Two more inked sketches - the colour version of the valkyrie pic I posted, and a very rough mock-up of a ‘Rosie the Riveter’-style picture of a woman with a prosthetic hand. I’m hoping to use the second one as a jumping-off point for a short story about skilled labour, if I can get my shit together.
This is my first mock-up of a poster for a project C. (and A.!) and I are working on. I plan to draw in some tiny people doing various crafty things, but C. suggested taking a scan sans folk, so I did. I’ll probably do another one from scratch since I screwed up a bunch of the inking.
In other news, having an 8.5 by 11 sketchbook is my new favourite thing.
A character concept I created for my ‘Hero City’ fictional world, based on the excellent aubade and the idea of ‘warrior librarians’. Armed with an electrified rapier, a Viking-esque helmet with radio link, a comfortable leather jerkin and matching leggings, and a satchel of wonders, this Librarian-Errant of Congress is an elite agent sent to retrieve and preserve information in a land given to chaos. There are several such women, named after troubadour songs of old and well-versed in all that may become a librarian.
This is just the black and white version, obviously, and I will be colouring it in later.
I’ll probably post something longer and more rambling about Mad Pride, the word ‘mad’, being ‘mad’, et cetera et cetera, but for now enjoy what I think should be the international logo of Mad Pride!
Today is the first official day of Script Frenzy, and although I haven’t written anything yet I’ve got the first scene (the cold open… that’s what those kids are calling it these days, right?) more or less mapped out in my head visually.
In addition, and this is an extremely vital part of my creative process and probably the same for many others, I’ve figured out what song should cue up after the action starts, to give just the right feel of “whoa shit things just got real son”. Spoiler alert: it’s the song I just uploaded here.
The combination of meandering banjo, sexy electric guitar, and just-a-titch creepy piano encapsulates everything I want the show to be. And the lyrics! The lyrics, in my understanding, seem to hint at a badass babe who won’t take shit from anyone, even if the overall intimation is also a bit of a “crazy eye” stereotype. I hope you can listen to this and envision the blasted, chaotic landscape of Hero City being traversed by some ladies with dirt on their faces and blood on their boots.
Today I did some brainstorming on general story elements, like what cities the main characters are from and what they did versus what they do. Since subverting stereotypes is my main goal, I opened the question of occupations (at least for one character) to facebook discussion: in what profession are women -least- represented? Lawyers, doctors, and security officers used to be three major segments that were male dominated, but the last two decades or so has shown vigorous changes. I’m sure you can name a couple female characters for each of those categories without trying too hard. So, what’s the patriarchal position de jour?
The general agreement was on sciences, especially sciences with a mechanical or mathematical bent. Engineers are almost always male, as are architects. A surprising (but accurate!) suggestion was blue collar workers - cab drivers, construction workers, that sort of thing. Mostly the conversation orbited around traits that women are almost always shown to have - the desire for babies (or resistance to the idea that crumbles at the first sight of baby), lack of self-confidence, expertise that’s unacknowledged except as secondary to a male of the profession, and so on. While there’s obviously way more that’s wrong with the gender dynamic of media depictions than any one person can tackle, I feel good that I’m trying to knock down even a few stereotypes while putting down a story.
Today’s picture is brought to you by hours of (painful) Googling and searching of Deviant Art and Flickr. Enid is my maternal grandmother’s name, and she is the queen of all badass, no-nonsense ladies in my opinion. Sykes I chose as a placeholder name for reasons I can’t recall, though I’ll probably change it since C. hates it with a fiery passion.
More tomorrow!
Once more I plan to mend my broken promises of updating regularly, but this time with a bit of practical record-keeping to back it up - I will be participating (and hopefully completing) Script Frenzy this year. I will be working on a story world I created a few years back, Hero City, a southwestern US mutant wasteland adventure with a heart of gold. My main goals in completing this script, beside the obvious one of completing a script, are:
1) To create a show with majority female characters, majority person-of-colour characters, and a show that’ll pass the Bechdel Test/Deggans Rule every episode.
2) To showcase some of the left-out details of (Southwestern) US culture as portrayed on television - among other things, I’d like to highlight the contributions of minorities to the shaping of the US ‘frontier’, and address issues of race and identity within the microcosm of the Hero City world. An example of this would be DeFord Bailey, a damned talented man who was all-too-predictably left poor and forgotten.
3) To raise money for the charity behind Script Frenzy, the Office of Letters and Light, who do a lot of amazing work and have been a driving force for so many aspiring writers of all ages. I have a personal fundraising page, that I will be decking out with all kinds of goodies as the month wears on.
4) To gear myself up for more serious pursuit of writing projects and blogging, among others! I have no link for that, since you are already at my blog.
I will be uploading snippets of my script and script-related activities over the course of April, so stay tuned or stay some other thing!
For a word that simply describes a farm animal (a common and, given the bacon fetishists, particularly beloved one), ‘pig’ and variants thereof are peculiarly value-laden. Take a minute and think of how many different uses of it you know, and then of how many of those are negative or offensive. Pigs themselves are perceived as obese, lazy, and dirty - characteristics that are patently untrue of any natural pig. Yes, some farmed pigs grow excessively fat and have proportionately abnormal behaviour, but that would be like classifying all human men as dickless by way of the existence of eunuchs. It’s inaccurate, and it’s ignorant, and it’s a little bit ridiculous.
As for the metaphorical value of the word, I’m not sure how it became such a popular byword for fatness and filth, but I imagine it’s the most universally accessible animal insult people could come up with. However it happened, telling anyone they look like a pig is one of the most grievous sins of our fat-phobic world, and heaven help you if they’re even remotely chubby. Example, for the visual thinkers and pop culture nerds: in a Halloween episode of Community, Shirley (who’s fat) is wearing a costume that includes a bright pink ballgown and the other characters are desperately trying to perceive/describe her as anything other than Ms. Piggy. It’s a good gag, everyone gets it, but what is it really saying? In conjunction with Señor Chang (an Asian male… obviously) who is dressed as Dorothy Hamill (decidedly not an Asian male… obviously) but is repeatedly assumed to be an Asian figure skater, the writers are making a clever point about physical features serving as the lens through which we identify people.
This Halloween issue is especially poignant to any kid of non-white heritage or a non-ideal shape - there’s a lot of pressure to dress as what you look like, and your options become extremely limited. Often, you’re reduced to a stereotype, a caricature of your actual appearance as interpreted by the heteronormative white Hollywood costume cartels. Does anyone believe that a little black kid with a lightsaber will be perceived as anything (or at least any Jedi) other than Mace Windu? I didn’t think so. But why does this pressure exist? Is it better to avoid the problematic possibility of ‘Blackface Jr.’ and keep kids in whatever box they were born to, or does this just reinforce the idea of appearance as the ultimate descriptor?
Personally, I think it’s a parental cop-out, and one that leads to serious problems further down the line. Costumes shouldn’t be race- or build-specific, though obviously that freedom comes with the freedom to look incredibly awkward. Parents should be distinguishing the choice to idolize a hero/villain of different appearance the choice to trivialize or exoticize basic feature sets - my child can go as Malcolm X or as Obi-Wan Kenobi Starbuck (and I hope they do both!), but they definitely cannot go as ‘Fat Ballerina’ or ‘Indian Princess’ ’Indian Brave’. Subsequently, they should be taught the difference between dressing as a person and dressing as a people (i.e., a stereotype). In addition to the million ways that the latter is offensive, it also makes for a pretty shitty and lackluster costume. Don’t do it. Don’t let your friends do it.
I’m going to stop here to reap the outrage/kudos/cold indifference generated by this post, but I’ll be continuing on this theme in my next post, returning to the specific injustice of ‘pig’.
(Also, as some of you may notice, I’m tagging this with the ‘thinspo’ hashtag. The whole thinspo movement is, in my opinion, incredibly unhealthy and dangerous, and I think the best way of fucking with it combating its influence is to throw the occasional “I LOVE FATTIES” post onto people’s dashboards. So, take that.)
EDIT: I fell into a variant of the same trap I described, and used only hypothetical male costumes as good and hypothetical female costumes as bad, a terrible oversight, which has now been remedied.
The loneliest whale in the world..
In 2004, The New York Times wrote an article about the loneliest whale in the world. Scientists have been tracking her since 1992 and they discovered the problem:
She isn’t like any other baleen whale. Unlike all other whales, she doesn’t have friends. She doesn’t have a family. She doesn’t belong to any tribe, pack or gang. She doesn’t have a lover. She never had one. Her songs come in groups of two to six calls, lasting for five to six seconds each. But her voice is unlike any other baleen whale. It is unique - while the rest of her kind communicate between 12 and 25hz, she sings at 52hz. You see, that’s precisely the problem. No other whales can hear her. Every one of her desperate calls to communicate remains unanswered. Each cry ignored. And, with every lonely song, she becomes sadder and more frustrated, her notes going deeper in despair as the years go by.
Just imagine that massive mammal, floating alone and singing - too big to connect with any of the beings it passes, feeling paradoxically small in the vast stretches of empty, open ocean.
Oh my god.
I want to start a Kickstarter IndieGoGo (Curse you, anti-Canadian bias!) to send Stephin Merritt out to serenade this lonely, lovely creature and record the subsequent duet. I think they’d dig each other.
(Source: erickimberlinbowley)
I’m going to post this right now at this catholic clinic i work in. Let’s see what happens, shall we?
Too good not to reblog.
(Source: joanvaritek.com)
