Owning a mask.

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Meet Pushy Garnet. She is old enough to be your mom, and completely approves of whatever impossible fantasy gets your motor running. For the right price she’ll draw it.

I have decided that now that I’m a forty-something lady who will probably never try to get “a real job” ever again, I can come clean about how much of a total pervert furry I am sometimes. A while back I spent much of a year drawing crazy cartoon porn commissions as Pushy, and could have made that pay the bills if I’d wanted to. And now you can see most of what I drew as her right here on my website.

I learnt a lot as Pushy. I learnt a few things about building an audience; I learnt a lot about drawing quickly. I wouldn’t be drawing a comic directly in Illustrator if not for the time I spent knocking out weird, sloppy erotica with a bottle of raspberry lambic (Pushy’s favorite drink) at my side. I learnt something about empathy; Pushy’s job was to figure out why someone’s weird kink was hot to them, and feel that enough herself to make a joyously hot drawing. I kinda picked up a couple more absurd fantasy kinks doing that.

I still sign some of my experiments with her name. Because drawing something sexy is easy, and it provides a nice base to try new techniques on top of.

the dream of my mother’s note

I dreamt that I was wandering around the back yard of the place I grew up in. It was a bit unkempt and messy, with a lot more stuff in it than there was when I was growing up.

On the door to the shed was a note from my mother, responding ever so politely to a note from a neighbor who was offended by her posting a comic critical of Bush’s policies on there. Why this was the place for such a discourse I wasn’t sure but there it was – ineffably polite but unyielding in her disagreement. It was nicely typeset.

DO TASKS, MEAT SACK

“I’d like to go out and have some breakfast,” I thought. But as I got dressed it became increasingly apparent that I really needed to do laundry. I put together a cute outfit with the intent of going out anyway, and then opened up the to-do list to tell my later self to consider this as an Important Tast That Needs Doing.
Upon thus escalating laundry from “a thing I do while procrastinating on Real Tasks” to a

  • REAL TASK

with a checkbox and everything, I found myself suddenly compelled to just

  • Do your laundry. It is past time.

All the scattered thoughts that nornally occupy my mind fled, and the whole of my consciousness was dedicated to

  • put a load in the washer as quick as possible so I can get on with doing what I actually want to do

I felt like I was two beings at that point: a sack of meat with a set of desires and a consciousness, and a secondary electronic consciousness that it had set up to tend to its longer plans. And the external me reacted with utter disdain to treating “laundry” as something at that level: Consciousness is a privilege, not a right, Meatsack, and if you can’t get these few basic support tasks done it will be revoked until you do them. 

When I had my brain back, I thought of Manfred Mancx in the first chapter of Stross’s Accelerando. And his system of self-notifications and alerts so complicated that when someone else stole his smartglasses, they began to become him. 

Suddenly that seemed less implausible.

another year gone by

The first thing through my head in the morning is “I should deal with those life insurance policies on Mom except wait I still haven’t gotten the death certificates what’s up with that”. This is going to be a long forty-fourth birthday.

Then I check my email. Every computer wishing me a happy birthday via email is like a little knife in the gut because it reminds me there won’t be a phone call from her.

Yeah. This is crap. I’m going back to sleep. Maybe I’ll feel better when I wake up again.

 

Later. I looked at those life insurance policies. Another year or two of runway for getting this whole ‘comics’ thing off the ground as a viable career. Maybe more, I didn’t try to untangle their descriptions too deeply. I’d rather have another decade of her around to see it.

The Bestest Pony

The Bestest Pony

 

Something I whipped up for my ex-with-benefits’ birthday. Which is today. And maybe for mine. Which is the day after tomorrow.

Illustrator, maybe like 45min.

Also I drew a sequel. Or rather my pornmonger alt drew a sequel. It is NSFW. You have been warned.

And then she drew another sequel. It’s even more NSFW. Or for opening in front of relatives, if you’re checking your feeds at your July 4 festivities.

A retcon for a game I have never actually played.

So. Splatoon. The light-hearted third-person team shooter in which you are a kid, and a squid.

I do not own own the appropriate game hardware on which to play it. All I know of it is from what people post on the Internet. A friend who does own it was pondering why you can’t swim when you’re being a kid, only when you’re a squid. “Maybe it’s the price they paid for their sentience,” Ian wondered.

To which I replied:

Squids are actually all small clusters of the Paint that have split off into smaller minds. Eventually they will return. But really they are all thoughts that the Paint is having. It takes a lot of effort to swim within It without becoming It again.

Ian: It’s just one giant blob of Grey Goo coloring itself up and playing games with itself.

Me: Splatoon: the most colorful post-apocalypse ever. These arenas are all that remains of the world after the Incident. Squid kids: memories of the people from before coalescing out of the Paint. But all are co-opted into its games, lest they escape.

Ian: IanJay_2015-Jul-02

 

Me: Huh. I guess it really IS the most colorful post-apocalyptic scenario ever. AWESOME.

Ian: This would explain why so much focus is put on playing by its world’s rules– the relentless urge to “stay fresh”, style-wise. By distracting the memories with a fragmented, nonsensical facsimile of Shibuya centered around fashion and battling, the Paint can keep its inhabitants’ interests narrow.

Me: YES. But what are the real aims of the Paint? What happens when you break out of the endless game into the secret adventure?

Ian: I don’t think the goal is to break out, but to regain sentience by considering the sum of your experiences & extracting meaning. In that way every Miiverse post in the game is a tiny act of defiance.

Me: Is this an extended metaphor for the concept of Maya.

Ian: Possibly! Or a very very extended ARG for custom map editor DLC.

Me: Or Frog Fractions 2.

 


squidkidsona

I couldn’t resist. I drew my squidsona. Her name is Only. She has seen the Tru7h and took the turquoise pill. Her favorite weapon is the spray-can.

 

Cleaning up that Tarot deck.

I just amended the page for the Tarot of the Silicon Dawn. It’s still not as cool as it was before I switched my site over to WordPress a few years ago, but at least now it has images of all of the cards on it. If you click on them you’ll even get to see the full text of the card.

Eventually I may make it spiffier again but I think this helps give a better sense of the contents than just ‘here is an unboxing video, here is where you can buy it’.

Owning my tools.

ai_cc_splash

There we go. No more creepy drowned corpses staring at me when I boot my computer up any more. And the real version number instead of the marketing number – I started with Illustrator 8, and I kinda like that reminder that I’ve been using this program that long.

If you want to use this, grab the high-res version and the low-res version, then right-click on Illustrator in the finder, select ‘show contents’, then drop them into contents/resources. You might want to rename Adobe’s ai_cc_splash.png and ai_cc_splash@2x.png before you do this, just in case it bitches come update time.

If you’d rather drop in your own art then you can grab my Illustrator file and go to town. If you keep the ‘type hider’ layer as-is then it’ll hide the credit for the person who drew the original splash screen by putting the same color behind that text.

(The image is a very orange icon I drew for someone a while back, with a few effects added here and there.)

History Lesson

pride-2015

Yesterday, the Supreme Court handed down a ruling: two people of any gender can get married anywhere in the US. I painted my nails rainbow colors to celebrate. Then I decided I wanted to draw something as well, and this fell out.

Really, I feel like this is kind of the fate of every holiday celebrating some ethnicity’s independence in the US: “hey I guess these people are cool but what’s really important here is drinking funny-colored liquor. And maybe dressing funny, too.” And once every single battle a LGBTQI* activist could dream of has been won, that’s what will remain of Pride.

* * * * *

If you are the kind of person who likes to share stuff on Tumblr, I bothered to do a separate post there this time with the image chopped up for better display. It’s here.

ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: Academic credit.

A while back – I think something like a year ago, maybe longer – I got pointed to a call for submissions for an academic journal. The “Transgender Studies Quarterly” was doing an issue called “Tranimalities”, themed around, well, honestly, teh furreh. And even teh postfurreh.

So on a whim I submitted a short B&W comic Nick and I had done a while back for the Anthrocon conbook. I gave it a pseudo-academic title. They accepted it.

And I got my contributor copy today.

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I briefly flipped through it after opening the package. Holy cow is it full of academia. I will need to sit down with a stiff drink before trying to actually read most of the articles in this thing.

If you want a physical copy of this sucker, you can order one here.

If you’re just interested in my comic, it’s right here on my site.

I got a comic about a catgirl turning into a robot spider into a serious academic journal. I can’t help but feel like this means I am winning at life.