ionodom

[ionodom]

Giant Malaysian Katydid is a species of carnivorous giant katydid. It is one of the largest insects in the world.This is its sound 😮

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Tatsuo Satō & Masaaki Yuasa. Cat Soup, 2001.

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Storyboards by Koji Morimoto for Glay's "Survival" music video, which he directed at Studio 4°C in 1999.

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Dysphoria (2025)

This is a repaint of an illustration I first posted right here on this account over a decade ago when I first transitioned. I did this for TDOV this year as a sort of 'then vs now' for myself more than anything. A lot has changed in a decade. I've changed.

A decade ago visibility felt like liberation, but today it feels like a target. A decade ago politicians made a lot of promises to us, and today they can't run away from us fast enough. A decade ago I was crashing out in a dysphoria spiral. Today, in spite of everything, I'm at peace with myself.

It's Pride Month in the States and the Trans community is going through it. Between the Skrmetti decision and the threat of HR1 stripping care from Trans people of ALL ages on Medicaid and ACA plans, Trans people need support more than ever. So I'm making this illustration available as a print in my shop (link in bio) and 100% of the proceeds will be donated to Point of Pride, an organization dedicated to providing financial aid for transition care. I'll post receipts of funds donated at the end of the month. I'm aiming to raise at least $2000, as that's the amount needed to cover 12 months of telehealth services, prescription medications, lab work, and more for at least one trans person in need of HRT. Transition care really IS life saving, it saved MY life. I wouldn't have lived to make any of the art that people have told me they love so much. My whole portfolio, all my work over the years, none of it would exist. If my art has ever meant anything to you, please, help.

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On Writing Team Books

A friend asks me about writing about team books, which reminds me I wrote an essay to a friend about it a while back, and put it in my newsletter. I figure I could put it on the tumblr for easier access. If you like this, I do stuff like this fairly often in the newsletter so sub.

I get the occasional mail from creator friends, asking me for advice on a topic. Last week, Alex Paknadel (he outed himself on twitter) asked me about writing team books, and I downloaded my brief thoughts to him. None of my thoughts are brief. Here’s an edited and slightly tidied version…

Right!

After I got the mail I wrote a list of five topics off the top of my head. I’m now going to go in and fill in some details beneath them. Fear the download.

1) Killing artists.

More than any other kind of book, the chance of breaking an artist on a team book is highest. You have a bunch of characters, which often do some stuff together. So you’re writing a 6 person team? That’s 6 people together. They’re in a fight? Maybe another 6 people against them.

So call your shots carefully when they’re together. Don’t call for shots of everyone in the same panel, unless you’re really giving it the space to land for the reader and you absolutely need it.

Worth noting sometimes you do: at least part of the team book is folks want to see a team doing the thing. That said, there’s exceptions to that…

2) Black Hole/Bad company . Probably Authority.

I usually say I learned to write team books by a teenage exposure to ABC WARRIORS: THE BLACK HOLE and BAD COMPANY VOL 2: THE BEWILDERNESS. This is classic 2000AD hypercompression - both explicit team books told in 5-6 page chunks. How did they do it?

ABC Warriors primarily does it by having a team member be the narrator in each episode, and then rotating the narrator between episodes. So you are both introduced to each character, and also (because the narrators are so different) introduced to the perspective of the character who is speaking., This also means this constant reintroduction isn’t in any way boring, because the characters are all so individually warped. You want to know what a sadistic fuck like Blackblood makes about everyone, right?

BAD COMPANY goes the other way, and has a strong single narrator in the form of Danny Franks, and uses them as the perspective we explore the rest of the cast. Some stuff is almost explicitly Franks interviewing team members.

Both speak to an underlying truth – a big chunk of team books are about moving the pieces around in new combinations, and seeing what they do.

I mention Authority, but the first run dose some key basic things of modern team story books – this almost procedural mode was especially popular in the 00s, and is something of a break of the Classic American Superteam approach. Speaking broadly, it does very cleanly some things superteams have always done - you can see where it moves from separating the group (so all team members gets a chance to do cool shit) and then bringing them together (so you get to do the big team book money shots).

But also note that when they’re together in a non-violent scene, someone - usually Jenny - takes lead, and almost everyone else shuts up. You may view this as the Authority becoming a solo book with a supporting cast rather than a true team book when the story demands - that speaks to it being a plot-first book. There’s not really much for the team to debate about - they all know what they’re going to do (kick people in the head, save the world).

TL;DR: Go breakdown some of your faves. How do their stories work?

3) Spotlight time.

That’s the main thing, and what all the above do, in various ways. If it’s a team book, characters need to be able to be on panel and do their thing. That it’s being sold as a team book implies that’s the promise to some degree. When planning an issue ensuring everyone gets to do their cool thing for a moment is not a bad perspective to take.

(This is pretty close to running an RPG group, btw. If someone’s not done something for a while, it’s probably time to give them a chance to do something.)

The alternative - especially in a one off - is to make the issue explicitly about an individual. Like the Black Hole, maybe this is just a single character in the team, and about how they work in the team. Of course, the effects do overlap - like in Bad Company, having the story be from an individual’s perspective you get to show how the other people are viewed by them, and so how cool their cool thing may be.

4) Team book vs ensemble cast.

That links to the above - like, what is the book, really?

There’s team books which aren’t really teams - they’re actually ensemble casts. WicDiv was one of them. DIE is much more of a team book - it’s a literal party (with Ash as the main narrator, ala BAD company). Watchmen has one scene when there’s a team, and they’re not called The Watchmen – it is absolutely an ensemble cast. Hickman’s X-men isn’t a team - it’s an ensemble cast (to the level where I think it’s more of a permanent event, or even a social novel). My Journey into Mystery is abstractly a solo book, but at times it became an ensemble book - and even a SERIES of team books, because Loki was always having to put teams together to do stuff. My Uncanny X-men run was primarily an Authority-mode procedural team book, with Cyclops taking the Jenny position and everyone having lots of focus time to do their cool thing (though see later on the exceptions).

The core difference between Ensemble books and Team books is that in a team book “I want to see the people together doing their thing” is part of the promise.

5) Split the Party.

You ever seen Dan Harmon write about Community? Clearly the story circle, but there’s also the sense that most episodes are about dividing the cast into smaller pairs and threes, and exploring that dynamic. This is in a lot of sitcoms, and an approach that 100% crosses over into team books.

5-9 people in a team normally means 7 of them standing around in a blob, with 1 person taking the leader role, and maybe one other takes the person to argue against the leader. Who is arguing likely varies, but it’s normally who feels most strongly about a situation. I suddenly find myself thinking like a team book is a zoom call, and most people are just standing and listening.

So you need to split that up.

Split up a 6 team into two groups of three, and you’ve got proper potential for actual drama. Each scene can be about those people, and by changing up the people you group together, you get to show different aspects of the characters. The Uncanny Run had a core team of nine, which is ludicrous… and when the book isn’t doing the widescreen mode, you’ll see I split the team into 3 groups of 3, and I get to play with all kinds of dynamics.

This is what team books do best, I think – in that you’ve got no single element which “needs” to be there (As in if opposed to you having a group cast around a a daredevil or a batman, readers are still broadly pissed off when you don’t see anything of the lead character). You get to see what emerges from all these different combinations, and then being able to bring them together to do the core TEAM beat when you need that.

Think about the subtext of “Avengers Assemble”. It implies that the Avengers were apart.

[ionodom]

DOMINION

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Sin and Punishment: Successor of the Skies // Yasushi Suzuki 

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A Q-bee comic to get you through the heatwave!

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Spoke to a gen z person the other night and apparently the young folks don't know about the very legal sites from which you can access public domain media (including Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and other Victorian gothic horror stories)?

Like this young person didn't even know about goddamn Gutenberg which is a SHAME. I linked to it and they went "aw yiss time to do a theft" and I was like "I mean yo ho ho and all that, sure, but. you know gutenberg is entirely legal, right?"

Anyway I'm gonna put this in a few Choice Tags (sorry dracula fans I DID mention it though so it's fair game) and then put some Cool Links in a reblog so this post will still show UP in said tags lmao.

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I don't like that I haven't posted anything since march so here's a few doodles of this mouse girl

I dunno her name yet

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Mei Ling ‘Metal Gear Solid’ PlayStation

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No wonder death grips fucking hate their fans, relistening to their music, it's so visceral and personal for it to be boiled down to "haha funny black guy scream xd" is insulting

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my piece for the ani-may scroll show at nucleus house portland!

this sirene wall scroll will be a limited edition of 25 🖤 the show is running from now through to june 1st!

twitter | ig | inprnt | patreon | store

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Cybercriminals are abusing Google’s infrastructure, creating emails that appear to come from Google in order to persuade people into handing over their Google account credentials. This attack, first flagged by Nick Johnson, the lead developer of the Ethereum Name Service (ENS), a blockchain equivalent of the popular internet naming convention known as the Domain Name System (DNS). Nick received a very official looking security alert about a subpoena allegedly issued to Google by law enforcement to information contained in Nick’s Google account. A URL in the email pointed Nick to a sites.google.com page that looked like an exact copy of the official Google support portal.

As a computer savvy person, Nick spotted that the official site should have been hosted on accounts.google.com and not sites.google.com. The difference is that anyone with a Google account can create a website on sites.google.com. And that is exactly what the cybercriminals did. Attackers increasingly use Google Sites to host phishing pages because the domain appears trustworthy to most users and can bypass many security filters. One of those filters is DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), an email authentication protocol that allows the sending server to attach a digital signature to an email. If the target clicked either “Upload additional documents” or “View case”, they were redirected to an exact copy of the Google sign-in page designed to steal their login credentials. Your Google credentials are coveted prey, because they give access to core Google services like Gmail, Google Drive, Google Photos, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, Google Maps, Google Play, and YouTube, but also any third-party apps and services you have chosen to log in with your Google account. The signs to recognize this scam are the pages hosted at sites.google.com which should have been support.google.com and accounts.google.com and the sender address in the email header. Although it was signed by accounts.google.com, it was emailed by another address. If a person had all these accounts compromised in one go, this could easily lead to identity theft.

How to avoid scams like this

Don’t follow links in unsolicited emails or on unexpected websites.

Carefully look at the email headers when you receive an unexpected mail.

Verify the legitimacy of such emails through another, independent method.

Don’t use your Google account (or Facebook for that matter) to log in at other sites and services. Instead create an account on the service itself.

Technical details Analyzing the URL used in the attack on Nick, (https://sites.google.com[/]u/17918456/d/1W4M_jFajsC8YKeRJn6tt_b1Ja9Puh6_v/edit) where /u/17918456/ is a user or account identifier and /d/1W4M_jFajsC8YKeRJn6tt_b1Ja9Puh6_v/ identifies the exact page, the /edit part stands out like a sore thumb. DKIM-signed messages keep the signature during replays as long as the body remains unchanged. So if a malicious actor gets access to a previously legitimate DKIM-signed email, they can resend that exact message at any time, and it will still pass authentication. So, what the cybercriminals did was: Set up a Gmail account starting with me@ so the visible email would look as if it was addressed to “me.” Register an OAuth app and set the app name to match the phishing link Grant the OAuth app access to their Google account which triggers a legitimate security warning from no-reply@accounts.google.com This alert has a valid DKIM signature, with the content of the phishing email embedded in the body as the app name. Forward the message untouched which keeps the DKIM signature valid. Creating the application containing the entire text of the phishing message for its name, and preparing the landing page and fake login site may seem a lot of work. But once the criminals have completed the initial work, the procedure is easy enough to repeat once a page gets reported, which is not easy on sites.google.com. Nick submitted a bug report to Google about this. Google originally closed the report as ‘Working as Intended,’ but later Google got back to him and said it had reconsidered the matter and it will fix the OAuth bug.

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Guys it's her birthday today 🎉

da queen