The Dumbing of Age Book 10 Kickstarter continues! We’re past $57K, working our way up to $60K, when we unlock the next character magnet: ERIC (the fingerguns guy)!
Five days to go!
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The Dumbing of Age Book 10 Kickstarter continues! We’re past $57K, working our way up to $60K, when we unlock the next character magnet: ERIC (the fingerguns guy)!
Five days to go!
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good Low cost cosplay tips
Wait…maybe Robin is actually qualified to teach this class.
Wait till she assigns the Hompkwork!
Let’s say that she can definitely teach the students something and leave the qualifications out of it.
Robin is absolutely the best teacher you could have about politics, if she really works at it she might do it intentionally one day.
“This bowtie? A bat than randomly decided to land on my collar. Shhh, it’s sleeping.”
Male-bat and Robin? The ultimate team.
NOOO!!! I NEEDED the bowtie, at least, to be real!!!
That’s… A surprisingly good lesson. Setting aside the implication that she’s not qualified to teach it, of course.
Considering the nature of the lesson, one could argue that the less qualified to teach any other lesson she is, the more qualified to teach this one.
“Implication” implies some degree of subtlety
Heh, I actually hate this whole set up because Robin as a lecturer makes me want to scream – even with comic logic it burns my eyeballs. But yes, I am pretty down with this.
Life Experience is her qualification, sadly.
Who said Goddamit?
I think if it was a named character they’d have a tag.
also my deduction but we can’t be sure yet
Pretty sure it was J.D. Salinger.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/400204-god-damn-it-he-said-there-are-nice-things-in
Eric Cartman?
This might be a different class than the one Becky, Dorothy, Joyce, amd Roz are in.
But if it was that class, I’d assume it was Roz (if she didn’t just spend the whole time seething).
My guess is it’s whoever said “what the f” at the end of this comic:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-11/02-look-straight-ahead/rondeau/
I figured it was Roz, who was hoping to learn from an actual professor. I feel for her.
I mean, she ain’t completely wrong… particularly regarding today’s politics.
No, this was always true. Why do you think so many kings ended up also being gods?
A tradition of Ancestor worship that ended up being extended to earthly power over the passing of generations?
Honestly pretty easy to follow and. . . honestly not the worst religious tradition that I’ve seen irl or in fiction.
I wonder how far back that idea of “God-Kings” goes in Human history.
General concensus is about 23rd century BC. Earliest known example was Naram-Sin of the Akkadian Empire.
Because part of the ancient perception (or at least, some ancient perceptions) of divinity was the ability to do things “with a nod” and it turns out kings and emperors do have the ability to do things “with a nod.” A king nods and a village might be built or be destroyed, men might be put to death or their lives might be saved. Under this conception, kings and emperors just straight DO possess the defining trait of a god, more than some of the smaller gods even. A king would at least seem to gave more power to do things “with a nod” than the god of a particular river, for instance.
Yeah that’s one of those things that really changed my view of ancient deification of rulers. With their view of gods, particularly “small” gods, well a particularly “big” humans like a king or an emperor really could fit the definition pretty well.
Let’s maybe not forget that a huge chunk of recorded history before industrial times was written by or at the behest of the ruling classes…
She’s saying what we’re all thinking!
That Mike should be written back into the comic with no explanation ever?
Yeah, the comic should really pull a Kenny with Mike.
He just shows up again and nobody questions it.
NO.
“The reports of my Death were greatly exaggerated.“
YES!
Mine has more weight because of the exclamation point. The ayes have it. Motion carried.
I mean, that’s basically how Shortpacked did it.
She deliberately picked the worst Batman story in order to drive home her point.
Hush is not even top 10 worst Batman stories. There’s some real RANK Batman stories out there. ASBAR for the first example that comes to mind.
I think the worst Batman story has to be The Night Gwen Stacy Died, hands down.
Seriously! Alfred’s not in that one, we never go to the Batcave and his costume is weird.
I mean, Robin herself barely appeared in it.
“but it’s Abraham Lincoln: Fo’ Shizzle!”
I assume that’s the blurb on the backcover.
Panel 4. It says “Fo’ Shizzle” on the front.
Just realised it could also be “Fo’ Rizzle”
Robin has to be the epitome of doing something wrong the right way. I would totally believe she was smarter if I didn’t already knowmthe truth.
Looks like Robin has successfully turned “political scientist” into an oxymoron.
Pfft. Like it wasn’t already.
Well, it used to be confined to the study of morons. She may be broaching study /by/ morons, except she hasn’t actually studied others beyond herself. Study of/by a moron is more auto-biographical than oxymoronic.
You do need a real pipe, even if you never light it up Bubble pipes are plastic and that would be a dead giveaway.
Secondly, any professor worth his salt smokes a bent pipe, not a straight stem.
Are there many lady professors that smoke pipes? I say it’s time to stop associating them with just men. Clear the pipes!
I assure you there are plenty of lady professors who smoke pipes, not sure if they smoke tobacco pipes though.
But the sticker on it in the store said “for tobacco use only”! How could it be used for anything else???
As a former pipe smoker, I encountered very, very few female pipe smokers of any profession; and with (tobacco) smoking falling farther and farther out of favor, I doubt that I will see too many new devotees. Unfortunately, the day of enjoying a pipeful of your favorite blend with your after-dinner drinks, even outdoors in some public parks, has gone the way of the T. rex, the passenger pigeon, and the dodo bird.
I’ve encountered very few professional pipe smokers of any gender.
The head sports teacher at my old high school was a pipe smoker. This was in the days when teachers could still smoke in staff areas.
It’s a dying sport.
The pipe is made of licorice and chocolate. (try a nibble)
Bets on how many classes before Roz has an aneurysm?
An aneurysm out of sheer stupidity?
Scariest part of this is I swear to god I had a college mathematics professor who pulled this stunt (almost word for word) once.
“Mathematics is all about optics?” I mean optics does rely on some trigonometry, but
… why?
Like I said, NEARLY word for word. It was the first day, and this professor just wanted something to break the ice and drive home the fact that he wasn’t someone we needed to be overly formal towards
They were probably being more honest than you’d think – many faculty are never specifically trained in teaching. Some grad programs provide instructional workshops for TAs, but (especially in disciplines with a lot of RAs) that might be a very small part of a person’s time in grad school.
Then they get a faculty position on the strength of their research and are dropped in front of a class for possibly the first time in 5+ years. Some discover a latent knack for teaching, and others… only teach upper-division/grad electives, because that way the chair at least doesn’t get complaints from *other* departments about how bad they suck.
That’s why it’s ‘publish or perish’, not ‘teach or perish’.
So the moral of the lesson is “fake it till you make it” actually works out more often then you think.
Not naming any names, but there are some politicians who didn’t even try to “fake it” and were still able to “make it”.
And on a pedantic note — shouldn’t it be “fake it ’til you make it.” since the actual word is ‘until’ and one is just using a contraction?
Nope:
“Interestingly, while it is commonly assumed that till is an abbreviated form of until (the spellings ’till and ’til reflect this), till is in fact the earlier form.”
TIL: Use till or until, but I still shan’t use ’til, waiting ’til I’ll need till or until.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/till
it’s a great lesson I’ve learned in computer programming
Fake it until it compiles?
First get hired. Then quickly learn the language being used.
Languages are easy to learn if you know how to program. Syntax isn’t the hard part.
To expand on your point: Many languages operate on the fairly common procedural and/or OO paradigms, and thus are easy to jump between, however there are other ways of thinking about programming, and that represents the bigger hurdle to overcome. So, yes syntax is absolutely the easy part, but “how to program” is a multi-tailed devil and grasping one facet of it does not obviously translate to grasping another.
(As a painful example, I’ve seen Masters of Comp Sci write 50 sequential lines of code, manually incrementing a single value, rather than introduce a loop.)
Not really. BS’ing your way through a couple of lectures is one thing; BS’ing your way through an entire semester is something else. What’s she going to do on Day 3? Day 4? Day 5? How long can she keep pulling something that vaguely resembles a lecture or lesson out of her ass?
There are people who really can just talk forever. (I am guilty of being verbose myself.) It’s not a lot different than bad writing. You just sit down and go, and don’t worry about consistency or a point. You’ll stumble across them eventually. And then you keep going.
Anyone else notice Robin’s… unique take on what BLM stands for?
Oh wow. creative
Beautiful Land Merman as near as I can make out.
Beautiful Land Mermaid – obviously a reference to Disney’s Little Mermaid, Ariel.
*plays “Mean Mister Mustard” on the hacked Muzak* (Fab Four if you care, though to me the Bee Gees version from the movie is just as good.)
Is that a ‘fo rizzle’ i see on that dust jacket
Fo’ shizzle i thought.
which could it be???
There is also the implication that if the college hires her and makes her class available that she must be qualified, so institutional approval and how closely it is tied to quality and ability may make for another important lesson.
Chris Sims was the guy Robin ran against, I’m assuming.
“The secret, o innocent supplicant, is that there is no secret.”
– P. Anthony, “For the Love of Evil”
well if politics and academia ever not work out, she could probably make some money in the field of security penetration testing
Or snake oil huckstering
Joe wanted to get into penetration testing and was then very disappointed.
Robin has something of a point about optics, but Robin, I promise you, nobody has ever once mistaken you for a professional. 😛
Reminds me of a commercial where a DJ dressed up as an insurance agent and effectively convinced a couple to go with his fake agency. The suit really makes all the difference, doesn’t it?
And was that a commercial for the suit by any chance?
I think it was for insurance.
How…?
Then again, most insurance commercials don’t make any sense nowadays beyond promoting brand recognition.
Rookie mistake. If she reveals everything in the first class, she’ll have no material for later on.
Presentations. Let the students pick the topic. Then fill the hour with them. After each one make inane remarks and give a random grade.
While I have had classes that resembled that, I’m not sure it would work for Robin.
It would mean letting all the attention be focused on someone else.
I’m sure she’ll come up with more material somehow. No idea what it’ll be next, but she seems to be weirdly good at this despite having no idea what she’s doing.
I thought it was Roz who reavealed everything. Robin has plenty left to reveal.
LOVE the Magritte subtext.
What, more meta? Goddammit
This is not a subtext.
Precisely. It’s a hovertext.
…. holy shit. Well done, Robin.
C’eci ne pas un professeur.
Where!
Dammit, that was supposed to be Wheee!
Don’t worry it also ended up being funny ^^
I’m now slightly less envious of Robin’s clothes
And slightly more envious of her sauce.
That goes without saying
Robin is the Bunny-Ears Lawyer trope taken to its natural extreme and I love it
Thank you for not linking.
Oop. My bad. Lemme just https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BunnyEarsLawyer
I started to wonder how she managed to get elected in the first place. Them I remembered it’s Indiana and she had the R next to her name, and it all makes sense.
She is SO MUCH MORE DIGNIFIED AND PROFESSIONAL than Marjorie Taylor-Greene (of the next district over from me), Lauren Boebert of Colorado, or Matt Gaetz (of the Federal Penitentiary) that’s it’s amazing.
And she is also clearly much smarter than Louie Gohmert of Texas.
And now students, how to use this very lesson to trick the cleaners into dry cleaning this Honey Mustard Sauce off my jacket for free!
No, no. Then you would have to buy actual patches.
Honey Mustard?! You steal men’s souls, and make them your slaves!
Perhaps the same could be said of all condiments.
It is not by my hand I was once again given flavor!
I wonder if the class are even half-ready for all the truths Robin is going to teach them!
If it was all in service of anything, then it’d be charming.
where does one even get a bubble-blowing pipe? is it just something you can win at carny games?
Comic books used to have ‘jokes and novelties’ mail-order catalogue pages back in the 1970s. These days? Try Amazon if you can stand the stench of modern slavery.
I believe Robin’s not a true professor, but I did believe she spent some nights at the Holiday Inn Express. 😛
Dumbing of Age Book 11: Beautiful hand Mermaid
DoA Book 11: I Just Keep Accidentally Dunkin’ My Elbows In Honey Mustard Sauce
“I’m not even a real lesbian!”
ALTERNATIVE EVEN BETTER TAKE:
The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth; it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.
(I would actually fucking love to see Robin teach a whole unit on Baudrillard like this)
Holy shit, Robin may be the best political science teacher without even trying or actually knowing jack shit about teaching.
Politics aren’t about theory, ideas, or even people. Politics is always, at it’s root, one person’s willingness to do anything for power. Aaaaaand, that’s class for today!
Let’s face it. Robin is the best teacher ever. In her own weird way. They can learn so much from her!
Batman Hush is a very boring comic whose defining feature is reminding you that better comics exist but it does do one thing that makes it notable enough to talk about: It killed Harold, the mute guy with hyperkyphosis (the medical definition of “hunchhback”, only Harold was depicted in-line more with Quasimodo) who was a genius with everything mechanical, and he died because after not appearing in the comics for three years at that point Harold came back suddenly able to speak and cured of his hyperkyphosis, revealed he had betrayed Batman and wanted to atone, and then Hush shot him to death a panel later.
Harold first appeared in 1990 and if you love your jokes about Batman indoctrinating children then buckle the hell up because Harold was basically kidnapped into the Batcave after Batman rescued him from having his mechanical genius exploited by the Penguin, since now Harold can “use his talents for good” and so plonked him in the Batcave doing maintenance on his car. Mostly his inclusion seemed in service of explaining how Batman has all his gear and vehicles, a question you only want answered if you’re a very boring person who needs to scientifically explain why Superman can fly or catch Lois when she falls, but otherwise never really did anything important. He was just there in the background building something while the other members of the Bat family talked about stuff, and if you were new to these comics you just had this guy repairing the Batmobile off to the side rarely getting acknowledged.
Come 2000 and the No Man’s Land story (a kinda famous one where Gotham gets hit by an apocalyptic earthquake and gets abandoned by the United States because even though the law doesn’t work like that it sure does make for a cool story) Harold was written out as he leaves the Batcave for the first time since his introduction, surveying the damage caused by the earthquake and deciding he’ll use his talents to fix Gotham.
And then Jeph Loeb killed him off, because as was soon as established over at Marvel, that’s just kind of his thing.
from yesterday’s patreon comments, i expected more harold talk than this
I was hoping for a lot of “what the hell are you talking about” because weird comics minutiae is always fun, but nobody bit. Maybe I need to try my hand at the Batman Who Laughs, or god forbid Batman: White Knight.
Also it’s really hard to talk about Harold because my one quarter of a paragraph description of his role in the comics is all there was to him. You’d just read a Batman comic in 1994 and there he would be in the corner and nobody would acknowledge him.
I’m not surprised that Robin thinks or would present politics as only being about optics. That way she can more easily distance herself from all the real harm she personally did to real people.
It’s a pretty self serving viewpoint.
That would be too calculating when it is very clear Robin DID think it was just about optics. The reason she ended up leaving politics and throwing the election is that she realized that she was causing real harm.
I don’t think people have to be aware of the lies they tell themselves are lies to be fooled by them. Self-serving viewpoints are very tempting for people to adopt exactly because they are self-serving.
Robin is the most important person for Robin to convince to distance herself from what she did.
Robin and Becky are uncannily alike in their ways, almost like mother and daughter.
Robin is teaching them kids that politics is a terrible field for terrible people. Which is only a half-truth, and therefore politically accurate.
Hush is like 240 pages long, right? Seems like that would be a rather thin hardcover, Robin. We all assumed you were waving around a children’s book on Lincoln.
Perhaps it is multiple copies of Hush put together. Ruses on top of ruses.
The thing is, she ain’t wrong. That’s kind of an important lesson about politics – you can study the theory and learn the in’s and out’s all you want, but if you don’t make yourself look good to your constituents, you really ain’t getting anywhere.
And also it’s important to immediately realize that your professors are fallible, if you hadn’t already figured that out from your teachers in high school already.
She’s also not right though.
Yeah, you’ve got to make yourself look good to your constituents to win elections, but campaigning isn’t all there is to politics. And the skills to campaign well seem to be more and more decoupled from the skills to do things well once you’re in office.
Robin’s major issue is that apparently she never considered that the issues were important at all.
It was always a scam for her.
So the revelation that people were being hurt by her actions is what shook her.
And that last point is how we know she’s a fictional Republican politician; the real ones are indifferent at best or revel in it at worst.
Absolutely, though it’s not just issues. There are practical skills to accomplishing things in politics, even if all you want to accomplish is paying off your donors and catering to bigoted supporters. Even grifting properly relies on understanding how things work.
Robin and Batman
“Where am I going with all this? Before any of you are ready to practice politics, you’re going to need to understand what politics actually is. So, buckle up, class, ’cause I’m gonna take you to see the man behind the curtain!“
Teaching by fooling everyone with bogus credentials.
Lets hope Robin never teaches flight school or nuclear engineering.
+100 point to Willis for “ceci n’est pas une pipe”!
Hg
But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar
How did the sleeve patches suddenly change their shape? Or is this just my mind playing a trick on me in the first panel, cause it knows how sleeve patches are supposed to look? 😉
Also Robin didn’t have sleeve patches in the previous strip – I wonder if this is Willis wiggling his way out of having to draw them every time.
I feel like Walky would really get on baord with the honey mustard elbow patches
Love the “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” reference! (I’m also assuming Scott McCloud reference as well?) 🙂
Robin: The important thing to understand is that it doesn’t matter if you kill a baby, only if you are SEEN killing a baby.
Becky: It matters to the baby.
Robin: STOP RUINING POLITICS, BECKY!
professor desanto is the best addition to DoA2 so far