Walking Home From School

I feel like whenever this discourse comes up of Tony being some evil mustache twirling war profiteer, it’s often glossed over that Tony wasn’t making weapons because “hahaha he’s evil and likes to watch people die” - he makes weapons so that people would be safe, literally he makes his weapons with more accurate targeting for the specific purpose to avoid collateral damage - he wants more effective and accurate weapons so that soldiers fighting wouldn’t have to needlessly die - why do you think he mocked Hammer and his tech for so long? Because they’re defective, they’re inadequate, they’re second rate, and people would be hurt by Hammer’s tech than actually save - why do you think the military and Rhodey went to Tony? Because they knew his tech wouldn’t fail or jam up on them when they’re in a firefight

Sure you can argue the morals of supplying soldiers for a war, but is it really that blameworthy that you want your side to be able to stay safe and win a war that you didn’t start? Because last I checked, Tony isn’t the one starting any wars, he didn’t make any of that decision - he’s only ever tried to make sure that his country and the troops were the best equipped - just like he builds weapons and tech to best equip his fellow Avengers, would that now be war profiteering too?

People also like to gloss over that Stark Industries also isn’t solely weapons development - Tony even mentions in Iron Man 1 that a lot of their other research projects in other departments like phones and energy and crops are funded by military funding they receive in exchange for tech - in fact he’s more involved in R&D in those departments than making things that blow up.

And really, why is it that people like to forget Obadiah Stane? As if Tony somehow just ended up kidnapped magically? As if he just happened to get his own weapon in his chest by coincidence? It’s like it’s forgotten how selectively Tony is about whom his tech is given to - the only reason Tony ever got hit by his own weapon isn’t because he was carelessly selling his weapons to anyone, but precisely because Obadiah was lying and double dealing to terrorists this whole time.

Tony Stark didn’t suddenly shut down his weapons development division because he got hurt by his own bombs - he shut it down because he realized that his weapons that he thought were controlled and in the right hands, were literally stolen out from under him and given to terrorists to be used on innocent people - call him naive, ignorant, and privileged, those are all true, but shutting down his weapons manufacturing was never about himself and how he got a taste of his own medicine but rather the event of his attack made him realize that what he had thought were his weapons used safely and right, now he knows they weren’t and he didn’t look deep enough to see it before and now he can’t ignore it and things have to change. The bombing on himself wasn’t the reason for the change, the bombing was the initial event that landed him in the situation where he discovered the reason to change.

Why do you think Obadiah tried to kill Tony? Why do you think he lied all this time? Because he knew that if Tony ever learned the truth, Tony wouldn’t be okay with it, and he was right, because as soon as Tony saw that his weapons were actually gettting into the hands of terrorists who just wanna hurt people - he totally shut it all down.

You can blame Tony for being naive in trusting Obadiah to run the company (even though Obadiah was a trusted family friend whom Tony relied on growing up), you can blame Tony for not looking deeply and carefully into where all his weapons were going, you can blame him for caring more about just inventing things than actually what is really being run in his company under his own nose - but you cannot blame Tony Stark for the actions of Obadiah Stane who decided to sell weapons to terrorists, who decided to lie to Tony about it and have Tony killed so Tony couldn’t stop him.

Tony Stark built his tech with all the intentions that they’d be used the right way, that nobody would get hurt but the bad guys - maybe that’s naive, maybe that’s stupid, and maybe that’s careless, the road to hell is often paved with good intentions after all - but let’s not forget that Tony Stark never sold weapons to terrorists, never lied and double dealed away his weapons so bad guys could use it - yes he made weapons for the military, but remember that it wasn’t simply because of that’s what was expected of him as his father’s son, but also because Rhodey was military liaison, Tony trusted Rhodey and if Rhodey believed then Tony would too. Tony trusted Rhodey do always do the right thing so why wouldn’t Tony give him weapons that would help him.

Geto/Gojo

I grew up in the 1960s on the West Side of Chicago. My mother died when I was six months old. She was only 16 and I never learned what it was that she died from - my grandmother, who drank more than most, couldn’t tell me later on.

It was my grandmother that took care of me. And she wasn’t a bad person - in fact she had a side to her that was so wonderful. She read to me, baked me stuff and cooked the best sweet potatoes. She just had this drinking problem. She would bring drinking partners home from the bar and after she got intoxicated and passed out these men would do things to me. It started when I was four or five years old and it became a regular occurrence. I’m certain my grandmother didn’t know anything about it. 

She worked as a domestic in the suburbs. It took her two hours to get to work and two hours to get home. So I was a latch-key kid - I wore a key around my neck and I would take myself to kindergarten and let myself back in at the end of the day. And the molesters knew about that, and they took advantage of it.

I would watch women with big glamorous hair and sparkly dresses standing on the street outside our house. I had no idea what they were up to; I just thought they were shiny. As a little girl, all I ever wanted was to be shiny. 

One day I asked my grandmother what the women were doing and she said, “Those women take their panties off and men give them money.” And I remember saying to myself, “I’ll probably do that” because men had already been taking my panties off. 

To look back now, I dealt with it all amazingly well. Alone in that house, I had imaginary friends to keep me company that I would sing and dance around with - an imaginary Elvis Presley, an imaginary Diana Ross and the Supremes. I think that helped me deal with things.

Even though I was a smart kid, I disconnected from school. Going into the 1970s, I became the kind of girl who didn’t know how to say “no” - if the little boys in the community told me that they liked me or treated me nice, they could basically have their way with me. By the time I was 14, I’d had two children with boys in the community, two baby girls. My grandmother started to say that I needed to bring in some money to pay for these kids, because there was no food in the house, we had nothing. 

So, one evening - it was actually Good Friday - I went along to the corner of Division Street and Clark Street and stood in front of the Mark Twain hotel. I was wearing a two-piece dress costing $3.99, cheap plastic shoes, and some orange lipstick which I thought might make me look older. 

I was 14 years old and I cried through everything. But I did it. I didn’t like it, but the five men who dated me that night showed me what to do. They knew I was young and it was almost as if they were excited by it. 

I made $400 but I didn’t get a cab home that night. I went home by train and I gave most of that money to my grandmother, who didn’t ask me where it came from. 

The following weekend I returned to Division and Clark, and it seemed like my grandmother was happy when I brought the money home. 

But the third time I went down there, a couple of guys pistol-whipped me and put me in the trunk of their car. They had approached me before because I was, as they called it, “unrepresented” on the street. All I knew was the light in the trunk of the car and then the faces of these two guys with their pistol. First they took me to a cornfield out in the middle of nowhere and raped me. Then they took me to a hotel room and locked me in the closet. That’s the kind of thing pimps will do to break a girl’s spirits. They kept me in there for a long time. I was begging them to let me out because I was hungry, but they would only allow me out of the closet if I agreed to work for them.

They pimped me for a while, six months or so. I wasn’t able to go home. I tried to get away but they caught me, and when they caught me they hurt me so bad. Later on, I was trafficked by other men. The physical abuse was horrible, but the real abuse was the mental abuse - the things they would say that would just stick and which you could never get from under. 

Pimps are very good at torture, they’re very good at manipulation. Some of them will do things like wake you in the middle of the night with a gun to your head. Others will pretend that they value you, and you feel like, “I’m Cinderella, and here comes my Prince Charming”. They seem so sweet and so charming and they tell you: “You just have to do this one thing for me and then you’ll get to the good part.” And you think, “My life has already been so hard, what’s a little bit more?” But you never ever do get to the good part. 

When people describe prostitution as being something that is glamorous, elegant, like in the story of Pretty Woman, well that doesn’t come close to it. A prostitute might sleep with five strangers a day. Across a year, that’s more than 1,800 men she’s having sexual intercourse or oral sex with. These are not relationships, no one’s bringing me any flowers here, trust me on that. They’re using my body like a toilet. 

And the johns - the clients - are violent. I’ve been shot five times, stabbed 13 times. I don’t know why those men attacked me, all I know is that society made it comfortable for them to do so. They brought their anger or whatever it was and they decided to wreak havoc on a prostitute, knowing I couldn’t go to the police and if I did I wouldn’t be taken seriously. I actually count myself very lucky. I knew some beautiful girls who were murdered out there on the streets.

I prostituted for 14 or 15 years before I did any drugs. But after a while, after you’ve turned as many tricks as you can, after you’ve been strangled, after someone’s put a knife to your throat or someone’s put a pillow over your head, you need something to put a bit of courage in your system. 

I was a prostitute for 25 years, and in all that time I never once saw a way out. But on 1 April 1997, when I was nearly 40 years old, a customer threw me out of his car. My dress got caught in the door and he dragged me six blocks along the ground, tearing all the skin off my face and the side of my body. 

I went to the County Hospital in Chicago and they immediately took me to the emergency room. Because of the condition I was in, they called in a police officer, who looked me over and said: “Oh I know her. She’s just a hooker. She probably beat some guy and took his money and got what she deserved.” And I could hear the nurse laughing along with him. They pushed me out into the waiting room as if I wasn’t worth anything, as if I didn’t deserve the services of the emergency room after all.

And it was at that moment, while I was waiting for the next shift to start and for someone to attend to my injuries, that I began to think about everything that had happened in my life. Up until that point I had always had some idea of what to do, where to go, how to pick myself up again. Suddenly it was like I had run out of bright ideas.

A doctor came and took care of me and she asked me to go and see social services in the hospital. What I knew about social services was they were anything but social. But they gave me a bus pass to go to a place called Genesis House, which was run by an awesome Englishwoman named Edwina Gateley, who became a great hero and mentor for me. She helped me turn my life around. It was a safe house, and I had everything that I needed there. I didn’t have to worry about paying for clothes, food, getting a job. They told me to take my time and stay as long as I needed - and I stayed almost two years. My face healed, my soul healed. I got Brenda back. 

Usually, when a woman gets out of prostitution, she doesn’t want to talk about it. What man will accept her as a wife? What person will hire her in their employment? And to begin with, after I left Genesis House, that was me too. I just wanted to get a job, pay my taxes and be like everybody else. But I started to do some volunteering with sex workers and to help a university researcher with her fieldwork. After a while I realised that nobody was helping these young ladies. Nobody was going back and saying, “That’s who I was, that’s where I was. This is who I am now. You can change too, you can heal too.” So in 2008, together with Stephanie Daniels-Wilson, we founded the Dreamcatcher Foundation. 

A dreamcatcher is a Native American object that you hang near a child’s cot. It is supposed to chase away children’s nightmares. That’s what we want to do - we want to chase away those bad dreams, those bad things that happen to young girls and women. The recent documentary film Dreamcatcher, directed by Kim Longinotto, showed the work that we do. We meet up with women who are still working on the street and we tell them, “There is a way out, we’re ready to help you when you’re ready to be helped.” We try to get through that brainwashing that says, “You’re born to do this, there’s nothing else for you.“ 

I also run after-school clubs with young girls who are exactly like I was in the 1970s. I can tell as soon as I meet a girl if she is in danger, but there is no fixed pattern. You might have one girl who’s quiet and introverted and doesn’t make eye contact. Then there might be another who’s loud and obnoxious and always getting in trouble. They’re both suffering abuse at home but they’re dealing with it in different ways - the only thing they have in common is that they are not going to talk about it. But in time they understand that I have been through what they’re going through, and then they talk to me about it.

People say different things about prostitution. Some people think that it would actually help sex workers more if it were decriminalized. I think it’s true to say that every woman has her own story. It may be OK for this girl, who is paying her way through law school, but not for this girl, who was molested as a child, who never knew she had another choice, who was just trying to get money to eat. 

But let me say this too. However the situation starts off for a girl, that’s not how the situation will end up. It might look OK now, the girl in law school might say she only has high-end clients that come to her through an agency, that she doesn’t work on the streets but arranges to meet people in hotel rooms, but the first time that someone hurts her, that’s when she really sees her situation for what it is. You always get that crazy guy slipping through and he has three or four guys behind him, and they force their way into your room and gang rape you, and take your phone and all your money. And suddenly you have no means to make a living and you’re beaten up too. That is the reality of prostitution.

Three years ago, I became the first woman in the state of Illinois to have her convictions for prostitution wiped from her record. It was after a new law was brought in, following lobbying from the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, a group that seeks to shift the criminal burden away from the victims of sexual trafficking. Women who have been tortured, manipulated and brainwashed should be treated as survivors, not criminals.

So I am here to tell you - there is life after so much damage, there is life after so much trauma. There is life after people have told you that you are nothing, that you are worthless and that you will never amount to anything. There is life - and I’m not just talking about a little bit of life. There is a lot of life.

#tutorial

My GIF making process!

I’ve been asked many times for a tutorial, but because I get really detailed, I always get overwhelmed by the idea. But I finally decided to buckle down! 

Just so you know: I don’t use PSDs in this, and I don’t import layers to frames or anything like that. I like the hard way—at least in gif making, I believe you get higher quality gifs. Join me as I show you how to make gifs by loading videos directly into the Photoshop timeline and my coloring and sharpening techniques.

Tools used:

Mac OS X (only necessary for the first step, and there are other ways around it with a PC)

Adobe Photoshop

YouTube Purchases (any streaming service will work)

Topics covered:

Obtaining the Source Material

Loading the video file into Photoshop

Prepping, Cropping, and Resizing the Media

Adjustment Layers

Sharpening

Exporting

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