Camera pans to nearby ‘forest’

This is the only workable option. Anything else is just asking for trouble in one form or another.

That’s a weird one. On the one hand, men in many areas somehow still absurdly think of childrearing as women’s work, and a positive feedback when they act like a parent can help things in a better direction… but it also seems absurd to praise an adult for doing what really should be the bare minimum, clapping for them like a child who remembered to use the potty.

It’s playing on the stereotypes of those particular countries. ‘Sister Norway’ isn’t like that at all.

Mostly, yes. The following is obviously a generalization.

Children are in a state of growth, so they heal quickly, in a state of care, so their needs/wants are usually met without effort, and in a state of ignorance, so they often aren’t aware of all the awful things they are surrounded by.

Adolescents are still in a state of growth, but it’s unstable, meaning they can feel awkward. They are in a state of semi-care, so many of their needs are cared for, but not all, and certainly not all of their wants. And they are often coming to realise the horrors of the world which were hidden before. They see and begin to comprehend death, tragedy, human cruelty and frailty, etc. though the concepts are usually distant.

Adults are worse off still. They get hurt and it’s permanent because the only growth they get to experience is cancer. They are expected to care for themselves almost completely, with little support entitlement. And they become not only aware of death and tragedy but correctly expectant that it will come for them. And they often then have kids, which means they have to provide the child’s full care on top of, and even in place of, their own. If they didn’t fall in love with the kids, they’d probably commit some combination of murder and/or suicide to escape them.

The elderly round things off. They are in near constant pain from all the damage done to their bodies. They are still expected to mostly care for themselves, or have saved up enough money/obligation to carry them through to the end as their bodies crumble. They are very aware of their impending doom as they watch friends, family, and personal heroes die around them. If they are wise, they are painfully aware of the foolish mistakes of those around them and have to watch their loved ones walk into the same holes into which they walked and from which they climbed years ago, and have all the experience to understand a world that has changed by the time they understand it. If they have children, they teeter between having to care for them and needing to be cared for by them. If not, they are forced to be still selfreliant as their ability to be so disintegrates.

And then there are the dying. It’s usually a painful process. That’s gotta suck.

Sorry, it seems your grant request fell through. You’ll have to fund the research out of your own pocket if you want to continue.

He just want give hugs and kiss to mouse frend.

Dick comes into your workspace and now you have more work to do?

‘Your character has no consistency.’

‘Uh… she has multiple personalities? But they all use the same name so no one notices.’

‘Well you’re either a genius or an idiot. I guess I’ll keep watching to find out which.’

‘Nobody was asking, man, but now we’re curious.’

Maybe Grausame Töchtor? At least, Aranea is one of the most consistently transgressive and productive artists I have enjoyed.

The first Clarissa comic has a bit of an anchor in my brain.

I’ve found others I enjoyed over the years but they’re usually one-off, unattributable, etc.

Something something butterfly wings?

Oh there’s no more need for any more experimental data. All further sex is canceled.

I’m not saying worst thing ever. I’m not catastrophizing. I’m not saying equal. They are different things. I’m saying unacceptable. I’m saying extent, though extant, is irrelevant to the question of acceptability.

This is an important point that keeps coming up in a thousand places and a thousand ways. The fact a femur can be broken does not make the papercut meaningless, acceptable, or excused any more than the fact someone can torture you and your loved ones for days on end could mean it’s acceptable to ‘only’ break your femur. If we try to scale measurement of harm in relation to ‘what might have been,’ attempted murder is completely acceptable as long as it fails, successful single murder is negligible as long as mass killings are possible, mass killings are fine as long as genocides are possible, and so on, and so on… You do not want to live in a world which takes the idea of ‘at least it’s not…’ seriously.

I’d take it as both being ‘past the line’ regardless of distance. If someone is seeking to defraud people, I don’t care whether their targets are made easier by desperation or not. The guy effectively robbing you is bad, but that doesn’t mean the guy price-gouging you isn’t. He didn’t help you out of a bad situation. He moved you from one bad situation to another. They are both harming you, and both would be prevented from doing it again in any just system.

They’re both forms of fraud. The gift card one is misrepresenting their position to trick you into giving them money. The house scam is misrepresenting your position to trick them into giving them something worth more than the money they give you. The only difference is that when they misrepresent you, it is expected that you be aware of your own situation such that you will be treated as though you gave informed consent, even if you didn’t. It’s analogous to the difference between someone sexually assaulting you by pretending to be a doctor vs never promising to be a doctor but telling you how sick you look and how they’re no expert but they’d be willing to condescend to feel around inside your undies as a favor to you. The only people who accept the offer have to be so dumb, desperate, intentionally misinformed, or some combination of all three as to be essentially incapable of informed consent.

You can’t.

‘Medium is the message.’ There are inherent limitations to the formats of social media and the way people interact with it. Text stores well for social media companies, but acts as a brutal limitation of social interaction. There is a self-selection issue for the kind of people who end up spending significant amounts of time online. There is a selection pressure created by the business model of social media. Anonymity is politically important but socially toxic. There is a problem of cultural inertia in changing anything about any of these things, even within the limits of their structures. All of these things interact with other external forces in complex ways.

All you can do is try to make your little part of things better. Help those you come into contact with. If you can, help them also to try to be a good influence on others. The earth is too big to affect all at once. You will never move it. But you can move someone near you.

I recognise this image from a ways back. Do guys still do the unsolicited dick pic thing? It’s practically a meme how stupid it is and how it doesn’t work.

How do you know we’re not in a time loop so long you can live entire lifetimes inside of it?

The mental image of one if them dancing into the whitehouse like a Ghanaian palbearer just to flip everyone off and say ‘I don’t give a fuck what you creepy old paedos have to say. I went to the fucking moon,’ is immensely entertaining.