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had to animate me furbies  |･ω･) // tip jar // shop 

“just torrent it! just pirate it! streaming sites exist!” (proceeds to give absolutely zero clear instructions on how to do any of these things)

⌻ ⍞ THRESHOLD ⍠ ⌻

environment paintings for the Portland Collective show, about the feeling that comes before you enter a portal.

Finally got Animal Crossing: New Leaf. Brewster is still my fav. :)

it’s a vow we make to each other; let’s wear rings of the same colour 

[image is a digital painting of riku, kairi, and sora getting married, all clutching starry bouquets and with matching expressions of joy and delight. kairi is jumping with her arms around her boys’ shoulders, holding her bouquet over her head; her dress is pink, with a wave pattern. sora is a dark suit with a red bowtie and cloud patterns on his lapels. riku is in a silver suit with a blue tie, and he’s reaching around the both of them to clasp sora’s shoulder.]

Welp, time to actually learn dutch and return to the motherland.

then the seven angels who had the seven trumpets prepared to sound them

Now that Miku is becoming more mainstream

It is important that anybody new to vocaloid or even veteran fans understand something VERY important:

Miku is an instrument, a tool, a program. A song cannot be "by" Hatsune Miku. By saying this you are refusing to credit the talented producer who made that song. Miku and any other vocaloid singer is a guest singer technically. If you're going to formally address a song, format it like this:

Rolling Girl by Wowaka ft. Hatsune Miku.

Specifically using Rolling Girl as an example because the producer, Wowaka, stopped making music with vocaloid because he wasn't being credited for his work. Nobody recognized his music as HIS music. It was all "Miku's music".

So please, if you plan on saying who the song is by, do not say the song was by Miku or Rin or whoever is singing, take the few seconds it takes to look up the song's producer and give them the credit they deserve.

“Get a rat and put it in a cage and give it two water bottles. One is just water, and one is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself very quickly, right, within a couple of weeks. So there you go. It’s our theory of addiction. Bruce comes along in the ‘70s and said, “Well, hang on a minute. We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It’s got nothing to do. Let’s try this a little bit differently.” So Bruce built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. Everything your rat about town could want, it’s got in Rat Park. It’s got lovely food. It’s got sex. It’s got loads of other rats to be friends with. It’s got loads of colored balls. Everything your rat could want. And they’ve got both the water bottles. They’ve got the drugged water and the normal water. But here’s the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don’t like the drugged water. They hardly use any of it. None of them ever overdose. None of them ever use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction. There’s a really interesting human example I’ll tell you about in a minute, but what Bruce says is that shows that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. So the right-wing theory is it’s a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says it’s not your morality, it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment. […] We’ve created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right? We’ve created a hyperconsumerist, hyperindividualist, isolated world that is, for a lot of people, much more like that first cage than it is like the bonded, connected cages that we need. The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of our society, is geared towards making us connect with things. If you are not a good consumer capitalist citizen, if you’re spending your time bonding with the people around you and not buying stuff—in fact, we are trained from a very young age to focus our hopes and our dreams and our ambitions on things we can buy and consume. And drug addiction is really a subset of that.”

— Johann Hari, Does Capitalism Drive Drug Addiction?

Hi, I know you can’t share the letters for ethical reasons, but could you share some tips on how to write effective fuck you letters? It sounds like a useful skill to have.

Oh absolutely. So a fuck you letter should always be in response to an inciting action from another party. We don’t write “fuck you” letters unprompted, we write them to illicit a specific “oh shit, I’ve fucked up” reaction from the recipient. Furthermore, the inciting action on the part of the other party ideally has to be wrong. Now, when I say wrong, I really mean two things: 1) that it would incense a reasonable person, and 2) that it’s the type of action that people can get in trouble for.

So, I’m going to make a example up to demonstrate. This example has literally nothing to do with the type of letters I write, but I think it illustrates my process. Say you live in a neighborhood that has a Homeowner’s Association, but your house was built prior to the HOA forming and no owner of the house, including you, has ever agreed to join. You hung up a Pride flag on your porch last June, which is unremarkable, as many houses have flags displayed on their front porch; some are purely decorative, others convey meanings, like your neighbor’s Blue Lives Matter flag, or your other neighbor’s Build the Wall flag. The day after hanging the flag, you go on vacation for a week. When you return, you find that your Pride flag is missing, and you also find a letter in the mail from the HOA stating that you have 24 hours to remove the flag or it will be removed and you will be billed for the cost of its removal. You have, furthermore, recieved a bill for 200 dollars for the expenses incurred by the HOA in removing your flag.

Okay, so we obviously have our wrong act. So now we’re onto Stage Two, and this is the most important stage, Fact Gathering and Research. The obvious move is to find proof that the HOA had no right to enter your land or remove your property, and naturally we’ll do that as the very first thing, but really, is that going to make them sweat? We want them to sweat. So, let’s find news articles about other times this HOA or other HOAs in this neighborhood have entered someone’s property and removed or materially altered the property. Let’s find out what happened to them - were they sued? How much did they get hit for? Was there a ton of negative publicity? How did that impact housing prices?

Even though you’re not a member of the HOW, can you get a copy of the bylaws and see what they say about decorations outside homes that are part of the HOA? Is there a rule against displaying all flags? How about the neighbors? Have any of them recieved demands to take their flags down?

How about researching the demographics of the neighborhood? Do any gay couples live there? Have any gay couples applied and been denied housing there? Does the jurisdiction you live in have a law against discriminating against housing applicants due to sexual orientation? Has anyone ever complained that the HOA has acted in a discriminatory fashion against them because they’re gay? What penalties are available in your jurisdiction if that were the case? Are any of those complaints still pending, and could the complainants use the HOA’s act of removing your flag as proof of discriminatory intent?

What about the bill for $200? How was it calculated? Was it based on the time it took to remove the flag? Did it actually take that amount of time? Do you or your neighbors have a video doorbell that might have captured the removal of the flag? Who actually removed the flag? Did they say anything while removing it that might bolster your argument that the HOA acted with the intent to discriminate against gay people?

How about your own property? Did anything get damaged in the course of the flag’s removal? How much was the flag worth? How much was the property damage worth? Have you spent money related to this incident?

Once you’re done with your fact gathering and research, you’re onto stage 3, which is organizing the letter. So, you line up everything you’ve figured out, and arrange it from “least scary to the HOA” to “pants shittingly terrifying for the HOA.” Let’s say here, least scary is probaby “the cost to replace your flag” and most scary is “the prospect of a ton of lawsuits from other people who have been discriminated against and the prospect of publicity that will cause every HOA associated home’s property value to tank,” with a bunch of other stuff in the middle. Start with establishing that you’re not subject to HOA rules, and then walk them, sentence by sentence, step by step, through just how badly they’ve fucked up, and the bad outcomes they can expect in response to their fuck up.

Finish by telling them who else you’re copying on the letter, if it makes strategic sense to do so and will result in a better outcome for everyone that’s been wronged. In this case, you might think about a variety of gay friendly organizations, local news media, and governmental representatives. Wrap it up by asking them to provide you with a list of the actions that they intend to take to repair the damage that they’ve done to you and to the community within, say, fourteen days, so that you can give that to your attorney in order to help you consider how best to respond to their actions.

End with the most brutally infuriating sentence known to man: “Thank you for your kind attention to this issue.”

You’ll sleep like a baby once that letter’s in the mail.

They won’t.