Lovely People aka 'the bunny comic'

[thegreyarea]

Oh no, as JoB kindly informed me - it used to be like that but it seems disqus actually screwed it up around a year ago, and like catbirds says there hasn't been much need for downvotes! I do still think a lot of people remembered that we used to be unable to and thus didn't bother to do it (proof: my post xD), but it's less bummering knowing it's been like that for a while and I just didn't notice it!

I don't recall that downvotes were off anytime, but I believe you and JoB. However it happened to me several times to accidentally downvote some comment when using my phone (big fingers+small screen combination...) and I remember downvoting some very rare unpolite commentary.
(note that I'm on Disqus only since April 2018, so they could have been off before that)
The truth is that we had very few situations when a downvote was appropriate before this recent storm, so we could spend weeks without seeing one.

[JoB]

but it seems disqus actually screwed it up around a year ago

(Or longer. As I said, I only noticed when a downvote appeared on one of my posts. Not that I'm not controversial occasionally, but not at the "I'll try to hack downvoting open again just to get at him!!" level. I hope.)

FWIW, I still remember the day when guests like myself were suddenly disallowed from leaving upvotes, so there definitively have been changes rolled out by Disqus over SSSS' lifetime.

the american election and other political events, which were in theory not allowed in the comments but uhhh not anymore (LP is inherently political in the modern context, so it makes little sense to ban politics when you're always providing a link to LP).

Don't know whether I would label religion as something necessarily political, but yes, "you forbade politics as being too inflammatory and now you bring in religion yourself!?" did cross my mind early on (before she locked the comments for a bunch of pages in a row) ...

Spoiler: show

That is, unless you had some particularly strong unpopular opinion on kade physiology, but uhhh, why would anyone? (If you do, that's cool)

Soylent Green is kade barf with added bitterns to make it a bit less addictive

[catbirds]

Don't know whether I would label religion as something necessarily political, but yes, "you forbade politics as being too inflammatory and now you bring in religion yourself!?" did cross my mind early on (before she locked the comments for a bunch of pages in a row) ...

Oops, language is confusing! I meant political not strictly in terms of things related to your ballot, but in the sense of taking a hard (ish) stance on real-world issues including technology, authoritarian governments, etc… but I think that's more of the way the word is used on the internet. Though the bible gets quoted occasionally in political debates (at least here in Canada), never (rarely?) as the central justification for policies, but almost always to add some rhetorical strength.

For SSSS/Minna Sundberg's internet presence, I'm not sure of how strictly she bans politics because on the one hand, explicit discussions about politics/elections get shut down immediately, but on the other hand she's also been pretty lax about joking about dictatorships and human experimentation on twitch sooo… ???

Spoiler: show

Soylent Green is kade barf with added bitterns to make it a bit less addictive

Spoiler: show

Aaah! The discourse that will tear the fandom apart! Oh well, at least their barf tastes good. Looking forward to working with Mx. Kade in the future.

(That movie came out before my mother was born, LOL. I'm way too young for this, but I'll keep it on the watchlist for when I get the chance.)

[Vulpes]

Spoiler: show

Soylent Green is kade barf with added bitterns to make it a bit less addictive

Spoiler: show

Well yes, adding small herons would be offputting...

[thorny]

Vulpes, that's exactly how I was imagining it!

[Draco Probabilisticus]

It appears I'm a tad late to the SSSS conscious/subconscious subtext discussion, but...

While reading the comic back when I did I hadn't really noticed the things you talked about like the lack of Saami people and non-white people in general (actually, IIRC I was a bit surprised by the latter, but didn't think much about it) because I knew nothing about Minna's views or her life in general. But now that I'm rethinking it with the context in place... the fact that the pandemic in SSSS begins with 11 illegal immigrants arriving on the Spanish coast is, uh... interesting.
I don't want to draw any strong conclusions about Minna's worldview here, I just found that detail fitting with the discussion above.

[JoB]

the fact that the pandemic in SSSS begins with 11 illegal immigrants arriving on the Spanish coast is, uh... interesting.

To be fair, if the Rash had entered Europe / transcontinental circulation by means of legal travelers / live animal shippings / goods transport, the blame would promptly have been pinned on a specific nation / region and the (intended, per Minna) obscurity about its origins would have become that much less believable.

Europe itself has been too populated for too long to be a believable source of a major unknown contagious disease anymore IMHO.

[esedege]

The fact is she uses “illegal refugees” which is a contradiction on its own terms. As I said before, it’s even worse story-wise because she states that the rash is more active in hot climates, so it should have devastated the equatorial area of Africa (and it should have been known) by the time it spread north.

I cannot agree with you JoB about the impossibility of a disease to be of European origin, there are studies that put the Spanish flu origin in France, and the mad cow disease ravaged the UK. Furthermore, our current pandemic’s origin is supposed to be somewhere in China, which is an area populated since ancient times.

[Yuuago]

I cannot agree with you JoB about the impossibility of a disease to be of European origin, there are studies that put the Spanish flu origin in France, and the mad cow disease ravaged the UK. Furthermore, our current pandemic’s origin is supposed to be somewhere in China, which is an area populated since ancient times.

Seconding this.

In fact, "A European country is the origin point of a mysterious disease" is a premise that's been done elsewhere - the first season of the tv series Fortitude is entirely about melting ice in Norway exposing an ancient/unknown source of contagion, and not once did I find it too much of a stretch for the story. (Considering the real cases in recent years where melting permafrost in other locations exposed anthrax etc.)

And then of course there's the fact that SSSS is not-entirely-realistic fiction, and the author has handwaved lots of other things... The origin choice is a deliberate choice, and taken with everything else, is a pretty unfortunate one.

[Draco Probabilisticus]

Oh, another thing. Several people said before that they've been feeling like there was something "off" about ongoing SSSS for a while. I have too, and I think I can actually formulate what it is (for me, anyway).
Even before this whole mess happened, I had believed for a while that Minna was losing interest in SSSS. The second story is... lackluster in terms of storytelling. I mean, we're past page 400 and there has been little to no character development or interesting dialogues beyond flashbacks, and plotwise all that's been happening for a while is one big Benny Hill goose bear chase. I understand that the first story had more opportunities for sidetracking to establish the setting, but even with that in mind the second story comes off as rather dull.

[JoB]

I cannot agree with you JoB about the impossibility of a disease to be of European origin, there are studies that put the Spanish flu origin in France, and the mad cow disease ravaged the UK. Furthermore, our current pandemic’s origin is supposed to be somewhere in China, which is an area populated since ancient times.

... you have a point, though possibly not the one you were trying to make. Pardon me for skipping the Spanish Flu, whose mechanisms I haven't looked into at depth, and addressing only the other two:

Spoiler: one dose of mathematician ... • show

SARS-CoV-2, as far as we know, originated in China, but more precisely around the wildlife market of Wuhan¹. In other words, a place that acts as an explicit interface between "populated" China and the wilderness parts of it. There are no similar markets in Europe¹ to my knowledge, though I suppose that our illegal pet/collectors' animal trafficking could serve a similar role.

Mad Cow (and later CJD) originated as - rather harmless - Scrapie, which was then introduced to cattle thanks to pretty shady livestock business practices.

So, neither entered the high-population world ready-made and under their own power, but were brought there by explicit human action, with our recklessness and/or ignorance (and all the obfuscation to cover that up) being major factors - and I have to admit that we're unlikely to rid the world, or even just Europe or a single nation in it, of those anytime soon ...

¹ While it's officially named a seafood market, which we certainly do have in Europe as well, the species suspected of having been hosts on the route to SARS-CoV-2 live on land, and I'm not aware of what effectly approaches "bush meat" getting anywhere near consumers alive here. Heck, Europe has called on China to outlaw such activities - how hollow a public statement would that be if we weren't doing it ourselves ...

In fact, "A European country is the origin point of a mysterious disease" is a premise that's been done elsewhere - the first season of the tv series Fortitude is entirely about melting ice in Norway exposing an ancient/unknown source of contagion, and not once did I find it too much of a stretch for the story. (Considering the real cases in recent years where melting permafrost in other locations exposed anthrax etc.)

Spoiler: ... and a pinch of nerdgasm • show

Or the Spanish Flu, actually, but weren't those found in human bodies that had to get buried back then and dug back up in current times for the germ to be found in a viable condition?

For real life, I'd find the "species X's range extended North with the climate change, it came in contact with established species Y there, and original disease Z was thus enabled to do the cross-species-spread-and-mutate game" scenario a more probable one ...

[thorny]

Europe itself has been too populated for too long to be a believable source of a major unknown contagious disease anymore IMHO.

Areas refugees have been coming to Europe from have been populated for longer than Europe and many have had dense populations for quite some time.

Spoiler: ... and a pinch of nerdgasm • show

Or the Spanish Flu, actually, but weren't those found in human bodies that had to get buried back then and dug back up in current times for the germ to be found in a viable condition?

There are bodies of various species including human buried in ice that is now melting. Production of a disease that causes a resurgence of the Norse gods seems to me more likely to have come from some such source.

In addition, if the Rash was engineered by humans, whether intentionally or by accident, that seems at least as likely to have happened in Europe or North America as in the global South; and more likely to have been done in an area not producing refugees than in one that is.

-- the speed of the spread has always seemed rather improbable to me; nearly every human on the planet's dead within a few weeks. That's seemed to me to require a magic component; and also to make it nearly impossible to tell where it started -- with the human world collapsing in all directions, how would it be possible to do the research needed to tell whether the first cases were actually on that ship or wherever the ship came from, or whether the people on the ship had caught it from an early case brought from somewhere else? On first reading, I had taken the announcement of the origin to be meant as simply somebody's guess -- there would have been a lot of false information on TV, some of it quite possibly on purpose as people tried to shift blame and/or calm populations, some of it purely by accident due to the essential confusion of the situation. If Minna's stated that that origin is full scale canon, that's also a deliberate authorial choice. It isn't something she was forced into by the nature of the story.

And having the disease enter Europe via refugees isn't a problem taken by itself -- but in combination with other information, (and with "illegal refugees" which as has been pointed out is a contradiction in terms) it looks rather iffy. There were most definitely other choices.

[esedege]

... you have a point, though possibly not the one you were trying to make. Pardon me for skipping the Spanish Flu, whose mechanisms I haven't looked into at depth, and addressing only the other two:

Spoiler: one dose of mathematician ... • show

SARS-CoV-2, as far as we know, originated in China, but more precisely around the wildlife market of Wuhan¹. In other words, a place that acts as an explicit interface between "populated" China and the wilderness parts of it. There are no similar markets in Europe¹ to my knowledge, though I suppose that our illegal pet/collectors' animal trafficking could serve a similar role.

Mad Cow (and later CJD) originated as - rather harmless - Scrapie, which was then introduced to cattle thanks to pretty shady livestock business practices.

So, neither entered the high-population world ready-made and under their own power, but were brought there by explicit human action, with our recklessness and/or ignorance (and all the obfuscation to cover that up) being major factors - and I have to admit that we're unlikely to rid the world, or even just Europe or a single nation in it, of those anytime soon ...

¹ While it's officially named a seafood market, which we certainly do have in Europe as well, the species suspected of having been hosts on the route to SARS-CoV-2 live on land, and I'm not aware of what effectly approaches "bush meat" getting anywhere near consumers alive here. Heck, Europe has called on China to outlaw such activities - how hollow a public statement would that be if we weren't doing it ourselves ...

Well, that's the point I wanted to make. I didn't went into details about the origin of neither of them, as Minna left hers vague.

Pertaining our incumbent coronavirus pandemic, certain sectors of Spain population are quite fond of hunting, which I guess is not unusual in Europe. So it's possible that right now there's some guy not even 50 Km away from me hunting a diseased-ridden wild boar with the potential of it being carrying a transmisible human disease (if it's open season, IDK). So there's still that wild-civilization connection here too, no need for animal black market (though it's a great addition I was not considering).

I think my point stands: Europe, though populated since Prehistoric times, is capable of inadvertently 'creating' a disease, which is exactly what I didn't agree with you about.

And, as thorny says, if it was human-engineered, refugees arriving to Spain are not the logical population to experiment upon.

[Tarnagh]

Minor nitpick re: Spanish flu. It didn't originate in Spain, but because Spain was neutral during WWI it was the only country that reported on it openly because of the censors on the news from practically every where else. Spain first reported on it in May 1918. The first known case was in Kansas, USA in March of 1918.
https://www.history.com/news/why-was-it-called-the-spanish-flu

While it’s unlikely that the “Spanish Flu” originated in Spain, scientists are still unsure of its source. France, China and Britain have all been suggested as the potential birthplace of the virus, as has the United States, where the first known case was reported at a military base in Kansas on March 11, 1918. Researchers have also conducted extensive studies on the remains of victims of the pandemic, but they have yet to discover why the strain that ravaged the world in 1918 was so lethal.

[katiemeredith]

Even before this whole mess happened, I had believed for a while that Minna was losing interest in SSSS. The second story is... lackluster in terms of storytelling.

You mean you don't LOVE reading 200 pages of People Hunting Really Tough Bears?

Seriously, I think that the first adventure of SSSS was great, but this one is not only poorly written, but also extremely boring and not memorable at all. Like, why are they even hunting the bears anymore? Because they're like, friends with Lalli's monster grandma? The recent chapters/past 200-300 or so pages have been not engaging at all. This totally gives off the vibe that Minna has lost interest in SSSS. I could be misremembering, but didn't she imply there were going to be more adventures than 2? Like 5? The first adventure was about the first real exploration into the lost world, and set up a clear path to take forward, if so desired. This adventure was really cool at the beginning, as Lalli's grandma's story really intrigued me. However, I think that ending the whole "series" on a note like this is sort of odd. Although, to be fair, it hasn't even ended yet.

It's interesting - and sad to see the decreasing in quality of writing, with this and with Lovely People. I mean, you can't even give Lovely People the benefit of the doubt, because this is a topic that is clearly very important to Minna. I know little to nothing about writing stories, so it would be useless for me to speculate on why this drop in quality is occuring...