I See A Lot Of Posts Saying "teach Boys About Consent".

Imagine being a fly in World War 1 or something and telling one of your fly friends “Oh yeah, that area over there? We don’t go there because that’s where the creatures that are 100x bigger than us have gathered into groups of tens of thousands to try and annihilate each other, sometimes with weapons even bigger than they are, in a conflict that destroys not only them but the land itself. You might want to go somewhere else tbh”

It's crazy how giant squids and sperm whales just have like giant kaiju battles down in the deepest depths everyday and it's real

Fun fact about the early Catholic church is that, despite spending generations being persecuted by the Roman empire, it took less than 15 years under Theodosius I to go from “the empire is Catholic now” to “and also every other religion is banned.” You can literally read St. Augustine move from “state religious persecution is unacceptable” to “state religious persecution is cool actually” over his lifetime as Catholicism came to power. I’m sure there’s no broader lessons to be learned there

The AI tech bubble finally bursting is going to be both catastrophic and very funny.

When we talk about men’s issues, it feels like it’s always the same handful of things (high suicide rate, drafting, divorce court, etc.) and even then it always feels like a token gesture. This is something that I always felt like us leftists need to talk more about, precisely because it’s something the movement actively needs to fix within itself. As a cishet man, it can be very strange to see how, no matter how much I value consent and the happiness of my partner, and no matter how deeply I understand that, as good as sex feels, a fulfilling emotional connection is more important, my sexuality is still seen as evil by a pretty big chunk of the movement. And of course, I understand why this is. Men have a long history of rapey behavior and right now it’s sorta getting better and worse at the same time, with lots of guys learning to confront and unlearn their misogyny and lots of other guys looking to people like Andrew Tate for solutions to their loneliness. I don’t think activism should be reactionary though. I mean what good do we accomplish if our “activism” is just reacting to societal issues that make us upset in whatever way feels right to our monkey brains? We should have an ideal that we’re striving towards, a specific vision of a better world that we have a plan for achieving. I know that to me, that ideal is a world where no one is ashamed of their sexuality while also still knowing where it is appropriate vs inappropriate to display it, and that we trust each other and that trust is earned because we’re all tuned in to each other’s wants and desires. That ideal doesn’t change depending on how mad or happy with men and/or women I am.

I cannot express how jarring it was after being raised by a "Porn Addiction Coach" to get into a relationship with a woman and come face to face with the fact that she did actually want me to sexually desire her.

Like, in Evangelical Purity Culture, male desire was basically poison. It was a threat. It was this constant temptation that would destroy everything. And even after leaving, in the sort of queer, feminist spaces i spend most of my time in that wasn't something that pretty much anyone was spending time actively dissuading me from feeling.

But my desire is good. It's not something that I'm being accepted in spite of. It's a positive thing. It's a bonus. Not even just vanilla stuff, all the stuff I'd convinced myself were these weird terrible desires that were shameful to have.

It honestly took me over a decade to fully accept that. To stop dissociating during sex and confront that I was, in fact, being a massive perv and that was fantastic and preferable and that I could accept that into my self-image without shame or self hatred.

But it's important to do. It's important to leave relationships that don't welcome that part of you. To know that your sexuality is valuable and valid and worth owning and celebrating. Because the alternative is just...not being. Either existing as yourself and repressing the part of your identity that is sexual or allowing that sexuality to exist but turning off your self while it does.

What makes this even funnier is if you’re a rich guy and do this the actual poker players will shower you with praise and stroke your ego (especially when you win hands through sheer variance) and say you’re great and to keep doing what you’re doing because they’re just siphoning money from you and want you to keep it up. Like, that’s the original definition of a “whale” in the gambling sense

no you dont get it... shadow the hedgehog was literally used over and over by people he should be able to trust to further their own selfish desires but despite this he was made in the name of love and always manages to find himself and do whats right for both the sake of the people he cares about and the sake of himself...... hes literally the dark guardian angel of the world

Congratulations on finishing Arc 1! I've been following this comic since pretty much the beginning (I remember when everyone thought Alinua was a cat girl because of how her ears looked under her hood). This comic has come a long way since then, and it's been a pleasure and inspiration to watch your journey!

So with Arc 1 done, how do you feel? Any thoughts about the early days of the comic, or some lessons you've learned? What are you most looking forward to in Arc 2?

(Side note- thank you for Erin. My brain chews on him regularly and I gave a presentation on him in speech class. He brings me immense joy)

Whoof! I feel like it's slowly sinking in, tbh. I'm pretty bad at appreciating my own accomplishments - I have a tendency to Fire And Forget to avoid getting bogged down by "oh I'd have done this better now" or "eek I don't like how I did that" or "oh no this aged badly" or "what if I just redid it but Better this time" - but I've gotten better at accepting all those things as Not The End Of The World and they do not make me a Bad Artist or Bad Person, and as a result, I'm able to look back and just be happy about this one. It's an odd feeling.

At some point in the last several chapters I decided the ending of Arc 1 needed to feel like a conclusion. Not a full series finale, but a season finale. Character arcs needed to hit points of resolution; setup needed to pay off; cool moves needed to get some airtime. It's not in my nature to end stories, but as I worked on this arc I got comfy with the idea that an ending wasn't mechanically locking in the last part of a story and saying Nothing Past This Point, it was resolving the major elements of the story that cried out for completeness. Stories can have many endings before they're actually done, and in order for Arc 1 to feel like a complete thing, I knew it needed to bring those dangling plot threads home.

The fun thing about resolving chunks of the plot is those resolutions open the door for entirely new problems, and I'm excited to play with those! Part of why I wanted to make sure I had the rest of the year off was so I could take my time and just sit in the new status quo, because freeform creative idea-spinning is my favorite part of the writing process, and it's a rare treat for me to have such a wide-open swath of possibility ahead of me.

so what's the take on epstein 5 years out. did he really do it?

oooh have you ever done a post about the ridiculous mandatory twist endings in old sci-fi and horror comics? Like when the guy at the end would be like "I saved the Earth from Martians because I am in fact a Vensuvian who has sworn to protect our sister planet!" with no build up whatsoever.

Yeah, that is a good question - why do some scifi twist endings fail?

As a teenager obsessed with Rod Serling and the Twilight Zone, I bought every single one of Rod Serling’s guides to writing. I wanted to know what he knew.

The reason that Rod Serling’s twist endings work is because they “answer the question” that the story raised in the first place. They are connected to the very clear reason to even tell the story at all. Rod’s story structures were all about starting off with a question, the way he did in his script for Planet of the Apes (yes, Rod Serling wrote the script for Planet of the Apes, which makes sense, since it feels like a Twilight Zone episode): “is mankind inherently violent and self-destructive?” The plot of Planet of the Apes argues the point back and forth, and finally, we get an answer to the question: the Planet of the Apes was earth, after we destroyed ourselves. The reason the ending has “oomph” is because it answers the question that the story asked. 

My friend and fellow Rod Serling fan Brian McDonald wrote an article about this where he explains everything beautifully. Check it out. His articles are all worth reading and he’s one of the most intelligent guys I’ve run into if you want to know how to be a better writer.

According to Rod Serling, every story has three parts: proposal, argument, and conclusion. Proposal is where you express the idea the story will go over, like, “are humans violent and self destructive?” Argument is where the characters go back and forth on this, and conclusion is where you answer the question the story raised in a definitive and clear fashion. 

The reason that a lot of twist endings like those of M. Night Shyamalan’s and a lot of the 1950s horror comics fail is that they’re just a thing that happens instead of being connected to the theme of the story. 

One of the most effective and memorable “final panels” in old scifi comics is EC Comics’ “Judgment Day,” where an astronaut from an enlightened earth visits a backward planet divided between orange and blue robots, where one group has more rights than the other. The point of the story is “is prejudice permanent, and will things ever get better?” And in the final panel, the astronaut from earth takes his helmet off and reveals he is a black man, answering the question the story raised. 

❗️Nevada voters - this is going to sound weird, but PICK UP YOUR PHONE if an unknown number calls.

**Lots of signatures on ballots are not matching and your ballot may need to be fixed.

TLDR; yes, signature matching is an antiquated way to verify ballots but it is still being used. Reportedly thousands of ballots here need to be cured. Answer the phone!