While perhaps unrelated to the otherwise heavy nature of the picture, it looks like there's something written on his arm that I can't quite make out.

"Nihil Aliud Scit Necessitas Quam Vincere."

Nicely rendered, heartfelt scene. Your getting good at these sorts of themes especially.

Whether that's a good thing is uncertain, haha.

But thanks, bro.

The background looks amazing!

Thanks, I really enjoying working on backgrounds. It's easy to lose myself in them.

Adding another mirror on the bathroom doors would make the image way more metaphorical... and harder to draw. :P

Anyhow, depression is a terrible subject. It always makes me think of predator and prey relationships in the wilderness. There are no depressed herbivores in the wild; all the old and sad and unhappy deers are already eaten by the wolves, as they don't have the will to run faster and possibly escape. Energy and matter circulate, and the wheel of fortune is round, it's bearings well lubricated. Only by facing the wolves' eyes you can beat depression. Only by bowing your head (thus submitting to the gods of fight) and rushing forward you can beat depression, rush like your life depends on it, impale the wolf, kill the wolf. Blood slowly trickles down your horns and then over your forehead, as the canid attacker whispers his last predatory breath.

Oh god, furries are so poetic! :3

Actually, I've had the same thought.

Because we've halted natural selection's progress, we suffer endemic defects as a race. I look forward to the day genetic engineering is popularized and deregulated.

A coin has two sides. I dread the day when genetic engineering would be available for consumers and bio-hackers. Imagine genetically-engineered Islamic State super-soldiers, who can walk for days without food or water. Imagine a flu-like disease which sweeps around the world in a matter of weeks. Imagine an ascended, telepathic being taking over the world (a.k.a. Lucy the movie).

If our immune systems can't keep up with the simplest of engineered life forms (AIDS virus), just think how helpless we would be against a military-grade threat.

Well, it's alll a matter of logistics; the Islamic State can't afford anything like that, and if they could, any industrialized nation could outspend them. The concept of biohacking and homegrown biological terorism is a lot more frightening to me because of the extent to which we're connected as a civilization. That being said, I can't take the stance of a Luddite. Never fear progress.

And wait, you're saying you believe HIV is genetically-engineered?

Well, there's no need to fear progress, unless it happens too fast for the law and ethics to follow it.

Oh yes, something stinks about HIV. There's just too many red flags about it in my mind. It came out of nowhere; it had a staggering 99.9% mortality rate, and the long incubation period allowed it to spread undetected. No virus has ever been found to have that kind of mortality rate (it's not a virus' goal to kill the host, but integrate with it's DNA and become immortal), that kind of polymorphic behavior (adapting to specific host's immune system), and that kind of spread. To me it felt like a natural extension of Nazi research from WW2. The outbreak happened within a minority group (homosexuals), but the real target group was Asia and Africa (again, a territory that a high-ranking Nazi strategist would want to "cleanse"). And fast forward to present, years after the 1980s outbreak, pharmaceutical companies are now earning a fortune by selling super-expensive medications. You must buy them, otherwise you'd die. It's like a financial blackmail.

I'd really like you to convince me that HIV is something natural!

Solely on the basis of inductive reasoning, I don't see nearly enough evidence to convince me of HIV being genetically-engineered.

HIV is extremely prominent in Africa, because it was first contracted in Kinshasa, DRC in the 1920's, and spread along the so-called "Kinshasa Highway", potentiated by lack to safe-sex education and resources on the continent, to areas like South Africa and Botswana, where it's now endemic. Its spread to the rest of the world was exacerbated by an increase in international travel with the commercialization of flight and the nondiscretionism of the Sexual Revolution.

Hitler had no interest in exterminating Africans or Asians, because he saw them as subjugable demihumans.

Okay then, all the worse! If AIDS was a naturally-occuring strain, then an engineered strain would be inconceivably more lethal.

Never before a single species had the tools to directly alter it's path of evolution. Up, or down.

Yeah, but I err on the side of guarded optimism. Be aware of the risks, and work toward the ideal.

I'm just afraid of the dissonance...

2097: European Council declares Immortality Serum a basic human right.
2099: Pope Mohammad Cheng declares a global fatwa on physical immortality.

2101: USA adds Basic Income to a constitution amendment.
2108: A fleet of 14.000 ships full of Chinese and Indus immigrants (totaling about 20 million people) is approaching California. US Coastal guard deploys armed drone submarines and UAVs. Human rights organizations have no comment.

I certainly appreciate your imagination, haha!

(and hopefully, Universal Income is a thing long before then)

Now that we've opened that can of worms... It makes me wonder, why there are so many sci-fi movies about alien invasion, zomibes, dinosaurs or AI robots, and none so far about Basic/Universal Income? Seems like socialism and it's derivatives are a taboo topic. :D

Not nearly as exciting, I would say. A post-scarcity economy isn't as sexy as intergalactic war or the supernatural.

Then again, Star Trek is enduringly popular.

Not nearly popular, I think, as much as they were in previous decades. Not many find the books like The Dispossessed more exciting than an action movie.

Okay, an amalgam of genres might help. Bake Mad Max and Star Trek, with a bold emphasis on the economy. A team which maintains free wireless post-nuclear Internet nodes gets ambushed by a gang of cryptocurrency bandits. :D

great poem, great to read something from a fellow deer and atheist.

I'm glad you enjoyed it, but those are actually lyrics from the song, By the Throat, by Eyedea. I heavily recommend that song, the whole album of the same name, and all his other collected work. He was brilliant.