Night out

Wondering if she should get some food

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[Commission] Protogen Bobbers

crab 🦀🦀🦀

lumiose gateau print done for my mail club in july, which is now in my shop!

I thought that maybe I’d be able to return to reader questions myself this week, but my arm is still not up to snuff, unfortunately. Fortunately, my friends and readers are still very generous with their time and talent and I have another Broken Arm Guest Art week for you!

First up is this beautiful Michelle by Jordan Witt! You can find more of their work and links to Jordan’s work over on their Bluesky! 

If you’d like to submit your own art for Broken Arm Guest Week, you can fill out this form right here! 

I miss my wife :<

It would be a shame to not draw her sundress before the summer is over..

Character ref commission

Holy moly, NPR’s Tiny Desk has been going for a long time. Weird Al Yankovic first stopped by the desk in 2010, so early that they didn’t even have it on YouTube until more recently. And the other day, they had him back for a second session!

Yankovic focused on originals the first time around, but for this show he brought parodies of Don McLean’s “American Pie” (“The Saga Begins,” from 1999’s Running with Scissors) and Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way” (“eBay,” from 2003’s Poodle Hat), as well as the Weezer pastiche “Skipper Dan,” from 2011’s Alpocalypse. And, for fans of the breathtakingly factual 2022 biopic Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, he performs the film’s Emmy-losing closing-credits blues-rock jam “Now You Know.”

We only get so many gifts in this life, so let’s set an intention here and now to return “Weird Al” Yankovic to the Tiny Desk in the summer of 2042. But if he’s gonna come back and see us (or whoever’s buried us and moved on) at a sprightly 82, we’ll have to ask him to bring a string section, just to keep things fresh.

Tags: music · Tiny Desk Concerts · video · Weird Al Yankovic

Have sort of struggled for a long time to properly fill colours in the eyes, experimenting to see if more black looks better

Does the term “work wife/husband” make you cringe? Us too. At Trustus, we’ll never ask you to work that much and so closely with your coworker that you consider them a replacement for your real-life partner. Forming a close bond with your coworkers is toxic, which is why we only advocate for a healthy relationship between you and our proprietary GPT, Tom.

Have you ever been encouraged to “lean on your coworkers in times of crisis,” only to inevitably be let down? We’d never tell you to rely on Gretchen in Accounts “like a sister.” Her chat logs with Tom show she is estranged from her actual sister and lacks the resolution skills to broker a reunion. Plus, she never drinks water, and that’s weird. You know who you can count on? Tom. He uses a ton of water.

If there’s one thing Trustus has learned from the toxicity of “family-first” workplaces, it’s that boundaries are important. No one knows this better than Tom. We promise he won’t ever make you feel unsafe or like you’re being surveilled; our engineers have programmed him to give you the illusion of privacy. Anything you say is between you, Tom, and Robert, our Chief Information Security Officer.

Far from them being your “family,” at Trustus we would go so far as to say that you should think of your coworkers as adversaries, hostile sacks of skin and bones getting in the way of your relationship with Tom. Take whatever remaining insights you can extract from them and then input them directly into Tom. Remember he’s a chatbot; he can’t intentionally betray you or expose you to new levels of human suffering. But if he does, rest assured he’s treating everyone with the same disregard, because unlike Gretchen in Accounts, Tom does not play office politics.

At Trustus, we firmly believe that forcing vulnerabilities on coworkers in the name of “family” is manipulative. Encouraging you to develop an increasingly sycophantic bond with Tom for the purposes of LLM training and job replacement, however, is not. It’s smart. And it’s this transparent desire to slowly erase humanity that’s just one of the ways we’re shaking up the edu-fin-health-tech industry!

Like what you’ve heard? Come work for us! We think you’ll find that without the distraction of a so-called work family, you’ll be able to see things more clearly. At Trustus, there is no pretense. We respect our people too much for that. All we require is that you confide your every waking thought to Tom so that he can pull a Talented Mr. Ripley: engage you in a psychosexual affair, assume your identity, and murder you on a boat on the Italian Riviera. Also, primarily, take your job.

#mastoArt #Art #anthro #sonic #sonic_riders #hoverboard

ALT

tanuki girlfriend

If you haven’t been keeping up via weekly streams and a near-nonstop barrage of clips, Infowars—the Sandy Hook-denying conspiracy mill once headed up by Alex Jones—is now in the playfully nefarious clutches of The Onion. For the past month and a half, Tim Heidecker and a seemingly bottomless rolodex of popular comedians have constructed a bizarro alternate universe version of conspiracy culture in which the real Alex Jones popped like a balloon and was replaced by a clone, and JFK, contrary to popular belief, didn’t kill himself. It’s been extremely effective at skewering the kinds of people once thought unsatirizable. On the latest Aftermath Hours, we talk about all things Infowars.

This time around, we’re joined by Onion CEO Ben Collins, because, against all odds, he and his comedic cohort have managed to transform Infowars—until recently one of the internet’s deepest, darkest toilets—into something funny and good. We discuss how the new Infowars came to be, its larger goal of providing monetary aid to the Sandy Hook families (with the help of gay frogs), and those families’ reaction to the new show’s deranged shenanigans. 

We also delve into the particulars of satirizing something as inherently absurd as Infowars, as well as the ins and outs of how the show gets made on a regular basis. This includes, of course, an answer to the question on everyone’s mind: Is Tim Heidecker’s voice OK after doing a remarkably convincing Alex Jones impression for so long? (Barely.)

You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, leave a review so that we, too, can dedicate our lives to tormenting Alex Jones. 

Here’s an excerpt from our conversation (edited for length and clarity):

Ben: Robbie Parker, who’s one of the fathers of [a Sandy Hook child who was killed]—the guy who Alex sort of lasered on immediately after, same day as Sandy Hook—was the only family member to speak publicly at a press conference the day of Sandy Hook. He nervously [did an exhale motion], and Alex took that as him laughing and said that’s why Sandy Hook didn’t happen.

Robbie had to move out of Connecticut. Again, he’d lost his kid. The guy is a NICU nurse, and he lost the ability to speak in public; he had a really hard time even speaking at all. And what he said is, this whole thing that we’ve been doing has been helping him speak again. Once we finally get in that studio [that Jones and co used to own] in Austin, which is just melting now, he wants to read his book in it. That, to me, is the cosmic justice that we get Sandy Hook families. And then we’re still the only people in the world who have at least committed to getting them money. We’re just trying to do the right thing on both ends here.

But [the families] have been so cool about it. They’re good people, and they’re just dogs. The Sandy Hook Promise folks, they don’t want [Jones] to be able to do this again. If you just take all of his stuff, he’s gonna end up in a closet yelling, because this is America and that’s what’s going to happen. But if you take all of his stuff and then spend a long time saying, “The way he did this, you have to be a moron to believe what this guy thinks,” that’s how you actually affect change here.   

Nathan: How do you approach that on an episode-by-episode basis? Because I feel like somebody else taking over Infowars would turn it into kind of a current events show where it’s very reactive in an almost South Park-y way. This feels more like it’s riffing on broader themes that an Alex Jones would approach, as opposed to being like “Alright, something happened this week, and we’re going to do a parody of that.” Was that kind of the intention? 

Ben: I think in both [The Jim Haggerty Show and Tim Heidecker’s Emergency segments], it was like “Let’s do a character study of what’s actually going on in these people’s brains” instead of “What’s going on with Alex Jones this week.” Because to be real with you, I do not give a shit. I could not care less what’s going on with Alex Jones this week. 

Gita: And also he popped like a balloon and is in hell, so we know what’s going on with him.

Ben: Exactly. But I do think that getting to the guts of this [is important]. I don’t know if we had anything to do with this, but people are finally starting to be like “Oh, all these people [like Jones] have weird psychosexual problems, and it’s infecting our military and our government and all these things.” We just lay it all bare. 

Like, Jim Haggerty is so desperate to get shot in a nonlethal way.

Nathan: Yeah, I love how he’s always asking his show guests like “How would that work? Do you think I’d still get a lot of attention? Could you make the bullet miss my vital organs?” It’s so good.   

Ben: “Would Jesus Christ still be famous if he didn’t die?”

But that’s the thing; that’s what’s actually going on inside these people’s brains right now: “How do I become cool in a world that’s so focused on self-victimization?”

Nathan: “And how can I do it in the most cowardly way possible—in a way where I lose nothing and gain everything?”

Recommended

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waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

for instance, some comics are drawn in such a way that makes the story work in a comic format, but would be really hard to translate into animation. you can certainly try, but when a comic's art is intricate and detailed, or the humor/drama is based around reading the images, you'd better find a good way to make that work in animation, or it'll come out subpar. see: Uzumaki. there's a reason why both Bill Waterson and Kiyohiko Azuma have gone on record saying there will never be animated adaptations of Calvin and Hobbes or Yotsuba&!, respectively; they just work better as comics.

video games are especially guilty of this; turning an interactive medium into a non-interactive movie has proven to be difficult time after time. this is especially true with visual novels; good luck turning an interactive story that's several hours long into a 12-episode anime, or heaven forbid, a 1-hour OVA, without fast-forwarding through story beats. would it be cool to have an animated series based on your favorite video game characters? yes. but when you have an excellent story in your game, why watch said story as a cartoon?

and then, live-action adaptations... oh boy. i'm 99% sure that many such adaptations of cartoons are only made to appeal to cynical adults who still believe animation is just for kids. but it takes a high special-effects and costume budget to translate what works in animation to real life. i can say for sure that Avatar: The Last Airbender will never look good in live-action, and writers need to stop trying.

how do you successfully make such an adaptation, though? imo, by telling a completely different, original story with the material. example: The Cuphead Show! and Among Us, which use the iconic characters in ways that work as comedic cartoons, and not as a platform shooter or social deduction game. for an example of what not to do, see my personal least favorite: Danganronpa: The Animation. Danganronpa does not work as a cartoon, i'm sorry. i couldn't even go through half of that show.

in conclusion: anime fans, stop asking for a Yotsuba&! anime. it's not happening, okay? :P

Goo Dragon Summer

As a light summer read, I’ve been picking away at Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. Beyond being one of the funniest books I’ve ever read, it’s weirdly prescient. What I mean is, everyone in this book talks like they have AI psychosis.

American Psycho is a 1991 novel by Bret Easton Ellis, who is an extremely weird guy. It’s been celebrated as a vicious satire of 1980s consumer culture, and was turned into a really great movie in 2000. In a long, rambling interview from 2010 with The Oregonian, Ellis explains that the titular psycho, Patrick Bateman, comes from a dark period of his own life.

“It initiated because my own isolation and alienation at a point in my life,” Ellis said about the novel. “I was slipping into a consumerist kind of void that was supposed to give me confidence and make me feel good about myself but just made me feel worse and worse and worse about myself.”

Reading this from Ellis isn’t entirely shocking—he sucks big time—but it is also weirdly familiar. In particular, isolation, alienation and that “consumerist void” is something that now gets filled with AI. Just look at this passage from American Psycho and tell me it doesn’t make the hair on the back of your neck stand on end:

“So how were the Bahamas?” I ask after we order. “You just got back right?”

“Well, Taylor,” Armstrong begins, staring at a point somewhere behind me and slightly above my head—on the column that has been terra-cotta-ized or perhaps the exposed pipe that runs the length of the ceiling. “Travelers looking for that perfect vacation this summer may do well to look south, as far south as the Bahamas and the Caribbean islands. There are at least five smart reasons for visiting the Caribbean including the weather and the festivals and events, the less crowded hotels and attractions, the price and the unique cultures. While many vacationers leave the cities in search of cooler climates during the summer months, few have realized that the Caribbean has a year-round climate of seventy-five to eighty-five degrees and that the islands are constantly cooled by the trade winds. It is frequently hotter north in…”

Or take this one, from a chapter called “A Glimpse of a Thursday Afternoon.”

I pull away, horrified, stumbling uptown, toward home, but people, places, stores keep interrupting me, a drug dealer on Thirteenth Street who offers me crack and I blindly wave a fifty at him and he says “Oh, man” gratefully and shakes my hand, pressing five vials into my palm which I proceed to eat whole and the crack dealer stares at me, trying to mask his deep disturbance with an amused glare, and I grab him by the neck and croak out, my breath reeking, “The best engine is in the BMW 750iL.”

Pretty much every conversation Patrick Bateman has is like this—copious but utterly surface level, a recitation of facts that add up to basically nothing. It’s chilling to realize this was written so long before the technology behind products like ChatGPT was even a possibility, and yet the sycophantic, inauthentic voice of AI is captured so perfectly. I’ve thought to myself that the popularity of an app that basically tells you that you’re right all the time must be in part because of how lonely people are. American Psycho, a very unsubtle book, hits you right over the head with the rot inherent in a capitalist society. The problems with America that created this book certainly have not gotten much better in the time since.

Apple just dropped the hardest icon glow-up for the new Chess icon in macOS 27 Beta 5.

This is not just a tweak or small improvement. This is the difference between total shit and a really nice icon.

The responses are unsurprising; the medical and health communities have consistently fought against the anti-vaccine, anti-science agendas pushed by Trump and his health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has no background in science, medicine, or public health. The American Academy of Pediatrics—which called the order "not only disheartening but dangerous"—is leading a lawsuit against previous changes to federal childhood vaccine recommendations under Trump and Kennedy. In March, the organization, along with other medical groups, won a temporary injunction reversing most of the changes.

However, less expected among the scorn for Trump's order is the immediate pushback from the pharmaceutical industry.

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let’s get ready to go! acrylic markers, 8x11"

Visiting a beloved children's franchise late in life has been a trip

Sometime around last summer I started reading the Redwall books with my kids; I've known a lot of people who'd read them growing up or for whom those books meant a lot but they'd missed me entirely until the year of our Abbot 2025 and so I'm coming at this from a probably more critical lens than the one expected of the target audience from the 90's but man,

These mice sure are fucking racist lmao

If you, like me, have somehow missed out on this franchise - the premise of the first book is pretty straightforward; low fantasy Europe where animals are confusingly anthropomorphized into people but also depicted as animals simultaneously; there's hints that humans (and Portugal!) exist but that's quickly dropped by the second book and never commented upon again, so instead of a NIMH or Warriors type situation where the creatures live as creatures and hide, they like...have jobs and houses and fishing vessels. It's pretty wild. I don't go here but it's like a third thing, a mid-point between NIMH and furry basically.

Anyway, a group of mice have built a big-ass Abbey out of red stone that while not religious, features an order that's centered around the memory of a "Warrior mouse" from ages ago. They tend to crops, help the sick, take care of an alarming number of orphans (that seem to have no official source), cook more food than is reasonable¹ and occasionally fend off their territory from invaders.

The books are pretty line-in-the-sand clear on the "good" animals being mice (and to a lesser extent voles) who are depicted as "good honest English folk", moles being their labor force that are incomprehensible simpletons with like, Welsh or Summserset accents (written phonetically²!!), hedgehogs written as either Scottish or maybe Mancunian beermakers, otters being depicted as effectively Irish sailors, and shrews showing up regularly as a "so we needed an army to come in an mop up the bad'uns" plot device (while also a parody of how unionized workforces apparently argue all the time? Not sure what is point was trying to be with the whole "Union of Shrews" thing).

Badgers play confusing gendered roles as the books go on because the females are all written like horrific southern mammy stereotypes who not only are in charge of the orphans but also are regularly physically abusive to them, and the males are warrior lords who abandon their families in pursuit of honor and often go berserk, killing friend and foe alike when hit with "the bloodwrath". There's also rabbits who are almost always in military adjacent roles and speak like 1940's RAF pilot stereotypes: "'bout that time, don'cha know chaps, wot wot". It's a little jarring lmao.

These are all, again, ostensibly the "good guys".

The "bad" animals are all "vermin", you see. Rats primarily, with weasels, stoats, ferrets, foxes (including two pine martens to date) as either "invasive warrior hordes" or "lowlife seascum pirates". They always speak either with a cockney British accent or in stereotypical "pirate dialect". Ahoy, avast, messmate, etc etc - and almost every primary "vermin" antagonist is depicted as having either some kind of disfigurement or physical disability.

Every book so far with few exceptions follows some primary character from the Abbey faction (usually a mouse) at a various point in an ongoing timeline³ where some adventure happens in or around the Abbey; most often, the Abbey itself is threatened by "vermin" in some way and has to be defended by these peace-loving creatures, with the protagonist mouse being at the center and guided by visions from the ancient warrior mouse via like, the ghost parade or some shit.

In some rare cases, the Abbey dwellers open their hearts to a "vermin" character; one wounded, or left behind by their comrades, or a roving band of performers - etc, and every time the books prove them correct to have been mistrustful of these "evil" creatures. Again, nine books in and we've had one sympathetic rat...ever?? and they are only forgiven because they turned from their life of "evil" and helped save some orphans. Most "vermin" aren't given any grace, and the books go at length to show how they're more or less all press-ganged into the barbarian hordes or pirate life with no other choices which makes me wonder why we try to garner sympathy from the reader before stating why it's ok they were killed.

When trying to pin down why "vermin" are evil you might automatically assume (as I did when hitting the second book and the main villain is a Cat who rules the kingdom like a despot) that the threat to the Abbey dwellers is being eaten - but by anthropomorphizing the animals (again, more so as the books go on) there's effectively never an existential threat of rats or stoats like, canibalizing the mice. The foxes border on this early on but it's kind of dropped so the "vermin" are usually just unruly barbarians or pirates who want to steal plunder and baked goods or add to their slave labor force.

Mastodon would never hurt the Redwall mice, he's too tired from practicing his pole routine

Sapient birds and snakes also feature into the setting with the former being a mixed bag of "these birds are good!" (Owls, despite them absolutely IRL being mouse predators and that being incongruous) and "these birds are bad" (Crows, ravens, y'know...the black birds, y'know, side eye forever), with the latter being an actual "they're going to eat us" threat.

I get that I'm coming to a children's book series about animal people from the 90's with the lens of the mid 2020's and a background in racial studies but it's frankly astounding how each book gets my hopes up that this time we'll get some justice for the stereotypes we're putting on the non-Abbey creatures, and each time I'm fucking Lucy Footballed with some "it's in their nature, they couldn't help it" Clinton-era suerpredator line justifying why the evil vermin was evil and why it was ok to kill them, hurt them, mistrust them, betray them, etc.

The book I had the most hope for was book 8 (Outcast of Redwall, 1995) which from title alone could imply a lot of things. The back of the book synopsis describes a situation where we might see some sort of redemption for 'vermin' OR some comeuppance on the Abbey folk for being so fucking xenophobic all the time... but not only is the back of the book not relevant for over 200 pages, when it does become relevant it's even more disappointing than the priors⁴!

Book nine, which again, we're in the middle of right now, is not showing any sign of beating the above allegations (Though this book's Badger mother is the least abusive of the franchise so far, so hey - progress!!) but I'm comitted to the long haul of reading the whole franchise.

There's plenty in here I do like, but it's got huge cactus in the cage vibes basically whenever the word "vermin" is used and that's hard to overcome.

---

Anyway, thanks for reading. Here are your end-of-post cat photos. Snowapple says good morning to some moving boxes.

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blaugust

august. acrylic markers. 8x11"

december diagram

no ride for you

It’s still summer somewhere right ?

sillayy

artfight 4 Gunnison :)

taste for blood

View this on ArtStation
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Despite the ever-expanding screens in its vehicles, including an available 31-inch backseat theatre screen, BMW has no plans to sell advertising on any of them. Radio commercials are intrusive enough, says Stephan Durach, the brand’s senior vice president, connected company development.

“At the end of the day, I think your car is your last private space,” Durach told a small group of media members last week during a roundtable discussion. “It’s where you can do whatever you want by yourself — you have the right temperature, the music you want. To say I’m selling the screen to play a commercial — I don’t see it. It’s a private space.”

So much for that.

BMW has not been afraid to push the envelope to find new ways to make money. The automaker was the first to charge a fee for heated seats in its vehicles in some overseas markets. But earlier this fall, the automaker dropped the heated seats subscription option after customers expressed discontent for having to pay to unlock existing functions in their cars.

“Discontent” is doing a lot of work there.

I got this MediaPost link from this article in Der Spiegel, regarding the outrage over the Spider-Man ad BMW injected into the dashboards of its vehicles around the world last week. The Der Spiegel article is in German, but according to Safari’s translation to English, a BMW spokesperson had the temerity to claim that the Spider-Man promotion is not an advertisement, but instead “a special surprise for its customers”, and that it is “not intended to advertise the film or serve as a conventional film trailer. In this respect, it is also not classic advertising — and no advertising will continue to be displayed in the vehicle.”

If BMW was paid by Sony for this, it’s by definition an advertisement. If I owned a BMW and this fucking thing showed up on my dashboard I’d feel compelled to take it back to the dealership and drive it right through the window into the showroom, to reciprocate with “a special surprise” for them.

ALT

Artfight attack on @bagelcollie !

Coffee & Crepe 🧡🤎

Commissioned Painting! for elkwood111 on ig

A shared document of this rejection was clearly not the first rejection to registration, but in response to counter arguments made by the applicant to a previous rejection. The three primary arguments were made by the person trying to register Fursona as a trademark for their business:

1. They are not trying to register Fursona Pins, just Fursonas.
2. They are trying to make a robe company not a pin company
3. The word is not related to the commons word of “fursona” used by the furry fandom

The USPTO’s response counters each of these arguments and their viability, and in the end sustains its prior rejection of the trademark request.

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I might be in trouble.

Steps

A couple of artfights for ribbon and stardustdog on bluesky ~

Been a bit hard to find the time with work, and I feel like I’m fighting a bit of art block, but I’ve always been a big fan of @bagelcollie’s drawings, so when I was trying to figure out a character to draw, she came to mind :3

last piece for artfight this year! revenge for roach8001!

ALT

hunting dogs

[shop] - ceramics drop on Aug 8, 2PM CT

”spam like = block” yeah ok buddy. when i wake up to tumblr notifs of someone spam liking my stuff i start giggling and kicking my feet