Gotta Get Through This World The Best We Can

Based this on part of Gustav Klimt's "The Tree of Life"...I cannot stop thinking about these two

back then i made a bunch of these but by now i lost the pic and dont know how to find the original post anymore

so anyway here is the diagram for anyone else who is interested!!

this requires pretty big carboard pieces, if you have a really big box or something you can make it from one piece, but if you don't, you can also just make each of the pieces individually and then tape them together

and then in the end you put it together like this!!

and then when you make a bunch you can put them all next to each other and stack your books like crazy

so i wanted to throw in some suggestions that, whenever I’m trying to find a character reference or otherwise draw very interesting-looking yet regular-looking people, which i usually have to do for bit characters in @ikroah​ or something, I tend to look for references in the following places. these are far from the only reliable way to get inspiration, this is just a non-exhaustive list of places i’ve looked before for visual inspiration when needing to create a character, whether starring characters or background ones:

pre-2000s television (The Sopranos and Twin Peaks especially having incredible character design)

extras in comedy sketch shows

esports players

real photos (not staged stock photos) of line cooks

70s baseball players

athletes from more obscure olympic sports like the javelin toss or greco-roman wrestling, especially if you’re looking for a specific body type

ska, jazz, and blues musicians

firefighters

improv troupes

for teenagers, searching “high school english class project” on youtube and sorting by Upload Date

state senators, small-town mayors, and generally obscure local government positions like comptroller or treasurer (yes i know politicians can be bad sometimes but smaller elections especially don’t really depend on looks)

people who walk by your window (if you live in a city like I do)

to explain what i mean by "coerced":

i think doing things that are morally bad is also bad for the individual. people shouldn't be forced to do things in general, but its especially bad to force someone to do something morally bad. its also bad to coerce them into doing that. and its quite horrific for a system to embed within someone a worldview which habitually leads them to do bad things, and a social system which incentivizes people to do bad things.

this post is in part inspired by reading the book Dirty Work which talks about moral injury & people (largely marginalized people) who do work that is seen as morally "dirty" in society. and specifically the chapter on people who work with drones for the US military (in a variety of ways). one of the major figures was a woman who grew up in poverty and was terrified of dying that way, went to join the military to get to see the world, and ended up working a job requiring her to watch hours and hours of drone footage, including hours of people living their lives, their gruesome deaths, and their families trying to collect their body parts in the aftermath. she recounts how much this weighed on her psychologically and morally, but not only her fear of poverty but also being court-martialed or otherwise subject to punishment if she spoke out or did anything, and her anger at protestors who seemed to be largely middle-class women who directed their protests at individual workers like her. she eventually did become a whistle-blower and says she experienced backlash from the left as well as the right because of her job.

now, this was a difficult read for me. it can be frustrating to read a whole chapter on the suffering of drone operators when so many people in the US don't give the beginning of a fuck about the people who have been getting bombed for years. the trauma of entire countries doesn't outweigh the trauma of a single US soldier. how can we talk about her anger at women protesting drone warfare because it hurts her feelings when we are still having to protest drone warfare that destroys entire families?

and yet. i think that reaction is partially an attempt to avoid the discomfort of how fucked the situation is holistically. the woman clearly had internalized plenty of dehumanizing, imperialistic, racist, and likely Orientalist beliefs and values. but this was hardly something she consciously chose. its easy to say "never join the US military" when you are someone who 1. already had the time and chance to develop a sense of how evil the US military is (not everyone necessarily does) 2. was not and is not in the position of being 17 and worried you'll die of a fentanyl overdose in the next five years like multiple of your classmates and desperate for any opportunity out.

does it make her decision better morally? i don't think so. but why was it a decision she had to make? why did she have so few options? why did things feel so desperate? why did a certain decision seem better and more accessible than others? if we are going up the line of responsibility here, the reason this harmful, morally bad action took place at all is because of the system of US imperialism and capitalism.

the problem is, that answer does not give us A Person To Punish. which we, as people socialized into a worldview of punitive justice, have been taught to want. transformative justice isn't just switching to A Person To Fix, its directing our energy towards social change and collective thinking and acting. that doesn't ignore the individual, but it always sees the individual through a social lens. the ultimate goal is a system which incentivizes the morals we want to see just as much as the current one incentives individualism and authoritarianism and puritanism and imperialism.

i think the perspective that we are coerced, by social systems like imperialism, patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacy, etc. into acting immorally and harming others and ourselves, more naturally invites people to see their own racism, sexism, orientalism, classism, etc. as both morally bad and yet not a sign they are bad. it directly counters the idea that saying "the thing you did is racist" means "YOU are racist and EVIL and CONSCIOUSLY DESPISE PEOPLE OF COLOR"*; the point is that the thing you did is racist, and if you don't want to do racist things, then you have to unlearn the shit you were socialized into believing. "coerced" keeps in mind that there are people who benefit from keeping this status quo. if racism is evil, and white supremacist culture means everyone has internalized racist beliefs, that doesn't mean everyone is evil. it means we have all been coerced into participating in evil, and we are demanding an end to that coercion; that is (one form of) accountability.

this perspective can't exist alone, either. it must be paired with a devotion to the victims of these systems. this is why it is a process. the back-and-forth has to be put into action to get a balanced solution. what is best is what practically creates system change, and having process for (again, social) forgiveness is a practical necessity.

^ wanna add these tags to the post if you don't mind because this is a vital issue to restorative justice being restorative and just and not just a smokescreen for further violence, and I want to give my thoughts on how we might navigate this (pre-emptively sorry for the very long post incoming, I'm incapable of making a succinct point when it comes to this topic).

I don't think restorative justice should be thought of as a fundamentally white thing, frameworks of restorative justice built by white people are frequently shoddy and poorly thought out. The idea of restorative justice being "a brand new radical theory invented by white leftist intellectuals" turns it into a hypothetical that fundamentally emerges from European culture, when restorative justice was initially introduced to modern Europe through centuries-old existing practices of various Indigenous nations. Restorative justice has been done better, by Indigenous people in the Americas and around the world.

I include some quotes in this reblog of this post about the Wendat nation's traditional framework for justice (which is only one version of restorative justice, ofc). I also touch on the justice system of DAANES / Rojava, a modern autonomous administration in Syria which uses restorative justice. Rojava is a Kurdish term, and the Kurds are an Indigenous ethnic minority that has faced intense oppression throughout West Asia, and as a result their model for governance in Rojava is built around being explicitly multiethnic.

Notably, both the Wendat and Rojava systems of justice take into account gender in a way that I think is very important for not just gender but how restorative justice needs to deal with marginalization as a whole. In Rojava, any issue regarding women (especially issues of marriage or sexual violence) must have women involved in the justice process from start to finish. On an institutional level, there must be gender parity across systems, including the justice system, and women can seek recourse on the most basic level by going to their local Mala Jin (women's house) to get support from their community. The Mala Jin are required to be consulted in any legal issue concerning women. Similarly, in the Wendat nation and many other nations, women had their own independent councils which had authority over their own issues.

Obviously, gender and race are different issues. But one can easily imagine how "restorative justice" could be used to excuse gendered violence by having a bunch of men demand a woman who was abused by her husband forgive him and prevent divorce. This is why Rojava is modeled the way it is, on every level; ethnic minorities are treated similarly, having their own democratic organizations and positions in councils to ensure they have a collective voice. The (Kurdish, Assyrian, Yazidi, Arab) women of Rojava have meaningful power over their lives and social organization, and they make sure that restorative justice is built to work for marginalized groups, rather than simply assuming the system itself is just so inherently good and moral in theory that everything will work out if its kept gender/race/class neutral.

It's not just a matter of implementing a system and then expecting everyone's mindset to change. Both the Wendat and Rojava systems involve a certain culture that facilitates people engaging in these systems, and the Rojava Revolution has involved dedicated work to spread the political and philosophical framework that underlies its justice system and allow it to function. In cases where restorative justice utterly fails, its a lot of times the result of either a poorly-made framework, people lacking the theoretical/cultural understanding to use that framework properly, or both.

The models of the Wendat and Rojava come from cultures that were/are both communalist and anti-authoritarian. For many Indigenous nations, the idea that someone could be forced to obey a political leader, or even that a child should be forced to obey a parent, was ridiculous and unjust. Leaders had to be constantly generous and persuasive to get people to follow them, and people had the inherent right to refuse orders. That is a very different way of relating to people than in more authoritarian cultures, like most European cultures. So trying to just cut + paste that kind of justice system without adopting any other part of the culture or political framework is obviously going to fail. It is a very European-Enlightenment way of thinking to imagine that if you just build a system that sounds really good and moral in theory, then in practice you can act and think however you want and the system will always spit out good results because it just looks so good on paper (this video from The Alt-Right Playbook isn't really relevant to restorative justice, but it is where I first heard this cultural idea of "the system will Just Work, no matter how many bad ideas are in it!" & I think it explains why a lot of white leftist attempts at various things are shitty. People don't want to put in the effort to do good, they just want a system that lets them act however they want and still feel good).

Any restorative justice system worth its salt should preempt situations like the above. No victim who is marginalized should be in a position where they, alone, have to defend themselves against a group of people who do not share their marginalization, even if those people (claim to) have good intentions. The system should be built specifically with that situation in mind, in order to ensure that no group is able to hoard the power and control what justice looks like. It should be a ground rule that if an incident involves people of a marginalized group, that the system has a way to ensure that group has authority over the proceedings. If the victim is a Black person, step one should be bringing in other Black people to support the victim and ensure that the victim as an individual, and the community as a whole, has not just a perfunctory voice but the power to dictate what restorative justice looks like in that situation.

If an attempt at restorative justice is not foundationally anti-racist and built to force white people to deal with discomfort and distress and social consequences for engaging in racism, it does not deserve respect. When cis/male/white/upper-class people are never made, in a justice system, to do any restorative acts that challenge the privileges they gain from those positions, the only clear end-goal of the process is the victim's forgiveness. And rather than that forgiveness being the natural result of a process that amends the harm done to them, the whole process collapses into "how fast can we get this person to shut up about what they went through?" because the process has been built for the comfort of the offenders, not for restoring harmony in the community to ensure the well-being of all its members. Good restorative justice sees the reform of offenders as a practical way of establishing that safety and harmony for everyone; if it didn't demand anything from the offenders, it would be completely inept. In one of those quotes in that post I linked, the restorative justice process is explicitly meant as an alternative for the victim('s family) demanding violent retribution, with the idea being "if they are not satisfied through restoration, they will demand blood and probably take matters into their own hands, so our restoration system needs to be genuinely effective to keep the peace." There was no assumption that the victim would just have to get whatever the community decides they get and have to deal with it (which ties back to the cultural anti-authoritarianism).

burn it 🔥

i genuinely encourage non black people to engage with this, who might be worried they can't because of the word "nigga" because they feel like it's overstepping. the only way it would be overstepping is saying it to me when ur not black, but please don't be afraid to engage with black art.

For those who were having a hard time with the face paint stuff like I did, I figured out a way to help by creating your own reference so it would be wayyy easier to format your oc onto the mii face grid (this guide is probably for hardcore Tomodachi life players but if you’re insane like me it might help you out). You’ll need a drawing software of some kind for this, doesn’t matter which one.

Put your Mii’s facial features together that don’t require the face paint feature. Once you’ve moved to that part, take a picture of the face with your grid type of choice. (This is the part I’m talking about! ⬇️)

2. Take the photo you have (doesn’t need to be perfect and you don’t need a capture card, a photo from a phone works too) and input into your drawing software of choice. If you can, trace the grid on a new layer with a different color so you can overlay the grid with your new reference. Make sure there’s some amount of space because you’re gonna want to place your oc’s face somewhere.

3. Find a front facing image of your oc and trace it so you can play with the lineart and color layer separately, or make a new front facing image (like I did). Copy the layer of the lineart and use that copied layer to format your oc’s face over the mii face. Let it be known that you will have to likely edit the lineart to have it fit well on the mii face.

4. When things look good, you can then create a color layer and experiment with what colors you want to use and what kinds of light and shadow you think will look best. I created an entirely new reference next to my lineart reference so I could see them both at the same time.

(One thing I would like to note is that the image you use on face paint DOES distort a bit as it kinda wraps around the face! Make sure to check the mii’s face and edit anything to fix any kind of distortion!)

5. Use your new reference to put together your oc in Tomodachi life! Let it be known that it won’t be perfect, but it might be an upgrade to your previous attempts like me. When I did this I saw a massive change in quality so maybe some people will find this helpful.

This also helps for planning out more complicated designs or designs that might be hard to fit on the face grid. Note that this does take a lot of time, so if you’re willing to pour hours into this stuff this guide might work.