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It was Nicholas who first taught me how to sneeze this way. Before, I would sneeze with the tiniest little “Chu-” sounding like a Pikachu and looking like my face was about to explode.

There are many different types of sneezes according to McSweeney’s. I only know the Pikachu and the Old Man Alone at Night in a Warehouse.

Perhaps it’s better for you to sneeze like an old man in a warehouse, but maybe not for everyone around you.

On the topic of scusimasen, this is Japaliano - the delightful blend of Italian and Japanese that naturally arises from populations living in the diaspora.

Our favourite examples include: scusimasen (two words meaning excuse me, and choto-momento (just a moment).

This is the likely the last of the Remarkable comics for the sake of my spinal function; I had started on this one before I had the big back blowout of '26, and it was less effort to finish it on the Remarkable than it would have been to transfer everything over to my more ergonomic solution. I’ve been a bit behind on comics because I’ve had a rough month for health and am getting some super-secrety-secret comic stuff ready for VanCAF - Vancouver’s HUGE Comic Arts Festival! It’s the first weekend of July, and if you’re in the Vancouver area, come find me! Booth locations haven’t been announced yet, but since VanCAF is rapidly approaching, they should be very soon.

I’m sure looking forward to being in a room with 11,000+ people… all weekend… let’s face it, I’m going to look like the me in the fourth panel for most of it, aren’t I?

Love,

Lily

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Based on a true story.

FYI, I’m pro-union, but the last little while I’ve been treating my body like I’m going to collect an annual C-Suite bonus and leave. The muscles went on strike because the management did not schedule breaks when they were needed. Or as my husband Nicholas puts it, “you must schedule maintenance for the meat mech, or the meat mech will schedule maintenance for you.”

It sure did.

As the above comic attests, I’ve had a bit of a rough patch recently. Stress exacerbates so many physiological things which are compounded by challenges with interoception (internal physical and emotional signals). There’s so much internal and external sensory noise that I often don’t realise how badly I need to slow down until my body hits a hard reset button.

It’s tricky being a humorist and discussing my own challenges with ability, accessibility, and inclusion.

Humour is my biggest coping strategy. During an emergency c-section, I tried to joke with the surgeon. Humor distracts from pain and helps me explain what I’m dealing with. I’ve come to realise that humour also creates the space for me to process things and allows me to find common threads of humanity in otherwise anxiety-inducing and notoriously difficult to navigate bureaucracies. The alternative? Honestly, I’d probably be stuck in a constant cycle of rage and full body shutdown.

But as a humourist, I’m mindful about turning disability into spectacle. We are not performers in a freakshow. We are not a exhibits in a human zoo. Our community has an unfortunate history (and present) with exploitation of people who differ from the “expected”.

When does visual humour cross that line? We are actual human beings, not an amusing collection of gaffes. How do we represent ourselves and preserve our own dignity?

People with disabilities, including invisible disabilites, need to be represented in culture, and across every genre of media, even humour. Children need access to mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors.

Mirrors are works in which people see themselves reflected, and windows are works through which they can see other lives different from their own. Finally, sliding glass doors are works through which they can step into support and advocacy roles to meet and make change alongside others’ whose lives are different from their own.

This isn’t just true for children. We all need to see ourselves reflected in the cultures that we’re apart of and that we’re subjected to.

The disability/spectacle issue is a fine line to walk, even though I’m generally making comics based on my own experience. Hahaha-I’m-bad-at-life doesn’t need to be the punchline of every joke. All the characters can participate in the funny. Life itself is a funny concept, when you really stop and think about it.

At the same time, I can use the medium to build empathy by explaining ideas that people outside of specific disability spaces aren’t usually trained in. It’s like wrapping a pill for a dog in a treat. And it’s me - I’m the dog - I’m often more willing to engage with painful information, if it’s got peanut butter levity either peanut butter or levity slathered on it.

My comics are often about my own experiences navigating a world that’s really not designed to be usable for people like me, and sometimes the mismatch is genuinely alien and funny.

Humour is also a big part of of how I recover. I spent some of last week rolling on the floor laughing. I was rolling a physio ball over trigger points. My laptop was on its side, playing improv comedy videos.

I can walk again, and sit at my desk, and work on comics (with modifications). But the pain is still there. I’m still kind of out of it. At this time, it feels too close to home… too much like spectacle for me to feel comfortable depicting myself in pain on the floor… plus the word bubbles were a lot easier to manage with reduced capacity.

At any rate, it seems the era of making comics on my Remarkable is nearing its end. It’s time to switch to the iPad.

It’s a shame, really. It was fun exploring what I could do within the confines of an e-ink tablet. But having disabilities sometimes means sacrificing aspects of your artistic workflow for the sake of your function. Using my Sketchboard pro (which is like a portable angled drawing desk for an iPad) takes the stress off my back and shoulder and means I’m more likely to be functional afterwards… unless somehow the cat finds a way to walk across my back.

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Little Libraries are windows into our communities

I love walking around our neighbourhood and peeking in the little libraries. We’ve found so many treasures, and we’ve left so many books that our neighbours have taken home to love.

Chloe does a lot of her gift-shopping there (if you get a book from her, it might be from a little library). Last year, someone let go of a hoard of Redwall books, and Chloe hauled them to school, hauled them home, and wrapped them up for Nicholas. It is not a one-sided relationship; our book collection is perpetually outgrowing our space, so giving books back to the little libraries is an ongoing practice.

We are privileged to be living in a highly educated area that we wouldn’t be able to afford without an amazing landlord. I’m sure we have a disproportionate number of well-stocked little libraries compared to many other neighbourhoods. The little libraries connect us to community, serving as a bulletin board of the community’s information diet and giving little clues about who lives here and what matters to them.

They also change with the seasons. In late April, December, and August, the little libraries burst with thick hardcover tomes with yellow USED textbooks stickers half-peeled off. Our proximity to the university means that philosophers often sit in conversation with each other on the shelves, holding space for the tension of opposing schools of thought.

As the summer draws to a close and parents prepare for the new school year, crayons, workbooks, and activities tend to be crammed into these spaces.

And yes, it’s very obvious when someone in the neighbourhood has finished working through a divorce. The titles get… spicy.

Through little libraries, people share intimate aspects of their information habits, anonymized more or less by postal code.

For example, recently there was, beside a BC legal guide to Divorce and the requisite copy of Eat, Pray, Love, a very saucy book called The New Massage, which, um, chose to depict all massage as having all participants naked, and suggested group massages of up to ten people. It included LOTS of pictures of these very 1980’s folks. This was apparently a way to get a dopamine boost in the pre-internet era. Non-sexual, of course, just pure, physical massage, with nine of your closest friends… all naked. A picture for proof, because I could not make up this sensory and social anxiety horror-show if I tried.

One has to wonder if this text was part of the divorce proceedings suggested by the books that appeared next to it.

And yes, I am a gremlin librarian. I can’t help but rearrange the books to help them tell more poignant stories of how they arrived at the little library. It’s a hobby, and I encourage people to try it. I guarantee you will make someone’s day when they wander past a well curated book spine story.

And if you do try it, shoot me a picture in subscriber chat or on Notes. I would LOVE to see it.

Happy Wednesday,

Love Lily

I’m back in school; please help support this caffeine-powered organism by donating $5 to buy me a coffee... or $10 for some new tips for my remarkable pencil; drawing comics sure wears them down.

P. S. Comic zines for the first Mirrorpane collection are also coming soon to an Etsy near you!

P. P. S. - If something about this post is less than accessible to you, please reach out and we’ll try to be better.

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Did you know the body has (at least) 8 senses? I’m sure you’re familiar with the big five: visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile (touch), and taste. But those who aren’t somewhere on the spectrum or haven’t spent time around occupational therapists might be less familiar with the other three, the vestibular, proprioceptive, and interoceptive senses.

An incredibly oversimplified explanation follows.

You’ve probably heard of the vestibular sense, or at least heard of it referred to as the inner ear. The vestibular sense is how your body is aware of where you are in space; it helps you determine, on a subconscious level, whether or not you’re upright relative to gravity, and helps you balance and move smoothly through a space.

It works with proprioception, which helps you sense force, impact, and limb position, which leads to coordination in movement. We have proprioceptive sensors in our skin, muscles, and joints. These work with the vestibular system so that we can sense our position in space and perceive the direction we’re moving in.

Interoception is our sense of our body’s internal needs, like having functioning hungry/full cues, or knowing we have to go to the bathroom before it’s suddenly an emergency.

Many autistic people struggle with some combination of these lesser known senses, getting too much or too little sensory input to have these processes run on auto-pilot.

For me, when some sensory sliders are maxxing out (for example if a room is too loud and that’s coupled with complex social demands, like say, I’m at a party to meet new people, my interoception sense just disappears until, in the best case scenario, I leave and realize my moodles are red-lining.

When someone has proprioceptive challenges, among other things, they may struggle to find where they are in space. For me that looks like gravitating towards “edges” when I’m walking, like getting close to walls. And I am always looping my belt loops on elongated door handles by accident.

Swimming is a funny sensory time. I love the feel of being surrounded by water, but I can’t see much without my glasses, and there’s nothing underfoot, so I’m pretty unmoored spatially and have a really hard time going in a straight line. It takes a lot of focus to keep going in the prescribed direction. The rest of my focus goes to tamping down the social anxiety that I look like an idiot.

This comic is more or less based on that experience. I have taken to keeping one hand out to brush against the lane markers when I swim. It may look strange, but it really helps to keep myself oriented in a safe direction that goes with the flow of traffic, instead of against it.

And honestly? It’s okay to support your own sensory needs, even if it might look strange to people who don’t have the same challenges.

Love,

Lily

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It would mean the world to me if you would show me some love and treat me to a Mother’s Day cuppa joe ;)

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I do not know why the Remarkable cut off the top text every time I tried to export this comic. I know that making comics on a Remarkable, which is essentially a kindle on steroids, is a bit of an odd choice for comic art, particularly when one owns a perfectly good iPad. Due to the e-ink screen, drawing on the Remarkable doesn’t feel like work. My brain says we’re doodling. It feels like play, and that’s why, despite the technical limitations of the device, I generally use it for my weekly dailies. I make these to learn, to experiment, to hopefully make people laugh with whatever I can coax out of a handful of brushes and layering a shade of grey.

I use the Remarkable in my own personal rebellion against perfectionism, as a piece of supportive technology that actually allows my brain to slow down and process information, instead of technology designed to make things hurry up and go faster in pursuit of constantly shifting productivity goalposts.

But onto Monsieur le cat.

Our cat is a considerable length for a house cat. He is adept at finding ways to sleep on the bed that make it difficult for the humanoids to sleep on it as intended. He is also an expert at putting all of his body weight on your spleen while he ponders where he’s going to settle. And yeah, given the opportunity, he will sleep on your face.

His breath always smells like fish.

-Lily

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There’s too much of Griftar on the internet these days. Griftar attempts to appeal to the ego. But Griftar isn’t someone you want living in your cave. Griftar doesn’t care about you; he just wants more tigers for himself, and will appeal to your fears to get them.

If Griftar were an RPG character, he’d be a barbarian with the charlatan background. Nicholas says Griftar would have a custom move called “Be Own Chief” that lets him separate you from your allies, so that you’re convinced that you’re all alone and don’t need anyone.

After all, how else can Griftar run his grift?

This comic was previewed in my zines at Rain City Comic-Con this weekend. New comic next week!

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The lettering is a bit wild here, but at this time of year, so am I.

The P-Word

I hate planning.

Actually, that’s not true.

Apparently, I love planning so much that it becomes The Activity™ itself. I can get remarkably granular with planning, to the point where all the dopamine falls out of the actual activity being planned, and my brain decides I’m over it before I’ve really gotten going. Once it’s been planned, I’ve already done the whole task in my mind, so why would I do it all over again?

As a certified Pantser, I very much do my best writing in the edit. I have never finished writing a novel or a story that’s been flogged to death with a solid plan. By the time the planning is done and it’s time to get started, I’m like a skittish dog at a fireworks festival — I’d rather crawl into a hole than be present.

And yet,

There’s a high executive function strain on my neurodivergent noggin’ when it comes to starting on projects.

Acitvating the P-word is necessary to get over that initial hurdle.

But I’ve never quite been able to master the tipping point where making a plan switches from reducing anxiety and creating clear expectations to increasing anxiety and overcomplicating tasks. Once we flip the P-switch on, somebody else needs to flip the breaker to shut it off. So we hit a point where we became P-avoidant.

This year, I’ve had a mentor at school as a support being a neurodivergent grad student. When I told them I was allergic to planning, and kept avoiding the planning time blocks I’d stick in my calendar, they said to call it something fun, like “Giddy Up Time”.

Giddy Up Time conjures mental images of lassos, hoofbeats, and the smell of horses and saddle soap. It sounds a lot more fun than breaking down tasks into lists and adding appointments to my calendar. It sounds like an adventure.

I don’t know how long it will last before I get wise to my tricks, but for now, Giddy Up Time occupies a permanent weekly slot in my calendar. Just don’t call it the P-word.

-Lily

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I firmly believe that for as long as there has been technology, there has been someone who steadfastly refused to read the instructions.

This comic was inspired by a post by , in which she described the oldest known “watch”:

You gotta know that somewhere, someone was sitting in the dark, trying to figure out why their sundial didn’t work… and to them I say,

“Have you tried pulling out the pin and putting it back in again?”

Love,

Lily

P.S.C - Please send coffee.

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I had this whole post planned on false binaries and how people get confused by them, and how they get used in disinformation campaigns and that there are different kinds of false binaries that get conflated and how it’s actually a fallacy to assume that there is a mythical unicorn middle ground viable option…

The middle ground between killing a lot of orphans and killing no orphans would be… killing some orphans? And that would still be not ideal, right?

So I was going to write this whole long essay talking about all this, but then, well, the comic pretty much predicted what actually happened when I went to write the thing.

Love,

Lily.

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It’s that time of year.

Please send coffee.

And tell my family that I love them.

I’ll see you on the other side.

Love,

Lily

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I am one of those people who is always and forever perpetually overheated. I wear shawls, and if the weather is really bad, a long sleeved shirt. March was the first time I had to break out my coat. This is… “normal” in Vancouver. This is normal, right? Going to Christmas light displays in a downpour and busting out the toboggans on spring break? One memorable year in high school, it snowed on my bestie’s birthday - March friggen’ 25th.

So Vancouver may be pretend California, with palm trees along the beaches in the West End… but a spring break beach party here would be somethin’ between a Polar Bear Swim and Singing in the Freezing Rain.

It took me a couple of weeks to post this, so we’ve transitioned out of our 2 days of snowy season back to cold wet mist.

But it’s coming back. Apparently yet again on March 25th.

Sorry high school bestie… hope you still like skiing.

Love, Lily

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I LOVE puppets. I have a big floppy sheepdog puppet named Derby — short for Demolition Derby. Derby and I used to do magic shows together, and the dog would always play tricks on my audience members. I also have a puppet octopus, a puppet sea otter, and a pair of socks with goose faces on them… just in case, you know, I’m feeling like I want to put them on my hands, honk at the people I love, and have the goose hands steal their keys.

It is a lovely day on the planet, and you are a horrible goose.

In one memorable D&D campaign, I played the bard and Punch and Judy puppeteer, Calamity Buskin. It was a Descent into Avernus campaign, so we were all literally in D&D hell, and I thought it might be nice to add a bit of levity to saving the world.

Fun fact: Descent into Avernus is set in Baldur’s Gate, where the insurance premiums for natural and unnatural disasters must be through the stratosphere.

That campaign fell apart mid-way because of real-world adult problems that I swear had nothing to do with my puppets. I had a beautiful, tragic farce planned for Calamity. Despite being in hell, she wasn’t doing so hot. And as the party descended further into Avernus to save the city, Calamity’s character would arc. Bit by bit, with each tragedy, she would retreat further into herself, increasingly only communicating with her party members through her puppets. It would be beautiful. Poetry told through a series of elegaic limericks with funny rhymes.

In my closet, there is still a sock puppet for each of my former party members, with representative felt and velcro accessories. I love Dollarama.

And maaaybeee there’s a hint of some deeply rooted personal desire to slowly age into a mad-woman with 30 cats and a full cast of Muppets ready to harass door-to-door sales-bots.

So I would LOVE to have a puppet version of myself; after all, inner child work is all the rage, isn’t it? Fortunately for my marriage, I value my interpersonal relationships far too much to possess a Little Lily.

I have pretty strong rejection sensitivity and am generally conflict avoidant. I would 100% mediate all of my conflicts through a smaller, flappier, felt version of myself if given the opportunity.

So for now, I’ll have to keep puppet me in two dimensions.

Love,

Lily

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Thanks to my parents’ VHS player and combined inability to throw anything out, Chloe was traumatized at an early age by the same rendition of the Little Mermaid that I was. Ahh, the 1989 animated classic.

Ursula sure was a spooky lady. And she sure spawned an awful lot of important discussions about racialized stereotypes in media.

I used to be all about Ariel. But now I feel like, girl, your dad just didn’t want you mixed up with the people who were literally EATING your friends. Now maybe that’s not exactly cannibalism, but it still seems like a shaky foundation for a relationship, y’know? The counselling bill on that union is going to be insane.

For the hugest nerds out there (my people), the Medievalists actually did an episode on how The Little Mermaid depicts the medieval world.

Happy Wednesday.

Love,

Lily

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Aye, ye liked the comic, did ya? My comics are always free to read, so why not do an ol’ sea lass a solid, and buy her a cuppa joe? Keep me whistle wet and me hearties drinking up, yo ho!

Chloe continues to adamantly request that this particular masterpiece be placed up prominently, in full view of my pillow. She is deeply convinced that this glowing eldritch gentleman will protect us from sleeping what lurks in the depths of darkness.

His arms are raised to scare away monsters.

Mobile Friendly Version follows. I tried something a little different, so let me know which version you like better :D.

Ah, there are so many heavy and important things that I want to say, but thinking feels like paddling through chowder against the wind. A Chloe comic is a nice break. Happy Wednesday.

Love,

Lily

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(I’ve made a few of these quick “daily” comics with the hopes of putting them up roughly weekly. Let me know what you think! Scroll down to see the comic in a mobile friendly format)

During my undergrad, I was fairly health obsessed, and generally eating boring healthy foods and getting regular exercise. But I was unreasonably tired.

Like a toddler well overdue for naptime, I would come home from school, and would crash on whatever furniture was nearest. It was a good day if I made it to the bed with my jacket and shoes still on. On the best of days, my keys were NOT buried in my pockets, where they would become intimately acquainted with my spleen when I inevitably rolled onto them.

Many times, I just fell asleep at my laptop, drooling on the keyboard and waking up with a cross-hatched face with clearly marked F and J key-cheeks. Sometimes, this happened outside of class.

I was so unreasonably exhausted after my classes, every day that I was on campus, that I went to the doctor. Actually, I went to three different doctors. There was a lot of head scratching. Maybe that was why the doctors I saw were all going bald.

One doctor was particularly memorable. He frowned a lot. Dr. Frowny asked me if I ate “multiple chocolate bars a day,” and was very confused that I did not do that and was active - how could someone lift weights, snowboard, swim, and subsist largely off chicken boobs and spinach and still be curvy? Dr. Frowny ran through the standard advice checklist that us curvy females generally get from the medical system that boils down to eat less, workout more, that’ll cure your cancer/AIDS/broken limb/insert expensive to diagnose or treat ailment here.

When Dr. Frowny sent me for bloodwork, he expressed certainty that my cholesterol was high or I was Diabetic or had spawned some other ‘preventable’ ailment through a failure of willpower. He seemed to deflate when the bloodwork came back particularly uninteresting, so he scratched his head and wrote down that I had “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?” (Yes, with the question mark), and said there was no point looking into it any further. Since I was already taking multivitamins, there was nothing Dr. Frowny could do. I was doomed to a lifetime of afternoon naps with major keyboard forehead.

The secret sauce that the early aughts medical system missed was that I was taking the bus for over an hour each way to and from school.

I mean, I told the doctors I felt tired after riding the bus, but they never wrote that down. Oh, yeah, I guess they also missed that I was very clinically diagnosable with a couple of specific flavours of neurospiciness, but I can’t hold that against them. As a twenty-year old, the doctors I had access to seemed ancient enough to have studied directly under Galen, so I’m just grateful that they didn’t try to rebalance my humors with bloodletting or something.

I shelled out a painful amount of money from my student loans for a parking pass at the university. I stopped riding the bus, with all its rumbles, and thumps, and smells, and sounds, and unexpected social and err… tactile encounters. Sooner or later anyone who rides public transit for long enough gets to roll on the Public Transit Random Encounters Table.

Lo and behold, once I stopped riding the bus, the “Chronic Fatigue” I’d suffered for at least a year suddenly wasn’t so chronic. It (mostly) faded away, along with the sounds of busses chuffing and diesel farting their way to the university and back again.

It turned out I had only so many ‘spoons’ to spend each day, and the bus was just chowing down on them like it was a smorgasboard. A spoonasboard, if you will. Deciding not to use a shifting sensory hellscape as my primary means of transportation for travelling long distances made a HUGE difference in my energy levels.

Now that I’m in grad school, I’m back on my old nemesis. I’m riding the bus again, albeit much shorter distances. I usually walk fifteen minutes to cut ten minutes off the bus ride. I figure you gotta know your limit, and play within it, you know?

(“Know your limit, play within it” is the BC Lottery Corporation slogan to promote “safe” gambling. I guess they’re also suggesting wearing a single oven mitt… to like protect yourself? Do they not clean their machines or something? Is there a risk of electrical fire? Image and confusing metaphor shamelessly copied from Instagram)

I’m a lot older than I was in my undergrad years, but I still forget how many spoons it takes to move around in a high traffic space, walk past a construction zone, take the bus back and forth, and generally exist in a city with senses that have their volume cranked to 11. And no, I can’t change the volume, it was set at max by the manufacturer.

So if I look like a space cadet in my afternoon class or if today’s morning classroom happens to be sensory-bad-bad-not-good, thank you in advance for understanding.

I’ve probably only got two spoons left for the day, and I’m definitely using them to drum out speed metal on my pre-frontal cortex. Let’s be honest; I wasn’t using that anyway.

With Love,

Lily

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These days, the socials feel like they’re all rage for the engage.

In internet history, the term rage baiting has been in use for at least 25 years. And its Wikipedia article contains such gems as,

“American writer Molly Jong-Fast described rage farming as "the product of a perfect storm of f*ckery, an unholy mélange of algorithms and anxiety".^{[2] ”}

When I was first on the internet back at the turn of the dinosaur era, someone gave me great advice for lurkin’ the forums.

DO NOT FEED THE TROLLS.

The trolls look a bit different these days. They might be bots, amoral algos, hundreds of dogpile on fake accounts managed by the same person, or powerful and influential individuals who seem to have hopped off the reality bus several stations ago.

But the advice still works.

The Wikipedia article uses a solid definition of rage-farming as “an offshoot of rage-baiting where the outrage of the person being provoked is farmed or manipulated into an online engagement by rage-seeding that helps amplify the message of the original content creator.”

So please do not feed the trolls. Your anger is a resource that rage baiters are mining farming. Your responses increase their reach, visibility, hell, even their ad revenue.

Just breathe and remember, a lot of it is frankly BS.

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Rage farming can also be a means of spreading disinformation. And with that we’ve looped back to plugging Killer Underwear Invasion. It’s a book for children, so it’s entertaining, informative, and extremely accessible.

Seriously, check it out at your local library, or just watch a Youtube read-through like this one. It’s a twenty minute read. It has pictures. And it’s a way to broach this topic with others: it sticks to the brain like warm taffy.

But seriously, don’t feed the trolls. There’s no need to fertilize their farms. If anything, use the bits that make your fists ball up to fuel writing your next antagonist.

Is crazy out there. Keep your feelies safe and your sanity (mostly) intact.

Love,

Lily

If you enjoyed this or found it valuable, please consider supporting Lily in her Library Studies program with Buy Me a Coffee. Lily is studying to be a librarian because she wants to contribute meaningful programs and assistance to her community. TIPS from writing Substack articles makes it a lot easier to afford the time to research and write articles and comics more frequently.

I have to credit this joke to my husband Nicholas. We were doing breakfast adjacent kitchen things and talking about how having the name James Bond must make for some interesting traffic stops, when James Stocks sprang to life.

James Bond is an uncommon name. Still, there are enough James Bonds out there to populate a small city. There is even a 2022 documentary, The Other Fellow, focusing on the poor unfortunate souls individuals who share a name with the iconic spy. And it sounds like a lot of them kind of hate 007.

On the other hand, James Stocks sounds to me like a man who is a shade too eager to fit in with the trust fund crowd. And yes, the bank clerk is an elf. I write fantasy, so why the hell not?

My thoughts drift a lot when I’m sketching comics. This time, they went to knowledge creation. I promise if you skip along on this yellow brick train of logic with me, it will bring us back to Mr. Bond Stocks.

I don’t think it’s crazy controversial to suggest that social media has changed how we think about knowledge. It’s changed how we perceive knowledge. It’s changed how we create knowledge. And to get really meta, it’s changed how we perceive the process of creating knowledge.

Regardless of the quality of information provided, platforms like Quora and Substack are designed around informing others and being informed. Quora is structured around questions and answers. It literally advertises itself as a knowledge platform.

Substack is designed around the essay and sharing knowledge. Compared to Quora, Substack is more subtle about its positioning. It uses language like “voices”, shows imagery of fancy pens and stationery, and includes informationcategories to pique a reader’s interest. To me, Substack’s marketing screams, “WE ALONE are the haven for the literate elite!” It kind of reminds me of bookshelves in a library, with featured books articles facing forward on endcaps to grab a reader’s attention.

Over the last two decades, social media has brought visibility to a slew of credible and incredibly in-credible writers. We have big problems with misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda. Consensus of what we consider “facts” or “truths” is eroding. And like most things in life, it’s complicated.

We can argue ‘til the self-driving cows fly home about what is and isn’t “legit” knowledge. But for the sake of Mr. Stocks, discussing what information should be considered knowledge and what should or shouldn’t be spread would be getting into the weeds.

To be Frank, I’m not sure what ivory tower gatekeeping or finger wagging has really accomplished.

I want to be pragmatic about what we, as knowledge creators, can actually do.

Oh yeah, did I mention that everyone on Substack is a knowledge creator? Bold statement, I know. I promise we’ll come back to that.

But first, I should explain how I’m using the word “knowledge”.

Knowledge = the stuff people know.

It’s a dumb definition, I know. Never define something with itself, etc, etcetera, et-cet-er-ah.

But I like to define words by how people en masse actually understand and use them. That’s what a dictionary does (at least in theory).

The Oxford Dictionary gives two definitions:

By those definitions, knowledge doesn’t necessarily have to be accurate.

We err when we assume knowledge is always fact based. That would be a nice and neat little world, the kind Terry Pratchett’s Auditors of Reality would appreciate.

In the real world, knowledge is messy.

It can fail the test of time. History oozes with examples - the sun doesn’t exactly rotate around the earth anymore, does it? Spoiler alert, it never did, but a lot of people absolutely had that idea as part of their knowledge base for an embarrassingly long time!

We now consider the Gilbert U-28 Atomic Energy Lab to be one of the most dangerous toys ever made. But way, way back in the 1950’s, it was thought of as an innocuous educational toy. Why shouldn’t kids increase their nuclear knowledge by creating nuclear reactions in their own homes?

So, yeah, sometimes knowledge creation can create harm.

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Btw, there’s a neat video on the U-28 here.

Knowledge can also be politically motivated.

It can be employed or destroyed by bad actors to build up their own ecosystems of what-everyone-should-know-to-be-true.

It can enshrine power structures.

It can justify cruelty.

Knowledge and knowledge creation can be *gasp* problematic.

But let’s not pretend that burying one’s head in the sand is the answer.

Please do not idealize the good old days. They were not a golden age. Does anyone remember Oregon Trail? The past was a place where crapping yourself to death was a major problem.

Knowledge creation is not a bad thing. Learning is net positive.

It’s just messy and complex, like literally everything else about being human.

And here’s where we come back to Substack.

Everyone on Substack participates in knowledge creation.

Some write to educate, familiarize, or raise awareness. Others enshrine their knowledge in their own little slices of access to public consciousness. Even lurkers spread knowledge by liking, following, and sharing (online and offline) what they think is worth reading.

Substack writers are trying to produce knowledge and share that with an audience. Clearly, we hope readers acquire this information. We have the option of never, ever letting our words see the blue glow of the internet. And yet, we deliberately place our ideas in public view.

Substackers being knowledge creators also applies to fiction writers of all shapes and genre sizes.

In stories, we engage with existing knowledge structures with our choices of characters and scenarios. Our biases spill into our work. We are responsible for emphasizing certain themes and viewpoints.

This is even true with how we describe and tag our work. When we describe our work, we think about what people will be searching for… and again, we make choices.

I found myself reflecting on a few questions from Metadata as Knowledge, by Stacy Allison-Cassin of Dalhousie University and Dean Seeman of the University of Victoria:

“Choose anything and try to describe it. It could be an object, resource, data, or even a person. During this descriptive act you will make choices. What are the most important aspects to highlight? What are my intentions? Who is my audience and what do they need? Are there standards or existing practices with which I need to comply? What language and terminology do I use? Do the people or machines on the receiving end of this description understand that language and terminology in the same way? Whose voices am I representing or amplifying? Whose voices am I silencing? Working through these types of questions surfaces the reality that metadata dictates how information circulates—it has the power to name, broadcast, normalize, oppress, and exclude. It does more than describe—it is knowledge.”1

Many of these questions are useful beyond metadata.

They’re relevant to all writers.

As far as writing advice goes, both “think about your audience” and “follow genre tropes” are pretty standard.

But as a writer, am I also thinking about my role as a knowledge creator?

Am I asking questions like whose voices are being amplified, and whose are being silenced?

Because even this comic does that.

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Even though he looks a bit silly, my nepo-baby wannabe James Stocks gets a voice, and the clerk doesn’t.

Why? Because I thought the joke worked better that way.

Peel back the layers of the onion.

Why does the joke work better that way?

Is it because we’re perpetuating what we understand?

Are we recreating what we’re accustomed to?

Or are we creating new ideas that we hope penetrate the public consciousness?

In a small way, my comic reinforces certain ideas and voices. It reinforces the power structure we expect between male in suit and female clerk. This creates a specific way to view the world based on a certain understanding of the world.

And this isn’t about passing judgement here. There’s nothing inherently wrong with presenting the joke this way.

But I am suggesting that we think critically about these questions, and how our work answers them.

We can consider our choices and our motives, both as authors and as readers.

When we create knowledge and when we consume it, we can be thoughtful about what is being normalized.

Since you got this far, I’ll assume you read some non-fiction. On the topic of being thoughtful about what we read and how we read it, I cannot recommend enough that you copy and paste the following into your preferred search. Just find the latest version of this pdf, it’s only a handful of pages long, and it’s a really straightforward read:

HOW TO READ A BOOK Strategies for Getting the Most out of Non-Fiction Reading © January, 2000 Paul N. Edwards

When we consume any media, certain things are being normalized. We do tell ourselves stories about what we read, even if we don’t realize it. The information we consume creates associations in our minds. Take James Bond.

There is a public understanding of who James Bond is. It apparently involves tuxedos. This has resulted in a contractually obligated lack of tuxedos for Bonds outside of Bond films. Because once the public knows someone is a Bond, they see the tuxedo and the brain says, “Yup, that’s Bond alright. Why’s he in a movie about badminton?” We have an awareness of Mr. James B. and the things he is supposed to be and stand for. (For one thing, I can’t imagine he’d ever let anyone call him Mr. B. Having a name like a middle school teacher hardly fits the fast car, martini swigging brand).

But these associations allow us understand that James B is legally distinct from Kir-by. This seems obvious, right? It’s only obvious because we have knowledge about these two characters that includes how they’re supposed to look and act. But who knows, maybe there are some similarities we can find between the two…

The things that we create and share help us create and solidify certain associations.

(I’m willing to bet you never thought about what Stan Pines or Kirby had in common with 007 before reading this.)

And these associations can have consequences for certain groups. Like the real James Bonds’ of this world, who may be tired of people projecting onto them what they think a James Bond should be like. People meet them with preconceptions about how a James Bond should look or should act. That would get tiring.

This doesn’t have to be about James Bond. But James Bond is a lot less polarizing than a lot of other ideas that are normalized when our writing spreads. When we write, we are contributing to knowledge.

So I’m asking us all to think critically, both when we write and when we read.

We can ask ourselves questions and make choices that align with our values.

It really is questions all the way down.

Thanks for reading.

Love,

Lily

If you enjoyed this or found it valuable, please consider helping Lily put herself through her Library Studies program with Buy Me a Coffee. It’s hard being a mom in school. Lily is studying to be a librarian because she wants to contribute meaningful programs and assistance to her community. TIPS from writing Substack articles makes it a lot easier to afford the time to research and write articles and comics more frequently. Thank you :)

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Aaaaaand we’re back, with the logic behind my unfortunate nickname, “Dungeon Child.” Yes, kids used to pick on me in high school. At this point, maybe I’ve earned it. Well into my adult life, I have continued to cultivate a delicious apathy towards ultra-processed, high fructose pop culture.

I rarely have conversations where it feels like I should have paid more attention to magazine covers at checkout stands, but this was definitely one of them. I have the same casual awareness of Drake that I do of Volvos. They’re around sometimes in the background, but I don’t notice them. If my friends are into Volvos, they don’t talk about it, and I couldn’t pick one out of a vehicular lineup without reading the label.

It turns out people DO know who this Drake character is, and that he’s controversial for reasons that roughly align with the reasons people dislike male ducks. (You’re going to want to do your sanity a favour and NOT Google that one, but if you know, you know.)

In my defense, I probably learned the name for male waterfowl in Grade Five Science class. Grade Five Science is pretty much the pinnacle of everyday critical information. It also doesn’t matter which grade you actually learned animal names or states of matter, it all muddles into the grade five puddle.

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My husband Nicholas neither raps, nor rolls, nor any of that jazz. He is a very nice nerd. He is clever, kind, and entirely sane. In every way he is totally unlike a duck. The yin to my yang… or is it the other way around? Anyway, I was trying to make a perfectly innocent comic about his totally healthy obsession affinity for video games that require an awful lot of logistics, planning, or inventory management.

Instead, we have achieved comiception. A comic within a comic. It’s comics all the way down, I suppose.

I have been working on a number of things lately, but find myself frustrated by the digital roadblocks in my process. I’ve finished multiple comics, but cannot effectively digitize them.

In 2025. Yeah.

By contrast, fifteen plus years ago, when I used to make the Professor Mariachi comic, this process worked splendidly. I would ink and sometimes colour on paper, and tidy things up in Photoshop. A cheap and cheerful Canon scanner decently digitized colour. It understood the assignment. When someone puts something on the scanner bed, they assume a roughly similar digital object will pop up on the screen.

I have much less pleasant things to say about today’s cheap and tearful Canon LiDE scanners. But um, they see complete black as light grey, and also white as well, light gray, so uh… I made them a poem. It comes from the bottom of my heart.

There once was a scanner from Canon,

That stunk worse than week-old bad salmon,

So return in a flash,

This Amazon Trash,

Or into the bin Canon ram in.

Love,

Lily

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Today, the tide of solutions could not be stemmed with even the strongest of flex tape.

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My dad recently told me about the jeans my grandparents bought when he was growing up. Sears Toughskins: the jeans that survived handing down through five kids.

The guarantee was that you would outgrow them before they wore out, unless you were a child shaped denim terminator, like this guy.

An awful lot of “solutions” have degraded in quality over the last few decades, and much has been written on this topic. Cory Doctorow has a deep dive into the “enshittification” of social platforms, which unwraps some of these larger issues in our techcentric lives. It’s worth a read.

Lately I’ve been looking for an actual scanner so my comics don’t look like they were photographed on my phone (they were). And I’m annoyed seeing all the secondhand ones that work just fine, except for the pesky fact that the drivers are obsolete.

Changing gears,

I'm not sure who needs to hear this, but it's okay to play with new forms, skills, and techniques as an adult.

It’s okay to learn in public.

It's okay to be messy, silly, and *GASP* human.

If nothing else, the kids need to know that it’s okay.

Human absurdity has an element of the creator’s logic and unique experience that AI can’t parse. And while I was annoyed that Canva added generative AI to clutter up their interface (and most certainly to train off artists existing work on the platform), I was highly amused that it refuses to participate in satire creation.

Y’know, for legal reasons.

Satire is by nature unsanitized creation, that very quickly gets unbound from a corporation’s ability to control it.

So guys, I think I’ll be okay.

One last school related project to finish, and I'll be free to think and write until September.

The horrors persist, yet we stay silly,

Lily

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My child threatened to make me famous for this one, grabbing me by the shoulders and demanding to know where people could see it after a week of acting as an enthusiastic unsigned hype person at daycamp.

I SLAY with a very specific cross-section of the under 10’s crowd.

If I keep sketching these things at gaming nights, I'm eventually going to have to come up with a name for them.

I've resisted this, in part because they're musings in panel form, and, like many things in my neurodivergent world, “lack consistency.” In this case, consistency of characters or styles. I love categorizing things, but hate labeling and naming them. I enjoy playing around with lines, pushing through my fears of using negative space, and putting out something hand drawn, and gasp ‘imperfect’.

I feel like it's an act of rebellion to come back to doodling as a grown-up, and especially as a mom. I feel like it's an act of defiance to experiment, have fun, and actually share the results, when there are a dozen or so ‘AI’ comic generators that can just do it all for you with a few lines of text.

But there's no joy in that.

The joy is in the process.

(More on that in a future newsletter).

Getting back to comics means I'm posting more frequently.

And I am working on other things for this Substack: an infographic about how to read (it’s actually not a joke!!!), a piece on morning pages, a series on the writing and the Enneagram… and I am trying to figure out whether this is the best venue to serialize my fiction, and if so, how best to manage that on Substack.

My last class project wraps around April 20th, so I'm hoping to finish and release some of those projects this summer.

Because I'll be capital B- busy come September.

Because…

I've been accepted into grad school for Library and Information Studies! (YAY!)

Sooo in the fall, we'll probably be back to comics and short pieces again, at least for awhile. So I really hope I can get some of the longer, more research heavy pieces I have backlogged out this summer.

Thanks for following along on my journey.

♥️

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