"The best thing we can do with power is give it away" - On the leftist critique of superhero narratives as authoritarian power fantasies:

The ongoing "Jason Todd is a cop" debate has reminded me of a brilliant brief image essay by Joey deVilla. So here it is, images first and the full essay text below:

Not to out myself as someone that’s been on tumblr for too long, but I’m so sad to see this new trend of people saying “I like this thing, even though the show isn’t airing anymore.” Like? That’s how things work! Keep enjoying them! Art doesn’t just vanish when it’s not airing, and it wasn’t made to be exclusively viewed live! 10+ years ago, the idea of saying “Ah, I’m still here in this fandom 2 years after the show was cancelled 😳” would have been BONKERS!

All these kids saying “It’s so sad the shows gone,” no it’s not!!! I saw your fanart yesterday! Last week you told me about my favorite character’s music playlist!!! I saw them running around in your AMV!

Where’s the longevity?? It was made for you!!! Not TV!!! It was made for keeps!!! Keep it!!! Please!!! That’s how art stays alive!!!

FOLKS, PLEASE…DO YOUSELVES A BIG BIG FAVOR AND STOP USING TURBOTAX!  IT IS USELESS NOW!!!

THE IRS website will let you fill out and file your return THERE ON THE IRS SITE.  You pay like $12 for the actual electronic filing process, and THAT’s IT!

Unless you have tremendous amounts of Schedule D stock shit, TurboTax is NOTHING BUT A RIPOFF!!!

The IRS website is EXCELLENT.  They allow you to look up your past returns, and have every bit of information you MIGHT POSSIBLY NEED!

FUCK TURBOTAX!

LIBERATE YOURSELF FROM IT!!!!!!!

Friendly reminder as well that if you’re making less than $66,000 a year, you don’t need to pay to file your taxes and also all tax-paying softwares (eg rhymes with FurboFax) have a free filing option hidden in their websites. 

Have at it kiddos:

https://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-just-tricked-you-into-paying-to-file-your-taxes

I hope you guys like…eventually live the life you want to live and I hope nothing haunts you for too long and I hope you’re all kind to yourselves

Streaming Service Rant

You could make this shorter by just going  “I’m a thief and refuse to pay for content”. Would save you a lot of time.

I’m a thief and refuse to pay for content and i encourage everyone else to do the same! Don’t be a little bitch like chemychems and jump aboard the ship, matey!

I Am Once Again Posting Web Lonks

https://soap2day.to/ tv + movies

https://twist.moe/ anime

http://mangakatana.com/ manga

https://libgen.is/ books (includes textbooks!)

https://gfxdrug.com/ https://shareae.com/after-effects-presets/ adobe shit

(source)

There are so many ways to make moodboards, bookcovers, and icons without plagiarising! As artists, authors, and other creatives, we need to be especially careful not to use someone else’s work and pass it off as our own. 

Please add on if you know any more resources for free images <3

As a college student, currently really hungry with nothing to eat, I understand how hard it can be to get food. Sometimes you really just don’t have the money to eat and when you do, you waste it all on fast food instead of stocking up on cheap things because you’re so tired of Ramen Noodes and canned food you could barf. So, I’ve composed a list of recipes and resources that will fit a college kid’s budget and appetite. Don’t go hungry! <3

Ramen Noodle Recipes:

Mug Meals:

Microwave Recipes:

Recipe Generators

Other Resources

Reblogging because lord knows college kids aren’t the only ones that are broke.

Reblogging because “broke” tips also convey extremely well to Survival tips.

Learn to make something outta nothing.

Reblogging for reference because I suspect I might be broker now than I was in university.

Because it might be helpful for spoonies on a budget!

This is the oldest piece of music known to humankind. It’s engraved in cuneiform on a tablet from 1400 BC. And it was a hymn to their goddess Nikkal.

I wasn’t actually expecting something serious.

That was, um, actually unexpected.

What is this grand old instrument? It is almost ethereal to my ears!

I wish more ancient music was written down. It’d be interesting to study it!

Only 15th century BC kids will remember this bop

It would’ve likely originally been played on a sammûm, a bit like a lyre, in accompaniment of a singer.

Whilst its the oldest piece of music, it’s not complete (I believe the oldest complete song is the Seikilos Epitaph), so it’s transcription is controversial; there are a few differing decipherments.

The fact that this recording exists is nothing short of miraculous when you consider all of the background work that you have to do before you put a lyrist in front of a staff-notation transcription.  This article will tell you about it in exhaustive detail:  https://musicircle.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Babylonian-Notatin-and-the-Hurrian-Melodic-Texts_Music-and-Letters-1994-WEST-161-79.pdf

In short, here are some of the things a musicologist would have to do in order to get to the point where you can start looking for someone who plays an ancient Mesopotamian lyre (yes, the sammûm is a type of lyre):

1.  Find the tablets. 2.  Know enough cuneiform to identify the language, the culture, the time period, and the fact that this is music notation, which was vanishingly rare in a culture where people wrote with a stylus on wet clay. 3.  Know what instruments people played and how they were used. 4.  Figure out how many strings this instrument had and how they were tuned.  This is harder than it looks because, while instruments can sometimes survive millennia, strings tend not to survive, and as any string player knows, tuning often doesn’t survive a single performance. 5.  Figure out the tuning system – our Western even-tempered scale is a recent invention.  J.S. Bach composed the Well-Tempered Clavier to show off even-tempered tuning in 1722.  The octave is a creation of physics; dividing the octave into pleasing individual notes that can be put together to make music is a creation of culture, and there’s no reason to assume that ancient Mesopotamians used modern Western scales. 6.  Learn the corpus of music theory that supports the structure of this piece of music.  If you know the theory, you can figure out what the music is doing; if you don’t know the theory, you have a random string of notes, not music. 7.  Because this was only a semi-written culture, music was heavily improvisatory.  You have to know that what’s written down is more of an outline or a suggestion.  The real art is in filling in the rest of the pattern.  A lot of traditional non-Western music works like this (and up until fairly recently, quite a bit of Western classical music also incorporated this aspect; even today, the art of playing a cadenza is a Thing), so if you’re not an ethnomusicologist, you’ll want to bring one in, preferably one who works with contemporary West Asian folk and/or classical forms. 8.  Ahhh!  At last!  You’ve gotten to the point where you think you can figure out what this piece is supposed to sound like.  Now you have to transcribe it all into Western staff notation (which isn’t designed to handle music like this). 9.  Unless you are also an expert on building and playing ancient Mesopotamian lyres, you must now go and find someone who is.  Fortunately, there are one or two of these people around.  Give that person your music, and book the recording studio! 10.  The next time anyone asks you why studying music is important, now you know.

pumpkin spice candles soon

pumpkin lattes soon

pumpkin everything

#ITS STILL JULY YOU ANIMALS

Sims 4 page on Steam. Not to be controversial but I think the CEO of EA should be beheaded for this

Totally don’t pirate it from Anadius or Fitgirl-Repacks on 1337x.to

“My privilege will try to make me complicit by default.”

This really hit home, so I’m posting it for others to see.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fukTk8gJ3M

[Image description: A photoset of a white vlogger in front of a bookshelf filled with DVDs, with the captions: "How is it my responsibility, or even my place, to apologize for the actions of my ancestors? Because they did it in my name. They did it for the prosperity of their descendants. But I don’t want any benefits conferred through slavery. I know it’s impossible for me to shed every single advantage that my ancestry affords me, but the least I could do is examine it. Be critical of it, to be as proactive as possible when it comes to the whole ‘not being complicit in historical atrocities’ thing. As a person of considerable privilege, I consider it my responsibility because my privilege will try to make me complicit by default.“]

Read more here:

Friendly reminder that GIMP does pretty much everything Photoshop does, and it’s 100% free. Fuck DRM and the license culture, we have plenty of open source options available to us as a consumer.

If Adobe is going to be greedy shitheads, then fuck ‘em. Don’t use their stuff. Freeware can be just as good, if not better, than Adobe CC.

reblog to save a digital arts major

Reblog to save an artist.

oh jEEZ

I will keep saying this: GIMP sucks butts.

- Medibang Paint and Fire Alpaca for more cartoon style illustration

- Krita for painting

- Clip Studio Paint (not free, but often on sale and cheap even at full price) is better than PS for art and I’m about to cut adobe entirely. Even does some photo editing.

- Paint Tool SAI (again, not free but cheap) old but good, there’s a ton of hacked copies around too. Not hard to get for free.

- Open Tunez for animation.

I’m currently using Affinity Photo and it’s a great Photoshop alternative. One time fee only and it’s not really expensive, plus supports PSD formats. Free trial available too! Davinci Resolve for video editing is amazing as well! :)

Another great art program to include in the list is the completely free, no download, browser recreation of photoshop, Photopea! It has the potential/customizability to be as robust as a full copy of photoshop while also being perfectly accessible to anyone looking to just do some quick edits with no strings attached.

Also, heads up to anyone using it,

As of July 5th 2021, Audacity is now considered a potential spyware security risk,

so please approach it with caution and do some research on the situation as things progress.

Updating my commission post again for 2021

Examples can be found in [my art] and [doodle tags]

[You can also make doodle requests at any time through my ko-fi]

my messages and inbox are open for any questions

prices in plain text below

Keep reading

hey while commissions are open im in a semi-panic about being able to cover bills this month so a commission, a kofi, or a straight up donation of any amount would help a ton

paypal: https://paypal.me/leonleonhart?locale.x=en_US

cashapp: $neroangelus

Which of these wholesome Memes are your Favourite? :)

Follow @memeuplift for more wholesome memes

Blessing your feed

no but the same way that phones and laptops are guilty of scheduled obsolescence, entertainment conglomerates, and to some extent even regular writers just trying to ‘make it big’, are treating stories as though they’re meant to have a built-in expiration date. it’s the obsession with plot twists that ultimately mean nothing, it’s shock for shock’s sake, it’s the way spoilers are treated as inherently experience-ruining. stories are written for the first viewing and the first viewing only, because after you’ve seen something once, why would you want to see it again? so it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t hold up on a second viewing or if the entire plot is ruined if you go into it knowing a single detail. you’re only going to care once, aren’t you?

but like. is that really true? is it really true that an experience with a piece of art is only worth having once? is it really not worth it to create something that will be loved enough that its lovers come back to it? that’s so much

What’s interesting to me is that I was noticing a lot of the behavior in the Before Times that other people are noticing now due to the pandemic. People (mostly, but certainly not exclusively, men) wandered about life, completely oblivious, it seemed to the fact that other people were also trying to go about their business. I even tried (in the Before Times) to let go of my constant awareness of other peoples’ distance, velocity, route, etc. and just chill. And you know what happened? People just walked right into me, A LOT. Many elbows went into my sides, running children would go slamming into my basket (not my CART, mind you, the basket I was holding at my side). Americans, at least, simply do not seem to go through life considering that there are other human beings that they might impact, for the most part. People will fucking sneeze into their hands and then use the self check-out machine. They will reach from behind you and brush against your gotdang face to grab something on the shelf in front of you. They will cuss you out because you did not get out of their way, moron! as you were minding your business reading the ingredients on a can. They will knock a bottle of oil onto the floor, briefly glance at the puddle of slipperiness spreading across the aisle, and continue about their day.

I’m sorry that this person (and many other people) are suddenly having to be aware of and paying attention to the behaviour of those around them, and that this situation is distressing to them. But some of us have always had to be acutely aware of other people, because having your foot run over by a full cart of groceries because your attention wavered from the dude next to you for a second fuckimg HURTS. Or because you’re concerned that maybe the grandma with a cane and the puddle of canola oil taking up most of the aisle she’s wobbling down are a bad combination. 

There have been a few comments on this post about how people who didn’t think this way about this type of behavior in the Before Times are ignorant, and I think it’s worth mentioning here some of the context behind this post. It doesn’t negate these concerns, but I still think it’s important.

Twitter OP went into this idea more in depth in his podcast. He is an advocate for men’s mental health and related how he has spent a long time actively working to stop caring so much about the actions of people around him for a reason. He realized that, due to his intense anxiety and low self esteem, he was constantly assuming that he was being judged and judging people in turn. 

In a previous time, he said, if he saw someone who looked really trendy for example, he would feel dumpy in comparison and project his bad feelings about himself on the other person, thinking “I bet this guy is a prick; I bet he thinks he’s so special” etc. He would be seething over someone who had done nothing wrong, his self-worth would plummet further, then he would find himself having a panic attack in the store because he assumed other people were thinking the same things about him, and then he would be in a depressive agoraphobia cycle.

He said that in normal times, his always feeling angry about other people’s behavior was something that could be worked through with therapy, because it was often an irrational response to something innocuous. But in this covid situation, he was struggling with the fact that these extreme negative thoughts were actually valid. He couldn’t psychoanalyze them away, because these people are pricks and do think they’re so special, and their actions do have real, deadly consequences. So he was expressing concern that this aspect of his mental health was really suffering and bringing him back to a place he didn’t want to be in where he was feeling anxious and neurotic about everyone, and that there wasn’t much he could do about it.