I have delved deep and hard into my own limitations and contradictions and predictable responses as a life form and as a complicated human entity. That part is even more soul-crushing because if I have learned how limited I really am and how predictable my brain is, and it means that the average person who doesn’t meditate or contemplate their own thinking must be either far more trapped in cyclic behavior, or even more crushing… far happier.

I am happy I had a chance to interact directly, because you did touch on something in this comic that I appreciate and I know AI is a very long way from taking from us, which is that “flow of an experience” that comes with art. You feel a scene, a situation, an exchange or a mood, you have an internal experience born from your own imagination and you want to share that feeling. Keep doing that and you will easily compete with the “Greats.”

Keep at it, the next biggest thing you need is just consistency and patience. It can take a long time before enough people experience the world through your eyes that they start missing it and seeking it out.

There are not NEARLY enough subtle, cerebral comics out there, this is giving me vibes like the few good ones like Bizarro or Perry Bible Fellowship, lean in harder, make art and stories for yourself, not public appeal, you will get a much more loyal following and make bigger waves. (I used to be a professional artist, I know the pains.)

Also, yeah there are AI all over reddit asking how to be human, asking the meaning of things like comics and memes, the whole “explain the joke” ring of subreddits exploded in volume since reddit announced that they were going to partner with Google and AI companies to use the platform as a training ground.

AI is going towards some strange directions and it’s going to be bigger and smarter than we expect. Eventually.

But it will be a long, long time before it starts making art like this, which gives a glimpse into an internal, personal idea or experience. Keep fighting the good fight.

A flashbulb or powder flash for a camera.

Also, I love your art.

I feel it’s a little of column A and a little of column B.

But what happens is all the good stuff, the bad stuff, everything in between, it just stacks up and stacks up. You get bored with a lot of things because you’ve seen it all before so many times. I cannot stand “new” movies because I’ve seen them all before in other forms. I am disappointed by tragic things humans do, but even with current problems in society, it’s new specifics but the broad story is the same. I see people debating things that they were debating 30 years ago. I see people voting against their best interest just a few years after doing the same thing.

What burns you out on life broadly, not in a dark, depressing way, is just the utter lack of novelty after a while. You will want to see more new things, you will want to travel and try new foods and experience new things, but even that all starts to feel cyclical.

After a point, and I’m not there yet, I am quite certain that I will feel a draw to a great unknown, because there’s nothing new left here to surprise me.

I’m not the penguin walking to the mountains yet, my community needs me and I need them… but I always have a side-eye to the mountains and a little voice in the back of my head: “Someday.”

I got it immediately, I thought it was clever.

Don’t be discouraged by the minority of people and AI posing as people who have a hard time with subtlety.

I’m probably one of the older users on this site, and can say with depressing clarity that everything just repeats over and over. The details, tone and accessories may change through the decades, but the rest stays the same, just this flat circle spinning 'round and round forever.

I really understand how people with otherwise good lives get to an age where they no longer want to live forever.

Hey Brits.

USA hostage here.

You are presently rolling your eyes at this manufactured outrage, hoping it will hurry up and just pass by already so people can get on with their lives, right?

We’ve been there. It’s not going to stop, it’s going to get worse. And worse.

This fascist, racist infection will turn into an even worse cancer over there because you have more than one nation around you with different looking and different sounding people who are going to start feeling more and more displacement from climate and geopolitics and who be seeking safety and survival.

You already have a surveillance state that beats us, you are losing rights and freedoms every day. You had the strongest alliances in the world, but between the Brexit fiasco and now the US’s oligarchs sabotaging NATO, you are losing your strongest source of capital, which was unity and international community strength. If Ukraine falls, you will have Russia on your doorstep controlling your gas and food.

You need to do what we failed to do early enough, which is reinforce local and domestic communities and see the threat for what it is, an active force of destruction that works in slow-motion and attacks you in your weak points, your forums and subreddits and your social media, your television stations and your news agencies.

You are in so much danger of escalating chaos it’s going to make the USA look sane and balanced.

Oh i’ve done some things also.

My friend, looking up: “That sure is an interesting place for a junction box.”

Me: “It was that or the next owners will get a horizontally mounted ceiling fan.”

if that fails, the wire glue, to glue a new length on.

I’m built different. You throw me to the wolves, I come back with a mate and puppies.

I skipped 1, I adored 2 and played it to a harmful degree, I tried 3 and got bored after three attempts to get into it. There was a fourth??

I mean, the second game was basically setting the thing up for a MMO open-world, group-mission-running/loot extraction type game across a huge, cel-shaded world with open PvP areas and wild custom characters… and they dropped the ball on that?

I think I’m good on that. They gave me all kinds of warnings and preparation for crazy shit they were prepared to do if it was “bad” but I don’t remember a word they said, either before the morphine or after, for opposite reasons.

Somewhat related:

Honey = Bee vomit.

Coffee = hot bean water

Milk = modified cow blood.

So I think drinking hot coffee with honey and milk is about one of the weirdest mixtures of substances known to humanity.

I remember when I was young I worked outside in the heat and drank just iced tea all summer long.

That also led to 12 hours writhing on the floor of the ER and my first experience in understanding how death can be preferable to life. The stone passed fine eventually once it got to the bladder, but the path from the kidney to bladder was some of the most violent, life-shattering pain I could have imagined.

About 100% of shooter/survival games made with open PVP turned on all the time become kill-on-sight instantaneously, and those games usually give players a PvE mode for people too scared or annoyed with PvP, the segregation has been normal in gaming since the early days of online gaming. So it’s not as simple as saying it’s “supposed” to be PvE, it’s that they tuned the mechanics and themes to encourage more cooperation in an unprecedented way.

After watching weather with my own peepers for close to five decades in a cognitive capacity, I can safely say that weather is just getting more extreme all around.

While I love Black and the routine, I always am baffled when people complain about the weather reports getting it wrong.

For the last million years of human society, the only predictor we had for weather was passed-down stories and signs in the sky to indicate changing seasons. We knew it gets cold in winter, but we had no idea when exactly the first snowfall would be, or if there would be a blizzard that would kill half the tribe.

Today we get very accurate predictions up to a week in advance when actual storm systems are approaching because we have god-like eyes in space that can see the goddamn clouds FROM ABOVE.

We are Gods incarnate, we can see into the future with magic in space. If the storm dumps more rain than expected, wow great… nature still is complicated, you still knew a storm was coming!

That spiel is funnier if you also read it in Lewis Black’s tone.