1415 Confirmation Interrogation

In a relationship there are times when one, or both, parties fall prey to the insanity that fear causes. Navigating your way out of a situation like this is delicate at best. Honestly there seems to be some sort of human need to fight because avoiding conflict in life is essentially impossible, no matter the scale. Sometime part of our brain wants to take control of a situation, so we start a fight that we can try and guide the outcome of. if they really love us they will stay and if they don’t I’ll be proven right. all of us want, and the most fearful of us need, control. Unfortunately other people have free will so control is only possible in small sections, but some of us just can’t deal with that. To this day I have trouble accepting that I can’t control everything. It is absolutely connected to my anxiety attacks. Not being sure how long I can tolerate being on my feet makes the idea of possibly getting trapped outside unbearable. An unknowable variable that throws all other aspects of life into disarray. Chances are I won’t be able to deal with going out for any length of tome until I know I’m well.

Anyway, it hardly matters. I make all my money online and I can make Amazon deliver me food if it comes to that. These days there’s not a lot of things you can’t have delivered. Its a good thing I don’t have a job that requires me to go anyplace far though, or this foot thing would have really docked me over.

I watched a string of tutorials about manga studio. So I’m going to be bringing that knowledge into the new pages. Hopefully the effort will be worthwhile. It could potentially eliminate the need to pay someone else for background work. well, not need, exactly. The desire I have to present a more complete world that most of you are fine not seeing. XD. Anyway itvwill make me feel like less of a fraud, and that’s the thing to focus on.

I’m going to try and get all the really important stuff dome before the weekend so I can get the highest rank possible in the next splatfest. This is me making the plan right now to set time aside for this goal. I want to becable to enjoy myself and not feel bad about it like last time. Scheduling, like an adult. Betweenfailures is my wiiu name thing if you want to friend me.

Oh yeah, I got scolded again for not putting the gofundme link in the posts. We pretty much got to the goal so I wasn’t going to make a big thing out of it…. here it is. As always thanks to anyone who donated. Be sure to mail me if you want to claim any of the bonuses that were offered. It may take a while, but I’ll get to them all eventually.

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Carol: I’M FEELING FAT AND SASSY! WHY ARE YOU NOT FEELING FAT AND SASSY? DOES MY FAT SASSINESS DOESN’T PLEASE YOU?

Thomas: I…what?

Seems like the sort of logic that women’s rags like Cosmo and Cleo would endorse.

Please tell me the term “rags” was just an unintentional typo…

A magazine is occasionally referred to as a ‘rag’. More often used in ages past. Rags… Not just for periods anymore!!

Seems to me like the term is better used to describe a magazine you’d use to absorb that bit of oil that drips out of one’s car from time to time…

Oh, you mean like one of those free Liberal newspapers one finds in most cities. I use them to protect the bench when I clean my guns.

Welcome to your first no win situation, Thomas.

This is one of those situations a person has to read between the lines. I.e., ignore what Carol is actually saying to get to what she actually cares about. Because she is mistaken about what’s bothering her (because why would an anxious state of mentality want to afford its own removal? of course it’s going to try to create more of itself by confusing the issue, not help Carol truename that which pains her so as to banish it.) – this I’m going to add because I think I’ve been mischaracterized as a stereotypifier and misogynist before, and don’t want to give Crave cause to suspend my privileges.

As to whether it is justified to expect this heroic feat from all partnerkind, that’s for Kermit’s tea.
A man cannot ‘win’ if he is distracted by the options presented to him, if ‘win’ means a win for the relationship. I don’t mean to exclude women from the point, I’m just not reaching beyond my ken with that choice of universal.

Oh boy. Ya screwed here Thomas. Your best bet at this point is a tactical retreat. Or shielding with “When your happy, it makes me happy.” Those magic seven words have gotten me out of a couple close calls.

Personally, I eat more when I’m not happy. I would hope extolling a few of Carol’s many virtues, and emphasising that these make him happy, might help here.

“It’s not that I haven’t gained weight, I’ve just lost a lot of it trying to keep up with you. The Yoga is really intense!”

I don’t know if this would work in that scenario, or maybe if you took off the Yoga part it might come off as sweet/loving depending on how you look at it. The only other thing I could think of doing is to squish her with a hug and tell her I love her to make her stop spiraling.

You don’t have to get fat to be happy. Hell, I think we’d all be happy if she lost a few pounds and returned somewhat to her pre-gaining weight.

I don’t think you quite realise how science doth work, Brandon. You can’t will weight away, and she’s a character who is very likeable no matter what her weight.

Hmm. This is a theme for you. You’re also the guy who went on about “not respecting shorter people” and how you’d physically assault them like a super badass, so signs point to “jerk”. Yes, 8 years later it’s STILL worth pointing this out.

But whatever you do, do NOT pat her on the head or kiss her to try and end the argument, this will only make us hate you more. Even if we are being irrational, crapping on our feelings in such a way is very very uncool. You have been warned.

I could have done with that warning a few years ago, but I probably wouldn’t have listened anyway.

I am thinking that pointing out that they have different metabolisms and that he loves her might be the way to go.

“Are you not happy?”
“Do these jeans make my butt look fat?”

Carol’s question is one of two that Thomas — or any man — should answer very carefully. The second one… I have come up with a slick answer that has pleased every woman who has asked me; three so far.

I actually don’t feel the need to control others, but I’m not so sure that’s a good thing.

I have ADHD and seldom have enough of a grasp of the situation around me to control it, but I compensate with quick thinking and improvisation. I also walk myself through hypothetical emergencies and other situations I can’t predict, so I can be somewhat prepared for those inevitable occasions when I screw up or get caught off guard. While I may appear clueless in ordinary environments, when I find myself in a situation that nobody knows how to handle I can stay calm and act rationally, because not knowing what’s going on or what I should do is normal for me. I also tend to get on the nerves of control freaks, because I am a variable that they can seldom predict (and I enjoy screwing with them).

I suppose I control things by trying to create contingency plans for all possible outcomes rather than trying to reach a particular outcome. This is the only approach that makes sense to me, given how unpredictable the world can be.

Just making an off topic post from Friday’s blog post. I’ve learned so much about how black people have to watch themselves more than I do it’s scary. At first, I didn’t believe the stories my wife would tell. She kept telling them, and she’s not given to lying.

She does some things that perplex me. However, seeing her relief the times she was pulled over with me in the car has really opened my eyes yo the things she must have been through in the past.

By the way, yes. My wife and I are an interracial couple.

This might be the only time in history where telling a girl that she’s just fat could POSSIBLY be the only solution…

I really wish there was spellcheck AI that is smart enough to check the wrong spelling of word based on the context of the sentence the word is in.

for example:

“Chances are I won’t be able to deal with going out for any length of tome until I know I’m well.”

tome = volume or book
So it’s spelling is correct but it used incorrectly. I wonder if there spelling dictionary AI out there because there is many people (potential customers) that could really use something that could not only fix your spelling and also fix the word in context to the sentence or the paragraph it is in.

Oh and sorry Jackie. I know you are writing informally in these posts of yours under the comic. I’m just wondering if anyone who reads your comic may have heard of a tool like what I’m describing.

As grammar checkers go, back in the days of DOS 3.3 I came across something called Gutenberg. [sp] I still may have the 5.5″ floppies somewhere that it came on since I recently discovered the disk-6-pack system that it used. It has been a long time since I did any work in the publishing industry but there should be some open source projects out there to handle stuff like that by now.

Ho hoooo…. Tricky situation. Thomas has the wits, but Carol s’not easy to deflect. Amazing how those “life” curveballs can be thrown at us in the most unexpected moments. Been there, obviously. With less than stellar results. Good luck, T.

Hmm…Yeah. (Ponder, ponder, ponder.)

I’m not sure why Carol is thinking this way.

But, I have known people, who, in their childhood, have always had to be friends with emotionally abusive people. This makes my friends give a twisted response to people, when things are comfortable, or OK. They can get into the habit of doing this twisted type of response:

“Friend/lover, you + I are very comfortable, when we are together. I can’t find anything uncomfortable or abusive in this friendship. We must be doing this friendship incorrectly.”

(PS: Minor typo in last word of comic. “Strenghts”?)

Correlation vs causation, confirmation bias…statistics is confusing stuff.

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