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I have had the honor of working on two different comics projects with Don Hertzfeldt. But this is the story of my first interaction with the man.

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Cole is an inside cat, and that means he takes it EXCEEDINGLY personally whenever he finds somewhere in the house that he's not allowed to go. he also Yearns for the washing machine.

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This is my new favourite headline I've seen all year lmaooo

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fresh, clean no-terf version for reblogs!

Your mom and aunts aren’t on tumblr.  Please warn them about this as well. 

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Hey, could you do me a favor?

Could you just RB this?

The little RB statistics chart is so pleasant and stimmy to look at and I want to see what it looks like when it gets really REALLY huge because it makes me think of some deep sea lifeform

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hey is it ok if i leave this sandwich out on the dash 🥪ill eat it later

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reblog if your name isn't Amanda.

2,121,566 people are not Amanda and counting!

We’ll find you Amanda.

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there are balls of moss on glaciers that roll around and we don't even know how they do it????? They can go an entire inch a day!

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so called out 

One Day at a Time - Episode 1, The Funeral

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I only know how to make it in the microwave, but my strat is a bit different - I nuke the butter and flour together, and prob more than in this recipe... then I add a smidgen of milk and stir. And another smidgen, and stir. When it’s seeming a bit liquidy, nuke it for another 30 seconds or so. Repeat adding milk and nuking til you have enough white sauce and it’s thick enough to be happy with :D  If you want it to become cheese sauce or whatever, add grated cheese and nutmeg after it’s nearly done. 

If you are so moved, please share your technique for making white sauce in the microwave? :D

sure!  I haven’t done it in a while but it’s pretty easy.  You’ll want to make it in something that has a spout, like a jug or something.  Put like a teaspoon of butter/margarine and a teaspoon of plain flour in it.  Microwave it for a few seconds to melt the fat, then stir it.  Then add some milk, salt and pepper, and put it back in the microwave for 30 seconds, then stir it, then another 30 seconds.  Stir/cook (revolving like that) as many times as you want for your desired temperature and consistency.  You can play with the amounts a bit to find your preferences on consistency and taste and such too.

it’s not as good as made on the stove white sauce if I recall correctly?  but it does the job, which, again, is the point haha.  :D

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Keep the Channel Open

So a couple days ago someone uploaded my recent breakup comic “Salt Soap” to Imgur without my permission.

I wouldn’t have known this had happened if several Facebook friends hadn’t contacted me excitedly about the fact that it was on the front page of the site—7th most popular item on the whole network that day. Upon investigating the post, I saw that a) the comic already had 100,000+ views (WHAT?!), and b) the person who’d uploaded my work (without my permission) had removed the comic’s title card, which included my name and claim to authorship. Perplexingly, they did credit me in the “source” section below the comic, including a link to my website, but the comic itself was missing the important bit at the top that tells people who made it. Y’know, this thing:

I had a tough time distilling my feelings about Imgur and sites like it into a clear series of Facebook comments that wouldn’t shame my friends for being excited on my behalf. After all, hundreds of thousands of people were looking at my work! That must be success, right? Gosh, how cool for Lucy. I could understand why they were thrilled, but I needed to elucidate why users posting my modified work to Imgur without my permission makes me see red. 

After thoroughly explaining (I thought) why the reposting of my story was problematic, I received the following well-intentioned comment from a friend:

In your post you say the header was removed. You want me to repost it with everything intact? And/or are you okay if I make a post highlighting you.. like “hey people, here is more of Lucy’s work and you need to go to her page for the awesome.”

This threw me. After everything I’d explained in the first comment thread, the takeaway seemed to be that my one problem with Imgur and this post was that someone had tampered with my work. Now, granted, that’s a big part of the problem, but there’s more going on here. Eventually I pulled together the following mini-manifesto, which I didn’t want to lose in the annals of Facebook, so if you’re interested here’s the whole kettle of fish:

Here’s why this is a hard question for me to answer: I understand that Imgur has a huge user base, and if the response to this comic is anything to go by (400,000+ views now), many of those people dig the work I’m doing. That’s great! I’m glad the comic has resonated with so many people, and the more people who see my work, the better. 

But it’s also a site that strips images off the web and reuploads them without metadata, depriving the original creators of their agency and ad revenue. Now, I don’t personally run ads on my sites, but I have many friends who do. Many ads pay per impression—that’s money for every person who just looks at the page. 400,000+ pairs of eyeballs can make a massive difference in the ad revenue an independent creator receives. All those views on Imgur? They’re benefiting Imgur, not the artist who made the comic being posted. And while my lack of ad use means that re-hosting my comic (even if it’s posted complete and unedited by someone like yourself with excellent intentions!) on a site I don’t run doesn’t directly effect my personal finances, it creates a precedent where people feel like Imgur is an okay place to repost comics in their entirety, and I think that’s a bad practice for supporting independent creators.

This also affects me indirectly because my livelihood is dependent on forging and maintaining relationships with my readers. By divorcing my content from the sites where I’ve personally chosen to share it, readers have very little access to information that will allow them to follow and support me easily. We are all, as Internet users, pretty lazy. I know I get distracted if I need to click more than twice to hunt down or otherwise access an artist’s work. So even if a site like Imgur rehosts my work with a link and many, MANY people see it, the number of readers who will actually click through to find me elsewhere on the web, let alone remain engaged as fans, is really small.

I try to make sure my work is available for free on as many popular platforms as possible (I’m on Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Medium, Patreon, etc.), and I’m always a fan of friends reblogging/liking/sharing on those platforms, or posting links to my work on places like Reddit (which I don’t personally use), because it’s a link repository, and those links take Redditors to sites that I design, curate, and update personally.

It just seems to me that places like Imgur take the artist out of the equation, and I love the Internet for precisely the opposite reason—it’s a place where comics fans get direct access to the creators whose work they enjoy. That relationship goes both ways and benefits both parties, and I feel pretty squiffy about platforms that get in the way of the channel.

So: the short answer to this can of worms is that I’d probably prefer it if you didn’t post my comic (even with the title!) on Imgur. If you want to post a preview of anything I’ve done, with a link to one of my sites where people can read the rest of the comic, that’s a great middle ground! But I just want folks to consider all the factors I’ve laid out above when posting content from creators they want to support.

Cool? Cool.

Got thoughts? Hit me up on Twitter: @LuBellWoo.

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why isn’t this a children’s book I can buy? 

oh my gdO CAN YOU DRAW GODZILLA MOMMA CARRYING LIKE A HUNDRED LIZARD BABIES ON HER BACK FOR TAKE YOUR CHILD (lizard) TO WORK DAY

oh SHOOT well i cant swing 100 but how bout

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this just makes me giggle even though I’ve seen it before. 

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you guys really need to stop messing with your pugs

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wow! 

Here's a flipped question for you: can you explain the evolution/original purpose of the clitoris? Because I know apes aren't the only mammals to have them.

Oh, boy, let’s enter THIS fray.

First of all, you are correct- apes are not the only mammals to have clitorises. You know which mammals have them? ALL OF THEM! CLITORISES FOR EVERYBODY!

That’s right- EVERY female mammal has a clitoris, even the really weird ones like platypi and echidnas. Not only that, there are quite a few remarkable clits out there. Squirrel monkeys have erectile clitorises which they use in dominance displays. Elephant clitorises are about 18 inches (45 cm) long! Galagos actually pee through their clits! And we all know about spotted hyenas, right?

Indeed, in the same manner that many mammal males have a bone in their penis (the baculum) the females of that same species actually have bones in their clits (the baubellum)!

And guess what, just like mammals aren’t the only ones to have evolved penis-like organs, they also aren’t the only ones to have evolved clitoris-like organs. Ostriches, ducks, and crocodilians have extendable clitorises (in fact, the genitals of male and female crocodiles look confusingly similar when extruded). Squamate reptiles have hemiclitores- that’s two clitorises on one lizard! 

(I bet you weren’t expecting them to be bright orange.)

It is likely true, in fact, that many other non-mammals have clitorises that we simply don’t know about. Why? Because despite the literal oceans of research into penises and penis-type things, the clitoris gets barely a paragraph or two of mumbled speculation in any reproductive anatomy textbook. In fact, the aforementioned hemiclitores were only named in 1995- scientists were dissecting lizards long before then.

The fact of the matter is that there is no real consensus on why the clitoris evolved because nobody is studying it. And why? This seems like a big deal! If all mammals and even some non-mammals have them, wouldn’t you say it’s something that’s been conserved for a reason?

Some scientists say no, the clitoris is just an artifact of an unformed penis: a leftover, vestigial organ in females like male nipples. Certainly the clitoris derives from the same developmental pathway that the penis does, and has many of the same features on the smaller scale. Yet for something that is supposedly vestigial, the clit is pretty well-maintained. It’s surrounded by spongy erectile tissue in mammals and full of nerves- in fact, more than the penis has. And the human clit is not just a tiny penis, though this was only recently discovered: it is actually just the tip of a large submerged organ that extends laterally around the vaginal walls. It’s known that at least mice have this submerged version of the clit as well, and probably all other mammals.

Most scientists now will begrudgingly agree that the function of the clit is, above all else, to provide sexual pleasure, but few agree entirely on why the sensitive tip of the pleasure center is located (in many cases) externally when fertilization takes place internally. Here is a grab bag of theories:

Females are more likely to mate more frequently if orgasm (via clitoris) is harder to reach

How well a male stimulates the clitoris tells a female something about his genetic desirability

The clitoris is a specific adaptation for human face-to-face sex

Obviously that last one is bunk, since we now know that clits are literally everywhere, all around us. And the other two are weakly supported at best, though there is good evidence that, at least in primates, larger clits indicate a more polyandrous lifestyle.

But the fact of the matter is that the topic has been barely touched in the scientific literature. And so any conclusions at this point don’t have the evidence behind them to go beyond mere speculation.

Speaking for myself, I wonder why female masturbation doesn’t figure more often into these theories: female animals do, in fact, masturbate, just like the males do. Furthermore, female sexual pleasure is often masked in animals because their arousal tends to be less obvious than an erect penis. (Or, when it occurs, it’s deliberately ignored because it’s ~embarassing~.) Could a dog licking her vulva be experiencing sexual pleasure? Well, studies have shown that cats, rabbits, and mice become aroused by pressure on the clitoris, so the answer is yeah- probably! If there’s a theory that male masturbation helps clean out the penis (there is) why not one for female masturbation?

Of course, this all hinges on the idea that there needs to be an evolutionary reason beyond the ability to have pleasurable sex for the clitoris. Perhaps we’re too quick to dismiss the power of pleasure as a motivator- particularly in animals.

Final thoughts: the male chicken’s “non-intromissive phallus” is arguably a clitoris. (Does that convince you more that it has an important function?)

References:

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