skruffie

[skruffie]

it's kinda a good thing my mom is already getting more radicalized out of being a democrat because I think the news about these attacks on Iran having been planned in Biden's administration otherwise would be a tough pill to swallow

[skruffie]

unrestrained summer fun

[skruffie]

the toontown server that fundamentally changed the core plot of the original game by involuntarily drafting your character into the cause at the start and then writing the cogs to have unique personalities and human names (which derails the whole point of why they're cogs)

is run by people who are arrogant and lapse in communication and run on power trips over a volunteer-run renewal of a children's mmorpg??? damn, color me shocked!!

[skruffie]

sometimes at marches I have found myself looking at the crowd and asking what kind of changes this is going to do. I've still gone to some marches and protests before but in my head there's always this little part of me that's like "but we're on the west coast and the people that need to be stopped are thousands of miles from here, they're not here in person to see this and see what we're saying about them". but then like

today when I was out, I saw an old woman with a sign that said "91 years old and this is my first protest"

it reminds me of this video that Cut did that was demonstrating people of different faiths and how they pray. In one segment, they addressed how sometimes people look at prayer as pointless and one participant in the video was like "yeah, I used to think that too" because there's no immediate results, or it doesn't magically grant the things you're praying for, or what you pray for doesn't happen, but she went on to say how prayer can change peoples' hearts.

just a few minutes ago I saw something on instagram that made me want to write this out: screenshots from twitter where one slide was saying "what was being asked at these no king protests? what happens next if the need is not met?"

next slide: there needs to be some destruction at protests to clog the machine up (which i do agree with frankly lmao)

next slide: calling the no kings protests "the single most performative gesture in the history of the United States"

already people are like "while you were out there, ICE was detaining immigrants", etc etc, and the thing is? The thing is? These things change hearts. Who is that 91 year old performing for? After the march I went to the local cafe we like to frequent where they have a table set up with zines and stickers and the like, and I overheard a mom talking to her child that she had brought to the demo about the stuff there. She was telling this child about Palestine being occupied, very plainly without an overwhelm of information. Exactly how you approach it with a child that's young.

Importantly, I think it's giving people hope and momentum. I got a bit emotional at the people that were driving past and I was seeing teenagers with braces and big smiles giving thumbs up at us from the passenger seats of cars. One kid stuck a sign out the window that said "fighting for my future".

Frankly, with the president, nationwide protests involving millions of people that are telling him to get fucked has a fun psychological warfare angle about it. People are scared, and they're doing it anyway. People are watching white journalists get shot at by police in broad daylight and their hearts and minds are changing. People are scared and do it knowing there is a risk of getting hurt. It's not performative. Sure, a lot of the signs are cringe, but this is a good entry for people who are not used to going to large protests and marches. Not everyone is going to be the ones setting cop cars on fire. These are starting conversations, giving people hope in times where hope feels scarce, and it changes hearts.

[skruffie]

my anger over the state of our country is enormous. it's been simmering quietly for a while now, and I've been trying to just keep focused on what I have in my immediate control around me: I work, I help people get glasses, I help them see, and I help people from every single walk of life. We had a meeting last month where a good portion of it was going over HIPAA and what to do if ICE comes to our clinic. HR said "this has nothing to do with anybody's opinions on immigration, these are purely the facts and the law". I know in her personal life she leans left and I think most of the people here do too, but it was good information to know.

I'm just thinking on this quote from Thomas Paine.

“THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated”

[skruffie]

i hate my vegetable #myvegetable

(source)

[skruffie]

tomorrow the yurok tribal council has some stuff on the docket for their meeting, namely

Constitutional Amendment Referendum - Lineal Descent

what I imagine will happen is that there's going to be a vote to the tribe. the advisory vote was in favor of lineal descent like overwhelmingly so if it's put to an official vote, i feel like it can pass. now, for lineal descent there's likely going to be a base roll or several they use for determining it. the karuk tribe uses the index to the census as an alternate roll and my fingers are crossed that if this passes then the yurok tribe will use the same

so like, if that happens, what i'm thinking is that my own steps are

get a cdib card

really think about this

because that enrollment pathway is much more closer to reality than i thought possible

[skruffie]

In your view/experience. is the rate of "incompleteness" among webcomics more or less the nature of online personal projects as a whole? Or is there something specific to webcomics like laboriousness, audience expectations, relative medium infancy or whatnot?

well for one thing webcomics has changed significantly in the last ten years. it used to have a much lower barrier for entry, just get a smackjeeves account or set up a website with a wordpress plugin. starting a webcomic when i started my webcomic vs starting a webcomic now are totally different experiences.

so i can only speak to people who started their webcomics roughly ten years ago. and roughly ten years ago a lot of us were a whole lot younger with a lot more time and energy to spend on a comic for free. this part is probably still somewhat true for new artists.

but then you get older. your ideas change. your skill develops and the old stuff isn't as good. or you don't have as much time, you got a day job. unless you're one of like five people on earth your webcomic is not paying your rent. you need to make money. your shoulder hurts. you're 30 now. you're struggling to make updates on time between whatever else makes you happy and what else you need to do to live. you wrote this story when you were 21, you don't relate to it anymore, you have different ideas, you've grown up, your audience has noticeably dropped off from the peak, social media managing is hard, you have to go to work, you're so tired, all the time.

it's a lot of things.

[skruffie]

long ass post about something that happened when I was fifteen

Twenty years ago on this date, a moment that was really only a few seconds out of my afternoon ended up being rather lifechanging. I was fifteen and in the cafeteria during lunch, and an acquaintance in our friend group put his hands on me. This was also the first time in my life this had happened and it startled me so bad I practically jumped up off of the seat. I slugged him in the shoulder and thought that was that.

It wasn't.

Any time I saw him after that made me panic, and there was one day where he tried to engage with me and accuse me of being afraid of guys. I cut him off and shouted "No, I'm just afraid of you." I didn't understand what happened and my only frame of reference for what to call it was that it seemed like he was trying to hit on me. A localish band performed in the cafeteria around this time and I used the noise of the crowd to vent my anxiety of having him near me by screaming. Luckily, it was close to the end of the school year and I assumed he would be going to the main high school in town rather than the 250 student population one that I was going to.

(photo below was like <2 weeks after it happened, on the last day of 9th grade)

I spent that summer trying to not think about it and hanging out with my friends, but there was one night we were all up late and playing truth or dare. It became a confessional moment of sorts, all of us around a dining room table with just an overhead light above. One of my friends asked "Have any of you been molested?" Honest to god I was not sure how to even answer it. When I talk about it now with Alice or Kaz, that's what they call it. At the time at age 15, I clumsily described it and probably said "I don't know if this counts..."

My first day of 10th grade in 2005, I was walking to my 2nd period classroom and passed by him in the hallway. This was the first time in my life I remember vividly dissociating: I saw him, watched my surroundings shift like I was on a dolly zoom, thought "What is he doing here", and then the next thing I recall is sitting in my classroom. I was having regular anxiety attacks when I saw him, and we encountered again in November when he sat behind me on the bus. He was trying to get a reaction out of me and started asking me questions. "Are you gay? Do you masturbate?"

So I tried to hit him again, and he left me alone.

He was on the periphery of my friend group and made a couple of my other friends uncomfortable, so after I found this out I cussed him out after school. He'd been reported to the counselor for sexual harassment but the counselor did literally nothing about it. A different friend of mine was following me on deviantart at the time and was the first one to point out to me that what I experienced was traumatic. This was the moment that kind of started my interest in trauma psychology, and what got me into sexual harassment + assault survivor advocacy. Traumatic stress fit what was happening to me that whole year: I was jumpy, I had nightmares that he would find and assault me (again), I was full of rage and fear. I still have almost every single piece of art and writing I did about this during high school saved in a binder because I'm not really sure what to do with it; it's not really good art, but it's raw and it's visceral. It's an important point from my life. There's pages torn out of my school planner from that time period because some sections had inspirational quotes that felt relevant. I think almost every piece in here is something I have never shown another person before, not even Alice.

I felt a little bit more stable when 11th grade started since I was expecting to know that he was there, but what I wasn't banking on was sharing a class with him. I had a journal I kept for a few years that I wrote in only when I was feeling anxious and this particular day even had time stamps.

In this journal, which I kept off and on for about three years, has a loooot of pain. I don't think I've ever fully re-read through it. 11th grade was also when an ex boyfriend of mine was being an outright prick and a creep so I'm sure there's entries in there regarding him as well.

For my senior year, I did my senior project on sexual assault awareness. My original plan was to try to do volunteer work with some hotlines but I wasn't old enough, so it eventually evolved into giving presentations to the freshmen. It felt nice to be able to talk to them, the students that were the same age I was. I also volunteered as a moderator on a forum for sexual harassment survivors and had some of my drawings posted there, but that site is no longer online. I think about that admin a lot and wonder how she's doing.

It took many years before I realized I was moving past it. There are still moments now, even twenty years later, where there's a chance I'll flinch if I feel someone is about to touch my thighs. I don't have nightmares or panic attacks about it, but I'll probably never forget his name. I don't hardly even get capital T Triggered about it; the most recent time I think I did was when one of my highschool friends died. I didn't even know that grief could retrigger the traumas from a specific time period in your life and I've been well acquainted with grief for as long as I can remember. I had seen him when I was working a Black Friday shift at Target once and all I can think is "Really? I thought he moved to Bellingham."

Sometimes certain things bring it back very briefly, like the smell of Fantasy by Britney Spears. I wore it every day in 10th grade.

I've even been in that cafeteria again off and on for events. The last time I went was for a round dance hosted by the school district and the local tribe, and rather than anxiety about trauma I was instead just anxious about feeling out of place. I had to sit with that discomfort and remind myself that I am a community member and alumni of that school district, and I belong. The cafeteria is smaller in person than in my memories.

Why am I writing this? I'm not sure. I used to dread this date, but today instead Alice and I used it to celebrate our wedding anniversary (Which is technically the 7th, but we both had separate plans yesterday). I enjoyed the sun walking around, we browsed antique stores, we got frozen yogurt. We talked about the things we love about each other and how we've changed as people thanks to knowing one another. Twenty years in the past, I'm probably up in my room at my parent's house replaying the afternoon on a loop in my head. Today I'm sipping on a lemonade and listening to the sounds of the evening outside. There's a distant airplane up in the sky, there's Kaz laughing out on the back porch, and a moment ago I heard birds.

Twenty years ago I was afraid that I would never forget what happened. Well... I never forgot, but it doesn't dominate my life the way it used to. I think my younger self would find peace with that.

[skruffie]

update from 2025: I was at the Indigenous People's Festival today.

I came home with a ribbon skirt.

Started to get in my feelings via Indigenous ancestry again and angsting about what I am “allowed” to reclaim, like if there is a degree to which I can maybe reclaim some traditions but not all of them, and

(Screenshot from The Ribbonskirt Project showing a black and white photograph of three women. A caption on the right says “Three Daughters of Norbert Laurence and Marie Parenteau, Marie, Rose, and Clarise wearing ribbon adorned skirts and apron. Date Unknown. Glenbow Archives.”)

THESE ARE LITERALLY MY RELATIVES

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[skruffie]

Finding that friend you can go "our sickos should fuck or kill each other" with in a ttrpg is more important then any government official

[skruffie]

Since I renewed my digital membership for the Humboldt County historical society, I decided to dive into the stuff they have online again. Stuff about my direct line is slim, but now that I am better equipped to understand who I am related to for broader context, I am diving into some indirect lines and/or people that knew my ancestors.

I found an obit for a James Masten, who was one of the witnesses for the index for one of my relatives. Him being from Gold Bluff makes sense for how long he said he knew my relative (lifelong, apparently). Tough thing is I can't find a family tree for James anywhere. He had daughters, but the daughters are hard to find too. Josie being listed as his cousin is just another point of validation for tracking that Gold Bluff is solidly where my family is from and who they knew.

I know there's several people in the tribe still with the name Masten so I wonder whatever became of this one.

[skruffie]

pig,,

[skruffie]

Guy who is touch starved but emotionally repressed goading you into punching him for completely normal reasons

[skruffie]

me when I'm posting in groups while trying to reconnect:

"hey everybody this is my name these are my ancestral names I think we come from here and here and I am looking to see if any of this sounds familiar or if I got any cousins here and also maybe do you want to chit chat? please don't think I'm trying to do this for a money grab or whatever, I just want to know the culture"

frequently, with other people:

[skruffie]