Sorry for the lateness. Tried to take a quick catnap last night and slept through my alarm. Woke up early enough to finish lineart at least though.
Finn and Jake want to know your location
Sorry for the lateness. Tried to take a quick catnap last night and slept through my alarm. Woke up early enough to finish lineart at least though.
First! Yay!
Yeah, sorry Selkie but schools do need to tell the parents. My guess is Todd isn’t going to be happy but isn’t really going to go hard on the punishment, probably a night’s grounding and have to pay him back for the flowers because they aren’t cheap…..
I do not understand what they are punishing her FOR.
Well, at a minimum, now, using her dad’s money without asking first. Not punishing her directly, but telling dad so he can, if he sees fit to.
And she wasn’t GOING to be punished by the school for the flowers themselves, just given a warning, for not getting permission from the school first, thereby letting them know in advance that it wasn’t a child predator or something genuinely skeevy.
A la:
“Heys sos I’s sending flowers anonymouslys tos someones ins my class, ok?”
“Ok, thank you for telling us, now we know there a) will be flowers coming b) they’re from you not some pedophile”
Simple.
THEY aren’t. As she said, there’s no rule against giving another student a gift. They’re just looking out for the safety of the students. Less “detention”, more “give us a heads up next time, yeah?”.
Todd, on the other hand… Well, the money had to come from *somewhere*. Even bouquets ain’t exactly ‘elementary schooler’s allowance’ cheap, ya know. A dozen roses ran me something like $15-20 last time I got some.
Does bring up the question of how did she pay for this…
“Over my dead reanimated lich corpse” might be my favorite phrase Selkies come up with
Seconded!! Easily my favorite line from this comic!
And it’s not pluralized.
At the risk of appearing ‘fanboy’ I’m gonna jump on-board, favorite Selkie saying evar.
Aha… so now the matter is less “inappropriate gift giving” and more “whose credit card was used to order the delivery?”
The trouble thickens! 😀
Lich?
An evil undead wizard, who essentially has sold their soul in exchange for an immortal half-life.
To be clear, that’s ‘sold their soul’ in a purely metaphorical sense. Most fantasy liches are decidedly Evil, and when it comes to Dungeons and Dragons, part of the ritual is flaying your own flesh from your bones, turning yourself into an animate skeleton.
Classically, a lich’s soul is still their own, but locked away somewhere safe so that it cannot be used to kill them permanently, e.g. Koschei the Deathless, who concealed his soul within a needle, enclosed in an egg, placed within a duck which is trapped within a hare that resides in a well-defended log on a remote island surrounded by rough waters and shipbreaking coastlines.
that seems…unnecessary.
It does seem unnecessary. Once you get the hare, it’s not going to be hard to fish out the needle.
Better nuke it from orbit just to be sure.
Technically, Voldemort was a lich, horcruxes are pretty much D&D’s phylacteries.
Flay yourself? That shows a lot of, … Commitment. Dang! But that’s gotta HURT! Wow, … Sure, but I’d hire some hench-persons to do that for me. Cause I’ve tried it and it’s really hard to reach around to flay your own back, it’s just really awkward.
This is a pretty messed up world. I’m homeschooling the fuck out of my kids. When are people going to pick up on the subtle but profound damage done to kids with these kind of arbitrary rules?
I don’t think it’s arbitrary so much as just cautious. As was pointed out in the comic and in comments, predators are a true threat schools have to worry about. Both the deliveryperson and the person sending a gift could be benign, but there have been cases where either one or both were not.
If you had a daughter Selkie’s age, ColdFusion, what would *you* think if someone delivered flowers, a typically romantic gift, to your daughter without clearing it with you or giving their name or age? Now imagine you have, oh, around 12 or so daughters, some of them younger than Selkie but none more than a year older than her, and any one of them could be the recipient.
I’d be relieved? and super proud of her?
But because things are the way they are, I’ll probably never get a date.
I’m a dyed-in-the-wool homeschooler, and seeing things like this do indeed make me glad for that fact. But, really, it’s part of the overall culture of fear that we do indeed live in, and that gets trained into kids (particularly girls) quite young. (My dad trained me to fear other countries, with the general idea that traveling to any other country was a huge risk of being kidnapped and made into a sex slave. Yeah, *that’s* a realistic fear to have of the world.)
For example, “Stranger Danger,” as if people you don’t know are automatically threats — completely ignoring the fact that you run across far more strangers than known people in your life, and yet, statistically, the threats to children come from people they know WAY more than from strangers.
But no, we simplify to an extreme that causes kids like my niephlings to be terrified of interacting with clerks at stores even when their mom or guardian is right there with them. And that’s probably led to some actual child deaths when kids are afraid to ask for help from strangers even when they really need it. Much like kids have died because firefighters look scary and the kids run and hide in closets rather than get rescued.
(When we run studies to figure out how people react to negative situations (e.g. a kid alone and shivering at a bus stop, without a coat), an alarming number completely ignore those in need — but of those who interact, the interaction is quite frequently positive and helpful. And that “don’t interact with strangers” mindset is likely part of this selfsame problem.)
And by making strangers the enemy, kids are left vulnerable to their own friends and family.
There’s an alternative tactic I’ve heard of, by the by, which instead of teaching fear of strangers, teaches kids to recognize the warning signs / red flags of creepy behavior, and thus to spot it even if it’s done by friends, family, even their own parents. Details like “don’t tell your parents or we’ll get in trouble” or wanting to see your private parts, wanting to rub against you, etc. Much more reasonable and effective.
Baader-Meinhof strikes again! The URL in my name there is the site I read a few minutes after getting done with my webcomics — and the comments section ended up discussing the program I was thinking of, which is apparently called “Tricky People.”
E.g. If an adult asks a kid for help, and the kid doesn’t know the adult, stay away — because adults don’t normally ask unknown kids for help, so they’re being “Tricky People” if they try. I suppose exceptions could be made for if the adult is clearly hurt (e.g. bleeding a lot) and nobody else is visibly around, but even then, the kid probably should run to find an adult.
Homeschooling does not necessarily prevent these kind of dramariffic shenanigans nor the importances of disciplining for them. Most of us who homeschool actually do put our kids into classes (or COOPs) outside our homes, and they can still get into trouble with other kids and the adults in charge (don’t start me about a poorly-run COOP we had quit).
As for Selkie’s choices, if she was my kid, we’d be having a good long talk about the importance of respecting others boundaries and using money wisely—especially if it wasn’t her own money used to buy the flowers. If she stole my credit card, we’d be looking at consequences of her working to earn the money back, being grounded for stealing, and I’d be expecting her to apologize to anyone she may have made uncomfortable.
Someone take the shovel out of her hands.
I guess she used a stolen credit card. Still, I think that’s a matter of her being in trouble with Todd, not a matter for the school to be involved in. But, is she assuming he wouldn’t notice the item on his credit bill?
(Yes, I’m aware that even teenagers have neglected to think that far ahead before ordering hundreds of dollars of pay-per-view porn.)
On another topic, it sounds like the consensus was that she ordered the flowers by voice call, but I find this unlikely because the order-taker would be very likely to edit out what sounds like a speech impediment — and the first one, “Yours”, would blend in with the next word “Secret” anyway. Web form seems more plausible, and since we know that the pluralization is a mental quirk, I could believe that it manifests in written form, too. (Do we have any evidence for or against this?)
Cake decorateours taking things literally is a meme, I don’t see why it would be any different with flowers.
https://static.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/funny-literal-cake-decorations-fails-4-57626ad71e2f5__605.jpg
Yeah, I remember that gag on Bojack Horseman, except it was banners instead of cake or flowers.
Hey, Dave, did this new principal atleast expel Trunchbull?
Hey, no, haven’t seen much of Truck lately. But because of politics, he’s still around, and (I think) in Therapy. Gotta say this about Dave: all his characters are neither all black nor all white, but complex sometimes contradictory.
Hey, no, haven’t seen much of Truck lately. But because of politics, he’s still around, and (I think) in Therapy. Gotta say this about Dave: all his characters are neither all black nor all white, but complex, sometimes contradictory.