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Groups that try to protect historic landmarks & whatnot have a hard road because most humans don’t give a fuck about history. They live in the moment, barely cognizant of what came before & unconcerned with what will come after. Animals essentially. We like to try and place our species far above the others, but we are, on average, little better than strategically shaved chimps. There are enough who look backwards & forwards though that we slowly inch along the path to utopia. The average and below claw at the ones who try to preserve & improve; stymying progress, but not halting it. Ironically they hold back the efforts of people who would improve life for everyone. Which is why I am putting myself forward as dictator for life of the known world. I’ve got what it takes to steer this planet to the Star Trek future we’re all waiting for.

31 Comments

Hey. I just looked at your Patreon and for some reason I can only see the two 1 dollar tiers. Also, the second one mentions art unlocked by other tiers and the first one doesn’t mention art at all, which is why I assumed that there are indeed other tiers that I can’t see. What’s up with that?

There are only 2 tiers, the original one & team never nude. There was only one tier at first but someone complained that there was too many nude requests so I made a tier for the ones who didn’t want any.

It always amused me that the ones who stand to gain the most long term are the ones slowing down progress… because they have to take a more immediate hit first. I don’t believe in pure socialism, but an income cap sounds better and better to me every year…

History! Ha! What has THAT done for us lately?

Um…it’s founded the basis of our society and provides needed insights toward possible future developments, and….

Shut up, nerd! History is stupid!

…I need to go build a bunker.

Even though prohibition was over it could still be a dry county, hence the speak easy. But why would it have had gas lights? That technology would have been on it’s way out thirty years earlier. I realize I am being pedantic but the geek in me is curious.

Is my nerd showing?

Keeping in mind that Alex is speaking to the history of the area, not in general. Many rural areas and especially poor ones might go for a long time without electricity.

My best friend grew up in South Carolina in the 70s… their house didn’t get electrified or indoor plumbing until the Bicentennial year.

Oddly enough, their barn *was* electrified.

The house I live in now, on what was originally my great-grandfather’s place, was built in 1960, but the house that was here before it (which burned down the night my Dad graduated High School) didn’t get electricity until after the War.

Was there a connection between your father graduating high school and the fire?

Sorry I didn’t spot this until my 2020 re-read.

No, no correlation whatever.
They used coal stoves for heat and somehow the coal bin (on the outside of the house, I have a photo of my 4-year old Dad and his grandfather next to it) got to smoldering.

The barn getting electricity first wasn’t necessarily that surprising. The barn is a business building, one that was probably filled with a very flammable material, and electric lights are less lightly to ignite it – especially if they’re using 2500 hour light bulbs, which operate at significantly cooler temperatures than 1000 hour bulbs.

The barn is pretty easy to electrify, because it’s mostly open space and probably the main thing they wanted was the electric lights. The house, on the other hand, has people running around it at all hours, they want a telephone system, a radio, and I don’t even remember what various other gadgets.

I’m honestly not sure why gas lamps were used since Google is not being my friend today, hah. I would guess it would be related to energy consumption, though, especially back in the days of comparatively low electricity use. A speakeasy would operate at many hours of the day (not just at night, when lights would be used), there wasn’t nearly as much reliance on electricity for running kitchens/cafes/etc. (meaning that, unlike nowadays, daytime energy usage was comparatively nonexistent), and the energy used at the same location would likely be roughly twice the amount of a normal business (due to energy being used for both the cover business and the speakeasy below it).

(The same happens nowadays with people who use grow lamps for indoor marijuana grow operations; the abnormally high rate of energy use can make energy companies suspicious and/or can be used as evidence for police investigations.)

There were many places in the rural south that didn’t have electricity. The Oklahoma farm where I grew up was next to a high way and probably had electricity from the time that the REA started coming through in the late 1930’s the neighbors two miles farther away didn’t have electricity until the mid 1970’s. Natural gas requires an infrastructure similar to electricity and the piping for gas lighting would be as expensive as wiring for electricity. Kerosene was common and my parents actually had a kerosene heated kitchen stove. Most Texas cities and towns of any size had electricity from the early 1900’s. I’m just being pedantic at this point because I have a Reggie like interest in such things. Just going along with some of the comments below I’ll point out that buildings and the like tend to deteriorate pretty quickly without constant maintenance.

naivety is expecting the future will be like Star Trek
realism knows the future will turn out more like Warhammer 40k.

But that’s heresy!

Speaking as a Trekkie-for-life, the Star Trek utopia includes: 24/7 monitoring of each citizen, forced mind control/electronic lobotomization for those who don’t comply (and incarceration for the .00001% who can resist it), and complete control of the media. That’s why Starfleet is so full of loose cannons: they’re escaping the socialist utopia that Earth has become the only way feasible.

Warhammer 40k, while grimly entertaining, strikes me as an entirely unsustainable civilization. Star Trek is okay, but seems to gloss over the fact that human nature does not change and has its inherent flaws, part of which makes our virtues stand out; also, every alien race in Star Trek is just an exaggeration of some human trait (greed – Ferengi, logic – Vulcan, deceit – Romulans, Cardassians, aggression – Klingons, etc.). If I had to pick a more realistic sci-fi setting from TV shows or movies, I’d say that Babylon 5 or Firefly is closer to reality.

I like your response though, Jackie. :D

If you’ve ever read 2000 ad I think that’s what the future is probably going to be like. A very poor massive population that is too busy trying to keep up with the latest fads take care while you have a complete totalitarian state.

On the history thing… in this comic’s case there actually IS a legitimate reason for filling in tunnels. They tend to collapse and when they do they take everything above them down with them.

Yup, even “historic” things are rarely built to last more than (say) a century, let alone secret tunnels built without oversight and by rum runners. Also, in our WarHammer 40k future, those things are magnets for mutants, heretic cults, and genestealer infestations….

Seriously, though, while I’m in favor of “historic sites” in principle, in practice it often screws over the building’s owners. If the building is so historically significant that it MUST be preserved “as is”, it’s historically significant enuf that preservationists should raise the funds to buy it off the current owner at fair market value. Instead of just dictating to the current and future owners that they now own a white elephant that now has restricted value and requires extraordinary expenditures to maintain.

It’s easy enuf for yuppiekin with no skin in the game to dictate to others “no, you can’t sell or change that plastic-coated diner – because we’re all nostalgic about having driven past it for 50 years” (without stopping to eat there, mind you).

On a somewhat related note, I was recently reading a fairly interesting book about the Apollo project. Lots of the historical sites from those missions either no longer exist or have been modified for new uses. In many cases that wasn’t necessarily because of indifference to history, but simply a question of resources and priorities. If NASA was going to do any new space science, they couldn’t very well blow their whole budget keeping everything preserved perfectly forever.

Rewriting history has been going on since the year after it became a thing. Pharaohs, kings and emperors have been expunging the names of their enemies — as well as their failures — from the record all down through the ages. It’s only natural to want to present your best face to the world. Now, with today’s social media, everybody has the power!

While humans may not give a fuck about history, it’s still important to give some related to the more groundbreaking changes that helped improve human society down the road.

The last thing we want is to go back to treating autistic people, the LGBTQ community, and ethnic minorities like shit just because of current political circumstances that frustrate our taxpayer dollars and livelihood.

When tunnels are filled in, it’s often a safety thing.

I’m from western Nevada. The famous boom town of Virginia City is sitting on tons of tunnels from its mining days. Most of them were filled in with rock when the mines closed to prevent potential cave-ins. They don’t get a lot of big earthquakes back home, but all it would take is one big one to break or dislodge a few of those 150+ year old support timbers, and the whole thing could come tumbling down. Not only would people be hurt or killed, but you’d be losing a LOT more history in that scenario than what was lost by refilling a bunch of useless holes in the ground.

There were a lot of US [moonshiners, + booze bootleggers] who liked doing those jobs, + liked doing those illegal jobs.

So, when booze became legal again, in the 1930s [?], the moonshiners + bootleggers went into a similar business- making + selling illegal drugs.

Maybe a gin-mill was made under this building, that later turned into a heroin-mill.

Secret rooms are difficult to hide if they’re the only thing using a distinctively smelly light and heat source. So they wouldn’t be included in the original electrification. However, they would then be included in the DIY expansion to that electrification that happened shortly afterwards. It’s just that DIY expansion doesn’t get reported for obvious reasons.

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