Especially as one gets older. 😉 After a while, you get so, SO tired of drama and baggage and you just find yourself craving someone who’s calm, reliable, steady and at peace with who they are and know what they want out of life.
Spencer
Yeah.
I’ve had enough chaos from the people in my life. A partner who’s a dependable rock that isn’t going to suddenly go fucking nuts on me is about as an ideal a romantic fantasy as I can muster.
You guys can motorcycle down the Mediterranean in gripping love triangles all you want, I’m playing scrabble with the missus/hubby.
Clif
There is an uncomfortable amount of truth in this.
milu
hear me out though: mediterranean motorcycle trip WITH a scrabble game?!
Erik
Strip Scrabble!
zee
Tbh I’m 21 and i just want boring. If my life is boring i can say I’ve succeeded. I just want a stable house and a couple dogs with my partner and only have to worry about things like. Taxes and the weather and shit. And not my current worries like girls getting kidnapped from my campus and a pervasive national r*pe culture
JasonAW3
Or.. You get to the point where corrupting the innocent becomes a thrill unto itself?
I hate drama because the relationships in my life have been constantly unreliable and hectic.
I know I’m the common denominator, I’m still a person, I’m still capable of the same kind of folly and mistakes as everyone around me (and also a cocktail of mental disorders doesn’t help), but that just means I want to vibe with someone where we mutually don’t trip over each others’ alarms.
Decidedly Orthogonal
So you’re telling me that someone who “rants and rants” about drama, isn’t causing drama or the cause of most of the drama in their life?
n.b. My life is a trainwreck caused by a dumpster fire in a flood. I know where my drama comes from and I know how to mitigate it as much as possible. I know the mistakes I’m responsible for. Looking at the mistakes I let myself walk into, and I am very confident in the original assertion, and its fairness. I respect your feelings on this, but I’ve seen far too much support for the assertion to disregard it from one claim that it’s not fair.
I’d suggest that maybe Joe was using that as a pickup line and tries it on everyone, but honestly I figure this is one area where he can be counted on to be totally honest.
We know her number before she was changed to zero. He said she was a 4, with the potential to be ‘upgraded to a ten’ with his dick once he ‘fixed’ her.
Rose by Any Other Name
That was later implied to have been a lie.
My money is on Joyce for #1.
Spencer
Was it? I thought it was pretty clear Joe was playing into a dumb fantasy of “naive churchy girl embraces the horny thanks to Joe’s monster dong.”
Void
I mean Joe does intentionally exaggerate his overly sexualness in an attempt to distance himself from others so that he can’t really hurt anyone.
Spencer
I was referring to their date at the very start of the comic where Joe was treating his life like a sex comedy.
Deanatay
1 seems a lower score than 11, though…
Decidedly Orthogonal
Not if she’s standing on top of the podium. Rankings don’t matter if at the end of the day you come in first.
Decidedly Orthogonal
Sorry, that should’ve been, “Sit astride the Joedium.”
Rose by Any Other Name
**sigh**
It makes me sad when I go out of my way to make my meaning clear and people still post replies that either misinterpret me or take my words out of context.
I did not suggest that Joyce was a “1”. I suggested that she is “#1” as in the one above Sal re the comic we are talking about.
Rose by Any Other Name
(A few seconds after posting, I realized that Deanatay’s comment may have been a joke. If so, I didn’t register that until too late. Apologies if so.)
BBCC
Joe probably means Joyce, although purely looks wise, he might mean Rachel, who’s the one person we know he ‘rated’ higher than Sal. Given Danny only knows of Joe’s list, that’s probably what he’s thinking of, based on when he last saw it (which was probably when it was being deleted). Joyce definitely means more to him though.
thejeff
He says “hottest”, so I’d guess he’s thinking more looks wise, rather than personal interest. It also doesn’t really make sense to rank Sal second in terms of his personal interest, since he’s had next to no contact with her. Thinking Joyce, then Sal would be an odd mixing of levels, one being rated high because he likes her and the other purely on looks/style.
BBCC
When? He seemed pretty legitimate about it during that storyline.
I wouldn’t be shocked if she was number one in his mind now, though Rachel’s probably the number one on his list (which is probably what Danny thinks he means).
He’s being a piece of work right now. Did Sal know that Danny was bi?
Thag Simmons
Danny’s said it’s basically an open secret, so I don’t think it’s a huge deal
Clif
It may, in fact, not be a huge deal to Danny. Which changes little.
If someone has a ‘non-standard’ orientation which could cause other people to treat them differently and in some cases treat them very badly, then basic decency requires you to exercise caution in who you mention it to. If the person wishes to announce it to the world at large, as Becky has done, it’s their choice. It’s not your choice, or shouldn’t be.
Joe is unfamiliar with the dynamic between Danny and Sal, and while he’s known Danny for a lifetime, he has no basis for knowing how Sal will react. Joe now knows that Sal is into Danny and while he doesn’t know that Danny cares enough about Sal to buy her a bike, Danny has just confessed that Sal is far enough out of his league to terrify him. So with no idea if it will be a deal killer for Sal, Joe puts it out there. Some friend.
Doesn’t mean that Joe is being intentionally malicious, but if he was, his behavior might not be much different.
Spencer
It strikes me as likely that Danny has both told Sal (because puns), though maybe not that he’s open to Sal to Joe.
Becky in Leslie’s classroom for example publicly outed Ruth and Jennifer to both Leslie and everyone else in the room, and more pointedly Jennifer is someone who has no interest in acknowledging her attraction to women at the moment.
It was definitely still a violation of boundaries and I think doing it to an entire classroom of people when one of them is insistent they don’t actually like girls right now is pretty dang awful, but it’s also how Becky would be written: she’s a loud jackass and Leslie’s her gay mom, so of course Becky’s going to scream about it to her.
Joe meanwhile is talking to his lifelong best friend in front of the girl who’s so into him she literally scaled a wall to come see him, someone we know or can at least infer that Danny is out to, and he’s making some nominal headway back into Fun No Feelings Sex Bro Joe after last chapter had him confront his feelings for Joyce.
If you want to make an endpoint to a few strips where Joe is going “how the hell is this super hot girl into my nerdy best friend?” where he comes up with a silly chauvinist and heteronormative reading why Sal likes him, it kind of had to play out like this, like how Becky in Leslie’s classroom would play out like it did.
milu
i sometimes feel like the central characters in this comic can all be depended upon to be sort of above-average woke. those who aren’t are either comically vile (Mary) or they’re well-meaning but— ok, they’re Joyce.
there have been instances of casual bigotry by sympathetic characters, like Jennifer being off-handedly classist on the phone in Sal’s presence, but for the most part the characters all exhibit a level of sensitivity that’s kind of unrealistic for a random sample of college freshmen.
so i get the sense that when we see Joe (or Becky) casually outing people, we’re not supposed to find that worrisome, like there’s a sort of comic licence going on?
Yes, this is not an ok thing to do irl. and i don’t know how i feel about the way it’s portrayed here like it’s nbd: on the one hand there’s something relaxing about this sort of soft utopia; i can enjoy today’s comic because within this universe’s parameters, i know that this is fine. on the other hand, this is different from superhero stunts where disbelief is suspended by genre conventions.
Spencer
Well yeah but that doesn’t actually matter.
“Woke” isn’t an on/off switch. A person who believes in progressive ideals is still as fallible as everyone else in living up to those ideals because ideals are perfect and people aren’t. I believe in progressive values but that does not make me incapable of ever doing wrong, even wrong that I stringently believe shouldn’t ever be committed.
Like, let’s compare Becky and Joe.
Becky is in a classroom of people she doesn’t know and walks in Ruth and Jennifer. Becky immediately starts talking out loud about their relationship to Leslie and, by consequence, the entire class until they get angry enough to leave (also Becky had a Machiavellian plan to keep them apart which is in-character since Becky is a stupid idiot).
Now, this is deeply, morally wrong in any real life scenario and fiction requires a suspension of disbelief before you even get into character motivations. Becky as a character would absolutely yell loudly about this to Leslie, that isn’t a dunk on Becky that is who she is and how she talks, and then there’s how the camera of the panels only focuses on the core cast so even though Ruth and Jennifer were forcibly outed, they were forcibly outed to people who only barely exist. It’s that Becky’s specific actions (and especially her later revealed stupid idiot motivation) still trip over these pitfalls and turn her into someone who just goes “HEY THESE TWO USED TO FUCK” at a teacher neither of them know, while Jennifer is adamant that she doesn’t like girls because she’s still in denial.
Meanwhile you’ve got this strip here where both Sal and Joe know Danny is bisexual (Joe was outright told, Sal is pretty easy to infer), but realistically Joe does not know that Sal knows and at most can make a sensible assumption that Danny has told her. Joe is backsliding into his old macho persona and so lands on Danny’s sexuality as some kind of magical excuse for why Sal is into him, and so lands on Danny’s sexuality. To actually set all this up we’d have to get a strip where Danny either tells Joe “yeah it’s fine to tell people” or for Sal to learn Danny is bi while Joe is in the room, meaning this one gag strip now has to get set up even though it won’t have any tangible impact on anyone’s relationship.
It’s really not as simple as “the characters are good so it’s not actually a mistake”, it’s not a binary thing where you’re either Woke or Problematic, and you’re correct to bring up the suspension of disbelief since I think that’s why it’s easier for me to roll with this versus how Becky acted.
milu
yes i completely agree with you and Clif that outing people without their consent is bad, and that you cannot count on people being “woke” enough not to do bad things with that information some way or other. (and actually i don’t like this word, and now wish i’d phrased my comment differently.)
but this being fiction, my point is that for me, as a reader, i get the feeling that the author is not interested in exploring the possible consequences of those transgressions. i may yet be proven wrong. let’s see how Danny (or Sal) reacts to this tomorrow. But in the Becky situation as i recall neither Ruth, Leslie, or even Jennifer (or Carla) seemed to have anything to say specifically about Becky loudly outing two non-straight people.
anyway, you make good points about it being in character for both Joe and Becky to be sketchy regarding others’ consent in both instances.
in any case, i’m grateful to you and Clif and others for pointing out that this is not ok, because i might not have noticed. which in a way, is my point? although probably that says more about me than it does about the strip. oh well.
If she was the first hottest, why would Joe envy someone who hasn’t even gone that far with the second hottest?
Reltzik
Sal went fucking bonkers for Danny (according to Joe). Malaya only went casual for Joe. Big difference.
Clif
Joe also already had intimacy with Roz (which is an odd way to phrase it). Doesn’t mean that Joe thinks either is the hottest. Just that they met his standards, which seem to be (a) willing and (b) above a 3 in his internal ranking system.
Personal anecdote time. Back in the 80’s I was going through AIT in the Army (Advanced training, which for my field was a year) and living in the barracks. They were brick and co-ed, but separated by sex. Women on one end of the third floor, men on the other floors and on the other end of the third floor. The third floor had a ‘temporary’ (permanent) wall built at the half-way point, separating the sexes.
They put the married men, or men with dependents, on the other end of the third floor, increasing the odds that nothing would happen.
Each floor, on the outside of the building, had a concrete extension, about 2 and a half feet wide, supposedly acting as ‘awnings’ or rain/sun shields, if you will.
What they ACTUALLY were, was a highway to bypass that inner wall. My room was the first inside the separation on the side of the building facing the center of the quad.
Every weekend night, and quite a few weekday nights, people would (nicely, mind you) ask if they could use our room, and proceed to come in, and go out the window, down the building, and in one of the female’s rooms. (Remember, most new Army personnel are under 21; I was 22 at the time).
Some of the people were other married men, as well… man, what a time that was. *I*, of course, *NEVER* used highway, nope, nope, never. This was before cell phones and ubiquitous cameras…
no, i’m fairly sure radioactive spiders are harder to kill. it makes sense if you think about, like, very quickly
Wizard
Obviously they’re super tough, otherwise the radiation would have killed them.
Clif
Even a normal spider, if you bite some of their legs off, they grow back.
I have no idea if machine learning could be trained to interface with spider brains in such a way as to allow spiders to operate appropriately scaled motorcycles. Like backbreeding chickens into classic dinosaurs, it’s a project that’s appealing on it’s own merits, or lack thereof.
243 thoughts on “Tap-tap”
Ana Chronistic
Sal is secretly Spider-Car, right
Stephen Bierce
No wonder her boots say Bridgestone on the sides.
Deanatay
Basically Batman
Belatedly Black Widow
Secretly Spider-Car
Weirdly Wonder Woman
Finally Full-Metal Frog
Schpoonman
Sal, you like him in part because he is boring.
Tunasammich
Boring is underrated
Zaxares
Especially as one gets older. 😉 After a while, you get so, SO tired of drama and baggage and you just find yourself craving someone who’s calm, reliable, steady and at peace with who they are and know what they want out of life.
Spencer
Yeah.
I’ve had enough chaos from the people in my life. A partner who’s a dependable rock that isn’t going to suddenly go fucking nuts on me is about as an ideal a romantic fantasy as I can muster.
You guys can motorcycle down the Mediterranean in gripping love triangles all you want, I’m playing scrabble with the missus/hubby.
Clif
There is an uncomfortable amount of truth in this.
milu
hear me out though: mediterranean motorcycle trip WITH a scrabble game?!
Erik
Strip Scrabble!
zee
Tbh I’m 21 and i just want boring. If my life is boring i can say I’ve succeeded. I just want a stable house and a couple dogs with my partner and only have to worry about things like. Taxes and the weather and shit. And not my current worries like girls getting kidnapped from my campus and a pervasive national r*pe culture
JasonAW3
Or.. You get to the point where corrupting the innocent becomes a thrill unto itself?
Decidedly Orthogonal
For the young ‘uns, if someone you know rants and rants about “how much they hate drama!” THEY are the cause of their drama. Steer clear.
RedCat
Not always true, and also not really fair.
Spencer
Yeah.
I hate drama because the relationships in my life have been constantly unreliable and hectic.
I know I’m the common denominator, I’m still a person, I’m still capable of the same kind of folly and mistakes as everyone around me (and also a cocktail of mental disorders doesn’t help), but that just means I want to vibe with someone where we mutually don’t trip over each others’ alarms.
Decidedly Orthogonal
So you’re telling me that someone who “rants and rants” about drama, isn’t causing drama or the cause of most of the drama in their life?
Also: [xkcitationd]
n.b. My life is a trainwreck caused by a dumpster fire in a flood. I know where my drama comes from and I know how to mitigate it as much as possible. I know the mistakes I’m responsible for. Looking at the mistakes I let myself walk into, and I am very confident in the original assertion, and its fairness. I respect your feelings on this, but I’ve seen far too much support for the assertion to disregard it from one claim that it’s not fair.
Seregiel
Or they’ve worked with people
Sirksome
You think Joe is talking about Joyce or Rachel for first hottest girl?
Thag Simmons
Rachel, I think, given the whole ‘eleven’ deal.
Doctor_Who
I’d suggest that maybe Joe was using that as a pickup line and tries it on everyone, but honestly I figure this is one area where he can be counted on to be totally honest.
DailyBrad
Might be Joyce, since we do not know what her number was before he changed it to 0, even if we take him calling Rachel an 11 at face value.
BBCC
We know her number before she was changed to zero. He said she was a 4, with the potential to be ‘upgraded to a ten’ with his dick once he ‘fixed’ her.
Rose by Any Other Name
That was later implied to have been a lie.
My money is on Joyce for #1.
Spencer
Was it? I thought it was pretty clear Joe was playing into a dumb fantasy of “naive churchy girl embraces the horny thanks to Joe’s monster dong.”
Void
I mean Joe does intentionally exaggerate his overly sexualness in an attempt to distance himself from others so that he can’t really hurt anyone.
Spencer
I was referring to their date at the very start of the comic where Joe was treating his life like a sex comedy.
Deanatay
1 seems a lower score than 11, though…
Decidedly Orthogonal
Not if she’s standing on top of the podium. Rankings don’t matter if at the end of the day you come in first.
Decidedly Orthogonal
Sorry, that should’ve been, “Sit astride the Joedium.”
Rose by Any Other Name
**sigh**
It makes me sad when I go out of my way to make my meaning clear and people still post replies that either misinterpret me or take my words out of context.
I did not suggest that Joyce was a “1”. I suggested that she is “#1” as in the one above Sal re the comic we are talking about.
Rose by Any Other Name
(A few seconds after posting, I realized that Deanatay’s comment may have been a joke. If so, I didn’t register that until too late. Apologies if so.)
BBCC
Joe probably means Joyce, although purely looks wise, he might mean Rachel, who’s the one person we know he ‘rated’ higher than Sal. Given Danny only knows of Joe’s list, that’s probably what he’s thinking of, based on when he last saw it (which was probably when it was being deleted). Joyce definitely means more to him though.
thejeff
He says “hottest”, so I’d guess he’s thinking more looks wise, rather than personal interest. It also doesn’t really make sense to rank Sal second in terms of his personal interest, since he’s had next to no contact with her. Thinking Joyce, then Sal would be an odd mixing of levels, one being rated high because he likes her and the other purely on looks/style.
BBCC
When? He seemed pretty legitimate about it during that storyline.
I wouldn’t be shocked if she was number one in his mind now, though Rachel’s probably the number one on his list (which is probably what Danny thinks he means).
Thag Simmons
He gave her a 4, but with potential to ‘upgrade’ to a 10
Joe can be a real piece of work at times.
Clif
He’s being a piece of work right now. Did Sal know that Danny was bi?
Thag Simmons
Danny’s said it’s basically an open secret, so I don’t think it’s a huge deal
Clif
It may, in fact, not be a huge deal to Danny. Which changes little.
If someone has a ‘non-standard’ orientation which could cause other people to treat them differently and in some cases treat them very badly, then basic decency requires you to exercise caution in who you mention it to. If the person wishes to announce it to the world at large, as Becky has done, it’s their choice. It’s not your choice, or shouldn’t be.
Joe is unfamiliar with the dynamic between Danny and Sal, and while he’s known Danny for a lifetime, he has no basis for knowing how Sal will react. Joe now knows that Sal is into Danny and while he doesn’t know that Danny cares enough about Sal to buy her a bike, Danny has just confessed that Sal is far enough out of his league to terrify him. So with no idea if it will be a deal killer for Sal, Joe puts it out there. Some friend.
Doesn’t mean that Joe is being intentionally malicious, but if he was, his behavior might not be much different.
Spencer
It strikes me as likely that Danny has both told Sal (because puns), though maybe not that he’s open to Sal to Joe.
Becky in Leslie’s classroom for example publicly outed Ruth and Jennifer to both Leslie and everyone else in the room, and more pointedly Jennifer is someone who has no interest in acknowledging her attraction to women at the moment.
It was definitely still a violation of boundaries and I think doing it to an entire classroom of people when one of them is insistent they don’t actually like girls right now is pretty dang awful, but it’s also how Becky would be written: she’s a loud jackass and Leslie’s her gay mom, so of course Becky’s going to scream about it to her.
Joe meanwhile is talking to his lifelong best friend in front of the girl who’s so into him she literally scaled a wall to come see him, someone we know or can at least infer that Danny is out to, and he’s making some nominal headway back into Fun No Feelings Sex Bro Joe after last chapter had him confront his feelings for Joyce.
If you want to make an endpoint to a few strips where Joe is going “how the hell is this super hot girl into my nerdy best friend?” where he comes up with a silly chauvinist and heteronormative reading why Sal likes him, it kind of had to play out like this, like how Becky in Leslie’s classroom would play out like it did.
milu
i sometimes feel like the central characters in this comic can all be depended upon to be sort of above-average woke. those who aren’t are either comically vile (Mary) or they’re well-meaning but— ok, they’re Joyce.
there have been instances of casual bigotry by sympathetic characters, like Jennifer being off-handedly classist on the phone in Sal’s presence, but for the most part the characters all exhibit a level of sensitivity that’s kind of unrealistic for a random sample of college freshmen.
so i get the sense that when we see Joe (or Becky) casually outing people, we’re not supposed to find that worrisome, like there’s a sort of comic licence going on?
Yes, this is not an ok thing to do irl. and i don’t know how i feel about the way it’s portrayed here like it’s nbd: on the one hand there’s something relaxing about this sort of soft utopia; i can enjoy today’s comic because within this universe’s parameters, i know that this is fine. on the other hand, this is different from superhero stunts where disbelief is suspended by genre conventions.
Spencer
Well yeah but that doesn’t actually matter.
“Woke” isn’t an on/off switch. A person who believes in progressive ideals is still as fallible as everyone else in living up to those ideals because ideals are perfect and people aren’t. I believe in progressive values but that does not make me incapable of ever doing wrong, even wrong that I stringently believe shouldn’t ever be committed.
Like, let’s compare Becky and Joe.
Becky is in a classroom of people she doesn’t know and walks in Ruth and Jennifer. Becky immediately starts talking out loud about their relationship to Leslie and, by consequence, the entire class until they get angry enough to leave (also Becky had a Machiavellian plan to keep them apart which is in-character since Becky is a stupid idiot).
Now, this is deeply, morally wrong in any real life scenario and fiction requires a suspension of disbelief before you even get into character motivations. Becky as a character would absolutely yell loudly about this to Leslie, that isn’t a dunk on Becky that is who she is and how she talks, and then there’s how the camera of the panels only focuses on the core cast so even though Ruth and Jennifer were forcibly outed, they were forcibly outed to people who only barely exist. It’s that Becky’s specific actions (and especially her later revealed stupid idiot motivation) still trip over these pitfalls and turn her into someone who just goes “HEY THESE TWO USED TO FUCK” at a teacher neither of them know, while Jennifer is adamant that she doesn’t like girls because she’s still in denial.
Meanwhile you’ve got this strip here where both Sal and Joe know Danny is bisexual (Joe was outright told, Sal is pretty easy to infer), but realistically Joe does not know that Sal knows and at most can make a sensible assumption that Danny has told her. Joe is backsliding into his old macho persona and so lands on Danny’s sexuality as some kind of magical excuse for why Sal is into him, and so lands on Danny’s sexuality. To actually set all this up we’d have to get a strip where Danny either tells Joe “yeah it’s fine to tell people” or for Sal to learn Danny is bi while Joe is in the room, meaning this one gag strip now has to get set up even though it won’t have any tangible impact on anyone’s relationship.
It’s really not as simple as “the characters are good so it’s not actually a mistake”, it’s not a binary thing where you’re either Woke or Problematic, and you’re correct to bring up the suspension of disbelief since I think that’s why it’s easier for me to roll with this versus how Becky acted.
milu
yes i completely agree with you and Clif that outing people without their consent is bad, and that you cannot count on people being “woke” enough not to do bad things with that information some way or other. (and actually i don’t like this word, and now wish i’d phrased my comment differently.)
but this being fiction, my point is that for me, as a reader, i get the feeling that the author is not interested in exploring the possible consequences of those transgressions. i may yet be proven wrong. let’s see how Danny (or Sal) reacts to this tomorrow. But in the Becky situation as i recall neither Ruth, Leslie, or even Jennifer (or Carla) seemed to have anything to say specifically about Becky loudly outing two non-straight people.
anyway, you make good points about it being in character for both Joe and Becky to be sketchy regarding others’ consent in both instances.
in any case, i’m grateful to you and Clif and others for pointing out that this is not ok, because i might not have noticed. which in a way, is my point? although probably that says more about me than it does about the strip. oh well.
Reltzik
Or Malaya?
Wagstaff
Didn’t Joe already have intimacy with Malaya?
If she was the first hottest, why would Joe envy someone who hasn’t even gone that far with the second hottest?
Reltzik
Sal went fucking bonkers for Danny (according to Joe). Malaya only went casual for Joe. Big difference.
Clif
Joe also already had intimacy with Roz (which is an odd way to phrase it). Doesn’t mean that Joe thinks either is the hottest. Just that they met his standards, which seem to be (a) willing and (b) above a 3 in his internal ranking system.
Needfuldoer
In his mind? Joyce.
In the version of that narrative he shares with the world? Probably Rachel.
RacingTurtle
Exactly. It’s Rachel Jackson on the List, but Joyce in his Feelings
Decidedly Orthogonal
Noooo! Not in the feeeeliiiiinnnngs! -Joe
Sombrero
I think he refers to Sarah as the first hottest.
DaisyFM
Carla is hottest girl.
Wagstaff
So true…..
Spencer
I think it’s Rachel given that she was an 11 on his Do-List and that’s the criteria he’s using.
I don’t think he would be using the Do-List to talk about Joyce, considering he knows how badly his behaviour hurt her.
Schpoonman
Joyce. Joe’s taste has improved markedly since the first semester.
Doctor_Who
They’re only on the second floor, right? Please say they’re on the second floor.
Rotunda
They’re on the third floor. Sorry.
AbacusWizard
I think they’re pretty high up—right behind the second E in the SEMMF sign at the top of the building.
Keulen
No idea what floor they’re on, but either Sal is really good at climbing buildings or that building is very easy to climb.
Chris (the other one)
Personal anecdote time. Back in the 80’s I was going through AIT in the Army (Advanced training, which for my field was a year) and living in the barracks. They were brick and co-ed, but separated by sex. Women on one end of the third floor, men on the other floors and on the other end of the third floor. The third floor had a ‘temporary’ (permanent) wall built at the half-way point, separating the sexes.
They put the married men, or men with dependents, on the other end of the third floor, increasing the odds that nothing would happen.
Each floor, on the outside of the building, had a concrete extension, about 2 and a half feet wide, supposedly acting as ‘awnings’ or rain/sun shields, if you will.
What they ACTUALLY were, was a highway to bypass that inner wall. My room was the first inside the separation on the side of the building facing the center of the quad.
Every weekend night, and quite a few weekday nights, people would (nicely, mind you) ask if they could use our room, and proceed to come in, and go out the window, down the building, and in one of the female’s rooms. (Remember, most new Army personnel are under 21; I was 22 at the time).
Some of the people were other married men, as well… man, what a time that was. *I*, of course, *NEVER* used highway, nope, nope, never. This was before cell phones and ubiquitous cameras…
Blibdoolpoolp
I don’t blame Billie for mistaking her for Amazi-girl anymore.
Deanatay
That’s an odd attitude for a savage aquatic demigod to take.
Clif
It’s the attitude of 9 out of 10 savage aquatic demigods though.
And I just now made the tenth one up.
Thag Simmons
Sal has apparently been bitten by a radioactive spider.
Doctor_Who
She bit the spider right back, and now it rides around on a sick motorcycle.
Thag Simmons
I think this kills the spider, actually.
milu
no, i’m fairly sure radioactive spiders are harder to kill. it makes sense if you think about, like, very quickly
Wizard
Obviously they’re super tough, otherwise the radiation would have killed them.
Clif
Even a normal spider, if you bite some of their legs off, they grow back.
I have no idea if machine learning could be trained to interface with spider brains in such a way as to allow spiders to operate appropriately scaled motorcycles. Like backbreeding chickens into classic dinosaurs, it’s a project that’s appealing on it’s own merits, or lack thereof.
milu
what about classic dinosaurs on motorcycles?!
Lingo
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly. I don’t know why she swallowed a fly. Perhaps she’ll die.
JessWitt
Getting that spider tattoo also didn’t help to keep her alias secret.
Thag Simmons
Alternatively, if she got a fancy red hat to go along with that Jacket she could pull off a decent Carmen Sandiego impersonation.
Spaghetti Thighs