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Every Tuesday since Balticon Tek, Encaf1 and I have taken to #OperationChikenWing, Where we get together at The Snooty Fox for half price wings and a geeky confab. We’re liking it a lot and since the weather is so nice, … Continue reading
I don’t ask for personal donations, not for the podcast, not for my art or anything I create on this site. Actually, if someone wanted to donate to me I would direct them to one of the many projects I wish I had more funds to support and donate to.
Today I am not asking for donations per say, and this is not a plea for help, but… if someone out there wanted to help me in any way, the best way would be to buy art supplies for me. I’m always in need of new stuff and have been rapidly replacing a lot of things. I can’t tell you how much I have spend in the last two years or so on new brushes, new paints, new canvas and stretchers. Pencils, pastels, pads, sketchbooks, portfolio and carrying cases, you name it. A lot of my stuff is over fifteen years old and either at it’s end or dried up.
I replaced most of what I need, as I work I’m going through some consumables and it would be nice to have some resupply. I’m not at the moment of running out and buying some more, simply because I am making due with some of the older stuff (like a watercolor block with a big ink stain on one side that bleed through all of the pages, I cut off the end of the paper.)
I have set up an Amazon Wish List of some of the more inexpensive items that I will be needing soon. If someone wanted to buy me something from that, that would be cool. You could think think of yourself as one of my patrons :)
Can you tell I don’t like asking for things?
Also, if anyone knows of a better site to set up a wishlist or something easier (or in Canada) please let me know. So far as I have found mail order art supplies are pretty limited (I also wish NB had a Pearl Paint or even a DeSerrs.)
Any night sweats? Terrors? Suddenly not knowing simple facts because you couldn’t look them up on Wikipedia? The Anti SOPA/PIPA blackout was interesting for me at least. I saw a few sites that said they would go black but didn’t, I attribute most of that to mistakes made in coding and one site I know believes the report that SOPA is dead.
Would SOPA/PIPA have passed if we didn’t do this today? Maybe, maybe not. Now we will never know since it is clear we have made a change. It took a day of people wanting to leave GoDaddy for them to change their mind and half a day of the internet to black out to shake the co-founders, I will call this a win. Still, let’s not think we won completely, the bills are still out there and they have supporters and lot of money behind it.
For the past few days I have been getting questions about my Twitter/Facebook/Google Plus avatar, why did I put a [CENSORED] bar over it? It’s not a joke involving innuendo or anything like that, it’s a sign to protest two bills that they are trying to pass in the USA, dubbed SOPA and PIPA. You also may have already noticed I censored this site a while ago to get people to write their congressmen and senators. I’m an American, I live in Canada but I am still an American and a voter, more so my host is in the USA so this would effect my site in addition to my enjoyment of the internet. The bills are written in such a way that would give the government (and private citizens and companies) the opportunity to harass innocent people and punish someone they think needs punishing when they can’t stop them with other legal means. You’ve seen it before, the local guy who is noisy against his local government gets tickets for jaywalking when no one else gets tickets in that city[true story].
I wrote my congressman, Joe Courtney and my senators, my congressman actually sent me a letter back. It’s a form letter telling me I don’t understand law and he is just trying to protect americans. I highlighted the portions of the bill that I have problems with and explained why and told him if he voted for this bill then I would not be voting for him. That was weeks ago, I don’t expect a reply. I have not gotten a reply from either Blumenthal or Lieberman and I’m not holding my breath. It saddens me that as a voter I’m basically told I don’t count, am too stupid to understand law and am just simply ignored. This isn’t how the world works, people have a voice and we will make our voice heard.
How? By blacking out the internet tomorrow. Goodbye wikipedia, good by all those fun blogs you like to read. The net is going dark… I’ll be fine, I have a lot of comics to read till it’s over. What will you be doing?
(I want to thank Tabitha Grace Smith and Mathew Wayne Selznick for helping me find tools to make blackout/strike easy for me, and everyone else trying to get the word out)
You know you’ve been living in Canada when you wake up and only realize that it’s Martin Luther King Jr’s Birthday because everyone is commenting about it on social media about it. That is truly sad, and I feel a little shame about it.
Growing up in NY we all knew King’s legacy, he was a hero everyone could look up to. Protesting, he did it right. He showed the world that you can make a change and be clear about your principles and ideals without confusing the message. He got progress because people worked together and were a team, they all wanted the same thing and they went after it in a way that made them mighty. Civil disobedience, non violent protest, these were things that helped bring the civil rights movement to progress. If you think spitting in a cop’s face is non violent protest, you’re wrong. Look to Dr. King as your template whenever you hold up a protest sign or stand in a picket line.
In a large part of the USA Dr. King’s birthday is not a day off from school or work, I remember being surprised when my nieces moved to VA and had school on this day, it baffled me and that was my eye opener that not everyone sees this man as great, even today :(
Are things perfectly equal and civil today? No, but we keep working, we keep trying and we continue to follow his message, we will get there.
Now I invited you to listen to the entirety of his “I have a dream” speech in it’s entirety, not just the section we are all familiar with.
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