Aida Manduley writes a nuanced article that addresses the fact that, yes, David Bowie was famous and talented and significant to a lot of people and, yes, he abused his power. Her title, “David Bowie: Time to Mourn or Call Out?,” is actually misleading. It suggests that the correct response is one or the other, but, as one reads Manduley’s analysis, one realizes that she is not proposing such a binary dilemma, but critiquing it. We can do both at once, she argues; in fact, she goes so far to say that doing both is the humanest, most compassionate response. In mourning, we respect the significant effect that David Bowie and his art had on people, while, in calling out, we respect those people that he disrespected and harmed. If we can hold a myriad of emotions in our minds, then we can respect the complexity of human experience.

Carl Wilson wasn’t paying attention. This is exactly the sort of encomium I was referring to in my previous entry where David Bowie is portrayed as having quasi-mystical, transcendent powers of queer expression.

• Ricky Gervais. Yeah, it’s so entertaining when you punch down, you self-important gasbag.  Just because you’re miserable doesn’t mean you have to spread it around. Also being offensive doesn’t mean that you’re successful. It just means that you’re offensive.
• Robert Frost. The inclusion of Frost may be a personal choice based on my alma mater, Middlebury College, where Frost was considered all that and a bag of chips because he taught at the Bread Loaf School of English for 42 years. Yes, he was the poet laureate of Vermont, and yes, he wrote regional poems in a compelling style that married nineteenth century formalism and new vernacular, and, yes, some of it is even good, but, no, he is not the greatest thing since sliced bread.
• William Shakespeare. Elizabethan era fan fictioneer extraordinaire and floating signifier, about whom we know very little except, for some reason, English-speaking people like to think he’s like the pinnacle of their cultural output. That’s a depressingly narrow view of English-speaking culture.
• David Bowie. Anyone who goes on and on like he invented ambiguous gender presentation is really not paying attention.
• Straight white cis non-disabled dudes. All of them ever, especially if they’re already famous for doing something supposedly noteworthy.

I have no idea why people think he’s so great. He has bamboozled great numbers of individuals into thinking he’s an edgy, creative, incisive filmmaker because he legitimizes his derivative, sexist, racist crap with callbacks to movies by straight, white, cis dudes of the past. Nope — sorry — it doesn’t take much talent to hold the majority of the world’s people in contempt. I am severely underimpressed.

For BJDs who bug me:

• Delmar needs faceup, hair, restringing, and tail. Working on faceup.
• Fritillaria needs faceup, eyes, hair, outfit.
• Mellifer needs a complete do-over. Stalled.
• Never the Less needs faceup, hair, clothes. Working on head.
• Polly needs a seat belt. Stalled.
• Thalia needs a shirt. Stalled.
• Timonium needs a new wig cap and new hair. Working on wig cap.
• Touralyn needs a new body and clothes. Body in progress.

For Zombieville denizens:

• Doctor Z needs her own body with appropriate neck. Ordered!
  
• Sylvia needs a new fat body. Need to look in raw dolls bin.

I started making freebie digital hairstyles last September. Using primarily PhilC’s Hair Designer [and a little bit of Alabone LLC’s Hair Shop beta, now folded into Head Shop], I constructed models that no one else was making. Hair Designer contains various hair figures, already rigged for Poser and UV mapped, such as single- and double-ponytail skullcaps, straight hair pieces, wavy hair pieces, and various accessories, from which to build one’s own creations. This is great for me, as I have not yet learned how to model anything from scratch. Thus my forays into digital hairstyling consist mostly of kitbashing elaborate updos from pre-existing pieces.

My first attempt at hair was Aliza, a multi-layered reproduction of Jareth’s ‘do in Labyrinth, still my most popular hair model to date. After a few Rococo pompadours and some more subdued modern-day styles, I took a hiatus of about 10 months, then turned my attention to historical women’s hairstyles. My first bundle was relatively simple, but my most recent release features 4 complicated, high-poly models with layers of cascading curls. I seem to have an affinity for complex styles!

My freebies have always received grateful thanks from people who bother to comment, but I consider that par for the course. The Poser/Daz community encourages and promotes creation of freely downloadable digital assets from anyone at any skill level. Every freebie garners accolades because downloaders not only like free stuff, but they also appreciate the generosity and skill of the freebie creators. Thus, while comments like “Thanks!” and “Nice!” certainly motivate me to continue making and offering my stuff, I consider them as general applause, not as specific compliments.

Public response has changed, though, with the issue of the 1820s G2F Hair Bundle 2. I first sensed that something was up when Arcadium69 commented on ShareCG, “It’s hard to believe your [sic] offering this kind of quality for free, but it’s very noble.” Over on the Daz boards, my post announcing the hairstyles actually generated some excited chatter, including jpb06t requesting 1870s styles [with pictures provided] and Tako Yakida asking when I would start making content for G3F. timmins.william posted some Iray renders of my freebies and, in a PM, even offered to do a promo render or two for me. SaphireWild had trouble loading the freebies, so the thread might offer some troubleshooting too.

I’m thrilled at the implications here. Arcadium69’s ShareCG comment indicates that they consider my efforts worth paying money for. Of course, I, being the critical creator, see many flaws in my freebies that I would never countenance if I had paid money for them, but I rejoice to hear that someone likes what I do enough to willingly part with money for it. jpb06t and Tako Yakida’s Daz board comments show they they like my models so much that they wish I would apply my skills to their chosen areas of interest [1870s hairdos and G3F respectively]. In summary, I have satisfied fans who eagerly await my next freebie. It’s like having avid readers of my photostories, only in a different realm!

Ringdoll Zombie Amy has come off her preorder and is now on regular sale until the end of January. Ringdoll has put up some more detailed pictures as well. Of course, none of them are unpainted, but they do confirm that she has a face embedded in her viscera where her navel would be. Why? I don’t know. I also don’t know why she is splattered with yellow stuff that looks like dried rubber cement.

I’m still not sure whether to get her. I still maintain that a decomposing dryad [with a sapling growing out of her eye socket!!] is a wonderful, hilarious concept that I could execute with great skill, panache, and satisfaction. However, whenever I think about getting the doll, I inevitably think of her “red paint and rubber cement” look, and it just grosses me out. I can’t tell whether I’m balking at artistic engagement with rot and decomposition and/or if I’m just really turned off by the default paint job.

Time to do some concept art…

I love the word “piquant,” but it’s one that I have learned only through reading. No one besides me uses it aloud, so I have always said it as “peek CON[T],” that is, in the French way, with the stress on the second syllable. This always sounded wrong, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out the right pronunciation. Nor did I bother to look it up.

I ended up researching the correct pronunciation this morning. Turns out that the stress should be on the first syllable, both in English [“PEEK unt”] and French [“PEE con(t)”]. I will be pronouncing it “PEE con[t]” from now on.

I saw Crimson Peak on the strength of its baroque costumes and set design. On that front, it did not disappoint. I especially liked Mia Wasikowska’s dressing gown, which had leg-o’-mutton sleeves so voluminous that that were deflating in on themselves, and Jessica Chastain’s end-scene…uh, let’s just call it deshabille, with endlessly flowing sleeves and streaming skirts, perfect for running around shrieking in. I was going to say that I’d like these articles of clothing in 1:3 scale or digital, but neither format would do justice to the restless, watery movement with which they moved on the big screen.

Oh yeah, I guess there were some people in those clothes too: aspiringly authorial Edith Cushing [Mia Wasikowska], the ingenue prying into the affairs of suspiciously vampiric Thomas Sharpe [Tom Hiddleston] and his scarily possessive sister Lucille [Jessica Chastain]. I liked the first act, occurring in Edith’s hometown of Buffalo, New York, during which the characters had personality and the Sharpes were obviously engaging in machinations. As soon as the action moved across the pond to Cumberland, England, location of the Sharpes’ ancestral estate, the quality of the costumes and set designs increased, while everyone’s personality evacuated. Opportunities for characters to not only demonstrate their personalities, but also somehow hitch into the plot — Edith’s writerly ambitions and her ability to see ghosts, Thomas’ mechanical aptitude, the whole thread with the dog and the siblings’ ambivalence toward it — appeared and then fell away because apparently del Toro could handle either a cogent script or lavish set dressing, but not both simultaneously.

I could have handled the general unraveling of the movie if it weren’t so lazily overdetermined. The movie sets itself up like a mystery, but there’s really no intrepid sleuthing of piecing together of clues. Okay, granted, Edith does a little poking around to find some wax cylinders from a previous tenant, but then the recordings spell everything out for her, as does Lucille during the end scene, as does Edith’s narration bookending the whole film. Look, del Toro — give the viewers a little credit. You don’t need to tell us that “ghosts are real” — Edith’s beginning and end claim. You can just tell the story, and we will recognize very soon that they are. Show, rather than tell. You’ll have a stronger story that way.

Crimson Peak would have been greatly improved if Lucille were dead all along, tied to Allerdale Hall, but still exerting influence over Thomas. He would have come to the US alone and then killed Edith’s father under Lucille’s urging so that Edith would feel compelled to marry him. Edith and Thomas would then go back to England, where Lucille would manifest to both of them and start restricting Edith’s life. Most of the plot would occur as usual, although there would be some hints that Lucille was not of the living. The true nature of Thomas and Edith’s relationship would thus be even more disturbing.

The climax would be mostly the same too, only Thomas’ clay extractor would somehow dig up Lucille’s corpse, leading Edith to realize that she’d been dealing with a dead woman all along. Thomas would become unhinged at the sight of Lucille’s body and start talking to it. His words would imply that his attachment to Lucille played a part in bringing her back as a ghost. At that point, thanks to Thomas’ invention, the creaky foundation of Allerdale Hall would fail, taking Lucille’s corpse and Thomas along with it. Edith alone would escape, probably to freeze to death in the blizzard. Sure, this ending owes a lot to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” but it’s also a damn sight creepier and more psychologically interesting than the actual ending.

…are obviously my favorite type of BJDs. The interest started back in 2004 when Cerebrus Project came out with an elf-eared version of its 1:3 scale sculpt Lishe. She also had fangs. I ended up getting the unfanged version for Sardonix 1.0, who I suppose could be an honorary open-mouthed vampire [OMV]. However, my interest in OMVs continued, and I currently have three. Araminthe started it all, followed by Yamarrah and, most recently, Thalia.

Well, actually, I have four. I just realized tonight that Janvier Jett, my Angelsdoll Ieseul Cat Avatar, can easily be reinterpreted as an OMV. Her sharp canines and pointed ears are supposed to denote, along with her broad, flat nose ridge, the traits of a feline therianthrope. However, because she has an open mouth and pointy teeth, she can also count as an OMV.

Janvier Jett never really came together as a character for me, which is why I’ve put her head on the DOA marketplace twice, but no one wants her. But maybe I do! I got the idea just now to wipe the Ieseul Cat Avatar head and reconceptualize the sculpt as another character with a more definite personality.

In fact, I already have a name — Venelda — and a concept: late 1980s/early 1990s. I’ve been wanting such a doll since I saw Angelsdoll Ieseul Cat Avatar’s default faceup, with its fabulous combination of blue and yellow eyeshadow. Both Lola Paprika and Janvier Jett, however, went off into Signature Style Land, rather than remaining in the 1980s. My next attempt at the 1980s, Yamarrah, decided to be a character of fire and ice [cream] instead, though her oversize sweatshirt, massive earrings, leggings, and legwarmers testify to the direction I originally wanted her to take.

Anyway, I see Venelda as a vampire turned somewhere in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Bright faceup, big hair [either short curls and a headband, or long hair and poofy bangs, or a high ponytail and poofy bangs], big earrings, tiered skirt, blouse with cap sleeves, fishnet fingerless gloves, armloads of jelly bracelets, jelly shoes if I can find them, slouch socks, etc., etc. She plays with her Gameboy and listens to tapes on her Walkman…or boom box. Maybe she plays games on a Commodore 64? ^_^ She doesn’t trust any technology made after 1990, but also has no patience for recent fetishization of the 1980s and 1990s.

I developed a schedule of themed meetups for VTDL:

• January: New Year’s/General Winter
• February: Valentine’s Day
• March: St. Patrick’s Day
• April: Easter
• July: Independence Day
• September: Back to School
• October: Halloween
• December: Christmas

I have some appropriate doll-scale props, but would like to acquire more, either in 1:4 scale or 1:3 scale, for entertaining photo ops. Anything with ** by it indicates that I can make it.

• New Year’s: champagne flutes, party hats**, party noisemakers**, Happy New Year goggles
• Valentine’s Day: valentine cards**, stuffed heart, teddy bear
• St. Patrick’s Day: four-leaf clovers**, pot of gold, green hats, green beer
• Easter: basket with fake grass, plastic eggs, wearable bunny ears**
• Fourth of July: American flag, hats with stars and stripes, ridiculously large firework**
• Back to School: backpack, notebook, writing implements, blackboard and chalk, globe
• October: domino mask**, broom, scythe, trick-or-treat containers**
• Christmas: Santa hats that actually fit**, wrapped presents**, seasonal cards

The New York Times recently published an article on The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the movie version of which is 40 years old this year. It’s an okay article, looking back on the musical’s difficult transition from stage show to movie and its blossoming into a “self-updating” cultural phenomenon. Tim Curry, Barry Bostwick, Susan Sarandon, and Lou Adler [film producer] reminisce on their roles and offer some analysis, while Richard O’Brien, who is apparently angry at Adler, refuses to contribute anything significant. I find most interesting the following excerpt about Curry:

Mr. Curry, who is recovering from a stroke he had in 2012, was happy to reminisce about his screen creation turning 40. But there was a time when he tried to distance himself from his most famous role because he worried it was holding him back. “I finally sorted through that,” he said. “I realized I’d been lucky. I still feel lucky.”

Magenta has words about luck.

Anyway, back off that necessary tangent, I find Curry’s change from rejection to acceptance illuminating. It reminds me of Leonard Nimoy’s distance from [I Am Not Spock] and ultimate embrace [I Am Spock] of his iconic role in Star Trek. I think that both of them started off feeling limited by their famous roles. They felt that people confused them with their characters and that they risked typecasting. Eventually, though, they each seemed to have reinterpreted the audience’s love for those roles/characters as an asset, rather than a liability. Curry, talking about luck, seems to be referring to the rare privilege of a performer who is so successful that they end up embodying some crucial cultural moment and thus becoming objects of endless passionate fascination. Very few performers ever hit that definition of success, and, while it may not be the sort of critical acclaim for one’s talents that perhaps Curry originally sought, he recognizes the significance of personifying the zeitgeist. It’s a pretty damn cool thing to do, and he gets to do it. I think it’s very wise of him to realize that struggling against the momentum is a waste of time and that accepting it, even if that means accepting that his life has gone otherwise to his plans, is easier.

I did a scatter plot graph of attendance numbers for VTDL since its inception in August, 2011. Attendance seems to be slowly increasing; we seem to generally have about 5 attendees per meetup, which is a lot more than the 2 or 3 we regularly had in the first 12 months. Continue reading VTDL attendance trends slowly upward

Why does the government care where my most recent spouse was born if we’ve been divorced for like 6 years? I don’t even know where my most recent spouse was born!

I have long wanted one of the 105cm Dollmore Trinity 1:2 scale BJDs — a Klaire, to be exact — but I could never buy one on the primary market and directly support Dollmore. Also the fullsets are ridiculously expensive, even for someone like me, used to dropping large amounts on dolls.

Anyway, guess who just appeared on the secondary market for $2K [when s/h and insurance are factored in]? Yup, a Klaire. Bah! How frustrating.

Janna said that Jadeite, 5StarDoll’s incredibly cute preying mantis therianthropic BJD, would not gross her out. I AM GOING TO GET A BUG DOLL!!!

…When I have the money.

• Adobe Lightroom
• more pants

Welcome to the Odd Planet, long-time home of my creative projects.

• Master Works. A Doctor Who charity anthology I edited.
• Powers of Creation. My general blog.
• the tacky trove. Digital freebies for 3D artists.
• Vermont Doll Lovers [off site]. The doll club I run, free and open to all.

If you’re interested in previous 1:6 scale melodramas, my older endeavors appear here and there online:

• Me and My Muses [off site]. 2012-2014. A Web comic of 1:6 scale ball-jointed dolls (BJDs), following a young queer woman, Ellery Langrock, and the various magical and sexy characters in her head.
• Zombieville. 2014-2018. A serial melodrama starring customized 1:6 scale articulated dolls. Thrill to the tale of Isabel, your average sarcastic feminist, as she adjusts to life on the edge of death.

I bought two 1:6ers from Andrea recently, one of which, Jun, appears below. She’s a Takara Cy Girl CG04 [Cutey Honey/Jun] headsculpt on a Takara CG 2.0 body, with a custom reroot by ???? and a custom faceup by Andrea. The dress and bloomers come from Lyrajean, who brought to VTDL a few months ago some miscellaneous doll clothes that she had unearthed somewhere. [They’re most likely for 8″ child dolls, from some time in the latter half of the 20th century. I picked them up because I thought that some of my fat 1:6ers might be able to fit them. Most of the dirt washed out, leaving me with some sturdily made mystery garments.] The feet are Hasbro Shoezies with Takara CG ankle pegs sunk in. Black tac gloves not shown amidst flouncy skirts!

There is probably a Japanese technical term for this kind of style, but I do not know it.

I feel like she might need some headphones and a mike and some sort of wearable computer. Every time I see it, her silver facepaint screams “cyber.”

Continue reading Frankly, Jun is unimpressed with your bullshit.

Things I would like to do with some dolls:

• Get Cutey Honey a red bob [style: Pinky] from Facets By Marcia.
• Improve Polly. Maybe some bubbles in her faceup? Definitely different hair.
• Gouge out Talia’s eye sockets. I haven’t found any decent tutorials on the subject, so I’m just going to start scraping with an X-acto knife.
• Better wig for Timonium!
• Redo Mellifer?
• Redo Araminthe’s faceup and wig?

“And I wasn’t having very much success figuring it out because a) I was only sixteen years old, b) I was the youngest of seven kids, and c) I was already three people, none of which I liked very much.”

And so begins my Jupiter Challenge…

The idea that I originally thought I would use for the Jupiter Challenge — that of the girl finding her origins in the mirror world — dates from 1997, when I was 19. Thus it’s three years too recent for consideration, as story ideas used in the challenge must have been generated at age 16 or before.

In other news, I have unearthed my trove of story outlines and discovered some alternative ideas that I did indeed think up before 16.

There’s the one where the girl writes a creation myth and makes a world, which she then enters, where she is worshipped as a god. She has to defeat her personified fear of death, which is causing people to sicken and die.

There’s the one where the boy has a magic ring inhabited by the soul of his dead aunt. He  and she join forces to defeat someone who yanks them from Earth into a magical world because she wants the ring.

There’s the one about the princess who’s white as snow, red and blood and black as ebony, but never at the same time, more like a series of three different appearances and corresponding personalities, and her search through a bunch of fairy tale tropes to find a cure for her condition.

There’s also a bunch of deliberately pointless quest narratives in which the sought-for object is never fully elucidated or centralized as much as the relationships between the people on the quest.

Hmmm…

The Jupiter Challenge, which Andrea reTumbled, thus catching my attention, has been bonking around in my head for the past few days. It’s a writing challenge, a la NaNoWriMo, in which “anyone old enough to be embarrassed by middle school” takes a sci fi/fantasy story idea from before they were 16 and writes 10K words, while “throw[ing] the rules out the window” and “go[ing] wild.”

As a person who has kept reams of stories, fragments, outlines and character sketches from my early days, I find this challenge irresistible. Indeed, it’s a bit overwhelming. I have so many possibilities to choose from.

First of all, do I go with an idea that I never pursued, or do I revisit old work? If revisiting, where do I go? To the girl who time-traveled back to Mount Independence during the Revolutionary War? To the trio of questers with extremely embarrassing names who were pulled together and dropped on another planet for an ill-defined quest that was pretty much incidental? To my sister’s and my long-running paracosm centered around the charismatic, magically enhanced twins who steamrolled everyone with their frenetic adventures and increasingly self-referential mockery?

If going with an idea that I never pursued, which of the many forks in the road should I take? The one where the girl’s imaginary world comes real and she goes into it to defeat the evil, only to find out the the evil is her? The one leading to a quest story that arose because I drew a map of the United Provinces of Ileon first, then grafted a story onto the cool land later? The destination where there’s a modern tomboy who knows she’s fated to eventually be stuck back in 1265, marrying a noble boy who thinks she’s a witch?

In fact, I’m leaning toward the one about the girl who discovers that she’s actually from the mirror world that’s been making more and more frequent incursions into her life…assuming I can find that outline.

I began this blog on LiveJournal about a decade ago [!], but switched to the DreamWidth platform in 2012 because I was enraged at LJ’s user-hostile developments. I spent some time at DW, but its clunky method of inserting photos into posts really put me off. I really sought an intuitive GUI like that of Blogspot, which hosts VTDL’s blog, but I wanted the control that comes from having a blog on one’s own server.

Powers of Creation has finally come to rest at the oddpla.net [“What’s a oddpla?” :p ] server, where most of my other Web sites live. Here I don’t pay extra for searchability, as I did with DW, and I can easily upload pictures to my entries.

I imported my journal from its mirror location on LJ, so my tags were all off. Thus all the months of painstaking tag curation that I did after transferring the journal to DW — all that has disappeared.Ugh!

I finally just deleted all ~600 tags from the import and decided to start afresh. I have decided to tag only sets of related entries not easily discovered by strategic use of search terms. That should greatly reduce the number of tags I have to populate.

Now that I think about it, I should probably bring the tacky trove, my Web site of 3d freebies, back to the oddpla.net server too…

I seriously need to invest in some good chairs for my 1:3 scale dolls. My single 1:3 scale chair has ridiculously short legs, leaving Jareth hanging out of it like a partly collapsed tent pole. :p Everyone else just sits directly on my bookshelf, and they have to keep folding their legs to the side so they don’t dangle.

There’s a person on DOA who sells flatpack chairs and couches, which may prove useful for my limited budget and space….

This entry was originally posted at http://modernwizard.dreamwidth.org/1709996.html. You can comment here, but I’d prefer it if you’d comment on my DW using OpenID.