Belief is not a requirement. Only the continuous repetition of the message until such time as the message becomes the truth.
Oh and such obfuscation and denial of reality has been part and parcel of the foundation of every government ever formed.
not Cristaldi’s of Seabrook NH. Square and it doesn’t even come with cheese. Cheese is extra, and it’s a slice of provolone. I know, sounds like blasphemy, but wait. Get the cheese and pepperoni. There are times when I gladly drive the hour plus that it takes to get there from here. If I ever go near Hampton Beach, I try to make it there, too. Mmm. Cristaldi’s. It’s been way too long since I’ve gone. God, i hope they’re still in business.
Sorry, whenever I think of square pizza, I think of three things:
– Elio’s frozen pizza-ish rectangles of blandness
– Institutional grade “pizza” as served in school (because “all kids love pizza”)*
– A pizza joint I went to when visiting relatives out in the Rhode Island boonies that basically just slapped canned sauce and pre-shredded cheese on bland bread dough, but “they fill the whole box” so it’s allegedly a good value. At least fry vinegar gave it a little flavor.
*Come to think of it, I think school cafeteria pizza is Elio’s…
Sorry, whenever I think of Elio I think “Call me by your name and I’ll call you by yours” followed by breathy iterations of “Elio… Elio…” and “Oliver… Oliver” and then I forget all about pizza. peaches may be involved in that train of thought at some point, though.
You neglect those enlightened few who follow the path of the odometer, the International Standards Organization, the alphanumerically sortable, and only well-bethought and well-defined format. We are legion, we are the 8601st. In another 78 years when people are /again complaining that we didn’t learn enough from y2k (or 17years, unix epoch), the 8601st will stand tall on the pillars of their legible datetimes, and they will laugh.
yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss (and so on) +TZ/UTC offset, if needed.
All else are heretics. Why MM vs mm? Because Months are bigger than minutes. Why HH not hh? Because 12 hour time needs more characters. Why biggest to smallest, left to right? Because maths (and thence science) has standardized on it. Why dashes(-) not slahes(/)? Because slashes have been corrupted, and I will fight you if you abuse dashes in a messed up usage with an old arrangement. (yes I’ve seen it done, and yes I left a smoking hole of ashes behind)
Given the number of so-called ‘educated’ people who still pronounce February as ‘FEB-yoo-air-ee’, nuclear as ‘NOO-que-lar’, or insist on ‘aksing’ a question, I think we can let Robin have a pass on this one.
or maybe we can even stop considering that deviations from an arbitrary linguistic standard have anything to do with a person’s worth, intellectual or otherwise?
That’s an interesting point, but it does raise questions for a person when communicating with another and they reveal aspects denoting ignorance on a topic. Since there isn’t a clearly defined boundary, all of these things present as markers that influence an animal’s measure of others in their environment. As a result, it will cause others to hear ignorance even if it is not the intent of the speaker to broadcast it.
Do I care if my mechanic worries about nookular war or a meltdown? No, since it is not (yet) relevant to the operation of my vehicle. Do I care if the people who build and maintain nuclear power systems, and wield the keys to a nuclear holocaust understand what they are responsible for? Damn right I do.
Nah, pedantry is just pedantry. Except for all those times when it’s actually prejudice. The way I see it, linguistic value judgments are among the most pervasive and least challenged proxies for class-, race-, and gender-based discrimination.
The problem with a dumbass in a position of power is with them being a dumbass, not whether they speak in a dialect some associate with a lack of education. Indeed, many dumbasses speak perfect English. It’s just not relevant.
No, it is NOT silent … or at least it wasn’t supposed to be. But if you get enough people to say or spell something incorrectly, eventually you can get someone to go along with you when you say it’s ‘an alternative version’ or ‘a regional dialect’. Next thing you know, it’s in a dictionary somewhere (even if it’s only ‘Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English’ — or even worse, the online ‘Urban Dictionary’), and from that point it’s “Katie, bar the door”.
Pah, Proto-Indo-Europeans scoff at your newfangled pronunciation of “February”, which I am sure you pretend to defend using some trendy fascicule such as Webster’s Third.
Any self-respecting PIE knows it is pronounced “dʰegʷʰris”. Scoff! Scoff!
ugh, I’m being silly and probably not even getting my point across. Languages evolve is all I’m saying. It’s a perfectly normal and innocuous process (at least in hegemonic languages like english). But hey, to each their windmills, god knows i have mine (such as engaging in this sort of argument in a bloody comment thread… will i ever learn.)
btw, I’d like to highly warmly fondly recommend an excellent book called “The Story of Ain’t” by David Skinner. It’s a delightful account of the publication of Webster’s 3rd edition in 1961. The first two editions had been heavily prescriptivist, and the 3rd edition took something of a turn towards descriptivism, and it got serious flak for it. It might sound dry or arcane, but it’s not, it’s a super fun read, as long as you’re even mildly interested in language.
They found the body of former Congresswoman Robin DeSanto on the ground outside the building’s teacher’s lounge. It appeared the former Congresswoman had been strangled and then defenestrated by a colleague. Fellow faculty present at the scene commented, “Yeah, that’s fair.”
Is Leslie still dating that one woman who’s name I forget but she only ever seemed to neg her about her appearance? Cause that could put a wrinkle in this ship. Jeez why is every woman Leslie seems to be interested in awful in some way?
Honestly, I read it more as Leslie having poor judgment in her dating life. Lord knows I’ve known a lot of people who kept rolling the dice on the same type and kept hoping to do better the next time.
Leslie’s always been kind of a doormat, both here and in the Walkyverse.
(I still ship her and Mindy, even though I haven’t yet found a way to combine their names into a portmanteau that isn’t awkward and clunky. Then again, that tracks…)
I’m pretty sure it was a reference to the movie “As Good as It Gets”; the antisocial author Melvin Udall was being asked how he wrote women so well, and in an effort to cut the questioning short, responded in an intentionally obnoxious and insulting manner.
My understanding is that Leslie’s attracted to confident and assertive women… but also to arrogant people who lack empathy because she struggles to recognise the difference.
To quote Leslie from another universe “My weakness is messed up lesbian relationships…in fiction.” It’s been one of her character traits the whole time. She has to have some flaws, right?
I mean, Shortpacked had Robin eventually growing up, being happily married to Leslie, and the two of them raising children. So we know that in some contexts the two can work.
But that required many years of character development, and with the speed at which time passes in this strip I wouldn’t hold my breath.
I would say…no, she wasn’t as bad in Shortpacked!. A total diasaster of a person, yes, but she had never supported anti-LGBTQ legislation, or any of the other rotten things she has to have voted for as a conservative Congressional representative
She’s like a crazy whirlwind that things just sorta happen to. It’s like if being a drama hurricane were a good thing. Also the de facto protagonist for a good while! Honestly shortpacked! is a good binge even if you have only basic knowledge of superheroes / retail. It’s almost a learning experience!
Honestly, kinda better, kinda worse? She did some pretty horrible things in Shortpacked!, but there’s a lot more leeway in a cartoony world like that. A lot of the time things snapped back to the status quo at the end of a story arc and everything was fine again.
No bigoted legislation though! Just… uh… Star Wars necrophilia voters. And sombreros.
Robin in Shortpacked was silly and often didn’t think about the consequences of her actions until later, but she was definitely way better than this DoA version of her. And it helps that the world in Shortpacked was more zany and silly anyway.
(I mostly have better taste in DoA. Becky/Dina is realistically imperfect but healthy, and Joyce/Joe could be healthy. I guess Robin/Leslie is the holdover.)
I don’t think that one’s lost forever, necessarily. I’ve currently got a theory about post-skip Jennifer that I’m really hoping turns out to be true, though I don’t expect to find out for another year or so.
All I’ll say is that it was partially inspired by reading this author commentary on Billie’s first appearance in Roomies! and partially by thisDoA strip.
Reading both things you linked has given me zero idea how that could possibly be tied into billifer’s current arc. Please, would you mind elaborating on your theory?
Okay, so I’m several weeks late on this and I might repost this later on when it’s more relevant and people will actually see it but here’s the gist of my theory for those who asked:
Apart from alcohol, Jennifer/Billie’s primary struggle over the course of the strip has been with her own identity. She has a tendency to deny aspects of herself that don’t fit with whatever image she wants to project to people at any given moment. Sometimes it’s over relatively minor stuff, like her secret love of Star Wars not fitting with the Head Cheerleader/Alpha Bongo persona she wanted to project last season. But more often, it’s over things that are a lot more fundamental to who she is. Since the time skip, she’s been insisting that her attraction to women (she’s only mentioned Ruth by name, but there was also Alice before her) was merely a phase that she was going through and is now out of. Even while she was dating Ruth, her response to Becky saying she was her “first queer role model” was “I’m not– I mean, everyone thinks about girls, like, eventually. I’m not different.” Likewise, she claimed to both Ruth and Howard that bisexuality “only exists in porn.”
When she’s trying to prove that some aspect of herself that she’s previously let slip isn’t really a part of her, she goes above and beyond. In this case, it isn’t enough for her to not be in a relationship with a woman, she has to be in a relationship with a man, and she has to make this fact known to people like Ruth and Becky, who both associate her with that particular trait. As per usual, her denial isn’t actually fooling anybody who knows her, and she knows that it isn’t. She isn’t really doing it for them, she’s trying to convince herself. And as part of that self-denial, she tends to push away the people who know her too well to fall for it, like she did with Walky all through high school and is doing with Ruth now. Out of sight, out of mind.
So with that in mind, what part of her identity is she struggling with that led her to stop using the nickname she’s used since she was a child? What is she trying to convince herself of? For some people, doing this would just be trying to appear grown-up, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. “Billie” is gender-neutral, maybe even leaning a bit towards masculine if it’s spelled with a “y”— the difference in spoken conversation is non-existent. Hell, according to Willis, the very first mention of Billie in their pre-Roomies text stories was as an anecdote Walky told another character “to prove some dumb point about girls with names that sound like boy names.” “Jennifer,” on the other hand, is pretty unambiguously feminine as a name.
To me, all of this adds up to the idea that Jennifer is trying to convince herself that she is… well, female. Which, given Jennifer’s long and well-documented history of denial, makes me think that at some point she began to realize that she isn’t… and then backed the hell away from that train of thought because she’s “normal,” dammit! Oh sure, there’s nothing wrong with being trans, but it’s not “normal!” Which she totally is! The second thing! Not the first one! It’s a thing other people are, not her! She’s not different! See, she’s using her birth name now and everything! And she sure as hell doesn’t like girls, no, that’s a thing guys do, not “normal” girls! She just wants to be “normal”… and because of all her internalized hetero- and cisnormativity, she can’t truly accept herself as such.
Note: I don’t really know how to handle pronouns when you’re talking about a fictional character that you think may be trans, so I’m erring on the side of using the name and pronouns she currently prefers. I appreciate feedback on this front.
If you find yourself encouraging a similarly unhealthy relationship IRL, that might be a problem but if you’re in a situation similar to THIS, you might wanna double check if you’re living in a Willis comic.
I am not sure if Leslie is still dating the dentist who kind of was unpleasant but maybe she isn’t off panelist? But her dating Robin would be a step down until Robin some how redeems herself like she did in Shortpacked tbh I don’t see that happening right now.
i meaaaan… staying at Leslie’s was not super unlawful? Like, Leslie was maybe ambivalent about it, certainly not “gtfo or i call the cops”.
and wrong? i mean… not very? was it? she was shirking her responsibilities as a conservative congresswoman, but that doesn’t sound wrong to me, i’m in favour of laziness in protofascists.
on a side note, let’s see if i got this gravatar thing right? *holds breath*
She did bring the paparazzi down on Leslie, though, and her continued squatting kept them RIGHT THERE. That was clearly a pretty unpleasant experience for Leslie, who did not want the attention.
The way Leslie and Anna’s date fell apart because Anna’s romanticization of the Robin thing reminded Leslie of herself circa two weeks ago also seems relevant in ‘assessing what Leslie felt about it all once it was over.’
Which is slightly bugging me, considering what this Robin has done in her political career. How many people are dead because of the anti-LGBT legislation she supported? At the same time, though, there’s major story potential to be mined in Robin, usually the silliest person in either universe, actually having to come face to face with the serious consequences (yeah yeah I know, take a shot) of what she did in a more realistic universe.
I’d prefer at least one of them to have an actual arc after recognition rather than the redemption equals death (so they never have to really reckon with it, and now Mike still has a hook in his former victims. Especially for a former Congresswoman, which would be a big old national mess.)
But yeah, at the moment Robin’s been passing her actions off when confronted with things like ‘well, (that anti-LGBT bill) didn’t pass.’ She got a taste of realization, when supporters dumped her for being queer and then her staff dumped her for taking the accusation of a sexual assaulter among her interns seriously, about just who she’d been allying herself with for power. I suspect she’s realized she doesn’t like them much – it’s pretty noticeable that the next person she attached herself to was Becky. (Since the timescale means it’s not super-feasible to do the current ‘Republicans who recognized after the insurrection that their party had been going fascist for a while’ thing – Robin would have had to be allying herself with the barely-veiled ones for her first run in like a year or two, tops.) But she still doesn’t get that her new, BETTER allies (who she wants to be friends with) don’t trust her for more than a paycheck because of her past actions, and she REALLY doesn’t get WHY. After all, Becky’s not homeless because of her! She got tuition, even! Even if Robin didn’t back the platform Becky ran for her, that’s not going to affect BECKY, right?
I think Robin could be very interesting being forced to realize and acknowledge that her actions impact people outside her orbit, and those people really do matter. I think right now she assumes that they’ll be all right, something will come through like she did for Becky, and that her actions don’t contribute to the culture at large if bills don’t pass. If she’s okay, why does it matter? Why does Leslie or Becky care about homeless teenagers? They’re fine, personally.
Depends on if Willis wants to or not, but there could be some catharsis in ‘politician realizes you should care about other people.’
I just kind of think of Robin as a sleazy conservative politician for years now the same way I do cop fiction: Yeah it’s nice to have a big story where the character breaks free and learns a lesson, but how much bullshit did they actively partake in on the way to their character development finishing?
Reasonable. Honestly I’d require ‘several years of Robin arcs that are steady clue-by-fours of This Is What You Caused’ before I even considered Robin on an actual redemption arc, and that would likely get old and miserable to watch in a strip-a-day format.
I loved where she ended up in Shortpacked, but this Robin will never manage to be that one. She already tipped the scales too far. I just don’t want another ‘we have conflicted feeings about the Dead Asshole because they realized they were an asshole before they died.’ I’m already frustrated Ethan and Amber are likely never going to get to realize ‘hey, Mike fucking sucked!’
Attempted murder may have a lesser sentence but it doesn’t mean your hands are clean after all.
Honestly even though it didn’t pass: she will have helped contribute to making such views be seen as remotely legitimate. There will definitely be awful parents or other family members/coworkers/teachers/fellow students of LGBTQ+ people who felt vindicated at the time to be even more awful than usual. After all there’s literally debates over whether their lives are even worthwhile to begin with. Even if it didn’t pass they have enough support to be even taken seriously rather than thrown out and burned and those proposing it got to keep their jobs. Robin left of her own accord and even before that she was only in diffs because she was thought to be one of them for a while.
Fact is if she was real she’s definitely would helped kill people just from supporting it even if it never passed. Just as every Congress person or any other individual supporting it holds a level of responsibility for what they’ve done. Helping one gay girl isn’t really enough to start setting things right. But maybe if she’s not only being a weirdo stalker to Leslie that’s why she thought about teaching: the kids will fix some of the damage she’s wrought for her. It won’t take back the people she’s already killed, but it’ll stop as many future deaths hopefully.
It’ll take a long time before she even breaks neutral in terms of her karma lbr. But some teaching gigs end up almost life long after all.
Romanticizing problems in fiction is a safe place to explore things we’d never want anywhere near us in life. It’s no different from hunting dragons in D&D.
I was about to say she did experience consequences, what with her political career ruined and all, but then I remembered that those consequences were for good things, like when she took sexual harassment seriously. And… well, I guess her stalky weird thing with Leslie wasn’t GOOD, but the thing that got her in trouble was just liking girls
Er… in the most realistic universe I know, Congresswomen/men seldom have to face any consequence of their acts. And some of them are sillier than former Congresswoman DeSanto, and they’re not even funny!
nope.
Her attraction to Leslie cost her everything.
She had the opportunity to take it back and refused, both guaranteeing a Democrat in office and placing a high progressive burden of expectations.
Now shes remade herself in way Leslie can respect.
The truth is Robin is in EVERY WAY a better person than when Leslie fawned over her and taken actions to redeem herself.
Leslie knew who she was when when she crushed on her.
Same, though my frothing incoherent rambling raging seeing Robin again did kind of put it together for me that in a cast of like 30 named and important characters who can take center stage of a series of strips, I only hate three and a half of them.
I don’t think anyone’s really been dropped by this point either. Except Mike, who was indeed dropped.
The first two because they’re boring. They have maybe five moments apiece where they do something other than “wacky dipshit” and “responsible and kind.” It’s not even that those are bad traits, it’s that they are *all* these two do and it’s impossible to care about a character when you already know how they’re going to act not only in a current strip, but like the next ten. Walky’s probably building up to something with his grief over Mike that could be interesting, but once it’s done I know how he’ll act afterwards so who cares?
One half of Becky just kind of taps into that Shortpacked! Robin energy of being this really loud obnoxious goofball, only we still have Robin here and she sucks and Becky takes it one step further by never suffering the slightest consequence for anything she does. She bullies Dorothy for years only for her to be completely defused with a little spiel of “we’re your friend” and now she just completely got away with being an inexcusably awful person to Jennifer and Ruth by outing them in class, and the only thing anyone had to say was Leslie praising her for being devious. So now she’s this master social manipulator who constantly acts like a loud dumb prick and no one in the comic is seemingly allowed to hold accountable for anything she ever does because she’s had a rough go of it.
Then the other half of Becky is spending time with Dina, and those two are the single best romance in the comic where they effortlessly dodge all the most ingrained rules of relationship drama by being effortless supportive and loving of each other, and after “Becky still has Joyce feels” fizzled out we’ve got another drama bomb brewing in Becky’s paradoxical viewpoints on her own perception as a sexual being, where she’s openly thirsty for Dina but Dina’s grey ace and doesn’t respond in the same overly enthusiastic manner, so now Becky’s floundering around thinking she’ll never be happy because of some inherent flaw on her part that she doesn’t know how to talk about and it’s really interesting to see it happen even if I know that the two can work it out because they haven’t been inundated with relationship drama to the point where I wonder why they even bother. They just love and think the world of each other, and that’s rad. Normalize healthy interesting relationships in fiction.
I can’t lie, that last panel made me simultaneously smile and drop my head down in resignation.
I don’t even know what I’m resigning myself to, but that was definitely the feeling I got.
Well played, sir, for making me be happy to preemptively give up to whatever you’re planning.
“Now look here, if I call a college and say I’ve got a woman who wants to be a professor, the first thing they ask isn’t going to be Does she have her own elbow patches?”
That last panel is the kind of DOA Robin I find funniest. When she’s being both smart and technically correct and very dumb and obnoxious at the same time.
She’s a multifaceted character, that Robin DeSanto. Just hella fulla facets.
So she still do got the feels for Leslie. This will go badly. I only say this because it’s Willis, not because it realistically would. It only realistically might.
i just binged this whole thing in the last two days… i was not ready to catch up. i was not ready for a lot of things. thank you willis for making something I needed to see.
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well, at least she’s honest
what does that say about her qualifications to teach Poli-Sci yuk yuk
Is she, though?
Give the appearance of honesty to maintain your version of events.
Anything can be the truth if you just believe it hard enough! That’s what modern politics is all about! Truthiness!
… *long audible groan of existential dread*
Belief is not a requirement. Only the continuous repetition of the message until such time as the message becomes the truth.
Oh and such obfuscation and denial of reality has been part and parcel of the foundation of every government ever formed.
Ah, I see you’ve discovered the hyperproblem.
To steal from Colbert, we’ve gone well beyond truthiness. We’re into Trumpiness now.
She’s honest when it’s convenient for her. That sounds like a perfect poly-sci professor.
Happy Pi day everyone! How do you celebrate?
By performing the sacred ritual of “Huh, Guess It Is” and then forgetting about it for 365 days.
That, yes.
Me.
happy ides of march, remember to beware your impending death
Be There Or Swallow Fire
Et tu, Snow Mouse?
Damn, I forgot. I could have had some pie today. Does a pizza pie count?
Yes. Very much so. Unless it’s square. You can’t square Pi(e).
Well. You CAN, but 9.869604401089359 isn’t all THAT interesting.
That’s circular reasoning.
Only tangentially so…
Square pizza is usually nasty, anyway.
not Cristaldi’s of Seabrook NH. Square and it doesn’t even come with cheese. Cheese is extra, and it’s a slice of provolone. I know, sounds like blasphemy, but wait. Get the cheese and pepperoni. There are times when I gladly drive the hour plus that it takes to get there from here. If I ever go near Hampton Beach, I try to make it there, too. Mmm. Cristaldi’s. It’s been way too long since I’ve gone. God, i hope they’re still in business.
Sorry, whenever I think of square pizza, I think of three things:
– Elio’s frozen pizza-ish rectangles of blandness
– Institutional grade “pizza” as served in school (because “all kids love pizza”)*
– A pizza joint I went to when visiting relatives out in the Rhode Island boonies that basically just slapped canned sauce and pre-shredded cheese on bland bread dough, but “they fill the whole box” so it’s allegedly a good value. At least fry vinegar gave it a little flavor.
*Come to think of it, I think school cafeteria pizza is Elio’s…
Sorry, whenever I think of Elio I think “Call me by your name and I’ll call you by yours” followed by breathy iterations of “Elio… Elio…” and “Oliver… Oliver” and then I forget all about pizza. peaches may be involved in that train of thought at some point, though.
I didn’t have any pie, so I had cake instead.
My reminder that it was Pi day came in the form of a notification from the Domino’s app. So yes, it absolutely counts.
With pi(e). Both chicken pot, and chocolate. We divided the chocolate into Radians, rather than sixths, so there will be a tiny slice left over later.
Also by wearing a t-shirt I purchased off a once-interesting company that has since been absorbed into the Seattle Monolith that ate retail.
You monster! Who gets stuck with the slightly-more-than-a-quarter slice??
(Actually as I get older, a quarter slice is usually enough for me, I’ll take it.)
And if you are one of the people who persist in putting the date before the month, you get to celebrate it again on 22/7.
You. are. a. monster.
Had both pizza, then peach pie. Sadly, both with round off errors. :—(
@opus: was it a TI-65? Or a Casio?
What, you mean, like, citizens of the entire rest of the world?
You neglect those enlightened few who follow the path of the odometer, the International Standards Organization, the alphanumerically sortable, and only well-bethought and well-defined format. We are legion, we are the 8601st. In another 78 years when people are /again complaining that we didn’t learn enough from y2k (or 17years, unix epoch), the 8601st will stand tall on the pillars of their legible datetimes, and they will laugh.
yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss (and so on) +TZ/UTC offset, if needed.
All else are heretics. Why MM vs mm? Because Months are bigger than minutes. Why HH not hh? Because 12 hour time needs more characters. Why biggest to smallest, left to right? Because maths (and thence science) has standardized on it. Why dashes(-) not slahes(/)? Because slashes have been corrupted, and I will fight you if you abuse dashes in a messed up usage with an old arrangement. (yes I’ve seen it done, and yes I left a smoking hole of ashes behind)
ISO 8601 or bust.
Exactly!
By reading DoA an hour earlier, since US daylight savings time just started.
All excellent!
I celebrated by memorizing yet another 50 digits.
And here I thought there was only 10 digits.
Pizza, despite the fact that we had McGriddles for breakfast and therefore had intended to have a healthier dinner. But it was Pi Day!
By protesting the use of Pi and advocating for Tau (6.28…). Then planning for the assasination of Caesar and the ides of March.
The usual, ate pie, and plugged equations using pi into my calculator…
I can’t believe I went all but the last 35 minutes of pie day without know it’s pie day.
Defrost, heat up and consume a most awesome and scrumptious blueberry pie with a delicate and flaky crust.
Had chicken pot pie for supper and cherry 🍒 pie 🥧 for dessert!
I’d feel more comfortable about Robin being a professor if she could spell the word….Uh I mean pronounce the word?
Given the number of so-called ‘educated’ people who still pronounce February as ‘FEB-yoo-air-ee’, nuclear as ‘NOO-que-lar’, or insist on ‘aksing’ a question, I think we can let Robin have a pass on this one.
… ouch
or maybe we can even stop considering that deviations from an arbitrary linguistic standard have anything to do with a person’s worth, intellectual or otherwise?
That’s an interesting point, but it does raise questions for a person when communicating with another and they reveal aspects denoting ignorance on a topic. Since there isn’t a clearly defined boundary, all of these things present as markers that influence an animal’s measure of others in their environment. As a result, it will cause others to hear ignorance even if it is not the intent of the speaker to broadcast it.
Do I care if my mechanic worries about nookular war or a meltdown? No, since it is not (yet) relevant to the operation of my vehicle. Do I care if the people who build and maintain nuclear power systems, and wield the keys to a nuclear holocaust understand what they are responsible for? Damn right I do.
Nah, pedantry is just pedantry. Except for all those times when it’s actually prejudice. The way I see it, linguistic value judgments are among the most pervasive and least challenged proxies for class-, race-, and gender-based discrimination.
The problem with a dumbass in a position of power is with them being a dumbass, not whether they speak in a dialect some associate with a lack of education. Indeed, many dumbasses speak perfect English. It’s just not relevant.
(….and by “perfect English” i mean an upper-class dialect, such as BBC english in the UK)
Yeah, a lot of this kind of thing is just dialect. Nothing to do with intellect or education, just growing up with different pronunciations.
Cosigned.
Resh zig glarp zib nub zoot raggle stosh.
You are very smart I’m sure
Let people pronounce things how they do, ever heard of an accent?
That’s how you’re supposed to pronounce February. The r is silent.
—By which I don’t mean pronouncing the r is wrong, but that it’s a regional dialect. Both are correct.
No, it is NOT silent … or at least it wasn’t supposed to be. But if you get enough people to say or spell something incorrectly, eventually you can get someone to go along with you when you say it’s ‘an alternative version’ or ‘a regional dialect’. Next thing you know, it’s in a dictionary somewhere (even if it’s only ‘Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English’ — or even worse, the online ‘Urban Dictionary’), and from that point it’s “Katie, bar the door”.
By the way, Willis … do we have a ‘Katie’ or a ‘Katherine’ in the cast yet? And if not, why not?
Pah, Proto-Indo-Europeans scoff at your newfangled pronunciation of “February”, which I am sure you pretend to defend using some trendy fascicule such as Webster’s Third.
Any self-respecting PIE knows it is pronounced “dʰegʷʰris”. Scoff! Scoff!
ugh, I’m being silly and probably not even getting my point across. Languages evolve is all I’m saying. It’s a perfectly normal and innocuous process (at least in hegemonic languages like english). But hey, to each their windmills, god knows i have mine (such as engaging in this sort of argument in a bloody comment thread… will i ever learn.)
I’m pretty sure the multiple pronunciations predate consistent spelling. Especially for something as old and multilingual as February.
If we’re quoting dictionaries, the silent r pronunciation is listed in Merriam-Webster first as the more common pronunciation.
Pronouncing the r is still acceptable, though, so don’t worry.
btw, I’d like to highly warmly fondly recommend an excellent book called “The Story of Ain’t” by David Skinner. It’s a delightful account of the publication of Webster’s 3rd edition in 1961. The first two editions had been heavily prescriptivist, and the 3rd edition took something of a turn towards descriptivism, and it got serious flak for it. It might sound dry or arcane, but it’s not, it’s a super fun read, as long as you’re even mildly interested in language.
Thanks. I’ll take a look.
They found the body of former Congresswoman Robin DeSanto on the ground outside the building’s teacher’s lounge. It appeared the former Congresswoman had been strangled and then defenestrated by a colleague. Fellow faculty present at the scene commented, “Yeah, that’s fair.”
Oooh, Amber! I’m more than okay with that.
More than okay with Amber. But will I be more than okay with this reroll!?!?
Actually yeah. Super okay with it! I wasn’t setup to be humbled with a Walky or anything!
Yay, Carla!
Hell yeah
New icons?
Ah barnacles.
Is it bad that I still want them to hook up?
We lost the Billie/Ruth problematic relationship, so this will make a fine substitute for our Shame Shipping.
Is Leslie still dating that one woman who’s name I forget but she only ever seemed to neg her about her appearance? Cause that could put a wrinkle in this ship. Jeez why is every woman Leslie seems to be interested in awful in some way?
Because first Willis thinks of a man. Then he takes away reason and accountability.
Alt: because they’re people.
Honestly, I read it more as Leslie having poor judgment in her dating life. Lord knows I’ve known a lot of people who kept rolling the dice on the same type and kept hoping to do better the next time.
Leslie’s always been kind of a doormat, both here and in the Walkyverse.
(I still ship her and Mindy, even though I haven’t yet found a way to combine their names into a portmanteau that isn’t awkward and clunky. Then again, that tracks…)
“Lindy”.
*facepalm*
Of course! It’s so simple it might just work! (It also opens up opportunities for “hurr durr do the Lindy” jokes!)
Only problem is that Lindy is a real name (although not seen, i think, in DoA).
Lendy? Lesdy? Minslie? Or just not worry about the mangling of names and ship the S.S. LeslieMindy out of the Isle of Lesbos.
MindyBean?
You’re not seriously accusing Willis of misogyny, are you?
There is a man without reason and accountability in this strip – Walky.
Women with reason and accountability include Dorothy, Sarah, Dina, and sometimes Becky.
With accountability (and sometimes reason): Amber / AmaziGirl.
With reason (and sometimes accountability: Carla.
I’m sure I could list more, but I don’t think more are necessary.
I’m pretty sure it was a reference to the movie “As Good as It Gets”; the antisocial author Melvin Udall was being asked how he wrote women so well, and in an effort to cut the questioning short, responded in an intentionally obnoxious and insulting manner.
Yep. In hindsight I’m happier with “because they’re people,” but then, I am one, which was my first mistake.
There were options?
To be or not to be.
My understanding is that Leslie’s attracted to confident and assertive women… but also to arrogant people who lack empathy because she struggles to recognise the difference.
That’s … fair. And probably accurate.
To quote Leslie from another universe “My weakness is messed up lesbian relationships…in fiction.” It’s been one of her character traits the whole time. She has to have some flaws, right?
Anna. her friend was Mindy so it was sort of an indiana joke but with an m thrown in
It’s been well established in both this universe and Shortpacked! that Leslie just has absolutely garbage taste in women
I think Leslie/Robin might actually be *worse* than Billie/Ruth, yet I love it more
I mean, Shortpacked had Robin eventually growing up, being happily married to Leslie, and the two of them raising children. So we know that in some contexts the two can work.
But that required many years of character development, and with the speed at which time passes in this strip I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Real question though. Was Robin as bad in Shortpacked as she is now in DoA cause I can’t imagine that scenario ever happening.
I would say…no, she wasn’t as bad in Shortpacked!. A total diasaster of a person, yes, but she had never supported anti-LGBTQ legislation, or any of the other rotten things she has to have voted for as a conservative Congressional representative
She’s like a crazy whirlwind that things just sorta happen to. It’s like if being a drama hurricane were a good thing. Also the de facto protagonist for a good while! Honestly shortpacked! is a good binge even if you have only basic knowledge of superheroes / retail. It’s almost a learning experience!
Can vouch, this version of Robin is way worse. And not just because she doesn’t go into a hyperspeed fugue state after eating Cadbury Egg Cereal.
Honestly, kinda better, kinda worse? She did some pretty horrible things in Shortpacked!, but there’s a lot more leeway in a cartoony world like that. A lot of the time things snapped back to the status quo at the end of a story arc and everything was fine again.
No bigoted legislation though! Just… uh… Star Wars necrophilia voters. And sombreros.
Robin in Shortpacked was silly and often didn’t think about the consequences of her actions until later, but she was definitely way better than this DoA version of her. And it helps that the world in Shortpacked was more zany and silly anyway.
My favorite relationship in the Walkyverse, edging out Amber/Mike by a smidgen
so your yardstick is “most fudged up”?
You are not wrong.
(I mostly have better taste in DoA. Becky/Dina is realistically imperfect but healthy, and Joyce/Joe could be healthy. I guess Robin/Leslie is the holdover.)
God i miss them. I still want a strip about them raising Donna
I don’t think that one’s lost forever, necessarily. I’ve currently got a theory about post-skip Jennifer that I’m really hoping turns out to be true, though I don’t expect to find out for another year or so.
All I’ll say is that it was partially inspired by reading this author commentary on Billie’s first appearance in Roomies! and partially by this DoA strip.
Also this and this.
Reading both things you linked has given me zero idea how that could possibly be tied into billifer’s current arc. Please, would you mind elaborating on your theory?
You’re shipping Jennifer with her previous persona?
That was my conclusion as well.
Okay, so I’m several weeks late on this and I might repost this later on when it’s more relevant and people will actually see it but here’s the gist of my theory for those who asked:
Apart from alcohol, Jennifer/Billie’s primary struggle over the course of the strip has been with her own identity. She has a tendency to deny aspects of herself that don’t fit with whatever image she wants to project to people at any given moment. Sometimes it’s over relatively minor stuff, like her secret love of Star Wars not fitting with the Head Cheerleader/Alpha Bongo persona she wanted to project last season. But more often, it’s over things that are a lot more fundamental to who she is. Since the time skip, she’s been insisting that her attraction to women (she’s only mentioned Ruth by name, but there was also Alice before her) was merely a phase that she was going through and is now out of. Even while she was dating Ruth, her response to Becky saying she was her “first queer role model” was “I’m not– I mean, everyone thinks about girls, like, eventually. I’m not different.” Likewise, she claimed to both Ruth and Howard that bisexuality “only exists in porn.”
When she’s trying to prove that some aspect of herself that she’s previously let slip isn’t really a part of her, she goes above and beyond. In this case, it isn’t enough for her to not be in a relationship with a woman, she has to be in a relationship with a man, and she has to make this fact known to people like Ruth and Becky, who both associate her with that particular trait. As per usual, her denial isn’t actually fooling anybody who knows her, and she knows that it isn’t. She isn’t really doing it for them, she’s trying to convince herself. And as part of that self-denial, she tends to push away the people who know her too well to fall for it, like she did with Walky all through high school and is doing with Ruth now. Out of sight, out of mind.
So with that in mind, what part of her identity is she struggling with that led her to stop using the nickname she’s used since she was a child? What is she trying to convince herself of? For some people, doing this would just be trying to appear grown-up, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. “Billie” is gender-neutral, maybe even leaning a bit towards masculine if it’s spelled with a “y”— the difference in spoken conversation is non-existent. Hell, according to Willis, the very first mention of Billie in their pre-Roomies text stories was as an anecdote Walky told another character “to prove some dumb point about girls with names that sound like boy names.” “Jennifer,” on the other hand, is pretty unambiguously feminine as a name.
To me, all of this adds up to the idea that Jennifer is trying to convince herself that she is… well, female. Which, given Jennifer’s long and well-documented history of denial, makes me think that at some point she began to realize that she isn’t… and then backed the hell away from that train of thought because she’s “normal,” dammit! Oh sure, there’s nothing wrong with being trans, but it’s not “normal!” Which she totally is! The second thing! Not the first one! It’s a thing other people are, not her! She’s not different! See, she’s using her birth name now and everything! And she sure as hell doesn’t like girls, no, that’s a thing guys do, not “normal” girls! She just wants to be “normal”… and because of all her internalized hetero- and cisnormativity, she can’t truly accept herself as such.
Note: I don’t really know how to handle pronouns when you’re talking about a fictional character that you think may be trans, so I’m erring on the side of using the name and pronouns she currently prefers. I appreciate feedback on this front.
Nah supporting worrisome ships is pretty consistent around here.
Is Becky going to intervene here too?
Yes, two fictional people bumping naughty bits must always be held to the highest of moral standards or you’re a terrible person. /s
Nah, ship whatever the fuck you want.
If you find yourself encouraging a similarly unhealthy relationship IRL, that might be a problem but if you’re in a situation similar to THIS, you might wanna double check if you’re living in a Willis comic.
* No female dogs. check
* Nothing important happens on a Tuesday. check
* La Porte spelled with a space. check
Damn you Willis!
I am not sure if Leslie is still dating the dentist who kind of was unpleasant but maybe she isn’t off panelist? But her dating Robin would be a step down until Robin some how redeems herself like she did in Shortpacked tbh I don’t see that happening right now.
A comic where Robin describes her behavior as “unlawful” but somehow still does not seem to admit she has done anything wrong
I mean there’s plenty of situations where what is lawful and what is moral are not the same.
This isn’t one of those, but still
i meaaaan… staying at Leslie’s was not super unlawful? Like, Leslie was maybe ambivalent about it, certainly not “gtfo or i call the cops”.
and wrong? i mean… not very? was it? she was shirking her responsibilities as a conservative congresswoman, but that doesn’t sound wrong to me, i’m in favour of laziness in protofascists.
on a side note, let’s see if i got this gravatar thing right? *holds breath*
yayyyy
She did bring the paparazzi down on Leslie, though, and her continued squatting kept them RIGHT THERE. That was clearly a pretty unpleasant experience for Leslie, who did not want the attention.
The way Leslie and Anna’s date fell apart because Anna’s romanticization of the Robin thing reminded Leslie of herself circa two weeks ago also seems relevant in ‘assessing what Leslie felt about it all once it was over.’
Mindy, anna is the other one who negs
Right, thanks! Honestly neither makes enough of a longterm impression to remember who’s who.
Breaking and entering is still unlawful, even if you hesitate to call the cops on a Congresswoman.
…ok, maybe i was romanticizing it a little.
point taken. =P
…wait was this another 4th wall thing?! mindblown.gif
A Leslie/Anna/Robin love triangle would be the rare event where I am voting for no one to hook up.
*plays Spin Doctors’ “Cleopatra’s Cat” on the hacked Muzak*
No! Romanticize it mooooore!
“Can we not romanticize these things?”
No. No we can’t not.
Which is slightly bugging me, considering what this Robin has done in her political career. How many people are dead because of the anti-LGBT legislation she supported? At the same time, though, there’s major story potential to be mined in Robin, usually the silliest person in either universe, actually having to come face to face with the serious consequences (yeah yeah I know, take a shot) of what she did in a more realistic universe.
Yeah it’s hard not to shake the fact that Robin gets to continue as-is thanks to being a Shortpacked! holdover.
She’s incongruous to DoA the same way Mike was (moreso in fact) and hopefully with the same chances of getting yeeted off a balcony.
Personally, I don’t want her to die, but I definitely want to see the full extent to which she’s hurt people actually sink in.
Mike did that and then he died.
Maybe we can go two for two.
I’d prefer at least one of them to have an actual arc after recognition rather than the redemption equals death (so they never have to really reckon with it, and now Mike still has a hook in his former victims. Especially for a former Congresswoman, which would be a big old national mess.)
But yeah, at the moment Robin’s been passing her actions off when confronted with things like ‘well, (that anti-LGBT bill) didn’t pass.’ She got a taste of realization, when supporters dumped her for being queer and then her staff dumped her for taking the accusation of a sexual assaulter among her interns seriously, about just who she’d been allying herself with for power. I suspect she’s realized she doesn’t like them much – it’s pretty noticeable that the next person she attached herself to was Becky. (Since the timescale means it’s not super-feasible to do the current ‘Republicans who recognized after the insurrection that their party had been going fascist for a while’ thing – Robin would have had to be allying herself with the barely-veiled ones for her first run in like a year or two, tops.) But she still doesn’t get that her new, BETTER allies (who she wants to be friends with) don’t trust her for more than a paycheck because of her past actions, and she REALLY doesn’t get WHY. After all, Becky’s not homeless because of her! She got tuition, even! Even if Robin didn’t back the platform Becky ran for her, that’s not going to affect BECKY, right?
I think Robin could be very interesting being forced to realize and acknowledge that her actions impact people outside her orbit, and those people really do matter. I think right now she assumes that they’ll be all right, something will come through like she did for Becky, and that her actions don’t contribute to the culture at large if bills don’t pass. If she’s okay, why does it matter? Why does Leslie or Becky care about homeless teenagers? They’re fine, personally.
Depends on if Willis wants to or not, but there could be some catharsis in ‘politician realizes you should care about other people.’
I just kind of think of Robin as a sleazy conservative politician for years now the same way I do cop fiction: Yeah it’s nice to have a big story where the character breaks free and learns a lesson, but how much bullshit did they actively partake in on the way to their character development finishing?
Reasonable. Honestly I’d require ‘several years of Robin arcs that are steady clue-by-fours of This Is What You Caused’ before I even considered Robin on an actual redemption arc, and that would likely get old and miserable to watch in a strip-a-day format.
I loved where she ended up in Shortpacked, but this Robin will never manage to be that one. She already tipped the scales too far. I just don’t want another ‘we have conflicted feeings about the Dead Asshole because they realized they were an asshole before they died.’ I’m already frustrated Ethan and Amber are likely never going to get to realize ‘hey, Mike fucking sucked!’
The legislation we know of didn’t pass, but as Joyce said, what kind of defence is that?
Attempted murder may have a lesser sentence but it doesn’t mean your hands are clean after all.
Honestly even though it didn’t pass: she will have helped contribute to making such views be seen as remotely legitimate. There will definitely be awful parents or other family members/coworkers/teachers/fellow students of LGBTQ+ people who felt vindicated at the time to be even more awful than usual. After all there’s literally debates over whether their lives are even worthwhile to begin with. Even if it didn’t pass they have enough support to be even taken seriously rather than thrown out and burned and those proposing it got to keep their jobs. Robin left of her own accord and even before that she was only in diffs because she was thought to be one of them for a while.
Fact is if she was real she’s definitely would helped kill people just from supporting it even if it never passed. Just as every Congress person or any other individual supporting it holds a level of responsibility for what they’ve done. Helping one gay girl isn’t really enough to start setting things right. But maybe if she’s not only being a weirdo stalker to Leslie that’s why she thought about teaching: the kids will fix some of the damage she’s wrought for her. It won’t take back the people she’s already killed, but it’ll stop as many future deaths hopefully.
It’ll take a long time before she even breaks neutral in terms of her karma lbr. But some teaching gigs end up almost life long after all.
Romanticizing problems in fiction is a safe place to explore things we’d never want anywhere near us in life. It’s no different from hunting dragons in D&D.
Or romancing dragons in D&D
I mean….we can’t really call it unrealistic, because clearly someone slept with the rabidly anti-gay politicians that were outed as gay.
I was about to say she did experience consequences, what with her political career ruined and all, but then I remembered that those consequences were for good things, like when she took sexual harassment seriously. And… well, I guess her stalky weird thing with Leslie wasn’t GOOD, but the thing that got her in trouble was just liking girls
Well, the consequences were the result of her character growth clashing with her job requirements.
Er… in the most realistic universe I know, Congresswomen/men seldom have to face any consequence of their acts. And some of them are sillier than former Congresswoman DeSanto, and they’re not even funny!
So, for this storyline, I’m here for Robin’s balloon to pop. It’s just wishful thinking isn’t it?
nope.
Her attraction to Leslie cost her everything.
She had the opportunity to take it back and refused, both guaranteeing a Democrat in office and placing a high progressive burden of expectations.
Now shes remade herself in way Leslie can respect.
The truth is Robin is in EVERY WAY a better person than when Leslie fawned over her and taken actions to redeem herself.
Leslie knew who she was when when she crushed on her.
Good point! Hadn’t thought of that! ^^
Unlawfully squatted? I hope she at least used the toilet.
… I mean, I 95% assume she did, but it’s Robin.
Robin is witty, even if she’s not always wise. Okay, quite rarely wise.
Still, different skillsets.
Willis, I see you moved the wordless panel around
Okay, but more Vivian?
She’s smart enough to nope out from the drama, much as I would like for her to stick around.
She does have a major role in the spinoff, Smarting of Age, though.
A Vivian and Asma comic, then? I’m up for it.
I’d like to see more of her too, hopefully when there’s not Leslie and Robin drama for her to avoid.
I hate Robin so goddamn much
Same, though my frothing incoherent rambling raging seeing Robin again did kind of put it together for me that in a cast of like 30 named and important characters who can take center stage of a series of strips, I only hate three and a half of them.
I don’t think anyone’s really been dropped by this point either. Except Mike, who was indeed dropped.
Who are the other two and a half, out of curiosity?
Walky, Dorothy, and half of Becky.
The first two because they’re boring. They have maybe five moments apiece where they do something other than “wacky dipshit” and “responsible and kind.” It’s not even that those are bad traits, it’s that they are *all* these two do and it’s impossible to care about a character when you already know how they’re going to act not only in a current strip, but like the next ten. Walky’s probably building up to something with his grief over Mike that could be interesting, but once it’s done I know how he’ll act afterwards so who cares?
One half of Becky just kind of taps into that Shortpacked! Robin energy of being this really loud obnoxious goofball, only we still have Robin here and she sucks and Becky takes it one step further by never suffering the slightest consequence for anything she does. She bullies Dorothy for years only for her to be completely defused with a little spiel of “we’re your friend” and now she just completely got away with being an inexcusably awful person to Jennifer and Ruth by outing them in class, and the only thing anyone had to say was Leslie praising her for being devious. So now she’s this master social manipulator who constantly acts like a loud dumb prick and no one in the comic is seemingly allowed to hold accountable for anything she ever does because she’s had a rough go of it.
Then the other half of Becky is spending time with Dina, and those two are the single best romance in the comic where they effortlessly dodge all the most ingrained rules of relationship drama by being effortless supportive and loving of each other, and after “Becky still has Joyce feels” fizzled out we’ve got another drama bomb brewing in Becky’s paradoxical viewpoints on her own perception as a sexual being, where she’s openly thirsty for Dina but Dina’s grey ace and doesn’t respond in the same overly enthusiastic manner, so now Becky’s floundering around thinking she’ll never be happy because of some inherent flaw on her part that she doesn’t know how to talk about and it’s really interesting to see it happen even if I know that the two can work it out because they haven’t been inundated with relationship drama to the point where I wonder why they even bother. They just love and think the world of each other, and that’s rad. Normalize healthy interesting relationships in fiction.
Can’t argue with the elbow patches.
There’s a bit of truth to that last statement though. Robin was in that house for barely more than a day and a half.
I can’t lie, that last panel made me simultaneously smile and drop my head down in resignation.
I don’t even know what I’m resigning myself to, but that was definitely the feeling I got.
Well played, sir, for making me be happy to preemptively give up to whatever you’re planning.
Leslie, I’m really shocked that you expected Robin to remember anything that wasn’t about herself or her narrow and immediate interests!
I think Vivian has the right idea. Best to just ignore Robin and leave.
I think I’ve said this before but it’s worth repeating:
I just Love Robin So Much <3
“Now look here, if I call a college and say I’ve got a woman who wants to be a professor, the first thing they ask isn’t going to be Does she have her own elbow patches?”
I know it breaks the rules but DoA Book 11: Can We Not Romanticize These Things? would be so great!
a perfesser
I can’t understand if Fobing is lying or not. But Leslie is starting to be angry.
…I would never have thought that Robin would actually admit to that.
Seriously, Leslie. That was a dark time in the greatest political science professor’s life.
Also, I love Robin, y’all just haters. Go drink that haterade some more, haters.
(Do I love Robin mostly out of vicious contrarian spite? That’s not material.)
She’s not the greatest person, but definitely an entertaining character
Honestly, yeah, this is pretty much it
It suddenly makes sense why Robin was so keen to teach here.
No no no. Keener is here to learn, DeSantoes are here to learn AND to teach.
That last panel is the kind of DOA Robin I find funniest. When she’s being both smart and technically correct and very dumb and obnoxious at the same time.
She’s a multifaceted character, that Robin DeSanto. Just hella fulla facets.
So she still do got the feels for Leslie. This will go badly. I only say this because it’s Willis, not because it realistically would. It only realistically might.
Rising Urge to chase Robin out of the Uni by throwing hardback copies of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at her
Robin should begin a wacky campaign against Leslie as part of their romance. Unwittingly getting her fired and losing her house!
i just binged this whole thing in the last two days… i was not ready to catch up. i was not ready for a lot of things. thank you willis for making something I needed to see.
First Panel reminds me of another Webcomic. just saying “Roddy! what are you doing here?”