Kaesa

So I finished coloring the thestral drawing! I might go back and add details (raggedy wings and battle scars) and a background. But not right now.


Medieval Auror on Thestral by ~KaesaAurelia on deviantART

Clio is wearing her Aura Aurelia uniform, which is paid for by Lady Aeaeae and thus is in Aeaeae colors. In the fic, Clio assures Godric that pink and blue aren't her colors. They were in fact so not her colors (see also) that I decided to use yellow and dark red. The blue, being symbolic of a.) femininity, b.) the Aegean Sea, and c.) Lady Aeaeae being richer than Hades, was not negotiable. (Thanks for putting up with me, thinkatory.)

Her wand is made of hazel wood. Based on the Pottermore descriptions of wandwoods, I was going to go with either cypress or hazel. Hazel has some interesting properties when its owner is under stress, and while they aren't useful in a peacetime context, I feel like they might be advantageous in battle.

I'm coloring the Clio-on-a-thestral drawing I did. Mostly done with the thestral's body; it's taking a long-ass time because I shade as I color, and also because, well, this is the first big thing I've ever colored. (The actual file is much larger.) Also, it's the first equine thing I've really sat down and tried to draw right, I think. The fact that thestrals are skeletal actually makes it easier, because I have absolutely no excuse not to look up equine skeletal structure.)

( Largish picture of a woman riding a giant death-horse. )

It occurs to me that I have no idea if the way I've attached the wings to the horsey scapula would work, and how it would influence galloping during takeoff and landing. Then I say to myself, "Kaesa, the thing has hardly any goddamn muscles in its legs. I DON'T THINK YOU HAVE TO WORRY ALL THAT MUCH ABOUT AERODYNAMICS."

Also, Clio's thestral, in case you were wondering, is named Barbara, after Barbara Wright, Slayer of Daleks.

So apparently it's Domestic Violence Awareness Month, which I didn't know until today. But as it turns out I have something to say anyway.

( TRIGGER WARNING FOR PHYSICAL AND EMOTIONAL ABUSE )

WHAT. I GOT STUCK IN GRYFFINDOR.

THIS IS NOT OKAY.

I AM BEREFT. WHAT ABOUT HUFFLEPUFF? ALSO, NO EXTRA HOUSE-Y CONTENT FOR MEEEE. I COULD HAVE SETTLED FOR RAVENCLAW! RAVENCLAW WOULD BE OKAY.

NOT THAT THERE IS ANYTHING WRONG WITH GRYFFINDOR, JUST, I AM PATENTLY OBVIOUSLY NOT ONE.

So I've been kind of absent from my friendslist and fandom for a bit, partly because thinkatory was here this weekend, but mostly because Netflix decided that a bunch of stuff that I wanted to watch would be expiring on Instant, and it seemed like a good way to pass the time while I was sick and not really good at concentration. (I'm getting better.)

ANYWAY what I'm really making this post about is POTTERMORE. I finally got my account set up! I'm CloakThestral111, and if you would like to be friends on Pottermore and have your username (even if you can't sign on yet), tell me your name and I'll add you.

Also, if I don't get into Hufflepuff I'm going to be somewhat upset. Cross your fingers for me!

Brief Life Update:

I have acute bronchitis! It sucks. I've had it for a little over a week now. Heavy-duty drugs are dulling the symptoms somewhat. The adverse effects of what I'm taking (if I overdosed) include "mental confusion and hallucination, restlessness and tremors, followed in extreme cases by convulsions and death." Kitty, Liz and I agreed that this is basically a normal day for the Doctor. Have been calling the drugs spectrox.

My boss is having trouble with the sale of his congregation's church, as there's some document from the 1870s that was never recorded with the Recorder of Deeds and they can't find anywhere in their files that the title company wants to see so they can cover their asses, as is the title company way. We hypothesize that sometime soon, my boss will get a hold of a TARDIS, go back to when they were putting said document away, and beg them for a copy right away. It being pre-Xerox-machine, they then give him their only copy, fail to record it, and that's why no one can find the damn thing.

Work has been crazy busy after the summer lull. (I know this isn't true, but sometimes I imagine that the colder it gets the more likely people are to file for divorce rather than just leave the house.)

Writing has been... slow, what with being exhausted and coughing up my lungs. I did manage to write a nice little scene where Rowena is having a really bad day, but that's most of what I write, isn't it? Poor Rowena. This time it's not something I can blame her for at all.

I owe a small fortune to the Chicago Public Library. Also, I'm halfway through Carter Beats the Devil. It's really good so far, but fair warning, it has depressing themes (suicide, death and depression mostly) so avoid it if you're avoiding those things.

I joined a gym, but then came down with the aforementioned bronchitis, so haven't been very much yet. It felt good to exercise again, though.

I've been watching Veronica Mars! I'm halfway through Season 2. I often like it, but then sometimes it pisses me off in a creepy rape culturey way. I feel like a lot of fannish people thought VM was TV's gift to feminism, and I like Veronica as a character, but I feel like she's presented as an Exceptional Woman^* and that makes me hesitate; I like that Veronica is smart and resourceful, but not that she's the only smart, resourceful girl in a school full of ditzy girls and guys who fall all over the spectrum. (Okay, there's Mac, but she's not a regular and she's not involved in relationship drama as far as we've seen. Also, that episode where she found out she was switched at birth and found out her rich ~*real family*~ were way smarter and nicer thank her poor ~*fake family*~ was really fucking offensive.) Also, can we stop with the Tragically Flat-Chested jokes already? Jeez.

* I can't find a good link about this, but basically the Exceptional Woman is the woman who is depicted as "not like those other women." She doesn't possess certain negative or frivolous qualities thought to be shared by most women, so she's worthy of being treated like a regular human being -- you know, like a man. Liking girly things shouldn't make you worth less in the eyes of society, but unfortunately, even as un-girly girls get told they're doing femininity wrong, girly girls get told they're doing humanity wrong, and that's why I find the Exceptional Woman stereotype so distasteful. There is, of course, nothing wrong with being a woman who's exceptional at what she does.

This was not supposed to happen in my Founderfic.

Everyone is in harbor in Hull on a boat made out of trees and a seige tower that's bigger on the inside. This is sort of the good news, because, as I think I mentioned, they'd been in Norway for the longest time. Now they have to get back to Hogwarts. While evading the Aurae.

The bad news is that everyone has managed to piss off everyone else, which is the part that wasn't supposed to happen. I have this party of seven people and the only two people who are still on good terms are Helga and Basil. Because Helga is lying to Basil, and Basil is pretending not to notice, and neither of them have seen each other for a longish time, so, yeah.

So now I'm having trouble picking a PoV that will adequately let me skim over all the stupid little arguments that the characters will be having to keep from having the major arguments as they flee for their lives. Augh. I'm going to try Helga. She's a liar but she's also sensible.

What do you do when a plotline becomes a great big knot of ridiculous and you worry you're turning into Robert Jordan? I mean, aside from editing the fuck out of it when you're done writing it.

I am trying to draw Clio Sheffield, Dark Action Girl, riding a thestral. It's not working so good.

Dear J. K. Rowling: congratulations! You win the World's Hardest Animal to Draw award for thestrals. Thestrals, if you're not familiar with them, are skeletal winged horses with reptilian features, which are also invisible if you've never witnessed and dealt with death. The invisibility makes them pretty easy to draw, actually, but if you're trying to draw from the PoV of someone who's seen death, aspects that are really hard to draw include:

• HOW THE FUCK DO THE WINGS ATTACH TO THE SHOULDERS? This is a problem with regular winged horses, but less so, because you can kind of hide it all in muscle, which thestrals don't have much of.


• The reptillian features. How extensive are these?


• Again with the wings: Sure they have one toe on each foot, but how many "fingers" does a hexapodal flying equine have on each wing?


• What the fuck kind of saddle would someone who regularly rode thestrals be using? What about the other tack?


• ...I'm taking a few seconds to be distracted by the hilarious mental image of Clio being yelled at by my childhood riding teacher for being terrible at posting. Aaand we're back.


• HOW THE FUCK DID THESTRALS EVOLVE ANYWAY?


• Okay that's not really a drawing question, is it?


• FUCK THIS, I think I'm just going to draw Clio riding Rainbow Dash.


• 

... I feel 20% better.

ETA: ( RAINBOOOOOOOW JEEEEEEEENKIIIIIIIIINS!!! )

Tablet update, because I know you are all totally waiting for more terrible art:

( Finished and colored Godric, and Rowenasketch. )

So I got a tablet! Um. I'm not really a very good artist, but I hope to improve.

( Pictures! )

Apropos of absolutely nothing, this is so cool:



I don't have a thinky post to write about it. I just like machines that fly.

Is there a reason people in action movies are always so willing to go along with Shady Dude Protag when he offers them a ridiculous amount of money to do a simple-sounding errand? If someone is desperately throwing ten thousand dollars at me to take a package to the post office, I'm going to ask whether the package is full of drugs, smallpox, or just the Maltese Falcon. I feel like this is basic common sense. (Netflix is allowing me to catch up on all the action movies I missed out on while I was being raised by wolves. Terminator was actually really good. I seriously had no idea.)

Totally unrelated to the above, I've been reading a lot of blog posts on Google+ and its terrible pseudonym policy.^* I probably won't use Google+ because I dislike social media sites, largely because they generally require the use of real names and I don't want to share ALL my thoughts with ALL the people in my social circle. (The other reason I don't like social media sites is that frankly I do not care about 99% of the things my social circle post on, say, Facebook, but it was hard for me to filter irrelevant stuff out and I haven't gone back to see if it's improved any. Also, in my experience, they don't care about 99% of the things I end up doing when I use Facebook, so really, why bother?) It sounds like Google is getting half of that right -- I do like the circles idea -- but the other half, the real names thing, is apparently not working out.

I'm Kaesa on the internet, which is super convenient because my real name isn't memorable in the least, and because I don't really want my mom finding my writing. If I ever sell any fiction for publication, I will probably use a penname, because, again, my real name isn't memorable, and it also isn't aesthetically pleasing written down or said aloud, and yes, I don't really want my mom finding my writing. At work and with family, obviously, I go by my given name, which is, paradoxically, both unmemorable and rare, so I do try not to look like an idiot on the internet while using that name. Technically, I also try not to look like an idiot when using this name, but "looking like an idiot" varies widely from employer to employer, so not looking like one generally means just not being particularly active. (Fittingly, one of the things my current boss thinks is idiotic is using a pseudonym on the internet. HE'LL NEVER FIND ME! But he has terrible Google-fu anyway.)

Anyway, in reading the blog posts, I'm struck by a.) the number of people who keep saying there are no good/valuable internet communities that operate without real names and b.) the amount of people equating having a pseudonym means being anonymous. I mean, do the people reading this feel anonymous? Because I sure don't.

*Geek Feminism has a pretty good group of recent posts on this stuff if you're unfamiliar with it.

Dear Escape Pod forumgoers:

Sometimes, an SF story will have more than one female character. I know, I know, why bother, right? Women are all the same! But you guys grin and bear it, because more female characters means more boobies. Then again, sometimes one of the female characters will be a lesbian, or a rape survivor, or transgender, or a person of color, or under the age of fifteen, or over the age of thirty-five, and that is when you all lose your shit.

The thing is, this is not actually a bug. It is a feature. Just because you are a straight guy who can't identify with female characters, especially if they have other areas of marginalization, does not mean the story isn't SF. I get it; you listen to Escape Pod because you like SF stories! So do lots of people! People who might not always be cisgender straight white guys with no experience of rape. If you want a story that speaks to your particular experiences? There are lots out there! Old ones, new ones, ones that are held up as Classics of Western Canon, ones that you can get in any airport with flashy ugly covers -- whatever you like to read, there is a straight white guy story about it. Tons of them are really good, and tons of them are terrible, but there are tons of them.

Also, believe it or not, you, as a guy, are not fundamentally incapable of identifying with women. I, as a woman, am plenty capable of identifying with dudes. I suffered with Odysseus as he kept getting close to home, and then failing because Poseidon hated his guts or he made a dumbass mistake. I knew the pain of being a complete and total disappointment like Neville did, and I felt for him. I right-click saved those Tyrion slapping Joffrey .gifs just as much as you did because let's face it, we all wanted to be Tyrion that day. I recently got the Iron Man movies from Netflix because, well, Tony Stark is a genius asshole, and who doesn't want to be a genius asshole sometimes? And I am going to cosplay as the Second Doctor this Halloween, because I aspire to be as awesome as him. So deal with it. You can identify with girls. Stories about girls won't give you cooties. Promise.

Anyway, just thought I'd tell y'all what was up with all the stories about icky girls, since you keep asking. And yes, this is why I'm not a member of the forums there, although if I were I'd probably spend more time asking things like "Hey, what's up with all the rape jokes Norm Sherman keeps making and why does he find mockingly threatening listeners with sexual assault hilarious?" and "Why are you all so upset that someone thought an SF story based on an old movie was fanfiction-like? Is fanfiction inherently bad? I think I missed something here, guys, but I am an icky girl, so that's probably normal." It wouldn't go well, is what I'm saying. So I stay out of it.

XOXOXO,
Kaesa

PS: Also, thanks, Escape Pod, for often running good stories which deserve better discussion than they get. You'll never be able to justify that horrible cosmetic-surgery-autism story or that fat-girl-falls-in-love-with-a-twinkie story, but I have to admit, when you're good, you're really, really good.

Also, arguably, my list of male characters is largely genius assholes + Neville. This is worrying.

The next time Rowena gets it into her head to do mental math half-aloud, I am going to write all the equations out before looking up medieval units, rather than stupidly trying to do them in medieval units as I write the dialogue.

The next time Godric loses most of his vocabulary due to extremely clever but also egregiously stupid and dangerous acts of experimental magic, I am going to have Rowena make him do all the math. ...Of course, then they would all die, because he's not very good at math, but that's not my problem until it happens.

HELLO LJ LAND. I just got back from therapy, where I discussed, among other things, the fear I have that I'm one of those people who starts things but never finishes them, and the fact that I actually am pretty close to being done with my Founderfic. (Um, the first in a trilogy. I meant it to be a duology, but structurally it's just not one. Everything's a goddamn trilogy these days. My writing's no exception. Sorry, guys. Hopefully once I'm done writing my Required Fantasy Trilogy I can move on to writing good stuff.)

( I also just got hit on by a really creepy guy! )

I hate replacing the lightbulbs in my kitchen? I'm about two inches too short to do any ceiling-related maintenance even with the stepladder I have, so I have to stack textbooks under the stepladder. (My gen chem+calculus books are this thick, as is The Golden Bough.) The long-term solutions to this are:
a. Get taller.
b. Wait 'til, growing tired of my whining, my friends get Tyrion Lannister to slap me in the face, forcing me to learn to deal with it.
c. Get a bigger stepladder.

I'm going with c. Eventually. Until then we'll see what happens with b.

ANYWAY.

How many genficcers does it take to change a lightbulb?

thinkatory says: "One, but they have to research and build the ladder first."

My answers:

"One to change the bulb, one for her to bitch at later about how no one appreciates her light fixtures."

and my favorite:

"WHY DO YOU PEOPLE ONLY CARE ABOUT NUMBERS? LOTS OF EXCITING THINGS CAN HAPPEN CHANGING A LIGHTBULB!"

... I just spilled an entire test vial of perfume on myself.

GOOD JOB, SELF.

At least it was rose and not something super-sweet and foody, like the last time I did this. Or E. coli, like the time before.

SOOO I just spent the better part of the week watching My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. Despite being the kind of thing I would have shunned as a child (I was very anti-girly-stuff until sometime in college) it charmed the hell out of me and I highly recommend it. PONIES PONIES PONIES! OMG I need a Pinkie Pie icon.

ANYWAY despite both this and my ongoing Quest To Watch All Of Doctor Who, science fail in fiction has been bothering me a whole lot elsewhere. I just read a fic that had Harry Potter explaining cheerfully to Voldemort (..so you know it is not exactly a realistic fic) that nobody knows how ABO blood group phenotypes are passed down. Now, I don't really expect Harry to know how this works but in the fic he'd done reading on it and apparently it was a Great Mystery, when actually it's... really really not.

And now, I am watching Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs (one of my favorite picture books, completely different premise) and the main character is insisting that his machine mutates the DNA of the water into whatever kind of food he wants it to be.

I mean, seriously? I. Just. WHAT. I'm pretty sure I would have caught that even back when I was in the target age group. The message of the film seems to be, broadly, that it's okay to be nerdy, if you're a guy. And if you don't know anything about chemistry.

DW has gotten away with much worse (like, I've lost track of the different kinds of antimatter and antimatter monsters/universes in the Whoniverse), but um, just a PSA, guys: Water doesn't have a genetic code, and if you want to know how blood types work, just fucking google it. I can also explain RNA interference to you FREE OF CHARGE, but nobody writes fiction about that.

If you haven't read it already, The TARDIS is Now Diamonds. I received it Sunday morning in my inbox and let me just say, it is a thing I love.

Also, I really like The Chicago Code, only I watch it as a fantasy show and pretend it's in an imaginary world. Which, considering I live here and recognize a lot of the neighborhoods? It's a little weird. But, like, the politics are interesting and yet totally fantasy-ish. It's like how in cliched fantasy the heroes don't have any plans for what's going to happen in the ensuing power vacuum after they vanquish the evil overlord. As if corrupt aldermen just exist in a vacuum. Because Chicago politics isn't full of opportunists, I guess. So, basically, it's heroic fantasy.

On the other hand, the way the CPD is depicted in it make the Aurae Aurelii in my Foundersverse look super professional. I am sure the local cops are just thrilled about that.

Speaking of which, been working on that again. Started the week off at 120,292 words, wrote 1,005 last night. Posting a small excerpt; there are thus vague spoilers behind the cut:

( Helga and Rowena talk about their adventures. )

So I've got a deeply awful cold, and for two days in a row my boss has sent me home early, to rest.

Except instead of resting I made femme!Doctor outfit sets for every Doctor I'd seen all of. (Just finished watching Castrovalva, and haven't settled in to Five yet.) I tend to err on the side of fitting the character or the look rather than the original version of the costume, but I think I did pretty well.

I think the first two are still my favorite outfits.