Maybe combine the first and third panels?

Or the second and third. Either way would work.

I can honestly say that there was a time when I thought family reunions were fun.

That was in the before times. The world was literally a better place.

You always have to ask “what right specifically?”

The answer usually boils down to racism and/or slavery.

Want higher birthrates? Just convince people that tomorrow will be better than today.

That’s how you see a spike in birth rates.

To maintain a steady birthrate, just convince potential parents that the world will not be any worse for their children than it is today.

See, easy.

See my first sentence.

If that embyo goop isn’t your property, it should be.

And if you’ve broken into the fertility clinic, that’s definitely a crime.

The gameplay loop was solid, but not completely original.

But the lore of the world was interesting and was dolled out fairly well. Neat little chunks of lore that felt like a reward when you get them.

Add in great art and music, and you have a game that you can build a fan base on.

Add in the free expansions and fan friendly developer, and you get a robust fan base.

Which leads to expectations for the sequel.

Lenin, betrayed the revolution after losing an election to actual communists and then wrote about how betraying the revolution and stamping out those pesky communists is fundamental to communism. Somehow.

Depending on how far along the prep work on the gourd was, it may have decomposed.

Employees in Japan are not okay. They’re often expected to put in extreme overtime, regardless of actual productivity.

You have workers who regularly sleep under their desks, because the work culture is so toxic that they’re low-key punished for daring to have a social life outside of work.

And there’s also a birth rate crisis that’s partially caused by that same toxic work culture.

You’ll sometimes hear buzz about fixing the birth rate crisis, but never anything about the toxic work culture.

You can say that was mostly the Romans. If you needed a calendar fucked up, they were the ones to do it.

I’d say the Arctic might be more fitting than the Pacific for separating the US from Russia… But then I know the names of the oceans.

My personal theory is that AGI is not possible with Binary architecture. I believe that it will take some form of analog computing, the simplest level of which is trinary. -1, 0, and 1.

What is intelligence without the ability to be uncertain?

Then there’s full analog computing. It’s not a robust field, but is deceptively powerful.

There are these little solar powered robots that automatically move towards light, and it’s done with a handful of transistors.

To do the whole thing in binary would take a full processor and a few lines of code.

Except for a select few movies, there’s no continuity in the James Bond franchise.

Marvel wanted a sandbox to play in with established and maintained continuity, that’s what a cinematic universe is. The main problem is that they’re not following up on the continuity, or rather not letting the world actually change.

I live dangerously with my fully up to date Arch box.

But I also have an LTS Ubuntu box that’s been humming away in the background for about the last five-ish years? Just a quiet little file server, doing its job and being ignored.

I always love to be reminded about that. It probably should have happened years earlier, but you take what you can get.

It was a wonderful experiment. And it showed what you can do with tight continuity control… But it was a bit too grimdark. Heroes need to be allowed to act like heroes, even when it’s hard.

The Ultimates universe felt like all the big names were slowly drifting towards evil.

You’re right, but I can still fight you if you want, say we meet at the park near sundown?

I’ll even let you get the first hit in, I’ll be walking around, and you can just run up and punch me.

They’re doing a Battleworld, the comic event where Doom kidnaps Franklin Richards, and the molecule man, in order to temporarily erase the multiverse.

The end of that particular comic storyline justified the end of the Ultimates universe, while allowing Miles Morales to join the main marvel universe.

Nothing else changed. Because the first law of comics is that nothing ever changes. Not really.

Movies on the other hand, have a problem. Actors age out of roles, so you should be changing the world with each movie… Marvel isn’t doing that.

While that works on a per clove basis, sometimes you need an entire head of garlic, and the shake method is the best and fastest.