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We adore it.The reason why there’s a “Washington DC” and a “Washington State” is because both are named after George Washington. There are actually tons of places in the US that have ‘Washington’ somewhere in the name - I believe there are over 100. How Did Washington State and Washington, D.C., Get the Same Name?There is a Kansas City Missouri because it is actually linked with Kansas City, Kansas. Ironically, the Missouri town was the first one to pop up (and it was named after the Kansas Native Americans); it was only after that Kansas City, Kansas appeared. Tales of Two Cities - Kansas City - The Heartland of AmericaIn terms of why there’s a Virginia in Minnesota, it was named by the original residents that because most of them came from Virginia, originally. Virginia, Minnesota - Wikipedia Americans do this a lot. For instance, I went to college in Northampton, Massachusetts. It was named after the British version of it.New York City/New York State? Named after old York. There are also about a billion cities named ‘Berlin’ in the US, including one in Pennsylvania called ‘East Berlin,’ if you are feeling nostalgic. How Many Berlins Are There In The U.S.? Also, Paris. 13 Places Called Paris And if you want to go to Moscow, you can go to Idaho. City of Moscow, IdahoBasically, Americans of the past had a strong tendency to name things after where they came from.

I’m here with you. You don’t have to be any way that you’re not. Let’s just be together. Sometimes I feel like I hate myself or can’t accept myself too. Right now I’m just here with you. We don’t need to do anything really, just be here together and see.Eric Friedland-Kays, MA Senior Psychotherapist, Windhorse Integrative Mental Health, Northampton, Massachusetts.

I’m going to name my favourite fictional character of the moment:Faye Whitaker from the webcomic Questionable Content, the only soap opera that I have ever enjoyed.Warning: article contains spoilers.QC, for those that don’t know it, was one of the first webcomics whose author, Jeph Jacques, managed to turn it into a living. It began in 2003, and still continues, being the story of a bunch of twentysomethings living in Northampton, Massachusetts, doing what twentysomethings in webcomics do: fall in and out of love, form bands, work in a coffee shop, etc. It differs from our reality in many ways, the most conspicuous difference being that it’s set in a world where artificial intelligence is a reality. The original main character, Marten Reed, has a robot buddy called Pintsize, who looks like a cross between a Mac and a teddy bear, and whose role in the comic is to be a cheerful, unapologetically irresponsible sex maniac; a precursor, if you like, of Seth MacFarlane's Ted.Faye was originally introduced as early as strip #3, as Marten’s potential love interest. The comic updates every weekday, the daily grind of labour being one of its themes, and at the time of publishing this answer is on #3783.One of the most interesting and absorbing things about QC, to me, has been the way that both Jacques' ability to draw and his interest in creating well-rounded characters have, shall we say, come on, over the years:The above picture is from #12, but by #275 he had improved dramatically:Yes, those are the same two characters in each strip: Faye and Marten. What a difference a year made.The early years of the strip were, to be honest, fairly entertaining but also rather insufferable, relying much too heavily on Jacques’ fondness for jokes about indie rock bands. Faye’s sole distinguishing characteristic in those days, apart from her relentless teasing of Marten, was her habit of snarking at everyone, which was presented at first as supposedly hilarious sarcasm:(Source: Questionable Content)Time in QC moves at an even more glacial pace than it does in most webcomics, on account of the fact that there’s one comic per weekday and each one usually follows on from the previous one. The strip has been running for fifteen years, but the best guesses are that only about three years have actually passed within the comic. This means that it evolves very, very slowly.One of the peculiar consequences of the slow pace of time in QC is that most of the main characters were conceived in 2003, but by 2018 they are only a few calendar years older, and so the comic itself has been able to mature and deepen as the characters do, and as Jacques himself has got older, while still credibly keeping them all in the same place. (Jacques married his girlfriend and business partner a few years into the strip, they divorced a few years later, and he is now on his second marriage.)And yet, most of the characters have not changed all that much. Marten, the chief male character, is a mild-mannered library assistant and part-time musician who spent the first 500 strips mooning after Faye, who returned his interest with a combination of teasing and rudeness. Matters were complicated by the fact that Faye and Marten are roommates, which is convenient in story terms, in that they always have an excuse to be around each other.Faye in those first 499 strips was not quite as hilariously sociopathic as she thought she was. A lot of the time she came across as merely unpleasant, and Jacques made some endearingly clumsy efforts to depict her as someone who knew she was mean and rude, and was trying not to be:(Questionable Content)Upon reaching strip 500, Jacques dumped Faye’s backstory on the reader, in a series of ten strips called 'The Talk' that represented his first attempt at deepening the comic and making it about more than just indie rock jokes, comedic sociopathy and Marten’s crappy love life.Faye asked Marten straight out if he wanted a relationship with her, and when he admitted that he did, she told him how as a young teenager her father had committed suicide in front of her:(Questionable Content)Faye went on to explain that her issues resulting from her father’s death meant that she didn’t feel like she could have a relationship with anyone, but that she didn’t want to lose Marten as a friend. Marten, in one of the strip’s first moments of character development, rose to the occasion and insisted that he would stop hoping that she’d one day start seeing him as a potential boyfriend: ‘If I have to have you as a friend and not a girlfriend, I’d rather at least have you as a happy friend.’It was a well-intentioned if rather clumsy episode in the strip’s history, but it did inaugurate the development of Faye as an interesting and three-dimensional character. It also featured what’s become the QC trademark blend of heartfelt sincerity and snark:Marten, who is evidently something of an authorial stand-in for the strip's creator, has stuck to his pledge on this. The non-romantic friendship between himself and Faye has been, for the last three thousand strips, one of the few unchanging features.Marten went on to date Dora, Faye's friend and boss, only for them to break up after several hundred strips over Dora's inability to accept that Marten genuinely didn't want to get together with Faye. Dora herself, who was established from her first appearance as bisexual—QC has always been hospitable to different kinds of sexuality—eventually ended up in a solid relationship with Marten's boss, Tai, a gleefully uninhibited lesbian librarian.Over the next several hundred (!) strips, Faye gradually overcame her issues about intimacy, first having a fling with Dora's selfish but charismatic brother (really, I'm starting to feel like Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie, here, frantically explaining his character's backstory) and then having a longer-term relationship with Angus, a regular customer at the coffee shop where she works. But Angus was an actor, and he got offered a part in a Saturday Night Live-type show in New York, so Angus was, as they say, Put On A Bus. Marten, meanwhile, found himself tentatively attracted to a young library intern, Claire, and was not at all fazed when Claire nervously told him that she's a trans woman. Eventually…but we're getting ahead of ourselves.All of this functioned in part as the kind of comforting, pleasing narrative broth that soap operas deliver.But in terms of how everyone else's lives moved on but Faye's stayed the same, it also served to ratchet up the tension.Throughout the strip, Faye had been reliably depicted as an enthusiastic drinker, always the first one to suggest going to the bar and happy to be the drunkest person in the room. But the end of her first big relationship causes her to become deeply unhappy and drink more and more, until by #2875 she’s drinking whisky upon waking up in the morning. When Dora discovers that Faye is drinking at work, she fires her on the spot. Faye’s reaction is to go home and drink so much that when Marten returns to the apartment they share, he finds Faye passed out in a puddle of vomit.Faye wakes up in hospital, and it’s a measure of how vastly Jacques had improved as an artist over the years that he was able to convey in just four frames and three speech bubbles the kind of development that used to take him ten strips and hundreds of words of dialogue. 'I'm just glad you’re all right,’ Marten chirps encouragingly. Faye stares at the blanket, her face cracking with misery, and quietly admits ‘I’m not all right,’ and starts to weep.At this point I should admit that, as someone who had been binge-reading QC up until that point (I didn't discover it until 2012 or so), I was so outraged by this swerve into seriousness and darkness that I stopped reading it, and swore off it. I had been enjoying the flip humour and insider references. I was not prepared to be made to take things more seriously.Nevertheless, a couple of years later, I decided to catch up and see what had been going on.I was startled to find that, while I hadn't been reading it, the strip had become much better.Faye duly starts attending AA meetings. To coincide with Faye's low point, Marten and Claire finally and sweetly consummated their relationship, in a development that caused at least some more rigidly cis straight male fans to recoil in horror.It was around this time that Jacques started to flesh out the we-live-in-a-world-full-of-robots theme. It had been there for some time, but the robots themselves had been mostly peripheral to the action, serving as miniature advisers, pals, or in Pintsize's case comically aggravating resident pervs, to the human characters. But Jacques soon began to give them their own stories: Marigold, a shy and introverted video game/anime fan, has a serious and responsible robot friend named Momo, whose own development is almost like a self-referential joke about QC's art development. When Momo is first introduced, she is drawn in the anime style of chibi, like a kind of adorable very young girl:But later on, Marigold decides to treat Momo to a 'chassis upgrade', and she becomes much more human-looking:Yes, that's Marten and Claire canoodling in the background.Momo has a friend and comic foil in another android, May, who's a self-confessed sociopath and convicted felon, and who compensates in fine style for Faye no longer being QC's chief provider of foul-mouthed snark:Having thus established the robots as more of a presence in the world of QC, Jacques laid the groundwork for the most interesting and engaging part of Faye's journey, from two-dimensional snarky asshole to, in my view, the strip's most appealing and sympathetic character.After having been fired from the coffee shop, Faye needs a job, and she turns to her art school training as a sculptor, finding work repairing robots for an underground robot-fighting ring. (It’s complicated.)This turns out to be a very good job, since it gives her a sense of purpose at the same time as satisfying her aggression, although at first, none of her old friends know she’s even doing it, and the further sophistication of the art was demonstrated in a cut between Faye’s old boss and sometime friend Dora and her brother Sven wondering what Faye was doing, and a cut to Faye actually enjoying herself:(Questionable Content)Faye’s co-worker at the robot repair shop is a large, solemn, introverted combat droid named Bubbles, and Faye’s character development went up a gear as she took it upon herself to make friends with Bubbles:(Questionable Content)Bubbles is the one character in the strip who seems to come from a world outside it. She's a combat veteran. In the QC universe, the US military experimented with allowing AIs into the armed forces, but eventually decided against it. Faye's tireless attempts to befriend Bubbles eventually tell us why.Bubbles was a respected squad leader, and is virtually indestructible, but in an attack in whatever war she was fighting in, she was rendered helpless by an unexpected electromagnetic pulse, after which her human squad was killed. She knows what happened, but the actual memory of it has been sealed off by at that point the strip's chief antagonist: hers and Faye's boss, a manipulative android called Corpse Witch, who runs the robot repair shop that they both work in.Faye's attitude to Bubbles moves slowly from impressed (Wow, cool giant robot lady!) through teasing (above), to wanting to show Bubbles a good time, to genuine affection, and then to protectiveness:The reader will notice that, even after he had been drawing the strip for 13 years, Jacques' draughtsmanship is still so inconsistent that the size of Faye's and Bubbles's jaws can change a lot from one frame to another.Nevertheless, the Faye/Bubbles arc has dominated the strip for much of the last year, as the friendship between the recovering alcoholic girl and the combat-traumatised robot got deeper and deeper. (Yeah, I know how weird it sounds. The trippily slow pace of QC's narrative somehow manages to get past the defences of even this reader.)Faye returns to visit the coffee shop, with Bubbles, only for Dora to greet her fondly (and squee with delight over how much more buff and butch Faye has become in her time away.) Faye is disturbed by how much nicer the coffee shop has become in her absence, and feeling abandoned, she goes to a liquor store and buys a bottle of bourbon. Bubbles, knowing that Faye is physically incapable of stopping her, accompanies Faye home and waits for Faye to start drinking. However, Faye doesn't drink, and instead works off her rage on Bubbles' punchbag. The next day:There have been altogether too many spoilers in this answer already for anyone who hasn't read the whole strip. But the depth and strength of the relationship between Faye and Bubbles is, in my view, one of the best-written things about QC, and it's reaffirmed my faith in the strip and in its creator's intentions.Faye changes from a two-dimensional snarker, to a three-dimensional snarker with abandonment issues, to a believable, cynical, tense and vulnerable young woman, to an angry shell of a person drowning herself in booze—who then struggles upwards into sobriety, lets herself be fully occupied by her concern for someone else, and ultimately becomes someone able to both give and receive love. Someone complex and mature enough that she can be surprised by her own feelings.QC is in many ways a rather daft story about indie rock fans and the robots who love them, but its curiosity about people and things, and its breadth of sympathy with difference—not just sexual difference, but human/AI difference—is, I think, one of the reasons why some of us are so fond of it.If you have made it this far in this answer, congratulations. If you've never read QC and are curious, you have weeks of binge-reading to look forward to.But seriously, who am I kidding? Few are going to have read this far.Nevertheless, I want to champion QC as a webcomic that has, at least, risked pissing off considerable portions of its fanbase, in pursuit of its creator's vision of a braver, more accepting world. It has sometimes been clumsy and unconvincing in support of that dream, but I for one am persuaded by Faye's journey. She has gone from being arguably the strip's most annoying character, to being its most likeable. Maybe even loveable.