That was very nearly my exact same thought. Maybe not for curious children with carrot-sized fingers, but for adults, how convenient! Business competitor’s body won’t quite fit in your fancy frunk? Just while away on your phone for about 10 minutes, let the cat do its magic, and off go the legs! Travel-sized!

From the US: I’m over 30 and this is the first time I’ve heard surrogacy referred to as human trafficking. And now I need to sit and think.

It’s always felt a little bit creepy to me, but I’ve also never wanted kids and the idea of pregnancy for any reason would be traumatic. So I’m starting out heavily biased. I think if you take the money out, it no longer counts…?

But the idea would be so out of left field that it would mostly be dismissed out of hand, probably even by most women.

Spring of 2015. Redesigned my sims’ mansion to be so gorgeous and intricate that by the time I was done perfecting it, the sheer size of the lot and the amount of moving parts in it made the entire file unplayable.

I swore I would keep the thing around until I had a better computer, because I loved it so much and I was doing a legacy family I’d gotten really attached to. Now, 9 years later, I have a better computer. The graphics are too dated to be fun.

I had to scroll back up just because she’s so pretty. That’s a quality cat, right there, and she knows it.
11/10 would kiss on her lil forehead.

Please be one of those people that washes their hands instead of this functioning as some broad, sweeping excuse because “it’s already everywhere.” I don’t know how else fecal matter would be expected to travel to a stove dial.

the plant was death because he put it in a closet because he bought in a woman and she could think he was gay so he hid it 👍

Well, what if she mistakenly saw him as a dependable person who could provide care for the most basic of life forms?

Otherwise known as: “what if everyone’s abusive ex ran the government?”

Average citizens are less culpable than government officials are, but we are all culpable for it to a degree.

There is a degree at which idealistic humanitarianism is pushed to such an extreme that it swings all the way back around into the concept of original sin. I know, because it’s where I’ve sat for years and I had to sit down about it when someone pointed out I’m basically so atheist I’ve gone catholic.

Guilt is indeed a matter of calibration. This is correct. But at a certain point of granularity, it becomes a pointless statement.

Anyone insisting on wearing clothing or utilizing objects they didn’t make by their own hand is a capitalistic slaver. You and I both own slaves right now.

I could disappear into the hills and become a vegan goatherd, and it’s probably the closest I could get to neutral. But by the mere act of minimizing my own harm, I’m also shutting my ears to the plight of all others, which is an implicit endorsement through inaction.

If I choose action and swing the tides over to Gaza, they still have their own weaponry. If bringing my corrupt genocidal government to its knees, I’ve created a power vacuum that harms countless and will most certainly kill. Doing nothing or something both make me a murderer.

Even in donating to a charity, you’re deliberately choosing to ignore three others just as worthy. When everyone answers to everything simply by chancing to be born, this kind of thinking becomes at best a semi-interesting joke and at worst actually psychologically destructive.

What am I meant to do, to stop personally committing at least 4 types of concurrent genocide across the globe? Stop paying taxes towards the military? At least my below-the-poverty-line ass is already there.

Calling my representatives won’t do much with the US so heavily invested in the area, but I suppose if I’m culpable for mass murder either way, I might as well go to prison for it.

Satan doesn’t punish. Satan’s whole job is temptation. Anyone tempted would technically be punished by god.

I assume the mixup has to be resultant of the constant game of religious Telephone. Not really surprising. It’s pretty awkward to frame your spotless savior who is the living embodiment of Love as also doing deliberate premeditated torture, even when it’s written right there. And comparatively simple to expect it from someone who’s supposed to embody unpleasantness.

• It would help someone whom I don’t want to.

…explain? We’re…silently and maliciously watching people eat shit when they don’t have to? And this happens often?

Y tho

Ok. Mini-rant because I can’t contain myself atm. Do you wanna know a badly-kept secret? I’ve been making art on and off for 29 years. My ass wishes I could draw too. A ton of artists wish they could draw.

Talent will only give you a leg up, and mainly just at the beginning. The rest, all of us have to struggle for and I’m quite sure very few of us appreciate having to do so. And no matter how good they get, there is always something they have no idea how to do yet or they have some idol whose style they envy more than their own. Or they’re the type that only hates what they make because they’re the one who made it.

Van Gogh had a painter friend named Gauguin, and they were both jealous of each other. There is no magical point that one hits where you feel like you’re Good Enough. The best you can aim for is the kind of steady improvement you don’t even notice happening except on a scale of years, and the confidence to acknowledge those improvements instead of hyper-focusing on every way it isn’t what you saw in your head (it never is).

Go get a pencil or your ipad or whatever. Youtube is by far your biggest friend. Go look up videos about how to actually see what’s in front of you instead of what your brain insists must logically be there. USE REFERENCE. Trace a photo over and over, then immediately try the same thing freehand – this one is super useful, because a lot of drawing is also muscle memory. Break things down into simple shapes and then build on those. Use the open space between objects if you need to, to trick yourself into drawing something complex without getting lost in intimidating structural details.

When you’ve got those down, move onto perspective and composition. Cry a little if you have to, then get back to it. Because now you’re able to do whole backgrounds. People? Do tons of deliberately imprecise gesture drawings. Give your OC a terrifying robot head, a pillow for a torso, and springs for limbs. But go get. Your pencil. And be ok with drawing at first like everyone thinks they draw.

Barring that, my second choice is singing.

Ideally, global warming, but it would be fair to view that as pointless when dissipating the extra CO2 doesn’t necessarily return the trees and the problem would degrade again in a couple hundred years. You’d have to introduce a new fuel source that is sought after, clean, and eternal. Which would be two wishes.

So you have to define it as both of your options, since the loss of either worsens the other. Turn the whole environment back to where it was in the 1200s, overrun the streets with bears, see if I care. It’ll give 'em something to do. Especially the Amazonian avocado farmers.

The part where the ecosystem is in collapse?

I’ll admit, there have been multiple times recently I’ve started to wonder if he’s somehow a pod person. And he’s…certainly one to speak, as a national representative.

But as much as it irks me, I’d rather admit to common ground than find myself sacrificing my own morals on the basis that I don’t like who said it.

I wouldn’t worry too hard about that one. The difference is one of the things a person only picks up on by seeing it written like that over and over for years. I’d probably have to stop and think about it too.

While it is funny, I don’t think that the punishment for her in this article will really amount to much. If she had the kind of empathy necessary to relate that experience with what she put others through, she wouldn’t have done it in the first place.

Whatever customers like herself that she comes across, I think it’s a 50/50 whether she spends her time doing nothing but exacerbating problems and causing regular scenes or siding with “her people” and breaking rules, stealing, etc. out of spite.

Agree with MrShankles it has to be under threat of breaking probation to even work. Ultimately, she needs more reform than just receiving identical abuse in turn.

No, a burrito to the face is physical abuse. Being verbally and physically abused every day of your job is not how jobs are supposed to work, and viewing things like that as silly small things to be affected by is itself pretty damaging.

If I lean across the counter and punch you in the head, you’re allowed to have some kind of feeling about that. Especially in a setting that heavily discourages and may even punish defending yourself, the way retail often does.

Convincing yourself it’s fine because the world is cruel keeps the world cruel. More importantly, it keeps you from considering you deserve anything other than cruelty. We need to care about each other.

In that case, I also choose NZ 802 years ago.

I am so absolutely not doing that, no. Maybe it’s a whole pound of free cocaine. Maybe god finally smiled on me and it’s a very ill-planned potato chip bomb like that experiment where you use a whole potato to power a light bulb. Probably it’s some kid’s lost gravel collection.

Whatever it is, it’s not going to be something whoever had the can last was dying for anyone to have and I don’t get paid enough to care.

Not that he isn’t a dickhole, but…that’ll…show them…? How did anyone else even notice this enough to care? Someone so poorly underpaying the cleaner guy that he opened a discarded parking lot pringles can in search of food?