a miscalculation has been made

30s | they/them | shipyrds on ao3 | joined this website over a decade ago and regrettably i'm still here

[burins]

since there are some more of y'all here I feel I should say: I'm an adult who regularly posts content intended for adults! in addition to a lot of comics and my cat I also sometimes post about things like sex and violence and taxes. i try to operate in good faith so feel free to say hi but I will not be getting into fandom arguments via my inbox 👍

[dustdotorg]

sometimes you will see a joke circulate within a fandom and at first it's all fun and games but then the slow and terrible realization starts to seep in that this will become in fact a widely-accepted way to read a specific situation between characters that were subject of said joke and there is nothing you can do about it but to watch the horrors unfold in real time

[mossgirl]

[catchaspark]

californians, consider calling your state assemblymembers in order to object to the current budget proposal stripping Medi-Cal (our Medicaid) from asylees and refugee applicants except in emergencies. also, they’re agreeing to reduce the asset limit for many Medi-Cal recipients back to $2000. That number means that the maximum amount a Medi-Cal recipient who is aged, blind, or disabled can have in the bank at any time is $2000. That figure is obscenely low, and it’s actually lower by about fifty bucks than the amount they’re allowed to get each month in income.* if enacted this policy change will vastly hurt thousands of seniors and disabled people and i’m not kidding. please speak up if you can.

[hexjulia]

look at the cute cow angel i saw when i tried to link to the correct page of that manuscript.

(the Apocalypse of Saint-Sever, (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS lat. 8878)

[sobadbad]

FROZEN PLANET II 1.02 • Frozen Ocean

[achillesinhighheels]

[soleminisanction]

Black Comics Recs

Been meaning to do something like this for a while and it was on my mind, so... since it seems like a lot of people have trouble finding indie comics outside the Big Six, here's a handful of the Black-led and often Black-owned indie comics I've picked up over the years:

Iron Circus Comics (https://ironcircus.com/) was originally founded to publish the founder’s webcomic and now publishes a whole range of diverse titles. You might know them for Kim Hyun Sook’s autobiography Banned Book Club; their anthologies of stories based in various mythologies, like The Woman in the Woods and Other North American Stories and  The Night Marchers and Other Oceanian Stories; or their Smut Peddler anthologies of woman-created and -centric erotica. And they’ve got a Pride sale on right now!

FairSquare Graphics (https://fairsquaregraphics.com/) describes itself a family, immigrant and minority-owned company who might be best known for their 1920s-era queer graphic novel A Boy Named Rose, which got nominated for an Eisner in 2024. For the purposes of this list I specifically want to highlight their Mutiny: Black Girl Magic series, which is currently in preorder, and their “Noir is the New Black” line, especially Watson and Holmes, which I sadly cannot find on their website anymore but I love and desperately want the next volume for. It’s Sherlock and Watson as modern-day Black men in Harlem, and features one of my favorite Holmes designs literally ever.  

I’m pretty sure Stranger Comics (https://www.strangercomics.com/) exists first and foremost to publish their World of Asunda Afro-fantasy series, though the also have other titles like Jaycen Wise, who appears to be the reverse Indiana Jones (stealing artifacts from museums to return them to their points of origin) and Defiant: the Story of Robert Smalls, a Black hero of the American Civil War.

Etan Comics (https://etancomics.com/) is a Pan-African company that releases their comics (or at least some of them) in both English and Amharic. Their titles include Tokoloshe Hunters, a shonen manga style anthology of Southern African mythology (that features some of the most harrowing sample pages I’ve ever seen); Jember, a superhero comic drawing in part on the history of Punt; Hawi, a mythology-based superheroine story at least partially based in a sci-fi version of the Axumite Empire; and their current headliner offering, Zufan, an epic sci-fi retelling of the 1896 Italian invasion of Ethiopia.

Honorable mention to Tuskegee Heirs: Flames of Destiny (https://tuskegeeheirs.com/), a futuristic sci-fi action-adventure comic that casts the titular teenaged heirs of the Tuskegee Airmen in giant robot battles against invading A.I. villains, and The Lie Behind the Star (https://www.indiegogo.com/en/projects/quinnhoward-22779913/the-lie-behind-the-star-graphic-novel), a sweeping bio-technology based sci-fi epic, which are both self-published by their creators. The Lie Behind the Star has unfortunately had a lot of production chaos since its IndieGoGo campaign wrapped, but the writer and project manager has some of the best sci-fi takes on YouTube so I’m still rooting for him to get it done.

Second honorable mention to BlackMask Studios, who I thought was Black owned until I looked them up and realized they’re a lot bigger than I thought, but I want to mention anyway because if you can get your hands on Kwanza Osajyefo’s Black, its second volume White, and/or the two Black AF spin-offs, you should (https://www.simonandschuster.com/series/BLACK). The pitch is, “What if only Black people had superpowers?” and while it’s not perfect—especially not the first volume, since they didn’t know if they’d ever get more and thus tried to essentially cram an entire superhero universe into 6 issues—it is super raw and righteously, unapologetically angry in a way that is both challenging and extremely cathartic. Other comics on this list were created with love to give Black children heroes to see themselves in; Black was created to cuss out the system and kick you in the teeth.

[burins]

(looking at a thing I sought out knowing it would make me mad) why am I mad

[burins]

personal growth: added the site that was making me mad to leechblock

[azspot]

“Rich kids should go to public schools. The mayor should ride the subway to work. When wealthy people get sick, they should be sent to public hospitals. Business executives should have to stand in the same airport security lines as everyone else. The very fact that people want to buy their way out of all of these experiences points to the reason why they shouldn’t be able to. Private schools and private limos and private doctors and private security are all pressure release valves that eliminate the friction that would cause powerful people to call for all of these bad things to get better. The degree to which we allow the rich to insulate themselves from the unpleasant reality that others are forced to experience is directly related to how long that reality is allowed to stay unpleasant. When they are left with no other option, rich people will force improvement in public systems. Their public spirit will be infinitely less urgent when they are contemplating these things from afar than when they are sitting in a hot ER waiting room for six hours themselves.”

— Everyone Into The Grinder

[threedollarsdotcom]

theyre taking me out back behind the shed presumably to give me a medal for my valor and heroism

[burins]

thanks, dilapidated house by the side of the highway

[burins]

i really enjoy when you have your windows in the summer and you get to hear little snippets of people's music when they drive by. sometimes it's bass boosted not like us (a full calendar year after release) and sometimes it's old school mariachi and sometimes it's 90s slow jam babymaking r&b and sometimes it's a woman waiting at the stop sign absolutely headbanging to fleetwood mac go your own way. sometimes it's the cyclist who rides by at the same time every day and has been listening to rise and fall of a midwest princess for two months. i know this is a part of living in a city that a lot of people hate but i find it really endearing... we all love to blast the tunes!

[burins]

latest open window jukebox: the preschool class who walks to the playground every day tunelessly singing a mashup of 1. abc song 2. twinkle twinkle little star 3. wheels on the bus (devolved into chaos when one child insisted the wheels on the bus go "clink clink clink clink")

[lilyblisslys]

Just learned about Bull Press, a tabletop publisher that focuses on games that are prison compliant (no hardcover, no dice, no maps), and their catalogue seems sick as hell. Def gonna pick smth up when I get paid next. They do a lot of donation work with books for prisoners programs!

[mortalityplays]

As mentioned, Bull Press donate playbooks to prisons out of their own pocket. If you know somebody in prison you'd like to refer to receive books, you can email them with requests.

and if you want to support them:

direct donation

patreon

merch (their shirt designs are sick as hell)

[official-german-gaming]

[habibi-queer]

can this guy communicate in any universe

[txttletale]

THE GAME OF THE BALL

(this parable was originally posted on my patreon) On a summer’s day an alien lands in Buenos Aires. He steps out of his spaceship, conical and rough like a snail’s shell, and speaks through a glistening translation bubble. He says to the bewildered boy in front of him, “I have heard of your great game, fútbol, and I want to see it.”  

So the boy nods, because he is an enterprising sort who has been taught to always be polite to strangers, and he leads the alien back to his home. He kicks off his shoes, sits on the couch, and switches the channel to today’s match. Uruguay is playing Chile in the Copa América. The alien watches for some time, but does not seem pleased. 

“This is a broadcast signal being displayed to me on a screen, child. This is not fútbol: I want to see fútbol.” 

So the boy, who is of course familiar with the nuanced differences between representation and reality says, “I understand. The television is only an object which can mediate the images produced by fútbol to me. Follow me.” 

And so the two of them walk to the stadium in the center of town, and they sneak in without paying, and the boy says, “This is the Estadio Monumental. This is where Maradona and Pele played, some of the greatest players of all time.” 

And the alien shakes one of his heads, more frustrated now. “Nonsense! This is not fútbol! Fútbol is a game, not a big building, or a field with goals on it.” 

“I get it!” says the boy. “These are merely the instruments of play for fútbol, its toys and stage. If you want the thing itself, then follow me.” 

And so the two of them go out behind the boy’s house, and walk down the street to where some of his friends are playing among themselves. “Come on, join us, Felipe!” shouts one, but Felipe shakes his head. 

“I am too busy illustrating a parable,” he says meekly, before turning to the alien. “See, here it is: real fútbol.” 

The alien, however, shakes all of his heads at once. “No, boy. These are only people playing fútbol. The game itself is nowhere to be found, and I need a sample of it for my library of specimens.” 

“Oh,” says the boy, and then laughs. “Silly alien! Fútbol is a set of procedures which can be instantiated at any moment. It is a socially mediated cultural object, and not a physical one!” 

The alien frowns. He is very confused. “Why are you calling me an alien?” he asks. “You’re an alien!”