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that is not entirely fair. We have not seen it, because it did not happen in comic, but we have been told that she supported Ethan a lot when he came out to his parents.
She has never been ‘completely unavailable’, she just hasn’t been ‘completely present’ either. Which isn’t fully her fault since she’s had a lot more severe mental stuff going on. And Ethan hasn’t really gone to her when worried about her or when stuff has been going on with him.
Ethan has bad shit of his own, but he doesn’t really know how to reach out to people because his first instinct is to take care of everyone else. With Amber specifically, they’re kinda caught in a loop of Amber having a problem, Ethan gently assuring her that nothing is wrong, and then Amber spiraling even harder because she’s not constructively dealing with her feelings and feels undeserving of Ethan’s kindness.
Ethan has spent so much time playing caretaker that I don’t think he really knows how to ask for help.
You’re right, but I think she still gets some points for this. I’ll rag on Amber a lot, because she has a lot to get dunked on for, but “I’m sorry I haven’t been more emotionally available” is a pretty good and honest apology in my books.
Mosquitos that survive perfectly intact from millions of years ago, that hold a treasure trove of ancient dinosaur DNA so you can build a poorly secured, and not well thought out theme park of genetically engineered and likely highly inaccurate monsters that can breed in the wild thanks to splicing them with frog genes?
Compare back breeding chickens into classic dinosaurs. Either way, if we want them to be viable in todays ecosystems, they’ll need to be somewhat inaccurate.
Definitely not dino DNA, that stuff has a half life of like 500 years (literally several orders of magnitude less than what’d be needed to revive the non-avian dinosaurs).
Last year the record for earliest DNA recovered was pushed back to over a million years ago. Still impressive but nowhere near the 66 million years separating us from the last non avian dinosaurs.
Impressive indeed, considering that that’d be roughly 2,000 DNA half-lives (for scale, after just 10% of that elapsed time, 200 half-lives, only 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000062230152778611% of the original would be left…now throw in about 1,800 additional half-lives to get to the time of that mammoth DNA). And yeah, end-Cretaceous DNA would require survival for an impossible minimum of around 130,000 DNA half-lives—that’s not even what’d be needed for mid-Cretaceous or gods forbid, Jurassic/Triassic DNA.
(In short, there’s a reason “twenty half-lives” is often used as a baseline for when a sample becomes all but unrecognizable; by that point, you have less than 0.0001% of the original sample remaining. In DNA’s case, that twenty-half-life baseline on a good day would barely stretch back to the beginning of the Holocene. Even Pliocenic DNA would be several times over the age of that mammoth DNA milu linked above…)
i’m not versed in physics/chemistry enough to understand what the half-life of DNA means. are we talking atomic disintegration? like radioactive elements? or does it refer to the resilience of the molecular bonds? does this measure depend on the environment at all (like temperature)?
in the article i linked to, researchers explained that they were only able to recover DNA this old because the mammoth had remained mummified inside permafrost the whole time, and even then they could only find a bunch of tiny fragments which they reconstructed jigsaw-style using a modern elephant genome for reference.
they note that, at the absolute most, the oldest DNA we could ever hope to find is 2,6 myo because that’s when the earliest permafrost formed.
As I understand it, the DNA breakdown rate—its half-life—is essentially the speed at which its molecules break apart from each other, yeah. Warmer temperatures and the presence of liquid water help accelerate this process, which is why the mammoth in the article (frozen in permafrost) was able to last as long as it did, even in its heavily-degraded form as was noted. The previous record-holder was a 700,000-year-old horse also frozen in permafrost, and a 130,000-year-old polar bear before that—all likewise preserved in permafrost.
Apparently the oldest DNA theoretically survivable in any significantly-reconstitutable/readable form (assuming ideal temperatures a little below freezing, and minimal presence of liquid water) could be up to 1.5myo, so that million-year-old mammoth DNA was definitely pushing the edges of what’s even possible…and dino-DNA is certainly altogether out of the picture (as even “unrecognizable” DNA, theoretically-speaking, would be entirely gone in less than 7 million years even given ideal conditions for preservation).
wow =) thanks for the deep dive. yeah, i’ve heard the 1.5 mya figure before, i’m excited to see if that is eventually pushed back by advances in genomics, either theoretical (better AI-assisted reconstruction?) or technical…
and while it might be disappointing that we’ll never get dinosaur DNA, i think it’s worth noting that DNA is not the blueprint that pop science/scifi would have us think of it as. To name just one thing DNA wouldn’t bring back: dinosaur gut microbiome. Will the baby dinos survive their first meal in a world many million years worth of microbial, viral, and plant evolution down the line? I really wish we’d knock DNA from its pedestal. We are not our chromosomes, no more than a book is the family tree of its author.
See, you clearly said “Hush”, but for some reason my brain replaced it with “Smoke on the Water”. Apparently, my brain believes in spite of all evidence that’s the only song they ever performed.
Ethan: Not a lot of people know what it feels like to be angry, in your bones. I mean, they understand, foster parents, everybody understands, for awhile. Then they want the angry little kid to do something he knows he can’t do, move on.
Amber: Are you quoting the Dark Knight Rises?
Ethan: HE WASN’T DICK GRAYSON! THE MOVIE’S ENDING MAKES NO SENSE!
I’m glad she came out and said it. I wonder if he’s brushing it off, or if he’s just not ready/willing to be vulnerable right now. This does seem less… hostile… than some of their past conversations.
To be fair to the both of them, the last time they did interact Amber was trying to push people away by being incredibly horny and talking to him about Danny. Who, while I do think he’s an overall decent guy, is on Ethan’s shit list for a valid reason
I actually wonder if he’s talked to Amber about what Danny said outside of Mike’s hospital room…
I think Ethan really wants company right now, but he also can’t really trust that Amber is going to be a good friend yet.
I hope she just shows she can be a chill friend in the mean time.
Sometimes the best way to be alone is in a crowded place, I’ve found. If I’m sitting in a food court with my iPad, no one bothers me at all. If I hole up in my home without speaking to anyone, I get a LOT of well-meaning trying to cheer me ip or whatever.
Plus, if I go do public-space solitude, no one can accuse me of hermiting. Because I went out, didn’t I?
This is actually remarkable progress for Amber. Usually her acknowledging her faults leads to her going on superhero death marches, and instead here she’s just flatly admitting she wasn’t as good as she wanted to be.
He has been there for her through every major life issue and is now grieving one of his very best friends who died in a horrible and senseless way.
His last interaction with Amber was her being a horny creep about someone he’s upset with (in a way that ties into the grief).
Yeah god forbid he not just get over that because Amber finally decided to try being a friend. If you don’t think he deserves to get a little of what he’s given all these years, just because he’s not all sunshine and roses, god help anyone in your life who has a bad day.
Likewise, though we didn’t see much of it, she was there for him to help through coming out as gay and dealing with his prejudiced family. This despite that being tied to ending their romantic relationship.
They both have their issues, but don’t pretend this has always been a one-way friendship.
And then she stopped talking to him because him being gay exhausted her, got pissy when Joyce took him to a meetup instead of her, and then things got bad enough that she was pretty much incapable of trying to help him with anything.
Amber’s not a giving friend, but she hasn’t had much to give because she takes control of other peoples’ suffering to fuel her own mental health spiral, and it’s something she’s only starting to confront now.
Amber can object and also it’s what happened, on top of needing to go be a superhero, apparently.
It also matters a lot that this is how Ethan put it, and then the next strip has him add that he gets it was exhausting and that’s it a lot more for him than it is her, and he never got the chance to escape it. Later that weak she broke down that he’d fake it for Joyce and not her.
Amber’s not an emotionally available friend, we know this because she is currently saying as much, and then the last time these two spoke Ethan real blunt-like told her that she only approaches him in a crisis, which she was doing then too.
Like yeah actually it’s okay to read this as a one-sided friendship and especially when the most evidence against it is something that happened off-screen that motivated them not speaking to each for like four years real time until Amber felt like it again. That’s what Amber’s facing up to right now and trying to amend.
I, personally, do not object to reading it as a largely one-sided friendship. However, I do not see that line as 1. a good quote to pull out of context like that 2. a fair assessment of what happened from a reader standpoint.
Ugh. I wish this was ever worth it, but it’s just not.
It’s not out of context, it’s a statement by Ethan about how he felt abandoned by someone who is in this strip going “I haven’t been emotionally available.” I don’t know what a “fair assessment of what happened from a reader standpoint” means either since knowing why Amber did it (crippling self-loathing, Ethan existing as a protector figure for her since childhood, being emotionally hurt from not being able to be with him the way she wanted) doesn’t suddenly means it didn’t happen, it just means we know why it did and how it contributed to Amber’s existing problem of spiraling real hard using other peoples’ problems, particularly Ethan’s, which was something else she admitted prior to the timeskip.
“And then she stopped talking to him”– fair! “And then she abandoned him,” even. But then there’s consideration for “Because him being gay exhausted her” vs because of other reasons, like the ones you listed.
Okay but “me being gay exhausted you” is the exact sentence used by the person Amber is currently admitting that she wants to be more emotionally open to, because that’s what it felt like to Ethan.
I didn’t even say “Because him being gay exhausted her” to mean “this is specifically why Amber abandoned him,” it was one of the multitude of reasons for why Amber, right now, is making an effort to be there for Ethan when he needs her and admitting fault for how she’s acted in the past.
Where are the campus therapists and psychiatrists to help teenagers who were kidnapped and nearly murdered by a mobster? Amber should have been there for Ethan, true, but the school should absolutely be offering free counseling to students they have repeatedly failed to protect.
ROZ: Niles said you’re going on a date with a trans woman.
FRASIER: I suppose you don’t approve.
ROZ: Oh, no, Frasier, I really feel for trans women.
FRASIER: Oh? Do go on.
ROZ: Oh, I can just relate to any woman who has a useless prick they’d like to get rid of
Dear cis people,
It's well past the point where this kind of thing will fix everything, but I want you to take note of how easy this is.
These little freaks are soft-handed little babies that will fold like a napkin in the rain.
Light these fools up.
Ari Drennen@aridrennen.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
Texas Republican Keithself storms out of the meeting he's supposed to be running because a Democrat asked him to treat his colleague Sarah McBride with respect. These people would not last one day as a trans person.
onion person @junlper.beer ⋅ 5h
Ari Drennen @aridrennen.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
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PAX East
TECHNICALLY she just asked if he minded
Hey he asked for silence. No comments! Shh….
Good luck with that.
Let me be the first to stand up and say loudly, and proudly, that I stand in solidarity and silence with Emothan.
Amber being asked to not be social? Oh no, how will she cope
About as well as usual?
And that’s how the school burned down.
It was just the student union.
I mean Amber’s never been very emotionally available so she really isn’t apologizing for much.
They were each other’s only friends except for Mike. And Mike was Mike.
But if she was never very emotionally available for Ethan, then technically she was apologizing for a lot.
that is not entirely fair. We have not seen it, because it did not happen in comic, but we have been told that she supported Ethan a lot when he came out to his parents.
She has never been ‘completely unavailable’, she just hasn’t been ‘completely present’ either. Which isn’t fully her fault since she’s had a lot more severe mental stuff going on. And Ethan hasn’t really gone to her when worried about her or when stuff has been going on with him.
Well, that’s kinda the problem.
Ethan has bad shit of his own, but he doesn’t really know how to reach out to people because his first instinct is to take care of everyone else. With Amber specifically, they’re kinda caught in a loop of Amber having a problem, Ethan gently assuring her that nothing is wrong, and then Amber spiraling even harder because she’s not constructively dealing with her feelings and feels undeserving of Ethan’s kindness.
Ethan has spent so much time playing caretaker that I don’t think he really knows how to ask for help.
You’re right, but I think she still gets some points for this. I’ll rag on Amber a lot, because she has a lot to get dunked on for, but “I’m sorry I haven’t been more emotionally available” is a pretty good and honest apology in my books.
Well, time for Amber to finally learn ASL.
Marcie is apparently not a half-bad teacher.
Which half?
I don’t know what that face on the last panel is supposed to indicate. And Amber you did say in silence.
Try messaging him instead.
Personally see that as a kind of “well I tried” shrug of acceptance. If Ethan doesn’t want to hear her apology, then she won’t force it.
I thought she’d said her piece, and was just taking the opportunity to enjoy being near each other in silence.
I took it as a challenge accepted face.
I think that’s a “composing a text” face.
I see it as “prepping herself to be uncharacteristically social in a way Emothan won’t like”.
I’m not sure what that face means either.
Just then Ethan and Amber noticed a bunch of tally marks on their bodies that weren’t there a moment earlier.
**Captain America Meme**
“I get that reference.”
I don’t. What obscure nonsense is this?
It works better as a ‘the Silence’ reference anyway.
I almost fell for that. Well played!
Ha I get that reference.
Except they might not know what it’s for O.O
Hey, who turned out the lights?
Silence in the
LibraryCafeteriaSo much Amber…
I feel like I’m trapped in Amber!!! 🤪
You know what else gets trapped in amber?
Here’s a hint: 🧬
Mosquitos that survive perfectly intact from millions of years ago, that hold a treasure trove of ancient dinosaur DNA so you can build a poorly secured, and not well thought out theme park of genetically engineered and likely highly inaccurate monsters that can breed in the wild thanks to splicing them with frog genes?
Compare back breeding chickens into classic dinosaurs. Either way, if we want them to be viable in todays ecosystems, they’ll need to be somewhat inaccurate.
Definitely not dino DNA, that stuff has a half life of like 500 years (literally several orders of magnitude less than what’d be needed to revive the non-avian dinosaurs).
But perfectly preserved dinosaur tails caught in amber, on the other hand…
yeah, mesozoic DNA is lost forever.
Last year the record for earliest DNA recovered was pushed back to over a million years ago. Still impressive but nowhere near the 66 million years separating us from the last non avian dinosaurs.
Impressive indeed, considering that that’d be roughly 2,000 DNA half-lives (for scale, after just 10% of that elapsed time, 200 half-lives, only 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000062230152778611% of the original would be left…now throw in about 1,800 additional half-lives to get to the time of that mammoth DNA). And yeah, end-Cretaceous DNA would require survival for an impossible minimum of around 130,000 DNA half-lives—that’s not even what’d be needed for mid-Cretaceous or gods forbid, Jurassic/Triassic DNA.
(In short, there’s a reason “twenty half-lives” is often used as a baseline for when a sample becomes all but unrecognizable; by that point, you have less than 0.0001% of the original sample remaining. In DNA’s case, that twenty-half-life baseline on a good day would barely stretch back to the beginning of the Holocene. Even Pliocenic DNA would be several times over the age of that mammoth DNA milu linked above…)
i’m not versed in physics/chemistry enough to understand what the half-life of DNA means. are we talking atomic disintegration? like radioactive elements? or does it refer to the resilience of the molecular bonds? does this measure depend on the environment at all (like temperature)?
in the article i linked to, researchers explained that they were only able to recover DNA this old because the mammoth had remained mummified inside permafrost the whole time, and even then they could only find a bunch of tiny fragments which they reconstructed jigsaw-style using a modern elephant genome for reference.
they note that, at the absolute most, the oldest DNA we could ever hope to find is 2,6 myo because that’s when the earliest permafrost formed.
As I understand it, the DNA breakdown rate—its half-life—is essentially the speed at which its molecules break apart from each other, yeah. Warmer temperatures and the presence of liquid water help accelerate this process, which is why the mammoth in the article (frozen in permafrost) was able to last as long as it did, even in its heavily-degraded form as was noted. The previous record-holder was a 700,000-year-old horse also frozen in permafrost, and a 130,000-year-old polar bear before that—all likewise preserved in permafrost.
Apparently the oldest DNA theoretically survivable in any significantly-reconstitutable/readable form (assuming ideal temperatures a little below freezing, and minimal presence of liquid water) could be up to 1.5myo, so that million-year-old mammoth DNA was definitely pushing the edges of what’s even possible…and dino-DNA is certainly altogether out of the picture (as even “unrecognizable” DNA, theoretically-speaking, would be entirely gone in less than 7 million years even given ideal conditions for preservation).
wow =) thanks for the deep dive. yeah, i’ve heard the 1.5 mya figure before, i’m excited to see if that is eventually pushed back by advances in genomics, either theoretical (better AI-assisted reconstruction?) or technical…
and while it might be disappointing that we’ll never get dinosaur DNA, i think it’s worth noting that DNA is not the blueprint that pop science/scifi would have us think of it as. To name just one thing DNA wouldn’t bring back: dinosaur gut microbiome. Will the baby dinos survive their first meal in a world many million years worth of microbial, viral, and plant evolution down the line? I really wish we’d knock DNA from its pedestal. We are not our chromosomes, no more than a book is the family tree of its author.
*plays Deep Purple’s “Hush” on the hacked Muzak*
As an Aussie, replaces it with Russell Morris’s earlier (and IMHO superior) version.
well now I have to find that.
It was the only hit for the band “Somebody’s Image” with him on lead vocals.
See, you clearly said “Hush”, but for some reason my brain replaced it with “Smoke on the Water”. Apparently, my brain believes in spite of all evidence that’s the only song they ever performed.
Not even Highway Star?
Smoke on the Water is the only time Zappa ever gets any attention on the radio. That’s a shame, but also entirely understandable.
*cues up “Don’t Speak” by No Doubt*
Amber just needs to give it space.
Ethan: Not a lot of people know what it feels like to be angry, in your bones. I mean, they understand, foster parents, everybody understands, for awhile. Then they want the angry little kid to do something he knows he can’t do, move on.
Amber: Are you quoting the Dark Knight Rises?
Ethan: HE WASN’T DICK GRAYSON! THE MOVIE’S ENDING MAKES NO SENSE!
Unfortunately he didn’t say anything about using telepathy.
Hey, silence together is still progress, right, Amber?
I’m glad she came out and said it. I wonder if he’s brushing it off, or if he’s just not ready/willing to be vulnerable right now. This does seem less… hostile… than some of their past conversations.
To be fair to the both of them, the last time they did interact Amber was trying to push people away by being incredibly horny and talking to him about Danny. Who, while I do think he’s an overall decent guy, is on Ethan’s shit list for a valid reason
I actually wonder if he’s talked to Amber about what Danny said outside of Mike’s hospital room…
I think Ethan really wants company right now, but he also can’t really trust that Amber is going to be a good friend yet.
I hope she just shows she can be a chill friend in the mean time.
So, what’s Ethan doing out in this harried throng of oversharing extraverts? Does Jacob need private use of their room?
Sometimes the best way to be alone is in a crowded place, I’ve found. If I’m sitting in a food court with my iPad, no one bothers me at all. If I hole up in my home without speaking to anyone, I get a LOT of well-meaning trying to cheer me ip or whatever.
Plus, if I go do public-space solitude, no one can accuse me of hermiting. Because I went out, didn’t I?
Honestly fair.
Oh hey, it just occurred to me that flipping someone off is completely silent….. wonder what is making me think that?
Just casually hanging next to each other isn’t a bad first step tho
Can someone please explain the alt-text?
I don’t see what a philosopher, mummy, surgeon in a trenchcoat has to do with the rest of the strip?
Hush can also be used as a word for keeping quiet, an example being: “You kids better hush and try to sleep.”
As for why it is the alt-text, only the great Willis knkws.
“Fair enough”.
Ethan twists the phone.
This will never get old.
This is actually remarkable progress for Amber. Usually her acknowledging her faults leads to her going on superhero death marches, and instead here she’s just flatly admitting she wasn’t as good as she wanted to be.
Yeah, for Amber this is pretty good right now.
okay holy fuck you know what this completely subverted my expectations amber pls be chill for a while this is a good look
Amber is trying. Kudos for her, but I wonder if Ethan deserves her attention.
He has been there for her through every major life issue and is now grieving one of his very best friends who died in a horrible and senseless way.
His last interaction with Amber was her being a horny creep about someone he’s upset with (in a way that ties into the grief).
Yeah god forbid he not just get over that because Amber finally decided to try being a friend. If you don’t think he deserves to get a little of what he’s given all these years, just because he’s not all sunshine and roses, god help anyone in your life who has a bad day.
Likewise, though we didn’t see much of it, she was there for him to help through coming out as gay and dealing with his prejudiced family. This despite that being tied to ending their romantic relationship.
They both have their issues, but don’t pretend this has always been a one-way friendship.
And then she stopped talking to him because him being gay exhausted her, got pissy when Joyce took him to a meetup instead of her, and then things got bad enough that she was pretty much incapable of trying to help him with anything.
Amber’s not a giving friend, but she hasn’t had much to give because she takes control of other peoples’ suffering to fuel her own mental health spiral, and it’s something she’s only starting to confront now.
Seriously? “because him being gay exhausted her”?
Don’t talk to me.
It’s literally the line!
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/02-guess-whos-coming-to-galassos/alwaysalways/
It’s the line from Ethan, which Amber objects to the next strip.
Amber can object and also it’s what happened, on top of needing to go be a superhero, apparently.
It also matters a lot that this is how Ethan put it, and then the next strip has him add that he gets it was exhausting and that’s it a lot more for him than it is her, and he never got the chance to escape it. Later that weak she broke down that he’d fake it for Joyce and not her.
Amber’s not an emotionally available friend, we know this because she is currently saying as much, and then the last time these two spoke Ethan real blunt-like told her that she only approaches him in a crisis, which she was doing then too.
Like yeah actually it’s okay to read this as a one-sided friendship and especially when the most evidence against it is something that happened off-screen that motivated them not speaking to each for like four years real time until Amber felt like it again. That’s what Amber’s facing up to right now and trying to amend.
I, personally, do not object to reading it as a largely one-sided friendship. However, I do not see that line as 1. a good quote to pull out of context like that 2. a fair assessment of what happened from a reader standpoint.
Ugh. I wish this was ever worth it, but it’s just not.
It’s not out of context, it’s a statement by Ethan about how he felt abandoned by someone who is in this strip going “I haven’t been emotionally available.” I don’t know what a “fair assessment of what happened from a reader standpoint” means either since knowing why Amber did it (crippling self-loathing, Ethan existing as a protector figure for her since childhood, being emotionally hurt from not being able to be with him the way she wanted) doesn’t suddenly means it didn’t happen, it just means we know why it did and how it contributed to Amber’s existing problem of spiraling real hard using other peoples’ problems, particularly Ethan’s, which was something else she admitted prior to the timeskip.
“And then she stopped talking to him”– fair! “And then she abandoned him,” even. But then there’s consideration for “Because him being gay exhausted her” vs because of other reasons, like the ones you listed.
Okay but “me being gay exhausted you” is the exact sentence used by the person Amber is currently admitting that she wants to be more emotionally open to, because that’s what it felt like to Ethan.
I didn’t even say “Because him being gay exhausted her” to mean “this is specifically why Amber abandoned him,” it was one of the multitude of reasons for why Amber, right now, is making an effort to be there for Ethan when he needs her and admitting fault for how she’s acted in the past.
Where are the campus therapists and psychiatrists to help teenagers who were kidnapped and nearly murdered by a mobster? Amber should have been there for Ethan, true, but the school should absolutely be offering free counseling to students they have repeatedly failed to protect.
A major theme of this web comic is that Indiana U does not care.
Walky said the school therapists aren’t very good, so I assume they’ve been.
Well his brow is unfurrowed, that’s a good start
JUST TALK YOU MOODY TEENAGER
Can’t, he’s too busy being pre-Batman.
Wait I’m confused wasn’t it Spider-Man 3?