today is a shitty day in US history. every day has been for a while, but this one's pretty notably shitty. Ruth Bader-Ginsburg died earlier this month and the Trump administration is trying to replace her. so now seems like as good a day as any to re-affirm something i made clear after the last election, as the next one approaches.

conservatives: i think you are bad people. yes, all of you. i think every conservative is a bad person and i don't want to have anything to do with you.

MAGA hat wearers: you're bad.
Never Trumpers: you're bad.
if you voted for Trump but regret it: you should feel bad pretty much indefinitely.
"old school" republicans: you're bad.
people who are "just very traditional": you. are. bad.
if you consider yourself conservative but "not one of the bigoted ones": you're still bad!
if you think you're a "compassionate conservative": you aren't! you're bad!

and don't think you're exempt from this just because you like weed, libertarians.

once you're an adult with the ability to inform yourself, your politics are a choice you make. and conservatives, every day, CHOOSE to be selfish, heartless, murderous, bigoted, hateful and willfully ignorant.

it is bad to want to withhold basic needs from your fellow humans because you think money is more important. it is bad to rail against welfare and food stamps and other things that help people survive in hard times, especially if you, in the past, have received those things. it is bad to expect religious institutions to fill in the gaps with charities, because these institutions have more leeway to discriminate and no obligation to actually fill the gaps.

it's bad to let people die of treatable illnesses or become homeless because they can't afford the absurd costs of the american healthcare system. it's bad to let homeless people suffer needlessly in cities with hundreds or thousands of empty homes. it's bad to tell minimum wage workers that they don't deserve better wages for doing hard work that needs doing, especially while while simultaneously saying that do-nothing billionaires deserve their money because they "worked hard for it". it is bad to push people into extreme poverty and then treat them like criminals when they're forced to steal just to survive. it's bad to support a system that lets people with mental illnesses and chronic pain languish without healthcare until they turn to substance abuse and then punish them for developing addictions. it's bad to arbitrarily criminalize drugs and make it impossible for people to research possible helpful uses for them.

it is bad to prevent consenting adults who are in love from getting married. it's bad to force people to endure something as expensive and dangerous and life-altering as pregnancy when they don't want to or aren't ready to. it's bad to insist that a fetus is human life that needs protecting, then turn around and tell schoolchildren whose parents can't pay off their lunch debt that they don't get anything to eat, or throw away their food in front of them and give them something inadequate. it's bad to protest abortion and call it genocide while you  support the ONGOING genocide of native americans. it's bad to say that you support religious freedom and yet constantly favor one religion's "freedom" so much that you keep trying to write it into laws.

it's bad to support a legal system where cops are allowed to kill indiscriminately and never face any consequences for it. it's bad to watch thousands of people die of gun violence, to watch a classroom full of kindergartners be slaughtered by someone who could have been prevented from owning a gun, and shrug and say it's just the price of freedom.
it's bad to torture and neglect migrants in concentration camps. it's bad to traumatize migrant children with separation from their parents and wreck their psyches so thoroughly that their bonds with their families are permanently damaged or destroyed. it's bad to support wars that tear apart other countries for our own benefit.

it's bad to refuse to believe in science and to continue destroying the future of humanity because you don't want rich people to have to give up money they would never even miss, or you think electric cars are unmanly or whatever the fuck justification you have for literally just not believing in or caring about reality.

it's bad to hold up the asshole who laughed and made homophobic jokes about the AIDS crisis as 80,000+ people died agonizing deaths as your hero president. it's bad to idolize the stupid fucking game show host who deliberately downplayed covid-19 because he didn't want to look bad.

it's bad to refuse to follow simple mask-wearing guidelines because you believe in your "personal freedom" to spew your nasty plague droplets everywhere more than you believe in working together to prevent the spread of a DEADLY PANDEMIC. it is super extremely fucking bad to make fake "medical exemption" cards and scream at essential workers and throw public tantrums because you've been slightly inconvenienced by everyone else TRYING NOT TO DIE. it's bad to keep yourself WILLFULLY ignorant about why masks and quarantine are necessary when people who demonstrably know way more than most of us are begging us to just please take these precautions for a while.

and it is BAD to insist, that despite all of the inhuman cruelty innate to conservative ideology, that it is in the end all in service of some greater good, or that the harm it does is unintentional, or just bad execution, or because of liberals mess it all up. it is bad to point at other ideologies and say "well they're worse!" instead of dealing with the plank in your own eye. it is BAD to allow yourself to exist in a state of denial because it's harder for you to reckon with your moral failings than it is to just pretend you aren't failing.

it is bad to not care about your fellow humans and their futures. if you don't care about other people, YOU ARE A SHITTY PERSON. it is not smart or cool or intellectual or even coldly practical of you to not care about other people, because you need other people to do the things for you that you can't. believe it or not, you might someday be the desperate person that everything just went really wrong for, who needs help, and if that time comes would you rather have socialized medicine, or crowdfund your medical treatment? would you rather have food stamps, or go hungry in order to stay housed? if something really bad happens, would you rather have a society that will catch you if you fall, or would you rather be left to pick up the pieces of your life by yourself? what would you want for the people in your life that you supposedly care about?

if you are a conservative and you think i'm unfairly representing your beliefs or putting words in your mouth, ask yourself what you really believe in. freedom? individual choice? family? God? the value of hard work? ok! conservatives think it's fine for you to spend most of your time away from your home and your family, working your ass off just to maintain financial stasis. they undervalue the work of the people who do the most essential jobs-- look at how little everyone involved in your continued ability to eat gets paid, from farmers to grocery store workers to waitstaff. your choice of healthcare is limited by your employer and income, and further limited by who will take your insurance. since your healthcare is tied to your employment, it's extremely risky for you to quit a job you don't like or that isn't paying enough. and conservatives often try to write their religion into law, rather than maintain the separation between church and state that actually protects your freedom of religion. and over and over again, we see studies done where we just help people the straightforward way, the way that conservatives insist will "spoil" people and keep them from working, and they do fine, and it's cheaper than this system where we means-test and torture and arrest and kill people instead of just helping them. btw, JUST HELPING PEOPLE is what Jesus would do.

maybe your values aren't right-wing values after all? maybe you should stop voting for these terrible fucking ghouls who lie about principles they don't actually hold in service of generating profit for themselves. maybe you could be a not-bad person. maybe you got fooled and you should actually be fucking pissed at the people who fooled you.

but if you insist on continuing, we cannot coexist peacefully, because again, your politics are a choice, and your choices hurt me. i am a queer woman with a uterus and a bunch of chronic medical conditions that prevent me from working full-time, and NONE of that is something i got to choose. conservative policy is harmful and often DEADLY for people like me. and it hurts and kills people i care about, and strangers i don't know but still care about, a concept i know might be difficult for people who think everyone is as self-centered as they are. there is no middle ground for us to find because i believe that all humans, even assholes i hate, deserve to have their basic needs met without question so that they can have the best chance to lead safe, fulfilling lives, and you are okay with the conditions that lead to people dying of exposure on park benches in the richest fucking country in the world.

so to anyone who falls under the bloodstained umbrella of conservatism: i don't like you. i don't want you here and don't want or need your support. your attention is worthless to me. your money is worthless to me. i will happily turn down commissions from you. i will not take patreon or ko-fi support from you. i don't want you following me on social media or sharing my posts. and if you ended up here because you like my art, maybe you should stop trying to kill me so i can keep making it.

and if you're some weak-willed liberal who wants to tell me i'm being divisive or unreasonable or a meaniehead and i'm Part Of The Problem: no, actually, that's you. your willingness to 
"compromise with" and "hear out" people whose politics are selfish at best and genocidal at worst is way more Part Of The Problem than i could ever dream of being. maybe you're still comfortable enough that you perceive politics as some game that runs parallel to reality, but i'm not. try googling "paradox of tolerance," and maybe also "useful idiot".

i started a blog on my personal website in january, thinking it might be fun to start blogging again. then the entire world fell apart.

i developed plantar fasciitis, which i'm still fighting.

my boyfriend and i are separating, temporarily, in an attempt to re-orient a relationship that's gotten stuck in some rocks.

but i'm here.

welcome to the doodlemancy blog. it's new as of today.

2019 was rough. i made a few pieces i was decently happy with, but this Fina one is the only thing i was really that proud of:

...and it felt like a fluke. not to be dramatic but for quite a while, i’ve been feeling like my goals are impossible, i’m never going to finish any project ever, and i am probably the worst artist in this universe and also all parallel universes in which i exist as some kind of artist. drawing has been A SLOG. just thinking about it made me feel tired and frustrated. lately, most of my drawing time has just been my patreon sketch requests, because at least that gets me paid and makes someone happy, cue sad violin and handkerchief honk. and then while doodling on my samsung galaxy tablet (a very fun rectangle, but small and not suitable for serious drawing) i thought, "i just want this, but bigger".

i had outgrown my tools. i got a bamboo 9 years ago and learned to draw digitally on that, then switched to an intuos 4. i’ve finally reached the point where the visual disconnect and small drawing area is causing me problems i just can’t solve. detailing feels like playing pool during an earthquake. the small drawing area strains my wrist and stiffens my drawings. my skills and needs have surpassed the capabilities of this rectangle.

i've been using non-monitor graphics tablets for as long as i've been doing digital art. 10 years ago, wacom was basically all their was, and the price of a cintiq was so astronomically high i had to convince myself i didn't want/need one so i wouldn't feel sad about it. same deal with the iPad when it started getting popular with artists-- it was out of my reach. i bought the galaxy tab last year because i wanted an iPad, but didn't want to give apple money (and didn't have enough money to give apple anyway).

the next morning, i started "casually" browsing tablets. a few competitors (namely monoprice, huion, xp-pen) have been making affordable graphics tablets for a while now. 5 hours of researching and feverish livetweeting later, i had purchased an xp-pen artist 15.6, because my roommate happens to have an xp-pen monitor tablet and let me try it for a minute. it took about 3 strokes of the pen to convince me. i was going to wait until my tax return showed up but i realized i was not going to draw until at least march if that was the case. i was in too deep. i had tasted the food of the fae and would never go back through the hedge. so i paid off my credit card and slapped the tablet purchase on it. then i thought and talked about nothing else for 3 days (i assume these 3 days were probably pretty excruciating for everyone who knows me or follows me on twitter).

4 days in: i'm enjoying drawing again. the thought of drawing makes me excited instead of exhausted. it's not a slog anymore. i was going to bed most nights night thinking "i didn't draw again, i'm a failure" and now i wake up excited to turn on my tablet and draw. i feel good about art for the first time in at least a year. i actually probably haven't felt this good and this optimistic about drawing since i was 13 and had just obtained a copy of How To Draw Manga: Compiling Characters from Powell's bookstore on a field trip.

the faulty carpenter blames his tools; the wise carpenter knows when to replace a hammer. especially if the hammer is really outdated, has a terrible driver that crashes constantly and is greatly impeding his ability to draw anime girls.

here is my first finished piece in CSP. it is a little awkward, and imo it doesn't look like my usual art style. but it contains more joy than anything i have drawn for a long time.