epic swag

I absolutely couldn’t resist drawing all of the new starter Pokemon. 

I don’t really think that God even has the time to care about if people are gay like if he’s got a whole world to run there are more important things anyway

And if God is love, he’s not just loving me if I am what he wants; he’s loving me as the person he made me to be, which is a queer person

You can’t say “I love you, and I made you gay but I’m sending you to hell you awful sinner” my dude that doesn’t make sense it’s not like hell has a low population is it

Hell, in Kenneth Davis’s Don’t Know Much About The Bible, there’s a passage that absolutely blows my mind and proves just how much we can misinterpret with simple translation mistakes: 

“In researching the world’s oldest city, for instance, I learned that Joshua’s Jericho is one of the oldest human settlements. It also lies on a major earthquake zone. Could that simple fact of geology have had anything to do with those famous walls tumbling down? Then I discovered that Moses and the tribes of Israel never crossed the Red Sea but escaped from Pharaoh and his chariots across the Sea of Reeds, an uncertain designation which might be one of several Egyptian lakes or a marshy section of the Nile Delta. This mistranslation crept into the Greek Septuagint version and was uncovered by modern scholars with access to old Hebrew manuscripts.”

The bible is one long-ass game of telephone, whispered around the world in dozens if not hundreds of languages, for thousands of years. I have a hard time knowing what my grandpa is talking about, when he starts going on about the technology or practices of his youth, and that was only about 80 years ago, in the same country and in the same language as me. So why every Joe on the streets thinks they can take one or two verses, completely out of context and probably mis-translated several times to boot, and use it to spout propaganda and hatred for an entire group of people will forever be beyond me. 

You guys know that verse in Leviticus that homophobes like to trot out? Well, I’m here to tell you:

They don’t read Hebrew and they don’t know shit.

And now here’s something you probably won’t hear from any of those Fine Christian Folks ™ anytime soon, either:

We do read Hebrew and we still don’t know shit.

Here’s the thing. The most “accurate” word-for-word translation of that verse would say “a man shall not lie with another man; it is forbidden.”

Here’s the issue.

The grammar surrounding “men” in that sentence isn’t correct, and the word I’ve translated as “forbidden” is “toevah,” a word so fucking old we literally don’t know what it meant anymore.

The strange sentence construction suggests that “lie with another man” uses a feminine construction you wouldn’t normally find in a sentence that’s entirely about men, and while “toevah” means “forbidden,” it’s not actually clear what is forbidden. Here’s an incomplete list of possibilities:

Pederasty (adult male/adolescent male sex) is full-stop forbidden, a man sleeping with a male prostitute is full-stop forbidden, a man sleeping with a man as part of any kind of sex magic or fertility ritual is forbidden.

And my rabbi’s personal interpretation, based on the sentence construction: a man shouldn’t sleep with another man in a woman’s bed. (So basically: don’t cheat on your wife with a dude, which is probably treated separately from “don’t commit adultery” because adultery would come with the risk of an illegitimate child.)

You’ll notice none of these involve “ew, you disgusting gays.”

Unless you accept a word-for-word literal translation with zero consideration for the social mores and other tribes surrounding Israel contemporary with the writing of Torah, nothing about this commandment has anything to do with our modern understanding of queer people having committed relationships. Once you start taking the rituals and practices of Israel’s contemporaries into account, it suddenly becomes clear why these prohibitions would have been put into place (sex magic was common in the cult of Ba’al, for example, while pederasty was practically a requirement in Greece).

If you’re just a person out there loving other people of the same gender as you? The Torah says nothing against you. But do you know what our literary tradition does say?

It puts you in the company of Naomi and Ruth.

Ruth is considered the first convert, and her vow to her mother-in-law Naomi (after Ruth’s husband’s death) forms the basis of our modern marriage vows. “Where you go, I shall go, and where you lodge, I shall lodge; your people shall be my people, and your G-d my G-d; and where you die I shall die, and there shall I be buried.” Ruth remarries as prescribed by law at the time, but even when a child is born of that new union, nobody calls it “Ruth’s and Boaz’s child”–they all say a child has been born to Ruth and Naomi.

BITMAP WATERCOLOR BRUSHES, Y’ALL!!! Want to make some SAI brushes in FireAlpaca? Check out THIS handy Guide!

Want to make this brush? Just make a perfect circle and save it (I call mine “round”) and use it as the bitmap, and copy the settings above. It works pretty nicely :D

UM, WHILE I’M HERE:

Here is where you can download FireAlpaca (it is completely free software)

*If English is not your native language, you can download it in other languages.

Please download from the official FireAlpaca websites, because a friend of mine simply googled FireAlpaca and downloaded from some random site, and she got malware! So PLEASE be careful.

FireAlpaca has a suggestion/bug reporting box on their site so you can request features, or let them know if you’re having any issues! Also FireAlpaca works fantastically on Mac computers! (though I will say the only time FA has crashed on me is when I used a Mac, so PLEASE save your work often)

Also, please visit these tumblrs if you do get into using FireAlpaca:

In The Lion King, unlike the other lions, Scar’s claws are always displayed throughout the movie.

In The Little Mermaid (1998) when King Triton is introduced, you can see Mickey, Donald, Goofy and Kermit the Frog in the crowd, underwater.

In Cars, the flies are actually tiny cars with wings.

In Hercules (1997) the Fates tell Hades all the planets will align but only show 6 planets aligning. These are the 5 planets plus Earth that the ancient Greeks were aware of and could see with the naked eye.

In Zootopia, while Officer Judy Hopps is ticketing cars around the city, she never crosses the street illegally. She always uses a crosswalk and looks both ways before crossing.

In monsters inc, sully’s chair has a hole in it to accommodate his tail.

In The Brave Little Toaster, all of the walls in the cottage are cleaned only as high as Blanky can reach.

In Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, during the food storm the president’s of Mount Rushmore get pied in the face but Abe gets hit in the back just like his assassination.

In Cars the truck stop advertises “convertible waitresses” i.e., topless.

In Finding Nemo, Bruce the shark starts crying when Marlin starts talking about Nemo, saying “I never knew my father”. Male sharks mate with the female then leave, so baby sharks never actually meet their father.

The Magic Carpet from Aladdin makes an appearance in Moana.

In UP, there are craft supplies on the table by Ellie’s hospital bed when she gives the Adventure Book to Carl.

The hold up scene in the Incredibles is actually an homage to a similar scene from Die Hard with a Vengeance, which also starred Samuel L. Jackson.

In Toy Story 3 (2010) Buzz Lightyear’s batteries are exposed showing the Buy n Large brand, the same company responsible for making WALL·E.

In Ratatouille (2007) Anton Ego’s typewriter resembles a skull and his office a coffin.

In Monsters, Inc. (2001), there are multiple sizes of coffee cup for each of the different sized monsters.

In Toy Story 2 (1999), as the restorationist is going through his equipment, he opens a drawer filled with chess pieces. This is a reference to the Pixar short “Geri’s Game” where a similar looking man plays a game of chess against himself.

In Inside Out (2015) while going through Imagination Land a game box can be seen in the background with Nemo on it called Find Me.

In Cars, you can spot Sully and Mike in cars form!

At the end of Ratatouille (2007) Anton Ego is a little bit fatter. This is especially poignant since he states, “I don’t like food, I love it… if I don’t love it I don’t swallow.”

In Coco we can see The Incredibles poster.

Insuricare, the company that offers “car life insurance” to the cars in Cars 2, is the same company Bob Parr works for in The Incredibles.

In Inside Out (2015) two of the memory orbs on the shelves contain scenes from Up (2009). One features Carl & Ellie’s wedding, while the other shows their house.

In Toy Story Woody is trapped in a crate which is stuck under a ‘Binford’ tool-box. Binford is the fictional tool company in the TV show Home Improvement which starred Tim Allen, the voice of Buzz Lightyear.

In The Incredibles, in Bob Parr’s home office, there’s a photo from a fishing trip where it appears he caught Bruce from Finding Nemo.

In Cars 2 (2011) while in a pub in London there is a tapestry on the wall that is the DunBroch family tapestry from Brave (2012), except they are portrayed as cars.

In “Ratatouille” (2007), Linguini has to hide Remy before his second day of work. He offers to hide him in his pants, revealing his briefs covered in The Incredibles logo.

After the plane is blown up in The Incredible, Helen (Elastigirl) knows the plane debris is going to fall on them due to seeing the reflection in the water.

Japan’s vast assortment of mascots all share a similar problem.

I don’t throw around the phrases “the worst thing I’ve ever made” or “abomination before God” very lightly, so believe me when I say this is both of those and also a mistake