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Tuesday, June 30th, 2009
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10:23 am - I am alive.
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I drove around three thousand miles across the country, moved in with with my boyfriend, and am about to start summer classes. Somewhere in between that was the grand canyon, the total destruction of my mother's car, and a funeral. Currently, I am in an ongoing effort to clean my boyfriend's house. After a month, I have cleared enough space that I can resume some of my hobbies, such as updating my livejournal and making comics.
There's not much to say about the road trip that ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) quincunx didn't say, but I'll be posting comics related to the trip for the next few weeks anyway.
The best part of the trip was undoubtedly finally getting to spend time with one of my best friends.
My only advice to anyone taking a similar trip would be: whenever you can, do something you haven't done before. Eat a type of food you've never heard of. Go to a biker bar/family restaurant. Turn off the road to see an attraction that looks cool. Even if you regret it, it will still be awesome as long as you're with people you love.
Wait--my other advice is to take your time and limit how much you drive in a day. That is also good advice.
Regardless of everything else, if I am trapped in a car for long enough, the conversation will eventually become somewhat surreal.
The Road Does Things to You
Wow, ok I cannot even tell you how fun this comic was to make. Unlike my last experiment with computer coloring, this was actually a breeze to do. "Me vs Toaster" took over three weeks to color and I wouldn't really consider the coloring on it to be complete. It took so long to do that all the fun was drained out of it. A lot of that is because I was essentially using the brush tool as a literal brush because I didn't have much of an idea on how to use the selection tools. Brendan corrected that, and with the power of the magic wand, this comic took less than a day to fully color, and I still had time to run errands, go to the gym, and go to like 4 comic shops. Coloring by hand is probably still quicker, but I think the other advantages of coloring on a computer outweigh that advantage.
Some more stuff that is great:
-I really love being able to change my mind about colors after I put them down. Just a quick ctrl-z and what would have been an accident to work around on paper might as well never have happened.
-The scanner will no longer pervert oranges, greens and purples. The colors that appear are the colors I intended with some slight variations due to monitor quality and settings.
-More choses for colors. I was severely limited to certain colors, and no matter how many pencils I bought, that never seemed to change. Now I have the power to, for example, show white people as being different shades of white. This is very important to me because I think comics tend to reenforce the idea that white is the default color for people. Genre fiction is, of course, often guilty of this too. It seems like people of color are always portrayed as an ethnic and cultural other, but if the author intends for a character to be ethnically neutral, they are as white as they come. The thing is that no one is completely ethnically neutral, and treating white as a default is probably harmful. So, I'll always try to keep culture and ethnicity in mind when writing comics, autobiographical or otherwise.
All of that in a comic where I essentially admit that all I know about Iowa is that they both grow corn and allow gay marriage.
Sorry Iowa! Maybe I will look up things about your culture on wikipedia later!
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| Friday, May 29th, 2009
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7:13 am
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| Tuesday, May 26th, 2009
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8:15 pm - roadtrip
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quincunx and I are going on a roadtrip. Maybe hopefully we won't die! Only time can say!
I rushed through drawing this comic basically because I wanted to post something before we leave but I have a million other things to do. I realize the text is too small, and that basically everything in the small panels is pretty bad too. I thought they would be easier but then my pen was too fat.
In the future, when I have my own scanner, I am planning to scan each panel on it's own piece of paper and then put it together in photoshop or whatever. This should make it so I can do really small panels better maybe.
I think for the first time ever, I feel like a chapter of my life is ending. I've never felt like that before--not in high school, not when I went to Japan, not ever. But today, every single part of me is aware that today is the last day of whatever my life has been up until this point.
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| Friday, May 22nd, 2009
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2:02 pm - The Inveterate Punster
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This is my step father Matt! I've been living with him for a while, but I'll be moving back to PA very soon, so here is a comic about him!
He loves puns. Perhaps more than any one person should. He's also incredibly good at them. It is a skill that is not necessarily endearing. When I showed him this, he didn't remember this specific pun, pretty much because he comes up with about 500 new ones a day.
The worst part is that I myself have begun to develop an appreciation for such things.
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| Friday, May 15th, 2009
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4:06 pm - vanishing into the clouds
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Kumogakure - vanishing into the clouds. This is a bit of an uncommon word, for which the very first hit on google is a wikipedia article discussing what I am quoting. The first hit in English is something or other about Naruto. This is profoundly pathetic, English Speaking Internet.
My mother died today. It is completely acceptable to quote someone else in this situation. If you're unfamiliar with the Tale of Genji, the chapter in which Genji dies is called "Vanishing into the Clouds." No description of event occurs; the pages of the chapter are blank.
We cleared through some of the last of her stuff and took it to Good Will today. In her belongings we found a forgotten Christmas present from her to me.
After that, we treated ourselves to lunch and shared ostrich burgers and buffalo burgers. The differences between the ground meat of one animal and the ground meat of another are not as much as one might think.
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| Thursday, May 14th, 2009
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11:26 pm - my good boy
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Still not used to drawing with my new pens, but I had a lot of fun with this page so it is of course a resounding success.
Spot is not my dog. He is Matt's dog. In fact it was like hate at first sight until somehow he turned into my dog bff and I no longer ever have a moment of privacy to myself. I cannot sleep or eat or pee unattended.
Dogs.
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| Friday, May 1st, 2009
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7:26 pm - sad times
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Can you tell? I have new pens!
This happened a while ago, back when nearly all of what she said always made sense.
This isn't a very funny comic. A lot of mine aren't very funny at all.
When I set out to write a comic I have a few goals, and they fall in about the following order.
1 - Have fun drawing. This one nearly always happens because I always love to draw, in spite of my lack of talent.
2 - Vent. Often drawing out what's bothering me helps me deal with it more than just talking about it does.
3 - Draw something relatable/cute/funny. I sort of consider this an added bonus after the first two.
This really just applies to my autobiographical comics. I'm sort of off and on working on some fictional stuff which will be more about communicating an ideas.
A lot of why I post stuff publicly is because I want to improve my art. Posting things for an audience other than myself makes me have to think about things like, "If everyone's head is the same shape, a reader will become bored looking at it, or have trouble telling characters apart." and "I can't break the 180 degree rule, it will trip people up." It also allows people to criticize what I draw, which tends to happen privately for some reason. All sorts of things that I never thought would be a problem get brought up, and suddenly I realize, "Oh yeah that is pretty dumb." and can avoid similar mistakes later.
I really like stylized art of all forms and don't really enjoy looking at v realistic art such as that of Alex Ross. But just because I'm not drawing from reality, doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement.
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| Monday, April 20th, 2009
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9:27 pm - Nursing Homes
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This is sad and this is awful, and so maybe you shouldn't read it.
We are putting her in a nursing home in Point Loma. We're in the next neighborhood over so it's not so bad. It might even be walkable if it wasn't for the persistent light of my old enemy, the day star. One day I will have my revenge.
Everything is awful. She is always in pain; there is always some emergency. We never sleep properly anymore. I cannot focus on things I enjoy doing let alone things I do not enjoy doing.
I tried to draw a comic, but I botched inking it. Maybe I will have a go again this weekend. Maybe not.
I have a paper due. I never sleep anymore, so doing it is nigh impossible. I will write the dean asking for an incomplete or something. Until she has been in a nursing home for a few days, I don't think I can deal with the paper. I cannot even deal with warcraft or comics at the moment. I keep trying to deal with the paper but not making any progress at all. I'm utterly burned out from everything.
The social services that you try to use in a situation like this are of no help. Hospice continues to pressure us to keep her at home as long as possible, even though we should have put her somewhere weeks ago. We didn't want to, but we are in a legally uninhabitable apartment that is not handicap accessible. In order to put a hospital bed in here, we got rid of my bed. The entire idea of having her here is basically a way for insurance companies and hospitals etc to save money at the expense of our mental health. The hospital kicked us out because she did not have a "skilled need" and because she does not have a "skilled need" they will not pay for a nursing facility or what have you. They say you have to go to hospice and they will help you set up your life so that your home is a nursing home and so that you yourself are a caregiver. So they save huge amounts of money, and we slowly go insane. It is the way of the world.
In spite of their assurances, it cannot go on this way. So we'll pay for a nursing home out of pocket.
The woman who showed us different homes nearly killed us. We were seconds from what would have been a fatal collision in her car because she was attempting to make an illegal U-turn, talk on her cell, fuss with her GPS, and talk to us at the same time. The car that nearly hit us was going more than 40 miles an hour, and it missed my door by inches. This near death experience did not prompt her to drive better. She told us she had a guardian angel and then proceeded to talk about her syncretic belief system for like 20 minutes.
By far, my least favorite thing about California is that everyone has Religion.
Not only do they have it, but they insist on talking about it at the drop of a hat. Like god damn it, I really do not care what you think of seances right now at all. Half the time it is some bizarre evangelical version of Christianity, the other half it is some strange mix of the shallowest possible interpretations of Christianity, Buddhism, and whatever flavor of animism is hip right now.
I'll say right now, I have no use for religion. I understand that other people do, but that is not me. The idea of god is largely depressing to me. I understand that people want to comfort me in some way, but really. Just shut up.
Maybe that's harsh. People always think atheists are harsh. I'm really not that harsh, I always let people prattle on about Tibetan bells or druids or whatever because intellectually I know that they are trying to help. It's just not helpful. I try to politely end the conversation, but there is no escaping it. I have to sit there until they exhaust themselves on the topic. It's the dumbest thing.
I'm not going to go on about the myriad things I simply do not get about religion except for this one thing.
I do not get what it is about protestants and the transubstantiation. Like, the religion I am probably most familiar with is Anglicanism/Episcopalianism and Catholicism. So maybe I am biased. But like I swear to god protestants keep bringing up transubstantiation as why Catholicism is ridiculous to me lately.
If you are already accepting that (1) all humans are born with original sin due to a snake tempting a woman to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge (2) an immaculately conceived virgin became pregnant by way of annunciation with the incarnation of god who was also the Messiah foretold in the old testament and that (3) this messiah was killed and then resurrected and and then ascended to heaven, the transubstantiation is not such a stretch. It really is not.
I guess a lot of people do this. They bring up crazy things about other religions as if their own religion is not its own special brand of crazy.
I am so tired.
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| Tuesday, March 31st, 2009
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8:58 am - Wieners
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Man, I have no idea why sometimes the colors are too bright and sometimes they are too muddy. I use the same scanner at the same kinkos. It makes no sense.
Things will be better when I have my own scanner maybe.
Did you ever pick up some annoying speech affectation because you hung around someone else too much? I am constantly spreading my irritating habit of ending statements on an up note, thus turning them into questions to my hapless friends. I guess because of that I deserve to say wiener forever maybe.
Also how did that rapscallion Spot make it into my comics? It is a mad world.
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| Saturday, March 28th, 2009
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10:45 am - rss feed
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I added an rss feed to my website. Finding out how to set one up without using some stupid program doing it for me was like going on a vision quest through the underbelly of the internet. Hint for anyone wanting to set their own up: forget whatever the internet says, just go and look at the page source for a bunch of the stupid things.
The feed is here by the way.
If you're not sure what this is: basically, rss feeds are like mailing lists except instead of your mailbox getting spammed, your rss feed reader gets spammed. There are a lot of benefits of using rss over mailing lists. The main one is that if the site uses an rss feed instead of a mailing list, the subscriber's privacy is protected and their mailing address cannot be sold to the penile enlargement companies of the world. In order to use an rss feed to its full capacity, you need an rss reader, which you can get for free through google and a number of other sites. If you're not interested in using the feed, that's fine because I will also continue posting updates on my livejournal. For the livejournal crowd, this feed is redundant.
I also finally changed my gallery to mark which images are new since the latest update to the gallery. Thanks for the idea, Karen ♥
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| Thursday, March 26th, 2009
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6:04 pm - Improvement: a constant frustration
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| Wednesday, March 25th, 2009
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2:28 pm - I hate outside.
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I am pulling into a parking space. I suddenly notice a tow away sign. Pausing not fully in the space but not obstructing traffic, I read the sign and heave a sigh of relief when I realize it does not apply to me. While reading, I feel that feeling of eyes boring into the back of my skull, so I turn around to see what appears to be George Costanza's parents peering at me from the safety of their car. Our eyes meet.
I give them the "Sorry, I'm pulling in not out" wave, finish parking, turn the car off, fuss around with my purse, get out, and--
They are still there. Watching me. Our eyes meet again.
Their window is down. Attempting to clear up the mix up, I say, "I was reading the tow away sign. Sorry..."
The man in some ridiculous accent that I am unable to place: "Why are you talking to me? Talk to your Obama!"
My Obama?
Instantly, they drive off without another word.
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| Tuesday, March 24th, 2009
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1:15 pm - Premonition
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As the legions of wild parrots screeched this morning, I had a sudden epiphany. Should they remain so concentrated and should I remain here, it would nearly become inevitable that I would encounter a dead one.
Mere hours later, I did.
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| Monday, March 23rd, 2009
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11:25 am - Hate & Vitrol
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| Friday, March 20th, 2009
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11:19 am - Lost Art of the Shameful Past
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Not that I periodically look though old sappy emails to my boyfriend or something weird like that, but it seems that one of the comics I made sometime before my life ended managed to survive my computer getting a virus and needing to be reformatted.
I made a few others before everything went bad, but who knows if they will ever see the light of day.
The Old Enemy Returns
It can also be found on my website with the rest of my comics now that I have decided to use my website as more than a more expensive photobucket.
Going through my mom's old blog, I also found this ancient piece of crap from like 4 years ago.
Looking through my drawings makes me feel so old.
In other news, my new keyboard is finally here. Can you believe that I actually wrote those last two TL;DR entries with a click to type program? I am insane and retarded. Perhaps even, dare I say it, insanely retarded.
I really hate how the scanner ruins the colors of everything. When I go home to a place where I will hypothetically have a scanner and a photo editing program, I will probably switch to coloring on the computer again just so the colors look how I want them to look.
Hopefully this weekend I will make it out to the kinkos and scan some stuff, there are some character designs that I would love to get some feedback on.
Edit: I just realized that this is the first comic where I decided to include a representation of how hideously asymmetrical my face is. The line coming out of one of my eyes is a Melasma. No I am not pregnant. It has been there since 7th grade. They said it appeared because of puberty and that it would go away. It did not.
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| Tuesday, March 17th, 2009
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2:43 pm - Dealing with the ignorant in discussions about minorities
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| Sunday, March 15th, 2009
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10:19 am - This is a post about Racefail
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I never miss a chance to rattle on about race. Ever.
I read through a lot of racefail. While I agreed with a lot of what was being said there were about two things that stood out to me about it that really disappointed me.
The first thing was that I continued to see in this racial discussion what I see in every racial discussion: a complete failure to understand forces such as globalization and cultural syncretism. These two forces are basically inevitable, and I really really wish they would stop being brought up in the context of "They stole our...!!!". Yes, white people stole rap and jazz and blues. This was going to happen, we live in the same god damn country. We can listen to the same radio stations and by the same CDs. On the same note, it was going to happen that black people would use white instruments such as turntables and basses in their music. We live in too close quarters for it not to occur, and this effect will only magnify as globalization causes our planet to shrink.
My absolute favorite phrasing of this situation was something I saw on Japanese TV. They were interviewing those weird guys that dress up as cowboys all the time and one of them said, "When I was a child I watched John Wayne every day. You say that this isn't my culture, but if growing up watching it every day is not my culture, what is?" I'm paraphrasing but it was something like that.
I guess what I am saying is that some aspects of black culture are going to become part of mainstream culture. There is nothing inherently bad about it. In fact, I would argue that there is a lot of stuff that is really really good about it, but this is going on long enough as it is. Media representation of minorities as stereotypes is a sort of different issue than widespread adoption of an art/music form.
The second thing I saw that really frustrated me was what I sort of perceived as a massive failure in communication between mainstream-but-questioning-the-status-quo whites and minorities.
Basically when you have a debate, there tends to be a side that represents the current order, and a side that is either leaning reactionary or radical. The side that does not represent the status quo is always going to be doubted more, judged more harshly, and held to stricter standards of conduct. The reason for this is because the audience basically sees the status quo argument every single day in everything that they do. So to beat the status quo's argument you really do have to present yourself better than the status quo will. It's not fair; it's simply reality.
To illustrate what I am saying, during one of the presidential debates maybe like 8 years ago, George Bush had terrible conduct. Interrupting the moderator and his opponent, going over his alloted time, the works. As a representative of the status quo, this was not counted against him in anyway, it may have even counted in his favor. Had any of his opponents done the same, they would have unanimously been declared the loser of the debate.
What I am getting at here is that it's a little bit insane to write a lot of posts on portrayal of minorities in sci-fi/fantacy and then answer questions along the lines of, "How can I learn to write minorities well?" with "Don't make this about you, white person!" and "It's not my responsibility to answer your questions and you only think I should due to white privilege."
It is a miserable truth, but here it is. If you write a post about race in a public place, you are engaging in a debate on it. If you turn away questions from the ignorant white onlookers, you lose the debate. You might be right in every god damn way, but you still lose the debate. You lose because as members of the ruling order, they will judge you by a harsher set of rules because they see the status quo's argument every day. They will not judge the status quo argument by the behavior of the one presenting it, but if you yell, if you are dismissive, condescending-- if you are anything, they will characterize your argument as whatever you did and said.
They cannot understand a statements like "Don't make this about you, white person!" and "It's not my responsibility to answer your questions and you only think I should due to white privilege." because the questions they are asking show basically no understanding of privilege and they will interpret your remarks as racist because yes really they are that ignorant.
It's important that you lost that person specifically because the fight against racism and any other form of chauvinism is a battle for hearts and minds. I know how much it sucks to deal with the ignorant. I'm openly not straight, I'm a woman, I grew up poor, and I am foreign when I live in Japan. It's more important that I and all non-straight people come out looking good than it is for me to vent my frustration at yet again being asked how I came to know that I like girls when it is no one's god damn business.
I guess I feel very bad to see people who are right lose the debate.
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| Wednesday, March 11th, 2009
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12:09 am - Website?
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What if there were dragons that were dying and all they needed was some of your clicks in order to live forever?
Would you click?
 
In a burst of artistic creativity I redid my entire website.
click here
I would love to know what anyone thinks, as well as if anyone finds anything broken or wrong.
To do:
-Update the "words" section to fit in with the rest of the site
-Add in the rest of the terrible artwork somewhere or other.
-Start adding content again
-sweep through LJ and fix broken images
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| Saturday, March 7th, 2009
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7:11 pm - DRAGONS.
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If you do not click on my dragons, they will die. You don't want that right?
I haven't posted in a while because my life fell apart! I don't even have a scanner anymore. My mom became terminally ill so I came home from Japan to take care of her. It maybe is as bad as it sounds.
I joined a gym and am trying to lose weight! I am white beyond comprehension in spite of the California sun. Everything is kind of awful and you do not even want to know. My wow addiction has reached new complexities now that it is basically my only leisure activity.
I'm going to start work on a short fictional comic very soon. If I can find a place like kinkos that does scanning, you may see it. It's based on the cover of what I assume is a successful romance novel. Hopefully fans of it will not be coming after me to kill me.
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| Thursday, September 25th, 2008
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11:10 pm - This is a comic about Warcraft
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FILLED WITH ANGRY WORDS