All of us really do seem to exist in parallel worlds now.

Talking to clueless liberals who seem utterly unaware of the terrifying reality facing trans people right now. Witnessing right wingers fabricate an entire fiction where trans people are responsible for every mass shooting and terrorist action. Massive internet meme-cultures that are incomprehensible to outsiders.

My understanding is that there are apparently scores of people who had only ever known Charlie Kirk to be a sort of inspirational speaker who encouraged hard work and going to school? They had apparently only ever seen a curated selection of clips that omitted all of his horrendous, multifaceted bigotry. I say this half facetiously, as there are untold scores of racists insisting that ol’ CK was a Christ-like saint who never said a hurtful word to or about anyone in his life, as though they didn’t follow him specifically for his racism, while at the same time there are apparently scores more of suburban white moms who do genuinely seem to have a curated understanding of Kirk that only included innocuous motivational messages. An algorithm tailored to a person can show them whatever they want to see, or whatever someone else wants them to see.

Personally, I had only ever known Kirk to be a vile bigot who said horrendous things about my community, and about numerous other communities. I never heard him say a good word about anyone who wasn’t white, straight, Christian, and American. I guess he had his one black friend in Candace Owens, but she’s an evil cunt, too, so it’s not like him filling that token slot with someone willing to agree with all of his bigoted views is going to earn him any points. As far as I had ever seen leading up to his death, the dude fucking sucked.

Of course, that’s not me saying that.

That’s just my social media algorithm feeding me that side of him! I wasn’t shown the good, gentle side of Kirk, apparently. Just like all of these sheltered boomers who only ever saw the nice half of Charlie can’t be blamed for not seeing his bigoted, hateful side, right? So me having these views of Kirk isn’t me being disrespectful to him at all! I just need to see that nice side of him and it’ll balance out my view, right?

Except, is someone who is sometimes nice to people and says things that some people find to be helpful and motivational, but who also sometimes says really horrible things about entire groups of people, really a good person? Doesn’t that nasty part of them kind of override the nice side?

It depends on how nasty we’re talking about, I suppose.

From what I can see, there is nothing motivational Charlie Kirk could say that would override the horrendous nature of the many, many bigoted statements I have seen and heard him make over the past decade or so. No, I am not going to dig up clips of his jackass face. If you can go listen to an entire, unedited Charlie Kirk speech or podcast episode and hear all of the horrible things he routinely says… sorry, said about black, latino, muslim, disabled, homeless, trans, and gay people, and find no issue there, then I have news for you: you, too, are a bigot.

And, while we’re at it, while I really do think that American political violence is a genuinely bad thing for North America and the world, and I really don’t want any podcasters or streamers to be murdered, you have to admit that Charlie Kirk’s death was objectively hilarious.

You mean to tell me that this guy who spent his adult life arguing for the unchecked proliferation and carrying of guns in his society, including making statements that gun deaths are an acceptable price to pay for the 2nd amendment, while he was “debating” somebody on this very issue, right after he gave a shitty, bigoted answer to a question, he was shot in the throat, thereby preventing his further advocation for guns. C’mon, that is the purest irony.

Also, there was yet another school shooting later that day carried out by a guy just like Charlie Kirk, and nobody even talked about it.

Also, don’t give me the “what about his wife and child?” Nobody marries a cunt like Charlie without also being a huge cunt, and there is no way that cunt Charlie was going to raise those kids in any way that wasn’t going to fuck them up. Those kids are most certainly better off without him in their lives, and judging by the TPUSA meme coin the widow Kirk placed in ol’ Charlie’s corpse hand at his funeral, she’s going to be just fine herself.

Of course, I suppose me just even saying all this as a trans person is marking us all now as terrorists? Except I got a feeling you guys are gonna label us all whatever you want, no matter what we say or do. You dummies already label us as genders we aren’t, and yet here we are. So I’m not about to hold my tongue on my own blog over the likes of Charlie Kirk, the evil little dork who died of irony.

This whole double standard is infuriating (careful, don’t show any anger or that’ll mark us all as emotionally unstable!) These pieces of shit get to call all of us the worst things under the sun and openly call for our imprisonment and torture, but we are not allowed to ever say anything in response or else we are the ones being aggressive. These nazi motherfuckers commit thousands of mass shootings every single year, and they have the audacity to say that we, the most persecuted group in this piece of shit society, are the ones responsible. Mass shootings are overwhelmingly done by right wing white cis men, and nobody talks about rounding them all up in the halls of government, nobody gets to just openly call them slurs and push for their medical torture. A trans girl is murdered or takes her own life, and the social media posts announcing her death get tens of thousands of laugh reacts, but we’re not allowed to breathe a sigh of relief when a bigot propagandist gets a taste of his own beliefs.

Aside from making it easier for them to justify getting rid of us, they are frankly lucky we don’t do shootings.

All we want is to live in peace as ourselves and they refuse to leave us alone. They demand the right to lord over us and inflict the worst tortures we can imagine upon us simply because to do so would torture us, and they need someone to torture to keep this hate-machine that prints money for old, white men running until we all go off the cliff with it. They need to keep you beating up on the pinata so you don’t turn on them, and because it flatters you, you go along with it and never question whether these people deserve what is being done to them. Or whether this couldn’t ever be turned upon you.

Truthfully, yes, I do feel hatred towards these people, because all I have ever felt from them is hatred, and their hatred came a long, long time before mine. If they are also good, kind people to others in their lives that they apparently deem to be fully human, I truly do not care, because they don’t seem to view me and all of my friends as fully human. They can stop being bigots any time at no cost to themselves other than a solid grift at the end of the world, we can’t stop being who we are without it being the end of our worlds.

I don’t care if this gets me put on some kind of a Palantir list. I’m already a tranny and a commie so there’s a spot reserved for me on there already. You could say I’m Palan-S-tier.

It’s not like I’m ever going to the United States again – even after Donald dies eating his 1000th stroke commemorative hamburger and Interim-President-For-Life Peter Thiel is peacefully elected out of office by the Harris-Cheney 2036 ticket, I’m not setting foot in that bigoted cess-pool. The damage is done and Americans have shown a side of themselves that I don’t think the rest of us can unsee. I wouldn’t eat any food or take any medicine out of RFK’s FDA or drink any tap water, for that matter. Besides, what are you even doing at this point if you’re not on some list by these bozos? What? Are you hoping they’ll leave you alone while they snatch up everyone else? Maybe it’s easier for me to say up here in Canada – you know, where our parliament gave Charlie Kirk a standing ovation and our “Liberal” government invited one of the architects of Project 2025 up to act as a consultant. If I’m lucky, I’ll only have to deal with whatever list I’m on during the US annexation of Canada. Until then, I refuse to be cowed into not saying exactly what I think about these wicked beasts, who are the source of all ruin on this earth.

RIP Charlie, the best video you ever made was your last

PS loljk this is all because of my social media algo so dont be mad 😉

New Comics coming out more! I am determined to return to putting things out! Somebody’s gotta fill the big hole left in all our necks by Charlie’s passing!

My bike got stolen the other night while I was teaching my FREE Queer & Trans Karate class! Maybe you can help me replace it?

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This week’s comic is my first in… a while.

I’ve made no secret in these blog posts how I’ve felt ‘stuck’ when it came to making comics. Whether it’s feeling trapped by the exhausting pressures of social media, discouraged by the state of the world and the evident failure of beliefs I once held about the power of art to effect social change, or simply just dissatisfaction in my line art vs my landscape paintings, comics just haven’t been forthcoming for me, even as I have resurrected this blog and done my best to post regular updates.

This past May even marked the 10th anniversary of Life of Bria, and I was so busy with sumo wrestling training that I didn’t even mark the occasion!

Just as I remember being that care-free girl after I first came out, I remember when I first started making these comics, and how excited I was to go into my art studio every day and just… draw. I felt so lucky that not only did I get to be myself, but I also got to do what I wanted to do. I am sad to say that I haven’t always kept that energy up over the last 10 years.

In addition to my falling out with comics, I’ve felt generally disillusioned and burnt out for a long time. I feel like a bitter, jaded, middle-aged woman in a world that is leaving me behind (not an inaccurate description of reality imo). But the real event and resulting feelings that this comic came out of had me wondering about where exactly that carefree girl I once was thought she would be when she was my age. I know many aspirations she had didn’t come true – both for better and for worse. I am definitely living a very different life than what she imagined, and that’s fine; we shouldn’t feel imprisoned by our past selves. But one thing I know she didn’t want was for me to be sad. To be bitter, hateful, mistrustful of others, and to not believe in herself. Those are all things that I have felt far more of than I think she wanted for me.

That girl 10 years ago did what she did because she wanted to be happy. And she was.

She was also very sad at times.

The first years of transition are very difficult, and she went through them mostly alone. During periods of my life where I remember myself being my happiest, I know for certain I was often quite depressed, as well. Dysphoria was a constant, as well as dissatisfaction with my art and career, and sadness about so much of my past being trapped in the closet. I carried on through those difficult times, though, because I had hope for the future. I hoped one day I might like myself and my body, just as I hoped one day we might live in a kinder, more sane world.

But, just I wrote about recently, I’m still me. And this world is still the same cruel world it’s always been. In fact, just as I keep getting older, the world just seems to keep getting more cruel.

But 10 years ago, when that scared, but hopeful, girl first came out, she was prepared to lose everything. She was prepared for everyone she knew to leave her, to never have any opportunities again, and to never “pass” as a woman in eyes of the people around her. While the woman I am today doesn’t have the benefit of youth and the wide-open hope and potential that it holds, I can say that none of those terrible things came to pass, and that in many ways I am living a far better life than she was fully prepared to lead.

The time in my life when I first came out felt like the “end” of something rather than the beginning. I had been through so many trials and adventures leading up to coming out, and my admitting my gender and taking steps to live life as who I wanted to be felt like a culmination of my entire life’s struggles up to that point. In a grand, heroic narrative, that time was the conclusion of the story, with the happy life that resulted being the “happily ever after”.

But, as I also wrote about earlier this year, there are no happily ever afters. Life just keeps going. And while we can’t expect to be happy all the time, happiness is something you have to keep working at. You can’t just reach what you believe to be a conclusion and then rest on your laurels, you have to keep watering that plant, giving it sunshine, pulling the weeds, etc.

Most of all, you have to allow yourself happiness – your thoughts shape your experience of life, and it is far too easy to fall into a habit of shooting happiness down before it can form. Perhaps we might call that “depression”, but as I’ve learned from returning to daily martial arts training, “you are what you do” and a little bit of consistent effort adds up over time. So, for me, one of the first steps of maintaining the hope and joy of my past self is to nix happiness terminating ruminations on things that I either cannot change or cannot know for certain. Starting from a belief in at least the possibility of happiness is essential, and having a point in your past to look to where you know that happiness was possible for you is quite useful for this.

I really do want to come back to making regular comics. I want to be able to feel like my art and my voice matters. Most of all I want to fulfill my younger ambitions of writing more graphic novels. I’m still not exactly sure what that will look like, but I do know that it can’t happen if I don’t believe in myself, or think I’m capable or worthy of happiness. Nihilism is a useless belief, because if it ends up being true, then the outcome is no different than had you not believed in it. So you might as well not believe in Nihilism and act as though your choices do matter, just in case.

If all those struggles I went through really did culminate in me coming out and living some kind of happily ever after, then in order for all those struggles to matter, I need to keep going. I need to keep that hope alive. Of course, I believe transition was neither an ending or a beginning, but simply a continuation, and in order to honor ourselves – past, present, and future – we simply have to carry on.

Here’s to 10 more years ❤

Please help me not be homeless!

All this stuff I do actually takes a lot of time and work, and the only way I am able to continue doing things and making art is through the support of readers like you! If you are able to send me a tip via Ko-fi, or support me monthly via Patreon, it is greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

I originally came up with the concept for this week’s comic probably about 10 years ago, and while I have long kicked myself for leaving it on my massive pile of unfinished projects and unrealized ideas, I am thankful that I never published it before now.

When I first wrote it, this comic was, in my mind, about feminism. It’s commentary was meant to be something about the asinine misogynist line of “Well if women want equal rights, does that mean we get to hit them now?” (barf)

Not to explain my own punchline here, but the whole idea hinges around the proportionality of a threat. In the view of any reasonable person, and, y’know, also, like, the law (supposedly), any kind of abuse, spousal or otherwise, is always wrong, regardless of the gender of the person committing it, and the only acceptable use of violence is in self-defense, when you feel that your life, or the life of another, is under threat.

So, if you are 6’2″ and 250 lbs, and your 5’2″ 120 lb girlfriend hits you because she’s mad at you, while it does sound like you may be in a toxic relationship dynamic, unless she is some kind of kung-fu master of the dim mak, can you really say that your life was in endangered by her hitting you enough for you to hit her back? Can you really claim that you would be acting in self-defense? Now, if your partner is a pro MMA fighter, regardless of if you weigh anything close to her weight, you may be under real threat of being harmed should you suffer abuse by her, and you may need to resort to some form of violent resistance just to survive her onslaught.

In any case, arguing whether or not roughly half of humans deserve equal rights around how you think it’s acceptable to hit your spouse pretty much just proves the point of why women need and deserve equal rights. The whole argument is asinine in the end, for to even entertain such a ridiculous sexist statement with a counter-argument is just giving too much oxygen to trash that isn’t worth anyone’s time.

But that’s just it…

Why are we giving so much oxygen to nonsense in public discussions?

At foremost in my mind today is the continual insistence of Israel’s “Right to Defend Itself” as counter to any admonishments of its war crimes and genocidal actions. Any condemnation of Israel’s actions brings the demand that you condemn Hamas, or to invoke October 7th as a justification, or swear that you affirm Israel’s right to defend itself.

Looking at the situation through the lens of the comic, how does the dynamic between Israel and Gaza stack up? Who has the potential to present the greater threat to the other?

Israel is a nuclear armed nation that gets hundreds of billions of dollars every year in weapons and military aid from the United States, Canada, the UK, Germany, and many other Western nations. This includes top of the line missiles, drones, fighter jets, weapons, and sniper scopes. Their air force budget alone is so massive that, if they had to pay for it themselves, it would take up all of their education, health, and social programs spending combined. Israel could not function as it currently does without massive foreign subsidy. That’s why protesters in Western countries focus on criticizing Israel over other repressive regimes around the world – our tax dollars are funding this apartheid and genocide, so conceivably we might actually be able to influence our own governments to put a stop to it. Short of going to war, what pressure could we put on Iran or North Korea that isn’t already being done?

But I digress.

Israel uses this massive defense spending to control every single border crossing into Gaza, and to hammer its people with more bombs in the last 20 months than were dropped in all of the Vietnam War (which was itself more than in all of World War II). By the way, we are talking about a strip of land roughly the size of New Jersey.

What does Hamas get? Well, they do have backers from around the Arab world. But since Israel controls every border crossing, there’s not a lot of material aid that can get into the area. Israel bans the entry of all construction materials and anything they say could conceivably be used to manufacture explosives – including cruel and ridiculous items like toys, candy, and sugar (wouldn’t want children to have any joy! They could make bombs out of it!) Virtually all of the explosives and rockets that Hamas and the Al-qassam brigade launch against the IOF and targets in Israel, are themselves unexploded ordinances that Israel launched into Gaza.

They are literally lobbing the scraps of Israel’s own genocidal bombing campaigns back at them.

What else can they do to defend themselves?

“But Hamas started it on October 7th!”

OK, so even if you ignore the fact that the Al-Aqsa Flood was the action of a generation of orphaned youths from previous Israeli bombing campaigns who had lived their entire lives in an open air prison, watching their people be slowly extinguished, if you ignore that the destruction of Palestine and its people has been an ongoing process of almost 80 years that has culminated in an apartheid system which persecutes and disenfranchises Palestinians in an effort to drive them out so Israel can occupy the entire region, and if you ignore that the Israeli government has intentionally empowered Hamas over the past 20 years so that they could have a more belligerent adversary in Gaza that they could use as an excuse for military actions – even if you ignore all that, these children on dirt bikes and kites managed to sneak through the concentration camp walls – past what is supposed to be one of the most powerful and expensive militaries in the world – and killed somewhere around 1000 people (about 200 of the 1,200 Israeli death toll that day were killed by the Israeli military in its clumsy counter attacks) and took about 200 people hostage.

I’ll do my due-duty here and condemn the killing of civilians. That’s not cool. I’m never going to say that is a good thing to do.

But I also can’t really get too worked up about this in the face of the death toll of Israel’s response, which has lasted almost two years, encompassed more bombs than the entire Vietnam war, destroyed every single university and almost every hospital in Gaza, and killed what any honest estimates put at well above 100,000 people. The low-end estimates of the children killed in Gaza alone is above 16,000. Almost 15x the total death toll of October 7th. The highest cohort of killed children? 6-12 year olds – can’t run as fast as adults, but too big to carry. This is to say nothing of the massive number of wounded, the psychologically scarred (can you imagine losing your entire family? or digging mutilated children out of rubble?), and the long-term poisoning of the land by chemical weapons and depleted uranium bullets (babies are being born without brains in Gaza now!)

So even if (and that’s a pretty big if), you give everything to Israel, and grant that this whole conflict started with Hamas’ aggression on October 7th, and totally wasn’t at all a provoked revolt against the keepers of a concentration camp, it seems as though Israel has paid back retribution in spades (can you say over 100 to 1 dead?) With their massive power imbalance, can what they’re doing be in any way reasonably called “self-defense”?

By the way, none of this even mentions the starvation of Gaza being enacted right now by Israel’s blockade on the region, or of their occupation in the West Bank, OR of the apartheid system within Israel proper, in which Arab-Israeli citizens are second class citizens. OR of their frequent invasions into Syria and Lebanon.

How does any of that fit into “self-defense”?

Of course, defenders of Israel will say that if Israel doesn’t do all of these terrible things to all of their neighbors and to their own citizens, then they will become the victims of a genocide by the surrounding Arab nations. They will say that protestors calling for the end of the occupation and destruction of Gaza, of the apartheid system in Israel and the West Bank, and for Israel to become a true democracy with equal laws and representation for all people living there, Jew and non-Jew alike, they will say calling for all that is somehow a call for the destruction of all Jews. This is extremely similar to what the White Afrikaners in South Africa said during the global campaign against their apartheid regime. Aside from the fact that this did not happen to the White Afrikaners (despite what Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Grok might say), to do an evil thing, and then justify the doing of the evil thing by saying you fear the consequences of having done the evil thing, is not self-defense. It is cry-bullying, and we live in an exceptional era for it (future blog post on that to come). No person rallying for Palestine is calling for the destruction of Jews in Israel (or anywhere) – a great many of them are Jews themselves, and many more are members of persecuted minorities who know first-hand the pain and terror of ethnic cleansing. These people are simply calling for justice, for international law to be upheld, and for an end to senseless violence.

In traditional Okinawan Karate, one was not ever meant to use their karate in violence. The true purpose of karate training was to strengthen one’s body and one’s moral character, so that they could confidently approach any situation in the spirit of non-violence. Even should the other party assail them with blows, they would not resort to using the incredible violence that they were capable of, and their strong bodies would be able to withstand the attack until they can convince the other party to stop and be reasonable. Many, more modern martial arts masters have affirmed that, should they be robbed by a mugger, they would willingly give them their wallet, as there is nothing within it that is worth doing another person harm.

To be truly strong is to be in a position to show kindness and patience. To resort to violence is to lose control of a situation or to succumb to fear, anger, or selfishness.

True self-defense can never involve retribution for the sake of inflicting punishment, and it can never include gratuitous violence. What Israel is doing is no more self-defense than punching a toddler who slaps you in a tantrum. They hold this population in the palm of their hand, and any violence that occurs in this situation is ultimately on them.

What is amazing is just how resilient the Palestinian people are. Though, that they have to be is a failure on our part. This isn’t something they trained for, it’s something that was foisted upon them by people in foreign lands.

Maybe they will be resilient enough to withstand Israel’s blows until they are willing to be reasonable and work for mutual justice, rather than greed and domination?

One can only hope. (And protest, and fund raise, and have difficult conversations, and

I NEED YOUR HELP!

I can continue making art and writing only with the support of my readers! I need to make rent this month and I am definitely going to come up short if I don’t ask a little more aggressively than I normally would.

Supporting my work with a monthly pledge to my Patreon is a HUGE help.

Buying me a coffee on Ko-fi or contributing directly to my PayPal also help out immensely.

If you want art from me, you can commission me! Headshots and sketches start at just $20. Send me a message at lifeofbria at gmail.com and we’ll talk!

Any support you are able to give during these lean times is greatly appreciated!

I honestly can’t remember if I ever posted this comic before. As I’ve written before, I have so many comics that I’ve done and then just sat on, I can’t always keep track of what’s been put where.

Luckily, greed and evil are evergreen content!

During this time of terror and uncertainty in the face of rising fascism in the United States and their Genocide Colony, Israel, so many people are hurting and in need of help. And yet, the priority of the US government this week has been to cut healthcare not just to over 150,000 transgender Americans explicitly, but also to countless others on Medicare and Medicaid, all in service of further cutting taxes for the wealthiest people and corporations on Earth. This is just one further step towards their goal of creating a society based entirely around the power of the wealthy (truly, we’ve been there for a long time, but now they’re just dabbing on us).

Any time you protest or complain or ask for help in the face of any of our society’s cruel policies, you are admonished for failing to live up to their standard of how a human being should live:

“How could you be so irresponsible?“

“Why don’t you work harder?“

“You should have gotten an education.“

or better yet

“You shouldn’t have wasted money on that education!“

Their answer to how people should live their lives, how society should be structured, and what should be valued within a person’s accomplishments, always just so happens to align with what benefits them. Money always ends up being of prime importance, as well as “personal responsibility” and “work ethic” – always in service to those who just so happen to have the money to pay you.

As if they are so good with money! Donald Trump himself has gone bankrupt, like, five times, and let’s not forget the 2008 market crash that resulted in the biggest banks on Earth getting bailed out by the Obama government.

I frequently think of the Kurosawa film, Rashomon, and the short story it was based on, In a Bamboo Grove, which details the investigation of a murder and the questioning of all of those involved. The main takeaway of the story: Everyone lies. From the suspect, to the witnesses, to even the victim (as channeled by a spiritual medium). Everybody tells a version of events, whether they mean to or not, that just so happens to align with their interests. When we’re talking about an individual in their day to day life, this really doesn’t matter too much, most of the time. But if you have a disproportionate amount of wealth and power and your decisions and actions have profound, sweeping consequences for millions of people, yeah, it kinda matters if you are being truthful with yourself and others and whether your guiding beliefs are rooted in something resembling reality.

These Silicon Valley psychos take mushrooms or go on a yoga retreat and then become zealots for “Longtermerism” or “Effective Altruism” or whatever anti-human philosophy they latch onto to justify why they deserve their position in society and why they don’t have to feel bad about anything they do. Spiritual experiences, whether pharmacologically facilitated or not, can be quite profound, but it is vitally important to not just allow yourself to be swept away by whatever it is you want to hear. To be of any value, any kind of spiritual or philosophical pursuit requires a practice of honest and emotionally mature inquiry into one’s own thoughts and behaviors. It requires self-reflection and a willingness toward self-critique. If all you’ve ever done is solve your problems with money, if all you have to do is pay people and they will do whatever you ask of them, if everybody around you will always tell you what you want to hear because you hold the power of life and death over them, then how likely do you think it is that such a person would be in the habit of genuine self-reflection?

Because, no, the people in charge of all of our lives don’t care about honesty or truth or what is actually good for anybody. They just want to keep on being rich, and keep feeling good about being rich, even as the world burns around them.

The same goes for any oppressor authority.

Cis people would believe in the validity of cis genders, but not trans ones, wouldn’t they?

Straight people would believe in the validity of heterosexuality over homosexuality.

Men would believe in the primacy of “males” over “females”.

White people would believe in the supremacy of their race over all others.

This, of course, is not to say that every member of any such group believes such things. But any time a member of such a group believes such a thing and demands that you do, too, well…

How. Convenient. For. You.

The good news is we can nakedly see the invalidity of their values. The society they’ve built and demand we toil and die for serves virtually nobody. The wicked deeds they do become increasingly obvious and demented.

One of the values of growing up trans is having a sense from my earliest memories that there was something wrong with how everything was organized – no matter what lies they told me to justify things being how they are, I had an intrinsic sense within myself that this was all bullshit. Seeing events fairly early on, like the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and then later the 2008 market crash, only solidified the sense that this order was built on evil.

I imagine the kids growing up today seeing the likes of Donald Trump and all his evil friends stripping the USA for copper wire, and the ghouls in Israel hiding behind the Holocaust to get away with doing a Holocaust of their own (all with the support of the politicians of the west) really only undermines their faith in the societal order even further. But with the rise of Right Wing Zoomers and the embrace of a kind of ruthless, cynical grifter culture based in generative AI and online dropshipping, I fear that the cultural undermining has gone too far and in an unhelpful direction. If people lose too much hope and belief in society, then they become truly just for themselves. They might not believe in the fairy tales of work ethic and toiling for a rich old man, but they also don’t believe in helping anybody besides themselves. This, too, is a kind of self-serving lie. One perhaps built out of fear, and a need to survive in an increasingly non-functional and contradictory system.

It frankly seems all too inevitable, sadly.

I’m reminded of being a kid in highschool, seeing the cracks in the authority of the flawed human beings in charge of my life for six hours a day, the dysfunction of the class room, the pointlessness of activities that were demanded we take seriously, and the kids who were getting away with bullying and misbehaving while others were arbitrarily singled out for punishment for far lesser offenses, and I remember just… checking out. Not caring about any of it anymore and just doing whatever I wanted to. None of it seemed to matter, so why waste a single bit of energy following the rules? Why be invested in the validity of this institution that claimed total control over years and years of my life?

A certain amount of this is very healthy and necessary. Don’t waste your life being trapped in some horrible person’s self-serving fiction of how the world works, toiling in a system that benefits them, but not you! But don’t replace that fiction with another selfish fiction that just so happens to tell you whatever you want to hear.

Left Wing ideas about socialist programs are depicted as lazy people who want free hand outs, but the truth is, it’s not about getting free stuff, it’s about getting the stuff that you have already earned, but currently goes to others who did absolutely nothing to earn it. Creating a truly equitable society would require that we as a society take a painful look at many of the things we value and whether or not they actually serve human flourishing – like, say, the right to own as many homes as you can afford to buy or the right to reap the benefits from other people’s labor because you own the business they need to work at in order to survive. We’ll have to let go of comforting myths of personal exceptionalism and accept the fact that nobody accomplishes anything truly on their own. If you have any aspirations of being above others, or if you are invested in yourself as being exceptional and deserving of more than other people, well, you’re going to have to let go of that if you want to make a better world. Many people online who fancy themselves as Left Wing activists are sadly still invested in a self-serving lie of personal branding and celebrity. Their activism is really about them and their own personal success rather than whatever cause they claim to champion. If you want to make real change, you’re gonna have to let go of that soothing lie you tell about yourself. That you are better than others, that you deserve to have more than them.

I am somebody who is never not working hard in my life, and I have accomplished a great many things in my close to 38 years on this planet. But I constantly fight against any impulse that I deserve anything more than others, or that the things I have are entirely because of my own efforts. Everything I have is because of the kindness of others. Whether it’s my supporters on Patreon, or the love and support of my wife, or the publicly funded healthcare system that saved me from cancer, or my parents who read to me from a young age and opened up my imagination, any opportunity I have had to work hard and have my hard work pay off is an immense privilege that has been gifted to me by the hard work and generosity of others.

It would be nice if others in our society who have benefited even more greatly from the work of others would be willing to take a look in the mirror and recognize that.

So next time some authority demands that you adhere to their values and their view of how the world works, just think: How convenient for you.

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I am also currently accepting art commissions! Character sketches and headshots as low as $20! Send an e-mail to lifeofbria at gmail.com for all inquiries!

Well, I won! I took home the big bag of rice from the 2025 Vancouver Spring Sumo Basho!

All of my three whole weeks of training paid off! I couldn’t have done it without the help and support of my coach, Sony, over at Praxis Grappling, and the Kensington Judo boys, as well as the loving support of my wonderful wife, and the help and support of my best friend and long-time training partner, Jazz.

My division – the “Heavy Lightweights” – was pretty stacked. I was up against the former champion (who is also head of the Vancouver Sumo Club), a co-facilitator of the sumo club (who is also a skilled judoka), and the wife of the head of the Rain City Sumo Club from Seattle (who was a total powerhouse!!) But I swept the division without a single defeat across multiple matches against each opponent! (although, I had one draw in my very first match, which was against my Seattle opponent, but which resulted in a rematch that I handily won)

Truthfully, I didn’t feel like I had to work very hard. While I competed under the name of “Buff Aunt Bria”, and made a big show of flexing my muscles, I came into this competition not wanting to win by strength, which I don’t think would have even worked against my opponent from Seattle. So I wasn’t charging and pushing super hard the way my opponents were. I focused on using a solid stance and posture, taken largely from the Uechi-ryu Sanchin kata that we teach at Kumakai, and combined it with tai chi push hands skills to neutralize my opponents’ awesome force and keep them from controlling my hips, shoulders, and elbows. In the end, they practically threw themselves by their own efforts to unbalance me. There were a couple of times where I had back to back matches, and I was asked if I needed a moment to catch my breath. I did not, as I wasn’t pushing and struggling the way everyone else was.

Many, many people came up to congratulate me and compliment me on my martial arts skills. My favourite by far was the elderly Japanese woman who emphatically told me she loved watching my “fighting spirit”. So, evidently, my performance seemed impressive to observers. Sweeping a stacked division without a single defeat in a sport I was competing in for the very first time after three weeks of preparation? Not too bad!

And yet, I wasn’t happy.

While I did win all of my matches, I didn’t have the time or wherewithal to use any of the techniques I had been drilling. I had been focusing on hitting single leg takedowns, foot sweeps, using arm drags to get to side control and pick my opponents up, and even fireman’s carry throws – all things that I had hit in sparring against larger, more powerful judoka. But I didn’t get even close to using any of that in the competition, primarily because people were pushing and charging too violently for my competition-noob brain to process how to enact my plan. My mistake was, because I had heard that strong judoka may show up to the competition, I primarily trained against judo. But a judoka wrestles much differently from a sumo specialist. They will be much more technical, trying to get grips and set up takedowns, instead of the power charge of forward momentum that is favoured by the rule-set of sumo.

So, despite my win, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed in myself.

In my melancholy, I was reminded of an episode of the fighting anime, Kengan Ashura. The villain, Kanoh Agito, a musclebound powerhouse who was heavily favoured to win the series’ titular tournament, is as skilled as he is proud, and so he insists that he be capable of beating his opponents at their own game, rather than doing the actual thing you typically must do in fighting, which is to employ a suitable strategy to disrupt your opponent’s strengths and fight them where they are weakest. In his match against the god-like Thai Boxing champion, Kaolan Wongsawat, Agito is unable to out-box his opponent, and is forced to beat him by countering his style with grappling. After his victory against such a legendary opponent, as soon as he is alone, this hard, fearsome man who under most circumstances shows almost no emotion and is regarded as a god of violence by virtually everyone around him, begins to cry. He starts beating up on himself for his inability to win the way he thought he “should have”.

I thought of this big, evil beefus having a little tantrum at himself over such a silly, prideful reason, and my feelings of inadequacy started to melt away. I remembered all of the things I have laid out in this post so far and decided to stop being so hard on myself. As a fortune cookie fortune that I keep on my altar alongside my Tarot cards told me “No one is happy who does not think himself so.” My feelings about my performance are entirely up to me – especially if my misgivings are entirely about not “winning the right way”. I could sit and stew and beat myself up, or I can feel proud of my effort, analyze my performance, and begin work to figure out how to accomplish whatever it is I would like to try doing next time.

Truly, though, in grappling, as in life, you don’t actually get to call the shots. You can’t go into a match and say “I’m going to hit a fireman’s carry throw on this person”. Like, maybe, if the situation arises. Grappling is about receiving an opponent’s energy and taking it where it wants to go. You don’t throw them, they throw themselves. My real failure wasn’t in not being skilled enough to do the techniques I had planned, it was in my hubris of believing that was even in my control in the first place.

I was sore the next day after the tournament, but less so because of the tournament itself, and more because of the workout I did that night after. I immediately began training for the next one! The Powell Street Festival is in August, and they have a sumo tournament there, as well. I’ve heard even stronger opponents often show up to that one! A little over two months of preparation is a lot more than three weeks, and I’m excited to see what I could do if I apply myself over a longer period of time. The only hiccup is that I also must be training for my Shodan (black belt) exam in August as well, which will call for a very different skill-set than sumo. If I want to balance these two somewhat contradictory training protocols, I’m going to have to think about employing a different strategy in the August tournament. Either way, I’m excited to test myself further in competition, and after competing in sumo once more, I would like to try out other competitions, like judo, karate, kickboxing, and eventually, kudo – a full-contact MMA-like competition circuit that primarily consists of a combination of judo and karate (hence the name, kudo) and that our karate club is moving towards being affiliated with.

Finally, of all the things I have to be proud of in my first real tournament experience, I am most proud of this:

I made this art for my coach, Sony, who I had heard is a big fan of 90’s comics. If you ever go train at Kensington Judo (and I highly recommend that you do), you may just see it framed and hanging on the wall. I planned the composition out digitally and then used my new projector I had been gifted to transfer it to paper by tracing the projected image in blue pencil, before finishing the art in ink.

I’m showing this partially because, I gotta be real, I need money.

Training this much has really taken my focus away from work, and I have basically a week to make rent. Yes, you can tip me on Ko-fi, support me on Patreon, or donate directly to my Paypal, but really, what I would like best is to make some more art for people!

Would you like some art from me? Please let me draw something for you!

I can do you something like I did for Coach Sony for $150 (either digital or as physical art). Or a simple headshot for $20. I’ll make more posts about opportunities to get art from me, but if you are interested, please e-mail me at lifeofbria at gmail.com, and we can get going right away!

Please help me keep this Win Train going by helping me find a bit more Work/Training balance in my life!

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