The part where the girl is saying Ed Piskor should "just hire a sex worker" really gets under my skin. One of the classic issues with consent-forward morality. When someone is propositioning a teen girl exchange sex for career advancement, he's a horrible creep that should be canceled. If he's just throwing cash at her, he's an innocent John, which is basically an oppressed class unto itself.
The professionalization of sex always un-persons the actual prostitutes. In this logic, to sleep with your teenage fans is to violate a "real" girl, whereas sex workers can't possibly be harmed by sex. Implicitly, to offer career advancement for sex is to tempt an "innocent girl" to "ruin" herself, whereas actual sex workers are seen as past the point of no return.
It all ultimately comes from this left-coded puritanism that holds all sex to be a crime against the woman; leftists want to ensure that crime is channeled onto "appropriate" targets.
Obviously the age-gap thing is morally wrong, he may have been some sort of criminal hebephile. But if so that crime needs to be the whole story; whether someone is propositioning a fan or a prostitute or a random woman on the street shouldn't matter.
It's also a very weird way of exercising privilege. You can have absolutely any kink that you care to mention, and as long as you have the means to pay for it there's no way out can be deemed morally wrong. Only the wealthy benefit from this level of moral laundering.
As an extension of this, I'm left wondering on the Harvey Weinstein outcry. He's most certainly a horrid monster, but... there must certainly be some porn directors out there that do the exact same thing to a whole host of vulnerable women by dangling the prospect of making them stars. They even film it the exploitation, and sell it.
It's a bit shocking that nobody seems to give a shit about that.
It is really strange to me that we draw a black box around the porn industry and apply absolutely none of the standards to it that we apply to anything else. In what other context could you be brutally beaten (without having signed up for that) and have no recourse? (So long as you look at the camera in the end and say “I consented,” which you need to do to get your paycheque.)
It's the problem with the consent = literally anything is okay model of sexual morality. You can make a woman eat shit or be brutalised by 10 men on camera but as long as she "consented" it's just a harmless kink and nobody's allowed to shame you for it.
Hard agree. The thought process seems to be that pressuring a woman into sex when she's not interested in you is immoral, unless the thing you're using to pressure her is money. For every influencer who thinks the softcore stuff they do is "empowering," there are ten women out there who prostitute themselves because they have no other option. "Fuck me or starve/go homeless" doesn't seem particularly consensual to me.
"Fun" fact: in studies done in earlier decades (which are probably taboo now because sex👏work👏is👏work etc) it was found that prostituted women have rates of PTSD over twice that of army veterans who have seen active service (68% vs 20-30%). They also were found to have more severe forms of PTSD than vets.
It also gets under my skin, but I don't think you've quite put the finger on why, at least for me.
I see the identified problems, and the identified solution, as being completely unrelated. The identified problem is that Ed is interested in sexual relationships with 17 year old girls, and the solution is to pay a prostitute.
There are two possibilities here, either she is suggesting that Ed hire a 17 year old prostitute, which I find unlikely (but I also find it weird that she did not consider that this is how her suggestion scans), or she is suggesting that Ed's true problem, loneliness, can be solved with prostitution. This is a lot like saying that loneliness can be solved by pornography, which is uncontroversially absurd.
I'm certainly grateful to the women who make pornography possible, but the more problems that you think sex work solves, the grimmer I imagine your ideal world to be.
And it strips women of their agency, which I think is the opposite of what consent-forward morality is intended to accomplish, because it is only focusing on choice. Agency is choosing the action _and_ fully owning the personal consequences of that outcome, insofar as they naturally follow that outcome.
I think when young people refer to “adulting” this is what they actually mean, even if they don’t describe it that way.
Kay-fayb. It's the fictional story that is told by pro wrestling, including the characters' personalities and back stories. If you don't watch wrestling, it's basically a soap opera but the setting is a series of fistfights instead of a hospital or something. Kayfabe is not as important these days, but back in the day the actors used to stay in character even when they were meeting fans. There are a few people who still do it though.
Kay-Fayb is an old carney term. It is the secret knowledge you keep away from the marks. I think that is a truer version of what this channel usually got at.
There is a lot more to the Ed Piskor story that is highly relevant - Ed wasn’t some X-men artist and his work on that was more of an exercise in indexing the history of the series much as he had done with hip hop in the highly acclaimed Hip-Hop Family Tree. Ed was to comics what someone like James Murphy is to music - a highly talented encyclopaedia of the whole genre. What is surprisingly missing from Katie’s coverage is that Piskor was - during this whole time - focused on producing an adult torture porn comic - Red Room. Red Room was deliberately set out to be the most extreme sex comic published and THIS is what his accuser was knowingly reaching out to connect to. Even her cultural references in the quote in the show are to Hunter S Thompson. She is more Bunny Lebowski than Fawn Knutson. She is also, in most countries and many states, well above the age of consent. Are we to pretend that 17 year old women are shrinking violets or not responsible for their own decisions? There is a tendency on Reddit to infantilise womens actions - ‘she’s just a child’. I’m in disagreement - if she’s reading Ed Piskor’s work, if she’s au fair with counter-culture fare like HST then she’s going to be well aware that men have a sexual interest in young women prepared to trade in their sexuality. Her rant at Ed is really a rant at herself but cloaked in a complete failure to take personal responsibility, enabled by an internet culture that seeks to elide responsibility in favour of a hierarchy of oppression.
The second thing missing from the telling, maybe less important overall but more BARpod relevant is that the cancelling and suicide overlapped with a major switch in Ed’s detractors from X to Bluesky. Comics has a lot of highly talented females working in it (Joelle Jones, Zoe Thorogood) and always has done (Trina Robbins, Julie Douchet, Marie Severin) but the last 10 years has a class of less talented (ie not very much at all) females using social justice to promote their personal brand. Chief amongst these is Alex Di Campi - a writer who’s never really had success - whose Twitter / Bluesky was an unreadable mix of self-praise and social justice messaging. These hacks had it out for Piskor and his cancellation was gist to the mill of their endless social justice self-praise. What’s particularly odious about this cohort is that they know the history of comics and how every major artist (from legend Robert Crumb to Frank Franzetta to Dave Steven’s) has used female friends and acquaintances as nude models. Professional life drawing models cost money and comic artists don’t make a hell of a lot of that* yet the Bluesky mob could act shocked at Piskor wanting to draw a female naked. Anyway what’s key is that just before Ed’s suicide DiCampi et all de-camped (boom, tish) to Bluesky so they were firewalled from the criticism and pushback against their po-faced self-interested moralising** People upset by Ed’s passing were still on X, the culprits on Bluesky.
* as a light-hearted aside - the godfather of underground comics Robert Crumb once fell out with several other main underground artists because they thought he was odd for not coming to draw some naked models with them - Crumbs reasoning was he’d already drawn so many nude women he would skip that session.
** DiCampi had no problems working with the master of erotic art and comic book pornographer, Milo Manara, when she had the chance to have him draw an erotic cover for one of her few published works. Manara is a post-war Italian comics giant whose work largely consists of books where women can’t control their sexual urges and have sex with anything - including dogs and underage children. Manara;’s art is considered so beautiful that nobody really minds the excess of the content and his reputation sells units. DiCampi knowingly worked with him for her own profit and strangely didn’t feel the need to call out his actions and work like she did Piskors.
Last open thread I was going to ask if there were any comic book readers :).
I am way too awkward to be super involved in any community but I read comics, nothing I read has been turned into a tv show or movie so I rarely encounter people who have even heard of it much less read it offline.
In my opinion, Ed's suicide note made him look worse, not better. He basically said that he was killing himself specifically to get vengeance on these people, even going so far as to say that he wants his family to sue them for wrongful death. I am firmly of the belief that this man is a creep. There is no excuse for a grown man to call a minor a "naughty girl" in private correspondence, even as a joke, and the remark about "titties" at the end solidified that for me. However, being creepy is not a capital crime, nor should it be. I think that the career repercussions he experienced were excessive, and not proportionate to his transgressions. If the blowjob girl were lying, he should've taken her to court for libel.
Also, traumatizing your family and foisting a legal battle onto them over internet drama derailing your career is so profoundly selfish.
No content comment - I'm on an overcrowded train back from the Edinburgh festival, and thank *fuck* for a brand new BARPod. You guys saved my life (again)
I always wondered if you guys would get to the comics community! Been listening for years, and every episode about some community I've been like "that sounds exactly like comics, but maybe a little better."
You did a great job with the Piskor story. Defintiely a lot more minor characters and threads in there but you got the main jist.
It definitely created a sea change in the community. There was a lot of nasty "woke" stuff going on in comics for years, but most people kept quiet because there was another loud, reactionary rightwing faction of comics and speaking out against the progressive side would get you lumped in with those losers.
Piskor's suicide changed that. A lot more people spoke out and stood up to the bullies who had been making their names on leftwing culture war stuff.
I don't think it changed the community to a more neutral set of liberal values or anything -- but, it seemed to ease the tension created by the progressive side some. Those types still exist and thrive over on BluSky, but I think most serious creators like myself largely "quiet quit" the community.
Between that and the AI art slop, a lot of artists have pulled out of community to just focus on their work. I wish we had a place we could connect, but for now, we've pretty much denied the community our attention and talents.
Does anyone think the section on Ed Piskor ended a little abruptly? It was like: women post some mostly unsubstantiated allegations against him, then he posts his own side of the story, also mostly unsubstantiated, then that's it. I still don't really know whether he was or wasn't a creep. I feel like there would have been a few more rounds of back and forth where people would post receipts and the truth would become a little more clear, except that he cut it off by killing himself. Which is not an act I have sympathy for.
I also hate that online opinion turned so quickly in his favor once he did it, because in other cases where there's a middle-aged dude against several younger women, even if the guy is innocent it usually takes a lot longer for him to clear his name, if he ever manages to. So it feels to me like reputationally at least his suicide got rewarded. Idk if I'm overly sensitive/unsympathetic as someone who's been passively suicidal in the past, but it just strikes me as really gross.
I don't think the online opinion quite flipped as neatly as they said it did (context, that's my community and Piskor's suicide caused me to pull back).
What happened was more that there was a huge chilling effect in comics since like 2015. This was partially due to progressive politics run amok, but also, we had our own "gamergate" style movement, so most of the reasonable folks kept quiet because if you spoke out against left excess, you'd get lumped into the other group.
Comics is super small, so the incentives to stay quiet are strong -- anyone, and I mean anyone, your best friend, your mother, etc. -- will step over your dead body for a gig in comics.
What Piskor's suicide did was change that dynamic. People who had kept quiet spoke up and/or basically quit the community. Very much a "we're not playing this bullshit culture war game anymore" kind of thing that was unthinkable for years.
Most of the hyper lefty comics people went to BluSky and keep doing their thing. The difference is, the community has lost a significant amount of participation and "playing nice" from talent who don't want to play this game anymore.
The Piskor suicide discussion hit close to home for me. I'm going to be vague about details bc it's still a bit raw, but a former teacher I had at one time been really close with committed suicide a few weeks ago. He was a huge influence on me artistically. Unfortunately, he was also abusive, not to me, but to a friend of mine who I have never known to lie or exagerrate. They had begun dating, which rubbed me the wrong way, but who am I to stand in the way of love, etc. They kept dating after we stopped talking. (We had fallen out of touch for unrelated reasons; my mom was in hospice and he said something so insensitive that I opted to keep my distance.)
I knew he could be a bit of a Lothario, but he attacked my friend in a moving car and almost killed them both. She called me in hysterics after it happened. Other allegations had been made against him in the past, but I was stupid and loyal and believed he was being persecuted racially and for his political beliefs.
I was furious when I found out that he died and how he died. I'm furious that people who had iced him out or stopped associating with him are making memorial posts and constantly sharing reminiscence about him. I'm furious that he was such an artistic genius but such a monstrous pig of a man. I'm furious that a mutual friend who knows what he did to other women has been glazing him online for weeks after his death. I'm furious that he's in a sense, absolved himself for what he's done via suicide. I do believe that when abusive people commit suicide, they are largely doing it as a final act of revenge. Mostly I'm furious that I still miss him, despite it all.
I think you made a good point about how suicide can be used as a tool by abusive people. If you’ll forgive me for bringing Epstein into this, the people who always believed that he killed himself (like the lawyer who landed him in jail the first time) say that it was to maintain control and to send one final “fuck you” to the people who thought they finally had him.
Like Jesse's library, my hometown library system went fine free because they were worried fines were scaring people away from the library. When I went six weeks without returning a Lawrence of Arabia Blu-Ray, I learned that they did not stop sending out letters threatening to turn people over to collection agencies for unreturned items.
My library doesn't collect fines but cuts off your borrowing privileges as soon as something goes overdue. It's a fantastic system for frequent borrowers with little kids who are always leaving books under furniture. I save a lot of petty cash in fines, but I do a reasonably good job of making the kids find and return stuff regularly.
A library where I worked 20 years ago had no fines, not because people were scared away by them but because the administrative overhead of tracking and collecting fines wasn't worth the small amount of money collected.
Fines always struck me as how you deal with kids and part of brining them up. A nickel for a day late means something to a kid (when I was a kid) and is practice for returning things on time as an adult.
This makes sense to me. I used to go to a library that had steep fines. At least they felt steep to me because I was working a temp job while also looking for full time work and barely had enough for food and rent.
One time I returned a book and it was not checked in properly so I had to literally find it on the shelf.
Mistakes get made but if you’re going to charge someone a quarter a day for an overdo book then people will feel differently about it.
At one point I got so depressed I relinquished my card because it was just too much.
My current library has no fees and honestly that makes me happy.
The hedgehog moment made me realize that my image of Janna is completely competent and on top of stuff, and so the hedgehog in the freezer has got to be Katie’s fault. Got to be.
Weird fox related fact: apparently after WWII in Alaska, the federal government subsidized fox farms all over the state, and would send barrels of grain for feed. But for some reason these farms produced very little fur, while a mysterious new surge of homemade booze flooded the state... Turns out the "fur farmers" were just taking the grain and turning it into liquor 😂
I think that there is also alot of domesticated foxes that came out of a program out of Russia that wasn’t that successful in domesticating them. Some people who have foxes get them from Russia because they can’t just live in the wild, but they aren’t quite tame either.
The part where the girl is saying Ed Piskor should "just hire a sex worker" really gets under my skin. One of the classic issues with consent-forward morality. When someone is propositioning a teen girl exchange sex for career advancement, he's a horrible creep that should be canceled. If he's just throwing cash at her, he's an innocent John, which is basically an oppressed class unto itself.
The professionalization of sex always un-persons the actual prostitutes. In this logic, to sleep with your teenage fans is to violate a "real" girl, whereas sex workers can't possibly be harmed by sex. Implicitly, to offer career advancement for sex is to tempt an "innocent girl" to "ruin" herself, whereas actual sex workers are seen as past the point of no return.
It all ultimately comes from this left-coded puritanism that holds all sex to be a crime against the woman; leftists want to ensure that crime is channeled onto "appropriate" targets.
Obviously the age-gap thing is morally wrong, he may have been some sort of criminal hebephile. But if so that crime needs to be the whole story; whether someone is propositioning a fan or a prostitute or a random woman on the street shouldn't matter.
It's also a very weird way of exercising privilege. You can have absolutely any kink that you care to mention, and as long as you have the means to pay for it there's no way out can be deemed morally wrong. Only the wealthy benefit from this level of moral laundering.
As an extension of this, I'm left wondering on the Harvey Weinstein outcry. He's most certainly a horrid monster, but... there must certainly be some porn directors out there that do the exact same thing to a whole host of vulnerable women by dangling the prospect of making them stars. They even film it the exploitation, and sell it.
It's a bit shocking that nobody seems to give a shit about that.
It is really strange to me that we draw a black box around the porn industry and apply absolutely none of the standards to it that we apply to anything else. In what other context could you be brutally beaten (without having signed up for that) and have no recourse? (So long as you look at the camera in the end and say “I consented,” which you need to do to get your paycheque.)
It's the problem with the consent = literally anything is okay model of sexual morality. You can make a woman eat shit or be brutalised by 10 men on camera but as long as she "consented" it's just a harmless kink and nobody's allowed to shame you for it.
Hard agree. The thought process seems to be that pressuring a woman into sex when she's not interested in you is immoral, unless the thing you're using to pressure her is money. For every influencer who thinks the softcore stuff they do is "empowering," there are ten women out there who prostitute themselves because they have no other option. "Fuck me or starve/go homeless" doesn't seem particularly consensual to me.
"Fun" fact: in studies done in earlier decades (which are probably taboo now because sex👏work👏is👏work etc) it was found that prostituted women have rates of PTSD over twice that of army veterans who have seen active service (68% vs 20-30%). They also were found to have more severe forms of PTSD than vets.
Also rates of head injury up there with pro footballers
It also gets under my skin, but I don't think you've quite put the finger on why, at least for me.
I see the identified problems, and the identified solution, as being completely unrelated. The identified problem is that Ed is interested in sexual relationships with 17 year old girls, and the solution is to pay a prostitute.
There are two possibilities here, either she is suggesting that Ed hire a 17 year old prostitute, which I find unlikely (but I also find it weird that she did not consider that this is how her suggestion scans), or she is suggesting that Ed's true problem, loneliness, can be solved with prostitution. This is a lot like saying that loneliness can be solved by pornography, which is uncontroversially absurd.
I'm certainly grateful to the women who make pornography possible, but the more problems that you think sex work solves, the grimmer I imagine your ideal world to be.
The third possibility is the cam girl or sex worker can role play the personality that he was looking for.
And it strips women of their agency, which I think is the opposite of what consent-forward morality is intended to accomplish, because it is only focusing on choice. Agency is choosing the action _and_ fully owning the personal consequences of that outcome, insofar as they naturally follow that outcome.
I think when young people refer to “adulting” this is what they actually mean, even if they don’t describe it that way.
Kay-fayb. It's the fictional story that is told by pro wrestling, including the characters' personalities and back stories. If you don't watch wrestling, it's basically a soap opera but the setting is a series of fistfights instead of a hospital or something. Kayfabe is not as important these days, but back in the day the actors used to stay in character even when they were meeting fans. There are a few people who still do it though.
Kay Fobby got me good
Kay-Fayb is an old carney term. It is the secret knowledge you keep away from the marks. I think that is a truer version of what this channel usually got at.
There is a lot more to the Ed Piskor story that is highly relevant - Ed wasn’t some X-men artist and his work on that was more of an exercise in indexing the history of the series much as he had done with hip hop in the highly acclaimed Hip-Hop Family Tree. Ed was to comics what someone like James Murphy is to music - a highly talented encyclopaedia of the whole genre. What is surprisingly missing from Katie’s coverage is that Piskor was - during this whole time - focused on producing an adult torture porn comic - Red Room. Red Room was deliberately set out to be the most extreme sex comic published and THIS is what his accuser was knowingly reaching out to connect to. Even her cultural references in the quote in the show are to Hunter S Thompson. She is more Bunny Lebowski than Fawn Knutson. She is also, in most countries and many states, well above the age of consent. Are we to pretend that 17 year old women are shrinking violets or not responsible for their own decisions? There is a tendency on Reddit to infantilise womens actions - ‘she’s just a child’. I’m in disagreement - if she’s reading Ed Piskor’s work, if she’s au fair with counter-culture fare like HST then she’s going to be well aware that men have a sexual interest in young women prepared to trade in their sexuality. Her rant at Ed is really a rant at herself but cloaked in a complete failure to take personal responsibility, enabled by an internet culture that seeks to elide responsibility in favour of a hierarchy of oppression.
The second thing missing from the telling, maybe less important overall but more BARpod relevant is that the cancelling and suicide overlapped with a major switch in Ed’s detractors from X to Bluesky. Comics has a lot of highly talented females working in it (Joelle Jones, Zoe Thorogood) and always has done (Trina Robbins, Julie Douchet, Marie Severin) but the last 10 years has a class of less talented (ie not very much at all) females using social justice to promote their personal brand. Chief amongst these is Alex Di Campi - a writer who’s never really had success - whose Twitter / Bluesky was an unreadable mix of self-praise and social justice messaging. These hacks had it out for Piskor and his cancellation was gist to the mill of their endless social justice self-praise. What’s particularly odious about this cohort is that they know the history of comics and how every major artist (from legend Robert Crumb to Frank Franzetta to Dave Steven’s) has used female friends and acquaintances as nude models. Professional life drawing models cost money and comic artists don’t make a hell of a lot of that* yet the Bluesky mob could act shocked at Piskor wanting to draw a female naked. Anyway what’s key is that just before Ed’s suicide DiCampi et all de-camped (boom, tish) to Bluesky so they were firewalled from the criticism and pushback against their po-faced self-interested moralising** People upset by Ed’s passing were still on X, the culprits on Bluesky.
* as a light-hearted aside - the godfather of underground comics Robert Crumb once fell out with several other main underground artists because they thought he was odd for not coming to draw some naked models with them - Crumbs reasoning was he’d already drawn so many nude women he would skip that session.
** DiCampi had no problems working with the master of erotic art and comic book pornographer, Milo Manara, when she had the chance to have him draw an erotic cover for one of her few published works. Manara is a post-war Italian comics giant whose work largely consists of books where women can’t control their sexual urges and have sex with anything - including dogs and underage children. Manara;’s art is considered so beautiful that nobody really minds the excess of the content and his reputation sells units. DiCampi knowingly worked with him for her own profit and strangely didn’t feel the need to call out his actions and work like she did Piskors.
RIP Ed.
Thank you very much for this post, Alphonse!
Last open thread I was going to ask if there were any comic book readers :).
I am way too awkward to be super involved in any community but I read comics, nothing I read has been turned into a tv show or movie so I rarely encounter people who have even heard of it much less read it offline.
In my opinion, Ed's suicide note made him look worse, not better. He basically said that he was killing himself specifically to get vengeance on these people, even going so far as to say that he wants his family to sue them for wrongful death. I am firmly of the belief that this man is a creep. There is no excuse for a grown man to call a minor a "naughty girl" in private correspondence, even as a joke, and the remark about "titties" at the end solidified that for me. However, being creepy is not a capital crime, nor should it be. I think that the career repercussions he experienced were excessive, and not proportionate to his transgressions. If the blowjob girl were lying, he should've taken her to court for libel.
Also, traumatizing your family and foisting a legal battle onto them over internet drama derailing your career is so profoundly selfish.
No content comment - I'm on an overcrowded train back from the Edinburgh festival, and thank *fuck* for a brand new BARPod. You guys saved my life (again)
> You guys saved my life (again)
For once, an internet post saved a life instead of ending it
*context
A person walking into the water dressed, then out? He is either peeing or had peed himself is my guess
I think he just had a moment. We all have these moments.
True, in this heat that sounds lovely honestly.
Wouldn't that just....spread the pee around?
I always wondered if you guys would get to the comics community! Been listening for years, and every episode about some community I've been like "that sounds exactly like comics, but maybe a little better."
You did a great job with the Piskor story. Defintiely a lot more minor characters and threads in there but you got the main jist.
It definitely created a sea change in the community. There was a lot of nasty "woke" stuff going on in comics for years, but most people kept quiet because there was another loud, reactionary rightwing faction of comics and speaking out against the progressive side would get you lumped in with those losers.
Piskor's suicide changed that. A lot more people spoke out and stood up to the bullies who had been making their names on leftwing culture war stuff.
I don't think it changed the community to a more neutral set of liberal values or anything -- but, it seemed to ease the tension created by the progressive side some. Those types still exist and thrive over on BluSky, but I think most serious creators like myself largely "quiet quit" the community.
Between that and the AI art slop, a lot of artists have pulled out of community to just focus on their work. I wish we had a place we could connect, but for now, we've pretty much denied the community our attention and talents.
Does anyone think the section on Ed Piskor ended a little abruptly? It was like: women post some mostly unsubstantiated allegations against him, then he posts his own side of the story, also mostly unsubstantiated, then that's it. I still don't really know whether he was or wasn't a creep. I feel like there would have been a few more rounds of back and forth where people would post receipts and the truth would become a little more clear, except that he cut it off by killing himself. Which is not an act I have sympathy for.
I also hate that online opinion turned so quickly in his favor once he did it, because in other cases where there's a middle-aged dude against several younger women, even if the guy is innocent it usually takes a lot longer for him to clear his name, if he ever manages to. So it feels to me like reputationally at least his suicide got rewarded. Idk if I'm overly sensitive/unsympathetic as someone who's been passively suicidal in the past, but it just strikes me as really gross.
I don't think the online opinion quite flipped as neatly as they said it did (context, that's my community and Piskor's suicide caused me to pull back).
What happened was more that there was a huge chilling effect in comics since like 2015. This was partially due to progressive politics run amok, but also, we had our own "gamergate" style movement, so most of the reasonable folks kept quiet because if you spoke out against left excess, you'd get lumped into the other group.
Comics is super small, so the incentives to stay quiet are strong -- anyone, and I mean anyone, your best friend, your mother, etc. -- will step over your dead body for a gig in comics.
What Piskor's suicide did was change that dynamic. People who had kept quiet spoke up and/or basically quit the community. Very much a "we're not playing this bullshit culture war game anymore" kind of thing that was unthinkable for years.
Most of the hyper lefty comics people went to BluSky and keep doing their thing. The difference is, the community has lost a significant amount of participation and "playing nice" from talent who don't want to play this game anymore.
Well that sounds good, the more parts of society where the actual talented productive people can decide to just ignore the blue sky rabble the better.
Completely agree.
KAY-FABE. It's super simple! Jesus a simple google search would reveal this. DO BETTER!!!
Kay like K. Fabe like fade with a b instead of a d. Do you really not know the first thing about pro wrestling?
lol yeah the pronunciation is grating on me
Why would anyone know anything about professional wrestling?
The Piskor suicide discussion hit close to home for me. I'm going to be vague about details bc it's still a bit raw, but a former teacher I had at one time been really close with committed suicide a few weeks ago. He was a huge influence on me artistically. Unfortunately, he was also abusive, not to me, but to a friend of mine who I have never known to lie or exagerrate. They had begun dating, which rubbed me the wrong way, but who am I to stand in the way of love, etc. They kept dating after we stopped talking. (We had fallen out of touch for unrelated reasons; my mom was in hospice and he said something so insensitive that I opted to keep my distance.)
I knew he could be a bit of a Lothario, but he attacked my friend in a moving car and almost killed them both. She called me in hysterics after it happened. Other allegations had been made against him in the past, but I was stupid and loyal and believed he was being persecuted racially and for his political beliefs.
I was furious when I found out that he died and how he died. I'm furious that people who had iced him out or stopped associating with him are making memorial posts and constantly sharing reminiscence about him. I'm furious that he was such an artistic genius but such a monstrous pig of a man. I'm furious that a mutual friend who knows what he did to other women has been glazing him online for weeks after his death. I'm furious that he's in a sense, absolved himself for what he's done via suicide. I do believe that when abusive people commit suicide, they are largely doing it as a final act of revenge. Mostly I'm furious that I still miss him, despite it all.
I’m sorry for all that you’re going through.
I think you made a good point about how suicide can be used as a tool by abusive people. If you’ll forgive me for bringing Epstein into this, the people who always believed that he killed himself (like the lawyer who landed him in jail the first time) say that it was to maintain control and to send one final “fuck you” to the people who thought they finally had him.
Like Jesse's library, my hometown library system went fine free because they were worried fines were scaring people away from the library. When I went six weeks without returning a Lawrence of Arabia Blu-Ray, I learned that they did not stop sending out letters threatening to turn people over to collection agencies for unreturned items.
My library doesn't collect fines but cuts off your borrowing privileges as soon as something goes overdue. It's a fantastic system for frequent borrowers with little kids who are always leaving books under furniture. I save a lot of petty cash in fines, but I do a reasonably good job of making the kids find and return stuff regularly.
A library where I worked 20 years ago had no fines, not because people were scared away by them but because the administrative overhead of tracking and collecting fines wasn't worth the small amount of money collected.
Fines always struck me as how you deal with kids and part of brining them up. A nickel for a day late means something to a kid (when I was a kid) and is practice for returning things on time as an adult.
This makes sense to me. I used to go to a library that had steep fines. At least they felt steep to me because I was working a temp job while also looking for full time work and barely had enough for food and rent.
One time I returned a book and it was not checked in properly so I had to literally find it on the shelf.
Mistakes get made but if you’re going to charge someone a quarter a day for an overdo book then people will feel differently about it.
At one point I got so depressed I relinquished my card because it was just too much.
My current library has no fees and honestly that makes me happy.
The hedgehog moment made me realize that my image of Janna is completely competent and on top of stuff, and so the hedgehog in the freezer has got to be Katie’s fault. Got to be.
Katie is the Jesse in that relationship.
Weird fox related fact: apparently after WWII in Alaska, the federal government subsidized fox farms all over the state, and would send barrels of grain for feed. But for some reason these farms produced very little fur, while a mysterious new surge of homemade booze flooded the state... Turns out the "fur farmers" were just taking the grain and turning it into liquor 😂
To me these people are heroes.
Man that Save A Fox video was heartbreaking. My prayers go out to Mikaylas family.....
I think that there is also alot of domesticated foxes that came out of a program out of Russia that wasn’t that successful in domesticating them. Some people who have foxes get them from Russia because they can’t just live in the wild, but they aren’t quite tame either.
here is a wiki about them: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox