She just had to air her Chinese Laundry.
…which is kind of a racist name for a shoe company, and Dina’s of Japanese descent, and Sarah isn’t Asian at all. I’m sorry I couldn’t think of one for, like, Rocket Dog or something.
Uggs, these pun comment threads are total Crocs. It’s Lugz like you guys that make us commenters look like real Heelys. I say Hush Puppies with the pun threads, or I’ll give you all a good Kickers.
The New Balance of power on this platform will depend on the ability to generate shoe puns at all hours of the day. It’s very important to be able to pump them out in the Nike of time.
Sarah is attempting to have a real conversation with another human being.
She pretty much stated the truth about Joyce (she drips alright), and Becky (an unflappable smart ass is a great description imo) and yeah Dina is sometimes hard to read. Dina sees things differently from most people and she is just too cute to believe.
What is depressing about the statements Sarah made I wonder?
it’s not this statement, in itself. It’s Sarah in general. She has misanthropic tendencies, almost no personal skills and tends to see the cloud in every silver lining. Even when trying to be sympathetic, she defaults to “This is why this sucks.”
And frankly, you can see it on her face: She knows she’s a (lonely and isolated) wet blanket, but doesn’t really know how to do anything else.
Even when trying to be sympathetic, she defaults to “This is why this sucks.”
But isn’t that generally how people do sympathy? “I’m sorry [bad thing] happened/is happening. I know this must be hard/terrible/distressing/etc.” Sympathy is basically acknowledging that someone is going through something bad.
All Sarah is doing here is apologizing for what she did in the previous strip and asking how Dina is doing. She looks sad because 1) she screwed up by complaining about being “tragedy-adjacent” and 2) she just realized that Dina could be having a hard time with what happened too.
And yeah, that’s not happy subject matter but this isn’t Sarah being “dark & depressing”.
Yeah, this. It’s nice hearing someone upset about how fucked up something is because it’s a reminder that yeah, it was fucked up and it shouldn’t have happened.
…HTML jokes aside, Dina is very adept at separating that distracting human emotion from all the important facts. ‘Cause who cares about people and feelings when you’ve got dinosaurs, amirite?
Given just how fanatically religious Toedad is, I recon he would be 1 of those people who would write to someone in authority about banning the entire Jurassic Park/World saga, due to it’s “heathen portrayal of evolution (no way he’s not a Creationist) & commenting on ‘Dinosaurs’ as if they ever actually existed on God’s green Earth”…
G: Am I… the guy is the one on top?
D: I’m pretty sure that’s a girl.
G: Really?? But, the tattoos…
D: My notes indicate that women have those now, too.
G: But, I thought ‘Tommi’ was a boy’s name…
D: It can also be a girl’s. And, even if it is a man’s name, it could still be on a man’s body. The evidence does not preclude this.
G: So confused…
You know, every now and then, I wonder exactly what I did to end up in this crowd. Then I realize that I have an answer, and the answer is itself an answer.
Answer: No. “Movie” generally implies full length feature, and porn (with a few exceptions) is nearly always on the order of 30 mins tops. They should be considered different formats.
Have you never seen or heard of a full length porn film? Cuz geez. I’ve see-*cough* I mean… heard of porn films, and I don’t mean like anthology “best of” collections and what have you, that come in two parts with an almost six hour total run time.
But 20-30 minutes is just typically just a single scene. With usually 4-6 scenes per movie.
When people pay to see a normal movie at a hotel (with the time the TV’s on being logged), they typically watch the whole movie, or at least a good chunk of it.
When they pay to see porn, they typically watch about 8 minutes.
I am breaking in Jiro, robbing a bank. We are in the middle of an assault. A bulldozer just shot Clover. Please, if you have any regard for life Wolf, you’d leave me out of this.
It’s not the 4th wall, but Clever Girl was a mood-killing out-of-place gag that made it very clear the situation was artificial. “Breaking the 4th wall” isn’t accurate, but it’s the closest shorthand we have for that situation.
Uh, no? This comic is all about finding small bits of humor in otherwise tragic situations. It’s why it’s fun to read, rather than maudlin and depressing.
Maybe it pulled you out, but you can’t make that claim for the audience in general.
Indeed. She used the Raptor’s tactic of distracting the target in 1 direction, then ponced from the side. Using that kind of tactic when attacking an enemy who’s definitely superior to yourself, that you need to take down to protect something, all I can say is clever girl…
Like in Jurassic Park itself! The raptor doesn’t actually jump on Muldoon the way any sensible ambush predator would, it chivalrously gives him space to say some last words before eviscerating him. It interrupted the documentary feeling and with an indication this was really a drama artificially constructed for humans to enjoy.
So the “clever girl” in Willis’ comic is just about as non-awesome as it was in the movie. That is how people thought of that line, as really pointless and jarring, right? No? Not even me? Huh.
I was a teenager when I watched that movie, so I did not find it jarring then. I probably would find it somewhat jarring now. Only somewhat, because at least it would be an original thing.
The particular comic strip, on the other hand, was extremely jarring because it was doing a “Look at how cool the ‘Clever Girl’ reference still is”* right in the middle of what was a tense and chilling situation; completely taking away all sense of danger that was going on in that moment.
Not that it is alone in doing that. It is a symptom of almost all action movies/TV shows today that one-liner quips in the middle of danger has to be inserted for the sake of making someone look cool -even if it is not otherwise consistent with their character-**. But the overall effect is that I end up never thinking these people are really in any danger, so why worry about them, eh?
*Personally, I find that thanks to the internet, the ‘Clever Girl’ phrase is as played out as a certain “N. Byson” phrase was in this comment field; so even without it being placed at the worst possible moment, I wouldn’t have found it to be much of a good strip.
** It is an unfortunate fact that the biggest movie stars will hire their own script writers to look over the script and rewrite the lines for the character to make said character look cooler/more kick-ass, not taking into account if this makes any sense for the character: http://www.cracked.com/blog/4-reasons-why-bad-movies-are-allowed-to-happen/
So if DoA was a movie/TV show, I would have assumed that the actor playing Toedad would have been the driving force behind the “clever girl” moment.
Maybe he was protesting outside a showing of Jurassic Park for that movie’s depiction of dinosaurs coming from millions of years ago, and he heard people quoting it.
Dinosaurs recreated by creation scientists would become domesticated livestock, just like they were for the cavemen of ancient times. I know this from this fantastic creation science documentary I watched called “The Flintstones”, you should check it out.
Jurassic Park, where dinosaurs are brought to life…I doubt Toedad would watch something which includes science and creatures brought back to life by it.
I’ve always interpreted that as “kids love dinosaurs, so we have to take them over and make them all about God”. Which is organized religion’s approach to everything, of course.
Not to mention these sorts of people love to look to old shows like the Flintstones as if they were documentaries that “prove” that “proper gender roles” likes in the early 60s were universal up until evil hippies and feminists ruined everything in the 70s and thus confused everyone about their proper place, creating “evil” like sex education, means of preventing dying or getting pregnant from sex, and queer people (cause those didn’t at all exist until the modern day, obviously).
Dinosaurs and sharks. And then there were sharks that lived AT THE SAME TIME AS dinosaurs! That completely blew me away as a 7-year old. Other megafauna was also kinda cool, but dinosaurs and sharks were the absolute BEST.
Giant sloths got a favoured status among mammals, because there may have still been a few sloths the size of elephants around just a couple hundred years ago. As big as an elephant, but with fluffy fur and wicked awesome claws, and compared to dinosaurs, REALLY recently.
They did dump a lot of their convicts here. That said, to survive here, it can take some toughness & tactics to survive all the Dropbear attacks, spiders, hoopsnakes, etc…
That said, the Aboriginals were dealing with them for ages before the Brits showed up, so that makes them even more badass…
I doubt Toedad would see it that way, he’d probably just see dinosaurs & science, cry “HERESY!!” OR “DEVIL’S WORK!!” & ban any family members from seeing it. Maybe even warn others in the community for seeing it too…
Killing a bunch of people is a bad idea? I mean, the Biblical God was constantly mad at Saul because Saul repeatedly failed to kill as many people as commanded.
It isn’t about killing, it is about authority and obedience. Killing when God tells you to – good. Killing when God told you not to – bad. Not killing when God told you to – bad.
I believe the actual line is “Of course liberal media is all temptations from the devil no man can resist, I mean, no offense, but look at you.” (omit the no offense for non Joyce-types.)
Seeing as Willis wrote Joyce and Becky to have a similar religious background to him, I believe the explanation they would have for dinosaur bones is that dinosaurs went extinct after The Flood.
I think Jurassic Park would still run him the wrong way because it implies that dinosaurs were around hundreds of millions years ago.
If Ross has seen any of Jurassic Park it’s some weird bootleg version with a dubbed on commentary from some preacher, pointing out every instance where it disagrees with Young Earth Creationism.
Or maybe they can just edit out all of the stuff that contradicts the Bible. Like that dinosaur book I saw at the tire store with the pages very selectively torn out.
I really don’t remember much that it violates, other than mentions of stuff being millions of years old, but, as creationists, we were used to ignoring that.
Sure, you might keep your kid from watching it, but people more steadfast in the faith were allowed to watch other stuff. Did you know the TV show Charmed had a huge fundamentalist older male following?
That’s not automatically true. It /can/ be true. In the case of hitler ate sugar, hitler shares something otherwise innocuous in common with you. Hitler did a lot of things. Was this innocuous before the introduction of Hitler, is the question.
The answer can be yes, of course, /but you should have the self awareness to check/.
I heard an awesome explanation once about how gay men are sinning but lesbians are not. Because, since woman was created specifically and solely to provide companionship, gay men are blasphemously spurning god’s first gift to mankind. Lesbians only exist because the men they were created for are depriving them of the ability to serve their primary purpose, and thus are forced to provide companionship to each other. Therefore, continue to condemn male homosexuality, but until all gay men have repented, be forgiving of and compassionate toward female homosexuality. It’s not their fault, and god won’t send those women to hell because that’s just how he made them.
Awesome (adj) — extremely impressive or daunting; inspiring great admiration, apprehension, or fear
I was impressed and in awe of how much thought went into this particular set of reasoning (compared to much more common things like “the bible says so” or “it’s just unnatural”, for example). I am in fear because this guy is much more likely to convince gray area individuals to join homophobic mob-mentality.
“Joyce drips what she’s feeling at any given moment out of her pores” is an incredibly on-point description of Joyce, what a great observation by Sarah there.
I can relate to this on a way more shallow level. I passed out at work while making an iced jasmine tea and swear to god, I still think about that and wonder if they got it. “how many scoops did I put in before I passed out, did they steep it long enough/too long? What about the other drinks in the que?”
I think Sarah has it nailed.
Joyce does drip, Becky is an unflappable smart ass, and Dina is hard to read.
I think she became hard to read in last panel. When Sarah got straightforward with her and expressed concern for her. Dina sidetracked. We’ve seen her lying awake – and I’m pretty sure it isn’t Toedad’s remark keeping her awake. But then, what she said to Sarah at the beginning was straight, she doesn’t want Becky to change a lot while she’s away: so she said what was on her mind.
Whatever way it goes, it does appear that Dina does get Sarah to be Sarah around her with no censure. Good for both of them. Sarah needs a friend, and Dina will get the straight goods from Sarah who never sugar coats anything.
I think Dina interpreted Sarah’s question as, “How are you doing in relation to what Becky’s dad did?” not as, “How have you been doing since that *in general*”? So not really a direct dodge, just answering a slightly different question.
Of course, I could be proven wrong as soon as tomorrow if the next strip has Dina admitting that what happened has been bothering her.
The interesting thing is that might actually be a big deal for her and legitimately upsetting her. Not just because in trauma, especially fresh trauma your brain picks weird ass things to focus on. I remember when I was sexually assaulted, it was at a convention, so I got hyper focused on the bit of why that convention and whether the guy was a fan of the people speaking because it was a way for my brain to avoid focusing on what happened to me.
But also because these things may be silly to most but matter most to her. She doesn’t want to worry that a beloved movie that makes her feel good to watch is going to conjure up images of Toedad shoving her head into the dirt.
Additionally, it’s an unknown and Dina strikes me as someone who likes to filter information into all its known parts and as such, the part she feels she has the least grasp on in the whole tragedy is what she’s fixating on.
Point being, it may not be as much of a dodge from real emotional weight as Sarah thinks.
Yeah, I really doubt it’s a dodge it may just be that that’s the only thing in that sequence of events that she doesn’t understand and being Dina and it being even tangentially related to dinosaurs she has to understand. It’s entirely possible that she isn’t even particularly affected by Toedad’s violence against her because some people can just shrug violence off without much in the way of psychological trauma.
It probably helps that in Dina’s first confrontation with Toedad she was the one who had been taken by surprise, and was forced to rely on social deception, which is one of her greatest weaknesses, but attained nearly flawless victory anyway. The second time, she was the one who initiated a hand-to-hand fight, from a position of stealth, which is one of her greatest strengths. I’m not sure she was scared at all; I think she was thinking “this guy might look tough, but he’s got nothing on me.” She apologized to Becky for failing to completely defeat Toedad because that seemed like a realistic outcome, the same way effortless As on college-level math seemed realistic to Walky.
I think you’re both right. I think she really did think she could take him or at least die trying, because she made a promise to protect Becky from him and doggonit she was going to try as hard as she could to fulfill that.
And I think it was the moment that didn’t make sense. It’s like, okay, hunting us, I guess I can see that from his behavior earlier and the gun would follow from that, but Becky wasn’t exposed to dinosaurs before me and he made a Jurassic Park reference… this doesn’t fit. Must devote all my brain cycles to worrying over this inconsistency instead of the raw horror of having my face slammed into the ground by the angry father of my girlfriend, a parent who very much wanted to kill me.
She doesn’t want to worry that a beloved movie that makes her feel good to watch is going to conjure up images of Toedad shoving her head into the dirt.
No kidding. I found this response very relatable. When I’ve experienced trauma I’ve tended to feel like little peripheral details about it were the Big Issue, rather than the trauma itself.
Also, I feel like Sarah doesn’t at all know how to handle trauma and traumatized people very well. It seems her default mode is to assume people are “irreparably broken” when they get a bit depressed and turn to coping strategies and that might be adding too much stress to how she handles roommate situations.
This is very true. Sarah doesn’t even feel she knows how to handle people who aren’t in trauma, and who might be having feelings. She is suspicious of everyone, and once she’s convinced that somebody is an OK person, she must then defend that person from everyone else. Possibly with a baseball bat. It must be exhausting.
We’re all prisoners in our own perspectives. If Sarah’s own experiences with emotional turmoil lead her to bitter cynicism, her natural reaction would probably be to assume others will not only go the same way, but that those who don’t are in some way delusional or coping. If no-one’s ever helped her break that viewpoint, there isn’t much reason for her to do so herself.
I’m pretty sure it’s a bit of a guilty pleasure for her. She loves it enough to learn the piano just to play that one song, and I bet a young Dina learnt a LOT of dinosaur lore just fact checking the movie.
Okay, in a master list of priorities it wouldn’t be my top pick in this situation either, Sarah. But you have to admit….that IS a valid question. It would kind of completely upset my image of Toedad as this conservative crazy shut in that shuns all pop culture as the devil’s playground.
Also good on Sarah reaching out and checking in on Dina once she realized she was talking to one of the central figures of the tragedy. Sarah does really try to be good people despite herself.
If you’d told me 3 years ago my favorite webcomic character would be a dinosaur-loving college freshie who is canonically indistinguishable from a 12-year-old I’d have been all ‘what’
“Becky, I have to know… did you ever watch Jurassic Park in your family?”
“Dunno, I lost TV privileges for life at age 8 (toots worth it though)”
“I MUST KNOW!!!”
Okay, guys. I know we like to analyze and overanalyze this comic. But can we take a step back, and try to figure out if Willis saw this stuff in the comments and made a joke about it, or if he predicted stuff a long time ago?
I do sometimes think that the analysis ignores the comedic aspects of this comic. This was a joke. We need more jokes after the heart break that was the end of the last arc.
The Buffer is currently about 4 months ahead of us. After the twins were born, it stalled for a few weeks, but I don’t think it ever got less than 2 months ahead.
Looks like it. In the last panel of yesterday’s she turns around and climbs up. She has her arms resting on the back of the chair. Note that Dina is now on her right instead of her left.
Obviously there is some hidden political meaning here.
Ehhh, Toedad saw it. Hypocrisy is no stranger to certain sects of fundamentalism. After all, plenty point to Leviticus for reasons to loathe X group but don’t follow any of the others.
Part of PTSD can often be anxiety – which can often look like lying awake at night thinking obsessively about little seemingly insignificant things associated with trauma.
Also it’s possible Dina is just a bad ass and that is seriously the only thing that bothers her about the situation now that Becky is relatively safe.
It can be hard to tell with high functioning folks on the autism spectrum sometimes, what the significance is of the details they cling to. Speaking from significant experience with both asperger’s and PTSD.
It could also just be a natural response to a highly stressful event. PTSD isn’t a universal experience, even for people who undergo traumatic experiences. Anxiety, stress, troubled thoughts… These are a natural response to a trauma and don’t become a pathology unless they refuse to go away and actively impair someone’s life.
PTSD is a specific diagnosis for a specific set of behaviours, not the universal human response. Even people who exhibit behaviours that normally characterize PTSD aren’t necessarily suffering from any disorder; they might just be human beings working through something. Normal behaviour ain’t a pathology. Pathology is when the normal behaviours become harmful.
Sarah not happy about the conversation going less real either. Check her eye-roll.
As to living for conversation, wait till you’ve gone 3 months on a mountain top without anyone to talk to. You want to tie the first person you see to a chair so they have to talk to you! (Rocks and mud are terrible conversationalists. I had lengthy discussions with the trees about them. 🙂 )
Loading ...
I’ve seen shoes Converse better.
Well, Adidas.
She just had to air her Chinese Laundry.
…which is kind of a racist name for a shoe company, and Dina’s of Japanese descent, and Sarah isn’t Asian at all. I’m sorry I couldn’t think of one for, like, Rocket Dog or something.
I didn’t Start-Rite. That was a bunch of Croc, and I should be imprisoned in a Foot Locker. Ugg.
It might not’ve been you–need to get some courtroom Sketchers in here.
Uggs, these pun comment threads are total Crocs. It’s Lugz like you guys that make us commenters look like real Heelys. I say Hush Puppies with the pun threads, or I’ll give you all a good Kickers.
Yours ECCO some of mine, but I’m Li-Ning towards the Naotion that we’re both Champs.
Shoe pun!
Look, I don’t know stuff about shoes, ok?
It’s okay, we’re all Supra tired at this hour.
The New Balance of power on this platform will depend on the ability to generate shoe puns at all hours of the day. It’s very important to be able to pump them out in the Nike of time.
Something something Thom McAn something Nunn Bush.
Well, whoever wants to win the pun comments should probably pray to Nike.
I’m not very good at shoe puns either, compared to the rest of you…you’re All-Stars, I’m nothing. 😛
(I did think about being the bigger man and not getting involved, but what can I say? I have no sole…)
All these puns are PUMA-nating my senses.
You didn’t bring a shoe pun to the table? Jordan trouble now.
I love it when everyone Keds around.
*old man voice* Yep, these Keds today just don’t know how to make a good pun. And get off my lawn!
Hush, puppies.
Damn Sarah, back at it again with the dark depression.
Sarah is attempting to have a real conversation with another human being.
She pretty much stated the truth about Joyce (she drips alright), and Becky (an unflappable smart ass is a great description imo) and yeah Dina is sometimes hard to read. Dina sees things differently from most people and she is just too cute to believe.
What is depressing about the statements Sarah made I wonder?
it’s not this statement, in itself. It’s Sarah in general. She has misanthropic tendencies, almost no personal skills and tends to see the cloud in every silver lining. Even when trying to be sympathetic, she defaults to “This is why this sucks.”
And frankly, you can see it on her face: She knows she’s a (lonely and isolated) wet blanket, but doesn’t really know how to do anything else.
Then Dina is probably the best person to hang out with right now, I’m thinking. Eh?
Even when trying to be sympathetic, she defaults to “This is why this sucks.”
But isn’t that generally how people do sympathy? “I’m sorry [bad thing] happened/is happening. I know this must be hard/terrible/distressing/etc.” Sympathy is basically acknowledging that someone is going through something bad.
All Sarah is doing here is apologizing for what she did in the previous strip and asking how Dina is doing. She looks sad because 1) she screwed up by complaining about being “tragedy-adjacent” and 2) she just realized that Dina could be having a hard time with what happened too.
And yeah, that’s not happy subject matter but this isn’t Sarah being “dark & depressing”.
Yeah, this. It’s nice hearing someone upset about how fucked up something is because it’s a reminder that yeah, it was fucked up and it shouldn’t have happened.
Dina is best poker player
She can participate in WSOP then.
Important questions from Dina, Willis.
priorities: she has them
She’s focused on the real/i> issues.
HTML. This shit is real.
…HTML jokes aside, Dina is very adept at separating that distracting human emotion from all the important facts. ‘Cause who cares about people and feelings when you’ve got dinosaurs, amirite?
Now I sincerely hope this is answered at some point. Seriously, to the point where I’d even welcome one more Ross comic for it.
Just one, but still.
It’ll be in a slipshine.
Mwa ha ha.
I’m not ready to see Ross mount someone in a dino costume. Or wear a triceratops effigy downstairs. Or deliver T-Rex soliloquies. Or all of the above.
If you aren’t ready, get ready. Somebody might already be drawing fanart to that end.
Or by Willis himself
Given just how fanatically religious Toedad is, I recon he would be 1 of those people who would write to someone in authority about banning the entire Jurassic Park/World saga, due to it’s “heathen portrayal of evolution (no way he’s not a Creationist) & commenting on ‘Dinosaurs’ as if they ever actually existed on God’s green Earth”…
I mean, he thought Dina’s Tri-horn jacket was a Pokemon & feared for her soul because of it…
This is not not a tri-horn jacket. It is a Tricera-Top™.
Sorry, my bad. Maybe I’ll get Daniel the human 1 for his birthday or something now I know the name…
Dina is slowly becoming Deadpool
Dina should be in Deadpool 2. In fact, Dina should be in every movie, without exception.
What about torture porn movies? (I’m sorry)
Quietly watching from the corner.
Also, what about hardcore porn?
Holding the camera and asking really awkward questions.
Dina becomes a porn director for research purposes.
Taking copious notes from the finished cut.
Galasso is her director of photography for the same reason.
G: Am I… the guy is the one on top?
D: I’m pretty sure that’s a girl.
G: Really?? But, the tattoos…
D: My notes indicate that women have those now, too.
G: But, I thought ‘Tommi’ was a boy’s name…
D: It can also be a girl’s. And, even if it is a man’s name, it could still be on a man’s body. The evidence does not preclude this.
G: So confused…
Asking the right questions.
Depends. Is Dina going to be the one doing the torturing? (I’m not sorry.)
What would she even torture people for?
To make quality torture porn, oc. Although (so long as it’s quality) I guess it wouldn’t be real torture then so much as pretend torture for the fans.
Either that or she would torture creationists with her FACTS. Obviously this would make the best torture porn imaginable.
This is another reason why this comments section needs an upvote capability.
Or she could make a Steven Spielberg look-alike stay in a cage with a bunch of pissed-off roosters.
Just upvote, though. No downvote.
Believing that dinosaurs couldn’t have been feathered because they weren’t giant chickens.
I’ve never understood that argument. Most reptiles tend to be ridiculously calm, but birds are generally aggressive as all hell.
Most crocodilians are pretty aggressive. But then they’re more closely related to sparrows than to lizards, so it could go either way.
If I recall correctly…
They’re very calm until they aren’t. They’re optimized for short bursts of activity. It’s an ectotherm thing.
……..
You know, every now and then, I wonder exactly what I did to end up in this crowd. Then I realize that I have an answer, and the answer is itself an answer.
Answer: No. “Movie” generally implies full length feature, and porn (with a few exceptions) is nearly always on the order of 30 mins tops. They should be considered different formats.
Have you never seen or heard of a full length porn film? Cuz geez. I’ve see-*cough* I mean… heard of porn films, and I don’t mean like anthology “best of” collections and what have you, that come in two parts with an almost six hour total run time.
But 20-30 minutes is just typically just a single scene. With usually 4-6 scenes per movie.
Unless my, uh… friend’s… sampling is biased.
Well let me put it this way.
When people pay to see a normal movie at a hotel (with the time the TV’s on being logged), they typically watch the whole movie, or at least a good chunk of it.
When they pay to see porn, they typically watch about 8 minutes.
How do you know she wasn’t already in Deadpool 1? Remember, she’s super good at being unnoticed.
It’s a little known fact that Dina has appeared in every sing DoA strip and Slipshine story.
…oh my god, Dina and Becky could be in a Slipshine someday.
2040 is the projected year when all the DoA fans is going to lose it!
A grossly misrepresented Dina would first have to appear in a Wolverine movie
How do you know she isn’t already in every movie? How could you tell?
I think I saw her behind the door at 1 point…
She is in every movie, you just haven’t seen her, she is that good.
No! She will get her face disfigured!
Hopefully Becky isn’t too superficial then.
I hear chicks dig scars.
“Hot damn, my girlfriend’s a badass.”
Now I’m imagining Dina jumping off of stuff yelling ‘Maximum effort!’ and that makes me very happy.
*Plays “Working for the Weekend” on the new Hacked Muzak*
This strip is about Becky though…
Ok…
*Plays “Jurassic Park Theme” on the new Hacked Muzak*
At least you notice the last panel… Right Dallas?
I am breaking in Jiro, robbing a bank. We are in the middle of an assault. A bulldozer just shot Clover. Please, if you have any regard for life Wolf, you’d leave me out of this.
who the heck are you “people”
Characters from some games(Hotline Miami, Payday).
*hijacks the Muzak back for some Hevisaurus*
https://www.youtube.com/user/HevisaurusVEVO
You’ll have to get past the assault waves….
Eh… Don’t mind Mr. Jacket. He upgraded the system with mega-surround sound. That way even Mr. Willis can hear it beautifully.
\m/
Is… is this breaking of the 4th wall?
More like leaning.
…no? She’s addressing another character, talking about something that happened to her in the story. Where’s the fourth wall come in?
It’s not the 4th wall, but Clever Girl was a mood-killing out-of-place gag that made it very clear the situation was artificial. “Breaking the 4th wall” isn’t accurate, but it’s the closest shorthand we have for that situation.
(¬_¬)
TVTropes refers to this sort of thing as “Lampshade Hanging“.
And the term predates the site by far, as certain storytellers will point out with a hilarious amount of anger.
It seems that your link has been neutralized. Let me fix that for you.
Hmmmm…. This is odd. Do you think the recent site redesign has anything to do with this?
Oh, wait, I forgot to close the string! Anyway, here’s the link you want.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LampshadeHanging
Posts like that make me want to lean back in the direction of titling Book 6 “Clever Girl.”
It’s one of those phrases that can have many different and possibly contradictory meanings depending on the reader. That usual makes a good title.
*usually
(Error proves that I’m not a “Clever Girl”.)
Uh, no? This comic is all about finding small bits of humor in otherwise tragic situations. It’s why it’s fun to read, rather than maudlin and depressing.
Maybe it pulled you out, but you can’t make that claim for the audience in general.
You mean the mood wasn’t killed a few seconds earlier when a college aged girl jumped a burly man with a gun while pretending to be a dinosaur?
Those both happened in the same strip.
I find that entirely plausible and in-character for Dina.
Indeed. She used the Raptor’s tactic of distracting the target in 1 direction, then ponced from the side. Using that kind of tactic when attacking an enemy who’s definitely superior to yourself, that you need to take down to protect something, all I can say is clever girl…
Like in Jurassic Park itself! The raptor doesn’t actually jump on Muldoon the way any sensible ambush predator would, it chivalrously gives him space to say some last words before eviscerating him. It interrupted the documentary feeling and with an indication this was really a drama artificially constructed for humans to enjoy.
So the “clever girl” in Willis’ comic is just about as non-awesome as it was in the movie. That is how people thought of that line, as really pointless and jarring, right? No? Not even me? Huh.
Taken straight from Dina’s card about why she can’t, in good conscience, recommend Jurassic Park, I’m sure.
I was a teenager when I watched that movie, so I did not find it jarring then. I probably would find it somewhat jarring now. Only somewhat, because at least it would be an original thing.
The particular comic strip, on the other hand, was extremely jarring because it was doing a “Look at how cool the ‘Clever Girl’ reference still is”* right in the middle of what was a tense and chilling situation; completely taking away all sense of danger that was going on in that moment.
Not that it is alone in doing that. It is a symptom of almost all action movies/TV shows today that one-liner quips in the middle of danger has to be inserted for the sake of making someone look cool -even if it is not otherwise consistent with their character-**. But the overall effect is that I end up never thinking these people are really in any danger, so why worry about them, eh?
*Personally, I find that thanks to the internet, the ‘Clever Girl’ phrase is as played out as a certain “N. Byson” phrase was in this comment field; so even without it being placed at the worst possible moment, I wouldn’t have found it to be much of a good strip.
** It is an unfortunate fact that the biggest movie stars will hire their own script writers to look over the script and rewrite the lines for the character to make said character look cooler/more kick-ass, not taking into account if this makes any sense for the character: http://www.cracked.com/blog/4-reasons-why-bad-movies-are-allowed-to-happen/
So if DoA was a movie/TV show, I would have assumed that the actor playing Toedad would have been the driving force behind the “clever girl” moment.
Well, sounds like she has her priorities in order
Sounds more like denial to me.
Yeah, she’s trying to process a traumatic event but getting stuck on the most superficial aspect of it.
Displacement activity.
Maybe he was protesting outside a showing of Jurassic Park for that movie’s depiction of dinosaurs coming from millions of years ago, and he heard people quoting it.
Honestly, he might just see the whole ‘don’t play god’ theme and ignore everything else that might bother him
Well, since the scientist creating those dinosaurs were operating from fundamentally wrong theories, of course things went bad.
Dinosaurs recreated by creation scientists would be tame and friendly, subsisting on coconuts.
Dinosaurs recreated by creation scientists would become domesticated livestock, just like they were for the cavemen of ancient times. I know this from this fantastic creation science documentary I watched called “The Flintstones”, you should check it out.
Remember when I said [anybody aside from Dina] was my favorite DoA character?
I lied.
The answer is, of course, “Yes”
Jurassic Park, where dinosaurs are brought to life…I doubt Toedad would watch something which includes science and creatures brought back to life by it.
Well, if the Creation Museum is anything to go by, fundies LOVE dinosaurs.
I’ve always interpreted that as “kids love dinosaurs, so we have to take them over and make them all about God”. Which is organized religion’s approach to everything, of course.
That and everyone loves dinosaurs…
Not to mention these sorts of people love to look to old shows like the Flintstones as if they were documentaries that “prove” that “proper gender roles” likes in the early 60s were universal up until evil hippies and feminists ruined everything in the 70s and thus confused everyone about their proper place, creating “evil” like sex education, means of preventing dying or getting pregnant from sex, and queer people (cause those didn’t at all exist until the modern day, obviously).
Dinosaurs and sharks. And then there were sharks that lived AT THE SAME TIME AS dinosaurs! That completely blew me away as a 7-year old. Other megafauna was also kinda cool, but dinosaurs and sharks were the absolute BEST.
Giant sloths got a favoured status among mammals, because there may have still been a few sloths the size of elephants around just a couple hundred years ago. As big as an elephant, but with fluffy fur and wicked awesome claws, and compared to dinosaurs, REALLY recently.
Have you seen Australian megafauna, both extinct & still living?
The British really had guts to colonize that continent… too bad for the Aboriginal Australians though.
They did dump a lot of their convicts here. That said, to survive here, it can take some toughness & tactics to survive all the Dropbear attacks, spiders, hoopsnakes, etc…
That said, the Aboriginals were dealing with them for ages before the Brits showed up, so that makes them even more badass…
Yeah, but the dinosaurs kill a bunch of people, showing that the whole thing was a bad idea.
Humans set themselves on a level with God by creating life, and are punished for their hubris. Sounds like a good Christian message to me.
I doubt Toedad would see it that way, he’d probably just see dinosaurs & science, cry “HERESY!!” OR “DEVIL’S WORK!!” & ban any family members from seeing it. Maybe even warn others in the community for seeing it too…
Killing a bunch of people is a bad idea? I mean, the Biblical God was constantly mad at Saul because Saul repeatedly failed to kill as many people as commanded.
It isn’t about killing, it is about authority and obedience. Killing when God tells you to – good. Killing when God told you not to – bad. Not killing when God told you to – bad.
Toedad wouldn’t watch since he KNOWS that “dinosaur bones only exist to test our faith that the world is only 6000 years old”.
Or he would watch it and reason to himself that since he’s a Man of God, he can resist the temptations.
You’d think that, but Fundies stay away from anything that doesn’t fit their world view. I guess their faith just isn’t that strong.
I believe the actual line is “Of course liberal media is all temptations from the devil no man can resist, I mean, no offense, but look at you.” (omit the no offense for non Joyce-types.)
Never underestimate the things people will tell themselves in order to not feel guilty.
Seeing as Willis wrote Joyce and Becky to have a similar religious background to him, I believe the explanation they would have for dinosaur bones is that dinosaurs went extinct after The Flood.
I think Jurassic Park would still run him the wrong way because it implies that dinosaurs were around hundreds of millions years ago.
THE WORLD MUST KNOW
If Ross has seen any of Jurassic Park it’s some weird bootleg version with a dubbed on commentary from some preacher, pointing out every instance where it disagrees with Young Earth Creationism.
Or maybe they can just edit out all of the stuff that contradicts the Bible. Like that dinosaur book I saw at the tire store with the pages very selectively torn out.
That’s… that’s horrible.
“He who destroys a good book kills reason itself.” – John Milton
“Reason and logic have NOTHING to do with religion, so religious people will have nothing to do with them.” – Me
*Most of Jurassic Park is instead replaced with Episodes of Hymmel the Hymael, complete with familiar faces…
I really don’t remember much that it violates, other than mentions of stuff being millions of years old, but, as creationists, we were used to ignoring that.
Sure, you might keep your kid from watching it, but people more steadfast in the faith were allowed to watch other stuff. Did you know the TV show Charmed had a huge fundamentalist older male following?
I’m both surprised and unsurprised. That show got… Weird about gender pretty quickly.
It’s a valid concern- if someone you consider to be a bad person has things in common with you, does that mean you could be a bad person yourself?
That’s dumb. It’s a case of Hitler Ate Sugar: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HitlerAteSugar.
Just because you share something in common with someone bad doesn’t make you bad yourself.
But does linking TVTropes make you bad?
Hitler never linked to TVTropes.
(Waits for someone resubbing that movie scene to be a rant about TVTropes.)
Of course Hitler never linked to TVTropes — That’s what Goebbels was for.
That’s not automatically true. It /can/ be true. In the case of hitler ate sugar, hitler shares something otherwise innocuous in common with you. Hitler did a lot of things. Was this innocuous before the introduction of Hitler, is the question.
The answer can be yes, of course, /but you should have the self awareness to check/.
Maybe he’s the type of fellow who goes to see the wicked heresy so that he knows how to decry it better.
“Ross, why are you watching lesbian porn?
“I watch it to understand how not to sin”
“Becky come over here, I have to show you how not to sin!”
‘I watch it in slow motion, over and over. The masturbation also helps me understand better.’
I feel these two responses to Mr k couldn’t be more unfortunately paired.
Careful, someone might take that as a challenge.
blugh. That’s his daughter, inqntrol!
Sorry, didn’t think it through.
No worries, I totally think with my mouth, too.
I heard an awesome explanation once about how gay men are sinning but lesbians are not. Because, since woman was created specifically and solely to provide companionship, gay men are blasphemously spurning god’s first gift to mankind. Lesbians only exist because the men they were created for are depriving them of the ability to serve their primary purpose, and thus are forced to provide companionship to each other. Therefore, continue to condemn male homosexuality, but until all gay men have repented, be forgiving of and compassionate toward female homosexuality. It’s not their fault, and god won’t send those women to hell because that’s just how he made them.
I think we have different definitions of the word “awesome”
Awesome (adj) — extremely impressive or daunting; inspiring great admiration, apprehension, or fear
I was impressed and in awe of how much thought went into this particular set of reasoning (compared to much more common things like “the bible says so” or “it’s just unnatural”, for example). I am in fear because this guy is much more likely to convince gray area individuals to join homophobic mob-mentality.
“Awesome” does not inherently mean “good”.
okay wow, new motherboard means I in fact reload a billion times yet end up with the new comic appearing only after 29 others =|
(others being comments)
I want to apologize for thew behavior of my colleagues.
Your “colleagues” being other commenters or other terrifying clown like beings with flags over their faces?
Ya got the clown thing right!
And don’t forget the chicken mask!
Different network interface drivers? (I assuming you didn’t get a whole new OS etc.)
Dina Saruyama asks the hard-hitting questions.
Panel 4: I’M CRYING
Panel 5: I AM LAUGH
Plot twist he’s seen Jurrassic Park but wasn’t referencing it.
Or, he’s never seen it but is familiar with the meme!
Dina is Dina, thus Sarah is able to be Sarah. Thus, life is good.
Do people still say “unflappable”?
Hopefully, you don’t forget the first “l”
Yup, but the internet and books tend to keep even words far more archaic or obscure than it in use, so that’s not saying much.
Yes we do.
Google it. There’s a book title (2012), a hashtag, Carly Fiorina, and more.
I wish I were unflappable.
About as much as ever.
I feel Dina’s pain.
Well not the pain of being thrown to the ground. I mean the wondering whether that was an intentional reference by Toedad.
It’ll get real enough, Sarah. Just give it time.
“Joyce drips what she’s feeling at any given moment out of her pores” is an incredibly on-point description of Joyce, what a great observation by Sarah there.
She should go to a dermatologist then.
That’s our Dina for you
I can relate to this on a way more shallow level. I passed out at work while making an iced jasmine tea and swear to god, I still think about that and wonder if they got it. “how many scoops did I put in before I passed out, did they steep it long enough/too long? What about the other drinks in the que?”
I was wondering the same thing, Dina…
I cant even right now David XD
WILLIS
I BEG YOU
DRAW THAT FUCKING ALT TEXT
also silly Dina fundies don’t watch dinosaur movies, he hasn’t even seen The Land Before Time.
He’s a real fan of The Land That Time Forgot, though.
I know, right? “MY GIRLFRIEND DEMANDS TO KNOW.” XD
I tried, but it’s pretty crappy. I think everyone has an idea of it going down in their heads though, I dunno.
I think Sarah has it nailed.
Joyce does drip, Becky is an unflappable smart ass, and Dina is hard to read.
I think she became hard to read in last panel. When Sarah got straightforward with her and expressed concern for her. Dina sidetracked. We’ve seen her lying awake – and I’m pretty sure it isn’t Toedad’s remark keeping her awake. But then, what she said to Sarah at the beginning was straight, she doesn’t want Becky to change a lot while she’s away: so she said what was on her mind.
Whatever way it goes, it does appear that Dina does get Sarah to be Sarah around her with no censure. Good for both of them. Sarah needs a friend, and Dina will get the straight goods from Sarah who never sugar coats anything.
I think Dina interpreted Sarah’s question as, “How are you doing in relation to what Becky’s dad did?” not as, “How have you been doing since that *in general*”? So not really a direct dodge, just answering a slightly different question.
Of course, I could be proven wrong as soon as tomorrow if the next strip has Dina admitting that what happened has been bothering her.
I’m not saying I could see Dina doing the alt text, but yes, she would do that.
The interesting thing is that might actually be a big deal for her and legitimately upsetting her. Not just because in trauma, especially fresh trauma your brain picks weird ass things to focus on. I remember when I was sexually assaulted, it was at a convention, so I got hyper focused on the bit of why that convention and whether the guy was a fan of the people speaking because it was a way for my brain to avoid focusing on what happened to me.
But also because these things may be silly to most but matter most to her. She doesn’t want to worry that a beloved movie that makes her feel good to watch is going to conjure up images of Toedad shoving her head into the dirt.
Additionally, it’s an unknown and Dina strikes me as someone who likes to filter information into all its known parts and as such, the part she feels she has the least grasp on in the whole tragedy is what she’s fixating on.
Point being, it may not be as much of a dodge from real emotional weight as Sarah thinks.
Yeah, I really doubt it’s a dodge it may just be that that’s the only thing in that sequence of events that she doesn’t understand and being Dina and it being even tangentially related to dinosaurs she has to understand. It’s entirely possible that she isn’t even particularly affected by Toedad’s violence against her because some people can just shrug violence off without much in the way of psychological trauma.
It probably helps that in Dina’s first confrontation with Toedad she was the one who had been taken by surprise, and was forced to rely on social deception, which is one of her greatest weaknesses, but attained nearly flawless victory anyway. The second time, she was the one who initiated a hand-to-hand fight, from a position of stealth, which is one of her greatest strengths. I’m not sure she was scared at all; I think she was thinking “this guy might look tough, but he’s got nothing on me.” She apologized to Becky for failing to completely defeat Toedad because that seemed like a realistic outcome, the same way effortless As on college-level math seemed realistic to Walky.
I think you’re both right. I think she really did think she could take him or at least die trying, because she made a promise to protect Becky from him and doggonit she was going to try as hard as she could to fulfill that.
And I think it was the moment that didn’t make sense. It’s like, okay, hunting us, I guess I can see that from his behavior earlier and the gun would follow from that, but Becky wasn’t exposed to dinosaurs before me and he made a Jurassic Park reference… this doesn’t fit. Must devote all my brain cycles to worrying over this inconsistency instead of the raw horror of having my face slammed into the ground by the angry father of my girlfriend, a parent who very much wanted to kill me.
She doesn’t want to worry that a beloved movie that makes her feel good to watch is going to conjure up images of Toedad shoving her head into the dirt.
That is an excellent point.
I’m very sorry that happened to you.
No kidding. I found this response very relatable. When I’ve experienced trauma I’ve tended to feel like little peripheral details about it were the Big Issue, rather than the trauma itself.
Also, I feel like Sarah doesn’t at all know how to handle trauma and traumatized people very well. It seems her default mode is to assume people are “irreparably broken” when they get a bit depressed and turn to coping strategies and that might be adding too much stress to how she handles roommate situations.
This is very true. Sarah doesn’t even feel she knows how to handle people who aren’t in trauma, and who might be having feelings. She is suspicious of everyone, and once she’s convinced that somebody is an OK person, she must then defend that person from everyone else. Possibly with a baseball bat. It must be exhausting.
True, but not strange given how much her attempt at trauma help blew up in her freshman year.
I’m thinking you’re onto something with the theory that Sarah didn’t help Dana quite as much as she hoped you mentioned a while back.
We’re all prisoners in our own perspectives. If Sarah’s own experiences with emotional turmoil lead her to bitter cynicism, her natural reaction would probably be to assume others will not only go the same way, but that those who don’t are in some way delusional or coping. If no-one’s ever helped her break that viewpoint, there isn’t much reason for her to do so herself.
Dina likes Jurassic Park? But it’s full of inaccuracies!
She has even listed them!
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/01-if-the-shoes-split/piano/
I’m pretty sure it’s a bit of a guilty pleasure for her. She loves it enough to learn the piano just to play that one song, and I bet a young Dina learnt a LOT of dinosaur lore just fact checking the movie.
She didn’t learn the piano just to learn that song! She also learned the Barney Theme!
A 2m tall purple and green T. rex with bare (plush) skin and a bite pattern of two flat semicircles is entirely in keeping with the fossil record.
We don’t even know that she actually learned the piano. She may have just learned those songs.
(in fact that was the very next comic.)
Okay, in a master list of priorities it wouldn’t be my top pick in this situation either, Sarah. But you have to admit….that IS a valid question. It would kind of completely upset my image of Toedad as this conservative crazy shut in that shuns all pop culture as the devil’s playground.
Also good on Sarah reaching out and checking in on Dina once she realized she was talking to one of the central figures of the tragedy. Sarah does really try to be good people despite herself.
Sarah is good people, but she’s good people with zero esteem in humanity including herself.
Yeah, I like this Sarah way better than Walkyverse Sarah. Walkyverse Sarah never saw concern, even after Joyce vanished.
Showed, not saw. Why did I say Saw?
If you’d told me 3 years ago my favorite webcomic character would be a dinosaur-loving college freshie who is canonically indistinguishable from a 12-year-old I’d have been all ‘what’
That… is surprisingly meta. However, given that this is Dina, maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised!
I bet to Toedad, Jurassic Park was a historical documentary.
You’re thinking of The Flintstones.
There will be a heart-to-heart about this later.
“Becky, I have to know… did you ever watch Jurassic Park in your family?”
“Dunno, I lost TV privileges for life at age 8 (toots worth it though)”
“I MUST KNOW!!!”
And here we thought Dina was lovesick when she was just wondering about ToeDad’s movie preferences. Silly us.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/02-that-perfect-girl/thoughtless/
tfw when there is no dinosaur girl in your life to have unreal conversations like this with.
HOly fucking shigt you should have saved that alt text idea for a patreon bonus strip or something
Okay, guys. I know we like to analyze and overanalyze this comic. But can we take a step back, and try to figure out if Willis saw this stuff in the comments and made a joke about it, or if he predicted stuff a long time ago?
I do sometimes think that the analysis ignores the comedic aspects of this comic. This was a joke. We need more jokes after the heart break that was the end of the last arc.
And note, that’s not me saying anything bad about analysis: I like it, too.
No. Willis’ buffer is over a month ahead of us.
That comic was over 3 months ago, though. He might not have written this one by that point.
The Buffer is currently about 4 months ahead of us. After the twins were born, it stalled for a few weeks, but I don’t think it ever got less than 2 months ahead.
We’re just that predictable.
Or Willis just does what he wants to do, and the comic has attracted an audience that shares his narrative pattern preferences.
We are all his puppets and we dance merrily on his strings.
We’re just his Jack in the Box.
Dina asking the important questions we all need the answer to as always.
#Priorities
Is Dina suffering a bit of PTSD?
I suppose Sarah is kneeling in the chair now? She’s a lot higher than in the last two strips.
Looks like it. In the last panel of yesterday’s she turns around and climbs up. She has her arms resting on the back of the chair. Note that Dina is now on her right instead of her left.
Obviously there is some hidden political meaning here.
Oh good, now I don’t get to sleep either.
Ehhh, Toedad saw it. Hypocrisy is no stranger to certain sects of fundamentalism. After all, plenty point to Leviticus for reasons to loathe X group but don’t follow any of the others.
Oh man, this was a good laugh. Thanks, I needed that.
Gotta love the Dinasaur. 🙂
Never change, Dina. Never change.
Further reason why I love Dina.
I wish my life were buffered up until June 6th. I could really use the certainty right now.
Didn’t some commenters just the other day credit Dina for always using proper grammar?
Though I guess “laying” can be put down to a spelling mistake in the transcription.
Lack of sleep (Dina’s or Mr. Willis’s).
She’s a dino nerd, not a grammar nerd. Just because she may be on the spectrum doesn’t mean she can use English like a Victorian grammarian.
That depends. Did he say it with an Australian accent?
Part of PTSD can often be anxiety – which can often look like lying awake at night thinking obsessively about little seemingly insignificant things associated with trauma.
Also it’s possible Dina is just a bad ass and that is seriously the only thing that bothers her about the situation now that Becky is relatively safe.
It can be hard to tell with high functioning folks on the autism spectrum sometimes, what the significance is of the details they cling to. Speaking from significant experience with both asperger’s and PTSD.
It could also just be a natural response to a highly stressful event. PTSD isn’t a universal experience, even for people who undergo traumatic experiences. Anxiety, stress, troubled thoughts… These are a natural response to a trauma and don’t become a pathology unless they refuse to go away and actively impair someone’s life.
PTSD is a specific diagnosis for a specific set of behaviours, not the universal human response. Even people who exhibit behaviours that normally characterize PTSD aren’t necessarily suffering from any disorder; they might just be human beings working through something. Normal behaviour ain’t a pathology. Pathology is when the normal behaviours become harmful.
I too wondered that Dina
I would not get along well with Sarah. I live for real conversations, to desire to avoid them is just…
Sarah not happy about the conversation going less real either. Check her eye-roll.
As to living for conversation, wait till you’ve gone 3 months on a mountain top without anyone to talk to. You want to tie the first person you see to a chair so they have to talk to you! (Rocks and mud are terrible conversationalists. I had lengthy discussions with the trees about them. 🙂 )
I know, right? The trees at least WAVE to you.
And they’ll whisper too. Rocks just growl and bite. 🙂
I’m so glad that this was actually addressed. It’s beautiful.
Wouldn’t Dina know the difference between lying and laying?
the conundrum distresses her THAT MUCH