The Dumbing of Age Book 10 Kickstarter is live!
This book will collect “Year Ten,” spanning the four storylines that start on August 18, 2019, and complete on September 9, 2020. This includes new commentary, behind-the-scenes artwork, and new character designs into an 236-page tome with luxurious glossy paper all bound up into a sturdy presentation. Our biggest book yet! And there will be a foreword by Seanan McGuire!
The book is titled Renounce Magical Thinking and Embrace Empirical Evidence, and it’s the culmination of a full decade of Dumbing of Age stories! This is the big one! With kidnappings and van chases! The Ending With A Huge Timeskip one!
4 days to go!
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“I was disappointed when it didn’t allow me to fly, however. Fo’ rizzle.”
My philosophy is that anything will fly if you launch it hard enough.
There’s a knack. The knack is in throwing yourself at the ground and missing.
Aye, it is the second part, the missing, that presents difficulties.
Right up there with one of Taylor’s maxims: Everything is air-droppable at least once.
The whole time this is going on, Roz’s brain is just making a constant “EEEEEEEEE” noise, like an old TV test pattern.
yesterday, Doctor_Who wrote “This bowtie? A bat than randomly decided to land on my collar. Shhh, it’s sleeping.”
Missed that one, didn’t you?
And I’m calling it now … since she is not wearing a carnation or anything in her lapel, she has a second squeeze bladder that causes a stream of water to shoot out of the center of the knot.
The test tone you typically associate with color bars is just a 1kHz sine wave. Try it in Audacity!
I mean she isn’t wrong.
I know, right? If 2020 taught us anything, it was this.
Cannot relate personally. I don’t want to be ruled. period.
On the other hand, we had a topless Vladimir Putin riding a horse. Wich led to Ride on Kings.
I can’t tell if this is going better or worse than expected.
Yes.
Huh, this is the second time this week I’ve been tempted to buy stereotypical comedy props
Definitely DONT have amazon open in another tab *sweats nervously*
Yeah, forget Amazon–buy direct from Taiwan.
Alibaba? What’s the Alibaba of Taiwan? Also, what’s it tell me that “Made in Taiwan” seems to be a mark of quality above that of “Made in China”?
Russian components, American components, ALL MADE IN TAIWAN!
Dooo it. Think of the comedic power you’d weild with a hand buzzer and a flower that squirts water!
You could rule this land!
“Sir, our system just reported a purchase with an 85% match to The Joker’s purchase history.”
“Dammit. Better CC the Batcave with the purchase info.”
Imagine respecting persons of authority when society doesn’t force you to.
Teach your class all the reasons they don’t need to respect you, but then build up respect by spitting straight facts?
Robin is smarter than we give her credit for.
She’d pretty much have to be.
I think she masks her “holy crap what do I do whatdoido” with wackiness, like Becky does with her sadness.
Woahwoahwoah, you save that lesson for the second year students, Robin! Like, three quarters of these students aren’t seriously going to go into political science, and you’re just completely disillusioning them! Do you want them to be bitter, broken shells that grimace every time someone calls Paul Ryan a wonk?
Im gonna say, yes?
Obligatory xkcd. Quoth he: “In a cavern deep below the Earth, Ayn Rand, Paul Ryan, Rand Paul, Ann Druyan, Paul Rudd, Alan Alda, and Duran Duran meet together in the Secret Council of /(b[plurandy]+b ?){2}/i.”
Best to discourage them early.
I refuse to believe anyone respected Robin as an authority
Except Becky
Becky didn’t really respect her so much as they were in a position to mutually benefit each other, and even then, she probably only really full-on respected her when she bowed out of the race.
benefit, exploit…
I just realized something.
Considering how new technologies (like smartphones and game consoles) are added to this comic as they are invented, and how decompressed the storytelling is, we may very well reach a point where several decades worth of world-changing technologies are stuffed into a single year!
Like spinny bow ties!
ah, Nutty Professor-style
Considering the position she is in she has a point about, but is she suggesting she can somehow teach them to fail upwards?
Nah. She’s saying she’ll pick a golden student and that one will fail upwards.
The other 99% will not learn this neat trick.
Becky’s not in her class, is she?
wtfomgroflcopter. How could i forget that detail. oi.
I kinda love how depressingly accurate Robin’s nihilistic assessment of politics is. I’m wondering if we’ll get some kind of bizarre heart-to-heart between her and Dorothy, since she’s the most politics-oriented of the main cast.
I really want this to happen.
Loving Robin’s expressions in this strip.
She’s definitely not wrong. Boorish fascists get MUCH more pushback than the mundane evil that just gets casually accepted in politics.
Boorish, insulting tweets: How unpresidential! Very bad, much decline of American prestige!
Casually bombing innocent civilians: Slip in a mention just before the human interest segment on the 11:30 news, or whatever. Nobody cares.
Or, see how quickly “kids in cages” became “migrant youths in detention centers.”
And I say this as someone who absolutely *loathes* Trump.
It’s unbelievably depressing that the current political situation still somehow manages to be the lesser evil.
Yes! This!
Is it because there is an near-effective majority across all legislative branches, or because despite being included in drafting bills, the minority is flatly voting “no” to everything “because reasons”.
Or is it that they are all behaving worse than preschoolers fighting over who gets the big shovel in the sand-box? (there are 5 shovels, all the same size)
And mea culpa, that isn’t a fair comparison to preschoolers.
Yeah, but the red one looks bigger. All about optics, amirite?
oh, I thought red wunz go faster
Because we have one party that has essentially given up on democracy as a concept or even on basic competence in making government function and instead runs completely on “owning the libs” and obstruction, knowing that any failure will be blamed on the party in power or on politicians in general, giving them the chance to get back into power, steal more and break more stuff, only to repeat the process again.
Assuming they don’t manage to seize control completely – see the “giving up on democracy” part.
It annoys me how many people were apparently more bothered by the boorish insulting tweets than all the other terrible stuff, and now that we have a new president doing a lot of the same stuff but without the mean tweets, they just don’t care.
The fun fact is , people say that but….
What proof do they have?
Media Reports which people always claim is false when the people are in charge they dont like?
Lessons from Proffessors who have there own political view and project that in there lessons?
Hearsay from other people that have heard from other peoples?
or Tweets ytube videos from groups that have a general agenda towards one side or the other?
I find it really hard these days to believe anything , just because people say it is so.
I don’t think people don’t care. I think at this point most Americans are just exhausted. The world was a dumpster fire and even getting the tiniest amount of surface change was difficult to say the least. The world is still very much a raging dumpster fire. I think when you are fighting for change and are prepared to see it change by inches only to have it change by millimeters, it’s all some people can do to not just give up.
We’ve been bombing civilians in the middle east for 20 years, half (or more) of an entire generational cohort’s lives. The conflict there has lasted longer than the Vietnam War. Even the cheers of the boot-licking ‘blind patriots’ faded years ago. Now we’re stuck propping the region up forever, lest we leave a power vacuum.
How would we not be exhausted at this point?
Meanwhile, Biden is removing all troops from Afghanistan, but we’ll still keep blaming him for the wars. We’ll also ignore Trump loosening the rules of engagement and pardoning war criminals we’ve convicted in favor of at best both-siderism if not out claims that Democrats are the war-mongerers.
Pulling out of Afghanistan is a good thing that should’ve happened a long time ago. I’m glad Biden’s finally getting it done. I just hope we’re leaving behind a stable government that won’t immediately fall to insurgency. (We came uncomfortably close to that almost happening at home.)
We aren’t.
Not even close.
Fack.
It’s also “annoying” when people don’t understand government and politics well enough to have any idea what the president can change on a dime and what what they can’t. Or to do more than a superficial comparison before writing them off as basically the same.
Take the “kids in cages”. Each of the last 3 administrations had that problem. That wasn’t what was unique about Trump, nor was it just that he was boorish about it. Trump’s policy of arresting and detaining all border crossers and separating any children from them since they were “criminals” was the real problem there. He deliberately isolated and caged more kids that both Biden and Obama would have left with their families and released pending asylum hearings.
First Obama and now Biden are responding to increased in children crossing the border alone. As minors, those kids can’t simply be released on their own. A family member or some sponsor needs to be found and they need to be somewhere while that happens. With the better facilities full, they’ve been pushed into the originally temporary “cages”. They’re supposed to be released from CBP custody to HHS within 72 hours, but HHS was overwhelmed themselves and wasn’t to accept them fast enough.
“What do you MEAN it takes more than 100 days for the system to pivot? Inertia is irrelevant! It’s not like the system was completely hosed for years beforehand or anything. I bet [fringe candidate with no hope of winning the general election] could have done it in a week if they hadn’t kept them down!”
/s
Things seem to have turned on a dime regarding covid and the US. And if the predecessor wants to dispute the claim that they did not have a roll-out plan, all they have to do is release it. (I didn’t vote for either of them. Don’t live there. I have no oar in this water.)
Oh I agree things undoubtedly took a turn for the better, but the people who think things are now worse (or aren’t getting good enough fast enough) will just move the goalposts to some other thing that hasn’t been cleaned up yet and “oh yeah well wuh’bout” their way out of admitting it.
Don’t forget the “migrant caravan” that appears every election season but somehow evaporates around Halloween.
And honestly, the “boorish insulting tweets” matter. The bully pulpit is one of the biggest tools the President has and Trump’s use of it encouraged open expression of racism and political violence and was certainly a big factor in the increase in hate crimes over the last 5 years. Culminating, so far, in the attack on the Capitol.
*plays “Send In The Clowns” on the hacked Muzak*
Why am I hearing Rammstein cover Send in the Clowns?
EVERYONE looks good in a suit. Rubio’s not especially fancy looking.
Maybe Robin accidentally revealed a bit of her personal tastes here. To me Rubio looks live a very average white dude, but to each their own.
Trump looked terrible in a suit, but at least part of that was that his suits were deliberately badly fit for some reason. There were articles written on it during his first run.
My money is on “His tailot, like everybody else with a lick of decency, hated him.”
Quite possible. It’s also likely that Trump’s delusions led him to demand suits that didn’t fit him well. If he was lying to the tailor about his size and refusing to be properly measured?
You both have my vote. Which is to say, his tailor hated him because his delisions and demands and refusing proper measurements.
My personal hypothesis is that Trump’s tailors never got paid, so the word was out about him, obliging him to buy his suits off the rack.
NGL, I’ve never seen him without one, so I can’t really say whether he looked better or worse in one. You’re right though, fit helps.
Not Boris Johnson who actively tries to look sloppy acts like a buffoon in order to try disarm people to the fact that he is a posh prick.
Fair enough, but that’s deliberate. 😛
I’m not sure if I’m having a tougher time believing that those kind of bow tie devices actually exist or that anyone actually had any respect for Marco Rubio in the first place.
It exists whether you believe or not.
https://www.walmart.com/ip/SPINNING-BOW-TIE/192659000?wmlspartner=wlpa&selectedSellerId=890&&adid=22222222227000000000&wl0=&wl1=g&wl2=c&wl3=42423897272&wl4=pla-51320962143&wl5=1026419&wl6=&wl7=&wl8=&wl9=pla&wl10=112561769&wl11=online&wl12=192659000&veh=sem&gclid=Cj0KCQjw4ImEBhDFARIsAGOTMj9OrZJsVhWPHhVAh32_e6CZLDEcm-_KN6PqyYBCLpV3KomyeKFOtnQaAnuNEALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds
Woah, that’s a long URL.
Long URLs still work if you cut off right before the question mark. The rest is just information how you got there.
Depends on how the backend software works. A url of
//somestore.com/showproduct?id=4738383 will fail if the query doesn’t include the id parameter. The rest of the above likely includes some referer or advertiser tracking references, but also may have information about when it was indexed, product version and other weird crap and operation details that backends shouldn’t be exposing to the user but often do.
my guess is the wl parameters are walmarts, and the selectedsellerid, adid and gclid are the advertisers and google’s click tracking. But that’s armchair spitballing.
Disclosure: i am still in bed and don’t own an armchair.
Roz is in the class? I guess she had no idea her sister would be the teacher?
Wait, isn’t there some kind of policy against students being family members?
This is there second class. She knew. The surprise is that she stayed in the class after her reaction the first time and having Robin blatantly pretend she was a stranger and pretty much gaslight her. I would’ve dropped. Roz is stronger than most.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-11/02-look-straight-ahead/questions/
Can you explain how she’s gaslighting? Gaslighting is specifically about making someone question their perception of reality, and I’m not seeing that here
It feels like a gaslight to me because she’s purposefully not acknowledging Roz’s existence as her sister instead calling her a “random student”. Disregarding the fact they’ve been siblings for years. Like how do you imagine Roz would feel in that moment? Discovering her sister who she despises is her teacher, and is also pretending to not be her sister? But maybe that’s a stretch. I admit I couldn’t figure out on the spot a better term for what Robin was doing “teasing” or “taunting” seems a little more innocent than I feel that interaction deserves. “Purposefully triggering”? I’m open to suggestions.
Robin is supposed to maintain at least a veneer of professional distance, otherwise any of the other students in the class can credibly accuse her of nepotism.
Remember that episode of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air where Aunt Viv teaches Carlton and Will’s class the history of the civil rights movement?
Pretending you don’t know your sister isn’t “a veneer of professional distance”.
Supposed to. We know they don’t really get along, so I bet Robin would’ve cited that norm to justify being a jerk.
I’d almost believe that if Robin didn’t immediately acknowledge and give Becky preferential treatment in that same segment while also saying conflicts of interest and norms don’t matter if no one enforces them. And then she gave Becky an automatic A in front of the class.
Maybe she just likes Becky more than Roz.
Another lesson in politics!
Needling?
Well, I mean, maybe some of the students were wondering if they’d had a psychotic break the minute they saw Robin walk in and start talking like she was going to teach the class.
Actually, a point to consider about gaslighting – having been subject to it, a lot, and being aware that it really doesn’t matter when having to untangle the mess – is the intent of the speaker to cause self doubt in the listener, or is the speaker just a liar who simply doesn’t care about the truth if their argument sounds good and they can get away with it? Something tells me that it’s almost more of a compulsive behaviour than an educated well thought out attack. (like watching the previous administration make up shit on the fly to see what sticks)
I think that Roz is now in the ‘staring at the freeway pile-up’ mind-space where she can’t stay away because she needs to see just what an utter fiasco Robin is going to make of things.
Besides, she kind of wants to graduate the course and can’t be bothered to transfer to another school to do so.
She’s in gender studies not politics, though this still might be a required class. I’m not sure.
No one knew until they walked into the first class with her
So Image, and the image you project, *does* have a lot to do with Politics and getting people to vote for you.
It’s how Rubio get’s by with his Christian Scripture quoting whenever he want’s to make a insipid stand on something.
Conversely this can also negatively affect one’s campaign.
If you showed up in Jorts and a Tank Top to a Political Debate. . .no one is ever going to take you seriously again. And not just for the horrible clash of attire.
So yeah this is actually a pretty dope lesson that Robin is teaching here.
I’m just curious where she’s going with it and if she can pull it off effectively.
I don’t know, I’ve seen some presidents with a tremendous popular attire, or even a disastreos outfit, and their followers just cheering him like: ‘wow, this guy is a people like us’.
But good point by the way.
Yeah, it’s true as a general rule, but then of course it bends, sometimes very far, depending on previously-held opinions. And not just for the actual clothing, appearance in general.
See “tan suit gate”, Angela Merkel’s armpit sweat stains, Nicolas Sarkozy’s heels… Yu can make ascandal out of anything if you put your mind to it!
Second six?
Right after the first five.
I guess I’m just gonna assume that Robin’s lessons manage to include multiple 6 second adverts and that was what that was about.
and thus we now know what all failed clown college hopefuls do when their dreams are crushed
they become politicians
What’s wrong with clip on ties? I refuse to wear anything else, on the rare occasions I’m forced to wear a tie.
When my father worked for IBM, he was *required* to wear a clip-on tie, so that when he was working on rotating machinery it wouldn’t suck in his face if it got tangled up. The tie that is, not his face.
Also short sleeved white shirts, same reason.
I would think sleeves would be more about them getting obviously dirty and or snagging and tearing than actually posing a risk. See counter example of full jump-suits for mechanics and machinists working.
Clip-on ties are are a safety neccesity in many professions. Paramedics whose uniform includes ties, must be clip on so if you get a disturbed person they can’t choke you.
Bring back clip-on collars!
On the flipside, Australian politicians try to earn respect by wearing akubras and hi-vis vests. Drongos haven’t lifted a shovel their whole life and think they can waltz onto a building site and do a couple of squats and be respected. . You gotta EARN the hi-vis. *grumblesintradie*
Suits do the same thing at a groundbreaking. Plop on a hard hat, put on a hi-vis vest over your suit, turn over one (gold or chrome plated) shovel-full of the dirt that’s been prepared for you, mug for a few photos, lose the blue-collar accessories, and scurry back into the office trailer or SUV before someone sees you sweat.
Please sort me out if I’m wrong Bogeywoman, but for the rest of us, Akubras are the coke of the classic Australian hat. Or did the company take their name from the drink, like RC Cola?
I’m gonna take a guess that her shoes are light-up Heelys.
Do they still make those?
Yes, surprisingly.
Don’t worry, Robin. If your bow tie isn’t enough to let you gaslight the education establishment into keeping this job, it is at least demonstrably enough to let you gaslight your way into a bartending job.
….. oh crap I just imagined Robin as a bartender.
“gaslight” isn’t synonymous with trick/scam/decieve/etc, it’s very specifically about making people doubt their ability to interpret reality, so they don’t believe their own experiences and trust you to tell them what the reality is. Telling someone “you have such a bad memory, you must be remembering this event wrong, just trust my memory of it instead” is gaslighting. Dressing up as a professor so people treat you as one, is just regular deception
While that’s the effect of it, gaslighter’s are not necessarily so on the nose as to say, “you need to doubt your reality.” Gaslighters can just be so contrary and lie with such comfort and confidence that it makes you question if you are remembering wrong. i.e. They may tell you you are wrong or just disagree, but they WILL lie about what happened. It just doesn’t require them to tell you your brain is faulty.
Lying about something both people were present for is sufficient. Just a lie in and of itself is not. But a large enough body of lies being thrown at you everyday will have the same effect. A good example of more subtle gas-lighting is having a disagreement about something, then later they get angry and say, “you said you’d do this thing.” It’ll fuck with your head cause you’ll remember having the argument, but not necessarily enough details to confidently dispute your agreement.
No people do mind being ruled by monsters but I’d those monsters are able to satisfy a core group of suppoeters that keep them in power then they rule.
Also I hate typing on phone corrections are *if and *supporters
People don’t care if their rulers are fancy and rulers don’t have to be fancy they just need a base of support that will get them into power.
Trump had the speech and elegance of a Elephant on Valium and looked like a tangarine left out in the sun yet he got elected.
I don’t want to summarize sectorate theory so here is the Wikipedia article
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selectorate_theory#:~:text=The%20selectorate%20theory%20is%20a,survival%20strategies%20and%20economic%20realities.&text=The%20theory%20is%20known%20for,coalitions%20within%20the%20total%20population
nice article, by the way
Here I am, working a lame job like a chump, when I could be faking my way into a university teaching gig.
Unless you have T.A.’s to dump your marking on, it’s not much of a gig. Robin may have found the cherry.
Sarah has to learn that there are not such things like “Person of authority”.
Robin really is nailing how completely fucked our political system is.
Sad to see that Robin’s lesson is not getting through. Happy to see Sarah, as always.
being anal about someone’s bowtie, really ?
Bowties are cool.
Most of the time.
Now that Tucker Carlson has given them up, the rehabilitation of the bow tie can begin.
Sarah, you had any respect left for Robin as an authority by this point?
Then again, all of us have had the benefit of reading the entire comic.
TBF, she was a bona fide senator. If that’s your career goal, and if even Robin can make it, you’d want to know the tips and tricks. (Having parents with money!)
Representative, not senator. I don’t think she’s old enough to be a senator, even.
She’s 30, according to Mary, so not old enough to be a senator, no.
If she’s 30, she is old enough to be a senator now, but would not have been at the time she was first elected to the House.
The age requirements are 25 for the House, 30 for the Senate, and 35 for the presidency, plus being a US Citizen and having resided here for a certain number of years which I don’t remember off-hand. Presidents must be native-born, but Reps and Senators can be naturalized citizens.
Okay, I thought the senate had to be 35 too.
Rep, not Senator, and if she started with rich parents, she’s quickly becoming what people might call a faildaughter.
To be fair to Robin, though, when she introduced into the Dumbiverse it was 2011, and we didn’t know that failsons like Trump’s kids, or Ben Quayle, (or Sununu’s kid, who inherited the NH govship) were in the offing. Right-wing reality has eclipsed her zany weirdness.
This was my first thought. “You respected ROBIN as a figure of authority? WHY?”
Soggies may rube!
Marco’s rube-y, yo!
ok i’m done
MAKE THEM READ BAUDRILLARD, ROBIN
DO IT DO IT DO IT DO IT
Like Robin knows who Baudrillard is.
Of course she knows who he was! Her predecessor in Congress left a couple of his books behind in the office, and she flipped through them* a few times.
* She wanted to make a sweet flipbook one day, and happened to grab one off the shelf so she could draw in the margins.
Oh. I assumed she just grabbed it off the shelf as a prop for a photo.
Robin just dependably being the best! ^_^
I would totally tackle Marco Rubio in a Walmart.
And I get a TV too? Sweet!
Well, you do have to pay for the TV.
Can someone please explain what it is she’s squeezing and what it’s doing? Or at least tell me enough to Google?
Google “spinning bow tie.” It came right up for me. It’s a silly novelty thing that I’d forgotten existed.
This is the most honest political science lecture I have ever seen.
My feelings about Roz are so complex because I like her, but I really don’t like her, but I REALLY like her, but I REALLY *DON’T* LIKE HER, you know what I mean?!
Politics is a con game. What you will not hear politicians say, but most of them know (except for Greens, who mostly have not yet been disillusioned) is that policies don’t actually matter.
A bad policy will work if you can persuade enough people to make it work, and
conversely, a good policy will fail if people don’t like it and won’t go along with it.
So, elections are a popularity contest, and policies are irrelevant. While I despise the GOP and their deliberate flouting of democracy . . . it is quite possible that they can “succeed” in governing again. Indeed, history suggests that they inevitably will sooner or later. I am not a U.S. citizen, but I will be sad when that happens. It will mark the end of the escape from feudalism that did so well for 200 years,
If politics is all a con game and policy doesn’t matter, why be sad about the end of democracy?
Monarchies or oligarchies suppress innovation. The people at the top like things the way they are, so they don’t want new inventions that might make money for the inventor(s) rather than the king/lords.
If innovation ceases, exploration ceases, and new ideas are discouraged, humanity loses its mojo. We will not become a space-faring civilisation. To extrapolate from the U.S. to the entire species is a bit of a stretch, but authoritarianism seems on the rise worldwide.
Humanity is still in its infancy. We have huge potential, but it can easily be short-circuited.