‘touching‘ shot by vassilis karidis for fantastic man, issue 30

Palestinian Mohamad Abu Thabet collects anemone coronaria flowers with his children in a field in the West Bank village of Beit Dajan, near Nablus, April 5, 2016. Abed Omar Qusini

ROACH PART 1, coming next weekend at YCON 2024 !

(In french for now ; an english digital release will come at a later date.) See you there hopefully !

could’ve died

a good vigorous seethe to get it out of one's system and then returning to the eternal work of forgiveness

hot artists don't gatekeep

I've been resource gathering for YEARS so now I am going to share my dragons hoard

Floorplanner. Design and furnish a house for you to use for having a consistent background in your comic or anything! Free, you need an account, easy to use, and you can save multiple houses.

Comparing Heights. Input the heights of characters to see what the different is between them. Great for keeping consistency. Free.

Magma. Draw online with friends in real time. Great for practice or hanging out. Free, paid plan available, account preferred.

Smithsonian Open Access. Loads of free images. Free.

SketchDaily. Lots of pose references, massive library, is set on a timer so you can practice quick figure drawing. Free.

SculptGL. A sculpting tool which I am yet to master, but you should be able to make whatever 3d object you like with it. free.

Pexels. Free stock images. And the search engine is actually pretty good at pulling up what you want.

Figurosity. Great pose references, diverse body types, lots of "how to draw" videos directly on the site, the models are 3d and you can rotate the angle, but you can't make custom poses or edit body proportions. Free, account option, paid plans available.

Line of Action. More drawing references, this one also has a focus on expressions, hands/feet, animals, landscapes. Free.

Animal Photo. You pose a 3d skull model and select an animal species, and they give you a bunch of photo references for that animal at that angle. Super handy. Free.

Height Weight Chart. You ever see an OC listed as having a certain weight but then they look Wildly different than the number suggests? Well here's a site to avoid that! It shows real people at different weights and heights to give you a better idea of what these abstract numbers all look like. Free to use.

something you don't learn until you get really far into the making and tinkering life is that there's no such thing as "glue" really. there are so many kinds of substances that stick other substances together and they are all very different and if you just go look at the adhesives aisle in the hardware store the packaging never actually tells you anything useful. it's like "this is SUPER T-REX POWER GLUE" and the fine print says "good for use on wood metal and plastic". okay. but WHICH PLASTICS MY GOOD BITCH,

because SURPRISE, there's no such thing as "plastic" either. every kind of wood is basically the same on a chemical level, but the only thing every plastic has in common is "some of its molecules are long" and that is NOT a quality that determines how things stick together.

I just ordered some stuff I hope will permanently stick a circuit board to a steel sheet and withstand temperatures up to 150 degrees. by the way circuit boards are made of epoxy-bound woven glass cloth which is cool as hell but what the fuck do you glue that with? can any of the 12 kinds of adhesives I currently own do that? no of course not. if I want to stick two pieces of acrylic together so hard they become watertight to a depth of 3000 metres I have some shit that does that, but it does literally nothing else.

anyway. once you start learning how many kinds of sticking things together there are, the people at 3M start to seem like witches and I don't know if they're the kind we can trust with that level of arcane knowledge

Can I introduce you to one of the most useful sites from the early web? It’s thistothat.com and it tells you what kind of adhesives work to stick different types of substances together. It looks like it was designed in 1999 with some ads slapped over the top, because it was designed in 1999…. But like most things from the early web, it does what’s on the label: tells you how to stick this to that.

Arcane knowledge my ass, the internet used to be useful about shit.

work crush will have you like "working only five days out of seven this week :("

coming to help on my day off after anora tomorrow

went there again on my day off to help

i'm over it

five of us got wasted at the afterparty of the work thing and all played truth or dare and all made out

assorted dublin sketches, oct 12 – 18

there is a weirdness to how I can escape particular kinds of threats through removing body parts. I can’t be threatened with forced pregnancy now because I removed my uterus. If I get my breasts and nipples removed my torso will no longer be legally obscene. The ability to change the body brings into stark focus how policed the body is. I think that is a large part of why reactionaries prioritize opposing transition so fiercely— changing one’s body and watching the legal system contort itself to apply new laws to the same person makes obvious the violence necessary to maintain the political structure they want people to believe is “natural” and “innate.” People undergoing sex change are almost walking symbols of how much effort, how many resources, how much violence (threats and punishment) everyone must collectively expend in maintaining the pericis patriarchal order. Transition suggests the possibility to everyone that patriarchy is deeply artificial and not as difficult to undermine and dismantle as one might imagine. Not an immutable force of nature but a delicate system constantly needing to be collectively maintained by a global majority of people in order to prevent collapse. Trans people by virtue of existing provoke cis people to realize they themselves might benefit from refusing to participate in this maintenance. Might it be easier and more freeing to not police bodies? Might the world be more just if we all refuse to revoke the bodily autonomy of others along axes of political power? These realizations threaten the hold of naturalized patriarchal ideologies and so trans people are relentlessly targeted for extermination.

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Well, you heard it here first, folks.

Little side comic for my SBCF24 debut, Sacred Bodies.

ba'it babies? important.

“I feel very small. I don't understand. I have so much courage, fire, energy, for many things, yet I get so hurt, so wounded by small things.”

“I have died for the smallest things. Nothing washes off”

by Renell Medrano