I’ve been a member of Ebay for about 9 and a half years. When in college, I used it to buy lesbian pulp fiction. Later on, I got lots of 1:6 goodies there. Most recently, I’ve used it as a source for DVDs and BJD stuff. With the recent policy change, though, I’m through. I haven’t been using the site in months, and I certainly don’t want to buy or sell on an auction site that won’t allow me as a seller to leave negative feedback for buyers! I, and many other members of the Ebay community, find this insulting and detrimental, and we’re leaving. I’m never using the auction part of the site again, although I’ve never had problems with half.com, so I’m keeping my account there.
Will finally has an appropriate digital wardrobe.
I’ve been trying for years to dress my representations of Will appropriately.
When I worked with my 1:6 plastic versions, his broad chest prevented me from putting him in women’s skimpy tops, and his hips were too wide for most skirts, even though I body-modded him several times. My 1:3 version’s clothes are prohibitively expensive, and he’s a non-standard size of doll [scrawny, 80 cm], so I’m just making due with large, loose, flowy blouses and skirts for smaller female dolls. Any early digital versions of Will, such as pixel doll versions or Meez avatars, failed because, for some reason, there were no options to dress your male avs in corsets and microminiskirts. >:
My first version of Will in Daz looked way too much like a boringly dressed man…until I discovered CrossDresser, that is. While beneficial for certain items, CrossDresser doesn’t work very well at flattening the chest area of tops designed for curvaceous women. Also CrossDresser doesn’t include morphs [body shaping] in the clothes, so I was left with converted dresses that had saggy cleavage and which were too wide for my skeletal Will.
Anyway, then I tried moving Will from a Michael 3 base to a Victoria 3 base so he’d fit in the dresses and heels better. As a result, he fit into all the bottoms okay, but his upper body was a disaster. Apparently you can either have an emaciated female V3 or a non-emaciated male V3, but you can’t have a convincing emaciated male V3 because the breast area starts puckering inward. [See the first panel here where Will is wearing a second-skin outfit that is essentially “painted” onto his body.] Even though I now have a more sophisticated clothing converter than CrossDresser [Wardrobe Wizard 2], converted dresses still imploded in the chest area if I wanted to fit them to my emaciated and male V3 based character. Arrrrrrgh!
Because I liked Will’s head as developed on a V3 base, I didn’t want to recreate him YET AGAIN on a male model. So, recently, I just did a head swap where I put his V3 head on the body of yet another male figure, not Michael 3, but David. While Michael 3 is blocky and stupid-looking, David, though more petite, has a smoother, more realistic shape that responds to deformation better. Plus he doesn’t have any chest protuberances to contend with, so I was able to create a long, scrawny, body with a sunken chest and no squinching around the [non-existent] boobs. Hooray!
After creating the latest version of Will out of a V3/David hybrid, I worked hard last night and the night before running clothes through Wardrobe Wizard 2 and fitting them to Will. I crunched just about everything in my runtimes that he could possibly be interested in, then went out and downloaded at least 20 free pieces of clothing, which I converted just for him. Just as I have bags of 1:6 clothing sorted by Short Skirts, Corsets, Scanties, Pleather, Jeans, etc., so I now have folders of converted digital clothing, all for Will, with names like Corsets, DressesandSkirts, Pants, Tops, etc. And they all fit, and there’s no squinching at the chest, and he finally looks like an androgynous guy wearing women’s clothing, rather than a non-androgynous guy wearing plate armor developed for a woman. Jubilation! Exultation! Exhilaration! Defenestration! :p I shold have pictures tonight; I know all 1.5 of you are waiting on the edge of your seats.
Now that I’ve run almost everything I have for Will through the wringer so that it actually fits him, I realize a few things.
1.) Goddamn — this is exactly what I have wanted to do for years: convert one fig’s clothing to another so that I can make truly atrocious and fashionless outfits without being hindered by the outfit’s original designs.
2.) Will needs more clothes…and more make-up. This is a guy who probably beats the movie version of Jareth the Goblin King in Labyrinth for frequency of wardrobe and facepaint changes. I need to have at least 3 times as many clothing options and makeup options as I think I will use.
3.) I just realized that I filmed two non-consecutive eps of LHF already in which Will was wearing the same makeup twice. This is an inexcusable lapse that I must correct by changing his makeup and redoing the second ep.
Run free, free like the wind.
http://free.daz3d.com/free_weekly/detail.php?free_id=226 Whisper outfit for Aiko
http://free.daz3d.com/free_weekly/detail.php?free_id=205 Aphrodite outfit for V3
http://free.daz3d.com/free_weekly/detail.php?free_id=183 Imagination for David [skirt!]
“Charles Atlas says he can give me a REAL body, all right!”
While clicking around, I discovered a site by Seanbaby devoted to those bizarre, grainy ads on the back of comic books. I remember, for example, this Charles Atlas ad, this very same one, from a childhood comic book. As soon as I rediscovered it on Seanbaby’s site, I immediately thought two things:
1. That ad struck me as poorly drawn, hokey, outmoded and a big fat lie when I first saw it around age 7.
2. Richard O’Brien didn’t have to push very far to make a parody of the Charles Atlas campaign when he wrote I Can Make You A Man for Rocky Horror. In fact, the ad copy here uses many phrases that show up, barely altered, in that song. I am, however, surprised that Richard O’Brien’s lyrics didn’t use some of the screamingly homoerotic subtext in such phrases as “Do you feel soft, frail skinny, or flabby, only HALF-ALIVE?” and “You want the Greek god type of physique…that makes other fellows green with envy.”
Zero Punctuation Flash comic gaming reviews
Ben Croshaw does snarky reviews of video games by making simple Flash animations combined with snarky narration. You don’t have to know anything about video games to find this shit hilarious, but you do need to be able to follow a high rate of speech, since he talks very fast. Go watch mini-eps of Zero Punctuation now.
Coloreria Italiana ad for fabric dye
When I saw this ad linked over at Feministing, my brain crunched, stopped and blew a few circuits of sheer incredulity that such sexist, racist, ageist bigotry could actually make it to the screen.
Basically it concerns a young Caucasian woman doing laundry in the basement of her home. She is approached by a hairy, mid-40s [?] Caucasian guy in briefs and tube socks [hahahah] who approaches her with leering confidence. He obviously thinks he is sexy, but she does not because she shoves him head-first in the laundry machine [!]. In case it’s not shocking enough that she assaults him, she sits on the shaking washing, pinning him inside, despite his cries of pain.
When the washer stops shaking, the woman opens the lid. Out comes a hairless, mid-20s [?] African man. Both the man and the woman look at each other in stupefied mutual admiration. The man flexes his arm muscles as the legend appears on the screen: “Coloreria Italiana. Coloured is better.”
WHO THOUGHT THAT WAS A GOOD IDEA, HUH? I don’t know about you, but if I’m approached by a leering man when I’m doing laundry in my residential building, I’m bound to panic, assuming that I’m about to be raped by an intruding pervert. [EDIT: It has come to my attention that the man could be interpreted as the woman’s husband.]
Well, dropping the literal interpretation, the leering man in his skivvies is obviously a concretized metaphor for undyed clothing. The man thinks he’s hot shit, but his extremely geeky underwear [knee socks, hah hah, the only funny thing about this spot], his excessive chest hair and his male pattern baldness say otherwise. Furthermore, the woman doing the laundry clearly ain’t impressed with him. Okay, fine, I can partly buy the symbolism of nerdy guy = undyed cloth.
The metaphorical significance falls apart, however, by the sheer violence of the assault in the next portion of the clip. You could say the woman throwing the man into the washer is so absurd that it just highlights the metaphorical freight of the commercial [into the washer goes the undyed fabric]. However, the commercial undercuts its metaphor by using highly non-metaphorical sounds of struggle and cries of pain from the man inside the washer. It is impossible for me to think that the woman threw undyed CLOTHES in the washer because the supposed symbol for the CLOTHES is acting in the way that any HUMAN BEING would if he had been pitched into a tumbling device and tortured. Yes, tortured. The obviously HUMAN sounds of struggle and pain override the equivalence between man and undyed clothes and make him a HUMAN BEING undergoing ASSAULT, which completely derails my attention.
As if the graphic violence weren’t enough, the end results are just as disturbing. Why is the black guy smiling so peacefully after having just bounced around in a machine that caused the white guy obvious physical distress? Why is the black guy about 20 years younger than the white guy who went in the washer? Why is he black in the first place? Why is he so desirable [as connoted by the white woman’s lustful glances] in contrast to the white guy? WHAT THE HELL?
So, to recap, a young, white, generically attractive woman shoves an older, white, supposedly unattractive man in a washer. Out comes a young, black, generically attractive man. How many biases can one cram into a single commercial? You’ve got sexism in the assumption that laundry is women’s work. You’ve also got sexism in the portrayal of guys as objects you can toss into the laundry and simply “clean up” to fit your fantasy of what they should be like. You’ve got ageism in the assumption that the older guy is undesireable. You’ve got heterosexism in the fact that the clothes are symbolized by various types of guys whose ultimate goal is to gain the woman’s desire. And you’ve got that old chestnut of racism in which the white male is seen as unfashionable, undesirable, deluded, weak and probably impotent, while the black male is seen as sexy, strong, highly desirable and full of “raw animal magnetism.” As a comment on Feministing noted, it’s a “rare trifecta” of racism, sexism and xenophobia.
There’s another commercial in the same series that makes the bias even more apparent. In this commercial, the older white guy from the first commercial is reading a porno about busty black young women jumping out of washers. A non-busty young white woman, connoted as homely, comes down to do her laundry. She and the man share looks of disgust. She confiscates his magazine. He glances at the magazine, lying on the floor so that you can clearly see a busty black woman jumping out of a washer, and then he throws the young non-busty non-black woman into the washer.
As the man sits on the washer, waiting, the non-busty non-black woman struggles, cries and bangs around inside the washer. Her protests diminish, however. The man on the washer rubs his hands together in anticipation of a young busty black woman. When he opens the washer, the same young hairless black guy from the first commercial comes out. He and the white man look at each other with puzzlement. The commercial ends by saying “Coloreria Italiana: What Women Want.” Racism, sexism, xenophobia and homophobia ensue.
This is an ad that ran in Italy for an Italian product. I understand that there are different levels of what’s acceptable in the media in different cultures, but this series of commercials is blowing my mind for ANY country.
Digital shadows are the bane of my existence.
Turn shadows on on main light. Select “raytraced.” Soften by 10%. Something good should happen.
Another free modeling app
It looks like CB Model Pro operates on the same relatively easy system that Poser magnets and DAZ D-Forms do, only with more sophistication. Perhaps this is the free modeling app that I’ve been looking for — one that allows me to make organic and industrial shapes relatively quickly?
Comic Life for Windows
Plasq finally made a Windows version of its sexy comic creation software, Comic Life. I’ll have to inspect the trial version. If it’s better than my limited Comic Book Creator, I’ll go for it….
EDIT: Comic Life allows you to customize your own page templates, a feature that Comic Book Creator does not have. It also has a greater variety of vectorized speech balloons, including thought bubbles… This looks promising.
Where are the shadows?
So far my renders for LHF are coming out great, except for one thing…I can’t get the characters to cast shadows. It’s fine for the ones who are vampires, but the humans aren’t casting shadows either. Hmmmm…
Aren’t people already doing this?
I need to read this book: Love and Sex With Robots by David Levy. He talks about having sex with and loving robots as a future development, but I thought people had been doing that for a long time…
“Traumatics thick and fast:” goddamned “reality” shows
While watching/listening to some eps of Crowned, a mother/daughter pageant competition “reality” show, I realize all over again how screamingly manipulated these so-called “reality” shows are. If there’s an interview that appears before a suspenseful contest, that interview probably occurred way after said event. If there’s an interview where someone seems to make a nasty comment about someone else, that could have been taken out of context where someone was talking about a passing annoyance, rather than a deep animosity…or the interviewee could have been talking about the food served on the set, rather than any one person.
And the actual narration heightens the tension by making everything superlative, either positively or negatively. If there is a supervisor of a competition, the supervisor is the MOST talented and MOST well-renowned and MOST qualified, according to the announcer. If there are awards, they are the MOST significant and the MOST expensive. Of course, if there’s an elimination, it’s always the most TRAUMATIC event ever, DEVASTATING to the losers, STUPENDOUS to the winners. Thus, tension and suspense are artificially created and maintained. Don’t get me started on the sappy music, which spells out what viewers should feel [“Feel sad DAMMIT! FEEL SAD!!!!”].
Also don’t get me started on the manufactured cattiness of Crowned, the lascivious camera angles, the enforced ditziness, the “cabana boys,” the lisping gay stereotypes, the profusion of male “experts” who for some reason supposedly know more about pageant stuff than the women who are actually in the pageants…
There’s no indictment of pageant culture here because there’s no real expose of it here. It’s just a purely formulaic “reality” show that shows the threadbare nature of the “reality” plots.
P.S. The quote is from Sweet Head by David Bowie: “Traumatics thick and fast / Your faith in me can last / Besides I’m known to lay you, one and all!!”
Nemu Nemu: recommended Web comic
I just found a slight, charming Web comic to share with you: Nemu Nemu, about the adventures of two 10-year-old girls and their pets, two living stuffed animal dogs who talk. The strips don’t have individual punchlines; rather, they knit together to form a story about Anise, Kana and the stuffed doggies. I like this strip for its simplicity, especially the streamlined style of drawing which, with just a few well-placed lines, accurately captures the energy and enthusiasm of the characters. I also like the aimable, rambling nature of its slice-of-life chronicles.
EDIT: The Nemu Nemu characters get BJDS and, like most owners, take pictures of the shipping box, otherwise known as box porn.
EDIT 2: And this is how many doll owners think of their dolls: as silent friends.
Publicizing LHF…Help please!
These are my ideas so far for publicizing LHF. Does anyone have any more?
biz cards
updates here
updates at Daz boards
upload to Renderosity
Deviant Art account and updates there
LJ feed
announce at Men With Dolls :p
lovehasfangs.com domain
Vampires do it in cold blood T-shirts
transcripts at ohnorobot.com
ads on other Web comics [hmmmmm…]
those goddamned comics rating sites
get interviewed for Web sites
tables at Arisia and Anime Boston [scary!]
LHF toons
So I put my favorite LHF characters into toon form and arranged them all together for a group shot. Their poses and facial expressions, as well as who they are watching, give you clues as to their characters….
Some books for LHF research
Avenues to Adulthood: Origins of the High School and Social Mobility in an American Suburb (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1987) by Reed Ueda. It talks about Somerville High School during the period when Will would have gone. Apparently a bitch to get a hold of used….
Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America by John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman. Because I need some more information about precolonial and colonial life.
Not a centaur, but still crushworthy
Several years back, Twigling made an equine girl custom CG 1.0/PB hybrid [I think] with articulated horse legs and a little tail and floppy horse ears and a custom dappled paint job. Now that Twigling is cleaning out her house, she is selling the horse girl to me. I haven’t received her yet, but below you can see some pictures of the cuteness I will be receiving eventually.
I like most the loose and messy aesthetic at work in her slightly uneven paint job, unhemmed clothes and uncombed hair. She looks like she’s been running around on the moors. And see her little ears poking out from her hair? Also she has a smirk, which endears her to me. Not to mention her voluptuous, muscular thighs…
“Beware of Japanese waitress bearing fortune cookie.”
At the end of one of the Pink Panther movies, Inspector Clouseau is dining at a Japanese restaurant when the server hands him something on a tray. It is a fortune cookie, which contains the following message: “Beware of Japanese waitress bearing fortune cookie.” Being completely oblivious, he takes a while to realize that he should have paid attention to the very person who gave him the fortune cookie. Meanwhile, the “Japanese waitress bearing fortune cookie” turns out to be Clouseau’s assistant, Cato, who takes every opportunity to ambush Clouseau to keep his self-defense techniques up to snuff. Cato attacks Clouseau. A melee ensues. And…curtain.
Beyond the stock comedic elements of drag, slapstick and food fights, this scene also depends on the viewer’s familiarity with fortune cookies. As presented in this country, fortune cookies are a phenomenon strictly associated with Chinese restaurants. Your average American probably thinks of fortune cookies as a Chinese invention, rather than a Japanese one, which is why “Japanese waitress bearing fortune cookie” is incongruous and therefore funny.
However, fortune cookies really are Japanese in origin, argues researcher Yasuko Nakamachi. Years of painstaking research into the fortune cookie trail have convinced her that the ubiquitous dessert of American Chinese takeout restaurants actually first began in shrine-side Japanese bakeries, where the wafers were hand-cooked over open coals. Reports of these Japanese fortune-cookie ancestors date back almost 200 years in literature and illustrations. Go read the article for speculation about how Japanese temple wafers hopped the ocean to California and somehow developed into a quintessentially American institution that was firmly associated with Chinese cuisine.
And don’t tell me you didn’t learn anything today.
Do you have questions about my dollses?
If so, fire away. This is about my BJDs only. Questions about the characters’ personalities, dolls’ construction and decoration, expenses, etc. welcomed. My BJDs are…
Frank, a Volks Yukinojo head on a DollMore Model Doll body with TwigLimbs arms, painted by me
Jareth, a modified Dollshe SA Haund, mods and faceup by Armeleia
Jennifer, an Obitsu Friend Gretel, all default
Sardonix, a Delf Juri 06 head on a modded ShinyDoll Thaasa body, mods by elisa_maza, faceup by me
Will, a Soom Sabik I.B. Hunter, default faceup accentuated by me
My Fake Baby: British reborn doll documentary
Hmmm…interesting. Commentary later.
LATER: I’m rather annoyed by the narration’s tendency to overdetermine the women’s experience by addressing the reborn dolls as if they are actual children, rather than dolls. From what I can see so far, owners of reborn dolls range in their reasons for owning and playing with reborn dolls, just in the same manner that people own and play with any other type of dolls [duh], from action figs to Barbies to RealDolls to 3-D models. The very title of the docu, My Fake Baby, sensationalizes the reborn doll interest as a pathological baby substitute for old woman with empty aching wombs, but, if you investigate the docu closely, you’ll see the dolls functioning as much more than kiddy substitutes.
I’m particularly interested by the woman in the first segment who freely admits that the reborn dolls fulfill her fantasy of having an odorless, docile, troublefree substitute for a child. She says that she likes kids, but she clearly likes the concept of kids, their cuteness from a distance, rather than the actual mess and responsibility. I’m not going to fault her for this ambivalence about children, and I would like to note that she’s rather pragmatic about her interest in reborn dolls. She has an idea of the psychological functions they have in her life, and she treats them like they’re real, but she knows they’re dolls. This is how most people I know play with dolls; they talk to them as if they are real, but they do know that the dolls are dolls, albeit heavily freighted with symbolic value. Despite the film’s attempt to make her come across as some sort of unhinged weirdo swaddled in the pink gauze of unreal baby fantasies, she actually appears to me as a relatively well-hinged doll owner whose major challenge is her obvious dissociation from any real-life experience involving kids.
I really like the artist in the first segment who paints the reborn dolls. She gets into the technical details and allows viewers to see that making one of these dolls is no different from any other detailed artistic endeavor. At the same time, the artist also knows that reborn dolls have a special affective power because they look like babies, which we are all programmed to respond protectively toward, and she cannily exploits the natural human interest in small Homo sapiens with her advertising techniques. She apparently goes out into public with her wares and gets people to do double-takes, then hands them business cards. She respects the emotive power that the dolls have for people and that people use the dolls for various emotional purposes, but she also has a straightforward view that she uses the dolls to make a living. Despite the paternalistic narration of the documentary, the artist also comes across as sane and average.
P.S. I’m never really impressed by the caliber of YouTube commenters, but I would like to point out that some of the commenters think that the reborn doll owners are insane because they talk as if the dolls are alive and because they spend lots of money on them. Oh good God! Just because someone treats an inanimate object as if it is alive, that is not automatically grounds for insanity. For just a few examples of the general populace treating inanimate objects as if they are alive, look at someone who gets angry at a rock after tripping over it, the loving personification that car owners may give to their cars, or the antagonism many people direct toward their electronic devices. Rather than being pathological, personification is more like an innate human tendency. There are pathological extremes of personification, to be sure, but I don’t see that any of these doll owners are manifesting it.
As for the argument that spending a lot of money on something means that someone is insane, that is just a different way of saying, “I cannot fathom what you are spending money on, so you must be nuts.” It’s not even worth a serious rebuttal, since it’s just a value judgment.
In today’s Totally Awesome category…
…please marvel at the music video for Dionysos’ Tais Toi Mon Coeur. Just in case you couldn’t figure it out from the associated pictures, Tais Toi Mon Coeur is French for, literally, Be Quiet, My Heart. In the dismissive, bouncy tone of the song, it can better be translated as Fuck Off, Heart. The animation reminds me of Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride or The Nightmare Before Christmas. It looks like it’s acted out by Victorian automatons. The general ambiance smells like Poe or Baudelaire, with that sort of cheer in gloominess. For some reason, it also reminds me of the BTVS ep Once More With Feeling and Spike singing to Buffy. Then, of course, there are the generally fascinating allusions to death, resurrection, self-objectification and mannequinization [which should be a word if it isn’t]. All in all, it’s quite an entertaining little number. I like the little wire-and-wood articulated hands and the shadowed eyelids the best. Clunky translation of lyrics here.
Woo hoo, improvements in rendering time…
Okay, I just wrestled my aforementioned Daz scene into a state of more submissive submission. There are still 2 characters in the scene, Anneka and Will, with high-res textures on their bodies, clothes and hair. But I have reduced the number of props in the scene to 30 [from 60 — mostly I got rid of a lot of individual books]. Also I slashed the size of most of these texture files to about 20% of original size and dropped posability information from the props that didn’t need it. [The stuffed animals don’t need to be posable; they just need to sit there and look cute.]
As a result, now a render of the entire scene [OpenGL, 8 passes per light] takes 40 seconds, rather than over 60.
Hiding everything except what will appear in the frame gets the rendering time down to 18 seconds. I’d like to have it render instantaneously, a la digital camera, but that won’t happen unless I get a more powerful processor or start reducing the resolution of the characters themselves, which I refuse to do.
Test of part of an actual ep of LHF
I just tested with posing, setting up, rendering and laying out part of LHF 1.1. Already I see some things I need to improve on.
1. First and foremost, I have way too many props, textures and gimcracks in my sets. 2 figures in an average set, which is just a sparsely decorated corner, with maybe 60 props total [mostly books :p] and 3 lights, really slows down my compooper. I can’t pose characters quickly; there’s a lag time of several seconds. Also rendering takes too long for my tastes, meaning that it takes 60-180 seconds. I need to relegate as much as possible to the 2-D backdrops except for furniture and 2 books, 1 telephone, 1 doll, 1 mermaid, 1 stuffed animal….the absolute essentials. I must resist the temptation to go insane with detail in the sets. They should be very simple, streamlined and highly stylized.
2. The font in the speech bubbles looks horrid. I think it needs to be 9 point BOLD.
That said, I’m enchanted with how the new medium is working out. I can get much tighter camera angles out of Daz than out of my own physical camera. I can also put the digital dolls in much more realistic, squinched-up postures than I could with my action figs. Plus the digital dolls’ likeness is much closer to what Anneka and Will actually look like. Hooray!!!! Is it strange to say that I am most enchanted with the sagginess and wrinkliness of their faces and the elegance of their hands?
Multi-phthongs
I always knew about diphthongs, but I didn’t know there were monophthongs and triphthongs as well. Monophthongs may be obvious [single, consistent vowel sounds], but triphthongs — single-syllable vowel sounds that vary three times over their duration — are more elusive. The only English example I have found is the pronunciation of “our” in dialects that drop the “r,” like a Bostonian accent, I guess, where someone would say “owww-uhhh-aaaaah,” to put it exaggeratedly.
Wow, I just greatly expanded the number of English words with the -phth- compound in them that I know. Monophthong, diphthong, triphthong, ophthamology [and variants], exophthalamos [and variants], naphthalene [and variants]. Man, that combination of letters together just looks odd.
Freakin’ fabulous fricatives and more
Fricatives are those sounds you make when you’re blowing air out your mouth, like ffffffff, sssssss, vvvvvvvv and zzzzzzzz. In fact, the word “fricative” begins and ends with a fricative! Frickin’ awesome!
Sibiliants are an awesome subtype of fricatives when the air that you’re blowing out is channeled by your tongue through your teeth, as in ssssssssss and zzzzzz. Wouldn’t you know — the word “sibiliants” begins and ends with a sibilant! Simply superb!
Plosives are those sounds you make when you stop air from going through your nose or your mouth, like bbbbbb, ddddd, gggg, kkk, pppp and tttt. Oh look…the word “plosives” starts with a plosive. Positively preposterous.
Nasal stops are those sounds you make when air goes out your nose, but not your mouth, like mmmmmm and nnnnn. Hey, there’s a nasal stop begining the phrase “nasal stop.”
Affricates are sounds where you start blowing air out your mouth, then stop suddenly, so they are fricatives that end in plosives. They are sounds like chchchchchch and jjjjjjjjj.
As I was writing this entry, I just noticed that almost all of these terms for oral articulation contains in itself an example of the term it’s describing. They are self-descriptive. [There’s probably a technical term for that, but it escapes me now.] They’re almost onomatopoetic. Sound and sense sometimes do go together in a poetical way.
Me-me-me meme
Here’s a meme I stole from Batchix…
TELL ME…
1. your name: William Philomel Ashby Cox.
2. birthday: Oh bloody Christ…you know…I…I forgot. Some time about 131 years ago.
3. place of residence: Slummerville, Masshole.
4. what makes you happy: lesbians, corsets, Baudelaire, girls who can kick ass. Ass-kicking lesbians in corsets reading Baudelaire.
5. what are you listening to now/have listened to last: My girlfriend trying to drink a blood/pomegranate cocktail and failing miserably.
6. do you read my lj: No. Do you think I should get one of these? Could I use it to promote lesbovamps.com?
7. if you do, what is particularly good/bad about it:
8. an interesting fact about you: I’m named after a woman who was raped by her brother-in-law and then had her tongue cut out so she wouldn’t tell [Philomel]. Typical Greek myth…
9. are you in love/have a crush at the moment: I’m not so sure about that.
10. favourite place to be: Old Burying Ground outside Harvard Square…a great place to mope.
11. favourite lyric: I have control of a story untold / It begins with the father of sin / I walk alone in the garden of stone / I turn into the monster within / Life is too long for me / I realize that I miss being human — Awakening by The Damning Well … No seriously, I really don’t listen to music, although this guy I knew, Mark, used to play the Pet Shop Boys, so I can sort of stand them sometimes.
12. best time of the year: Winter because of the short days and weak light.
13. any pets? No, but, if I had one, it would be a cat.
3. place of residence: Slummerville, Masshole.
4. what makes you happy: lesbians, corsets, Baudelaire, girls who can kick ass. Ass-kicking lesbians in corsets reading Baudelaire.
5. what are you listening to now/have listened to last: My girlfriend trying to drink a blood/pomegranate cocktail and failing miserably.
6. do you read my lj: No. Do you think I should get one of these? Could I use it to promote lesbovamps.com?
7. if you do, what is particularly good/bad about it:
8. an interesting fact about you: I’m named after a woman who was raped by her brother-in-law and then had her tongue cut out so she wouldn’t tell [Philomel]. Typical Greek myth…
9. are you in love/have a crush at the moment: I’m not so sure about that.
10. favourite place to be: Old Burying Ground outside Harvard Square…a great place to mope.
11. favourite lyric: I have control of a story untold / It begins with the father of sin / I walk alone in the garden of stone / I turn into the monster within / Life is too long for me / I realize that I miss being human — Awakening by The Damning Well … No seriously, I really don’t listen to music, although this guy I knew, Mark, used to play the Pet Shop Boys, so I can sort of stand them sometimes.
12. best time of the year: Winter because of the short days and weak light.
13. any pets? No, but, if I had one, it would be a cat.
RECOMMEND
1. a film: 300, if you like oily beefcake.
2. a book: The Collected Poems of Algernon Swinburne.
3. a band, a song and an album: Can I just go with my answer to number 11?
PLUS
1. one thing you like about me: You’re pretty hot. I’d hit it.
2. two things you like about yourself: I’m a lot less stupid than I used to be. I also have slightly more fashion sense, which is saying a lot.
3. a picture of yourself! Here’s me over on the left. I have no idea who that is over on the right. :p
4.. put this in your lj so i can tell you what i think of you if you want. I don’t have an LJ, so I’m sticking it in hers.
Kiss Kiss, Faint Faint
James Marsters is guest-starring on Torchwood season 2 in the Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang ep.
Hemicorporectomy?!?!?!?!?!?
I’m astounded, boggled and vomitoriously grossed out by my sheer accidental discovery of the extremely rare surgical procedure known as hemicorporectomy.
As the word itself suggests, a hemicorporectomy involves the removal of essentially half the body.
This medical dictionary says that the legs, pelvic bones, genitalia and excretory system [rectum to anus] are removed. I assume the reproductive system would be removed as well. This ain’t no double-limb amputation, people. It’s translumbar, which means that it goes through the lower back.
A hemicorporectomy usually happens because of a) a severe traumatic injury or b) horrible cancer of the lower spine or pelvic girdle that doctors want to keep from spreading. It’s usually done in two stages. The first stage reroutes the excretory system to a colostomy bag. The second stage is the amputation.
Needless to say, this is a radical surgery with a high fatality rate, done only in the extremest cases. If a person does survive, he or she has many special considerations. For example, he or she has just lost half of his/her body weight, including circulatory system. He or she must be monitored to make sure that the heart is adequately adjusting a new blood pressure set point. Also loss of the colon can lead to loss of electrolytes.
Survivors of hemicorporectomy face many mobility challenges. Obviously, without legs, they pretty much use wheelchairs or stay in bed. Furthermore, they have a smaller surface area on which to bear weight for sitting or lying. Pressure sores may result. Conventional prostheses are like bucket sockets, to put it crudely, with prostheses made from a non-breathing polymer to cap the lower torso. The polymer scrapes against the survivors’ skin, injuring them. Additionally, because the prostheses don’t breathe, the survivors cannot dissipate perspiration out of the area covered by the prostheses — a large area of their remaining body parts! — so they can’t regulate their body temperatures. This article shows some breathable, load-bearing alternatives to bucket prostheses. Check out the pictures, which give you an idea of what a clothed hemicorporectomy survivor’s lower body looks like. I’m still not clear on what’s keeping their remaining organs from falling out. Their diaphragms must be working hard, I guess.
So today I learned that people can survive without portions of their spine. That just amazes me. I always assumed that people needed their heads, necks and entire cores [body minus limbs] to survive. Now that I think about it, though, the entire core is not absolutely necessary. Ventilators can help to work the lungs, dialysis machines the kidneys, feeding tubes the digestive system, colostomy systems the excretory system. I suppose it is theoretically possible to move those bodily functions to machines so that the core consists of heart, [reduced] lungs, [reduced] digestive, [reduced] excretory, head and brain. That’s mind-blowing.
Apparently people can live without pretty much all of their bodies!!! Just think about it… People have been known to live without the following, where “without” means the absence thereof, not the non-working presence of… all limbs, hair, sweat glands, larynx, tonsils, 2 eyes, nose, 2 ears, 1 lung, teeth, tongue, upper palette, lower jaw, 1 or 2 kidneys, reproductive systems, 2 breasts, large tracts of intestine, spleen and other organs that I’m probably missing. People have also been known to live with portions of their brains removed. I want to say that I read about someone who was running successfully on one hemisphere after a radical operation designed to reduce seizures, but I don’t have a source for that.
Not fashion, but a national emergency.
Well, Will finally has appropriate [?] winter clothes. The peanut gallery at right makes typically snarky comments.
I have got to start writing about these characters again…They are BUGGING me.
Don we now our gay apparel…
Well, not really, but look we now at some gay ads, fa la la la la, la la la la. Radar’s feature, Gay for Pay, provides proof positive that gay-targeted ads rely heavily on stereotypes of effeminacy/drag, phallic symbols and the assumption that lesbians don’t exist. Part of me is offended by the clumsy use of trite gay characterizations, while part of me is offended that there’s only one ad explicitly targeted at women [the beer ad], although I suppose you could make a case for the Subaru ad [suits/sparkly dress] being for a woman as well.
Intimidating Anneka
Yeah, this most closely resembles my mental idea of Anneka: tall, buxom, androgynous and intimidating, definitely a dom. Custom second skin outfit from Zew Clother, corset and sleeves [Devilicious] from Runtime DNA freebies. I think I might actually be getting the hang of this Daz stuff…
Ergh, now that my aches have subsided, it’s bed time.
Corpse Re-Animation Technology Still 10 Years Off, Say MIT Mad Scientists
I’m especially amused by this old Onion article because the mad scientists who bring back the dead are from MIT, which is where Janet, who reanimated her sister Velvette, studied.
A digital mullet?
Serviceable scarf // Clothing porn
I’m lazy, so I am not modeling one from scratch. I will just take the Bushy Tail 2.0 that I downloaded for all my therianthropic purposes, make it spiral and hang like a scarf, export as OBJ, then import and use a custom shader on it to make it look fuzzy. Totally tubular. Why reinvent the wheel when I can modify someone else’s wheel?
By the way, I’m now coveting Wardrobe Wizard. It does what CrossDresser does — translate clothes from one figure to another — but it does so with more sophistication. CrossDresser’s translated clothes only fit the basic shape of the target figure, not skinny ones, fat ones, transgendered ones, etc. WW2 allows you much more control to translate clothes so they fit fit, skinny, transgendered and otherwise altered figures. Since my mostly highly used character is a transgendered Victoria 3 [=Will] who wears lots of women’s clothes but doesn’t have boobs, WW2 should be very useful.
I would buy it right now if it weren’t $75.00. Fidget, fidget.
In an effort to learn 3-D modeling…
I have downloaded Wings3D, a free modeling app, and am following the tutorial in the user’s manual on how to model a [very elaborate] doghouse. I have no need for a doghouse, but the tutorial does get me familiar with the program. So far everything seems pretty intuitive, responsive and user-friendly, although I can’t figure out how to easily view my model from the bottom…or how to rotate it un-automatically.
When you’re cold and clammy already…
You hate getting any colder. Will explains.
Will is freezing in part because he has no scarf. I can’t find a decent scarf anywhere, so I’m so annoyed that I have to model one by my own damn self…
Jacket is actually part of a Chinese set that I bought specifically for Chow, but it goes along with Will’s atrocious sartorial sense.
Blaming the victim in transphobic violence
Talia Mae Bettcher writes an interesting article in Hypatia about transphobia and its connection to murders of trans people. Basically she points out that there’s this persistent theme that trans people are deceivers and that, if one checks what’s in their pants, one sees what they “really” are. So what we have here is the essentialist notion that gender depends not on how one dresses, acts and identifies, but what one covers up with one’s underwear.
For example, you can see that assumption at work in the stupid “Transvestite [sic]” ad for 42 Below Vodka, lambasted here. The ad, which basically tells the story of a potential hook-up between a sloshed guy and a sexy woman which ends in the man’s panic because the woman has a dick, depends on the shock of revelation. The ad wants you to agree with the freaked-out man who discovers that the woman isn’t “really” a woman because of her sexual equipment. This line of thinking would have you believe that the woman is really a man.
Bettcher discusses the deleterious effects of the “trans=deceiver” idea in relation to the 2002 rape and murder of Californian 17-year-old trans woman Gwen Araujo. In part of the pre-murder humiliation and torture, her attackers forced her to show her genitals. The defendants and the defense tried to argue that the sight of Araujo’s penis violated her rapists in the same way that her rapists violated her. Basically, they were saying that Araujo’s identity as a trans woman was a bullshit performance because the existence of her penis was the ultimate truth, negating how she identified herself and how others perceived her.
Additionally, the defense claimed that Araujo, by being trans, was being a malicious, provocative liar who inflamed resentment and rage in the attackers by having a secret penis. Her secret penis, once revealed, blew her attackers’ minds so completely that it was like a mental and emotional rape. Of course they lashed out at her, raping and killing her! Well, that’s what the defense and the defendants would have you believe.
So…let me see if I get this straight [hur de hur hur]. The defense and the defendants were arguing that Araujo was asking to be raped and murdered merely because her physical unclothed being and her self-identification didn’t “match,” according to some idiots’ limited, provincial, antediluvian concept of gender. And I’m supposed to believe that trans people are using secret genital weapons to flagrantly oppress non-trans people and even rape them emotionally. Oh yeah, and your average straight man is so pathetic and unstable as to become completely unhinged by the merest sight of someone’s penis. Do I need to articulate how biased, insulting, stupid and just plain damaging these assumptions are to everyone involved, trans people and straight guys alike [and trans straight guys]? How the hell is such a bigoted argument supposed to excite one’s sympathy for the proponent?
The rhetoric being spewed in this case argues eloquently that feminism should not limit itself to women’s rights, but also encompass gay rights and trans rights, since much of the sexism and stupidity holding gay people and trans people back is the same sexism and stupidity holding women back.
I was going to title this one “I was raped by the sight of a secret penis!!!!” but I wanted to make it explicit that I am not using such language seriously, but rather mocking those who think that this is a valid defense. Also, despite the fact that this is a transparently public blog, I shy from explicit topic titles, preferring instead to be explicit in the post content, as if that makes it less raunchy.
If there aren’t words for things that need words…
“And then everyone in the book gets pregnant at the same time!”
After an excoriation of Nineteen Minutes, Vanishing Acts and My Sister’s Keeper last night, Jill and I determined that Jodi Picoult is actually writing romance novels gussied up to look like Big Important Literature. I personally have a great appreciation for both romance novels [good and bad], as well as Big Important Literature. What particularly pisses me off about Jodi Picoult, though, is that her writing has such transparent, sweating pretensions to Big Important Literature, but her bad form betrays her.
And by bad form, I mean that
she protests that she addresses serious, soul-searching problems, but she always escapes any real emotional or psychological weight through a deus ex machina, rather than pursuing her knotty dilemmas to their knotty and complicated limits. For example, in My Sister’s Keeper, the main story is something about a teenager who was conceived as a potential marrow donor for her older sister. The teenager tries to become emancipated from her parents, which brings about the implosion of the family. Anyway, at the end of My Sister’s Keeper, Picoult killed off her main character basically for no other reason than to fuck with the readers. In an interview in the back of the paperback copy, she insisted that she was being realistic to have a random tragedy occur to said main character, but it was irrelevant, adding nothing to the story, serving only as a pyrotechnic display to get readers to remember the book.
Another example of Picoult’s bad form is her ham-handed bungling with themes and symbolism. One of the characters in My Sister’s Keeper is a fire fighter who ends up fighting a fire that his son, a budding pyromaniac, lit. The fire fighter broods extensively about fire as a metaphor for situations getting out of control, while not realizing that the situation with his family is burning out of control IN THE SAME DAMN WAY THAT HIS SON IS SETTING OUT-OF-CONTROL FIRES. I could forgive the unsophisticated irony if Picoult didn’t bang me over the head with it every time the fire fighter and the son’s viewpoints came around. Her stupidity with symbolism reminds Jill of Johanna Lindsey writing in Warrior’s Woman something to the extent of the fact that her doofus alpha male lunkhead’s name, Challen, “lacked only a G-E to make it ‘challenge.’ She wondered if it was symbolic.” Of course it’s symbolic, and, if you think your readers are impercipent enough to need it spelled out for them, you’re insulting your readers AND demonstrating what an unskilled writer you are. [NB: That’s a rare stupid moment in Lindsey’s book. The rest is pitch-perfect for what it is, and what it is is a sadomasochistic lust novel. Anyway, the stupidity that Lindsey evinces only momentarily appears terminally throughout Picoult’s work.]
Just to make it clear, I respect a good romance novel as much as a good piece of Big Important Literature. I respect even more a good romance novel that pushes the generic conventions, The Spanish Pearl by Catherine Friend being a pretty good example. And I respect Big Important Literature that uses romantic tropes and themes [anything by the Brontes, for example]. I just don’t respect romance novels that push generic boundaries BADLY, and Picoult does it BADLY. She would write perfectly zippy, compelling, melodramatic romance novels if she would just stop trying to address Important Ethical Dilemmas and Heart-Wrenching Current Events and just admit that she is writing soap operas and GO FOR IT!!
Jill says Nineteen Minutes is pretty interesting, despite a high dose of drama… At least, she says, it’s better than Vanishing Acts, which she wants me to read so we can bitch about it together. I love a good, meaty piece of schlock…
Author Plays God — me and Will
I made a digital model of me last night, primarily so I could enter LHF and bitch out the characters. Here I am lording it over Will. I am not a nice author. :p I have no hair because I could not find any haircuts with bangs that were buzzed up the sides. Also, I have been bald in the past, so it is not technically out of character.
The latest version of Anneka, not shown, is based on the following digital version of me.
Print ads with Orangina therianthropes
I found the Flickr stream of the print ads with the dancing animal humanoids who are so craaaaaaazy for Orangina. Because I am much more accustomed to still pictures of animal humanoids, I am much less bothered by them. Except for the palm tree because it looks like someone with a mummification fetish. See?
That therianthropic Orangina commercial
Conveniently enough for my therianthrope kick, BoingBoing linked to this French Orangina commercial. In case you are ignorant of this awesome drink, Orangina is like sweetened, watered, fizzy orange juice with some pulp, and it is so very good.
The commercial starts with a bipedal humanoid deer woman, who is masturbating rocking in solitary ecstasy on a swing in a bucolic forest. Then a bipedal humanoid bear man steals her Orangina.
The seductive flavor of the contested drink apparently causes them to go against the natural order and fall in love. The entire forest bursts into a chorus line of predator/prey couples, dancing flowers and Orangina bottles blowing their wads and showering particpants. With many shots intercut between furry cleavage and lissome bottle necks, this commercial plays on the fact that the French term for “pulpy,” pulpeuse, can also be a slang term for “curvaceous.”
Mostly this commercial is overflowing with pulpy goodness. It gets points for including an entire menagerie of bipedal humanoid therianthropes based on a variety of animals, including deer, bears, zebras, pandas, giraffes, rabbits and geckos…although the octopi were quite incongruous with all the terrestrial fauna. I also liked its attention to certain detail, like twitching ears and tails. Finally, I can’t deny the appeal of its rampantly suggestive innuendo: the SWING [a symbol for women’s sexual pleasure], the FALLING BACK INTO FLOWERS, the DANCING, the RIPPING THE WOMAN’S CLOTHES OFF AS SHE SPINS, the SITTING ON WAD-SHOOTING BOTTLES, the LAP DANCES, the ASS-SLAPPING, the SHOWERING ONESELF WITH ORANGINA and the BASICALLY SQUIRTING ORANGINA OUT OF ONE’S TITS. [Side note: It was the tentacular humanoid that was squirting Orangina from its mammaries. Brain…breaking… Unable to…countenance… illogical…biological implausibility…of two phyla…hybridizing…] Watching this commercial is like watching the part in Disney’s animated Fantasia where all the therianthropes are dancing around to Beethoven’s Pastoral, only this is what they would behave like if they were all in their sexual prime.
Two things seriously, deeply disturb me about this commercial, however. One is the ursine humanoid. He walks swiftly and nimbly on his knuckles, shoulders jerking up and down, like a large primate. But bears are basically oversized dogs with lots of extra fat, fur and muscle, and they move like dogs, you know, trotting, without visible shoulder jerks and with more of a general roll and twist in their gait. The ursine humanoid was not loping like a bear! Second, none of the hooved humanoids had digitigrade legs. Third, and most disturbingly of all, animals were dancing with each other that should have been either eating each other or running away from each other. I suppose the point of the commercial was to show that the pulpy, sexy goodness of Orangina was so strong that it could overcome even predator/prey instincts, but the sight of a deer humanoid tangoing with a bear humanoid just strikes me as seriously wrong. And yet I can handle everything else about this commercial… Go figure….
Freakin’ at the freakers’ ball
The best Xmas prezint I received was the knowledge of a beloved children’s author’s kinky side. I did not know that Shel Silverstein, known to generations of kids as the author and illustrator of such classics as Where the Sidewalk Ends, The Missing Piece, The Giving Tree and A Light in the Attic, wrote and sang pervy songs like The Freakers’ Ball. See excerpt below:
White ones, black ones, yellow ones, red ones
Necrophiliacs looking for dead ones
The greatest of the sadists and the masochists too
Screaming, “Please hit me, and I’ll hit you!!”
I have listened to other songs by this man, and they are equally cock-eyed [nur hur hur hur] and amusing. I must get me a copy of his greatest hits.
Froudian faery sleeping
I’ve been working on a custom Victoria 4.1 character for the past few weeks. She is scrawny, with a long, snout-like face, inspired by the gangly, mischievous critters in Brian Froud’s illustrations. Because I am too chicken to create a custom texture [skin] because V4’s UV map [skin texture layout] is confusing, I am just making the morphs and poses. So far, I’ve made the character’s custom head and body morph [using the pretty cool Creature Creator morph pack] and some custom poses. Here she is sleeping. It was a real pain to make her pose because I had to adjust each of her finger joints individually. The result looks quite relaxed and naturalistic, however, if I do say so myself. I put her in the “therianthropes” category because I used all sorts of animal morphs [including “HeadGoat” (?!?!?!) and “EarGremlin” 🙂 ] to deform her features.
Apollo Maximus: So good in some ways, so disappointing in others
At Sailor Zeo’s instigation, I experimented with the Apollo Maximus fig last night.
Things I liked about the fig: Apollo default looks much more realistic than Michael 3, modeled with an average distribution of fat, as opposed to Michael 3’s tight and built body. I also liked Apollo’s more fluid morphing capabilities; while Daz figures morph certain features in isolation, Apollo morphs much more smoothly, with more realistic interplay between, say, nose and philtrum if you’re making the nose longer. I also liked the fact that Apollo was free with a wide range of clothing guaranteed to fit him, no matter what his morphs.
Things I disliked about the fig: Well, mostly I disliked the female options, and this is what killed the fig for me. If a character has morph options like “Gender01” and “Gender02” on the head, as well as options to change width of hips and shoulders, as well as chest size and placement of fat deposits, it’s practically advertising its transgender capabilities. When I see a fig with such morphs available, I assume that I’ll be able to get a passably male fig out of it, if it’s female and a passably female fig out of it if it’s male.
For a little excursus about transgender figs… As I enjoyed creating them in 3-D, so I enjoy digitally modeling them. My latest digital iteration of Will is based on the Victoria 3 female mesh, heavily tweaked with the Rayne morphs. My latest digital iteration of Anneka is based on the Michael 3 male mesh, heavily tweaked with the Brom morphs. And you don’t necessarily need extra-fancy morph packs to transgenderize V3 or M3. In fact, V3’s standard morph pack includes “Male” and “Young Male” body shapes, “Male Chest Span,” “HeadMale,” “HeadMale2,” “HeadAlienMale,” et hoc genus omne, allowing you to approximate a male fig very well. [M3 is more of a challenge because of the flat-chest-to-boobs conversion.]
Okay, anyway, fresh from the transgenderizing abilities of Daz figures, I expected similar results from Apollo, perhaps even more impressive ones, since the Web site goes on and on pissing about how he’s new and sexy and improved and loads better than Daz models. I didn’t get anything close. I fought with the morphs for almost an hour, and the best I could manage was a short man with sloping shoulders and wide, fat, curving upper thighs. I could not narrow the shoulders appropriately without tearing the mesh; nor could I find any way to generate breasts on the fig. Furthermore, the only way to get rid of the penis involved making an obvious hole in the fig’s pubis through which you could see its butt crack. I was very sad.
In conclusion, Apollo should not be marketed as the super-duper fig to end all figs. A super-duper fig to end all figs would cough up a female shape if you asked it to. >_< Instead, Apollo should be correctly billed for what he is: an amazing super-duper MALE fig with extensive morphing capacity and free clothes for all your various MALE permutations, created by a guy who very well could be gay [a makeup artist/fashion designer who worked on Newbury Street in Boston for 10 years before hitting the 3-D scene — hmmm, my gaydar is ringing] and therefore more focused on the MALE body anyway. The morph dials should not imply transgenderization, but instead a young/old spectrum or a high fat/low fat spectrum. I erased him from my computer.
This is for SailorZeo, who asked me about my crack habit.
In answer to your question about my 3-D modeling tools, Zeo, I use Daz because it’s free and because Poser looked a little too complex and daunting for my basic purposes. Be warned that any 3-D modeling program requires lots of practice; just as a beginning kitbasher won’t instantly create repaints worthy of the Japanese customizers and outfits worthy of an42, so the beginning modeler needs to learn the basics, like morphing characters and sticking clothes on them, before moving on to more exciting things like making custom textures [skins] and props. After two months, I’ve finally hit an intermediate skill level with Daz, but that’s because I’ve spent almost all my free time on it.
In terms of models, I use primarily Victoria 3 and Michael 3, both made by Daz. Frankly, they are not particularly cheap — I’d say $100 to get the base figures and morphs — but, on the plus side, they are the most widely supported, so free clothing and textures [skins] can be acquired widely. They’re not the latest and greatest, but they work very well for my purposes.
To be honest, I haven’t investigated Apollo Maximus. By the time I heard about him, I was already ensconced with V3 and M3. I thought that Apollo was solely a male character, and models that cannot represent the full complement of human shapes do not interest me. However, I notice that Apollo’s morphs include parameters for female body parts, so you can probably harass him into yielding a female fig. In any case, I would highly recommend him for free experimentation since he has a good base package and great customizability. [I also note that the linked page contains a free James Marsters/Spike morph for Apollo, if you’re interested in that sort of thing… :p]
Incidentally, it seems as if you are already familiar with 3-D modeling of a sense through the Sims. Depending on what you want to do with custom 3-D characters and sets, the Sims may be sufficient for your interests. From what I can tell, the Sims automates lots of tedious and frustrating things [lighting, animation, expressions] that one does by hand in Daz and Poser. Of course, if you like pushing your characters’ mouths around for hours, attempting to achieve the perfect smirk, Daz may be the alternative for you….
Mom, the abyss is making faces at me!
When you look into the abyss, said Friedrich Nietzsche, the abyss also looks back into you. He neglected to mention that the abyss could quite possibly be wearing an evil smirk. Because she has a snake tail, the subject of this picture is classed as a therianthrope, even if you can’t see her anguineous parts.
“Hello, I’m a Wii.”
This parody commercial, in which the PS2 is personified as a Rubenesque girl with glasses and short brown hair and the Wii is a tall, scrawny girl with no glasses and blond curly hair, is annoying. First, it sets up a false dichotomy between intelligent, down-to-earth, regular-looking traits and gregarious, impulsive, stereotypically attractive traits. It suggests that the first are undesirable and the latter are desirable, but whether a certain mix of traits is desirable depends on one’s tastes. I personally have the hots for the Rubenesque girl in terms of character and physical appearance, but I really like the scrawny girl’s flirtiness. However, in the framework of the commercial, the Rubenesque girl is ultimately an arrogant, castrating, mannish lesbian and fat slob, and the scrawny girl is a stupid, push-over, super-femmy, breakable slut, and neither one of them is ultimately desirable, so I think the parody just shot itself in the foot. The only way I’d like them both was if they were in 1:6 or 1:3.
Mein Herz Brennt in Hellboy 2 trailer!
Rammstein’s Mein Herz Brennt appears in the Hellboy 2 trailer! Appropriately enough for a movie about supernatural characters from Hell, some of the lyrics go:
Sie kommen zu euch in der Nacht
Dämonen Geister schwarze Feen
sie kriechen aus dem Kellerschacht
und werden unter euer Bettzeug sehen
They come to you in the night —
Demons, ghosts, darkling fae
They creep out from the cellar shaft
And spy under your bedclothes
I’m over my Rammstein obsession, and I’m not particularly thrilled by the Hellboy series, but I do think that Rammstein and Hellboy are a perfect marriage of tongue-in-cheek, mordant humor and comic-bookish violence.
I hate it when roosters get involved: Puzzling 42 Below Vodka ads
Saatchi and Saatchi created a print ad campaign for 42 Below Vodka that apparently won a Clio. God knows why. I mean, the rebus idea is really clever, but I don’t understand why it’s a good thing that your alcoholic beverage promotes drinking your way to the White House or getting crabs.
And then there’s the two following examples of the campaign, which use the typical straight male fear of other penises to make fun of 1) gay men and 2) trans women. [And don’t get me started on how the ad with the man and the trans woman was titled “Transvestite.” I interpreted the ad about being about a man and a woman who happened to have a dick. A woman who happens to have a dick is transgendered, but not necessarily a transvestite. People can be so stupid sometimes.]
LHF revamp…now with tooniness!
After my enjoyable experience with Boopsie, I tried recreating the same tooniness last night in realistic Will, using only M3’s standard morphs. So, basically, inspired by my love for “The Girl” and the toony morphs of Boopsie, I tried to get a toony Will out of a realistic character and his realistic morphs. Trying to get a toony character out of standard morphs made Will look like an origami lemur. I failed so badly and disappointingly that I’m not going to even show the results.
Fortunately, the creator of Boopsie also has similar custom morph packages for other characters. So I got Rayne, a set of toony morphs for V3. [V3 is the main female base I use for characters. Dolly nerds can think of her as a CG 1.5.] I will now be redoing all my characters, male and female, young and old, child and adult, on V3 bases with Rayne morphs…or on other bodies with V3/Rayne heads swapped on, if I can ever figure out how to work a head swap. Blllllaaaagh.
3-D freeform modeling app freeware, Teddy
Poking around on the BoingBoing post about Plushie, I found that someone linked to another program also worked on by Takeo Igarashi. This program, called Teddy, is freeware allowing creating of digital 3-D models via freeform strokes. And — here’s the exciting thing for people who are interesting in 3-D modeling stuff — YOU CAN EXPORT YOUR CREATIONS AS OBJS! The OBJ format is a pretty-much-universal format for 3-D models — for example, the models that I’ve been using for my LHF digital characters are in OBJ format. Perhaps this program could aid in prop creation for LHF??
Real-time plushie pattern creator from 3-D CGI model
Watch this video demonstrating a new app. The app, titled Plushie, allows users to cut, shape and otherwise deform a virtual 3-D plush blob. As the blob is deformed, the righthand window shows a constantly updated version of the pattern pieces needed to created the blob out of fabric. It may be difficult to understand the narrator, a Japanese woman who speaks English as a second language, but the pictures explain everything clearly. Now if only the same principles could somehow be applied to doll sculpting….
Lovingly rendered with NO attention to scale or perspective
I just saw some Spike porn [photomanipulations], and they were done with such obvious wanking love for the character [yay!] and such amateurish pasting, scaling and PSP brush effects [boo!] that my gorge couldn’t decide whether to rise or fall, so it’s still bubbling up and down somewhere around my trachea. I am going to run far, far away from the site and play with my agreeably scaled, posed, pasted and lit dolls and models. For all that I talk about sex, think about sex and run my characters around the subject of sex, I much prefer suggestion, double entendre and innuendo than explicit depictions.
Seriously in love with “The Girl”
I wonder what the LHF characters would look like with toony heads all based on “The Girl” and more realistic bodies? Maybe they would achieve that doll-like look that I’m going for. Do you think they’d look like BeGoth characters? Here’s one who reminds me very much of Will.
Toony Will
I’m getting more mileage out of “The Girl” with a new morph pack, Boopsie, which I got with my $25 Daz gift certificate. [Tutorials that are accepted and published on the Web site are recompensed with store credit in the Web shop!!] Tonight I fucked off and made a Will “The Girl.” He looks, unsurprisingly enough, disgustingly cute as a toon. I’m sure other flamboyant LHF characters, such as Anneka, Velvette, Rori, Dom and Baozha, would also flourish fabulously in a toony style, but the other 50%, including Mark, Alexandra, Max, Minerva, Leonora, Chow, etc., deserve a more subdued and realistic rendering style. Forthwith, the fabulous, flirty and fun Will toon!!
Guerdon the Bald-Faced, staunch little goblin guard
Here’s my custom “The Girl” character, Guerdon, as she stands tonight [not finished]. I Made her custom body shape [longer legs, smaller hands, longer neck, bigger feet] with “The Girl” base package, no extra morphs. Her homely, pointy face is also entirely an original product of several tedious hours with D-Forms, although I did use “The Girl” morph pack to create her expression of fierce concentration. Corset, shorts, boots and arm warmer from Glorious Goth. Streamer sleeves from The Dress. Hat from The Dress Headpiece. Shoulder pads from Planet Vixens Toxic II freebie. The skin texture is my work, and it incorporates seamless skin tiles by kabuki-chan at Renderosity and PSP 7 Stitches brushes by slshimerdla at Renderosity as well.
Anyway, she’s a well-disciplined member of the Goblin Royal Guard who has been trained since she was a toddler to protect the life of the Goblin Queen. Highly skilled and unquestioningly devoted, she knows the seven defensive arts of the Lower Orders and the eight tongues of the Roundaway world, making her equally talented in warcraft or espionage.
She was the one who intercepted the Elvish assassin who tried to kill the Queen during last year’s Festival of Worms. For this feat of selfless bravery, she suffered a disfiguring amputation of her eyebrows, sheared off by the vengeful assassin before he expired, choked to death by Guerdon’s hat streamer. The assassin intended to shame Guerdon by removing from her the most prized features of goblin physiognomy: their thick, swooping, expressive eyebrows. [Elves often take goblin eyebrows like scalps in battle, and goblin soldiers have been known to kill themselves before submitting to such dishonor.] Guerdon, though, was not to be daunted, and she had stitches tattooed in place of her brows. This is how she came to be known as Guerdon the Bald-Faced, in reference to her eyebrowlessness, as well as her general courage.
Buffy/Spike animated moods
My favorite icon in this set is “awake,” in which Spike is saying, “Who lit the bloody fire under my arse?!” Doo nah, doo nah, I love James Marsters, which probably explains why I now never watch BTVS — because I love him so much.
I have a crush on “The Girl.”
I figured out why I like “The Girl” so much…She looks like a My Scene Barbie doll, and I love the stylized features of this line. Here’s some background on “The Girl,” including an interview with the creator, concept designs and a gallery.
I’m currently making a custom goblin morph for “The Girl,” no commercial morph packs required. The custom morph involves a primitive form of 3-D modeling with Daz’ version of magnets called D-Forms. It’s horribly fiddly and time-consuming, but a lot of fun to put my own impressions on an existing character. Right now she has big pointy ears, a little pointy jutting chin, a pointy little beaky nose, high cheekbones, slightly sunken cheeks and a high, sloping forehead. I want to sink her temples and add a mohawk of spikes on her head. 😀
With a flying leap, she left her shirt behind and soared into the sky…
I was playing with a new fig tonight, the toonily proportioned “The Girl.” Her gravity-defying pose and wide, rubbery mouth just call for exuberant poses. Isn’t she cute? She was wearing a skintight boob squisher but I kept getting poke-through on every pose, so I went for second skin clothing.
Gareth
Here’s Gareth, a long-time character of mine. He’s made off a Will base because I’ve been using that physique for characters for decades. Since he’s a predator of ideas, he has many bestial characteristics, including talons, vespertilian wings, feline eyes, big pointy ears, hollow bones and a predatorial sensibility, highly apparent here.
Attacked in the paint factory!!
“They just threw all the black and blue paint in my eyes and ran!” Since I successfully downloaded the merchant resource Gothifully Yours, I’ve been reveling in the pursuit of hyperbolic makeup. See Will below in a black and blue theme. Maybe I’ll make a whole black-and-blue texture set for a freebie… Please note that Will does not usually wear cool colors or drippy styles, but the result is pretty awesome, in an amusing sort of way.
The greater the glitter, the closer to God.
Three layers of glittery eyeshadow, magenta lipstick and blush!!!!! I’ve been applying virtual makeup for the last few hours. My artistic vision is becoming reality. Who knew my artistic vision was so goddamned TACKY? :p
Oh YEAH BABY!!! Texturing in progress
I’m drawing again…only, in the terminology of 3-D modeling, they call it “texturing.” But yeah, I’m drawing people’s faces. Last night and this morning I used a variety of free texture resources, Photoshop brushes, digital makeup kits [yeah, they exist] and some merchant resources [digital makeup you pay for], threw it all in the blender of my creative mind and came out with this… It’s a head texture in progress for Will. I thnk it could use more eyeshadow…or sparkles…or sparkly eyeshadow. But it still represents the elaborate and overdone style of makeup that is the pinnacle of attractiveness according to my drag-queeny imagination. [His head is a different color from his body because I’m only working on the head now.]
Crap I downloaded, only to be foiled by my unresponsive flash drive
http://www.sharecg.com/v/18206/poser/Paper-coffee-cup
http://www.sharecg.com/v/17602/texture/Makeup-Kit-for-Preteen-Vicky
http://www.sharecg.com/v/13356/texture/V4-Lip-Colors?division_id=6
Gothfully Yours sampler on Renderosity
5 seamless skin tiles on Renderosity
Mega lip guides by SnowSultan on Renderosity
http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/shop/itemdetails/-/?item=1098&cat=57 V3 seam guides here
http://www.file-upload.net/member/download-3486/Face-intems2007.zip.html
making custom brushes in PSP http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/tutorial/tutorial/-/?id=1643
Mat poses
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/tutorial/index.php?print=606 making a full mat pose using Mat Pose Editor
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/tutorial/index.php?print=60 another on making a full mat pose
http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/tutorial/tutorial/-/tutorial?id=1142 making a partial mat pose
http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=37454&highlight=partial+mat+poses Daz equivalent of mat poses
Daz freebies hide here.
Skin-making geekery
http://www.thebluesdragon.com/ftp/Tutorial-Skin.pdf Sarsa’s tutorial
http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=66730&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=54 some supplements to Sarsa’s tutorial
http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/tutorial/tutorial/-/?id=2123 DAZ-hosted tutorial
And apparently there are some raw high-res JPEGS on Renderotica for texturing…
I should make my own base for people…dammit!!!
Filling a linguistic void: “Murine”
Say you want to describe someone who looks like a rat or a mouse with a kind of long pointy face and prominent front teeth and twitchy disposition. “Mousy” indicates a shy person, which is not quite right, while “rat-like” has negative connotations [sorry, rats — but it’s true], and “rodent-like” is too general, given that rodents go from cabybaras to jerboas.
As a solution, I present to you the word “murine.” It means “of or pertaining to the family Muridae, a group that includes mice and rats.” It comes from the genitive plural murinus, which means “of or belonging to mice.” It also has deceptively tranquil and pleasing connotations, due to its accidental homophony with “marine.”
Murine would make a good name for a murine therianthrope!!
Ooooh, anguineous parts!
Snake parts for 3-D models! I love snakes.
A song to slit your wrists to: A Perfect Circle’s cover of Imagine
Right here is an example of how a song originally done by John Lennon as a light, uplifting, optimistic, sincere, profoundly joyful song can be turned into the trudging, ominous dirge of recruiting cult zombies. It’s not just the minor keys, the slow-down and the slowly, painfully thrashing drums. It’s the way that the vocalist flattens his voice and draws out the least expected words — “Imagine all the peeeeeeople…” Yeah, “imagine all the people” all right. When they’re done listening to this song, they’ll be too brainwashed to imagine anything. It’s pretty awesome as reinterpretations go. Listen to it.
Marilyn Manson does drag.
Okay, for all that he kinda whines in his earlier albums, I still think Marilyn Manson is cool because he’s really smart and thoughtful and coherent and also, more to the point here, I greatly admire his sense of style. He does rock-star drag oh so very well, and he applies his makeup with a trowel. In this sense, he reminds me of a Ziggy-era David Bowie, only less of a fashion plate and more of a flamboyant costume-jewelry type. Check out, for example, the teeth this this cover of Tainted Love.
How to figure out lighting in Daz: Cheat.
Wow! Finally, after months of tinkering with 3-D modeling, I finally rendered one of the basic units of an LHF comic: a fully stocked interior scene with a character. Below Chow sits in his study, reflecting. [Please note his poster of the Chinatown gate on the wall! I took that picture.] I overcame my difficulties with lighting by cheating. I stole some lights from a daytime exterior set. They were set not to cast shadows, so I added a spotlight over Chow’s table and set it to cast raytraced shadows. Oh yeah, I also removed the ceiling from Chow’s study so I could actually shine lights in because my skills are not sophisticated enough to illuminate a room with a roof.
There’s also a view of the full set below. Yes, I’m aware that Chow’s boot is running into the mat. But that’s never showing up in the final pictures, so I’m ignoring that comment.
Lesbian speed dating.
More Big Gay Sketch Show. You could insert any characters of your choice, though. The sound in the background was me falling out of my chair in laughter.
“Home Depot! Home Depot! HOME DEPOT!!!!!”
Lesbian phone sex, courtesy of the Big Gay Sketch Comedy. Please watch the woman who makes the call; her practically boneless wriggling shows what a gifted physical comedian she is. Watch her feet….
Harpy parts
Ooooh, check this out…harpy parts for 3-D models! Hell yeah that’s awesome!!!
Bad-ass unicorn therianthrope [draft]
Here’s a unicorn therianthrope character using the same skin mat as my bad-ass octopus therianthrope. [I like the skin…it’s versatile for a myriad characters.] Yes, I understand that you can see part of her tail through her butt…but she’s just a draft.
Ray Wise is a handsome Devil.
So E.R. is the serious medical drama show, and Scrubs is the comedic, nudge-nudge, wink-wink, clowning cousin — same subject, different tone. Likewise, while Supernatural is the serious, heavy-handed, philosophical and emotionally weighty show about monster hunters, Reaper, which I just watched [listened to, rather, at work] a few eps of, is the silly soufflee version. It concerns a doofus 20-something who is a bounty hunter for the Devil, returning escaped souls to Hell with the help of his doofus friends and the doofus person he wants to be his girlfriend.
Really nothing about Reaper is original. Even the cleverest portions, set at the hellish hardware warehouse/store where all the doofuses slave away under a sadistically cheerful weirdo brainwashed by corporate affirmations, have been taken from countless movies and TV shows. I always appreciate a good work-is-hell theme, but the silliness in the hardware story kept reminding me of George’s awkward, excruciating temp work and scarily perky manager in Dead Like Me or Buffy’s McJob in BTVS. Reaper owes a lot, perhaps too much, to better shows about demon slayers that have gone before it.
The best part, a reason well worth sticking around, is Ray Wise as the Devil. Like Mick Jagger sings in Sympathy for the Devil, Wise’s Satan is “a man of wealth and taste,” always impeccably dressed and wearing that smug smirk of a privileged dead white guy who has omnipotence in his sector. He treats the reaper doofus with amusing avuncularity while constantly trying to mind-fuck him. You can tell Wise really digs playing the charming rascal, and he sure does it well because the screen lights up [with hellfire :p ] whenever he glides majestically on.
That said, I recommend Reaper. I wouldn’t go out of my way to watch it, but then again, I never really go out of my way to watch anything on my TV. If you’re looking for a low-key, silly time-passer that doesn’t take itself that seriously, see streaming eps of Reaper on the CW Web site, which I currently can’t dig up a link to. Me, I’m gonna go to the angsty side of the subject and listen to some Supernatural. I hear there were some vampires in a recent ep….
Daz scripts
http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=42376&highlight=transferring+morphs Morph Loader?
http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=54215&highlight=export+obj+daz settings for OBJ export?
Where’s the werewolf?
Over there…no, wait…she ran away. Fortunately I took this picture. She shares the same atrocious fashion sense as all of my characters, as well as the Signature MW Evil Smirk. I like her blocky face and her horsey teeth. 😀 She has yet to tell me her name. Oh wait…she just did. It’s Kelly Ashley Brittany Dupree.
Helen Boyd will be at Gender Crash next week!
This is the author of My Husband Betty and She’s Not the Man I Married, which I have discussed previously in two entries [1 and 2]. She’s a writer and activist for transgender rights, and you should go see her if interested. I am excited to hear her in person. I really hope her reading/presentation is good….
Thursday Dec 13, 2007
Gender Crash Open mic
For poets/spoken wordsters/literary geeks/journal
writers/queers/transgender/gender queers
Gender Crash Open mic
For poets/spoken wordsters/literary geeks/journal
writers/queers/transgender/gender queers
Feature: Helen Boyd!
Helen Boyd is the author of My Husband Betty and She’s Not the Man I
Married. She speaks and writes regularly on becoming queer and being
the partner of a trans person, and her writing has been published in
anthologies edited by Vern Bullough, Mattilda, and Rachel Kramer
Bussel. Her blog (en)gender can be found at www.myhusbandbetty.com.
Bring your Poetry, Spoken Word, Slam Style Poems, Essays, Acoustic
Music, Performance, Singing, Drag, and Dance are all welcome. Where
you can be a Rock Star! for at least 3 minutes!
Doors open at 7p show at 7:30pm at Spontaneous Celebrations, 45
Danforth St, Jamaica Plain, Orange line, Stony brook stop, all ages $5
– 10 at the door, open to everyone, more info?
http://www.gendercrash.com
Medusa de la Mer draft
Okay, she was going to be a mermaid with head tentacles, but she informed me that her tentacles actually go on the lower half of her body, so I had to oblige. You don’t contradict someone with teeth [and muscles] like that. I need to work on making her octopus parts less plastic and more like shiny wet skin.
She is dancing happily because I constructed her with her tentacles in the appropriate place [on her hips, not on her head]. Please don’t ask how she goes to the bathroom or reproduces. It’s magic.
Medusa de la Mer, or, Distracted musings of a therianthropophile
I just discovered that I have a free octopus model and a free mertail model. I should make a merperson with tentacular [yes, that’s the adjectival form of “tentacle” — I made it up] hair. Hmmm, now I’m thinking of that picture I did, combining a person and all the non-human animals I could think of. It was like a woman with horns and wings and claws on her hands, a centaur front half and some sort of fish tail. Oh yeah…and feline eyes. It was quite silly. However, I’m sure that somewhere someone has created a detailed world and culture for such beings.
“What made the red man red?”
In her comment on my previous entry, katranna notes that Disney actively avoids black characters. This is true, but they used to be a little less avoidant. For example, the original version of the animated Fantasia had a little black centaur girl in the Beethoven’s Pastoral section. The little black centaur girl, Sunflower, was being a sycophantic slave to the white centaur girls. Sunflower has since been cropped out, denied and otherwise suppressed during Fantasia theatrical and DVD re-releases. See here for a still of Sunflower and even a clip! The rest of the article [about Disney’s most racist characters] is worth reading as well.
The subject line comes from the #3 most racist characters, the Indians in Disney’s Peter Pan [admittedly based on J.M. Barrie’s stereotyped Pickanninny tribe, which, in a confusing stew of racism, are named after a derogatory term for African-Americans]. They sing a song with that title.
P.S . The list at Cracked.com forgot Stromboli, the fat yelling Italian stereotype in Pinnochio, as well as the eeeeevil slanty-eyed suck-uppy Siamese cats in The Lady and the Tramp who don’t speak grammatically [“Now we looking over our new domicile / If we like, we stay for maybe quite a while”].
Stupid reaction to Disney princess industry
As the stepparent of a 6-year-old, the Disney princess marketing machine is old news to me. This article by the always-behind-the-times Newsweek pisses me off, though. Here’s part of the concluding paragraph:
Considering that “What’s Love Got to Do With It” attitude, it’s no wonder that Disney is modernizing its princess formulas.
In the new Broadway “Little Mermaid,” Ariel no longer needs Prince Eric to dispatch Ursula the sea witch; she does it herself. In 2009 the studio will debut the animated film “The Princess and the Frog,” featuring its first African-American princess (which is pretty shocking, if you think about the fact that there’s already been Asian, Native American and Arab princesses). She’s already stirred some controversy —she was originally a lowly chambermaid named Maddy, but after the blogosphere got wind of that, she was promoted to full princess and given a more regal-sounding name: Tiana. “Enchanted” (which comes out this week) offers its own extreme princess makeover. Giselle begins as your classic, animated princess. When she falls through a manhole into Times Square (where the movie switches to live action) and falls again after climbing up a billboard for a castle-themed casino, she reasons she’s always falling because, well, someone always catches her. Not in New York City, sweetheart. Giselle soon discovers that her petticoats are a pain and her saccharine personality annoys people. She gets her man, but not before she’s lost the dress and the breathy voice and learned to stand on her own feet—or at least catch herself when she falls down. “Traditionally, the female character is very strong until the last minutes of the film, and then the prince comes in and she’s saved,” says “Enchanted” director Kevin Lima. “I don’t think that’s a contemporarily responsible story. I had to give an alternate ending.” Lima wants the new message to be: “You are responsible for your own happily-ever-after.” And if that includes a Disney Fairy Tale Wedding Snow White gown, all the better.
So, after a review of the Disney princess marketing machine, this article tries to allay concerns that said marketing machine is racist, classist, sexist and generally stupefying to people who buy into it, especially if they are little girls who don’t know any better. The concluding paragraph as quoted above turns backflips in an attempt to convince readers that Disney princess culture is not a huge cause for alarm.
Disney princess culture isn’t sexist, the article argues, because, for example, the stage musical version of Disney’s The Little Mermaid has given Ariel a more active role in defeating the sea witch Ursula. She’s more assertive, not a wimpy woman at all.
No, actually, what would make The Little Mermaid less sexist would be having Ariel defeat the sea witch by herself in the first place in the damn original animated film…or by considering the novel idea that perhaps a powerful, magical, ambitious, frustrated, middle-aged female character like Ursula should not be automatically vilified, ridiculed and made into a grotesque parody.
Disney princess culture isn’t racist, the article insists, because…look! They have an African-American princess coming up in The Princess and the Frog in 2009.
No, actually, what would make Disney princess culture less racist would be, say, a little respect for the cultures they’re portraying. For example, the ancestors as venerated in Mulan could be serious characters; or they could be off-screen completely; they needn’t be slapstick caricatures. Or the Native Americans as portrayed in Pocahontas could stop having some sort of gooey, hallucinatory relationship with colored wind and talking trees, and their spiritual practices could be woven into the story with more understatement and less excuse for talking non-human characters.
Disney princess culture isn’t generally retrograde, the article tries desperately to convince us, because Enchanted provides a modern twist on the happy-ever-after ending. In Enchanted, Giselle finds that her animated air-headedness can’t stand up to reality. Also she saves the divorce lawyer before the end. That makes it all better.
No, actually, what would make Disney princess culture less retrograde would be for them to dump the pining/suffering/wedding arc that characterizes all Disney princess stories. Just because Giselle in Enchanted momentarily flexes her muscles before settling down to her wedding does not mean that the pining/suffering/wedding arc has been radically disrupted, allowing for change. Giselle’s rescue of the divorce lawyer represents a superficial concession to reality, brains and general feminist agitation. There is no wholesale examination and revamping of the inherent passivity and stupidity of the tropes. Enchanted is NOT “contemporarily responsible.” It’s just a tired old retread.
“You are responsible for your own happily-ever-after.” And if that includes a Disney Fairy Tale Wedding Snow White gown, all the better.
This conclusion disturbs me. It implies that happily-ever-after does exist and is achievable. Furthermore, it suggests that participating in the Disney princess culture helps a person achieve said happy ending. But, as we’ve seen, Disney princess culture is a seething boil of sexism, racism, classism and general hebetation. It may purport to be liberating, hip, empowering and cool, but it is not. It is merely dressing up sexist, racist, classist stupidity in an appealing guise so that people will think that Disney princess culture represents the road to happiness and therefore consume more Disney princess products and increase Disney’s capital.
There is no happily-ever-after. There is only life. Happily-ever-after is not achieved by consuming Disney princess products because there’s no happily-ever-after to achieve in the first place. Thus, Disney princess products are merely a part of life. Their consumption does not lead to happiness. I do not deny that their consumption may bring pleasure to people; I do, however, vehemently dispute the assumption that consumption of Disney products causes lifelong personal fulfillment and deep satisfaction. They do not. No product does. In fact, consumption of Disney princess products can lead to distress, unhappiness and a dead-end state in a mire of racism, classism, sexism and stupidity…if one does not develop a critical intelligence about the hidden goals of the Disney corporate conglomerate.
So that’s the key, folks. Examine; criticize, and provide alternatives.
P.S. For bonus nausea [and possibly VOMITING!!!!!], note that the 2009 Princess and the Frog is set in New Orleans. Cue the sassy Southern mammy stereotype, the comic and subhuman speaker of Cajun creole, not to mention the stupid, ignorant, stereotyped jokes about voodoo [more properly called Voudon, I think]. Extra bingo points for gratuitous depiction of New Orleans as some sort of swingin’ place full of cheerful Stepin Fetchits just groovin’ to the wild rhythms of that racy, “uncivilized,” “wild” jazz.
P.P.S. For a bonus bonus, read Deborah Siegl’s review of Enchanted, which uses the movie as a case study to argue many of the points I bring up here.
Dude! Here are the 4 most recent Supernatural eps!
Streaming! Right here!
Hi, my name is MW, and I…I like centaurs.
I’ve had a long-term, back-burner love affair with therianthropic — human/non-human animal creatures — from my earliest days.
Since I was introduced to Greek myths at a very early age, I was trying to draw centaurs [and failing] as early as age 5. [Another challenge at which I failed was figuring out where centaurs came from. The Greek mythological universe always mentions the rowdy, rambunctious, drunk and annoying male centaurs, the wise tutor Cheiron excepted, but never any females. I spent a long time trying to figure out who the male centaurs mated with to have more centaurs. By the way, I refuse to accept the explanation that a cross between a male centaur and a human woman, a la Rape of the Sabines, would produce a baby centaur. Human + therianthrope =/= therianthrope. The centaurs of Disney’s animated Fantasia, while nauseatingly pastel and cute, appeared in both male and female versions, satisfying my need for a comprehensive reproductive scheme for said creatures.]
Mermaids also figured largely in my childhood interests. I thought they were glamorous, fascinating and magical even before Disney’s animated Little Mermaid appeared in 1989 and popularized such creatures. After the mermaid’s infiltration of mass culture, I still persisted in finding them eminently awesome, though I was more interested in Andersen’s Little Mermaid [and the rest of his sick, twisted fairy tales], mermaid lore in general and, again, a realistic schematic for merpeople. [My sister and I pondered the realistic biology of merpeople extensively. We spent much time wondering exactly how a fish part and a human part could fit together into a cooperative body. If merpeople had piscene nether regions, did they then lay eggs? Did they have gills? Could they breathe underwater? Would they really have all the hair that they are traditionally depicted with? Eventually we decided that realistic merpeople would be more like human-dolphin hybrids, air-breathing, viviparous, mostly hairless, very streamlined and entirely mammalian.]
Before the Age of the Internet, my interest in therianthropes existed in an enjoyable vacuum, far away from others who shared my interest [except for Jill]. Therianthropophilia was a harmless, offbeat interest based in mythology and fairy tales. About 5 to 7 years ago, though, with the democratization of the Intertubes, therianthropophilia’s frame of reference changed. Furry subculture — in which people enjoy a broad spectrum of identifying with, dressing up as, discussing, producing artwork about and getting turned on by non-human animals or therianthropes — became much more visible. [Witness Creature Creator for Victoria 4.1, a set of horns, hooves, tails and paws to make the 3-D model Victoria 4.1 into a deer girl, a cat girl, a devil, etc.] As furry subculture became more visible, the mainstream made fun of it as a collection of sex perverts in mascot costumes. The general derisive attitude toward furry subculture spread outward and tainted the general view of anything remotely related to therianthropes.
So, anyway, now I feel really odd and self-conscious about my therianthropophilia [which explains why you haven’t seen any therianthropes I’ve been making in Daz — also because they are really BAYUD]. I feel like I can’t just rave about how cool mermaids and centaurs and sphinxes and such are; I have to justify myself by explaining that I’m not sexually attracted to them. Stupid stereotypes aren’t even true, and they tar everyone with the same brush.
3 kidsies, 1 outfit
From left to right, Geordie, Baozha and Little Will demonstrate variations on my favorite clothing package, the Storytime dress and pantaloons. Geordie has the Clematis style dress and shoes. Baozha has a customized blouse and harem pants based on the bodice and pantaloons, and Little Will has the Rose style dress, pantaloons and shoes. Yup, it’s a versatile and pretty awesome clothing set.
Apparently Robert Jensen…
…is in the same hysterically anti-porn camp as Andrea Dworkin and Catharine Mackinnon, whose detailed diatribes against porn are, well, pornographic. See observations here. Well, he may be a pornographic anti-porn person, but I still think his points about masculinity, porn and anxiety are valid.
Little Will, take 4
With wider cheekbones than take 3.
Little Will, draft 3
I tried to recreate Little Will’s features using only the Preteen Vickie built-in morphs. Good Lord, he looks like his parents are about to be murdered before his eyes. Don’t worry, sweetheart. That won’t happen till you’re 30.
Masculinity as fear
I don’t have time to go into detail about this topic, but I do think it’s interesting. As I know from personal experience, the state of being culturally construed as a woman basically boils down to fear: fear that one will be taken advantage of by those culturally construed as men. At the same time, those culturally construed as men have their own fear: fear that they will lose their power. What pathetic, anxious cowards the patriarchy makes of us all!
I was prompted to the masculinity=fear equation by an excerpt from Robert Jensen’s Getting Off: Porn and the End of Masculinity, as posted on Alter.net. Here is the conclusion of the excerpt:
Pornography knows men’s weakness. It speaks to that weakness, softly. Pornography ends up being about men’s domination of women and about the ugly ways that men will take pleasure. But for most men, it starts with the soft voice that speaks to our deepest fear: That we aren’t man enough.
Maybe I’m just sensitive to the anxieties of masculinity because I’m writing about a guy who is firmly convinced that he is not man enough and, interestingly enough, uses porn to try to prove himself to himself.
When I next get some money…
…I am purchasing a 3-month subscription to PoserWorld and downloading like crazy…. At $30.00 for 3 months of unlimited downloads, it offers a staggering array of clothing for all figs, including lots of historical stuff…. The proportions of content offered are, interestingly enough, very similar to my own interests. About 50% of the stuff is fantasy fetish wear, and the other 50% of it is historical, casual, utilitarian sort of stuff. Just like 50% of my characters are meretricious, and the other 50% are historical and/or sober!
Little Will, revision 3
Hmmm, I see that my Preteen Vicky model has all facial and body morphs fully loaded into her, so I might try recreating little Will’s head with Preteen Vicky’s, especially since I can’t get my current version of Little Will soft enough in the face. The lines of his chin are still too harsh….
Little Will in his little dress
Here’s a picture of my latest draft of little Will in his little dress. I made little Will by using a Millennium Girls Preteen Vicky body and neck, then erasing the body of my Michael 3 Will and resizing and shaping it so that it looked young and the appropriate size for the preteen body. As a result, I realized that Will looks extremely cute, but also very anxious. You would be too if your mom raised you on gory tales from Ovid’s Metamorphoses!!
He’s really a very cute little kid. Littlle does little Will know that he will grow up to become a dead guy with gender confusion and no fashion sense.
Please pay attention to the beauty of his dress!!
Little Will’s dress!
After many long hours looking for specific items of clothing [corsets for men, dresses for men, chunky platform heels for anyone, baggy T-shirts, hooded sweatshirts, winter coats, etc.] and NOT FINDING IT, I actually FOUND SOMETHING PERFECT today. Behold — a dress and pantaloons for the Millennium Girls and Preschoolers!!!
With minor tiddlywinking, I will be able to use this outfit as a dress for a preteen girl or non-breeched boy from the 19th century. Translated by my good friend CrossDresser, it might make a good long summer dress for modern Will too, although it’s a bit conservative for his tastes.
In case you can’t tell, I installed my kid models this morning and just started to experiment with them. I have Millennium Kids Preschoolers, Millennium Girls and Millennium Kids Young Teens. I’m most partial to the Preschoolers, who, besides being really cute, come with very expressive poses such as Monster Time, Cannonball!, Bored, Defiance, and [the highlight, well-known to anyone who deals with the under 5 set] I Want That! Unfortunately there is no Tantrum pose with clenched fists and stamping foot…
Anyway, I don’t have the morphs for any of these characters, so I’ll probably just splice Victoria and Michael heads onto them, as I’m doing with little Will. Speaking of which, I think his chin needs to be softer….
Now I can do flashback scenes with Will and his mom and with little Anneka and her parents, even with her and Mamie and Minerva too!!!!!
Little Will
This is a test; this is only a test. The person on the left is Will between the age of 8 and 12. He has a second skin wetsuit only because I lack clothes for my new kid models. He should be wearing one of those dresses that boys in the 19th century were sometimes kept in until they were 6 or 8 or even [really REALLY pushing it] 10. [Most of them went to short pants by 8, though.] Also his hair is supposed to be in ringlets, but that is the closest I could find.
I mentioned earlier that I wanted to scale down my adult models to make child models, but I ended up not doing that. I scaled down a copy of my Will model and morphed its head to make young Will’s head, then erased the rest of the small Will model’s body, then stuck the small Will’s head onto a Millennium Kids Young Teens Mike body because the neck area of the small Will model did not look appropriately smooth and fat for a child.
Dancing on 6 limbs
Check out these two ballet dancers. I am not linking to this because it’s an inspirational example of disabled people overcoming their limitations. That’s a load of tripe. I’m linking to this because their dance plays perfectly to their strengths and to their disabilities in such a way that their performance tells a pretty cool story about disability acceptance. I also like the choreography, which incorporates the idiom of modern dance [like tumbling!]. Special props also to the choreography for designing such a fluid, graceful movement for the male dancer so that his character can embody for the uncertain female character the joy of living in one’s body, no matter what the shape.
Subservient Santa
First there was Subservient Chicken, Burger King’s advertising gimmick where you could type in commands and, if they were within the applet’s repertoire, watch a guy dressed up as a chicken act them out.
Then there was Subservient Programmer, which is the best of all the subservient applets I’ve seen. The animation loops are most carefully timed to create the illusion of continuity. There is also a wide range of commands available.
Now there’s Simon Sez Santa. It is not as well-looped as Subservient Programmer, but the sound effects are funny. If you choose the naughty version, make him drink a beer. :p There’s also a kid-appropriate version so you can show him to little ones.
Chinatown sites
Chinatown Gateway Coalition http://www.chinatowngateway.org/ A grassroots org to preserve and accentuate Chinatown’s geographic, historical and cultural heritage through strategic development of the Chinatown Gate area.
The Chinatown Blog http://bostonchinatowngateway.com/ A relatively new blog written by younger residents of Chinatown.
Chinatown Main Street http://www.chinatownmainstreet.org/ A business directory.
South Bay Planning Study Documents http://southbayplanningstudy.org/documents.asp Documents about development plans for Chinatown, Fort Point Channel and the Leather District, including the Chinatown Masterplan 2000 [which is not, as the name implies, some sort of blender], Chinatown Community Plan 1990, etc.
Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center http://www.bcnc.net/index.php Providing social services to residents of Chinatown, the South End and South Cove.
Nightly patrols reduce crime in Chinatown http://www.baystatebanner.com/issues/2007/08/23/news/local08230713.htm An article about the volunteer Chinatown Crime Watch.
http://boston.indymedia.org/feature/display/186609 A firsthand account of the Chinatown Crime Watch delivering the smackdown on some fighting idiots.
Making kids in Daz
Instead of loading completely new kid figures into Daz, I should just be able to rescale my two main models, Victoria 3 and Michael 3, so that they have kid-like or teen-like proportions. As a matter of fact, I have been messing around with proportions a lot recently. I successfully created two teen girls, one in her early teens [Magdelena] and one in her mid-teens [Baozha].
I also created my craziest morph yet by tweaking and shrinking Victoria 3 so that I could get a fashion doll model. [And it really looks like a fashion doll, which is somehow extremely disturbing, despite my great experience with fashion dolls.] If I can make Victoria 3 into a 1:6 bobblehead with pointy little feets and gazongas bigger than her head, surely I can make her into an acceptable kidsy.
My l33t skillz
I’m nearing the point where the time I spend setting up a digital scene is equal to the time I spend setting up a scene with dolls. While working yesterday on 2 sets, Chow’s study and Will’s room, I spent about 13 hours, which actually is probably less than the amount of time needed to produce the same scenes in real format. [Digital format allows for much quicker deployment and customization of props!] After all that labor, both sets look very close to how I want them…
…Except for the shadows. I’m having a problem with them. Note to self: Find out how to make everything create shadows. Help may be here: http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/tutorial/0/-/?
I’m also very comfortable and fairly skilled with Daz. How can I tell? Well, when I didn’t have any posters or poster frames for aforesaid sets, I instantly created some basic ones using the primitive shapes available in Daz. I didn’t balk at the thought of extending my existing skills; I just constructed something simply and quickly so that I could go back to the greater fun of scattering digital stuff all over Will’s digital floor. [I never knew he had so many shoes!]
Pictures later. It will be interesting to see how long a render takes with all the stuff in these scenes.
Maid
Finally, finally, finally, I got a decent French maid set from a temperamental Japanese Web site. Result below with strategic posture to conceal crotchlessness of underwear. Sometimes I spend so much time on details that never appear in the final version…
Automatic vector graphic maker
Photos or drawings converted into vector graphics look really cool. However, manually converting a rasterized file to a vectorized file takes a really long time. If you’d like to automate the vectorizing process, however, visit VectorMagic, a Web site hosted by Stanford where you can vectorize anything. No guarantee on how awesome the results will be, but, if you choose a rasterized image with a low number of artifacts and a relatively narrow palette, you should get stupendous and scalable results.
Below is an example. It is a picture of Will, made on “logo without artifacts,” “medium palette,” “medium quality” settings. I like the harsher, more chiseled look that vectorization supplies. The original picture is right here.
Smells like rain…
You know that sharp, light, floral odor of the first rain? It has a name: petrichor. Actually petrichor is an exudation of certain plants during dry spells. This chemical leaches into rocks and soil, which then give it off, along with a compound known as geosmin [literally, “earth smell,” that full, brown, slightly crunchy, moist smell of, well, earthy things, like beets]. Petrichor + geosmin = “smells like rain.”
Incidentally, Petrichor and Geosmin are perfectly conceivable, under the current ridiculous drug-naming schemata, as names for medication. Petrichor is for drooling idiots with rocks in their heads…it comes in little brown pills. Geosmin, which comes in swirly blue and green tablets, aims to counteract LGS [Loss of Gravity Syndrome], when excess air in the cranial cavity causes a person to float away. Neither of them are really effective, but they sure sound imposing.
Eat me!
I am disturbed, amused and still carnivorous after checking out Suicide Food, an illustrated survey of self-sacrificing animal illos.
Some people look good in skirts.
Will is one of them. He also looks good in second-skin fishnet. Also, as you can see, he has a new, much paler complexion, more character-appropriate makeup and reflections in his eyes. The reflections make him look more alive, which is ironic because he’s dead. :p
Several frustrations resolved in one piece of software
Frustration 1. It’s hard to make tight clothes look good on dolls. That’s because the dolls are not 1:1 scale, but the clothing is, so the clothing does not look appropriately form-fitting. It looks too bulky. Plus it usually limits the dolls’ movement.
Frustration 2. Poke-through on 3-D models. This is when the position of your 3-D digital person is such that the person’s body part penetrates the clothes unrealistically. If someone’s arms are bent acutely, you may see, for example, elbow poke-through in the shirt. It’s not realistic, and it limits model poses.
Frustration 3. Memory hogging. 3-D modeling programs put a huge drain on computers. Every piece of clothing has its own construction, design, morph and texture information, which can get really complicated if you have a scene with 3 people, each with 1 hair, 3 items of clothing, 1 accessory, not to mention the set made up of 6 props. Memory hogging makes loading the files, saving them and rendering them really slow.
A partial solution is second skin clothing.
This is how it works. A 3-D digital person has two basic parts: the object and the texture. The object is, well, duh, the 3-D object, like an unpainted doll or resin kit model. The texture is a 2-D picture that “paints” the object. In the case of digital people, most of them have two textures or mats. One is a head mat and the other is a body mat. The mats look like flayed human beings with their skin flattened out conveniently into 2-D. When you apply a body mat and a head mat to a digital person, the pictures wrap around the person, translating from 2-D to 3-D, and the person looks successfully naked.
So every digital person is covered with a skin and a head mat, but then, if you want to give them clothing, you have to add pieces of clothing. Each piece of clothing is an object + mat as well, so you can see how the memory drain increases quickly.
Second skin clothing avoids the memory drain by painting the clothing directly onto a digital person’s body mat. Because the clothing is thus part of the skin mat and not separate, there’s no out-of-scale bulkiness. There’s also no poke-through. And, because the person is only wearing the [modified] body mat and not any extra clothing objects, the memory load is reduced.
Here’s a picture of Rori wearing second skin fishnets. They are painted on her body mat:
Anyway, I’d like to make second skin clothes for my characters, so I’ve discovered some software that can help me. Zew’s Clother and Clothim give you men’s and women’s clothing that you can easily apply on any body mat to create custom second skins. They’re the same program, differing only in the base wardrobe supplied. Second skins will be very helpful for certain characters [Anneka, Will, Velvette, Dom, Pippilotta, etc.] who wear tight clothes. It will also be good for putting underwear on everyone so I don’t have to see their [lack of] genitalia.
Hee hee, check out the Clothim add-ons. Do you or do you not see a distinctly FABULOUS sensibility at work here? I mean, seriously…tank tops for men that don’t cover the nipples? And over here in the downloads…underwear with a question mark on it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any guy wear clothes like this, except for at pride parades…WHICH MAKES IT PERFECT for my fashionless vampires! PERFECT I SAY!
“Oh, you know, Jon, mainly how GAY it is…”
I’ve been cracking up over this round-up of gay humor from the Daily Show, especially the clip where Jon Stewart is talking to Stephen Colbert about Prince Charles’ alleged gay experience, and there’s a banana involved. I’m surprised Stephen Colbert didn’t choke on it, since he was laughing so hard. The best part is the trouble he has with the “Whoever kills the fewest grouse…” line. It’s still hilarious the 45th time.
Gargoyles are fabulous!
Especially when they color-coordinate their horns, clothes, tattoos, lipstick, etc. This was done off a Will base, but I’m not sure that it’s him any more. Knowing him, it probably is….
If only I were Gothic…
On my lunch break, I inspected many offerings of 3-D content from Sixus1. They have a lot of therianthropic creatures with an emphasis on dragons, dinosaurs, werewolves, etc., all of them studded with teeth, spikes, claws and optional impractical [but imposing] armor. Like the Raptorian female with armor. I can just picture the designers saying, “What’s cooler than dinosaurs? Oh, I know…DINOSAURS WITH ARMOR! Hell yeah!” Somebody loooooves the monsters over there.
Then I went over to Meshbox, which is apparently staffed by highly literate horror nerds. They have thematically arranged sets of intricate design, including the admirable City of Vampires, which looks about as bleak and ominous as a Gothic cathedral in bad weather. My favorite element is the Old Library, where the vampires enter by flying in and out of a portal in the ceiling! It also has the only commercially available set of stacks that I’ve seen so far.
Anyway, it’s really too bad that my vampires are just dead, ground-based, non-transforming queers with no fashion sense who live in an actual city in the modern day where the monsters are stupidity, jealousy, rage, depression and homophobia. If only they were Gothic and fantastic, they could have some real cool shit goin’ on…
This is the most beautiful 3-D modeling product I have ever seen.
It is a texture set and series of morphs for Victoria 3 called “Mary Ann.” The advertising text says she’s perfect for a “mom, a young grandma or even a witch.” However, I think she’s perfectly lovely for anyone over the age of 25. I especially like the light flush over her face, the hollows under her eyes and the brackets around her mouth. Where so many character sets look flat, flawless and stupid, with most of their variety appearing in the palette used, this character has obvious depth and personality.
Sexy but obviously stylized stuff: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/index.php?ViewProduct=51887&Start=91&TopID=11219.44031.44033. Lillith…lots of dribbly eye makeup…has second skins, but…sigh…
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/index.php?ViewProduct=50621&Start=121&TopID=11219.44031.44033. Diwania…eye makeup is too heavy…
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/index.php?ViewProduct=44503&Start=331&TopID=11219.44031.44033. Marilyn…lots of eyeshadow…
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/index.php?ViewProduct=44420&Start=331&TopID=11219.44031.44033. Rachel…a little less eyeliner…but definitely a frickin’ lot!
OOoooooOOOOOOoooooohhhhh…
For almost a month, I’ve been moving the cameras around in DAZ with only the right mouse button, wondering why the heck I can’t get the camera to orbit around a figure. Apparently I can press down the OTHER mouse button and get more effects. Maybe that will keep me from cursing at the computer so much….
W/Racked with guilt?
If I’m wracked with an emotion, should I be RACKED or WRACKED? If I use “rack,” I conjure up the pleasant image of someone’s tendons being unscrewed on a Procrustean bed. If I use “wrack,” it connotes “wreck” and “wreak,” a verb that absolutely must be conjoined with “havoc.” [Seriously, what else do you wreak besides havoc? Destruction, maybe, but that’s about it.] Both spellings are acceptable and absolutely synonymous, so the choice comes down to a predilection for connotations. I use “wrack” because, when someone is wracked with pain, sobs, a coughing fit, etc., he/she is usually incapacitated, hunched over, deflated and otherwise wrecked. I like the wreckage, not the rackage.
Boy, that silent W in “wracked” looks stupid. I guess I shouldn’t look at words like “write,” “wriggle,” “wrap,” “wraith,” “wreath,” “wrath,” etc. They all look RONG! :p
Silly Goth joke from joke generator
Surrealist.co.uk’s Bad Joke Generator came up with a relatively good one about Goths…
What’s a Goth’s favorite drink?
Emo-nade.
Books to hunt down and read
The Doll Maker and Other Tales of the Uncanny by Sarban
Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker
My digital modeling skills are not in demand…
…by the greater modeling community. This is because I specialize in making rotund people, scrawny people, ancient people and — my forte — guys in drag. In contrast, all of the people I have seen in the greater modeling community are lean, tight, voluptuous and between the ages of 18 and 25. They are all wearing clothes designed for their sex.
Anyway, here is Mamie Sinquell. She is not Anneka’s dying grandmother; she is Anneka’s dying grandmother’s long-term partner. She was a mannish lesbian before people even came up with the term. She’s still as intimidating in her 90s as she was when she was the hard-ass headmistress of Endless Lake Boarding School. Since she was either skiing or hiking or running around taking photos in the Adirondacks, she has poor skin that’s probably on the verge of precancerous melanoma. I love her. She, on the other hand, is not impressed with YOU, but you knew that already from the picture.
Welcome back…I think.
This morning, I decided to write a re-intro to LHF, checking up on where Anneka and Will are now. Oh boy did I ever find out. They were yelling at each other, as is frequently the case, and they managed to throw almost every important detail of their histories in each other’s faces without sounding too much like they were reading from exposition cards. In chronological order, they hit the following touchstones, neatly sketching out the major players, their relationships to each other and their preoccupations:
Hot topics: lesbovamps.com, mermaids, La Biblio, Mark, Velvette, Janet, de Sade, Ovid, Minerva, Alzheimer’s, Mamie, Adirondacks, Maximilian, colonial New England, Alexandra, counseling, Leonora, fairy tales, Chow, the Hun, the MeMo, Chinatown, Boston, Wintermere, gender dysphoria, invalidism, bisexuality, cross-dressing.
About the only things that didn’t get in there were Viktor, Sibley, Pippilotta and Mark’s cacti! I do wish that I could wedge Viktor and Sibley in there, but this season focuses less on them and more on Anneka, Will and their families.
Chow again
The inimitable Chow, redesigned, with better mesh and more appropriate clothes.
And another of Rori
…because she’s awesome.
Dammit Janet!
Janet Planet, semi-mad scientist, sister to Velvette Crush and creator of Viktor, shown in a heavily cropped portrait shot because I haven’t found appropriately baggy and formless clothes for her yet.
Scutwork
Today’s phrase is “the scutwork of the flesh,” from Alison Bechdel’s pretentious but fascinating graphic memoir Fun Home. She uses the phrase to refer to the minutiae of embalming that her father did when he ran the family funeral home. It’s a perfect word; it sounds foundational and visceral at the same time, as if it involves ploughing through muddy trenches or the furrows of an open abdominal cavity, trudging with dismal work. It also has a Shakespearean sound. “Poor forked creatures…” I think that phrase is from Shakespeare, but I can’t find out wherefrom.
Anneka and Will
As much as I like messing around with cross-dressing and humorous sexual situations, that’s not my main reason for getting Daz. With tight angles and minute adjustments in posing, this Daz test represents the sort of things I always wanted to do with my dolls and my camera, but could never accomplish.
Viktor finds booty.
Viktor’s back!! This scene, which has two characters, a Cyclorama background, two props and an unknown number of clothing items, took about 60 seconds to render.
Inspect my booty.
Now working with the Daz Cyclorama… Scrawny Will definitely looks better with his arms covered up.
Rori Halsted
Here’s Rori, barkeep at the Nightcrawler, out of her element in some strange forest. I’m using this as a background because it’s one of the premade ones included with Daz. Rori is so damn cute….
This sucks.
I started on Viktor and did Rori earlier today, but then went back to Will. I used another of those dark, shadowy and atmospheric backgrounds by Tony Hayes, whose work is deliciously melancholy and creepy. [He did the abandoned asylum too.] Anyway, I learned about lights for this picture, adding two spotlights, one over Will and one pointing toward his face, all with the hope that the lighting on him would be equivalent to the light in the background. I made this one extra big so you could admire the background!
New & improved naughty nurse
Removed obvious seams from skin mat, added fishnets, reposed hyperextended right hand.
Now you’re going to feel a little poke…
…as I gore your arm with this harpoon in order to surgically drain you for my next meal.
Yeah, I know he’s really pale, and you can see the places where his skin textures are a wee bit too small, and he looks severely malnourished with a disturbing resemblance to Richard O’Brien, and he’s even faggier than before, with even more of a predilection for violent pink, and the lighting is probably off for this scene, and he’s not really holding the syringe, and his hands look like they are flexed unnaturally, but I don’t want to hear about it. I am proud of myself beyond measure because I finally figured out how to make someone use a prop that wasn’t hair-related and easy to stick on someone’s head. Now if I could just figure out a way to move props easily into position, I’d be all set.
I’d probably develop a hankerin’ for violently pink makeup too if I’d been dead and out of the sun for 130+ years. I’m not sure about the alarming fingernails, though. I didn’t know he had those until…well, they happened. I think nail polish is one of the world’s stupidest inventions, but apparently my characters disagree. At least it matches his outfit.
I need to fix the size of the body textures. Dolls don’t have seam lines like that….
Death in 3 minutes, 37 seconds, to a rock soundtrack
GOOD magazine provides a comic view at the death industry. My favorite part is that all the employees of the death industries are shown as ancient Egyptian jackal-headed gods of the underworld Anubis.
Despite the concept and the names behind it…
…Dollhouse, an upcoming Fox series created and produced by Joss Whedon, starring Eliza Dushku and somehow involving Tim Minear [who was involved with Angel, Firefly and the rockin’ awesome Pushing Daisies], will go down in flames, despite a hyperactive cult following, only to be released on DVD in a year and a half with unaired episodes. I’m also not sure that the sexy but rather flat Eliza Dushku is the appropriate choice for a main character who is basically a Method actor bot. I don’t think she has enough range. It is amusing to note, however, that, in the linked interview, she’s very happy that the Red Sox Losers won the World Series.
Chow
I’m having some problems with the M3 mesh, so this is the only angle from which he doesn’t have strange lumps on his arms poking through. It’s also a characteristic posture. I would like everyone to know that I successfully subdued the V3 Ultimate Changing Ponytail and made Chow’s hair. He’s supposed to be dressed in a subdued and somewhat antiquated manner, befitting his personality.
Experimenting with Anneka
With her short hair and straight eyebrows, she looks much more like me than the 1:6 version. She sees you when you’re sleeping and knows when you’re awake….
Free hair conversion kit!!
http://netherworks-studios.com/shoppe/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=10&products_id=20 a download that will finally get me to fit V3’s Ultimate Changing Ponytail to Chow’s head!!!
Happy Halloween from a sweet transvestite!!
Here’s Will again as he dresses for the Harvard Square midnight showings of Rocky Horror, which, he would like you to know, he attends very rarely, and he only played Riff that one time because he had promised the girl who usually played him that he would do it, and besides, he never would have done it if he wasn’t drunk, and the only thing he is going to say about the Short Skirts showing is that “madness takes its toll [50 cents please!].”
Transvestitism all the way here! Just about everything Will has on was originally developed for a female model. First I used a free texture for Victoria 3 called Valarie for the base. Using Photoshop, I reduced the resolution of head and body textures, hid the scary scary nipples, whited out the genitalia, darkened the eyebrows and added more eyeliner from the Victoria 3 default makeup. Oh yeah, and I added some pink to his lips. Textures can be used for male and female models without problems, so I didn’t need my new best friend CrossDresser for that. XD did, however, translate the boots [V3 morph-to-fit clothes], short shorts [from a free V3 waitress outfit] and the underbust corset [from a free clothing pack for the female Maya Doll figure]. I think even his hair [Wedge Cut 2.0] is, at the very least, unisex. The mesh is the only masculine thing here. :p
Anyway, I tinkered with him for hours tonight. I took melopoeia’s suggestion that he looked too rough and ruddy with the default M3 textures, which makes sense because, as much as he’s supposed to be a human [or formerly human] character, his appearance in my head is strongly influenced by the fact that he was/is a doll with stylized features. So I made him look pale and inhuman. melopoeia also thought he looked too mesomorphic, so I put him through the wringer and elongated some of his body parts so that he more closely resembles 1:3 Will, my Sabik. As for the face, his original makeup didn’t look shocking and cheerful enough, so I messed with it more.
Funnily enough, this is not really that much of a costume for him. The makeup’s normal, as are the shoes and the short shorts. I do suspect that he’d usually be wearing something over the corset, however.
No comments unless you’re reciprocating with Halloween wishes, please.
Free pale textures and vampy makeup
Renderosity:
AVA Gothica
U3 White Dragon
Valarie V3
V3 Angel
Elisa [Pippilotta?]
Raven V3
Free boingy ponytails and an underbust corset, Dial Cleaner
http://www.3digitalcrafts.net/studiomaya/1download/index.html Free hair and clothes, including an underbust corset
http://free.daz3d.com/free_weekly/detail.php?free_id=112 Dial Cleaner
http://free.daz3d.com/free_weekly/detail.php?free_id=81 Stakes and crosses
http://free.daz3d.com/free_weekly/detail.php?free_id=36 Squirt guns [change color]
http://free.daz3d.com/free_weekly/detail.php?free_id=27 Ancient book
http://poserpros.daz3d.com/store/viewitem.php?selitem=2238&start=0&selcat=0&selsub=0 not free, but a corset for M3?
http://poserpros.daz3d.com/store/viewitem.php?selitem=8829&start=0&selcat=0&selsub=0 underbust corset
http://poserpros.daz3d.com/store/viewitem.php?selitem=5044&start=0&selcat=0&selsub=0 short short skirt, spike platform heels, underbust corset thingy
http://poserpros.daz3d.com/store/viewitem.php?selitem=7251&start=0&selcat=0&selsub=0 underbust and lots of fishnet pieces
http://poserpros.daz3d.com/store/viewitem.php?selitem=158&start=0&selcat=0&selsub=0 overbust
Find Glorious Goth for The Girl???
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/index.php?ViewProduct=35878&Start=31&vendor=_samildanach_ the best corset thingy for M3 I’ve ever seen, plus arm sleeves
Making props in just Daz // Another modeling program
http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/tutorial/tutorial/-/?id=2083 Dumbbell tutorial
http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=69557&highlight=using+primitives Merging primitives
http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=52807&highlight=primitives How to play with planes
http://www.wings3d.com Wings3D
http://market.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showforum.php?forum_id=12445 an active W3D forum
The drag queen as Christ figure, or, Everything I Needed to Know About Rocky Horror…
The drag queen as Christ figure, or, Everything I Needed to Know About Rocky Horror… published on Read more posts by the author of The drag queen as Christ figure, or, Everything I Needed to Know About Rocky Horror…, ModernWizard2 Comments on The drag queen as Christ figure, or, Everything I Needed to Know About Rocky Horror…
…I Learned from A Film Freak Commentary…
In any event, this is not supposed to be a speech about a dragon. This is, indeed, a song about a dragon…
No, seriously…In Film Freak Central, Alex Jackson provides some personal and perceptive commentary on Rocky Horror [and Shock Treatment, but I’m ignoring that part].
Because Jackson never got converted to the Halloweeny mania of midnight showings, he has an outsider’s slightly more balanced view to the whole proceeedings. Interestingly enough, he thinks that the fan celebration of RHPS as an excuse for silliness “neuters” the fact that it’s an interesting, very good, really touching movie. [Yeah, it grabs him where he likes to be grabbed.]
Now I’m not sure that RHPS is very good or even really touching, but I agree with some of Jackson’s observations on what makes it more interesting and textured than a throwaway diversion. He notes a persistent threat of angst, sadness and loss that looms [heavy, black and pendulous] across the movie. Jackson is at his most insightful when he’s talking about one of my favorite themes, the pathos of the villain:
… The film introduces him as the monster, but by the end we cease identifying with Brad and Janet and embrace Frank as one of us. Often Frank will look directly into the camera and grin or break the fourth wall with a line of dialogue, facilitating the identification process and establishing that he owns this movie and that everything that happens in the film happens on his terms. It doesn’t, of course–he has to brainwash his friends to get them to stay and he is subsquently surprised, slain, and defeated. The pathos of the film is in the total humbling of this god-in-his-own-mind. Frank has what I think is the most powerful moment in the film: Riff-Raff and Magenta tell him that they are returning to Transylvania and he sings “I’m Going Home” with tears forming in his eyes. As he slowly approaches them, expecting to leave this mortal coil, he imagines an audience applauding him. …
So his point is that the movie divorces us from B&J [Blow&Job] and links us with Frank through techniques of breaking the fourth wall. We thus grow invested in this supposedly villainous character, identifying with him such that we feel that we are like him, control-freaky and manipulative though he may be. When Frank sings I’m Going Home, it’s not just the ironic delusional of a nutcase; it’s a character singing about his sadness, his isolation and his rather pathetic need to imagine a theater full of accepting, adoring fans because he can’t get any in real life except under duress. Because we sympathize already with Frank, his expression of loneliness becomes a conduit for a general human desire for love and companionship. And, if you want to get really really deep about it, the fact that Frank is just about to die is really just an intensification of the fact that all of us in the audience are going to die too, probably without ever transcending our painful daily lives and seeing the “blue skies” of happiness and safety promised by the mythic state of “home.”
So, by twanging on the heartstrings labeled NEED FOR LOVE and FEAR OF DEATH, Frank in this song reveals himself as the most recognizably human and accessible character. Because he voices thoughts and feelings that we usually keep squished and because he does it so vulnerably [nakedly…vulnerably… same thing], it is very easy to respond to him. This is why, every time I listen to I’m Going Home, I seriously feel heartbroken. It’s a nondescript little ditty [as so many O’Brien tunes are] out of context, but, in context, it’s an encapsulation of our primal desires and our eternal state of yearning.
I do think that the comparison between Frank and a Christ figure is pushing it too far, though. Christ figures are like Nazis; whenever they enter the discussion, the tenor just devolves into something flat, stupid, repetitive and uninteresting. Christ figures are not useful devices. They obfuscate the humanity of the character that is supposedly such a figure. They are saintly and godly and powerful and pure and passive and dead and glowing and awesome and really, really, really boring. I wish they would all go away, but that is a separate entry.
Make your own tombstones…
Instead of buying some tombstone models that don’t look like the ones in the Old Burying Ground, I could use Blender to make them my very own self!!!
Dear blender
Oh won’t you help a first offender
Oh, toaster
Don’t you put the burn on me
Refrigerator, why are we always sooner or later
Bitchin’ in the kitchen or crying in the bedroom all night
No thanks to you, Shock Treatment.
Dirty rotten cheatin’ doll companies
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m keeping a running list [part I here, part II here] of BJD companies that I do not deal with because of dishonest, dubious and/or illegal business practices. Now I’ve got a new one for the list: Dollkot. In advertising a custom sculpting service, Dollkot committed a pile of egregious offenses. Instead of showcasing their own sculptors’ talents and results, they used photos from DIM’s MiniMee project to illustrate their concept.
Okay, that’s dishonest, but it gets worse. Said photos from the MiniMee project were actually directly scanned from a magazine article in Haute Doll where MiniMee owners contributed their personal photos and comments about their MiniMee dolls. So, not only did Dollkot misrepresent its services, but it did so by doubly stealing: once from Haute Doll, which gave no permission for the article to be reused, and also from the MiniMee owners, whose photos and comments were reproduced on Dollkot’s Web site without permission.
To add insult to injury, their inanely cheerful response to Armeleia, one of the MiniMee owners whose photos and quotes were illegally used, implies that they thought they could get away with it. They removed the pictures, but why were they even up in the first place?
Next on my themed playlists…FANGS!!!
I’ve done multiple playlists about queer characters and one about dolls and one about the ’80s. Now it’s time for…one or two or three about VAMPIRES! The A.V. Club has a good starting point. Although the article focuses on obscure novelty tunes, the comments have a trove of alternatives. I have to say…I’m surprised that nothing by Type O Negative is on the list. Or Vampires by the Pet Shop Boys from their appropriately titled Nightlife album, which makes explicit the connection between love, death, sex, desire, hunger and blood in these lines:
Do what you want
and then can I do it to you
You’re a vampire
I’m a vampire too
You’re a vampire
I’m a vampire too
It’s a reflex
Just a reflex
like fear or sex
Edit: There’s more here: in a Philly paper’s special section.
Portrait of Will
Tonight I learned that you can put makeup maps developed for Victoria onto Michael’s face. However, when the designers made makeup maps for Victoria, they apparently erased her eyebrows and replaced them with thin, high lines that make her look revoltingly surprised. I ended up approximating Will’s makeup by pasting the eyes from Victoria’s map onto a map for Will. Then I just changed his lip color in the Surfaces menu, with some gloss from the Victoria maps. Besides all this, I also closed his eyes slightly so that he doesn’t look so much like a bug, then puckered his lips slightly, since his mouth is supposed to be short. If anyone says he looks like an aging queen, why, you’re right. He looks a little softer with makeup on. It’s definitely an improvement from his stark look with invisible eyelashes….
Will’s Pussy Part II
Here’s the second installment of the Daz test comic. Will is distracted from his gender-related bitching by a mysterious noise. Strangeness ensues.
A note on Rotten Slimeball, the kitty cat: As soon as I discovered that Daz offered a cat to download for free, I couldn’t resist taking advantage of the product. The default state of the cat character is, of course, much cuter than the deformed Rotten Slimeball. In order to make a truly supernatural feline, I elongated the legs and the neck and increased the size of the ears. It has lopsided eyes and a protruding tongue because…well, it’s a zombie. Its texture is taken from a photo of red lichen on rocks.
Will’s barf was also surprisingly hard to do. I never thought I’d have to seriously think about the physics of spitting up blood, but I just did today. I decided that it would dribble viscously, rather than spew with force.
Here we go.
I don’t know what he’s doing. It’s just that this pose amuses me. I finally found him some underwear too, thank God, so he’s not flashing me any more. This is actually a more accurate rendition of the clothing that I imagine him wearing: short, bright and tight.
You do know that no one can take you seriously in these clothes, right, Will? It’s not the boots so much, and the underwear isn’t a problem because usually no one sees it, and even the shirt is kind of acceptable…but what’s with the dress?
Why is Will smirking?
Can you guess?Continue reading Why is Will smirking?
I love you, CrossDresser!
I finally got my CrossDresser program to work, converting clothes for female figs into clothes for male figs. I’m still running into problems with skirts for anyone, male or female, but I’m happy to report that XD successfully converted a ridiculously short, long-sleeved crop top [not shown] and some black pleather platform heels! Well, at least Will’s footwear [and certain shirts — he always did have a thing for crop tops] is accurate now. I’m going to go to bed and work on the skirts later… Heels below.
Skirt wrangling
Me trying to make Will wear something more in his style. Every time he moves his legs, though, they poke through the skirt, so I have to fix that. Remarks were made that his is not a very sophisticated outfit. This is true. He can dress very much the macho part [with relative success], but, when it comes to his true tastes, they are either flamboyant or clueless or both… The best part of this outfit are the boots, which are textured with a picture of a swirling pink fantasy planet!! Please also note that he is flaming, as per the flames on his shirt. Nyar har har.
Spinal whiplash
Today I learned some important things. 1) I can now keep characters’ pants or skirts on so they don’t leap out of them when being posed. 2) Clothes made for Victoria do not behave when fitted to Michael. That goes for shoes too…. 3) However, poses developed for Victoria 3 translate nicely to Michael 3, thereby expanding my library of poses easily! 4) Whenever Will comes out of his closet, his [lack of] fashion sense always startles me.
Anyway, here he is in another sartorial folly as only he can accomplish. [Pinstripe pants and red pleather… I weep.] He is in a Victoria model pose, which explains why he appears to be on the verge of spinal whiplash. [Modeling poses are pretty dumb, but he does look pretty anxious and intent.] I do like the lines in the pose, though. They really convey a sense of quick, focused motion.
Saving morphed characters, clothing, also general organization and Cyclorama
Saving morphed characters, clothing, also general organization and Cyclorama published on Read more posts by the author of Saving morphed characters, clothing, also general organization and Cyclorama, ModernWizardNo Comments on Saving morphed characters, clothing, also general organization and Cyclorama
“Fit to” vs. “parent and adjust:” http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=52607&highlight=parent+clothes
Keeping clothes on and moving with fig: http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=54638&highlight=loading+clothes
Putting clothes on morphed figs: http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=68516&highlight=clothes+fit+pose
Overview of 3D modeling programs: http://www.canary3d.com/tutorial/3d-intro.htm
Organizing runtimes: http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/tutorial/tutorial/-/?id=2231
Possible organization for runtimes: http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=50433&highlight=save+characters
Saving morphed characters: http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=59134&highlight=save+characters
Customized textures into Cyclorama: http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=54947&highlight=cyclorama
How to make custom textures and MAT files for Cyclorama: http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=54947&highlight=cyclorama
Will’s Pussy Part I, take 2
All right, here’s my second try on Will’s Pussy Part I. He’s now against a real live photo backdrop of the Charles River, along Memorial Drive between Western Ave and JFK Street, looking toward Western Ave. Now you can see the details of my photograph and of his bulge. I assume this is an improvement. No comments about the size of the bulge, please. It’s a function of the outfit, which apparently maps its textures directly onto his skin.
Baby Got Back
Original by Sir Mix A Lot. Depressingly literal in its music-video interpretation.
Remixed to be like a Gilbert & Sullivan song…highlighting the similarities between the rhyme scheme of rap and classic Broadway musicals.
Jonathan Coulton does it sensitively. Genius!
Notes on LHF lighting, or, The Curse of the Night
When in the latter days of LHF 1.0, I wanted to make my characters hanging out in recognizable Boston metro locations. I tried using photos of mine as backgrounds to achieve this effect. However, since LHF characters are all goddamned nocturnal vampires, I darkened my pictures to simulate night. While the low light was accurate to the time of day, the night effects effaced the detail in my characters, my backgrounds and my overall compositions.
I observe the same effacement in Will’s Pussy Part I. Therefore, I’m thinking that I shouldn’t go for full night effects. I’ll stick to dawn and dusk, which means I should only take photos early in the morning, early in the evening or on very cloudy days. On that subject, I took some photos along the Charles River between 7:30 and 8:00 AM today with clouds and light rain. Perhaps I can use them as part of a new scene for Will’s Pussy Part I.
Will’s Pussy Part I
Here’s the first panel of a test comic that I rendered in Daz tonight. Will is standing in the pre-loaded Faerie [HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH] Forest scene that came with the program. The lights are on “night.” Auspiciously enough, my computer did NOT have a hernia while rendering a high-res character with a bunch of high-res props and a background. Let’s see what happens when the second character enters the scene….
For my next trick…
Using only a few photos and some digital props, I am going to artistically recreate a 3-D set of the Old Burying Ground in Cambridge, my favorite cemetery, and then force my characters to hang out in it because I slaved so hard over it. This is, of course, assuming that my computer doesn’t go totally hemorrhageous from all those high-res textures.
My photos will be of the actual cemetery, hopefully projected using the Cyclorama. I have a sarcophagus prop, several gravestone props [with lichen!] and a Spooky Tree [TM] prop. Eventually my characters will be able to sit on top of the sarcophagus and at the base of the Spooky Tree. Oh yeah, and there’s a Light Dome to make it look like night.
I would really love to make an aerial view of Will curled up on the ground next to a gravestone, sleeping with his teddy bear and smiling. 😀 😀
Today’s Daz work: primitive renders of Will
After downloading the necessary stuff for actually getting shit done in Daz [base figures, face/body morphs, standard textures, some clothes, some poses, Will’s teddy bear, etc.], I spent several hours tonight tweaking Michael 3.0 in order to get Will out of it. He has the skinny body morph with a lot of tweaks to his face that make him look rather old. These are about the only clothes that I knew how to put on him without parenting something to body parts. A full report on the program and its usability ensues later, but so far it’s exceeding my expectations. Look at how close up I can get in the photos below. [Any resemblances to James Marsters and the character of Spike are completely intentional and probably accentuated by the outfit. I should have made the coat leopard print, but I was getting lazy.]
Say hello to Will’s package!
Say hello to Will’s eyelashes.
Leaving only one part of an image colored
http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/tutorial/tutorial/-/?id=905
An easy tutorial for my later use!
Marginalization of 3-D homosexuals — and where are the 3-D crossdressers?
I’ve discovered something interesting about the distribution and availability of heterosexual couples poses and homosexual couples poses for Daz.
Hetero couples poses can be downloaded for free from Renderosity. They also appear on the official Daz Web site, where you can buy the Pure Romanze set of props and poses. It consists of a gazebo, a pergola and 10 couples poses of demure, starry-eyed romance. There’s also a Budding Romance hetero couple pose, depicting mostly hugs, cuddling and other affectionate behavior. I’m not exaggerating when I say that hetero couples poses are obviously posted and freely available. They also range from mildly romantic (like the Pure Romanze set) to sexually explicit.
In contrast, I have only found homo couples poses on Renderotica [warning: this is a pretty boring site that leans heavily on stereotypical porn wear for female characters, stereotypical BDSM props and silly, silly animations] and similar age-limited sites for Poser porn. As can be expected from the general tenor of such sites, most of the homo couples poses are sexually explicit. I have yet to find a couples pose set for homos that contains casual affection or romance. Anyway, it seems that homo couples poses exist only on porn sites where you have to pay for them. They are not freely available.
Given the distribution of hetero and homo couples poses, it’s very clear to me that Daz [the developers of the program] and the general user community assumes the hetero orientation of the 3-D people you create. This is not surprising; when I was more active in Men With Dolls, people’s dolls were generally assumed hetero until proved otherwise, kind of the way it is with people. Hetero is the default orientation, so I refuse to make a stink about that assumption. It’s rampant in this world and in digital worlds.
What pisses me off is the sexualization and marginalization of homo couples. The appearance of homo couples poses solely on porn sites implies that all homos do is have sex. While we queers do make queer desire our defining feature of our sexual orientation, our queerness is not necessarily the overriding feature of our lives. Even in the case of queer activists and artists who make a living out of identity politics, they [we] do much more than have queer sex. The placement of homo couples poses on porn sites accentuates sex to the detriment of any other aspect of queer life, while simultaneously making queer couples seem pornographic, potentially objectionable and obscene, like the surrounding material.
And while I’m ranting about Renderotica [and similar sites], I would just like to ask where the 3-D crossdressers are, specifically the male ones. There is a huge interest in male crossdressing porn, which also shades into forced feminization, transgender, she-male, etc. porn. Surprisingly enough, I haven’t seen those themes represented at all. Am I the only Daz user who wants to use CrossDresser to put a male character in clothes designed for female characters? [And I’m not talking about men in fantasy robes; that’s boring.]
EDIT: Okay, I found some homo couples poses on Renderosity. Here’s Gals 1 poses with lesbian romantic poses. Here’s MM3 Guy Poses 1 with gay romantic poses. I think my point still holds, though, since I stumbled upon these just by chance.
Daz final
29.95 http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/shop/itemdetails/-/?item=1&spmeta=rq 1 monthly discount club membership
14.88 http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/shop/itemdetails/-/?item=3008&spmeta=ab head and body morphs, skin and eye colors V3
13.97 http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/shop/itemdetails/-/?item=1101&spmeta=rq V3 standard texture maps
[14.95 http://istore.mikrotec.com/philc/index1.html?page=catalog&trackerid=1677428544&category=a&vid=943124624&pid=1949675316&oldvid=2143420604 V3 everyday clothes]
[14.00 http://www.contentparadise.com/us/user/ultra_mega_pak_for_philcs_v3_clopak_1_product_3276 V3 textures]
11.95 http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/shop/itemdetails/-/?item=1032 Treadz V3 M3
20.97 http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/shop/itemdetails/-/?item=3009&spmeta=rq head and body morphs M3
9.91 http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/shop/itemdetails/-/?item=1563&spmeta=ab M3 standard texture maps
http://www.evilinnocence.com/xd/ CrossDresser!
9.97 http://www.evilinnocence.com/module.php?module=store&module_template=product&store_prod_id=244 CrossDresser M3 license
39.95 http://www.masker.zew3d.com/ Masker [Will’s makeup]
http://www.masker.zew3d.com/download.htm free Masker downloads
14.95 http://www.renderotica.com/roticashop/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=renderotica&Product_Code=ixdon_mm3vv3guygalp1&Category_Code=poses M3xM3 V3xV3 affectionate poses
What’s this Multiplane Cyclorama?
Making low-res Daz people & using Cyclorama
http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/tutorial/tutorial/-/?id=1632
This tutorial takes out all the photorealistic details that I don’t need because I am supposed to be making comics with dolls, not people.
http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/tutorial/tutorial/-/?id=755
This one is about how to make your own Cyclorama backgrounds….
Today’s fridge poetry is entitled “Please Shut Up!”
The online version of Online Poetry, Genius edition, certainly has a lot of vituperative terms in it… Either that or it’s just so much fun to denigrate someone with polysyllables.
we understand that
your vapid temerity is
an amalgam of crass platitutdes
with pejorative caterwauling
& a verbose fusillade of obtuse turgidity
I learned a new word today…
An exceedingly rare occurrence, given that I know the standard “unusual words.” Today’s word is hypaethral. Can you guess its meaning from the context in the following sentence?
We were thinking of putting a roof over our porch, but, if we leave it hypaethral, we’ll get more sunlight and we’ll have a convenient location to look at stars on clear nights.
It means roofless. I learned it at FreeRice, a vocab quick with a cheap charity gimmick. My vocab level on the quiz fluctuates between 47 and 50, although, now, after 200 words, I see that they are recycling some. What’s your score?
I just found the Frederick’s of Hollywood for 3-D guys…
Some genius developed an application called CrossDresser, which allows you to reconform any clothing for any 3-D model to any other 3-D model. So you can reconform clothing for Victoria 3 to clothing for Michael 3, which allows me to make 3-D Will wear 3-D Anneka’s clothes, which saves the trouble of me finding dresses specifically for him.
Plus de shit
Goth Poser stuff from Renderosity.
Dark Moods [reflective] V4 http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/index.php?ViewProduct=58167&Start=31&SearchTerm=vampire
Alexandra base http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/index.php?ViewProduct=59479
Mark and Maximilan base http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/index.php?ViewProduct=37061
Hair porn
Please check out this picture of Paradise Hair. It’s a hairstyle for the Daz 3D Victoria 4.1 female model. The Paradise Hair model consists of one ponytail on either side of the head with loose strands on the forehead and around the ears. Length of the ponytails can be varied.
This particular hair model immediately inspired lust in me because it’s a realistic render of Anneka’s wild, full, gravity-defying ponytails. Streams of hair! Oceans of hair! Buckets of hair! I love the watery profusion of it all, as well as the shimmering highlights and the illusion of the strands being fine and possibly charged a bit by static. I love the way that it seems to be the work of an artist who starts drawing quick strokes for the ponytails and gets so into the groove of making those satisfying swooping motions that he or she just goes berserk with them. The result looks realistic, but it is not achievable in this particular universe. It’s a fantastical style done with not just great technical skill, but also great exuberance and relish, and for that I really esteem it.
Hair and clothes
Found more dresses for guys on the Daz 3D Web site in its official store…they were all hiding in the fantasy/sci fi category because no guy would ever want to wear a dress in real life. The stupid gender binaries of these rendering programs astonish me. On the plus side of things, I found Will’s sperm-crunchingly tight pants and fishnet shirt! More links.
Will’s wave http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/shop/itemdetails/-/?item=5355&cat=125
Will’s wedge cut http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/shop/itemdetails/-/?item=2257
Will’s spike http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/shop/itemdetails/-/?item=3885
Viktor’s loose ponytail? http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/shop/itemdetails/-/?item=1522&cat=125
Versatile hair up down short long braid pony http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/shop/itemdetails/-/?item=676
Will’s pants and shirts http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/shop/itemdetails/-/?item=2057
Will’s miniskirts http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/shop/itemdetails/-/?item=729
Will’s long-sleeved dresses mid calf http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/shop/itemdetails/-/?item=5236&spmeta=rq
Kinky textures for it http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/shop/itemdetails/-/?item=1547
M3 head and body morphs http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/shop/itemdetails/-/?item=3009&spmeta=rq
Victoria 4.1 complete http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/shop/itemdetails/-/?item=4781
More Poser stuff for LHF
Including dresses, gowns and skirts for Will, which were hiding under “robes” or “tribal clothing” or “Egyptian” because apparently you can’t search for “dress AND michael” [Michael = latest Daz 3D male character] and except to come up with anything, nooooo. I’m beginning to despair of finding corsetry. Forthwith, what I HAVE found…
Laptop http://www.3dmrug.org/free/freemarket_files/laptop.htm
Leopard love seat http://www.sharecg.com/v/16164/poser/LoveSeat
Cell phone [iPhone] http://www.sharecg.com/v/16080/poser/iPhone-for-Poser
Egg chair and sci fi furniture http://www.most-digital-creations.com/free_poser_poses_textures_morphs_props_13.htm
Small bedroom and girl’s bedroom http://arcadiazone.page.tl/Poser-Files.htm
Reto chair http://www.sharecg.com/v/12303/poser/RETO-CHAIR
Bookshelves, piles of books, single books and full shelves of books http://www.joes3dfantasyworlds.com/down/misc01/misc01.htm
Posable secretary chair http://www.pretty3d.com/download_page.php?pic_id=7
Big Bertha V4 morph http://www.most-digital-creations.com/free_poser_poses_textures_morphs_props_12.htm
Eating and Drinking poses V4 http://www.most-digital-creations.com/free_poser_poses_textures_morphs_props_11.htm
Fishnet V4 http://www.most-digital-creations.com/free_poser_poses_textures_morphs_props_10.htm
More Designer Bed poses http://www.most-digital-creations.com/free_poser_poses_textures_morphs_props_9.htm
Vampire, Playing Dead and Designer Bed 1 poses V4 http://www.most-digital-creations.com/free_poser_poses_textures_morphs_props_8.htm
Couples Designer Bed poses and Couples poses for Free Chair http://www.most-digital-creations.com/free_poser_poses_textures_morphs_props_7.htm
Designer Bed and some Couples poses http://www.most-digital-creations.com/free_poser_poses_textures_morphs_props_6.htm
Free Chair and poses, glasses http://www.most-digital-creations.com/free_poser_poses_textures_morphs_props_5.htm
Facial piercings http://www.most-digital-creations.com/free_poser_poses_textures_morphs_props_4.htm
Simple bed, night backgrounds, chrome furniture http://poser.webz.cz/
Search for Lips Sofa under free stuff for Poser on Renderosity!
Bar Scene http://www.sharecg.com/v/10906/3d-model/Little-bar-scene
Manual wheelchair http://www.zme.me.uk/
Fangs for both M3 and V4 https://df38.dot5hosting.com/~posernat/store/catalog/free_stuff.php
Pharaoh of the Sun M3 [short-sleeved gown] http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/shop/itemdetails/-/?item=5144
Tribal Clothing M3 [wrap skirt] http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/shop/itemdetails/-/?item=2564
Dystopian MedBay http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/shop/itemdetails/-/?item=2199&cat=32
Victoria 4.1 http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/shop/itemdetails/-/?item=4783&spmeta=rq
Michael 3 http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/shop/itemdetails/-/?item=1558
Hair and some props
Free shit on Renderosity!
Renderosity amasses many free things for Poser. I found several kitchens [Alexandra and Maximilian’s backdrop], a bar [the NIghtcrawler], a living room [Anneka and/or Will?], multiple bedrooms [Anneka and Will], a cellar [Janet and Velvette, a kid’s room [Geordie], kitchen cabinets [Alexandra and Maximilian], a toilet, a sink, a bathtub, beds with curtains, a folding screen [Chow and Baozha], a taser [Janet], a syringe [Janet], Pocky [Baozha], barrels of toxic waste [Janet], an egg chair [Will!!], a corner sofa, a wheeled table, all sorts of bookcases [Anneka, Will and Mark], office desks [Anneka, Will, Mark, Janet], candlesticks with unlit candles [Will], a fucking Gothic tomb with removable grave [Will], a “Dystopia Console” [Janet], hats, watches, BDSM equipment [Anneka and Will], a 5-ring earpiece [Baozha], open and closed books [Anneka, Will and Mark], wheelchairs [Maximilian] and lots more….
Maybe I should just get…
Poser! It has collision detection, dynamic cloth and a mouse-based interface, plus a much larger built-in library of items, faces editable all over, editable hair, a sprawling user community with free items and…more realistic results than iClone. The base pack of Poser 7 is just around $250, and you don’t have to buy hundreds of extra bonus packs just to do simple things like make people naked or modify their clothes. Better deal?
Bang Ping, otherwise known as Baozha Bang
Look…it’s Bang Ping, otherwise known as Baozha [meaning “explosion”] Bang.
She’s the adopted daughter of the leader of the Hun, the vampires of Chinatown. From most to least formal, her adoptive father’s names go like this:
Bang-shi-fu=Lord Bang [what he wants people to call him]
Bang Chow=his full name [last, first]
Chow Mandarin=Chow the Chinaman [what his fellow sailors, who were Englishmen, called him]
Chow=his first name [used disrespectfully by Baozha, Will and anyone who wants to piss him off]
Anyway, since I just refer to all characters by their first names, Baozha is Chow’s kid.
This is my first all-around accurate iClone render of an LHF character. [Previous ones of Will were experimental and thus didn’t count. I also did Janet earlier, but she doesn’t have appropriate hair.] Everything about Baozha’s build, features and even clothing is accurate to her character. Her outfit represents my earliest pathetic attempts at customized clothing design. For example, her pants were made with a downloaded texture, originally in green and opaque, which I tweaked to look like bleached denim. Her shirt is an application of a fantasy industrial scene jpg with a clear reflection + yellow glow so it looks like it’s made out of plastic. [I foresee lots of shiny, slick and plasticky clothes for my characters.] As you can see, her face is going to freeze in that expression…
Sims 2 BodyShop Editor?!
What’s this then? An av generator? Should I be caring? I don’t know… I’ll look into it later.
They took until 2.5 to develop drag-and-drop?! *boggle*
So…I got iClone 2.1 Hooray! I have yet to do anything substantive with it, though. From what I read, I should probably just wait until the 2.5 patch, released later this season, which will make manipulating characters, props and other elements much easier.
You see — iClone currently allows you to change positions of characters, props and other elements with some stupid little slider bars that you have to click the arrows on. This is a clunky interface, buried in the options box, rather than obviously right in front of you on the real-time render screen. It’s akin to working in Photoshop with the keyboard only, no mouse — it can be done, but it’s inefficient and time-consuming.
Any developers with brains would have programmed in the capability to edit characters, props and other elements via mouse right in the real-time render screen. But no, despite the almost universal use of WYSIWYG GUIs, the elegance, ease and familiarity of these apparently did not register in the first major or second major iteration of iClone. It took until 2.5 for this basic interface to be incorporated. I wonder if the programmers tested the program on real amateur users?
Oh yeah, and on a positive ranting note, I find the site Renderosity a great source of free 2D backgrounds and textures. I downloaded some creepy/industrial/Gothic/night scenes for possible use in LHF 2.0. The only disappointment I have with Renderosity is that it contains many Poser and 3DX files that I cannot use because I do not have the software. But the thumbnails sure are pretty to look at.
BBC’s Ouch! podcast
For 30 or 40 minutes every month, you can crack up over the BBC’s Ouch! podcast, which features actor Mat Fraser and comedian Liz Carr hosting a talk and comedy show about disabilities. The two interview celebrities, banter sarcastically together and run a hysterical quiz show called Vegetable, Vegetable or Vegetable?, where they try to guess a caller’s disability based on yes/no questions. All archives are available on the site, not only sound files, but also transcripts, so you can read them if you wish. Go to the general Ouch! Web site to find columnists, blogs, Q&As and other fun stuff. Thanks to melopoeia for the rec.
iClone 2 outlay revised
iClone Studio 2.1 $199.95 [the engine]
CloneCloth vol. 1 $97.46 [so they can wear more than pants and shirts]
Classic cuts vol. 2 $17.95 [more styles for guys and gals]
Saloon chairs and table $1.59
Mahogany round table and chair 0.80
Voluptuous bedroom free download
City rooftop free download
French maid character free download
German soldier free download
Geisha character free download
Apron free download
Lil2 character free download
Oh la la character free download
Elegance character free download
Amanda character free download
Gina character free download
old graveyard prop free download
open coffin free download
animated candles free download
laptop free download
study room free download
bass guitar free download
bed prop free download
stone room free download
hospital bed free download
sci fi workstation free download
lying down and blood pooling project free download
glowing green room project free download
Lilac ladies clothing download
5 women’s hairstyles free download
Agent Trinity character free download
Lilac clothing textures free download
Lilac clothing textures 2 free download
Lilac clothing textures 3 free download
Library scene free download
3 outfits and textures free download
30 motion poses free download
16 poses free download
model with stockings free download
winter clothes free download
30 more lilac poses free download
Adam Ant free download
cocktail scene lounge free download
fashion project files free download
dresses and some hairstyles free download
bodysuit and trench free download
sparkly bikini, also dress and bolero vest free download
Attack of the Clones: More iClone renders
A mad scientist discovers a fatal flaw in her master creation.
Messing with iClone again. This is the default character, a female Hero. Apparently this body style is the “plump” one, but I don’t really see that. The scientist has a “sad” expression, while the clone has a “tease” expression with a “dance” animation.
iClone render of Will, iteration 2
Okay, here we go. I imported a picture of my Will doll to use as the base for this version of Will. I couldn’t get him as cadaverous as I wanted, but the skin is a nice interesting dead color. Eyes are accurately blue, sockets accurately shadowed.
Here’s his atrocious yet riveting outfit. Both the pants and the boots are “female casual.” I didn’t know over-the-knee fuck-me boots were casual wear….
And here’s a close-up. Why yes, he is smirking with 100% “Evil Intention.” He also looks like David Bowie, no?
Empty sockets
Well, this set was intended to show Will’s naturalistic posture in my living room, knees curled up toward his chest, hands in his lap. Instead, I cranked with the levels, contrast and Dark Strokes filter to get these pictures. He either looks like he has skull holes instead of eyes or he’s been punched in the face…take your pick.
iClone 2 render of Will
Using my trial verson of iClone 2, this is as close as I can get to Will. Hairstyle is inaccurate [not sticking up enough], as are eyes [not brown] and pants [not tight enough], but the complete lack of fashion sense, the cadaverous build and the eeeeevil smirk are right on. I am very amused to note that there is an “Evil Intention” emote generator, which I cranked up to 100% to get the following smirk.
iClone 2, interestingly enough, separates everything by sex. Bodies, clothing and shoes are understandable. [In a bonus for me, women can wear “male” clothes and men “female,” although “female” tops have prefab breast bumps in them which do not look good on a male character who is not a drag queen. In the case of shoes, though, it’s no problem. Will’s wearing “female” casual black boots.] But even body language is segregated! “Male” poses connect solidly with the earth, looking dynamic and forceful, while “female” poses show more imbalance and tentative, swaying movements. [But the sex of the character does not determine available poses and motions; Will is in a “female” casual seated posture.]
iClone 2.0 outlay
Assuming I want to use it…
iClone 2.0 Standard $79.95 [the engine]
Furniture Pack 1 $39.95 [because they need beds and chairs and tables, but that’s about it]
Working Fashion Theme Pack #1 $97.46 [because they need to sit, stand and talk — that’s all they do]
Total $217.36
Monetarily speaking, that’s actually cheaper than 1:6, given than I’ve probably spent $2K [?] on 1:6 in the past 5 years, maybe more. {We won’t talk about my BJD spending. Oh, okay, we will. I’ve had Zephque, Sardonix 1.0, Jareth, little Jennifer, Frank, big Jennifer, Submit, Sardonix 2.0 and Will, which is 9 dolls, not to mention their clothes. I’d say that I’ve spent about $9K on them in the past 3.5 years.]
Alternatively, iClone 2.0 Studio is $199.95 and it comes with Working Fashion Theme Pack #1.
Cool Clones has downloads.
Cool Creators has a store.
I would like to try before making a commitment of several hundred dollars!
a decaying glass universe
Working exhaustedly with the online Poet supply of words from Magnetic Poetry’s Web site.
you work at the translucent round
of a decaying glass universe
encircling the weary sky
with ghostly streams of used eternity
of a decaying glass universe
encircling the weary sky
with ghostly streams of used eternity
Sensations of death via an article in New Scientist
Just in time for Halloween, New Scientist’s October 13, 2007 issue has an article about what various types of death [hanging, drowning, bleeding to death] feel like, as reported by those who have survived massive injuries. I was particularly interested in the effects of exsanguination which, it turns out, are just an extreme version of what happens after donating blood.
How to make a web comic
Option: 1:6 dolls and backdrops
Pros:
I know how to do it.
Reasonable photography skills
Instant manipulation
Instant control over light and setting
Portable
Inexpensive
Computer needed only in after work
I know how to do it.
Reasonable photography skills
Instant manipulation
Instant control over light and setting
Portable
Inexpensive
Computer needed only in after work
Cons:
I’m burned out on that medium.
Pasting them into photoed backgrounds takes time.
No diversity of body shapes
Takes so much time
Low-res results
Option 2: Software like iClone
Pros:
Diversity of body shapes
Import faces of existing characters
Avatars look plasticky
Easy pasting in photoed backgrounds
Photography and composition skills applicable here
High-res results
Outlay equal to that of 1:6
Mega-zoom
Diversity of body shapes
Import faces of existing characters
Avatars look plasticky
Easy pasting in photoed backgrounds
Photography and composition skills applicable here
High-res results
Outlay equal to that of 1:6
Mega-zoom
Cons:
Program’s learning curve
All time at computer
Less fluid, more stereotyped posing [fetal position, head in hands, handshake, eating, having sex poses available?]
Large initial outlay
How many characters per scene?
Option 3: Photos to line drawings
Pros:
Simplification of messy photos
Just like original LHF
Simplification of messy photos
Just like original LHF
Cons:
Just as much work as original LHF
Loss of significant, affecting detail
No showcase for photoed backgrounds
Option 4: Get a drawing partner
Pros:
More time to concentrate on story
More time to concentrate on story
Cons:
Lack of complete god-like creative control
Necessity of compromise
Infiltration of someone else into my ideas
Option 5: Draw a simple sketch comic
Pros:
Simple
Characters easily caricatured
Simple
Characters easily caricatured
Cons:
Lose subtleties of light, shade and expression
Can’t draw dynamic poses and backgrounds well
Option 6: Draw a detailed realistic full-body comic
Pros:
Complete control
Limited by imagination, rather than doll shapes and clothes or software limitations
Cons:
Lack of drawing skills
Option 7: BJDs and backdrops
Pros:
High detail
Showcase for photography
Even moodier
High detail
Showcase for photography
Even moodier
Cons:
Heavy
Bank-breakingly expensive
Space hog
Option 8: Export from something like Sims
Pros:
Highly customizable avatars
Shot control
Highly customizable avatars
Shot control
Cons:
Not compatible with photoed backgrounds
Existing faces not importable
Pathetic scenery
Too flat-looking, not plasticky enough
L’Harpiste Mauresque
Extra, extra! Remember the delicate, skeletal harp-playing double amputee I linked to yesterday? Her name is L’Harpiste Mauresque, or the Moorish Harpist, and she was created around 1880 by the French automatonist Gustave Vichy.
Well, there’s a full version of her at the Morris Museum in Morristown, NJ, and she’s wearing golden spangles and seated on an octagonal stand. If you go to the Morris Museum’s main site, then Current Exhibitions, then Musical Machines and Living Dolls, then the picture of L’Harpiste [last one in the first row], you can see a high-quality video of her playing and, yes, moving her eyelids.
Here’s a still from the February 2005 Journal of Antiques, where you can see her expressive little purple face.
With those big eyes, she looks like a BJD! [Thanks to
![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
for the links.] I like the haggard-looking one better… I want one.
my sharpened tongue
It’s hard to concentrate at work. [No, really??] Forthwith, some spew from the online Romantic selection of Magnetic Poetry [TM]. I like the sharpened tongue the best…it’s the little inhuman touches that are most effective… :p I notice that all of my fridge poetry appears to be about death, disturbance and violence. Or sex. Or several of the above. WOOOOO HOOOOOO!
when I open your laughing throat
warm blood soaks my sharpened tongue
I drink I devour I am drunk in this hour
oh a world of wild redness rushes through
my skin
warm blood soaks my sharpened tongue
I drink I devour I am drunk in this hour
oh a world of wild redness rushes through
my skin
Lazy comic creation
suggests a program like this, which converts photos into line drawings. I wonder if I could make this work for a comic strip. I could take pictures of characters in stereotyped positions, then mix and match parts…? I know that Oh My Gods!, a much simpler comic strip, uses preselected parts to construct the characters, and Two Lumps is just lazy, reusing images of the cats with different expressions. Maybe I could use a similar method WITH SLIGHTLY MORE FINESSE. [I miss LHF.]
I think her eyelids move…
This is an automaton from the 1880s, unrestored, a bust of a harpist playing a song. The skeletal and stained condition makes it all the more affecting and compelling. She’s beautiful!
wild ripe night
I was just messing with Magnetic Poetry’s online Garden suite of words. I was trying to see how much I could pervert it. I think I succeeded. This one is for all you vampires out there….
emerge from purple earth
fresh with gritty magic
eat a child as fruit
thrive on fecund blood
revel in wild ripe night
fresh with gritty magic
eat a child as fruit
thrive on fecund blood
revel in wild ripe night
tantamount to temerity
I checked out a fridge poetry community, but all the entries were too serious and/or pretentious, so I left for Magnetic Poetry, which has a Web site where you can futz with some of the kits. I used the Genius edition, which is more like the Regular Vocabulary edition for me. I like “tinged with galling language” and “tantamount to temerity” the best. They just speak trippingly on the tongue, you know. Tantamount and temerity are good words to eject contemptuously and if you get them both together you just have a veritable mortar spray of plosives!
your vicissitudes were
tinged with galling language
secreted in veiled books
by a trenchant cunning woman
whose mellifluous opinions
are tantamount to temerity
tinged with galling language
secreted in veiled books
by a trenchant cunning woman
whose mellifluous opinions
are tantamount to temerity
I’m older than you think.
One hundred years older…
Just like a Real Artist [TM]!
I got some new paintbrushes today. I will NOT be storing these bristles down. Anyway, I got out my supplies…
Then I shaved some pastels with my craft knife onto my technologically advanced palette:
Then I made a mess all over Will’s face, putting some brown around his nose and on his philtrum and, most significantly, a thin layer of purple shadows [see unmixed blue + red above] under his eyes. Here’s a harshly lit shot that shows the additions. I am just now exploiting his darkened eyes in a formal shoot.
Dead people, demons and other fun stuff, Tuesdays at 9 PM
Reaper is about a 21-year-old guy whose parents sold his soul to the Devil, so he has to be a bounty hunter for errant souls. Reviews say it has witty banter and comedy. I’ll bite, but I’m damn well spittin’ it out if it don’t taste no good.
Is “undead” a legit TV subgenre now?!
Why does mint taste cold?
This is why you should listen to Quirks & Quarks because you can learn the answers to riveting scientific queries of the day, like this one.
The sensation of mint as cold has long fascinated me, but I have never known why mint makes my mouth chilly. Now the answer is here. Apparently mint, like Tabasco sauce, stimulates your taste buds with a sensation like pain. It’s not technically a taste, but rather a feeling of pain!
Because your taste buds have been primed by this painful mint, anything cold that you eat afterward with seem colder. Interestingly enough, anything hot that you eat afterward will seem hotter.
Mint also increases your salivation and washes away thick protective saliva from your taste buds, so more of the cold or hot thing hits your naked, shivering taste buds.
Messy nasal shading
Will had some marks on his nose. I tried to erase them with paint remover. In doing so, I erased all the paint from his nose, forming ragged edges between his paintless bridge of his nose and everywhere where the paint is. I tried to fix this today by applying some shaved pastels to the ragged areas. The result is very messy because I was working in low lamplight, not natural daylight. Also my paintbrush was frazzled. Finally, I have a messy and unfinished style of painting and drawing anyway.
I’m not really perturbed by the messiness. When I first got Will, he looked perfect, pure and unblemished. I admire the high grade of resin used to make the doll, but the appearance of the doll is not accurate to Will’s character. Will is supposed to be over 130 years old. While his body has remained at approximately 30, he has suffered over a century of wear and tear. I imagine him as beautiful but also haggard, more like an aristocratic, finely made-up old lady who used to be a pageant queen, rather than a person in his shining prime. My messiness thus takes away his flawless appearance, but he’s not supposed to look young anyway.
giftless juice of a screaming symphony
Figured out the peculiarity of Magnetic Poetry. With its preponderance of adjectives, it has no association with workaday language, so it all but requires a) endless concatenations of nouns and adjectives or b) strings of adjectives that you would not expect to go together. Case in point is today’s effort. Also I swear that I didn’t set out to write about cunnilingus. I just realized after that the last clause could be interpreted that way.
I recall repulsive
white love & the
giftless juice of a
screaming symphony
beneath the thousand
smooth tongues
of girls
white love & the
giftless juice of a
screaming symphony
beneath the thousand
smooth tongues
of girls
to crush the delirious moon
…Continuing the tradition of complete and grammatically correct sentences created with Magnetic Poetry [TM]. Not particularly inspired by anything, except we had all the adjectives collected together, so fast, true and black were nearby.
your fast true black diamond
shot up to the lightless pole
to crush the delirious moon
& so I will sleep in honey
shot up to the lightless pole
to crush the delirious moon
& so I will sleep in honey
In an alternate universe, Buffy is scared of vampires…
Given the huge popularity of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this Chick tract about a kid named Buffy who hates spiders, vampires, Halloween because it’s the “Devil’s holiday” is really, really funny. Trick or treat…would you like some irony with your waxy candy corn? Site contains full text and pictures of all other Chick tracts. As a bonus, here’s an MST3K version of Dark Dungeons, about an anti-D&D Chick tract.
“Flock of Seagulls hair!”
So saith my wife when she sees Frank and Will in their new-to-me fake fur Wicked Wigs. I picked these up today in a face-to-face exchange with DOAer SolarCat [Lauren]. I showed her my Soom Sabik; she showed me her Soom Kanoa, an irresistibly smirking little guy with a great pointy nose. She sold me the Wicked Wigs for 1/3 of list price, and I got two well-crafted wigs that fit closely to the contours of my dolls’ heads.
I’m pleased with the construction and quality and even more with the result. The length of short-pile fake fur is a much better approximation of Will’s hair as I imagine it in my head. Picture below [crappy, low light], with Frank just in time for Halloween and Will apparently anticipating Xmas.
Pushing Daisies: Watch it before it dies.
Hi, I just watched the pilot of Pushing Daisies on ABC. Those of you who enjoy candy-colored, quip-ridden whimsy should check out this show before it is flushed down the inevitable toilet. Its well-balanced construction of consistently witty writing, neatly sketched characters, sun-drenched nostalgic colors and perky narration can only last so long before one of two things happens.
Either it will implode into a twee, trite mockery of itself, or it will be canceled because mainstream networks can’t handle originality and creativity, especially in the form of a prime-time TV show.
So, anyway, Pushing Daisies is about a pie maker who can bring people back to life with one touch, then kill them again with the next. Ned [Lee Pace, deadpan] spends his days making perfect pastries and solving murder cases with the victims’ help, splitting his rewards with sardonic investigator friend [Chi McBride, suitably snarky]. Everything going swimmingly until he resurrects childhood crush Chuck [Anna Friel, unusually bright and punchy for a charming love interest]. Now she’s alive when she’s not supposed to be; he can’t touch the woman he loves, and there’s this matter of her killer still menacing people nearby.
The overdetermining narration very nearly pushes this slight, comic tale into the land of tooth-grittingly saccharine TV morals, but the collective skills of the cast really bring the conceit out of cleverness and into something memorable, even occasionally resonant. All major characters have lost something — Ned his mom, Chuck her dad and her normal life with her aunts, her aunts their synchronized swimming careers and an association with the outside world, Emerson any sort of semblance of normalcy in his life. In a show that’s all about an endless cycle of losing and gaining, I hope that the makers have the courage to explore both the light side of rebirth and the dark side of death. But I doubt they will because, like I said, the show will either turn too ooey-gooey for its own good, or it will be nixed for being too inventive.
So far, Pushing Daisies compares favorably with many shows and movies I have seen… For just a few… The tongue-in-cheek narration and Technicolor brightness reminds me of the movie Amelie. The clean suburbia populated by shining caricatures of people and sneaky gallows humor recalls the movie Beetlejuice. Chuck’s struggle to with the end of one life and the beginning of another reminds me of the premise of Dead Like Me. The carnivalesque view of characters as lovable freaks reminds me of some of Ray Bradbury’s fiction for young adults, especially Something Wicked This Way Comes.
Life expectancy quiz
Oh rapture, joy and ecstasy unabated…I found the BASIC life expectancy quiz I used to mess with on my Commodore 64. It’s in an out-of-print book of BASIC programs that have been all scanned and made available online. Isn’t that great? I really have to find a BASIC emulator so that I can do simple programs. Then I can make silly questionnaires and revel in the nostalgia.
New TV shows
Well, I wanted to watch the Moonlight premiere last week [about the tortured cliche vampire falling in love with a stereotype human woman], but I missed it. Maybe I’ll catch it this week, although I see that Pushing Daisies, another show about a human/undead relationship, is premiering tonight, so I might want to catch that. Furthermore, season 3 of Supernatural begins this Thursday, but I don’t know if I will be able to catch that, which is tragic, given my current VIOLENT crush on Jensen Ackles [who plays Dean]. Dammit…so many walking dead, so little time.
My hair is fabulous, and the rest of me is naked.
I’m purchasing two fake fur wigs from Wicked Wigs secondhand. One is a patchwork of black and orange, the other a twist between white and blood red. Will’s wardrobe may never progress beyond leather pants and a black tank top, but he’ll have hot-rockin’ hair.
Elfdoll Halloween Hana witch and wizard
GODDAMMIT! Just when I have no money, Elfdoll releases the little Hanas again, this time in pale white, with witch or wizard costumes and POINTY SHOES! Since they are limited editions, I will probably never get one.
I like the wizard version, not because of the faceup [too much eyeliner], but because of the hooded robe. The special “holding hand” looks like it would be useful to grasp very small items, and I think the POINTY SHOES, being larger than the bare feet, would look more proportionate AND provide better upright support.
These are extremely cute dolls, and they make me really [sniff] miss [sniff] Submit. I had such fun with her character, even though I didn’t have her for long. She was sacrificed to a good cause, though [moving expenses].
My wife says, “Well, Sardonix came back into your life, didn’t she? Maybe Submit will.” Assuming I get a RAISE at the end of this year…
News site
Supposedly an indie journalism site, Alter.net provides analysis under the major radar.
Flaming…
Especially with messed-up levels and high white contrast.
The original:
Flaming…I like the way his skin turns orange, as if it is a banked coal. He looks full of vitality, which he isn’t.
Black and white version… I like this one for the way in which the hair in his eyes has been changed to strands of light.
Messing around with Photoshop even more…
When you’ve been wearing make-up for 100+ years, it becomes very, errrrr, stylized….
Before…
After… [“Dark strokes” filter added.].
I’m not Goth. I’m just filtered that way.
High contrast, black and white.
“Dark Strokes” filter adds a whole bunch of eyeliner…a whole bunch.
There was a book in this shoot…
…But it disappeared in my fascination with Will’s head.
High contrast, greyscale.
Same.
La meme chose.
Watch this??
Ultraviolet, a TV series from 1998. Contains vampires, naturally.
Lady in red
For some reason, those song lyrics are in my head. Here are some artsy-fartsy shots of Will with hair that approximates his actual length of hair.
TWoP interview with James Marsters: Sexy intelligence and BTVS insights
I really respect highly accomplished artists who fuse technical skills with passionate execution and attention to detail. I respect them even more when they are intelligent, analytical people who have insights into themselves, their craft and how their craft affects others. For example, Sarah Michelle Gellar is a highly accomplished actor, and I respect that, but I can’t respect her as a person because she’s not very thoughtful or reflective; plus she’s really squandering her talent.
James Marsters, on the other hand, ranks right up there with David Bowie for me. He’s really talented AND really intelligent, not to mention jovial and humorous, as you can see in the latest Television Without Pity interview. After reading the transcript, I conclude that he seems to be a charismatic, extroverted person with the gift of making almost anyone feel relaxed and accepted.
Anyway, in case I need any more reason to have a crush on him, here he is saying intelligent things about the massive popularity of Spike in BTVS. Brains are such a turn-on. A cut from the TWoP interview:
CB: Speaking of Spike, one more question about him. Obviously, I don’t have to tell you how popular a character he is, but if you can separate acting ability and looks from the equation, what is it about his essence that makes him so alluring?
JM: Hmm…that’s a really hard question for me to answer, because I wasn’t objective about it. I think at the end of the day, it’s either of two things or both of them, and one is probably more for women than men. But the first is that the show wasn’t supposed to be about sexy vampires. It was supposed to be about ugly vampires who die. The mythology was that the vampires stood for what sucks about high school, and so Joss got talked into Angel, which was not in his ground plan, and the character just took off, and he’s like, that’s it, it’s one sexy vampire, I will allow you no more. And then I come along, and I think that he was trying to keep a cap on…he recognized that I was thematically dangerous to his show. He didn’t want it to become a soap opera of sexy vampires. And so he, uh, marginalized the character, and it’s ironic, because the show is about outsiders, it’s about people who are not the popular people, and he didn’t really realize it, but he created within…so the show is about these outsider outcasts, and in this group of outcasts, there’s this other outcast. So he made me the super-outcast, and the show speaks to everyone who feels sometimes like an outcast, which is pretty much everybody. So thematically, I don’t know that he meant to set it up that way, but it kind of went down that way.
China Executes Lead-Contaminated Toys!
Sometimes The Onion is funny, but, when the writing committee combines its historical perspective and incisive sarcasm, as in this article, their satire can be almost sublime. I especially like the ways in which the conventions of genocide and execution have been adapted for toys, with the Barbies being “separated from their Kens” and “leaned against the wall” for the firing squad [because they can’t stand up by themselves]. The best detail, however, is the nonchalant, almost bured mention of civilian deaths. Genius!
Another book to get
Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of American Girlhood, 1830-1930 (Paperback)
The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England by Alex Owen
A blog to poke into much more thoroughly
Morbid Anatomy is a compendium of posts about medical and death-related art, such as post-mortem photos, anatomical waxes and ecorches [engravings of partly flayed people showing musculature]. Off I go to waste my lunch hour. Janet would definitely have some of this stuff in her lab alongside the Kraftwerk posters.
EDIT: The links from Morbid Anatomy are most instructive and detailed. For example, The Fantastic in Art and Fiction is a bank of thematically grouped images [Madness & Possession, Angels & Demons, the Grotesque] from across the centuries, supplemented with lists of scholarly studies, literary works, plastic arts and movies that pertain to the theme. There are many wonderfully freaky out-of-copyright images here that would be great for indie authors illustrating their own book covers.
your likeness behind me shines & incubates purple shadows
We have long had magnetic alphabets on our fridge, but those have only so much entertainment value because we quickly reach the limit of 52 letters [2 alphabets]. When we moved into our new apartment, I bought some magnetic poetry. I enjoy using it, but then I want to preserve my stupid creations for all eternity, which prevents me from raping them for recombination. So I’ve decided to photograph the results of my magnetic maundering. As you can see, it’s all in character: long sentences that take unexpected turns as they tell fantastic stories burbling with unusual conflict.
First effort, early on in September… It was supposed to be “bitter iron cities,” but apparently the basic Magnetic Poetry set doesn’t have cities in it.
we love gorgeous winding road trips
under lazy pink mists
away from those bitter iron forests
& into the easy cool void of death
Second effort, same date of early in September. When you divorce words such as “breast” and “blood” and “wave” from context, you realize that they can all be nouns or verbs.
peach visions breast the
delicate winter waters
Effort from last night. Is it just me, or does everything sound erotically charged with this damn magnetic word game?
we are weak from these
luscious moments & drunk
on beauty together
Another effort from yesterday, probably someone straining desperately to have a rational reaction to a supernatural apparition. I suspect the sordid urges are winning. They usually do. They were originally “bloody urges,” but, combined with “flooding,” that left a menstrual impression that I didn’t want.
will you please elaborate
for your likeness behind me
shines & incubates purple shadows
flooding my will with sordid urges
Books to read:
Garnered from the bibliography of the jargonlicious article on philosophy of corsets:
The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World
Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England
That’s not a word!
You know what really pisses me off? When I’m reading an otherwise cogent, insightful and pretty well-written work on the philosophy of Victorian corsets [‘Hooked and Buttoned Together:’ Victorian Underwear and Representations of the Female Body, Casey Finch, Victorian Studies 34(3):337-363], and the author pulls a sentence like this out of his/her ass:
The ideology of reproduction was troped into a system of erotics where the meaning of sexuality operated not as a public “fact” but as a private secret.
TROPE is not a verb! It’s a noun, a pretty obscure noun, unless you live in the rarefied atmosphere of the academy. Bloody hell, people! “System of erotics” is just as bad. What is a “system of erotics?” Nobody knows! How am I supposed to enjoy my history of underwear if you keep making up jargon-laced sentences that don’t actually mean anything?!
Why not write something like this:
Erotic images centered around women’s reproductive capacities and visible sexual signs slowly changed into a set of erotic ideas about sexuality as dissociated from public reproduction and thus secret and hidden.
Sure, my version definitely has more words in it, but it’s much more readable, especially if you stopped living in an English department upon graduation.
Histories of underwear should be lucid, limpid, lively, highly illustrated and see-through, not complicated, obscure and difficult to undo.
P.S. And, if you’re going to use “trope” as a verb, don’t use it twice within 4 pages! Bad form, as Captain Hook would say.
Good, evil and moral heterogeneity in some supernatural TV shows: BTVS, Charmed and Supernatural
Good, evil and moral heterogeneity in some supernatural TV shows: BTVS, Charmed and Supernatural published on Read more posts by the author of Good, evil and moral heterogeneity in some supernatural TV shows: BTVS, Charmed and Supernatural, ModernWizardNo Comments on Good, evil and moral heterogeneity in some supernatural TV shows: BTVS, Charmed and Supernatural
Whether you believe that the universe tends toward good, bad or mediocre, there’s still the question of where to assign these capacities. Are people good, bad, good+bad, bad+mediocre, etc.?
Such questions are complicated in TV shows with supernatural elements. BTVS, Charmed and Supernatural all accept the existence of non-human creatures, including demons, ghosts, spirits and monsters. The question of moral value applies to the supernaturals as well. In each show, the supernaturals have different moral values. In BTVS, they’re morally heterogeneous with a tendency toward goodness and humanity. In Charmed, they are good and bad, with bad being more potent than good. In Supernatural, they are just bad.
BTVS, as I have discussed before, makes its monsters sociological metaphors for the struggles of modern bourgeois youth. Said struggles, such as having a romantic relationship, entering the work force, graduating from high school, going to college, being responsible for siblings and getting married, are neutral in and of themselves, not inherently good, bad or mediocre. Thus, by extension, the monsters that personify these struggles aren’t inherently good, bad or mediocre either.
In fact, BTVS’ entire trend seems to be toward humanizing and discovering the good and beneficial in something that first appears as a puzzling, bad threat. Example: Angel used to be a person, but was transformed into a soulless demon, but, due to a curse, literally became human again when his soul was returned to him. Though he does lose his soul for a good part of season 2, he eventually returns, subdues his soullnessness and recurs occasionally on the series as a friend and helper. Despite his morally offensive past and his period of death-dealing in season 2, the surrounding characters believe in his perfectibility, and the show ends up putting more emphasis on his peaceful, helpful, caring actions.
Same with Spike, who started off cheerfully sadistic and rather flat in his first appearance because he was only supposed to be a one-off antagonist. Due to audience popularity, however, he was introduced as a regular and suffered the entire series getting the moral repulsive parts of him beaten into submission. [Hmmm, I think there’s another essay here about the endless degradation this character goes through — mocked and abandoned by sire Drusilla, inserted with computer chip and experimented on a la lab rat, chained in Giles’ basement for a good chunk of season 5, exploited as a sex toy in season 6 by Buffy, physically pounded by that demon who returns his soul, possessed by the First in season 7. It’s like some sort of torture porn narrative on how to break the will of a restive sub.] Anyway, he ends up pretty much good.
Finally, there’s the character of Dawn, who pretty much embodies the whole theme of threat made human. I mean, she’s a big glowing ball of energy that, if harnessed by Glory, could bring about the end of the world. But she is personified, literally made into a person, and she is shown as capable of love toward Buffy and Joyce, friendship and solicitude toward the rest of the gang — typical tendencies toward moral good. The entire crew responds to her not as a doomsday device, but as a person who has dangerous powers, but is worthy of respect and love. All of this is to say that the BTVS universe may be full of inhuman things, but the general tendency is to seek the understandable, good and redeemable in these things and force them into moral, controllable, acceptable domesticity. [This begs the question: If something doesn’t want to be good, should you make it so?]
Charmed, tragically enough, lacks the depth, subtlety and emotional heft of either BTVS or Supernatural, preferring instead to base its longevity on boobs and comedy [and comic boobs]. That said, it has an interesting moral framework in which good is distant and ceremonial, while evil is corporate, ruthlessly efficient and immediate. What strikes me most about Charmed is that, aside from the Halliwell witches, there ain’t much good directly available for them to depend on. Supposedly they get help from whitelighters, but do we ever actually see them? I watched a bunch of season 4, and they never appeared! In fact, they were notable for being off-screen. Leo visited them once an episode for help or advice, but his absence always led to demons hurting someone, and the advice he came back with never did any good anyway. In summary, the forces of good in Charmed are just a plot device with no actual moral bearing.
On the other hand, as the season 4 arc about Cole being the Source and trying to get an heir illustrates, the baddies are amongst us! Apparently the evil minions of the Source occupy skyscrapers and offices in downtown San Fran. They work effectively through a familiar corporate structure where the Source is like the CEO, and the demons who all sit around the table are like middle management, and the ones who actually appear and snarl at people are like the labor. Evil doesn’t just exist in Hell [world’s cheapest Hell set = sound stage and dry ice], but here on this plane. It has regiments, legions, armies! How are three witches who are too busy flashing their tits supposed to combat this stuff? Even if they are “aided” by a terminally dense and frequently off-screen whitelighter [I’m looking at YOU, Leo…], their cause is hopeless. For all its gooey insistence about “the power of three” and the strength of family ties, Charmed has a grim world view.
Supernatural is pretty binary about its assignment of moral values. All the good goes to the humans, all the bad to the supernaturals. The only good supernatural is a dead supernatural. You might say that the cow-sucking vampires in Bloodlust were good because Sam and Dean let them live, but those vampires were permitted to live in the same way that non-practicing pedophiles are reluctantly allowed to settle down in boarding houses instead of under highway overpasses. In the moral calculus of the show, those vampires are still morally objectionable because supernatural, no matter how restrained and non-murderous they behave. They are tainted, and they can’t ever be cleansed.
Evil in Supernatural is irredeemably evil; in contrast to BTVS, empathy doesn’t help at all. Supernatural makes gestures toward psychologizing and understanding the activities of the paranormal creatures. In Playthings, which was about a ghost girl who wanted to drown a living girl so she could have a friend for all eternity, the show gestured toward poignancy by suggesting that the spirit was really lonely and, like most kids, wanted someone to play with. But no attempt was made to deal with the spirit by any means except the usual: KILLING IT!
Realistically enough, stabbing every damn threat in sight is a psychologically valid reaction when the paranormal creatures you encounter are just your own private problems writ large. Killing things, in this case, can be seen as a mental defense mechanism, Dean and Sam’s way of avoiding the reasons for their psychological disturbance. They do that a lot…avoiding. In season 2, they’re always keeping secrets from each other; Dad sacrificed his soul for Dean, but shhhh, that’s a secret. Dad says Dean might have to kill Sam, but shhhh, that’s a secret. Dean promised his soul to the yellow-eyed demon to get back Sam, but shhhh, that’s a secret. Not to mention the whole ingenious frame of the brothers tooling around in a car — that’s a master image of avoidance. Sure, they may be driving to jobs, but they have no fixed destination, which smells even more strongly of RUNNING AWAY than it does of any particular QUEST. Anyway, my point is that all the supernaturals are bad because everyone thinks they’re bad, which leaves open the hope that Supernatural might move on to a more morally heterogeneous view of paranormal creatures as Dean and Sam address their hang-ups more directly. In the mean time, paranormals are BAD and brotherly love wins the day [not THAT kind!].
Frank uses his improved arms.
Naturally he employs them to feel up Jareth.
Group shots: my desk layout and a group portrait
Here’s what my desk looks like in my new apartment. As you can see, everyone is very interested in whatever I do on the computer! [I have no idea why it’s so small. I must have resized it twice.]
And here’s a larger shot of my entire collection of BJDs. Frank and Jareth are not looking at the camera because they are too busy taking advantage of Frank’s new arms and groping each other. Will, as usual, is ennuye and melancholic, so he can’t be bothered to look at the camera. Only Jennifer and Sardonix are paying attention, probably because they figure that, the sooner they cooperate, the sooner they can return to stabbing annoying people with a unicorn [Sardonix] and writing in her memorandum book [Jennifer].
Contrast makes moods.
More messing around with burn/dodge [on the eyes] and wild skewing of levels and contrast. Will just conduces this somehow.
Frank N. Dolly
Frank now combines the head of Volks Yukinojo, the body of a Model Doll girl [Bella Auden] and, for the most recent addition, Twiglimbs arms and hands made by twigling. Poor Frank has been languishing without arms since the end of August. A month later, I finally got around to reassembling him today with a pathetic improvisation of regular stringing elastic, round cord elastic suitable for tinies and 18 gauge plastic-coated steel wire.
I’m extremely pleased with the result. Ever since I got Frank’s Model Doll body, I disliked his narrow shoulders and scrawny, slender arms. Now with the Twiglimbs arms and shoulder cups, he has appropriately broad shoulders. His thicker arms and larger hands are also much more proportionate. Now his overall look is one of extreme muscularity and extreme curvaceousness, which is a much more accurate representation of how he looks in my head. The addition of his robust arms also makes him look less like a lollipop and more like the ambiguously sexed and gendered being he is. His arms have the squareness and muscle definition usually associated with men, as does his face. The rest of him, however, looks ridiculously long and curvy, like certain comic-book heroines. Success!
Power of love?
So Dollmore, known for its slightly silly names [see Pubis Club outfit], has just issued a new male Model Doll named Huey Lewis. All you children of the ’80s must agree that this begs the inevitable question: But where’s the News? :p
Monsters as metaphors in BTVS and Supernatural
I like supernatural creatures. Partly I like them because they are a testament to human inventiveness in the face of the unknown and inexplicable. They’re beautiful creations of folk logic [“Well, if it looks like the corpse’s nails and hair are growing and it’s in a pool of blood when we dig it up, that means it must be alive and feeding on blood!”], fear and wonder. That’s why I will devour stories about them: because, as human creations, they are clever, rich and powerful, full of meaning… They’ve got a hold on us.
I also like supernatural creatures because they work as lovely metaphors, which partly explains their continuing fascination, even to people who do not believe in them.
On the subject of vampires again, you can easily freight them with any sort of baggage you want. You can play up their blood-drinking, infection by bites and sensual nature, and you can make them avatars of diseases transmitted by bodily fluids. You can accentuate the fact they they are dead, cold, unmoving and still chasing you [as in the genius movie Nosferatu], and you can then make them symbols of inevitable mortality. You can view them as person-like entities that used to be people and do many things like people [eat, sleep, make more of their kind] while yet remaining apart from people, and this view entails a characterization of them as a shunned subculture, an oppressed minority group. On a slightly different tack, you can view their nocturnalism, blood-drinking and dislike of religious relics as just facts of life, limitations that they happen to have, and your vampires can be metaphors for disabled people. Polymorphous metaphors aren’t limited to vampires. Think of any other supernatural creature — zombies, ghosts, werewolves, even all the way to mythical creatures such as unicorns and mermaids — and you can pile on the meanings any which way you want.
…Which gets me to the subject of BTVS [Buffy the Vampire Slayer] and Supernatural. Both of them have the same premises, in which vigilant, unnaturally empowered humans eliminate supernatural menaces. However, both shows have different metaphorical perspectives on the monsters that each main character confronts. In Buffy’s case, the monsters are metaphors for the trials of adolescence. Those involved with the show have said as much, and people who analyze BTVS have hammered this point home ad nauseam.
BTVS’ conception of monsters as the challenges of modern bourgeois adolescence appears most clearly and humorously in an episode like Doublemeat Palace, in which Buffy is forced to take a low-status, low-paying day job at a fast-food place to support herself and Dawn. This being Sunnydale, a demon haunts the place, killing employees. It’s not much of a stretch to see how dead Doublemeat employees make concrete the fear of Buffy [and many modern bourgeois teens] that your horrible first job will crush your soul and make your life meaningless.
Even such a plot arc as Angel’s re-demonization after he and Buffy have sex — even this development can be interpreted as a universal teen turning point. While Angel’s loss of a soul after sex with Buffy is clearly the manifestation of a personal demon, an anxiety that Buffy has by her own self, it’s also a more universal panic among modern middle-class girls. Angel’s unensoulment realizes the feminine panic that one’s boyfriend may turn nasty, avoiding calls, harming friends and generally behaving like a dickhead, after one dares to be intimate with him. It’s a generalized feminine fear of crass exploitation by a male sex partner.
BTVS’ view of demons may properly be labeled a sociological interpretation, insofar as demons are taken as metonymic of the problems facing a whole group of people [modern bourgeois teens]. As we move over to Supernatural, we find that its view of demons may properly be labeled a psychological interpretation, insofar as the demons personify anxieties peculiar to the characters involved.
Season 2 shows some obvious examples of demons as psychodynamic figures, especially in the plot arc where Sam is worrying about being a “chosen child” according to the yellow-eyed demon. Being a chosen one or potential bad seed is not a problem endemic to modern bourgeois teens; by contrast, it’s a problem in Sam’s own head [and in Dean’s too because Dean hangs around with Sam]. Conveniently enough, many of the monsters that the brothers encounter exemplify Sam and Dean’s worries about Sam’s identity.
I mean, for God’s sake, season 2 gives us not one, but two, eps about shapeshifters: The Usual Suspects and Nightshifters. In both cases, people behave in unexpected ways, and the brothers must determine whether this unexpected behavior signifies a long-hidden part of someone’s true character or whether it means that someone is being exploited by malevolent forces. In Born Under a Bad Sign, the show’s psychodynamic interpretation of demons becomes explicit when Sam is possessed. While Sam thinks that the murders he committed when he was possessed indicate that he is truly a bad seed, Dean argues that the murders can be explained by an outside evil force: a demon. Avoiding the whole debate on free will that subserves this disagreement between the brothers, we can still clearly see that the demon is an excuse to debate Sam’s individual psychological problems: Does he have an unavoidably demonic [=evil] destiny, or can he overcome these tendencies to be a good person [the kind his brother thinks he is]?
It may also be pertinent that, in BTVS, the monsters inhabit a range of moral values [see, for example, Spike, who runs the gamut from gratuitously sadistic and BAD in season 2 to noble, self-sacrificing and GOOD in season 7], while, in Supernatural, they all exist on the BAD end of the moral scale. However, this is probably a separate essay.
Supernatural arrived!
I got my season 2 of Supernatural in the mail today! I’m so excited! I’m disappointed with Half.com’s “expedited” shipping, however. The default shipping method is media mail, which takes 2-4 weeks. “Expedited” shipping is regular first class.
Fine, right? Well, my “expedited” DVDs took a week to arrive from TN. First class mail, even a package, from TN to MA should take 3 days, according to the handy-dandy postage calculator at the USPS Web site. Why did it take double that? Why did I even bother “expediting?” [Answer: Because I wanted my dose of stupid TV NOW!]
Half.com is not the source for instant gratification or even slightly delayed gratification. The low prices are so low in part because the shipping is a flat fee for a slow postage method. Most of the time I can stand the trade-off, but I was especially impatient for these DVDs.
My Jareth doll in print?
Back in February, 2006, Mercy on DOA put a call out for “celebrity dolls,” that is, BJDs made after famous persons, real or imaginary. I submitted information about Jareth and Frank. Anyway, out of the blue, Mercy PMed me to say that pictures of someone [I think it was Jareth] got into Doll Reader a few months ago, and she’s trying to get Doll Reader to send me a copy of the magazine. That was completely unexpected. So maybe some day eventually I will get a copy of a magazine with a picture of Jareth in it or at least a quote from me about him. Fascinating, I know.
Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors and Media by Marina Warner
Sardonix’ weird accessory of the week
You’ve seen her Vengeance Unicorn, her string devil and her Tarot cards, but have you seen what the previous tenant left for her in our new apartment…?
Moody shots of Will
When I look at Will with my eyes, I feel as if I am seeing his character the way that he presents to the world. When I look at photographs of him, I can adjust color, contrast, levels and burn/dodge so that I can see his moods, feelings, thoughts and parts of his character’s mental state that he keeps hidden. Apparently his mood have lots of eyeliner….
The sad, ironic and really insulting anti-abuse ad
If you really want to see an offensive ad, check out Kabayanihan’s anti-violence print ad below the cut, courtesy of AdverBox.
The ad contains outlets labeled Wife, Partner, Soul Mate, Confidant, Spouse, Friend, Better Half, Companion, Cover Up, Concubine, Servant, Punching Bag, Vagina. A plug is in the outlet labeled Vagina. The text nearby says, “How some men think of women.” Then it says in smaller letters, “If you are a victim of abuse, please report to Hotline number 603 2143 3361 and we will help. Kabayanihan.”
Where do I begin detailing the stupid, sexist, reductionist attitudes operating in this ad? First of all, let’s start with the symbolism of plugs and outlets. While the women are represented by white outlets of pure vacuity, the man is represented by a black plug. As something that can fill up holes, a plug is an aggressive phallic object. The black color connotes that its power is a negative, dangerous one. This is actually not a bad symbol for the sort of domineering, sexually aggressive man who is assumed to be battering the female consumers of this ad.
While the man=black plug equation works well, the symbolism for women in this ad is problematic. Women are represented as white outlets. Outlets are holes that wait on the wall for something to be stuck into them, or, in other words, to be used. The symbolism of the outlet implies that women are passive, exploitable victims, even if they are held in esteem by men as Friend or Better Half. The color white also brings to mind purity, innocence and emptiness, which makes women not only actionless and limp, but also blank and lacking in substance. So, basically, according to this ad, women are full of negative connotations.
You could argue that it is only the male abuser sees women as white outlets full of negative connotations, but that’s not precisely what the ad says. Remember that the ad text states that it is showing how “some men” perceive women. “Some men” think that women are just Vaginas. But, the ad implies, there are other ways for men to perceive women, as indicated by the alternative white outlets. However, please notice how the whole grouping of outlets is NOT a subset of a wall containing a myriad of outlets including Sister, Mother, Grandmother, Aunt, Cousin, Acquaintance, Role Model, Goddess, Fag Hag, Medium, Dominatrix, Object, Pest, Earth Mother, Bluestocking, Dyke, etc., etc. The whole grouping of outlets is neatly centered in the photo, arranged so that it forms a discrete, total, complete set. The ad, in effect, says that these 14 ways are the only ways in which men can perceive women. So, to get back to my topic sentence, it’s not just the male abuser’s view that women are a yawning void of quiescent, dependent boringness; it’s ALL men’s views of women. Even the perspective labeled Confidant is still, yes, a white outlet, meaning that even the more positive views of women in this ad are contaminated by the demeaning, infantilizing symbolism.
The underlying structures of this ad are bad enough, but even the surface messages are blatantly misleading, overly specific, confusing and just plain wrong. For example, the fact that there is just one plug in the Vagina outlet suggests that ONLY those men who see women as Vaginas abuse women. Also, the fact that the plug is in the Vagina outlet, denoting a sexual orifice, defines sexual abuse as the only type of abuse extant. First, men who see women as Concubines and Cover Ups and, yes, even Wives, also abuse women. Second, there are more types of abuse than just sexual abuse. Am I the only one who is revolted by the casual use of the term Punching Bag in this ad? The fact that the Punching Bag outlet does NOT have a plug in it seems to imply that men who see women as Punching Bags, that is, men who hit women, do not abuse women, since abuse, according to this ad, does not include hitting. This ad has an extremely narrow focus that seems to exclude verbal abuse, emotional manipulation, assault and other forms of abuse besides sexual, not to mention abuse of wives, friends, friends, prostitutes [Concubines], children, elders, basically any woman who is not listed among the outlets. What kind of abuse is this ad thinking of, then? The kind where a stranger attacks and rapes an unknown woman? Such cases form a statistically small percentage of abuse cases. You are much more likely to be abused by someone you know, a relative, friend or acquaintance. Nowhere does the ad accommodate this brutal reality.
Imagine the effect of this ad on the target population: a woman who has been abused. I can envision a woman whose husband jealously controls her phone calls, yells at her when she burns toast and hasn’t had sex with her in two years because he’s been having affairs. This woman is in an abusive situation, but it is quite possible that, thanks to this stupid and confusing ad, she might not call Kabayanihan to get the help that she desperately needs. The ad is clearly talking about men who sexually objectify women as Vaginas, but our hypothetical viewer doesn’t think that designation applies to her, first, because she’s obviously a Wife and, second, because her husband has not had sex with her in two years. Also, because the ad speaks of “men” in general as the perpetrators, when in reality the perp is usually a friend or relation [thus the violence could more properly be called “domestic”], the hypothetical viewer may feel she is excluded because the ad is talking about strangers, not family members. The viewer hurries to return home, where her husband throws an empty beer bottle, hitting her in the head, because she was five minutes late setting the table. And another misguided ad campaign fails to reach out to the very people it’s trying to help. In fact, you could even make a case for this ad being potentially alienating, rather than inclusive.
What’s really sickening about this whole business is that this is an ad for ANTI-abuse services. The help promised by this ad is supposed to empower women [I assume] to cope with the aftermath of abusive trauma and leave abusive situations if they are stuck in them. But instead it’s just a further depressing reminder of how limiting male conceptions of women can be, how invisible domestic violence is and how helpless many women [whether they are abused or not] feel in a world where the threat of male violence against them is almost constant.
Heineken Draught Keg robo-woman ad: sexist?
I’ve never commented on ads before, although I’ve always enjoyed Ms. magazine’s back page where the inflammatorily sexist ads are rounded up for my viewing pleasure. However, I was poking around online, reading about the controversy [as, for example, on the blog of Bob Garfield, columnist for Ad Age] over the Heineken draught keg TV spot … In this ad, the robot woman supposedly does a C section on herself and brings a draught keg out of her uterus.
For the record, I would like to say that I am truly torn about the ad.
Every time I try to watch it to see if it’s sexist, I am continually distracted by the sexy, mechanically lissome forms of the robotic women. I also like the techno music, even if it’s a ridiculous ditty about popping the flip top or whatever. Anyway, after repeated viewing [for research purposes!!], I opine that the sexism in the ad does not come from the keg=uterus equation because the location of said keg is nowhere near the robot woman’s uterus. It appears to be keg=small intestines.
The sexism at work here is nothing new. It’s just your tired, old, run-of-the-mill objectification of women as inanimate objects [robots] whose sole purpose is to sacrifice their own desires so that they may cater to the tastes [for draught keg contents] of the implied male viewer. In fact, the image in the commercial of a woman emptying herself for a man while keeping a constant smile is actually a disturbing reification of many women’s experience. Socialized to abnegate themselves, women may try and try to please other people, draining themselves of energy, until they are as empty as used beer cans. While the images used here are distractingly sexy, the underlying message is a terrifying turn-off, yet another example of how Heineken’s execs underestimate their target audience [hey, hetero men, you don’t want female companionship, just a fembot-like servitor!], insult women and leave everyone feeling demoralized and worse for wear.
Or maybe it’s draught keg=abdominal cavity. In any case, as you can clearly see, it’s way too high up in her body to be the location of her uterus.
Will’s Commission
Sometimes freelancers sell out.
Darkness in the first six photos was achieved by darkening the darks, lightening the lights, burn/dodging Will’s eyes where necessary and fiddling with the contrast. I think it is amusing how easily adjusting these controls can give Will the look of a person with heavy eyeliner and dark lipstick.
Yippee, I ordered some Supernatural!
Supernatural season 2 DVDs are coming my way with expedited shipping! I ordered them this morning. I figure that, if I no longer want them when done, I can sell them on Ebay. Since I watched much of season 1 and some of season 2 on DailyMotion, I know the plot lines, but my viewing enjoyment was marred by a) dark, grainy, small pictures, b) interruptions in video streaming and c) removal of Supernatural eps for copyright violation [dammit!]. I’d like to indulge in the eps without swearing at the computer when it stops loading at a crucial moment in the action. Hopefully the DVDs will come soon.
Tool for finding negative or neutral Ebay feedback
The feedback collections on Ebay are a great record of a seller or buyer’s overall trustworthiness, but Ebay does not allow users to analyze the feedback to best effect. For example, there is no easy way to find negatives or neutrals through the Ebay site proper. But this Web site, Toolhaus, has a tool that allows you to pick out bad feedback. You type in the Ebay ID and check the results. You can find bad feedback given and bad feedback received.
StoryCorps: Amateur interviews and the stories therefrom!
StoryCorps is a neat project aimed at tapping the oral history of the nation. At mobile booths around the country, almost anyone can schedule time and record an interview with a friend or a family member about…almost anything. I have listened to two stories so far, and I will be checking out more. Here a man talks about saving his friend’s little brother from the train tracks. Very dramatic! Here a Vermont lesbian couple are talking about their 30-year partnership and getting civilly united. Their happiness, after all these years, is still infectious.
Bonus: Here are two women talking about being identical twins, dispelling some stupid assumptions about their relationship and being very practical about the whole thing. “Being a twin was the best thing that ever happened to me! I recommend it to everyone!”
That’s just what this television needs…
More angst-ridden crime-solving goody-two-shoes vampires. Welcome to CBS’ Moonlight, starting at the end of this month, treading in a well-worn path first hewn out by Forever Knight, followed by Angel. While curious, I have much better things to do with my puny mortal life than sit around and watch a new show when it first airs. I’ll wait a while to see if it’s anything of any substance that I can sink my teeth into.
I change my hair as I change my mood.
This is Will a la mode francaise.
In a cool blue mood…
In a raccoon mood? I dunno…
Will and the kid
At the Burlington Doll Club meet today, I enjoyed seeing members that I hadn’t greeted in a while. I showed off my new Sabik, and Rosa Palomino’s YoSD Ann was interested in his hat.
Smite!
As I was unpacking my dolls, I put together a showcase for my favorite outfit.
AJ head with hair added and deco’ed by me, on PB 2.0 body with hands and boots from Jun, sleeves sewn by bojangles, bodice from Swan Lake Ballerina Barbie and modded by me, skirt made from two capes from Jun, sword from Cutey Honey, choker handmade by unknown maker, metal padlock from one of the Three Zero dolls, underwear from Fujiko Mine DX, rings from various travels in my life, stand from ComiCon silver CG. It’s interesting to see how many disparate places my stuff has come from over the years.
Watch me suffer [gasp, sniff], yes, SUFFER!!
Because I’m reading My Husband Betty again, I went to Helen Boyd’s blog, thence to her personal site, where she linked to media appearances. From there I hit upon a clip from All My Children in which the transgender character goes to a transgender support group. Betty is in the clip, which is why the clip was linked from Boyd’s site.
I have mixed feelings about the clip. On one hand, I appreciated the presence of all the other support group members, who were transgender activists and authors, appearing under their own names. I think that it’s important to show all types of people in media so that all types of people can identify with the media figures. Furthermore, I also think it’s important that all types of people be shown not as sicko freaks, but as happy, well-adjusted individuals, which all of the activists appearing under their own names appeared to be.
That being said, the clip really blew my mind because there was such a difference in presentation between the AMC trans woman and the trans activists. The trans activists, if anything, underplayed their roles, with a very matter-of-fact, level tone and no histrionic affectation, which gave the support group scene a very naturalistic air, as if the viewers were eavesdropping. By contrast, the AMC trans woman was a barely coherent pile of melodramatic jelly [behaving like the subject line], in the manner of all soap operatic characters when they are on the edge of something momentous [which they always are]. The acting style of the person who played the AMC trans woman did not fit with the rest of the players in the support group scene, which distracted me to no end.
Perhaps I shouldn’t say that the AMC trans woman’s character did not fit into the support group scene. After all, the AMC trans woman’s character is a soap operatic type, and this is a soap opera. Therefore, with the insertion of an underplayed, naturalistic scene with well-adjusted individuals, the support group scene and the well-adjusted trans activists are the things that do not fit in the soap opera. Soap operas thrive on ostentatious suffering and angst, sad endings, bad turns of events. I think the goal of trans inclusion is laudable, but it’s hard to make trans people look happy, healthy and productive when the TV universe into which they are being introduced makes EVERYONE look miserable, perverted and stunted. So is it really much of a step toward trans understanding, inclusivity and tolerance to turn them into hammily degraded victims, just like almost everyone else in soap operas?
Internet Public Library
At the Internet Public Library, you can do everything that you would do at your usual public library: read fiction, join a book group, find tax forms, do research. Only here, it’s all virtual. IPL organizes the many online atlases, books, reference Web sites, etc., into an easily browsable, subject-based format so that you can more easily find what you are looking for. Your local public library or university library or corporate library may have a similar site, but IPL is open to all users.
HAH!
On podcast 45, in response to a woman who thinks that S&M represents emotional disability and mental sickness, Dan Savage points out that S&M is PLAY, and he says, “What S&M is is cops and robbers for grown-ups without your pants on.” Now I’m just imagining law enforcement professionals chasing crooks out of a bank in a completely serious context, except all parties are lacking pants. :p
Retro views of the future
I enjoy Paleofuture, an intelligently organized blog highlighting outmoded views of what people in the past thought the future would be like.
It’s all the same character… Gareth –> Will
Dull comparison for no one except me. Here’s a photo of Will next to a picture of a story character that I drew about 7 years ago. The character was originally invented about 12 years ago, and I’ve been pursuing his likeness for over a decade.
Will and my music box
Now that I’ve moved to an apartment with more than two rooms, I have an improved set-up for photographing my dolls. My desk now sits in the living room with a filled-in fireplace to the left and two windows to the right. The wealth of natural light + white walls provides soft tones and bright colors, in contrast to my previous apartment, where yellow walls + way too much daylight produced overly warm tones and yellowy colors. These pictures were taken at about 5:15 PM.
Will is listening to my music box, which plays Fur Elise. He is wearing a hat from a My Friend Becky doll. His shirt is the I.B. Hunter default. His skirt is a peasant dress fitted for Doll More Model Dolls. His socks are Friend Gretel’s defaults. You can see how I heat-cured the fingers of his left hand into a cupping posture.
Herds of words for nerds
Blog for language nerds: Language Log. This site appears to be an eclectic mix of etymology, observation of word use in the wild, history, misconceptions, etc.
Mannequins moving in…
I don’t care about the band or the song, but the cinematography and use of shadows here in this Inverse Order music video demonstrates just how expressive and unsettling mannequins can be. I need more mannequins [with heads!] in my life.
Where the shipping is more than the book price…
While I do patronize my local, independent booksellers, if I want a used book, I am much more likely to go to half.com. Why? Because I can often find ridiculous deals where the shipping price is much greater than the book’s price. Witness my recent haul.
Just to provide some context, the first three are scholarly treatments of sexuality and courtship in historical America, soundly written, well-respected titles, you know, the sort that cost half a hundred dollars when they first come out. They owe their disgusting cheapness, I assume, to their promulgation [hence quick use and discard] as college course books. The last is the aforementioned book My Husband Betty, which, as a popular, recent trade paperback, is significantly more expensive. Note, however, that shipping still makes up more than 50% of the costs.
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Twilight Zone boxed set!
All in one set, the entire run of the original Twilight Zone for your viewing delectation!
She’s Not The Man I Married (sequel to My Husband Betty)
I didn’t know, but Helen Boyd wrote a follow-up to My Husband Betty. The follow-up, She’s Not the Man I Married, chronicles her husband’s transgender transition. [I think…I haven’t read it.] I may have to look at it.