Next on the docket: the case of Kindle versus some talentless hack self-published novelist.
This one pretty much speaks for itself. Although maybe I should have called it “You Can All Go #@$* Yourselves!” Usually I like to think that I can be just as funny without swearing, but The Man suggested I go with the grawlix, which I’ve never done before, but is a time-honored comic trope. Because, seriously, in this situation, what else would you say?
Him: We blinked at the same time! It’s definitely a signal that I should kiss her. Her: I wonder how many giant nuclear powered robots I would need to take over North America.
Three things: First, a few people indicated in a Facebook thread that they would enjoy being depicted in a QvD comic, so here’s the first one. You may recognize Laura from that one time she modeled my merchandise. Actually, she’s been featured in this blog twice, but the first time she was wearing a welding mask over her face, because she’s that kind of person, so you probably wouldn’t recognize her from that.
Second, I was thinking about gender, because that is something I think about. All. The. Time. Specifically, I was thinking about the interaction between heteronormative men and every kind of woman, and the Rabbit’s running commentary about the men who force her to interact with them on the Bart and the Oakland/San Francisco ferry, and about some of these dudes on Reddit who seem to willfully not to get it. So let me lay it out slowly: the odds that a woman with whom you briefly exchanged glances on public transit is very excited to meet you are low. Extremely low. This situation that I’ve drawn is a no-brainer. Note the woman’s posture: she is turned away from you AND leaning away from you AND she has her legs crossed away from you AND she has her arm protectively around her leg AND she clutching her purse on her lap AND she’s reading a book. She is doing this because she wants to reduce the number of times in a given day random strangers hit on her.
Your interest in her is not special; more interesting men than you express interest in her. All. The. Time. She is overtly demonstrating her lack of interest in you, and her desire to maintain her perimeter. There is a 100% chance that if you try to talk to a woman with this posture, you are annoying her. There is a 50% chance that she finds you actually threatening. I don’t care that you’re a “nice guy.” If you can’t understand this, you’re not a nice guy. Like I tell my stepkids, just wanting something doesn’t mean you get it. No matter what you think, she is not playing hard to get or sending you magical brain signals about how much she wants you. This human being is interested in reading her book without being disturbed for her entire commute.
Which leads me to the third thing, which is that although Laura does some modeling work and often looks like a model when she’s dressed up, Laura is not a model. Laura’s profession is actually metallurgist. She has a degree, I think, in materials engineering. This is the thing that drives me crazy about men who address random strangers with the idea that if a girl is attractive to you, she must be interested in you: they almost never approach you with the idea that you might be smarter than them, and if they do, they usually don’t have any way to use that knowledge except as a compliment. So if random sweatsuit wearing subway guy plunks down next to lovely bookworm girl and asks about her book, he’s going to be way out of his league if she actually starts discussing differential equations.
I should point out that I know nothing about differential equations, having barely passed my requisite math classes in high school. I copied this one from the internet because I liked its shape and its name: it’s the Anger Equation, and I carry a lot of anger. But I don’t enjoy talking with human beings in general, so I rarely start conversations with strangers in public and will not likely be embarrassed because someone wants to talk about differential equations.
I should also point out that this comic must have been in some way inspired by the classic Gary Larson strip, Same planet, different worlds.
Also, I hope Laura has a good sense of humor about me putting her head on someone else’s body to make a point about not objectifying attractive women. At least I’m not a random stranger.
Actually, I’d rather forget about the diagnoses I already have.
It’s late; I’m tired. Also, I have depression and chronic pain. And insomnia. But not, I’ve been reassured, early onset Alzheimer’s, although my grandmother and 2 of my aunts both died from it, so it could still happen. Until then, the only option is to soldier through the cyclical feeling that I’m down 2 or 3 standard deviations on the bell curve, intelligence-wise. Then I just remind myself of this classic scene from The Simpsons. Losing my perspicacity, indeed.
There would have been more to this blog post but it’s late, I’m tired, and I have depression, chronic pain, and insomnia. Oh! Here’s a good one; I also forgot to eat dinner. All in all, things have not been optimal.
ETA 10/8/22: I don’t usually update old blog posts but fun fact, it turned out to not be chronic pain and depression causing this issue, but in fact it was the benzodiazapines I was taking to treat the chronic pain and depression that were causing memory loss. I went cold turkey when I figured it out. That stuff will mess you up, kids.
The mythopoetic tree serpent ascends.
Before all the webcomics, and the Trickster’s Hat, the first couple months of this blog were just scans of every piece of art I’d made prior to starting the blog. Not everything, of course, but everything I still had that I still liked, going back to when I was 11 years old. But still not everything, because I keep remembering, for example, this photograph of a painting I did when I lived in Israel, in the fall of 1997.
The original’s probably long gone. When I left the kibbutz, I gave it to the volunteer coordinator because he had admired it once, and I was going to bum around Europe and didn’t want to carry it, but about 6 hours after I gave it to him, this guy I knew told me about a terribly racist thing the volunteer coordinator had done and I wished I hadn’t. He probably didn’t want it anyway. For my purposes, the photo is probably sufficient.
The Fabulous Butterfly Screen
This butterfly screen is definitely the biggest thing I ever painted, and the most complex. Actually, paint costing what it does, I’ve done very little painting in my life, and this is the only piece that took me more than an hour or two to finish. I think it took close to a month, actually, but it was a labor of love, a gift for an old friend. This is Christmas 2000, I think. Maybe 1999. Wonder if this screen still exists.
It’s hard to imagine painting this by hand. How much more righteous would it have been if it were done in Photoshop?
No one ever goes back to the beginning of this blog but it’s still nice to have everything uploaded to one place. Although if I could go back and do it again, I would have made this blog a Tumblr.
Ever have one of those incarnations when you feel like you’re just eating your own tail?
Whilst searching for some other document (never found; can’t even remember what it was now), came across this blast from the past: one my first mandalas. Not sure about the date, but probably from sometime in the mid-’90s, although it could be earlier. Sketching it out was meticulous work; I literally used a compass and a protractor to get all the curves and angles. The center part shows the phases of the moon, and the cardinal points are trees during the 4 seasons.
After putting so much effort into making the sketch perfect, I then became terrified to ruin it by trying to color it, so it just hung out in a tube for 15 or 20 years. No idea how it got stained…the stains are not as bad as they look, but rather amplified due to the Photoshop correction I had to do to the original image just to make the pencil lines clearly visible.
The whole this is pretty banged up, and, of course, held together with scotch tape, but none of that matters anymore, because now I do have Photoshop. I could draw a clean and more perfect copy in a relatively short period of time, and I could color it in a million different ways without ruining the original. Would make a wicked cool T-shirt.
Not that I don’t have 50 other projects.
Well, here goes something.
There will be a bigger deal made about this in the next week or so, but: my adult-fairy-tale-with-elements-of-horror-and-romance novel will be coming out through Brother Wolf Press (e-pub available in the Kindle store), exact date TBA, and here’s the cover!
Unlike some of my art projects, I was able to create to something that almost exactly matched what my brain visualized. Actually, in this case, the cover is better than I imagined it, because I hadn’t figure out how wonderful the sky would be. But it is wonderful.
I wanted it, first of all, to look like a tarot card from the Rider-Waite deck, at which task it seems to succeed admirably. The coyote is crazy adorable; her design is based on the wolf from The Moon card. The Hermit is, of course The Hermit, but her face is more the Queen of Cups, except less constipated looking, and she is disarmingly unassuming. The landscape also takes cues from other cards, although the sky is kind of improvised. Even the font turned out spot-on. And then there’s the gallon jug full of magical water. Intrigued at all? I even had a lot of fun with the little sigil/signature in the bottom right, which, at first glance, looks a fair amount like the artist’s mark on the Rider-Waite deck, but is actually comprised of my initials.
My instinct is to always keep tinkering with it, but of course the Rider-Waite deck is hand drawn and imperfect, and anyway, my whole thing now is letting it be imperfect. Perfectly imperfect.
Love it.
I’m all about needless complication, especially when it comes to my snack food.
This is the real way to make popcorn in my book. You take a pot with a lid, add a generous dollop of oil, drop in one kernel, close the lid, and turn the burner onto high. Then you wait. When the first kernel pops, you open the lid, dump in the rest of the popcorn, close the lid, and shake the pot vigorously until it all pops. You can’t let it sit on the heat once the popping stops or it will burn, but 100% of the time, some kernels don’t pop until you open the lid.
That’s my story for today, as the Rabbit says.
In the next chapter, we will discuss the organism’s mating strategies, which vary depending upon which university it attends and whether or not it decides to rush.
For a very long time, I’ve suspected that butterflies have the right idea. Their larva are grubby but not without their charm, often visually pleasing, even if they are prickly and disgusting to touch. Their final form is, of course, stunning. And while they’re stuck in that transitional phase, which is almost certainly disgusting beyond measure, they get to do it in peace and quiet. They go into a room as a baby and come out as a lovely adult.
Humans, on the other hand, suffer the animal kingdom’s most distressing adolescence. Everyone can see them struggling along awkwardly, not babies, but not grown up, either. Awash with terrifying chemicals, all their body parts are growing at different rates, bizarre and unpleasant changes are taking place inside and out, and they’re constantly being forced to compare their development to those around them.
I posit that the human way to go through adolescence would be with an option, around the 11th birthday, to lock oneself away from the world and stay in hiding until age 15 or so, at which point you emerge, gorgeous and confident and ready to take the driver’s exam and make out with other recently reintroduced teenagers. How much less psychological distress would we have to overcome if we could spin cocoons?
There are 2 adolescent humans in this house, although we count ourselves pretty lucky that they have not yet shown any signs of hormone poisoning. There’s no arguing or sullen silence or anything like that. Just a fairly constant direct connection to screens. But, MAN, when I was 12, I would have given almost anything for the privilege of going into my room and not coming out until at least my junior year of high school.
I’m just going to leave this prophylactic inside the screen door in case you decide to do the right thing for humanity.
I try not to get too political only because I’m non-confrontational, and when you publish anything vaguely political in a public forum, people see that as an invitation to publicly attack you. But when a comic comes to me, I draw it. For later in the week I have some really great stuff about puberty and also one about popcorn, but today it’s the Republican nominee.
Let me say that I don’t believe he is the antichrist or the next Hitler. I do believe he is a racist rabble rouser who couldn’t define the word diplomacy if his life depended on it and who certainly cannot be trusted with the military capabilities of the United States, and that it would be better for political discourse and the fate of mankind if he had never been born.
Originally, I envisioned Fred as more receptive to Dr. Morimoto’s message, but I do research this stuff (note my sketchy interpretation of a Tudor revival home) and I guess the Donald learned hatred at home. Fred Trump was sued for refusing to rent his low-income housing to black people, a policy that continued years after the courts ordered him to cut that out. According to the Justice Department, “racially discriminatory conduct by Trump agents has occurred with such frequency that it has created a substantial impediment to the full enjoyment of equal opportunity.”
In this comic, Fred uses the phrase “colored folks,” which was a polite term at the time, but I’m guessing in reality he would have used the word that I only say out loud if I’m discussing Huck Finn and hip hop lyrics, or possibly the German equivalent (his parents were German immigrants), which I’m guessing is quite similar to the Yiddish one my grandmother used.
Speaking of immigrants, Fred’s wife, Mary Anne, was one of those destitute human beings who came to America to escape poverty and take crappy jobs that natural-born Americans don’t want. She was Scottish, which I tried to impart via dialog. The line “What’s for ye’ll not go by ye,” is a Scottish saying that means, “If it’s meant to happen, it will.” But who knows. Maybe Donald thought his mom was a parasite, too.
It also occurred to me, while writing, that in 1945, a Japanese woman shouting on someone’s lawn would be subject to racist interpretation. Japanese American internment camps weren’t closed until 1946, although the majority of mainland Japanese Americans lived on the west coast in the ’40s. When I first created this character, I just wanted to pick a name that was fun to say and sounded like it could belong to a postmodern superhero/scientists. I didn’t even think about the fact that, traveling through time, she might lose credibility with some targets due to her ethnicity.
Another fun fact I learned in the course of writing this comic: Fred Trump died of Alzheimer’s. So it’s entirely possible that all this unfiltered hatred coming out of Donald Trump’s mouth is early stage senile dementia, in which case, his nomination makes perfect sense, because the Republicans have been looking for the next Ronald Reagan for a long time.
Yes, my scanner is fixed; no, I’m not into rescanning stuff right now.
Last night found me working feverishly until 2 a.m. to finish a project that’s been rolling around my head for years. There’s a possibility that it will actually be needed soon. Anyway, it came out wonderfully, almost exactly what I’d envisioned in my head, which is the best metric of success when you can’t depend on outside approval for validation.
Yesterday I went to a meet-up for the members of the Science Fiction Writers of America who live in Tucson. I am not a member of the SFWA–I think the criteria for membership is something like 3 professional sales or 6 semi-professional sales, and I only have 2 semi-professional sales–but I received an invitation and damnit, I went. The writers were very cool and inclusive; half of them I already knew, included one with whom I had been conversing on Facebook for over 3 years but had never met face to face (although I did once hear her speak at the Tucson Festival of Books). Even though everyone there had achieve a greater level of professional success than I had, they weren’t really any different from me. None of them thought they had really achieved a great level of professional success. All of them spoke wistfully of writers who had done better. Two of them mentioned that their most successful stories were those that happened to be anthologized in books where their bylines shared space with household names like Stephen King and RL Stine.
It felt good to be part of a writing community again.
This mandala is badly reproduced, but I’m already 14 hours late posting this blog, and I have come to loathe scanning things. It’s worse than photocopying (because it takes longer). It’s ideologically similar to another mandala I drew, so I gave it the same name. This one doesn’t exactly look “like a Hot Topic exploding over an Orange Julius stand at the mall.” It looks like the explosion stayed in the Hot Topic.
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