Why is he calling this "everyone's" idea of heaven? That's not what my idea of heaven is like at all. The heaven that Hans is describing is extremely Earthlike, in fact I would call it a 1:1 recreation of an ideal life on Earth. Why does this man assume that "everyone" thinks of heaven as being the same as Earth?
It doesn't make much sense to me for the world of the dead to be the same as the world of the living. The souls of the dead don't need to eat, right? Because they're dead. Therefore, "enough food for everyone" would be none at all. Eating should be completely optional, as should drinking, breathing, and everything else we need to do to survive, because once we get to heaven, we're done surviving.
The best way to describe how I've always thought of heaven is that it operates on dream logic. It can be whatever kind of world you want it to be, and you can do whatever you want, forever.
"Oh, but how would everybody get along if they all want different things?" you might be wondering, "wouldn't people have the same kinds of disagreements that they had in life?" That is something I used to wonder about, myself. But the workaround I thought of for that is a story for another post, as it would take way too much space for me to type about it here.
Drawing is normally what helps me get through tough times and work out my emotions, but lately I’ve been plagued by thoughts of my own mortality (which is sadly common for me), and I can’t shake the feeling that I’m spending my life “making sandcastles” so to speak.
When a sandcastle is made, it gets washed away by the tide, and I fear that all of my stories and artwork, both physical and digital, are just as impermanent. I wouldn’t be worried about this if not for the fact that one of my greatest fears is losing all my memories of having ever been alive once I die. If that happened, then everything I did in life, art included, will have been for nothing, as if I had never lived at all.
I don’t draw pictures and make up stories so that I can get famous after I die like Vincent Van Gogh did. I became an artist for two reasons. The first is to enjoy being one for as long as I’m alive, and the second one, after my life is over and I’ve told every story I possibly can, is to then use my body of work as assets with which to craft my perfect post-mortem fantasy world to inhabit forever after.
Unfortunately, I face opposition on two fronts- Christian fundamentalists on one side, and on the other side are the people who believe there is nothing after death. The first group believes I’m doomed to permanent post-mortem imprisonment unless I join their side, and the second group are the ones who believe that my fear of forgetting my life after I die will come true. Both ideas, particularly the second one, have been draining my motivation to create anything. 😞
If the only thing you're creating is momentary enjoyment for yourself, then that's more than enough. And personally, I don't see why someone else's viewpoint on what might happen to you after death is any reason to stop trying to construct YOUR idea of an afterlife.
These thoughts have been weighing on me for far, far too long. It was cathartic to finally get them out and share them with someone.
The reason why I ruminate so much on what other people think will happen after death is mostly due to feeling outnumbered by both the Christian fundamentalists and the nothingness-after-death believers, whose views on death I feel are considered to be the two “normal” ones to have.
I, however, consider them to be a false dichotomy, acting as two sides of the same coin, as their believers share the same certainty that they are absolutely, irrefutably correct about what will happen after we die, despite not yet having personally experienced death themselves.
Although the fundies are the ones in positions of power, and the nothingness-believers aren’t, I can’t respect either of their beliefs because they both agree that I will never achieve my post-mortem dreams no matter how successful I am at achieving my pre-mortem dreams.
The fundies believe that after I die, I’ll regret spending my life following my dreams and wish that I’d spent it serving their misanthropic god instead, and the nothingness-believers believe that after I die, I’ll forget having ever accomplished my dreams in the first place.
So I can’t respect the beliefs of either group, and see them both as obstacles to achieving both my pre-mortem and post-mortem goals.
The last time I ever cared to watch new american tv cartoons for kids was when it was amphibia and owl house, and even by the end of those I felt too aware that they weren't made for me.
They were nice ones to "end" on as kind of exactly the cartoons I wanted when I was still a child (bugs and monsters and demons and cool villains!), but they were both also so obviously throttled by Disney that my outer adult was wincing for the showrunners who clearly wanted to do something with still more edge to it.
So, very big fan of what both creators are now up to.
I'm feeling the opposite. I watched Knights of Guinevere and explained in this post why I'm not interested in seeing any future episodes of it. I'm getting tired of adult cartoons, and I'm going to take a break from them after I see the last episode of The Amazing Digital Circus.
Sorry, Bog, but I can't "move on" from kids' cartoons together with you. I've already lost too many other joys in my life, so I'm not going to give this one up just for the sake of following your lead.
That’s ambiguous syntax. By “it” is actually all we have, do you mean “some small joy” is actually all we have or that “this life” is actually all we have?
That’s ambiguous syntax. By “it” is actually all we have, do you mean “some small joy” is actually all we have or that “this life” is actually all we have?
You have no idea how the for you page works. No one is posting specifically for you. It's algorithmically-collected posts made by people who don't even know you exist. You are not the main character.
If the posts in the For You page aren't specifically for me, why is it called the "For You" page? Also, this isn't just about my own For You page, because obviously I'm not the sole target audience of the posts on my For You page. I would imagine that the posts on my For You page should also be appearing on the For You pages of other people who are the target audiences of those posts. Assuming the posters know how to choose their target audiences, that is.
Also, what am I not the main character of? Tumblr? I never claimed to be the main character of Tumblr. I wouldn't want to be the main character of Tumblr. I'd never have any privacy if I was. I don't even know how you found my post in the first place because you're clearly not a fan of mine. If you don't intend on becoming my follower, I suggest you move on to a different blog.
Just imagine it for a second, what being the main character of Tumblr would be like. Your inbox would be constantly overflowing with messages, and only some of them would be from actual fans of yours wanting to ask you genuine questions. The rest would be spam and/or hate mail from random losers who couldn't type well if their lives depended on it.
Every single one of your posts would be doing outrageously high numbers, to the point where you'd be receiving nonstop notifications on your computer, smartphone, and/or tablet. Not just of likes and reblogs, but also of comments, and boy howdy could you imagine what kinds of flame wars your commentators would be getting into while you weren't looking (or even while you were looking)?
Yeah, that's not the kind of status I'd want to have on this website. If you were to ask me who the current "main character" of Tumblr is, I would say it's Gooseworx. If, however, you were to ask me who Tumblr's main character was ten years ago, when the Undertale fandom was at its busiest, I would have said Loverofpiggies, AKA The Crayon Queen.
The False Dichotomy of the Christian Afterlife and Nothingness After Death
PROSELYTIZERS DO NOT INTERACT: Anyone who reblogs or comments on this post with the intent of proselytizing will be blocked. You have been warned.
Halloween is in just a couple of weeks, and since it's ghost season, I'm going to post another essay about a topic that I've already discussed multiple times on this blog- death.
More specifically, my frustration regarding a phenomenon I've witnessed multiple times in the YouTube comment sections of videos or posts about someone who died. Whether the deceased loved one is a person or a pet, many of the commenters have a habit of sorting themselves into one of two categories.
First, there's the commenters who'll wax poetic about god and Jesus, saying that god and/or Jesus have the dead loved one "in his arms" or that the dead person is "healed" or "living forever". Yes, there are people in the comment section who'll claim that a dead person is alive, as contradictory as that may seem.
And second are the commenters who say that god's not real, heaven's not real, souls aren't real, there's nothing after death, etc. They typically show up in the reply sections of the above commenters' comments, seemingly with the intention of raining on their parade.
Though, what I find worse than that is sometimes these commenters will even reply to comments that don't mention god or Jesus at all, but are simply speculating on what the dead person might be doing in heaven/the spirit world/afterlife/etc., which means that a mourning commenter doesn't necessarily have to be Christian to attract the attention of a nothingness-after-death-believer.
Unsurprisingly, this often results in the commentators getting into arguments with each other. With me being as sensitive as I am about the topic of what happens after death, these arguments can be very unpleasant for me to read. Both the Christians and the nothingness-believers can be equally insufferable to me. What also bothers me- and this is the reason for the title of this post- is that, other options beyond these two are rarely considered.
While comments about a dead person being in heaven don't always specify a Christian heaven (as was stated two paragraphs ago), that seems to be the kind that not only Christians, but also the nothingness-believers, default to. It gives me the impression that they both believe that the Christian afterlives and nothingness are the only two "valid" beliefs to have about what happens after death, hence why I refer to these beliefs as a false dichotomy.
Back in 2022, I made a post satirizing both Christians (specifically the fundamentalist types who act like pushy car salesmen about their beliefs) and nothingness-after-death-believers. In that post I referred to the nothingness-believers as atheists (which they are), but @cursed--alien clarified in the comments section of that post that not all atheists believe in nothingness after death- they just don't believe in god. This is the reason why I'm using the term "nothingness believers" in this post instead of calling them atheists.
Besides, people like me whose answer to whether god exists or not is "I don't know" apparently overlap with atheists to some degree:
In conclusion, my frustration with the YouTube comments isn't so much about god as it is about the implied false dichotomy of beliefs towards what happened to the posters' dead loved ones after they died. I truly do not believe that the binary Christian afterlife, and nothingness, are the only two possible destinations for the dead. Neither of them seem realistic to me.
PROSELYTIZERS DO NOT INTERACT: Anyone who reblogs or comments on this post with the intent of proselytizing will be blocked. You have been warned.
I'm grouchy because this has been on my mind again. No, I haven't read any more YouTube reply chains debating whether there's anything after death or not, but I can't overstate how difficult it is for me not to regularly ponder my own mortality.
Because it's late and I don't feel like thinking of too many new paragraphs to type, I'm going to post some private messages I sent to @bogleech that he didn't reply to.
This might seem strange, but it is, in fact, true. The nothingness-believers, the ones who claim to have science on their side, would be easier for me to debate with than the fundie Christians would be, because the nothingness-believers don't just make up debate points on the fly like the fundies seem to do. I already have a general idea of what direction the nothingness believers' arguments will go in, and therefore I would have a much easier time preparing proper counter-arguments to their nihilistic views on life and death.
But the fundies? Their arguments for why I should convert to their restrictive belief system could be just about anything.
The good news is, I haven't received much pushback from fundies in years. The bad news is, the nothingness-believers are still just as much of a thorn in my side as the fundies are, just in a more passive way, as opposed to the fundies with their pushy car salesman-like behavior.
PROSELYTIZERS DO NOT INTERACT: Anyone who reblogs or comments on this post with the intent of proselytizing will be blocked. You have been warned.
How can people separate art from artist though. Characters ARE their creators to me. Legal status never changes that. Even public domain doesn't change that. Mickey Mouse effectively is Walt Disney in my brain, just forever no matter what and Cthulhu is a piece of H.P Lovecraft's mind even generations after he's been a skeleton in the dirt.
Will I probably watch the new ren and stimpy delightfully now headed by almost everyone their original creator ever wronged? I'm sure that's going to be funny as hell and they were always the real talent but like...he still invented the characters. Something will always feel weird and off like they really could have let it lie and make a different show. Same with whatever they're gonna do with all the roiland stuff. I actually unironically liked solar opposites and even parts of ricko morto but no matter who replaces him or writes for it, he made up those characters, it'll always be weird. Just have everyone else on those shows make new equivalent shows?? Morty's dad was funnier than anyone else in it. Who does that voice again? Give him a whole show with a similar guy getting into weird trouble. Far funnier.
I've been down in the dumps once again and part of it has been because this post has been stewing in my brain. Are you saying that you think of Mickey Mouse as a self-insert?
Does that mean that if I were to daydream about him riding on a bus, train, plane, etc. together with a bunch of other cartoon and/or videogame characters, that would count as me having Walt Disney together with Genndy Tartakovsky, Craig McCracken, Danny Antonucci, Shigeru Miyamoto, Satoshi Tajiri, Masahiro Sakurai, etc. inside my head? Even though I never met any of them, living or dead, and there's no telling whether I'd even get along with them if I did?
What about your characters? I've never thought of any of your characters as "being you" except for the fly-headed man in the fishing vest that was actually meant to be a self-insert. I don't think of Fern, Willis, Bwabwabwa, Brains and Guts, Hit Me Hit Me Hit Me, etc. as you, I just think of them as characters you made up. And Jay is pretty much the opposite of a self-insert because he's based on people you don't like.
I remember this one post I added to my favorites that said "Fictional characters may not be real, but our relationships with them are." And that has always been true for me. As someone who didn't have a dedicated friend group growing up, cartoon characters, video game characters, and even book characters were like friends to me when I was a kid. Watching cartoons, playing video games, reading books, drawing pictures, and playing pretend all felt like spending time together with friends to me. They gave me a sense of stability that real life people wouldn't give me. It's a sense of stability that I'd really like to have back nowadays to help me cope with my politics-induced depression.
But I haven't been able to daydream about cartoon characters without you there in my head giving me the same lecture that you gave in your post. I know that I could get around this problem by daydreaming about my OCs instead, but all that does is give me intrusive thoughts about people on the internet making pornographic fanart of them.
I'm grouchy, I'm sad, and I just want to spend time with my "friends" in my head without feeling like I'm actually spending time with random real-life people who might not even get along with me. Is that too much to ask?
behold the genderfuck radical queer character who is disrupting the fuck out of gender norms. and then the character is just someone with facial and body hair wearing a dress. and the implication here is that the combination of these traits makes it obviously wrong or imperceptive to assume that this character could or would simply be a woman -- it has to be something else, something Radical -- since women couldn't possibly-- !
