lighthearted.
if this comic resonated with you, please consider donating to this palestinian escape fund (vetted by @/nabulsi and @/el-shab-hussein) as it is less than $7,000 away from it's goal.
i turn 24 today. To celebrate, I made this comic to be a spiritual successor to lead balloon, a comic in which I talked about the darkest period of my life so far.
A lot has changed since my 23rd birthday and this one. My priorities have shifted a lot, in ways that I think are mostly good. But i think the best part about today is that suicide has gone back to being a far away notion. I'm really lucky, and I'm grateful for that.
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at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"
like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.
"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."
... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.
and i'd still keep writing.
i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.
i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley
"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"
and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.
it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.
you create because you're greedy.
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You watch him hem and haw over answering, feet shifting, same beat up black shoes, scuffing the gravel, cape swishing behind him in a one-two step. The halo of his hair, bleached eery white in the street lamp, how the light never seems to catch the rim of his shades.
You missed this, you think. The bits of him that are so unsettlingly inhuman, how he's so close to you, but just far enough that you couldn't reach to touch.
- Metempsychosis
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Have there been times the Turner parents have suspected something but shrugged it off?
They have never suspected Timmy Turner of anything! Despite often expressing regret or disappointment, they still very much love their son! And all the benefits he brings them!!
The Turners are a well established family in the neighborhood. It wouldn't bode them well to go around casting doubt against their own son. It'd affect their reputation terribly!
Bitties Series: [Start] > [Previous] > [Next]
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I absolutely love the concept of Clark being a Bruce wayne/Batman shipper
Like he’s so into it that he made socials dedicated to it. he’ll be fangirling with other fellow Bruceman ships about it every time he’s online.
And one of the main reasons he’s even a fan is because he has a crush on both of them.
He fell for Batman at first and when he first stumbled upon the ship he was a little negative about it because why does a ditsy himbo billionaire get to be paired with Batman but not Superman? (Superbat wasn’t as big) but when he started doing research on Bruce Wayne the more he dug up that he has been donating to charity and helping Gotham silently. And BOOM he also falls for Bruce Wayne.
Now he’s tied between the two because at one hand he’s best friends and coworkers with Batman and it seemed like he could have a chance but at the other hand Bruce Wayne has been flirting with him on every interview they do and he falls for it every time.
But that’s why he’s a Bruceman shipper. If he can’t have either or both then maybe it would be hot if both his crushes end up together. They seem cute together.
Bonus: When Clark finds out Bruce Wayne and Batman are the same he’s devastated.
Clark “I am so dead” Kent: wdym my two favorite people that I ship are actually just one person? does this mean I get a chance? No wait. They can’t be the same person they have too different personalities. DOES THIS MEAN I’VE BEEN SHIPPING SELFCEST?! IF BATMAN— BRUCE FINDS OUT HOW WILL HE EVER FORGIVE ME?!?!
Meanwhile Bruce who knew all along about everything (Clark’s identity, the shipping, the accounts): Does this mean I can marry him now that he knows?
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