Brandon Sanderson || Art: Karl Gussow // Jean Claude Kabongo // George Frederic Watts

Oysterlings

step aside Finn, you already have Nico the Catboy, give me a chance with heeerrrrr

Sketches 🕊️ °˖➴

Listening to my brain usually brings me to similar conclusions.

In 2017, American film researchers recovered “Something Good – Negro Kiss,” a short film depicting a playful kiss between a Black couple which had not seen the light of day for more than a century. A long-forgotten artifact from the earliest years of American film, the sweet, humanizing vignette, produced by the Selig Polyscope Company, makes a startling contrast to the overwhelmingly racist and blackface-ridden contempory portrayals of African Americans. Four years later in 2021, archivists in Norway, halfway across the world, identified a sister short in their collections—an extended alternate cut which reveals more of Chicago stage performers Gertie Brown and Saint Suttle’s vaudeville-like routine, a theatrical, hot-and-cold romantic dynamic between two lovers which parodies the popular and controversial short “The Kiss” (1896). Both films, which had previously been lost, were known from entries in old motion picture catalogs but had been assumed to be era-typical, anti-Black “race films” until their rediscovery in the 21st century. Together with its more famous sibling, which has since been inducted into the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry, this alternate version of “Something Good” represents the first-known instance of Black intimacy ever captured on-screen.

SOMETHING GOOD [Alternate Version] (1898) Directed by William Selig

(open pages for better image quality)

the moment I heard elphaba's delivery of "there's a girl i know..." in i'm not that girl i knew i had to draw this comic, i strongly recommend listening to it while you read for the full experience!

this comic is a companion to this piece (which was inspired by glinda's delivery of the same line in the i'm not that girl reprise).

pages 1-4 are from elphie's pov, pages 5-8 are from glinda's.

prints of individual pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

flower meanings in order of appearance:

what’s it called when you’re so disconnected from reality that cold water doesn’t feel like anything and you can barely taste food anymore

Spectrum of overwhelm, now in triangle form due to popular demand

[Image description: A triangle chart titled, ‘Spectrum of Overwhelm.’ The three points are ‘404 Error,’ showing a person with an empty thought bubble; ‘wet beast,’ showing a person sweating and sobbing; and ‘rage beast’ showing a person clenching their fists in an outline of orange fire. The peak is the ‘404 error’ vertex, and the inside of the triangle here is coloured beige and labelled, ‘shutdown.’ The lower half is labelled ‘meltdown’ and is red on the rage beast side and blue on the wet beast side. \End description]

I fucking hate that the general response to RFK Jr's eugenist take on autistic people is "autistic people do pay taxes, autistic people do work, autistic people do date!"

Some autistic people don't and that shouldn't make them less worthy of life. Some autistic people do need constant help and support and that shouldn't make them less worthy of life.

Once again we're falling in the right wing trap of :

They make a hateful, fascist statement

Instead of focusing on the fact that it is hateful and fascist we try to show them that they are factually wrong

We throw our own allies and the most vulnerable of us under the bus in the process

We legitimise an only slightly less hateful, fascist view as we go

They have completed their goal of making us accept the still hateful, fascist second version, hurrah. What a victory.

Right now what we're getting to with that is that autistic people who can work and pay taxes are okay, and the others aren't. Fuck this shit.

Same thing happens with the people who are being deported ("they have a visa!", "they didn't even have a criminal record!" -> even if they didn't have a visa, even if they did have a criminal record, deporting them and detaining them in what's essentially a concentration camp wouldn't be okay, you absolute tools of fascism.)