I have thousands of shitposts, rants, and essays sitting in notebooks, left over from decades of not using social media or having many friends. Hold on tight.
166 posts
AAAAAAA
I used to take care of a couple goats, I am now feeling very weird that I didn't know goats have a dental pad.
Goat opinion: pygmy goat wethers are only obnoxious if you make it easy for them. Otherwise, they're practically obedient. And incredibly sweet!
Why is this simple fact so hard for people to understand
While on that again, I notice that people do this thing where they're like "TME is useful because it describes how people who are not trans women can and do invent malicious rumors and harassment campaigns about trans women and everyone believes them".
And I'm sorry to point out but it's not just "TMEs" that do this. I have been around here for many years and I can confirm that trans women are just as happy to invent or reblog callout posts and generally do abuse by proxy. Just like everyone else.
There isn't really any kind of identity category that makes someone inherently safe, principled, or progressive.
@comicaurora
When Jesus went up on the mountain alone, to pray and meditate, do you think He was ever interrupted by rich Roman tourists, who, having ridden sedan chairs all the way up, stood right next to Him, and loudly told each other to "look at all the rocks"?
Smugfolk: (getting off the ferry) "How are you, this morning?"
Ferry terminal agent: "Cold. Wet."
Smugfolk: (who has already stopped listening) "What?"
Kyana: me and my boys are gonna mess you up
Dani: I rolled a one
Vhas: I rolled a one
VRLA who rolled a seven: Fuck
It would be an interesting challenge to write a narrative of some kind where the adults are selfish assholes to the kids in the show, but nothing the adults do is illegal, nor is it socially or culturally inappropriate or bad. It's horrible, but all plausibly deniable.
The poor kids just have to bear it, maybe the focus is their coping mechanisms or something, like Bridge to Terabithia or something.
Oh, right.
I watched this a couple weeks before I came up with the bit about a triple-A publisher launching a video game that "plays itself for you," because they're that out of touch.
Must have still been kicking around my skull when I watched that Oxbox video about disturbing trends in the video game industry. The cringey XBox reveal in it prompted several pointed, well-reasoned comments, that was the other seed.
GAMES NEED AN EASY MODE.
Or maybe they don't. Today we look into it.
The adhd modes of food
1. You ate that burger so fast. You ate that burger so fucking fast and now the whole Red Robin is staring at you god what the fuck
2. You started eating like a normal person, but then you started talking or daydreaming and now the waitress is handing you the check but you’ve still got half a plate of cold fettuccine
3. You were going to go out to eat, but then you saw a video in your YouTube recommendation that drew you towards it like moth to a flame, and now it’s 10 pm and you’ve got an empty bag of tortilla chips in your hand and shame in your heart
4. Mac And Cheese
Not telling your kid they have a learning disability, chronic illness, mental illness etc. so they can “feel normal” actually does the opposite. They will not feel normal if they do not have the context to understand that their normal will be different from that of their peers.
Fellas is it romantic to survive being incinerated together
It's a talking coin.
Sounds interesting, right?
Well, it's a tiny, tiny copper piece, much smaller than a modern penny, and it only says one thing, over and over.
"I am groat."
Sveaborg (1844) by Ivan Aivazovsky
Also, my two cents, it's amazing what happens when I go and do a little light manual labor. Raking leaves, washing dishes, weeding the garden... and suddenly the ideas and solutions start moving again.
Hey, sorry if you’ve been asked this before, but I have ADHD and I’ve been following your comic for years and just now have started to write my own comic (partially because you really inspired me). But I’m really struggling with staying on the project even when it’s boring and getting myself to work on it in the first place. Do you have any tips on how to keep your brain invested or just to make yourself do the work at all?
I have excellent news, I literally just figured out something really important about this.
So when you're an ADHD kiddo or otherwise have difficulty staying on task in a structured environment where Task is the Priority, the main way people try to MAKE you stay on task is by removing your access to anything that is not The Task. No phone, no TV, no doodling, no going outside, etc. In practice, this just makes us miserable because it takes the boredom that's always simmering around a 2 or 3 and cranks it all the way up to 11. In the same way that you would have difficulty staying on task if you were in physical pain, this crushing existential monotony makes it very difficult to work. The work might get done simply because you have no other options, but it will not be done quickly or well, and it will take a while to recover from how much it hurt.
What I realized earlier this week is I caught myself doing this to myself. I had 42 pages of background colors to do, and I thought to myself "this sounds really tedious, but I suppose I have nothing better I can do." And I realized what I'd just thought, and got very alarmed.
Because back when I was an ADHD kiddo imprisoned by school scheduling and a million little factors that keep children immobile and restrained, I couldn't stop thinking about how big and exciting the world was, and how much I wanted to be anywhere but here. When I was feeling really crushed in I'd pick a random spot on the maps on my wall and just imagine being there instead of my bedroom. This was the impetus behind almost all of my creative energy. I've said it before - anything is a prison if you can't leave, and being in a prison makes it easy to imagine how amazing things could be outside of it. Aurora's initial worldbuilding was forged in the crucible of fifth grade misery. My enthusiasm for art and my creative drive are inextricable from my sense of wonder and yearning for excitement in the real world. Not escapism, but appreciation. Wonders unimaginable are out there, and I gain just as much joy seeking them out as I do conjuring them up in my head and sharing them with all of you.
So now that I'm a grown-up with actual freedom in every way I've been able to get, the idea that I was staying on task by making myself believe the world was small and not worth seeing was extremely alarming. It could keep me on task for an afternoon, but at the cost of slowly extinguishing the thing that made me want to make art in the first place - the hunger to experience and draw inspiration from all the myriad complexities in the world.
So what I've been doing is I've been purposefully and intentionally taking excursions whenever I catch myself thinking "I could take a break but it wouldn't be worth it, it's the same outdoors as always, I'll be uncomfy and unproductive and tired." Because that is never true. Every time I've put down the stylus and gone out, I've been renewed in one way or another, and when I come back to comfort fully recharged I get a lot of shit done. Because it is easier to work on anything if you remember why you wanted to make it in the first place, and it is self-defeating misery to just lock yourself in with it and tell yourself you're a bad person if you can't get it done.
I honestly don't know how widely applicable this is. I have worse wanderlust than anyone I know, so for me this has always been modeled as imprisonment vs freedom. I've also been extremely lucky to find myself in a profession that lets me set my own pace on literally everything I do. But I genuinely believe that when it comes to making art with ADHD, you need to give yourself freedom to move laterally, not just in the direction of obvious forward progress. We don't think linearly in any other part of our lives - art is no different.
OSP Red, over on her Tumblr blog Comicaurora, posted a brilliant and refreshingly frank analysis of "Fable of the Dragon Tyrant."
I can't believe I didn't figure out it was an allegory about death, but we all miss something sometimes, I guess.
Go read the whole post.