AAAAHH

“The United States has quietly approved and delivered more than 100 separate foreign military sales to Israel since the Gaza war began Oct. 7, amounting to thousands of precision-guided munitions, small-diameter bombs, bunker busters, small arms and other lethal aid, U.S. officials told members of Congress in a recent classified briefing.”

* * *

“For many years the USA has provided Israel substantial sums of money. …the blank check approach must end, the USA must make it clear that while we are friends of Israel…we cannot be complicit in actions that violate international law and our sense of decency. That includes end to indiscriminate bombing….so that humanitarian assistance can come in to the region,…the displaced Gazans to return to their homes, no long-term Israeli occupation of Gaza, an end to settlers violence in the West Bank and a freeze on settlement expansion; a commitment to broad peace talks for a two-state solution.” The Senator reposed: “I, and some other members of Congress, have tried to do what we could. Obviously we did not do enough. Now we must recommit to this effort. The stake are just too high to give up.”

While we consider whether Biden’s foreign policy failures disqualify him from a second term, let us remember an area where he did succeed… domestic policy!

As expected, the deficit has come up as an election year issue once again. Last time I remember hearing about our nation’s debt was the lead up to the 2012 election, where Mitt Romney Republicans desperately painted the claim that Obama had spent too much money and that our growing debt was a liability. Once again in 2024, Republicans have turned to “THE DEFICIT!!!!” once again in an attempt to beat an incumbent Democrat.

Here’s the thing though– short of cutting nearly every government program upon which this country relies (let me remind you that our agriculture, oil, and healthcare sectors are propped up by government funding), the spending can’t be curbed. I have yet to meet a single Republican with a serious plan for reducing spending in a meaningful way, and indeed even Donald Trump has promised that he would not cut a single cent of social security. Regardless of Republican party bluster, voters on all sides of the aisle like being able to pay for hospital bills and doctor’s visits. Republican voters are just as dependent upon government assistance as everyone else, and as the years go by the social safety net is only going to become more entrenched in the lives of a majority of Americans. Of course, cutting the military budget or even holding the military industrial complex accountable to fraud is out of the question.

If we cannot cut enough programs to stop borrowing, then it stands that the best solution to the deficit is *GASP* paying down our debt with real money! Who would have thought that the massive tax breaks on America’s wealthiest earners would cause our country to become unable to pay for itself? Yet that is exactly what happened. Ever since the failure of Reagan’s “Trickle Down” theory, America has transformed from an industrial nation that could pay for itself to one that had to leverage debt in order to make ends meet. Biden’s solution is painfully obvious–if we resume proportional taxes on the ultra-rich, then we can pay down our debt and strengthen the programs that bring vitality to this nation.

Let’s cut through the BS and take the stakes at face value: Trump is pro-wealthy. He grew up with an inheritance and clearly has interests lie beyond helping Americans near the bottom of the ladder. His actions as president favored the highest wealth class in America, from massive tax breaks to obfuscating the very mechanisms in place to track where the ultra-rich spend their money. It is no wonder that Elon Musk has turned to the Republicans–they protect his money at the expense of ours. The richest men on the history of the Earth walk today, and they launch rockets into space while we work like dogs for a sliver of a sliver of the profits.

Biden’s stance on the economy drives a stark contrast with Trump’s. While Trump rails on and on about inflation with no clear answer for it, Joe speaks to the root cause– “Same size bag, put fewer chips in it.” When the oil companies raised prices at the pump, Joe Biden was quick to call them out on it. High pump prices did not reflect the robust success of the industry, which happened to be making record profits while producing record high quantities of fuel (this continues as of writing). Biden also actively calls out the rampant “shrinkflation” that has driven up price of goods post-pandemic. Companies with a stranglehold on production are raising prices and shrinking quantities for seemingly no other reason than the fact that they can. This is a more compelling argument than Trump’s. Trump says that “printing money” caused by pandemic stimulus (which he himself participated in) is responsible for inflation… No, it seems like companies just decided to raise prices because they could, and they have no reason to bring them down. Congress has refused to act on this phenomenon, leaving the job of tackling inflation to interest rate hikes that, again, hurt the people at the bottom disproportionately.

Palestinians being exterminated on our watch stinks, but at least Joe has an economic plan! Trump has none.

Despite the great passage of time, less than 15 people are known to have beaten the Dragon in Better Than Wolves. Will this year bring new champions?

Not being on Reddit anymore means I tend to miss big internet dramas as they are happening. This past month, under my very nose, Nintendo sued the creators of the Switch Emulator Yuzu (and the 3DS emulator Citra). Tropic Haze (the creators of Yuzu) have agreed to a settlement in which they pay $2 million to Nintendo and agree to cease all development of their emulators. They will also forfeit their domain, https://yuzu-emu.org/, to Nintendo.

Yuzu’s own statement on the matter admits their own guilt:

“We started the projects in good faith, out of passion for Nintendo and its consoles and games, and were not intending to cause harm. But we see now that because our projects can circumvent Nintendo’s technological protection measures and allow users to play games outside of authorized hardware, they have led to extensive piracy.”

– Yuzu Statement

On Nintendo’s side, they argue that the emulator is illegal because it can only be used alongside the presence of unauthorized cryptographic keys. In essence, they argue that there is no legal use case for Yuzu:

Developing or distributing software, including Yuzu, that in its ordinary course functions only when cryptographic keys are integrated without authorization, violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s prohibition on trafficking in devices that circumvent effective technological measures, because the software is primarily designed for the purpose of circumventing technological measures.

– Nintendo Lawyer Speak

I won’t argue with the point that the Yuzu team overtly used their platform to promote piracy… I was able to play TOTK on my computer using someone else’s ROM dump within a week of the game’s official release! The Yuzu team probably made the bulk of their money (a mere $30,000 a year…) facilitating piracy, and I suspect the reason Yuzu caved so easily to a settlement was because Nintendo had a lot of evidence on them. The open promotion of digital piracy is not legal ground to win a lawsuit on.

That said, Nintendo’s assertion that the Yuzu Switch emulators is illegal because it can only be used by “circumventing technological measures” is an extremely concerning legal precedent to me. I strongly believe that consumers should have the right to use the products they buy in any way they see fit. If I own a Zelda catridge, I should have every right to tinker with the product and dump the software if I choose. The owner of a automobile is not barred from tinkering, modifying, and repairing their own vehicle– you own your car and can do whatever the hell you want with it. Owning video games should grant the same rights. If Nintendo will not provide an official avenue for dumping a ROM and playing Nintendo games on another piece of hardware, then users should legally have every right to pursue their own means of porting the work. The use of cryptographic keys to prevent users from copying and running software on anything but officially sanctioned hardware stifles innovation and personal freedom.

In Nintendo’s view, a person buying a physical game cartridge only owns a single license of the video game. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act allows developers to include legally binding means of locking down software through keys and other DRM tactics. These measures helps protect corporate profits while forcing users to engage rigidly with software on the company’s terms. But while I can re-download my rightfully paid for copies of Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop onto new computers (it would be absurd if you could only buy Photoshop for use on one device forever!), Nintendo games are locked to a cartridge that can be lost, stolen, or destroyed. Thanks to Nintendo’s DRM measures and hostile stance on emulation, I am not allowed to dump the cartridge onto my computer for the purposes of backing up and engaging with a product I have paid for. Do I own my Mario Maker cartridge? Or is the cartridge merely the physical marker of a one-time license to play? That is a bad precedent to set. When I spend $60 on a game, I expect to own the game. I am not a renting it indefinitely!

Could Yuzu have worked harder to ensure that users could only use products they are verified to own? Maybe so. Nintendo also could have taken the lead and created an API for exactly that purpose. They didn’t, though. Microsoft allows users to play Minecraft through user-created launchers and interfaces provided that these unofficial launchers verify through an official Microsoft login api. As a result of this open promotion of modification and iteration, Minecraft can be played on pretty much any device with a processor, from Android Phones to Nintendo Switches. Nintendo could offer the very same service to the creators of Nintendo emulators.

This will never happen because Nintendo wants everyone to play Nintendo games on official hardware that will eventually fall out of date and lose official support. Emulators ensure that regardless of the futurity of the creators, users can still preserve software and run it on a computer even after the official hardware it was designed to run on falls out of production. They don’t make GameCubes anymore, but I can still play Super Smash Brothers Melee on an emulator! In that same vein, my disc copy of Smash will eventually wear out, scratch, and break. But thanks to the independent work of fans online, the game has been uploaded to the internet so that it can continue to exist long after the original distribution media is corroded and gone.

Given that Nintendo has used user uploaded ROMs themselves to resell old Mario Bros games, the value of emulation is clear. Preserving software in ways that are accessible to everyone benefits even the original company that created the software! Alternatively, I think the fight for emulation is a broader fight for the rights of consumers to actually own the things we are buying. Why should Nintendo dictate to me how I must use their product after they sell it to me? Ford can’t tell me not to take apart the car I purchased. A vacuum cleaner company can’t jail me for ripping apart their mechanism and learning how it works. Innovation depends upon the right of individuals to tinker. Engineers, creators, and artists learn by dissecting the works that came before them. Video games should be no different. Such a transformative medium should not be locked down by licenses and premium hardware, and Nintendo can certainly do more to promote a modding/emulation environment that flourishes without piracy.

Every year you hear the same thing– “This is the most important election ever! Don’t sit on the fence! Voting third party is just throwing your vote away!”

And I’m here to tell you that this is still as true as ever!

Unless 1) you are gunning for a third party candidate that has an established following and 2) you are willing to put in some work to support this candidate either monetarily or with your own activism, voting third party is a waste of your time. This is just how our election system was set up.

There is no second place. Ranked choice voting is not the national norm. Voting for anyone but the two front runners is about as politically effective as staying home on election day. If you have a third party candidate that you really love and are willing to advocate for, then go for it! Try to grow your movement! All movements start somewhere, but we are already well into the party primary process so if this is the first time you are thinking about this then it is probably too late. At this point, March 2024, Biden and Trump are our obvious choices and that is not looking like it will change.

With all that in mind, do you accept the consequences? Is Joe Biden’s handling of Israel Palestine worth a Trump presidency to you? Trump’s support of Israel is likely to be just as staunch, if not more, than Biden’s. Is revenge against Biden worth it? That is a question I will be answering myself over the next few months. There is still time until November for Biden to resolve all of this, but it requires decisive action now!

Is this really the most efficient way to save lives in Gaza? Talk about having your cake and eating it too! Joe Biden’s administration wants to be a peacemaker and a war profiteer at the same time!

“Neither the Balfour Declaration nor the mandate ever specifically conceded that Palestinians had political, as opposed to civil and religious, rights in Palestine. The idea of inequality between Jews and Arabs was therefore built into British, and subsequently Israeli and United States, policy from the start.”

– Edward Said 1999

American presidents and politicians have been calling for a “Two State Solution” to the Israeli Palestine conflict for at least thirty years now. In this proposed solution, Israel and a governing body for Palestine would negotiate, give up land, and form the borders of a new Palestinian state free of Israeli occupation. One scholar called this approach “peace without Palestinians.” But is separating the two feuding nationalities of the holy land really a path to peace? Myself and those before me argue No. True peace, the kind that allows democracy and freedom to reign, is not born out of separation along racial lines. Certainly, a healthy democracy cannot long endure in the face of such an unsatisfying peace. The history of the United States shows that well enough.

The United States of America, despite being founded under the declaration “All Men are Created Equal,” was flawed from the start. American settlers from Europe were not able to coexist with Native Americans and ultimately eliminated most of them. The natives that remained were relegated to small reservations sometimes hundreds of miles from originally inhabited lands. The society born out of the colonization of America was also rife with inequality. The institution of slavery allowed white Americans to own and control black Americans, and this rotten power dynamic endured even after the dissolution of slavery thanks to a doctrine of “Separate but Equal” that codified a system of legal segregation. Segregation allowed Americans to exclude one another publicly and privately along racial lines, and segregation persisted in the United States until the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It took centuries for Black Americans to achieve equal recognition under the law, and there is still work to be done.

To this day, the USA is not a perfect place. Our culture is rife with prejudices old and new, and we find novel ways to hurt and exclude one another every day. Regardless, we the people of the United States find ourselves among one of the most culturally and racially diverse places on this Earth. The idea of the Great American Melting Pot is often decried, but I stand by it. Our identity as a country, a successful democratic country in which the right to speak and act is enshrined by the law of the land, hinges on the American capacity to adapt to newness and accept people for who they are, difficult as it has historically been. The never ending strive for tolerance is paramount to the USA’s success as a nation.

In comparing Israel’s founding to America’s, parallels abound, but the outcomes have not yet been so bright. European colonists, this time Jews, decided to once again settle a land that was already populated. A system of inequality immediately arose in which the native peoples were not offered the same rights under the law as the new arrivals. After a series of violent confrontations, the Palestinians have been routinely pushed, segregated if you will, into shrinking reservations. Obviously one could make academic arguments delineating American segregation, Native and Black history from the modern relationship between Israelis and Palestinians, but on a fundamental Democratic level the civil rights case before us is exactly the same. We have in Israel a place that professes itself a Democratic country that does not treat all of the people living within its borders equally under the law. Palestinians living in Gaza or the West Bank cannot even be called second class citizens, since Israel does not consider them citizens at all. They are not afforded the right to vote in Israeli elections, they are not free to move freely within Israel, and they are not allowed to express themselves freely without harassment or repercussions from Israeli authority.

Within Israel’s Declaration of Independence we see kernels of Democratic intention that are ultimately overshadowed by a larger desire to create a Jewish national homeland. The 12th paragraph of THE DECLARATION OF THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL reads:

“THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.”

This part of the declaration invokes the cause of liberty and justice for all, stating that Israel will ensure “complete” equality of rights regardless of race. The rest of the declaration, however, is concerned chiefly with Jewishness. The history of Jewish exile, the birth of Zionism, and the Holocaust are all explained. Through these the case is made that the Jewish people deserve a state and that that state should be in the holy land. Jewishness preceded Democracy in the founding of Israel. The final paragraph reads:

“WE APPEAL to the Jewish people throughout the Diaspora to rally round the Jews of Eretz-Israel in the tasks of immigration and upbuilding and to stand by them in the great struggle for the realization of the age-old dream – the redemption of Israel.”

The ideals of racial and sexual equality promised by the Israeli declaration have yet to be codified into law because Israel still lacks a formal constitution. Instead, judges refer to a cobbled series of laws and existing precedents to decide what rights are afforded to Israelis. It goes without saying that there is no bill of rights either. Miraculously, America managed to survive the failure of the Articles of Confederation to create the constitution we have today. Then America went further to immediately ratify 10 more amendments to the constitution that enshrined the most fundamental rights that we as Americans possess today, freedom of speech and the right to protest chief among them. Israel was not so fortunate–its founding did not carry enough momentum to reach a formal constitution and the rights of its citizens and those occupied suffer for this failure every day. Just this year, the ability of the Israeli judiciary to counter the legislative branch of government was challenged and very nearly eroded. Journalists and protesters that push anti-war ideas are silenced in Israel, especially after the events of October 7th.

“We Palestinians ask why a Jew born in Warsaw or New York has the right to settle here (according to Israel’s Law of Return), whereas we, the people who lived here for centuries, cannot.”

The Zionist dream of creating a Jewish national state is inherently flawed from a democratic perspective because any form of citizenship based on ethnicity forments inequality. Citizenship in a real democracy does not consider genetics or lineage. “We hold these truths to be self evident…” When a nation is willing to sacrifice the rights of one ethnicity for the betterment of another, that nation creeps toward hyper nationalism and indeed the very fascism that lead to the Holocaust. To safeguard against the real and repeatedly demonstrated reality of genocide, a country must be willing to recognize the equal right to life and liberty granted to all that inhabit it. Jews should know this better than all others, yet Zionism predated Nazism and was clearly born out of a time and place that did not privilege civil rights to the same extend that we of the 21st century purport to. Zionism is a nationalist movement from a time before the world saw just how disgusting nationalism can get. Edward Said put it much better than I ever could:

“The beginning is to develop something entirely missing from both Israeli and Palestinian realities today: the idea and practice of citizenship, not of ethnic or racial community, as the main vehicle for coexistence. In a modern state, all its members are citizens by virtue of their presence and the sharing of rights and responsibilities. Citizenship therefore entitles an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian Arab to the same privileges and resources. A constitution and a bill of rights thus become necessary for getting beyond Square 1 of the conflict because each group would have the same right to self-determination; that is, the right to practice communal life in its own (Jewish or Palestinian) way, perhaps in federated cantons, with a joint capital in Jerusalem, equal access to land and inalienable secular and juridical rights. Neither side should be held hostage to religious extremists.”

This is to say that expelling the Palestinians to their own country with a wall of barbed wire between them and Israelis will not do a service to anybody. The two state solution would only cement Palestinian resentment onto a map, and the question of Israeli democracy will be once again kicked down the road possibly never to be realized. It is my fear that a majority of Israelis do not actually hold the creation of a democracy as an objective of any importance. It is enough for them, perhaps, that the land of Israel belongs to Jews and no others. Whether a parliament or a congress or a glorious dictator oversees the Zionist dream is then unimportant. It is enough to have won.

“Religious and right-wing Israelis and their supporters have no problem with such a formulation. Yes, they say, we won, but that’s how it should be. This land is the land of Israel, not of anyone else. I heard those words from an Israeli soldier guarding a bulldozer that was destroying a West Bank Palestinian’s field (its owner helplessly watching) to expand a bypass road.”

The law of winning is pure hubris, not to mention not at all future-proof. A time might come when Israelis do not hold the cards anymore. A people with larger weapons and a smarter army might some day decide that they like the law of winning very much and indiscriminately beat, enslave, and cull the Jews once again. They’ll sit on the ashes of once great Israel and say, grinning, “We won. This is the right afforded to winners.” Certainly the Nazis or the Japanese at the height of their conquest felt that means justified ends and that was that. Thankfully, the United States and its allies were stronger and the arrogant fascists were put in their place. We might not be so lucky next time.

Democracy tries to build something better than a never-ending series of conquests. And yet, the history of the world’s greatest modern democracy, the USA, is built on the back of colonization and conquest. The civil rights that America has so far secured and enshrined were hard won. It is high time Israel undertook its own democratic reformation, and it starts with recognizing that the right to live free runs deeper than blood. Zionists will never succeed in building an enduring state of Israel by excluding Palestinians. An Israel that follows the path of exclusion will crumble. A single racially diverse state that grants liberty and justice for all is an Israel that will stand the test of time.

To this end, I would like to frame the Israeli Palestinian conflict as a civil rights issue. The state of Israel and its inhabitants are obligated to tackle this problem. If Israel remains a segregated state, then it cannot call itself the lone democracy in the Middle East. We used to stick black people in the back of the bus. Israelis stick Palestinians in ghettos. It just isn’t right. The fact that it isn’t right is obvious to Americans but seemingly lost on the people of Israel. Someday I hope that a generation of Israelis will be able to look back on its history of apartheid and cringe.

Will nobody help them?

UNDER CONSTRUCTION– sorry the formatting messed up! Will update with actual story soon

While modding, I sometimes I find myself in a ridiculous situation where I have three or even four instances of Minecraft running on my computer at the same time. Using the Minecraft Coder Pack (MCP), I am able to conjure up a fresh instance of Minecraft with the click of a button. I can choose the username associated with the instance or have the program assign a random player name.

In fact, I don’t even play logged in with a launcher anymore unless I want to connect to a server. My main world is tucked inside my development environment now. By tweaking lines of code in the editor and rebooting the game, I can change the mechanics of the game and test them in real time. Computers are marvelous! They possess an unlimited capacity to create. If it can be displayed on a screen, a computer can be made to conjure it.

Programming can be a headache, but the high of creating something and seeing users engage with it is fabulous!

Dear readers, I am pleased to present Myporia 2024, the new look for AAAAHH.net! Features include…

• A complete re-write of the underlying CSS with real mobile support! (try opening this site on your phone!)
• A new Archive page that doesn’t bug out when post titles are too long
• An eye-friendly color scheme made for cave-lords and tired people
• Room to expand into new forms of content-presentation, including sidebars and web-comic interfaces

I haven’t touched WordPress development since 2020, so this revamp is long overdue. I have tons of web related projects floating in limbo right now, so I decided to just hunker down and finish something for once.

What’s next? Well, I have been hacking away at a wiki-theme that I hope to turn into a cute retro Minecraft guide! It will have icons and be mobile friendly and link to all kinds of useful places. Hopefully I will find some time to write as well. There is SO MUCH to write about, but my attention is split these days. Yes, it will probably mostly be political in nature. It is an election year, and if I don’t bust my ass trying to prevent the Republicans from lying they might actually win! Lord knows the Democrats aren’t going to do the job for me.

I have created a simple little HTML site for Better Than Wolves based on my old crafting recipe reference:
www.aaaahh.net/btw

I hope to make this site a kind of stylized wiki loaded with survival tips, guides, and interesting information about Better Than Wolves. For now, it provides a simple ctr-f compatible reference for all the early-game crafting recipes with some light advice-giving. If someone wanted to get through jump into BTW with the barest possible scaffolding, I think my how-to-beat-btw.html page does the trick.

A few years ago I wrote a blog post about making a comic: https://www.aaaahh.net/how-to-draw-a-comic/

I have decided to formalize this advice into something that other artists can follow to kick-start their own adventures in comic-making. While the steps written in this post pertain specifically to my own comic-making journey, I imagine that my advice could be applied to many artistic pursuits in the realm of physical media. And physical media is indeed precisely what I hope to encourage here! Digital drawing is convenient, wonderful, and beautiful, but I think learning to draw with paper and a pencil teaches fundamental truths about drawing that digital art tends to obfuscate among beginners. So, without further ado, let’s start with the medium itself, your sketchbook.

Step 1: Acquire a CHEAP notebook and mechanical pencils

Yes, Cheap as in Inexpensive!

You can draw on anything from printer paper to an expensive Moleskine notebook of course, but money creates apprehension. This object is going to be a drawing notebook that you throw into your bag and take with you all over the place; it will be crushed, folded over, and spilled-upon. If you purchase something fancy shmancy, you will be afraid to carry it around and ultimately leave it at home. You must create as little hesitation as possible between yourself and the act of drawing, so if you buy expensive equipment that makes you hesitant to use it, then you have failed yourself.

The notebook doesn’t even have to be branded as a drawing notebook to fulfill its role. In fact, you will probably be up-charged if you try to buy a sketchbook from a big name art supplier. A smaller, local art store, or even just a stationary store, will have what you need. Just look for something smallish and cheap with blank pages (don’t draw on lined paper!).

It AINT gonna be Pretty!

Another thing to recognize about your drawing notebook is that it won’t look very pretty as you fill it up. YouTube sketchbook culture is very misleading; you see tons of videos of established artists showing off pages upon pages of crisp, finished sketches with seemingly perfect line work. This is an illusion that will mentally inhibit you from drawing.

Your drawing notebook isn’t going to look like something pulled off the shelf of Barnes&Noble. And this a good thing.

You don’t want to worry about having to show off a pretty, perfect, brand-name drawing notebook to people. The book is a tool, not a fashion accessory. You must accept the fact that your drawings won’t meet your expectations, so fill pages with abandon! Draw in the notebook as much as you can regardless of style or technique. Scribble if you want to! Your sketchbook must be a place where you are comfortable experimenting or jotting ideas. Every page is a fresh opportunity to draw, so let the apprehension slip away. Fill those pristine pages with your art, bad as you think it is, and when the notebook itself is completely full, get a fresh one and start again!

Over time, you will have chronological stacks of old notebook detailing your artistic journey to browse and show off. You might even find that you like your old art a lot more than you did when you originally drew it. Your worst critic is always yourself.

Spiral Bound Notebooks Suck

You may be tempted to buy a notebook with a metal or plastic spiral binding to it.. don’t! Over time, the notebook takes a beating and the spirals begin to lose their shape. As this happens, the pages of the notebook start to tear and fall out. It can get so bad that the notebook can’t even be opened anymore and just implodes.

Also, the external binding of spirals prevents the edge of the notebook from laying flat, which is sort of annoying on your arm as you draw.

Why Mechanical Pencils?

You can draw with whatever you want. Pens are great, No. 2 pencils are cool. I prefer mechanical pencils for comic art, however, because they maintain the same line width regardless of how much you use them. Over time, standard pencils become blunt and start to draw in different ways as the tip flattens out. They need to be sharpened to maintain uniformity. This means that you have to carry around a pencil sharpener or a knife to keep your pencil in working order, and that level of maintenance to be a hindrance to beginners. Mechanical pencils, on the other hand, can be refilled with some lead and they are good to go for a while. If the tip snaps, just click and keep drawing.

This isn’t to say that a dull pencil isn’t a useful drawing tool. You can accomplish some great shading with a flat pencil, but I preferred to prioritize line consistency.

What do I use?

You are going to have to adapt your materials to what is available to you either locally or online, but for years I have used Muji notebooks for all my sketching needs. That is because they are CHEAP AS HELL. When I first began drawing comics back in 2019 or whatever, you could get a plain paper Muji for a buck fifty. Prices have certainly climbed since, but you are still paying less than $5 for a notebook (which is fine by me). The pages also have this slightly off-white tinge to them that I find pleasing to draw on. Printer paper is too harsh and bright by comparison.

For mechanical pencils, I have a slew of different types. My go-to are these little plastic Staples pencils that I got in a pack of different colors:

I used to own a really nice mechanical pencil… but I lost it 😛

That’s the reality we are working with here; you want to begin with cheap materials so that you do not feel bad about misplacing or damaging them. If you want to begin a lifestyle of drawing often, maybe even every day, then you have to be ready to throw your materials into a bag and move with them when duty calls. Stuff naturally gets lost along the way, and that is okay.

We have reached a novel point of contention regarding Israel; should America place conditions on any money, weapons, or resources sent? My knee-jerk response is an unequivocal yes, “Yes!”

Why of course! All of the stuff we send to other countries should come with the condition that it is not used to slay the innocent, destroy valuable infrastructure, and make life hell for others. On the contrary, our aid should be used to promote freedom and happiness across the globe. So, especially in this matter of Israel pummeling Palestinians to the point that 5000+ children have been slain and over 50% of northern Gaza is rubble, we should definitely withhold any aid unless Israel intends to resolve the conflict sometime soon.

But this begs the question: have conditions ever been placed on American aid before? Not really. For instance, Saudi Arabia receives a lot of weapons from the USA and generally uses them to pummel Yemen and nearby regions into dust. The Syrian refugee crisis, one of the largest displacement crises in history, is propelled in part because Saudi Arabia provides arms to rebel groups within Syria. Our fingerprints are all over this stuff, but it isn’t until now that public outcry has lead us to question our weapons dealings abroad. One might be lead to think that antisemitism drives criticism of Israel given that America has never before questioned the intention of foreign governments acquiring our weaponry. Are Jews undeserving while the Saudi royalty is? Of course not, but I can see where some might draw that conclusion. Scrutiny against Israel has seemingly never been higher, despite the fact that Israel and many other countries have been committing war crimes on America’s dime for a long time.

What is it about this particular conflict, Israel versus Palestine, that so invigorates us, while we are numb to others? I don’t know broadly, and I can’t speak for others on this issue. Personally, I have been following the tension between Israel and Palestine since I was a kid. And even when I was a supposedly impressionable youth sitting in the synagogue listening to my rabbi claim that everyone in the world wanted us dead, I questioned. It seemed like conservative Jews were being made to feel that somehow the survival of Israel spoke for the survival of all Jews (even though Israel itself seemed always very far from annihilation, always militarily dominant and backed by the USA). Now that the full vengeance of Israel is on display for the whole world to see, I feel that I was right to question. What Israel is doing right now in Gaza is nothing short of genocide–calling on millions of Palestinians to leave their homes and pilgrimage south to live in camps–bombing hospitals, schools, and living quarters into dust–bombing fleeing civilians dead as they try to find safety–hemming an entire population into a small region and refusing their right to freely leave. And all of this AFTER 75 years of settler violence and the steady exile of the Palestinian people to the small regions that now remain to them. Jews across the world should be appalled that the country claiming to represent us is willing to commit acts so deranged and clearly evil.

The word we hear from Israel’s government does not suggest that they are actively working to end this conflict in any way other than violent domination. Tellingly, Israel uses the American military response to 9/11 to justify its own actions today. Doing such a thing is nothing short of an abuse of history, because the Iraq war has been unilaterally recognized to be an utter mistake. Bush himself has admitted to such. Israel is making its own mistake now, and the Israeli government should stop immediately and pursue a more meaningful path toward peace as soon as possible.

So to conclude, yes, we should not give Israel one cent unless they promise to resume consistent, mandatory peace talks with Palestine with the ultimate goal of connecting Gaza to the West Bank. It is not until Palestinians have a place to call home that it will be possible for a real Palestinian government to form that is not driven by resentment and blood lust (cough ahem Hamas). On a larger scale, *all* American foreign aid should hinge on this same ideal. We should not be selling weapons to anybody unless there is a clear path to peace that can be pursued (looking at you Saudi Arabia). Otherwise, we propel geopolitical conflicts into eternity.

Is there anything more deeply American than the drive to overthrow an empire? Yet for many Americans the plight of Palestinians to be free from the oppression of Israel is branded “terrorism” and disregarded.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Massacre

Remember the Boston massacre. The British killed their own subjects, and the event added to the increasing appetite for freedom felt by the American colonists. How many Boston Massacre level events has Israel committed against Palestinians over the past few decades? How many times have settlers from Israel come and violently taken land from Palestinians? How many Boston Massacres would you take before your decided that you would no longer lay down and take it? I’ll leave you with that thought.