I think the idea is that living dinosaurs were put on the ark by Noah. This is the Fred Flintstone idea of dinosaurs and humans living together at the same time. Then, at some point after the flood but before modern times, dinosaurs were hunted to extinction.
I’m pretty sure that’s an actual belief, if no longer one she holds, on her part. Remember, she earnestly asserted her favorite dinosaur could ‘breathe fire’ using a similar mechanism to the bombardier beetle.
No, no, nothing ate meat until after the Flood! When there wasn’t a firmament of water overhead anymore to keep everyone strong and healthy while still maintaining a vegetarian diet, so now people and animals had to start eating meat!
Yes, this is what I was taught, that God decided dinosaurs prolly didnt really fit in any more and so had Noah leave them off the ark, hence the mass extinction. Always seems odd that the other mass annihilation of animals doesnt seem to be reflected in the fossil record. But maybe they all turned to oil in another one of Gods mysterious plots where he set us up to bring about the end times by finding that oil and burning it all, causing global warming.
Except that oil is not formed from dinosaurs, it is formed by algae settling to the bottom of oceans over millions of years, then getting buried and compressed under tremendous heat and pressure.
There’s actually a Chick Tract claiming that dinosaurs were on the ark, but the Earth’s climate changed after the flood making it less suitable to them, so they died out (and were finally hunted into extinction by people.)
The Bible (literary true) says that God or Noah put two, four, or fourteen specimens of every kind of animal aboard the ark. Now, obviously it doesn’t mean to include aquatic animals, but it says every kind.
[at risk of DontExplainTheJoke.jpg I was pointing out the dangling modifier of “I’ve never thought Satan put dinosaur bones in the ground to trick us.” … “They, the dinosaur bones, were put on the ark and later hunted to extinction.”]
I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the cast id undeclared. What is Joyce even majoring in? Last I remember she wanted to be a teacher but I think Joyce’s career motivations have long since evolved beyond that. I know Sarah is studying law, I think Amber and Danny are in computer science courses? Jennifer is journalism. I can’t really think of anyone else.
I think Becky’s also in on a political science major or whatever the deal is with Robin’s sponsoring even though she’s just using it to game the system and take science classes. That’s probably also what Dorothy’s majoring in. Carla’s probably in engineering. Malaya and possibly Mary are in art. Has Sal ever stated anything? She’s probably undeclared too. It’s pretty interesting trying to imagine what some of the cast might be into for a career.
I don’t think Joyce has given any indications of switching careers. Heck, a first year Biology course like this is perfect for ‘yeah I can teach a whole range of subjects’ for primary educators.
Also, Raidah and Jacob are in law. Mary is in art, not sure about Malaya. Dorothy is more likely than not political science.
Joyce didn’t want to be a teacher, she became an education major so she could homeschool her future children better. She was actually going for her MRS, although her lifeplans are probably not quite the same now, although she may not realize it yet.
Yeah, I suspect she recognizes it on SOME level after last semester – it’s clear she’s never going back to that church, and even if she hasn’t fully come to terms with it yet, she knows she doesn’t really believe in God anymore.
But I don’t think she’s let herself think beyond that brief ‘fighter pilot’ idea (and honestly I’m not sure how much serious thought went into that beyond ‘flying planes and being cool’) what she actually DOES want to do. I’d bet she does change her major eventually, though. No clue what yet.
To be slightly more serious, I’m sure you can angle a creative writing course somewhere, maybe English Lit, and do a lot of focus on comparing, I dunno, displays of eroticism in media between medieval writing to modern day things like Fifty Shades or something.
I mean I was a humanities major who got an undergrad thesis greenlit about our perception of Muppets as living, friendly beings who are also puppets and the uncanny valley so, I can see it. Try hard enough and you can justify A LOt in an academic paper.
A friend of mine actually did her PhD in that. Well, ‘Comparing Occurrences of ‘Deviant’ Sexuality in Something Century Literature from France and England.’ (Can’t remember what period she focused on! But apparently there was a lot more bestiality than she’d expected, which she found very exciting.)
This is actually a reply to Bubbletea… you peaked my curiosity, and don’t know if this is what you were referring to, but I found “Transgressing the Boundaries of Holiness: Sexual Deviance in the Early Medieval Penitential Handbooks of Ireland, England and France 500-1000.” by C. A. McCann… fascinating reading. The author was able to figure out the (many) sexual deviancies of the early Middle Ages by studying the penitential handbooks. We know what they did, because we know what they chastised themselves for doing.
@Roborat (the original one), you are most likely correct, since that is the usual usage, however Chris may actually have meant that their curiosity was elevated to a maximum degree, rather than their curiosity was provoked.
To be honest though, in a fit of pique, I peeked at the particulars of piqued and peaked to be sure I didn’t place my proboscis problematically and pique peoples proclivity to impart a passage on piqued to we pupils.
Well there’s the evidence! My question is if that still holds up now with Joyce’s change in outlook after what happened? She’s being pushed farther away from the person she was even during that date so her end career if we ever see it could still be dramatically different from what she planned. Although i can easily imagine her teaching and having a side gig as the famous author of the Julia Grey chronicles. It will be made into a movie franchise or tv series, probably on the CW.
Aaah, right, thanks! I’m with Sirksome that I’m still not certain she does – given her response to Walky’s ‘you need good vision to be a fighter pilot’ she still seems to have that fantasy as a HER fantasy, not just Julia, and there was a LOT going on in the Brother Visit that could have been influencing what she said and was thinking there* (also given Joyce’s sensory issues, elementary school kids would probably be hell on her,) but I’m glad she actually has started questioning that one at least a little bit.
* Also given what we saw in the glasses arc that she will, in fact, deny that she’s changing even in a way she should have expected in the face of undeniable evidence. Her expression in that last panel isn’t exactly relieved.
thanks, I thought it was something like that…the fundy way of educating women- let them learn until they find a man then they have to drop out so he can support them
Is being undeclared even a thing anymore? When I was at college (a state school mumble decades ago), I was officially undeclared for almost 2 years, then changed my major 3 times before I graduated. (Still got out in 4 years, but with way more than the needed credits to graduate.)
When my kids were in college (different state schools, but the same state, 10+ years ago), it appeared you were expected to declare a major when you started, and while changing was possible, it seemingly was discouraged. The requirements for graduating in most majors didn’t allow much delay in starting major-specific classes, and if you passed the number of credits required for graduating by more than (depending on the year – it’s varied) 10-20% (which becomes likely to make up the needed classes if you change majors more than a short while after you started), they charge a per credit hour “surcharge”, which is currently 100%. (That is, they charge twice as much tuition – but not fees, which are roughly the same level as tuition – for each credit than if you don’t exceed the limit.). This is intended to encourage “efficiency”, so students don’t take too long to graduate.
Yeah, I didn’t declare a major until sophomore year and I would have enrolled… fuck, a decade ago in September. Depends on the school, I think. (I also declared a minor going in that I ended up not finishing without any real issue. Such is life.)
A little googling tells me that undergrads at Indiana U have to meet certain requirments before they declare a major, often at the end of freshman year.
I transfered between one university and another, and at the first I didn’t have to declare a major until I had completed 2nd year (I was in Faculty of Arts) while the second required incoming students to apply for a particular major. I changed mine before I even set foot on campus.
Comıng from a non-US education system, even the idea that you can be “undeclared” seems absurd to me.
You are supposed to pick between math&science / math&literature / social studies at the beginning of 9th grade here. And then you better know what major you want to study by the time you graduate highschool, as you have to put it on the form before you enter a university entrance exam.
From the first day of university you are bombarded with classes in your chosen major, and 4 years is barely enough time to fit them all. So just picking random “human evolution” and “gender studies” classes for the first two semesters and then deciding to study robotics in the second year… I just can’t even comprehend how you’d fit all those courses into your schedule.
What happens if you study for longer than the four years?
Here in Germany, it depends on university, but you can basically study as long as you want at some universities, unless you fail too many exams of your chosen major. If you do, that bars you from studying any major where that course is mandatory (so, if, say, you fail “intro to statistics for STEM students” with biology as your major, and you want to study chemistry after, you are SOL.)
The downside is of course, that at some point you fall out of the financial perks of being a student (like cheaper insurance) and the costs start catching up to you. And it looks bad on your resume.
Yeah it changes from uni to uni, but generally people can do double majors, and finish it in 5 years. In some unis you have to have really high grades before you are allowed to double major. And in some cases you lose your scholarship if you can’t finish the uni in 4 years. In some cases you lose it if your GPA falls below 3.5. And in some cases you don’t lose it no matter what you do. (Heck I had a friend who took like 10 years to finish and he still had his scholarship).
So once you are in your chosen course, it’s largely up to the university and your scholarship to decide how much choice you have.
From a sounds-like-it’s-different non-US education system, here you straight up enter an educational program. You don’t “pick” classes other than like, a couple of elective choices (do you take cognitive psychology, psychology or sociology as supplement to your software engineering studies? type of thing) throughout all four years of your education. You are enrolled into a course of people with your chosen specialty (Computer Science, Software Engineering, etc – and yes, these are different as they are two different educational programs), have lectures with your whole course (and some lectures even with several different courses of your year in big enough lecture halls), then the course is also subdivided into groups which all have the same program but have workshops / practical classes / lab classes at different times so a teacher doesn’t have to wrangle 90+ people all trying to speak English or something, and can just handle 10-20 at the same time. You don’t pick your group, you’re assigned to it. (Though I imagine if you want to switch for some reason there’s no reason why you couldn’t, it just has to go through official paperwork and stuff)
(Electives like the psychology/sociology ones I mentioned are offered to a whole year of students of the same faculty that doesn’t have that as their primary specialty, as they are not tailored to their specific major in any way as a result. That’s why you have choices – when there’s 300 people making choices and you’re going to have 10+ groups as a result either way, you might as well offer 3-4 different subjects… that the same teachers will teach anyway)
(And it’s year-specific, always. You don’t get to “take” the same class either in the second or third year because you don’t really “take” classes. You just attend them. Same as school)
Joyce – Elementary Education
Dorothy – Political Science
Walky – Telecommunications
Billie – Journalism
Amber, Danny, Rachel – Computer science
Ethan – Undeclared but was considering English
Joe – Undeclared
Sal – Undeclared, though we’ve seen her looking at musical stuff lately so maybe she’ll go into that
Mary – Art Education (Malaya was not an art major, it was an elective)
Mike, before he died, was in Social Work
Sarah, Raidah, Jacob – Pre-Law (as in, takes Classes to prep for law school, not an actual major)
Carla – Computer engineering
Roz – Gender Studies
Dina – Biology
Becky – Political Science, probably wants to double major or minor in Biology
Ruth – English
Booster – Psychology
Joe isn’t questioning her presence, he’s objecting to being paired with someone who has previously said they don’t believe in evolution in a Biology class. Unlike Joyce simply being in the same political class as Roz, Joe being lab partners with her could affect his grade.
Realizing that to some sects Judaism is considered a proto-Christianity that became frozen in time and obsolete 2000 years ago makes some attitudes and phrases like “Judeo-Christian” make a lot more sense.
Some sort of umbrella term is useful for distinguishing the Abrahamic religions from other unrelated ones is useful. One that excludes Islam (and some smaller related religions) is not.
Interestingly, back in the early 20th century in even more antisemitic times, Jewish leaders often pushed the term, since it emphasized the ties and connections and thus could lessen prejudice.
Words change, it used to have some uses for unity but not any more. “Judeo-christian values” when appealing to making a monument of the Ten Commandments, or explaining why one should forgive at the start of atonement instead of the end, or justifying bigotry against gay folks, is an Evangelical Christian perspective trying to disguise itself as multi-cultural to pass some filters. Or, more accurately, to give some people who agree an excuse to be okay with it.
In modern times I have never heard it in a context where just saying Christian wouldn’t suffice, and the Judeo portion is “it’s in the Old Testament and they interpret that exactly the same as we do right?” And half the time it’s not even that much of a nod, they just go straight into the Evangelical doctrine.
What blows my mind is that they all worship some incarnation of an Abrahamic diety, and yet there is /no/ judeo-christi-slamic values or commaraderie. (aside from despising atheists)
Judaism and Islam actually have more in common than either does with Christianity. Hell, Islam’s basically the only other religion that isn’t considered idolatry by Jewish standards, we just disagree on the number of prophets!
…not to say that that isn’t far outweighed by uh. certain recent historical and geopolitical factors. but still.
That’s an explanation which only works if you don’t comprehend the mind boggling diversity of natural life. Like just fitting two of every kind of living animal on a boat would be an impossible task. Extend that back to two of every kind of animal that has ever lived and it becomes exponentially more impossible
Honestly my big question is like. Bees. And other hive-based insects whose sexual reproduction is so profoundly Different from our own, but especially bees because they’re used for agriculture so like. How. Some YEC HAS to know enough about bees to have or need an explanation for this.
Not just the salinity, but the turbidity, all that silt and clay in the water. The fish would likely choke on the dirt accumulating on their gills. Suspect their would be severe water temperature changes as well.
I asked my Rabbi that once as a kid. Turns out there’s a parable for that.
The animals heard about the flood and wanted to beg God to protect them. The eagle, whose strength was in his ability to fly high, assumed God must be even higher and so prayed to the sun. The lion assumed God would be louder and prayed to the thunder (or was it the echo of his roar? Been something like 30 years). The fish, surrounded and dependent on water but not surpassed by it, assumed God was all around them regardless of their particular strengths. To honor this God chose a flood, thus saving all the fish.
To the question of insects, I was taught that the insects by and large all survived on floating mats of driftwood/debris/corpses for the entire year that the Flood lasted, and that very few if any of them were actually on the Ark.
Also, remember that the “two of every kind” stipulation only applies to the “unclean” animals! Of the “clean” ones, like sheep and cattle and such, there were fourteen (seven pairs) of each on the Ark!
The rain poured down for 40 days and 40 nights, but it took a lot longer for the actual floodwaters to recede after the rain so that Noah et al. could leave the Ark – a year and 17 days in full, if I recall correctly.
That, plus I’m pretty sure for a lot of animal species, trying to repopulate their species with only two individuals would result in some pretty bad inbreeding.
Joe: If it’s safe, sane, and consensual, then probably, but if you think you can actually identify safety, sanity, and consent where alien physiologies and psychologies and cultures are concerned then you are definitely thinking too highly of your expertise in those areas and why am I even taking the question seriously when it was just an attempt to deflect and/or rile up Joyce.
Except not really. The myth of Kirk as a womaniser does not stand up to watching the original materials. It is a brain bug that became canon cancer when introduced by the ascended fan JJ Abrams.
Kirk wasn’t an ascetic, either. He just wasn’t the womanising frat-boy truculent drunkard creep that the re-booted series replaced him with.
My mental picture of Kirk the womanizer dates from long before JJ Abrams. I watched TOS when it was new. He would get romantically involved in pretty much every female he encountered. They just didn’t make it obvious they where having sex because of 60s morality laws on tv.
Okay, this touches on one of my pet peeves: people who use “sentient” when they really mean “sapient”. “Sentient” just means “has senses”. All animals are sentient. “Sapient” is the one that means “capable of thoughts”.
Terry Pratchett’s “the Luggage” (made of sapient pearwood) has been useful in spreading the word about this. I don’t necessarily correct every instance of ‘sentient’ I come across, but thanks to the Luggage, I always *say* ‘sapient’.
Ray is thinking like I did… the prohibition — which appears no fewer than three times in the Torah — is that “one shall not seethe a kid in its mother’s milk.” Since chickens do not give milk, I think that this one would be OK.
People who keep strict kosher don’t mix any meat, including poultry, with dairy. There is a zero percent chance Joe follows the strictest version, but it wouldn’t be too surprising if he had relatives who do.
Well, there is great variation and disagreement among groups, but no, it is all meat. The Torah says “You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.” A very specific case, but somehow this got ridiculously expanded to no meat (even from non-mammals who by definition have no milk) mixed with any dairy product. That’s how the traditional kosher rules work.
The Torah says “You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.” A very specific case, but somehow this got ridiculously expanded…
Right? It’s even weirder to me when you consider that all of the dietary rules that come right before it are in the form of, “Don’t eat [X], it’s unclean”. Very straight-forward and are taken as is. Yet when they get to the kid/milk one suddenly it can’t mean exactly what it says?
…We didn’t keep meat and dairy separate when I was growing up. Then again, not a whole lot of things require literally boiling beef in milk. (Hamburger Helper…there’s probably something else?)
The explanation that I heard once was that this, unlike most of the rest, wasn’t just part of a Bronze Age food safety course – that “a kid boiled in its mother’s milk” was a cultural food of one of the other local tribes, and so the people who made the rules were quite specific and strict about “this is Their food, not Our food, so don’t eat it or we’ll kick you out of the club.”
Talmudic law involves a lot of building fences around fences to make sure that commandments aren’t accidentally broken. So a kid and its mother’s milk is interpreted as serving milk and meat together, aka life and death (the separation of which is the standard for kashrut all throughout the text; it’s also where the prohibition against mixing fabrics comes from). Birds don’t produce milk, but poultry and milk are included in the ban to put an extra layer of protective separation. (Fish are considered sufficiently different as to be considered parve.)
My personal take: Like all religious dietary codes, it isn’t about making sense, it is about “I am more pious than you” dick-size wars and making it difficult to socialize with outsiders. That it makes it hard to go out to dinner with your non-Jewish friends is a *feature* not a bug.
This take really rubs me the wrong way. In addition to being a gross representation of how Jews view Gentiles, it’s also blaming minority groups for having their own set of arbitrary dietary rules separate from the ruling majority’s arbitrary dietary rules that says, for instance, that pigs are okay to eat but not dogs.
Agreed on how offensive that was, but I do disagree that a society’s majority or minority food rules are arbitrary. That is often the throw away argument of people who are minimizing others food systems without bothering to look at what might have created them in the first place or what benefit certain parts of them have. People tend to abstain from changing diets without reason. Instead, they do so for perceived health reasons, availability, culture or moral beliefs. I guess how one prioritizes those is a bit arbitrary on an individual level, but it is still strongly governed by the environment you are raised in and knowledge youre exposed to.
Arbitrary was 4 yr old me liking brown sauce, but not gravey. They were the same thing, my grandparents just called it something different so I would eat it. Arbitrary is my friend wanting to eat a camel because he thinks they are collectively a jerk species. Those were random choices but not dietary rules. What is not arbitrary is obstaining from eating animals that contain higher risk of contagions or required higher nutritional inputs to farm (predators> omnivores> herbivores). It is not arbitrary to avoid eating animals that are perceived to have greater value in other roles. It isn’t arbitrary to decide to obstain from meat for environmental concerns as long as make sure your diet isn’t causing ones in other areas (like greater reliance on prepackaged offerings etc). It also isn’t arbitrary to avoiding certain foods you are allergic too/cost too much/are difficult to balance life style wise/come from cultural respect/you’ve tried 8x and know you dont like it, etc. Food is most often a choice based on knowledge, values, taste, preferences… very rarely does one pick a food system on a whim. There are definitely instances where one might commit to part of a food system based on erroneous beliefs, but that still doesn’t make it arbitrary.
“Arbitrary” in this case was intended to poke fun at the eurocentrism that comes from assuming that it’s the majority group’s dietary rules that are “normal” and that anything that deviates from that is weird, but I definitely could have been more clear in communicating that. Apologies.
It’s not the phrasing. The take itself is offensive.
Is the purpose of not celebrating Christmas or Easter to impede social mixing, despite being enormous, culture-blanketing, economy-shifting holidays? I’d like to assume you’d say no. To say otherwise implies that the norms of the majority are the only “correct” ones. It makes an unexamined and frankly privileged assumption that what you grew up with and are accustomed to is normal, even though you’ve been molded by dietary laws with no basis in anything rational.
The same applies to the food you eat. Pigs are as smart as (if not smarter than) dogs or cats, but only pigs out of those three are acceptable for consumption in western society. Crustaceans are food, but not insects. These rules are far from universal all over the world, and there’s nothing but the weight of tradition propping them up. Keeping kosher, or halal, or any other set of dietary norms is no different.
Also, saying that Jews (or anyone else, but I can only speak personally for myself as a non-believing Jew who keeps kosher) are trying to be holier-than-thou jerks while also handwaving, like…hundreds of years of Rabbinic debate that are readily available if you want to pick apart the reasoning behind kashrut, is just a really bad look, please try to avoid that look
That’s definitely a lie, although from his expression he’s at least thinking of it. But seriously, he totally took this class because Joyce is taking it. 100%.
Is Joyce just keeping up the act, or is she still holding onto some of these beliefs? I have trouble believing an atheist would keep the beliefs in creationism or Noah’s ark. How long until Joyce confides in Joe about the atheism? I’ll say “later today,” their time.
One possibility is that since she is not “out” as atheist, she might be simply expressing opinions that she would as a believing YEC. Note that while she may have confessed to Sarah, Sarah keeps her privacy and does not point out any contradictions.
The weirdest possibility is that she thinks that God is literally and actually dead; formerly alive and active, and having done everything in the bible, but now defunct. So she speaks as though all of YEC is correct except for the part about God being eternal and alive. Unlikely, perhaps, but people can believe all sorts of unlikely things.
Those early teachings sink in deep and are hard to root out. She may not have fully come to terms with her lack of belief meaning that all the creationist nonsense has to go and all the evolutionary stuff she was taught to debunk is actually right.
Especially since a lot of the debunking is based on pseudoscientific arguments (like the what if carbon decay changed? bit) which isn’t instantly invalidated by there not being a God.
Agreed. I think she’s more open to the idea now than she was before (I could see her having an equivalent to Becky’s ‘corn looked like THAT 10,000 years ago?!… Corn looked like that 10,000 years ago?!’ moment, or whatever the number was,) but she hasn’t yet done the active rooting out of pseudoscience we saw Becky do earlier. She’s barely willing to admit to herself – or to Sarah, who already knows and is keeping quiet – that she’s an atheist, she’s not ready to completely reframe her worldview in that lens.
I think she’s just scared to stop. Changing the way she acts and talks makes it real. Makes it external. Admitting it to Sarah; who won’t bring it up and make Joyce confront it, was extremely difficult for Joyce. Telling the rest of your friends? Admitting that the hyper religious backwards weirdo has lost her faith? Then everyone will have a reaction (and she may be fearing by ‘coming out’ as someone different she’ll alienate them and be alone) that she’ll have to continually deal with like a constant reminder of her loss of faith.
I’m not Joyce; my Protestant Christian background was not nearly so toxic or extreme. I came out of it with a personal faith I was proud of and happy with. I’m still struggling to admit I’ve lost it. That I don’t feel God’s presence anymore. Its very lonely and I feel very small and vulnerable.
Uuuuhhh… pretend there’s a wacky musical number here to make this end on a less depressing and personal note.
I think you nailed it in her thought process, yeah. I don’t think she’s thought out entirely ‘I don’t believe in original sin so the Eden thing can’t be accurate’ yet, as well, but that it’s an active avoidance of confronting that in part because admitting it even to herself would make it a real thing that’s not going away, and eventually she’d have to say something to Becky.
Hey there’s that Joe we all know and don’t appreciate because he’s skeevy and uncool.
High chance this is him sticking to his brand though and there is a legitimate reason he’s in this class he doesn’t want Joyce (or anybody but mostly Joyce) to know. Can’t have him, you know, CARE about something that wasn’t vagina and sex. He has an image to maintain or something.
Joe: bad use of Superman. How dare they give him more depth than just “ultimate powerful being”- it’s almost like they want him to continue on to sell more comics to give those same Jewish men more work!
Never mind that the guy overseeing the development was himself a Jewish man who is one of the greatest comic editors of all time…
Yeah, see, when I read Joe’s line I’m very much thinking, say, Man of Steel and similar modern Mediocre Superman Stories that play him up as a Christ analogue and also miss any interesting traits of his. You tend to see the two go hand in hand. (Not that there are no good Superman stories with him in a more Christ-analogue role – Death of Superman, for one – but for a certain brand of terrible writer, that’s the only way they can think of to make him a Big Good. And also they ignore that the journalist who is also a force of absolute goodness is probably going to have some Strong Opinions about injustices he can’t punch away, so he becomes Bland Saltine Christ Knockoff Superman and not Superman Who Scares Corrupt Senators Into Confessing Their Crimes.)
but wasn’t the Original Flavor Superman specifically made strong enough to punch the people (or threaten them with a good punching) who were responsible for those injustices, as well as bulletproof enough that they couldn’t just sic the cops, Pinkertons, etc etc on him? My recollection of those early comics leans very hard into Social Justice Power Fantasy, with a fair amount of not at all subtle physical coercion.
(if the observed rule of the world is that Might Makes Right, then your imaginary Big Good needs to be the mightiest.)
like, that Superman liked to do the thing we now associate with Batman, of dangling bad guys (corrupt industrialists) from high places until they confessed, promised to do better, and/or wet themselves.
meanwhile, the Batman of the era just f*cking shot people.
Yep. That ‘scare a corrupt senator’ thing was from Action Comics #1.
These tend to be the same shitty modern writers who pair him with Wonder Woman on the grounds that she’s the strongest heroine, he’s the strongest hero, ergo they should be an item and completely miss the point of both characters and Lois Lane. (Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex has SO MUCH to answer for.)
I mean lbr I’m thinking of the modern Boring Christ Analogue Supermans (who, like any good American Jesus analogue, originally had a very anti-wealth bent that is completely ignored,) but there’s also been a gradual neutering of Superman’s bite just from the rise of DC as a massive corporate entity as well.
I thought he was referring to Superman the intellectual property created by two Jewish guys who were paid a one-time pittance for the character and then left uncredited for decades.
8 Of clean beasts, and of beasts that are not clean, and of fowls, and of every thing that creepeth upon the earth,
9 There went in two and two unto Noah into the ark, the male and the female, as God had commanded Noah.
Back in Gen 7:2–3 God commanded Noah to take two pairs of every unclean kind of animal and seven pairs of every kind of bird and clean animal, but when it got around to Gen 7:8–9 He only actually loaded two and two of each kind.
Which is all very well and no contradiction until you reach the clause “as God commanded Noah”. Fortunately we can harmonise the apparent contradiction: that clause is telling us that God then commanded Noah to do that, over-riding His previous instructions.
Considering that the (IIRC) first thing Noah did after setting foot outside the Ark again was to kill and offer as burnt sacrifice from each of the “clean” animals brought into the Ark, I’m pretty sure the intent was that fourteen of each clean animal were brought in. Since, obviously, birds and domestic animals still existed afterward.
What to do when you have several versions of an Important Story and want to compose the True One? Obviously you take the best bits from each one.
( this is how we got lilith )
Joe continues
“Also, I’m thinking of like, designing my own life form. Like, it was either that or try to design a sentient robot flying car, but the Ruttens already have the robotics thing down pretty well and they’ll probably beat me to it. So instead I’m going to use genetic engineering to create…Ultra Bio? Ugh, I’ll have to think of a better name.”
Since Julia Gray’s beloved, DefinitelyNotJacob, has been known to appear as a Space Vampire, this conversation is nearer to Joyce’s interests than she would like to admit
Joe is seeking answers to the most important questions. Everyone seems to think (as far as I can tell from hentai) that other creatures would have the same genitals as humans, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. It would probably be okay to bang a cat-girl, but you probably wouldn’t want to be banged by a cat-boy, based on the characteristics of feline penises.
it does sometimes seem that the first question(s) that occur to most humans, all the way back to our early ancestors, was “can I eat it, get high off it, and/or fuck it?”
Hunter gatherers and fallen fermented berries, IIRC.
Our civilization literally exists because, some time later on, people settled down so they could grow grain to make into beer and get wasted on the regular.
You don’t have to depend on fermentation. Plenty of plants and fungi offer wild psychotropic effects when picked fresh. Hemp and peyote have been with us a long time. Failing that, you can always lick a toad.
The late Professor Jack Cohen, go-to guy for biology in science fiction, once commented that John Carter, Warlord of Mars, must have had a huge shock when he encountered Dejah Thoris’s eggshell producing equipment.
Sometimes I think about this myself and my conclusion is that, while lots of people fantasize about having a good time with more exotic variants of what’s in humans (as demonstrated by the diversity in sex toys), sometimes mixing non-humans with non-human genitalia is too much even when the character/creature in question is very much humanoid.
Not like there isn’t people that would fuck whatever, but sometimes they just want a funny looking person instead of the full package.
In the end it comes down to personal preference.
There’s a reason so many fictional space babes are described as or depicted by attractive women with head prosthetics and/or body paint.
(For one thing there aren’t any talent agencies with a roster of aspiring actor amorphous tentacle blobs here on Earth, and the commute from a planet that does have them would be brutal.)
I am reminded of a book I read once where all the different alien species all look mostly human because generations ago when humans set out to space, they basically fucked every alien species they came across until the entire galaxy was human/alien hybrids.
This, in turn, got referenced in an old fan joke about a bit of Early Installment Weirdness in the second TOS pilot: Gary Mitchell creates a tombstone for Kirk that gives his middle initial as “R”, not “T” (for Tiberius). The joke is that it stands for rishathra.
I mean… Joyce’s reasoning in the second panel actual exhibits some good critical thinking, that would lend itself well to science.
What if she starts to love evolution theory in particular? Evolution’s seemingly ontological and explanatory strength could be very attractive to Joyce right now. It even formalizes change and adaption, which she might take as a metaphor.
Maybe she’ll respond well to the prof’s “machine theory” of life, too. It would be fitting but ironic if Joyce starts to love the class, while Becky would start to feel uncomfortable with a lack of a watch engineer/godly inspiration.
Honestly, I think I’d prefer if Joyce became interested in physics. Biology is messy and a more universalist and philosophical system would be interesting to her. Billions of unchanging stars and cosmic systems. But then again, I kind of like her being the anti-Dina.
DoA Book 11: I Just Think It’s Important to Know, In the Event That I’m Stranded on an Alien Planet, If It’s Cool to Bang the Sentient-But-Nonhuman Cat Creatures There
Incidentally, while Joyce may not have been taught it, some YECs did (still do?) think that Satan planted fossils. Her statement about juvenile dinosaurs on the ark, though, is almost certainly from Ken Ham/Answers in Genesis (as linked to above), which probably dominates the beliefs of most YECs nowadays.
I am not sure if Ham came up with the idea himself, but I suspect that he latched on to it at least partially because lots of people think that dinosaurs are cool, and he could therefore make dinosaur models and animatronics attractions for his Creation “Museum” and Ark Park.
First we have to define “virgin”. As a long lost friend once commented after hearing “quiet, there are virgin ears here” They commented “I don’t know, not sure if I’ve done it that way YET. Does that mean I’m still a virgin?”
I want to tell Joe that when he finds himself on that alien planet to NOT yet Thundercat’s Hoooooooooooo. The ladies may not appreciate being called Ho’s.
Superman when he was created: Story of a child rocketed from his home to a new world where he grows up and becomes an important and valued member of society.
Superman when written by Zack Snyder and Bryan Singer: Son of an old bearded man from a paradise world who was rocketed to Earth so he could lead them by example. Also literally just stretches his arms out in the crucifix position for no reason.
Superman as written by J Michael Straczynski: If you illegal aliens from another world don’t use your secret gold reserves to boost the economy of this town you live in then I’m not going to let you stay.
hee hee see this wit and level of consideration for his theoretical sexy cat person partner is why I like Joe.
(And he’s 100% right about Protestants ruining everything by trying to dumb it down and make it concretely understandable instead of a topic of philosophy, thought, and debate. Even as a kid Protestant I liked the Jewish kids better. XD )
Anyway I wasn’t around when it happened so I wanna talk about the moment that changed Joe/Joyce for me from “they’d be cute together and have a great dynamic” to “please get married my heart can’t take it”, Joe and Jacob’s chat about her after the disastrous date she went on with Jacob.
Jacob’s obviously right to be furious with her, nothing she did was okay and Joe sympathizes, but then adds what are transparently his own feelings on Joyce: She started out a trash fire and is gradually deprogramming that. She’ll say something nutty one day because that’s who she is and then trip and stumble and fall flat on her face until she gets up and does it right, then another thing will happen and instead of giving up she’ll trip and stumble and fall flat on her face all over again until she gets that right too. There’s no state where Joyce will remain who she is, she’s going to keep becoming a better person until one day, as Joe puts it, she’s perfect, and Jacob will have wished he had been there for that.
And for someone like Joe who makes a point of being a guy who only does things “that don’t matter,” because then he won’t get hurt or hurt anyone else, that kind of speaks to the level of outright admiration Joe has for Joyce. Joe does not simply believe Joyce will outgrow some of her worst traits in being exposed to the real world, Joe believes so strongly in Joyce’s goodness and ability to change in the face of her own personal shortcomings that she will one day become the best possible Joyce she can be and he can’t figure out why anyone would want to miss out on that.
I already shipped it but you, my good sir? Have converted me into a True Believer. (Which considering the subject matter is HILARIOUS but yes oh my god please please they need to kiss ;AAAA;)
It’s generally a bad idea to do more than one or two in a day – we’ve had a couple commenters get issues posting comments if they play around too much at once with the caps.
It’s not so much comment content as something weird in the posting system, we think? Whoever it was who had to change their comment name can probably weigh in, but I don’t think it’s a simple moderation issue.
Right? And meanwhile there’s Joyce who’d be justified writing him off after first impressions, but somehow he’s become the person she feels comfortable telling about her struggles with going home after the first kidnapping. When she sees the Do List and he says ‘it doesn’t matter, it’s not hurting anyone, I can’t do better than this,’ she tells him he’s wrong and it does matter, but in a way that so clearly says ‘I know you can do better, too.’ Someday he’s going to get that he can be. Not immediately, but someday. And that day’s gonna be AMAZING.
Yep, the reveal that Joe was the mystery texter was a moment ripe for digging. The surface level one is “Joe isn’t so bad after all!” but then you get into the nitty gritty of how Joe views what he did: Joyce is someone he will *never* put effort into, broadly speaking, Being Joe over, so by talking to her he instantly dodged all his usual bullshit and precisely landed where he had to be for her. Then Joyce comes back to college and Joe acts like nothing happened not because he wants to hide it, but because he thinks he just did a normal thing that he doesn’t even realize contradicts the entire persona he’s crafted.
Joe’s realization that he hasn’t just been having no strings attached fun that hurts nobody, because he made clear to Joyce that Ryan wasn’t just some singular evil but an individual part of a grand culture that teaches young men to treat women like objects, that’s real. That’s Joe. He friggin’ started tearing up. He’s pretty obviously built who he is based off of his parents’ marriage and that’s deep seated stuff, but the realization that he hurt Joyce? Nope. Nuh uh. Time to put an end to one of his more firmly held core beliefs of how his life is supposed to work, because that shit isn’t going to fly if it comes at her expense.
I realized something writing this: how much of Old Joe have we seen since he said he reverted back to his horndog persona because people don’t change? Off the top of my head he’s proven to be a fairly devoted stepbrother to Amber trying to get her involved with his religion if only for his dad’s sake, and going out to ogle girls with Danny he seemed like he wanted for Danny to realize it was fine to notice hot guys too, or at the very least he wanted Danny to be included in some way. Joe said that people never change and then launches into a speech at Jacob in Joyce’s defense about how she’s *always* changing for the better and you’d have to be an idiot not to see it. That’s not how you act when you shrug your shoulders and decide that the way things were worked for the best.
I think he still hasn’t totally figured out that yes, he is not destined to be his father and is capable of having a longterm relationship without cheating, but he’s definitely been WAY less surface-level between Danny coming out to him (and Joe recognizing that sometimes they DO need to have those sappy Feelings Talks because he does genuinely value Danny in his life) and Joyce showing him he hurt her (and probably by extension other people on campus – I don’t think he cares much what random strangers think of him, but he does seem to care about not being actively HARMFUL.)
The thing about Joe is he never seems to think maybe his parents were just better off separated because his dad and mom were BOTH unhappy. That their fidelity was not the source of their problem but just a symptom.
OTOH, he did go out to ogle and comment on girls – loudly enough to be heard by other people around them. He did it with Danny and included guys in it for Danny’s sake, which is good for their friendship, but isn’t really a good sign for him treating women better.
After he fell off the wagon with Malaya (as he saw it) he went back to not trusting himself and I think to even more performatively playing his old role. Now I think it’s more about making sure that no women (particularly Joyce?) get close enough that he can really hurt them than trying to get laid without emotional connections.
Assuming the sentient-but-nonhuman cat creatures consent (And the implied ability to mutually understand each other in order TO consent)… Bang away, my friend.
OF COURSE it’s cool to bang the sentient cat-creatures (as long as you learn their language and obtain consent)!! Haven’t you watched ANY of the Star Treks??
I pity Joe when he learns that the odds of an alien world, with the odds of a immensely different environment and gravity field, would produce an ecosystem in which something even remotely comparable to a feline, let alone a humanoid feline entity, let alone a humanoid feline entity that reproduces in a way similar to a human being….let’s just say he’s gonna be disappointed.
I would like to take a moment to appreciate Joe for not pointing out that Joyce has glasses. I’m sure it’s coming up, but he might know how much she hates change and didn’t want to have that be the starting point. It’s still nice he’s not being all “OMG YOUR FACE! It’s all weird now, what are these?! *pokes at glasses*”
Joe, humans and any independently evolved alien life would be so genetically distant there’d be no risk of offspring so you’re fine in the procreation risk part. The way more complicated and interesting question would be how to balance issues of consent and cultural sensitivity around reproductive acts with an alien sapience.
(I’ve actually thought about it because I am massive dork)
Ugh, Joyce and Joe are both SO wrong. After the firmament, the form of water went from mist to rain and clouds. The dinosaurs couldn’t breathe the new humid atmosphere as easily and died out in a few generations. Only SOME of the bones are Satan’s tricks. Most of them are the bones of the semi-human giants born of the sinful unions angels formed with humans before God cast them out for their sin.
You’d think that! But the firmament was holding all that water back, which is why it only ever misted, not rained. After the firmament was broken, it released all the water that’s currently in the atmosphere.
It’s literal! In many strains of creationist theology, the “firmament” was a giant shell of water above the atmosphere, enveloping the entire planet. This is where at least a significant proportion of the water in the Great Flood cake from, according to them – the firmament “broke” at God’s command, and the water it contained rained down until it was depleted 40 days and 40 nights later.
On my phone right this second (hence the “cake” typo above) so I can’t link, but there’s even a DoA comic I recall where Becky talks about this with Dina.
You have no idea how relieved/annoyed I am that I remembered that detail entirely correctly; I was half sure someone would be like “What? No, the firmament made the atmosphere LESS humid.”
so, is Dumbing of Age set in a universe where Kent Hovind and AiG never became national punchlines or is Joyce somehow THAT ignorant of…well…everything?
FYI: I KNEW a guy like Joyce in my freshman year of college, by the time I was a sophomore I didn’t find anyone like him anymore.
Jocelyne!!!
EXTRA hooray! (76%, 2,507 Votes)
wait who's jocelyne i didn't read the first ten years of the strip (13%, 433 Votes)
Loading ...
why were dinosaur bones put on the ark tho
(inb4: I got really into editing a wiki bc I’m literally the only contributor other than the person who created the front page and sodded off)
Yo ana you had disappeared last night, what happened?
ALSO the comic is up like 10 minutes early
(Or my computer is like 10 minutes late)
DoA’s server time has been out of sync for a while.
Accordingly to this measurement it’s early by ~6 minutes. This is being posted at exactly 20:12
👆
Damn, you’re good.
Do you know what the Powerball numbers will be, or will you only know with the same couple minutes’ lead time?
I think the idea is that living dinosaurs were put on the ark by Noah. This is the Fred Flintstone idea of dinosaurs and humans living together at the same time. Then, at some point after the flood but before modern times, dinosaurs were hunted to extinction.
She’s joking.
I’m pretty sure that’s an actual belief, if no longer one she holds, on her part. Remember, she earnestly asserted her favorite dinosaur could ‘breathe fire’ using a similar mechanism to the bombardier beetle.
Not Joyce, Ana.
We know Joyce believed in the arc. This was about Ana’s joke about the phrasing Joyce used.
As someone who grew up believing the same thing that she describes, it’s an actual (possibly formerly-held) belief.
Yeah, that grav checks out.
Meh, I find it a fun idea of Noah’s ark and dinosaurs.
but why the bones, why not the live versions
Noah and his family got hungry, ate the dinosaurs and threw the bones over the side.
The bones spilled overboard when Noah put the rack of Brontosaurus ribs on the little window tray and the ark tipped over.
No, no, nothing ate meat until after the Flood! When there wasn’t a firmament of water overhead anymore to keep everyone strong and healthy while still maintaining a vegetarian diet, so now people and animals had to start eating meat!
I thought their excuse was that dinosaurs were NOT on the ark, and that’s why they are extinct now.
Yes, this is what I was taught, that God decided dinosaurs prolly didnt really fit in any more and so had Noah leave them off the ark, hence the mass extinction. Always seems odd that the other mass annihilation of animals doesnt seem to be reflected in the fossil record. But maybe they all turned to oil in another one of Gods mysterious plots where he set us up to bring about the end times by finding that oil and burning it all, causing global warming.
No wait, what? WHERES MY JENNIFER?? DAMN YOU WILLIS!
MWAHAHAHAHAA! I was just thinking yesterday that we haven’t had a good “Damn you Willis!” on here in a while. I needed that.
Except that oil is not formed from dinosaurs, it is formed by algae settling to the bottom of oceans over millions of years, then getting buried and compressed under tremendous heat and pressure.
That’s just what teh evilutionists want you to think!
There’s actually a Chick Tract claiming that dinosaurs were on the ark, but the Earth’s climate changed after the flood making it less suitable to them, so they died out (and were finally hunted into extinction by people.)
The Bible (literary true) says that God or Noah put two, four, or fourteen specimens of every kind of animal aboard the ark. Now, obviously it doesn’t mean to include aquatic animals, but it says every kind.
I have always wondered which of the humans on the ark had to host all the parasitic critters and various disease carrying viruses and bacteria.
The one that always won on poker night.
[at risk of DontExplainTheJoke.jpg I was pointing out the dangling modifier of “I’ve never thought Satan put dinosaur bones in the ground to trick us.” … “They, the dinosaur bones, were put on the ark and later hunted to extinction.”]
1) What IS Joe’s major, anyway?
2) There was a lot of how-dare-you when Roz questioned Joyce’s presence in a class. I’m wondering how this is different.
In the other universe, he was basically undeclared until situations got him into robotics.
I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the cast id undeclared. What is Joyce even majoring in? Last I remember she wanted to be a teacher but I think Joyce’s career motivations have long since evolved beyond that. I know Sarah is studying law, I think Amber and Danny are in computer science courses? Jennifer is journalism. I can’t really think of anyone else.
Ruth is in english, Walky is in telecommunications, Booster is in psych
I think Becky’s also in on a political science major or whatever the deal is with Robin’s sponsoring even though she’s just using it to game the system and take science classes. That’s probably also what Dorothy’s majoring in. Carla’s probably in engineering. Malaya and possibly Mary are in art. Has Sal ever stated anything? She’s probably undeclared too. It’s pretty interesting trying to imagine what some of the cast might be into for a career.
I don’t think Joyce has given any indications of switching careers. Heck, a first year Biology course like this is perfect for ‘yeah I can teach a whole range of subjects’ for primary educators.
Also, Raidah and Jacob are in law. Mary is in art, not sure about Malaya. Dorothy is more likely than not political science.
There isn’t actually a pre-law major. They never specifically said what their majors are.
Joyce didn’t want to be a teacher, she became an education major so she could homeschool her future children better. She was actually going for her MRS, although her lifeplans are probably not quite the same now, although she may not realize it yet.
Yeah, I suspect she recognizes it on SOME level after last semester – it’s clear she’s never going back to that church, and even if she hasn’t fully come to terms with it yet, she knows she doesn’t really believe in God anymore.
But I don’t think she’s let herself think beyond that brief ‘fighter pilot’ idea (and honestly I’m not sure how much serious thought went into that beyond ‘flying planes and being cool’) what she actually DOES want to do. I’d bet she does change her major eventually, though. No clue what yet.
Future pornlord.
Unfortunately, I don’t think IU offers it as a major.
Seriously unfortunate because I’d love to see her and Roz in a class together again and Roz going ‘… wait, seriously? Woooow.’
To be slightly more serious, I’m sure you can angle a creative writing course somewhere, maybe English Lit, and do a lot of focus on comparing, I dunno, displays of eroticism in media between medieval writing to modern day things like Fifty Shades or something.
I mean I was a humanities major who got an undergrad thesis greenlit about our perception of Muppets as living, friendly beings who are also puppets and the uncanny valley so, I can see it. Try hard enough and you can justify A LOt in an academic paper.
Needs to be in one of those “Build your own major” deals like how Isaac Bonewits got a degree in “Magic” from UC Berkeley.
A friend of mine actually did her PhD in that. Well, ‘Comparing Occurrences of ‘Deviant’ Sexuality in Something Century Literature from France and England.’ (Can’t remember what period she focused on! But apparently there was a lot more bestiality than she’d expected, which she found very exciting.)
This is actually a reply to Bubbletea… you peaked my curiosity, and don’t know if this is what you were referring to, but I found “Transgressing the Boundaries of Holiness: Sexual Deviance in the Early Medieval Penitential Handbooks of Ireland, England and France 500-1000.” by C. A. McCann… fascinating reading. The author was able to figure out the (many) sexual deviancies of the early Middle Ages by studying the penitential handbooks. We know what they did, because we know what they chastised themselves for doing.
@chris (the other one) the word you want is piqued, not peaked.
@Roborat (the original one), you are most likely correct, since that is the usual usage, however Chris may actually have meant that their curiosity was elevated to a maximum degree, rather than their curiosity was provoked.
To be honest though, in a fit of pique, I peeked at the particulars of piqued and peaked to be sure I didn’t place my proboscis problematically and pique peoples proclivity to impart a passage on piqued to we pupils.
@Demoted Oblivious, that was brilliant, I am still softly chortling to myself.
Since Sal is minoring in AWESOME, maybe Joyce could major in it.
Pretty sure Sal already Mastered that.
She considered it during dinner with Jacob and his brother. She declared then that she DID want to teach.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-10/01-birthday-pursuit/goals/
Well there’s the evidence! My question is if that still holds up now with Joyce’s change in outlook after what happened? She’s being pushed farther away from the person she was even during that date so her end career if we ever see it could still be dramatically different from what she planned. Although i can easily imagine her teaching and having a side gig as the famous author of the Julia Grey chronicles. It will be made into a movie franchise or tv series, probably on the CW.
Aaah, right, thanks! I’m with Sirksome that I’m still not certain she does – given her response to Walky’s ‘you need good vision to be a fighter pilot’ she still seems to have that fantasy as a HER fantasy, not just Julia, and there was a LOT going on in the Brother Visit that could have been influencing what she said and was thinking there* (also given Joyce’s sensory issues, elementary school kids would probably be hell on her,) but I’m glad she actually has started questioning that one at least a little bit.
* Also given what we saw in the glasses arc that she will, in fact, deny that she’s changing even in a way she should have expected in the face of undeniable evidence. Her expression in that last panel isn’t exactly relieved.
thanks, I thought it was something like that…the fundy way of educating women- let them learn until they find a man then they have to drop out so he can support them
Wasn’t Joyce in education(learning to teach before she got her Mrs. Degree)?
Is being undeclared even a thing anymore? When I was at college (a state school mumble decades ago), I was officially undeclared for almost 2 years, then changed my major 3 times before I graduated. (Still got out in 4 years, but with way more than the needed credits to graduate.)
When my kids were in college (different state schools, but the same state, 10+ years ago), it appeared you were expected to declare a major when you started, and while changing was possible, it seemingly was discouraged. The requirements for graduating in most majors didn’t allow much delay in starting major-specific classes, and if you passed the number of credits required for graduating by more than (depending on the year – it’s varied) 10-20% (which becomes likely to make up the needed classes if you change majors more than a short while after you started), they charge a per credit hour “surcharge”, which is currently 100%. (That is, they charge twice as much tuition – but not fees, which are roughly the same level as tuition – for each credit than if you don’t exceed the limit.). This is intended to encourage “efficiency”, so students don’t take too long to graduate.
Maybe some states aren’t as asinine as mine?
Yeah, I didn’t declare a major until sophomore year and I would have enrolled… fuck, a decade ago in September. Depends on the school, I think. (I also declared a minor going in that I ended up not finishing without any real issue. Such is life.)
In the late 70s I just took courses until I got tired and looked to see what I could build out of the combination. (BS in Physics/Math)
Your advisor should be shot though.
“oh no no no can’t have people learning TOO much now.”
-literally every authority figure, ever
A little googling tells me that undergrads at Indiana U have to meet certain requirments before they declare a major, often at the end of freshman year.
I transfered between one university and another, and at the first I didn’t have to declare a major until I had completed 2nd year (I was in Faculty of Arts) while the second required incoming students to apply for a particular major. I changed mine before I even set foot on campus.
Comıng from a non-US education system, even the idea that you can be “undeclared” seems absurd to me.
You are supposed to pick between math&science / math&literature / social studies at the beginning of 9th grade here. And then you better know what major you want to study by the time you graduate highschool, as you have to put it on the form before you enter a university entrance exam.
From the first day of university you are bombarded with classes in your chosen major, and 4 years is barely enough time to fit them all. So just picking random “human evolution” and “gender studies” classes for the first two semesters and then deciding to study robotics in the second year… I just can’t even comprehend how you’d fit all those courses into your schedule.
What happens if you study for longer than the four years?
Here in Germany, it depends on university, but you can basically study as long as you want at some universities, unless you fail too many exams of your chosen major. If you do, that bars you from studying any major where that course is mandatory (so, if, say, you fail “intro to statistics for STEM students” with biology as your major, and you want to study chemistry after, you are SOL.)
The downside is of course, that at some point you fall out of the financial perks of being a student (like cheaper insurance) and the costs start catching up to you. And it looks bad on your resume.
Yeah it changes from uni to uni, but generally people can do double majors, and finish it in 5 years. In some unis you have to have really high grades before you are allowed to double major. And in some cases you lose your scholarship if you can’t finish the uni in 4 years. In some cases you lose it if your GPA falls below 3.5. And in some cases you don’t lose it no matter what you do. (Heck I had a friend who took like 10 years to finish and he still had his scholarship).
So once you are in your chosen course, it’s largely up to the university and your scholarship to decide how much choice you have.
From a sounds-like-it’s-different non-US education system, here you straight up enter an educational program. You don’t “pick” classes other than like, a couple of elective choices (do you take cognitive psychology, psychology or sociology as supplement to your software engineering studies? type of thing) throughout all four years of your education. You are enrolled into a course of people with your chosen specialty (Computer Science, Software Engineering, etc – and yes, these are different as they are two different educational programs), have lectures with your whole course (and some lectures even with several different courses of your year in big enough lecture halls), then the course is also subdivided into groups which all have the same program but have workshops / practical classes / lab classes at different times so a teacher doesn’t have to wrangle 90+ people all trying to speak English or something, and can just handle 10-20 at the same time. You don’t pick your group, you’re assigned to it. (Though I imagine if you want to switch for some reason there’s no reason why you couldn’t, it just has to go through official paperwork and stuff)
(Electives like the psychology/sociology ones I mentioned are offered to a whole year of students of the same faculty that doesn’t have that as their primary specialty, as they are not tailored to their specific major in any way as a result. That’s why you have choices – when there’s 300 people making choices and you’re going to have 10+ groups as a result either way, you might as well offer 3-4 different subjects… that the same teachers will teach anyway)
(And it’s year-specific, always. You don’t get to “take” the same class either in the second or third year because you don’t really “take” classes. You just attend them. Same as school)
She wants to be a elementary school teacher but she was originally all about her Mrs.
Joyce – Elementary Education
Dorothy – Political Science
Walky – Telecommunications
Billie – Journalism
Amber, Danny, Rachel – Computer science
Ethan – Undeclared but was considering English
Joe – Undeclared
Sal – Undeclared, though we’ve seen her looking at musical stuff lately so maybe she’ll go into that
Mary – Art Education (Malaya was not an art major, it was an elective)
Mike, before he died, was in Social Work
Sarah, Raidah, Jacob – Pre-Law (as in, takes Classes to prep for law school, not an actual major)
Carla – Computer engineering
Roz – Gender Studies
Dina – Biology
Becky – Political Science, probably wants to double major or minor in Biology
Ruth – English
Booster – Psychology
We dunno about Lucy or Malaya.
Joe is currently undeclared
Joe is just responding to Joyce being rude about being partnered with him. Plus, Joe is sort of a friend.
People don’t care if its someone they don’t like that much. Sad state of affairs but rude behavior isn’t judged universally.
Joe isn’t questioning her presence, he’s objecting to being paired with someone who has previously said they don’t believe in evolution in a Biology class. Unlike Joyce simply being in the same political class as Roz, Joe being lab partners with her could affect his grade.
Plus Roz was being insufferably elitist about it. “This is a special class that plebes like you shouldn’t have been able to get in.”
Pretty sure the comment was about what JOYCE says in the last panel.
That is why *I* took BIO courses…
I laughed at Joe.
Twice.
This is a damn record.
joe speaking what every jew is thinking every year around Easter
Seconded. And having to put up with knowing that most Gentiles think The Ten Commandments is how Passover happened.
On the other hand, the Irish probably prefer the modern version of St. Patrick’s Day.
I think the Goddess Ostara might want some words with you.
… is what every Pagan is thinking.
The Last Supper was a seder, dude. Ex-Pagan Christians took our holiday and turned it into your holiday.
And to the pagans, I say feh: https://historyforatheists.com/2017/04/easter-ishtar-eostre-and-eggs/
Bah, it’s all just universal constants about the calender and position of the sun.
NO ONE GETS THE HOLIDAYS.
Hey, remember that year the Sun didn’t come back?
( rough times tell ya )
Was that 2020?
It was 1816, so no, I don’t remember it personally (I’m old, but not that old.
However, I have read that it was indeed . . . rough.
Realizing that to some sects Judaism is considered a proto-Christianity that became frozen in time and obsolete 2000 years ago makes some attitudes and phrases like “Judeo-Christian” make a lot more sense.
So, like someone still running the Windows 95 OS?
Some sort of umbrella term is useful for distinguishing the Abrahamic religions from other unrelated ones is useful. One that excludes Islam (and some smaller related religions) is not.
Interestingly, back in the early 20th century in even more antisemitic times, Jewish leaders often pushed the term, since it emphasized the ties and connections and thus could lessen prejudice.
Words change, it used to have some uses for unity but not any more. “Judeo-christian values” when appealing to making a monument of the Ten Commandments, or explaining why one should forgive at the start of atonement instead of the end, or justifying bigotry against gay folks, is an Evangelical Christian perspective trying to disguise itself as multi-cultural to pass some filters. Or, more accurately, to give some people who agree an excuse to be okay with it.
In modern times I have never heard it in a context where just saying Christian wouldn’t suffice, and the Judeo portion is “it’s in the Old Testament and they interpret that exactly the same as we do right?” And half the time it’s not even that much of a nod, they just go straight into the Evangelical doctrine.
Pretty much. The only other context I’ve seen it in is the sort of vague “The West” and explicitly opposed to Islam.
What blows my mind is that they all worship some incarnation of an Abrahamic diety, and yet there is /no/ judeo-christi-slamic values or commaraderie. (aside from despising atheists)
Judaism and Islam actually have more in common than either does with Christianity. Hell, Islam’s basically the only other religion that isn’t considered idolatry by Jewish standards, we just disagree on the number of prophets!
…not to say that that isn’t far outweighed by uh. certain recent historical and geopolitical factors. but still.
Joe = Jewish hipster. In2 God B4 fame ruined hir.
I mean, there had to be an Ark, or else how did the Autobots get to earth 4 million years ago.
Sentient=consentient
Especially if they have sharp claws.
While you’re not *wrong*, the ability to fight back is probably not a good base-line for determining if you’ll seek consent.
I like consentient though. That tickles the word neurons a-plenty.
No need to leave the planet Joe. We may very well have those in 30 years right here on Earth.
Truth! You don’t need expensive equipment to do genetic engineering. There are hobbyists tampering with God’s will in their basements.
You mis-spelt “have had those for 30 years”. Joe apparently hasn’t gone to a gaming/comic convention.
It’s only cool to bang the cat creatures if their sun’s radiation give you and thus your offspring super powers! That’s the rule!
“man of steel, woman of tissue paper”. less cool than it sounds.
Don’t forget the inverse, death by snu-snu.
Depends what kind of sentient cat creatures. Ronso? Miqo’te? Those dancing tigers from Zootopia?
Khajiit has “wares” if you have coin.
Ha! +1
Ctarl-Ctarl
I don’t think any of us, even Joe, are man enough to handle Aisha.
Agreed.
If Joe can survive banging a kzin, more power to him!
Damn, that’s somewhat of an obscure reference. Maybe being banged would cheer some of those grumpy telepaths up.
I thought Kzin females were much different from the males.
On the ringworld, not so much. Speaker-to-Animals got kind of dinged up assuming that they were.
Pretty sure Miqo’te were created specifically for people who would want to get it on with them.
I mean, I’m convinced the same reasoning is why all dragons in fantasy are shapeshifters with human forms.
Anime-style catgirls perhaps?
Space Pirate Amazon Ninja Catgirls!
Very nice.
Joe probably envisioned a planet of Cheetara clones, and himself as James T. Kirk.
I’d rather see him with a Hrothgar.
Yes I know they’re only males at this point.
I would like to see him try to take on a female Rigellian. They are fond of humans, so would likely be willing. The question is, would he survive.
-see if anyone gets that reference
A nekopara dystopia
What about the Hani? I bet that Tully was gonna try sinner or later….
Yeah, there was definitely something going on there.
Jellicle Cats. Of either the horrifying CGI or far less horrifying stage performer variety.
That’s an explanation which only works if you don’t comprehend the mind boggling diversity of natural life. Like just fitting two of every kind of living animal on a boat would be an impossible task. Extend that back to two of every kind of animal that has ever lived and it becomes exponentially more impossible
https://answersingenesis.org/creation-science/baraminology/what-are-kinds-in-genesis/
Here’s the more detailed account.
It’s funny that your picture is Dina, lol
Really, what gets me is that Dina would never post a link to Answers in Genesis, more than the appropriateness of Dina posting a link in general.
And she definitely wouldn’t be smiling about it.
Honestly my big question is like. Bees. And other hive-based insects whose sexual reproduction is so profoundly Different from our own, but especially bees because they’re used for agriculture so like. How. Some YEC HAS to know enough about bees to have or need an explanation for this.
* Or other Biblical literalist but like. The two tend to go hand in hand.
My question is why nobody ever considered that people only seem to consider aquatic based animals.
Where do they keep the fish? Sharks? Giant squid?
Presumably the fish were okay during the flooding? I suppose?
Except the whole freshwater vs saltwater thingand yeah this makes no sense again.
I assume they just stay in the water and somehow aren’t killed but the salinity changes.
Not just the salinity, but the turbidity, all that silt and clay in the water. The fish would likely choke on the dirt accumulating on their gills. Suspect their would be severe water temperature changes as well.
I asked my Rabbi that once as a kid. Turns out there’s a parable for that.
The animals heard about the flood and wanted to beg God to protect them. The eagle, whose strength was in his ability to fly high, assumed God must be even higher and so prayed to the sun. The lion assumed God would be louder and prayed to the thunder (or was it the echo of his roar? Been something like 30 years). The fish, surrounded and dependent on water but not surpassed by it, assumed God was all around them regardless of their particular strengths. To honor this God chose a flood, thus saving all the fish.
To the question of insects, I was taught that the insects by and large all survived on floating mats of driftwood/debris/corpses for the entire year that the Flood lasted, and that very few if any of them were actually on the Ark.
Also, remember that the “two of every kind” stipulation only applies to the “unclean” animals! Of the “clean” ones, like sheep and cattle and such, there were fourteen (seven pairs) of each on the Ark!
Thank you for the explanation. It doesn’t make much sense to me, but it is an explanation.
I thought the flood was 40 days and 40 nights?
The rain poured down for 40 days and 40 nights, but it took a lot longer for the actual floodwaters to recede after the rain so that Noah et al. could leave the Ark – a year and 17 days in full, if I recall correctly.
Aaah, thanks!
That, plus I’m pretty sure for a lot of animal species, trying to repopulate their species with only two individuals would result in some pretty bad inbreeding.
Any god who can create and destroy a couple of entire oceans-full of water can fix up the inbreeding later.
And that is not even considering the genetic bottleneck that would result in such a restrictive gene pool for the species.
Is Joe a secret Sholan Alliance series fan?
Is Willis a secret Sholan Alliance series fan?
Oh, Joe. You started off fun and then gave the most you-ish answer to that last question.
I laughed at the third panel though.
And ooh! Dina! Excellent gravitar for now.
Joe’s a furry. Canon.
/s
Joe is a furry confirmed
*plays “Year of the Cat” on the hacked Muzak*
I was expecting Bowie’s “Cat People”, but yours is also a great song.
Joe: If it’s safe, sane, and consensual, then probably, but if you think you can actually identify safety, sanity, and consent where alien physiologies and psychologies and cultures are concerned then you are definitely thinking too highly of your expertise in those areas and why am I even taking the question seriously when it was just an attempt to deflect and/or rile up Joyce.
Just remember you can’t do it if they are on catnip.
Why not, his role model Captain Kirk managed to bang anything female he ran across.
Except not really. The myth of Kirk as a womaniser does not stand up to watching the original materials. It is a brain bug that became canon cancer when introduced by the ascended fan JJ Abrams.
Kirk wasn’t an ascetic, either. He just wasn’t the womanising frat-boy truculent drunkard creep that the re-booted series replaced him with.
My mental picture of Kirk the womanizer dates from long before JJ Abrams. I watched TOS when it was new. He would get romantically involved in pretty much every female he encountered. They just didn’t make it obvious they where having sex because of 60s morality laws on tv.
Okay, this touches on one of my pet peeves: people who use “sentient” when they really mean “sapient”. “Sentient” just means “has senses”. All animals are sentient. “Sapient” is the one that means “capable of thoughts”.
Or “sophont.”
Same. Hell arguments could be made that some plants are sentient.
… since when are sea sponges sentient?
Clearly you haven’t watched my favorite documentary, Spongebob Squarepants.
It was created by an expert marine biologist, so obviously everything it says is true.
+1
Terry Pratchett’s “the Luggage” (made of sapient pearwood) has been useful in spreading the word about this. I don’t necessarily correct every instance of ‘sentient’ I come across, but thanks to the Luggage, I always *say* ‘sapient’.
(Oops, Joe again.)
If I’m around the Luggage I always say “Sir.”
I’d rather ask Joe if it’s OK for Jews to eat chicken wings with ranch dressing as a dipping sauce.
No. Mixing meat and dairy.
The amount of artificial ranch options that are dairy free would refute this answer.
You can only eat those at home, lest another Jew see you, assume that there is dairy in your dipping sauce, and be lead to sin.
Not Jewish, but I think it is just beef with dairy. I don’t know if there is anything against chicken with eggs, but that could make sense.
Mammals and dairy is a no-no; birds would probably be okay?
Ray is thinking like I did… the prohibition — which appears no fewer than three times in the Torah — is that “one shall not seethe a kid in its mother’s milk.” Since chickens do not give milk, I think that this one would be OK.
People who keep strict kosher don’t mix any meat, including poultry, with dairy. There is a zero percent chance Joe follows the strictest version, but it wouldn’t be too surprising if he had relatives who do.
Well, there is great variation and disagreement among groups, but no, it is all meat. The Torah says “You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.” A very specific case, but somehow this got ridiculously expanded to no meat (even from non-mammals who by definition have no milk) mixed with any dairy product. That’s how the traditional kosher rules work.
The Torah says “You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.” A very specific case, but somehow this got ridiculously expanded…
Right? It’s even weirder to me when you consider that all of the dietary rules that come right before it are in the form of, “Don’t eat [X], it’s unclean”. Very straight-forward and are taken as is. Yet when they get to the kid/milk one suddenly it can’t mean exactly what it says?
…We didn’t keep meat and dairy separate when I was growing up. Then again, not a whole lot of things require literally boiling beef in milk. (Hamburger Helper…there’s probably something else?)
The explanation that I heard once was that this, unlike most of the rest, wasn’t just part of a Bronze Age food safety course – that “a kid boiled in its mother’s milk” was a cultural food of one of the other local tribes, and so the people who made the rules were quite specific and strict about “this is Their food, not Our food, so don’t eat it or we’ll kick you out of the club.”
And on the other end, we have the Catholics, who took “no meat on Fridays during Lent” and decided that fish wasn’t meat, so it was fine.
Neither were barnacle geese.
Nor beavers. Eurasian beavers were hunted to near-extinction.
Capybaras and alligators aren’t meat either.
I remember when it was no meat on Fridays at all, nor on any day during Lent.
Talmudic law involves a lot of building fences around fences to make sure that commandments aren’t accidentally broken. So a kid and its mother’s milk is interpreted as serving milk and meat together, aka life and death (the separation of which is the standard for kashrut all throughout the text; it’s also where the prohibition against mixing fabrics comes from). Birds don’t produce milk, but poultry and milk are included in the ban to put an extra layer of protective separation. (Fish are considered sufficiently different as to be considered parve.)
My personal take: Like all religious dietary codes, it isn’t about making sense, it is about “I am more pious than you” dick-size wars and making it difficult to socialize with outsiders. That it makes it hard to go out to dinner with your non-Jewish friends is a *feature* not a bug.
This take really rubs me the wrong way. In addition to being a gross representation of how Jews view Gentiles, it’s also blaming minority groups for having their own set of arbitrary dietary rules separate from the ruling majority’s arbitrary dietary rules that says, for instance, that pigs are okay to eat but not dogs.
Agreed on how offensive that was, but I do disagree that a society’s majority or minority food rules are arbitrary. That is often the throw away argument of people who are minimizing others food systems without bothering to look at what might have created them in the first place or what benefit certain parts of them have. People tend to abstain from changing diets without reason. Instead, they do so for perceived health reasons, availability, culture or moral beliefs. I guess how one prioritizes those is a bit arbitrary on an individual level, but it is still strongly governed by the environment you are raised in and knowledge youre exposed to.
Arbitrary was 4 yr old me liking brown sauce, but not gravey. They were the same thing, my grandparents just called it something different so I would eat it. Arbitrary is my friend wanting to eat a camel because he thinks they are collectively a jerk species. Those were random choices but not dietary rules. What is not arbitrary is obstaining from eating animals that contain higher risk of contagions or required higher nutritional inputs to farm (predators> omnivores> herbivores). It is not arbitrary to avoid eating animals that are perceived to have greater value in other roles. It isn’t arbitrary to decide to obstain from meat for environmental concerns as long as make sure your diet isn’t causing ones in other areas (like greater reliance on prepackaged offerings etc). It also isn’t arbitrary to avoiding certain foods you are allergic too/cost too much/are difficult to balance life style wise/come from cultural respect/you’ve tried 8x and know you dont like it, etc. Food is most often a choice based on knowledge, values, taste, preferences… very rarely does one pick a food system on a whim. There are definitely instances where one might commit to part of a food system based on erroneous beliefs, but that still doesn’t make it arbitrary.
“Arbitrary” in this case was intended to poke fun at the eurocentrism that comes from assuming that it’s the majority group’s dietary rules that are “normal” and that anything that deviates from that is weird, but I definitely could have been more clear in communicating that. Apologies.
The word you want there is abstain, not obstain.
So how would you phrase the effect?
If I am saying it wrong, what is the right way to express the idea that dietary laws impede social mixing?
It’s not the phrasing. The take itself is offensive.
Is the purpose of not celebrating Christmas or Easter to impede social mixing, despite being enormous, culture-blanketing, economy-shifting holidays? I’d like to assume you’d say no. To say otherwise implies that the norms of the majority are the only “correct” ones. It makes an unexamined and frankly privileged assumption that what you grew up with and are accustomed to is normal, even though you’ve been molded by dietary laws with no basis in anything rational.
The same applies to the food you eat. Pigs are as smart as (if not smarter than) dogs or cats, but only pigs out of those three are acceptable for consumption in western society. Crustaceans are food, but not insects. These rules are far from universal all over the world, and there’s nothing but the weight of tradition propping them up. Keeping kosher, or halal, or any other set of dietary norms is no different.
Also, saying that Jews (or anyone else, but I can only speak personally for myself as a non-believing Jew who keeps kosher) are trying to be holier-than-thou jerks while also handwaving, like…hundreds of years of Rabbinic debate that are readily available if you want to pick apart the reasoning behind kashrut, is just a really bad look, please try to avoid that look
Meh I still ship them.
As you should
Is it just me, or is Joe biting his lower lip as a daydream reaction?
Also, I’m sure he would kiss a girl from Venus. For science.
Given the atmospheric conditions I doubt any sort of native venusian girls are kissable.
Not more than once.
Maybe if they’re flying creatures that live way up in the clouds and never touch the surface.
Men are spindly honking motile plants from Mars, women are acid-resistant floating gas-bags from Venus?
He’s so brave.
He’ll be her love slave.
FOREVER.
They’re gonna have the weirdest kids.
Or they’ll be super normal and well-adjusted just due to being a median between Joyce and Joe’s crazy.
Well, there’s the Warners…
I’m still kinda curious how Walky got outta that hug while having major morning boner.
And the Warner sister Dot?
That’s definitely a lie, although from his expression he’s at least thinking of it. But seriously, he totally took this class because Joyce is taking it. 100%.
Oh poop wrong comic
Oh poop right comic actually I can’t read
Joe’s mission statement is “To boldly come where no man has come before!”…
Kirk would approve :-p
Is Joyce just keeping up the act, or is she still holding onto some of these beliefs? I have trouble believing an atheist would keep the beliefs in creationism or Noah’s ark. How long until Joyce confides in Joe about the atheism? I’ll say “later today,” their time.
She can hold multiple thoughts in her head, is what I’m going with.
We could run her through an ore-damaged transporter and get a bunch of different Joyces…
Something like that sort-of happened in another universe. The results were Joe-approved, but complicated.
That’s the same thing I was wondering about… We’ll see, I guess
Dammit, I wanted to play grav roulette for once, but it didn’t work… Shouldn’t changing the email address capitalization be enough?
Maybe it doesn’t work when you have a custom Gravatar set.
Yeah, if you already have a custom grav set you need to disable it first in order to play grav roulette.
Joyce may be engaging in double-think here.
One possibility is that since she is not “out” as atheist, she might be simply expressing opinions that she would as a believing YEC. Note that while she may have confessed to Sarah, Sarah keeps her privacy and does not point out any contradictions.
The weirdest possibility is that she thinks that God is literally and actually dead; formerly alive and active, and having done everything in the bible, but now defunct. So she speaks as though all of YEC is correct except for the part about God being eternal and alive. Unlikely, perhaps, but people can believe all sorts of unlikely things.
Those early teachings sink in deep and are hard to root out. She may not have fully come to terms with her lack of belief meaning that all the creationist nonsense has to go and all the evolutionary stuff she was taught to debunk is actually right.
Especially since a lot of the debunking is based on pseudoscientific arguments (like the what if carbon decay changed? bit) which isn’t instantly invalidated by there not being a God.
Agreed. I think she’s more open to the idea now than she was before (I could see her having an equivalent to Becky’s ‘corn looked like THAT 10,000 years ago?!… Corn looked like that 10,000 years ago?!’ moment, or whatever the number was,) but she hasn’t yet done the active rooting out of pseudoscience we saw Becky do earlier. She’s barely willing to admit to herself – or to Sarah, who already knows and is keeping quiet – that she’s an atheist, she’s not ready to completely reframe her worldview in that lens.
I think it’s not that Joyce believes. It’s that she DOESN’T CARE.
Which is even worse from Dina’s perspective at this point.
I think she’s just scared to stop. Changing the way she acts and talks makes it real. Makes it external. Admitting it to Sarah; who won’t bring it up and make Joyce confront it, was extremely difficult for Joyce. Telling the rest of your friends? Admitting that the hyper religious backwards weirdo has lost her faith? Then everyone will have a reaction (and she may be fearing by ‘coming out’ as someone different she’ll alienate them and be alone) that she’ll have to continually deal with like a constant reminder of her loss of faith.
I’m not Joyce; my Protestant Christian background was not nearly so toxic or extreme. I came out of it with a personal faith I was proud of and happy with. I’m still struggling to admit I’ve lost it. That I don’t feel God’s presence anymore. Its very lonely and I feel very small and vulnerable.
Uuuuhhh… pretend there’s a wacky musical number here to make this end on a less depressing and personal note.
*Offers internet pats*
I think you nailed it in her thought process, yeah. I don’t think she’s thought out entirely ‘I don’t believe in original sin so the Eden thing can’t be accurate’ yet, as well, but that it’s an active avoidance of confronting that in part because admitting it even to herself would make it a real thing that’s not going away, and eventually she’d have to say something to Becky.
… First of all I don’t care what anyone says; Joe is doing God’s work.
Second: let’s see if we can’t get this ship back on course.
Oh neat! My new gravatar is Joyce!
Joyce with glasses, too! She really does look like her sister with those, even if she doesn’t know exactly how true that is.
Hey there’s that Joe we all know and don’t appreciate because he’s skeevy and uncool.
High chance this is him sticking to his brand though and there is a legitimate reason he’s in this class he doesn’t want Joyce (or anybody but mostly Joyce) to know. Can’t have him, you know, CARE about something that wasn’t vagina and sex. He has an image to maintain or something.
Every time Joe reminds us he’s Jewish I feel like I’m getting hit by something but I just don’t quite know by what…
Joe: bad use of Superman. How dare they give him more depth than just “ultimate powerful being”- it’s almost like they want him to continue on to sell more comics to give those same Jewish men more work!
Never mind that the guy overseeing the development was himself a Jewish man who is one of the greatest comic editors of all time…
Yeah, see, when I read Joe’s line I’m very much thinking, say, Man of Steel and similar modern Mediocre Superman Stories that play him up as a Christ analogue and also miss any interesting traits of his. You tend to see the two go hand in hand. (Not that there are no good Superman stories with him in a more Christ-analogue role – Death of Superman, for one – but for a certain brand of terrible writer, that’s the only way they can think of to make him a Big Good. And also they ignore that the journalist who is also a force of absolute goodness is probably going to have some Strong Opinions about injustices he can’t punch away, so he becomes Bland Saltine Christ Knockoff Superman and not Superman Who Scares Corrupt Senators Into Confessing Their Crimes.)
I am the Very Model of a Modern Mediocre Superman …
but wasn’t the Original Flavor Superman specifically made strong enough to punch the people (or threaten them with a good punching) who were responsible for those injustices, as well as bulletproof enough that they couldn’t just sic the cops, Pinkertons, etc etc on him? My recollection of those early comics leans very hard into Social Justice Power Fantasy, with a fair amount of not at all subtle physical coercion.
(if the observed rule of the world is that Might Makes Right, then your imaginary Big Good needs to be the mightiest.)
like, that Superman liked to do the thing we now associate with Batman, of dangling bad guys (corrupt industrialists) from high places until they confessed, promised to do better, and/or wet themselves.
meanwhile, the Batman of the era just f*cking shot people.
Yep. That ‘scare a corrupt senator’ thing was from Action Comics #1.
These tend to be the same shitty modern writers who pair him with Wonder Woman on the grounds that she’s the strongest heroine, he’s the strongest hero, ergo they should be an item and completely miss the point of both characters and Lois Lane. (Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex has SO MUCH to answer for.)
I mean lbr I’m thinking of the modern Boring Christ Analogue Supermans (who, like any good American Jesus analogue, originally had a very anti-wealth bent that is completely ignored,) but there’s also been a gradual neutering of Superman’s bite just from the rise of DC as a massive corporate entity as well.
Since Joe is not 100 years old, and a Jewish editor is not a Protestant nerd, I don’t think his complaint is about the Silver Age of comics.
I thought he was referring to Superman the intellectual property created by two Jewish guys who were paid a one-time pittance for the character and then left uncredited for decades.
They did not give those same jewishish men more work though.
“Two”
She didn’t read Genesis 7:2 “seven pairs of every kind of clean animal”.
Dirty heathen
I don’t think the dinosaurs Joyce’s creationist textbooks recognized as ‘saurs count as “clean” animals. 😛
Or perhaps she did read Genesis 7:8–9
8 Of clean beasts, and of beasts that are not clean, and of fowls, and of every thing that creepeth upon the earth,
9 There went in two and two unto Noah into the ark, the male and the female, as God had commanded Noah.
Back in Gen 7:2–3 God commanded Noah to take two pairs of every unclean kind of animal and seven pairs of every kind of bird and clean animal, but when it got around to Gen 7:8–9 He only actually loaded two and two of each kind.
Which is all very well and no contradiction until you reach the clause “as God commanded Noah”. Fortunately we can harmonise the apparent contradiction: that clause is telling us that God then commanded Noah to do that, over-riding His previous instructions.
Considering that the (IIRC) first thing Noah did after setting foot outside the Ark again was to kill and offer as burnt sacrifice from each of the “clean” animals brought into the Ark, I’m pretty sure the intent was that fourteen of each clean animal were brought in. Since, obviously, birds and domestic animals still existed afterward.
What to do when you have several versions of an Important Story and want to compose the True One? Obviously you take the best bits from each one.
( this is how we got lilith )
Joe wants to fuck a Coeurl
Or a Tamaranian. Their planet’s people evolved from tree cats, if memory serves.
I thought a Tamaranian was a fruit?
All I know is a tamarin is a monkey and a tamarind is a fruit. No idea about the rest.
Starfire from the Teen Titans.
Don’t remember if they evolved from tree cats or not.
Joe continues
“Also, I’m thinking of like, designing my own life form. Like, it was either that or try to design a sentient robot flying car, but the Ruttens already have the robotics thing down pretty well and they’ll probably beat me to it. So instead I’m going to use genetic engineering to create…Ultra Bio? Ugh, I’ll have to think of a better name.”
Please do a bonus strip where Joe asks Professor Brock about hooking up with sentient nonhuman cat creatures.
@Last Panel
Future Slipshine concept featuring Joe? 😛
The Harkness test states if it’s of age for it’s species, and you are able to communicate sufficently to establish mutual consent, bang away!
This kind of thinking only enabled the Bronies.
Now I want to read something by one of the Brontes.
oh dear, somebody wants to have imaginary sex with imaginary creatures! that’s…worse than anime fandom how, exactly?
don’t forget, it also has to be sufficiently intelligent to be able to understand the potential ramifications of sexual congress.
When is it NOT cool to bang the Space Pirate Amazon Ninja Cat-girls?
If they don’t like SPANCing.
Since Julia Gray’s beloved, DefinitelyNotJacob, has been known to appear as a Space Vampire, this conversation is nearer to Joyce’s interests than she would like to admit
Joe is seeking answers to the most important questions. Everyone seems to think (as far as I can tell from hentai) that other creatures would have the same genitals as humans, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. It would probably be okay to bang a cat-girl, but you probably wouldn’t want to be banged by a cat-boy, based on the characteristics of feline penises.
it does sometimes seem that the first question(s) that occur to most humans, all the way back to our early ancestors, was “can I eat it, get high off it, and/or fuck it?”
I wonder when exactly becoming intoxicated on purpose started
Iirc, alcoholic drinks are fairly old but it still beggs the question of why
Hunter gatherers and fallen fermented berries, IIRC.
Our civilization literally exists because, some time later on, people settled down so they could grow grain to make into beer and get wasted on the regular.
Then they needed to build walls and make weapons against the scumwads who wanted to crash the parties.
You don’t have to depend on fermentation. Plenty of plants and fungi offer wild psychotropic effects when picked fresh. Hemp and peyote have been with us a long time. Failing that, you can always lick a toad.
Honest Trailers on Howard the Duck: “Duck genitalia is nothing like human genitalia!”
The late Professor Jack Cohen, go-to guy for biology in science fiction, once commented that John Carter, Warlord of Mars, must have had a huge shock when he encountered Dejah Thoris’s eggshell producing equipment.
You forgot to word it properly. It is the incomparable Dejah Thoris.
Sometimes I think about this myself and my conclusion is that, while lots of people fantasize about having a good time with more exotic variants of what’s in humans (as demonstrated by the diversity in sex toys), sometimes mixing non-humans with non-human genitalia is too much even when the character/creature in question is very much humanoid.
Not like there isn’t people that would fuck whatever, but sometimes they just want a funny looking person instead of the full package.
In the end it comes down to personal preference.
There’s a reason so many fictional space babes are described as or depicted by attractive women with head prosthetics and/or body paint.
(For one thing there aren’t any talent agencies with a roster of aspiring actor amorphous tentacle blobs here on Earth, and the commute from a planet that does have them would be brutal.)
(Trying to invoke the trope without linking to the time sink website.)
Likewise where there’s a specific type of “furry” girl that’s really just a regular girl with an extra set of ears and maybe a tail.
And hairy toes. I just love hairy toes.
finest parody of all time.
Perfect gravatar is perfect.
I am reminded of a book I read once where all the different alien species all look mostly human because generations ago when humans set out to space, they basically fucked every alien species they came across until the entire galaxy was human/alien hybrids.
Or Ringworld – where the premise involves aliens descended from protohumans speciating to fill all the niches on the giant ringworld.
Sex was a common introduction ritual when two of the species met and wanted to negotiate.
This, in turn, got referenced in an old fan joke about a bit of Early Installment Weirdness in the second TOS pilot: Gary Mitchell creates a tombstone for Kirk that gives his middle initial as “R”, not “T” (for Tiberius). The joke is that it stands for rishathra.
I mean… Joyce’s reasoning in the second panel actual exhibits some good critical thinking, that would lend itself well to science.
What if she starts to love evolution theory in particular? Evolution’s seemingly ontological and explanatory strength could be very attractive to Joyce right now. It even formalizes change and adaption, which she might take as a metaphor.
Maybe she’ll respond well to the prof’s “machine theory” of life, too. It would be fitting but ironic if Joyce starts to love the class, while Becky would start to feel uncomfortable with a lack of a watch engineer/godly inspiration.
Honestly, I think I’d prefer if Joyce became interested in physics. Biology is messy and a more universalist and philosophical system would be interesting to her. Billions of unchanging stars and cosmic systems. But then again, I kind of like her being the anti-Dina.
Stars are not unchanging.
I am still waiting for the Joyce-horror-face when she finally grasps Deep Time. Or rather grasps that it is ungraspable.
lifegoals right there XD
DoA Book 11: I Just Think It’s Important to Know, In the Event That I’m Stranded on an Alien Planet, If It’s Cool to Bang the Sentient-But-Nonhuman Cat Creatures There
Incidentally, while Joyce may not have been taught it, some YECs did (still do?) think that Satan planted fossils. Her statement about juvenile dinosaurs on the ark, though, is almost certainly from Ken Ham/Answers in Genesis (as linked to above), which probably dominates the beliefs of most YECs nowadays.
I am not sure if Ham came up with the idea himself, but I suspect that he latched on to it at least partially because lots of people think that dinosaurs are cool, and he could therefore make dinosaur models and animatronics attractions for his Creation “Museum” and Ark Park.
Awww, I was hoping we’d get Dina vs. Professor Doc.
Joe: Of course! Catbabes are the universal standard of hotness.
Note that Joe has decided not to make a big deal of Joyce’s glasses. I hope she realizes.
Are both of them professing beliefs they don’t really hold in order to save face? Otherwise, it bad.
I find myself wondering if Joe is actually a virgin.
I hear there’s pretty solid video proof that confirms he’s had sex.
Roz alone disputes that.
And Malaya. Unless I’m paying a monthly fee for lies.
First we have to define “virgin”. As a long lost friend once commented after hearing “quiet, there are virgin ears here” They commented “I don’t know, not sure if I’ve done it that way YET. Does that mean I’m still a virgin?”
I want to tell Joe that when he finds himself on that alien planet to NOT yet Thundercat’s Hoooooooooooo. The ladies may not appreciate being called Ho’s.
Maybe he could wait until Christmas. Thundercats Ho Ho Ho!
Superman when he was created: Story of a child rocketed from his home to a new world where he grows up and becomes an important and valued member of society.
Superman when written by Zack Snyder and Bryan Singer: Son of an old bearded man from a paradise world who was rocketed to Earth so he could lead them by example. Also literally just stretches his arms out in the crucifix position for no reason.
Superman as written by J Michael Straczynski: If you illegal aliens from another world don’t use your secret gold reserves to boost the economy of this town you live in then I’m not going to let you stay.
hee hee see this wit and level of consideration for his theoretical sexy cat person partner is why I like Joe.
(And he’s 100% right about Protestants ruining everything by trying to dumb it down and make it concretely understandable instead of a topic of philosophy, thought, and debate. Even as a kid Protestant I liked the Jewish kids better. XD )
While no longer a possibility (monogamous and a unrepentant flirt) I feel Joe’s dilemma. OTGH, yeah long as they make an overt offer I see no issues.
If I’ve learned anything from watching Star Trek TNG and William Riker, the answer is yes.
Anyway I wasn’t around when it happened so I wanna talk about the moment that changed Joe/Joyce for me from “they’d be cute together and have a great dynamic” to “please get married my heart can’t take it”, Joe and Jacob’s chat about her after the disastrous date she went on with Jacob.
Jacob’s obviously right to be furious with her, nothing she did was okay and Joe sympathizes, but then adds what are transparently his own feelings on Joyce: She started out a trash fire and is gradually deprogramming that. She’ll say something nutty one day because that’s who she is and then trip and stumble and fall flat on her face until she gets up and does it right, then another thing will happen and instead of giving up she’ll trip and stumble and fall flat on her face all over again until she gets that right too. There’s no state where Joyce will remain who she is, she’s going to keep becoming a better person until one day, as Joe puts it, she’s perfect, and Jacob will have wished he had been there for that.
And for someone like Joe who makes a point of being a guy who only does things “that don’t matter,” because then he won’t get hurt or hurt anyone else, that kind of speaks to the level of outright admiration Joe has for Joyce. Joe does not simply believe Joyce will outgrow some of her worst traits in being exposed to the real world, Joe believes so strongly in Joyce’s goodness and ability to change in the face of her own personal shortcomings that she will one day become the best possible Joyce she can be and he can’t figure out why anyone would want to miss out on that.
He’s so dang in love, y’all.
Well now I’m fucking shipping it REAL hard. Thanks didn’t need my heart anyway.
Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken? What’s love got to do with it.
I already shipped it but you, my good sir? Have converted me into a True Believer. (Which considering the subject matter is HILARIOUS but yes oh my god please please they need to kiss ;AAAA;)
(Ohnoooo, Grav Roulette don’t do this to me. Let’s change.)
(……ok that’s worse. IS THERE A LIMIT TO ATTEMPTS?)
Depends on how many letters you can change. Why…why do I keep trying?
UGH YOU ARE THE WORST, RAGE
It’s generally a bad idea to do more than one or two in a day – we’ve had a couple commenters get issues posting comments if they play around too much at once with the caps.
It’s why I try to be adding something to the conversation while testing. I’ve kinda given up…
It’s not so much comment content as something weird in the posting system, we think? Whoever it was who had to change their comment name can probably weigh in, but I don’t think it’s a simple moderation issue.
One day, DYW will get tired of the grav roulette nonsense and change it so your first grav is the only one you can ever have.
Right? And meanwhile there’s Joyce who’d be justified writing him off after first impressions, but somehow he’s become the person she feels comfortable telling about her struggles with going home after the first kidnapping. When she sees the Do List and he says ‘it doesn’t matter, it’s not hurting anyone, I can’t do better than this,’ she tells him he’s wrong and it does matter, but in a way that so clearly says ‘I know you can do better, too.’ Someday he’s going to get that he can be. Not immediately, but someday. And that day’s gonna be AMAZING.
Yep, the reveal that Joe was the mystery texter was a moment ripe for digging. The surface level one is “Joe isn’t so bad after all!” but then you get into the nitty gritty of how Joe views what he did: Joyce is someone he will *never* put effort into, broadly speaking, Being Joe over, so by talking to her he instantly dodged all his usual bullshit and precisely landed where he had to be for her. Then Joyce comes back to college and Joe acts like nothing happened not because he wants to hide it, but because he thinks he just did a normal thing that he doesn’t even realize contradicts the entire persona he’s crafted.
Joe’s realization that he hasn’t just been having no strings attached fun that hurts nobody, because he made clear to Joyce that Ryan wasn’t just some singular evil but an individual part of a grand culture that teaches young men to treat women like objects, that’s real. That’s Joe. He friggin’ started tearing up. He’s pretty obviously built who he is based off of his parents’ marriage and that’s deep seated stuff, but the realization that he hurt Joyce? Nope. Nuh uh. Time to put an end to one of his more firmly held core beliefs of how his life is supposed to work, because that shit isn’t going to fly if it comes at her expense.
I realized something writing this: how much of Old Joe have we seen since he said he reverted back to his horndog persona because people don’t change? Off the top of my head he’s proven to be a fairly devoted stepbrother to Amber trying to get her involved with his religion if only for his dad’s sake, and going out to ogle girls with Danny he seemed like he wanted for Danny to realize it was fine to notice hot guys too, or at the very least he wanted Danny to be included in some way. Joe said that people never change and then launches into a speech at Jacob in Joyce’s defense about how she’s *always* changing for the better and you’d have to be an idiot not to see it. That’s not how you act when you shrug your shoulders and decide that the way things were worked for the best.
I think he still hasn’t totally figured out that yes, he is not destined to be his father and is capable of having a longterm relationship without cheating, but he’s definitely been WAY less surface-level between Danny coming out to him (and Joe recognizing that sometimes they DO need to have those sappy Feelings Talks because he does genuinely value Danny in his life) and Joyce showing him he hurt her (and probably by extension other people on campus – I don’t think he cares much what random strangers think of him, but he does seem to care about not being actively HARMFUL.)
The thing about Joe is he never seems to think maybe his parents were just better off separated because his dad and mom were BOTH unhappy. That their fidelity was not the source of their problem but just a symptom.
OTOH, he did go out to ogle and comment on girls – loudly enough to be heard by other people around them. He did it with Danny and included guys in it for Danny’s sake, which is good for their friendship, but isn’t really a good sign for him treating women better.
After he fell off the wagon with Malaya (as he saw it) he went back to not trusting himself and I think to even more performatively playing his old role. Now I think it’s more about making sure that no women (particularly Joyce?) get close enough that he can really hurt them than trying to get laid without emotional connections.
Assuming the sentient-but-nonhuman cat creatures consent (And the implied ability to mutually understand each other in order TO consent)… Bang away, my friend.
Joe may be worried about safety with respect to allergy/immune issues and anatomical compatibility.
… insemination between animals of different species will sometimes provoke a possibly lethal immune reaction. A female Cimex lectularius traumatically inseminated by a male C. hemipterus will swell up at the site of insemination as the immune system responds to male ejaculates. In the process, the female’s lifespan is reduced. In some cases, this immune reaction can be so massive as to be almost immediately fatal. A female Hesperocimex sonorensis will swell up, blacken, and die within 24–48 hours after being traumatically inseminated by a male H. cochimiensis. And that’s within the same genus. The Dog knows what might happen upon intimate seral contact with a cat-woman less closely related to Joe than poison ivy is.
Catwoman, Poison Ivy… interesting choice of examples there.
We had Superman and Batman yesterday.
Joe is the voice of a generation.
Unfortunately, it’s from the 1920’s.
Joe.
Joe!
JOE
OF COURSE it’s cool to bang the sentient cat-creatures (as long as you learn their language and obtain consent)!! Haven’t you watched ANY of the Star Treks??
…she really still believes all this?
In public, for now.
I have to say that I preferred he “then it’s all a LIE” phase.
TYPO!
That was supposed to be “I have to say that I preferred her “then it’s all a LIE” phase”.
Provided that they consent to it, Joe, it’s cool.
I pity Joe when he learns that the odds of an alien world, with the odds of a immensely different environment and gravity field, would produce an ecosystem in which something even remotely comparable to a feline, let alone a humanoid feline entity, let alone a humanoid feline entity that reproduces in a way similar to a human being….let’s just say he’s gonna be disappointed.
Joe:”…but the odds aren’t 0, are they?”
adora says yes
FINALLY. A WHOLE COMMENT SECTION DISCUSSING CATGIRLS… And not ONE mention of Catra?
This confirms to me you’re a scholar and a gentleperson. Thank you.
Catra’s massive Disaster Lesbian energy is so intense my brain rejects putting her SPECIES in the same thought as ‘sexual partners with Joe.’
I mean, she would kill Joe in a horribly violent fashion if he tried any moves (or, you know, laugh at him).
He should probably just hang out with Sea Hawk and hope for the best.
Pretty much, yeah.
Thank you. If my 75k+ words worth of She-Ra fanfics do not qualify me to the title of ‘schol´ar’, I have not idea what would.
I would like to take a moment to appreciate Joe for not pointing out that Joyce has glasses. I’m sure it’s coming up, but he might know how much she hates change and didn’t want to have that be the starting point. It’s still nice he’s not being all “OMG YOUR FACE! It’s all weird now, what are these?! *pokes at glasses*”
Frick, I give up, Sarah is lost to me. I think this was Dina, gosh I hope so. Sarah’s best friend is an acceptable second.
I love booster but I prefer having pretty girl gravs so, roulette time
I feel like daisy. I love you Walky but you are not a pretty girl
Eh, billies okay. I like her new look. One more time
…back to billie
(Ambers pretty but also one of my least favorites)
Oof, bad roll.
Coital hooks, Joe. Coital hooks.
Joe, humans and any independently evolved alien life would be so genetically distant there’d be no risk of offspring so you’re fine in the procreation risk part. The way more complicated and interesting question would be how to balance issues of consent and cultural sensitivity around reproductive acts with an alien sapience.
(I’ve actually thought about it because I am massive dork)
He should just hook up with Dabbler, no issues with consent there.
Ugh, Joyce and Joe are both SO wrong. After the firmament, the form of water went from mist to rain and clouds. The dinosaurs couldn’t breathe the new humid atmosphere as easily and died out in a few generations. Only SOME of the bones are Satan’s tricks. Most of them are the bones of the semi-human giants born of the sinful unions angels formed with humans before God cast them out for their sin.
…is a thing my mom taught us from very young.
In defense of your mother, that last half is metal as hell.
So going from mist to rain and clouds is more humid? I would think it would be less.
You’d think that! But the firmament was holding all that water back, which is why it only ever misted, not rained. After the firmament was broken, it released all the water that’s currently in the atmosphere.
Uh, is “the firmament was broken” a metaphor for something?
( my english teacher needs me to ask )
It’s literal! In many strains of creationist theology, the “firmament” was a giant shell of water above the atmosphere, enveloping the entire planet. This is where at least a significant proportion of the water in the Great Flood cake from, according to them – the firmament “broke” at God’s command, and the water it contained rained down until it was depleted 40 days and 40 nights later.
On my phone right this second (hence the “cake” typo above) so I can’t link, but there’s even a DoA comic I recall where Becky talks about this with Dina.
You have no idea how relieved/annoyed I am that I remembered that detail entirely correctly; I was half sure someone would be like “What? No, the firmament made the atmosphere LESS humid.”
I think physics would have something to say about that.
Oh no.
Joe, regular cats are sentient-but-not-human cat creatures.
I’m pretty sure the story of Noah’s Ark is an Old Testament story..so that’s like a Jewish thing too, right?
I can’t speak for Jewish teachings, but Noah’s Ark is definitely in the Old Testament.
Yeah, but AFAIK, most Jewish interpretations aren’t literal. The book is, y’know, a book, not a literally word-for-word true account.
In all honesty, I don’t believe the New Testament is a word for word account either.
so, is Dumbing of Age set in a universe where Kent Hovind and AiG never became national punchlines or is Joyce somehow THAT ignorant of…well…everything?
FYI: I KNEW a guy like Joyce in my freshman year of college, by the time I was a sophomore I didn’t find anyone like him anymore.