Ravens and Writing Desks

- Britney for making fun of her when she had her breakdown

- Monica Lewinski for judging her when she was a 22year old temp sexually assaulted by the most powerful man in the world

- Ke$ha for ever thinking she was trashy when all she wanted to do was make party music

- Kristen Stewart for ever thinking she was dumb when she’s actually one of the coolest people ever

- Megan Fox for ever thinking she was just a slut when actually she was an actress being harassed by her employer. 

- Hating all the women who made a career out of having a hot body. Being is shape is hard, beauty is a weapon and auto promotion is hard work. 

- All the Mary-Sues, who exist because young girls everywhere want to be part of a story they love so much

- All the female characters I ever snobbed because they got in the way of my ship.

“Out of the Cage”

A drawing companion to For Me This is Heaven by thunder_nari, as part of Supernatural/J2 Big Bang. Please read the fic ^o^ PDF version available

plus six or seven people who just….can’t figure out what a frog paper could possibly be. (guys it’s…a scientific paper. about frogs.)

and this one

which made me laugh despairingly because i mean

“Underwent unplanned rapid disassembly” – it exploded, and it wasn’t an explosion we wanted to happen

“Lithobraking maneuver” – it stopped because it hit the goddamned ground.

“Engine-rich exhaust” – the engine bell melted or evaporated, or the engine ejected itself out the back of the rocket without having a very good reason to do so.

“Fishing orbit” – the craft is in the ocean instead of space and we didn’t mean to put it there

“Thrust was observed along an undesired vector” – the engine leaked and the rocket spun off into oblivion.

“Wearing his manager hat” – a moron who shouldn’t be an engineer (a reference to the infamous quote “take off your engineer hat and put on your manager hat” in the meeting in which the Challenger was cleared for launch)

So far so normal, right? But then:

Like what. And then:

I haven’t seen this on here so I thought I might share:

In this case – as of July 7, 2020 – this is an active issue!

So yes, NOW really is the time to call your reps and senators!  Sign petitions, sure.  But please call or write, if you can.  (Remember that an original email, rather than one using a script, is usually more effective, even if it’s only one line.)

In trying to figure out the status of this, I came across these other possibly useful links:

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/116/s3398

(Where you can track this bill’s progress and status.)

https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/06/01/us-senate-should-reject-earn-it-act

An article on the Human Rights Watch website.  Pull quote (the letter referenced below is linked above):

The United States Senate Judiciary Committee should reject a proposed law that would jeopardize privacy and free expression rights without effectively protecting children from online sexual exploitation, Human Rights Watch said today in a letter to the committee’s leadership.

https://fcw.com/articles/2020/07/06/johnson-earn-it-act.aspx

An article on the website of Federal Computer Week. Pull quote:

Civil liberty and digital rights groups were unmoved by the changes. The Center for Democracy and Technology said the amendments “do not fix the problems that are core to the bill’s misguided approach,” while the American Civil Liberties Union issued a letter saying the legislation is well intentioned but “would undermine the privacy of every single American, stifle our ability to communicate freely online, and may jeopardize the very prosecutions it seeks to enable.”

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), said the new version of EARN IT “will do even less than the previous version to stop the spread of child sexual abuse material” and urged the committee to table the bill so lawmakers can further vet the proposal to determine if it would do more harm than good.

“By allowing any individual state to set laws for internet content, this bill will create massive uncertainty, both for strong encryption and free speech online,” said Wyden, who instead called for Congress to pass legislation that would boost funding and modernize IT systems for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

I’m including these pull quotes here because this is a complex issue, and I wanted to highlight the basis of the opposition to a bill that, on the surface, seems like it’s about protecting children from online exploitation and abuse, and banning the online exchange of child pornography.  That is certainly the intent of the bill, but as with any bill, it’s really important to dig deep enough to figure out if the bill will actually accomplish what it says it wants to. 

That is frequently a problem with bills that come before Congress!  Bill sponsors always know that they should give a bill a snappy name and summarize it in a way that makes it sound great, and that also makes it sound like opposition to it is supporting the thing the bill is against.  It’s not even always a matter of looking for the “poison pill” within bills.  Listen to experts who examine bills that sound reasonable on the surface, but that have unanticipated (by the bill’s writers) complications with implementation. 

I am not at all dismissing the testimony or aims of the victims who sent statements to the Senate Judiciary Committee.  This isn’t a case of “either you want to curb online sexual exploitation of children or you don’t”.  This is a case where people in the government received those testimonies and requests for action, and then crafted this bill.  But, they may have done a bad job crafting the bill, and this may not be the way to actually take effective action. 

Sir Elton John has admitted to having sex with a Russian spy on a hotel roof during a trip to the Soviet Union.

The 66-year-old singer believes that the KGB spy was planted in his entourage by the country's secret police at the height of the Cold War to follow his every move.

He says that after discovering that the man was a mole who worked for the Russian security agency, he slept with him to compromise him.

"I went to Russia in 1979 and I knew we were being watched all the time," John told the Observer.

"I had an interpreter that they'd clearly set up. I ended up having sex with him on the hotel roof."

John became the first Western popstar to perform behind the Iron Curtain when he took to the stage in St Petersburg, formerly Leningrad, in 1979.

American’s Teasing Canada: u have moose and beavers, maple syrup u like it

American’s Teasing Australia: kangaroos and koalas, it’s hot there, summer time, toilets flush backward

My high school history teacher was shot in the back on campus. Everyone here knows someone who’s been affected by gun violence. Everyone knows someone who’s been affected by healthcare, or lack thereof. Everyone knows someone whose life has been ruined by college debt. 

Shoes on in house

Smiling too much

High school football

Opossums, raccoons, deer, etc.

Carpet (I’ve heard other countries aren’t as obsessed with carpet as Americans)

Sales tax (how much will this cost? Nobody knows!)

Roadside tourist attractions (world’s biggest ball of yarn etc)

“it’s only a 6 hour drive”

Buying tea in a gallon jug

Being in the prairie states and there literally being nothing in any direction for miles not even trees

Tornadoes anything to do with tornado culture

Waffle house

The mere concept of semi trucks / 18 wheelers

HELL IS REAL billboard here in Ohio

The giant dinosaur roadside tourist attraction out in the middle of nowhere

Route 66

Fanny packs

Prom (I’ve heard other countries don’t have prom? Or any of the other 100 school dances a year??)

People microwave their tea instead of boiling it

The white people half-jog-and-wave combo when crossing the street

Freeways.  Look a Californian in the eyes, say “the 405″ and watch a piece of their soul flicker out.

Our collective inability to decide the pronunciation of “kebab”.

Sweetened tea is somehow the default.

That every restaurant claims to be “world famous” and somehow nobody ever gets called out on that bullshit.

The utter nonsense that is our continued fascination with disco.

[Image description: a stock photo of a woman holding an apple in both hands. If you are not from the United States, the apple is fucking huge, at least according to my British friends. If you’re from the US, it’s normal.]

^ That? Is a normal-sized apple. Three apples at the supermarket = about 1 ¼ pounds. (That’s about four-tenths of a kilogram.) According to my friend from Bristol, this is FREAKISHLY large. I sent him a photo of one of our so-called “lunchbox-sized” apples and his response was “that’s a normal apple. WTF do you think a full-sized apple is then” and I just about gave him a damn heart attack sending him a picture of a regular one, which covers my entire palm and then some.

–Our milk takes like three or four weeks to expire. No, I am not shitting you. Same friend and I had an entire argument over Sherlock because of the “she’s been gone at least two days, the milk’s gone off” in the second episode, with me insisting that was too much bullshit to be believed and him insisting that no, milk goes off in 3-4 days, what kind of freakish Frankenstein milk am I drinking. ( @rowanthestrange​, paging you for this conversation.)

–American cooking: “look! I put three cans in a pot and added ketchup!” If you can do closer to “from scratch” than this, people will look at you with fucking awe. I make a salsa for company parties that’s functionally “chop things and put them in a bowl, do this at certain times for three days so all the flavors meld right” and people think I’m some kind of wizard, and, in spite of the fact that you should not be able to fuck this up, they always always always do in fact manage to fuck it up when trying to recreate it.

--I have never had British bread, but I have been told by multiple British friends who’ve been to America that our bread is almost as sweet as British cake. Same with our milk–apparently it’s weirdly sweet.

–we have to refrigerate our eggs.

–apparently we say aluminum weird? (I personally think Y’ALL say it weird, but whatever, again, Rowan can confirm we have had entire arguments about this)

–schedule. We say it so the first bit is like “school,” WHICH MAKES SOME FUCKING SENSE.

–a certain subset of Americans just being like. Wildly obsessed with historical reenactment. And I’m not talking about the douchey Confederate ones, either. There are like entire groups that go out and dress as Ben Franklin and do “I’m standing on a literal soapbox teaching you about the Founding Fathers” stuff at Fourth of July festivals and stuff. I’ve met some of them. They use historical sewing tools and methods. Can you imagine sewing an entire fucking colonial dress and all its undergarments, by hand, with a bone needle?! FOR FUN?!?

football parties, including massive “super bowl parties” that can have dozens of people. going to high school football games even as adults. watching football on tv, especially on holidays.

the weird obsession with potlucks that is apparently not quite as common in other places. i mean we have potluck dinners for all sorts of gatherings and parties, we even have them for weddings

corn and soybeans, everywhere you look

midwesterners saying “ope!” about everything

the absolute inability of like half the population to pronounce “caught” correctly (it’s more like “cot,” and this is also true of other “-aught” sounding words like “thought”)

“how far is it?” “about 20 minutes, 10 if the traffic ain’t bad”

oranges the size of softballs

massive portion sizes at restaurants because we take half the meal home (not because we always eat everything in a single sitting, but because we have enough left overs for a second meal)

breakfast foods being predominently sweet

the way people in tornado alley will literally just sit on their porch and watch the tornado go past their houses with little to no alarm

*midwesterner sees a cow for the 92783916207439735825th time* “cow!!!”

how you can stand the parking lot of one church and toss rocks to hit 6 other churches in some towns

deserted highways

saguaro cacti (the stereotypical wild west cacti) and how they can literally reach like 40ft in height and are illegal to cut down

our unholy obsession with cheese

area 51

vast temperature differences from region to region

I’ve been hearing/seeing a lot of drama concerning Hazbin Hotel and it’s creator VivziePop, and while I don’t know her personally or really care what people think, I do hate slander and the spread of misinformation. Truly nothing in this world upsets me more than when people believe rumours while making no effort to fact check, and that’s exactly what’s happening right now. That said, I wanted to try and clear up some of the rumours going around about Vivzie and the show, because I think some of them are absolutely outrageous and need to be addressed.

1. Vivzie hired an abuser onto the show.

Now, I’m not here to burn anyone at the stake, especially since I don’t know anything about Chris Niosi (the alleged abuser), who I believe openly admitted to the allegations? Regardless, this is a moot point. He’s not credited anywhere at the end of the episode. So either he was booted before production wrapped up or he had nothing to do with the show in the first place.

2. Vivzie supports bestiality.

Admittedly I thought this one might be true, since she draws so many anthropomorphic animals. In the very least, I figured she was probably a furry, but I haven’t seen any evidence supporting this accusation either. Near as I can tell, this rumour started for two reasons. One, because of her famous Zoophobia comic, which revolves around a therapist named Cameron who gets assigned to work with human-like animals. Ironically, poor Cameron suffers from crippling zoophobia, which makes for some pretty decent comedy. I didn’t read the whole comic because, quite frankly, it’s not my cup of tea and I just don’t have the time. But from what I saw there are no examples of bestiality anywhere in its contents.

Two, this message, which blew up all over social media:

To me, this just proves that people are more interested in virtue signalling than checking to see if their claims are actually true. Everything about this message is 100% false, which I’ll touch on in my next point.

3. Vivzie is a pedophile and she’s drawn child porn.

This is hands down the worst allegation and holy shit, I really wish people would stop using it to defame someone when they don’t have any proof. This is a life-ruining accusation and you’re disgusting if you believe it based solely on hearsay. This rumour began to spread when Vivzie allegedly shipped the two underage characters in the above photo and drew them NSFW-style. At the time, one character was 19 while the other was 14, and the relationship was a very illegal student-teacher relationship.

This is WRONG! The characters were not 14 and 19, they were actually 18 and 19, the legal age of consent! Additionally, the relationship wasn’t student-teacher. One character is a student and the other is Alumni (a student teacher). This one pisses me off the most because it’s obvious the person who sent that message didn’t even bother to conduct any research. They said, “He’s a teacher, she’s a child.” Both characters are MALE!

Since then, Vivzie has apologised for any NSFW art she drew in the past and stated that it’s not a reflection of her art today, and I’m inclined to believe her. Almost every artist has drawn NSFW content at some point in their career, and hers wasn’t even distasteful. Other than this one example, there is no evidence anywhere that suggests she’s drawn “child porn”. In fact, she’s never even drawn explicit NSFW.

Please stop spreading this rumour. It’s dangerous and completely incorrect.

4. Vivzie said the “N” word!

This is the only claim I found that was actually credible. Yes, she did indeed say the “N” word on Twitter, and it was pretty brutal. However, she was only 17 and it was meant to be an edgy inside joke with her friends. Am I making excuses for her? No. Was she wrong for saying it? Definitely. But this was over 5 years ago, and she’s apologised for it ad infinitum. People change, and I don’t think it’s fair to hold her accountable for something she said when she was a dumb teenager. She hasn’t repeated the mishap since, so as far as I’m concerned there’s no reason to dwell on it. I mean, how do you expect people to mature and grow as individuals when you constantly rake them over the coals for something they did when they were barely out of puberty?

5. Vivzie is copyright striking every video that criticises her!

No she isn’t. YouTube’s DMCA is automatically striking people who are using full clips without permission. Vivzie has gone public several times, telling people exactly how to avoid getting a copy strike from the algorithm, which is something she absolutely does not have to do. At this point, she doesn’t owe you anything. In my opinion, she should just sit back and watch these channels burn.

6. Vivzie copies and traces other artists’ work.

This is another one I’ve seen going around, but I looked into it as thoroughly as I could and failed to find any concrete evidence to support the allegations. As of right now, there are only two examples of Vivzie “copying” or “tracing” other artists’ work, and both of them can be explained. The first is a gif she made with a character from her Zoophobia comic, which looked a lot like the girl from ME!ME!ME!:

Damn, that’s pretty incriminating. She obviously stole– oh, wait. This gif was part of a ME!ME!ME! MEP (multi editor’s project) and Vivzie didn’t take full credit, despite the fact that it’s not even a direct trace. It’s supposed to look like the original, which she fully cited. The second example comes from a short dance sequence from her Timber video, which seems to have been inspired by several Disney movies. As Vivzie herself stated, that was an homage to the original animations. Lots of artists and shows do this, including the beloved Stephen Universe series.

Regardless, this doesn’t count as stealing character designs or plagiarising someone’s work. It’s meant to be respectful, an admiration of other projects. Other than these two instances, however, there is no evidence of her tracing or stealing other people’s art. From what I’ve discovered, all other designs she’s been accused of “stealing” are characters she bought and paid for. They’re quite literally HER characters.

7. Vivzie supports problematic creators.

I’m getting really tired of guilt by association. Vivzie follows and enjoys some controversial figures, but who cares? We can argue all day about whether or not the accusations against them are true, but it ultimately has nothing to do with the show or Vivzie as a person. I do the exact same thing, to be honest– follow and listen to people on all sides so I can learn, understand, and form my own opinions. The fact that some people think this is bad, to me, is absolutely mesmerising. Vivzie doesn’t control what the people she follows post, and if they do something overly questionable she publicly criticises and denounces it.

From Vivzie:

Now that that’s been dealt with, I’d like to address some complaints/claims about the actual show.

8. Vaggie is an angry Latina stereotype and a lesbian stereotype. Vivzie is appropriating Hispanic culture and misrepresenting the gay for profit.

First off, I see a lot of people passing around yet more misinformation regarding Vivzie’s race. So many people seem to think she’s white? Well, I’m here to tell you they’re wrong. Very incorrect. Vivzie is in fact Latina, and Vaggie is meant to mirror some of her own personality traits.

Second, who is Vaggie mad at? Context matters, and if we take a look at the episode, we see that Vaggie is literally only mad at two specific people: Angel Dust and Alastor. Why? Well, for starters, it’s her girlfriend’s dream to run a rehab hotel for sinners, and Angel Dust nearly demolishes that dream single-handedly. Vaggie has every right to be over-the-top vitriolic. Then there’s Alastor, a known sadist, narcissist, and murderer who loves trapping people in his nefarious schemes. He invites himself in, effectively takes over the hotel, and pushes both her and Charlie aside. At one point he even sexually assaults her by slapping her butt during his musical number. So yeah, I think her seething ire is totally justified. Keep in mind, however, that when she’s around Charlie she’s calm, collected, and happy. I wouldn’t call that a stereotype.

Thirdly, the lesbian stereotypes. I keep hearing this argument but I really don’t see it. Both Vaggie and Charlie have so much personality and trust for each other. Maybe I’m wrong, but the stereotype I know always totes a more butch, tomboyish woman with a ditsy, innocent, naive woman. Charlie is optimistic, but she isn’t stupid. She refuses to shake Alastor’s hand because she knows he’s likely trying to screw her over. She’s also not entirely innocent herself and uses words like “fuck” and “shit”. I also wouldn’t call Vaggie butch or tomboyish. She has a cute, girly presentation, complete with a pink ribbon in her hair, lace stockings, and a dress. She’s protective of her girlfriend, as I think we all are with our partners, and there’s nothing wrong with that. They’re flawed characters, as every character is meant to be. This isn’t a problem.

9. The show is racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, blah, blah, blah.

I’m amazed this is even an argument. The show is supposed to be a dark comedy that takes place in HELL. You know, the place the worst of the worst end up after they die? What were you expecting? Everyone gets a shot or two fired at them, but that doesn’t make them bad characters nor does it make the show itself horrible. Take, for example, Katie Killjoy, the news reporter so many people are up in arms about. She says she doesn’t “touch the gays” because she has “standards”. Well, here’s a newsflash of my own: we’re not supposed to like her! She’s an antagonist. Not to mention ten seconds later Charlie insults her and isn’t the least bit slighted by her pretentious attitude. The characters are strong and don’t take shit from anyone, because to some degree they’re all terrible people who can throw down when it’s called for.