Monkeys and keyboards aside, one Random + CSS still doesn't make poop.

Nekocon was a fairly laid-back con, all things considered. It didn't feel like there were too many people there, and I heard a few people say that sales weren't as good as last year's . . . but that being said, when they hit at the artists' alley, they hit hard. My sales there beat ACen's and are just dollars away from ANext's. This means I am a very happy Random.

Weird con was weird, though. Standard heavy sellers like the metal flower kanzashi and hair sticks didn't move like usual, though the new steampunk cuff prototypes couldn't be kept on the table and I sold more single earrings than I have during my entire crafting career. The co-conspirator had the same problem--she wasn't really moving her magnetic katamari balls, which are usually gone by Saturday, but sold scarves instead.

Otherwise: The weekend was strangely relaxing. Our (cheap!) hotel had a pool and a hot tub, not to mention real sausage for breakfast (not spiced veggie stuff like our Otakon hotel gave us) and real sausage gravy to go with it. Voldemart had cheap wine, and IHOP was made of awesome and win and pecans. Then there was Buckroe Beach--not a show-stopper, but a nice, pretty clean, community-feeling place with a couple neat photo op spots--just five miles away. And best of all, I think I walked away without con plague. I intend to go back again next year. :D


(Also, I got a big plush Appa. He's so snuggly. I still haven't seen Avatar but I love this thingy anyway. *snugson*)

Is this a branch of Racefail, or is it just outright race & gender failure?


Justine Larbalestier wrote a YA book called Liar, about a mixed-race, dark-skinned, short-haired character--a book where the character's race and appearance factor heavily into the storyline. Publisher Bloomsbury Press decided the best cover to put on this book was a shot of a long-haired white girl.

Now, plenty of covers fuck up character descriptions--but when official people from the publishing house defend their choices with things like this:

“The entire premise of this book is about a compulsive liar,” said Melanie Cecka, publishing director of Bloomsbury Children’s Books USA and Walker Books for Young Readers, who worked on Liar. “Of all the things you’re going to choose to believe of her, you’re going to choose to believe she was telling the truth about race?”

And tell the author things like this:

Since I've told publishing friends how upset I am with my Liar cover, I have been hearing anecdotes from every single house about how hard it is to push through covers with people of colour on them. Editors have told me that their sales departments say black covers don't sell. Sales reps have told me that many of their accounts won't take books with black covers. Booksellers have told me that they can't give away YAs with black covers. Authors have told me that their books with black covers are frequently not shelved in the same part of the library as other YA-they're exiled to the Urban Fiction section-and many bookshops simply don't stock them at all.

Yeah, not cool. Seems it's too strange a thing to have people of color on book covers, and no one wants to try to acclimate the general public to the novel idea of integration.

At least, not if a potential monetary loss is involved.

~~

And while we're at it . . . An anthology is coming out entitled The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing Sci-Fi. People checking out the book noticed that the list of included "mind-blowing" authors contains no women or people of color.

Not only has at least one of the authors come charging out of the woodwork to make an ass of himself:

Every single commenter here seems to me to be committing a logical fallacy of tremendous dimension, one so big it distorts entire worldviews:

DEMANDING THAT EVERY SINGLE INSTANCE OF EVERYTHING COMPOSITE SHOULD BE ABSOLUTELY STATISTICALLY REPRESENTATIVE OF THE COMPOSITION OF THE ENTIRE COSMOS

You know what: a potato field is not likely to contain corn plants. A pine forest might feature an oak or three, but be 99% pine trees. The Beatles were 4 white guys. Sonic Youth has no people of color! My ream of copy paper is all white, with no sheets of lettuce included!

(...)

But I have to say that when ANY WRITER (not just female writers or writers of color) complains about being excluded from a venue and cites issues of platonic principle and idealism, I always first posit underlying jealousy and a desire for status underneath all the lofty hypothetical talk.

(To which I said, "What the hell?")

Then the editor, Mike Ashley, came in to help make things worse.

That probably has something to do with my concept of "mind-blowing". Women are every bit as capable of writing mindblowing sf as men are, but with women the stories concentrate far more on people, life, society and not the hard-scientific concepts I was looking for.

Mike Ashley also notes that he did ask for stories from women, too. Two of them. Even though all we're capable of writing about is people and society, not science.

(Also, as an editor I want to bite him.)

Fires need set. I think The Angry Black Woman just set that fire for me. I like her. :D

Eta: Another bit of WTF has come to my attention: that of a male author with a feminine name, who wrote a story from a male's POV and had it rejected--brutally--because the editor says he, as a woman writer, doesn't know how to write a convincing male character.

Etsy. Flu. Whining. Eeeh. :P


I got the brilliant idea that I'd try to go official with the crafty mess, become my own business and possibly a LLC and all that fun stuff (if anyone has hints or tips, plz help!), and so I picked up Barbara Brabec's book Handmade for Profit for whatever help I could get. The book desperately needs an editor and dear Ms. Brabec needs to STFU about God already, but it has lots of interesting & helpful information--some of which I've put to use already.


So while I'm busy trying to flood the etsy with new neatness and think of being official and all that shiny scariness, I ran into a few interesting things. Calls to arms, perhaps: This one blogger explains at length why it's a cop-out to blame your small business not doing well on the economy. And on a similar note: Don't worry about other people or the economy or spend your time whining--just get out there and kick butt.

Hey, I may need these links some day. Maybe. :P Either way, it's a revamp of the previous mindset.



Now to get my applications in for some more of the local shows. I find myself becoming frustrated with some show coordinators due to their basic lack of professionalism regarding things as simple as getting back to people. That being said--ANext just got back to me a couple days ago. I'm in there. So this June I'll be at (MITSUWAAAA!) ANext's Artists' Alley, possibly for 24 hours a day (except for when I'm at Mitsuwa!) with shiny things absolutely Everywhere. :D

Unless I run out before then. :P


Oh, this shall be a very busy, crafty next few months.

One of the things on the new releases cart, to be put out tomorrow, was a new Dean Koontz hardcover--a graphic novel version of his wanna-be-trilogy-stuck-at-pair Frankenstein novels. If you remember, I once picked one of the novels up out of curiosity and have yet to unsee the official God-Awful Worst Sentence Ever . . . So like anyone else who suffers from acute trainwreck syndrome, I grabbed one of the graphic novels and started flipping through.

Then I paused: I knew this art style. The hair was out to eat someone's head, the musculature was worse, characters' torsos were extremely stretched, all the faces looked the same, there were about a billion perfect profiles and Stop-watching-Labyrinth you're-gettin'-a-yeast-infection-thar-sonny crotch-bulges . . .

I flipped a little further and found 'em--BOOM! Gigantic thighs! Smugglin' turkeys thighs! THIGHS of CAPS-LOCKED DOOM!

It seems I wasn't mistaken: The artist is Brett Booth, a twenty-some year comic field veteran who used to draw for the Anita Blake comic (see: The Annotated Anita Blake, 3 4 5 6 7-3 . . . oh fuck, there's no method to this madness.). I'm told the wide and wild mockery of his particular art style is the reason the Anita Blake creators & writers--a batshit insane woman not exactly known for her quality control and the editorially-challenged sycophants surrounding/enabling her--traded him in for a less OH HOLY WTF model. sorta kinda

But Koontz & co. still picked him up/got saddled with him for this adventure.



I wonder if anyone's informed Chris of Chris's Invincible Super Blog.

You'd think someone would've learned after the dismal failure exemplified at NYAF--where Random House's imprint Del Rey tried to give away copies of Koontz-as-manga and failed. (If they couldn't give the shit away, imagine how well it sold. Then again, the market for novels-to-manga seems to be pretty evenly awful. It might be in part because most of the novels being turned are . . . awful. Hmm.) It's still kinda sad, in a way: It looks like this guy's trying to get his art style under control a little, but really--it still all looks the same.

Saddleback, sad•dle•back•ing \ˈsa-dəl-ˈba-kiŋ\ vb [fr. Saddleback Church] (2009): the phenomenon of Christian teens engaging in unprotected anal sex in order to preserve their virginities.

After attending the Purity Ball, Heather and Bill saddlebacked all night because she’s saving herself for marriage. Unfortunately her parents found out because they got santorum all over the sheets.

See also: saddlebacking


(I blame Dan Savage!)

Oprah's not doing so well with these authors of real-life sob stories . . . The latest person caught lying about their life story is Herman Rosenblat, who's been telling whoever'd listen that he first met his wife through the fence of a concentration camp, and that she threw him food every day to keep him alive. Oprah loved the story. Publishers loved the story; two different books were written about it, one for children (Angel Girl, by Laurie Friedman), one an autobiography. Sappy sentimentalists loved it: IIRC, the thing made its rounds through a handful of email forwards and also into a Chicken Soup collection. Even movie-makers loved the story--the movie was in the works.

Researchers debunked Mr. Rosenblat's story. Despite fighting an uphill battle with Berkley Books and the guy who wanted to make the movie, they eventually prevailed--and the movie was nixed, the kids' book was pulled from the shelves, and the (juvenile, terribly-written) autobiography shall never see the inside of a commercial publisher. (Indeed, it looks like Rosenblat's aimed straight for a DIY/vanity press.)

The question remaining for most people, it seems, is "Why?" Why do something like this, when it just gives ammunition to Holocaust deniers like David Irving--or more locally, the douchebag who named his kids Adolph Hitler and JoyceLynn Aryan Nation and Honszlynn Hinler (because he wanted them to have "good German names.") Was it greed? Was it all about the money, the attention? Was it that he just really, really wanted to meet Oprah?

Nope. It's because the guy's bugfuck crazy. He went under anesthesia for surgery and his dead mother told him to share his love story--so while recovering, he made one up.


Do I need to talk about why we don't pay attention to crazy people without doing our damned research? Really?

Didn't think so.


Maybe instead I need to consider why so many people were so willing to ignore historians and facts in favor of a wildly, unbelievably improbable love story.

Thoughts on the passing of Proposition 8 (a ban on gay marriages) on the West coast, the subsequent protests and attacks on/arrests of protesters . . . and the number of tv shows out there that feature or focus on on gay/bi characters?

Let's take special note of how House and Bones, a pair of fairly mainstream and popular shows, both currently and suddenly feature pretty young femme women who take to making out with other pretty young femme women.

Good enough to be entertainment but not good enough to deserve equal rights, huh?




I still don't understand how people honestly think two gays getting married will somehow invalidate their own heterosexual marriages, or somehow make their feelings for their partners be magically lessened.

Yes we can--and we did!

I wanna watch Obama's speech again. If you haven't seen it, be sure to watch it--I'll look for a link later on. (ETA: Here it is, and here's a transcript.) I feel a little bad for McCain, with his crowd booing during his concession speech (transcript here), but he was well-spoken & fairly gracious.


Dear Dog, things are finally gonna change.


(This is the biggest, bluest spanking I've ever seen.)


O and btw:

So what's this shit about McCain putting women's health in air quotes?



Seriously, this man can not be allowed to get into office. Fuck him. Fuck him right in the ear. Because you know what? This isn't about abortion.

No, seriously. McCain's "crusade" (and I use those quotes as mockingly as possible) against abortion here is about as sensible as a kid in the backyard yelling for the rain to stop. Here's how it works: Despite McCain's notably colorful youth (and being an adulturer, cheating on and leaving his first wife after she was terribly disfigured in a car wreck), he's all about abstinence-only education--no matter that studies prove it doesn't work. Young girls are still having sex--only now it's uninformed/unprotected sex, which means our country's teen pregnancy rate is the highest in the industrialized world and the percentage of them with STDs (25%+) is utterly ridiculous.

But there's more! McCain doesn't think women should have their birth control covered by insurance. So if you're poor and need the pill, be it because you're sexually active or because you've got cramps that'll otherwise leave you curled up crying on the floor . . . Well, you might just be shit out of luck. But then again, McCain apparently didn't understand that birth control (condoms) helps prevent the spread of STDs, so this entire trainwreck might just be because he's woefully misinformed. Or an absolute fucking idiot.

So let's get this straight: Despite his youthful cockery, McCain doesn't think young people should have sex. If you have sex, McCain doesn't want you to know about having safe sex--which leads to pregnancy. And if you know about safe sex, McCain doesn't want you to have easy access to birth control. And what would this policy cause? More unintended pregnancies--which would in turn lead to more abortions.  Hell, even a guy who helped start the Religious Right knows this. Quote:

And I’d say something else about the choice issue. I am pro-life. I haven’t changed in that regard. If people read my book, Crazy for God, they’ll see that I’ve gone left, if you want to put it that way, in many, many areas, but not that one. But I actually believe that if your interest is not ideology and ideological purity, but rather abortion itself, i.e. you want more or less abortions, that the medical and social programs that Barack Obama is talking about for our country, in terms of care of women and children and families, improvement in education and possibilities for all Americans, actually will result in less abortions. So my interest in the abortion issue is that I think abortion is a tragedy. My interest is not the politics of it, as in always appearing to vote for the person who has the correct ideology.

With this in mind, does McCain's policy make the least bit of sense? Not unless he's just out to penalize women for being sexually active, or unless he's so busy trying to stand on his soapbox he hasn't realized it's at the bottom of a logical gully.

(Don't forget how if something goes terribly wrong somewhere along the line and you end up pregnant, McCain wants you to carry it to term--no matter your financial situation or mental situation or any of thousands of extenuating circumstances. And then he'll mock you and call you a radical pro-abortionist if you've got a health situation.)

Considering voting Republican, ladies? I'd certainly hope not.

You know those awful Bratz dolls, right? Huge eyes and lips but no noses, huge heads over tiny bodies with twiggy limbs and exaggerated curves, and enough makeup to make a stereotypical streetwalker proud?

Welp, Barbie just pwned them. Or Mattel did. Seems the guy who came up with the trashy pieces of plastic did so while under contract with Mattel--so the company that actually made them, MGA Entertainment, has been doin' wrong. And they just got legally smited for it.

Now, I'm no fan of Barbie either--but in comparison to the even more warped female image put forth by Bratz, Barbie's practically 110% girl power.

~~

Wanna kill a few hours? Or figure out the origins of all those weird references that get bounced about various forums, cons, and Anonymous picketings? Then go look at the Internet Memes timeline. :D Though in all seriousness, it's not nearly as addictive as tvtropes.org.

But speaking of odd references: Everyone needs to watch this video. Even if you don't like stoned hippies, watch it--because otherwise you won't understand when I start going on something about "DON'T YOU KNOW, I GOT A LEG!"


And because life wouldn't be complete unless I shared this one too:

( Link-heavy ramblings on the FLDS and its multiple violations of human rights. )