bittercape

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funeral procession (miss you forever) I - IV, 2024, oil pastel on paper.

drawings of photos from the 99 highway in my home province of British Columbia during the past three years of driving up and down from city to town at midnight to catch planes to get to funerals.

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Two things that have vastly improved my online life lately:

1. Adding ||accounts.google.com/gsi/*$xhr,script,3p to Ublock Origin, which comprehensively blocks every Google login popup on random websites;

2. Switching my paypal.com bookmark to https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_account, which bypasses the "Download the app" nag-screen.

I can't tell you how much both of these fucking things annoyed the shit out of me, and how satisfying it is to eke out a little disenshittification because I'm using a browser that can be modified to take orders from me, and not giant, stupid corporations that believe that if their customers are too happy, they're leaving money on the table.

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One of those insidious little things I notice sometimes is how much the window of 'appropriate for children' content has shrunk within the past 20 years. The range of things it is socially acceptable to show a 10-year-old has never been more limited, and it's happened incredibly quickly.

Take, for instance, Star Trek: TNG. I grew up watching TNG. I was a little young for it as it was airing, but it got syndicated almost immediately and they would show an episode most weekday evenings on the Space Channel, and I'd watch it with my lifelong Trekkie mom. This was a very common thing. I was by no means unusual for watching Star Trek as a child.

Star Trek: TNG has lots of sex in it! It's never explicit (unless you have a particularly niche interpretation of some of the borg stuff) but on many an occasion you'll have a few characters doing a bit of making out followed by a closing door or fade to black, and then they wake up in bed together. If you know what sex is, you know that is what is being implied here. Even my 8-year-old self, whose understanding of the subject mostly came from books of ancient mythology that used words like 'ravish' and 'the pleasures of the couch' a whole bunch, could tell that what was happening was sex.

And I am not bringing this up as a 'see, I watched all this inappropriate stuff and I turned out just fine!'. I'm bringing it up to argue that TNG's level of sexual content is not inappropriate for children (I'm not using the legalese 'minors', because I think that lumping children and teenagers together in this conversation would make it nonsense. Star Trek is obviously appropriate for teenagers. Don't use 'minors' when you mean either children or teens, it just muddies the waters).

The point is that Star Trek: TNG was very obviously designed to be watched by children and teenagers. There's a whole character in the main cast whose role in the show is to be an audience insert for children and teenagers. The moral tone of TNG, its occasional dips into 'don't do drugs, kids' type messaging, and its general avoidance of graphic violence all scream 'we are designing this with an audience of children - but not just children - in mind'. It's a family show. It's supposed to be watched by the whole family.

Which means that, until at least the end of the 90s, this amount of sexual content was generally considered appropriate for kids to see. It's not pornographic - it's not even graphic. Maybe the very most conservative parents wouldn't let their kids watch TNG, but that might have had more to do with all the socialism and atheism.

So, why did that change? Why do we now have such a strong bullwark between 'things kids are allowed to know about' and 'things for GROWN UPS ONLY 18+ Minors DNI', and why have we relegated even the most discreet references to sex to the second category only?

And the next time you find yourself experiencing that knee-jerk 'think of the children' reaction, consider: would what you're looking at have been ok on Star Trek: TNG in the 90s?

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There is a species of butterfly that lives in the mountains.

When it hatches as a caterpillar, it lowers itself to the ground on a strand of silk, and then produces a chemical that smells like the larvae of ants. An ant eventually discovers it, lured by the scent, and brings it back to the anthill, where it is cared for by the colony until it pupates. After a few weeks, the adult butterfly crawls back up through the anthill, through the dirt and the winding tunnels, and out into the sunlight before it can finally open its wings.

Some say that the caterpillar “tricks” the ants into doing this. I don’t know if I agree – I think it’s too small a thing to accuse of guile, don’t you?

With this in mind: Once upon a time, there were seven dwarves.

They lived and worked in the mountains, mining for gold and jewels and precious things. And one night, after a long day’s labour, they heard a knocking at the great stone doors of their mountain.

Outside, shivering and small, they found a human child.

I’m sure you can guess most of what she told them. Stepmothers were involved – it’s not important. What’s important was that each of the dwarves felt a dire and pressing need to care for the child, and they took her into their home, fed her, clothed her, and gave her a warm bed to sleep in. And many seasons passed around that mountain, with the dwarves raising the child as one of their own, until one autumn’s day.

The girl laid, slender and still, in a coffin of spun glass. And some weeks later, one of the dwarves had the idea to call for a prince. This was of course the sensible thing to do, and the prince of a nearby kingdom who listened to the story thought an ensorcelled girl would be a grand thing to rescue.

Poor devils. It feels cruel to judge them. But there were so many questions they could’ve asked – what was this stepmother’s name? Was she real? Did she exist? Who had made the glass coffin? Surely one of them must’ve thought of the question. And why did it grow more opaque with every passing day?

Were they wrong to trust?

I guess it doesn’t matter now.

The moment the prince stepped into the subterranean chamber with the glass coffin, it shivered with a twinkling, plinking noise. Threads of glass exploded into glittering, razor-edged confetti.

A claw split the great glass cocoon.

The thing that spilled out of it, hulking and huge, knew in the fog of its mind, in a base animal sense that screamed, that it was in a room too small for it to fit. It wanted up. It wanted out.

In front of it was some twiggy little thing holding a sword.

It took its first breath.

The flames were the colour of cornflowers.

The dwarves fled. The thing followed close behind, up, up, up through the stone and the winding tunnels, not to chase, not to hunt, but to get up, to get out, out, out–

It struck the great stone doors at a run. They crumbled like gingerbread. And then there was sunlight, and the open sky…

And it could finally open its wings.

Convergent evolution is a hell of a thing.

The dragon, of course, lived happily ever after with its loot of gold and jewels from a hastily abandoned dwarf mine. Being much bigger than a caterpillar, we could accuse it of tricking the dwarves who were kind to it, had taken it in, had fed and clothed and warmed it.

It probably wouldn't mind.

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Relaxing with assorted Margies.

Last we checked in with Marige, she was banished by Mother Superior. But the peace doesn’t last long.

[Context - origin & design] [Comic #1 Margie is discovered, immediately adopted] [Comic #2 Margie immediately gets in trouble by being a little scamp] [Comic #3 The Nuns decide to try to smuggle Margie back into the convent]

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Okay, english is not my first language so this might be a matter of communication issues: when I say "children are not directly and instantly traumatised by the sight of a natural naked human body", I mean the bodies of living people. Seeing a corpse in some state of decomposition, without being properly introduced to the idea beforehand within clearly defined boundaries is obviously traumatising to a child, regardless of whether the cadaver is clothed or not.

What I am talking about is children seeing people they know in various states of undress in normal home context. But in case you really are claiming that children are by default scarred for life at the sight of people with no clothes on, you guys are just weird.

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there are so many words to use in place of “penis” in regards to smut. there’s dick. or shaft. we got cock. member. organ. length. hell, even manhood! all are acceptable replacements.

but what do we have for the testicles? nuts? no thank you. ballsac or, lord forbid, just sac? i’d literally rather be tarred and feathered. using their government name and just calling them testicles? take me out back and gimme the ol’ yeller treatment.

how has the english language evolved so much yet we have no acceptable word for testicles in a sexy context? how can we claim we’ve advanced as a society when the best word for describing when two characters are fucking nasty and the noble and mighty testes are swaying about is balls?

BALLS

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what a kind fellow

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He’s never done anything wrong in his life

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I'll post the full panel when this ends lol, no cheating and searching the img!!!

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small naps

watercolour

twitter/ insta/bluesky/ store

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I LOVE THIS THING❗️❗️❗️

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"nothing is real atoms never touch each other youve never touched anything in your life" ok. well when i pet my dog he is soft and when he licks my hand it is wet and that is far more real to me than whatevers going on at an atomic level

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Would you care to keep him company and scratch behind his ear?

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i think it's fucked up that there are plants that decided they wanted to eat meat