A set of digital risograph negatives for a comic I made for uni, as part of a bigger wordless comic assignment. I’ll post the final prints once they’re done!
YOU ARE A REGULAR GUY. YOU CAN HANDLE CRITIQUE. YOU ARE A REGULAR GUY. YOU CAN EMBRACE BEING TOLD YOU WERE WRONG. YOU ARE A REGULAR GUY. YOU CAN ACCOMPLISH UNPLEASANT TASKS. YOU ARE A REGULAR GUY. YOU CAN DELIVER DISAPPOINTING NEWS. YOU ARE A REGULAR GUY. YOU KNOW HOW TO BE DISAGREED WITH. YOU ARE A REGULAR GUY. YOU CAN BE CORRECTED. YOU ARE A REGULAR GUY. YOU CAN BE TOLD YOU MESSED UP. YOU ARE A REGULAR GUY. YOU ARE ABLE TO DO HARD THINGS.
I ended up having a really interesting conversation with some people at the bus stop today. They were getting out of some sort of ‘clean and sober’ meeting and had starting saying how they were so bored because they didn’t have anything to do, and had to stay at home because all their old friends would pull them back. So I said something like, ‘So this is the time to do all the stuff your parents told you they didn’t have money/time for!’
“Whatcha mean?”
“You know, like when you were five and you REALLY wanted to have that toy or do that thing and you were like, ‘Please mom please I gotta have this I gotta go do this’ and they went ‘Hell no you think I’m paying for that do you want to goddamn EAT?’ “
And this light went on in their eyes. The lady is going to go check thrift stores for an Easybake Oven and I told her about Wilton cake decorating classes. The dude is going to Griffith Park and ride horses, because, ‘I always wanted to be a cowboy, and you can’t drink when you’re on a horse ‘cause you’ll fucking die!’
Fuck it. This is what being an adult is. Sure it’s bills and work and relationships, but damn it, it’s also time to do the things you LIKE.
I signed up for a free class/lecture on Water Gardens. I’m going. It’s time.
no joke, this is such an important aspect of overcoming trauma. I mean the trauma of abusive parents, the trauma of broke ass parents who got toxic because of it, the trauma of capitalism. Like fuck it. Go to Wrestlemania. Build a shit ton of terrariums.
I identify the most with the woman who has a green velvet ribbon around her neck and keeps being like "DONT untie my neck ribbon or something really bad will happen" and then her husband unties the ribbon and her head falls off. this is extremely real to me. spent my whole life like "please don't do this thing to me or really bad stuff will happen" and everyone around me being like "that sounds fake" and doing it anyway. and then my head fell off!
christmas is kind of like if for 1/6 of the year everyone got really into ska and started wearing the fedoras and checkered clothing and they only played ska music in stores that the employees clearly weren't enjoying and everything was just ska themed for a while and one day someone eagerly asks you what ska you're listening to and when you tell them you're not doing the whole ska thing for the tenth time in a row its like a 50/50 chance that their face suddenly falls deathly serious and they say "are you one of those people who thinks all orphans should be drowned in boiling shit?" or they chuckle and squint at you and say "oh yeah you must be one of those people that listens to pop punk! Its kinda like a weird, different ska I guess! I am going to a ska concert later today if you wanna come along and see how awesome ska is, as enforced by the ephemeral force of enjoying ska instilled in all moral beings!" and this has been going on for so long that all the ska music is just people saying "pick it up" over and over again and plastering everything in checker patterns and theres a whole wave of people who think everyone has forgotten how to really enjoy ska but they actually just want an older version of the artificially enforced ska mania everyone is having and they made a book and several movies called "the man who did not like ska" about a disgusting evil spinach creature that hated everything and ate broken glass every day who learns basic empathy after hearing an upstrummed guitar for the first time.
Tomorrow is National Give Your Pet Pancreatitis Or A Gastric Foreign Body Day here in the United States and I'd like to beg all of you who follow me to NOT participate this year.
Do not feed your dog or cat human food tomorrow. No, not even a bit of your mashed potatoes. No, not even just a bit of turkey. No, not even the green bean casserole. All of these foods are traditionally prepared in such a way as to be unhealthy for your pets to eat due to the richness of the foods.
If you want them to have a treat, a small bit of plain boiled potato (no butter, no gravy, no cream/milk/cheese, no added salt, etc), some raw or lightly steamed plain green beans (again, no salt, butter, spices, etc), a small amount of plain boiled, skinless chicken breast (no salt, spices, etc) are options (allergies and other health factors permitting) that you can specifically prepare for your animal friends.
And if you have a counter surfer, they need to be locked up during meal time, prep, and clean up. If your pet gets into the trash then the trash goes out immediately to the bin outside. Do NOT give them corn cobs to chew on. Do NOT give them any bones, raw or cooked, from your meal.
Keep your pet safe, keep your money in your bank account, and make your local vet clinics next week a lot easier. Please.
we simply can’t go back in time to prevent the assassination of john f kennedy do you even know—look, the time traffic around that day is egregious. you know how many paradoxes that buildup has caused? exactly. no one does. nature of the thing. and anyway, who’s to say someone else doesn’t get him later? can we be certain that by preventing this particular assassination of jfk we aren’t simply opening the world up to a different one? are you willing to spend the rest of our lives in debt from all the time fuel we’d need to buy to keep going back and making sure no one ever kills him? no. the only way to truly prevent kennedy’s assassination is to make sure nothing like this has even the slightest possibility of ever happening. [Brightly, as if i just thought of it] Suppose we blow up the Mayflower
Thirty Minutes in the Lion’s Den: The Interview Trump Thought He Controlled
There’s a strange thing that happens when you watch the full thirty-minute interview instead of the clipped version the internet tosses around. The edges soften. The masks slip. And you start to see the actual geometry of the interaction — where power sits, where insecurity leaks, where the tone changes, where the truth speaks by accident. The viral clip makes it look like a moment. The full meeting reveals a dynamic.
This wasn’t a showdown. It wasn’t a humiliation. It wasn’t a triumph for either man. It was something far more revealing: a case study in how a bully behaves when he can’t rely on fear, and how a principled politician behaves when he refuses the role of the victim.
The meeting begins as all Trump meetings do — with noise.
The first five minutes are pure Trump: monologues disguised as greetings, numbers inflated beyond physics, scattered recollections of the 1980s like the era froze and preserved him in amber. You can practically hear his brain flipping through its greatest hits, trying to set the tone: This is my room. My chair. My story.
But Mamdani doesn’t react to any of it.
And that is the first hinge of the meeting.
A man like Trump needs emotional feedback to function. Fear works. Flattery works. Even anger works. Mamdani gives him nothing. He sits there with the calm of someone who refuses to let the other person set the emotional tempo. It’s a small thing, but with Trump, it’s enough to break the cycle.
Then comes the shift — the “gracious Trump” phase.
People mistake this for maturity or diplomacy. It’s not. It’s a reflex Trump only deploys when he can’t dominate the room. The tone goes soft, the eyebrows lift, the compliments come out in forced, syrupy bursts.
“You’re doing great work.”
“New York is lucky to have you.”
“You’re a very smart guy.”
It sounds statesmanlike until you remember the same man called him a communist threat two weeks earlier. What’s happening here isn’t respect — it’s adaptation. A chameleon trying to match the color of the wall.
Trump is gracious when graciousness benefits Trump.
As Mamdani shifts to policy, Trump drifts into autobiography.
This is the most telling stretch — minutes twelve to eighteen. Mamdani tries to talk like a mayor-elect:
transit
housing
Rikers
federal cooperation
immigrant protections
Real issues, real stakes, real governance.
Trump responds by vanishing into his own mythology. Crime statistics from memory that don’t exist. Grievances about prosecutors. Stories from “the old days.” Complaints about how unfairly he’s been treated.
It’s not sabotage — it’s incapacity.
Mamdani is speaking a civic language Trump’s brain can’t decode.
They aren’t having the same conversation.
They aren’t even on the same continent.
Then comes the moment everyone’s dissecting — the “fascistic tendencies” line.
And yes, it happened in the room, not after. Mamdani doesn’t weaponize the word. He doesn’t turn it into a headline. He does something more dangerous: he analytically names the pattern.
Immigrant raids.
Political retribution.
Targeting dissent.
Erosion of checks and balances.
Threats against the judiciary.
He lays out the evidence and names the behavior: fascistic tendencies.
Trump nods and smiles like someone being told he has an excellent golf swing.
It’s not bravado. It’s not denial.
It’s something almost sadder: he doesn’t understand the language of critique unless it’s blunt and emotional. Mamdani moved the discussion into the realm of political analysis, and Trump’s instincts don’t live there. So he simply… accepts it. Not because he agrees, but because he can’t absorb what the words actually mean.
The last ten minutes are the clearest portrait of Trump’s psyche.
Once Mamdani refuses to bend, Trump compensates by overcorrecting into flattery:
“You’re going to surprise people.”
“I feel very comfortable with you.”
“We’re going to get along great.”
It’s dominance disguised as benevolence. When Trump can’t conquer, he tries to adopt. He folds the other person into his narrative: You and I are the same. We’re allies. You approve of me. I approve of you.
It’s a kind of political camouflage — digest the threat by complimenting it.
Mamdani doesn’t take the bait.
He doesn’t fight.
He doesn’t flatter.
He just continues speaking plainly.
Which leaves Trump in the one position he hates most:
performing civility for an audience that isn’t fooled.
What the meeting really showed
The full interview isn’t about Mamdani calling Trump a fascist.
It’s not about Trump pretending to be gracious.
It’s not about a progressive mayor meeting an authoritarian president.
What the meeting showed is simpler and more damning:
Trump is only powerful when the room fears him.
Take the fear away, and he becomes oddly gentle, strangely polite, and completely unable to dominate the conversation.
People think tyrants rage because they’re strong.
But the truth is they only rage when they know the room will absorb it.
Mamdani didn’t absorb it.
So Trump didn’t rage.
He folded.
Nicely. Neatly.
Like a man who knows the cameras are watching and doesn’t want the world to see what he looks like when the mask cracks.
And if there’s a lesson here for the rest of the country, it’s this:
Fear is the oxygen of authoritarianism.
Take it away, and even a strongman starts to sound like a man.
more now i want to talk about the constant harassment, the sexual assault and violence, and the straight up bullying and sabotaging that women in trades experience. especially women of color, especially lesbians, & trans women. hr does nothing to protect them. instead yr told to have "thick skin" to work in the fields, like getting assaulted on the job is normal; but only for women? a 20yo welder in Minnesota was just murdered by her coworker because he "didn't like her." her story of being ignored until the worst happens is too common in this field. women in trade are bullied or harassed out of their places of work by coworkers, customers, their stations and tools are sabotaged by their men colleagues, they're overlooked, underpaid, or ignored for jobs, we're made to feel unsafe by them until the only thing you can do is leave. very little has changed in the trades for years. please listen to tradewomens stories more than ever.
amber czech was 20 years old. her family has started a gofundme. please consider sharing.
We are heartbroken to share the loss of our beloved, Amber Czech. She was taken from us far too soon … Shawn Labat needs your support for Am
This post led me to reminisce on the nature of cat’s meowing, and I have a funny story
I befriended a feral cat once who had spent her life in the forest without human interaction. I was worried about her because she had a paw damaged from an old injury and was emaciated but obviously nursing kittens that were hidden away somewhere. It took me weeks of putting out food and sitting across the yard every evening for her to trust me even a little and when she decided we were friends and she expected dinner every night she started coming to my door and trying to call for me in the evening, but she didn’t meow. Why would she? Cats only meow naturally as kittens when their vocal chords/ears aren’t fully developed, adult cats communicate with vocalizations that aren’t audible to humans. She probably tried making noises I couldn’t hear to call me but ended up sticking to the one I always responded to- a horrible yowling growl that she had made at me when we first encountered each other in the forest. Except once we were friends she would make this noise while purring and rubbing affectionately against a nearby tree or the porch railing (because she didn’t want to touch me yet). This understandably freaked my family members out but I was touched that she had taken the time to find a way to basically yell FUCK OFF in an affectionate way.
Fast forward to when she finally trusts me enough to bring her hidden kittens out of the forest to me, long story short I gained their trust and put them in this big pen, that I had previously used to keep chickens in, so they’d be safe and to keep her from having another litter. Except she was already secretly pregnant again! (Fix your pets, guys, they make SO many babies) and ended up having her new babies in this pen. I kept my distance, sitting on the outside once they were born until she seemed comfortable enough to let me come inside. The kittens were a bit wild, hissing viscously at me as soon as they opened their eyes, but they warmed up to me. There were four of them and soon they all wanted to be the center of attention during the twice daily play sessions. I’d be playing with one and another would meow insistently behind me and I’d immediately answer them and give them love, teaching them that humans could be friends that answer their needs- making them adoptable once they were weaned. Mama cat (Artie) would just watch me play with them, and I guess she was doing some thinking because one day when they were about a month old I was playing with them and one meowed behind me. I was confused because I hadn’t realized there was a kitten behind me and when I turned, there wasn’t. The only cat there was Artie looking at me really intensely. I turned back around to the kittens and I heard the meow again, I turned back to Artie and responded in the way I always did with the kittens “yes baby?” And she meowed again in an exact imitation of her kittens! After that she would.not.shut.up. It was like she had cracked some kind of code, meowing for attention and snacks and just to say hi. Her two older kittens, the ones she’d had in the forest, had never meowed at me either but started to once they saw how I responded to their mom. and I find it endlessly fascinating because before that it had never occurred to me that cats only meow at humans because they were taught by other cats to keep meowing past kittenhood because that’s the best way to get a human’s attention.
Imagine befriending some weird giant with the wrong number of legs that you met in the forest who seems nice enough but doesn’t seem to be able to hear you, until your friend explains that all they can understand is fuck off! And I’m a baby give me love!
"ADHD is disabling and should be taken seriously as a disability" and "able-bodied people who have ADHD should not be talking over physically disabled people when it comes to physical disabilities" are statements that can and should coexist.
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