This is far from the first Devil's Panties comic posted here and many of the others mention her ADHD. You're missing the deep lore.
codexarcanum
Dragonball (not Z) is pretty funny and goofy. Early DBZ is also kind of goofy, but steadily takes the fights more seriously over each arc. Characters like Mr. Satan and Bu bring back some of the goofball comedy in later episodes, but the ratio of funny to fighting is basically flipped from DB to DBZ.
This process is called Flanderization, whereby a character on a long running show becomes a self-parody as their most distinctive traits and behaviors are amplified again and again. It's named for a popular side character Ned Flanders, from the show the Simpsons. Though arguably Ned undergoes more permanent personal growth than any other character on the show.
My impressions from this comic are that I would hate the creator if I ever met them.
I think the joke is a typical take on ADHDers having "eyes bigger than their stomachs" for large tasks. Swimming in a lake is very fun, and can help one feel connected to nature. Swimming across a lake is a huge task, possibly requiring training, could take a long time, and is dangerous.
Why they decided to sit on the beach instead of swimming at all, I have no idea. Maybe it's a "lakes are deep and scary because lake monsters" thing?
Outlets like the BBC regularly reused film stock and destroyed their archives. Many episodes of old shows like Dr. Who (the first season especially) are lost media due to this practice. The show's were considered like stage plays: performed once, broadcast, and the money was made. For how "innovative" capitalism is, it took the corpos decades to realize the latent value of media IP.
The ongoing push towards *AAS is the backlash to realizing that physical media gave consumers a permanent version of things. They actually prefer it under the broadcast model where you got what they felt like putting out and liked it.
My point is that capitalism and culture are fundamentally incompatible. The illusion that capitalism has culture is only because it steals culture from the people who actually create it by alienating us from the process of creation (automation, assembly lines, AI, etc) and then using IP law to claim ownership over the artifacts of culture, which they sell back to us. The owner class have never been good stewards of anything.
I miss the 90s because in 1999 I was 14, the Matrix and System Shock 2 had just come out, and the radio was nothing but optimistic pop and dance music. It was a time of high optimism, there was a real feeling that the new millennium was ours, that we were going to make the world better. Life was never going to feel like that again.
Then Bush, then 9/11. In 2 years I went from starry eyed high-school naif to being a politically engaged college student. It's hard after that to separate my feeling about whether the world (USA society specifically) really did get worse or if I was just old and politically aware enough then to notice.
It certainly feels like things declined pretty steadily. I think a lot of us were lured into comforting nostalgia by Obama. A nice little warm dose of return to the good days of before Bush! It put us to sleep like warm milk. Then waking up to realize that Bush-ism never ended.
Cruelty Squad, underneath it's sewer candy aesthetic, is premised on this idea: that you're a gig economy hitman. The reason you can replay missions is because your targets are so rich they can't actually be killed, and are replaced by new clones (or something equivalent) after every mission.
A tremendous amount of issues in the world stem from people not understanding what abuse is and passing it on to others as "the way it has to be."
I started painting in my late 30s and love it, and get regular compliments and good natured critiques of my work. I have never cried about it, and if someone thought I needed to be torn down to improve, they would no longer be in my life. But I don't hold any delusions that I'm making high art either.
People tend to have a really shitty grasp of context and nuance. People also do use AI becaue they want to skip the work and go straight to rewards. These all stem from the same issue: lack of care. We've been trained to see the world like rich people: devoid of empathy, compassion, and care. It takes time and energy to understand your situation and formulate a proper reaponse. Sometimes art is a struggle and it takes time and energy to overcome your limits or figure out what it is you actually want from the work. Properly offering good critique requires empathy, and it requires the time and energy to dedicate to the critique.
It's easy to cruelly criticize. It's easy to throw out slop. It's easy to just let the machine do it.
Is this another Disco Elysium situation? I really like Unknown World's and their games. This is a real letdown; guess Natural Selection 3 or any new titles won't be announced any time soon.
I'd never noticed that in this order, it's almost π!
Off by 0.001 and some change; that coincidence is going to haunt me.
🧐: 0 is the origin of time, the big bang (if you believe in that kind if thing)
The problem then is figuring out when earth (and then human) time starts, but we can just add some arbitrary offsets that feel right and everyone agrees on.
Imagine creating one of the best, most important pieces of media of your generation. Being a rock star of a new medium, defining genres, shaping history and the world.
Then imagine struggling to keep a job, find work, and create more works in your medium. And now imagine that you were barely in your 20s when you broke out, so that the rest of your life is always in the shadow of your first masterpieces.
Romero seems like way too nice a person, too good of a being, to be treated with such indignity. In a lot of ways Bill Gates and his company have been fucking over Romero for like 30 years now.