kalakagatha

[kalakagatha]

Anyways. Biden and Trump are NOT the same.

[kalakagatha]

A lot of people are genuinely terrified about what will happen if Donald Trump wins reelection and it's really weird how some of y'all are acting like everyone begging you to vote for Biden is some privileged, rich, out of touch, neo-liberal when a lot of them are just vulnerable people who don't want to like...die in a brutal civil war or watch all their remaining rights get stripped away by an increasingly authoritarian Republican Party.

I do not know how to express to you how much worse it can get.

[kalakagatha]

an important thread. be worried. be scared. make sure you’re prepared to vote, and volunteer if you’re able to. 67 days.

[kalakagatha]

FINALLY, A PRESSURE POINT TO FIGHT USPS SABOTAGE: LOTS of calls and emails to USPS Board of Governors. Ready, set, go. We know how to do this. Be concerned, firm, polite. Louis DeJoy, the Postmaster General and Trump appointee who is now dismantling the USPS on behalf of Trump, “serves at the pleasure of” and reports to the 6-member USPS Board of Governors. These six men have the power & duty to #StopDeJoy & prevent Election Day chaos. 5 of the 6 are Trump appointees, but retired Harvard lawyer (CCJ, @NastyOldWomyn) contributing this info on Twitter is clear that a relentless barrage of calls, emails, and other callings-out will absolutely get their attention. She says: · I’ve represented Boards as a lawyer, and I know “this kind of attention is not what they’ve signed up for. It’s disruptive to their day jobs, which is where they make their money.” · “None of the members wants to suffer reputational damage from overseeing the meltdown of USPS during a pandemic. They do NOT want to be in the spotlight, so SHINE IT BRIGHT!” · “Board members HATE being contacted, HATE having their phone mailboxes fill up with messages, HATE being inundated with emails and letters. And, oh, they would HATE being picketed at work, if someone decided to start a demonstration.” · In contacting these 6 Board members, “I plan to be polite but firm about my fury about the recent deterioration of USPS’s service, giving personal & family examples regarding medication & veterans services, & expressing my distrust of & dissatisfaction with the performance of PG DeJoy. In my experience, rudeness NEVER helps. Call & email each of the 6 USPS Board of Governors. Tell them who & what you are (a retiree? Veteran?), what you & family rely on the USPS for in this pandemic, how DeJoy’s changes are disrupting that & causing stress. Express worry about Vote-by-Mail. Their emails: directoraccessmailbox@cigna.com; lee.moak@moakgroup.com; roman@rmiv.com; ron.bloom@brookfield.com; barger.jim@gmail.com; mduncan@inezdepositbank.com.

Tagging @fericita-s @broadwaybaggins @mercurygray @tortoisesshells @britishdetectives @amarguerite @incognito-princess @sassy-doctor-foster @the-spaztic-fantastic to get some traction

[kalakagatha]

Helping out a whole bunch of farms in Iowa

If you’ve ever read and enjoyed A Farm in Iowa, and you have the means, can I ask you to help out folks in Iowa today? On Monday, a derecho tore through the central and eastern part of the state (including the area where Farm is set).  In real terms that means a category II hurricane hit the midwest.  Whole counties of people have been without power ever since.  About 40% of the crops in the state are destroyed.  Trees are broken like twigs; people’s houses have been crushed; there’s little to no access to gas, food, or ice; cell phone service is spotty; businesses can’t function; ATMs are out of money and banks are closed.  A friend in Grinnell said it looks like it’s been bombed.  Cedar Rapids is even worse.  My friend has a tree through her house in Davenport.  Estimates are that it will be next Thursday before everyone gets power, and so food is rotting, and there’s no trash pick up. People need help, and yet FEMA, the Red Cross, and the state of Iowa aren’t yet doing nearly enough, if they’re doing anything at all.  Here are some organizations who are helping, however: The Iowa Giving Crew (focused on Cedar Rapids/Marion): paypal: IowaGivingCrew@outlook.com / venmo: Iowa-GivingCrew the Eastern Iowa United Way Disaster Fund: https://www.uweci.org/disasterfund/ Donate to the Horizons Meals on Wheels program: https://horizonsfamily.org/meals-on-wheels/#meals-volunteer-donate If you are in or near Iowa and can help with your time and presence: https://unitedwayofeastcentraliowa.galaxydigital.com/need/index?s=1&need_init_id=3463

[kalakagatha]

My art got stolen again and the thieves made over 600 sales. I’m linking places you can buy my art, where I barely make 10-20 sales a month. Please shop here instead. If you see this please reblog to help fight Tumblr’s algorithm against links. I’m just a small artist trying to pay rent during the pandemic. Thanks!

Shop: missypena.myshopify.com/collections/all  INPRNT: inprnt.com/gallery/misspenart S6: society6.com/zimmay RB: redbubble.com/people/zimmay

[kalakagatha]

HOW TO DONATE TO BLM WHEN YOU HAVE NO MONEY

a black woman named zoe amira posted a video on youtube. this video is an hour long and filled with art and music from black creators. it has a ton of ads, and in result will rack up a ton of revenue. 100% of the ad revenue from the video will be dispersed between various blm organizations, including bail-out funds for protesters. it will be split between the following, dependent on necessity

brooklyn bail fund

minnesota freedom fund

atlanta action network

columbus freedom fund

louisville community bail fund

chicago bond

black visions collective

richmond community bail fund

the bail project inc

nw com bail fund

philadelphia bail fund

the korchhinski-parquet family gofundme

george floyd’s family gofundme

blacklivesmatter.com

reclaim the block

aclu

turn off your adblocker and put the video on repeat. do not skip ads. let it play on loop whether you’re listening or not. mute the tab if you need to focus elsewhere. but let. it. play.

youtube will donate to blm for you.

please, please reblog. for people who don’t have money to spare, this is incredibly important information to have.

[kalakagatha]

When we’re talking about fandom purity culture and the fan police, there’s an issue I think fandom needs to deeply grapple with. Obviously, I wish the people doing the grappling, digging into the research and finding complex answers, were the same people who think it’s cool to call people sexual predators for writing short adults having sex with tall adults. But just as obviously, those people are absolutely unequipped to do it.

So I’ll say it: Anti culture imagines art to work very differently than it actually does, and has defined many things as harmful when they are not actually. I actually agree, personally, that authors have a responsibility not to glorify or encourage child sexual abuse or domestic violence, and I would support reasonable methods aimed at discouraging the creation of artworks that do that.

However, in the first place, their proposed methods are ineffective and harmful, but that is outside the scope of this post. In the second place, the artwork that they think “encourages” those harmful things quite frequently doesn’t, actually.

How do I know that?

1. Art and fiction is a very ineffective way to influence people’s behaviour. As an artist, I’d like to think the things I write are Changing Peoples’ Lives–but even at its greatest, I have to admit that the science says my reach is rather more limited. Like, to boil down everything I’ve read from the field of Media Psychology research, media, art, and fiction:

influence people’s emotions, observably;

Influence their attitudes about things, to some degree, but not in ways you’d always expect

Influences their behaviour, very little.

For example, I think we can all agree that many video games glorify and encourage violence: They’re specifically designed to make you pretend to injure and kill people and think it’s a really fun cool acceptable way to pass the time. But the research, after decades of desperately trying to prove that video games cause violence, shows that people who play video games are only a tiny bit more violent than those who do not. 

The causes of behaviour, or misbehaviour, are much deeper than what somebody reads or watches or plays.

(Does anyone want to dig into media psychology more? I found an entire book chapter online!)

2. How art and fiction affect people varies A LOT from person to person.

Pretty much all fan police crusades are based on the assumption that artwork can be objectively assessed. Work A glorifies abuse; Work B does not. Then, if Work A glorifies abuse, and somebody likes it, they must support abuse.

It’s said all the time. “This is just objectively disgusting.”

I… look. I’m going to try to spare you guys just how tedious and jargon-filled the field of “Perception in Art” is. I’ll try to say this another way.

In psychology, we have this thing called the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT). It’s a set of drawings of real people in ambiguous situations, for example, an old woman looking out a window with her back turned to a young man holding a hat. People are shown a card, and then asked to tell a story about what they think is going on in that picture.

Two things you need to know about the TAT:

1. It’s a projective test, which means the answers people give say way more about them–their upbringing, experience, emotional state, and perspective on the world–than the objective reality of the card. It relies on the fact that people will interpret works of art a million different ways.

2. People’s responses to the TAT were so unpredictably different, and it was so difficult to interpret what the hell their response said about them, that it’s not even considered a valid test anymore, because the field of psychology has collectively thrown up its hands and decided that even people highly trained in interpreting human emotions were incapable of figuring out why the fuck people respond to art in different ways. (It’s still used sometimes, but more because it’s a fabulous conversation starter than for its diagnostic validity.)

If someone ran an experiment asking people to read certain fics about a subject and say whether or not that story “romanticized” or “glorified” that thing, I will bet you this year’s entire tax return that the variation in responses would be HUGE. There would be people absolutely sure it did, and some people absolutely sure it didn’t. And what’s more, those groups would both have a fair number of people with direct, personal experience of the thing it depicted.

Right now, in fandom, the perception of a work that’s accepted as “true” tends to be the person who shouts accusations loudest and is scariest to argue with. These people will often leverage social justice axioms about believing marginalized people to mean that they are the marginalized person who should be listened to, pay no attention to all the people who share their marginalization and disagree with them behind the curtain. That, or they cast anyone who disagrees with them in the worst light, by accusing them of “defending” the bad thing–the bad thing those people are usually trying to argue they don’t think the work actually promotes.

There’s a big discussion to be had, about what makes someone capable or qualified to judge a work of art–whether some interpretations of art are equally or more valid than others–about whose opinion should be listened to–about what should happen if they’re right.

But the first thing we need to do is stop accepting that just because one perception of a work of art is that it “glorifies” or “romanticizes” a thing, that is the actual objective unarguable truth about it.

[kalakagatha]

Okay Bernie stans.

I need you all to prepare yourselves to vote for Biden in November.  

I’m not happy about it either.  I wanted Elizabeth Warren to destroy Trump on the debate floor.  I wanted to watch her shatter the glass ceiling.  I wanted student loan forgiveness, Medicare for All, and refugee and immigrant protections.

But I’m not going to get that.  So I am going all in for Biden.

This can no longer be a matter of “well if I don’t get my way THEN I’M NOT VOTING”.  I’d hoped you all learned your lessons four years ago, but from what I’ve seen on social media, that’s not been the case.  Biden is not ideal but he is better than the alternative.  He is a Democrat who will continue Obama’s legacy.  And you have a shot in hell of getting progressive movements like Medicare for All under a blue majority Congress; we do not have that under Trump.  

Biden is more willing to listen to the progressive factions of the Democrat party than Trump is.  We will get shit done under him.    

We cannot survive a second term of Trump.  I need you all to hold your noses, put on your big girl pants, and deal with it.  Prepare to vote for Biden.

[kalakagatha]

Multifandom Mashup 2019 What unites people? 

Stories.  

[kalakagatha]

ANNOUNCEMENT from the official YOI website: the movie has been postponed.

I know many of us have been anticipating the movie since they originally announced it would be released in 2019, but I’m very happy that they’re taking the time to do it right.

No matter what’s in the movie and when it eventually comes out, I won’t be disappointed because there’s such a dedicated team working on YOI that’s willing to give it the life and love it deserves. 💙

Source: http://yurionice-movie.com/

[kalakagatha]

Take this with you

[kalakagatha]

[kalakagatha]

This Pride don’t forget your brothers and sisters fighting for their rights all over the world. 

[kalakagatha]

[kalakagatha]

Victor Nikiforov.

[kalakagatha]

Recently I have been spamming my eyeballs with YOI fanarts and then my life was kidnapped by the urge to sketch some skating Yuuris. I love his character, and his designs, and generally am just needing more YOI content. I am excited for the movie! I hope Yuuri is in it at least a little bit ;_;