@Thoctar: That sounds really nice. Keep being happy :-)

Belgium doesn't do Thanksgiving (but the shops missed the memo and still did the whole Black Friday thing), but I went on a citytrip and went to the zoo (saw gay penguins, the new coral reef they build and an octopus) and to a play about Caligula. Had a nice weekend.

Congrats Thoctar! That sounds awesome!

They've been trying to push Black Friday in Canada lately. The deals just aren't there though. I was talking with a coworker about Black Friday and he noted that he hadn't heard of anybody dying in Black Friday this year. And then we realized that Black Friday is kind of messed up when you expect to hear about somebody dying.

Why do you think they call it BLACK friday? The myth about retailers now being "in the black"? Ha! It's the rampant stampede deaths.

Because of Magic, duh.

Black Friday is a very black-aligned holiday.

This is true. Christmas in general, really. It's kinda funny that the modern celebration of All Hallow's Eve is less about reanimating the dead and more about giving stuff (even if it's just candy) to people you don't know.

That is oddly insightful.

It's a shame, really. Halloween is pretty awesome once all the commercialization is cut away. Most other holidays too, for that matter. But I especially love the aesthetics & concept of Halloween.

Actually, Christmas is not necessarily so much about greed as you might think. The man who founded the theater company I work for wrote a really interesting play about that. The basic synopsis is that there are two demons, one of whom is very proud of his efforts to ruin Christmas. He has caused the stores to decorate earlier each year, he has turned giving into a competition, he has made it a season full of stress and pressure. And then the other demon points out that starting Christmas earlier means people being friendly to each other more, competitive giving means that more gifts are being given, and retail stress means seasonal work for people who otherwise have no income. In the end they agree that people complaining about the commercialization of Christmas are a lot better for their cause than the commercialization itself ever was.

Christmas is blue

Could have SWORN that was going to be Gifts Ungiven.

Have to say that Second Demon makes a great devil's advocate, but his arguments are pretty flimsy. It's like saying that America's over-incarceration problem is okay since it has the silver lining of making more work for barbed wire manufactures.

That's because is should be
but gatherer is useless now.

Honestly, everyone should be in jail, we're all terrible people.

[Syndrome]And when everyone's in jail... no one will be.[/Syndrome]

Once upon a time there was a man who build a reverse prison. It was a small space with high walls and tightly barred doors, grey stone and very sturdy. The man stayed within the structure, but defined his side to be the outside: it was the rest of the world that was locked away from him.

Actually, I immediately thought of Taramir and the Grand Fortress. I somewhat wonder if "prison" for them was to send someone outside the walls and not let them back in until they've served their sentence. Of course, I imagine no one ever came back...

Being in prison is mostly a binary state, and not relative. If everyone's in jail, then everyone's in jail. Just like if everyone is in America, then everyone is in America.

I don't know if it's explicit nudity when it's a cartoon. There's a gray line somewhere between porn and roman art, I would assume, just not one I have thought much of until now.

It feels like you are trying to undermine my beliefs by alluding to hypocrisy, but I'm not entirely sure, since I don't see it as such.

I think we need a chain of puns to lighten the mood.

My first thought was



I think I see your point, but only when I scaled it up. I think a better analogy would have been that everyone is on Earth.