Could you give me a minute to think it over? Oh, wait, shit…

Lots of fun stupid ideas here…

• Everyone in the world is now their own microstate with their current position as the start point for a voronoi style distribution of territory.
• Canada and Canadia are now legally distinct, coterritorial nations. Anyone who refers to themselves as Canadian has the effect of renouncing their citizenship to Canada and joining Canadia. Anyone who refers to themselves as Canadan does the opposite.
• The world is now divided into nations by elevation rather than latitude and longitude.
• All locations are redistributed by their affixes. All -stans are one nation. All -villes are another. All -tons and -towns another. All San- and Santa- are another. And so on, and so on. Any conflicts based on having multiple affixes are decided by a fight to the death between randomly chosen locals who prefer one or the other.
• All areas are formed into nations based on the most common seasoning in that region.

In a certain way, almost anything. Movie companies seem loathe to make anything original, with no IP history on which to build nostalgia-based marketing.

Preaching to the choir, there. Nostalgia started out as a mental illness and needs to go back to that status.

Then they don’t get my respect either. Buying clothes doesn’t make you special.

There seems to be an interesting rhythm to perceptions. Things are what they are in the now, then the good gets realised as bad and vice versa with the benefit of hindsight. Then the past gets far enough away that hindsight dims and people switch to their nostalgia goggles.

Those few get some credit, but I doubt that’s the norm.

At least a fursuit is something someone put real time, energy, and talent into bringing to existence. I have no respect for someone who just runs a piece of software someone else made to change how they look. It’s Instagram filters but dumber.

Sort of, but dumber. At least a tulpa is a display of a quirk of the human mind that it can create an imaginary friend that feels like a different person, and isn’t done for the titillation of strangers. Vtubers are just the laziest automation of a ventriloquist act.

They don’t learn the subtle art of throwing their voice and looking like they’re paying attention, practicing a skill like a magician. They don’t even engage sincerely with an esoteric religious tradition like tulpamancers. They just run a software to control the digital dummy and do the exact same thing every other streamer does. Give it a few more years and they won’t be anime girls, it’ll all be AI Pokimane bodies with AI modulated voice changers played by the 50 dudes who sold their souls, their cars, and their neighborhood children to get ahold of the only 100 consumer graphics cards to leak out of the Nvidia pipeline.

A job that seems perfect for weaponized incompetence. Wave in anybody that doesn’t have a ZZ Top beard and collect paycheck.

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.

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

‘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.

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.