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SpiderForest is a not-for-profit webcomic collective run by volunteer comic creators. We feature over 100 high-quality, free-to-read webcomi
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hey, here's a link to look up your local MP's email to let them know that 1. we want to see the environmental assessment 2. no more data centres until regulatory law catches up.
for those in BC, write to your MLA.
All of this, but also, what does “data sovereignty” mean when all LLMs are built with stolen data to begin with? Is all our data going to be re-stolen for the Canadian AI? or is this just the American pool of stolen data that already includes Canadian stolen data?
I like brutalist buildings, I want you to know.
But I like this MORE.
WARNING do NOT start reading books and comics or watching movies or looking at art!!! you will start wanting to create art yourself. or god forbid. writing.
Random thing for people to consider is that since Laika is the saint of one way trips should Felicette be known as the saint of safe landings since she did make it back to the ground safely
tu LANCES félicette ? tu lances son corps comme la fusée ? oh ! oh ! prison pour les scientifiques ! prison pour les scientifiques pendant Un Mille Ans !
You can understand the French perfectly fine with only context but the English translation I got still had me floored
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Here's another bunch of pages from Phobos and Deimos.
Hey, this comic is going to be ten years old next month! Ten years is a lot! To celebrate, I want fan art. Send me fan art of Phobos and Deimos, and I will post it on my website in May.
This interview with Ncuti Gatwa crossed my dash again, and I was reminded of how much I like it. Because it makes the rare Third Argument for representation in fiction, the argument I think is the best, and I'm always happy to see it. I quote:
At times, Gatwa’s casting in those projects has been dismissed as an exercise in ‘box-ticking’. Gatwa scoffs. ‘First of all, you don’t know anything about me. Secondly, tick fcking boxes! People need to be fcking seen. What are you going to do, tell the same stories? Have the same people fronting things for all of eternity? Representation and inclusivity and branching out… it enriches us all. How embarrassing. You people with your tiny mindsets – open a book, look out the window and then f*ck off.’ (source)
What do I mean by the Third Argument? Well, I'm not sure I've ever made a post about this directly, but as far as I can see it, there are three main arguments for greater diversity in popular media. The first two are the most common, and they go like this:
It is good for media to be diverse because it is good for people to see people like them on screen. That is, the beneficiaries are marginalized people.
It is good for media to be diverse because it is good for people to see and learn about people who are not like them through art. That is, the beneficiaries are non-marginalized people, who then (hopefully) pass on the benefit by treating marginalized people better.
These two arguments are the source of a lot of debate here on ye olde tumblr. Despite both being arguments for representation, they pull in different directions. What counts as 'good' representation for the purposes of Argument 1 often would not be good for the purposes of Argument 2, and vice versa. Authentic versus sympathetic. Ugly or over-sanitized. You see this debate play out constantly. It's really hard for a piece of - say - queer media to do both at once.
But these debates tend to leave out Argument 3, the one that Gatwa is making above. And that argument cuts through a lot of this debate.
3. It is good for media to be diverse because art needs variety. The beneficiary of representation is art itself, absent any social effects that may or may not be present.
For this argument, diverse stories are intrinsically good. It is good to make art that's not just the same thing you've seen a hundred times before. Putting the kinds of people who don't often make it into mainstream media into your art is an extremely efficient way to make that happen. It's not the only method, but it's a really good method.
For representation to be 'good representation' according to Argument 3, all it needs to be is interesting. A story you haven't heard before, at least not in that medium. That which counts as 'bad representation' by the lights of this argument are stock characters, like the Eternally Patient Mother, the Gay Best Friend, the Wise Black Advisor. Perhaps there was a time in which these characters were new, but that time has long passed. There's no art in pulling a bog-standard character trope off the shelf. Show us a new kind of guy. The world is infinitely diverse. You're not going to run out. Telling the same stories with the same voices for all eternity, as Gatwa says, is boring. Even if there was nothing else wrong with it, this would be. Art isn't supposed to be boring.
And that's why Argument 3 is my favourite. I do want the world to be a better place, of course, and I think art is a part of that. But the main job of art is to be good as art. And diversity in all aspects of the production of art makes art better.
I made a zine about revolutions.
”I have this artistic idea but not the skills to achieve it to the standard I want.”
congrats! Now you have a motif! A recurring theme! A focus for your art! Something to haunt you!
Seventeen still lives of dandelions? Three hundred poems about grief? A sketchbook dedicated to your grandmother’s house? Two books trying to unravel the complexities of familial relationships?
Don’t let the fear of it not being perfect on the first try stop you from being Weird About It!
Please view Hokusai's gradual working towards The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, over a period of 39 years.
An early exploration of the themes Hokusai would keep coming back to is Spring in Enoshima, done in 1793 when he was 33. The wave is small and there are no boats, but Mt Fuji is clear in the background, and Enoshima is in Kanagawa, so we are clearly beginning to work towards something here.
A second pass, eleven years later in 1803 when he was 44. The title of this one begins to get more familiar: The View of Honmoku Off Kanazawa. It has a towering wave over a smaller boat, but Mt Fuji is not present, and the boat is considerably larger and has a sail. But the feeling of danger in the wave and the smallness of the boat are here, and of course the general composition is definitely recognizable.
This is A View Of Express Delivery Boats, done in 1805, merely two years later at age 46. Here we find the wave and the boats almost exactly as we'll find them in The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, though Mt Fuji isn't present, and the location is uncertain. And it's a good picture! The wave is threatening, the boats are small -- but the feeling of "ocean" isn't really there yet, is it? It's unlikely this picture would have become a classic for the ages. But that's okay, there's still time.
And here we have it, a full 26 years later, done by Hokusai in 1831 at the age of 72. The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, one of the most recognizable pieces of art in the world. The boats are there, the mountain is there, the wave is there, and the FEELING is there. He did it! He reached the apex of his ongoing motif and theme!
Or did he? Because the whole point of a motif is not that you're striving to get to the perfect version of it, the one idealized image you carried in your head all along, and when it is done, you are also done. Hokusai is on record at the age of 73 saying he'd only just begun to feel like he was learning how to draw things properly, and that "if I keep up my efforts, I will have even a better understanding when I was 80 and by 90 will have penetrated to the heart of things. At 100, I may reach a level of divine understanding, and if I live decades beyond that, everything I paint — dot and line — will be alive." He had drawn The Great Wave, but he didn't believe he was finished -- he thought that he was still just beginning to get started.
And he wasn't finished with his ocean motif, either. Please check out his Mt Fuji At Sea, done in 1834 at the age of 75.
It's all there; Mt Fuji, the ocean, the wave. The boats are gone, but replaced with birds, flying with the wave instead of fighting against it. It's not as famous as The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, but that's not what motifs are for -- each successive work does not have to surpass the previous in terms of success, especially in terms of external success. They're there for you to keep playing with, keep remixing and re-experiencing, for as long as you think you have something to say.
I also want everybody to know that Google and most of the internet think that all of those paintings bar the last one are called "The Great Wave Off Kanagawa", so I had to do a sort of middling deep dive just to find their actual names. And then I was like "I don't think those translations are very accurate", so I went on a second quest to retranslate them, which was particularly difficult with painting three (A View Of Express Delivery Boats) because for some reason he titled that one entirely in hiragana, and it's all archaic words that were very hard to chase down without their corresponding kanji. Google suggested "the push-off is a transportation route", which wasn't particularly helpful.
All of which is to say that I probably spent a bit too much time on all of that, but it was fun; and at least I know what those paintings are called now.
and thank you so much for doing all that!
When people argue that food from Chinese and Mexican restaurants in the US are not 'real' representations of that culture's cuisine ignore the historical reality that these dishes were developed by diasporic communities striving to recreate the flavors of home with available resources. Such criticism frames adaptation as a loss of authenticity, rather than recognizing it as a sincere and evolving expression of culture by people separated from their homeland.
Too good to leave in the tags
You can’t get chop suey or General Tso’s chicken or fortune cookies in China because those are FUSION dishes originating in the Americas. They’re not any more “fake” than Canto-Western dishes like Portuguese chicken, French toast, or egg tarts, which are not at all like food you would find in France or Portugal. Canto-Western food is local to Hong Kong and Macao. You can get it Canada now, too, and it’s great.
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Muslims in Space
I posted this on my Ko-Fi. I post something every month (and then usually forget to repost it on Tumblr), so follow me there... or patronize my page... to get more.
Eid mubarak to everyone who's been observing Ramadan this past month. Today's topic is one I've been thinking about writing about for a while, and I guess Eid is the excuse I needed to actually do it.
Maida is from Mars, of course, and as we know, there are Muslims on Mars.
So how do things like keeping track of time and space for religious purposes work, in space? Well, the Islamic calendar is based on the moon's orbit around the Earth, so there's no reason for that to change. Muslims celebrate Ramadan at the same time everywhere (or NEARLY the same time everywhere, with some variation based on what time of day it is where you are, and when the new moon can be observed in your area). Elsewhere in the Solar System you won't be able to rely on direct observations of the moon's phases, but it only takes between 3 and 22 minutes for news to arrive on Mars from Earth, so a declaration from Mecca will have to do. Mars' days are 25 hours long, and except for near the poles where weeks without sunrise or sunset would mess everyone up, everyone on Earth uses their local sunrise and sunset to determine their daily routines of prayer and fasting (and eating). Ramadan on Mars will be a day or two shorter, but otherwise the local day cycle should work just fine. Prayers can be directed towards the Earth, which it does take some extra effort to track from a planet where Earth is not always in the same place in the sky, but this shouldn't be difficult. It will impact the architecture of masjids, though, in ways that will probably be interesting.
As for maintaining the calendar in the rest of the Solar System, we'll get to that in a minute.
There is a book that I read a few years ago, Artemis, by Andy Weir, author of The Martian and Project Hail Mary. It lives up to Andy Weir's reputation for his books being the most realistic when it comes to describing the physics and practicalities of near-future space travel. The only way to get a more accurate depiction of how to grow potatoes on Mars, or how to mine aluminum on the Moon, is for someone to try it. The main character in Artemis is a (nonpracticing) Muslima. Her father, who also lives on the Moon, has a scene where he is building a device to help him pray facing Earth, deciding of his own accord, without consulting anyone, to set a new precedent for the right way to do this. This is... not how this works.
Now I am not in any position to criticize a non-Muslim author for choosing to write a Muslim protagonist, when I am literally doing the exact same thing. But reading Artemis I get the strong impression, even with my limited perspective, that Andy listened even less to his sensitivity reader than I did to mine. Jazz, the main character, reads to me like an American rather than someone from Saudi with no American ties. Except for her father, she reads like being Muslim was an afterthought, not a main ingredient of her character design. A quick google search confirms that that's not just me. I think it's fair to say that only a Muslim writer is likely to do a good job of writing a character whose dominant trait (or most important trait to the story) is being Muslim. But I believe there can be a middle ground where an amateur outside observer, a white science fiction author for example, can make being Muslim a part of a fictional character, one that informs who they are, on the way to writing about other things, and without treating it like a palette swap you can make that will have no other impact. A character should be able to be Muslim, without that being their only thing, and without it being nothing.
But more to the point of this current essay, we don't need to invent from whole cloth how to be Muslim in space. Muslims have already done that. Muslims have BEEN in space. At least nine of them, so far. So when I say "the correct way to pray is to face the Earth, if you can, prostrate on the ground unless you're in microgravity, in which case just do your best, maybe tie your feet to the wall so you can make the correct motions without floating away," that's not just me speculating. That's based on precedent. Specifically, the case of Malaysia's first astronaut, Dr. Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, and the fatwa that was written for his benefit by a team of Islamic scholars (so he could be free to "focus on the science" when he was up there). The only original scholarship I'm willing to suggest, and only because it seems self-evident, is that on Mars you should be able to use the planet's own day cycle rather than using the clock from whichever time zone you launched from, which is what the current fatwa says to do.
There is another fatwa, apparently, written by other scholars, warning Muslims not to go to Mars, but it seems to me that that's based on our current technology level making such a mission "suicidal" (their words), and I can't say that's wrong. Don't let Elon Musk put you on a spaceship to Mars. Some day in the far future, when it's safe to do so, I trust that everyone should be able to go to Mars. As the Qu'ran says, “O assembly of Jinn and men! If you can pass beyond the zones of the heavens and the earth, then pass!” (Q. 55:33)
More Phobos and Deimos from a while back.
There is more here.
We’re back with the weighty graphic novel Hello Sunshine by Keezy Young, a book that weaves together one person’s mental health crisis with supernatural horror in a way that is simultaneously smart, original, and respectful. This book is a lot more than just “Scooby-Doo, but serious.” Be prepared for spoilers (go read the book first), and stay tuned for some character-revealing moments.
Also mentioned in this episode: Sunflowers and Taproot: A Story About a Gardener and a Ghost also by Keezy Young Robots, Pine Trees, and Broken Hearts edited by Cloudscape Comics Archie Comics by various Show-ha Shoten! by Akinari Asakura and Takeshi Obata Don’t Read This by I Drink Mercury and Suzume directed by Makoto Shinkai
Music by Sleuth
You can find us at: J Dalton Jam Jeff Ellis
You can also follow the TradeWaiters on Tumblr, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, and Ko-Fi.
Our next episode will be on Flip by Ngozi Ukazu.
I’m now on the third draft of these cards for my card game. I’ve cleaned up the text for clarity, and added cute little icons for fun. Bigger pictures would be more fun, but there isn’t space.
The forgetting of the past of the Americas is intentional. We are not taught to think of the places we live in as unique or permanent, and not just because it suits white supremacy to imagine history beginning with the arrival of settlers. Most of our cities were build as sites for resource extraction. You build a mine and then you build a town around it. People move in for the jobs. When the mine runs dry, you expect those people to abandon the town and move on to work at the next resource extraction site. If there’s no gold in Barkerville, you don’t need a Barkerville. If New Orleans is flooding, let it flood and build a new city elsewhere. Nobody would ever abandon Amsterdam or Zurich under similar circumstances, because these cities are unique, cultural treasures, cities with deep roots. Well, Phoenix, Arizona and Vancouver, BC have deep roots and unique cultures as well. But you’re not supposed to know about the Hohokam canals or the Skwxwu7mesh fishing towns in what is now Stanley Park, because then you’ll get attached. You’re not supposed to be attached to this land or help in defending it. You’re supposed to be ready to move on as soon as capitalism requires it.
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the main problem i have with america is that nothings old as hell there. i cant be so far away from a castle it damages my aura
man people really just say stuff on here huh
Noooo haha don't spread racist ideals and colonizer propaganda by idolizing white european aesthetics above all else and denying the life and accomplishments of native peoples on their own lands
People have been living in the downtown area of Tucson, Arizona for at least 4,500 years. The greater Santa Cruz river valley has been occupied by humans for 12,000 years.
You see this?
That's not a river. That's the South Canal in Mesa, Arizona (Phoenix metro area).
This is a view of the East and South canals. At least half of all the Phoenix metro canals were originally built by the Hohokam (from roughly 200-1400 CE), and are still in use (restored) today.
Phoenix, Arizona actually has more miles (kilometers) of Canals total than both Venice and Amsterdam. No, really. Phoenix has about 180 miles of canals, many of which are built on ancient canal foundations.
below is an aerial view photo taken in the late 1930's of one branch of Phoenix's canal systems:
Also have the "Montezuma Castle," if you need a castle:
I don't need to look at some 12th century European castle to see age.
@isuggestlandback
I HAVE A SUGGESTION
