red is the first color of the rainbow

commissions are open! updated the sheet, plus posting it on my art blog

dm for details + my paypal: [email protected]

Then there is the YouTuber talking about Transformers, casually dropping the "Iraq war aesthetic" like it's a color palette. Desert punk. Military core. A vibe. This is what happens when your country hasn't had a war on its own soil in living memory; the violence becomes media, a backdrop for childhood toys. The explosions are no longer the sound of mothers screaming; they are cool action sequences. They are digesting the visual debris of massacre as a nostalgic fashion choice, scraping the trauma off and compressing it into a genre for their retro-futurist fantasies. The apocalypse becomes a mood board.

And finally, the girl recounting celebrity love triangles from her childhood, flippantly mentioning how the U.S. was "busy with the Iraq war or whatever." Or whatever. That single phrase is the thesis statement of American innocence. Over a million dead, a region destabilized for a century, an endless river of grief; and for her, it was the commercial break between pop culture segments. It didn't raise her rent. It didn't stop her Wi-Fi. The violence is geo-locked to brown skin and distant deserts, just background noise like a refrigerator humming. She has the luxury of forgetting because the machine doesn't eat her children, it eats yours.

Help Nader, please. He needs pain medication and surgery and to get those things he needs exorbitant amounts of cash. They don't have much in savings right now, last time Nader reported for living expenses such as rent/etc (extremely high and not fixed) is only a little over $10k, and this is dwindling because of gaps in donations.

That might sound like a lot, but it's absolutely not. If I had $10k, with the price of living so high I could survive about 6 months in my city before running out of money for rent and groceries, I didn't even factor my utilities.

Imagine a city that has been for the most part cut from the outside world. Resources are limited and the money is draining fast. If you're working class with a job, think about how hard it is for you to save money in an economy that may be suffering but isn't being strangled.

It's almost impossible to get ahead. And to get out is hundreds of thousands with his family members and father's medical expenses.

I can't fathom how hopeless he must feel.

The Rose of Versailles manga handles Oscar’s relationship to gender so unbelievably well that Oscar could be considered an entire different character than to the latter half of the anime. While I absolutely have criticisms of how André is written in the manga, the anime takes many of those flaws and turns them into an argument that Oscar should ultimately accept an essentialized form of womanhood and become a wife, which is the opposite of what the manga is doing with Oscars character and the opposite of what Oscar and André’s relationship was supposed to represent in the narrative.