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Meredith Rose @mrose.ink ⋅ 6h
Alex Wayne @aawayne.bsky.social ⋅ 9h
David F Walker a.k.a. BadAzz MoFo @davidfwalker.bsky.social ⋅ 1d
Arren @arrenm.bsky.social ⋅ 3m
David M Willis! @damnyouwillis.bsky.social ⋅ 1d
Nothings Monstered @nothingsmonstrd.bsky.social ⋅ 18h
Shaenon K. Garrity @shaenon.bsky.social ⋅ 12d
Gillian Branstetter @gbbranstetter.bsky.social ⋅ 1d
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Panel 2: posting at midnight
Panel 3: posting at midnight with a Patreon subscription
Panel 4: everyone who didn’t know about Panel 3 and is seeing it for the first time and is all, “WTF I WAS HERE AND THERE WAS NOTHING HOWWWWWWW”
Panel 5: whoever happens to randomly FIRST one night after knowing about Panel 3
So I’m guessing you keep this on the clipboard while waiting for the RSS to update?
I think patrons are able to comment on comics before they go live for everyone else.
I somehow doubt Ana Chronistic is the only Patreon supporter that comments on individual strips, and I also doubt that Patreon supporter comments would be uploaded one by one over time instead of all at once if they were able to comment before the comics are uploaded here.
Obviously Ana has a program set up to automatically post their comments.
She has her own, super secret, Patreon level.
Unless they’re all in on it…
I think her name reveals all; she has awesome temporal powers.
Shush, we don’t talk about that.
The comic is posted a day earlier on the Patreon website, and patrons can comment on it there, having the same arguments as her a day earlier.
Of course Dorothy knew, Becky! She’s your archnemesis. Who do you think staged the daring jailbreak as part of her evil plan to keep Joyce all for herself?
Dorothy isn’t that cheap. She wouldnt pay to free a fanatic. She would pay to build a mecha powered by secular music and patented by the MIT. Only Blaine and Carol are cheap villains.
Good on you, Joyce.
And oh boy, wacky-as-coping!Becky is back.
Yep, this is gonna hurt.
Please let Leslie hugs return soon. We need more Leslie hugs.
Eh, Wacky-as-coping! is probably her best strategy right now–she needs to keep an even keel going into the interview, and she’s good at this particular mechanism; also, it will let her disarm the situation if it DOES come up in the interview, and good job on Dorothy of spotting that particular disaster looming on the horizon. Now, afterwards, once she’s out of the interview, she needs to drop it, and that’ll be where we see if she can find some better means of coping.
That and “hey, the chance to imply my best friend has a crush on her new college friend, and maybe it’s true and we’ll realize we’re both gay and can commiserate/navigate this all together, even if I don’t actually want to date her anymore” is a thing a lot of baby queers would love.
Plus that is 100% the face I make every time I’m teasing a friend I love about their crush that they’re trying to deny.
She might be distracting herself to cope but I cannot blame her at all.
We all love wacky-as-coping!Becky. Except for the annoying majority.
Of which I am a part
I think it’s about as healthy as Amber’s coping mechanism(s), which is to say, not at all.
As long as she doesn’t snap and turn into Amazigirls Joker I’m OK with it.
What is with that last expression?
I choose to interpret it as Becky imagining what Joyce and Dorothy are getting up to in their spare time, as filtered through her complete lack of filter.
I’m wondering, too. I can’t really figure out what she’s doing with her mouth.
Biting her lower lip? Or half of it?
Yeah, it’s definitely a lip bite.
Yeah, she’s fuming and tryna keep her composure by biting her lip.
>:3
A smug, feline like grin.
I took it as a look of a bit of spite, due to her “rivalry” with Dorothy that she treats with varying degrees of seriousness.
That is the face of giving your best friend a hard time just to get a rise out of her and to break the tension because humor is your coping mechanism.
Exactley this! ^_^
Yup!
You are wise, and I think yer right.
As coping mechanisms in this series goes, it’s one of the healthier ones.
That bar is subterranean.
Yep, AKA tweaking your straight crush
You’re not my supervisor
Wait, who is my supervisor?
Wait, what is a supervisor?
It’s a visor that fell into a vat of unobtanium and acquired secret powers.
Meanwhile, the person who actually did something to fight off Mr Toehead is nowhere to be found.
His ghost is around though.
His body is stashed in Amber’s closet along with Amazigirl’s uniform.
I now half expect the very last strip of this chapter to be a very groggy, beat up Mike wandering out of Amber’s closet as she is changing. She is startled and freaked, and Mike just goes, “Don’t care” as he drags his half dead ass out
Dina? Amazi-Girl? Both missing.
Dina was there like an hour ago should we consider her missing so soon?
We haven’t seen Dina since she woke up with Becky, but then again, we haven’t seen any sort of plot stuff that would indicate she’s in trouble. Without any sort of clue, it’s safer to assume she’s fine.
Didn’t we see Dina in her room with Amber and Walky?
Yes, and many (self included) got very angry at Amber/Walky for treating Dina as a object and not a person, when they tried to stop Dina from going to her midterm so they wouldn’t have sex.
I have no personal experience with either, but I’m pretty sure a live interview is very different from being the lead in a teen church musical.
Not if you played Zachary Zewicky.
I’m hoping none of this matters cause Ross and Blaine both caught Corona virus. They both seem in the age range where it starts to get dangerous.
They’re way too young. They’re barely 40.
Hey, maybe their lungs are bad enough that they end up at risk anyways?
Are they heavy smokers?
Blaine’s a mob goon; that generally means spending a lot of time in smoke-filled rooms, even if you’re not a smoker (and in general, Asian immigrants have high levels of smoking, culturally; since Blaine is, I believe, working for the Korean mob, yeah, his lungs are probably tar city, even if he never lit up himself).
Toedad is a bit harder to guess. He could go the “My body is a temple” route, in which case he regards smoking as a sinful vice to be avoided at all cost, and assumes that anyone who does smoke is unclean (and, in the case of a female, probably sexually licentious), or he could go the “Evil liberal conspiracy” route, in which case he smokes like a chimney out of spite.
Toe strikes me as someone whose faith is more about finding an easy wife and keeping others in line than about doing anything mildly inconvenient.
“What’s that? The second commandment forbids being all bling and no substance about God? Naw it just means you can’t say the ABC’s of words like ass and butt. Except when I say them because do as I say not as I do.
The fifth forbids killing? Naw she doesn’t count as a person, she’s helping a .”
You know, that sort.
Ross may be late 40s, but still not in the danger range.
Man I’ve grossly overestimated how old they are. Blaine looks reasonably young I guess but I was sure Ross was at least 50 by now.
Coming from the fundie end of evangelical christianity in the USA he likely married some time in his twenties. Becky is 17 or 18, so I can’t see Ross being any older than 45 at most, and likely closer to 40. Blaine might well be somewhat older than that, but it’s anyone’s guess really.
I find it interesting Becky doesn’t seem that alarmed about the Ross situation. I know that she’s seemingly stopped being afraid of him for a while now, given how thoroughly she shut the door on that chapter of her life, but even before she latched onto the Dorothy bit, she really seems to be no-selling it almost entirely.
Remember, “wacky” is her coping mechanism.
Now go look back at Panel 4 again.
To be fair, it’s still amazing she didn’t just snap right then and there
I actually kind of love Becky’s deflection when she’s anxious.
It’s generally endearing and always relatable.
Who’s Zachary Zewicky? Google turns up nothing.
Apparently, he was a lead performer in a Christian musical
https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/35773020?q&versionId=45088481
Now try teen church musical productions.
Not to be confused with Becky Zewacky.
Yay for Joyce being honest even if she wasn’t sure it was the right thing due to timing, etc! Smarting of Age!
Kudos to Dorothy for spotting the potential disaster, too. “So, Becky, tell me, how do you feel about your father being out on bail and at large again?” “Who the what now?”
Now I’m trying to figure out what musical theater lead Becky would be the best in.
I would say Elphaba (they both dropped in on a college, they both have best friends they’re sorta kinda in love with, they both have terrible dads), but then I don’t think Becky would go full villain on everybody if provoked.
I sort of think Angel, from RENT. What do you guys think?
My loathing for RENT makes it a poor candidate to transfer any character I like into it.
So you have 525,600 reasons to loathe it?
So, bets on what the curveball question is gonna be?
Of course Becky will use comedy to deal with existential dread. She can’t waste a chance to tease Joyce and cvontinue her imaginary feud with Dorothy.
It’s tonight already? Huh, looks like the evil dads fight and Mike reveal could be ‘tomorrow’ after all!
Also, what kind of small market TV station would send an MMJ* with just a couple lights and a little camera to a planned interview? This usually calls for two shooters, three cameras (interviewer, interviewee, wide shot), and a good light kit. They’re usually shot and edited ahead of time too; if not then this would have to be switched in the field on a little video switcher. (good luck getting three paths back to the station in perfect sync to do it there.
Sorry, just my inner TV production nerd screaming.
*MMJ – Multimedia Journalist. A reporter who writes, shoots, and edits all their own material with no cameraperson.
They’re not at the interview yet. That’s Robin’s stuff.
Did they ever say it was for TV? Given Becky’s sphere of influence I was thinking more of an online news site kind of thing.
Never mind. They did say “TV interview”
I was assuming it was a remote interview. Becky here in her apartment, some cable news guy at their studio, possibly one of Manley’s people remoting in from their campaign headquarters or such as well for opposing view.
They wouldn’t have to send a crew out for that; there are Skype appliances that tie in with the rest of a station’s systems.
The ‘sat delay’ of having a debate between both candidates remotely through the station though… oof.
Where do you see a crew?
Out of frame, where we belong.
It probably tells you a lot about how much growing up Becky has been forced to do that her biggest concern at this point it to tease Joyce about how everything seems to need to go through or at least be cross-verified with Dorothy! Panel 5 definitely seems to say: “So, time to tease sis!”
Says a lot about how ingrained her defense mechanisms are, I’d say.
“So, time to tease sis, because that’ll keep me from a complete breakdown.”
Well done Joyce! Telling Becky was the right thing to do.
Now tell her that Robin hired security for her.
I’d like to up the bidding to “Your dad IS out of jail and was within 100 meters of you last night with PLANS”.
Mike or Amazi-Girl would have to be the one with that news, and Mike is busy in the basement with the lotion and the hose.
Joyce and Becky are so gosh-darn cute.
Priority: not be angry with Joyce.
That grin is fantastic.
@Willis: I know it’s problem not created by you, could you find a different way for opting out of personalized ads (living in Europe, so DSGVO)? It’s really annoying to have to do 20 klicks every few days to re-state that I still don’t want personalized ads. (On every comic I read). I don’t understand why I have to re-enter my choices every few days and why there are so many different things to opt out of. Does anyone really want to be tracked by one or two out of the 50 odd companies listed?
I‘m on patron, so it’s not like I‘m cheating you out of money, I just don’t wanna be tracked.
Talk to Hiveworks about intrusive ads. They’re the ones who delete them, not Willis.
This is not about intrusive ads. This is about the „Do you want cookies“ dialogue that was invented because of European Law which states that setting cookies without user approval is illegal. The problem is that advertising networks want to set hundreds of cookies to track your behaviors across all the sites you use, with the aim of presenting personalized ads.
If each site once presented me with a dialogue „ do you want personalized ads“ and when I answer „no“, they and they ad partners do not set tracking cookies and that’s it, that would be great.
But the damn dialogue has 8 or 9 screens with long lists of companies who want to set cookies and track me, and it pops up every 3-7 days AGAIN.
So it would be much easier for me to use an ad-blocker, which would reduce the ad revenue Willis gets even more than non-personalized ads do.
Hiveworks did not react to a mail on the topic, they didn’t even explain why the thing appears every other day (and at least tries to enable google cookies if you don’t go through all the screens to disable it again).
It might be an issue with the company in reaction to European law then. Hiveworks and Willis may not have any control over it.
It is actually the responsibility of the individual websites to ask for permission for any cookies that are set when I visit the site, so it’s either Willis or Hiveworks responsibility.
Yes, Becky, Dorothy knew. So did Robin, except Robin had no plans to tell you this.
Trust Joyce to do the right thing.
Eventually.
also trust her to tell her friend in the most adorable, nervous way possible.
aw.
Panel 4 Becky. Sad. Worried. Dismayed at the shite sandwich which she’s busy eating.
Panel 5 Becky. Trolling Joyce.
Thank you Willis.
I’m glad Joyce did the right thing eventually, and sooner than planned.
Also, I too text vomit like that when I get nervous about telling someone anything vaguely unpleasant. Except it’s all one big text cause I know nothing about spacing.
Of course that’s what she’s attached to
I find it fascinating that over the past couple of years the comment count has dropped dramatically over time. I know I’m new here, but strips like this of about the same caliber and tone in 2015 would have like twice the comments. What happened?
(Also I think I’ve gone through the archives like 5 times since discovering the comic. Perhaps i need to find a new hobby.)
Some people stop reading, some people don’t feel like commenting, and some are likely waiting for 6 months to go past so by the time they return, what happened to Mike will be known. Some people have likely shifted to being binge readers.
There’s also Patreon now, where some people– likely some of those who are the most into the comic– can support it and read and comment a day early. I’m not sure when that was introduced, but I imagine it impacts the number of on-site comments.
I love how little the information has impressed Becky. She’s truly a strong, powerhouse woman.
Actually, no (IMO). She’s fucking terrified (you can see it in the middle panels), and resorting to her usual means of deflecting/pretending otherwise.
Very unrelated but i would die on the hill for shipping dorothy and joyce together, it is very much fruitless as their both very likely straight but my heart ships what it must ship
Don’t worry, we’re in the same boat.
O7
They’re not wrong, if there was any chance that the interviewer would bring it up, it’s better for Becky to know what’s going on ahead of time.