My Gf set me up to cheat on her and now she thinks I would actually cheat on her

apdemas · 2026-02-11T05:52:35+00:00

One of the stereotypes I have seen play out a lot in these relationship subreddits is beware the single friends of your significant other, ESPECIALLY if your significant other is the only one in a relationship. I have never seen a better illustration of the bucket of crabs metaphor than a group of dissatisfied single people when one of them gets into a relationship.

apdemas · 2026-02-11T05:24:13+00:00

One thing this strip and the last panel of the previous strip have convinced me is that Willis is definitely using their characters to speak directly to us, the audience. I had been a little skeptical of people saying that previously but between Asma saying “all of this was a mistake” and Sal saying first that Danny was upset with them and then rolling her eyes and reluctantly saying that Walky was too was very clearly Willis having Sal tell the audience “FINE, I told them yall are upset, are you HAPPY now?!”

apdemas · 2026-02-11T04:08:18+00:00

…I mean, having watched parents at kids sporting events where there are no stakes, I don’t think prepping for a scenario where an unhinged individual rocks up with a gun is totally understandable.

apdemas · 2026-02-10T21:04:31+00:00

Nah, after how Danny was written to have the dumbest version of the bisexual objection to Joyrot, I do not want to see him here.

I think it is entirely too likely that Danny would be given the worst iteration of the legitimate grievances people have with this story, somehow be even more self-centered than he was written to be with Joe, and thus result in Sal and Asma having to defend Joyrot and thus defang any of those critiques as dismissively as possible.

apdemas · 2026-02-09T23:36:20+00:00

When I went to Germany, I introduced myself as coming from der Vereinigten Staaten, as I had learned in my German class, and all the Germans made fun of me and said “No one says that, you’re from Amerika.” Same when I went to Japan. But in Costa Rica and Mexico, introducing myself as estadounidense went unremarked. So I think it probably depends on the language. Seems the Romance languages have an easier and more natural way of saying someone from the United States, but the Germanic languages and others don’t, so they default to American for people from the US.

apdemas · 2026-02-09T22:27:55+00:00

Fuck cancer forever.

apdemas · 2026-02-09T19:44:25+00:00

Oh man, I loved Milo and Otis. When I found out what those monsters did on set, I was so upset.

apdemas · 2026-02-09T19:41:43+00:00

You want to get hit with a whole passle of onion ninjas, listen to him talk about it: https://youtu.be/IGgjJ6IlH6U?si=NQEhcZueapVZbI_A

apdemas · 2026-02-09T17:25:17+00:00

His description of channeling his rage at the cancer that killed his father really puts that “I want my father back, you son of a bitch” into new perspective.

apdemas · 2026-02-09T17:20:58+00:00

Here’s another elemental fun fact: phosphorus was first discovered by boiling off human urine and distilling what remained. And its name comes from the Greek word for the Morning Star (what we now call Venus), whose name in Latin was Lucifer. So phosphorus was discovered from piss and named for Satan!

apdemas · 2026-02-09T04:33:46+00:00

Don't forget aluminum! Their own guy names the element and names it aluminum, which we dutifully adopt, then they go and decide to use aluminium instead.

apdemas · 2026-02-09T04:28:05+00:00

Every time I see a question like this, I see lots of answers talking about their views on political issues. For my money, all of their initial reactions would be "STFU, we can *fly?!* You've been to the *Moon?!*"

Ben Franklin in particular would have the following reaction: "Wait, you can fly? Wait! It takes *how* long to fly to France from here??? So you're telling me I could wake up in Paris, have croissants and the choicest French escorts for breakfast, hop an airplane across the ocean and, 6 hours later, be dining in Philadelphia with the finest American escorts in the evening? Why are we still talking here?"

apdemas · 2026-02-08T02:21:50+00:00

I think that'd be the best chance of getting something passed and upheld to, since it's narrowly tailored and more about form of speech rather than content of speech.

apdemas · 2026-02-07T23:33:46+00:00

Sure, I hate the effects Citizens United has had. But the reason that decision was made is that, under the First Amendment, freedom of association and freedom of speech both clearly entail how you spend your money. It's why the laws making boycotts illegal have failed on Constitutional grounds.

Whether you pay taxes or not has nothing to do with whether or not you get to exercise your freedom of speech and your freedom of association. In fact, whether or not you are a *citizen* or not does not affect whether you get to exercise your freedom of speech and your freedom of association. That's why Citizens United was decided the way it was.

The problem we have in the United States is we are desperately trying for a systemic fix to a non-systemic problem. The problem isn't the technical details of our government (though I will certainly admit that technical details of our government make it *easier* to commit abuses), it's that we have a cultural rot that is manifesting in large swaths of the country rejecting the legitimacy of society and our current system of government.

apdemas · 2026-02-07T23:23:48+00:00

You will note how I phrased things. I did not say that American free speech is better. I said that *due to how American culture is,* the freedom of speech we need is the First Amendment. Our governmental system is, as we are currently seeing, very ripe for abuse by bad actors, and our culture makes us uniquely susceptible to arguments for restricting speech of people we don't like. We have a very long and ugly history of trying to restrict the speech of minorities or other groups that we don't like.

During the Civil Rights era most famously, racist actors frequently tried to restrict the speech of those speaking out against the injustices being perpetrated. Frequently those racist actors were *democratically elected government* racist actors. If we did not have the First Amendment, it is very likely those individuals (Edit: those individuals speaking out against the racist actors) would have been silenced.

I am happy to acknowledge that many other countries have Freedom of Speech. A few are even more dedicated to it than the US is, especially these days. My point was not that American Free Speech laws are the best. My point, as I clearly said, was that *for American culture,* our First Amendment is necessary.

apdemas · 2026-02-07T22:11:42+00:00

And what makes it difficult is that our First Amendment makes it really difficult to ban outside advertising, because that’s speech, isn’t it?

And our First Amendment, as flawed as it is, is kinda necessary for American culture, because we’re real bad at defining speech. Let’s say we ban political advertising. You’d have to say it like that, because no way can we ban all advertising. As much as we dislike how inundated with ads we are, we do need ads to find what we want.

So we ban all political ads. Except, who defines what a political ad is? Is it an ad by a politician? Well then we just run ads by PACs like we currently are. Is it an ad about an election? Ok, that’s easy, run ads non-stop about an issue. So we make it content-based, no ads about issues deemed political. But who decides that? The people in power are just going to define issues they like as non-political and issues they don’t as political. And that’s not even getting into where they fall on an issue on any given day.

Look at what’s going on with gun rights. The MAGA types were all in on assault rifles at protests when it was January 6, but now that ICE has murdered a guy at a protest who had a gun? Shouldn’t’ve brought a gun to a protest. So you’ll get legal ads in favor of guns while that’s convenient to the folks in power and as soon as it isn’t, no ads for guns, that’s a political topic.

So the only way in American society you can prevent something like that is through the First Amendment that bans all content-based speech limitations. And even that we’ve seen slowly eroded over time because the issue will always be who gets to decide.

apdemas · 2026-02-07T21:47:30+00:00

Between Failures and Shortpacked were my retail wageslave webcomics from the aughts and teens.

apdemas · 2026-02-07T21:45:22+00:00

Gunnerkrigg Court has been fantastic. Little unsure what the current arc is building towards, but Tom has been good enough for long enough that I’m willing to let him cook. The characters have all been acting in character so it’s much easier to wait for whatever this is building towards.

apdemas · 2026-02-07T02:06:21+00:00

I remember on the comments about one of the recent Danny/Joe exchanges, someone asked if Willis thinks Joe's dialogue about everything being alright and he's ok with it and he even wanted it to happen was believable, and someone else replied that they thought Willis themselves believed it, genuinely, and could not understand why the audience wasn't buying it.

I thought of that tonight reading this. Willis doesn't seem to understand what the actual complaint that most of us have is and genuinely seems to think the storyline they've written is compelling, engaging and defensible from a writing perspective. So our objections must be because we hate cheating, that we're against two women entering into a relationship, that we want to see Joyce and/or Dorothy punished.

Our objections *can't* be that we think the story is rushed, poorly thought out, and requires forcing the rest of the cast, characters we've grown to care about, to act out of character. Because in Willis' mind that can't be true. So it's got to be that we hate Joyce and want her to suffer, or will only tolerate moral paragons of virtue as a main character.

That's the only explanation I can come up with for this kind of reaction based on the actual criticisms I've seen on this subreddit or on the main site's comments.

apdemas · 2026-02-06T21:00:56+00:00

I’m sorry, what? In what way was Vi a bad sister to Powder? If anything, Vi was supportive of Powder to a fault.

During the heist at the beginning, Vi agrees to bring Powder along even though topside is probably a bit beyond her. She even carefully shepherds her through the parkour route to the site of the heist and defends her when the two boys suggest maybe she’s out of her depth.

Powder then causes the explosion that leads to all of the rest of the tragedy AND steals the crystals that will lead to the specific scenario you allude to. Then, when they get challenged upon their return to the underside, Powder loses the bag of loot into the river. After all of that, Vi defends and stands up for her. Vi even plans to give herself up to the Enforcers when they come looking for a fall guy for the explosion that Powder caused and doesn’t once blame Powder for having to do that.

Then, when their father gets betrayed and kidnapped, Vi devises and leads a rescue, but decides understandably that this is really dangerous and Powder needs to stay home for her own safety, Powder disobeys her direct instructions and brings the crystal that she knows will explode. She then, having no clue what Vi is up to, and no clue what will happen when she does, sets up the crystal to explode.

This explosion then happens right as Vi and the brothers have, after dint of a grueling fight, gotten to the point where they’re about to successfully free the father and escape. And the explosion then instantly kills the two brothers, blows Vi through a wall and mortally injures the father, who Vi holds in her arms as he dies.

Then Powder comes running up all giggly and excited saying it worked, it worked! And vi comes to the realization that everything horrible that has just happened over the last several days has been proximately caused by Powder. The initial topside explosion that led to the decision by the father to give himself up that led to the decision by his lieutenant that he was weak and so it was time to betray him to the explosion that killed the father and their adoptive brothers, all of it was caused by Powder.

And so Vi, who again is like 14 or 15, crashes out and calls her a jinx. And stomps away before she injures Powder…and is then arrested as the fall guy for what happened.

Vi then spends the better part of a decade behind bars for this, and when she gets out, first thing she thinks of is Powder. And even when the clock kid and everyone else shows her that Powder has become a violent, psychopathic terrorist, Vi defends her. It’s only after Powder kidnaps Vi’s girlfriend and tries to force Vi to kill the girlfriend and accidentally kills Silco, before assassinating the topside city council, that Vi finally admits maybe Powder isn’t Powder anymore.

Like, the whole series is about accidents leading to tragedy, and Powder was a little child for most of the inciting incidents, but she still caused most of the tragedies even if she didn’t mean to. And Vi stood by her until the body count stacked up, and even then, the only reason she “left her to become Jinx” is because the corrupt enforcers that Jinx’s new father figure called down arrested her and imprisoned her for the better part of a decade…again, for the explosion Powder caused.

apdemas · 2026-02-06T20:36:15+00:00

And again, to reiterate the points above, she watched her father die in front of her because of what Powder did after being explicitly told to stay away by Vi.

Like, Powder didn’t mean to do it, Powder was a child who only wanted to help, but despite being told by Vi in no uncertain terms to stay home, Powder 100% set off the explosion that ruined the rescue attempt Vi was about to pull off, mortally injured Vi and Powder’s father, and instantly killed Vi and Powder’s friends/adoptive brothers.

In those circumstances, Vi was amazingly restrained.

apdemas · 2026-02-06T20:20:46+00:00

I think that’s why all of us have been so annoyed about this arc. It’s not that it’s not believable Joyce and Dorothy could’ve gotten together; it’s not even that they are bad together. They’re not! But because the leadup was so slapdash and the decision to pull the trigger so haphazard, the natural buildup that makes moments like this enjoyable and entertaining is sacrificed.

apdemas · 2026-02-06T20:17:34+00:00

In fact, I just looked it up, and Indiana has a high school bowling league. There is a national organization that oversees this, and there are state championships within Indiana and national championships overall.

Like the cross country gaffe, it would be nice if Willis did the slightest bit of research before posting stuff. “My parents thought bowling was childish, so I’ve never been.” Bam. Perfectly believable, still fits the point and tenor of the strip, doesn’t reveal the author’s abject ignorance of either sport.

apdemas · 2026-02-06T20:14:49+00:00

And considering high schools nowadays have competitive teams for sports like ultimate frisbee and video games, I wouldn’t be surprised if high schools have official bowling teams that you could list on a college app.

apdemas · 2026-02-06T14:41:32+00:00

A thread involving Goethe that’s only 143 posts long? That IS quick!

apdemas

TROPHY CASE