The 25 Inktober 2019 prompt was "tasty', so I drew a tasty burger! Happy Thanksgiving! Nelson's word today is 'pen’. The turkey is very done; it came out of the cooker in a half dozen pieces, the largest of which was the two breasts! 8-P

What am I thankful for on this Thanksgiving 2021? That Covid-19 was not the end of the line, merely a harbinger of more to come… call me ‘Doomer’, but the shortages which we’re complaining about right now pale in comparison to if the world-wide network had collapsed. Not the end of technical civilization, but near enough as to make no difference! We need to be energy-independent and source all critical production to the continental US, possibly including Canada and Mexico. The latter would be a lot more realistic and the former is not nearly as threatening as what they already have, providing southerly big brother with resources and the occasional high tech.

So what would that be like? For one thing, since we’re going to have to bribe the corporations to do the right thing anyway, and Slippery Joe Mansion (no, Google Docs, I don’t want to use that losers’ actual name, he deserves worse than to be mocked and nameless, but let it go...), tax and land grants in west virginia and the rust belt to get additive manufacturing rolling in. We need to get started prepping for climate change anyway and the rust belt looks to be the part of the country which just might ride out the worst. At any rate, do something for the working poor, the rich can take care of themselves and will manage to make money off of it anyway!

This is ‘twenty minutes in the future’, a setting about a generation from now when my buddy Dan Newton’s new-born son will come of age, the twenty-forties. Coastal cities will start to be abandoned (Boston has already started in places, perhaps New York, too) as the sea encroaches in low-lying parts, like subways, places will continue to dry out, stay warm longer, and, if we don’t learn better, continue to become less and less fertile as we destroy the topsoil instead of building it up and stashing organic carbon away in it instead of releasing it as CO2. Probably re-wilding as we turn to cheap vat-grown meat versus factory-farmed, plus fruits and veggies in greenhouses tended by robots. Or turning those former farms into permaculture forests harvested by robots is an idea which has been kicking around for a little while, too. The yields might even be better, after you consider that we are currently making a lot of our food indirectly out of petroleum in the form of fertilizers and poisoning ourselves with pesticides. Ugh. Rant over…

I made a page which lets you make lists of items and then randomly pick one. I need to figure out some way of modifying each list item, including removing it. I’ve created to do lists and modified them into the dead simple character generator, but they were all about adding things and removing them, not revising text which I entered...