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friends, if I can give you one piece of advice for those of you who are new to work, or are about to enter the workforce, especially if you have any sort of office job:
Do not work on your days off.
"But--"
DO NOT WORK ON YOUR DAYS OFF.
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Vixen's one of those characters who was sincerely meant at the time of creation but held back by her creator's inherent prejudices. Her creator, Gerry Conway, talks a bit about wanting to make a character in the same vein as X-Men's Storm and...it shows. On the one hand, self-assured woman in a influential, financially independent modelling position. On the other hand, African transplant who gets her powers from an ancient totem from Anansi. It's that same thing where a black woman in America can't be lauded unless she's evoking some badly construed or completely fictitious majesty from the mother country.
I also learned that DC canned what would have been her debut solo series due to budget cuts, so she didn't even get the attempts at character development that Ororo eventually got. It's understandable that she got spotlighted in JL Unlimited, which was all about highlighting the more obscure parts of DC's lineup (including Vigilante), but it's very much a choice to have her connect with Green Lantern as a rebound rather than as a fellow black person.
...This led me to check which superheroines were introduced in JL Unlimited who could have been a love interest for Green Lantern (not already in a relationship with someone, not significantly younger than him), and I think the only options are Zatanna, Fire and Ice, and...Gypsy. So it could be worse.
It is kinda weird that John Stewart, the only black regular cast member of the Justice League cartoon, dates two animal-themed women in a row, right?
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CLOAK AND DAGGER FIRST COMIC WRITTEN BY A BLACK WOMAN OR A BLACK PERSON IN GENERAL OHHHH WE'RE SO FUCKING BACK!!!!

#...cloak has never been written by a black person#well#that explains a lot#it explains quite a lot actually
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I don't think it's a weird thing with Hawkgirl. I think it's just the extant awkwardness of Vixen as a character poisoning the whole situation.
It is kinda weird that John Stewart, the only black regular cast member of the Justice League cartoon, dates two animal-themed women in a row, right?
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@atimewillcomeforsinging
One of my earlier embroidery animations, this was my second one. I made sure that the designs were very simple, since I wanted this to be fairly long. The tangled thread is just purposefully messed up French knots.
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"It's so fucked up women have to do sex work to survive" so trueee it's so fucked up we live in a capitalist society where you need to do work you don't want to do just to be alive. I'm so glad we're talking about ALL the jobs that are forced onto people, especially women, that are full of harassment. Thank God we're not just focusing on jobs that are already heavily stigmatized and shaming women for doing what's necessary to survive, even though every single person has to do that but for some reason it's immoral when it's a stripper instead of a fast food employee
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okay so I finished Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by Harriet Jacobs, and here are my takeaways, because it was AMAZING and I can't believe all US students aren't required to read it in school:
shows how slavery actually worked in nuanced ways i'd never thought much about
example: Jacobs's grandmother would work making goods like crackers and preserves after she was done with her work day (so imagine boiling jars at like 3 a.m.) so that she could sell them in the local market
through this her grandmother actually earned enough money, over many years, to buy herself and earn her freedom
BUT her "mistress" needed to borrow money from her. :)))) Yeah. Seriously. And never paid her back, and there was obviously no legal recourse for your "owner" stealing your life's savings, so all those years of laboring to buy her freedom were just ****ing wasted. like.
But also! Her grandmother met a lot of white women by selling them her homemade goods, and she cultivated so much good will in the community that she was able to essentially peer pressure the family that "owned" her into freeing her when she was elderly (because otherwise her so-called owners' white neighbors would have judged them for being total assholes, which they were)
She was free and lived in her own home, but she had to watch her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren all continue to be enslaved. She tried to buy her family but their "owners" wouldn't allow it.
Enslaved people celebrated Christmas. they feasted, and men went around caroling as a way to ask white people in the community for money.
But Christmas made enslaved people incredibly anxious because New Years was a common time for them to be sold, so mothers giving their children homemade dolls on Christmas might, in just a few days' time, be separated from their children forever
over and over again, families were deliberately ripped apart in just the one community that Harriet Jacobs lived in. so many parents kept from their children. just insane to think of that happening everywhere across the slave states for almost 200 years
Harriet Jacobs was kept from marrying a free Black man she loved because her "owner" wouldn't let her
Jacobs also shows numerous ways slavery made white people powerless
for example: a white politician had some kind of relationship with her outside of marriage, obviously very questionably consensual (she didn't hate him but couldn't have safely said no), and she had 2 children by him--but he wasn't her "master," so her "master" was allowed to legally "own" his children, even though he was an influential and wealthy man and tried for years to buy his children's freedom
she also gives examples of white men raping Black women and, when the Black women gave birth to children who resembled their "masters," the wives of those "masters" would be devastated--like, their husbands were (from their POV) cheating on them, committing violent sexual acts in their own house, and the wives couldn't do anything about it (except take out their anger on the enslaved women who were already rape victims)
just to emphasize: rape was LEGALLY INCENTIVIZED BY US LAW LESS THAN 200 YEARS AGO. It was a legal decision that made children slaves like their mothers were, meaning that a slaveowner who was a serial rapist would "own" more "property" and be better off financially than a man who would not commit rape.
also so many examples of white people promising to free the enslaved but then dying too soon, or marrying a spouse who wouldn't allow it, or going bankrupt and deciding to sell the enslaved person as a last resort instead
A lot of white people who seemed to feel that they would make morally better decisions if not for the fact that they were suffering financially and needed the enslaved to give them some kind of net worth; reminds me of people who buy Shein and other slave-made products because they just "can"t" afford fairly traded stuff
but also there were white people who helped Harriet Jacobs, including a ship captain whose brother was a slavetrader, but he himself felt slavery was wrong, so he agreed to sail Harriet to a free state; later, her white employer did everything she could to help Harriet when Harriet was being hunted by her "owner"
^so clearly the excuse that "people were just racist back then" doesn't hold any water; there were plenty of folks who found it just as insane and wrongminded as we do now
Harriet Jacobs making it to the "free" north and being surprised that she wasn't legally entitled to sit first-class on the train. Again: segregation wasn't this natural thing that seemed normal to people in the 1800s. it was weird and fucked up and it felt weird and fucked up!
Also how valued literacy skills were for the enslaved! Just one example: Harriet Jacobs at one point needed to trick the "slaveowner" who was hunting her into thinking she was in New York, and she used an NYC newspaper to research the names of streets and avenues so that she could send him a letter from a fake New York address
I don't wanna give away the book, because even though it's an autobiography, it has a strangely thrilling plot. But these were some of the points that made a big impression on me.
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl also inspired the first novel written by a Black American woman, Frances Harper, who penned Iola Leroy. And Iola Leroy, in turn, helped inspire books by writers like Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston. Harriet Jacob is also credited in Colson Whitehead's acknowledgments page for informing the plot of The Underground Railroad. so this book is a pivotal work in the US literary canon and, again, it's weird that we don't all read it as a matter of course.
(also P.S. it's free on project gutenberg and i personally read it [also free] on the app Serial Reader)
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Looking at some of your work, it is stunning but it is very similar in style to AI artwork, do you have any recommendations for how to tell apart photography like yours from AI.
I've been thinking about this. And this may sound controversial at first, but I'm hoping people will hear me out.
We should stop trying so hard to detect AI art.
I think we should all lift that burden from our brains.
I have often talked about "woke goggles." Where conservatives have lost the ability to enjoy anything because they are hypervigilant about detecting anything woke. They've cursed themselves into just hating everything. All they have left is the "God's Not Dead" Cinematic Universe.

And I worry people are getting AI goggles now. They are so concerned about accidentally enjoying robot art and hurting artists that they have overcorrected to the point where they are hurting artists.
One cannot say "AI is all soulless slop that always looks bad" and then accuse a real artist of making something that looks like AI and not hurt them. By doing so, it includes the baggage of all of the "slop" comments along with it. This crusade is having collateral damage to the very artists we are trying to protect.
Yes, we need to be cautious about malicious AI images. Misinformation and deepfakes are going to be a big problem. People using AI imagery for profit is already a mess. But if you are cruising your feed and like a cool sci-fi robot gal or a photo of a waterfall and it turns out to be AI... that's fine.
It was trained by real artists and AI is going to create some cool shit because of that.
Honestly, I think a lot of the worst slop is because the dipshits creating the prompts have no artistic taste. People keep blaming the AI for how bad it looks and often don't consider it is a product of the loser who published it.
There is plenty of non-slop out there that has fooled me. And, like it or not, it is going to get harder and harder to tell what is AI. Until there are better tools or better regulations, I don't think there is much we can do to avoid enjoying AI art every once in a while. If only by accident.
Current "AI detectors" are mostly a scam. Even the best forensic-level AI image detectors struggle to stay above 70–80% accuracy across a wide range of models and image types. And that's in controlled lab conditions.
Free online tools often drop to near coin-flip accuracy (50–60%), especially with newer image generators and post-processing applied.
The best way to avoid AI imagery is to look at an artist's body of work. It's much harder to create consistent, non-obvious fake images in a large sample size. That is usually enough to have confidence in authenticity. Plus, if they have posted similar art before 2022, you can pretty much rule out any shenanigans.
Otis literally died before genAI was available.
But images you see in the wild, just let yourself enjoy them if that is what your brain wants to do. It'll be okay.
I just think we are attacking this backwards. If we want to protect artists, we need to support them.
Calling out random AI art does not support them.
It does not put money in their pockets.
It does not grow their audience.
Over a decade ago I tried to lead a fight to create better systems of attribution on websites like Reddit and Imgur. I even spoke to the Imgur team after an article was written about me.

I asked them to allow sources on their posts and to develop tech that would help people find where an image came from. They said they were "working on it" and it never manifested.
IMAGE SHARING SITES STEAL MORE FROM ARTISTS THAN AI.
But we just kind of accepted it. No one really joined me in my fight. The prevailing defeatist attitude was, "That's just the way it is."
I think now is the time to demand better attribution systems. We need to be vigilant about making sure as many posts as possible have good sourcing. If an image on Reddit goes viral, the top comment should be the source. And if it isn't, you should try to find it and add it.
Just to be clear, "credit to the original artist" is NOT proper attribution.
And perhaps we can lobby these image sharing sites to create better sourcing systems and tools. They could even use fucking AI to find the earliest posted version of an image.
And it would be nice if it didn't require people to go into the comments to find the source. It could just be in the headline. They could even create little badges "made by a human" for verified artists.
Good attribution helps artists grow their audience. It is one of the single most effective things you can do to help them.
I literally just got this message...

There are maybe 10 popular artists who I helped grow their audience early on. Just because I reblogged their work and added links to all of their social media. I even hired my best friend to add sourcing information to every post because I believed so much in good attribution.
Calling out AI art may feel good in the moment. You caught someone trying to trick people and it feels like justice. But, in most cases, the tangible benefits to real artists seem small. It impedes your ability to enjoy art without always being suspicious. And the risk of telling someone you think they make soulless slop doesn't seem worth it.
But putting that time and effort into attribution *would* be worth it. I have proven it time and time again.
I also think people should consider having a monthly art budget. I don't care if it is $5. But if we all commit to seeking out cool artists and being their collective patrons, we could really make a difference and keep real art alive. Just commit to finding a cool new artist every month and financially contributing to them in some way.
On a bigger scale I think advocating for universal basic income, art grants for education and creation, and government regulation of AI would all be helpful long term goals. Though I think our friends in Europe may have to take the lead on regulation at the moment.
So...
Stop worrying about enjoying or calling out AI art.
Demand better attribution from image sharing sites.
Make sure all art has a source listed.
Start an art budget.
Advocate for better regulations.
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the cultural object of the black hole is kind of remarkable. It's almost an anti-God in a sense, a negative infinity. Yeah there's this kind of dead sun that's collapsed into an infinitely dense point, and if you fall past its event horizon you're fucked. Every schoolchild knows this. A black hole can be introduced in a superhero blockbuster without any explanation except for its established look and the name "black hole", and this will be understood as the ultimate natural disaster, which even superman could not hope to defeat. truly S-tier cosmic object
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I’m sure you’ll all be happy to hear that Hideo Kojima is living his best life after leaving Konami. Not only did he get to frolic around with Mads Mikkelsen, he also got himself a sub. You think I jest but...


Translation: Refn is a kinkster who use his movies to express his kinks. He knows Kojima is a kinkster too who also puts his kinks in his games and that he’s going to use Refn for something that turns Kojima on, and Refn thinks that’s hot. Their’s is a relationship you probably shouldn’t dig too much into.
+ Bonus: confused and scared Kojima fanboys

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raccoons make no sense because they will leave your birdseed and garbage and garden and compost pile alone but they WILL open a barrel and pull out an empty 5 gallon gas canister and unscrew the lid and leave it in your yard and also untie the dog tether from your porch beam for no reason
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a virginia slims ad I love (1971)
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Pro writer tip, if you ever need to get rid of a character but can't write them out gracefully, just have them exclaim out loud "oh fuck my herd of cattle" and then let them run off, never to be seen again. it will be understood. every reader subconsciously suspects that there's a rural farming subplot happening somewhere in the distance of each story they read. it will be understood that it's that character's time to return to pastoralism. goodbye mafia joe. goodbye mitzi bonaparte-hunt. goodbye president jimmy carter. you belong to the farm now.
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Yeah so unfortunately, my friend was right. Muttering 'I'm gonna put on the greatest talent show this town has ever seen' darkly to myself is not only vastly funnier than saying I'm gonna kms, but is also somehow more concerning to anyone who might overhear it
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Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (2004) dir. Danny Leiner
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