Things become uniformly dense across an area over time? I’m pretty sure gravity and planetary formation don’t work like that, to say nothing of black holes.
Well, I mean, it’d take more work giving his password out individually than it just propagating on its own due to you know handing out the password on a whim.
I, really am, judging you on your looks here.
Would you please tell me where you got that avatar? I’d like to find out if the story is as good as the art.
Oh. Your avatar has me wanting to change my guess.
Either Roz, who he shared a Very Special Video Presentation with, or maybe Mike, who lives for setting things right,.. in the most painful manner possible.
If Mary, may she be se seeking revenge for getting a lower.score than she thought she deserved?
There is plenty to ruminate on how Mary views The Do List. Example: Is she merely full of her own sanctimony, or is she old-fashioned enough to care about her number?
Scarface.
He already took out Amber and Dottie (RIP) and now he is slowly but surely going to take out the rest of the crew one by one in a singularly unique manner. He is destroying Joe in the one way he values himself and will finish him after he is completely broken.
Billie will be last because the cheerleader has to make it the longest.
In the June 2016 Patreon bonus strip, it shows that his list is actually private and password-protected. My guess is that, after Rachel got rated in the last storyline, she hacked into his phone and posted the list. Since she’s a Comp Sci major.
Being a Comp Sci major implies to me that you’re good with computers. And possibly knowledgeable about hacking. I don’t think it’s unlikely that Rachel has hacking in her skill set.
CompSci just teaches you how to turn things off and back on again, how binary logic works, basic programming, what all the ports are on a motherboard, advanced math, IPv4 subnetting, and how to configure Cisco equipment. Any “hacking” will probably be limited to whatever canned script kiddie tools somebody who thinks they’re clever brings in on a flash drive.
We’ve seen Amber do all sorts of L33t hacking already in DoA. Just because someone didn’t learn it in CS class doesn’t mean they’re incapable of hacking, and being a CS major implies strong interest already.
It’s kind of insulting to CS majors that you’d assume this, honestly.
I am a CS major (or was a decade ago). In my experience maybe 1 out of 50 people had that kind of interest and knowledge coming into it. That was incredibly disappointing to me.
I remember one of my classmates brought Sub7 in on a flash drive but couldn’t get it working properly on the teacher’s PC like he wanted to because he put the server side under his own user profile instead of letting it run as a system process. Someone else fried a server by jamming the RAM in backwards and crooked. The networking classes taught us about time-division multiplexing and ISDN lines, and we spent a week just on what an IP address is. The final project had us playing system integrator to build a nation-wide network for a fictional large company, and one team specced the cheapest PCs they could find at Wal-Mart and $300 for one copy of Office (not one copy per machine, one single-install license to install on every workstation).
I don’t know, maybe things have changed since then.
“one team specced the cheapest PCs they could find at Wal-Mart”
I have worked in a fairly large number of office environments since I have spent many years as a contractor. I find that the members of the team referenced above was hired by a good number of IT departments and applied the lessons learned in that project.
I’d say Roz or Mike. This isn’t Mary’s style, and I don’t think she’s even met Joe. Roz has motive, and Mike has been looking for someone Danny-adjacent to screw over since Danny himself is off-limits.
Yeah but he already picked Ethan as the Danny adjacent person to screw and Roz didn’t strike me as being all that phased by Joe’s rating system. She seemed irritated but hardly mad enough to go for elaborate revenge. Rachel on the other hand based on how she tore down Ruth seems exactly like she could have been that mad and we know Joe isn’t exactly making the list hard to find. I’m guessing she posted a link somewhere publicly or sent out a mass text about it the same night she went to the hellish floor meeting.
Willis knows how to draw lovely ladies without making them all look the same. Bruce Timm could take lessons. I honestly can’t think of any of his female characters that are unattractive.
Except Mary, and that’s not because her design isn’t nice, it’s because she stole all her facial expressions from Mr. Burns.
Bruce Timm falls into a trap a lot of artists do. In which He only draws one woman but he’s pretty good at drawing that one woman he draws.
I’m lookin’ at you Chris Sanders and Echiiro Oda. Oda especially has shown how good he is drawing lots of interesting characters with unique silhouettes so it bugs me when he defaults to squished barbie proportions. Then again he has introduced some neat ones in the current arc.
Yay, someone pointing out Chris Sanders too! I really love his linework but yeah, all the women are the same mold. Same with Glen Keane. Disney, you’re cursed.
Well boobs are apparently two points, since Billie’s bumped her from a 6 to an 8. And now excuse me, I need to take a million showers just for typing that.
Of course. But the evidence of Joe hitting on other women elsewhere makes me think his list is too long to recall all the contents. I can only imagine there being a lot of Joe-rating having taken place off-panel.
Might be a case of him being a little bit rattled and going for someone lower on his list to get a higher chance of a positive response to alley his fears that anything is wrong.
Danny is a good enough egg to give Joe the stinkeye which has been deserved. I hope I’d top on board the stinkeye train if I were in Danny’s jaunty cap..
Any second now… *glares at watch* Yup, any second… *shakes watch violently* Ugh, that learns me for buying the cheap moral change watches for the secondary characters. At least I decked out Joyce’s first so that’s all solid.
Who uses moral change watches any more? Watches are outdated technology. Everyone just uses their cell phones instead. There’s a moral change ap with regular updates for changing social mores and a feature that gives you wake-up calls.
Not exactly. Instead, it suffers from delayed updates, which keep you from using your phone while they download and often cause you to overuse your data plan.
Joyce has had way more “screen time” than Joe, and what she has had has more often been meaningful. If we saw as much of Joe- both in how often he’s around and how meaningful his appearances are- as we have of Joyce I think we’d have a lot more to say about his personal growth.
But it’s looking like we may be seeing something in that regard soon-ish!
OTOH, Joyce has had huge amounts of personal growth. Joe is doing the same things he was doing in his first appearances, at least as far as his treatment of women goes.
We’ve had a few glimpses deeper into his character and he’s shown a few signs of improvement – the texting with Joyce and his attempt to talk to Danny these last few strips, but basically, he’s still the same Joe.
I change my mind, Danny’s comment here about manifest charm maniFESTERING was the best thing I’ve read all day. And I have spent yet another day writing.
Rating women is horrible by itself, but Joe using every number on his invented 10 point scale just makes it all so much worse. Even video game reviews rarely go under 6.
(note: do not rate people, especially do not rate people like they are video games)
Yeah, going the extra effort to even add women he finds unattractive to the list makes it extra douchey.
A “list of women I’d like to bang and how much I’d like to bang them” is bad enough, but including even the the low scores suggests its actually a list detailing how much he’d like to bang every single woman he’s met, which is even worse.
He went for what he assumed was an easy target, just to boost his ego. Because obviously his opinion must be shared by all men, and thus she must be so very starved for male attention.
Mm hmm. Like he thought that because she’s a “3” in his system, she’d just be overwhelmed with joy that a hot man is speaking to her and giving her attention and thus be willing to tell him anything he wanted just to have his “wonderful” presence.
And yes, this is a thing in real life from these fucks too and it’s no less insulting to witness there.
And yeah, this is exactly why I refer to his list as that genre of douchery known as the “unprompted boner update”. Cause this type of guy really does believe the world revolves around his boner. That hot women want to know all the time what his boner thinks of them, that ugly women by his estimation need to know that they are not doing their proper job of prettying themselves up in service to making his boner happy and so on.
Like, this is textbook PUA shit and the major players of that cesspit like RooshV constantly view the world in these terms, believing that this faux-objective system somehow makes their obsession with viewing women only in terms of their sexual utility is part of some bigger and more important and objective thing. But it’s not.
And if you’re wondering who RooshV is, then feel free to click the link, but all the trigger warnings first for horrendous vile sexism and rape apologia:
Well, uh, I’m not envied often, but okay. It helps that there was this huge section of text telling me why I should continue to avoid finding out who he is above the link.
Also that I don’t do social or news or whatever much. That helps too.
But that’s exactly why I click the link – even though the first few minutes already made my skin crawl (especially after I asked for more info and clarification on this kinda topic yesterday). I can’t always stay in this bubble of innocence – and it helps that I in real life personally know very good and rational thinking men (especially my father and my brother-in-law) who’d just react to this the same way as I do).
I just need to keep my toxicity levels down. So chugging something figuratively labeled nuclear waste doesn’t really benefit me in any way. Knowing the reasons why he’s horrible and understanding that these things are horrible means I can skip the step where I have to subject myself to the horribleness.
Understandable! And you don’t need to, especially if it’s already affecting you like that in general!
I just finished watching it – and although the views made my skin continue to crawl non-stop, for me it helped that the interviewer (or documenter/journalist?) was a rational, sane person, with a logical conclusion. Of this Roosh V you just need to know what’s said by Cerberus.
I got through half of it but I have to go to work so I guess the other half will have to go unwatched. I can’t say it made my skin crawl, it just made me very very confused. Like, what are these people even talking about?? (probably doesn’t help that in my 34 years of life I have only experienced sexism once and that left me just as confused as the video) I will never understand what gender (or skin colour or religion, etc) has to do with anything. People are people. (fun fact: that Dr. Seuss book with the creatures that some had stars on their bellies and some didn’t or whatever ALSO left me equally confused. THEY’RE ALL THE SAAAAAME ffs)
Unfortunately I do know who that douchebro is. What constantly amazes me is that that walking dumpster fire hasn’t had the living crap beaten out of him yet.
I’m going with “Joe doesn’t remember Other Rachel and/or the rating given”. It adds that impersonal touch which Joe seems to have with all females except for Dorothy and Joyce.
We reader know who she is. Joe goes to many wings for his PUA act, not just the one Willis centers DofA on. Also this is the first strip they’re both tagged in.
The old Computer Gaming World magazine was famous for giving low reviews if the game deserved it. I think the lowest record was held by Derek Smart. If you don’t know who he is, go do some reading, it will be very entertaining.
Imagine being known as ‘other’ Rachel, not even having your own identity, and then discovering there’s someone lurking about who looks exactly like you. There is nothing that’s your own.
I like to think it’s literally “other” in another language, as if an ancestor’s family immigrated through Ellis Island, and the clerk didn’t understand them so they just phonetically wrote what they heard.
Rachel Andere (German, Italian)
Rachel Andet (Danish)
Rachel Harall (Welsh)
Rachel Drugi (Serbian in Latin script)
But, you know. I’ve been called “hey sexy” by a stranger and it was weird and annoying, put me off for a day. But the few times I’ve been called ugly (whether it’s by a bully or a stranger) hurt to the point of tears.
There is no way to interpret “3” as anything other than ugly. From my experience, being widely recognized as ugly generally means you have some significant visible difference–a disability, scarring, a *lot* of acne, messed up teeth, or obesity. It basically says, “You know the part of your appearance that you’re the most self-conscious about? That’s the first thing I noticed about you.” It *sucks* .
Oh, no, don’t get me wrong. I definitely get why it might smart more on a personal level. I don’t mean she shouldn’t be more upset, I just mean it’s no better or worse of a shitbag move on his part.
Although I think with the reputation it looks like Joe is about to end up with… let’s just say in metaphorical terms, it probably won’t hurt too much to be called a “3” by a known zero.
Yeah, this is kind of like when people get really angry about the method with which they got dumped. (I mean, yes, there are some ways that are exceptionally cruel, but it’s not like there’a a way that doesn’t suck. Usually, you’re far more upset about getting dumped than about whether it was by phone or not.)
The 3 probably just added insult to injury, especially since it’s public.
Well – probably depends on the kind of relationship – it’s length, the closeness, how long the people knew each other until they got together, etc. But being dumped on the phone usually happens one-way, as in opposition of a face-to-face talk where you get the chance that the one dumping you (or the other way round) actually sees your (or you see their) reaction to dumping/being dumped. Unless it’s because they’re in a distance-relationship, it’s the “easier” way out, than especially meeting up and have a talk, and I personally find it a tad disrespectful, because it kinda suggest that the one doing the dumping never valued the dumped one enough to care about their final reaction. (this though mostly applies to relatively healthy relationships without problems such as anger burst or physical aggressiveness in either of the people involved)
Yup, good or bad, it’s still an unwanted and unprompted boner update and all the ugly creepy triggering baggage that comes with being sized up like a piece of meat like that and judged by your sexual utility.
And honestly both outcomes are shit when targeted by the kind of guy who uses this type of system.
If you score “high”, you get creeped on and boundary-violated and stalked in the hopes of wearing you down to a yes. If you score “low”, you get harassed and abused because the type of guy who does this tends on average to also be the kind of guy who takes it deeply personally that a woman existed in ways that were not pleasing to his boner.
Is this where we see Joe’s character development? I’ve honestly been waiting for this. Mostly because Joe reminds me of my First Year roommate. Danny reminds me of me minus the hat, ukulele and being bisexual. But if you add glasses he’s pretty much me.
I’m pretty sure Emperors get a certain amount of free passes on that. Well, so long as small children don’t call you out for public nudity…and you don’t decide to practice a musical instrument while your kingdom is burning down.
Nero actually wasn’t playing the fiddle when Rome burned. A) They didn’t exist yet and B) He wasn’t actually there at the time (he was at his palace, miles away) and when he heard about it, he went to go help out relief efforts.
Well, yeah, but at least one later historian decided it’d be a great way to paint the already dead Nero in a bad light by claiming that he was playing his lyre and rejoicing as Rome burned.
Hence Nero’s reputation as a foolish emperor, even if its not true.
rectilinearpropagation Not entirely clear, but it does look like he already started the process by taking out his phone and tapping things on it, so I say the odds are pretty good.
I didn’t realize/remember until someone pointed it out below but he’s actually brought it up more than once so, yeah, it wasn’t sarcasm. The feed actually freaking exists so I agree that the odds are good.
Yup, and the casualness of him doing that, especially when they have almost no interaction with each other and she’s in the middle of expressing revulsion at the notion of what he admitted to, shows that he literally throws out that link to everyone with little care, assuming that his one security trick of referring to people in terms of their physical descriptions rather than their names (because he doesn’t care about their names) as his only obfuscation of identity.
Like it was only a matter of time someone leaked it and honestly I kind of hope it was Raidah, cause she kinda needs a moment of awesome in her arc.
Joe is still Jacob’s friend despite Joe being Joe. It’s possible if it is Raidah that Jacob will be upset about her hurting his friend enough to put their relationship in danger.
No it isn’t. I’ve been tainting my soul for *years* going after you guys.
The problem is more one of energy inefficiency: it takes somewhere between 100 and 1,000 points of energy input into the equation to render one point of repercussion.
“You guys” is uncomfortably close to “you people”. I feel it lumps me in with a group of undesirables, with whom I most likely only share the trait of being cisgendered, a trait over which I have no control.
I recently heard of a white man (cisgenderredness unknown) getting police-related consequences for making violent statements about queer people online.
Yeah, I immediately checked to see if I had fallen into a parallel world, and how not to get back if I had.
Oh, it does. Any women’s place giving 5-day courses knows it. One starts to menstruate und a few suddenly start early and wonder why. Or maybe not in th US, don’t know how widespread the use of special deodorants is there.
Joe believes it does, but even so, the idea that every woman wandering around that dorm would undergo the effect (not just roomates, say), after under two months since the start of the semester, is triply dumb.
I’m just glad he has displayed knowledge about safe sex practices than he shows here about menstruation.
i mean there are a lot of women who believe in this
and tbh, it’s a really fun urban legend? like it’s really nice to think you could just get close enough to another person that you would share something so intimate and related to owning a uterus that everyone else gets grossed out by. it would be really cool to have syncing uteruses. like. it would be just kind of magical
I know the science/data on this is sketchy but I’ve many friends and acquaintances experience the phenomenon, including one who was Navy and IIRC was mostly surrounded by other women at sea. Its a little hard to hear so many stories from buddies who say they’ve had it happen and not believe it a little. ^_^
(Also since I’m not gonna comment elsewhere; wow Joe. I just hope he learns from the consequences.)
if you read the second link, it tracks how the phenomenon takes place: i.e. like if one woman has 27 days between periods, another woman has 30 days between privileges, and another woman has 28 days between periods, the odds of their periods syncing up is really good for at least a few months out of the year! although it might vary by a couple days. and that’s enough to make it seem like they’re syncing up even if they technically aren’t.
but it’s more fun and communal to say that they’re syncing up anyways, and it’s not like it hurts anybody, so
It was a thing that happened to most of my floor when I was in boarding school back in high school. They all even commented about it and wondered why the rest of us were out of sync.
*gasp* thank goodness, only the IRS audits things, Joe, and I don’t think they have your crappy rating system in mind. 3 is a totally ugly number anyway, being a boring prime that looks somewhat like a butt, so I don’t like it either. 😛
Me too! (liking the number and being a fan – well, at least I hold it in good memory, it’s been quite some time since I watched it)
Mostly because I consider it my lucky number, as my b-day is on a third!
Yup, he’s that kind of scumbag. And he’s also the scumbag who’ll send it to a woman who is in the middle of saying she doesn’t even want to know that he has a list and that she finds it morally abhorrent.
Cause Joe is… great at boundaries. Just A+ consent and non-harassment practices.
Yes, but “Roomies”, “It’s Walky”, “Joyce and Walky”, and “Shortpacked!” ran for years, with essentially the same characters.
I’d have expected the character styles to have stabilized before this strip.
Yup. Hell, Joe’s just put him in a fucked place. If Danny doesn’t tell him off, his own impression in the eyes of everyone watching drops. Because if you value “bro code” over women’s safety and humanity, then women notice that shit and remember.
But it’s really hard and shitty to call out a long-time friend, especially for someone bad at confrontation like Danny.
So yeah, rock and a hard place and none of it is his fault.
This is definitely a shitty place for Danny to be in. It is made worse by the fact that if he chides Joe for his “do” list now, Joe is likely to push back claiming that Danny has lost the moral high ground. Danny has known about the list at least since Dorothy broke up with him but is only criticizing Joe for it now that it might negatively impact him by proximity.
Of course, having failed to stand up to Joe for his shitty behavior in the past in no way invalidates him doing so now, but Joe is likely to go on the defensive and try to guilt Danny into quiet acquiescence.
He at least had the sense to password protect it somehow. But apparently he hands that out pretty easily if he considered himself “remiss” in not having offered Raidah the password when the list came up.
Oh no, I think he’s done worse. Not much worse but worse. I think Joe has actually gotten worse as a person in IU. He started off bad but he’s morphed into something even more awful.
I think this may be because in the beginning, the comic strip was still leaning more towards the gags and the silliness of things. But as the drama tag’s gotten seriously pulled and we get to see more realistic-ish consequences to many* of the situations, the horribleness of Joe’s character stands out more and more.
I think he’s gotten worse as a reaction to the gender studies class. He’s never been exposed to the information about privelage, and he’s not handling it well. When confronted with how shitty their behavior has been, some people soul search and learn to change, while others clam up and double down on their worse habits. He’s doing the latter.
Is Willis gonna try and draw some parallel between Joe and Ryan? It’s not like the comic’s not done with Ryan (as a talking point, at least), but this is pretty clearly a Joe-centric arc.
I suspect that’s where this is heading. And it would make sense. The toxic masculinity, entitlement, and sexism that Joe is tapping into is the bread-and-butter of the rape culture Ryan has fully micturated himself into.
Ryan is the BAD END of Joe’s path and I think the thing that’ll clink through his skull that he needs to change before the way he’s been playing fast and loose with consent and boundaries crosses that line that should never be crossed.
I don’t know, I’d personally consider becoming the kind of person, like Ryan, who gives the general douche bag population an even worse name a case of wetting the bed.
If Joe’s been as “successful” as he talks and he’s done so with the kind of “game” he tried using on Joyce and others, not to mention the help of alcohol, he’s likely got more than a few women who are at least really unhappy they slept with him and quite possibly feeling quite used and hurt.
I kind of wish Willis had chosen to explore that side, rather than focus on the obnoxious “do” list. We’ll see where this goes though.
I have some small sympathy for Joe if we assume this was his private notes and he wasn’t actually sharing it with a following (I don’t actually recall him ever doing that in the comic) but that’s gone if he had it as a private ratings site like Facebook started as. Albeit, Joe as Zuckerberg is almost disturbingly accurate.
More like semi-public notes on an RSS feed he personally set up and then secured with a password that he has apparently given out to a select few (presumably only the “hotties” since he’s said before that he doesn’t tell the low rankers their score).
It’d be easy enough for someone who knew to hand out the password, or let other people see the feed, or just recite the list to people.
I don’t think he has anything about the dumping on there (it would be off topic!), I think he was, in his own mind, being a good bro to Danny by seeing he had easy access to which girls were hot enough to seek out now that he was single.
It’s a dream; the projections are getting hostile.
In three strips, they converge on Joe and Danny with infinite knives and Joe snaps awake after about the hundredth stab wound, about the time his muscles finish peeling off.
See, I’m pretty sure the biggest difference currently between Joe and “Ryan” is quite possibly that Joe hasn’t done anything that would legally excuse someone knifing him.
I mean there are a variety of other differences and points along the scale, for sure, but for now the fact that the ladies are only glaring daggers at him instead of slashing him with literal daggers means he has a lot more chance of turning his life around.
Or you know, settling for being Forever Alone for the rest of college?
Don’t rate women, Joe. Danny, keep up the sass. It’s a good look. At any rate…
A microphone and muffling material are all well and good, and certainly needed, but what’s a podcast without guests? If anyone would like to be featured on a show that’s meant to give a voice to people who might not otherwise be heard, do let me know. And if you have any suggestions regarding other users who you think would be a great choice, I’m all ears.
I, as well as some of the people I know IRL who have expressed interest in appearing on the podcast, will occasionally say things that may be problematic. It should be stated before anyone here expresses interest, we do not say these things out of malevolence, but ignorance, and will always apologise and correct ourselves afterward, if it’s pointed out. I should also state that I have some passing experience with the sort of topics people on here have discussed, but for the most part am still learning.
You can consider this a preemptive content warning, not as a crutch to allow myself to say whatever and just apologise later, thinking it will be fine, but as encouragement to point out when I or another speaker has stepped out of line.
One of the main reasons I haven’t started something like this in the past, is that I always want the highest quality possible from anything I produce; this podcast will only be happening due to the encouragement I’ve received here and elsewhere.
I actually don’t think its very obvious who tattled on Joe. Its like one of his go to topics if he sees you as anything other than a one night stand or a teacher. He could also tell you about it if you are a one night stand and have a high rank. This could be a random guy who resents the fact that Joe’s having sex. This could be any woman with a high score who asked for the info and thinks he’s a creep. This could be a shallow woman who thinks her classmates care that she’s a ten.
I don’t think it is as random as ‘a random guy’ doing it only because often his interactions with other guys are limited which makes it more likely to be a female, but not definitely a female.
Narratively speaking, it almost has to be one of the named characters and probably in reaction to something fairly recent. Probably foreshadowed by him giving out the password on camera.
I was thinking Rachel, thanks to their little spat yesterday, but I don’t think he actually gave her the password. Raidah’s a possibility, since she was openly disgusted and he sent her a password.
I wonder if Joe slept with Other Rachel. Yes, he introduces himself but the fact is she’s got a spot on his list. Also, Joe has had a bunch of causal sex since enrolling. I can’t help but wonder if his do list included Other Rachel after a causal hook-up and that’s part of her furious reaction.
He had her listed as a four due to her virginity, but yeah, he planned to ‘update her’ with his dick.
He also listed AG as a 9 because he said she MUST have mental health issues if she dresses as a superhero and he says that translates to great kink. Joe is GROSS.
He also practically begged to meet Sal when he heard Danny’s description of ‘barely wears clothes and rides a motorcycle’. Normally that wouldn’t bother me at all – it’s 100% fine to ask a friend to introduce you to someone who sounds hot. But we know that Joe’s a creepy bastard and that the meeting in question would have been for math tutoring and the hair on my arms stands up. Cripes that’d have been gross. And we probably wouldn’t get to see Sal and Danny’s budding friendship, which would suck, because I like it.
Other-Rachel’s rage at being rated a 3 out of ten by some asshole she’s never spoken to before has finally unlocked her long-dormant mutant powers: teleportation and extra-dimensional-identification-cloaking.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve hooked up before. Joe doesn’t even remember the sexes of the threesome partners he’s hooked up with, let alone their names.
Wow. Go fuck yourself, Joe, because no one else is fucking interested in doing it. Creep.
Like seriously, leading off with a “lol ladies menstruating so moody” joke, and then acting like it’s a fucking favor that you didn’t systematically list off the factors that make a particular woman sexually unappealing to you, to her face? Fuck. Off.
Um, I’m trying to tie this into Mary’s weird happiness and comment to Carla early on, did Joe give Carla some kind of bullshit awful rating and Mary’s enjoying it? Did he make some kind of transphobic remark about her? Did he not include her in the ratings of the girls in the dorm because he didn’t count her as being a girl? I’m sweating over here, what the fuck and why was Mary so happy?
Hmm. I guess it’s possible, as dudebro misogynists aren’t known for their progressive views re: trans women, but til we find out more either way I’m just going to assume Mary’s just happy (she thinks) she can keep abusing people with impunity because (she thinks) Billie has something to lose now.
I mean, I get Mary feeling happy that Billie has something to lose, but even while she was at the highest point of influence over Ruth and Billie she didn’t act that gleeful or friendly, and I just feel like there’s some kind of motive behind complimenting Carla. I’m just paranoid at this point.
Mary’s happy that Billie now has something to lose (Carla) though I still haven’t figured out how Mary’s going to use that against her. (Especially since Billie is supposed to be getting moved anyway?)
Mind you, I wouldn’t be surprised if Joe found out the only woman who knows about the List and willing to date him would be Mary (she’s an 8 for appearance in Joe’s list). Then she’d make a antisemitic remark and he’d realize he had to change his ways.
This strangely reminds me of video game reviewer Angry Joe’s video on feminism where he comments that Dudebros shoot themselves in the foot because feminists love sex so treating them with respect is awesome for your love life.
And yet his handling of things in public is STILL better than Joe’s.
…that dude comes off as just as much of a creep as Joe, because while yes, some feminists love sex, just as many are ambivalent or not that into it, and being nice to someone JUST because you think it’ll get you in their pants is still gross as hell.
To be fair to Angry Joe, it was a misguided attempt to get toxic masculinity obsessed people not to be douchebags to Anita Sarkesian. Which is like asking fire not to burn.
I can see where the idea came from, but the idea of a gamergater doucheass nerdbro faking nice at me because he thinks it’ll buy him access to my genitalia has made my panties dryer than they’ve ever been ever.
Keep in mind, that’s already a real thing. I have several friends who dated a guy that presented as an “open minded lefty vegan feminist” and turned out to be an abusive sociopath.
I recommend Jim Sterling. He’s a video game YouTube guy who doesn’t act like a total creep, except for exaggerated effect, and even then, I’m pretty sure it’s toward ungodly buff guys from video games.
It helps that Jim Sterling is queer af. He actually hosts a podcast with Laura Dale, one of the precious handful of out trans women in the gaming industry.
Well, I mean its his “Thing” or especially was when he was working for The Escapist with his Zero Punctuation Reviews.
There were like one or two games he couldn’t find anything bad to say about them even so, but yeah usually he either tears into the games a bit too savagely for my taste, or its a game I had zero interest in anyways.
I dunno, I don’t really have much desire to listen to what basically amounts to comedy skits where the person in question has an overblown persona they use in their videos. Especially not as a review to tell me if I should play a game or not.
I mean, I literally only even watch JonTron on the rare occasions that I do so in the hopes that he’ll burst into song. Whatever else is true about the man, he’s got a decent singing voice, at least for just singing silly songs.
Wait, Yahtzee does Zero Punctuation. Or is he just the YouTube face of it, and Jim did written ones? I have to admit, I never did follow The Escapist, beyond the videos those two put out.
Now, you specified “current”. Was there something wrong with a former Game Grump? I’m not familiar with them, though I’ve heard Arin Hanson (Egoraptor) is in that group.
Jontron went fully off the rails at some point in the height of Gamergate; I’m not really following his bullshit at this point but I’ve vaguely heard he’s gone outright nazi lately.
I wasn’t paying attention to anything around GamerGate’s heyday, but I feel I should clarify that Jon has not gone Nazi on us. The debate in which he made the racist comments was effectively set up to put him on the defensive against an experienced debater who pretty much made it impossible for him to get a good word in, without immediately getting jumped for it. He later clarified about this, while also admitting that what he said was way off-center and apologising for it, and others have backed up his account of the other person’s general behavior.
I wasn’t aware Jon was part of the Game Grumps, though.
To clarify, the above is what I’ve managed to understand from what I’ve read about the incident. There were a lot of articles blowing the entire thing out of proportion, so I may have missed some problematic things he actually did say/do.
Jontron was the “Not so Grump” before Danny. He took some (much deserved) flack for racist comments he made during a debate and on Twitter. My experience with Danny and Arin is that they occasionally say problematic things out of ignorance but they try to avoid saying anything hurtful and tend to be very apologetic when they are corrected on it.
There were tweets that clearly suggested some xenophobic ideas, but the bulk of the racist comments were from the debate with Destiny. While I agree that Destiny is by far the more experienced debater and kept JonTron off balance for most of the debate, some of JonTron’s comments can’t be excused by lack of experience whether Destiny was Gish-galloping him or not. Destiny didn’t somehow trick JonTron into claiming that Mexican immigrants are trying to annex portions of the United States.
While I haven’t seen his response to the backlash, I appreciate that he apologized for his statements and recognized that they were inaccurate. It’s a good first step to reconciliation, but he’s still left a very bad taste in my mouth.
If you’d like to hear some of his own words about it, there’s a video floating about titled something like “The Jontron Apology Video”, and he made an appearance on the Schmucks Podcast, where he touched on it again briefly.
Honestly, I feel worse about him after hearing his apology video. It sounded like he was saying “I meant all that racist stuff I said, but I didn’t mean it in a racist way.”
Yeah, you can watch their old Sonic ’06 playthrough, there’s a lot of points where Arin’s discomfort at some of the stuff Jon says is almost tangible. Plus there’s lots of moments where Jon had to be bleeped. Considering they swear all the time, I’m pretty sure he was casually and repeatedly dropping the n-word or some other racial slur. In retrospect, it’s not surprising what followed.
In contrast, Arin and Danny have only gotten more openly feminist and generally cool over time.
James Rolfe (Cinemassacre) makes video game related content, but the cursing in AVGN videos is just silly nonsense to describe how terrible NES movie tie-ins were in an over-the-top manner. Most of the videos at this point are just him and his friends playing video games or watching horror movies. He’s also married with kids. If he does have terrible opinions he keeps them to himself.
I just rewatched his “I’m not reviewing it” video, and I don’t see what the big deal is. Basically he says he doesn’t want to watch it because it’s an unnecessary reboot of one of his favorite movies, and that he thinks it should have tied into the originals instead of starting over. As I remember, he only made that video because he was inundated with requests for his opinion.
Nah, I wouldn’t say that. I watch a few LPers that are stand-up guys. One of my personal favourites is NicoB, as while I am not a big fan of sexual jokes (he makes a few, not enough that it is grating), he’s enthusiastic, loves the games he plays and he always makes his own running jokes. Plus, ever since he got his dog Bernie, he usually adds small clips of her at the end of most videos and it is great.
I wonder how David felt as he tried to get into Joe’s head and rate these women as Joe would. I tried and thought about what would make Other Rachel a 3, and felt disgusting.
I can’t think of anything about Rachel that hasn’t already been seen on a woman Joe would give a high rating, so it’s definitely baffling. She’s short, but so are Roz and Joyce; she has glasses, but so have Roz and Dorothy; she has dyed hair, but so has Mandy… Is it the modest clothing? Off-hand, I can’t think of any women he’s interacted with who dress similarly to Rachel, and Joe certainly seems the type to see that as a negative.
Not that I’m advocating for this behavior, of course. It’s just puzzling why someone who partakes in it would be inconsistent about it.
The…er…logic I came up with due to the “Power of Hollywood Standards of Beauty” is that she has a…heavier build than a lot of the other people that Joe has rated higher.
Or at least that’s the only “nice” enough phrasing for me to feel comfortable typing. Plenty of other worse ways to say it, but that’s pretty horrible to use as justification for the ranking?
But I suppose a system that requires a person to do so is pretty horrible in any case.
What? An unencrypted RSS feed he hands out the password to like it was candy somehow ended up getting mass accessed by the very women he predatorily targeted and rated? Unpossible!
But yeah, even if this didn’t get out, he was already well on his way to earning himself one of those reputations. I.e. becoming the missing stair everyone tries to warn everyone else about.
Like, when the people who willingly sleep with you are even going “yeah, you’re a dick, stop rating people” and your whole shtick is this fucking PUA shit, there was no way it was going to end anywhere else but here.
And the sick part is that women often end up having to create and teach each other strategies to defuse this shit, just to be safe being in certain public spaces, and it really really sucks.
Panel 1: Joe… my little man-child, why do you keep giving me new reasons to loathe you with all of my being?
Like, fucking hell, everyone is pissed at you, so let’s dismiss that with a bullshit “PMS” joke*, cause y’know “hurr hurr, women get all hormonal and upset at guys for no reason on their periods hurr hurr”. Sure, let’s just throw that misogynist dumpster fire on the raging trash fire you’ve already lit. That’s surely a smart approach.
*Which it’s worth noting that misogynist assholes think that periods are somehow a magic “woman be angry” time where they get blown up at “for no reason” because folks with menstrual cycles are often in intense pain when they are on their periods. And when you’re in intense pain you’ve got a lot less patience for grinning and bearing all the sexist shit that gets dumped on you.
It’s basically like wondering why folks in recovery from surgery don’t have much patience for handling abusive family members. Gosh, I wonder, it’s almost like physical distress robs spoons from mental distress resource pile.
Like, I have special loathing for this “blame a sexist idea of how hormones work” shit because when I was being discriminated out of my job and relentlessly bullied and abused by my workplace, I was also starting estrogen, which my workplace knew about.
So like sometimes it got bad enough that I was leaving the workplace in tears and the midlevel bosses were all like “oh yes, estrogen does release more emotions, I’m sure. I read about that sort of thing on reddit”. And internally I was just screaming “no, I’m not crying because of girl pills, I’m crying because I’m being abused and mistreated”.
Cause like that’s the central thing of this sort of shit. That women and other menstruator’s rightful anger at upsetting things happening to them gets dismissed as some sexist idea of hormones rather than being taken as real and valid.
Cause y’know women and those read as women aren’t allowed any real space to be upset and angry.
I wonder how much of that is because “Anger” is THE “Man’s Emotion”. Like the only one they’re allowed other than “Horny” I guess?
Intense pain doesn’t tend to result in any sort of good mood period either, which seems like it should be obvious, but I suppose misinformation tends to be the rule of the day when people who don’t actually know how things work (and in this case are generally terrified of even having to think about it for more than the half a second it takes to be grossed out by it) get to be the ones who “explain it”?
Yup. So if women are allowed to access that, then they would “take” the “one” emotion men are “allowed” to have.
And yeah, the complete general ignorance is why I take extra time from my Bio classes to explain how the menstrual cycle works in depth as well as hammer against a few other common myths about how that whole system works.
See, I’m not even sure how that compares to regular Bio classes, cause I kind of ended up basically somehow managing to never actually take one.
I mean I’ve seen anatomy charts so I know a little about the inner workings of the human body, but yeah…
The whole “Emotion are ‘feelings’ and therefore ‘weakness’ and therefore only suitable for womenfolk cause MEN have to be STRONG, oh but Anger isn’t a ‘feeling’ so its okay cause aggression is also STRONG” thing seems like its one of the big lynchpins in the whole dynamic.
I mean not that the dynamic isn’t stupid and full of bad logic, but the toxic lifestyle might be harder to sustain without that backing it up. I mean there’d still be the obsession with dominance and submission as core cultural values, and wanting to lock down the dominant end of things, but I’m not sure they’d have much of a rational to be able to justify doing so to themselves at that point.
Panel 2: This feels like close to a major breaking point for Danny/Joe. Cause like, Danny was trying to be nice and soft-pedal the fact that everyone is pissed at Joe and Joe turned that into a sexist joke and a dismissal of what Danny was trying to say.
And also because Danny is wrong here. Yeah, they’re mad at Joe, but folks willingly hanging out with the person they’re mad at tend to also get some of that or otherwise be seen suspiciously because they clearly don’t see anything wrong enough to object to with the sexist asshole next to them.
And so this one walk out together does a lot of damage to his desire to be seen as a “good egg”, because he doesn’t yet have the confidence to fully call Joe to the carpet on his sexist bullshit and the women around him are directly noticing that.
Also, another heavy sigh for Joe still investing bad money after bad into this idea that he has “game” or “charm”. No, Joe, you’re a sleaze merchant, just like your father. You don’t have to remain a sleaze merchant and this is the time to stop being a sleaze merchant, but what you think is charm is a creepy ugly mess that the women who sleep with you overlook on account of your general attractiveness.
Panel 3: Ugh, the eyes he makes are the fucking worst too. Like, when he’s in predator mode, he looks at the women he’s targeting like meat and it’s an intensely douchey look to adopt when everyone around him is pissed at him. Like, if he wanted this interaction to have had any chance of going well, he needed to have a face more like Panel 4 Danny rather than this “I’m such a smooth player and mentally masturbating to the notion of how ‘good’ I am at manipulating people into telling me what I want” shtick.
And good on you Other Rachel fucking slamming his bullshit right in his face. Like, even if he was rating every woman by @dogrates numbers, it would still be bullshit and vile, but the fact that he’s married himself to this bullshit faux-objective style where he not only has a boner update log, but one that names and shames those who don’t please his boner as if that has ever mattered to anyone besides his conceited ass.
Like, this was always going to blow up in this exact way. It really was only going to be a matter of when and having that go viral at the same time as Scarface is going to make women even less forgiving of that shit, because it is the same viewing women only through their sexual utility in entitled fashion that births shit like Ryan.
Yeah, re: Joe’s predator look, I was trying earlier to translate it from cartoon dot eyes to how it’d look in reality, and I have to say, if a dude approached me looking like that and trying to hit on me, I would feel intensely unsafe and grab a friend to retreat with a quickness.
Yup, I’ve had guys approach me with that look. It never feels safe and I’m always keenly aware that things can go really dangerously bad if they figure out I’m trans.
I think that’s very likely that this will lead to a breaking point between Joe and Danny – because that is the intersection of two ongoing themes.
Joe is loosing friends and even people who are willing to stand his bullshit. We have seen it with Roz and Dorothy and Rachel, and even his last time with Jacob was all him being pissy about Jacob and Joyce flirting (which may be understandable, but is a violation of his own stupid bro-code). His increasingly desperate attempts to get Danny to talk about bro-feelings can be read as him desperately trying to keep Danny as a friend.
At the same time, Danny is gaining confidence. His relationship with Dorothy ended and he survived. His relationship with Amazi-girl ended and he survived. He came out to Ethan and he survived. He has gained a friend in Sal. Danny can actually start to afford taking risks. He does not need everything to stay the same way as before college. He does not necessarily need Joe.
Joe is painting himself into a corner, and even if he has shown some glimpses of realizing that he need to change his attitude (such as apologizing to Dorothy) he has a LONG way to go.
There is no guarantee that Danny will wait that long.
I tend not to have as much sympathy for Danny types who enable that kind of misogyny in their friends.
Because, while this Danny doesn’t, a lot of Danny types (especially the ones who like to make a big damn show of being a feminist or “not like THOSE guys”) are just as predatory and creepy in their own way. It’s Nice Guy schtick only performed more skillfully than typical.
A lot of those types will brag about how they see and treat women like people – or, if they’ve just been rejected, they’ll announce it and wonder aloud why she couldn’t see that he wasn’t like those other assholes… And it’s just… no, dude. No. Seeing and treating women as people is not a sign of virtue, it’s a bare minimum “decent person” standard of behavior. You wouldn’t expect a promotion just for showing up at work, don’t expect high esteem just for the bare minimum of human civility. Also, protip: People who actually see women as people and not as props for their own self-aggrandizement don’t need to announce their feminism or their views on women from the highest tower at every opportunity.
Danny’s not like that – but if Joe were a little less invested in classic toxic masculinity but every bit as invested in social sexism, I could see him doing that. And I can easily see that Danny would be tripping people’s alarm bells here on that regard.
I guess what I’m saying is while this Danny doesn’t trip my creep-dar, most Danny-types do.
(why yes, I included Canada’s PM in that one at first, mollified to a degree now by the fact that mainly seems to have walked his prior talk on feminism for the most part and his exasperation at people for being amazed and heaping praise on him for walking his talk seems to have been genuine inasmuch as anything a professional face does or says is genuine. Like, what I’m saying is either that was much better acting than I’m used to seeing out of a Canadian politician or he’s genuinely was exasperated and decided it wouldn’t be a PR disaster if he showed it – groomed for public consumption, of course. I am certain think he focus-grouped the hell out of “because it’s 2015” before he ever said it in public.)
Yup, it’s a necessary defense mechanism oftentimes because the people who seem decent but don’t call out sexist friends can often go really really bad and this can often be a big red flag of that.
Which is why I have some major sympathy for Danny here. Confrontation is something super hard for him and he has to live with Joe at the end of the day, but yeah, a lot of women are going to react accordingly to the red flag of him not doing much to push back Joe.
But I also think that’s some of the tests a good egg has to deal with. It’s really easy to call out sexists super removed from you. It’s a lot harder to call out sexism or racism or homophobia among close friends. But that’s something you eventually end up having to do on the good egg path and becomes a lot easier over time.
You note here that Joe doesn’t actually have game, and I just want to say that I’ve started getting uncomfortable at the insistence that he must have some magical game we haven’t seen, otherwise he wouldn’t ever have sex.
It’s even something I was sort of unconsciously buying into, but the implication is really uncomfortable.
It still posits all women at IU as players on an opposing team. It suggests that Joe can’t possibly just be (as we know he is) physically attractive and in the vicinity of a woman who’s interested in casual sex. No, Joe must be a Master Seducer. He must be convincing women to sleep with him through charm.
Like, boy is that attitude ever deeply ingrained. I’m actively trying to watch out for stuff like that, and it still got me somehow. I was buying into the idea that Joe must have “game” in order to ever have sex, and by extension into the idea that women don’t actually have sexual agency; that we must be ‘won’ and ‘convinced’ and ‘seduced’, that we must be ‘out-gamed’.
Panel 4: I want Joe to get better. I want him to heal. To break away from toxic masculinity. But Danny needs to get away from Joe or find the courage to call him out to his face. Like, he’s watching the distress caused, the raw sexism, the complete assholery he’s still engaging in even after being caught out and every instance where he just feels sad but doesn’t do anything to reign in Joe, the women around him are judging him harshly as someone who just stands by and watches and does nothing.
And given that he wants so hard to be seen as a “good egg”, as a person it is safe and good to interact with, this is a major test for him and we see in Panels 2 and 5 that it might be getting to that breaking point where Danny is realizing his duty to call out his friend and call him out on his behavior and make it explicit not in a “bro, c’mon” way, but in a “bro, no, stop this, now” way.
And I have all the sympathy in the world for Danny here. It’s not easy building up the courage to call out long time friends on their awful bullshit and it’s so easy to fall into a pattern of soft-selling shit in a way you wouldn’t others in the hopes of gently steering them away from their path without needing to blow up at them or cut them out of your life. And it’s often hard to feel like you can do anything. But this is a growth moment for Danny as much as Joe. Joe is going off the rails and maybe this time Danny can’t rescue him from the consequences of his actions and it’s more important to call out Joe than trying to be the good egg peacemaker that he is.
Panel 5: And yeah, I think this is Danny running out of patience and taking that step to actually condemn Joe more sternly. Like that look is not one he gets often. His main default emotion is a sort of hyper-cerebral empathy, wanting to do right but over-thinking it. He doesn’t like getting mad and upset at people. So the fact that he is getting mad and upset at Joe and that his empathy is almost entirely directed at Other Rachel is a big deal. As is his calling out of Joe’s charms as ManiFESTERING.
And Joe… fucking Joe. LIke, I don’t like hating the guy, I really don’t and I get that he’s reeling because the entire mythology of his world view he has papered over his insecurities is crumbling in front of him and being revealed as the facade it is.
But fucking hell. You knew the system was fucked. Multiple people multiple times have told you that your system is fucked. And no amount of bullshit rationalization faux-objectivity removes that from the equations or makes the actions you already took not morally wrong. You had many many opportunities to fix this before it got to this point and instead you escalated assuming Danny was being a wet blanket and dismissing Roz and Dorothy and Joyce as “percussion instruments, right?”
And now you’re only in distress because you got caught out doing that wrong and are facing the most minor of social consequences for said bad behavior. So yeah, it leaves me in that place. If you don’t like this, fix it. Delete your bullshit RSS feed, stop marrying yourself to a toxic culture that will drag you into bitter singledom and train you to hate all the women who rightfully won’t sleep with you because of this shit. And make that ugly, painful step to rip off this toxic masculinity band-aid that is impairing you.
Like, hell, you can’t even say you don’t have role models. Jacob is demonstrating every day a form of masculinity that isn’t predatory or looks down on the contributions and values of women, Danny is constructing a masculinity that allows him some femininity as well and doesn’t have as strict cloistering rules, and there are other examples like Ethan’s gentleness also on display. You have all the tools to heal. Now you just need the will.
If Joe had a list of women he wanted to have sex with in his head, that’s fine. Keep it to yourself but that’s fine. It’s the fact it’s ALL the women around him and the EFFORT he’s gone to to systematize it as well as record it that disturbs the hell out of me.
Yup, he spent all his time on it, gave it to people who didn’t want it, updated it even to the detriment of the feelings of those around it (like, he updated Dorothy in front of Danny immediately after the breakup and Danny was terrified to introduce his best friend to AG knowing putting her on his radar would be bad), and has chided those around him for not following his meticulously crafted numerical system and seeing it as a guide for them as well.
It’s basically a life-destroying obsession at the moment.
I would have given her a 3 not for her looks (she is actually kinda cute), but for thinking that Ross is a better choice for an RA than Dorothy… or that she is good period. HAHA!!!
……Ah…. but seriously if this is a list that Joe made for rating women and it got passed around that is really crappy, even for Joe.
Now I’m picturing Ross marching through the halls with his rifle, reciting Bible quotes under his breath and threatening to pray for people he sees acting up.
Indeed, low intelligence is a turn-off for me XD Just kidding Roz is just really good at acting to get what she wants it doesn’t reflect too poorly on people who bought the act, it’s not like she’s a human shaped pile of shit like real life politicians.
Though with Joe I’d think easily fooled girls would be higher on his list… cause you know… easier to fool them into thinking sex with you is a good idea.
The yelling at Joe makes sense and hopefully leads to some self-reflection. I don’t expect him to actually be threatened. But if he were, and could only escape because Danny soothed people with his beautiful Disney tunes? That would be the best debt of gratitude ever.
See, I’m taking it as Joe knows it’s just his personal view, and not objectively a score anyone would rate.
Though I am finding it a little funny that Willis basically had to score the women of his comic for this storyline.
I’m constantly sure/worried that people are thinking the worst of me (in general, not just appearance). Confirming that would be depressing but I wouldn’t be able to trust anything that said they weren’t thinking the worst.
Everyone is curious how people see them as a person to a degree, but only when they ASK for it.
No one wants to be randomly judged by a guy based solely on appearance or after just one encounter at most and have him writing down thoughts and figures which he then shares with other people without the permission of the people he judged.
So it was that Joe slowly became aware that maybe publishing his conclusions might have been a mistake. Especially with women whom he might want to interact for whatever reason in the future.
I have to say that it’s so Joe that it looks like he still doesn’t get it.
Okay, I actually like Joe somewhat and am in the boat that he can be a good person if he tried, but he absolutely deserves this and I’m gonna enjoy second of it.
In “Men are from Beck, Women are from Clark”, Joe decribed her as a 4, but implied she could have been a 10 if not for her innocence and lack of experience and conservatism. However, due to the events of this storyline, Joe has removed Joyce from his “Do” List (Possibly the only lady he ever removed, considering he appreantly put “grannies” there?)
Joe, aside from the purely practical, “making women avoid you at all costs” aspect, your rating system is just a horrible thing to do. The former is a direct consequence of the latter, but, you know, be a good egg. Stop doing this shit.
All eyes on me, in the center of the ring, just like a circus
…Actually, that’s a good comparison. People got fed up with the circuses, tore them apart, and they shut down. Joe and his list look to be going the same direction.
I always thought Mandy and Other Rachel were about the same height. But yesterday + today shows Mandy about tall as Danny, and Other Rachel maybe half a head shorter.
Ah, Joe, the bloom is off the rose, isn’t it? The ladies are detesting you now because of your constant reduction of femininity to a number. Well, it had to happen sometime and it couldn’t happen to a better guy than you. The only person who’s more despicable than you in the DOA universe in the eyes of women would be Ryan. Speaking of which, I wonder what’s happening with Scarface right now?
Cosby was world-famous and well-loved for a generation. Ryan isn’t. The defense was able to make a lot of hay over his victim’s ongoing relationship with him for months after the assault. Joyce has no such relationship with him. Etc.
I’m not saying he won’t get off, but it won’t be the way that Cosby got off.
Also, to anyone out there who has been numbered in this way: It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. All that matters is that you know you’re effing HOT.
I don’t have the endurance to get through all these comments. However, I thought people might like to see a similar list compiled by women. http://www.thesmokinggun.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/750×970/documents/thursdaymit.jpg
In this case, it was published on purpose. When I saw it a year or two later, I thought it was hilarious*. Unfortunately, they weren’t selling 4 star t-shirts any more. I thought the whole thing was hilarious at the time, but then I wasn’t reviewed. I actually met some of the people involved, though not in any way that could end in a review. I’m skeptical that Keith ever actually took his boots off.
Unfortunately for Richie and Gilbert, there was a media circus that blew things all out of proportion. The MIT administration didn’t have much of a sense of humor about it either.
*This doesn’t mean I was cynical and jaded. Quite the reverse, actually. Still wet behind the ears.
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Hey, @SCAR MAN!! https://disqus.com/home/discussion/channel-theknightsoftheoldkrowskourt/london_and_minerva_61417_stonecutter/#comment-3366256363
I need to get better at links, it’s supposed to say: Do you maybe want a grav with the hat?
…and before anyone corrects me,I do realize what I did wrong.
Now that I’ve made a complete fool of myself:
Let’s try this again, hopefully without the stupid blunder. Scar. Man!!! Hat. Grav. Link.
Sorry I took Ana’s spot for this stupity, I was so confident when I started.
not that hard to do, I was on a restaurant WiFi + iPad makes it harder to spam refresh
Joe’s Manifest Density that his expansion across IU is inevitable and justified meets his critics
I’m not sure if you meant to say “Destiny” or “Density”. Either way, “Density” is apt.
“My density has brought me to you.”
Actually, I could see Danny flirting like George McFly if he allowed Joe to coach him.
Ana’s just channeling George McFly.
ThatsTheJoke.jpg
Well, it is a rule that things become uniformly dense across an area over time.
Does that mean that Joe is going to become more dense in regards to other things, or less so in regards to women?
I mean I guess we don’t really know what sort of grades he’s getting, so maybe he’s already approaching uniform density?
Things become uniformly dense across an area over time? I’m pretty sure gravity and planetary formation don’t work like that, to say nothing of black holes.
Give it time.
Entropy always wins in the end.
(Eat Arby’s.)
Hawking radiation is a thing.
Eat at Arby’s
http://www.chud.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/destiny-density.jpeg
Alright, who posted his Do List
Roz or Dorothy maybe?
My money’s on Roz.
My money’s on Joe.
Whoever they are, they are most likely my new hero (bar it being someone Mary tier awful or higher).
He did. RSS feed, remember?
The real question is who shared the password with people who weren’t high enough ranked to “deserve” to know their ratings?
I mean, it might also be Joe, but that would have been awfully careless of him.
How much more careless than he’s already been?
Well, I mean, it’d take more work giving his password out individually than it just propagating on its own due to you know handing out the password on a whim.
His fellow porn co-star, most likely.
Joyce
That would be interesting
I, really am, judging you on your looks here.
Would you please tell me where you got that avatar? I’d like to find out if the story is as good as the art.
I believe that’s fanart of Futaba Sakura from Persona 5
Thank you.
I see. A game for a platform I don’t have. I was hoping it was another webcomic.
Well, the fan-art is very good.
Rachel.
It might explain why Mary was so cheerful.
Screw over/ piss off almost every female on campus. Check.
Oh. Your avatar has me wanting to change my guess.
Either Roz, who he shared a Very Special Video Presentation with, or maybe Mike, who lives for setting things right,.. in the most painful manner possible.
Even better than puppies.
Oh god you’re probably right. I could see her being happy for high or low, but I’m not sure which would make her worse.
If Mary, may she be se seeking revenge for getting a lower.score than she thought she deserved?
There is plenty to ruminate on how Mary views The Do List. Example: Is she merely full of her own sanctimony, or is she old-fashioned enough to care about her number?
Scarface.
He already took out Amber and Dottie (RIP) and now he is slowly but surely going to take out the rest of the crew one by one in a singularly unique manner. He is destroying Joe in the one way he values himself and will finish him after he is completely broken.
Billie will be last because the cheerleader has to make it the longest.
Wow. I kinda wish Willis was gonna draw this horror direction that probably won’t happen as an alternate version.
Dorothy isn’t dead. She’s just in a nice quiet institution somewhere where she wakes up screaming every night.
Joyce is probably the Final Girl.
Oh my god that fits too well. Now I’m worried.
I vote mike leaked the list.
That’s actually plausible.
In the June 2016 Patreon bonus strip, it shows that his list is actually private and password-protected. My guess is that, after Rachel got rated in the last storyline, she hacked into his phone and posted the list. Since she’s a Comp Sci major.
That’s not how CompSci major works
Being a Comp Sci major implies to me that you’re good with computers. And possibly knowledgeable about hacking. I don’t think it’s unlikely that Rachel has hacking in her skill set.
CompSci just teaches you how to turn things off and back on again, how binary logic works, basic programming, what all the ports are on a motherboard, advanced math, IPv4 subnetting, and how to configure Cisco equipment. Any “hacking” will probably be limited to whatever canned script kiddie tools somebody who thinks they’re clever brings in on a flash drive.
We’ve seen Amber do all sorts of L33t hacking already in DoA. Just because someone didn’t learn it in CS class doesn’t mean they’re incapable of hacking, and being a CS major implies strong interest already.
It’s kind of insulting to CS majors that you’d assume this, honestly.
I am a CS major (or was a decade ago). In my experience maybe 1 out of 50 people had that kind of interest and knowledge coming into it. That was incredibly disappointing to me.
I remember one of my classmates brought Sub7 in on a flash drive but couldn’t get it working properly on the teacher’s PC like he wanted to because he put the server side under his own user profile instead of letting it run as a system process. Someone else fried a server by jamming the RAM in backwards and crooked. The networking classes taught us about time-division multiplexing and ISDN lines, and we spent a week just on what an IP address is. The final project had us playing system integrator to build a nation-wide network for a fictional large company, and one team specced the cheapest PCs they could find at Wal-Mart and $300 for one copy of Office (not one copy per machine, one single-install license to install on every workstation).
I don’t know, maybe things have changed since then.
“one team specced the cheapest PCs they could find at Wal-Mart”
I have worked in a fairly large number of office environments since I have spent many years as a contractor. I find that the members of the team referenced above was hired by a good number of IT departments and applied the lessons learned in that project.
The skill or talent of CS majors is irrelevant. Hollywood’s portrayal of “hacking” is about as realistic as Bugs Bunny.
I’m surprised no one has referenced the Bob Hackerman, County Password Inspector SMBC strip yet.
I think you’re better off asking if Willis was a CS major.
His list is password protected, but it isn’t private. It has it’s own RSS feed.
I’d say Roz or Mike. This isn’t Mary’s style, and I don’t think she’s even met Joe. Roz has motive, and Mike has been looking for someone Danny-adjacent to screw over since Danny himself is off-limits.
Yeah but he already picked Ethan as the Danny adjacent person to screw and Roz didn’t strike me as being all that phased by Joe’s rating system. She seemed irritated but hardly mad enough to go for elaborate revenge. Rachel on the other hand based on how she tore down Ruth seems exactly like she could have been that mad and we know Joe isn’t exactly making the list hard to find. I’m guessing she posted a link somewhere publicly or sent out a mass text about it the same night she went to the hellish floor meeting.
Not only is Joe an asshole but he’s ALSO got shitty taste.
Willis knows how to draw lovely ladies without making them all look the same. Bruce Timm could take lessons. I honestly can’t think of any of his female characters that are unattractive.
Except Mary, and that’s not because her design isn’t nice, it’s because she stole all her facial expressions from Mr. Burns.
Mary seems like the type who would watch The Simpsons and complain about how unfair everyone is to Mr. Burns.
i never knew there were people like this, and yet somehow…i knew all along
Bruce Timm falls into a trap a lot of artists do. In which He only draws one woman but he’s pretty good at drawing that one woman he draws.
I’m lookin’ at you Chris Sanders and Echiiro Oda. Oda especially has shown how good he is drawing lots of interesting characters with unique silhouettes so it bugs me when he defaults to squished barbie proportions. Then again he has introduced some neat ones in the current arc.
Yay, someone pointing out Chris Sanders too! I really love his linework but yeah, all the women are the same mold. Same with Glen Keane. Disney, you’re cursed.
Willis does a lot with a minimum amount of line, avoiding the dreaded sameface.
She also stole her attitude from Maj. Burns.
Yeah a 3 is waaay to harsh.
A three and Joe is still hitting on her. He also has multiple criteria which makes me morbidly curious.
Well boobs are apparently two points, since Billie’s bumped her from a 6 to an 8. And now excuse me, I need to take a million showers just for typing that.
Has Joe rated so many women he doesn’t memorize them all?
Also, does he spend a lot of time in that wing where Other Rachel lives? I’m sure his various exploits haven’t been just there.
Other Rachel’s on the same floor. Rooms with Rachel, of course.
Of course. But the evidence of Joe hitting on other women elsewhere makes me think his list is too long to recall all the contents. I can only imagine there being a lot of Joe-rating having taken place off-panel.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/01-if-the-shoes-split/billingsworth/
Might be a case of him being a little bit rattled and going for someone lower on his list to get a higher chance of a positive response to alley his fears that anything is wrong.
Liking the Dubious Danny face in panel 2.
Yeah, I dig it too.
Danny is a good enough egg to give Joe the stinkeye which has been deserved. I hope I’d top on board the stinkeye train if I were in Danny’s jaunty cap..
I knoooow Danny’s killing it today OMG
Good snark from the Dan today.
Joe might want to consider wearing a cup the way he’s going.
He’s gonna need all the protective gear he can get.
Which will somehow be doused with itching powder.
Way to be terrible Joe.
You can stop anytime, FYI.
Any second now… *glares at watch* Yup, any second… *shakes watch violently* Ugh, that learns me for buying the cheap moral change watches for the secondary characters. At least I decked out Joyce’s first so that’s all solid.
Who uses moral change watches any more? Watches are outdated technology. Everyone just uses their cell phones instead. There’s a moral change ap with regular updates for changing social mores and a feature that gives you wake-up calls.
Is there a feature to give Joe a wake-up call?
Sadly, no. But at least Joe can no longer use it to try to seduce his next target, thanks to federal legislation cutting back on tellamarkathing.
Does it remind you to descend into a mouth-foaming rage when others don’t change to the new social mores as quickly as you did?
Not exactly. Instead, it suffers from delayed updates, which keep you from using your phone while they download and often cause you to overuse your data plan.
But functionally it works out to the same thing.
Joyce has had way more “screen time” than Joe, and what she has had has more often been meaningful. If we saw as much of Joe- both in how often he’s around and how meaningful his appearances are- as we have of Joyce I think we’d have a lot more to say about his personal growth.
But it’s looking like we may be seeing something in that regard soon-ish!
OTOH, Joyce has had huge amounts of personal growth. Joe is doing the same things he was doing in his first appearances, at least as far as his treatment of women goes.
We’ve had a few glimpses deeper into his character and he’s shown a few signs of improvement – the texting with Joyce and his attempt to talk to Danny these last few strips, but basically, he’s still the same Joe.
I change my mind, Danny’s comment here about manifest charm maniFESTERING was the best thing I’ve read all day. And I have spent yet another day writing.
Just… Danny. Danny. Danny Danny Danny.
DANNY.
Damn. Way to level three times in one strip.
Keep this the hell up.
He’s on a good good road and I’m so rooting for the kid.
He’s a good egg, or so I heard.
I like the way he rolls now.
He didn’t level more than once. There’s an XP cap of half a level per snark or sudden realization.
I also approved of the line.
Rating women is horrible by itself, but Joe using every number on his invented 10 point scale just makes it all so much worse. Even video game reviews rarely go under 6.
(note: do not rate people, especially do not rate people like they are video games)
It kinda depends on whether he’s using theoretical extremes or a bell curve. A 3 could be within one standard deviation.
Joe Rosenthal: Too much bro.
Now imagining a column in Joe’s checklist titled “replay value.”
*Throws up a bit in my mouth.*
…what if Joe really doesn’t use the low numbers that often?
What if his numbers are as inflated as video game reviews?
Doesn’t matter. Still fucking gross.
“13/10. Would pick up again.” No, wait, that was from WeRateChicks, which features pictures of actual baby chickens.
That sounds legitimately amazing.
Yeah, going the extra effort to even add women he finds unattractive to the list makes it extra douchey.
A “list of women I’d like to bang and how much I’d like to bang them” is bad enough, but including even the the low scores suggests its actually a list detailing how much he’d like to bang every single woman he’s met, which is even worse.
Not to mention, he can’t interact with women without flirting, if he’s flirting with someone he finds unattractive who’s already mad at him.
The exception being Joyce of course.
He can’t interact with Joyce without flirting, at least in person. Often flirting and insulting, but still flirting.
And yet, he’s also hitting on the girl he marked as a three. That just makes it more confusing and…slimy.
Nah, just more slimy.
He went for what he assumed was an easy target, just to boost his ego. Because obviously his opinion must be shared by all men, and thus she must be so very starved for male attention.
Mm hmm. Like he thought that because she’s a “3” in his system, she’d just be overwhelmed with joy that a hot man is speaking to her and giving her attention and thus be willing to tell him anything he wanted just to have his “wonderful” presence.
And yes, this is a thing in real life from these fucks too and it’s no less insulting to witness there.
And yeah, this is exactly why I refer to his list as that genre of douchery known as the “unprompted boner update”. Cause this type of guy really does believe the world revolves around his boner. That hot women want to know all the time what his boner thinks of them, that ugly women by his estimation need to know that they are not doing their proper job of prettying themselves up in service to making his boner happy and so on.
Like, this is textbook PUA shit and the major players of that cesspit like RooshV constantly view the world in these terms, believing that this faux-objective system somehow makes their obsession with viewing women only in terms of their sexual utility is part of some bigger and more important and objective thing. But it’s not.
And if you’re wondering who RooshV is, then feel free to click the link, but all the trigger warnings first for horrendous vile sexism and rape apologia:
https://vimeo.com/151003209
If you’re wondering who RooshV is, I envy you your innocence.
Well, uh, I’m not envied often, but okay. It helps that there was this huge section of text telling me why I should continue to avoid finding out who he is above the link.
Also that I don’t do social or news or whatever much. That helps too.
But that’s exactly why I click the link – even though the first few minutes already made my skin crawl (especially after I asked for more info and clarification on this kinda topic yesterday). I can’t always stay in this bubble of innocence – and it helps that I in real life personally know very good and rational thinking men (especially my father and my brother-in-law) who’d just react to this the same way as I do).
I just need to keep my toxicity levels down. So chugging something figuratively labeled nuclear waste doesn’t really benefit me in any way. Knowing the reasons why he’s horrible and understanding that these things are horrible means I can skip the step where I have to subject myself to the horribleness.
Understandable! And you don’t need to, especially if it’s already affecting you like that in general!
I just finished watching it – and although the views made my skin continue to crawl non-stop, for me it helped that the interviewer (or documenter/journalist?) was a rational, sane person, with a logical conclusion. Of this Roosh V you just need to know what’s said by Cerberus.
I got through half of it but I have to go to work so I guess the other half will have to go unwatched. I can’t say it made my skin crawl, it just made me very very confused. Like, what are these people even talking about?? (probably doesn’t help that in my 34 years of life I have only experienced sexism once and that left me just as confused as the video) I will never understand what gender (or skin colour or religion, etc) has to do with anything. People are people. (fun fact: that Dr. Seuss book with the creatures that some had stars on their bellies and some didn’t or whatever ALSO left me equally confused. THEY’RE ALL THE SAAAAAME ffs)
Unfortunately I do know who that douchebro is. What constantly amazes me is that that walking dumpster fire hasn’t had the living crap beaten out of him yet.
I’m going with “Joe doesn’t remember Other Rachel and/or the rating given”. It adds that impersonal touch which Joe seems to have with all females except for Dorothy and Joyce.
We reader know who she is. Joe goes to many wings for his PUA act, not just the one Willis centers DofA on. Also this is the first strip they’re both tagged in.
Look, I’ve gotta review a dozen of these this week, so if it takes a while to get to the action I’m just gonna mark it down and move on.
… I love that you said that with that avatar.
I agree with this but it also made me think of Angry Joe’s 1/10 reviews.
I think I would actually watch angry video game style reviews of politicians. Or in the style of a Gordon Ramsey rant.
“Look at it! He’s got pork sat next to the legitimate legislation!”
Clearly I need sleep.
More video game scores really should go under 6.
The old Computer Gaming World magazine was famous for giving low reviews if the game deserved it. I think the lowest record was held by Derek Smart. If you don’t know who he is, go do some reading, it will be very entertaining.
Uh, other Rachel isn’t tagged. Unless that isn’t other Rachel DUN-DUN-DUN!!
But yeah it’s been a long time coming for Mr. Rosenthal. Time to wake up.
Imagine being known as ‘other’ Rachel, not even having your own identity, and then discovering there’s someone lurking about who looks exactly like you. There is nothing that’s your own.
She doesn’t even have a last name I think. Unless “Other” or some variant is her surname.
I like to think it’s literally “other” in another language, as if an ancestor’s family immigrated through Ellis Island, and the clerk didn’t understand them so they just phonetically wrote what they heard.
Rachel Andere (German, Italian)
Rachel Andet (Danish)
Rachel Harall (Welsh)
Rachel Drugi (Serbian in Latin script)
Yep! That’s what I’m going for. It’s all in Willis’ hands now.
That’s some real Twilight Zone shit, right there.
Daaamn, Danny, when’d you get so good at burning people besides yourself?
It must be the berret, when he’s wearing it he becomes cool.
That’s not a beret. It’s a flat cap. </nitpick>
Beret…. okay!
I’d rather bet it’s the power of the ukulele.
… Dad?
Probably just a look alike the logic is not nearly convoluted enough, and there is a distinct lack of exposition 😉
Well, this is literally the “I am an endless barrel of exposition!” face.
I laughed at that way too hard.
Okay, I laughed at that the proper amount.
…which is way too hard.
(Ugh. I hit post by mistake.)
…I completely forgot, while picking my avatar, that there already was someone here with a Verres pointing up in their avatar.
Like father, like genderfluid offspring.
I… I don’t think a positive score would have made anything about Joe slapping a number on you any better, though.
Well, yeah, the “8” girl seemed to be mad too.
But, you know. I’ve been called “hey sexy” by a stranger and it was weird and annoying, put me off for a day. But the few times I’ve been called ugly (whether it’s by a bully or a stranger) hurt to the point of tears.
There is no way to interpret “3” as anything other than ugly. From my experience, being widely recognized as ugly generally means you have some significant visible difference–a disability, scarring, a *lot* of acne, messed up teeth, or obesity. It basically says, “You know the part of your appearance that you’re the most self-conscious about? That’s the first thing I noticed about you.” It *sucks* .
True. Plus she knows that everyone heard him — it’s public embarrassment.
Oh, no, don’t get me wrong. I definitely get why it might smart more on a personal level. I don’t mean she shouldn’t be more upset, I just mean it’s no better or worse of a shitbag move on his part.
Although I think with the reputation it looks like Joe is about to end up with… let’s just say in metaphorical terms, it probably won’t hurt too much to be called a “3” by a known zero.
Yeah, this is kind of like when people get really angry about the method with which they got dumped. (I mean, yes, there are some ways that are exceptionally cruel, but it’s not like there’a a way that doesn’t suck. Usually, you’re far more upset about getting dumped than about whether it was by phone or not.)
The 3 probably just added insult to injury, especially since it’s public.
Well – probably depends on the kind of relationship – it’s length, the closeness, how long the people knew each other until they got together, etc. But being dumped on the phone usually happens one-way, as in opposition of a face-to-face talk where you get the chance that the one dumping you (or the other way round) actually sees your (or you see their) reaction to dumping/being dumped. Unless it’s because they’re in a distance-relationship, it’s the “easier” way out, than especially meeting up and have a talk, and I personally find it a tad disrespectful, because it kinda suggest that the one doing the dumping never valued the dumped one enough to care about their final reaction. (this though mostly applies to relatively healthy relationships without problems such as anger burst or physical aggressiveness in either of the people involved)
(though that wasn’t the point of the discussion, but my eyes kinda got stuck on that example)
In one case I was genuinely more upset by the method than the break up. Dumped by text. It sucked.
Friend of mine back in college was not dumped over the phone.
He was dumped after a cross-country drive to visit her.
Being rated as a woman is undoubtedly offensive. Being rated BADLY will sting more even if it shouldn’t.
Yup, good or bad, it’s still an unwanted and unprompted boner update and all the ugly creepy triggering baggage that comes with being sized up like a piece of meat like that and judged by your sexual utility.
And honestly both outcomes are shit when targeted by the kind of guy who uses this type of system.
If you score “high”, you get creeped on and boundary-violated and stalked in the hopes of wearing you down to a yes. If you score “low”, you get harassed and abused because the type of guy who does this tends on average to also be the kind of guy who takes it deeply personally that a woman existed in ways that were not pleasing to his boner.
Is this where we see Joe’s character development? I’ve honestly been waiting for this. Mostly because Joe reminds me of my First Year roommate. Danny reminds me of me minus the hat, ukulele and being bisexual. But if you add glasses he’s pretty much me.
You’re a good egg.
If you want to get the full details of a product you have to subscribe to Joe’s version of Consumer Reports.
So informative and thorough!
They’ve given you a Number/And taken away your name…
*electric guitar riffs*
“I am not a number, I am a person” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0LaT6qVRpg
They found the website, did they not.
But who could have told them? Who? Who could possibly have told them, after being sent the password to the feed against her wishes?
It’s a mysteryyyyyyy!
(Now, in the event that it was not in fact Raidah who’s published that stuff, I’m sure I’ll look like a damn fool. Oh well, I’m used to it.)
It has been a second since we’ve seen her.
Excuse me, going into the character tag to find the strip in question.
Don’t worry. Being absolutely sure about something from this comic, then being proven wrong in short order, isn’t all that bad.
I’m pretty sure Emperors get a certain amount of free passes on that. Well, so long as small children don’t call you out for public nudity…and you don’t decide to practice a musical instrument while your kingdom is burning down.
Nero actually wasn’t playing the fiddle when Rome burned. A) They didn’t exist yet and B) He wasn’t actually there at the time (he was at his palace, miles away) and when he heard about it, he went to go help out relief efforts.
Well, yeah, but at least one later historian decided it’d be a great way to paint the already dead Nero in a bad light by claiming that he was playing his lyre and rejoicing as Rome burned.
Hence Nero’s reputation as a foolish emperor, even if its not true.
It may be true, but not for that specific reason. And yeah, it was a way to make him look worse.
Just out of curiosity, is the thing about Nero and the Olympics true?
As far as I can tell, yeah.
I found it but it’s not clear he actually ended up giving her the password:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/02-everything-youve-ever-wanted/boyspizzaretreat/
rectilinearpropagation Not entirely clear, but it does look like he already started the process by taking out his phone and tapping things on it, so I say the odds are pretty good.
I didn’t realize/remember until someone pointed it out below but he’s actually brought it up more than once so, yeah, it wasn’t sarcasm. The feed actually freaking exists so I agree that the odds are good.
Yup, and the casualness of him doing that, especially when they have almost no interaction with each other and she’s in the middle of expressing revulsion at the notion of what he admitted to, shows that he literally throws out that link to everyone with little care, assuming that his one security trick of referring to people in terms of their physical descriptions rather than their names (because he doesn’t care about their names) as his only obfuscation of identity.
Like it was only a matter of time someone leaked it and honestly I kind of hope it was Raidah, cause she kinda needs a moment of awesome in her arc.
Well, Jacob’s a good egg*, and he’s still with Raidah (AFAIK). She must have some good characteristics.
Joe is still Jacob’s friend despite Joe being Joe. It’s possible if it is Raidah that Jacob will be upset about her hurting his friend enough to put their relationship in danger.
maybe not a good idea to publicly rate your classmates like that if you dont want it known.
Or at all. 🙂
not saying its a good thing to do but it is especially dumb to make it accessible to the public to view like he did.
Theory: Rachel and/or Roz decided to clue the rest of her wing in on Joe’s list.
(Also, why isn’t Other-Rachel tagged?)
nm, she was just ret-tagged.
…. er, I mean, she was always tagged all along, and we’ve always been at war with Eastasia.
Oh. Ohhhhh. this is repercussions. I’m down for it
::passes popcorn::
Wait, those can happen to cis dudes? *mind boggles*
Citation needed.
Sure! The Dreyfus Affair was a prime example.
(At least, I assume he was cis. It gets harder to tell as you go back in time who was really cis and who was closeted.)
See, we can face repercussions, but it requires a dark ritual that taints the souls of the ones performing it, so it’s avoided whenever possible.
No it isn’t. I’ve been tainting my soul for *years* going after you guys.
The problem is more one of energy inefficiency: it takes somewhere between 100 and 1,000 points of energy input into the equation to render one point of repercussion.
“You guys” is uncomfortably close to “you people”. I feel it lumps me in with a group of undesirables, with whom I most likely only share the trait of being cisgendered, a trait over which I have no control.
I recently heard of a white man (cisgenderredness unknown) getting police-related consequences for making violent statements about queer people online.
Yeah, I immediately checked to see if I had fallen into a parallel world, and how not to get back if I had.
“Their cycles have synched!”
Ahahahahahahahaha…haha…ha.
Go fuck yourself up the road and down the block, you asshat.
Also, singling out someone he finds unattractive because he no doubt thought she’d be desperate and easy to charm. Another layer of crappy
cycle syncing isn’t even a thing that happens
Oh, it does. Any women’s place giving 5-day courses knows it. One starts to menstruate und a few suddenly start early and wonder why. Or maybe not in th US, don’t know how widespread the use of special deodorants is there.
Hold on, do they have deodorants that affect menstruation, where you’re from?
http://www.glamour.com/story/surprise-your-period-probably-doesnt-sync-up-to-women-you-hang-out-with
yeah it’s…not really borne out by scientific study
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-37256161
Joe believes it does, but even so, the idea that every woman wandering around that dorm would undergo the effect (not just roomates, say), after under two months since the start of the semester, is triply dumb.
I’m just glad he has displayed knowledge about safe sex practices than he shows here about menstruation.
i mean there are a lot of women who believe in this
and tbh, it’s a really fun urban legend? like it’s really nice to think you could just get close enough to another person that you would share something so intimate and related to owning a uterus that everyone else gets grossed out by. it would be really cool to have syncing uteruses. like. it would be just kind of magical
but unfortunately, no
I know the science/data on this is sketchy but I’ve many friends and acquaintances experience the phenomenon, including one who was Navy and IIRC was mostly surrounded by other women at sea. Its a little hard to hear so many stories from buddies who say they’ve had it happen and not believe it a little. ^_^
(Also since I’m not gonna comment elsewhere; wow Joe. I just hope he learns from the consequences.)
haha no i feel that
if you read the second link, it tracks how the phenomenon takes place: i.e. like if one woman has 27 days between periods, another woman has 30 days between privileges, and another woman has 28 days between periods, the odds of their periods syncing up is really good for at least a few months out of the year! although it might vary by a couple days. and that’s enough to make it seem like they’re syncing up even if they technically aren’t.
but it’s more fun and communal to say that they’re syncing up anyways, and it’s not like it hurts anybody, so
(ha. YEAH.)
It was a thing that happened to most of my floor when I was in boarding school back in high school. They all even commented about it and wondered why the rest of us were out of sync.
*gasp* thank goodness, only the IRS audits things, Joe, and I don’t think they have your crappy rating system in mind. 3 is a totally ugly number anyway, being a boring prime that looks somewhat like a butt, so I don’t like it either. 😛
I like the number 3, but that may be somehow related to my being a huge fan of Charmed.
Me too! (liking the number and being a fan – well, at least I hold it in good memory, it’s been quite some time since I watched it)
Mostly because I consider it my lucky number, as my b-day is on a third!
You take that back. 3 is a beautiful number. It is Joe’s usage of it that is ugly. 3 is innocent.
Did someone get a hold of Joe’s ranking list and make it public?
Joe did himself, because he makes terrible decisions.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2010/comic/book-1/01-move-in-day/prediction/
OMG, he’s mentioned the RSS feed MORE THAN ONCE?!
He has…subscribers. Holy shit.
Yup, he’s that kind of scumbag. And he’s also the scumbag who’ll send it to a woman who is in the middle of saying she doesn’t even want to know that he has a list and that she finds it morally abhorrent.
Cause Joe is… great at boundaries. Just A+ consent and non-harassment practices.
Huh. Why does the art look different?
The author has spent years refining the look of these very characters. Why’d they change appearance so recently?
Because that strip is 7 years old.
Yes, but “Roomies”, “It’s Walky”, “Joyce and Walky”, and “Shortpacked!” ran for years, with essentially the same characters.
I’d have expected the character styles to have stabilized before this strip.
Danny could get really popular, really quickly, by loudly telling off Joe in this room. Or by smacking him. Yes. Let’s all smack Joe in the face.
That would be a Class A Bro Code Violation, though.
Only because if Danny did slap Joe, he wouldn’t be doing it to try and get laid. Good thing Danny doesn’t seem to follow the bro code
The only way to win is not to play.
Yup. Hell, Joe’s just put him in a fucked place. If Danny doesn’t tell him off, his own impression in the eyes of everyone watching drops. Because if you value “bro code” over women’s safety and humanity, then women notice that shit and remember.
But it’s really hard and shitty to call out a long-time friend, especially for someone bad at confrontation like Danny.
So yeah, rock and a hard place and none of it is his fault.
This is definitely a shitty place for Danny to be in. It is made worse by the fact that if he chides Joe for his “do” list now, Joe is likely to push back claiming that Danny has lost the moral high ground. Danny has known about the list at least since Dorothy broke up with him but is only criticizing Joe for it now that it might negatively impact him by proximity.
Of course, having failed to stand up to Joe for his shitty behavior in the past in no way invalidates him doing so now, but Joe is likely to go on the defensive and try to guilt Danny into quiet acquiescence.
And Danny has to LIVE with him after this! Joe’s really shat in Danny’s socks, here.
Apparently all the ladies in the dorm are now aware of Joe’s do list. I don’t remember which strip it was, but did he post it online or something?
He made an RSS feed for it. Fuckin’ joe.
He at least had the sense to password protect it somehow. But apparently he hands that out pretty easily if he considered himself “remiss” in not having offered Raidah the password when the list came up.
He asks Dan if he’s subscribed to it. Wow.
This is an example of Karma starting to work.
“Every woman in this room is mad at you Joe.”
“They must ALL be on their period.”
Effing hell, Joe. FFS.
That just might be the single worse thing Joe’s ever said
And it’s not like there’s no competition in that field.
Oh no, I think he’s done worse. Not much worse but worse. I think Joe has actually gotten worse as a person in IU. He started off bad but he’s morphed into something even more awful.
I think this may be because in the beginning, the comic strip was still leaning more towards the gags and the silliness of things. But as the drama tag’s gotten seriously pulled and we get to see more realistic-ish consequences to many* of the situations, the horribleness of Joe’s character stands out more and more.
*I said many, not all.
I think he’s gotten worse as a reaction to the gender studies class. He’s never been exposed to the information about privelage, and he’s not handling it well. When confronted with how shitty their behavior has been, some people soul search and learn to change, while others clam up and double down on their worse habits. He’s doing the latter.
worsT
No. I’d say the “Fix her with my penis” bit was worse.
I’m not at all sure he’s gotten worse. More that his appearances have been spread out enough it’s easy to forget how bad he is.
I think you are exactly right.
Yeah, I really like Joe, and I can’t even..
Is Willis gonna try and draw some parallel between Joe and Ryan? It’s not like the comic’s not done with Ryan (as a talking point, at least), but this is pretty clearly a Joe-centric arc.
I’m wondering.
Was Asma on duty when Ryan/Amber/Dorothy went down? Wouldn’t the doorway be visible from her desk?
Joe. Don’t be drawing parallels between yourself and a rapist in the presence of someone who’s likely to do something about it.
I suspect that’s where this is heading. And it would make sense. The toxic masculinity, entitlement, and sexism that Joe is tapping into is the bread-and-butter of the rape culture Ryan has fully micturated himself into.
Ryan is the BAD END of Joe’s path and I think the thing that’ll clink through his skull that he needs to change before the way he’s been playing fast and loose with consent and boundaries crosses that line that should never be crossed.
I wonder if “micturate” is the verb you’re looking for; I don’t see how it works even as a metaphor.
You’re right, I meant mired. Wow, that’s a brain fart.
Well, if he doesn’t piss you off…
Hey, I learned a new word today.
I don’t know, I’d personally consider becoming the kind of person, like Ryan, who gives the general douche bag population an even worse name a case of wetting the bed.
What’s the GOOD END?
The good end is escaping from toxic masculinity.
Let’s not get Ryan and Joe mixed up here. Joe would never harm anyone. Even when he got his ass kicked with his date with Joyce, he just left.
Joe might have ruffled Joyce’s feathers, but he’s not the type that would ever scar her for life.
Not on purpose, anyway. You don’t have to go as far as assault to be causing real harm to people around you.
If Joe’s been as “successful” as he talks and he’s done so with the kind of “game” he tried using on Joyce and others, not to mention the help of alcohol, he’s likely got more than a few women who are at least really unhappy they slept with him and quite possibly feeling quite used and hurt.
I kind of wish Willis had chosen to explore that side, rather than focus on the obnoxious “do” list. We’ll see where this goes though.
I have some small sympathy for Joe if we assume this was his private notes and he wasn’t actually sharing it with a following (I don’t actually recall him ever doing that in the comic) but that’s gone if he had it as a private ratings site like Facebook started as. Albeit, Joe as Zuckerberg is almost disturbingly accurate.
It was an RSS feed. Which is…I don’t know, a social media thing?
It’s not social media, it’s a feed that people can subscribe to so they get new content when it’s updated automatically.
If you subscribe to a podcast, it’s like that.
More like semi-public notes on an RSS feed he personally set up and then secured with a password that he has apparently given out to a select few (presumably only the “hotties” since he’s said before that he doesn’t tell the low rankers their score).
It’d be easy enough for someone who knew to hand out the password, or let other people see the feed, or just recite the list to people.
He’s even an ass to Danny as he has his dumping by Dorothy on the RSS.
I don’t think he has anything about the dumping on there (it would be off topic!), I think he was, in his own mind, being a good bro to Danny by seeing he had easy access to which girls were hot enough to seek out now that he was single.
Didn’t he put Dorothy on the list, after her and Danny broke up?
Yup. He was a “good” bro, by not putting her on the list until they broke up.
I don’t. He made it clear from the start this was a public list. He is getting exactly what he deserves and I’ve been waiting for it.
Girls being crankypants at him isn’t “exactly what he deserves.” What he deserves is a punch in the teeth.
It’s a dream; the projections are getting hostile.
In three strips, they converge on Joe and Danny with infinite knives and Joe snaps awake after about the hundredth stab wound, about the time his muscles finish peeling off.
See, I’m pretty sure the biggest difference currently between Joe and “Ryan” is quite possibly that Joe hasn’t done anything that would legally excuse someone knifing him.
I mean there are a variety of other differences and points along the scale, for sure, but for now the fact that the ladies are only glaring daggers at him instead of slashing him with literal daggers means he has a lot more chance of turning his life around.
Or you know, settling for being Forever Alone for the rest of college?
All of these strips are hallucinations that Ryan is having as he is slowly being hacked to pieces.
http://imgur.com/RMdxC7J
Gotta give her some love, cuz Joe won’t.
Hah, nice!
Don’t rate women, Joe. Danny, keep up the sass. It’s a good look. At any rate…
A microphone and muffling material are all well and good, and certainly needed, but what’s a podcast without guests? If anyone would like to be featured on a show that’s meant to give a voice to people who might not otherwise be heard, do let me know. And if you have any suggestions regarding other users who you think would be a great choice, I’m all ears.
I felt this was worth mentioning:
I, as well as some of the people I know IRL who have expressed interest in appearing on the podcast, will occasionally say things that may be problematic. It should be stated before anyone here expresses interest, we do not say these things out of malevolence, but ignorance, and will always apologise and correct ourselves afterward, if it’s pointed out. I should also state that I have some passing experience with the sort of topics people on here have discussed, but for the most part am still learning.
You can consider this a preemptive content warning, not as a crutch to allow myself to say whatever and just apologise later, thinking it will be fine, but as encouragement to point out when I or another speaker has stepped out of line.
One of the main reasons I haven’t started something like this in the past, is that I always want the highest quality possible from anything I produce; this podcast will only be happening due to the encouragement I’ve received here and elsewhere.
Good luck, my friend. 🙂
I actually don’t think its very obvious who tattled on Joe. Its like one of his go to topics if he sees you as anything other than a one night stand or a teacher. He could also tell you about it if you are a one night stand and have a high rank. This could be a random guy who resents the fact that Joe’s having sex. This could be any woman with a high score who asked for the info and thinks he’s a creep. This could be a shallow woman who thinks her classmates care that she’s a ten.
I don’t think it is as random as ‘a random guy’ doing it only because often his interactions with other guys are limited which makes it more likely to be a female, but not definitely a female.
Narratively speaking, it almost has to be one of the named characters and probably in reaction to something fairly recent. Probably foreshadowed by him giving out the password on camera.
I was thinking Rachel, thanks to their little spat yesterday, but I don’t think he actually gave her the password. Raidah’s a possibility, since she was openly disgusted and he sent her a password.
I wonder if Joe slept with Other Rachel. Yes, he introduces himself but the fact is she’s got a spot on his list. Also, Joe has had a bunch of causal sex since enrolling. I can’t help but wonder if his do list included Other Rachel after a causal hook-up and that’s part of her furious reaction.
He rated Joyce.
Joe said he excised Joyce from the list actually.
He still rated her (and Sarah) without sleeping with either of them.
I highly doubt he’s slept with more than a tiny fraction of the women he’s put on his list.
He said she was PRACTICALLY excised. She’s still on the list he just won’t do anything about it.
Also, he rated her a four because she was a virgin. Joe’s gross.
Even worse, he updated her from a four to a ten due to the virginity.
He had her listed as a four due to her virginity, but yeah, he planned to ‘update her’ with his dick.
He also listed AG as a 9 because he said she MUST have mental health issues if she dresses as a superhero and he says that translates to great kink. Joe is GROSS.
… Ew, dude…
He also practically begged to meet Sal when he heard Danny’s description of ‘barely wears clothes and rides a motorcycle’. Normally that wouldn’t bother me at all – it’s 100% fine to ask a friend to introduce you to someone who sounds hot. But we know that Joe’s a creepy bastard and that the meeting in question would have been for math tutoring and the hair on my arms stands up. Cripes that’d have been gross. And we probably wouldn’t get to see Sal and Danny’s budding friendship, which would suck, because I like it.
Oh… OK, I see what you mean now. I misread his comment in that strip back then.
Also, ew, Joe!
Other-Rachel’s rage at being rated a 3 out of ten by some asshole she’s never spoken to before has finally unlocked her long-dormant mutant powers: teleportation and extra-dimensional-identification-cloaking.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve hooked up before. Joe doesn’t even remember the sexes of the threesome partners he’s hooked up with, let alone their names.
I’ll see your “rehaBROlitated” and raise you a “maniFESTERING.”
Wow. Go fuck yourself, Joe, because no one else is fucking interested in doing it. Creep.
Like seriously, leading off with a “lol ladies menstruating so moody” joke, and then acting like it’s a fucking favor that you didn’t systematically list off the factors that make a particular woman sexually unappealing to you, to her face? Fuck. Off.
A joke would imply he doesn’t actually believe it, but I think he does. Which is hilarious on it’s own.
Um, I’m trying to tie this into Mary’s weird happiness and comment to Carla early on, did Joe give Carla some kind of bullshit awful rating and Mary’s enjoying it? Did he make some kind of transphobic remark about her? Did he not include her in the ratings of the girls in the dorm because he didn’t count her as being a girl? I’m sweating over here, what the fuck and why was Mary so happy?
Aliens actually exist in the DOA verse and they erased Mary’s memories of her fundamentalist past, just like Joyce, and now she’s a good person.
Aliens actually exist in the Walkyverse. DoA is a reboot, where “Head Alien” is a character from a cartoon.
Like maybe a teletubby…or a smurf.
A cartoon fixed Mary’s memories? Well, I suppose it’s possible.
It must have been one of those cartoons that causes some kids to have seizures…
Hmm. I guess it’s possible, as dudebro misogynists aren’t known for their progressive views re: trans women, but til we find out more either way I’m just going to assume Mary’s just happy (she thinks) she can keep abusing people with impunity because (she thinks) Billie has something to lose now.
I mean, I get Mary feeling happy that Billie has something to lose, but even while she was at the highest point of influence over Ruth and Billie she didn’t act that gleeful or friendly, and I just feel like there’s some kind of motive behind complimenting Carla. I’m just paranoid at this point.
Mary’s happy that Billie now has something to lose (Carla) though I still haven’t figured out how Mary’s going to use that against her. (Especially since Billie is supposed to be getting moved anyway?)
I don’t think this is related to Mary.
Mind you, I wouldn’t be surprised if Joe found out the only woman who knows about the List and willing to date him would be Mary (she’s an 8 for appearance in Joe’s list). Then she’d make a antisemitic remark and he’d realize he had to change his ways.
This strangely reminds me of video game reviewer Angry Joe’s video on feminism where he comments that Dudebros shoot themselves in the foot because feminists love sex so treating them with respect is awesome for your love life.
And yet his handling of things in public is STILL better than Joe’s.
…that dude comes off as just as much of a creep as Joe, because while yes, some feminists love sex, just as many are ambivalent or not that into it, and being nice to someone JUST because you think it’ll get you in their pants is still gross as hell.
To be fair to Angry Joe, it was a misguided attempt to get toxic masculinity obsessed people not to be douchebags to Anita Sarkesian. Which is like asking fire not to burn.
I can see where the idea came from, but the idea of a gamergater doucheass nerdbro faking nice at me because he thinks it’ll buy him access to my genitalia has made my panties dryer than they’ve ever been ever.
Yeah, there’s a reason that stuck in my head as very DOA Joe-like.
Keep in mind, that’s already a real thing. I have several friends who dated a guy that presented as an “open minded lefty vegan feminist” and turned out to be an abusive sociopath.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=kTMow_7H47Q
Yeah, Angry Joe isn’t exactly the most persuasive of people anyway, and creepy douchebags tend not to listen to anyone, unless you count their dicks.
Should I just accept that every male YouTuber is going to end up being disappointing?
I recommend Jim Sterling. He’s a video game YouTube guy who doesn’t act like a total creep, except for exaggerated effect, and even then, I’m pretty sure it’s toward ungodly buff guys from video games.
It helps that Jim Sterling is queer af. He actually hosts a podcast with Laura Dale, one of the precious handful of out trans women in the gaming industry.
I’m not a big fan of how critical he tends to be about games, but yeah he’s not a creep about things at least?
His overblown criticisms of things people generally write off as “just part of the industry” are a large part of why I enjoy his videos.
Well, I mean its his “Thing” or especially was when he was working for The Escapist with his Zero Punctuation Reviews.
There were like one or two games he couldn’t find anything bad to say about them even so, but yeah usually he either tears into the games a bit too savagely for my taste, or its a game I had zero interest in anyways.
I dunno, I don’t really have much desire to listen to what basically amounts to comedy skits where the person in question has an overblown persona they use in their videos. Especially not as a review to tell me if I should play a game or not.
I mean, I literally only even watch JonTron on the rare occasions that I do so in the hopes that he’ll burst into song. Whatever else is true about the man, he’s got a decent singing voice, at least for just singing silly songs.
Wait, Yahtzee does Zero Punctuation. Or is he just the YouTube face of it, and Jim did written ones? I have to admit, I never did follow The Escapist, beyond the videos those two put out.
Hmm, might just be getting people with overblown critical judgments of games mixed up on my end.
Sorry about the confusion.
I actually haven’t checked out the Podquisition, yet, so I wasn’t aware of his co-host. That’s pretty cool.
The (current) Game Grumps are pretty awesome, particularly of late.
Now, you specified “current”. Was there something wrong with a former Game Grump? I’m not familiar with them, though I’ve heard Arin Hanson (Egoraptor) is in that group.
Jontron (one of the originals) made some racist comments some time back.
And probably sexist and homophobic, too, since those tend to come as a package, but it was the racism I heard about.
Jontron went fully off the rails at some point in the height of Gamergate; I’m not really following his bullshit at this point but I’ve vaguely heard he’s gone outright nazi lately.
I wasn’t paying attention to anything around GamerGate’s heyday, but I feel I should clarify that Jon has not gone Nazi on us. The debate in which he made the racist comments was effectively set up to put him on the defensive against an experienced debater who pretty much made it impossible for him to get a good word in, without immediately getting jumped for it. He later clarified about this, while also admitting that what he said was way off-center and apologising for it, and others have backed up his account of the other person’s general behavior.
I wasn’t aware Jon was part of the Game Grumps, though.
To clarify, the above is what I’ve managed to understand from what I’ve read about the incident. There were a lot of articles blowing the entire thing out of proportion, so I may have missed some problematic things he actually did say/do.
Nah, he went straight Nazi.
I looked at his twitter once, I think before the debate thing, and it was pretty horrible.
Jontron was the “Not so Grump” before Danny. He took some (much deserved) flack for racist comments he made during a debate and on Twitter. My experience with Danny and Arin is that they occasionally say problematic things out of ignorance but they try to avoid saying anything hurtful and tend to be very apologetic when they are corrected on it.
Oh, did the comments happen on Twitter as well? I didn’t know that, I thought it was just during that debate.
There were tweets that clearly suggested some xenophobic ideas, but the bulk of the racist comments were from the debate with Destiny. While I agree that Destiny is by far the more experienced debater and kept JonTron off balance for most of the debate, some of JonTron’s comments can’t be excused by lack of experience whether Destiny was Gish-galloping him or not. Destiny didn’t somehow trick JonTron into claiming that Mexican immigrants are trying to annex portions of the United States.
While I haven’t seen his response to the backlash, I appreciate that he apologized for his statements and recognized that they were inaccurate. It’s a good first step to reconciliation, but he’s still left a very bad taste in my mouth.
If you’d like to hear some of his own words about it, there’s a video floating about titled something like “The Jontron Apology Video”, and he made an appearance on the Schmucks Podcast, where he touched on it again briefly.
Honestly, I feel worse about him after hearing his apology video. It sounded like he was saying “I meant all that racist stuff I said, but I didn’t mean it in a racist way.”
Yeah, you can watch their old Sonic ’06 playthrough, there’s a lot of points where Arin’s discomfort at some of the stuff Jon says is almost tangible. Plus there’s lots of moments where Jon had to be bleeped. Considering they swear all the time, I’m pretty sure he was casually and repeatedly dropping the n-word or some other racial slur. In retrospect, it’s not surprising what followed.
In contrast, Arin and Danny have only gotten more openly feminist and generally cool over time.
James Rolfe (Cinemassacre) makes video game related content, but the cursing in AVGN videos is just silly nonsense to describe how terrible NES movie tie-ins were in an over-the-top manner. Most of the videos at this point are just him and his friends playing video games or watching horror movies. He’s also married with kids. If he does have terrible opinions he keeps them to himself.
But he didn’t want to see Ghostbusters! That means he’s a problem and must be erased! /sarcasm
I’m not getting e-celebrities mixed up again, am I? Pretty sure he’s the one people were flipping their lids over, around that time.
No that was him. AVGN wasn’t interested in seeing the new one.
I just rewatched his “I’m not reviewing it” video, and I don’t see what the big deal is. Basically he says he doesn’t want to watch it because it’s an unnecessary reboot of one of his favorite movies, and that he thinks it should have tied into the originals instead of starting over. As I remember, he only made that video because he was inundated with requests for his opinion.
I mean, Team Four Star seem decent at least.
Or are you asking specifically for like, “personalities”, whose main content is themselves talking?
Just general whining in disappointment but I appreciate the recommendations.
I have watched a few of their LPs where they’re in character as Krillin or Vegeta. (Super Hot was my favorite.)
Nah, I wouldn’t say that. I watch a few LPers that are stand-up guys. One of my personal favourites is NicoB, as while I am not a big fan of sexual jokes (he makes a few, not enough that it is grating), he’s enthusiastic, loves the games he plays and he always makes his own running jokes. Plus, ever since he got his dog Bernie, he usually adds small clips of her at the end of most videos and it is great.
I love that this is exploding in Joe’s face and isn’t just talked about once and forgotten. It’s a whole arc for him.
This is great, and we’re gonna need more popcorn.
Forget popcorn, I’m getting some wine!
*sigh* god damn it Joe, and here I was trying to give you the benefit of the doubt yesterday >_<
I wonder how David felt as he tried to get into Joe’s head and rate these women as Joe would. I tried and thought about what would make Other Rachel a 3, and felt disgusting.
I can’t think of anything about Rachel that hasn’t already been seen on a woman Joe would give a high rating, so it’s definitely baffling. She’s short, but so are Roz and Joyce; she has glasses, but so have Roz and Dorothy; she has dyed hair, but so has Mandy… Is it the modest clothing? Off-hand, I can’t think of any women he’s interacted with who dress similarly to Rachel, and Joe certainly seems the type to see that as a negative.
Not that I’m advocating for this behavior, of course. It’s just puzzling why someone who partakes in it would be inconsistent about it.
The…er…logic I came up with due to the “Power of Hollywood Standards of Beauty” is that she has a…heavier build than a lot of the other people that Joe has rated higher.
Or at least that’s the only “nice” enough phrasing for me to feel comfortable typing. Plenty of other worse ways to say it, but that’s pretty horrible to use as justification for the ranking?
But I suppose a system that requires a person to do so is pretty horrible in any case.
Personally, I’d think a sturdier build on a short woman would be a positive thing. More to grab onto when you lift her up, after all.
That’s a weird thing I just said. This mindset leads to weird things.
Well, it’s all arbitrary and Joe has poor taste so it sort of writes itself.
There’s actually kinda-sorta an answer in the Walkyverse?
http://www.joyceandwalky.com/d/20040130.html
And yeah it’s pretty gross. But I’d imagine Willis was thinking of this strip when he decided the number.
Comic Reactions:
What? An unencrypted RSS feed he hands out the password to like it was candy somehow ended up getting mass accessed by the very women he predatorily targeted and rated? Unpossible!
But yeah, even if this didn’t get out, he was already well on his way to earning himself one of those reputations. I.e. becoming the missing stair everyone tries to warn everyone else about.
Like, when the people who willingly sleep with you are even going “yeah, you’re a dick, stop rating people” and your whole shtick is this fucking PUA shit, there was no way it was going to end anywhere else but here.
And the sick part is that women often end up having to create and teach each other strategies to defuse this shit, just to be safe being in certain public spaces, and it really really sucks.
Panel 1: Joe… my little man-child, why do you keep giving me new reasons to loathe you with all of my being?
Like, fucking hell, everyone is pissed at you, so let’s dismiss that with a bullshit “PMS” joke*, cause y’know “hurr hurr, women get all hormonal and upset at guys for no reason on their periods hurr hurr”. Sure, let’s just throw that misogynist dumpster fire on the raging trash fire you’ve already lit. That’s surely a smart approach.
*Which it’s worth noting that misogynist assholes think that periods are somehow a magic “woman be angry” time where they get blown up at “for no reason” because folks with menstrual cycles are often in intense pain when they are on their periods. And when you’re in intense pain you’ve got a lot less patience for grinning and bearing all the sexist shit that gets dumped on you.
It’s basically like wondering why folks in recovery from surgery don’t have much patience for handling abusive family members. Gosh, I wonder, it’s almost like physical distress robs spoons from mental distress resource pile.
Like, I have special loathing for this “blame a sexist idea of how hormones work” shit because when I was being discriminated out of my job and relentlessly bullied and abused by my workplace, I was also starting estrogen, which my workplace knew about.
So like sometimes it got bad enough that I was leaving the workplace in tears and the midlevel bosses were all like “oh yes, estrogen does release more emotions, I’m sure. I read about that sort of thing on reddit”. And internally I was just screaming “no, I’m not crying because of girl pills, I’m crying because I’m being abused and mistreated”.
Cause like that’s the central thing of this sort of shit. That women and other menstruator’s rightful anger at upsetting things happening to them gets dismissed as some sexist idea of hormones rather than being taken as real and valid.
Cause y’know women and those read as women aren’t allowed any real space to be upset and angry.
I wonder how much of that is because “Anger” is THE “Man’s Emotion”. Like the only one they’re allowed other than “Horny” I guess?
Intense pain doesn’t tend to result in any sort of good mood period either, which seems like it should be obvious, but I suppose misinformation tends to be the rule of the day when people who don’t actually know how things work (and in this case are generally terrified of even having to think about it for more than the half a second it takes to be grossed out by it) get to be the ones who “explain it”?
Yup. So if women are allowed to access that, then they would “take” the “one” emotion men are “allowed” to have.
And yeah, the complete general ignorance is why I take extra time from my Bio classes to explain how the menstrual cycle works in depth as well as hammer against a few other common myths about how that whole system works.
I used to think Joe had redeeming qualities but he has become a complete waste of space, Cerberus. You are correct.
See, I’m not even sure how that compares to regular Bio classes, cause I kind of ended up basically somehow managing to never actually take one.
I mean I’ve seen anatomy charts so I know a little about the inner workings of the human body, but yeah…
The whole “Emotion are ‘feelings’ and therefore ‘weakness’ and therefore only suitable for womenfolk cause MEN have to be STRONG, oh but Anger isn’t a ‘feeling’ so its okay cause aggression is also STRONG” thing seems like its one of the big lynchpins in the whole dynamic.
I mean not that the dynamic isn’t stupid and full of bad logic, but the toxic lifestyle might be harder to sustain without that backing it up. I mean there’d still be the obsession with dominance and submission as core cultural values, and wanting to lock down the dominant end of things, but I’m not sure they’d have much of a rational to be able to justify doing so to themselves at that point.
Panel 2: This feels like close to a major breaking point for Danny/Joe. Cause like, Danny was trying to be nice and soft-pedal the fact that everyone is pissed at Joe and Joe turned that into a sexist joke and a dismissal of what Danny was trying to say.
And also because Danny is wrong here. Yeah, they’re mad at Joe, but folks willingly hanging out with the person they’re mad at tend to also get some of that or otherwise be seen suspiciously because they clearly don’t see anything wrong enough to object to with the sexist asshole next to them.
And so this one walk out together does a lot of damage to his desire to be seen as a “good egg”, because he doesn’t yet have the confidence to fully call Joe to the carpet on his sexist bullshit and the women around him are directly noticing that.
Also, another heavy sigh for Joe still investing bad money after bad into this idea that he has “game” or “charm”. No, Joe, you’re a sleaze merchant, just like your father. You don’t have to remain a sleaze merchant and this is the time to stop being a sleaze merchant, but what you think is charm is a creepy ugly mess that the women who sleep with you overlook on account of your general attractiveness.
Panel 3: Ugh, the eyes he makes are the fucking worst too. Like, when he’s in predator mode, he looks at the women he’s targeting like meat and it’s an intensely douchey look to adopt when everyone around him is pissed at him. Like, if he wanted this interaction to have had any chance of going well, he needed to have a face more like Panel 4 Danny rather than this “I’m such a smooth player and mentally masturbating to the notion of how ‘good’ I am at manipulating people into telling me what I want” shtick.
And good on you Other Rachel fucking slamming his bullshit right in his face. Like, even if he was rating every woman by @dogrates numbers, it would still be bullshit and vile, but the fact that he’s married himself to this bullshit faux-objective style where he not only has a boner update log, but one that names and shames those who don’t please his boner as if that has ever mattered to anyone besides his conceited ass.
Like, this was always going to blow up in this exact way. It really was only going to be a matter of when and having that go viral at the same time as Scarface is going to make women even less forgiving of that shit, because it is the same viewing women only through their sexual utility in entitled fashion that births shit like Ryan.
Yeah, re: Joe’s predator look, I was trying earlier to translate it from cartoon dot eyes to how it’d look in reality, and I have to say, if a dude approached me looking like that and trying to hit on me, I would feel intensely unsafe and grab a friend to retreat with a quickness.
Yup, I’ve had guys approach me with that look. It never feels safe and I’m always keenly aware that things can go really dangerously bad if they figure out I’m trans.
You have my deepest sympathies. No one should have to feel that sort of fear, gay, straight, trans, cis, or anyone.
Does Danny understand what’s happening enough for that, though?
I think that’s very likely that this will lead to a breaking point between Joe and Danny – because that is the intersection of two ongoing themes.
Joe is loosing friends and even people who are willing to stand his bullshit. We have seen it with Roz and Dorothy and Rachel, and even his last time with Jacob was all him being pissy about Jacob and Joyce flirting (which may be understandable, but is a violation of his own stupid bro-code). His increasingly desperate attempts to get Danny to talk about bro-feelings can be read as him desperately trying to keep Danny as a friend.
At the same time, Danny is gaining confidence. His relationship with Dorothy ended and he survived. His relationship with Amazi-girl ended and he survived. He came out to Ethan and he survived. He has gained a friend in Sal. Danny can actually start to afford taking risks. He does not need everything to stay the same way as before college. He does not necessarily need Joe.
Joe is painting himself into a corner, and even if he has shown some glimpses of realizing that he need to change his attitude (such as apologizing to Dorothy) he has a LONG way to go.
There is no guarantee that Danny will wait that long.
I tend not to have as much sympathy for Danny types who enable that kind of misogyny in their friends.
Because, while this Danny doesn’t, a lot of Danny types (especially the ones who like to make a big damn show of being a feminist or “not like THOSE guys”) are just as predatory and creepy in their own way. It’s Nice Guy schtick only performed more skillfully than typical.
A lot of those types will brag about how they see and treat women like people – or, if they’ve just been rejected, they’ll announce it and wonder aloud why she couldn’t see that he wasn’t like those other assholes… And it’s just… no, dude. No. Seeing and treating women as people is not a sign of virtue, it’s a bare minimum “decent person” standard of behavior. You wouldn’t expect a promotion just for showing up at work, don’t expect high esteem just for the bare minimum of human civility. Also, protip: People who actually see women as people and not as props for their own self-aggrandizement don’t need to announce their feminism or their views on women from the highest tower at every opportunity.
Danny’s not like that – but if Joe were a little less invested in classic toxic masculinity but every bit as invested in social sexism, I could see him doing that. And I can easily see that Danny would be tripping people’s alarm bells here on that regard.
I guess what I’m saying is while this Danny doesn’t trip my creep-dar, most Danny-types do.
(why yes, I included Canada’s PM in that one at first, mollified to a degree now by the fact that mainly seems to have walked his prior talk on feminism for the most part and his exasperation at people for being amazed and heaping praise on him for walking his talk seems to have been genuine inasmuch as anything a professional face does or says is genuine. Like, what I’m saying is either that was much better acting than I’m used to seeing out of a Canadian politician or he’s genuinely was exasperated and decided it wouldn’t be a PR disaster if he showed it – groomed for public consumption, of course. I am certain think he focus-grouped the hell out of “because it’s 2015” before he ever said it in public.)
Yup, it’s a necessary defense mechanism oftentimes because the people who seem decent but don’t call out sexist friends can often go really really bad and this can often be a big red flag of that.
Which is why I have some major sympathy for Danny here. Confrontation is something super hard for him and he has to live with Joe at the end of the day, but yeah, a lot of women are going to react accordingly to the red flag of him not doing much to push back Joe.
But I also think that’s some of the tests a good egg has to deal with. It’s really easy to call out sexists super removed from you. It’s a lot harder to call out sexism or racism or homophobia among close friends. But that’s something you eventually end up having to do on the good egg path and becomes a lot easier over time.
You note here that Joe doesn’t actually have game, and I just want to say that I’ve started getting uncomfortable at the insistence that he must have some magical game we haven’t seen, otherwise he wouldn’t ever have sex.
It’s even something I was sort of unconsciously buying into, but the implication is really uncomfortable.
It still posits all women at IU as players on an opposing team. It suggests that Joe can’t possibly just be (as we know he is) physically attractive and in the vicinity of a woman who’s interested in casual sex. No, Joe must be a Master Seducer. He must be convincing women to sleep with him through charm.
Like, boy is that attitude ever deeply ingrained. I’m actively trying to watch out for stuff like that, and it still got me somehow. I was buying into the idea that Joe must have “game” in order to ever have sex, and by extension into the idea that women don’t actually have sexual agency; that we must be ‘won’ and ‘convinced’ and ‘seduced’, that we must be ‘out-gamed’.
Panel 4: I want Joe to get better. I want him to heal. To break away from toxic masculinity. But Danny needs to get away from Joe or find the courage to call him out to his face. Like, he’s watching the distress caused, the raw sexism, the complete assholery he’s still engaging in even after being caught out and every instance where he just feels sad but doesn’t do anything to reign in Joe, the women around him are judging him harshly as someone who just stands by and watches and does nothing.
And given that he wants so hard to be seen as a “good egg”, as a person it is safe and good to interact with, this is a major test for him and we see in Panels 2 and 5 that it might be getting to that breaking point where Danny is realizing his duty to call out his friend and call him out on his behavior and make it explicit not in a “bro, c’mon” way, but in a “bro, no, stop this, now” way.
And I have all the sympathy in the world for Danny here. It’s not easy building up the courage to call out long time friends on their awful bullshit and it’s so easy to fall into a pattern of soft-selling shit in a way you wouldn’t others in the hopes of gently steering them away from their path without needing to blow up at them or cut them out of your life. And it’s often hard to feel like you can do anything. But this is a growth moment for Danny as much as Joe. Joe is going off the rails and maybe this time Danny can’t rescue him from the consequences of his actions and it’s more important to call out Joe than trying to be the good egg peacemaker that he is.
Panel 5: And yeah, I think this is Danny running out of patience and taking that step to actually condemn Joe more sternly. Like that look is not one he gets often. His main default emotion is a sort of hyper-cerebral empathy, wanting to do right but over-thinking it. He doesn’t like getting mad and upset at people. So the fact that he is getting mad and upset at Joe and that his empathy is almost entirely directed at Other Rachel is a big deal. As is his calling out of Joe’s charms as ManiFESTERING.
And Joe… fucking Joe. LIke, I don’t like hating the guy, I really don’t and I get that he’s reeling because the entire mythology of his world view he has papered over his insecurities is crumbling in front of him and being revealed as the facade it is.
But fucking hell. You knew the system was fucked. Multiple people multiple times have told you that your system is fucked. And no amount of bullshit rationalization faux-objectivity removes that from the equations or makes the actions you already took not morally wrong. You had many many opportunities to fix this before it got to this point and instead you escalated assuming Danny was being a wet blanket and dismissing Roz and Dorothy and Joyce as “percussion instruments, right?”
And now you’re only in distress because you got caught out doing that wrong and are facing the most minor of social consequences for said bad behavior. So yeah, it leaves me in that place. If you don’t like this, fix it. Delete your bullshit RSS feed, stop marrying yourself to a toxic culture that will drag you into bitter singledom and train you to hate all the women who rightfully won’t sleep with you because of this shit. And make that ugly, painful step to rip off this toxic masculinity band-aid that is impairing you.
Like, hell, you can’t even say you don’t have role models. Jacob is demonstrating every day a form of masculinity that isn’t predatory or looks down on the contributions and values of women, Danny is constructing a masculinity that allows him some femininity as well and doesn’t have as strict cloistering rules, and there are other examples like Ethan’s gentleness also on display. You have all the tools to heal. Now you just need the will.
I don’t want Joe to delete his RSS feed.
I want him to delete all the ratings and make an apology post so that when people come to check it, all they’ll see is that one post.
If Joe had a list of women he wanted to have sex with in his head, that’s fine. Keep it to yourself but that’s fine. It’s the fact it’s ALL the women around him and the EFFORT he’s gone to to systematize it as well as record it that disturbs the hell out of me.
This was Joe’s HOBBY.
Yup, he spent all his time on it, gave it to people who didn’t want it, updated it even to the detriment of the feelings of those around it (like, he updated Dorothy in front of Danny immediately after the breakup and Danny was terrified to introduce his best friend to AG knowing putting her on his radar would be bad), and has chided those around him for not following his meticulously crafted numerical system and seeing it as a guide for them as well.
It’s basically a life-destroying obsession at the moment.
I think someone’s private ranking list might have been made public. /Very public/.
Hey it’s Furiosa in the first panel
No no, that can’t be her because she’s looking angry at Joe and yet he still has all his body parts.
Oh god he’s named Joe too
I was hoping Furiso would turn out to be Immorten Joe’s daughter for maximum Ra’s Al Ghul.
So that makes Danny his Doof Warrior.
I would have given her a 3 not for her looks (she is actually kinda cute), but for thinking that Ross is a better choice for an RA than Dorothy… or that she is good period. HAHA!!!
……Ah…. but seriously if this is a list that Joe made for rating women and it got passed around that is really crappy, even for Joe.
Ross?
Presumably a typo for Roz.
Or this is from an alternate universe where Toedad was running for RA… against a Mirror Universe version of Dorothy.
The irony is that’s the universe where Mary really was just trying to study.
Now I’m picturing Ross marching through the halls with his rifle, reciting Bible quotes under his breath and threatening to pray for people he sees acting up.
You’ve just described the world’s worst “Christian military academy for troubled youth”.
Sadly, that reminds me of my headcanon that our universe’s Dorothy is Hillary Clinton.
Does she get the standard issue Mirror Universe goatee, or do women get an “I demand to speak to your manager” Kate Gosselin hairdo over there?
Well that would explain Mary being nice to Carla earlier lol, alternate universes have indeed been slipped into
Yep it’s Roz, sorry all.
No no, it makes sense to rank someone low for thinking Ross would be a good RA.
Indeed, low intelligence is a turn-off for me XD Just kidding Roz is just really good at acting to get what she wants it doesn’t reflect too poorly on people who bought the act, it’s not like she’s a human shaped pile of shit like real life politicians.
Though with Joe I’d think easily fooled girls would be higher on his list… cause you know… easier to fool them into thinking sex with you is a good idea.
The yelling at Joe makes sense and hopefully leads to some self-reflection. I don’t expect him to actually be threatened. But if he were, and could only escape because Danny soothed people with his beautiful Disney tunes? That would be the best debt of gratitude ever.
Well there’s always that morbid curiosity of wanting to know what others think of you even if you know it’ll probably be disturbing.
Joe clearly is an objective source of male wisdom on who is hot and who is not.
All other lesser men must go to him for who to sleep with.
Women must follow his standards to be attractive.
….
Oygh.
See, I’m taking it as Joe knows it’s just his personal view, and not objectively a score anyone would rate.
Though I am finding it a little funny that Willis basically had to score the women of his comic for this storyline.
I’d kinda like having access to an outside assessment of my looks from a stranger, though I wouldn’t date anyone who volunteered.
I’m constantly sure/worried that people are thinking the worst of me (in general, not just appearance). Confirming that would be depressing but I wouldn’t be able to trust anything that said they weren’t thinking the worst.
Everyone is curious how people see them as a person to a degree, but only when they ASK for it.
No one wants to be randomly judged by a guy based solely on appearance or after just one encounter at most and have him writing down thoughts and figures which he then shares with other people without the permission of the people he judged.
Oooh, one dorm discovered the online do-list.
That’s what happens when you put stuff online under your real name or an identifyable pseudonym, Joe.
I think it is named the “to JOE list.”
And yeah, he has bragged about it constantly so it’s not like it’s a secret.
Or, y’know. Actively hand out links to the list to anyone and everyone you see.
Don’t rate women, Joe.
Not sure if it says “Red” Center Desk or “Read” Center Desk.
i figure it’s “rad”
Read. It’s Read Hall.
So which female did you not rate, Joe?
His grandmother. Maybe.
He did say there are grannies on that thing though…?
mike’s mom
So it was that Joe slowly became aware that maybe publishing his conclusions might have been a mistake. Especially with women whom he might want to interact for whatever reason in the future.
I have to say that it’s so Joe that it looks like he still doesn’t get it.
The timing of this incident has me seriously wondering if my theory was right and Ryan uses Joe’s ‘do-list’ to shop for ‘easy marks’.
Okay, I actually like Joe somewhat and am in the boat that he can be a good person if he tried, but he absolutely deserves this and I’m gonna enjoy second of it.
I fucked up the italics somehow. That tone was only supposed to be applied to “like” and “can”.
And the bolding. That was only supposed to be on “absolutely”. This whole train is a clusterfuck, please ignore me.
The bolding works, though.
I think it looks perfect as it slowly looks like you are emphasising more with passion.
No no, it felt like you were slowly raising your voice passionately, I love it
CharlieHarperSucks.com all over again lol
Hmmm… I wonder what rating Joe gave Joyce?
In “Men are from Beck, Women are from Clark”, Joe decribed her as a 4, but implied she could have been a 10 if not for her innocence and lack of experience and conservatism. However, due to the events of this storyline, Joe has removed Joyce from his “Do” List (Possibly the only lady he ever removed, considering he appreantly put “grannies” there?)
He hasn’t removed her from the list. She’s just “practically” excised:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/02-everything-youve-ever-wanted/boyspizzaretreat/
I.e. she’s probably on there but with a rant listed instead of a number.
Who is the blond in the first panel?
She’s cute!
Yeah. I’d give her an eigh–er, umm…
*tries unsuccessfully to slink into the shadows*
Hah, I knew it. Someone published his ‘ratings’.
Yeah, someone named Joe.
Haven’t seen Mike in a while, maybe he did it?
Willis, that first panel’s background must have taken a lot of time to draw. The effort is appreciated.
Also great detailing on the untagged woman standing at the computer terminal. Even drawn small, I can see the stern look towards Joe.
So… I’m guessing that Joe actually kept a list of his “ratings”, and that list somehow got leaked to the wider community.
He kept a list alright. With an RSS feed online and freaking SUBSCRIBERS.
Well, yes, it was stated in comic that he did. It apparently has a password but he shares it really easily.
Joe’s charm has been curdled by a leaked password.
Oh dear. I am so very sorry. So very, very sorry.
*Collapses in laughter*
OMG someone leaked Joe’s list. Yea, he is gonna get trashed left, right and center.
Joe, aside from the purely practical, “making women avoid you at all costs” aspect, your rating system is just a horrible thing to do. The former is a direct consequence of the latter, but, you know, be a good egg. Stop doing this shit.
Wait….did I miss when his list got leaked/found by all the other females?
Nope. We’re finding that out now, along with him.
oooooooh Joe look what’s finally backfiring on you :>
“└ Tags: asma, danny, joe, mandy, other rachel”
I think this might be the first time I’ve seen Willis leave a character untagged. =O
all eyes on joe, in the worst way
All eyes on me, in the center of the ring, just like a circus
…Actually, that’s a good comparison. People got fed up with the circuses, tore them apart, and they shut down. Joe and his list look to be going the same direction.
I just know Willis is softening us up for a Big Reveal. I just know.
I always thought Mandy and Other Rachel were about the same height. But yesterday + today shows Mandy about tall as Danny, and Other Rachel maybe half a head shorter.
Ah, Joe, the bloom is off the rose, isn’t it? The ladies are detesting you now because of your constant reduction of femininity to a number. Well, it had to happen sometime and it couldn’t happen to a better guy than you. The only person who’s more despicable than you in the DOA universe in the eyes of women would be Ryan. Speaking of which, I wonder what’s happening with Scarface right now?
In the hospital, presumably, before getting carted off to jail.
Realistically, I doubt “Ryan” would go to jail. More likely, I suspect he’ll go the way of Cosby.
He tried to murder two women with a knife.
Cosby was world-famous and well-loved for a generation. Ryan isn’t. The defense was able to make a lot of hay over his victim’s ongoing relationship with him for months after the assault. Joyce has no such relationship with him. Etc.
I’m not saying he won’t get off, but it won’t be the way that Cosby got off.
Regardless of how it happens, he still did the crimes and avoids punishment. I don’t think the particulars of it matter that much.
I think he’s changing his name to scarsface.
Also. It appears that January 26th’s alt text was a LIE.
… also-also, is that an untagged first-panel Rose?
Based on current trends, Danny, you may have better luck maintaining your popularity sticking with your ukelele than with Joe.
Hmm… it appears Joe’s been hacked, and his ratings have been widely disseminated. This will be fun.
Annnnnd he’s losing credit again. Dangit, Joe. I want to like you. Don’t do this to yourself.
Also, to anyone out there who has been numbered in this way: It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. All that matters is that you know you’re effing HOT.
I think my auto gravitar is still this girl so…
Wtf a three?
Apparently not.
I don’t have the endurance to get through all these comments. However, I thought people might like to see a similar list compiled by women.
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/750×970/documents/thursdaymit.jpg
In this case, it was published on purpose. When I saw it a year or two later, I thought it was hilarious*. Unfortunately, they weren’t selling 4 star t-shirts any more. I thought the whole thing was hilarious at the time, but then I wasn’t reviewed. I actually met some of the people involved, though not in any way that could end in a review. I’m skeptical that Keith ever actually took his boots off.
Unfortunately for Richie and Gilbert, there was a media circus that blew things all out of proportion. The MIT administration didn’t have much of a sense of humor about it either.
*This doesn’t mean I was cynical and jaded. Quite the reverse, actually. Still wet behind the ears.