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I’m at the library. I pulled a big thick tome of Futurist art off the shelves. These are my favorite images. Enjoy! Someday I hope to do a comic that gets described as “a Futurist nightmare”. Or “a Futurist dream”. Either way.
Omfg chapter X of Decrypting Rita is FINALLY DONE. If you want to catch up then go back to here to read the whole chapter. At 17 pages, it’s the longest one so far, and probably the longest one in the entire story – I’ve got most of book 3 planned out and nothing looks to be anywhere near this long.
This also means that it’s probably time to get moving on the Kickstarter. There’s one more chapter in book 3, but it’s about eight pages, with a fairly low panels-per-page count (especially compared to the last few pages of this one, which ranged from 7-12 panels per page), so I should have no problems getting it done during the month-long span of a campaign. I also want to do some editing to a few things in this last chapter, and of course there’s going to be a pass of considering where spot gloss belongs.
In other Rita news, yesterday I dropped by Phoenix Comics in Capitol Hill. It’s run by some friends of mine, who’d asked for a few copies of Rita last month; turns out the last of the three copies had just sold a couple days ago, and they wanted more! So I’ll be dropping off four more sometime soon.
Also here is a cool thing: Jim Steranko did a comics adaptation of the 1981 SF movie “Outland”. It ran in Heavy Metal over six months, then was collected – but only in France. He drew it almost entirely in double-page spreads, with lots of huge drawings balanced against rows of smaller ones. If I’d seen this before starting Rita, I might have done some different panel rhythms – and I still might swipe from it for the final volume. Which is kind of coming full circle; the initial flash of Rita climbing up the side of a building, rendered very starkly and bluely, came when I was in the shower after reading an article talking about the first issue of Steranko’s run on “Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD”. I guess maybe if I ever run into him at a con I should say “hey thanks for the inspiration” and pass him a copy or something.
Woohoo! I got on the scale this morning and saw a number below 160 for the first time in a year or two. I’m getting back to the zone where I start to shift from “looks pretty good” to “omghottt” in my own eyes. And that’s really what matters – when I’m constantly seeing my reflection as HOTTT, my mood is tons better, and I’m even more outgoing and friendly. And confident. Which is attractive.
Just a fragment.
I was in a furniture warehouse/programmer’s collective. While talking to one of the programmers, one of them asked about all the plastic stuck to my arms. It was all where my tattoo of dragon wings SHOULD be, except the wings weren’t visible. I was unconcerned about this, figuring it had something to do with the fluorescent lighting in the warehouse. As I started paying attention to that area, the outer edges of the wings started to dimly appear on my flesh as areas of slightly darkened and roughened skin.
I guess I’ve had these wings long enough – almost a year since I first started getting them done, and very close to “finished” – that my dream-self is starting to have them as well.
Nick came over yesterday. We futzed around: went out for some food, came back to my place and caught me up on Venture Brothers. Which meant four episodes back to back.
Then the next morning we went out to the cafe and poked at projects. I ALMOST got the next page of Rita roughed out – its gonna be eight or nine complex panels, so it takes a while. I might split it in two so I can give things a bit more breathing room, at the expense of making the longest chapter in the whole story even longer. Splitting it up may also make it happen faster; I have a terrible time getting into any kind of groove on pages with more than about six panels, I find.
We wandered up to Ravenna Park for a bit, then I saw him off to the bus. And went back to the park, where I just hung out on a shaded bridge for a while, lying there and listening to the birds. I'd intended to get some more work done on Rita but I ended up browsing the net for a few hours instead.
Tomorrow is market day. I'll probably try to get some progress on Rita, and might wander out to a regular spin jam down in Capitol Hill that I found out about recently. And then tomorrow is a party. Weekends, yay.
I just pulled my scanner out of the closet. It’s a Canon LiDE 60; it’s served me well for many years. I haven’t been using it much lately because I’ve been working direct in Illustrator. It worked just fine the last time I used it, no problems at all.
I tried to scan with it. The system scanner driver wouldn’t recognize it. I fiddled with it for a bit, then remembered my HP printer also has a scanner in it. So I poked at that. Ended up having to connect a physical cable to it; for some reason it doesn’t want to scan over the network, and I didn’t want to get lost in the rabbit hole of trouble-shooting that.
When I finally got a scan of the pencils I wanted out of it, it had applied all kinds of autocorrection and was utterly unusable. Despite the fact that the scan UI insisted all the autocorrection was turned off.
I ended up pulling out my phone, putting the sketch in question on the ground outside in the sunlight, and photographing it. Throw that into Evernote, then pull it out on the computer for work in Illustrator. Total time: maybe 30 seconds? With an image that may not be quite as high-res but is infinitely more usable for my purposes.
Welcome to the future, where everything is either awesome, or a complete clusterfuck of incompatibility.
For a long time, I’ve been pretty happy to be a no-op transwoman. I wore the label “dickgirl” with pride, eventually shifting to “pricklady” as I felt I became more grown-up and dignified. But yesterday, a switch flipped. Suddenly I’m seriously contemplating getting genital surgery.
I feel like it’s not so much that my personal, private performance of a female gender requires me to be able to easily put three penises inside me at once. That’s a part of it – if I could wave a magic wand and swap bits, I’d certainly do it and enjoy the hell out of finally being able to have vaginal sex – but that’s not what made me finally decide. No, what made me finally decide to do something about my genitals is the day in, day out hassle of tucking. I’ve worked hard to have the body I do. I’ve poured a lot of hormones into it, I’ve learnt how to dress it nicely, I exercise regularly to keep it in good shape. I have a pretty thing I want to show off, and I’m tired of always having to worry, somewhere in the back of my mind, if the tape on my loins is going to come unstuck and let my cock come flopping out to make a huge misgendering bulge in my skirt. And even when I’m not showing myself off? Hell, take right now – I’ve got to get dressed for yoga class soon, which pretty much involves a top, leggings, and tape. And right now my loins are tender from being tightly tucked through most of a long, sweaty day out the day before yesterday; there’s a spot the tape goes on that got the top layer of skin pulled off, and is too tender to tape. Am I going to fiddle with a different arrangement? Make do with some tight underwear? Or just blow it off? I’d rather just get up, pull on a blouse and leggings, and go. I loved what getting my facial hair removed did for the amount of hassle involved in getting ready to leaving the house, and now I want to remove the next hassle.
It feels kind of superficial when I put it like that, but I mentioned this in much briefer form on Twitter and instantly had pretty much all my post-op MtF acquaintances chiming in and saying “yeah that was most of it for me too”. I’m at a point where people are routinely surprised when I mention I’m trans, but I’m tired of having to be constantly AWARE of my genitals.
So now I need to start researching. Who do I want to sculpt my flesh into a new configuration? What kind of options do I have? How much is it gonna cost me? Can I get insurance to pay for it? Do I want to try to do any deliberate artistic choices in the shaping of my new genitals? This is gonna be so much hassle. But in the long run it’ll hopefully be a major reduction in the amount of hassle in my life, when I can get up in the morning and not give a flying shit about whether or not my dick is gonna poke out of my clothes. Maybe this is my subconscious asking for the biggest birthday present ever; I did have a birthday two weeks ago, after all.
I really thought I’d never come to this point, that I’d be happy being a pricklady until such time as I could have hot-swappable genitals. But I guess the back of my head had other ideas.
fuss•y•spi•der | ˈfəsēspīdər |
noun
an eight-legged arachnid who has an intense desire to keep her web neat and clean
verb
to clean one’s home, especially whilst adopting the persona of “Miss Fussyspider”: my studio is totally transliminal, I need to fussyspider the fuck out of it.
trans•lim•i•nal | tranzlimənl, translimənl |
adjective
1 messy, and stressfully so: I feel much better now that my studio is less transliminal.
…or in other words, I just beat back a lot of the chaos that’s accumulated due to conventions over the past month, and I feel a lot better about my working space now!
One of these days I really need to do that comic about sorting algorithms starring Ms. Fussyspider. “I prefer to use cycle sort when organizing the corpses of my previous lovers, as it minimizes the number of husks I have to haul around. But now that you’re here to help I can use quicksort* instead – it’s much faster!”
* sorts mentioned may not actually have these qualities, I haven’t done the research for that comic yet.
I just went back and read a chunk of 1930 Nightmare Theatre.
God damn it, Ricky.
Can I pay my Basic Health premiums online?
Yes, Basic Health accepts credit card payments online from current members (offered applicants, disenrolled/suspended members, group members, or Washington Health members cannot pay online). There is an additional charge to use this payment option, called a convenience fee.
Basic Health cannot take credit card payments over the phone or in person. This payment option is only available online.
whyyyyyyyyyyyyy why the fuck can’t I pay online as a new applicant why the fuck are you charging extra for the method of payment that involves no human time whatsoever are you people stuck in the twentieth century or something
sweet and sour monkey sphincters, i’m not sure if i even have any stamps in the house ugh fuck this twentieth-century bullshit (and fuck the whole “health insurance” racket while I’m at it)
Oh well I need to go deposit the cash I got from AC anyway, the post office isn’t much further than that. Still. Checks. In the mail. Ugh.