#I'm like if a guy had mental issues

[rigels-nigels]

:p

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

She can't keep getting away with this!

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[canisalbus]

Hello I made you some more art!! IDK Why your little guys have just stuck in my brain as of late but yeah I'm just on a roll I guess!

This piece was inspired by wondering who was present around Machete's assassination, and how people around him would react to his downfall. So I had the idea for a portrait of a final lover's embrace, as Vasco holds his dying beloved in bloodsoaked arms.

I tried my best with the clothing -- especially the shoes -- and I think I did a pretty good job but BOY were they hard! XD Anyways, I hope you like this one, it was a blast to draw! I love machete sm istg <3

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[normcore-tertiary-character]

One thing I really wish they'd leaned into on Ghosts was early on excusing all her ghost-related behavior as being because of her head trauma at the start of the series. In the first few episodes it would make more sense if she was leaning on that reasoning for her weird behavior, particularly when she does think the ghosts are concussion hallucinations. Then when she gets in a pinch like with the Farnsbeys where she's probably healed but acting really weird it would be a reasonable way to try to shrug off some suspicion.

Then she just gets used to it as an excuse and it crops up in increasingly ridiculous circumstances. She tells the waiter at her mom's diner that she's talking to the air because of a head trauma. She tells Mike like 6 months into his working for them. In season 2 she tells guests who walk in on her talking to herself that it's due to a head injury. Eventually she's so used to all ghost things being because of her head trauma that someone sees the lights flickering from Thor and she's like "hey, sorry, I have a concussion"

[moe-broey]

Sketch dump I was gonna post after several other drawings but I just. Need to get it out of my system actually.

Big hc I've been running w lately is that Alfonse is a lap guy (entirely on his terms) and I. Had the thought. Of that extending to Lif.

Also finally pinned down the Alfonse/Dimitri/Lif dynamic and it's Evil Compatibility, where they're a perfect match to inevitably bring out the worst in each other LMFAOO

[daz4i]

hate that i can't explain to people that sometimes things give me a mental block and i can't fix them on my own. bc it'll make me sound crazy. there is something on the table that is preventing me from using it. i can't move it on my own. physically i could, but mentally, my brain won't let me. i don't know why. just approaching the table makes me panic. yes i know it doesn't make sense. no i don't know how to change that. can't you just move it? why not? why do i need to give a logical reason for my brain's illogical behavior to get this very simply help from you? why do i need a reason at all?

[dollopheadsandclotpoles]

A friend who I made when I was going through one of the worst mental health periods of my life just said that I was "more neurotypical than him and his friend were" when we met, just because I was more likely to stand up to assholes than either of them were. Ok, well, glad I'm passing ig

[tunglrsillyman]

:3

Sure I'll share this (OC posting below)

how it started (Circa 2018)

how its going (drew it last night using the same technique this time using Samsung's notes drawing program. But also for the funnies, this is also taking place in 2018.)

[yellowocaballero]

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THE EXTRA MATT. you write him so perfectly annoying

THANKS I LIKE HIM MORE THAN HE DESERVES.

Out of all the superheroes I've written in that series he's the first one I actually, like, enjoy and care about, so I had to make him the most insufferably annoying man physically possible. Most of his annoyingness in the final draft was shifted onto the next chapter, since he ended up being used more for plot reasons than anything else, and I we didn't end up with as much of him as I wanted. He might need a side story (for peak annoying). I have a whole-ass backstory and tons of meta for him that I can't share until after the next chapter's published, so check back in then and I can talk more about the ninja industrial complex.

The thing about Daredevil comics is that 60% are mediocre and boring, 30% are good and boring, and 10% are by Waid, Soule, or Zdarsky (so, both good and fun). Miller and Loeb are probably the most influential DD authors, which tells you all about how fun and occasionally questionable the DD status quo is.

The Matt I wrote was closer in tone to Waid, Soule, etc than the status quo Matt, lining up further with Waid's general 'massive troll' energy. This was actually a bit dishonest of me, as Waid's Matt is less a Fraction/Aja style reimagining and more 'this is our normal status quo Matt + one absolute mental breakdown as a result of canon events'. Taking Waid's >:3 Matt wholesale without consideration of the actual root of why he acts like that (Miller Loeb & Bendis induced mental breakdown) does disservice to why the portrayal was interesting. On the other hand, >:3 Matt is fun to read and write and status quo Matt is not. I decided to just pick up on the important lesson from that - that Matt's history is a history of intense pain, that he is somebody who is just so intensely sad constantly, and that it is absolutely best to write him as somebody who is so sad he decided to go apeshit insane.

Anyway, Matt is the other part-timer helper-outer with the Heroes For Hire, and like Jake he feels a sense of superiority over them. He thinks arguing is fun and will argue about anything for absolutely no reason. He didn't really intend to set himself up as someone with no light perception (NLP) and entered college meaning on passing himself off as moderately visually impaired, but when absolutely everybody assumed that the cane and glasses meant you had NLP he just started going with it and things snowballed from there. Foggy is the only one who knows that he's ok at distinguishing objects and spatial perception but that's just because Foggy was the only one who asked. He has his life together in every standard way and is only a disaster at keeping girlfriends alive. Matt, Foggy, and Karen all go clothes shopping together and help each other buy clothes. They color coordinate and Matt doesn't know this. When he was a kid he felt constantly guilty about inconveniencing others and as an adult he's decided to inconvenience everybody around him as much as possible. If you ask him any personal detail, no matter how inconsequential it is, he will lie about it. Responds to most criticism by saying 'can't help being a Libra'. Is a Capricorn.

The best depictions of Matt remember that he is blind. Check back later and I'll describe how he's an accredited yet nonlicensed ninja.

[dont-offend-the-bees]

O o o f should not have showed the folks everything everywhere all at once

[theeverdream]

if you do not have sensory processing issues and you are a person who has made my personal life harder because of my sensory issues (so like not anybody here) I FUCKING HATE YOU SO MUCH

[capitateoftheherald]

for the past few days i've only really been out of bed to eat and use the bathroom because i'm having a mental illness moment (active suicidal ideation; neither method i'd choose is available to me though). been smoking wayy too much as a result. most of my time is spent maladaptive daydreaming.

had a conversation with a guy i used to be friends with (and had a crush on) and i'm So So Clearly Still Down Bad. he was texting me and i would smile stupidly at the careful way he phrased his messages and the LENGTH !! a chatty cathy. but i need to meet up with him in person to unmix my feelings on the matter.

However. because of the mental illness moment i am Wary. i feel not really like myself & i'm struggling to differentiate between bpd and Normal emotions & i don't wanna do some dumb weird shit in regards to him and fuck it up and hurt him somehow !

it's a strange feeling to simultaneously desperately desire someone and desperately wish to die. like YES i wanna smash and YES i wanna cuddle but also YES the thought of any kind of future is impossible to me currently so it wouldn't really feel fair to drag you into it. idk. i hate trying to navigate this stupid dumbfuck brain

edit: okay i'm realizing that part of my mixed feelings is because i am terrified that if i'm too genuine with him he'll leave again. and i am like PLS god do not leave i do not have another friend near enough to me rn. which is a little hilarious because i am the one that got hurt in the first place so He should be the nervous one if he's interested in rekindling a friendship.. get on your hands and knees and beg boy. apologize harder or whatever. need to keep reminding myself of this i think.

[mental-skillness]

"This is gonna be my last pack for sure. I'm gonna taper myself off," i say, three days before i get someone to buy me a second pack

[aw-bean-s]

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[wifelinkmtg]

TUMBLR POST EDITOR WON'T LET ME TITLE THIS POST ANYMORE SO I GUESS THIS IS THE TITLE NOW. WEBBED SITE INNIT

So let's say you grew up in the nineties and that The Lion King was an important movie to you. Let's say that the character of Scar - snarling, ambitious, condescending, effeminate Scar - stirred feelings in you which you had no words for as a child. And then let's say, many years later, you're talking about it with a college friend, and you say something like, "oh man, I think Scar was some sort of gay awakening for me," and she fixes you with this level stare and says, "Scar was a fascist. What's the matter with you?"

The immediate feeling is not unlike missing a step: hang on, what's happening, what did I miss? You knew there were goose-stepping hyenas in "Be Prepared," but you didn't think it mattered that much. He's the bad guy, after all, and the movie's just pointing it out. Your friend says it's more than that: the visuals of the song are directly referencing the Nuremberg rallies. They're practically an homage to Riefenstahl. This was your sexual awakening? Is this why you're so into peaked caps and leather, then? Subliminal nazi kink, perhaps?

And then one of your other friends cuts in. "Hold up," he says, "let's think about what Scar actually did in the movie. He organized a group of racialized outcasts and led them against a predatory monarchy. Why are you so keen to defend their hereditary rule? Scar's the good guy here." The conversation immediately descends into a verbal slap fight about who the real bad guy is, whether Scar's regime was actually responsible for the ecological devastation of the Pride Lands, whether the hyenas actually count as "racialized" because James Earl Jones voiced Mufasa after all. Your Catholic friend starts saying some strange and frankly concerning shit about Natural Law. Someone brings The Lion King 2 into it. You leave the conversation feeling a little bit lost and a little bit anxious. What were we even talking about?

INTRODUCING: THE DITCH

There is a way of reading texts which I'm afraid is pervasive, which has as its most classical expression the smug obsession with trivia and minutiae you find in a certain vein of comic book fan. "Who was the first Green Lantern? What was his weakness? Do you even know the Green Lantern Oath?" It eschews the subjective in favor of definitively knowable fact. You can't argue with this guy that, say, Alan Scott shouldn't really count as the first Green Lantern because his whole deal is so radically different from the Hal Jordan/John Stewart/Guy Gardner Corps-era Lanterns, because this guy will simply say "but he's called Green Lantern. Says so right on the cover. Checkmate." This approach to reading a text is fundamentally 1) emotionally detached (there's a reason the joke goes, oh you like X band? name three of their songs - and not, which of their songs means the most to you? which of them came into your life at exactly the right moment to tell you exactly what you needed to hear just then?) and 2) defensive. It's a stance that is designed not to lose arguments. It says so right on the cover. Checkmate.

And then you get the guys who are like "well obviously Bruce Wayne could do far more as a billionaire to solve societal problems by using his tremendous wealth to address systemic issues instead of dressing up as a bat and punching mental patients in the head," and these guys have half a point but they're basically in the same ditch butting heads with the "well, actually" guys, and can we not simply extricate ourselves from the ditch entirely?

So, okay, let's return to our initial example. Scar is portrayed using Nazi iconography - the goose-stepping, the monumentality, the Nuremberg Lichtdom. He is also flamboyant and effete. He unifies and leads a group of downtrodden exiles to overthrow an absolute monarch. He's also a self-serving despot on whose rule Heaven Itself turns its back. You can't reconcile these things from within the ditch - or if you can, the attempt is likely to be ad-hoc supposition and duct tape.

Instead, let's ask ourselves what perspective The Lion King is coming from. What does it say is true about the world? What are its precepts, its axioms?

There is a natural hierarchical order to the world. This is just and righteous and the way of things, and attempts to overthrow this order will be punished severely by the world itself.

Fascism is what happens when evil men attempt to usurp this natural order with the aid of a group or groups of people who refuse to accept their place in the order.

There exists an alternative to defending and adhering to one's place in the natural order - it consists only of selfish spineless apathy.

Manliness is an essential quality of a just ruler. Unmanliness renders a person unfit for rule, and often resentful and dangerous as well.

And isn't that interesting, laid out like that? It renders the entire argument about the movie irrelevant (except for whatever your Catholic friend was on about, since his understanding of the world seems to line up with the above precepts weirdly well.) It's meaningless to argue about whether Scar was a secret hero or a fascist, when the movie doesn't understand fascism and has a damn-near alien view of what good and evil are.

There's always gonna be someone who, having read this far, wants to reply, "so, what? The Lion King is a bad movie and the people who made it were homophobes and also American monarchists, somehow? And anyone who likes it is also some sort of gay-bashing crypto-authoritarian?" To which I have to reply, man, c'mon, get out of the ditch. You're no good to anyone in there. Take my hand. I'm going to pull on three. One... two...

SO PHYREXIA [PAUSE FOR APPLAUSE, GROANS]

We're talking about everyone's favorite ichor-drooling surgery monsters again because there was a bit in my ~*~seminal~*~ essay Transformation, Horror, Eros, Phyrexia which seemed to give a number of readers quite a bit of trouble: namely, the idea that while Phyrexia is textually fascist, their aesthetic is incompatible with real-world fascism, and further, that this aesthetic incompatibility in some way outweighs the ways in which they act like a fascist nation in terms of how we think of them. I'll take responsibility here: I don't think that point is at all clear or well-argued in that essay. What I was trying to articulate was that the text of Magic: the Gathering very much wants Phyrexia to be supremely evil and dangerous fascists, because that makes for effective antagonists, but in the process of constructing that, it's accidentally encoded a whole bunch of fascinating presuppositions that end up working at cross-purposes with its apparent aim. That's... not that much clearer, is it? Hmm. Why don't I just show you what I mean?

Atraxa, Grand Unifier (art by Marta Nael)

In "Beneath Eyes Unblinking," one of the March of the Machine stories by K. Arsenault Rivera, there's a fascinating and I think revealing passage in which Atraxa (big-deal Phyrexianized angel and Elesh Norn's lieutenant) has a run-in with an art museum in New Capenna. The first thing I want to talk about is that, in this passage, Atraxa has no understanding of the concept of "beauty". A great deal of space in such a rushed storyline is devoted to her trying to puzzle out what beauty means and interrogating the minds of her recently-compleated Capennan aesthetes to try and understand it. In the end, she is unable to conceive of beauty except as "wrongness," as anathema.

So my first question is, why doesn't Atraxa have any idea of beauty? This is nonsense, right? We could point to a previous story, "A Garden of Flesh," by Lora Gray, in which Elesh Norn explicitly thinks in terms of beauty, but that's a little bit ditchbound, isn't it? The better argument is to simply look at Phyrexian bodies, at the Phyrexian landscape, all of which looks the way it does on purpose, all of which has been shaped in accordance with the very real aesthetic preferences of Phyrexians. How you could look at the Fair Basilica and not understand that Phyrexians most definitely have an idea of beauty, even if you personally disagree with it, is baffling. This is a lot like the canonical assertion that Phyrexians lack souls, which is both contradicted elsewhere in canon and essentially meaningless, given Magic's unwillingness or inability to articulate what a soul is in its setting, and as with this, it seems the goal is simply to dehumanize Phyrexians, to render them alien, even at the cost of incoherence or internal contradiction.

Atraxa's progress through the museum is fascinating. It evokes the 1937 Nazi exhibit on "degenerate art" in Munich, but not at all cleanly. The first exhibit, which is of representational art, she angrily destroys for being too individualistic (a point of dissonance with the European fascist movements of the 20th century, which formed in direct antagonism to communism.) The second exhibit, filled with abstract paintings and sculptures, she destroys even more angrily for having no conceivable use (this is much more in line with the Nazi idea of "degenerate art", so well done there.) The third exhibit is filled with war trophies and reconstructions from a failed Phyrexian invasion of Capenna many years prior, which she is angriest of all with (and fair enough, I suppose.) But then, after she's done completely trashing the place, she spots a number of angel statues on the cathedral across the plaza, and she goes apeshit. In a fugue of white-hot rage, she pulverizes the angel heads, and here is where I have to ask my second question:

Why angels? If you are trying to invoke fascist attitudes toward art, big statues of angels are precisely the wrong thing for your fascist analogues to hate. Fascists love monumental, heroic representations of superhuman perfection. It's practically their whole aesthetic deal. I understand that we're foreshadowing the imminent defeat of Phyrexia at the hands of legions of angels and a multiversal proliferation of angel juice, but that just leads to the exact same question: why angels? To the best of my knowledge, the Phyrexian weakness to New Capennan angel juice is something invented for this storyline. They have, after all, been happily compleating angels since 1997. We could talk about the in-universe justification for why Halo specifically is so potent, but I don't remember what that justification is, and also don't care. Let's not jump back in the ditch, please. The point is, someone decided that this time, Phyrexia would be defeated by an angelic host, and what does that mean? What is the text trying to say? What are its precepts and axioms?

Let me ask you a question: how many physically disabled angels are there in Magic: the Gathering? How about transsexual angels? How many angels are there, on all of the cards that have ever been printed for Magic: the Gathering, that are even just a bit ugly? Do you get it yet? Or do you need me to spell it out for you?

SPELLING IT OUT FOR YOU

There is a kind of body which is bad. It is bad because it has been significantly altered from its natural state, and it is bad because it is repellent to our aesthetic sensibilities.

The bad kind of body is contagious. It spreads through contact. Sometimes people we love are infected, and then they become the bad kind of body too.

There is a kind of body which is good. It is good because it is pleasing to our aesthetic sensibilities, and it is good because it is unaltered from its (super)natural state.

A happy ending is when all the good bodies destroy or drive into hiding all of the bad bodies. A happy ending is when the bad bodies of the people we love are forcibly returned to being the good kind of body.

Do you get it now?

ENDNOTES

It's worth noting that the ditch is very similar to the white American Evangelical hermeneutics of "the Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it," the defensive chapter-and-verse-or-it-didn't-happen approach to reading a text, what Fred Clark of slacktivist calls "concordance-ism". I don't think that's accidental. We stand underneath centuries of people reading the Bible very poorly - how could that not affect how we read things today? We are participants in history whether we like it or not.

I sincerely hope I haven't come across as condescending in this essay. Close reading is legitimately difficult! They teach college courses on this stuff! And while it is frustrating to have my close readings interrogated by people who... aren't doing that, like. I do get it. I find myself back in the ditch all the time. This stuff is hard. It is also, sorry, crucial if you intend to say something about a text that's worth saying.

I also hope I've communicated clearly here. Magic story is sufficiently incoherent that trying to develop a thesis about it often feels like trying to nail jello to the wall. If anyone has questions, please ask them! And thank you for reading. Next time, we'll probably do the new Eldraine set.

[thatlittleegyptologist]

Out of curiousity, do you think most national museums are participating in the same kind of thing that the British Museum is, i.e. holding onto items that they stole in conquest / archaeological items that other nations are requesting back?

I always wonder if we should be looking at the bigger picture rather than just this one spotlighted issue (not that the spotlight isn't important in raising the issue originally).

oh goodie we're digging up stuff I wrote from 2 years ago...yay

Okay, for starters, let's look at how you've phrased your question. Currently, the heavy implication is that this is all the BM is (i.e. it only holds colonial loot and contested items), which is false. Yes, it does hold colonial loot from the British Empire. No one is disputing that. It also holds contested items such as the Parthenon Marbles and the Rosetta Stone. What it also holds are many items taken from digs where the country in question permitted them taking them, and then also gifts and other such non colonial requisitions.

Mostly, I need to stress, because as someone who's adjacent to museums this drives me insane: Framing all museum collections as Bad and only containing Bad Items from Bad Deeds doesn't give you the full picture and if you don't have the full picture you can't really address the issue of repatriation properly. It's the classic 'All or Nothing' mentality and I'm begging people to seek nuance on complex topics such as this. Also governments suck and so hearing repeated 'well museums suck because XYZ' means they're more than happy to simply defund them, which they already are doing and that's not helping stuff like repatriation either.

In short, if you're asking does any other museum have a law like BM63 (I wrote 68 in the post because...I'm bad at numbers)? Not as far as I'm aware, no. The BM is unique in that instance where the government literally created a law to prevent it from divesting of its collection.

Do other national museums hold colonial looted artefacts and contested items? Yes. Lots of them. All over the world.

Germany's Neues Museum holds the bust of Nefertiti, which is contested.

The Louvre in Paris has multiple Italian artworks that were stolen in the 1790s that Italy wants back.

The Horses of St Mark's (in Venice) were stolen from Greece by Constantine in the 1200s. (Not really all that contested but they were definitely stolen).

Yale University holds numerous items from Machu Picchu. The 1911 dig had permission from the Peruvian Government, but the items were supposed to be returned. I believe (don't quote me) that less than half were originally. They have subsequently been returned, but this is not an uncommon story.

There's a bunch of Nazi looted artworks that are in museums that need to be returned to their rightful owners.

The MET museum in the US and everything it got from Douglas Latchford (this is ongoing, with some repatriations having already happened)

The National Museum of Australia also got caught out by that guy.

To be fair, the MET Museum has a problem with looted artefacts in general from the 70s onwards as they tried to compete with the European collections and thus ended up gaining a lot of 'not properly provenanced artefacts'. There was a gold sarcophagus they returned only recently that was looted from Egypt post-2011.

The Bible Museum in the US has...stuff it shouldn't (there's a lot and I'm not listing it).

*voice dripping with derision* Whatever the Hobby Lobby is up to

I could go on!

Focusing solely on the BM is a result of a US-Centric mindset, and a pervasive anglophone bias in things people will read. (Or in other words: It's fun to shit on the Brits and most of you only read English anyway.)

This has the unfortunate effect of making it seem like the BM is only museum in the world doing this, and they're not. Not in the slightest. Many museums, national or not, will have colonial looted items if that country has, at any time in the past, waged expansionist wars against other nations, no matter how brief. If your local museum has artefacts from Not Your Country there's a good chance they were looted! Again, I stress that many many artefacts that left places like Egypt were part of agreements with the Egyptian government (called partition agreements) whereby the Egyptian government took first pick of artefacts from a dig and then the dig organisers could take the rest. This hasn't happened since UNESCO World Heritage Convention 1975, which prohibits new artefacts from leaving countries which is also why I will bonk on the head with a cardboard tube anyone who says Archaeologists/Museums are still stealing things.

So yeah, if you're looking at repatriation, you'll be much better looking at the bigger picture and understanding how all this came to be in the first place than you'll ever be making memes about the BM stealing things on the internet.