Hello. You may remember this post I made about the brutal agression of French students, organized by the University’s Dean. I have some updates, if you’re interested. Since Thursday, we haven’t been idle. We went of several marches and protests against the violences, asking for the Dean to step down. As of today, he has been arrested, alongside the History teacher who came with the fascist group and hit the students.
Friday morning, there was still blood on the stairs leading to the Law University. At 1pm, 400 students gathered in front of the uni, where the girl in the picture in my previous post came to explain what happened, before passing out and being transported back to the hospital. Then, we marched to the Prefecture, where we asked to be received by the Prefet. We were, and he listened.
Sunday, there was a fascist march, which we stopped by simply being three times as many and making them run. The police was protecting them from us, even if they were the one who attacked and we haven’t hurt anyone in the two months our strike has been going on.
Tuesday, we held an Assembly at my university, to vote for the continued blocking of the campus, as well as our Dean’s resignation. The picture at the top of this post is when we voted (we were around 3,000 people). As you can see, we won. We vote for the unlimited blocking of the campus until all our demands are met (demands which include the French President’s resignation, only because we know we’ll never get it which means the blocking will never stop).
On Tuesday, the students who were hurt at the Law University went to the Police Station. The police officers refused to receive them, claiming their complain wasn’t acceptable and they were never attacked by fascist. So we sent about 200 students from our Assembly to the Police Station and we basically yelled them into submission. Our friends were received and their complaint heard.
Today, we marched against police violence and fascists groups. We marched fro three hours, we blocked the train station (because the train company employees are striking and we are supporting them). The police treated us like dangerous criminal, and we had to hide our faces because the fascists are taking pictures of us and compiling them to attack us in the street. We were 1,200.
Please share this around, like you did for the first post. Something big is happening. Our friends who were sent to the hospital deserve it.
So @dreriart made a post about commission pricing and I thought since it is doin’ the rounds I’d copy-paste this thing I wrote on DA over to Tumblr because for some reason I … never … did that … before??
So one recurring thing I see a lot in the art community in many
different formats is ‘how much should I charge for my commissions?’
What
normally follows is a lot of bad advice. Terrible advice. So I’m here
to give you some good advice and tell you all about how to value your
skillset and price accordingly. This guide has been written with the
intended audience of folk who are just starting out with commissions,
but I hope it will encourage other artists to give themselves a fair
wage and, of course, a lot of this can be transposed over to other
creative professions as well.
So let’s answer the question of ‘how much should I be charging people for work?’
The answer to this is deceptively simple. Here are the questions you need to ask yourself to form an appropriate response:
Where do you live?
How old are you?
For obvious reasons I cannot assist you with these. But once you have these you go to Google and you type in the following:
‘minimum wage per hour in <location name>’
Which is more than likely going to bring up an official government page for your area. Here is the one for the UK since that is where I live.Now
what? Well. How old are you? Because some locations have different
rates for those in different age brackets. But essentially all you need
to do is get the following info:
How much is the minimum wage per hour for my age in my area?
Now
that you have this, how long does a piece take you? You do not need to
be exact. A rough guesstimation will do. This will form your base price
of:
Minimum Wage x Estimated Hours
Therefore if I take five hours to paint a portrait and my min wage is £7.83 then my base price for a painted portrait is £39.15.
That is the absolute minimum you should be charging for your work.
And please take into considerations the following:
Working outside your comfort zone will up times taken on a piece.
If you’re working with traditional materials, how much for paper/canvas/paint/pens/etc?
Minimum wage is quite often garbage anyway.
Whenever
I say this though, I often get a variety of responses in the negatory
for this method. I have answers for each of them. So, let’s run a
sort-of-FAQ on this method shall we?
I’m not good enough to price that high.
Yes you are. Who says? Your government, for starters. Also me. Here’s the thing. No matter the quality of your art, you deserve a fair living wage for your work.
There
are lots of people out there with no understanding of the time, effort
and tears that go into honing artistic skills. Digital art, making
comics, mastering musical composition, sculpting, or whatever it is all
takes time to learn and we are constantly growing and improving. And if
someone wants to hand you money for what you are producing guess what?
You ARE good enough. That is the proof right there. Another human being
wants to give you cold hard cash for something that only you can make.
If
it puts a different perspective on things for you, think of job roles
that would be traditionally minimum wage. Probably the one most people
will go to is ‘burger flipping at McDonalds’ as an example of a low
skill occupation that is stereotypically easy and for those who failed
in life etc. etc. (spoiler alert: it isn’t, but that’s a journal entry
for another day). Why should this theoretical failure of humanity earn
more than you doing a job that ‘anyone can do’? Because art is
absolutely more difficult than cleaning out a McFlurry machine (that’s a
legit fact by the way: I’ve cleaned one of those and art is way
harder).
Also, art is a luxury product my friend. No one needs to
be buying commissions of their MMO character. They want it? They can
play by our rules. And they will.
My family member/friend/random internet guy said that’s too expensive and I should lower my prices.
Your
family member/friend/random internet berk is a fucking idiot at best,
or intentionally trying to get you to undersell at worst. Firstly, I’d
be willing to bet that the person who said this to you is not an
artist. If so, what makes them more qualified than another actual artist
to tell YOU how to price yourself? Because you trust their opinion?
Yeah, but what if their opinion is formed on a factually incorrect
assumption of how much art costs/the time it takes to produce because
that is a HUGE deal in our community right now. And what if they just
want you to stay cheap because it threatens them? Or, as a consumer,
want you to stay cheaper for their own selfish purchasing habits? What
then? Tell them to fuck off.
But there is someone better than me charging less! Why should a client pick me over them?
Spoiler
alert: there will always be someone better than you charging less.
There are thousands of mega quality artists out there. I’m considered
expensive for what I produce, especially as I live in a country with a
currency that translates highly to other currencies. Yet people
constantly ask me for commission work. So what gives? Here are some
reasons why a prospective client might chose you over someone else:
You are nicer than they are.
You are faster than they are.
You’re working in a niche sector.
They know you personally.
They like your art style better.
You have lots of good feedback.
A friend recommended you.
They aren’t even open for commissions right now.
They had a bad experience with that artist in the past.
You’re easier to purchase from.
You have a larger following and purchasing from you exposes that audience to them by proxy.
There
are lots of other reasons but price isn’t necessarily often the
deciding factor for a lot of clients. Don’t spend your life being
concerned with how other people are better than you or you’ll never be
happy.
I’m nervous about pricing so highly! What if no one wants my art?If
a client doesn’t want to pay you a fair living wage for their luxury
item purchase then that’s a client you can probably do without to be
honest with you.Someone complained about my prices being so high! What do I do?
Refer them to this:
Something worth noting is that minimum wage is normally used for people who are employed (not self employed). So people who work contracted 16, 24, 37 or 40+ hours per week for an employer.
Anyone who is not guaranteed work for a set amount of hours per week is absolutely within their right to charge well over the minimum wage, to cover those hours that they are not guaranteed.
Ever wonder why the plumber is so expensive? Or the electrician? The pc repair guy (£60 to transfer my data? Really? All you do is plug it in and leave it for a few hours..)
That’s why. Because most traders/self employed people don’t have work lined up 9-5 mon-fri (though it’s great news if you do!). If my lovely pc repair tech only charged me £20 to transfer my data, or £5 labour (half an hour) +
>insert price of laptop screen here< to repair my screen, he’s never going to make enough money to stay open, because he doesn’t have people coming and going in his shop all day every day.
If you’re considering being a part or full time artist, then perhaps consider not just how many hours it takes you per piece, but how much of your time you want to spend on commissions. If you plan on spending 20 hours per week on it (not just the art itself, but consider things like liasing with customers and promoting yourself as well) then calculate the hours with the minimum wage (in the above instance, it would be 20 x £7.83 = £156.60). Then you figure in that week you can hopefully (and realistically) complete let’s say, 3 commissions. That would be £52.20 each. Already that’s more than the base price stated above (which I am not saying is wrong at all). But you’ve covered yourself for the additional work and downtime hours, and given yourself a real expectation that of what income you’ll be earning per week.
Also, if you’re self-employed you also have to take care of insurances and retirement funding yourself. I know this is a foreign concept to many people but when I get paid at my day-job, about 15% of my hourly earnings go straight into the established governmental health care and retirement funds.
That means, when I’m working freelance, I have to provide for those investments myself, which means that I’m upping my hourly cost. That’s why I’m charging 45 Euros and more per hour to fix your computer.
call me captain obvious but the difference between how the parkland teens & the ferguson protesters were/are treated during protest & portrayed in media isn’t just like a matter of (for lack of a better term) post-hoc racism & antiblackness whereby white and Black people doing the same thing will be treated in different ways. the reason that the ferguson protesters were treated in ways spanning the range of dismissal, criminalisation, and police surveillance, violence & brutality wasn’t solely because individual protesters were Black per se but because their entire experience & platform was shaped by the experience of Blackness/racialisation, aka in order to defend their right to. exist freely, with the respect they deserve, safe from fear, they had to be against militarisation of the police, police violence, etc.. the reason the parkland teens can be treated with comparative respect & deference & magazine covers etc. isn’t just because “they’re white aka people will be more inclined to make positive value judgements about them” but also because “they’re white aka they exist under material circumstances that make it very easy for their platform to be subsumed into a capitalist police state & even to advance the goals of that police state.” we’re not looking at racism as attitude aka people being valuated differently for engaging in the same behaviour, but racism as structure aka people being.. constituted such that very different goals & behaviours are even available to them, & some of those behaviours are in line with the goals of a police state & some of them (by design) are not. there’s a difference between protesting to protect your lives if you’re (largely) the people whom police are designed to protect vs. if you’re (largely) the people they’re designed to harm. we need to implicate more in an analysis of racism & anti-Blackness than attitude, even “mass” or “collective” attitude. again ignore me if this is obvious but I feel from some people’s wording that they’re going the “attitude” approach
Radical librarian Jason Griffey (previously) wants librarians to continue their 21st century leadership in the resistance to surveillance and persecution – a proud record that includes the most effective stands against GW Bush’s Patriot Act – by pledging to make libraries safe havens from trumpism and its evils: electronic surveillance; racial and gender-based discrimination; and the assertion that ideology trumps empirical reality.
Neutrality favors the powerful, and further marginalizes the marginalized. In the face of the current political climate, with the use of opinions as bludgeons and disinformation as the weapon of choice for manipulation and intellectual coercion, it is up to those who value fact and believe in the care of those in need to stand up and positively affirm that to do otherwise is evil.
For libraries and librarians, that means:
1. Making the physical space of the library safe for those that need it by publicly stating your stance on the targeting of marginalized communities and then following up with actions and policies that back up those statements
2. Protecting your patrons from targeting and oppression, even in the face of possible governmental pressures, by resisting calls for information about your patrons at every level
3. Making your digital spaces safe for you patrons by limiting the data you collect, eliminating the data that you store, encrypting your communications at all levels and importantly insisting that your vendors do the same
4. Running programs that actively provide support for your at-risk patrons, whatever that looks like in your community
5. By being the voice of reason and compassion when dealing with your city or county government, and by modeling the same by advocating for those at risk
These things are vital and necessary. Especially now.
ok but that sign is SO COOL. It is illegal – fucking fuck – for a library to say it has been approached by the FBI. The workaround is that a library can say they have not been approached until, ya know, that’s a lie and they take down the sign.
That is also actually why a lot of libraries no longer keep records of what a person checks out. Like they take broad stats but a lot of computer programs don’t even have the capacity to log what a person has checked out. You can’t disclose what you don’t have.
tldr, librarians can be awesome when we stop doing this neutrality lie.
Why in the hell is that illegal? That’s sketch af guys. Someone in the law making business is shade. Shaaaaaade.
the FBI used to maintain watch lists of books people took out, and librarians didn’t like it, so they told their patrons to work from a book in the library so they didn’t go on the watch list, or took the books out themselves, so the FBI got really pissed at them and got the lawmakers to make it illegal to warn them
but librarians are smart wily fuckers – the FBI didn’t stand a chance
Librarians are quiet front-line fighters when it comes to authoritarianism. When I worked as a librarian, I had to take an oath to protect and to serve the public’s access to knowledge and right to privacy.
These guys are serious.
Librarians have always been quiet, steadfast heroes.
Dyscalculia is a learning disability, a lot like dyslexia, but with math and numbers. Everyone knows what dyslexia is, but for some reason, dyscalculia isn’t as well known. I want people to know about this so no more kids are gonna believe uneducated adults who tells them that they’re just lazy and no more kids are going to think they’re just hopeless idiots when they try and try but just can’t understand. It happened to me, and I won’t let it happen to anyone else.
It’s surprisingly common and is often linked to ADHD. If you’ve ever had issues, look it up – you might find things fall into place for you, too.
Inability to comprehend financial planning or budgeting, sometimes
even at a basic level; for example, estimating the cost of the items in a
shopping basket or balancing a checkbook.
Inconsistent results in addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.
Difficulty with multiplication, subtraction, addition, and division tables, mental arithmetic, etc.
Problems with differentiating between left and right.
A “warped” sense of spatial awareness, or an understanding of
shapes, distance, or volume that seems more like guesswork than actual
comprehension.
Difficulty with time, directions, recalling schedules, sequences of
events. Difficulty keeping track of time. Frequently late or early.
Poor memory (retention & retrieval) of math concepts; may be
able to perform math operations one day, but draw a blank the next. May
be able to do book work but then fails tests.
Difficulty reading musical notation.
Difficulty with choreographed dance steps.
Having particular difficulty mentally estimating the measurement of
an object or distance (e.g., whether something is 3 or 6 meters (10 or
20 feet) away).
When writing, reading and recalling numbers, mistakes may occur in
the areas such as: number additions, substitutions, transpositions,
omissions, and reversals.
Inability to grasp and remember mathematical concepts, rules, formulae, and sequences.
Inability to concentrate on mentally intensive tasks.
I can’t even comprehend what it might be like being a human who doesn’t have all of these characteristics. I don’t know how a brain can possibly just “remember” how to do long division or know what ten feet looks like.
I can’t even accept that a car is more than like nine feet long. Ours is fifteen feet long, and even standing next to it, my brain is POSITIVE it’s small enough to fit in a bathroom.
This is the most me thing I’ve ever read on this site. I can’t read analog clocks I can’t recall number sequences etc.
WELL THEN
I have this! It wasn’t really a “thing” when I was growing up, so I was just inexplicably “bad at math” and had “poor spatial skilled,”’etc. Sometimes I wonder what I could have accomplished if this had been a more well-known disorder.
I’m pissed, pissed, at finding out this information. I even went to the journal site and read the article to make sure there wasn’t a spin. 47% of black kids and 67% of Puerto Rican children?! Those numbers are astronomical and point to a largely increased amount of morbidity (and mortality in some cases) in regards to asthma related complications in patients. Like all this proves is that white researchers only research white people despite how much it can help them and everyone else to diversify their subject pools. This is the community I am joining. The medical community has long been using racist sexist classist data to treat our patients and slowly but surely it is coming to light that we have been hurting our patients because of it. More research needs to be done immediately to figure out if there are better drugs (besides short acting beta 2 agonists) that can help minorities with asthma.
I wish I had the time/mental energy/focus to write something really long and important about this but it’s bugging me enough that I had to get something out.
One of the things that is really, really useful about genderbend/rule 63/sex swap/whatever you want to call it (and I understand there is Discourse around this issue, but I don’t want to get into it here because that’s Another Issue Separate From This One), is examining how audience reaction to certain personality traits and behaviours changes or doesn’t change.
One thing you’ll notice about Naruto characters (and many other media, but here we’re talking specifically about Naruto to narrow the focus) is that there are many female characters who:
1. have a Temper 2. express this temper by hitting male characters (and it is Always Male) 3. distortion is used to emphasize that their hitting is a silly thing, comic relief
This trope relies heavily on the idea that women can’t really be a threat to men.
It’s notable that Sakura, who was probably #1 for this trope in original Naruto, is never shown hitting her daughter Sarada or even getting scary-angry at her; instead, she once (and only once!) takes out her frustration by striking the ground and accidentally destroying her house.
In contrast, Hinata, who never shows this kind of temper in the original series, several times is depicted in this light with regard to her son Boruto. But she is never shown doing this to Himawari. Poor Temari gets reduced to only this trope in Boruto.
There’s a misogyny to this trope and it’s made worse by people often reacting to it by blaming the female characters themselves, as if they were actual people with agency instead of characters written almost entirely by men.
“If Sakura were a man, people wouldn’t find him smacking Naruko around funny” they say, and I say “Yes! That’s true!” and then they continue “and that’s why Sakura is a bad character and a bad person” and I’m like “Nooooooooooo how can you get so close yet so far!”
The key aspect about this female character behaviour is that female anger against men is impotent. It has no lasting power. The male characters are always fine in the very next scene.
We don’t assume male violence is impotent, ever. We take furious men, especially when their fury is turned against female targets, as a serious threat.
This cannot be separated from the fact that in canon Naruto, female characters never, not once, have a solo victory against a male character that isn’t immediately undercut. (Sasori “let himself be stabbed” etc.)
Female characters are only allowed to have unqualified victories against other females. And this is why this comedic female anger is not directed against female characters.
This does relate to male victims of female abusers in real life and how they are often dismissed. But M//RA types get it wrong when they think that women/feminism is to blame for this. This trope props up toxic masculinity and misogyny–real male victims are collateral damage. Truly dismantling this trope is not about making women be sweet; it’s about taking female anger and female power seriously. That’s why I’m vehemently against bashing female characters for engaging in this trope. Especially because fandom bashing of this kind of character almost never involves actually showing her violence as being serious; instead, her violence is still ineffectual (can’t let Naruto be actually physically hurt by Sakura! he’s not a real man then!) but everyone in-universe suddenly hates her for it. This is not an improvement.
(As a last aside, this is not to say that all comedic violence is misogynistic; it’s quite possible to have slapstick that isn’t gendered like this. It’s just about this specific kind of female comedic violence and how it relies on a shared agreement between creator and audience that Golly the Wimmen Sure Are Cute When They’re Mad, What A Laugh.)
wupacing 