joanneko13

[joanneko13]

RANT TIME. Not all of this is sensible or coherent but I’m pissed and writing out all my fucked up thoughts. Bear with me.

Why are we doing this? Why are we letting history repeat itself? Why is this imperfect country that we’ve been building up throughout history, from its Independence, which y’all just fucking celebrated, to present date, crumbling back into its shitty origins?

Why are we letting an elite few mandate the rights of the many? Why are we allowing ICE’s actions when clearly it’s the beginning of mass cleansing? Prisons full of people who were not allowed due process are just concentration camps. Neo-nazis and latinos, cowboys and Indians, confederacy and union, when does it end?

Why aren’t we punching Nazis anymore? Instead we put them in the White House and buy their cars. The hispanics that these racist so vilify this time around actually played a big part in putting this POTUS in power. How does that fucking happen!? Oh my gods, how!?

Honestly, fuck that.

We, actually we, I’m talking Puerto Ricans now, have a history marred by the death of our people. Taínos are no more. Their legacy runs watered down in our veins and soon even that may be no more if we, second-class citizens that we are, dont push back. As Latinos we are part of the targeted community of the present “regime”.

And so I say that as such we are uniquely positioned by virtue of our diversity to make a stand. We who are white, black, native, asian, hispanic, latino, caribbean, american, albeit second-class, [insert religions here], and spread across the planet, we need to fucking take a stand for the betterment of humanity. Honestly we suck, too. We’re riddled with racists and idiots and hate-filled bigots. But we could fucking make a change if we took our heads out of our asses and actually took a good look at the world, at ourselves, at OUR history and made the right choice.

Honestly, scratch that. It’s too selfish to put so much on us. We can’t even fight for ourselves. We went from Spanish control to American control and the majority of us just bitch about it while those who try for actual change are silenced.

So rest of the fucking world: open your goddamn eyes. Stop this dichotomy of black/white = good/bad, and look at the beauty of the gray. Diversity. Humanity is a melting pot of so many beautiful, albeit flawed, beings. Realize this. Realize that we are beautiful. That we hold meaning.

And realize that the exceptions to this one rule are those who don’t see it. People like, Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Stalin, Pinochet, Kim Jong Un, Putin, fucking Musk and Trump. Dictators, the lot of them. Condemn THEM. Condemn those who threaten the beauty of mankind.

Condemn singularity and celebrate diversity.

Realize that we are not enemies. Your fellow man is not the enemy. Spiders are. I rest my case.

[joanneko13]

I originally posted this April 27th, 2015 on Facebook. I think it’s past due for a repost and wider audience:

I'm going to rant. Quite a long rant. I tried to properly organize my thoughts, but I can't promise I fully succeeded. Opinions are welcome. Unless it's unfounded bs, then just please walk away. Anyway, here goes.

Hate.

hate

— verb (used with object), hat·ed, hat·ing.

to dislike intensely or passionately; feel extreme aversion for or extreme hostility toward; detest: to hate the enemy; to hate bigotry.

to be unwilling; dislike: I hate to do it.

— verb (used without object), hat·ed, hat·ing.

to feel intense dislike, or extreme aversion or hostility.

— noun

intense dislike; extreme aversion or hostility.

the object of extreme aversion or hostility.

We sometimes throw that word around like it's nothing. "I hate that food", "I hate that show", "I hate this/that". But how many times do we actually mean it? How many of those things we profess to hate on a daily basis actually stir feelings of extreme/intense hostility/aversion within us? Usually those things we claim to hate simply annoy us at best.

Now, "hate", when you mean it, is a big deal. For example, there's really only one thing that comes to mind if I'm asked "What do I really hate?" And that thing stirs up utterly unhealthy feelings of anger and resentment in me. I'm not kidding, I feel murderous. That is pure unadulterated hate. It's a feeling that makes you want to hurt/destroy something.

Well, I've thought about this dozens of times, and I finally felt the need to articulate it:

My memory's not very good. I remember very little of my childhood or growing up in general. But one thing I do remember is trying to be friends with everyone or trying to treat everyone the same. (This was before constant teasing/bullying led to developing social anxiety.) I didn't discriminate: boy, girl, tall, short, white, black, younger, older, whatever. I was as nice as I could be. I'll admit to straying from this path as I got older and more cynical but even then I never hated anyone or thought of myself as better than anyone. I could not, and I still can't, understand why someone would be mean or cruel or claim to hate someone else for being a little different. Be annoyed by it? Alright, that's plausible. But I couldn't, and can't, understand how some people can have this feeling of superiority that makes them think they have the right to hate or treat people like they're dirt. So, I've always wondered: what has to happen to a person that they could feel those things? More specifically, feel those things toward something that cannot be changed or does not actively antagonize them.

Are they taught? If I recall correctly, I never was. Who would teach something like that? The aforementioned thing that inspires feelings of deep hatred in me took years to reach such a peak and half a dozen lines had to be crossed before I snapped. And I would give anything to get rid of this feeling. So why would someone purposefully instill this in another being? If it's not taught, then how? Where does it come from? Like I said, my one true hatred was something that had to be worked at. It's something that personally attacked me, an antagonizing force in my life. A label can't do that. Someones race, gender, sexuality, likes, dislikes, etc. can't actively antagonize you. So how can you come to truly hate these things?

How is it that such innocuous things could come to inspire such hate in an individual, or groups of individuals? A hate that develops to a point where you try to demonize people for things that they have no power over, things they can't change. To a point where you put serious effort into taking rights away from people; people who've done nothing to you or anyone else?

How does a person come to hate so? It just doesn't seem possible, yet it's happened throughout history and it is still happening. I can't wrap my head around it, hard as I have tried.

And the one alternative I can come up with, that it's not hate but an annoyance that's been confused for hate, is even more disturbing. That you could discriminate so strongly against one group that you would actively antagonize them simply because something about them annoyed/bothered you? It's horrifying. How do people not realize this. How do those who work to deny others their rights not understand how horrible their actions are? It's so fucking frustrating!

And don't get me started on animal abuse or reproductive rights.

Ok. Rant over.

EDIT

Rant continued:

How is it that so much media exists showing the stark difference love and kindness can do in the world as opposed to hatred and cruelty yet the world’s loud majority chooses to spew the latter? How could someone hear The Beatles “Let It Be” or Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror” and not feel a need to strive for compassion? How can you read a book or watch a movie and root for the good guy and not realize when you’re backing the bad guy in real life? How can you consume popular media and not feel moved toward betterness? Or is media harmful? Does history repeat itself because people see it not as a warning of what could happen but as a story that could never come true today? Like a scary movie? It feels cliched to cite V for Vendetta, but here goes:

Evey Hammond: My father was a writer. You would've liked him. *He used to say that artists use lies to tell the truth, while politicians use them to cover the truth up.*

(I also want to cite Harry Potter as an example but JK Rowling’s a piece of trash so I’m conflicted. If you read it, you know what I mean. If you didn’t, don’t. Unless you do it like Jack Sparrow 😘)

Back to the topic at hand. I beg of you. Don’t see media as “a big lie”. Something that couldn’t come to pass. See it as a lesson. Learn from history. Learn from art. Choose love. Choose compassion. Choose empathy.

Be kind.

Okay, end rant.

[joanneko13]

[joanneko13]

Making Cato the Elder’s ‘Savillum’

Keep reading

[joanneko13]

om nom nom

[joanneko13]

Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

Look buddy, i’m just trying to make it to Friday.

[joanneko13]

Chapter two is up https://archiveofourown.org/works/49982848/chapters/126199126

I wrote some more smut…let me know what you think

[joanneko13]

[joanneko13]

Inspired by the wiki fact: "Alastor dislikes being touched and will go out of his way to avoid it. Conversely, Alastor does not respect the personal space of others at all".

Very normal cat behaviour.

[joanneko13]

[joanneko13]

[joanneko13]

My therapist just told me my problem is that I need to write more fanfiction.

[joanneko13]

I spent ten years building up a following on Tumblr. I had 30k+ followers, great engagement, it helped my career thrive like nothing else. I could quit my day job and live off the fan base I’d accrued.

Then, their policies changed. Half my work was no longer allowed. People left the site in droves. I left too, for awhile. I came back to a ghost town. I still have 25k followers, but I don’t think more than 10% are active anymore. I’m followed by ghosts. Same with DeviantArt, although I was never quite as big there, and I’ve been gone so much longer.

This disallowed half of my work was never allowed on Facebook in the first place, or Instagram, but their algorithms are such that my stuff rarely makes it to anyone’s feeds, and if I post a link to where people could actually pay me for my content, it’s hidden unless I pay for it. Patreon swept my work away to a dark corner where no one could see it unless I personally guided them there. Twitch is so strict you can’t even show bare feet. The death of Google Reader means nobody follows RSS feeds anymore, so I can’t direct people to my own site.

So there’s Twitter I guess, where I can post whatever I want, but again, algorithms. But more than that, I don’t have the energy to build up a following once again on a site I don’t own that can delete my career on a whim. The thought of spending time jumping around through hoops for attention just to have it taken away again has stripped any motivation I had to try.

The internet has been gentrified. All the small cute houses and mom & pop shops have been shut down and replaced by big corporations that control everything. I’ve been making webcomics for twenty years, and at the start, the internet was a beautiful wild place. Everyone had a home page. It was like having a house and people came to visit you and you would visit other people in their houses. Now, we don’t visit each other in personal spaces anymore. It’s like we have to visit each other in the aisles of a megamart. Everything is clean and sanitized and the weirdos who made the internet what it was are no longer welcome. No space for freaks anymore.

People still ask me for advice on how to break into comics, and I don’t have any wisdom because I don’t recognize the internet anymore. I don’t feel comfortable working within its boundaries which seems to be getting smaller and smaller and smaller. None of the tools I used when I started exist anymore. They’ve been replaced by things I don’t know how to use. I don’t think I could break into comics today. 2002 had so few barriers compared to now. You might have started on Keenspace, but you could reach a point where you could break away to your own site and people would go to it. Now, you start on Webtoon or Patreon and I guess you just stay there? It feels so much like owning a hardware store for years and then having to go work as a cashier at the Home Depot that put you out of business. I’m looking at my career trajectory and it all points to being a Wal-Mart greeter with uncontrolled arthritis.

I don’t want to make “content,” I want to make comics, I want to make art, and I want to do it in a space that is mine. I’m not sure there’s a place for that anymore.

[joanneko13]

I wrote some more smut...let me know what you think

[joanneko13]

Because I'm only seeing other Jews posting about this, non-Jews I need you to be aware that for the past month or two there has been a wave of bomb threats and swattings at synagogues all across the US. They usually do it when services are being livestreamed. I haven't seen a single non-Jew talking about this. High holidays are coming up in a few weeks, which is when most attacks happen against our communities. We're worried, and we need people to know what's happening to us.