grumpyoldsnake

[grumpyoldsnake]

i realized i haven't really posted any pages from hunger's bite here, and the bookshop page doesn't show any previews, so here--! comics! look at my comics!!!!

buy hunger's bite! it comes out next tuesday but people are getting their copies early!!!

[grumpyoldsnake]

✨little sneak peeks of my cards for the Literary Tarot!✨  can you guess what books they are? 👀👀

[grumpyoldsnake]

A little too smart

[grumpyoldsnake]

Comic about a werewolf child Gotta learn how to howl More comics on my Patreon

[grumpyoldsnake]

*faux leather no animals were harmed! :)

[grumpyoldsnake]

There are people – some in my own Party – who think that if you just give Donald Trump everything he wants, he’ll make an exception and spare you some of the harm. I’ll ignore the moral abdication of that position for just a second to say — almost none of those people have the experience with this President that I do. I once swallowed my pride to offer him what he values most — public praise on the Sunday news shows — in return for ventilators and N95 masks during the worst of the pandemic. We made a deal. And it turns out his promises were as broken as the BIPAP machines he sent us instead of ventilators. Going along to get along does not work – just ask the Trump-fearing red state Governors who are dealing with the same cuts that we are. I won’t be fooled twice.

I’ve been reflecting, these past four weeks, on two important parts of my life: my work helping to build the Illinois Holocaust Museum and the two times I’ve had the privilege of reciting the oath of office for Illinois Governor.

As some of you know, Skokie, Illinois once had one of the largest populations of Holocaust survivors anywhere in the world. In 1978, Nazis decided they wanted to march there.

The leaders of that march knew that the images of Swastika clad young men goose stepping down a peaceful suburban street would terrorize the local Jewish population – so many of whom had never recovered from their time in German concentration camps.

The prospect of that march sparked a legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court. It was a Jewish lawyer from the ACLU who argued the case for the Nazis – contending that even the most hateful of speech was protected under the first amendment.

As an American and a Jew, I find it difficult to resolve my feelings around that Supreme Court case – but I am grateful that the prospect of Nazis marching in their streets spurred the survivors and other Skokie residents to act. They joined together to form the Holocaust Memorial Foundation and built the first Illinois Holocaust Museum in a storefront in 1981 – a small but important forerunner to the one I helped build thirty years later.

I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly. But I know the history intimately — and have spent more time than probably anyone in this room with people who survived the Holocaust. Here’s what I’ve learned – the root that tears apart your house’s foundation begins as a seed – a seed of distrust and hate and blame.

The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago didn’t arrive overnight. It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame.

I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now. A president who watches a plane go down in the Potomac – and suggests — without facts or findings — that a diversity hire is responsible for the crash. Or the Missouri Attorney General who just sued Starbucks – arguing that consumers pay higher prices for their coffee because the baristas are too “female” and “nonwhite.” The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here: They point to a group of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems.

I just have one question: What comes next? After we’ve discriminated against, deported or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities – once we’ve ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends – After that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face – what comes next.

All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don’t want to repeat history – then for God’s sake in this moment we better be strong enough to learn from it.

I swore the following oath on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible: “I do solemnly swear that I will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the state of Illinois, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of Governor .... according to the best of my ability.

My oath is to the Constitution of our state and of our country. We don’t have kings in America – and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one. I am not speaking up in service to my ambitions — but in deference to my obligations.

If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this:

It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.

Those Illinois Nazis did end up holding their march in 1978 – just not in Skokie. After all the blowback from the case, they decided to march in Chicago instead. Only twenty of them showed up. But 2000 people came to counter protest. The Chicago Tribune reported that day that the “rally sputtered to an unspectacular end after ten minutes.” It was Illinoisans who smothered those embers before they could burn into a flame.

Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the “tragic spirit of despair” overcome us when our country needs us the most.

Sources:

• NBC Chicago & J.B. Pritzker, Democratic governor of Illinois, State of the State address 2025: Watch speech here | Full text

• Betches News on Instagram (screencaps)

[grumpyoldsnake]

some quick August expressions

[grumpyoldsnake]

i think the true horror of i saw the tv glow is the feeling of the narrative haunting you after you've seen it. i think the movie is simultaneously a warning against repression and ignoring your true self, a narrative of those who dont always have the life they wanted to live, and a story full of hope that you can still cut yourself open and see what's inside, and you can always walk out of the door of your old life. but you have to be the one to do it. your friend cannot save you. your interests cannot save you. you have to save yourself and that in itself is a haunting narrative. the horror that we see in i saw the tv glow is not at all jumpscares or gore or creepy crawlies that other horror films have, but its the horror of longing, of fear, of knowing that you shouldve taken that chance when you were younger but you know deep down you can still do it. dont fool yourself into thinking that once you're 20, 25, 30, 40, that you cant take your life into your own hands, that your choices arent yours to make anymore. it will always hurt, at least a little, to cut open your own chest and to let it out and see who you are inside but theres never a better time to do that then now, even if that's when you're stuck at a deadend job after you had a public breakdown. you can walk out of the door. there is still time.

[grumpyoldsnake]

[grumpyoldsnake]

drew over something i wrote for a class and liked :] sorry the cars are lowkey ugly, its because I fucking hate cars and cant be bothered to learn what they look like beyond ominous hunks of metal

[grumpyoldsnake]

Something to watch for, which I learned from stage magic but which is extremely relevant to detecting scams as well:

The magician or scammer will *tell you* how he is going to prove his honesty.

The magician rifles through the deck until you say "stop", then he says, "Are you sure? I'll keep going if you want." and asks "Now, you agree that you could have stopped anywhere you wanted, so there's absolutely no way I could know which card you got" and because it's a magic show and you aren't paying close attention you didn't notice he didn't deal a card from where you stopped, he dealt the bottom card of the deck.

The magician doesn't ask you, "What would it take for you to believe this" because you might say, "I'd need you to use a sealed deck" or "I'd have to personally shuffle the deck" or some other proof that would make the trick impossible.

Magicians say "You agree that if I did *this*, it would mean *that*, right?" and you say yes, and it feels like you are the one who got to verify things, but of course the magician is lying and the proof is nothing of the kind.

Scammers do the same thing. A really concrete example is phone scammers pretending to be working for the government will say, "Look, I see you're skeptical if I'm who I say I am, I'm going to hang up and call back, and you'll see on the caller ID it says, 'FBI' and that tells you that I'm really working for the government."

Now, caller ID can be spoofed pretty easily, so it doesn't prove anything at all.

But it *feels* to you like you demanded proof and the scammer was willing to give you the proof.

But you didn't tell the scammer what out would take to prove it to you, the scammer told you what the proof would be.

This is actually like a really basic thing to look for if you want to start decoding magic tricks and scams.

[grumpyoldsnake]

@nurgletwh

Via dindin.inparis

[grumpyoldsnake]

I have done very few responsible or sociable things today (or this weekend) but I have baked a lot of bread, done a bit of cooking, done way too many dishes (and yet somehow not enough, many remain), and started a painting!

The weekend was productive and delicious! But… I do not feel very rested. 😅

[grumpyoldsnake]

Spot the cobalt mix!

Ffffff

Why does indanthrone blue have to be SO PRETTY when it is SO fussy to control in wash -_-

[grumpyoldsnake]

Fine. Fine. I will swatch some other pigment mixes.

Cobalt blue seems to keep wiggling its way back into my life despite its toxicity and high cost because it is just SO well-behaved. And v pretty in its own right.

I think I can glimpse where the people who don’t want to give up cadmium pigments might be coming from.

I think I am never going to let myself try cadmium pigments. 😂

Ffffff

Why does indanthrone blue have to be SO PRETTY when it is SO fussy to control in wash -_-

[grumpyoldsnake]

Ffffff

Why does indanthrone blue have to be SO PRETTY when it is SO fussy to control in wash -_-