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It's wild how "women are reading frivolous and immoral novels that are rotting their brains" is such an evergreen moral panic. You'd think we'd have figured this one out by now.

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Comic #357 : Enshittification - Website links here ~ This may be one of the worst times to be posting art online. So many platforms being swamped with A*I*, spammed with aggressive bots and algorithms that will hide you until you play their silly secret games. What else can we do but ride it out?

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Yaaaaaaaay I have Vesta!

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Bad news: The Facebook Groups suggestion emails are back

(the ones I can't unsubscribe to, nor can I even try to join the groups because Facebook won't let me access my account or make a new one or delete the existing one)

Good news: At least they're all Animal Crossing stuff now instead of increasingly aggressive homo-and-transphobia

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Captain Wilson + chainsaw

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whoever came up with the phraise "eepy" i hate you because its so cringe and embarassing but its the first word that comes to me when im feeling eepy

fuck you

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Hey! It's Free Comic Book Day (or at least in the United States and Canada, it is... I don't know if distributors in other countries do this) Go give your local comic book shop a visit if you've got one!

Grab some free reading material. Peruse new releases. And if you're up for it here's my little assignment: Find a title you've never heard of with some cool art, and give it a shot on a whim.

Be a little reckless, a little random, and just grab whatever issue's most recent, even if it's issue, like, 300 or something --if you like it you can come back some other day and work your way backwards from there until you hit the start of the most recent storyline. Or you can just find the rest online if it's inconvenient to make that trip on the regular. (I promise I won't tell on you to your LCBS)

I know things are tight right now for everyone, but it's just $3.99* for a bit of fun, and I feel like comic books, as a cultural fixture/artifact/practice(?), have sort of lost their disposable whimsy.

(*Did you know in the US there's no sales tax on what are considered "periodicals"? That includes physical newspapers, magazines, and comic books!)

It's not 25¢ cheap like when you dad (grandad(?)) was a kid, i know... but I feel like people have forgotten that a single issue of a comic is a thing you shouldn't feel bad about maybe fucking up the pages of, or reading until it falls apart, or leaving on the seat of a bus or train or park bench, or food court. I wouldn't ask you to suddenly start keeping up with a dozen ongoing titles on the regular, but picking up just one new comic should feel easy, low commitment, and regret free.

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This is Patrick. ER S01E08 (1994) vrs. SpongeBob SquarePants S02E03 (2000)

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dandelion fields

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it's got solitaire btw. if you even care

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meditation 🪷

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ok im going to #seriouspost for a second here. I don't think Harry Potter is a manifesto. I think it was a flawed passion project that millennials latched onto because of the fantasy of sticking it to their mean teachers and arbitrarily categorizing themselves (hogwarts houses; it's the thinking millennial's astrology). I think the fact that the series got popular when and how it did was very much a product of its time.

I don't think Harry Potter is the biggest symbol of JKR's bigotry. I think the most flagrant sign of that was how she responded to critics. I watched her become radicalized in real time. I watched how she doubled down on her racism when she was called out for the ways she promoted her tragically mid fantastic beasts movies. I watched her chase marginalized teenagers with a double digit follower count off of twitter for daring to criticize her thought process, and no one with any kind of power standing against her because she was the one who was paying them. This isn't to say Harry Potter is without flaws. This is to say she really didn't give a shit about that. Getting rich and powerful is a hell of a drug, and she had enough sycophants that she had no reason to care about what her critics were saying.

She was convinced that she was a martyr; a voice for the unheard; a leader for the ages, so of course her detractors were the bad guys. And I think we should take this to heart. We should see this as an example of how easy it is to get radicalized; if you think of yourself as a paragon of virtue, you are going to think that whatever you see as good and right is an objective fact. Most people don't know this, but the majority of terfs start out as trans allies. You are not immune to propaganda! You are not immune to falling into dangerous ideologies!!!

This is why the most important thing you can do as an activist is to listen. Do NOT think you're above being wrong; do NOT develop a god complex; do NOT form an identity out of being right all the time. Involve yourselves in the groups you claim to speak for. Listen to trans women; share resources that help trans women; familiarize yourself with the diversity of experiences that trans people have and the struggles they face.

No, none of you are as bad as JKR because you don't have her money or her power. You will likely never have the capacity for harm she does. But check yourselves. Do not affirm yourselves into thinking you always have the moral high ground. Watch yourselves; humble yourselves; check yourselves for signs of cult behavior and internalized prejudice. You are always learning. You will always be learning. Do not allow yourselves to get a power trip from brushing off marginalized voices.

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love the fact that yusuke states he hates birds (iirc a couple times), meanwhile his spirit beast- a literal representation of the energy from his soul- ends up being a bird. surely this doesnt have any deeper implications about yusukes self image :)

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8> 👻

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I feel like there's something to say about what we each see vs what we don't, and how that ties into some complaints looking overblown. Which is to say sometimes people whine about valid criticism as if it's an attack, but sometimes that valid criticism has a bunch of unneeded vitriol mixed into it that a lot of us don't end up seeing because the internet is filled with a mix of trolls and people who don't seem to understand the difference between communicating with someone you know and a random stranger, especially if that random stranger is famous enough to have some kind of parasocial following.

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I promise I wasn't assuming you were a child. I checked your pinned post before I said that because you said 2009 and my first thought was maybe that was just when you first heard of it. So when I saw your listed age I thought "I definitely became aware of it within a few years of when you were born so it might be older actually."

Hey. Take my hand. I feel like if 4chan can afford to keep running since 2009 despite having an unmarketable shitty userbase then whatever may happen to tumblr will not be our fault.