I couldn't have said it better myself.

As a 30 year old man who escaped the Alt-right pipeline, you're not going to be happy about the answer.

All I hear from leftists is how much they hate me for my immutable traits, how much they blame me for everything wrong with the world, how much they want me and everyone who looks like me dead.

Whereas Alt-right types would call me "brother" and welcome me into their ranks so long as I hated the right ways.

Do you understand the difference?

I'm an ally and support equality because I feel it's the morally correct choice to make, but holy fuck is it difficult to reconcile that with the fact that means fighting for a lot of people who see you as the scum of the earth.

Read this and then read it again and then read some fucking bell hooks because this is a legitimate problem on the left.

"To create loving men, we must love males. Loving maleness is different from praising and rewarding males for living up to sexist-defined notions of male identity. Caring about men because of what they do for us is not the same as loving males for simply being." - bell hooks, The Will to Change https://bellhooksbooks.com/product/the-will-to-change/

IMPORTANT: TUMBLR HAS MADE A DEAL WITH MIDJOURNEY/OPENAI.

YOUR ART AND IMAGES ON TUMBLR ARE BEING USED TO TRAIN AI MODELS.

The opt-in is automatic, but you can turn it off in settings.

Go to "Blog Settings" -> "Visibility" -> "Third-Party Sharing" and turn on "Prevent third-party sharing for [blog]". (This post shows how to do it on browser and on mobile.) You need to do this with every sideblog. (Note: The option in settings might not appear if your app hasn't updated yet. You can still opt out via browser.)

Spread the word. Everyone on Tumblr needs to know about this.

surviving the current age of internet means saying no to subscriptions and premiums for basic features. you must endure the inconvenience of not being able to use every server emoji in discord. you must build the patience to find alternatives like NewPipe so you can listen to music on youtube while your phone screen sleeps. do Not give these corporations your limited disposable income. tiktok not letting me view videos on my phone without downloading the app? i will outlast tiktok and the execs will be remembered as dull,disgusting capitalists. listen to me, listen to me. if you do not know how to pirate shows from hulu, learn. if you can't pirate it, it is not worth the money to rent it. please i'm on my hands and knees. do not accept this form of internet.

follow up

say YES to artist owned platforms. say yes to nebula for your favorite funny person or informative commentator. say yes or even join cartoonist.coop to support sustainable income for your favorite artist. use the money you saved from cancelling webtoons and commission a new artist for a silly icon pic. i'm telling you it's worth it!

Here's a reddit post with alternatives to start your degoogle journey

Skip Google for Research

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

⁂

Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

IOS users and Patreon. Big old heads up.

"Apple is requiring that Patreon use their in-app purchasing system and remove all other billing systems from the Patreon iOS app by November 2024. This means that starting in November, new memberships purchased in the iOS app will be subject to Apple's 30% App Store fee.

First, we want to be clear about one thing: this will not impact your existing memberships at all. Apple's App Store fee only applies to new memberships purchased in the iOS app beginning in November 2024."

Apple users, if you make your pledges through your browser you can dodge this fee.

This is just apple doing its usual nickel and diming to take a slice of every pie.

30% is a comically huge cut on top of what patreon already takes. Please, for future support of patreon creators, please avoid the Apple App version of patreon. Open a web browser and support your favorite creators that way to make sure your money goes to the creators and not just disappear into the void of another giant corporate greed hole.

I know lots of fellow artists who need patreon to live and keep making things. Don’t let Apple gobble up what you’re trying to give to them. This is just ridiculous.

Another art from the backlog! I'm close to having not much else left for the year besides my Drawtober stuff, oh boy... ^^;

Anyways, this is a random idea I had for a while: gummy worm dragons! With a bunch of different variants. Not sure if I'll really use this "species" for anything though. Still, figured I could share it since I'm sure a few other people would love an idea like this!

And of course, feel free to just draw your own gummy worm dragons too if you want! It's not like it's specific enough to be like... one of those adoptable closed species or something. At least, I don't think so?

If you're the type who likes to have design rules for this kind of thing, just two suggestions:

Otherwise go wild with the horns/wings/legs. Heck, if you have a dragon or dragon-like OC, maybe try out making a gummy worm dragon version of them or something, lol. And otherwise you can just ignore this and make your own version of a gummy worm dragon! Go forth and be creative!! \o/

"Ah, I've waited so long to fulfill one last wish..." - Siren Of Riven, The Last Wish raid

One Last Wish: A Destiny 2 Ahamkara zine has been awakened! This is a free fanzine crafted by 40 artists and writers, dedicated to our favorite wish dragons, the Ahamkara! A lot of love and care was put into this zine, I'm so proud of all our contributors and I hope everyone enjoys our creations! 💜

View the zine here!

I spent the evening looking into this AI shit and made a wee informative post of the information I found and thought all artists would be interested and maybe help yall?

edit: forgot to mention Glaze and Nightshade to alter/disrupt AI from taking your work into their machines. You can use these and post and it will apparently mess up the AI and it wont take your content into it's machine! (this post is also on twt)

I submitted this free app to the Windows Store/Microsoft Store.

It's a GIF viewer. It lets you take a close look at them.

You can search for "gif enjoyer" on the Windows Store/Microsoft Store app. It's the one with the icon that looks like this:

I'm still updating it with a few more stuff but it takes a few days for the store to approve some updates. I'd like to keep the app simple and focused on what it does though.

I'm still fixing some stuff.

This isn't how I meant for this to work but maybe I'll just keep it this way?

A portable version is now available from itch.io

Since it's portable, it won't auto-update like the Windows Store version does. But it won't require you to make an Microsoft account or link it to Windows.

If you use it for work, I appreciate any small contribution!

making art is so fucking hard. wheres that defunctland quote