The Notes Are Broken 😂

As someome whos always lived in apartments, those "typical american homes" look huge to me, and where i live all the houses that look amything like that are at multi family homes

I literally don't care when people are like "haha americans are so annoying/dumb/whatever" cuz I can take a joke, but I've been seeing tags on posts of mine from people who like. Deeply, Viscerally, Venomously Hate USAmericans.

They see us as the privileged oppressor class of the world who willfully and gleefully fuck everyone else over so "we" can enjoy luxuries. Our big cars, our extravagant restaurants, our Disney World and McMansions, right?

And it makes something inside me die a little bit, because the USA distributes TV shows, movies, magazines, newspapers and advertisements that tell you what America is like and what luxuries Americans enjoy...

...and it's propaganda. It's propaganda, not reality. These images and mythology of a luxurious, affluent America are so inescapable, constant and penetrating, like radiation, that even Americans believe it even in spite of reality around them.

It hurts that the propaganda is all anyone sees outside the USA as well, is what I mean to say, because inside the USA it's the same. I feel average, not poor, but I have always been demeaned by these depictions that tell me, "This is a normal American" showing financial privileges I would never hope to have and that my mother or her mother would never have been able to even imagine.

Like I looked up "average american neighborhood" on google images

And there are articles from American papers and publications that use these stock photos as images of an "American neighborhood" or "American homes" and it feels like being chipped away bit by bit, because when I was in middle school I went to the house of my friend and my friend's mom asked me condescending questions about whether my family ate instant noodles and "frozen food" (which they were too good for) and that year I was too humiliated to invite any of my wealthier friends over to my house, and yet they did not live in houses as big as the houses in these photos. THIS IS NOT AVERAGE. AVERAGE AMERICANS DO NOT LIVE HERE. WHAT THE HELL. There is a neighborhood in my town that looks like this and in my head I call it the "rich people neighborhood."

I come from the Americans that live here

and mobile homes/trailers are around 12% of houses in my state, so it's not rare, and when my mom was growing up everybody she knew lived in one of these. But this isn't what the world is shown. And even in America when this is shown it's something to be gawked at and pitied.

"Americans buy fast fashion every month and on average only wear it a couple times" I wear my clothes until they're falling apart and many of the clothes i have now are hand-me-downs from my mom or from Goodwill. "Americans eat out at restaurants all the time" Growing up I would eat out at Red Lobster as a treat with my dad about once a year, and sometimes we couldn't afford that. "Americans work so much because they're so obsessed with money" when I was a kid I remember when my dad would sometimes be working until 11pm or later at his construction and remodeling job, coming home exhausted and covered in drywall dust, and we barely got to see him because he was trying to dig us out of our house imminently going into foreclosure.

And I know that I have it so much better than so many people that came before me. Compared with the world my mom grew up in, I grew up in a world of fabulous luxury. My Mamaw's family was sharecroppers and by the time she was highschool age she started working in the cotton mills making gold-toe socks. And being white they've got a position of relative privilege even then. At least they didn't face violence and hatred over the color of their skin.

Why do the articles and writings say "Americans" live in big houses and eat in extravagant restaurants, but they don't say "Americans" live in flimsy, non-permanent structures propped up on cinder blocks and eat whatever cheap processed food is sold at the Dollar General, which is the only store for miles around and doesn't even sell fresh fruits or vegetables?

We're all trained to identify ourselves with the folks in the big houses, not the folks who have to camp out under tarps underneath the bridge, but I would say more of us are closer to the second one than the first. The images of America don't look like people I would talk to and hang out with, they look like the people that used to look down on me and my family like we were less than.

Fact is, "americans have it sooooo much better than all those people in third world countries, everybody there would kill to have the privileges you have" is a fundamental key part of the propaganda, and the purpose is to make Americans, especially poor Americans, think they're fundamentally different than working class people in other countries.

The mythology that the USA is the best place on Earth is a threat. Truth be told, a lot of poor folks are panicky conservative reactionaries in part because they can't afford to travel and see what the cities are like, let alone another country, and they have been told their whole lives that this is the best possible society, and they are scared to death of things getting worse.

Idk where i'm going with this, I just think seeing nation states as discrete categories of people that have more in common with each other than they do with anybody outside their country is a nefarious piece of propaganda

and also I have seen people claiming specifically that Black people in America have it better than the rest of the world by virtue of being American, which is so fucking stupid but i didn't wanna start shit but now i'm sick and in bed and kinda do

we are more alike than we are unalike and the people that say otherwise are mostly trying to get us to identify with a nation state that sees us as lower than garbage

This map is the most up to date version as of 3-4-2023 and takes into account all recent movement on anti-trans legislation

This was. funny to me

(they could be real btw: [1] [2])

how to grow the fuck up

I wanna be the extremely gay gender queer side character that everybody loves and way to many people relate to

"everyone's the main character of their own story" god no please just make me a side character i am begging you

duo teeth dividers!!! all handmade by me

works best with dark site themes!!

other colors:

please reblog if using and credit somewhere if possible!!

[ID: Three sets of dividers depicting sharp teeth between a set of jagged horizontal lines. In each divider set, the first has a row of six sharp upper teeth with longer canines and two teeth behind, while the second has a row of six sharp smaller lower teeth with slightly longer canines and four teeth behind. The first set of dividers is an off-white bone color with a dark purple outline, the second is white with a dark gray outline, and the third is gray with a black outline. /End ID.]

hot artists don't gatekeep

I've been resource gathering for YEARS so now I am going to share my dragons hoard

Floorplanner. Design and furnish a house for you to use for having a consistent background in your comic or anything! Free, you need an account, easy to use, and you can save multiple houses.

Comparing Heights. Input the heights of characters to see what the different is between them. Great for keeping consistency. Free.

Magma. Draw online with friends in real time. Great for practice or hanging out. Free, paid plan available, account preferred.

Smithsonian Open Access. Loads of free images. Free.

SketchDaily. Lots of pose references, massive library, is set on a timer so you can practice quick figure drawing. Free.

SculptGL. A sculpting tool which I am yet to master, but you should be able to make whatever 3d object you like with it. free.

Pexels. Free stock images. And the search engine is actually pretty good at pulling up what you want.

Figurosity. Great pose references, diverse body types, lots of "how to draw" videos directly on the site, the models are 3d and you can rotate the angle, but you can't make custom poses or edit body proportions. Free, account option, paid plans available.

Line of Action. More drawing references, this one also has a focus on expressions, hands/feet, animals, landscapes. Free.

Animal Photo. You pose a 3d skull model and select an animal species, and they give you a bunch of photo references for that animal at that angle. Super handy. Free.

Height Weight Chart. You ever see an OC listed as having a certain weight but then they look Wildly different than the number suggests? Well here's a site to avoid that! It shows real people at different weights and heights to give you a better idea of what these abstract numbers all look like. Free to use.

season 4 but cas is like a crow and keeps giving shiny things to dean bc he just thinks theyre neat

tbh the best thing about being nd and missing social cues is that a lot of bullying attempts in high school fell really flat because i didnt realize they were trying to bully me