He is, but at the same time, if your solution to spreading yourself too thin is reducing the time you dedicate to relaxation and stress relief, you’re probably not solving the problem.
Mmm, but if your needed stress relief time is an hour or two, and you’re spending double that time, then maybe you’re not stress relieving, but avoiding.
(Yes, I’m fully aware I’ve wildly made up numbers here, but the point remains the same: Walky might be spending more time than needed for relaxation’s sake. And Joe, who would know better than I, did say “watch fewer”, not “stop watching”.)
zoelogical
yeee but like the reason you’re avoiding is because the stress is too much for you to handle, which leaves you back in the situation you were to begin with
like that’s half the problem with procrastination among high achievers – the stress they put on themselves increases the stress of their situation and the conflict between their self image and their reality of not Always Being Hot Shit is just a cognitive dissonance that is too much for them to handle because they’ve never been taught how to handle failure. so like: the answer is to go back and learn how to handle failure, not to keep pushing yourself to succeed in a situation where you have not been set up to succeed. and by learning how to handle failure you learn how to succeed, etc
i mean like the answer here is to go back and learn how to handle stress which is…stress relief….but also can be stress-inducing, because it’s not directly handling the cause of the stress
…..circles!!!!!
Halpful
yup. one thing I learned last week is that while anxiety sometimes identifies valid problems, it is stupendously bad at solutions. like, even worse than anger.
it’s like “hey! listen! there’s too much stress here! quick, add more stress, that’ll fix it!”
if it had its own body, it would be a cat throwing up on the carpet.
*facepalm*
now that I have the tools to find more sensible solutions, I need to train it to let me use them. 😛 (but, it does have a point that I’m too much in the habit of *not* using them)
He’s investigating why AG knew him. Obviously when he had AG’s phone, he saw that she’d been messaging about him with someone named Dorothy, and from there it’s not a lot or research to realize that’s probably the Dorothy that writes about AG in the school paper. He tracked her down and is trying to figure out which (I’m sure there’s more than one) of the girls he roofied is ratting him out on social media. He’s probably -hoping- it’s Joyce, because that’d give him a chance to get back at the girl that scarred him.
This is worryingly competent stuff from somebody that is such a total shitbag. Say what you want about Toedad and Blaine, at least they were idiots.
Zoe Quinn is a game dev who was thrust into the public eye when their ex-boyfriend, angry over the breakup, decided to stir 4chan into a frenzy and ruin their life under the guise of “ethics in gaming journalism”. It was a whole thing, usually known as Gamergate.
zoelogical
so does this mean his next target is actually danny, to try and get him to post false allegations of dorothy cheating on him
Smiling Cat
Not strictly that. It doesn’t actually require anybody directly involved with Dotty. Remember that Gamergate wasn’t based on any actual true information, just innuendo and inertia once enough people who wanted to believe it picked it up. The fact that Zoe Quinn’s ex initiated it isn’t really significant outside of being someone who wanted to hurt Zoe Quinn.
Putting on my Herman Kahn hat for a moment, it seems to be the tactic with the highest possible reward for Ryan to employ. Rephrase the narrative from a warning about a potential serial rapist to one about a feminist witch hunt being guided by an overly ambitious hypocrite looking to make a name for herself among social justice warriors on her path into politics.
If he can sell it, he takes her out of the game and gets himself out of the spotlight.
zoelogical
-nod nod-
fair enough!! and i mean it’s not like zoe quinn was the only person to be affected by gamergate at all
Delicious Taffy
Oh, right. I’d almost forgotten about that (somehow ongoing) incident. I really only know about it from the occasional meme and what Jim Sterling has covered.
zoelogical
it was so weird!! but yeah that’s how it all started, an ex-boyfriend of zoe’s posting allegations that she’d* cheated on him. among other things, he said she’d gotten positive press coverage for her game from a reporter she’d been sleeping with. she and the reporter were not in a relationship at the time when the article was published. but like that’s what started the onslaught of harassment and also gamergate. zoe was doxxed and had both rape and death threats sent to her. and so did a number of other female-aligned people in the gaming industry.
and like that’s pretty much why the gamergate line that “well actually it’s about ethics in game journalism” is bullshit, tbh, because nothing about this was done ethically
*zoe identifies as agender, but i can’t find preferred pronouns at the moment.
KRVeale
You are 20067% right, and not only was it not done ethically, it wasn’t about journalism: the howling turdstorm involved targets women, meaning that Zoe (not a journalist) gets attacked at a far higher rate than the actual journalist she’s linked with in the counterfactual nonsense. There are so many examples I am now tired thinking about them.
I’ve been doing some academic writing about all this, so… it’s a bit close to home for me. The upside is I know enough to recommend a good book about what happened and the reasons behind it:
Golding, Dan, and Leena Van Deventer. 2016. “Game Changers: From Minecraft to Misogyny, the Fight for the Future of Videogames.” South Melbourne: VIC Affirm Press.
Knayt
Then there’s the matter of Anita Sarkeesian – if the criticisms about game reviewers who were basically hired mouthpieces for the industry were the actual complaints and not a smokescreen she would be beloved by Gamergate. Clearly she’s willing to put her own opinion out, even if it’s negative. If the complaints about video games not being taken seriously as an art form weren’t part of the smokescreen it would be much the same – she’s taking them seriously, doing actual literary criticism, etc. Yet Gamergate hates her.
It’s almost like it’s not about that at all, and is instead a cesspool of vile misogyny.
zoelogical
oh wow!! good on you for making academic records.
i remember hearing around the time that because of gamergate keeping physical records of video games was getting a lot less funded precisely because it was so viscerally threatening
KRVeale
Knayt: Yep. Also the fact that they rail against “corruption in games journalism” by attacking the outlets that frequently critique and REVEAL corruption in games journalism. Of course, what they mean by “corruption” is “anything less than slavish praise,” not to mention the whole completely ridiculous idea that it’s possible to have an “objective review,” or that anything is ever outside of politics.
Zoelogical: Thanks! Lots of people are writing on it too, and that book is a good source. I saw the thing about Gamergate destroying game curation too. It’s a problem: there are plenty of academic areas where treating games seriously was making slow, precarious inroads, and now that’s all burned down again due to association with godawful fucksocks.
Unless they’ve said anything else since their coming out, any pronouns are okay but they/them are most accurate
zoelogical
thank you!!!
it’s a little awkward because, like. a lot of what happened to zoe happened because of their perceived femininity. I MEAN doesn’t mean that you can’t use they/them pronouns but like it’s…a lot to explain? and not easy to do gracefully.
or just suck it up and do it and then it becomes graceful, i guess
That was a pretty interesting read. Learning is fun.
zoelogical
thank you!!
Random832
I really don’t want to get into this in general, but from what I’ve heard, that particular allegation didn’t even actually come from Gjoni – who described one of the alleged other guys as a journalist but did not suggest any kind of quid pro quo. (Which, the people using this to somehow defend gamergate haven’t seemed to notice, actually means that the “it’s about ethics in journalism” crowd is even more full of crap than they already were – the whole basis for it is out of nowhere.)
If that were true she wouldn’t have contacted all of her other professors to see if there was a pattern.
Most people, even those who care about school, would have just seen that as a sign to do better in *that* class. That she cared enough to make sure things were OK in other classes rather than waiting to eventually get graded assignments back means she’s as far as lackadaisical as it gets.
Um, this IS college, she’s a freshman, with a very ambitious future goal to accomplish – if she’s not spending a large portion of her free time studying, she’s not as ambitious as she wants to think.
ellernock
to be fair, i got way over-scheduled in college by a bad advisor and ended up taking 18 credits of honors and art courses, both super time-intensive and requiring lots of out of class work, and i had to medically withdraw by the end of the semester. no matter how ambitious and smart you are, sometimes you agree to more than you can handle. high school is so much more structured than college and you get a crash course in time management pretty quickly. i really sympathize with how dorothy’s probably feeling right about now. i’m glad she’s not avoiding the heck out of her classes out of guilt, though, because that is the road to just bombing.
She may have bitten off too many credits in topics that are hard and that she’s not passionate about. I can’t explain why intro to logic is essential or even particularly connected to her big goals or her aptitudes. I wonder if she can.
rectilinearpropagation
If Intro to Logic == “Prove someone’s argument is invalid using math”* then it actually makes a lot of sense for someone going into politics to take. Also, being able to spot fallacies is just a good skill in general.
*It was called Critical Thinking at my college so I’m not sure if it’s the same thing.
BBCC
It might also be a Philosophy class, which is also relevant to Dorothy’s career.
thejeff
I dunno. It doesn’t seem to be a skill actually possessed by many politicians, from what I can tell.
When you prove someone’s argument invalid using math your audience’s eyes glaze over and they respond to his emotional appeal.
pwrbttm
Usually there are very few numbers involved in logic classes – it depends on which department teaches the course but that’s my experience with most classes named “logic”
Kitty
If she’s planning on the law->politics route she could also be taking it to get a leg up on the LSAT.
I mean, hasn’t this been coming for the entire strip? I mean, when she first announced “I didn’t get into Harvard the first time around, so I’m here until I can transfer”, I read that as foreshadowing that Dorothy’s big arc was going to be learning that no matter how lofty her goals and how hard she works, she’s going to fail and have to learn to reexamine her goals.
Thaaaaat doesn’t sound like the kind of thing Willis would do when he’s explicitly said Dorothy’s ambition is not a character flaw. Having her decide her ambition’s unrealistic and give up isn’t much better.
Sdrainbow
Sorry, I didn’t mean that her ambition is a character flaw.
I just think she’s got her sights set at the absolute tippy top, and she already kinda failed phase 1 – she didn’t get to Harvard.
I haven’t the slightest idea how good a school Indiana is, nor do I have any prior knowledge of the Walkyverse other than something about aliens and a toy store. I’m just saying, this arc has been a long time coming, and it’s been foreshadowed from the very beginning.
283 thoughts on “Jettison”
Ana Chronistic
YOU HEATHEN
Ana Chronistic
NO LONGER FRIENDS
Emperor Daniel
” . . . it . . . goes up again?”
“no”
Lone Wolf
BLASPHEMY!
AnvilPro
Walky’s flailing arms won’t hide you Ryan
Doctor_Who
I only noticed him because of your comment.
Where’s Ryan would make for a creepy and depressing Where’s Waldo spin-off.
Emperor Daniel
If he’s out here now, that’s making the “he’s stalking Dorothy” theory a lot more plausible.
Clif
Yep.
Hope Amazigirl is on the job.
Woobie
I hope Amazi-Girl is reading the tags, otherwise she might miss him.
Kinoko
Ew. I hadn’t realized that theory existed. It makes too much sense. :<
Heavensrun
MADNESS.
Kris
Joe is …..not wrong?
Tori
He is, but at the same time, if your solution to spreading yourself too thin is reducing the time you dedicate to relaxation and stress relief, you’re probably not solving the problem.
zoelogical
yeeee
i mean sometimes you just need like…more effective/less time-consuming forms of stress relief, but…not always easy to do
Inspector Hound
Mmm, but if your needed stress relief time is an hour or two, and you’re spending double that time, then maybe you’re not stress relieving, but avoiding.
(Yes, I’m fully aware I’ve wildly made up numbers here, but the point remains the same: Walky might be spending more time than needed for relaxation’s sake. And Joe, who would know better than I, did say “watch fewer”, not “stop watching”.)
zoelogical
yeee but like the reason you’re avoiding is because the stress is too much for you to handle, which leaves you back in the situation you were to begin with
like that’s half the problem with procrastination among high achievers – the stress they put on themselves increases the stress of their situation and the conflict between their self image and their reality of not Always Being Hot Shit is just a cognitive dissonance that is too much for them to handle because they’ve never been taught how to handle failure. so like: the answer is to go back and learn how to handle failure, not to keep pushing yourself to succeed in a situation where you have not been set up to succeed. and by learning how to handle failure you learn how to succeed, etc
i mean like the answer here is to go back and learn how to handle stress which is…stress relief….but also can be stress-inducing, because it’s not directly handling the cause of the stress
…..circles!!!!!
Halpful
yup. one thing I learned last week is that while anxiety sometimes identifies valid problems, it is stupendously bad at solutions. like, even worse than anger.
it’s like “hey! listen! there’s too much stress here! quick, add more stress, that’ll fix it!”
if it had its own body, it would be a cat throwing up on the carpet.
*facepalm*
now that I have the tools to find more sensible solutions, I need to train it to let me use them. 😛 (but, it does have a point that I’m too much in the habit of *not* using them)
Delicious Taffy
Oh, I see that motherfucker peeking out of that doorway. Don’t think I fucking can’t.
zoelogical
oh fuck
Chris
Shhiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii…
Dave
Wait…what?
*re-examines strip*
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUU-!
Stalker alert!
Rosicrucian
Even as much as she’s bummed, Dorothy is handling this a lot better than Walky was.
You talk to your professors. You don’t just start skipping class entirely and pretend the Rapture is happening when called out on it.
Woobie
Yeah. Invoking The Rapture is going too far 🙂
Dean
Seriously, Ragnarok is a lot more plausible.
SgtWadeyWilson
“Oh, shit! Is that giant serpent fighting a deity?!” *Runs away.*
Deanatay
What about becoming British nobility? Is THAT still OK?
Vx
At least it doesn’t seem like she plans to jettison /him/ to focus on her grades.
Yet.
Paidraig
If anything, I expect Walky to be the one to suggest that,
Rukduk
If it weren’t for finally talking to Jason he probably would have suggested it in panel 3.
zoelogical
well i mean he’s a much more supportive boyfriend than danny was at that time
CandidCanid
I SPOTTED HIM AGAIN. PANEL 4.
AHHHH
Cattleprod
Things are serious when you stop using punctuation. In spoken language.
Meta
No no no he’s following
Mav
Is he looking to get to Joyce?? That’s so terrifying. To think this actually happens to people
Clif
Joyce didn’t post his picture.
Delicious Taffy
Nah, all she did was scar his face and drive him off after his unwanted advances. Why would he go after her? 😐
Heavensrun
He’s investigating why AG knew him. Obviously when he had AG’s phone, he saw that she’d been messaging about him with someone named Dorothy, and from there it’s not a lot or research to realize that’s probably the Dorothy that writes about AG in the school paper. He tracked her down and is trying to figure out which (I’m sure there’s more than one) of the girls he roofied is ratting him out on social media. He’s probably -hoping- it’s Joyce, because that’d give him a chance to get back at the girl that scarred him.
This is worryingly competent stuff from somebody that is such a total shitbag. Say what you want about Toedad and Blaine, at least they were idiots.
Smiling Cat
I said it before and I’ll say it again. He’s looking for a chance to Zoe Quinn her.
Delicious Taffy
Who?
Shiro
Zoe Quinn is a game dev who was thrust into the public eye when their ex-boyfriend, angry over the breakup, decided to stir 4chan into a frenzy and ruin their life under the guise of “ethics in gaming journalism”. It was a whole thing, usually known as Gamergate.
zoelogical
so does this mean his next target is actually danny, to try and get him to post false allegations of dorothy cheating on him
Smiling Cat
Not strictly that. It doesn’t actually require anybody directly involved with Dotty. Remember that Gamergate wasn’t based on any actual true information, just innuendo and inertia once enough people who wanted to believe it picked it up. The fact that Zoe Quinn’s ex initiated it isn’t really significant outside of being someone who wanted to hurt Zoe Quinn.
Putting on my Herman Kahn hat for a moment, it seems to be the tactic with the highest possible reward for Ryan to employ. Rephrase the narrative from a warning about a potential serial rapist to one about a feminist witch hunt being guided by an overly ambitious hypocrite looking to make a name for herself among social justice warriors on her path into politics.
If he can sell it, he takes her out of the game and gets himself out of the spotlight.
zoelogical
-nod nod-
fair enough!! and i mean it’s not like zoe quinn was the only person to be affected by gamergate at all
Delicious Taffy
Oh, right. I’d almost forgotten about that (somehow ongoing) incident. I really only know about it from the occasional meme and what Jim Sterling has covered.
zoelogical
it was so weird!! but yeah that’s how it all started, an ex-boyfriend of zoe’s posting allegations that she’d* cheated on him. among other things, he said she’d gotten positive press coverage for her game from a reporter she’d been sleeping with. she and the reporter were not in a relationship at the time when the article was published. but like that’s what started the onslaught of harassment and also gamergate. zoe was doxxed and had both rape and death threats sent to her. and so did a number of other female-aligned people in the gaming industry.
and like that’s pretty much why the gamergate line that “well actually it’s about ethics in game journalism” is bullshit, tbh, because nothing about this was done ethically
*zoe identifies as agender, but i can’t find preferred pronouns at the moment.
KRVeale
You are 20067% right, and not only was it not done ethically, it wasn’t about journalism: the howling turdstorm involved targets women, meaning that Zoe (not a journalist) gets attacked at a far higher rate than the actual journalist she’s linked with in the counterfactual nonsense. There are so many examples I am now tired thinking about them.
I’ve been doing some academic writing about all this, so… it’s a bit close to home for me. The upside is I know enough to recommend a good book about what happened and the reasons behind it:
Golding, Dan, and Leena Van Deventer. 2016. “Game Changers: From Minecraft to Misogyny, the Fight for the Future of Videogames.” South Melbourne: VIC Affirm Press.
Knayt
Then there’s the matter of Anita Sarkeesian – if the criticisms about game reviewers who were basically hired mouthpieces for the industry were the actual complaints and not a smokescreen she would be beloved by Gamergate. Clearly she’s willing to put her own opinion out, even if it’s negative. If the complaints about video games not being taken seriously as an art form weren’t part of the smokescreen it would be much the same – she’s taking them seriously, doing actual literary criticism, etc. Yet Gamergate hates her.
It’s almost like it’s not about that at all, and is instead a cesspool of vile misogyny.
zoelogical
oh wow!! good on you for making academic records.
i remember hearing around the time that because of gamergate keeping physical records of video games was getting a lot less funded precisely because it was so viscerally threatening
KRVeale
Knayt: Yep. Also the fact that they rail against “corruption in games journalism” by attacking the outlets that frequently critique and REVEAL corruption in games journalism. Of course, what they mean by “corruption” is “anything less than slavish praise,” not to mention the whole completely ridiculous idea that it’s possible to have an “objective review,” or that anything is ever outside of politics.
Zoelogical: Thanks! Lots of people are writing on it too, and that book is a good source. I saw the thing about Gamergate destroying game curation too. It’s a problem: there are plenty of academic areas where treating games seriously was making slow, precarious inroads, and now that’s all burned down again due to association with godawful fucksocks.
Shiro
Unless they’ve said anything else since their coming out, any pronouns are okay but they/them are most accurate
zoelogical
thank you!!!
it’s a little awkward because, like. a lot of what happened to zoe happened because of their perceived femininity. I MEAN doesn’t mean that you can’t use they/them pronouns but like it’s…a lot to explain? and not easy to do gracefully.
or just suck it up and do it and then it becomes graceful, i guess
bhtooefr
Looks like they have no preferred pronouns, but consider “they” most accurate: https://thezoequinn.tumblr.com/post/155785701663/a-gender
Delicious Taffy
That was a pretty interesting read. Learning is fun.
zoelogical
thank you!!
Random832
I really don’t want to get into this in general, but from what I’ve heard, that particular allegation didn’t even actually come from Gjoni – who described one of the alleged other guys as a journalist but did not suggest any kind of quid pro quo. (Which, the people using this to somehow defend gamergate haven’t seemed to notice, actually means that the “it’s about ethics in journalism” crowd is even more full of crap than they already were – the whole basis for it is out of nowhere.)
zoelogical
huh
bizarre
Fart Captor
Oh shit I didn’t even see him
Optimal Optimus
Or maybe Walky’s lackadaisical attitude towards school has rubbed off you, Dorothy?
rectilinearpropagation
If that were true she wouldn’t have contacted all of her other professors to see if there was a pattern.
Most people, even those who care about school, would have just seen that as a sign to do better in *that* class. That she cared enough to make sure things were OK in other classes rather than waiting to eventually get graded assignments back means she’s as far as lackadaisical as it gets.
Shiro
I think if that had happened, we would’ve seen some sign before now.
monkyvirus
Was she over-credited? I think it’s likely a case of biting off more than you can chew. She shouldn’t have to study constantly in her free-time.
Deanatay
Um, this IS college, she’s a freshman, with a very ambitious future goal to accomplish – if she’s not spending a large portion of her free time studying, she’s not as ambitious as she wants to think.
ellernock
to be fair, i got way over-scheduled in college by a bad advisor and ended up taking 18 credits of honors and art courses, both super time-intensive and requiring lots of out of class work, and i had to medically withdraw by the end of the semester. no matter how ambitious and smart you are, sometimes you agree to more than you can handle. high school is so much more structured than college and you get a crash course in time management pretty quickly. i really sympathize with how dorothy’s probably feeling right about now. i’m glad she’s not avoiding the heck out of her classes out of guilt, though, because that is the road to just bombing.
btoblake
She may have bitten off too many credits in topics that are hard and that she’s not passionate about. I can’t explain why intro to logic is essential or even particularly connected to her big goals or her aptitudes. I wonder if she can.
rectilinearpropagation
If Intro to Logic == “Prove someone’s argument is invalid using math”* then it actually makes a lot of sense for someone going into politics to take. Also, being able to spot fallacies is just a good skill in general.
*It was called Critical Thinking at my college so I’m not sure if it’s the same thing.
BBCC
It might also be a Philosophy class, which is also relevant to Dorothy’s career.
thejeff
I dunno. It doesn’t seem to be a skill actually possessed by many politicians, from what I can tell.
When you prove someone’s argument invalid using math your audience’s eyes glaze over and they respond to his emotional appeal.
pwrbttm
Usually there are very few numbers involved in logic classes – it depends on which department teaches the course but that’s my experience with most classes named “logic”
Kitty
If she’s planning on the law->politics route she could also be taking it to get a leg up on the LSAT.
sundriedrainbow
I mean, hasn’t this been coming for the entire strip? I mean, when she first announced “I didn’t get into Harvard the first time around, so I’m here until I can transfer”, I read that as foreshadowing that Dorothy’s big arc was going to be learning that no matter how lofty her goals and how hard she works, she’s going to fail and have to learn to reexamine her goals.
I maybe read too much into things.
BBCC
Thaaaaat doesn’t sound like the kind of thing Willis would do when he’s explicitly said Dorothy’s ambition is not a character flaw. Having her decide her ambition’s unrealistic and give up isn’t much better.
Sdrainbow
Sorry, I didn’t mean that her ambition is a character flaw.
I just think she’s got her sights set at the absolute tippy top, and she already kinda failed phase 1 – she didn’t get to Harvard.
I haven’t the slightest idea how good a school Indiana is, nor do I have any prior knowledge of the Walkyverse other than something about aliens and a toy store. I’m just saying, this arc has been a long time coming, and it’s been foreshadowed from the very beginning.