What the Doctor said. There’s an excellent series on Amazon Prime. There’s an excellent BBC radio play. And there’s the book, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. There are probably a few others, but those three are the best picks off the top of my head.
I know it’s not the popular opinion lately but god I love these two more in this strip than in Shortpacked. Call me a sucker but I’m compelled by two people who are closely bonded by something fiercer and more fucked up than romantic attraction.
You have to be at least 25 to run for House of Representatives, and Robin was running for reelection, she she must be at least 27. Mary says she’s 30 in this strip, which is either facetious rounding or something Roz said once:
Yikes. When I started reading DOA I was younger than or the same age as most of the cast and now I’m older than their teachers.
nicoleandmaggie
My first post on this forum was a discussion about Leslie’s age. 26 is awfully young for a professor, especially in humanities programs– my thought was that maybe she has an MFA instead of a PhD.
Oooh, oooh! Is something bad happening to twitter? Has it finally started to die? Please, god, tell me that disgusting abomination is finally shambling to an ignominious death.
Well not quite but musky is trying to crypto yolo holdo stonk the platform into oblivion in order to make it a tax write off and ruin thousands of people’s lives a statement I may not be able to put on Twitter beacuse allegedly anti musk rhetoric is being silenced on the platform and I also don’t use it.
Also I have no proof that what he is doing but it wouldn’t surprise me.
Reltzik
I hearby dub the ever-lengthening list of controversial crap that he’s doing at Twitter as Elongate.
UrsulaDavina
I don’t have many internet to give but you get an internet!
BarerMender
Love it. Elongate it is.
Hazel
The only justifiable use of -gate suffix in, like, ever.
Just for the record, this is JUST because the controversy-list keeps getting longer, and not at all in any way definitely not because his purchase of Twitter is part of some sort of rich-person dick-measuring contest.
Thag Simmons
I think saying he’s crashing the service deliberately is giving him too much credit.
He’s a spiteful idiot whose bluff was called and was forced into doing something he didn’t want to do and isn’t capable of doing.
UrsulaDavina
I am not really saying that he wanted to do intially do this twitter nor do i have any evidence to back this up nor am i that serious, but i am just basing this on his tendency to scam. Also spiteful idiots are perfectly capable of manipulating the tax code in their favor or at least hire people to do it just look at Orange Julius Ceaser.
Thag Simmons
I am not saying the dude isn’t evil, he absolutely is, but I also think this is him sincerely trying to make the site work and claw himself out of the debt he put himself in.
UrsulaDavina
*I am not saying that he initially wanted to do this to Twitter,
Sorry this forum really isn’t optimized for phones and there is no edit button.
Elon Musk was forced to follow through on his proposed deal to buy twitter on threat of legal proceedings airing all his dirty laundry, and he’s currently in the early stages mismanaging it because he’s an idiot who saddled an already unstable company with massive debt.
It’s very funny and also probably going to have a severe negative impact on a lot of people’s livelihoods
Bryy
The tweet in which he revealed the company is losing $4m A DAY was something else.
Thag Simmons
People thought this man was taking us to Mars
Clif
He may or may not take us to Mars, but without him our manned space program would be crap.
Proxiehunter
Without his money our manned space program would be crap. He’s not the only source of money.
misanthropope
that clown is going to drive a satellite through somebody’s space station and the resulting debris will end *all* exploration of the solar system for 20 years.
Thag Simmons
There’s nothing Musk’s company is doing that a well funded NASA couldn’t be doing without it, and it’s not like SpaceX functions without massive government funding anyways.
Needfuldoer
If only that platform hadn’t become a load-bearing structural component of Web 2.0.
As much as one may or may not dislike Twitter, it IS responsible for a lot of people’s livelihoods or social circles. It being driven into the ground is bad.
I may not vibe with some things like Snaphat or Tiktok, but I’m not gonna knock it if some people get some enjoyment out of it.
Elon Musk bought Twitter for 44 billion dollars, fired half of the employees, declared “free speech for all” and “comedy is allowed again”, decided that blue checkmarks should cost 20$ per month, immediately bargained down to 8$ a month, advertisers started pulling out en masse. people running the numbers have said that Musk is rocketing Twitter deeper and deeper into debt because it would take every single Verified User paying 8$ a month, for a whole year, would make as much money as 30 hours of ad dollars. I don’t understand all of the financial details of the loans but he has borrowed some big dollars from the banks and I think if it gets bad enough he has to sell Tesla shares to get out of it. Also Tesla stock is dropping like a rock, everyone is fleeing Twitter like it’s the Exodus, Musk immediately rescinded “free speech for all” because people were making fun of him, new subscription Twitter is supposed to have half the ads but they’re better targeted, and give priority to your tweets. It’s supposed to roll out Monday morning except he’s fired half of the staff so I don’t know who he’s expecting to actually… Do the work. Also he’s being sued because firing half of your workforce without at least 60 days notice is one of those things they have “laws” about. Thaaaat should about cover it?
Bryy
You literally won’t show up on people’s feeds unless you are Verified now. Elon Musk has destroyed the very purpose of Twitter.
He’ll sell it in a year, but the damage is done.
Needfuldoer
Huh, it turns out making an unstable individual the face of a company, and using their temper tantrums as the company’s guiding principle, isn’t a viable business strategy. Go figure.
“Also Tesla stock is dropping like a rock”
The worst part of that for him, is that he can’t use “X Tesla shares” against the loan, he had to put up “$X worth of Tesla stock”. The lower Tesla stock goes, the more he has to sell to raise the same amount of USD.
Oh no! Anyway.
Max
And now thy are racing to try and hire some of the people back, because they realized that the company has a hard time functioning when you fire most of the people who are keeping it running.
JBento
As it turns out, the REAL answer to “Who is John Galt?” is “somebody who can’t do jackshit without a huge number of workers and government-sponsored infrastructre turning the crazy potdreams he had into stuff that actually functions in reality”, who knew?
Reltzik
I think you missed the part where he promised to unban the man behind 6 Jan, unless that fell under the heading of “free speech for all”.
thejeff
With luck, Trump’ll attack Musk for not unbanning him yet and Musk’ll get pissy about it and not do it at all.
Elon Musk bought it, said ‘Comedy is now legal on Twitter’, started charging for blue verification checkmarks (which defeats the point of them being to stop impersonation) and is now acting like a crybaby when people impersonate him and don’t specify that it is a ‘parody’.
Like it is almost like, the blue checkmarks had a purpose to specifically prevent impersonation! Wow!
It would be funny to see him flail around destroying it with horrible mismanagement if it didn’t also mean a bunch of people got fired and him driving it into the ground will screw over content creators, artists and others that use Twitter as part of their career.
Short form, Elon Musk tried to manipulate the stock price and instead whoops’d himself into buying Twitter. It has since come out that Twitter is basically a profitability black hole and there’s a non-zero chance that the site becomes a smoking crater within the next few years, or at least it becomes MySpace-levels of relevant.
As with all things with tendrils into the lives of many people, this will cause a lot of pain until people figure out new ways of doing adequately similar things. And also there’s a misinformation explosion happening because the content moderation team was bulldozed. (That’s part of why Jeph was banned. The full story is slightly funnier.)
It’s probably a net good for humanity, but it’s also too little too late, so.
(I haven’t used Twitter since 2011 or so. Never got the hang of it. I’m old.)
Jeph’s attitude to it seems to pretty much be ‘LOL, whatevs, social media isn’t great anyway, and it was funny, so it was worth it’ from the newspost he made.
But yeah, Twitter seems to be changing in mostly bad ways from what I can tell.
I’m surprised there aren’t more alternatives. Every programming language / web framework book I’ve bought in the last five years has “let’s make a clone of Twitter!” as its tutorial project.
Making a clone of Twitter isn’t hard, but building the infrastructure to handle what everyone does on Twitter is significantly more expensive than what can be handled in a tutorial.
Anyway, people should check out pillowfort.social.
Ol’ Jepheroni seems pleased as punch with the whole thing. He knew exactly what he was doin’ and got the result he wanted, so I’d say things are goin’ pretty well for ‘im.
Devils are LE unless 5th edition changed that Daemons NE and Demons Chaotic Evil, though she could have had alignment shift but I guess the GM isn’t enforcing the negative level penalty.
A) I didn’t specify edition.
B) I’m borrowing from both the DnD alignment system and from the shoulder angel/devil tropes, and classifying them as angels and devils came from the trope rather than DnD.
UrsulaDavina
I mean no offense I am aware of the tropes but Devils are evil so if Robin was CN devil she would have lost level points or her CR would have gone down from power loss. If she is an NPC.
Also I don’t know if 5th edtion has changed the alignment system for Devils I haven’t played it.
Thag Simmons
It’s really common nowadays to use the alignment system as general shorthand rather than talking about it the context of D&D
Daibhid C
And “shoulder slaad” is a joke on its own that would distract from the point more than clarify it.
Masumi
I mean she *has* suffered a penalty in form of not getting politician level money anymore…
Off-color jokes propelled her into being a House Representative. I’d say that counts as a national success.
Sirksome
I guess. Like Leslie mentioned though Robin’s politics were probably the biggest tangible threat to Becky’s life other than her father. And Robin hasn’t actually shown any guilt or remorse for that. She has for Becky specifically but not for anyone else or even her own family. Don’t know if that’s a great role model even if she did manage a successful career politically.
146 thoughts on “Fun mentor”
Doctor_Who
This is how Crowley and Aziraphale got started.
Shitbird
What?
Doctor_Who
Read or watch Good Omens immediately. It will enrich your life.
Mark
Upvoted.
Harmony
Updooted.
The Wellerman
Up TOOTED! ?
Jamie
What the Doctor said. There’s an excellent series on Amazon Prime. There’s an excellent BBC radio play. And there’s the book, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. There are probably a few others, but those three are the best picks off the top of my head.
Thag Simmons
A Demon and Angel odd couple from the Neil Gaiman / Terry Pratchett collaboration Good Omens.
Scolopendra
I know it’s not the popular opinion lately but god I love these two more in this strip than in Shortpacked. Call me a sucker but I’m compelled by two people who are closely bonded by something fiercer and more fucked up than romantic attraction.
Clif
What can be more fucked up than romantic attraction?
Needfuldoer
It’s like they amicably divorced but still fight over how to co-parent.
Delavan
That you for posting it so I didn’t have to 🙂
Ana Chronistic
oh good, it’s the adults version of Dorothy and Becky
Thag Simmons
Considerably more actual serious and justified animosity here.
Doctor_Who
Except weirdly, here it’s the mature responsible one who’s insisting on the rivalry, and the goofball who wants to be friends.
StClair
“adults”
Jason
How old are they? Mid to late twenties?
And when do people definitely become adults? …Mid to late never, I’m starting to think?
Airyu
…I don’t think a whole lot of people get to be professors or politicians in their mid twenties
wwwhhattt
Robin first ran for congress at 25, so she’s at least 27?
Evidence: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/06-yesterday-was-thursday/activist/
Needfuldoer
You have to be at least 25 to run for House of Representatives, and Robin was running for reelection, she she must be at least 27. Mary says she’s 30 in this strip, which is either facetious rounding or something Roz said once:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/04-it-all-returns/fraud/
Leslie says she’s 26 in this strip:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-10/01-birthday-pursuit/scaredmess/
Sirksome
Yikes. When I started reading DOA I was younger than or the same age as most of the cast and now I’m older than their teachers.
nicoleandmaggie
My first post on this forum was a discussion about Leslie’s age. 26 is awfully young for a professor, especially in humanities programs– my thought was that maybe she has an MFA instead of a PhD.
Nono
Remember Leslie, you started this conversation. You’re maybe a little partners.
Shiro
Excited to see where this Good Omens AU goes
The Wellerman
Willis, seeing what’s happening to Twitter deeply concerns me. ?
Especially after seeing Jeph Jacques get screwed over in an instant. ?
Just how many of your readers come via Twitter? Are you considering migrating to Mastodon or other alternatives?
Also is Amber gonna stay there?
Azhrei Vep
Oooh, oooh! Is something bad happening to twitter? Has it finally started to die? Please, god, tell me that disgusting abomination is finally shambling to an ignominious death.
UrsulaDavina
Well not quite but musky is trying to crypto yolo holdo stonk the platform into oblivion in order to make it a tax write off and ruin thousands of people’s lives a statement I may not be able to put on Twitter beacuse allegedly anti musk rhetoric is being silenced on the platform and I also don’t use it.
Also I have no proof that what he is doing but it wouldn’t surprise me.
Reltzik
I hearby dub the ever-lengthening list of controversial crap that he’s doing at Twitter as Elongate.
UrsulaDavina
I don’t have many internet to give but you get an internet!
BarerMender
Love it. Elongate it is.
Hazel
The only justifiable use of -gate suffix in, like, ever.
Opus the Poet
You win!
Reltzik
Just for the record, this is JUST because the controversy-list keeps getting longer, and not at all in any way definitely not because his purchase of Twitter is part of some sort of rich-person dick-measuring contest.
Thag Simmons
I think saying he’s crashing the service deliberately is giving him too much credit.
He’s a spiteful idiot whose bluff was called and was forced into doing something he didn’t want to do and isn’t capable of doing.
UrsulaDavina
I am not really saying that he wanted to do intially do this twitter nor do i have any evidence to back this up nor am i that serious, but i am just basing this on his tendency to scam. Also spiteful idiots are perfectly capable of manipulating the tax code in their favor or at least hire people to do it just look at Orange Julius Ceaser.
Thag Simmons
I am not saying the dude isn’t evil, he absolutely is, but I also think this is him sincerely trying to make the site work and claw himself out of the debt he put himself in.
UrsulaDavina
*I am not saying that he initially wanted to do this to Twitter,
Sorry this forum really isn’t optimized for phones and there is no edit button.
Thag Simmons
Elon Musk was forced to follow through on his proposed deal to buy twitter on threat of legal proceedings airing all his dirty laundry, and he’s currently in the early stages mismanaging it because he’s an idiot who saddled an already unstable company with massive debt.
It’s very funny and also probably going to have a severe negative impact on a lot of people’s livelihoods
Bryy
The tweet in which he revealed the company is losing $4m A DAY was something else.
Thag Simmons
People thought this man was taking us to Mars
Clif
He may or may not take us to Mars, but without him our manned space program would be crap.
Proxiehunter
Without his money our manned space program would be crap. He’s not the only source of money.
misanthropope
that clown is going to drive a satellite through somebody’s space station and the resulting debris will end *all* exploration of the solar system for 20 years.
Thag Simmons
There’s nothing Musk’s company is doing that a well funded NASA couldn’t be doing without it, and it’s not like SpaceX functions without massive government funding anyways.
Needfuldoer
If only that platform hadn’t become a load-bearing structural component of Web 2.0.
thejeff
And now it’s on fire. It’s a load-bearing fire.
Nono
As much as one may or may not dislike Twitter, it IS responsible for a lot of people’s livelihoods or social circles. It being driven into the ground is bad.
I may not vibe with some things like Snaphat or Tiktok, but I’m not gonna knock it if some people get some enjoyment out of it.
YggiDee
Elon Musk bought Twitter for 44 billion dollars, fired half of the employees, declared “free speech for all” and “comedy is allowed again”, decided that blue checkmarks should cost 20$ per month, immediately bargained down to 8$ a month, advertisers started pulling out en masse. people running the numbers have said that Musk is rocketing Twitter deeper and deeper into debt because it would take every single Verified User paying 8$ a month, for a whole year, would make as much money as 30 hours of ad dollars. I don’t understand all of the financial details of the loans but he has borrowed some big dollars from the banks and I think if it gets bad enough he has to sell Tesla shares to get out of it. Also Tesla stock is dropping like a rock, everyone is fleeing Twitter like it’s the Exodus, Musk immediately rescinded “free speech for all” because people were making fun of him, new subscription Twitter is supposed to have half the ads but they’re better targeted, and give priority to your tweets. It’s supposed to roll out Monday morning except he’s fired half of the staff so I don’t know who he’s expecting to actually… Do the work. Also he’s being sued because firing half of your workforce without at least 60 days notice is one of those things they have “laws” about. Thaaaat should about cover it?
Bryy
You literally won’t show up on people’s feeds unless you are Verified now. Elon Musk has destroyed the very purpose of Twitter.
He’ll sell it in a year, but the damage is done.
Needfuldoer
Huh, it turns out making an unstable individual the face of a company, and using their temper tantrums as the company’s guiding principle, isn’t a viable business strategy. Go figure.
“Also Tesla stock is dropping like a rock”
The worst part of that for him, is that he can’t use “X Tesla shares” against the loan, he had to put up “$X worth of Tesla stock”. The lower Tesla stock goes, the more he has to sell to raise the same amount of USD.
Oh no! Anyway.
Max
And now thy are racing to try and hire some of the people back, because they realized that the company has a hard time functioning when you fire most of the people who are keeping it running.
JBento
As it turns out, the REAL answer to “Who is John Galt?” is “somebody who can’t do jackshit without a huge number of workers and government-sponsored infrastructre turning the crazy potdreams he had into stuff that actually functions in reality”, who knew?
Reltzik
I think you missed the part where he promised to unban the man behind 6 Jan, unless that fell under the heading of “free speech for all”.
thejeff
With luck, Trump’ll attack Musk for not unbanning him yet and Musk’ll get pissy about it and not do it at all.
Sam
Elon Musk bought it, said ‘Comedy is now legal on Twitter’, started charging for blue verification checkmarks (which defeats the point of them being to stop impersonation) and is now acting like a crybaby when people impersonate him and don’t specify that it is a ‘parody’.
Like it is almost like, the blue checkmarks had a purpose to specifically prevent impersonation! Wow!
It would be funny to see him flail around destroying it with horrible mismanagement if it didn’t also mean a bunch of people got fired and him driving it into the ground will screw over content creators, artists and others that use Twitter as part of their career.
Jamie
Short form, Elon Musk tried to manipulate the stock price and instead whoops’d himself into buying Twitter. It has since come out that Twitter is basically a profitability black hole and there’s a non-zero chance that the site becomes a smoking crater within the next few years, or at least it becomes MySpace-levels of relevant.
As with all things with tendrils into the lives of many people, this will cause a lot of pain until people figure out new ways of doing adequately similar things. And also there’s a misinformation explosion happening because the content moderation team was bulldozed. (That’s part of why Jeph was banned. The full story is slightly funnier.)
It’s probably a net good for humanity, but it’s also too little too late, so.
(I haven’t used Twitter since 2011 or so. Never got the hang of it. I’m old.)
Sam
Jeph’s attitude to it seems to pretty much be ‘LOL, whatevs, social media isn’t great anyway, and it was funny, so it was worth it’ from the newspost he made.
But yeah, Twitter seems to be changing in mostly bad ways from what I can tell.
easrng
They have a mastodon account but they rarely (if ever) post there directly, it’s all cross posted from twitter as far as I can tell.
Mark
I’m surprised there aren’t more alternatives. Every programming language / web framework book I’ve bought in the last five years has “let’s make a clone of Twitter!” as its tutorial project.
egg egg
Making a clone of Twitter isn’t hard, but building the infrastructure to handle what everyone does on Twitter is significantly more expensive than what can be handled in a tutorial.
Anyway, people should check out pillowfort.social.
Taffy
Ol’ Jepheroni seems pleased as punch with the whole thing. He knew exactly what he was doin’ and got the result he wanted, so I’d say things are goin’ pretty well for ‘im.
Reltzik
Again, Robin is the CN shoulder-devil, and Leslie is the NG shoulder-angel.
UrsulaDavina
Devils are LE unless 5th edition changed that Daemons NE and Demons Chaotic Evil, though she could have had alignment shift but I guess the GM isn’t enforcing the negative level penalty.
Reltzik
A) I didn’t specify edition.
B) I’m borrowing from both the DnD alignment system and from the shoulder angel/devil tropes, and classifying them as angels and devils came from the trope rather than DnD.
UrsulaDavina
I mean no offense I am aware of the tropes but Devils are evil so if Robin was CN devil she would have lost level points or her CR would have gone down from power loss. If she is an NPC.
Also I don’t know if 5th edtion has changed the alignment system for Devils I haven’t played it.
Thag Simmons
It’s really common nowadays to use the alignment system as general shorthand rather than talking about it the context of D&D
Daibhid C
And “shoulder slaad” is a joke on its own that would distract from the point more than clarify it.
Masumi
I mean she *has* suffered a penalty in form of not getting politician level money anymore…
Jamie
From a 5s Google, it does not appear that 5e changed that.
Sirksome
Robin is so unlikeable I’m astounded Becky actually considers her a role model.
Jamie
Robin leveraged a version of Becky’s coping mechanism into national success. Why wouldn’t she be a role model for Becky?
Sirksome
She did?
Jamie
Off-color jokes propelled her into being a House Representative. I’d say that counts as a national success.
Sirksome
I guess. Like Leslie mentioned though Robin’s politics were probably the biggest tangible threat to Becky’s life other than her father. And Robin hasn’t actually shown any guilt or remorse for that. She has for Becky specifically but not for anyone else or even her own family. Don’t know if that’s a great role model even if she did manage a successful career politically.