I dunno. I mean, as a person with ADHD, I’ve come to accept that fact that making bad choices isn’t mutually exclusive to having ADHD. Like, being neurodivergent doesn’t give you a forever pass and excuse for everything; it’s an explanation for why certain things are more challenging. So I think both Walky and Linda are right. He started failing because he was worse at math than he thought and his ADHD makes studying very challenging. But he also CHOSE to then stop going to class (he didn’t forget about the class, which would have been fairly excused by ADHD) and he CHOSE to fuck around during the one on one tutoring sessions with Jason. Though in fairness to Walky for that one, we know canonically that Jason is a shit tutor, and Walky didn’t fuck around in his studying with amazigirl. But yeah, Linda is a garbage parent, and she should friggen listen to Walky when he’s trying to be honest and open with her, but also, Walky does need to take ownership of the bad choices he did actively make.
That’s very generous of you. Linda has only seen two choices Walky made. Dating Amber qnd Lucy. I get the feeling Linda is talking about Lucy. Certainly Linda is nasty enough to be focussed on dredging stuff up during fun-time activities. And the beer in her hand…
I’d ask if she’s a mean drunk, but she’s not nice – ever – so how could we tell?
Yeah, that’s fair. Linda is only accidentally correct, because you’re right: She isn’t actually aware that Walky actively stopped attending class or screwed around during his tutoring sessions. So probably whatever she is calling out as bad choices is her being a terrible person, because *gestures vaguely at Linda’s track record.*
Walky also chose to believe that he was lacking intelligence, not effort. That his failure was inevitable, not correctable. Since then he’s seen evidence that the other choice was more likely, and I hope that that lesson went home.
Linda is right in that Walky has a lot going for him when he uses it well.
Trying to literally run away from his bad grades could be called a bad decision. Sure, it should be exactly what Linda wanted him to do in that situation, because why else did she teach him to be terrified of failing?, but I imagine she disapproves anyway.
I mean, usually when someone believes their failure is a problem of lacking skill/intelligence/ability and not effort, it’s because their experience thus far is of people praising those things rather than the effort made, creating an association of intelligence = do well, therefore is not do well, intelligence too low.
And I can very easily believe that Linda and Charles are the type of parents who would do that (Not out of malice, just not knowing any better). So, while it’s still his choice to think that, it’s probably not a choice being made freely and without heav influence.
The problem with that in kids like Walky when it comes to school is that he was getting the good grades without effort. Praising the effort wouldn’t have worked, since he wasn’t actually putting in any effort.
Especially fun when putting in effort, thus finishing quickly, was actually functionally punished.
‘OK, Mx Brain. Spend the next 50 minutes sitting quietly at your desk. But don’t take out a book to read. Completely denying you mental stimulation will certainly not have bad results on your psyche and behaviour.’
They tried that on me, when I was a kid, that “No reading even though you did all your work and it’s clearly all correct” bullshit. Then I started throwing things (tantrums, pencils, textbooks) and they learned to just let me read because it wasn’t disruptive and had less chance of somebody getting hurt. Not that I could do much damage in the first place, it was just too much of a hassle to calm me back down from my spergouts.
Stuff like that is where it was super convenient that I love to draw. I basically never had to worry about being bored in class. Kept my hands busy too which also helped me focus when I needed to listen to the teacher. And made it kind of ironic when a teacher would tell me to “stop doodling and pay attention.” They were basically ensuring I could NOT pay attention.
I also sometimes kept a tiny piece of modeling clay in my pocket. It was a great “fidget” (long before actual “fidget toys” existed) because it was so easy to hide and kept my hands busy without requiring me to actually look at it. I’d just keep my hands under my desk and try to shape it into simple things (a sphere, a cube, a velociraptor claw like the one Alan Grant was always fiddling with in Jurassic Park, etc).
She also may be projecting. I’m getting vibes from her and her husband that they’ve peaked prospect-wise some time ago and this could be partially existential dread-related…
All the world has to do is just bend to her every whim, and she’ll be happy. What’s so difficult about that? Is it really so much to ask, when she’s right anyway?
he’s never rly brought it up from what i can remember, but who knows, maybe the reason walky did ‘well’ in school (by public school standards lol) and was smart “Did you think i was stupid?” “you threw a toy at my head”, was that he had a consistent schedule and either extra tutoring or the mom making sure he actually studied/at least finished homework or he was one of those kids that ‘coasted by’ as long as he did well on tests but i’d imagine at this point lucy would step in and say that they study properly together instead of doing datey/lovey dovey stuff
I definitely think he was able to coast by, especially since he was in public school. It’s funny, the older I get the more I realize I do share a lot with Walky. I’m sure the reason he went undiagnosed for his ADHD is the same reason I was, which was that we were in public school and were able to pay enough attention/do well enough to get good grades. Public school doesn’t have high standards honestly, they seem to be the bare minimum when it comes to schooling, and at least during the time I was in school, being curious about a student being neurotypical or not was only when they had bad grades. I didn’t have as hard an adjustment as Walky did, but there WAS a big adjustment to go from never needing to study to actually needing to study college material.
Yeah, I had similar experiences at a UK state school (“public school” means something different and completely non-intuitive here…) which recognised “Daibhid has issues interacting with other kids in the playground” was a problem, but solved this problem by keeping me indoors during breaks, rather than asking why I had issues. When my grades were up, they didn’t care beyond that; when they weren’t, I was just being lazy because I’d shown I could get good grades. Then they washed my hands of me and suggested I’d be better off at a special school.
This was better, but it was run by hippies who “didn’t believe in labels”, so I still didn’t actually get diagnosed with anything.
I would suggest that both schools were doing what they’re actually paid to do. All over our societies, we ought to take a hard look at what we are actually paying people to do.
I was going to launch into a long analysis for you, but after a bit of thought I decided that Puppeteer Nessus’ explanation is about the same and much more succinct.
Being able to coast through high school getting good grades without much effort then having problems in college as you get to harder material isn’t really a huge stretch. I lost some points by not liking the busy work assigned us, especially in middle school, but mostly you can do the assigned homework, listen in class and still not really study.
Honestly, it didn’t really hit me in college until late in the program and even them only really in my major, but that derailed me pretty badly.
I don’t really know what public school could have done better, unless you go to the level of lots of individualized one on one work with each student.
Ugh. As someone who wasn’t diagnosed with ADHD until her mid-thirties, I both understand and HATE this message: “You’re great at anything you put your mind to…”
With the unspoken completion…
“…so if you’re not being great, you aren’t really trying.”
So I spent most of my life “trying myself to death’s door,” because the expectation around me seemed to be – If you aren’t successful OR haven’t worked yourself into the hospital yet, you haven’t really tried hard enough.”
Yup. This. Exactly this. Up to and including the multiple chronic illnesses, literal hospital visits, and being wheeled out of work on an ambulance stretcher because I was fucking terrified of not going and proving I couldn’t work.
I mean, not to belittle or question your specific experience, but not putting his mind to it, or not working hard enough does actually apply to Walky’s situation. He basically tried to just coast through things like he always had, which to be fair has to be on some level on his parents to a degree.
But I wonder if you might be conflating “trying” with “being successful.”
We actually see MULTIPLE times Walky TRIED to study.
He’d sit there, with the book. He TRIED.
But he did NOT know how to study SUCCESSFULLY.
Probably because with his ADHD, whatever methods other people found successful didn’t really WORK for him. And if he’s never worked with someone who knows what WORKS for someone with ADHD, he’s probably going to get the sense that NOTHING works for him.
So if your experience is that whether you try or not, you either fail or succeed…but your success seems to have zero relationship to your effort…the “logical” conclusion is that continuing to try is a “waste of time.”
I can’t tell you how many students I worked with who had just completely given up at school, because they’d TRY studying for HOURS…then fail the test (because the study methods they’d been taught didn’t work for them), and when their outcome wasn’t success, the teacher would say “I can tell you didn’t even try. You didn’t even study.”
Why on earth would you keep putting yourself out there, making the effort, then being told you hadn’t? If you’re going to lose anyway, why lose at the cost of a lot of time/effort?
I started working with these ADHD kids, teaching them the methods that had WORKED for me (taught to me by my undiagnosed ADHD parents)…and suddenly, their grades started rising! They started passing tests! And…they were EXCITED! They started using those methods themselves, they started TRYING again, because finally trying was linked to success!
But if your trying doesn’t lead to success…yeah, at some point you quit trying and just coast or give up.
Oh yeah…realizing all my learning/studying methods worked gangbusters for my ADHD students? A major part of eventually getting diagnosed with ADHD myself.
If you don’t mind sharing further, I would be very interested to learn what these study methods are that work for ADHD kids, because I have ADHD and never got much of anything out of studying. I’m really good at retaining info from lectures, and when I can make myself read a textbook I’m great at retaining that too, but textbooks are so dry that they can’t hold my attention for any length of time unless I’m really invested in the specific material being covered, which isn’t often. I certainly can’t make myself focus on things like homework, especially when it’s repetitive busy work covering material I understood when the teacher explained it, like math. Also writing papers is a huge struggle for me, or at least starting them, usually once I start writing I get a flow going and can bang it out relatively quickly, but starting that flow is harder than starting my old lawnmower was.
How To ADHD on YouTube has a very comprehensive and effective collection of strategies for working with having an ADHD brain as well as explaining why some things work better than others.
To summarise what works for me is taking into consideration that ADHD brains have an interest-based nervous system whereas non ADHD people have an importance-based nervous system. We are more motivated by novelty, competition, interest and urgency.
Specific examples: Lean into material that you’re invested in and focus on what is interesting. I weave my special interests into assignments, and get the best grades on those. I will also substitute readings for writers that I vibe with better. Once I managed to integrate live action roleplay of the apocalypse into a presentation, and another time I used zines.
Switch up how you study or where. Oddly, I find it easier to read boring material if I’m in a bar or music venue. I also enjoy studying in dog parks. Industrial music is also great for me to read to, since it’s musically interesting but has limited vocals. Using alternating highlighters is also helpful for breaking up info.
Having a body double can help a lot with focusing on dull info, and if it’s someone who understands what you’re learning you can use the Pomodoro method to study and discuss what you just read with them during rest periods. I also involve art in my study, like
Give yourself an earlier due date, or have someone (a friend or tutor) set a date for you to submit a draft by. Helps build urgency.
Starting is always the hardest part. I have a ridiculous, borderline compulsive way to do assignments, but find free writing what you know is a good way to get the juices flowing, and always start with the intro and conclusion.
I’ve got like a billion tips and strategies I could talk about. I’ve been at uni for a decade.
I want to reinforce this point. Even neurotypical kids will run into this if they haven’t had to TRY to study before. A lot of kids hit that point in college. Or they were very managed all their lives and don’t do well with the lack of structure, and have to TRY to set aside the time for study. I can’t speak as to Walky’s reasons as I am, to the best of my knowledge, neurotypical and I’ve always been pretty good at retaining school information, but I think it’s important to know that, yeah, studying is a skill and not everyone has it, or has it by a certain age, or past a certain point.
I got lucky and figured it out in high school but my mom is a huge believer in alternative medicines, so I had tried a ton of different things through out high school before giving up on getting medicine. In college a few years in, I finally was able to get the amphetamines I needed, after the first two medicines didn’t work. All it cost was nearly failing out and wasting numerous semesters redoing classes.
…wish I knew you when I was in university. Maybe I wouldn’t have dropped out. I did finish community College, but I always mourn the loss of my astrophysics degree 🤷
I think maybe for Walky it ended up being a bit of both. Up until college he’d been able just coast on his innate ability but runs into the wall in college. His initial bad habits got him behind and when he tried to study to try and catch up ran into the exact kind of problems you’re talking about, with little experience dealing with them.
So while I can see how it could be seen as being unfair because of the difficulty studying, I can’t help but feel it applies far more to the fact that he didn’t take the class seriously at all until he couldn’t push off the looming realization that he was going to fail it.
Just about everybody I knew who did as well as I did in school pretty much realized the first time they flunk a class that “Hey, you’re in the big leagues now, I guess you’re gonna have to do that studying thing that everybody else does.“
Right but the thing is. (NOTE: WHAT FOLLOWS IS ONLY MY OWN EXPERIENCE WITH ADHD)
… That’s how ADHD *works*. It’s–it’s very badly misnamed. It should, honestly, be called “Executive Function Disorder”, because the part of my brain that unconciously ranks tasks and starts tasks *doesn’t work right*. Everything gets set to “Task priority 1”: Ranking them takes actual mental effort.
This includes tasks like “eating.”
Also, we don’t get a dopamine hit for completing a task. Apparently people without ADHD do?
I’m also very fortunate: I was (CORRECTLY) diagnosed as a child. That *did* lead to my mom getting diagnosed once she started reading “You mean I’m not Lazy, Stupid, or Crazy?”, and the slow revelation that not only do I, my younger brother, and mother have it, but so does *every single member of my mother’s immediate family.*
(And I’m one of the people that Strattera seems to work well for. I was even part of the drug study, actually.)
Yes, there is pleasure in completing a task, but I have to ask myself for it. When I’ve finished yard work for the day, after I clean up the mess and put the tools away, I make myself go back and survey what I’ve done. The work is no fun for me, but seeing the modest result is mildly rewarding.
Dunno if that would work for you, but it works for me.
Wait. *Thats* why neurotypical people can just… do things? They get that dopamine fix of anticipation and reward for things that *they* assign rather than interests that are assigned *to* them?? MAN I wish I could do that. That feels like a superpower!
An auDHDer who has also suffered from that “not trying hard enough” bullshit, I think society would be that much better if people realized that seeing success is privilege.
We ALL work hard, but very few actually get to see that hard work succeed.
THIS! I was one of the lucky ones who was mostly able to coast through college too (grad school is where the ouch hit) and I saw tons of very smart friends in college trying harder than me without getting the grades I got.
Then, in grad school, when I suddenly COULDN’T write the papers the night, or even the week, before they were due, then I had to work harder than my classmates trying to figure out how to learn new study habits and project timelines and how to make my adhd (undiagnosed of course) activate hyperfocus mode earlier and for longer. I managed to do okay through my masters, but the PhD went downhill FAST. The abusive faculty then made that 10000000000 times worse, but that’s a different problem.
My parents helped me learn enough ADHD-friendly study techniques, I could commit concepts to memory pretty well (it was still a lot of work, but at least I’d learned things that actually WORKED for me).
But I was diagnosed during grad school, when suddenly I couldn’t just cram two final papers in the same night. It was miserable.
Thankfully, I had an incredibly gracious program director/professor who also had undiagnosed ADHD (he was just old enough by the time he realized it, he was all-but retired, so he didn’t seek out an official diagnosis). He helped me get through the program and supported me as I started the diagnosis process myself.
I haven’t started a doctorate, and I’m really worried I would NOT make it. I only barely started completing papers in less than 2-3 contiguous days by my last course. Even mid-program, I was still cranking out 40-60 pages of final exam paper in 3 days. But it made me so miserable, it almost torpedoed my marriage.
I’m AuDHD and only found out five years ago. I’ve been at uni for a decade and never finished a degree. I went from psych/criminology double and had a breakdown, switched to arts and finally found social work, which combines my interest in people and society, and is incredibly values based and social justicey. Because it’s social work and the teachers are used to working with people from shitty backgrounds they were especially kind to me.
Ive wanted to quit so many times because I couldn’t see how I could “succeed”. I struggled with finding balance between perfectionism and burn out and there were never any good examples of practitioners with my kind of brain. I eventually found small groups and advocates online and began intentionally focusing on neurodivergent affirming practice, and now I’m a representative with the disability collective and I write/talk about the structural issues in education and solutions to improve access for disabled social workers.
I expect to graduate next year, but Ive had to take breaks every other semester because of how badly my mental health and general wellbeing gets. I expend SO much effort studying, starting a month before classes start just to fall behind by mid-sem.
Thirties ouch I was sort of lucky I found out in my twenties while my parents figured I was but the US public school system isn’t good at identifying ADHD or autism in students or at least my school wasn’t like Walky I was a good student, so I couldn’t possibly have learning disability. And my meltdowns were just me being disruptive.
There’s also a layer of “You’re great at everything you’ve put your mind to *so far*.” If you never struggle for the first thirteen years of your education, then you don’t know how to react when you’re *not* instantly good at something.
Even though I don’t have ADHD or something similar, I can totally relate. I grew up for lack of a better term “over trying” at everything. Destroying myself mentally whenever I failed because “I just wasn’t trying hard enough”. It wasn’t until now around my late thirties that I finally realized I was in a very literal way that was affecting my physical health, trying myself to death. It wasn’t until my personal trainer told me “why are you overworking yourself like this? Just who are you trying to impress? Who do you need to prove yourself to and will they appreciate it?” that I realized what I was doing.
It wasn’t worth it. My family was great at criticizing every single aspect of my life and making sure I remembered each and every failure. Every single “You just didn’t put enough effort into it.” But when I got ill they weren’t at the doctors with me. I was at the gym (doctor’s orders) by myself and they still criticized me for not having results immediately. I took my trainer’s advice. Fuck them. I’m not out to impress anyone at anything. I’m sorry it took this long to realize it, and it’s actually done wonders for my health, and even overall attitude. I’m out to impress myself now.
As for the comic itself, I feel like everyone has a moment where you somehow have to make a realization or choice that somehow defines your character and serves as a transition into adulthood or a first “adult choice”. I think Walky’s gonna have one of those VERY soon.
Another AuDHDer here. I’m about 20 years ahead of you, and none of this neurodivergent stuff was a thing in my childhood, so I’m sorting it out for myself literally this year, rounding out the many painful lessons I’ve had to learn throughout my life.
I agree that the whole “if you tried hard enough” doesn’t even take into account how much *harder* ND brains have to work to accomplish things, and the feelings of failure when one can’t magically get your brain to do what you want them to. As a teen and young adult, I was pretty good at the things I was good at – lol- and limping along or outright failing at things that did not interest me. Even things I was “good at” and desperately wanted to do were often beyond me for reasons I did not understand, NOT for lack of trying. Jay-sus. I’ve eventually managed to accomplish many things in life, but not because of “trying hard enough.” *old lady sputtering*
I went in to see if my husband (who is 1.5 feet taller than me) was awake and if he’d be taking the 5 year old to a birthday party today or if I would be. He semi-woke up and flailed because he thought I was leaning over him and jabbed me hard in the septum then blamed me for leaning over him. I. Was. Standing. Upright. I was not Joyce-waking him!
Tall people being judgey towards short people for being short are the worst. I concluded he was asleep and I’d be on party duty.
I couldn’t handle math until I did a year of carpentry and construction.
It’s a matter of remembering how to quiet one’s thoughts.
It became meditative, after a while. Following rules. Figuring it out.
Until I passed my mandatory math requirement and promptly forgot everything again! x-D
I can remember how it used to feel to know those things. But I don’t remember what I knew or how to use it anymore.
Fleeting skill. Slips through fingers.
“The worst person you know just made a good point”
(also accidentally flagged if any mod(s) are reading this, sorry!)
academic stuff aside it would be good if he did have a creative outlet and made something amazing. i mean, even carla’s pie throwing machine or so i imagine he’d do to get a kick out of/troll ppl with lol
Also, irl, Walky would be pissing me off big time here.
I’ve got no issues with people who don’t like sports or whatever but to deliberately be a dick about something because people are into it and your not is not funny, it’s just sad
He’s a pathetic little tosspot and hopefully he gets some sense knocked into him (figuratively or literally) soon
He Charles and Lucy are all just having fun doing it, because pretending not to know how sports work is a fun thing to do. Maybe you should learn to get a better hold on your anger
Yes we’re all aware of that vanishingly tiny minority that every sports nerd claims to be part of whenever they get called on that, like but, like “Good Cops” that don’t arrest bad cops… #YesAllSportsNerds
While, it’s hard to ever defend her, he really never suffered any consequences for that, Amber fixed it for him and there were no repercussions to him not taking college seriously to the first half of the semester.
What consequences should he have faced? I might say the resolution didn’t really get enough focus, but we did see some stuff about him getting functional at studying and then going to take the midterm after the kidnapping.
Amber’s grade hacking more boosted his confidence than anything. He got back on track and passed the class himself.
And again, it’s not really “him not taking college seriously”, but him dealing with undiagnosed ADHD.
I’m cutting off the first thing I want to say to you because I know logically I shouldn’t come in with that hostile energy and it will probably get me in trouble. But just, read the thread above you, ffs. Saying shit like that splashes on like half the readers here
And the one bragging about being in way more fights than anyone else here, as if that’s meant to be impressive. 💅 A very violent-minded person, really.
well he was allowed to play around more than sal a little even if they also were dragged to acting auditions.
tho i mean at this point it’d be harder not to know the rules of basketball, if not him having a masculinity complex about “Of course I’d att least know how to play even if i’m not good at it” i mean they are all going to the game together so i assume she enjoys it herself to a bit ,unless it was the dad’s choice this time
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Linda may have a point. Walky made the questionable choice NOT to put his mind to certain courses, because he didn’t think he needed to, and then when his grades started slipping, chose not to address the issue right away, hence his current situation.
Eh, I’ve been where Walky was. If you breeze through and don’t know how to study, you are left panicking. It’s not easy picking up a skill that can take years to develop
Panel 5 is how she’s wrong. I’m pretty sure he was a goofball in high school too. He was good at things without putting his mind to them, high school provided the structure. His grades got better after AG showed him a way to do structure for himself, and apparently it worked for the rest of the semester.
He did make questionable choices, but not all the ones she’s thinking of. Hiding from his failing math grades was a bad choice, this approach to life contributed to his failing, making a joke out of everything is why he didn’t get anything out of tutoring from Jason. But Linda’s probably also comparing Dorothy to Lucy and Amber, and he was dating her when he was failing.
And her response is, as always, to give her kids tough love until it fixes the problem, which it doesn’t. And he’s not flunking anymore.
Linda just wants to be mad at him rather than ask questions, because that’s her parenting style. She was 100% okay with him being a goofball up until yesterday, but now that she found out he’s not perfect she’s bitter and cold to him. He is now where Sal was and I’m betting anything this storyline ends with him either putting his foot down or telling Sal he didn’t realize how hard it was for her
Yep and she refuses to register any reason for failure that implies she overlooked his weak points growing up. like Sal with Danny, Walkys sucess all because of her good parenting but once he messes up its all his own fault. Her self narrative is that he was so perfect before he left her care and started making mistakes.
I was less harsh on the Walkerton parents at first but watching her completely flip purely based on his grades dipping and Danny dating Sal has made me really detest Linda. She’s the worst kind of tiger mom; taking all of the credit and simply blindly refusing to accept that she might bear responsibility of the way her kids treat her. Hopefully both of her kids getting sick of her shit at the same time starts to at least make her husband doubt things more directly. She’s not going to learn otherwise.
The “questionable choice” to continue doing what had worked for him throughout his school life so far. Why wouldn’t he?
Then when that blew up on him, he had a few weeks of panicked flailing around and then managed to sort himself out with help from his friends (particularly Amber.)
Thus his current situation, which is his mom tearing him down about a crisis he has already overcome.
I mean, she’s not wrong, but wow, she’s also so very, very, very wrong. Some people wait a whole lifetime to be so wrong and right at the same time. Sometimes they have to hold political office! So, good job, Linda.
There are ways of being right and presenting it badly, awfully, even disastrously. Some people just don’t have the knack for encouraging others, and have never learned the technique.
She really doesn’t understand the importance of the “were” in that sentence, does she? He WAS failing. He no longer is. Cut the fucking attitude, Linda.
who knows maybe if an uglier side comes off charles might reconsider his marriage. some older ppl are kinda stubborn and stick around using kids as an excuse but joyce’s dad got a divorce and he looked fairly older than charles
I’m not holding my breath on Charles having a change of heart today, the way he placed himself as far away from his wife and son without being too obvious tells me he’s preparing to weather another Linda verbal storm not leave storm county.
Or he might consider fixing his marriage rather than junking it. Hard, painful work that might not succeed, yes. Depends on what it’s worth to him. On what a lot of things are worth to him.
Besides Linda being awful I always get annoyed with the term sportsball
Look, I get that ‘Sportsball’ is often used humorously, but to me, it sounds pretty condescending. I’m a fan of anime, Star Trek, Star Wars, comic books, musicals, and tabletop RPGs like D&D. But guess what? I also really enjoy traditional sports like football and basketball. Using the term ‘Sportsball’ seems to trivialize the complexity and skill involved in these sports. I’m well-versed in the rules for both tabletop RPGs and sports like American football, so why diminish either by using dismissive language? Let’s give each hobby the respect it deserves, shall we?”
Not actually a term.
but I should add a caveat. When sports commentators use the term ‘Sportsball,’ I actually don’t mind. They’re coming from a place of appreciation for sports, so in that context, it’s more of an inside joke among fans. It doesn’t carry the same condescending weight because the intent behind using the term is different. So for me, it really boils down to the respect and understanding one has for the sport they’re talking about.”
Eh, it’s fine as shorthand. There’s a lot of sports with two teams and a ball –and as someone who’s always been more of a fan of the “be the fastest at this” or “poke holes in something” sort of sports they all sort of blend together
It’s not anymore dismissive than calling something a roguelike
I responded with said caveat above but should also include sports fans, also I’m not one of those people who gets bent out of shape if you don’t know 3 members or 2 or even one a team member a fan is fan. I run in some geeky circles and the term sportsball is used alot in a condescending manner.
So there’s a way of using the term that is offensive. I get that.
I took Lucy’s use of the word to mean that she’s personally uninterested in sports and hasn’t learned anything about them that requires effort, but wants to be accepting of others’ enthusiasm and join in the social aspect of watching a game together.
I should note that this is the first time I’ve seen or heard that particular term.
Then say Basketball or the team name(Hoosiers) that doesn’t require much or any effort also given Walky’s purposesful use of the wrong sport I m pretty sure they’re both being condsending.
At least based on the usage of the term “Sportsball” in my family, it’s less condescending toward the game(s), and more a joke at the expense of the commentators.
My husband was a sports journalist, played at least 5 different team sports, including going to junior adult leagues in one (honestly, I’m not the sports person, so I don’t know the official terms), and he continues to follow sports at a level more akin to a professional sports commentator than any regular fan.
And yet, when he and my brother go to play Switch sports, they laughingly call it their “Sportsball” time, because their personal attitude toward the sports at that time is casual (and because my brother knows little about sports beyond Wi/Switch sports games). It’s referring to their simplistic attitude toward the sports, not that the sports themselves are simple.
Kinda like Walky is joking about fumbles, even though he knows that’s not a basketball thing.
And we’re huge Trekkies, board gamers, DND/tabletop-ers, etc.
Because turnabout is fair play.
It’s pushback against a lifetime of condescension to people who don’t like Sportsbal. It’s also convenient when forming an ingroup to have a demonized out group.
I get the idea of pushback, but using ‘Sportsball’ just perpetuates a cycle of condescension. Instead of demonizing each other’s interests, why not celebrate the diversity of what we all enjoy?
she’s probably just irritated about their last dinner, although she also might not have seen as much ‘snarkiness’ before, walky may not be completely filtered but i know some ppl def act way diff around friends they’re comfortable with versus parents
tho i don’t think lucy said it in a mocking/satirical way or so, but even tho it’s more acceptable these days to the point where it’s like “being nerdy and a gamer is the mainstream/popular now” plenty of ppl grew up being mocked for that kinda stuff so ‘sportsball’ is pretty tame
“I know it may seem like a small issue, but it actually does bother me. Sports have been a lifelong passion for me, just as much as my geek hobbies. They’re also a way for me to bond with family members who don’t share my other interests, like my brothers-in-law. What irks me about the term ‘Sportsball’ is that it creates this unnecessary sense of superiority, as if enjoying sports is somehow less valid or intellectual. I’ve never felt the need to diminish someone else’s hobbies, so it’s frustrating when mine aren’t given the same level of respect.
Not really? It more just has a sense of “idk shit about sports but I know there’s a ball so whoo go that thing I think”. It feels more like cluelessness on the users part than condescension
Eh? It just seems like a harmless joke to me. Like i don’t doubt you’ve met several 1000 IQ reddit type geeks who like to pretend they’re better than sports fans because they remind them of the jocks that bullied them in school. But it’s not like that’s the only context where the joke gets used. “Yay sportsball” is just a fun thing to say
It’s been 57 years, and I still get upset by my one experience with basketball. I was a freshman at Marshall U., where “gym” was still a required course. I was in a basketball game, hovering at the edge of the court because I didn’t know what to do. The coach said, “Get in there. Get after them.” So I got after them, but now they’re getting pissed off because I’m interfering with play. I look over at the coach but he and his goon squad are laughing at me. If it were now, I’d say something (e.g., are you going to explain the rules, or are you going to laugh at me?), but I had just come down out of the violent Appalachians and was terrified of confrontation, especially with jocks. I never tried again, and to this day I refer to the game as “bouncy bouncy ball.”
I used to call it “sportsball” because I thought I was clearly making fun of myself for not knowing about sports — until I learned that people can take it as belittling sports fans, instead.
I don’t want to make fun of people for liking things.
I’ve only ever heard the term used by this specific punk band from my home town (Flangipanis, the BEST and most fun band to see in Brisbane) in the song ‘Sportsball’. The band do enjoy and play sports all (softball, rugby, not sure what else) but the song is about the attitude and issues in major sports leagues. Kind of. It’s mostly just funny.
i mean with the way the rest of the conversation is going, walky being a goof ball is just not the reason she’s pissy about things but i imagine she still would be not satisfied if walkys grades did stay steady (even if he was a decent student pre-college in comparison it’s not as if he was some kinda honors student or so)
…it occurs to me that you’ve just hit on why one of the subplots in this chapter is Dorothy, who also takes things too seriously, in a completely different but, as she’s learning, also toxic way.
It is an ambition of mine to someday get really into a sport – and I mean REALLY into it, like, knowing every player’s name and background and statistics, just an absolute nerd for the sport – and then exclusively refer to it as “sportsball” around other people.
or better yet, flex on everyone and just /buy/own a team, and then act like that to the players like “good job handling those balls” “We’re a hockey team, we use pucks”
I also find this strip sad because of how we last left Sal and Linda. Here’s Linda telling Walky he’s ‘great no matter what’ (although his ‘choices’ are bad and thus he isn’t measuring up) whereas Sal cannot be great, ever. She is never enough. She only stands up to mommy’s standards when her sweet white boyfriend is around. And that… is sad. Linda is a terrible mom to both of her children.
Yep, and Sal standing up only works out favorably with Danny because her mom treats parental approval like a transaction, ” doing something I like for once? Heres my acceptance! Why are you alone? i never paid , ahem, gave approval for that! ” Walky has the equivalent of a longer line if credit but you bet Linda counting every little thing he does now because she’s getting her perfect Dr. Son one way or another.
parents easily forget what school is like for them unless they’re active teachers.
Tho i wonder if walky would be snarky and like “well i WAS kidnapped by a religious wackjob and could’ve died, cut me some slack” but i imagine the pity for that would run out eventually
Linda never had any real pity for Walkys kidnapping to begin with, the minute she assessed thst her golden boy was unharmed she immediately starts lashing out at others, no real worry for how her kid is doing. The whole thing felt like a Karen angry that her merchandise got bruised.
Am I the only one who’s pretty sure the “bad choice” Linda’s not directly talking about but nonetheless stumbling against in the sauce is in fact Lucy?
Also am I the only one reading into that big red background Linda’s emotional violence level in much the same way that the nonliteral solid red backgrounds have been used to indicate emotional and physical violence levels previously in this strip?
’cause if full-screen red background means throwing punches of rage then I’m reading Linda at about 85% to go time
Definitely not the only one on the Lucy front. But I think the red bg is just the chairs because they show Lucy sitting with red behind her as well… though I guess it’s not zoomed in so that could be an artistic decision on purpose by Willis to signify anger? I dunno.
You’ll note that Walky is zoomed in on, but not given a background. Might be a significant artistic choice.
Sometimes a red background is just a red background, but Willis has used literal red lighting to echo the red flashback panels before. Most notably with red sunset light in the Sal/Amber fight.
i mean his grades were slipping way before he considered going out with lucy right?
but if it does spill out hopefully we can see if lucy would actually say something about it, or reevaluate her relationship with walky whether or not he stands up for her or not
Yep, Linda is still probably seething about her least favorite just walking away from her so now she’s angry and without the “saving grace” of a white SO she’s becoming extra critical of everything her son does. I highly doubt this is the first time Walky has been goofy at a sports game, this is just the first time Linda is taking note.
I think she’s taking note because Lucy and Walky are being goofy together. She’s accidentally right that treating things like a joke is part of why he was failing.
There is definitely symbolism in this case. Even though Walky and Linda are both behind the same red bleacher his background banners are white while hers are mostly red, probably to represent his overall mood being light in a happy way…in contrast to his mother.
i do like the idea of the red background as a blowout gauge =D
maybe the frame starts tilting until it’s plunging on Linda fully surrounded by a red background.
Part 3 (Suggestive)
A little late but I wanted to finish this. This was originally gonna be the last one but honestly I might have to keep this going. It’s funny how as this went on I got more into the dialogue than the horny.
Haha that is funny. I actually LEGIT forgot she dated Danny but I like the idea that Danny is so forgettable that she just forgot about that a few months after.
He just becomes a ninja because no one will recognize his presence. He could slice someone in half in front of everyone and people would be like “Yo, how’d Tim die!?”
There are so many things to love about this, but I’ll go for the viewpoint changes. I don’t know if you were just trying different angles for the challenge but it works so well. Reminded me of the car trunk scene in Out Of Sight.
Thanks for noticing! I really love the vibe of like…different angles for dialogue heavy comics/shows to keep it visually interesting. Really glad to hear that paid off.
absolutely! really great work on the angles here. just a masterclass in keeping a monologue entertaining while providing visual context and emotional cues! <3
Amber being super deadpan throughout like some kind of sex ninja is perfect
This is what happens when I’m sleepy and don’t read comments: I miss out on Yotomoe’s pre-porn setups (porn prologues? Pornlogues? We’ll workshop it).
Luckily, reading the previous two days comment sections is a super power we all share.
I really enjoy all 3 parts.
It’s low key making me jealous in a way.
I rarely enjoyed the kind of friendship with a woman where we could casually cuddle/be up on each other.
It was always romantic/sexual, which was great since that was what I wanted, but sucks when you’re not trying to date, but would still like a cuddle buddy.
That said, if this scenario stayed like this or switched to sexy timed, I would be (almost) equally satisfied.
Also, it sucks that your NSFW stuff can’t be posted there anymore.
There’s always Twitter, though I don’t think it gives you the option to put everything in one post.
I’m on the fence on where it goes from here. I’m just going off vibes but I hope to maintain that feeling of “not romantic but still a bit horny”. I gotta find a second place to post it. I would love a place where people can comment on each individual drawing cuz I love the interactions/comments.
Thighs 🤌🤌
Been showing these to my boyfriend who’s never read any Willis comic bc I know he’d love the way you write amber. He says your perspective shots are really good
She’s terrible, but I’d like to think she’s not wrong about this. Walky’s probably got lots of potential to excel at whatever he wanted, but he’s too much a walking avatar of procrastination
Oh she’s completely in the right, but it’s entirely by accident. More specifically, if forced to elaborate past a couple basic sentences, she would *stop* being right pretty quickly, is what I imagine.
Not unless he can turn his focus on and off like a hose. Which he cannot.
My parents said stuff like this too. They literally thought that, by invalidating my difficulties and blaming me for them, that they were being encouraging.
Spoiler: it was not encouraging. Heck, it wasn’t even true. (I was gifted but with undiagnosed ADHD and an undiagnosed learning disability that impacted math. But even if I’d been gifted-and-NT, sometimes things are hard for people.)
Anyway I wonder if I’ll ever meet this Leorale who is living up to their potential. They sound pretty fancy. And very, very mythical.
Yeah. My life is populated with alternate universes made up of “what if” and “if only” and “the road not taken”. When I think about that version of Laura who actually “lived up to potential,” it sounds EXHAUSTING. I feel more like the repetition in that novel “Brave New World”: “I’m really awfully glad that I’m a Beta.”
We do so much, already. It’s important to be proud if what we do, and what we do have, and what we do bring into the world.
Yeah, well, it’s the “whatever he wants” part of that that’s the sticking point.
It’s the same for my family. We’re all really good at doing really well at whatever we want – but if we don’t want to do it? Oh, wow, no, it’s such a slog.
Hasn’t he been doing better since he faced up to not being naturally gifted at everything and started studying? Obviously it was painful at first, but neurodivergent or not it’s going to take some time to build up his concentration. I think Walky’s interpretation is closer to the truth.
Or to be “Explain The Meme” guy: The NFL has a trademark on the phrase “Super Bowl” and has a rep for being hyper-litigious in defense of same (“Disney issuing C&D orders to day care centers with Micky and Donald painted on their exteriors” litigious).
So “alternative phrases” have emerged to refer to “The Big Game”, “Superb Owl” and “Soup Or Bowl” being among the most popular/sarcastic.
If I had a nickel for every mom in this comic who dismisses their adult college-going child’s observations about their own life in favor of a half-baked stew of clouded memories and unrealistic expectations, I’d have more nickels than Mike.
Nooo, please put me back to Carla’s moment! I wanna stay there, where shes struggling with being with Charlie!
Everything is more sweet than Walky’s family.
Just imagining for a second, after this, Mike decided that he was going to try to be a better person and encourage Walky to get diagnosed. a sincere heart to heart, the day after Dina and Sarah’s birthday party.
I feel like Linda is both drinking and already hung over. The bluntness, her expression, her slumped body language- she’s not feeling good at all. I think she’s walking on a wire; on one side is the chance to change her behavior and apologize, and on the other side is the chance to take out her frustration on those around her. I genuinely don’t know where she’s gonna fall.
I’m guessing not drunk but angry and disapproving. Remember how Sal having a white guy by her side made Linda act like her thoughts had value for once? Were seeing the reverse here with Walky and Lucy. Everything Walky does now is worthy of scrutiny no matter how small and petty.
Yikes, inviting them was another good cop bad cop plot. Charles is on opposite sides of his wife and Walky, prime location to be the bystander if his wife decides to start a long critical tirade whime being the furthest away from Walky. It sucks when people turn what is supposed to be family fun into an interrogation about what you’ve accomplished, it doesn’t really help make you better or more productive and forever makes you weary iof their future invites.
Oh my god, the looks Linda is giving, the expressions.
I wanted Lucy to experience “The Full Linda” but I sure as hell do not want her to experience, “The Drunk Linda.” That… that’s like pouring a case of Mentos into a vat of Pepsi Cola.
The “you can do anything you set your mind to” mantra nearly killed me. Legitimately. I was top of class in highschool. I won awards, including for being the most likely to succeed at uni. I struggled socially and just put everything into pleasing my teachers. My first try at uni, I really really tried. Had a breakdown and ended up in hospital after developing agoraphobia from increasingly severe panic attacks. I assumed it was my fault for not trying hard enough, which made me worthless. It took years to recover, to realise why I struggle so much and I still haven’t finished.
We have to stop treating personal failure like moral failings. That’s how you get a culture where people are so afraid of being bad at stuff they dare not try anything to begin with. (By people I mean me.) (And by we I mean Linda.)
For real. It took me until I was 26 to even start trying to do things, after decades of being made to feel like I had to be perfect at everything from the word “Go”. Now I’m a wizened and wily 30-year-old and if somebody doesn’t like me sucking at something early on, I figure they can go suck a dick and stop hovering over my shoulder. I was literally so afraid of failure that I never even bothered getting good at any of the video games I was playing 24/7. That’s a decade wasted, completely lost to burnout, and it was entirely the fault of this worthless perfection culture.
Wow, yeah, besides the hospitalization and the panic attacks (I think? I don’t know if I’ve ever been good at objectively judging the severity of the things that go on in my head), this paragraph feels eerily familiar. I’m sorry you also had to deal with this. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone else.
Like you, I was an excellent student in high school, well-liked by teachers and had some social struggles for a while–part of the reason I think I may possibly be on the autism spectrum is because I have learned with hindsight that the majority of the social skills I was able to practice and emulate in the latter half of high school were behaviors learned through study and observation in my theater and speech & debate participation, and weren’t something that came naturally to me like it seemed to with other kids. I too once genuinely believed the “do anything you set your mind to,” mantra instilled in me by well-meaning parents, only to have reality break me down into something that was only bare minimum functional for quite some time. Still not sure sometimes how I managed to *survive* college, let alone graduate.
Now I’ve developed all sorts of unhealthy habits and rarely ever leave my home for anything besides grocery shopping and going to work. I hate it and am actively trying to improve the situation, but trying to maintain a steady schedule and good physical and mental habits that can make me into something that my mind would recognize as a functional human being is a struggle for me sometimes. Even though admittedly I’m comparatively much, much better now than I was when I left college, I don’t when or even if I’ll ever be able to be as sociable or feel as normal as I did by the end of high school.
I can at least be happy my parents weren’t like Walky’s, but his struggles academically and in terms of figuring out who he is rings really true to me. People deserve to have a functioning support system and a family that will stand by them.
I did the same thing regarding learning social skills by observation. I was fascinated with psychology and sociology (which is what led me to my current study) and basically studied/copied other people. I kept notebooks written in code to keep track. I still get along best with people younger (ie children) or much older because I find the social rules to be easier to understand.
A lot of my obvious difficulties only started as a teen/adult because I struggle with self-managing my life. I am definitely better off mentally knowing what I know now about my brain because I can adapt strategies to my strengths and needs. Plus I found a neat community of ND people who’s social styles are similar to mine.
The contrast between Walky in panel two and four is kind of heartbreaking the more I think of it. He’s only recently come into a more confident and self assured version of himself but like with Sal from earlier it is dismissed and belittled because Linda doesn’t care at all about getting to know her real children. It’s all about them fitting her imaginary image of them.
Actually horrified at all the people saying Linda is right for any reason or by any metric.
You understand ADHD is a mental illness, correct? Are you going to blame a diabetic person for not being able to manage their blood sugar without insulin or even being aware they need to manage it?
Some of you are just blowing so hard on your dog whistles I’m amazed you haven’t blown them up yet, but the rest of you, goddamn stop blaming people for in-born chronic/terminal sickness.
Ikr? Like, folks here are revealing that they that they are not, “as good at a buncha stuff,” as they think are. Namely, sniffing out bullshit and empathy. They’re forgetting that hateful people tend to say some things that sound right on the the surface to cover up the the bs underneath. Let’s do a breakdown of what Linda is saying here:
“David, you know the rules to basketball.” – seems innocuous on the surface, but it’s super passive aggressive and joyless. This is how Jennifer would talk to Walky. Danger, warning, danger.
“Is this approach to life the reason you were failing you classes last semester?” – Again, passive aggressive. Also, remember that Linda has never actually asked why or what happened. She has only screamed at a restaurant, and made this snide remark. She hasn’t asked if Walky is okay, or if something happened to him. She hasn’t offered any help, support, or comfort. A empathetic person might at least wonder if trauma had played a role, or Wally’s breakups. But that would require Linda to actually know her children’s feelings.
“Nonsense. You are great at anything you put your mind to. You’ve just made some bad choices.” – This might sound like typical parent talk, but look a little closer. Walky just told Linda what his problems are, and rather than engage in conversation and learn more, Linda just shuts him down. “Nonsense.” She just flat out tells him his feeling and experience is wrong. She won’t even engage with the idea. Doesn’t even ask what stuff Wally is struggling with. If you parent this way, your child will just learn not to come to you with their problems, and not tell you anything.
Yeah to that “something happened” part. It’s not like we (and Linda) don’t know that something traumatic did happen – the kidnapping, the death of his roommate. We know the problems with grades didn’t have anything to do with that, though I wouldn’t discount the nightmare of rooming with Mike playing a role, but you’d think that would be a parent’s first thought after finding out.
I can sniff out some bullshit. Treating everything like it’s a joke is part of why he was failing. It’s not the main reason, but it’s also not unrelated. It’s a coping strategy, sure, but he was a dick to his tutor because he thought it was funnier than admitting he was having trouble concentrating and didn’t know what to do.
Looking back at the strips of Walky and Jason, what stands out to me the most is just that Walky is very adhd and Jason isn’t a very good tutor (hence Danny was able to tutor Sal better than him. Personally, I see Walky’s sense of humor as both an imitation of his parents (see Charles’s self-immolation joke from earlier, and Linda joking about banging a teacher) and as a coping mechanism for his decidedly unhappy home and high school life. We know the Walkerton house was just constant yelling and passive aggression when he was younger, and we know Jennifer disavowed him and then shoved him into lockers in high school. Being a clown can be a coping mechanism.
I said it was a coping mechanism. Doesn’t make him not a prick. https://www.dumbingofage.com/sharpen/
For as mid a tutor Jason is, he recognized Walky’s trouble concentrating, and when he tried to get Walky to see it, Walky made fun of him.
Walky realizing he’s not as good at some stuff as he thought is a great. He still hasn’t realized that being a prick to someone because you think it’s a funny way to avoid a problem is shitty.
I think you and I see things differently. My reading of that strip is that Jason was already going to tell Walky to never come back before Walky interrupted. That Jason was already giving up on him. I look at Walky in that strip, and I see a unhelpfully panicking boy from an abusive household, with no lasting friendships (not at that time), and all the social graces of Linda and Charles (who seems to default to snarky comments, public screaming, and whispering about people within earshot). Is he a prick? Sure. Sometimes. But as reader, I feel I have some understanding and empathy for why Walky is the way that he is. And I think maybe him being a prick is the only way he’s ever learned how to deal with a problem, seeing as how his mom is Karen-prime. But Walky is less mean than Linda, and tries to do it a joke, as a goofball, while Linda plays for blood.
Anyways, all of this is to say that it’s weird to see people say Linda has a point, because she doesn’t even understand the problem and doesn’t want to. And it ignores a lot of the things we’ve learned about Walky.
nope. it does not ignore the things we’ve learned about Walky. I can sympathize and also recognize how he sabotages himself. Making fun of his tutor the whole time he was trying to help, is an example of Walky treating everything like a joke, and is part of why he was failing.
It’s weird that “it’s ok that he’s a little shit to people because he’s just joking” is an explanation on how making a joke out of everything had nothing to do with him failing.
I have an aunt who is a lot like Linda. She’s honestly a GREAT mom/babysitter for very small children, but as soon as those children get old enough to know that grown-ups are not always entirely right about everything, her “parenting” collapses into despotism and passive-aggression. All of her now-adult children spend as much time as far away from her as possible because she wants to continue to run their lives like they are toddlers.
Basically, she needs dogs, not children. She’s AMAZING with dogs because dogs never talk back or cause us to challenge our ideas or have their own ideas about how to live.
Walky has put his mind to his studies, it’s a different scenario here, and I’m pleasantly surprised he’s said he’s not as good at stuff as he thought.
I don’t know if he’s said it out loud before. Hope he knows his ADHD is something to work both around and with. I went decades without a diagnosis and it had ups and downs in the applying myself department.
ADHD is a real thing, but I believe Walky is just in over his head. Many things I’ve wanted to do in life I found out I just have no aptitude for. I stopped at an Associates degree because I learned what I needed to learn to make it in life without those two extra years of unnecessary classes and subjects. Walky doesn’t need a diagnosis or therapy; he just doesn’t belong in college.
Having said that, Linda is definitely an itch-bay.
Walky’s figured out how to work about his ADHD and actually study. His grades are fine now, though he actually has to work at them.
He’s not in over his head. There’s no reason to think he doesn’t belong in college.
When I was a kid, every once in a while I’d do well on a test or assignment in school. My reward was to be told “See? You CAN do it if you’d just try!” and I’d die a little more.
The feeling of unworthiness followed me in college and throughout life. I constantly deal with intrusive suicidal ideation, and I’m on Social Security.
I wonder what Linda’s parents are/were like. How was she raised that she turned into such a bitter, entitled person? Was her house so devoid of love that she’s incapable of giving it to her own children? What happened to make her such a miserable person?
Not really. As the older, already matched pair they are acting as bookends to the group. Implicitly including both their son and his date in the group.
If the Walkertons sat together, the result would either be to separate their son from his date, to shove his date to the far end of the line (implicitly excluding her), or to force both parents to lean over and yell to speak to their son.
They are both kind of saying the same thing even if their intentions behind saying it are different. He didn’t put his mind to it because he thought he was so good that he didn’t need to.
It was recently been pointed out that we haven’t seen Ruth in, like, 2 days (in-comic). Intolerable! So, here she is. (NSFW, technically) (this one’s for you @Taffy)
Linda looks like she’s already had a couple drinks and she’s going to lose her ability to keep her racism veiled. I’m wondering how long until she overtly says something about not liking Lucy because she’s Black instead of burying it in subtext and passive-aggressive behavior.
Eh, at least in my experience, veiling racism is pretty much second nature for these kinda folk because of the bourgeois culture, language, etc. in which they are entrenched. Nothing is ever racism to them, it’s always a million loaded, inconsistent bullshit reasons for decisions and customs that just HAPPEN to hurt minorities more than they hurt the straight, white, all round “normal” people that have held power in their country for centuries.
Getting them to acknowledge their own or other fellow white folks’ racism is like trying to point at a shadow with a flashlight.
On a somewhat OT note, but going back to Joyce… anyone got any advice for ARFID? Lately I’ve just been feeling too nauseated to eat. Like everything is disgusting. EVERYTHING. Anyone got some good tricks for dealing with that? Thanks, pals!
I expect that is enough outside my experience that I doubt my “things I eat when I’m feeling nauseated” would help. In case it’s not, rice and cabbage porridge for calories. unseasoned poached tilapia for protein. I’ve heard weed is good for suppressing nausea in the context of chemo.
Just take it easy. Drink tea and stuff to help. And if you gotta eat something, eat whatever you feel like, a comfort food (mac and cheese with hotdog, mustard, butter in my case). If you don’t stomach much or anything at all, no worries.
when my ARFID is at its worst I’ve resorted to eating food like pills — small bites of as unflavored foods straight down the hatch. for me my ARFID has a lot to do with chewing though. it’s not a great method in general but it’s gotten food in me when otherwise impossible.
i feel like Lucy could really get into college sports if she let go of the nerd/jock dichotomy and embraced the fact that “hoosiers” sounds like a word JK Rowling or Roald Dahl would make up.
She could be in the nosebleed section yelling “Hoosier daddy?” and then giggling to herself every time Indiana scores.
What's gayer?
whatever it is Dorothy and Joyce are doing now (84%, 2,828 Votes)
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“some”
I suspect Linda’s idea of Walky’s bad choices is not one I would agree with.
I dunno. I mean, as a person with ADHD, I’ve come to accept that fact that making bad choices isn’t mutually exclusive to having ADHD. Like, being neurodivergent doesn’t give you a forever pass and excuse for everything; it’s an explanation for why certain things are more challenging. So I think both Walky and Linda are right. He started failing because he was worse at math than he thought and his ADHD makes studying very challenging. But he also CHOSE to then stop going to class (he didn’t forget about the class, which would have been fairly excused by ADHD) and he CHOSE to fuck around during the one on one tutoring sessions with Jason. Though in fairness to Walky for that one, we know canonically that Jason is a shit tutor, and Walky didn’t fuck around in his studying with amazigirl. But yeah, Linda is a garbage parent, and she should friggen listen to Walky when he’s trying to be honest and open with her, but also, Walky does need to take ownership of the bad choices he did actively make.
That’s very generous of you. Linda has only seen two choices Walky made. Dating Amber qnd Lucy. I get the feeling Linda is talking about Lucy. Certainly Linda is nasty enough to be focussed on dredging stuff up during fun-time activities. And the beer in her hand…
I’d ask if she’s a mean drunk, but she’s not nice – ever – so how could we tell?
Yeah, that’s fair. Linda is only accidentally correct, because you’re right: She isn’t actually aware that Walky actively stopped attending class or screwed around during his tutoring sessions. So probably whatever she is calling out as bad choices is her being a terrible person, because *gestures vaguely at Linda’s track record.*
That was my take. I’m wondering how long until she decides Lucy is the reason he failed, as well.
Walky also chose to believe that he was lacking intelligence, not effort. That his failure was inevitable, not correctable. Since then he’s seen evidence that the other choice was more likely, and I hope that that lesson went home.
Linda is right in that Walky has a lot going for him when he uses it well.
Trying to literally run away from his bad grades could be called a bad decision. Sure, it should be exactly what Linda wanted him to do in that situation, because why else did she teach him to be terrified of failing?, but I imagine she disapproves anyway.
I mean, usually when someone believes their failure is a problem of lacking skill/intelligence/ability and not effort, it’s because their experience thus far is of people praising those things rather than the effort made, creating an association of intelligence = do well, therefore is not do well, intelligence too low.
And I can very easily believe that Linda and Charles are the type of parents who would do that (Not out of malice, just not knowing any better). So, while it’s still his choice to think that, it’s probably not a choice being made freely and without heav influence.
The problem with that in kids like Walky when it comes to school is that he was getting the good grades without effort. Praising the effort wouldn’t have worked, since he wasn’t actually putting in any effort.
Yep. Been there, done that.
Especially fun when putting in effort, thus finishing quickly, was actually functionally punished.
‘OK, Mx Brain. Spend the next 50 minutes sitting quietly at your desk. But don’t take out a book to read. Completely denying you mental stimulation will certainly not have bad results on your psyche and behaviour.’
They tried that on me, when I was a kid, that “No reading even though you did all your work and it’s clearly all correct” bullshit. Then I started throwing things (tantrums, pencils, textbooks) and they learned to just let me read because it wasn’t disruptive and had less chance of somebody getting hurt. Not that I could do much damage in the first place, it was just too much of a hassle to calm me back down from my spergouts.
Stuff like that is where it was super convenient that I love to draw. I basically never had to worry about being bored in class. Kept my hands busy too which also helped me focus when I needed to listen to the teacher. And made it kind of ironic when a teacher would tell me to “stop doodling and pay attention.” They were basically ensuring I could NOT pay attention.
I also sometimes kept a tiny piece of modeling clay in my pocket. It was a great “fidget” (long before actual “fidget toys” existed) because it was so easy to hide and kept my hands busy without requiring me to actually look at it. I’d just keep my hands under my desk and try to shape it into simple things (a sphere, a cube, a velociraptor claw like the one Alan Grant was always fiddling with in Jurassic Park, etc).
I feel like I’d agree but for completely different reasons.
She also may be projecting. I’m getting vibes from her and her husband that they’ve peaked prospect-wise some time ago and this could be partially existential dread-related…
now remembering a questionable Wayfarer submission
Awe great, now I need a drink 😑
get two, one yummy one to enjoy yourself ,and another full of paint to splash on her clothes lol
me, after reading any pages where Linda is tagged
Bruh
Or rather
Muh
Now, does she mean dating or does she mean in his major
I’m thinking she means the everything about Walky that Linda doesn’t have a hand in. Dating, his major, his personality…
Dude, we’re talking about Linda, she’s honestly never happy with anything.
All the world has to do is just bend to her every whim, and she’ll be happy. What’s so difficult about that? Is it really so much to ask, when she’s right anyway?
/s
She’s getting piss-drunk because her children dared be nice to her.
She has fucking issues.
well, she was happy about Danny for a minute
Yes
he’s never rly brought it up from what i can remember, but who knows, maybe the reason walky did ‘well’ in school (by public school standards lol) and was smart “Did you think i was stupid?” “you threw a toy at my head”, was that he had a consistent schedule and either extra tutoring or the mom making sure he actually studied/at least finished homework or he was one of those kids that ‘coasted by’ as long as he did well on tests but i’d imagine at this point lucy would step in and say that they study properly together instead of doing datey/lovey dovey stuff
I definitely think he was able to coast by, especially since he was in public school. It’s funny, the older I get the more I realize I do share a lot with Walky. I’m sure the reason he went undiagnosed for his ADHD is the same reason I was, which was that we were in public school and were able to pay enough attention/do well enough to get good grades. Public school doesn’t have high standards honestly, they seem to be the bare minimum when it comes to schooling, and at least during the time I was in school, being curious about a student being neurotypical or not was only when they had bad grades. I didn’t have as hard an adjustment as Walky did, but there WAS a big adjustment to go from never needing to study to actually needing to study college material.
Yeah, I had similar experiences at a UK state school (“public school” means something different and completely non-intuitive here…) which recognised “Daibhid has issues interacting with other kids in the playground” was a problem, but solved this problem by keeping me indoors during breaks, rather than asking why I had issues. When my grades were up, they didn’t care beyond that; when they weren’t, I was just being lazy because I’d shown I could get good grades. Then they washed my hands of me and suggested I’d be better off at a special school.
This was better, but it was run by hippies who “didn’t believe in labels”, so I still didn’t actually get diagnosed with anything.
No disrespect to hippies or they hippie-adjacent intended. Or even to the school, which was mostly fine and did its best.
I would suggest that both schools were doing what they’re actually paid to do. All over our societies, we ought to take a hard look at what we are actually paying people to do.
hm i’m curious what you mean by that
“Babysitting” rather than “Educating” is what comes to mind
I was going to launch into a long analysis for you, but after a bit of thought I decided that Puppeteer Nessus’ explanation is about the same and much more succinct.
Being able to coast through high school getting good grades without much effort then having problems in college as you get to harder material isn’t really a huge stretch. I lost some points by not liking the busy work assigned us, especially in middle school, but mostly you can do the assigned homework, listen in class and still not really study.
Honestly, it didn’t really hit me in college until late in the program and even them only really in my major, but that derailed me pretty badly.
I don’t really know what public school could have done better, unless you go to the level of lots of individualized one on one work with each student.
Yes.
Tune in tomorrow for the answers to this and other questions.
Yes.
“Turns out I’m not great at putting my mind to things.”
adhd mood
“except for comedy”
Ugh. As someone who wasn’t diagnosed with ADHD until her mid-thirties, I both understand and HATE this message: “You’re great at anything you put your mind to…”
With the unspoken completion…
“…so if you’re not being great, you aren’t really trying.”
So I spent most of my life “trying myself to death’s door,” because the expectation around me seemed to be – If you aren’t successful OR haven’t worked yourself into the hospital yet, you haven’t really tried hard enough.”
It nearly ruined me.
Ugh.
I repeat, Linda. Ugh.
Yup. This. Exactly this. Up to and including the multiple chronic illnesses, literal hospital visits, and being wheeled out of work on an ambulance stretcher because I was fucking terrified of not going and proving I couldn’t work.
Oh no. I am so sorry.
Are you me? I literally lost my job last June after being ambulanced to the ER when I started vomiting then passed out at work.
Leadership was super nice about it all……..at first.
Three months later, I was let go.
“Not a good culture fit.”
Apparently I was “trying too hard.”
…
I mean, not to belittle or question your specific experience, but not putting his mind to it, or not working hard enough does actually apply to Walky’s situation. He basically tried to just coast through things like he always had, which to be fair has to be on some level on his parents to a degree.
I think I understand your intent.
But I wonder if you might be conflating “trying” with “being successful.”
We actually see MULTIPLE times Walky TRIED to study.
He’d sit there, with the book. He TRIED.
But he did NOT know how to study SUCCESSFULLY.
Probably because with his ADHD, whatever methods other people found successful didn’t really WORK for him. And if he’s never worked with someone who knows what WORKS for someone with ADHD, he’s probably going to get the sense that NOTHING works for him.
So if your experience is that whether you try or not, you either fail or succeed…but your success seems to have zero relationship to your effort…the “logical” conclusion is that continuing to try is a “waste of time.”
I can’t tell you how many students I worked with who had just completely given up at school, because they’d TRY studying for HOURS…then fail the test (because the study methods they’d been taught didn’t work for them), and when their outcome wasn’t success, the teacher would say “I can tell you didn’t even try. You didn’t even study.”
Why on earth would you keep putting yourself out there, making the effort, then being told you hadn’t? If you’re going to lose anyway, why lose at the cost of a lot of time/effort?
I started working with these ADHD kids, teaching them the methods that had WORKED for me (taught to me by my undiagnosed ADHD parents)…and suddenly, their grades started rising! They started passing tests! And…they were EXCITED! They started using those methods themselves, they started TRYING again, because finally trying was linked to success!
But if your trying doesn’t lead to success…yeah, at some point you quit trying and just coast or give up.
Oh yeah…realizing all my learning/studying methods worked gangbusters for my ADHD students? A major part of eventually getting diagnosed with ADHD myself.
If you don’t mind sharing further, I would be very interested to learn what these study methods are that work for ADHD kids, because I have ADHD and never got much of anything out of studying. I’m really good at retaining info from lectures, and when I can make myself read a textbook I’m great at retaining that too, but textbooks are so dry that they can’t hold my attention for any length of time unless I’m really invested in the specific material being covered, which isn’t often. I certainly can’t make myself focus on things like homework, especially when it’s repetitive busy work covering material I understood when the teacher explained it, like math. Also writing papers is a huge struggle for me, or at least starting them, usually once I start writing I get a flow going and can bang it out relatively quickly, but starting that flow is harder than starting my old lawnmower was.
How To ADHD on YouTube has a very comprehensive and effective collection of strategies for working with having an ADHD brain as well as explaining why some things work better than others.
To summarise what works for me is taking into consideration that ADHD brains have an interest-based nervous system whereas non ADHD people have an importance-based nervous system. We are more motivated by novelty, competition, interest and urgency.
Specific examples: Lean into material that you’re invested in and focus on what is interesting. I weave my special interests into assignments, and get the best grades on those. I will also substitute readings for writers that I vibe with better. Once I managed to integrate live action roleplay of the apocalypse into a presentation, and another time I used zines.
Switch up how you study or where. Oddly, I find it easier to read boring material if I’m in a bar or music venue. I also enjoy studying in dog parks. Industrial music is also great for me to read to, since it’s musically interesting but has limited vocals. Using alternating highlighters is also helpful for breaking up info.
Having a body double can help a lot with focusing on dull info, and if it’s someone who understands what you’re learning you can use the Pomodoro method to study and discuss what you just read with them during rest periods. I also involve art in my study, like
Give yourself an earlier due date, or have someone (a friend or tutor) set a date for you to submit a draft by. Helps build urgency.
Starting is always the hardest part. I have a ridiculous, borderline compulsive way to do assignments, but find free writing what you know is a good way to get the juices flowing, and always start with the intro and conclusion.
I’ve got like a billion tips and strategies I could talk about. I’ve been at uni for a decade.
I want to reinforce this point. Even neurotypical kids will run into this if they haven’t had to TRY to study before. A lot of kids hit that point in college. Or they were very managed all their lives and don’t do well with the lack of structure, and have to TRY to set aside the time for study. I can’t speak as to Walky’s reasons as I am, to the best of my knowledge, neurotypical and I’ve always been pretty good at retaining school information, but I think it’s important to know that, yeah, studying is a skill and not everyone has it, or has it by a certain age, or past a certain point.
And that some people just pick up that skill by exposure, but others of us have to be taught.
You rang? I’m just glad it only took me 2-3 years of barely passing college after straight-As in high school to learn how to actually study.
I got lucky and figured it out in high school but my mom is a huge believer in alternative medicines, so I had tried a ton of different things through out high school before giving up on getting medicine. In college a few years in, I finally was able to get the amphetamines I needed, after the first two medicines didn’t work. All it cost was nearly failing out and wasting numerous semesters redoing classes.
…wish I knew you when I was in university. Maybe I wouldn’t have dropped out. I did finish community College, but I always mourn the loss of my astrophysics degree 🤷
Please, would you share or reference methods that you used?
I think maybe for Walky it ended up being a bit of both. Up until college he’d been able just coast on his innate ability but runs into the wall in college. His initial bad habits got him behind and when he tried to study to try and catch up ran into the exact kind of problems you’re talking about, with little experience dealing with them.
So while I can see how it could be seen as being unfair because of the difficulty studying, I can’t help but feel it applies far more to the fact that he didn’t take the class seriously at all until he couldn’t push off the looming realization that he was going to fail it.
Pretty much anybody who excels in high school.
Just about everybody I knew who did as well as I did in school pretty much realized the first time they flunk a class that “Hey, you’re in the big leagues now, I guess you’re gonna have to do that studying thing that everybody else does.“
Kind of like getting a baseball bat to the head.
Right but the thing is. (NOTE: WHAT FOLLOWS IS ONLY MY OWN EXPERIENCE WITH ADHD)
… That’s how ADHD *works*. It’s–it’s very badly misnamed. It should, honestly, be called “Executive Function Disorder”, because the part of my brain that unconciously ranks tasks and starts tasks *doesn’t work right*. Everything gets set to “Task priority 1”: Ranking them takes actual mental effort.
This includes tasks like “eating.”
Also, we don’t get a dopamine hit for completing a task. Apparently people without ADHD do?
I’m also very fortunate: I was (CORRECTLY) diagnosed as a child. That *did* lead to my mom getting diagnosed once she started reading “You mean I’m not Lazy, Stupid, or Crazy?”, and the slow revelation that not only do I, my younger brother, and mother have it, but so does *every single member of my mother’s immediate family.*
(And I’m one of the people that Strattera seems to work well for. I was even part of the drug study, actually.)
Yes, there is pleasure in completing a task, but I have to ask myself for it. When I’ve finished yard work for the day, after I clean up the mess and put the tools away, I make myself go back and survey what I’ve done. The work is no fun for me, but seeing the modest result is mildly rewarding.
Dunno if that would work for you, but it works for me.
Wait. *Thats* why neurotypical people can just… do things? They get that dopamine fix of anticipation and reward for things that *they* assign rather than interests that are assigned *to* them?? MAN I wish I could do that. That feels like a superpower!
That is also why NDRIs like Wellbutrin are used off lable for ADHD as an alternative to stimulants
An auDHDer who has also suffered from that “not trying hard enough” bullshit, I think society would be that much better if people realized that seeing success is privilege.
We ALL work hard, but very few actually get to see that hard work succeed.
So true, NG!
THIS! I was one of the lucky ones who was mostly able to coast through college too (grad school is where the ouch hit) and I saw tons of very smart friends in college trying harder than me without getting the grades I got.
Then, in grad school, when I suddenly COULDN’T write the papers the night, or even the week, before they were due, then I had to work harder than my classmates trying to figure out how to learn new study habits and project timelines and how to make my adhd (undiagnosed of course) activate hyperfocus mode earlier and for longer. I managed to do okay through my masters, but the PhD went downhill FAST. The abusive faculty then made that 10000000000 times worse, but that’s a different problem.
This was me.
My parents helped me learn enough ADHD-friendly study techniques, I could commit concepts to memory pretty well (it was still a lot of work, but at least I’d learned things that actually WORKED for me).
But I was diagnosed during grad school, when suddenly I couldn’t just cram two final papers in the same night. It was miserable.
Thankfully, I had an incredibly gracious program director/professor who also had undiagnosed ADHD (he was just old enough by the time he realized it, he was all-but retired, so he didn’t seek out an official diagnosis). He helped me get through the program and supported me as I started the diagnosis process myself.
I haven’t started a doctorate, and I’m really worried I would NOT make it. I only barely started completing papers in less than 2-3 contiguous days by my last course. Even mid-program, I was still cranking out 40-60 pages of final exam paper in 3 days. But it made me so miserable, it almost torpedoed my marriage.
I’m AuDHD and only found out five years ago. I’ve been at uni for a decade and never finished a degree. I went from psych/criminology double and had a breakdown, switched to arts and finally found social work, which combines my interest in people and society, and is incredibly values based and social justicey. Because it’s social work and the teachers are used to working with people from shitty backgrounds they were especially kind to me.
Ive wanted to quit so many times because I couldn’t see how I could “succeed”. I struggled with finding balance between perfectionism and burn out and there were never any good examples of practitioners with my kind of brain. I eventually found small groups and advocates online and began intentionally focusing on neurodivergent affirming practice, and now I’m a representative with the disability collective and I write/talk about the structural issues in education and solutions to improve access for disabled social workers.
I expect to graduate next year, but Ive had to take breaks every other semester because of how badly my mental health and general wellbeing gets. I expend SO much effort studying, starting a month before classes start just to fall behind by mid-sem.
Thirties ouch I was sort of lucky I found out in my twenties while my parents figured I was but the US public school system isn’t good at identifying ADHD or autism in students or at least my school wasn’t like Walky I was a good student, so I couldn’t possibly have learning disability. And my meltdowns were just me being disruptive.
There’s also a layer of “You’re great at everything you’ve put your mind to *so far*.” If you never struggle for the first thirteen years of your education, then you don’t know how to react when you’re *not* instantly good at something.
Even though I don’t have ADHD or something similar, I can totally relate. I grew up for lack of a better term “over trying” at everything. Destroying myself mentally whenever I failed because “I just wasn’t trying hard enough”. It wasn’t until now around my late thirties that I finally realized I was in a very literal way that was affecting my physical health, trying myself to death. It wasn’t until my personal trainer told me “why are you overworking yourself like this? Just who are you trying to impress? Who do you need to prove yourself to and will they appreciate it?” that I realized what I was doing.
It wasn’t worth it. My family was great at criticizing every single aspect of my life and making sure I remembered each and every failure. Every single “You just didn’t put enough effort into it.” But when I got ill they weren’t at the doctors with me. I was at the gym (doctor’s orders) by myself and they still criticized me for not having results immediately. I took my trainer’s advice. Fuck them. I’m not out to impress anyone at anything. I’m sorry it took this long to realize it, and it’s actually done wonders for my health, and even overall attitude. I’m out to impress myself now.
As for the comic itself, I feel like everyone has a moment where you somehow have to make a realization or choice that somehow defines your character and serves as a transition into adulthood or a first “adult choice”. I think Walky’s gonna have one of those VERY soon.
I just want to say: Go you!
I hope to one day get to the same mental place are you are – out to impress myself.
Still working on it.
So glad for you that you’re achieving it! You’re awesome!
Another AuDHDer here. I’m about 20 years ahead of you, and none of this neurodivergent stuff was a thing in my childhood, so I’m sorting it out for myself literally this year, rounding out the many painful lessons I’ve had to learn throughout my life.
I agree that the whole “if you tried hard enough” doesn’t even take into account how much *harder* ND brains have to work to accomplish things, and the feelings of failure when one can’t magically get your brain to do what you want them to. As a teen and young adult, I was pretty good at the things I was good at – lol- and limping along or outright failing at things that did not interest me. Even things I was “good at” and desperately wanted to do were often beyond me for reasons I did not understand, NOT for lack of trying. Jay-sus. I’ve eventually managed to accomplish many things in life, but not because of “trying hard enough.” *old lady sputtering*
TLDR: Walky doesn’t needs this hostile bullshit.
I’m in this comment and I don’t like it.
Telling someone with ADHD they “just have to try harder” is like telling a short person they can reach something if they “just get taller”.
I went in to see if my husband (who is 1.5 feet taller than me) was awake and if he’d be taking the 5 year old to a birthday party today or if I would be. He semi-woke up and flailed because he thought I was leaning over him and jabbed me hard in the septum then blamed me for leaning over him. I. Was. Standing. Upright. I was not Joyce-waking him!
Tall people being judgey towards short people for being short are the worst.I concluded he was asleep and I’d be on party duty.In fairness, he does change all lightbulbs…
Linda laying down some truth bombs and not falling for Walkys tiresome act
I tried to put my mind to defirential calculus and advanced algebra but it didn’t take until I started taking concerta and extra time on tests.
I couldn’t handle math until I did a year of carpentry and construction.
It’s a matter of remembering how to quiet one’s thoughts.
It became meditative, after a while. Following rules. Figuring it out.
Until I passed my mandatory math requirement and promptly forgot everything again! x-D
I can remember how it used to feel to know those things. But I don’t remember what I knew or how to use it anymore.
Fleeting skill. Slips through fingers.
*For me, anyway. Everything I say is purely personal and speaks only to my own subjective experience!
“The worst person you know just made a good point”
(also accidentally flagged if any mod(s) are reading this, sorry!)
academic stuff aside it would be good if he did have a creative outlet and made something amazing. i mean, even carla’s pie throwing machine or so i imagine he’d do to get a kick out of/troll ppl with lol
Also, irl, Walky would be pissing me off big time here.
I’ve got no issues with people who don’t like sports or whatever but to deliberately be a dick about something because people are into it and your not is not funny, it’s just sad
He’s a pathetic little tosspot and hopefully he gets some sense knocked into him (figuratively or literally) soon
He Charles and Lucy are all just having fun doing it, because pretending not to know how sports work is a fun thing to do. Maybe you should learn to get a better hold on your anger
How absolutely dare these teenagers have fun while they watch a game. Unconscionable and malicious.
He’s clearly not into it (which is fine, not everyone likes sports) but he’s being deliberately ignorent to provoke some sort (or any really) reaction
Why do sports nerds get SO mad when standard nerds do to them what they’ve been doing to the standard nerds their entire lives?
You do realise it’s possible to be both a standard nerd and a sports nerd all at the same time, its not one or the other
Yes we’re all aware of that vanishingly tiny minority that every sports nerd claims to be part of whenever they get called on that, like but, like “Good Cops” that don’t arrest bad cops… #YesAllSportsNerds
In that case please let me know what interests are nerd interests and which aren’t because, heaven forbid, I claim to be something I’m not
I feel like that Linda is totally sidestepping that he *was* flunking and is no longer because he started committing to it so she can lash out at him.
In Linda’s world, past missteps are ammunition to be used against you in perpetuity.
While, it’s hard to ever defend her, he really never suffered any consequences for that, Amber fixed it for him and there were no repercussions to him not taking college seriously to the first half of the semester.
What consequences should he have faced? I might say the resolution didn’t really get enough focus, but we did see some stuff about him getting functional at studying and then going to take the midterm after the kidnapping.
Amber’s grade hacking more boosted his confidence than anything. He got back on track and passed the class himself.
And again, it’s not really “him not taking college seriously”, but him dealing with undiagnosed ADHD.
God, you’re fucking terrible.
okay but to her one of the “mistakes” is dating Lucy because she’s black
if youre agreeing with linda here i think thats a good sign you need to re examine yourself lmao
I’m cutting off the first thing I want to say to you because I know logically I shouldn’t come in with that hostile energy and it will probably get me in trouble. But just, read the thread above you, ffs. Saying shit like that splashes on like half the readers here
The again you’re also the one who was also absolutely slobbering the cop boot the other day so I kinda doubt anyone would hold it against me too much
And the one bragging about being in way more fights than anyone else here, as if that’s meant to be impressive. 💅 A very violent-minded person, really.
Could you link to or copy and paste my “bragging” as that doesn’t sound like me
Do it yourself, I’m not your damn maid.
Walky acts like does to cause a reaction, this is my reaction
Your reaction is shitty
That’s your reaction which is fair enough
Walky isn’t real. If he’s trying to get a reaction, you’re not his audience. Seek professional help, this is extremely unhealthy behavior.
Just say you don’t understand ADHD and move on.
In no part of this is Linda “dropping a truth bomb” as you put it. Christ.
linda shut the fuuuuck uuuuuuup
Walky creepily looks like Asher in panel 3 and Willis is doing it on purpose.
he’s not in panel three though
That’s why it’s creepy.
Can confirm. Linda looking like Asher in panel 3 is creepy.
This made me crack up. Thank you.
it’s the ‘smug eyes’ lol
I’m amazed she *let* Walky learn the rules of basketball.
Probably only after she was sure he’d never hit 5’9″.
well he was allowed to play around more than sal a little even if they also were dragged to acting auditions.
tho i mean at this point it’d be harder not to know the rules of basketball, if not him having a masculinity complex about “Of course I’d att least know how to play even if i’m not good at it” i mean they are all going to the game together so i assume she enjoys it herself to a bit ,unless it was the dad’s choice this time
I assume Linda made sure he knew the rules because of the social aspect of networking with people at games.
Not as questionable as a big choice Charles made twenty-something years ago.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Linda may have a point. Walky made the questionable choice NOT to put his mind to certain courses, because he didn’t think he needed to, and then when his grades started slipping, chose not to address the issue right away, hence his current situation.
Eh, I’ve been where Walky was. If you breeze through and don’t know how to study, you are left panicking. It’s not easy picking up a skill that can take years to develop
It is possible to say something correct and still be wrong, and I feel like that’s where this is going.
Sure, but you just KNOW the “questionable choice” he made was dating a Black girl.
Panel 5 is how she’s wrong. I’m pretty sure he was a goofball in high school too. He was good at things without putting his mind to them, high school provided the structure. His grades got better after AG showed him a way to do structure for himself, and apparently it worked for the rest of the semester.
He did make questionable choices, but not all the ones she’s thinking of. Hiding from his failing math grades was a bad choice, this approach to life contributed to his failing, making a joke out of everything is why he didn’t get anything out of tutoring from Jason. But Linda’s probably also comparing Dorothy to Lucy and Amber, and he was dating her when he was failing.
And her response is, as always, to give her kids tough love until it fixes the problem, which it doesn’t. And he’s not flunking anymore.
Linda just wants to be mad at him rather than ask questions, because that’s her parenting style. She was 100% okay with him being a goofball up until yesterday, but now that she found out he’s not perfect she’s bitter and cold to him. He is now where Sal was and I’m betting anything this storyline ends with him either putting his foot down or telling Sal he didn’t realize how hard it was for her
Yep and she refuses to register any reason for failure that implies she overlooked his weak points growing up. like Sal with Danny, Walkys sucess all because of her good parenting but once he messes up its all his own fault. Her self narrative is that he was so perfect before he left her care and started making mistakes.
I was less harsh on the Walkerton parents at first but watching her completely flip purely based on his grades dipping and Danny dating Sal has made me really detest Linda. She’s the worst kind of tiger mom; taking all of the credit and simply blindly refusing to accept that she might bear responsibility of the way her kids treat her. Hopefully both of her kids getting sick of her shit at the same time starts to at least make her husband doubt things more directly. She’s not going to learn otherwise.
We are WAY beyond “the most terrible person oyu know just made a great point”.
The “questionable choice” to continue doing what had worked for him throughout his school life so far. Why wouldn’t he?
Then when that blew up on him, he had a few weeks of panicked flailing around and then managed to sort himself out with help from his friends (particularly Amber.)
Thus his current situation, which is his mom tearing him down about a crisis he has already overcome.
yooo THERE’s my mom. supportive until you don’t do well, at which point you “are smart enough to do well, so you must not be trying.”
ppl always joke about ‘daddy issues’ but from what i’ve seen, fiction and real life ‘mommy’ issues are basically equally bad if not worse
Being your son wasn’t a choice, Linda.
facts
also GOTTEM because wow is Linda about to get even worse because she’s boozing up?
I don’t know how many beers she’s had but it already seems like she has had too much even when she hasn’t had any.
I think we’re seeing where the kids get their tolerance from.
You didn’t have to kill her.
Not that anyone is complaining.
I figured you guys would be okay with it.
Linda has alcohol in her system.
Folks?
We are about to see the definition of ‘shit hitting the fan’.
I’ve been dreading this happening since Charles said she went to look for a beer five or so strips ago.
maybe she’s nicer when she’s intoxicated
I would not take anything short of 50:1 against because otherwise it’s not worth the nickel
you know, that nickel
(I’m pretty sure she’s gonna be the anti-Walkyverse Mike and be even worse when drunk)
Linda doesn’t seem like that person she seems like a person who becomes “brutally honest” with way more emphasis placed on the brutal part.
given her attitude/personality, unless she’s had more off screen i can’t imagine her being a lightweight after one drink
https://youtu.be/fwx0mswHhqg?feature=shared
i mean, unless it changes after having kids. “after we had kids one sip of wine is all it takes’
I mean, she’s not wrong, but wow, she’s also so very, very, very wrong. Some people wait a whole lifetime to be so wrong and right at the same time. Sometimes they have to hold political office! So, good job, Linda.
There are ways of being right and presenting it badly, awfully, even disastrously. Some people just don’t have the knack for encouraging others, and have never learned the technique.
She really doesn’t understand the importance of the “were” in that sentence, does she? He WAS failing. He no longer is. Cut the fucking attitude, Linda.
This is going to turn ugly quickly.
who knows maybe if an uglier side comes off charles might reconsider his marriage. some older ppl are kinda stubborn and stick around using kids as an excuse but joyce’s dad got a divorce and he looked fairly older than charles
I’m not holding my breath on Charles having a change of heart today, the way he placed himself as far away from his wife and son without being too obvious tells me he’s preparing to weather another Linda verbal storm not leave storm county.
Or he might consider fixing his marriage rather than junking it. Hard, painful work that might not succeed, yes. Depends on what it’s worth to him. On what a lot of things are worth to him.
We all make choices in life, Miles.
Walky: “Nah. Imma do my own thing.”
Ah, Jaysus…
Aaaah, memories.
Ugh, L i n d a
Linda just seems miserable, just in an absolute Linda mood.
Besides Linda being awful I always get annoyed with the term sportsball
Look, I get that ‘Sportsball’ is often used humorously, but to me, it sounds pretty condescending. I’m a fan of anime, Star Trek, Star Wars, comic books, musicals, and tabletop RPGs like D&D. But guess what? I also really enjoy traditional sports like football and basketball. Using the term ‘Sportsball’ seems to trivialize the complexity and skill involved in these sports. I’m well-versed in the rules for both tabletop RPGs and sports like American football, so why diminish either by using dismissive language? Let’s give each hobby the respect it deserves, shall we?”
We’re not talking about the sportsball, we’re talking about the sportsbol.
Not actually a term.
but I should add a caveat. When sports commentators use the term ‘Sportsball,’ I actually don’t mind. They’re coming from a place of appreciation for sports, so in that context, it’s more of an inside joke among fans. It doesn’t carry the same condescending weight because the intent behind using the term is different. So for me, it really boils down to the respect and understanding one has for the sport they’re talking about.”
Eh, it’s fine as shorthand. There’s a lot of sports with two teams and a ball –and as someone who’s always been more of a fan of the “be the fastest at this” or “poke holes in something” sort of sports they all sort of blend together
It’s not anymore dismissive than calling something a roguelike
I responded with said caveat above but should also include sports fans, also I’m not one of those people who gets bent out of shape if you don’t know 3 members or 2 or even one a team member a fan is fan. I run in some geeky circles and the term sportsball is used alot in a condescending manner.
So there’s a way of using the term that is offensive. I get that.
I took Lucy’s use of the word to mean that she’s personally uninterested in sports and hasn’t learned anything about them that requires effort, but wants to be accepting of others’ enthusiasm and join in the social aspect of watching a game together.
I should note that this is the first time I’ve seen or heard that particular term.
Then say Basketball or the team name(Hoosiers) that doesn’t require much or any effort also given Walky’s purposesful use of the wrong sport I m pretty sure they’re both being condsending.
At least based on the usage of the term “Sportsball” in my family, it’s less condescending toward the game(s), and more a joke at the expense of the commentators.
My husband was a sports journalist, played at least 5 different team sports, including going to junior adult leagues in one (honestly, I’m not the sports person, so I don’t know the official terms), and he continues to follow sports at a level more akin to a professional sports commentator than any regular fan.
And yet, when he and my brother go to play Switch sports, they laughingly call it their “Sportsball” time, because their personal attitude toward the sports at that time is casual (and because my brother knows little about sports beyond Wi/Switch sports games). It’s referring to their simplistic attitude toward the sports, not that the sports themselves are simple.
Kinda like Walky is joking about fumbles, even though he knows that’s not a basketball thing.
And we’re huge Trekkies, board gamers, DND/tabletop-ers, etc.
See I’m okay with that
I think he’s being self-deprecating.
she*
Oh, you mean Lucy. It took me a second.
Because turnabout is fair play.
It’s pushback against a lifetime of condescension to people who don’t like Sportsbal. It’s also convenient when forming an ingroup to have a demonized out group.
I get the idea of pushback, but using ‘Sportsball’ just perpetuates a cycle of condescension. Instead of demonizing each other’s interests, why not celebrate the diversity of what we all enjoy?
I see Lucy still sucks, refusing to even learn the team’s name. I’m not on Linda’s side, I just hate Lucy for her whole personality.
she’s probably just irritated about their last dinner, although she also might not have seen as much ‘snarkiness’ before, walky may not be completely filtered but i know some ppl def act way diff around friends they’re comfortable with versus parents
tho i don’t think lucy said it in a mocking/satirical way or so, but even tho it’s more acceptable these days to the point where it’s like “being nerdy and a gamer is the mainstream/popular now” plenty of ppl grew up being mocked for that kinda stuff so ‘sportsball’ is pretty tame
“I know it may seem like a small issue, but it actually does bother me. Sports have been a lifelong passion for me, just as much as my geek hobbies. They’re also a way for me to bond with family members who don’t share my other interests, like my brothers-in-law. What irks me about the term ‘Sportsball’ is that it creates this unnecessary sense of superiority, as if enjoying sports is somehow less valid or intellectual. I’ve never felt the need to diminish someone else’s hobbies, so it’s frustrating when mine aren’t given the same level of respect.
Not really? It more just has a sense of “idk shit about sports but I know there’s a ball so whoo go that thing I think”. It feels more like cluelessness on the users part than condescension
You can say the name of the sport or the team which Lucy knows both.
Eh? It just seems like a harmless joke to me. Like i don’t doubt you’ve met several 1000 IQ reddit type geeks who like to pretend they’re better than sports fans because they remind them of the jocks that bullied them in school. But it’s not like that’s the only context where the joke gets used. “Yay sportsball” is just a fun thing to say
It’s been 57 years, and I still get upset by my one experience with basketball. I was a freshman at Marshall U., where “gym” was still a required course. I was in a basketball game, hovering at the edge of the court because I didn’t know what to do. The coach said, “Get in there. Get after them.” So I got after them, but now they’re getting pissed off because I’m interfering with play. I look over at the coach but he and his goon squad are laughing at me. If it were now, I’d say something (e.g., are you going to explain the rules, or are you going to laugh at me?), but I had just come down out of the violent Appalachians and was terrified of confrontation, especially with jocks. I never tried again, and to this day I refer to the game as “bouncy bouncy ball.”
I get it if someone is being condescending but in this case, I think Lucy is only using it because she doesn’t know anything about basketball.
Couldn’t she just say “Go *whatever the name of the team is*”?
(As someone who likes “nerd” stuff and some sport stuff, I do kinda agree that it’s a bit condescending. )
I used to call it “sportsball” because I thought I was clearly making fun of myself for not knowing about sports — until I learned that people can take it as belittling sports fans, instead.
I don’t want to make fun of people for liking things.
I’ve only ever heard the term used by this specific punk band from my home town (Flangipanis, the BEST and most fun band to see in Brisbane) in the song ‘Sportsball’. The band do enjoy and play sports all (softball, rugby, not sure what else) but the song is about the attitude and issues in major sports leagues. Kind of. It’s mostly just funny.
https://flangipanis.bandcamp.com/album/sportsball
linda.
usually this is what I tell to people who take things too seriously in the comments.
PLEASE. learn some whimsy. I. BEG. OF. YOU.
i mean with the way the rest of the conversation is going, walky being a goof ball is just not the reason she’s pissy about things but i imagine she still would be not satisfied if walkys grades did stay steady (even if he was a decent student pre-college in comparison it’s not as if he was some kinda honors student or so)
maybe all the ‘whimsy’ went into walkys genes lol
…it occurs to me that you’ve just hit on why one of the subplots in this chapter is Dorothy, who also takes things too seriously, in a completely different but, as she’s learning, also toxic way.
It is an ambition of mine to someday get really into a sport – and I mean REALLY into it, like, knowing every player’s name and background and statistics, just an absolute nerd for the sport – and then exclusively refer to it as “sportsball” around other people.
or better yet, flex on everyone and just /buy/own a team, and then act like that to the players like “good job handling those balls” “We’re a hockey team, we use pucks”
I feel like that point it’s just normal out-of-touch rich person behavior.
The only sport I’m into is pro wrestling so sadly no sportsball for me.
go sportsfoldingchair!
I also find this strip sad because of how we last left Sal and Linda. Here’s Linda telling Walky he’s ‘great no matter what’ (although his ‘choices’ are bad and thus he isn’t measuring up) whereas Sal cannot be great, ever. She is never enough. She only stands up to mommy’s standards when her sweet white boyfriend is around. And that… is sad. Linda is a terrible mom to both of her children.
Yep, and Sal standing up only works out favorably with Danny because her mom treats parental approval like a transaction, ” doing something I like for once? Heres my acceptance! Why are you alone? i never paid , ahem, gave approval for that! ” Walky has the equivalent of a longer line if credit but you bet Linda counting every little thing he does now because she’s getting her perfect Dr. Son one way or another.
I’m hoping Walky stands up for his sister as she did for him at Galasso’s.
Alright, Sal vouched for Lucy, not Walky. But still I hope he does it for Sal.
I’m hoping Walky takes Lucy by the hand and walks the hell out. Sal had the right idea.
If things come to a head, I’m fine with that course of action.
oh, Linda, that is absolutely not how skills and learning and intelligence actually work at all and you ought to know better
parents easily forget what school is like for them unless they’re active teachers.
Tho i wonder if walky would be snarky and like “well i WAS kidnapped by a religious wackjob and could’ve died, cut me some slack” but i imagine the pity for that would run out eventually
Linda never had any real pity for Walkys kidnapping to begin with, the minute she assessed thst her golden boy was unharmed she immediately starts lashing out at others, no real worry for how her kid is doing. The whole thing felt like a Karen angry that her merchandise got bruised.
Am I the only one who’s pretty sure the “bad choice” Linda’s not directly talking about but nonetheless stumbling against in the sauce is in fact Lucy?
Also am I the only one reading into that big red background Linda’s emotional violence level in much the same way that the nonliteral solid red backgrounds have been used to indicate emotional and physical violence levels previously in this strip?
’cause if full-screen red background means throwing punches of rage then I’m reading Linda at about 85% to go time
Definitely not the only one on the Lucy front. But I think the red bg is just the chairs because they show Lucy sitting with red behind her as well… though I guess it’s not zoomed in so that could be an artistic decision on purpose by Willis to signify anger? I dunno.
You’ll note that Walky is zoomed in on, but not given a background. Might be a significant artistic choice.
Sometimes a red background is just a red background, but Willis has used literal red lighting to echo the red flashback panels before. Most notably with red sunset light in the Sal/Amber fight.
oh!
i mean his grades were slipping way before he considered going out with lucy right?
but if it does spill out hopefully we can see if lucy would actually say something about it, or reevaluate her relationship with walky whether or not he stands up for her or not
Sure, but it’s like, “that was one bad choice, now here’s another bad choice, you’re making so many bad choices and I’m mad about it.”
Ooh, I didn’t notice the big red background. Nice catch.
I mean, IU’s colours are red (and white?) and I didn’t check but… that looks like the violent rage red to me.
And sure, it’s also seen elsewhere in the same strip, but not used like it is in those last two panels.
It’s passive aggressive rage background.
Pretty sure the seats in Indiana’s stadium are red, because that’s their team color
Yeah, I know, but there’s framing, right? Framing is intentional.
And this looks like pretty intentional framing.
Might not be. But… looks like it might be to me.
Yep, Linda is still probably seething about her least favorite just walking away from her so now she’s angry and without the “saving grace” of a white SO she’s becoming extra critical of everything her son does. I highly doubt this is the first time Walky has been goofy at a sports game, this is just the first time Linda is taking note.
I think she’s taking note because Lucy and Walky are being goofy together. She’s accidentally right that treating things like a joke is part of why he was failing.
The crimson background could mean that, but it also means you’re at IU, where the color is inescapable.
Hey, did anybody notice that they’re no longer in the top row?
Last time we saw them, Charles suggested they all go down to the good seats and hope they hadn’t filled up.
There is definitely symbolism in this case. Even though Walky and Linda are both behind the same red bleacher his background banners are white while hers are mostly red, probably to represent his overall mood being light in a happy way…in contrast to his mother.
i do like the idea of the red background as a blowout gauge =D
maybe the frame starts tilting until it’s plunging on Linda fully surrounded by a red background.
Coming here, for example.
C O M E D Y
G O L D
Part 3 (Suggestive)
A little late but I wanted to finish this. This was originally gonna be the last one but honestly I might have to keep this going. It’s funny how as this went on I got more into the dialogue than the horny.
I’m amused by the idea that Amber might actually not remember “ukulele guy’s” name even though her alt mode dated him.
Haha that is funny. I actually LEGIT forgot she dated Danny but I like the idea that Danny is so forgettable that she just forgot about that a few months after.
I’m not sure if it’s depressing or awesome to be so forgettable you can fuck somebody upside-down on a grappling hook and they still forget about you.
play to your strengths, Danny. embrace the forgetability.
He just becomes a ninja because no one will recognize his presence. He could slice someone in half in front of everyone and people would be like “Yo, how’d Tim die!?”
Hahaha excellent
In a world where there’s porn on tap, “oops all narrative” is hotter.
Yoto, gosh, your Amber is AMAZING. Spot on! Lovely.
Holy moly. If nobody else is gonna say it, I will. That sitting position is hotter than the sun, just from the potential.
I’m all about the GAMS with this one 😛
A good set of legs is impossible to argue with, and everyone can admit it.
There are so many things to love about this, but I’ll go for the viewpoint changes. I don’t know if you were just trying different angles for the challenge but it works so well. Reminded me of the car trunk scene in Out Of Sight.
Thanks for noticing! I really love the vibe of like…different angles for dialogue heavy comics/shows to keep it visually interesting. Really glad to hear that paid off.
absolutely! really great work on the angles here. just a masterclass in keeping a monologue entertaining while providing visual context and emotional cues! <3
Amber being super deadpan throughout like some kind of sex ninja is perfect
The dialogue is pretty horny too. I’d love it if you kept drawing these.
Just want y’all to know your responses give me life.
This is what happens when I’m sleepy and don’t read comments: I miss out on Yotomoe’s pre-porn setups (porn prologues? Pornlogues? We’ll workshop it).
Luckily, reading the previous two days comment sections is a super power we all share.
I really enjoy all 3 parts.
It’s low key making me jealous in a way.
I rarely enjoyed the kind of friendship with a woman where we could casually cuddle/be up on each other.
It was always romantic/sexual, which was great since that was what I wanted, but sucks when you’re not trying to date, but would still like a cuddle buddy.
That said, if this scenario stayed like this or switched to sexy timed, I would be (almost) equally satisfied.
Also, it sucks that your NSFW stuff can’t be posted there anymore.
There’s always Twitter, though I don’t think it gives you the option to put everything in one post.
I’m on the fence on where it goes from here. I’m just going off vibes but I hope to maintain that feeling of “not romantic but still a bit horny”. I gotta find a second place to post it. I would love a place where people can comment on each individual drawing cuz I love the interactions/comments.
So where can I find parts one and two? I must have missed them.
Previous comment sections from yesterday and the day before.
Thighs 🤌🤌
Been showing these to my boyfriend who’s never read any Willis comic bc I know he’d love the way you write amber. He says your perspective shots are really good
<3 <3 <3
Tell him that means the world to me
For instance: You have chosen not to “accidentally” push Linda into traffic.
She’s terrible, but I’d like to think she’s not wrong about this. Walky’s probably got lots of potential to excel at whatever he wanted, but he’s too much a walking avatar of procrastination
Whether she’s accidentally right taken literally or not, she obviously means Lucy.
Oh she’s completely in the right, but it’s entirely by accident. More specifically, if forced to elaborate past a couple basic sentences, she would *stop* being right pretty quickly, is what I imagine.
“Ceaseless Procrastinator, I would ask you to turn your gaze into this wretched thing but we both know you’re not gonna do that.”
Not unless he can turn his focus on and off like a hose. Which he cannot.
My parents said stuff like this too. They literally thought that, by invalidating my difficulties and blaming me for them, that they were being encouraging.
Spoiler: it was not encouraging. Heck, it wasn’t even true. (I was gifted but with undiagnosed ADHD and an undiagnosed learning disability that impacted math. But even if I’d been gifted-and-NT, sometimes things are hard for people.)
Anyway I wonder if I’ll ever meet this Leorale who is living up to their potential. They sound pretty fancy. And very, very mythical.
Yeah. My life is populated with alternate universes made up of “what if” and “if only” and “the road not taken”. When I think about that version of Laura who actually “lived up to potential,” it sounds EXHAUSTING. I feel more like the repetition in that novel “Brave New World”: “I’m really awfully glad that I’m a Beta.”
We do so much, already. It’s important to be proud if what we do, and what we do have, and what we do bring into the world.
Like the old mantra goes:
“I have enough.
I am enough.
I do enough.”
Yeah, well, it’s the “whatever he wants” part of that that’s the sticking point.
It’s the same for my family. We’re all really good at doing really well at whatever we want – but if we don’t want to do it? Oh, wow, no, it’s such a slog.
That’s the ADHD and the autism tango.
Hasn’t he been doing better since he faced up to not being naturally gifted at everything and started studying? Obviously it was painful at first, but neurodivergent or not it’s going to take some time to build up his concentration. I think Walky’s interpretation is closer to the truth.
I’m kind of missing the alt-text. “No superb owl?” Huh? Clue? Bob? I’m clueless.
Would appreciate any guidance.
Hey, NG, I tried making omurice this morning! I followed your recipe! It was DEEEE-VINE! Thank you for introducing me!
SuperbOwl
AH! Thank you!
https://www.reddit.com/r/Superbowl/ it’s a whoel subreddit concept too lol
Or to be “Explain The Meme” guy: The NFL has a trademark on the phrase “Super Bowl” and has a rep for being hyper-litigious in defense of same (“Disney issuing C&D orders to day care centers with Micky and Donald painted on their exteriors” litigious).
So “alternative phrases” have emerged to refer to “The Big Game”, “Superb Owl” and “Soup Or Bowl” being among the most popular/sarcastic.
Much obliged! I’m always up for a good meme explaining!
Awe no problem Laura, I’m glad! 😋🍳
“Fuck You, Linda” incoming…
Linda, no. Where’s my spray bottle I use on Boomers?
Karen’ough™
(Linda’s not a boomer tho. X gen more like)
Careful with that spray bottle. Some of us boomers are still petty tough.
*pretty tough*
walky would never, unless he was able to hop on sal’s motorcycle to drive off as many miles away within the next ten seconds lol
What if Linda suddenly developed a beer allergy and oxygen no reach lung?
I hope we’ve cut away to this background story, so the comic’s main story can skip ahead to Carla picking out a dress.
…aaaaaaaaaaaand here it comes.
Taking bets as to
whomwhat Bad Choice #1 is gonna be.No bet, no bet.
Good thing no one asked you, Linda. :[
If I had a nickel for every mom in this comic who dismisses their adult college-going child’s observations about their own life in favor of a half-baked stew of clouded memories and unrealistic expectations, I’d have more nickels than Mike.
Nooo, please put me back to Carla’s moment! I wanna stay there, where shes struggling with being with Charlie!
Everything is more sweet than Walky’s family.
Just imagining for a second, after this, Mike decided that he was going to try to be a better person and encourage Walky to get diagnosed. a sincere heart to heart, the day after Dina and Sarah’s birthday party.
I feel like Linda is both drinking and already hung over. The bluntness, her expression, her slumped body language- she’s not feeling good at all. I think she’s walking on a wire; on one side is the chance to change her behavior and apologize, and on the other side is the chance to take out her frustration on those around her. I genuinely don’t know where she’s gonna fall.
I’m guessing not drunk but angry and disapproving. Remember how Sal having a white guy by her side made Linda act like her thoughts had value for once? Were seeing the reverse here with Walky and Lucy. Everything Walky does now is worthy of scrutiny no matter how small and petty.
She seems well acquainted with the misery and bitterness that frequently comes with a hangover, so perhaps it’s just her default state
Yeah the problem is him not being able to put his mind to it properly.
“put his mind to it properly”
Basically, don’t be neurodivergent in a system built for the neurotypical Everyman™ 😑
Linda’s a complete write-off personality wise, but I’d at least hook up with her in a broom closet at somebody’s house party 30 years ago.
Yikes, inviting them was another good cop bad cop plot. Charles is on opposite sides of his wife and Walky, prime location to be the bystander if his wife decides to start a long critical tirade whime being the furthest away from Walky. It sucks when people turn what is supposed to be family fun into an interrogation about what you’ve accomplished, it doesn’t really help make you better or more productive and forever makes you weary iof their future invites.
*while
Oh my god, the looks Linda is giving, the expressions.
I wanted Lucy to experience “The Full Linda” but I sure as hell do not want her to experience, “The Drunk Linda.” That… that’s like pouring a case of Mentos into a vat of Pepsi Cola.
Would be funny if Linda was drunk but I fear what we’re seeing is her stone cold sober and disapproving of the very air Walky and Lucy breath.
I want to fight.
The “you can do anything you set your mind to” mantra nearly killed me. Legitimately. I was top of class in highschool. I won awards, including for being the most likely to succeed at uni. I struggled socially and just put everything into pleasing my teachers. My first try at uni, I really really tried. Had a breakdown and ended up in hospital after developing agoraphobia from increasingly severe panic attacks. I assumed it was my fault for not trying hard enough, which made me worthless. It took years to recover, to realise why I struggle so much and I still haven’t finished.
I want to FIGHT.
We have to stop treating personal failure like moral failings. That’s how you get a culture where people are so afraid of being bad at stuff they dare not try anything to begin with. (By people I mean me.) (And by we I mean Linda.)
For real. It took me until I was 26 to even start trying to do things, after decades of being made to feel like I had to be perfect at everything from the word “Go”. Now I’m a wizened and wily 30-year-old and if somebody doesn’t like me sucking at something early on, I figure they can go suck a dick and stop hovering over my shoulder. I was literally so afraid of failure that I never even bothered getting good at any of the video games I was playing 24/7. That’s a decade wasted, completely lost to burnout, and it was entirely the fault of this worthless perfection culture.
Wow, yeah, besides the hospitalization and the panic attacks (I think? I don’t know if I’ve ever been good at objectively judging the severity of the things that go on in my head), this paragraph feels eerily familiar. I’m sorry you also had to deal with this. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone else.
Like you, I was an excellent student in high school, well-liked by teachers and had some social struggles for a while–part of the reason I think I may possibly be on the autism spectrum is because I have learned with hindsight that the majority of the social skills I was able to practice and emulate in the latter half of high school were behaviors learned through study and observation in my theater and speech & debate participation, and weren’t something that came naturally to me like it seemed to with other kids. I too once genuinely believed the “do anything you set your mind to,” mantra instilled in me by well-meaning parents, only to have reality break me down into something that was only bare minimum functional for quite some time. Still not sure sometimes how I managed to *survive* college, let alone graduate.
Now I’ve developed all sorts of unhealthy habits and rarely ever leave my home for anything besides grocery shopping and going to work. I hate it and am actively trying to improve the situation, but trying to maintain a steady schedule and good physical and mental habits that can make me into something that my mind would recognize as a functional human being is a struggle for me sometimes. Even though admittedly I’m comparatively much, much better now than I was when I left college, I don’t when or even if I’ll ever be able to be as sociable or feel as normal as I did by the end of high school.
I can at least be happy my parents weren’t like Walky’s, but his struggles academically and in terms of figuring out who he is rings really true to me. People deserve to have a functioning support system and a family that will stand by them.
*”I don’t know when or even if I’ll ever be able to be…”
I don’t know how the word “know” got omitted there. Clumsy typing on my part.
I did the same thing regarding learning social skills by observation. I was fascinated with psychology and sociology (which is what led me to my current study) and basically studied/copied other people. I kept notebooks written in code to keep track. I still get along best with people younger (ie children) or much older because I find the social rules to be easier to understand.
A lot of my obvious difficulties only started as a teen/adult because I struggle with self-managing my life. I am definitely better off mentally knowing what I know now about my brain because I can adapt strategies to my strengths and needs. Plus I found a neat community of ND people who’s social styles are similar to mine.
How does one comic manage to fit so many terrible parents in?
Really, I feel like every main cast member would benefit from playing a ‘real game of ‘Marry / F*** / Kill.”
You don’t know shit, Linda.
(and huh. She really went to get a beer.)
The contrast between Walky in panel two and four is kind of heartbreaking the more I think of it. He’s only recently come into a more confident and self assured version of himself but like with Sal from earlier it is dismissed and belittled because Linda doesn’t care at all about getting to know her real children. It’s all about them fitting her imaginary image of them.
From her looks, I don’t think that’s her first one. Or her second.
Too bad this doesn’t apply to Sal, for, reasons.
Actually horrified at all the people saying Linda is right for any reason or by any metric.
You understand ADHD is a mental illness, correct? Are you going to blame a diabetic person for not being able to manage their blood sugar without insulin or even being aware they need to manage it?
Some of you are just blowing so hard on your dog whistles I’m amazed you haven’t blown them up yet, but the rest of you, goddamn stop blaming people for in-born chronic/terminal sickness.
Ikr? Like, folks here are revealing that they that they are not, “as good at a buncha stuff,” as they think are. Namely, sniffing out bullshit and empathy. They’re forgetting that hateful people tend to say some things that sound right on the the surface to cover up the the bs underneath. Let’s do a breakdown of what Linda is saying here:
“David, you know the rules to basketball.” – seems innocuous on the surface, but it’s super passive aggressive and joyless. This is how Jennifer would talk to Walky. Danger, warning, danger.
“Is this approach to life the reason you were failing you classes last semester?” – Again, passive aggressive. Also, remember that Linda has never actually asked why or what happened. She has only screamed at a restaurant, and made this snide remark. She hasn’t asked if Walky is okay, or if something happened to him. She hasn’t offered any help, support, or comfort. A empathetic person might at least wonder if trauma had played a role, or Wally’s breakups. But that would require Linda to actually know her children’s feelings.
“Nonsense. You are great at anything you put your mind to. You’ve just made some bad choices.” – This might sound like typical parent talk, but look a little closer. Walky just told Linda what his problems are, and rather than engage in conversation and learn more, Linda just shuts him down. “Nonsense.” She just flat out tells him his feeling and experience is wrong. She won’t even engage with the idea. Doesn’t even ask what stuff Wally is struggling with. If you parent this way, your child will just learn not to come to you with their problems, and not tell you anything.
Yeah to that “something happened” part. It’s not like we (and Linda) don’t know that something traumatic did happen – the kidnapping, the death of his roommate. We know the problems with grades didn’t have anything to do with that, though I wouldn’t discount the nightmare of rooming with Mike playing a role, but you’d think that would be a parent’s first thought after finding out.
I can sniff out some bullshit. Treating everything like it’s a joke is part of why he was failing. It’s not the main reason, but it’s also not unrelated. It’s a coping strategy, sure, but he was a dick to his tutor because he thought it was funnier than admitting he was having trouble concentrating and didn’t know what to do.
Having ADHD is part of the explanation why he was an ass to Jason, not a free pass. Diabetes is also not a free pass.
Looking back at the strips of Walky and Jason, what stands out to me the most is just that Walky is very adhd and Jason isn’t a very good tutor (hence Danny was able to tutor Sal better than him. Personally, I see Walky’s sense of humor as both an imitation of his parents (see Charles’s self-immolation joke from earlier, and Linda joking about banging a teacher) and as a coping mechanism for his decidedly unhappy home and high school life. We know the Walkerton house was just constant yelling and passive aggression when he was younger, and we know Jennifer disavowed him and then shoved him into lockers in high school. Being a clown can be a coping mechanism.
I said it was a coping mechanism. Doesn’t make him not a prick.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/sharpen/
For as mid a tutor Jason is, he recognized Walky’s trouble concentrating, and when he tried to get Walky to see it, Walky made fun of him.
Walky realizing he’s not as good at some stuff as he thought is a great. He still hasn’t realized that being a prick to someone because you think it’s a funny way to avoid a problem is shitty.
I think you and I see things differently. My reading of that strip is that Jason was already going to tell Walky to never come back before Walky interrupted. That Jason was already giving up on him. I look at Walky in that strip, and I see a unhelpfully panicking boy from an abusive household, with no lasting friendships (not at that time), and all the social graces of Linda and Charles (who seems to default to snarky comments, public screaming, and whispering about people within earshot). Is he a prick? Sure. Sometimes. But as reader, I feel I have some understanding and empathy for why Walky is the way that he is. And I think maybe him being a prick is the only way he’s ever learned how to deal with a problem, seeing as how his mom is Karen-prime. But Walky is less mean than Linda, and tries to do it a joke, as a goofball, while Linda plays for blood.
Anyways, all of this is to say that it’s weird to see people say Linda has a point, because she doesn’t even understand the problem and doesn’t want to. And it ignores a lot of the things we’ve learned about Walky.
nope. it does not ignore the things we’ve learned about Walky. I can sympathize and also recognize how he sabotages himself. Making fun of his tutor the whole time he was trying to help, is an example of Walky treating everything like a joke, and is part of why he was failing.
It’s weird that “it’s ok that he’s a little shit to people because he’s just joking” is an explanation on how making a joke out of everything had nothing to do with him failing.
I have an aunt who is a lot like Linda. She’s honestly a GREAT mom/babysitter for very small children, but as soon as those children get old enough to know that grown-ups are not always entirely right about everything, her “parenting” collapses into despotism and passive-aggression. All of her now-adult children spend as much time as far away from her as possible because she wants to continue to run their lives like they are toddlers.
Basically, she needs dogs, not children. She’s AMAZING with dogs because dogs never talk back or cause us to challenge our ideas or have their own ideas about how to live.
Walky has put his mind to his studies, it’s a different scenario here, and I’m pleasantly surprised he’s said he’s not as good at stuff as he thought.
I don’t know if he’s said it out loud before. Hope he knows his ADHD is something to work both around and with. I went decades without a diagnosis and it had ups and downs in the applying myself department.
I’m freindshipping Charles and Lucy.
ADHD is a real thing, but I believe Walky is just in over his head. Many things I’ve wanted to do in life I found out I just have no aptitude for. I stopped at an Associates degree because I learned what I needed to learn to make it in life without those two extra years of unnecessary classes and subjects. Walky doesn’t need a diagnosis or therapy; he just doesn’t belong in college.
Having said that, Linda is definitely an itch-bay.
Why would you say any of that?
Walky’s figured out how to work about his ADHD and actually study. His grades are fine now, though he actually has to work at them.
He’s not in over his head. There’s no reason to think he doesn’t belong in college.
When I was a kid, every once in a while I’d do well on a test or assignment in school. My reward was to be told “See? You CAN do it if you’d just try!” and I’d die a little more.
The feeling of unworthiness followed me in college and throughout life. I constantly deal with intrusive suicidal ideation, and I’m on Social Security.
Fuck. All. The Way Off, Linda.
I wonder what Linda’s parents are/were like. How was she raised that she turned into such a bitter, entitled person? Was her house so devoid of love that she’s incapable of giving it to her own children? What happened to make her such a miserable person?
Very telling how the parents are not sitting together, hm?
Not really. As the older, already matched pair they are acting as bookends to the group. Implicitly including both their son and his date in the group.
If the Walkertons sat together, the result would either be to separate their son from his date, to shove his date to the far end of the line (implicitly excluding her), or to force both parents to lean over and yell to speak to their son.
Wow, that is some pretty mature self reflection from Walky there. Too bad his mom was so dismissive of it
They are both kind of saying the same thing even if their intentions behind saying it are different. He didn’t put his mind to it because he thought he was so good that he didn’t need to.
And then he couldn’t because he’s ADHD, but he’d never needed to learn coping strategies before.
No Linda isn’t right, stfu. That’s not how undiagnosed ADHD works. Just read the fuckin thread up top under Sarah Lea
Alrighty. Time to have Linda get a beer poured on her head.
oh joy, Linda is here to ruin things.
Fanart, babies! 🎨
Carla takes her own advice. (SFW)
It was recently been pointed out that we haven’t seen Ruth in, like, 2 days (in-comic). Intolerable! So, here she is. (NSFW, technically) (this one’s for you @Taffy)
Ah. MAZE. ZING! AMAZING! WOW! 8-D
Hubba, hubba, Milu! Yowee kazawee!
Thank you for your service. 🤘 Murderqueen Ruth and her large cat companion Swelbagore are my new favorite headcanon.
nice, nice,
Both Carla and Ruth are killing here…
Linda looks like she’s already had a couple drinks and she’s going to lose her ability to keep her racism veiled. I’m wondering how long until she overtly says something about not liking Lucy because she’s Black instead of burying it in subtext and passive-aggressive behavior.
Eh, at least in my experience, veiling racism is pretty much second nature for these kinda folk because of the bourgeois culture, language, etc. in which they are entrenched. Nothing is ever racism to them, it’s always a million loaded, inconsistent bullshit reasons for decisions and customs that just HAPPEN to hurt minorities more than they hurt the straight, white, all round “normal” people that have held power in their country for centuries.
Getting them to acknowledge their own or other fellow white folks’ racism is like trying to point at a shadow with a flashlight.
On a somewhat OT note, but going back to Joyce… anyone got any advice for ARFID? Lately I’ve just been feeling too nauseated to eat. Like everything is disgusting. EVERYTHING. Anyone got some good tricks for dealing with that? Thanks, pals!
Vitamins and milkshakes if you’re not lactose intolerant. Drinking your calories is an option.
Yes, that is a good idea, ZerglingOne. Thank you!
I expect that is enough outside my experience that I doubt my “things I eat when I’m feeling nauseated” would help. In case it’s not, rice and cabbage porridge for calories. unseasoned poached tilapia for protein. I’ve heard weed is good for suppressing nausea in the context of chemo.
No, that IS a good idea, HueSatLight. Thank you! That does help! Much appreciated.
Just take it easy. Drink tea and stuff to help. And if you gotta eat something, eat whatever you feel like, a comfort food (mac and cheese with hotdog, mustard, butter in my case). If you don’t stomach much or anything at all, no worries.
Yes, that does make sense, NG. Thank you. That’s a good idea.
when my ARFID is at its worst I’ve resorted to eating food like pills — small bites of as unflavored foods straight down the hatch. for me my ARFID has a lot to do with chewing though. it’s not a great method in general but it’s gotten food in me when otherwise impossible.
i feel like Lucy could really get into college sports if she let go of the nerd/jock dichotomy and embraced the fact that “hoosiers” sounds like a word JK Rowling or Roald Dahl would make up.
She could be in the nosebleed section yelling “Hoosier daddy?” and then giggling to herself every time Indiana scores.