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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...
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Monster Pulse
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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.
Paranatural
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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!
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The Witch Door
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Katariina Lehto discovers her neighbor is a witch called Jousia Muotka. Jousia introduces Katariina to the strange people and places beyond the witch door...
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Demon's Mirror
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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!
Godslave
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Edith has been thrown into the dangerous world of modern-day Egyptian mythology. Fighting monsters and dealing with family drama of godly proportions.
The Sanity Circus
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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.
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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.
Widdershins
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A series of light-hearted Victorian-era adventure stories featuring grumpy bounty hunters, accidental thiefkings, and more, in England's magical capital city Widdershins!
Tigress Queen
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A barbarian warlord and a pampered prince try to avoid a marriage alliance that could end decades of violence.
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Oscar decided to rent an old haunted house, and that's when things got weird...
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In the troubled aftermath of a great war between Witches and her fellow Nuns, novice Sister Claire just wants a purpose.
Monsterkind
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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.
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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.
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Correction: if they KNEW they were related, Lucy would have said that. in the It’s Walky setting, Amber, Faz, Zaph, and Rose all had the same father and different mothers.
Read hall and forest quad are the opposite of each other, so logically if billie was wrong about literally everything in read hall she’s genuinely got good intuition in forest quad
Turned into a flashback- we’ve seen flashbacks in this style before where DW specifically said that it wasn’t the character remembering- it was the comic mocking him. But yeah, spot on- it’s flashbacking to what just happened for context.
(Also if you had to mix up two words due to internal language shenanigans, those two merge together well enough to barely be noticeable! It would have been worse in German. It would have been AMAZING in Welsh.)
Ah, that’s a word I was looking for, flashback. My brain seems to have it with language shenanigans today, and just HOW did you know it was German that got mixed in? (well, the ending, at least, of “Szenerie”)
Welsh would’ve been amazing, or possibly Irish (as that’s one I’m actually learning. Though I’m not as far as learning such sophisticated vocabulary items)
I… I didn’t! I wish I could claim that I somehow worked that out. I just imagined mashing a German and an English word together would result in something much more different than “the English word ending in ie instead of y”. And now I look silly!
English is a Germanic language! English is the bastard offspring of German, which the Vikings brought with them into celtic/pictish’s house, and then had wild unfaithful flings with every other language in the continent.
English has an untidy background
Actually, I saw it more like NCIS ‘foreshadowing’ the last frame of the act at the beginning of the act (‘act’ being the part of an episode separated by commercial breaks).
Of course not, because you can flashback to the flashback and top the joke. And since you can keep adding to it recursively, there IS no upper bar (aka height) of comedy.
I’m reminded of an old Patrice O’Neal bit from the Roast of Charlie Sheen:
“See the problem with Seth MacFarland is he doesn’t have a partner like Hanna-Babera. I know we’ve heard that whole story where Hanna said ‘I’m bigger than Yogi’ and Barbera slapped the shit out of him for saying that-
Seth needs a barbera to slap him, and to slap him twice:
Once: to say ‘don’t forget why people [actually] love you.”
The second reason he gave was, although highly objectionable in itself, weirdly rhymes with Billie’s own insane experiences with Ruth-
and of course when he says slap I’m assuming/hoping he was being figurative.
Also may/may not have originated with Kim Possible, and seeing as mid ’00s cartoons/teenage fads seem to form the entirety of Lucy’s cultural frame of reference-
-I’m not slating her for that! Mid-00s cartoons are fifty percent of mine! I’m just saying it would never occur to me to try to bond with people exclusively through TV shows, young adult books and commentary tracks based on same. That just seems like a real self-imposed challenge is all.
uuuugh it’s another abbreviation, I do not like (English is my second language and I never understand these because they’re usually based on pronunciation rather than how they are spelled)
Being both English and Canadian, I often feel the urge to apologize for this bastardized mess of a language. Although it does have some lovely flowery words I wish I could remember right now, so I could properly insult it.. with.. it…
Apparently Forest Quad is in the middle of a massive renovation, so given the floating timeline, who knows? The gallery of the current IU:RPS page for Forest
shows no hallways but it does show three common areas, one in Flashback Blue, one in a neutral color I can’t name, and one in a cheerful two-toned orange.
I assume there is someone at IU whose full-time job it is to read DoA with a view towards proposing renovations/remodelings/amenity changess just to thwart Willis.
(Also, it’s been so long since I’ve seen a .cfml extension. Memories.)
To be fair, lack of self-awareness was something Billie’s had since the very beginning of the strip. So it’s probably not a side-effect of Forest Quad inflating her ego.
Wee-eell, we’ve seen how it went with Malaya…
People here seem pretty easy going, though, so I imagine many people just shrug and ignore it.
People pleasing is a sad trait. It never comes from a good place. You can want to make life better for those around you from a good place, but people pleasing means putting yourself aside for others, defining yourself by what you can do for others. I wonder where it came from for Lucy.
I have the best superpower, it’s just like Squirrel Girl, the power to win as long as it’s funny.
Some really stupid superpowers might include:
Always knowing where North is because you can only face North
Having an extra elbow
The power to ripen fruit
Time travel, but only at a rate of one second per second
So time travel, but you can only pause or fast-forward?
The power to untangle jammed 8-track tapes with a snap of the fingers.
Insides that are impervious to lava, but skin that isn’t.
Spider-sense for toast popping out of toasters.
Ripening fruit would let you increase production times, yields, and profits for Big Agriculture by a lot! You could contract with them and make millions!
Arm Fall Off Boy. Another failed Legion candidate.
His name’s actually slightly misleading – he could pull an arm off and beat you with it, then reattach it.
Not so much that his arms would just fall off.
Legion tryouts were great for one-shot (sometimes one-panel) wacky powers.
We once ran a quick superhero roleplaying game and went around the table asking players to come up with a character concept and super power on the spot.
One of the players panicked and blurted out “I’m cold blooded!!!” and spent the rest of the game reacting to the temperature of the surroundings while the rest of us controlled electricity and what-not. (He totally fooled an IR security camera, though).
I’m having one of those nights where I want to look more non-binary, and of course if you’re non-binary then however you look is how that looks, you know? But like. I want to confuse people. I want people who insist that one person can’t be a “they” to panic and use they or avoid pronouns altogether when referring to me because they don’t know what to do.
Just not feeling enby enough I guess. Tried giving my reflection finger guns and saying I was valid, but eh.
I realize this isn’t really relevant to the strip but no one followers the tumblr I would ramble on and it’s nice to think that someone might actually read my ramblings.
Do you want to rattle specific people or is your idea just to be about and rattle random persons?
I’m not sure the strategy works with random people. Maybe with people who have to be polite to you? People who don’t believe in binary usually don’t care if they use the right pronouns anyway, and also http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/02-guess-whos-coming-to-galassos/proven/
See, a couple years back I shaved my head, and it did rattle/confuse some people. Random people too, some who were bigoted and some who were just confused. (On the bigoted side:
Me: *super short hair, clothes from the men’s section but wearing lipstick*
Random dude passing me on campus: “Faggot.”
On the just confused side:
Random volunteer at an event I was at: “The…men’s bathrooms are this way and…the women’s bathrooms…are that way…”
And you’re right that the first person probably wouldn’t care about being bigoted incorrectly. He’s probably an asshat. But with the pronoun thing specifically, I have seen people respond in the way I described, and people that go ahead and make an assumption but clearly aren’t sure about it and people who say things that I laugh about years later.
(I wad once with my mom with my super short hair and clothes from the men’s section, and the worker at the place we were at asked my mom, “And is he older than seven?”
Like not even twelve or something. Seven. And I was a grown ass adult.)
Wild idea: Make half your head/face look subtly masculine, the other half subtly feminine, and stand so someone’s first impression is a profile view of you.
Bonus points for turning 180 degrees while they’re not paying attention.
Double bonus points if you blend the looks well enough that when they finally see you from the front, it takes them a while to figure out what you did.
I just lost a fairly long and personal comment about how hard it can be to separate the need to do for yourself vs the need to be perceived by others AS yourself- especially for trans* people- so I’ll end with the bit I ended with anyway.
I have really cute bunnies and I send you cute bunny cuddles over the Internet.
I asked this actor whether I should refer to them as he or as she (in Chinese it’s tā either way).
He is fine, he said. And then, on second thought: he when I’m in men’s clothes, she when I’m in women’s clothes.
What about now, I asked, because the actor was wearing the outfit in the picture, which was as fashionable as it was androgynous.
Not sure, Kiwebaby laughed.
This isn’t relevant to the strip either, but I thought of Kiwebaby in that outfit when I read your post. Yay for confusing non-binary looks.
What Billie should be saying is: “I can’t have such a hideous track record forever! Eventually I have to get it luck, even if it’s just by applying common sense or by completely blind luck!”
Being naturally able to effortlessly learn lessons selectively so as to avoid uncomfortable self-awareness of one’s own ineptitude is its own kind of luck! And it’s DEFINITELY blind luck!
Why was she brushing her teeth in the hallway to begin with? Even I only do that if it’s the only way to butt into someone else’s conversation quickly enough to make a lame pun!
What I’m saying is, is Billie needs to make more lame puns.
Maybe her social… ignorance?… is why she can? In the way if you tell a child ‘Even though I look like a girl, I’m a boy’ loads of them are just like ‘okay, cool, can I have more juice mister?’
There’s no built up expectation
The majority of the cast has shown themselves to not really care about that kind of thing. Everyone who is intolerant is an antagonist or Joyce whom the whole point is showcasing her character development from a sheltered fundie to a ball of sunshine
Did she not know about bisexuality, or did she just not attribute it to herself? I remember Danny didn’t know about bisexuality, but was Billie that ignorant about it? Because there’s a world of difference between knowing what bisexuality is and thinking “oh hey maybe that label fits me.”
For one thing, it’s difficult to recognize things in yourself when you have always framed it differently (“I’m ‘experimenting’ to figure out whether I’m gay or straight”). For another thing, you can understand the ideas and not understand it in practice. Billie might be trying to give off the sophisticated “oh yeah I know tons of trans people no big deal” air when she’s really thinking “i’m glad i had a toothbrush in my mouth, cuz i’d have no idea how to talk to someone trans and i’m sure i’d say something stupid”
Pfft, sure, Billie got’s great intuation. Like when she thought Sal was Am… Oh… OK, or like the time she thought Mary was in love with Ca… Oh… Well, how about just now when she said she got grea…. DAMMIT, WILLIS. WE ARE SUPPOSED TO PROVIDE THE CHEAP QUIPS HERE. DON’T DO OUR JOB FOR US!!!
Wow, Lucy, I like you, but never offer to explain a trans person’s “sitch” ever again. I’m out about about and that still made me uncomfortable. It’s just not something for Cis people to discuss amongst themselves – just ask the guy in person, if you need to know so desperately. (which nobody ever really needs)
Even if she was only talking about the romantic tension…IDK it doesn’t make much sense for her to randomly offer up the details of some hallmates’ non-romance if that’s all she was planning to say.
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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 ⋅ 1d
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 ⋅ 1d
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 ⋅ 8h
Josh Gerstein @joshgerstein.bsky.social ⋅ 1d
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com ⋅ 1d
Pavel
@spavel.bsky.social ⋅ 10d
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aww, how sweet–
–wait, does that mean Billie is wrong
…
damn you willis
eh, I will believe it is sweet ^_^
If we’re going by It’s Walky family relations, Zaph and Rose are half siblings.
But going by It’s Walky relations Carla would be Joe and Rachel’s daughter, so.
Lucy would probably have said “that makes you a great sister” in yesterday’s strip if they were related, so I’m gonna guess not.
Correction: if they KNEW they were related, Lucy would have said that. in the It’s Walky setting, Amber, Faz, Zaph, and Rose all had the same father and different mothers.
Eh, I mean based on Lucy’s reaction Billie’s at least right about Zaph and Rose.
That’s the important one, because it’s the most adorable
Read hall and forest quad are the opposite of each other, so logically if billie was wrong about literally everything in read hall she’s genuinely got good intuition in forest quad
Or, does this mean Malaya has excellent perception?
Malaya forms correct conclusions about EVERYONE.
She just never tells anyone about them.
Why should she? They’re all just a bunch of jerks, anyway. And that Lucy. THE WORST
… except about herself?
Yeah, that’s my headcanon till someone disproves it.
To be fair, we still don’t have REAL proof that Sal isn’t Amazi-Girl
Or that Sal won’t be the next Amazi-girl when Amber is unable to continue.
Amazi-Girl 2: Winter Saldier.
Would that be followed by Sal-Val War?
And then Infinity Warner.
Will Mike gain all six Infinity Nickels and fuck the universe’s mom?
If Infinity War follows the comics, that’s sorta Thanos’s plan already.
Except instead of someone who gave birth to everyone, she does the opposite.
Thanos: Mad Titan, or just the stalkeriest stalker to ever stalk?
(Spoilers: it’s kinda both.)
And Sal-narok
Sal and Amazi-girl was both in the same place in the middle of a brawl for a entire crowd to see.
But Billie wasn’t there so it didn’t happen. Either that or it was just Sal’s Amazi-girl robot being used to throw off suspicion.
That’s just hearsay – no one important (Billie) witnessed it, so there’s no proof it happened. It’s just one Sal’s word against a Billie’s!
Whoever said there was only ONE Amazi-girl??? OOOOooooOOoOo
Last panel, Billie has stopped breathing.
Or Elsa’s paying a visit.
Let it go!
Let it go!
I want some beer, you know!
I thought, just as she said it, it turned into a memory – therefore the stylistic choice of colouring it blue.
I imagine the “dun-dun” sound of Law & Order to follow that panel, before we get a change of scenerie.
*scenery (somehow got my languages mixed up, started in the one, ended in the second)
Turned into a flashback- we’ve seen flashbacks in this style before where DW specifically said that it wasn’t the character remembering- it was the comic mocking him. But yeah, spot on- it’s flashbacking to what just happened for context.
(Also if you had to mix up two words due to internal language shenanigans, those two merge together well enough to barely be noticeable! It would have been worse in German. It would have been AMAZING in Welsh.)
Ah, that’s a word I was looking for, flashback. My brain seems to have it with language shenanigans today, and just HOW did you know it was German that got mixed in? (well, the ending, at least, of “Szenerie”)
Welsh would’ve been amazing, or possibly Irish (as that’s one I’m actually learning. Though I’m not as far as learning such sophisticated vocabulary items)
I… I didn’t! I wish I could claim that I somehow worked that out. I just imagined mashing a German and an English word together would result in something much more different than “the English word ending in ie instead of y”. And now I look silly!
English is a Germanic language! English is the bastard offspring of German, which the Vikings brought with them into celtic/pictish’s house, and then had wild unfaithful flings with every other language in the continent.
English has an untidy background
Actually, I saw it more like NCIS ‘foreshadowing’ the last frame of the act at the beginning of the act (‘act’ being the part of an episode separated by commercial breaks).
Wow Billie has been totally wrong about a lot of stuff this far
Flashbacks to things that happened seconds ago will never not be the height of comedy.
Hey, remember right now, when we had a flashback to the beginning of this sentence?
I’m so good at commenting on DoA strips. Remember that time I posted such a great comment? It was two sentences ago!
Even the background of this page is flashback blue.
looks upward, ripples
“Blue girls come in every size…”
Of course not, because you can flashback to the flashback and top the joke. And since you can keep adding to it recursively, there IS no upper bar (aka height) of comedy.
Don’t worry, Billie, one day your intuition will be right!
In Bizzaro campus, Billie has amazing intuition.
Ask her how she cracked the case of the Blackboard Cooter Burglar.
Oddly enough, it was still Joyce.
I haven’t laughed so hard in a long time, Billie. Thanks!
I tried to think of something funny for Billie to be wrong about, but I blanked. So let’s brainstorm some ideas!
Billie believes the world is carried on the back of a turtle.
Everyone knows it’s on an elephant’s back.
No, it’s carried on the backs of four elephants riding on the back of a turtle.
The turtle moves.
Anyway Billie thinks love can cure somebody’s crushing mental illness.
No the turtle stays still while the dung beetle rolls the sun across the sky
No the Earth is a sphere and we are bound to it by the will of Om.
No, it’s turtles all the way down.
*god* the narrative’s gotten even snarkier with time, I love it
love the gilligan cuts
I mean, traditionally a gilligan cut refers to a cut to present. Not sure if there’s a special term for a flashback that serves the same function.
I know if it’s a flash forward then that would be a smash cut.
You know, some say New York City itself is one of the characters
Not seen: Panel 7, which is just a smaller version of panels 4 through 7 arranged in a rectangle
Well, not being drunk all the time will probably help.
billie is kind of a dingus sometimes
Who was it that Billie thought Mary liked. It’s been awhile.
Carla.
(Yeah she was way off)
That’s what I thought, but I thought she might’ve been referring to Roz.
I’m reminded of an old Patrice O’Neal bit from the Roast of Charlie Sheen:
“See the problem with Seth MacFarland is he doesn’t have a partner like Hanna-Babera. I know we’ve heard that whole story where Hanna said ‘I’m bigger than Yogi’ and Barbera slapped the shit out of him for saying that-
Seth needs a barbera to slap him, and to slap him twice:
Once: to say ‘don’t forget why people [actually] love you.”
The second reason he gave was, although highly objectionable in itself, weirdly rhymes with Billie’s own insane experiences with Ruth-
and of course when he says slap I’m assuming/hoping he was being figurative.
what does sitch mean?
Situation. What’s happening. Lo que pasa en el mundo. The present set of circumstances. The deets. The biz.
situation, basically
Ahh, memories of Kim Possible.
Also may/may not have originated with Kim Possible, and seeing as mid ’00s cartoons/teenage fads seem to form the entirety of Lucy’s cultural frame of reference-
-I’m not slating her for that! Mid-00s cartoons are fifty percent of mine! I’m just saying it would never occur to me to try to bond with people exclusively through TV shows, young adult books and commentary tracks based on same. That just seems like a real self-imposed challenge is all.
Kigo was very important to younger me.
uuuugh it’s another abbreviation, I do not like (English is my second language and I never understand these because they’re usually based on pronunciation rather than how they are spelled)
Being both English and Canadian, I often feel the urge to apologize for this bastardized mess of a language. Although it does have some lovely flowery words I wish I could remember right now, so I could properly insult it.. with.. it…
how do I words
As English speakers, we can just blame everything on the Danes, the Germans, and the French.
Jesus, forget one’s roomate she’s doing that to the whole floor
Intuition’s kind of a crapshoot really.
RE: ALT-TEXT: So what color should forest quad’s halls be instead? Neon orange?
Apparently Forest Quad is in the middle of a massive renovation, so given the floating timeline, who knows? The gallery of
the current IU:RPS page for Forest
shows no hallways but it does show three common areas, one in Flashback Blue, one in a neutral color I can’t name, and one in a cheerful two-toned orange.
I assume there is someone at IU whose full-time job it is to read DoA with a view towards proposing renovations/remodelings/amenity changess just to thwart Willis.
(Also, it’s been so long since I’ve seen a .cfml extension. Memories.)
To be fair, lack of self-awareness was something Billie’s had since the very beginning of the strip. So it’s probably not a side-effect of Forest Quad inflating her ego.
Gotta love the recursive confidence here, arguing a position by using the current situation as reinforcement for itself is a classic power move.
the BEST intuition
Hilarious intuition IS the best intuition.
I wonder if Lucy’s people-pleasing isn’t that pleasing.
What else has Billie been wrong about?
Wee-eell, we’ve seen how it went with Malaya…
People here seem pretty easy going, though, so I imagine many people just shrug and ignore it.
People pleasing is a sad trait. It never comes from a good place. You can want to make life better for those around you from a good place, but people pleasing means putting yourself aside for others, defining yourself by what you can do for others. I wonder where it came from for Lucy.
Billie intuition has got to be the worst super power.
The worst super power? Worse than being able to induce a slight fatigue?
Well what’s your superpower?
(Mine is that I’m impervious to being hit by cars;not impervious to hitting the ground, though.)
I have the best superpower, it’s just like Squirrel Girl, the power to win as long as it’s funny.
Some really stupid superpowers might include:
Always knowing where North is because you can only face North
Having an extra elbow
The power to ripen fruit
Time travel, but only at a rate of one second per second
How about mine, being able to navigate in the dark but running into shit and tripping over nothing in broad daylight
Have you considered being Batman?
So time travel, but you can only pause or fast-forward?
The power to untangle jammed 8-track tapes with a snap of the fingers.
Insides that are impervious to lava, but skin that isn’t.
Spider-sense for toast popping out of toasters.
Pausing or fast forwarding time would be incredibly useful and overpowered if you knew what you were doing.
Ripening fruit would let you increase production times, yields, and profits for Big Agriculture by a lot! You could contract with them and make millions!
There’s a canon character who has the power to ripen fruit.
Hurray for the Legion of Superheroes and people who somehow fail to be good enough to join them!
I think I remember there was some character whose superpower was that their arm could fall off.
Arm Fall Off Boy. Another failed Legion candidate.
His name’s actually slightly misleading – he could pull an arm off and beat you with it, then reattach it.
Not so much that his arms would just fall off.
Legion tryouts were great for one-shot (sometimes one-panel) wacky powers.
What about having a heightened sense of smell but only for spoiled milk?
Sounds like the makings of a great witch-finder.
We once ran a quick superhero roleplaying game and went around the table asking players to come up with a character concept and super power on the spot.
One of the players panicked and blurted out “I’m cold blooded!!!” and spent the rest of the game reacting to the temperature of the surroundings while the rest of us controlled electricity and what-not. (He totally fooled an IR security camera, though).
Mystery Men and the Invisible Boy, whose power was to be invisible when no one was looking.
Now, in all fairness, she did say that Rose “maybe” had a thing for Zaph, and ended with “I dunno”
So if she’s completely off base, she can always fall back on that, right..?
Panel 4 is a redraw referencing this early strip:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/01-pajama-jeans/hero/
(The dialogue in this panel is a bit of a cheat)
Panel 5 is copied straight from a much more recent strip:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/04-the-do-list/secretly/
“Shoves is not loves” is still one of the best lines in the entire DoA run.
Thanks for the legwork!
Today’s strip flashes back to that Hero one, which flashes back to two more.
Next up: An infinite regression of flashbacks?
Painting the walls Flashback Blue is also, somehow, a result of Billie’s great intuition.
This is a clue that this scene isn’t real, it is all a fever dream Billie has while she is dying.
I’m having one of those nights where I want to look more non-binary, and of course if you’re non-binary then however you look is how that looks, you know? But like. I want to confuse people. I want people who insist that one person can’t be a “they” to panic and use they or avoid pronouns altogether when referring to me because they don’t know what to do.
Just not feeling enby enough I guess. Tried giving my reflection finger guns and saying I was valid, but eh.
I realize this isn’t really relevant to the strip but no one followers the tumblr I would ramble on and it’s nice to think that someone might actually read my ramblings.
Do you want to rattle specific people or is your idea just to be about and rattle random persons?
I’m not sure the strategy works with random people. Maybe with people who have to be polite to you? People who don’t believe in binary usually don’t care if they use the right pronouns anyway, and also http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/02-guess-whos-coming-to-galassos/proven/
See, a couple years back I shaved my head, and it did rattle/confuse some people. Random people too, some who were bigoted and some who were just confused. (On the bigoted side:
Me: *super short hair, clothes from the men’s section but wearing lipstick*
Random dude passing me on campus: “Faggot.”
On the just confused side:
Random volunteer at an event I was at: “The…men’s bathrooms are this way and…the women’s bathrooms…are that way…”
And you’re right that the first person probably wouldn’t care about being bigoted incorrectly. He’s probably an asshat. But with the pronoun thing specifically, I have seen people respond in the way I described, and people that go ahead and make an assumption but clearly aren’t sure about it and people who say things that I laugh about years later.
(I wad once with my mom with my super short hair and clothes from the men’s section, and the worker at the place we were at asked my mom, “And is he older than seven?”
Like not even twelve or something. Seven. And I was a grown ass adult.)
Wild idea: Make half your head/face look subtly masculine, the other half subtly feminine, and stand so someone’s first impression is a profile view of you.
Bonus points for turning 180 degrees while they’re not paying attention.
Double bonus points if you blend the looks well enough that when they finally see you from the front, it takes them a while to figure out what you did.
I just lost a fairly long and personal comment about how hard it can be to separate the need to do for yourself vs the need to be perceived by others AS yourself- especially for trans* people- so I’ll end with the bit I ended with anyway.
I have really cute bunnies and I send you cute bunny cuddles over the Internet.
Cute.
I met someone like that, Taiwanese actor/general famous person Kiwebaby. Pictures in this article: https://udn.com/news/story/8/2261158.
I asked this actor whether I should refer to them as he or as she (in Chinese it’s tā either way).
He is fine, he said. And then, on second thought: he when I’m in men’s clothes, she when I’m in women’s clothes.
What about now, I asked, because the actor was wearing the outfit in the picture, which was as fashionable as it was androgynous.
Not sure, Kiwebaby laughed.
This isn’t relevant to the strip either, but I thought of Kiwebaby in that outfit when I read your post. Yay for confusing non-binary looks.
Gods, that outfit is ugly as sin… I’m not sure if it’s so much androgynous as distracting you from considering their gender with sheer hideousness.
What Billie should be saying is: “I can’t have such a hideous track record forever! Eventually I have to get it luck, even if it’s just by applying common sense or by completely blind luck!”
Being naturally able to effortlessly learn lessons selectively so as to avoid uncomfortable self-awareness of one’s own ineptitude is its own kind of luck! And it’s DEFINITELY blind luck!
”what’s to know… I dunno” this seems contradictory
It’s meant to be contradictory. The whole objective of the formation of the sentence is to give the speaker the maximum wiggle-room.
Lucy REALLY can’t catch a break; even the flashback forgot she was in the room with Billie three panels ago.
I believe that Billie is right, by virtue of a broken clock.
Did she just swallow her toothpaste?
Is that better or worse than her just spitting it out on to the floor of the dorm hall?
Why was she brushing her teeth in the hallway to begin with? Even I only do that if it’s the only way to butt into someone else’s conversation quickly enough to make a lame pun!
What I’m saying is, is Billie needs to make more lame puns.
I pace when I brush my teeth, but I pace a lot in the first place to help me organize my thoughts.
She’s building up an immunity to fluoride poisoning
Alt-text: But if we’re in retrospect, then the halls HAVE to be flashback blue!
I like Billie’s blithe no-big-deal about Zaph coming out as a guy. Maybe her intuition is hilariously off, but this does help.
I’m surprised Billie has the social intuition to be aware of transgender people when she (for example) didn’t know that bisexuality existed.
Maybe her social… ignorance?… is why she can? In the way if you tell a child ‘Even though I look like a girl, I’m a boy’ loads of them are just like ‘okay, cool, can I have more juice mister?’
There’s no built up expectation
The majority of the cast has shown themselves to not really care about that kind of thing. Everyone who is intolerant is an antagonist or Joyce whom the whole point is showcasing her character development from a sheltered fundie to a ball of sunshine
Did she not know about bisexuality, or did she just not attribute it to herself? I remember Danny didn’t know about bisexuality, but was Billie that ignorant about it? Because there’s a world of difference between knowing what bisexuality is and thinking “oh hey maybe that label fits me.”
For one thing, it’s difficult to recognize things in yourself when you have always framed it differently (“I’m ‘experimenting’ to figure out whether I’m gay or straight”). For another thing, you can understand the ideas and not understand it in practice. Billie might be trying to give off the sophisticated “oh yeah I know tons of trans people no big deal” air when she’s really thinking “i’m glad i had a toothbrush in my mouth, cuz i’d have no idea how to talk to someone trans and i’m sure i’d say something stupid”
She thought bisexuality only existed in porn as of the last time we saw Howard.
Well, Billie does know about Carla, so she’s had some time to adjust, even if that was her first introduction to the idea.
Billiestradamus is the new Toddstradamus.
I wonder if this is Billie’s self-awareness kicking in or if this is the narrative making fun of her
Seeing as Billie has no self awareness probably the latter.
“You have to know these things when you’re a head cheerleader.”
Don’t be a gossip, Lucy.
Pfft, sure, Billie got’s great intuation. Like when she thought Sal was Am… Oh… OK, or like the time she thought Mary was in love with Ca… Oh… Well, how about just now when she said she got grea…. DAMMIT, WILLIS. WE ARE SUPPOSED TO PROVIDE THE CHEAP QUIPS HERE. DON’T DO OUR JOB FOR US!!!
Looks like Willis flipped Lucy in the first panel.
Even the birdflash shirt is looking at Billie.
Okay I confess… I’m shipping Carla & Mary…
Does that make me a bad person??
Yes. Yes it does.
It…doesn’t make you a good person.
Wow, Lucy, I like you, but never offer to explain a trans person’s “sitch” ever again. I’m out about about and that still made me uncomfortable. It’s just not something for Cis people to discuss amongst themselves – just ask the guy in person, if you need to know so desperately. (which nobody ever really needs)
Even if she was only talking about the romantic tension…IDK it doesn’t make much sense for her to randomly offer up the details of some hallmates’ non-romance if that’s all she was planning to say.
Maybe the guy explicitly asked his hallmates to explain this to new people for him?