Sydney hadn’t called on the part of her brain that stores normal meat dishes, and then suddenly the dam broke, and every recipe, meat related or not, spilled out.

Maxima does have an extensive shopping list, but an Earther can’t just go and buy a food replicator and expect it to work. For one, the plug isn’t compatible. But primarily, there’s no way something like that would run on 120 volts, or even 240. She’ll also have to buy the equivalent of a Mr. Fusion for each replicator too, and that just for household appliances.

From my understanding, the hardest thing about de-vegetarianizing is that the texture of meat becomes quite off putting, which honestly is understandable. A good piece of meat is about the best thing there is, but a gristly steak, or a drumstick with a bunch of tendons or a rib with some of those floaty cartilage bits at the end can be really off-putting, even if you’re fully on board with the omnivorousness. And I can see where even the nicest slice of a perfectly prepared porterhouse wouldn’t be cromulent to a vegetarian if they’re used to eating anything but meat.

Say you’re the Demolition Man, and you’re biting into your underground sewer burger, and you’re told it’s actually a rat burger. You’d probably pause before your next bite, and that’s if you don’t spit it out. Sure, 90% of your concern is that chances are, the rat meat isn’t USDA certified and you don’t know what kind of diseased meat you’re currently grinding up with your teeth. But part of that is reflexive. “Oh, no! Rat meat is gross!” But is it? People eat rabbit all the time. Also, I imagine, squirrel, groundhog, beaver, and all kinds of other rodents. Rat meat probably isn’t all that popular, not because it tastes especially weird or anything (I have no idea, maybe it does) but I have to assume that any animal under a certain body weight becomes more trouble than it’s worth to slaughter for its meat. Depending on the species of rat, they weigh from like a 0.25 to 1.5 pounds? And how much of that is meat? Honestly rabbits seems like they’d be on the edge of that effort/reward curve. Of course, any food is food if you’re hungry enough. I just mean there’s a few reasons we don’t mass-farm tiny mammals for their meat.

Anyway, I guess my point with the Demolition Man ratburger thing is that it isn’t so much that rat meat is gross, it’s that most people aren’t acclimated to the idea of eating it. I think there’s part of our brains that recognizes that all meat is kind of gross, up until we decide it isn’t. Chewing muscle and fat tissue that someone used to use to use as a leg…  Just don’t think about it too much. Vegetarians arguably have thought about it too much. Though I suppose there are some people who are vegetarian strictly due to the reduced carbon footprint, I think the vast majority make the switch due to ethicalness and/or the gross factor.

I’m almost ready with the new vote incentive. I have the nude version almost done, but not the clothed one. I’ll try and have that ready for next Monday’s comic. It’s a non-censored (obviously) version of one of the panels from the topless watch party, but honestly, I got kind of bored with it, and started working on a different picture that I like quite a bit more. It’s actually quite far along as well, but I realized it’s kind of… spoilery? I think I need to wait on that one till the tournament progresses a little further.

Ah! I thought I had more time till March. I’m bad at looking at dates apparently.

Here is Gaxgy’s painting Maxima promised him. Weird how he draws almost exactly like me.

I did try and do an oil painting version of this, by actually re-painting over the whole thing with brush-strokey brushes, but what I figured out is that most brushy oil paintings are kind of low detail. Sure, a skilled painter like Bob Ross or whoever can dab a brush down a canvas and make a great looking tree or a shed with shingles, but in trying to preserve the detail of my picture (eyelashes, reflections, etc) was that I had to keep making the brush smaller and smaller, and the end result was that honestly, it didn’t really look all that oil-painted. I’ll post that version over at Patreon, just for fun, but I kind of quit on it after getting mostly done with re-painting Max.

Patreon has a no-dragon-bikini version of of the picture as well, naturally.

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.