…I feel like there are a lot of things I’ve regretted doing, and only a handful things I’ve regretted NOT doing, idk, there are so many times where doing X isn’t reversible but NOT doing X still can be reversed
“Well son, a funny thing about regret is that it’s better to regret something you have done than to regret something you haven’t done. And by the way, if you see your mom this weekend, would you be sure and tell her…Satan! Satan! Satan!”
I’m 63, Ana, and I feel just the opposite. I’ve never learned to pilot a planes or helicopter, never seen Florence, never sailed on the Mediterranean, never scuba dived off Wolf and Darwin, and many more. All of these were big on my imaginary bucket list, but careers, education, marriage, kids, injuries have gotten in the way. Regardless of the why, the regrets are real.
I think the ratio of “things you regret doing” and “things you regret not doing” are just two ways to say the same thing. “If you could do it over, would you choose differently?”
You will always regret the choices that had negative consequences. You *may* regret choices that had neutral consequences, if something great seemed achievable. My thoughts? Make the best choice you feel you can, and if you later feel it was wrong, think of that as a needed lesson in decision making.
I regret making it out of the womb… so, there’s that. Since I had a distressed delivery, I’m given to ponder my existence in the context of the movie the Butterfly Effect, and… I can’t say I disagree with the choice Kutcher’s character makes.
You know, I feel like this is somehow invoking the old lesbian stereotype about lesbian couples moving very quickly through the early relationship stages….
And yet, as an example of that stereotype (but with bi women) in real life, I can’t really fault it either.
Now, I’m just wondering how much that old stereotype was influenced by exactly this sort of situation.
The stereotype isn’t that they get married fast – partly due to not having the option longterm- but that they get super serious and move in together *fast*.
I don’t know what the stereotype on marriage is nowadays, considering there’s the general idea of women being really specific about wedding planning and stuff.
Rose by Any Other Name
Yes, Z, I’m aware. Hence the phrase ‘somehow invoking’ rather than outright an example of.
And I, on the other hand, do fit the stereotype (sort of) since my wife and I moved in together fairly quickly after we started dating.
Of course, the flipside to me is that we’d been best friends for going in three years prior, so when we became romantic, we went from 0 to 60 VERY fast because all of that ‘getting to know you’ stuff had already happened.
Z
Okay but living in sin is kind of the opposite of “assuaging feelings about sex before marriage”.
Delicious Taffy
Living in “sin” is humanity’s default state and Gosh will get over it.
Because they are like 18 and students, it’s one thing to know you love someone and feel like you want to spend your lives together. It’s another to actually make such a commitment
Dina had a 19th birthday party in-comic right before Mike got murdered.
Nono
Was it a murder, or ‘self-inflicted death’? Because Mike did basically throw himself (and Blaine) off the building.
King Daniel
Hmm. Tough question, especially since I’m most definitely not a lawyer. 😛 AFAIK though, under Indiana state law technically any death which takes place during the commission of a felony counts under the Felony Murder rule, which means you’re potentially on the hook for murdering that person even if you didn’t physically assault them (under the legal grounds that that person wouldn’t have been in a position to die in the first place if it weren’t for the felony being actively committed). I believe some people have even been prosecuted for felony murder as a result of heart attacks taking place in such situations.
Maybe the hardest part is figuring out what crimes Blaine was doing exactly when attacking those teens with a hammer, body armor and a school shooter accomplice he’d just bailed out of jail. Well, we know he was conspiring to if not attempting extortion, kidnapping and murder, but I wonder what a court would think.
Probably they’d think “felony assault”. And they’d definitely think Mike only tried to defend himself and Amber. I doubt any court in the world would let Blaine off with less than murder.
Needfuldoer
He was going to get at least one murder charge anyway because he killed Toedead. The only witnesses to the Mike encounter were Blaine, Ross, and Amaziber. (I genuinely don’t know how the split would work in court, unless Amber got all the memories of that incident. If she only got glimpses, it could be explained as shock or trauma.)
[Puts on Doylist hat] That’s probably why he killed Ross, and then the dirty cop offed him in the hospital. Otherwise, “the pending trial of HammerToe” would hang over the comic for the rest of its run. Wrapping that arc up in the season finale let the comic start fresh for the season 2 premiere.
To require tax benefits, you need a job to pay taxes on. And then you need a job that pays well enough to get you over the poverty line.
Sirksome
Bah! You people and your logic! What if they want to buy a property? Or maybe Becky and/or Dina comes into a sudden inheritance of millions and then one of them dies?! Maybe they decide to start a small business and their combined credit scores help secure a loan!
Clif
Are we ignoring the fact that Becky is going to be in huge demand next election cycle?
Delicious Taffy
Do specific teenagers usually have longevity as political props? Feels like everyone pretty quickly forgot about that Uma Thurman kid from a few years ago.
King Daniel
Also Becky won’t be marketable as a Teen Genius:tm: next cycle, as she’ll be 20 years old—not to mention that Dumbing of Age probably won’t pass Becky’s 20th birthday until the 2100s barring an end-of-comic epilogue.
Ah, but as a low income wage earner, Becky may qualify for EITC. (Earned Income Tax Credit, as close as the US gets to negative income tax.) I’m not sure if marrying Dina would help or hurt… may depend on how Dina’s parents handle her finances.
Z
Dina is almost certainly a dependent for tax purposes. Her parents paying for her college could be really tricky to navigate if she’s no longer a dependent in terms of taxes. We went to university after getting married so had to file our own taxes and we had to report financial aid as income – it’s possible that “parents paying my college costs” would be regarded as income as well. (Even if they literally pay directly to the college -the government may see it as “they give you the money which you then give to the college”. I mean, I sure as hell didn’t see that financial aid money pass through *my* hands and it was still considered my income. Again not an issue with dependents)
It’ll also be an issue for Dina receiving health insurance, she’ll no longer qualify for her parents’.
khn0
Ok I see that taxes are an important subject (and apparently mostly in how to avoid them, what never cease to wonder me for redistribution purposes as I said to an accounting teacher from a public school when we covered the subject of tax optimisation), but what really bugs me is that: how is marriage, which is a binding form of contract between inequals in het marriage but also still binding and bureaucratic and hard to put an end to between gay “equals” (if that exist), wishable at all when there is, due to age but non only, a chance, be it slight, that oneother would want to become free again. Disclaimer: not married, have kids, and still suffer from bureaucratic dependency to marriage bindings and inequality.
I don’t see the tension. If anything, Dina just reaffirmed the certainty of their relationship and not just with the sex. This feels less like a rejection and more like a postponement.
yeah, I feel the same, Dina basically just said she would marry Becky, just at a later date, but the line “it’s not like it wasn’t gonna happen anyway” “I know” means that Dina is on board. ~<3
I think they are speaking of different “it’s” here.
Becky is referring to the act of “losing it,” which is what she’s been focused on. Dina takes it to mean marriage. She’s accepting the proposal, but refusing the date.
I dunno, I’m kinda reading it as a strip with two meanings.
One is that Becky has not truly faced up to her fundie sex guilt feelings and still feels the need to loophole her way around them, and the other is that these two are so deadass in love that they can’t think of life without the other.
192 thoughts on “Five-second”
Ana Chronistic
…I feel like there are a lot of things I’ve regretted doing, and only a handful things I’ve regretted NOT doing, idk, there are so many times where doing X isn’t reversible but NOT doing X still can be reversed
just sayin
Doctor_Who
“Well son, a funny thing about regret is that it’s better to regret something you have done than to regret something you haven’t done. And by the way, if you see your mom this weekend, would you be sure and tell her…Satan! Satan! Satan!”
(Way too obscure, I bet)
Rose by Any Other Name
I agree with the first sentence.
The second… less so.
a/snow/mous/e
gonna guess Ned Flanders before his wife died, but i assume i’m wrong
Pongles
More likely Grandpa Simpson, why would Ned want one of his kids to yell “Satan! Satan! Satan!” at their not-yet-dead mother.
wwwhhattt
The Butthole Surfers can’t be that obscure surely?
Chuk
A local(ish) record store used that for a TV ad back in the 80s, it was great.
Sibre
Hey, Orbital! Well, that’s where I know that line from, anyway.
Chaucer59
I’m 63, Ana, and I feel just the opposite. I’ve never learned to pilot a planes or helicopter, never seen Florence, never sailed on the Mediterranean, never scuba dived off Wolf and Darwin, and many more. All of these were big on my imaginary bucket list, but careers, education, marriage, kids, injuries have gotten in the way. Regardless of the why, the regrets are real.
BorkBorkBork
I think the ratio of “things you regret doing” and “things you regret not doing” are just two ways to say the same thing. “If you could do it over, would you choose differently?”
You will always regret the choices that had negative consequences. You *may* regret choices that had neutral consequences, if something great seemed achievable. My thoughts? Make the best choice you feel you can, and if you later feel it was wrong, think of that as a needed lesson in decision making.
The Wellerman
Eh, sometimes you don’t know it’s the wrong choice until after you’ve gotten information that wasn’t available until it was too late.
This even has a name too — Hindsight Bias.
Golly, when will humans ever learn?
Decidedly Orthogonal
I regret making it out of the womb… so, there’s that. Since I had a distressed delivery, I’m given to ponder my existence in the context of the movie the Butterfly Effect, and… I can’t say I disagree with the choice Kutcher’s character makes.
King Daniel
Huh, looks like my first try at commenting today got eaten. I’m guessing by accident? Anyway,
An Immodest Proposal™
RassilonTDavros
let’s eat children in a dinosaurchestra
Clif
If it be done, let it be done Swiftly.
a/snow/mous/e
Children are so gullible; it’ll be easy to get their livers.
…too subtle? too tangential? ah, well. c’est la vie. one who travails over the slightest of puns rarely sees the fruit of their labor.
Jess
I salute you.
Kyrik Michalowski
While Becky’s line of thinking is a bit weird, I’m glad Dina said ” not right now.” Seems like Becky’s handling the sitiation at the moment.
So what is about to go wrong? Please leave your ideas, no matter how strange.
King Daniel
The Head Alien bursts into the room with a gun and tells them to come with him if they want to live.
RassilonTDavros
The Head Alien does love crashing weddings…
The Wellerman
If he’s there, then I’m there with a million parasite spores aimed at his forehead.
Clif
Nonsense. Becky is about to be run over by a truck to punish her for spending money on a hair cut.
King Daniel
But only if she acts with integrity.
Delicious Taffy
Those 20 U.S. dollars were supposed to be spent setting herself up for life!
The Wellerman
With just $20? JK LOL
That’s a Homo sapien thing, right?
Thag Simmons
I think we’re good for these two for the rest of the book, at least.
It’s an ensemble cast after all, some cast members can have good things happen while others pick up the dramatic slack
King Daniel
On the other hand, we still have roughly a dozen Dina strips left in the chapter from memory.
Lars
Dotothy sitting in the half bath, gumbling: Mammals are strange.
Spencer
Becky goes to brag to Joyce that she had sex first.
And then Joyce goes “didn’t think I’d beat you to the punch on that.”
And then we find out it was with Arnold.
Thag Simmons
That’s sweet
Rose by Any Other Name
You know, I feel like this is somehow invoking the old lesbian stereotype about lesbian couples moving very quickly through the early relationship stages….
And yet, as an example of that stereotype (but with bi women) in real life, I can’t really fault it either.
Now, I’m just wondering how much that old stereotype was influenced by exactly this sort of situation.
Z
The stereotype isn’t that they get married fast – partly due to not having the option longterm- but that they get super serious and move in together *fast*.
I don’t know what the stereotype on marriage is nowadays, considering there’s the general idea of women being really specific about wedding planning and stuff.
Rose by Any Other Name
Yes, Z, I’m aware. Hence the phrase ‘somehow invoking’ rather than outright an example of.
And I, on the other hand, do fit the stereotype (sort of) since my wife and I moved in together fairly quickly after we started dating.
Of course, the flipside to me is that we’d been best friends for going in three years prior, so when we became romantic, we went from 0 to 60 VERY fast because all of that ‘getting to know you’ stuff had already happened.
Z
Okay but living in sin is kind of the opposite of “assuaging feelings about sex before marriage”.
Delicious Taffy
Living in “sin” is humanity’s default state and Gosh will get over it.
thejeff
And this isn’t really quite that either, since they’ve been dating for months.
Needfuldoer
In this instance it might be panic and doubt setting in, so Becky’s lunging for the first loophole she can think of.
I hope not, but maybe.
Sirksome
I mean is you both know it’s gonna happen eventually why not take advantage of the tax benefits early?
The Wellerman
Like I said once and I’ll say it again,
We CANNOT get UBI soon enough!!!!
Rose by Any Other Name
Amen to that.
Clif
The tax benefits, if any, will still be there on Tuesday.
Shitbird
Because they are like 18 and students, it’s one thing to know you love someone and feel like you want to spend your lives together. It’s another to actually make such a commitment
Opus the Poet
Dina had a 19th birthday party in-comic right before Mike got murdered.
Nono
Was it a murder, or ‘self-inflicted death’? Because Mike did basically throw himself (and Blaine) off the building.
King Daniel
Hmm. Tough question, especially since I’m most definitely not a lawyer. 😛 AFAIK though, under Indiana state law technically any death which takes place during the commission of a felony counts under the Felony Murder rule, which means you’re potentially on the hook for murdering that person even if you didn’t physically assault them (under the legal grounds that that person wouldn’t have been in a position to die in the first place if it weren’t for the felony being actively committed). I believe some people have even been prosecuted for felony murder as a result of heart attacks taking place in such situations.
Amelie Wikström
Maybe the hardest part is figuring out what crimes Blaine was doing exactly when attacking those teens with a hammer, body armor and a school shooter accomplice he’d just bailed out of jail. Well, we know he was conspiring to if not attempting extortion, kidnapping and murder, but I wonder what a court would think.
Probably they’d think “felony assault”. And they’d definitely think Mike only tried to defend himself and Amber. I doubt any court in the world would let Blaine off with less than murder.
Needfuldoer
He was going to get at least one murder charge anyway because he killed Toedead. The only witnesses to the Mike encounter were Blaine, Ross, and Amaziber. (I genuinely don’t know how the split would work in court, unless Amber got all the memories of that incident. If she only got glimpses, it could be explained as shock or trauma.)
[Puts on Doylist hat] That’s probably why he killed Ross, and then the dirty cop offed him in the hospital. Otherwise, “the pending trial of HammerToe” would hang over the comic for the rest of its run. Wrapping that arc up in the season finale let the comic start fresh for the season 2 premiere.
CrazyJ
What tax benefits? One of them undoubtedly isn’t getting paid enough to owe federal taxes and the other doesn’t appear to have a job at this point.
Rose by Any Other Name
And that was what I was going to say.
To require tax benefits, you need a job to pay taxes on. And then you need a job that pays well enough to get you over the poverty line.
Sirksome
Bah! You people and your logic! What if they want to buy a property? Or maybe Becky and/or Dina comes into a sudden inheritance of millions and then one of them dies?! Maybe they decide to start a small business and their combined credit scores help secure a loan!
Clif
Are we ignoring the fact that Becky is going to be in huge demand next election cycle?
Delicious Taffy
Do specific teenagers usually have longevity as political props? Feels like everyone pretty quickly forgot about that Uma Thurman kid from a few years ago.
King Daniel
Also Becky won’t be marketable as a Teen Genius:tm: next cycle, as she’ll be 20 years old—not to mention that Dumbing of Age probably won’t pass Becky’s 20th birthday until the 2100s barring an end-of-comic epilogue.
drs
Ah, but as a low income wage earner, Becky may qualify for EITC. (Earned Income Tax Credit, as close as the US gets to negative income tax.) I’m not sure if marrying Dina would help or hurt… may depend on how Dina’s parents handle her finances.
Z
Dina is almost certainly a dependent for tax purposes. Her parents paying for her college could be really tricky to navigate if she’s no longer a dependent in terms of taxes. We went to university after getting married so had to file our own taxes and we had to report financial aid as income – it’s possible that “parents paying my college costs” would be regarded as income as well. (Even if they literally pay directly to the college -the government may see it as “they give you the money which you then give to the college”. I mean, I sure as hell didn’t see that financial aid money pass through *my* hands and it was still considered my income. Again not an issue with dependents)
It’ll also be an issue for Dina receiving health insurance, she’ll no longer qualify for her parents’.
khn0
Ok I see that taxes are an important subject (and apparently mostly in how to avoid them, what never cease to wonder me for redistribution purposes as I said to an accounting teacher from a public school when we covered the subject of tax optimisation), but what really bugs me is that: how is marriage, which is a binding form of contract between inequals in het marriage but also still binding and bureaucratic and hard to put an end to between gay “equals” (if that exist), wishable at all when there is, due to age but non only, a chance, be it slight, that oneother would want to become free again. Disclaimer: not married, have kids, and still suffer from bureaucratic dependency to marriage bindings and inequality.
DojimaKojima
uh oh i sense this is gonna create some tension between them.
Sirksome
I don’t see the tension. If anything, Dina just reaffirmed the certainty of their relationship and not just with the sex. This feels less like a rejection and more like a postponement.
DJTsurugi
yeah, I feel the same, Dina basically just said she would marry Becky, just at a later date, but the line “it’s not like it wasn’t gonna happen anyway” “I know” means that Dina is on board. ~<3
alongcameaspider
I mean eventually Dina is gonna catch wind of her conflict with Joyce and she’d likely not approve of Becky wanting to push Joyce back into religion
PirateTawnee
Maybe not tension between Becky and Dina, very possibly tension between Christian Becky and Sexual Becky.
Clay
This.
StClair
Seconded.
Spencer
All I got this time is that the unbridled confidence these two have that it’s gonna happen eventually is just plain heckin’ cute
Matthew E Davis
I think they are speaking of different “it’s” here.
Becky is referring to the act of “losing it,” which is what she’s been focused on. Dina takes it to mean marriage. She’s accepting the proposal, but refusing the date.
Spencer
I dunno, I’m kinda reading it as a strip with two meanings.
One is that Becky has not truly faced up to her fundie sex guilt feelings and still feels the need to loophole her way around them, and the other is that these two are so deadass in love that they can’t think of life without the other.
Opinus
Does that count as a shotgun wedding?
King Daniel
I think it’d be more of a got-shun wedding
’cause Becky got shunned by her former church, see
Loki
Got shagged wedding
newlland(Henryvolt)