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April 27th is International Crow and Raven Appreciation Day! My comic Crow time is pretty much stuffed to the brim with crows, so it's a good way to celebrate these goth little dudes.

READ CROW TIME!

OR GET PLUSH GOTH BOI?? WOW!

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rare vent art from a few months ago

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This starts out as a nice gesture, then quickly becomes absolutely ridiculous.

1,024 dice. Man.

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In honor of our very first sneak peek of the movie Wicked, my nostalgia kicked into high gear and I'm honoring one of my earliest fandom crazes with a silly little comic I'm calling "Fiyero Doesn't Get Enough Recognition For All The Shit He's Been Through."

Enjoy Fiyero having the weirdest 72 hours of his life.

Sequel comic here.

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My author copies of The Pale Queen have arrived! The book looks stunning and the colors are so vivid! It's always an incredible feeling to hold a book I made for the first time.

The Pale Queen is on shelves this June. If you like the sound of a queer dark fairy tale about dangerous bargains, old myths, new love, and at least one weird little guy, please preorder wherever you get books!

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Hey everyone, please consider buying the 2024 itch.io Palestinian Relief Bundle- it's 373 games, game-making assets, tabletop roleplaying games, zines, and comics for a minimum of just 8 USD! They have a goal of 100,000 USD, and as of the time I'm writing this post, they have 8 more days to reach it.

Link will be in the reblog!

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"Despite a huge amount of political opposition from the chemical industry, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced its first regulations aimed at limiting quantities of PFAs, or ‘forever chemicals,’ in American drinking water.

For decades, Polyfluoroalkyl substances or PFAs have been used for coatings that resist fire, oil, stains, and water and are now found in a wide variety of products like waterproof clothing, stain-resistant furniture, food packaging, adhesives, firefighting spray foams, and non-stick cooking surfaces.

There are thousands of PFAS compounds with varying effects and toxicity levels, and the new EPA regulations will require water utilities to test for 6 different classes of them.

The new standards will reduce PFAS exposure—and thereby decrease the health risk—for 100 million people in the U.S.

A fund worth $1 billion for treatment and testing will be made available to water utilities nationwide—part of a $9 billion investment made possible by the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to assist communities impacted by PFAS contamination.

“Drinking water contaminated with PFAS has plagued communities across this country for too long,” said EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan in a statement Wednesday.

Under Regan’s leadership, the EPA began in 2021 to establish a roadmap for dealing with widespread PFAS contamination, and so far they’ve gathered much data, including monitoring drinking water, and begun requiring more reports from businesses about use of the unregulated substances.

The agency reported that current peer-reviewed scientific studies have shown that exposure to certain levels of PFAS may lead to a myriad of health issues that are difficult to specify because of the variety of compounds coming from different places.

Regardless, the 66,000 water utility operators will have five years to test for the PFAS pollution and install necessary technology to treat the contamination, which the EPA estimates that 6%–10% of facilities will need. [Note: Deeply curious where they got a number that low, but anyway.]

Records show that some of the manufacturers knew these chemicals posed health hazards. A few major lawsuits in recent years have been settled that sought to hold chemical companies, like 3M, accountable for the environment damage.""

-via Good News Network, April 13, 2024

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i keep seeing that post about how frustrating the buff guy -> petite girl type genderbending is, and i wanted to add my two cents regarding the addition of ‘just swap pronouns and don’t change the design’ approach because i think these are two sides of the same coin, as they both fail to really delve into what i think is the most interesting aspect of this design exercise.

the reason i find genderbending to be such a fun and interesting challenge is because, if you actually want to be good at it and put thought into it, you have to really consider the character’s canon gender expression and think about what it means to them and how it reflects in their outward appearance and presentation.

is this male character buff because he likes to work out / be strong, or does he aspire to achieve conventional heteronormative male beauty?

is this female character a tomboy because she likes to express herself in a more masculine way, or is she doing it to fight gender norms?

the answers to those questions should produce very different designs!

this website loves to say that gender is a spectrum, but sometimes i genuinely wonder if people actually understand what that means. 

gender expression, much like gender, is also a spectrum, which is why keeping the character exactly the same won’t always work, in the same way that just making the character conventionally attractive won’t always work. but sometimes, a buff dude would actually just be a hot girl. lady bane, however, would 100% look exactly the same.

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"School districts that don’t respect transgender and nonbinary students’ pronouns or force them to use restrooms that don’t align with their gender identity could be committing federal civil rights violations beginning this fall.

Today, the U.S. Department of Education announced the issuance of a final rule under Title IX to protect people in public schools from sex-based discrimination and harassment. The announcement marks a significant update in federal efforts to combat sex discrimination in federally funded educational institutions. During a call with reporters, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona emphasized the administration’s dedication to ensuring that Title IX effectively serves all students by providing safe, welcoming, and rights-respecting educational environments."

Read the full piece here

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Fresh Waffles and boys will be boys wildelifecomic.com

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Spider cat

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You know, that Mythbusters post legitimately changed my life. Before seeing it, I had exponentially more guilt and stress about not being able to sleep, which of course, further exacerbated my inability to sleep.

Now, every time I wake up about three am, knowing I have to get up at 6.45, instead of stressing and panicking about how my day is going to be sleep deprived and miserable, I just tell myself 'Time to activate Mythbusters Protocol' and lie there with my eyes closed safe in the knowledge that I am measurably reducing later feelings of exhaustion.

And when this happens, about 70% of the time the reduction of guilt and stress means I actually do fall back asleep, so all in all instead of getting only three or four hours sleep, I get five to six and a half.

Which y'know, major improvement in health and energy.

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anyway the actual point of fandom is to inspire each other. reading each other's fics and admiring each other's art and saying wow i love this and i feel something and i want to invoke this in other people, i want to write a sentence that feels like a meteor shower, i want to paint a kiss with such tenderness it makes you ache, i want to create something that someone else somewhere will see it and think oh, i need to do that too, right now. i am embracing being a corny cunt on main to say inspiring each other is one of the things humanity is best at and one of the things fandom is built for and i think that's beautiful

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Fresh Waffles and run away wildelifecomic.com

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After raising the price of COVID-19 vaccines more than four-fold this year, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla told investors Monday that the company will also likely hike the price of its lifesaving COVID-19 antiviral treatment, Paxlovid, raising further concern about access and healthcare costs.