Rodanof42

There’s no question but that in American culture the predominant view is one that is rich, white, male, straight and Christian. And while “The male gaze” is pretty well known, we’re getting to learn about the “white gaze” as well. Have you ever wondered what it looks like? Now we know. Except it’s from New Zealand AND America.

Shocking isn’t it? Here is some more of that toxic white gaze:

The gaze in question is Mahou Shounen Breakfast Club a newish webcomic by New Zealander Katie O’Neill and American Toril Orlesky. Or rather it WAS, because despite praise and anticipation, the duo pulled the plug on the comic after a mere 13 pages after it was accused of cultural appropriation because it was a comic set in Japan with Japanese story lines that was by two white kids from across the globe. And also because one of them responded to a troll on Tumblr in a way that the Tumblr police deemed inappropriate. Here’s that crime again.

Deb Aoki has heroically (and I mean it HEROICALLY) compiled the entire saga, which played out on Twitter, in one epic epic Storify. Normally I would embed it, but it’s so huge and epic it would crash your browser. Anyway I cannot recommend enough that you read the whole thing because the wise Aoki takes this molehill and tackles an entire mountain of the question “Do You Have to Be Japanese to Make Manga?” which is a huge one that this Storify doesn’t answer…but it does raise more and more questions.

For the digest version, shortly after MSBC began running, an ANONYMOUS questioner on Tumblr asked on O’Neill’s tumblr:

Anonymous asked: God damn this is why I hate it when ignorant white people like you try to make stuff about Japan just because it’s trendy. Learn how to write kanji that isn’t so awkward before you even think about making a story set in the place the language is from. 嫌なら自分の文化を使え　それとも世界で他の文化が色々があるんだろう。

Hey! I actually have a BA in Japanese and speak it with some fluency (though it’s been a few years since I graduated), and the kanji in the logo is based off a font I got from a Japanese website! Thanks for your concern, but if you’re basically saying that white people should only write about white people that’s kind of messed up. We’re always going to be open to criticism and concerns, so if we get something wrong let us know!

O’Neill’s answer was deemed to be flippant and somehow racist (even when other people pointed out that ANONYMOUS wasn’t that great with Kanji either.)

Things intensified on the twitter and tumblr of cartoonist Iasmin Omar Ata, theirself the author of a well-received webcomic Mis(H)adra:

Anonymous asked: oh my god thank you for calling out msbc i’ve been side-eying that project since forever….

 

hey! i’m glad you’ve noticed the issue, too. honestly, i’m shocked at how people haven’t really called out the creators for a) their blatant cultural appropriation, and b) the awful “it’s fine” response to that ask. the whole thing is garbage and unfortunately is just another reminder of how toxic the ever-present white gaze is. i hope that soon we can do away with this kind of thing in comics because i for one am up tohere with it.

Orlesky and Ata also hashed it out on twitter:

@shoujoshitlord this is so god damn transparent and shitty I can’t even believe you’re serious right about now

— ☆IASMIN OMAR ATA☆ (@DELTAHEAD_) March 3, 2015

And even if they had a point, Ata was definitely being a jerk about it. The response did not fit the crime.

UPDATE: When I wrote the above I was unaware that Ata was responding to these now deleted tweets by Orlesky:

@Comixace i just want to ask one question: were you aware of these tweets when you wrote yr article? pic.twitter.com/FOVca74B8p

— ☆IASMIN OMAR ATA☆ (@DELTAHEAD_) March 5, 2015

 

Given that Ata’s rather forceful response was to a different matter, I apologize for the “jerk” comment.

While some people—even Japanese people—said they saw nothing wrong with MSBC, unfortunately, O’Neill and Orlesky decided to pull the plug on the comic even though it is not clear from anyone anywhere aside from anonymous trolls what they did wrong:

Note on Mahou Shounen Breakfast Club
As I’m sure you’ll know, last month we launched our webcomic, Mahou Shounen Breakfast Club! We were very excited about it, however we absolutely do not want to hurt anyone with it and we are concerned that this is unavoidable. From the outset we tried to be aware of issues such as cultural appropriation, fetishization and stereotyping and did our best to avoid them and write in a nuanced manner. We hoped that extensive research and experience living and working in Japan would be enough to make a portrayal that wasn’t hurtful. We can see now this was incorrect and not possible, and we don’t wish to create a comic that will hurt people, so it seems the solution is to simply stop. We sincerely apologise to anyone who was upset by it.

Thank you everyone who had faith in our comic skills before we even started, and who has given us kind feedback about the art especially! It means a lot to us that people feel this strongly about us as creators, and we will absolutely be working together again in future! Feel free to keep following the strangestarcomics blog if you’re interested in our other projects!

Now I’m willing to write part of this off as young, insecure cartoonists who are still figuring things out and not really being able to take possibly faulty criticism well. There are lots of tweets around that subject on the Storify above. I know we live in a time of identify politics where cultural appropriation is a terrible crime. Of course that didn’t stop Osamu Tezuka from culturally appropriating Walt Disney and Robert Louis Stevenson to invent manga in the first place, or Naoki Urasawa from drawing a manga about half English half Japanese insurance inspector, or any of a thousand other example of the cross pollination that makes cultural exchange a wonderful thing. Culture isn’t a bag of potato chips —you don’t chomp it up and then it’s gone. It’s an ocean that flows and ebbs and freezes and evaporates and becomes different things everywhere.

Which isn’t to say that, YEAH, people from one culture can misunderstand and fetishize people from other cultures. And it’s good to point that out.

But did Mahou Shounen Breakfast Club ACTUALLY DO THAT???? Japanese-New Zealand Cartoonist Jem Yoshioka wrote about this and this is possibly the most well meaning and infuriating document I’ve read this month.

Yoshioka runs down a FAQ of why she agrees with O’Neill and Orlesky shutting down the strip, but fails to explain any reason why the critics were correct. For instance.

In the case of MSBC too much hinged on the Japanese setting, so they have decided it’s best to stop making it.

WHAT NOW? Because a story is set in Japan and that setting effects the story it is bad? God forbid she ever watch Lost in Translation.

Also, here’s a great straw man:

Isn’t this exactly the same as when Japanese people write about western countries or white people?

 

No. Western countries and white people occupy a significant place of power within our global world, economically and culturally. To put it simply, the whole world is drowning in white culture, so it’s not culturally appropriative to write a story about white people or set in a western country. There’s a strong power imbalance in favour of western countries and white culture(s).

If anything I find this attitude MORE dismissive of Japanese culture than a wee tribute. Hundreds of millions if not billions of people are influenced by Japanese culture, billions more by other Asian cultures which are strong and thriving and, yeah, ignored by Westerners who think that US culture is the be all and end all of world culture. That just isn’t true. Posing Japanese culture as a timid weak hothouse flower before American aggression is just an insult to Japan, as American children clutch their Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers cereal spoons while playing with their Transformers.

But then we get to the meat of the matter:

What are the issues with MSBC specifically? It seemed fine to me. I’ve seen way worse stuff get made.

 

MSBC doesn’t necessarily look like cultural appropriation. The kanji is correct, the landscapes are representative of real Tokyo landscapes, and while there were a couple of inaccuracies around the reality of the voice acting industry, that’s an acceptable leap to make for the sake of storytelling purposes (see all movies ever that feature computers, science, engineering or hacking as plot points).

OK so aside from being an actually awkward story, nothing wrong here.

However, even though it was respectfully well-researched and executed, MSBC did personally make me feel a bit weird. MSBC intentionally draws on anime and manga tropes, which can be problematic and reductive in their representation of women, gay men and often focus on specific elements of Japanese culture. There is also a lot of white western readers of this material who are still early on their journey of understanding the difference between respect and appropriation, often with a heavy side of racial fetishisation and overly romanticised ideas of Japan.

Now what tropes would those be that were revealed in the 13 pages of Masou Shounen Breakfast Club? The TROPES that CAN BE problematic and reductive.

CAN BE

Not were. It isn’t shown that MSBC used these tropes in any problematic and reductive way. Just that they COULD HAVE BEEN.

It’s fine to use these tropes, but it’s important to take the overall environment into account when writing them as a white westerner. While Katie and Toril were obviously aware of this when working on MSBC and worked hard to make sure they didn’t fetishise or stereotype, the genre itself and the wider effect it has within the community makes it difficult to achieve that.

Get that now? Because other people fucked it up, Katie and Toril probably would too, so they had to shut things down after just 13 pages before they did it. Once again, no actual crime, we’re talking total pre-cog here.

For a lot of people MSBC won’t be considered anywhere near appropriative or fetishistic, and that’s just where you are on your own journey. For me personally it does approach a line that makes me uncomfortable. I would have kept reading anyway because I enjoy the storytelling and illustrative style, but I think that feeling would have stayed with me the whole way through. The weird thing is that if they had kept going I likely would never have said anything about how I felt, because I would have been too scared of being instantly shot down about it, feared I was being silly and felt I’d never be able to properly articulate my issues. I am overjoyed to know that Katie and Toril are the kind of creators who are respectful and listen to this kind of feedback this seriously.

Yoshioka seems like a very nice, reasonable person, and I totally dig her art, but…what exactly is the crime here? The comic made Yoshioka feel uncomfortable because…feelings.

And eventually someday she would have been upset by it.

Got that? She was sure that someday she would get upset by the way that these two were sure to fuck things up. Two non-Japanese people—even with knowledge of Japan—doing a comic set in Japan was fetishistic no matter what the context or content. Just the concept was enough to ensure that lines would be crossed.
If O’Neill and Orlesky decided to pull their comic because they didn’t want to hurt even one person’s feelings, well then, okay. I get it. Hurting feelings is bad. I also suggest that they get out of any creative endeavor in the future because all great art hurts feelings, causes feelings and in general shakes things up. It isn’t safe and it isn’t afraid. Under these rules that Yoshioka lays out, no great comic would ever have been completed because some element of its creation MIGHT have been used incorrectly in the past.
If you have been reading my writings for any amount of time, you know that I’m a fan of multicultural diversity, and of multiple viewpoints and creators of every sex, religion, creed, race and sexual orientation getting a chance to tell their stories.
I’m also a huge fan of cultural context for stories that examine how the preconceptions of a work of art are reflected in the execution. But I never want to see these criticisms used to PROACTIVELY SILENCE ART.
The problem with a lot of the sociological criticism that we’re seeing now is that it sets up a Zeno’s Paradox race against some kind of Platonic ideal that has never been proved to exist. Nearly all art has a cultural context that insults SOMEONE. If I take all the anti-MSBC arguments above and reduce them to a fine gravy, it DOES come out that no one should ever write or draw a story about a culture or place other than their own because they might get it wrong. White people should stick to white people (aka the status quo), black people should stick to black people and Japan should never write a story that takes place in another culture (because I’ve read plenty of manga that fetishized some bizarre element of American culture.)
Fetishishing is wrong, orientalism is wrong, appropriation for cool points (Hey Iggy) is wrong. But absorbing the rich cultural stew of the entire world and trying to express it in your own art and comics is not wrong. And as far as I can tell, that’s the crime that O’Neill and Orlesky were convicted of in tumblr court, and that’s a shame.

Concept art for Mahou Shounen Breakfast Club.

Update: Shea Hennum has a further commentary to all this,  and suggests (as many on Twitter have) that my own white gaze does not allow me to criticize those who were offended or hurt by the problems with MSBC. Fair enough. Whatever hurtful element is in this webcomic is something that my cultural upbringing has rendered me immune to, and no one has communicated the exact nature of the offense so that I can share the outrage. It was also suggested that I was reinforcing a culture of oppressing non-white opinions by arguing with people of color over their perceptions of racism. While I would LIKE to live in a world where people can discuss different viewpoints on matters of cultural appropriation without validating repression, I am sadly aware that we don’t live in a world where that is the case. It is easy for me to pretend otherwise, and much more difficult for people of color, and I do want to acknowledge that.

In the end the creators of Mahou Shounen Breakfast Club decided that they could not tell this story in a way that wasn’t hurtful, and that’s their decision. Hopefully they’ll go on to create more comics that gain notoriety only for their excellence.

[The first version of this post misidentified Toril Orlesky as being from NZ rather than from the US,  and Iasmin Omar Ata as male. I regret the errors but it doesn’t change a thing I think because I judge people on their behavior not their identity.]

Snippets in Stone

Here are two unusual stone fragments. The object at the top is an “ostrakon”, a piece of stone or pottery filled with text, in this case from Byzantine Egypt, dating from c. 600. While the fragment seems to be part of something that was initially much bigger (a sizable pot filled with a long biblical text, perhaps), it was actually always meant to be like this: a snippet with only a few words. The object was filled with text after it had become a fragment, as can be seen from the words written on its side. It is the equivalent of a page from a notebook. The second image, from 1280 BCE, has an even stronger draft connotation. This piece of stone was likely a teaching tool used by a master who showed his apprentice how to draw a face. The pupil subsequently tried out a pair of arms, which look clumsy - lots to learn here. Both items deceive us: they seem broken and insignificant, yet are complete and full of history.

Pic: (top) Metropolian Museum of Art, Accession nr. 14.1.103, dated c. 600 (more here); (bottom) Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, Accession nr. 32.1 (more here).

franklytriggering:

This is nothing new.

Today, a friend of mine expressed that she has become too paralysed with fear to continue writing. She’s working through it and it’s compounded by her mental illness which magnifies this sort of self-destructive rumination. However, as for the trigger, she named it specifically as Tumblr’s vicious hostility towards any piece of work which does not pass their arbitrary, ever-shifting and vastly varying criteria. Criteria for being “inclusive”, as well as portraying “diverse” characters in a way which doesn’t raise red flags for some subset of users and thus gets stamped “problematic”, or if you’re feeling saucy, “garbage shit trash”.

To summarize: Tumblr “critical consumption” has effectively silenced a queer, female, mentally ill creative voice.

I am a minority creator myself (biracial, mentally ill) and I’ll be the first to admit that hanging around tumblr has been helpful in learning how to examine my programming and how it shows up in my work. However, I possess a confidence— and arrogance— in my work that others do not, which allows me to press forward even when my inbox accuses my queer characters being “lip service” because they don’t have romantic arcs.

Is deep-sj tumblr happy with this model? Are we content to batter aspiring socially-conscious creators into abandoning the idea of creating altogether, while scores of white boys skim past your open condemnation of Urbance with a scoff, if they even read it at all?

Let’s talk about Urbance. Before I get right into it I have a related anecdote.

Some time ago, I recommended The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin to a user seeking books with gender-nonbinary characters (the work in question contains characters who are, quite explicitly and viscerally, genderfluid). They immediately discarded the idea after reading its summary on goodreads. They didn’t want to read a book about “some white guys from Earth having to ~learn to accept~ gender noncomforming aliens and that being the entire arc of the story”.

Anyone who’s actually read Left Hand knows this is ludicrous, but for your benefit, the main character is black, and he is the only Earthborn human in the story; the Gethenians are described as ‘Inuit brown’ and are humanoid in every respect besides their unique sexual physiology. The core themes of the book are actually about exploring a society which doesn’t have a masculinity construct. Where everyone is both male and female. No time is spent by the (BLACK) protag being disgusted or crudely fascinated by the Gethenians; only with examining how his two-gendered social programming has led him to frequently prejudge and misunderstand them.

No, that wasn’t good enough. These barriers need to not exist, because we want diverse stories where LGBT and people of color don’t face prejudice, right?

Urbance. Urbance was almost utterly destroyed by Tumblr; its creators sought to portray a society where everyone was mixed race (their characters were unmistakably black and asian-coded) and the construct of ‘race’ was absent, a relic of a bygone era. Tumblr users decided that this, in itself, was racist. They proceeded to pick apart every line of a translated-from-French Q&A page and decided that Urbance was acephobic, nb-phobic, transphobic, queer-erasing, whatever; until, embarrassingly enough, Urbance received a funding surge at the eleventh hour from fucking GamerGate.

GamerGate had to pick up a promising, racially and sexually diverse project because Tumblr users were so utterly batshit hateful towards it that it almost didn’t get funded. Simply to spite us.

So that’s at least one high profile ‘progressive’ piece of media that Tumblr has waved its dick and balls at and nearly destroyed— has there been an analogous example of a diverse project that Tumblr has rallied behind? 

Oh right— The Arkh Project. 

I really have nothing else to add that hasn’t been said a hundred times over by people more versed in this stuff than I am— everything is problematic, progress in small steps, glass half full, etc.

The fact of the matter is Tumblr needs to sort its fucking attitude out, and quick, or we’re looking at a lot of the same shit for the next ten years while the same straight white guys make everything, and laugh at “SJWs” constantly, impotently, pointlessly, complaining. While queer, female, mentally ill writers languish in corners, silent, hiding like battered wives from the people who are supposed to be their advocates, their protectors, and their fans.

Sort it out.

by Zachary Clemente

Last week, musician and producer Thomas Wesley Pentz (AKA Diplo) teased his upcoming collaboration with Missy Elliot on Snapchat, a video-sending service that’s being used as a new method of digital promotion among musicians. The video played a snippet of the track over a popular animated illustration by Rebecca Mock, a celebrated artist who has worked with The New York Times, The Walrus magazine, Nautilus online publication, and many more. Upon calling out Pentz on twitter for neither requesting permission to use her work or giving her credit, Mock was lambasted by Pentz and his followers. Much of the response Mock received is considered harassment, some of which is sexual in nature. He later uploaded the video to instagram, including a credit to her. The public side of the situation lasted about 2 days, resulting in a number of deleted tweets, a swell of write-ups, an apology of sorts, and potential legal action. Please be aware, the below contains potentially triggering verbal abuse.

.@diplo has shared one of my .gifs as background art for his music w/out asking me. my work isn't your clip art dude. don't sample my gif.

— Rebecca Mock (@rebeccamock) February 11, 2015

How many times have you heard someone attempt to describe the internet? For me, it typically involves poor metaphors accompanied by wild gesticulation around my head – it’s a vast semi-connected mess of stuff that relates to other stuff, but not necessarily in a way that we see or care about. It has a constant and amorphous give and take of action and reaction nested so far up, down, and around that conventional structures such as copyright law are brutally difficult to apply. There’s plenty of argument as to why that lack of structure can be a useful thing, but I bring it up because it means we have to operate under our own rules built out of even older structures, such as morals and good faith. These rules aren’t written anywhere nor could they be as I can’t think of a place other than Google where literally everyone goes, so they propagate, much like videos of felines, virally; an evolutionary ethos if you will.

Where I’m going with this is even though the way the letter of the law, especially when it comes to copyrighted material, doesn’t easily shake out now that someone’s creation can be a collection of pixels which is technically “reproduced” every time it’s viewed on another screen – there are easily recognizable values to adhere to in the use and application of this material. This is something Pentz should have been aware of and therefore, disregarded by choice.

“The Aftershocks” by Rebecca Mock

What we get are a lot of slip-ups; someone will post something without credit and people will correct them. They’ll apologize then edit, credit, or pay and we’ll move on feeling, ideally, more knowledgable and satisfied with the overall experience. Unfortunately, this isn’t a common thing as one of the many, perhaps not well-exercised, behaviors that the internet enables is the speed with which we will share/retweet/reblog something. As an example, consider the number of times you’ve seen the first two panels of KC Green’s “On Fire” strip from his comic Gunshow without credit; it’s probably a lot. Community-based (read = not creator-based) aggregator platforms such as imgur, reddit, 9gag, and in the case of Pentz, Wifflegif, make it extraordinarily easy to view the action of sharing an animated gif or similar content as harmless fun. Nine times out of ten, I’m right there with you, but we have to acknowledge that we, as consumers of media, often take for granted the time and effort put into creating something and the fact that the little “share” button has become the preeminent way we show support.

Now, is this a bad thing? No, of course not – it’s a tool. But this tool isn’t a static object, it’s a means of communication that has foundational effects on how what is communicated is perceived, discussed, and framed. Sharing a book or a research paper is widely immune to this because you’re handling a source material that, by law, should be properly credited – all t’s crossed and i’s dotted. However, when a blog post (such as this one) is shared on twitter or facebook, there’s no guarantee that every embedded image is credited, and each subsequent sharer is less and less likely to ensure the inclusion of that credit. Instead of turtles, it’s the possibility of a passive application of the nonchalant disregard of creator ownership all the way down. Is it sometimes hard to tell how to approach this? Sure – but exercising a bit of caution can’t hurt.

Alright, where am I going with this, really?

Pentz should have known better is where this is going. For someone whose twitter feed is rife with easily digestible memes: images, gifs, hashtags used as inside jokes shared with millions, he is more than capable of knowing when something, like an image of a less-than-content cat with white text, is a product of the share-and-share-alike internet culture or when something is a labor of love and needs to be treated as such. As an experiment, I used Google’s image search, which allows you to make a query based on an uploaded image file, such as Mock’s “The Aftershocks”, embedded above. Here was my result:

Almost like magic, right? Just for the naysayers out there: I created a new profile on my computer to ensure there was no associated search data or cookies present and renamed the file to gif.gif instead of a uniquely generated file name from tumblr. I chose to not edit the metadata of the image assuming that the uploader at Wifflegif did the same. The search completed in half a second, pulling up Mock’s name, blog, and portfolio website as the top hits. I posit that this process was so easy that even a savvy producer of digital music working on a computer 24/7 could do it, but I’ve been wrong before. This was Pentz’s first error, and easily the most excusable as there would still be a way to make amends afterwards.

Unfortunately Pentz’s subsequent responses to Mock’s tweet calling him out and those of her supporters ruined any chance of recompense; some choice examples are featured below.

To me there’s a singular, and often under-discussed, place that all of these responses are coming from: Pentz’s feelings of entitlement. They come in readily customizable colors and sizes for all applications and can become quite pervasive if left unchecked; but the primary one here is that of being male.

Not only were Pentz’s responses abusive and flippant, they were wrapped in that soft nougat of everyday misogyny to make that made-to-serve blend we know as sexual harassment. It starts with a grotesquely sexually-charged rehash of a “have her cake and eat it too” strike aimed at Mock, moves to the emotionally abusive and gendered attack on Mock’s collaborator Hope Larson with some targeted misuse of a rather politically-feverish hashtag, slips back into cut and dry sexual harassment, and finishes with a brazen apathy for the effect Mock and her supports will have on his life complete with a touch of his, now patently gross, misuse of politically charged hashtags. Was that exhausting to read? Just try to imagine how it must have been for Mock. I doubt that the gendered form in which this harassment was conducted would have occurred if Mock and Larson were male; Pentz would’ve had to make do with attacks that were less sexual nature.

Clearly Pentz is of the “in for a penny, in for a pound” school of thought as it’s not only the comments directed at Mock that can be attributed to his entitlement.

Here’s where Pentz’s disconnect really hits home for me: he genuinely thinks what he has said and did wasn’t wrong and likely still doesn’t; we’ll get into his apology later. He exposed her art to his large number of followers, that’s a good thing right? Eh – yes and no. Sure, she may ultimately get more work out of this debacle – but that wasn’t Pentz’s choice to make. He did not receive consent from Mock to utilize her work as a means of promoting his own. Yes, many people saw her animation; but inside the frame of his own promotion – undermining her work and agency as an artist. The disregard of this socially required and well-known form of consent is the most worrying aspect of this situation to me as it’s the genesis of all other actions Pentz has taken. Further proof of this is him linking her instagram account to the permanent upload of the offending video as a tepid means of offering credit; no consideration was taken into how she uses her account (accord to Mock – it’s more of a personal scrapbook) and has only opened up more avenues for Pentz’s irate fans to harass her and her friends. Pentz just doesn’t seem to give a damn about how this situation is negatively affecting peoples’ lives and probably never will. So why did he care now? Why did he even engage?

Because he can and no harm will come to him. Voilà, meet entitlement’s secret ruler: privilege.

While scrolling through his twitter feed as this unfolded, I saw many of his fans decrying Mock’s first tweet as unwarranted, stating that she should have contacted him privately to address the issue. Sure – that seems reasonable enough, except…how? In preparation for this post, I spent a good hour or so hunting far and wide for contact information that wasn’t his social media platforms and found nothing to work with. All I turned up were two email addresses associated with his record label, Mad Decent; I sent a request for a statement into that void and doubt that anything will come of it. I don’t know what they expect of Mock, but I doubt that there’s some kind of secret society of people who have more than 5K followers on twitter that exists exclusively so they can contact each other privately.

At the end of the day, what we have is a clashing of two different worlds: the comics world and the music industry where nothing is one-to-one. Mock is a freelance illustrator who has to handle her own day-to-day business whereas Pentz likely has a team of people working under him to manage his various projects; he has plenty of literal and figurative gates barring people from interacting with him in a way that he deems unfit. It’s hard to see this as a problem of any kind as both exist and work in a normal situation, in context to their respective fields. However, for this you simply need to take a look at their twitter followers to see that Pentz has been happily surrounded in an echo chamber of support; it’s impossible to meet an aggressor on the field when their side approximately outnumbers yours 260:1. He doesn’t know how good he has it and doesn’t care how awful he’s made it for Mock.

Now, the apology (also screencapped here in case it gets removed). I don’t know about you, but I really believe that he wrote it with earnest and thought his way through each and every bizarre use of incomplete ellipses…then promptly cast the whole thing aside as if nothing had happened. Befitting his previous behavior, he excuses himself by stating “I’m sorry thats my nature” and “I’m just a joking person and i don’t even take myself serious so how can i take you guys seriously.” Half-hearted at best, Pentz’s attempt to address Mock’s concerns only highlight the problem at play: he never got her permission to use her art and doesn’t see that as a bad thing. Even worse were the provided explanations for his terrible behavior, ending the note with “so maybe this is also a future apology to everyone on the internet who follows me”. We’re left with Pentz telling Mock that this situation is little more than a future anecdote to him; he can’t even complete an apology to her without undermining the validity of her experience.

There’s a lesson to be learned here, I like to believe. There’s an opportunity for us to do better and find common ground when a dispute like this crops up. In this case, Pentz could have contacted Mock privately to diffuse the problem and address her concerns – creator to creator. Hell, in the most ideal of situations, they may have decided to collaborate in the future, sharing a laugh over the amusing way their paths crossed. However, thanks to Pentz – this is not to be. I urge you to check out this post from game designer Joshua A.C. Newman who resolved a situation with another game creator, Matt Rivaldi, over two similarly named titles hitting Kickstarter around the same time in a way that benefited both parties. He makes it look easy, because it is.

You can find Rebecca Mock’s work here and support her by purchasing a print or four. The image “The Aftershocks” was originally commissioned for an article on Medium.

manuscriptbook:

The Elegant Simplicity of the St Cuthbert Gospel

This simple page, bare of decoration, is actually one of the most remarkable pages in Western manuscript history. It is in fact a folio (2v) from the St Cuthbert Gospel, also known as the Stonyhurst Gospel (British Library, Add MS 89000), which is the oldest intact European book. The book was apparently tucked away in the coffin of St Cuthbert –  a prominent English saint – from 698 to 1104, after which it was discovered in near perfect condition when St Cuthbert’s remains were moved from his coffin to a new location. The book is currently in the collection of the British Library, who bought it in 2012 for the considerable sum of £9 million.

The book consists of the Gospel of St John, in remarkably clear handwritten script. The script is elegant and simple, with only a few initials and rubrications – only one red initial seen on this page – and has been hailed for its “simple design and perfect execution” (Brown, The Stonyhurst Gospel of Saint John, 1969). The subtle decorative elements of the text never muddle the form of the letters, further attributing to its clarity. Almost all letters are in fact very clear even to a modern reader, and show, overall, how closely tied our basic letter forms can be to those of even the oldest books. All elements of the Cuthbert Gospel – ink, page and binding –  are a testament to how expertly it was made, and how it has survived to this day as a uniquely well-preserved part of European book history.

- Anna Käyhkö

700-year-old English speech bubbles

If you thought comics were a modern invention, think again! The top image of c. 1300 shows a drawing that has the ingredients of a modern comic book drawing, including the fact that the text is placed in real speech bubbles: the words (which are in English!) are connected to the speaker’s mouth by means of a tiny line. It turns out this tradition was alive and kicking in medieval times. Read more about these 700-year-old speech bubbles - including what the funny English text says - in this longer blog I posted.

Pics: London, British Library, Stowe MS 49 (c. 1300); Los Angeles, Getty Museum, MS 66 (13th century); Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 11978 (15th century).

It’s Image Expo day so expect a ton of news rolling out as we get going. But first, the new Image comics Humble Bundle is up and it’s a great jumping on point with digital editions of the Image Expo 2015 Preview Book, Alex + Ada Vol. 1 (#1-5), Deadly Class Vol. 1 (#1-6), C.O.W.L. Vol. 1 (#1-5), Elephantmen 2260 Book One (#51-55), Minimum Wage Vol. 1 (#1-6), God Hates Astronauts Vol. 1, Genius (#1-5), and Satellite Sam Vol. 1 (#1-5). If you pay more than the average price, you also get The Manhattan Projects Book One (#1-10), The Wicked + The Divine Vol. 1 (#1-5), The Fuse Vol. 1 (#1-6), Velvet Vol. 1 (#1-5), Sex Criminals Vol. 1 (#1-5), Wytches #1, The Walking Dead Vol. 22: A New Beginning (#127-132), and The Fade Out #1. If you pay $18 or more, you’ll receive all of the above plus The Walking Dead Compendium One (#1-48), East of West: The World, and Saga Book One (#1-18).

Free comics will be available every day, and proceed benefit The Hero Initiative. So get on over!

celestedoodles:

the Ghost of Christmas Present here to party

Since it's a movie about an actor best known for playing a superhero, it's not entirely strange for the Birdman movie website to have a section of comics. Unexpected, sure, but it makes a certain kind of sense. The story of the film surrounds an actor whose public persona is tied to a superhero film franchise. Comics could help tie the movie more tightly to that superhero's mythology, and flesh out the world of a film in an interesting and engaging way for fans who are curious to find out more.

But here's the thing: The comics on the Birdman website aren't about Birdman at all. Instead, they're about its star, Michael Keaton, telling strange stories about how he was attacked by Michael Douglas and forced to change his name, how a meeting with Chris Farley involved prophecies of death, and, perhaps strangest of all, a long text piece about Courtney Cox's unfortunate super-powers.

Continue reading…

lifeascomics:

Defenders!

postcardsfromspace:

by Rachel Edidin

(I’ve posted this before, but I keep forgetting to add attribution. And I’m baking today, so.)

---

INGREDIENTS:

• 5 1/2 c sifted all-purpose flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp salt
• 3 tsp ground cinnamon
• 2 tsp ground ginger
• 2 tsp ground cloves
• 1 tsp ground nutmeg
• 1 c vegetable shortening
• 1 c molasses
• 1 egg
• 1 c sugar

1. Make friends with a girl who will become your best friend, but maybe somewhat less than you’ll be hers. Split a Best Friends necklace that you buy for two dollars at the holiday gift bazaar at school.

2. Sift flour, salt, nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger, loves [sic], and baking soda onto wax paper.

3. Every December, go to your best friend’s house. Sleep over. Her mom will have gingerbread dough waiting to roll and cut and bake and assemble into houses. The lawns will be a thick layer of frosting with green sprinkles. Play with Barbies even though you’re both too old for Barbies. Her mom will make you French toast in the morning and braid your hair. Your mom doesn’t know how to braid hair. Watch National Velvet and Cheetah.

4. In a large bowl, beat shortening with sugar until fluffy light. Beat in molasses and egg. Stir in flour mixture to make a stiff dough. (You will probably need a large spoon to stir in the last portion of the flour; the dough at this point will be too stiff for a mixer.)

5. The Winter your best friend is in rehab (the first time), go anyway. Her mom will have gingerbread dough waiting. Sleep in your best friend’s bed, and take her mom out for breakfast in the morning.

6. Chill several hours or overnight—until dough is firm enough to roll.

7. After a particularly horrible holiday when your best friend ditches you for a boy and you stay up waiting for her until four in the morning, fall out of touch. Decide that you’ve gone out on enough limbs and been left hanging many times too many, and that if she wants to be friends with you, she has your number.

8. Place a sheet of aluminum foil, large enough to line the cookie sheet, on the counter oor [sic] table. Sprinkle lightly with flour. Roll out about 1/4 of the dough, intil [sic.] it has a thickness of about one eighth inch. This should just about cover the entire foil/ cookie sheet.

9. Exchange cards and letters with your friend’s mom fairly regularly. Ask for her gingerbread recipe. Bake it in your dorm kitchen, estimating measurements with a coffee mug and soup spoon. Be surprised at how well it turns out.

10. Cut pattern piecesor [sic] cookies in this dough, but leave the cookies on the sheet. (You should leave a half inch between pieces.) Now remove all of the dough in between the cookies oor [sic] gingerbread house pattern pieces. Carefully slide the cookie sheet under the foil, and secure the foil on to the cookie sheet.

11. When your mom calls an hour before you’d normally get up for work, answer the phone. Afterwards, go to work anyway, because you’re not sure what else to do.

12. Bake in a slow oven (300 degrees) for 20 minutes, or until cookies feel firm to the touch. Remove cookie sheet from oven and trim any cookie or house pieces while still warm. Cool cookies on cookie on [sic] a wire rack for 5 minutes, then slide off foil and cool completely.

13. Go to your best friend’s house and help her mom clean out her room. Don’t make gingerbread. Listen while her mom reads aloud from her diary. Cling to each other on the floor of her room and cry until your throat hurts while a legion of porcelain dolls watch impassively from above. Go home with a shoebox full of Barbie clothes.

14. Top with royal icing (simple version).

dr-archeville:

ealperin:

the-real-seebs:

odins-one-eyed-fuck:

hippity-hoppity-brigade:

stillvisions:

maybenotboring:

and at no point has anyone thought “maybe we should not build a giant flammable goat this year”

They tried fireproofing. And armed guards. And fences, and cameras… Sadly the wikipedia page has been cut down by super srs folks to remove all the awesome Keystone cops tales of the goat’s history (emphasis added by me)

• 1966 Stig Gavlén came up with the idea of a giant goat made out of straw. But it turned out that Gavlén organisation did not have enough funding for the goat. Then Harry Ström, who at that time was the chairman of the Södra Kungsgatan Ideella Förening (a non-profit society), decided to pay the whole cost for the goat out of his own pocket. The goat stood until midnight of New Year’s Eve, when it went up in flames. The perpetrator, who was from Hofors,Gästrikland, was found and convicted of vandalism. The first goat was insured and Ström got all his money back.
  
• 1967 Nothing happened.
  
• 1968 The goat survived. A fence was built around the goat. Previously it was popular for children to play hide-and-seek inside and around the goat. There was also a rumor that one night a couple had sex inside the goat. In subsequent years the inside of the goat was protected by a chicken-wire net.
  
• 1969 The goat was burnt down on New Year’s Eve.
  
• 1970 The goat was burnt down only six hours after it was assembled. Two very drunk teenagers were connected with the crime. With help from several financial contributors the goat was reassembled out of lake reed.
  
• 1971 The Southern Merchants got tired of their goats being burned and stopped building the goat. The Natural Science Club (Naturvetenskapliga Föreningen:NF) from the School of Vasa (Vasaskolan) took over. 
  
• 1972 The goat collapsed because of sabotage.
  
• 1973 N/A
• 1974 Burnt.
  
• 1975 N/A
• 1976 Hit by a car.
  
• 1977 N/A
• 1978 Again, the goat was kicked to pieces.
  
• 1979 The goat was burnt even before it was erected. A new one was built and fireproofed. It was destroyed and broken into pieces.
  
• 1980 Burnt down on Christmas Eve.
  
• 1981 Nothing happened.
  
• 1982 Burnt down on Lucia (13 December).
  
• 1983 The legs were destroyed.
  
• 1984 Burnt down on 12 December, the night before Lucia.
  
• 1985 The 12.5 metre (41 ft) tall goat of the Natural Science Club was featured in the Guinness Book of Records for the first time. Even though the goat was enclosed by a 2 metres (6.6 ft) high metal fence, guarded by Securitas and even soldiers from the Gävle I 14 Infantry Regiment, it was burnt down in January.
  
• 1986 The merchants of Gävle decided they were willing to build the goat once again. From 1986 on two goats were built, the Southern Merchants’ and the School of Vasa’s. The big goat burnt down the night before Christmas Eve.
  
• 1987 A heavily fireproofed goat was built. It got burnt down a week before Christmas.^[21]
• 1988 Nothing happened to the goat, but gamblers were for the first time able to gamble on the fate of the goat with English bookmakers.
  
• 1989 Again, the goat burnt down before it was assembled. Financial contributions from the public were raised to rebuild a goat that was burnt down in January. In March 1990 another goat was built, this time for the shooting of a Swedish motion picture called Black Jack.
  
• 1990 Nothing happened. The goat was guarded by many volunteers.
  
• 1991 The goat was joined by an advertising sled, that turned out to be illegally built. On the morning of Christmas Eve the goat was burnt down. It was later rebuilt to be taken to Stockholm as a part of a protest campaign against the closing of the I 14 Infantry Regiment.
  
• 1992 The goat was burnt down eight days after it was built. The Natural Science Club’s goat burnt down the same night. The Southern Merchants’ goat was rebuilt, but burned down on 20 December. The perpetrator of the three attacks was caught and sent to jail. The Goat Committee was founded in 1992.
  
• 1993 Once more the goat was featured in the Guinness Book of Records, the School of Vasa’s goat measured 14.9 metres (49 ft). The goat was guarded by taxis and the Swedish Home Guard. Nothing happened.
  
• 1994 Nothing happened. The goat followed the Swedish national hockey team to Italy for the World Championship in hockey.
  
• 1995 A Norwegian was arrested for attempting to burn down the goat. Burnt down on the morning of Christmas Day. Rebuilt to be standing before the 550th anniversary of Gävle county.
  
• 1996 The first time the goat was guarded by webcams, nothing happened.
  
• 1997 Damaged by fireworks. The Natural Science Club’s goat was attacked too, but survived with minor damage.
  
• 1998 Burnt down on 11 December, even though there was a major blizzard. Was rebuilt.
  
• 1999 Burnt down only a couple of hours after it was erected. Rebuilt again before Lucia. The Natural Science Club’s goat was burnt down as well.
  
• 2000 Burnt down a couple of days before New Year’s Eve. The Natural Science Club’s goat got tossed in the Gävle river.
  
• 2001 Goat set on fire on 23 December by Lawrence Jones, a 51-year-old visitor from Cleveland, Ohio, who spent 18 days in jail and was subsequently convicted and ordered to pay 100,000 Swedish kronor in damages. The court confiscated Jones’s cigarette lighter with the argument that he clearly was not able to handle it. Jones stated in court that he was no “goat burner”, and believed that he was taking part in a completely legal goat-burning tradition. After Jones was released from jail he went straight back to the US without paying his fine. As of 2006 it was still unpaid. The Natural Science Club’s goat was also burnt down.
  
• 2002 A 22 year old from Stockholm tried to set the Southern Merchants’ goat on fire, but failed, the goat receiving only minor damage. On Lucia the goat was guarded by Swedish radio and TV personality Gert Fylking.
  
• 2003 Burnt down on 12 December.
  
• 2004 Burnt 21 December, only three days before Christmas Eve. The fire brigade quickly arrived on the scene, but the goat could not be saved. No new goat was built.
  
• 2005 Burnt by unknown vandals reportedly dressed as Santa and the gingerbread man, by shooting a flaming arrow at the goat at 21:00 on 3 December. Reconstructed on 5 December. The hunt for the arsonist responsible for the goat-burning in 2005 was featured on the weekly Swedish live broadcast TV3’s “Most Wanted" ("Efterlyst”) on 8 December.
• 2006 On the night of 15 December at 03:00, someone tried to set fire to the goat by dousing the right front leg in petrol (gasoline). The red ribbon on that leg was slightly burned and fell off. The lower part of the right leg was scorched, but the rest of the goat failed to light. The leg was repaired that morning. The Natural Science Club’s goat was burned at about 00:40 on 20 December; the vandals were not seen and got away. On the night of 25 December, a drunken man managed to climb up on the goat. Before the police arrived on the scene the man climbed down and disappeared. He did not try to set fire to the goat. The Southern Merchants’ goat survived New Year’s Eve and was taken down on 2 January. It is now stored in a secret location.
  
• 2007 The Natural Science Club’s goat was toppled on 13 December and was burned on the night of 24 December. The Southern Merchants’ goat survived.
• 2008 10,000 people turned out for the inauguration of one of the goats. No back-up goat was built to replace the main goat should the worst happen, nor was the goat treated with flame repellent (Anna Östman, spokesperson of the Goat-committee said the repellent made it look ugly in the previous years, like a brown terrier). On 16 December the Natural Science Club’s Goat was vandalised and later removed. On 26 December there was an attempt to burn down the Southern Merchants’ Goat but patriotic passers-by managed to extinguish the fire. The following day the goat finally succumbed to the flames ignited by an unknown assailant at 03:50 CET.
• 2009 A person attempted to set the Southern Merchants’ goat on fire the night of 7 December. An unsuccessful attempt was made to throw the Natural Science Club’s goat into the river the weekend of 11 December. The culprit then tried, again without success, to set the goat on fire. Someone stole the Natural Science Club’s goat utilizing a truck the night of 14 December.^[36] On the night of 23 December before 04:00 the South Merchant goat was set on fire and was burned to the frame, even though it had a thick layer of snow on its back.^[37] The goat had two online webcams which were put out of service by aDoS attack, instigated by computer hackers just before the burning.^[38]
• 2010 On the night of 2 December, arsonists made an unsuccessful attempt to burn the Natural Science Club’s goat.^[39] On 17 December, a Swedish news site reported that one of the guards tasked with protecting the Southern Merchants’ goat had been offered payment to leave his post so that the goat could be stolen via helicopter and transported to Stockholm. Both goats survived and were dismantled and returned to storage in early January 2011.
  
• 2011 The inauguration of the goat took place on 27 November. The fire-fighters of Gävle sprayed the goat with water to create a coating of ice in the hope of protecting it from arson. The goat was burnt down in the early morning of 2 December.
  
• 2012 The inauguration of the goat took place on 2 December. It was burnt just ten days later in the hours before midnight of 12 December, one day before Lucia.
  
• 2013 As in 2006 and 2007, the straw used to build the goat has been soaked in anti-flammable liquid to prevent it from burning in the event of an arson attack. The inauguration ceremony took place on 1 December. But despite the anti-flammable liquids the goat was burnt down on the early morning of December 21.
  

Any history of plots involving a DDoS attack on the security cameras, a plot to steal it with a helicopter and flaming arrows shot by people dressed as Santa and the Gingerbread man is just plain hilarious in my book.

This really gets my goat. 

WHY DO THEY KEEP BUILDING IT

Well, if they didn’t, they’d no longer have a Christmas goat. I mean, this is like asking why people keep having lunch every day; because they get hungry.

I personally think they should decriminalize the burning of these specific goats and just recognize it as a sport.

The Christmas Goat is IMMORTAL.

ALL HAIL CHRISTMAS GOAT!

I didn’t mention this particular tradition (well, these traditions, I should say) when I was talking about the Yule Goat recently, but here you go.

digital-femme:

Comic strip by Kris Straub

andrewmaclean:

Little Nemo in a Rift in Slumberland

…for Locust Moon’s Little Nemo: Dream Another Dream. Purchase this amazing book here:
http://locustmoon.storenvy.com/products/8656665-little-nemo-dream-another-dream

View it full size here:
http://www.deviantart.com/download/493732620/little_nemo_by_andrew_ross_maclean-d85yej0.jpg?token=9195751c2c881bcb834cbd641b07ad8954887711&ts=1415645276

darreninfinity:

beavercop:

melleigh:

This machine allows anyone to work for minimum wage for as long as they like. Turning the crank on the side releases one penny every 4.97 seconds, for a total of $7.25 per hour. This corresponds to minimum wage for a person in New York. This piece is brilliant on multiple levels, particularly as social commentary. Without a doubt, most people who started operating the machine for fun would quickly grow disheartened and stop when realizing just how little they’re earning by turning this mindless crank. A person would then conceivably realize that this is what nearly two million people in the United States do every day…at much harder jobs than turning a crank. This turns the piece into a simple, yet effective argument for raising the minimum wage.

god damn

What a brilliant way to display this

The artist is Blake Fall-Conroy, who’s also done many other interesting projects. 

Updated, The Billy Ireland’s Library’s Caitlin McGurk has confirmed that she and Jenny Robb—who helped organized the Watterson art exhibit at the library—will represent him at Angoulême.

Earlier this year, the selection of Bill Watterson as the Grand Prix winner at the Angoulême comics festival created quite a stir. The winner is traditionally the “grand marshal” of the whole festival, helping plan exhibits and appearing at official events. (Or, as in the case of Willem, last ear’s winner, hanging out at Le Chat Noir until 1 am with everyone else.) It seemed a bit of a stretch for Watterson, but was it impossible?

Although the once reclusive Calvin & Hobbes creator hasn’t exactly turned into Taylor Swift, he makes occasional semi public appearances and is way more accessible in interviews. (If you call once or twice a year accessible.) When the win was announced, Watterson’s editor Lee Salem said he would try to tell him how wonderful Angoulême is, so maybe Watterson would make an exception for this so not a comic-con event?

However, an interview at the French language 20 Minutes website has not only unveiled Watterson’s poster for the festival but confirmed that the poster will be the full extent of his participation. The traditional exhibit of Watterson’s work will be based on the exhibit at OSU. According to the brief but news-packed interview, Watterson found the poster an interesting challenge, but did not use his Calvin and Hobbes characters because he doesn’t believe in using them to promote anything—even comics. But according to Google Translate, Watterson says “In this sense, I hope I have managed to express both my work and comics in general. And to pay tribute to what makes this medium so pleasant to read.”

heinekenrana:

nudityandnerdery:

electricpastry:

CNN Discussion feat. Amanda Seales and Steve Santagati.

Sure, because a woman should have to be prepared to kill or injure someone, rather than guys should learn to just not harass women. For fuck’s sake…

It’s amazing the lengths that some people will go to in order to refuse to admit that the problem lies with a group they identify with.

…”THEN CARRY A GUN” you mealymouthed son of a bitch why don’t you kiss my fat ass

Parchment face

Here’s something special. Last Friday I posted a blog on holes found in the pages of medieval books (The skinny on bad parchment). As in the image above, such defects are usually caused by the parchment maker: he pushed his knife too hard cleaning the animal skin, causing it to rip. While the resulting holes must have been a major annoyance to producers of books, the scribe of this twelfth-century manuscript used them to his advantage. He drew a bearded man while turning the gaps into an eye and a nose (slightly displaced), as well as a big laughing mouth. The reader of this serious text - a commentary to the Song of Songs - will no doubt have laughed at the unexpected sight of this funny stranger. Making art out of flaws: it’s just the perfect image, then and now.

Pic: Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, Msc.Patr.41, fol. 69r. Full digital edition here. This is a direct link to the page in question.

Bad skin

These four images share a feature frequently encountered in medieval books: skin problems. That is to say, in all four there is something bad about the animal skin - or parchment - from which the page is made. Three of them feature a gaping hole, caused by the pressure of the parchment maker’s knife, while the fourth turned purple from the mould that attacked the page due to damp storage conditions. The skin may be bad, but it makes for lovely images.

More about what you can learn from such damage in my blog post The Skinny on Bad Parchment.

Pics: Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, Msc.-Nat.1 (top); Engelbert, Stiftsbibliothek, 161 (middle, left); Leiden, University Library, BPL 2896 (middle, right) and Uppsala, University Library, shelfmark unknown (bottom).

marigolds-sorry:

nekobakaz:

scattered-minutiae:

cocksucking-accent:

shorm:

knightless:

theliquidchicken:

captoring:

matosuwa:

zerostatereflex:

Not everyone sees the same color when they stare at this spinning disk.

The gif is called, “Benham’s disk" "is named after the English toymaker Charles Benham, who in 1895 sold a top painted with the pattern shown. When the disk is spun, arcs of pale color, called Fechner colors or pattern-induced flicker colors (PIFCs), are visible at different places on the disk. Not everyone sees the same colors."

"The phenomenon originates from neural activity in the retina and spatial interactions in the primary visual cortex, which plays a role in encoding low-level image features, such as edges and spatiotemporal frequency components."

Fascinating how our brains work, I see a brown tan, what do you see? :D

i see lavender!

bright green! ah this is so cooool

we should use this whenever we need to assign a random color to ourselves, for games and stuff

i see a super light pink, weird!

I actually get a dark goldenrod. Huh! This is kind of fascinating.

Whoa, what? I see green apple.

… I see white?

I see very light, almost imperceptible yellow. Also the disk keeps freezing up and pausing for a split second? Do others see that?

brown. a light and dark brown.

Reddish-pink, lime green, teal, and yellow around the outside.

yep that’s definitely a few different shades of green.

See, nah, you got it all wrong. The trick here to mastering your depression is accepting that it’s not going to go away. There’s no cure for it. But there are loads of ways of managing it and making it easier to deal with.

By expecting your depression to one day just disappear you’re just going to end up frustrated that it’s not going away, you’re going to get more depressed because you’re still depressed, an endless cycle. 

So what you got to do, is accept your depression states, and cherish your happy states. Sometimes I wake up and I’m a huge grump, but I’ve been dealing with this for over a decade, so I can now tell myself “Okay, you’re experiencing depression right now, and that kind of sucks, but you know this will go away later in the day or tomorrow, just look forward to the happy moments”. And that helps a lot. The first step really is acceptance, the sooner you can accept that you’re depressed, the less of a bother it will be.

There are things that can help a lot, talking to people being a big one, if you can talk to a therapist and just blurt out all your problems every week, you’ll feel a lot more refreshed and clear-minded within minutes. Or confide in a friend, or parent, just having someone to vent to can make the feelings seem much smaller 

There’s also medication, but again, there’s no medicine that actually cures depression, what the medication does is just make the depression easier to handle. When I needed anti-depressants, I guess my mood before was like “BLARGH I’M DEPRESSED EVERYTHING SUCKS I JUST WANT TO SLEEP”, but then once I was on them it was more “Okay I’m depressed right now, but that’s okay because tomorrow I got a date with Fiona and I have chocolate in the fridge”. It helps you accept your depression and helps you manage it better. I’m now off meds and my brain is now thankfully still in that later state, where I get depressed but I’m okay with it because I know it’s only fleeting.

So that’s the trick. That’s the way to get through depression. Let it be a part of you, don’t feel guilty about it or try and squish it down, it happens, the less time you spend worrying and getting angry about it, means the more time you have to focus and appreciate when things are actually going okay.

Humans are two sides, a yin and yang, you can’t have happiness without knowing your sadness. And being happy all of the time would be just as tiring as being sad all of the time. Balance your mind and you’ll find yourself whole.

Good luck

Sometimes when I post links, they’re simply interesting things I’ve run across. These, though, are essential reads:

Why the Trolls Will Always Win, by Kathy Sierra, Wired

A detailed post by Java expert and game developer Sierra describing the harassment and vilification she’s faced for the crime of, well, basically for being a woman in the tech world. While long and a bit rambling in spots, this is an important piece that, among other things, describes how harassers can sometimes transform slanderous assertions about their targets into “conventional wisdom,” details the damage that “trolls” can have on a person’s reputation (and their life generally), and offers some sobering reflections on the culture of harassment and how difficult it can be to fight.

She offers these thoughts on the ways in which Twitter can serve as an enabler of this kind of harassment:

Twitter, for all its good, is a hate amplifier. Twitter boosts signal power with head-snapping speed and strength. Today, Twitter (and this isn’t a complaint about Twitter, it’s about what Twitter enables) is the troll’s best weapon for attacking you. …

It begins with simple threats. You know, rape, dismemberment, the usual. It’s a good place to start, those threats, because you might simply vanish once those threats include your family. Mission accomplished. But today, many women online — you women who are far braver than I am — you stick around. And now, since you stuck around through the first wave of threats, you are now a much BIGGER problem.

And she takes on the “troll logic” of those who insist that unless there’s legal action no “real” harassment has happened:

You’re probably more likely to win the lottery than to get any law enforcement agency in the United States to take action when you are harassed online, no matter how viciously and explicitly. Local agencies lack the resources, federal agencies won’t bother. (Unless you’re a huge important celebrity. But the rules are always different for them. But trolls are quite happy to attack people who lack the resources to do anything about it. Troll code totally supports punching DOWN.)

There IS no “the authorities” that will help us.

We are on our own.

And if we don’t take care of one another, nobody else will.

We are all we’ve got.

Much of Sierra’s piece focuses on one of her biggest enemy in all of this, “hacktivist” Andrew Auernheimer, better known as weev. He’s posted a response to Sierra’s piece. It’s pretty appalling; weev is a hateful misogynist and white supremacist. Here’s a sampling:

Kathy Sierra is the epitome of what is wrong with my community. She had something coming to her and by the standards set by her own peers in the social justice community, there was nothing wrong with what she got.

I do not hate women. My colleagues include quite a few (cis and trans) women. I support women making tech. However, it is high time for the “women in tech” to get the fuck out.

The other essential bit of reading?

Telling My Story, by Adria Richards, Storify.

Developer and tech evangelist Richards, you may recall, ignited the fury of the Great Internet Lady Harassment Machine by tweeting about sexist jokes she overheard at a tech conference. At the time, she largely kept silent about the harassment she was getting. But now she’s speaking up and sharing the details.

In a series of Tweets yesterday, Richards posted screenshots documenting some of the worst harassment she’s gotten; this Storify collection pulls these together in one place.

Make the effort to enlarge and read the screenshots; they’re horrifying. And Richards promises to post more.

While I’m posting links, here’s one that’s hardly essential but that’s pretty funny:

Local Chicago Man Would Like Women to Smile, Accept His Advances, by Kara Brown.

No, this last one isn’t from The Onion. It’s REALLLL.

Right from the start, Sam Humphries and Dalton Rose's Sacrifice is identifiable as a work of passion. It was self-published – a risky proposition in the direct market – and it was a story of personal importance to the author. Humphries has epilepsy, and Sacrifice is the story of a boy whose epilepsy isn't only a source of frustration and anguish, but also a superpower that propels him into an adventure at the zenith of the Aztec civilization – and perhaps also provides the ultimate key to his agency.

That's not the only source of passion evident in Sacrifice, though. The premise of the series – a suicidal Joy Division fanatic has a seizure that sends him back in time to before Cortés' invasion of the Aztecs – provides a venue for Humphries to spit fire over how profoundly outrageous and angering the perception and purported 'history' of the Aztecs is. As someone fascinated by and familiar with the truth about the Aztecs, Humphries uses the series' bedrock of time travel, violence, and destiny, to help readers take a step towards that truth.

Continue reading…

discardingimages:

butt-licking cat

see original here

Book of Hours, Lyon, ca. 1505-1510.

Lyon, BM, Ms 6881, fol. 30r

Come for the butt licking cat, stay for all else.  Follow Discarding Images, you will enjoy.

And as Valiant ended, Oni has taken up the Humble Bundle comics slot. $360 worth of comics including The Sixth Gun, Letter 44 and more. And you benefit the charity Direct Relief. Here’s more:

locustmooncomics:

Little Nemo and how copyright isn’t always in creator interests.

"Being public domain doesn’t make Little Nemo uniquely vulnerable, then. On the contrary, being public domain seems to afford him some measure of protection. When you’re owned by a large conglomerate, there’s no telling what sort of sordid nonsense will happen to you under the auspices of "official" continuity—a villainous thug may turn into a dashing anti-hero, a warrior woman can be changed into an amnesiac sex doll. Why not, if it’s good for business?

Public domain, though, at least potentially changes the incentives. Nobody owns Nemo. He doesn’t belong to a corporation; he belongs to everyone. And since he belongs to them, the artists in this anthology treat him as if he’s in their care.”

Read the full essay/review at the link above. It’s pretty great, adding a new level of thought to our book that we hadn’t really consciously processed before.

postcardsfromspace:

bigredrobot:

Kurt Busiek dropping the mic on the “wretched, insulting narrative that Kirby’s heirs up and sued Marvel because they smelled money.”

Definitely worth reading the whole thing cuz these screenshots are terrible.

This is so important. Read it. All of it.

Just unreal important. Don’t let some idiot badmouth the Kirbys. Don’t be that idiot.

Gotham Academy is exactly the comic book I want to read.

That probably doesn't come as a surprise to anyone who's been reading ComicsAlliance for any significant amount of time. I mean, if you made a list of the things I like seeing in my comics, then Batman, teenage mystery solvers, and high school drama set in a superhero universe are all things that are going to land pretty close to the top of the list, and those three elements form the exact core of Gotham Academy's premise. It's so perfectly designed to fit my very specific tastes that you'd actually have to work hard to combine them into something that I wouldn't like.

Because of that, it might be tempting to write off anything nice I have to say about the book, but trust me: this first issue of Gotham Academy is great, not just because it's got a bunch of stuff I want to see, but because Becky Cloonan, Brenden Fletcher, Karl Kerschl, Geyser, and Dave McCaig, have produced one of the most solid starts of the year.

Continue reading…

via innerbohemienne:

The Codex Gigas

The Codex Gigas (or ‘Giant Book”) is also known as “The Devil’s Bible.” A curious illustration of Lucifer gives the tome its nickname.

The 13th-century manuscript is thought to have been created solely by a Herman the Recluse, a monk of the Benedictine monastery of Podlažice near Chrudim in Czech Republic. The calligraphy style is amazingly uniform throughout, believed to have taken 25 to 30 years  of work. There are no notable mistakes or omissions.  Pigment analysis revealed the ink to be consistent throughout. The book is enormous - it  measures 36.2” tall, 19.3” wide, and 8.6” thick; it weighs approximately 165 pounds. There are 310 vellum  leaves (620 pages).  The leaves are bound in a wooden folder covered with leather and ornate metal.

The manuscript is elaborately illuminated in red, blue, yellow, green and gold.  The entire document is written in Latin, and also contains Hebrew, Greek, and Slavic Cyrillic and Glagolitic alphabets. The first part of the text includes the Vulgate version of the Bible.  Between the Old and New Testaments are Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews and De bello iudaico, as well as Isidore of Seville's encyclopedia Etymologiae and medical works of Hippocrates, Theophilus, Philaretus, and Constantinus.  Following a blank page, the New Testament commences.

Beginning the second part is a depiction of the devil.  Directly opposite is a full picture of the kingdom of heaven, juxtaposing the “good versus evil.”  The second half, following the picture of the devil, is Cosmas of Prague's Chronicle of Bohemia.  A list of brothers in the Podlažice monastery and a calendar with necrologium, magic formulae and other local records round out the codex.  Record entries end in the year 1229CE.

In 1648 at the end of the Thirty Years’ War, the Swedish army invaded Prague and the Codex was stolen as plunder.  It is now held at the National Library of Sweden in Stockholm.  For more information, check out this short National Geographic documentary and/or flip through this digital copy.

( Wikipedia entry, et. al)

Several short National Geographic videos ~

One Helluva Book

Who Wrote The Devil’s Bible?

Super-human Scribe

The Devil’s Bible - Part 1.flv  (9:59) (derived from full video bleow)

The Devil’s Bible - Part 2.flv  (9:59) (derived from full video below)

** If you have the least amount of intellectual curiosity or interest in history, the short vids above will only whet your appetite: might as well grab a cold drink & some popcorn, then settle in to watch the whole thing ~

NatGeo : The Devil’s Bible - Full video  (44:58)

Hey, I recently wrote a thing with a reference to this thing in it