☆ Your Resident Sally Fan☆

Second picture for the @creatingblackcharacters Melanin Beam Challenge! I was mentally searching through different cartoons I enjoyed, trying to land on one that would both be nice to see featuring Black characters, but also would have an enhanced message... when I came to My Life as a Teenage Robot, I thought about how Jenny is very much accepted as a trans icon (rightly so); she was expected to have a specific role, but she wants to assert her own identity. She's a robot, who is figuring out how to be a teenager, and be seen as a girl. As a Black teenage robot girl, she navigates finding her own identity, there is the pressure to fit in with other people and sometimes try to "hide" the fact that she is a robot, but she is also expected to always be exceptional and save the day. She can't just NOT be any of these things, because it is all part of herself, and ultimately she finds friends who accept her, and gains a good relationship with her mom, so she has the space to grow and be comfortable with herself~

Yasuke (Assassin's Creed Shadows)

quick break from artfight to get back to what's Important. which is middle-aged women

Carb starts your engine, protein keeps it going.

Cookie

Fruit (canned or fresh)

Chips

Piece of bread

Popcorn

Crackers

Easy protein add on:

Nuts

Spoonful of nut butter

Cheese

Roasted chickpea snacks

Glass of milk (dairy or non dairy)

Carb starts your engine, protein keeps it going.

Cookie

Fruit (canned or fresh)

Chips

Piece of bread

Popcorn

Crackers

Easy protein add on:

Nuts

Spoonful of nut butter

Cheese

Roasted chickpea snacks

Glass of milk (dairy or non dairy)

it's been there for years and they never "stock" it so it's just sitting there. anyway, i thought it would be cute to make a little squirrel out of sculpey and leave it on one of the stools in the middle of the night. i also made a little sculpey beer bottle with its own label.

squirrel REAPPEARED today... NOW PAINTED

a few weeks ago i sculpted a new patron:

and put him in the bar. the next day he was gone. a couple weeks later he reappeared painted... but with ANOTHER new guest: a 3D printed squirrel based on the first one i sculpted (with a bottle!)

So of course automation is dreamt up to be a solution to the "embarrassment" of failed human interactions and subsequent poor customer experiences. We wouldn't want another Stitch gender rant. But behind all the attempts at automating "living characters" are real human developers who are bringing their real human biases to their work. There are assumptions being made about what a given guest wants to hear, and what their human reactions to an automated character imply. Developers can try and assign quantitative values to a facial expression, but they're still making assumptions about how the numbers they come up with will apply to hundreds of thousands of people. Thus any time an automated character expresses social biases, it remains a reflection of its human "operators" despite the superficial removal of humans from the equation. (I'm also considering things like the orientalist tropes wrapped up in Destini's character, for example, to be an expression of social biases. Real people decided this was the best way to present the idea they've been developing to the public.)

1) the U.S. entertainment industry (especially animation) is run by older conservative types who make up offensive terms and get really mad about them.

2) the people who run Disney would be the first to fall in line with a fascist regime.

3) most of the media we consume is tailor-made and watered-down to appeal to the tastes of older, deeply religious conservative audiences.

And published it in Penthouse, to force those same censors to buy a skin mag. The editor there asked, why Penthouse?

That one is from his autobiography, Becoming Superman. See also:

When he was making Pulp Fiction, he was worried that the MPAA would object to the high level of violence in the film, so he shot a bunch of extra-gory stuff that he didn’t actually want in the film, and added it in before submitting it to the MPAA. Predictibly, they asked him to cut most of it (without even commenting on some of the things that had him worried, like the bits of Marvin’s skull that lodge in Samuel L. Jackson’s hairpiece). The resultant cuts were actually more permissive than he’d expected, so he cut a little more and submitted it, and it got passed with an R.

The second story is about that artist on Morrowind whose name escapes me (I’m not a big ES fan tbh) who figured out that if he made two creature designs, one weird and what he wanted, and one even weirder, he could get Todd Howard to agree to just about anything by showing him the whopper first, then going back and “working” for another few hours on a second, “toned-down” version, and it worked every time.

The reason I bring these up is that the thing that drives censors isn’t some extant physical rubrick of what is and isn’t acceptable, it’s the idea that they can have absolute power over someone else’s creative work. It’s about the social dominance of the interaction.

There is nothing so innocent, so clean, that a censor will not find some fault with it. Because they must find something wrong with it to justify their existence, and because it makes them feel powerful.

Bodily autonomy (like abortion, anti draft, etc) -> “The government shouldn’t be able to force anything on my body I don’t want.”

Anti surveillance -> “I don’t trust big government/big tech (big brother if you’re feeling frisky) with the ability to spy on me and my family.”

Immigration -> “Next to all of us immigrated at some point, I don’t see why the elites get to decide who’s allowed to be where. What’s to stop them coming for me?”

Climate Change -> “Big oil shouldn’t get to determine whether or not I get to go places. I don’t want to be dependent on some big business to survive.”

State Violence -> “I don’t want the goddamn secret police breathing down my neck! I trust my community a whole hell of a lot more to help me than I do the state!”