Since OP decided not to post it, here’s the extra text:
“This is one of those comics that causes a bunch of readers to check in on my mental health, isn’t it?”
I much prefer when OPs include it in the description.
Did not know SMBC features extra text, but in my defence I’ve linked the source
It would do you honour to link to the source, too. It is not that hard.
FWIW I checked the comic at SBMC and Im not sure what extra text they are talking about unless the author shared said extra text on a social network, but I don’t see anything you missed from your source.
If you click on the comic (at least on mobile) the extra text comes up (on the site). I think there is some for every comic.
I did though. I do not see said text.
You gotta long press on the picture
Oh so its the unfurl description. Interesting, but maybe a little obtuse for most users to find.
Also doesnt show up on mine in the menu or on the share screen. Just when it unfurls in a chat.
But I use Fennec and /e/OS so likely a user experience difference.
You get to be one of todays lucky 10 thousand!
It’s one of those holdover things a good number internet old webcomics do, including the linked XKCD. It’s one of those things that’s effortless with your traditional mouse-keyboard desktop setup, because you hover your mouse and magically the alt-text appears without having to really find it. But for new users in the touch screen era? As you say, yeah, definitely obtuse. :)
I had a dream once where a woman grabbed my head, looked me in the eye, and said “when you wake up I won’t exist.”
Freaked me out
I had a dream where I was in a group project back in high school, and I was apologizing to all of my group mates because I knew it was a dream and I was gonna wake up soon and leave them with all the work.
Oh my god, are you okay? That’s one of those you never let go of.
He’s okay, it’s the woman who’s in trouble here.
I wonder if he ever woke up. This is sad.
I hope he did, because if he didn’t then that means we’re inside his dream too.
In which case we need to make sure he never wakes up.
Was your dream this xkcd?
Oh good it wasn’t my idea so she’s not actually real
Relevant xkcd
But they were alive in my head and my existence is only validated by my perception. Thus, they were real. I perceived therefore I experience reality.
I dunno. I’m not like a philosopher or anything
Heart breaking
I fully expected in big font underneath:
9/11/01
What happened on November 9th 2001? Some sort of beach monster?
An extremely American event that should obviously get an American date, and you should get called out if you don’t put it in an American format.
They are having the best day of its life, for ever.
Yes, but what they represent is what’s beautiful. Things do not need to be real to have inherent meaning.
After all, it’s not what is real, it is what we experience that matters. Ever found yourself in another place when reading a book? Experienced a game so immersive that you are the character? Cried over a movie?
None of this is real. But all of this matters.
Long winded way of saying materiality is fleeting and immateriality is all.
Not quite; ultimately, what you experience is brought to you by material objects and events; we just consider our thinking and perception to be immaterial to maintain integrity with our limited perception.
The book you read is material. The game you play is a set of pixels on a material screen captured by your retina. The very thought you have while considering the immaterial is actually very material, with electrons traveling through the synapses of your brain neurons. At the end of the day, everything is material, and immateriality is nothing.
I think you are completely disregarding the existence of the third state.
While the brain is material, it is not just. You say to maintain integrity with our perception but you refuse the first acknowledgement of Rene Descartes. The dude essentially discovered his namesake.
Material, immaterial, and both. Before we get into the nonsenses of Hubbard, when I say both it is a temporary and fleeting state. The material is the vessel for the immaterial. The immaterial can exist devoid. Death for example is a constant and is completely immaterial yet as a concept we can allocate it to anything, even that which has no life. Remember the past is gone and the future is an illusion, because they are completely internalized immaterial states of being. Facilitated by your body but ultimately designed by things ultimately no longer material in a whole sense.
You get deep enough into this and you’ll have to bring up the ship of Theseus as this whole subject would relate to our definition of an item being, not being, or partly being. You are still you even if materially you are not the same. Yet your mind never stopped, never did it notice the change until it had already been done.
The material decays, the immaterial continues changing but locked in form. For example god has no physical domain indetifiable yet it keeps breathing. With no matter to speak of?
Death and God are merely concepts brought about by the currents in our neurons. And through this quirkiness instilled in us through the imperfection of evolution, we started seeing lack of something as a concept of its own, even though it’s still a strictly material circumstance directly related to presence of a respective concept.
Death is simply lack of life (which is why we can attribute it to something that didn’t live in the first place). Vacuum is similarly just a lack of matter. It’s the same, just two sides of a spectrum defined merely by the material circumstances.
Descartes merely found he existed regardless of the reality of perception, which, yes, he did.
The time is yet another coordinate of spacetime. What happened in the past is merely off one coordinate same as when we move left or right. What will happen in the future is also off the same coordinate. It’s all there, materially - but we can only be present in one place at a given time - and vice versa, move it one second and you and the planet you stand on are in a wildly different place, and you’ll never return.
And God is just something we imagined not to feel alone and scared in the grand realm of the Universe. Who says He needs breathing? Who says He is alive? Who says He…is?
The person breathes and utters god, yet no god has ever breathed.
The person lives and yet no god has ever lived.
My point is that god as a concept exists with no material form. If you are to say all immateriality exists with material. Then by your evidence if the concept of god exists, is it the neurons making it exist, is that the body of god?
It is the person who breathes into it life. As a material object it is not, it can be written and spoken and traverse the material. Yet wholely it remains in the immaterial domain of man, imperceivable by any other being. It is immaterial for the dogs cannot listen and they cannot fathom.
To say time is a coordinate is to map something immaterial as well, time passed and yet nothing changed. Time flows, yet nothing makes it move.
Rene discovered rebirth.
My point is that the concept of God, or any other concept for that matter, never unbounds the material carrier. It could be the neurons in your brain, or letters in a book we learn to transform into the neural activity, or something else - but it is always material.
If all people die, all books rot, all hard drives lose surface charge, all material evidence of the concept gets destroyed, so does the concept itself. It doesn’t persist outside the material - we just learned to replicate it and taught others to restore materially bound knowledge to make it last ages.
This is, by the way, exactly why concepts remain in the “human domain”. We don’t have any kind of special affinity to the “immaterial”; we are simply the only animals that can convert letters and drawings (which are material) to respective neural activity (which is also material), and vice versa, thanks to the evolutionary development of respective brain parts. This allows us to be more efficient at communicating concepts, even without personal presence, as long as you both agree on what symbols mean.
As for time, it’s not moving anywhere. It is us moving through it, similarly as we move through space with Earth without ever doing anything, or to falling off a cliff, for example. As any concept, time is what we formulated to explain to ourselves why things happen the way they do, and to predict what happens next. What we objectively experience we then attribute to the flow of time, yet the Universe is more complicated, and time gets “warped” (or rather, it does what it always did, it just falls out of a simple human perception) all the time in all the places. Think of black holes, or near-light travel, or even GPS satellite clocks needing correction because they literally move through time differently. The concept of time is merely a reflection of the immensely interrelated processes happening in the Universe. Yet, they’re all material, and so is the man-made concept of time flowing through our neurons.
How I feel after watching we were liars
Oh shit, they made a movie based on that book? 😮
The ending was so twisted I regretted watching it almost. Idk how I didn’t see it coming. Heart wrenching stuff
Yeah, I remember reading the book back in the day and having a similar feeling.
My eldest lad is growing up too fast - he’s got lots of hobbies, one of which needs a lot of fitness so I try and get out with him once a week for a half hour run - partly to introduce him to cardio training but mainly to just get some time alone with him before he realises his dad is an arsehole.
It’s great. Admittedly, he’s just “Roblox Roblox Roblox Roblox Roblox Roblox can we go to the shop Roblox Roblox” but it’s time with him to talk to me about whatever he wants and it’s time that I absolutely adore. I hope when (if) he chooses to have kids, he’ll look back and think “hey that was some decent dad time I had outside the house”.
I’m also secretly hoping that if he’s ever going through a rough time in life that he’s keeping to himself and we’re still out banging miles into the tarmac, then somewhere between “what’s your favourite Grow Your Garden pet?” and “I just got a badge in Doors for using a crucifix on door 69 while getting chased by rush”, there’ll be a little breadcrumb or hint at a drama that we can talk about and ease his mental health just a tiny bit.
Who knows. A dad can hope.
Awwww. A caring dad. They will see and remember this.
Omg, I feel this so goddamn much
Worse, they were AI generated.
Even after all these years, I recognized this as Saturday morning breakfast cereal!
