a robision drawing for a person called Draque of a mysterious creature performing a tarot card reading. ordinarily I do not show robisions here, as I believe I said the last time I did so, but as was also likely the case last time, this is what I have this week and so here it shall go! and NEXT week I won’t be here at all, so I may have less to show than this.
the sun symbol on the decoration is from the arcade game “3 wonders.” Initially I was trying to draw the circus emblem from shining force but couldn’t remember if i had a screenshot of it available but I knew I had this one since I used it on a web page back in 2003 and it actually made less sense than this does.
draque suggested a “seedy bar” as a setting. I very much hate bars and felt intimidated by that until i realized there wouldn’t be much room to show scenery. then i looked up the phrase “seedy bar” and was reminded that a lot of bars and restaurants that for whatever reason fancy themselves as being bar-like tend to have framed monochrome photographs of famous patrons or people that they wish had been patrons, so that provided a simple way of suggesting there was more going on than just bricks. Just the thought that they might be PROUD the dope came there, or even worse WISH the dope would but couldn’t persuade it to do so must surely mean this is among the seediest of all bars.
although suspiciously two of my pose sketches indicate that the dope is in the bar as this scene is taking place and I am uncertain if I would have put something else in the picture frame knowing that. What if dopes are this bar’s ONLY customers? That place should go out of business IMMEDIATELY. not just because instead of buying drinks dopes just wander around smiling at people, allowing them on the premises at all is most certainly a mental health code violation. Although I am sad to say they still probably would not make for the most annoying experience I ever had in a bar, I can yet blame the dopes for reminding me of that!
this month is, as an increasing number of businesses want to tell me, a “pride month.” Specifically with regard to whom you do or do not want to have sexual relations. But I do not know how to be proud of something that I did not have a choice about or work to achieve, particularly when the things I DID work to achieve I am also often not proud of! Even if I could manage it, experience has shown that no established group represents any of my own interests, especially as more and more of the symbols are co-opted by global corporations that are larger than many national governments. I am destined to be confused and alone! Is it possible I am proud of THAT? I hope not. But I am confused and consequently uncertain.
Contrary to what deviantart and world-class comedian Fortune Feimster suggest, my true self’s pride is not what it creates with, but what with which it distances itself from other people.
i do appreciate that the person i never heard of being shoved at me today by a corporate entity is not a fraction of my age and famous for smirking on youtube or singing shoddy songs, but I still find no fun or camaraderie in marketer-approved activities.
I used the pathetic snake in the illustration because it has and is problems closest to coinciding with my own, despite being subtly different in appearance from my self.
my “regular” characters are extremely proud of themselves but none of them know what “sex” is as far as I am aware. YOU may, naturally, be proud of whatever you want! this here is only about me. and it.
for other websites I named this piece “pride and precipice” because oh how droll it rhymes with the title of a book I never read. But I also realized that
years ago naming this painting “unimprecipe” must have made no sense. i confused “precipice,” a word for the edge of a cliff (specifically a vertical edge rather than the cartoonish, ready-to-crumble overhangs I prefer to draw but nobody knows that) with the evidently non-existent “precipe.” This is otherwise irrelevant to the present subject matter.
a few weeks earlier my mother had sent me a link to “asexuality, the ascent of the invisible sexual orientation” but which seemed to especially focus on “asexual” folk wanting to see more asexual folk on television, and I was not sure how to respond to the link-sender about it, and never did. I am not asking you to read that! I am merely issuing proof that it exists.
I appreciate my mother’s consideration, as twenty three years ago when I first knew I didn’t want to be called he him his, there was absolutely no way to bring up this topic and not encounter misery or mockery. I remember the first time I did I was asked by this person “do you want to be like TOBY?” a ridiculous ‘neuter’ person who had appeared on the Sally Jesse Raphael show, clips of which were subsequently shown and laughed at on the E channel’s Talk Soup program, which we both watched. I did not want to be like Toby. I still do not want to be like Toby.
it’s about 40 minutes, this link is just to prove it exists, I am not asking you to watch it!
Toby is boring and has a boring name, even though Toby’s stated approach to sexual matters and method of responding to people who are far too curious about it is similar to mine. Asexual is not the same as agender but they occupy the same “nobody is selling what I am buying” part of their respective spectrums. AND I don’t want anyone to sell it!
However I am not at all concerned about the more recent self-labeling asexuals’ “representation.” Any group with photogenic representatives will eventually get represented in photography, and they are certainly prettier than Toby. They will get what they want. I do not seek representation, as I do not trust anyone else to achieve it. What I want is to be believed and accepted when I describe my own condition, not have to check a box and not have to choose a flag. Maybe news of self-described asexuals would reach more neuro-normal fans of awful media, and after long enough eventually be believed by them, and make it easier to describe my own problem to them, but that would be a side-effect.
Admittedly I have in the past appreciated fictional characters that are never shown to have outwardly sexual identities, like Samus, Tintin, even dumb old Rygar. I don’t need an official seal of “by the way they’re ASEXUAL!” to appreciate that they do something important without romance screwing things up. And I would continue to prefer them if labeled asexuals started appearing in crummy tv shows, having that be their core defining trait and being exactly like every other annoying complacent smirking jeans-wearing forklogan I don’t like otherwise.
And I do like Olive Oyl, Dynamite Headdy and certain Batmans, who sometimes have their decision-making skills impaired by the appearance of romance potential, because they are able to remain interesting. Sailor Moon is perfectly capable of both fighting evil by moonlight and winning love by daylight. What I don’t like are gross, boring “sex scenes” and contrived pairings, like when a woman and man fight each other a lot and then out of nowhere start kissing, I can’t stand it.
it is the “love” as a completely embarrassing and forced plot device that I cannot tolerate. I may also experience difficulty tolerating the people who tolerate them! Even if asexuals never do this I have every confidence that terrible writers will think of other disconcertingly moronic things for them to do instead.
I can imagine the gay porn test being a quad-annual requirement for renewing your asexual license.
I don’t even like the WORD “sex” and I think “ace” sounds stupid but that isn’t necessarily the fault of anyone I am griping about today.
apparently there are rings you can buy or forge to grant yourself the magical power to not want to do sex. I should be grateful to not need one, perhaps. I suppose the idea is to identify yourself so you can be found and find others with a similar condition without having to be very ostentatious and PROUD. A little black ring is more discreet than a big dumb flag. I don’t like having constricting trinkets stuck to my skin, though. I have never even been able to wear a watch, back when people wore watches. A ring is worse since it will either be too tight or inclined to fall off and get lost, and I would want to constantly fiddle with and adjust it before then.
and now I need a flag to let everyone know I am a fiddler!
welcome to stop and shop
It is being reorganized; the one nearer to my previous location went through the same screwy phase last year, but this temporary sign is showing the obsolete 2008-2018 logo from when Stop and Shop was merged with the Mid-Atlantic supermarket chain “Giant,” which it no longer is, so I don’t understand why it is considered preferable to the logoless, proper sign that had been here two weeks ago.
it is a dinstinctily nonsensical logo, reminiscent of the incoherent mass of shapes beside the “L” in the dangelogo, so i noticed immediately when it stopped being used, and again with it reused.
I am getting mixed messages at this store. Or maybe just a mixed mess.
Despite the arrows, or perhaps to spite the arrows, people would blatantly walk the wrong way into the narrowest aisles and then just stand there like The Zax until *I* turned around and go out the opposite way I came in because I want to avoid a fight, which is the only reason I follow the arrows to begin with. I will obey a rule that makes no sense in order to prevent hypothetical conflict but I won’t hold up such a rule when conflict picks a fight with it. I will walk the wrong way over an arrow to get something at the end of the aisle and if nobody is facing me. Overall I want to not do anything that will get me faced.
Yes I drew that stupid header picture for this one bit. I initially intended to put the drawing with this section but I also don’t want a boring photograph of a shoddy storefront at the top of the website I provide to people who ask about my art drawings since somebody did recently and I would prefer such a person to be put off by an actual shoddy art piece.
I postponed finishing this for 2 weeks since other stuff kept happening and the store went and got rid of the stupid arrows and mask policy but the aisles are still a mess, and people are just as inclined to go full speed in a one-cart-wide space and not care if someone is in front of them facing the opposite direction. AND with the mask mandate lifted it did turn out that the person opposed to me was masked and I wasn’t, though I also wasn’t wearing an ugly baseball hat with a stupid slogan on it. Additionally I was not naked, sticking my posterior end out needlessly nor standing in a Charlie Chaplin pose, so disregard the rumors.
What kind of loser would drink this?
I couldn’t tell if twitter people who saw this a few weeks ago thought I was legitimately accusing seltzer drinkers of being losers or they simply don’t think napoleon jokes are funny. I do share a home with two seltzer drinkers and I greatly prefer when they DRINK the overpriced, fouled bubble water rather than pour a little bit into another drink and leave the cans all over the place.
Charmin is great toilet paper if you buy that for companionship
and for bad math but that seems to come standard at this point.
dumb fact: I have had charmin toilet paper in my house approximately one time, last april, at the height of the bogus toilet paper shortage when that was the only brand left in the store because everybody in town recognizes it is inferior at its primary stated purpose and also thoroughly incompatible with all the septic tanks common in a seaside locale that used to be all farms. Supposedly it was “septic safe” and my guess is they determined that by flushing one square and observing that the house didn’t explode. I likely used most of it for blowing my nose and diverted my strategic toilet paper for nose blowing reserve to active restroom duty.
apparently plumbers have particularly heavy excrement which makes them ideal test subjects
hey you want chips? you’ve come to the right six different places
two of which even say “chips” on the aisle markers
you want 50 percent discounts that don’t register when scanned, that the service desk will say will register at checkout, which don’t, which the attendant will key in an exception for but that the actual store manager won’t see the big deal about leaving mislabeled and having less-attentive customers pay full price for? apparently I do because I still shop here and simply took two and unscanned one the last time this happened because I didn’t want to need to show anyone that I was buying hamburger helper, much less making a fuss about not saving one dollar on it. It usually happens on stupid products, like 2 pound bags of york peppermint patricias or cans of cat food. The latter of which isn’t inherently embarrassing but I don’t want anyone thinking that I personally approve of the cat’s actions.
this discount was also fake but fortunately the math still worked out.
there are occasional “random” audits triggered when attempting to check out, which prompt an employee to approach your purchases and rescan them until the computer says they can stop which fortunately hasn’t bumped up against my personal manual override of their broken pricing system yet.
at the TIME i was buying these in single serve containers because I kept making the 64 ounce size go bad prematurely by chopping up bits of lemon and dropping them into the bottle to improve the flavor which I didn’t immediately realize was responsible for spoiling the fluid early. I have a great many personal tricks that don’t actually work because I do not know how to do proper research. For example, I have on occasion considered that the creature nemitz, while an inexcusable crumbum, might be compatible with the concept of plush toys, but imagined mits possession of horns would be a problem. However some time in 2019 my then four year old neice violet showed up with a stuffed animal that appeared to be a mixture between unicorn and octopus and it had a horn which looked rigid but was collapsible and i tried to poke my own eye with it and it didn’t hurt, and was difficult enough to seem like it wouldn’t happen by accident, which would presumably not-hurt slightly less, which meant an accurate doll nemitz was perhaps feasible, if not at all justifiable. I am inclined to believe there was a better way I could have determined how safe it was to jab my own eye without actually doing that.
Also the reason I didn’t post this two weeks ago was because I meant to find that unicorn octopus doll in this house so I could photograph it, and I didn’t, and then I forgot. Absolutely nemitz’s fault.
ALSO even that iced tea purchase is also outdated, because I have lately been so inclined to augment the iced tea I buy with additional lemon or additional tea I decided to just make my own full pot of it, today. Eh my concoction needs some tweaking, and I don’t think i saved any money yet either because it meant I had to buy a pitcher, I found one here, for $14. When I went to remove the internal components to wash it before using it, I discovered they were broken. When I went back to return and replace the item, knowing that the longer I put off doing that the more it seemed like I broke it, I found the four of the remaining pitchers ALSO had the same part broken.
However Stop and Shop is still a better store than Shop Rite, a substantially better store than Price Chopper, has very good deli meats and self-scanning machines that greatly improve the overall experience. I just like to complain.
There is always someone to blame.
I personally liked it better in a square layout but then i had too much extra space to fill, and social media websites are lamentably kinder to vertically elongated images. i initially planned it with two additional frames that i realized were irrelevant, and then thought of a new one to add in, but that still messed with the negative space. in fact i could probably still eliminate three more to aid in clarity for anyone, probably most people, who have not had this particular problem.
I found that when i tried to invent a car suitable to the creature’s proportions i lacked the skill to make individual parts of the control mechanisms apparent as what they were intended to represent, and so used direct photograph references. the more realistic car may produce an amusing contrast relative to the blatantly fake driver, anyhow.
a commission drawing of a fancy phoenix for twitter.com/spongbros, because I have nothing special to say about it which means I can post it much faster than what I was trying to do otherwise.
no no no, I already did THAT last week! That took even longer!
I do not talk about “commission” much around these parts because I have surmised that the people who want to see what typically comprises that don’t want to see things other than that from me, so there would be little purpose to advertising or placing most of them here where I primarily do things other than that! Most of them are fairly stupid and it would be imprudent to say that about them until a few months or years later when the buyer realizes how much stuff I think is stupid and would be less alarmed by my saying as much about their own drawing had they not ceased all awareness of my deeds before or on account of that. But I think this one here is largely lacking in aspects that I would feel inclined to pass remark upon and so I can display it without issue or deliberate delay.
still friday, and I should have put a dope in there. even with peter the phoenik bird fulfilling a dope-like role I think that would help me feel better about it. it would mean one more dope that is there and not here.
I keep forgetting i put that dumb texas belt buckle there. I feel reassured whenever somebody acknowledges it. There is a tendency for fan-art to be very reverent and homagey without having anything to say beyond “hey! a popular thing exists! and I have tied myself to it!” The Texas isn’t making a point at all but it is distracting enough to keep the piece from drowning in self-indulgence. I indulge myself to include Texas belts but most people don’t konw that.
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Friday now! The picture is “finished” enough to post on websites where I cannot replace the image but I still think I have better avoid looking at it since there is definitely stuff still wrong with it. There will always be stuff wrong with it but I have dealt with all the wrong stuff that is at my level and within the range of what I can tolerate without taking a prolonged break from it, but I already put off dealing with the sketch for several years and I most certainly do not want to be putting this away until 2024 and having nothing at all to show for whatever the heap I was doing the past four weeks.
I cannot help thinking that the real value was forcing myself to learn a faster way of changing layers and controlling transparency because ultimately this doesn’t look a whole lot better than the awkward garbage I was doing 10 years ago. Individual bits are more skillfully done but the whole looks like an inorganic mess. Spending weeks making pictures like this will not get me closer to out of the hole! It was not supposed to take weeks or have hole-rank-improvement as a goal, but anything that does take that long needs to pay off in some way that a product this irregular cannot. However the RELATIVE payoff of not working on it any further should be fairly pleasant.
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I forgot to put out the trash for wednesday but I did poke away at this picture some more. It still needs help but less help than it previously needed.
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not really complete but the areas in massive trouble are by now largely localized to the lower right corner and I can fiddle with that some more and probably update this before anyone apart from me is realistically likely to see it.
It is based on a scene in the video game “Shining Force II: Ancient Ceiling” with an attempt at analyzing and adhering to the concept art far in excess of my organic capabilities or what anybody else would notice or care about.
i should have a drawing to post on tuesday. I should also have had it on sunday but it is a tricky drawing. everything is tricky these days! even that nemitz picture which was simple became very tricky and unpleasant once I attempted to talk about it so ideally i will say very little on tuesday.
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a needlessly nemity variation on a widely circulated image of uncertain origin
I am fascinated by this image, and plainly a lot of other people also are, often altering it to suit their needs. The envelope is apparently from 1895! I found this using the tineye reverse image search. Once in a while that actually works, yes. So I presume the picture is from before then, though how much before then I am unaware.
At my home from 1985 to 2001 this game was in a bathroom closet that never seemed to be closed, maybe it couldn’t be closed. I never saw the game be played, in fact I don’t believe I even saw the back of the box until I found it for sale on e-bay, but I always remembered the drawing.
I see now that Word Of Mouth’s is the only version to have a hat and non-clenched hands, and after comparing them I saw that its hands indeed had a more casual 1960s low budget school house rock animation sort of style to them than the rest of the drawing.
It was only years later, some time after the feature film was released, that I became aware of Sweeney Todd using a very similar drawing. I was only able to compare them recently, and saw that Todd’s is drawn by a different hand. I appreciate that Frank Verlizzo’s Sweeney Todd version redrew it outright to make the alterations less out of place and to match the Angela “Murder She Not-Yet Wrote/Did” Lansbury mutant that had to be drawn fresh. Also back in the 1970s fewer people assumed you could just change something on another person’s drawing or song and copyright it exclusively for yourself forever.
Another odd bit is that the one on the left was drawn to resemble Angela Lansbury but obviously the one on the right just is that same guy it was before. He does VAGUELY resemble the drawing but only as much as any other large 19th century man with his hair parted in the middle would, and yet that was enough. Verlizzo didn’t even incorporate the suspenders and nobody ever thought to ask: does this drawing actually look like the character?
Ironically, the Johnny Depp Todd DOES look like the drawing, wearing a vest and striped pants with messier side hair but the film never used that artwork in promotion. Presumably there was concern that Helena Bonham Carter looked less realistic than the cartoon Angela Lansbury.
unlike Todd’s, the collective soul version of the very angry man edits the an imprint directly and poorly and it is obvious (and the print itself is somewhat shoddy, as if somebody scanned a t-shirt that it had already been printed on). The whitish glow and white (or actually green)-tinted shadow against an inappropriate-colored backdrop resembles a vintage geocities gif and the mouth looks like somebody drew it with a mouse in GIMP. However, gimp and geocities didn’t exist then. Somebody had to work much harder to make an edit this bad in those days.
My older brother Colberon had this album and I had to ask him what album it was that had the Word of Mouth man on the cover, and fortunately he remembered. I don’t know what the MUSIC sounds like; it probably isn’t good if they think this cover looks good.
ohhhhhh it’s THAT song, the heaven let your light shine down band.
yeah
I forgot Colberon used to listen to slightly more palatable garbage off the radio before he was actually in bands. I figured it was some mopey cheaply produced garbage like I used to find in our shared Kazaa folder years afterward. “Sparta’s” singer sounds like a sick puppy and the music sounds like what I hear while passed out when I am sick myself.
ehhhnyway, wikehhhpedia sez:
The title is claimed to be just lines lifted from that annoying Paul Simon song about wanting me to be his body guard. Why name your entire debut album after irrelevant lines in somebody else’s song? How can you have any respect for a band about which you believe that? That would mean the bums weren’t even trying. And the “fact” has been on the page so long that obviously loads of folks are quite willing to believe it is true, while I seeing that statement for the second time knew I needed to look it up. AND the actual Simony lyrics, apart from being fairly strangleworthy, don’t include the “and things left unsaid part.”
I am tired of garbage like this. I used to think it was funny when I found dumb lies on wikipedia but now it just makes me mad because people who know nothing will paraphrase those lies to prove they are smarter than and dismiss someone like me when they don’t know a ding dang thing, and then hundreds of other fandom wikis and automatically generated clickbait landfills will copy all the same junk and then after being established long enough each can be cited as sources by any other.
I don’t even care about this album and I easily proved both these statements to not be provable. I went there because I was angry about one thing and then became angry about something else in the same paragraph.
I don’t need my edits to be permanent, but I like knowing that anybody who goes to revert them will have to become aware of how annoyed I was. I was in a bad enough state to not realize I derisively used the word “bit” twice. I haven’t been that angry since somebody claimed [adventures of] Lomax was voiced by Kath Soucie, even though Lomax has the exact same voice as every other character in the game and only says things like “oh no!” and “let’s go” that sound like the same pitch-shifted probably sound-effect guy voice samples used in Lemmings 2.
I was kidding, sort of, with the manner in which I present these objections, yet this sort of thing really is a problem.
Soucie is an actor popular for squeakily voicing female often animal-based cartoon characters that became the target of lascivious affections from viewers, some of them extending their taste in animated wank fodder on to soucie herself. I don’t know WHY such a person NEEDS her to be Lomax’s voice, but now it is phrased countless different ways out there, so that each is harder to identify as copied from a casual falsehood on wikipedia, and I doubt Soucie remembers every single character she has given a voice to and every name that character has been known by, and maybe eventually she will also believe she voiced something called “Lomax.” But she didn’t! True enough, real lemmings don’t voluntarily run off cliffs to kill themselves, but 70 years ago Disney’s crew filmed some lemmings being deliberately shoved off a cliff just because they thought that was interesting, and real people younger than me still believe that happens so in comparison the lomax matter perhaps seems like a relatively benign invention.
Some people just NEED trash like that to be true for their lives to have meaning. And I get angry about it because my life also has no meaning because everything is run by imbeciles who trust fiction written by nobody to dismiss real people in their own orbit. msg, gmo, qanon, nft, sjw, inherited lies and stupid abbreviations everywhere. Even over stupid inconsequential trivia. Perhaps especially over that. I am a pariah across all the lands because I don’t trust anyone who tries to tell me who to trust, and that is typically a condition for peaceful coexistence.
I of course blame nemitz.
too much has already been said
this crummy sketch is, I believe, from 2012. I am impressed the sandwich is still good after so long.
with the amount of words in there it had better be self explanatory. however you may need to click at it to be shown a more legible version.
The main point this sets out to prove is to myself; often complaining about things with words is less effective than using pictures of words, but and so I needed to try it like this to finally shut myself up about it! Although having said that it is generally unwise to believe anything that a snake tells you or tells me.
I suspect it may have especially missed the mark because the first, so far the only “like” this has in its favor (for I am yet paranoid enough to check) within the facebook is from one of the specific people whose confounding behavior inspired it.
a robision for cyanic of Sudo the Caralynx, having been ambushed by dopes in a jungle setting
I have no idea why somebody would pay me to draw their character getting hassled by dopes. If I were a morally upright sort perhaps I would decline but I prefer this to being asked to draw morbid obesity fetish that swears it isn’t a fetish-art or morbid-dullardry fetish animal people wearing jeans pants and drinking coffee. Also since i theoretically “created” dopes I don’t need to look up references to draw them properly, and know that in fact no dope is proper.
9-13-2020 addender:
I only added the panera logo yesterday after having to drive a car somewhere and seeing repeated mentions of Panera and I considered that I feel more insulted by panera than mcdonalds; selling junk of a comparable quality and nutrition level but with a pretentious attitude of “this is REAL food for SMART people” and they don’t even have chicken nuggets so it definitely had to go in here, even if it is apparent as a late addition.
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click for needlessly larger image
this is not meant to be: i hate all this stuff and we can’t be friends if you like any of it; i probably hate 75% of this stuff and generally I can only be friends with anyone as a remote exception. It is more about a system that inhuman but ostensibly run by humans constantly pushes forced hype and enthusiasm for brands as if this is organic rather than uncompensated labor for corporations that can afford to pay for it.
I don’t like paid promotion either but that is correctly identified as “advertising.”
admittedly I primarily get nfl rubbed in my business off the internet, but I have had a LOT of nfl rubbed in my business. Although I would not be recognized as a legless naked orange mutant off the internet.
Or put another way, the same thing i have been saying incessantly for 15 years presented in a sadder, more defeated manner. I look forward to feeling inspired to say something else!
Don’t make me put bandai or whoever’s logo in there. please. there isn’t space for it.
I wish I could tell you what their collective problem is but if I ever knew, I do not now remember.
9-4-2020 545pm busy busy busy tired tired oh too tired to say it again
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what, so this should be MY problem? I am tired of having to make all the decisions around here! Every one of those dumb things looks terrible, I shan’t choose.
a startlingly elaborate commission drawing for someone known as Animancer featuring Luck, the jerboa type person, not quite succeeding at golf and possibly other things.
I had not initially set out to make it elaborate and thus some components seem incongruent. additionally the fire department has better things to do than keep getting pog out of trees.
a twitter-inspired image, not a judgement so much as an observation. from sunday, before “black out tuesday” during which numerous people posted pictures of black squares to show their belief that black lives matter and/or to stage a Kazimir Malevich-inspired art exhibit.
Combating white supremacists with white suprematists is certainly an approach I would not have considered.
my intent is not to judge anyone for not wanting to be an activist; not every person posting is in the united states and we’ve seen riots before, but the dichotomy is bizarre. I don’t think posting hashtags, saying you “stand with” someone or “going silent” accomplishes anything important, but if it helps some people feel like they are part of something positive, and maybe some even get a legitimate positive feeling out of it, that is good, right? I know that I wouldn’t, I would feel like a silly person being led by a force I don’t understand or necessarily have the means to identify or trust so I don’t. I tried doing that for a few years trying to please internet activist sorts that I knew and I wasn’t good at it, I didn’t like trying to do something I wasn’t good at for no real reason, and I don’t know any of those people now.
as implied, I have encountered NUMEROUS videos of police clobbering people in the street with seemingly no provocation. and mixed in with them are occasional videos of non-police doing awful things. I think there is nothing noble about ganging up on people even if they came looking for a fight. The goal of these protests, ultimately, is to reduce police violence, and ANYTHING counter to that empowers sorts who advocate more brutal policing, and they’re forever seeking to be. I see far more of the “bad police” videos but as long as there are a few “bad non-police” videos the people who fixate on THAT angle won’t acknowledge any other type. I remember a few years ago when it was trendy to say and sell shoddy merchandise branded with “punch a nazi!” But they aren’t exactly wearing swastika armbands and executing minorities in public, and if you do punch somebody who displays mildly nazi-like tendencies, and it is RECORDED, bet on any context being edited out so you look like you are against free speech. Of course if such a person punches you first the video will be labeled as justified by the same people who would criticize you for punching first but it won’t be at risk of changing anyone’s mind.
I think it is valid to point out that USAmerica’s thuggish law enforcement did not start with Trump, but he is held up by many supporters as a Obama/Clinton antithesis despite seeming to double down on and enjoy their worst traits. His “virtue” is his emotional honesty and no other kind. He tells you he is going to send soldiers to clear protesters, and by bolly he does it, and doesn’t pretend that he wishes he didn’t. It is as refreshing as getting sprayed in the face with lachrymator agents can be.
if you are seriously considering robbing a dollar store please just look for a vending machine to beat up instead.
dollar tree supposedly took $22 billion in revenue in 2017 and has over fifteen thousand stores, so they can handle being burgled, but it isn’t time well-spent and the individual employees aren’t getting paid enough to deal with that.
THAT sentiment, in the blue text, though not the exact wording, was from Thursday may 28, before somebody who I knew five years who had not engaged with me previously on that topic or really any other recently responded “people are getting murdered” and was done with me without any further discussion. Nothing like “hey person I’ve known for half a decade, traded art and had prolonged conversations with, I think this joke is tasteless. Are you unaware of how serious this situation is? Are you getting news from an automated aggregator of websites that are slow to update and may have agendas rather than righteous retweet chains? Perhaps I can provide you with insight that you lack.” I may still be dwelling on it. That doesn’t mean I think I am oppressed now, but I also don’t believe that attitude, turning on anyone who isn’t as dedicated to saying all the “right” things as you are helps anybody, and it’s impossible to know which tragic world events that affect other world events are bad enough to temporarily get fun outlawed and which, like the by now regular mass shootings and unprecedented natural disasters, aren’t. the fact is that nobody can know and care about everything, and nobody does, and anyone who acts like they do is full of beans and only does it when instructed to do so by “influencers” as they are now called who I couldn’t possibly keep track of unless I spent every day doing that and I won’t. I think communication should precede condemnation if the possibility exists.
Perhaps this is new because the murder was filmed and unmistakable. Alright but if anyone is awful now they (or I) didn’t just abruptly become that way because the dominant public sentiment suddenly shifted.
and then yesterday June 2 a 77 year old retired police captain David Dorn trying to help out his friend who owned a pawn shop by checking on the place was murdered by a looter stealing a television set. and I wondered: would a thief who was willing to shoot someone dead robbing a best buy be less likely to face opposition if they had robbed a dollar tree? Which is a ludicrous thing for me to wonder since I am not responsible for the action of someone who was willing to kill anyway unless I have advance access to that person plus awareness of that intent. And I didn’t! A joke in bad taste does not make a person bad. I also think back to a “few” years ago when I was angry at somebody for supporting an artist who, to seem cool, presumably, espoused nazi-flavored antagonism. This is not the same thing. I am not setting out to rile people up and then pretending I wasn’t usually.
here is a theological question that not enough people are asking.
this may raise even more