Too much power in an individuals hands for my liking
Demoted Oblivious
If that’s /really/ the issue, the answer is simple. Pass laws regulating how _politicians_ can use social media or provide them their own platform, like c-span. Nobody took away the press corps. The guy gave away his power by monopolizing it under a single utility. Per their own rules he should have been banned years ago. Also, no-one has pointed out that news organizations aren’t requires to show up and report on white house press briefings. No one /has/ to carry news briefings (except specific types like E.B.S).
I do agree there is too much power in tech giants, but this incident is not an example of that problem. When people start talking seriously about the thousands of j. q. publics who have been deplatformed, had their content used by companies without consent, and lost access to their data, then we may have a real discussion about the actual problem.
Rabid Rabbit
I did enjoy whichever Trump representative it was insisting in the last days of the regime that he’d been silenced. Like, dude, he was still the president: he’s got this whole press briefing room he could tell lies in. Of course, the problem is that people there might publically point out he was lying his pants off.
Still not quite as fun as QAnon-Congresswoman giving a speech on the floor of the House while wearing a “Censored” mask, though.
Shane Short
Surprised he could hold it.
Eclipsa
I’m conflicted, because I had planned to unfollow him on inauguration day and now I’m denied the satisfaction of doing that lol. (IDK if his account is even still there for me to unfollow, I haven’t actually checked, but even if it is, I don’t think it would be quite as satisfying to do it now.)
MrSmith
What concerns me is the power wielded by a handful of individuals beholden to virtually no one
Its always fine when its someone like Trump but what if it happens to the next republican candidate or a centrist democrat that maybe wants to reign in the tech companies (Elizabeth Warren for example)
This is a helluva slippery slope we’re on
Mel Drake
You say this as if this wasn’t constantly wielded against others who weren’t breaking the rules, consistently and extremely, for years. Allow me to cry a river when someone on power who regularly incited violence is finally not allowed to do so
MrSmith
Someone should not have the amount of power that someone like Jack Dorsey has without the ability to be held accountable
Trump got held to account and got voted out by the people (and rightly so) but who holds the tech companies to account?
Felix
The user-base. If you feel that say, twatter has over stepped some bounds then you should just close your account and stop using their service. Case in point, I did so a very, very long time ago. And frankly I’m happier for it.
Lurra
This *is* tech companies being held accountable.
Ever heard of Gab? It was launched in 2016 as an alternative to Twitter. It hailed itself as a protector of free speech, allowing users to post updates without worrying about getting suspended based on what they say. But due to their laissez-faire attitude toward hate speech, Apple did not allow the app in their store. Google allowed initially but removed their app afterward.
Consumers clearly don’t want to be part of a collection of other users who are mean or hateful. You feel it’s power-hunger, while it’s actually just the free market.
MrSmith
The influence the tech companies have is too concentrated, as an example if Twitter was bought out by some right wing nut bars what damage could they do or if Apple or Google were bought out
Worse what if they started censoring differing points of view, who’ll stop them
Sorry but the amount of power they have to influence peoples thoughts is not good at all
Deanatay
So, basically what happened to Parler.
The alternative is to put that power into the hands of the government, which would be even worse. Imagine if Twitter were nationalized, and Trump had been allowed to put someone in charge of it. Who do you think would have had their accounts blocked then?
MrSmith
Yeah true that, letting politicians near it certainly wouldn’t work either
Needfuldoer
Is this not the glorious, unregulated hand of the free market at work? Why should a company give any individual special treatment on their own platform? Shouldn’t all users be held to the same standard?
(I’d argue they handled him with kid gloves until it was “safer” to drop him and save face. Anyone else would’ve been banned much sooner for far less. Just look at that bot account that copied and reposted his tweets verbatim in real time; it was suspended and locked numerous times.)
Chris
You all are forgetting something. Trump blocked users and then people complained about censorship it was said “it’s my personal account”. If twitter were to be nationalized, then no one would get blocked, because that is government censorship and is disallowed by the first amendment. Trump could block because “it’s my account.” It was his personal account, so hey tweeter… block and ban all you want.
Pylgrim
The power to… ban a user from using the space they own and maintain due to violation of their T&Cs? The power that anybody who owns any sort of business wields?
maarvarq
+1
uniquepassive
Mm, I get where you’re coming from, but also terms of service pretty much renders that fear null. The real slippery slope is how much leniency they grant to political figures when they are violating their platform’s policies. They needed to draw the line early, or not at all.
MrSmith
Yeah true I’d imagine that being able to silence the most powerful man in the world is quite the message to send to other politicians especially politicians that might be thinking of limiting their powers…
Needfuldoer
45 was never “silenced” by social media companies. They just finally put their collective foot down after there was virtually zero chance of negative repercussions on their part. The Emergency Alert System and White House briefing room were always right there. He was too hyperfocused on the personal sleight of getting kicked off the privately owned platform that perma-banned him (after years of egregious ToS infractions) to use them.
Doom Shepherd
Too late. FB is quietly purging left-wing sites that did not violate any content rules.
Politicians can’t be silenced by tech companies. Politicians have plenty of avenues to communicate. They can hold rallies, press conferences, go on talk shows or send surrogates to do so. They are news. Even being blocked by a social media platform is itself a big story.
Old media companies shifting or slanting their coverage of politicians has far more effect and that’s gone on forever.
MrSmith
Political landscapes changing unfortunately and social media is becoming bigger and bigger (a lot to do with how bad the msm are at the moment, imho)
Needfuldoer
What qualifies as “MsM”?
Are we only supposed to trust the likes of Firstname Bunchanumbers on Twitter and Freedom Eagle Gazette on Blogspot for “real” news?
The actual newsgathering organizations behind the big networks prodice solid content; the problem is that it gets chewed up, regurgitated, mixed with opinions, and spoon-fed to hungry eyeballs for ratings. 90% of the talking heads on the big cable networks are spouting opinions on top of lower thirds full of twisted, leading questions. (Fox is especially guilty of this, I think they only do hard news for five minutes in a graveyard slot.)
Where’s Walter Cronkite when we need him? We need to know the way it is. (Oh who am I kidding, he’d get booted after a week because he wouldn’t get ratings.)
thejeff
Nonetheless, it’s still hardly being silenced. When the big news story for days is how you were silenced and all your complaints about it, you’re not actually silenced.
The real problem was that those tech companies gave Trump free rein to ignore their terms of service for years – because of fear of retaliation and because he brought in eyeballs. To a lesser degree the same is true for right wing content in general.
Some Ed
The handful of individuals aren’t beholden to nobody. The millions of Twitter customers make a choice every time they use Twitter as a platform, and they can make a different choice if they feel that Twitter has gone the wrong direction.
Take a look at the Signal outage recently, caused by a privacy policy change by … I’m not sure what the platform everyone was leaving, but I think I heard it was run by Facebook. All I really knew about it was my apartmentmates couldn’t log into their social media platform so that they could talk to each other while not in the same room, and it was apparently because millions of people were leaving the one platform to go to the one they used.
I think the bigger issue is that there’s something allowed sometimes called ‘corporate acquisitions’, and other times called ‘corporate mergers’.
I recognize that when a company is having financial difficulty, allowing it to be acquired by a healthier company allows for a more graceful process for the people that were depending on the failing company.
But I also recognize that many times, the companies get into the position of a failing company because one or more of their competitors engaged in practices that are made illegal for confirmed monopolies by anti-trust laws. I feel like those practices should be more generally frowned upon and at least somewhat more broadly made illegal. If they were only allowed for companies that were already in peril, many probably wouldn’t happen, because many of them are behaviors that, absent smaller rivals to run out of business, are generally self-sabotaging.
There is, of course, a subset of those practices that is reasonable, in the right context. For example, deviating from the published standard can be necessary for a company to innovate if they want to release new functionality not supported by the current public standards, and their attempts to extend the public standards have been thwarted. That said, I’m not aware of any time a company has deviated from the public standards for that specific reason, without publishing their own version of what they wanted to do. Publishing their own version is part of the process I described, even, because the standards community can’t decide to approve their extension without that.
The actual monopolistic behavior closest to this is just releasing a product not conforming to standards without documentation. These days, the product will support interoperating with companies following the standards, but only to a point – which shows that it’s not just ignorance of the standards that’s responsible for the behavior.
Without the acquisitions of healthy companies, mergers between very healthy companies, and monopolistic practices being allowed for healthy non-monopolies, we would have far more diversity in social media.
I grant you, this would be a big pain, except that there would be companies which would do social media consolidation, so you could go to one site to check on users from hundreds of platforms. There would be dozens of these to choose from. It would be a giant, glorious mess that would be difficult to shut a Trump out of, but given the way Trump behaved, I’m sure he still would’ve been.
That only holds in the pit of misery. Happiness can also be created, and shared or gifted to others. However, when the chain of command blocks all of that, the only remainder is schadenfreude, which does follow the LoCoH. This of course is the origin of that synonym for crazy.
In my limited experience, happiness can be destroyed without the creation of more happiness. It’s only in dysfunctional environments where the destruction of one person’s happiness is seen as a viable way to produce happiness for another person.
Also, from what I’ve heard, in the armed services, especially boot camp or their equivalent, where this happiness transfer seems most prevalent, it’s mostly the happiness of dozens of people is used to make one person a bit more content. It’s not a very efficient process, if the purpose is to transfer happiness. According to those people I’ve met who have been boot camp sergeants, the happiness transfer is not considered an interesting part of the process.
A recent counter-example also works. When Trump was banned from Twitter, that caused a lot of anguish for one person, a fair amount of discomfort for millions, but more comfort and sometimes even happiness for more millions. Net happiness was created by that act.
To be fair, boot camp is “Where Happiness Goes to Die.” There isn’t even much schadenfreude as most instructors are net less happy being there as well (at least in the great hopefully more inclusive north).
You have allergies also? My sympathies. My, um, boss, has been giving me a lot of problems lately, but between meds and using some N95s like they were intended, pre-Covid, I may get out from under its harsh rule soon.
I didn’t get glasses until well into high school. (I had contacts for a few years first actually because only one eye was myopic and for the first year or two I only had ONE contact.) 10 years later I mostly tolerate them, but even thinking about glasses induces me to start itching on the bridge of my nose.
“Since you were 12” I think is the key here. Joyce is 18 and tons of people have been since this glasses plot started how uncomfortable the transition to glasses are when you’ve never worn them before. But also Joyce is really being a baby about this whole thing too so don’t cut her any slack on it.
I’ve worn glasses since I was 13 and I’m still not fully used to the feeling. I always have to take them off and rub my nose bridge when I’m at home. And that’s just how it is with the ones that fit!
I’ve “worn” glasses starting when I was 18, and the transition from not having glasses to “wearing” them was not really at all difficult for me.
Admittedly, I think the only time I’ve worn them for more than about an hour at a time was when I was doing cross-country driving. I’m now 48, and I do know where my glasses are. One pair is in my backpack, and the other two pair are in my winter coat.
Oh, I did not like wearing them at all either for the first couple of weeks I had them! But that was primarily because I had persistent headaches as I was getting used to them and having something on my face was off-putting (I am autistic and have some sensory issues too, but it’s not debilitating). I still have to take them off sometimes if I have a headache. They were never itchy though, haha. Maybe it’s because I had the kind without nose pieces?
seregiel
Glasses Pressure Headaches are real. Also, if you have high peripheral vision, the noticing of things at the side not in focus also hurts.
I started wearing glasses when I was around 13 and never had any itching troubles. But Joyce can’t have two kinds of food touching each other on her plate; she seems like the kind of person to have trouble with a “foreign” object sitting on her face.
My first pair literally made my nose go numb. I can’t wear the kind with the adjustable nose pads and I have to wear my glasses a bit too lose around the ears or I get a headache from the pressure behind my ears
If the nose piece is bothering her, perhaps she needs an adjustment. Dorothy was wrong when she said you just get used to it. There is not anything you are meant to get used to! That is why it is adjustable!
157 thoughts on “Zero-sum”
Ana Chronistic
I… don’t think I’ve EVER experienced that
Ana Chronistic
although… I guess we’re ALL feeling better while Trumpy is unable to tweet
Lokitsu
I know my happiness went up 100% after the ban.
MrSmith
Too much power in an individuals hands for my liking
Demoted Oblivious
If that’s /really/ the issue, the answer is simple. Pass laws regulating how _politicians_ can use social media or provide them their own platform, like c-span. Nobody took away the press corps. The guy gave away his power by monopolizing it under a single utility. Per their own rules he should have been banned years ago. Also, no-one has pointed out that news organizations aren’t requires to show up and report on white house press briefings. No one /has/ to carry news briefings (except specific types like E.B.S).
I do agree there is too much power in tech giants, but this incident is not an example of that problem. When people start talking seriously about the thousands of j. q. publics who have been deplatformed, had their content used by companies without consent, and lost access to their data, then we may have a real discussion about the actual problem.
Rabid Rabbit
I did enjoy whichever Trump representative it was insisting in the last days of the regime that he’d been silenced. Like, dude, he was still the president: he’s got this whole press briefing room he could tell lies in. Of course, the problem is that people there might publically point out he was lying his pants off.
Still not quite as fun as QAnon-Congresswoman giving a speech on the floor of the House while wearing a “Censored” mask, though.
Shane Short
Surprised he could hold it.
Eclipsa
I’m conflicted, because I had planned to unfollow him on inauguration day and now I’m denied the satisfaction of doing that lol. (IDK if his account is even still there for me to unfollow, I haven’t actually checked, but even if it is, I don’t think it would be quite as satisfying to do it now.)
MrSmith
What concerns me is the power wielded by a handful of individuals beholden to virtually no one
Its always fine when its someone like Trump but what if it happens to the next republican candidate or a centrist democrat that maybe wants to reign in the tech companies (Elizabeth Warren for example)
This is a helluva slippery slope we’re on
Mel Drake
You say this as if this wasn’t constantly wielded against others who weren’t breaking the rules, consistently and extremely, for years. Allow me to cry a river when someone on power who regularly incited violence is finally not allowed to do so
MrSmith
Someone should not have the amount of power that someone like Jack Dorsey has without the ability to be held accountable
Trump got held to account and got voted out by the people (and rightly so) but who holds the tech companies to account?
Felix
The user-base. If you feel that say, twatter has over stepped some bounds then you should just close your account and stop using their service. Case in point, I did so a very, very long time ago. And frankly I’m happier for it.
Lurra
This *is* tech companies being held accountable.
Ever heard of Gab? It was launched in 2016 as an alternative to Twitter. It hailed itself as a protector of free speech, allowing users to post updates without worrying about getting suspended based on what they say. But due to their laissez-faire attitude toward hate speech, Apple did not allow the app in their store. Google allowed initially but removed their app afterward.
Consumers clearly don’t want to be part of a collection of other users who are mean or hateful. You feel it’s power-hunger, while it’s actually just the free market.
MrSmith
The influence the tech companies have is too concentrated, as an example if Twitter was bought out by some right wing nut bars what damage could they do or if Apple or Google were bought out
Worse what if they started censoring differing points of view, who’ll stop them
Sorry but the amount of power they have to influence peoples thoughts is not good at all
Deanatay
So, basically what happened to Parler.
The alternative is to put that power into the hands of the government, which would be even worse. Imagine if Twitter were nationalized, and Trump had been allowed to put someone in charge of it. Who do you think would have had their accounts blocked then?
MrSmith
Yeah true that, letting politicians near it certainly wouldn’t work either
Needfuldoer
Is this not the glorious, unregulated hand of the free market at work? Why should a company give any individual special treatment on their own platform? Shouldn’t all users be held to the same standard?
(I’d argue they handled him with kid gloves until it was “safer” to drop him and save face. Anyone else would’ve been banned much sooner for far less. Just look at that bot account that copied and reposted his tweets verbatim in real time; it was suspended and locked numerous times.)
Chris
You all are forgetting something. Trump blocked users and then people complained about censorship it was said “it’s my personal account”. If twitter were to be nationalized, then no one would get blocked, because that is government censorship and is disallowed by the first amendment. Trump could block because “it’s my account.” It was his personal account, so hey tweeter… block and ban all you want.
Pylgrim
The power to… ban a user from using the space they own and maintain due to violation of their T&Cs? The power that anybody who owns any sort of business wields?
maarvarq
+1
uniquepassive
Mm, I get where you’re coming from, but also terms of service pretty much renders that fear null. The real slippery slope is how much leniency they grant to political figures when they are violating their platform’s policies. They needed to draw the line early, or not at all.
MrSmith
Yeah true I’d imagine that being able to silence the most powerful man in the world is quite the message to send to other politicians especially politicians that might be thinking of limiting their powers…
Needfuldoer
45 was never “silenced” by social media companies. They just finally put their collective foot down after there was virtually zero chance of negative repercussions on their part. The Emergency Alert System and White House briefing room were always right there. He was too hyperfocused on the personal sleight of getting kicked off the privately owned platform that perma-banned him (after years of egregious ToS infractions) to use them.
Doom Shepherd
Too late. FB is quietly purging left-wing sites that did not violate any content rules.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/01/23/pers-j23.html
MrSmith
Interesting, wonder why that is
thejeff
Politicians can’t be silenced by tech companies. Politicians have plenty of avenues to communicate. They can hold rallies, press conferences, go on talk shows or send surrogates to do so. They are news. Even being blocked by a social media platform is itself a big story.
Old media companies shifting or slanting their coverage of politicians has far more effect and that’s gone on forever.
MrSmith
Political landscapes changing unfortunately and social media is becoming bigger and bigger (a lot to do with how bad the msm are at the moment, imho)
Needfuldoer
What qualifies as “MsM”?
Are we only supposed to trust the likes of Firstname Bunchanumbers on Twitter and Freedom Eagle Gazette on Blogspot for “real” news?
The actual newsgathering organizations behind the big networks prodice solid content; the problem is that it gets chewed up, regurgitated, mixed with opinions, and spoon-fed to hungry eyeballs for ratings. 90% of the talking heads on the big cable networks are spouting opinions on top of lower thirds full of twisted, leading questions. (Fox is especially guilty of this, I think they only do hard news for five minutes in a graveyard slot.)
Where’s Walter Cronkite when we need him? We need to know the way it is. (Oh who am I kidding, he’d get booted after a week because he wouldn’t get ratings.)
thejeff
Nonetheless, it’s still hardly being silenced. When the big news story for days is how you were silenced and all your complaints about it, you’re not actually silenced.
The real problem was that those tech companies gave Trump free rein to ignore their terms of service for years – because of fear of retaliation and because he brought in eyeballs. To a lesser degree the same is true for right wing content in general.
Some Ed
The handful of individuals aren’t beholden to nobody. The millions of Twitter customers make a choice every time they use Twitter as a platform, and they can make a different choice if they feel that Twitter has gone the wrong direction.
Take a look at the Signal outage recently, caused by a privacy policy change by … I’m not sure what the platform everyone was leaving, but I think I heard it was run by Facebook. All I really knew about it was my apartmentmates couldn’t log into their social media platform so that they could talk to each other while not in the same room, and it was apparently because millions of people were leaving the one platform to go to the one they used.
I think the bigger issue is that there’s something allowed sometimes called ‘corporate acquisitions’, and other times called ‘corporate mergers’.
I recognize that when a company is having financial difficulty, allowing it to be acquired by a healthier company allows for a more graceful process for the people that were depending on the failing company.
But I also recognize that many times, the companies get into the position of a failing company because one or more of their competitors engaged in practices that are made illegal for confirmed monopolies by anti-trust laws. I feel like those practices should be more generally frowned upon and at least somewhat more broadly made illegal. If they were only allowed for companies that were already in peril, many probably wouldn’t happen, because many of them are behaviors that, absent smaller rivals to run out of business, are generally self-sabotaging.
There is, of course, a subset of those practices that is reasonable, in the right context. For example, deviating from the published standard can be necessary for a company to innovate if they want to release new functionality not supported by the current public standards, and their attempts to extend the public standards have been thwarted. That said, I’m not aware of any time a company has deviated from the public standards for that specific reason, without publishing their own version of what they wanted to do. Publishing their own version is part of the process I described, even, because the standards community can’t decide to approve their extension without that.
The actual monopolistic behavior closest to this is just releasing a product not conforming to standards without documentation. These days, the product will support interoperating with companies following the standards, but only to a point – which shows that it’s not just ignorance of the standards that’s responsible for the behavior.
Without the acquisitions of healthy companies, mergers between very healthy companies, and monopolistic practices being allowed for healthy non-monopolies, we would have far more diversity in social media.
I grant you, this would be a big pain, except that there would be companies which would do social media consolidation, so you could go to one site to check on users from hundreds of platforms. There would be dozens of these to choose from. It would be a giant, glorious mess that would be difficult to shut a Trump out of, but given the way Trump behaved, I’m sure he still would’ve been.
Jade
The closest I’ve ever gotten was spectating the supernatural drama as a nonfan this November.
Zor
Oh same
Ana Chronistic
probably too late to be clear, the “that” was the itching glasses, but this resulting thread is cool
Chris
Even someone else’s glasses bouncing off her head can’t spoil this moment.
Suet
Happiness can only savored for such a limited amount of time.
If those glasses survive, ho nelly. Net-negative action, tho.
Needfuldoer
The half-life of happiness is only a few minutes at most.
Lumino
Law of Conservation of Happiness. Well known in the military, or at least in the Navy.
In order to be happier, I have to steal your happiness. That’s why all sailors are giant assholes.
Demoted Oblivious
That only holds in the pit of misery. Happiness can also be created, and shared or gifted to others. However, when the chain of command blocks all of that, the only remainder is schadenfreude, which does follow the LoCoH. This of course is the origin of that synonym for crazy.
Some Ed
In my limited experience, happiness can be destroyed without the creation of more happiness. It’s only in dysfunctional environments where the destruction of one person’s happiness is seen as a viable way to produce happiness for another person.
Also, from what I’ve heard, in the armed services, especially boot camp or their equivalent, where this happiness transfer seems most prevalent, it’s mostly the happiness of dozens of people is used to make one person a bit more content. It’s not a very efficient process, if the purpose is to transfer happiness. According to those people I’ve met who have been boot camp sergeants, the happiness transfer is not considered an interesting part of the process.
A recent counter-example also works. When Trump was banned from Twitter, that caused a lot of anguish for one person, a fair amount of discomfort for millions, but more comfort and sometimes even happiness for more millions. Net happiness was created by that act.
Demoted Oblivious
To be fair, boot camp is “Where Happiness Goes to Die.” There isn’t even much schadenfreude as most instructors are net less happy being there as well (at least in the great hopefully more inclusive north).
BBCC
Sarah remains an absolute gem.
Annika
What is happening in this comic?? I’ve worn glasses since I was 12 and I’ve never experienced what Joyce seems to be going through here, haha.
Dunedon
My first couple of pairs caused my boss to itch like crazy until I got used to them. After that was never a problem.
Dunedon
My boss? Sigh … My nose … Also, I got Carla, WIN!
Some Ed
You have allergies also? My sympathies. My, um, boss, has been giving me a lot of problems lately, but between meds and using some N95s like they were intended, pre-Covid, I may get out from under its harsh rule soon.
thejeff
I kind of want a pair of glasses that make my boss itch.
Steamweed
I definitely want a pair of eyeglasses that make my boss itch! 😀
Blob
I didn’t get glasses until well into high school. (I had contacts for a few years first actually because only one eye was myopic and for the first year or two I only had ONE contact.) 10 years later I mostly tolerate them, but even thinking about glasses induces me to start itching on the bridge of my nose.
Sirksome
“Since you were 12” I think is the key here. Joyce is 18 and tons of people have been since this glasses plot started how uncomfortable the transition to glasses are when you’ve never worn them before. But also Joyce is really being a baby about this whole thing too so don’t cut her any slack on it.
Norah
I think Joyce has some sensory issues too.
JetstreamGW
Unsurprising. Joyce at least appears to exhibit quite a few lowkey spectrum behaviors.
Demoted Oblivious
I’m not sure whats happening to me cognitively, but I first read that as,
“honkey spectrum disorders”.
JetstreamGW
Well, I mean… objectively…
Needfuldoer
I think it’s mostly obsessive-compulsive disorder in her case.
zee
I’ve worn glasses since I was 13 and I’m still not fully used to the feeling. I always have to take them off and rub my nose bridge when I’m at home. And that’s just how it is with the ones that fit!
Some Ed
I’ve “worn” glasses starting when I was 18, and the transition from not having glasses to “wearing” them was not really at all difficult for me.
Admittedly, I think the only time I’ve worn them for more than about an hour at a time was when I was doing cross-country driving. I’m now 48, and I do know where my glasses are. One pair is in my backpack, and the other two pair are in my winter coat.
Annika
Oh, I did not like wearing them at all either for the first couple of weeks I had them! But that was primarily because I had persistent headaches as I was getting used to them and having something on my face was off-putting (I am autistic and have some sensory issues too, but it’s not debilitating). I still have to take them off sometimes if I have a headache. They were never itchy though, haha. Maybe it’s because I had the kind without nose pieces?
seregiel
Glasses Pressure Headaches are real. Also, if you have high peripheral vision, the noticing of things at the side not in focus also hurts.
sultryglebe
But do you allow your foods to touch?
Rectilinear Propagation
The itching specifically or you’ve never had an uncomfortable pair of glasses?
I had one pair once that I was half convinced I was allergic to.
june gloom
I was made to wear glasses when I was around 10. I hated them so much I refused to wear them.
GeekRyuu
I was the opposite. I got glasses at seven and my parents struggled to get me to take them off. I was so utterly gleeful at being able to see clearly.
Keulen
I’ve worn glasses since I was 3 or 4. I can’t relate to what Joyce is going through either.
Arianod
I started wearing glasses when I was around 13 and never had any itching troubles. But Joyce can’t have two kinds of food touching each other on her plate; she seems like the kind of person to have trouble with a “foreign” object sitting on her face.
DinaJoyce
My first pair literally made my nose go numb. I can’t wear the kind with the adjustable nose pads and I have to wear my glasses a bit too lose around the ears or I get a headache from the pressure behind my ears
Annika
I can’t wear the kind with adjustable nose pieces either!
Passchendaele
sarah: nope, that just makes me feel even better
Stephen Bierce
“Stop making a spectacle of yourself!”–Abbott (to Costello)
Sirksome
As a life long glasses wearer I’m starting to feel just a little insulted.
Axel
glasses of aging
CC
thrilled to announce today’s Joyce will be drawn by Chuck Jones
Proto_Eevee
I could stare at Joyce’s face here for hours and not stop laughing
Rikunda
If the nose piece is bothering her, perhaps she needs an adjustment. Dorothy was wrong when she said you just get used to it. There is not anything you are meant to get used to! That is why it is adjustable!
crow