hi i made an art blog bc i want to post art but my main has become a nightmare for trying to post any sort of content. follow @cinnamixi if ur interested in seeing what i can produce 💃💃💃
we're at a point where the united states illegally invaded venezuela, kidnapped its president and established their own leader, freely talks about how they want to invade cuba, and now new audio files have been leaked where they openly discuss organizing and funding a mass misinformation campaign to get their candidates in power in mexico and colombia AND NO ONE FUCKING BATS AN EYE I FEEL LIKE IM GOING CRAZY
[another post about racism in r1999. spoiler warning]
Ssssooooo, my original post talking about racism/orientalism in reverse:1999 is making the rounds so I feel like I should clarify some stuff and/or give corrections. This post is also longer so I'll be putting the main post under the cut.
Very important for me to correct my view on J; after seeing how some artists draw the man with super pale skin in both fanart and official art, acting like he's not "dark skinned" was just shitty of me. He isn't, however, explicitly stated to be a part of any specific ethnic group as far as I'm aware, which is what I was trying to say. Still, he is dark skinned in some capacity.
Since I made that post, they've introduced a few different characters who have african american features, namely Poitier comes to mind as a major story character in her debut event...but, uhhh....girl is a COP. which. I'm not saying black cops don't exist but that's certainly A Choice! Still waiting on more African characters (like. from the actual continent this time, BP.)
Also, I want to talk about Fatutu a little. I've seen a lot of mixed opinions on her, and though I'm not a Polynesian native, I am still part of an indigenous peoples. My point of view comes from that, still, I want to acknowledge that people from the cultures hers is inspired by will have more standing.
Fatutu as a character seems to be pretty complicated, although her presence is welcome. She also looks to be one of the more popular characters, getting multiple skins, the newest of which is incredibly detailed (bagging a collab skin? when she was practically brand new? that is something.)
And it seems like her storyline has resonated with so many people, myself included. While not perfect, they acknowledge the sort of struggles that a lot of indigenous people are out through. Colonization and displacement. Being treated like savage tribes people who are just "lost" and looking for their perfect savior to guide them to the new world.
She's a very sympathetic character! And I personally love her. HOWEVER, I'd be remiss to act like it's perfect. Not only do we just NOT get an actual island culture, it's a collage of multiple, from what I've heard from folks of Polynesian/Oceanic cultures, a common problem when it comes to representation in media. A hodgepodge of inspirations that's either entirely unintended because of pure ignorance, or a way to avoid referencing actual specific cultures. Regardless of their intentions, this happens often with depictions of Arabs in media as well.
Also, can we talk about Ms. Grace? I'm sorry. But I think making her turn out to be "actually a good guy all along" without hesitation is absolutely bull???
TO BE COMPLETELY HONEST: I have to catch up on the anecdotes. Maybe Fatutu's gives more light on it all. But the general impression I get from how they treat Ms. Grace, is that she will get away with it, only getting a slap on the wrist and maybe like one moment saying she did an "oopsie."
This woman took advantage of a crisis that the people of Nukutaeao were facing and took them from their homes, brainwashed and killed some of them, and we're just expected to forgive her I guess because??? "oh she's a spy! she's been doing it for the greater good! she's not REALLY evil!"
okay bro. I'm not gonna forget this, White Woman.
Unless, of course, they actually ACKNOWLEDGED her actions in later stories I haven't read yet or have yet to be added to global, then I suppose I'll give them a single brownie point, even though that's literally the bare minimum. But it leaves a bad taste in my mouth how characters like Igor and Isolde face repercussions for their actions in some form, yet the moment we get to something like this... "she's just a widdle baby 🥺🥺" like shut the hell up.
Do I even DARE speak of the disaster of the São Paulo update?
I'll give some folks their due and say that, from what I've seen, some people from Brazil say that it's actually not entirely inaccurate to propose the country is in a state of civil war among its citizens and gang members etc., but I don't think that nullifies every criticism. Namely, the fact they don't even fucking speak Portuguese. The main character of that update, Lopera, isn't even Brazilian. Most of the characters...aren't Brazilian! The most we get is Mr. Duncan who's a reversed version of someone else!!
And, even IF it's technically "not inaccurate" that the country is as violent as it's portrayed to be in the game, it's a pretty common issue for companies to write countries like Brazil and other Latin countries as violent, is it not? Because they tend to be seen as "less developed" and "more cutthroat, brutish cultures" by outsiders. Especially when those locations are known to have lots of brown skinned people. I mean, it doesn't always happen, but just look at the 1.3 update. C'mon.
Of course, I'm not Brazilian. I'm pretty sure actual Latinos especially could probably give more accurate criticism of this update than I. If you must, correct me! But I know that lots of people have issues with that update as well.
One small criticism I DO have more standing in is that of Poitier. It's very lovely that they decided to hire a black woman to voice her, by the way, that's appreciated! And also her having a good relationship with Liang Yue is pretty cool, considering the tensions between Asian and Black communities in America at some point. Even though Liang Yue isn't American, but, it's just nice to see! Friendship between POC is always very important to portray, we're not always at each other's throats, y'know?
But I have a little bit of a conflicted opinion on her being a cop. Having such focus put on the fact she's a cop. It's...it's a choice...that's for sure. Given the historical context of, well...EVERYTHING surrounding us and cops, I always felt a little odd about it.
Then again the other African American NPC in this game so far is a Foundation politician (who I forgot the name of) so maybe we got it better in r1999 or something I dunno bro.
And I'll also bring up the very obvious obsession they seem to have with West Europeans, specifically Russians, Germans, and The British. And to a lesser extent, North Americans.
In general, I think I'd say R1999 is still in the same place it was when I made that original post. It's a game that could use WORK. And I'm glad less people are touting it around as if it's the best mobile game of its time because it has more brown and black skinned people than the average gacha game.
I think that it's making slow strides to be better. That's good! But I wish those strides were less baby steps and more leaps and bounds. Especially for a game that prides itself on portraying so many different cultures.
Obviously, feel free to direct any critique my way as well. Maybe my wording in this post was off at some point or maybe my criticisms aren't as solid as I thought. Feel free to discuss! Please!
PLEASE CALL YOUR REPS AND TELL THEM TO VOTE NO ON H.R. 7661, THE TRANSPHOBIC NATIONAL BOOK BAN BILL!
House Republicans have introduced a bill to effectively grant the federal government decision-making power over what books make it into the library. Misleadingly called the "Stop the Sexualization of Children Act," H.R. 7661 is a national-level book banning bill that would ban any book that, according to the bill's language, "(ii) involves gender dysphoria or transgenderism." This means any book about a trans person or the trans experience would be banned from every public school in the United States. You can read the full text here.
The bill has been referred to the House Committee on Education and Workforce. If you are represented by one of the members of this committee listed below, they need to hear from you.
Rep. Kevin Kiley, California (CA-3) (Chair) - entering vulnerable election cycle
Rep. Mary E. Miller, Illinois (Vice Chair)
Rep. Glenn "GT" Thompson, Pennsylvania
Rep. Burgess Owens, Utah
Rep. Michael A. Rulli, Ohio
Rep. James C. Moylan, Guam - entering vulnerable election cycle
Rep. Ryan Mackenzie, Pennsylvania - entering vulnerable election cycle
Rep. Mark Harris, North Carolina
Rep. Mark B. Messmer, Indiana
Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, Oregon, Ranking Member
Rep. Jahana Hayes, Connecticut
Rep. Summer L. Lee, Pennsylvania
Rep. John W. Mannion, New York
Rep. Frederica S. Wilson, Florida
Rep. Alma S. Adams, North Carolina
Rep. Adelita Grijalva, Arizona
Call your reps. Tell them they must oppose this bill at every turn. It is egregiously unconstitutional, targets ideas based on ideological disapproval, and misleads parents and the public about the content of children's books. It does nothing to protect kids and will badly harm education. It will tie school material funding into knots and hurt anyone who is a library materials vendor, regardless of content. If you are a bookseller, librarian, or author, tell them your livelihood depends on the next generation of readers. If you are a supporter of free speech, please call your reps and tell them to vote no on HR 7661!
Thank you to @authorsagainstbookbans for the graphics and text in the four blue slides.
Hi. The state of Trans Rights in the USA is upsetting right now.
Let's fuckin' do something about it.
For the month of March, I have Marching Band themed YCH (Your Character Here) Donation Commissions open!
I have a Google Form to fill out that'll walk you step-by-step through it all, but the basic gist is:
Pick a tier - how many guys you want
Pick your poses and assign them a character based on the presets I've made
Make a donation corresponding to your tier to either The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) or The Transgender Law Center and upload your receipt (with any personal information that you don't wanna share crossed out)
These will probably be open until the first week of April or so (we'll see)
Analyzing the politics of a work that's meant to be apolitical is actually a really interesting exercise because it asks you to critically examine what the creator considers to be "political" in the first place. Which ideas are just How Things Are, and which ones are Political, and how is that influenced by the creator's beliefs?
Angrily lashing out at the suggestion that it's possible to do basic media analysis was foundational to the ragebait ecosystem of the 2010s, from which we got basically the entire culture of modern far right politics, btw.
I went outside and got an education, that's where I learned that you can obtain knowledge and insight through analytical methods, then noticed that some people who sit on the internet yelling at strangers get really mad about that constantly.
Long before there was Jeffrey Epstein and his repulsive rape ring, there was the terror of murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls.
Article text:
Long before there was Jeffrey Epstein and his repulsive rape ring, there was the terror of murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls.
The MMIW crisis spans decades, arguably centuries, and involves 1000s of cases in the US and Canada, and yet, even as the Epstein story captures mass media attention and builds pressure for more prosecutions, Indigenous women and girls and women-identified people continue to turn up dead, or simply don’t turn up at all – and only native activists seem to care.
I felt the ice of that terror freeze a new friend once, in a Holiday Inn parking lot off a flat highway in Minnesota. We’d pulled in, just before dark, after a hot, dusty pipeline protest followed by some earnest pleading from two happy, helpful, just-barely teenage girls. Brave before cops and mobs, I saw the skin around the eyes of their mother, my new friend, tighten. An experienced native organizer, her smile squeezed to a clench as she saw white men with trucks milling about. One swim. In my eyesight. No leaving your room – for any reason. We left early. I got it: terror. Happy indigenous girls are an endangered species in America.
In 2022, the National Crime Information Center reported 5,487 cases of missing Native American and Alaska Native women and girls in the United States, where the majority of missing persons cases involved girls aged 0-17 years old. It is estimated that Indigenous women are murdered at a rate at least ten times higher than the national average in some counties, but the data is hard to nail down and record-keeping has always been weak.
Not long ago, a record four Indigenous women managed to get themselves elected to Congress where they did something historic. They passed the Not Invisible Act, authored by then-Rep. Deb Haaland, and signed by President Trump, which created a Commission to study the problem and lay out an action plan.
“The federal government must act now; not tomorrow; not next week; not next month; and not next year. Once and for all, the federal government must end its systematic failure to address this crisis, and react, redress, and resolve this,” declared the Not Invisible Act Commissioners.
In one virtual, and seven in-person hearings in places including Billings, MO, Tulsa, OK, and Anchorage, AK , Commission members heard testimony from tribal leaders, law enforcement officers, service providers, and family members. Motivated by the same righteous rage that moves the relatives of Epstein’s trafficked girls, the family members of murdered and missing Indigenous people made often arduous journeys to testify.
With heroic nerve, Indigenous survivors of human trafficking stood in front of strangers and recalled the worst horrors of their lives. America’s indigenous survivors shared their warnings with the same mix of gratitude and skepticism that we’ve heard from the victims of Epstein. (Someone is finally listening, but will anything, ever, be done? )
Commissioners heard several versions of the same witness sentiment: “I don’t want anyone else to have to live through this nightmare.”
After 260 witnesses and hours of testimony, the Not Invisible Act Commission produced a report. It described in damning detail the many sources of the problem: longstanding white racism, a limited tribal justice system, jurisdictional cracks – more like chasms — into which most MMIW cases fall. Above all, they expressed the urgent need for adequate funding for investigation, prosecution, prevention and care.
The Not Invisible Act Commission Report was posted on the Justice Department’s website in November of 2023.
By February of this year, that link was dead. The report disappeared soon after Donald Trump resumed office, along with nearly half of all federal funding allocated to federally recognized Native American and Alaska Native nations, and massive cuts to hundreds of safety and justice-related grants. Today, the website of the Department of Justice Office on Violence Against Women (a primary source of support for MMIW- and MMIP-related resources) features a warning to applicants about falling “out of scope”. Under the administration’s new “anti-DEI” and “anti-woke” regulations, it’s a violation, for example, to “frame domestic violence or sexual assault as systemic social justice issues rather than criminal offenses” or “addressing missing or murdered indigenous persons (MMIP) unrelated to domestic violence or sexual assault.” ) As of November, 21, the site reads “There are no FY 2025 open notices of funding opportunity at this time.”
Where’s the outcry? A bi-partisan Congress has voted to force Trump’s DOJ to release the full Epstein files. Now, how about making the Not Invisible Commission Report visible once again, and implementing its recommendations? Funding for prosecution, prevention and healing in Indigenous communities was never sufficient. It’s in tragically short supply now.
Blaming and shaming the elite and the powerful people around Epstein is necessary and satisfying, but justice for victims of gender-and-race-based violence requires much more than a few high-profile perp-walks. When it comes to the use and abuse of women, we as a nation need a fundamental culture shift, and that demands turning our collective conscience to the colonial cruelty at the heart of so much of our story.
Finally cherishing Indigenous women and girls would be a good way to start.
this is the one and only time I will acknowledge these but oh my fucking. god. these ads are killing me dawg SHUT UPPPP not only are you dystopian but you're ANNOYING ABOUT IT. oh my god. absolutely diabolical in the worst way possible. and they have the gall to involve potentially very talented artists in their stupid LLM bullshit.
hope whoever made these sincerely eats the stalest most unpleasantly crispy crackers they've ever had in their life. i hope all the bread they toast comes out the way they hate it. i hope they bite down on a slightly undercooked noodle that isn't too hard but hard enough that you can TELL it's uncooked. fuck you
I'm serious when I say we gotta give Temmie Chang half the credit for Making Undertale (and Deltarune)
She's got an animation degree, I know the art in Undertale gets underappreciated sometimes because it's trying to evoke an older simpler style, but the art in Undertale is legit amazing and without Temmie, none of Toby's ideas would have been able to be realized (without finding some other artist and animator)
She deserves more flowers for being the one who made the vast majority of the art assets for an entire game that is one of the most commonly cited games as an influence on others (her style is so beloved and recognizeable, there's a fully complete Undertale fangame emulating it)
thinking about the time some terf dipshit on twitter said "you weirdos will be saying TREES are a social construct next" and I got nerdsniped and waded in like "trees ARE a social construct. there is no fundamental binary characteristic that separates trees from other plants" and well, I'll spare you the details but the conversation ended with the dipshit yelling "PALM TREES HAVE WOOD" which is hilarious because "wood" actually does have a pretty unambiguous, binary definition and palms in fact do not qualify
a handful of terfs are being super weird in the notes and some of them are providing absolute gems like this
like this is actually such an incredible insight into the terf belief that every interaction has to be morally delineated based on definitions and classes and not actions. the reason cutting down your neighbour's tree is a crime isn't because it's a tree you fucking grenade brain. it's because you destroyed someone else's shit. that's the bad part. who the fuck cares if it's a tree.
I don't think I can fully explain this without going completely insane, but this is exactly parallel to the mental framework that terfs apply to sex crimes. everything is about whether or not you had a penis at the time of the incident and not about what you did
Gonna step outside my usual programming a bit because that light pollution take and a lot of the responses to it aggravated me so much.
No, wanting to see the night sky isn't a twee retvrn to ghibli-ass take. It's not a matter of some anprim impulse to dismantle industrial society for ~nature aesthetics~, it's an extremely visible symptom of environmental degradation that gets downplayed because the externality seems trivial to most people: "Oh no, the night sky, what ever will we do without it."
But it actively disrupts light-sensitive circadian rhythms in plants and wildlife, which disrupts foraging patterns, reproductive and hibernation cycles, and contributes to wildlife population declines. It's not the major contributor to those declines, but it's an additional point of stress in an ecosystem already stressed by climate change and other forms of industrial pollution. And so much of it is wholly unnecessary.
I don't think people realize how far-reaching the problem is, either. That light isn't just confined to the places people use. You don't escape it by just taking the bus to the edge of town. That light carries, in some cases for hundreds of kilometers. Death Valley has some of the darkest skies in the US, and yet, the dome of light above Las Vegas is visible on the horizon over 250 km away! Anywhere within 50 km of a major urban center, just about anywhere in the world, never gets darker than a night under a full moon.
And this is very much a recent problem too. Before the switchover to LEDs, it was relatively expensive to light places. That meant actually accounting for the energy use and making sure it was being used where it was needed. That light was also warm-colored, so it didn't travel as far. With the decreased cost of lighting, it became standard to light places like daytime whenever they might be needed. Lighting didn't get safer, it just got more thoughtless.
The reason you see astronomy-types sounding the alarm most loudly is because they're the ones who have been seeing the full effects of light pollution and its encroachment on dark skies. It's a hobby for me too, but it's partly because I'm a night owl who grew up in a small town with nothing else to do. I used to be able to clearly see the Milky Way horizon to horizon when I grew up in the mid-00s. The last time I visited about five years ago, I could only see it overhead. The population has fallen by like 10%, but the skies are brighter. I can tell when the college decided to leave the football stadium lights overnight. I can tell where the car dealerships that added overnight display lights are. I can even see when trucks with the fuckass LED light bars are coming over a hill from 5 km away.
I'm all for well-lit, safe, and accessible spaces for people to work and play at night. But there is an impact from lighting, and it can and should be regulated like any other point source pollution. It's a pretty straightforward and materialist assessment. But go off about the big scary anprims are coming for your society so people can see the stars I guess, that's not at all a reactionary response to hearing about a problem
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