Belief system
on August 10, 2013 at 12:01 amThat’s advice that would have worked out pretty well, Sarah.
This is one of those strips that “got me in trouble” with some of my long-time readers. Â As you can imagine, early Roomies! had gathered an audience that had some fairly conservative folks in it. Â Which is fine! Â It’s super great. Â Everyone’s people. Â But some of them started getting angry at me when my views started to change and it became apparent in some of these strips. Â This one strip especially got one dude mad at me because of Joyce’s suggestion here, that our views are always in flux. Â His views were already super the best, with no room for improvement! Â And here I was, using his favorite characters to voice things he thought were vile and wrong.
It didn’t help that he was already mad at me for the Ruth/Billie make-out thing. Â Oy.
EVERYTHING SHOULD BE EXACTLY THE SAME FOREVER!!!!!
But how will the second coming ever happen then?
It just has to happen EXACTLY the same way as the first.
But better.
Hope not. Dont want to put hey-zeus through that again.
that guy and Medusa would NOT get along xD
Why is Sarrah phasing away?
A metaphor for her role in the comics.
The holodeck is deactivating.
Looks like Joyce maybe will discover the Ship of Theseus.
Wait how did he know about the makeout thing? I thought it didn’t get publishehd.
It did get publsihed online.
“No, it MEANS I should stop reading this book, CLEARLY”
* Alien mind-alteration technology may affect averages.
This…this comic is oddly forshadowing.
Probably because it was drawn in 2004.
I was a very different person 7 years ago. Granted, I was only 14 years old 7 years ago.
I think there’s a variant of this called the 5 year rule, where you look back on the you of 5 years or so ago and think, “Damn, I was an idiot.”
This is why I always worry about getting a tattoo. I know that myself, 5 years ago, was an idiot. And I’m pretty sure that, 5 years from now, I’ll look back at my age now, and think “I was an idiot.”
I can look at my current me for that.
But 5 years ago was more of it.
…hi.
So I’ve been… aware of these comics for years now? Keep hearing about them, first encountered your work directly while on a Fans! archive binge several years ago, intermittently read Shortpacked since then.
A week ago, I decided to go through and actually read your stuff from the beginning.
Half an hour ago, I hit Walky’s not-a-monster rage epiphany from 2003.
I broke down and cried. Not just manly tears, I’m talking five minutes of uncontrollable sobbing.
…You’re terrifyingly good, Willis, you know that?
Honestly, this one isn’t easy for ANYONE to handle consistently, I think. Who wants to believe their personality has seven years or less to live? However, it’s now nine years after these later Roomies strips were drawn, so I guess this is the test. Is you still is, Willis?
Luckily for us, our personalities aren’t just going to stay the same for 7 years and then get replaced. They’ll just gradually, slowly change, and we won’t even notice it. You’ll already be a slightly different person by this time next year!
I am already slightly different person than when I woke up today.
I’m personally happy that we constantly change and grow. Change doesn’t have to be feared, it’s the opportunity for improvement! Can you honestly say you think you’re perfect now? Or are there things that you would like to improve in yourself? In seven years, you could be that much closer to the person you want to be.
Of course, change isn’t always positive! Sometimes you get older and get crankier and despite being pretty open as a younger person, you grow more resilient to change. Sometimes you learn the wrong things, and sometimes it’s one step forward, two steps back. It’s not always a glorious climb to awesome.
Mountain ain’t gonna scale itself.
I’d say I’ve evolved plenty since then.
I’m having a hard time believing anyone could think they don’t change over the years. I mean, maybe your conscious beliefs don’t change, since you can decide whether to believe in that, but there’s all sorts of other stuff! Habits and things you think about and so on. As you go through life, situations happen which make you conscious of more things. Offending a friend with a casual statement might make you more careful about what you say. Trying something new and liking it is probably going to lead to a deeper interest in that thing.
Personality develops fluidly and beliefs follow! Dang!
I’m totally distracted by the fact that in the last panel, a capital “I” with serifs is immediately followed by an “I” with no serifs. And I have the feeling that Willis has actually talked about this before.
He did. Pronoun ‘I’ gets serifs. Any other ‘I’ doesn’t.
Shocking that that dude was upset at the whole Ruth/Billie thing. Gay, straight, male, female, conservative or liberal, EVERYONE likes watching girls make out! I bet his outrage was just for show, and in private he was madly fapping away to the image.
I just realized the last two panels are not fully inked.
It means we won’t get a better Joyce until about seven years comic-time.
I wonder if it counts if YOU think you’ve changed a fair margin, but other people still comment on how you’re exactly the same. (Including even appearance, oddly.) Maybe its a people you’re around thing?
I want to reach back through time and slap that guy. Clearly he has lived too long around an unpulled drama tag.
“It means Danny will love me in seven years!”
Wait, is that not what you were going for? Then I’m out of ideas. But… that whole ‘new person every seven years’ bit seems really unsound to me.
Originally posted:
May 10, 2005