Light Musings

I'm so sorry for your loss.

You process grief slowly, at your own pace and in your own way.

Time will heal, or at least scab over the wound. And in the meantime, you keep on going because the world will keep on going.

It's okay to cry, okay not to cry. When my father died I didn't cry for him for months, until one day I was reading a story by a friend and someone died in the story I'd only met a few pages earlier and I found myself weeping like a baby. And then I started to surface from the numbness and the pain.

Don't let anyone tell you what they think you should be feeling. And if they do tell you, ignore them.

I consider it to be, if not *the* reason, one of the reasons I’m such a staunch supporter of the trans community. I was 14 years old and it opened my eyes to a whole community I knew nothing about. Thank you for your writing, it changed my life. I don’t care if you respond to this but I wanted you to know how big of a difference writing one person in a comic made to me.

I’m glad it helped.

Maupin cleverly had the main character be a young straight woman newly arrived in SF from the Midwest, but there were several prominent gay characters, especially Michael “Mouse” Tolliver who gradually becomes her best friend. (And no spoilers, but one of the main characters is revealed as trans.)

This really shaped my attitude toward queer people — it was fuckin' 1980, no one I knew was out, there was almost no gay representation in media aside from the Village People, and homophobia and slurs were mainstream. I wasn’t actively homophobic, but if I thought of gay people it was stereotypes and probably a bit of revulsion. Tales of the City really opened my eyes.

Zanis Waldheims, 1970′s

After mass protests, the President of Pakistan was forced to resign, along with many other members of the ruling party.

Worldwide, hundreds of people – many rich and powerful – were arrested.

Billions in stolen assets were returned to the people.

And 82 countries changed their laws to crack down on the wealth hoarding the papers revealed.

(Source here)

To say the Panama Papers accomplished nothing is an insult to Daphne Galizia’s memory. Her work, and the work of the hundreds of other journalists who contributed to the Papers, changed the world.

Disinformation like this is designed to discourage you, to make you feel you’re powerless against the monsters of the world. They want you to feel that way, because they are terrified of your power to make change.

(...and you don't want to join 20 new websites)

First, get an RSS reader*:

Desktop: Feedbro (browser extension), QuiteRSS, Raven Reader

Android: Feeder

iOS/Mac: NetNewsWire

You'll be able to make a custom feed to follow blogs, webcomics, social media feeds, podcasts, news, and other stuff on the web all in one place. To follow something, find its "feed URL"-- often marked by an icon that looks like this ↓-- and paste it into your reader of choice as a new feed.

Some feed URLs for social media:

Twitter: Feedbro can use Twitter profile URLs as feed URLs. Otherwise, use nitter.net/username/rss (or other Nitter instance) (You can get a CSV file of all the accounts you follow using "Download a user's friends list" on Tweetbeaver)

Tumblr: Use username.tumblr.com/rss or username.tumblr.com/tagged/my%20art/rss to follow a blog's "my art" tag (as an example)

Cohost: Use username.cohost.org/rss/public (WIP feature)

Mastodon: Use instance.url/@­username.rss

Deviantart: Info here

Spacehey: Info here

Youtube: Go to a channel in a web browser, view page source, and use Ctrl-F/Command-F to find a link that starts with "https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id="

Instagram: Feedbro can use Instagram profile and hashtag URLs as feed URLs. Otherwise, Instagram doesn't have RSS feeds, and due to aggressive rate limiting on their part, it's not so simple to generate a feed URL.

Facebook: Feedbro can use public Facebook group/page URLs as feed URLs.

(If you know an artist who exclusively posts to Instagram, you may want to gently suggest that they crosspost elsewhere...)

Also see how to find the RSS feed URL for almost any site. Try using public RSS-Bridge instances or Happyou Final Scraper to generate feeds for sites that don't have them (Pillowfort, Patreon, etc).