Spookie's Spooky Art Cave

This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles. Perched above public streets, they are birdlike things, weatherproof, and they photograph every passing car and file it in a searchable national database. Somebody cut two of them in half at Washington Avenue and Westcott in Houston, spray-painted the wreckage, and left an American flag on one of them. Police were notified on the morning of the Fourth of July. Somebody severed a camera in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. The police department posted the photograph itself and collected more than twenty thousand comments. “Not all heroes wear capes.” “Give them a medal.” Here is what the cameras do when nobody cuts them down. Cops use them to hunt immigrants and to follow ICE targets across state lines and to find women who ended pregnancies in states where that is a crime and to watch exes and to watch women they want, without a warrant and without a judge. A cop types a reason in a box and the box does not check. A man in Burleson, Texas, told deputies his girlfriend had taken abortion pills. He showed them the photographs, the FedEx envelope, the instructions. Deputies opened a death investigation into a non-viable fetus, and the district attorney told them the state could not charge her, and they searched anyway: 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks, a month of everywhere she had been. The reason they typed was had an abortion, search for female. The search reached Illinois and Washington, where what she did was legal. They found her in Dallas. She came into the sheriff’s office a week later, and they thought she had come to explain the fetus, and she had come to report that the man who called them had put a gun to her head. A sheriff in Jerome County, Idaho ran his wife’s plate more than seven hundred times in three months. He typed the same reason every time. Test. The attorney general found nothing to charge him with. He retired in April. The Institute for Justice counts at least twenty-two officers who used the system to track people they were romantically interested in, and calls that almost certainly an undercount. And the cameras keep falling.

As if Joanne couldn't get any shittier, she misgendered and insulted a woman who called for support, all because the woman had PCOS/PMOS and "didn't sound feminine enough."

Fuck her.

not broken

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We need to start commenting under other people's posts about how to properly warn for flashing lights and eyestrain. We need to be emailing and calling companies about their possibly triggering advertisements that could induce seizures. We need to stop tolerating ableism and start speaking up for the more vulnerable.

Also, stop putting epilepsy warnings. That's like saying "warning: schizophrenia" on a post including unreality or "warning: dyslexia" on a post with a typing quirk. First off, the disability mentioned isn't the only group of people that this could trigger. Second, it doesn't truly get the message across and instead makes it worse for those with the disability-- scrolling through the epilepsy tag on Tumblr should get you to view the content of other epileptic people, but no, you just get a bunch of flashing lights and eyestrain, even though you could instead tag for, oh I dunno, flashing lights and eyestrain.

On its face, it's a crude comedy anime about, well, an anime cat girl with a crippling nicotine addiction. However, under the slapstick, it's got undercurrents which point towards other matters of social commentary.

It not-so subtly shows how drug addiction is a coping mechanism but also fucking ruins your life and makes you a seemingly inconsiderate asshole towards those around you.

But also: it much more subtly points to how these coping mechanisms are more likely to be used within communities that are already under higher degrees of societal pressure with very few avenues for social advancement.

Because it would appear that cat girls are in fact a great allegorical representation of the experience of societal marginalization, while not directly representing any individual real world group.

The anime cat girls are not specifically trans women, or immigrants, or a racial minority, or anything else- they're cat girls.

But they ARE shown on screen to all have low income apartments. They are shown to be offered worse jobs and menial labor positions. They are called specific terms that sound a lot like slurs. The police treat them differently. The neighborhoods they dominate appear to have negative stigma attached to them. The girls that are socially respected by non-cat girls are the ones who seem to play the most to respectability politics, and even then they just get patronizingly regarded as "one of the *good ones*."

But on top of how they are broadly disadvantaged and disparaged, they are also simultaneously fetishized.