:3c

I was wondering if you had some sort of a list of long-lenght GL movies from any Asian country. I've either found short films on GagaOOLala, or very few titles at all.

Hi! There are lots of movies and many good lists to find online, especially on Letterboxd. Here are some I’ve watched and would recommend:

Blue (2002), dir. Hiroshi Ando

An introverted schoolgirl falls in love and starts a relationship with one of her classmates. Set in a small seaside town in Japan.

Saving Face (2004), dir. Alice Woo

A Chinese-American lesbian and her traditionalist mother are reluctant to go public with secret loves that clash against cultural expectations.

The Handmaiden (2016), dir. Park Chan-wook

In 1930s Korea, a swindler and a young woman pose as a Japanese count and a handmaiden to seduce a Japanese heiress and steal her fortune.

Billie & Emma (2018), dir. Samantha Lee

Billie, a teenage rockstar, moves to the province and meets Emma, a model and almost perfect example of a good daughter. They go through the experience of first love.

Moonlit Winter (2019), dir. Lim Dae-hyung

The arrival of an intimate letter prompts a young woman to bring her mother on vacation to a small Japanese town, where someone special resides.

Badhaai Do (2022), dir. Harshavardhan Kulkarni

A gay cop and a lesbian teacher enter a sham marriage to pacify their families but find that relationships — both real and fake — aren’t all that easy.

Maja Ma (2022), dir. Anand Tiwari

A rumour about an unassuming housewife threatens to disrupt her middle-class family’s life on the eve of her son’s engagement.

Rookie (2023), dir. Samantha Lee

Not directly. I think if I was a little younger when Warrior Cats debuted, I would have been all over that, but it really didn't show up on my radar until sometime after I had started making Lackadaisy comics. The Warrior Cats MAP animators really showed up for us when we put the word out we were hiring for the Lackadaisy pilot, though! They go hard, and we've been lucky to have their participation.

There's a Shop Talk episode on the Lackadaisy YouTube Channel featuring a few of these animators, in fact. We may or may not have spent part of the interview sorting out what the Lackadaisy characters' Warrior names would be....

for those who don’t know what the internet archive is, it’s a virtual library full of media. books, magazines, recordings, visuals, flash games, websites - a lot of these things either don’t exist anymore or cannot be found & bought. heard of the wayback machine? that’s part of the internet archive. it is the most important website to exist, and i don’t say that lightly. if the internet archive goes down, the cultural loss will be immeasurable.

so how can you help?

boycott the publishing companies involved in this. they’re absolute ghouls, frankly, and don’t deserve a penny. the companies involved are harpercollins (imprints), wiley (imprints), penguin random house llc (imprints), and hachette book group (imprints). make sure the websites are set to your location as it may differ worldwide.

learn to torrent. download a torrent client (i recommend transmission), a vpn (i recommend protonvpn - sign up and choose the area that’s closest to your continent/country), and hit up /r/piracy on reddit for websites. with torrenting, you can get (almost) any media you want for free in high quality, with add-ons such as subtitles, and with no risks of loss. i would also recommend getting into the habit of watching stuff online for free. the less you can pay to a giant corporation, the better.

get into the habit of downloading and archiving materials. find a TB external hard drive, ideally the higher the better. it’ll probably cost around $60 for 1TB and continue to go up, but they’re so so useful. if you can’t afford a drive, look for any GB harddrives or memory sticks you have lying around and just fill them up. videos, pdfs, magazines, songs, movies, games - anything you can rip and download and fit on there, do it, because nothing is permanent.

donate to the internet archive. this is the most important option on the list. the IA relies entirely on funding, and it’s going to need more to fight this case. whatever you can donate, do it. i promise it’s helpful.

and finally…

Unknown

豆鼠木彫根付

Netsuke of a Rat Grasping a Soybean Pod

I recommend this book to anyone else who wants to learn more about drawing fat folds, both for adult and infant bodies. 🤙🏼

Then, their policies changed. Half my work was no longer allowed. People left the site in droves. I left too, for awhile. I came back to a ghost town. I still have 25k followers, but I don’t think more than 10% are active anymore. I’m followed by ghosts. Same with DeviantArt, although I was never quite as big there, and I’ve been gone so much longer.

This disallowed half of my work was never allowed on Facebook in the first place, or Instagram, but their algorithms are such that my stuff rarely makes it to anyone’s feeds, and if I post a link to where people could actually pay me for my content, it’s hidden unless I pay for it. Patreon swept my work away to a dark corner where no one could see it unless I personally guided them there. Twitch is so strict you can’t even show bare feet. The death of Google Reader means nobody follows RSS feeds anymore, so I can’t direct people to my own site.

So there’s Twitter I guess, where I can post whatever I want, but again, algorithms. But more than that, I don’t have the energy to build up a following once again on a site I don’t own that can delete my career on a whim. The thought of spending time jumping around through hoops for attention just to have it taken away again has stripped any motivation I had to try.

The internet has been gentrified. All the small cute houses and mom & pop shops have been shut down and replaced by big corporations that control everything. I’ve been making webcomics for twenty years, and at the start, the internet was a beautiful wild place. Everyone had a home page. It was like having a house and people came to visit you and you would visit other people in their houses. Now, we don’t visit each other in personal spaces anymore. It’s like we have to visit each other in the aisles of a megamart. Everything is clean and sanitized and the weirdos who made the internet what it was are no longer welcome. No space for freaks anymore.

People still ask me for advice on how to break into comics, and I don’t have any wisdom because I don’t recognize the internet anymore. I don’t feel comfortable working within its boundaries which seems to be getting smaller and smaller and smaller. None of the tools I used when I started exist anymore. They’ve been replaced by things I don’t know how to use. I don’t think I could break into comics today. 2002 had so few barriers compared to now. You might have started on Keenspace, but you could reach a point where you could break away to your own site and people would go to it. Now, you start on Webtoon or Patreon and I guess you just stay there? It feels so much like owning a hardware store for years and then having to go work as a cashier at the Home Depot that put you out of business. I’m looking at my career trajectory and it all points to being a Wal-Mart greeter with uncontrolled arthritis.

- your most sought-after goal

- a strongly-held belief or conviction

- your revenge.

and it can be hard to look at your childhood and go “I was hurt” and also know that the hurt wasn’t deliberate. it’s uniquely painful to not have someone to blame. 

you do not have to excuse the people who hurt you, even if it was unintentional. & acknowledging your own pain does not necessarily entail blaming them for it.

Except it wasn’t criticism, it was constant daily harassment. Look, I’ve been making comics for the internet for 10 years. I made comics for BuzzFeed for about two years, but people love to focus on those comics for some reason. They were simpler and quicker because I needed to publish at least one thing a day. And I loved it! I learned a lot!

At some point when I was getting really popular, Reddit and Tumblr decided they’d had enough and launched a targeted campaign against me. Tried to doxx me multiple times. Sent death threats. 4Chan threads started popping up for the sole purpose of spreading rumors that I’m a pedophile. All because I was making “lazy” comics and getting a salary for it.

Also, it’s always the same 10 or so comics that got posted as proof of my laziness. I made 1,008 comics at BuzzFeed (I counted). I worked really hard for my extremely mediocre salary.

Artists know other artists. If I'm having trouble with something specific, I can actively say "who do I know that does this really well?" and immediately come up with a shortlist of names belonging to people who I 1)trust to be honest and helpful and provide me with actual solutions to the problem I'm having, 2) know what they're talking about, 3) are at least somewhat familiar with my workload and process and 4) have time for my questions. If my issue is more involved, I will even offer to pay them for their time!

Most artists will not take unsolicited advice from random people on Tumblr or in their comments, and they shouldn't! You have no way of knowing if the person giving you critique has any experience, has any insight into what might work better, has any familiarity with anything about how you work, and so on. You also don't know anything about them personally, so you really can't trust that someone has genuinely good intentions towards you and isn't just fucking with you--that even if you did everything they said they wouldn't just move the goalposts until you finally realised that their goal wasn't to help you improve, it was to waste your time and jerk you around for as long as they could get away with.

Also, you never want to give people who consume your work the idea that they have power over the decisions you make, because then you set yourself up for caving to audience whim in a time and place where collective hate-reading is a thing that people do.

That's not to say that your readers shouldn't call you out if you say something shitty or racist or genuinely harmful, but that is an entirely different situation from constantly being hounded by a group of assholes who are all saying 'you're doing it wrong, do it a different way because I say so, and if you don't I'm going to tell everyone that you just can't take criticism!' Fuck that.