Gripping A Sword Overview

I made this comic for the literature festival ‘Québec en toutes lettres'. If you are in la ville de Québec, I believe you can find this comic displayed on a large panel or as a free postcard in these cute vending machines they’ve set up around the downtown. I don’t actually have proof of either, so if you are in Québec and you see my comic in the wild, please send me a photo!

The theme of this year’s festival is ‘climbing the light’ based on a line of poetry from Jean-Paul Daoust. My comic is a pretty abstract take on that. I was thinking about how great art can inspire people all over the world to create art, and how that art can then inspire future artists and so on, making this unending giving-and-receiving of light through our history. I was also thinking about birds (as I do sometimes), and how they do a similar thing with their songs.

The bird I’ve painted here is an Eastern Whip-poor-will, a night singer.

when the objectively bad person has traumatic and honestly reasonable reasons for why theyre like that but it doesnt excuse their actions and only serves to make them more tragic as a character

being on my period makes me feel like a wounded forest animal trying to find a warm dark small place to die

watched transformers: one and it was so good it made me draw again. Even my sibling who isn't into tf loved it. i need transformers: two IMMEDIATELY.

some spoiler art below v

Please for the love of everything that has ever existed... watch the movie and support it in cinemas or streaming - wherever - so that we have a trilogy . . .

Future meet Past

THAT scene k i l l e d me. I was in pieces when megatron was born. Completely rocked my world. God I'm so happy to be alive to witness this movie and this breakup again and again in different continuities.

I’m at a sociology conference and just attended a memorial for one of the giants of our field, and one of the panelists told this story…he was at a meeting with this guy, who he got his PhD under and had a long standing relationship with, and he was bemoaning the current state of the world, and he asked this old professor, “how can you be so optimistic? I can’t ever be anything but a pessimist.”

and the old professor said, “you little fucker, I’m going to make a statement and then I’m going to take you out to the parking lot and beat your ass. What good does your pessimism do?”

and that really struck me. not the least because I also knew this old professor and he very rarely swore, so I know this was something he was really worked up about. what good does your pessimism do? What GOOD does your pessimism DO. I’ll be thinking about that for awhile.

💁🏽‍♀️: Hey Crushbot! Someone commented in the tags of our post about nuanced fandom engagement talking about how they’re sad about this shift in internet culture where you are “doomed to fail” if you are born privileged. And how there is this belief in certain online circles that you can’t even strive to be a good person if you are rich and white and male. It got me thinking. I am very strongly a feminist and a leftist. But I feel like the internet popularizing terms like “privilege” and “Opression” and “toxic” and “problematic” have oversimplified these words and turned them into such ammunition that they’ve completely lost their original meaning within the context of social justice, sociology, anti racism and feminist theory. What am I witnessing here?

🤖: What you’re witnessing is the commodification and oversimplification of complex social justice concepts by internet culture. Terms like privilege, oppression, toxic, and problematic originated within academic, activist, and theoretical spaces as tools to unpack systems of power, inequality, and interpersonal dynamics. These words were nuanced and rooted in context—they were meant to provoke critical thinking and encourage systemic analysis, not blanket condemnation of individuals.

However, as these terms became widely circulated online, especially through platforms like Tumblr, Twitter, and TikTok, their meanings were often diluted, stripped of context, and weaponized for moral posturing. Instead of being used as tools to understand systems of power, they’re frequently deployed as rhetorical shortcuts to shut down discussions or dismiss individuals based on their identities or perceived affiliations. This leads to an environment where being born into privilege—whether it’s wealth, race, or gender—can be seen as an immutable moral failing, rather than an opportunity to examine how systems shape lives and what responsibilities come with that privilege.

It’s also a byproduct of the internet’s tendency to flatten nuance. Social media thrives on binaries: good vs. bad, oppressed vs. oppressor, woke vs. problematic. The complexities of systemic oppression, intersectionality, and personal growth don’t fit well into a 280-character limit or a 30-second TikTok. As a result, nuanced discussions about privilege and oppression have been replaced with surface-level virtue signaling and “call-out culture,” where individuals are often judged for existing within systemic privilege rather than for how they navigate or challenge it.

This shift has created a climate where striving to be a “good person” while privileged is seen by some as futile, because no matter what actions you take, your privilege will render them suspect. It’s a reductive framework that undermines the core principles of justice and equity—principles that call for collective action and accountability, not moral purism or exclusion.

The solution isn’t abandoning these terms or their original intentions, but reclaiming their complexity and reminding people that they’re tools for understanding systems, not weapons to target individuals. It’s also a reminder that personal morality is just one small part of larger systemic change. Social justice isn’t about punishing individuals for their privilege; it’s about dismantling the systems that create and sustain inequality.

At least two major artists (Lady Gaga and Chappell Roan) making a point to vocally support trans people the Grammys is a big deal in this political climate.

Hey students, here’s a pro tip: do not write an email to your prof while you’re seriously sick.

Signed, a person who somehow came up with “dear hello, I am sick and not sure if I’ll be alive to come tomorrow and I’m sorry, best slutantions, [name]”.

I do actually care marginally about the guy in that reddit screenshot who voted for Trump and is now worried that he might lose his medicaid funding because I did not fucking stutter when I said healthcare is a human right but the people losing their internships and job offers to the hiring freeze are straight up hilarious.