In my Rain of Terror

indian residential school survivors society (BC)

toronto indigenous harm reduction (ON)

native women's resource centre of toronto (ON)

water first (nationwide)

indspire (nationwide)

miskanawah (AB)

ma mawi wi chi itata centre (MB)

manitoba indigenous cultural education centre (MB)

native women's shelter of montreal (QC)

native friendship centre of montreal (QC)

first light (NL)

thank you for the info!!

first light (merchandise store only; unfortunately there is no direct donation link that I could find)

nfc montreal (updated)

Commission for @purplejuni

<3

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Tags passing peer review, gonna share.

Uber is a fucking shell game of a company designed to leech investor capital and output bootleg cabs.

Nvidia posted a profit in 2023 of $4.37 billion. This is like someone stealing less than a penny from me.

And they lock this kid in a prison hospital for LIFE?

The reason webcomics are so bad (and I'm a firm believer that more than 99% of them are terrible ❤️) is that the bar to entry is extremely low.

Anyone can draw a few panels. By hand, with ms paint. I've seen webcomics where it was photos rather than drawings. (I say drawings rather than art because photos, of course, are also an artistic medium)

Anyone can write a joke. (Most of the bad webcomics I've seen have purported to be comedies.) In fact, when you think of a webcomic as just an illustrated joke it becomes really clear how low the bar to entry is.

And on the level of artistic expression that's a great thing. Anyone SHOULD be able to draw a few panels, write a joke, slap it on the internet, and make a webcomic.

For quality, it's a very bad thing. You don't need any practice, you don't need any training, you don't need any editors, you don't need any test audiences. These things all get a bad rap (and certainly there are many artists without formal training and there are great writers without editors) but they generally raise the quality level.

So there you have it. Webcomics are bad and that's why.

So, for instance, I couldn’t say “this book didn’t give its characters strong agency or goals”. I instead had to say, “the characters in this book acted in ways that often felt misaligned with their characterization as if they were being pulled by the plot.”

I think this is really important because a lot of “critiques” people give, if subverted to address what the book does instead of what it doesn’t do, actually read pretty nonsensical. For instance, “none of the characters were unique” becomes “all of the characters read like other characters that exist in other media”, which like… okay? That’s not really a critique. It’s just how fiction works. Or “none of the characters were likeable” becomes “all of the characters, at some point or another, did things that I found disagreeable or annoying” which is literally how every book works?

It also keeps you from holding a book to a standard it never sought to meet. “The world building in this book simply wasn’t complex enough” becomes “The world building in this book was very simple”, which, yes, good, that can actually be a good thing. Many books aspire to this. It’s not actually a negative critique. Or “The stakes weren’t very high and the climax didn’t really offer any major plot twists or turns” becomes “The stakes were low and and the ending was quite predictable”, which, if this is a cute romcom is exactly what I’m looking for.

Not to mention, I think this really helps to deconstruct a lot of the biases we carry into fiction. Characters not having strong agency isn’t inherently bad. Characters who react to their surroundings can make a good story, so saying “the characters didn’t have enough agency” is kind of weak, but when you flip it to say “the characters acted misaligned from their characterization” we can now see that the *real* problem here isn’t that they lacked agency but that this lack of agency is inconsistent with the type of character that they are. a character this strong-willed *should* have more agency even if a weak-willed character might not.

People speak of online "spaces" but online does not have physical space in it and that is the problem.

It's like if all the conversations people ever had in public had to take place in a huge warehouse-sized room where everyone could hear and see everyone else at the exact same volume and with the exact same clarity no matter where they were standing.

Some people are seriously discussing political action. Some people are goofing off. Someone is panhandling, someone is venting to their friends about something awful that happened to them, someone is giving a speech about a topic that interests them, someone is crying about the pain in their life, someone is just thinking out loud to themselves, a bunch of people just want to watch movies or hang out with their friends. Someone is trying to sell some junk. A bunch of people are passing around newspapers.

And all of these people can hear and see each other perfectly so that they don't even know if they themselves or anyone else is in an intimate conversation with people who sympathize, if they're having a town hall meeting, if they're attending a lecture, if they are behind the podium giving a lecture, if they're hanging out at the bar with friends, if they're in their friend's car, or if they're just in a public park watching the clouds.

If someone who thinks they're in the movie group makes a comment about the movie, the people who think they're in the audience at the lecture hall will think the movie watcher is the lecturer behind the podium. So, they will turn to their friends and say "wow, get a load of that guy, they just said..." but the people who think they are at a town hall meeting will think "wow, this is clearly an important concern," but the person who thinks they are crying to their friends is like "Seriously? We're talking about a MOVIE when my life is falling apart?"