[0717] Dropping The Bomb
└ posted on Thursday, 10 September 2015, by Novil
I expect at least 300 comments. Don’t disappoint me.
- Larisa: Hi, Landon. Are you enjoying the hiking trip with your dad?
- Larisa: I’m glad you two are having some fun despite the ugly divorce.
- Larisa: Sooo… did you like the pic I sent you?
- Larisa: You’re cute when you stutter. I can’t wait to give you your real birthday present once you’re back!
- Larisa: Haha, you will! See you soon, sweety!
- Sandra: Didn’t you just forget something?
- Larisa: Like, what?
- Sandra: For example, mentioning the national scandal you caused half an hour ago?
- Larisa: Pfff…
- Larisa: I’ll be blind in ten years and dead in twenty. I don’t give a damn if some puritans have a problem with my naked body.
![[0717] Dropping The Bomb](/comics/2015-09-10-0717-dropping-the-bomb.png "[0717] Dropping The Bomb")
Aaaah, this is going to hurt. 🙁
@ antema:
I wonder if cloud’s little sister is smart enough to pack a working WFS1 gene into a virus for delivery to Larissa’s cells? Having a working copy of the gene might cure Larissa’s condition, and would give the little genius something to do (which would now provide WORLDWIDE recognition).
@ M:
/me starts folding proteins to lend a hand with Larissa’s condition: http://folding.stanford.edu/nacl/
Whoot! 300!!
@ mark w:
Thank you.
@ M:
What. No team yet?
Lukkai wrote:
Doesn’t anyone have a problem with Larisa’s “sexting”?
300 reached!
@ Lookfar:
I missed that. Just reading up on it from another comment.
Wolfram’s Syndrome Type 1? That explains everything.
As for Lorenzo’s Oil, I never read the book but I did see the screenplay adaptation starring Nick Nolte. I definitely recommend it. While a treatment will slow down or halt the progression of the disease, curing would mean finding a way to regenerate living tissue. Stem cell research?
MidoriLuna wrote:
Half of my family has polycystosis of liver and and kidneys.
I do not. I would NOT be here if the prenatal genetic test said I have it.
My cousin solved that by simply choosing the screened embrios (her and her husbands) which do not have it… (it is only one chromozome)
Thing is – at least in “civilized” world such problem could be eliminated in 2 generations with proper screening which would actually end up cheeper than managing the condition.
but well “eugenics are bad”… Why the hell does human kind develop tools to screen and fix problems if they are not used?
@ Expendable Crew Member:
And this was the counterpoint i was looking for.
I grew up homeschooled ( not un-schooled, not no-schooled, not replacement-schooled ).
we went all year, did a couple co-op’s here and there, and a science by mail thing or 2.
and it was kind of not rushed and the worst? of it was planning are vacations around what could be learned ( aka a lot of museums ).
I was also in …… Boy Scouts, 4H, “Ch” AV Tech.
and whith door to door popcorn in the middle of nowhere i got top sales and probably knew everybody in the surrounding 3 or 4+ towns.
meanwhile I also had adults who were amazed That I could stretch my communication across all age groups. and oh yah i am an total introvert.
I had a friend who was in school at his house ( set wake-up time, dress code, strict requirements… ). after a few? years he decided that he wanted to go to school ( the real thing ). and I’ve only ever asked him once what it was like/how it was going, and that answered 2 questions #1 never ask again #2 never ask and #3 don’t ask…..
aka not well!…
so given that my only idea of school is from stories/TV. and that many schools are worse than prison. bullying has always been there it’s just making more public news now. and the role of schools and prisons is reversed ( minus? the barbed wire on the top of the fence ).
I think you can learn a lot more at your own pace, and i even knew at that time all 3? of my neighbors ( middle of nowhere NY).
It was a good 10 months in 2011 where I checked out just about every Eug video in the small library ( family medical issues / no living siblings…… ). so that year i pretty much worked at my own pace in biology, started the eyewitness series at “A” and ended somewhere and I can’t remember what else i did now.
the closest i ever got to school, was going to the school for speech therapy to slow my thought process down ( highly intelligent ) so that I could process and say what I was thinking.
now whenever I would like to know something I just look it up online. yah am also lazy as I could look it up in a book. although I do like having text-to-speech and speech-to-text for the times when my slight dyslexia gets the better of me.
The only thing I think I would’ve missed in school would have been theater, but last year i got to do sound for 6-year-olds in their first-ever big school play! OH SO FUN!! ( the lead came out said 3 words and ran off the stage, was talked into coming back 15m later. it gave everybody else confidence and they managed to finish the play beautifully !!!!! ).
OH and we passed the 300, Now what was the deadline for that?
Casually dropping the bomb.
Related to diabetes, causes blindness around the early twenties, life expectancy of low 30s, related to diabetes. It sounds like our favourite arsonist has a mutation of the wolframin gene. How unfortunate. There is no known treatment, so it looks like she really will die.
M wrote:
Ok, since no one has set up a team yet, I went ahead and did one:
Sandra_and_Woo_fans_for_Larisa — team number 229464
@ Jerry:
She is diabetic. A friend of mine die just like that… well, not before several amputations… she was the uncaring kind.
Question. What does she mean she’ll be blind in ten years and dead in twenty?
Dissapoint you are not, mein frulein.
…don’t let her die.
Far wrote:
Ali wrote:
Considering that she only has diabetes because she has Wolfram Syndrome that is 100% incurable, untreatable, causes blindness or deafness by age 20 and is fatal by age 30…
…I find myself not giving a rat’s ass about some pics she took. No punishment can top the sentence she is already serving.
I was born with Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis and first diagnosed at age 2 because I still couldn’t walk. By complete miracle I went into remission at age 5, but by then I knew what my fate would likely be and I tried to live my life accordingly. When my rheumatologist re-diagnosed me with active rheumatoid arthritis at age 20, I was neither surprised nor crest-fallen. I’d prepared for it my entire life and accepted my fate after watching my aunt die of it. I got lucky… but as I get older it’s been getting much worse and I don’t expect to live to see my grandchildren. (currently available treatments have proven worse than useless) I treat every day as a gift that may be my last. I dropped out of public education as a worthless waste of my life and self educated until I could get a job in the field I love. I doubt I would have were it not for my illness… and my life would have been so much worse.
I cried when I figured out what Larisa has… and I don’t care one bit if she has sex with Landon, nor if she gets expelled and gets pregnant at 13. Given she’ll be blind if she waits for a “respectable age” to have kids and never get the chance to see their face, I’d say she deserves the chance. By the time she graduates high school she might not even be able to read her diploma, let alone the uselessness of a college degree she would be too disabled to ever use.
Live it Larisa and tell anyone that tries to shove you into the round hole of conformity to shove it!
@ Trey Marlette:
The Tsar Bomba was built with a last minute change in the initiator, via a lithium inclusion for neutron production. It made the bomb the cleanest bomb ever detonated, but the purpose was to HALVE the yield to 50 MT.
There was significant concern that despite the height, parachute and turbo-prop performance of the Bear bombers, that at 100MT they would be enveloped in the detonation or certainly turned to fragments by the shock wave, despite being empty and flying near 500 MPH. They would also lose the data recorded by such a flight if that were to happen. And of course there were not others flying TOWARD the detonation to collect that data, just the one trying to get the hell away!
Andrei Sakharov, after designing and witnessing this bomb began to have significant second thoughts about his accomplishments as a physicist, much the same as Oppenheimer did when “The baby was born.” – and became a political prisoner as a result of voicing his conscience for many, many years.
gotta say that “Bomb” about that larisa character’s disease was pretty poory done.. it’s like this :
“Im batman , defender of gotham”
“Hows you get so great?”
“hard work…”
“and?”
“Training”
impressive… il see you later”
“Oh and my parents were killed in front of me when I was little..”
see the problem?
Kintrex wrote:
Hey, just too sides to the same syndrome.
And when does or did Landon find out?
This strip should be tagged Landon, he doesn’t appear, but is on the phone.
N8 wrote:
Sandra’s 13 birthday party doesn’t happen until strip 889 “Smells like Teen Spirit” in May 2017. Time passes *slowly” in this comic.
Don’t mind me, just testing the formatting.