Theo and the Magical Talisman

So I've been watching this series on Danish TV and it wasn't bad but it did make me shout “screw the natural order” at the TV a lot, because apparently that is my reaction to overly deathist narratives. It's not even that the decisions made were necessarily bad, because this is explicitly a setting with an afterlife, which might very well be nice enough that being deathist is warranted in this specific case. But they didn't even check.

The basic plot is that our protagonist wants his dying grandfather to not. Luckily, he finds an amulet that lets him enter Fantasy Limbo and make someone else die in his grandfather's place. But then it turns out that if you do that, Fantasy Limbo starts to crumble, making everyone in a radius of a few hundred kilometers unable to die.

Which. Even assuming that this prevents only death itself, not all accidents and disease. (It must still prevent the very worst cases of either or the in-story news reports would've been phrased very differently.) And assuming also that this would've eventually killed the 8 otherwise immortal beings who live in Fantasy Limbo and work as spirit guides. That sounds like a damn good trade.

You could travel around to different places on Earth, crumbling almost all the limboes but leaving a few death zones for the chronically suicidal and those with religious objections. Set up a charity to pay for any consenting adult's transport there. It still wouldn't be ideal for chronically suicidal people, since there's a non-opt-out afterlife, but the status quo also has that. And on the upside, billions of people would get to have more time, finally able to spend decades doing whatever they want without having to feel like they're wasting a valuable resource.

Of course, it's possible that this setting's afterlife is awesome enough to make that a bad idea, that it is in fact just as good as life on Earth or possibly even better. It's not the impression I got — there was a lot of emphasis put on the dead Looking Down Upon Their Loved Ones and Waiting For Them At The Entrance and it left me with the impression they didn't have much else to do. But it's possible my impression is wrong, in which case I think the correct answer is to try a lot harder to prove to everyone else that this world exists. Let everyone make their life choices while fully informed of what life actually entails, make it so nobody has to fear Hell ever again, give people in bad circumstances access to an easily accessible alternative.

…but of course in the actual series, the protagonist makes none of these considerations. He simply “realizes that what he did was wrong”, undoes the swap, and the natural order resumes.

Minor updates

1. I got a very pretty spinner ring for Christmas! Hopefully it'll help me fidget in a way that doesn't mess up my nails. (I really love Etsy sometimes, finding any spinner ring in a normal store is basically impossible, but on Etsy you get pages upon pages of beautiful search results!)

2. I am trying to make a Chrome extension that makes it so gifs only animate when hovered, because having gifs autoplay is kind of distracting actually and I couldn't find an already existing extension that does this thing. Currently it is successfully swapping all gifs with a placeholder image, and they successfully swap back to being gifs when hovered — except on very dynamic sites for some reason that my MutationObserver isn't catching. I'll figure it out, though, the detective work is part of the fun!

3. Also, happy new year! I wanted to mention a neat fact about the number 2019 but couldn't immediately find one. If I didn't know it was impossible, I'd say it might be a boring number.