And now we’ve reached the part where PDR is going to introduce a philosophical thought experiment about the social ties that bind us all:

Suppose a Supernatural Being came to you and explained to you that there was an impending cosmic doom that will be magically smiting every person on Earth who is not vouched for by anyone else, those people just turn into pillars of salt or whatever. This doom will happen in a matter of seconds, though time has stopped while the Supernatural Being gathers the information about who vouches for which other people.

The Supernatural Being explains the rules clearly: You are the first person, selected randomly from the entire population to go first, and you must vouch for two other people to survive the cosmic doom, and also those two people are each then given the same opportunity to vouch for two people. Nobody knows who vouched for them, or who has already been vouched for, but the Supernatural Being explains the last wrinkle: if someone is vouched for twice, that person gets a third vote and can select one more person. But that’s it. If they are vouched for again after that, they do not get a fourth vote. Each person who gets to vote has the rules clearly explained to them by the Supernatural Being so that there aren’t any mistakes or anything, but the voters can’t communicate with each other. We each make this choice alone.

So that’s the deal. What can we think of based on that? Who would you vote for? How can we strategize to ensure the most people survive and the fewest are left to fall for the cracks?

As of this writing, I’ve thought about this thought about this experiment more than anyone else, so I suppose I have to give my thoughts. Given the rules above, I don’t think this would spread to the whole world, sadly. If I were vouched for and got to vote, I’d probably go with my mother, whom I assume would spread vouches into the family, and some friend who lives somewhere else, to try to get survival spreading as widely as possible. But I see ways this could go badly. For all I know, my mother or that friend are the one who vouched for me, and for all I know they’ve each already been vouched for and had their third vote already. In that scenario I would survive, but I would be a dead end. That seems less likely than one of them still being able to receive a third vote, so survival would only get one more chance to spread, but the risk would still be there that they would then become a dead end. In fact, the more beloved a person is, the more people would be vouching for them and shattering their votes against someone who has already spent their three.

It’s a thought experiment I’d love to see mulled over and mapped by computers, to see how far it could spread. But mostly I just needed to get it out of my own head and into the world.

I have continued to experiment with 1-bit art this week, in this case using some pictures of my friend Wuckajuice as a model:

Here’s the inside of my head:

I’m trying to teach myself to be good at making pixel art (I’ve always maintained it was an unconscionable failure that I didn’t make Adventure Dennis in pixel art), so I kinda drew a stream-of-consciouness piece. The results are full of PDR-ness, so I thought I’d make some annotations:

• To begin, the colour scheme is basically that of this website (more orangey than yellow, but close), which I’ll have had for 20 years this year. It’s a pretty important part of my life, even if after all that time I don’t think I’ve managed to make of it what I want it to be. But I’m still going here in this Internet age of social media, how many websites from 2006 can say that?
• It’s a cityscape. None of the buildings here are specific references, really, but PDR is definitely cityfolk and likes tall buildings. I tried to work in a garden of flowers on the rooftop near the beekeeper, but I sucked at drawing it, so instead we have a cityscape that doesn’t show as much nature as I’d like, but I can pretend that’s there and just enjoy the cityness of it.
• I mentioned the beekeeper, and that’s another very PDR thing. Remember when the Internet was a little more innocent and people got into debates about Pirates versus Ninjas? Well, PDR decided he had to be kooky and special and different and chose Beekeepers. But you can’t say I didn’t commit. I have become the world’s foremost reviewer of Fictional Beekeepers, after all. The Beekeeper in the image could be Adam Obianu, my own badass fictional beekeeper, but it doesn’t really matter, it’s just the concept of Beekeepers.
• The person with the beekeeper is nobody in particular, but I’ve come to think that if this is, as I joked, the inside of my head, that’s probably my own self image. Certainly it doesn’t look like me physically, since I’m a big masc oaf, but I do think that if I could choose my physical form at will something smaller and more feminine would be likely, since I already feel like I take up more space than I’d like and I am not especially manly by the standards of society. And she’s friends with the beekeeper. I like friends and I like beekeepers.
• The building the beekeeper and figure are standing on has a little occult symbol on there. I mostly just enjoy designing symbols that look occult (I did it in The Demon of South Gloria as a recent example), but the one in the image I have designed with a story in mind that I’ve not yet managed to tell.
• To the lower left of that occult symbol you can see Mackestry Manor, home to Many Monsters and setting of activity books I’ve made for sale on the Internet. I’ve not had the energy to make more recently, but I intend to get back there at some point.
• On a building overlooking the Manor is a little creature called a skeffix. This little guy comes from a one-page RPG I made as part of a Game Jam, and is standing in for my desire to create games. I mean, I technically HAVE created games, Skeffix for example, but I’d like to have the time to really refine and produce one that I could sell to the world. Maybe this’ll be the year.
• Above the skeffix is my attempt at a duck flying by. I purposely made to attempt to make this accurate to any species of duck because, once again, this is a self-reference. Back before emails and stuff, when I used to send letters to friends, I would occasionally just end them with “and here’s a picture of a duck” and do a little doodle of a duck. It was never meant to be high art, it was meant to be PDR’s way of ending a letter. I just like ducks. Here’s one time I made a Snow Duck.
• To the right of the duck you’ll see some sort of UFO-looking thing, but that’s actually the Hover Headquarters, home to Hover Head and the Team of Superheroes, the stars of a comic I made years and years ago. As far as this image is concerned, that floating base stands in for all my webcomics, including the likes of the insufferable Comical Comedy Rabbit Comics, or the Phone Guys, which has somehow had over 800 strips at this point. The fact that the two comics I have that are still ongoing are the ones I’ve intentionally made difficult is not lost on me. I really ought to revisit Hover Head and try to make a comic that actually works.
• Behind the Hover Headquarters one will note a massive sphere in the sky. That certainly isn’t the sun, PDR doesn’t enjoy the sun enough to include that particular massive sphere. While making the drawing, I got it into my head that this city is on a moon around a gas giant world. No real reason for that beyond my general love of science fiction, but that still counts.
• And finally, streaking across the sky, is a little spaceship designed by none other than PDR at some point under age ten. I don’t remember exactly when, but in elementary school I made a little spaceship design out of some construction toys and I still have it. I use an image of me as a child as my profile image on pretty much all social media because I want that kid’s dreams to come true. And that includes that spaceship. Like the occult symbol, I have a story in mind for that spaceship, and I hope to tell it someday.