What about children who get raped? What lesson did your god want them to learn? And what about animals who die horribly in wildfires? Wildfires are natural, so why is there so much needless suffering? Your "divine order" doesn't seem very fairly ordered.

Is it bathing in the blood of its enemies?

I have a friend who's a professional painter and she says that to make it as an artist, producing art is only like 20% of the process. The rest is networking, marketing, and accounting. She's basically a small business. She says most of her time is spent advertising her art, joining artist communities, and re-calculating her budget every month. She went through years of trial and error to succeed, and she did this because she listened to criticism and constantly improved.

It's the same with every creative project. It's not enough for you to have a stack of patents -- you need to learn about copyright law, marketing, and manufacturing. The optimism/pessimism oversimplification is a false dichotomy -- you absolutely need to listen to the naysayers because they'll tell you the weak points in your inventions. Your friend telling you why your ideas won't work will help you optimize your designs and create several backup plans. Don't discount his opinions.

Mother here. Don't sweat it. I've compared both of my kids to dogs on many occasions. Though some older women in my family weren't too fond of the title "a toddler is like a dog that slowly learns to speak" that I used for the video of my oldest kid attempting her first sentences.

If someone said that their dog had the same name as one of my daughters, I'd compliment them on their good taste in names.

You didn't do anything wrong.

The fuck is that, even?

Look, the truth is that your friend is never going to famous author. So best case scenario is he listens to you, makes his book more readable and... no one is gonna buy it because he'll need to spend a few hundred on advertising to make any sales. The worst case scenario is that he's resentful about you "stifling his creativity" or becomes too self-conscious to publish, and the result is still the same, no one buys his book.

So you're risking your friendship for something that won't make any difference in book sales.

A lot of writers are just objectively bad, but the process of writing and designing a book makes them happy, and as their friends, that's what we should support.

The whole AI debate really makes you realize how much human artists steal ideas from one another.

So is the bunny dead already, or?

Lol, that's like saying the Olive Garden is Italian