iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

crepuscular type guy @thephooka.bsky.social · 5h

A couple optimistic parting shots from the afterword.

There is the past and its continuing horrors: violence, war, prejudices against those who are different, outrageous monopolization of the good earth's wealth by a few, political power in the hands of liars and murderers, the building of prisons instead of schools, the poisoning of the press and the entire culture by money. It is easy to become discouraged observing this, especially since this is what the press and television insist that we look at, and nothing more.
But there is also (though much of this is kept from us, to keep us intimidated and without hope) the bubbling of change under the surface of obedience: the growing revulsion against the endless wars (I think of the Russian women in the nineties, demanding their country end its military intervention in Chechnya, as did Americans during the Vietnam war); the insistence of women all over the world that they will no longer tolerate abuse and subordination-we see, for instance, the new international movement against female genital mutilation, and the militancy of welfare mothers against punitive laws. There is civil disobedience against the military machine, protest against police brutality directed especially at people of color.

I think of the words of the poet Shelley, recited by women garment workers in New York to one another at the start of the twentieth cen-tury.
Rise like lions after slumber In unvanquishable number!
Shake your chains to earth, like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many; they are few!

crepuscular type guy @thephooka.bsky.social · 5h

It’s always 30%. You start noticing it in every national poll for anything, there’s always about 30% who are, I don’t know, evil/stupid/some combo thereof. I don’t know what to do about that.

In 1980 Reagan received 51.6 percent of the popular vote, while Jimmy Carter received 41.7 percent and John Anderson (a liberal Republican running on a third-party ticket) received 6.7 percent. Only 54 percent of the voting-age population voted, so that—of the total eligible to vote—27 percent voted for Reagan.
A survey by the New York Times found that only 11 percent of those who voted for Reagan did so because "he's a real conservative." Three times as many said they voted for him because "it is time for a change." For a second term, running against former Vice-President Walter Mondale, Reagan won 59 percent of the popular vote, but with half the electorate not voting, he had 29 percent of the voting population.
In the 1988 election, with Vice-President George Bush running against Democrat Michael Dukakis, Bush's 54 percent victory added up to 27 percent of the eligible voters.
Because our peculiar voting arrangements allow a small margin of popular votes to become a huge majority of electoral votes, the media can talk about "overwhelming victory," thus deceiving their readers and disheartening those who don't look closely at the statistics. Could one say from these figures that "the American people" wanted Reagan, or Bush, as President? One could certainly say that more voters preferred the Republican candidates to their opponents. But even more seemed to want neither candidate. Nevertheless, on the basis of these slim electoral pluralities, Reagan and Bush would claim that "the people" had spoken.

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crepuscular type guy @thephooka.bsky.social · 5h

Finished—this edition was published in 2005 and Howard Zinn died in 2010. Much prescient stuff in the last couple of chapters.

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crepuscular type guy @thephooka.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Teige has the bonus bad design decision of his motif magical color being Unprintable Green.

comic character design bad decision bingo. Somehow I only have two bingos despite 18/25 squares filled

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crepuscular type guy @thephooka.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

The New York Times has always sucked ass

A movement for the eight-hour day began among working people after the war, helped by the formation of the first national federation of unions, the National Labor Union. A three-month strike of 100,000 workers in New York won the eight-hour day, and at a victory celebration in June 1872, 150,000 workers paraded through the city. The New York Times wondered what proportion of the strikers were "thoroughly
American."

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crepuscular type guy @thephooka.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I’m in the 70s-90s now which is making me exceptionally mad, bc you start seeing the same mfers who are still actively causing misery today

tiate combat to prevent further erosion of his support at home."
On October 30, a secret decision was made for war against Iraq. The United Nations had responded to the invasion of Kuwait by establishing sanctions against Iraq. Witness after witness testified before Congressional committees in the fall of 1990 that the sanctions were having an effect and should continue. Secret CIA testimony to the Senate affirmed that Iraq's imports and exports had been reduced by more than 90 percent because of the sanctions.
But after the November elections brought gains for the Democrats in Congress, Bush doubled American military forces in the Gulf, to 500,000, creating what was now clearly an offensive force rather than defensive one. According to Elizabeth Drew, a writer for the New Yorker Bush's aide John Sununu "was telling people that a short successful wa would be pure political gold for the President and would guarantee hi re-election."
Historian Jon Wiener, analyzing the domestic context of the wa decision shortly afterward, wrote that "Bush abandoned sanctions an chose war because his time frame was a political one set by the approaching 1992 presidential elections."

A Yale professor of military history, Michael Howard, writing in the New fork Times January 28, 1991), quoted the military strategist Clausewitz approvingly: "The fact that a bloody slaughter is a horrifying act must make us take war more seriously, but not provide an excuse for gradually blunting our swords in the name of humanity." Howard went on to say: "In this conflict of wills, the bottom line remains a readiness to kill and be killed. ...
The human consequences of the war became shockingly clear after its end, when it was revealed that the bombings of Iraq had caused starvation, disease, and the deaths of tens of thousands of children. A U.N. team visit-

CARTER-REAGAN-BUSH: THE BIPARTISAN CONSENSUS

The press was especially timid and obsequious during the Reagan years, as Mark Hertsgaard documents in his book On Bended Knee.
When journalist Raymond Bonner continued to report on the atrocities in El Salvador, and on the U.S. role, the New York Times removed him from his assignment. Back in 1981 Bonner had reported on the massacre of hundreds of civilians in the town of El Mozote, by a battalion of soldiers trained by the United States. The Reagan administration scoffed at the account, but in 1992, a team of forensic anthropologists began unearthing skeletons from the site of the massacre, most of them chil-dren; the following year a UN commission confirmed the story of the massacre at El Mozote.

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crepuscular type guy @thephooka.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

It's gotta be the album art for Sonic 3 ost

Album art for Sonic the Hedgehog 3 OST on which Sonic is wearing a white suit and a black shirt tastefully open over his chest, reclining and giving u The Look

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crepuscular type guy @thephooka.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

White Noise has updated! Start here and click thru: www.white-noise-comic.com/comic/i1-v8 #webcomics #comics

White Noise update image: a cylindrical basket resting on its side. Some kind of Creature is inside it.

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crepuscular type guy @thephooka.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

And wouldn’t you know it, he’s still cute!

A tuxedo cat on a cat tree lounging with his legs hanging off the sides

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crepuscular type guy @thephooka.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Little look into my Youtube algo here

a waifish new wave guy with a mullet, wearing a blazer with one epaulet and some kind of silver brooch, singing into a microphone. on keys behind him is an extremely cool looking mustaschioed dude wearing a tropical shirt, visors, and a navy military-kind of hat.

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crepuscular type guy @thephooka.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

White Noise has updated! The epilogue. www.white-noise-comic.com/comic/i1-sep #webcomics #comics

White Noise update image: Numair sitting at a table reading off a sheaf of papers, with Sraddi seated on a perch next to a large bowl.

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crepuscular type guy @thephooka.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Had to redo my hiatus plans some bc I ran out of buffer earlier than intended—so here’s the mostly settled plan. Hiatus starts 9/13 and ends 10/18!

Photo of a calendar showing Sept 2026-Nov 2026 with various little abbreviations written on various days in different colors for posting, Patreon deadlines, and working on. Some info is redacted by a big black scribble

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crepuscular type guy @thephooka.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

White Noise has updated! He thought he was done for the day... www.white-noise-comic.com/comic/i1-s28 #webcomics #comics #whitenoise

White Noise update image: Hawk's hand holding a small coptic-bound book.

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crepuscular type guy @thephooka.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

I was drawing over this? but I have no idea why, lol

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crepuscular type guy @thephooka.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Found this in my WIPs folder, have no memory of this. Bunch of very good faces though! #art

A bunch of sketches of axolotls making goofy faces, arranged in a 4x3 grid.

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crepuscular type guy @thephooka.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Next verse! Same as the first! Little bit louder and a little bit worse!

Except from A People’s History of the United States:
J. P. Morgan had started before the war, as the son of a banker who began selling stocks for the railroads for good commissions. During the Civil War he bought five thousand rifles for $3.50 each from an army arsenal, and sold them to a general in the field for $22 each. The rifles were defective and would shoot off the thumbs of the soldiers using them. A congressional committee noted this in the small print of an obscure report, but a federal judge upheld the deal as the fulfillment of a valid legal contract.
Morgan had escaped military service in the Civil War by paying $300 to a substitute. So did John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Philip Armour, Jay Gould, and James Mellon. Mellon's father had written to him that "a man may be a patriot without risking his own life or sacrificing his health. There are plenty of lives less valuable."

Meanwhile, the government of the United States was behaving almost exactly as Karl Marx described a capitalist state: pretending neutrality to maintain order, but serving the interests of the rich. Not that the rich agreed among themselves; they had disputes over policies. But the purpose of the state was to settle upper-class disputes peacefully, control lower-class rebellion, and adopt policies that would further the long-range stability of the system. The arrangement between Democrats and Republicans to elect Rutherford Hayes in 1877 set the tone.
Whether Democrats or Republicans won, national policy would not change in any important way.
When Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, ran for President in 1884, the general impression in the country was that he opposed the power of monopolies and corporations, and that the Republican party, whose candidate was James Blaine, stood for the wealthy. But when Cleveland defeated Blaine, Jay Gould wired him: "I feel ... that the vast business interests of the country will be entirely safe in your hands." And he was right.

Henry George, a self-educated workingman from a poor Philadelphia family, who became a newspaperman and an economist, wrote a book that was published in 1879 and sold millions of copies, not only in the United States, but all over the world. His book Progress and Poverty argued that the basis of wealth was land, that this was becoming monop-olized, and that a single tax on land, abolishing all others, would bring enough revenue to solve the problem of poverty and equalize wealth in the nation. Readers may not have been persuaded of his solutions, but they could see in their own lives the accuracy of his observations:
It is true that wealth has been greatly increased, and that the average of comfort, leisure and refinement has been raised; but these gains are not gen-eral. In them the lowest class do not share.... This association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times.... There is a vague but general feeling of disappointment; an increased bitterness among the working classes; a widespread feeling of unrest and brooding revolution.... The civilized world is trembling on the verge of a great movement. Either it must be a leap upward, which will open the way to advances yet undreamed of, or it must be a plunge downward which will carry us back toward bar-barism. ...

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court, despite its look of somber, black-robed fairness, was doing its bit for the ruling elite. How could it be independent, with its members chosen by the President and ratified by the Senate? How could it be neutral between rich and poor when its members were often former wealthy lawyers, and almost always came from the upper class? Early in the nineteenth century the Court laid the legal basis for a nationally regulated economy by establishing federal control over interstate commerce, and the legal basis for corporate capitalism by making the contract sacred.
In 1895 the Court interpreted the Sherman Act so as to make it harmless. It said a monopoly of sugar refining was a monopoly in manu-facturing, not commerce, and so could not be regulated by Congress through the Sherman Act (U.S. v. E. C. Knight Co.). The Court also said the Sherman Act could be used against interstate strikes (the railway strike of 1894) because they were in restraint of trade. It also declared unconstitutional a small attempt by Congress to tax high incomes at a higher rate (Pollock v. Farmers' Loan t Trust Company. In later years it would refuse to break up the Standard Oil and American Tobacco monopolies, saying the Sherman Act barred only "unreasonable" combinations in restraint of trade.
A New York banker toasted the Supreme Court in 1895: "I give you, gentlemen, the Supreme Court of the United States-guardian of the dollar, defender of private property, enemy of spoliation, sheet anchor of the Republic."

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crepuscular type guy @thephooka.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

White Noise has updated! Let's cuddle while talking about our day. www.white-noise-comic.com/comic/i1-s27 #webcomics #comics

White Noise update image: a close up of Numair with his cheek pressed to someone's skin, looking tired and concerned.

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crepuscular type guy @thephooka.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

Somebody can't read generally apparently.

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crepuscular type guy @thephooka.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

White Noise has updated! Can’t hide from the magical vibe check. www.white-noise-comic.com/comic/i1-s26 #whitenoise #webcomics #comics

White Noise update image: Numair looking both tired and concerned.

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crepuscular type guy @thephooka.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

White Noise has updated! He's getting better at this. www.white-noise-comic.com/comic/i1-s25 #webcomics #comics

White Noise update image: Hawk with his eyes shut and light flickering around his arm.

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crepuscular type guy @thephooka.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

This was my AP History book in public high school in Florida in 2008 and no one threw a fit. Almost like book bans and CRT are all an astroturfing campaign

Back cover of A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
"One of the most important books I have ever read in a long life of reading... It's a wonderful, splendid book a book that should be read by every American, student or otherwise, who wants to understand his country, its true history, and its hope for the future." — Howard Fast
Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, A People's A History of the United States is the only volume to tell America's story from the point of view of-and in the words of - America's women, factory workers, African Americans, Native Americans, working poor, and immigrant laborers.
"Professor Zinn writes with an enthusiasm rarely encountered in the leaden prose of academic history; and his text is studded with telling quotations from labor leaders, war resisters, and fugitive slaves. There are vivid descriptions of events that are usually ignored, such as the great railroad strike of 1877 and the brutal suppression of the Philippine independence movement at the turn of the last century. Professor Zinn's chapter on Vietnam-bringing to life once again the free-fire zones, secret bombings, massacres, and cover-ups-should be required reading for a new generation of students."
-Eric Foner, New York Times Book Review
"A brilliant and moving history of the American people."
—Library Journal
HOWARD ZINN is a historian, playwright, and social activist. He lives with his wife, painter Roslyn Zinn, in Auburndale, Massachusetts.

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crepuscular type guy @thephooka.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Here's the same panel 12 years apart by the way!

Panel of man standing in front of a low house on stilts under a grey sky, calling "You an' Liya keep each other safe, y'hear?"

Essentially the same panel but better drawn and without the dialogue. Above the house it reads 'Do I make my peace an' ascend to heaven, or what?'

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crepuscular type guy @thephooka.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

White Noise has updated! Knock it off. www.white-noise-comic.com/comic/i1-s24 #webcomics #comics

White Noise update image: a close up of Hawk's face. He has his eyes shut and looks uncomfortable.

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crepuscular type guy @thephooka.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

White Noise has updated! What happens next? www.white-noise-comic.com/comic/i1-s23 #webcomics #comics

White Noise update image: A winged man in silhouette coming in for a landing.

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crepuscular type guy @thephooka.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

White Noise has updated! Goodbye again. www.white-noise-comic.com/comic/i1-s22 #webcomics #comics #indiecomic

White Noise update image: the silhouette of a winged person in an orange sky.

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crepuscular type guy @thephooka.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

White Noise has updated! Goodbye. www.white-noise-comic.com/comic/i1-s21 #webcomics #comics

White Noise update image: close up of a taloned, black hand shaking with a few tiny lights in the palm.

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crepuscular type guy @thephooka.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

Had to go back to some pages featuring Emry for reference and realized he was 33 at this point in the comic...and I'm now 35. I was 23 when I drew this page. Damn.

A drawing of a man with a beard and longish dark hair, looking off to panel left.

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crepuscular type guy @thephooka.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

All cower at the sound of his war cry

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crepuscular type guy @thephooka.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

White Noise has updated! Who can say? www.white-noise-comic.com/comic/i1-s20 #indiecomics #webcomics

White Noise update image: a four-antlered deer approaching a huge taloned hand offered to them.

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crepuscular type guy @thephooka.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

It’s a perfect night to eat and/or smell some plants

A snap pea bush growing up a tomato cage with severs pods ready to be picked

A handful of raspberries. Two chickens are looking up expectantly in the background

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crepuscular type guy @thephooka.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

White Noise has updated! Sad and boring and a little scary. www.white-noise-comic.com/comic/i1-s19 #webcomics #indiecomics

White Noise update image: a deer with four antlers, ear piercings, and a nose ring.

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crepuscular type guy @thephooka.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

My desk! It was used by some local news office at least between 1981-83 based on the contact info for public officials that's still taped to the pullout tray, I assume it's a little older than that. It's got a typewriter tray that I use for storing craft stuff. I love this big bastard.

A photo of a big wood veneer desk. It has two monitors, a small shelf, and an array of books and drawers on it among other items. The typewriter cubby on the left is open and is stuffed with more items.

Closer photo of the surface of the desk. There's a lot of Stuff but it's reasonably well organized.

Photo of a pullout side tray. Yellowed pieces of newsprint are taped to it displaying contact information for local public officials in Portland OR circa 1981-83. A newer piece of paper showing contact info for local officials as of 2026 is taped next to them.

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