Plot twist: Dorothy decides to become an actual clown. Just straight up go to Clown College, join a circus, perform birthdays.
Even twistier: She’s fucking great at it. Just super hilarious and beloved. She single-handedly undoes the decades of “clowns = creepy”. Gets a TV show, does movies, tons of charity work.
There used to be an honest-to-God Clown Camp held annually at the university in Wisconsin that I once worked at. It was considered to be one of the best in the country, with professional and amateur clowns and wanna-bes in attendance. Since I knew the organization/founder/coordinator I even got to sit in on a class oriented to clown magicians to get some ideas – and pick up some props – for my magic act (that eventually went nowhere).
Nah she is way too fragile to suddenly cut herself off from her entire support network and simultaneously take on a way higher workload. Unless she takes the rest of the semester off for therapy she will have a breakdown and probably flunk out of yale
That, right there, is the defeated expression of a woman who’s just realized that her 40-day free trial period is over, and now she must either buy a license or remove WinRAR from her computer.
The presidency has been her stated goal for a LONG time. And in the last few days/weeks, she realized she isn’t comfortable accepting Yale’s admission, which she has very much linked to the presidency in her mind. But also, Dorothy’s main goal has actually been to lead with the aim of helping other people, and Raidah has just handed her a heaping dose of Reality Check on that. Being the president of the United States does not = helping people, it means being the president. With all the ugliness and death that currently entails. Sure, there’s good stuff and helping, too, but that is not all it is, and Dorothy can no longer look at her childhood dream with the rose-tinted glasses I suspect she’s been wearing until very recently.
So I imagine she’s been stuck trying to reconcile her longtime dream with her perception of herself as a Good Person Who Helps, while at the same time trying to figure out her discomfort with…something I don’t know she’s able to even fully put her finger on. And now Raidah has brought it all to the fore. Because the thing is, Raidah was RIGHT. She was cruel in her delivery, but she was not factually wrong about what being the president will entail, and Dorothy is, I think, less “mindboggled” and more “having a full blown crisis of identity.” Those…don’t resolve easily.
Does anyone know if she’s still seeing her therapist regularly? I would be surprised if she wasn’t, but she has a LOT to work through. Including “I ended two relationships, one of which I did not actually WANT to end, for the sake of a goal I don’t know I even want anymore.” She has made real sacrifices and she’s staring down the barrel of “was it even worth it?” I really hope she brings this to her therapist, even if it happens offscreen.
I could be wrong about any or all of this, it’s mostly speculation. But if she’s been standing here for that long, I don’t think it was just about what Raidah said. Something else is also going on.
…I guess it’s also possible she hasn’t been there the WHOLE time, and we’re just cutting back to a few minutes after her previous interaction? Do we know she’s been standing there this whole time?
Yeah, this is not going to go well if she decides to stay and then attempts to rekindle things with Walky. He’s obviously still hung up on her as well, and Lucy deserves better.
She’s not even that good at the manipulate thing. The best way to do it is to not let people know your doing it and she’s been too obvious. Drilling him on his family connection, buttering him up, trying to make her case on why his current group is no good.
She’s not the master manipulater she’s portraying his self to be.
I don’t even think she is portraying herself as anything of the sort.
If she was asked to her face, she would confirm that yes, this is exactly what she thinks networking is like, sees nothing wrong with it, and actively hiding it would be a waste of time. All she is doing is dressing it up to look “better”.
Were her definition of “better” not the metaphorical equivalent of wearing a suit made of human skin, she might just made a great case of Affably Evil.
Or swear allegiance to Sarah: the sort of mastermind who can make enemies like Raidah, who put their hearts and souls into trying to get revenge, without even trying…
I’m honestly really happy for Dorothy (I typoed “Dorkthy”, and if she weren’t already having such a bad day I would have kept it). Like, her fixation on being president has never felt, totally healthy? It kind of seemed like she was setting a high goal post for the sake of setting a high goal post. She clearly isn’t fully comfortable with politics when she’s actually forced to practice them, and I feel like she’d find much more rewarding work somewhat lower down where she doesn’t have to campaign.
That does seem to be the case so far, her strengths point to academic and management roles and it’s beginning to look like even if she improved her social skills she still would struggle to lie like Joyce and be even worse at bantering with people who dont follow her social script. I think that’s an even bigger nail in the coffin for her because this sort of reaction to another politicians bad faith debate would look like a lose to her supporters and her own party would use that against her.
It’s kind of a long shot right now, but I’m betting that this whole connected “Post Winter Break” saga is gonna lead to Dorothy and Walky hooking up. I just have the feeling that the dominoes are being put in place for it.
Actually, my long shot dream is that the breakfast leads to Walky realizing that he isn’t what Lucy wants and ending the relationship. Then Walky and Dorothy get back together.
she’s definitely having a lot of realizations at once so I get stalling out, but it’s wild to me that she didn’t have the war criminal thing in mind already- like, that she was shocked when Raidah said it. I would have expected her to be a little surprised that it came up, but be like “yeah, that’s the point though, to make the presidency a non-war-criminal job,” not mumble to herself about whether or not all of them are
I honestly don’t think she’s given BEING president half as much thought as BECOMING president. Dorothy fixates on goals. She’s got the grindset. Becoming president was just the biggest, best goal she could think of, and whether or not it would be a job she was really comfortable with wasn’t something she really let herself think about.
Dorothy was kind of a big fish in a little pond. Nobody ever seriously questioned her dreams. Like her parents are super supportive, which is great. But I don’t think anyone’s ever thrown the “this is the ugly side of your dream” to her face before.
I think it’s good that she has to deal with this now though, instead of having a breakdown five years into politics when they ask her to cut a dirty deal to get a lead in the polls or something.
You have good points, although to clarify it’s less that I thought she’d have heard this before, and more that I considered her pretty politically aware (I am less confident in this judgment now).
And yes, much better to realize now, while she can not only change her career path but, if she wanted, even change her major etc (hopefully after more than one day of doubt).
There are a lot of people in this country who are sometimes aware of the bad things presidents (and other federal-level politicians) do in this country, but they seem to think it’s not as bad when those politicians are a member of their preferred party, or that everything will somehow be fine if we can just elect the “right person” to the job. I can’t be sure if Dorothy actually thought that before what Raidah said to her, but it does feel like she really didn’t think about what it takes to become president and what presidents are usually expected to do in the current U.S. political system before now.
This strip makes me think of Obama. Apparently he was severely shaken the first time he had to sign off on a drone assasination. Two years later, he was joking about them at parties.
People have mentioned but it really reeks of “this comic started in 2010”
Bc i could buy a sheltered white millennial with like, at most a myspace and Facebook to play games in terms of social media usage, reaching college age all bright eyed and bushy tailed thinking “if the goodest person works the hardest they can become president and if the goodest person is president they can help everyone!”
But i could not for the life of me imagine a Zoomer reaching the big age of 19 and still being this hopeful. She’d have to be as sheltered as Joyce.
My first experience of politics that I can remember is the too-on-the-nose-for-fiction time I came home from school to find that the BBC had shuffled the after-school cartoon slot to make room for footage of the start of the Iraq War, and that’s now plausibly before Dorothy was born. When I was her age I was already in ‘The system’s fucked, but maybe not unfixably so’ mode, so I don’t know how she’s so optimistic now she’s that much younger than me, unless maybe she’s secretly motivated to be the equivalent of Pope John Calvin?
She’s thinking about whether being President is really the dream for her, or whether she should chuck it into the recycling bin for someone else to pick up.
It really kills me that politicians these days, in general, either don’t realize or don’t care to not be terrible.
No matter how messed up past presidents have been, Dorothy, you can always choose to, you know, not.
Yes, presidents have a lot of power, and should listen to Uncle Ben, but if your decision is between committing a war crime and not committing one, you can always just not do that.
The question is, does not committing a war crime make you a bad president.
Since someone will ALWAYS think you’re a bad president, instead of worrying about that, you should worry about being the best president you can be.
And if you think being the best president requires a willingness to commit war crimes, then you need to man/woman/person up and decide to either give up that dream or decide what war crimes you’re willing to commit for what you believe to be the greater good.
And if you think it doesn’t require a willingness to commit war crimes, then you have nothing to worry about and should continue on with your day.
I think you worded this very well, and I agree, but I will add, as a slight clarification of how I see it, “a good president” can encompass “is able to get anything done before being forced out of office”. Jimmy Carter, famously least terrible president, also had a very, very short stint, and didn’t get a lot done because he made too many enemies with his ideals. Being a president means becoming a part of something larger, something larger that is not necessarily good or kind or safe to be around.
That’s why I focused on not committing war crimes and also on working towards the greater good vs simply being good, as there’s a lot of grey area between good and terrible that so many politicians seem to ignore these days.
Consider that the last “no war crimes” president just entered Hospice Care in Plains GA, and everybody was talking about what a terrible sitting president he was and what a fantastic ex-president he is, sometimes in the same breath.
This. I happen to believe that Idealism has no place in politics. It’s good to have principles, but the World is too messy to be an Idealist rather than a Pragmatist President.
I’m going to have to disagree a bit. I’d prefer politicians have some ideals, even if they do have to be tempered with a little practicality. Otherwise, it’s way too easy to justify atrocities as realpolitik, even when they’re neither necessary or even helpful. See the long history of US meddling in Latin America and the middle east, just for starters.
Hate to break it to you, but politicians in this country, and particularly presidents, have been doing terrible things since pretty much the beginning. Even the presidents who most people think were “good” have done some terrible things that a lot people either don’t know or don’t want to know about.
Okay. But then what? Can you be president without doing anything terrible?
And should you want that?
Are there degrees of terrible between different presidents, and does that matter? And to whom?
Like, fine. All US presidents are war criminals.
Let’s leave the ethics of war crimes aside for one moment.
Someone’s gonna be US president at any given point, barring a full-blown revolution, which we can safely agree, unfortunately, is never a likely scenario. (Like idc i’m still a utopian but i do get pragmatism)
Are there better and worse case situations?
It’s like.. Obviously it’s fine that not everyone wants to be potus but if you do have that (weird) ambition.. Should you give up because you can’t be perfect? Or should you soldier on in the full knowledge that you are committing yourself to moral compromissions, while holding on to the desire to do good– or at least, to be a lesser evil?
I don’t know.
I’m suspicious of people who want power, generally. Though i find someone like Dorothy who has a fairytale view of the presidency less scary than someone like Raidah whose aim is to move up knowing full well and accepting from the get-go that you don’t make a tortilla without breaking a few eggs.
Perhaps it’s not so much the naivete as the ideological commitment that makes Dorothy sympathetic to me. Some politicians, even when not perfect or perfectly aligned with my beliefs, do stir up something in me because they don’t seem completely cynical, but like they actually believe in something, and will sacrifice their ambitions over their beliefs.
Or maybe that’s celebrity culture and christian eschatology poisoning my mind and i should fight that instinct as well idk
haha, no it wasn’t a typo, but nor was it an intentional portmanteau. i’m just french and sometimes i forget that english didn’t quite incorporate our entire vocabulary back in the 11th century =P
Then again, as i think Hannah Arendt said, “those who choose a lesser evil should never forget they chose evil”.
No choice is beyond accountability.
There is no purity when it comes to politics. None of us is innocent. Which is not tragic, in fact it’s liberating. Innocence is a metaphysical construct. It doesnt belong to the realm od (secular) politics. I think most of us need to worry less about our soul and more about what we do with our freedom…
I guess you can see it as liberating, but it’s easier for it to push people in the other direction – to stop distinguishing between the lesser and greater evils and refuse to participate at all, even if that aids the greater evil.
yeah… i don’t know. i think the current climate crisis might be shifting that somewhat, at least in rich nations? where being part of the silent majority is not seen as acceptable, and there is a sense that accountability is at least to some extent distributed. maybe? i don’t know? wishful thinking???
now i’m not sure what you’re trying to say. my point is that purity politics is bad because it tends to encourage doing nothing rather trying and failing to be perfect…
and my (admittedly hopeful) hope is that global warming feels like something none of us are innocent of, and so incentivizes activism rather than apathy? because if your hands were never clean to begin with there is no metaphysical profit to sitting back?
then again a lot of the reaction i see seems to be cynical defeatism which is just as bad. so, i don’t know. i just personally dislike purity politics and find more satisfaction in some kind of framing around responsibility or something. i know the big words but i don’t think i really know how to use them tbh
oh i see. yeah, words do matter and you’re right, the ‘lesser evil’ phrasing i’ve been using is pretty fraught. guess i should shelve that.
freedom and responsibility are what i’m interested in, really. i also like the idea of trouble, and ambiguity, like accepting that political choices should never feel completely comfortable? if that makes sense? it’s probably not a very appealing framing. then again, i do take an odd kind of comfort in being a flawed motherfucker, with flawed ideas and actions and just accepting that but also trying to get better and do better. the world is too complicated to hold myself to any higher standard, and when i’ve tried i got burnt out, dogmatic, or cynical and all those options suck.
in any case, we can’t just get rid of purity politics, we also need concepts (and words) to replace it with, so, that’s where i’m at. and it feels… not perfect i guess but… that’s kind of my whole thing, so.
also, i think i’m influenced in this sort of view by existentialists and late 20th century queer authors like Haraway, the stuff i’ve been soaking up lately. i guess the current virtue politics on the left and far-left does feel like a failure of that programme (if it ever was one). queerness was supposed to liberate us from Fall narratives and innocence goddammit.
You touched on the solution, but you dismissed it as never likely. The entire US political system is corrupt, and the two major political parties are both owned by the wealthy and the big corporations. The reason all presidents are war criminals is because they serve the interests of the big businesses that make weapons. I’m convinced that revolution is the only and necessary way to fix this. You can’t fix a system that works for the wealthy from within. You have to overthrow it and build a new system that works for the working class.
but to me, that’s unsatisfactory. like… ok? the system can’t be “fixed” from within? but does that mean that any situation that is not revolutionary is as bad as any other, and any praxis that doesn’t purely focus on bringing about revolution is the same as doing nothing?
revolutions are definitely not predictable, but nor do they rely purely on the enthusiasm and praxis of those on your side. explosions of violence can go in very dark directions. i don’t know that an overthrow of the government happening today in my country or yours is necessarily a bright prospect. there’s a lot of very energetic and empowered fascists preparing for that sort of moment of chaos, and i don’t think the left is currently in a very strong position should it come to that.
i feel like being politically engaged in a meaningful way means understanding the world as it happens to be right now, and agitating for radical change should totally be a part of that but it feels a bit absurd to be singly focused on revolution right now. but ok, that’s just me.
Revolutions also don’t happen until things get really bad. Or at least until the public is manipulated into thinking they’re really bad.
And as messed up as America is, it’s not really bad by historical standards. We’re nowhere near the level of desperation that leads to popular revolutions. (Though we might be closer to the manipulated version, but coups backed by a faction of the elites aren’t really what we’re talking here.)
This kind of thinking can lead to accelerationism and that’s an evil all its own.
You’ve also got to have a definition of “war crime” that’s not just an inevitable result of war.
Terrible things happen in war. Civilians are always the main victims. Collateral damage. Bad intelligence leading to strikes against the wrong targets. And on and on.
And as President, you’re likely to inherit a war, so you can’t even really make the decision just not to start one.
Consider, for example, the withdrawal from Afghanistan. No more US war crimes there, but can you justify that to the women of Afghanistan?
I don’t see any need to justify our withdrawal from Afghanistan. If anything, I think both the US and Afghan women might be better off if we’d left many years sooner. Without US forces propping up a corrupt and incompetent government, Afghans might have actually assembled something functional enough to reject the Taliban. Instead, our continued presence allowed the Taliban to rebuild, with US actions effectively providing a recruiting campaign. We wasted too many American lives and far too many Afghan lives, not to mention over a trillion dollars, with very little to show for it. Too much of that money did nothing but line the pockets of corrupt officials, and even many of the things that actually got built are already crumbling due to shoddy construction or abandoned because they were never practical to start with.
I don’t like what’s currently happening in Afghanistan one bit, but that doesn’t mean the US should (or even can) fix it. How much longer should we have stayed? Another year? Five? Twenty? Too many politicians seem to believe that American money and military force can fix any problem, and they fact they keep getting elected suggests that too many voters buy into the idea as well. Any realistic analysis shows how wrong this is. For every bit of good we accomplish, we’re responsible for at least as much harm. Instead of remaking the world in our image, we’ve created greater instability and violence. Just because there are bad things happening in the world, that doesn’t mean the US can, much less should, fix them. The only problems I believe we’re obligated to fix are the ones we created, and in most cases the best thing we could do is just stop making things worse.
I kind of think you’re right. My point wasn’t that Biden was wrong and we should have stayed, but that these aren’t easy decisions. People get hurt either way. It’s easy to justify to me in the abstract – I’m an American guy with no real stake in the situation. Much harder to do so to someone whose now living under Taliban rule. Not a conversation I’d want to have.
And leaving sooner wasn’t an option for Biden. He wasn’t President sooner. You could quibble about trying to push Obama to pull us out as VP, but the larger point is that as President, you inherit situations and saying it would have been best to do something else before you took over isn’t an option. You’ve got to play the hand you’re dealt.
I also don’t buy your initial premise at all. The Taliban remained a threat, basically throughout our occupation. Us leaving sooner wouldn’t have turned the admittedly corrupt Afghan government into something functional, it just would have led to the Taliban returning sooner. We helped with their recruiting campaign, but so did the corrupt government and they were never down to the point of being something the Afghan government/army could handle on their own. There was never a right time to leave.
also, to “The only problems I believe we’re obligated to fix are the ones we created,” well…
not to dwell on the Afghan situation specifically, but as the main military, commercial and diplomatic force in the world for the last many decades, the US saying “this isn’t our problem” about practically any major conflict in the world would be like me, a french person saying france has no responsibility to west africa, among many other places.
to your point that sometimes the best thing to do is nothing, sure. that’s always one of the options to be weighed.
yeah, i wasn’t speaking to that situation but to Wizard’s conclusion,
” The only problems I believe we’re obligated to fix are the ones we created, and in most cases the best thing we could do is just stop making things worse.”
What makes this more infuriating is Dorothy was going to attend her Civic engagement club meeting and probably do positive work while Raidah attempts and her ilk are doing nothing of importance and try to manipulate Walky into joining their clique.
They’re the politicians Dorothy is the civil servant who has been bullied into abandoning her civil service. Which is pretty close parallel to the political climate.
It finally came to he that she could have sexually imprinted herself on Joyce. And, that Joyce had been expecting them doing “hanky panky” things to/with each other.
Any guess on who will come and snap her out of this.
My first choice would be Amber as I think she has some experience with this type of thing (I want to say this is called disassociating but I’m probably wrong).
My second choice would be Joe, potentially walking Joyce to class, so that this would be an opportunity for her to see a different side to him.
Third would be she snaps herself out of it.
Honorable mention goes to Dina who sees Dorothy like this, recognizes she’s having an issue, and decides to quietly stand next to her in solidarity and support.
Good. Then it’s no additional drama for one of them to ask, “Dorothy, what the FRAC is wrong with you?” And maybe she’ll blurt it out, and they (and we) will, at last, know.
19 is a completely reasonable time for a quarter life crisis. I had mine when I was 20.
and there’s no magic fresh start waiting around the corner for her, because there’s not much point in going to Yale if she’s not gunning for the presidency anymore.
we’ve had amazing growth arcs from other characters during their freshman year. now it’s Dorothy’s turn. growing pains are an inevitable part of growth.
I’d disagree with there being no fresh start or point to Yale anymore. This kind of moment could actually galvanize Dorothy into attending Yale for a totally new/different career path, especially because most of her social circle and acquaintances know her as “future-president Dorothy Keener” and that shit would just keep hammering on her every time she had to correct them.
It annoyed me to no end how much of a supporter of The System (TM) Dorothy /was/.
Let’s see where she goes from here.
Maybe instead of Yale she’ll enroll in the YPG?
I won’t get my hopes up just yet, but I’d like to imagine this might be the start of Dorothy realizing that if she really wants to help regular folks in this country, she’s better off trying to change the system from outside of it rather than from within. Trying to change a corrupt system that really only benefits the wealthy from within tends to result in that system changing you, not the other way around.
It worked pretty well for several countries that tried it. The Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and other socialist and communist countries seem to have treated their workers much better than all the capitalist countries ever have.
And even at the heights of Soviet power, the life of the average citizen was miserable compared to even how shitty American working class life can be. Much less some of the northern European capitalist countries.
A case might be able to be made for pre-New Deal America?
I know president bad and all that, but it’s a little sad when people’s dreams are crushed. Like, it’s an ugly job, and Dorothy might not actually be happy doing it, but seeing her defeated like this just makes me wish being president was a thing someone like her could actually want to do/be able to do well/whatever. Hopefully you get what I mean.
Odd fact: When I was 11 years old, I wanted to be the President and my dad said, “Well, the first thing you need to know is whether or not you’re willing to press the button. If not, find a new job.”
I have generally been against Dotty trying to become president and she shouldn’t but Radiah just such a jerk with this whole thing. Also Radiah comment may seem profound, but she probably put little actual thought into her comment it’s only purpose was to hurt Dorothy.
War Crimes and who is a war criminal may seem sime but then you get tied up in alot of treaty and customary law and also has to reconcile the ideas of national and responsibility to protect. There are historical and philosophical questions that arise when consider.
Dorothy is thinking of all that. While Raidah is eating breakfast not even giving a second thought about Dorothy beacuse Sarah seems to be on the forefront of her mind. And that’s what makes this situation tragic to me and why I have been making multiple posts about it.
There really aren’t that many questions to consider when appraising the genocidal state known as America. It’s war crimes all the way down, while we censure and blockade and invade other nations for doing the same as us. It actually is pretty simple.
good jokes and laughs aside.
How Dorothy hadn’t thought of that before. aside from the simple dilemma of not committing war crimes. As a leader, she will have much more difficult decisions, such as the distribution of limited resources to whom to help, where to help, in what order, someone will always be left out. Or a Star Trek classic, would she be able to sacrifice an individual for the good of the whole
Oh, get over it. Just don’t knowingly blow up any civilians once you get to the office, it’s probably that easy. I don’t blow up civilians all day every day, and I’m a powerless 29-year-old autist. Imagine how much power to not blow up civilians the President has, it’s probably a lot.
Oh, and fix some of the FUCKING ROADS. If everything is so goddamn car-reliant and pedestrian-hostile, how come all the roads suck? Like, don’t even shoot for half. 25%, start there. Say you’re aiming for like 60%, do 25%, and even if it looks disappointing by comparison to the promise, you’ll have fixed a quarter of the nation’s roads.
Federalism can explain the roads suck not every road is the responsibility of the Federal government and states can be real cheap. Also weather and Semi-trailer trucks and that most states and municipalities use asphalt for the local roads. Concrete is more durable.
I didn’t name any states. I also don’t care who’s responsible IRL, that shit needs fixed and I said it directly to a cartoon. If Joyce can teleport, Dorothy can fix America’s roads.
You probably don’t have to make the decision between drone strike with 80% likelihood of taking out a high prize target, spending more time to create greater certainty of the target but lower likelihood of success of the target or putting boots on the ground.
If it was just as easy as “hey don’t do this thing that will make you look dumb if you are wrong” then nobody would do the thing.
How about “Don’t get involved in any wars?”
Oh wait, you’re going to inherit some.
And boots on the ground doesn’t really decrease the chance of civilian casualties much and drastically increases the chances of things going completely wrong.
Yeah, lemme put a few dozen of the dumbest people you’ve ever met in a civilian-rich environment, arm them with machine guns, and expect nothing to go wrong. Also at least half of them are racist against the civilians. And at least half of those haven’t slept in a week, which I hear is really good for critical thinking and reaction times.
Oh no I don’t think boots on the ground improves the likelihood of success or accuracy, I was just saying that’s the third option. Same thing, if just putting more military personnel on the ground solved the problem we would just do that all the time.
What we really need to do is get like 1000 of those “If I was there” guys and send them into every tricky situation. Its a win-win. If they succeed, every gets to see how cool they are. If they fail, they finally shut the fuck up.
And if you promise 60% and get 25% you are absolutely getting rocked in midterms and the general because then the next person only has to promise 40% giving them way less margin of error and voters will go with that.
The average voter did not see an increase of 0 to 25. The average voter saw a promise of 60 and only got 25. They will feel like they lost 35 and that’s assuming that your opponent didn’t directly sabotage it. Citation: Any red state voter that got healthcare at a lower premium because of the ACA, but still hate it because hashtag socialism.
I don’t think they’re braindead. I think the average American voter is, unfortunately, indoctrinated into thinking that they have to vote for either the red or the blue of the two right-wing capitalist parties, and that voting for one of those two parties will somehow make things better. Evidence shows otherwise, but the sort of propaganda most American voters are exposed to on a daily basis is hard to break free of.
Nah, fuck ’em. They keep doing the dumbest shit possible and it keeps hurting me and mine, so they can get in the sea. It’s fine to write off the majority of the country, actually.
Could someone gently slide Dorothy into the corner and get a spotlight on her so the only thing she loses is her religion and not, as seems currently to be happening, her entire sense of self?
Dorothy should stop standing in the room obsessively watching Walky have breakfast sitting next to his girlfriend. That’s sad in a very disturbing level.
What? Am I missing something here? Are you joking?
Isn’t Dorothy still standing in the Lobby where Walky and Radiah left her? And are Walky and Lucy not in a completely different location?
Dorothy should stop standing in the dorm lobby obsessively using her x-ray and telescopic vision to watch Walky having breakfast in a restaurant about a mile away.
(Yes, I looked it up on Google Maps for the sake of this joke.)
So… If Dotty does finally give up the dream, what do folks think WOULD be a good professional fit for her?
My pick would be social work. Granted I’m biased since I study SW, but I think it’d be a good choice. She’s conscientious and prompt, could manage a heavy workload, so her skills fit neatly. It’s a very values based profession with a focus on both social structures and how individuals are affected. Plus work paths vary from helping people one on one, civic engagement/community work, and also policy development. Plus fewer war crimes.
Social Work (well, performing well at social work) requires you to connect with people in a way that Dorothy seems mostyl incapable of doing (and, wrt Franco’s suggestion, she’s not combative enough for law).
If she’s good at math, she’d make a good engineer. She’d also make a good cabinet member in several positions, provided none of those positions require her to deal with people. Dorothy is good at information processing, so any job that is only “input data -> output solution” she’d be good in.
There were lots of things I couldn’t do at 19 that after years of training I was totally a pro at by 27 (when I got out of grad school). Part of college is training you in specific ways of thinking and acting. I didn’t start out an economist, I became one.
Dorothy can become whatever she wants to if she puts in the effort (even if she needs to put in more effort than Roz or Becky would). You can actually become good at people if you put in the effort and get the right training. It’s just a matter of what she wants to do.
Plus, what makes you popular in college isn’t necessarily what you need as an adult in the workplace.
I think I finally get why Dorothy and Walky were so good together. They have more in common than they realize. We’ve just seen them experience the two major flavors of “cleverest kid in their high school class goes to college, oh no”.
Anybody know where to start looking for a way to filter out/eliminate noise pollution, mentally? I’ve never been able to shut out intrusive sound, to the point that it will completely ruin my ability to focus if a bird chirps too much or if a car drives by. On top of that, everything around me is so fucking LOUD, makes noise nonstop, and either can’t be shut off or vibrates so goddamn hard even covering my ears doesn’t stop it from piercing through and filling my brain with static. Idk it it’s a mental block, a physical sensitivity, or what, but I don’t know where to look for prevention/mitigation methods, or even how to phrase it in a search bar in a way that will actually get results and not just seventy dudes jerking each other off on Reddit about experiencing the same thing, with no actual solution mentioned in the thread.
Just an idle query, not especially caused by anything. I know y’all ain’t doctors or therapists or nothin’, but I figure at least one or two people can agree that everything is too goddamn noisy and might even know how to start looking into solutions.
See, when I read “closed-back headphones”, I assumed they had some sort of strap for the back of your head. I didn’t even know open-backs existed, so thanks for the new info.
I’m sorry about that. It seems that noise-cancelling would be the most important thing for you. As you state below, research on good headphones seems to be required. I’m not an expert, but based on what you describe, if noise-cancelling is not total maybe you could try to mask the remaining noise by playing a monotonous sound, something that does not disturb your focusing with unexpected variation. Anyway, I hope you find something effective soon.
Those little orange foam things that don’t stay in my ear for more than two seconds yes I put them in correctly and didn’t mess with them and yes my ears are clean stop looking at me like that?
For some reason, nothing ever stays in my ears like it would for others. Anything meant to plug into the socket just flops right out within moments, regardless of who puts it in there or how little I move. I figure it’s a shape thing.
You don’t have ADHD, do you? Noise sensitivity is the biggest part of my disorder. To add to Needfuldoer’s suggestion, closed-back headphones are great, active noise-canceling are better, but the weird pressure of ANC can be distracting in its own right.
Matter of fact, I certainly do have the ADHD. Noise sensitivity out the ass, like I used to work at a fast food place that was constantly noisy, and when I got home I was so worn out from the inescapable racket that I couldn’t play or watch anything with the sound above muttering volume for a few hours. Plus, words get jumbled up real good when I talk to people in person, to the point that most active conversations sound like complete and total gibberish. Makes listening to songs with lyrics a real pain in the ass sometimes, especially since I grew up listening to a lot of British bands from the 70s and 80s, so the fuckers had accents that made the words sound even more jumbled. I thought Rammstein’s songs were sung in English until I was 10.
As for noise-cancelling headphones, I’m assuming they’re probably expensive (expensive meaning “more than $20-40”), so I’ll have to put a lot of research into which ones to buy, so I don’t wind up wasting a hundred bucks on bad ones.
Yeah, you’ve got the exact same kind as me. I know from experience Bose makes excellent ANC over-ear phones, but they were on the expensive side last I checked. Klipsch makes earbuds with excellent sound quality that are designed to passively block out noise, and those were around $50-$70 USD.
I recently ordered some earplugs for my husband from flare audio. They have an “Earshade” version of the earplugs that gets thicker as it exits the ear. I’m really hoping this helps his overstimulation in grocery stores and such.
I personally can’t keep earbuds in my ear, either, so whenever I need something to stay in my ear I wear a long beanie that covers my ears. The outside pressure keeps the earbuds in and I don’t have to fucking fiddle with them every 2 seconds anymore. I love hats anyway, so double win.
Is it sensitivity to all noise or certain noises? Something that works for my brain is having an alternate, non-irritating noise for it to latch onto, to the point it forgets the other noise is even happening. I use a variety of pink noises for this.
Your goal with soundproofing is to keep sounds from getting in, and keep them from echoing once they *are* in.
Which means you’re putting things which stop vibrations everywhere you can. Heavy curtains over the windows, cork pads under every piece of furniture and behind every painting on the wall, carpeting on every floor with soundproofing mats underneath it, insulating tape around all your doors and windows to keep them from rattling or letting sound in – this stuff is a lot cheaper than professional soundproofing and surprisingly effective.
As for earplugs, there are soundproofing headphones which are there for protection rather than music. If headphones aren’t a problem, those could help. Alternatively, you can use regular noise cancelling headphones just for the noise cancelling and not play any music through them. Even cheap brands will let you do that. I suspect that the heavy duty ear protection things are more effective, but they may cost more or be less comfortable.
laughs in restrictive rental apartment
On the off chance I ever buy a home, I’m definitely spending an outrageous amount of money on good insulation and soundproofing, that’s for goddamn sure. I guess I can take a look at buying some more of these lovely sound foam squares I bought a few years ago for a podcast/streaming booth, as a compromise. It’s funny you mention echoing, because our hallway (if it can be called that) is basically built to amplify noise and funnel it directly to my favorite seat.
Yeah, it sounds like crap, but most of the things I suggested can be done without altering the apartment – they’re stuff that goes on your furniture, over your windows, or on your floors. Heavy rugs are better than thin ones, but even super cheap rugs with no padding under are better than a bare wood or tile floor, and cheap tablecloths provide some soundproofing vs no tablecloth. (And actually, the cheapest thing I suggested is that insulating tape around the doors and windows. Removable when you leave, too, if you think your landlord’s gonna gouge you on the security deposit.)
If you don’t mind your apartment *looking* like crap you can basically hang a lot of heavy blanketry over all your walls, especially those nearest the loudest noise sources. Shove some cork or foam panels behind them for a bit more oomph – or a bit less oomph if you want to look at it that way.
Or, if you have a bit more cash, you can get nice quilts and do the same thing, but it looks better.
Not sure why people think Radiah is the only reason she’s upset/lost.. Dorothy has been through hell, kidnapped, handling the police after, working so hard for Yale on her own merits but getting accepted for said kidnapping… Rejecting it due to her own morals, trying so hard to help but every attempt at it just blows up in her face, highlighting just how bad at peopling she is.
And the cherry on top, Radiah comes over and just adds another cut.
Dorothy’s not shaken by Radiah’s words.. s’ just the straw that done broke her back.
Not that I support crushing Dorothy’s dreams or anything, but I sort of hope this leads to a change of major for her eventually. I changed my major in my second semester of college under similar “oh, shit, this won’t be like in my head” circumstances. I think it’s a common enough thing that happens irl and can be a really effective story growth arc.
Anyone remember when Sarah put herself in a corner so she had to take her Halloween decorations down or admit she liked things? Last panel went grey, people joking about The Sound of Silence as the background music, the works?
Well, one of the jokes was “This is the comic now, characters being devastated one after the other with greyscale and S&G.”
For all the guff I’ve given Dorothy I think she is or really tries to be a good person. So she would make an awful President. You have to be grimy and you have to play the game or you’re gonna get mowed down by the opposition assuming you ever even manage break out of your own field playing nice.
Oh Dorothy, Honey. I’m so sorry. But this is for the best. May you find a new passion (without the wheel-spinning chaos most college 2nd semester freshmen go through)
I think I’m gonna keep my comments on this storyline to a minimum from here on. I don’t like the direction a lot of the commentariot wants it to go and seeing most of it be so excited for it is bugging me and you guys don’t deserve to deal with a grumpy BBCC for it.
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Dotty forgot what she went there to get
mood
Happens to the best of us.
And to the rest of us.
It has to happen to the best of us
The rich folks suffer like the rest of us
It’ll happen to you
Gotta slip a little Warrren Zevon onto the Muzak.
Jeeze. I come back 20 hours later and she’s _still_ standing there?
Oh, sweetie. Someone hug her!
I wouldn’t. Don’t apply any more pressure to her just now, people could get hit by the shrapnel.
Someone grab a paperclip and reboot the Dorothy.
I hesitate to ask but…where, exactly, do you suggest one insert the paperclip?
Behind the ear.
Broken Dorothy is broken. Bring duct tape.
It is now time for me to hum The Duct Tape Madrigal.
Seconded
you ok bud?
Dorothy, no. You’re a few years too young for a Quarter-Life Crisis.
Well she’s very efficient.
Well if she’s 19, 19 X 4 is 76
I’d say it’s the perfect she for a quarter life crisis
Oh gosh Dorothy is realizing a lot of things lately huh
Aw, jeez, Dorothy.
–The Tears of A Clown/When there’s no one around
*bops*
Plot twist: Dorothy decides to become an actual clown. Just straight up go to Clown College, join a circus, perform birthdays.
Even twistier: She’s fucking great at it. Just super hilarious and beloved. She single-handedly undoes the decades of “clowns = creepy”. Gets a TV show, does movies, tons of charity work.
Living her best life.
While wearing a giant peanut costume, gets trampled in a circus parade… by an elephant.
Mourners the world over don’t know whether to laugh or to cry.
I saw that Mary Tyler Moore show in first run.
A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants.
Thats a route into the presidency!
Being a clown…
…and orange.
There used to be an honest-to-God Clown Camp held annually at the university in Wisconsin that I once worked at. It was considered to be one of the best in the country, with professional and amateur clowns and wanna-bes in attendance. Since I knew the organization/founder/coordinator I even got to sit in on a class oriented to clown magicians to get some ideas – and pick up some props – for my magic act (that eventually went nowhere).
Well, yeah, right down the road from The Circus….
Dottie, someone’s going to make those choices.
Might as well be you.
Dotty, you CAN be a murderer.
We believe in you!
Get In The fricking Oval Office Dorothy
I don’t trust anyone with this power, but I trust me least
Distrust me least, gorrammit
Oh no. I know what this is. I almost can’t bear to watch. 😖
*plays “Rain” by the SeatBelts on hacked muzak*
Excellent choice, Mr. Spiegel.
Spiegal’s great, but really, Edward is the best! 😍🥰📼💿
Take my imaginary upvote for referring to Radical Edward.
One of the highlights of an outstanding soundtrack.
DOTTY OH NO 😢
Ouch. With just one sentence, er plans, hopes, and dreams for her entire life have been raidahcally upturned.
I believe in you Dotty! You can kill all the people!
It has to have least been like an hour now, damn.
🙁
DOROTHY GO TO YALE
Yeah, she’s not sure what her ambition is anymore after this morning’s conversation, but she worked so hard to get there
Nah she is way too fragile to suddenly cut herself off from her entire support network and simultaneously take on a way higher workload. Unless she takes the rest of the semester off for therapy she will have a breakdown and probably flunk out of yale
I’ve been yelling NOOOOOOOOO in the back of my head ever since we saw that acceptance letter. GO TO YALE.
Shit’s complicated, but she should follow her dreams. Your dreams change as you learn, anyway. (I know she won’t !@#%$%^**)
It has been one and a half hours… Now we wait for her to realize something is wrong…
How long is this going to take?!?
Dumbing of Age Book 13
That, right there, is the defeated expression of a woman who’s just realized that her 40-day free trial period is over, and now she must either buy a license or remove WinRAR from her computer.
You guys don’t just buy WinRAR when you’re really drunk?
40 days? Fuck, mine’s been going for closer to 4000.
..y’know Dorothy WOULD pay for the license instead of just closing the prompt window every time she uses winRAR
Holy crap she’s been standing the entire time!? Was the recent realization really that mind boggling?
The presidency has been her stated goal for a LONG time. And in the last few days/weeks, she realized she isn’t comfortable accepting Yale’s admission, which she has very much linked to the presidency in her mind. But also, Dorothy’s main goal has actually been to lead with the aim of helping other people, and Raidah has just handed her a heaping dose of Reality Check on that. Being the president of the United States does not = helping people, it means being the president. With all the ugliness and death that currently entails. Sure, there’s good stuff and helping, too, but that is not all it is, and Dorothy can no longer look at her childhood dream with the rose-tinted glasses I suspect she’s been wearing until very recently.
So I imagine she’s been stuck trying to reconcile her longtime dream with her perception of herself as a Good Person Who Helps, while at the same time trying to figure out her discomfort with…something I don’t know she’s able to even fully put her finger on. And now Raidah has brought it all to the fore. Because the thing is, Raidah was RIGHT. She was cruel in her delivery, but she was not factually wrong about what being the president will entail, and Dorothy is, I think, less “mindboggled” and more “having a full blown crisis of identity.” Those…don’t resolve easily.
Does anyone know if she’s still seeing her therapist regularly? I would be surprised if she wasn’t, but she has a LOT to work through. Including “I ended two relationships, one of which I did not actually WANT to end, for the sake of a goal I don’t know I even want anymore.” She has made real sacrifices and she’s staring down the barrel of “was it even worth it?” I really hope she brings this to her therapist, even if it happens offscreen.
I could be wrong about any or all of this, it’s mostly speculation. But if she’s been standing here for that long, I don’t think it was just about what Raidah said. Something else is also going on.
…I guess it’s also possible she hasn’t been there the WHOLE time, and we’re just cutting back to a few minutes after her previous interaction? Do we know she’s been standing there this whole time?
Whether she’s been standing there the whole time or not, she’s been standing there the whole time.
Sure, but is the whole time, you know – the whole time?
Another possibility: the whole time.
I prefer skim time
1% time feels like being a dishwasher.
Vegan almond-cashew time is trendy these days
@Stanistani I’m pretty sure 1% time is becoming a multibillionaire?
or like a day to celebrate them? (ewww)
She had intended to, but had to take a bathroom break. It just made things worse, because now she has failed at standing forlornly as well.
Yeah, this is not going to go well if she decides to stay and then attempts to rekindle things with Walky. He’s obviously still hung up on her as well, and Lucy deserves better.
Dorothy should swear allegiance to Raidah and learn how to be a war criminal and social manipulator.
She’s not even that good at the manipulate thing. The best way to do it is to not let people know your doing it and she’s been too obvious. Drilling him on his family connection, buttering him up, trying to make her case on why his current group is no good.
She’s not the master manipulater she’s portraying his self to be.
I don’t even think she is portraying herself as anything of the sort.
If she was asked to her face, she would confirm that yes, this is exactly what she thinks networking is like, sees nothing wrong with it, and actively hiding it would be a waste of time. All she is doing is dressing it up to look “better”.
Were her definition of “better” not the metaphorical equivalent of wearing a suit made of human skin, she might just made a great case of Affably Evil.
But if her main motivation is revenge on Sarah and Joyce and she’s hiding that behind the obvious social climbing, that’s a little more subtle.
Or swear allegiance to Sarah: the sort of mastermind who can make enemies like Raidah, who put their hearts and souls into trying to get revenge, without even trying…
I’m honestly really happy for Dorothy (I typoed “Dorkthy”, and if she weren’t already having such a bad day I would have kept it). Like, her fixation on being president has never felt, totally healthy? It kind of seemed like she was setting a high goal post for the sake of setting a high goal post. She clearly isn’t fully comfortable with politics when she’s actually forced to practice them, and I feel like she’d find much more rewarding work somewhat lower down where she doesn’t have to campaign.
That does seem to be the case so far, her strengths point to academic and management roles and it’s beginning to look like even if she improved her social skills she still would struggle to lie like Joyce and be even worse at bantering with people who dont follow her social script. I think that’s an even bigger nail in the coffin for her because this sort of reaction to another politicians bad faith debate would look like a lose to her supporters and her own party would use that against her.
time for a nap
Always.
Dorothy needs some Walky.
It’s kind of a long shot right now, but I’m betting that this whole connected “Post Winter Break” saga is gonna lead to Dorothy and Walky hooking up. I just have the feeling that the dominoes are being put in place for it.
I kinda see Walky telling Dorothy that he’s with Lucy now, and can’t hook up with anybody ATM.
Actually, my long shot dream is that the breakfast leads to Walky realizing that he isn’t what Lucy wants and ending the relationship. Then Walky and Dorothy get back together.
She can’t have him though. (Which she’s probably also kicking herself for.)
she’s definitely having a lot of realizations at once so I get stalling out, but it’s wild to me that she didn’t have the war criminal thing in mind already- like, that she was shocked when Raidah said it. I would have expected her to be a little surprised that it came up, but be like “yeah, that’s the point though, to make the presidency a non-war-criminal job,” not mumble to herself about whether or not all of them are
I honestly don’t think she’s given BEING president half as much thought as BECOMING president. Dorothy fixates on goals. She’s got the grindset. Becoming president was just the biggest, best goal she could think of, and whether or not it would be a job she was really comfortable with wasn’t something she really let herself think about.
Dorothy was kind of a big fish in a little pond. Nobody ever seriously questioned her dreams. Like her parents are super supportive, which is great. But I don’t think anyone’s ever thrown the “this is the ugly side of your dream” to her face before.
I think it’s good that she has to deal with this now though, instead of having a breakdown five years into politics when they ask her to cut a dirty deal to get a lead in the polls or something.
You have good points, although to clarify it’s less that I thought she’d have heard this before, and more that I considered her pretty politically aware (I am less confident in this judgment now).
And yes, much better to realize now, while she can not only change her career path but, if she wanted, even change her major etc (hopefully after more than one day of doubt).
There are a lot of people in this country who are sometimes aware of the bad things presidents (and other federal-level politicians) do in this country, but they seem to think it’s not as bad when those politicians are a member of their preferred party, or that everything will somehow be fine if we can just elect the “right person” to the job. I can’t be sure if Dorothy actually thought that before what Raidah said to her, but it does feel like she really didn’t think about what it takes to become president and what presidents are usually expected to do in the current U.S. political system before now.
This strip makes me think of Obama. Apparently he was severely shaken the first time he had to sign off on a drone assasination. Two years later, he was joking about them at parties.
People have mentioned but it really reeks of “this comic started in 2010”
Bc i could buy a sheltered white millennial with like, at most a myspace and Facebook to play games in terms of social media usage, reaching college age all bright eyed and bushy tailed thinking “if the goodest person works the hardest they can become president and if the goodest person is president they can help everyone!”
But i could not for the life of me imagine a Zoomer reaching the big age of 19 and still being this hopeful. She’d have to be as sheltered as Joyce.
My first experience of politics that I can remember is the too-on-the-nose-for-fiction time I came home from school to find that the BBC had shuffled the after-school cartoon slot to make room for footage of the start of the Iraq War, and that’s now plausibly before Dorothy was born. When I was her age I was already in ‘The system’s fucked, but maybe not unfixably so’ mode, so I don’t know how she’s so optimistic now she’s that much younger than me, unless maybe she’s secretly motivated to be the equivalent of Pope John Calvin?
Dorothy realizing that sadly, the recycling bin is simply no substitute for the washing machine she broke.
She’s thinking about whether being President is really the dream for her, or whether she should chuck it into the recycling bin for someone else to pick up.
Dotty Radiah is a bully and shouldn’t dampen your day.
It really kills me that politicians these days, in general, either don’t realize or don’t care to not be terrible.
No matter how messed up past presidents have been, Dorothy, you can always choose to, you know, not.
Yes, presidents have a lot of power, and should listen to Uncle Ben, but if your decision is between committing a war crime and not committing one, you can always just not do that.
The question is, does not committing a war crime make you a bad president.
Since someone will ALWAYS think you’re a bad president, instead of worrying about that, you should worry about being the best president you can be.
And if you think being the best president requires a willingness to commit war crimes, then you need to man/woman/person up and decide to either give up that dream or decide what war crimes you’re willing to commit for what you believe to be the greater good.
And if you think it doesn’t require a willingness to commit war crimes, then you have nothing to worry about and should continue on with your day.
I think you worded this very well, and I agree, but I will add, as a slight clarification of how I see it, “a good president” can encompass “is able to get anything done before being forced out of office”. Jimmy Carter, famously least terrible president, also had a very, very short stint, and didn’t get a lot done because he made too many enemies with his ideals. Being a president means becoming a part of something larger, something larger that is not necessarily good or kind or safe to be around.
That’s why I focused on not committing war crimes and also on working towards the greater good vs simply being good, as there’s a lot of grey area between good and terrible that so many politicians seem to ignore these days.
But thank you.
And at least he wasn’t clubbed to death by his political enemies. People didn’t get to talk about the fantastic post-politics lives of the Gracchi.
Consider that the last “no war crimes” president just entered Hospice Care in Plains GA, and everybody was talking about what a terrible sitting president he was and what a fantastic ex-president he is, sometimes in the same breath.
This. I happen to believe that Idealism has no place in politics. It’s good to have principles, but the World is too messy to be an Idealist rather than a Pragmatist President.
I’m going to have to disagree a bit. I’d prefer politicians have some ideals, even if they do have to be tempered with a little practicality. Otherwise, it’s way too easy to justify atrocities as realpolitik, even when they’re neither necessary or even helpful. See the long history of US meddling in Latin America and the middle east, just for starters.
Hate to break it to you, but politicians in this country, and particularly presidents, have been doing terrible things since pretty much the beginning. Even the presidents who most people think were “good” have done some terrible things that a lot people either don’t know or don’t want to know about.
Okay. But then what?
Can you be president without doing anything terrible?
And should you want that?
Are there degrees of terrible between different presidents, and does that matter? And to whom?
Like, fine. All US presidents are war criminals.
Let’s leave the ethics of war crimes aside for one moment.
Someone’s gonna be US president at any given point, barring a full-blown revolution, which we can safely agree, unfortunately, is never a likely scenario. (Like idc i’m still a utopian but i do get pragmatism)
Are there better and worse case situations?
It’s like.. Obviously it’s fine that not everyone wants to be potus but if you do have that (weird) ambition.. Should you give up because you can’t be perfect? Or should you soldier on in the full knowledge that you are committing yourself to moral compromissions, while holding on to the desire to do good– or at least, to be a lesser evil?
I don’t know.
I’m suspicious of people who want power, generally. Though i find someone like Dorothy who has a fairytale view of the presidency less scary than someone like Raidah whose aim is to move up knowing full well and accepting from the get-go that you don’t make a tortilla without breaking a few eggs.
Perhaps it’s not so much the naivete as the ideological commitment that makes Dorothy sympathetic to me. Some politicians, even when not perfect or perfectly aligned with my beliefs, do stir up something in me because they don’t seem completely cynical, but like they actually believe in something, and will sacrifice their ambitions over their beliefs.
Or maybe that’s celebrity culture and christian eschatology poisoning my mind and i should fight that instinct as well idk
Okay, your entire post was great, but I’ve gotta say…
I don’t know if “moral comprimissions” was intentional or a typo…
…but I’m totally stealing it going forward.
Well coined!
Argh.
Moral Compromissions!
haha, no it wasn’t a typo, but nor was it an intentional portmanteau. i’m just french and sometimes i forget that english didn’t quite incorporate our entire vocabulary back in the 11th century =P
No, Milu, you’re remembering to not make perfect the enemy of good.
My new life goal: To become a lesser evil.
Then again, as i think Hannah Arendt said, “those who choose a lesser evil should never forget they chose evil”.
No choice is beyond accountability.
There is no purity when it comes to politics. None of us is innocent. Which is not tragic, in fact it’s liberating. Innocence is a metaphysical construct. It doesnt belong to the realm od (secular) politics. I think most of us need to worry less about our soul and more about what we do with our freedom…
I guess you can see it as liberating, but it’s easier for it to push people in the other direction – to stop distinguishing between the lesser and greater evils and refuse to participate at all, even if that aids the greater evil.
yeah… i don’t know. i think the current climate crisis might be shifting that somewhat, at least in rich nations? where being part of the silent majority is not seen as acceptable, and there is a sense that accountability is at least to some extent distributed. maybe? i don’t know? wishful thinking???
But often even that can play into the greater evil’s hands.
Purity politics.
now i’m not sure what you’re trying to say. my point is that purity politics is bad because it tends to encourage doing nothing rather trying and failing to be perfect…
and my (admittedly hopeful) hope is that global warming feels like something none of us are innocent of, and so incentivizes activism rather than apathy? because if your hands were never clean to begin with there is no metaphysical profit to sitting back?
then again a lot of the reaction i see seems to be cynical defeatism which is just as bad. so, i don’t know. i just personally dislike purity politics and find more satisfaction in some kind of framing around responsibility or something. i know the big words but i don’t think i really know how to use them tbh
Basically that the “lesser evil is still evil” approach leads too easily to purity politics, rather than away from it.
Maybe it should be liberating, but it rarely is.
oh i see. yeah, words do matter and you’re right, the ‘lesser evil’ phrasing i’ve been using is pretty fraught. guess i should shelve that.
freedom and responsibility are what i’m interested in, really. i also like the idea of trouble, and ambiguity, like accepting that political choices should never feel completely comfortable? if that makes sense? it’s probably not a very appealing framing. then again, i do take an odd kind of comfort in being a flawed motherfucker, with flawed ideas and actions and just accepting that but also trying to get better and do better. the world is too complicated to hold myself to any higher standard, and when i’ve tried i got burnt out, dogmatic, or cynical and all those options suck.
in any case, we can’t just get rid of purity politics, we also need concepts (and words) to replace it with, so, that’s where i’m at. and it feels… not perfect i guess but… that’s kind of my whole thing, so.
also, i think i’m influenced in this sort of view by existentialists and late 20th century queer authors like Haraway, the stuff i’ve been soaking up lately. i guess the current virtue politics on the left and far-left does feel like a failure of that programme (if it ever was one). queerness was supposed to liberate us from Fall narratives and innocence goddammit.
You touched on the solution, but you dismissed it as never likely. The entire US political system is corrupt, and the two major political parties are both owned by the wealthy and the big corporations. The reason all presidents are war criminals is because they serve the interests of the big businesses that make weapons. I’m convinced that revolution is the only and necessary way to fix this. You can’t fix a system that works for the wealthy from within. You have to overthrow it and build a new system that works for the working class.
but to me, that’s unsatisfactory. like… ok? the system can’t be “fixed” from within? but does that mean that any situation that is not revolutionary is as bad as any other, and any praxis that doesn’t purely focus on bringing about revolution is the same as doing nothing?
revolutions are definitely not predictable, but nor do they rely purely on the enthusiasm and praxis of those on your side. explosions of violence can go in very dark directions. i don’t know that an overthrow of the government happening today in my country or yours is necessarily a bright prospect. there’s a lot of very energetic and empowered fascists preparing for that sort of moment of chaos, and i don’t think the left is currently in a very strong position should it come to that.
i feel like being politically engaged in a meaningful way means understanding the world as it happens to be right now, and agitating for radical change should totally be a part of that but it feels a bit absurd to be singly focused on revolution right now. but ok, that’s just me.
Revolutions also don’t happen until things get really bad. Or at least until the public is manipulated into thinking they’re really bad.
And as messed up as America is, it’s not really bad by historical standards. We’re nowhere near the level of desperation that leads to popular revolutions. (Though we might be closer to the manipulated version, but coups backed by a faction of the elites aren’t really what we’re talking here.)
This kind of thinking can lead to accelerationism and that’s an evil all its own.
You’ve also got to have a definition of “war crime” that’s not just an inevitable result of war.
Terrible things happen in war. Civilians are always the main victims. Collateral damage. Bad intelligence leading to strikes against the wrong targets. And on and on.
And as President, you’re likely to inherit a war, so you can’t even really make the decision just not to start one.
Consider, for example, the withdrawal from Afghanistan. No more US war crimes there, but can you justify that to the women of Afghanistan?
I don’t see any need to justify our withdrawal from Afghanistan. If anything, I think both the US and Afghan women might be better off if we’d left many years sooner. Without US forces propping up a corrupt and incompetent government, Afghans might have actually assembled something functional enough to reject the Taliban. Instead, our continued presence allowed the Taliban to rebuild, with US actions effectively providing a recruiting campaign. We wasted too many American lives and far too many Afghan lives, not to mention over a trillion dollars, with very little to show for it. Too much of that money did nothing but line the pockets of corrupt officials, and even many of the things that actually got built are already crumbling due to shoddy construction or abandoned because they were never practical to start with.
I don’t like what’s currently happening in Afghanistan one bit, but that doesn’t mean the US should (or even can) fix it. How much longer should we have stayed? Another year? Five? Twenty? Too many politicians seem to believe that American money and military force can fix any problem, and they fact they keep getting elected suggests that too many voters buy into the idea as well. Any realistic analysis shows how wrong this is. For every bit of good we accomplish, we’re responsible for at least as much harm. Instead of remaking the world in our image, we’ve created greater instability and violence. Just because there are bad things happening in the world, that doesn’t mean the US can, much less should, fix them. The only problems I believe we’re obligated to fix are the ones we created, and in most cases the best thing we could do is just stop making things worse.
I kind of think you’re right. My point wasn’t that Biden was wrong and we should have stayed, but that these aren’t easy decisions. People get hurt either way. It’s easy to justify to me in the abstract – I’m an American guy with no real stake in the situation. Much harder to do so to someone whose now living under Taliban rule. Not a conversation I’d want to have.
And leaving sooner wasn’t an option for Biden. He wasn’t President sooner. You could quibble about trying to push Obama to pull us out as VP, but the larger point is that as President, you inherit situations and saying it would have been best to do something else before you took over isn’t an option. You’ve got to play the hand you’re dealt.
I also don’t buy your initial premise at all. The Taliban remained a threat, basically throughout our occupation. Us leaving sooner wouldn’t have turned the admittedly corrupt Afghan government into something functional, it just would have led to the Taliban returning sooner. We helped with their recruiting campaign, but so did the corrupt government and they were never down to the point of being something the Afghan government/army could handle on their own. There was never a right time to leave.
also, to “The only problems I believe we’re obligated to fix are the ones we created,” well…
not to dwell on the Afghan situation specifically, but as the main military, commercial and diplomatic force in the world for the last many decades, the US saying “this isn’t our problem” about practically any major conflict in the world would be like me, a french person saying france has no responsibility to west africa, among many other places.
to your point that sometimes the best thing to do is nothing, sure. that’s always one of the options to be weighed.
Is it? What is “nothing” in the case of Biden and Afghanistan? Nothing wasn’t really an option. We were already there.
yeah, i wasn’t speaking to that situation but to Wizard’s conclusion,
” The only problems I believe we’re obligated to fix are the ones we created, and in most cases the best thing we could do is just stop making things worse.”
sorry yeah that was @Wizard not @you
This comment will be Sad Dorothy’d, because all of my comments are Sad Dorothy’d. I don’t know why. But it IS predictable.
(/Willis Twitter meme)
What makes this more infuriating is Dorothy was going to attend her Civic engagement club meeting and probably do positive work while Raidah attempts and her ilk are doing nothing of importance and try to manipulate Walky into joining their clique.
They’re the politicians Dorothy is the civil servant who has been bullied into abandoning her civil service. Which is pretty close parallel to the political climate.
*trying
Oh yeah! Those would be good people to talk this over with too!
It finally came to he that she could have sexually imprinted herself on Joyce. And, that Joyce had been expecting them doing “hanky panky” things to/with each other.
Surrender, Dorothy. Surrender your ambition…
Two internets for you
Any guess on who will come and snap her out of this.
My first choice would be Amber as I think she has some experience with this type of thing (I want to say this is called disassociating but I’m probably wrong).
My second choice would be Joe, potentially walking Joyce to class, so that this would be an opportunity for her to see a different side to him.
Third would be she snaps herself out of it.
Honorable mention goes to Dina who sees Dorothy like this, recognizes she’s having an issue, and decides to quietly stand next to her in solidarity and support.
As awesome as it would be for Dina to help her, unfortunately Dina’s only gonna be seen for 3 strips this arc and that’s probably not enough time. 🙁
Dina’s only going to be noticed in 3 strips.
My money’s on Joe.
Probably Joe and Joyce, with Dorothy still not seeing the different side of him.
If she saw Joe walking Joyce she’d go full out meltdown on him. All her rage and self-loathing, right in his face. A bukakae of repressed angst.
Good. Then it’s no additional drama for one of them to ask, “Dorothy, what the FRAC is wrong with you?” And maybe she’ll blurt it out, and they (and we) will, at last, know.
Might be dissociating, might be non clinically lost in thought
19 x 4 =76
19 is a completely reasonable time for a quarter life crisis. I had mine when I was 20.
and there’s no magic fresh start waiting around the corner for her, because there’s not much point in going to Yale if she’s not gunning for the presidency anymore.
we’ve had amazing growth arcs from other characters during their freshman year. now it’s Dorothy’s turn. growing pains are an inevitable part of growth.
I’d disagree with there being no fresh start or point to Yale anymore. This kind of moment could actually galvanize Dorothy into attending Yale for a totally new/different career path, especially because most of her social circle and acquaintances know her as “future-president Dorothy Keener” and that shit would just keep hammering on her every time she had to correct them.
I’m just….I ‘m just standing here.
Menacingly?
It annoyed me to no end how much of a supporter of The System (TM) Dorothy /was/.
Let’s see where she goes from here.
Maybe instead of Yale she’ll enroll in the YPG?
I won’t get my hopes up just yet, but I’d like to imagine this might be the start of Dorothy realizing that if she really wants to help regular folks in this country, she’s better off trying to change the system from outside of it rather than from within. Trying to change a corrupt system that really only benefits the wealthy from within tends to result in that system changing you, not the other way around.
Changing the system from outside hasn’t usually worked out all that well either.
It worked pretty well for several countries that tried it. The Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and other socialist and communist countries seem to have treated their workers much better than all the capitalist countries ever have.
wow ok, how much of a tanky are you exactly? just so i know when to stop bothering
…then again i’m not sure what i expected from someone with a USSR flag avatar and so far as i can remember, no discernible penchant for sarcasm 🙄
Sure, as long as they weren’t Jewish. Or Muslim. Or Ukrainian. Or Tatars. Or other ethnic or religious minorities. Or……oh dear.
And even at the heights of Soviet power, the life of the average citizen was miserable compared to even how shitty American working class life can be. Much less some of the northern European capitalist countries.
A case might be able to be made for pre-New Deal America?
My heart is breaking for you, Dorothy 💙
I know president bad and all that, but it’s a little sad when people’s dreams are crushed. Like, it’s an ugly job, and Dorothy might not actually be happy doing it, but seeing her defeated like this just makes me wish being president was a thing someone like her could actually want to do/be able to do well/whatever. Hopefully you get what I mean.
I love how being told “you’re not a potential war criminal” is a major setback for her.
You are Dead, Dead Dead (X2)
Thought you were hot, guess what you’re not
(…)
I hope you improve your lousy score
Adios, See you later, Bye Bye
Try Again
*Joe Sparks “You are Dead”
Deep cut!
Odd fact: When I was 11 years old, I wanted to be the President and my dad said, “Well, the first thing you need to know is whether or not you’re willing to press the button. If not, find a new job.”
…Heat death of the Universe.
I am loving Dorothy’s winter arc
Dang.
I’m not buying it.
I have generally been against Dotty trying to become president and she shouldn’t but Radiah just such a jerk with this whole thing. Also Radiah comment may seem profound, but she probably put little actual thought into her comment it’s only purpose was to hurt Dorothy.
War Crimes and who is a war criminal may seem sime but then you get tied up in alot of treaty and customary law and also has to reconcile the ideas of national and responsibility to protect. There are historical and philosophical questions that arise when consider.
Dorothy is thinking of all that. While Raidah is eating breakfast not even giving a second thought about Dorothy beacuse Sarah seems to be on the forefront of her mind. And that’s what makes this situation tragic to me and why I have been making multiple posts about it.
Truth comes from strange places.
There really aren’t that many questions to consider when appraising the genocidal state known as America. It’s war crimes all the way down, while we censure and blockade and invade other nations for doing the same as us. It actually is pretty simple.
Got it states are unitary actors so basically no one can criticze human rights abuses if your home nation commits human rights abuses.
oh no, open view camera moment…
Poor Dorothy looks like she could use some fentanyl.
Maybe some ether and mescaline, Hunter S. Thompson
As your attorney,
Walky, you had one job, which was to text Becky to come scrape Dorothy off the walls.
You had me In the First Half, I’m not Gonna lie…
good jokes and laughs aside.
How Dorothy hadn’t thought of that before. aside from the simple dilemma of not committing war crimes. As a leader, she will have much more difficult decisions, such as the distribution of limited resources to whom to help, where to help, in what order, someone will always be left out. Or a Star Trek classic, would she be able to sacrifice an individual for the good of the whole
This one would have been good as a stereogram. https://twitter.com/maegodhavemercy/status/1592041589203177473
https://www.tumblr.com/huesatlight/711114769270292480/march-7-2023-dumbing-of-age-made-stereoscopic?source=share
Nnneat.
Oh, get over it. Just don’t knowingly blow up any civilians once you get to the office, it’s probably that easy. I don’t blow up civilians all day every day, and I’m a powerless 29-year-old autist. Imagine how much power to not blow up civilians the President has, it’s probably a lot.
Oh, and fix some of the FUCKING ROADS. If everything is so goddamn car-reliant and pedestrian-hostile, how come all the roads suck? Like, don’t even shoot for half. 25%, start there. Say you’re aiming for like 60%, do 25%, and even if it looks disappointing by comparison to the promise, you’ll have fixed a quarter of the nation’s roads.
Federalism can explain the roads suck not every road is the responsibility of the Federal government and states can be real cheap. Also weather and Semi-trailer trucks and that most states and municipalities use asphalt for the local roads. Concrete is more durable.
Not all states mind you but the ones your think of are.
I didn’t name any states. I also don’t care who’s responsible IRL, that shit needs fixed and I said it directly to a cartoon. If Joyce can teleport, Dorothy can fix America’s roads.
This is Dorothy we’re talking about. She doesn’t compromise or settle. It’s 100% or nothing.
Or at least it was. Now? I guess we’ll see.
The poor kid’s gonna be devastated when she shoots for 100% and only gets 95%.
Good. She’ll keep trying. Failing and not giving up is how you succeed.
Also, try to not be responsible for literally toxic literal train wrecks. That’d be nice.
So, don’t become president of a railroad?
Sure. And also don’t executive order away a strike that has as one of its complaints lack of safety conditions.
You probably don’t have to make the decision between drone strike with 80% likelihood of taking out a high prize target, spending more time to create greater certainty of the target but lower likelihood of success of the target or putting boots on the ground.
If it was just as easy as “hey don’t do this thing that will make you look dumb if you are wrong” then nobody would do the thing.
How about “Don’t get involved in any wars?”
Oh wait, you’re going to inherit some.
And boots on the ground doesn’t really decrease the chance of civilian casualties much and drastically increases the chances of things going completely wrong.
Yeah, lemme put a few dozen of the dumbest people you’ve ever met in a civilian-rich environment, arm them with machine guns, and expect nothing to go wrong. Also at least half of them are racist against the civilians. And at least half of those haven’t slept in a week, which I hear is really good for critical thinking and reaction times.
Oh no I don’t think boots on the ground improves the likelihood of success or accuracy, I was just saying that’s the third option. Same thing, if just putting more military personnel on the ground solved the problem we would just do that all the time.
What we really need to do is get like 1000 of those “If I was there” guys and send them into every tricky situation. Its a win-win. If they succeed, every gets to see how cool they are. If they fail, they finally shut the fuck up.
okay that, is an incredible idea.
i’m now imagining this as the premise to an SMBC comic. it would end with.. natural selection making the subjunctive mood disappear?
shit, i meant the conditional mood
I’m not typing the /s after my posts. You can’t make me type the /s.
Just type the /s at the start of your first post of the day.
And if you promise 60% and get 25% you are absolutely getting rocked in midterms and the general because then the next person only has to promise 40% giving them way less margin of error and voters will go with that.
Okay, but you still fixed 25% of the roads. That’s more than 0%, which is what we’re getting right now.
The average voter did not see an increase of 0 to 25. The average voter saw a promise of 60 and only got 25. They will feel like they lost 35 and that’s assuming that your opponent didn’t directly sabotage it. Citation: Any red state voter that got healthcare at a lower premium because of the ACA, but still hate it because hashtag socialism.
The average voter is fucking braindead and voted based on their favorite color. The average voter is not to be trusted with factual benefits.
But you still need their vote to win.
I don’t think they’re braindead. I think the average American voter is, unfortunately, indoctrinated into thinking that they have to vote for either the red or the blue of the two right-wing capitalist parties, and that voting for one of those two parties will somehow make things better. Evidence shows otherwise, but the sort of propaganda most American voters are exposed to on a daily basis is hard to break free of.
Nah, fuck ’em. They keep doing the dumbest shit possible and it keeps hurting me and mine, so they can get in the sea. It’s fine to write off the majority of the country, actually.
Well, many of them are climate denialists, so they will refuse to see that the sea is coming to them.
ohno
Brain lagging: Have you tried to turn it off and on again?
Could someone gently slide Dorothy into the corner and get a spotlight on her so the only thing she loses is her religion and not, as seems currently to be happening, her entire sense of self?
Much appreciated.
I mean
I think becoming prez is kind of her religion? Kinds of a missionary type thing
But that was just a dream, just a dream…
Dorothy should stop standing in the room obsessively watching Walky have breakfast sitting next to his girlfriend. That’s sad in a very disturbing level.
What? Am I missing something here? Are you joking?
Isn’t Dorothy still standing in the Lobby where Walky and Radiah left her? And are Walky and Lucy not in a completely different location?
Dorothy should stop standing in the dorm lobby obsessively using her x-ray and telescopic vision to watch Walky having breakfast in a restaurant about a mile away.
(Yes, I looked it up on Google Maps for the sake of this joke.)
Hem… Wish it was a joke. The truth is that I didn’t understand anything about what was going on.
She could be visualizing that scene from a mile away. That can be worse than seeing.
So… If Dotty does finally give up the dream, what do folks think WOULD be a good professional fit for her?
My pick would be social work. Granted I’m biased since I study SW, but I think it’d be a good choice. She’s conscientious and prompt, could manage a heavy workload, so her skills fit neatly. It’s a very values based profession with a focus on both social structures and how individuals are affected. Plus work paths vary from helping people one on one, civic engagement/community work, and also policy development. Plus fewer war crimes.
as a judge or a prosecutor to torpedo Raidah’s lawyer career
Social Work (well, performing well at social work) requires you to connect with people in a way that Dorothy seems mostyl incapable of doing (and, wrt Franco’s suggestion, she’s not combative enough for law).
If she’s good at math, she’d make a good engineer. She’d also make a good cabinet member in several positions, provided none of those positions require her to deal with people. Dorothy is good at information processing, so any job that is only “input data -> output solution” she’d be good in.
There were lots of things I couldn’t do at 19 that after years of training I was totally a pro at by 27 (when I got out of grad school). Part of college is training you in specific ways of thinking and acting. I didn’t start out an economist, I became one.
Dorothy can become whatever she wants to if she puts in the effort (even if she needs to put in more effort than Roz or Becky would). You can actually become good at people if you put in the effort and get the right training. It’s just a matter of what she wants to do.
Plus, what makes you popular in college isn’t necessarily what you need as an adult in the workplace.
Civil engineer or city manager.
If Dorothy turns out to be a quitter, that will be a sad day for me.
I think I finally get why Dorothy and Walky were so good together. They have more in common than they realize. We’ve just seen them experience the two major flavors of “cleverest kid in their high school class goes to college, oh no”.
Anybody know where to start looking for a way to filter out/eliminate noise pollution, mentally? I’ve never been able to shut out intrusive sound, to the point that it will completely ruin my ability to focus if a bird chirps too much or if a car drives by. On top of that, everything around me is so fucking LOUD, makes noise nonstop, and either can’t be shut off or vibrates so goddamn hard even covering my ears doesn’t stop it from piercing through and filling my brain with static. Idk it it’s a mental block, a physical sensitivity, or what, but I don’t know where to look for prevention/mitigation methods, or even how to phrase it in a search bar in a way that will actually get results and not just seventy dudes jerking each other off on Reddit about experiencing the same thing, with no actual solution mentioned in the thread.
Just an idle query, not especially caused by anything. I know y’all ain’t doctors or therapists or nothin’, but I figure at least one or two people can agree that everything is too goddamn noisy and might even know how to start looking into solutions.
Closed-back headphones with active noise cancellation supposedly work well.
See, when I read “closed-back headphones”, I assumed they had some sort of strap for the back of your head. I didn’t even know open-backs existed, so thanks for the new info.
Good noise-cancelling headphones playing unobtrusive music works for me.
I dearly wish music helped me. It winds up being extra noise on top of the rest, a lot of the time.
I’m sorry about that. It seems that noise-cancelling would be the most important thing for you. As you state below, research on good headphones seems to be required. I’m not an expert, but based on what you describe, if noise-cancelling is not total maybe you could try to mask the remaining noise by playing a monotonous sound, something that does not disturb your focusing with unexpected variation. Anyway, I hope you find something effective soon.
Earplugs?
If the whole house vibrates, all you can do is move.
Those little orange foam things that don’t stay in my ear for more than two seconds yes I put them in correctly and didn’t mess with them and yes my ears are clean stop looking at me like that?
For some reason, nothing ever stays in my ears like it would for others. Anything meant to plug into the socket just flops right out within moments, regardless of who puts it in there or how little I move. I figure it’s a shape thing.
Haha, I have ears like that too.
You don’t have ADHD, do you? Noise sensitivity is the biggest part of my disorder. To add to Needfuldoer’s suggestion, closed-back headphones are great, active noise-canceling are better, but the weird pressure of ANC can be distracting in its own right.
Matter of fact, I certainly do have the ADHD. Noise sensitivity out the ass, like I used to work at a fast food place that was constantly noisy, and when I got home I was so worn out from the inescapable racket that I couldn’t play or watch anything with the sound above muttering volume for a few hours. Plus, words get jumbled up real good when I talk to people in person, to the point that most active conversations sound like complete and total gibberish. Makes listening to songs with lyrics a real pain in the ass sometimes, especially since I grew up listening to a lot of British bands from the 70s and 80s, so the fuckers had accents that made the words sound even more jumbled. I thought Rammstein’s songs were sung in English until I was 10.
As for noise-cancelling headphones, I’m assuming they’re probably expensive (expensive meaning “more than $20-40”), so I’ll have to put a lot of research into which ones to buy, so I don’t wind up wasting a hundred bucks on bad ones.
Yeah, you’ve got the exact same kind as me. I know from experience Bose makes excellent ANC over-ear phones, but they were on the expensive side last I checked. Klipsch makes earbuds with excellent sound quality that are designed to passively block out noise, and those were around $50-$70 USD.
I recently ordered some earplugs for my husband from flare audio. They have an “Earshade” version of the earplugs that gets thicker as it exits the ear. I’m really hoping this helps his overstimulation in grocery stores and such.
I personally can’t keep earbuds in my ear, either, so whenever I need something to stay in my ear I wear a long beanie that covers my ears. The outside pressure keeps the earbuds in and I don’t have to fucking fiddle with them every 2 seconds anymore. I love hats anyway, so double win.
Is it sensitivity to all noise or certain noises? Something that works for my brain is having an alternate, non-irritating noise for it to latch onto, to the point it forgets the other noise is even happening. I use a variety of pink noises for this.
There exists non-music calming sounds that just help one focus. It might help, it might not, check out Pulse Emitter. Very low key compared to stuff with rhythm. https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Pulse_Emitter/Live_at_WFMU_on_Brian_Turners_show_692009/LIve_at_WFMU_2009_full_set
I feel you so much here bruh!!!! My noise-canceling headphones are practically part of my body at this point, I can’t LIVE without them!!! 😭😭😭😭😭😭
Your goal with soundproofing is to keep sounds from getting in, and keep them from echoing once they *are* in.
Which means you’re putting things which stop vibrations everywhere you can. Heavy curtains over the windows, cork pads under every piece of furniture and behind every painting on the wall, carpeting on every floor with soundproofing mats underneath it, insulating tape around all your doors and windows to keep them from rattling or letting sound in – this stuff is a lot cheaper than professional soundproofing and surprisingly effective.
As for earplugs, there are soundproofing headphones which are there for protection rather than music. If headphones aren’t a problem, those could help. Alternatively, you can use regular noise cancelling headphones just for the noise cancelling and not play any music through them. Even cheap brands will let you do that. I suspect that the heavy duty ear protection things are more effective, but they may cost more or be less comfortable.
laughs in restrictive rental apartment
On the off chance I ever buy a home, I’m definitely spending an outrageous amount of money on good insulation and soundproofing, that’s for goddamn sure. I guess I can take a look at buying some more of these lovely sound foam squares I bought a few years ago for a podcast/streaming booth, as a compromise. It’s funny you mention echoing, because our hallway (if it can be called that) is basically built to amplify noise and funnel it directly to my favorite seat.
Yeah, it sounds like crap, but most of the things I suggested can be done without altering the apartment – they’re stuff that goes on your furniture, over your windows, or on your floors. Heavy rugs are better than thin ones, but even super cheap rugs with no padding under are better than a bare wood or tile floor, and cheap tablecloths provide some soundproofing vs no tablecloth. (And actually, the cheapest thing I suggested is that insulating tape around the doors and windows. Removable when you leave, too, if you think your landlord’s gonna gouge you on the security deposit.)
If you don’t mind your apartment *looking* like crap you can basically hang a lot of heavy blanketry over all your walls, especially those nearest the loudest noise sources. Shove some cork or foam panels behind them for a bit more oomph – or a bit less oomph if you want to look at it that way.
Or, if you have a bit more cash, you can get nice quilts and do the same thing, but it looks better.
Not sure why people think Radiah is the only reason she’s upset/lost.. Dorothy has been through hell, kidnapped, handling the police after, working so hard for Yale on her own merits but getting accepted for said kidnapping… Rejecting it due to her own morals, trying so hard to help but every attempt at it just blows up in her face, highlighting just how bad at peopling she is.
And the cherry on top, Radiah comes over and just adds another cut.
Dorothy’s not shaken by Radiah’s words.. s’ just the straw that done broke her back.
Those are some weird door handles!
Damn it. I give up.
I can’t find the five differences between the two pictures. Could someone fill me in on it?
I only found Dorothy head tilt and Mary secretly reading Reagan slashfics
Not that I support crushing Dorothy’s dreams or anything, but I sort of hope this leads to a change of major for her eventually. I changed my major in my second semester of college under similar “oh, shit, this won’t be like in my head” circumstances. I think it’s a common enough thing that happens irl and can be a really effective story growth arc.
Are the recycling bins there for symbolic purposes or it’s just Willis penchant for faithful recreation of the surroundings?
Radish did her a favor in the long run, but damn.
Obviously supposed to be “Raidah”, but I’m leaving it
Gonna start calling Raidah “Raditz”.
Ah so all of Sarah’s death glares were actually her struggling to charge her special beam cannon, it makes much more sense
She keeps flubbing “Makankosappo” and refuses to say “Special Beam Cannon”.
Yeah, and she was originally gonna use it on Jennifer. :3
The Oakland Raidahs.
Someone turn her off and on again. (so, have Joe walk by, then Walky, I guess?)
That’d do it.
Is this a Spot the Difference?
Ain’t that a mood.
“But doctor, I am supportive friend Dorothy.”
No, Dorothy, you move.
Anyone remember when Sarah put herself in a corner so she had to take her Halloween decorations down or admit she liked things? Last panel went grey, people joking about The Sound of Silence as the background music, the works?
Well, one of the jokes was “This is the comic now, characters being devastated one after the other with greyscale and S&G.”
It’s finally Dorothy’s turn!
For all the guff I’ve given Dorothy I think she is or really tries to be a good person. So she would make an awful President. You have to be grimy and you have to play the game or you’re gonna get mowed down by the opposition assuming you ever even manage break out of your own field playing nice.
Oh Dorothy, Honey. I’m so sorry. But this is for the best. May you find a new passion (without the wheel-spinning chaos most college 2nd semester freshmen go through)
Don’t cry out loud
Just keep it inside
Oh
Learn how to hide
Your feelings
Fly high and proud
And if you should fall
Remember you almost had it all
Don’t cry out loud…
I think I’m gonna keep my comments on this storyline to a minimum from here on. I don’t like the direction a lot of the commentariot wants it to go and seeing most of it be so excited for it is bugging me and you guys don’t deserve to deal with a grumpy BBCC for it.
Dorothy needs to study under Robin to kill her conscience.
Honey <3
This makes a really nice 3D strip if you cross your eyes.