Jay Naylor's Blog

The Red comic is completed and up on the adult catalog, now ( https://jaynaylor.com/catalog.php ) and I'm already sort of gearing up for the next project. I'm pleased that I'm doing these at an even better clip than before. A project like this would have taken me a bit longer with my old pace. The pages look really nice. I'm also really excited to work on the continuation of the original Cottonwine story. This next comic will continue events left off from the Fall of Little Red Riding Hood and be the first installment in the Rise of the Wolf Queen.

I also have a project featuring Mai and Minh and some nice little explanations about them from Priscilla's standpoint that's pretty foremost in my mind. So much so that there's a good chance it'll be the comic I do after the first Wolf Queen comic. There's also a comic possibly involving Brice having his own fling which will coincide with an Original Life arc I have planned for this year, but it's release will warrant some timing, so I can't say when that'll manifest. Aside from that, this year is fairly up in the air. There are a lot of half-stories and good ideas that I haven't yet coalesced into workable form that could make for fun things to do.

Thanks for your support! :3

Jay

Things for 2013 are a little more loose than my usual collection of ideas. This is in the hopes that by the time I have time for some of the little germs in my mind, they'll still seem new and exciting and I won't feel like bypassing them. Many projects in the past have never seen the light of day because of that.

Another thing worth noting is how I plan to be much quicker in producing work. One of the things that really slows me down is overthinking which lines I'll put where and what I'll put in this frame or that in a comic, when a more stream-of-consciousness approach yields equally effective results. That's more or less what I did with the Samantha comic and it came out great. I would have finished the comic much sooner, but my move to Florida put a huge speed bump in my production schedule. But in 2013, I'm hoping 10 and 15+ page comics become normal, instead of an impressive exception. I'm also getting more work done per day in my new place. I feel much less dreary.

The next comic I'll be working on will be about Red the otter. It's something I've been thinking on for a while and it's time. I'm working on this as a comic that I'll work on as 2012 ends and 2013 ramps up. This is what I will work on while the ideas for The Rise of the Wolf Queen begin to come together in a more solid form. Right now the story is still just loose notes due to not being able to think on much else. But I am eager to get started on the next series from the Cottonwine universe. There are also plenty of ideas swirling around about Priscilla's little retinue of household help, mainly revolving around Mai and Minh. Their relationship and behavior has become a subject of a few drawings of mine and I'd love to expand on it further in project form. Right now I'm keeping that idea for later in the year, possibly after the first Wolf Queen comic.

That's all for now. Thanks to everyone who supports my work. You're the best. :3

I secured the keys to my new place last Friday and I'm in the process of ferrying down loads of things leading up to moving the large things down in about a week. It's a sweet place. Secure, strong and made of concrete, having survived many decades of storms. I used to live at the same complex a few years ago and I really missed living there. I really am cut out for warm weather and a relaxed, beachy life. I'll be that self employed dude who lives by the beach and sets his own hours, and it's a good thing to be.

Here's a view of the pool from my balcony. It's a sweet pool. There's also a fitness room so I can run on a hamster wheel no matter what the weather is like.


Five minutes walk from the apartment is this:


It's a smaller beach than Cocoa to the North, but that's kind of nice. It's never been overcrowded in my memory and when the tide's too high, it's still nice to sit on the small boardwalk there and just enjoy the ocean.

The move is putting a hit on my productivity. I was sure to finish the ongoing Samantha project before the end of this month, and right now it could go over by a few days. It's a large project, so it'll be worth the wait. All my spare time is devoted to keeping the webcomics up to date and working on the Samantha project, so all the ideas I have for single images I want to upload to my site galleries are on hold and piling up in my mind. It could be a while before I continue my contributions to FA, DA, Tumblr, and Weasyl in any significant way.

It also means I'm pushing back my commission schedule. Those on my commission list aren't out any money, so there's no tension, but still, I like to keep in communication. I'll be plunging back into my commission list after I get fully settled in the new place.

Thanks!

Most of this movie was about what I expected. It was clear that each film in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy cover an important period of Wayne's crime fighting "career", and that this would, by necessity, had to be his last. What I also expected, and came away validated on, was that the sorts of people who really liked the second movie in the trilogy, wouldn't like this one nearly as much because it lacked the same tension and pacing from the beginning, as well as the nihilistic Joker character who holds a philosophy that justifies many of their darkest fantasies in such a macabre way. To them, the film would have fallen "flat" because they aren't really there to analyze the entire tale, as much as they are there to enjoy mindfucks and good fights. It does leave me wondering what this third film would have been like if Ledger had still been alive.

Spoilers ahead, naturally.
In any event, I liked the film. I look at movies in a different way than most people I know, including my friends. It starts out more slowly than perhaps we would have expected, building very steadily to a level where the usual emotional body-blows and tension we expect are present toward the second half of the film. I can appreciate the challenge in fitting so much into the constraints of a marketable film. Imagining such a challenge, I don't know if I'd have the patience with the medium. Another thing that I enjoyed about the film, that no doubt will cause others to dislike it, is that it requires the use of your mind to fully grasp what's going on. The antagonist isn't just a bad dude who wants to destroy things, but also, heralding back to parts of the first film, Wayne has to fight parts of himself. He has to overcome his apathy towards death and regain a sense of his own life and happiness outside of his Batman persona. This was actually an incredibly refreshing thing to see in a modern movie about a hero like this, who actually goes on to live a good life instead of sacrificing himself at the end. I think expecting, and being disappointed, in Wayne's survival at the end, reveals a pretty bleak personality and I'm glad the movie avoided catering to that idea of sacrifice.

And no, I'm not really interested in listening to someone's opinion about how heroism necessarily requires sacrifice, even the ultimate one.

While I really enjoyed the second movie, there were a few things that left me uneasy at the end of them. Namely, that the foundation of Gotham's hope was left on the lie that Dent was a good, incorruptible man, as well as the false truth that Alfred allowed Wayne imagine by burning Dawes' letter. The third film went on to invalidate these untruths by illustrating the damage done by their revealing, and then the benefit of people acting with the clarity of reality once they learned the truth. Wayne was able to move on, and Gotham was able to rally around Batman as the symbol they needed. The temptation for the easy lie was accepted at first, but it didn't pay off. While the second movie seemed to denigrate the ordinary man trying to stand up and do things themselves (with the Batman copycats in the beginning of the film), the third movie implied a more noble version of this. Without relying on superheroes, regular people could take to the streets, coordinate actions, and assault bad guy strong holds. The turnaround of the douchebaggy police chief at the end of the movie, taking to the streets in his dress blues, was a nice touch.

Ultimately, I think my favorite parts of the film were the ones that played to an undercurrent theme throughout, starting with Alfred's suggestions here and there, and culminating in Wayne's climb out of the prison pit. It wasn't a fearless attitude toward death that made Wayne a capable hero and a fighter, but ultimately, it was his realization that his life was worth living, and therefor, worth fighting for. Again, an inversion of the typical hero template.

Selina Kyle was handled well, the only way Nolan could, I think. I don't think she was ever called "Catwoman" during the entire film. She was simply called a cat burglar on one occasion. She had no tail. She never purred or meowed, nor did she live in an apartment full of cats. Her "ears" were nothing more than protrusions from her goggles, which went away as soon as they were over her eyes. Catwoman was always a Batman character on the edge of villain and hero. The harshness of the city turned her into what she was, but she never succumbed completely. Even in the Nolan film when she sees the end game of her populist motivations, one can tell she's realizing her mistake.

Populism played a big role in the film. The concept of social justice and wealth redistribution, heedless to being rightfully earned, is used by those who understand its ultimate conclusion: the destruction of value all together. Talia and Bane use this populism as a trojan horse, tailor made to disguise their destructive intent. The film reveals how people motivated by altruism and social justice are more open to corruption, deception, and wanton destruction, than those motivated by their own sense of life and real justice. It also rejects the sense of "group justice" offered by Talia, which requires the destruction of an entire city, innocent along with the guilty, in order to "reset" society back on a path of their choosing. The fight against this motivation is a fight to preserve the innocent and good individuals, even if they are surrounded by bad elements. This is a pretty good rejection of the Platonic view of the world, where individuals are regarded as inconsequential to the overall group "concept" they may be a part of in someone else's mind.

Analyzing the movie from the context of all three, I thought it was a good way to end the trilogy. Some people will agree, others will think it wasn't as good as the second and therefor not a success. There may be some points about how the film could have been paced at the beginning, to add a more thrilling feel to the entire build-up, but without being able to see it a few times, I can't speak to that right now, and it's all speculative, anyway.

A couple of weeks ago I decided to conduct an experiment that involved excluding wheat (as well as a host of other grains) from my diet. There were a few contributing factors that lead me to try this. I had a roommate who had a sensitivity to gluten. When she excluded it from her diet, she lost a considerable amount of weight. I started hearing about various diets that downplayed the importance of carbohydrates, such as the Paleo diet movement and the like. Paleo is founded on the idea that the human body evolved for hundreds of thousands of years on a hunter-gatherer diet, as opposed to a grain-heavy agricultural diet, which was only made possible to mankind very recently in our species' history. Because of this, a diet that mirrors a hunter-gatherer diet (meat, fruit, greens) is healthier for our biology, than carb-heavy agricultural diets dominated by domesticated grains.

This experiment was very easy for me to conduct because my eating life was already a very simple affair. I've never been overweight. When I was in my late 20s and I noticed the waist of my pants getting tighter, I made the conscious decision to mind my diet instead of resigning to purchasing new pants. Despite having a sedentary job, I force myself to do floor exercises throughout my workday in order to keep some muscle tone and just feel good about myself. My diet was already pretty light on carbs most of the time. I would eat very simply. Things I could season and throw on an electric grill, and a simple side, allowed me to eat quickly and get back to work without the hassle of leaving the house for fast food. My wheat exposure at the time amounted to snacky things around the house, like crackers and such. I noticed that every three or four days of this, I would feel the urge to consume a lot of food. I needed to eat until I felt that fully satisfied (read: FULL) feeling. This would be satiated by a meal at McDonalds, some kind of chinese delivery, or a large thin crust pizza. Now, I said I wasn't overweight, but since my late 20s, I've had an ever-present layer of softness around the middle. Nothing severe, and nothing coming close to the impressive spare tires or potbellies of most of my friends. But just enough to make me less than model-thin at the waist. This was more evident when the elastic of my underwear would dig in, creating little muffin-top love handles.
Always on a quest for quick foods I could prepare during my work day, I decided to start making sandwiches. I hadn't bought a loaf of bread in a long time. I started having sandwiches for lunch, and I noticed how differently I felt. It was pretty stark. I don't have any digestive disorders, intolerances, allergies, anything. But I noticed that after I had a tuna fish sandwich on whole wheat bread, I felt sluggish, lazier, even my attitude was less motivated to return to work with the same gusto to finish what I'd started that morning. I'd push through it, curiously wondering why when I had something as heavy as steak and sweet potato for lunch, I could return to work perfectly fine, with ample motivation. This happened every time I had a sandwich for lunch. I'd heard a lot of this-and-that about wheat in the past and decided to look into it further by reading the book "Wheat Belly" (okay "reading" is a stretch, as I listened to it on audiobook while working).

It covers a lot of ground I suspected, but also talks about the differences between the wheat we eat today, and the wheat people ate in early civilizations and even a hundred years ago. It goes over the genetic modification that took place to produce wheat with enhanced yields, so it could be cheaper, more abundant, and help combat global hunger. Noble aims, to be sure. There was no consideration for how the new strains of wheat would impact the human system. It just wasn't thought of. Ironically, while seeming to cite regulatory oversight as a preventative measure against these sorts of things, the book indicts the very incorrect government and quasi-government nutritional guidelines that emphasize a diet heavy in "healthy whole grains". This was a dietary push that ramped up into high gear in the 1980s and coincides with the gradual ballooning of the American population (a trend now spreading to other parts of the industrialized world). People who exercise and consider themselves as having healthy diets are still overweight and quite perplexed. Now, the book covers a few patients seen by the author, William Davis, who have a range of issues attributed to wheat exposure. Many of these are no doubt not universal to all humans. It's worth noting the author has a gluten intolerance, and that when eating strains of "natural" prehistoric wheat preserved by some advocacy groups, he failed to manifest the same immediate symptoms associated with modern wheat.

But this is why it was even more interesting, for me, someone without any intolerances, issues, or even the slightest allergy, to try this and notice the difference.

Adjusting was an easy matter of getting rid of the wheat-based snacks I would sometimes munch on, and resisting the urge to hit a lot of satisfying convenience foods, such as fast foods and the like. Most of all, I had to come up with home meals during those times I'd be tempted to grab a fat burger or order a big pizza. It's a worthwhile experiment you can try yourself: eat as much of a pizza as you can and see how you feel afterwards. Then another day, eat as many chicken wings (traditional unbreaded) as you can and see if there's a difference in how you feel. What I found missing from my meals was the "full and lazy" feeling afterwards, normally associated with sluggishness, and in its worst form: nap-inducing food coma. After starting the experiment my mind never felt clouded and lazy after eating anymore, and my motivation to work never suffered because of what I ate for lunch. After I got over a few initial temptations to order out (instead of ordering a pizza from Pizza Hut, I ordered buffalo wings from Wing Street once), I found my apetite would really coast on less throughout my day.

In "Wheat Belly", wheat is explained as an appetite enhancer. It actually encourages you to eat more by the way it reacts with the body. Wheat has an incredibly high glycemic index, meaning it raises your blood sugar to high levels compared to other foods. Your body absorbs these carbs readily and converts them to blood sugar. This generates an induced "satisfied" feeling for your body that lasts until the sugar level crashes a few hours later. Then, your body tells you that you need to eat more to compensate for this "crash" from a previous blood sugar spike. This is what induces a sense of extreme hunger, the overwhelming temptation to eat, and the irritability expressed by people who have "low blood sugar" and need food, soon. These ups and downs are replaced by a more steady, even blood sugar level throughout your day, because you're not spiking it with quickly absorbed carbs. You're still taking in sugars in other forms, such as fruit (which the book recommends minimizing your intake of), but it's nothing like the every-meal presence of wheat, and it doesn't hit the body as hard. I can attest to how easily it is to now eat lightly, to coast through periods where you're grazing on simple things, to eat because you know you should, not because your body is yelling at you to satiate an impatient craving.

Since beginning the experiment, my middle has become thinner. The love handles have shrunk (and I hope continue to do so). I don't feel like I have to go through periods of hunger or over-grueling exercise, just to maintain a 33 waist. As it is, I see myself moving to a 32, easily. Right now, desire isn't an obstacle. The idea of consuming bread isn't appealing to me any longer. Declining things like pizza and burgers can be tougher, and eating on the road is a real chore. I ate 10 chicken McNuggets while on the road to Florida with Mahrkale for vacation last weekend. I could feel the same sort of mental haze and sluggishness setting in afterwards (they are breaded and fried). The rest of the weekend, I did well. While hitting IHOP and other breakfast joints, I felt great after a breakfast of eggs, meat, fruit, and coffee, avoiding pancakes, toast, and other bread/flour based foods (though IHOP's omelettes have pancake batter in their eggs, so I had to "suffice" with a T-Bone steak - oh the humanity).

For some, wheat is like a chemical addiction. They try to go without it and they end up scarfing down muffins and doughnuts and having to start over at some point. I've never had an addictive personality to begin with. I have weaknesses for whiskey, which is distilled from grain (even if not specifically wheat), so I've kept them to a minimum. I still sip my bourbon from time to time, though. Without a second though, I'll go weeks without a drink or a puff from one of my pipes, and then suddenly decide to enjoy a little, so minimizing such pleasures has never been difficult for me. Just as well, modifying my food intake isn't that difficult either. Others may have a harder time tackling this. No more beer, evening relaxers include red wine, fine sipping tequila, and the occasional bourbon or scotch. Don't think I'm willing to give up the latter just yet in order to become completely "grain free". Just eliminating the wheat as much as possible, wherever possible, has me feeling much better.

I'm at the point where I'm pretty sure I don't want to go back to wheat. There are entire areas of the supermarket I happily ignore, now. If you're wondering about this, read the book and try the experiment and see for yourself. One of the things you will be immediately struck by is how prevalent wheat is in almost everything available, especially anything cheap and convenient. It means finding new ways to prepare things, finding new dishes, and learning to enjoy quick meals you can prepare at home if you don't have the time to cook complex dishes for hours. You have to be a little extra vigilant about what you buy and eat, but I think it's well worth it.

I'm keeping the main comic feed for Original Life PG-13 by adding mosaic censoring to the open nudity. It's hard to cover a clothing optional community without doing that. I thought of trying to cleverly hide everything with sprigs of foliage and wisps of hair, but felt I should just go natural with it. I want people to be able to read the stories as they please, anywhere they like, without worry, which is why I'm keeping the main comic site censored.

You can find the uncensored comics on my Tumblr account ( http://jayrnaylor.tumblr.com/ ). I'll try to post them up the mornings they update on the main site, when I wake up. They're not really sexual or crazy or anything, really, but I thought I'd give the option to people who like to save the files.

This isn't the first time I've received an email along these lines, but this one was specific and thorough enough to share, and it sheds light into why I don't get upset when people talk about me on the internet. Reality stands for itself.

Shared with permission:

Hi, my name is (name withheld). I was reading Bad Webcomics Wiki, which is
generally entertaining in pointing out blatant flaws in comics, when I
happened upon the review of your comic, Original Life. I read the
entire reviews, as well as your entire comic, and I must say that I DO
NOT understand what they are complaining about!

Their criticism amounts to "asdf they don't have the same views as
me!!!! no fair!!!!" and insults about art style from your very early
comics, which I must say has improved greatly since the first comic.
In the later half of the article, the criticism devolves completely
into personal attacks and accusations of pedophilia (wat?).

I usually enjoy Bad Webcomics Wiki, but I must say that the article on
your comic was entirely uncalled for. I am just writing to let you
know that not everyone will mindlessly hate any comic posted on that
site, and that your comic has gained a new reader, regardless of
controversy.

P.S. In case this surprises you, I am not a very political person, and
I do not consider myself a furry. I just enjoy the comic, even though
the wiki article implies your only fans are pedophile animal rapists
with a penchant for Ayn Rand. Some people will get worked up about
anything.

<3 (name withheld)

After saying thank you and stating essentially what I said at the top of this journal post, they added in a following email:

My realization about the review of your comic on Bad Webcomics Wiki
has actually caused me to look back at the other reviews there more
objectively. I am beginning to see that many (but not all!) of the
comics on that wiki were being unfairly criticized in a similar manner
to yours, which really sucks, turning away many prospective readers
without even giving them a chance to read for themselves. So, thanks
for having a comic that stood up so well against it's critics as to
help me realize this! :D

I do understand the entertainment value of sites that make fun of other things. They can be a great bit of frivolous humor to fill a bit of time and make us laugh at the efforts of others. Unfortunately, by their nature, they do become depositories for grudges, speculation, and the accenting of faults. This is done sometimes to simply fuel the pleasure of sharing a mutual dislike for someone. Most of all, it's important to realize these things and never let such things factor into your desire to create and have fun.

If what someone's saying is untrue, your repudiation is your material. Such things say more about the people leveling the accusations and bitching over the internet, than they do about you. Simply put.

I'm often treated to the spectacle of someone on the left revealing their thoughts on the nature of conservatives and why they do what they do. Very often, they show just how much they've been influenced by sensational fiction by ascribing various villainous cliches to the motives of their ideological opponents. I guess I have a unique perspective. Having once been what one might call "on the left", and then having been a conservative, and now finding myself disagreeing with everything on the traditional left-right spectrum, I can at least come away with an understanding as to why my ideological opponents think what they think. Few seem to possess this insight.

I think the left-right spectrum is misleading. I prefer a freedom-statism spectrum, myself, as both aspects of the modern left and right embody statism and collectivism at their core philosophies, only to varying degrees and on different issues. Even when I agree with a traditional left or right stance on an issue, I find those who identify on the left-right spectrum agree with me for the wrong reasons. They all have terrible premises and sloppy thought processes, and when they're right about something, they're almost always right by accident. I know what liberal and conservative mean as modern American political terms, but I prefer to avoid the term "liberal". A hundred years ago, I'd be described as a classical liberal, the term sharing the root word with "liberty" and meaning a proponent of independence and freedom. Today, the political "liberal" is a statist at his core, regardless of whatever personal behavioral freedoms he lobbies for. Since they've turned to statism to push their agenda, they're no longer worthy of the term "liberal", and so I won't use it.

This is a very generalized description of the conservative thought process based on my personal experiences and discussions, both as a conservative in the past, and as an outsider in discussions of various contention. It's not applicable to all, of course. But I believe it most likely represents the thought processes of the majority of conservatives. They may disagree and recoil at being analyzed, but I can't help that. Any offense is unintentional, and one can rest assured that at least my own insight is more flattering than the juvenile "insight" into conservative cast by your average leftist.

The whole process toward putting this journal together got started when I noticed the reactions to the vote in North Carolina on this absurd amendment to the state constitution to prevent same-sex marriages. It's such a great issue to shed light on why they believe what they do. So that's what I'm going to use.
If you have the imaginative prowess at your disposal, I'd invite you to put yourself in the head of another person. This person grows up on a fairly ordinary American setting. There are hardships and there are good times. There is a sense of stability he finds in his family, or his community, or failing these things, at least in a vague "sense" of a society that's admittedly a great one compared to much of the rest of the world, and owes its high points to a legacy dating back to the European Enlightenment (though he doesn't take it that far in his conscious thoughts). He grows and witnesses an erosion of community cohesiveness and culture, and that erosion manifests in rising crime, failing schools, graduates with terrible work ethics, and a litany of other problems that if left unchecked, seem to be headed toward the future depicted in Robocop's Detroit, with OCP replaced by an entrenched government bureaucracy. In fact, the state of Detroit, today, is a classic example of what happens to a city that's almost completely beholden to the people who are lining up to be his ideological opponents (leftist Democrats, unions, etc). Even if he's not suffering these things in his own tight circles, he is hearing about them and noticing them on the news. He is beholding statistics that bear them out, and he may see glimpses in his daily life.

Unlike the average modern American leftist, his mind at least tries to integrate political perceptions and he tries to iron out stark contradictions in his principles. He's sloppy at this, and he's often not even fully conscious that he's doing this, so he integrates observations and knowledge incorrectly, deriving bad conclusions and forming a chimera of bad principles. Most importantly of all, the more subtle contradictions in his thinking slip by his conscious mind unnoticed. He forms associations that influence his views on issues. The Democratic party panders to everyone with a gripe, tossing out goody bags to their myriad of constituency groups, many of whom have contradictory aims. In either case, in his mind, the aims of these different constituency groups form the same colossal erosive force behind what his mind has nonchalantly called "societal decay". Issues that aren't even seemingly related to high crime, neighborhoods falling apart, high divorce rates, children who never know their fathers, poor work ethic, are nonetheless associated, even if vaguely, with what's behind these circumstances. He becomes naturally antagonistic to anything that smells of what he'd classify as stemming from an atmosphere of "willy nilly anything-goes permissiveness".

Just like how the leftist will flippantly equate freedom with "anarchy" and see personal economic freedom as "willy nilly anything-goes permissiveness" with the result of children starving in the streets, the conservative forms the same sloppy either-or code in his mind when it comes to the permissiveness toward "flaunted personal behavior" that doesn't quite fit the picture he had of society as he grew up. It doesn't fit in with his concept of stability. It leads, even if indirectly, to the erosion of our values, our cohesiveness, and somehow, therefor, breeds a flippant attitude about marriage, high divorce, single parents, high crime, urban decay, etc... etc... And at no point does the conservative or the leftist ever visit the tenuous threads of their arguments and wonder if the connections really exist. They never find a common principle. It's why our conservative will argue for economic "freedom" but turn into an ardent statist on issues like same-sex marriage. He doesn't see the contradiction, because he doesn't actually hold any principles. He may think he does, but he actually does not. He supports economic freedom for pragmatic reasons like growth and prosperity (which incidentally gives the moral high ground to the left, which isn't concerned with either growth or prosperity at its moral core [though leftists will argue on the surface that they do]). So it's no surprise that his opposition to certain personal freedoms, like same-sex marriage, is born of misguided pragmatic notions in his mind. He is, essentially, a philosophical pragmatist without a moral base. Even if he is religious and finds his moral base there, his arguments for the need for religion follow pragmatic lines: we need community cohesiveness, values, stability, etc... therefor, we need the moral foundation found in religion (and generally the more tender and loving New Testament).

Like the leftist, the conservative is starting to find government power an enticing weapon in his fight. The government possesses a monopoly on the initiation of coercive force against non-criminals. It writes all the laws and makes all the rules by which we must abide or be punished against our will. It's by this means that statism hijacked modern liberalism. It's a seductive instrument when your goal is societal change. You can force people to do things by law, instead of just changing the culture and persuading others, but otherwise leaving them free to do as they please with their own property. As the left can use the government to force change, the conservative can use it to attempt to stem the tide of what he sees as this erosion of society. He turns to legal mechanisms to prevent things he sees as "threats" to his vague sense of societal cohesiveness and normality, same-sex marriage included. He never once visits the premise of individual rights on the matter, and whether or not someone's rights are being violated by permitting same-sex marriage. And if the answer is "no" it should be a legally permitted act. He's looking for a big forceful hammer by which he can slay the conceptual enemies of societal functionality and values, never looking past the issue at hand and into any underlying principles. His connections are vague, nothing more than a "sense", so he can't explain them fully with words. Without the ability to explain, laws will have to suffice. He just knows. How? He can't quite explain. But to him, it's still very real.

This is why a conservative can say he's not homophobic, he doesn't hate homosexuals, he's not a bigot, but he must still oppose things like same-sex marriages. (Most are truly and sincerely not bigots. In my own life, I've encountered more bigotry from the modern left.) To the modern left, which lacks even the most rudimentary effort into insight, this can't make sense and the only explanation must lie with a deep seated bigotry. Without the ability to even understand each other, both sides end up at these rhetorical stalemates and end up using government power to beat each other over the head.

What really needs to happen is that both conservatives and modern leftists need to be dragged... kicking and screaming if necessary... to the irreducible premises behind their arguments on every issue, and have their noses rubbed in it like dogs. This needs to happen rhetorically, of course. They need to be flummoxed when they refuse to think any deeper than their own emotional reactions. They need to be debated into logical corners where their only means of escape are rhetorical slights and other evasions, so their focus is "winning an argument" in perception, if not learning anything about reality. The slightly smarter ones will think about your points when no one else is around, at least.

What can be taken away from this is that the more thoughtful conservative can at least be dealt with on this level. He can be taught the preliminary process of the introspection which will lead him to question his vague notions and unfounded convictions. It will take time, but so does anything that's worth it. He's not a Neanderthal, he's just incorrect.

Accusations like sexual harassment and child abuse are hard to shake in the realm of public opinion, even if you're completely innocent. It's even worse for people who get involved in politics, which is polarizing by its very nature. Politicians and editorialists are assumed guilty of all accusations by people who are ideologically inclined to oppose them. It's the nature of humans who don't think: people you don't like are automatically guilty of horrible things. All this is magnified by the Internet, where the seriousness of any accusation is overshadowed by the tremendous glee taken by others in the presumption of its truth, magnified in an echo-chamber of people who also dislike the person being accused of something.

A hard thing for a creator to shake is being accused of ripping off someone else's creation. It's even more terrible when there are similarities, but they are completely unintentional and coincidental. And then one finds himself having to explain this, knowing full well those who are inclined to dislike him are much happier presuming the worst (or most probably, will never read this at all).
In Original Life, I had Stacy suffer a night of torment to break her addiction to nicotine, and I fell back on the creative stand-by of personifying the object of her addiction as a projection of her mind. It's actually a very common thing to do. Someone trying to overcome an alcohol addiction would be tempted by a talking whisky bottle, or the feminine charms of a bottle of wine. I remember one Kids in the Hall sketch where a fellow was trying to overcome his addiction to tea. In his feverish nighttime torment, David Foley was chasing him around the house dressed as a gigantic tea bag, seductively murmuring alluring and vaguely sexual enticements. In any event, my depiction of an anthropomorphic cigarette drew comparisons to the "Mr. Butts" character in Doonesbury. It blindsided me because I don't follow Doonesbury and I'm not familiar with its characters. The few Doonesbury comics I've read in the past didn't lead me to believe I'd enjoy it further, so I never thought about it again. But nonetheless, my depiction of an unnamed, one-shot, anthropomorphic cigarette drew some accusations that I'd "ripped off" Doonesbury. At least one friendly person noticed a similarity, and then I noticed one rabble-rousing Twitter child making the accusation of a rip-off. I can say it's a very terrible thing to draw up something that appears for two pages, only to learn that someone else's creation has a similar concept from many years ago.

Here are some links so you can see.
http://jaynaylor.com/originallife/archives/2012/04/304.html (the OL page with the unnamed mental figment of a talking cigarette)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Butts (A wikipedia entry about the Doonesbury character, with illustration)

Probably the real irony is that I DID do an intentional homage to Bloom County in the very same story arc, when I had Stacy clutching a knife in her jaws while she was tied to a chair. I was pleased at the people who got the reference from that one page. But there were no accusations of ripping someone off. I guess that's the difference between an entire plot arc and a character that just kinda looks like another character. Plus, I imagine the kinds of people who'd enjoy a comic like Doonesbury are the same sort of rabble inclined to presume the worst about me and sling an accusation right out of the gate. The kinds of people who like Bloom County just have better taste and manners. Makes sense.

I couldn't post my thoughts on ME3's ending, or the fan-image I did for it, without being bombarded with comments from everyone who thought they were the first to tell me about the Indoctrination Theory Ending, and a link to the video that explains it. I'll admit, it's a very compelling video that pieces together some convincing evidence. It's even had me partially sold at some point. Only partially, because I never take these kinds of things for granted unless they come from the creative source of the original work. In other words, I won't believe it until Bioware adopts it as canon.

But, there's reason to doubt they will, as this was never their intention with the ending. Yes, the video pieces together compelling evidence. Yes, it's a very strong desire on our parts to explain away how unfulfilling and disjointed this ending felt compared to the rest of the Mass Effect experience up to that point.
I'm going to push past much of the evidence offered in the video. I will say that visions of a child throughout Shepard's game doesn't exactly mean his final experience was entirely a dream. As he saw the child outside of dream-states (such as on Earth prior to escaping), it stands to reason the ending sequence may not have been intended as a mental vision. It could just mean they were trying very hard to be very poignant by including the vision of a child in a very harsh and dark setting. It's sometimes what writers do.

A lot has been made of Bioware's writing. A little too much. They're good at interpersonal motivations and dialog, but their grand-scheme writing actually reverts to using a lot of cliches (outer space "warrior" races, evil mega-corporations, evil mercs, a race of all-female human-enough-looking space hotties who can reproduce with anything, etc...). It could very well be that the writers are fantastic at putting together stories and settings that people find compelling, but they just suck at wrapping it all up in a concise ending that deals with all the loose ends. Some writers just suck at endings. I'm not excusing it. After ME2's fairly fantastic ending sequence known as the "Suicide Mission" which was very gratifying, there is no excuse for ME3's ending. However, these things happen, especially as creative types get so wrapped up in trying to convey an artistic message and lose sight of the emotional expectations of the fans of, what is essentially, an interactive and customizable fiction.

In order to buy the Indoctrination Theory regarding ME3's ending, we have to assume some things that I'm not ready to. We have to assume that this was Bioware's intent: a MASSIVE open plot-twist, the nature of which is not revealed in the actual game purchased by millions of fans. The evidence for this monumental twist is subtle enough to require most of them to figure it out by going to YouTube and seeing video analysis put together by commentators with that much time on their hands. If they had this twist in mind, why would they rely on THIS method of revealing it? If they did, they missed the opportunity to knock a plot point out of the park, and leave their fans salivating for more. I can't believe they would... I can't believe it anymore than I could believe the writer of Fight Club would decide to NOT make it clear (eventually) that the narrator had been Tyler Durden all along. Bioware would have realized that this reveal would have been a defining moment in the game, a literary home-run that would cause all the "what?" moments to finally snap into crystal clarity and really wow their fans. In order for the Indoctrination Theory to hold water, Bioware would have had to have made the conscious decision to NOT include this reveal, and intentionally leave most of their fans confused and disappointed.

If they do adopt the Indoctrination Theory for the end of this trilogy, I would have to assume it was because those hard working video analyzers and hopeful fans gave them the idea afterwards. Because of the prior paragraph, I can't believe it would be intentional prior to the release of the game.

There's also too much extraneous video footage in the ending sequence. If their intent was to "restart" galactic civilization (as the ending obviously declares) the sequence where the Normandy is fleeing battle and crash-lands makes perfect sense. Despite the plot-hole where the squad-mates who assisted in your final battles are on the Normandy - I would state that the squad-mates depicted are simply the ones the game knows for a fact survived, and that would be the ones you picked for your final missions. I think it was a decision that made programming easier. If it were a "vision", it wouldn't fit in. Why would Shepard be having a "vision" of the Normandy fleeing the field of battle and crashing? Why would this vision go unexplained? Why would they offer it as canon on the surface to their fans, without any clarification until the fans demanded one?

Equally damning is the video at the end of the credits, where it's obvious that galactic civilization has reset to a pre-FTL state. It puts the final cap on the Mass Effect universe and slaps the label on it signifying a "finished" product. Any future DLC, stories, games, whatever, that take place after the ending of ME3, have to contend with that after-credits video. I'm not saying they can't remove it from the game, just like Valve changed the game-ending video to Portal when they realized they wanted to make a sequel. What I'm saying is it wasn't their intention to do so when they created the game and proclaimed it "done". The only thing that gives me some heart about this incredibly finalizing video is the reference to more Shepard stories. It could be just a literary line that sounds intriguing but ultimately means nothing. If there is more Shepard to be played, it would contradict all the claims that ME3 would be the conclusion to the Shepard story, which I still think was Bioware's initial intent, regardless of whether they change their minds after this.

Supposedly the DLC that "clarifies" and expands the ending is coming out this summer, and it'll be free.