say no…
Is there a term for someone who wishes that they weren’t born as inferior carbon units?
Silicon-based lifeforms get all the cool powers.
Such as firmness, but then they just look fake.
Now I wish there had been a Star Trek episode dealing with silicone (as opposed to silicon, like Horta) life forms. Captain Kirk would have to be involved, of course.
Like acid blood and that little mouth inside your main mouth? The ability to facehug John Hurt?
I believe that’s called: human.
Dalek.
Daleks already believe themselves to be superior to all so not the word I was looking for.
Pre-post-humanist?
I now want terribly for Carla to meet Dina. They can bond over rejecting their unwanted human heritage to be machine and dinosaur respectively.
Or just find common ground over how cool Beast Wars is, since that has characters who are both dinosaurs and robots. And Ethan would want to get in on the action as well!
So what you’re trying to say is, more characters should be into Beast Wars.
Everyone should be into Beast Wars. Beast Wars was awesome.
Beast Wars friggin’ ruled, but I’ve always been sorta bummed how underrated Beast Machines was.
I blame the cliffhangery plot arcs, with frequent reruns, and actually rather slow ramp-up compared to where Beast Wars left off. All combined absolutely killed the pacing. Watched shotgun-style its more tolerable.
Man, every time I read the comments and Transformers comes up, I find myself kinda wanting to watch it…
Succumb. You will not regret it, particularly if you become a hardcore fan. It takes no time or money whatsoever.
Now I want Carla to meet Joyce’s sibling while they both deal with Ethan’s closet issues.
I wouldn’t be half surprised if that happened at some point…of course, it’ll be around 2016 by the time this comic gets to Homecoming.
Mike needs to be in there somewhere. In other news, I now ship Mike/Carla. It might not make sense, but it would be amazing.
That pairing was the first thing that popped into my head after reading this.
Also, the idea of Mike having a relationship with anybody hardly makes sense until Willis makes it happen.
Mike/Amber forever in every universe!
I’m totally with you, Mike and Carla ship.
An Ethan, Carla, Dina 3 way? I wouldn’t mind watching it.
First my mind went to the wost adorable dino Kaiju vs. Mecha fight ever. Then I was reminded of the dinosaur outfit Vanessa like to wear in Something*Positive.
Second balloon, first panel. Wrong person. Should point off-screen.
But it is. Sal is standing to Carla’s left, as shown in the final panel of today’s strip, and the tail of the text balloon is pointing to the left edge of the panel, indicating the voice is coming from off-screen.
See also panel four, which is now focused on Sal who angrily retorts that “Ah can fuckin’ skate”. The lower speech balloon, which contains Carla’s reply, points off-screen to the viewer’s left/Sal’s right.
there was a mistake, i fixed it
Yeah, when it first went up, Carla was saying both things in the first panel.
its her cigarette i tell ya
“Bite my sadly organic ass”
+1
*throws another +1 in your direction*
*snatches all the +1’s and presents them all to Doctor_Who*
+10.
Carla, are you high?
Carla: No………Why do you ask?
I’m sure it’s medicinal.
Yes, it’s her cure for the unfortunate human condition.
Isn’t that the stereotypical response of people who take hallucinatory drugs?
I thought that the stereotypical response to “Are you taking hallucinatory drugs?” is “I don’t need to justify myself to you Mr Plaid Ten-headed Chicken-snake.”
I think the stereotypical response when told that is, “Ma’am, how much PCP have you taken in the past hour?”
Friend of ours was struggling to keep a straight face (and nearly failed) when a customer came in and talked about how much she loved her kids… and PCP.
Tell me more of this story, I need the deets
I want to LAUGH
This isn’t really relevant but I just noticed.
Their ears…everyone’s ear has the number 5 on it!
My whole world has been flip turned upside down!
I always thought 6 was an ear number.
Yeah I’ve seen a lot of cartoons where people have 6 for ears as well.
My my, how ear-ie.
But wait there’s more! I just noticed another thing. The ear’s used to be F’s!
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2010/comic/book-1/01-move-in-day/loft/
Her dad’s ear was a backwards five as well. Now I can’t not notice it.
The late Stan Lynde, creator of the Western-themed newspaper cartoon “Rick O’Shay” back in the 1960s and 1970s, drew his characters without any indication of earlobes at all. In one interview he said that he couldn’t begin to estimate the amount of time (and ink!) that this saved him over the run of the comic.
“I just don’t like organized sports.”
I know where you can go, Sal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOGXeGMH6_U
So ya old days
I actually prefer to get older, though…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHqlpZ6dBD8
You know, if I hadn’t read up on Shortpacked!, about here is where I might make the connection to Ultra Car…
Does she need to know how to skate? She can get into motorcross any time she wanted to.
Aah the old days.
Wrong comment
I like Carla’s face in the last panel.
I also empathize with her words in the last panel. I don’t necessarily like that I have to do that pretty often, but I do. (Though in my case it’s less “murderous” and more “crushing, all-consuming despair”. … It’s probably time for me to go to sleep.)
Also, “skatefailing liar” is my favorite insult this week.
100% in agreement with these statements.
Same here. It really helps me not get so frustrated with people if I just think of them like any other animal. “It’s okay, they don’t know any better.” It’s such a relief, and keeps out disappointment and anger when they do stupid things so frequently. I just look at it the way I do for a wild squirrel that runs into the road. Didn’t understand, didn’t know, couldn’t know.
No sport is more disorganized than Calvinball.
Sal-vinball!
Dinaball! It’s like Calvinball, but involves large therapuods eating herbivorous dinosaurs!
Therapods*
dammit, and I had this whole dinosaur encyclopedia thingy from my childhood memorized too.
i’m pretty sure calvenball already had that. ,’:/
No, those were Calvin’s dream sequences.
How about House Rules Parcheesi?
Um…
http://www.bugmartini.com/comic/thats-what-friends-are-for/
hence the safety gear
Carla is so cute. I’m in love.
You’re in love with a pothead that wants to be an android?
Yes.
You’re NOT?
Well. Yes.
Yes.
Sal will now learn to skate if it kills her …. because Carla called her out.
or Sal will be her typical cool self and not give a shit one way or another, and go on riding her definitely cooler byke.
I called it.
i think i just fell in love with carla
OH NO CARLA IS REALLY CUTE IN PANEL 2
Agreed. That sass.
*looks at alt text*
I wish I were a brain in a jar attached to a cyborg pterosaur. With lasers.
And wifi.
Would you settle for being a helicopter?
A Dongcopter?
Sure.
Carla is rapidly becoming my favorite Dumbing of Age character.
Actually, emotionally distancing yourself from other humans, and actually seeing them as a different species would INCREASE the likelihood of going on a murderous rampage. It’s called dehumanization. Most of the atrocities that have been committed in history have been due to lack of empathy to others and seeing them as a different class of species than oneself.
I dunno. I don’t give a shit about insects, but as long as they aren’t in my house, I’m not gonna go on a murderous rampage taking them out.
[partly due to an incident w/ a bad shortcut and yellow jackets, which is a cautionary tale about people as well]
That may explain some “ethnic cleansings” in history. And now I’m thinking Carla’s just kiddin’ around with the whole separate species spiel.
Carla: srs feels or jus prankin ya?
Can’t tell if joint or badly drawn cigarette.
I’m pretty sure it’s a joint. You can see the spiral lines from the paper being rolled up.
We have also seen Sal smoke cigs before, Willis draws ’em different. It’s a joint.
In public even!
She can fuckin’ skate!
She just didn’t say how well.
So do Carla and Malaya bang in this universe too?
Oh Carla, how I wish you could just dump people you don’t like in the Amazon.
She could, until the cops seized her trebuchet.
I’m interested in knowing some of Carla’s backstory. All things in good time I s’pose.
Oh. Yesterday’s update had made it look for a moment as if Carla wasn’t as huge a jerk as her Shortpacked! incarnation. But I see it’s business as usual ^^
Quoting my exact state of mind when it comes to people, Carla, I want you in every strip.
Coincidentally, I just want her to strip.
…
pleasedon’tkillme
Carla is like me in that sense
Panel 3
Sal’s *eye twitch*
It’s… Beautiful
Wolowitz—“I smell Robot”.
Sal, your Walky is showing.
Guess there are some things deep down that
having a badass bikeCatholic school can’t change.I really like Carla’s expression on the second panel, smug and cute. Perfectly Carla.
There’s a joke in here somewhere about Carla, smoking, and exhaust pipes.
But it doesn’t prevent drawing dicks on doors, does it?
Carla’s face in the second panel beats any face Ultra Car has ever done.
Carla’s building back her jerk reputation, I see.
Didn’t notice that was a joint on the mobile app. Had to see it on my monitor to notice.
I’ve always wanted to be a dog. Or a constellation.
*gasps* OR MAYBE BOTH