here's one of several. there's a proud-boy leader in a discord I use that she sent an original to, as well. this is the publicly known instance.
being good at art doesn't mean you're not dead stupid, all this q shit has sucked in every mouth breather that leans right.
I think the company said her last commissioned art for them is in the next set coming out.
I would say that being good at art makes it more likely that you're dead stupid, given my anecdotal interactions with artists at large. I think this is a bit of a split:
From a post-2013 business perspective, Nielson doing this is fucking stupid. Of course some fat poly ADHD winner of a programmer is going to find anything possible to get you fired in the modern moment if you even incidentally mention you believe there's a difference between XX and XY. Donating to persona-non-gratas is a good way to ensure that you lose business connections, ties, and income for essentially no net gain whatsoever, meaning any choice to do so in such a public and overt manner - it's clear these guys didn't order the prints, but were just given them - is career self-harm.
However, from a "does this matter?" perspective in a broader sense, I don't fucking care if she's a dipshit who thinks that Obama is secret hitler trying to kill all the white people and trump's chosen people are trying to take over the world any more than I would care if she thought that Trump was secret hitler trying to kill all the brown people and israel is trying to take over the world and thus the pogroms were actually not so bad. She makes pretty looking art. The average person that plays this game plays it because it's fun, not because it's some core component of their identity in which every element must perfectly match it. Maybe that's changing as more consumerist, unaccomplished losers with trustie cash drift into the hobby; I don't know.
Do you know Chippy's politics? John Stanko's? Kekai Kotaki? Wayne Renolds? Bear in mind here, I'm still saying businesses-wise, she was stupid -- other magic artists are probably all much smarter by not propping this shit up. But if you leafed through the names of artists in a given deck, do you know fuckall about any of them, at all? For probably 99% of people that play the game, paper or digital, it's just an image on some paper. For .5%, she's a witch that must be purged -- for the last .5%, she's a martyr that must be saved.
It's functionally just such an exceptional, pointless cycle that perfectly describes how something cool - neat art - gets thrown onto the bonfire because something inconsequential - bored autists with political grudges - get involved. I don't know of mtg artists getting pressured for saying "yeah fuck all capitalism, we need to kill the rich and the world will be a better place - mao was a hero" or shit like that, but I'd be just as fucking annoyed and peeved if -that- got one of them booted. Well, provided their art was good, and not just a step up from the foglios.
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on the tangentially related topic of rudy, he's shown that he runs (ran?) a restaurant, failed at opening a storefront, started getting into real estate, speculated poorly and had to take 15-20% losses on firesale products that were firesale for a reason, fucked up badly on preorders to the point where he had to eat losses to fulfill demand, so-on. He's fairly transparent about the fact that what he's doing isn't really something to emulate, or even something that's wholly stable or reliable. There's plenty of between-the-lines advice and statements that he tends to sneak in to his videos, which are utterly missed if one's perspective on him is wholly informed by reddit. He's clearly hauling ass for ridiculous hours each week to make less money than he could elsewhere, but it seems like he's got the energy for it and he enjoys it. I can see him not being peoples' cup of tea, but I don't understand why people don't just... not watch him.
Well, except people who whine about speculators until the end of days, as if magic should somehow be immune from the sorts of things that happen to literally every other hobby in existence. I can see why they'd hate him - Rudy appeals to exactly the kind of person playing a fun kitchen table deck who would point and laugh at someone bitching about the price and CAPITALIST INHUMANITY of double masters while they fork over 1k for 3 boxes of it.
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