Welp, Order of selection doesn’t matter unless you’re also including sexual dominance in the equation (Or possibly who initiated courtship).
So from a purely romantic standpoint there are 153 pairings and 816 triples and 3060 quads.
So we could certainly keep Willis busy for quite some time with slip-shines if he was willing to go back and do slip shines for the characters in the ItsWalk! universe as well as any future comic universes.
You’re making the problem set smaller than it is and that’s actually making the math more complicated.
We can have ANY POSITIVE NUMBER of cast members involved, up to the full ensemble. Yes, even solo acts. …. but okay, zero is pretty boring, leave that out.
With a cast of 18, the calculation for this is 2^18 – 1 = 262,143 combinations.
This Right Here is why I always read the comments section. Sure, you could take Willis’s comic and smile at Joyce’s antics … OR you could actually debate the best way to calculate the exact number of sexual variations possible in the cast.
I’m fairly certain that, straight or no, at least one scenario involves her living with Dorothy in a small townhouse with an unspecified number of adopted children.
“I have created this chart showing all of the possible relationships that can occur among people you know. As you can see, all of the important ones center around me.”
“I have created this chart” really is all you need
to change a normal quote into a Faz quote:
“‘I have created this chart showing that’ If you
want to make an apple pie from scratch, you
must first create the universe”
-Faz (it used to be Carl Sagan)
Please tell me you mean “shipping” in the sense of advocating for a particular romantic pairing, and not in the sense of some bizarre crate-and-forklift Faz-fetish.
“No lady wants my, the great Faz’s, penis in them, you want no penis in you. Our love is destined to be, let us get married so we can entwine our genitals.”
Well, if we’re going to differentiate, there are at least a dozen scenarios per pairing. Mutual pursuit, drunken one-night stand, mutual pursuit while oblivious to the other’s intentions… And then degrees of tsundereness…
We could use triple integrals to calculate the change in volume of the tsun, and then Newton’s Third Law will help us determine the magnitude of the ensuing dere. The resulting formula for how many discrete tsundere level settings we have to account for will be expressed in terms of: range of emotional expression, level of emotional honesty, partner’s EQ, stubbornness, and genre of current medium.
It’s sad that we have to BSoD Joyce to get her to update her drivers. Her social network card, her sexual experience card, and her science drivers are horribly out of date and yet she barely thinks about patching them.
Her time_t function only goes back or forward about 6,000 years without overflowing, too. I mean that’s way better than a 32-bit *nix clock, but hugely inferior to a modern 64-bit one.
That’s ordered pairs though. Counting combinations rather than permutations there are “only” 153 possible couples, 816 threesomes, 3,060 quartets, 8,568 quintets, 18,564 sextets (hurr!), 31,824 septets, 43,758 octets, 48,620 nonetets, 43,758 decetets, and so forth, for a total of 262,125 combinations not counting solitaires or the null orgy.
I was trying to figure that out, as well. There’s a clear pattern, so I’m pretty sure that I could wrap it all up into one easy equation. Of course, trying to come up with that equation (without looking it up – that’s cheating!) is taking me much longer.
Of course, that total assumes everyone is bisexual, polyamorous, and open to incest. So… yeah.
We get a constellation for every subset of at least size 2. There are a total of 2¹⁸ subsets. Subtract the singletons and the empty set and you have 2¹⁸-18-1 = 262125.
And if anyone’s like me and didn’t get this intuitively, that’s because, for each of 18 characters, you either include or don’t include them in the Slipshine. So 2 possible options, for each of 18 people.
The trick for me was always remembering the REASON for the formula, and for the combination formula it’s pretty easy.
When you want, oh, let’s say 4 out of 18, you pick the first one at random. That’s 18 possibilities. Then you pick another one at random out of the remaining 17, giving you 18 * 17. Then another one at random from the remaining 16, then another one from the remaining 15, giving you 18 * 17 * 16 * 15. So you’re multiplying the top 4 numbers. If you had 20 possibles instead of 18, you’d still multiply the top 4 numbers, but the “top” would have moved a bit higher. If you wanted a combination of 6, you’d multiply the top 6 numbers. Generally speaking, if you have n possibles and want to get k out of them, multiply the top k numbers (with the top-most being n).
Someone once upon the time got the clever but confusing idea that 18 * 17 * 16 * 15 was actually 18!, 18 * 17 * 16 * 15 * 14 * … * 2 * 1, with everything past 15 crossed out. How do you do that? Divide by 14 factorial.
This gives us part of the formula:
n! / (n-k)!
Why? Because n – k (18 – 4 = 14 in this example) is where you start crossing numbers out from n!.
This is the formula for permutations, where order matters. Since order doesn’t matter, we also have to divide by the number of possible orderings, which is k!. This gives us
n!
————–
(n-k)! * k!
…. and no one’s reading this because the next comic’s up. Yeah. That’s the reason.
I read it, and I would like to know WHERE WERE YOU when I was studying combinatorial analysis. This is the mnemonic I’ve always needed and didn’t realize until now.
I think it might be more prudent to not turn Joyce *on*. All those years of sexual repression coming to the forefront when she finally decides to be with someone?
We’ll finally get visitors from another world, but they’re just stopping by to ask us to turn down the horrible music that’s some girl screaming in ecstasy at the top of her lungs.
If Joyce ever were to meet Joyce, I think that the Congresswoman would instantly become her personal idol and role model. They’re both… really that frantically upbeat and whimsical.
I remember a thread on Tumblr where it was determined that Transformers is the franchise with the highest number of possible ships, considering the vast number of characters who exist across multiple continuities. I forget how high the numbers got, but they were in the millions at least.
And Joyce is friends with Ethan now, so if he introduces her to the franchise she’ll be busy from now until the end of time.
Temporarily experiencing incoherent rage; please stand by.
Seriously, $30 for a little piece of plastic that makes up a tiny portion of an army is ludicrous. And that’s before paints, tools, transfer sheets/ brass icons, and terrain enter the equation…
I have a friend who is basically Joyce and loved that show, and watching her slowly (and I mean REALLY slowly) come to the realization that Korrasami was canon was hilarious.
Someday I will introduce her to Steven Universe, mark my words.
In modern language, slashfic is often used as a general term for fics based on shipping (more often than not smutty, but not necessarily), regardless of gender.
No, the slash refers to the / between the names of the pairings. It was originally brought in to discuss male/male pairings but still refered to all non-canon couples. Later words were added in order to be specific.
“You know what Joyce, I’m gonna write hardcore sexing at the end of this story so graphic that you will be unable to even think about us together without also thinking about it.”
“As those you care about try to drown the pain of a pointless existence in alcohol, so too may you try to drown your sorrows in Arby’s Barbecue Sauce.”
Well when a mommy and a daddy love each other very much, or at least find each other hot or at least have consumed enough alcohol to think either of those things…
That shes seriously contemplating scenarios where Walky falls in love with someone else, someone else that he considers a sister, telling him to his face and not considering Walkys own feelings towards Dorothy in all this and of course Billie will break up with her boyfriend as well because romance I guess
Walky also acts like a gigantic butthole on a nearly daily basis, consistently mocks Joyce’s beliefs, and repeatedly insists she’s nursing a thinly-veiled lust for Dorothy.
She has been. Dorothy told her she can’t harass him into doing things he doesn’t want to after she screamed at him for dumping Dorothy, and likewise, Sal got in Walky’s face when he was harassing her over being such a lesbian.
They’re dicks to each other all the time. That’s the entire basis of their relationship. If Walky wants to start putting limitations on what she’s allowed to say to him he needs to cut down on the r/Atheism bullshit.
Thats your opinion and you’re entitled to it but to me Joe isn’t an emotionally stunted pig, Sarah has very good reasons for being cranky and Malaya is…well shes a bongo but she was justified in her reactions with Sal
Okay, Joyce, secretly shipping your friends is one thing. Telling your friends about your shipping fantasies for them is another thing entirely. And kind of creepy.
Look, dammit, Scripture tells us that two (or seven, depending on which version) of every kind of animal was on that boat! Dinosaurs were animals! They were on the boat!
Creationists have determined they must have put baby dinosaurs on the Ark, though, to conserve space. Let’s hope many animals don’t grow to adult size very quickly!
Yeah,growing to adult size would bad,since some of this animals are eaten by us and also used for other things,but Jack Horner doesn’t care that they might take revenge against us.
The Ark was to be 450 feet long and 75 feet wide, with three decks, divided internally into rooms. God commanded Noah to take either (a) two animals of every sort (Gen 6:19–20), or (b) two couples of every sort that is unclean and seven couples of every beast that is clean and every bird of the air (perhaps for performing sacrifices with?) (Gen 7:2–3), or perhaps (c) He meant both. But Noah actually loaded (Gen 7:15) of every sort, clean and unclean “two and two”, which I think makes four. Which was as God commanded (Gen 7:16).
One would think so, but when you really think about the origin of the story, the “world” at that time was pretty well the Mesopotamian region, which is the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in modern-day Iraq. And all the animals would be those native to that region.
At least, that is one explanation I’ve seen from historians in regard to that story, when discussing historical merit to the story. What was a rather minor flood between two rivers can be overblown into a world-wide event through oral history. Like a centuries-long game of telephone. 😉
I see many of the stories in Genesis as apocryphal, written to be more of a parable than historical fact. In fact, I’ve even had a priest (I’m Roman Catholic) describe the creation story as a parable, in a conversation I had with him one time.
In fact, my belief regarding the creation story has long been about the same as what the Vatican teaches.
This post isn’t to debate that the story of Noah’s Ark is something that is possible using the dimensions provided, but rather just to highlight that the common belief of the extent of how many animals were on the Ark is much more than what, in actual fact, would have been considered for transport by Noah.
I was raised to believe the Bible was literal truth, so if Genesis said God was going to cover the entire world with a Flood and Noah had to get every single damn animal, then God covered the entire world with a Flood and Noah got every single damn animal.
So I’m assuming your childhood teachings were along the lines of this site instead?
I’ve never really encountered much in the way of Biblical literalism, outside of the internet or TV anyways. I’ve also gathered, from your writings, that you no longer believe much of what you were raised to believe, so I guess I wasn’t taking that into account with my post. I kinda went O.O when I read the above link. 😉
My post was more about providing some plausibility to the fantastical, rather than any attempt to specifically contradict you. Sorta like:
plausible = 50 different animals on the big boat
fantastical = over 1 million different animals on the big boat
From a historical, or scientific, viewpoint, which one is likely to be closer to the person at the beginning of the line in the telephone game? That’s really all I was trying to say. 🙂
The website you link neglects to mention the consequences of only putting vague “kind”s of animals on the Ark — namely, in order to get to the diversity in animals we have today from that sparse sample of creatures, there must have been a brief period of “super-evolution” immediately following the Flood. Like, the math requires literally a new species every second or so.
Yes, this is a thing people actually believe, that evolution is totally fake but Super Evolution is fine.
For some reason I couldn’t reply to your reply directly, so I’m replying here instead. I think the guy who wrote that article did actually mention some stuff about that in the comments below the article, in his responses to all the people responding to him to refute his article. I kinda browsed through some of them, but didn’t read too thoroughly. I think I remember seeing some mention of that in some of his responses, though. I just couldn’t read any more of it. 😛
Joyce of course, admitted the moment they make hot passionate biracial love. Would that be quadriracial…well maybe just triracial since they both got white in ’em.
Never exactly, since the binary expansion of 1/3 is non-terminating (since three is coprime with two). But you can get arbitarily close if you have enough generations. For example, if you go back 7 generations you have 128 5-g-parents. With 43 each of red and green and 42 blue you would be 33.6% each red and green and 32.8% blue. If that’s not close enough. marry someone 33.6% each red and blue and 32.8% green: your children will be 33.6% red and 33.2% each green and blue.
Also, the amount of DNA you get from each grandparent varies. For example your mother could pass you 2/3 of your maternal grandmother’s genome, but only 1/3 of your grandfather’s, so that could complicate matters if you start going back enough generations.
I suppose that’s one good thing about having bisexual tendencies — it doubles you chances of being able to get a date.
It also doubles your chances of getting shot down, though…..
They don’t have to be bi (or pan, or what have you) to be compatible, though.
Dina x Becky, for example. Becky is definitively monosexual. (Homosexual, to be precise.) Dina, we don’t know for certain yet, and yet they still work.
Everyone does have to be bi for someone’s bisexuality to double their chances of getting a date. In reality the chance of getting a date with the opposite sex is more likely than the same sex because the majority of people are heterosexual. (How much of a majority isn’t really known, but that’s besides the point. Which is specifically saying that your chances would not double).
Can someone clarify what the averages are for het, bi/pan and a? I’ve heard dozens of different statements on this, including both “most people are bi” and “most people are het”.
I believe the usual numbers are, like, 2% for trans* and 5-10 % homosexuals, but I don’t know if they’ve ever compiled numbers on bisexuals. Kinsey might be a place to start, but his numbers are probably way out of date. I’ve heard zoo keepers and other biologists claim that about 10% of birds form same-sex pairings, so if you say 10% is not 100% straight, you probably won’t be too far off.
–There’s an interesting Wikipedia article with numbers. It also points out that it depends on a lot of factors (the numbers you get), varying by country, urban/rural respondents, whether you are asking how they self-identify or asking what experiences/interests they’ve had (Australian women, for example–Australia did a couple big studies–report being straight 96.3% of the time; but report having had same-sex experiences or interests 19% of the time, which of course doesn’t add up); even the setting in which the questions are asked skews the responses. Still, an interesting article.
Sure you can. Sodium pentahol.
…
Okay, just kidding. But couldn’t you simply monitor the electric activity in the part of the brain where sexual interest is processed, show the subjects pictures of three dozen or so people of various appearances, and use that to determine where they fall on the Kinsey scale?
Joyce need to up her Math game. The number of variables (people) is the same, and the number of possible pairs has way more than doubled. Example: 5 boys and 5 girls has 5!=120 possible boy-girl pairing, wheras 10 people has 9!=362880 possible pairings.
Asymptotically, factorial(n) grows approximately like exp(n log n), which, yes, is faster than exp(n). However, people sometimes use “exponential growth” to mean anything that is exp(polynomial), which does include factorial(n).
Is that (“number of variables” = “number of people”) really what Joyce means with “known variables”?
From a programmer’s point of view, “sexual orientation” was a constant for Joyce, and it always was “opposite of own sex” (i assume that she would use the term sex, not gender).
However what she has learned now is that sexual orientation can be different, so that is a new variable for her “scenarios”.
Everyone’s gotta start somewhere. Everyone has a shameful self-insert fanfic in their past somewhere that we don’t talk about anymore. Ahem. I mean. SO I’VE HEARD 😉
I do have to wonder what Joyce’s reasoning is here.
She hasn’t met Billie’s “boyfriend” (or so she thinks) so she has no reason to think they are a bad pairing or should be broken up. She considers Billie to be her “best christian friend”, and while she hangs around Walky, I don’t know if she’d consider him to be great friends.
So why hope for the breakup of one of your best friends, only to have her paired with a guy you sometimes tolerate but often fight with?
Apart from teasing Walky I think she sees it as less than a future prediction and more like an idle fantasy. Like she says, she runs ALL the scenarios. We know from Becky that she spent the better part of their childhood shipping anyone with anyone (with half the parameters)
Also, it’s of course the bias in that she knows Billie and Walky but not Billie’s boyfriend. And maybe, just maybe, even Joyce can tell something is off with Billie’s relationship…
It isn’t that Billie/whoever is bad, it’s that the childhood sweethearts to adult lovers and eventual life-partners for Walky/Billie is so sweet and romantic and cute and… squeeee! It’s like a fairy-tale romance and something tells me that this is pretty much Joyce’s ideal.
A part of me wants her to keep this innocence about relationships. However, the realistic part of me knows it won’t happen.
First of all, where did Joyce call Billie her “best Christian friend”? I would have thought that Becky would fit that moniker.
Also I think that Joyce is engaging in less reasoning and more in wishful thinking, going for scenarios she likes best instead of going for those most likely. That would also explain her imagining Walky and Billie as predestinated lovers – she might not like him, but it’s more important that her idea of “true love” is affirmed.
And Joyce gets to be their favorite aunt and she will come and visit and spend a LOT of time with Dorothy and her beautiful babies (and Walky will be there too) and they will all watch MonkeyMaster together.
Well at the party on Saturday she invited the following guys:
Walky: Currently with Dorothy. Also a jerk
Ethan: Gay
Jacob: She’s not going to pursue him because she’s the number one fan of Jacob/Sarah OTP. (Also? Only fan)
Mike: Jerk, who was only allowed to come if he could be nice. Unsurprisingly, he failed to show.
Danny was allowed in because others vouched for him. (Dorothy, Amber, and Ethan would. Also, does Joyce know he’s Amazi Girl’s boyfriend?). But she still doesn’t know him at all. And Joe was anti invited
I think for the near future she’s settling on living vicariously through others.
No one at this point I think. Ethan was mostly because he was safe, Dotty, Sal and Becky are unfortunately the wrong gender to her preferences (Sal’s chocolate hair aside), Walky is a butthead, she doesn’t spend time with that many other boys.
Mike Warner – Joyce, deep down, wants to be with a bad boy. Which is ironic, because Mike is actually a fairly okay guy who clearly respects Joyce on some level but has the flaw that he needs to push people away all the time.
its a relationship shes already thoroughly dismissed, but i think the only person left shed even be remotely compatible with in that regard is… joe. think theyll work something out?
Billie is bisexual so it isn’t impossible, if her relationship with Ruth self-destructs… or if Ruth self-destructs in a non-lethal way (and that is most possible)… she may end up with some guy.
FWIW, though, I think Joyce’s scenario is based on an over-optimistic assessment of Dorothy’s chances of getting into Yale. They only take you if you’re:
1) Rich;
2) Fantastically well-connected in a social or commercial way;
3) A certified genius.
I don’t think that Dorothy is any of these and I can imagine an interesting character arc coming up where she gets their “Don’t call us, we’ll call you” letter. That said, if I was Walky, I’d feel a bit peeved at the thought of being the guy Dorothy ‘settled’ for, even if that isn’t even remotely true.
He and Amber will end up working in a dead-end retail job in San Francisco. Their mutual cynicism and misanthropy leads to a hate-sex relationship that finally blossoms into love when they realise that they’re the only ones who’s ever really cared about what they want rather than insist that they fit into some arbitrary ‘happy’ template; they are married shortly after their daughter is born.
Gee… I may have read that one somewhere else, now I think about it! 😉
So, basically, Joyce spends most of her time thinking up shipfics about her friends and associates? That’s… disturbing. Very, very disturbing. It’s an easy step to jump from ‘hypothetical scenarios’ to ‘preferred scenarios’ and ‘I want to make this happen’! I mean, I know that she’s a romantic and all but, combine this with her need to help people and, well, she could easily end up as freshman year’s very own Yenta!
I really think that someone needs to educate her about the need to avoid meddling in others’ personal lives. They also need to remind her that ‘plausible’ doesn’t mean ‘inevitable’.
I also think that a relationship of her own… any relationship will help. She won’t need romance-by-proxy if she has one of her own to focus on!
‘Relationship’ does not have to equal sexual contact and would be less likely in any early phase with Joyce anyway. However, a romantic interest, even if only a platonic one (at first) would be healthy for her, I think.
I have no doubt that Joyce will be back on the manhunt (albeit more world-wise) when she feels she has enough distance from the Ryan incident. When there’s room for a relationship she’ll work it out, right now she’s taken a time-out. It’s important to have those sometimes.
The shipping could be seen as her redirecting all that frantic manhunt energy towards someone else than herself. Maybe not super convenient, but probably better than most plausible alternatives.
Oh Joyce. She should probably not be doing this, but I am just finding this hilarious. Shipping childhood friends is such a thing, but I’m not sure if you’re supposed to do it for real life people Joyce?? Also I love how she can joke about her own slow update on the ‘woo homosexuality!’ front.
Just loving Joyce right now, I don’t really care if this isnt healthy behaviour
I’m not sure it’s a joke. She looks like she’s still genuinely freaked out by it but I think she’s one of those people for whom reality triumphs every time. So, as it is possible, she’s going to factor it in.
Besides… Yeah, Saturday’s strip shows that she can feel the cute in this too!
Hey, at least she performed the critical system update. Some people just keep putting those off for… Shut up, Avira, I’ll reboot for that update when I’m ready! For the umpteenth time, remind me again in 4 hours.
The cuteness of today’s strip aside, I just wanted to thank Dave Willis for having a buffer.
I read a number of online comics, and one of my other favorites isn’t going to update this week because the author attended a con. I shall not complain, as it is a free service, but I will be MOST GRATEFUL that Dave Willis has us constantly entertained months in advance. DoA is an important part of my daily online life, and I’m glad for uninterrupted service.
Mind you, should DoA end (I’m in denial that it isn’t forever), I think I shall have to go move to wherever Mr. Willis is, where I shall take up a room above his garage. On a daily basis, I shall be asking “So what happened to Dina next? And Dorothy? Did she realize that grad school is much more important on the resume than undergrad? Was Walky a good First Gentlemen? Tell us, Uncle Dave, tell us!”
And despite the fact that I am several years his senior, I will insist on calling him Uncle Dave as I pester him for story time. 🙂
*Long time fan. First time commenting*
I don’t get why Billie doesn’t want people to know she has a girlfriend. Or does she not want people knowing she’s dating RUTH? Idk, so.. help?
It is probably partly because she doesn’t want to have to explain what bisexuality is over and over like she has had to do for the rest of her life, and partly because it will throw other people off the scent because even the other characters who know what bisexuality is will still believe Joyce and think she is dating a man.
It’s mostly the later. Ruth dating a student could get her fired and/or suspended if the authorities find out and Billie prefer that her friends don’t know so they can’t let the secret out.
Wait, if she’s going through all the scenarios, has she run the idea of Ruth and Billie through her head, yet? Or is she really holding out for Walky/Billie?
I like that Joyce also unequivocally believes that Dorothy will be going to Yale and doesn’t have any sort of reservation about it. Even Walky’s sort of bothered by it, though for the completely understandable reason that he’s really falling for her.
Hmmm. Now I want fanart of that scene (since the comic won’t ever get there). Dorothy leaving for the car, carrying her stuff, trying to stop herself from having second thoughts. The friends assemble behind her , trying to put on a brave face or in the case of Joyce just crying their eyes out. It would be beautiful in a sad way.
“So what’s our shipfic?”
“Our story would be a sci-fi epic in which I loose my memory and end up joining the government agency you work at. Together with the rest of our team of superpowerd people(and our math T.A.) we fight aliens and giant robots. All the while our love grows for each other. You also end up loosing an arm.”
I’m gay and my boyfriends bi, but it’s still a homosexual relationship, them being bi is not what matters, a jerkass wouldn’t see them kissing and say “that’s so bi” they’d still say gay
Theyre not saying its not a gay relationship, but just because your boyfriends in a gay relationship doesnt remove the fact theyre bi. It is an important distinction to make as there is a history of people of gay and straight orientation to whitewash out the bi spectrum. Its a bad precedent because its basically the same thing as aaying “oh its just a phase”.
It’s weird seeing so many people going along with Joyce, I honestly kinda thought what she said here was really creepy and rude. Not to say it ruins the character or it’s a condemnation, but I hope that’s a behavior she ends up dumping.
Eighteen doesn’t even come close to the total characters possible for pairings. That’s just the “main” characters listed on the bio page, the “A” cast, if you will (some of whom barely qualify as A-listers in the story). Joyce’s real list should include anyone she knows the name of that is not currently married and is around the same age range. This includes:
Amazi-Girl (still a separate entity in Joyce’s mind)
Leslie (teacher but young and still in the market)
Jason (thought she wouldn’t know about his relationship with Sal, but there was a strip where she saw Sal grabbing his shirt, and that’s good enough for Joyce’s brain)
Kaitlin (Becky’s first lover, part of system update)
Mary (really should be on the cast page)
Raidah (ditto)
Alice (Billie’s old friend, who confessed her almost-love in front of Joyce)
Sierra
Mandy
Grace
Rachel
Other Rachel
Agatha
Robin (Leslie flirted with her in class while Joyce was there)
Jocelyne (he’s her brother, why wouldn’t he be on the list?)
Jim
Bryan
There are some people that wouldn’t be on the list, despite them being valid candidates for pairings, simply because Joyce hasn’t met them or doesn’t know their names. Those include Daisy, Penny, Faz, Asma, and Conquest. Daisy in particular is an oversight because she is certainly in the market, but Joyce doesn’t know her.
And finally, in a banned category of her mind, quarantined, encrypted, and firewalled from the list, is Ryan.
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so the freak-out face is a Joyce BSoD, then she reboots in Safe Mode and downloads updates?
wait
there are eighteen characters just in the cast list, and seventeen ways to pair any one of them off, so that’s 306 Slipshines
OH BUT WHAT ABOUT MENAGE A THREES
that’s *4896* SLIPSHINES
but wait, what about… fours??
ahhh hahhhh
*brain lock*
(inb4 I don’t really calculate Slipshines, I just read them as they come)
((HURR COME))
Spoiler Alert: The menage a trois always involve god.
So the puritans believed…
That Jesus is cumming!(ok i’ll go in my corner now).
My favorite was always “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the LORD!” I figured that’s why people traditionally scream “oh god” during sex.
This took surprisingly long to find.
Or AmbMazi-Girl
Now THAT is what I call a Holy Trinity!
Welp, Order of selection doesn’t matter unless you’re also including sexual dominance in the equation (Or possibly who initiated courtship).
So from a purely romantic standpoint there are 153 pairings and 816 triples and 3060 quads.
So we could certainly keep Willis busy for quite some time with slip-shines if he was willing to go back and do slip shines for the characters in the ItsWalk! universe as well as any future comic universes.
you forgot the one true ship, the inevitable 18-way
You’re making the problem set smaller than it is and that’s actually making the math more complicated.
We can have ANY POSITIVE NUMBER of cast members involved, up to the full ensemble. Yes, even solo acts. …. but okay, zero is pretty boring, leave that out.
With a cast of 18, the calculation for this is 2^18 – 1 = 262,143 combinations.
There’s nothing like math to make sex sexier!
This Right Here is why I always read the comments section. Sure, you could take Willis’s comic and smile at Joyce’s antics … OR you could actually debate the best way to calculate the exact number of sexual variations possible in the cast.
This makes my morning.
I concur. THIS is why the comment section is the best thing about a Willis comic (or any webcomic in general).
True. Don’t always have time to read it all or comment but I try to read as many as I can.
Personally, I’d remove the one-ways…. but that still leaves us with 262 125 sexytime combinations!
18 chars, but that include Joyce. Does she run scenario with herself as a variable as well ?
Joyce is always a variable.
Joyce is the wild card.
Error JOYCE.CPP 27: Cannot modify a const object ‘GOD’
a compliment to your joke
WILD CARD bongoES
Hmmm.
WILD CARD bongoES!
😀
Yep, it doesn’t form the correct plural, but it does retain capitalization from the original B-word.
I’m fairly certain that, straight or no, at least one scenario involves her living with Dorothy in a small townhouse with an unspecified number of adopted children.
Yeah, I betcha one does XD
Or puggles. I’d go with the puggles.
Puggles might make decent baby-guards.
19. Joyce is including Jesus.
Yes, but she only admits it with her blushes.
“brain lock” is an appropriate response to any slipshine scenario involving faz, yes
Luckily, Joyce has not met Faz. She is spared that.
For the moment.
But Faz can help Joyce draw up the shipping diagrams.
It would just be a bunch of lines radiating out from a point marked “Faz”
“I have created this chart showing all of the possible relationships that can occur among people you know. As you can see, all of the important ones center around me.”
“I have created this chart” really is all you need
to change a normal quote into a Faz quote:
“‘I have created this chart showing that’ If you
want to make an apple pie from scratch, you
must first create the universe”
-Faz (it used to be Carl Sagan)
Is it a bad thing if the first thing that came to mind when I saw my own comment was “hey, that looks like Arkansas”
And the second:
“‘The designers of the Arkansas
Were inspired to choose a form that was
The exact dimensions and the shape
of the state whose name she bore
Yes the ship was shaped like Arkansas
And the hull was formed without a flaw
Every detail had been reproduced on a scale of one to one'”
Please tell me you mean “shipping” in the sense of advocating for a particular romantic pairing, and not in the sense of some bizarre crate-and-forklift Faz-fetish.
“No lady wants my, the great Faz’s, penis in them, you want no penis in you. Our love is destined to be, let us get married so we can entwine our genitals.”
Something, something…Half Life 3 confirmed.
Oh Half Life 3 is always being confirmed. Nobody will even notice when it actually does.
Wait, what, really?
Valve likes to keep a captive audience.
:O what about HL2 Episode 3? I want my episode 3 !!!!!
I also demand the next instalment of Sin: Episodes.
That game was fun but way too short.
Don’t worry – JoyceOS (jOySe?) can only handle pairs. It’s a hardware limit, no updates can remove it
jOySe is absolutely the way software engineers would write it
“It was a triumph. I’m making a not here: Huge success”
ah-ah-ah, you forgot to divide by 2 to eliminate duplicate pairs. Poor shipping math
Has to calculate from both points of view, silly.
also there are others that don’t have a cast page, so I bet I’m correct anyway! (for the wrong reasons)
Can anyone guess how your comment reminded me of rabbits?
(Hint: Michael C.)
(does this count as too seemingly random and off topic to post?)
They aren’t in the Cretaceous?
You messed up the math. Assuming only pairs, there’s no significant difference between Walky/Billie and Billie/Walky. So 163 potential pairs.
153, right?
Yes, 153, Viktoria also screwed it up.
There’s a HUGE difference between Walky courting Billie and Billie courting Walky
do you NOT AGREE
Well, if we’re going to differentiate, there are at least a dozen scenarios per pairing. Mutual pursuit, drunken one-night stand, mutual pursuit while oblivious to the other’s intentions… And then degrees of tsundereness…
We could be looking at a whole new field of tsundere-based mathematics here.
We could use triple integrals to calculate the change in volume of the tsun, and then Newton’s Third Law will help us determine the magnitude of the ensuing dere. The resulting formula for how many discrete tsundere level settings we have to account for will be expressed in terms of: range of emotional expression, level of emotional honesty, partner’s EQ, stubbornness, and genre of current medium.
It’s sad that we have to BSoD Joyce to get her to update her drivers. Her social network card, her sexual experience card, and her science drivers are horribly out of date and yet she barely thinks about patching them.
Her time_t function only goes back or forward about 6,000 years without overflowing, too. I mean that’s way better than a 32-bit *nix clock, but hugely inferior to a modern 64-bit one.
That’s ordered pairs though. Counting combinations rather than permutations there are “only” 153 possible couples, 816 threesomes, 3,060 quartets, 8,568 quintets, 18,564 sextets (hurr!), 31,824 septets, 43,758 octets, 48,620 nonetets, 43,758 decetets, and so forth, for a total of 262,125 combinations not counting solitaires or the null orgy.
This post evidently took me way too long to compose.
DID I NOT SAY I DO NOT ACTUALLY CALCULATE SLIPSHINES
You did. But that’s not to say that I don’t.
NEVER TELL HIR THE ODDS (OF A SLIPSHINE).
I was trying to figure that out, as well. There’s a clear pattern, so I’m pretty sure that I could wrap it all up into one easy equation. Of course, trying to come up with that equation (without looking it up – that’s cheating!) is taking me much longer.
Of course, that total assumes everyone is bisexual, polyamorous, and open to incest. So… yeah.
We get a constellation for every subset of at least size 2. There are a total of 2¹⁸ subsets. Subtract the singletons and the empty set and you have 2¹⁸-18-1 = 262125.
And if anyone’s like me and didn’t get this intuitively, that’s because, for each of 18 characters, you either include or don’t include them in the Slipshine. So 2 possible options, for each of 18 people.
…do we have to subtract the singletons?
If you want to calculate the number of possible combinations of k people out of a total ensemble of n, the formula is:
n!
————-
k! * (n-k)!
Where the ! is the factorial operator, indicating that you multiply all positive integers up to that number. For example 5! = 5 * 4 * 3 * 2 * 1 = 120.
…. and here I thought I would be the only one cra-cray enough to do the math on this.
I was always pretty good at solving math problems in school.
Remembering which formula to use for each problem is a different matter.
The trick for me was always remembering the REASON for the formula, and for the combination formula it’s pretty easy.
When you want, oh, let’s say 4 out of 18, you pick the first one at random. That’s 18 possibilities. Then you pick another one at random out of the remaining 17, giving you 18 * 17. Then another one at random from the remaining 16, then another one from the remaining 15, giving you 18 * 17 * 16 * 15. So you’re multiplying the top 4 numbers. If you had 20 possibles instead of 18, you’d still multiply the top 4 numbers, but the “top” would have moved a bit higher. If you wanted a combination of 6, you’d multiply the top 6 numbers. Generally speaking, if you have n possibles and want to get k out of them, multiply the top k numbers (with the top-most being n).
Someone once upon the time got the clever but confusing idea that 18 * 17 * 16 * 15 was actually 18!, 18 * 17 * 16 * 15 * 14 * … * 2 * 1, with everything past 15 crossed out. How do you do that? Divide by 14 factorial.
This gives us part of the formula:
n! / (n-k)!
Why? Because n – k (18 – 4 = 14 in this example) is where you start crossing numbers out from n!.
This is the formula for permutations, where order matters. Since order doesn’t matter, we also have to divide by the number of possible orderings, which is k!. This gives us
n!
————–
(n-k)! * k!
…. and no one’s reading this because the next comic’s up. Yeah. That’s the reason.
I read it, and I would like to know WHERE WERE YOU when I was studying combinatorial analysis. This is the mnemonic I’ve always needed and didn’t realize until now.
There’s a C(n,r) button on my calculator.
As for looking things up, we covered the Binomial Theorem in my Year 11 maths class, and I have a freak memory.
I think I will engage in a null orgy right now.
It sounds like science fictiony fun. Plus, “orgy”. Hurr.
‘The null orgy’ is the best thing I have read all day.
Her 32-bit architecture will run out of integers.
I bet she calls them menage a threes because French is the Devil’s language.
Wouldn’t that then be “mixtures of three”?
Gosh dangit Joyce.
Joyce has updated to DoA 10. Would you like to update to DoA 10.1?
Please do not turn off Joyce while updating…
I think it might be more prudent to not turn Joyce *on*. All those years of sexual repression coming to the forefront when she finally decides to be with someone?
We’ll finally get visitors from another world, but they’re just stopping by to ask us to turn down the horrible music that’s some girl screaming in ecstasy at the top of her lungs.
Not quite sure sexual repression works the same as a dam rupture.
The Rupture will happen in our lifetimes! Repent and be shaved! It’s the second cumming!
Augh, but now TDR_JESUS_CARD keeps failing causing fresh BSoD’s.
I take it the backup image is still at the mum’s place?
Earlier restore points simply make the problem worse.
The device is simply not compatible with real world conditions so, the system is more stable without it.
nooo why a windows 10 comparison whyyyyyy
As long as it isn’t Windows 8, which is an unglorified smartphone OS.
Joyce needs to meet up with Robin. She can show her the finer points of keeping your Shipping Chart up to date on a blackboard.
Robin was tracking actual relationships, though. Joyce is addressing possibilities. It requires a different organization scheme.
Faz has all the knowledge you need about graphs.
Maybe spreadsheets?
If Joyce ever were to meet Joyce, I think that the Congresswoman would instantly become her personal idol and role model. They’re both… really that frantically upbeat and whimsical.
D’oh! I meant if Joyce were ever to meet Robin!
Don’t post early in the morning and before you’ve had your coffee, kids! 😮
That, or they would dislike each other intensely. I give it a 50/50 chance of either outcome.
That system better not fry.
Joyce is the worst shipper. Like, actively bad at this.
I shudder to think what she would have made of Grey’s Anatomy.
I remember a thread on Tumblr where it was determined that Transformers is the franchise with the highest number of possible ships, considering the vast number of characters who exist across multiple continuities. I forget how high the numbers got, but they were in the millions at least.
And Joyce is friends with Ethan now, so if he introduces her to the franchise she’ll be busy from now until the end of time.
what about the marvel comics fandom? Surely they have more characters across all continuities. (Earth-1089!Sue StormxEarth 616!Heller Zemo 4evr)
NOT ANYMORE
aw shit i forgot D’:
I create characters at the drop of a hat (or upon realization of a shitty pun name). I bet I have everyone beat =p
((not that I really want to count them all, that’s been driving me bonkers as it is))
I used to do that. Now I make Warhammer 40K army lists.
Shame the bloody game’s so prohibitively expensive.
Buy it? Around here we get cough yarr cough free.
Temporarily experiencing incoherent rage; please stand by.
Seriously, $30 for a little piece of plastic that makes up a tiny portion of an army is ludicrous. And that’s before paints, tools, transfer sheets/ brass icons, and terrain enter the equation…
If her parents let her watch Legend of Korra, she would probably support the Korra/Mako pairing.
Oh god you’re right.
On the plus side, I’d have loved to watch Korrasami melt her brain
I have a friend who is basically Joyce and loved that show, and watching her slowly (and I mean REALLY slowly) come to the realization that Korrasami was canon was hilarious.
Someday I will introduce her to Steven Universe, mark my words.
That would literally uncreate her and if you love her you will do it now. She needs to be strong in the real way!
WHY is there no way for me to leave a like on this comment?
Please please please for the love of all that is good in the multiverse, PLEASE record her reactions to SU. 😀
“But they’re just good friends, like Dorothy and me! ” – Joyce at the ending, probably
“But Joyce, didn’t you know that Bryan and Mike have confirmed that–”
“LA LA LA LA LA, I’M NOT HEARING ANYTHING”
Joyce needs shipping charts
All the shipping. A never-ending well of it.
I didn’t know Joyce was capable of critical system updates.
“Here, read my Walky/Billie slashfic.”
slashfic?? who’s genderbent? cuz genderbent walky would be…well, you know
In modern language, slashfic is often used as a general term for fics based on shipping (more often than not smutty, but not necessarily), regardless of gender.
so the ‘slash’ is no longer about same gender pairings but about the ‘/’ between any pairing names?
No it isn’t. Slashfic is purely for male homosexual pairings, femslash for female homosexual pairings and het for hetrosexual pairings.
Or… slang is inherently transitory and demanding a concrete definition based on your locale (be it physical or virtual) is perhaps a waste of time.
(Having said that, although I’ve seen that “purely homosexual” restriction in some conversations, it seems a little dated to me.)
No, the slash refers to the / between the names of the pairings. It was originally brought in to discuss male/male pairings but still refered to all non-canon couples. Later words were added in order to be specific.
So, with “slash”, “femslash” and “hetslash” slashfic has the ironic problem of presumption of (male) homosexuality?
Yes, because it was popularised by fics that involved male/male pairings.
wouldn’t that be friendfiction for her?
“You know what Joyce, I’m gonna write hardcore sexing at the end of this story so graphic that you will be unable to even think about us together without also thinking about it.”
Joyce: D8
…wait, is joyce saying that she will run every girl/girl scenario in her head just in case? perhaps we should compare notes…
also, let’s see what she thinks of ruth/billie!
Perfect gravatar is perfect
it’s what we call…in-depth reporting
>.> Daisy’d like someone to report on her inner depths.
Daisy: Girlfriends, how long does it take to be rolling in them?
Becky: A weekend or so
Daisy: WHYYYYYYYYYYYYY
follow-up article: extreme attempts to get a girlfriend. this week, i will become homeless and hit on awkward girls at parties
JOURNALISM
“Ruth/Billie?! Don’t be silly, that could never happen. They hate each other. They would have to be, like, really drunk or something.”
Also, it clearly is a boyfriend. I have a package of Arby’s sauce to prove it.
There’s a Nihilist Arby’s joke in here somewhere about how Billie and Ruth seem dead set on destroying themselves, but damn if I can articulate it.
“As those you care about try to drown the pain of a pointless existence in alcohol, so too may you try to drown your sorrows in Arby’s Barbecue Sauce.”
Come on, Joyce, you already know how this one will go down now when you have all the parameters.
Walky will meet Gary. They will be man-married.
dinosaur to be provided at a later date
Dina and Becky will combine their talents and somehow manifest a dinosaur and kickstart Walky’s plan.
If they can enlist someone in robotics, I wouldn’t be surprised if they did make a mechanical theropod steed.
Befriend carla.
Joyce.exe running all variables.
(This joke was probably done wrong. Yeah, I don’t really get computer humor.)
Runtime error ‘7’:
Out of memory
Abort, retry, fail?
You must construct additional pylons?
I) influence with a large hammer
Is this happening in the Land of the Lost??
Is she in the computer class with Amber?
The statistics program I use calls its executable files .do-files. Joyce.do is probably an interesting routine…
*checks comic at 10:03 PM. No comments. Goes to comments about 30 seconds later, tons have flooded in*
WHERE DID YOU PEOPLE COME FROM?
A few eons ago, a rocks became magically fertile and an egg named thought was created…
Tathagata Buddha, the Father Buddha, said, “With our thoughts, we make the world.” Elemental forces caused the egg to hatch!
From the egg came a stone monkey. The nature of Monkey was irrepressible!
And now you have to crack the shell for the revolution or something.
Babies.
Well when a mommy and a daddy love each other very much, or at least find each other hot or at least have consumed enough alcohol to think either of those things…
Through tears in the fabric of space-time.
The internet. No need to worry, citizen.
I love how Walky kinda forgets to be offended in the last strip because he his genuinely intrigued by Joyce change of perspective.
I’d be interesting seeing Walky stand up to himself and tell Joyce off but that’s not likely to happen anytime soon
It’s happened before, right now he just doesn’t have time for this shit.
What are you talking about? Walky tells Joyce off all the time. If anything she needs to stand up to him.
I mean a proper, serious talking to not a put down but something similar to what Roz did (taken down a notch)
Why would he? All they do is bicker like this, and Walky bickers just as much as Joyce.
In what circumstance would he even have the moral highground to say “leave me alone” to Joyce?
That shes seriously contemplating scenarios where Walky falls in love with someone else, someone else that he considers a sister, telling him to his face and not considering Walkys own feelings towards Dorothy in all this and of course Billie will break up with her boyfriend as well because romance I guess
Walky also acts like a gigantic butthole on a nearly daily basis, consistently mocks Joyce’s beliefs, and repeatedly insists she’s nursing a thinly-veiled lust for Dorothy.
That doesn’t mean Walky can’t call out Joyce or vice versa
She has been. Dorothy told her she can’t harass him into doing things he doesn’t want to after she screamed at him for dumping Dorothy, and likewise, Sal got in Walky’s face when he was harassing her over being such a lesbian.
They’re dicks to each other all the time. That’s the entire basis of their relationship. If Walky wants to start putting limitations on what she’s allowed to say to him he needs to cut down on the r/Atheism bullshit.
Thats fine and Joyce has the right to say that to Walky when he brings it up however at this junction its Joyce being inappropriate not Walky
Well alright then, just as long as you’re there when Walky calls her deluded for being religious.
Or when Joe acts like an emotionally stunted pig to Danny.
Or when Sarah gets super cranky at people for saying anything remotely outside of her comfort zone.
Or when Malaya speaks like at all.
Thats your opinion and you’re entitled to it but to me Joe isn’t an emotionally stunted pig, Sarah has very good reasons for being cranky and Malaya is…well shes a bongo but she was justified in her reactions with Sal
Does this mean that Joyce will be sporting new orange sunnies very soon?
Wow, an Utena avatar.
I wonder if there’s a special term for when a CHARACTER ships her fellow characters.
creepy? trust me on this. you do not say it out loud
Captain? 😛
Pathetic?
Her own fandom?
TV Tropes calls it “Shipper on Deck”.
Ah, TV Tropes.
Is there anything you don’t know??
Other than, say, how to not get lost in a million varied links creating the greatest time sink ever?
A million? I’m impressed. My browser always crashes before I can get to 1400.
TV Tropes knows how to do that too, it just doesn’t.
The answer to that is simple, just read it all the first time through.
And yes, Dumbing of Age has an entry in the Webcomics list for Shipper on Deck!
Okay, Joyce, secretly shipping your friends is one thing. Telling your friends about your shipping fantasies for them is another thing entirely. And kind of creepy.
The new font isn’t really growing on me.
I’m shipping you with the new font, regardless of your feelings for it.
The font is fine with me.
Of course, it needs to be Comic Sans to have a little extra kick.
But every font needs to be Comic Sans IMHO.
Dangit Jerry!
PURGE THE UNCLEAN
What do you think you’re running from? THE DISEASE IS INSIDE OF YOU!
Walkyverse Walky disagrees with you! Strongly!
Joyce hasn’t seen this much shipping since Noah’s Ark…
congratulations! that was awesome! you’ve won…a new boat!
Compared to the supertankers, Noah’s Ark wasn’t all that big.
Well that explains some things.
Look, dammit, Scripture tells us that two (or seven, depending on which version) of every kind of animal was on that boat! Dinosaurs were animals! They were on the boat!
Creationists have determined they must have put baby dinosaurs on the Ark, though, to conserve space. Let’s hope many animals don’t grow to adult size very quickly!
are we talking the Autobots’ Ark? ’cause then that might make sense
Yeah,growing to adult size would bad,since some of this animals are eaten by us and also used for other things,but Jack Horner doesn’t care that they might take revenge against us.
Noah had DNA samples of each animal, and a cloning machine. It’s the only explanation that makes sense.
Also, Noah was Galasso.
The Ark was to be 450 feet long and 75 feet wide, with three decks, divided internally into rooms. God commanded Noah to take either (a) two animals of every sort (Gen 6:19–20), or (b) two couples of every sort that is unclean and seven couples of every beast that is clean and every bird of the air (perhaps for performing sacrifices with?) (Gen 7:2–3), or perhaps (c) He meant both. But Noah actually loaded (Gen 7:15) of every sort, clean and unclean “two and two”, which I think makes four. Which was as God commanded (Gen 7:16).
Does anyone here have any experience with the way fundies say he prevented inbreeding?
One would think so, but when you really think about the origin of the story, the “world” at that time was pretty well the Mesopotamian region, which is the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in modern-day Iraq. And all the animals would be those native to that region.
At least, that is one explanation I’ve seen from historians in regard to that story, when discussing historical merit to the story. What was a rather minor flood between two rivers can be overblown into a world-wide event through oral history. Like a centuries-long game of telephone. 😉
I see many of the stories in Genesis as apocryphal, written to be more of a parable than historical fact. In fact, I’ve even had a priest (I’m Roman Catholic) describe the creation story as a parable, in a conversation I had with him one time.
In fact, my belief regarding the creation story has long been about the same as what the Vatican teaches.
This post isn’t to debate that the story of Noah’s Ark is something that is possible using the dimensions provided, but rather just to highlight that the common belief of the extent of how many animals were on the Ark is much more than what, in actual fact, would have been considered for transport by Noah.
I was raised to believe the Bible was literal truth, so if Genesis said God was going to cover the entire world with a Flood and Noah had to get every single damn animal, then God covered the entire world with a Flood and Noah got every single damn animal.
So I’m assuming your childhood teachings were along the lines of this site instead?
I’ve never really encountered much in the way of Biblical literalism, outside of the internet or TV anyways. I’ve also gathered, from your writings, that you no longer believe much of what you were raised to believe, so I guess I wasn’t taking that into account with my post. I kinda went O.O when I read the above link. 😉
My post was more about providing some plausibility to the fantastical, rather than any attempt to specifically contradict you. Sorta like:
plausible = 50 different animals on the big boat
fantastical = over 1 million different animals on the big boat
From a historical, or scientific, viewpoint, which one is likely to be closer to the person at the beginning of the line in the telephone game? That’s really all I was trying to say. 🙂
The website you link neglects to mention the consequences of only putting vague “kind”s of animals on the Ark — namely, in order to get to the diversity in animals we have today from that sparse sample of creatures, there must have been a brief period of “super-evolution” immediately following the Flood. Like, the math requires literally a new species every second or so.
Yes, this is a thing people actually believe, that evolution is totally fake but Super Evolution is fine.
For some reason I couldn’t reply to your reply directly, so I’m replying here instead. I think the guy who wrote that article did actually mention some stuff about that in the comments below the article, in his responses to all the people responding to him to refute his article. I kinda browsed through some of them, but didn’t read too thoroughly. I think I remember seeing some mention of that in some of his responses, though. I just couldn’t read any more of it. 😛
like why we don’t have unicorns now.
Oh, that is established fact
and…
I can’t do html again
https://youtu.be/_EPsuOEH1fY
And just how many supertankers are made out of wood?
You can almost bet that Joyce hasn’t allowed even a single scenario for herself. I know how this works.
Best critical system update ever 🙂
I dunno. I prefer the critical update that also includes ALIENS.
That’s why Alienware is for.
Alienware is a tad bit overpriced for its level of hardware performance. However, it more than makes up for this in its badassery-for-buck ratio..
But it’s so expensive.
Less so after a few months when it becomes obsolete.
Joyce of course, admitted the moment they make hot passionate biracial love. Would that be quadriracial…well maybe just triracial since they both got white in ’em.
Is it possible to be near equally triracial? As in 33% of each race?
I’m sure if your mom is first generation biracial and your dad is a purebread.
That’d be 25/25/50.
Danny is Wonderbread, is that close enough?
Never exactly, since the binary expansion of 1/3 is non-terminating (since three is coprime with two). But you can get arbitarily close if you have enough generations. For example, if you go back 7 generations you have 128 5-g-parents. With 43 each of red and green and 42 blue you would be 33.6% each red and green and 32.8% blue. If that’s not close enough. marry someone 33.6% each red and blue and 32.8% green: your children will be 33.6% red and 33.2% each green and blue.
Neat! Thanks for the mathematastic answer.
Also, the amount of DNA you get from each grandparent varies. For example your mother could pass you 2/3 of your maternal grandmother’s genome, but only 1/3 of your grandfather’s, so that could complicate matters if you start going back enough generations.
Excellent point! With crossing-over it’s not limited to whole chromosomes, either.
*was about to make a UPS slogan joke, and realized that Joyce’s family name is Brown*
*plays Robert Plant’s “Ship Of Fools” on the Muzak*
I suppose that’s one good thing about having bisexual tendencies — it doubles you chances of being able to get a date.
It also doubles your chances of getting shot down, though…..
But if you are bi and also incredibly resilient in the face of rejection, you have a chance of getting a date that approaches unity.
Only if everyone else is also bi.
They don’t have to be bi (or pan, or what have you) to be compatible, though.
Dina x Becky, for example. Becky is definitively monosexual. (Homosexual, to be precise.) Dina, we don’t know for certain yet, and yet they still work.
Everyone does have to be bi for someone’s bisexuality to double their chances of getting a date. In reality the chance of getting a date with the opposite sex is more likely than the same sex because the majority of people are heterosexual. (How much of a majority isn’t really known, but that’s besides the point. Which is specifically saying that your chances would not double).
Can someone clarify what the averages are for het, bi/pan and a? I’ve heard dozens of different statements on this, including both “most people are bi” and “most people are het”.
I believe the usual numbers are, like, 2% for trans* and 5-10 % homosexuals, but I don’t know if they’ve ever compiled numbers on bisexuals. Kinsey might be a place to start, but his numbers are probably way out of date. I’ve heard zoo keepers and other biologists claim that about 10% of birds form same-sex pairings, so if you say 10% is not 100% straight, you probably won’t be too far off.
–There’s an interesting Wikipedia article with numbers. It also points out that it depends on a lot of factors (the numbers you get), varying by country, urban/rural respondents, whether you are asking how they self-identify or asking what experiences/interests they’ve had (Australian women, for example–Australia did a couple big studies–report being straight 96.3% of the time; but report having had same-sex experiences or interests 19% of the time, which of course doesn’t add up); even the setting in which the questions are asked skews the responses. Still, an interesting article.
Accurate numbers are impossible since we can’t poll everyone and can’t force them to be honest.
Not to mention how many people are ignorant, questioning, or in denial of their sexuality.
Sure you can. Sodium pentahol.
…
Okay, just kidding. But couldn’t you simply monitor the electric activity in the part of the brain where sexual interest is processed, show the subjects pictures of three dozen or so people of various appearances, and use that to determine where they fall on the Kinsey scale?
Nope, because not everyone responds to soley physical stimulous, for some people the personality of the p[erson is the most important part.
Yes, yes, but, “Only if everyone else is also bi,” is punchier than, “Only if everyone else has a compatible sexual orientation.”
Hohoho, Joyce is so innocent and precious, isn’t she? It’s not like this forum compulsively debates any possible ship in absurd detail?
Speaking off… sorry, Daisy, it turns out Becky’s ship was one that no one could foresee.
Yeah, but we don’t tell the people we’re shipping about it. ‘Cause they’re fictional and stuff.
I still think that one of the unwritten rules of the Dumbiverse is that Daisy never gets any, ever.
Joyce need to up her Math game. The number of variables (people) is the same, and the number of possible pairs has way more than doubled. Example: 5 boys and 5 girls has 5!=120 possible boy-girl pairing, wheras 10 people has 9!=362880 possible pairings.
Heck yeah! More people exponentially adds to the number of possible orgies!
I think the factorial progression is even faster than exponential.
Asymptotically, factorial(n) grows approximately like exp(n log n), which, yes, is faster than exp(n). However, people sometimes use “exponential growth” to mean anything that is exp(polynomial), which does include factorial(n).
Close. 5 boys and 5 girls has 5×5=25 pairings.
Yep. And changing the parameters to allow homosexual pairings brings you to (10-1)10/2=45. The number of possible pairings doesn’t even double!
Of course, Agemegos is also correct, and probably has the better approach. But this is my approach, and I’m stubborn, dammit!
Ten choose two is ten factorial divided by eight factorial divided by two factorial. 45 possible un-ordered pairings.
Wonder if this universe’s Joyce also has a ridiculous calculator. Seems like it’d come in handy for just this type of situation.
Is that (“number of variables” = “number of people”) really what Joyce means with “known variables”?
From a programmer’s point of view, “sexual orientation” was a constant for Joyce, and it always was “opposite of own sex” (i assume that she would use the term sex, not gender).
However what she has learned now is that sexual orientation can be different, so that is a new variable for her “scenarios”.
Kinda looks like Becky’s got a little bit of Deathstroke happening with her hair.
Sorry, B-Bill, your math is wrong. It doubles the opportunities to ask. The odds of acceptance/failure remain roughly the same.
Ya joyce because everything always goes exactly the way you thought it would. Your a modern day freaking nostradamus.
Or one of those evangelical doomsday people, since referring to Joyce.
Now all we need is a picture of old lady joyce standing on the street holding a sighn.
Why old?
Age needs too twist her mind a bit.
Nostradamus was a seer because he was such a bad alchemist.
It’s only gonna be a matter of time until Joyce discovers the treasures of fanfiction. I have a feeling she’d be good at it 😉
No, I think she’d be the kind who writes fanfic in which Harry Potter finds God and renounces witchcraft.
Everyone’s gotta start somewhere. Everyone has a shameful self-insert fanfic in their past somewhere that we don’t talk about anymore. Ahem. I mean. SO I’VE HEARD 😉
*cough*
Yeah, when I rediscovered my Gary Studio character, I ended up changing him into the “jerk, but too competant to get rid of” archetype.
“Chastity Churchmouse and the Silver Key”…. No, wait, that one was by Becky. Joyce’s old fanfics were about cute lite mouse boys.
On the other hand, given that her favorite movie in gender studies was Twilight she may already have found a different caliber of fanfics altogether.
Considering that Fifty Shades of Grey started life as a Twilight fanfic…!
Joyce is a Nicholas Sparks fan?
Those exist? The only one I’ve met was a sufficiently amazing pastry baker than I assumed she was some kind of fairy, and therefore not real.
PASTRY BAKERS ARE PEOPLE TOO!
This one was too good to be true.
I must disagree with you there.
Pastries are a source of magic which can make anyone amazing at anything.
Few, however, harness this power.
I’m not sorry
That reminds me I’m going to try to catch your next stream.
“And by pillow talk, I mean stuff your face between these so that if you try to talk I don’t have to fucking hear you.”
Careful Billie! Many a man hasn’t found their way out of THOSE pillows!
At least it’s not the worst way for somebody to die.
… I kinda ship it now.
I’m pretty sure Billie would ship it under those circumstances. At least she’d be rid of him.
That is a great Billie.
I do have to wonder what Joyce’s reasoning is here.
She hasn’t met Billie’s “boyfriend” (or so she thinks) so she has no reason to think they are a bad pairing or should be broken up. She considers Billie to be her “best christian friend”, and while she hangs around Walky, I don’t know if she’d consider him to be great friends.
So why hope for the breakup of one of your best friends, only to have her paired with a guy you sometimes tolerate but often fight with?
Apart from teasing Walky I think she sees it as less than a future prediction and more like an idle fantasy. Like she says, she runs ALL the scenarios. We know from Becky that she spent the better part of their childhood shipping anyone with anyone (with half the parameters)
Also, it’s of course the bias in that she knows Billie and Walky but not Billie’s boyfriend. And maybe, just maybe, even Joyce can tell something is off with Billie’s relationship…
It isn’t that Billie/whoever is bad, it’s that the childhood sweethearts to adult lovers and eventual life-partners for Walky/Billie is so sweet and romantic and cute and… squeeee! It’s like a fairy-tale romance and something tells me that this is pretty much Joyce’s ideal.
A part of me wants her to keep this innocence about relationships. However, the realistic part of me knows it won’t happen.
First of all, where did Joyce call Billie her “best Christian friend”? I would have thought that Becky would fit that moniker.
Also I think that Joyce is engaging in less reasoning and more in wishful thinking, going for scenarios she likes best instead of going for those most likely. That would also explain her imagining Walky and Billie as predestinated lovers – she might not like him, but it’s more important that her idea of “true love” is affirmed.
Joyce called Billie her “closest Christian friend” when she was introducing Becky to everyone.
Shown here is Billie’s (horrified) realization that Joyce is her best friend as well.
Such a people-person!
And then suddenly Walky also gets a transfer invite from Yale.
Because reasons.
Dorothy’s expected one arrives two days later.
They do not break up and go on to marry and make many beautiful babies.
And then come to Jesus.
And Joyce gets to be their favorite aunt and she will come and visit and spend a LOT of time with Dorothy and her beautiful babies (and Walky will be there too) and they will all watch MonkeyMaster together.
Twist ending: Joyce will end up being that one aunt that makes everyone uncomfortable at family get-togethers
If Joyce has it all worked out, who does she see herself with?
Good question.
Yeah. Since escaping Ryan she has restricted her social circle to a set that includes no single straight guys.
Oh God…don’t tell me she’s actually given up on finding someone , that would just need depressing.
Well, she’s not doing this any more.
But getting hitched isn’t a race, and it’s only been three weeks. Give a girl some time.
Dammit, I flubbed that link.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2010/comic/book-1/02-uphill-from-here/codependent/
Well at the party on Saturday she invited the following guys:
Walky: Currently with Dorothy. Also a jerk
Ethan: Gay
Jacob: She’s not going to pursue him because she’s the number one fan of Jacob/Sarah OTP. (Also? Only fan)
Mike: Jerk, who was only allowed to come if he could be nice. Unsurprisingly, he failed to show.
Danny was allowed in because others vouched for him. (Dorothy, Amber, and Ethan would. Also, does Joyce know he’s Amazi Girl’s boyfriend?). But she still doesn’t know him at all. And Joe was anti invited
I think for the near future she’s settling on living vicariously through others.
No one at this point I think. Ethan was mostly because he was safe, Dotty, Sal and Becky are unfortunately the wrong gender to her preferences (Sal’s chocolate hair aside), Walky is a butthead, she doesn’t spend time with that many other boys.
Sal’s bike. With a love affair with Sal’s hair.
Don’t think Sal would go for such a weird 4 way relationship.
Mike Warner – Joyce, deep down, wants to be with a bad boy. Which is ironic, because Mike is actually a fairly okay guy who clearly respects Joyce on some level but has the flaw that he needs to push people away all the time.
its a relationship shes already thoroughly dismissed, but i think the only person left shed even be remotely compatible with in that regard is… joe. think theyll work something out?
or mike.
place your bets.
I guess it is still too soon for her. Living life vicariously through others is safer, though sadder.
We all love Dina but let’s face it her being interested romantically in ANYONE practically triples all possibilities
Shipping intensifies. Literally!
I applaud her attempt, but I think she still has some recalculations left when it comes to Billie.
What makes you think she hasn’t considered the “alcoholic sexy lesbian suicide pact with the asshole RA” angle?
“I’ve done this scenario fifty times in simulation. Stand back.”
Billie is bisexual so it isn’t impossible, if her relationship with Ruth self-destructs… or if Ruth self-destructs in a non-lethal way (and that is most possible)… she may end up with some guy.
FWIW, though, I think Joyce’s scenario is based on an over-optimistic assessment of Dorothy’s chances of getting into Yale. They only take you if you’re:
1) Rich;
2) Fantastically well-connected in a social or commercial way;
3) A certified genius.
I don’t think that Dorothy is any of these and I can imagine an interesting character arc coming up where she gets their “Don’t call us, we’ll call you” letter. That said, if I was Walky, I’d feel a bit peeved at the thought of being the guy Dorothy ‘settled’ for, even if that isn’t even remotely true.
Presumably, if Walky were holding a boombox in the aforementioned scenario, it would be playing that classic Peter Gabriel hit, “Shock the Monkey.”
And what are Joyce’s scenarios about Mike, I wonder.
He and Amber will end up working in a dead-end retail job in San Francisco. Their mutual cynicism and misanthropy leads to a hate-sex relationship that finally blossoms into love when they realise that they’re the only ones who’s ever really cared about what they want rather than insist that they fit into some arbitrary ‘happy’ template; they are married shortly after their daughter is born.
Gee… I may have read that one somewhere else, now I think about it! 😉
I sure haven’t read this anywhere else…
Does it end with a reference to a cereal ad I never knew existing taking over the world?
At least two probably involve him lying facedown in a ditch somewhere.
just wait until she learns about polyamory
Joyce’s brain has downloaded and installed the Francis 2015 update to ChristOS, now with enhanced support for same-sex unions.
Joyce is using the protestant repository,so the Francis 2015 update isn’t signed from a source she trust.
So, basically, Joyce spends most of her time thinking up shipfics about her friends and associates? That’s… disturbing. Very, very disturbing. It’s an easy step to jump from ‘hypothetical scenarios’ to ‘preferred scenarios’ and ‘I want to make this happen’! I mean, I know that she’s a romantic and all but, combine this with her need to help people and, well, she could easily end up as freshman year’s very own Yenta!
I really think that someone needs to educate her about the need to avoid meddling in others’ personal lives. They also need to remind her that ‘plausible’ doesn’t mean ‘inevitable’.
I also think that a relationship of her own… any relationship will help. She won’t need romance-by-proxy if she has one of her own to focus on!
After Ryan, I think she’s desperately trying to avoid everything EXCEPT romance by proxy.
Makes a lot of sense.
‘Relationship’ does not have to equal sexual contact and would be less likely in any early phase with Joyce anyway. However, a romantic interest, even if only a platonic one (at first) would be healthy for her, I think.
I have no doubt that Joyce will be back on the manhunt (albeit more world-wise) when she feels she has enough distance from the Ryan incident. When there’s room for a relationship she’ll work it out, right now she’s taken a time-out. It’s important to have those sometimes.
The shipping could be seen as her redirecting all that frantic manhunt energy towards someone else than herself. Maybe not super convenient, but probably better than most plausible alternatives.
That remind me of this incredibly stupid NotAlwaysLearning.com story. Good lord, really? No, Joyce. Bad Joyce. This never ends well.
Oh Joyce. She should probably not be doing this, but I am just finding this hilarious. Shipping childhood friends is such a thing, but I’m not sure if you’re supposed to do it for real life people Joyce?? Also I love how she can joke about her own slow update on the ‘woo homosexuality!’ front.
Just loving Joyce right now, I don’t really care if this isnt healthy behaviour
I’m not sure it’s a joke. She looks like she’s still genuinely freaked out by it but I think she’s one of those people for whom reality triumphs every time. So, as it is possible, she’s going to factor it in.
Besides… Yeah, Saturday’s strip shows that she can feel the cute in this too!
Hey, at least she performed the critical system update. Some people just keep putting those off for… Shut up, Avira, I’ll reboot for that update when I’m ready! For the umpteenth time, remind me again in 4 hours.
Joyce, take it from a veteran shipper: Currently, you are NOT considering every possibility.
Pray to God that it stays that way.
Y’know, I think that Willis likes writing Joyce and Walky interacting without the baggage of their relationship in the Walkyverse!
Why do I get the feeling that she hasn’t yet considered the Joyce and Walky scenario.
It’d be hilarious if they hatefucked. In both ironic and unironic ways.
The cuteness of today’s strip aside, I just wanted to thank Dave Willis for having a buffer.
I read a number of online comics, and one of my other favorites isn’t going to update this week because the author attended a con. I shall not complain, as it is a free service, but I will be MOST GRATEFUL that Dave Willis has us constantly entertained months in advance. DoA is an important part of my daily online life, and I’m glad for uninterrupted service.
Mind you, should DoA end (I’m in denial that it isn’t forever), I think I shall have to go move to wherever Mr. Willis is, where I shall take up a room above his garage. On a daily basis, I shall be asking “So what happened to Dina next? And Dorothy? Did she realize that grad school is much more important on the resume than undergrad? Was Walky a good First Gentlemen? Tell us, Uncle Dave, tell us!”
And despite the fact that I am several years his senior, I will insist on calling him Uncle Dave as I pester him for story time. 🙂
I wonder how he’s able to keep up this schedule for every day of the week? I know I probably couldn’t do it.
*Long time fan. First time commenting*
I don’t get why Billie doesn’t want people to know she has a girlfriend. Or does she not want people knowing she’s dating RUTH? Idk, so.. help?
It is probably partly because she doesn’t want to have to explain what bisexuality is over and over like she has had to do for the rest of her life, and partly because it will throw other people off the scent because even the other characters who know what bisexuality is will still believe Joyce and think she is dating a man.
It’s mostly the later. Ruth dating a student could get her fired and/or suspended if the authorities find out and Billie prefer that her friends don’t know so they can’t let the secret out.
*latter
(sorry)
Wait, if she’s going through all the scenarios, has she run the idea of Ruth and Billie through her head, yet? Or is she really holding out for Walky/Billie?
I like that Joyce also unequivocally believes that Dorothy will be going to Yale and doesn’t have any sort of reservation about it. Even Walky’s sort of bothered by it, though for the completely understandable reason that he’s really falling for her.
I agree, Joyce really, truly believes in Dorothy. She will be devastated when time comes for Dorothy to move, but she still is behind her 100%
Walky also has his “I’m so cool I don’t care about stuff” persona to maintain.
Hmmm. Now I want fanart of that scene (since the comic won’t ever get there). Dorothy leaving for the car, carrying her stuff, trying to stop herself from having second thoughts. The friends assemble behind her , trying to put on a brave face or in the case of Joyce just crying their eyes out. It would be beautiful in a sad way.
“I’ve considered EVERY possibility. And I think I’ll make a webcomic about it. And then one day, I’ll be an internet pornlady.”
Damn patriarchy made “pornlady” sound less empowering than “pornlord”, to my dismise 🙁
Damn patriarchy!
It’s real! It’s everywhere! It wants you to be a dick! D:
Maybe try “porngoddess”?
Pornduchess? Pornmastermind?
…Masturbatrix?
Lord is not necessarily limited to being masculine. It is just more commonly used that way.
Really? YAY! Leveled up my english \o/
But has Joyce considered Walky/Joyce?
“So what’s our shipfic?”
“Our story would be a sci-fi epic in which I loose my memory and end up joining the government agency you work at. Together with the rest of our team of superpowerd people(and our math T.A.) we fight aliens and giant robots. All the while our love grows for each other. You also end up loosing an arm.”
“I… don’t want to discuss my slutty alternate self.”
Those eyes at the end are filled with fear. Only one thing could have run through her head.
“What if Walky became a Lesbian”
That almost happened once upon a multiverse.
It was profoundly uncomfortable for everyone involved.
Looks like I botched the link. Here’s the plain URL.
http://www.joyceandwalky.com/d/20031122.html
Summer 2016: Dumbing of Age’s Spin-off Series “Matchmaker Joyce” only in your dreams.
Has David ever said how long the strip will run? (e.g.) The first semester of college?
when i run out of stories
aka when you die of old age?
Yas
Do you think we could crowd-fund a vampire for Willis?
I can get behind that
im making one
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/372499377/2041425191?token=bc0a689d
But there will become two warring camps of vampire backers:
Team Angel and Team Spike.
It’s will be a long and bloody war.
Won’t there be a Team Edward camp of trolls?
And Team Nic “I’M A VAMPIRE” Cage.
It’s going to be pretty awkward as the story goes on over the decades.
“C’mon, Ethan, let’s download some comics into our Brain-Comps using the Universal Mindscape!”
*says nervously*, Oh yeah, boyfriend, that’s who she’s with, you aren’t surrounded by a majority of homosexuals at all
Not at at all Joyce
Ruth and Billie are bi.
I’m gay and my boyfriends bi, but it’s still a homosexual relationship, them being bi is not what matters, a jerkass wouldn’t see them kissing and say “that’s so bi” they’d still say gay
Theyre not saying its not a gay relationship, but just because your boyfriends in a gay relationship doesnt remove the fact theyre bi. It is an important distinction to make as there is a history of people of gay and straight orientation to whitewash out the bi spectrum. Its a bad precedent because its basically the same thing as aaying “oh its just a phase”.
So this Joyce is on the path of being a romance novel writer, creating fan-fics of those around her is where it starts.
That last panel is making me hope Joyce is in a programming class.
Innocent Jesus crazy computer programmers are my kink.
It’s a very meta and very nerdy thing for Joyce to say. I don’t think she’s studying anything comp-sci related.
STOP KINK SHAMING ME!
…I wasn’t?
Unless she’s been hanging out with Amber whilst off-panel and she’s started picking up the lingo!
Joyce is channeling Tina from Bob’s Burgers with her erotic friend fiction.
Joyce should meet Tina. They can write erotic friend-fiction together.
Nina over at Between Failures could join in as well.
AND THUS, I AM NOW CAUGHT UP FOR THE FIRST TIME IN 6 MONTHS. drat
Even after all this time, it’s still weird seeing Joyce and Walky interacting and not being in love.
It’s weird seeing so many people going along with Joyce, I honestly kinda thought what she said here was really creepy and rude. Not to say it ruins the character or it’s a condemnation, but I hope that’s a behavior she ends up dumping.
Eighteen doesn’t even come close to the total characters possible for pairings. That’s just the “main” characters listed on the bio page, the “A” cast, if you will (some of whom barely qualify as A-listers in the story). Joyce’s real list should include anyone she knows the name of that is not currently married and is around the same age range. This includes:
Amazi-Girl (still a separate entity in Joyce’s mind)
Leslie (teacher but young and still in the market)
Jason (thought she wouldn’t know about his relationship with Sal, but there was a strip where she saw Sal grabbing his shirt, and that’s good enough for Joyce’s brain)
Kaitlin (Becky’s first lover, part of system update)
Mary (really should be on the cast page)
Raidah (ditto)
Alice (Billie’s old friend, who confessed her almost-love in front of Joyce)
Sierra
Mandy
Grace
Rachel
Other Rachel
Agatha
Robin (Leslie flirted with her in class while Joyce was there)
Jocelyne (he’s her brother, why wouldn’t he be on the list?)
Jim
Bryan
There are some people that wouldn’t be on the list, despite them being valid candidates for pairings, simply because Joyce hasn’t met them or doesn’t know their names. Those include Daisy, Penny, Faz, Asma, and Conquest. Daisy in particular is an oversight because she is certainly in the market, but Joyce doesn’t know her.
And finally, in a banned category of her mind, quarantined, encrypted, and firewalled from the list, is Ryan.