How to Argue Like a Reasonable Adult

I think the problem isn’t that our role models are unrealistic, so much as who we pick to be our unrealistic role models. Looking back now, I see that most of the fictional characters I was presented with as role models were men who were really good at fighting, and at saving the semi-helpless women to whom they were attracted.

That’s not great, but it is better than what girls got for role models, which was women who were really good at being attractive and imploring the boys’ role models to save them.

Indiana Jones and Marion Ravenwood could have bucked that trend. They at least had other interests beyond fighting and being attractive. He was a professor and a scientist. She was a small business owner and a successful competitive drinker.

Of course, as a Hollywood film hero, Indiana Jones needed to have a different girlfriend every movie. He moved on to a squeamish damsel and a backstabbing Nazi, fine role models both!

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How to Decide Whether or Not to Tell Somebody the Painful Truth

So, in America, Smarties are a candy that’s pretty much just sugar pressed into a pill shape. I don’t know why they’re called Smarties, except that maybe their inventor named them after himself, because he was proud of having thought of a legal way to make money with a used pill press.

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How to Plan the Perfect Crime

If the producers of the Ocean’s movies are looking for people to help write any future sequels, please consider this comic my job application.

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How to Explain Men's Emotions

This comic was, of course, written for humorous purposes, and doesn’t really reflect my opinions about how men and women process their emotions.

In reality, I think the only real difference between how men and women handle their emotions is that women have to process several emotions men don’t. For example, women have to deal with the emotions created when men constantly accuse them of being overly emotional. This, sometimes makes women angry, which the man in question points to as proof, making her even angrier, resulting in an escalating chain reaction that will eventually end with women finally deposing us in a violent revolution, while their male victims shout things like, “What?!” “Calm down!” and “Don’t you think you’re overreacting?”

And I, for one, welcome our new feminine overlords. I remind them that some men are on the record as “getting it,” having, for example, said positive things about women in the commentaries posted with reruns of their web comics.

Note from Missy: I’ll put in a word with my cohorts about sparing you.

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How to Write Your Own Vows

To the wedding guests, self-written vows are often an excruciating exercise in enduring excessive earnestness. (Sorry, got a little carried away with the alliteration there.) From a performance point of view though, self-written vows are a marvelous opportunity to deliberately inflict discomfort on a large group of people. It’s the one time in the average person’s life that they can hand-select the members of a large audience, have that audience’s undivided attention, and say whatever they want with zero fear of being interrupted.

I’m kind of amazed that most personalized wedding vows don’s sound something like, “I promise to love, honor, and obey, and to treat you with respect and honestly, a marked contrast to how I’ve been treated by my cousin Eric, who is sitting in the third row, and still owes me money from when we were 16!”

If you tell everyone you know that you want to call a meeting of all of your family and friends so that you can say a few things, they tense up, and a lot of them will deliberately avoid the whole thing. If you tell them you’re getting married or renewing your vows, they’ll not only show up, they’ll bring a gift.

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How to Lead by Example

Sadly, it’s all true. That’s how I proposed, that’s how we got married, and that’s how we announced it to my family.

For the record, when my father and his wife at the time got their card, their first comment was, “Geez, Scott. You’ve gotten so fat, I didn’t recognize you in that picture.”

What I’m saying is that we Meyers aren’t an emotionally demonstrative bunch.

Note from Missy: It’s been over 20 years, but this is how I remember the proposal: We were walking by the shop window, looked at the rings, and I said, “Hey, that ring we were thinking about is on sale.” Then we both shrugged and were kind of like, “You wanna?”  So really, either way, TOTES ROMANTIC.

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How to Defend Your Sanity

This comic documents one of the only times that Missy’s reaction to the idea for one comic was extreme enough to inspire a second comic.

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How to Fight a Fake Looking Monster

Captain Kirk was a terrible fist fighter. I can’t think of a single time Kirk ever singlehandedly beat someone into submission with his fists. He always had other crewmen, or Spock was there to hit them with the Vulcan nerve pinch. Maybe ending an episode with the captain just punching an alien in the face until they cried uncle wasn’t deemed heroic enough.

It has always struck me that in Star Trek (and now on The Orville, A TOTALLY DIFFERENT AND DISTINCT SHOW!!!) humans are the most feeble, least ferocious sentient creatures in the galaxy. Except maybe for the Ferengi. I dunno. They do have those sharp little teeth.

On Star Trek: Discovery, there’s a creature who they state many times is from a prey species. He talks at length about how his people can sense death, and live in constant fear. Well, it turns out he can also crush a communicator with his bare hands.

If Star Trek were realistic, humans would not be in command of all the Federation ships. Their primary jobs would be as an emergency source of protein.

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How to Gain Wisdom from the People Around You

So, about the song “Love the One You’re With.” I have to assume that Stephen Stills was single at the time that he wrote it, or went through a breakup shortly afterward, because I don’t know how you play that song for the person you’re in a relationship with and not have it forever change that person’s attitude towards you.

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How to ask an Unanswerable Question (A Little NSFW)

You may think the commercial I suggest is stupid, and you’d be right, but that doesn’t mean nobody’d do it, or that it wouldn’t work. Ever since the debut of Juicy Juice and its slogan, “Juicy Juice is the Juiciest Juice,” all bets have been off.

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