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Star Impact
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Back in my day, the M&M characters were “regular”, “peanut”, and “girl”. Kids these days with their “crispy” and their “anxiety”. The other day at the gas station I heard some bluehhair say her favorite flavor of M&Ms was Skittles. Yeah right, get a job.
and this commenter sitting here like “wait, has Tristan come up before? shit, he’s only got one strip in his tag, oh no how out of the loop am I? not like this noooo”
For all we know, this could be college age Tristan having this dream, and we won’t find out until the SUV is driving through the multiverse and Joyce starts to fall out while Tristan tries to pull her back while simultaneously not wearing pants.
given how starry eyed joyce was at the beginning of the series and her opinion/view of relationships it’s probably just a crush from afar or she said something embarrassing and ended up avoiding him. or she never said anything b/c he was popular enough to the point where he was never single lol
He might be a jerk if he actually comes back in the present, but he’s not likely to be too bad in the flashback. No worse than Joyce and Becky were at least. She was still crushing on him a bit when he was first mentioned.
the only thing we know is that he’s also jewish so hopefully her parents didn’t make some passive aggressive comments towards his family to where she’d be too ashamed to talk to him lol
Maybe Squirrel is that guy’s name who had just passed the group while walking in the other direction.
I humbly request another strip with the squirrel that doesn’t have either a squirrel or said guy.
There’s a They Might Be Giants song called Twisting?
Anyway, “twisting in the wind” is already an idiom for leaving someone in an uncomfortable situation without help, so I think we can guess some of what’s to come.
there’s a lot of towns in the us with weird names. before playing geoguessr i never would have realized how many palestines we have. not to mention places like white butte and beaver lick.
i don’t even question it anymore.
I hate it. You have no idea how annoying it is searching for anything in my country just to get results from “Jamaica, IA”. Canada too, fuck you Kingston, Ontario
The Boundary Water is a wilderness area in northern Minnesota on the border of Minnesota and Canada, more or less due north of Duluth. Little Minnesota, on the other hand, is a northern suburb of Saint Paul, which is about 300 miles south of the Boundary Waters… and I doubt you’d find an outfitter that far away from the area you’re going to be exploring.
Now if it had been someplace like Grand Marais or Ely ….
I assumed the same. I ended up spending all of high school chasing one girl who I thought /might/ like me as more than a best friend, but nothing ever came of it.
I had a coworker who walked up behind me and unexpectedly massaged my shoulders for a few seconds as a greeting, and I was physically attracted to/aware of her from that point on, to the point that I wondered if she was bisexual vs a full (probably not the right term) lesbian, and that she had done that because she liked me (never asked so who knows).
Oh, absolutely. It was my defence mechanism in my younger years, I only got interested in someone if they showed interest in me first. That was I never had to feel one-sided affection! And instead just had to deal with being interested in garbage people simply because they liked me!
If you find out someone is an option romantically, you’re more likely to consider them that way even if you hadn’t before. When it happened to me my reaction was more like, “Oh, really? Interesting…” rather than immediately falling in love, but then I wasn’t a sheltered Evangelical kid like Joyce
hahaha, yes, absolutely! i was going to comment that this is literally EXACTLY how i got with my first boyfriend in high school. he was a friend of a friend and i honestly didn’t notice him much at all, until one day he said i was cute and asked me out. no one had expressed any kind of interest in me before and abruptly it was like my brain flipped- nothing had EVER been so attractive to me as being told i was liked. we dated for three or four months until the high wore off and i realized that there was a reason i hadn’t paid attention to him in the first place…
Maybe her arms just around the back of the seat, but I like to think that Becky has found away to be riding in the back of a van with arms around two girls. She was a smooth operator even then.
Yeah, don’t point at him. We’re talking about him while he’s in the same car as us (allegedly whispering), looking right at him, but if you point he might know something’s up.
It’s an ugly-ass vehicle, I don’t think anyone is gonna get uppity if you call it an SUV when it’s technically a truck with a hooded autoback or whatever the fuck Car People call the part that makes it seats instead of a bed. Just a dogshit thing to look at, miserable from start to finish.
Tristan isn’t even in the car, he’s just strapped to the side because boys are tough and safety is for women and queers, and he ain’t no fruit is he, so suck it up buttercup and get ratchet strapped to the door. Choo choo motherfuckers, if it’s God’s will for this young boy to become hamburger on the road then God wills it.
The titles these past two days are baffling, yet muttering “more like Tryst-an in the Wind” under my breath ruined my week the most. So what about Bob?
How is she in the car twice? That’s very obviously Becky in the middle there, it’s like impossible to mistake her for a second instance of a completely different person.
???????????? what on earth are you saying? yes, that *is* becky in the middle of panel 2, and she very clearly does not braces. the girl on the right does, and according to the tags her name is misha.
Look, cbwroses accused Becky of being “Misha with braces”. That’s the most reasonable interpretation of that sentence, and it’s mind boggling that you’d even question it, let alone treat it as some outlandish display. Get a grip.
I cannot tell if you’re serious or trolling.
And I feel like that’s not the first time I’ve said that to you.
Maybe you could add an emoji or something for people like me who struggle with that?
…ok now I feel like what happened is that Taffy misread it initially and then read it correctly when looking back at it. (either that or their initial comment was directed at bicycle bill but then they decided to pretend they were talking to cbw)
My bad … I got the two mixed up. But the point still stands … did Joyce have braces when she was younger? I don’t seem to remember seeing them in the amusement park picture, for example.
J. R. “Bob” Dobbs was a salesman from the 1950s, who is revered as a prophet by the Church of the SubGenius, which he founded in 1953. Jehovah 1,[ an extraterrestrial who contacted “Bob” in the early 1950s while he was building a television set, gave him supernatural knowledge of the past and future, an ineffable nature and a limited ability to travel in time. Jehovah 1 and his spouse Eris were technically part of the Elder gods, who are committed to human pain and are led by Yog-Sothoth, but Johava 1 is “relatively good” with Eris less so, however both are members of the “rebel gods” working against the Elder gods. Jehovah 1 intended “Bob” to lead a powerful conspiracy and brainwash individuals to make them work for a living. “Bob” refused; instead visiting Tibet where he infiltrated and then organized a counter-movement.to bring SLACK to the human descendants of the Yeti, the Subgenus. “Bob” teaches that Slack a unique magical system which will will allow a free, comfortable life (without hard work or responsibility) which is the rightful entitlement.of the Yeti and their descendants. Slack is obtained primarily through sex and the avoidance of work. The church plans to rid the world of everyone who did not descend from yetis and a complex counter-conspiracy is now unfolding where “Bob” hopes to rid the Earth of 90% of humanity, making the Earth “clear”
Love that we get a Minnesota shoutout! I feel duty-bound to point out, however, that Little Canada (despite the misleading name) is just a regular-degular suburb of St. Paul and has really nothing whatsoever to do with the Boundary Waters.
There aren’t very many merits, when you think about it.
1) I benefit from this concept
2) People my dad taught me to hate suffer from it
C) [unintelligible muttering about skull shapes]
IV: I shidded on the highway dad
Imagine it’s almost 300 years since Jesus was executed. There’s a con for his fandom, in Nicea, Asia-Minor. There’s competing fan theories over some timey-wimey aspect of when and how Jesus was generated: somehow before time or during when time existed. Real nerd stuff. There’s a vote and the pro-timey-wimey group wins and says if you disagree then you don’t get to go to heaven (literal, not an idiom). They come up with a creed everyone has to say, and it is very emphatic about the timey-wimey stuff, but they use jargon. And 1700 years later, English speaking Christians have to say “begotten” like three times in two sentences. “begotten, not made” blah blah blah. And then a couple of lines later, the Greek word that had been translated as “begotten” before gets translated as “made”.
The lead of the faction of fans opposed to the timey-wimey stuff was named Arius, so Arianism. Some modern day offshoots of Christianity are accused of Arianism, and like a lot of old-timey heresies, it’s part of a random Christians* personal theologies. *Who ironically want there to be church police doing an inquisition.
I’d say it has more to do with white privelege than christianity, but also, having a truckload of kids encourages you to have, well… a truck!
I don’t really get driving a huge-ass car when you are single and alone in it 99% of the time, but when you have 4 kids (which the Browns do if I recall correctly), there is a need for extra space and a regular 5 seater won’t cut it, so it kinda makes sense (though there are more economical and less flashy options).
On the other hand my understanding is that the average European car gets almost twice our gas mileage (kilometerage?); American cars can be labeled fuel efficient while getting fewer than 50 miles per gallon.
It’d be interesting to get a more apples to apples comparison; for two adults living the same distance from an in-person job and working the same hours, who spends more on gas each week?
Do we even know it’s the Brown’s car? I was assuming some kind of church trip, especially given that Tristan’s there and Joyce doesn’t seem particularly close to him at this point.
Even putting that aside, it’s weird to single Christians out given how dominant they remain in the US. Especially true going back a generation or more to Joyce’s parents.
Having read this comic since I was 13, and thus having been younger than or the same age as these characters for the longest time. It feels really uncomfortable to think about the fact that at this point in the time scale, in 2020 i would have been 19/20 and they would have been 13/14/15
It’s sad that I know Michael W. Smith wrote this, but like David I grew up on Christian music; and in spite of being an atheist now, I still listen to it sometimes because of nostalgia.
I wonder if this’ll be the only appearance Misha makes? It would be….interesting to see how another old friend, one who hasn’t gone through the experiences Becky has, would react to the new Atheist Joyce.
Little Canada is actually in the southern third of Minnesota, a good five hour drive from the Boundary Waters. I don’t think you really start to see signs for the BWCA until you get closer to Duluth.
given that it’s ‘heard from kory that izzy said’ i wouldnt’ be surprsied if ti was like a game of ‘telephone’ if not a meanspirited kid prank, if not some kinda manipulation as a way to get tristan’s attention lol
Oh, huh. Well, that’s a new perspective on Joyce’s childhood crush. So she wasn’t really interested in Tristan, specifically, as much as she was interested in having Some Dude that she was given permission to project all her romantic(/sexual?) feelings onto! At least, that’s how I’m interpreting this.
guess at that age you can get crushes easily from someone being nice to you , if not just someone telling you that another person might like you, as opposed to to immediately going ‘ew boys’ lol.
tho i wonder if there’ll be some underlying “becky realizes she likes joyce” in a subconscious way lol
well, tristan was mentioned before but she didn’t rly seem to be too concerned about it either way when his name was brougt up, if only being in denial like “i definitely didn’t ride my bike past his house to sneak a peek at him”
i guess it’s a good thing joyce’s family wasn’t too religiously dependent to deny medicine to where she couldn’t get braces lol
there def were some ppl that would’ve wanted invisalign or removed as soon as possible b/c of the pain or so lol but other than huge gaps, i think crooked teeth are fine/common in other countries.
Americans are very weird about our teeth, as an American. We have a big fixation on how white and straight and even they are, none of which actually relate to their health.
lol i wonder if this flash back means we’ll she this friend in the future too, assuming she doesn’t shun becky and joyce for their current personality/beliefs lol
I’m sorry Willis, but *this* is how the Tristan crush started?? This is the most comphet start to a crush in the world, no fucking wonder Becky was like “you’re just playing it up to fit in and hide your feelings” lmao
For the benefit of those who don’t know, Boundary Waters is a real place near the Canadian border in Minnesota. Assuming they’re driving to or from La Porte, that’s about a 10 hour ride. They appear to be near Little Canada, which is just east of St. Paul.
Optimus Prime broke down and cried on the set of "Transformers" (2007) due to the extensive use of green screen filming. He reportedly said, "This is not why I became an actor."
“I’m just going to say it, shame on any of us who throws a trans child under the bus for thinking they’re going to get elected. That child deserves our support. Don’t worry about the pollsters calling it distractions, because we need to be the party of human dignity.”
Minnesota Star Tribune@startribune.com ⋅ 2d
Gov. Tim Walz is doubling down on trans rights — and criticizing members of his party who are retreating — at a time when the issue has become a political lightning rod nationally and back home in Minnesota.
they managed to get the arms and thighs to be different grays, which I wasn't sure they'd be able to do, the way the mold's set up
though maybe they're just producing a lot of extra thighs and/or arms in the wrong colors and throwing those away, i dunno
Minnesota Star Tribune @startribune.com ⋅ 2d
preternia @preternia.com ⋅ 2d
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⚧️Coming Out
Hailey Piper 
Commenters: “He does exist!”
Tristan: “They DO exist!”
(mutual fainting)
I want to be the Crispy M&M in this scenario.
what a great sentence to glimpse without context
i don’t think Crispy existed when that commercial came out. it was Red and Yellow (the peanut)
Oh Crispy definitely wasn’t in the commercial, but I figure we can be all inclusive.
We, the commenters, are not all just Regular and Peanut, are we?
Back in my day, the M&M characters were “regular”, “peanut”, and “girl”. Kids these days with their “crispy” and their “anxiety”. The other day at the gas station I heard some bluehhair say her favorite flavor of M&Ms was Skittles. Yeah right, get a job.
(/s)
It’s insensitive to tell those dirty fucking Skittles to get jobs.
Yeah! They don’t exist to work! They deserve to fall into my mouth to their delicious deaths! :p
Found Robin’s Grav.
They have jobs.
They’re coporate shills and sucrosetarian edibles.
Can’t say I’m a big fan of Anxiety M&Ms. But I do hear they are popular.
My understanding is the purple M&M is basically anxiety?
Lol, remember when “bluehair” meant an old lady?
Pepperidge Farm remembers…
And that, kids, is how I met your mother.
Back in MY day, they were “Regular” and “Peanut,” and pretty much had no character whatsoever.
Everybody forgets Almond.
When I was in military, they called ’em male or female (w or w/o nuts)
Mounds and Almond Joy used to have a jingle “Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t”, which we decided was the first bisexual commercial.
No, you’re all peanut.
The peanut GALLERY! AYOOOOO
Better than being the caramel one Red and Yellow ripped in half for that picture on the packaging.
and this commenter sitting here like “wait, has Tristan come up before? shit, he’s only got one strip in his tag, oh no how out of the loop am I? not like this noooo”
Joyce had Snapchat filters before it was cool
12:15!!
Time keeps on slippin’
sliding timescale means this is probably happening at a point when snapchat was cool, and if it isn’t yet it will be soon
I did think about mentioning that at some point it would be AFTER it was cool but eh
love how the filter shows him with stubble, so i guess joe should be fine even if he some how comes into the picture and still super hot lol
Oh boy, more Joyce dreams. What could go wrong this time?
This isn’t a dream, it’s a flashback! XD
*plays “Closer” by the Carpenters on passing car’s radio*
Even worse; dreams can be explained, but memories hurt the most.
Could be both.
Jennifer’s was.
Incidentally, that was at the beginning of “Don’t Stop Billie-ving”, the chapter that takes place 1 week before this chapters (presumably).
Not “Yesterday Once More”?
For all we know, this could be college age Tristan having this dream, and we won’t find out until the SUV is driving through the multiverse and Joyce starts to fall out while Tristan tries to pull her back while simultaneously not wearing pants.
Or it’s Becky’s flashback/dream
It’s Misha’s dream, and she’s about to wake up wondering, “why was I in a comic strip?”
Danny wakes up extremely confused about his dream.
given how starry eyed joyce was at the beginning of the series and her opinion/view of relationships it’s probably just a crush from afar or she said something embarrassing and ended up avoiding him. or she never said anything b/c he was popular enough to the point where he was never single lol
I immediately and irrationally hate Tristan.
The odds aren’t exactly great for how he’s gonna turn out
He might be a jerk if he actually comes back in the present, but he’s not likely to be too bad in the flashback. No worse than Joyce and Becky were at least. She was still crushing on him a bit when he was first mentioned.
you and past Becky
the only thing we know is that he’s also jewish so hopefully her parents didn’t make some passive aggressive comments towards his family to where she’d be too ashamed to talk to him lol
His dad is from Poland, so Carol assumed he was Jewish. https://www.dumbingofage.com/ohhh/
Which is so weird an assumption it has to be something directly from Willis’s childhood.
Backstreet Boys filter: ON
Misha has a tag.
Interesting.
Something begins
This comic is really thorough with tags, so Misha could easily have like two more pages before they’re gone forever.
That’s still something! It might be something small!
I mean, the horse got a tag. The squirrel got a tag.
Blowj0b cat has a tag
Well obviously, he’s the main character.
Maybe Squirrel is that guy’s name who had just passed the group while walking in the other direction.
I humbly request another strip with the squirrel that doesn’t have either a squirrel or said guy.
The cricket didn’t and I remain eternally bitter
Tag the cricket!
i mean this is a flash back so i imagine she’s going to have a copule more strips where it’s still in the past lol
Ah the infamous Tristan! Nice to finally meet him.
We finally meet the mysterious Tristan.
He’s not coming around in the present time is he?
…… well. This arc is called….. what it is.
Pun on his name, tryst, and possibly a reference to They Might Be Giants – Twisting? Is it a three-for?
There’s a They Might Be Giants song called Twisting?
Anyway, “twisting in the wind” is already an idiom for leaving someone in an uncomfortable situation without help, so I think we can guess some of what’s to come.
oh yeah, there really is and it’s a great one
she’s not your satellite
she doesn’t miss you
turn off your smoke machine
and marshall stack
she doesn’t have to have
her young fresh fellas tape back now
but there’s not a lot of things that
she’ll take back
she wants to see you again
she wants to see you again
slowly twistin’
in the wind
twistin’ twistin’
in the wind
Huh. Not bad.
I always thought that idiom was from the final scene of Brave New World.
The final scene in BNW and the idiom both describe something that’s happened a lot of times unfortunately, since antiquity.
On the Flood album, IIRC.
Trystin’ could easily have multiple meanings here, especially since there’s a lot of set-up for potential trysta
wait
Little Canada
what
there’s a lot of towns in the us with weird names. before playing geoguessr i never would have realized how many palestines we have. not to mention places like white butte and beaver lick.
i don’t even question it anymore.
Don’t forget Toad Suck, and Skunk Holler
Stone Head; Gnaw Bone. Yes these are real place names.
I bought my first car in New Palestine, IN.
I hate it. You have no idea how annoying it is searching for anything in my country just to get results from “Jamaica, IA”. Canada too, fuck you Kingston, Ontario
I would burn down the internet.
You are not alone: there is a city in Pennsylvania named “Indiana”. They have a University, too, betcha can guess its name….
The Boundary Water is a wilderness area in northern Minnesota on the border of Minnesota and Canada, more or less due north of Duluth. Little Minnesota, on the other hand, is a northern suburb of Saint Paul, which is about 300 miles south of the Boundary Waters… and I doubt you’d find an outfitter that far away from the area you’re going to be exploring.
Now if it had been someplace like Grand Marais or Ely ….
there is a town called Wyoming in Minnesota
Indiana has a Moscow and a Mexico.
And there’s a town called Buffalo in Wyoming
i wonder how long you could chain these
Brace yourself for another trip to memory lane.
Though it was bound to happen, I can’t wait to sink my teeth into it.
I bet the drama of this arc will be delicious.
THE TRISTAN IS REAL!!!
Ah, more Rich Mullins!
Hammered dulcimer anticipation increases
I went looking and I guess not, which is too bad.
Has anyone here actually experienced a sudden interest in someone because they might like you?
Maybe I was just missing it during high school and it is actually common.
I was never so self-confident to assume anyone actually liked me
I assumed the same. I ended up spending all of high school chasing one girl who I thought /might/ like me as more than a best friend, but nothing ever came of it.
Kinda? At the very least, it made me more aware of them in the case of one of my coworkers who I had previously not paid a lot of mind to.
I mean, I am still not going to date her, but I am certainly more aware of her.
I had a coworker who walked up behind me and unexpectedly massaged my shoulders for a few seconds as a greeting, and I was physically attracted to/aware of her from that point on, to the point that I wondered if she was bisexual vs a full (probably not the right term) lesbian, and that she had done that because she liked me (never asked so who knows).
Oh, absolutely. It was my defence mechanism in my younger years, I only got interested in someone if they showed interest in me first. That was I never had to feel one-sided affection! And instead just had to deal with being interested in garbage people simply because they liked me!
If you find out someone is an option romantically, you’re more likely to consider them that way even if you hadn’t before. When it happened to me my reaction was more like, “Oh, really? Interesting…” rather than immediately falling in love, but then I wasn’t a sheltered Evangelical kid like Joyce
hahaha, yes, absolutely! i was going to comment that this is literally EXACTLY how i got with my first boyfriend in high school. he was a friend of a friend and i honestly didn’t notice him much at all, until one day he said i was cute and asked me out. no one had expressed any kind of interest in me before and abruptly it was like my brain flipped- nothing had EVER been so attractive to me as being told i was liked. we dated for three or four months until the high wore off and i realized that there was a reason i hadn’t paid attention to him in the first place…
Ab-so-freakin’-lutely!!
And I might add I was in my late forties when it happened.
No because no one ever liked me in school. If they did, no they didn’t that was a joke and I refuse to believe otherwise
I did fall hard from “yeah I wanna hook up” to “marry me” when my boyfriend confesses his feelings tho so there’s that ig
So Joyce had at least one other friend and an implied four other friends. Where are they now? Answer? Becky clearly systematically eliminated them.
If they were still part of the congregation, yeah, you could say Becky did just that.
Except for the systematically part.
BABY JOYCE BABY JOYCE LOOK AT HER LOOK!!!
Also the fabled Tristan appears at last-
Maybe her arms just around the back of the seat, but I like to think that Becky has found away to be riding in the back of a van with arms around two girls. She was a smooth operator even then.
Long ago in the distant dream of 2007…
No wait i got the math wrong, probably more like 2015. It was a simpler time.
No alt text, I do not know. Who or what did he look like? A groundhog?
Bill Murray?
…
Does Bill Murray look like a groundhog?
He could if he wanted to
He can do a great impression.
Yeah, don’t point at him. We’re talking about him while he’s in the same car as us (allegedly whispering), looking right at him, but if you point he might know something’s up.
I think he’s in the next row up in the… SUV I guess?
It’s an ugly-ass vehicle, I don’t think anyone is gonna get uppity if you call it an SUV when it’s technically a truck with a hooded autoback or whatever the fuck Car People call the part that makes it seats instead of a bed. Just a dogshit thing to look at, miserable from start to finish.
Tristan isn’t even in the car, he’s just strapped to the side because boys are tough and safety is for women and queers, and he ain’t no fruit is he, so suck it up buttercup and get ratchet strapped to the door. Choo choo motherfuckers, if it’s God’s will for this young boy to become hamburger on the road then God wills it.
So she already was into beard stubs back then
Oh no!
Joyce just saw a 5 o’clock shadow!
NOW WINTER IN THIS COMIC IS GOING TO LAST FOR ANOTHER 16 YEARS!
*snerk!*
It’s…. groundhog day!
As much a curse as a blessing, climate change might mean that winter in this comic could be sliding time-scaled away into early spring
relating hard to wee Joyce here and hoping this turns out better for her than it did for me (my friends were lying so i’d embarrass myself)
That’s so nasty, I would have lost trust in my friends forever!
that would be the smart thing to do, yes
Oh god, i remember that song. It was a nice one to sing
So Joyce has always been into stubble, huh. No judgement here.
2015 chevy tahoe.
Ahh, crushes. Pathetic.
The titles these past two days are baffling, yet muttering “more like Tryst-an in the Wind” under my breath ruined my week the most. So what about Bob?
That’s another Bill Murray film.
And Bob was there.
Are Joyce and Becky both fitted with tin grins in this flashback?
That’s Misha with braces, not Becky.
How is she in the car twice? That’s very obviously Becky in the middle there, it’s like impossible to mistake her for a second instance of a completely different person.
???????????? what on earth are you saying? yes, that *is* becky in the middle of panel 2, and she very clearly does not braces. the girl on the right does, and according to the tags her name is misha.
does not *have braces, missed a word.
Look, cbwroses accused Becky of being “Misha with braces”. That’s the most reasonable interpretation of that sentence, and it’s mind boggling that you’d even question it, let alone treat it as some outlandish display. Get a grip.
I cannot tell if you’re serious or trolling.
And I feel like that’s not the first time I’ve said that to you.
Maybe you could add an emoji or something for people like me who struggle with that?
It’s extremely not the most reasonable interpretation. You’re being very silly and dramatic right now.
First day in the comments?
[takes a long drag on a cigarette, gazes moodily into the sunset] comment sections…comment sections never change.
cbwroses was saying “That’s Misha [who’s wearing] the braces, not Becky.” ie “Misha is the one with braces; Becky doesn’t have braces.”
…ok now I feel like what happened is that Taffy misread it initially and then read it correctly when looking back at it. (either that or their initial comment was directed at bicycle bill but then they decided to pretend they were talking to cbw)
I read it correctly and then took it in a really stupid direction for my own sleep-deprived amusement.
My bad … I got the two mixed up. But the point still stands … did Joyce have braces when she was younger? I don’t seem to remember seeing them in the amusement park picture, for example.
Her character model for this flashback has braces.
I think this is set a few years after the trip to Six Flags Great America.
Who the fuck is Bob, anyway
J. R. “Bob” Dobbs was a salesman from the 1950s, who is revered as a prophet by the Church of the SubGenius, which he founded in 1953. Jehovah 1,[ an extraterrestrial who contacted “Bob” in the early 1950s while he was building a television set, gave him supernatural knowledge of the past and future, an ineffable nature and a limited ability to travel in time. Jehovah 1 and his spouse Eris were technically part of the Elder gods, who are committed to human pain and are led by Yog-Sothoth, but Johava 1 is “relatively good” with Eris less so, however both are members of the “rebel gods” working against the Elder gods. Jehovah 1 intended “Bob” to lead a powerful conspiracy and brainwash individuals to make them work for a living. “Bob” refused; instead visiting Tibet where he infiltrated and then organized a counter-movement.to bring SLACK to the human descendants of the Yeti, the Subgenus. “Bob” teaches that Slack a unique magical system which will will allow a free, comfortable life (without hard work or responsibility) which is the rightful entitlement.of the Yeti and their descendants. Slack is obtained primarily through sex and the avoidance of work. The church plans to rid the world of everyone who did not descend from yetis and a complex counter-conspiracy is now unfolding where “Bob” hopes to rid the Earth of 90% of humanity, making the Earth “clear”
Praise “Bob!”
I’m not sure how much of that is real, but I’m into it either way. A world where we descended from yetis? Sign me the fuck up.
I feel certain that you are a Yeti descendant and so I refer you to https://www.subgenius.com .
Bob is [also] another Bill Murray character, a needy patient who refuses to let his psychiatrist go on a family vacation without him.
Love that we get a Minnesota shoutout! I feel duty-bound to point out, however, that Little Canada (despite the misleading name) is just a regular-degular suburb of St. Paul and has really nothing whatsoever to do with the Boundary Waters.
meanwhile, Tristan is deep in thought, mulling the merits of Arianism.
There aren’t very many merits, when you think about it.
1) I benefit from this concept
2) People my dad taught me to hate suffer from it
C) [unintelligible muttering about skull shapes]
IV: I shidded on the highway dad
That word… I don’t think it means what you think it means. Arianism is a 4th century heresy regarding the nature of Christ.
According to legend it was the cause of Nicholas of Myra (yes, Santa Claus!) striking Arius at the Council of Nicaea, but this is disputed.
Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
Keep your meme to yourself.
does it involve calipers?
Imagine it’s almost 300 years since Jesus was executed. There’s a con for his fandom, in Nicea, Asia-Minor. There’s competing fan theories over some timey-wimey aspect of when and how Jesus was generated: somehow before time or during when time existed. Real nerd stuff. There’s a vote and the pro-timey-wimey group wins and says if you disagree then you don’t get to go to heaven (literal, not an idiom). They come up with a creed everyone has to say, and it is very emphatic about the timey-wimey stuff, but they use jargon. And 1700 years later, English speaking Christians have to say “begotten” like three times in two sentences. “begotten, not made” blah blah blah. And then a couple of lines later, the Greek word that had been translated as “begotten” before gets translated as “made”.
The lead of the faction of fans opposed to the timey-wimey stuff was named Arius, so Arianism. Some modern day offshoots of Christianity are accused of Arianism, and like a lot of old-timey heresies, it’s part of a random Christians* personal theologies. *Who ironically want there to be church police doing an inquisition.
oops, should have picked a better known Christian heresy for the joke.
You all know about Gnosticism?
Of course the Christians have a massive car.
It comes with the yearly church subscription
I’d say it has more to do with white privelege than christianity, but also, having a truckload of kids encourages you to have, well… a truck!
I don’t really get driving a huge-ass car when you are single and alone in it 99% of the time, but when you have 4 kids (which the Browns do if I recall correctly), there is a need for extra space and a regular 5 seater won’t cut it, so it kinda makes sense (though there are more economical and less flashy options).
At least American gas is cheap so it’s not as bad as if you’d try in other countries.
That feels like a lie.
Cheaper than in most of Europe (1.5 to 2 €/liter, which is approximately 6 to 8 $/gallon) at least.
On the other hand my understanding is that the average European car gets almost twice our gas mileage (kilometerage?); American cars can be labeled fuel efficient while getting fewer than 50 miles per gallon.
It’d be interesting to get a more apples to apples comparison; for two adults living the same distance from an in-person job and working the same hours, who spends more on gas each week?
Do we even know it’s the Brown’s car? I was assuming some kind of church trip, especially given that Tristan’s there and Joyce doesn’t seem particularly close to him at this point.
Eh, Christian families of color aren’t benefiting from white privilege.
Even putting that aside, it’s weird to single Christians out given how dominant they remain in the US. Especially true going back a generation or more to Joyce’s parents.
It’s just a Suburban.
I’m shocked it’s not a 15 passenger church van, but most of those probably disappeared years ago because they’re death traps.
ah, I thought Tahoe, but the side rear window size didn’t quite match.
“A friend of a friend told me…”
A wild Tristan (finally) appears!
*WOOHOO*
*plays Pokemon Red/Blue Battle Theme on his Game Boy*
Joyce is now young enough to have been a tween when the 2015-2020 Chevrolet Suburban was around.
Floating timelines are a reminder that time is scary.
I’m sorry but you must be mistaken, surely 2020 was yesterday!
It was!
But that truck debuted years after the comic started…
The pandemic doesn’t count.
It’s still 2020, really
It’s actually September 11112th, 1993.
Having read this comic since I was 13, and thus having been younger than or the same age as these characters for the longest time. It feels really uncomfortable to think about the fact that at this point in the time scale, in 2020 i would have been 19/20 and they would have been 13/14/15
2015 is when we could read about Becky and Dina getting together.
It’s sad that I know Michael W. Smith wrote this, but like David I grew up on Christian music; and in spite of being an atheist now, I still listen to it sometimes because of nostalgia.
Rich Mullins!
Ohh ok. I guess I was just thinking of the version sang by Michael W Smith. I heard that constantly growing up.
Ah, the homeschool van rides. Good times.
Oh, it’s Joyce’s first contact with the Devil.
I wonder if this’ll be the only appearance Misha makes? It would be….interesting to see how another old friend, one who hasn’t gone through the experiences Becky has, would react to the new Atheist Joyce.
J: I have no opinions about Tristan!
M: Tristan exists, by the way.
J: I have many opinions about Tristan!
“Circa ‘What About Bob’”
So, this flashback were, more or less, on 1991, right?
Huh, never would’ve guessed Joyce had braces.
Dental plan
one of those simpsons bits my dad loves to retell lol
Damn, I was about to make a Simpsons joke.
It’s how she got her perfect smile
Calling it, the storyline where Joyce bangs!
Oh my Cheese it only took 14 years for us to finally see Tristan!
Little Canada is actually in the southern third of Minnesota, a good five hour drive from the Boundary Waters. I don’t think you really start to see signs for the BWCA until you get closer to Duluth.
The man, the myth, the legend!
Ah yes nothing like getting information third or fourth hand, especially with the guy present
Misha_ We had a Misha before?
…
New antagonist?
Foil?
Hell with Misha. I wanna hear about Izzy.
given that it’s ‘heard from kory that izzy said’ i wouldnt’ be surprsied if ti was like a game of ‘telephone’ if not a meanspirited kid prank, if not some kinda manipulation as a way to get tristan’s attention lol
Oh, huh. Well, that’s a new perspective on Joyce’s childhood crush. So she wasn’t really interested in Tristan, specifically, as much as she was interested in having Some Dude that she was given permission to project all her romantic(/sexual?) feelings onto! At least, that’s how I’m interpreting this.
guess at that age you can get crushes easily from someone being nice to you , if not just someone telling you that another person might like you, as opposed to to immediately going ‘ew boys’ lol.
tho i wonder if there’ll be some underlying “becky realizes she likes joyce” in a subconscious way lol
A Joyce dream, this’ll either be repressed sexual urges or trauma.
well, tristan was mentioned before but she didn’t rly seem to be too concerned about it either way when his name was brougt up, if only being in denial like “i definitely didn’t ride my bike past his house to sneak a peek at him”
I always wonder how the lyrics sound to people who didn’t grow up with these songs / hear them in their head when reading the lyrics
Truly, we are burdened with knowledge and in my case a new earworm
weird way for me to be reminded just how many kids had braces
I don’t think they were quite /that/ common up in Canada however, so I have to wonder if it’s one of those big capitalism scams
i guess it’s a good thing joyce’s family wasn’t too religiously dependent to deny medicine to where she couldn’t get braces lol
there def were some ppl that would’ve wanted invisalign or removed as soon as possible b/c of the pain or so lol but other than huge gaps, i think crooked teeth are fine/common in other countries.
isn’t joyce’s DAD a dentist? i feel like that was mentioned at some point.
Americans are very weird about our teeth, as an American. We have a big fixation on how white and straight and even they are, none of which actually relate to their health.
lol i wonder if this flash back means we’ll she this friend in the future too, assuming she doesn’t shun becky and joyce for their current personality/beliefs lol
I’m sorry Willis, but *this* is how the Tristan crush started?? This is the most comphet start to a crush in the world, no fucking wonder Becky was like “you’re just playing it up to fit in and hide your feelings” lmao
For the benefit of those who don’t know, Boundary Waters is a real place near the Canadian border in Minnesota. Assuming they’re driving to or from La Porte, that’s about a 10 hour ride. They appear to be near Little Canada, which is just east of St. Paul.