It’s a shame, because classic Ghibli movies are not shallow or inhumane at all. They were not based on trends. Miyazaki could not have made such beautiful films if he had not had real life experiences.

“The dragon is supposed to fall from down the air vent, but, being a dragon, it doesn’t land on the ground,” Miyazaki says. “It attaches itself to the wall, like a gecko. And then—ow!—it falls—thud!—it should fall like a serpent. Have you ever seen a snake fall out of a tree?” He explains that it “doesn’t slither, but holds its position.” He looks around at the animators, most of whom appear to be in their twenties and early thirties. They are taking notes, looking grave: nobody has seen a snake fall out of a tree.

Miyazaki goes on to describe how the dragon—a protean creature named Haku, who sometimes takes this form—struggles when he is pinned down. “This will be tricky,” Miyazaki says, smiling. “If you want to get an idea, go to an eel restaurant and see how an eel is gutted.” The director wriggles around in his seat, imitating the action of a recalcitrant eel. “Have you ever seen an eel resisting?” Miyazaki asks.

“No, actually,” admits a young man with hipster glasses, an orange sweatshirt, and an indoor pallor.

Miyazaki groans. “Japanese culture is doomed!” he says.

Even if we accept that the AI-using guy is correct - that he takes two minutes to formulate the perfect query, and gets a successful response based on that - he had to read books in order to know how to do that.

The people currently using AI were alive before it existed. They gained an education in a more traditional way, which perhaps allows them to take shortcuts using AI.

In the future, if nobody reads books, they will be even less able to prompt AI or to evaluate its responses.

Good points, and I think we generally agree. I definitely didn’t mean to exclude anyone in those real or hypothetical situations you mentioned. To me, those examples are more about showing how gender is, or can be, biologically fluid. There are many “odd” situations that aren’t binary. So amongst the many unusual ways that sex can occur biologically, “male brain in a female body” or “I reject the concept of gender entirely” are valid and believable.

I agree with your last point as well, but in the context of this post, would you tell Rachel Dolezal that she says she’s Black, so she’s Black? I guess I was trying to find some sort of difference between gender and race identity, the way the question was posed.

I’m definitely not claiming to have an unassailable argument, so thanks for responding with good points.

I’m no expert on either topic. But I believe humans basically start off as female in the womb, and either become male or don’t. And there are many intersex conditions. The body responds to hormones typically associated with either sex. So gender is fluid in a biological sense. If someone transitions to male, female or nonbinary, they already kind of contained that potential.

However, race is a social construct, usually based on heritage as well as biological appearance. So it’s hard to say how much biology is really involved. Does the human body contain the ability to be any race? Or to cultivate an appearance that prompts other humans to socially categorize you as one race or the other?

Maybe for people who are mixed race, there is a sort of spectrum available to them. They likely know how to present themselves in a way that gets them categorized as one race or the other.

But otherwise, not really. If you’re White, and you say, “I identify as Black,” the question might be: do you have Black heritage? If you don’t, you can’t really create it out of thin air. There wasn’t a situation while you were in the womb where various hormones could have influenced you to appear more Black than you do. If your parents are both White, they were going to have a White baby, no matter what. Race is a social construct, but it’s based on appearance and heritage. It’s about belonging to a group, not about being an individual, the way gender is.

If you’re assigned female at birth, and you say, “I identify as male,” then cool! Your body already has the capability to become hormonally male. You can socially identify as male. Any human, of any race, has this potential. Any two parents could have a baby that is any sex or gender, depending on various factors.

It’s not the same exact plane, but another article mentions a Boeing employee who did have nightmares about specific planes being sold to Air India. This plane was produced shortly after the time when she was keeping track of those ones:

Cynthia Kitchens, a former quality manager who worked at the Charleston plant between 2009 and 2016, has a binder full of notes, documents and photos from her frustrating years at Boeing, one page of which lists the numbers of the eleven planes delivered between early 2012 and late 2013 whose quality defects most kept her awake at night. Six of them went to Air India, whose purchases were bolstered by billions of dollars in Export-Import Bank loan guarantees. The plane that crashed was delivered in January 2014 from Boeing’s now-defunct assembly line in Everett, Washington, though its mid- and aft- fuselages were produced in Charleston.

Aww, thank you!!

Thank you. I appreciate that you took the effort to give specific compliments and critique.

I agree about the meat stick throne. I wish I had taken a little more time with the watercolour application, maybe so that the red of the meat sticks would be the focus of the last panel, and not be competing with blues and pinks.

I also hesitated to show the trucker on a meat throne, because I wanted him to be less of a king and more of an equal participant in the revelry, but I couldn’t think of another pose for him. Plus… meat stick throne!!

Just for fun, I’m attempting to attach another photo I took of the comic, in sunlight, with brighter colours.

[(https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/2e0a9beb-6753-4e43-adc8-c44f74c1480a.jpeg)

He realizes that the non-sasquatch elf characters are also travelers who veered off the path, and slowly transformed into elves.

New people arrive over the years in various ways.

Whoa. I never thought of that, but it could very well be his dream.

I don’t have a website or social media with comics, unfortunately. I started making these recently to share with friends (as motivation). There is one other comic I posted on Lemmy, but it’s in a different style.

Maybe in the future? :)

You should interpret it as me making this comic quickly and forgetting to fill in his hair colour in the second panel

The magic forest restored his youth.

Also, thank you for the nice compliment!

Thanks for answering.

“I don’t have any evidence, I just think so, and I’m old” is enough for me to understand your mentality.

I don’t see it as a cage at all.

I know my comment was long, but you haven’t answered:

• Why you think that the same people who advocate for services within 15 minutes also advocate for confining people within a certain zone as part of that goal - have they ever said so? Why would they want to do so anyway? What do they get out of it?
• Why you think that traffic calming is a slippery slope to confining vehicles, or all modes of transport, within a certain zone, instead of just trying to balance the ease of access between vehicles and bikes, scooters, skateboards, buses, pedestrians, etc.

If you want to believe in a conspiracy, why not look at the ways in which the auto industry has suppressed other modes of transport, from inventing the term “jaywalking” to suppressing electric trams to building giant highways through poor neighbourhoods?

Yeah, fictional romance is more interesting when it’s forbidden in some way. Otherwise, who wants to read a romance novel about a nice couple who meets at the library when they’re both single, and proceeds to have a wholesome relationship? Great for real life, but boring to read about or watch a movie about.

Many of the traditional reasons for forbidding a romance are gone in the contemporary world. Different race, different social class, same gender, rival families? Not convincing.

So you’re left with stuff that’s plausible but icky, like being in a relationship already, or being teacher/student or boss/employee. Or pornographic stuff like step-family. Those are problematic and people will criticize them.

You could set your story in a historical setting in which the countess and the gardener are truly forbidden from passion, or a fantasy world where the ogopogos and sasquatches are sexy rivals.

Or just have a lukewarm type of forbidden-ness, like “his family’s greeting-card store is in competition with my family’s greeting-card store” or “we’re coworkers.”

“oh, Trump wouldn’t do that, it’s illegal”

Phew, what a relief!

Also, when Trump does illegal stuff, people tend to allow it and obey him. If they try to shut him down using the legal system, he goes ahead and does it anyway.

I kind of just roll my eyes when someone says, “Aha, it’s illegal! He can’t do that!” We don’t really live in that world anymore.

I looked this up and found this information about it:

In its Local Plan 2040, Oxford City Council proposed installing elements from the 15-minute city urban concept in neighborhoods throughout the city over the next 20 years. These plans included proposals to improve accessibility to local shops and other amenities for residents so they didn’t have to always drive. Separately, Oxfordshire County Council announced traffic-reducing measures throughout the city, with infrastructure to encourage car travel around the city by using the ring road rather than already congested roads. Initial opposition to the plans led to proposals to introduce permit schemes to facilitate car travel at certain times, allowing car access to areas that the council planned to restrict to motorists.

First, the article says it was separate. Nobody said, “We are blocking everybody’s access to this road because the goal of 15-Minute City is to restrict people and forbid them from leaving their zone.”

Second, it was just traffic-calming. They put up some planters blocking roads to vehicles to encourage access by bike, pedestrians, etc. That’s not restricting access, that is INCREASING access. By bikes.

They decided that a different, busier road was more appropriate for cars. How on earth does that equate to restricting access? So your car had to drive further, using a big busy road instead of a local quiet street - boo-hoo! This, to you, was a sign that the government wants to confine you to a 15 minute area and never let you leave?

Are the following measures, to you, a sign of nefarious “restricting access”?

• An ambulance can drive the wrong way down the street, but you cannot
• A bus can travel in a bus lane, but you cannot
• A commercial vehicle can park in a loading zone, but you cannot
• A vehicle with several people can travel in a special HOV lane, but you cannot if you are driving alone
• A toll bridge reads your license plate to check if you paid a fee to access that route, and charges you a fine if you did not
• The city takes out a vehicle lane to build a dedicated bike lane and plant some nice shrubs
• The city closes a street temporarily for a neighbourhood block party
• The city installs speed bumps on a quiet street
• The city builds a traffic circle at a quiet intersection
• The city puts up a sign limiting the speed you can travel
• A highway cuts through an existing quiet suburb, meaning your car cannot cross it on a quiet street; you have to use an onramp and get on the busy highway

All of those technically “restrict access” by your seeming definition. Well, at least by vehicle. Is it your assertion that private vehicles reign supreme, and if the government does anything to slow down, discourage, or increase the cost of vehicle travel, it means their future goal is to create walled mini-cities that folks can’t leave?

Edit: also, you say that people threatened to hang the city council to get them to renege - are you proud of this? Your “side” is threatening to murder people if they don’t govern the way they want, and that’s just “being vigilant”? To prevent planters from being placed on a street? What the hell?

It really is. You’d think they’d choose a positive news story.

Has anyone ever actually said, “I think we should have all services within a zone of 15-minute travel, and we should restrict people from leaving their zone, and this is called 15 Minute Cities and I support that idea”?

“Having services readily available” is the entire idea. “You’re not allowed to go to another area” is nonsense that someone else tacked on to the concept to make people hate it.

The eyeballs are a good example. But perhaps an ignorant pro-vag-washing man could retort, "Well, nobody jizzes in my eyeballs!’

Maybe the issue is self-loathing as well as misogyny - they think their cum is disgusting, so they assume it contaminates a vag?

I agree. Many people are imagining, “instead of using his vast wealth to fix the world, he dedicates all his money and mental energy to an elaborate bunker that will ensure his survival in a specific apocalyptic scenario he believes is likely to happen.”

It might be more like, "amongst all the random wealthy-person shit he’s bought, there are guns and motorcycles (because he thinks they are cool) as well as a pantry full of canned food (because everyone should have an emergency kit and you never know).

But I could be wrong.

Not even a grown-up book! Read a different magical fantasy book aimed at children or teenagers. And see how good those are, too. Many of them were written before Harry Potter.

I do think HP is good at the pacing and mystery aspect of it. The magical world isn’t really that alluring, unless you are a 12 year old kid in 2001 who never read another book until now.