Many modern DSLRs do have WiFi! Some can dump to the cloud on their own, some can do it by piggybacking on a cell phone’s Access Point.
They also make special SD cards that have built-in WiFi as well! I bought one a while back, but it was only 16GB and I was kind of “meh” on the whole thing. However, that was several years ago; easy to imagine they’ve made better ones since then.
So Booster is a psychology major who is more attracted to someone based on how fucked up they are?
Let’s hope and pray they never take a job at Arkham Asylum. Though if the staff there are smart, they’ve since added exactly that as a question on the application.
I’m not liking Booster much now, unless they’re joking about keeping them on the cloud. They should remove the pics ASAP because it’s kinda creepy to keep any pictures of someone without their consent.
Good, decent behavior is rarely funny, Tulipkitten. Showing class and respecting boundaries is the smart move, (*pointing at the title of the comic to illustrate).
Booster behaving immaturely? failing to understand, grasp, or respect boundaries? What are they, Eighteen year old or something?
Oh…RIGHT…
While DW started this back in 2010, the fact is, it’s been a handful of months-in-character (including the timeskips) and these are immature, childish people because they’re CHILDREN.
Children in adult bodies, with minimal supervision, but mentally and psychologically they’re CHILDREN. Expecting Booster to have the discretion of a 40 year old with extensive life experience is a no-go at this station, so maybe cut them a little slack before you judge them? THEY don’t even know who they are yet.
Freemage
Pretty sure I knew at 18 that voyeurism and stalking were wrong and creepy.
Daniel M Ball
Did you know it because you KNEW IT or because you were TOLD? Did you start off with boundary issues, or did you learn them? Lemme put it this-a-way, Freemage. Most of the asshats you run into think of themselves as ‘pretty good guys’, They don’t GET that some of the shit they see in the media is WRONG until it blows up in their face. (Points to the “Joe’s Do-List” storyline for an example.) Booster is in a pretty unusual condition, because Booster’s got this whole ‘thing’ going on with their identity, which ‘thing’ tends to alter their own peception, just like every other Kid trying to stand out.
IOW it’s completely credible that a person who’s already pushing boundaries might fail to take into account other people’s boundaries, especially when the subject in question is atypical. Doesn’t mean they mean any harm, it means they don’t recognize what they’re doing is wrong, because they really don’t GRASP the other person’s perspective with a normal level of empathy…because they really don’t grasp the other person’s perspective, because they haven’t built up enough life-experience dealing with others in the real world to do so.
Which is not unusual for immature people in their late teens who do NOT have a background that includes ‘Behaviors that get you sent to Juvie, or Expelled’.
Empathy can be present without understanding. (see: lots of Christian Fundamentalists who AREN’T homicidal lunatics), and understanding can be present without Empathy (see manipulative psychopathic assholes that thrive in political or corporate settings).
Booster’s choice to upload it to the Cloud reflects lack of one of those two-either a lack of Empathy, or a lack of Understanding. It also reflects the kind of thing a kid whose major exposures to other people comes from Media and on-line interactions instead of in-person risks and failures. I’m going with lack of UNDERSTANDING, in hopes DW didn’t just drop a psychopath (excuse me, “Antisocial personality disorder”) into the cast.
APD’s are surface-charming and narcissistic. IOW not what most people think at all. They are GREAT at selling things, including the idea that they’re good people. Most people confuse that with someone who is ‘unsociable’-which is the person who avoids personal contact and huddles away from social situations where they might be highlighted.
Freemage
You talking about Joe’s “Do List” is actually pretty illustrative of the problem. No one in the comments defended Joe’s list–not the attitudes behind it, nor the fact of it. And the story itself called it out, first with comments from other characters, then with an up-front incident showing Joe the problem–and letting him grow, albeit fitfully.
If Booster changes to be a better person? Awesome. I’m all about that. My dislike of Roz, in particular, is her insistence that a person is always to be judged by their worst behavior, even when they try to change.
But thus far, I’ve seen nothing in the character for that better person to be built upon. This differs from Joe (and most of the rest of the cast, for that matter, at least those who aren’t largely two-dimensional foils, like Mary)–his genuine affection for Danny has been obvious since day one, showing that he HAS empathy, even if he likes to pretend he doesn’t. Likewise, even at his worst, he expresses a belief in consent and choice. Those traits played very heavily, I would argue, into him being able to understand about the issues around the “Do List”, leading to both him abandoning it and apologizing for it publicly.
Booster, OTOH, has never once shown any awareness of anyone else’s boundaries. And there’s never been any in-world consequences for these transgressions.
SDRainbow
“good behavior isn’t funny” is a defense for WILLIS, not the characters.
Especially here in the Dumbing Of Age Comments, prosecution of character is a full time sport. While we accept youth and inexperience as a…let’s say reason for the behavior to occur, it’s not a reason to cease discussion for it being bad behavior.
Meagan
I think there’s a spectrum of how much grace we as a comments section give characters for their inexperience and being in their learning process. Sometimes things are talked about more on principle, but other times it does get into more of a character attack.
ESM
I don’t have an issue with characters, even “good” characters, acting problematically. In fact, while Booster’s refusal to delete the photos makes THEM creepier, it makes this scene a bit less creepy, because the framing is not on Booster’s side here.
With that said, it *is* creepy in a way that’s unusual for DoA (In which characters who are being assholes like to go “I am an asshole now! It is me!”), which is interesting and worth talking about.
Ari
18-year-olds are not children, they’re adults with (unless something went incredibly wrong) very little experience living as adults. None of these characters are “children in adult bodies”. They’re young adults in young adult bodies. If they were a couple years younger, they would be adolescents in adolescent bodies. None of this changes that Booster’s inexperience at life plays into how they’re treating Amber – I’m guessing they think they’re seeing her say she’s ugly and they think that continuing to assert that they think she’s hot will help her feel more attractive, and time will tell how if that plays out negatively but probably yeah – but this is absolutely the kind of mistake that a young adult, or a not-young adult with poor social skills (related to neurodivergence or otherwise) or from a cultural/familial background where pushing against someone’s boundaries if you think it’s for their own good is in some situations considered the right thing to do, would make. There are 40-year-olds with extensive life experience who do this.
I’m not defending treating young adults like more experienced adults (including re: really fucked up age gaps in dating, which I hate having to specify but if I don’t then some shithead is absolutely going to think that’s what this is about) or holding people to standards they’re incapable of meeting in general, but infantalizing people is rude and cruel and there are people these characters’ age in the comments. There are ways to talk about age and development and behavior without implying that an undergrad is more similar to an 8-year-old than to someone who’s already graduated and has a job.
Daniel M Ball
Ari, your brain doesn’t stop forming its basic structure before 25 or so in most humans. For kids who GO to college instead of out into the work-force or into the Service, they’re very much still KIDS mentally, and most of the time, they’re not just kids, but SHELTERED kids in that demographic. Maturity is built off of experience, and for the vast majority of kids who go straight from High School to College?
They’re still mentally and emotionally children-that is, they lack maturity, experience, and judgment beyond the purely theoretical. VERY few of your college friends at 18 to 21 have much at all in the way of experience or maturity. Their identity is still FORMING. (this is also why armies like ’em young for enlistment-because they’re moldable.)
Booster’s got it extra-bad, because They haven’t figured out WHO they are yet, just that it isn’t someone who conforms to traditional roles or rules. Remember Joe’s “Do List”? That whole storyline is just exactly what a kid with little life experience and plenty of childish arrogance would come up with-that’s what made it a funny storyline.
Booster has issues with respecting boundaries, and little understanding or Empathy beyond the theoretical, because Booster hasn’t got the experience base to grasp those things fully yet. If Booster were a 27 year old Grad Student, it would go well past the horizon of ‘Creepy as fuck’, because mature mentalities don’t DO that kind of shit.
But kids? Kids do that kind of shit without thinking about it-and even worse, Stalker/creep behavior is LIONIZED in media. Every ‘romance’ show you’ve ever watched, slow it down and analyzed it, every ‘Love Song’ since the 1950s at LEAST is stock full of creepy, stalker sentiment. The maturity to separate “this is fiction, you don’t do this in real life” from “this is so cool” comes with EXPERIENCE and observation of the real world. You can’t get that from Tumblr or Facebook or whatever-the-god-botherers-are-using.
Ari
I don’t really care if the brain keeps forming because what you’re describing is a very small part of brain development associated with risk-taking specifically, which is really variable across individuals, and in fact, it might actually be a useful adaptation for young adults to be more likely to take risks rather than something that young adults are lacking. The brain also continues to change throughout an individual’s life. Are 40-year-olds children because their brains are generally different than the average 60-year-old’s? Also, the 25-years-old figure is based on cis men, and the corresponding figure for cis women is more like 20-years-old (there aren’t studies I know of on anyone else.) The brain is really plastic and changes based on experience and expectations – there are brain differences from culture to culture that are almost certainly not related to genetics – and cis girls are generally encouraged to be more cautious than cis boys, so I’m guessing most of this is social. If people are imitating their peer groups, don’t you think it’s likely that the young men in these studies are settling down as their friends do, too?
Identity is not something that conveniently crystallizes within a specific age range. Many things about a person shift and evolve as time passes and they experience new things. 80-year-olds are out there developing new interests, losing old ones, changing their outlooks on life based on their continued experience.
None of this even requires knowledge of neuroscience to understand. Nearly everything I am describing can be understood by observing the lives of actual people, which I can only assume is something you either don’t do, or are spectacularly bad at doing.
Even aside from that, if you want to talk science, you should probably make sure you actually know the science you’re talking about. You’re categorically infantilizing and dehumanizing all LEGAL ADULTS who have yet to meet your vague, scientifically and logically bankrupt threshold.
Also, I’m old enough that my brain should be fully cooked, and due to my combination of mental illnesses, I have trouble with impulse control and risk-taking, as well as zero natural understanding of boundaries. Am I a fake adult because I don’t suit your oversimplified misunderstanding of neuroscience? Should I be treated like a child because the life I’ve lived means that my personality has developed in a way that doesn’t suit the nebulous mythological standard you seem to be talking about? Does the answer change based on whether I’m trying to understand boundaries because I care about boundaries, or because I’ll be rejected if I don’t? Does it change based on whether I see my differences as completely detrimental, or as a mixed bag?
I’m not saying these characters aren’t specifically young adults and should be cut some slack. I feel like I pretty clearly articulated that I think these characters are specifically young adults and should be cut some slack. They are in a different developmental stage than other adults, who also make up several different developmental stages. The thing I was annoyed about is that you are saying a group of adults are literal children for being different than other adults. But that doesn’t make them children. That makes them young adults. I’m now also annoyed that you’re describing a nonbinary character who seems to be pretty solid in their personality and interests as someone who hasn’t figured out who they are yet, and that you’re bringing up The Media and inability to tell fiction from reality, when like, studies show that kids can tell fiction from reality at around 4. The art isn’t producing the culture, it’s reflecting it.
Your bizarre tangent about romantic media “lionizing” whatever it is that you personally consider “stalker” behavior (including apparently all or most romantic music released in the last 70 years, a statement that is so extreme and blatantly false that you are frankly lucky I even bothered addressing it) is not particularly relevant or accurate, and I don’t really appreciate that you wasted even more of my time with it. Everything about your post only tells me that YOU have very little actual life experience, regardless of your age, and are most likely regurgitating inaccurate information you essentially cannot have meaningfully researched yourself (because if you had, you would already know most of this) AND have approached with a gruesomely minimal amount of critical thinking.
Helicoptering and robbing young-ish people of reasonable amounts of personal agency is already destructive enough when we’re applying it to actual minors. Attempting to enforce similar standards on LEGAL ADULTS is vile enough that even statements that would typically be hyperbolic seem insufficient.
You legitimately have no idea what the hell you’re talking about and your opinions are gross, cruel, disturbing, and frankly outright dangerous. The condescending, demonstrably inaccurate posts you’ve made about this are actively corrosive toward both society in general and a large amount of actual human lives.
And you said it all, applying the same logic to REAL people, about someone who doesn’t even exist. You are the person who struggles to differentiate between fiction and reality.
This reminds me of the song by The Police, “Every Step You Take”, which at the time it came out was a love anthem, but these days it sounds like a stalker’s manifesto.
Needfuldoer
See also: Baby It’s Cold Outside.
Ari
There’s some interesting cultural context there. Currently, it reads super rapey, but in its original context it kind of wasn’t? There was a really good essay about this a while back. For example, when she asks what’s in her drink, that sounds really bad! But at the time the song was written, it was a stock joke that a character behaving foolishly or uninhibitedly (or wanting to) would ask what was in their drink, and the answer would always be that it was either not a significant enough amount of alcohol to alter their decision-making ability, or no alcohol at all. The girl wants to stay over and get her bone on, but she’s worried about social disapproval (see: all the lines referencing social disapproval! purity culture and rape culture can both be bad) and he’s giving her excuses for ways to justify this as being not about boning at all. They wouldn’t be singing in harmony at the end if they weren’t meant to be on the same page.
The same essayist pointed out that this is also a really good illustration of one of the ways rape culture manifested at the time. If you can’t agree to sex without people thinking you’re a slut, then you kind of have to put up an intentionally weak fight and hope your boyfriend understands what you’re doing – but not everyone’s capable of being assertive enough that they don’t look like they’re putting up an intentionally weak fight, and not everybody cares if their partner is trying to say yes or trying to say no. So yeah, art reflects the culture, babeyyy
Ari
Actually, Sting was intentionally writing from the perspective of a stalker and didn’t find it romantic at all, and he’s been annoyed that people seem to take the song as portraying something more consensual than it is. It’s one of those songs that gets misinterpreted all the time, like people playing “Lips of an Angel” at their wedding when it’s about cheating, or, like, so many different kinds of reaction to that Decemberists double suicide song. In this case, it’s probably because it has a bit of a deceptive sound to it (also intentional).
Proxiehunter
The attitude that an 18 year old is still a kid contributes directly to the number of people that can excuse a father traveling to the campus and shoving his daughter who at her age is an adult and not a kid into his car against her will so he can bring her back home where she “belongs”. After all, she’s a kid.
Parents have the right to make their kids get in the car and go home, by necessity they have to have that right in order to keep their kids safe from situations their kid doesn’t understand are dangerous.
Parents do not have the right to do that to adult children but insisting that their adult children are just kids makes it seem more acceptable to bystanders and churches willing to pay that dad’s bail.
What I’m saying is that calling an 18 year old adult a kid is practically Toe Dad apologia.
Mark
I heard a way of explaining this that makes sense to me: teenagers are not children and they are not adults; they are *teenagers* and their strengths and weaknesses are not the same as those of children *or* adults.
Proxiehunter
That’s great when you’re dealing with the ages 13-17, but 18 year old people are adults. They aren’t neither, they’re one of those things and that thing is adults. Saying anything else is saying that Toe Dad had a right to shove Becky in his car and drive away with her. Stop being creepy and admit that adults are adults.
Taffy
I can’t keep up with this double standard. Are 18-year-olds adults who can be reasonably expected to function societally the same as a 36-year-old with a stable income and good mental health, or are they literal children who can’t be trusted to know their own gender? We need to pick one and stick with it.
All he has done so far is point out that they have already been backed up to the cloud; he hasn’t given any indication that he won’t subsequently delete them.
The cloud backup is automatic; deleting the backups takes effort, and, possibly, devices like a computer or tablet which he doesn’t have with him at the moment.
If he had taken the pics with his phone, deleting them would be trivial; but doing so from the original camera is probably near-impossible.
Rabisch
THIS!!!
Nova
Booster’s pronouns are They/Them, just so you know.
Booster could have said, “They’re still on the cloud, you know, but don’t worry, I’ll delete them.” Or any number of other ways of assuring Amber that Booster was not, in fact, going to be creepy about this. Booster chose not to take any of those options, and is being judged accordingly.
Tulipkitten,
I might point out that the pictures were taken in the common area. Is there an enforceable expectation of privacy?
Anon200
There’s a difference between taking a picture of general area with people in it and taking pictures of someone without their consent 3 feet away from them, which booster was doing and yes it is creepy.
Really disliking booster
Freemage
“Enforceable”? No, there’s no Photo Police about to burst in and take Booster down. But rude, creepy behavior shouldn’t need police to be called out as such, either.
They handed over the memory card (which has monetary value if nothing else) promptly when asked; I think it’s jumping to conclusions to assume they will now hoard the pictures like a sleezy dragon rather then removing them later just because they pointed out they’re already clouded.
It’s fortunate that everyone answers the application honestly.
someone
When you travel to the USA, there’s a form where they ask you if you are a terrorist.
Taffy
I’m assuming that if you answer “Yes”, you’re handed a machine gun, immediate citizenship, and a $50 Walmart gift card to buy some blue jeans and a white tank top.
thejeff
They have to check against the convenient color coded chart though.
Taffy
Well yeah, naturally. Gotta keep the horrible horrible status quo, otherwise we might have to examine our own culture, and then we might find flaws.
Incidentally, this is why Hawkeye’s Endgamecrusade against the Yakuza and cartels was probably at least slightly a little bit very racist. Dude’s already from a place with plenty of horrible unchecked terrorism, why’s he gotta go abroad for that?
Jamie
For the record, Hawkeye also went after some Mexican cartels. That was off-screen, though. So he spread it around.
Taffy
“Yakuza and cartels”
FlamestAndLight
only if they’d consider you white
asmodai
I’ve been told they actually refuse you entry if you say yes, and this is actually because if you get caught doing terrorist acts on US soil, it means you lied to a federal agency (or entered the US illegally, either, or) which allows them to do all sort of crazy stuff.
well, we don’t know if they’ll succeed in getting a phd but i’d hope even an ‘intro to psychology’ would have some kinda brief talk about ‘ethics’ and like ‘don’t armchair diagnose strangers’ or so
Tho i wouldn’t be surprised if there was reddit posts of psych majors admitting they’re taking those kinda classes to learn to manipulate others
Maybe “Intro to Psychology” is a 200-level class. At my school the Computer Science curriculum didn’t have any CS classes the first year; 100-level CS is for Business majors.
Remembering the comments from the last couple days, I just can’t help but think of this scene from the Fairly Odd Parents about an incriminating tape that keeps getting paused and played over and over again:
Omg I was really unclear how this was related for the first bit, but I see it now. We are basically seeing these characters’ stories this way, or even slower. We don’t know how it is going to play out. Like that Buddhist parable about the man whose son finds a horse, and then breaks his leg, and then there’s a war…etc.
251 thoughts on “Renders”
Ana Chronistic
https://sgpsketch.tumblr.com/post/695521259895783424/doa-cloud
and it ends up the photos are of the back of her head or a stain on the table anyway
(alternately, they are AWESOME PHOTOS and maybe clue Amber in to she’s pretty damn hot)
Rose by Any Other Name
**slowclap.gif**
True Survivor
That is awesome. Great Job!!
Clif
:-O
Needfuldoer
When did Booster have an opportunity to dump that SD card, anyway? Does that DSLR have WiFi and an independent connection to DropBox?
Ray Radlein
Many modern DSLRs do have WiFi! Some can dump to the cloud on their own, some can do it by piggybacking on a cell phone’s Access Point.
They also make special SD cards that have built-in WiFi as well! I bought one a while back, but it was only 16GB and I was kind of “meh” on the whole thing. However, that was several years ago; easy to imagine they’ve made better ones since then.
Eric
It’s comic book land; things work how ever they need to work.
Ana Chronistic
Also we never actually heard any clicks
The photos both on the card and in the cloud are of the Switch and snow angels from before lolololol
(I’d link but WiFi went out and I hate burning data)
Ana Chronistic
ok there:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-11/03-see-you-in-the-funny-page/nintendo/
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-11/03-see-you-in-the-funny-page/angels/
Andy
Maybe it is just a cell phone in a fancy dlsr case, probably not, but interesting to me.
Deanatay
She’s a Hot Potato.
Sajuuk-Khar
Beautiful, no notes.
Doctor_Who
So Booster is a psychology major who is more attracted to someone based on how fucked up they are?
Let’s hope and pray they never take a job at Arkham Asylum. Though if the staff there are smart, they’ve since added exactly that as a question on the application.
Taffy
What’s the worst that could happen?
Freezer
Non-Binary Harley Qunn.
Taffy
I said “worst”.
Jamie
Binary Joker.
Deanatay
Enby Penguin.
TulipKitten
I’m not liking Booster much now, unless they’re joking about keeping them on the cloud. They should remove the pics ASAP because it’s kinda creepy to keep any pictures of someone without their consent.
Daniel M Ball
Good, decent behavior is rarely funny, Tulipkitten. Showing class and respecting boundaries is the smart move, (*pointing at the title of the comic to illustrate).
Booster behaving immaturely? failing to understand, grasp, or respect boundaries? What are they, Eighteen year old or something?
Oh…RIGHT…
While DW started this back in 2010, the fact is, it’s been a handful of months-in-character (including the timeskips) and these are immature, childish people because they’re CHILDREN.
Children in adult bodies, with minimal supervision, but mentally and psychologically they’re CHILDREN. Expecting Booster to have the discretion of a 40 year old with extensive life experience is a no-go at this station, so maybe cut them a little slack before you judge them? THEY don’t even know who they are yet.
Freemage
Pretty sure I knew at 18 that voyeurism and stalking were wrong and creepy.
Daniel M Ball
Did you know it because you KNEW IT or because you were TOLD? Did you start off with boundary issues, or did you learn them? Lemme put it this-a-way, Freemage. Most of the asshats you run into think of themselves as ‘pretty good guys’, They don’t GET that some of the shit they see in the media is WRONG until it blows up in their face. (Points to the “Joe’s Do-List” storyline for an example.) Booster is in a pretty unusual condition, because Booster’s got this whole ‘thing’ going on with their identity, which ‘thing’ tends to alter their own peception, just like every other Kid trying to stand out.
IOW it’s completely credible that a person who’s already pushing boundaries might fail to take into account other people’s boundaries, especially when the subject in question is atypical. Doesn’t mean they mean any harm, it means they don’t recognize what they’re doing is wrong, because they really don’t GRASP the other person’s perspective with a normal level of empathy…because they really don’t grasp the other person’s perspective, because they haven’t built up enough life-experience dealing with others in the real world to do so.
Which is not unusual for immature people in their late teens who do NOT have a background that includes ‘Behaviors that get you sent to Juvie, or Expelled’.
Empathy can be present without understanding. (see: lots of Christian Fundamentalists who AREN’T homicidal lunatics), and understanding can be present without Empathy (see manipulative psychopathic assholes that thrive in political or corporate settings).
Booster’s choice to upload it to the Cloud reflects lack of one of those two-either a lack of Empathy, or a lack of Understanding. It also reflects the kind of thing a kid whose major exposures to other people comes from Media and on-line interactions instead of in-person risks and failures. I’m going with lack of UNDERSTANDING, in hopes DW didn’t just drop a psychopath (excuse me, “Antisocial personality disorder”) into the cast.
APD’s are surface-charming and narcissistic. IOW not what most people think at all. They are GREAT at selling things, including the idea that they’re good people. Most people confuse that with someone who is ‘unsociable’-which is the person who avoids personal contact and huddles away from social situations where they might be highlighted.
Freemage
You talking about Joe’s “Do List” is actually pretty illustrative of the problem. No one in the comments defended Joe’s list–not the attitudes behind it, nor the fact of it. And the story itself called it out, first with comments from other characters, then with an up-front incident showing Joe the problem–and letting him grow, albeit fitfully.
If Booster changes to be a better person? Awesome. I’m all about that. My dislike of Roz, in particular, is her insistence that a person is always to be judged by their worst behavior, even when they try to change.
But thus far, I’ve seen nothing in the character for that better person to be built upon. This differs from Joe (and most of the rest of the cast, for that matter, at least those who aren’t largely two-dimensional foils, like Mary)–his genuine affection for Danny has been obvious since day one, showing that he HAS empathy, even if he likes to pretend he doesn’t. Likewise, even at his worst, he expresses a belief in consent and choice. Those traits played very heavily, I would argue, into him being able to understand about the issues around the “Do List”, leading to both him abandoning it and apologizing for it publicly.
Booster, OTOH, has never once shown any awareness of anyone else’s boundaries. And there’s never been any in-world consequences for these transgressions.
SDRainbow
“good behavior isn’t funny” is a defense for WILLIS, not the characters.
Especially here in the Dumbing Of Age Comments, prosecution of character is a full time sport. While we accept youth and inexperience as a…let’s say reason for the behavior to occur, it’s not a reason to cease discussion for it being bad behavior.
Meagan
I think there’s a spectrum of how much grace we as a comments section give characters for their inexperience and being in their learning process. Sometimes things are talked about more on principle, but other times it does get into more of a character attack.
ESM
I don’t have an issue with characters, even “good” characters, acting problematically. In fact, while Booster’s refusal to delete the photos makes THEM creepier, it makes this scene a bit less creepy, because the framing is not on Booster’s side here.
With that said, it *is* creepy in a way that’s unusual for DoA (In which characters who are being assholes like to go “I am an asshole now! It is me!”), which is interesting and worth talking about.
Ari
18-year-olds are not children, they’re adults with (unless something went incredibly wrong) very little experience living as adults. None of these characters are “children in adult bodies”. They’re young adults in young adult bodies. If they were a couple years younger, they would be adolescents in adolescent bodies. None of this changes that Booster’s inexperience at life plays into how they’re treating Amber – I’m guessing they think they’re seeing her say she’s ugly and they think that continuing to assert that they think she’s hot will help her feel more attractive, and time will tell how if that plays out negatively but probably yeah – but this is absolutely the kind of mistake that a young adult, or a not-young adult with poor social skills (related to neurodivergence or otherwise) or from a cultural/familial background where pushing against someone’s boundaries if you think it’s for their own good is in some situations considered the right thing to do, would make. There are 40-year-olds with extensive life experience who do this.
I’m not defending treating young adults like more experienced adults (including re: really fucked up age gaps in dating, which I hate having to specify but if I don’t then some shithead is absolutely going to think that’s what this is about) or holding people to standards they’re incapable of meeting in general, but infantalizing people is rude and cruel and there are people these characters’ age in the comments. There are ways to talk about age and development and behavior without implying that an undergrad is more similar to an 8-year-old than to someone who’s already graduated and has a job.
Daniel M Ball
Ari, your brain doesn’t stop forming its basic structure before 25 or so in most humans. For kids who GO to college instead of out into the work-force or into the Service, they’re very much still KIDS mentally, and most of the time, they’re not just kids, but SHELTERED kids in that demographic. Maturity is built off of experience, and for the vast majority of kids who go straight from High School to College?
They’re still mentally and emotionally children-that is, they lack maturity, experience, and judgment beyond the purely theoretical. VERY few of your college friends at 18 to 21 have much at all in the way of experience or maturity. Their identity is still FORMING. (this is also why armies like ’em young for enlistment-because they’re moldable.)
Booster’s got it extra-bad, because They haven’t figured out WHO they are yet, just that it isn’t someone who conforms to traditional roles or rules. Remember Joe’s “Do List”? That whole storyline is just exactly what a kid with little life experience and plenty of childish arrogance would come up with-that’s what made it a funny storyline.
Booster has issues with respecting boundaries, and little understanding or Empathy beyond the theoretical, because Booster hasn’t got the experience base to grasp those things fully yet. If Booster were a 27 year old Grad Student, it would go well past the horizon of ‘Creepy as fuck’, because mature mentalities don’t DO that kind of shit.
But kids? Kids do that kind of shit without thinking about it-and even worse, Stalker/creep behavior is LIONIZED in media. Every ‘romance’ show you’ve ever watched, slow it down and analyzed it, every ‘Love Song’ since the 1950s at LEAST is stock full of creepy, stalker sentiment. The maturity to separate “this is fiction, you don’t do this in real life” from “this is so cool” comes with EXPERIENCE and observation of the real world. You can’t get that from Tumblr or Facebook or whatever-the-god-botherers-are-using.
Ari
I don’t really care if the brain keeps forming because what you’re describing is a very small part of brain development associated with risk-taking specifically, which is really variable across individuals, and in fact, it might actually be a useful adaptation for young adults to be more likely to take risks rather than something that young adults are lacking. The brain also continues to change throughout an individual’s life. Are 40-year-olds children because their brains are generally different than the average 60-year-old’s? Also, the 25-years-old figure is based on cis men, and the corresponding figure for cis women is more like 20-years-old (there aren’t studies I know of on anyone else.) The brain is really plastic and changes based on experience and expectations – there are brain differences from culture to culture that are almost certainly not related to genetics – and cis girls are generally encouraged to be more cautious than cis boys, so I’m guessing most of this is social. If people are imitating their peer groups, don’t you think it’s likely that the young men in these studies are settling down as their friends do, too?
Identity is not something that conveniently crystallizes within a specific age range. Many things about a person shift and evolve as time passes and they experience new things. 80-year-olds are out there developing new interests, losing old ones, changing their outlooks on life based on their continued experience.
None of this even requires knowledge of neuroscience to understand. Nearly everything I am describing can be understood by observing the lives of actual people, which I can only assume is something you either don’t do, or are spectacularly bad at doing.
Even aside from that, if you want to talk science, you should probably make sure you actually know the science you’re talking about. You’re categorically infantilizing and dehumanizing all LEGAL ADULTS who have yet to meet your vague, scientifically and logically bankrupt threshold.
Also, I’m old enough that my brain should be fully cooked, and due to my combination of mental illnesses, I have trouble with impulse control and risk-taking, as well as zero natural understanding of boundaries. Am I a fake adult because I don’t suit your oversimplified misunderstanding of neuroscience? Should I be treated like a child because the life I’ve lived means that my personality has developed in a way that doesn’t suit the nebulous mythological standard you seem to be talking about? Does the answer change based on whether I’m trying to understand boundaries because I care about boundaries, or because I’ll be rejected if I don’t? Does it change based on whether I see my differences as completely detrimental, or as a mixed bag?
I’m not saying these characters aren’t specifically young adults and should be cut some slack. I feel like I pretty clearly articulated that I think these characters are specifically young adults and should be cut some slack. They are in a different developmental stage than other adults, who also make up several different developmental stages. The thing I was annoyed about is that you are saying a group of adults are literal children for being different than other adults. But that doesn’t make them children. That makes them young adults. I’m now also annoyed that you’re describing a nonbinary character who seems to be pretty solid in their personality and interests as someone who hasn’t figured out who they are yet, and that you’re bringing up The Media and inability to tell fiction from reality, when like, studies show that kids can tell fiction from reality at around 4. The art isn’t producing the culture, it’s reflecting it.
Your bizarre tangent about romantic media “lionizing” whatever it is that you personally consider “stalker” behavior (including apparently all or most romantic music released in the last 70 years, a statement that is so extreme and blatantly false that you are frankly lucky I even bothered addressing it) is not particularly relevant or accurate, and I don’t really appreciate that you wasted even more of my time with it. Everything about your post only tells me that YOU have very little actual life experience, regardless of your age, and are most likely regurgitating inaccurate information you essentially cannot have meaningfully researched yourself (because if you had, you would already know most of this) AND have approached with a gruesomely minimal amount of critical thinking.
Helicoptering and robbing young-ish people of reasonable amounts of personal agency is already destructive enough when we’re applying it to actual minors. Attempting to enforce similar standards on LEGAL ADULTS is vile enough that even statements that would typically be hyperbolic seem insufficient.
You legitimately have no idea what the hell you’re talking about and your opinions are gross, cruel, disturbing, and frankly outright dangerous. The condescending, demonstrably inaccurate posts you’ve made about this are actively corrosive toward both society in general and a large amount of actual human lives.
And you said it all, applying the same logic to REAL people, about someone who doesn’t even exist. You are the person who struggles to differentiate between fiction and reality.
Opus the Poet
This reminds me of the song by The Police, “Every Step You Take”, which at the time it came out was a love anthem, but these days it sounds like a stalker’s manifesto.
Needfuldoer
See also: Baby It’s Cold Outside.
Ari
There’s some interesting cultural context there. Currently, it reads super rapey, but in its original context it kind of wasn’t? There was a really good essay about this a while back. For example, when she asks what’s in her drink, that sounds really bad! But at the time the song was written, it was a stock joke that a character behaving foolishly or uninhibitedly (or wanting to) would ask what was in their drink, and the answer would always be that it was either not a significant enough amount of alcohol to alter their decision-making ability, or no alcohol at all. The girl wants to stay over and get her bone on, but she’s worried about social disapproval (see: all the lines referencing social disapproval! purity culture and rape culture can both be bad) and he’s giving her excuses for ways to justify this as being not about boning at all. They wouldn’t be singing in harmony at the end if they weren’t meant to be on the same page.
The same essayist pointed out that this is also a really good illustration of one of the ways rape culture manifested at the time. If you can’t agree to sex without people thinking you’re a slut, then you kind of have to put up an intentionally weak fight and hope your boyfriend understands what you’re doing – but not everyone’s capable of being assertive enough that they don’t look like they’re putting up an intentionally weak fight, and not everybody cares if their partner is trying to say yes or trying to say no. So yeah, art reflects the culture, babeyyy
Ari
Actually, Sting was intentionally writing from the perspective of a stalker and didn’t find it romantic at all, and he’s been annoyed that people seem to take the song as portraying something more consensual than it is. It’s one of those songs that gets misinterpreted all the time, like people playing “Lips of an Angel” at their wedding when it’s about cheating, or, like, so many different kinds of reaction to that Decemberists double suicide song. In this case, it’s probably because it has a bit of a deceptive sound to it (also intentional).
Proxiehunter
The attitude that an 18 year old is still a kid contributes directly to the number of people that can excuse a father traveling to the campus and shoving his daughter who at her age is an adult and not a kid into his car against her will so he can bring her back home where she “belongs”. After all, she’s a kid.
Parents have the right to make their kids get in the car and go home, by necessity they have to have that right in order to keep their kids safe from situations their kid doesn’t understand are dangerous.
Parents do not have the right to do that to adult children but insisting that their adult children are just kids makes it seem more acceptable to bystanders and churches willing to pay that dad’s bail.
What I’m saying is that calling an 18 year old adult a kid is practically Toe Dad apologia.
Mark
I heard a way of explaining this that makes sense to me: teenagers are not children and they are not adults; they are *teenagers* and their strengths and weaknesses are not the same as those of children *or* adults.
Proxiehunter
That’s great when you’re dealing with the ages 13-17, but 18 year old people are adults. They aren’t neither, they’re one of those things and that thing is adults. Saying anything else is saying that Toe Dad had a right to shove Becky in his car and drive away with her. Stop being creepy and admit that adults are adults.
Taffy
I can’t keep up with this double standard. Are 18-year-olds adults who can be reasonably expected to function societally the same as a 36-year-old with a stable income and good mental health, or are they literal children who can’t be trusted to know their own gender? We need to pick one and stick with it.
JepMZ
That’s how Mike is, an asshole
Ray Radlein
All he has done so far is point out that they have already been backed up to the cloud; he hasn’t given any indication that he won’t subsequently delete them.
The cloud backup is automatic; deleting the backups takes effort, and, possibly, devices like a computer or tablet which he doesn’t have with him at the moment.
If he had taken the pics with his phone, deleting them would be trivial; but doing so from the original camera is probably near-impossible.
Rabisch
THIS!!!
Nova
Booster’s pronouns are They/Them, just so you know.
Ray Radlein
DAMMIT.
Sorry, Booster.
Freemage
Booster could have said, “They’re still on the cloud, you know, but don’t worry, I’ll delete them.” Or any number of other ways of assuring Amber that Booster was not, in fact, going to be creepy about this. Booster chose not to take any of those options, and is being judged accordingly.
Chris (the other one)
Tulipkitten,
I might point out that the pictures were taken in the common area. Is there an enforceable expectation of privacy?
Anon200
There’s a difference between taking a picture of general area with people in it and taking pictures of someone without their consent 3 feet away from them, which booster was doing and yes it is creepy.
Really disliking booster
Freemage
“Enforceable”? No, there’s no Photo Police about to burst in and take Booster down. But rude, creepy behavior shouldn’t need police to be called out as such, either.
Darasara
They handed over the memory card (which has monetary value if nothing else) promptly when asked; I think it’s jumping to conclusions to assume they will now hoard the pictures like a sleezy dragon rather then removing them later just because they pointed out they’re already clouded.
Proxiehunter
It’s been on the application ever since the incident with Doctor Harleen Quinzel, now one of their most frequent patients.
Clif
It’s fortunate that everyone answers the application honestly.
someone
When you travel to the USA, there’s a form where they ask you if you are a terrorist.
Taffy
I’m assuming that if you answer “Yes”, you’re handed a machine gun, immediate citizenship, and a $50 Walmart gift card to buy some blue jeans and a white tank top.
thejeff
They have to check against the convenient color coded chart though.
Taffy
Well yeah, naturally. Gotta keep the horrible horrible status quo, otherwise we might have to examine our own culture, and then we might find flaws.
Incidentally, this is why Hawkeye’s Endgamecrusade against the Yakuza and cartels was probably at least slightly a little bit very racist. Dude’s already from a place with plenty of horrible unchecked terrorism, why’s he gotta go abroad for that?
Jamie
For the record, Hawkeye also went after some Mexican cartels. That was off-screen, though. So he spread it around.
Taffy
“Yakuza and cartels”
FlamestAndLight
only if they’d consider you white
asmodai
I’ve been told they actually refuse you entry if you say yes, and this is actually because if you get caught doing terrorist acts on US soil, it means you lied to a federal agency (or entered the US illegally, either, or) which allows them to do all sort of crazy stuff.
anon
well, we don’t know if they’ll succeed in getting a phd but i’d hope even an ‘intro to psychology’ would have some kinda brief talk about ‘ethics’ and like ‘don’t armchair diagnose strangers’ or so
Tho i wouldn’t be surprised if there was reddit posts of psych majors admitting they’re taking those kinda classes to learn to manipulate others
Mark
Maybe “Intro to Psychology” is a 200-level class. At my school the Computer Science curriculum didn’t have any CS classes the first year; 100-level CS is for Business majors.
Thag Simmons
They really are replacement Mike
Axel
old man punches cloud
Clif
It had it coming.
ButWhyASpoon
Old man yells at cloud.
Roborat
Tells it to keep off his lawn.
The Wellerman
Remembering the comments from the last couple days, I just can’t help but think of this scene from the Fairly Odd Parents about an incriminating tape that keeps getting paused and played over and over again:
https://m.facebook.com/RememberWhenNick/videos/cosmos-mother/844914279226936/
It’s really funny when you think about it ???
True Survivor
Some of the auto-generated closed captions on this video are really funny – and surprisingly profane.
Meagan
Omg I was really unclear how this was related for the first bit, but I see it now. We are basically seeing these characters’ stories this way, or even slower. We don’t know how it is going to play out. Like that Buddhist parable about the man whose son finds a horse, and then breaks his leg, and then there’s a war…etc.
Stephen Bierce
Hey! (Hey) You! (You)
Get Me Off Of Your Cloud!
cbwroses
I don’t want to be in your files!
Johan
Good for you, Amber!
Needfuldoer
Except for the “calling herself a ‘potato'” part. That’s internalized Blaine abuse poking though. 🙁
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-8/04-of-mike-and-men/potato/
Taffy
Their camera uploads things immediately? What if there’s no WiFi?
Clif
By this point most university dorms will have WiFi.