This comic is about a robot powered by bees, but it's also about the kind of people who think filling a robot with bees is a good idea, and why they're wrong.
Namesake
Isa, Meg
There's ghosts at your heels and fairy tale worlds ahead. What do you do? Jump down the rabbit hole!
Dumbing of Age
David M Willis
Joyce has been homeschooled her entire life until now, when she's suddenly a freshman in college! Things don't go well.
The Otherknown
Lorian Merriman
Chandra is a 12-year-old accidental time traveler with a reluctant new dad, who happens to be a member of a feared galactic crime syndicate.
Mac Hall
Matt Boyd
The legendary early-aughts webcomic that inspired a wave of webcomic creators.
Blindsprings
Kadi Fedoruk
Tamaura, wrested into a world 300 years in the future, must find a way to save the magic fading from her country.
Cyanide & Happiness
Explosm
Satire, dark humor and surreal humor.
Fantomestein
Beka Duke
Desperate for companionship, Frankenstein's Monster pretends to be the Opera Ghost. A grave mistake.
Countdown to Countdown
Velinxi
Iris Black is a self-proclaimed inventor with the curious ability to bring his drawings to life, and yearns to find a space where he can use his powers freely.
Guilded Age
T Campbell, John Waltrip, Florence Machina
Welcome to the saga of the working-class adventurer! Enjoy the complete story with new annotations daily!
Slightly Damned
Chu
Rhea Snaketail returns from the dead, befriending a Demon who falls in love with an Angel. The afterlife ain't what it used to be!
Paint the Town Red
Windy, Winter Jay Kiakas
Winona runs a werewolf shelter with partner in crime, Odile in the Gothic city of Merlot. One day they take in an injured vampire, and soon unravels many of the dark secrets of Merlot.
2 Slices
RJ Morel
After a case of mistaken identity, will awkward Daisuke find help from excitable Mamo, or will his love life be thrown completely off track?
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Not for eating Ice Cream. Seriously, ice cream consumption is an ART. You have to constantly juggle the different surfaces, remembering not to let any of them sit for too long.
(I have almost no sense of smell. There are all kinds of things I never imagined to have a smell. But I can smell scented candles, and they all smell the same, a disgusting “chemical” smell, much like detergent)
Friend of mine worked for a time with some idiot who made ice cream for his ice creak store, and was simultaneously being mentored in photography by this kinky couple (went over to their house once; they had, like, magnetic poetry about paddling on the refrigerator) and one day, the lady of the kinky photo-people referred to my friend as “vanilla girl.” She was pretty offended when she relayed the story to me, because she thought that she was being made fun of for making ice cream. [Redacted], I says to her I says, “vanilla” is what kinky people call non-kinky sex. This prompted her to indignantly protest that she liked some kinky stuff. She was way more offended when she thought it was literally about ice cream, though.
So, in conclusion, vanilla is actually a delicious flavor and I think it’s association with sexy-time-blandness is ill-deserved.
I have magnetic poetry about paddling on my fridge and nobody ever wanted to take pictures of me doing kinky things. In fact the magnets might be dekinkenizing the whole apartment.
They were taking boring pictures of boring stuff. Y’know, like, nature.
Perhaps it would be best to convince potential sexy-times-associates that you have some nice boring interests as well, and THEN propose butt-whacking-and-related-activities stuff. Yeah, don’t let yer magnets do all the talkin’ fer ya.
Actually the term vanilla is not so much about blandness and more about being mainstream popular. Most people like vanilla you can bring it to a party and no one will raise an eyebrow. Not everyone is up for say pistachio, lots of people might hesitant to try it for the first time and of those who do some will just plain not like it.
But for that analogy to work, strawberry ice cream should consist of vanilla ice cream plus strawberry flavor, and I’m pretty sure that isn’t the case.
Paradoxically, vanillin, like capsaicin, tinyatocin, and resinifertoxin, is a powerful agonists of one of the channels present on heat-sensing neurons in mammals. Unlike the others, it quickly goes from binding to blocking, so that instead of producing a chili-like sensation of heat (or a painful and damaging sensation of agony, as tinyatoxin and resiniferatoxin do,) produces a sense of coolness. In the case of ice-cream, it reinforces the coolness of the ice cream.
Guys… it’s soft serve! You don’t put hard chunks of stuff in there! A good soft serve though deserves prime chocolate coating. Strawberry soft serve with dark chocolate on top is heavenly, let me tell you that. I bet it’s delicious with orange soft serve too…
I’ve never seen strawberry soft serve. Only chocolate and
and vanilla. I like chocolate. While vanilla hard packed (let
the jokes begin) is pretty good, vanilla soft serve is fairly
bland to me. Chocolate forever!!!
Go to a Boardwalk in New Jersey during the summer and get Kohr’s. It’s soft serve frozen custard, and they have like 3 dozen different flavors at the good ones. *drools at thought of cookies and cream*
I remember this one place where the soft serve dispenser had vanilla, chocolate & caramel and you can even have all three coming out of one nozzle, it was great.
I feel bad for feeling this but I kind of want Walky to end it with Dorothy because he DOES love her. Just enough to know he doesn’t want to go any deeper.
I don’t know, I am really rooting for the girl to get some of her dreams come true. I mean realistically, with everything she seems to be doing and if she gets perfect grades, some great college, if not Yale, is bound to accept her at some point.
I hope not. Willis has explicitly called out the normalization of women in popular culture in a negative light — go back to the Women’s Studies class where Mike humiliated Dorothy.
There are a couple of better solutions: (a) Walky could follow Dorothy to Yale. (Remember, he gets great grades, too.) (b) They could try to set up a long-distance relationship.
I’d forgotten about that — but it only reinforces my sense that Willis is signaling that we have a forthcoming conflict about this. After all, staying because of Walky would be the exact thing that Dorothy doesn’t like Danny.
And (b) is exactly what Danny could have done if he weren’t a clingy, dependent, boyfriend.
Wasn’t a long-distance relationship with Danny not going to happen because it was Danny, though? Like, he said he’d follow her and just find a different college close to her?
Walky isn’t Danny, so the options aren’t necessarily the same.
Fair enough: Mike was being sadistic towards Walky, rather than Dorothy. He managed to splatter her either way — and she’s the one who asked that he be ejected from the classroom
Yeah, I kinda want to see Walky get serious and get into Yale too. Current evidence suggests he could totally swing it. But I don’t know that we will ever get to that point in comic. I hope Willis at least eventually ends with a postscript telling what happens with everyone.
If aliens come to earth, the thing that will baffle them the most is that our culture has both war and ice cream.
You’d think that as soon as ice cream was invented, we’d have all thrown down our weapons, joined hands in brotherhood to celebrate this milestone, redirected our wealth and labor resources to producing as much of the heavenly dessert as possible, and then all died of cholesterol poisoning within five years.
FWIW, lactose intolerance among ‘anglos’ here in North America is anomalously high, particularly when compared to the rates in Britain or Germany. My guess is that arises from the fact that most of us have rather more cosmopolitan ancestries than we might realize. (http://milk.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=000661)
Don’t tell the Klan, but a lot of them are probably not “pure white”…
After the cost of purchasing all those typewriters, ribbons, and blank paper, not everyone can also afford to feed and shelter a million monkeys. Some of us have to make do with lesser creatures.
Of course, no toppings, too decadent, but why is she not separating the ice cream from the cone and eating it with a spoon? WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH JOYCE!?
I imagine that Joyce is able to view the cone as a delivery system, such a s a plate, that just happened to be edible afterwards. (Assuming, that it, that she doesn’t just wastefully toss the cone when done.) But yes, things such as sprinkles, fudge, nuts, whipped cream, cherries, or what have you… I think Joyce would freak out at the difficulty or impossibility of separating them all!
I wonder what she would feel about hard ice cream flavors that have chunks in them, such as mint chocolate chip. Would she see that as one item and happily eat it? Or would the compulsion to pull out the chocolate chunks first and eat them separately overwhelm her?
Ah, but even pulling them out, there’s bound to be a tiny bit of ice cream residue left on them. I guess it depends on how anal Joyce is about getting the food separated.
I HATE it when I’m trying have a spiritual experience with my favorite food and someone thinks that this is an appropriate time to talk, and etiquette prevents me from yelling, “Leave me alone! This pizza is at the perfect temperature!”
I had a spiritual experience with ice cream once. My favorite flavor of Ben & Jerry’s growing up was White Russian, but they discontinued it in the mid-90’s. A year or two back, my girlfriend and I were visiting their factory in Vermont. I had planned to get a sundae at the ice cream shop they have there… and then I saw that, for their factory shop, they’d made a batch of White Russian!
I was like, “Forget the sundae! I am just getting a dish of that, pure and without distractions!” And I savored every bite. And apparently the bliss and enjoyment on my face was enough to make my girlfriend jealous. (Not jealous in the, “I wish my ice cream was that good!” way. Jealous in the, “Hey, ice cream! Back off my man!” way.)
Also, since we had stopped at the flavor graveyard on the way in so I could pay my respects to two dearly departed flavors (the aforementioned White Russian, and Vermonty Python), this thought occurred to me as I was eating, between bliss-filled bites:
“Hold on, we just visited this flavor’s grave. Yet here it is, right in front of me… Aaaaahhhh! Zombie ice cream!”
Fortunately, the way to escape zombie ice cream is to eat it all.
Well, White Russian was basically like an extra rich and creamy coffee flavor. (Funny, I hate coffee as its own thing, but love it as an ice cream flavor!)
Vermonty Python, I actually still have an empty pint of that I cleaned and saved, so I can actually tell you the official description of the flavor: “Coffee Liqueur Ice Cream with a Chocolate Cookie Crumb Swirl & Fudge Cows.” The fudge cows were exactly what it sounds like: little fudge candy pieces shaped like cows.
My empty Vermonty Python pint sits on a shelf next to the unopened can of Spam that my folks got me when they went to see Spamalot on Broadway. I’d have rather they bought me an extra ticket and brought me along… but I suppose the Spam was a halfway decent consolation prize. Still need to see Spamalot one of these days, but I really wish I could have while Tim Curry was still in it!
Sorry about that; it’s just that when I thumbed through my copy of DoA #3 and this was the first strip I found that showed the dining area background in question.
This is probably one of the few times a food joke has made me proud to be an Amurican.
America can be weird about a lot of things, but I think people of all nationalities can learn and benefit from the fast-acting, calming, and healing properties of the occasional soft-serve.
I get up at Ass ‘o-clock in the morning, and the comment section has already formed into its own self-regulating ecosystem. What gives? Is there something I’m missing?
9PM here. I catch it sometimes, and get the warm fuzzy feeling of being among the first 50 commenters. Last night, though, I was catching up on frivolesque after it got linked a couple days ago.
Theres actually research done that concludes that people are happier and calmer after eating sugar. At an ethics and positive psychology seminar the speaker recomended keeping chocolate in your desk to reduce stress and ultimately getting burnt out.
I need to have more faith in the power of ice cream! My browser took like half a minute or so to load the lower half of the comic, so all I could see was the dialogue, and I assumed it was a comic of sads…Joyce standing off somewhere looking depressed first panel, then starting to cry silently third panel, you know, that kind of thing.
I was super pleased to be able to put my sads away, unused, when I saw the rest of the comic! Truly, I should have known better!
Nah, OmegaDez is just french speaking.
I’m totally(?) bilingual, so it really feels strange to realize how I, in my long life, never found myself ordering “soft ice cream” in an english-speaking setting and thus never had a reason to learn how it was actually called.
It feels really weird too considering how basic it is. (and how much I love the stuff)
I love Vermont. I drive through it every time I go to the US, and I’m always so happy to remember how low the prices are in the US. Granted, it’s not specific to Vermont, but it’s always where I remember it.
Haha. You would NEVER hear a Quebecois say “Glace” for Ice Cream. We say “Crème glacée” and really don’t understand why frenchmen say “Glace”. Glace just means “ice”, damnit. Maybe it’s because french people don’t experiment winter the way we canadians do and don’t need to have a word for Ice that simply means “ice” and nothing else. (they also say “glace” for “mirror”. I swear, I’ll never understand ’em.)
So soft serve is just “crème glacée molle” here (soft ice cream, litterally).
Hearing “glace italienne” would make me think of actual italian gelato I guess? ^^
Yup. Like I was saying up there, I just realized reading those strips that I NEVER ordered the stuff in an english speaking environment, and I feel totally weird about the whole thing.
Not going to lie, it annoys the hell out of me that a character can’t show up without the entire comments section screaming “LESBIANS”. It’s almost to the point of fetishization.
Yeah, shipping is fun but we’ve been taking it a bit far lately. It’s like we found out Danny was bisexual and suddenly lost any sense of restraint or logic.
I know this commentariat too well to suggest that we wouldn’t be all “OMG LESBIANS” if Willis weren’t dropping hints that not all is as it seems with Becky and that her secret is quite plausibly an unrequited lesbian crush on Joyce… but the fact remains that that’s what happening. Yesterday’s strip wasn’t quite canon confirmation, but it’s pretty strong support.
And that Joyce is possibly more bicurious than she’s comfortable with – even above and beyond her basic level of discomfort with her sexuality, which is pretty high – and maybe wants to get into Dorothy’s pants has been a plot thread for a while now.
Ever since Culvers opened in town, I have forsaken soft serve for the worship of frozen custard, which is best fresh and only partially frozen. Its like soft serve Wisconsin style.
There is a Culver’s that opened less than a half-mile away from my house, right on the bicycle trail. Guess where I’m going to be spending much of next summer?
Me if I ever see Tony Hawk: Hey you’re Tony Hawk the famous skateboarder. That’s right I recognise you. Won’t be able to get any content out of this will you, you piece of shit
How to read all 28 issues of my Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane run on Marvel Unlimited:
1: The first four issues were published as the miniseries "Mary Jane."
www.marvel.com/comics/serie...
today in #9chickweedlane i learned we have to be shown children learning and relearning what sex is, for Reasons, even though they already clearly know and have prepared nuanced questions about it!
also that Gran must hate, if she's still alive, how Old Juliette is the same but with gray hair
one of my favorite things is when a commenter explodes WHEN DO THESE CHARACTERS GET THERAPY but directed towards a character who canonically has a regular therapist
Hot Toys Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith 1/6 Scale Darth Vader Deluxe ($495) & Standard ($315) is up for preorder at Sideshow - shrsl.com/4wcx6 #ad
If you preorder make sure to hit the Exclusive versions since they include a commemorative plaque and cost the same.
btw if you're one of those rando bluesky weirdos who doesn't know me but sees me in the wild being sarcastic and don't know i'm being sarcastic because you haven't taken like 30 seconds to, like, maybe look at my user profile or something, keep walking, you're not going to score internet points here
Here's an entertaining cite at the bottom of the first page
Josh Gerstein@joshgerstein.bsky.social ⋅ 3d
JUST IN: Milwaukee Judge Hannah Dugan moves to dismiss federal criminal case against her for allegedly helping immigrant hide from ICE. Her lawyers say she's protected by official acts & judicial immunity and 10th Amendment. Doc: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
Where did Hollywood go so wrong? I thought movies were supposed to be an escape from reality, a chance to put your worries aside and not have to think about any underlying ideas or concepts. Well, not anymore.
theonion.com/you-can...
It's not a new argument, of course, but Chesterton dismissed it effectively in 1908.
"You will hear everlastingly... this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man."
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com ⋅ 3d
Hawley dismisses Trump lining his pockets with his memecoin: "Listen, I think nobody believes that Donald Trump can be bought. I mean, what does Donald Trump need more money for?"
preternia @preternia.com ⋅ 2d
Josh Gerstein @joshgerstein.bsky.social ⋅ 3d
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com ⋅ 3d
Pavel
@spavel.bsky.social ⋅ 12d
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*coos* “oh, to be that cone of soft serve, so that Joyce might stick her tongue in me”
If that’s what you’re going for, I think the finger is valid there also.
Joyce has surprisingly good technique.
She’s even remembering to knock on the back door in that last panel there
Not for eating Ice Cream. Seriously, ice cream consumption is an ART. You have to constantly juggle the different surfaces, remembering not to let any of them sit for too long.
or if she was that cone of soft serve so i could put my…….. (smoke Bomb)
Amen to that!
Wow, forbidden-fruit much?
You’d think that Becky would know better than to interrupt Joyce when she’d got her tongue in something sweet.
Adorable
“Ice cream kisses!” to quote Martin & Claire…
*Marten
cutest tongue ever!
Even Joyce’s ICE CREAM tastes are pretty Vanilla.
Vanilla is fucking awesome.
Yeah! And it smells great too. It’s my favorite candle scent.
Wait, vanilla has a *smell*? Weird!
(I have almost no sense of smell. There are all kinds of things I never imagined to have a smell. But I can smell scented candles, and they all smell the same, a disgusting “chemical” smell, much like detergent)
I find vanilla has a gentle, soft scent. The particular candle brand I bought was some sort of baked good so it was pretty authentic.
Smbc has the answer.http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2738
Friend of mine worked for a time with some idiot who made ice cream for his ice creak store, and was simultaneously being mentored in photography by this kinky couple (went over to their house once; they had, like, magnetic poetry about paddling on the refrigerator) and one day, the lady of the kinky photo-people referred to my friend as “vanilla girl.” She was pretty offended when she relayed the story to me, because she thought that she was being made fun of for making ice cream. [Redacted], I says to her I says, “vanilla” is what kinky people call non-kinky sex. This prompted her to indignantly protest that she liked some kinky stuff. She was way more offended when she thought it was literally about ice cream, though.
So, in conclusion, vanilla is actually a delicious flavor and I think it’s association with sexy-time-blandness is ill-deserved.
I have magnetic poetry about paddling on my fridge and nobody ever wanted to take pictures of me doing kinky things. In fact the magnets might be dekinkenizing the whole apartment.
They were taking boring pictures of boring stuff. Y’know, like, nature.
Perhaps it would be best to convince potential sexy-times-associates that you have some nice boring interests as well, and THEN propose butt-whacking-and-related-activities stuff. Yeah, don’t let yer magnets do all the talkin’ fer ya.
…I guess?
Sigh. Fucking magnets, how do they work?
are you a Juggalo
mOtHeRfUcKiNg MaGnEtS, mAn, HoW dO tHeY wOrK?
Actually the term vanilla is not so much about blandness and more about being mainstream popular. Most people like vanilla you can bring it to a party and no one will raise an eyebrow. Not everyone is up for say pistachio, lots of people might hesitant to try it for the first time and of those who do some will just plain not like it.
How would paddling poetry go, out of curiosity?
To be fair, I don’t think it inherently means “blandness.” Think of it as closer to “default”.
What ice cream shall I get? Can’t decide, so I guess I’ll go with that deliciously good ol’ standbye, vanilla.
What sex shall I have? Can’t decide, so I guess I’ll go with that deliciously good ol’ standbye, PIV with foreplay.
You don’t have to hate vanilla to love a chocolate fudge sundae every once in a while.
i love vanilla and it is unfairly maligned as a solo flavor.
Agreed.
I always considered the phrase that it was unadorned. Not that the flavor was bland, but that you were having it plain without any “extras”
That’s pretty much the definition given in Eric Raymond’s Jargon File.
Jargon Files! High five!
But for that analogy to work, strawberry ice cream should consist of vanilla ice cream plus strawberry flavor, and I’m pretty sure that isn’t the case.
Nah, it works fine. You can have kink with or without vanilla elements as well.
Actually a lot of things that aren’t vanilla flavored have vanilla as part of the recipe, so the analogy does work, Nicknack Paddywack.
I’ve made a lot of desserts and, more often than not, the recipe will call for vanilla.
my bf ordered a chocolate shake once, and they were out of vanilla… “Is it okay to use chocolate?” “…yes??”
VVANNILLA HOOKUD
I see what you did there!
Paradoxically, vanillin, like capsaicin, tinyatocin, and resinifertoxin, is a powerful agonists of one of the channels present on heat-sensing neurons in mammals. Unlike the others, it quickly goes from binding to blocking, so that instead of producing a chili-like sensation of heat (or a painful and damaging sensation of agony, as tinyatoxin and resiniferatoxin do,) produces a sense of coolness. In the case of ice-cream, it reinforces the coolness of the ice cream.
Huh. I didn’t know that; thank you for sharing!
THE POWER OF SCIENCE
Becky: I wish that ice cream was my ….
..ice cream. Then I could eat it instead!
That’s what you were going for, right?
Becky’s all like, “I got something you can lick”
I’m sorry, that was just nasty. I don’t know what I was thinking…
People have posted worse ( speaking from experience)
…favorite flavor, Rocky Road, so we could share.
What? That’s not what you were thinking?
You fucking disgust me. Seriously. Why would anyone this that Rocky Road is an acceptable flavor? It’s clearly Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough.
Cappachino Mocha Chunk
Guys… it’s soft serve! You don’t put hard chunks of stuff in there! A good soft serve though deserves prime chocolate coating. Strawberry soft serve with dark chocolate on top is heavenly, let me tell you that. I bet it’s delicious with orange soft serve too…
I love it when you go to a good quality All You Can Eat that has a soft serve dispenser and chocolate mousse, it’s a great combo.
I’ve never seen strawberry soft serve. Only chocolate and
and vanilla. I like chocolate. While vanilla hard packed (let
the jokes begin) is pretty good, vanilla soft serve is fairly
bland to me. Chocolate forever!!!
Go to a Boardwalk in New Jersey during the summer and get Kohr’s. It’s soft serve frozen custard, and they have like 3 dozen different flavors at the good ones. *drools at thought of cookies and cream*
Any boardwalk? Their web site only mentions five locations, in Seaside Heights, Seaside Park, and Point Pleasant. No mention of Long Branch or Belmar.
If you are instead in western Upstate NY, get Abbott’s, same thing.
I remember this one place where the soft serve dispenser had vanilla, chocolate & caramel and you can even have all three coming out of one nozzle, it was great.
Never!
dangit, now I miss TCBY
“I love Rocky Road”, by Weird Al Yankovic
So weren’t you going to buy a half-gallon, baby?
Come and have a triple-scoop with me!
Mocha Okra Cola with Lime Peel and a Barbeque Ribbon
…Strawberry Cheesecake because it’s awesome.
Good ol’ Soft serve. He’ll never let you down.
Soft Serve Soothes the Savage JoySe. (sic – sorry, had to keep the alliteration going)
Think her tongue might be stuck.
The drawbacks of making ice-cream with liquid nitrogen.
There is, in fact, a place that does that in Oakland, CA.
Stuck?
Stuck!
Stuuuuucckk!!!
It is Christmas time soon…
That was my first thought when I read this page.
I love how concerned she looks that Becky would even ask such a question. “Y… you see the ice cream, right? How many fingers am I holding up?”
“Have you ever been sad and eaten ice cream? NO. Cuz that’s impossible.”
“I mean, come on Becky. Open your eyes.
“Cant talk now, too busy practicing cunnilingus”
…I said before being ejected from the SAT exam
I’m sure it will taste just the same too.
…said my classmates before being kicked out of kindergarden.
…I said before getting booted from the Job Interview. In reality, I was killing spiders.
I feel bad for feeling this but I kind of want Walky to end it with Dorothy because he DOES love her. Just enough to know he doesn’t want to go any deeper.
I dunno, couldn’t he be equally likely to be avoiding admitting to himself the relationship has grown deeper than “just a funsies”?
Do you think Dorothy will change her mind and decide she likes it here?
The more likely scenario is that Yale doesn’t accept her transfer application,
making it a moot point.
Or Yale ceases to exist spontaneously in the Great College Disappearance of [Sliding Time Scale Year]
I don’t know, I am really rooting for the girl to get some of her dreams come true. I mean realistically, with everything she seems to be doing and if she gets perfect grades, some great college, if not Yale, is bound to accept her at some point.
I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but a fun trivia fact that may or may not come up at some point: Yale does not accept transfer students.
http://admissions.yale.edu/faq/transfer-program
I hope not. Willis has explicitly called out the normalization of women in popular culture in a negative light — go back to the Women’s Studies class where Mike humiliated Dorothy.
There are a couple of better solutions: (a) Walky could follow Dorothy to Yale. (Remember, he gets great grades, too.) (b) They could try to set up a long-distance relationship.
But those are what Dorothy thinks are the things she doesn’t like about Danny.
I’d forgotten about that — but it only reinforces my sense that Willis is signaling that we have a forthcoming conflict about this. After all, staying because of Walky would be the exact thing that Dorothy doesn’t like Danny.
And (b) is exactly what Danny could have done if he weren’t a clingy, dependent, boyfriend.
No, what Dorothy didn’t like about Danny is his assumption that if he just showed enough devotion she might give up on her dreams in order to be with him.
You forget that he also offered to throw his degree to be with her.
Wasn’t a long-distance relationship with Danny not going to happen because it was Danny, though? Like, he said he’d follow her and just find a different college close to her?
Walky isn’t Danny, so the options aren’t necessarily the same.
@JWLM Dotty wasn’t Mike’s actual target, Walky was.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/03-the-first-step-towards-recovery/target/
Fair enough: Mike was being sadistic towards Walky, rather than Dorothy. He managed to splatter her either way — and she’s the one who asked that he be ejected from the classroom
Yeah, I kinda want to see Walky get serious and get into Yale too. Current evidence suggests he could totally swing it. But I don’t know that we will ever get to that point in comic. I hope Willis at least eventually ends with a postscript telling what happens with everyone.
Feeling bad for wanting two people who love each other to be together? >_>
Yep, here comes the bomb that breaks the closet door.
It all started when Becky asked if she could have a lick…
But somehow not a refrigerator.
We’re saving the refrigerator explosion for Joyce so it can go along with the first time she swears, just like in my prediction
Not every character is —
actually who am I kidding this is a David Willis comic strip, every character is gay
…don’t forget every commenter.
Indeed! Reading this comic often makes me quite gay!
… … …
Um… we are using the admittedly somewhat archaic at this point definition of “happy,” right?
Except Walky. And Joe. And Sal. And a bunch of other characters. But yeah, basically all of them, for sure.
And Billie, Ruth and Danny (they are bi, not gay). And Carla (though if she is like UC, she is homoromantic. But not homosexual)
If aliens come to earth, the thing that will baffle them the most is that our culture has both war and ice cream.
You’d think that as soon as ice cream was invented, we’d have all thrown down our weapons, joined hands in brotherhood to celebrate this milestone, redirected our wealth and labor resources to producing as much of the heavenly dessert as possible, and then all died of cholesterol poisoning within five years.
because the war fiends subsist entirely on meat and potatoes
[and MREs]
[[and being told that they should be PROUD to work hundred-hour weeks for a penny a day like the HARD-WORKING [chumps] THEY ARE]]
It’s mostly because of lactose intellorance I bet.
Indeed. And don’t forget that among non-Caucasians, adult lactose intolerance is the norm, not the exception… http://cdn.foodbeast.com.s3.amazonaws.com/content/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Global-Lactose-Intolerance.png
FWIW, lactose intolerance among ‘anglos’ here in North America is anomalously high, particularly when compared to the rates in Britain or Germany. My guess is that arises from the fact that most of us have rather more cosmopolitan ancestries than we might realize. (http://milk.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=000661)
Don’t tell the Klan, but a lot of them are probably not “pure white”…
Haha cute
That’s a stupid question the answer is Ice cream, I’m doing Ice cream better .
Joyce begins practising for the million dicks she’s got lined up.
Shouldn’t she have gotten a hot dog then?
Gotta start soft
Just like dicks!
Well, you’re supposed to BITE into a hot dog… so it’s not the best for that kind of practice.
Yet some people are into that its weird.
Joyce Performs a Snaps and Sucks a Million Dicks
She has a million ducks?
Kinky.
After the cost of purchasing all those typewriters, ribbons, and blank paper, not everyone can also afford to feed and shelter a million monkeys. Some of us have to make do with lesser creatures.
Plain vanilla. Because anything else including toppings would be decadent.
You’re not supposed to put ANYTHING on good ice cream! and they’re called SPRINKLES! Not Jimmies you fools!
Of course, no toppings, too decadent, but why is she not separating the ice cream from the cone and eating it with a spoon? WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH JOYCE!?
I imagine that Joyce is able to view the cone as a delivery system, such a s a plate, that just happened to be edible afterwards. (Assuming, that it, that she doesn’t just wastefully toss the cone when done.) But yes, things such as sprinkles, fudge, nuts, whipped cream, cherries, or what have you… I think Joyce would freak out at the difficulty or impossibility of separating them all!
I wonder what she would feel about hard ice cream flavors that have chunks in them, such as mint chocolate chip. Would she see that as one item and happily eat it? Or would the compulsion to pull out the chocolate chunks first and eat them separately overwhelm her?
It’s not like they’re that tricky to pry out and nom separately, barring crumbly stuff like Oreos.
Ah, but even pulling them out, there’s bound to be a tiny bit of ice cream residue left on them. I guess it depends on how anal Joyce is about getting the food separated.
I imagine Joyce will eat every bit of the soft-serve before biting into the cone. That is her way.
Just like separating pizza, it’s not the church’s doctrine, just hers.
Any takers on how long it will take before someone alters what Joyce is licking? Not very long I would assume.
Mmm, ice cream and possible we’re-all-hoping lady lovin’ reveals. Best options there.
I think that’s chocolate/vanilla swirl there, at lest that is what it looks like on my monitor…
No, that’s straight vanilla. The darker part is shadowing, like on Joyce’s forearm.
I HATE it when I’m trying have a spiritual experience with my favorite food and someone thinks that this is an appropriate time to talk, and etiquette prevents me from yelling, “Leave me alone! This pizza is at the perfect temperature!”
” I’m enjoying my fucking root beer damnit don’t bother me ! …it OK my love they’re gone.
I had a spiritual experience with ice cream once. My favorite flavor of Ben & Jerry’s growing up was White Russian, but they discontinued it in the mid-90’s. A year or two back, my girlfriend and I were visiting their factory in Vermont. I had planned to get a sundae at the ice cream shop they have there… and then I saw that, for their factory shop, they’d made a batch of White Russian!
I was like, “Forget the sundae! I am just getting a dish of that, pure and without distractions!” And I savored every bite. And apparently the bliss and enjoyment on my face was enough to make my girlfriend jealous. (Not jealous in the, “I wish my ice cream was that good!” way. Jealous in the, “Hey, ice cream! Back off my man!” way.)
Also, since we had stopped at the flavor graveyard on the way in so I could pay my respects to two dearly departed flavors (the aforementioned White Russian, and Vermonty Python), this thought occurred to me as I was eating, between bliss-filled bites:
“Hold on, we just visited this flavor’s grave. Yet here it is, right in front of me… Aaaaahhhh! Zombie ice cream!”
Fortunately, the way to escape zombie ice cream is to eat it all.
I was born too late to enjoy either of those flavors. What were they like? I may have to make a pilgrimage out to their factory…
Well, White Russian was basically like an extra rich and creamy coffee flavor. (Funny, I hate coffee as its own thing, but love it as an ice cream flavor!)
Vermonty Python, I actually still have an empty pint of that I cleaned and saved, so I can actually tell you the official description of the flavor: “Coffee Liqueur Ice Cream with a Chocolate Cookie Crumb Swirl & Fudge Cows.” The fudge cows were exactly what it sounds like: little fudge candy pieces shaped like cows.
My empty Vermonty Python pint sits on a shelf next to the unopened can of Spam that my folks got me when they went to see Spamalot on Broadway. I’d have rather they bought me an extra ticket and brought me along… but I suppose the Spam was a halfway decent consolation prize. Still need to see Spamalot one of these days, but I really wish I could have while Tim Curry was still in it!
Bah, the best flavor ever was Wavy Gravy. I still miss that stuff.
Deli and Grill? Chili and Grill? What kind of li goes with a grill?
Deli and Grill.
Hooray for continuity! And thank you for assuaging my obsessively compulsively disorderly problem with parallax.
Well.
Revisiting that shifted my mood away from “Yay, ice cream!” just a bit. And I just cleaned out my remaining stockpile…
Sorry about that; it’s just that when I thumbed through my copy of DoA #3 and this was the first strip I found that showed the dining area background in question.
Hello, ice cream, my old friend,
I’ve come to lap you up again!
Sounds of SILENCE YOU FOOL IT’S ICE CREAM TIME
Looks like art shading on the ice cream. Joyce not adventurous enough for swill cone.
Okay, so don’t talk. How in heck hard is to shake your head?
Agg editing….that’s ‘swirl’ cone.
Someone needs to invent a swill cone now. New gruel-flavor soft serve, coming soon to a gulag near you!
You know gruel is just a thin oatmeal, right.
And why is Becky apologizing for Walky? Not her place, nor problem.
Just asking?
It’s an empathetic apology, not an apology on behalf of Walky, lol.
Yeah, it’s more of a “I’m sorry that happened” kind of sorry.
It could be because she was kinda making fun of Joyce by going along with Walky’s humor…
“Soooo…ya like licking things huh?”
I drew a hot and heavy picture of Joyce and Becky in bed.
CHECK IT.
Wh… why do this thing?
(Its really well drawn btw)
That’s just the kind of man I am!
Bait, And, Switch. Nicely done.
arg!
ARgh, why would you bring up my hopes like that!
Actually, that is a different webcomic.
Not… Not what I was expecting. Hilarious! But… unexpected!
Thats very well drawn!
D:
Someone icon that first panel.
Right now.
“Now lick me like that”
“What?”
“What?”
Oh no her tongue is frozen!
The ice cream froze to her face! Just like a puppy would!
“You keep working that ice cream. Don’t mind me, I’m just gonna grab my camera real quick.”
Seriously though, I still don’t think either of them are gay.
I agree. Probably there’s a story behind the “I know what you mean,” but I’m not sure it’s Joyce.
I have a new ship.
Joyce x Soft Serve OTP
*types in lascivious comment about Joyce’s tongue, then wisely deletes it before posting*
*types out witty response, then foolishly deleted it out of spite and also I’m lying*
I typed out a normal response in an attempt to be funny. Laugh.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lfiTebewnc
Posts an obscure reference that nobody gets. Feels sad.
The punchline was food.
>Americanhumor
This is probably one of the few times a food joke has made me proud to be an Amurican.
America can be weird about a lot of things, but I think people of all nationalities can learn and benefit from the fast-acting, calming, and healing properties of the occasional soft-serve.
Can’t you see I’m holding my tongue against this cone? Can’t you see the phallic imagery here?
Phallic things shouldn’t be soft things.
Not for very long, anyway.
For certain phallic things, soft is the usual and desirable state; being hard for extended periods would be inconvenient or even dangerous.
If you think a frosty cone and a penis have similar shapes you should probably see a doctor.
…I want Dairy Queen….
Aww… We have to wait nineteen hours until Becky makes out with Joyce…
Soft serve is not ice-cream!
It is unworthy of the title!
AAAAAARGHHH!
And Margaret Thatcher helped to invent it.
I get up at Ass ‘o-clock in the morning, and the comment section has already formed into its own self-regulating ecosystem. What gives? Is there something I’m missing?
No matter what time you wake up, that’s when tons of other people are going to bed.
You’re missing 12:05 am
In germany it’s 6:00 AM when the new comic is released, just in time for me
9PM here. I catch it sometimes, and get the warm fuzzy feeling of being among the first 50 commenters. Last night, though, I was catching up on frivolesque after it got linked a couple days ago.
~~
Is it just me or does the way it’s drawn make it look like Joyce’s tongue is stuck to the icecream like it was an freezing metal pole?
The pointing gesture only reinforces this for me.
Theres actually research done that concludes that people are happier and calmer after eating sugar. At an ethics and positive psychology seminar the speaker recomended keeping chocolate in your desk to reduce stress and ultimately getting burnt out.
In my experience, the many negative effects of chocolate far outweigh the benefits. But then again, when I eat chocolate, I tend to overdo it. A lot.
I think it’s just better to have a bunch of organic bananas handy.
http://i0.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/006/759/both.png
I need to have more faith in the power of ice cream! My browser took like half a minute or so to load the lower half of the comic, so all I could see was the dialogue, and I assumed it was a comic of sads…Joyce standing off somewhere looking depressed first panel, then starting to cry silently third panel, you know, that kind of thing.
I was super pleased to be able to put my sads away, unused, when I saw the rest of the comic! Truly, I should have known better!
a little fun
http://ryanbalis.tumblr.com/image/103645487605
Joe seems very fascinated by Joyce’s eating of ice cream.
I had never heard the words “soft serve” before today!
You learn new things everyday it seems. DoA is super educational.
So what do they call the ice-cream that they dispense from a machine into a cone in Canada then?
Soft-serve.
They even had a type of store bought ice-cream that stayed soft called soft-serve up here. OmegaDez just lives under a rock, I guess.
Nah, OmegaDez is just french speaking.
I’m totally(?) bilingual, so it really feels strange to realize how I, in my long life, never found myself ordering “soft ice cream” in an english-speaking setting and thus never had a reason to learn how it was actually called.
It feels really weird too considering how basic it is. (and how much I love the stuff)
If you come down to Vermont, we don’t even call it “soft serve” here. It’s a creemee. I think that’s unique to Vermont.
I love Vermont. I drive through it every time I go to the US, and I’m always so happy to remember how low the prices are in the US. Granted, it’s not specific to Vermont, but it’s always where I remember it.
I think this has more to do with Dez being Quebecois. I’m pretty familiar with the term, but Quebec has its own terms for things.
Maybe they use the French term, “glace italienne” (even though there is nothing Italian about it at all)
Haha. You would NEVER hear a Quebecois say “Glace” for Ice Cream. We say “Crème glacée” and really don’t understand why frenchmen say “Glace”. Glace just means “ice”, damnit. Maybe it’s because french people don’t experiment winter the way we canadians do and don’t need to have a word for Ice that simply means “ice” and nothing else. (they also say “glace” for “mirror”. I swear, I’ll never understand ’em.)
So soft serve is just “crème glacée molle” here (soft ice cream, litterally).
Hearing “glace italienne” would make me think of actual italian gelato I guess? ^^
Could just be about context. If someone offers you some ice I wouldn’t assume they were talking about a frozen puddle or something.
I’m from Quebec and I would use “Glace” but only to mess with people.
Well, that certainly makes more sense.
Maybe somebody in France thought it resembled gelato (which usually is on the soft side) and the term just stuck.
Yup. Like I was saying up there, I just realized reading those strips that I NEVER ordered the stuff in an english speaking environment, and I feel totally weird about the whole thing.
Same old Joyce
Not going to lie, it annoys the hell out of me that a character can’t show up without the entire comments section screaming “LESBIANS”. It’s almost to the point of fetishization.
“Almost”?
Are you new to the internets? XD
Also, it’s so funny reading your comments while noticing your avatar is Joyce.
Yeah, shipping is fun but we’ve been taking it a bit far lately. It’s like we found out Danny was bisexual and suddenly lost any sense of restraint or logic.
I know this commentariat too well to suggest that we wouldn’t be all “OMG LESBIANS” if Willis weren’t dropping hints that not all is as it seems with Becky and that her secret is quite plausibly an unrequited lesbian crush on Joyce… but the fact remains that that’s what happening. Yesterday’s strip wasn’t quite canon confirmation, but it’s pretty strong support.
And that Joyce is possibly more bicurious than she’s comfortable with – even above and beyond her basic level of discomfort with her sexuality, which is pretty high – and maybe wants to get into Dorothy’s pants has been a plot thread for a while now.
You got a point. It get a bit uncomfortable at times.
“I have other attributes” – Leslie Beans
That’s not actually her tongue. It’s a huge straw connected to the Plane of Ice Cream.
Imagine if it wasn’t Joyce licking the soft serve but instead it was the soft serve licking Joyce.
And when you gaze long into the soft serve, the soft serve also gazes into you.
What is best in life? To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their soft serve
*Suggestively, to icecream* Helllooooo
Adorable.
So when is Becky going to reveal her unrequited crush on Joyce?
But Joyce is one ice cream headache away from being even worse off.
The paradox of soft serve.
Looks like her tongue is stuck on the ice cream
Ever since Culvers opened in town, I have forsaken soft serve for the worship of frozen custard, which is best fresh and only partially frozen. Its like soft serve Wisconsin style.
There is a Culver’s that opened less than a half-mile away from my house, right on the bicycle trail. Guess where I’m going to be spending much of next summer?
My favourite coffee mug isn’t mine, but i claim it for myself whenever I visit the friend who owns it. It reads:
“Money doesn’t buy happiness…
…but it buys ice cream, which is basically the same thing.”