this is going to be a total clustercuss

Julance Day 11: The infinite universe

I’m in love with how this turned outttt

Please give a warm welcome to our Skaters as they take the ice—we are so excited to make something beautiful with this group of incredible creatives 💙⛸️

Thank you nananunonana for the lovely art ✨

❄️

For our show opener, we have our amazing cover artist, @alexsiple 🩵

Next to the ice is our first flight of Page Artists:

@badsongpetey @angrybbuing

Let’s hear your cheers for our second flight of Page Artists:

@eimqo @ladyxagh

Give it up for our third flight of Page Artists:

@oliverniko @pillsopa @pokkibon

Last but not least, our final flight of Page Artists:

@somie @zephyrine-gale

Please welcome our Comic Artists to the ice:

@illumous

An exhibition program isn’t complete without a good prop or two—introducing our Merch Artists:

@abinitioart @mirarasol @patapoulpe-art

We love a skating duet! Please welcome our Spot Artists:

@thelolaveart

Moving onto the writing discipline, give it up for our first flight of Story Writers:

@haiang @inbetween-lines @keijae

Please welcome our second flight of Story Writers to the ice:

@makkareads @superplatonicyearning @wormdomination

And to close out our show, our Alternative Contributors:

Taking the ice in our Story Writer discipline is Mari! Why do they keep coming back to YOI?

Also, more often than you might think, they’re not actually promoting bigotry so much as “didn’t consider all the implications of something” or just used words that were polite then but considered offensive now.

Everyone writes about characters "not meeting Character's gaze." Let’s retire it for a minute.

• A smile that doesn’t reach the eyes • Holding eye contact a beat too long • Laughing half a second too late • Over-correcting posture when addressed • Clearing their throat before answering • Adjusting sleeves, cuffs, jewelry repeatedly • A visible swallow before speaking • Exhaling through the nose instead of responding • Looking at the exit mid-conversation • Nodding too quickly

I'm working on my second book right now, about the ~18,000 German, Austrian, and Polish Jews who fled to Shanghai between ~1938 and 1941, and who stayed there until ~1946-1950.

I'm working heavily with memoirs written by people who spent the war years in Shanghai, and as I reach the end of each one, the writer and their families are trying to figure out where to move next after they discern that the Shanghai of the future wouldn't be overly friendly to foreigners (which, some of them recognized, made perfect sense).

They weighed their options. Only the very old wished to return to Germany, Austria, and Poland. Many regretted it once they did. Some went to Israel after it declared statehood. Many more expressed that they didn't want to move to another war zone where life may be even harder than it was in Shanghai.

Some of them spent a few years in Australia, and then relocated to the USA.

Throughout these sources, Jewish refugees and Displaced Persons speak of America as though it is their destiny; their fate. They believed that they would eventually make it to America, regardless of the Paper Walls situation of the late 1930s.

Throughout the war they prayed for a US victory. When American planes reached Shanghai, they cheered the bombers even when the "Designated Area" in which they lived took a direct hit. They mourned President Roosevelt, and when they finally made it to America, they felt free.

They felt safe. They felt as though they were staring boundless opportunity in the eye after spending so long in (metaphorical) chains.

There's an episode of Derry Girls where President Clinton traveled to Derry to make a speech about the NI Peace Process. I remember in that episode, the symbolic value of the POTUS traveling to Northern Ireland. The way it gave everyone so much hope. That episode makes me so sad to rewatch.

The USA was a symbol of hope for those characters, their experiences based on the lived experiences of series creator Lisa McGee.

In many ways, for many millions of people, that version of America never existed. My grandmother and her parents were Holocaust refugees had successfully fled to the USA. Shortly upon their arrival they took a road trip through the American South. My grandmother was so horrified by the way she saw black Americans being treated that she never traveled south of the Mason-Dixon Line again.

Even as black soldiers were fighting against White Supremacy in Europe, they were forced to do so in segregated troops. And in late 1940s/early 1950s America, no black, Hispanic, or Asian Americans were sailing into San Francisco with wide optimistic tear-blurred eyes. That America wasn't real. America was a place of violence, unfreedom, lack of agency, violence, and rejection. In many ways it still is.

And for some of the Jewish refugees, it wasn't real. For Americans in the 90s, that symbolic sense of trust that President Clinton bought with him to NI wasn't real. It was the product of nearly a century of hard and soft power building on a global level.

But it could have been real. It could be real.

I was chatting with Bestie about how, as disgusted as we are by the last quarter century of US domestic politics, there is still a little part of us that feels a sense of discomfort, of insecurity when we read about other countries surpassing the USA in some metric or another. Because nationalist socialization, but also, in our hearts, we see this country's potential. We see everything it could be and could have been and might still be if we change course.

I'm sad. I'm sad, watching women of my mother's generation protest over rights and issues they thought they'd already won. I'm sad seeing fascist rhetoric and behavior come from the highest levels of government. I'm sad, seeing how many American elites are bending the knee to said fascism. I'm desperately sad to see how eagerly the US right and left have refashioned anti-Semitism to fit the purposes of the mid-2020s. I'm sad, seeing the hope and progressivism of the Obama Era turn into something old-fashioned and "cringe." I'm sad, seeing how deeply my people dreamed of coming here, only for me to be quietly looking into emigration options two generations later.

I hope maybe we can one day be that country that Jewish refugees dreamed of; that country which carried so with it so much promise of peace and egalitarianism and, the strong notion that grown ups are in charge. We never were that country. I used to have hope we could be that country. I still hope for a course reversal.

straighten your back

go pee goddAMN IT STOP HOLDING IT

go take your meds if you need to

drink some water

go get a snack if you havent eaten in a while

maybe wander around the house/stretch a little if you’ve been sat at the computer a while (artists especially: sTRETCH THOSE WRISTS)

reply to that text/message from earlier you’d forgotten about