as it turns out I learn my co-workers’ names on a need-to-know basis, bc if I don’t need to know them, why expend the effort (I’ll get them wrong anyway w/o context)
I figured out in my early 30s that my entire use of English is structured around never getting to a point in any sentence where using names would be appropriate, in part just because of how badly I fail to learn names and how difficult it is to recall even the ones I know. It takes me about a year to learn a name fairly reliably, assuming I’m working with/socialising with them on a regular basis. If I only meet/work with them occasionally, I just don’t.
Before the memory meds, I couldn’t even remember a name long enough to repeat it back to you. Now I can! And I learn names more quickly. But it’s still really hard.
Same here! And I’m pretty much face blind too – even if I really like a person, it’ll take me a few encounters to reliably recognise them. Which makes the whole ‘finding friends’ thing kinda hard.
Embarrassing story time: once we had a French exchange student in my lab, who sat in my room actually. There was also a French girl in my Chinese class. I occasionally talked to both (yay trying to be social!).
Half a semester in, I told lab!girl a story. She was like “yeah I know, you already told me that earlier in Chinese class”.
I truly hope she didn’t notice and just thought I’m forgetful about what stories I tell o.o
I take a neuroreceptor precursor called Deanol which is only effective in rather rare cases where you have very specific metabolic production issues. (I also can’t be a vegetarian for possibly the exact same reason, but definitely for similar reasons in that my body can’t synthesise all the amino acids it needs, same as housecats. There are two rare but known genetic reasons for this; guess who appears to have BOTH lol)
Anyway, in the US it’s OTC and marketed it as an anti-wrinkle product, but that’s not actually a thing, it’s just nonsense. But if you’re in the States and want to try it, don’t look for Deanol, look for DMAE, which is the name used when they want to market it was a “smart supplement.”
Um… oh, right. Do you understand time? If you do, it’s less likely to help.
AT 73, I get to say, “Uh, Sorry, I’m having a senior moment and am blanking on your name.” Unfortunately, this is completely believable because just last week my mind refused to produce the name of someone that’s been a good friend for 50 years.
Any day now you’ll see a “Damn you, whatchurname that writes this comic!”
I’ve woken up and completely forgotten my name several times. It happened the first time no later than when I was 26. Whenever it might seem like I should know someone’s name, I point out that little tidbit. Works alright for me.
I was hanging out with my little sister once when I was a teen trying to remember how old I was. I was pretty certain I’d turned X, might have turned X+1, and had a nagging feeling I was older than that. I asked the kiddy. I was X+4, from memory. I can’t remember what X was though – maybe 13…
My husband routinely guesses his age wrong too though so I assume this is reasonably normal now we’re in our later 30s at least so I’m going to assume I was precocious 😉
All last year, I was remembering my age wrong. I was confusing it with my husband’s age, which I also misremember. Usually, I have to do math to remember. I guess at some point, they all blur together. So I’m like errr what year is it? So then, …..
My issue is that as a college instructor I get an entire new batch of names in my head and they completely replace the space in my grey matter that previous names filled, so I fully explain forgetting people’s names as that occurring.
Yes, I’ve found over the years that as new cohorts of students arrive, their names overwrite the names of the cohorts that have left. So I’m in complete agreement on this one.
I used to have a teacher, who would only greet in the hallway the students he was teaching that year. So he wouldn’t greet you, even if you had been his student the previous two years. Maybe he had a similar thing going on!
Seeing names written down definitely helps. I communicate with my coworkers mostly by email, so I know all their names. But there are a few last names I’m really fuzzy on how to pronounce.
My workplace has a wall dedicated to photos and names of co-workers. I casually saunter by it at least once a day to remember a name. It’s also a nice reminder that my co-workers have faces (masking is still mandatory)
We had a high turnover rate at work and I had a standard 6 Month rule for new hires. If they lasted that long I would remember their names. I didn’t like to get attached to seasonal help either.
I just got dumped with 22 new seasonal workers, who I may or may not ever work with again after last week. Ive figured out who the two senior workers are and their names, the rest of them I have no clue and no inclination to try and learn.
I promised myself to not read the comment section and I fail again.
I’ve been in the position of having regularly new places to work, as seasonal or short contract or short time worker. It’s extremely unpleasant to be me with “you’re not going to be long enough here to be bothered to be treated as a normal human”. It’s like if as I worked sub teach I wouldn’t learn the name of a new kid because he was a carny kid, or in transition to the foreign language section. Nobody ask you to get it right, but ask for a name and *try*.
Now really I have to go and stop reading this part as I do out of habit.
Case in point: I went back and forth a couple of times on whether I should spend some of my finite time and effort responding to you, because there’s a fair chance you might not ever read it. And if not, what’s the point?
(It was thinking of those who definitely will that nudged me over the line.)
Similar experience at my last job, with utterly ridiculous turnover. If someone stayed around long enough to get their official uniforms (with name tags), I’d make an effort to remember their name. Until then, they were just “new guy”, although I would make an exception for people I was training.
I’m pretty bad with names too. Biggest problem is, I might see somebody every day, but they will of course only introduce themselves once. So you really only have that one chance plus whenever you hear somebody else calling them by their name to learn.
My brain does that constantly… but it’s very unhelpful.
“Being introduced to a new person. I’ll probably never see them so no need to remember their name.”
“Oh, look, it’s that person I was introduced to yesterday, whatshisname?”
“I’ve seen this dude three days in a row, clearly we’ll be working together regularly. I’ve been calling him ‘hey you’ for three days; I NEED to know his damned name! …but we’re already past the introductory period and it’s way too awkward to ask now. I need to hover around other conversations like a spy and hope someone else addresses him by name… How do I keep getting a reputation as a creepy guy again?”
Remembering nuanced things like the names of Transformers or voice actors for Xiaolin Showdown or Teen Titans characters is much more important than a replacement’s name.
Yes, this tracks. When people compliment me on my memory because I’ve just recited an entire passage from a Discworld novel, I reply “Yeah, now ask me if I’ve had lunch”.
They probably didn’t have the best first impression given the psychological ‘dunking’ on everyone they did at the RA meeting. Even if Ruth specifically asked for it, it did come off as rude/presumptuous to assume it about strangers even if they were mostly? right, even if it’s a harsh truth someone needs to hear, from someone who wants to be a therapist, usually that kinda talk would be done in private and (hopefully) without judgement
Also, lately a lot of Amber’s coping mechanisms have been deeply rooted in the “I am already unrepentant garbage, so it’s immaterial that I would be this devoid of basic social grace, because I Am A Goblin and thus it’s just easier to accept that being this way is normal and put in zero effort whatsoever,” school of philosophy. It was always kind of a problem, but it has definitely metastasized since all the cool trauma has gone down.
What is this phone book you speak of, and why wouldn’t someone as brilliant as Einstein just figure out how to get his phone’s option menu to cough up his phone number instead?
I always have to look up my own phone number. I have never managed to learn a number I never dial.
…in fact, since the advent of smartphones, where phoning someone is simply a matter of a couple of screen touches and actual numbered buttons are very much not in evidence, phone numbers are harder to learn generally, I find. I moved into a new school building in February that has code locks on all the internal doors, took me less that a day to have all the codes memorised.
My own phone number (landline, house I’ve lived in since I was three) is one of exactly two phone numbers I remember, because my parents used to recite it down the line when they answered it, and I picked up the habit.
The other one is my first job, something I only discovered about ten years ago, when I was calling in sick, and confidently stated that I remembered the number for my current job…
Got to feel for Booster, its confusing as fuck to be constantly compared to someone who’s not around and you don’t know while no one will even tell you who fuck this is.
I’m reading this differently. I’m reading it as Amber not being deliberately rude but Amber only realizing now SHE DIDN’T BOTHER TO LEARN THEIR NAME. Which, since Amber now wants to speak with Booster, means she (Amber) is horribly embarrassed.
We haven’t seen enough of Booster to get a good handle on their personality, yet, I don’t think. I wanna see more of them. Are they an animate incarnation of the Power Booster Rod from the previous verse, or were they designed to be a foil to Mike? What of their family? Their twin? What is their ethos? We know they get pissed when someone misnames them, so how long before they verbally destroy Amber?
I’m hoping this is a sign that Amber is beginning to make peace with Mike’s death, or at least progressing to another stage of the process, since she’s seemingly stopped seeing his ghost and Booster’s mere presence had served as a reminder that Mike is dead.
I don’t blame Booster at one bit for being all “what the fuck” though. Hoping she starts to see them as their own person, in part because I’d love to learn more about what makes them tick.
I get it — because Booster’s always ready to assert themself, just like Scrappy Doo in the cartoon. Was that what you meant, that Scrappy would be a good nickname for Booster? I agree!
Amber’s pretty internet savvy, so they could probably dig around. I don’t really think she WOULD do that, though. Like, she’s inconsiderate at points, ignorant in some cases, and socially bankrupt a lot of times, but we haven’t really seen her be a bigot.
Wonder how this is gonna go. even if they do it unconsciously/unintentionally i dont think amber would appreciate being psychoanayzed by a psych major/student (would be quite something tho, “a student helped me more than an actual therapist did”)
I’m assuming – more than likely incorrectly – that the name appearing on the birth certificate of the person pictured in the first panel is not ‘Booster’. While I don’t mind people identifying by nicknames – Jughead or Moose (from the Archies), Gidget (from the eponymous movie), or Jaws (from the 007 franchise) come to mind – they all had full given names as well which were mentioned at least once in the series/movie/franchise. Willis needs to create a backstory and full name for Booster.
Booster is trans. It’s very possible their name now IS Booster. They may not have gotten to legally change it yet though and so it’s very possible there is no full, legal name that wouldn’t be a dead name and Willis has said he doesn’t want to reveal trans character’s dead names. Same reason we won’t ever get one for Carla.
i think in some states , even if you don’t transition on hrt and such (tho i assume some non binary people wouldn’t really need hormones in the first place unless they wanna look more feminine/masculine but not identify with a specific gender), you can just pay a court like 500 bucks or so when you legally become an adult. Or become so famous under a stage name that no one cares anymore lol/j
their full name is on the cast page, just like everyone else’s – it’s “booster sanchez,” along with some of info about who they are that’s been established in the comic so far.
and it’s a little weird to demand that someone reveal a trans character’s dead name and imply that a trans person’s name is somehow less real/authentic/important if it isn’t the one written on their birth certificate.
It may be a dead name to Booster and were I in a real-life situation with a trans person, I’d use their desired appellation rather than their former name out of simple courtesy, but it’s still a part of that person’s history. When I used to DJ I used the performing name of ‘J.R. Williams’ – and still do when I sing karaoke – and I’ve been using “Bicycle Bill” or a variation thereof pretty much ever since I hit the internets back in the 1990s. I also had a fraternity nickname in college, and there are still some people who refer to me by that. But whenever I finally kick the bucket and they lower me into my hole, it’s my original name that my mom and dad gave to me that’s going to be carved on the rock they use to hold me down and make sure I stay put.
Let’s play a little game. Would you have posted this?
“It may be a dead name to BoosterCarla and were I in a real-life situation with a trans person, I’d use their desired appellation rather than their former name out of simple courtesy, but it’s still a part of that person’s history.”
that isn’t even remotely the same thing. Booster isn’t a nickname or a stage name, it’s just their name, same as David or Joyce or Carla. and i know if someone justified putting my “””original name””” instead of my real name (that i got married and paid real actual money for) on my tombstone because it was “basically just a nickname,” i would haunt them and the rest of their family for generations out of sheer transgender rage.
just because this is fiction, doesn’t mean this instinct you have isn’t rooted in real-world transphobia. These are fictional characters but the rules still apply – their “””original name””” is none of anyone’s business, and is an extraneous detail that really doesn’t, and shouldn’t, matter to anyone.
Booster Sanchez is the name that appears on their driver’s license, on their tax return, on their mail from the bank, and will someday appear on their grave (unless they change it again in the meantime). It is not a nickname.
Boomer, Bowzer, Boxer, Boozer, Booster, Bouser, Bruster, Bonjour, Bower, Beamer, and Gustove-Hosendorf are all pretty unique names. How are you going to remember which one they have?
https://circuitglobe.com/booster-transformer.html This is what i got a s a first result lol. Tho feels like there’d prolly be a variation rather than introducing a chara and just being like “I’m optimus” haha
totally fair! I can only remember slingshot and silverbolt. slingshot has yellow head and sunglasses, and silverbolt is the torso one. the rest of them could be anybody.
We’ve had human characters for some of the more unusual characters and such from the Walkyverse (Carla and Booster, for example). Have we seen more, like Cheese or Honey Bun?
i’ve often thought about that. i don’t have the skills, but it seems like it shouldn’t be too hard to put together an algorithm that crawls every strip and OCR’s all of the dialogue? Willis’s font hasn’t changed much in 11 years i think. (maybe once? going back to early strips the font does look a bit different)
i wouldn’t know where to start, but if someone with the know-how wants to try this and they need some transcriptions to train their bot i will gladly transcribe a few strips for them =)
Amber and Mike fought Honey Bun, so Blain must Honey Bun. The Cheese kept an occasional eye on the Booster, so until proven otherwise, the Cheese is Booster’s sister.
This is a Monty Python joke (slightly rewritten) : A pretty but dim lab assistant guesses something, and her lab partner says “try again” and she guesses identically so he replies “try again, but different”.
That was me after everyone started coming back to the office. Sales folks I hadn’t seen in 2 or 3 years started popping up asking for tech support help. I recognized faces and names, but the links between them were broken.
If they wanted me to send an email, I asked them “how do you spell your last name, again?”. After they spelled it back out, the mental link was rebuilt and they weren’t offended. 90% of the time, it works every time.
Speaking of the Aerialbots, does anyone else find it interesting that all five of them, when transformed, become what are more-or-less obsolete aircraft?
Im surprised at how many people are nodding along at Amber now, when what she describes has not been my experience of having a brain, at all. Memory is less like a hard disk, more like a muscle. The more stuff you memorize, the better you get at memorizing more stuff.
OTOH you do have to care about something to commit it to memory…
(first, nothing personal)
I can’t help but find it significant that it’s the “face” you key off first, then the name. (Most of us are probably similar.)
That it’s usually faces (or other visual tags or identifiers) that we respond to and rely upon to establish identity, with names and other traits or labels coming in second if at all.
my objection wasn’t to Amber claiming to be bad at names, that’s very common and unremarkable, but to her hard disk metaphor, which i think is probably not how brains work, like, at all.
Interesting. I don’t know if I would know if anything I’ve done would have improved my memory in general.
I know that what information I get and how matters for how well I remember it. (It takes me a while to get someone’s name memorized. It’s harder to get requirements down when people describe them in a wishy-washy way.) But I don’t know if, for example, learning to play instruments and memorizing songs improved my memory overall. It would make sense if it did but I didn’t notice it happening.
re: remembering names, i find it helps to make a conscious effort towards it? when i’m introduced to someone and i’m not exhausted or distracted by social anxiety i will deliberately massage their name into my mid/long-term memory by looking for some kind of anchor: someone else i know by that same name, or some word that rhymes, or whatever random association i can pull up on the fly while carrying on with the conversation. i’m neurotypical-ish, so ymmv for sure. i also write down names of people i’ve met recently in my notebook on occasion. i also like to remind myself i personally don’t mind being asked for my name again (and again), so i try to extend that same charity to myself for forgetting other people’s.
re: memory as a muscle, you know what, i actually don’t know how true that is, it just feels intuitively sensible but what do i know. i’ve just messaged an educational resource engineer i know who’s had cognitive psychology classes, i’ll report back her answer =)
ok, so my friend informs me, as far as she knows, memory can absolutely be trained but that will only improve your performance for the task for which you train it.
so, you memorize melodies, you get better at learning new melodies. you train your mind to remember a bunch of names, you should get better and better at remembering new names.
so, as i was saying, Amber’s rationale doesn’t make sense (but of course what she actually means is that she isn’t interested in remembering Booster’s name)
The floor meeting where Booster acted like a jerk, psychoanalyzing everyone whether they wanted it or not. I’d say based on her experiences with Booster so far, Amber’s not wrong to call them Replacement Mike.
I want to judge Amber here, but I’ve often reflected that my dedication to remembering the name of basically every single Pokemon and Pokemon Trainer is probably to blame for how little space I seem to have room in my brain for names. Then again, when I don’t know somebody’s name I just say “hey, how’s it going” and play dumb, I don’t throw around words like “replacement.” So yeah, what the fuck Amber?
Booster didnt ask for the title but they certainly stepped into the role as well as possible by giving a room full of people unwanted psychoanalysis and being proud of it afterwards.
Not gonna lie, I had completely forgotten that they existed. Then on this strip I was also thinking of them as “Replacement Mike.” I had to look at the tags to figure it out.
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as it turns out I learn my co-workers’ names on a need-to-know basis, bc if I don’t need to know them, why expend the effort (I’ll get them wrong anyway w/o context)
I get by way too long with just “hey, how are you?”
I figured out in my early 30s that my entire use of English is structured around never getting to a point in any sentence where using names would be appropriate, in part just because of how badly I fail to learn names and how difficult it is to recall even the ones I know. It takes me about a year to learn a name fairly reliably, assuming I’m working with/socialising with them on a regular basis. If I only meet/work with them occasionally, I just don’t.
Before the memory meds, I couldn’t even remember a name long enough to repeat it back to you. Now I can! And I learn names more quickly. But it’s still really hard.
Same here! And I’m pretty much face blind too – even if I really like a person, it’ll take me a few encounters to reliably recognise them. Which makes the whole ‘finding friends’ thing kinda hard.
Embarrassing story time: once we had a French exchange student in my lab, who sat in my room actually. There was also a French girl in my Chinese class. I occasionally talked to both (yay trying to be social!).
Half a semester in, I told lab!girl a story. She was like “yeah I know, you already told me that earlier in Chinese class”.
I truly hope she didn’t notice and just thought I’m forgetful about what stories I tell o.o
memory meds? which ones
I take a neuroreceptor precursor called Deanol which is only effective in rather rare cases where you have very specific metabolic production issues. (I also can’t be a vegetarian for possibly the exact same reason, but definitely for similar reasons in that my body can’t synthesise all the amino acids it needs, same as housecats. There are two rare but known genetic reasons for this; guess who appears to have BOTH lol)
Anyway, in the US it’s OTC and marketed it as an anti-wrinkle product, but that’s not actually a thing, it’s just nonsense. But if you’re in the States and want to try it, don’t look for Deanol, look for DMAE, which is the name used when they want to market it was a “smart supplement.”
Um… oh, right. Do you understand time? If you do, it’s less likely to help.
That’s exactly how I interact with my identical twin cousins
I don’t know which is which, so I just never use names
Ive done that but then it gets to this point where it seems like too much time has gone by for it to be OK to ask.
AT 73, I get to say, “Uh, Sorry, I’m having a senior moment and am blanking on your name.” Unfortunately, this is completely believable because just last week my mind refused to produce the name of someone that’s been a good friend for 50 years.
Any day now you’ll see a “Damn you, whatchurname that writes this comic!”
Damn you!….erm…William? xP
I’ve woken up and completely forgotten my name several times. It happened the first time no later than when I was 26. Whenever it might seem like I should know someone’s name, I point out that little tidbit. Works alright for me.
I was hanging out with my little sister once when I was a teen trying to remember how old I was. I was pretty certain I’d turned X, might have turned X+1, and had a nagging feeling I was older than that. I asked the kiddy. I was X+4, from memory. I can’t remember what X was though – maybe 13…
My husband routinely guesses his age wrong too though so I assume this is reasonably normal now we’re in our later 30s at least so I’m going to assume I was precocious 😉
All last year, I was remembering my age wrong. I was confusing it with my husband’s age, which I also misremember. Usually, I have to do math to remember. I guess at some point, they all blur together. So I’m like errr what year is it? So then, …..
My aunt once misremembered her age, confusing it with the age of my dad (her younger brother).
They’re 10 years apart. xD
Forgetting your age is completely reasonable. They keep changing it on you every year.
My issue is that as a college instructor I get an entire new batch of names in my head and they completely replace the space in my grey matter that previous names filled, so I fully explain forgetting people’s names as that occurring.
Yes, I’ve found over the years that as new cohorts of students arrive, their names overwrite the names of the cohorts that have left. So I’m in complete agreement on this one.
I used to have a teacher, who would only greet in the hallway the students he was teaching that year. So he wouldn’t greet you, even if you had been his student the previous two years. Maybe he had a similar thing going on!
I sometimes talk about artists by the name of their comic, just bc I don’t know if *who I’m talking to* remembers who it is
my spouse remembers Willis, tho, bc he’ll laugh and call him “Wesley Willis”(??)
There should be quarterly “name amnesty” days in work places where every 3 months everybody wears nice big clear name badges!!
It makes it especially bad that everybody seems to know who I am!
This is such a great idea! I might actually suggest this at my job.
Seeing names written down definitely helps. I communicate with my coworkers mostly by email, so I know all their names. But there are a few last names I’m really fuzzy on how to pronounce.
My workplace has a wall dedicated to photos and names of co-workers. I casually saunter by it at least once a day to remember a name. It’s also a nice reminder that my co-workers have faces (masking is still mandatory)
We had a high turnover rate at work and I had a standard 6 Month rule for new hires. If they lasted that long I would remember their names. I didn’t like to get attached to seasonal help either.
I just got dumped with 22 new seasonal workers, who I may or may not ever work with again after last week. Ive figured out who the two senior workers are and their names, the rest of them I have no clue and no inclination to try and learn.
I promised myself to not read the comment section and I fail again.
I’ve been in the position of having regularly new places to work, as seasonal or short contract or short time worker. It’s extremely unpleasant to be me with “you’re not going to be long enough here to be bothered to be treated as a normal human”. It’s like if as I worked sub teach I wouldn’t learn the name of a new kid because he was a carny kid, or in transition to the foreign language section. Nobody ask you to get it right, but ask for a name and *try*.
Now really I have to go and stop reading this part as I do out of habit.
Case in point: I went back and forth a couple of times on whether I should spend some of my finite time and effort responding to you, because there’s a fair chance you might not ever read it. And if not, what’s the point?
(It was thinking of those who definitely will that nudged me over the line.)
Similar experience at my last job, with utterly ridiculous turnover. If someone stayed around long enough to get their official uniforms (with name tags), I’d make an effort to remember their name. Until then, they were just “new guy”, although I would make an exception for people I was training.
I’m pretty bad with names too. Biggest problem is, I might see somebody every day, but they will of course only introduce themselves once. So you really only have that one chance plus whenever you hear somebody else calling them by their name to learn.
My brain does that constantly… but it’s very unhelpful.
“Being introduced to a new person. I’ll probably never see them so no need to remember their name.”
“Oh, look, it’s that person I was introduced to yesterday, whatshisname?”
“I’ve seen this dude three days in a row, clearly we’ll be working together regularly. I’ve been calling him ‘hey you’ for three days; I NEED to know his damned name! …but we’re already past the introductory period and it’s way too awkward to ask now. I need to hover around other conversations like a spy and hope someone else addresses him by name… How do I keep getting a reputation as a creepy guy again?”
“Okay, Extraneous Mike”
New Mike,
New hoo hoo hoo Mike
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIKGV2cTgqA
Remembering nuanced things like the names of Transformers or voice actors for Xiaolin Showdown or Teen Titans characters is much more important than a replacement’s name.
Oof. Gonna need a Burn Heal for that one.
Yes, this tracks. When people compliment me on my memory because I’ve just recited an entire passage from a Discworld novel, I reply “Yeah, now ask me if I’ve had lunch”.
…That kind of works as a reply, but wasn’t actually meant to be one.
How This Comments Section Works is another thing that you’d think I’d remember, but don’t…
….. booster?
…Gold
And Blue Beetle.
Backup Mike.
…boost….errrr
…vaccination? lol
booze errr
drunkee? lol
boom errr
old fart? lol
etc.
Solid Rocket.
That’s the GoG/Metal Gear crossover character, right?
Either that or a porn parody for… either of them really.
Not wrong.
Agreed.
Imagine insulting Booster like that, what the fuck.
They probably didn’t have the best first impression given the psychological ‘dunking’ on everyone they did at the RA meeting. Even if Ruth specifically asked for it, it did come off as rude/presumptuous to assume it about strangers even if they were mostly? right, even if it’s a harsh truth someone needs to hear, from someone who wants to be a therapist, usually that kinda talk would be done in private and (hopefully) without judgement
Also, lately a lot of Amber’s coping mechanisms have been deeply rooted in the “I am already unrepentant garbage, so it’s immaterial that I would be this devoid of basic social grace, because I Am A Goblin and thus it’s just easier to accept that being this way is normal and put in zero effort whatsoever,” school of philosophy. It was always kind of a problem, but it has definitely metastasized since all the cool trauma has gone down.
Insult? That’s a rare complement.
I mean, there’s a reason it’s rare, but still.
You always have the worst takes, nice to know you’re staying regular.
you do realize Clif’s comments are pretty much always tongue-in-cheek?
I mean, Booster is the most horrible person in the main cast, just like Mike was. So, from an in-universe level AND a meta level, Amber is right.
Imagine your whole existence is summed up as being a replacement for someone else. It’s bad enough everyone forgets you exist to begin with.
Mike’s assholery was somewhat amusing, albeit more so in the Walkyverse settings. So far, Booster mostly just strikes me as annoying.
Exactly, why insult Booster by reducing them to Mike’s replacement when there’s a bounty of others
When the gang finally drives Booster over the edge it is going to be terrifying.
Look how long it took for them to drive Joyce over the edge. And yeah, it was terrifying, but life goes on.
The Gang Destroys Booster.
I got you.
https://www.iasip.app/60cna2znIkykqFviUvl_ug
*clap clap clap*
You know, there’s an art to writing that kind of music.
Careful, if Booster‘s Replacement Mike, I am not inclined to visit another wake.
There should be no lightbulb above my head, considering yesterday.
Why would Amber be here, huh. She’s definitely not wanting to see Walky, so she’s… here to see Booster???
No reason to be there to see Booster, so she must have unfinished business with Walky.
Perhaps. Forgive me if I’m wrong but I think Walky’s the only one she’s close (enough) to that is still willing to talk to her.
Ethan’s got those terra shields up. Amber’s got all the social grace of a hikikomori.
There’s Joe.
Annoying brothers don’t count.
I hope her annoying brother Joe will become more and more important for Amber.
Silverbolt and Silverbolt’s friends #1-4. And sometimes Alpha Bravo and Powerglide.
Albert Einstein famously had to look up his phone number in the phone book when asked for it because “Why memorize what I can easily look up?”
Yeah, he’s among my favorite neurodivergent OGs 😎
Oh yeah, for a long time that was pretty much me. To quote Lisa Kudrow in Friends: “well, I never call me!”.
What is this phone book you speak of, and why wouldn’t someone as brilliant as Einstein just figure out how to get his phone’s option menu to cough up his phone number instead?
His phone’s menu was voice controlled only and couldn’t understand his German accent.
I mean, phones weren’t a sophisticated back then. You had to learn Morse code in order to send text messages.
As a not-young who got his ham license at 14, I very much enjoy your bon mot.
I always have to look up my own phone number. I have never managed to learn a number I never dial.
…in fact, since the advent of smartphones, where phoning someone is simply a matter of a couple of screen touches and actual numbered buttons are very much not in evidence, phone numbers are harder to learn generally, I find. I moved into a new school building in February that has code locks on all the internal doors, took me less that a day to have all the codes memorised.
“I wrote them down in my Grail Diary so I wouldn’t have to remember!”
Well, okay, but I hope you didn’t erase Henry’s notes
My own phone number (landline, house I’ve lived in since I was three) is one of exactly two phone numbers I remember, because my parents used to recite it down the line when they answered it, and I picked up the habit.
The other one is my first job, something I only discovered about ten years ago, when I was calling in sick, and confidently stated that I remembered the number for my current job…
Green Lantern?
One of the Arialbots was named Green Lantern? I smell a lawsuit!
*excerpts some “E-Bow (The Letter)” from R.E.M. on the hacked Muzak*
Yeah, I can keep Silverbolt and Slingshot straight, and the other three are kinda a wash, mentally.
It’s not complicated. Booster isn’t replacement Mike they are Mike in disguise and also Amazi-Girl!
We have Willis’s work that Jennifer is AmaziGirl.
Hey look, it’s Ken.
Got to feel for Booster, its confusing as fuck to be constantly compared to someone who’s not around and you don’t know while no one will even tell you who fuck this is.
Brutally honest
I’m reading this differently. I’m reading it as Amber not being deliberately rude but Amber only realizing now SHE DIDN’T BOTHER TO LEARN THEIR NAME. Which, since Amber now wants to speak with Booster, means she (Amber) is horribly embarrassed.
Maybe amazigirl would keep better track, if only for potential leads/troublemakers
Though question is if she’s even here to talk to booster or walky
It’s kind of a long shot, but maybe she want’s to apologize for over-reacting on Halloween and pick up where they left off, being garbage together.
Because of her resemblance to Dorothy, Walky will be tempted.
In a sentence probably not often uttered in the comments, ah cool, nice to see Booster.
(It’s been a while, feels like.)
Yayyyy Booster =)
I like them.
it really has been a while and i’m really excited to see more of them!
We haven’t seen enough of Booster to get a good handle on their personality, yet, I don’t think. I wanna see more of them. Are they an animate incarnation of the Power Booster Rod from the previous verse, or were they designed to be a foil to Mike? What of their family? Their twin? What is their ethos? We know they get pissed when someone misnames them, so how long before they verbally destroy Amber?
They are based on the rod, I think, but obviously, leaves a lot room for variance from there.
But yeah, that’s the thing. I am nonbinary, anyway, so maybe that’s part of it, but I wanna see what Booster’s all about.
I’m hoping this is a sign that Amber is beginning to make peace with Mike’s death, or at least progressing to another stage of the process, since she’s seemingly stopped seeing his ghost and Booster’s mere presence had served as a reminder that Mike is dead.
I don’t blame Booster at one bit for being all “what the fuck” though. Hoping she starts to see them as their own person, in part because I’d love to learn more about what makes them tick.
Im schocked Amber second time dont use name Replacement Scrappy.
Some of those are English words.
I get it — because Booster’s always ready to assert themself, just like Scrappy Doo in the cartoon. Was that what you meant, that Scrappy would be a good nickname for Booster? I agree!
So we’re all agreed? Henceforth Booster will be refereed to only as scrappy.
Or Replacement Scrappy. Mike was pretty scrappy too…
;-D
…But only if Booster wants a new nickname. Which, so far, they seem pretty happy with the name they’ve got. So the redubbing may be premature…
I’d say “at least she’s not dead-naming them”, but the guy who owns that name IS dead, so…..
That’s ….
a fair point.
How would Amber even know their dead name TO dead name them?
Mike’s name is as dead as this horse that we should keep beating indefinitely in honor of Mike.
Amber’s pretty internet savvy, so they could probably dig around. I don’t really think she WOULD do that, though. Like, she’s inconsiderate at points, ignorant in some cases, and socially bankrupt a lot of times, but we haven’t really seen her be a bigot.
Now I can’t un-see Booster as Mike in disguise…
What’s the simplest explanation for that?
Clearly, Mike was Booster in disguise.
I believe you’ve solved it. The answer was staring us in the face the whole time.
And here I was thinking they were Red Herring.
https://medium.com/literally-literary/red-herring-2b6bf1c0a899
Wonder how this is gonna go. even if they do it unconsciously/unintentionally i dont think amber would appreciate being psychoanayzed by a psych major/student (would be quite something tho, “a student helped me more than an actual therapist did”)
Oh? Booster gets a storyline?
Well a psych major (future psychiatrist?) in training, and with this group’s issues, it would be a goldmine for interactions lol
And if he’s looking for people with issues, Amber is a gold mine.
They
They came out swinging at that floor meeting, and that was just a warm-up.
I’m assuming – more than likely incorrectly – that the name appearing on the birth certificate of the person pictured in the first panel is not ‘Booster’. While I don’t mind people identifying by nicknames – Jughead or Moose (from the Archies), Gidget (from the eponymous movie), or Jaws (from the 007 franchise) come to mind – they all had full given names as well which were mentioned at least once in the series/movie/franchise. Willis needs to create a backstory and full name for Booster.
Booster is trans. It’s very possible their name now IS Booster. They may not have gotten to legally change it yet though and so it’s very possible there is no full, legal name that wouldn’t be a dead name and Willis has said he doesn’t want to reveal trans character’s dead names. Same reason we won’t ever get one for Carla.
i think in some states , even if you don’t transition on hrt and such (tho i assume some non binary people wouldn’t really need hormones in the first place unless they wanna look more feminine/masculine but not identify with a specific gender), you can just pay a court like 500 bucks or so when you legally become an adult.
Or become so famous under a stage name that no one cares anymore lol/jtheir full name is on the cast page, just like everyone else’s – it’s “booster sanchez,” along with some of info about who they are that’s been established in the comic so far.
and it’s a little weird to demand that someone reveal a trans character’s dead name and imply that a trans person’s name is somehow less real/authentic/important if it isn’t the one written on their birth certificate.
It may be a dead name to Booster and were I in a real-life situation with a trans person, I’d use their desired appellation rather than their former name out of simple courtesy, but it’s still a part of that person’s history. When I used to DJ I used the performing name of ‘J.R. Williams’ – and still do when I sing karaoke – and I’ve been using “Bicycle Bill” or a variation thereof pretty much ever since I hit the internets back in the 1990s. I also had a fraternity nickname in college, and there are still some people who refer to me by that. But whenever I finally kick the bucket and they lower me into my hole, it’s my original name that my mom and dad gave to me that’s going to be carved on the rock they use to hold me down and make sure I stay put.
OK, but unless you are transgender yourself, your experience isn’t actually relevant.
There is no systematic oppression of ex-DJs or frat boys.
You should really go out there and educate yourself about trans experiences I think, if you’re going to opine
Let’s play a little game. Would you have posted this?
“It may be a dead name to
BoosterCarla and were I in a real-life situation with a trans person, I’d use their desired appellation rather than their former name out of simple courtesy, but it’s still a part of that person’s history.”that isn’t even remotely the same thing. Booster isn’t a nickname or a stage name, it’s just their name, same as David or Joyce or Carla. and i know if someone justified putting my “””original name””” instead of my real name (that i got married and paid real actual money for) on my tombstone because it was “basically just a nickname,” i would haunt them and the rest of their family for generations out of sheer transgender rage.
just because this is fiction, doesn’t mean this instinct you have isn’t rooted in real-world transphobia. These are fictional characters but the rules still apply – their “””original name””” is none of anyone’s business, and is an extraneous detail that really doesn’t, and shouldn’t, matter to anyone.
Booster Sanchez is the name that appears on their driver’s license, on their tax return, on their mail from the bank, and will someday appear on their grave (unless they change it again in the meantime). It is not a nickname.
Probably. Hopefully. (Not sure it that’s established in canon.) Some people, especially at their age, haven’t been able to formally change it.
That shouldn’t be used as an excuse to deadname them.
Not giving them the surname “Rodriguez” was a missed opportunity, in my opinion.
(Unless that would’ve been a little too on-the-nose…)
So, how much of a side eye did your parents get from the civil registry when they filled YOUR birth certificate with “Bicycle Bill”?
‘Booster’ is not their nickname.
their real name is booster
Look, Booster, Amber has a Nerd Lore type brain and all her name memory slots have been taken up by fictional characters. Accept that now.
Booster is a pretty ‘unique’ name imo to where i could prolly remember it in the back of my mind even if i panic in teh moment.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-11/01-this-bright-millennium/formed/ Guess they never bothered to read/comment on her fanfics lol
Boomer, Bowzer, Boxer, Boozer, Booster, Bouser, Bruster, Bonjour, Bower, Beamer, and Gustove-Hosendorf are all pretty unique names. How are you going to remember which one they have?
i mean i’m sure ppl would def call someone boomer and memorize bowser for meme/pop culture refs lol
but yeah if you google ‘booster’ even if you put like ‘name’ behind it most of the results are about hte covid vaccine
conspiracy theory: boosters name was chosen to subconsciously spread vaccine awareness /hj
I have it on good authority that in England booster shot is spelled borchestershire shot.
Now THAT was funny. Good work.
Unless they use a screenname on the site where Amber posts her fan fiction.
I suspect Joyce never sent the link.
There’s gotta be a transformer named Booster, right?
https://circuitglobe.com/booster-transformer.html This is what i got a s a first result lol. Tho feels like there’d prolly be a variation rather than introducing a chara and just being like “I’m optimus” haha
totally fair! I can only remember slingshot and silverbolt. slingshot has yellow head and sunglasses, and silverbolt is the torso one. the rest of them could be anybody.
They couldn’t be Gustove-Hosendorf. Word of Willis that Jennifer is Gustove-Hosendorf.
We’ve had human characters for some of the more unusual characters and such from the Walkyverse (Carla and Booster, for example). Have we seen more, like Cheese or Honey Bun?
I think the cheese is youth pastor powers.
Honey Bun is currently appearing in the basement vending machine.
I I’m just going to assume that thejeff has typed in the dialog and description of every strip so they can do searches.
If only I had such a resource. I just remembered that was before the toe incident, so I knew who was there.
i’ve often thought about that. i don’t have the skills, but it seems like it shouldn’t be too hard to put together an algorithm that crawls every strip and OCR’s all of the dialogue? Willis’s font hasn’t changed much in 11 years i think. (maybe once? going back to early strips the font does look a bit different)
i wouldn’t know where to start, but if someone with the know-how wants to try this and they need some transcriptions to train their bot i will gladly transcribe a few strips for them =)
Amber and Mike fought Honey Bun, so Blain must Honey Bun. The Cheese kept an occasional eye on the Booster, so until proven otherwise, the Cheese is Booster’s sister.
This is a Monty Python joke (slightly rewritten) : A pretty but dim lab assistant guesses something, and her lab partner says “try again” and she guesses identically so he replies “try again, but different”.
TMYK.
Pouty Booster pouty Booster !
Oh, Booster. It’s been so long since we saw them last that I might have kinda forgot they existed.
depending on the way this arc goes we’ll prolly see more of them than compared to say, agatha or ‘other’ rachel lol
I wonder if the commentariat’s whining over them not being Mike recovering from a TBI changed plans and put them on the back burner for a while.
Yes, I kind of forgot their name too, for a bit. I knew it was something kind of unusual for a name, but that was it.
Amber, they’ve got a nerd name. Like the superhero that time traveled from the far far future and hangs out with Ted Kord.
I freely admit that’s exactly how I remember Booster’s name. ‘Like Booster Gold but only in the name.’
Amber truly have no fucks left to give, does she?
She actually looks embarrassed that she has no idea what Boosters name is.
That was me after everyone started coming back to the office. Sales folks I hadn’t seen in 2 or 3 years started popping up asking for tech support help. I recognized faces and names, but the links between them were broken.
If they wanted me to send an email, I asked them “how do you spell your last name, again?”. After they spelled it back out, the mental link was rebuilt and they weren’t offended. 90% of the time, it works every time.
The other 10% of the time, their last name is Jones.
That’s not nice, Amber.
Speaking of the Aerialbots, does anyone else find it interesting that all five of them, when transformed, become what are more-or-less obsolete aircraft?
Obsolete now, not so much in 1985.
Im surprised at how many people are nodding along at Amber now, when what she describes has not been my experience of having a brain, at all. Memory is less like a hard disk, more like a muscle. The more stuff you memorize, the better you get at memorizing more stuff.
OTOH you do have to care about something to commit it to memory…
Very true, Milu. Wish I could upvote this
one day … people names are the first to go
non ho capito. do you mean, as you get older and your memory starts to deteriorate, names tend to disappear first?
oh shoot, mixed you up with Franco based on the avatar and the cryptic wording. that first bit meant, “i didn’t understand” fwiw
(first, nothing personal)
I can’t help but find it significant that it’s the “face” you key off first, then the name. (Most of us are probably similar.)
Significant of what?
That it’s usually faces (or other visual tags or identifiers) that we respond to and rely upon to establish identity, with names and other traits or labels coming in second if at all.
oh sure. no argument there
maybe i wasn’t clear.
my objection wasn’t to Amber claiming to be bad at names, that’s very common and unremarkable, but to her hard disk metaphor, which i think is probably not how brains work, like, at all.
Interesting. I don’t know if I would know if anything I’ve done would have improved my memory in general.
I know that what information I get and how matters for how well I remember it. (It takes me a while to get someone’s name memorized. It’s harder to get requirements down when people describe them in a wishy-washy way.) But I don’t know if, for example, learning to play instruments and memorizing songs improved my memory overall. It would make sense if it did but I didn’t notice it happening.
re: remembering names, i find it helps to make a conscious effort towards it? when i’m introduced to someone and i’m not exhausted or distracted by social anxiety i will deliberately massage their name into my mid/long-term memory by looking for some kind of anchor: someone else i know by that same name, or some word that rhymes, or whatever random association i can pull up on the fly while carrying on with the conversation. i’m neurotypical-ish, so ymmv for sure. i also write down names of people i’ve met recently in my notebook on occasion. i also like to remind myself i personally don’t mind being asked for my name again (and again), so i try to extend that same charity to myself for forgetting other people’s.
re: memory as a muscle, you know what, i actually don’t know how true that is, it just feels intuitively sensible but what do i know. i’ve just messaged an educational resource engineer i know who’s had cognitive psychology classes, i’ll report back her answer =)
ok, so my friend informs me, as far as she knows, memory can absolutely be trained but that will only improve your performance for the task for which you train it.
so, you memorize melodies, you get better at learning new melodies. you train your mind to remember a bunch of names, you should get better and better at remembering new names.
so, as i was saying, Amber’s rationale doesn’t make sense (but of course what she actually means is that she isn’t interested in remembering Booster’s name)
Wait, is she looking for Walky?
Oh this is gonna be interesting AF.
unstoppable force vs immovable object
Amber hasn’t had a positive interaction with Walky in a while…
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-11/04-hompk/location/
Amber hasn’t had a positive interaction with Booster ever.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-11/01-this-bright-millennium/replacement-2/
OH SHIT.
NEW CONTEXT.
“gosh this makes me so mad, so mad, im gonna psychoanalyze the SHIT outta you…”
“ok Replacement Mike”
Amber seems to have met Booster at a floor meeting where she wasn’t paying attention. Easy to not store the name.
Or maybe replacement Mike is an office like Thor. Or the dummer from Spinal Tap.
I assume the position of Office Thor is an elected one?
The floor meeting where Booster acted like a jerk, psychoanalyzing everyone whether they wanted it or not. I’d say based on her experiences with Booster so far, Amber’s not wrong to call them Replacement Mike.
I’m amused anew to remember that Booster is DOA’s version of the power booster rod from the Walkyverse.
Wait till Sal gets her hands on them.
everyone will be psychoanalyzed except Danny.
for some reason.
…how did I only just realize that?
Oh FFS how did that slip by me?
Wow, Amber, way to be an asshole.
Oh yeah. I’d forgotten Mr. “Unwanted Psychoanalysis” existed.
They’re not a Mr.
I want to judge Amber here, but I’ve often reflected that my dedication to remembering the name of basically every single Pokemon and Pokemon Trainer is probably to blame for how little space I seem to have room in my brain for names. Then again, when I don’t know somebody’s name I just say “hey, how’s it going” and play dumb, I don’t throw around words like “replacement.” So yeah, what the fuck Amber?
Booster didnt ask for the title but they certainly stepped into the role as well as possible by giving a room full of people unwanted psychoanalysis and being proud of it afterwards.
Yay booster
Too busy getting my ass beat by covid to say what i usually would but it’s nice to see them again
Ugh, I’m sorry, I hope it passes quickly.
Come on, Amber, no-one knows which of the Aerialbots (other than Silverbolt) is which.
And he’s not even the best Silverbolt.
Gasp! Could this be the awkward beginning of a incredibly passionate love story?
Been 10 months since we’ve seen Booster.
Not gonna lie, I had completely forgotten that they existed. Then on this strip I was also thinking of them as “Replacement Mike.” I had to look at the tags to figure it out.
This was supposed to be a reply to Taigan.
TFW you just can’t reply to the right person :/