Spencer Greenwood

Mad Dog Run is a game about letting the dogs out by Chris Ziporyn.

Play Online

Why Try It: Be a dog and run around knocking over garbage cans in a park to eat tasty food.

Mood: Rowdy

Author’s Notes: “Have you ever wanted to be a dog running away from the Man whilst eating as much food as possible? Want to run through the grass while the sun shines down on you? Then Mad Dog Run is for you!“

You Might Also Like: Last Chance Supermarket, Party Time, Tony Eagle: Amateur Skateboarding

Hello, my dears.

I’m down with a bad case of head-cold-turned-bronchitis and my drawing tablet is down with a bad case of malfunctioning adapter cable. (I’m wheezing and floppy and the tablet is blacking out every 30 seconds or so. We’re quite the couple.) As a result, this week’s page is pencilled but not inked or colored! Boo, hiss. The upshot is that I’ve just picked up a SUPER SEXY inhaler to help with the ole’ breathing tube and a SUPER SEXY adapter cable replacement is on order from the computer store. Stay tuned for the next page as soon as we’re all feeling a little better.

browneyesandanhourglass:

feministingforchange:

a-little-bi-furious:

natashiyaa:

shatteredchrystal:

runaon:

a-little-bi-furious:

asherehsa:

samjoonyuh:

Perspective. 

"Looting? I thought these were supposed to be nonviolent protests"

I know it’s incredible! People are literally coming out of the woodwork to comment on this photoset to focus on the looting headline with “well yes it is nice they were helping people hit with the tear gas, but stealing is still wrong uwu” as if they’re back to kindergarten morality.

Like everyone who’s gone to boot camp I’ve been tear gassed. They put about 50+ of you in a gas chamber and toss it in. You have to stay there until your rank is allowed to exit. Before that though, you have to say your name, rank, and social security number. You then exit and file into ranks (again) outside and are not allowed at any point to rinse your face or eyes for the entire day.

That right there? Easily the worst part of boot camp. My eyes were literally swollen shut. I was blinded for a good 30 minutes and my chest hurt for days.

I have zero problem and not and ounce of judgement for people raiding a mcdonalds that can easily afford to repair damage for ANYTHING to help ease the shittiness that is being tear gassed. Esp because every one of us in boot were medically sound to deal with tear gas. Children, asthmatics, people prone to panic and anxiety attacks, the elderly as sooo many more are NOT going to handle tear gas well at ALL.

Or that smoke the police use either.

It’s easy to sit there and judge someone from the safety of your home and say things like “it’s just tear gas” or “it can’t be that bad”.

Fuck you. As someone who HAS been gassed, you need to stfu.

I remember all the preparation they did to get us ready for the gas chamber in boot camp. We were taught how to handle ourselves, how to control our breathing, not to touch anything, how to avoid the worst of the gas. But it still didn’t matter. I remember taking in that first breath and feeling like I had just been kicked in the chest. I remember a few guys in my platoon falling down and vomiting. We knew the gas wasn’t as bad on the floor but we were the fifth platoon through and the vomit kept us from bending over more than absolutely necessary. I remember a few guys, guys in peak health training to be infantrymen, breaking ranks and running for the door only to be dragged back in kicking and screaming until they said name, rank and serial. They were expecting it, trained for it, bragging about how it wouldn’t bother them.
I remember standing there with all of the mucus from my nasal cavity on the front of my ACUs and thinking to myself “This is the nonviolent option?”
Covered head to toe and my skin still itching I looked down at the silver wedding band hanging next to my dog tags and realized that the gas had eaten little pits into its surface.
I stood there and thought of all the news reports I had seen over the years. The uprisings and revolutionaries being gassed, the crowds running from men in masks.
That’s the moment I got it, staring at my ruined wedding band, that’s the moment I realized terrorism isn’t about bombs or who is using them. It’s about controlling people through fear. It’s about removing their ability to act reasonably, to make them seem like the monsters. Terrorism is about triggering people to fight or flight then blaming them for not being rational. It’s about power. Remove someone’s power to act with reason, and you remove their humanity.

Oh fuck

My god this commentary is perfect. Also a reminder that it turned out this “looting” was not that at all, the police bust that window with a bullet and the staff were gracious enough to hand milk out it seems, the protestors did not break in but even if they did just look at what they were trying to do with that milk, look at what they went through. The immense endurance that’s been shown by the people of Ferguson in the face of all this is incredible.

bolding mine

This why you can’t trust the tv media. they don’t tell the truth at all.

Penciling comic pages in my cold, drafty house today.  

Calvin melded seamlessly with his surroundings, Predator-like. (He only revealed himself in order to slap my face when I laughed too hard at something on the internet.)

Dog Petting Sim is a game about chilling with some pups by Emily E. Meo.

Play Online

Why Try It: Meet friendly dogs and pet them in a quiet environment.

Mood: Soothing

Author’s Notes: “Pet some randomly-generated dogs! They are friendly and will say nice things to you.

Featured dogs:

• Lilly (golden retriever)
  
• Carl (Pug)
  
• Hermione (bouvier des flandres)
  
• Jacquesimo (bouvier des flandres)
  
• Mandy (dachshund)
  

Future versions will include more dogs!“

You Might Also Like: Feed Some Ducks, Corgi Simulator 2071, Purr  

A quick-turnaround illustration for yesterday’s Adweek, announcing the launch of the Glass Lion award at the Cannes film festival. The award was created to celebrate creative work that breaks gender stereotypes and challenges gender bias. Which is pretty great! Any award that encourages creativity and more nuanced and varied portrayals of women (and men) sounds like a breath of fresh air to me. Thanks to my AD Ron Goodman! Read the article here!

royalboiler:

8house #1 Arclight Marian’s final cover & logo. 

If I could have a job doing nothing but painting court portraits of fictional queer fantasy knights, then my life would be perfect, more or less - I’m just saying.

marixicana:

Melonie Elizabeth Rose committed suicide on February 26th and there is only one article about her suicide and it’s aftermath anywhere online (http://www.dominickevans.com/2015/02/her-name-was-melonie-another-trans-woc-has-committed-suicide/). It’s no one person’s fault for not knowing about her suicide, but it speaks volumes to the transmisogyny and transmisogynoir in our culture and communities that the death of Melonie and countless other trans women of colour go mostly unnoticed. It’s not a question of “How many twoc have to die before people start caring?” because so many have died and there is no movement. People memorize lists of names with no context behind the lives that were lived and cut short. These are not senseless tragedies—they are deliberate and it’s terrifying. 

Janet Mock, talking about the murders of six out trans women of colour this year, made a good point: 

The names of our sisters shouldn’t only make headlines when we walk a red carpet or lay in a casket. Our visibility shouldn’t be subject to such extreme circumstances. […] It’s part of the reason why I am weary of amplifying these women’s deaths because it often feels like these women’s names are only spoken by the majority of us when they can no longer respond. But I must speak their names and when I do, I am aware that my sisters do not need to be reminded of their vulnerability and the threat of violence that looms over their lives.

sherlockandspockinthetardis:

This is the best spiderman movie ever

bryankonietzko:

abbydraws:

Yangchen

My submission piece which was accepted for Gallery Nucleus’ Avatar/Korra Show! (March 7-22 2015) this was inspired by the Tian Tan Buddha in Hong Kong.

Happy 10th Anniversary to Avatar:the Last Airbender!

An exquisite submission by an incredible artist. What a lovely moment.

Ohohoho wow

You could spend all day in a section of wikipedia like this

a good review of a life-sized sculpture of a black trans fem should start out by calling it “hermaphroditic” and derivative, then dismiss it and move on to engage at length with stuff by white people (ignoring her nearby textual works—this snap judgment of a body followed by the denial of voice and interiority )

Oh hey, my Republic City Evening Post piece is going to be in Gallery Nucleus’ upcoming Avatar/Korra tribute show next month!  Wish I could have made more for the show, but I’m super excited to be a part of it either way. :)

tkohl:

American anti-capitalist poster, 1938.

iburnmace:

just-a-penis-with-a-dream:

persephoneholly:

ten-and-donna:

kissnecks:

THIS OKAY

You want to get kids out of foster care and into good, loving homes? I’ve got a simple solution to your problem.

Did you know LGBT couples are more likely to adopt older, children of color and disable children than straight couples? LGBT couples tend to adopt ‘undesired’ children more (basically kids no one else wants.)

This is so important because I remember being in the system and being so scared that I would never be adopted or loved or whatever and seriously just fucking let them, take the fear out of finding a family

Exactly. I reblog this every time I see it. EVERY time.

I’m a programmer by trade. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past 17 years doing this professionally, it’s that everything old is new again. There are really only so many patterns, and they just circle back around with new (and often more ridiculous) names.  

It’s rare that something really new comes along. I’d argue that the web, more specifically http, offered up the last truly new paradigm in computing. It is a single, elegant standard for distributed systems. We should all take the time every now and then to think about the beauty, power, and simplicity of this standard.

I’ve always had a similar affinity for RSS. If content is going to be distributed all over the world, it’s essential to have an elegant system for syndicating and subscribing to content sources. On top of that, a huge percentage of content sites adopted this standard years ago and still maintain it to this day. Man, are we lucky.  I can’t believe how many people still browse from site to site or just take what they can get from Twitter, et al.

It’s easy to get swept up in the latest trends in technology. Hardware, apps, development frameworks, social networks and so on. It’s never ending. But too often it takes us away from what I really want to be able to do with technology. Give me a browser, an RSS reader, and an email account and I’m all set. These are the standards that are built to last. Everything else just comes and goes.

Faaaavorite character xD (Bringing Up Baby)

I write about cultural appropriation in fashion a lot. I’ve taken on big brands and small brands, arguing that our images and cultural property should be taken seriously. But today, things got personal. Brand KTZ’s Fall/Winter line at New York Fashion Week was “a tribute” to Indigenous peoples. There’s a lot to critique in the line (and I will), but nestled among the 45 looks was this dress:

Does it look familiar? It might, because it is a DIRECT rip-off of my friend Bethany Yellowtail’s design from her Crow Pop Collection:

If you need a side-by-side:

Notice the form of the dress is the same, with the collar, the length, the shape, and the designs are clearly “inspired” by Bethany’s. Here’s the thing. Bethany’s design is not just a collection of abstract shapes, she utilized Crow beadwork that had been in her family for generations for her design. The colors, the shapes, and the patterns have meaning, origins, and history. They belong to her family and tribe. They are cultural property, not designs that are free for the taking.

In this video clip from FNX, Bethany talks about the beadwork designs and what they symbolize, as well as her journey to incorporating these designs into her work:

When I listen to her words, I hear humility and care, and she demonstrates how much thought goes in to incorporating her culture into her designs. This is not a task she takes lightly, and she realizes that these designs are for her community as much, if not more so, as her career. Bethany understands that responsibility, and takes it on with pride. She is a wonderful example of why Native people need to be the ones designing from our cultures–this knowledge and understanding comes out of community ties and respect, and is hard, if not impossible, to achieve without that deep connection to culture.

(2/19 ETA) I’m realizing folks aren’t necessarily watching the video, so I’ll transcribe out what Bethany says about the designs, starting at 1:26: “I started with beadwork that has been in my family for generations. This was actually my great grandmother’s, Irene Yellowtail. This is from the early 1900’s. This design here is really traditional to the Crow people. I remember when I was younger, I was told that this balance shape, this meant our spirit world and our physical world, and this is where the Crow live. So I started reflecting on those things, and this beadwork is really dear to me, so I realized that was what was going to start guiding me. That balance. So that’s really prevalent in my designing–that shape. And it’s really common in Crow beadwork, and they still use it today in contemporary ways.” 

Here’s the beadwork next to her work:

As you can see from the KTZ design above, this balance shape that is so important to Bethany and the Crow people is exactly the one centered on the dress in question. It’s not “just” inverted triangles.

So back to Marjan Pejoski, the designer behind KTZ. He’s a Macedonian-born, Bali-living designer who is most well known for a rather infamous Swan dress. He’s not a household name, but is definitely highly influential and often named a designer “to watch”–whatever that means. According to Women’s Wear Daily, he said in an interview that this Fall/Winter 2015 line was “a tribute to the primal woman indigenous to this land, who evolves into a sexualized, empowered being“. So many things wrong with that statement. So otherizing and exoticizing. So stereotypical. Also, in no way is this a “tribute.” This is a mockery and a celebration of cultural theft.

Here are a few more images from his collection, the full runway can be seen here at Vogue.

This is a direct lifting of Navajo Yei weaving designs:

Here’s a traditional rug for comparison:

There’s beadwork:

And of course feathers:

So far, this has happened at nearly every fashion week in the five years that I’ve been writing Native Appropriations. There was Nicholas K’s “Apache Shamanistic Journey,” and Karl Lagerfeld’s Chanel disaster that happened nearly a year ago to the day, as well as many, many others. When Jessica Metcalfe of Beyond Buckskin saw the Chanel photos last year, she said on Facebook, “In addition to this being the same ol same ol privileged white people playing Indian, Karl Lagerfeld hasn’t had a creative idea since the ’80s. Even with this show he’s just rehashing Ralph Lauren and Gaultier and playing the ‘trendy headdress’ card. So yes, I give him a huge double fail.”

That, to me is a huge part of this. There is absolutely no creativity here. If I can point to several other lines in the last year, and dozens more over the last decade, that have done the exact. same. thing., there’s nothing original or new about your designs–cultural appropriation notwithstanding. It was our people who did the heavy lifting creative work for you. We designed these images. We have the knowledge and understanding of what they mean and how they can be appropriately used. We evolved and developed and maintained our cultures for thousands of years. Our cultures are not in, what Jessica calls, “the free bin” for your taking.

So why is it that Indigenous intellectual property is not seen as “real” intellectual property? Yes, the boundaries are difficult to find and difficult to enforce–but if KTZ had directly ripped off images from, say Valentino, or Yves Saint Laurent, or, shoot, McDonalds or Apple or anyone else, there would be a major case to be made about violations of intellectual property rights, and people would scoff at his lack of creativity. But “primitive” or in his words, “primal” peoples are not ever given the same consideration. Our designs and cultural markers are used to “enhance” white culture, while white cultural artifacts are protected and policed.

The bottom line is this: There should be no representations of us, without us. You want to draw upon Indigenous cultures for your line? Involve Indigenous artists and designers. There is no alternative answer. You love Bethany’s Crow designs? Call Bethany. Collaborate with Bethany. Give her a chance to show at New York Fashion Week with you. The fashion world costs hella money to get a foot in the door, so if you as a designer truly want to offer a “tribute” to Native people? Bring a Native designer up with you.

But I have one last concern, and it’s been something working at me since the Ralph Lauren debacle a couple months back. These days, the outrage machine is quick and fierce when brands appropriate our cultures, and I love it. Immediately folks mobilize online to get the company to apologize and make changes, and we have the ability to take down multi-national companies in hours. It’s amazing. But there’s a dark side. Our dozens of columns and think-pieces, thousands of tweets and comments–they offer free publicity for the brand/designer/company. For a few days, their name is everywhere, their site stats shoot through the roof, and their pictures are on the front page of blogs and news outlets nationwide. The old adage “no such thing as bad publicity” may ring true in these cases, because there is truly little consequence for these brands. They release a half-hearted-non-apology, they take down an offending image, they shrug and move on. We, as a community, can boycott these brands, but Native peoples and our allies are such a small percentage of the population, and let’s be real–how many of us are buying high-end luxury fashion? So for the week or so that these instances take center stage, everyone knows Marjan Pejoksi (had you heard of him before? Probs not.), and in a few months, the outrage will die down, and we’ll forget why we know his name–we’ll just know it.

It frustrates me, and I don’t know what to do to change it. Right now, this is the only recourse we have, and it works–to a certain extent. We as Native peoples deserve respect, and we have to demand it through the channels we have available to us. Awareness is huge, and has done so much for preventing these instances from happening more. But there needs to be another step, and we do need to acknowledge that our well-functioning (since we never get a break!) outrage machine may be giving some of these folks exactly what they want.

I spoke to Beth this afternoon, and she has been thinking through what the best outcomes would be for this situation. The dress in question isn’t in stores yet, and she is adamant that it not ever end up on the racks, and I agree. She also would like a conversation with the designer, either on camera or in person, to discuss what happened. Beth wants him to see her. As a Native person, as a designer, as a contemporary in the fashion world, not as an ancient artifact.

The other piece she pointed out that resonated deeply with me are the layers of erasure, violation, and power that went into this situation. KTZ wanted honor Indigenous women, but instead they erased us. We talk so much about missing and murdered indigenous women, and this is yet another example of how we are systematically erased. And for Beth, as a Crow woman, putting these designs out to the world is a deeply personal process–and that connection, that spirituality, was violated by Pejoski. It’s not just a design, it is her entire being as a Native woman represented in that dress. Not to mention the power imbalance here. In the words of Matika Wilbur (we had a fancy Indian conference call), “this is modern day colonialism at work.” So painfully true.

But right now, how do you, as an individual, contribute to positive change in this area? Support Native designers. Buy Bethany’s amazing line. Visit the Beyond Buckskin Boutique. Contribute to real Native fashion.

Tweet out your support for Bethany (@byellowtail), contact KTZ through their twitter (@KTZofficial), their Facebook page, instagram, or website. Let folks know that we mean business, and that our cultures aren’t free for the taking.

sloaneshutup:

kingofooo:

Dark Purple - title card

designed by Sloane Leong

painted by Nick Jennings

premieres Thursday, February 19th at 7:30/6:30c on Cartoon Network

:-)

this is the episode with a reference to me!

adventure time is basically my favorite cartoon so im freaking out!!

Today and every day.

This is a shirt design I made for the fine folks over at Challenger’s Comics. You can go over and try to score one of these bad boys this weekend, to celebrate your romantic love for a storytelling medium.

Buy yourself a prezzie.

xo

hallo

I had a really good day today.

Winter Blues!

It’s been tough going from perpetual sunny Florida to a dark Pacific NW Winter and it hit me hard! Winter Depression is no fun! 

Suki Waterhouse “California Dreamin’” shoot, InStyle March 2015 (can you tell that I don’t get my hands on a ton of magazines?)

slayshana:

swanqueenidiot:

You know something’s wrong when even these people admit it’s messed up

EVEN THE RACISTS ARE LIKE DAMN THIS IS RACIST

Hourly comics day 2016 (Pt 2) (read part 1 here)