They’re cute! I approve!

I suspect we all have mental problems. Most people are not assessed and are high-functioning, yet we’re not meant to work forty hours a week and live in nuclear families, let alone struggle in precarity. Mental illness is and family dysfunction are intergenerational and have been through the twentieth century, if not through the common era.

While there are recreational uses for drugs, I suspect most drug users self medicate, which is to say the drugs they take unpresribed are used to cope with symptoms of stress and existential horror, the same way we take drugs to cope with migraines or allergies, or chronic symptoms.

Does that mean they’re uncool? Not at all. Self aware people, deep thinkers, philosophers, artists, scientists and engineers all often drink, smoke, binge on edibles or engage in street chemistries in order to cope, and the ones who are self-aware are able to recognize it’s a thing they need right now, and that others who are addicted are not to be blamed or judged by whatever gets them by, night after night.

Until we can find a better way to enforce civil liberties, the striking of illegally obtained evidence in the prosecution of terrible criminals is necessary. That they get to walk free is the point first as a penalty to the state (that now a monster remains at large) and second as a penalty to the public for allowing the state to let its agents abuse their power.

If neonazis and terrorists aren’t protected by our Bill of Rights, then you aren’t either. And it informs how the massive extrajudicial surveillance state got formed in the first place, as the US state believes national security (in all its ambiguity) is valued more than American lives.

That’s why cat ears are mandatory when you’re computer hacking.

So far! no-one has ever died from loaded halloween candy. (The few incidents have all been inside jobs, like a parent poisoning their own kid).

The fentanyl candy scare came from brightly colored Oxy tabs that looked like packed-powder candy such as Sweetarts. It was a non-issue, but made for a scare piece to frighten conservative people who believe in teen rainbow parties.

My plug on Satisfactory is you come for playing around with and making sculptures with conveyor belts, and then stay to play with jump-pads, pneumatic hypertubes and later, trains (that actually carry freight and have a purpose). Also the planet is pretty (and you’re going to ruin it all by turning it into factories).

As with other automation games, it’s coding in disguise, and if you get a buzz from configuring logistics to distribute parts and fluids from sources to processing machines, then this game can take over your life. The two principle schools of players are make it efficient and make it pretty. In the end, you have a giant playground to zoom around in and watch all the parts zip this way and that down conveyors, each with actual purpose behind them.

So my take is I should put a Croc on my dog’s head and will be enlightened?

I was going to say this. To those species who are capable of interplanetary colonization, we look like savage war goblins who can only negotiate transaction-based societies and are compelled by number-go-uo at the expense of letting children starve.

There’s a Pacific Drive + Techtonica bundle I’m looking at and might grab.

Part of the problem is I’m obsessed with Satisfactory which scratches a lot of the itches Terraria did but in 3D.

Is the guy in the second panel Quasimodo?

To be fair, Jesus’ message (some of it, scripture is not univocal) is that divine power is within the grasp of us mere mortals. That everyone who follows him would be able to do miracles like his.

(Apologists suggest he was referring to just the apostles to explain why the rest of us are bound by naturalism, but there are implications that’s not what he meant.)

Note that Gospel Jesus was big on direct evidence.

That said, the cross was made of wood, and Jesus wasn’t the only convict tasked with carrying one. The gravity is in being willing to die for one’s principles which all of these characters would do unflinchingly.

This is why you have to run when you find a goose among your ducks.

I thought up Goose as a superhero for a street level setting, essentially she’s a tough scrapper, easy to underestimate, and is really good at blending into crowds or workstaff. Mistique without the mutant shapechangey stuff.

Reagan was super anti-worker, and that’s when the drift started. After the PATRIOT act, the entire justice system (including the court systems) started seeing the public as the enemy (after all, we were harboring terrorists) which corresponds to the shredding of the Bill of Rights (specifically the fourth and fifth amendments to the Constitution of the United States). Business interests (and their plutocratic masters) were the true citizens of the US, with us lowly proletariat becoming second class citizens. Citizens United took us by surprise but we haven’t really done anything and won’t until the police are busting our own heads (or we see enough officer-involved brutality – which is, incidentally, how La Résistance got started in Paris).

Now recently

• SCOTUS neutering regulatory agencies in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo
• SCOTUS deciding in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson that civil and criminal penalties for camping on public land do not constitute cruel and unusual punishment of homeless people.

If you’re too broke to have a place to live (easy to do right now), then you can have life, liberty and property stripped from you by the state. Essentially, being a human being is very much insufficient to have rights in the US. You must also be able to afford renting or owning a place to sleep. (As tempted as I am to rant about this, I’ll stop here.)

I assumed I was already being spit-roasted.

Do you work for an employer?

Here in the States we are forced to work to eat and survive (we’re not allowed to go off into the woods and trap animals and pick vert and live as a hermit.)

You may not personally worship money, but your captives certainly do.

The Lady makes me think of the unnamed god in American Gods who is never identified but seems to be associated with gambling.

Wikipedia describes him thus:

The Forgettable God – An unknown god whom Mr. Wednesday meets in Las Vegas along with Shadow, whose name slipped from Shadow’s mind whenever Mr. Wednesday said it. He has a liking for Soma, a Vedic ritual drink. Gaiman has never confirmed the identity of this god.

More that we exhibit the same behaviors around some things that we exhibit around gods, even to the point of sacrificing life and limb to them.

Gridiron Football is quite godlike in the US. We lose only a few teen and college lives every year on the field itself (Twelve a year, according to NBC news), but the injuries and concussions are plentiful and life-defining. And it’s normal for us to erect vast stadiums for pro-ball with taxpayer dollars while children go hungry and workers are without medical care.

The immersion problem in grain silos fits right into American Gods in which small private farms don’t keep their grain silos adequately arrid (dehumidified) and so it sticks in chunks and has to be prodded down leading to twenty or so worker deaths by immersion, Sacrifices to Ceres or Demeter. The level of moisture also increases the mold growth in the grain, though I don’t know if it’s to dangerous levels.

My own favorite natural god is the sun which shines life giving energy on us every day for eons. Yet we have to avoid looking at it and without the protection of the Earth’s magnetic field would quickly be fried in its presence (at eight light seconds away). Without the sun, we’d freeze and die. And if we were to imagine the sun a human body, the rest of the solar system (mostly Jupiter) would be a blood draw, and the earth would be a drop of blood smeared on a slide.

After Ubi’s careless addition of microtransactions into games, I stopped buying Ubisoft games. After the whole unaddressed sexual harassment of the staff by executive officers scandal made news, I stopped playing even the Ubisoft games I own.

Are we absolutely sure it’s real Bill Gates and not Robot Bill Gates? I mean he’s had bad takes before but maybe it’s best to be sure?

Inside me are two ranchers. I’m still trying to figure out a viable configuration for a third.