195

Popular
Posted on January 18, 2019 by David M Willis
Fourteen years ago, I began a webcomic called Shortpacked!  It was about people who worked in a toy store and told jokes about Batman.  Anyway, to celebrate, I put up a coupon code on Twitter yesterday for $5 off any order of books from my online store.  (Surprise, the code is SHORTPACKED.)  Any books!  Not just Shortpacked!, but Dumbing of Age, It's Walky!, or Roomies!.  Today, the code still works!  So use that knowledge how you wish.

195 thoughts on “Popular”

  1. Ana Chronistic

    We played poker at our table!

    I think it was poker

    eh cards

    1. Ana Chronistic

      FOURTEEN SHORTPACKED YEARS

      I think my classmates have children older than that AUGH

      1. BarerMender

        My little sister has a grandson about that age.

      2. Kaidah

        I have kids older than that…wait, *I* have kids older than that…? When did I become old? I’m too young to be old.

        1. keithcurtis

          It gets worse.

    2. UltraValkyrie

      Heck yeah, card games during lunch buds

      1. UltraValkyrie

        also we were definitely the nerd table. mathletes and robotics team members 😛

    3. Stephen Bierce

      “We don’t play poker.”

      “What do you play?”

      “CRIBBAGE.”–The Monkees

      1. JoeCovenant

        🙂 After not playing for DECADES I just got back into cribbage this week thanks to the wonders that are Apps! (Still re-learning the intricacies!)

      2. Ana Chronistic

        It may have been we played Bullshit

        That sounds on-brand

      3. Eyebrow

        We played Hearts. Incessantly.

    4. foamy

      You had a table?

      Lucky.

      1. Ana Chronistic

        I guess “table” isn’t super accurate

        “Bar” more like, especially since they apparently put in individual stool-shaped protrusions on each side after I graduated

    5. Freezer

      Are you me?

  2. Doctor_Who

    I would have thought stuff like that was cool in Canada.

    I mean, don’t they still do stuff like this in Canadian school?

    1. Dean

      In Canada, the cool kids build igloos and trap beaver during lunch. Or so I am given to understand.

      1. Roborat

        Actually, they don’t do that anymore, we need a building permit to build igloos now, and trapping beavers was outlawed after the great drought of ’93. The big thing is moose tipping now.

    2. Norah

      I got the impression she was taking about after she moved to Indiana.

    3. Eyebrow

      In Canada, at lunch, we played Hearts.

    4. Roborat

      What, rip of Laugh In?

  3. Stu

    Billie REALLY needs to break out of the high school clique mentality – for her sake and Ruth’s.

    1. Doopyboop

      Amen to that.

    2. DailyBrad

      We’re hopefully seeing that break in progress, or at the very least, knowledge that cool in college and highschool are very different things.

    3. JetstreamGW

      The whole damn world is just as obsessed with who’s the best dressed and who’s having sex. Who’s got the money, who’s got the honeys, who’s kinda cute and who’s just a mess.

      And you still don’t have the right look, and you don’t have the right friends. Nothing changes but the faces, the names, and the trends.

      High. School. Never. Ends.

      1. C.T Phipps

        I wonder if there’s sororities which take women who have DUIs.

        Billie’s major problem is that she hasn’t found the place where women like her go to continue their high school lives.

        Mind you, the ones on my campus would have other issues to refuse her like her….associations. With a certain…kind…of people.

        *pause*

        By which I mean, the ones on my campus were racist as fuck.

      2. All-Purpose Guru

        The Great Burrito Extortion Case.

        Bowling for Soup FTW.

    4. MatsuoTanuki

      Four years, you think for sure
      That’s all you’ve got to endure
      All the total dicks, all the stuck up chicks
      So superficial so immature
      Then when you graduate
      You take a look around
      And you say “HEY WAIT!”
      “This is the same as where I just came from!”
      “I thought it was over, aw that”s just great…”
      The whole damned world is just as obsessed
      With who’s the best dressed and who’s having sex
      Who’s got the money? Who gets the honeys?
      Who’s kinda cute and who’s just a mess?
      And you still don’t have the right looks
      And you still don’t have the right friends
      Nothing changes but the faces, the names and the treeeeeends!
      High school never eeends!

      1. 3-I

        Hold your breath and count the days, we’re graduating soon.
        College will be paradise if I’m not dead by June!
        But I know, I know…. Life can be beautiful.
        I hope, I wish, I pray for a better way.
        If we changed back then,
        We could change again…
        We could be beautiful…

        Just not today.

        1. TemperaryObsessor

          I can’t help but think half the school is singing that same song and Veronica is just another voice in the crowd to them.

    5. UnDrewsual

      In college, the cliques are replaced by frats and sororoties. Which is why I was SO glad to go to a university that has few of them and at which they are mostly ignored. Like, if you are in one, YOU are the odd one.

  4. Yumi

    Tag yourself, I’m the one who wrote the newsletter.

    1. Tunasammich

      I’m definitely stood still in dodgeball

      1. Doctor_Who

        Maps for me. Ran a D&D campaign.

        1. Dunedon

          I was Ruth …

        2. Chrissy

          Me too

        3. LeslieBean4Shizzle

          I didn’t write a newsletter, but I did write for my highschool newspaper. So… close?

          As for D&D maps/campaigns, I didn’t get into that until college.

        4. StClair

          I still have some of those maps.

        5. Opus the Poet

          I used to read maps for fun, and was part of the hex map wargame club. So, whichever one closest aligns with that.

        6. Roborat

          Panzer Blitz forever!

      2. lilyliv

        Same

    2. Emperor Norton II

      I’m the one who had business cards made that just said:

      The Crow

      Somewhere

      (Note, the reasons for these were a bit more complicated (and frankly boring) than simply having watched a certain Brandon Lee movie.)

      1. Opus the Poet

        You mean I’m not the only one who remembers The Crow was a creepy comic book before it was a cursed movie?

    3. ktbear

      I’d see me as the one drawing maps, probably for some kind of rpg…

      1. ShinyNeen

        Maps buddy! High-five!

      2. Roborat

        Why would you need a map for a rocket propelled grenade?

    4. Marsh Maryrose

      I wasn’t nearly normal enough to hang out with the weirdos. I spent my lunch periods in the school library.

      1. vlademir1

        That was more or less me as well. I was in the library or somewhere else quiet reading or else getting homework done so I didn’t have to bother with it at home.

      2. thejeff

        Pretty much. Honestly, I don’t really remember lunch in high school particularly. On my own mostly, one way or another.

        College was where I hung out with the weird kids. There were more of them around, so we could group. 🙂

      3. ruhrow

        We weren’t allowed to go to the library during lunch in high school. So I usually snuc in or begged teachers for a pass, or just hung out in their rooms.

    5. Betty Anne

      Stood still during dodgeball! And sometimes drew maps. :3

      1. Roborat

        I rocked at dodgeball, I would be the last one left on my side and they couldn’t hit me. One game was called a tie because I ended up with all the balls and wouldn’t throw any.

    6. Liquid Len

      Math team and band geek. Not a newsletter, but I wrote… songs.

  5. Rowan

    We WERE the weirdo table, Mister.

  6. Stephen Bierce

    *puts the Weird Al CDs on shuffle mode on the hacked Muzak–where it stops nobody knows*

    1. Tacos

      You just know it’s gonna end up on “White and Nerdy”

    2. Keulen

      I was gonna suggest “High School Never Ends” by Bowling For Soup.

  7. ValdVin

    Fascinating how descriptive Ruth gets and Billie has to still be told that that was the weird table

    They all start to blur together from a head cheerleader’s mighty perch.

    1. C.T Phipps

      Billie is having difficulty believing she’s been dating…a nerd.

      1. StClair

        “No… that’s not true… that’s impossible!“

        1. Dev Non

          “Search your feelings, Billie. You know it to be true.”

        2. cookie1995

          Noooooooooo!!!!!!!

    2. thejeff

      Yeah, that’s more denial than blurring.

  8. Sam

    I like Ruth’s weirdo table. Sounds fun.

  9. tyranidswarm

    Could be worse, you could be the sit-in-the-library-during-lunch-so-you-don’t-have-to-talk-to-anyone kid

    1. Marsh Maryrose

      Twinsies!

      I was actually pretty happy in the library. I have many happy memories about it.

      I only have one memory of going into the cafetorium, and standing there, dumbfounded, trying to figure out what I was supposed to do.

    2. AeromechanicalAce

      You say worse, But my school had trade collections of classic Marvel Comics.

      If going through Two decades worth of spiderman instead of dealing with high schoolers is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

    3. Needfuldoer

      Only thing worse is being the “volunteer for lunch room cleanup and office supply duty” kid.

      I was both! The lunch room cleanup crew got to avoid bullying and finish off the leftover pudding cups!

      1. Geneseepaws

        Please tell me you are not so old that you remember back before pudding came in individual sealed containers, but came in open, reusable real dishes, ….

        1. Needfuldoer

          The lunch ladies prepared little ceramic bowls of pudding with a dollop of fake whipped cream on top through my middle school years. Not sure if they made the pudding from a mix, or if it came premade in 5 gallon buckets.

          Not sure if that says more about my age, or how set in their ways my school system was.

    4. Mel

      I used to go to the library to use the single computer with a modem to go on bbses. Weee I’m old

      1. thejeff

        Young pup.
        I didn’t find modems and bbses until college.

        1. StClair

          Same. My middle school computers were Apple ][s.

        2. Rabid Rabbit

          Modems? You had modems?

          Wait, I mean, computers? You had computers?

          (Okay, fine, we had computers in the later years of school.)

      2. hof1991

        If I wanted those in high school, I would have had to invent them. Damn, I’m Hank. I mean darn I’m Hank.

    5. Deanatay

      Or so you could READ BOOKS!!

      … better than friends…

    6. DSL

      I was weird table until my tablemates all picked up and headed off to the regional vocational school (it’s called a “career center” now and is about what we would have called a community college in my day; seriously, you can learn some pretty useful sh!t there). Then I was part of the boring table.
      My “weird table” was formally called “Advanced Drawing” — a bunch of students the art teacher really had no idea what to do with, so she parked the five of us in one corner of the Art Basement with a bunch of art supplies for the semester and told us to have at it.
      35 years later, one of us is a semi-retired newspaper cartoonist now freelancing, one works for an industrial design firm and teaches on the side, one makes short films (works for some sort of design firm to pay the bills); his partner in crime has a nine-to-fiver but runs a soda shop on the side; the scary-weird one was working as a sculptor for The Empire of the Mouse last I heard; and then there was Harry.
      Harry would spend the time drawing pictures of our school mascot (a bulldog) making Hitler-rally-style speeches. Last I saw Harry was a couple years after graduation. He was marching — yes, marching — up Main Street downtown, stopped at the corner, pulled an ancient-looking pair of binoculars out of an old leather case, and peered up and down Main, then up and down Broadway, through the binocs before stowing them again and marching back the way he came. I … didn’t bother him.

    7. Ed Rhodes

      I was the sit in the library during study hall so I wouldn’t have to interact with anyone. (When they closed the library for renovations, the teacher in the study hall didn’t know who I was!) Lunch, I sat alone!

    8. Sam

      Not only did I go to the library, I became the head library assistant.

    9. SgtWadeyWilson

      I wish they let me go to the library. I literally just sat at a table by myself. Rows of tables pushed together, two beches that sat about five on each. One table on the end of a row with just me, a novel and a sketchbook there. The weirdo table looked cool by comparison.

      I kinda wish I’d had friends, but I did get a lot of reading and drawing done, so… silver lining.

  10. DailyBrad

    I knew a kid who was trying to make wearing a cape a thing, but I think it was less a lack of social acumen, and more him trying very hard to look quirkier than he ultimately was.

    1. lilyliv

      To be fair, wearing capes *should* be a thing. (Oddly enough, I was driving past my former college the other day and saw a kid walking across campus with a cape. They’re multiplying!)

      1. Inahc

        NO! NO CAPES! 😉

        1. McBogue

          Yes, Edna.

        2. Deanatay

          Clearly you two prefer Tricera-tops.

      2. thejeff

        Capes seem pretty impractical. Cloaks are where it’s at.

    2. tim gueguen

      Are you sure he wasn’t trying to look like Rick Wakeman?

      1. DailyBrad

        I think he was trying for a “hot vampire” thing, going by how he put on Crow makeup a few times, too, but he couldn’t get it going.

    3. 3-I

      Why do you hate fun, Brad.

  11. Plasma Mongoose

    Meanwhile, Billie was like Kim Possible but without any of the hero stuff or naked molerats and way more daddy issues.

    1. MatthewTheLucky

      So Kim Possible but bad?

      1. JetstreamGW

        There’s a name for that.

        Bonnie Rockwaller.

  12. ShinyNeen

    Pictured: the Clark Wing’s weirdo table. Well, one of them. It’s complicated. Like all high school-esque social hierarchy-type stuff!

    1. Marsh Maryrose

      Pffft. The weirdo table of Clark Wing? in Read Hall? Read Hall, stereotypically known for being full of music major anti-social head cases?

      Which brings about the question, and I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me earlier, but: why was Billie ever in Read in the first place, given its reputation?

      1. BarerMender

        Because she’s a head case?

        1. Marsh Maryrose

          Yeah, but she doesn’t admit that she’s a head case. She is the one who stuffs nerds in the locker, not the nerd who gets stuffed in the locker.

        2. Kinoko

          I wonder if she wasn’t sure where she wanted to go, so the school chose for her? Maybe put her in the same hall as Walky and Sal, because she already knows them?

          (I know she clearly put down a preference for Sal as her room-mate, but I think that tends to come after you’ve been assigned your hall or whatever. At least, for me it did.)

        3. Liquid Len

          Is dorm choice a thing for Freshmen? I don’t recall getting a choice myself (but it was about 30 years ago…)

        4. Marsh Maryrose

          It was a thing for freshmen at my college, 40 years ago. In fact, because of the way the room assignment system worked, I had a better room as a freshman than I did as a sophomore.

          It is definitely a thing at IU-Bloomington. The IU:RPS Housing Locations guide is a marketing blurb, replete with cutesy little summaries.

          From another page on the IU:RPS site:
          “You may bond over late-night pizza. Game of Thrones. A floor trip to Chicago. Frisbee on the quad. A propensity for procrastination. Or a fondness for cat videos. Whatever brings them together, many IU students choose to live with the friends they make in the residence halls long after their first year.”

      2. ShinyNeen

        Ah, dang, you’re right. Read Hall is just the weirdo table of the rest of the school!

      3. Charlotte

        So, am I the only one who finds people in Read Hall mostly a lot more normal than what we’ve seen of Forest Quad?

        1. Marsh Maryrose

          I would say yes, but I would also say that the small sample size from Forest means that we can’t draw any conclusions from data points generated thus far.

          The sample size from Read honestly isn’t more statistically meaningful. Read has a reputation for having a bunch of music majors, but so far the only cast member who might be a music major is Sal. (My first reaction to that was: Willis, where are you hiding my peeps?)

  13. Fart Captor

    My table had JUGGLERS, and I was one of them. I wore black jeans and had a Limp Bizkit t-shirt. No they weren’t actually popular at the time

    Oh shit and I drew really bad comics for the school newspaper based on me and my friends that not-at-all-subtly emulated Penny Arcade’s style. I think I deliberately blocked that from my memory

    1. Charlotte

      I was in the Juggling Society at university for quite a while. Full of mathematicians and physicists! (I’m one, too.)

      1. Fart Captor

        We didn’t have a club. We were just dorks who worked at the renaissance festival

  14. JediMB

    Billie really needs to let go of all these ideas about popularity and “weirdos” and nerds, and just embrace the weirdo in front of her.

    1. Bathymetheus

      Well, she’s already doing the last part. I like to think she’s working on the others.

    2. C.T Phipps

      Billie needs the opportunity to just be a soulless jerk. The world keeps trying to change her and she has to be her.

      A thoroughly awful person.

      1. thejeff

        It never ceases to amaze me that in this comic that is explicitly about growing up and healing from your childhood damage so many readers are so eager to write characters of as just awful people.

        1. Schpoonman

          Billie is a pretty accurate representation of a pretty hideous clique that many of us dealt with growing up, and in almost every opportunity she’s fought growing as a person, in stark contrast to a great many others in the cast, including her own girlfriend.

          Let me be clear, Billie is not the Walkertons, she is not Ethan, she is not Dina. Her baggage has gone past her now (really, since long before) and is actively fucking up other people now. She is Joyce and Joe except when her face is ground into the damage she causes she recites the Narcissist’s Prayer.

          After the sixish years that I’ve been reading, I personally am ready for Billie’s extremely harmful fantasies and biases to come crashing down. I’m only regretful that it will hurt Ruth.

        2. Nikol Geier

          “I’m only regretful that it will hurt Ruth.” Oh, right, the very nice person who cruelly bullied her hall residents for a month.

          It’s fine to have personal baggage about these characters—at times Lucy is like nails on chalkboard to me, and I find Dorothy and Rachel incredibly frustrating, and Joyce is JOYCE and is to this day an extremely toxic person in many regards—but trying to externalize those and act like any of them are somehow uniquely bad is just petty.

        3. Rabid Rabbit

          No, the badly damaged person who has crashed and is aware of what she’s done wrong (i.e., cruelly bullied her hall residents for a month, and presumably all of last year too), and really doesn’t need anything more bad to happen to her.

          There’s a slight difference, in that Ruth has hit rock bottom, and Billie hasn’t quite (despite the encounter with Alice).

        4. Schpoonman

          Ruth is working on her shit. Billie is not.

  15. BBCC

    So, Billie how’s it feel dating a nerd now? 😀

    1. 3-I

      She’s a journalism major. She IS a nerd now.

      1. BBCC

        Can’t be. She’s a cheerleader. She can only have one clique.

  16. Tacos

    I didn’t really talk to people during lunch though I sat with the fairly popular kids. We had like 20 minutes for lunch and like 5 of those minutes were spent in line to get our food. I got no time to waste talking, I gotta scarf down this food quickly.

    1. mrnoidea

      There should be a category for the kids who were *allowed* to sit at the popular table, but never actively participated with popular “friends” outside of school because such kids were left out.

      Actually, that describes post-HS Billie, doesn’t it?

      1. Chronos

        Holy shit, Alice. I had forgotten all about her.

        I wonder if she’ll ever come back into the story.

        1. Marsh Maryrose

          What would she bring to the table, in terms of narrative arcs?

          In her first round, she fleshed out Billie’s backstory (DUI) and character (“drama hurricane”). But that’s already done now.

          Maybe Willis has a plan for her as a character in her own right. But otherwise, I wouldn’t expect to see her again, except maybe as a character in the background.

  17. DarkoNeko

    At least Billie isn’t trying to push the subject under the rug. That’d ended in an even poorer fashion

  18. C.T Phipps

    I’m glad Billie is understanding that she needs to dump the uncool people in her life.

    Unfortunately, that includes her as drunk driving high-school obsessed jerks are the embodiment of uncool.

    1. Axel

      seriously I’ve been astounded for the whole entirety of this comic that even Billie thinks/thought having been a high school cheerleader would be impressive in college. Most people, myself included, felt a little embarrassed to bring up stuff that happened in high school.

      Specifically on cheerleading, in my high school I barely even knew there were cheerleaders (I think I only ever saw two) and no one spoke about it, so the one time I spoke to a middle schooler who was like ‘in high school, I’m going to be a cheerleader, then you’ll all be jealous of me!’ I thought she had just watched a little too much Lizzie McGuire. And it was a sports heavy school.

      (I’m now aware that a) that’s different in places and b) cheerleaders often are involved in some pretty cool gymnastics (I don’t think they did anything like this at my school, but idk) so I can appreciate it a little more)

      1. C.T Phipps

        I think Billie keeps going back to high school because she expected to be creating cool new vibes in college.

        However, she can’t join any groups because she’s a DUI raging mess.

  19. Wizard

    My high school lunch table experience shifted drastically from year to year. Freshman year I ate with a table of generally attractive junior and senior girls. The whole school was in awe of me. (I wasn’t actually all that great; I just knew one of the girls from church, and my last class before lunch was really close to the cafeteria so I could grab a table early. )

    Sophomore year I ate with weirdos. Junior year I ate with swimmers. Given this clear downward trajectory, I skipped lunch my senior year. I just didn’t have the guts to find out what came next.

  20. Bagge

    Congratulations, Billie. You are dating a nerd.

    Congratulations, Ruth. You have exchanged nerd for bully. That counts as a step up?

    1. BBCC

      I mean, according to Billie…

      1. Bagge

        And for Ruth, that’s the one that counts.

    2. Betty Anne

      Hey, I did that in college! It worked out by the time I got out of tech school, into a liberal arts college, and learned that being a bully is actually a pretty shitty thing to do. 😐

      1. Bagge

        I’m glad you continued to evolve.

  21. C.T Phipps

    I have this weird image in my head that Ruth’s table was incredibly likely to have been the Monster Hunting table. Ruth being the Slayer of her generation sounds appropriate for this universe.

  22. BBCC

    Do American high schools actually work like this? Was Disney Channel telling the truth this whole time and I, in my Canadian ignorance, assumed it was made up?

    1. StClair

      “There were stories about what happened.”
      “It’s true. All of it.”

    2. AeromechanicalAce

      It’s actually probably worse in reality. Few institutions are as inheriently toxic as the American High school.

    3. the final pam

      From my personal experience, ehh. As far as I remembered, there really weren’t strict cliques at school. Like, you could group kids together by who played football, who smoked pot, who were the weird anime kids, but there weren’t any exaggerated cartoonish high school cliques like this, no. Cheerleaders especially didn’t have any kind of prominent status in the school.

      But I’m also speaking as someone that mostly hang tangentially around the aforementioned weird anime kids and potheads.

    4. Marsh Maryrose

      I actually only spent my freshman year (9th grade) in a typical American high school, and my knowledge of Disney Channel comes only via cultural osmosis and co-workers who have children, but:

      Outside of classes, there was no adult monitoring of social behavior. There was no violence that I know of, but socially, it was kind of a Lord of the Flies environment.

    5. Doopyboop

      I’d say it depends. For instance, I come from a small town in the South where our sports team was usually unimpressive and not much to sneeze at. Ergo, cheerleaders and jocks didn’t really have much clout, at least not to the point that movies make it seem. Time period means a lot too like my school had a lot of…I guess they’d be called ‘scene kids’! Vaguely similar to emo, but a lot more colorful.

    6. Chronos

      The first two years of high school, I faintly remember at lunch sitting with a motley crew of people I had little in common with; at most, one or two people sort of knew each other. I don’t remember what, if any, cliques any of us belonged to, but then again, I barely paid attention to that at all at the time.

    7. Axel

      I’m also Canadian, and my school had distinct groups of people who had lunch together (not ‘the goths’ and ‘the weebs’ and so on, but like ‘those six people who always sit in the science wing and those ten people who sit in the math wing and those 4 who always walk to the convenience store, and the group who either eat or draw in the art room’), but the American thing seems really unrealistic, if for no other reason (and there are many), because I went to a pretty small school compared to the American schools that are portrayed in those ways, and there were way too many people and too many groups and too many ways those groups intersected to call anyone “the (whatevers)” or “a (whatever)”

      ugh there’s no good spot to break that into paragraphs

    8. Fart Captor

      Mine sure as hell did. Like 70% of the lunchroom was not visibly segregated into specific cliques, but the tables of goths, preps, jocks, nerds, losers and weirdos were easily identifiable even if there was some overlap here and there

    9. Betty Anne

      I went to a high school that definitely had segregated cliques, and the cheerleaders were one of them (though they overlapped slightly with the women’s volleyball players, because pffffft yeah right male cheerleaders XP).

      I was in the weirdo/nerd clique. I got shoved into my locker just for being a nerd in the hallway. I got picked on for my “lack of fashion” as a nerd. There are things that are painfully true about those high school shows.

    10. Opus the Poet

      My school was horribly overcrowded because the school district served a bunch of suburban towns that exploded pretty much overnight during the early ’70s and building schools didn’t keep up with the population growth. If my HS had been a separate town it would have been the 4th or 5th largest town in the state because everybody pretty much lived in one metropolitan area back then. So even if they wanted too there just weren’t enough tables for different groups to segregate, because too many people had to have a place to sit. About the only group who could get somewhat separated was the JROTC class because they had a separate dining area so they could keep uniforms clean, but we had to clean that area ourselves after school.

    11. vlademir1

      It very much depends on the school, when one attended and the larger local demographic trends. For the years I was in school (late ’85 through early ’98) in the area I lived (a relatively socioeconomically homogeneous military bedroom community) cliques were rare and fairly permeable. In other nearby communities there was a more rigid hierarchical structure to such things similar to the normal media depictions.

    12. Swissaboo

      I think it partly depends on not being above a certain size. My school had 2000 kids, and while there was a vague “popular” group, that was more a matter of there were people who were broadly pretty well liked by most of the people that knew them, and those people pretty much all knew each other, but functionally nobody knew who more than a couple of the “popular” crowd was. They did somewhat intersect with the sports/cheerleading crowd though, and there WERE at least some personal feuds between members of that crowd and other individuals that osmosised out a little bit, but that was basically it.

      Except for the Theatre kids, that was absolutely their own little separate thing that behaved exactly like a high school movie, it was astonishing.

    13. Roborat

      I am Canadian, military brat, my high school was in town, and the major employer was the Air Force base, where I did junior high. Didn’t have typical cliques, aside from the stoners, but it was split pigeons (air force kids), rats (local townies) and sea gulls (kids from next town over, located on a large lake). The sorting got a little confused when my dad retired and we moved off base for my last year.

  23. Bagge

    Suddenly Ruth’s attempted camraderie with Amber makes more sense. They have more in common that ONLY their fondness for beating the crap out of parental bully figures.

  24. kitty

    my “high school” had assigned seats that were changed every couple of weeks to prevent clique tables. but near every time i was the only one who didnt talk

    1. Betty Anne

      My middle school tried that once after a fight between cliques broke out, only they seated us alphabetically instead of rotating it.

      Needless to say, when one person throws an open milk carton full of milk across three tables to hit someone from a rival clique who is now three tables away instead of one, more people get involved in the fight than were before. ^^; The assigned seating didn’t last long. ^^;

      1. kitty

        yea it kind of worked but outside of the lunch room there were still (more subtle than tv but still there) cliques and feuds.. so sometimes there would be 2 or more kids giving another a death glare. but kids that may have never talked otherwise had friendly conversation so it that way it succeeded?? i was still the map drawer

  25. Rowen Morland

    ‘Girl who stood still during dodgeball’ is just making me see the Daria intro in my head.

    1. Chronos

      la la la, la la….

  26. Mr. Random

    … so does anyone know polish well enough to guess what’s phonetically similar to ‘ketchup for me’?

    1. Betty Anne

      No, but I know it could have easily been, “Ketchup for me.” ^^; My class had a Polish exchange student, he knew English very well, and he laughed more than the rest of us at a piece of paper passed around class with both sides saying “How to keep a Polack busy – turn over.” ^^;

      1. Eldritch Gentleman

        Ah yes, the Polack jokes.

  27. brasca1

    Wow! 14 years ago! Speaking of when is the next Shortpacked book coming out since the last one only goes up to 2008.

  28. stoodmuffin

    IF THIS IS THE REASON YOU SPLIT, I WILL BE SO FUCKING MAD, lol

    1. Needfuldoer

      Some people’s brains never leave high school. Billie is one of these people.

      1. stoodmuffin

        Me too, for different reasons. Sigh.

    2. Raen

      “The whole damn world is still obsessed with who’s the best dressed and who’s having sex…”

    3. Bagge

      I mean… it WOULD be pretty funny after all they’ve been through… in a Dorothy and Walky kinda way. *sobs in coffee*

      1. stoodmuffin

        Oof. I ALMOST Believed you, but you making me realize that DW parrellel confirms my initial thought.

        No. It would not. Only sad.

  29. BenRG

    Okay, I’m having a moment of total empathy and kinship for Ruth here!

  30. Kinoko

    I moved to California from the UK halfway into what became my freshman year of high school (instead of my third year of secondary school).
    I thought I was having lunch with the nerdiest nerds, since they were into drawing, anime, and video games, and would have been deemed total losers at my school in the UK (a girls’ school where everyone was hyper-judgmental). I was pretty happy about that because I finally felt accepted and validated. Turns out, I actually made friends with the aloof art nerds, and while we certainly would be friendly to the kids at the “loser table”, I realized way later that they would never have been invited to our lunch group.
    I joined the anti-social elitist nerds. Whoops. 😛

  31. CC

    “Don’t be offended by my frank analysis, think of it as personality dialysis …”

    1. CC

      ….. yeah there’s like a 95% chance lucy’s seen Wicked huh

      1. King Daniel

        Well, Amber’s quoted it in the comic, at least. And there was a whole chapter in Book 6 named after a line from Defying Gravity.

  32. Iain

    We played Cripple Mr Onion, and occasionally drew maps.

    Drawing maps is so dang relaxing.

  33. Keulen

    I didn’t draw maps during school hours, but in middle or high school I used to get on MS paint and make maps.

  34. Axel

    Newsletter girl sounds either wholly fun or wholly annoying, depending how much she wrote about each person and how much she pushed the copies on them.

    1. Daibhid C

      I think possibly on what she wrote about them as well.

      I used to write AU fanfic about my friends (not that I knew it was called that in 198[mumble]), which was … politely received, I think is the best way of putting it.

      1. Axel

        erotic friendfiction

  35. Felgraf

    Wooo Weirdo table! That said, I actually *loved* it when we played dodgeball, because I was pretty much Matrix-level good at the dodging part.
    (A combination of A) Having to develop fast reflexes due to my dyspraxia to avoid constantly injuring myself and B) My younger brother and I playing the backyard game of ‘Hurl frisbees at each other as hard as we possibly can’ contributed to these skills.)

  36. Zaxares

    I was always that “weird kid” who spent his lunchtimes alone, either off reading by myself, or in the library (and, once computers started to become commonplace in schools, the computer lab). But this weirdo table? I’d have sat there. 😉

  37. notlegato

    can’t be the weirdo table solo!

  38. missilentmurmur

    It’s been a while since I last commented.

    I want to share an experience that came to me recently. I’ve always felt “stuck” with the introverts and nerds all through high school and university, too. I felt I was missing out on a lot of things. I’ve got pretty good at making introvert friends and catering to their needs, I had two pretty long and happy relationships. Recently, I finally came out as an extrovert and made a friend who used to be super cool in high school and the first few years of university. It is just amazing to see how different our “expertise” and blind spots are. I grew aware of my strengths and we compare our notes regularly, because as he’s my first “cool” friend, I am his first “nerd” friend, too. Maybe it’s a bit late to be doing this at 28, but it’s such a rich experience. I’m happy to stand as equals, but with different life skills.

    1. Charlotte

      I’m your age and I honestly don’t think this cool/not cool shit matters anymore as an adult. I haven’t thought about it for years. What’s cool anyway? I don’t know whether most of my friends from after school were “cool” at school or not and I don’t care.
      For some I learned incidentally, and those are an even mix. I can’t say that my friendships with either group are any different, what matters is the kind of people we’re now.

      (I’m someone who was always happy enough to be branded as a nerd and didn’t care about how cool she was considered to be. I’m not sure whether I’m an extrovert and an introvert and I don’t think that necessarily lines up with being cool or not. Funnily enough when I was at school in Australia I was suddenly considered a jock because I was on the volleyball team. Really weird to learn about the supposed difference this made.)

      1. bleepbloop

        I honestly didn’t even think people cared about that stuff past high school.

  39. ischemgeek

    Depending on the year I either sat at the weirdo table or skipped lunch and spent it in the library instead.

    I was never not that kid other kids wouldn’t hang out with because I was a social status black hole. Anyone who hung out with me or even was nice to me instantly became one of the weirdos. So there was like two kids who weren’t assholes to me just out of self preservation.

    Frankly the folks who are still in the high school mentality are usually those whose social status and life in general peaked in high school.

  40. CJ

    When reading this, I’m kinda happy school usually ended around 1 or 2 pm and we had lunch at home. Less opportunity to be an outsider.

  41. JessWitt

    Sounds like The Breakfast Club if everyone was Ally Sheedy.

    And yeah that would defeat the purpose of the film but whatevs.

  42. BenRG

    TFW you realise that, in high school, your peers would have considered your girlfriend to be you ‘slumming it’, even though she is practically the woman of your dreams.

  43. Zee

    Lucy isn’t here for me to gush over but she’s probably off somewhere being amazing
    Ruth’s expressions in this are adorable and I love them

    1. BenRG

      I’m betting that she’s going to meet Joyce, tell her about the movie night problem and end up with all Joyce-adjacent characters packed into Billie and Lucy’s room that night (whilst Billie is busy snuggling with Ruth back in Read Hall).

      Yes, I’m anticipating that Joyce will badger everyone she knows and likes to hang out with Lucy on pain of being given puppy-dog eyes.

  44. abysswatcher1993

    So are you Joyce, or you are Ruth, Willis? Also, I hopt this is the momemnt Billie starts realizing you don’t need to be popular to be happy. The same lesson goes to Mob from Mob Psycho 100.

  45. Arianod

    That alt text though

  46. Borg

    Please clarify, Ruth: did she write an unsolicited newsletter about the weirdo table specifically, or people at the school in general?

    1. Fiddler115

      As someone who sat with Willis at the wierdo table in high school and middle school, I can shed some light on this. He wrote an Ultra Car newsletter combining both the fictional Ultra Car universe and the real life people from the lunch table.

  47. Eldritch Gentleman

    O_o Why would my countrywoman be obsessed with ketchup? We are more of a potatoes and vodka kind of people.

    1. Makkabee

      Perhaps it’s the novelty of the stuff?

  48. Hari

    I sat at the Weirdo Table and I’m proud. =D

  49. Shane Wegner

    Billie is oddly fixated on popularity. Maybe someday she’ll realize most actual grownups place almost no importance on high school cheerleading.

    After grudgingly adjudicating that we weren’t summoning Satan, our high school authorities deigned to allow us to play Magic the Gathering at our lunch table. Since in the real world you need peoples’ permission do what you want for 5-10 minutes on your lunch break.

    1. C.T Phipps

      She would love to be a college age cheerleader but she doesn’t have that.

      She was also a shitty reporter.

      So what DOES Billie have to talk about?

  50. Robert

    This reminded me of an incident while working at the VA hospital. I was eating lunch in the cafeteria, when a colleague from another department* approached and asked apologetically, ‘it’s really crowded; may I share your table? I promise not to talk to you.’ I gestured compliance, he sat, we ate, I read. When he was finished, he thanked me discreetly and left.

    I always ate by myself in high school, typically at a table empty except for myself. My husband has informed me that most well-adjusted people do not have that memory.

    *Someone I actually liked and got along with.

  51. Jimmy

    Better than me. I usually sat alone, unless the church kids felt sorry for me.

  52. Micki

    This is entirely the perfect amount of specific, Willis. It makes it real! 😀

  53. steelbright

    MY LUNCH TABLE OMG

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