I don’t mind evil robots. As a nerd I’ve always known I would one day face evil robots one day.
But I never in a million years thought they would try to make me use Google+ to comment on youtube videos. I thought they’d stick to harmless stuff like launching nukes.
Robots, definitely. Even leaving aside the fantasy nature of the zombies themselves, the whole zombie apocalypse scenario is really implausible. The thing is that, as predators, humans in their natural state suck hard. We’re slow, weak, have no natural weapons or defenses to speak of, and our senses are all near-useless (except our daylight vision, which is excellent). But we’re the planet’s number one badasses, and the reasons for that are thinking, talking, and tool use. And a zombie is a human with all those things that make us the planet’s top badasses taken away, leaving it just our frankly crap basic capabilities.
Yeah, infectious bite, takes more killin’ than an ordinary human, but those don’t really matter, because it won’t take long for us to figure out what’s going on, get the word out about it – in a world where pretty much everyone carries a camera connected to the internet on their person at all times, the only question is how long before the first lolzombie is posted – and bring the incredibly effective tools we use for killing the planet’s top badasses – each other – to bear on the problem. And there is absolutely jack shit a zombie can do to a tank, or an APC, or an attack helicopter, or a UAV…
Robots, on the other hand, we’ve been doing our best to make better at those things than we are ourselves, and more capable in all those other respects as well, and, though we’re still having trouble with some aspects of the thinking, we’ve largely succeeded on the other fronts. It’s not the zombies we have to worry about; it’s the drones we built to kill them turning on us.
(Yeah, I’ll just talk about the zombie/robot apocalypse because it’s way less depressing than the strip.)
Actually, as natural predators we’re not that bad because we can outrun everything else over time. Quadruped animals need to time their breathing to their rhythm of running, which means when they get hot they can’t pant and overheat – they can run very fast, but not for long amounts of time. Bipeds (us) don’t need to worry about timing our breath to the way we run, and not only that – we have sweat glands! So sure we’re a lot slower, but we can keep going and going, forcing the animal we’re chasing to also keep going until they basically overheat themselves to death.
Of course, in a zombie chasing human situation this doesn’t apply, because we’re also bipeds. And, y’know, we got cars.
Zombies have the endurance but not the healing. A broken leg won’t kill a zombie, but it will let you outrun it. And with no ability to heal eventually all zombies will, simply by moving around long enough, be crawling, then just sort of flopping around like fish. We can outlast them as a race, even if they take out a lot (and they probably won’t)
Robots we’ll have to go matrix and blot out the sun. Even when we win, that’ll suck.
Humans as predators weren’t meant to take prey down quickly, like a wolf or big cat. Humans are the kind of predator who can injure an animal and then follow, for days if need be, until the prey wears itself down or dies. Not only that, but humans are remarkably resistant to injury, heal fast, can walk for days on end with little or no sleep, and are intelligent enough to follow tracks. So even though we aren’t as fast as the big predators, we are just as deadly. Particularly because things like broken limbs don’t entirely stop us like they do for other animals.
Even with all that though, robots would probably be worse.
Depends how the infection spreads. In most zombies stories it get around the world before anyone really knows what is happening.
If it is that sort then it’s a real problem because humans number so many and by extension, so will the zombie hordes. If only a fifth of, say, London turned into zombies during the first phase before people know what is going on that’s over a million people, more people than are in the entire US armed forces.
Even if they can’t get to you, how many people have guns and enough ammo to clear a way free of a safe location to get somewhere with food and water once supplies run out? Even if they have gun, most Americans have only handguns, not noted for their accuracy or ranged ability, and not that much ammo.
And if you’re in a safe location (Any building with the first set of stairs taken out is pretty safe, anywhere with two sets of stairs taken out is practically impregnable) how many of us have food and water to last more than a few days? I’d imagine very little and less so without power to cook or freeze it.
This leads onto the next problem, which is for most of us food is something delivered to their town. With zombies everywhere production and delivery will cease. The stuff in any urban location would last the population of that location only a few days even if shared out evenly, not counting supermarkets and suchlike impossible to get to because they are filled with the walking dead. And going out to get it would be asking for trouble because under pressured conditions like that, most people can’t shoot for shit and every gunshot will draw more zombies all around you.
Heck, many entire countries produce less food that their population needs, of less types and in the wrong seasons depending on when this starts.
You also have to factor in the human element: People won’t know what is wrong with zombies until they get bit. They won’t want to kill infected or zombified relatives and may well fight to protect them. They’ll fight each other for supplies. They’ll cause accidental fires that could spread like crazy without a fire service to stop them. They’ll generally panic all round and make bad decisions. They’ll waste tons of ammo firing wildly, and they’ll flee along roads when they should stay home and stay home when they need to move.
Also most people lack the very basic survival skills they need and even people with advanced skills will find themselves limited. Sure a doctor has a lot of training, but he relies on many other people making his drugs and equipment, never mind how little he can do without power, or that hospitals will be the worst place to be. Even the army, which has everything you need to survive, will have trouble. How many soldiers will want to stay on base when their families are in danger half a country a way? And can they really move fast enough to save the rest of the population from starvation and being overwhelmed?
In the long run my money is on the humans too, but most people dying in the process is not unrealistic.
Human cooperation is the only one of the characteristics listed that is a strong element of human survival techniques. Humans primary advantages are physical endurance (name another land species that can run continuously for over twenty-five miles; hell, there are running competitions that cover one hundred miles), language (which is not a technology but an inherent and defining characteristic), and environmental displacement (in Africa where we evolved megafauna is relatively prosperous having evolved side by side with humans,on other continents where humans migrated, we hunted them to extinction).
That’s the real problem with apocalypse fiction, they tend to posit that the basic human character is selfish bastard, if that were true we would have been extinct long ago, humans, instinctively, are cooperative. Of course the evidence seems to indicate we aren’t really a species . . .
Zombies might be harder to take down, but you can just wait them out. They’re really not all that effective at surviving.
– Their food source is their method of reproducing
– They lack the higher brain functions required to prevent them from injuring themselves or to help them pathfind, putting them in the same boat as robots
– They are still physically susceptible to the exact same kind of harm as humans- blunt trauma, temperature, dehydration, etc; even if they just ignore the damage it’s still there
Maybe some depictions of zombies show them as smart, or capable of feeding on other things, or somehow more durable, but by that point they kind of stop being zombies and start being vampires.
Now, there’s a pervasive misunderstanding here, and I blame it on movies like “The Walking Dead” and Vincent Price’s masterful “Last Man on Earth.” Zombies are commonly portrayed now as the victims of a bizarre virus that ruins one’s eating habits and sense of hygiene. That’s not a zombie, that’s a medical tragedy.
Zombies are corpses reanimated by Voodoo magic. That’s the proper use of the term, and it reduces the danger considerably. After death, the period of greatest danger from reanimation is about three hours, after which rigor mortis will prevent the revenant from chasing anyone. Rigor mortis does wear off eventually, but only because autolysis – the process of cellular breakdown into fluids – makes the muscles into a sort of mush which is incapable of of significant movement.
So imagine the day of the waking dead. The only real threat is posed by corpses on autopsy tables and in morgues, the fresh few that are dead but not yet stiff. The buried dead, even if their tissues are not already decayed beyond use, have to overcome a sealed casket and six feet of dirt before they can pose any threat at all. The effort is beyond most healthy adults, as shown by the many failed attempts by escape artists and magicians to escape a buried casket; for the zombie to work its way out will take a severe toll on its already weakened physique.
Those living within a hundred yards of a graveyard may be overcome by the stench, and morgue workers might have to put down an occasional escapee, but on the whole the most obvious sign of a zombie rising would be these occasional trails of organ parts radiating out from the graves of the disintegrating dearly departed. The living dead might get about fifty feet or so before falling apart.
Now, Black Lantern rings are another story, but that’s kind of a touchy subject so we won’t go there.
Try one of loyal sidekick Rat’s Heartstopper Bacon Bacon Bacon Cheeseburgers with Bacon. We only eat them during deer/elk season when we’re running around the mountains with packs and rifles, and they are assembled thus:
1) Prepare ample bacon. One pound per person, minimum.
2) Cook, over open fire, those big half-pound burger patties with the cheese and bacon mixed into the patty.
3) Fry the buns in the leftover bacon grease.
4) Assemble: Lower bun, a layer of bacon, the cooked burger, more bacon, a layer of cheese, bacon, toppings to suit, another layer of bacon, then the top bun.
5) Place on plate with bacon side dish and a bacon garnish.
6) Accompany with the adult beverage of choice.
There are few things better on a clear, cold night on the mountains, while sitting around a roaring fire, unwinding after a long, hard day of pursuing wild ungulates.
Social anxiety/social avoidance is NOT the same thing as autism.
And with a father as controlling and abusive as Blaine is, it’s also pretty damn natural for Amber to have some issues with others’ potential judgment.
My girlfriend has similar issues (though her parents are nowhere near as bad as Blaine) and I had issues like that in my own past as well.
It turns out having a parent who spends all their time with you coming up with arbitrary reasons why you’re terrible shit will give you problems when interacting with other people.
Exactly.
Autism means you have trouble picking up on social cues and understanding other people’s emotions.
Anxiety means you can empathise with other people but become overwhelmed and don’t know how to act. So you’re left thinking; What do I do? What if they laugh at me? What do I do? What if I hurt their feelings? What do I do?
Specifically an inability to decipher facial expressions, tone of voice, and body language is generally viewed as the definitive characteristic of autism.
The social cues and empathy issues are derived from that cause.
I’m pretty sure official statements on the subject are that we don’t know, since she’s never seen a doctor about it.
I personally am hesitant to bandy about diagnoses, but from my limited experience with the subject I know that the doctors diagnose by counting the number of symptoms you have. You need like 9 out of 14 or some weird number like that for the doctor to hand out a diagnosis, so if she were to go to a doctor her answer would just be based on that number count. Despite the nonverbal communication thing being considered the definitive characteristic it’s still only 1 symptom when the doctor starts counting.
I don’t say that to indicate that she’s not autistic, merely that it’s not necessarily as cut and dry as it may seem.
True. Like, the bullying autistic people get can and does cause social anxiety, there’s a decent bit of overlap where autistic folks have social anxiety TOO, but I don’t think that’s how Amber got her anxiety.
I don’t read her as autistic as much as social anxiety, but that doesn’t mean she’s *not.*
We do have word of god that no one’s diagnosed as autistic, which is a different statement from no one being autistic. (Women, PoC, and even more so WoC because they’re in the intersection of those two categories, have a tendency to get missed, and suprisingly many people think that all autistic people had a speech delay.)
No, this isn’t what autism is about.
She is socially awkward and self conscience, made worse by her father.
Ethan is her link to the rest of the world and her shield from herself and her father.
Which is why she fought so hard for him and why his rejection was so tough on her.
As a female with aspergers who often lurks the comments but has never posted before, I’d like to weigh in on this.
I don’t believe that Amber is on the spectrum, but the way she has acted in the past few pages IS indeed characteristic of a female with aspergers. While Dina is my very very favourite character, her presentation is pretty stereotypical and perhaps exaggerated – although some people (especially males) do present that way. A large amount of females on the spectrum evade diagnosis because they present more like how Amber acts in these flashbacks than like Dina, and they also usually learn to fake social interactions better than their male counterparts.
I also want to point out that the idea of autism as a “lack of empathy” (since someone commented about that) is incorrect and based on old ideas. Plenty of those on the spectrum may have the incorrect responses to other people’s emotions or have problems with displaying empathy, but others may be overwhelmed by emotions or have no problem with empathy. Also, anxiety/social anxiety and perhaps some other issues are very often linked to (or a result of) autism itself, so I think saying “no, it’s just social anxiety” is a bit disingenuous. For example, I really do care what people think and if I upset someone else, but I can’t manage eye contact or small talk. So if I went into a gas station and had to ask the clerk a question or something, yeah, I’d probably have a mini-panic like Amber is now.
And another thing – there’s a saying, “if you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person.” Amber’s mannerisms in the flashback are characteristic of aspergers. Dina is as well. It’s a spectrum, people present in many different ways, and you often can’t tell, especially in females. Just because Amber doesn’t present in a stereotypical way doesn’t mean that this doesn’t resemble an autistic person. Again, I don’t think that Amber is autistic at all, I think this is related to stress from her dad – but nobody is wrong for pointing out that it looks like aspergers.
Let me reiterate one last time – I never thought Amber was on the spectrum. I don’t think she’s autistic. Nothing about her in present-time seems autistic to me. However, in every panel of the flashback, it’s definitely come to mind because it really resembles it for some girls. I think this is just some sort of anxiety/stress/perhaps PTSD related to her dad. But I can certainly see where the “hey, is she autistic?” idea might’ve come from.
Which ones are the brownies with the mini m&ms? They used to sell them for $0.55 per brownie in my middle school and I bought them every time I found money. I then discovered you could get WAY more if you just bought them in the supermarket.
Hersheys has never been all that appealing to us Aussies, myself included. Over here the most popular chocolte brads are Cadburys, Nestle, Mars, Lindts and Toblerones.
At first, you tell yourself you can control it; just one or two Twinkies a day, no big deal. Before you know it, you’re in some back alley on the other side of town turning tricks for half a fuckin’ donette.
Mary is what he thinks a very annoying hateful Christian is like: hateful, annoying & hateful. She is therefore, part of his thoughts. Especially ones of hate.
Oy. I had to brace myself to go to urbandictionary to find out what PSL stands for since the Google didn’t give me any other good alternatives. Amusingly, there was a definition dealing with Joyce from “It’s Walky”.
Amusing to me since I have zero PSL for Joyce. I actually hate her. As for the other women in the strip, it varies: Admiration, respect, sympathy, empathy. Some annoyance at times tempered with realization that (a) they’re in their late teens or early 20s and (b) they’re web comic characters. The guys have various flaws, but I could hang with moth of them, although Ethan’s starting to annoy me.
Dina was spontaneously formed when someone dropped a dinosaur coloring book into a bowl of cereal that had been irradiated with Moe-Waves by leaving it in front of an anime marathon overnight, then tried to hide the mess by putting a hat on it and hiding it behind the closet door.
I see Dina as the person we all wish we could be: upfront and proud about what she likes and not giving a damn about what anybody else thinks, no matter how “strange” or socially awkward it is.
Amber/Ethan/Danny, on the other hand, are failing to live up to this ideal in one way or another, and thus remind us of who we actually are.
Dina may have something in the autism spectrum. Amber was/is full of social anxiety.
So one has limitations, the other has huge hang-ups and self conscienceness.
Dina has awareness that she is different, but doesn’t seem to have strong anxieties about it.
It can be a plus, but autism spectrum people are not socially adept. It is a defining feature.
I don’t think Dina is proud of what she is, she just is what she is.
Sure, there are some useful benefits, but it’s a net negative. Cute as the character is, society doesn’t work well that way.
If someone is standing where I need to be to reach a book in a tight space in a book store, I leave and browse elsewhere in the store and then come back to the spot later. I can’t just stand there and pretend like I’m looking at the books nearby for very long without getting pretty awkward.
And the horrible thing is that in an abusive relationship, even that little piece of information could and might get used against Amber. Which is really sad.
Knowledge is power. Absolute knowledge is the power to create and to destroy. Every time somebody learns something about you they are one step closer to that.
I’m imagining the need to make threats in sign language while holding a weapon. Then the increasing frustration as the clerk looks confused.
Alternately, having a series of pre-made signs.
Marcie getting all annoyed because no one is considerate enough to employ clerks who know ASL in case of deaf and/or mute robbers, and then the clerk explaining in fluent ASL that they just can’t understand what she’s saying around the gun in her hands.
It occurs to me that in about four years this particular strip will become irrelevant for about seven months, due to the fact that this flashback, as stated previously, takes place five years before whatever the current date is. Therefore, in about four years it’ll have been about five years since twinkies were taken temporarily off the market because of their father company’s bankruptcy.
I think what he’s referring to is that the period where there was no twinkies will be the time that this flashback is supposed to take place in at some point. Thus why is specified “For seven months”
If things continue at their current pace, we will be getting DoA for at least a decade. (Yay!) It’s already been three years and change, so if we were on real time, Sarah would be graduating.
As time passes, a story set in 2010 will become more and more a “period piece.” Trends, pop culture, and technology from the real world’s present day will become anachronisms if mentioned in comics.
Instead of doing that, Willis will be operating on what’s often referred to as “comic book time.” So the strip will be taking place in the “present day,” whatever that is. It allows the comic to be up to date and topical without having the characters spend a decade and a half in a four-year institution/
By saying “one”, it would mean that it’s Ethan is a Twinkie. It would be strange to say Amber likes Twinkie, because that ruins both the joke and the actual sentence, as the food product is usually referred to as plural. Stop being pedantic, it’s not cool.
Like, thank you for this comic? So much? This is exactly me, I have literally no idea why I’m afraid of strangers knowing my thoughts but I am (no, not in a paranoid way, but in this exact “they’ll judge me” way).
I’ve come a long long way since I was Amber’s age here but its still excruciating to think other people might know your motivations. I’ve avoided bathroom breaks, not buying what I want in stores, not asking waiters for things, never letting people know I like them, panicking about making phone calls… all for this reason. So thanks for putting it into words, I’ve never been able to.
(12 years later and people actually think I’m this confident, outgoing person; anxiety issues are a bongo but you can overcome them)
Nah, I’m 25 and still put on clothes, get anxious about other peoples’ judgment of them, and change before going to work. I’d wager this speaks to a lot of people.
The interesting thing about this is that it occurs in the same world where people have browsed porn magazines and bought them from news stands on the sidewalk.
Humans run the gamut.
Thank you all for making me realize how little problems I have. My day usually involves 10 seconds of looking for an undershirt that is thin enough to not melt in and doesnt have anything pornographic on it (I save those for days off). As weird as I think I am its nice to hear I have it easy. I cant even imagine. Good for you all for being able to deal with this. I am impressed .
And to think that these flashbacks, the table-flipping, Amber’s emotional crises, Ethan and Amber’s fights, Danny’s faux-date faux pas, the table-flipping, the spite kiss, Sal getting introduced to the Nintendo DS for the first time, and even Faz finding himself wrapped in harpoon wire, would just not have happened had Blaine just stayed in his goddamn car.
Literally, Blaine deciding whether to be or not be a douche affects the geography of so many things in this world, up to and including his jaw.
Oh my god, Amber is doing exactly what I do all the time with my hair. Including the bringing it to the face part, though I’m not sure if she smelled it like I tend to do. According to my parents, it’s a stim – I like the way my hair feels when it’s all smooth and tight around my finger, and my sense of smell is very sensitive, having a pleasant aroma floating around helps.
I think alot of people who stim may have a mild Asperger’s component to their makeup. Probably not diagnosed. But even more likely, we suffer from high social anxiety because of abuse or because we know we are going to be considered weird.
I don’t read her that way, but that doesn’t mean she’s automatically not.
That totally is a stim for a lot of people, including me.
And yeah, high social anxiety (and PTSD) rates in autistic people is almost certainly a thing because of bullying and abuse.
I didn’t actually really consider the possibility until just now because of my experience with her character, but from the way she’s been acting in her flashbacks…
I do that exact thing too! And while not on the autism spectrum (if anything, I can read social cues better than average) I was nearly diagnosed with Asperger’s when I was a kid because of behaviors like that.
I think for some kids, stims are also a way to focus, by providing sort of a centering feeling to concentrate on? Because I always did it in front of my face while reading, and I couldn’t focus otherwise.
When I saw the hair twirling, I remembered back. I hid behind my hair and played with it all my time. I spent my seventh grade year only speaking if I were spoken to….long story, but I just shut down into elective mutism. I really feel sorry for Amber now, seeing the terrified kid underneath.
I understand a little. I wasn’t as bad as Amber. But, I held my hand over my mouth when talking in school at my desk.
I wouldn’t look clerks in the eye, they may look back.
I couldn’t stand next to people to long in line or in stores.
And never ever eat in public. That took some arranging, but I did it.
I’m not sure if it was because I was afraid others would know my motives or my wants, I never thought about it that way.
Eventually I grew thru it, not out of it, but so that I can handle clerks and eating in public, and etc.
I just don’t much like it.
>Sal appears in flashback robbing the store
>flashback ends
>Amber realizes Sal’s in front her
>yells out what was done
>freaks out and runs away to hide behind the door with Dina forever
>the only thing Dan gets from the whole experience is that Sal fights crime to atone for her actions
Anyway, Twinkies are entry-level; Ho Hos are where it’s at.
This Incident may have been the catalyst… or the “goddammit, Ethan had my back for years” epiphany… in either case, if my best friend was getting the kind of shit Ethan was, I’d sure as hell fight it, too!
[saying so after having had awesome in-law types but Stockholm Syndrome from the odd passive-abusive ex]
They brought back the pies too, but I hear they are rancid now and not at all the same. I never was into Twinkies or the cupcakes that much, they were OK but not something I bought more than once every few years. The pies though, I will miss the fruit pies forever.
The closer I get to revealing the reality of myself, the more some dude has to pop up and say it’s unrealistic. Man, I’m not tired of that! Not tired of that at all!
For every dozen people who say “oh my god thank you for writing what it’s like to be me” there’s always some guy who has to be the dude who says “wtf is this fake shit.” It’s super charming, lemme tell you.
It’s frightening how many people cannot understand social anxiety. It’s utterly incomprehensible to them. Normal, caring, friendly people, who are presented with someone with social anxiety and think that person is some kind of demonic freak or judgemental arsehole.
I remember people making fun of a friend’s girl (now ex) behind her back, really harshly criticizing her because she worried too much what they all thought about her, and because (they thought) she was unfriendly because she’d sometimes avoid social events out of fear of being perceived as awkward. So, you don’t like her and are criticizing her because she’s afraid people don’t like her and might talk about her behind her back? Nobody sees what is wrong here? I tried to explain this to people but it was some “you have no ears and I must scream” shit.
And people don’t necessarily have to understand it as such – just to understand that it exists, accept it, and deal with the people in their lives that have it accordingly. People are different.
Case in point: Me. I have pretty much the exact opposite of social anxiety. I’m a Type AAA personality. In my youth I was confrontational and even (at times) combative. Now, in middle age, I’m matured into being just outgoing and confident. I’ve have always been self-confident to the point where I’m accused of being a little cocky.
Now, I’ve had friends that have social anxiety issues. I don’t and never will understand precisely why; I don’t see how I can. But I know enough to make allowances for them in my interactions with them.
If you’ll allow an analogy, I have gay friends. I’m about as hetero as you can be; I like women. I’ve always liked women and women have always liked me. I can’t understand how a man could be sexually attracted to another man. It’s not in my nature to understand it. But that’s OK; I don’t understand why people like watching football on television, either. I don’t have to understand it. I just have to understand that people are different, and those differences don’t necessarily make them better or worse people.
I get social anxiety like this, along with severe general anxiety, it absolutely sucks. I might even have random panic attacks later over whether my wording in this comment made me sound stupid somehow. So here’s another thanks for writing this, and if you suffer this sort of crap too, I hope you’re able to get better. Also, a tip to share – l-theanine (marketed as suntheanine) isn’t quite as powerful as benzodiazepines, but it’s also non-addictive, extremely safe, and can really take the edge off of prolonged anxiety attacks, though I find I need to take 600mg instead of the recommended 100-150mg. It’s the magical chemical that makes tea all soothing and calming, and gives British people our classy coolness (I may be making that last part up).
Boy do I get you on the comment related anxiety. I don’t have panic attacks about it but I am completely unable to go back to the comment section on any comic to which I’ve contributed. I always worry that people will think what I had to say was stupid. So instead of finding out and dealing with it and responding to people, I just avoid it forever. Or until a reply is no longer expected of me.
I obsess over the one who reveals that they don’t actually get what I’m doing through dismissive and demeaning putdowns, in ways that overshadow those who get it and appreciate it. I’m not too good at ignoring the one, and telling myself that there’s going to be one in every crowd, no matter what I do, isn’t a magic balm. But, you know, there IS going to be that one no matter what you do AND there are a LOT of folks who appreciate and benefit from what you do–so thanks.
Mostly I wish that one guy would notice the dozen folks before pooping all over ’em. They’re right there, you passed right by them to say this stuff is impossible!
The thing I have come to understand is that some of us are in the less than 1% bracket. In addition to that because shy people often never reach the point of telling the world about themselves by definition we wind up even more marginalized.
I remember going to a store, looking for some nerdy specific thing and inevitably the store not having it. I then would become incredibly anxious about leaving without having purchased anything. I would think that the clerks and people coming in would look at me and think I must have stole something because I didn’t buy anything. Especially since I wear a big coat, and having worked retail I know they tell you to keep an eye out for people in big coats. So I would wander the store, tense about leaving, thinking that if I left in a hurry it would look even worse. I would be mentally screaming at myself “Don’t look flustered, don’t look flustered, don’t rush!” as I eventually left or I would buy some stuff I didn’t even need. Then I’d get to the next store to look for the same item and I’d consider not even going in, because what if they don’t have it again.
Feeling this so hard. Still do. Here is my strategy to manage the didn’t-buy-anything anxiety: I make myself leave the store right when I want to, but I amble out real slowly, then pause immediately outside the store and stare at my phone a while before continuing. Y’know, make it clear to the staff I’m not in a hurry to get away!
I don’t know what that even does for anyone else, but it tends to manage my anxiety over the situation…!
Just face it Willis, your reality isn’t realistic. In fact, you’re not even real. I’m sick of this cartoonists cramming all this Willis down our throats. Blatent tokenism.
Flashback to the childhood. Both comic and me. This speaks to me on a deep personal level. For years I was obsessed by the taught that people can use (and will use) anything I say or do against me. So I tried to be as silent as I could. I wished I could be invisible.
If you don’t give any information to the enemy, they can’t use it as a weapon against you.
Cragalanch knows what you mean. The thought of everyone being out against you ruled my life for many years. The problem was even more prevelant because that was somewhat the case, being bullied like Cragalanch was. Cragalnach only started to come out his stony shell when he met someone who actually wasn’t out to get me
No, not really. My anxiety just tends to manifest itself in the form of “what if”s, particularly around disasters or other terrible things. “What if” an earthquake were to hit right now? “What if” a bee is on the ground, and I anger it by stepping too close to it? “What if” I were to get some terrible disease from a mosquito bite? “What if”, “what if”, “what if”. You get the idea.
I’ve yet to meet a woman who hasn’t had an intense fear of being understood. Heck, I had a girlfriend who refused to wear her favorite color because she didn’t want anyone to know red was her favorite.
I really identify with Amber in this strip, and for me, it’s not a fear of ring understood so much as it is the fear of what people could DO with that understanding. People can manipulate you if they understand how you work. It’s a trust issue. I wouldn’t say all women have a fear of being understood. Most women (actually most people) have a very strong dislike of being manipulated and controlled.
What the fuck? Women are people. If we want to spew out bizarrely generalizing (though less offensive in my case) anecdotes, I have yet to meet a woman who DIDN’T want to be understood.
I have considered owning a shop, and I have an Amber-like tendency in small shops (due to some stupidity and sticky fingers in the past). It would be super weird watching someone else have a panic attack over what I think of them, when I can tell exactly what’s going on.
At first I was like, don’t all Americans like Twinkies? As in, don’t you have to answer positive to the question “Do you like Twinkies?” when applying for U.S. citizenship?
And then I read the comments and I’m like oh, it’s not about the Twinkies at all. Amber would be just as likely to think “They’ll see me breathing and they’ll know I like air!”
And then my mind starts to wander and I’m like, I wonder what Twinkies taste like? And then I remember that every time I’ve tried some legendary American foodstuff, it’s turned out to be extremely underwhelming and/or more or less equivalent to something I’ve already tasted.
And then I’m like, I think I should finish this comment now.
I grew up Not Eating Twinkies, and the actual Twinkies are very disappointing. Before the company went bankrupt/sold to someone else, I’d get a huge craving for Twinkies every few years and buy and eat them and be disappointed every single time. I think they’re a thing that’s only good if you grew up eating them. IOW, don’t feel bad for not having tried them, they’re kind of gross unless you grew up eating them!!!
Although, for the record, you can have great parents and still be afflicted with crippling social anxiety. *points to self* I’m sure Blaine compounded her problems though–and it IS quite possible that he caused them in the first place–but I think some part of it comes down to an inherent susceptibility to anxiety.
Sir Robin, I was just about to call it — this or another closely related scenario. You take this one ^. I’ll go with this: Sal follows Amber out of the store with the Twinkies, thinking that Amber bought them and then forgot them, and they accuse Sal of taking them for herself.
When I previously considered the “Sal traumatized Amber while robbing a store” scenario I never pictured Blaine being in the vicinity. Now I’m wondering if this will play out with Amber being traumatized by Blaine (maybe the first time seeing him go full psycho on someone) and Sal being the victim of the attack. She could still get in trouble for robbing the store even if she is attacked by a lunatic customer, right?
I’m leaning toward a different scenario.
Young Amber’s panic attack during the crime hits critical mass, and her own inner Blaine bursts out in a spasm of violence that stops the robbery. She wins overwhelming approval from her interaction with strangers by stopping crime.
At the same time, something rubs her nose in the fact that her Blaine traits were what fueled her ability to gain that approval. This may be where Blaine being in the vicinity figures in.
Dilemma! She doesn’t want to be a person who is like her father, but she wants to explore this new experience of being successful at interacting with strangers.
Solution: become somebody different and let that different persona be the one who fights crime and does good deeds.
Compartmentalize the bad parts of herself, re-purposing them into positive acts.
Ethan is being a great friend here and very understanding for his age.
This puts Amber and Dina on a new plain. Amber knows something about social awkwardness and can relate to Dina, even though it is not he same exact thing.
Amber has come miles in dealing with what was a crippling problem, with no help from her father.
I expect Blaine will catch Sal robbing the store, thereby ruining another life. If Sail sees him sneaking around the dorm, there will be no survivors. Amber seeing Blaine violently detaining a young girl and handing her over to the police won’t help Amber’s anxiety at all.
And is there any chance Seal wasn’t really robbing he store. Maybe Blaine escalates a miscommunication and Sal wasn’t an armed robber. Except that I seem to remember there was two or more robberies. Still, I could see shoplifting escalate into armed robbery due to Blaine’ intervention.
Not to be that guy, but it’s tough to feel sympathy for a robber whose life gets ruined because she is caught in the act, at the expense of the person who actually caught her.
I’m calling it: Blaine abuses the twinkies in front of amber, sal is the clerk, blaine frames her for the robbery.
When Sal and Blaine meet, there shall the greatest beatdown in dumbing of age history commence… and willis won’t be artistically up to the task of rendering it until he’s moved onto the 4th Dumbing of Age related spinoff comic and the kickstarter for the “Dumbing of Age Remastered!” overhaul is completed.
Also, as much as i’m enjoying this drama, i kind of hope the story after this is riley and dina debating about cereal or something. we’re gonna need a breather…
Well, she’s come a long way from that girl who couldn’t buy Twinkies.
Now she’s up to flipping tables and grabbing the arms of people she barely knows in order to yell, “bongo, where the hell do you get off??” at them.
I’m kind of glad that I grew up back when it was usually just called “shy” and we weren’t slapping the label “social anxiety” on everything. I almost certainly had it (and probably still do), but it seems to me that having a medical professional tell me I had it would have simply further enabled the behavior. Instead of working to overcome it as I have all these years, I would have simply accepted the behavior and thought, “This is just who I am. I do have social anxiety disorder, after all…”
Now, I shall move on from this comment section before a bunch of young folks rip me to pieces for being so insensitive. =P
No, you’re not insensitive. Just obtuse. It’s fine; I do the same things. It’s hard to put yourself outside your own body and understand that everyone faces their own problems differently. No one really has the “same” problem. It all jumbles up inside differently for each person. So while you have worked to overcome it; others may have been doing the same thing and not coming to the same conclusions you have.
Same goes for “slapping a label” on something. For some folks it empowers them to have a name on it. Feels like they can control it. Maybe not for you, and that’s cool! We’re all different. But for some it may help. It doesn’t always mean they can ignore it after it has a name, and it likewise doesn’t mean that people who DON’T get diagnosed will have an easier time dealing with it.
In retrospect I’m very annoyed that my upbringing drilled into me notions of a stiff-upper-lip, why-don’t-you-grow-a-pair, lots-of-people-have-it-worse-so-what-do-you-have-to-complain-about-anyway. THAT upbringing hurt me. It would have helped massively if I had been diagnosed with social anxiety earlier.
When I was finally diagnosed with social anxiety (so bad that the accumulated stress and anxiety had directly caused a breakdown) it was a massive relief. Being aware of my condition allowed me to get educated about it and deal with it properly, rather than just trying to overcome it.
I hadn’t realised at the time but I NEEDED to be easier on myself and give myself that little bit of breathing space and allowance, rather than always just trying to grit it out because I thought those feelings were pathetic and weak. Now that I have an awareness of how and why those feelings arise I have become infinitely better at coping. I no longer self-recriminate when I have to blow people off or take time by myself to recover from (what feel like to me) intense social situations because I know it’s important for my health and well-being.
Don’t get me wrong Marc, I’m not saying that you are wrong. This aspect of your upbringing -which seems to have been similar to mine in this respect- seems to have been good for but. But your experience won’t match up with everyone’s. It was patently harmful for me.
David Willis: At first, I thought you were using a red filter over your drawings in these past couple of strips, and then I realised that’s the actual colouring you’re using. Not easy. As an amateur cartoonist, I am impressed. Now, I have to get off this damn computer and get to drawing. I’m working on a graphic-novel sample for the University of British Columbia’s creative-writing MFA program.
Amber’s convoluted thought process here= exactly the sort of “logic” that rules your life with an anxiety disorder. I’m improving, but similar to this, I end up worrying that taxi drivers will judge me for taking a taxi somewhere. When that’s how they, you know, earn a living.
I used to do the same with with Public Junk Food, but my hang ups were specifically because I was (am) a fat girl and I knew that no matter what food I bought or who it was for someone was going to be a gaping asshole and Judge Me For It. Now I give much less of a fuck about it.
I’d say this level of social anxiety is unrealistic, but it took me a solid month to work up the nerve necessary to get advised for classes for next semester.
In reference to the alt text:
When I was little, my family did this tie-dye thing where we took perfectly good shirts and turned them into hippie rainbows. I was never seen in public in mine.
Short answer, yes. Most characteristics of people vary. Most people experience some anxiety occasionally. As you move away from the average, in one direction you find people with less anxiety, in the other direction you find people who experience more, until you reach the extremes of both, which are VERY extreme. In both directions the people who reach the extremes are a small percentage, but they are part of humanity’s diversity.
When I visit home, my mother sends my younger sister with me on errands “just in case I need to talk to people.” I’m 24. Yes, social anxiety can be this bad.
I now find it all the more endearing that Amber has been making the effort to teach Dina how to socialize.
I also have to empty my mind of these lyrics, which the strip reminded me of: “He makes friends easy, he’s not like me. I watch for judgment anxiously . . . ”
An internet to the first person to identify the quote *without using Google.* : )
This isn’t cute or appalling. It’s just realistic.
Well it’s cute that Ethan is helping her through it, but the social anxiety thing shouldn’t be appealing to you.
Even as an adult I sometimes get so overcome with anxiety that I can’t buy groceries because I feel like the cashier will be able to know all of my deepest thoughts just based on my veggie selection. I am so, so lucky to have a husband who is patient with me and doesn’t mind picking up the slack on my bad anxiety days. My heart is seriously going out to Amber right now. I hate that so much is hitting her right now 🙁
Do you have some other mental illness? Like Bi polarity or something? I’m just curious is all. I have a friend who’s bi polar 2 and he has days where he gets paranoid on an insane level and refuses to go outside etc. He’s literally said to me on several occasions “If I get the the point where I’m frozen in the supermarket because of my brain, just shoot me.”
I always laugh him off and say “Lose my best friend because you’re having a bad day? Fuck off dude, I’d just take your shopping list, buy everything, pay for it and then arm drag you out.”
Social anxiety on this level is very typically a symptom of some other problem.
Social anxiety of this level can also just be really severe social anxiety. Bipolar disorder is a pretty big jump.
I’m just really anxious sometimes. It’s gotten a lot better as I’ve gotten older. It’s just been a little worse lately since I’ve stopped taking pills now that I’m pregnant. It’s not indicative of anything else though. Just boring old anxiousness.
There was some brand called ‘___ Street Wear’ (can’t find the name now, it was really popular in the 1980s). I begged my mom to get me a shirt with that logo on it and wore it to school. My only comment was that the logo was too big. To this day I still never wear clothing with obvious brands printed on it.
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Nooo, traumatized by Twinkies!
and Clerks
…shit, *I* was traumatized by Clerks =p
Dude, Clerks was awesome.
Except that Buffalo Bill dance.
That scene did not age well.
37?!
You know who I can do without? I can do without the people in the video store.
Seeing as most video stores are going out of business, your problem is solved.
The world is one step ahead of you. We’re inside a year of not even having video stores.
In a row?
Great, five more to come. XP
Goodbye horses…
Now I need the clerk to be randal. Or Silent Bob.
Dude, I was named after the Dante from Clerks
Pretty sure I win the traumatized thingy hands-down
pretty sure you do, bro …………..
man…
*beaten*
And now we have the NSA so we know they know already!
Google already knows – they also know everything you dream of doing with Twinkies. All your searches, Twinky slash-fic, & fetishes.
And now they got scary-ass attack robots to go after you when ya fuck up.
I don’t mind evil robots. As a nerd I’ve always known I would one day face evil robots one day.
But I never in a million years thought they would try to make me use Google+ to comment on youtube videos. I thought they’d stick to harmless stuff like launching nukes.
I said “one day” twice. I has a dumb.
The Grammar Police have been notified. Expect their enforcement drones shortly.
I understand they can be distracted by a teenager with a smart phone.
“Next time, I’ll be deadly serious next time!”
“What?”
“Never mind!”
Call the Department of Redundancy Department
And the next time she was.
I wonder which would actually be harder to take down, a zombie horde or evil robots attacking.
The robots. Unless you’re in Voodooland, zombies are make-believe.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but even if zombies were real, robots would be wickedly easy to take out.
If you tell anyone I said this, I’ll extra-crispy you with the fusion cannon.
Fire retardant foam.
Robots, definitely. Even leaving aside the fantasy nature of the zombies themselves, the whole zombie apocalypse scenario is really implausible. The thing is that, as predators, humans in their natural state suck hard. We’re slow, weak, have no natural weapons or defenses to speak of, and our senses are all near-useless (except our daylight vision, which is excellent). But we’re the planet’s number one badasses, and the reasons for that are thinking, talking, and tool use. And a zombie is a human with all those things that make us the planet’s top badasses taken away, leaving it just our frankly crap basic capabilities.
Yeah, infectious bite, takes more killin’ than an ordinary human, but those don’t really matter, because it won’t take long for us to figure out what’s going on, get the word out about it – in a world where pretty much everyone carries a camera connected to the internet on their person at all times, the only question is how long before the first lolzombie is posted – and bring the incredibly effective tools we use for killing the planet’s top badasses – each other – to bear on the problem. And there is absolutely jack shit a zombie can do to a tank, or an APC, or an attack helicopter, or a UAV…
Robots, on the other hand, we’ve been doing our best to make better at those things than we are ourselves, and more capable in all those other respects as well, and, though we’re still having trouble with some aspects of the thinking, we’ve largely succeeded on the other fronts. It’s not the zombies we have to worry about; it’s the drones we built to kill them turning on us.
(Yeah, I’ll just talk about the zombie/robot apocalypse because it’s way less depressing than the strip.)
Actually, as natural predators we’re not that bad because we can outrun everything else over time. Quadruped animals need to time their breathing to their rhythm of running, which means when they get hot they can’t pant and overheat – they can run very fast, but not for long amounts of time. Bipeds (us) don’t need to worry about timing our breath to the way we run, and not only that – we have sweat glands! So sure we’re a lot slower, but we can keep going and going, forcing the animal we’re chasing to also keep going until they basically overheat themselves to death.
Of course, in a zombie chasing human situation this doesn’t apply, because we’re also bipeds. And, y’know, we got cars.
Zombies have the endurance but not the healing. A broken leg won’t kill a zombie, but it will let you outrun it. And with no ability to heal eventually all zombies will, simply by moving around long enough, be crawling, then just sort of flopping around like fish. We can outlast them as a race, even if they take out a lot (and they probably won’t)
Robots we’ll have to go matrix and blot out the sun. Even when we win, that’ll suck.
Humans as predators weren’t meant to take prey down quickly, like a wolf or big cat. Humans are the kind of predator who can injure an animal and then follow, for days if need be, until the prey wears itself down or dies. Not only that, but humans are remarkably resistant to injury, heal fast, can walk for days on end with little or no sleep, and are intelligent enough to follow tracks. So even though we aren’t as fast as the big predators, we are just as deadly. Particularly because things like broken limbs don’t entirely stop us like they do for other animals.
Even with all that though, robots would probably be worse.
Depends how the infection spreads. In most zombies stories it get around the world before anyone really knows what is happening.
If it is that sort then it’s a real problem because humans number so many and by extension, so will the zombie hordes. If only a fifth of, say, London turned into zombies during the first phase before people know what is going on that’s over a million people, more people than are in the entire US armed forces.
Even if they can’t get to you, how many people have guns and enough ammo to clear a way free of a safe location to get somewhere with food and water once supplies run out? Even if they have gun, most Americans have only handguns, not noted for their accuracy or ranged ability, and not that much ammo.
And if you’re in a safe location (Any building with the first set of stairs taken out is pretty safe, anywhere with two sets of stairs taken out is practically impregnable) how many of us have food and water to last more than a few days? I’d imagine very little and less so without power to cook or freeze it.
This leads onto the next problem, which is for most of us food is something delivered to their town. With zombies everywhere production and delivery will cease. The stuff in any urban location would last the population of that location only a few days even if shared out evenly, not counting supermarkets and suchlike impossible to get to because they are filled with the walking dead. And going out to get it would be asking for trouble because under pressured conditions like that, most people can’t shoot for shit and every gunshot will draw more zombies all around you.
Heck, many entire countries produce less food that their population needs, of less types and in the wrong seasons depending on when this starts.
You also have to factor in the human element: People won’t know what is wrong with zombies until they get bit. They won’t want to kill infected or zombified relatives and may well fight to protect them. They’ll fight each other for supplies. They’ll cause accidental fires that could spread like crazy without a fire service to stop them. They’ll generally panic all round and make bad decisions. They’ll waste tons of ammo firing wildly, and they’ll flee along roads when they should stay home and stay home when they need to move.
Also most people lack the very basic survival skills they need and even people with advanced skills will find themselves limited. Sure a doctor has a lot of training, but he relies on many other people making his drugs and equipment, never mind how little he can do without power, or that hospitals will be the worst place to be. Even the army, which has everything you need to survive, will have trouble. How many soldiers will want to stay on base when their families are in danger half a country a way? And can they really move fast enough to save the rest of the population from starvation and being overwhelmed?
In the long run my money is on the humans too, but most people dying in the process is not unrealistic.
Human cooperation is the only one of the characteristics listed that is a strong element of human survival techniques. Humans primary advantages are physical endurance (name another land species that can run continuously for over twenty-five miles; hell, there are running competitions that cover one hundred miles), language (which is not a technology but an inherent and defining characteristic), and environmental displacement (in Africa where we evolved megafauna is relatively prosperous having evolved side by side with humans,on other continents where humans migrated, we hunted them to extinction).
That’s the real problem with apocalypse fiction, they tend to posit that the basic human character is selfish bastard, if that were true we would have been extinct long ago, humans, instinctively, are cooperative. Of course the evidence seems to indicate we aren’t really a species . . .
Zombies might be harder to take down, but you can just wait them out. They’re really not all that effective at surviving.
– Their food source is their method of reproducing
– They lack the higher brain functions required to prevent them from injuring themselves or to help them pathfind, putting them in the same boat as robots
– They are still physically susceptible to the exact same kind of harm as humans- blunt trauma, temperature, dehydration, etc; even if they just ignore the damage it’s still there
Maybe some depictions of zombies show them as smart, or capable of feeding on other things, or somehow more durable, but by that point they kind of stop being zombies and start being vampires.
And that’s only comparing zombies to humanoid robots.
Now, there’s a pervasive misunderstanding here, and I blame it on movies like “The Walking Dead” and Vincent Price’s masterful “Last Man on Earth.” Zombies are commonly portrayed now as the victims of a bizarre virus that ruins one’s eating habits and sense of hygiene. That’s not a zombie, that’s a medical tragedy.
Zombies are corpses reanimated by Voodoo magic. That’s the proper use of the term, and it reduces the danger considerably. After death, the period of greatest danger from reanimation is about three hours, after which rigor mortis will prevent the revenant from chasing anyone. Rigor mortis does wear off eventually, but only because autolysis – the process of cellular breakdown into fluids – makes the muscles into a sort of mush which is incapable of of significant movement.
So imagine the day of the waking dead. The only real threat is posed by corpses on autopsy tables and in morgues, the fresh few that are dead but not yet stiff. The buried dead, even if their tissues are not already decayed beyond use, have to overcome a sealed casket and six feet of dirt before they can pose any threat at all. The effort is beyond most healthy adults, as shown by the many failed attempts by escape artists and magicians to escape a buried casket; for the zombie to work its way out will take a severe toll on its already weakened physique.
Those living within a hundred yards of a graveyard may be overcome by the stench, and morgue workers might have to put down an occasional escapee, but on the whole the most obvious sign of a zombie rising would be these occasional trails of organ parts radiating out from the graves of the disintegrating dearly departed. The living dead might get about fifty feet or so before falling apart.
Now, Black Lantern rings are another story, but that’s kind of a touchy subject so we won’t go there.
Both are valid uses of the term. You can pretty much just divide it into sci fi zombies and fantasy zombies.
I think you’re better off. Twinkies are gross as heck.
Yo, Ding Dong man. Ding Dong, Ding Dong yo.
strawberry shortcake all the way
Careful, if you eat enough Ding Dongs, your shadow will weigh 42 pounds.
You ain’t fat, you ain’t nuthin’!
[shoves burger into LiaHansen’s face] Yo, eat this man, it’s good for you.
man a regular burger won’t do if we really want her eating healthy it needs to be a double bacon cheeseburger on a donut!
Sounds good, I’ll take twelve
Actually, I’m thinking a Twinkie Wiener Sandwich would hit the spot right now.
Try one of loyal sidekick Rat’s Heartstopper Bacon Bacon Bacon Cheeseburgers with Bacon. We only eat them during deer/elk season when we’re running around the mountains with packs and rifles, and they are assembled thus:
1) Prepare ample bacon. One pound per person, minimum.
2) Cook, over open fire, those big half-pound burger patties with the cheese and bacon mixed into the patty.
3) Fry the buns in the leftover bacon grease.
4) Assemble: Lower bun, a layer of bacon, the cooked burger, more bacon, a layer of cheese, bacon, toppings to suit, another layer of bacon, then the top bun.
5) Place on plate with bacon side dish and a bacon garnish.
6) Accompany with the adult beverage of choice.
There are few things better on a clear, cold night on the mountains, while sitting around a roaring fire, unwinding after a long, hard day of pursuing wild ungulates.
Oh, and for dessert: A really good cigar is recommended.
I tried one of those Twinkies a few years ago, they were… OK I guess but I couldn’t see the big deal about them myself.
Cupcakes are where it’s at, bongoes.
Yeah, and they lead to even worse food. One day it’s Twinkies, the next you’re eating Taco Bell. Someone must stop the madness.
your gravatar is hexadecimal fro the cartoon Reboot, correct?
Woah, woah, woah, don’t you be railing on Twinkies or Taco Bell. Especially the latter; the wrath of Willis might befall you.
We have Taco John’s up where I live. Beats the stuffin’s out of Taco Hell.
I miss Taco John’s. Taco Tuesday was the best.
That rejection by Ethan gets worse.
Is Amber autistic or something
Naw, she’s just a TURBONERD.
Social anxiety/social avoidance is NOT the same thing as autism.
And with a father as controlling and abusive as Blaine is, it’s also pretty damn natural for Amber to have some issues with others’ potential judgment.
My girlfriend has similar issues (though her parents are nowhere near as bad as Blaine) and I had issues like that in my own past as well.
It’s especially understandable since Blaine probably rides her about “embarassing” him in public.
It turns out having a parent who spends all their time with you coming up with arbitrary reasons why you’re terrible shit will give you problems when interacting with other people.
Shocking, I know!
Exactly.
Autism means you have trouble picking up on social cues and understanding other people’s emotions.
Anxiety means you can empathise with other people but become overwhelmed and don’t know how to act. So you’re left thinking; What do I do? What if they laugh at me? What do I do? What if I hurt their feelings? What do I do?
Specifically an inability to decipher facial expressions, tone of voice, and body language is generally viewed as the definitive characteristic of autism.
The social cues and empathy issues are derived from that cause.
Wait so does that mean Dina actually is autistic?
Yes.
Dina is on the autistic spectrum, and very high-functioning. She likely has Asperger Syndrome.
I’m pretty sure official statements on the subject are that we don’t know, since she’s never seen a doctor about it.
I personally am hesitant to bandy about diagnoses, but from my limited experience with the subject I know that the doctors diagnose by counting the number of symptoms you have. You need like 9 out of 14 or some weird number like that for the doctor to hand out a diagnosis, so if she were to go to a doctor her answer would just be based on that number count. Despite the nonverbal communication thing being considered the definitive characteristic it’s still only 1 symptom when the doctor starts counting.
I don’t say that to indicate that she’s not autistic, merely that it’s not necessarily as cut and dry as it may seem.
No wonder I relate so well with her, then. (High functioning Aspergers right here)
You can’t spell TURBONERD without “boner!”
Which leaves… “turd”?
I don’t like where this is going.
dude there is a big difference between autism and social anxiety
True. Like, the bullying autistic people get can and does cause social anxiety, there’s a decent bit of overlap where autistic folks have social anxiety TOO, but I don’t think that’s how Amber got her anxiety.
I don’t read her as autistic as much as social anxiety, but that doesn’t mean she’s *not.*
We do have word of god that no one’s diagnosed as autistic, which is a different statement from no one being autistic. (Women, PoC, and even more so WoC because they’re in the intersection of those two categories, have a tendency to get missed, and suprisingly many people think that all autistic people had a speech delay.)
I suspect that Amber’s father is to Blaine for her anxiety.
I see what you did there, sneaking that pun in so low it hits under a snake’s belt.
I’m a Pungeon Master after all. ^_^
Pungeons and Braggin’s?
Something like that ^_^
No, this isn’t what autism is about.
She is socially awkward and self conscience, made worse by her father.
Ethan is her link to the rest of the world and her shield from herself and her father.
Which is why she fought so hard for him and why his rejection was so tough on her.
As a female with aspergers who often lurks the comments but has never posted before, I’d like to weigh in on this.
I don’t believe that Amber is on the spectrum, but the way she has acted in the past few pages IS indeed characteristic of a female with aspergers. While Dina is my very very favourite character, her presentation is pretty stereotypical and perhaps exaggerated – although some people (especially males) do present that way. A large amount of females on the spectrum evade diagnosis because they present more like how Amber acts in these flashbacks than like Dina, and they also usually learn to fake social interactions better than their male counterparts.
I also want to point out that the idea of autism as a “lack of empathy” (since someone commented about that) is incorrect and based on old ideas. Plenty of those on the spectrum may have the incorrect responses to other people’s emotions or have problems with displaying empathy, but others may be overwhelmed by emotions or have no problem with empathy. Also, anxiety/social anxiety and perhaps some other issues are very often linked to (or a result of) autism itself, so I think saying “no, it’s just social anxiety” is a bit disingenuous. For example, I really do care what people think and if I upset someone else, but I can’t manage eye contact or small talk. So if I went into a gas station and had to ask the clerk a question or something, yeah, I’d probably have a mini-panic like Amber is now.
And another thing – there’s a saying, “if you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person.” Amber’s mannerisms in the flashback are characteristic of aspergers. Dina is as well. It’s a spectrum, people present in many different ways, and you often can’t tell, especially in females. Just because Amber doesn’t present in a stereotypical way doesn’t mean that this doesn’t resemble an autistic person. Again, I don’t think that Amber is autistic at all, I think this is related to stress from her dad – but nobody is wrong for pointing out that it looks like aspergers.
Let me reiterate one last time – I never thought Amber was on the spectrum. I don’t think she’s autistic. Nothing about her in present-time seems autistic to me. However, in every panel of the flashback, it’s definitely come to mind because it really resembles it for some girls. I think this is just some sort of anxiety/stress/perhaps PTSD related to her dad. But I can certainly see where the “hey, is she autistic?” idea might’ve come from.
Oh Amber. Baby. You poor thing.
I should really just repeat that comment every single day through this flashback and then through the rest of her breakdown.
I kind of want to hug my laptop and pat it on the head.
Just say NO to Twinks.
Twinkies are a gateway pastry. Soon you’ll be getting CupCakes, Snowballs, Donut sticks, Zebra Cakes.
EVERYTHING.
Once you’re on Moon Pies you know you’ve hit rock bottom.
I’m happy to say I’m on my way to recovery. I’m working my way back and I’m on peanut M&M’s at the moment.
Mars Inc are the only large American brand of chocolates that I really like, Hershey’s chocolates… not so much.
Well you’re just a HATER.
And if you don’t like 3 Musketeers/Milky Way’s, we can’t be friends.
Which ones are the brownies with the mini m&ms? They used to sell them for $0.55 per brownie in my middle school and I bought them every time I found money. I then discovered you could get WAY more if you just bought them in the supermarket.
Cosmic Brownies? Oh my God, those things were the fucking best.
What? No love for the Dolly Madison Zingers?
Hersheys has never been all that appealing to us Aussies, myself included. Over here the most popular chocolte brads are Cadburys, Nestle, Mars, Lindts and Toblerones.
Soon, people will be wondering what is with that white powdery substance around the mouth and nose.
At first, you tell yourself you can control it; just one or two Twinkies a day, no big deal. Before you know it, you’re in some back alley on the other side of town turning tricks for half a fuckin’ donette.
I knew I’d hit my bottom when I started eating Little Debbies. Anything by Little Debbies.
Gay men get to like the ‘barely legal’ look just like straight men.
Ugh, this is unsettlingly true-to-life. Social anxiety is the mind-killer, the little death, etc.
Yeah, this reminds me uncomfortably of me in high school.
Poor ethan
Oh god, it just keeps going.
So is that why she cut her hair? So she wouldn’t have anything to twirl when self-conscious and thus be less self-conscious?
Self Conciousness comes from having an outlet for it….too bad I can’t cut off my feet. I pace when I’M nervous.
Anxiety issues make me anxious.
I just love how dorky and awkward Ethan looks as a kid. I had forgotten Amber’s remark about him getting suddenly hot, but I can visualize it now.
I’ve been hearing the Simpsons’ Squeaky-Voiced Teen in my head for all of Ethan’s lines the last couple days.
Dorky and awkward? Ethan looks completely normal in this comic. Did you mean Amber?
(no, I’m not judging Amber, I have horrible social anxiety as well, but seriously, how does Ethan look dorky here?)
Willis how did you ever work up to publishing comics.
The Internet is between him and everyone else.
+1
+1 more (although somehow my +1 doesn’t feel as valuable as Willis’s)
I thought Joyce was based on Willis’s coming-of-age, not Amber?
I spread my insecurities around.
You remind me of Isaac Asimov. He wrote a whole series of book about his love of small spaces and his fear of open spaces.
I have plenty of my own, but the thought was well-intended…
All the DoA girls are in some parts Willis, which makes any PSL you harbour for any of them unintentionally homoerotic. 😀
I am OK with this.
Me too, especially since PM qualified it with “unintentionally”.
Is this true? What about Mary?
Mary is what he thinks a very annoying hateful Christian is like: hateful, annoying & hateful. She is therefore, part of his thoughts. Especially ones of hate.
Oy. I had to brace myself to go to urbandictionary to find out what PSL stands for since the Google didn’t give me any other good alternatives. Amusingly, there was a definition dealing with Joyce from “It’s Walky”.
Amusing to me since I have zero PSL for Joyce. I actually hate her. As for the other women in the strip, it varies: Admiration, respect, sympathy, empathy. Some annoyance at times tempered with realization that (a) they’re in their late teens or early 20s and (b) they’re web comic characters. The guys have various flaws, but I could hang with moth of them, although Ethan’s starting to annoy me.
I’m pretty sure PSL (Perverse Sexual Lust) was coined in regards to (the Walkyverse version of) Joyce.
You mean “any version of Joyce”
<—- Living embodiment of Perverse Sexual Lust.
That’s ’cause this is
where the phrase came from.
And so I learned something new. 🙂 I’d read that comic sometime back when, but obviously the phrase never stuck with me.
In TVTropes PSL refers to any attraction/lust towards a fitional character(s).
My Perverse Sexual Lust is unintentionally *heteroerotic*, thank you very much :P.
I have actually done this before.
She actually seems mentally broken.
And at the same time reminds me of Dina.
She’s Dina with less confidence.
As Dina is to Dinosaurs, Amber is to Transformers.
She grew out of her Dina phase. Think about what phase DINA grew out of to get to her current phase?
Dina was spontaneously formed when someone dropped a dinosaur coloring book into a bowl of cereal that had been irradiated with Moe-Waves by leaving it in front of an anime marathon overnight, then tried to hide the mess by putting a hat on it and hiding it behind the closet door.
So you’re basically saying is that we can all grow our Dinas?
😀
As long as you have petri dishes, maaaybeee.
Amazon has ’em.
http://www.amazon.com/Sterile-Plastic-Petri-Dishes-100mm/dp/B008SWSM0W/
Pack of 20. I’m gonna grow me a Dina army.
Remember to order the Dina hats from Willis’ catalogue.
I see Dina as the person we all wish we could be: upfront and proud about what she likes and not giving a damn about what anybody else thinks, no matter how “strange” or socially awkward it is.
Amber/Ethan/Danny, on the other hand, are failing to live up to this ideal in one way or another, and thus remind us of who we actually are.
Dina may have something in the autism spectrum. Amber was/is full of social anxiety.
So one has limitations, the other has huge hang-ups and self conscienceness.
Dina has awareness that she is different, but doesn’t seem to have strong anxieties about it.
See, I see not having anxieties about being different as a big time plus. Although having a bit more deftness in social situations would be ideal.
It can be a plus, but autism spectrum people are not socially adept. It is a defining feature.
I don’t think Dina is proud of what she is, she just is what she is.
Sure, there are some useful benefits, but it’s a net negative. Cute as the character is, society doesn’t work well that way.
Is it bad that now I want another flashback with Amber and Ethan meeting and becoming friends for the first time?
It’d just be both adorable and heart-wrenching knowing the present day.
“OK Amber, no Twinkies. But we gotta get something here. How about a… yeah, a Zebra Cake?”
“Y-you want me to buy Little Debbie products? In PUBLIC??”
fuck you zebra cakes are delicious
The author speaks truth.
And the Christmas color ones with sprinkles? Yum.
They become even more magical in the refrigerator.
Jew here. This is a thing?????
http://www.littledebbie.com/www/docs/157/?ld_product=84
I far prefer Zebra Cakes to twinkies.
Let’s just get the Hostess cupcakes instead before they go bankrupt, sell to new owners who change the formula, and say it’s the same.
Eh, I have no strong feelings towards Zebra Cakes, myself.
I just needed something with a funny name.
Though I do agree with Yotomoe on the Zebra Cakes v. Twinkies subject.
I second this statement.
And with that statement, I hereby swear allegiance to the Army of Willis.
I have no idea what these things are.
What in Grodd’s name is a Zebra cake?
Oof, this hits way too close to home.
If someone is standing where I need to be to reach a book in a tight space in a book store, I leave and browse elsewhere in the store and then come back to the spot later. I can’t just stand there and pretend like I’m looking at the books nearby for very long without getting pretty awkward.
I do that too. I will also do a loop around the store before I come back so the reason is less evident.
Oh no. They’re catching on to my secret. They know that I like fatty snack foods, just think of the things they could do with that information!
Send you health magazines?
I would burn them.
And the horrible thing is that in an abusive relationship, even that little piece of information could and might get used against Amber. Which is really sad.
Knowledge is power. Absolute knowledge is the power to create and to destroy. Every time somebody learns something about you they are one step closer to that.
My theory. It’s Marcie planning the robbery. After all, nobody suspects the mute girl.
Is that a Catcher in the Rye reference?
No.
Damn… 😛
I feel like you haven’t read catcher in the eye recently
Nope, not in a long time.
I’m imagining the need to make threats in sign language while holding a weapon. Then the increasing frustration as the clerk looks confused.
Alternately, having a series of pre-made signs.
Marcie getting all annoyed because no one is considerate enough to employ clerks who know ASL in case of deaf and/or mute robbers, and then the clerk explaining in fluent ASL that they just can’t understand what she’s saying around the gun in her hands.
Police come in, Marcie holds up a Wile E. Coyote style ‘Uh Oh’ sign.
It occurs to me that in about four years this particular strip will become irrelevant for about seven months, due to the fact that this flashback, as stated previously, takes place five years before whatever the current date is. Therefore, in about four years it’ll have been about five years since twinkies were taken temporarily off the market because of their father company’s bankruptcy.
Way to date your comic, Willis.
Twinkies are back, dude. They have been for months! Someone bought them.
I think what he’s referring to is that the period where there was no twinkies will be the time that this flashback is supposed to take place in at some point. Thus why is specified “For seven months”
Bingo
As long as this strip takes place between July and December, that will never ever be a thing.
I dunno Willis, looks very May to me.
“As long as this strip takes place between July and December….”
Is this your way of telling us we will never see the second semester?
it’s my way of telling you that this flashback doesn’t happen literally five exact years ago from now to the day.
Good save.
I honestly try to find why is a comic having a especific date a bad thing… O.o maybe it’s just me.
If things continue at their current pace, we will be getting DoA for at least a decade. (Yay!) It’s already been three years and change, so if we were on real time, Sarah would be graduating.
As time passes, a story set in 2010 will become more and more a “period piece.” Trends, pop culture, and technology from the real world’s present day will become anachronisms if mentioned in comics.
Instead of doing that, Willis will be operating on what’s often referred to as “comic book time.” So the strip will be taking place in the “present day,” whatever that is. It allows the comic to be up to date and topical without having the characters spend a decade and a half in a four-year institution/
Yup, Megetokyo syndrome.
By which I meant, Megatokyo.
Well of course Amber likes Twinkies. She’s standing next to one.
*Dodges the array of tomatoes tossed his way*
Ethan is a plural now?
By saying “one”, it would mean that it’s Ethan is a Twinkie. It would be strange to say Amber likes Twinkie, because that ruins both the joke and the actual sentence, as the food product is usually referred to as plural. Stop being pedantic, it’s not cool.
d’awwwwwwwww
“Hey bob, did you see that girl buy twinkies?”
“yeah, I did”
“Pfff, loser. Let’s tell the world.”
“Already got the president on the line”
“Yes, hello, is this the President of Cool? Yeah, we’ve got the sickest gossip here.”
Come on already, Sal! Blaine’s tired of traumatizing Amber. Give him a break and take his job!
Oh man, I totally looked just like Amber growing up and I also did the hair-twirl-around-finger thing, so this comic is weird.
I was somewhat less awkward, though, thankfully. Also not as adorable.
Like, thank you for this comic? So much? This is exactly me, I have literally no idea why I’m afraid of strangers knowing my thoughts but I am (no, not in a paranoid way, but in this exact “they’ll judge me” way).
I’ve come a long long way since I was Amber’s age here but its still excruciating to think other people might know your motivations. I’ve avoided bathroom breaks, not buying what I want in stores, not asking waiters for things, never letting people know I like them, panicking about making phone calls… all for this reason. So thanks for putting it into words, I’ve never been able to.
(12 years later and people actually think I’m this confident, outgoing person; anxiety issues are a bongo but you can overcome them)
I’m mostly glad at least one other person knows what it means. I was worried I’d get blank stares. This was my childhood.
Nah, I’m 25 and still put on clothes, get anxious about other peoples’ judgment of them, and change before going to work. I’d wager this speaks to a lot of people.
I’m now laughing at the fact that I almost didn’t post this in the first place because I was afraid of people on here judging me. Irony.
+1 for bravery and honesty!
And I have a reply to a post that I’m afraid to make because I don’t want the poster to think that I’m judging her.
This wasn’t everyone’s childhood? Whaaaat?
Willis, this was my childhood too! I’m glad to know I wasn’t alone in that.
Yes. This. All of this.
Lord in heaven have mercy.
The interesting thing about this is that it occurs in the same world where people have browsed porn magazines and bought them from news stands on the sidewalk.
Humans run the gamut.
Haha, I don’t even like to ORDER PIZZA over the phone. Or in person.
And thank you for your post! I could empathize with Amber, but i can relate even better to how you describe it.
I’m definitely like that. All of that!
I was very much like this when I was younger. I sadly dealt with it the wrong way, and I’m still dealing with the fallout of that.
Ouch I can feel your pain; never had these problems as severe as Amber here, but I can totally relate to most of the situations in your comment.
Thank you all for making me realize how little problems I have. My day usually involves 10 seconds of looking for an undershirt that is thin enough to not melt in and doesnt have anything pornographic on it (I save those for days off). As weird as I think I am its nice to hear I have it easy. I cant even imagine. Good for you all for being able to deal with this. I am impressed .
Ashamed of your addiction to Twinkies? Just replace that addiction with cocaine, Amber!
Sherbet provides a better high than coke, also tastier.
I shall have to test this, for science purposes.
And to think that these flashbacks, the table-flipping, Amber’s emotional crises, Ethan and Amber’s fights, Danny’s faux-date faux pas, the table-flipping, the spite kiss, Sal getting introduced to the Nintendo DS for the first time, and even Faz finding himself wrapped in harpoon wire, would just not have happened had Blaine just stayed in his goddamn car.
Literally, Blaine deciding whether to be or not be a douche affects the geography of so many things in this world, up to and including his jaw.
There are days I question the practical applications of knowing how to tie a noose, and then I remember Blaine and I get a warm fuzzy feeling.
Enjoy twinkies while you can. One day they might not be available.
And then come back 5 months later.
Oh my god, Amber is doing exactly what I do all the time with my hair. Including the bringing it to the face part, though I’m not sure if she smelled it like I tend to do. According to my parents, it’s a stim – I like the way my hair feels when it’s all smooth and tight around my finger, and my sense of smell is very sensitive, having a pleasant aroma floating around helps.
…Could Amber be on the autism spectrum?
I think alot of people who stim may have a mild Asperger’s component to their makeup. Probably not diagnosed. But even more likely, we suffer from high social anxiety because of abuse or because we know we are going to be considered weird.
I don’t read her that way, but that doesn’t mean she’s automatically not.
That totally is a stim for a lot of people, including me.
And yeah, high social anxiety (and PTSD) rates in autistic people is almost certainly a thing because of bullying and abuse.
I didn’t actually really consider the possibility until just now because of my experience with her character, but from the way she’s been acting in her flashbacks…
Amber is doing with her finger what I do with MOTHERS.
…
Yes.
WITH MY PENIS.
I do that exact thing too! And while not on the autism spectrum (if anything, I can read social cues better than average) I was nearly diagnosed with Asperger’s when I was a kid because of behaviors like that.
I think for some kids, stims are also a way to focus, by providing sort of a centering feeling to concentrate on? Because I always did it in front of my face while reading, and I couldn’t focus otherwise.
When I saw the hair twirling, I remembered back. I hid behind my hair and played with it all my time. I spent my seventh grade year only speaking if I were spoken to….long story, but I just shut down into elective mutism. I really feel sorry for Amber now, seeing the terrified kid underneath.
I understand a little. I wasn’t as bad as Amber. But, I held my hand over my mouth when talking in school at my desk.
I wouldn’t look clerks in the eye, they may look back.
I couldn’t stand next to people to long in line or in stores.
And never ever eat in public. That took some arranging, but I did it.
I’m not sure if it was because I was afraid others would know my motives or my wants, I never thought about it that way.
Eventually I grew thru it, not out of it, but so that I can handle clerks and eating in public, and etc.
I just don’t much like it.
Wait a minute, wasn’t there a two year period in which Twinkies were on the market?
I reckon this is what’ll happen:
>Sal appears in flashback robbing the store
>flashback ends
>Amber realizes Sal’s in front her
>yells out what was done
>freaks out and runs away to hide behind the door with Dina forever
>the only thing Dan gets from the whole experience is that Sal fights crime to atone for her actions
Anyway, Twinkies are entry-level; Ho Hos are where it’s at.
Wow. Man, it’s hard to imagine this Amber fighting Ethan’s parents for him. Her anger seems a tiny bit more justified now.
This Incident may have been the catalyst… or the “goddammit, Ethan had my back for years” epiphany… in either case, if my best friend was getting the kind of shit Ethan was, I’d sure as hell fight it, too!
[saying so after having had awesome in-law types but Stockholm Syndrome from the odd passive-abusive ex]
Twinkles are disgusting creations from the pits of Hell
I concur
They brought back the pies too, but I hear they are rancid now and not at all the same. I never was into Twinkies or the cupcakes that much, they were OK but not something I bought more than once every few years. The pies though, I will miss the fruit pies forever.
Amber is soooo adorable…I just wanna pinch her cheeks….
I think you tried to hard on the entire shy girl bit
The closer I get to revealing the reality of myself, the more some dude has to pop up and say it’s unrealistic. Man, I’m not tired of that! Not tired of that at all!
dat Privilege =p
For every dozen people who say “oh my god thank you for writing what it’s like to be me” there’s always some guy who has to be the dude who says “wtf is this fake shit.” It’s super charming, lemme tell you.
Well, it’s telling that he took this as “shy girl” rather than “crippling social anxieties.”
It’s frightening how many people cannot understand social anxiety. It’s utterly incomprehensible to them. Normal, caring, friendly people, who are presented with someone with social anxiety and think that person is some kind of demonic freak or judgemental arsehole.
I remember people making fun of a friend’s girl (now ex) behind her back, really harshly criticizing her because she worried too much what they all thought about her, and because (they thought) she was unfriendly because she’d sometimes avoid social events out of fear of being perceived as awkward. So, you don’t like her and are criticizing her because she’s afraid people don’t like her and might talk about her behind her back? Nobody sees what is wrong here? I tried to explain this to people but it was some “you have no ears and I must scream” shit.
And people don’t necessarily have to understand it as such – just to understand that it exists, accept it, and deal with the people in their lives that have it accordingly. People are different.
Case in point: Me. I have pretty much the exact opposite of social anxiety. I’m a Type AAA personality. In my youth I was confrontational and even (at times) combative. Now, in middle age, I’m matured into being just outgoing and confident. I’ve have always been self-confident to the point where I’m accused of being a little cocky.
Now, I’ve had friends that have social anxiety issues. I don’t and never will understand precisely why; I don’t see how I can. But I know enough to make allowances for them in my interactions with them.
If you’ll allow an analogy, I have gay friends. I’m about as hetero as you can be; I like women. I’ve always liked women and women have always liked me. I can’t understand how a man could be sexually attracted to another man. It’s not in my nature to understand it. But that’s OK; I don’t understand why people like watching football on television, either. I don’t have to understand it. I just have to understand that people are different, and those differences don’t necessarily make them better or worse people.
I get social anxiety like this, along with severe general anxiety, it absolutely sucks. I might even have random panic attacks later over whether my wording in this comment made me sound stupid somehow. So here’s another thanks for writing this, and if you suffer this sort of crap too, I hope you’re able to get better. Also, a tip to share – l-theanine (marketed as suntheanine) isn’t quite as powerful as benzodiazepines, but it’s also non-addictive, extremely safe, and can really take the edge off of prolonged anxiety attacks, though I find I need to take 600mg instead of the recommended 100-150mg. It’s the magical chemical that makes tea all soothing and calming, and gives British people our classy coolness (I may be making that last part up).
Boy do I get you on the comment related anxiety. I don’t have panic attacks about it but I am completely unable to go back to the comment section on any comic to which I’ve contributed. I always worry that people will think what I had to say was stupid. So instead of finding out and dealing with it and responding to people, I just avoid it forever. Or until a reply is no longer expected of me.
I obsess over the one who reveals that they don’t actually get what I’m doing through dismissive and demeaning putdowns, in ways that overshadow those who get it and appreciate it. I’m not too good at ignoring the one, and telling myself that there’s going to be one in every crowd, no matter what I do, isn’t a magic balm. But, you know, there IS going to be that one no matter what you do AND there are a LOT of folks who appreciate and benefit from what you do–so thanks.
A dozen to one. Remember that part.
Yeah, it doesn’t always work for me either.
Mostly I wish that one guy would notice the dozen folks before pooping all over ’em. They’re right there, you passed right by them to say this stuff is impossible!
The poet Schiller wrote, The gods themselves struggle in vain against stupidity. Or: Poopers gotta poop.
The thing I have come to understand is that some of us are in the less than 1% bracket. In addition to that because shy people often never reach the point of telling the world about themselves by definition we wind up even more marginalized.
I remember going to a store, looking for some nerdy specific thing and inevitably the store not having it. I then would become incredibly anxious about leaving without having purchased anything. I would think that the clerks and people coming in would look at me and think I must have stole something because I didn’t buy anything. Especially since I wear a big coat, and having worked retail I know they tell you to keep an eye out for people in big coats. So I would wander the store, tense about leaving, thinking that if I left in a hurry it would look even worse. I would be mentally screaming at myself “Don’t look flustered, don’t look flustered, don’t rush!” as I eventually left or I would buy some stuff I didn’t even need. Then I’d get to the next store to look for the same item and I’d consider not even going in, because what if they don’t have it again.
Feeling this so hard. Still do. Here is my strategy to manage the didn’t-buy-anything anxiety: I make myself leave the store right when I want to, but I amble out real slowly, then pause immediately outside the store and stare at my phone a while before continuing. Y’know, make it clear to the staff I’m not in a hurry to get away!
I don’t know what that even does for anyone else, but it tends to manage my anxiety over the situation…!
Just face it Willis, your reality isn’t realistic. In fact, you’re not even real. I’m sick of this cartoonists cramming all this Willis down our throats. Blatent tokenism.
I know this is supposed to be a dramatic story-line, but all I could think of when reading this was “man, this is some quality Whomp!.”
Oh my god that poor girl. Willis, you need to stop piling on the backstory. She can’t take anymore. Please.
Flashback to the childhood. Both comic and me. This speaks to me on a deep personal level. For years I was obsessed by the taught that people can use (and will use) anything I say or do against me. So I tried to be as silent as I could. I wished I could be invisible.
If you don’t give any information to the enemy, they can’t use it as a weapon against you.
Cragalanch knows what you mean. The thought of everyone being out against you ruled my life for many years. The problem was even more prevelant because that was somewhat the case, being bullied like Cragalanch was. Cragalnach only started to come out his stony shell when he met someone who actually wasn’t out to get me
Does Cragalanch(e) always talk in the third person?
Well, he uses the first person in the paragraph you replied to.
First person is “I” and “me.” Cragalanch is referring to himself in the third person.
He seems to slip in and out of the third and first person. I’m not sure what that means for his mental state
I literally dropped out of college because I couldn’t leave my room when I had anxiety like this
The meds really help
Awwwww *hug*
I know what that feels like. I also dropped out largely because of chronic anxiety.
The fact that there are people that act like this amazes me. It’s so weird!
…says the man who worries about mountain lions jumping through his dorm window and murdering him.
Is this… a normal concern? o_O
No, not really. My anxiety just tends to manifest itself in the form of “what if”s, particularly around disasters or other terrible things. “What if” an earthquake were to hit right now? “What if” a bee is on the ground, and I anger it by stepping too close to it? “What if” I were to get some terrible disease from a mosquito bite? “What if”, “what if”, “what if”. You get the idea.
The mountain lions don’t want to hurt you, they’re just hoping you have weed and a Netflix subscription in your dorm room.
B-But I don’t have either!
I’ve yet to meet a woman who hasn’t had an intense fear of being understood. Heck, I had a girlfriend who refused to wear her favorite color because she didn’t want anyone to know red was her favorite.
I really identify with Amber in this strip, and for me, it’s not a fear of ring understood so much as it is the fear of what people could DO with that understanding. People can manipulate you if they understand how you work. It’s a trust issue. I wouldn’t say all women have a fear of being understood. Most women (actually most people) have a very strong dislike of being manipulated and controlled.
What the fuck? Women are people. If we want to spew out bizarrely generalizing (though less offensive in my case) anecdotes, I have yet to meet a woman who DIDN’T want to be understood.
I can’t decide whether this is cute or appalling.
I also can’t think of a good portmanteau. Cutalling? Appcuting?
Wow, new Whomp! on a Saturday!
Video games are only used as a shield by people who want to disconnect from the real world. This comic has taught me so.
Reminds me of when I was younger dealing with OCD. Anxiety can be hell.
I have considered owning a shop, and I have an Amber-like tendency in small shops (due to some stupidity and sticky fingers in the past). It would be super weird watching someone else have a panic attack over what I think of them, when I can tell exactly what’s going on.
Well. Whatever you may think of Amber’s issues, at least she’s gone a long way from where she started O_Ou
Still hoping that, after this flashback, Danny says something about Sal’s hair during the conversation that ensues.
I just like seeing Sal do that eye-twitch thing.
I KNOW these feels. ‘Oh my gosh what if that cashier thinks the books I want to buy are SILLY?!’
I used to get the same way buying comics. Mum would say “But its a comic shop! They aren’t going to judge you for buying comics!”
And I’d say “They might judge me for buying these comics! They probably like The Invisibles and Watchmen and stuff, and I’m buying Batman Adventures!”
At first I was like, don’t all Americans like Twinkies? As in, don’t you have to answer positive to the question “Do you like Twinkies?” when applying for U.S. citizenship?
And then I read the comments and I’m like oh, it’s not about the Twinkies at all. Amber would be just as likely to think “They’ll see me breathing and they’ll know I like air!”
And then my mind starts to wander and I’m like, I wonder what Twinkies taste like? And then I remember that every time I’ve tried some legendary American foodstuff, it’s turned out to be extremely underwhelming and/or more or less equivalent to something I’ve already tasted.
And then I’m like, I think I should finish this comment now.
I grew up Not Eating Twinkies, and the actual Twinkies are very disappointing. Before the company went bankrupt/sold to someone else, I’d get a huge craving for Twinkies every few years and buy and eat them and be disappointed every single time. I think they’re a thing that’s only good if you grew up eating them. IOW, don’t feel bad for not having tried them, they’re kind of gross unless you grew up eating them!!!
As a Canadian… Twinkies sound disgusting. So do Hostess cakes.
Jeez, Amber’s issues go way back (with yesterday’s strip I just thought she was a bit shy or something). No wonder with a father like that.
Although, for the record, you can have great parents and still be afflicted with crippling social anxiety. *points to self* I’m sure Blaine compounded her problems though–and it IS quite possible that he caused them in the first place–but I think some part of it comes down to an inherent susceptibility to anxiety.
I don’t know if anyone else has called it, but I think it is Amber who steals the Twinkies and somehow Sal ends up taking the blame
Sir Robin, I was just about to call it — this or another closely related scenario. You take this one ^. I’ll go with this: Sal follows Amber out of the store with the Twinkies, thinking that Amber bought them and then forgot them, and they accuse Sal of taking them for herself.
David Willis, why dost thou taunt us like this?
WHY
ain’t he something else?
So, a thought occurred to me.
When I previously considered the “Sal traumatized Amber while robbing a store” scenario I never pictured Blaine being in the vicinity. Now I’m wondering if this will play out with Amber being traumatized by Blaine (maybe the first time seeing him go full psycho on someone) and Sal being the victim of the attack. She could still get in trouble for robbing the store even if she is attacked by a lunatic customer, right?
I’m leaning toward a different scenario.
Young Amber’s panic attack during the crime hits critical mass, and her own inner Blaine bursts out in a spasm of violence that stops the robbery. She wins overwhelming approval from her interaction with strangers by stopping crime.
At the same time, something rubs her nose in the fact that her Blaine traits were what fueled her ability to gain that approval. This may be where Blaine being in the vicinity figures in.
Dilemma! She doesn’t want to be a person who is like her father, but she wants to explore this new experience of being successful at interacting with strangers.
Solution: become somebody different and let that different persona be the one who fights crime and does good deeds.
Compartmentalize the bad parts of herself, re-purposing them into positive acts.
Ack. This one strikes a little close to home.
This one resonates on a lot of levels.
Ethan is being a great friend here and very understanding for his age.
This puts Amber and Dina on a new plain. Amber knows something about social awkwardness and can relate to Dina, even though it is not he same exact thing.
Amber has come miles in dealing with what was a crippling problem, with no help from her father.
I expect Blaine will catch Sal robbing the store, thereby ruining another life. If Sail sees him sneaking around the dorm, there will be no survivors. Amber seeing Blaine violently detaining a young girl and handing her over to the police won’t help Amber’s anxiety at all.
And is there any chance Seal wasn’t really robbing he store. Maybe Blaine escalates a miscommunication and Sal wasn’t an armed robber. Except that I seem to remember there was two or more robberies. Still, I could see shoplifting escalate into armed robbery due to Blaine’ intervention.
Not to be that guy, but it’s tough to feel sympathy for a robber whose life gets ruined because she is caught in the act, at the expense of the person who actually caught her.
Sal’s 14. I think it’s hard not to sympathize with her.
I’m calling it: Blaine abuses the twinkies in front of amber, sal is the clerk, blaine frames her for the robbery.
When Sal and Blaine meet, there shall the greatest beatdown in dumbing of age history commence… and willis won’t be artistically up to the task of rendering it until he’s moved onto the 4th Dumbing of Age related spinoff comic and the kickstarter for the “Dumbing of Age Remastered!” overhaul is completed.
Except that Sal would be too young to be the clerk. By far.
Poor amber. social anxiety is the worst 🙁
Also, as much as i’m enjoying this drama, i kind of hope the story after this is riley and dina debating about cereal or something. we’re gonna need a breather…
Well, she’s come a long way from that girl who couldn’t buy Twinkies.
Now she’s up to flipping tables and grabbing the arms of people she barely knows in order to yell, “bongo, where the hell do you get off??” at them.
I’m kind of glad that I grew up back when it was usually just called “shy” and we weren’t slapping the label “social anxiety” on everything. I almost certainly had it (and probably still do), but it seems to me that having a medical professional tell me I had it would have simply further enabled the behavior. Instead of working to overcome it as I have all these years, I would have simply accepted the behavior and thought, “This is just who I am. I do have social anxiety disorder, after all…”
Now, I shall move on from this comment section before a bunch of young folks rip me to pieces for being so insensitive. =P
No, you’re not insensitive. Just obtuse. It’s fine; I do the same things. It’s hard to put yourself outside your own body and understand that everyone faces their own problems differently. No one really has the “same” problem. It all jumbles up inside differently for each person. So while you have worked to overcome it; others may have been doing the same thing and not coming to the same conclusions you have.
Same goes for “slapping a label” on something. For some folks it empowers them to have a name on it. Feels like they can control it. Maybe not for you, and that’s cool! We’re all different. But for some it may help. It doesn’t always mean they can ignore it after it has a name, and it likewise doesn’t mean that people who DON’T get diagnosed will have an easier time dealing with it.
Exactly. It’s so very easy to forget that other people are genuinely different. One person’s elixir is person’s toxin.
*another
My personal experience is precisely the opposite.
In retrospect I’m very annoyed that my upbringing drilled into me notions of a stiff-upper-lip, why-don’t-you-grow-a-pair, lots-of-people-have-it-worse-so-what-do-you-have-to-complain-about-anyway. THAT upbringing hurt me. It would have helped massively if I had been diagnosed with social anxiety earlier.
When I was finally diagnosed with social anxiety (so bad that the accumulated stress and anxiety had directly caused a breakdown) it was a massive relief. Being aware of my condition allowed me to get educated about it and deal with it properly, rather than just trying to overcome it.
I hadn’t realised at the time but I NEEDED to be easier on myself and give myself that little bit of breathing space and allowance, rather than always just trying to grit it out because I thought those feelings were pathetic and weak. Now that I have an awareness of how and why those feelings arise I have become infinitely better at coping. I no longer self-recriminate when I have to blow people off or take time by myself to recover from (what feel like to me) intense social situations because I know it’s important for my health and well-being.
Don’t get me wrong Marc, I’m not saying that you are wrong. This aspect of your upbringing -which seems to have been similar to mine in this respect- seems to have been good for but. But your experience won’t match up with everyone’s. It was patently harmful for me.
Transformers, junk snacks and crippling teenage angst. Now this is the Willis we used to know.
Oh god, this isn’t THAT convenience store, is it? Noooooo.
David Willis: At first, I thought you were using a red filter over your drawings in these past couple of strips, and then I realised that’s the actual colouring you’re using. Not easy. As an amateur cartoonist, I am impressed. Now, I have to get off this damn computer and get to drawing. I’m working on a graphic-novel sample for the University of British Columbia’s creative-writing MFA program.
Amber’s convoluted thought process here= exactly the sort of “logic” that rules your life with an anxiety disorder. I’m improving, but similar to this, I end up worrying that taxi drivers will judge me for taking a taxi somewhere. When that’s how they, you know, earn a living.
I used to do the same with with Public Junk Food, but my hang ups were specifically because I was (am) a fat girl and I knew that no matter what food I bought or who it was for someone was going to be a gaping asshole and Judge Me For It. Now I give much less of a fuck about it.
I have no personal concept of this level of social anxiety. I still can’t stand to call strangers on the telephone, but this level boggles my mind.
I’d say this level of social anxiety is unrealistic, but it took me a solid month to work up the nerve necessary to get advised for classes for next semester.
I used to have insecurities somewhat like this, and then I realized that I’m just one drop in a huge ass lake that keeps growing.
What the….?
In reference to the alt text:
When I was little, my family did this tie-dye thing where we took perfectly good shirts and turned them into hippie rainbows. I was never seen in public in mine.
Ever.
And then they were shot in an alley?
I mean it was stained with their blood at that point, so…
IT WAS TRAUMATIC.
how do you see alt text?
On a computer, just hover over the strip.
Does social anxiety really get this bad?
Honest question for the sake of curiosity.
Short answer, yes. Most characteristics of people vary. Most people experience some anxiety occasionally. As you move away from the average, in one direction you find people with less anxiety, in the other direction you find people who experience more, until you reach the extremes of both, which are VERY extreme. In both directions the people who reach the extremes are a small percentage, but they are part of humanity’s diversity.
Oh yeah. Shaking like a jackhammer bad.
When I visit home, my mother sends my younger sister with me on errands “just in case I need to talk to people.” I’m 24. Yes, social anxiety can be this bad.
I now find it all the more endearing that Amber has been making the effort to teach Dina how to socialize.
I also have to empty my mind of these lyrics, which the strip reminded me of: “He makes friends easy, he’s not like me. I watch for judgment anxiously . . . ”
An internet to the first person to identify the quote *without using Google.* : )
For the twinkies!!!!
This isn’t cute or appalling. It’s just realistic.
Well it’s cute that Ethan is helping her through it, but the social anxiety thing shouldn’t be appealing to you.
Not to sound like a jerk, but if Amber’s traumatic memory is her STEALING TWINKIES FROM A ROADSIDE GAS STATION, then I’ll actually be surprised.
However, I’m certain it will be worse than that…
Amber is my spirit animal.
Even as an adult I sometimes get so overcome with anxiety that I can’t buy groceries because I feel like the cashier will be able to know all of my deepest thoughts just based on my veggie selection. I am so, so lucky to have a husband who is patient with me and doesn’t mind picking up the slack on my bad anxiety days. My heart is seriously going out to Amber right now. I hate that so much is hitting her right now 🙁
Do you have some other mental illness? Like Bi polarity or something? I’m just curious is all. I have a friend who’s bi polar 2 and he has days where he gets paranoid on an insane level and refuses to go outside etc. He’s literally said to me on several occasions “If I get the the point where I’m frozen in the supermarket because of my brain, just shoot me.”
I always laugh him off and say “Lose my best friend because you’re having a bad day? Fuck off dude, I’d just take your shopping list, buy everything, pay for it and then arm drag you out.”
Social anxiety on this level is very typically a symptom of some other problem.
Social anxiety of this level can also just be really severe social anxiety. Bipolar disorder is a pretty big jump.
I’m just really anxious sometimes. It’s gotten a lot better as I’ve gotten older. It’s just been a little worse lately since I’ve stopped taking pills now that I’m pregnant. It’s not indicative of anything else though. Just boring old anxiousness.
Man if Amber has it this rough, imagine what dealing with the whole “you turned our son gay” thing must have been like.
She’s actually the toughest.
great page
howwwwwwwwwwwwww
Amber looks very sweet in panel 3 but I feel bad for thinking that as shes obviously distressed
Aww, don’t you feel the need of just hugging her?
Plot twist: Amber was the robber, and Sal was trying to it.
stop it I meant.
There was some brand called ‘___ Street Wear’ (can’t find the name now, it was really popular in the 1980s). I begged my mom to get me a shirt with that logo on it and wore it to school. My only comment was that the logo was too big. To this day I still never wear clothing with obvious brands printed on it.