| Let's play Guess the Hatcher Hatchling... |
[24 May 2012|05:06pm] |
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I am full term this week (37+ weeks) and exhausted. AND super cranky. Oh, man, SO cranky. I still have a million things to do before the baby is born, but most of them involve organizing and cleaning... so I need a distraction. A fun one. This is where YOU come in!
I think pretty much everyone knows that we haven't found out the baby's sex. We thought it would be fun to have it be a surprise (who knows what we'll decide for subsequent baby-havings) and we also knew it would keep me from buying pink tutus if it's a girl (or, you know, blue tutus if it's a boy) and from having the bedroom next to ours end up looking like Strawberry Shortcake horked in there (kind of like this blog layout... heh). So, there's that. There’s also the fact that in spite of my due date being June 12th, the doctor shakes her head every time I have an appointment and just says it'll be born any time between NOW and the end of June. (How I am surviving with this much suspense when I like knowing everything in advance baffles even me. George, on the other hand, adoooores surprises.)
And this is where the game-playing comes in. Let's play guess the delivery date and sex! Just a few rules...
YOU CAN ONLY "PARTICIPATE" ONCE. YOU GET ONE VOTE... and it must be in the comments section of this post. Not on our statuses. Not via text message. And please, be really clear. "May 29th, girl" is fine. "Tuesday, boy" is not. WHICH TUESDAY?! And you really can guess any date in the next four to five weeks. We're not going to induce labor unless I go over 42 weeks, much to my OB's chagrin.
Any given date only has two options. Like, June 12th can be "June 12th, girl" or "June 12th, boy". Once someone uses a date and a sex, you can ONLY pick that same date for the opposite sex. And a "June 12th" vote counts as any time between 12:00:00am EST and 11:59:59pm EST on that date. (Eastern Standard Time since that's OUR time zone and therefore, the baby's birth date time zone.)
You cannot change your guess once you post it... and you cannot post more than one vote. If the date comes and goes... sorry, Charlie.
Once the first email, text message, or phone call goes out that I'm in labor, voting is closed.
Check the comments before yours: if someone already picked the date and sex combination, you can't pick the same one. If you are too lazy to check and thereby end up posting the same combo someone else already posted, the first person to have posted the correct one wins.
If no one guesses correctly, we will just give ourselves a prize! Just kidding. :) If no one guesses correctly, the person with the closest guess wins. If someone guesses May 27th and someone else the 29th, and the baby is born May 28th, the winner will be determined by whether the baby was born before or after noon.
The prize: It will probably take a couple weeks to get to you (especially if you don't live locally). Also, if you don't live locally, you'll obviously have to provide us with your address so we can send it to you. We have some ideas on what the prize/gift will be, but it'll definitely end up being something personalized and tailored to the person who wins (for example, we're not going to give one of our sisters the same thing we would give a guy friend). No matter what it ends up being, we'll try to make it something we think the specific person would like and appreciate.
May the person with the creepiest capacity of foreseeing the future win!
Originally published at fresita.org. Please leave any comments there.
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| Features: Savage Love: May 23, 2012 |
[23 May 2012|12:00am] |
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http://www.avclub.com/articles/may-23-2012,75526/?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=feeds&utm_source=type_savage-love I’m a 17-year-old girl, and in most aspects, I’m confident with myself, my identity, and my body. Earlier this year, I met a girl. She had some serious drama at home and needed to get out of her house, so I let her stay at mine. Things went a LOT further than I was ready for. I had just had my first kiss the month before, and I didn’t feel like our relationship was ready for sex, but I went along with it because she never gave me a chance to slow things down or say no ...
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| reblog yr idols |
[22 May 2012|11:18pm] |
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last week-end @ the University of Chicago, 17 American comix giants got together for Comics: Philosophy & Practice, to talk about what they do and where comix might be going. I'm waiting for the conference's website to post video, but in the meantime, Phoebe Gloeckner put a few pictures up on her Flickr:
L-R: Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, Seth, Chris Ware
(photograph by Phoebe Gloeckner)
L-R: Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Phoebe Gloeckner, Carol Tyler, Joe Sacco, Robert Crumb
(photograph by Phoebe Gloeckner)
And once more, zoomed outside the panel:
(photograph by Carol Tyler)
You ever suddenly, irrationally feel like the world's in good hands?
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| sara pichelli and her invisible pen |
[22 May 2012|02:33pm] |
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anyhow, the following two vids constitute everything I know about Sara Pichelli, who co-created the black Latino Spider-Man. This is sped up, not recorded in real time, but even so, it's obvious: if you want to be a pro you'd better draw damn fast:
Drawing black Latino Spider-Man for a living appears to make some people not stop smiling:
Sara Pichelli Says Hello at NYCC 2011 from The Comic Archive on Vimeo.
Another reality of working for the Big Two: you have to learn how to draw porn stars well. For a female cartoonist, this might feel like Uncle-Tomming, but the target audience for caped escapism will never stop loving you for it:
Speaking of porn, I watched The Avengers last week-end, but as a secret protest against Marvel's long-standing indifference to its artists' well-being, I did so by sneaking in after buying a ticket to a different movie
"I like being bad and then going home and being good."
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| Patio furniture? I'm such an adult! |
[20 May 2012|04:46pm] |
I went to Milford, MA today to pick up a small teak wood table, chairs and umbrella stand for our new place. It needs a little repair, but we're pretty happy with it. Coupled with our tall metal table, I think we're set for patio furniture. Now we need an umbrella.
Keeping with the new house theme, I'm going to begin the dreaded cleaning of the spare room. It'll be a slog, that's for sure.
(See what I'm doing here? I'm posting to LiveJournal regularly-ish!)
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[20 May 2012|08:33pm] |
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| refugee |
[18 May 2012|11:09am] |
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As foretold, the waters rose a third time. Men in masks descended on Matthew's office and tore the walls asunder. Knocked over cabinets, disassembled desks, and ran great polyurethane tubes through the rubble. Industrial fans rip the humid air and disperse the spores the sprouted in the moist carpet.
Matthew sits in his swivel chair at the pile of bent metal and drywall shards that occupy the same space his desk once did. He takes a deep breath of stale air, and pokes at his phone. Eventually, someone from upstairs comes to retrieve him.
His temporary desk is nearly identcal to his old one, except it is above sea level and deep - deep - in a cube farm. One neighbor streams Vivaldi, and the others chatter about unfamiliar children. The walls of his cube are ragged, slashed by a quasi-human hand. The corners of the desk appear to have been chewed on, impressions of molars in the simulated wood. Matthew considers the desk's previous occupant as Vivaldi storms.
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| fiction |
[17 May 2012|03:30pm] |
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Delvin opens the closet door to find a number of aromatic candles flickering atop his desk, casting a dancing shadow down around his bed. "Hey." says a smoky voice from the shadow. He lowers himself to see under the desk and as his eyes adjust to the dark, they meet hers. "Hey," he says.
Counterpoint pauses, frowns. CTRL+A DELETE. The problem he has with writing is that he can't imagine writing anything that anybody would ever want to read. He thinks about writing about the things that are important to him, but he doesn't like actually thinking about important things. Important things are upsetting. Better to occupy himself with fiction. He closes his laptop and crawls out of his nest.
The condo is quiet during the day. Matt and Lish are out, Bananacat tends to sleep. Counterpoint tends to sleep too, but today he's restless. If it was dark out, he'd take a long walk to clear his head, but he doesn't like to go out in the sunlight.
Bananacat sleeps in a perfect circle on the carpet. CP kneels down to pet her on the shoulder but she wakes up and bites his hand, teeth sink into the meat between his thumb and forefinger. Counterpoint returns to his nest, shuts the doors, and gives sleep another try.
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| Mid-2012 Update! |
[16 May 2012|10:25am] |
Hey-yo! Been a while since I posted, but thought I would hop on for a bit. Let's see, it's 2012, almost 2 years since the last post.
Here's some news:
We currently have two cats and one dog (we lost Ronin in May 2011). We are finally getting married this year. June 16, 2012. The venue's all paid for and everything. We are also buying a single-family home in Somerville (yayayayayayayayayayay!) that's bigger than our current place and has both a driveway and a yard. This is so awesome, I can't even express it.
I'm working on calligraphy these days. My main focus right now is Roman Caps. Let me tell you, for a style that is so ubiquitous, these bad boys are HARD. Really really hard. Without even trying, my skill at Italic calligraphy has increased ten-fold due to my concentration on just trying to draw a straight line for Roman Caps. I've had three weekend-long classes on this stuff and my teacher (the excellent Reggie Ezell) told us that it took him 6 months, 3 hours a day to get anywhere near proficient at these. Wow. Intimidating, but encouraging.
Just like with knitting, there are so many things to think about in creation of the letters. Holding and moving the pen correctly is a huge part of it, as is holding the needles and entering the stitch correctly to form a piece of knitting. But there's also the viscosity of the writing fluid, the preparation of the pen nib, the lightness of hand, the quality of the paper, etc. It all influences the final outcome, so only practicing the letter forms won't get you very far. From experience, I know that the only way to get better is to practice a lot. So I will. I really love doing this, and, much like knitting, I expect to be frustrated at the beginning, but over time, see improvements.
When I came here to write this post, livejournal asked me if I wanted to recover a previously unposted post. I did, and it's below. Apparently, I was writing something just after January 1, 2011. Let's see what's up with that:
( Way-back Machine )
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| property |
[15 May 2012|12:59pm] |
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"Ew," says Lichelle, her manicured fingernail picking at a buckled corner of countertop laminate. "I thought we agreed that granite is a must."
"And look at this," says Aiden, "Would you just look." He opens the oven and he opens the dishwasher, and when they are all the way down the doors overlap. "How are we supposed to get any work done in here?"
Lichelle and Aiden flit around the space, calling out flaws to the realtor that anxiously tails them. This condo is a third-floor end unit, one bedroom one bath, and "open concept" in the sense that the entryway and dining room and living room are all the same room. Duct tape holds a small section of the ceiling/molding in place. Lichelle gestures toward it and the realtor notes it on the growing list of complaints:
- More than the acceptable number of holes in the ceiling
- Kitchen too small
- Counters not granite
- Spiders living in windowframes
- Ugly paint in closet/office
- Some sort of nest in the closet/office
- Two people asleep in bedroom (rude)
- Bathroom tiles crooked
- Excessive dust
- Walls are too lime green
- Carpets are not hardwood floors
- Cat smell
- Broken lock on door to hallway
- Building's security door easily forced
Matthew wakes to the sound of early-morning traffic. He climbs out of bed, stretches, runs a hand through his hair. He stumbles to the kitchen and fixes himself a bowl of cereal and spills it when he trips over the oven and dishwasher doors.
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| leftovers |
[15 May 2012|12:09am] |
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Counterpoint lives under Matthew’s desk. He’s made a little nest in the accumulated detritus, broken video game peripherals and spent sketchbooks. Matt offers him a hand to help him up but CP just shakes it. “Hey,” he says.
“Hey,” says Matthew. “How are you these days? Is everything okay?”
“Oh I’m just fine,” Counterpoint says. “Getting a lot of rest. Spending a lot of time thinking. I may write a novel.”
“That’s great. You should do that.”
"Yeah," says Counterpoint, "I think I will." He smiles weakly.
They continue shaking hands in silence.
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| office |
[14 May 2012|09:38am] |
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Matthew has a computer in a closet. The closet is sort of an office, in that it has a desk and a chair and a computer. Matthew can sit in his swivel chair and put his arms straight out to his sides and press his palms flat against either wall. The walls are a vibrant blue.
This is a color that Matthew selected from the children’s section of the paint store. According to its paint chip, this color is called Surf’s Up. The walls are cool on his palms. Matthew sits at his desk in his tiny office and lets the surf wash over him.
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