In my city the homeless run a newspaper. Good on-the-street reporting and homeless people can also sell the paper to get money.

Anyways, got to talking to a paper-seller. His story was rough; had a job, a house… and then a major medical event that took his house and all of his savings away in bills. His job fired him for ‘poor attendance’. At least the people at the paper were helping him get back on his feet.

Bought his last few papers so he could go home, but figured he was probably cold and hungry after standing around all day, so I bought him dinner and some new warm socks too.

Hope that guy is doing all right.

I mean, that’s a valid tactic too. See Comcast -> Xfinity

Yes, yes, we should totally be understanding of the people who want to see my cousin dead and my uncle run out of the country.

/s because there are sadly a lot of people who legitimately think this way

Dude… these guys go there because us western women are ‘too woke’, ‘too feminist’, ‘don’t understand traditional gender roles’ (i.e. we refuse to be a housebound sex slave) etc, etc.

They’re told that women in X country (Mexico, Japan, and Thailand are the usual culprits listed) are submissive, traditional, uneducated, and you can just buy one, instead of, you know, actually working at building a relationship.

They don’t bother to learn the culture. They don’t bother to even learn the language. They believe that, because they’re white, all they have to do is show up and wave money around and every woman will fall all over their epic alpha maleness.

These guys are just gross.

Be great for getting things off the top shelf ;)

I’d say yes… except he does it to smart and digital watches too.

My snake likes to wrap around and ‘strangle’ watches. Not bracelets, just watches.

On a more serious note, I do think it’s kinda dumb that local attractions have to pay to be on those signs. You’d think it would be more of a community funded thing to encourage more tourists.

I first saw it as ‘coop’ and immediately thought, ‘hell yes, I’d support a community-owned coop, but only if there were lots of fluffy chickens and a 24/7 camera on them’.

Then I realized what you really meant. Which I’m also not opposed to, if it was set up well.

It’s a play on two things: parents threatening ‘consequences’ if kids roughhoused on the bed, and telling kids not to throw rocks at/antagonize hornet nests (both of which kids would often do anyways).

This, basically

Hmmm

Even the Far Side got in on the act

I did like Spiderman the best, I will admit. It felt a lot more relatable and real.

But then the Gwen-Stacy-as-a-plot-device-and-not-a-person nonsense started, and I was just like… oh, here we go. Again.

At least the manga I read never treated women as fridge stuffing, even if they were regulated to background characters.

I think the thing that grinds my gears the most about Rob Liefeld isn’t that he’s a terrible artist; it was that he’s a terrible artist who was kept on the payroll and allowed to keep making terrible comics. They could have fired him and hired someone else, anyone else.

Hell, at the time there were lots of successful women doing manga in Japan, and I doubt they had the only women in the world who could draw comics. It really feels like he was mostly keeping his job because he was white and male.

Even today Marvel and DC all but body-check women comic artists out the door. Thank goodness for the internet, so they can put their art out anyways, and on their own terms.

Edit to add: I recommend reading Magic Knight Rayearth if you have the time. (Maybe don’t watch the anime. Trying to simplify Clamp’s highly detailed art… didn’t work that well. Although the OAV wasn’t too bad.)

It’s an oldie, but it’s one of the comics that first got me into manga back in high school. It’s by an all-woman team, it’s beautiful (really, pretty much all of CLAMP’s art is, and I recommend checking it out), and not only did it have teenage women as the protagonists, but it was the first story I read where there was no actual villain or hero, and the story was actually compelling!

This This is a funny one. It looks like it was drawn by someone who carves wood with a chainsaw for a living. It even has the dark areas where you’d use a blowtorch lol.

Plus bonus parade balloon muscles.

With the source material, at least for me as compared to western stuff like X-men, Superman, etc, is that one, it crosses all genres and appeals to all genders. Comic books for much of their existence were largely geared to a specific, very male audience, and it was made quite clear by their writing and the actions of people into comics at the time that other genders (and, to a certain extent, skin colors) need not apply to join the club.

Since I’m a girl, when I was a kid I got teased a lot for liking ‘guy stuff’ like Batman and GI Joe. The problem was, well, I liked action stuff for one, but back then there just wasn’t anything for girls. Hell, I remember them even taking Wonder Woman’s power away, because apparently women empowerment reasons?

Those comics were all written by largely out-of-touch white guys who had, shall we say, definite opinions of what a woman could look like and should act like. And as a woman, I was never impressed. Especially by the time I got to the hundredth drawing of a woman’s ass and legs framing a supposedly ‘serious’ scene.

Then I found manga, with all-women writing teams, and artists who wrote well-rounded characters of all genders and orientations (Sailor Moon had many adorable scenes between a lesbian couple, just to name one example). They drew women who were people. They were sweet, they were brash, they were rude and crass, they were funny. And who weren’t afraid to fireball their way out of trouble. Hell, they drew varied guys who were weak, strong, silly, spacey… they felt real, in a way that I’d never seen in western comics.

Another thing is that mangaka tell the story, their characters get a satisfying actual ending, and then the artist moves on to another story. None of this ‘Oh, the X-men found happiness and solved their problems! In our next comic, watch as everything goes back to the shitty status quo because we have no idea how to write different stories!’ or ‘Welcome to the 2,171st reboot of Superman, now with Extra Edge^TM (because we hear that’s all the rage with kids these days). And remember that this iteration specifically references that one part of reboot #1,023, so read that too (if you can find it lol).’

And the third thing for me is it was quite a bit more beautiful and fluid and varied than western animation. Especially in the case of the days of Too-Many-Pockets Rob and his wooden doll faces, or the small beady eyes of, well, every comic character ever. Anime and manga faces were much more expressive, the worlds more varied and creative, and they weren’t afraid to draw regular people as protagonists, without muscles bulky enough to make you think you were looking at a Macy’s parade balloon.

It is, though—women having children later in life are at higher risk for complications for both themselves and the baby. It also has a higher risk of birth defects.

You’d be surprised how much effort people will put into proving you wrong.

And of course he adds in a picture of John Wayne, the draft-dodging, woman-beating, other wannabe cowboy poser.

Not the same. A more apt version using your comparison would be someone saying ‘I’ve been sober for a year!’ and the other person (who still drinks, but perhaps cheered them on now and again from the sidelines) says either ‘You mean we’ve been sober for a year!’ or ‘Yes, and it’s all thanks to me!’ - never mind they didn’t actively step in to help, or try to go dry themselves.

What the complaint you quoted was objecting to are people claiming full part of something they had no control over and no (or not much) involvement in, just to make themselves feel more important.

Yes we as a social species like to share in accomplishments, and that’s fine! But there is a line, that unfortunately gets crossed quite a lot, where people start to feel that they themselves were involved in the accomplishments of others, and that’s not so good. To paraphrase an above poster, we didn’t win the Super Bowl.

And also, some things people take ‘group pride’ in aren’t accomplishments at all. Being born in a specific place, for instance, or having a specific skin color. Or even just trying to share credit with every inventor/creator/whatever of the same gender. It does all tie back to our instinctive tribalism, but that doesn’t make it a good thing.

Works on my phone