Cutie-wootie widdle genius [Jan 27, 2012]

[Adrishiana]

I'd imagine she is consciously aware that you can be both wealthy and a truly horrible person (Cyndi!) as easily as you can be poor and a great one, but subconsciously, well, 18 years of conditioning doesn't go away overnight.

[Zanosuke Kurosaki]

I'd imagine she is consciously aware that you can be both wealthy and a truly horrible person (Cyndi!) as easily as you can be poor and a great one, but subconsciously, well, 18 years of conditioning doesn't go away overnight.

Very true. Having it be heavily reinforced by her social interactions has probably only made it a harder battle for her to not automatically assume this, too. Either way, I'm kind of amused that she has such a mental image in the first place. I mean geez, Sara, you're no uneducated peasant yourself, y'know. XD

[Papuasblya]

Then again, one of the best ways to ingratiate yourself with and manipulate your next victim, who knows less than she thinks she does, is to pretend to know nothing but want to learn.

[gangler]

If you like hanging out with people who know things it's good to get used to occasionally being the ignorant one in the room. Just start making a list of things to look up when you get home and come to the next meet-up a little more knowledgeable.

[someone]

If Internet things are doomed when they're coded in PHP, I guess it means Slashdot is the only safe place to be. It's written in Perl!

[bunnyThor]

And I've been in this situation before, Sara. Get a drink, and nurse it. Sip, don't gulp.

You do realize that the punch is almost certainly non-alcoholic, right?

Any frat that serves booze at an open party, heavily populated with the under-21 crowd (including most of the fraternity!), would get busted and banned so fast.

[Alice Macher]

So I was just checking out, as a non-programmer, the Wikipedia article on PHP, because of Sara's question as to what the initials stand for, and I thought I'd post the answer for the other pig-carrying hillbillies--I mean non-programmers--like myself.

Briefly, PHP's name had its origins in a set of Perl scripts called "Personal Home Page/Forms Interpreter" or "PHP/FI." There were two releases of this, but with the PHP 3 release, the developers changed the name to a recursive acronym, so that it now stood for "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor." (Another example of this would be the GNU operating system; the name "GNU" stands for "GNU's Not Unix.")

So there's a stealth joke of sorts in having Sara anxiously wonder about that.

[CEOIII]

And I've been in this situation before, Sara. Get a drink, and nurse it. Sip, don't gulp.

You do realize that the punch is almost certainly non-alcoholic, right?

Any frat that serves booze at an open party, heavily populated with the under-21 crowd (including most of the fraternity!), would get busted and banned so fast.

You're not trying to get drunk, you're trying to look busy. Standing there scratching herself will get someone to ask her something, standing there drinking something will let her blend in. Dr. Pepper or Dos Equis, drinking something while others are talking lessens your chances of being asked anything.

semi-professional wallflower, so I know of whence I speak---------------->

[Fen]

I have no idea what angry blondie's talking about. It sounds like incoherent babble put in too many words so as to sound like she's talking about something =/.
An anti-old Testament lesbian? Shock, right? Quran-Leviticus comparison inaccurate.
Ooooh, she read the Quran in English. And she confused the female translator with a male boxer because they have ridiculously common names. A badass!
Foreign films. We have a badass. (Eastern European films suck)
Fancy faux-elitist views on programming languages.

No Sara, you're alright. They're just good at keeping the image.

[sun tzu]

Don't worry, Sara Moon. Sure, they look cool now, and the Talismans that summon the Holy Grail are contained within them, but when they go all "Hard Women Making Hard Decisions" you get to prove their philosophy wrong at the end of the season.
...and I just crossed some threshold between sane and insane nerdiness, haven't I?

[Lia S]

Looks like a room full of people only pretending to know what they're talking about.

About the PHP thing: the same argument could be made about any programming language that is used by "amateurs" (by the way, a lot of code written by professionals is way worse than amateur code because it was written in a hurry). Good programmers know to always use the language that will make their job easiest, and of course languages that make things easy get used by amateurs a lot.

So if you think about it for a moment, it becomes clear she hasn't done any serious programming in any other language than PHP (because she hasn't seen as much trash code in other languages), which for me puts her at exactly the "cutie-wootie widdle genius" level.

ETA: Facebook probably uses a lot of C for things that aren't obvious to users, and I happen to know their chat system was written in Erlang. If they did use PHP for everything they would be worse than doomed, they couldn't possibly exist that way. It may be worth noting that I passionately dislike the Facebook company, I have no reason to claim their developers know what they're doing other than that they appear to know what they're doing.

[TCampbell]

Jason added a lot of status-related details to my original script for panel 4. I'm just guessing here, but I think he's correctly pointing out that breast size is just one more way for the LAZes to be superior to Sara, both as people to compare herself to and in terms of what she considers sexually attractive. Sara's always liked the boobies. And I note that her "DUH" rendition of herself is a size or so smaller than she actually is, too.

[Alice Macher]

I have no idea what angry blondie's talking about. It sounds like incoherent babble put in too many words so as to sound like she's talking about something =/.
An anti-old Testament lesbian? Shock, right? Quran-Leviticus comparison inaccurate.
Ooooh, she read the Quran in English. And she confused the female translator with a male boxer because they have ridiculously common names. A badass!
Foreign films. We have a badass. (Eastern European films suck)
Fancy faux-elitist views on programming languages.

No Sara, you're alright. They're just good at keeping the image.

I think perhaps you're being a little too hard on these women, Leah excepted (since she's already shown she deserves the invective, for other reasons).

Uma (the "angry blondie"): It's quite clear to me what she's talking about, namely the use of quotes taken selectively and out-of-context from the Qur'an to justify U.S. foreign policy decisions (presumably, either the recent interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the calls from certain quarters to intervene militarily in Iran).

Emma (the pink-haired one): She's not saying Leviticus and the Qur'an are equivalent. She's making a point about the selective, out-of-context use of scriptural passages to justify any position.

Leah: Here, I'm inclined to agree, because unless she knows classical Arabic fluently and has a deep grounding in Islamic history and thought, then yes, she has no better grounds for recommending one Qur'an translation over another than I do.

Off-panel Film Buff: Okay, so you, Fen, think "Eastern European films suck." That's fine. That's your opinion. The off-panel speaker likes Eastern European films. That's her opinion. De gustibus non disputandum est. And she isn't even being pretentious about it; she's simply stating her preference.

(Also: "Badass"-- "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." )

Monica: No comment, because I don't know PHP from ASP or whatever.

So in conclusion, Leah's the only one who really comes off to me as pretentious and as trying to appear more knowledgeable than she actually is. That's apart from her other faults as displayed so far.

[Kamino Neko]

I think the film buff comes off a bit pretentious, due to the casual dismissal of the film whoever she was talking to was talking about. (I say this as someone who frequently mentions the country of origin of movies I'm speaking about - particularly horror flicks. So, uh... >_> Allo, Pot.)

[Freemage]

1: I admit, I enjoyed a bit of schadenfreude, here. Psst, Sara, how you gonna feel when Leah takes you to bed tonight because you're such a... simple girl?

2: I think Monica's point is that since PHP (from what I'm gathering from other folks on this discussion) is flexible to write in (unlike more rigorous languages), it will get progressively harder to update/fix, as the code becomes layers and layers of different people's kludges. In this, it's different than CEO III's Final Fantasy simile, simply because each FF game is stand-alone, rather than requiring programmers to build on the mistakes of their predecessors. I'm not saying she's ~right~, mind you, just saying that her point withstands a momentary smell-test.

3: The notion that the punch MUST be non-alcoholic, as expressed by BunnyThor, amused me. Sorry, but I know for a fact that on some campuses, the alcoholic content of the drinks available is precisely the draw used to bring in freshmen to the rush parties (though this tends to be more true of fraternities than sororities). Some nights, on some campuses, it's possible to go from one frat to another, in a kind of pub-crawl, with the bonus that it's all free. It all depends on how strongly the local cops feel about letting the campus police itself, and how much the campus cops care. The stronger the Greek system is on the campus, the more likely it is that anything goes--partly because Greek organization membership is one of those things that some folks carry well into their professional lives after school, and guess what? Those folks also tend to be high-donating alumni. If your biggest donor still wears his I Phelta Thi tie-clip to the office, it becomes very tempting for the administration to tell the campus cops to not bother breaking up IPT's parties.

4: Yes, some of the sisters are coming off as pretentious. That's what mid-tier college students DO, especially if the setting isn't a get-drunk sort of party. (Mid-tier: Sophomores and Juniors. In my experience, the seniors are all upstairs, trying desperately to finish their major projects and wishing everyone else would keep it down. Sophomores and juniors, though, tend to have more free time, while also being walking examples of the danger of a little knowledge.)