hol volt, hol nem volt...

the old well

You know why this is really funny? Because it’s true.

had to share @shinethewaythrough ’s tags about the ancient city of Herculaneum:

“protip: when your well starts delivering you colored marble instead of water, get an archaeologist on it because you happened to dig a well straight into the center of the Herculaneum municipal theater”

My latest cartoon for @GuardianBooks.

This is what will happen when I die if I am good.

The Legend of Shen Li 与凤行 (2024) | Episode 8

THE LEGEND OF SHEN LI 与凤行 (2024) dir. deng ke - Episode 1

When I say “free water, free food, free shelter, free healthcare, free education for everyone” in that “everyone” I even include the people I hate. Too many people get surprised at the idea that I do wish for the people I hate to have better lives.

When I say EVERYONE, I mean EVERYONE. These are things ALL people should have. If you reblog this saying “except THIS group” then you’ve missed the point entirely.

i want to remove the boots from necks altogether, not just be the one to put on the boot.

Don’t know about OP, but when I say it, this is not selflessness! It’s not selflessness at all. There are still people I would prefer get fucked over! There are really awful shitty people in the world!

But I understand that the tables always turn. ALWAYS. There is no final glorious revolution where The Right People will be in charge forever. The only way to ensure the boot will never be on your neck again is to throw away the fucking boot. Set the table so you eat well no matter which way it turns!

ALL OF THIS. Leave no one behind. We all deserve food, clean water, clean air, healthcare, housing, electricity, internet, and so forth. No matter who you are, you deserve to be able to access and have what you need to survive.

So yes, yes, yes to “throw away the fucking boot.”

It’s not really so radical.

[Transcript: Look, Penelope. Look. There is nobody out here. Nobody. Do you see that? Do you see that? Look- Look over here. There’s nobody. Look over here. There’s nobody! There is nobody out here. End transcript.]

me reading the end of the odyssey

(Penelope is a small black chihuahua, roughly the size of three bagels, and is being held out at arm's length.)

Murderbot wrote this.

IG : @emperorofmischief

Scott McCloud’s incomparable “Understanding Comics”.

I swear you can open this book to any page and it’s amazing.

(ps it’s actually a digital image of a printed copy of a drawing of a painting of a pipe)

Highly recommend scott mccloud’s “understanding comics” as an introduction to all forms of visual media, but especially educational work like scientific illustration because the man does have a handle on some of the funkier stuff that happens when a viewer tries to interpret an image.

Also reccomended: james gurney’s “light and color”. The man did Dinotopia he knows what the fuck he’s talking about.

While I really hate the narrative of "tech bros" because of how it conflates shitty CEOs with non-shitty base-level programmers, and how it conflates Dunning-Kruger-y early adopters with people who Know Their Shit about computers...

...On the AI art issue, I will say, there is probably a legit a culture clash between people who primarily specialize in programming and people who primarily specialize in art.

Because, like, while in the experience of modern working illustrators a free commons has ended up representing a Hobbseyan experience of "a war of all against all" that's a constant threat to making a living, in software from what I can tell it's kinda been the reverse.

IE, freedom of access to shared code/information has kinda been seen as A Vital Thing wrt people's abilities to do their job at a core level. So, naturally, there's going to be some very different reactions to the morality of scraped data online.

And, it's probably the same reason that a lot of the creative commons movement came from the free software movement.

And while I agree a lot with the core principles of these movements, it's also probably unfortunately why they so often come off as tone-deaf and haven't really made that proper breakthrough wrt fighting against copyright bloat.

It also really doesn't help that, in terms of treatment by capital, for most of our lives programmers have been Mother's Special Little Boy whereas artists (especially online independent artists post '08 crash) have been treated as The Ratboy We Keep In The Basement And Throw Scraps To.

So, it make sense the latter would have resentment wrt the former...

My pitch in this regard is long and rambly. I'm in pain, so apologies if the table wobbles a bit.

It's important to note that when Harlan Ellison won the single victory of a writer over Hollywood over a stolen series concept it was an aberration of a system that's designed to funnel control of as much art as possible into the hands of corporate rent-seekers.

What is often left out is that Harlan won another intellectual property victory, only this one doesn't get brought up as much because it was the IP system working as intended, rather than advertised.

James Cameron made the mistake of being honest about his inspirations, and mentioned that Terminator was partially inspired by the episodes "Soldier" and "Demon With a Glass Hand" of the Outer Limits.

I've seen Terminator, and I've seen both episodes. This was an act of pure, malicious rent-seeking. The elements that it takes from each are "a soldier and his arch foe travel back in time, a gun store is involved" and "a cyborg from the future looks human on the outside but has robot parts inside, with a dramatic hand reveal."

To grant Ellison this claim is to essentially say that he owned the idea of time-traveling soldiers and cyborgs that look like people. This kind of reach would make every boarding school with powered kids fodder for a Disney cease and desist. I can guarantee you that even by 1963 you'd have found dozens of instances of prior art in the Marvel and DC archives alone of each of those concepts.

But this wasn't the James Cameron of now, this was early Cameron who was a Corman-acoylte lying to cops on the street to get away with shooting Terminator without permits. Terminator was a mid-budget horror movie, not a blockbuster like the later installments.

Its hard not to see it as Harlan using his established role and studio backing to punch down at the new guy coming up. It was settled because the fight wasn't worth the cost. Because it doesn't matter if you're right, are you right enough that you can fight studio lawyers?

In the end, Harlan got a credit on a movie that, IMHO, he did not earn. That was a TV show from 1963. Cameron saw a TV show he loved at age 9, and took inspiration for it in adulthood in a completely transformative way, and he lost because of money, not merit.

So, what I'd ask people to ask themselves is this: How many of you have the kind of cash James Cameron had in 1984? How many of your creations are inspired by what you loved at age 9... or later? How much does your style look like your inspirations?

How many of their tropes are you using? Is it less than: 'a time traveling soldier in a gun store' and 'a man who is a robot inside from the future?'

This is what happened when a fanfic site is profit driven. Wattpad sucks 😞

The email from Wattpad is so condescending imagine pressuring writers to update and work while they are doing it for free and fun. Also the discovery? Algorithm? Of Wattpad looks like a stressful popularity contest 😑

Hey I just wanna quickly say that you only get these if someone reports the story. I've barely updated on Wattpad in the past two years and haven't gotten any of these, mostly because I don't even have an audience over there who has the potential or drive to report my fics. So, corporate greed is bad, yes, but it's also readers being buttheads

Hmm, that's interesting! You know what happens if someone reports a story for being incomplete on AO3? Jack shit, because not churning out content for your fun little hobby is not a reportable offense on AO3! And that's because, unlike Wattpad, AO3 isn't profiting off of your work, either directly or indirectly, and so when readers are buttheads, the AO3 abuse mods ignore them, instead of sending out weird automated messages harassing writers for daring to have a wip.