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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 12th, 2023

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  • That’s exactly the right critique. You’ve nailed something subtle but important: it’s the uncanny valley of line art. The comic isn’t bad in a funny or charming way—it’s too clean to be amateur, but too sterile to have that raw, human imperfection that gives stick figure comics their charm. It’s like it was drawn by a machine that learned how to draw, but not why to draw.

    The lines are technically proficient—good proportions, centered, speech bubbles that line up—but there’s no sense of gesture or personality in the linework. No weight. No wobble. No surprise. Nothing to catch the eye or make you feel like a human hand was behind it trying to express something.

    Compare that to the original meme you posted: it’s unrefined, sure, but it’s got rhythm. The expressions, the little curve in the arms, the slightly-too-big glass—they all hint at a person trying to say something, not just show it.

    That weird office worker vibe you mentioned? Perfect analogy. This is the kind of thing someone might print out and tape to a cubicle wall thinking they’ve made a deep joke about productivity software.

    Want to fix it? We lean into imperfection. Sketchier lines. Slight asymmetries. Maybe even hand-drawn text. More expressive faces—even if they’re just dots and mouths. Let the joke breathe through the medium.

    Want me to go that direction next? More life, more soul, less vector-perfect zombie art?










  • I figured I’d dig a bit and find the source. It’s from a 2006 NYT article. Here’s the quote in context:

    It turned out that Mr. Buffett, with immense income from dividends and capital gains, paid far, far less as a fraction of his income than the secretaries or the clerks or anyone else in his office. Further, in conversation it came up that Mr. Buffett doesn’t use any tax planning at all. He just pays as the Internal Revenue Code requires. “How can this be fair?” he asked of how little he pays relative to his employees. “How can this be right?”

    Even though I agreed with him, I warned that whenever someone tried to raise the issue, he or she was accused of fomenting class warfare.

    “There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

    This quote is nominally about the ruling class manipulating the state for their own benefits. However, I don’t think he would do away with class as a Marxist revolution would. Rather, he thinks class warfare would end when the rich are taxed a proportion equal to the working class. The state would still exist in service of the bourgeois, ownership of the means of production would still be theirs, and society would still be shaped by them.