It may have suffered, but it’s distinctive.

The webcomic space is flooded with generic “good art”. If you want to stand out and build or maintain your brand - you need a unique look. Artists want their audience to be able to look at a character and instantly know they drew it.

(The best example of this is perhaps the worst human being in webcomics today. You can recognize his style in the first three lines of a face.)

I think PA was in kind of a bad place, because they were popular so early in the webcomic boom and so many people copied their style that their original art became generic. What’s going to attract a new teenage reader to PA if it looks just like every other crappy “two guys on a couch playing video games” webcomic they’ve seen?

So PA had to change their style. And say what you will about it, there’s no doubt who drew (or had an AI tool draw) those characters.

I agree. Times change. Putting people out of work is not inherently a bad thing. How many oil workers and coal miners will be out of work when we ban fossil fuels? How many jobs emptying chamber pots and hauling dung were lost when cities installed sewer systems? Hell, how many taxi drivers were put out of work by Uber, and how many Uber drivers are about to be put out of work by self-driving vehicles? When specialized labor is replaced by technology that can do it faster and cheaper, that’s good for society as a whole.

The problem is, society also needs better support for people whose jobs are replaced by technology, and that’s something we don’t have. The logic of capitalism requires unemployed people to suffer, so workers fear losing their jobs and don’t oppose their bosses. OP’s comic shouldn’t be read as an attack on AI, but as an attack on capitalism.

Is this really a surprise? Both candidates are 80-year-old rich white men. They don’t give a shit about the environment personally, because they’re going to be dead before things get really bad. They don’t give a shit about the environment for the sake of their families, because their families have enough generational wealth to guarantee them a seat in the metaphorical ark. And when politicians have no personal investment in a cause they don’t talk about it. Shocker.

Sounds like an excuse.

What I mean is: it sounds like his handlers kept making excuses and you kept accepting them because you wanted to believe them.

I know, I’m frustrated too. I dismissed the Alex Jones Fox News crowd because they were known liars, they’d lied to us for decades, and this really did seem like standard conservative projection to deflect from their candidates’ obvious mental issues.

Hate to admit it. But the conservatives were right and we were wrong.

Yes. Stealing. From the taxpayers that maintain that forest. From the public who owns the property.

And from the indigenous people who originally lived there - these people are very clearly not Aboriginal Australians.

I’ve heard Native American activists argue that white influencer style permaculture is inherently racist when performed on American soil, because it’s modeled on a romanticized ideal of white settler lifeways and has nothing to do with how permaculture was actually practiced in North America before the genocides. I’m not sure how I feel about that argument. But having a family of white Australian permaculturists literally stealing from public land to maintain their settler lifestyle… it’s a little too on the nose.

So here’s the thing. Just Stop Oil is performing symbolic disruption and vandalism. And they are doing it to exactly the targets you say they should - for example, Taylor Swift’s private jet.

And they are also performing symbolic vandalism against works of art and history.

And I submit the way you feel about them targeting Stonehenge is very similar to the way a wealthy conservative feels about them targeting private jets - it offends you even though it does no actual harm because it’s an attack on something you value and something you feel should be respected, which makes you feel like it’s an attack on you personally.

Just Stop Oil has been very clear about why they symbolically vandalize works of art - because every dollar you spent on preserving human art and history is meaningless if the human species drives itself to extinction, and anyone who cares about art and history needs to get off their asses and demand political change. They do it because people who care more about art than the environment are the people they’re trying to shake up and motivate.

Preserving art is a bourgeois luxury. If we as a species don’t get off our asses and fight climate change we won’t have any art left to preserve or any human beings left to appreciate it.

The essence of white Berkeley liberalism.

How naive. True change doesn’t come from offending moderates - true change comes from making moderates comfortable, so they feel secure and confident that the change you won’t harm them. Any protest that makes people uncomfortable about society or their own actions is counterproductive and just makes things worse.

Take Colin Kaepernick. Taking a knee during the national anthem before a football game was exactly the wrong way to protest racism, because it angered people who loved football and loved America, who should have been his natural allies. What Colin should have done was been even more patriotic and sung the anthem even louder, to express how much he loved America and how he wanted to see it become better. That would have inspired people who supported his cause, without offending people who disagreed with him, and there would have been no controversy.

That’s the way white moderates want to see people protest. Being conformist and forgettable is how we make change.

Am I still being too subtle?

You don’t understand. That protest provoked an emotional reaction in me and I didn’t like it. Responsible protests don’t hurt people’s feelings. They went too far.

Wait, do you really expect British citizens to fly to the US or China in order to commit vandalism?

What do you think they’d put on their visa application? “Purpose of travel: throw paint on the Statue of Liberty”?

In a world full of bad faith “I support your cause but not your methods” attacks on environmental activism, this is one of the most ridiculous ones I’ve ever heard.

We only discuss their tactics briefly when they do something dramatic and get on the news.

When people hear about their tactics, ask why they’re going so far, and look into environmental issues as a result, I think that can have a much longer lasting impact.

Same as when one of the big name hosting companies takes a site down. You hope it’s archived, and if it was important enough to you, hopefully you saved it to your personal server.

What you’re describing is a major benefit of federation. Any site can be taken down. But when a federated server goes down it’s because the site owner exercised their control over their own data. If Google or Amazon takes a site down, you lose your data, but they keep copies to use however they want.

The fact you think “off brand” is garbage is painful. And telling.

Global insect biomass has declined 75% since I was born. And a big part of it is people who don’t want insects on their property - reasonably, as the person you’re responding to points out - and manage their lawns to deprive insects of habitat. And there’s so many more people in the world now than when I was born, and correspondingly less habitat for insects. And everything else.

I didn’t find one, someone else might have better luck.

To be fair, I do love mockingbirds, and mockingbirds love mowed lawns :)

Libraries have free books. That takes profit from Amazon.

Libraries have free Internet. That takes profit from ISPs.

Libraries have free research tools and expert guidance from librarians. That takes profit from all sorts of companies that profit off your ignorance.

And worst of all, that stuff is all publicly funded, so when you look at a library you see government helping people. And there’s nothing conservatives hate more than government that helps people.

Have you ever seen a sheep be sheared? It’s violent and bloody. If your barber held you down and cut and scraped scraped the hell out of your scalp while shaving your head, you’d fire them.

Also, sheep too old to produce good wool don’t get a peaceful retirement. They get slaughtered and turned into dog or chicken food. The same thing happens when there’s a disease epidemic - common because of the crowded and filthy conditions in factory farming - or crop failures or drought. As soon as it’s not profitable to keep the sheep alive we kill them.

But neither of those points are actually the point of the conversation at all. The point is it’s immoral to use an animal as an object to benefit humans. If you wouldn’t keep humans in pens and shave them to make clothing, you shouldn’t do the same thing to sheep. Simple as.

How about spaying or neutering them and letting them live out their natural lives?

Yawn.

“Genocide” only applies to humans. The correct term for animals is “extinction”.

And I remind you: we humans control when and if our domestic livestock breed. And we let specific breeds of domestic livestock go extinct all the time. There are dozens of breeds of cows and chickens and sheep that are now extinct because they were replaced by other, more useful breeds - or the cultures that bred them were wiped out. Consider the Tautersheep, for example.

Let me be blunt. If scientists developed synthetic wool that was chemically identical to sheep wool but ten times cheaper, domestic sheep would be extinct within a decade. And nobody but sheep farmers would complain. So when carnists argue we have a moral duty to the species of domestic sheep to continue breeding them for human use I just roll my eyes.