Yeah that’s also true. But I switched to proton specifically to have LESS work managing automatic email aliases that are tied to instantly creatable passwords/accounts. I might look into bitwarden with their alias service integration. But I’m not looking forward to another transfer of all of my stuff. For this very specific set of features, really all I can see is bitwarden or proton, and I really hope bitwarden is as seamless and easy as proton because I do not have the mental energy to fiddle with it all the time.

Wow, that’s so many different services to splinter one Proton account into. I was thinking about it too, but that sounds exhausting.

This is how I interpret it personally, with no effort put in to attempting to discover the artist’s true intent.

I relate the the grungy, gritty, malformed and out of proportion art style with the overall narrative theme of Linux, freedom, anti-consumerism and post-collapse with the following logic:

With all of the hyper consumerism, anti-consumer behavior from corporations, ad-ridden web, and attempts to restrict digital freedom, we are exhausted. I have been so beaten down by the online hellscape, it has sapped my will and left me unstable. The uncomfortable character design embodies how I feel as a tech user. I am not healthy, I have no safe place to exist online unless I forge one for myself. I scrap together a system that works for me from small in-development projects. I don’t get to engage with the clean, shiny nice things because they’re all predatory.

My mental health, which is effected by all of this, is easy to relate to how the characters look like they feel like. It’s uncomfortable and unnatural, just like the state of existing online for an early internet user in current year.

The fight for personal freedom in software, culture, and economics is not a glorious one. It is a dirty, personal fight. You will get no help from the system. It is not easy. It is not clean. You will get lost. You will give things up. It will leave you unrelatable to some or all of your friends and coworkers. But you’ll have your scrappy little friends to help you, who are also in the same headspace.

This is why the comic looks the way it does, or at least this is how I choose to interpret it.

While the art style may be uncomfortable, it is highly relatable to me.

Just like how the possum memes came to be, for a more simple analogy. Possums are scraggly little folks that look annoyed, scared and dirty. The perfect animal to represent many neurodivergent individuals, which are who adopted the meme first. Identifying with imperfection or wounded mindset and using that identity to make light of or come to terms with that imperfection or wounded mindset is something becoming more common.