When you’re the source of gossip, everyone IS like a zombie. Except, instead of wanting to eat your brains, they just want to dig through it for the juicy tidbits they don’t know yet. Funny; that actually makes it sound more symbolic and relevant than I meant it to be.
The “guy gossip” that Rudy faces isn’t much better than the girl gossip that Rain faced in the last update. It’s just dirtier (and even then, I wrote it kind of tame). I wanted to include an additional bit of dialogue about “bases” too, but I left it out because I don’t know if high school boys still follow those rules or if that was just one of the dumb things of my generation.
And the "Base System" was in use back in 1977-1980 too. I, for one, wish I could've been Rain back then. Instead I was accused by too many to be a Rudy. I hated it, but at least I wasn't by my own small group of high school buddies. We had only one openly gay boy in my class, and he was tormented by most of the other kids. He often got into fights, and actually became a pretty good fighter and after he beat the holy crap out of one of his tormenters one day my senior year, nobody ever started a fight with him again. We had one boy a year younger than me who committed suicide that year too. One of my marching band friend's father also committed suicide shortly after. They were neighbors on the same street. It never dawned on me what happened until years later after I was in college, but the boy who committed suicide had a gay affair with my friend's father and they got caught, the police were getting ready to arrest the father. What a screwed up and cruel time tge 1970s were.
BTW, I probably shouldn't say this here, but what the hell... my real birth name is Rudy, hence the choice of my female name, which was given to me by my sister and my 3rd grade puppy-love girlfriend when I was 8 yrs old.
Wow, this was one of my first replies about a month before I began HRT at the very beginning of my transition. 2 years later much has changed in my life. I'm 100% publicly out as trans now, have feminized greatly from hormones including grown breasts, am well along the way in social transition, and completely legally transitioned with name and gender marker change completed. I settled on Ruth as my middle name and because of this webcomic, blatantly stole Ruby as my new first name and am well settled and adjusted to being known as Ruby now. This very webcomic has been a major impact and played a pivotal role in my life . I binge-read all 800 pages two years ago in early August 2016, and have followed it closely since then. Two days ago was the 8th anniversary of this webcomic, I just wonder hiw many other lifes were touched by it and changed like mine was?
It was amusing
For the record, I wish I could've been either Rudy or Rain back then.
BTW, I probably shouldn't say this here, but what the hell... my real birth name is Rudy, hence the choice of my female name, which was given to me by my sister and my 3rd grade puppy-love girlfriend when I was 8 yrs old.
If you want more information, and you trust Wikipedia at all, look up Baseball Metaphors for Sex.
Poor Rudy.