The Dumbing of Age Book 10 Kickstarter continues! We’re just a small bit away from unlocking the next character magnet, Hostage Amber, at $45k!
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The Dumbing of Age Book 10 Kickstarter continues! We’re just a small bit away from unlocking the next character magnet, Hostage Amber, at $45k!
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how is that door just unlocked
College Me would’ve had twenty deadbolts and a bureau on it
Especially at this college. I mean just last semester a scar faced dude with a knife tried to get in specifically to cut people up. I mean he didn’t even make it into the building but it’s the principle of it.
I notice the door doesn’t have a whiteboard on it. We all know why. The incident.
I think it’s just the angle, you can see the two lines where it is. Further proof: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-11/01-this-bright-millennium/tantalizin/
“A guy came here to cut people up and got fucking disembowed before he even made it into the building” is kind of encouraging from a security perspective.
Coming from someone who works security, not really.
One year? One year? In the dorm? A bunch of student keys would work other random doors on the corridor. Most people had keys that would work only their door, but a lot of ’em would work two or three others, and somebody had a key that would open almost every door on the floor, like they’d got a goddamn master key.
Did this get addressed? No. It did not. Did the inevitable and endless pranking this enabled follow? Yes. Yes, it did.
That’s just how keys work, there’s only so many combinations that don’t fuck up the tiny little mechanism
Even fix pins for 14 rooms? Nah, they can do better. They just didn’t.
TL;DR: with just 14 rooms, they should have been able to do better. But shit like this does happen.
I was in a dorm with something like 40 rooms. (25 on one side of the hall, but a bunch of rooms on the other side of the hall were skipped to provide the bathroom and trash room. Otherwise, the room numbers lined up.)
I’ll admit, I didn’t try my key on any other rooms, but I had at least one roommate while living there who couldn’t count first thing in the morning and could not see without his glasses. Due to prank concerns, said glasses were left in the room when he went to shower. (He knew I knew they were vital and effectively irreplaceable. Other people on the floor did not.) Not trying his key in the RA’s door was easy. I would’ve thought not trying his key in the doors past the elevators would be easy, especially past the stairway door. His response was, “Do you want to reconsider trying to look through my glasses again?” (I was the one person who hadn’t tried when he made the offer before. I should have stuck to my prior decision. Damn that was painful.)
There were also a lot of drunk people who tried their keys in various other people’s rooms. But nobody apparently had a key that would open someone else’s room, apart from the RA (whose key, of course, opened all the doors.)
There were rumors of a lesser version of this happening in other dorms, but not ours. One of the other dorms was a guys only dorm, with a reputed 100 rooms per floor. I was never in it, so I’ve no idea if they had any skipped room numbers that went unreported, but in any event, they certainly had more rooms per floor. They supposedly had a few instances most years of a few keys opening a couple other doors. It usually wasn’t symmetric.
There was a legend of the full version happening one year in one of the women’s dorms, despite their only having the same roughly 40 rooms per floor the dorm I mentioned being in had. According to some versions of the legend, they had a problem with some of the locks, and only had funds to select which dorm got the bad locks and picked a women’s dorm because they hoped the pranking would be less. I don’t remember most of the details enough to guess whether they made the right call or not. That said, one of the two lucky people to get a key that worked on all of the rooms got expelled over a very nasty prank that couldn’t be attributed to one or the other of them, combined with her having gotten caught in the act of a prank shortly after that, and that mostly ended the pranking. (Well, it being dead week of second semester when that happened may have also had some effect on the number of pranks that followed.)
Says tldr then writes a whole essay
Sounds like somebody filed down their own bump key, or the locks were just that worn out.
We had a van at work with an ignition like that. All the keys were Nth generation copies with barely any cuts left, and the switch was so worn out you could start it with a butter knife.
The Driver-side door on my old ’69 Camaro needed body language and a finely-honed touch to unlock, but what it didn’t really need was any specific key at all
That’s common on mid-sixties GM cars. My dad’s Pontiac LeMans could be started and driven with a flathead screwdriver.
I think the locks were just that worn out, really. I saw the almost-all-doors key, it didn’t look filed at all.
This is common because as the keys and locks wear they get sloppy.
One other guy and myself were well-known as having keys that would pop just about everyone’s doors. Everyone ALSO knew that the other guy and I could be trusted, but there WERE creepy guys on our floor… We successfully broke the RA’s cartel on unlocking doors for money.
Nowadays this is fixed by all of the dorms having cardkeys instead of keys.
Becky also lives in this room now. I assume she unlocked it with her key
You say that like Becky wouldn’t break into her own dorm just for fun.
Damn, you’re right tho
Where is the key, then? No way she unlocked the door, put away her key, THEN triumphantly touted her peastry
(sorry, forgot to come back and respond)
When I was in college, leaving your dorm room unlocked was guaranteed to result in your computer getting porned.
I don’t think it’s unlocked, Becky and Dorothy are roommates. Becks let herself in, it’s her room. Though to be fair my roommate in college and I were pretty lax about our door, our wrong was close and someone would’ve probably seen a stranger go into our room and texted one of us. Nothing was ever stolen anyway.
I’m assuming Becky unlocked it since she lives in that room with Dorothy, and Dorothy would also have a key.
When I was a Freshman, we never locked our (apartment-style) dorm room doors. We’d come back from class and find various friends of one or the others of ours hanging out, watching our TV (not everyone even had one then, because I Am An Old), playing cards, whatever, often without any of the room’s nominal occupants present.
Finally, one day, we decided we should get serious about security and lock our doors.
Our room got broken into and all kinds of shit got stolen that very day.
I lost my 35mm SLR with all its lenses and a très expensive HP-41CX calculator (again: I Am An Old, and no one owned computers yet). It was an absolute fucksnarl.
Turns out, we were robbed by a custodial worker with a master key; the only thing that had been keeping him from robbing us earlier was that there were always lots of people in our room because the doors were unlocked.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Wow, all y’all had some serious dorm room key fuckery that I never experienced at my college. I dunno if we were lucky or naïve. Maybe both.
I do know that my entire freshman dorm floor left their doors unlocked, not because this is what most people did, but because we were on the fourth floor and there were no elevators and no one could be arsed to walk up four flights of stairs to steal from us, especially when we were on the ass end of campus anyway.
Hah! Call me when you don’t sleep at all! That’s when you’ll have the edge!
(Reads alt text)
Yes, yes you are.
Can someone other than Willis (to save him the trouble) explain? I don’t understand why it would be unwise to make peacetry the title, or why Twitter is relevant here. Did miss some drama?
Putting a punchline as a title is dickish to folks who read on twitter, because the title of the strip is the twitter link.
How is that any more dickish than seeing the title before reading the strip normally?
Spoils the punchline. Titles are punchline-spoiler free.
Okay, now that makes sense.
But ‘peastry’ isn’t the punchline….
It’s A punchline though.
Yeah this is my thought, it’s not the punchline, just a pun
Peacetry was in panel 1 though.
You know who is also up in the wee hours of the morning?
AMAZI-GIRL!
We at last know her identity!
no one gets the jump on dotty. no. one.
All she is saying is give peacetry a chance.
*slow clap*
Here, have the damn Internet.
Of course the Internet is damned. I’m surprised you had to ask.
Dorothy is really running in a full winter jacket? I get it’s cold but damn
Pretty sure it’s thin. A proper winter jacket would cook her like an oven.
now that I take a closer look… It looks more like a light sweater over a turtleneck sweater, or she’s just wearing a scarf.
I believe the top layer is meant to be a high-vis jacket (since she is jogging in pre-dawn hours when it is still dark out)
BAKER: Time to make the donuts.
BAKER: I MADE the donuts!
*and the hacked Muzak plays Ratt’s “Round And Round”*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYRurPB4WA0&ab_channel=FM1156
Fred: I made the donuts
Dorothy’s morning jogs make her unstoppable. I get out of bed and my first thought is, “Man I wish I could sleep more.” Just imagine if we all had Dorothy’s drive, we could be doing amazing things.
Although… having Dorothy’s drive might also come with her inability to properly relax, so that could be bad.
Meh. All of my amazing shit is done at 2am.
Oh hell yeah this.
I’m a mess in the early sun. But at 1, 2, 3am, still up? I’m an absolute machine.
You have the makings of a fine grad student.
I have enough trouble getting up before noon. Can’t imagine how Dorothy can get up that early. But then, I’ve never been a morning person. Staying up really late at night is much better for me.
Her runs start at 4 AM (or at least did last semester). Dorothy is a FREAK.
This would be a good reference, I think, if I remembered what the reference was
I think it’s a call back to a previous comic where someone said this, but I’m not going to go to the tedious effort of searching for it on a site without a search function.
It’s an Andy Griffith reference.
Well, at least Becky is trying something other than the silly feud business. That’s nice. Thoughtful even. Not sure Dorothy would eat donuts though, unless Becky developed a taste for the Rainbow Bakery from the brief time she lived 2 blocks away from the place (and given the name she likely would have tried it if she noticed it, famously being a lesbian and all).
Seriously though, if you are in Bloomington and have a hankering for vegan pastries look them up. They are pretty good. You can enjoy a delicious breakfast sandwich (my person favorite) while checking out Blowjob Cat (a name even my wife has added to her vocabulary because of this webcomic).
Oh hey, she does know Dorothy’s name!
This is what irks me about Becky, she knows Dorothys name, Dorothy has called Becky out on it before but still Becky chooses to call Dorothy by a nickname Dorothy doesn’t like
Even when Becky is doing a nice thing (not sure if she has an ulterior motive) she still wants Dorothy to answer to, and thus accept, the nickname Becky wants her to have
This gets brought up every time, but I never seem to see an actual link to Dorothy objecting to the nickname? I’d really be interested in seeing that strip to confirm that it’s an issue.
I’ve been reading through the books, and at least as far as Book 8, she’s said nothing.
I’m sure I recall it early on in their interactions but since I tried looking for it I can’t locate it so either I’m really hopeless at looking things up (a distinct possibility) or my dislike of Becky is strong enough that I took for granted what someone else said and accepted it without checking (Mandela Effect in action)
In which case subtract all references to Dorothy calling out Becky about her nickname and add in the general meanness, pettiness and low-grade bullying Becky likes to inflict on Dorothy instead
Okay, but then it doesn’t really fit for this strip.
Maybe, juries still out on an ulterior motive
Where has Dorothy said she dislikes it? I can’t find her ever saying so.
I don’t think she specifically said that. If I remember correctly, she more implied it by restating her name was Dorothy early on in their interactions in response to being called it I think.
Probably didn’t want to make a big deal of it because of Beckys situation.
Unfortunately Dorothy is just to nice of a person and too much of a decent type to be a, major, politician
Its a shame.
Or she just doesn’t care, because it’s just a nickname
I have been through every strip tagged Becky+Dorothy and not once that I have found has Dorothy corrected Becky regarding her name. The only thing she attempts to correct is when Becky refers to them as enemies/nemeses/etc.
(There have been a few prior instances of Becky calling her Dorothy, like when announcing she was Robin’s campaign manager and on their first seeing each other post-timeskip; none were commented upon either)
I wake up at 4, but it means I need to be in bed by 9 pm. How does she get enough sleep in a dormitory?
Does she get enough sleep?
It depends on her personal ability to sleep. I’ve known people that once they decide to sleep neither God nor a marching band could stop them. I hate those people
My dad can fall asleep through anything anywhere. He has fallen asleep during movies at the theater. While I can’t go to sleep if I can hear a TV or a person in another room speaking at a volume where I can understand what is being said. But I still got plenty of sleep in dorms because other people also enjoyed sleeping.
Ugh, same. I usually end up reading or watching YouTube videos until I crash. But if I try to go to bed early on purpose? lol nope, wide awake until midnight. The only time I can get to sleep early is if I was up almost the whole night before. Waking up at 1 sucks when your circadian rhythm is still calibrated for 4:30.
My mother fell asleep at a Who concert, I fell asleep at an IMSA race that had a Mazda prototype with a rotary engine. But in my favor it was very warm at Texas World Speedway that day.
I recall reading in a bodybuilding magazine about 20 plus years ago (all natural muscle and fitness if memory serves) that one of the reasons countries from the former soviet bloc did so well in the Olympics (apart from state sponsored steroid programs) is that a lot of their training was in extremely cold conditions
Basically they were harder mentally because they trained in harder conditions so well done Dorothy
That and if you fail your family might get sent to Siberia… I’m only half-joking.
They certainly took the carrot and stick motivation to the extreme
Communism is a collectivist ideology, the rights of an individual are non-existent when it comes to the needs of the collective and needs of the collective are usually what the elites decide they are and are enforced by cops and armed civilians.
So is capitalism. We just pretend otherwise.
The rights of the individual are non-existent when it comes to the needs of corporate entities and those needs are enforced by police and courts and just not paying people enough to live.
The key difference is that you have actual freedom under capitalism. Yes it’s limited by government and corporate manipulation but you can actually ignore it or speak against it. No such thing under Communism which is a totalitarian system which controls everything and violently destroys any opposition. You CAN speak against the corporations, against the politicians, against the very system. In a Communism country, which mine was in the past, you’d get hauled off to prison or Gulag for saying that maybe the party members are not demi-gods who shit gold.
Capitalism is far from perfect but on a scale from Worst to Best it’s still higher than Communism.
Here is a quick test. Go on any social media platform and say names of politicians, CEOs and Corporations and that they are evil and shit.
If the next day you won’t have Police at your door it means you are living in a better system than Communism.
Eh, I mean, if Pinochet were in charge, you’d definitely have the police at your door. And for more recent examples, Erdogan. Or for a less extreme example, Hungary and Poland are certainly trending that way.
Meanwhile, post-Mao, you were free to speak your mind in communist China (even if it ended up… Not being communist, after a while), just so long as you weren’t perceived as a threat. Things lightened up in Vietnam after a while as well.
This isn’t a communist vs capitalist thing, really. It’s a “are you being run by a tinpot dictator” thing, and, well… The Soviet Union was largely run by petty dictators, and they propped up petty dictators in places they controlled. It’s not like the place was ever run as a democracy, and there are extremely few places that experimented with communism without having their fingerprints over everything.
Well China is definitely starting to swing back with the whole “Social Credit System” and that “Not being a threat” is Far from having actual Freedom of Speech.
China’s been a capitalist country for a while now – and Xi Jinping’s consolidation of power speaks to my point regarding leadership mattering more than economic model. He rewrote the constitution (changed after Mao passed away to prevent power from being so concentrated in the hands of one person) to stay in power, you know.
But with only two countries that matter having experimented with communism, both of which were born out of violent revolution and one of which had descended into an irrelevant backwater with no industry, had last been an absolute monarchy under a tsar, and where most of the population still had living memories of serfdom… Well, I’m saying you have a pretty small sample size there, when compared to the hundreds of countries that have tried capitalism. Of course we have more examples of capitalism leading to good outcomes; we can just look at all the countries that failed, and learn from their mistakes before they become disasters.
I’m not arguing that it’d be a great idea to try out communism, here – just that “Communism is doomed to all of these flaws, just look at the Soviet Union!” ignores the vast number of flaws the Soviet Union possessed which had nothing at all to do with communism. Just look at the way it broke up, for instance – no other nation in the world has the kind of disparity between states that Russia had with the other members of its “union”. Such a breakup would be literally impossible with most every other country.
Honestly it’s more of a mixed economy than just Capitalist. Private people can run companies but the Party can order them around or take the company away from them if they are unhappy with what the company is doing. Private companies with Absolute control over them by the Communists.
Oh please, two countries? What about all the other communists countries, what about entire Eastern Europe? Korea? Vietnam? Cuba? My country people’s live better off after 30 years of Capitalism than they ever did during the 50 years of Communism.
Here is one Flaw of Communism that is key to its failure. To each according to his needs. This was part of the Communist doctrine in my country. All people were paid about the same, regardless of whether they worked hard or worked barely at all. Result? Empty shelves in stores, crappy quality of the products, supremely unmotivated work force.
If the workers aren’t the ones who own the business, then it’s not communist. The one who paid for the business owns the busness in China, so it’s capitalist.
The state exerting a measure of control or intervening doesn’t make it less capitalist – the US bailed out the auto industry, but nobody would deny it’s a capitalist country, and it exerts a strong measure of control over critical industries like basic utilities and defense industries. China takes it further in many cases, but that’s not enough to define it as something other than capitalist – else, we couldn’t say there’s an actual capitalist country on earth. Especially considering how many industries have been jump-started by direct investment from the government since the start of the industrial revolution, which is largely what China has done.
And as for two countries – yes, only two countries that mattered for determining the viability of communism. What communist country in Eastern Europe didn’t take their orders from Moscow? Vietnam certainly followed the lead of Beijing. And Korea’s pretty much a dystopian nightmare version of an absolute dictatorship, regardless of what they call themselves.
Only two countries that could conceivably have had enough of an economic base to experiment with their own model have tried it. Everyone else was just following their lead, and received generous subsidies from their patrons to do so – along with all of the strings that came with that money. If it’s not an independent experiment, it doesn’t matter – the failure of the Soviet Union took them all down with it, and even if it didn’t, the Soviets ensured that all of their puppets would share their flaws anyway.
Well, I guess Yugoslavia is an exception. But that was doomed by its complete reliance on a single leader.
Panel two’s expression and voice waver when she switches names are poor Becky thinking kidnappings have happened again, aren’t they?
It’s quite likely.
I love the implication that Dorothy is having her own fun with this “rivalry”, judging by her fourth panel cute smugness. I’m glad, Dorothy can definitely afford some levity in her life from time to time.
I hope so! This rivalry would be a lot more entertaining if Dorothy was willing to sass Becky.
I approve of Becky’s beanie choice. It doesn’t look like the bottom part of a plunger like her last one!
I like the dawn room lighting. It works with the dialogue to set the time of day.
Note: this strip makes reference to times of day such as “4 AM” and “6 AM”. Keep in mind that it is a work of fiction!
That smug smile
Becky in panel one, Dorothy in panel four, or both?
The answer, as always, is ‘yes’
I’m adding the concept of the “Peace Donut” to my list of ridiculous but brilliant ideas to use if I find a time and place to do so!
Related to but not identical to “apollogy donut”
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/04-the-do-list/beefed/
Totally different from a Hertz Donut.
[Laughs in waking up at 1 AM]
[Guzzles another coffee]
You just gotta adjust your sleeping schedule my dude.
Uh-huh. “You just”.
Much easier said than done, and I’ve heard that platitude from so many people who haven’t had to do it themselves. Try going to bed at 6 PM every day, especially when it’s still broad daylight and everyone else is wide awake. That’s not even accounting for a chaotic work schedule that has variable length weeks that don’t line up with the actual days of the week, with start times between 3 and 7 AM…
Sorry, getting cranky again. Time for more coffee.
you’re allowed to be cranky when randos act like your problems are easy to solve because they only know a one-sentence summary of them ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Try working for a company that keeps office hours in Vietnam or Singapore. They close their office at 1800 local time, which was about 0500 my time.
DoA Book 11: I, In My Benevolent Benevolence, Have Broughtcha a Peace Donut
Awwwww.. Becky want to say she’s sorry, even if in her peculiar way ♡ The beginning of a true friendship!?
I don’t know about you but if someone woke me up at 6 AM to offer me a donut I’d probably make them choke on it… I can only see malevolence in Becky’s actions.
“A donut? In the morning? As a genuine gesture of goodwill? Not fucking likely! It’s probably poisoned, or soaked in venom, or covered in glass! Dorothy should do the sensible thing and strangle Becky till she DIES, the SLATTERN.”
—a completely normal comment
But let’s admit it’s really hard to sympathize with someone who wakes up at 4 or 5 in the morning to go jogging..
Dotty either made a deal with dark entities from the great beyond or takes caffeine Intravenously
Let me put it in context, I usually get up around 9 AM and I am supremely cranky when I don’t get enough sleep. Depriving me of sleep is like Nr. 1 way of getting on my shit list.
I think that depends on the person. Dorothy probably exudes early bird tendencies. Most likely, Becky woke up, and Dorothy was showed, dressed, and reading her syllabus for the 90th time, eating an orange or some other healthy bull.
Now me, I would stare blankly, take said donut, sniff it, then inhale it and fall back to sleep. Yes, the sniff is important, because if it smells like anything healthy, I would respond with a “bleh” and attempt to give back like a normal person, but most likely throw it in their face.
Becky is probably looking for advice potentially with Dina hence the baked goods. She may try to hate her (or get Dorothy to hate her) but can accept that Dorothy can do that and often like gently too.
Granted given this new knowledge for her perhaps Becks should be grateful Dorothy doesn’t take their so called rivalry seriously. It would be over before she was even conscious.
I mean, maybe but don’t forget she went out the other night to find apology food for dorothy already. Maybe she just didn’t find something she thought was good until now
I wonder if there’s a particular signifiance for someone who never had any money until recently (and hell, was homeless), to decide to buy donuts for Dorothy.
Wouldn’t “Peace Donut” be a great name for a ’60s psychedelic band?
Ask your grandpa — he was probably their bass player.
*adds another name to his Civ 6 band name list*
“Peace Donut,” the underappreciated Cat Stevens follow-up to the hit “Peace Train.”
A song on the coffee music mix on YTM.
I don’t know the artist, but there is a song title “Peace Donut”.
I wondered idly earlier what about Dorothy sometimes irritates me, besides her trends towards milquetoast center-liberalism in politics and her general aura of Unimpeachable Virtue, to the degree that were it to come to serious conflict I would be Team Becky all the way.
And now I remember. People who run at 4AM are demonic. They are indwelt by Satan, and have partaken of the Black Mass and its vile sacrament.
Okay Dorothy, I usually enjoy you except when you exude Lawful Good tendencies too much, but why the ever living fuck would you go jogging before the sun is up outside in the middle of winter when there is an established gym in your building where it’s perfectly safe, warm, and not likely to get you kidnapped or killed? You really learned nothing last year, your burn out this semester will be truly deserved.
Right, and before my brain snapped at Dorothy acting foolish (though I will give her props for wearing very bright colors), I appreciated that Becky is legit concerned that her room mate has disappeared and may be worrying she may have been kidnapped yet again.
So are wee doing a minor time skip to the morning because Joe is dead now?
He’ll be replaced by a new character with vague physical similarities but a polar opposite personality shortly.
Spoilers.
But still fulfilling the same role and eliciting the same fan rage.
my country’s previous president (our versión of Trump) was so incredibly lazy, he had an important meeting with several political figures and representativas at 8 am that was being transmited to every public TV and radio, he came like an hour late and started with “i’m sorry to have you wake up so early”