marvel's biggest bone-liner

[RobClock]

Ryan Pequin, former storyboard artist for Regular Show, and Infinity Train, Director of Summer Camp Island, and author of ThreeWordPhrase, has put up his college sketchbooks on Gumroad for FREE or an optional donation and I think that's just dang nifty and they're worth checking out so maybe do that

https://7715922644845.gumroad.com/l/tjvpu

[RobClock]

also I just want to state for the record, "hawk tuah" is not the sound of spitting, it's the sound of hocking a loogie. if somebody hocked a loogie on my dick I'd be insulted

It was an at best moderately amusing street interview and, you know, good for her for making money on arbitrary notoriety but also yeah thats the sound of clearing your throat of snot which isn't very sexy and call me a pig but she's not particularly attractive and now she wants to separate herself from the meme that is the only reason anyone knows who she is and is the basis of her stupid podcast brand?? Get over yourself sweetheart.

[RobClock]

meme culture was a mistake the internet sucks now

[Slurpee]

aw :3

[Slurpee]

I'm pretty sure I listen to ok go wrong

you're not supposed to just enjoy their songs as music, right? you're supposed to watch the music videos and go "wowwwwww, haha!"

but I genuinely like like 5 or 6 of their songs

[RobClock]

aw :3

When I met Kate Beaton I told her that she and Ryan were my two great inspirations/favourite artists and she sang his praises, said he was the reason she made a live journal which would become Hark A Vagrant

I really wish I could get Ryan's autograph too lol

[PhantomCatClock]

really really strong goth original character: aurelio swoltaire

[RobClock]

I got confirmation from Ryan that he was referring to Kate Beaton there

https://bsky.app/profile/ryanpequin.bsky.social/post/3lafacjtojv2v

[zl]

like that, do you ever feel like that?

kind of

There's a lot going on, and I want it to connect into a coherent story, something that could give a clear idea of what comes next. But I can't tie it all together.

It feels like the best of times, in some ways, in some circles. Like there's this collective revelation about the ways we've been bound by definitions written by violence. There's been a dissection of misogyny, of hierarchy, of power, of abuse, and it's not just recognizing these things, but it's actually made a shift, revealed a way out. A population of people who want to shed a legacy of cruelty, and to instead love and support each other. And an idea to make a better world not through combat, but mutual uplifting. And it's happening, in some pockets, in some relationships, in some people.

It feels new, at least in some of the language, in the specificity, in the precise examination of how the world is and how it came to be like this. I'm arguing against a part of me that's like, "Well, you know who else has argued for liberation through love? Friend, I have an old book and good news." But it's not just love I'm talking about. It's an understanding of hate, of generational currents of pain, and of recognizing the man-made origins of concepts that were called "natural."

I mean specifically, when I'm reading about radical anthropology or socialism or police abolition or restorative justice, I see this vanguard movement of societal improvement, a vision for a better world, grounded in the world we're in now, with actual steps that can be taken, not requiring a war, not confined to idle fantasy. And it's not like every part of it needs to be understood - there's an underlying message of communal welfare; that by helping others we help ourselves, and that by giving freedoms we become more free. People are living it; people are doing that work.

Which is encouraging, but it's also just a small part of what's going on. A small part that isn't in the driver's seat. The car is speeding in the wrong direction, it's accelerating in the wrong directions, and it's unclear whether all the good work in the world is even able to slow down the rate of acceleration.

I get messed up, thinking about species extinction. Species that are made on a geologic timescale. We're losing thousands a year. What could possibly be worth that? The existence of a species on earth is beyond valuation, it's the treasure of a world we've found no equal to in the observed universe. There's something so grotesquely, catastrophically wrong with the world order that humanity has created. And the sheer momentum of it has snowballed into something beyond our capacity to repair. And the reward for all that damage, in the richest country on earth, is a population that feels bitter and harried and forced to make it on their own. Why should we help others, when nobody is helping us? A culture that thinks the best kind of person must be someone who requires no help from anyone.

When I think about entrenched individualism and the machinery of modern life, of the all the ACs switching on in a heat wave, burning energy to shield ourselves from all the energy we've already burnt, I feel like I've got to turn away from that broad view, from problems I can't begin to face. But when I take a narrow view of my own life, I remember that there's something else happening, something I'm ignoring.

I, by necessity, have felt a need to judge my value by my small contributions - if I can help a friend feel better, if I can be kind to a stranger, if I can make something that people enjoy or find meaningful, if I can be there for people I love. But a part of me feels guilty for considering that sufficient. "Leaving the world a slightly better place." I don't think I have it in me to do more, but it still feels self-serving to be satisfied with making a few people feel better on a sinking ship.

Existentially, we're all just passing through, we'll all be leaving. Our time alive is our time alive, and our experiences of each moment are the raw material of life. Improving those moments, for someone... isn't that the point of the large-scale work, anyway? The quality of those moments for a great many people? Maybe we can even extend that consideration to the experiences of the other animal awarenesses on Earth. My cat, for example - isn't it worth something to give her good moments during her brief time alive? Is it really so bad if I'm only helping a handful of moments for a handful of people?

But there's the suffering, and there's the cruelty of looking away from it, a reproachful thought juts in. I can't rest comfortably in any self-evaluation, I chastise and chase myself from perspective to perspective. Is that what good people do? Or just ineffectual people?

What can I do when I'm jarringly reminded of massive momentum of suffering in the world, as it spreads through people and crashes into the Earth? I guess I did get a little too comfortable after all, for it to feel so shocking.

[Slurpee]

kind of

wish I knew what to say other than that I really, really feel you

[Slurpee]

hope that doesn't sound flippant, I really mean it
I tried to articulate myself better but kept finding myself veering into heuristics and aphorisms that feel a bit patronizing and vulgar and not quite capturing the essence of the matter

[Slurpee]

oh
on a lighter note, I originally came here to post that I found one of my white whales 🎉

check out this ad:

isn't that a cool ad?

I hope so, I've been looking for it for about 20 years.
yes, just the ad.

I knew I'd seen it in a magazine but I could not for the life of me remember which or when or what it was for, or find it despite digging through all the magazines I owned multiple times as a teen, and nobody ever knew what I was talking about

"cmon dude it's a guy holding a pipe in a parking garage and there's a girl behind him and he's looking at an indistinct monster running through the background. it's such a striking and evocative image, I cannot be the only one who saw and remembers it"

finally found it this morning on a whim after a string of adhd bullshit led me to scouring random issues of old video game magazines on the internet archive over breakfast (far from the first time I've done this)

turns out it was an ad for "ifuse", which isn't around anymore, and a lot of things and websites have gone by that name since, but I did some digging and it appears that the ifuse that this was advertising was... 🥁
https://web.archive.org/web/20000302090643/http://iserver.contentproject.com/ifusebeta/popculprit/1,1430,fast_news,00.html" https://web.archive.org/web/20000302090658/http://iserver.contentproject.com:80/iFuseBeta/aboutus/index.htm
an extremely short-lived pop culture news website

... k. well, cool ad, anyway.

[VCRClock]

posting this because I spent an indeterminate amount of time on my phone writing something even more long winded and shitty and deleting it to come up with this, even though we're talking about cool magazine ads now:

We're just in the place, like mice who have plunged into Best Viral Home Mouse Trap 2023, that we've realized that we've created problems for ourselves for which we do not have a ready solution. This puts us in league with other dumb animals, who we can't blame too much for hurting themselves and others when they don't know how not to. We blame ourselves because we think we should know better than to do that, to get stuck in the trap, but apparently we don't "know better" enough to get right out.

The problems are too big for one person to solve on their own. They also can't be solved by doing your own bit, if every other person out there is not also doing their bit, and they're not. Doing more than your own bit is not straightforward, and possibly no more effective than doing your own bit, depending on circumstances which may or may not be in your control. (How popular are you?)

Different people have different opportunities to change things. If Company X is doing something wasteful, somebody who works for Company X can do more to change that than somebody protesting outside. But if nobody protests, there's no reason for Company X to change.

Obviously we're dealing with entities bigger than Company X that are run by people who seem to be in the business of ignoring popular opinion, but I think we'll be in better ideological shape after it all collapses a little

[PhantomCatClock]

my three-day-weekend vow of silence has come to an end and i did not have any of my demands met. going to hold my breath and airfast for the next one

[PannacottaClock]

i am going to tough out this headache

[PhantomCatClock]

i would urinate if i had to go through that

[PhantomCatClock]

[Slurpee]

I just read an article about epilepsy and now I'm wondering why there isn't a plug-in or accessibility setting to limit flashing lights

there's all kinds of developer guidelines and recommendations for how to not potentially kill about 0.03% of people who view your website, and I feel like you could make it a lot less work and let a lot of people be a lot less dependent on the benevolence of every web developer in the world if there was a thing that helped with that universally

and I feel like I could do this in like a summer
but I also feel like it's probably something that would better be implemented in the kernel

the Harding test, which is used to detect if video may cause harm to people with photosensitive epilepsy, is just already an algorithm.
I feel like you could load the next like 10 seconds of screen output data to a buffer and run it through the Harding test (or some nonproprietary variation of it), and if it fails, dim the luminosity and slow the framerate of the playback until it's passing again. yes? no?

too much processor overhead maybe?

[PhantomCatClock]

I was going to say, you don't know which patch of squares the user is looking at. Like, would a kernel-level one see a 3x5pixel version of potential triggering flashes in your simpsons forum signature and black that out


but the the rest makes sense and is good, that's a nice extra bit of research. just like, a firefox extension or something





one thing I've been doing lately is admiring how fucking expensive it is to be blind on the internet. There are very helpful devices. If you want a good one, it's three thousand dollars. You can settle for a worse one, though. That'll only set you back three thousand dollars. These refreshable Braille displays are so priced, it is said, because people don't buy them. Governments do. Actual blind people borrow them from their local library, or get a grant to help pay for one for themselves——the companies making them will never make the product cost less because you can charge the government whatever you want. Other people's money. Even linux support for blindness is preeeeeeetty shitty. "JAWS" is probably the best* (most accessible) software for screenreading/piping stuff to your braille display on Windows. Software that helps blind people use the expensive hardware made for blind people!

..It's a hundred dollars per year. You can get a lifetime subscription for more than $1000, less than $2000. Forgot the actual number.

I'm only beginning my journey to make a small change there, but I BRING IT UP BECAUSE the harding test is proprietary because eat shit and die, vulnerable people

[PhantomCatClock]

https://hardingtest.com/pricing

drag the slider around and then click the quality buttons if you want to see why they haven't made this available yet.



yes, you should make something yourself and make it very very open source. holy fuck, those prices.