what a great time to be alive
in case clarification is required, this didn’t happen, to me, recently, but it has happened recently, though generally in the form of being TOLD rather than asked or even accused, and it has happened to me, and it can happen again, and even when it isn’t happening to me i know it would if it was aware of me. These attitudes are much older than touchy trump and precious kirksy’s influence on american culture; i have been called “faggot” since I was twelvish and “retard” before that. Trumpism and Kirkism and general racial supremacist creepism merely told adults who were abusive as children that it is acceptable to continue being abusive as adults. They saw that kind of garbage from the likes of the taliban and instead of thinking “we’re better than them because we don’t do that” they preferred “HEY why can’t WE do that? We’re better than them!”

the “i don’t talk about my problems” creature was based on someone reacting to the first three frames and it bothered me enough to add the fourth frame, and then i looked at that person’s youtube page and was reminded that he voluntarily uses a normal man’s name and is comfortable being filmed with a beard while wearing baseball hats and short sleeve shirts and I considered that i really don’t need to defer to this person’s experience since it is utterly different than mine but i already drew the character fairly vague and just added the beard which doesn’t look like the person’s actual casual shab jd vance beard and round sunglasses because he had those in one video and i inadvertently made that character more stylish than i intended to, so it has that going for it in the event my characterization is otherwise unfair.

Shortly after I posted the earlier version of that comic stripzoid without the fourth frame –it had been three frames across and I only turned it into a box to appease insta-gram’s irritating cropping system which could not be done properly prior to the additional frame balancing out the first one– I received this curious anonymous message on tumblr, where I had never mentioned any of these issues. I asked one person who enjoys sending me incomprehensible messages under varying identities who denied having done it on this occasion. “greener pastures” is such a gosh darn hokey phrase i assume it is either a regressive older person raised on hokey television or someone who listens to hokey older people talk on television a lot, and they’re usually condemning someone they don’t understand for extremely minor transgressions that they don’t want to understand.

And i know they know how to use websites to some degree since this is in place and presumably got money out of somebody. The world was not better and simpler when you or i or anyone was “growing up.” You were just better insulated against how crummy it was and knowledge of who was suffering the most for that, and you can’t “go back” to that, except mentally, by reinsulating yourself, because it doesn’t exist, and you can’t force anyone else to “go back” to that since they never were that.