#red said

[thedreadvampy]

you gotta be able to say "die"

you gotta be able to say "suicide"

you gotta be able to talk about "sex"

they're uncomfortable topics, YEAH for SURE

because LIFE is uncomfortable. Death and suicide and sex and pain are straight up going to happen. not having words for the way it discomforts you doesn't make it more comfortable, it just makes you less able to reach out about it.

even more vital, you gotta be able to say words like "rape", "abuse", "queer" or "racist". cause we fought fucking hard to name those experiences. to identify "rape" as distinct from "sex" and "racism" as distinct from "acceptable behaviour" and "queer" as distinct from "invert"

like the function of communication is not to minimise immediate discomfort. we gotta be able to talk about stuff that's hard or sucks or causes difficult conversations.

[thedreadvampy]

male gaze is not 'when person look sexy' or 'when misogynist make film'

death of the author is not 'miku wrote this'

I don't think you have to read either essay to grasp the basic concepts

death of the author means that once a work is complete, what the author believes it to mean is irrelevant to critical analysis of what's in the text. it means when analysing the meaning of a text you prioritise reader interpretation above author intention, and that an interpretation can hold valid meaning even if it's utterly unintentional on the part of the person who created the thing. it doesn't mean 'i can ignore that the person who made this is a bigot' - it may in fact often mean 'this piece of art holds a lot of bigoted meanings that the author probably wasn't intentionally trying to convey but did anyway, and it's worth addressing that on its own terms regardless of whether the author recognises it's there.' it's important to understand because most artists are not consciously and vocally aware of all the possible meanings of their art, and because art is communal and interpretive. and because what somebody thinks they mean, what you think somebody means, and what a text is saying to you are three entirely different things and it's important to be able to tell the difference.

male gaze is a cinematographic theory on how films construct subjectivity (ie who you identify with and who you look at). it argues that film language assumes that the watcher is a (cis straight white hegemonically normative) man, and treats men as relatable subjects and women as unknowable objects - men as people with interior lives and women as things to be looked at or interacted with but not related to. this includes sexual objectification and voyeurism, but it doesn't mean 'finding a lady sexy' or 'looking with a sexual lens', it means the ways in which visual languages strip women of interiority and encourage us to understand only men as relatable people. it's important to understand this because not all related gaze theories are sexual in nature and if you can't get a grip on male gaze beyond 'sexual imagery', you're really going to struggle with concepts of white or abled or cis subjectivities.

[thedreadvampy]

people seriously pretending EEAAO is overrated suddenly bc it swept awards? it swept awards largely because it is very very very good. I cried like someone who's just had a religious revelation BOTH times I watched it bc it touched something raw and real and beautiful but it was also just very, very funny. everyone's performance kills and the concept is creative and interesting and doesn't distract from the emotional core. you guys are just contrarian.

[thedreadvampy]

ppl pulling the 'just let people enjoy Wizard Game' are often met with 'JKR funds anti-trans groups!' and that's. entirely true. but doesn't actually go far enough.

like if you're on team Let People Enjoy Wizard Game hey. did you know. that in my city RIGHT NOW JKR is sole funder and key board member of an unregulated private agab-policed rape crisis shelter set up specifically to Own The Transes

and which now sits on several gendered violence prevention boards alongside representatives from the (publicly funded and accountable) existing Rape Crisis Centre, against the staff of which her friends and followers have been involved in a years-long harassment campaign purely and explicitly because they run trans-inclusive support services and bc their CEO is a trans woman of colour.

(my friend works there and the pure volume of transphobic harassment has caused several long standing members of staff to quit. which I'm really fucking angry about bc I would not be here today if the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre hadn't been there to help me)

and that on those boards they're known for supporting increased police harassment and approaches that disproportionately criminalise trans people, unhoused people and sex workers and provably don't positively impact the issue of gendered violence.

what I'm saying is that yes JKR funds anti-trans groups but she is also pretty directly involved in materials worsening conditions for vulnerable people at a local and personal level too!!!! she's running an unregulated crisis shelter out of spite and using that to legitimise her political lobbying!!!!!! fuck you!

[thedreadvampy]

Losing my shit about this article in which a transphobic Tory was so busy panicking about existing in the vicinity of a Trans that she almost certainly misheard "jeans" as "penis" and decided that not only was this a problem with the other woman, but also that the world must be informed of this pressing danger.

"a trans woman! I had to stand directly behind her....I thought, 'this is going well', I'm handling The Situation fine'..."

translated: I saw a tall woman with broad shoulders. How would I get out of this alive? I thought. she has a PENIS. PENIS PENIS PENIS. through some force of PENIS I mean will I managed to PENIS behave normally towards her. My hands were PENIS PENIS PENIS shaking as I tried to dry them. summoning up all my PENIS courage I said 'dryer's crap innit'. she turned to me and said " yeah I'm just goiPENIS PENIS PENIS"

It's been a week and I'm still shaking. This proves trans women are the problem and I'm not weird. I'm fine. It's fine. If you think about it I'm the hero hePENIS!!!!!

very this

[thedreadvampy]

Hey idk if you've seen this (if you're on Twitter etc) but my friend Frank who is wonderful and who you might know from such hits as The Mechanisms and The Magnus Archives and Being A Generally Cool Guy is having big problems with some dickheads in the council who have sprung a surprise eviction notice on them and their family. They're pretty substantially disabled and have been in a precarious situation for a long time now so there isn't any give in their finances to pay off the council and avoid eviction.

They've set up a gofundme to pay off the Surprise Council Debt and keep afloat (in addition to the money they apparently now owe their rent has been massively increased). If you've got a few quid spare and have enjoyed their work in the past (or just think people shouldn't be booted out of their home for being disabled in a cost of living crisis) it sounds like it would go a long way.

[thedreadvampy]

I mean fundamentally the thing about Israel/Palestine that makes people uncomfortable is not that "it's complicated" it's that it's extremely fundamentally morally simple, it's just difficult

there is not a morally acceptable solution that will be accepted by the expansionist Israeli government or its allies in Europe and America

the balance of power has remained basically the same since Balfour handed the country over. Israel has the power to displace and kill Palestinians without accountability because it's backed by the majority of major world powers. there's fundamentally no back and forth of power. Palestine and its people were sold from the control of the British to the control of Israel for the political convenience of a bunch of people on different continents. there's no retribution or wrestle for power. Israel has had power over Palestine for decades and Palestine, despite Palestinians occupying the land for millennia, has never had power over Israel.

the fundamentals of the situation are discomforting because Israel is in many ways the last surviving bastion of the type of turn-of-the-century colonialism which the contemporary economy of Britain, America and much of the West is rooted in.

that's why the media and political classes are so invested in the Israeli party line - not because Israel ~controls the media~ or whatever but because the fundamental existence of Israel is the interests of the British ruling class, for example. It is in the interests of the British ruling class that we accept as a basic precept that there are Civilised and Uncivilised nations, and that it is right and good and natural that the Civilised nations should be able to decide the fates of the Uncivilised nations, for their own profit, without brooking any complaint from the Uncivilised Peoples. The structure of Western capitalism requires, as well, that we accept that any number of deaths and any amount of suffering among the Uncivilised Peoples is an acceptable price to pay for the comfort of Civilised Peoples. That's why the media classes are more interested in pearl clutching that somebody slashed up a hack painting of a famously antisemitic and genocidal British lord than in the loss of swathes of priceless and irreplaceable artworks, historical relics and Human Fucking Lives in Gaza.

it isn't complicated. it's just uncomfortable because fundamentally it lays bare the basic reality of colonial capitalism, and generally we in the UK are sort of trying to pretend we're over that whole thing even though we're obviously not, politicians just try to be a bit less obvious about it. so it's discomforting to people to be faced with the rawness of Israel's open colonialism, and so those who can't or don't want to divest from Britain's own ongoing colonial endeavours end up tying themselves in knots trying to justify why it's Fine Actually.

while obviously Israel is a Zionist project so it can no more be decoupled from Judaism than the British empire is decoupled from Christianity, the conflation of Jewishness and Israel is a mostly irrelevant (and harmful) distraction from the underlying Problem With Israel, which is that it's an incredibly 19th century European style of colony in 21st century Asia, and the nature, consistency and ferocity of its colonial project has been pretty unchanged for like 3-4 generations.

but it's a very successful distraction because

a) a lot of people do actually hate Jews a whole bunch so yeah antisemitism is a genuine and legitimate fear, but it doesn't connect to the core issues of genocide, oppression and colonialism (and conflating Israel with Jewishness does play into existing antisemitic ideas of the Jewish perpetual foreigner and perpetual dual loyalty)

b) people want it to be complicated. They don't want it to be simple in a way that would create discomfort for them. We don't want to acknowledge that to free Palestine we'd have to take a hit to our own economies by not selling arms to Israel. We don't want to acknowledge that what's practiced openly in Israel is the same structure of systemic injustice underpinning almost all British and American foreign affairs, but with more of a veil over it. We don't want to challenge the underlying assumption that there are those who should rule and those who should be ruled over. But with the assertion that Israel=Jewishness, and the rewriting of history to say there's an Endless Cycle of Violence on Both Sides, Who Can Say Where It Started Really, you're off the hook! It's Complicated! Who Can Really Say?

(this Who Can Really Say thing is fascinating in itself. It's not like it's ancient history! it's been slightly over a century since the birth of the Israeli project! you can look it up! we have the news articles! we have the correspondence! this is my grandparents' generation not the distant mists of time!)

but yeah like fuck 'Israel controls the media' bullshit. It does not require a Shadowy Jewish Cabal of Puppetmasters to create mass appeasement from the media and ruling class, and if you think that's the best explanation you're fucking gross. The media and political establishment of Europe and the US are not being Controlled By The Wicked Jews. They are colonial projects. Israel is a colonial project. Their interests are aligned. It's not complicated it's So Fucking Simple. Our ruling classes, whether in Tel Aviv, Washington, Westminster or Berlin, are enthusiastically invested in the project of global apartheid. It makes them money. It maintained them power. It is in their interests to preserve the impunity of the occupying state where it shores up the civilised West vs barbarian East paradigm. It is not "too complicated" it's just huge, implacable and miserable to recognise.

[thedreadvampy]

Me messaging my boss usually: of no in sorry I haven't quite finished the 6 hour piece of work you gave me an hour ago!!!! maybe I could work late and finish it after work?

Me responding to my boss asking anything of me today, my last day and the day after they tried to discipline me for mentioning unions: do it yourself or fuck off and die lol, furthermore bosses get the guillotine

[thedreadvampy]

My life is full of people who are like "as an Autistic I despise the Big Light" and that's so fuckin valid but unfortunately as an Autistic who hates partial sensation (and has poor vision) I despise the Small Light. squinting gives me a headache and makes me notice flickering more. doesn't this make you guys tiiiiiired?

starting to feel like I'm the only autistic person who WANTS THE BIG LIGHT ON. MAXIMAL LIGHT. FEED ME DELICIOUS PHOTONS. RB IF U AGREE.

[thedreadvampy]

The thing is. Bad/gross food is rarely a DISH - when food is bad it's because it's been badly made, whether because of skills or available ingredients. but a dish p much only exists recognisably and has a name because someone likes at least one version of it.

which is to say. there isn't really a way of naming a dish, school of dishes or specific food culture and going EW ISN'T THIS DISH UNILATERALLY CONCEPTUALLY DISGUSTING without denigrating quite a lot of people.

like you don't have to like it in any form. but it's eaten and shared because it's good to a not insubstantial number of people when cooked right.

(and I don't really understand how you approach that with total incuriosity when it's a dish you haven't tried like. ARE rocky mountain oysters good? Maybe! I would very much eat some to find out!!!!)

this is actually something the British food poll did in a way the American ones I've seen haven't really - they described how the food they're imagining is, specifically, badly prepared (grey meat and veggies; unseasoned shepherd's pie). which is wildly tipping the scales by calling it British Food but. like. that is an on point definition of why that food is gross.

(this also applies to American chocolate, which like. Broad category but I think most of us understand this refers to low-cocoa high-sugar chocolate, probably with bucolic acid. so we are being invited to imagine Badly Made Chocolate not. the concept of chocolate)

personally I just think it's very rarely a good or funny idea to shittalk how gross any given food culture is. partly because food is important and culturally evocative for most people, partly because it's very...alienating? to be like WHO COULD EAT SUCH A THING? just because you wouldn't, and largely because to be frank it says more about you than about the food that you have so little imagination or curiosity that you can't imagine why a food might be enjoyable to folks who aren't you.

yes this includes jello salad, I would like to try it. ONCE. if it wasn't appealing to someone it wouldn't be so widespread.

[thedreadvampy]

this is such a tiny thing and doesn't even mean I dislike it, but of all the Fanon Characterisations I Don't Get I think Tim Stoker is up there. where is this happy go lucky scamp jock thing coming from? is it purely bc sometimes he makes sarcastic jokes at work? because like so does Sasha and yet she's always characterised as an uptight Sensible Bensible (despite evidence to the contrary). like where do all these Hawaiian shirts and goofings offs come in? because he makes jokes sometimes and thinks he's funny? baffling.

[thedreadvampy]

I'm trying to give Conflict Is Not Abuse a fair shake because I think it's important to unpick overstatement of harm.

and the introduction felt really clear and coherent and strong in laying out the thesis; acts of harm occur when one of both parties construe the other as having threatened them, and often that threat is not real and could be avoided through reflection and communication.

so she swings into chapter 1 with the idea that we're all responsible for reflecting on conflict rather than immediately jumping to the worst case We Are Enemies Now scenario

ah yes. I agree.

she chooses to illustrate this idea in several ways:

If I flirt with someone I assume she might interpret it as harassment, but she should consider that we're both fine actually because Actually she's probably interested in me but struggles to recognise her own feelings.

A friend is under huge pressure and has to cancel plans last minute so she sends me an email, but I don't WANT an email so she should be understanding and spend 5-10 minutes on the phone so I feel better, and the fact she doesn't means she doesn't care about me

Sometimes Women Say No But Mean Yes

A woman I went on a date with didn't text me back. I'm going to devote 2 pages to how she's clearly full of rage at me because she's unfairly judging me for being overbearing, which is very short sighted of her. At no point in that do I offer any possible explanation for not texting other than She Despises Me.

My most charitable response here is yeah Sarah you're right we should reflect on whether we're assuming harm in arguments. Can I suggest you start by turning the mirror around real quick? cause not one of these examples involves the possibility that she might be making some assumptions of her own.

[thedreadvampy]

fwiw if you want to introduce more variety to how you draw faces I strongly suggest thinking really hard about noses

noses give you so much information about someone! they're usually one of the first things which define how we think of someone's face (after all - they're by far the feature that takes up most of it).

They change as we age - they take up more of our faces and move away from our mouths. babies almost all have round little tips of noses with no definable bridges, while depending on the type of nose an adult has they may get bonier and sharper or softer and flatter with age. nostrils widen, skin creases, eyes drop back from the bridge. I think often people try to age faces by putting wrinkles around an unchanged nose and it throws stuff off.

They're also a really racialised feature. like there is no one Black Nose or East Asian Nose or Desi Nose or White Nose, obviously, there's huge variation within and across ethnic groups, but there's a lot of overlapping trends in nose shape for different ethnicities and it's often a big contributing factor to people drawing characters of colour that kind of look like palette-swapped white people? like there are so many nose shapes that are super common but because they're relatively uncommon for white people, they're just not the noses people often learn to draw as standard.

but also a diversity of noses says so much about a character, the same way that their build or eye shape or face shape does. like. a long sharp narrow nose in a bony face? a round, slightly flat nose on a face full of smile lines? an upturned, softly rounded nose with freckles and no bridge? a long hooked nose with a curved tip? a crooked, broken nose? a bulbous, reddened nose? noses can imply strength, weakness, innocence, experience, childishness, wisdom, suffering, whatever you want to get out of a character design. don't neglect the nose!!!!

and like. obviously depending on how stylised the art is there's going to be information lost, but that's the thing - there's a real upper limit on how much variation you can put in eyes or mouths or face shape in simpler styles without making it overly realistic, but you can go really nuts on nose shapes! even with just one or two lines or one simple shape you can imply so many different noses by changing little things!

and yet really often I look at people who are trying to broaden variety on faces and they mix up everything except the noses, which stay like a circle or a triangle or a line or whatever their standard noise is, and as a result there's still this sameness to all the faces.

bc eyes and mouths and jawlines are all very well but noses are, in my opinion, the most varied part of the face. I can't think of any two people I know who have the same shape of nose except maybe me and my identical twin.

(and I'm not talking big Vs small, or hooked vs snub vs straight vs flat. really look at people's noses in real life cause there are so many variables)

(some leading questions under the cut)

how big is it? how long from the front? how far away from the face does it sit in profile?

does it have a rounded tip? how round? some people's noses have a profile that's basically a triangle point, some people's are basically a round tip with no visible cartilage above it, and everything in between.

What's going on at the bridge? in profile, is there a clear dip in between the brow and the bridge of the nose, or does the brow come straight down to meet it (or, if you have a kind of striking profile like Hangman Adam Page who looks like an early 2000s DreamWorks character, is your profile one line from brow to the top of your nose)? from the front, is there a clearly defined edge to the bridge of your nose or does it curve out? how much of the space between your eye sockets is nose, on a range from 100% to 0%?

What shape is the top of the nose in profile? Is it a straight line from bridge to tip? does it curve down? does it curve up like a ski slope? does it come to a sharp stop and angle out into a round tip?

does it have sharp edges? does it look bony, with a pronounced ridge? or is it all soft lines? Does it meet the cheek at an angle or at a curve?

does the tip come to a sharp point, or to a curve? does it angle up (so you can see the nostrils from the front), or down (so you can only see the line of the nose)?

how big is the base of the nose compared to the bridge? from the front, does it flare wide across the face at the bottom, or is it almost a straight line down? is it broader higher up the nose?

what are the nostrils doing? how big are they? are they round, or slit-shaped? do they sit behind the tip, with the noise all contained in a single pyramid shape, or do they sit to the sides? do they sit along the face, point forward towards the tip, or point up higher than the tip?

how does the nose interact with the other features? does it dominate the face? is it a tiny wee thing? does it sit over a very long upper lip with a pronounced philtrum, or is it almost touching the mouth? How much of the space between the eyes is taken up by the bridge of the nose? do the eyebrows curve towards the nose, or meet them at a hard angle? if they wear glasses, where on the nose do they sit?

colouration - is it all the same colour, or pinker at the tip or over the bridge? are the insides of the nostrils visible, and are they pale or dark pink? does the top of the nose get more sun - is it darker?

surface details - are there creases at the bridge or around the nostrils and cheeks? are they from scowling (vertical) or laughing (horizontal)? does their nose scrunch up when they smile, or flare when they're angry? is there hair? freckles? piercings? scars or breaks?

like the nose, jaw and brow are the structure around which the rest of the face is built. if you get to a place in your art style where you're comfortable playing around with that then you immediately add so much more diversity and life and verisimilitude to your characters!

also noses are just great. like they're so fun to draw and there are so many different gorgeous noses! I'm so into noses that usually the way I find how I want a character to look is to draw the eyes, draw the nose, then redraw the eyes and build the whole face around the nose.

(this advice is coming from the fact that the most common compliment I get on my art is the diversity and believability of characters and I would say that's like 50-60% in the nose/brow)

[thedreadvampy]

hahaha sweet vindication I went to a fuckin. uh so we have an inclusion and diversity working group at work and a subgroup of that which meets separately for LGBT+ inclusion. which is the fun one. the party group.

anyway got onto the teams call and both the other people in the room were already talking about how fucked up the last Inclusion and Diversity meeting was. you know the one where I suggested we might be a bit overwhelmingly white at 98% White People On Staff and maybe we should do something about it and the senior director pitched a defensive fit and started talking about how it's "never been a priority" in the fully white room of people driving the diversity agenda and how it's FINE because we sometimes work with BAME client groups and maybe people of colour just don't WANT to work here for NO PARTICULAR REASON? that meeting?

very nice to hear that everyone except the two people getting defensive left that meeting going WHAT THE FUCK and immediately went to talk to their colleagues about the whiteness problem in this workplace.

so the HR team are now talking among themselves about how to emphasise that it does need to be a priority, two Asian members of staff have sent emails to the I&D group diplomatically saying "hey here's why the overwhelming whiteness is a deeply affecting problem for me and makes me feel unsafe at work", and in the LGBT group we are discussing how to use the budget we already have allocated for improving LGBT+ inclusivity to Trojan horse in some data gathering that will demonstrate that no actually the problem is not "mysterious whiteness" there's an addressable systemic issue

so once again "being too angry to let it go" is playing out positively. my friends. start shit when people talk shit, is my policy 😘 saying 'hey that seems fucked up' in a meeting where nobody else is saying it has almost always, in my experience, had the effect of other people going YEAH ACTUALLY IT IS FUCKED UP I THOUGHT I WAS THE ONLY PERSON THINKING THAT WE SHOULD DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT

cause managers love to make you feel like you're being ridiculous and Just Don't Understand and if you speak up everyone will laugh at you. but you understand fine! and if you ask a polite question, either someone will have an obvious answer to give you and you can move on, or, more often, they won't have a good answer and other people will be like 'hey yeah that's a shit answer! why did we accept that as obvious?'

in my entire professional life this 'if you feel uncomfortable with something, question it out loud' approach has gone wrong like. a single figure number of times. and right almost every time. is all I'm saying. not cause I'm usually right but cause it requires people to think about what they're saying.

[thedreadvampy]

Now Ruth afficianados may know that a birthday means One Thing: new drag act

this preview goes out to @dippingbirdfursona who I think is going to enjoy the look I'm calling Serving Sleepy Cunt

[thedreadvampy]

none of the following dichotomies are all-encompassing, they're often ambiguous, and many of them contain really bad ideas about trans/NB people when used to describe misogyny:

"women and non-binary people" vs "men"

"woman-aligned people" vs "men"

"non-men" vs "men"

"afabs" vs "amabs"

"females" vs "males"

buuuuut there's an issue, right? because ultimately patriarchal misogyny is a driving social force in most contemporary cultures. and patriarchal misogyny does operate on a dichotomous model. so if we're going to talk about systemic injustices we need shorthands for "people who tend to be socially categorised as women under patriarchy" and "people who tend to be socially categorised as men under patriarchy". "people who are expected to submit to violence" and "people who are expected to deal out violence". etc but I can't write out a full description of each role bc they're very very very complex, that's why there's all these BOOKS about them.

I use "men and women" or "male and female" or "masculine and feminine" not because that's a true representation of how people ARE but because it's a true representation, I think, of the pressures EXERTED ON PEOPLE. I don't want to expand that to "women and afab NB people and NB transfems" or something bc that's less accurate, because it implies that that's a coherent group with a shared single experience. it's not - neither is "women". In the context of discussions of patriarchal power, "women" is a social expectation not a group of individual actual people. as is "girls", "men" and "boys". There isn't a non-binary version of the patriarchal "women" construct because the whole point of patriarchal gender is that it's a binary system of power. that doesn't mean non-binary people don't exist, just that it's not a coherent patriarchal gender role.

anyway with this as with many things I fear that in an attempt for universal language we end up preventing ourselves being able to discuss Very Obviously True power dynamics 🤷‍♀️