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No we are not plotting anything. Why do you think we are plotting something?

The Spirit of Miyazaki Poster Collection - Created by Edward J. Moran II

This is something I think about a lot…having an audience means having an opportunity (and also maybe a responsibility) to do interesting things with and for that audience. However, there are lots of things that are difficult or impossible to do without money. 

When I think about what to do with the audience we have, part of that equation always has to be money, because I have no more free moments in the day (though I suppose you could say this is a free moment, since I’m spending it answering an ask on Tumblr, but I consider that to be an important part of my job.)

So I have to hire people if I want to do something new, whether that’s Crash Course, VidCon, or Dear Hank and John. Those things have very different budgets, but all of them need to pay for themselves or else I would need to do all of the work myself. 

When I’m having an idea, I definitely think about whether it will be able to make money both because money is nice to have and because I would literally not be able to do it otherwise. Now I’m not going to say that I haven’t gotten richer in the last ten years, but I will say two things.

1. All ad revenue from Vlogbrothers is shared between the Foundation to Decrease Worldsuck and a grant program that we use to distribute money to give a leg-up to smaller content creators.

2. The merch we sell through the Project for Awesome raises more money than we make in merch sales for the entire rest of the year. 

3. I have said “no” to more money in the last year than I have made in my entire life. 

4. John doesn’t make any money from video stuff at all. He doesn’t even take a salary. I do, but our financial situations are…a little different :-). 

Here are some reasons why we do it this way:

1. Because we don’t really need money at the moment.

2. Because it’s more rewarding to do interesting things with money than to have money.

3. Because the most valuable thing in our lives is our relationship with this community. Diminishing that in exchange for money would probably cost us a lot more value than we’d be receiving in dollars.

So before we head into the next round of primaries I wanted to add a little context and depth to the conversation we are having on Climate Change and what candidate best reflects the concerns of the Climate Change movement.

Why Hillary Clinton is definitely NOT your candidate:

1. Hillary’s “safe and responsible” energy plan calls for expansion of domestic fracking, which has been shown to disproportionately impact communities of color.

2. She promoted fracking as Secretary of State both domestically & internationally and her own SuperPAC has credited her with selling fracking to the world.

3. The State Dept. under Hillary attempted to fast-track the Keystone XL pipeline, outsourcing the review process to TransCanada, a company with an extremely poor safety record which was building the pipeline.

4. She has deep ties to fossil fuel financiers and lobbyists including Jeff Berman who now holds a senior position on her 2016 campaign and was a top lobbyist for TransCanada.

5. Her financial bundlers for the 2016 campaign include several oil lobbyists. And Clinton has many of the same donors as far-right politicians, including one of the worst Gov. Rick Snyder.

6. Half of Clinton’s speaking fees come from groups lobbying Congress, several of which were lobbying on fossil fuels.

7. The Hillary campaign and her SuperPAC’s have received large contributions from fossil-fuel industry groups, along with all GOP candidates.

8. The Clinton Foundation has been called by some a “money laundering” operation, with Keystone-related groups, foreign oil companies, and other big oil interests giving millions to the foundation while Hillary was Secretary of State and actively lobbying Congress to fast-track the KXL pipeline.

9. Not surprisingly, Hillary has never offered a comprehensive plan on fossil fuel extraction or climate change, though she publicly supports climate action. the climate section of her website was recently scrubbed, and she has implicitly ruled out a carbon tax through her opposition to new taxes on anyone making less than $250K.

10. Clinton has a long and clear record of supporting Free Trade deals including NAFTA, CAFTA, and the TPP. Note: TransCanada is now suing the US for $15B for blocking the Keystone pipeline (via the NAFTA agreement).

11. The latest email dump from Clinton’s servers show she was aggressively promoting the Colombia Free Trade Agreement, despite having vowed to her voters to block it.

12. Under these neoliberal trade agreements supported by Clinton, the US just announced it will sue India for its “Solar Revolution” plan through the World Trade Organization.

____________________________________________

Why Bernie Sanders DEFINITELY is your candidate:

1. Sanders introduced the Keep It In The Ground Act – legislation that would put an end to fossil-fuel leases on public lands.

2. Sanders calls climate change our greatest national security threat.

3. Sanders supports a national ban on tracking (video), and is running television ads showing how fracking disproportionately impacts low-income communities and communities of color, polluting domestic water supplies (video).

4. Sanders has stated his support for the fossil-fuel Divest-Invest movement.

5. Sanders has a long record of introducing legislation and initiating programs to protect the environment and expand clean, renewable energy.

6. Sanders supports a strong and rising carbon tax to fund clean energy infrastructure, creating millions of working class jobs in America.

7. Sanders has a long and very clear record of opposing free trade deals like NAFTA, CAFTA, and the TPP which allows corporations to sue governments if their environmental laws impact shareholder value.

8. Sanders called for Governor Rick Snyder’s resignation because of the Flint water crisis, in which government leaders at all levels knew they were poisoning this low-income community.

9. Sanders is one of the most outspoken critics of the Koch brothers and GOP climate deniers (video).

10. Sanders has a long record of supporting environmental justice and is the ONLY candidate with a climate justice plank in his comprehensive climate platform.

11. While Clinton’s campaign is being run by fossil fuel lobbyists, Sanders’ campaign is staffed with a roster of important climate activists, including Becky Bond, Zack Malitz, Karthik Ganapathy, Claire Sandberg.

The dog kicked the door open and howled. A small German family blinked, and stared, astonished. The wife was the first to react. She reacted poorly. The dog re-reacted poorly. Frankly, everybody could have handled it a lot better.

These duels to the death aren’t uncommon in 22nd Century Germany. The rise of Kaiser Trumplebottom shook the country out of what had been a long, prosperous and (some may claim), decidedly ethical post-War slumber. But tides turn (thrice daily now, due to Moon II), leaders fall, and the zeitgeist conveniently fades from one form to the next.

The Russian Method returned to the scientific world. Shipments of bells, pet food and assorted canines flooded into New Berlin. The Academy De Genetic hummed in the dark, wet nights, trucks rumbling in and out. Police files show complaints from neighbours about howls and growls, snuffles and scratches. As the reports decrease, a new trend appears - complaints of men shouting, men with deep, guttural voices. Men speaking a language that nobody could identify. Men roaring into the night. And then the alarms sounded.

1.) I don’t know why “ya’ll” feel the need to criticize what I post here as if it’s your birthright to whatever content YOU in particular see as fit to be posted. 

2.) I don’t know why so many of you are so phobic to displays of the female form. I get a comment like this every so often only in response to such content.

I teach figure drawing as a class and it’s not hard to separate nudity/form as anatomy from sexuality.

that being said:

3.)  I understand how anatomy works. Is this 100% accurate? NOPE

are dragons 100% accurate? NOPE

most of the art here DOES NOT EXIST. It’s primarily fantasy and conceptual art. Not to be taken at face value.

I reblogged it because I felt it demonstrated excellent use and understanding of color, light and texture as it applied to the metal and the face. 

This is the Great Pyramid of King Khufu.  Everybody knows the Great Pyramid of King Khufu, but you probably don’t know about the Shit Pyramids of his father, King Sneferu.  This is a shame, because they are amazing.

When King Sneferu came to the throne of Egypt, the cool thing that all the pharaohs had was a Step Pyramid, like the original one built by King Djoser and designed by Imhotep (not the mummy).  King Sneferu could easily have had one one because his predecessor King Huni had died before his could be finished. All Sneferu had to do was step in and put the last few blocks on.

But King Sneferu had a vision.  He didn’t want any old Step Pyramid.  He was going to build Egypt’s first smooth-sided pyramid, and make King Huni’s pyramid way taller in the bargain.  It didn’t work.  The core of Huni’s pyramid couldn’t handle the modifications and nowadays the Step Pyramid at Meidum looks like this:

It’s not on a hill - that’s the outer layers of the pyramid that have fallen down all around it.  The name of the structure in Arabic is Heram el-Kaddaab, which means something like The Sort-Of Pyramid.

Anyway, King Sneferu was understandably disappointed and made his pyramid-builders start over from scratch at a different site.  Apparently having learned nothing about the Big Fat Nowhere that hubristic pyramid ambition was going to get him, this pyramid was designed to be even taller and pointier than the last effort!  Too tall and pointy, in fact - the bedrock proved to be less stable than he might have hoped, and by the time the pyramid was half-finished stuff was already moving and cracking inside of it.  There are ceilings in this pyramid that are to this day partially held up by wooden beams.

The builders seem to have panicked and decided that the only way to finish the pyramid without another disaster was to make the top half lighter than the bottom half.  They did this by changing the angle of the slope, ending up with a pyramid that looks like this:

Egyptologists call this one the Bent Pyramid for fairly obvious reasons.  Uniquely among Egyptian Pyramids, it has most of its smooth outer blocks intact, rather than having them all stolen to build other stuff (most of medieval Cairo is built from the skin of the Giza pyramids).  I’m guessing this is because nobody dared touch the thing for fear the whole structure would come down like a giant limestone game of Jenga.

I’m sure the pyramid-builders were very proud of this solution.  Sneferu appears to have been less so.  He had them move over about half a mile and start over.  Again.  Why only half a mile when he had them move 34 miles between the Sort-of Pyramid and the Bent Pyramid is a mystery.  I think he wanted to keep them in sight of the Bent Pyramid so they could look at it and feel ashamed every once in a while.

And there they built Sneferu’s third pyramid, which is called the Red Pyramid.  As pyramids go, it’s a very cautious one - it’s got the shallowest slope rise of any Egyptian pyramid, and while it’s the same height as the Bent Pyramid it spreads its weight over a much greater base area, making it far more stable.  Sneferu seems to have been happy with this one, because he was buried in it.  Either that, or after a forty-eight-year reign he just finally died and that was the pyramid they used because it was the nicest of the three.

These three pyramids together actually contain substantially more stone than the Great Pyramid of Sneferu’s son Khufu.  By the time Sneferu died, his workforce had honed themselves into a lean, mean pyramid-building machine.  They had already made every possible pyramid mistake.  So when Khufu announced that he didn’t just want a great pyramid, but The Great Pyramid, these guys built him a pyramid so fucking great that we now think aliens must have done it.