all cops are bastards because all cops are just doing their jobs

“I’m just doing what I’m told. If I am ordered to remove gold fillings from refugees theeth then that’s what I’ll do”, says police officer Michael Hansen. Just thought I’d add this since not a lot of people outside of the nordic countries seem to have seen it. This is a danish police officer discussing a new danish law that says the police should seize the possesions and money of refugees to finance the integration.

He uh, skipped awful quickly to “stealing gold fillings” didn’t he?

I want more villains who care about their henchmen. I wanna see the bad guy fly into a rage because the hero hurt their very favorite bungling goon and it was nearly his birthday.

"how dare you fail me you miserable oafs!!" should be retired. "How DARE they bully my adorable oafs!!!" should be industry standard.

Underlings having to hold back their dark lord like an overprotective parent because they don't really want a famous hero to get outright murdered just on their behalf.

I had to draw something

I don’t want to go ‘realism in fiction’ bc we all know how much of a dogwhistle that can be. But it really always bothers me that this isn’t the norm. Like, how the fuck do all these dark lords and evil empresses and what not keep any minions or lieutenants or what not around?

Literally, what is stopping them from just walking to Hero and going ‘I surrender, get me the hell away from this asshole!’ when most Heros will immediately turn them in a redemption story and all.

Like, how they hell do the villains keep anyone working for them without a solid health plan, 401K, and recreational facilities? Isn’t that the minimum. Has no one actually read Machiavelli?

Indeed; one of my least favorite tropes is the whole "I don't need you anymore" bit, where a villain backstabs a fellow villain working beneath them, which inevitably ends up with the betrayed villain aiding the heroes in order to spite the big bad.

Luckily, I can just draw something that cuts that bullshit out!

Russia is fighting Russia, what a GOOD DAY

A source for clarification

https://abcnews.go.com/International/wagner-mercenary-chief-calls-armed-rebellion-russian-military/story?id=100335756

That source leaves out the key detail that the Wagner group are NeoNazis.

In fact it also leaves out a lot of the more extreme, blatant red flags Wagner members have been saying that make it clear when they say the Kremlin is compromised by a "clan of oligarchs" they mean Jews and "degenerates." ABC is just posting the more sanitized comments that anti-Putin western audiences would agree with, which is pretty upsetting because again these are literal NeoNazis and no one should be supporting them.

The Wagner group were not helpless soldiers following orders in a war they didn't believe in, they were the group doing some of the worst atrocities who are only mad now because they're losing.

Begging people not to fall for the trap of "hating Putin" meaning someone is good. A fascist imperialist is suffering military defeats which makes him look weak, so his Nazi death squad is trying to seize power. This is a "bite each other's dicks off" situation where we want both sides to lose. You do not, under any circumstances, have to hand it to the Wagner group.

THE MAGNETIC FIELDS ARE DOING WHAT

They are on tour. Look:

Presale info is being released right now at

And here is a 22 year old photograph from The Bottom Line club on Sunday, June 17, 2001. It was a double bill. We each did two shows that night.

Weirdly, I was the one they spelled right.

The Bottom Line was New York City’s living room. Not so much small and intimate as comfortably crowded.

It was on Father’s Day (US) so Neil read us Blueberry Girl.

Blueberry Girl was a gift for Tash, Tori Amos’ daughter, and was private.

Neil asked us to turn off any recording devices, so the poem wouldn’t leave the room, and you heard clicks, and then silence.

Neil shared this sweet secret poem with us for Father’s Day, a poem about mothers and daughters.

I’d taken the L from Sheepshead Bay into Greenwich Village to have an adventure, leaving my mother and father behind with my grandparents to see Neil.

My family was unhappy that I’d put my own wants ahead of Father’s Day expectations. But then they were so often unhappy with everything. Still are.

Blueberry Girl captured an aspirational relationship, not the one my mom experienced raising a crying, irrational being. The expectations of the time were that it and her arguably more rational husband were now focus of her identity. She was only 24 when I showed up.

I’d kissed 24 goodbye almost a decade before 2001, yet I was still a tremendous fuck up at meeting family expectations. I failed at doing the things that I saw made my parents miserable. Blueberry Girl was a beautiful poem, but that it would relate to real mothers and daughters was a bit of a laugh.

But I wished it wouldn’t be. And I’m glad it’s no longer a secret.

Here are some of Charles Vess's gorgeous illustrations for Blueberry Girl:

Written for Tash Hawley when she was still an idea...

i do find it a bit frustrating when people respond to the uncomfortable truth that some really well made pieces of art are made with crunch or other unhealthy work practices, and therefore believe that the only sustainable morally ethical alternative, are ugly/uninspiring pieces of art, like as if the bad cgi in mcu movie's aren't also the result of crunch.

recently some animators who worked on across the spider-verse talked about the unhealthy work practices that went into making the movie and while i do think this article is worth the read i do take a bit of a grain of salt with this part.

i feel at face value, the takeaway from this would be "it's impossible to make a movie like across the spider-verse without overworking the animators" but i feel like the more obvious takeaway is that making ANY project with the tight deadlines and margins that are often asked by corporations is extremely stressful and backbreaking, but also the ask of "absolute perfection" because i'm sure the movie still looked great before the constant revisionism. because like the whole rhetoric of "it's impossible to make great looking media without crunch" does not make people more tolerable to ugly look media, despite how many people post that "i want shorter games with uglier looking graphics" meme online.

tl:dr saying stuff like "it's impossible to make something that looks as good as spider-verse without crunch" is kind of like saying "spider-verse looks as good as it does BECAUSE of crunch" which is, just isn't true in fact, it could of looked even better, if the animators were given more of a heads-up ahead of time instead of being forced to completely re-animated scenes that were already finished.

framing the crunch as just the natural consequence of making a film like spider-verse just kind of feeds into the whole notion that "real art requires human suffering" which like no, humans who are being treated like human beings can actually still produce art that's extremely amazing. happy people can still make movie with good animation believe it or not.

Fuck you #TARGET . i just want some God damned shoes

I just want some god damned clothes

The black areas represent the remaining natural dark skies in the United States

I’ve been in the middle of the ocean at night and now live in texas and it is so hard to explain to people that no, they have not ever seen the night sky. It is so hard to explain to people that what they think is a proper night sky is fucking pathetic. A disgrace.

People talk about how you can’t see stars in the city and yeah, that’s true, but their concept of “seeing stars” is being able to make out orion’s belt.

So, so few people have see the sky in all its glory and it’s not sad. It’s a fucking crime. Seeing a perfectly dark night, no clouds, not a hint of light pollution? That’s a fucking religious experience.

The sky the vast vast majority of us grew up with is not the sky that inspired us to look up. It is not the sky that inspired constellations. You can’t even see most constellations.

Your ancestors looked at the night sky and said “surely, that is where the gods must live.” And you might be lucky if you can see hardly more than a handful of stars.

The sky is full, fucking FULL, of stars, and you’ve never seen them.

I remember the first time I saw a properly dark sky and was like ‘oh that’s why it’s called the milky way’ and promptly started to cry

When we were on a field trip to the middle of the red sea, I remember us all crowding at the end of the boat that didn’t have lights and just lying on our backs and staring

When you see a properly dark starscape

You understand why people wrote poems and made up legends and built rockets and said heaven’s in the sky

The universe is infinite. So are the stars

I’m trying to find a picture on google images to show you what I mean and I can’t find any

You think of the night sky like fairy lights on black velvet, but it’s not it’s not it’s like, like, dust in sunlight, like - I can’t find the words.

The stars are everywhere, like sugar, like glitter, like dust. You can’t find the constellations at first, not because you can’t recognise them, but because there’s so many stars you can’t pick out the familiar line of Orion’s belt. The North star has gone from bright familiarity to almost vanishing among a thousand, a hundred thousand, a million other lights. The milky way is a line of light arcing across the sky like a moon-trail on water only infinitely, infinitely bigger.

And for the first time in your life you’ll understand why people call it a dome, because it is, it’s three dimensional in exactly the way a city skyscape isn’t.

You’ll understand why Luthien Tinúviel danced under starlight, not moonlight, why people in a time before we knew the earth was round still looked up and wondered and built telescopes and dreamed about the stars.

The stars are endless and ancient and infinite and you will stand with your head craned back and your rucksack forgotten at your feet and you’ll feel like you’re falling upwards into that great bright sky like it’s calling you home and you’ll wonder how you ever thought the stars were beautiful before tonight when all you’d ever seen were the naked empty skyscapes of your home. And you’ll cry and you’ll spend the rest of your time there gazing up and wondering and imagining what it would be like to stand among those bright silver flecks

And then you’ll come home, and look up, and fall in a different kind of love with that handful of blazing stars to stubborn to be outdone by the whole of human invention, leading you home despite the light pollution and the clouds and the endless bustle of this shrinking planet.

In honor of Day of the Dead, here’s a repost of my comic about the San Francisco Columbarium and the man who spent 26 years restoring it.

This comic originally appeared on Medium at The Nib. Go check out my other work there.

Emmitt and the Columbarium.

Same energy

trifecta

quadrifecta

“Tortilla” would match to “torta”, which….is a real Spanish word that just means cake, y’all.

Tortillas are little flat cakes.

in addition, mosca means fly

mosquito does mean little fly

lmfao

‘dump’ is an old adjective that meant “doughy” so “dumpling” is basically “little doughy thing”

Yes but that’s not funny.

Dorito is a contraction of doradito, which means little fried/golden thing.

According to NBC here in the US, the missing titanic sub has been found. As debris. Off the bow of the Titanic wreckage.

And it looks like the sub suffered what we all suspected, and what was undoubtedly the more merciful of the two options: a catastrophic implosion from the pressure.

Also, more info has come to light about the fishing trawler with the hundreds of migrants that sank cataclysmically off the coast of Greece, indicating that the greek coast guard knew about the vessel AND how much trouble the vessel was in, and were towing it at a speed that made it capsize, at which point they unhooked the tow line and watched the trawler sink without helping the passengers to safety. Despite a bunch of other ships trying to help as well throughout the whole ordeal.

So a lot of people are dead, all because of regulations (and the lack thereof) regarding sea-faring vessels and rescue protocols. People shouldnt be allowed to make a business charging a ton of money for a ride on an uncertified, unsafe, un-seaworthy ship going deep into the ocean with no distress beacon or tether to the mothership. People also shouldnt be allowed to enact laws that criminalize the ferrying of refugees, which then force the refugees to hitch rides on fishing trawlers, and which also prevent people from helping those fishing trawlers full of refugees due to fear of legal consequences.

Hopefully BOTH of these events spark changes on an international scale in terms of what is legally allowed to be sailed, who is legally allowed to be the passengers, and what the rescue protocols are in the event of disaster for any seafaring vessel, illegal or not. It shouldnt be just the global 1% who get 24/7 search parties and remote-operated submersibles helping rescue them.

The Australian Ballet is doing Alice in Wonderland again and on one hand I’ve seen it before, and on the other, their Queen of Hearts has my favourite costume in anything every

It’s just this and her court pushes her around the stage on wheels and every act it gets taller until she towers over everyone

Also in act 3 (I think) it swings open at the front and her husband is sitting inside reading a newspaper

I saw this again on Tuesday so here are some things I’d forgotten about:

here’s a video

more. (btw this is a parody/reference to the very famous “rose adagio” from sleeping beauty)

the Caterpillar is pretty neat too

(all of these videos are from the Royal Ballet’s productions in 2014 and 2017)

Finally an adaptation that makes feel like I’m going to have stroke, it’s perfect

reblogging for later and also to state that my girls are in an Alice production and my eldest is, in fact, in the caucus race, so that makes two I guess

One single republican decided to base his vote on a reasonable evaluation of available data and it quite possibly improved thousands of lives. I hope maybe in my lifetime I’ll see an America where that isn’t shocking for a politician to do, and maybe one in which people’s entire well being doesn’t come down to just one extra guy having a shred of decency.

something very charming about “I don’t really know what’s going on here but I don’t think it’s my problem” as a response to the anti-trans hysteria

To fellow spoonies

When studies show that underage drinking is harmful, it's banned easily. But when studies show that spanking is harmful, it remains legal and parents still insist on doing it.

Age restrictions on purchasing cigarettes pass easily. But laws prohibiting smoking where children are forced to breathe in secondhand smoke are much harder to pass.

Children under a certain age are prohibited from using most social media websites. But adults are allowed to post videos of their children's meltdowns.

Teenagers need their parents' permission to get body modifications. But parents can get their babies' ears pierced.

Anyone who genuinely wants to protect children would not panic about the children's own choices while ignoring what adults force on them. Anyone who genuinely wants to protect children would not insist that studies on the dangers of children's own choices be fully trusted and obeyed while ignoring and arguing with studies on the dangers of how adults treat children.

But many adults just want to control children, not protect them.

Aliko Dangote, the richest man in Africa, has been tormented by a Brazilian man named Osvaldo for the last several years.

I’ve gone to the women’s restroom a lot in my life, and not once have I ever seen genitalia besides my own while there. No penis, no vulva, nothing.

I’ve literally seen a bathroom full of baby lizards, one time a whole fucking fish on the floor, and someone come out of the stall with a plate, knife, and fork like they just ate a meal before I’ve seen genitals. Why would I ever be worried about seeing some woman with her cock out