It all depends on what you mean by “conscious”, which IMO doesn’t fall under “Maybe everything is conscious” because that’s wrongly assuming that “conscious” is a binary property instead of a spectrum that humans and plants are both on while clearly being at vastly different levels. Maybe I just have a much looser definition of “conscious” than most people, but why don’t tropisms count as a very primitive form of consciousness?

Some background on this comic:

Transcript:

My brother once woke up screaming in the middle of the night from a nightmare. In his dream, a wolf, with “pure, white eyes” and walking on its hind legs, was trying to get him. He was able to quickly dismiss the ordeal, but he told the story so vividly that his younger sibling (me) could never shake the image. Ironically, my brother’s nightmare ended up scaring me for years. The creature on the right in this cartoon closely resembles the “wolf” as I’ve always pictured it.

In bed at night, I was so scared of this and other monsters that I nearly suffocated trying to stay completely under the blankets. Any exposed skin meant certain death.

The monster snorkel would have been a wonderful thing in my little world. (It still would be.)

The big news will be that John Titor is being sent back in time to save us from the Epochalypse:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor

In his online postings, Titor claimed to be an American soldier from the year 2036, based in Tampa, Florida. He said that he was assigned to a governmental time-travel project, and that as part of the project he was sent back to 1975 to retrieve an IBM 5100 computer, which was needed to debug various legacy computer programs that existed in 2036

I tried feeding frozen peas to ducks in a pond near me. The peas mostly sank below the water immediately, and the ducks didn’t seem to care for them anyways. A few of them came over to investigate and weren’t interested after checking them out. I might’ve been doing it wrong, or maybe the ducks just were just too used to getting fed bread.

XKCD has you covered:

Looks like they’re intentionally different than the books, which are more gentle:

It has come to my mind, that your ‘Moomin’ family could make an interesting comic strip, which would not necessarily be aimed at children. It is obvious that the Moomin family appeals to children, but we think these wonderful creatures could be used in comic strip form to satirise our so-called civilised lifestyle.

“And the rules are internally inconsistent 😈”

Zaphod Beeblebrox’s earlier years

Generally speaking, in the US, you can leave with no notice. I’m sure the company would like a couple of month’s notice, but I’m not aware of any way they could force that (IANAL). There’s situations where it might matter, like if you signed something that has language like “i’ll keep working for you for at least a year, if you pay for my school”, but at that point you should talk to a lawyer.

Generally you’ll have sign an employment contract that you should check, and have a lawyer look over if it’s going to matter. A lot of non-competes on paper are unenforceable, but IANAL.

OTOH, the threat is sometimes good enough. I know a hair stylist that left her job and had to work other jobs for a year. The non-compete was almost certainly unenforceable, but the owner at her previous employer was crazy and petty, and likely would’ve tried to throw lots of legal resources at it.

Back when that mustache wasn’t permanently out of style

I would guess that it got caught in the piefed.social spam filter, like Garfield did for a little while: https://discuss.online/post/30278036/19192450

It sounds like it’s been fixed now and should be propagating, but if it currently isn’t lemme know.

That might just be all me, I’m moving several communities over:

• !oglaf@midwest.social
• !smbc@midwest.social
• !peanuts@midwest.social

All the communities on midwest.social that I post daily comics to. I’m not really sure what the federation issue is exactly so can’t comment on scale. What I’m seeing is that my posts will randomly not federate and get lost unless I sit there and “jiggle” it a bunch by upvoting/downvoting it. Seems to be related to image posts since I don’t think posting news links to !msp@midwest.social ever failed.

Yeah, even accounting for perspective, the ratio seems off

TBH I don’t really get the joke here, other than general absurdism. The horse getting bigger is probably a reference to the sandworms from Dune, but the connection to religion isn’t clear. Could be a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Messiah’s_Donkey:

The triumphal entry into Jerusalem is a narrative in the four canonical Gospels describing the arrival of Jesus in Jerusalem a few days before his crucifixion. This event is celebrated each year by Christians on Palm Sunday.

It’s a rather specific reference for the Oglaf creators to make, and the comic wasn’t posted on any day that’s related to that, but that’s my best guess.

Interestingly, he redrew this for The Far Side, it previously appeared in his earlier strip, Nature’s Way:

Yeah, it’s from the Patreon of the creators of Oglaf (link at top of post). They do a mix of Oglaf and random one-offs like this. There isn’t a better place for them, so I’ve been posting them here

Here’s some context:

https://davidmarchant.blogspot.com/2024/12/i-loved-those-paper-drives.html

Old paper used to be more valuable for recycling. Not sure if it was just that on-street recycling pickup wasn’t a thing yet, or that it wasn’t quite worth the money to do more than have kids run around doing cheap labor, or what. Recyclers would have kids go around and collect paper to bring to them, and the kids would get some money for their school/community.

Shermy and Charlie Brown have collected some paper already and plan to collect more, but get distracted when they notice comics in the papers they’ve already collected. It confused me at first why they’d have papers and call it a paper sale, but also want to collect papers. It’s because they’re selling donated papers to a recycler. “Paper drive” pulled up better search results than “paper sale”, which was mostly online paper stores

Seems like that’s a Playboy thing, yeah:

Yeah, weird how it all worked out today. I’ll have to spend the next few days obsessing about what it all means until I look like this: