Anonymous asked:
zjemptv answered:
I’d enable comments if anyone could explain why random fuckwits should be entitled to have their incoherent trash featured adjacent to my hard work <3
Anonymous asked:
When do we plan to do it?
Anonymous, I’m not a Republic serial villain. Do you seriously think I’d explain my masterstroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome? We did it thirty-five minutes ago.
Anonymous asked: Do you believe a man can be a feminist even if he doesn’t get outraged, or as outraged, as you do about certain things? The whole “check your privilege” saying seems to suggest the idea that men who don’t get behind a specific complaint are just being blind to the plight of women, and I’m curious on your take. I’d view myself as absolutely a feminist, yet I don’t really agree with the outrage at certain incidents.
Well, I don’t think that outrage—or emotion—is the best metric for feminism, especially because characterizing it that way makes it seem like it’s more about the feelings people have, and not about the very real and systematic inequalities that exist because of gender. People certainly do get angry when they are treated badly, and I think that’s understandable, but I don’t think you need to be hulk out or simulate more emotion than you feel in order to be a good ally; a calm, firm declaration of support can be just as powerful (and sometimes more so, when speaking to other men).
That said, I think your question is about more than just whether or not your anger-o-meter hits exact the same number as some of the women around you; it’s about not understanding why they’re so upset in the first place. My concern, based on your admittedly brief question, is that when you hear a woman say “check your privilege,” what you’re hearing is, “I demand you validate my anger immediately even though you have no idea why this situation warrants it!” I think you’re skipping a couple important steps there, and it’s leading you to a conclusion that is alienating (to both you and the feminists around you, I’m guessing).
First, I think it’s important to realize that feminists are definitely not a monolithic block; They’re a wide-ranging group of women (and men), and they’re going to have different experiences, perspectives and takes on things. (Ask me about Donglegate! Or on second thought, really don’t, but know that my take on it is different from many other feminists!) Even among feminists, not everyone is going to agree about the relative importance of different incidents.
That said, as a guy who cares about these issues, you still have to recognize that when you don’t understand why women are getting upset, it’s very likely because they’ve had very different experiences from you that are informing their responses.
Take a common example: Many men don’t understand why making public comments about women being attractive could be perceived as unpleasant. Over at Gawker, Tom Scocca offered a useful analogy in the wake of President Obama’s recent “good-looking” gaffe that I like to call “cheeseburger privilege”:
Pretend a compliment on your looks is a cheeseburger. Who doesn’t like a delicious cheeseburger? Dudes love cheeseburgers. Now suppose that every time you asked for anything, all day long, you got a cheeseburger. Hey, good morning, sleepyhead, here’s a cup of cheeseburger to wake you up. Lunchtime is a cheeseburger with a cheeseburger. Smoke break: Light up a cheeseburger. Get home and open that envelope from the Department of Motor Vehicles, and instead of your new license, they mailed you a cheeseburger. Looking for the remote? Have a cheeseburger.
Some of these are really inherently unappetizing cheeseburgers, too, by the way, cold school-lunch gristleburgers with unmelted cheese, but that barely even registers, because no one in years has even asked you if you want another fucking cheeseburger. You’re a dude; you get cheeseburgers. Everybody give this dude a cheeseburger! And then the president of the United States comes by, and he praises your professional performance—as you do richly deserve, on your merits—and then he says, “Give it up for the cheeseburger guy!” and he shoves a cheeseburger in your mouth, in front of everybody.
A better (and more practically useful) way to think about privilege is that it is that when a woman says “check your privilege,” she’s saying, “think about the fact that your cheeseburger-eating experience (read: life experience) is so different from mine that you may not have the context to understand why this seemingly benign act of handing me a cheeseburger (read: source of the controversy) just made me flip out.”
If you want to take it a second and even more useful level, “check your privilege” is a call to action: Rather than just concluding that women are getting upset for inexplicable/silly reasons or just like to get angry because something something, try a more generous approach: Assume that they really do have a good reason that you don’t quite understand, and see it as an opportunity to investigate and discover what that is.
Or if you want to think about it in a slightly more comic-booky way, realize that half of the human population lives inside a slightly different dimension from you, on that is invisibly laid over top of the one that you see. When feminists get upset about something, consider that there are all sorts of forces and powers in play inside that dimension, that are affecting women all the time in ways that just aren’t visible to you.
But the good news is that this sort of extra-dimensional vision is a skill you can develop. If you spend a lot of time listening to women and tuning into their perspectives, your ability to see into that dimension will improve. Acknowledging that there are things you can’t see—and trying to see them—is what’s crucial, even if at the end of the day you still end up deciding that you disagree about a particular issue. Again, not every woman will agree about what’s happening and what it means either.
(N.B: Notice that I said “listen to women” rather than “talk to women” because tenor and construction matters here—especially because women encounter a lot of men who treat their “invisible” experiences as imaginary. Saying, “I don’t get why you’re so upset about X, Y, Z” can easily be read as a dismissal or a shut down; you’re not creating room for women to give you information, you’re filling it with your own information (i.e. I think this is silly). Asking a question rather than a statement—something like “Can you help me understand why this is upsetting?”—invites women to talk and creates room for them to answer.
Same pro tip applies to anyone who wants to be an interviewer/journalist, or even a good date, for that matter. In a world where a lot of people are just waiting for the other person to shut up so they can start talking again, listening can be a powerful act. And the results can be revelatory.
The Internet.
I THOUGHT A PROMOTIONAL POSTER AT MY COLLEGE LOOKED FAMILIAR
AND THERE’S NOT EVEN CREDIT OR ANYTHING TO NEDROID (but there’s the school’s watermark at the bottom! - which I blurred out to keep them anonymous unless the artist wants to know).
(photo taken on my phone, so apologies for the blurry quality)
“How can we promote our arts and crafts fair? I know! Stolen art!”
OH COME ON
LOTS of Transformers from IDW today, including a reference-heavy issue of MTMTE! Not a sitcom watcher? Don’t pay a heck of a lot of attention to Swerve’s shoulder over the course of four frickin’ years? TFWiki’s here to help! Where everybody knows your name - ‘cos we turned off anonymous editing a while back.
ALSO THIS WEEK!
COMBINER HUNTERS #1 - “An Uneventful Night”
WINDBLADE #5 - “Race Against the Light”
and TRANSFORMERS VS. G.I. JOE #8 - “Pax Megatronus”
(If you enjoy my regular detailed write-ups of IDW titles for TFWiki, please consider showing your support on Patreon - you wouldn’t believe how much time this takes when they release four issues on one day!)
In 2009, I wrote this comic strip!
Then, lots of people asked for the bumper sticker pictured in the comic – “I was an honor student; I don’t know what happened” – so I made it too!
There is a particular trajectory that sometimes happens with funny phrases. They become popular; then they become common; then they become anonymous.
Recently I was talking with someone who started a new T-shirt website. Their designs were all copies of common slogans, including one that originated with a friend of mine. I pointed this out to them, and they honestly didn’t see the difference between someone specific having created a particular design, and anyone at all being able to make and sell their own version of it because they saw it out in the world somewhere.
Think of any slogan you’ve seen on multiple different T-shirts or stickers, in gift shops, or at conventions, or in truck stops, or tourist stores. Who was the first person to think of the phrase “FBI – Female Body Inspector”? I don’t know how you’d ever find that out.
If you were to put that on a shirt of your own, nobody would stop you. It’s neither novel nor artful, but you could do it all you like. To be unique, you’d have to drill down the parody well even further – e.g., Flannel & Beard Inspector.
But somebody did come up with that phrase, and somebody was the first to put it on a T-shirt, and somebody else did copy them. The phrase “female body inspector” is not trademarked in the United States, according to a USPTO search I just did.
So, because there’s no trademark, and the originator is not vigorously pursuing copyright claims against other versions, it’s essentially impossible now for anyone to claim ownership of it. (Unless someone trademarked a particular visual design incorporating those words – but the only reason I could think of for that would be if it were in a TV show or something, and featured a character or something else from the show.)
Maybe that’s okay! Maybe the culture is benefited by everyone in the world being allowed to make “Female Body Inspector” T-shirts to their hearts’ content. It’s not something I personally want to buy, or wear, or make; I don’t want to hawk anything that I don’t feel is original or artful, and also, come on. But maybe the ability to sell that design royalty-free is what’s keeping horrible tourist shops in business. God bless them, may they sell sleepy-sombrero-man vulgar cactus pots until the earth opens up to swallow them whole.
ANYWAY. I made the above sticker. People rip it off all the time. But yesterday I found a Zazzle seller who went one amazingly lazy step further:
They didn’t quite copy my slogan, they just put my own photograph of the product onto a series of mugs.
Probably they found the photo on imgur or somewhere, and so to them it’s just one more anonymous piece of fodder to be mindlessly thrown onto every imaginable print-on-demand item in the vain hope of making a few pennies here, a few pennies there. The only real winner is probably Zazzle.
I complained about these other Zazzle products using my slogan, but I don’t know if they’ll side with me – when it comes to copyright claims, trying to prove ownership of an un-trademarked slogan presents a certain burden. I do think this particular claim (about the product above) is a good one since they’re literally using my photograph, and photographs are protected under copyright.
It’s worth fighting because having “vigorously defended” one’s intellectual property is a necessary part of proving in court (if it were to ever come to that) that your IP qualifies for protection in the first place, as opposed to being simply lost to the public commons like “Female Body Inspector.”
Besides spending loads of money on trademarks or truckloads of money on litigation, though, there’s little any of us can do. We can send emails, we can make snarky tweets, we can hover over our ideas like dragons on a pile of gold.
But in the end, speaking completely pragmatically, the best way to ensure one’s creative livelihood even in an age where ideas are so easily copyable is to always be creating, always coming up with new ideas. Staying one step ahead.
It’s with that in mind that I’d like to present for sale an all-new, original mug design. Check it out on Zazzle.
Happy holidays! An anonymous fear submitted to deep dark fears. Just trying to draw like Helen Jo today. The new Deep Dark Fears book is
available now at
Amazon,
B&N,
IndieBound,
iBooks,
Google Books, your local bookstore, and wherever books are sold!
joshreads asked:
US evangelicals think girls with long hair are pretty, and being pretty is what girls are for. Therefore, a girl with short hair is signifying that they are rejecting the strict gender roles that God has given us.
That’s basically it.
rawr means ‘have you SEEN chris pratt’ in dinosaur
Thanks to an anonymous user who pointed me to the source of this great comic I posted yesterday.
Egads, I’ve been found out!
Remember, all dumb questions a guy refuses to answer actually reveal a hidden truth. It never has anything to do with being annoyed with dumb questions.
There’s a reason I turn anonymous questions off on my ask box.
Sometimes I forget and turn them back on. Because most of them are fine! But then some coward comes along and destroys everything, as per usual.
zeromayhem
siphersaysstuff
Who is your dad, now?
I WILL reblog this video every damn time I see it because this kids is A GENIUS
