It is a quantum phenomenon. The truthfulness of dinosaur fact and Dina’s attack are in an entangled superposition. Once the fact is observed, it becomes either true or false, and the attack commences immediately in the later case. As such, there is no communication delay. However, since truthfulness is revealed only moments before attack, it sadly cannot be used to send information across great distances, per no-communication theorem.
If this were able to violate causality, the distance between them wouldn’t matter. You may need a bit of distance to allow for reaction time, observations and records to show that the cause of the effect was chronologically outside of the error margins of the observed timing, but for the actual violation of causality, distance doesn’t matter so long as it’s outside the light-cone. (which is to say that effects are always within the light cone of the cause, except for certain weird quantum experiments they’ve been conducting where things are gettung fishy)
It’s not that she picks up on it instantaneously, it’s that there’s no light-speed delay in her physical corrective response (aka ‘attack’) that worries me.
They are in the the Girl’s dorms atm, and Dina’s room isnt to far away from her’s, so while that was a fast reaction, it probably isnt to difficult to hear things through those dorm room walls.
Why not just “Rest in Pieces”? Or did you actually mean tear into pieces? Or rest in Pisces? Or are you condemning the dead to be dismembered and scattered? Or..There is a lot to unpack in this.
Analytically dissecting a common joke phrase? Why don’t I just head over to the ATM machine and input my pin number to withdraw $5 dollars to reward you for your originality.
That’s why the one week wait. Thanks to modern video duplication and youtube like sites, Sadako has been swamped with requests for haunting. She’s so behind schedule at this point she doesn’t know when she’s actually going to get time off to rest in peace.
Dina’s “incorrect dino facts-sense” is kind of like Peter Parker’s “spidey-sense”. It triggers whenever someone states false facts about dinosaurs, regardless of their proximity to Dina. She doesn’t need to “hear” the fact to know it was wrong!
It is possibly also precognitive (as Parker’s spider-sense has sometimes been described), allowing her to sense the falsehood even before it is uttered!
Modern theory suggests that only one attack will occur, sparing one or more ignorant parties from due justice, but nobody has yet been brave enough to verify this experimentally.
She grabs whoever’s closest in her teeth, whips them back and forth like a dog shaking a rat, and then flings them across campus where on landing they crush the other offender.
I like to imagine that, in the case of simultaneous incorrect assertions among their friend group, Becky would happily chip in to handle one while Dina gets the other.
Not necessarily. Epigenetic inheritance allows a variety of traits to be transmitted across generations via routes of inherited DNA methyl tags, microbiomes, and antibodies just to name afew.
Not as much as you seem to think though. Lamarckian theory was b.s., yes, but there is a remarkable amount of inheritable traits based on epigenetics. Even new therapies based on methyl tags. See: CRISPR and the new therapies for dis- and re-en abling specific genetics: CRISPRoff and CRISPRon. These are designed to cure genetic diseases, but instead of full excising the genes with CRISPR (like an amputation), now they can just switch them off and observe the effects, and these epigenetic changes are inheritable. An example of a real world epigentic trait, is a person growing up in an environment requiring broad hands (think blacksmith) will have their body respond, grow stronger, but also a more robust skeleton with larger hands. Their children have been shown to be more likely to have broad hands, even if they don’t grow up blacksmithing. (this was a cited example when I first read about epigenetics, but I can’t recall where that was written, else I’d provide the source)
Possibility 1 counts as nurture. While not sufficient for skills on their own, epigenetic inheritance may have at least provided some kind of head start in their development.
I meant that being descended from ninja and/or samurai could be the source of her skills BECAUSE HER FAMILY TAUGHT HER.
….
…. okay, no, I’m getting a little bit uncomfortable with adjacency to the Japanese-implies-ninja-samurai-and/or-karate trope, so I’m going with the Lamarck thing instead. This is a silly thread, I get to be silly.
I merely suggested that epigenetic inheritance is one of the major factors behind her skills, although it probably plays less of a role than her study of prehistoric species.
Were your parents particularly silly Reltzik? Maybe this silliness is also a heritable trait too? Also, why is it that everytime I read your handle, it makes me think of Ruth Lessick? Some combination of the letters and structure I suppose.
Demoted: Mom’s particularly silly. Dad’s particularly quick to go to another room when Mom and I are in a positive-silly-feedback-loop. And I’m guessing you’re right about why the name makes you think of Ruth (mostly the same letters or close to them, in roughly the same order), but I was using this handle before IW started.
No, it wouldn’t necessarily require Lamarckian descent. I am a descendant of foundry workers, which has left me with a short, square physique and fantastic stamina. But my ancestors didn’t give me that physique because they were foundry workers, they became foundry workers because during the industrial revolution, my bloodline’s genetic tendency towards “short, broad and strong” made them perfectly suited for foundry jobs.
Similarly, Dina could inherit ninja traits from a ninja ancestor, because those were the traits that gave said ancestor the aptitude for ninja training.
i live for these nonsense conversations about evolution <3
anyway, here's a thought experiment.
suppose there's a skill, such as "raptor-sense" which one really has to start learning in the first 2 or 3 years of life, or it's very unlikely you'll ever catch up with the True Raptors if you learn it later.
Let's say that early training is complicated, and time-consuming, and you have to teach it exactly right or it's no use. so you have to really know what you're doing, and be really motivated.
Now, who but a True Raptor, or someone very well versed in those arts, will go to the trouble of teaching their infant the crucial early stages of the art?
Final point: though the core teaching is unchanging, as some techniques (such as how to neutralize someone armed with a bamboo flute) become disused (due to the lack of bamboo flutes in your environment), the Raptors may stop teaching them; while some techniques which would not have existed previously (such as using concrete-based architecture to bounce around) are eventually developped and passed on.
OK, now you're an alien scientist and in earthling evolution 101 you learn, "there's darwinian evolution, yadda yadda, and there's lamarckian evolution though it's barely a thing in multicellular organisms, bla bla".
Now you decide to study the lineages of Raptors in that one earthling species, Homo Sapiens. (which you probably call by a less pretentious latin name, such as Simius Invasivus or whatever).
How do you NOT run back to your thesis advisor and yell: OMG I've found lamarckian evolution in Homo Sapiens!!!
idk is that silly? did i just silly all over your smarts?
I notice that a major confusion over epigenetics is that it somehow confirms Lamarckian theory, which it does not.
Darwin said that traits had some means of mutating and getting transmitted among generations, but he didn’t specify exactly what those mechanisms actually were.
DNA was naturally the first means of said mutation and transmission we discovered in host cells of living things.
Since then, we have built even more upon Darwin’s original work with population genetics and the like. Epigenetic mechanisms are just building upon this framework even more!
ok yeah, that’s useful PSA as regards what Darwin and Lamarck actually said (and i do feel bad for poor Lamarck getting remembered as “the guy who was wrong”, when really w/r/t inheritance Darwin basically agreed with Lamarck and so was equally wrong) but anyway, by now the word “lamarckian” has, however improperly, become shorthand for “inheritance of acquired characters”, so, that’s how i was using it =)
The brain, the skills and knowledge it can retain and transmit to others without reproduction, their ability to mutate and refine useful behaviors called meme, were a major game changer for all of life. In a sense, I guess you can call neuroplasticity the Ultimate Epigenome.
Just below the massively adaptable brain lay the other means of inheritance, in order of speed of mutation: antibodies, host DNA methylation, microbiome and prion mutation.
I know that this is a massive oversimplification. But a very important point is still made.
Milu: For the same reason we classify mechanical reactions, chemical reactions, and nuclear reactions differently.
Genetics involves changes to the genes themselves. Call this analogous to a nuclear reaction where the nucleus of an atom is changed by adding or removing protons or electrons.
Epigenetics doesn’t change the DNA, but does change how that DNA expresses itself, including the nature of the cells the DNA reproduces and how they react to their surroundings. Call this equivalent to chemical reactions. The underlying atoms are the same, but they are brought together in different ways to create different molecules that are fundamentally different in how they interact with other molecules.
Learning changes neither. The cells of the brain remain basically the same in their functioning. What changes is how the cells are organized and interconnected and the strengths of the connections between them. (Maybe you could make a case for some aspects of this to be epigenetic, but it’s something of a grey matter.) This is a bit like a mechanical reaction. You rearrange a machine or take apart and rebuild an object, but the underlying chemistry remains the same.
…
…. okay, I don’t really know what I’m talking about. That was just an excuse for the stealth pun. *flees for dear punning life*
meh, i guess Wagstaff was right, i am a bit muddled myself.
My INITIAL musing wasn’t really “should cultural inheritance count as epigenetic” as i’m sure you’re right that epigenetics being defined as related to the switching-on-&-off of genes is by and large accepted as canon;
INSTEAD i was really interested in the way biologists (afaict????) tend to basically wave away “inheritance of acquired characteristics” (let’s call’em IAC) as non-existant or at best irrelevant.
and yeah sure this has been challenged by epigenetics, but i feel like the consensus is that IAC is still essentially not a thing in complex organisms, with the exception of immunity but geneticists have always known about that and accepted that that was a special case, so, whatever.
NOTWITHSTANDING all that noise, WHY don’t we count CULTURAL transmission as IAC? i pompously wonder.
…and, you know, your answer still holds, in that those are just the categories we (mostly) agree upon. biology (mostly) doesn’t deal with cultural inheritance because that’s (mostly) not what biology is about, and there’s a line in the sand between biology and non-biology and that’s just the way… things… are.
but that line has shifted before, and it might shift again!!!
…although as i write this i’m reminded that biologists blithely forcing their evolutionary models onto humans has not *always* been a cool idea in the past, so, idk maybe that line in the sand is fine just where it is. ok, bye
Just to br clear, evolutionary models on their own were not responsible for said damaging discrimination of the past; bearing scarce exceptions, the scientists behind these models respected the nature, origins and limits of their research.
Much akin to IQ tests, evolutionary models were of course appropriated, misused and abused by bigots, who turned these models into ammunition for their own unacceptable purposes.
ok, no. theories are not innocent of the social context of the people producing them. And the elaboration of modern evolutionary theory paralleled European colonialism and the American conquest of the west.
Look, i’m not sufficiently versed to make a solid argument, but i’ve also read enough history of biology to know to be sceptical of the claim that “bearing scarce exceptions… the scientists behind the models respected the limits of their research”. I’m not burning any books here. But context matters.
I’m also dubious about how scarce the exceptions were. It’s hard to think that, for example, eugenics was the work of only a few outliers.
But as a good rule of thumb, scientists (er, “scientists”) who start out looking to arrive at certain conclusions matching their own attitudes (be those attitudes racial chauvinism, or religious chauvinism, or male chauvinism, or buy-our-product chauvinism) don’t discover so much as fabricate. If they’re too busy forcing the evidence where they want it to go, they can’t follow the evidence where it leads. What results is usually either something completely unfalsifiable (which, nowadays at least, is acknowledged as bad science) or something that is quickly falsified. That doesn’t mean that all the scientists that made huge breakthroughs were free of such attitudes, far from it, but being able to put aside their prejudice while you work is an essential skill for doing science. If they can’t do that, the resulting theory will not withstand review.
What you get in that case is… well, something akin to a YEC or QAnon or an election conspiracy theorist. People who will rapidly snap up any factoid to “prove” the point, who produces an abhorrent mess of a theory that falls apart with only the slightest bit of skeptical review, but who can still sell the finished product because the people they’re selling it to are buying affirmation rather than truth and aren’t the sort to check under the hood or kick the tires if it matches their preconceptions.
The people who did that weren’t even real scientists. Social Darwinism wasn’t invented by Darwin. The inventor of the IQ test even protested against its use in disenfranchised people.
Also Milu, the time period and dominant religious atmosphere in which a scientific or otherwise secular theory is created has nothing to do with the validity of its content.
When I quote the author of some idea, sometimes I may have very significant disagreements with them. For instance, I achknowledge that Darwin grew up in a very binary thinking society, and even though he was an agnostic, I still disagree with him there.
The point I’m trying to make is, the author is incidental, and the idea always stands or falls on its OWN merits, not that of the author.
The original IQ tests and evolutionary theory had no elements in them that were intrinsically supremacist. In fact, inter-species cooperation is very well supported by Darwin’s original framework.
Condemning evolutionary theory for having its popular understanding twisted by bigots for their unacceptable purposes is like condemning the brick instead of its wielder for stoning someone to death.
In fairness, Milu does have a point. Darwinian evolution (much less the modern synthesis) isn’t tainted by what the racists did and still do with it, but there is still a warning to be taken from that whole kerfuffle to beware of science that one doesn’t understand, especially in the hands of groups using it to further their own ideological ends.
(Also, string theory isn’t accepted as proven science. An interesting model (er, set of models) with theoretical coherence, potential, and a couple of details that have born fruit, but as a whole it’s still a hypothetical.)
@Wag,
my point was, biologists (#NotAllBiologists) have at times presumed of the explanatory power of their discipline, and overapplied their methods to realms that they were either not really equipped to deal with, or were simply too biased to study carefully. I’m not calling out darwinian evolution itself, like who am I? anyway, i basically worship Darwin and i refuse to learn anything unsavoury about him.
no, but i was mostly thinking, as Reltzik said, of eugenics (Francis Galton: scientist) and assorted flavours of scientific racism.
*HOT TAKE* scientific racism: it was a thing done by scientists!!!
…many of them very reputable. The Paris Society of Anthropology was founded in the 19th century by Paul Broca (very famous doctor) and comprised many fairly eminent scholars of the time, and it was essentially dedicated to measuring skulls, based on the hypothesis of anatomically measurable differences in intelligence between the races and the sexes (a hypothesis which took a very long time to be dropped despite, obviously, no evidence whatsoever.)
So, i feel like we’re not talking of the same thing, quite. i have nothing but admiration for good science that stems from wonder and humility, my ranting was more about how, uh.. good dogs do bad things? i don’t know. i’m exhausted. fucking insomnia, man.
ok and now i’m rereading and it sounds like i’m moving the goalposts. i did say that scientific theories shouldn’t be abstracted from their social context, and i stand by that , (i guess i was making 2 sort-of-separate points ok) but it’s a looong conversation??? and now that i’m finally boring myself to sleep i dont wanna miss this train of melatonin, so, xoxox
On the other hand, maybe she and Walky are more compatible than we’ve credited them for because they actually have some common interests, like cartoons and comics?
Dina is Schrodenger’s dinosaur: she is potentially behind every door. You can only know whether she’s actually behind any given door when you collapse the wave form by actually looking behind the door. Or by saying something wrong about dinosaurs.
She can hear anything in the immediate vicinity of a door, and can proceed from behind one open door to behind another without having to traverse the spacetime between them.
Basically from what I recall, it comes from a misunderstanding of Stegosaurus physiology; despite being the size of a minivan, Stegosaurus‘s brain was famously the size of a walnut – but a large cavity (as in, 20x the size of their brain cavity) was discovered to exist in their spinal-cord-canal where it passed through their hips, leading to the misconception that this large cavity was used to hold a “second brain” that controlled the…lower-body functions of the dinosaur, among other things.
We’re not currently sure! Modern birds have a similarly-located cavity around their spinal cord that’s used to contain what’s known as a “glycogen body”, but that still leaves a whole lot of questions since 1) despite both being dinosaurs, Stegosaurus isn’t exactly closely related to modern birds – meaning this might just be a case of convergent evolution – and 2) we don’t actually know for sure what a bird’s glycogen body does for it either (though there’s a few theories). I’m sure there’re people out there who’ve dedicated whole parts of their careers to studying these things. 😛
Various other dinosaurs had it, too, so the distribution shouldn’t be a problem. And while we don’t know what the glycogen body in birds does specifically, glycogen is the usual way to store energy as glucose; we do that, too, just not in a centralized place like that.
According to a quick Google check, it was an enlarged neural canal near the hip regions of Stegosaurus and other large sauropods like Diplodocus, Brachiasaurus, Camarasaurus, and Brontosaurus, and since the known brain cavity was about the size of a walnut, it was mistakenly assumed that no animal of such size could function with such a small brain and that this enlargement was for a ‘second brain’ that controlled the hind regions and tail.
Ornithischia so unfortunately named because the shape/orientation of their pubis and hips were similar to that of birds. Birds were later shown to be theropodia.
(which are a branch of saurischia meaning “lizard-hipped” dinosaurs, so that’s ironic and confusing, except actually it happens constantly so maybe we shouldn’t pay too much attention to the latin etymologies)
Indeed. We’ll just file the with the list of retcons. Also inuded should be the north pole on a magnet, and the charge of an electron (+ v -) so conventional current can flow the right way.
I didn’t mean to infer that Stegosaurus was a sauropod … it isn’t … although members of the Stegosaur displayed the enlarged neural canal — AS DID OTHER LARGE SAUROPODS. I could have written it better to avoid the confusion, but I didn’t want to be accused of being a full-on pedantic nerd.
You’re not inferring anything, you’re IMPLYING that stegosaurs are sauropods – when you say “other large sauropods”, it implies that what you mentioned previously is ALSO a sauropod, otherwise there wouldn’t be “other” sauropods.
OK, here’s what I found in my ten-second Google search — and from no less a respectable source than Smithsonian.com —
(excerpt verbatim from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-double-dinosaur-brain-myth-12155823/) … but there was one particular misunderstanding that caught my attention. For decades, popular articles and books claimed that the armor-plated Stegosaurus and the biggest of the sauropod dinosaurs had second brains in their rumps. … Sauropods and stegosaurs seemed like the perfect candidates for butt brains. These huge dinosaurs seemed to have pitiful brain sizes compared to the rest of their body, and a second brain–or similar organ–could have helped coordinate their back legs and tails.
Othniel Charles Marsh. The idea was that Stegosaurs and Sauropods were so big and their brains were so small that they needed a second brain to co-ordinate their movements.
Dinosaurs also had enlarged spinal cords around their limbs, evidence of larger amounts of nervous system tissue, that could be mistaken for the location of a second brain.
It’s an understandable theory, but not an accurate one.
It would be funny if Jennifer attracting and being interested in bisexuals is a universal constant.
(Granted, we don’t technically know enough about Alice to be certain, but given she was evidently fooling around with dudes at parties much like Jennifer – I think that came up in a Patreon strip but that might be me fabricating something based off how we know Jennifer shrugged the Thing With Alice off to herself as just an ‘everyone does it, right?’ – I’ve been assuming bi as well. That said, she was clearly more invested in Jennifer than said dudes, and while that’s probably because Jennifer was the one she was fooling around with more than once, I wouldn’t rule out compulsory heterosexuality being in play there as well. We’re unlikely to see more Alice any time soon so the point’s moot and I would consider her a corroborating example since she was apparently a significant relationship in backstory, but eh, discussing her for completion’s sake/if I’m gonna list her anyway, may as well discuss her in more detail than a bit role merits.)
Anyway. Also Team Bi Asher. Complete the Bi-llingsworth Love Interests Set!
Kinda forgot about Alice when I wrote the comment initially TBH. I don’t know if Jennifer actually considered that a serious romantic relationship, considering both her general internalized bi-erasure and her apparently never having been on “a date with a girl” before Ruth.
Anywho as for evidence of Alice liking guys, I can’t find anything in non-Patreon DoA strips, or in Roomies for that matter. Not like there’s all that much of her to go on, though– all of like eleven appearances total.
There have been (and probably still are) a surprising number of people who have fulfilled various levels of relationships/romantic activities only to later in their life claim they’ve never been on a date before.
Absolutely. Which I considered but didn’t really elaborate well. Like I said, I think she’s bi and what evidence there is implies it, but she’s had so few appearances as a whole that if she ever reappeared and announced she’s gay it would just be a ‘huh. Well then.’ moment.
Asher could be bi. I’d never rule that out unless confirmed otherwise, but also it’s just attractive people in general are better treated. Walky’s hot, why wouldn’t you acknowledge a hot person?
To acknowledge that he’s hot, you first have to find him hot. To be able to find him hot, you first need to be into that sort of person. That means we know Asher isn’t 0 on the Kinsey scale. Given that he’s obviously not 6 either, he’s bi/pan in the widest sense. (Probably he’s 1, like apparently most people.)
Dina’s hat is like Yehuda Moon’s cycling cap or Burt Reynolds’ cowboy hat in “Smokey and the Bandit” (see the scene with Sally Field and Reynolds when she tells him, “Beau – take your hat off.”).
It only comes off for one reason and one reason alone.
Does anyone else think Dina is kinda starting to be a problem? I mean, she’s physically attacking people for making incorrect statements about dinosaurs. At the very least, someone like Amber needs to take her aside and tell her that’s not cool.
Eh I mean Dina doesn’t move the needle for me one way or another so. I dunno if problem is the right word but I wouldn’t mind a break from her
(And then the monkey paw curls and we get a Malaya centric story with a Mary B plot for six months.)
YES
MORE MALAYA
HWAT EVIL POWER MUST I SUMMON
DAVID666WILLIS I AM YOUR HUMBLE MINION
I BEG OF YOU TO ANTAGONIZE EVERYBODY AND MAKE MALAYA THE PROTAGONIST THANKYOU i’ll patreon you when im no longer broke, mwah
“also” as in, in addition to the regular ways i harvest power?
or “also” as in, like you?
whichever, listen, last night i dreamt about dogs for some reason, there was one dog who’d grabbed a crow between their teeth and they were sort of wrestling, and actually kind of flying around, i guess it was one of the really strong crows. then they almost got hit by a bus, and the crow was able to escape, and the dog was sad, and the bus driver was pissed.
so, you know, that was probably an omen of some sort.
I do not necessarily believe in omens. Besides their entertainment value, dreams provide a brief but valuable insight into the true nature of one’s mind, a tease of the potential of the most complex structure in the known universe.
As of recently, Joyce’s dream had power flowing through me like moonlight through fireflies. Oh how I savor nightmare fuel….
listen to yourself!!! you know you WANNA believe in omens!!!
come to our sabbath!!! get outrageously high and shed your upstanding scepticism for a night of Seditions, Witchcraft and Revelings!!!
Seriously though, if gods only communicate through scriptures and omens, the two most error-prone means of communication, one of two things must be certain:
1. Gods are really stupid and not worth praying to.
3. Gods are mischevious and teasing and mean, and they’re just constantly trolling us.
but even more seriously, if we’re talking seriously-seriously, i don’t believe in omens because i’m constitutionally unsuperstitious, but i can see how “believing” in omens, or astrology, or the I ching or whatever, could be a wonderful proxy to explore precisely what you said: the complex inner workings of our minds, especially the subconscious or nonverbal parts of it. Like, if i read a certain event as an omen of a certain thing, that’s some part of me doing the reading, and i’m retrieving information about me— regardless of whether the information was in the stars, or in the neural processes inside my body that were triggered by watching the stars. so believing it’s “actually” the latter doesn’t really matter, and maybe if you believe the former you listen to yourself better? i wouldn’t know anything about that, but, on paper, i support it
Fascinating Milu. Curiosity and excitment about what else the brain can do does not require evoking the supernatural.
Optimism, and even fiction about what we may discover in our continuing advancement of science and technology can very well be used to generate valuable predictions, and I do very, VERY well encourage it.
But we must remember though, whether they are generated through fear or optimism, all predictions must still hold up to the scientific method.
oh.
so it is.
i didn’t remember that song very well haha.
here let me copy have the relevant verse
I want your ugly, I want your disease
I want your everything as long as it’s free
I want your love
Love, love, love, I want your love, oh, ey
I want your drama, the touch of your hand (Hey!)
I want your leather-studded kiss in the sand
I’m listing this with her standard Comedic Teleportation abilities, personally. Presumably next arc will have less of them. But yeah, taken seriously, this is pretty dang inappropriate, Dina.
I think this is meant as a joke for comedic effect, and not really something we’re expected to understand as having happened. Partly since I’m pretty sure humans can’t actually jump that high. Also because, if she was legitimately attacking people, I would expect legitimate upset responses.
Things happening for comedic effect in this universe don’t not happen per se, but rather are swept under the rug when they violate otherwise consistent rules.
It’s like the Rule of Cool in D&D, but it’s the Rule of Funny. Events should not be taken seriously and will be immune to all consequences except those that further the funny.
it’s like people constantly getting horribly dead in Buffy The Vampire Slayer and people carrying on like it’s nbd.
eventually it got so outrageous that they justified it by implying that people living on a Hellmouth got mild amnesia about the carnage that went on around them on the daily. it was a minor running joke of the show.
let’s not overthink goofy slapstick. devouring amber’s pants was just a sight gag that happened off screen. it “happened” and was referenced afterward because otherwise we wouldn’t have known about it without a slipshine account.
Also because it furthered the funny. We got no further reference to the Hompking of Mary because it completed that funny arc. But there was more funny to be had still with the instance with Amber.
Ah, but the Stegosaurus lived in the Jurassic, whereas the larger HOMPKing dromaeosaurs she is emulating did not arise until the Cretaceous so she should obviously not be able to harm Lucy
It almost looks like Dina is leaping into the frame from outside the boundaries of the comic strip itself. If Willis had made that explicit somehow, it would have been even funnier 🙂
This is supposed to be played for laughs, but it’s getting aggravating. It’s one thing to attack Mary for being a fundie pest and another to help Amber out of a sticky situation, but Lucy would be well within her rights to press charges.
One aspect of Dina’s apparent abilities I didn’t notice anyone mention is not only that she’s teleportation level fast, but that she’s apparently getting FASTER.
When Amber riled her up, it took several seconds from somewhere in their own dorm for Dina to arrive. Here it’s instantaneous. Imagine if her rate of growth continues at this pace.
Her hearing may also be growing at the same rate since Amber felt yelling was necessary to summon the all powerful Dina. Here, what one would presume is a conversation of a relatively low decibel in another building was heard by her.
If her abilities increase, we could possibly see Dina visiting other dimensions or hompking backwards and forwards thru time.
Also the image of Dumbingverse Dina obtaining Cheese-levels of power through Dino Inaccuracy Senses to wipe out endless tide of ad comic villains who ruin cereal by making it soggy is just narratively perfect on like four levels, thank you for suggesting it.
One again, I am reminded of why I’ve come to strongly dislike the character of Dina and that she needs someone to take her to one side and spray her in the face with water or something until she finally come to realise that no-one cares whether it’s scientifically accurate. They only care if it’s fun or interesting for their own entertainment.
That’s not a good attitude to hold though. Like you should care about the science of a thing at least a little bit.
Dina takes it to sort of a slapstick extreme (because this webcomic is trying to tell jokes and be funny) but that doesn’t mean correcting misconceptions is inherently a bad thing
I dunno that’s really annoying to be honest. Nobody likes someone going “WELL ACTUALLY”every time you might be misinformed about something. It’s obnoxious.
That’s why instead of going “well actually” she directly pounces at you.
And not only that, she doesn’t explain the inaccuracy at the first attack so that you get some room to learn and grow on your own.
Someone correct me if I am mistaken, but I only recall Dina “Hompking” or in some other way correcting people she’s relatively close to. (Dorm building residents being the most distant connection.) I also think if someone asked Dina to stop telling them about dinosaurs, Dina would comply. I think most people have accepted this about her. That’s my two cents thrown into the void.
If it were played at all seriously, I’d be inclined to agree about Dina jumping people. But it’s not and no other characters have said boo about it, so it’s a little off-putting to put this gag under the same microscope as a real issue.
I mean, if we were taking this seriously, I’d probably get a bit pissed about “Someone really needs to tell the neuro-divergent-coded person that nobody cares about the things they care about, preferably using physical negative reinforcement”. But we’re not, so I don’t.
I mean if someone insists on being super aggressive about their obsession to the point they fly into a rage when someone’s incorrect, I would absolutely tell them I don’t care, neurodivergent or not. Being neurodivergent isn’t a free pass to be a pill and you should definitely be told when they’re overstepping. Especially since they may not have the social skills to be aware they’re bothering people.
Also if someone attacks me I wanna at least restrain them cuz getting pounced on is hot hurts.
But BenRG’s comment didn’t focus on the behavior of attacking people, which might be a problem if this wasn’t a comic invoking rule of funny. Really, if BenRG’s comment wasn’t its own attempt at being somewhat funny, then it does come off as rude.
Dina is a favorite which is why I find this behavior troubling. I know it’s being played for laughs and perhaps Dina has the wherewithal to know who she’s targeting. Nobody had a problem with her driving Mary away because she’s Mary. And Amber deliberately triggered Dina to get out of a sticky situation. Dina even compensated her later, but how well does she know Lucy? Lucy might not care for these shenanigans. And like it or not in America you have the right to be ignorant so if she attacks someone over incorrect dinosaur facts they could very well press charges. Outside the college campus she could get hurt because the attacked could use self defense as an excuse to deliver a beat down.
Now there’s a scene. Becky wondering how the hell she wound up in this scenario and also probably very excited, Dina getting some good exercise in and also cackling evilly because she knows exactly what she’s doing.
Listen I’m not saying she SHOULD. But like if I was Becky I would definitely say incorrect facts about Dinosaurs so Dina could rip my clothes off in a wild fury. 😛 The safe word should be correct dinosaur factoids.
While it’s perfectly right and natural that most comments are revolving around Dina here, I think there needs to be a comment thread just for appreciating how cute Walky and Lucy are snuggled up under a blanket together.
….
…. also, does their ship have a name yet? I thought it did but I don’t remember what it was. If there isn’t…. hmmm. “Light Walking”, maybe?
Ya know what, you’re right. We’ve all been (understandably) distracted with the cool dinosaur chick and haven’t said enough about the cartoon nerds cuddling. I think Lucy’s probably feeling extremely content after drooling over this jackass for the last three years, and I’m 200% here for that.
As for their ship name, how about “Lucky”? It combines their names nicely and could describe them both as well as their probable feelings about dating each other.
I feel like Dina should maybe differentiate from willful dino-incorrectness (such as creationists or Walky’s “they’re too cool to have feathers”) attitude and just, someone misunderstanding or repeating an incorrect but commonly held thought on dinosaurs.
One does deserve a solid HOMPFK, the other perhaps a polite infodump. I don’t see Lucy as the type to try to argue with Dina about dinosaurs.
Also, does Lucy have a loft bed? If so, Dina should join a basketball team.
I just also feel like other shots of Lucy’s room have those posters at regular standing height rather than level with a loft bed
Okay, not gonna lie, if I was student there I would walk around making incorrect statements about dinosaurs on purpose just so that when Dina flung herself through the air at me I could just step to the side and watch her faceplant.
Wouldn’t work. If she’s fast enough to cover such a vast distance at such a speed, as demonstrated in this strip, then she’s probably fast enough to catch herself in time, or better yet, do a barrel roll!
Impressive, apparently she has hearing strong enough to pick up incorrect dinosaur facts clear over in another building, and can instantaneously teleport to that exact location and phase through solid matter on reentry in order to attack. I did initially think that she was pants less when she telehompked, but then realized it was just the colour of her pants.
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Walky’s “incorrect dinosaur facts”-dar is improving
As a survival skill more than anything
Shouldn’t’ve said that …
Have to say any strip involving Stegosaurus facts has to be tailor-made for Thag Simmons
No kidding… apparently it can pick up inaccuracies all the way in different dorms now
Damn, misread that comment.
Dina’s, not Walky’s, has increased significantly increased in range
Do you think she picks up on it instantaneously, or is there a lightspeed delay?
If we moved her far enough away from the person saying the incorrect dinosaur fact, we could violate causality.
It is a quantum phenomenon. The truthfulness of dinosaur fact and Dina’s attack are in an entangled superposition. Once the fact is observed, it becomes either true or false, and the attack commences immediately in the later case. As such, there is no communication delay. However, since truthfulness is revealed only moments before attack, it sadly cannot be used to send information across great distances, per no-communication theorem.
She hears before the misstatement is made. Like a Ranyhyn arriving when called from the Plains of Ra.
Now, that’s a deep pop reference. The Unbeliever trilogy goes back to the 70s.
Quoting the 1970s does not violate any Covenant.
Geneseepaws FTW!
If this were able to violate causality, the distance between them wouldn’t matter. You may need a bit of distance to allow for reaction time, observations and records to show that the cause of the effect was chronologically outside of the error margins of the observed timing, but for the actual violation of causality, distance doesn’t matter so long as it’s outside the light-cone. (which is to say that effects are always within the light cone of the cause, except for certain weird quantum experiments they’ve been conducting where things are gettung fishy)
It’s not that she picks up on it instantaneously, it’s that there’s no light-speed delay in her physical corrective response (aka ‘attack’) that worries me.
They are in the the Girl’s dorms atm, and Dina’s room isnt to far away from her’s, so while that was a fast reaction, it probably isnt to difficult to hear things through those dorm room walls.
No, Lucy and Jennifer live in a different dorm.
Does anyone else notice strange similarities between her and Baldi from Baldi’s Basics?
Both use green in their color schemes.
Both are annoyed at scholarly inaccuracies.
Both have incredible hearing.
There’s some sort of wormhole-like phenomenon hiding behind doors. So far only Dina’s figured out how to use them.
Though Joyce can use a similar phenomenon to teleport to Dorothy.
I guess Mike & the Evil Dads (worst band name ever) gave Willis a taste for blood, now he’s killing off characters left and right!
rip in pieces
Why not just “Rest in Pieces”? Or did you actually mean tear into pieces? Or rest in Pisces? Or are you condemning the dead to be dismembered and scattered? Or..There is a lot to unpack in this.
Analytically dissecting a common joke phrase? Why don’t I just head over to the ATM machine and input my pin number to withdraw $5 dollars to reward you for your originality.
oof, that was unnecessary i think?
Unnecessary.
Hey, 5$ is 5$. I’ll take it. Please donate it to Child’s Play Charity. They donate games and toys for kids in childrens hospitals around the world.
Wait, isn’t this Lucy’s dorm room? That Starfire poster is hers, right?
…Just how good is Dina’s hearing, and how fast can she move?
The same thing occurred to me as well
The question is, if there are two incorrect dinosaur facts on opposite ends of campus, what happens?
Wonder what happens if two people watch copies of the Ringu video at the same time and then wait.
Though Dina’s clearly got Sadako beat on speed, Lucy didn’t have to wait a week for a response.
That’s why the one week wait. Thanks to modern video duplication and youtube like sites, Sadako has been swamped with requests for haunting. She’s so behind schedule at this point she doesn’t know when she’s actually going to get time off to rest in peace.
Dina’s “incorrect dino facts-sense” is kind of like Peter Parker’s “spidey-sense”. It triggers whenever someone states false facts about dinosaurs, regardless of their proximity to Dina. She doesn’t need to “hear” the fact to know it was wrong!
It is possibly also precognitive (as Parker’s spider-sense has sometimes been described), allowing her to sense the falsehood even before it is uttered!
Ooh! Dina’s a Pre-cog! She’ll soon be starring in a new movie: Minority Report: Jurassic World.
But will it protect Dina’s financial stability, as the ol’ Spidey-Sense has been shown to do?
Modern theory suggests that only one attack will occur, sparing one or more ignorant parties from due justice, but nobody has yet been brave enough to verify this experimentally.
She grabs whoever’s closest in her teeth, whips them back and forth like a dog shaking a rat, and then flings them across campus where on landing they crush the other offender.
I like to imagine that, in the case of simultaneous incorrect assertions among their friend group, Becky would happily chip in to handle one while Dina gets the other.
Dina is all-seeing, all-knowing, and omnipresent.
I can see two hypotheses much more likely to explain her extraordinary speed, senses and strength.
1. She learned those skills through meticulous study of the biophysics of prehistoric creatures, mostly dinosaurs.
2. She is the decendant of a samurai or a ninja.
2 would require the existence of Lamarckian inheritance (which is bullshit), so we can rule that out.
Not necessarily. Epigenetic inheritance allows a variety of traits to be transmitted across generations via routes of inherited DNA methyl tags, microbiomes, and antibodies just to name afew.
Fine. On a large scale (such as would be necessary to transfer human traits, skills, and abilities), Lamarckian inheritance is bullshit.
Silly me! I forgot to consider the possibility that it could be both of those suggested mechanisms working together!
Not as much as you seem to think though. Lamarckian theory was b.s., yes, but there is a remarkable amount of inheritable traits based on epigenetics. Even new therapies based on methyl tags. See: CRISPR and the new therapies for dis- and re-en abling specific genetics: CRISPRoff and CRISPRon. These are designed to cure genetic diseases, but instead of full excising the genes with CRISPR (like an amputation), now they can just switch them off and observe the effects, and these epigenetic changes are inheritable. An example of a real world epigentic trait, is a person growing up in an environment requiring broad hands (think blacksmith) will have their body respond, grow stronger, but also a more robust skeleton with larger hands. Their children have been shown to be more likely to have broad hands, even if they don’t grow up blacksmithing. (this was a cited example when I first read about epigenetics, but I can’t recall where that was written, else I’d provide the source)
too bad you don’t have a source, cos that sounds like a big claim.
Thank you. I’m so sick of people saying Lamarckian inheritance isn’t real when we know at this point that it is, in ways.
So we’re ruling out nature, but why rule out nurture?
Possibility 1 counts as nurture. While not sufficient for skills on their own, epigenetic inheritance may have at least provided some kind of head start in their development.
… so epigentics from ninja/samurai heritage?
I meant that being descended from ninja and/or samurai could be the source of her skills BECAUSE HER FAMILY TAUGHT HER.
….
…. okay, no, I’m getting a little bit uncomfortable with adjacency to the Japanese-implies-ninja-samurai-and/or-karate trope, so I’m going with the Lamarck thing instead. This is a silly thread, I get to be silly.
Oooh, better yet! Non-epigentic Evolutionary-Science skills through Lamarkian inheritance!
I merely suggested that epigenetic inheritance is one of the major factors behind her skills, although it probably plays less of a role than her study of prehistoric species.
I mean her skills of extraordinary speed, senses and strength.
Were your parents particularly silly Reltzik? Maybe this silliness is also a heritable trait too? Also, why is it that everytime I read your handle, it makes me think of Ruth Lessick? Some combination of the letters and structure I suppose.
Demoted: Mom’s particularly silly. Dad’s particularly quick to go to another room when Mom and I are in a positive-silly-feedback-loop. And I’m guessing you’re right about why the name makes you think of Ruth (mostly the same letters or close to them, in roughly the same order), but I was using this handle before IW started.
No, it wouldn’t necessarily require Lamarckian descent. I am a descendant of foundry workers, which has left me with a short, square physique and fantastic stamina. But my ancestors didn’t give me that physique because they were foundry workers, they became foundry workers because during the industrial revolution, my bloodline’s genetic tendency towards “short, broad and strong” made them perfectly suited for foundry jobs.
Similarly, Dina could inherit ninja traits from a ninja ancestor, because those were the traits that gave said ancestor the aptitude for ninja training.
i live for these nonsense conversations about evolution <3
anyway, here's a thought experiment.
suppose there's a skill, such as "raptor-sense" which one really has to start learning in the first 2 or 3 years of life, or it's very unlikely you'll ever catch up with the True Raptors if you learn it later.
Let's say that early training is complicated, and time-consuming, and you have to teach it exactly right or it's no use. so you have to really know what you're doing, and be really motivated.
Now, who but a True Raptor, or someone very well versed in those arts, will go to the trouble of teaching their infant the crucial early stages of the art?
Final point: though the core teaching is unchanging, as some techniques (such as how to neutralize someone armed with a bamboo flute) become disused (due to the lack of bamboo flutes in your environment), the Raptors may stop teaching them; while some techniques which would not have existed previously (such as using concrete-based architecture to bounce around) are eventually developped and passed on.
OK, now you're an alien scientist and in earthling evolution 101 you learn, "there's darwinian evolution, yadda yadda, and there's lamarckian evolution though it's barely a thing in multicellular organisms, bla bla".
Now you decide to study the lineages of Raptors in that one earthling species, Homo Sapiens. (which you probably call by a less pretentious latin name, such as Simius Invasivus or whatever).
How do you NOT run back to your thesis advisor and yell: OMG I've found lamarckian evolution in Homo Sapiens!!!
idk is that silly? did i just silly all over your smarts?
I notice that a major confusion over epigenetics is that it somehow confirms Lamarckian theory, which it does not.
Darwin said that traits had some means of mutating and getting transmitted among generations, but he didn’t specify exactly what those mechanisms actually were.
DNA was naturally the first means of said mutation and transmission we discovered in host cells of living things.
Since then, we have built even more upon Darwin’s original work with population genetics and the like. Epigenetic mechanisms are just building upon this framework even more!
ok yeah, that’s useful PSA as regards what Darwin and Lamarck actually said (and i do feel bad for poor Lamarck getting remembered as “the guy who was wrong”, when really w/r/t inheritance Darwin basically agreed with Lamarck and so was equally wrong) but anyway, by now the word “lamarckian” has, however improperly, become shorthand for “inheritance of acquired characters”, so, that’s how i was using it =)
but to put what i’ve said another way,
why don’t we include cultural transmission under the umbrella of “epigenetic transmission”?
The brain, the skills and knowledge it can retain and transmit to others without reproduction, their ability to mutate and refine useful behaviors called meme, were a major game changer for all of life. In a sense, I guess you can call neuroplasticity the Ultimate Epigenome.
Just below the massively adaptable brain lay the other means of inheritance, in order of speed of mutation: antibodies, host DNA methylation, microbiome and prion mutation.
I know that this is a massive oversimplification. But a very important point is still made.
Milu: For the same reason we classify mechanical reactions, chemical reactions, and nuclear reactions differently.
Genetics involves changes to the genes themselves. Call this analogous to a nuclear reaction where the nucleus of an atom is changed by adding or removing protons or electrons.
Epigenetics doesn’t change the DNA, but does change how that DNA expresses itself, including the nature of the cells the DNA reproduces and how they react to their surroundings. Call this equivalent to chemical reactions. The underlying atoms are the same, but they are brought together in different ways to create different molecules that are fundamentally different in how they interact with other molecules.
Learning changes neither. The cells of the brain remain basically the same in their functioning. What changes is how the cells are organized and interconnected and the strengths of the connections between them. (Maybe you could make a case for some aspects of this to be epigenetic, but it’s something of a grey matter.) This is a bit like a mechanical reaction. You rearrange a machine or take apart and rebuild an object, but the underlying chemistry remains the same.
…
…. okay, I don’t really know what I’m talking about. That was just an excuse for the stealth pun. *flees for dear punning life*
meh, i guess Wagstaff was right, i am a bit muddled myself.
My INITIAL musing wasn’t really “should cultural inheritance count as epigenetic” as i’m sure you’re right that epigenetics being defined as related to the switching-on-&-off of genes is by and large accepted as canon;
INSTEAD i was really interested in the way biologists (afaict????) tend to basically wave away “inheritance of acquired characteristics” (let’s call’em IAC) as non-existant or at best irrelevant.
and yeah sure this has been challenged by epigenetics, but i feel like the consensus is that IAC is still essentially not a thing in complex organisms, with the exception of immunity but geneticists have always known about that and accepted that that was a special case, so, whatever.
NOTWITHSTANDING all that noise, WHY don’t we count CULTURAL transmission as IAC? i pompously wonder.
…and, you know, your answer still holds, in that those are just the categories we (mostly) agree upon. biology (mostly) doesn’t deal with cultural inheritance because that’s (mostly) not what biology is about, and there’s a line in the sand between biology and non-biology and that’s just the way… things… are.
but that line has shifted before, and it might shift again!!!
…although as i write this i’m reminded that biologists blithely forcing their evolutionary models onto humans has not *always* been a cool idea in the past, so, idk maybe that line in the sand is fine just where it is. ok, bye
PS. that was a terrible pun. worth it.
Just to br clear, evolutionary models on their own were not responsible for said damaging discrimination of the past; bearing scarce exceptions, the scientists behind these models respected the nature, origins and limits of their research.
Much akin to IQ tests, evolutionary models were of course appropriated, misused and abused by bigots, who turned these models into ammunition for their own unacceptable purposes.
ok, no. theories are not innocent of the social context of the people producing them. And the elaboration of modern evolutionary theory paralleled European colonialism and the American conquest of the west.
Look, i’m not sufficiently versed to make a solid argument, but i’ve also read enough history of biology to know to be sceptical of the claim that “bearing scarce exceptions… the scientists behind the models respected the limits of their research”. I’m not burning any books here. But context matters.
I’m also dubious about how scarce the exceptions were. It’s hard to think that, for example, eugenics was the work of only a few outliers.
But as a good rule of thumb, scientists (er, “scientists”) who start out looking to arrive at certain conclusions matching their own attitudes (be those attitudes racial chauvinism, or religious chauvinism, or male chauvinism, or buy-our-product chauvinism) don’t discover so much as fabricate. If they’re too busy forcing the evidence where they want it to go, they can’t follow the evidence where it leads. What results is usually either something completely unfalsifiable (which, nowadays at least, is acknowledged as bad science) or something that is quickly falsified. That doesn’t mean that all the scientists that made huge breakthroughs were free of such attitudes, far from it, but being able to put aside their prejudice while you work is an essential skill for doing science. If they can’t do that, the resulting theory will not withstand review.
What you get in that case is… well, something akin to a YEC or QAnon or an election conspiracy theorist. People who will rapidly snap up any factoid to “prove” the point, who produces an abhorrent mess of a theory that falls apart with only the slightest bit of skeptical review, but who can still sell the finished product because the people they’re selling it to are buying affirmation rather than truth and aren’t the sort to check under the hood or kick the tires if it matches their preconceptions.
“something completely unfalsifiable (which, nowadays at least, is acknowledged as bad science)”
You would think, and yet string theory.
The people who did that weren’t even real scientists. Social Darwinism wasn’t invented by Darwin. The inventor of the IQ test even protested against its use in disenfranchised people.
Also Milu, the time period and dominant religious atmosphere in which a scientific or otherwise secular theory is created has nothing to do with the validity of its content.
When I quote the author of some idea, sometimes I may have very significant disagreements with them. For instance, I achknowledge that Darwin grew up in a very binary thinking society, and even though he was an agnostic, I still disagree with him there.
The point I’m trying to make is, the author is incidental, and the idea always stands or falls on its OWN merits, not that of the author.
The original IQ tests and evolutionary theory had no elements in them that were intrinsically supremacist. In fact, inter-species cooperation is very well supported by Darwin’s original framework.
Condemning evolutionary theory for having its popular understanding twisted by bigots for their unacceptable purposes is like condemning the brick instead of its wielder for stoning someone to death.
In fairness, Milu does have a point. Darwinian evolution (much less the modern synthesis) isn’t tainted by what the racists did and still do with it, but there is still a warning to be taken from that whole kerfuffle to beware of science that one doesn’t understand, especially in the hands of groups using it to further their own ideological ends.
(Also, string theory isn’t accepted as proven science. An interesting model (er, set of models) with theoretical coherence, potential, and a couple of details that have born fruit, but as a whole it’s still a hypothetical.)
@Wag,
my point was, biologists (#NotAllBiologists) have at times presumed of the explanatory power of their discipline, and overapplied their methods to realms that they were either not really equipped to deal with, or were simply too biased to study carefully. I’m not calling out darwinian evolution itself, like who am I? anyway, i basically worship Darwin and i refuse to learn anything unsavoury about him.
no, but i was mostly thinking, as Reltzik said, of eugenics (Francis Galton: scientist) and assorted flavours of scientific racism.
*HOT TAKE* scientific racism: it was a thing done by scientists!!!
…many of them very reputable. The Paris Society of Anthropology was founded in the 19th century by Paul Broca (very famous doctor) and comprised many fairly eminent scholars of the time, and it was essentially dedicated to measuring skulls, based on the hypothesis of anatomically measurable differences in intelligence between the races and the sexes (a hypothesis which took a very long time to be dropped despite, obviously, no evidence whatsoever.)
So, i feel like we’re not talking of the same thing, quite. i have nothing but admiration for good science that stems from wonder and humility, my ranting was more about how, uh.. good dogs do bad things? i don’t know. i’m exhausted. fucking insomnia, man.
but anyway, i appreciated this conversation =)
ok and now i’m rereading and it sounds like i’m moving the goalposts. i did say that scientific theories shouldn’t be abstracted from their social context, and i stand by that , (i guess i was making 2 sort-of-separate points ok) but it’s a looong conversation??? and now that i’m finally boring myself to sleep i dont wanna miss this train of melatonin, so, xoxox
Alternatively, we can assume that ninjas have undergone generations of selective breeding, which is Darwinian evolution.
Actually, it’s just that Dina is all-seeing, all-knowing, and omnipresent.
3. In DoA, Dina is The Cheese.
Raptor, raptor, what do you hear?
*Dina turns, staring at the fourth wall with sharp, sharp teeth.’
“ALL.”
Maybe she raised a poster of Starfire in Walky’s room, like a flag of conquest.
Oooh, I like this theory!
Claiming her territory…
On the other hand, maybe she and Walky are more compatible than we’ve credited them for because they actually have some common interests, like cartoons and comics?
Dina is Schrodenger’s dinosaur: she is potentially behind every door. You can only know whether she’s actually behind any given door when you collapse the wave form by actually looking behind the door. Or by saying something wrong about dinosaurs.
As fast as the funny needs her to move.
She can hear anything in the immediate vicinity of a door, and can proceed from behind one open door to behind another without having to traverse the spacetime between them.
Well RIP
Brains in their what??? Now who started that rumor?
It was a common Dinosaur Fact back when I was a kid, but I’ve never tried doing the research forensics to figure out where it came from.
Othniel Charles Marsh. In fairness to him, it was 1881 and paleontology was still an anything goes-sort of discipline.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-double-dinosaur-brain-myth-12155823/
You don’t hear much from kids named ‘Othniel’ these days.
Basically from what I recall, it comes from a misunderstanding of Stegosaurus physiology; despite being the size of a minivan, Stegosaurus‘s brain was famously the size of a walnut – but a large cavity (as in, 20x the size of their brain cavity) was discovered to exist in their spinal-cord-canal where it passed through their hips, leading to the misconception that this large cavity was used to hold a “second brain” that controlled the…lower-body functions of the dinosaur, among other things.
So what was the second cavity used for?
We’re not currently sure! Modern birds have a similarly-located cavity around their spinal cord that’s used to contain what’s known as a “glycogen body”, but that still leaves a whole lot of questions since 1) despite both being dinosaurs, Stegosaurus isn’t exactly closely related to modern birds – meaning this might just be a case of convergent evolution – and 2) we don’t actually know for sure what a bird’s glycogen body does for it either (though there’s a few theories). I’m sure there’re people out there who’ve dedicated whole parts of their careers to studying these things. 😛
Various other dinosaurs had it, too, so the distribution shouldn’t be a problem. And while we don’t know what the glycogen body in birds does specifically, glycogen is the usual way to store energy as glucose; we do that, too, just not in a centralized place like that.
According to a quick Google check, it was an enlarged neural canal near the hip regions of Stegosaurus and other large sauropods like Diplodocus, Brachiasaurus, Camarasaurus, and Brontosaurus, and since the known brain cavity was about the size of a walnut, it was mistakenly assumed that no animal of such size could function with such a small brain and that this enlargement was for a ‘second brain’ that controlled the hind regions and tail.
Stegosaurus wasn’t a sauropod. They weren’t even closely related, what with sauropods being saurischia and stegosauria being ornitischia.
Ornithischia so unfortunately named because the shape/orientation of their pubis and hips were similar to that of birds. Birds were later shown to be theropodia.
(which are a branch of saurischia meaning “lizard-hipped” dinosaurs, so that’s ironic and confusing, except actually it happens constantly so maybe we shouldn’t pay too much attention to the latin etymologies)
Indeed. We’ll just file the with the list of retcons. Also inuded should be the north pole on a magnet, and the charge of an electron (+ v -) so conventional current can flow the right way.
*historical retcons. For future time travellers or universe hackers to correct. Also, Tau vs Pi while we’re at it.
I didn’t mean to infer that Stegosaurus was a sauropod … it isn’t … although members of the Stegosaur displayed the enlarged neural canal — AS DID OTHER LARGE SAUROPODS. I could have written it better to avoid the confusion, but I didn’t want to be accused of being a full-on pedantic nerd.
You’re not inferring anything, you’re IMPLYING that stegosaurs are sauropods – when you say “other large sauropods”, it implies that what you mentioned previously is ALSO a sauropod, otherwise there wouldn’t be “other” sauropods.
OK, here’s what I found in my ten-second Google search — and from no less a respectable source than Smithsonian.com —
(excerpt verbatim from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-double-dinosaur-brain-myth-12155823/)
… but there was one particular misunderstanding that caught my attention. For decades, popular articles and books claimed that the armor-plated Stegosaurus and the biggest of the sauropod dinosaurs had second brains in their rumps. … Sauropods and stegosaurs seemed like the perfect candidates for butt brains. These huge dinosaurs seemed to have pitiful brain sizes compared to the rest of their body, and a second brain–or similar organ–could have helped coordinate their back legs and tails.
You still got a problem, take it up with them.
You’ll note the absolute lack of the word “other” in that quote.
Ignore Bill and Daniel. The second cavity was used to smuggle cocaine and anyone who denies it is a cop.
Nonono. The cops are the ones yelling that it’s a fact. The ones denying it are the unjustly-profiled Stegosauruses.
(Stegosauri? There are supposed to be italics, but do I also italicize the pluralization?)
That’s what she said! (God I’m so sorry)
Othniel Charles Marsh. The idea was that Stegosaurs and Sauropods were so big and their brains were so small that they needed a second brain to co-ordinate their movements.
Dinosaurs also had enlarged spinal cords around their limbs, evidence of larger amounts of nervous system tissue, that could be mistaken for the location of a second brain.
It’s an understandable theory, but not an accurate one.
Now Lucy has also gotten further with Dina than Becky…she really needs to learn some dino facts, or I guess not learn them actually.
Super cute, and also, I’m still curious if this is a “like recognizes like” thing with Asher, or if he’s bisexual.
I mean basically every other major love interest Jennifer has had to date in either continuity has been bi, so…
It would be funny if Jennifer attracting and being interested in bisexuals is a universal constant.
(Granted, we don’t technically know enough about Alice to be certain, but given she was evidently fooling around with dudes at parties much like Jennifer – I think that came up in a Patreon strip but that might be me fabricating something based off how we know Jennifer shrugged the Thing With Alice off to herself as just an ‘everyone does it, right?’ – I’ve been assuming bi as well. That said, she was clearly more invested in Jennifer than said dudes, and while that’s probably because Jennifer was the one she was fooling around with more than once, I wouldn’t rule out compulsory heterosexuality being in play there as well. We’re unlikely to see more Alice any time soon so the point’s moot and I would consider her a corroborating example since she was apparently a significant relationship in backstory, but eh, discussing her for completion’s sake/if I’m gonna list her anyway, may as well discuss her in more detail than a bit role merits.)
Anyway. Also Team Bi Asher. Complete the Bi-llingsworth Love Interests Set!
Kinda forgot about Alice when I wrote the comment initially TBH. I don’t know if Jennifer actually considered that a serious romantic relationship, considering both her general internalized bi-erasure and her apparently never having been on “a date with a girl” before Ruth.
Anywho as for evidence of Alice liking guys, I can’t find anything in non-Patreon DoA strips, or in Roomies for that matter. Not like there’s all that much of her to go on, though– all of like eleven appearances total.
There have been (and probably still are) a surprising number of people who have fulfilled various levels of relationships/romantic activities only to later in their life claim they’ve never been on a date before.
Alice being more invested in Jennifer doesn’t mean she was more interested in girls than boys, just that she was more infatuated with Jennifer.
Absolutely. Which I considered but didn’t really elaborate well. Like I said, I think she’s bi and what evidence there is implies it, but she’s had so few appearances as a whole that if she ever reappeared and announced she’s gay it would just be a ‘huh. Well then.’ moment.
Asher could be bi. I’d never rule that out unless confirmed otherwise, but also it’s just attractive people in general are better treated. Walky’s hot, why wouldn’t you acknowledge a hot person?
To acknowledge that he’s hot, you first have to find him hot. To be able to find him hot, you first need to be into that sort of person. That means we know Asher isn’t 0 on the Kinsey scale. Given that he’s obviously not 6 either, he’s bi/pan in the widest sense. (Probably he’s 1, like apparently most people.)
If he is Bi then he and Jennifer got that in common.
DEATH FROM ABOVE
Sometimes, some memes really make sense, even ad nauseam.
Bring up that one GTA pic, and maybe some new garments.
Dina is HOMPKing so hard her hat almost fell off.
Identity of what her host once was is classifiedGood thing her hat didn’t come off, a completely inconspicuous apartment building in Denver might’ve exploded otherwise.
Dina’s hat is like Yehuda Moon’s cycling cap or Burt Reynolds’ cowboy hat in “Smokey and the Bandit” (see the scene with Sally Field and Reynolds when she tells him, “Beau – take your hat off.”).
It only comes off for one reason and one reason alone.
Feral Dina Hair is barely restrained by the hat.
Meanwhile, back in Read hall, Becy just got a rush and can’t quite place why.
Dammit Dina, this is not a good time.
Well Lucy should’ve thought of that before trotting out a false dino fact.
Okay, but hear me out – I was enjoying the date.
I agree with you, but I gotta side with Devin on this one.
Dinawoman strikes!
Walky being so hung up on being feminine is weird when by all accounts his sister is the tougher one.
Which may be playing into his insecurities, if you think about it
This right here.
I’m willing to bet this comes up explicitly in-story before *checks backlog date* October this year.
Wait, does this count as a “messy hair Dina”?
Does anyone else think Dina is kinda starting to be a problem? I mean, she’s physically attacking people for making incorrect statements about dinosaurs. At the very least, someone like Amber needs to take her aside and tell her that’s not cool.
“You should only physically attack people as a way to deal with your past trauma and increasingly problematic habit of dissociating.”
Works for me.
Eh I mean Dina doesn’t move the needle for me one way or another so. I dunno if problem is the right word but I wouldn’t mind a break from her
(And then the monkey paw curls and we get a Malaya centric story with a Mary B plot for six months.)
YES
MORE MALAYA
HWAT EVIL POWER MUST I SUMMON
DAVID666WILLIS I AM YOUR HUMBLE MINION
I BEG OF YOU TO ANTAGONIZE EVERYBODY AND MAKE MALAYA THE PROTAGONIST THANKYOU i’ll patreon you when im no longer broke, mwah
So you also draw upon dark forces for your power? Oh too fascinating!!!
I sure hope we get to see someone’s dream sometime soon! Such would be a marvelous battery….
“also” as in, in addition to the regular ways i harvest power?
or “also” as in, like you?
whichever, listen, last night i dreamt about dogs for some reason, there was one dog who’d grabbed a crow between their teeth and they were sort of wrestling, and actually kind of flying around, i guess it was one of the really strong crows. then they almost got hit by a bus, and the crow was able to escape, and the dog was sad, and the bus driver was pissed.
so, you know, that was probably an omen of some sort.
By the looks of it, the first option for “also”.
I do not necessarily believe in omens. Besides their entertainment value, dreams provide a brief but valuable insight into the true nature of one’s mind, a tease of the potential of the most complex structure in the known universe.
As of recently, Joyce’s dream had power flowing through me like moonlight through fireflies. Oh how I savor nightmare fuel….
But I don’t mean that in an Evil Queen Beryl kind of way!
listen to yourself!!! you know you WANNA believe in omens!!!
come to our sabbath!!! get outrageously high and shed your upstanding scepticism for a night of Seditions, Witchcraft and Revelings!!!
Seriously though, if gods only communicate through scriptures and omens, the two most error-prone means of communication, one of two things must be certain:
1. Gods are really stupid and not worth praying to.
2. Gods don’t exist.
OOOOOOORRRR third options:
3. Gods are mischevious and teasing and mean, and they’re just constantly trolling us.
but even more seriously, if we’re talking seriously-seriously, i don’t believe in omens because i’m constitutionally unsuperstitious, but i can see how “believing” in omens, or astrology, or the I ching or whatever, could be a wonderful proxy to explore precisely what you said: the complex inner workings of our minds, especially the subconscious or nonverbal parts of it. Like, if i read a certain event as an omen of a certain thing, that’s some part of me doing the reading, and i’m retrieving information about me— regardless of whether the information was in the stars, or in the neural processes inside my body that were triggered by watching the stars. so believing it’s “actually” the latter doesn’t really matter, and maybe if you believe the former you listen to yourself better? i wouldn’t know anything about that, but, on paper, i support it
Fascinating Milu. Curiosity and excitment about what else the brain can do does not require evoking the supernatural.
Optimism, and even fiction about what we may discover in our continuing advancement of science and technology can very well be used to generate valuable predictions, and I do very, VERY well encourage it.
But we must remember though, whether they are generated through fear or optimism, all predictions must still hold up to the scientific method.
Honestly, I’m just enthusiastic about dreams for the hope that one day, I’ll have one that’s like a month long, bizarre, action packed adventure!
sweet month-long bizarre action-packed dreams to you then, Waggy!
The Roller Derby arc is next, so you may get your wish
HEY! the title of the next storyline just changed by the way, did you see? it used to be something different, “I Want Your Revenge” I think?
THOUGHT YOU COULD SLIP THIS ONE PAST US WILLIS
NICE TRYYYYyyok i’ve definitely had too much coffee
I think it had another title before that, actually! Still a reference to “Bad Romance,” though.
oh.
so it is.
i didn’t remember that song very well haha.
here let me copy have the relevant verse
I want your ugly, I want your disease
I want your everything as long as it’s free
I want your love
Love, love, love, I want your love, oh, ey
I want your drama, the touch of your hand (Hey!)
I want your leather-studded kiss in the sand
I’m listing this with her standard Comedic Teleportation abilities, personally. Presumably next arc will have less of them. But yeah, taken seriously, this is pretty dang inappropriate, Dina.
I think this is meant as a joke for comedic effect, and not really something we’re expected to understand as having happened. Partly since I’m pretty sure humans can’t actually jump that high. Also because, if she was legitimately attacking people, I would expect legitimate upset responses.
I mean, she did have to buy Amber new pants after “devouring” her other pair, so it’s difficult to say that “didn’t happen.”
Things happening for comedic effect in this universe don’t not happen per se, but rather are swept under the rug when they violate otherwise consistent rules.
It’s like the Rule of Cool in D&D, but it’s the Rule of Funny. Events should not be taken seriously and will be immune to all consequences except those that further the funny.
it’s like people constantly getting horribly dead in Buffy The Vampire Slayer and people carrying on like it’s nbd.
eventually it got so outrageous that they justified it by implying that people living on a Hellmouth got mild amnesia about the carnage that went on around them on the daily. it was a minor running joke of the show.
Huh. You make this sound like it’s some kind of comic strip or something.
This, a comic strip? Nah, Dumbing of Age is funny sometimes.
Rule of Funny.
Remember the MST3K Mantra.
“Just repeat to yourself ‘it’s just a
showcomic, I should really just relax’.”let’s not overthink goofy slapstick. devouring amber’s pants was just a sight gag that happened off screen. it “happened” and was referenced afterward because otherwise we wouldn’t have known about it without a slipshine account.
Also because it furthered the funny. We got no further reference to the Hompking of Mary because it completed that funny arc. But there was more funny to be had still with the instance with Amber.
>let’s not overthink goofy slapstick
Careful, now. That sort of thinking might just lead to nuclear war, one day. Somehow.
Probably not Amber, that’d be incredibly hypocritical.
Amber being hypocritical would be wildly out of character, I gotta say.
If more people got a beating for spouting unscientific nonsense, we wouldn’t have to deal with antivaxxers.
I don’t know if going that far would be necessary, but seriously, not a bad trade!
The main reason those fuckheads don’t get hit more is that people with more than one brain cell tend not to touch toxic waste.
Ah, but the Stegosaurus lived in the Jurassic, whereas the larger HOMPKing dromaeosaurs she is emulating did not arise until the Cretaceous so she should obviously not be able to harm Lucy
Who’s to say that nothing went HOMPK before the dromaeosaurs? Reasonable speculation, I say.
There are dromaeosaur teeth contemporary with Stegosaurus.
Dina didn’t even use the door this time, she was moving so fast she phased through the wall like a Mario 64 speedrunner.
Maiming people spreading dinosaur inaccuracies speedrun (world record)
She was behind the door all along.
She is behind all the doors.
*plays the Godzilla march on the hacked Muzak*
A Classic Is A Classic.
How about boss music from the NES game?
Prefers a more modern classic.
I was thinking more of the music playing during the raptor attack in The Lost World
Now I don’t know if I must keep this “Dinna lurking in the dark” avatar, or just put this “Dinna in bersek” awesome face.
Walky, you should stop arguing to Lucy right now. She speaking in Latim, so, she must be right.
Dina….dinosaurs and chickens may be related on some evolutionary level, but that doesn’t mean you need to be a cock blocker.
I wonder if Lucy did that on purpose, for the same reason Ruth hid behind the bar counter…
For a second I thought she punched in without any pants on.
Dina was in the middle of using the bathroom when she heard what Lucy said. Time was of the essence.
“Vandelay Industries!”
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if someone had portrayed Dimetredon and Triceratops living in the same time period
Worse, it’s as if someone said Dimetredon was a dinosaur.
Are you telling me my bag of plastic dinosaurs was a lie?
I love Walky’s utter lack of reaction to Dina’s appearance.
“Fourth time today, damn.”
It almost looks like Dina is leaping into the frame from outside the boundaries of the comic strip itself. If Willis had made that explicit somehow, it would have been even funnier 🙂
Look again. Dina is using the poster as a portal.
All storylines should end with Dina pouncing on somebody.
That would be lawesome
Maulsome
I am sensing a tremor in the Yoto.
What kinda pouncing are we talking about here? 😛
That’s kind of a…really nice angle on Dina’s body right there.
Kinda hotgood angle
You said it first.
If one were to state a false dino fact while Dina was in the shower, would they receive a nude Dina tackle?
And then Lucy was never seen again…
…
…
…
Uttering falsehoods about dinosaurs, I mean.
Whoops, Lucy’s dead now
Someone needs to introduce Dina to Kent Hovind.
…
Because of the spectacle, that’s why.
“Oh the humanity!”
The amount of blood exceeds the volume of an actual human body.
Uhh, Dina…
Velociraptors may have feathers, but that doesn’t mean they could fly.
Well, at the very least, they could jump really far.
Dina’s only been a Velociraptor once to my memory – she’s been a whole bunch of other raptors too, and some species were capable of flight.
But there were flying dromaeosaurids
Or at least ones that could fall with style
This is supposed to be played for laughs, but it’s getting aggravating. It’s one thing to attack Mary for being a fundie pest and another to help Amber out of a sticky situation, but Lucy would be well within her rights to press charges.
This.
This is such a weird take, and it’s weird to see multiple people sharing it about something so goofy and not at all serious.
One aspect of Dina’s apparent abilities I didn’t notice anyone mention is not only that she’s teleportation level fast, but that she’s apparently getting FASTER.
When Amber riled her up, it took several seconds from somewhere in their own dorm for Dina to arrive. Here it’s instantaneous. Imagine if her rate of growth continues at this pace.
Her hearing may also be growing at the same rate since Amber felt yelling was necessary to summon the all powerful Dina. Here, what one would presume is a conversation of a relatively low decibel in another building was heard by her.
If her abilities increase, we could possibly see Dina visiting other dimensions or hompking backwards and forwards thru time.
“Heh heh heh. They may have bested us before, but with these almighty Sog-raptors, finally SOGGIES MAY RULE.”
“Almighty Sogmaster, aren’t these actually based of Deinonychus?”
“Who cares about that?”
*An extended silence, before:*
“HOMPK!”
And that’s how the Soggies were finally defeated. Though Dina was of course disgusted by their awful texture.
I was hoping for something like this.
Happy to oblige!
Also the image of Dumbingverse Dina obtaining Cheese-levels of power through Dino Inaccuracy Senses to wipe out endless tide of ad comic villains who ruin cereal by making it soggy is just narratively perfect on like four levels, thank you for suggesting it.
When did Walky become Irish?
Huh?
He’s always been Irish. Did his last name being O’Niell not tip you off?
And it’s times like frame 4 that remind me that in the other universe, Walky and Dina used to date.
One again, I am reminded of why I’ve come to strongly dislike the character of Dina and that she needs someone to take her to one side and spray her in the face with water or something until she finally come to realise that no-one cares whether it’s scientifically accurate. They only care if it’s fun or interesting for their own entertainment.
I mean, if you’re effective enough in hunting them down they might start to care.
That’s not a good attitude to hold though. Like you should care about the science of a thing at least a little bit.
Dina takes it to sort of a slapstick extreme (because this webcomic is trying to tell jokes and be funny) but that doesn’t mean correcting misconceptions is inherently a bad thing
I dunno that’s really annoying to be honest. Nobody likes someone going “WELL ACTUALLY”every time you might be misinformed about something. It’s obnoxious.
That’s why instead of going “well actually” she directly pounces at you.
And not only that, she doesn’t explain the inaccuracy at the first attack so that you get some room to learn and grow on your own.
Someone correct me if I am mistaken, but I only recall Dina “Hompking” or in some other way correcting people she’s relatively close to. (Dorm building residents being the most distant connection.) I also think if someone asked Dina to stop telling them about dinosaurs, Dina would comply. I think most people have accepted this about her. That’s my two cents thrown into the void.
The void says “thank you, please come again” in a chilling lovecraftian hiss.
If it were played at all seriously, I’d be inclined to agree about Dina jumping people. But it’s not and no other characters have said boo about it, so it’s a little off-putting to put this gag under the same microscope as a real issue.
I mean, if we were taking this seriously, I’d probably get a bit pissed about “Someone really needs to tell the neuro-divergent-coded person that nobody cares about the things they care about, preferably using physical negative reinforcement”. But we’re not, so I don’t.
That would be a pretty good point, hypothetically speaking.
I mean if someone insists on being super aggressive about their obsession to the point they fly into a rage when someone’s incorrect, I would absolutely tell them I don’t care, neurodivergent or not. Being neurodivergent isn’t a free pass to be a pill and you should definitely be told when they’re overstepping. Especially since they may not have the social skills to be aware they’re bothering people.
Also if someone attacks me I wanna at least restrain them cuz getting pounced on
is hothurts.But BenRG’s comment didn’t focus on the behavior of attacking people, which might be a problem if this wasn’t a comic invoking rule of funny. Really, if BenRG’s comment wasn’t its own attempt at being somewhat funny, then it does come off as rude.
She knows that, and she’s trying to change it.
Dina is a favorite which is why I find this behavior troubling. I know it’s being played for laughs and perhaps Dina has the wherewithal to know who she’s targeting. Nobody had a problem with her driving Mary away because she’s Mary. And Amber deliberately triggered Dina to get out of a sticky situation. Dina even compensated her later, but how well does she know Lucy? Lucy might not care for these shenanigans. And like it or not in America you have the right to be ignorant so if she attacks someone over incorrect dinosaur facts they could very well press charges. Outside the college campus she could get hurt because the attacked could use self defense as an excuse to deliver a beat down.
Could you explain what Dina being a favorite has to do with the rest of your comment, if it’s meant to be related?
Now this is the kind of quality content I come here for.
Apparently Dina has gained the ability to teleport, but only when someone says something inaccurate about dinosaurs.
It’s like how Joyce can teleport, but only directly to Dorothy.
I wonder if it can be used for inter-planetary travel…
Yes but you have to get the incorrect-fact-sayer there the old fashioned way first. The big question is how much extra mass could Dina carry?
Time for Dina to hit the gym… we might start with benchpressing Becky.
Now there’s a scene. Becky wondering how the hell she wound up in this scenario and also probably very excited, Dina getting some good exercise in and also cackling evilly because she knows exactly what she’s doing.
Listen I’m not saying she SHOULD. But like if I was Becky I would definitely say incorrect facts about Dinosaurs so Dina could rip my clothes off in a wild fury. 😛 The safe word should be correct dinosaur factoids.
Like any healthy couple, watching certain seasons of Power Rangers is foreplay for those two.
Becky wold be quite aroused by Dina’s sheer animal force in this one.
I love Walky’s complete lack of surprise.
Okay, there’s cute and then there’s being a jerk. Dina, you are just starting to straddle that line.
Who knows. Maybe the mechanism had become common knowledge since Amber first used it, and now Lucy is using it for the same reason.
Why would she want to get away from Walky?
Are incorrect dinosaur factoids the DoA universe’s version of the flute from Legend of Zelda? Does that make Feral Dina a tornado?
She doesn’t want to get away from Walky, she wants someone to tear her clothes off so she can Joyce-excuse her way to boning him sooner.
Dina is becoming to powerful!!!
*two
Because
While it’s perfectly right and natural that most comments are revolving around Dina here, I think there needs to be a comment thread just for appreciating how cute Walky and Lucy are snuggled up under a blanket together.
….
…. also, does their ship have a name yet? I thought it did but I don’t remember what it was. If there isn’t…. hmmm. “Light Walking”, maybe?
Ya know what, you’re right. We’ve all been (understandably) distracted with the cool dinosaur chick and haven’t said enough about the cartoon nerds cuddling. I think Lucy’s probably feeling extremely content after drooling over this jackass for the last three years, and I’m 200% here for that.
As for their ship name, how about “Lucky”? It combines their names nicely and could describe them both as well as their probable feelings about dating each other.
Vote up for the S.S. Lucky. Also, she’s been into Walky for roughly three/four months from her perspective. I mean, it’s still early January right?
Lucky.
Okay, yeah, Lucky’s way better.
For extra chaos points, you could even pronounce it like “loose-key”.
Except tuesdays and any day Ana Chronistic doesnt show up when its pronounced “throatwobbler mangrove”.
I find your logic compelling.
What was that about hats?
Even as a kid, learning about dinosaurs in the 80s, I always thought that particular “fact” seemed implausible.
Says the person with two twin hemisphere brains loosely integrated.
Don’t knock the bandwidth on that interconnect though. It’s nothing to sneeze at.
I feel like Dina should maybe differentiate from willful dino-incorrectness (such as creationists or Walky’s “they’re too cool to have feathers”) attitude and just, someone misunderstanding or repeating an incorrect but commonly held thought on dinosaurs.
One does deserve a solid HOMPFK, the other perhaps a polite infodump. I don’t see Lucy as the type to try to argue with Dina about dinosaurs.
Also, does Lucy have a loft bed? If so, Dina should join a basketball team.
I just also feel like other shots of Lucy’s room have those posters at regular standing height rather than level with a loft bed
She does not. Malaya commented on the loft beds when she moved to the new dorm.
Okay, not gonna lie, if I was student there I would walk around making incorrect statements about dinosaurs on purpose just so that when Dina flung herself through the air at me I could just step to the side and watch her faceplant.
Wouldn’t work. If she’s fast enough to cover such a vast distance at such a speed, as demonstrated in this strip, then she’s probably fast enough to catch herself in time, or better yet, do a barrel roll!
Seeing Dina always brightens my day.
and then they all fucked
*were all fucked
Because the attack comes from the side.
Hompk!
Impressive, apparently she has hearing strong enough to pick up incorrect dinosaur facts clear over in another building, and can instantaneously teleport to that exact location and phase through solid matter on reentry in order to attack. I did initially think that she was pants less when she telehompked, but then realized it was just the colour of her pants.