Parents Got A New Cat They Named Lord Montague And This Morning I Heard My Dad In The Other Room Say

this panel haunts me. He has no right looking this peaceful. He has no right looking this comforting. And that fucking line. You don’t get to say that Walter. Especially since it’s fucking true

How did you get out?

Sorry for going missing without a trace guys, I got eaten by a frox on my last delivery run. It was not a pleasant experience.

Glory to Master Kohga.

There was no beauty in what we did to each other. And now there is no beauty in me.

The Iranian Regime is going to execute rapper Toomaj Salehi for supporting protests of Jina Amini’s murder by the regime in his songs.

Iranian activist Elica Le Bon says, “Iranians in the diaspora picked up on the fact that the regime tends not to execute people who become known to the international community. We have seen many examples of prisoners that were either released on bail or had their sentences commuted through our “say their names to save their lives” campaign on social media, using hashtags to garner attention for their causes, and even before social media existed, through getting the stories of political prisoners to international media outlets. Once reported on, and once the eyes shift to the regime and the reality of its pending brutality, realizing that the action is not worth the repercussions, we have seen them back down and not execute. For that reason, this is part of an urgent campaign for readers to talk about Toomaj as much as you can, using the hashtag #FreeToomaj or #ToomajSalehi. Every comment makes a difference, and if we were wrong, what did we lose by trying?”

Rolling Stone

Iranian Rapper Toomaj Salehi Sentenced to Death for Songs Critical of Government

Toomaj Salehi, a dissident Iranian rapper, was sentenced to death on charges related to the antigovernment music he released during the 2022

one of the best ways i’ve found to combat that inherent depressive pessimism without veering into toxic positivity territory is simply the phrase “i’m open to the possibility”

this particularly works with anything negative i’ve forecasted. “i woke up feeling like shit today, so my day is gonna suck” isn’t a particularly helpful thought, but “it’s a great day to be alive!!!!!” feels hollow and insincere when i have a pounding headache & am running on three hours of sleep

instead i’ll tell myself, “i really don’t feel good right now, but i’m open to the possibility that coffee and breakfast might perk me up a bit.” or “i’m in a lot of pain today, but i’m open to the possibility that my workday might still have fun parts despite that”

sometimes, when your impulse is to slam the door on anything good, but you’re not exactly up to going out & hunting it down yourself, leaving the door open just a crack makes all the difference

I think about this post every day

Daily reminder to please PLEASE don’t just read headlines, even if you think the headline tells you everything you need to know, there’s always more to learn about a situation then what can be conveyed in a single catchy sentence.

Hi! I'm a big fan of your work. Thanks for taking the time to read this.

 I'm an artist who's been working on a story with a close writer friend of mine since the pandemic. Together we've outlined a webcomic that we're both very excited and passionate about, and it's been a great experience. Late last year we started actually making the comic itself, and a little less than a year later we're 37 pages in. 

I wanted to ask you how you're able to somehow push out three high-quality pages every week? I work full time, and most days I'm too drained when I get home to immediately start working on the comic. Plus all the other stuff I have to take care of to be a functional adult. I'm not even that slow of an artist, but it just doesn't feel like there's enough hours in the day. At my current rate, I get about one page done per week. I'm 24 now, I don't want to be in my 50s still working on this story. Do you have any advice for increasing your output as an artist without completely overwhelming yourself?

Sorry for the wordy question. There's a reason I'm the artist and not the writer.

Oof, that's a tough one!

I mean, to start with, a fundamental difference in our schedules is I don't work full time. Everything I do for a living is very self-scheduled, and I can work far in advance to meet the deadlines I set and take entire days or even weeks off when I need them. Back when I was in college, dealing with outside schedule requirements, I definitely wouldn't have been able to keep up everything I do now.

That said, there are still methods to streamline and speed up the artistic process. I don't know the details of your methods, but I'd recommend sketching and storyboarding larger numbers of pages at a time and finalizing them at a more leisurely pace, rather than taking one page of comic at a time from a total blank to a finalized, polished version. The storyboard can be very basic; many of mine are little more than color-coded scribbles showing the characters and text boxes showing their dialogue. It's just enough to be readable to me so I can go in and edit it for pacing and timing, but it looks like absolute chickenscratch to anyone else. On the production side, that makes it much more feasible for me to work on multiple pages at a time, since I don't need to finish polishing one page before I can start boarding another.

This method can be expanded into a bit of a factory production line, allowing for a two-pronged approach of progress - one for finalizing older pages, the other farther along for storyboarding new ones. And once you have multiple pages done at a time, you can schedule them well in advance, which takes a lot of deadline pressure off and can make it less mentally daunting to work on. This also diversifies the space of things you can work on, depending on your headspace and energy levels - which is a useful option to have when you're wiped from outside responsibilities.

I am begging everybody, fucking begging them, to slow the fuck down and fucking look things up. Right now, there are a lot of people who are making money off of creating headlines that are meant to make you mad, and it's going to get worse as we get closer to the election.

If someone tells you that there's a secret conspiracy to [do a thing you don't like] and that it's unique to Biden, you better fucking look that thing up, because chances are you're going to find that it's been happening under every administration for the last 50 years. Is that good? No! Should you want to change it? Probably! Is it a unique crime to Biden? Nope!

"Biden said [bad thing] [X] years ago." Well, this bad thing he said happens to be true, but it looks like it was 45 years ago, and he changed his stance 40 years ago. "Biden said [other bad thing] [Y] years ago." What's the source on that? So there's one person who says he said it? And nobody else who was there has corroborated that account? Who posted the story?

These are all random examples of things I've seen over the last couple of weeks, with the details slightly changed from the Tumblr posts and news articles I've seen, because the point isn't the details of the particular story, so I don't want to get bogged down in particulars that don't matter to the point I'm making.

The point of this post isn't the specific things I'm referencing but the fact that in each of these cases, the reality was not what was initially presented. Either the reality was wildly different, or this story can't be corroborated and was told by someone with a clear and very well-known agenda of their own, which means that at the very least, the story should be treated with extreme suspicion.

And on that note, please don't believe that because you're a leftist that you can't be radicalized in the same way that right-wingers are. You aren't immune to propaganda either. I'm not saying you have to like, or should like, any particular politician or political entity. I am saying, however, that you should view a lot of the news with a gimlet eye, and that goes double for anything that makes you real fucking mad.

You need - need - to stop and read the whole article and ask yourself if you can verify the claims and who benefits from this making you mad.

Please. For the sake of the people around you who have to patiently explain to you that you've gotten fucking bamboozled again by propaganda if for no other reason. We're all very tired of you thinking that leftists can't be propagandized.