Now that I’ve started wearing contact lenses and bras, I am amazed at how quickly it started looking really, really weird to see myself in the mirror with glasses and/or without a bra on beneath my clothes.
I look a hell of a lot older with the glasses on. Tiny little eyes.
I’ve been re-reading the Discworld series. All 40 or so books. In publication order. Starting with “The Colour of Magic”.
Right now I’m on #5, “Sourcery”. Which, in a lot of ways, feels like a retread of a lot of the ideas Pratchett was playing with in #3, “Equal Rites” – both of them involve a wizard’s power being passed down to their very magical child, with some part of said wizard’s identity hanging around, trying to direct how the child grows up.
“Rites” had the additional narrative of said wizard being a woman, who had to deal with the fact that Women Are Witches and Men Are Wizards, despite her magical power being very much Wizard Power, but both of them feel like their core issue is the way really powerful magic kind of detaches its practitioner from the world – Esk and her fellow student Simon end up forming a working partnership to investigate the power of Pointedly Not Doing Magic, and thus presumably keep themselves interested in the world, but Coin ends up stepping out of the Discworld into a little magical pocket universe.
And none of these characters are ever heard from again.* Pratchett’s narrative attention will continue to be concerned with wizardry now and then, but these particuar wizards are too competent for comedy.
Arguably, #5, “Mort”** has core similarities to these two books – they’re about the use of immense power. Esk, Mort, and Coin all get given frightening amounts of power by their stories; Esk and Mort both renounce it, while Coin renounces the world instead. It’s as if Pratchett set out to write a story about gender issues in “Equal Rites”, and found something midway through it that was compelling enough for him to explore as a theme for three entire novels. With, of course, the default male protagonists afterwards.
It is also rather disconcerting to read Discworld novels that concern themselves with the affairs of wizards that don’t have Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully. He won’t be appearing until 1990’s “Moving Pictures”; until then, it seems that every time we visit the Unseen University, we’re introduced to a new set of wizards at the top of its administrative structure. Magic is dangerous, even for the assorted comedic types Pratchett is using for the average wizard; partially because doing serious magic starts to attract Things from outside of reality, but mostly because advancement in the ranks is by means of killing someone ahead of you. Once Ridcully came along, this stopped, due to him being rather a bit of a bad-ass – though that too would fade in his later appearances, with what felt like a cultural shift happening in the Unseen University and a lot less emphasis on Wizards Killing Wizards For Comedy. (I think we also never see another female wizard after Esk? She tried to change the world of wizarding, and had next to no impact on it.)
Really, I tend to think of the Discworld as a comedic, harmless place, but there is a hell of a lot of death going on in these stories. It just never happens to anyone he makes us care about. And then he’ll distract you with an over-the-top, cartoony moment. (Quite literally sometimes; there’s a moment in “Mort”*** where a wizard accidentally drinks a whole bottle of love potion, and ends up running around for a moment with his loins quite literally on fire.)
* okay yes I know Esk has a cameo in the last Tiffany Aching book in 2010, but that’s a gap of thirteen years before Pratchett feels like writing her again.
** that’s the one where Death takes an apprentice, if you’ve forgotten.
*** Hell, look at that entire book. It’s about Death. And Pratchett begins portraying Death as a creature who wants to be rather friendly, insofar as this is possible when his entire raison d’etre is the taking of souls after their bodies die. Every death we see Mort personally attending to, as he learns to do Death’s Duty, is a tranquil, welcomed one. There are brief mentions of other ones that are messier, but never on-screen…
“I should go get something to eat for dinner.”
Walk into bedroom to put some panties back on.
Experience sudden, irresistible attraction to MY OWN BED.
Fall into bed, still mostly dressed (except for the aforementioned panties, which I removed when going to the bathroom and didn't bother putting back on).
Yeah um no I don't think I'm leaving the house tonight. I ate too much Saturday night, I can skip dinner tonight.
Repeat two more times in the next couple weeks oh my fuck kill me now.
I have a friend that draws a lot of porn. Today, she wanted to stretch a little after doing a bunch of Serious Work and posted to Tumblr asking for Interesting Kinks To Draw.
One of the requests she received was, and I quote: “Egypturnash’s Rita, in her dragon chassis, with a big fat cock and balls”. She decided not to draw it, because it felt like “a smut request” to her rather than just a random interesting kink. But she told me about it.
My feelings about this are pretty complicated. On the one hand, I know damn well that drawing porn of a thing, or causing porn of a thing to be drawn, is how the Internet expresses its love for that thing. Hell, I drew a picture of GLaDOS and SHODAN getting it on. It is a good thing that people care enough about my crazy comic to want to see this sort of thing. On the other hand, I’ve kind of developed a certain amount of respect for these characters; while I’ve implied that Rita’s got a healthy, and occasionally kinky, sex life – in all of her incarnations – I kinda feel like the bedroom is just not a place I want to put my camera.
On the gripping hand, my mostly-dormant smutmonger alias drew a porn of Rita having sex, with a couple hot-swappable genitals lying in arm’s reach, so it’s not like I can say “THIS SHOULD NEVER HAPPEN!!!!!1!”.
(And for the record: you want porn of Rita? Go for it. I’d love it if you linked to the comic in your image’s description… and I’m not entirely sure I want you to show it to me.)
Anyway. I’m back from Rose City Comic-Con and I just wanna have some solitary dinner and go to sleep.
Hello, Portland. I am in you.
More precisely I’m in the Portland Doubletree with a belly full of half of a double burger from a place called LARDO’S, after hooking up with SIgil and Bazeel for dinner. I gave Sigil my minion badge, since I have no minion for my table and she wanted to hit the con I’m here for.
The con? Rose City Comic-Con. Attendance last year was 18k; I got email from them yesterday telling me that online sales were twice what they were last year at that point. Two-day passes and Saturday-only are sold out.
I have no idea how much or how little to expect out of this con. Last year I think I mostly broke even and had a good time, plus picking up an interesting new pro-level fan; this year I’m expecting absolutely nothing beyond feeling confident I’ll break even again now that I have two volumes of Rita to sell. If something more happens then YAY.
The show floor is no bigger than it was last year. Kinda small, really, compared to ECCC. Like last year, I’m close enough to the entrance that I don’t need to worry about being lost in the hinterlands. So things are looking positive. I grabbed an early signup sheet for next year, and need to spend a little time away from my table considering the crowdflow – do I want to stick around the Alley next year, or switch to a booth? Or even multiple booths shared with friends like I’m doing at ECCC15? We will see.
I still kinda want to just be at home sleeping and finishing up Kickstarter shipping but hey. This is what I need to do this weekend. If you’re in Portland and doing the con, stop by table I-9 and say hi; if not, then you can probably attend it vicariously through my sarcastic tweets listing the costumes I see, unless business is booming too much for me to be twittering.
And when I get home I need to throw together the grope controllers for Duck Duck Poison, and go to Rainfurrest. That should be low-key after this, to be honest – after doing a couple years of Serious Comic Cons, furry cons feel like training wheels now. I’ll be there to have fun and dance my ass off, you know?
I also got the art for the shirt for the Kickstarter mostly done on the train down here. It still needs some finesse but NOT NOW; I want to sleep, and hit the con bright and early tomorrow, to be ready for the horde I suspect may be coming in.
We are coral reefs.
We secrete these structures of calcium. We live within and upon them.
We pull against these structures to move them about.
It's a pretty good gig. It's luxurious enough that we can afford to blow a significant chunk of our energy on a knot of coral that just talks to itself. And comes up with ways for us to pull against our calcium structures to make the world around us even more luxurious for us.
Or at least that's the way I like to look at my body sometimes. (Yes, I know we are not descended from coral. It sounds a lot prettier than “colonies of cells”.
Starting to experiment with contact lenses is having interesting effects: I’m starting to feel like I want to move my style around a little… and I feel like it may be time to get my nipples pierced.
The latter is probably a really bad idea on the week before three back-to-back conventions*. But I’m dropping this here to make it easy to remember ‘hey how long have I been thinking I want my nipples pierced again?’ if it’s still sticking around after cons are done.
I dunno. Seeing myself in the mirror without glasses for the first time in something like twenty years is subtly powerful. The last time I wore contacts with any regularity, I was still Paul. Now I’m Peggy, and I’ve worn glasses for the entire time I’ve worn that identity. It is also possible that I’m having a subtle reversion to Who I Was When I Was In My Early 20s due to this change in the apparent shape of my face, and now want to act like a Young Adult instead of a crazy fortysomething lady…
* Rose City Comic Con, Rainfurrest, and APE, if you happen to be attending any of those.
A while back I sent this little comic about postfurry spider babes to this call for submissions and forgot about it.
They just wrote back. I now need to write “an artist statement on your work and this comic in particular of no more than 500 words, by Oct. 3, 2014”.
It’s kinda tempting to just reply with one of the little bits of microfiction I wrote about the asteroid spiders, but I wrote something in normal English instead. (And while I was looking at those old stories I did some slight edits to fix a few places where my prose got way too packed. I still want to do The Spider Show someday, and probably manifest it as an artbook too – about a dozen large, detailed images, and a similar number of pieces of evocative microfiction.)
While reading some critical essays on the women of the Discworld, I was struck by an urge: I would like to re-read Discworld. All forty books of it. In publication order.
I could probably get them all for free with a minimum of searching. Hell, I might even have them sitting around my computer. And arguably I would not be making any major moral mis-steps by doing this, as I used to own copies of them, purchased one by one as they were written. But it’s not without its toll; I’d have to trawl through various sites that are more interested in serving up ads and viruses, or guiding me to pay memberships, than they are with spreading culture. And the files I’d acquire that way would be of dubious quality – they might be copies of the official e-books, or they might be a badly-OCRed scan of the book, with pages missing, and probably no cover image.
I could also probably get them all as used paperbacks without any significant searching. But I’m loathe to carry physical books on the plane now that I have the iPad; I read fast, and I have no desire to return to humping six or seven books around in my bag just to make sure I have sufficient things to amuse myself during the flight. (I’ve tried to draw on the flight, but laptop plus wacom tablet takes up more space than I can routinely expect to have, and then of course there’s the lack of oxygen as well.)
Or I could spend six bucks apiece on Amazon and be done with it. I like that plan. The time I’d spend hunting down good copies feels worth that.
My time has value to me. Truly, I am an adult now.