Taylor didn’t seem to have been particularly fascinated by insects until her power provided incentive. I’d find Rachel a closer parallel, though her behavior is wildly different from Dina’s.
Also discredited: that this actually happens to dinosaurs. They do not just see movement, no matter what some movie might have told you. Neither are T-rex’s scavengers, or velociraptors bigger than a chicken.
I had a paleontologist roommate in college, and he went on and on about the bullshit in Jurassic Park. And this was before the feather thing was found to be so ubiquitous.
“Neither are T-rex’s scavengers, or velociraptors bigger than a chicken.”
Then consider it a misidentified Austoraptor cabazai or Utahraptor ostrommaysorum.
It-Was-A-Book/Movie-For-Heaven’s-Sake.
Are you going to criticize Harry Potter because science says it’s impossible?
I just figured it was both. He reminds me of one of those retired football players who let themselves go, so they’re still hugely strong but also kinda look like walking couches.
In real speech, it’s actually pretty rare for anyone to do that. One time I managed to get by for months without admitting that I’d totally forgotten my roommate’s name because of that.
We didn’t get mail delivery to the room. I didn’t have a key to his mailbox. To this day I do not know whether the guy’s name was “Mark” or “Mike”. (Or maybe “Matt”? It began with ‘M’, I’m pretty sure about that.) And to be fair, I saw more of my girlfriend’s roommate that semester than I did my own.
I saw this one guy routinely every club meeting for a small tabletop gaming club last semester. He wasn’t playing, just observing. It was not until this semester that I learned his name.
Are you that one co-worker of mine? ’cause I swear every sentence out of her mouth starts with my name >=| (even within like two minutes of meeting her, and with no introductions!)
(oddly enough, it took me like six months to hear hers, even after I told her to answer the phone, “say [the company’s name] and your name”–she still only says the company name)
My entire use of language is arranged about never having to use peoples’ names, because before meds it would routinely take me years to learn a new one, so I generally didn’t. That means my phraseology is often kind of strange.
My friend solved this problem. She met a guy in a bar while she was drunk and agreed to a date with him, but in her phone she named him Eyebrows or something like that.
So while they were out, she pretended like she didn’t believe that he was 28 or whatever and “demanded” to see his ID. He was Nathan. They dated for like 4 months.
A guy I’d known for two years in high school asked me to the prom (as a friend; he was a grade below and needed a senior as a date to get in). It was only when I was asked to give his name when buying the tickets that I realized I’d spent the past two years referring to him by a nickname.
To be fair, most college experiences aren’t like this. Average drama tends more toward the Walky side of the spectrum (“I’m not getting effortless As anymore? I have to study??“), sometimes Carla & Mary, or Billie/Ruth.
Dina: Yes, Sierra’s feet are quite amazing, and Faz is cool.
Suddenly Willis chases Yotomoe away from his tablet with a broom. Then he glances at the screen, shrugs, and decides to publish the strip anyway. Hey, the man’s got twins to look after, and he’s got to keep that buffer up somehow.
This isn’t the first time that the obsession of the comment thread on one day is more than answered by the comic available on patreon.
Honestly, Willis must have the self-restraint of an obstinate rhino to resist the urge to just derail comment threads with a *cough cough* 3 strips from now *cough* *cough* type of thing all the time.
…It’s not like focusing on ally angst isn’t a thing that happens in tons of fiction. That it’s not happening in this specific case doesn’t somehow mean that it’s stopped being a highly pervasive trope.
We were listening to Sarah complain at length about how the problems affecting Joyce and Becky were bothering her, it’s just that that was the intended point and not, like, just the assumption because Sarah is an ally and we’re used to focusing on the allies when bad things happen to queer characters when we read, well, anything.
The flip side to ally angst though is that you either have to drop the angst altogether or keep the LGBT characters wallowing in it. I like that Becky and Carla (and Dina here) aren’t angsty characters. Much like Willis deliberately avoided fridging Becky, I suspect he’s also deliberately avoiding having her suffering and traumatized.
You can and should have sequences where allies react, you just can’t have queer characters suffer where the only focus is on the allies. Likewise, it’s okay to have queer characters suffer and have angst so long as suffering and angsting over how miserable and trying it is to be queer isn’t the only thing they do.
Two of the best examples of this are shown with Joyce reacting to Becky and Ethan. Right before Becky reveals her new haircut Joyce starts building a romanticized narrative where Becky is sad and alone and crying in her room, so that Joyce can burst in and tell her that gay people are okay i guess and redeem herself for her previous actions, only for Becky to not only be completely fine, but totally brush off Joyce’s attempts at trying to be the atoner, because Becky is not Joyce’s story telling device, with her even bluntly stating “it’s not always about you.”
Ethan is another example where the Sad Gay Dude lives almost entirely in reaction to his Sad Gay Angst, but like with Becky it excels because it’s always about him. Joyce tries to convince him to go to questioning gatherings because she feels bad about how she treated him, only for Ethan to say that if he’s going to do it, it’s going to be for his own sake, and he’s not going to do it just to soothe Joyce’s conscious. When they actually do go, Joyce practically disappears from the plot because it’s about Ethan, and moves on to how he feels and meeting Danny there. You could remove Joyce and still get Ethan’s story, which, ultimately, is how ally focus should be handled; it’s not about them.
Maybe having Mary wouldn’t be too bad. She doesn’t make much noise and doesn’t do anything that casts a doubt on Sarah’s negative view of humanity. Wouldn’t beeing looked down on be a small price to pay for a non-cognitive-dissonance-inducing roommate?
“Object permanence is the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be observed (seen, heard, touched, smelled or sensed in any way).”
See, I read it backwards: “I have object permanence” as in I won’t go away if you can’t see me.
Which I’m not actually sure is true for Dina. It might explain her door ninja qualities. 🙂
Just that Sarah hiding won’t make a difference, Dina will remember she’s there.
Babies don’t have object permanence, which means that when you play peek-a-boo with them they actually think you’re gone when you hide your face. Understanding that stuff is still there even though you can’t see it develops around 4-7 months.
It’s theoretically a big part of why babies drop items from their high chairs – they’re learning that when you retrieve it, it’s still the same object. I have promised my older brother that I’ll keep small items in my pockets, so that when his eventual baby drops a spoon or whatever, I can give back a crayon… the kid isn’t even conceived yet but I’ve already been forbidden from babysitting duty. Win!
Honestly, it’s actually pretty awesome that Sarah at least recognizes that it would be bad form to expect the person more central to a tragedy to provide emotional support for her reflected traumas as that’s not always a thing.
Now she just needs to work on not overreacting when she messes up.
Or maybe that she is acknowledging that Joyce actually played a very small part in the last drama, and is embarrassed that she was moaning over Joyce and ignoring Becky and Dina’s very real part in it.
Mm, while that’s an important point, I don’t think it’s one that Sarah was making. After all, she says “I am (that word)ing about being tragedy adjacent”.
Basically, she was complaining about how hard it is to deal with a traumatized Joyce falling out of that whole clusterfuck not realizing that she was talking to one of the two people who actually were chased after with a gun.
Also, as far as Joyce and trauma goes, he did point a gun at her face and shoot off the gun immediately afterwards (albeit upwards) before kidnapping her best friend in front of her. That’s at least equally traumatizing as Dina’s situation (though certainly Becky got the worst of all worlds in the whole affair).
Plus, Sarah had been watching Joyce dealing with many things that have been chipping-away at her faith/innocence. Ross et al was just the cherry on top of Joyce’s Sundae-bloody-sundae.
I recently learned there’s a name for this! It’s called the Ring Theory, where you comfort those closest to the tragedy and vent to those less involved; comfort in, dump out. If you’re in the center of the tragedy you can vent to the world. If you’re on the peripheral, suck it up.
Dina’s closer to the center of this clusterfuck than Sarah. By all rights Dina should be complaining to Sarah instead.
Finally, someone (of course it’s Sarah) acknowledges that Joyce was a bystander in this latest drama, and only involved as an aggressor, riding with Sal, and punching out Toedad.
Gee, fancy that. Joyce is not the center of the universe, other people have been hurt much worse that she has. She just attracts the most attention.
Of course, while Dina may have been more directly involved with the action, Joyce has been more affected by the fallout. As far as we know, neither of Dina’s parents have been sympathetic to Toedad. Nor is the violation of trust the same, since Ross wasn’t someone she’d known and relied on as an adult since her childhood.
Joyce has plenty of reason for angst here and Sarah has plenty of reasons to be worried about her.
Honestly, Becky, Joyce and Dina all have plenty of reason to be traumatized and should all be getting some kind of counseling to help them process it. Even if Becky & Dina aren’t showing any obvious signs.
IIRC it was implemented because of the strip with Roz delivering a “Reason You Suck” Speech to Joyce after her epiphany about gay people, most people in the comments section were calling Roz a bongo. Though I could be wrong, my memory is blurring together if it’s further than 2 weeks.
Being surrounded by tragedy can take a toll on a person. I’ve had a similar situation; a year ago, I had a roomie literally die (heart attack! at 19!). She really does need to move towards some kind of action, though. Or at least changing her social context.
I phrased that poorly; she shouldn’t ditch the people she knows now, but if you value people being reasonable and effectual, the you need to put yourself in a position to encounter such folks instead of browsing on your phone. ‘Seize control of your life’ requires a verb.
I suppose Sarah’s misanthropy and what self centeredness she has are quite interrelated. I love Sarah, and Raidah is not in a position to make a good appraisal of her, but what negatives she sees are mostly there.
I knew a cat who didn’t have object permanence. Like you’d walk around the corner inside the apartment and he’d MOW piteously because he was all alone forever. (He also couldn’t meow properly. Or jump, or climb, or use the litter box successfully. He wore a diaper, attached by starbucks-green lederhosen, over partially shaved floofy fur. One ear stood up, the other was permenantly deflated, and his whiskers were all askew, so he looked quite quizzical. He was so dumb that when he fell over for no reason — which happened a lot because gravity is hard — he didn’t even land on his feet. Everyone loved him very very much.) :3
I’ll bet you anything young Dina actually tested if she has object permanence. She seems like the kind of person who goes through the entire philosophy to test if it applies to herself. “I DO think… yes, by his logic that means I am. Next.”
The correct grammar is ‘Becky and I’ here, since ‘was’ is a copula. This explains why ‘who’ is used as a relative pronoun, rather than ‘whom’. I insist that no real-life person would ever make this mistake.
Time for my (at least) weekly Googling of a phrase used in DoA that I’m completely unfamiliar with and have never been previously exposed to. Today’s winner: ‘object permanence’.
Object permanence (or lack thereof) is why babies are so fun to play peek-a-boo with. Because for the half second you’re behind the blanket, you literally cease to exist!
“Actually, it was Becky and me who were chased with the rifle.”
—————————
Which reminds me — did we ever find out what happened to Dina after she jumped Toedad in Dunn’s Woods? Was she just temporarily stunned after he tossed her to the ground, or did he do something else — like KO her with the butt of the rifle — that further incapacitated her?
She was probably just temporarily stunned on the ground. Remember that Ross saw Becky across the field. He probably immediately went back to his car to chase after her.
I’m not sure why everyone speculates that something worse happened to Dina in that scene.
I think the big arc for Sarah coming up will be her recognizing she is less resilient to setbacks and failures than others around her. She is honestly pretty similar to Walky in that neither of them responds to challenges that require hard work particularly well. I think if Joyce recovers some of her sunny disposition (which she probably will), Sarah might wonder why others can succeed after facing greater difficulities than she has faced. Being around people who overcome huge problems might help her overcome the self-fulfilling prophecy of her fatalism.
Honestly, she needs perspective more than anything. It looks like she sees her failures as greater in either number or magnitude than her peers – probably both. So that fatalism is sometimes directed outwards – her sometimes hostile actions – but more often is self-targeted. “Of course I screwed up. Why would I think otherwise?” Think of the disastrous “friendly experiment,” or her immediate reaction to her selfish moment here. She’s convinced she can’t socialize, and is a terrible friend – and so she is.
I knew Dina was short, but I didn’t realize HOW short until just now when I noticed that she was standing up behind that chair and not crouching like I thought she was.
Thankfully that never happens to me, as I am literally the most amazing and important human being to ever live throughout all known history, and all history to come.
Wow… Despite not having the best social skills Dina is a freaking mental fortress. Lesser Humans would have been scared for life by less then what she went through and be ultra sensitive about it. Dina here is all like… Yeah I was part of that.
Dina really is someone to look up to.
Having trouble figuring out if the alt text means “No [Sarah], sometimes it is useful to have object permanence” or supporting her with “Sometimes not having object permanence is useful.”
Loading ...
*Sarah promptly vanishes*
COMIC OVER THANK YOU FOR PLAYING
Who vanished?
Somebody vanished?
Who gave me this starfish?
It just appeared out of thin air.
+10 Internets for the username, all hail the emperor, King of San Francisco! Please tell me I’m not the only one who knows who he is…
I eat his tasty chips all the time. +5 Internets for you for spotting it.
for the sake of this joke, i will not remember fuko’s name
…dang it!
I just started watching this and it makes me pretty happy that i already found a reference.
omg i used to love that anime… wish i hadn’t gone to bed early last night now…
Hey! I got that reference. Yay me. That is one of my favourite Anime ever.
Wait there was a vanishing? Was a certain “jack” involved?
One with a Candle preceding?
Imp.
Does that make Dina Regent? Because no.
Impaired social skills? Fascination with specific kind of animal? Obviously Dinah is Skitter.
Taylor didn’t seem to have been particularly fascinated by insects until her power provided incentive. I’d find Rachel a closer parallel, though her behavior is wildly different from Dina’s.
oh my god. I can’t believe I didn’t check the comments last night.
But what about my high score!? THE TOP SHELF PRIZE!
Sarah wouldn’t vanish, Dina has object permanence. However, Dina and the rest of the world may vanish. Time will tell if Sarah has object permanence.
If Sarah is in a box with no observation is she really there?
Is she dead or alive?
I’m guessing with the lateness of the comic, it did in fact disappear =’
or, more realistically, the newest Firefox ruined my evil “
FIRST!” schemesSarah isnt great with small talk is she
Dina however is the best ever.
True.
You do Sarah you do.
Sarah, maybe if you stop moving Dina will stop seeing you?
discredited
dina actually sees in 5 dimensions, and circularly-polarized light
Since when is Dina a mantis shrimp?
if you have to ask that, then you clearly haven’t been paying enough attention.
also cheers for trivia!
Also discredited: that this actually happens to dinosaurs. They do not just see movement, no matter what some movie might have told you. Neither are T-rex’s scavengers, or velociraptors bigger than a chicken.
I had a paleontologist roommate in college, and he went on and on about the bullshit in Jurassic Park. And this was before the feather thing was found to be so ubiquitous.
A T. Rex probably had eyesight comparable to an eagle’s, apparently.
http://thepunchlineismachismo.com/archives/comic/i-didnt-even-have-a-joke-for-this-week
Relevant…for given values of relevant.
Plus they could smell in 3D. Which is awesome.
“Neither are T-rex’s scavengers, or velociraptors bigger than a chicken.”
Then consider it a misidentified Austoraptor cabazai or Utahraptor ostrommaysorum.
It-Was-A-Book/Movie-For-Heaven’s-Sake.
Are you going to criticize Harry Potter because science says it’s impossible?
Only difference between Sarah and Dina, really, is that Dina didn’t have a bat.
I have the feeling that Sarah will have a long and successful career ahead of her in the field of insurance.
*looks around for some Rufus to play on the hacked Muzak*
*Hacks into the hacked muzak, plays some loverboy*
Won’t flipping the chair over just turn it into like a little doghouse? People will still be able to see her crouched under it from the front.
Not if she pushes it up against a wall.
But won’t she trap herself?
Only if she still exists!
Then she would never have to deal with people or FEEEELS again.
In the wild, a Sarah may sometimes resort to hiding and ignoring object permanence as a form of fight-or-flight response
A shame Sarah isn’t a shadowdancer. Hide in Plain Sight sure would be handy right about now.
She’s a high level fighter, with weapon specialization in bats.
Besides, it has already been established that Dina is the one with the Hide in Plain Sight feat and a couple hundred points in Hide.
Unfortunately, Toedad’s thick layer of fat gave him Fortification, so he was able to shrug off her Sneak Attack.
you mean muscle
His body is a temple and it will beat you down if you dare disobey him.
I just figured it was both. He reminds me of one of those retired football players who let themselves go, so they’re still hugely strong but also kinda look like walking couches.
Sarah, 2nd level Human Fighter
STR 15 DEX 9 CON 12 INT 16 WIS 13 CHA 6
Able Learner, Power Attack, Weapon Focus (Greatclub), Cleave
I’d forgotten human fighters get so many feats so fast.
I wouldn’t mention Sarah’s Cleavage too loudly, if I were you.
If you say so, Friend Computer.
i feel like its rare for dina to address somebody directly by their name. like how hobbes hardly ever says “calvin”
In real speech, it’s actually pretty rare for anyone to do that. One time I managed to get by for months without admitting that I’d totally forgotten my roommate’s name because of that.
…. but your ROOMMATES. You couldn’t peek at the addressee on the incoming mail?
We didn’t get mail delivery to the room. I didn’t have a key to his mailbox. To this day I do not know whether the guy’s name was “Mark” or “Mike”. (Or maybe “Matt”? It began with ‘M’, I’m pretty sure about that.) And to be fair, I saw more of my girlfriend’s roommate that semester than I did my own.
My headcanon is that his name was Mark.
just mention a made up other friend named mark in a story that could be about him, and then if he asks about it, his name is mark. easy.
I saw this one guy routinely every club meeting for a small tabletop gaming club last semester. He wasn’t playing, just observing. It was not until this semester that I learned his name.
I’m now picturing you as Bruce Campbell. “Klaatu… verata… necktie… nickel… I know it’s an n-word!”
I say people’s names every two sentences when I’m familiar with them.
Are you that one co-worker of mine? ’cause I swear every sentence out of her mouth starts with my name >=| (even within like two minutes of meeting her, and with no introductions!)
(oddly enough, it took me like six months to hear hers, even after I told her to answer the phone, “say [the company’s name] and your name”–she still only says the company name)
Can’t be, I’m a guy! Unless she’s actually a guy too. Could be why she doesn’t like saying her name.
My entire use of language is arranged about never having to use peoples’ names, because before meds it would routinely take me years to learn a new one, so I generally didn’t. That means my phraseology is often kind of strange.
I actually managed to go 4 dates with a girl before learning her name. And that was after sitting next to her in class for half a semester.
You’d be surprised at how rarely people’s names come up in conversation. That is, when you’re talking to them, not about them.
Mulva??
My friend solved this problem. She met a guy in a bar while she was drunk and agreed to a date with him, but in her phone she named him Eyebrows or something like that.
So while they were out, she pretended like she didn’t believe that he was 28 or whatever and “demanded” to see his ID. He was Nathan. They dated for like 4 months.
Clever girl.
It’s actually a great wait to get someone’s attention or show attraction, using their name. Particular if you end a sentence/question with it.
Or if you’re a salesman or proselytizer!
I’m just gonna leave this here: DCiGtH
A guy I’d known for two years in high school asked me to the prom (as a friend; he was a grade below and needed a senior as a date to get in). It was only when I was asked to give his name when buying the tickets that I realized I’d spent the past two years referring to him by a nickname.
It seems Sarah’s comeuppance is starting off strong!
College! *jazz hands*
To be fair, most college experiences aren’t like this. Average drama tends more toward the Walky side of the spectrum (“I’m not getting effortless As anymore? I have to study??“), sometimes Carla & Mary, or Billie/Ruth.
Indeed.
It’s funny that actually getting through college is often easier for the people who had to work their butts off before.
For us, college is just continuing the slog of highschool with more parties and beer pong.
If not for the buffer, I would’ve guessed that this was written specifically to address a comment thread yesterday. Whoa, trippy.
Next strip is entirely talking about Sierra’s feet
Sarah: Don’t you like Sierra’s feet?
Dina: Yes, Sierra’s feet are quite amazing, and Faz is cool.
Suddenly Willis chases Yotomoe away from his tablet with a broom. Then he glances at the screen, shrugs, and decides to publish the strip anyway. Hey, the man’s got twins to look after, and he’s got to keep that buffer up somehow.
Carol: Hey Becky lets make out
Becky: Yay!
Willis: bad Yotomoe bad!
Speaking of Yotomoe, where is he? We need him to draw these fanfics pronto!
This isn’t the first time that the obsession of the comment thread on one day is more than answered by the comic available on patreon.
Honestly, Willis must have the self-restraint of an obstinate rhino to resist the urge to just derail comment threads with a *cough cough* 3 strips from now *cough* *cough* type of thing all the time.
He must smile though when a comment thread takes off a on a tangent that is completely wrong.
I always pictured him laughing a sinister laugh, and stroking his goatee.
i didnt see the thread, but ive got a feeling its something that comes up a lot
I was thinking the same thing. The thread about the ally angst. Freaky stuff!
…It’s not like focusing on ally angst isn’t a thing that happens in tons of fiction. That it’s not happening in this specific case doesn’t somehow mean that it’s stopped being a highly pervasive trope.
We were listening to Sarah complain at length about how the problems affecting Joyce and Becky were bothering her, it’s just that that was the intended point and not, like, just the assumption because Sarah is an ally and we’re used to focusing on the allies when bad things happen to queer characters when we read, well, anything.
The flip side to ally angst though is that you either have to drop the angst altogether or keep the LGBT characters wallowing in it. I like that Becky and Carla (and Dina here) aren’t angsty characters. Much like Willis deliberately avoided fridging Becky, I suspect he’s also deliberately avoiding having her suffering and traumatized.
You can and should have sequences where allies react, you just can’t have queer characters suffer where the only focus is on the allies. Likewise, it’s okay to have queer characters suffer and have angst so long as suffering and angsting over how miserable and trying it is to be queer isn’t the only thing they do.
Two of the best examples of this are shown with Joyce reacting to Becky and Ethan. Right before Becky reveals her new haircut Joyce starts building a romanticized narrative where Becky is sad and alone and crying in her room, so that Joyce can burst in and tell her that gay people are okay i guess and redeem herself for her previous actions, only for Becky to not only be completely fine, but totally brush off Joyce’s attempts at trying to be the atoner, because Becky is not Joyce’s story telling device, with her even bluntly stating “it’s not always about you.”
Ethan is another example where the Sad Gay Dude lives almost entirely in reaction to his Sad Gay Angst, but like with Becky it excels because it’s always about him. Joyce tries to convince him to go to questioning gatherings because she feels bad about how she treated him, only for Ethan to say that if he’s going to do it, it’s going to be for his own sake, and he’s not going to do it just to soothe Joyce’s conscious. When they actually do go, Joyce practically disappears from the plot because it’s about Ethan, and moves on to how he feels and meeting Danny there. You could remove Joyce and still get Ethan’s story, which, ultimately, is how ally focus should be handled; it’s not about them.
And it could have been worse, Sarah. You could have gotten Mary.
Maybe Mary lacks object permanence? She says what ever she wants to people, because she literally believes they disappear when she can’t see them.
And we joyfully forget her presence pretty quickly between the storylines in which she unfortunately exists.
In much the same way that I only think about splinters when I happen to have one, like right now. :p
Maybe having Mary wouldn’t be too bad. She doesn’t make much noise and doesn’t do anything that casts a doubt on Sarah’s negative view of humanity. Wouldn’t beeing looked down on be a small price to pay for a non-cognitive-dissonance-inducing roommate?
Other people’s object permanence only works when I can see them.
? also, nice
I see Dina behind the chair and can’t help thinking “Hi-dee-ho neighbor!”
+1
Or at least the Home Improvement theme song.
*uhhhh?!?*
Where’s a pile of sand to stick your head in when you need it.
Sarah should get four of them and make a fort. Then she has this big space for herself!
“Perfect for those long nights when you need to be somewhere but you can’t!”
Like prison?
It’d be neat if some objects lacked object permanence. Slight-of-hand magicians would lose out but everything else would be hilarious. And confusing.
With enough people, that could happen.
Jacket, you’re not posing as me.
Now if you had my Email…
I could give it to him right now…
Dallas, no.
“I have object permanence” might be my favorite punchline.
Also :((((((((((((( at everything.
To be honest, I don’t get that. What did Dina mean by saying she had object permanence?
“Object permanence is the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be observed (seen, heard, touched, smelled or sensed in any way).”
“If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there, does it make a noise?”
I don’t think I have object permanence. I fell in the forest and the only thing that was heard was the sound of one hand clapping.
But did you figure out why a raven is like a writing desk on the way down?
No, but I did figure out why the bowl of Petunia’s popped into existence and immediately thought “oh no not again”.
Whales are like that.
See, I read it backwards: “I have object permanence” as in I won’t go away if you can’t see me.
Which I’m not actually sure is true for Dina. It might explain her door ninja qualities. 🙂
Just that Sarah hiding won’t make a difference, Dina will remember she’s there.
Babies don’t have object permanence, which means that when you play peek-a-boo with them they actually think you’re gone when you hide your face. Understanding that stuff is still there even though you can’t see it develops around 4-7 months.
It’s theoretically a big part of why babies drop items from their high chairs – they’re learning that when you retrieve it, it’s still the same object. I have promised my older brother that I’ll keep small items in my pockets, so that when his eventual baby drops a spoon or whatever, I can give back a crayon… the kid isn’t even conceived yet but I’ve already been forbidden from babysitting duty. Win!
We tied a string to the spoon and tied it to the chair. It made retrieval easier for everyone involved.
That is a really good idea.
Honestly, it’s actually pretty awesome that Sarah at least recognizes that it would be bad form to expect the person more central to a tragedy to provide emotional support for her reflected traumas as that’s not always a thing.
Now she just needs to work on not overreacting when she messes up.
Or maybe that she is acknowledging that Joyce actually played a very small part in the last drama, and is embarrassed that she was moaning over Joyce and ignoring Becky and Dina’s very real part in it.
Mm, while that’s an important point, I don’t think it’s one that Sarah was making. After all, she says “I am (that word)ing about being tragedy adjacent”.
Basically, she was complaining about how hard it is to deal with a traumatized Joyce falling out of that whole clusterfuck not realizing that she was talking to one of the two people who actually were chased after with a gun.
Also, as far as Joyce and trauma goes, he did point a gun at her face and shoot off the gun immediately afterwards (albeit upwards) before kidnapping her best friend in front of her. That’s at least equally traumatizing as Dina’s situation (though certainly Becky got the worst of all worlds in the whole affair).
Plus, Sarah had been watching Joyce dealing with many things that have been chipping-away at her faith/innocence. Ross et al was just the cherry on top of Joyce’s Sundae-bloody-sundae.
I recently learned there’s a name for this! It’s called the Ring Theory, where you comfort those closest to the tragedy and vent to those less involved; comfort in, dump out. If you’re in the center of the tragedy you can vent to the world. If you’re on the peripheral, suck it up.
Dina’s closer to the center of this clusterfuck than Sarah. By all rights Dina should be complaining to Sarah instead.
Finally, someone (of course it’s Sarah) acknowledges that Joyce was a bystander in this latest drama, and only involved as an aggressor, riding with Sal, and punching out Toedad.
Gee, fancy that. Joyce is not the center of the universe, other people have been hurt much worse that she has. She just attracts the most attention.
She wasn’t just a bystander, she’s as much a part of it as Dina. And she’s been dealing with basically everything she’s known falling apart around her
youre right that shes not a bystander, but she was threatened while dina was actually pursued and attacked.
its not exactly on the same level.
She was just as threatened at the fountain. Dina is merely pointing out that she wasn’t technically chased.
Dina and Joyce both attacked him. I’m not sure how attacking him can happen without being involved.
Of course, while Dina may have been more directly involved with the action, Joyce has been more affected by the fallout. As far as we know, neither of Dina’s parents have been sympathetic to Toedad. Nor is the violation of trust the same, since Ross wasn’t someone she’d known and relied on as an adult since her childhood.
Joyce has plenty of reason for angst here and Sarah has plenty of reasons to be worried about her.
Honestly, Becky, Joyce and Dina all have plenty of reason to be traumatized and should all be getting some kind of counseling to help them process it. Even if Becky & Dina aren’t showing any obvious signs.
I love how many strips we’re getting to spend with these two awesome, multi-dimensional, complex, smart, strong, fully-realized WoC characters :3
Sarah, don’t you mean “bongoing”? Not “bit’ching”.
lol imagine if the bongo filter was implemented in the actual comic as well, that’d be hilarious and probably technically impossible xD
Wait–does bongo mean that word? I thought it meant asshole this entire time.
If it means the “B-word,” then I fully understand what Willis did. While it can have its place, it is often quite misogynistic.
IIRC it was implemented because of the strip with Roz delivering a “Reason You Suck” Speech to Joyce after her epiphany about gay people, most people in the comments section were calling Roz a bongo. Though I could be wrong, my memory is blurring together if it’s further than 2 weeks.
Someone called “make a fort out of that chair”. Who was that? Come up and claim your bragging rights!
…that was Mr. Willis himself, in the hovertext of yesterday’s comic.
Ive come to realize that I spend more time commenting on the commenters, then the actual comic.
We have to do something to fill the 23 hours and 59 minutes until the next panel.
AND SO IT BEGINS.
… er, wait, it began when you commented on the comic.
AND SO IT MOUNTS.
…. no, technically accurate, but an unfortunate alternative interpretation.
AND SO IT GROWS.
… same problem.
AND SO IT ESCALATES.
Doesn’t flow right.
YUP YOU’RE SCREWED.
Perfect.
Yup! We have conversations and stuff. Very interactive.
Sarah, just because you realize your foot is in your mouth, doesn’t mean you have to cut off your leg as you spit it out.
Am I the only one who saw the title “Oh ho ho”, and read it in Strong Bad’s voice? As in “Oh-ho-ho! Devilish laugh!”
Like here:
http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail91.html
Sarah’s a little self-centered, isn’t she? At least she realized how dickish she was being mid-comic this time.
Being surrounded by tragedy can take a toll on a person. I’ve had a similar situation; a year ago, I had a roomie literally die (heart attack! at 19!). She really does need to move towards some kind of action, though. Or at least changing her social context.
I phrased that poorly; she shouldn’t ditch the people she knows now, but if you value people being reasonable and effectual, the you need to put yourself in a position to encounter such folks instead of browsing on your phone. ‘Seize control of your life’ requires a verb.
Every character in the comic is a little self centered, and also a little altruistic, and also a little bit of a lot of things.
Wait… are you saying they’re supposed to be humans?
All this time, I thought they were robots!
I suppose Sarah’s misanthropy and what self centeredness she has are quite interrelated. I love Sarah, and Raidah is not in a position to make a good appraisal of her, but what negatives she sees are mostly there.
Daily DoA ritual:
Read comic.
Read alt-text.
Read Ana Chronistic’s post.
A new religion should be created out of this.
Otherwise knows as the Willis, the Strip and the Holy Post.
*polite applause*
Impolite applause. How dare the Pod succeed where I failed.
I knew a cat who didn’t have object permanence. Like you’d walk around the corner inside the apartment and he’d MOW piteously because he was all alone forever. (He also couldn’t meow properly. Or jump, or climb, or use the litter box successfully. He wore a diaper, attached by starbucks-green lederhosen, over partially shaved floofy fur. One ear stood up, the other was permenantly deflated, and his whiskers were all askew, so he looked quite quizzical. He was so dumb that when he fell over for no reason — which happened a lot because gravity is hard — he didn’t even land on his feet. Everyone loved him very very much.) :3
That’s adorable… I think.
CAT!!!
mmMOW
Now THAT is how an “um, actually” is DONE.
Is this where Sarah either (a) starts reading some really horrendous poetry or (b) destroys the Earth so that interstellar bypass can be built?
Dammit. And I screw up the difference between Vogons and Ravenous Bugblatter beasts of Traal.
You should at least make sure that you know where your towel is.
“Actually, the events were slightly different. Actually, I have object permanence.” Dina is such a nitpicker. 🙂
I’m sure there is a dinosaur forum somewhere where the other posters have come to dread “smallerwingspan89’s” post that star with “actually…”
I’ll bet you anything young Dina actually tested if she has object permanence. She seems like the kind of person who goes through the entire philosophy to test if it applies to herself. “I DO think… yes, by his logic that means I am. Next.”
I can totally see it! We totally need someone to draw it…
Next up, Dina steps in the same river twice. Then she behaves like she wants everyone else to behave.
Poor Sarah! She’s going through a lot of social angst right now, isn’t she?
I love that Dina pointed out that she has object permanence. Literally laughed out loud.
“Just bury me now under the chair.”
Sometimes I lack object permanence, but I suspect the remote really DOES cease existing if I’m not looking at it.
No one ever laughs when I play the Object Permanence card in Cards Against Humanity…
The correct grammar is ‘Becky and I’ here, since ‘was’ is a copula. This explains why ‘who’ is used as a relative pronoun, rather than ‘whom’. I insist that no real-life person would ever make this mistake.
This comment wins the Peduncle Seal of Approval.
Time for my (at least) weekly Googling of a phrase used in DoA that I’m completely unfamiliar with and have never been previously exposed to. Today’s winner: ‘object permanence’.
You aren’t the only one. I had to google it too!
Object permanence (or lack thereof) is why babies are so fun to play peek-a-boo with. Because for the half second you’re behind the blanket, you literally cease to exist!
one has object permanence, the other has permanent objections.
together they fight crime!“Actually, it was Becky and me who were chased with the rifle.”
—————————
Which reminds me — did we ever find out what happened to Dina after she jumped Toedad in Dunn’s Woods? Was she just temporarily stunned after he tossed her to the ground, or did he do something else — like KO her with the butt of the rifle — that further incapacitated her?
She was probably just temporarily stunned on the ground. Remember that Ross saw Becky across the field. He probably immediately went back to his car to chase after her.
I’m not sure why everyone speculates that something worse happened to Dina in that scene.
Because Toedad is a monster. Anything additional he die to her would just emphasize his monstrosity (as if he needed that).
Well Willis didn’t fridge any of his characters just to demonstrate just how bad Toedad was. And honestly I’m glad about that.
I think the big arc for Sarah coming up will be her recognizing she is less resilient to setbacks and failures than others around her. She is honestly pretty similar to Walky in that neither of them responds to challenges that require hard work particularly well. I think if Joyce recovers some of her sunny disposition (which she probably will), Sarah might wonder why others can succeed after facing greater difficulities than she has faced. Being around people who overcome huge problems might help her overcome the self-fulfilling prophecy of her fatalism.
Of course, I don’t know anything. So ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Honestly, she needs perspective more than anything. It looks like she sees her failures as greater in either number or magnitude than her peers – probably both. So that fatalism is sometimes directed outwards – her sometimes hostile actions – but more often is self-targeted. “Of course I screwed up. Why would I think otherwise?” Think of the disastrous “friendly experiment,” or her immediate reaction to her selfish moment here. She’s convinced she can’t socialize, and is a terrible friend – and so she is.
Man, I WISH I could make things stop existing by not looking at them.
Soo… many… things…
Object permanence. :). Someone has been reading his child development books!!!
I knew Dina was short, but I didn’t realize HOW short until just now when I noticed that she was standing up behind that chair and not crouching like I thought she was.
I find it adorable that Dina spend this entire conversation peeking over the chair
That uncomfortable moment when you realize its not all about you.
Thankfully that never happens to me, as I am literally the most amazing and important human being to ever live throughout all known history, and all history to come.
Oh geez, Sarah. Guilt cycles are the worst, especially since they lead to self-fulfilling prophecies.
Wow… Despite not having the best social skills Dina is a freaking mental fortress. Lesser Humans would have been scared for life by less then what she went through and be ultra sensitive about it. Dina here is all like… Yeah I was part of that.
Dina really is someone to look up to.
I see Dina is trying her hand at being Wilson W. Wilson, Jr. these days.
I’m stealing that response – “I have object permanence.”
I don’t know when I’ll be able to use it but I love it.
Having trouble figuring out if the alt text means “No [Sarah], sometimes it is useful to have object permanence” or supporting her with “Sometimes not having object permanence is useful.”
The latter—the former would have a comma to denote the separate clauses
Sympathy through moderate physical contact incoming?
Sarah only gets sympathy through physical contact with Other Jacob.
Eh… I think a hug would do more good here. And Dina has been practising hugs.
I have looked for “cube chair” but none have sides or backs as high as the ones shown here. Google has failed me.