Baby, look at me and tell me what you see
You ain’t seen the worst of me yet
Give me time, I’ll make you forget the rest
I got more in me and you can set it free
I can crush the mood in my hand
Don’t you know who I am?
Remember I’m lame
I’m gonna cringe forever
I’d like to curl up and die
(Die)
I feel it coming unravelled
People will laugh while I cry
Embarrassment on a new level
Light up my face like a flame
(Shame)
I’m gonna cringe forever
Baby, remember I’m lame
What’s kind of characters are they: “L̷̛͙̲̥͝O̷̧͉̲̖̪͐̑O̴͎̮̫̰͓̾͝K̶͎̽̚̚ ̷̰̗̅͝͠A̶̧͉̔͗͌̑̚T̵͎̲̠̞͝ ̴̘̯̈D̵̺̊̉̅I̸̹̦̚N̵͈̺͗͗̍̉Ą̸̦̈́̉̾”?
Where I can set into my computer?
Finally I could find someone that can use this characters…
Very much a case of implementing something without considering how it will be abused. Not LingoJam, but the character encoding for the glyphs to spam outside of the root glyphs base. I wonder how bad it will get, before có̷̩̜̗̩͈͈̮͈̣̹̭̣̘̠̘̽̏̓͑̿̅͊̎̍͂̈́̚ͅuntermeasures are created.
f̷̥͖̝̍͊͐͆͂̎̓̀͠i̶͎̲̘̠̬̜͈̘̫̜͎̿̈́̀͂̅̓̈́͛͋̕n̸̤̝̩̯̩͌̃̃͛̚ä̶̧̧̢͇̲̫̳̺̫͙͚̬́̐̓̉̀̑̕ľ̷̯̲̖̲̬̜͖̑̈́̚͜ľ̸̢̛̰̜̯̳̟̱͎̻̱̈̓̈̓̽̊̐́͗͠ͅỷ̴̢͉̬͑̅͘͜, thank you. It will be useful for some… projects.
Climbing Joe is probably pretty fun though. Not in a sexual way (although the ladies might say otherwise) but as in if I was like four foot nothing and was regularly outsized by children physically climbing a six foot plus muscle dude seems entertaining. You could pretend to be a monkey!
Speaking as an ace person, I think Dina would be a good person for Joe to discuss his problem with. I don’t know if it’s just me but I tend to view sex in a more abstract way, and Joe would benefit from unpacking what happened with someone who won’t take a moral stance on it.
It’s like . . . skydiving. I have no interest in going skydiving. I potentially might try it if there’s someone I care about who wishes to share that experience, but I’m fine with never going skydiving otherwise. If other people want to go skydiving, I’m not gonna judge them for it; as long as they’re not trying to shove someone out of a plane and everyone’s enjoying themselves, have fun. And the concept of someone having a weird moral stance on skydiving that they think should be used to prevent other people from going skydiving is just absurd.
Or the idea that if a person ever wants to go skydiving, sometimes with a specific person but sometimes just in general, this is bad and will inevitably end up hurting the person they want to go skydiving with specifically.
Okay, the metaphor falls apart there. But I definitely think in some ways, Dina would be helpful to Joe by saying ‘my girlfriend feels sexual attraction differently than I do, because she will sometimes look at a person and want to have sex with them, whereas I generally don’t. She does not care less for me because she experiences sexual attraction towards people who are not me, and I am not better at her for experiencing sexual attraction only to someone I care about. I trust her not to hurt me because she is sexually attracted to another person, because she chooses not to act on that.’ He could use someone to point out that the issue isn’t being sexually attracted to people other than your partner, it’s the decision to act on that attraction, and him having a sex drive doesn’t doom him to be his father.
And I think Joe, in turn, might be a good resource for the ‘fundies, especially fundies who were raised as girls, tend to have a lot of shame about wanting to have sex’ thing, since he’s seen it several times now, he’s a pretty good reader of people all told and does care a lot more than Sarah or Amber force themselves not to, and he doesn’t have the same stake in this that Joyce or Dorothy would. Dina knows Becky isn’t ready to have sex even if she is attracted to Dina, but I don’t think Dina can totally get JUST HOW BADLY Joyce and Becky’s upbringing hurt them, and how hard it is to defuse some of the more insidious bullshit. (Partly because much like Dorothy, Dina’s a fairly well-adjusted atheist with good parents who never internalized the Local Christian Bullshit, partly because as an ace who’s clearly neurodivergent, Dina seems not to have internalized the American cultural shame about women having sex drives, either.)
I am told I am a good person to talk about relationship and emotion-stuff with and I assume it’s because, as an Autistic person I spent years researching how to communicate effectively and maintain relationships (my interest is people so I hoard psychology/linguistics/sociological books).
Plus I find my ND friends tend to be less assumptive/more open/ask nonjudgemental clarification questions than NT friends which is good when emotions are happening.
“Interest” has two senses, each with a different negation. Disinterest is not at all the same as uninterest. For example, we want legislators to be disinterested but not uninterested.
Nicely spotted, except “99” lb altogether too precise a figure for a species known from a single jaw XD
100 lb makes more sense.
(based on the wikipedia entry, Gregory S. Paul estimated atrociraptor’s weight at 15kg, which does convert to 33 lb, but you realise the fact that Paul landed on a multiple of 5 kg (~10 lb) is not coincidental, they most likely judged that they couldn’t narrow it down to a smaller interval. The same margin of error should be applied, and not doubt is applied by Dina, in the imperial conversion)
well, but the rounding itself is meaningful, innit? it conveys information about the degree of accuracy represented by the estimate. like, 15kg and 15.000kg are in some sense “the same number” but each implies a very different level of precision. It would be a bit goofy for a paleontologist to claim that Atrociraptor weighed “33 lb”. Like, a) there’s definitely enough variation within the species that such a level of precision is not relevant, and b) even going on that one individual specimen, you can’t possibly give this granular an estimate not knowing what the rest of the skeleton looked like, let alone the amount of fat, feathers etc.
I’m sure I didn’t get your point if I’m explaining this to you though :embarrassed:
Anyway, I went and checked the Wikipedia source (“The Princeton Field Guide To Dinosaurs”) via google books, and lo! here’s what it says exactly (p. 151):
Atrociraptor marshalli 2 m (6 ft) TL, 15 kg (30 lb)
…So going by that, and assuming this is the book Dina is basing her calculation on, she might, in fact, weigh just 90 lb. (disclaimer because this is starting to feel creepy, i do not care AT ALL how much Dina weighs. This is just a fun geeky discussion about paleontology stuff.)
Though if I recall correctly, she did say “roughly”.
I suspect what’s going on in that listing is that they’re rounding both the kilos and the pounds separately – and possibly to different precisions. Kilos to 5 and punds to 10, which would make some sense because it’s roughly the same variance. Rounding both to the nearest 5 would imply the measurement in pounds was more accurate.
Assuming essentially a range of 25-35 lbs, then both suggestions for Dina’s weight are within the possible range of 3 atrociraptors.
I tend to suspect that rather than rather than worry about variance, the author doubled the kilograms and, since it was an estimate anyway, left it at a nice round number. Since the actual factor is 2.2 pounds per kilogram to the nearest hundredth, and assuming that kilograms were primary, as is usual in scientific work, the actual variance is a bit larger, from 27.5 pounds to 38.5 pounds . But 30 pounds is towards the edge of the interval and 33 pounds is the center. Assuming the actual weight is represented by a uniform distribution in the interval, 99 pounds is much more likely to be a better estimate of the actual weight than 90 is. If we assume a normal distribution with cutoff, then 99 pounds becomes even more likely.
This fits in with my assumption that Joe is lowballing her weight for effect, but as thejeff points out, he might still be right.
haha now you ninja’d me after I spent an hour looking for sources for Atrociraptor. Anyway, i’m copy-pasting anyway, because i’m not letting this good (fruitless) work go to waste, although i essentially arrive at the same conclusion via a different logic.
So, scientific (incl. paleontology) papers normally use S.I. units, so the original figure is likely to be 15 kilograms. So i’d say the 30 lb figure is secondary, and is derived from the 15 kg figure.
So 15 kg ± 2.5 kg = 33 lb ± 5.5 lb
But even if Dina is aware of this margin of uncertainty and factors it in, and even though she does say “roughly”, this ends up translating to a weight of between 83 and 116 lb, which starts to be a nonsensically larger bracket for a human.
I think she meant to say she was about 90 lb, and the “roughness” of that figure doesn’t have to do with how wide a net she’s casting around her own weight but rather is meant as a hedge about how much Atrociraptors actually weighed, because who the hell really knows, and also, intraspecific variation.
(caveat: i haven’t been able to track down a source for the 15 kg figure besides the Princeton Guide itself (i thought it might’ve been from the 2004 species description paper but nope) so maybe it was produced by the author of that book (G. S. Paul) for the purpose of a nice consistent list, so who even knows)
That reminds me of a pet peeve of mine when I was in the military. We would be getting a lecture on something, and give us the specs on some item to a decimal place, when it was pretty obvious that the number was just hard converted from an imperial value, so instead of having to memorize something like 5 to 20 (whatever units), it would be 1.52 to 6.10 or something equally silly.
Bill Gates funded the research that showed how to hack the photosynthesis process to be hella more efficient which is going to wind up feeding a ton of people, so he gets a large indulgence in my book.
Sometimes beady-eyed characters get sclera for a panel or strip in order to better convey where their gaze is pointed, or to increase the visual impact of their expression. It’s happened to Walky a few times.
At least you have some way of flirting with people. I usually don’t bother because I realized years ago that I don’t really know how to flirt, and I can’t tell when someone else is flirting with me either.
Weirdly, Dina could be a great person for Joe to talk to. He’s pretty good at being blunt no straightforward, it will help him get some distance from the Feelings bit of things here, and Dina would be able to accept the confidence in the actual spirit offered. Maybe she’d even appreciate the bluntness.
Just had a look at the list. Good to see Grrlpower at the top, as usual. I am somewhat baffled why all those Pronquest spinoffs are so high on the list, many of those haven’t updated in years.
Is it time for Joe to tell someone about his feelings? Be open and honest? Maybe cry a little? I would love to see that! Obviously he feels terrible, but I don’t know if he and Dina are close enough for this kind of confidences. Maybe it would be better if he talked to Danny about it.
you know sometimes i think Dina is the least messed up one in the strip …. why is joe upset ….i mean the sister thought she was all that and ready to go but chickened out /had a change of heart other than saying yes in the first place .. he didnt do anything go…. a lot of guys wouldn’t of stopped like he did or would have gotten her so high she couldn’t say no
Joe’s scared of emotional connections with women because his foundation for “an emotional connection with a woman” is his parents’ divorce because his dad kept cheating on his mom.
Now he’s got one of those with Joyce, and it’s scaring the crap out of him even if they’re currently just friends, because Joe barely knows how to handle that with a woman too, and worse, he’s totes mcgotes in love. Right now, Joe can only see himself as his dad and Joyce as his mom*, so if he wants to avoid hurting her then he has to purge himself of the feels, and the way to do that is to process those feels by having sex with Liz, who is exactly like Joyce; he just has to sample the goods and he’ll get over it.
Then Liz begins panicking during sex. This is wrong, it’s horrible, it should be with someone she loves. Having sex with Joe would have ruined her forever. While obviously not pointed commentary at Joe himself, that’s how he’s taking it; he tried to dive back into his comfort zone where no one gets hurt or hurts anyone else, and the both of got hurt.
He lost that stability a long time ago, but now he’s lost the hope of ever going back to it. Joe’s only hope is changing, that thing he feels convinced he cannot do.
*It’s okay, writing it made me as uncomfortable as you felt reading.
I think he may have realized being Mr No-Strings wasn’t the moral highground he thought it was. Because he got a glimpse into how sex without an emotional connection can feel like a mistake to some people.
Reading Joe now in contrast with his more confident IW! counterpart, I think the difference is that IW!Joe never had a big, defining moment that made his actions wrong (y’know, on purpose). In the Walkyverse Joe, due to actually getting to grow up, eventually relaxed enough without really losing that edge to him. When Joyce tried to make it hppenl Joe shot her down because he didn’t want to be that person with her and didn’t think it was fair for her to try and make him be that person, until eventually the light clicked on in his own head and by the time he did, Joyce and Walky made it official. In the end he was fine being monogamous with Rachel, he’s still a horny lug but he’s mellowed out enough that it’s directed at his girlfriend. It’s not really “maturity” in the sense that he was promiscuous and now monogamous, he just found happiness with his wife and car daughter.
DoA!Joe, by contrast, is a Joe who’s never going to get to grow up. He’s never going to mellow out with age, so for him to stop being a horndog lech would have to involve something big.
That’s Joyce, again, but more importantly it’s that Joyce made him realize he was wrong.
Joe right now is in a state where he’s lost his confidence in the identity he built thinking it’d be an ideal, and now he’s lost hope he’ll ever be able to run back to it, because he can never change except now even trying to remain static and shallow is going to lead him to hurt the women in his life. He hurt Liz, sex with him would have ruined her forever, and it’d be the same as Joyce (and I’m gonna get back to this). There’s a fun little meta gag going on this conversation, where in It’s Walky! Joe and Dina were specifically contrasted for a storyline as the most and least confident cast members and where Dina was trying to learn to talk to people with his help. Here, though? Dina’s the one in the lead, because for all her social difficulties she’s confident enough to charge through them, whereas Joe here thought he had it all figured out and, much like Joyce and her religious beliefs, it’s all crumbled.
And in writing this, I realized Joe’s status as an Indomitable Sex Monster has actually had pretty positive effect on one person: Dina. Joe knows Sex Things and Dina doesn’t recognize the enforced social boundaries of never talking about sex because it’s icky, he can actually just engage with her on her level by blatantly asking if she gets aroused by things.
There have been implications here and there that even besides Joe’s ability to be compassionate to Joyce, he used to have a richer life and personality that he started to deliberately bury to turn himself into a big ol’ horny bro. He was pretty upset with Amber for not engaging with him and his dad trying to introduce her and Stacy to Hanukkah, I think there’s a strip in the archives or Patreon implying that he used to be pretty studious and bookish as a kid, but for the life of me I can’t remember it. I bring this up to say that DoA!Joe, not getting the chance to mellow out the same way his Walkyverse counterpart has, I think we’re not just going to see him as Joyce’s emotionally supportive frenemy (again, getting to that right after this), we’re going to start seeing the person he used to be as well.
It’s Walky! one of the webcomics David Willis did prior to Dumbing of Age, a sci-fi comic about Walky in a secret government agency fighting an alien invasion.
Dumbing of Age is their fifth series, and it takes all but a few of the cast from their previous work and drops them into college.
And now for more trash goblin shipper musings: I don’t actually think Joyce would react the same way Liz did last night.
Probably at this very moment, yes, she’s in a bad state confused about who she is, which was made worse when that big blank void of “who’s Joyce?” had to be turned into an iron fortress defending herself from Becky and Sarah. If Joyce had sex with someone right now it probably would mess her up until she figures out what sex and having sex for the first time mean to her, and if that person was Joe I don’t think she’d really be able to stomach it, I think they’d both feel they ruined things for each other.
They have a connection now (which is a fun little conversation I want to have, but I don’t know how to work it in here so someone please ask me so I can say it), there’s a degree of trust in Joe that Joyce didn’t share with her actual best friends and was totally proven correct in not doing so, they’re both going through the same struggle of being repeatedly mocked for who they were, and having changed, suffering even more for it, and all Joyce knows about her views on sexual purity is that they’re as bullshit as everything else.
I think Joyce is someone who still needs that strong emotional bond to actually go through with it, Joyce at her healthiest is still someone who places a lot of emotional power on sex (relatable), but even disregarding sex within a committed relationship (’cause, you know, she can’t get married to Walky and destroy their hotel room), I don’t actually think Joyce, in a state where she could decide to have sex, would react that badly if it happened with Joe. Yes, he’s her friend, but he’s someone she’s been around the block with, she’s starting to trust him, we’ve gotten two strips indicating that she’s physically attracted to him. Without her beliefs in sex as this inherently defiling, corrupting act, would Joyce actually take it that poorly if she went for it with him?
So Joe’s feelings on Joyce are pretty clear: he’s in love with the first woman who believed in him enough to think he can change, and every time she’s got a problem he forces himself to step up regardless of his stated role as Shallow Friend, and then finds a way out of committing to his words while still helping.
(now that I think about it, I wonder how many women his dad had been with thought he could change too)
With Joyce, however, there hasn’t been that much focus. I don’t think she’s into him romantically yet, Joyce would not be subtle about that to the audience, though she’s had two strips to the effect of getting all hot and bothered seeing him in his boxers, that’s a physical attraction in someone who has, until now, thought sex was factually a corrupting, perverse act.
Joyce loves people extremely easily. If you’re a good person, she likes you. When you’re a total jerk, she’s perfectly happy hating you, and between their first date and the time Joyce texted him, Joe was a total jerk to her.
And then Joyce relies on him in a pinch because she knows he has divorced parents, and Joe, having no reason to try and score with Joyce because he already declared her a Zero Minus after their date, immediately sidesteps any of his beliefs in being a real man and emotional connections by just plainly offering advice. Joe doesn’t even realize it, but right there he defied everything he thinks about himself.
Joyce likes all her friends, and after returning to campus Joyce liked Joe because he had proven he was good all along, except Joe immediately tries to reassert their old status quo because he has no reason not to think it’s changed; it was a transaction, he helped, that’s it.
From there, Joyce starts interacting with him more. She gets mad when he’s ogling Leslie in class, but then his clearly painful reaction to talking about marriage causes her to try and reach out to him. Eventually the Do List comes out and Joyce spells in block capital what he’s been doing, and Joe immediately changes himself for the better, except he doesn’t know what better is until, eventually, he lets her down again by sleeping with Malaya, so he declares he’s incapable of changing and starts to performatively return to his old self, and then a few days later Joyce falls asleep on his chest without freaking out in the morning and then Joe tells Jacob to his face that Joyce is going to be perfect one day and missing out on that is a mistake.
Joe never went to Garbage Roof, he’s still not Joyce’s friend, but once they meet again next semester Joyce makes it pretty clear what she thinks of him: he cares, he just won’t admit he cares, but when Becky asks Joyce cares if he cares, Joyce yells back that she does not, at all, in the slightest, no sirree bob, and that’s their current status quo: Joyce is troubled, Joe helps, and then when it comes to admitting he’s helping because he cares, he finds a way out of it:
– Joyce confides in him that she’s an atheist, he acknowledges that it’s huge, so to keep her secret he’ll keep making fun of her.
– Joyce learns she is a monkey, so she flails and panics and screams while Joe tells her being a monkey is great because you can decide for yourself what has meaning, and when he grants her meaning by patting her on the head, Joyce asks if it’s just so they can get back to work and he affirms it.
– Joyce is looking at her phone all sad two times, Joe asks why, and Joyce counters by asking if he’s “that kind of friend now?” to which Joe answers that he’s not. Then both of them land in Amber’s room, Joyce angrily yells that she’ll swear all she wants because nothing she believed in was real and neither are the Gordian knots she tied herself in, and he tells her that even if Heaven and Hell aren’t real, she was, and the person she was mattered. He asks what’s bugging her, she tells him he doesn’t care because she’s a stupid home-schooled girl he made fun of all the time, Joe directly states that she’s more than that to him in what is the closest he’s ever gotten to being honest, and then Joyce says she’s a stupid home-schooled girl with glasses, and Joe rolls with it before offering his advice.
Joyce trusts Joe enough now that she’s fine inviting him to the party they had for Becky’s mom, he was her “friend with rewards program” by process of elimination, sure, but she went in there and lied to Liz about all the awesome sex she had with him and she could do that because she trusted him enough to lie through him. She’s fine with him now, she knows he cares, the support he’s offered to her since the timeskip has genuinely been more helpful than Dorothy’s even, but every time it’s come to the point where Joe is about to confirm that he cares about her, he backs off, and I think that trips Joyce up because she wants to know where they stand. He’s he’s perpetually a step away from being the person Joyce wants him to be, to admit that he already is, but he always pulls back leaving Joyce with his support, but not the admission that he’s supporting her because he cares.
And for someone like Joyce I think that’s frustrating, but in a kind of productive way where the payoff feels worth it. She’s not trying to make him better or change him, she’s waiting for him to admit that the person he’s changing into is who he’s been all along.
Nice musings. And nice symmetry: “she’s waiting for him to admit that the person he’s changing into is who he’s been all along”. I’m not 100% positive that Joe is waiting, but sure Joyce is also in the long way to admitting the same thing.
I find Dina an interesting character. I can relate to some her somewhat due to being autistic and sometimes she acts similar to me, though other times she acts in ways that I wouldn’t. It reminds me that autism is a spectrum and no two autistic people will act the same all the time.
Agreed that I want to see Dina’s take on the situation. Honestly, I’m surprised at his “shame”. He really has changed. My view of his actions (albeit coloured by his past behaviour gives him a low bar to get over) is that he did a great job. He carefully considered the situation when Liz arrived, and didn’t pressure her to keep going when they were in heat.
He did good on that front but Liz’s regret gave him a window into how his past behavior may have affected other partners. He always thought of casual sex as a mutually good time and never considered that there might be deeper emotions at play. He scoffed at Danny’s idea that an emotionally vulnerable Billie might have later regretted sex. Now he’s realizing there might be some truth to it.
Yes, I love seeing his character development, I’d say he’s one of my fav characters now. I’m not really surprised though, I’d be pretty devastated if someone told me they almost ruined their life by doing something with me. He did the best he could and I’m pretty sure he knows where Liz is coming from but that gotta hurt. Even more when you have a crush on someone from a similar background.
I’m not sure how much he carefully considered the situation when Liz arrived – other than what we saw about how he could use it get over Joyce. I don’t think he put much thought into what it might mean for her, how it might affect her or if she was really as ready as she was presenting. (And as most here would agree, he’s not required to, though I wouldn’t go as far as some and say that he shouldn’t.)
I think he’s been blindsided by the idea that she could think she’d have been ruined and he’s thinking how close that came to happening anyway, despite having checked all the boxes on his consent worksheet.
Willis had some fun drawin’ some Dina faces here i think
and Dina continues to be a fairly relatable character. i sometimes give way too much eye contact because i was told i dont give enough. nowadays im often told i stare too much. ya cant win with the neurotypicals!
You know that feeling when your pack leader tells you to outflank the psittacosaurus herd and scare them back towards the thicket where the pack is waiting to ambush them, and you trip and they escape, and you just feel like you’re bad at being a deinonychus? it’s sort of like that.
I appreciate so much how Dina can just accept that people are feeling things at face value without trying to fix it.
Like I know some folks are going to find her cold and uncaring here but I don’t get that read off her.
Too many folks (regardless of neurotype) see someone feeling bad and try to fix it. Dina’s able to be with you without trying to fix your mood, so if I was going through hard times she’d be a better support than most people honestly.
Lots going on here for Joe. While he technically did nothing wrong with Liz, he’s still coming off the emotional repercussions of “the list” and how it made the cardboard cutouts he used to just have a bit of sexy fun with into people. People who he discovered he was both degrading and threatening, especially Joyce; who he considers a friend and is possibly in love with, although he apparently doesn’t recognize it yet.
So all of a sudden sex has consequences, when it didn’t use to.
THEN someone comes on to him hard as if she just wants a bit of sexy fun time like he used to have, which rings some alarm bells for him but he decides to ignore – and turns into a total disaster! Which he thinks he might be/probably is responsible for!
Keep in mind that i don’t think he is aware of purity culture, what it does to girls and women, and that her reaction wasn’t about him and had virtually nothing to do with him. It’s all in Liz’s head, thanks to her upbringing. But if he’s not aware of that then he must be thinking that it somehow IS his fault.
Lastly, i wouldn’t be surprised if this is making him reevaluate every sexual encounter and wonder if maybe it’s his fault he’s not in a relationship. And maybe wonder why his father’s relationship(s) didn’t work out either, and does he really want to become his father…?
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Dina: best person for Joe to run into first this morning of shame
Best person for anyone to run into ever, you mean.
See, i originally read that as best person to run into this first morning of shame.
People don’t run into Dina. They go looking, but when they think they’ve found her, the attack comes from the sides.
What a clever girl!
It’s Shame! was my favourite entry in the Walkyverse.
I liked the Western AU, Come Back, Shame!
Baby, look at me and tell me what you see
You ain’t seen the worst of me yet
Give me time, I’ll make you forget the rest
I got more in me and you can set it free
I can crush the mood in my hand
Don’t you know who I am?
Remember I’m lame
I’m gonna cringe forever
I’d like to curl up and die
(Die)
I feel it coming unravelled
People will laugh while I cry
Embarrassment on a new level
Light up my face like a flame
(Shame)
I’m gonna cringe forever
Baby, remember I’m lame
+1
90lbs but it’s a tough 90lbs.
I mean, that can’t be good for Joe’s back.
His abs are basically getting in some free crunches, though.
As far as we know Joe didn’t get a workout in today so Dina probably did him a favor.
Naah the weight is pulling his chest forward so its his lower back taking the strain
About 9 pounds more than that, actually.
Dina Awareness Week Continues
I am always aware of Dina
dude, she’s standing right behind you.
Shame on me…Shame on you
Shame on every little thing…that we do–The Motels
New favorite Dina Moment
Is that Carl photoshopped onto Alucard?
I think it’s straight up dracula actually
I think Schpoonman’s right, actually. Look at this reference image for Dracula:
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/castlevania/images/5/51/DracSymph.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/250?cb=20200703143712
versus for Carl:
https://external-preview.redd.it/YFbzxX_fjB3Myvq-BeH65NlUhNDzaNhOSTB04cP9d6c.png?auto=webp&s=fe2a184ad8b9e07acd850d5b9132025b7c04e198
The thing that made me just about certain is the dent in his nose, right in line with his eyes.
Specifically, it is Dracula from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, with Carl’s face on it.
Alucard is Dracula’s son and game’s protagonist and he wears a completely different set of impossibly fancy goth clothes.
look at Dina
LOOK AT DINA
L̷̛͙̲̥͝O̷̧͉̲̖̪͐̑O̴͎̮̫̰͓̾͝K̶͎̽̚̚ ̷̰̗̅͝͠A̶̧͉̔͗͌̑̚T̵͎̲̠̞͝ ̴̘̯̈D̵̺̊̉̅I̸̹̦̚N̵͈̺͗͗̍̉Ą̸̦̈́̉̾
I’m looking! I’m looking!
Am I doing it right though? I can’t tell.
What’s kind of characters are they: “L̷̛͙̲̥͝O̷̧͉̲̖̪͐̑O̴͎̮̫̰͓̾͝K̶͎̽̚̚ ̷̰̗̅͝͠A̶̧͉̔͗͌̑̚T̵͎̲̠̞͝ ̴̘̯̈D̵̺̊̉̅I̸̹̦̚N̵͈̺͗͗̍̉Ą̸̦̈́̉̾”?
Where I can set into my computer?
Finally I could find someone that can use this characters…
This should be just about what you’re looking for:
https://lingojam.com/GlitchTextGenerator
Very much a case of implementing something without considering how it will be abused. Not LingoJam, but the character encoding for the glyphs to spam outside of the root glyphs base. I wonder how bad it will get, before có̷̩̜̗̩͈͈̮͈̣̹̭̣̘̠̘̽̏̓͑̿̅͊̎̍͂̈́̚ͅuntermeasures are created.
*diac̴̺̜̹̳͂͛̀͂͑̐̑̏̌̓͛͑̌̑͊̉͐̎ͅͅritics
huh. i always thought it was just a cool glitch that had no use outside of memetics. what sort of abuse are we talking about?
f̷̥͖̝̍͊͐͆͂̎̓̀͠i̶͎̲̘̠̬̜͈̘̫̜͎̿̈́̀͂̅̓̈́͛͋̕n̸̤̝̩̯̩͌̃̃͛̚ä̶̧̧̢͇̲̫̳̺̫͙͚̬́̐̓̉̀̑̕ľ̷̯̲̖̲̬̜͖̑̈́̚͜ľ̸̢̛̰̜̯̳̟̱͎̻̱̈̓̈̓̽̊̐́͗͠ͅỷ̴̢͉̬͑̅͘͜, thank you. It will be useful for some… projects.
Climbing Joe is probably pretty fun though. Not in a sexual way (although the ladies might say otherwise) but as in if I was like four foot nothing and was regularly outsized by children physically climbing a six foot plus muscle dude seems entertaining. You could pretend to be a monkey!
Yeah!
It’d be like that one episode of Spongebob where a bunch of kids were climbing on Mr. Krabs dressed as a chicken LOL!!!
Tai climbing Bubbles in QC springs to mind.
hup!
Joe, you confide in Dina right now, I am loving this friendship.
‘Eyyyy! National treasure <3
All this effort, yet there is not a single panel in which they make eye contact.
It looks like they might have been making eye contact in the first panel to me.
I really dig this dynamic. I feel like Dina could be a good presence in Joe’s life tbh.
Speaking as an ace person, I think Dina would be a good person for Joe to discuss his problem with. I don’t know if it’s just me but I tend to view sex in a more abstract way, and Joe would benefit from unpacking what happened with someone who won’t take a moral stance on it.
It’s like . . . skydiving. I have no interest in going skydiving. I potentially might try it if there’s someone I care about who wishes to share that experience, but I’m fine with never going skydiving otherwise. If other people want to go skydiving, I’m not gonna judge them for it; as long as they’re not trying to shove someone out of a plane and everyone’s enjoying themselves, have fun. And the concept of someone having a weird moral stance on skydiving that they think should be used to prevent other people from going skydiving is just absurd.
. . . I think the metaphor got away from me.
Or the idea that if a person ever wants to go skydiving, sometimes with a specific person but sometimes just in general, this is bad and will inevitably end up hurting the person they want to go skydiving with specifically.
Okay, the metaphor falls apart there. But I definitely think in some ways, Dina would be helpful to Joe by saying ‘my girlfriend feels sexual attraction differently than I do, because she will sometimes look at a person and want to have sex with them, whereas I generally don’t. She does not care less for me because she experiences sexual attraction towards people who are not me, and I am not better at her for experiencing sexual attraction only to someone I care about. I trust her not to hurt me because she is sexually attracted to another person, because she chooses not to act on that.’ He could use someone to point out that the issue isn’t being sexually attracted to people other than your partner, it’s the decision to act on that attraction, and him having a sex drive doesn’t doom him to be his father.
And I think Joe, in turn, might be a good resource for the ‘fundies, especially fundies who were raised as girls, tend to have a lot of shame about wanting to have sex’ thing, since he’s seen it several times now, he’s a pretty good reader of people all told and does care a lot more than Sarah or Amber force themselves not to, and he doesn’t have the same stake in this that Joyce or Dorothy would. Dina knows Becky isn’t ready to have sex even if she is attracted to Dina, but I don’t think Dina can totally get JUST HOW BADLY Joyce and Becky’s upbringing hurt them, and how hard it is to defuse some of the more insidious bullshit. (Partly because much like Dorothy, Dina’s a fairly well-adjusted atheist with good parents who never internalized the Local Christian Bullshit, partly because as an ace who’s clearly neurodivergent, Dina seems not to have internalized the American cultural shame about women having sex drives, either.)
Ack, that one could use proofreading.
Nah, it’s a really good point decently delivered. It’s not like we’re writing dissertations here 😀
I think it held up to the end. Good job 🙂
I am told I am a good person to talk about relationship and emotion-stuff with and I assume it’s because, as an Autistic person I spent years researching how to communicate effectively and maintain relationships (my interest is people so I hoard psychology/linguistics/sociological books).
Plus I find my ND friends tend to be less assumptive/more open/ask nonjudgemental clarification questions than NT friends which is good when emotions are happening.
“Interest” has two senses, each with a different negation. Disinterest is not at all the same as uninterest. For example, we want legislators to be disinterested but not uninterested.
Isn’t that interesting?
Actually Joe, it’s roughly 99 pounds:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/04-it-all-returns/superglue/
But you were close though!!!
Nicely spotted, except “99” lb altogether too precise a figure for a species known from a single jaw XD
100 lb makes more sense.
(based on the wikipedia entry, Gregory S. Paul estimated atrociraptor’s weight at 15kg, which does convert to 33 lb, but you realise the fact that Paul landed on a multiple of 5 kg (~10 lb) is not coincidental, they most likely judged that they couldn’t narrow it down to a smaller interval. The same margin of error should be applied, and not doubt is applied by Dina, in the imperial conversion)
Oh, silly me! 😜 what was I thinking?
considering my training I really should know thisI just assume it’s always good ol’ rounding leaving us all these nice easy-to-handle numbers.
well, but the rounding itself is meaningful, innit? it conveys information about the degree of accuracy represented by the estimate. like, 15kg and 15.000kg are in some sense “the same number” but each implies a very different level of precision. It would be a bit goofy for a paleontologist to claim that Atrociraptor weighed “33 lb”. Like, a) there’s definitely enough variation within the species that such a level of precision is not relevant, and b) even going on that one individual specimen, you can’t possibly give this granular an estimate not knowing what the rest of the skeleton looked like, let alone the amount of fat, feathers etc.
I’m sure I didn’t get your point if I’m explaining this to you though :embarrassed:
Anyway, I went and checked the Wikipedia source (“The Princeton Field Guide To Dinosaurs”) via google books, and lo!
here’s what it says exactly (p. 151):
Atrociraptor marshalli
2 m (6 ft) TL, 15 kg (30 lb)
…So going by that, and assuming this is the book Dina is basing her calculation on, she might, in fact, weigh just 90 lb. (disclaimer because this is starting to feel creepy, i do not care AT ALL how much Dina weighs. This is just a fun geeky discussion about paleontology stuff.)
Though if I recall correctly, she did say “roughly”.
I suspect what’s going on in that listing is that they’re rounding both the kilos and the pounds separately – and possibly to different precisions. Kilos to 5 and punds to 10, which would make some sense because it’s roughly the same variance. Rounding both to the nearest 5 would imply the measurement in pounds was more accurate.
Assuming essentially a range of 25-35 lbs, then both suggestions for Dina’s weight are within the possible range of 3 atrociraptors.
I tend to suspect that rather than rather than worry about variance, the author doubled the kilograms and, since it was an estimate anyway, left it at a nice round number. Since the actual factor is 2.2 pounds per kilogram to the nearest hundredth, and assuming that kilograms were primary, as is usual in scientific work, the actual variance is a bit larger, from 27.5 pounds to 38.5 pounds . But 30 pounds is towards the edge of the interval and 33 pounds is the center. Assuming the actual weight is represented by a uniform distribution in the interval, 99 pounds is much more likely to be a better estimate of the actual weight than 90 is. If we assume a normal distribution with cutoff, then 99 pounds becomes even more likely.
This fits in with my assumption that Joe is lowballing her weight for effect, but as thejeff points out, he might still be right.
haha now you ninja’d me after I spent an hour looking for sources for Atrociraptor. Anyway, i’m copy-pasting anyway, because i’m not letting this good (fruitless) work go to waste, although i essentially arrive at the same conclusion via a different logic.
So, scientific (incl. paleontology) papers normally use S.I. units, so the original figure is likely to be 15 kilograms. So i’d say the 30 lb figure is secondary, and is derived from the 15 kg figure.
So 15 kg ± 2.5 kg = 33 lb ± 5.5 lb
But even if Dina is aware of this margin of uncertainty and factors it in, and even though she does say “roughly”, this ends up translating to a weight of between 83 and 116 lb, which starts to be a nonsensically larger bracket for a human.
I think she meant to say she was about 90 lb, and the “roughness” of that figure doesn’t have to do with how wide a net she’s casting around her own weight but rather is meant as a hedge about how much Atrociraptors actually weighed, because who the hell really knows, and also, intraspecific variation.
(caveat: i haven’t been able to track down a source for the 15 kg figure besides the Princeton Guide itself (i thought it might’ve been from the 2004 species description paper but nope) so maybe it was produced by the author of that book (G. S. Paul) for the purpose of a nice consistent list, so who even knows)
NO she meant to say she was about 100 pounds.
sorry! got myself all confused with all them numbers.
See @Clif, THIS is the real reason i don’t nerd out about math.
BECAUSE I SUCK AT IT
actually wait. did she mean 90? did she mean 100? i don’t even know now. i got absorbed in the minutiae and lost sight of the big picture!!!
So i guess: either she counts in S.I. units in her head (possible) and she most likely weighs about 100 lbs.
Or even she doesn’t care THAT much— and if her source is that Princeton Guide, then she’s most likely 90 lbs.
WE’LL NEVER KNOW probably
AKA the best discussion.
Well, no. Fun geeky discussions about math stuff is better. But close.
This was intended as a reply to milu, but I was ninja’d by thejeff.
eh, I won’t follow you into deep math geekery because i have a limit on how much abstraction will hold my attention apparently ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That reminds me of a pet peeve of mine when I was in the military. We would be getting a lecture on something, and give us the specs on some item to a decimal place, when it was pretty obvious that the number was just hard converted from an imperial value, so instead of having to memorize something like 5 to 20 (whatever units), it would be 1.52 to 6.10 or something equally silly.
Good, Job. Let the guilt and shame flow through you.
Also please make eye contact. Neither of you are social beings by nature, but that alone seems to be enough to help the one who who needs help here.
I mean, I guess Job can let the guilt and shame flow through him too, but I meant specifically Joe in this case.
Steve Jobs may have been a jerk a lot of the time, but surely he was the lesser of two evils between him and Bill Gates?
I’d say Bill Gates was the more shrewd businessman. Jobs was more of an ideas guy and pitchman.
Bill Gates funded the research that showed how to hack the photosynthesis process to be hella more efficient which is going to wind up feeding a ton of people, so he gets a large indulgence in my book.
My boy is extremely not okay.
Do you think sometimes Willis forgets which characters he gave beady eyes and which characters he gave eyes with whites?
Sometimes beady-eyed characters get sclera for a panel or strip in order to better convey where their gaze is pointed, or to increase the visual impact of their expression. It’s happened to Walky a few times.
“We two are social beings and we are making a ritualistic connection” is how I flirt with cute people.
I may ave to try that one myself.
Hell, nothing else seems to work.
At least you have some way of flirting with people. I usually don’t bother because I realized years ago that I don’t really know how to flirt, and I can’t tell when someone else is flirting with me either.
Nailed it, Dina
Faces close
Mutual blushing
Jina?
Nah, Dina’s not blushing. Her cheeks always look like that.
Okay, can I say it? Joe’s cute with a blush.
Weirdly, Dina could be a great person for Joe to talk to. He’s pretty good at being blunt no straightforward, it will help him get some distance from the Feelings bit of things here, and Dina would be able to accept the confidence in the actual spirit offered. Maybe she’d even appreciate the bluntness.
Why is it that everytime I reload this page, I get a flash of the strip and my brain automatically thinks they’re gonna make out?
Because that’s what this sort of visual tends to be used for
You know, if Joe and Joyce start dating, and Joyce and Becky don’t make up, things are going to get very awkward between Dina and Joe.
It’s not like they’re particularly close, or even friends. They’re classmates, with mutual friends of a friend
I don’t know, I think both Joe and Dina could be good at separating their relationship with each other from their relationships with SOs.
Bio Besties will maintain their friendship secretly through the divorce.
In other news, DOA has surpassed Girl Genius by 4 votes.
Now we get to slack off and let it run back down to zero.
In the meantime, enjoy the eclipse!
yay ^^
thanks for linking yesterday Clif, i wouldn’t have voted had you not
Just had a look at the list. Good to see Grrlpower at the top, as usual. I am somewhat baffled why all those Pronquest spinoffs are so high on the list, many of those haven’t updated in years.
Probably bots, if I had to guess.
Is it time for Joe to tell someone about his feelings? Be open and honest? Maybe cry a little? I would love to see that! Obviously he feels terrible, but I don’t know if he and Dina are close enough for this kind of confidences. Maybe it would be better if he talked to Danny about it.
That last panel is just awkwardly cute.
Lately, I’m paying less attention to people face. I hope it’s just desinterest…
“Also you’re cleaning your shoes on my sweater”
I just saw the Lunar eclipse on the Blood Moon!
Can you feel the power?!?! 😆😆😆
I’ll bet it enhances dinosaur powers too!!! 🥚
The eclipse was pretty cool, but sadly I don’t think it gave me any powers.
I was disappointed, it was cloudy here last night and I couldn’t see anything. Only could see various recordings by others.
Dina/Joe interactions really work. I hope there are many of them in store.
you know sometimes i think Dina is the least messed up one in the strip …. why is joe upset ….i mean the sister thought she was all that and ready to go but chickened out /had a change of heart other than saying yes in the first place .. he didnt do anything go…. a lot of guys wouldn’t of stopped like he did or would have gotten her so high she couldn’t say no
I mean I’d be a bit rattled if someone referred to having sex w me as “ruining (them)self”
Yeah that.
Joe’s scared of emotional connections with women because his foundation for “an emotional connection with a woman” is his parents’ divorce because his dad kept cheating on his mom.
Now he’s got one of those with Joyce, and it’s scaring the crap out of him even if they’re currently just friends, because Joe barely knows how to handle that with a woman too, and worse, he’s totes mcgotes in love. Right now, Joe can only see himself as his dad and Joyce as his mom*, so if he wants to avoid hurting her then he has to purge himself of the feels, and the way to do that is to process those feels by having sex with Liz, who is exactly like Joyce; he just has to sample the goods and he’ll get over it.
Then Liz begins panicking during sex. This is wrong, it’s horrible, it should be with someone she loves. Having sex with Joe would have ruined her forever. While obviously not pointed commentary at Joe himself, that’s how he’s taking it; he tried to dive back into his comfort zone where no one gets hurt or hurts anyone else, and the both of got hurt.
He lost that stability a long time ago, but now he’s lost the hope of ever going back to it. Joe’s only hope is changing, that thing he feels convinced he cannot do.
*It’s okay, writing it made me as uncomfortable as you felt reading.
I think he may have realized being Mr No-Strings wasn’t the moral highground he thought it was. Because he got a glimpse into how sex without an emotional connection can feel like a mistake to some people.
Oh hey, another new Shortpacked! Don’t look right at it though, you might scare it off.
https://www.shortpacked.com/
Got some musings.
Reading Joe now in contrast with his more confident IW! counterpart, I think the difference is that IW!Joe never had a big, defining moment that made his actions wrong (y’know, on purpose). In the Walkyverse Joe, due to actually getting to grow up, eventually relaxed enough without really losing that edge to him. When Joyce tried to make it hppenl Joe shot her down because he didn’t want to be that person with her and didn’t think it was fair for her to try and make him be that person, until eventually the light clicked on in his own head and by the time he did, Joyce and Walky made it official. In the end he was fine being monogamous with Rachel, he’s still a horny lug but he’s mellowed out enough that it’s directed at his girlfriend. It’s not really “maturity” in the sense that he was promiscuous and now monogamous, he just found happiness with his wife and car daughter.
DoA!Joe, by contrast, is a Joe who’s never going to get to grow up. He’s never going to mellow out with age, so for him to stop being a horndog lech would have to involve something big.
That’s Joyce, again, but more importantly it’s that Joyce made him realize he was wrong.
Joe right now is in a state where he’s lost his confidence in the identity he built thinking it’d be an ideal, and now he’s lost hope he’ll ever be able to run back to it, because he can never change except now even trying to remain static and shallow is going to lead him to hurt the women in his life. He hurt Liz, sex with him would have ruined her forever, and it’d be the same as Joyce (and I’m gonna get back to this). There’s a fun little meta gag going on this conversation, where in It’s Walky! Joe and Dina were specifically contrasted for a storyline as the most and least confident cast members and where Dina was trying to learn to talk to people with his help. Here, though? Dina’s the one in the lead, because for all her social difficulties she’s confident enough to charge through them, whereas Joe here thought he had it all figured out and, much like Joyce and her religious beliefs, it’s all crumbled.
And in writing this, I realized Joe’s status as an Indomitable Sex Monster has actually had pretty positive effect on one person: Dina. Joe knows Sex Things and Dina doesn’t recognize the enforced social boundaries of never talking about sex because it’s icky, he can actually just engage with her on her level by blatantly asking if she gets aroused by things.
There have been implications here and there that even besides Joe’s ability to be compassionate to Joyce, he used to have a richer life and personality that he started to deliberately bury to turn himself into a big ol’ horny bro. He was pretty upset with Amber for not engaging with him and his dad trying to introduce her and Stacy to Hanukkah, I think there’s a strip in the archives or Patreon implying that he used to be pretty studious and bookish as a kid, but for the life of me I can’t remember it. I bring this up to say that DoA!Joe, not getting the chance to mellow out the same way his Walkyverse counterpart has, I think we’re not just going to see him as Joyce’s emotionally supportive frenemy (again, getting to that right after this), we’re going to start seeing the person he used to be as well.
What’s IW!?
It’s Walky! one of the webcomics David Willis did prior to Dumbing of Age, a sci-fi comic about Walky in a secret government agency fighting an alien invasion.
Dumbing of Age is their fifth series, and it takes all but a few of the cast from their previous work and drops them into college.
And now for more trash goblin shipper musings: I don’t actually think Joyce would react the same way Liz did last night.
Probably at this very moment, yes, she’s in a bad state confused about who she is, which was made worse when that big blank void of “who’s Joyce?” had to be turned into an iron fortress defending herself from Becky and Sarah. If Joyce had sex with someone right now it probably would mess her up until she figures out what sex and having sex for the first time mean to her, and if that person was Joe I don’t think she’d really be able to stomach it, I think they’d both feel they ruined things for each other.
They have a connection now (which is a fun little conversation I want to have, but I don’t know how to work it in here so someone please ask me so I can say it), there’s a degree of trust in Joe that Joyce didn’t share with her actual best friends and was totally proven correct in not doing so, they’re both going through the same struggle of being repeatedly mocked for who they were, and having changed, suffering even more for it, and all Joyce knows about her views on sexual purity is that they’re as bullshit as everything else.
I think Joyce is someone who still needs that strong emotional bond to actually go through with it, Joyce at her healthiest is still someone who places a lot of emotional power on sex (relatable), but even disregarding sex within a committed relationship (’cause, you know, she can’t get married to Walky and destroy their hotel room), I don’t actually think Joyce, in a state where she could decide to have sex, would react that badly if it happened with Joe. Yes, he’s her friend, but he’s someone she’s been around the block with, she’s starting to trust him, we’ve gotten two strips indicating that she’s physically attracted to him. Without her beliefs in sex as this inherently defiling, corrupting act, would Joyce actually take it that poorly if she went for it with him?
What are your thoughts on their connection?
Oh, I am ever so glad you asked!
So Joe’s feelings on Joyce are pretty clear: he’s in love with the first woman who believed in him enough to think he can change, and every time she’s got a problem he forces himself to step up regardless of his stated role as Shallow Friend, and then finds a way out of committing to his words while still helping.
(now that I think about it, I wonder how many women his dad had been with thought he could change too)
With Joyce, however, there hasn’t been that much focus. I don’t think she’s into him romantically yet, Joyce would not be subtle about that to the audience, though she’s had two strips to the effect of getting all hot and bothered seeing him in his boxers, that’s a physical attraction in someone who has, until now, thought sex was factually a corrupting, perverse act.
Joyce loves people extremely easily. If you’re a good person, she likes you. When you’re a total jerk, she’s perfectly happy hating you, and between their first date and the time Joyce texted him, Joe was a total jerk to her.
And then Joyce relies on him in a pinch because she knows he has divorced parents, and Joe, having no reason to try and score with Joyce because he already declared her a Zero Minus after their date, immediately sidesteps any of his beliefs in being a real man and emotional connections by just plainly offering advice. Joe doesn’t even realize it, but right there he defied everything he thinks about himself.
Joyce likes all her friends, and after returning to campus Joyce liked Joe because he had proven he was good all along, except Joe immediately tries to reassert their old status quo because he has no reason not to think it’s changed; it was a transaction, he helped, that’s it.
From there, Joyce starts interacting with him more. She gets mad when he’s ogling Leslie in class, but then his clearly painful reaction to talking about marriage causes her to try and reach out to him. Eventually the Do List comes out and Joyce spells in block capital what he’s been doing, and Joe immediately changes himself for the better, except he doesn’t know what better is until, eventually, he lets her down again by sleeping with Malaya, so he declares he’s incapable of changing and starts to performatively return to his old self, and then a few days later Joyce falls asleep on his chest without freaking out in the morning and then Joe tells Jacob to his face that Joyce is going to be perfect one day and missing out on that is a mistake.
Joe never went to Garbage Roof, he’s still not Joyce’s friend, but once they meet again next semester Joyce makes it pretty clear what she thinks of him: he cares, he just won’t admit he cares, but when Becky asks Joyce cares if he cares, Joyce yells back that she does not, at all, in the slightest, no sirree bob, and that’s their current status quo: Joyce is troubled, Joe helps, and then when it comes to admitting he’s helping because he cares, he finds a way out of it:
– Joyce confides in him that she’s an atheist, he acknowledges that it’s huge, so to keep her secret he’ll keep making fun of her.
– Joyce learns she is a monkey, so she flails and panics and screams while Joe tells her being a monkey is great because you can decide for yourself what has meaning, and when he grants her meaning by patting her on the head, Joyce asks if it’s just so they can get back to work and he affirms it.
– Joyce is looking at her phone all sad two times, Joe asks why, and Joyce counters by asking if he’s “that kind of friend now?” to which Joe answers that he’s not. Then both of them land in Amber’s room, Joyce angrily yells that she’ll swear all she wants because nothing she believed in was real and neither are the Gordian knots she tied herself in, and he tells her that even if Heaven and Hell aren’t real, she was, and the person she was mattered. He asks what’s bugging her, she tells him he doesn’t care because she’s a stupid home-schooled girl he made fun of all the time, Joe directly states that she’s more than that to him in what is the closest he’s ever gotten to being honest, and then Joyce says she’s a stupid home-schooled girl with glasses, and Joe rolls with it before offering his advice.
Joyce trusts Joe enough now that she’s fine inviting him to the party they had for Becky’s mom, he was her “friend with rewards program” by process of elimination, sure, but she went in there and lied to Liz about all the awesome sex she had with him and she could do that because she trusted him enough to lie through him. She’s fine with him now, she knows he cares, the support he’s offered to her since the timeskip has genuinely been more helpful than Dorothy’s even, but every time it’s come to the point where Joe is about to confirm that he cares about her, he backs off, and I think that trips Joyce up because she wants to know where they stand. He’s he’s perpetually a step away from being the person Joyce wants him to be, to admit that he already is, but he always pulls back leaving Joyce with his support, but not the admission that he’s supporting her because he cares.
And for someone like Joyce I think that’s frustrating, but in a kind of productive way where the payoff feels worth it. She’s not trying to make him better or change him, she’s waiting for him to admit that the person he’s changing into is who he’s been all along.
Nice musings. And nice symmetry: “she’s waiting for him to admit that the person he’s changing into is who he’s been all along”. I’m not 100% positive that Joe is waiting, but sure Joyce is also in the long way to admitting the same thing.
Interesting reading, and I think you just surpassed yourself in the “longest wall of text” category.
Nah that’d have to be the five part essay with 15 citations where the conclusion ended up being proven wrong the next day.
Oh, I know that feel.
Did you omit the plain donut Joe saved for Joyce?
I find Dina an interesting character. I can relate to some her somewhat due to being autistic and sometimes she acts similar to me, though other times she acts in ways that I wouldn’t. It reminds me that autism is a spectrum and no two autistic people will act the same all the time.
This may be easily one of my favourite strips ever. I want to see Dina’s input on current Joe situation sooo much!
Agreed that I want to see Dina’s take on the situation. Honestly, I’m surprised at his “shame”. He really has changed. My view of his actions (albeit coloured by his past behaviour gives him a low bar to get over) is that he did a great job. He carefully considered the situation when Liz arrived, and didn’t pressure her to keep going when they were in heat.
He did good on that front but Liz’s regret gave him a window into how his past behavior may have affected other partners. He always thought of casual sex as a mutually good time and never considered that there might be deeper emotions at play. He scoffed at Danny’s idea that an emotionally vulnerable Billie might have later regretted sex. Now he’s realizing there might be some truth to it.
Yes, I love seeing his character development, I’d say he’s one of my fav characters now. I’m not really surprised though, I’d be pretty devastated if someone told me they almost ruined their life by doing something with me. He did the best he could and I’m pretty sure he knows where Liz is coming from but that gotta hurt. Even more when you have a crush on someone from a similar background.
I’m not sure how much he carefully considered the situation when Liz arrived – other than what we saw about how he could use it get over Joyce. I don’t think he put much thought into what it might mean for her, how it might affect her or if she was really as ready as she was presenting. (And as most here would agree, he’s not required to, though I wouldn’t go as far as some and say that he shouldn’t.)
I think he’s been blindsided by the idea that she could think she’d have been ruined and he’s thinking how close that came to happening anyway, despite having checked all the boxes on his consent worksheet.
“Not until you say the safe word”.
Willis had some fun drawin’ some Dina faces here i think
and Dina continues to be a fairly relatable character. i sometimes give way too much eye contact because i was told i dont give enough. nowadays im often told i stare too much. ya cant win with the neurotypicals!
not sure how i feel about being daisy. lemme see what this gives me
Shame, you say? What is this human emotion?
You know that feeling when your pack leader tells you to outflank the psittacosaurus herd and scare them back towards the thicket where the pack is waiting to ambush them, and you trip and they escape, and you just feel like you’re bad at being a deinonychus? it’s sort of like that.
I appreciate so much how Dina can just accept that people are feeling things at face value without trying to fix it.
Like I know some folks are going to find her cold and uncaring here but I don’t get that read off her.
Too many folks (regardless of neurotype) see someone feeling bad and try to fix it. Dina’s able to be with you without trying to fix your mood, so if I was going through hard times she’d be a better support than most people honestly.
Lots going on here for Joe. While he technically did nothing wrong with Liz, he’s still coming off the emotional repercussions of “the list” and how it made the cardboard cutouts he used to just have a bit of sexy fun with into people. People who he discovered he was both degrading and threatening, especially Joyce; who he considers a friend and is possibly in love with, although he apparently doesn’t recognize it yet.
So all of a sudden sex has consequences, when it didn’t use to.
THEN someone comes on to him hard as if she just wants a bit of sexy fun time like he used to have, which rings some alarm bells for him but he decides to ignore – and turns into a total disaster! Which he thinks he might be/probably is responsible for!
Keep in mind that i don’t think he is aware of purity culture, what it does to girls and women, and that her reaction wasn’t about him and had virtually nothing to do with him. It’s all in Liz’s head, thanks to her upbringing. But if he’s not aware of that then he must be thinking that it somehow IS his fault.
Lastly, i wouldn’t be surprised if this is making him reevaluate every sexual encounter and wonder if maybe it’s his fault he’s not in a relationship. And maybe wonder why his father’s relationship(s) didn’t work out either, and does he really want to become his father…?