Farm vs. Marriage

“Planting the seed of a bad idea”

The heroine, Flora Poste, always referred to as “Robert Poste’s child”, stays at Aunt Ada Doom’s isolated farm in the fictional village of Howling in Sussex. As is typical in a certain genre of romantic 19th-century and early 20th-century literature, each of the farm’s inhabitants has some long-festering emotional problem caused by ignorance, hatred or fear, and the farm is badly run. Flora, being a level-headed, urban woman, applies modern common sense to their problems and helps them adapt to the 20th century.

As with our ancestors, it might be functional for much of em (whole brain emulation) leisure to be devoted to relatively functional social bonding and mutual signaling of abilities, shared loyalty, and values. Farmer leisure differs from rich forager leisure, for good functional reasons. Compared to us, ems might prefer leisure that more celebrates self-control, religion, honor, loyalty, submission, grit, and determination. They might on average be happy, but with a grittier farmer style happiness. Whether such lives seem worth living to you probably depends on how fiercely you side with foragers in the forager-farmer divide.

This 3-star assignment was really fun.  After the first paragraph I thought it would be really easy, but the second paragraph definitely made it so that was not the case.  The second paragraph was from a pretty bizarre blog.  It seemed to be describing a possible future world where brains could be copied and we’d have a great source of cheap labor.  Kinda weird.  Anyway that got me thinking about AI, which I decided to represent as robots.  So i found a picture of a robot couple on flickr.  Actually all of the images I used are from flickr.  It was really easy to look up creative commons images there thanks to an advanced search option that lets you filter by licensing.  As far as the other images go, I chose the farm because, well, it’s in the title and featured in both paragraphs.  And the lightning had to be there because clearly there is some drama.

To start creating the image above, I loaded all three flickr images in Paint.NET as their own layers.  I then resized them to be roughly the same size, trimming off parts of them that weren’t necessary.  This trimming was useful in making the farm and couple images roughly the same size.  I lined up the images in the order I wanted, then merged the layers into one.  The merging was really easy thanks to a tool in Paint.NET that does it for you.  I then added the black background as a layer and got to work looking for fonts.

At first I thought it would be hard to find fonts and make it so that I could use them in an application like Paint.NET.  Turns out it’s not.  I found this site, which has tons of free ones.  All you have to do is browse until you find a font you like, download it, double click on the download, and press install.  That’s seriously it.  It came up first in Google’ search results for “farm font” and “wedding font” and wound up being the only site I needed.  Once I had the fonts installed, I made textboxes to hold the text at the top of the image.  And then I was done.