michele_blue

http://www.octopuspie.com/2012-05-26/537-dead-forever/

Eve and Manuel are some of Marek's favorite pets.

Thanks for waiting on comics, guys! I just finished the line art for the first issue of Marceline and the Scream Queens, which I am drawing and writing! No big deal. Except that I am SUPER CRAZY excited about it constantly.

Things may ebb and flow for a few months updates-wise, but it'll be worth it. Stick around for some more updates next week!

Welcome to the seventh Crowdfunding Creative Jam! This session will run Saturday, May 26-Sunday, May 27. The theme is "food."  (Visit the Creative Jam over on Dreamwidth.)

Crowdfunding Creative Jam
Everyone is eligible to post prompts, which may be words or phrases, titles, images, etc. Prompters may request a specific creator, but everyone else may still use that prompt if they wish. Prompts may specify a particular character/world/etc. but creators may use the prompt for something else anyway and post the results. Prompters are still encouraged to post mostly prompts that anyone could use anywhere, as this maximizes the chance of having creators make something based on your prompt. Please title your comment "Prompt" or "Prompts" when providing inspiration so these are easy to find.

Prompt responses may also be treated as prompts and used for further inspiration. For example, a prompt may lead to a sketch which leads to a story, and so on. This kind of cascading inspiration is one of the most fun things about a collective jam session.

Everyone is eligible to use prompts, and everyone who wants to use a given prompt may do so, for maximum flexibility of creator choice in inspiration. You do not have to post a "Claim" reply when you decide to use a prompt, but this does help indicate what is going on so that other prompters can spread out their choice of prompts if they wish.

Creators are encouraged, but not required, to post at least one item free. Likewise, sharing a private copy of material with the prompter is encouraged but not required. Creative material resulting from prompts should be indicated in a reply to the prompt, with a link to the full content elsewhere on the creator's site (if desired); a brief excerpt and/or description of the material may be included in the reply (if desired). It helps to title your comment "Prompt Filled" or something like that so these are easy to identify. There is no time limit on responding to prompts. However, creators are encouraged to post replies sooner rather than later, as the attention of prompters will be highest during and shortly after the session.

Some items created from prompts may become available for sponsorship. Some creators may offer perks for donations, linkbacks, or other activity relating to this project. Check creator comments and links for their respective offerings.

Prompters, creators, and bystanders are expected to behave in a responsible and civil manner. If the moderators have to drag someone out of the sandbox for improper behavior, we will not be amused. Please respect other people's territory and intellectual property rights, and only play with someone else's characters/setting/etc. if you have permission. (Fanfic/fanart freebies are okay.) If you want to invite folks to play with something of yours, title the comment something like "Open Playground" so it's easy to spot. This can be a good way to attract new people to a shared world or open-source project, or just have some good non-canon fun.

Boost the signal! The more people who participate, the more fun this will be. Hopefully we'll see activity from a lot of folks who regularly mention their projects in this community, but new people are always welcome. You can link to this session post or to individual items created from prompts, whatever you think is awesome enough to recommend to your friends.

Apparently my life is sufficently boring that I can’t think of anything to blog about. I have to draw winners for the BYD contest, but since I already blew my first deadline on that and there’s a long weekend coming up in America, I think I’ll wait until next week.

In the meantime, random things:

I believe this is very much the sort of thing the phrase “Oh, snap!” was invented for: Back to back questions presented to Robert Downey Jr and Scarlett Johansson.

*laughs* My wallet died, so I found an old one I knew I had lying around. It has Sarah/shadowhwk‘s work phone # ca 2001, a 1999 bank receipt, a photo of me & Ted from 1997, a 1994 pic of my sister, & the crowning glory, the thing that made me actually laugh out loud because it was so unexpected, an early 90s photo of the unrequited high school Love Of My Life. *laughs & laughs*

Speaking of pictures, this is probably the most awesome one I’ve seen this week. MIB-Avengers mashup FTW!

I believe I have got all the ducks in a row for launching ORIGINS next Friday. Having re-read the stories, I feel that the ORSSP patrons got their money’s worth, and that so too will the people buying it as an e-book. *waits impatiently for Friday next*

(x-posted from the essential kit)

I was just thinking about this piece of adorableness that made the rounds a few months back. I assume most of you have seen it, but those of you who haven't deserve to.
Sorry about the lack of . . . anything . . . previously. I posted it using an Android app which . . . didn't.

I am in, either tweaking the opening to The Wild Hunt or The Silver Hand.  Or both.

I've been intending to post this for a week or two, now, and I was just reminded by it by the front-page poll on LiveJournal, about "how many languages do you speak"?

I consider myself monolingual, although I know a couple words in other languages, and have a dilettante's interest in linguistics, so I know a little bit about the different ways that different languages put together grammar, and, off of my speech and rhetoric, I have a little tangential knowledge of different phonemes, including a few that don't appear in English. So I know a little bit ABOUT languages, but I don't know any other languages, themselves.

Anyway, a couple weeks ago, I went to Home Depot to look for a grinding wheel that I could attach to my drill, and then use to sharpen my machete, rather than using a file. It's a cheap machete, so the blade gets knicked up badly whenever I hit a rock, which is often, so I wanted a quicker way to grind out knicks than a hand-tool. The BEST tool for that, of course, would be a bench grinder, but that's kinda excessive for me to own.

So, I went to Home Depot, poked around for a bit, and then asked one of the clerks for help. I started explaining what I wanted, and he wasn't sure, so he pulled over another clerk, who actually knew the section better. The second clerk was Deaf, and the first clerk was trying to enunciate so the second clerk could read his lips, and was having trouble, and he started to pull out a pad of paper.

I stepped in, and started signing. 'Cause I know a LITTLE ASL.

Now, I used a LOT of fingerspelling, some miming, a lot of pointing at stuff. . . but he understood what I wanted, I understood what he was telling me. He was able to show me what they had, but we agreed that what they had wasn't EXACTLY what I wanted, and he suggested that I check out another store that was a bit south of them on Rte 1.

So I thanked him, and that's what I did, where I did, in fact, find something that worked for me.

It wasn't until I left that I realized that I'd just had a conversation in which I was able to express a relatively complex problem, and understand a relatively complex response. I didn't do it grammatically, nor prettily, nor entirely within the bounds of that single language (fingerspelling isn't ASL, in my mind, although there are signs in ASL that include fingerspelling forms). But I did it.

Can I think of myself as bilingual in ASL? I DON'T think of myself that way. But I DID muddle my way through.

Ford's put a commercial for the 2013 Mustang up on YouTube. It's completely visual, and I can't think of any good way to describe it, so apologize to my blind friends.



Personally, I LOVE this commercial. I'd like to note a couple things about it.

Let's look at the four Mustang lovers shown. Two of them are male, two are female. One is clearly white, three are less-white -- the woman looks mixed-race to me, the first man looks light-skinned Black, and the girl looks Hispanic. I mean, race isn't always obvious, so I don't know if that's how the actors classify themselves, or if my guesses actually match with their heritages, but at least the commercial doesn't look as racially homogeneous as one might expect.

Also, the little girl is being cared for by a man, presumably her father. So we have the image of a father as caregiver, taking his daughter to ballet class.

Of course, the big moment of the commercial is the subversion of pinkwashing.

And -- this one is a bit more arguable -- but watch the guy at 0.17 seconds into the ad. It looks to me like he's totally checking out the dude in the blue shirt. It's not obvious, and it's possible that he's just sorta looking in that direction, but I like to think that they put a gay man in as one of their typical customers.

Plus, the look on the little girl's face at the end of the commercial is freakin' adorable.

In my experience, this pretty well matches up with the demographics of Mustang lovers. They include everybody.

Originally published at Dylan Meconis. You can comment here or there.

Page 253 now online!

(permalink to this week’s page)

Mother knows best. Or does she?  Maybe next week you’ll find out what that leather neck strap is for, at least…

This weekend I’ll be in beautiful British Columbia, at the first ever Vancouver Comic Arts Festival! You can’t miss me – I’ll be right by the entrance at Table 30. I love Vancouver and I’m really excited to finally have a comics convention that gives me an excuse to visit.

Admission to the Fest is FREE, so Vancouver residents, please come by and support the show!
 

I don't like to rant on the Internet.  I prefer the surgical strike.  Precise.  Cleansing.  But sometimes a lady just gets all pissed.

( Read more... )

So the Cartoon Art Museum has a new show up, a retrospective of the history of MAD.  Thanks to the generosity of many lenders and the hard work of the museum's tiny staff, the show includes Kurtzman cover roughs, classic Elder parodies, Jaffee Fold-Ins, Spy Vs. Spy strips by both Prohias and Kuper, one of the two covers ever drawn by Sergio Aragones, and work by present-day contributors like Keith Knight and Chris Baldwin.  Andrew, the curator of CAM and my main squeeze, says it's the best show he's ever curated, but he says that a lot.

I wrote the wall text for the show; I do that for CAM shows when the staff is swamped.  While I was at it, I also wrote up text for a set of extra labels, just fun facts: how many issues Sergio Aragones has appeared in, this funny thing Al Jaffee said, etc.  One of the common criticisms the museum gets on places like Yelp is that we don't provide enough context for the pieces, and I'd like to correct that by giving visitors a little bit of inside information.

Yesterday I noticed that Andrew hadn't included my little factoids in the show.  When I asked him about it, he confirmed that, no, the museum didn't print them.  Because it couldn't afford to.  The Cartoon Art Museum is on such a tight budget that it can't afford the cost of mounting a half-dozen extra labels on foamcore down at the copy shop.

This goes on all the time, of course.  CAM survives by cutting its operations down to the bare bones.  But that doesn't make each penny pinched any less painful.

So you can imagine my delight today when I learned that webcartoonist Scott Kurtz is busy trying to convince people not to donate to comics nonprofits.

To be fair, Kurtz's post isn't directed at the Cartoon Art Museum.  His primary target is the Hero Initiative, an organization that pays the medical costs of cartoonists who lack health care.  Many of the Hero Initiative's beneficiaries are older comic-book artists who, to put it bluntly, got screwed over by their publishers.  Kurtz is opposed to the donating to the Hero Initiative because...

Okay, I don't know.  I'm not sure if he even believes half the things he posts on the Internet.  I hate responding to him at all, because, when he dismissed giving to the Hero Initiative as "slacktivism" and sarcastically mocked the people who do so, it's likely that the only thought going through his head was, "Holy shit, some people who aren't me are getting attention!  And frankly, they're getting attention because they're better people than me!  To my blog!"  By acknowledging his little online asshole dance, I'm just giving him what he wants.  So I'm a sucker.  Sue me.

Kurtz doesn't like that a small online movement has started encouraging people who enjoyed the movie "The Avengers" to give to comics nonprofits--mainly the Hero Initiative, but also groups like the Cartoon Art Museum, MoCCA, the Cartoon Research Library, and the Pittsburgh ToonSeum--as a gesture of support for the artists who created the Avengers, because Marvel and Disney have been adamant in their refusal to do so.  This little movement isn't telling people not to see "The Avengers."  It's just saying, "Hey, the companies that made the movie aren't supporting the original writers and artists, so let's step up and support them ourselves."

Kurtz is mad about that.  Because I don't know.

I don't get the mindset that makes people write this stuff.  I just don't.  I mean, okay, sure, sometimes we all think things like, "Man, I hope the artists I admire die penniless and suffering, and no one reaches out to them in their moment of need."  But most of us, before we share this thought with the world, stop and think again, and we realize, wait, no, that's awful.  If there's one thing the Internet has taught me, I guess, it's that some people don't have that crucial second thought.

Comics nonprofits run on the thinnest of shoestrings.  They're not a popular target for grants or large donations.  They live or die on the generosity of individuals who love the art form, people who can't give a lot but somehow manage, together, to give enough.  Telling people not to give to these nonprofits--actually mocking people who do so--is rotten behavior.

Kurtz visited the Cartoon Art Museum a couple of years ago--in fact, at the same time the museum was putting up a show of work by artist Ed Hannigan, who has multiple sclerosis, to benefit the Hero Initiative.  Kurtz seemed to have a good time.  But maybe he was thinking what a shame it is that we get just enough help from fans to stay open, and hoping he could change that situation.

Or maybe he doesn't think about a blessed thing that pops into his head before he posts mean-spirited crap on the Internet.

Anyway.  Rant over.  And here's the Hero Initiative website again.