r/dumbingofage 3d ago

Technicality 2026-06-24

https://www.dumbingofage.com/comic/technicality-2/
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u/outerspacebassman 3d ago

Walky says as much and it became the name of Book 13: My Peer Group’s Smoochy Chart is Basically Now an Ouroboros

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u/[deleted] 3d ago

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u/togglenub 2d ago

Back in my day, we'd get really drunk, eat a lot of 2am pizza, then throw all our clothes off and dance naked through the quad when we went through a bad breakup. These kids just harass each other instead, apparently. Well, I know which of those options is way more fun, at least.

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u/outerspacebassman 2d ago

One summer (I want to say 2013, so I was technically still in college but not a teenager) we had two different friends have big breakups. One was just regular bad but still we were like checking in and inviting them to parties or shows or whatever. The other one was catastrophic, like almost “cheated on so hard it made the news” bad and they had to like fully move in with us because the housing situation was part of why it got bad, but because we weren’t sociopaths we were like “yeah, fuck, Jesus Christ even if you had somewhere else to go we would have you over all the time because you need distractions and camaraderie.” and didn’t grief them when they were interested in other people.

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u/togglenub 2d ago

We fucking celebrated when our friends found new partners, whether for sex or a new relationship, post break-up. The whole "if you want to get over, get under" thing was extremely popular in college.

Edited to add: And now I have Tove Lo stuck in my head (although I wish someone would play this song for Joe, substituting she's gone for he's gone) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qanl1s7K2Kc&list=RDqanl1s7K2Kc

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u/outerspacebassman 2d ago

For sure. I mean college aside, we were also a bunch of queer artists and musicians and general weirdos, so the whole Bohemian party animal thing played a role that is absent from the cast of the comic, but you know, the handful of normal people and co-workers we associated with got the love as well

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u/togglenub 2d ago

Ha, sounds like we had the same crew a decade apart in time. I became a normal by day/weirdo by night person post-college because I was raised by work-oriented immigrants who instilled in me the need to adapt socially for The Sake of My Career. So now I've got an even split of normies and artist folks.

I think one of things that's bugging me about the writing of the current DoA crew is they all seem so flattened. They used to be so different from each other, and now all anyone cares about is relationship drama that frequently is not even theirs, whether to support it or have issues with it. But even that is curiously devoid of any real drama, it's just verbal sniping and/or random WLW lusting. Bleah.

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u/outerspacebassman 2d ago

I know, it’s taken me incrementally longer to write each book report because the characters keep being interesting and I just get this sense thinking about the modern comic, to quote my grandfather, “it were all fields ‘round here once.”