The Iranian Regime is going to execute rapper Toomaj Salehi for supporting protests of Jina Amini’s murder by the regime in his songs.
Iranian activist Elica Le Bon says, “Iranians in the diaspora picked up on the fact that the regime tends not to execute people who become known to the international community. We have seen many examples of prisoners that were either released on bail or had their sentences commuted through our “say their names to save their lives” campaign on social media, using hashtags to garner attention for their causes, and even before social media existed, through getting the stories of political prisoners to international media outlets. Once reported on, and once the eyes shift to the regime and the reality of its pending brutality, realizing that the action is not worth the repercussions, we have seen them back down and not execute. For that reason, this is part of an urgent campaign for readers to talk about Toomaj as much as you can, using the hashtag #FreeToomaj or #ToomajSalehi. Every comment makes a difference, and if we were wrong, what did we lose by trying?”
Toomaj Salehi, a dissident Iranian rapper, was sentenced to death on charges related to the antigovernment music he released during the 2022
I know this is something u were probably asked before but as the guy that has a good relationship with art....how do you do that??? I mean I get that this question is vague but how do you not care if it looks bad? Do you just?? Keep on going till it looks like you want it to look? Despite the agonies? You seem like you enjoy talking abt this thats why im asking, dont feel the need to answer if u dont wanna
hmmmm. You know, I don't think about the agonies much these days. But it's not that I don't care. I guess I've become a freak who sees beauty in the agonies, sorta? It's kind of complicated! I will do my best to explain!
First of all, I know that I have the unfair advantage of having no ambition. I don't have a goal for my art besides making art when I feel like it. That makes it easy to be less judgemental-- I remember having a rockier relationship to my own art during the time when I thought I would make it my career.
This is why I like talking about my perspective, though!! I think it's important to try not to let yourself be consumed by self-criticism as an artist, even if self-criticism is necessary for you, and hopefully my carefree way of looking at things can help balance things out haha.
Anyways, ambition or not-- and I know how this sounds but bear with me-- art doesn't ever look bad.
(Barring ethically harmful art, ugh, I don't want to get into ethics so just-- surely you know what I mean!!!)
Art gets a lot less stressful if you can tell yourself that no art is bad, and remember the reasoning behind that until you really believe it. It isn't a fast process, but it's very worth the work.
•••
The truth is that art either looks how you want it to look, or it looks different from the way you want it to look, but both are ultimately neutral. You CAN make art that looks different from what you wanted, that you still feel pleased with.
When art looks different from how you wanted, the gut reaction you have is often to call it bad or get frustrated. And of course it's frustrating! Maybe you feel it's not as effective at communicating something as you'd hoped, or you feel it's not as visually impactful as you imagined...but it's important to remember those things are only your perception. Not an objective fact. And art is a two-way street! A communication between creator and observer! And communication is really weird and complicated.
Other people's perception of your work won't ever be exactly the same as yours. Sometimes this is desireable and sometimes it isn't! Maybe your art will communicate the thing better to someone than anything they've ever seen-- even if a more effective version could theoretically exist, the "imperfect" version that actually exists and communicates is all that matters to the observer. Or, maybe a feature that turned out exactly how you wanted it to will fly completely over an observer's head, and not have the effect you wanted at all. A lot of the time, you'll never even know.
An artist can NEVER fully control an observer's perspective, so at a certain point you have to live with what you have. You already do this, to some degree, if you have ever EVER decided to stop working on a piece of art and share it. You can always keep adding to something. You can always keep editing. But sometimes, you stop. And perfection doesn't exist, so when you stop it must be because the art is good enough for now. And nothing about "good enough" is objective!
And is that really so bad? Surely people who grow fruit understand that a fruit which is smaller than they imagined can still feed somebody-- that at the very least it will feed bugs and microorganisms and be useful as fertilizer to grow more apples. Your art still means something, still accomplishes something, is still worth making whether it turns out how you imagined or not.
A lot of art is learning when to quit and move on. As a habitual perfectionist, this was something I had to learn early, to stop myself from erasing holes into every piece of paper I drew on.
There's this rule I was taught in middle school drama class: if you fuck up, act like you didn't fuck up. The audience doesn't have your script memorized, so odds are they won't have any idea you fucked up unless you tell them. Other art works the same way. No one knows what you wanted to make but you. And more importantly, a "perfect" version of your art doesn't exist (no "perfect" version of anyone's art exists, or ever will).
The version you made exists, so you have to find what's worth loving about that version. You have found what's worth loving in the imperfect art of others many times. Many observers will treat your art the same way you treat others' art. Why not treat your own art that way, too?
It sounds really REALLY corny, but I try not to think of this as embracing "mistakes." I think of it as celebrating coincidences.
I really really like coincidences. I like that every circumstance wasn't guaranteed to happen, that everything comes down to chance. I think all the little random things are beautiful because they turned out however they did, and not any of the millions of other ways things might have turned out. It's a coincidence that my genes expressed the way they did. It's a coincidence that my parents met in college. It's a coincidence that my oldest friend and I both got to middle school early every day, and stayed close even when we didn't share any classes.
Art is full of coincidences! I try to draw a straight line. The line does not turn out straight, because of the way my hand is shaped and the way my muscles contracted, because my body is not exactly like anyone else's in the world. No one else would have drawn that slightly not-straight line just exactly how I did. It's mine, and it's crookedness is what makes my art mine. Okay, maybe it's a little too crooked for what I want this time-- I'll erase it and draw a new crooked line at a bit of a different angle. There we go, I like that! Now it's my beautiful, irreplaceable crooked line! And the ghost of its predecessor guides the eye just so, and no one else's two crooked lines would guide your eye the same way, only mine! Isn't that nice on its own? Just to have made something that can't ever be replicated? To have made something no one else has ever made before?
You can also apply this in a bit less dreamy and more practical ways, I promise haha.
For example...I've never been a canvas flipper, as a digital character artist. I don't mirror my canvases to see if they still look preportional to me from either direction. I also don't usually draw visual novel character sprites that need to look good mirrored in either direction to serve their function, so it's never been a practical concern of mine.
I consider many kinds of distortion on a character I've drawn to be a good part of the visual flow of the image. Like a smear frame in animation, distoriton in the right places can make character art look dynamic and energized because it can lead the eye through a certain visual flow over the form of the character. If I were to flip the canvas, that eye-leading effect might hit differently because my American eye is used to reading from left to right-- perhaps it doesn't feel as "smooth" going in the opposite direction. This doesn't mean I need to change the distortion necessarily, it just means I prefer not to flip the canvas.
Often, these distortions aren't intentional. They're a coincidence of how my muscles move as I draw, and the areas my left-to-right American eyeballs instinctively pay more attention to. But the effect is still desireable to me. So, happy coincidence!
I think...that's the best I've got for now? Feel free to ask for clarification. I hope it's not total nonsense!
My mother did this to my father once. They got into an argument, my very pregnant and hormonal mother stormed off…except they lived in a tiny apartment so the only place to go was to shut herself into the closet for a good long sulk. And while she was sitting in there, fuming, she looked up and saw her sewing kit on the shelf, and all my father’s uniforms hanging right there.
So she picked one shirt and one pair of trousers, carefully, methodically ripped every third stitch out of every seam, and then hung them back up together so that he would be likely to pick them at the same time. This took her a couple hours, so by the time she was done, the anger had worn down. She came out, she and my father had a talk that ended in apologies, after which they were tired and went to bed. My mother swears up and down that she meant to warn my father about the sabotaged clothes in the morning, but he wore a different uniform set and they were both still feeling a little raw, so she didn’t want to bring up the fight again. She decided to tell him that night instead.
And then she forgot.
Anyway, about four days later, my father apparently came home roughly an hour after he left for work, his clothes slowly, gently shredding off his body, the most bewildered expression on his face. “Paula,” he said, his voice mildly shell-shocked. “Paula, my clothes are broken.”
My mother promptly burst out laughing so hard that she went into labor. And that’s the story of my birth, heralded by petty vengeance and utter confusion.
I wasn’t going to respond to this, I looked at your blog. Your irrational hatred and bile directed towards trans people is palpable and pathetic. This was intended to upset me.
But I now have a chance to talk about who my grandfather is.
You see, I find it interesting that you claim the only way my 90yr old grandfather could possibly be so accepting is if he was dying of one of the most horrible diseases known to man, a condition which eats your brain from the inside out and turns you in an angry, scared shell of the child you once were while your family has to grieve you long before you’re dead.
You find it easier - and evidently prefer - to believe that to accept me, my grandfather must have Alzheimer’s rather than any other reason.
Why is that easier to believe than a man who lived through (not was born during, not was around for, lived through) the Second World War and the aftermath, seeing footage of the concentration camps and meeting refugees would be accepting?
A poor builder and a farmer who worked alongside queer men and deaf men and the few people of colour in Northern Ireland in the 1950s and was himself barred from many places of employment and education due to his religion?
This man, whose oldest son was born the year the British army began occupying his country, who lived through the Troubles and was automatically considered suspicious and dangerous through an incident of birth? A man who helped raise six children - most of them boys and therefore in great danger of the army turning their guns on them for playing kid-games - in a time of civil war where it didn’t seem to matter which side you were on, the bombs and shootings could get you either way? A man who once was taken hostage by the IRA?
My grandfather’s oldest son - my dad - was the first in his family to go to university and there he met and fell in love with a Protestant woman. This was before the Good Friday Agreement, when the civil war was still happening, and if my grandparents had a problem with it - they never let said to my mum.
(My grandpa and my mum don’t really get along, but that’s more to do with me being a premature baby and tensions over my survival and disagreements on how to look after me. My mum and my Nana? Thick as thieves.)
They certainly never let it slip to us when we came along because it wasn’t important anymore that we were something many people in Northern Ireland would have preferred to not exist. It didn’t matter.
He voted in the Good Friday Agreement in hopes of stopping the conflict. He spent a lot of time listening to me about the bullying I was facing for being - unbeknownst to me at the time - queer and disabled. He just told me that being happy was far more important.
Being trans? It does not matter. Of course it doesn’t matter to him because he’s seen worse things in the world.
He’s ninety years old. He’s still out on the farm, he’s still studying history, he’s still sharp as fuck. I’ve seen someone die of Alzheimer's. I know every bit of it and it’s not him. Besides, I’ve not medically transitioned in anyway yet. He’s only seen me presenting fully masc for six days in person. Two years in total. If he had Alzheimer’s he’d be calling me by my deadname and using she/her.
And he’s not unusual. Outside of your echo chamber, most people are fine with trans people. Most people don’t care. Most people are accepting. They may not understand, they may not use the right words, but they’re accepting.
I do find it interesting that once again the TERF tactic is try and wrestle autonomy and self-control away from people who don’t follow your bigoted stances. Autistics must be being manipulated. Trans men are clearly confused little girls. Children obviously can’t understand their own minds and bodies.
My grandfather must have Alzheimer's.
Of course my view of a world I’ve seen in a Tumblr textpost must be more correct than the reality everyone else lives in.
She was born in 1940 in Spain. She was sent to catholic school then married a man and came to the us in the 60s.
She’s had a long list of lovers, both men and women.
She doesn’t understand my gender. But she slips up less than almost anyone in my immediate family. I’m her grandson, su hijo, her handsome man.
People love saying that it’s Alzheimers or dementia or something else fucking with her memory. But she still speaks English and spanish perfectly (she has never ever misgendered me in spanish). She can get up and down stairs. She can read and watch tv and understand.
Old people can be accepting and loving and caring without understanding.
My nana asked me soon after I came out, “you’ll be happier this way? As a man?” When I said yes, she said okay and… that was that. Over 5 years ago. Before my mother came around. Before my lesbian aunt came around. Before my cousins disowned me. My 83 year old nana has been on my side.
My parents were accepting when I came out as a trans woman, how could they not be? They've been active in the queer community longer than I have been alive. My dad had some concerns about my health, my mom had some concerns about how people would treat me, but they were supportive and just wanted me to be happy. I was concerned about how my mom's side of the family would take it - we're Southern and a lot of them are conservative Baptists. My mom offered to talk to them for me, and I decided ultimately I didn't care what most of them thought but I did want her to talk to her mom, my Granny. My Granny has always only ever wanted the best for me, but I was worried that she wouldn't understand I didn't think I could handle that in person. My mom talked to her, and her only real questions were "So I call [Sophos] her now?" Yes, at the time "Is she going to change her name?" No, I changed my last name when I got married but I'm never dropping my first or middle name, and finally "Is this going to make her happy?" Yes, a million times yes. Ever since then she has only ever referred to me as her beautiful granddaughter. The first time I saw her after my mom talked to her, she asked if I wanted her to make me a dress (she's a seamstress and while her skills have declined slightly as her eyesight and manual dexterity have declined, she's still one of the best I know). This 72 year old (at the time, closer to 78 now) Southern Christian woman, who until the last couple of elections voted Republican, heard her grandchild was trans and embraced that as fully as she possibly could.
Adding on that my grand aunt, a woman who survived the Great Depression and who lost her only son to suicide far, far too young and who was a devout Catholic to her death was more accepting of my transness and me dating people of my biosex than any other member of my family was initially.
Before my mom really came around, before my dad stopped talking about how much he didn't get it, she accepted me.
I told her, worriedly tbh, that I'd like to be called something else. And she called me that. No questions, no fussing, just a flat out okay.
My very catholic (as in, went to church all the time and was good friends with the priests at her parish and would invite them over all the time) great grandmother actually did have Alzheimer's, and you know what she said to me before her memory really fell apart? "Know that I accept and love you for who you are. My memory is getting bad and I might not remember your new name, but I love you and I'm happy for you". I hold that memory in a very special place and it means so much that she let me know she accepted me before she couldn't anymore. She ended up not knowing who I was at all not long after that, regardless of whether it was my birth name or my current one.
But sure, it's just the Alzheimer's that makes old people gender their trans family members correctly 🙄
We did not discuss it. You sent me a dm and I ignored it. I just checked your blog and your pinned post does call intersex people mutants and you’re still going on about not being able to change your gender, so… don’t pretend I gave you any blessing.
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