i've achieved my final form

With a heavy heart, I come to you all with the news announced by close friends of Cat Frazier that she had passed away on Monday, June 29.

She had been running @animatedtext since 2012, with her impact on the internet SHAPING tumblr. If you have a years long history on this site, you’ve seen her art.

She ran a venue in Oakland called Oakland Secret, a punk venue where I’d vend at regularly as an artist. She made a safe space for queer artists, artists of color, and local furs too. I am forever grateful for her work both in the Bay Area creative scene and online, and am forever changed by the totality of her impact.

I’ll be linking some articles from the 2010’s about her impact online: The Fader | Action | Jezebel | ObviouslySocial

I invite you to take a visit through her archive, and if you have a long history with this site like I do, it’s like walking down memory lane.

Parents and teachers in Canada will now have an “educational toolkit” to help them if they notice a child being groomed by a hate group.

The new resource, launched by the Canadian government in partnership with the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, intends to combat the growing prevalence of hate groups online. Members of those groups, most of whom were raised in the digital age, are becoming more adept at recruiting. For example, the neo-Nazi terror group The Base, as well as other neo-Nazi groups, have used meme websites to recruit young people, usually male teenagers, into their movement.

Authorities are still figuring out ways to effectively combat the problem.

The toolkit can be found online free of charge here and contains modules that run teachers and parents through a variety of subjects related to hate groups, such as ideologies and recruitment techniques. One of the sections presents scenarios and offers ways to handle to them from a variety of perspectives. Elizabeth Simons, the deputy director for the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, said that the examples were all taken from real-world events that had occurred in Canada.

"The scenarios in the toolkit deal with increasing severity of what hate might look like within the school community, said Simons.“You start out with anonymous hate promotion—so that could be graffiti, that could be a swastika on a desk.

“It starts from there and then it escalates all the way to overt hate organizing within the school community and outside the school community” she added.

The project is one of the latest anti-racism initiatives rolled out by Canada’s government. In a Wednesday press conference announcing the project, Ahmed Hussen, the minister of housing diversity and inclusion, said that in total the government "has invested $35 million to fund 175 anti-racism projects across the country."

Again, the link to the toolkit is https://www.antihate.school . I haven't read through the whole thing yet, but knowing the CAHN, it should be a good start. Of course, a tool can only serve its purpose if people use it, so I'm hoping this will be part of curriculum in schools across the country.

Daily Painting(s) [Self-portrait Edition]

Zinaida Serebriakova SELF-PORTRAIT (1909)

Zinaida Serebriakova SELF-PORTRAIT WITH A BRUSH (1926)