Sketches: Jon

I thought it might be nice to put Jon and Lena in the same month, since they're realizing they're kinda falling in love with each other. And, ya know, this month is February and all.

I'm silly like that.

Fun tidbit - I had no idea Jon, but Jon is apparently of some kind of African descent. We haven't been able to pin it down yet, but it took Lena telling Caitlin that she liked the way his dark skin looked against her pale skin for me to go "Wait, you mean he's not just like, some super tanned guy from the Mediterranean or something?"

Yup, my own character, holding out on me. :P We'll pin him down eventually, but I think he might be a Moor or Berber? Not sure, as I know VERY little about these cultures and have done little research into them. I'll figure it out later if it ever comes up, but for right now, Jon's exact ethnicity isn't very important. I just thought it was highly entertaining that he never bothered to tell me. It just wasn't important to him, I guess. Can't have been that important to me, either, I never thought to ask him why his skin was so dark. I've only ever seen him in a darkened bar, so I didn't think too much of it.

Some changes

It's official- I'm changing my Blogger account over to a more personal style blog. Anyone looking for my writing and such, head on over to the Word Press account of the same name. For now, I'm going to leave my nephew's tribute up on the home page, and you'll always be able to find the same material on his tribute page.

Thank you everyone for all your kind thoughts and well-wishes.

My nephew

Sketches: Lena, progression

Sketching at work one night. This is how doodles become characters. Sadly, I don't remember the order I did these in originally, but here they are.

Sketches: Lena

Here's another character that I sketched a few times before putting her into "The Book", so I played around with her expressions a bit too. This is Lena.

Read this comic!

I've been following Oh Joy Sex toy for a while now, and this week's installment has me needing to share. I personally don't get the appeal to getting it on while dressed like something you'd run into at Disney Land, but I do LOVE how enlightening this strip is- the whole series, really. I like how it combats fear and ignorance with a wonderful combination of seriousness and mirth- exactly how the bedroom should be approached in my opinion.

WARNING: link is definitely NSFW

http://www.ohjoysextoy.com/furry/

What I'm gonna do with blogger

I know I've been writing a lot of non-writing based posts lately. I'm thinking I might keep my blogger up for that, and try to keep my Word Press blog a little more on topic. I just - there's so much that keeps hitting me in the wrong (or right) ways lately, and I can't keep quiet about them. I know that speaking up is how things change- one voice becomes two, becomes ten, becomes 100, becomes change.

All my thoughts are swirling around lately. It's hard to make sense of them. I know I'm not presenting the clear, compelling arguments I want to, but I'd rather come off as ranty and unorganized than not be heard at all.

Sketches: Tripp's Tat

This is the second thing I drew in my awesome BazBiz sketch book, partially because we were sitting across from an awesome booth selling Muerto stuff, and partially cause I opened up my bag and discovered I'd accidentally brought along a whole crap ton of colored pencils, so that was exciting.

Fun facts about this piece:

• This is Tripp's first tattoo. It's a shoulder cap - holy crap blanking out on important character details! It's on his dominant hand's arm, but I suddenly can't remember if Tripp is right or left handed! D'oh!
• Zig designed and inked this tat for his bro, and yes, it is designed after Aladdin Sane.
• I totally have plans to get this tattoo myself! It will also be my first tat, and I am BEYOND excited to get it!

Free Money

Read this article.

Why we should give free money to everyone

This made me sad, it made me angry, and in the back of my distrustful mind, it made me hope. I'm not going to lie - I would most certainly stop going to my soul sucking job and write a novel. I'd write five. And I'd paint. And take up sculpting. And weaving, and yarn spinning and dying, and all number of creative things I just don't have time to do working 8 to 12 hours a way, 5 to 7 days a week. All those things people always say "Gosh, that's so creative, I wish I could do that!" I would do. I would bring into the world things other people just can't, if someone would just give me money enough to live on so I didn't have to waste half my day worrying and working at it. If I knew, no matter what, there would be a roof over my head and food in my belly, and that if I wanted to keep creating I'd have to creating things people wanted to buy from me - you beat I would. If need be, I would teach people's snot nosed kids the tricks of my trade for the extra money for art supplies. I would become an editor, I would sell cupcakes and cookies and food I like making, instead of pandering my boss's desires and corporate's tape. I would make things people wanted to have, just for the ability to keep making things people want to have. I cannot see how this is wrong.

I make no claims to being a genius artist. I know there's a very good chance my writing is only interesting to me. But I also know I would keep trying until I found something I made that society benefited from, because I would be depending on consumers to want the fruits of my artistic labors in order to fund my "hobbies" - my passions, more correctly.

I need to stop writing things I'm passionate about first thing in the morning. I know none of this is as compelling or coherent as I want it to be - but it matters to me. I need to get it out, even before coffee-need it more than I need coffee, if you can imagine such a thing.

This article hit me hard, because ever since proving to myself with NaNoWriMo that I can write every day, day after day, and still want to do it, I can't stop thinking about how to achieve this dream. I can't stop feeling caged in my wage-slave job. I can't stop raging against how much I hate the fact that I'm trapped, that no one ever taught me how to actually support myself, that I have no idea what a grown up job is and how to get one and what it would even mean to have one and how much I hate that all this UNNECESSARY thoughts are what's ruling my emotional and mental energies, rather than wrestling with how I'm going to actually end the novel I've written instead of trailing off into the ether. That even when I've made the decision to embrace my passions and try to become an author, all I can think about is what job can I possibly get to support me and my partner, but still leave me with enough time to write, and not be so soul-suckingly awful as to strip me of all my energy and will - that even when I've committed to walking away, I can't walk away, because I have to have a job. I have to stay in the service industry, or take a HUGE paycut working for free to get the experience to prove to people I can do something else. I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT SOMETHING ELSE IS, because the first ten years of my working life have been eaten up by fast food because it was the only job I knew to apply for as a kid.

The past six months have been a pretty big wake up call for me, but now that I'm awake, I don't know what to do with it. This frustrates me more than I can say. I know I'm a reasonably intelligent person, but all the smarts in the world will get you nothing if you don't know how to learn - if you don't even know what you need to learn. I have a bachelors degree, and I feel like I know less about the world than anyone else my age, or any age. I am lost in a country too big to see that it's a forest, let alone the trees. I almost wish, some days, that I was born to an underdeveloped country, so that the fight for survival would eat all of my thoughts, and not leave me in this half-aware, nebulous state.

I need to quit while I'm ahead, but I don't feel like I've gotten my point across yet.

Maybe I don't know what my point is.

A rant

This really bothered me. Yes, it’s cute and funny, but it’s also a lot of what’s wrong with our take on Sex Ed.

It’s Sexual Education, not How to keep teens from knocking each other up. Sure, this tactic would great for keeping kids who already understand how sex works from making babies, but there are girls out there that don’t know how they get pregnant, or don’t even know what their period is. There are boys that don’t understand how condoms actually work, who try the candy bar wrapper because they think it’ll work.

Let’s not even get started on STI’s and such, we’re talking basic reproductive facts. As basic as “That stuff that comes out of your penis has baby makings in it, and when you put it inside a girl, it can make a baby. It doesn’t matter if you’re standing, sitting, laying down, holding a penny between your legs or what – penis in vagina CAN make a baby, even if you pull out.” KIDS AREN’T BEING TAUGHT THAT.

Let alone a chance to explain to kids how their FEELINGS work –some of you might not identify with the biological bits you’ve got. Some of you might have undergone surgery as infants to make your body conform to male or female. Some of you will feel attracted to girls, or boys, or both, or neither AND ALL OF THIS IS NORMAL. Other people do it to, and no one tells these kids this.

This isn’t a coherent essay, well thought out and organized bullet point by bullet point, but it shouldn’t have to be, either. This should be BASIC COMMON SENSE, but no one is concerned with arming our future with common sense, or basic literacy, or the ability to count fucking change – we’re content to operate in an generational island, ignoring our pasts and our futures and largely our present as well.

This started as me just wanting to get something off my chest, but it’s burrowed its way down to touch a real issue that I apparently feel very strongly about. That fact right there – the fact that I didn’t even know I felt this strongly about this issue- is exactly my point. We’re trained to insulate ourselves from our thoughts and feelings, from the world around us and the world a million miles away and the world going on in the house next door – it’s a problem, and it’s a problem so big I don’t even know how to start tackling it.

I have no proposed solution, no game plan for correcting this hideous state, but for now, being aware of it is enough. As long as I don’t let myself sink back into numbness, as long as I remind myself to keep wracking my brain for a way to fix this, the problem will get better. I won’t go out and preach, I’ll live the solution by example, and teach it to those around me by my very interactions with them, and that is how this will be solved. By real people, making real changes every day. Little things, moment to moment, is how the world turns.