It’s a type in pokemon. Only weak to fighting. Widely considered the neutral type since it doesn’t have many strengths or weaknesses offensive or defensively. Interestingly enough the only type in the game that can’t hit for super effective damage.
Also it’s attacks don’t work on ghost types and vice versa. I really prefer Dragons Fairy and Psychic I started Gen 1 where despite few dragons they were open same with Psychic also I like Fairy beacuse it converted some normal types into actually useful mons.
This makes so much sense. Also why Amber, a Fighting type, couldn’t get rid of Mike for how long, as Ghost can affect Fighting but Fighting can’t affect Ghost.
Wouldn’t even be that hard. Spearow can be caught at like level 3 and Fearow is quite strong for that game and Dodrio even more so later. You can snag Clefairy in Mt Moon, and about halfway thru the game you can get a pair of Snorlax and then it’s just over.
Or literally any game. Normals are some of the most versatile types, and many are extremely powerful. They have an insane number of dual types, not to mention get STAB on Return an early-game move with a max power over 100, as long as you’re playing older gens.
Playing through as literally any other type is far more of a challenge.
If you’re really looking for a challenge, you could try ironmon or Kaizo randomizer challenges. Watching a streamer try (and fail, repeatedly, literally over a thousand times) to beat Kaizo is what got me hooked back in.
Normal is a continuous probability distribution that is symmetrical on both sides of the mean, so the right side of the center is a mirror image of the left side.
A miserable little pile of secrets. But enough talk, have at you!
(Other possible answers included “the force one object exerts upon another perpendicular to its face”, and the more serious “an aggregation/average of common perception”)
Normal is a vector parallel to the axis of rotation (direction determined by the right hand rule) with a magnitude equal to the angular velocity or momentum. In other words, every attempt to present something as normal is pure spin.
“Normal” is what characterizes the situation of the overwhelming majority of people. In other words, what’s normal is the anxiety of watching the world around us going to shit at an accelerating rate while we are powerless to effect any sort of change, because the people who call the shot, they are not normal and they don’t care.
Le Corbusier said that: “A house is a machine for living in.”
I think of that a lot.
A body is a machine for living.
A brain is a machine for thinking.
A heart is a machine for feeling.
A community is a machine for growing.
A planet is a machine for holding and sustaining us all.
A job is a machine that pumps out money in exchange for work.
So when I have a certain thought, or a set of repetitive thoughts or behaviors or actions, or a certain food, or expose myself to certain people, I can ask myself:
“Is this good fuel for my machine?
Will this help me keep my machines running?
How long do my machines have to run to get the job done? How can I keep them in good working order long enough?”
I think about that a lot.
Nothing we experience is forever.
It’s not even long.
It’s just a certain set of tasks that need to be accomplished before we can finish, and a certain set of inputs (food, money, love, hope, pride, self-worth, community…) that allow us to get those tasks done.
…Maybe that doesn’t make sense. I’m sorry — I’m tired, and I’m very, very sad right now.
But it does help, I think, if I can think of my life as a table to be balanced, a set of instructions to be fulfilled, a project to be done.
Maybe that helps others cope with uncertainty, too.
I think Joyce is coping with a lot of uncertainty right now.
A brain is a machine for thinking and feeling. A heart is a machine for pumping blood. Many of the things you mention are indeed machines, but that is not all that they are. Analyzing them solely as machines can be misleading.
Just I think it’s worth noting that the definition of a “machine” is not necessarily universal, and as they are able to do more and more every day, more and more what we once thought was common sense about “machines” is getting thrown out the window as we speak.
Machine — an apparatus using or applying mechanical power and having several parts, each with a definite function and together performing a particular task. — Oxford Languages.
Humans are more than an apparatus. Relationships are not things. Electrical power is not mechanical power. Joy is not a task.
I dunno. I often think of emotions and relationships as tasks.
Balance sheets. They’re transactional.
Like when I comment on a website or attend a social event I’m building social capital with that community, which may potentially be available for debiting when needed later. Putting in face time.
Like how some parents can pencil out “quality time” for their kids, specifically for bonding, because bonding is healthy for the kids. Logging the hours to get the job done. Because they care about the job of raising healthy kids.
People sometimes think that’s cynical and heartless, but I don’t think so. It doesn’t seem that way to me, anyway. “Ruthless and calculating,” is sometimes just figuring out the right thing to say at the right time to meet the needs of the situation and the people around. That can be a form of caring — like how Dorothy approaches the people around her as puzzles to solve. Because she cares about them.
Personally very much not a fan of mind/body dualism, as it leads to all kinds of crazy non-disprovable and harmful beliefs, like souls, or that people can “overcome” their “sinful” biological impulses, or that mental disorders are willpower problems.
Also, mechanical power *is* electrical power. Mechanical motion between two objects on the macro level is just electrical repulsion on an atomic level.
Besides the fact that machines’ parts can use electrical and electro-chemical power like human brains do, if a “machine” is able to perform more than one task and/or any of it’s parts are able to fulfill multiple needs of the whole thing functioning, does it suddenly cease to be a “machine”?
Le Corbusier was a fascist (in the literal sense that he was part of fascist league with the actual word fascist in it). I wouldn’t trust him with any kind of philosophy.
Really! Wow! I had no idea. So odd… I studied Le Corbusier extensively in college and they never talked about his fascism.
…Which is weird, because they talked a lot about the political movements associated with other styles of architecture and decor. Why would they omit Le Corbusier? Did I just blank that part out? Man… now I’m questioning my memories!
So bizarre that I could have learned so much about the man and never hear of his politics.
This was decades ago, though, so maybe the architecture professors weren’t as conscious of political nuance back then? Hm…
There was an expo lately in the Pompidou center for modern arts where they were criticized for it and they said: “but we alreedy told that part 35 years ago!”. That’s always the same bullshit when speaking about fascist France: the myth is that the resistance was everywhere. Hint: it wasn’t, and there isn’t an excuse like in germany where potential resistants were murdered before with the blessing of the right wing socio-democrats. In the eastern part of the country, people were force integrated in the SS, so you can’t even speak of people who didn’t got forced bc it’s a “sore point” and it’s insensitive to call out that not all were force integrated.
From 45, all Europa is a shitstorm, because capitalism needed nazis friend to be pardoned to keep the infrastructures in place, and France particularly so. Shit, Céline and Cioran, sometimes even Drieu, are still considered as great authors (wtf did they do that other didn’t? You can’t exist alone in arts, you always successor and predecessor to someone at least, breaking points arent like in sciences a moment of invention but a gradual change influences by a whole society) and their antisemitism is always camouflaged under “nihilism” or “misanthropism” syndroms.
So yeah, I lived in many cities with one or more building designed by Le Corbusier, got some architect friends for years, and nowhere I read about it, until I actually met some local historian that was pissed about how it’s now an indisputed figure – while it has with modulor a clear patriarcal bia (he built for 180 cm men!), and he was not only a fascist follower but leader!
Yeah, Jennifer was a little defensive there. Question hit a little too close to home there, Jennifer?
Love the alt-text: “Are you there, Joyce? It’s me, Billie.” (hat tip to Judy Blume)
Also love Jennifer’s choice of words. I think she started out saying, “sloppy empathetic,” as in “sloppy drunk,” or “sloppy lovey-dovey”. She caught herself, though, because she knows Joyce is NEVER sloppy! So instead she said, “slipshod empathetic”. As in, someone who walks their shoes so far and on such rough roads that they’ve worn the heels all down to holes. Slipshod.
The most careful and care-full choice of word for someone who is all worn out from caring so much about too much and too many.
…Jennifer is a “word nerd” if I ever heard her! ;-D
(Sorry if my words come out wrong. My brain’s all sloppy right now.)
Finally figured out how to search by character tag for multiple people, which made it easier to narrow down to that strip. Not even sure this is the only example given Ruth’s an english major.
Flubbed my email address when trying to change the punctuation to get a new gravitar sorry. Wish there was a way to delete or edit. The typoed address doesn’t exist so reposting this again if you see this Willis just discard the previous one.
A word nerd and several other kinds of nerd too. There’s a good reason she speaks nerd she just won’t admit it. Reminds me of the protagonist of Shinozaki-san Ki wo Ota Shika ni! (“Don’t become an otaku, Shinozaki-san!)
Just out of curiousity, do you ever see yourself explicitly saying your characters are neurodivergent or specifically autistic in the novel or official author answers to questions your future fans will have about them?
Not within the novels themselves since they’re historical/fantasy and as such the terms do not yet exist. A similar issue occurs with their orientation and gender identities (cis female, bi and genderfluid, bi) – everything is shown, but nothing is explicitly told.
As for interviews, if any were to occur, then yes – I would have no issue discussing the symptoms they both express. What that necessarily means, even I’m not entirely sure yet. I’m still getting used to my own paradigm shifts on the matter.
Thanks!
Here’s hoping we pick up a new publisher soon. Our poor readers, few though they may be, have been waiting over two years for the next book in the series to be released.
Several times now I have come close to posting an Oprah Winfrey joke about “You get autism! And YOU get autism!” but kept second-guessing myself about hurting someone’s feelings, so glad I can just respond to anl similar post
I’m having the opposite response. I had a relatively similar(ish) upbringing to Joyce and I just got diagnosed with ADHD as an adult. And my reaction to my diagnosis has ranged from “wow! everything makes sense now!” to “huh, that tracks,” kinda like everybody else in the cast reacting to Joyce’s diagnosis. I self diagnosed a few months before I got a doctor to confirm it, so maybe that’s different. And I have siblings who were diagnosed a long time ago. And ADHD is different than Autism and the stigmas are a lot different. But still. Her intense reaction doesn’t match mine at all. It’s weird so soon after my own diagnosis.
Mm, I think a big part of it is stigma, though. ADHD, which I have, is often seen as “quirky” or “eccentric,” at least in the way it presents in me and in my region/local culture.
Whereas autism has a stigma specifically about being unempathetic or a jerk. Or dangerous / on the verge of having a “meltdown.” I have never heard anyone blame violence or murder on ADHD.
But, I have heard people credit a person’s violent actions to autism, and even say aggressive or harassing behavior should be tolerated when the aggressor is autistic (either allegedly or confirmed).
Autism is also stigmatized as something that makes people bad at friendship or relationships. And it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Autistic adults are 4x more likely to attempt suicide than non-autistic adults. The most frequently cited reason is loneliness and social isolation.
Obviously, these stigmas are not inherent to autism. Plenty of autistic people are non-violent, non-aggressive, and have deep, committed relationships.
But I definitely can see an autism diagnosis be incredibly jarring, especially if someone believes that autism = unempathetic, given the cultural assumptions. If the diagnosed person doesn’t match the stereotype, what does that mean?
I kinda wonder if things would’ve been better or worse for me if I had gotten diagnosed as a kid. I might have understood myself and why I acted the way I did better much earlier, but at the same time I feel like there were a lot more misconceptions about autism among the scientific community back when I was a kid than there are now.
This is something I’ve often wondered about in regards to my husband. It’s possible he would have gotten targeted help (his parents cared, in theory)… but it’s equally possible that even with well-intentioned parents he would have been treated horribly by therapists and other specialists of the time.
Like, we’re talking back in the 90s here. I was diagnosed with ADHD, something with significantly less stigma at the time (though not without its own problems, like being put on a ~gifted~ pedestal), and was still not given nearly enough tangible help. So, when it comes to autistic stuff… feels like a tossup between ‘helpful’ and ‘shitty’, really. :C
Getting an autism diagnosis and disclosing of it as a kid was and still is a major risk of putting a target on your back for really unfair treatment from friends, family, teachers and “professionals” that include not only denigrating infantilization, but also dehumanization, [⚠️TW] physical and psychological abuse and even legally justified torture[END TW] in some cases.
To make matters worse, it can actually even make it harder to understand yourself in many cases on the account of the misconception that other people and “professionals” can know your brain that much better than you do, thinking all autistics are more or less the same — in the beginning stages of untangling your unique stripes after you’ve discovered you’re neurodivergent, this toxic pitfall is one that’s all too easy to fall into, and can quickly lead to the voices of others drowning our your own. To add insult to injury, it can also be reinforced by a sense of “betrayal” you could sense in others when you don’t act like how people expect you to act, how they think autistics are “supposed” to act.
Spite the trigger warning, I’m really sorry if cataloging the potential pitfalls of disclosing of autism upset anyone here. I do this out of a place of compassion, because I think it’s only fair that newly discovered neurodivergents know what they could be in for and pitfalls to avoid so that they can have a safer, smoother time with others and themselves as they undertake their personal neurodivergent journeys.
You Never Give Me Your Money
You only give me your funny paper
And in the middle of negotiations
You break down
I never give you my number
I only give you my situation
And in the middle of investigation
I break down…
If we want to get really technical, then Stephen is quoting “You Never Give Me Your Money” but Joe is quoting “Carry That Weight”. Both part of the Abbey Road medley but 2 separate tracks!
… yes, the Beatles were/are one of my Special Interests.
I…thought that was song lyrics from some pop punk song but I’m currently too high to recognize the song, so I thought it was one I don’t know. Those are good lyrics, I’m havin’ ’em.
Social Mimicry is pretty basic human behaviour. Part of why we’ve been so successful, not only are we smart enough to figure shit out we’re pretty good at sharing that information with other humans
True.
Then again, this kinda reminded me of the time I overdid it. Was giving a talk, one of the professors had questions, I replied, kinda mirroring his demeanor.
Turns out everyone else perceived this guy as attacking me, and me as fighting back – meanwhile, I was just having a good time XD
I’ve wondered if Billie/Jennifer was autistic before, actually. Her fixation on the nerds/popular-kids dichotomy screams “managed to form a very strict understanding of social dynamics and resists any attempts to modify that understanding because it makes sense to her and she’s used to it”.
Alison Bechdel has a comic strip about that kind of confirmation bias. One partner is reading a self-help book and says, “Oh, no! According to this quiz we’ve got ‘sex addiction’ and ‘lesbian bed death’ at the SAME TIME!” When you peer too long into the Rorschach test, the Rorschach test also peers back at you. Any given diagnosis can be a mirror to see bits and parts of oneself in sometimes.
it can be an interesting lens to apply! I also have a hot take that, because of the way characters are written in the language of fiction, MOST characters are coded at least a little autistic, but that’s a huge can of worms and I think these comments sections are a little too literal and pedantic for it to be anything other than exhausting.
the basic gist is that because characters in stories tend to be simpler than real people, and tend to be written in such a way that their interests and insecurities and flaws can be conveyed very easily (and I’m an entertaining manner) to the audience, they actually come across as having special interests and rituals and communication problems. there’s other stuff, too, but that’s the short version. we’re just numb to it because it’s such a default way of writing the days.
I think it’s more an inherent limitation of fiction, because, you know, it’s not real. Reality is far more complicated than we can perceive; and every personality is an epic
, some of which will go over that personality’s head. I forger how many books are in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, but I’m sure Mr. P left a lot of stuff out without meaning to.
I do agree with you that authors often have to take shortcuts, and the end result can be characters that come off as simplified compared to real people. I don’t know that I’d say it particularly makes them come off as autistic, though?
(I do legitimately think your theory is interesting, though, so I hope this doesn’t come off as overly critical…? I just think that in this situation the cookie can crumble in more than one way, and ‘seems autistic’ is only one of those outcomes.)
I think the ways in which they seem “simpler” can line up a lot with autistic presentation, and especially with autistic coding. Like, for a very childish example, take a character in a children’s cartoon. Like, Applejack. Applejack is always talking about apples and her farm, because that’s her character thing, she’s a farmer. But it also tends to make her seem kind of obsessed with apples. Applejack also tends to state her feelings very plainly, because all children’s show characters do that, it’s how the audience knows how they feel. Adult media does this, too, just to a less silly extent. However, this is something many autistic people do–we can’t always convey how we’re feeling through nonverbal cues, or it’s stressful to try, so we prefer to air things out in the open.
Joyce looks to be developing a version of the Baby Gay “wait, is everybody gay?” phase we all went through. And going by the cast of this comic, the answer might be yes! ^_^
Like, do I find them sexually attractive? No. Can I recognise that Ryan Reynolds or Jensen Ackles or whoever are handsome? Sure. In the same way that I look at tanzanite and go “hey, that’s a really pretty gemstone”.
For the record, I genuinely don’t. Like I can recognize whether a man looks pleasant or not, but not what makes them attractive. It would have been nice if it were otherwise but I’m stuck with it.
She was waiting for the one clean shower stall at one point when they were banging in there (before [Sarah?] came in and explained that the stall would no longer be clean when they were finished. Although that might have been in the slipshine and not the comic proper?
Thanks for the explanation of ‘slipshod’ – this was way more helpful than the translation I looked up. Now it may even have a chance to stick to my passive vocabulary.
I would comment on the comic itself, but my mind is distracted by trying to figure out who that portrait in the bottom left of the first panel is supposed to be. It doesn’t quite seem to match any characters I can think of off the top of my head.
Not surprising; but a lot of friends; who are on the spectrum, I have had are some of the most genuine, passionate, and empathetic people I know.
Its almost like some “normal” parts of us can make us inherently shittier people; and we gotta work passed that to be better.
All that aside; Jennibilliefer is gonna have to face the fact that her “normal” has always been something she believed she needed to be in order to fit in. Whether or not that involved being thrown across a room, or making weird drunken pacts. . . I dunno; I’m not her therapist.
It’s not like people with Autism are emotionless automatons, it’s just that the way those feelings are expressed and interpreted can be a bit haywire. Uncontrollably laughing at intensely stressful situations, under- or over-emoting where a situation doesn’t call for it, not hiding reactions when a neurotypical person would…
One of the biggest misconceptions about autistic people is that we lack empathy. We have empathy, we just don’t express our feelings the same way that neurotypical people do.
Re: the last panel; Billie was being a bit obtuse when saying “everyone has those thoughts and acts on them sometimes” because in-comic she has never described herself as queer or bisexual (if I recall she once even said bisexual is not a real word, just a porn catergory) BUT she’s not entirely wrong. There are very few people who fall into a 0 or 6 in the Kinsey scale, meaning most people can at least appreciate what is attractive about someone that is not their usual preferred partner.
So “everyone” is perhaps a bit too broad, but she’s mostly correct.
Two-spirit is a native-specific term which has been in use for a very long time. It recently became more widely known because native voices have started being heard on social media like TikTok.
I implore non-natives to PLEASE not use this term to describe themselves. It is a term with cultural significance to us which I encourage you to google if you’re curious, but please not appropriate.
To be clear: Not saying you were being appropriative here, Wellerman, you only mentioned it and I wanted to A) Explain where it was from and B) Use the conversation to make my usual request of non-native folk.
Thank you so much for letting me know, I definitely don’t want to be appropriative and will definitely keep this in mind as I discuss the concept with others!
I didn’t know you were native! I think that’s so cool! 😃
If you’re OK with me asking, which tribe(s) are you part of?
Also while we’re still on the topic, do you know if any native tribes had their own concepts of neurodivergence and/or descriptors for neurodivergents that they developed separately from colonists?
The Wellerman, while I recognize your questions about queerness and neurodiversity in First Nations cultures come from a place of curiosity and not malice, I will flag that it’s not really fair to expect a Native person to drop their day and educate you. This is a particular form of racism that many folks who are visual minorities experience – and I didn’t realize it myself until I saw how often people expect my partner to be a walking single person native culture and history museum when he just wants to be a game writer and live his life.
Reliable sources to answer those kinds of questions include Navajo and Autism: The Beauty of Harmony (free access pdf), The Cultural Context of Neurodiversity, among others. Short version is that many First Nations cultures prior to Colonial genocide efforts didn’t typically pathologize the way colonial societies do (note: I’ll flag that the Mi’kmaq of the region we call Atlantic Canada and Northern Maine are as far away from the Tututni of what we call Oregon as Germany is from the Republic of Congo, so making sweeping generalizations isn’t wholly appropriate since FN cultures are every bit as diverse as cultures of any other continent). Like gender diversity, many FN cultures accepted various forms of neurodiversity as just different people prior to colonization, but a lot of culture was lost over the several century long cultural genocide campaigns of the various Colonial powers so in some cases it’s hard to say.
(I’m flagging my race here mainly because I want to make it clear I do not speak with lived experience on these issues but more that I see what my partner deals with. I’m more familiar than most white people because of who my partner is but by no means am I an expert.
As well – Nova please feel free to tell me to back off if I’ve overstepped, I just saw behavior my partner finds tiring and figured I’d flag it)
Oh also & Wellerman, not saying you were making a sweeping generalization but more that North American culture has a tendency to treat all FN cultures as a monolith when there was huge diversity in language, technology, cultural beliefs and values, religion, and way of life. Some of the agrarian communities in the Great Lakes region had beadwork that served a similar purpose to Western writing, for example, while the some cultures were relatively warlike, and the Wabanaki Confederacy was/is a huge multinational trade alliance and mutual aid pact spanning almost the full Eastern quarter of North America, as a few examples. And of course there’s the famous superstructures of the Mayans and Aztecs, etc.
You have not overstepped! I found it honestly a relief and I appreciate you being an ally. Your wife found a very good partner it seems, so thank you very much for speaking up.
Thank you for letting me know ischemgeek, I definitely don’t want to come off like I’m pressuring members of visual minorities like that and want to make it more clear in my future writinf that it’s their choice whether or not they want to answer and completely respect their choice 🙏
Thank you for pointing me in this direction and telling me the short version. I hope one day societies all over the world can learn from example of FN cultures in regards to neurodivergent acceptance, so hopeful for the future, so happy, so grateful for you telling me this, thank you so much 😭
Also sorry I didn’t see what you posted about how diverse native tribes and their cultures are.
Totes with you on that one, many people in America all too easily fall into the mistake of lumping all natives into one overly generic category, where the reality is that these many many tribes spanned thousands of miles and were often times geographically and linguistically isolated from each other and developed their cultures and societies very differently. Example to my knowledge, the part of North America now known as the states of California and Oregan, prior to the colonial era, had some of the greatest linguistic diversity in the entire world.
TL;DR what’s true of one tribe can definitely never be assumed to be true of any other.
Makes me all the more happy to know just how many different non-western concepts of neurodivergence there are that I can learn from, thank you again so much, very grateful that you share this
The Kinsey scale was an important bit of queer history, but IRL it’s pretty reductive. I’m enby and consider myself a queer lesbian because I’m predominantly attracted to women and never men, but the actual traits that I’m attracted to (femininity, particular ways of holding the body/moving/ways of interacting) are also common with nonbinary people, too, regardless of assigned gender.
I specifically call myself queer or lesbian, and not something like bisexual, because people assume that bi people are attracted to men and I don’t want anyone to think that about me ever.
I think at some point the language has to evolve a bit more – right now we primarily talk about who we love in reference to our own genders. Homo/heterosexual and hetero/homoromantic are both ‘the gender the same as/opposite to me’. Bi and pan (probably being younger in modern vocabulary) are smarter since they don’t do it but they’re still too broad for some.
My friend only publicly came out as trans recently and we laugh about the idea that ‘the gayest person in the world’ is suddenly ‘straight’ because of how we’re supposed to express things. But I’m going through a bit of a ‘fuck labels’ phase, so whatever, I guess.
Just out of curiosity, given that I’m a gender-fluid slick who flows through genders that are mostly feminine or don’t quite belong in either binary, and am attracted to feminine features that can be found on NBs too, what would my orientation be called? Does my orientation even have a name yet?
Hmmm, if one is attracted to multiple genders for certain traits like that but not all genders, I think that is called poly-sexual? I could be thinking of something else tho.
I tried that one out, but it’s essentially the same as bisexual (attraction to same and other genders), only it requires explanation to anyone with a beginner’s sex literacy. If I’m gonna explain sexualities to someone, then I rather enjoy discussing the evolution of the lesbian identity from invert to women-attracted-to-women to the queered notion of lesbian as a cultural/community identity based on life experiences, as well as attraction. (gonna stop with that otherwise I WILL write a 2000 essay on the subject instead of this assignment I’m avoiding lol)
Bruh, totally get it! I’m much the same way about neurodivergence. Basically everywhere but here I describe my neurodivergent stripes actively anticipating lack of literacy much the same way you expect that when describing your stripes of sexual orientation.
Also, as we speak I am resisting the urge to write whole essays here on the philosophy of AI and cognition regarding Joyce’s “machine” comment. Neuro-fluid! 😅
That’s exactly why I used to call myself pansexual but now just use bi. The straights generally understand bi and I don’t feel like giving “sexual orientation diversity 101” every time I disclose I’m not straight. And it’s close enough. (And generally I think pan is a subset of bi although I realize that’s not a universal opinion)
I agree with the Kinsey scale being a bit reductive. And your comment is actually fascinating to me because I think we might have similar preferences, but chose a different way to express it (with the important distinction that my preferences seem a little less absolute than yours, if I’m reading this right).
If someone needs to know, I’ll call myself bi/pan because, in the end, gender identity will not invalidate my attraction to someone, ever. However… I am definitely mostly into people who are in the more femme-androgynous spectrum of gender presentation. I have liked cis men/characters before, but 99% of men that people say are hot have me squinting in confusion like… really? You think that’s hot? Can’t relate LOL.
And this is coming from someone who used to identify as a gay man before I realized it was okay if I liked women too. So I can say with certainty that the things I’m attracted to REALLY do not tend to line up with what other people into men generally think are hot OMG
But yeah, anyway, words are just to communicate concepts so in the end you should go with what works best for you day-to-day. And if that’s summarizing yourself as lesbian instead of bi, then cool. Makes sense to me! 😀 Ever since I came out as nonbinary, I myself have trended more and more toward calling myself queer over any other label. If someone wants to know more specifics, I can elaborate as needed.
Actually, that’s called ✨ aesthetic attraction✨
You have sexual attraction: i see that thing and it makes me wanna fuck it
Romantic attraction: i wanna love the shit out of you
And aesthetic attraction: damn that sure is nice to look at
Aesthetic attraction is often mixed up with sexual attraction when it comes to people. Most monosexuals can look at a hot person from their non preferred gender and go “yeah i get it”. When a straight guy looks at, Jason Mamoa for example and say he’s hot, it’s not necessarily “damn he makes me horny” but more like, “damn he’s nice to look at.” It’s like when you see a really beautiful painting. It can be breathtaking, but you don’t really wanna fuck it.
This distinction is important in asexuality, and helped me and my boyfriend realize we’re ace. So, the more you know ✨
Yeah, theoretically there are very few people who are absolutely 100% on either end of the scale, but Jennifer went well beyond that, even if she was technically correct. She was using it to deny that she fit in a queer category. To maintain that she was “normal”.
Mostly to herself of course. It’s pretty clear she never hid the relationships, just what they meant about her.
Regarding exorcism, what pains me most of all is seeing human hosts getting subjected to torture that thinks it can justify itself in the name of religion.
Demons are not always bad, in fact we can be very important in helping the daily function of and even personal empowerment of our human hosts. 😊😈
Demon or not, only 50% of all cells in the body are human — the rest are the microbiome, which includes bacteria, microscopic insects, symbiotes and parasites and other little critters that do really important work. Without them, you wouldn’t even be able to survive a meal.
Judging by what I just read about it on TV tropes while not falling down that nearly endless internet rabbit hole (phew!!!!)
It’s like Dumbing of Age and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure had a baby! Fucking SWEET, gotta check that out some time! 🤩
On the same vein of demon webcomics, my favorite by far HAS to be Erma, who is just one of the sweetest and coolest and most adorable demon girls in the world. 😭
No really, next to Dina, Erma has got to be one of my most favorite webcomic characters EVER 🥰🥲
Jennifer really is a great friend ♡. She accepts to be Billie again for Joyce’s sake and she is doing a formidable effort to calm her. But Joyce continues to push her facing things she wants to avoid, this is not nice at all! We don’t know what happened to Jennifer and Ruth, but she’s still suffering from that and Joyce seems wanting to do even possible effort for reopening the wounds. I wonder if she thinks that because she is suffering, everybody has to suffer a little with her.
Platitudes are nice and all but sometimes you actually want the truth, and you’ve gotta point out the flaws in those platitudes to get there. What reassurance is it that Jennifer thinks imitating people is normal, if Jennifer can’t be trusted to know what’s normal?
Point out where the logic fails, and maybe you’ll get a real explanation. One that you can actually believe.
The real question: is Jennifer coming to Joyce knowing that she will prod her to look where she’s been refusing to look for some time? Or is she so blinded by her alpha-bongo trip that this is an unwelcome surprise?
I appreciate that Jennifer came here to offer Joyce support about periods/birth control, but has pivoted to offering support about Joyce’s discovery that she may be autistic pretty seamlessly. She’s being a good friend here. Which is not a thing Joyce has been getting a lot of lately!
(I think it might be useful to, instead of sorting the people in Joyce’s social circle into “good” friends and “bad” friends, distinguish between good friend *behavior* and not-good behavior. Like, Dorothy’s intentions towards Joyce have always been positive—she wants good things for her, she wants to see her succeed academically and have a strong social network, and grow and learn and be happy as a person—but some of the way that’s been manifesting lately has been as pressure and judgment at points when Joyce needed *support*. That doesn’t mean she’s a bad friend or that historically has never been a good friend, it just means she’s not behaving as a good friend right now, in Joyce’s current circumstances and with her current struggles. Jennifer wasn’t being a good friend to Joyce when she distanced herself from her as part of her latest self-reinvention—but today, she HAS acted as a good friend to Joyce, by giving her support and advice at the right tenor for Joyce to hear it. This may or may not lead to a revitalization of this friendship, but even if it doesn’t, it’s still meaningful. And as long as Jennifer doesn’t set up any expectations of being a more regular presence in Joyce’s life that she has no plans to meet, it’s not necessarily a bad thing to be the friend who only really shows up in a crisis, and doesn’t stick around day-to-day.)
But only when directed outwards. Her self-awareness…needs work. And when the outwards and inwards butt up against each other, historically she doesn’t react super well.
If only we could combine Jennifer’s emotional intelligence with regards to other people with Becky’s remarkable self-awareness, we might have like…one functional human being.
I feel like Becky’s self-awareness comes in fits and spurts, given how easily she’s shifted from “No this thing is too much for how I Christian” to “HEY EVERYONE LOOK AT THIS THING I DID”.
This is not to say she isn’t any kind of self-aware, but she wouldn’t be my go-to. Daisy on the other hand, knows herself, her limits, and what she needs/wants. Not sure who I’d pick as a go-to in the main cast though. They pretty much all do a lot of lying to themselves.
I say self-aware, not that she’s great at acting constructively ON that self-awareness. Like, she understands exactly what she needs from Joyce, and can name it, but won’t acknowledge how massively unfair that is to Joyce, or back off from requiring it from her. She knows the origin of her sexual hang-ups and can talk about them with her partner, but she can’t just turn them off or prevent them from sabotaging her relationship or her enjoyment of sex (I don’t mean she and Dina are DOOMED DOOOOOOOOOOOOOMED when I say ‘sabotage,’ but we have absolutely seen her issues with sex and desire put painful pressure on them both). She just strikes me as someone who has a lot of clarity about her feelings and emotions—what they are, where they come from —without that making her any better at handling them than your average 18-year-old. (I might be off-base here, but I suspect some of this probably comes from having been closeted in self-defense for many years, and having to do a lot more self-interrogation in relation to her ultra-conservative Christian upbringing than Joyce did before they both left for college. You have to pay a lot of attention to yourself in order to hide yourself effectively from danger. Plus, it seems to be pretty common for younger LGBT folks to go through a phase where they try to deny the Bad Thoughts, especially when they’re in unsafe home/social environments, and I imagine that self-acceptance in the face of that impulse to denial requires a period of focused introspection. I bet Becky did a *lot* of self-reflecting to get the point of being so open and proud of being a lesbian, the very second she felt like she was somewhere remotely safe to do so.)
tl;dr I think Becky is as much of a mess as most of the cast, but her personal flavor of mess involves less lying to herself or trying to fit herself into an image that doesn’t really match her insides.
I have a feeling that in another 20 years we’re going to realize that there’s no such thing as autism and everyone in the world just has their own quirks. The people who we assumed we “neurotypical” just being the ones who had quirks that allowed them to socialize better.
I think autism really exists, but it is also the psychological flavor of the day. I am not sure how much it is being diagnosed and treated in the psychological community, but in the webverse, everyone seems to have it.
A couple of rules I learned in psychology:
1. Everyone could be diagnosed with something. No one meets the definition of psychologically normal.
2. If your quirks are not significantly interfering with your life, then they are not bad enough to warrant a major diagnosis.*
*You can still seek help dealing with issues, but a major diagnosis and, especially, a drug regimen may not be appropriate. Note: Because everyone wants/requires a diagnosis, there are several diagnoses in the DSM 5 that are basically “mostly normal with some issues/quirks”. What most people (not the DSM 5) call mild autism is one of these.
re: what OBBWG said. That was something I got out of therapy for anxiety– I was diagnosed with a phobia that we chose not to treat, fear of crowds, but since I was never going to go to another high school dance or rock concert and I didn’t have a problem on city streets or in theaters where people sit down instead of stand, it didn’t make sense to try to fix it. (This was before I knew the US would start turning to fascism and I’d be needing to go to protests. Turns out I still get panic attacks in large crowds.) My therapist said if it wasn’t decreasing my quality of life, then it didn’t need to be treated, which seems really obvious when you think about it but not when you’re thinking about it in terms of making people more normal.
Test anxiety, otoh, was interfering with my career path, so that’s what we treated.
I agree. I also think people here are trying a little too hard to diagnosis the characters. Look, Joyce is in a comic strip. She’s a cartoon, which by definition is not an actual person. Of course, everything is out-of-whack and skewed; she’s supposed to make you laugh. I’m still not sure if it will do anything for the strip going forward for Joyce to be retconned into ASL, if that’s what happens, but she’s Willis’ creation and she has enough quirks and foibles to support a bunch of different diagnoses – OCD, anxiety disorder, aggression…
Yeah, it really depends on what you mean by “autism”.
What people tend to mean by that much of the time is a very very broad collection of neurodivergent stripes, conditions and even personalities that are all haphazardly lumped together into one overly generic category. What is true of one autistic** you meet can never be assumed to be true about any other. If some of them have trouble with eye contact and rigid diet patterns, that doesn’t mean that they all do.
The only thing that all these many traits and stripes have in common is that, from a western neurotypical viewpoint, they seem to occur with each other, when they can occur with or without each other in countless unique combinations.
Grouping them all under a single label sells the impression that these traits are all down to a single, discernable ’cause of existence inside the brain.
Besides the fact that the human brain is still the most complex structure in the known universe and there’s still so much we don’t know about it, there’s more than enough evidence to suggest that all the traits people shove into the autism category don’t all have the same root cause in the brain.
If that were really true, we’d expect at least some persistent pattern that could be found in ALL autistic brains. But no such persistent pattern has ever been found. In fact, the opposite. It’s been shown that as well as other neurodivergents, all autistic brains alongside each other actually display MORE diversity then the entirety of all brains in the human species.
It is definitely my hope for the future that we get more/better ways of describing our unique neurodivergences so that others can better understand us and we can better understand ourselves.
I don’t know, I don’t think it is or ever will be useful to dismiss the concept of autism entirely. Think of neurodiversity as like the color spectrum – we may not have common words for every specific shade of visible light, but we don’t just go, “Hey, it’s all just colors, man, no need to put labels on them.” Saying something is blue is just more practical in most situations than saying it’s web color #0247FE or whatever, and just because the words we use for color are category words doesn’t mean there isn’t a meaningful distinction between blue and red. Similarly, saying that someone is autistic may not precisely capture their specific experience, but it’s still a useful categorization.
Thankoru, this is very much valid, and I want to extend on the points you made that are actually not mutually exclusive to what I want to point out.
Not all tools are necessary like colors where people can clearly see differences and nuances in most cases and know how to react in any system that uses it, like traffic lights and exit signs.
In the specific case of neurodivergents, it’s not really like a broken leg or a broken arm with a colorful cast, where people can clearly see what you need help with and what you don’t, and know what to do and what boundaries to respect when you consent for help. Neurodivergence is something that affects us in very invisible, very diverse ways, so tools that can help us clearly communicate what we want people to know about us are essential.
Just as with any other tool, an information tool such a label can and will fail if either it is not designed properly or people ask it to do the wrong job.
The autism label is no exception, although unlike other tools, people don’t tend to question the ways they misuse it that hurt us even when informed otherwise, and basically end up saying this:
“The Stars in your Personal Brain Galaxy don’t quite align with my current categories and calculations. I know MY maps of understanding are perfect, so it’s YOUR stars that must be wrong”. (see what the basic falt is in this logic)?
Joyce clearly has an imperfect understanding of autism, but I believe it relates to Billie’s need to convince herself that everything she did was completely normal and everyone else must feel the same way.
Having gay thoughts isn’t, but (from what I gather) Joyce is (incorrectly) assuming/suggesting that Billie’s temporarily sleeping with Ruth was because she is autistic and doing it in an attempt to fit in with the majority (‘everyone has gay thoughts sometimes, therefore I must too’).
I don’t think that’s it. I don’t think Joyce is saying anything about gay and autistic being related.
She’s comparing Jennifer’s claim that “Everyone copies everyone else, just to fit in. That’s normal” to Jennifer’s previous claim about “Everyone liking girls sometimes. That’s normal”, by pointing out that Jennifer went well beyond what “everyone does” in terms of liking girls and it might be the same situation here – so if Jennifer thinks this autistic trait is just normal, it might be because she’s autistic too.
Yeah. Basically Joyce is pointing out that, historically, Jennifer have not been a good arbiter of what is “normal”. Jennifer projects a lot and Joyce is recognizing that. The ultimate conclusion is probably wrong, but the pattern is there.
hey @Devin, not sure if you’re reading today’s comments, but if you are and you have a minute, please explain what you meant by the “moving goalposts” thing yesterday.
I don’t think we’ll agree about Mary and Sarah, and that’s fine, but it really rubs me the wrong way to be accused of something like that when I thought I was keeping my points consistent. Maybe there’s something I’m not seeing
Maybe it was a miscommunication. The way it read to me was that your initial focus was on the things Mary and Sarah judged people on, and then in the reply you acknowledged their different motivations and focused instead on the fact that they both publicly disapprove of people to their faces (which they absolutely do in different ways, but yeah I think we’re just going to disagree on them).
Basically the exact opposite, honestly. There’s a study saying “Autistic people just care too fuckin’ much, damn.” Because headlines are bullshit and science is a scam, when it comes to our brains. Apparently.
CDC has a list of 30 ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) symptoms then ends with “It is important to note that children with ASD may not have all or any of the behaviors listed as examples here.” So, um, not very clear.
But a common theme is that various instinctive socialization skills are broken. It doesn’t prevent compensatory skills from being learned. Think Dina.
(I’m going to change my name from “Lucky Winner” to “Cruithne”. Yes, emails tells me I am again the lucky verified winner of 4.5 million dollars from the Ukrainian something-or-other today. But the name’s more snarky than I want.)
Eh, humans shouldn’t be trusting a lot of their oh so “natural” and somehow therefore “good” social instincts anyway, what with tribalism and not. Also socially on a multicultural frontier, misunderstandings are better off treated as the rule than the exception anyway. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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what’s normal
that’s a good question
It’s a type in pokemon. Only weak to fighting. Widely considered the neutral type since it doesn’t have many strengths or weaknesses offensive or defensively. Interestingly enough the only type in the game that can’t hit for super effective damage.
Also it’s attacks don’t work on ghost types and vice versa. I really prefer Dragons Fairy and Psychic I started Gen 1 where despite few dragons they were open same with Psychic also I like Fairy beacuse it converted some normal types into actually useful mons.
This makes so much sense. Also why Amber, a Fighting type, couldn’t get rid of Mike for how long, as Ghost can affect Fighting but Fighting can’t affect Ghost.
One day, I’ll try to finish Pokemon with only normal-type. Because of challenge.
(Of course it will be done with Generation 1 game).
Wouldn’t even be that hard. Spearow can be caught at like level 3 and Fearow is quite strong for that game and Dodrio even more so later. You can snag Clefairy in Mt Moon, and about halfway thru the game you can get a pair of Snorlax and then it’s just over.
Or literally any game. Normals are some of the most versatile types, and many are extremely powerful. They have an insane number of dual types, not to mention get STAB on Return an early-game move with a max power over 100, as long as you’re playing older gens.
Playing through as literally any other type is far more of a challenge.
The few times I’ve ever TRULY struggled to beat a gym, it was a normal type gym
Normal types are OP
Oh god Whitney’s Miltank has flashbacks to the miltank hitting rollout after rollout
I had a Fearow as one of my main party, it kicked ass.
If you’re really looking for a challenge, you could try ironmon or Kaizo randomizer challenges. Watching a streamer try (and fail, repeatedly, literally over a thousand times) to beat Kaizo is what got me hooked back in.
Normal is a continuous probability distribution that is symmetrical on both sides of the mean, so the right side of the center is a mirror image of the left side.
What is normal
Billie don’t hurt me
Don’t hurt me no more
A miserable little pile of secrets. But enough talk, have at you!
(Other possible answers included “the force one object exerts upon another perpendicular to its face”, and the more serious “an aggregation/average of common perception”)
Normal is a vector parallel to the axis of rotation (direction determined by the right hand rule) with a magnitude equal to the angular velocity or momentum. In other words, every attempt to present something as normal is pure spin.
Normal is what is at right angles to the current environment. Learned that in electronic tech class back in 1988.
It’s like formal but with more Norm. Of or relating to Norm. Nobody’s sure which Norm we mean.
Well, there’s one who spills beer and always has a self-deprecating one-liner on deck, and another who builds things out of lumber…
Me, dammit! I’m the global standard of normal. Or normal-ish, anyway.
Why am I compelled to read your username in a southern drawl? Judas Peckuhwooood
Normal people frighten me. – Lydia Benecke
Doofinsmirtz son/robot.
“Normal” is what characterizes the situation of the overwhelming majority of people. In other words, what’s normal is the anxiety of watching the world around us going to shit at an accelerating rate while we are powerless to effect any sort of change, because the people who call the shot, they are not normal and they don’t care.
So true!
I think it’s a country in Europe?
No, thats Normandy.
No, that’s the ship from Mass Effect. “Normal” is the real name of the first Green Goblin.
No, that’s Norman. “Normal” is that cat Garfield hates.
No, that’s Nermal. Normal is Ralph Kramden’s buddy who works in the sewer.
No. That’s Norton. Normal is the comedian that voiced Death in Family Guy.
No that’s Norm Macdonald. Normal is the first stage of a gen 3 fire/ground type Pokémon based on camels.
No that’s Numel, Normal is Jerry’s evil postman neighbor.
Actually normal is just a geometric term. It’s the point intersecting line that is perpendicular to a surface. Also known as the Z axis.
No that’s Nermal, “normal” is the german word for “again”
Isn’t that a setting on the washing machine?
Normal is what everyone else is, and you are not.
This applies to everyone.
https://www.gocomics.com/thenorm
Normal is a city in Illinois.
We all are machine that more or less regurgitate everyone else’s reactions
Joyce has been paying attention in her science class.
Le Corbusier said that: “A house is a machine for living in.”
I think of that a lot.
A body is a machine for living.
A brain is a machine for thinking.
A heart is a machine for feeling.
A community is a machine for growing.
A planet is a machine for holding and sustaining us all.
A job is a machine that pumps out money in exchange for work.
So when I have a certain thought, or a set of repetitive thoughts or behaviors or actions, or a certain food, or expose myself to certain people, I can ask myself:
“Is this good fuel for my machine?
Will this help me keep my machines running?
How long do my machines have to run to get the job done? How can I keep them in good working order long enough?”
I think about that a lot.
Nothing we experience is forever.
It’s not even long.
It’s just a certain set of tasks that need to be accomplished before we can finish, and a certain set of inputs (food, money, love, hope, pride, self-worth, community…) that allow us to get those tasks done.
…Maybe that doesn’t make sense. I’m sorry — I’m tired, and I’m very, very sad right now.
But it does help, I think, if I can think of my life as a table to be balanced, a set of instructions to be fulfilled, a project to be done.
Maybe that helps others cope with uncertainty, too.
I think Joyce is coping with a lot of uncertainty right now.
A brain is a machine for thinking and feeling. A heart is a machine for pumping blood. Many of the things you mention are indeed machines, but that is not all that they are. Analyzing them solely as machines can be misleading.
Very true, Clif. Thanks for that perspective.
Just curious, what do you mean by “machines” in “analyzing them solely as machines”?
Just I think it’s worth noting that the definition of a “machine” is not necessarily universal, and as they are able to do more and more every day, more and more what we once thought was common sense about “machines” is getting thrown out the window as we speak.
Machine — an apparatus using or applying mechanical power and having several parts, each with a definite function and together performing a particular task. — Oxford Languages.
Humans are more than an apparatus. Relationships are not things. Electrical power is not mechanical power. Joy is not a task.
I dunno. I often think of emotions and relationships as tasks.
Balance sheets. They’re transactional.
Like when I comment on a website or attend a social event I’m building social capital with that community, which may potentially be available for debiting when needed later. Putting in face time.
Like how some parents can pencil out “quality time” for their kids, specifically for bonding, because bonding is healthy for the kids. Logging the hours to get the job done. Because they care about the job of raising healthy kids.
People sometimes think that’s cynical and heartless, but I don’t think so. It doesn’t seem that way to me, anyway. “Ruthless and calculating,” is sometimes just figuring out the right thing to say at the right time to meet the needs of the situation and the people around. That can be a form of caring — like how Dorothy approaches the people around her as puzzles to solve. Because she cares about them.
Personally very much not a fan of mind/body dualism, as it leads to all kinds of crazy non-disprovable and harmful beliefs, like souls, or that people can “overcome” their “sinful” biological impulses, or that mental disorders are willpower problems.
Also, mechanical power *is* electrical power. Mechanical motion between two objects on the macro level is just electrical repulsion on an atomic level.
And joy is definitely a task, at least for me.
Besides the fact that machines’ parts can use electrical and electro-chemical power like human brains do, if a “machine” is able to perform more than one task and/or any of it’s parts are able to fulfill multiple needs of the whole thing functioning, does it suddenly cease to be a “machine”?
I think of a machine as a set of tools or processes put together for a specific purpose or set of purposes.
Very, very complicated, self-assembling machines, all the way down to the molecular level. A pretty far cry from anything we’ve made, really.
M coming around to the idea that the Rete is the organ of feeling, or… at least a better true false detector than my Brain is.
Fascinating! What’s a Rete? Is it the vascular system?
It’s the neural net, associated with the expression “gut feeling.”
Le Corbusier was a fascist (in the literal sense that he was part of fascist league with the actual word fascist in it). I wouldn’t trust him with any kind of philosophy.
Really! Wow! I had no idea. So odd… I studied Le Corbusier extensively in college and they never talked about his fascism.
…Which is weird, because they talked a lot about the political movements associated with other styles of architecture and decor. Why would they omit Le Corbusier? Did I just blank that part out? Man… now I’m questioning my memories!
Huh. Wild. You’re right!
Just looked it up:
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/13/arts/design/le-corbusiers-architecture-and-his-politics-are-revisited.html
So bizarre that I could have learned so much about the man and never hear of his politics.
This was decades ago, though, so maybe the architecture professors weren’t as conscious of political nuance back then? Hm…
There was an expo lately in the Pompidou center for modern arts where they were criticized for it and they said: “but we alreedy told that part 35 years ago!”. That’s always the same bullshit when speaking about fascist France: the myth is that the resistance was everywhere. Hint: it wasn’t, and there isn’t an excuse like in germany where potential resistants were murdered before with the blessing of the right wing socio-democrats. In the eastern part of the country, people were force integrated in the SS, so you can’t even speak of people who didn’t got forced bc it’s a “sore point” and it’s insensitive to call out that not all were force integrated.
From 45, all Europa is a shitstorm, because capitalism needed nazis friend to be pardoned to keep the infrastructures in place, and France particularly so. Shit, Céline and Cioran, sometimes even Drieu, are still considered as great authors (wtf did they do that other didn’t? You can’t exist alone in arts, you always successor and predecessor to someone at least, breaking points arent like in sciences a moment of invention but a gradual change influences by a whole society) and their antisemitism is always camouflaged under “nihilism” or “misanthropism” syndroms.
So yeah, I lived in many cities with one or more building designed by Le Corbusier, got some architect friends for years, and nowhere I read about it, until I actually met some local historian that was pissed about how it’s now an indisputed figure – while it has with modulor a clear patriarcal bia (he built for 180 cm men!), and he was not only a fascist follower but leader!
I’m a machine, you’re a machine
Everybody that you know
You know, they are machines.
Love it!
Maybe everyone in the cast is autistic! That’s the secret!
Plot twist: except for Dina.
Dina just cannot get diagnosed.
“And when everyone’s autistic, nobody will be!!! Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!!”
*cackles maniacally like Syndrome from The Incredibles* 🤣
[very brennan lee mulligan voice] uh, hell yeah
Your comment made me slow smile.
Yeah, Jennifer was a little defensive there. Question hit a little too close to home there, Jennifer?
Love the alt-text: “Are you there, Joyce? It’s me, Billie.” (hat tip to Judy Blume)
Also love Jennifer’s choice of words. I think she started out saying, “sloppy empathetic,” as in “sloppy drunk,” or “sloppy lovey-dovey”. She caught herself, though, because she knows Joyce is NEVER sloppy! So instead she said, “slipshod empathetic”. As in, someone who walks their shoes so far and on such rough roads that they’ve worn the heels all down to holes. Slipshod.
The most careful and care-full choice of word for someone who is all worn out from caring so much about too much and too many.
…Jennifer is a “word nerd” if I ever heard her! ;-D
(Sorry if my words come out wrong. My brain’s all sloppy right now.)
Journalism major! Word nerd is one of the things she shared with Ruth that I don’t think got a lot of attention.
What did Ruth nerd out on? I forget that.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-9-comic/02-but-the-sun-still-shines/bongo-2/
Finally figured out how to search by character tag for multiple people, which made it easier to narrow down to that strip. Not even sure this is the only example given Ruth’s an english major.
Oh, cool, thanks Deathjavu!
How do you search multiple characters? I still haven’t figured that out! Don’t let me accidentally flagging you, discourage you revealing the secret!
Like this: https://www.dumbingofage.com/tag/jennifer+ruth/
Yep, that’s exactly it. You can keep adding +[character name] as well, to find strips with 3 or more specific people.
Oh this is very good to know, thank you Laura!
Thanks for that extra tip, Deathjavu!
Flubbed my email address when trying to change the punctuation to get a new gravitar sorry. Wish there was a way to delete or edit. The typoed address doesn’t exist so reposting this again if you see this Willis just discard the previous one.
A word nerd and several other kinds of nerd too. There’s a good reason she speaks nerd she just won’t admit it. Reminds me of the protagonist of Shinozaki-san Ki wo Ota Shika ni! (“Don’t become an otaku, Shinozaki-san!)
I mean, my romance novel series has kinda gone that way accidentally.
The two female leads have personality traits based on my wife and I… personality traits which we have since learned are symptoms of female autism.
Just out of curiousity, do you ever see yourself explicitly saying your characters are neurodivergent or specifically autistic in the novel or official author answers to questions your future fans will have about them?
Why or why not?
Not within the novels themselves since they’re historical/fantasy and as such the terms do not yet exist. A similar issue occurs with their orientation and gender identities (cis female, bi and genderfluid, bi) – everything is shown, but nothing is explicitly told.
As for interviews, if any were to occur, then yes – I would have no issue discussing the symptoms they both express. What that necessarily means, even I’m not entirely sure yet. I’m still getting used to my own paradigm shifts on the matter.
Happy Summer Solstice, Rose!
Thanks! Happy Summer Solstice to you too!
Good luck with your romance novel series! Ooh, exciting! 😀
Thanks!
Here’s hoping we pick up a new publisher soon. Our poor readers, few though they may be, have been waiting over two years for the next book in the series to be released.
It had just come to me to wonder if everyone in the world is autistic.
That’s my secret, Cap. I’m always autistic.
I don’t know about autistic, but at this point I’m pretty sure Carla is faceblind, that’s a comorbidity of sorts
Several times now I have come close to posting an Oprah Winfrey joke about “You get autism! And YOU get autism!” but kept second-guessing myself about hurting someone’s feelings, so glad I can just respond to anl similar post
Wtf is anl, phone
Maybe not all, but I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the ones based on Willis might have several autistic traits.
I was fortunate enough to have gotten a diagnosis as a kid, I imagine if I had gotten it as an adult I would have handled it roughly how Joyce is
I’m having the opposite response. I had a relatively similar(ish) upbringing to Joyce and I just got diagnosed with ADHD as an adult. And my reaction to my diagnosis has ranged from “wow! everything makes sense now!” to “huh, that tracks,” kinda like everybody else in the cast reacting to Joyce’s diagnosis. I self diagnosed a few months before I got a doctor to confirm it, so maybe that’s different. And I have siblings who were diagnosed a long time ago. And ADHD is different than Autism and the stigmas are a lot different. But still. Her intense reaction doesn’t match mine at all. It’s weird so soon after my own diagnosis.
Mm, I think a big part of it is stigma, though. ADHD, which I have, is often seen as “quirky” or “eccentric,” at least in the way it presents in me and in my region/local culture.
Whereas autism has a stigma specifically about being unempathetic or a jerk. Or dangerous / on the verge of having a “meltdown.” I have never heard anyone blame violence or murder on ADHD.
But, I have heard people credit a person’s violent actions to autism, and even say aggressive or harassing behavior should be tolerated when the aggressor is autistic (either allegedly or confirmed).
Autism is also stigmatized as something that makes people bad at friendship or relationships. And it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Autistic adults are 4x more likely to attempt suicide than non-autistic adults. The most frequently cited reason is loneliness and social isolation.
Obviously, these stigmas are not inherent to autism. Plenty of autistic people are non-violent, non-aggressive, and have deep, committed relationships.
But I definitely can see an autism diagnosis be incredibly jarring, especially if someone believes that autism = unempathetic, given the cultural assumptions. If the diagnosed person doesn’t match the stereotype, what does that mean?
I kinda wonder if things would’ve been better or worse for me if I had gotten diagnosed as a kid. I might have understood myself and why I acted the way I did better much earlier, but at the same time I feel like there were a lot more misconceptions about autism among the scientific community back when I was a kid than there are now.
This is something I’ve often wondered about in regards to my husband. It’s possible he would have gotten targeted help (his parents cared, in theory)… but it’s equally possible that even with well-intentioned parents he would have been treated horribly by therapists and other specialists of the time.
Like, we’re talking back in the 90s here. I was diagnosed with ADHD, something with significantly less stigma at the time (though not without its own problems, like being put on a ~gifted~ pedestal), and was still not given nearly enough tangible help. So, when it comes to autistic stuff… feels like a tossup between ‘helpful’ and ‘shitty’, really. :C
Believe me there still are many misconceptions.
Getting an autism diagnosis and disclosing of it as a kid was and still is a major risk of putting a target on your back for really unfair treatment from friends, family, teachers and “professionals” that include not only denigrating infantilization, but also dehumanization, [⚠️TW]
physical and psychological abuse and even legally justified torture[END TW] in some cases.To make matters worse, it can actually even make it harder to understand yourself in many cases on the account of the misconception that other people and “professionals” can know your brain that much better than you do, thinking all autistics are more or less the same — in the beginning stages of untangling your unique stripes after you’ve discovered you’re neurodivergent, this toxic pitfall is one that’s all too easy to fall into, and can quickly lead to the voices of others drowning our your own. To add insult to injury, it can also be reinforced by a sense of “betrayal” you could sense in others when you don’t act like how people expect you to act, how they think autistics are “supposed” to act.
Spite the trigger warning, I’m really sorry if cataloging the potential pitfalls of disclosing of autism upset anyone here. I do this out of a place of compassion, because I think it’s only fair that newly discovered neurodivergents know what they could be in for and pitfalls to avoid so that they can have a safer, smoother time with others and themselves as they undertake their personal neurodivergent journeys.
Oh, yeah, I knew all that. My husband’s been out as autistic among our friends for like… ten years now haha.
But you’re right. So many ‘professionals’ lack compassion and still stereotype so much. :C
OH WAIT that wasn’t actually a direct reply to me. My bad! I missaw the reply chain aaaaa
You Never Give Me Your Money
You only give me your funny paper
And in the middle of negotiations
You break down
I never give you my number
I only give you my situation
And in the middle of investigation
I break down…
♫ I never give you my pillow
I only send you my invitations
And in the middle of the celebrations
I break down ♪
I thought it was “funny faces”?
And “I never give you my pillow. I only give you my invitation.”
Maybe there’s more than one verse to the song…
If we want to get really technical, then Stephen is quoting “You Never Give Me Your Money” but Joe is quoting “Carry That Weight”. Both part of the Abbey Road medley but 2 separate tracks!
… yes, the Beatles were/are one of my Special Interests.
Fascinating! I did not know that.
…Out of college, money spent
wait no, it isn’t 2090 yet
fuck, that last line was supposed to be non-italicized but I forgot the html
I…thought that was song lyrics from some pop punk song but I’m currently too high to recognize the song, so I thought it was one I don’t know. Those are good lyrics, I’m havin’ ’em.
Beatles.
Look, if you don’t tattle on me it doesn’t matter if I steal their lyrics.
Mum’s the word! ;-D
Oh, I love this strip. I’ve felt like Joyce so many times in my life 😵💫
Social Mimicry is pretty basic human behaviour. Part of why we’ve been so successful, not only are we smart enough to figure shit out we’re pretty good at sharing that information with other humans
Yeah, Joyce with that “machine” comment, she doesn’t know that she basically just described consciousness in a nutshell. 😆
I mean, has she NOT been paying enough attention in Professor Brock’s class?!?!?
”We are [all] machines and nothing more.”
True.
Then again, this kinda reminded me of the time I overdid it. Was giving a talk, one of the professors had questions, I replied, kinda mirroring his demeanor.
Turns out everyone else perceived this guy as attacking me, and me as fighting back – meanwhile, I was just having a good time XD
I’ve wondered if Billie/Jennifer was autistic before, actually. Her fixation on the nerds/popular-kids dichotomy screams “managed to form a very strict understanding of social dynamics and resists any attempts to modify that understanding because it makes sense to her and she’s used to it”.
Lots of people without autism do that too.
okay?
I suspect if we went looking we could find points to support literally any of the major characters being autistic
Alison Bechdel has a comic strip about that kind of confirmation bias. One partner is reading a self-help book and says, “Oh, no! According to this quiz we’ve got ‘sex addiction’ and ‘lesbian bed death’ at the SAME TIME!”
When you peer too long into the Rorschach test, the Rorschach test also peers back at you. Any given diagnosis can be a mirror to see bits and parts of oneself in sometimes.
…And any fictional character can, too!
No offense meant by putting diagnoses in quotes. I was just recalling the comic strip to the best of my memory.
“Lesbian Bed Death” is a fantastic band name.
it can be an interesting lens to apply! I also have a hot take that, because of the way characters are written in the language of fiction, MOST characters are coded at least a little autistic, but that’s a huge can of worms and I think these comments sections are a little too literal and pedantic for it to be anything other than exhausting.
the basic gist is that because characters in stories tend to be simpler than real people, and tend to be written in such a way that their interests and insecurities and flaws can be conveyed very easily (and I’m an entertaining manner) to the audience, they actually come across as having special interests and rituals and communication problems. there’s other stuff, too, but that’s the short version. we’re just numb to it because it’s such a default way of writing the days.
I think it’s more an inherent limitation of fiction, because, you know, it’s not real. Reality is far more complicated than we can perceive; and every personality is an epic
, some of which will go over that personality’s head. I forger how many books are in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, but I’m sure Mr. P left a lot of stuff out without meaning to.
yeah, that’s what I’m saying. It’s the language of literature. The language of literature inherently bends characters towards autism.
Huh. This is a really interesting take.
I do agree with you that authors often have to take shortcuts, and the end result can be characters that come off as simplified compared to real people. I don’t know that I’d say it particularly makes them come off as autistic, though?
(I do legitimately think your theory is interesting, though, so I hope this doesn’t come off as overly critical…? I just think that in this situation the cookie can crumble in more than one way, and ‘seems autistic’ is only one of those outcomes.)
I think the ways in which they seem “simpler” can line up a lot with autistic presentation, and especially with autistic coding. Like, for a very childish example, take a character in a children’s cartoon. Like, Applejack. Applejack is always talking about apples and her farm, because that’s her character thing, she’s a farmer. But it also tends to make her seem kind of obsessed with apples. Applejack also tends to state her feelings very plainly, because all children’s show characters do that, it’s how the audience knows how they feel. Adult media does this, too, just to a less silly extent. However, this is something many autistic people do–we can’t always convey how we’re feeling through nonverbal cues, or it’s stressful to try, so we prefer to air things out in the open.
That’s true! I see what you mean about simplifying a character’s interests making it appear like a special interest might IRL.
I saw it as a way to find her grouping in the absence of a home life.
Well this is nice. I’m glad to see these two talking again. Joyce is going through a lot and it’s nice to see her talk it out
Autism for everyone!🎉
Joyce looks to be developing a version of the Baby Gay “wait, is everybody gay?” phase we all went through. And going by the cast of this comic, the answer might be yes! ^_^
I think it is less “Joyce is gay” and more “Joyce identified an instance where Jennifer was projecting” and is (playfully) calling her out on it.
I meant, like, “I’m (group member), is everyone else (group member)?”
But yes, Joyce’s playful sarcasm is in fine form! ^_^
Yeah being bi I’m like seriously you don’t find *any* dudes attractive? Ryan Reynolds is literally right there
Shit, I’m not even into dudes, and I think that’s an excellent point. Not as excellent as Jensen Ackles, but still excellent.
Meanwhile, I am bi but not really into either of these examples LOL
Like, do I find them sexually attractive? No. Can I recognise that Ryan Reynolds or Jensen Ackles or whoever are handsome? Sure. In the same way that I look at tanzanite and go “hey, that’s a really pretty gemstone”.
I think Joyce is too upset now to be playful.
For the record, I genuinely don’t. Like I can recognize whether a man looks pleasant or not, but not what makes them attractive. It would have been nice if it were otherwise but I’m stuck with it.
joyce knew about that?
…you mean about Billifer hanky-pankying Ruth? I mean, I don’t think she had any reason to think they weren’t, once she knew they were dating.
She was waiting for the one clean shower stall at one point when they were banging in there (before [Sarah?] came in and explained that the stall would no longer be clean when they were finished. Although that might have been in the slipshine and not the comic proper?
oh yeah i forgot about that!
That was in Slipshine yes. Keep It Clean I think.
Billie’s back, and about time too.
Not according to the character tags though.
And this time, she’s in the mood!
She can’t fly real high with her jetpack on, though. That’s Joyce’s thing.
Hm?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWSgsbWiX_g&t=133s
O.M.G. that is FANTASTIC.
Our favorite superhero, Billie The Normalizer is back!!
Aww, a sweet strip! But, “slipshod empathetic”?
I think she’s finding a nicer way to say, “sloppy empathetic.” Like sloppy kisses, or sloppy drunk. Enthusiastically empathetic all over the place.
It’s like smoke; Ungrabbable and all over the place.
Thanks for the explanation of ‘slipshod’ – this was way more helpful than the translation I looked up. Now it may even have a chance to stick to my passive vocabulary.
Journalism Major Jennifer choosing her words carefully.
Joyce: IS MY ENTIRE PERSONALITY JUST COPYING THE BEHAVIOR OF THE PEOPLE AROUND ME?
Also Joyce: Still uses “hanky-panky” instead of “sex” while talking to Billie.
I’m not sure that’s exactly the substitution being made.
What if Joyce has liked waffles all this time.
Wait, copying other people to fit in?!
Was THAT what I was supposed to be doing?
This is new to me as well. How am i supposed to know who to copy?
Copy the ones who are best at faking being normal.
But make sure you don’t copy the actual normals. They’re just boring.
I would comment on the comic itself, but my mind is distracted by trying to figure out who that portrait in the bottom left of the first panel is supposed to be. It doesn’t quite seem to match any characters I can think of off the top of my head.
I THINK it’s Dorothy, but I’m not positive.
It’s the character in Joyce’s comic who is definitely not Dorothy.
Well Jennifer’s been more helpful towards Joyces situatio then Dotty Dina And Sarah combined so kudos to Jenifer.
I think Jennifer has enough distance that she can focus on what Joyce needs and not on how it affects her.
I love when I forget to check Patreon and end up getting two strips on the same day.
Two in one day?!?!?! JACK-POT!!!! Thank you Willis, for this really happy accident!!!! 🤩🤩🤩
#ThankYouWillis
Two months, but they took breaks.
Not surprising; but a lot of friends; who are on the spectrum, I have had are some of the most genuine, passionate, and empathetic people I know.
Its almost like some “normal” parts of us can make us inherently shittier people; and we gotta work passed that to be better.
All that aside; Jennibilliefer is gonna have to face the fact that her “normal” has always been something she believed she needed to be in order to fit in. Whether or not that involved being thrown across a room, or making weird drunken pacts. . . I dunno; I’m not her therapist.
It’s not like people with Autism are emotionless automatons, it’s just that the way those feelings are expressed and interpreted can be a bit haywire. Uncontrollably laughing at intensely stressful situations, under- or over-emoting where a situation doesn’t call for it, not hiding reactions when a neurotypical person would…
I always disliked how being caring or emphatic is like put as an innate trait or such, when it something you actively *do*.
One of the biggest misconceptions about autistic people is that we lack empathy. We have empathy, we just don’t express our feelings the same way that neurotypical people do.
And sometimes we can simply not give a shit, just like neurotypical people do!
Don’t worry Joyce, I know how you feel….
If there’s anything I know as an alien parasite, it’s feeling like an impostor Among Us!
🤣🤣🤣
-the wellerman is ejected from the ship-
Wellerman sus! Did you vent??
“Then who’s freaking out right now?”
(I panic, therefore I am.)
“Hey Billie, you fucked a redhead, don’t you think that’s kind of autistic?”
Oh yeah, Joyce? Honey? 🤨
Huh, all this time and I never realized my attraction to green-eyed gingers was something I could be diagnosed for…
I hereby diagnose you with good taste.
If that’s a diagnosis, doctor I got a TERMINAL disorder heyooooooo
I think Karen Gillan is smoking hot, guess I’m undiagnosed autistic now, too.
That’s only a symptom of having functional eyeballs.
Sure, I guess my eyeballs could be charitably described as “functional”, between the myopia, the astigmatism, and the recurrent epithelial erosion.
Re: the last panel; Billie was being a bit obtuse when saying “everyone has those thoughts and acts on them sometimes” because in-comic she has never described herself as queer or bisexual (if I recall she once even said bisexual is not a real word, just a porn catergory) BUT she’s not entirely wrong. There are very few people who fall into a 0 or 6 in the Kinsey scale, meaning most people can at least appreciate what is attractive about someone that is not their usual preferred partner.
So “everyone” is perhaps a bit too broad, but she’s mostly correct.
Just curious, how is attraction towards NBs of sorts rated on the Kinsey scale?
Genuinely asking, I forgot! 😅
I doubt Kinsey ever considered the matter, but others might have
bolted it onextended his work.Be it for sexual orientation, gender or neurodivergence, no matter how how well a system of description is, there’s ALWAYS room for improvement! 😉
I mean, how did the Kinsey scale get to become this widely known and used thing? What about descriptors like “gender-fluid” and “two-spirit”?
Two-spirit is a native-specific term which has been in use for a very long time. It recently became more widely known because native voices have started being heard on social media like TikTok.
I implore non-natives to PLEASE not use this term to describe themselves. It is a term with cultural significance to us which I encourage you to google if you’re curious, but please not appropriate.
To be clear: Not saying you were being appropriative here, Wellerman, you only mentioned it and I wanted to A) Explain where it was from and B) Use the conversation to make my usual request of non-native folk.
Thank you so much for letting me know, I definitely don’t want to be appropriative and will definitely keep this in mind as I discuss the concept with others!
I didn’t know you were native! I think that’s so cool! 😃
If you’re OK with me asking, which tribe(s) are you part of?
Also while we’re still on the topic, do you know if any native tribes had their own concepts of neurodivergence and/or descriptors for neurodivergents that they developed separately from colonists?
White partner of a Native person here:
The Wellerman, while I recognize your questions about queerness and neurodiversity in First Nations cultures come from a place of curiosity and not malice, I will flag that it’s not really fair to expect a Native person to drop their day and educate you. This is a particular form of racism that many folks who are visual minorities experience – and I didn’t realize it myself until I saw how often people expect my partner to be a walking single person native culture and history museum when he just wants to be a game writer and live his life.
Reliable sources to answer those kinds of questions include Navajo and Autism: The Beauty of Harmony (free access pdf), The Cultural Context of Neurodiversity, among others. Short version is that many First Nations cultures prior to Colonial genocide efforts didn’t typically pathologize the way colonial societies do (note: I’ll flag that the Mi’kmaq of the region we call Atlantic Canada and Northern Maine are as far away from the Tututni of what we call Oregon as Germany is from the Republic of Congo, so making sweeping generalizations isn’t wholly appropriate since FN cultures are every bit as diverse as cultures of any other continent). Like gender diversity, many FN cultures accepted various forms of neurodiversity as just different people prior to colonization, but a lot of culture was lost over the several century long cultural genocide campaigns of the various Colonial powers so in some cases it’s hard to say.
(I’m flagging my race here mainly because I want to make it clear I do not speak with lived experience on these issues but more that I see what my partner deals with. I’m more familiar than most white people because of who my partner is but by no means am I an expert.
As well – Nova please feel free to tell me to back off if I’ve overstepped, I just saw behavior my partner finds tiring and figured I’d flag it)
Oh also & Wellerman, not saying you were making a sweeping generalization but more that North American culture has a tendency to treat all FN cultures as a monolith when there was huge diversity in language, technology, cultural beliefs and values, religion, and way of life. Some of the agrarian communities in the Great Lakes region had beadwork that served a similar purpose to Western writing, for example, while the some cultures were relatively warlike, and the Wabanaki Confederacy was/is a huge multinational trade alliance and mutual aid pact spanning almost the full Eastern quarter of North America, as a few examples. And of course there’s the famous superstructures of the Mayans and Aztecs, etc.
You have not overstepped! I found it honestly a relief and I appreciate you being an ally. Your wife found a very good partner it seems, so thank you very much for speaking up.
Ugh I didn’t mean WIFE I meant PARTNER – autopilot brain. Apologies.
Thank you for letting me know ischemgeek, I definitely don’t want to come off like I’m pressuring members of visual minorities like that and want to make it more clear in my future writinf that it’s their choice whether or not they want to answer and completely respect their choice 🙏
Thank you for pointing me in this direction and telling me the short version. I hope one day societies all over the world can learn from example of FN cultures in regards to neurodivergent acceptance, so hopeful for the future, so happy, so grateful for you telling me this, thank you so much 😭
Also sorry I didn’t see what you posted about how diverse native tribes and their cultures are.
Totes with you on that one, many people in America all too easily fall into the mistake of lumping all natives into one overly generic category, where the reality is that these many many tribes spanned thousands of miles and were often times geographically and linguistically isolated from each other and developed their cultures and societies very differently. Example to my knowledge, the part of North America now known as the states of California and Oregan, prior to the colonial era, had some of the greatest linguistic diversity in the entire world.
TL;DR what’s true of one tribe can definitely never be assumed to be true of any other.
Makes me all the more happy to know just how many different non-western concepts of neurodivergence there are that I can learn from, thank you again so much, very grateful that you share this
On a scale from Gay Luigi to Mama Luigi, it’s somewhere in the area of It’s A Stone Luigi. If that makes sense.
The Kinsey scale was an important bit of queer history, but IRL it’s pretty reductive. I’m enby and consider myself a queer lesbian because I’m predominantly attracted to women and never men, but the actual traits that I’m attracted to (femininity, particular ways of holding the body/moving/ways of interacting) are also common with nonbinary people, too, regardless of assigned gender.
I specifically call myself queer or lesbian, and not something like bisexual, because people assume that bi people are attracted to men and I don’t want anyone to think that about me ever.
I think at some point the language has to evolve a bit more – right now we primarily talk about who we love in reference to our own genders. Homo/heterosexual and hetero/homoromantic are both ‘the gender the same as/opposite to me’. Bi and pan (probably being younger in modern vocabulary) are smarter since they don’t do it but they’re still too broad for some.
My friend only publicly came out as trans recently and we laugh about the idea that ‘the gayest person in the world’ is suddenly ‘straight’ because of how we’re supposed to express things. But I’m going through a bit of a ‘fuck labels’ phase, so whatever, I guess.
Just out of curiosity, given that I’m a gender-fluid slick who flows through genders that are mostly feminine or don’t quite belong in either binary, and am attracted to feminine features that can be found on NBs too, what would my orientation be called? Does my orientation even have a name yet?
Hmmm, if one is attracted to multiple genders for certain traits like that but not all genders, I think that is called poly-sexual? I could be thinking of something else tho.
I tried that one out, but it’s essentially the same as bisexual (attraction to same and other genders), only it requires explanation to anyone with a beginner’s sex literacy. If I’m gonna explain sexualities to someone, then I rather enjoy discussing the evolution of the lesbian identity from invert to women-attracted-to-women to the queered notion of lesbian as a cultural/community identity based on life experiences, as well as attraction. (gonna stop with that otherwise I WILL write a 2000 essay on the subject instead of this assignment I’m avoiding lol)
Bruh, totally get it! I’m much the same way about neurodivergence. Basically everywhere but here I describe my neurodivergent stripes actively anticipating lack of literacy much the same way you expect that when describing your stripes of sexual orientation.
Also, as we speak I am resisting the urge to write whole essays here on the philosophy of AI and cognition regarding Joyce’s “machine” comment. Neuro-fluid! 😅
That’s exactly why I used to call myself pansexual but now just use bi. The straights generally understand bi and I don’t feel like giving “sexual orientation diversity 101” every time I disclose I’m not straight. And it’s close enough. (And generally I think pan is a subset of bi although I realize that’s not a universal opinion)
I agree with the Kinsey scale being a bit reductive. And your comment is actually fascinating to me because I think we might have similar preferences, but chose a different way to express it (with the important distinction that my preferences seem a little less absolute than yours, if I’m reading this right).
If someone needs to know, I’ll call myself bi/pan because, in the end, gender identity will not invalidate my attraction to someone, ever. However… I am definitely mostly into people who are in the more femme-androgynous spectrum of gender presentation. I have liked cis men/characters before, but 99% of men that people say are hot have me squinting in confusion like… really? You think that’s hot? Can’t relate LOL.
And this is coming from someone who used to identify as a gay man before I realized it was okay if I liked women too. So I can say with certainty that the things I’m attracted to REALLY do not tend to line up with what other people into men generally think are hot OMG
But yeah, anyway, words are just to communicate concepts so in the end you should go with what works best for you day-to-day. And if that’s summarizing yourself as lesbian instead of bi, then cool. Makes sense to me! 😀 Ever since I came out as nonbinary, I myself have trended more and more toward calling myself queer over any other label. If someone wants to know more specifics, I can elaborate as needed.
Actually, that’s called ✨ aesthetic attraction✨
You have sexual attraction: i see that thing and it makes me wanna fuck it
Romantic attraction: i wanna love the shit out of you
And aesthetic attraction: damn that sure is nice to look at
Aesthetic attraction is often mixed up with sexual attraction when it comes to people. Most monosexuals can look at a hot person from their non preferred gender and go “yeah i get it”. When a straight guy looks at, Jason Mamoa for example and say he’s hot, it’s not necessarily “damn he makes me horny” but more like, “damn he’s nice to look at.” It’s like when you see a really beautiful painting. It can be breathtaking, but you don’t really wanna fuck it.
This distinction is important in asexuality, and helped me and my boyfriend realize we’re ace. So, the more you know ✨
But if you DO wanna fuck a really nice painting (of a person), there’s also a term for that. :>
Paintingfuckers unite.
Thank you so much for sharing this zeek! ❤️
It’s real good to know as I’m untangling and figuring out what to call my sexuality 🥰
Yeah, theoretically there are very few people who are absolutely 100% on either end of the scale, but Jennifer went well beyond that, even if she was technically correct. She was using it to deny that she fit in a queer category. To maintain that she was “normal”.
Mostly to herself of course. It’s pretty clear she never hid the relationships, just what they meant about her.
For the longest time I felt super weird for not having crushes. On any one. I thought something was really wrong with me.
2002
Me, age 7: “Mum, I think I’m in love with my (lady) teacher”
Mum: “Don’t worry, everyone has crushes on ladies sometimes”
2005
Mum: “Kids, I’m a lesbian”
Classic
<3 <3 <3
NGL I think this so far is the best case scenario I could’ve hoped for
I knew it. I knew Billie knows how to handle this!
As an autistic with light sensitivity, I appreciate these strips happening in darkness. Makes anything easier to deal with.
Yeah, I like darkness for comfort too, except in my case it’s not down to my neurodivergence but rather to being an alien parasite and a demon 🥰 👾 😈
The trouble with darkness is then I can’t see. As a demon, what are your views on exorcism?
Regarding exorcism, what pains me most of all is seeing human hosts getting subjected to torture that thinks it can justify itself in the name of religion.
Demons are not always bad, in fact we can be very important in helping the daily function of and even personal empowerment of our human hosts. 😊😈
Demon or not, only 50% of all cells in the body are human — the rest are the microbiome, which includes bacteria, microscopic insects, symbiotes and parasites and other little critters that do really important work. Without them, you wouldn’t even be able to survive a meal.
WRT your discussion of demons, do you read the Wapsi Square webcomic?
Judging by what I just read about it on TV tropes while not falling down that nearly endless internet rabbit hole (phew!!!!)
It’s like Dumbing of Age and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure had a baby! Fucking SWEET, gotta check that out some time! 🤩
On the same vein of demon webcomics, my favorite by far HAS to be Erma, who is just one of the sweetest and coolest and most adorable demon girls in the world. 😭
No really, next to Dina, Erma has got to be one of my most favorite webcomic characters EVER 🥰🥲
Hanky-panked her so hard
Jennifer really is a great friend ♡. She accepts to be Billie again for Joyce’s sake and she is doing a formidable effort to calm her. But Joyce continues to push her facing things she wants to avoid, this is not nice at all! We don’t know what happened to Jennifer and Ruth, but she’s still suffering from that and Joyce seems wanting to do even possible effort for reopening the wounds. I wonder if she thinks that because she is suffering, everybody has to suffer a little with her.
Platitudes are nice and all but sometimes you actually want the truth, and you’ve gotta point out the flaws in those platitudes to get there. What reassurance is it that Jennifer thinks imitating people is normal, if Jennifer can’t be trusted to know what’s normal?
Point out where the logic fails, and maybe you’ll get a real explanation. One that you can actually believe.
I mean, that razor sharp line of attack out of the blue is starting to convince me Joyce might really be autistic.
The real question: is Jennifer coming to Joyce knowing that she will prod her to look where she’s been refusing to look for some time? Or is she so blinded by her alpha-bongo trip that this is an unwelcome surprise?
“Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I have ever known.” – Chuck Palahniuk
“It’s Billie?”
“Yeah, sure, whatever gets this conversation going.”
I appreciate that Jennifer came here to offer Joyce support about periods/birth control, but has pivoted to offering support about Joyce’s discovery that she may be autistic pretty seamlessly. She’s being a good friend here. Which is not a thing Joyce has been getting a lot of lately!
(I think it might be useful to, instead of sorting the people in Joyce’s social circle into “good” friends and “bad” friends, distinguish between good friend *behavior* and not-good behavior. Like, Dorothy’s intentions towards Joyce have always been positive—she wants good things for her, she wants to see her succeed academically and have a strong social network, and grow and learn and be happy as a person—but some of the way that’s been manifesting lately has been as pressure and judgment at points when Joyce needed *support*. That doesn’t mean she’s a bad friend or that historically has never been a good friend, it just means she’s not behaving as a good friend right now, in Joyce’s current circumstances and with her current struggles. Jennifer wasn’t being a good friend to Joyce when she distanced herself from her as part of her latest self-reinvention—but today, she HAS acted as a good friend to Joyce, by giving her support and advice at the right tenor for Joyce to hear it. This may or may not lead to a revitalization of this friendship, but even if it doesn’t, it’s still meaningful. And as long as Jennifer doesn’t set up any expectations of being a more regular presence in Joyce’s life that she has no plans to meet, it’s not necessarily a bad thing to be the friend who only really shows up in a crisis, and doesn’t stick around day-to-day.)
Very much this.
Jennifer probably has the highest emotional awareness and relational ability of the main cast, when she feels like using it.
But only when directed outwards. Her self-awareness…needs work. And when the outwards and inwards butt up against each other, historically she doesn’t react super well.
If only we could combine Jennifer’s emotional intelligence with regards to other people with Becky’s remarkable self-awareness, we might have like…one functional human being.
I feel like Becky’s self-awareness comes in fits and spurts, given how easily she’s shifted from “No this thing is too much for how I Christian” to “HEY EVERYONE LOOK AT THIS THING I DID”.
This is not to say she isn’t any kind of self-aware, but she wouldn’t be my go-to. Daisy on the other hand, knows herself, her limits, and what she needs/wants. Not sure who I’d pick as a go-to in the main cast though. They pretty much all do a lot of lying to themselves.
I say self-aware, not that she’s great at acting constructively ON that self-awareness. Like, she understands exactly what she needs from Joyce, and can name it, but won’t acknowledge how massively unfair that is to Joyce, or back off from requiring it from her. She knows the origin of her sexual hang-ups and can talk about them with her partner, but she can’t just turn them off or prevent them from sabotaging her relationship or her enjoyment of sex (I don’t mean she and Dina are DOOMED DOOOOOOOOOOOOOMED when I say ‘sabotage,’ but we have absolutely seen her issues with sex and desire put painful pressure on them both). She just strikes me as someone who has a lot of clarity about her feelings and emotions—what they are, where they come from —without that making her any better at handling them than your average 18-year-old. (I might be off-base here, but I suspect some of this probably comes from having been closeted in self-defense for many years, and having to do a lot more self-interrogation in relation to her ultra-conservative Christian upbringing than Joyce did before they both left for college. You have to pay a lot of attention to yourself in order to hide yourself effectively from danger. Plus, it seems to be pretty common for younger LGBT folks to go through a phase where they try to deny the Bad Thoughts, especially when they’re in unsafe home/social environments, and I imagine that self-acceptance in the face of that impulse to denial requires a period of focused introspection. I bet Becky did a *lot* of self-reflecting to get the point of being so open and proud of being a lesbian, the very second she felt like she was somewhere remotely safe to do so.)
tl;dr I think Becky is as much of a mess as most of the cast, but her personal flavor of mess involves less lying to herself or trying to fit herself into an image that doesn’t really match her insides.
Yes I agree, I think it’s more about bad behavior than being a Bad Friend.
I feel like they might be half-assing this
Maybe
Not sure
yeah, joyce, how the turntables…
I have a feeling that in another 20 years we’re going to realize that there’s no such thing as autism and everyone in the world just has their own quirks. The people who we assumed we “neurotypical” just being the ones who had quirks that allowed them to socialize better.
Yeah, and we’ll all be riding around on magical talking ponies and make a million bucks every day and
I think autism really exists, but it is also the psychological flavor of the day. I am not sure how much it is being diagnosed and treated in the psychological community, but in the webverse, everyone seems to have it.
A couple of rules I learned in psychology:
1. Everyone could be diagnosed with something. No one meets the definition of psychologically normal.
2. If your quirks are not significantly interfering with your life, then they are not bad enough to warrant a major diagnosis.*
*You can still seek help dealing with issues, but a major diagnosis and, especially, a drug regimen may not be appropriate. Note: Because everyone wants/requires a diagnosis, there are several diagnoses in the DSM 5 that are basically “mostly normal with some issues/quirks”. What most people (not the DSM 5) call mild autism is one of these.
Oh my god I spent so long trying to convince literal doctors of these exact two things.
re: what OBBWG said. That was something I got out of therapy for anxiety– I was diagnosed with a phobia that we chose not to treat, fear of crowds, but since I was never going to go to another high school dance or rock concert and I didn’t have a problem on city streets or in theaters where people sit down instead of stand, it didn’t make sense to try to fix it. (This was before I knew the US would start turning to fascism and I’d be needing to go to protests. Turns out I still get panic attacks in large crowds.) My therapist said if it wasn’t decreasing my quality of life, then it didn’t need to be treated, which seems really obvious when you think about it but not when you’re thinking about it in terms of making people more normal.
Test anxiety, otoh, was interfering with my career path, so that’s what we treated.
I agree. I also think people here are trying a little too hard to diagnosis the characters. Look, Joyce is in a comic strip. She’s a cartoon, which by definition is not an actual person. Of course, everything is out-of-whack and skewed; she’s supposed to make you laugh. I’m still not sure if it will do anything for the strip going forward for Joyce to be retconned into ASL, if that’s what happens, but she’s Willis’ creation and she has enough quirks and foibles to support a bunch of different diagnoses – OCD, anxiety disorder, aggression…
I assume you mean ASD, not ASL. ASL is American Sign Language.
Yeah, it really depends on what you mean by “autism”.
What people tend to mean by that much of the time is a very very broad collection of neurodivergent stripes, conditions and even personalities that are all haphazardly lumped together into one overly generic category. What is true of one autistic** you meet can never be assumed to be true about any other. If some of them have trouble with eye contact and rigid diet patterns, that doesn’t mean that they all do.
The only thing that all these many traits and stripes have in common is that, from a western neurotypical viewpoint, they seem to occur with each other, when they can occur with or without each other in countless unique combinations.
Grouping them all under a single label sells the impression that these traits are all down to a single, discernable ’cause of existence inside the brain.
Besides the fact that the human brain is still the most complex structure in the known universe and there’s still so much we don’t know about it, there’s more than enough evidence to suggest that all the traits people shove into the autism category don’t all have the same root cause in the brain.
If that were really true, we’d expect at least some persistent pattern that could be found in ALL autistic brains. But no such persistent pattern has ever been found. In fact, the opposite. It’s been shown that as well as other neurodivergents, all autistic brains alongside each other actually display MORE diversity then the entirety of all brains in the human species.
It is definitely my hope for the future that we get more/better ways of describing our unique neurodivergences so that others can better understand us and we can better understand ourselves.
I don’t know, I don’t think it is or ever will be useful to dismiss the concept of autism entirely. Think of neurodiversity as like the color spectrum – we may not have common words for every specific shade of visible light, but we don’t just go, “Hey, it’s all just colors, man, no need to put labels on them.” Saying something is blue is just more practical in most situations than saying it’s web color #0247FE or whatever, and just because the words we use for color are category words doesn’t mean there isn’t a meaningful distinction between blue and red. Similarly, saying that someone is autistic may not precisely capture their specific experience, but it’s still a useful categorization.
Thankoru, this is very much valid, and I want to extend on the points you made that are actually not mutually exclusive to what I want to point out.
Not all tools are necessary like colors where people can clearly see differences and nuances in most cases and know how to react in any system that uses it, like traffic lights and exit signs.
In the specific case of neurodivergents, it’s not really like a broken leg or a broken arm with a colorful cast, where people can clearly see what you need help with and what you don’t, and know what to do and what boundaries to respect when you consent for help. Neurodivergence is something that affects us in very invisible, very diverse ways, so tools that can help us clearly communicate what we want people to know about us are essential.
Just as with any other tool, an information tool such a label can and will fail if either it is not designed properly or people ask it to do the wrong job.
The autism label is no exception, although unlike other tools, people don’t tend to question the ways they misuse it that hurt us even when informed otherwise, and basically end up saying this:
“The Stars in your Personal Brain Galaxy don’t quite align with my current categories and calculations. I know MY maps of understanding are perfect, so it’s YOUR stars that must be wrong”. (see what the basic falt is in this logic)?
wait what, why is having gay thought autistic? i missed the memo 😀
Joyce clearly has an imperfect understanding of autism, but I believe it relates to Billie’s need to convince herself that everything she did was completely normal and everyone else must feel the same way.
Having gay thoughts isn’t, but (from what I gather) Joyce is (incorrectly) assuming/suggesting that Billie’s temporarily sleeping with Ruth was because she is autistic and doing it in an attempt to fit in with the majority (‘everyone has gay thoughts sometimes, therefore I must too’).
I don’t think that’s it. I don’t think Joyce is saying anything about gay and autistic being related.
She’s comparing Jennifer’s claim that “Everyone copies everyone else, just to fit in. That’s normal” to Jennifer’s previous claim about “Everyone liking girls sometimes. That’s normal”, by pointing out that Jennifer went well beyond what “everyone does” in terms of liking girls and it might be the same situation here – so if Jennifer thinks this autistic trait is just normal, it might be because she’s autistic too.
Yep pretty much.
Yeah. Basically Joyce is pointing out that, historically, Jennifer have not been a good arbiter of what is “normal”. Jennifer projects a lot and Joyce is recognizing that. The ultimate conclusion is probably wrong, but the pattern is there.
Oof, been there with the “am I actually feeling these things or am I just copying what I think I should be feeling” thing. Those times are… fun
I’m now having an existential crisis about never having such feelings.
New Spinoff, with a new fresh name: “It’s Billie”.
hey @Devin, not sure if you’re reading today’s comments, but if you are and you have a minute, please explain what you meant by the “moving goalposts” thing yesterday.
I don’t think we’ll agree about Mary and Sarah, and that’s fine, but it really rubs me the wrong way to be accused of something like that when I thought I was keeping my points consistent. Maybe there’s something I’m not seeing
Maybe it was a miscommunication. The way it read to me was that your initial focus was on the things Mary and Sarah judged people on, and then in the reply you acknowledged their different motivations and focused instead on the fact that they both publicly disapprove of people to their faces (which they absolutely do in different ways, but yeah I think we’re just going to disagree on them).
Please excuse my ignorance on this subject. Is being autistic something that prevents empathy?
That’s how the stereotype goes, anyway.
A very hurtful stereotype, if that. 😔
Basically the exact opposite, honestly. There’s a study saying “Autistic people just care too fuckin’ much, damn.” Because headlines are bullshit and science is a scam, when it comes to our brains. Apparently.
CDC has a list of 30 ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) symptoms then ends with “It is important to note that children with ASD may not have all or any of the behaviors listed as examples here.” So, um, not very clear.
But a common theme is that various instinctive socialization skills are broken. It doesn’t prevent compensatory skills from being learned. Think Dina.
(I’m going to change my name from “Lucky Winner” to “Cruithne”. Yes, emails tells me I am again the lucky verified winner of 4.5 million dollars from the Ukrainian something-or-other today. But the name’s more snarky than I want.)
Eh, humans shouldn’t be trusting a lot of their oh so “natural” and somehow therefore “good” social instincts anyway, what with tribalism and not. Also socially on a multicultural frontier, misunderstandings are better off treated as the rule than the exception anyway. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Kinda starting to think this is insensitive to autistic people…
Spiderman pointing meme