amuseoffirebane

[amuseoffirebane]

did that thing where i was given a character, put my music on shuffle, and drew something based on the song

Maxis - Fistful of Concrete by Miracle of Sound Hector - Pull Your Circuit Breaker by Patient Zero

Max's is very much "hero fighting to save the city" energy. Hector's is just "destroying the life's work of the man who tortured you for fourteen years". :)

[amuseoffirebane]

What was your obscure chatroom/forum that you used before social media? Don’t say Gaia Online or Club Penguin. I’m talking obscure.

[amuseoffirebane]

I'm having that problem where I feel too tired to do anything but am not sleepy enough to nap. How annoying!

[amuseoffirebane]

its so fucked that not only did they erase our languages and beat and kill our people for using them but they stole the words of important tribes and important people and used them for the military and for trees and for food and for summer camps. average native american name is seen by non ntvs as a joke or something to use or consume, not a human being

[amuseoffirebane]

Late night page posting before I forget about it yet again <3

Latest entry for @ftlcamp (which HEY is gonna have TWO DEBUT SLOTS next round so ummmmm check it out if you wanna play toys with us (or just watch))

ID in alt text

[amuseoffirebane]

So I don't know if I've pulled this post together entirely as I would like to, it's not perfect, but I don't want to linger on it all day so just getting it down was more important to me.

Something I think about often, as an Indigenous person, is the contrast between how people online, especially settlers, or folks with distant Indigenous ancestry but no real connection to their nation, talk about things like the Wendigo, versus how our actual cultures relate to sacred stories, taboos, and the act of carrying those teachings forward.

There’s a modern trend where people treat words like “Wendigo” as inherently cursed or dangerous, almost in a superstitious, horror movie way. You’ll see posts that say “don’t say the word,” “don’t include it in media,” “white people shouldn’t touch this,” "Make sure you censor it," and so on. And while I get that it’s often coming from a place of wanting to protect something, it’s also deeply disconnected from any living cultural framework.

It becomes performance. The loudest voices are usually not people grounded in community teachings, but people trying to wield indigenous people as a kind of online moral weapon.

In many Indigenous cultures, there are story taboos. There are stories that are only told in winter, or only told to certain people, or in certain contexts.

There are stories that are sacred, and not meant for entertainment or casual consumption.

But those taboos are not about silence for silence’s sake, they’re about context, relationship, reciprocity, and responsibility. And crucially: they are ours. They are not content warnings for the internet to enforce. They are part of a living culture that knows when and how to speak its truths.

One example I always return to is the historical taboo against painting sacred stories and beings, a taboo that was challenged by Norval Morrisseau (Copper Thunderbird), an Indigenous artist whose work was, at least to me, absolutely revolutionary. He painted sacred forms to reclaim story and identity for people who had been cut off by colonialism, residential schools, and systemic erasure.

His work wasn’t sacrilege. It was art. And he was criticized, extremely so, by the Elders, but in the end he changed the way we hold those taboos. He made it possible to talk again, to see again. He is one of my heroes.

So when I see people online say things like “don’t even say Wendigo,” it doesn’t feel like protection, it feels like fear. Not fear rooted in spiritual protocol, but fear rooted in settler guilt and internet moralism.

If you're not part of a nation, or you’re not grounded in those teachings, it's not your job to police sacred boundaries based on someone else’s cosmology. Your job is to listen. To understand why a taboo exists, who it protects, and how it lives. Because not everything sacred is forbidden, and not everything forbidden is yours to defend, and not everything you think is forbidden is actually forbidden, and not everything actually forbidden should stay forbidden.

We preserve culture by carrying it, not by locking it away, not by mimicking silence, but by understanding the weight of what we choose to speak.

And part of why this matters so deeply to me, why I feel so strongly about the difference between performance and lived tradition, is because art is not just a hobby or a pastime for me. It is sacred. It is divine.

Art is not just what I do; it is who I am. It is how I connect with the world, with spirit, with others, with grief and joy alike. I create because it is a form of prayer. Because it is a way to breathe. Because when I write, draw, create, speak, I am reaching through time, not just as myself, but as part of something old, wounded, and despite that, still alive.

I believe deeply in artistic freedom, not just in principle, but in practice. I do not believe art should be censored to appease the comfort of those who do not share in its context. I believe in the right to speak, even when the subject is painful. Especially when the subject is painful. Because if we cannot speak pain, we cannot heal it.

And that’s why, when it comes to the Wendigo, I will not take part in the moral panic around its name or its depiction.

I carry the teachings and fears of my people in my body. I know the stories, not because I read them in a horror anthology or watched them on TV, but because they are part of the world I come from.

And I carry that weight into the choices I make as an artist.

I do not treat it as a cursed word that must never be uttered, never depicted, never grappled with. I treat it as a truth, ugly, dangerous, hungry, starving even, that deserves to be met with eyes open.

The art taboos of my ancestors were real. There was a time when sacred stories were not to be painted, not to be shared in certain ways. And yet that taboo was not the end of the story.

I believe I and others too, have that right, just as Copper Thunderbird did.

Yes, some people, many of them strangers to the culture they claim to protect, may find my stance uncomfortable. But I can live with that. I have to. Because I live with far worse. I live with the ghosts and absences colonialism has left behind. And frankly, the living memory of that spirit what it means, and what it consumes is far more real to me than online discourse.

I am more concerned with preserving the power of art than I am with preserving a silence that was already fraying under the weight of history. I honor my elders, and I honor the stories. But I do not mistake the past for a cage. I will carry what I have inherited into the future, with care, but not with absolutist reverence.

Let me create. Let me speak. Let me offer the truth of what lives in me, even if it is hard to look at. Especially then.

That is what I believe art is for.

And as long as I'm being honest;

I’m not particularly concerned with whether white people use the Wendigo in horror movies.

I understand why some folks feel protective, especially in diaspora or reconnecting contexts, when so much has been taken, the scraps feel like they matter. But I don't think this is the battleground we should die on. The Wendigo is not some uniquely special, sacred figure immune to horror depiction. It’s not a god, not a story reserved only for ceremony. It’s a warning. A lesson. A spirit of consumption and decay and hunger and greed and myriad other things, and those are things everyone relates to I'm sure, so I can see why it happened, also they're fucking scary so yeah no shit it happened.

I’m not saying “anyone SHOULD do anything they want forever.” I think Native people should be involved in these stories. Should be paid, should be credited, should be listened to. I think if you want to write a Wendigo story, you should at the very least try to understand what it meant to the people who believed in it first. Because that's just respect.

But I’m also saying that I have watched my people die from real hunger. From real poverty, overdose, housing loss, despair. I have seen firsthand, just what it means to be devoured by something much larger than yourself.

And that, not some dumb horror movie monster is where my fear and my grief lies.

If a white person misuses a story, I might sigh, I might roll my eyes. But if someone uses a story well, if someone takes the myth and reshapes it with care, with horror, with beauty, and with craft, I’m not going to chase them down screaming about "misuse." Because frankly, we have bigger problems.

And we have bigger, scarier monsters.

I don’t want “representation” that amounts to gatekeeping scraps.

I want sovereignty.

I want land back.

I want our languages and waters and children safe.

I want Native artists to be funded, housed, heard.

We are not fragile. Our stories are not fragile.

Let them be shared.

I’m sure there are fellow Native people, from my nation and from adjacent ones, who disagree with me on all this. That’s okay. We are not a monolith. We were never meant to be. Our cultures are living, breathing, and full of contradictions, just like any other people.

But I also know that my opinion is not unique, and it is certainly not unpopular within our circles. I support my fellow Indigenous people, always. I want safety and sovereignty and self-expression for us all. But on this? On this one? We’ll just have to disagree.

And I can live with that.

[amuseoffirebane]

Done-zo. Now I just gotta decide if I want to try and finish that half-written fic. It will not be a long one if I do.

Man I went into both my tumblr and computer archives and found like, 6.5 short old Becile Bots fics that I don't think I ever put on the askblog. Wondering if it's worth it to try and finish that half-written one, and also if these all warrant separate Ao3 entries.

[amuseoffirebane]

Got two transferred so far but I gotta go do stuff so I'll figure out what I'm doing for the rest this evening.

Man I went into both my tumblr and computer archives and found like, 6.5 short old Becile Bots fics that I don't think I ever put on the askblog. Wondering if it's worth it to try and finish that half-written one, and also if these all warrant separate Ao3 entries.

[amuseoffirebane]

Man I went into both my tumblr and computer archives and found like, 6.5 short old Becile Bots fics that I don't think I ever put on the askblog. Wondering if it's worth it to try and finish that half-written one, and also if these all warrant separate Ao3 entries.

[amuseoffirebane]

I still have things I need to do, but for tonight we're just drawing the real OG Ceata

ID in alt text

[amuseoffirebane]

Mozilla, in its finite wisdom, embedded LLM bots into recent versions of Firefox for the vitally-important purpose of… naming tab groups. Now, some users are noticing CPU and power usage spikes caused by a background process called Inference.

Ugh. Reminder again for Firefox users to visit your about:config page, search for the browser.ml.chat.enabled key, and set that to false:

If yours says true then double-click it until it reads false.

Doing that turns off the AI chatbot features in Firefox, but also the stupid new LLM tab-naming feature that's rolling out.

[amuseoffirebane]

"there should be some kind of test you have to take before having kids" -> wrong, extremely dangerous and highkey eugenicist and racist "the youth should have safe and effective legal pathways at their disposal to make sure their human rights are constantly protected and upheld" -> based, centers the youth, gives minors more power to fight inequality and does not reinforce the idea that parents are immune to scrutiny from their kids

[amuseoffirebane]

EPILEPSY WARNINGS 1:37-1:39, 3:17-3:19

View an epilepsy friendlier version here!

[Video Description: a digitally drawn animatic set to the song Outrage by Capital Lights, featuring characters from Steam Powered Giraffe's fictional backstory. It is a war between an army of robotic elephants versus the titular steam powered giraffe and another army of androids, culminating in a fight between their respective inventors. End VD]

In the late 1800’s, two men of science formed an age old dispute…

My take on the Weekend War from Steam Powered Giraffe's Lore! Nearly 450 individual frames, drawn in FireAlpaca and assembled in MS Clipchamp, about a month's worth of work-- the beginning was done awhile ago, but the bulk of this was done in the last 3-4 weeks, not counting the years the concept spent percolating in my brain!

Enjoy!

[amuseoffirebane]

So I saw some lovely Weekend War art by @neonartistycauseidk that used lyrics from this EPIC: The Musical song (I think it's like, an alternate version made by one of the actors?) called 'Just A Man (Antinous ver.)' and uhhhhh it pushed me down my feels stairs so hard I had to drop everything and make these!

Did Thadeus know how far he'd gone? Did Peter I think Thadeus was truly irredeemable? Did Delilah blame herself, before her death or after being ressurected? all questions :,)

[amuseoffirebane]

So I saw some lovely Weekend War art by @neonartistycauseidk that used lyrics from this EPIC: The Musical song (I think it's like, an alternate version made by one of the actors?) called 'Just A Man (Antinous ver.)' and uhhhhh it pushed me down my feels stairs so hard I had to drop everything and make these!

Did Thadeus know how far he'd gone? Did Peter I think Thadeus was truly irredeemable? Did Delilah blame herself, before her death or after being ressurected? all questions :,)

[amuseoffirebane]

So I saw some lovely Weekend War art by @neonartistycauseidk that used lyrics from this EPIC: The Musical song (I think it's like, an alternate version made by one of the actors?) called 'Just A Man (Antinous ver.)' and uhhhhh it pushed me down my feels stairs so hard I had to drop everything and make these!

Did Thadeus know how far he'd gone? Did Peter I think he was just as monstrous? Did Delilah blame herself, before her death or after being ressurected? all questions :,)

[amuseoffirebane]

Oh my gosh you're so sweet, I'm so happy you've enjoyed my stuff! ^^ Yeah, every once in a while I'll check out the Becile related tags and I think that's where your art popped up! And I was like /points at Thadeus, that's my idiot <3

In fact, watch this space, cuz I'm working on something right now .... ;D

So I looked up Just A Man Antinous ver. After seeing your art. That song pushed me down the stairs of my Weekend War feels and I just wanted to say thanks! I've fallen and I can't get up :D

Holy mother of…AHHHHHHH!!! I can’t believe you saw my art!!!

But, uh…yeah. The second I heard that version of “Just A Man” I instantly knew instantly who and WHAT it reminded me of…

Annnnnnnd—then I was fueled by the fire, and bucket loads of angst, to make the drawing—while also having the song a repeat for a solid four hours.

What can I say, I’m a sucker for angst ¯\(ツ)/¯

(By the way—you’re super cool and an amazing artist!!! I love your work, whether it be SPG related or non-related, and I always get super happy and excited when I see it… :D !!!!!)