This year I discovered the power of print-on-demand stickers! So of course I made doofy Chinese art history ones. From left to right: a BRONZE trophy, a SONG-taur, and a KOI-tesan.

(or, to over-explain it: Zhou dynasty bronze vessels were often made to commemorate major events or given to leaders of vassal states, the Song dynasty centaur is modeled after the 五马图 painting, and the Tang dynasty court lady mermaid is modeled after 仕女图, and yes I know that koi is the Japanese term but it's hard to come up with a dumb pun guyz 😭)

I also made a bunch of GAYsian stickers (okay fine actually just queer Chinese-American stuff that is mostly for me, "Asian" is such a loaded term). One is a mooncake that I made because I was having feelings about how mooncakes often look similar on the outside but have so much diversity of filling (fewer and fewer mooncakes are properly labeled these days...) And the others are QUEERlin, because I wanted to draw qilin (mythical Chinese creatures of good luck) in pride flag colors. But yes, trying to bring more representation to work 👍

On the off chance these are stickers that you, random tumblr user, would want in physical form, them are on my storenvy at potofoup.storenvy.com .

I'm also trying to be better about late stage capitalism's consumer culture and reduce the pressure to monetize my interests, so if you want one of these for free, you could, um... send an ask???

Last year I made a rather silly comic about deep sea angler fish for our local comics group's anthology. (The theme was "Fang")

Anglerfish facts found through lackadaisical googling, apologies for the probably many factual inaccuracies.

Oh here's the actual youtube video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anDIlMVgNwk

I also threw the comic up on AO3, and will probably on the comics group website when I get my act together (sbaycomics.com)

in my pursuit of ever-increasingly niche comics, I drew a 13 page comic about Tape v Hurley, a court case about Chinese-American school segregation in 1885. The rest of the pages are after the readmore, as well as on AO3 here. More obsure Chinese American court case comics are there, as well.

Historical Notes

Mary and Joseph Tape were not born in America, but their names and identities were very much formed in America. Joseph Tape was born Jeu Dip in Guangdong, China, immigrated the America when he was twelve, and spent his teenage years working as a house servant in an Irish household. Mary arrived in America at the age of eleven, and was found and raised as Mary McGladery in a Protestant orphanage as the only Chinese child amongst ~80 children. Both Mary and Jeu spent their formative years amongst White Christian families, so when Jeu Dip and Mary married in 1875, little wonder that Jeu picked the English name of Joseph Tape -- Joseph to match with Mary, and the German last name Tape as a nod to his former name of Dip.

The Tape family lived about 14 blocks outside of Chinatown, in a primarily white neighborhood. They dressed in Western clothing, spoke English at home, and Mamie grew up playing with non-Chinese kids. Naturally, they wanted their children to attend the local elementary school, a mere 3 blocks from their home. The principal, Ms. Hurley, denied her entrance, claiming that she was “filthy and diseased.” At the time, there was no public school option for Chinese children -- the 1870 state law stipulated separate schools for “African and Indian children” only, not Chinese. The Tape family, with the help of the Chinese Six Companies, their church, and the Chinese consulate, decided to sue, claiming that the 1880 California school code guaranteed everyone a right to public education and that this was a violation of the 14th Amendment.

They won.

But this was 1885, three years after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act and six years before Plessy v Ferguson. Regardless of what the California Supreme Court might decide, public sentiment was on the side of the San Francisco school district. Determined to keep out this “invasion of Mongol barbarism”, the California State Legislature passed a law permitting separate schools for Chinese children, which then allowed Principal Hurley to reject Mamie Tape once more.

While Mamie was rejected from the Spring Valley Elementary School for being Chinese, she also had a hard time fitting in to the Chinese public school. The Chinese merchants saw Western education as something primarily for boys. (Their girl children learned from their mothers at home.) Mamie, a girl dressed in Western clothes, would have stood out like a sore thumb. The final panel of the comic was based on a photo from three years later, and even then, Mamie was the only girl.

Places where I fudged the history: Frank, Mamie’s younger brother, was actually six years old and should have been more present in the comic, but I wante to keep the focus on Mamie and Mary. Also, Mamie had actually shown up to her first day of school in Western clothes. An earlier draft of the comic had a separate arc involving Mamie feeling rejected at school and Mary buying her some Chinese clothes, but that got too long and complicated.

Much of this was drawn from Mae Ngai’s book about the Tape family and their experiences as 2nd and 3rd generation Chinese Americans, titled “The Lucky Ones.”

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Here is Mary Tape's letter to the San Francisco School Board, 1885:

1769 Green Street. San Francisco, April 8, 1885. To the Board of Education - Dear Sirs: I see that you are going to make all sorts of excuses to keep my child out off the Public schools. Dear sirs, Will you please to tell me! Is it a disgrace to be Born a Chinese? Didn’t God make us all!!! What right have you to bar my children out of the school because she is a chinese Decend. They is no other worldly reason that you could keep her out, except that. I suppose, you all goes to churches on Sundays! Do you call that a Christian act to compell my little children to go so far to a school that is made in purpose for them. My children don’t dress like the other Chinese. They look just as phunny amongst them as the Chinese dress in Chinese look amongst you Caucasians. Besides, if I had any wish to send them to a chinese school I could have sent them two years ago without going to all this trouble. You have expended a lot of the Public money foolishly, all because ofa one poor little Child. Her playmates is all Caucasians ever since she could toddle around. If she is good enough to play with them! Then is she not good enough to be in the same room and studie with them? You had better come and see for yourselves. See if the Tape’s is not same as other Caucasians, except in features. It seems no matter how a Chinese may live and dress so long as you know they Chinese. Then they are hated as one. There is not any right or justice for them. You have seen my husband and child. You told him it wasn’t Mamie Tape you object to. If it were not Mamie Tape you object to, then why didn’t you let her attend the school nearest her home! Instead of first making one pre tense Then another pretense of some kind to keep her out? It seems to me Mr. Moulder has a grudge against this Eight-year-old Mamie Tape. I know they is no other child I mean Chinese child! care to go to your public Chinese school. May you Mr. Moulder, never be persecuted like the way you have persecuted little Mamie Tape. Mamie Tape will never attend any of the Chinese schools of your making! Never!!! I will let the world see sir What justice there is When it is govern by the Race prejudice men! Just because she is of the Chinese decend, not because she don’t dress like you because she does. Just because she is descended of Chinese parents I guess she is more of a American then a good many of you that is going to prewent her being Educated. Mrs. M. Tape

I swear it wasn’t on purpose, but I made a Tang koi lady (koi-tesan?) and then realized that it’s Mermay or something...

2023

1. COMMIT TO THE BIT

2. PARTAKE IN THE DIVINE ACT OF CREATION

3. LET THE SOFT ANIMAL THAT IS YOUR BODY LOVE WHAT IT LOVES

I love her sense of humor! Two quick additional notes: - the portable speaker part is a pun, because "making noise" is a homophone to "thinking" - when she's pointing to herself and what she's thinking, she's wondering what a pig-human would look like (美人鱼 "beauty fish" is mermaid, so 美人猪 "beauty pig" would be... pigmaid?). Anyways, I bring this up because if I had to spend time imagining that, you should too. XD;;;

Translation request for Anon. English added by me :)

English added by me :)

English added by me :)

spouse being smart

Don't Lie To Me About Web 2.0

If you're like me and you're trying to keep an open mind that there may someday be a non-scam application of blockchains, you've probably read some articles about "Web3", which promises to re-decentralize the web by something something Blockchain.

I realize this is far from the most important criticism but i think it's really interesting that the standard explanation you find replicated nearly word-for-word at the beginning of most "Web3" articles has a big ol' chunk of historical revisionism in it. It goes like this:

"First there was web 1.0, which was, like, geocities pages and stuff, and it was decentralized. Then there was web 2.0, which was the centralized silos of social media - facebook, twitter, etc. Now Web3 is gonna re-decentralize everything by letting you own your own data on the blockchain…"

No! Stop there! Web 2.0 was not social media! You're rewriting history that's less than 20 years old!

Web 2.0 was:

blogs with comment sections

wikis (wikipedia was far from the first wiki!)

forums (that is, discussion that was previously on Usenet migrating to like phpBB web forums)

bookmark sharing sites like Del.icio.us

user-defined tagging systems as in del.icio.us (and computer nerds who spent a lot of time defining taxonomies being blown away when it turned out you could let users define their own tags and a useful system could organically emerge)

on a technical, behind-the-scenes level, static HTML files, server-side includes, and Perl CGI scripts were getting replaced with structured, database-backed web frameworks (Ruby on Rails, Drupal, etc.)

AJAX as a way of loading content dynamically into a page without the user navigating to a new page

Javascript in general allowing more full-featured applications - as did Flash

RSS feed as a user-defined way of aggregating content

when someone tried to buzzwordify all these disparate trends they noticed that what a lot of them had in common was "Website owner allows website visitors to enter words that will be seen by other website visitors" and summed that up as "User-generated content" and branded it "Web 2.0" around 2004-2005.

I was there. I worked on backends for a lot of this stuff!

The key shift was where things were hosted. In Web 2.0 you might use off-the-shelf software like WordPress or phpBB or whatever but you were still hosting all that stuff on your own server. Your server, your rules; you'd set your own moderation policy and wield your own "banhammer". The free speech compromise was "don't like my moderation policy? Make your own website."

It was a huge paradigm shift in 2005-6 when YouTube started and said "we'll host your videos for you". (What? trust a third-party website to host my videos? Sounds sketchy) That was the beginning of the end, because once people gave up running their own server in favor of letting a big company host their stuff on a centralized server, we gave up all the power.

Social media wasn't web 2.0, it's what killed Web 2.0!

You might think I'm arguing over mere nomenclature but the important fact is that this era existed, and the Web3 pitch pretends it didn't. We already had decentralized internet with social features. This fact contradicts the story the Web3/blockchain advocates want to tell you, so their story skips this entire era.

Web 2.0 lost to siloed social media because:

running your own server is a pain

running your own server costs money, especially if you want to host video

signing up for facebook/twitter/etc is much easier for non-computer-literate users, who outnumber us 1,000 to 1

once there's a critical mass of users there, anybody who wants an audience has to be there (network effects)

non-technical users didn't understand about paying with their privacy, and in most cases had no experience with the freedom they were giving up

the price was not apparent until everybody was locked in

Apple made a fateful decision that mobile-phone internet should be app-centric, not browser/website centric. Then Android copied their mistake.

To make the web3 argument you have to explain why "a distributed ledger where each update contains a cryptographically signed pointer to the previous update, replicated across many computers via a decentralized protocol, that rewards people for hosting nodes by paying them pretend money when they brute-force solve a cryptographic hash" is relevant to any of these problems. I suspect it is not relevant, because:

the blockchain is incredibly slow, inefficient, and energy-intensive, and it can only hold miniscule amounts of data. (The ape pictures are not on the chain, only links to them are on the chain). So everything still has to be hosted elsewhere.

for most web3 stuff "the" blockchain means the Ethereum blockchain, where it sometimes costs thousands of dollars to make a single transaction process.

people who don't want to run their own webserver sure as heck aren't gonna run their own blockchain node

in practice, people don't interact with the blockchain directly, but through intermediarires (coinbase.com etc), who inevitably become centralized.

in practice, control over blockchain itself, for any popular blockchain, is highly centralized to a tiny number of the largest mining consortiums

if you want to make the dream of "buy your Minecraft skin as an NFT and bring it with you to wear in Fortnight!" work (why is this the example every article uses?) you would need to get all the games involved to decide to implement equivalent items, or some kind of framework of item portability, and if you could do that then you wouldn't need the blockchain!

What might help solve any of the problems that killed Web 2.0:

cheap and easy (EASY!) web hosting

portable data standards

antitrust enforcement with teeth

privacy laws around data collection that make the centralized social media business model unprofitable

a critical mass of dissatisfaction with corporate social media

I want a decentralized internet to come back more than anybody, but blockchain is completely irrelevant to that.

hey there random tumbloid, stop scrolling and take a tea break! :)

oh good, @sponsoredpostarchive is reblogging/archiving Blaze posts!  They are performing a crucial service on this hellsite

Since I’m at it, here’s a list of tree planting organizations: Trees for the Future (trees.org) They are trying to get farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa to plant "Forest Gardens" (instead of slash-and-burn) which is a mixture of trees, shrubs, and veggies that create a diversified farm.  Their projects involve getting a whole village to do it, and takes 4 years, so it's pretty slow-build. So it’s pretty impressive that they’ve established 25,000 new forest gardens last year! Here’s their 2021 impact report.  (Their website used to be more informative, with actual cost breakdowns and a detailed explanation of the multi-year process, but now I find it a little too streamlined)

Eden Reforestation Project (edenprojects.org) They've planted over 830 million trees since 2005, yowza.  They’re in 10 countries, ranging from Kenya and Nepal to Honduras. Unlike Trees for the Future, they seem to go for mass tree nurseries and planting, basically getting enough planted that the trees will naturally regenerate. They have a nice run-down of what’s going on in each site in the “Our Work” dropdown.  Here’s their 2020 annual report.

National Forest Foundation (US-only, nationalforests.org) A lot of tree planting organizations seem to be focused on developing world areas, so I wanted to find one that’s for the US.  $1 donation brings $2 from the forest service.  They have a goal of planting 50 million trees by 2025, they planted 22 million since 2018, mostly by restoring fire-ravaged national parks. Here’s the 2021 impact report. 

Lastly, here’s Ecosia’s list of organizations that they donate to, in case you want a longer list that seems to be pretty well-vetted.  (Ecosia is a search engine that uses Bing, and funnels all of the search-result revenue into the above list of organizations.  It’s pretty good on privacy, too.)

Here’s some climate political action links for belated Earth Day: (US-only)

League of Conservation Voters (lcv.org): Has a great scorecard for house and senate representatives (clearly organized, easy to get detailed information while maintaining visual simplicity).  Here's the link for activism/donating/volunteering, which I like because oftentimes websites only have one option to either give money or give time. (also: they're hiring!) Give Green (givegreen.com): Has a list of "green” candidates in state/house/senate races, with filters for location, priority, etc, and the ability to select and batch donate.  I personally find it really heartening to see all the faces of these people who are running -- they're mostly not old white men!  The sheer number of candidates is a bit overwhelming, though, and everyone is labeled as "priority", lol.  Candidate info is from LCV. Climate Hawks Vote (climatehawksvote.com): Has a MUCH shorter list of priority candidates if you found the Give Green kind of overwhelming and a bit green-washy.  They really vet each one re: how much they actually care about environmental change, and how electable they actually are. That means there's only 7 people on their list. Climate Cabinet Action (climatecabinetaction.org) does a state legislature scorecard for ~20 states (not mine, but probably prioritizing the more contentious ones). 

oh man I want to see the best Tumblr Blaze posts, this might be the thing that brings me back to my tumblr dash.  Just waiting for them to enable blaze-only sponsored posts

Also, I’m just thinking about the tumblr staff who gets to approve all these Blaze posts, just like, “hmmm entire script of Bee Movie, APPROVED”.  just ... thank and bless

Thank fuck I can finally pay for this hellsite

Okay one of the downsides of having 1.5 jobs and a child and being generally overloaded is that I basically never use my tumblr dash anymore, and I basically visit individual tumblrs on the browser like it’s blogspot circa 1999.   BUT apparently tumblr finally rolled out a way for me to pay them for their service?  YES PLEASE.   Thank you @staff​ .  I don’t even care what it’s ostensibly for, because FINALLY this means that I’m the customer and not the data that they’re selling.  And $40/year makes sense given how much image and video they’re hosting and the continued development of features.   (Like, I don’t visit my dash for a year and now suddenly there’s like, built-in comment and tag viewing?)

Please take my money and develop more features for the users of the site, yes good.

Here’s a list of features I’d want, btw:

- privatized blogs should still be allowed to have tag-based browsing (right now, blogs that can only be viewed by logged-in users on the dash only loads in the sidebar, which means that you can’t go to /tagged/tagname, or /search/searchterm).  (maybe the new blog view that they’re rolling out will solve this, in which case, thanks, Tumblr, for already putting in the work hours for that)

- ability to reply to comments in a post with a sideblog name and not the main

- dash filtering and curation by *me* and not an algorithm (for example, if I can group the people I follow by fandom or by general post vibe (artblog, etc) via a blog-tagging system, and then click to quickly show just, say the people posting about Ukraine

- ability to gift paid accounts to other people

- ability to sort and tag my “likes”

- ability to “mute” certain posts on the activity feed

Note: I don’t think any of these features should be locked behind a paywall (or, at most, the ones that are minor conveniences, the way Discord Nitro works).  I just want to be a paying customer for a service again.

Rosemary? You mean spicy pine needles?

Not my posts but an interesting thought.