A depressed, portly, hirsute anime fan stumbles through life in the ever-pursuit of chicken nuggets and other life-shortening indulgences.
Between Failures
Jackie Wohlenhaus
The low stakes adventures of an assorted group of 20 somethings trapped in the declining years of American retail. They are naughty and say lots of swears.
Girl Genius
Phil Foglio, Kaja Foglio
In a time when the Industrial Revolution has become an all-out war, Mad Science rules the World...with mixed success.
Nerf Now!!
Josué Pereira
A cute webcomic about fanservice, video games, and... love. Mostly video games, though.
The Witch Door
Anni K.
Katariina Lehto discovers her neighbor is a witch called Jousia Muotka. Jousia introduces Katariina to the strange people and places beyond the witch door...
Jailbird
Charlie Davis
An all-ages comic about a recently escaped prisoner's struggle to understand the outside world, and vice-versa. Also, a magic cape!
Demon's Mirror
Harry Bogosian
Based loosely off of "The Snow Queen", a story by Hans Christian Andersen, we see things take a different turn as the demons become central characters, and the side characters stick around. Yup, that's the only differences. Enjoy!
Sufficiently Remarkable
Maki Naro
Two young women living in Brooklyn discover that you're always coming of age.
Cut Time
Juby
Rel and her trusty avian friend Fugue are on a quest to save a world that's lost track of time. Follow them and their new recruits, in a story written with help from the stars.
Lighter Than Heir
Melissa Albino
A young Volant woman joins the military in an effort to upstage her war-hero father.
Sam & Fuzzy
Sam Logan
Troubled by gangster rodents, lovesick vampire stalkers, or confused ninja assassins? Don't panic! Sam and Fuzzy are here to help. (For a reasonable fee.)
The Automan's Daughter
Mike Stamm
Aisha Osman and her uncle Siddig outwit bikers, spies and kidnappers while gearing up for a showdown with the formidable Widowmaker mecha.
El Goonish Shive
Dan Shive
WARNING: This comic often ignores the Laws of Physics
Kochab
Sarah Webb
A YA F/F fantasy comic about Sonya, a lost skier trying to survive a snowy wilderness and find her way back to her village; and Kyra - a fire spirit trying to fix the home that she let fall apart around her.
Hazy London
Scotty
A story about messy relationships. From friendly foes to crazy families. Nothing is black and white, just full of color. But, all colors can get a little hazy...
Godslave
Meaghan Carter
Edith has been thrown into the dangerous world of modern-day Egyptian mythology. Fighting monsters and dealing with family drama of godly proportions.
Atomic Robo
Brian Clevinger, Scott Wegener
The robot punches monsters and bad robots and one time he was a cowboy.
Devil's Candy
Rem, Bikkuri
A lush fantasy about boy genius Kazu Decker, the girl he constructed for his 9th grade science project, and the world of devils and monsters they live in.
Starhammer
J.N. Monk, Harry Bogosian
A teen girl inherits a powerful alien artifact and proceeds to make a series of increasingly poor decisions
Go Get a Roomie
Clover
Experience the queer journey of an upbeat hippie and the friendships she makes along the way! A tale of self-discovery and love of many forms.
Monster Pulse
Magnolia Porter Siddell
Four kids run afoul of a creepy secret organization's experiments, which turn their body parts into fighting monsters. Part sentimental coming-of-age story, part monster-training shonen manga, with just a bit of sci-fi body horror.
Real Science Adventures
Brian Clevinger
Spin off stories and other adventures from the world of Atomic Robo!
Love Not Found
Gina Biggs
Abeille is on a quest to find someone who wants to do it the old-fashioned way in a time when touching has become outdated.
Wilde Life
Pascalle Lepas
Oscar decided to rent an old haunted house, and that's when things got weird...
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.
Astral Aves
Moon Cabal
A fantasy coming-of-age following the adventures of Astra The Black and friends, as they navigate the mysterious world around them. It's politics, adventure, and the supernatural; oh, and crazy hair.
Caramel Corn
Potchimew
Sarah is the only human left in a world full of mythical creatures and monsters. All she wants to do is live a quiet life, but everything changes when she meets her guardian angel, Jacob.
Cyanide & Happiness
Explosm
Satire, dark humor and surreal humor.
Widdershins
Kate Ashwin
A series of light-hearted Victorian-era adventure stories featuring grumpy bounty hunters, accidental thiefkings, and more, in England's magical capital city Widdershins!
The Sanity Circus
Windy
Magic, monsters and mysteries await in the odd city of Sanity. It's up to Attley and a colorful group of characters to find out just what is going on.
The End
August Brown, Cory Brown
Two aliens crash a sci-fi convention and accidentally take seven nerds on an adventure that spans the galaxy!
Kiwi Blitz
Mary Cagle (Cube Watermelon)
Steffi thinks she can use her kiwi mech to become a superhero. This idea turns out to be very stupid.
Goodbye to Halos
Valerie Halla
Cuddles, gay flirting, weird feelings, and magic-fueled knife fights - it's an adventure across the queer multiverse!
Empowered
Adam Warren
A sexy superhero comedy (except when it isn't) about the never-ending struggles of a plucky but very unlucky young superheroine.
Monsterkind
Taylor C
Wallace Foster, a young, bright-eyed human social worker, has his entire world view rocked when he's suddenly relocated into a city primarily inhabited by monsters.
Stand Still, Stay Silent
Minna Sundberg
A few generations after the end of the world, a small, poorly financed research crew is sent out to rediscover whatever is left of the forbidden old world in the south.
The Lonely Vincent Bellingham
Diana Huh
Vincent is an unkind man looking to disappear, and finds himself in the care of a vampire and her two wicked children.
Alice and the Nightmare
Misha Krivanek
Alice finally attends University to learn to collect the dreams of humans, meet new friends, and deal with a pesky reflection along the way.
Star Trip
Gisele Weaver
Jas is a human taken from her home planet on a trip across the galaxy she will never forget.
Star Impact
Jack McGee
A young, energetic woman fights her way up in the world of super-powered boxing after discovering the mighty gloves of her missing idol!
Paranatural
Zack Morrison
Superpowered middle schoolers fight evil spirits in their rural hometown. Come for the jokes, stay for the cast, the creatures, and the mystery that ties them all together!
Anarchy Dreamers
Emily Ree
Sparkly undead kids fight society's worst Nightmares in this pastel-punk urban fantasy coming-of-age!
Sister Claire
Yamino
In the troubled aftermath of a great war between Witches and her fellow Nuns, novice Sister Claire just wants a purpose.
Fireweeds Moors
Gato Iberico
A cat-headed man and a girl with a sandwich hankering accidentally end up in a myth-infused country where magic chalices are a really big thing.
Knights Errant
J.R. Doyle
Wilfrid's humble quest for revenge becomes bigger and bloodier by the day.
Tigress Queen
Allison Shaw
A barbarian warlord and a pampered prince try to avoid a marriage alliance that could end decades of violence.
Never Satisfied
Taylor Robin
Lucy Marlowe, a magician's apprentice, competes against other apprentices for an important, magical, Goverment Job.
[un]Divine
Ayme
A highschool senior thought giving up his soul for a demon was a good idea. It wasn't.
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!
Ghost Junk Sickness
Studio CARTRIDGE, Laura Lee
Two hunters try to survive and end up being pushed to pursue a deadly bounty dubbed "The Ghost".
Cassiopeia Quinn
Gunwild, Psudonym
A cute, pantsless thief is pursued across the stars by a buttoned-up military officer in the spacey, laser-filled future.
Awaken
Koti Saavedra/Flipfloppery
Superpowers, monsters and conspiracies. Piras, the spoiled Dameschi heir, fights to recover his identity after becoming a terrorist!
Wychwood
Varethane
When Tiara's pyrokinesis is finally noticed, she is captured by a magical research organization for study. If she cooperates, she could be helping to save humanity from a dire threat - but can she trust them?
This is Not Fiction
Nicole Mannino
What do you do when the person you're in-love with is an anonymous romance novelist? Get your best friend to hire your worst enemy for help!
Lilith's Word
inkPangur
If you had the power to make any wish come true using just one word, what would you say?
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Great song. “Running Scared” is one of my favorite movies!
“Try not to scrape the third rail, OK? There’s about 600 volts in there. ”
“It’s not the voltage that gets you. It’s the amps.”
“How many amps are there?”
“Enough to push a train!”
“Hablo, Smith and Wesson? You have the right to remain DEAD. Anything you do will be used against you. You have the right to a CORONER. If you cannot afford one, we will appoint a medical examiner for you.”
Of course, in light of headlines over the last few years and a better awareness of police/minority relations – in Chicago, as well as elsewhere, good chunks of it are far more problematic than it seemed to my naive self in the 80s. It’s still witty as hell though. Just that I’m wincing along with laughing.
They scroll down to the comment section. Some of the comments are educational. Others link to link to educational comics. Also, educational animations. They skip the other, more fun-focused comments.
OR you are a cute dinosaur chick falling in love with a rad lesbian on the run from her butthole father, which ends up with a car chase and you biting his face and teaching her about 9000 year old corn.
But what is with her hair? Looks like she spilled something on the top.
Or is she supposed to be a bottle-blonde and she’s in the middle of going back to brunette?
I’m surprised how much testing they have in the first semester of freshmen year. Weekly math quizzes and people studying seriously in about six weeks in?
It’s Sunday afternoon/early evening. THE TIME FOR STUDY, unless you’ve completely lost control of your life and that’s usually…
well actually it can be right about this point of the semester now that I’m remembering *that* October, but that was mostly beginning and I’m pretty sure most college students aren’t the anxiety disaster zone I was in late 2013 and like. all of 2014. We’ve seen enough of Sierra at least to figure she has an actual executive function and no significant signs of an anxiety disorder reaching critical mass.
Anyway it took me like, TWO more months before I reached the point people were calling me and driving up to campus to make sure I was alive that year anyway!
I would always fall into this habit of starting off “Oh this is finally going to be the year/semester/class where I FUNCTION!” and for a while it would work! Homework would be done the night it was assigned! I would consider Planning and Outlining my papers, maybe even write some of it in stages! I WOULDN’T routinely do homework 11 PM the night before at earliest!
And then inevitably I’d fall off the wagon. Something would slip by. I’d try to write a paper and get stuck. Sometimes I’d miss class. Sometimes I’d not have something ready in time for the class it was due in and avoid it for just one day because I’d DEFINITELY have it ready in time for Thursday! Sometimes I’d be so caught up in homework for one course I’d completely forget the other one had it until being confronted with it, like, sometimes the day of. Sometimes I’d open the assignment and just stare in paralyzing fear, particularly when there was a question that threw me off.
And sometimes I’d just procrastinate because I was a legally-adult-developmentally-FUCK-IF-I-KNOW* and time has never been a thing I’ve had a good handle on. And of course if anyone asked if I needed help I’d say no, because I didn’t really I could totally handle this (I could not totally handle this) and if I wasn’t that was my own fault for not bootstrapping myself into pulling all-nighters again because hey, it worked the first two years, eventually my fear of failure would push through the paralyzing anxiety and brain fog and I’d get shit done even though it was clear that fear of failure was no longer a sufficient motivator. And it all piled up until I was avoiding classes so frequently my professors called DSS and my case manager called my mom and she, in fact, drove to campus one Monday night because I wasn’t answering my phone (in that brilliant anxiety logic that if people are calling you repeatedly and you won’t answer, eventually they’ll give up) and she was, in fact, seriously worried about my life status since even though I’m pretty sure I had left my dorm room to get food, no one had seen me. Not a good day.
And then we had a talk. I emailed my professors assuring them I was in fact alive and asking for an extension on my final assignments. I read through Adam fucking Bede and Tess of the D’Urbervilles in one night each to have enough of my English Lit class material read to write papers on them. I took an F on the one class after trying all break to make up for material my brain just could not grok. I made it through that spring semester with several more flares of threatening agoraphobia, caught myself and dragged myself into the DSS office to ask for help one day after I realized I needed it and had managed to get out to eat, had several breakdowns including one in the office of the professor I was begging to be able to retake a test for because my spiralling anxiety and routine adherence kept me from scheduling it at the testing center (by the way, fudge you to THAT professor who kept asking me if I thought it was ‘fair to my classmates’ I was asking to take this test, with a guaranteed letter grade loss due to delay, while I was sobbing. My classmates didn’t have a poorly-managed anxiety disorder, learning and developmental disabilities simultaneously kicking their asses!) I got a tutor/Papers For Executive Functioning How-To Person that semester. We tried to adjust my medications over the summer to deal with the mounting anxiety.
I took a medical leave of absence fall semester senior year, took one class at the school my mom worked at to stay in some degree of habit once I crawled out of the pit THAT med switch precipitated, spent spring semester taking two classes and writing a thesis and being nonetheless entirely spent (in part due to recovering depression, in part due to undiagnosed vitamin deficiencies), and finally seemed to learn some degree of study skill by that point. Graduated in four years/three and a half because thank goodness for AP credits.** If not then then now, a year and a half after graduating when I’m back at school for paralegal training and seem to be actually handling it at a reasonable pace.
(I really feel bad for Walky and hope he learns in less than five years. It was not fun.)
* Like I hate and resent that “chronologically they’re x age but mentally they’re x years younger” narrative with autistic and neurodivergent people, but at the same time our brains do in fact develop at different rates and it’s not as though your frontal cortex is even done at 20 for the neurotypical, I have no idea what my brain looked like in 2013-2014 but it was not a Functional Adult Brain.
** Yes, I took AP courses and still didn’t have a functional study ability to take to college. It’s complicated.
I believe you. All AP courses do is give you an excuse not to take a course; they’re still high school level. If I had known that, I wiuld have done it with Chemistry, that way I wouldn’t have to waste time and money taking it a third time because I suck at getting papers done (I failed Chem 101 Lab twice because of that!).
Actually, I think I’ve figured out the secret to beating procrastination.
It’s not to stop procrastinating. I’ve determined I don’t have the skill to pull it off.
It’s to procrastinate some MORE.
For me, procrastination is something I am quite thoroughly capable of doing. It is a well-practiced, well-honed skill that I implement effortlessly. So, why not turn the liability into a strength? I figure, whenever I want to procrastinate, I will procrastinate on procrastinating?
That’s right, I can just put off procrastinating until I’m done with whatever I need to do! And THAT is the secret to productivity!
… at least I think it is. I’ll get around to actually trying it one of these days.
Honestly, in my three years in the dorm I barely needed my RAs. One helped me out in the second semester of my freshman year when I got sick and started puking (in my lofted bed) in the middle of the night, in my sophomore year one helped me locate a shovel to dig out my friends car in the winter, and in my junior year my RA was found passed out drunk in the bathroom around a month in and then we got a new one who I barely saw.
But also, during my senior year something like seven RAs from one building were caught drinking in one of their rooms at some sort of RA party, and apparently in the time the university scrambled for their replacements, that building was wild.
I got help from the one telling the asshole partiers next door to quiet down a bit past curfew/sure it’s 11 PM on a Saturday so technically you can but WE CAN LITERALLY HEAR YOUR MUSIC ON THE OPPOSITE SIDE OF THE BUILDING, THROUGH CLOSED DOORS AND GLASS, THIS IS EXCESSIVE, but other than that they were mostly hands-off. Though I think she did check in the day after the Are You Alive debacle but I don’t think Res Life passed on the “please send your RA to check on this student” tip until the day after.
Which considering that was the semester there was in fact a suicide on campus, was kind of jarring.
My year in dorm, my RA was worse than useless – he instigated a lot of the floor hijinks and drama.
His response to my complaint about my roommate’s 3 AM on a week night hour-long phone conversation habit (happened about 4 nights out of 5)? “Lighten up – at least she has someone to talk to.”
Yeaaah.
Eventually wound up going all the way to the Residence Admin building on that front because no, fuck you, a 3AM phone conversation over something that is NOT an emergency is NOT something I should have to put up with more nights than not. She can damn well step outside or schedule the call at a reasonable fucking hour.
Yeah, my experience was super similar, where the RA was too focused on creeping on freshman girls to really even be present on our side of the hall and so all manner of fucked up things ended up occurring with no checks.
Hell, the one time we had an official response to anything it wasn’t the guy being sexiled from his room for two months, the person who moved their gf into the dorm room for the entire year, the drug dealer, my roommate’s weird exorcism thing, or any of that. It was one single party by the drunk who regularly had loud drunken parties in his room because he was literally throwing beer cans out the window at passerbys and that caught the attention of campus security.
And this was at a non-party college. That said, my reaction to the lack of supervision was pretty much Sierra and Mandy’s.
While my attitude was much like Mandy and Sierr’s my four suite mates were very much party animals. Also, racist. If I had a penny for every time I heard them shout *insert racist term for a black person* or *insert racist term for a Jewish person* I probably would have no student debt. And this was just for junior year. Campus security actually got called on them twice, and since the college operated on a “three strikes” rule they were one away from being kicked off campus. Of course, the first RA got kicked for smoking weed with a student (which they procured from another student). And another student actually got expelled for having a gun in his room. This was all at a private college as well, so administration was not happy. But they were busy trying to deal with four sexual assaults that year, so a lot of crap was gotten away with.
Literally all I ever did with my RAs was talk to them when they were on desk duty, to help pass the time. They would occasionally have hallway meetings.
I mean, I heard stories about things that happened, like someone getting fined $500 for pulling the fire alarm, but that’s it.
Sarah: “PLEASE LET ME JOIN YOU GUYS!!!!”
Mandy: “Sorry, this is a no drama zone.”
Sarah: “What do you mean???? I’m no drama, I don’t do dram… oh shit, I have to check on Joyce and maybe have a shouting match with Raidah, I’ll be back in a minute to tell you about my drama free life.”
You know mobs aren’t important if they’re pallet-swapped and the designers couldn’t be bothered to make a new model for them. She’s clearly a dye-m a dozen.
The problem is, the only person who thinks Mary is an authority is Mary, and people she has blackmail on. Everyone else seems to just kind of tune her out, or even outright ignore her entire existence.
Would /you/ want to try and fuck with Joyce right now?
Then again, Mary is the sort of spineless ‘better-than-thou/born-again’ who desperately needs the reality check of a good beat down. Would not be good for Joyce, psychologically, but would remind Mary how to shut the fuck up and keep her opinions to herself like a good entitled, self-righteous asshat,
So the moral of the story is, no, I wouldn’t want to try and fuck with Joyce right now, but then again I’m smarter than Mary. (And am also benefiting from third-person omniscient perspective.)
Though at least if she does take things to Chloe/Chloe inevitably finds out because she Actually Pays Attention To Her Job, she seems aware enough to be “wait aren’t you the girl who was rescued from the shooter last week?”
It’s probably not in her jurisdiction to do anything beyond “okay you can’t live here anymore” and I’m sure she’ll be too swamped to really follow up there, but I can’t imagine her not at least going “you are a clearly homeless teen who was just in the news due to a hate crime, here’s the LGBT helplines.”
I could see her saying, “Here’s a bunch of resources, and I’m going out on a limb and extending the amount of time you’re allowed to visit to give you one more week.”
I thought of that nightmare possibility too, but I’m guessing the administration would much prefer to hire someone who’s not a freshman (as Mary seems to be).
So I’m guessing … Raidah. (Sarah would probably refuse.)
All hell breaks loose without the RA, unless of course, the RA is a factor in the hell. Then the RM prevents all hell from breaking loose.
All hail pudding Jesus, though Willis the Damned, the great and terrible Pornlord may still send her there for three days. Someone must suffer for our viewing pleasure after all.
She probably started off intending to say ‘until she’s recovered enough to come back’ and then realised that a) it’s possible that Ruth might end up needing to take the rest of the semester or more off (or be pressured to by the school), and b) Ruth did actually violate the code of conduct(?) in having a relationship with Billie and there may have to be consequences for that as well.
Sounds to me like she doesn’t want to commit to anything. So from her point of view, Ruth isn’t necessarily out but also the situation is to unstable to say Ruth will be back.
Yup, my take is essentially both of those. She was about to say “until she’s recovered enough to come back”, then realized that might be a long time or might not happen (I suspect that Ruth might end up being given just a warning and some heavy observation for her many violations of the code of conduct, if only because the forces downstairs don’t want to deal with all the extra work of finding a replacement).
ALREADY INTERNET COMMENTATORS HAVE ABANDONED BASIC NETIQUETTE AND ARE TYPING IN ALL CAPS! SOON WE SHALL DESCEND DOWN THE SLIPPERY SLOPE TO LOSS OF PUNCTUATION
When I was in high school, I was in mostly AP classes by my senior year. If one of our teachers called out, what happened was one of the Administrators would pop in, tell us, “Your teacher won’t be here today, please do independent study or form your groups”, then leave us alone, and…we would all form our study groups and work on our assigned reading or exam prep together.
Those classes really prepared me best for how college would be. I don’t think I ever heard of one single actual movie-scene “party” or “rager” being thrown. We were all too tired and stressed out to do anything but sleep or play video games in our off time.
Damn, your classmates formed study groups and actually worked together? Maybe it’s just that half my AP classmates also took IB and were thus running on stress, despair, and the need to pass despite an utterly back-and-soul-crushing workload to stay in the magnet program instead of going back to the schools they were districted in, but they were known among the school body as the worst cheaters among other goofing offs.
I think the Art History elective classmates were pretty good, though. Maybe the ones who chose to take AP classes and not the AP/IB combo were well-adjusted, and not walking corpses.
During my freshman year of high school, my biology teacher was out for a meeting one day and the school forgot to get a sub. We were supposed to be taking notes from the overhead that day, so we just sat there and…took notes. When ever the volume level started to rise up, someone would be like, “Guys, we can talk once we’re done.”
Later in the day (this was second hour) it was found out that a teacher was missing, and when our teacher found out that we had done the work and he hadn’t lost a day of instruction or anything, he was really proud. (I, personally, always thought it was weird that no one told us we should have told the office ourselves, but whatever.)
Oh man, I just realized it’s been weeks since we got a strip that wasn’t either really sad, or really happy, or both. Now I don’t know how to deal with a strip that’s not packed with drama!
WHAT DOES IT MEEAAAN?? What ominous fate does this portend???
Dust settling may be the answer. I’ve noticed Willis usually avoids unrealistic scene cuts. So rather than have everyone walk into the elevator at the health center then instantly appear on the dorm floor, he puts in some unrelated scene while they travel.
And it gives us time to start anticipating when SOMEBODY is going to realize that Becky doesn’t have a place to stay.
It means that shortly there will be a strip with a main character angsting in their bed. While the strains of Komm Susser Tod echo subliminally in the foreshadowing.
It’s a Sunday, she’s still dealing with the fallout of “And I just took two seriously depressed students to the Health Center”, and she almost certainly has a pile of paperwork to deal with that.
Also in my experience the RM offices tend to be in the dorm building themselves if they’re big enough (this one certainly is), and I’m not sure there’s always one on-hours during the weekend. (Certainly they answer if a call comes, but I’m not sure there’s someone in the office.)
Yeah, given her comment about thinking Ruth was the only RA who had their shit together and campuses’ penchants for understaffing, underpaying, and overworking their few staff positions, I can definitely see Chloe as a poor RM in charge of all the floors of the dorm and busy managing the drama of all of the other floors and all the other poorly-functioning RAs, some of whom are learning how to job for the first time.
On the flipside, that may protect Ruth somewhat so long as she recovers relatively quickly to be able to return to her duties in some capacity as the general curve for RAs may be somewhat low, so all of her violations of the code of conduct may just earn her a crapton of observation and a very short leash for fucking up again.
There’s also no indication at this point that Chloe knows how badly Ruth was doing her job. No one’s listening to Mary and no one else seems to be coming forward with “Ruth was violent and abusive” or “Ruth was drunk all the time”. I don’t think anyone but Billie really knows the latter.
Given that, the working assumption might well be that this is a singular lapse and that given support for the depression and some means to handle the relationship, Ruth can go back to doing her previous excellent job.
no one else seems to be coming forward with “Ruth was violent and abusive”
Yeah, there is a good reason for that: Ruth was extremely good at it.
And with that, I mean that she was extremely good at doing it in a way that made it hard to punish her for it. Mainly in the fact that she would not throw the first punch in public. Ever. She would always let the other person (mostly Billie) star the actual physical altercation, so that she could act “in self-defence”.
If anyone had reported her the first dorm meeting, she would in fact have said just that, that Billie attacked her, and she stopped the attacker. And that would carry a lot of weight, especially with an RM that actually thinks you are the only competent one.
Now, one could always argue that she did her best to provoke Billie into attacking; and to be honest, I think she probably did, precisely to get that justification. But even so, the fact still remains that Billie started attacking, and Ruth will milk that for everything it is worth.
And the reaction to this show was not entirely one of horror either. I believe that several of the other residents were in fact quite in awe over how Ruth dealt with what might well have appeared to them to be an entitled, spoiled kid that just tried to punch the R.A. That sort of thing can give off this strange sort of fear mixed with misapplied respect.
The one other person that I can remember seeing her being violent with was Blaine; and again, the witnesses of that episode seemed to have little reason to come forward to this. Again, she did not attack first. And from what the witnesses just heard, it was a major jerk-ass who probably deserved it anyway.
And the only person I can remember Ruth targeting for actual abuse was Billie. Which again was tactically smart, even if it was morally crap. Ruth in fact got to Billie so bad that when Billie tried to make a story out of it, she could not describe it in terms that did not sound absolutely ridiculous to Daisy. So when that did not work out for Billie, she probably figured nobody else would believe her either.
Actually it’s a little surprising that she would announce it this quick after the event. (And a little out of character for Willis to not make us wonder longer. But it does make a good one strip gag.)
She’s probably following up from the earlier events, trying to make sure people know where they can go if they need to so no one feels completely on their own, especially since this floor might be flagged because of the recent traumatic events that have befallen some of the people on the floor.
And so it ends up being a two-fer, because she might not be able to be back up here for a week or more due to all the other work of her other duties and having to check in on the recovery of Ruth.
She’ll likely come up again in an hour with a bunch of copies of a letter to tape to doors or shove under them, informing everyone that she’s the new emergency contact and where to find her. Hopefully, she’s not just trusting Sierra and Mandy to spread the word.
But yeah, she won’t have time to be very hands on.
As far as the eligible part — in my experience on both sides, if an employee with a proven record of good performance is going through a rough patch, any good supervisor will accommodate as much as they can for a reasonable time. Whether or not it’s up to Chloe depends on the workplace. I’m guessing that needing acute care is not going to affect Ruth’s eligibility. But if she’s not able to return to work in a reasonable amount of time….
Yup, given Chloe’s empathetic response and her “until” comment, it looks like she’s partially wanting Ruth to come back to the position and isn’t intending to fire her, which is good for Ruth.
But Ruth may need some intensive work and time off and that might eventually prove too much time for Chloe to handle dealing with this floor on her own. Or some of her other stuff might come out like the abuse and threats towards her charges or the alcoholism that might make Chloe re-evaluate the situation.
Though most anything that comes out in the hospital or in therapy should be confidential. In a college setting that’s often not really the case, even if it should be.
Every employer I’ve had included a clause in their insurance plan that gave up my right to privacy for any treatment paid for by it. And I witnessed employees fired right after seeking psychiatric help.
If there’s anything that Depression-era Hollywood taught us, the last panel should have the two characters facing each other, simultaneously shouting “Lets put on a show!!”
That comment ” I will be RA until, well, until whenever” may be good?
She seemed sympathetic to Ruth’s problems, so maybe this means she’s holding her job open for her?
Also, when Mary attempted to take over the scene out in the hall, Chloe managed to blow Mary off with little effort, she just ignored her. I don’t think Mary is going to find a sympathetic ear in Chloe’s office.
Then again, if Mary comes to her with Becky’s story, that will be hard to ignore that a non-student is living in the dorm.
Ah, but where will Becky be living exactly? This is kind of up in the air right now. I mean, sure, Mary could probably figure it out, but Becky could relocate with very little effort. She has almost no stuff.
There are several possibilities if the Mary problem can be contained. She could stay in Ruth’s room (Billie and Carla have keys) or Billie could stay in Ruth’s room while Becky stays in Billie’s room with Sal.
But I doubt Mary will stop being a pain, so I still think Leslie will be involved in finding a place for Becky. She offered to once.
Maybe this will be an excuse for Becky to finally get her s*** together and actually register with the school she’s been living at and taking classes at for a month instead of squatting illegally in the dorms.
That was my take as well on Ruth possibly being in the clear so long as her recovery is over soon enough to make it so Chloe doesn’t feel overwhelmed and like she desperately needs someone to take over. But if she can be stabilized within a week or two (not better, just no longer under observation and more or less trusted to be able to handle things), she should be good and safe from being thrown to the Sir wolves.
Mary could strike with Becky information, but she’s probably a bit worried at the moment about her blackmail attempt getting out so will probably try and fly under the RM’s radar for a few days until she’s sure Rachel and Grace haven’t ratted her out.
“No RA, no RA, nananananana”
“IDIOTS, there will be an RA”
“But you said…”
“I WILL BE YOUR RA!!!! COME WITH ME AND YOU’LL NEVER HAVE TO STUDY AGAIN!!!”
You know, Scar gets a lot of crap but he’s actually a pretty nice guy to his minions. He basically ends Mufasa’s policy of “banish the hyenas to the worst area of the Pridelands”, with the only real reason that it doesn’t work being a mystically occurring drought.
My freshman year at college our RA didn’t even live in the same building as us. I saw him a grand total of once, and that was because I went and knocked on his door to get him to sign something. And even that took like a week of trying. It was a great year.
What’s genuinely concerning me about Ms. Pudding is that she seems to have thought Ruth was a person who was in any way qualified to be an RA in the first place. Is she some sort of hidden Dolores Umbridge with Ruth as her favorite? The only thing which Ruth ever expressed as an RA was the desire to hurt others so their pain might provide a momentary distraction from her own.
And you know, plenty of minor help and reminders on shit to do. They just weren’t (metaphorically. Or actually) sexy or particularly dramatic, so it wasn’t necessary to do it all the time.
Yes. Take actions from when she was suicidally depressed and could only get out of bed with great effort as the basis for what people do. This is excellent decision making.
Ruth’s suicidal depression is the only time we’ve seen her being an RA because it’s a horrible horrible condition which dominates her life when untreated (her alcoholism certainly didn’t help matters and may be as responsible for her attitude). I love Ruth as a character but that doesn’t mean she should be the RA even if she gets treatment. It’s not an essential part of her character anymore than Buffy working at Fast Food in Seaosn 5 is.
And the name of the comic strongly implies she’d do this sort of thing frequently. We’ve also seen it when she used her standing around offering helpful advice which ended with her fucking with Billie
Whether or not it’s part of her character isn’t really a concern of mine. What is a concern of mine is the idea that she’s never done anything regarding her duties, period.
The point is that said reaction was while she was depressed, so you have no idea how she would act when she’s better.
Not that I have any problem with what she did. Sure, if people actually cared, then she should be there for them. But since no one did, she handled the mandated meeting perfectly–the same way my RAs did it. They would have a fast meeting doing everything on the list and be done.
Her threats of violence are the much bigger issue. Those are not actual symptoms of depression (anger is, but not calculated violence), and are not remotely what she is supposed to be doing. There’s maybe something to say about being a bit intimidating and strict, to encourage people work out their own problems. But never violence.
Pretty much. Even assuming they were basically not ‘actual’ threats against anyone besides Billy (And Blaine), it’s not a healthy way (for her charges) for her to go about doing shit. That shit’s fucked up.
Though given that she had the victim herself in her hall, I /do/ actually agree that a bit more on that meeting was called for. Well, no, not the meeting, with Joyce herself.
Well, no. Just using your lack of supervision to do stuff is… it’s not going to make you Mary. Mary was rather active and /tried/ to hurt people. She succeeded, but it’s also important that she tried. Playing music kinda loud might screw someone over, but where they are now, it could easily not, and, well. It’s not willfully trying to hurt people.
Just came off a high feel comic, I guess we needed a drama-free chaser. At least Mary or Amazigirl aren’t tagged in this comic, cause if anyone gonna bring the drama right now, they seem to be the ones most likely to do so.
It’s possible, but I don’t think it’s likely. Ruth’s relationship with Billie’s out in the open now. If this was over Ruth’s depression then that could conceivably leave her open to return later, but she violated one of the rules of the job.
Of course it depends on how seriously they take that rule about RAs having relationships with students.
If it were a teacher/student relationship, it would definitely be a no-no. But, an RA doesn’t have as much power over a student, so its possible they would just let things slide.
(Of course, the double-whammy of the relationship plus Ruth’s depression might make it a problem.)
A lot depends on how long it takes until they reach ‘Until’. If it’s long enough, I can see a temporary RA being appointed just to keep things moving. Sarah or Raidah are the only obvious candidates at this point although I think Raidah may decline just because she doesn’t want to have to move to Read Hall from wherever she’s currently staying.
I’m thinking that ‘until’ means “Until the doctors come back with some solid assessment of Ruth’s mental and emotional health.” It’s quite possible that the Residence Department may decide that Ruth’s depression makes it dangerous for her to hold such a position as RA simply because she may literally be so unable to function on some days that she simply cannot motivate herself to do even the most essential duties or provide even the most urgently-needed (immediately safety-critical) assistance.
However, I can see a possibility that Ruth’s doctor may recommend that she retain some level of responsibility on the grounds that she needs to feel useful and she needs to have some manner of a paid position to maintain her stability; without it, she may crash even worse than before. In those circumstances, I can see Ruth being retained as nominally RA (and, in fact, doing the job more often than not) but with an ‘assistant’ (in fact, a monitor) who will step in if she has a bad turn and can’t function for a few days.
ANARCHY!!!!! Meh, the first big tests are coming up, so no time.
But beyond that, I’m really heartened by Chloe’s comment and general empathy to Ruth’s situation. Ruth may actually have a job at the end of all this, but have to rapidly adapt her approach as she’ll be under much stricter observation, random checks, and generally more oversight than she’s used to.*
*Not to say that Ruth is at all qualified for said job at the moment, more just the low curve of RAs is working in her favor. As is Chloe being the sort of RM who understands how nasty a disease like depression can be and is sympathetic to it.
That all said, it’s probably got a time limit and that time limit is when it proves too much stress and work for Chloe, or if more of her actions come to light and the forces above her say she needs to be suspended or forced to take a semester off. And that might be more than Ruth can handle.
Ruth might also just complete the self-destruction because she can’t handle worrying about it anymore or the limbo state of her job and tell Chloe to employ someone else for the position.
But she’s definitely in a much better position than she ever hoped she would be when this situation came out.
Yeah, I think there might also be an element of guilt there. And I think she’s going to try and do what she can to support her, even though that might be very little. Which is kinda what you want from a person for whom part of the job is mentoring students.
So the door is left open for Ruth returning. In the real world, I think that the job of RA is such a terrible, thankless job that only the desperate or malicious will take it. Is Chloe so hard up for people that will take this job that she’ll overlook Ruth’s problems?
Or what if Ruth really was one of the better RA’s, and the others are much worse?
So far the only other RA we’ve even heard of is the guys’ RA who apparently doesn’t give a damn as long as his Star Trek marathons aren’t interrupted. That said, knowing some hardcore Trekkies (I’m more of a Trekkie light myself) interrupting said marathons with, say, loud music might actually result in action that makes the theft of femurs look light by comparison.
I’m imagining him barging into the offending students’ room in full costume and administering a couple of headbutts before destroying the stereo with a bat’leth.
Well, when she actually did her job, she seemed to be a competent (if mean) RA, up until she got blackmailed. If she were actually dealing with her drinking and depression, she would probably be much better at it.
While she did run a ‘tight ship’, she also:
– used violence on a student (tossing Billie)
– messed with a student’s property (throwing Joyce’s gloves out the window)
Now, you characterize it as being ‘mean’, but some might say its downright abusive.
There was also the whole saga of “I went into your room, stole your property, and am going to vandalize it until you get me your roommate agreement, even though it’s your roommate who’s the actual hangup here.” Abusive and incompetent.
The sane way to deal with that: emailing Sal and Billie to let them know she needs their roommate agreement ASAP. The insane way: stealing Sal’s personal possessions and leaving a note as to why. Either would have gotten the job done faster.
I still hope Puddinghair goes to Ruth and says, “You have to get better. You were the only person who TERRIFIED these kids. Who made them weep, beg, and drop out of school! WE NEED YOU!”
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btw if you're one of those rando bluesky weirdos who doesn't know me but sees me in the wild being sarcastic and don't know i'm being sarcastic because you haven't taken like 30 seconds to, like, maybe look at my user profile or something, keep walking, you're not going to score internet points here
Here's an entertaining cite at the bottom of the first page
Josh Gerstein@joshgerstein.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
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 ⋅ 2d
Hawley dismisses Trump lining his pockets with his memecoin: "Listen, I think nobody believes that Donald Trump can be bought. I mean, what does Donald Trump need more money for?"
wilbur, savvy enough to know he's in a comic strip but still not a great actor, awkwardly lifts a muffin up into frame so that we, the audience, understand that he has a muffin right now, which is very important narratively, but he's not really selling it well as an organic, human action
confirming that the reason there's been no Galaxy Version female characters in Blokees until now is that they felt they needed to make Round Lady Thighs For Ladies
preternia @preternia.com ⋅ 19h
Josh Gerstein @joshgerstein.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com ⋅ 2d
Pavel
@spavel.bsky.social ⋅ 11d
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But… this is the BEST time to make loads of bad decisions with no one to catch you before you ruin your life FOREVAR!
/did nothing worse in college life than fail to sign in a dude visitor
COLLEGE GIRLS GONE WILDwith educational dedication
“Tonight, let’s not use the cover protectors on our books”
That is going too far. Always Practice Safe Text!
Cover protectors: condoms for textbooks, because we know how they multiply over the years.
On behalf of all college students, I award to you this internet for spreading safe text awareness. Let none of us forget to do our part to control the text population. Only buy used books for school, and new books for enjoyment. Don’t spend 160 dollars on a history book you never open!
woohooo studying ALL NIGHT
“Bring Your Own Books” sounds like my kind of party!
Until someone brings phonebooks to a blanket party.
There must be at least one college girls gone wild movie attempting to fool frat boys into studying.
Young adults making responsible decisions and actively working to better themselves? What the hell is happening to this comic?!
It’s okay, they’re extras. The main cast is still super-messed up.
… except Dorothy. Dorothy’s just weird.
They’re studying but Dorothy isn’t! “Inconceivable.” What’s next? Mary being compassionate and accepting. Maybe the comic has been hijacked!
The strip seems forced, blink twice if you’re kidnapped, Willis
I see some kind of blinking code.
“H-E-L-P-I-V-E-B-E-E-N-T-A-K-E-N-H-O-S-T-A-G-E-B-Y-T-H-E-D-E-P-A-R-T-M-E-N-T-O-F-E-D-U-C-A-T-I-O-N”
Whatever could it mean?
But that’s what they do when they’re being watched.
Not sure if the worst thing I did in college would be making out with my boyfriend or being in the ballroom dancing club.
I went to a very strict fundamentalist college. Either of those could have gotten me expelled.
Ballroom dancing was grounds for expulsion? Why, for not “leaving room for Jesus”?!
Did they give detention to anyone listening to music more edgy than Pat Boone and Up With People?
wow, that’s stricter than where I go. We started allowing dancing in 2009
I, uh, think you may have just broken the first two rules of ballroom dancing club
The worst thing I ever did was in secondary school, not uni. It was jerking it in class and getting away with that shit.
pssht, whatever, got shit to do
That is kinda your whole thing
I AM AN ENDLESS FOUNTAIN OF SHIT
Did you eat sugarfree gummy bears?
Take out the H and you’re still correct!
Whee freedom
I’m free. to bad i am to busy to enjoy it.
*plays Michael McDonald’s “Sweet Freedom” on the hacked Muzak*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewjCsK_icz4 <- "In this neighborhood, a Mercedes is probable cause!"
Great song. “Running Scared” is one of my favorite movies!
“Try not to scrape the third rail, OK? There’s about 600 volts in there. ”
“It’s not the voltage that gets you. It’s the amps.”
“How many amps are there?”
“Enough to push a train!”
Gotta love showing your age when that movie title makes you think of Billy Crystal, Gregory Hines and Jimmy Smits instead of Paul Walker.
“… Why weren’t we on THAT rail?”
“Oh, now you’re going to criticize my driving??”
And, of course, my FAVE Running Scared line:
“You want to come and go as you please – invincible, invulnerable, invisible.”
“Can you do that?”
“Won’t be invisible until 4:30.”
It’s one of those movies with all the best lines.
“Hablo, Smith and Wesson? You have the right to remain DEAD. Anything you do will be used against you. You have the right to a CORONER. If you cannot afford one, we will appoint a medical examiner for you.”
Of course, in light of headlines over the last few years and a better awareness of police/minority relations – in Chicago, as well as elsewhere, good chunks of it are far more problematic than it seemed to my naive self in the 80s. It’s still witty as hell though. Just that I’m wincing along with laughing.
Yea, freedom! But could you keep it down? I’ve got an early class tomorrow. (They really know how to run amuck here.)
This was one of the first tunes I put on a mix tape, off the radio, and later acquired as an mp3.
… my, how thirty years flies.
FREEDOM!
HORRIBLE HORRIBLE FREEDOM!
They can go crazy! They don’t have to wear shoes now!
you never have to wear shoes in college (except when it snows…)
Or in the dining hall.
yeah, that doesn’t change with the RA leaving tho
RAS are there for the people on the further edges of the bell curve.
Those rascals with their studyin’ and their BOOKS!
Way to not live up to this webcomic’s title.
*they both go back to their rooms and “study” with comics inside the books*
**yes, even though no one’s watching them**
A more advanced textbook is tucked inside the comic.
I… I didn’t want the other students to feel inferior!
A graphic novelization of a dissertation is placed inside the more advanced textbook.
A tablet with this very webcomic open is placed inside the graphic novelization of a dissertation.
They scroll down to the comment section. Some of the comments are educational. Others link to link to educational comics. Also, educational animations. They skip the other, more fun-focused comments.
Wat.
They skip the other, more fun-focused comments.
Like the pun chains? Those two sicken me.
It occurred to me there are now Shakespearian graphic novels!
That’s a novel idea, but Shakespeare was pretty graphic already!
The Trope name for this is Reality Ensues.
Man, reality sucks.
Counterpoint: Reality has beer, fireworks, anime, tacos, video games, and Batman the Animated Series.
They are just choosing to ignore these things.
Don’t forget rockets, the ISS, superconductors, cosmic microwave background radiation, gravitational waves, pentaquarks, aaaaaand pornography. And butts. Never forget about butts.
im more of a leg guy myself
but in the defense of butts i suppose i can add this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6mAeipSTvs
Without butts there’d be nowhere for legs to attach!
but without legs, butts wouldnt have anything to support them!
im sorry if this makes you the butt of the joke, but you dont have a leg to stand on!
Isn’t the “standing” joke for this is that without your butt, you wouldn’t have anywhere to sit? (Sorry!)
You’ve seen this week’s “Oglaf”, then?
Counter-counterpoint. Taxes and/or tuition.
They should all dye their hair red to help Becky get lost in the crowd so Chloe never realizes there are too many redheads.
Sadly, Too Many Redheads, the Harry Potter spinoff sitcom about hijinks at the Weasely household, only lasted a single season.
Publicity still.
Ha! Love it!
…distant relatives of my mom?
Actually, with Mandy’s hair dyed blue, Becky makes it add up to the same number of gingers as before.
Her not living on the same floor may help with that.
I can only hope that after that crap Mary pulled before, she won’t be inclined to listen to anything she might try to report
Also, seriously, who would complain about there being too many redheads?
Maybe she’s jealous. Puddinghead has all the powers of a blonde and a brunette… but she can never be a redhead.
(Unless she, like, dyed her hair or something. But who does that?*)
*mandy
Too many redheads. Throw a redhead away
I remember that MASH episode.
“They said my nose was just sprained and that i should stay off of it for a week.”
There, I took care of it
Did Sierra always talk like Shirley the Loon, and I’m just now noticing?
Who like knows? She’s barely had like any speaking lines. I’m thinking like probably not though.
I’ll be convinced when she starts using words like “Grody” and using “or some junk” as her go-to interjection.
She’s a bit too young to have peak valley-speak. Dropping “like” into every other sentence is the last remnant of that, but it’s everywhere.
Back in college seemingly every girl had fallen into this habit. To this day I have no idea why.
She might have picked that up from another show.
SIERRA!….See you again in like three months or something.
And Mandy as well.
That’s literally what college is like and I love it. You’re either living it 80%, 90% wild or you’re…this.
OR you are a cute dinosaur chick falling in love with a rad lesbian on the run from her butthole father, which ends up with a car chase and you biting his face and teaching her about 9000 year old corn.
Did danyone figure out which repurposed character she was? I don’t remember her from any of the older comics.
She’s Chloe, a Wal-mart clerk that appeared for all of two strips towards the end of It’s Walky!
walmart? what walmart? wasn’t it a nondescript corner store?
Possibly, my memory’s off on that one.
Chloe? She was the cashier at the convenience store where Joyce and Walky bought the box of condoms.
Who, Chloe? Yeah, she was the snarky convenience store clerk from near the end of IW!.
Walkyverse Cloe’s [sic] only on-screen appearance. Yeah, I remembered and recognized her from that.
But what is with her hair? Looks like she spilled something on the top.
Or is she supposed to be a bottle-blonde and she’s in the middle of going back to brunette?
It’s established canon that she’s a scoop of ice cream with chocolate poured on top. (Or pudding, but whatever.)
Same. Except, I never really study, so not same, congruent.
Well… this is… sad?
Really playin’ at our heartstrings, there.
Everyone’s experience through college.
Dang you, Willis?
This is an almost eerie level of responsibility from college freshmen.
I’m surprised how much testing they have in the first semester of freshmen year. Weekly math quizzes and people studying seriously in about six weeks in?
…Clearly your college experience was very different from mine.
Ruth, Joyce, and Amber used up all the local drama reserves for the moment. Gotta give it a coupla days to refill before someone else gets into shit.
Why? Ruth isn’t the one that has been making them study up till now.
It’s Sunday afternoon/early evening. THE TIME FOR STUDY, unless you’ve completely lost control of your life and that’s usually…
well actually it can be right about this point of the semester now that I’m remembering *that* October, but that was mostly beginning and I’m pretty sure most college students aren’t the anxiety disaster zone I was in late 2013 and like. all of 2014. We’ve seen enough of Sierra at least to figure she has an actual executive function and no significant signs of an anxiety disorder reaching critical mass.
Anyway it took me like, TWO more months before I reached the point people were calling me and driving up to campus to make sure I was alive that year anyway!
It took me forEver to stop postponing study and homework until the last minute (Sunday evening).
I would always fall into this habit of starting off “Oh this is finally going to be the year/semester/class where I FUNCTION!” and for a while it would work! Homework would be done the night it was assigned! I would consider Planning and Outlining my papers, maybe even write some of it in stages! I WOULDN’T routinely do homework 11 PM the night before at earliest!
And then inevitably I’d fall off the wagon. Something would slip by. I’d try to write a paper and get stuck. Sometimes I’d miss class. Sometimes I’d not have something ready in time for the class it was due in and avoid it for just one day because I’d DEFINITELY have it ready in time for Thursday! Sometimes I’d be so caught up in homework for one course I’d completely forget the other one had it until being confronted with it, like, sometimes the day of. Sometimes I’d open the assignment and just stare in paralyzing fear, particularly when there was a question that threw me off.
And sometimes I’d just procrastinate because I was a legally-adult-developmentally-FUCK-IF-I-KNOW* and time has never been a thing I’ve had a good handle on. And of course if anyone asked if I needed help I’d say no, because I didn’t really I could totally handle this (I could not totally handle this) and if I wasn’t that was my own fault for not bootstrapping myself into pulling all-nighters again because hey, it worked the first two years, eventually my fear of failure would push through the paralyzing anxiety and brain fog and I’d get shit done even though it was clear that fear of failure was no longer a sufficient motivator. And it all piled up until I was avoiding classes so frequently my professors called DSS and my case manager called my mom and she, in fact, drove to campus one Monday night because I wasn’t answering my phone (in that brilliant anxiety logic that if people are calling you repeatedly and you won’t answer, eventually they’ll give up) and she was, in fact, seriously worried about my life status since even though I’m pretty sure I had left my dorm room to get food, no one had seen me. Not a good day.
And then we had a talk. I emailed my professors assuring them I was in fact alive and asking for an extension on my final assignments. I read through Adam fucking Bede and Tess of the D’Urbervilles in one night each to have enough of my English Lit class material read to write papers on them. I took an F on the one class after trying all break to make up for material my brain just could not grok. I made it through that spring semester with several more flares of threatening agoraphobia, caught myself and dragged myself into the DSS office to ask for help one day after I realized I needed it and had managed to get out to eat, had several breakdowns including one in the office of the professor I was begging to be able to retake a test for because my spiralling anxiety and routine adherence kept me from scheduling it at the testing center (by the way, fudge you to THAT professor who kept asking me if I thought it was ‘fair to my classmates’ I was asking to take this test, with a guaranteed letter grade loss due to delay, while I was sobbing. My classmates didn’t have a poorly-managed anxiety disorder, learning and developmental disabilities simultaneously kicking their asses!) I got a tutor/Papers For Executive Functioning How-To Person that semester. We tried to adjust my medications over the summer to deal with the mounting anxiety.
I took a medical leave of absence fall semester senior year, took one class at the school my mom worked at to stay in some degree of habit once I crawled out of the pit THAT med switch precipitated, spent spring semester taking two classes and writing a thesis and being nonetheless entirely spent (in part due to recovering depression, in part due to undiagnosed vitamin deficiencies), and finally seemed to learn some degree of study skill by that point. Graduated in four years/three and a half because thank goodness for AP credits.** If not then then now, a year and a half after graduating when I’m back at school for paralegal training and seem to be actually handling it at a reasonable pace.
(I really feel bad for Walky and hope he learns in less than five years. It was not fun.)
* Like I hate and resent that “chronologically they’re x age but mentally they’re x years younger” narrative with autistic and neurodivergent people, but at the same time our brains do in fact develop at different rates and it’s not as though your frontal cortex is even done at 20 for the neurotypical, I have no idea what my brain looked like in 2013-2014 but it was not a Functional Adult Brain.
** Yes, I took AP courses and still didn’t have a functional study ability to take to college. It’s complicated.
Hagu, if you want one.
older me!
I believe you. All AP courses do is give you an excuse not to take a course; they’re still high school level. If I had known that, I wiuld have done it with Chemistry, that way I wouldn’t have to waste time and money taking it a third time because I suck at getting papers done (I failed Chem 101 Lab twice because of that!).
Actually, I think I’ve figured out the secret to beating procrastination.
It’s not to stop procrastinating. I’ve determined I don’t have the skill to pull it off.
It’s to procrastinate some MORE.
For me, procrastination is something I am quite thoroughly capable of doing. It is a well-practiced, well-honed skill that I implement effortlessly. So, why not turn the liability into a strength? I figure, whenever I want to procrastinate, I will procrastinate on procrastinating?
That’s right, I can just put off procrastinating until I’m done with whatever I need to do! And THAT is the secret to productivity!
… at least I think it is. I’ll get around to actually trying it one of these days.
What else would they be doing?
Finally something that looks like what I actually experienced in college. (Probably because I lived in an engineering learning community, but still.)
Hey, it’s characters who just had their first appearance reposted on It’s Walky! Synergy.
But where’s Guns?
We’re kinda due for someone else to shoot up campus. It’s been a whole year.
NO GUNS EVER.
Hasn’t it only been a week in-comic since the Ross incident?
Yeah, but it’s America. A week without a gun incident is actually a pretty long time.
Nobody has mentioned mid-terms yet.
At this rate we won’t get mid-terms until sometime after the year 2020…
In the yearrrr
2525…
Americans in real life will see a midterm election before the people in this comic see a midterm exam.
I’m sure Dorothy will remind us of them.
What anarchy is this? Studying!? Have they no self-control?
Freedom’s just another word for nuthin’ left to do.
nuthin’
DON’T MEAN NOTHING HUN IF IT AIN’T FREE
Freedom’s just another word for having to do your homework
Pretty much…
Honestly, in my three years in the dorm I barely needed my RAs. One helped me out in the second semester of my freshman year when I got sick and started puking (in my lofted bed) in the middle of the night, in my sophomore year one helped me locate a shovel to dig out my friends car in the winter, and in my junior year my RA was found passed out drunk in the bathroom around a month in and then we got a new one who I barely saw.
But also, during my senior year something like seven RAs from one building were caught drinking in one of their rooms at some sort of RA party, and apparently in the time the university scrambled for their replacements, that building was wild.
“Ruth helped me to find a shovel to….”
For some reason the first end I think of that sentence is NOT “to dig out my friends car”
Would Ruth help you bury a body?
If you let her keep the femurs, sure.
I got help from the one telling the asshole partiers next door to quiet down a bit past curfew/sure it’s 11 PM on a Saturday so technically you can but WE CAN LITERALLY HEAR YOUR MUSIC ON THE OPPOSITE SIDE OF THE BUILDING, THROUGH CLOSED DOORS AND GLASS, THIS IS EXCESSIVE, but other than that they were mostly hands-off. Though I think she did check in the day after the Are You Alive debacle but I don’t think Res Life passed on the “please send your RA to check on this student” tip until the day after.
Which considering that was the semester there was in fact a suicide on campus, was kind of jarring.
My year in dorm, my RA was worse than useless – he instigated a lot of the floor hijinks and drama.
His response to my complaint about my roommate’s 3 AM on a week night hour-long phone conversation habit (happened about 4 nights out of 5)? “Lighten up – at least she has someone to talk to.”
Yeaaah.
Eventually wound up going all the way to the Residence Admin building on that front because no, fuck you, a 3AM phone conversation over something that is NOT an emergency is NOT something I should have to put up with more nights than not. She can damn well step outside or schedule the call at a reasonable fucking hour.
Yeah, my experience was super similar, where the RA was too focused on creeping on freshman girls to really even be present on our side of the hall and so all manner of fucked up things ended up occurring with no checks.
Hell, the one time we had an official response to anything it wasn’t the guy being sexiled from his room for two months, the person who moved their gf into the dorm room for the entire year, the drug dealer, my roommate’s weird exorcism thing, or any of that. It was one single party by the drunk who regularly had loud drunken parties in his room because he was literally throwing beer cans out the window at passerbys and that caught the attention of campus security.
And this was at a non-party college. That said, my reaction to the lack of supervision was pretty much Sierra and Mandy’s.
While my attitude was much like Mandy and Sierr’s my four suite mates were very much party animals. Also, racist. If I had a penny for every time I heard them shout *insert racist term for a black person* or *insert racist term for a Jewish person* I probably would have no student debt. And this was just for junior year. Campus security actually got called on them twice, and since the college operated on a “three strikes” rule they were one away from being kicked off campus. Of course, the first RA got kicked for smoking weed with a student (which they procured from another student). And another student actually got expelled for having a gun in his room. This was all at a private college as well, so administration was not happy. But they were busy trying to deal with four sexual assaults that year, so a lot of crap was gotten away with.
Literally all I ever did with my RAs was talk to them when they were on desk duty, to help pass the time. They would occasionally have hallway meetings.
I mean, I heard stories about things that happened, like someone getting fined $500 for pulling the fire alarm, but that’s it.
And this is why Mandy and Sierra aren’t main characters.
Sarah: “PLEASE LET ME JOIN YOU GUYS!!!!”
Mandy: “Sorry, this is a no drama zone.”
Sarah: “What do you mean???? I’m no drama, I don’t do dram… oh shit, I have to check on Joyce and maybe have a shouting match with Raidah, I’ll be back in a minute to tell you about my drama free life.”
–At least until Willis reveals the scars Sierra is hiding behind her hair.
Palette-swapped Mandy still looks weird.
That’s Player 2 Mandy.
Manduigi!
You know mobs aren’t important if they’re pallet-swapped and the designers couldn’t be bothered to make a new model for them. She’s clearly a dye-m a dozen.
Hopefully Mary doesn’t find out about the lack of an RA too soon, as she’s likely to appoint herself as the new one.
The problem is, the only person who thinks Mary is an authority is Mary, and people she has blackmail on. Everyone else seems to just kind of tune her out, or even outright ignore her entire existence.
And she’s kinda out of people to blackmail.
Except Becky. …. and Joyce.
… and she’s got the RM to go tattle to.
…. but surely that won’t be relevant to the plot at all! It’s not like Becky and Joyce have anything Mary wants.
Would /you/ want to try and fuck with Joyce right now?
Then again, Mary is the sort of spineless ‘better-than-thou/born-again’ who desperately needs the reality check of a good beat down. Would not be good for Joyce, psychologically, but would remind Mary how to shut the fuck up and keep her opinions to herself like a good entitled, self-righteous asshat,
So the moral of the story is, no, I wouldn’t want to try and fuck with Joyce right now, but then again I’m smarter than Mary. (And am also benefiting from third-person omniscient perspective.)
For her sake, I hope she never tries to blackmail Amber.
Though at least if she does take things to Chloe/Chloe inevitably finds out because she Actually Pays Attention To Her Job, she seems aware enough to be “wait aren’t you the girl who was rescued from the shooter last week?”
It’s probably not in her jurisdiction to do anything beyond “okay you can’t live here anymore” and I’m sure she’ll be too swamped to really follow up there, but I can’t imagine her not at least going “you are a clearly homeless teen who was just in the news due to a hate crime, here’s the LGBT helplines.”
I could see her saying, “Here’s a bunch of resources, and I’m going out on a limb and extending the amount of time you’re allowed to visit to give you one more week.”
I thought of that nightmare possibility too, but I’m guessing the administration would much prefer to hire someone who’s not a freshman (as Mary seems to be).
So I’m guessing … Raidah. (Sarah would probably refuse.)
All hell breaks loose without the RA, unless of course, the RA is a factor in the hell. Then the RM prevents all hell from breaking loose.
All hail pudding Jesus, though Willis the Damned, the great and terrible Pornlord may still send her there for three days. Someone must suffer for our viewing pleasure after all.
Questing of Age
The Airship continues to fly through the sky, and begins to pass over a series of mountains.
Suddenly
Hank: Crap!
Joyce: What’s wrong?
Hank: For some reason, I’ve lost control of the airship. You’re going to need to evacuate.
Joyce, Dina, Amber, Ethan, Sarah, Becky, Dorothy and Walky jump out of the ship, while Hank guides it into a snowdrift.
Hank steps out and walks over to them.
Hank: Well, it didn’t explode, but it will take a few days to prepare.
Dorothy: Well at least we brought food, and we can still use the airship for shelter.
Joyce: I’m going to use this time to train.
Becky: I’ll join you.
Dina: I also wish to train.
Everyone goes there separate ways, and Joyce spends her time training with Dina and Becky.
Joyce and Becky throw rocks at each other, trying to evade them.
Joyce and Becky also spend their training, wearing leg weights and climbing up the sides of mountains as quickly as possible.
Meanwhile, Dina trains by tracking and catching small animals, such as snow rabbits. Making them unable to sense her.
Joyce: CREATION OF ADAM!
Joyce attack makes a hole through a mountain.
Becky: Wow.
Joyce: Glad to see I haven’t lost it.
Dorothy walks up to them.
Dorothy: Hey, what are you doing?
Becky: Training, you?
Dorothy: Sparring.
Suddenly Walky comes flying in, Dorothy grabs his ankle and slams him into the snow.
Becky: Oooh fun!
Sarah walks up.
Sarah: I think Hank’s close to being done with the repairs.
Walky gets up and brushes himself off.
Walky: That’s good.
Dorothy looks on at Joyce, who continues to train.
Dorothy: I can’t believe how much she continues to improve.
Becky: We’ve all gotten stronger the last few days, but she takes the cake.
Hank steps out and calls to them.
Hank: Hey, the ship is fixed!
And so they set out again.
Also Jocelyne was there.
I WAS WORRIED
…until what, pudding lady?
She probably started off intending to say ‘until she’s recovered enough to come back’ and then realised that a) it’s possible that Ruth might end up needing to take the rest of the semester or more off (or be pressured to by the school), and b) Ruth did actually violate the code of conduct(?) in having a relationship with Billie and there may have to be consequences for that as well.
Sounds to me like she doesn’t want to commit to anything. So from her point of view, Ruth isn’t necessarily out but also the situation is to unstable to say Ruth will be back.
Yup, my take is essentially both of those. She was about to say “until she’s recovered enough to come back”, then realized that might be a long time or might not happen (I suspect that Ruth might end up being given just a warning and some heavy observation for her many violations of the code of conduct, if only because the forces downstairs don’t want to deal with all the extra work of finding a replacement).
“They may take our R.A., but they will never take… OUR HOMEWORK!!!!”
More’s the pity.
Is it really homework if you don’t go home to do it? Isn’t that dormwork instead?
Meh. I still call my schoolwork homework, even though I do all of it at home (I take online classes).
I wish my roommates back in college had been as responsible and self-disciplined as Mandy and Sierra.
BEHOLD IN HORROR THE GRIM SPECTER OF A LEADERLESS SOCIETY DESCENDING INTO HOBBESIAN ANARCHY!
YOUR MIDTERMS SHALL BE NASTY, BRUTISH, AND SHORT
ALREADY INTERNET COMMENTATORS HAVE ABANDONED BASIC NETIQUETTE AND ARE TYPING IN ALL CAPS! SOON WE SHALL DESCEND DOWN THE SLIPPERY SLOPE TO LOSS OF PUNCTUATION
When I was in high school, I was in mostly AP classes by my senior year. If one of our teachers called out, what happened was one of the Administrators would pop in, tell us, “Your teacher won’t be here today, please do independent study or form your groups”, then leave us alone, and…we would all form our study groups and work on our assigned reading or exam prep together.
Those classes really prepared me best for how college would be. I don’t think I ever heard of one single actual movie-scene “party” or “rager” being thrown. We were all too tired and stressed out to do anything but sleep or play video games in our off time.
Damn, your classmates formed study groups and actually worked together? Maybe it’s just that half my AP classmates also took IB and were thus running on stress, despair, and the need to pass despite an utterly back-and-soul-crushing workload to stay in the magnet program instead of going back to the schools they were districted in, but they were known among the school body as the worst cheaters among other goofing offs.
I think the Art History elective classmates were pretty good, though. Maybe the ones who chose to take AP classes and not the AP/IB combo were well-adjusted, and not walking corpses.
During my freshman year of high school, my biology teacher was out for a meeting one day and the school forgot to get a sub. We were supposed to be taking notes from the overhead that day, so we just sat there and…took notes. When ever the volume level started to rise up, someone would be like, “Guys, we can talk once we’re done.”
Later in the day (this was second hour) it was found out that a teacher was missing, and when our teacher found out that we had done the work and he hadn’t lost a day of instruction or anything, he was really proud. (I, personally, always thought it was weird that no one told us we should have told the office ourselves, but whatever.)
Impressive.
Oh man, I just realized it’s been weeks since we got a strip that wasn’t either really sad, or really happy, or both. Now I don’t know how to deal with a strip that’s not packed with drama!
WHAT DOES IT MEEAAAN?? What ominous fate does this portend???
Sierra has no shoes – that means she is fated to play electric guitar!!!!
…. does not compute.
It was a VERY far fetched reference to rock history.
Paul Mccartney was the only Beatle without shoes on the Abbey Road cover, which was seen by some as a portent about his murder.
He also played electric guitar.
OMG, Sierra’s going to die!!!
Bass, actually. But I do admire that very far fetched reference, which I totally missed but might have gotten if you’d said bass.
I stand corrected!
Paul’s supposed death was a car accident, not a murder.
So what you’re saying is that Sierra is going to be hit by a truck?
…or is she the truck???
No, I’m saying Ruth is Paul.
Thus the Ontario Provincial Police patch he’s wearing on Sgt Pepper.
IT ALL COMES TOGETHER.
For making a joke entirely based on Beatles lore, I really fail my Beatles facts today…
Attempted sexy lesbian suicide wasn’t drama?
I mean, today’s strip. The dust is still settling, of course, but there’s definitely no new drama today.
Dust settling may be the answer. I’ve noticed Willis usually avoids unrealistic scene cuts. So rather than have everyone walk into the elevator at the health center then instantly appear on the dorm floor, he puts in some unrelated scene while they travel.
And it gives us time to start anticipating when SOMEBODY is going to realize that Becky doesn’t have a place to stay.
It means that shortly there will be a strip with a main character angsting in their bed. While the strains of Komm Susser Tod echo subliminally in the foreshadowing.
I mean, we are in a storyline named for the song.
It all returns to nothing…
DORM PARTY!!!
It’s anarchy, maaaan!
Well, sorta low key, responsible kinda anarchy, dude.
But anarchy has to be wild and chaotic! It’s a rule!
Then they’re doing it wrong. “Kids today just don’t know how to anarchy anymore! Why in my day … ZZZZZZZZ”
Hey, sleeping when you’re not supposed to be sleeping is the BEST form of anarchy.
So I’m a *Rebel in PJ’s* ?
(I like that!)
Well that explains who’s taking over the RA position. Question is, will Ruth still be eligible or even wanting to be RA?
Brilliant, decisive management plan there Chloe. “If there’s any problems, I’ll be in my office. Or not.”
Remember, this is the same woman who considered Ruth one of her best R.A.’s
I’ve known several bosses who thought the best employees were just the ones they never saw, (’cause they never got caught).
It’s a Sunday, she’s still dealing with the fallout of “And I just took two seriously depressed students to the Health Center”, and she almost certainly has a pile of paperwork to deal with that.
Also in my experience the RM offices tend to be in the dorm building themselves if they’re big enough (this one certainly is), and I’m not sure there’s always one on-hours during the weekend. (Certainly they answer if a call comes, but I’m not sure there’s someone in the office.)
Yeah, given her comment about thinking Ruth was the only RA who had their shit together and campuses’ penchants for understaffing, underpaying, and overworking their few staff positions, I can definitely see Chloe as a poor RM in charge of all the floors of the dorm and busy managing the drama of all of the other floors and all the other poorly-functioning RAs, some of whom are learning how to job for the first time.
On the flipside, that may protect Ruth somewhat so long as she recovers relatively quickly to be able to return to her duties in some capacity as the general curve for RAs may be somewhat low, so all of her violations of the code of conduct may just earn her a crapton of observation and a very short leash for fucking up again.
There’s also no indication at this point that Chloe knows how badly Ruth was doing her job. No one’s listening to Mary and no one else seems to be coming forward with “Ruth was violent and abusive” or “Ruth was drunk all the time”. I don’t think anyone but Billie really knows the latter.
Given that, the working assumption might well be that this is a singular lapse and that given support for the depression and some means to handle the relationship, Ruth can go back to doing her previous excellent job.
As noted in various other comments on this comic, it is IMO entirely possible that all the other RAs are, in fact, even worse at their alleged job(s).
no one else seems to be coming forward with “Ruth was violent and abusive”
Yeah, there is a good reason for that: Ruth was extremely good at it.
And with that, I mean that she was extremely good at doing it in a way that made it hard to punish her for it. Mainly in the fact that she would not throw the first punch in public. Ever. She would always let the other person (mostly Billie) star the actual physical altercation, so that she could act “in self-defence”.
If anyone had reported her the first dorm meeting, she would in fact have said just that, that Billie attacked her, and she stopped the attacker. And that would carry a lot of weight, especially with an RM that actually thinks you are the only competent one.
Now, one could always argue that she did her best to provoke Billie into attacking; and to be honest, I think she probably did, precisely to get that justification. But even so, the fact still remains that Billie started attacking, and Ruth will milk that for everything it is worth.
And the reaction to this show was not entirely one of horror either. I believe that several of the other residents were in fact quite in awe over how Ruth dealt with what might well have appeared to them to be an entitled, spoiled kid that just tried to punch the R.A. That sort of thing can give off this strange sort of fear mixed with misapplied respect.
The one other person that I can remember seeing her being violent with was Blaine; and again, the witnesses of that episode seemed to have little reason to come forward to this. Again, she did not attack first. And from what the witnesses just heard, it was a major jerk-ass who probably deserved it anyway.
And the only person I can remember Ruth targeting for actual abuse was Billie. Which again was tactically smart, even if it was morally crap. Ruth in fact got to Billie so bad that when Billie tried to make a story out of it, she could not describe it in terms that did not sound absolutely ridiculous to Daisy. So when that did not work out for Billie, she probably figured nobody else would believe her either.
It’s a Sunday night. I kinda doubt that Chloe has someone in her contact list ready to step in on an hour’s notice.
Actually it’s a little surprising that she would announce it this quick after the event. (And a little out of character for Willis to not make us wonder longer. But it does make a good one strip gag.)
She’s probably following up from the earlier events, trying to make sure people know where they can go if they need to so no one feels completely on their own, especially since this floor might be flagged because of the recent traumatic events that have befallen some of the people on the floor.
And so it ends up being a two-fer, because she might not be able to be back up here for a week or more due to all the other work of her other duties and having to check in on the recovery of Ruth.
She’ll likely come up again in an hour with a bunch of copies of a letter to tape to doors or shove under them, informing everyone that she’s the new emergency contact and where to find her. Hopefully, she’s not just trusting Sierra and Mandy to spread the word.
But yeah, she won’t have time to be very hands on.
As far as the eligible part — in my experience on both sides, if an employee with a proven record of good performance is going through a rough patch, any good supervisor will accommodate as much as they can for a reasonable time. Whether or not it’s up to Chloe depends on the workplace. I’m guessing that needing acute care is not going to affect Ruth’s eligibility. But if she’s not able to return to work in a reasonable amount of time….
Yup, given Chloe’s empathetic response and her “until” comment, it looks like she’s partially wanting Ruth to come back to the position and isn’t intending to fire her, which is good for Ruth.
But Ruth may need some intensive work and time off and that might eventually prove too much time for Chloe to handle dealing with this floor on her own. Or some of her other stuff might come out like the abuse and threats towards her charges or the alcoholism that might make Chloe re-evaluate the situation.
Though most anything that comes out in the hospital or in therapy should be confidential. In a college setting that’s often not really the case, even if it should be.
Every employer I’ve had included a clause in their insurance plan that gave up my right to privacy for any treatment paid for by it. And I witnessed employees fired right after seeking psychiatric help.
As you said “it should be”, but often it isn’t.
This day would go down in the annals of Clark Wing as The Day No Femurs Were Lost.
Wild dogs whimper outside campus. “will no one come to feed us?”
SO TRUE
If there’s anything that Depression-era Hollywood taught us, the last panel should have the two characters facing each other, simultaneously shouting “Lets put on a show!!”
That comment ” I will be RA until, well, until whenever” may be good?
She seemed sympathetic to Ruth’s problems, so maybe this means she’s holding her job open for her?
Also, when Mary attempted to take over the scene out in the hall, Chloe managed to blow Mary off with little effort, she just ignored her. I don’t think Mary is going to find a sympathetic ear in Chloe’s office.
Then again, if Mary comes to her with Becky’s story, that will be hard to ignore that a non-student is living in the dorm.
Ah, but where will Becky be living exactly? This is kind of up in the air right now. I mean, sure, Mary could probably figure it out, but Becky could relocate with very little effort. She has almost no stuff.
Yeah, but all the places she could relocate to are on the same floor. Not exactly gonna throw anyone off her trail.
There are several possibilities if the Mary problem can be contained. She could stay in Ruth’s room (Billie and Carla have keys) or Billie could stay in Ruth’s room while Becky stays in Billie’s room with Sal.
But I doubt Mary will stop being a pain, so I still think Leslie will be involved in finding a place for Becky. She offered to once.
Maybe this will be an excuse for Becky to finally get her s*** together and actually register with the school she’s been living at and taking classes at for a month instead of squatting illegally in the dorms.
What do you call trying to find a job and *pay* for all that? And trying to get the documents she needs in order to legally get said job?
She hasn’t exactly been sitting idle for the past week since her dad kidnapped her at gunpoint
“Holding Ruth’s job for her” and “good” only go together if the worst “isn’t” is between them. Ruth is fucking inept, they need to replace her stat.
That was my take as well on Ruth possibly being in the clear so long as her recovery is over soon enough to make it so Chloe doesn’t feel overwhelmed and like she desperately needs someone to take over. But if she can be stabilized within a week or two (not better, just no longer under observation and more or less trusted to be able to handle things), she should be good and safe from being thrown to the Sir wolves.
Mary could strike with Becky information, but she’s probably a bit worried at the moment about her blackmail attempt getting out so will probably try and fly under the RM’s radar for a few days until she’s sure Rachel and Grace haven’t ratted her out.
I like Sierra’s fashion choices.
She knows that one day walking barefoot will be the new fashion.
she is giving short people the opportunity to stare at her navel
As opposed to, what, her knees? I bet it’s her knees.
THE BEE’S KNEES
It must be pretty warm in Indiana in early October.
I live in Minnesota, and I have coworkers who wear shorts well into November, and t-shirts almost year-round
Authority is superfluous, order may prevail without institutionalized hierarchy.
NO GODS NO MASTERS NO RA’S
“No RA, no RA, nananananana”
“IDIOTS, there will be an RA”
“But you said…”
“I WILL BE YOUR RA!!!! COME WITH ME AND YOU’LL NEVER HAVE TO STUDY AGAIN!!!”
You know, Scar gets a lot of crap but he’s actually a pretty nice guy to his minions. He basically ends Mufasa’s policy of “banish the hyenas to the worst area of the Pridelands”, with the only real reason that it doesn’t work being a mystically occurring drought.
My freshman year at college our RA didn’t even live in the same building as us. I saw him a grand total of once, and that was because I went and knocked on his door to get him to sign something. And even that took like a week of trying. It was a great year.
What’s genuinely concerning me about Ms. Pudding is that she seems to have thought Ruth was a person who was in any way qualified to be an RA in the first place. Is she some sort of hidden Dolores Umbridge with Ruth as her favorite? The only thing which Ruth ever expressed as an RA was the desire to hurt others so their pain might provide a momentary distraction from her own.
And you know, plenty of minor help and reminders on shit to do. They just weren’t (metaphorically. Or actually) sexy or particularly dramatic, so it wasn’t necessary to do it all the time.
I’m still caught on the, “There’s a school shooting. I’m going to just blow this off since no one seems to care.”
Yes. Take actions from when she was suicidally depressed and could only get out of bed with great effort as the basis for what people do. This is excellent decision making.
Ruth’s suicidal depression is the only time we’ve seen her being an RA because it’s a horrible horrible condition which dominates her life when untreated (her alcoholism certainly didn’t help matters and may be as responsible for her attitude). I love Ruth as a character but that doesn’t mean she should be the RA even if she gets treatment. It’s not an essential part of her character anymore than Buffy working at Fast Food in Seaosn 5 is.
FLatly untrue. For instance:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-4/02-i-was-a-teenage-churchmouse/rounds/
And the name of the comic strongly implies she’d do this sort of thing frequently. We’ve also seen it when she used her standing around offering helpful advice which ended with her fucking with Billie
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/01-if-the-shoes-split/pie/
Whether or not it’s part of her character isn’t really a concern of mine. What is a concern of mine is the idea that she’s never done anything regarding her duties, period.
The point is that said reaction was while she was depressed, so you have no idea how she would act when she’s better.
Not that I have any problem with what she did. Sure, if people actually cared, then she should be there for them. But since no one did, she handled the mandated meeting perfectly–the same way my RAs did it. They would have a fast meeting doing everything on the list and be done.
Her threats of violence are the much bigger issue. Those are not actual symptoms of depression (anger is, but not calculated violence), and are not remotely what she is supposed to be doing. There’s maybe something to say about being a bit intimidating and strict, to encourage people work out their own problems. But never violence.
Pretty much. Even assuming they were basically not ‘actual’ threats against anyone besides Billy (And Blaine), it’s not a healthy way (for her charges) for her to go about doing shit. That shit’s fucked up.
Though given that she had the victim herself in her hall, I /do/ actually agree that a bit more on that meeting was called for. Well, no, not the meeting, with Joyce herself.
“So, what wild and crazy thing will we do whilst there’s no Ruthless to control us?”
“I’ll think about that later; I’ve got a big essay due on Monday!”
It’s a miracle really that college students actually ever have the opportunity to do anything ‘wild and crazy’!
Yeah, but in this case taking advantage of the situation makes you… well.. Mary
Well, no. Just using your lack of supervision to do stuff is… it’s not going to make you Mary. Mary was rather active and /tried/ to hurt people. She succeeded, but it’s also important that she tried. Playing music kinda loud might screw someone over, but where they are now, it could easily not, and, well. It’s not willfully trying to hurt people.
Just came off a high feel comic, I guess we needed a drama-free chaser. At least Mary or Amazigirl aren’t tagged in this comic, cause if anyone gonna bring the drama right now, they seem to be the ones most likely to do so.
Well, ‘zanny’ drama.
At least turn the music up a little!
Ah, college.
Study or die!
directed by Michael Bay.
Anarchy Rules, OK!
Unless it is just too much effort, in which case we’ll stick with quietly conforming.
Well, that is actually part of anarchism.
…. what are the words “anarchy” and “rules” doing comprising a sentence together? That’s like a direct contradiction.
Chloe’s informing is pretty neutral. Is she leaving it potentially open for Ruth to come back?
It’s possible, but I don’t think it’s likely. Ruth’s relationship with Billie’s out in the open now. If this was over Ruth’s depression then that could conceivably leave her open to return later, but she violated one of the rules of the job.
True I suppose. It can be read negatively in that way then.
Of course it depends on how seriously they take that rule about RAs having relationships with students.
If it were a teacher/student relationship, it would definitely be a no-no. But, an RA doesn’t have as much power over a student, so its possible they would just let things slide.
(Of course, the double-whammy of the relationship plus Ruth’s depression might make it a problem.)
A lot depends on how long it takes until they reach ‘Until’. If it’s long enough, I can see a temporary RA being appointed just to keep things moving. Sarah or Raidah are the only obvious candidates at this point although I think Raidah may decline just because she doesn’t want to have to move to Read Hall from wherever she’s currently staying.
I’m thinking that ‘until’ means “Until the doctors come back with some solid assessment of Ruth’s mental and emotional health.” It’s quite possible that the Residence Department may decide that Ruth’s depression makes it dangerous for her to hold such a position as RA simply because she may literally be so unable to function on some days that she simply cannot motivate herself to do even the most essential duties or provide even the most urgently-needed (immediately safety-critical) assistance.
However, I can see a possibility that Ruth’s doctor may recommend that she retain some level of responsibility on the grounds that she needs to feel useful and she needs to have some manner of a paid position to maintain her stability; without it, she may crash even worse than before. In those circumstances, I can see Ruth being retained as nominally RA (and, in fact, doing the job more often than not) but with an ‘assistant’ (in fact, a monitor) who will step in if she has a bad turn and can’t function for a few days.
Who are they staring at in panel 4?
YOUUUUUUUUUUU
Mary. She’d been gagged and duct taped to the ceiling, and these two had been considering letting her down.
They’re staring at a big bare drywall with ‘Fourth Wall – Do Not Look Directly At This’ stencilled on it in red.
And now there’s no one to stop them!
Hah! Take that, wall!
They’re just not that into us.
Comic Reactions:
ANARCHY!!!!! Meh, the first big tests are coming up, so no time.
But beyond that, I’m really heartened by Chloe’s comment and general empathy to Ruth’s situation. Ruth may actually have a job at the end of all this, but have to rapidly adapt her approach as she’ll be under much stricter observation, random checks, and generally more oversight than she’s used to.*
*Not to say that Ruth is at all qualified for said job at the moment, more just the low curve of RAs is working in her favor. As is Chloe being the sort of RM who understands how nasty a disease like depression can be and is sympathetic to it.
That all said, it’s probably got a time limit and that time limit is when it proves too much stress and work for Chloe, or if more of her actions come to light and the forces above her say she needs to be suspended or forced to take a semester off. And that might be more than Ruth can handle.
Ruth might also just complete the self-destruction because she can’t handle worrying about it anymore or the limbo state of her job and tell Chloe to employ someone else for the position.
But she’s definitely in a much better position than she ever hoped she would be when this situation came out.
If nothing else I think Chloe will be sympathetic and actively try to help Ruth find a possible solution to keep her in Indiana.
She might even feel a tad guilty for letting the situation go this far without noticing and stepping in, at least that’s how I read her small-voice comment here
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/04-it-all-returns/chloe/
Yeah, I think there might also be an element of guilt there. And I think she’s going to try and do what she can to support her, even though that might be very little. Which is kinda what you want from a person for whom part of the job is mentoring students.
So the door is left open for Ruth returning. In the real world, I think that the job of RA is such a terrible, thankless job that only the desperate or malicious will take it. Is Chloe so hard up for people that will take this job that she’ll overlook Ruth’s problems?
Or what if Ruth really was one of the better RA’s, and the others are much worse?
So far the only other RA we’ve even heard of is the guys’ RA who apparently doesn’t give a damn as long as his Star Trek marathons aren’t interrupted. That said, knowing some hardcore Trekkies (I’m more of a Trekkie light myself) interrupting said marathons with, say, loud music might actually result in action that makes the theft of femurs look light by comparison.
I’m imagining him barging into the offending students’ room in full costume and administering a couple of headbutts before destroying the stereo with a bat’leth.
So for any infraction of the rules, he makes them wear a Red Shirt and threatens if they do it again, he’ll send them on an Away Mission.
Well, when she actually did her job, she seemed to be a competent (if mean) RA, up until she got blackmailed. If she were actually dealing with her drinking and depression, she would probably be much better at it.
Maybe, maybe not.
While she did run a ‘tight ship’, she also:
– used violence on a student (tossing Billie)
– messed with a student’s property (throwing Joyce’s gloves out the window)
Now, you characterize it as being ‘mean’, but some might say its downright abusive.
There was also the whole saga of “I went into your room, stole your property, and am going to vandalize it until you get me your roommate agreement, even though it’s your roommate who’s the actual hangup here.” Abusive and incompetent.
I don’t know about incompetent. Given how much trouble Billie had tracking her down, I’d say it made sense to delegate.
Though I had forgotten about the stuff she had done early on.
The sane way to deal with that: emailing Sal and Billie to let them know she needs their roommate agreement ASAP. The insane way: stealing Sal’s personal possessions and leaving a note as to why. Either would have gotten the job done faster.
who would have thought they could be responsible adults who don’t need constant supervision.
I still hope Puddinghair goes to Ruth and says, “You have to get better. You were the only person who TERRIFIED these kids. Who made them weep, beg, and drop out of school! WE NEED YOU!”
YAY MANDY PLEASE ALWAYS MORE MANDY
where’s GraceSo glad we’re all responsible here.
[inward snrk]
This is so true.
welcome to the dessert of the real girls.
The girl with hair covering her face is Glasco’s daughter from Short pack?Did she scheme her way into collage via the movie Soul Man?
No, that was Connie / Conquest.