Mother's Day (part deux)

This comic by Kate Beaton about something wonderful her mother did for her once captures perfectly the reality of trying to go to university for a creative degree.

In primary and secondary school in the US (and I would guess in Nova Scotia too from this comic), they don't really teach you much about how to do fine arts-- performing or otherwise. This effectively makes these pursuits reserved for the wealthy, because most instruction in these activities is not going to be available for free. Artistry, creative writing instruction, musical instrument lessons and the like, that all costs money and time, and even if the child has the dedication and devotion to do these things in their free time, if the money for the training isn't present, you can really only learn what you teach yourself. That leads to a great, highly developed individual talent, but it might not match up to the surprisingly narrow view that people in academia have of what's an acceptable or desirable use of these creative skills.

As for my mother's day: We went to the movies as planned. Highlights:

Towards the beginning of the movie, a guy tells Queen Victoria that they've beaten all their enemies at sea but one, and in the process lists their bested foes. When he said they'd defeated Portugal, I caught my grandmother shaking her fist at the screen. This was incredibly adorable.

Walking out of the movie, grandma was fascinated by my hair:

Grandma: [grabbing a handful of it] Ohh, so soft!
Dev: Well, thank you! Haha, it's because I just showered.
Grandma: Oh, but the color is so nice. And-- [sniffs the hair] you smell so good!
Dev: Like coconut, yup.
Mom: Let me smell! [grabs hair from the other side, sniffs] That's nice.

(For the sake of painting an accurate picture here, both my grandma and my mom are about a foot shorter than I am. There was a lot of bending down to keep my hair on my head involved, haha!)

And politics

I just want to scream sometimes over the stupid shit going on politically in the US.

The Republicans want to keep Student Loans interest rates at 3.4 percent, but to do it they want to make cuts to healthcare. (Not that they haven't ripped that up everywhere else as much as they can, almost out of spite, as far as I can tell.) The Democrats want to do the same thing, but THEY want to pull the money to pay for the lower loan percentage from huge corporations, so of course NEITHER SIDE SUCCEEDS and the people who're going to pay for it are the people trying to go to college.

Add to that that the AZ legislature just cut state funding for Planned Parenthood last week, and Jan Brewer signed through that awful legislation trying to further limit access to contraceptives, and I just feel so powerless I wish screaming would HELP. I want to hit something. A wall, if I wasn't worried the walls here at work are so thin they might break. What the hell can you do in this situation?

There's a fundamentalist movement screaming through this country for absolutely no good reason and I don't know why it's so successful, but it is, and for reasons that I just can't understand as a person who considers organized religious belief to be kind of nonsensical, it's attacking the values that the USA is supposed to actually be about. I feel like someone is intentionally going around trying to rip human decency, equality, and vast amounts of important information from us, and they're winning so far.

Women shouldn't have to depend on the kindness of their doctor and pharmacist to get their birth control pills and have the right to an ordinary life. I seriously feel like these things should just be available commercially without needing a prescription. Why the hell do I need a prescription to have birth control pills? Am I somehow not trustworthy enough to know whether I want to have babies or not, even though I'm assumed to know whether I need cream to soothe my muscle pain, mild painkillers or a medication to help me with fever symptoms.

I shouldn't have to feel like I'm asking for something illegal every time I go pick up my birth control prescription every month. But with these legislations, I sure as hell feel like it, and that's WRONG.

The Republicans have pretty much admitted that they're only passing this ludicrous crap legislation because they know they can right now without having to fight for it, so they're furthering their personal agendas at the expense of the people. What the hell kind of government is built around bullying people who don't agree with your personal views? Not a democracy, not a republic.

I also just sort of wish that all religions would be forced to disband simultaneously. I think religion has value culturally, I think that religious texts and histories are interesting, but I also think that permitting religions to serve as secondary governments is dangerous and unfair to whatever unfortunates happen to not be part of the religion that ends up wielding the power.

The only reason I don't usually feel so strongly that the world would be better off without religion is that I think people who are religious must find some comfort in believing whatever spiritualistic stuff their particular faith subscribes to (souls go to X when you die; rebirth cycles; spirits linger and become the ancestral spirits we worship, etc), but here's the thing: If it's as easy as that, doesn't that sound pretty convenient? Do religious people really never think about the condition of mortality, about the utter certainty that eventually they'll die, and whether they're right or wrong, they won't be around anymore?

I think that they do. I think that people don't like looking mortality in the face; I think that most people will come up with a glib answer (religious or otherwise) to help them deal with that feeling. So, knowing that the answer is glib, how spiteful and thoroughly heartless do you have to be to intentionally go around denying other people the right to live the ONLY LIFE WE KNOW WE GET FOR SURE as happily and under their own power as possible? What kind of sick animal do you have to be to choose to deny another person the right to live their life the way that they want to live it?

I may come back to edit this to be a little less vitriolic later, but right now I'm just so thoroughly frustrated I can't express this otherwise. I seriously do wish that all religions would be forcibly disbanded, because I think that that is what's wrong with the world. Religious division prevents people from helping each other as much and as effectively as we could if we'd just get over that and all work together to better the world.

TL;DR: I don't like religion. I like history about religious texts and find them interesting, but I don't like religion.

More fun than the previous post

Man, gonna have to stay late to get this thing done today. Hopefully not by much, but yuck!

On the upside, I'm super excited because the Rangers United club I'm in over on Deviantart is doing a contest soon. It looks like we have ten participants so far; I'm hoping more folks in the club will enter so it'll last longer and be more exciting. (Or, you know, if any of you on the FL would like to join, it's relatively easy and you could participate too!)

Finished: Isle of Dread!

Ugh, today was really bonkers! I worked almost two hours late to finish something, and then we had the final session of the module monday D&D game right when I got home. I'm utterly exhausted now, though the ending was kinda fun. Derek decided that Bek's other-self (who was some boring businessman that Bek became when he dreamed) had killed himself, so Bek was getting better sleep and still shining a bizarre light upon the nature of mortality in the creepiest way possible. King's to you, Derek. King's to you.

( Summary: The final events of the Isle of Dread! )

Surprisingly, we survived! 'Ro at least is of the opinion that they should never, ever speak of it again, but I think we all went crazy when we finally escaped anyway. It was pretty awesome.

I then checked my email to find out that my kid brother has bronchitis! I'm worried for him, but he sounded grudgingly tolerant of being sick and how crappy that is. He neglected to mention whether the doctor who diagnosed him also prescribed medicines, and whether he is taking them, but it's late to call and big sister at him, so I'll do it tomorrow.

And, unrelated, but after seeing another of her arts on her tumblr in the midst of some drama, I commented to Natash Allegri (one of the animators on Adventure Time) in the hope that she might read it and take it under consideration. The picture in question is here: It involves the gender-flipped cast of the show.

She had received a polite, earnest critique of the work's poses and choice of layout that I don't really feel quite got to the heart of what was sexist about the picture (and the gender flipped stuff in general), and then a lot of people chimed in to bash whoever dared critique it and assure her that the picture is great.

That's just the thing; the picture IS great, but it's also sexist. It's not like they're mutually exclusive. So here was my comment. I really do hope she reads and considers it; I like her work and I love Adventure Time, obviously, so it's not like I don't want to see her post lots more of her stuff.

"Hi Nat,

I really like your art, but I feel that leosboots's opinion is perfectly valid. Number one problem I have with your response is stating that you're a woman, therefore exempt from being sexist. That is completely untrue; women can be and often are very sexist. We're our own worst enemy. Society teaches us to draw women as dainty, beautiful, covered in bows, smiling, and in dresses. This is true of your picture, and it doesn't make your picture less pretty, but it does make it sexist.

Being sexist isn't something absolutely terrible. It's something that needs to be acknowledged and worked at, a little bit at a time. You can be a really nice person, and a woman, and still be sexist; it doesn't make you really horrible, or anything, but if you willfully ignore it or laugh it off, you can never stop being that way and that's hurtful in the long run to the rights of women everywhere.

I wouldn't say that the girls here are oversexualized. I do think that they are postured and dressed in gender-normative fashions. Most notably for me, I think Marceline and Marshall Lee are the clearest "same person" character. Both of them are showing some skin, postured with the obvious intent of looking sexy-- and that's the character, so that makes sense.

PB's dress and pose are a little unusual for her, which makes her stand out as not really looking quite like PB to me-- girlier than PB of the show. Flame Princess we honestly don't know very well, so as far as I can tell, she and Flame Prince are pretty much the same.

The notable difference, to me, is Finn and Fionna; specifically, the fact that Fionna's wearing a backless dress with a huge ruffly skirt that would make it hard to fight in. This compared to Finn's tuxedo seems way less functional and more objectifying as a dress. I'd write it off because Finn (and thus by extension Fionna) is complicated, as we know, except that it doesn't seem like a "character-quirk" type of dress so much as a "pretty, societally approved girl-ideal" dress. So as someone just glancing at this, it'd stand out to me as setting Fionna apart from Finn. It feels like her sword is for show, while his is a real sword.

The ribbons look nice but since there's no equivalent for the boys it's another element that separates them by gender. And as someone else pointed out, Fionna should be with the boys, and Finn should be with the girls- I think it's safe to assume that that, however, is a stylistic choice since the piece is supposed to be about them as counterparts to each other, right?

Anyway-- my point is, I'm someone completely unrelated to this person, and I had a really similar reaction. I feel like leosboots expressed her thoughts pretty calmly and rationally, and I'm disappointed to see you dismissing them. I'm really sad that a bunch of people apparently then commented meanly to her, on top of it all. That's pretty sucky."