This is one of those scenes where I’m both very conscious that Dina is a fictional character, but also extremely impressed with her in a real-feeling way.
I knew a guy like this in the army. A true grey-man. Dude could move in and out of groups and places and it’d be anywhere between 5min and an hour before people noticed uf he was or wasn’t present.
The fun little loophole, though, is that you need to be in possession of pirated material to commit that crime. If you are streaming pirated material and the actual file is never on a device you own, you are not committing a crime, you are merely benefitting from somebody *else* committing that crime. If a graffiti artist defaces an ugly wall with a beautiful mural without the permission of the owner or anybody else who would need to give approval for a public mural, and you drive across town to see it when you normally wouldn’t be in that part of town, and even snap a picture of it to save as your phone wallpaper and share on social media, you are benefitting from crime but doing nothing illegal. Same thing if you enjoy pirated media but never actually possess or distribute pirated media.
Hexx
Also, because pirating media is so easy, unless you’re actively burning DVDs and selling them to people, it isn’t worth the corporation’s time to go after everyone who Pirates movies and music for their own personal use. They would spend far more in legal fees than they would ever get out of mostly broke college students.
And every time they pay a developer good money to come up with new DRM, a wave of passionate and possibly autistic hackers deacend upon the new DRM, strip it to the bone and leave it’s defeated corpse on the corporation’s doorstep as a warning to others. Lol
Pizzasgood
Uh, no. That isn’t how streaming media works. When you stream a video, your computer still downloads that video file. The only difference with streaming is that instead of waiting for the complete file to download before viewing, you watch it as the data flows in and then discard the data shortly after. You still download and possess the entire video, just not all at the same time.
i mean, if she did get caught maybe you’d get in less trouble for leaving money versus just stealing on top of it, but would’ve been a power move to just have taken joyce’s wallet without noticing and paying with /her/ money
Altho i wish i could be invisible to random ppl on the street but otherwise going ‘unnoticed’ would be more of a pain compared to just looking underage depending on the situation. or if ppl are so ‘forgettable’ they can order food and just dine and dash xD
I was about to call this a fib, when I realized that it could be read to ways:
I first read it as “a half-mile, which was from A to B, and then back the same way in 3 minutes”, which would have been way faster than the world record for the mile.
Now I believe you meant “a half-mile, which was from A to B and back, in three minutes”, which is totally believable.
We also don’t know how long Becky and Joyce have been bickering about this since the last page. I once checked for walky-related reasons and the estimated walking distance from Read Hall to the village pantry down the block and across the street is 5 minutes according to google maps. 5 minutes there, 5 minutes back, and probably around 5 minutes to get to the front exit makes it roughly 15 minutes, give or take a bit for getting whatever you get inside. Having said that, if she didn’t take the elevator to the ground level and instead took the stairs down to the second level where there’s a side exit we’ve seen them take a few times, that could shave off 2-3 minutes, and if she ran or jogged to the village pantry and back, then you could easily shave off 2-3 minutes of travel time either way.
Joyce and Becky aren’t standing in the same position anymore, suggesting at least some time has passed, and both are known to stubbornly bicker and hold onto things way longer than is reasonable, especially with each other. They could easily have been at this for the 6-15 minutes Dina probably took to complete her mission, and it was just left out since it would have been redundant with panel one of this page, and also less funny.
They did at The University of Maryland (in my day)! The place is called “The Tick Tock” and it opened after WWII when the crossroads were dirt and they were surrounded by farmland and trees…Now it’s surrounded by two 3-lane highways and run down apartment buildings (built in the late 50’s) occupied by locals and grad students.
I don’t know if it’s the name of an actual chain or so but ‘village pantry’ makes me think it’s one of those ‘canned/boxed/packaged’ food bank places ppl donate their spare food to or so versus an actual store (which i imagine most college students would take advantage of every weekend lol)
Listen, the truth is Dina is just a scapegoat here. Joyce was not thinking of Becky at all and she should say it with her full chest. Becky would appreciate all aspects of that.
Yeah, Joyce has got herself full-on into “what a tangled web” territory by lying, which she pretends to hate. When Becky confronted her for not taking Becky hijinking she could have told the truth: “I needed to have a heart-to-heart talk with Dorothy, and your stupid enemies schtick would have prevented that by making her defensive.” Then she wouldn’t be in this mess.
But she also doesn’t want to talk about why she needed that heart-to-heart talk with Dorothy, because that’s Dorothy’s problem. So she would have needed to make up a story about that.
morleuca
I mean the answer to the question “what did you have to talk to Dorothy about?” Is simply “now of your business.”
I disagree: Becky would not appreciate it nor take it well. She’d see it as a bad thing when there’s no reason for Joyce to feel bad about. She wanted to do something for a friend in need. It was THEIR time to bond. There should have been no reason for Becky to cross her mind in the same way that Dorothy should not cross her mind when she does something special just for Becky.
Can you imagine if during a special bonding time between Joyce and Becky, Joyce suggested to bring in Dorothy? Becky would NOT be happy.
Becky doesn’t really want to share Joyce with anyone.
It’s a trauma response, after losing just about everything else.
Dante
Oh, most def! That’s what explains it. It’s super cause-consequence and Becky has been shaped by grief like, a lot.
… Doesn’t mean the reaction justified, tho. Our emotions are valid, and that means we have a right to feel them. But acting on them, and/or making everyone else’s Thing, that’s a choice – and it’s not always the Healthy ™ one.
Needfuldoer
Not justified, but understandable.
Icalasari
THAT explains why I am more forgiving about Becky’s possessiveness! I went through the same (or at least similar) possessiveness after my brother died!
I have had Joyce’s issue in the past, which is you start lying to avoid hurting someone’s feelings because you were raised to believe white lies are better than the truth. As it turns out, being honest but authentic is a better strat all around, but even today it’s hard to shake that internal core training towards “kind” deception
I’m not sure Joyce is “lying” per se, sure what genuinely happened was she just wasn’t considering Becky at all, but Becky wanted a reason not to have invited her, so Joyce provided one. “I didn’t think of you” isn’t a *reason*, it’s an *explanation*. There have absolutely been times I didn’t consciously consider a decision, and then later when asked to explain it I came up with justifications that had nothing to do with the actual thought process in the moment, and it was definitely *not* any kind of deception, it was just the first thing that came to mind when asked for a reason when I never really had one in the first place. You think “why would I have done that?” and then the answer you come up with retroactively becomes the reason since it makes sense, at least in your head, the fact that it was never part of your thought process before hand is irrelevant. Lying is when you intentionally make false statements with the intent to deceive, this is an attempt to explain something retroactively that wasn’t done with conscious reasoning. Some people are good at accurately guessing their subconscious motives, others are not, practice and context can both have a large impact as well. Joyce is fairly new to interrogating her own motives and thought processes, and in the middle of a confrontation with your best friend that you inadvertently hurt is not a context particularly conducive to proper introspection.
Joyce is trying, failing miserably, but she is trying. It’s going to take a while before Joyce realizes she is not doing the right thing, but to her credit she did tell Dina she was going to do her best to treat her better.
Psychie
And I think that’s why Dina’s response was to prove Joyce wrong, and not to call her out like they had previously agreed. She recognized that Joyce wasn’t coming from a place of malice and was actively trying (albeit failing) to be as diplomatic about the issue as she could. Arguing with Joyce wouldn’t be helpful, but proving her assumption incorrect is a great way to resolve the conflict. It’s cutting the knot, so to speak.
Added bonus, now that they have alcohol they can go back to one of their rooms and drink together now, thus resolving the core of the conflict between Joyce and Becky since they get to do the thing Becky felt left out on.
– Sal
– Asher
– Amber
– Joyce?
– Dina
– Becky? (I mean she did break into a house but it was her own)
– pretty much everyone who did underaged drinking so like, a lot
I strongly suspect that taking booze you can’t legally buy is still technically a crime even if you leave enough money behind.
I think we are into the murky area of the distinction between “crimes that are a violation of laws I think are stupid” and “crimes that are a violation of laws I agree with.”
350 thoughts on “No second chances”
NGPZ
dino digga gotz the booze like BOOM!
AWE YEAH *^-^*
*plays “Tank!” by The Seatbelts on hacked muzak*
Yet_One_More_Idiot
DoA Book 14: Be Gay, Do Crimes!
Trisar
I think it’s time to blow this scene. Get everybody and their stuff together. Ok, three, two, one!
bemisawa
Let’s jam!
easrng
she’s so real for this
easrng
can we have a hi res version pleaseeeee ?
NGPZ
pretty pweaaase ?
brumagem
This is one of those scenes where I’m both very conscious that Dina is a fictional character, but also extremely impressed with her in a real-feeling way.
Dina is not to be trifled with.
Decidedly Orthogonal
I knew a guy like this in the army. A true grey-man. Dude could move in and out of groups and places and it’d be anywhere between 5min and an hour before people noticed uf he was or wasn’t present.
IntangibleMatter
Dina is gay and apparently refuses to pirate movies
Kinda disappointed in her about that second bit but what are you gonna do
IntangibleMatter
God dammit I missed the first “not”
On a brighter note hell yeah Dina can pirate movies
Doctor_Who
I mean, you think she’s gonna PAY to hate-watch the Jurassic World films?
Chaucer59
The Unbearable Whiteness of Being Joyce.
Marianne
Isn’t copyright infringement a civil rather than criminal matter?
Briar
copyright infringement, yes. Media piracy, no
Psychie
The fun little loophole, though, is that you need to be in possession of pirated material to commit that crime. If you are streaming pirated material and the actual file is never on a device you own, you are not committing a crime, you are merely benefitting from somebody *else* committing that crime. If a graffiti artist defaces an ugly wall with a beautiful mural without the permission of the owner or anybody else who would need to give approval for a public mural, and you drive across town to see it when you normally wouldn’t be in that part of town, and even snap a picture of it to save as your phone wallpaper and share on social media, you are benefitting from crime but doing nothing illegal. Same thing if you enjoy pirated media but never actually possess or distribute pirated media.
Hexx
Also, because pirating media is so easy, unless you’re actively burning DVDs and selling them to people, it isn’t worth the corporation’s time to go after everyone who Pirates movies and music for their own personal use. They would spend far more in legal fees than they would ever get out of mostly broke college students.
And every time they pay a developer good money to come up with new DRM, a wave of passionate and possibly autistic hackers deacend upon the new DRM, strip it to the bone and leave it’s defeated corpse on the corporation’s doorstep as a warning to others. Lol
Pizzasgood
Uh, no. That isn’t how streaming media works. When you stream a video, your computer still downloads that video file. The only difference with streaming is that instead of waiting for the complete file to download before viewing, you watch it as the data flows in and then discard the data shortly after. You still download and possess the entire video, just not all at the same time.
anon
i mean, if she did get caught maybe you’d get in less trouble for leaving money versus just stealing on top of it, but would’ve been a power move to just have taken joyce’s wallet without noticing and paying with /her/ money
Altho i wish i could be invisible to random ppl on the street but otherwise going ‘unnoticed’ would be more of a pain compared to just looking underage depending on the situation. or if ppl are so ‘forgettable’ they can order food and just dine and dash xD
Dara
holy shit she’s fast
i mean we know about the invisible part but dang
that’s fast
IntangibleMatter
Sometimes you just really need to prove your girlfriend’s best friend wrong about your ability to drink
rowanmikaio
We don’t call them velociraptors because they’re slow
Delavan
She really pushed the acceleraptor on this one though.
Bryy
I once ran a half-mile from my theater department to my dorm room and back in three minutes.
MacareuxMoine
I was about to call this a fib, when I realized that it could be read to ways:
I first read it as “a half-mile, which was from A to B, and then back the same way in 3 minutes”, which would have been way faster than the world record for the mile.
Now I believe you meant “a half-mile, which was from A to B and back, in three minutes”, which is totally believable.
Icalasari
She’s not fast, she can teleport. We’ve established this. Joyce needs an iguana on her head to mimic even a fraction of Dina’s power
thejeff
Joyce has also been shown to teleport – usually to Dorothy, but there have been other instances.
Psychie
We also don’t know how long Becky and Joyce have been bickering about this since the last page. I once checked for walky-related reasons and the estimated walking distance from Read Hall to the village pantry down the block and across the street is 5 minutes according to google maps. 5 minutes there, 5 minutes back, and probably around 5 minutes to get to the front exit makes it roughly 15 minutes, give or take a bit for getting whatever you get inside. Having said that, if she didn’t take the elevator to the ground level and instead took the stairs down to the second level where there’s a side exit we’ve seen them take a few times, that could shave off 2-3 minutes, and if she ran or jogged to the village pantry and back, then you could easily shave off 2-3 minutes of travel time either way.
Joyce and Becky aren’t standing in the same position anymore, suggesting at least some time has passed, and both are known to stubbornly bicker and hold onto things way longer than is reasonable, especially with each other. They could easily have been at this for the 6-15 minutes Dina probably took to complete her mission, and it was just left out since it would have been redundant with panel one of this page, and also less funny.
Nathan
Did YOUR university sell jugs of hobo moonshine on campus? Because I don’t think mine did.
foamy
We just had a bar run by the student’s union.
Nono
Depends how big the hobo population was.
Frelance
I mean, not *on* campus, but uhh… Appalachia, yo
Dara
I went to grad school at the University of Kentucky.
I can assure you, they did.
(Well, just off campus. xD )
Van Jealous
They did at The University of Maryland (in my day)! The place is called “The Tick Tock” and it opened after WWII when the crossroads were dirt and they were surrounded by farmland and trees…Now it’s surrounded by two 3-lane highways and run down apartment buildings (built in the late 50’s) occupied by locals and grad students.
HueSatLight
That’s just a large container of Dos Equis. For moonshine you need at least tres equis.
Proxiehunter
That wasn’t on campus, it was across the street.
Needfuldoer
I’m amazed a convenience store that close to campus sells the hard stuff. Around here, ours only have beer at the most.
Dave the Inverted
ASU has Jerry’s Drive-In Liquors literally across the street from campus…. +shrug+
Roborat
Can’t be that hard, it only has 2 Xs on the label.
anon
I don’t know if it’s the name of an actual chain or so but ‘village pantry’ makes me think it’s one of those ‘canned/boxed/packaged’ food bank places ppl donate their spare food to or so versus an actual store (which i imagine most college students would take advantage of every weekend lol)
Random832
It is an actual chain of gas station convenience stores [bought out by fas mart in 2015, but still using its own brand name at least in indiana]
Ray
SHENANIGANS
David M Willis
one person immediately understands
Sirksome
Listen, the truth is Dina is just a scapegoat here. Joyce was not thinking of Becky at all and she should say it with her full chest. Becky would appreciate all aspects of that.
Jamie
I mean, yes.
Bruno
Yeah.
Agemegos
Yeah, Joyce has got herself full-on into “what a tangled web” territory by lying, which she pretends to hate. When Becky confronted her for not taking Becky hijinking she could have told the truth: “I needed to have a heart-to-heart talk with Dorothy, and your stupid enemies schtick would have prevented that by making her defensive.” Then she wouldn’t be in this mess.
Bash
As much as I would like to see that, I can understand why Joyce doesn’t want to poke that bear.
thejeff
But she also doesn’t want to talk about why she needed that heart-to-heart talk with Dorothy, because that’s Dorothy’s problem. So she would have needed to make up a story about that.
morleuca
I mean the answer to the question “what did you have to talk to Dorothy about?” Is simply “now of your business.”
morleuca
None! None! For f’s sake autocucumber!
Pylgrim
I disagree: Becky would not appreciate it nor take it well. She’d see it as a bad thing when there’s no reason for Joyce to feel bad about. She wanted to do something for a friend in need. It was THEIR time to bond. There should have been no reason for Becky to cross her mind in the same way that Dorothy should not cross her mind when she does something special just for Becky.
Can you imagine if during a special bonding time between Joyce and Becky, Joyce suggested to bring in Dorothy? Becky would NOT be happy.
Needfuldoer
Becky doesn’t really want to share Joyce with anyone.
It’s a trauma response, after losing just about everything else.
Dante
Oh, most def! That’s what explains it. It’s super cause-consequence and Becky has been shaped by grief like, a lot.
… Doesn’t mean the reaction justified, tho. Our emotions are valid, and that means we have a right to feel them. But acting on them, and/or making everyone else’s Thing, that’s a choice – and it’s not always the Healthy ™ one.
Needfuldoer
Not justified, but understandable.
Icalasari
THAT explains why I am more forgiving about Becky’s possessiveness! I went through the same (or at least similar) possessiveness after my brother died!
Wilde
I have had Joyce’s issue in the past, which is you start lying to avoid hurting someone’s feelings because you were raised to believe white lies are better than the truth. As it turns out, being honest but authentic is a better strat all around, but even today it’s hard to shake that internal core training towards “kind” deception
Psychie
I’m not sure Joyce is “lying” per se, sure what genuinely happened was she just wasn’t considering Becky at all, but Becky wanted a reason not to have invited her, so Joyce provided one. “I didn’t think of you” isn’t a *reason*, it’s an *explanation*. There have absolutely been times I didn’t consciously consider a decision, and then later when asked to explain it I came up with justifications that had nothing to do with the actual thought process in the moment, and it was definitely *not* any kind of deception, it was just the first thing that came to mind when asked for a reason when I never really had one in the first place. You think “why would I have done that?” and then the answer you come up with retroactively becomes the reason since it makes sense, at least in your head, the fact that it was never part of your thought process before hand is irrelevant. Lying is when you intentionally make false statements with the intent to deceive, this is an attempt to explain something retroactively that wasn’t done with conscious reasoning. Some people are good at accurately guessing their subconscious motives, others are not, practice and context can both have a large impact as well. Joyce is fairly new to interrogating her own motives and thought processes, and in the middle of a confrontation with your best friend that you inadvertently hurt is not a context particularly conducive to proper introspection.
Kyrik Michalowski
Damn, that is actually rather impressive. Who knew Dina had it in her?
True Survivor
Neither the laws of Physics or Church have been able to contain Dina, what chance did the Indiana General Assembly have?
Masha
Presumably Joyce if she ever talked to Dina like she’s an equal adult.
Kyrik Michalowski
Joyce is trying, failing miserably, but she is trying. It’s going to take a while before Joyce realizes she is not doing the right thing, but to her credit she did tell Dina she was going to do her best to treat her better.
Psychie
And I think that’s why Dina’s response was to prove Joyce wrong, and not to call her out like they had previously agreed. She recognized that Joyce wasn’t coming from a place of malice and was actively trying (albeit failing) to be as diplomatic about the issue as she could. Arguing with Joyce wouldn’t be helpful, but proving her assumption incorrect is a great way to resolve the conflict. It’s cutting the knot, so to speak.
Added bonus, now that they have alcohol they can go back to one of their rooms and drink together now, thus resolving the core of the conflict between Joyce and Becky since they get to do the thing Becky felt left out on.
Needfuldoer
She doesn’t. She’s carrying it in a big bottle.
Dante
It’s such a display of dominance I’m in awe, both surprised and yet should’ve seen it coming.
Dina cares not for the laws of the land. If they make no sense, then they do not.
Nono
Cast members now who have done crimes:
– Sal
– Asher
– Amber
– Joyce?
– Dina
– Becky? (I mean she did break into a house but it was her own)
– pretty much everyone who did underaged drinking so like, a lot
Slartibeast Button, BIA
I strongly suspect that taking booze you can’t legally buy is still technically a crime even if you leave enough money behind.
I think we are into the murky area of the distinction between “crimes that are a violation of laws I think are stupid” and “crimes that are a violation of laws I agree with.”
Bruno
You think it should be illegal to steal booze from Village Pantry? Real hall monitor hours in the dumbing of age comment section.
Nathan
I think they think that JOYCE is in that murky area. But I could be wrong.
zaratustra
god forbid women do anything
Fuzzy
what??