My Illustrative Life

First, your favourite e-vice and mine nogoodforme posted (by way of Gatochy and clair_voyant) this among many amazing 1960s make-up adverts. Then, a character sketch went wrong and turned into an Eastenders-worthy slaaaag. And then I became attached to her, as you do (those tarts with ‘(e)arts!), so I drew’er mor an’ mor.

An’ naw I fink she’s GAWJUS! And ripe for the drawing-with-a-paintbrush practice, because I am bum at that. As you can see. Those first two faces looked good before I ruined them, honest.. guv..

I cannot get enough of the “can’t make tea/can play darts = AWFUL FEMALE” idea. It’s so baffling that it dazzles me!

NOTE: I’m basically still offline! But I wrote this, and transfered it to a computer that can get online, so, here it is.. for YOU.

>((Cross your fingers for me to be able to get my BSB colum up the day after tomorrow, huh?))

I used to watch Ocean Girl

Actually, I used to watch Ocean Odyssey, because I am Bri’ish. But the show was Australian, and in Australia it was known as Ocean Girl.

I read it, too; there was a cinemanga-style phoo story adaption thing in Girl Talk, which was my favourite magazine. The radest thing about going to the Big Bash in year six was going to the Girl Talk booth and talking to the editor, getting a goodie bag and my nails done.

Ocean Girl was a pretty good show. It was the kind of sci-fi where the speculative aspect of the genre is just an add-on to our current real life, and Australia and New Zealand (something in the air? Or water?) were apparently really good at those from about 1994-2005. According to wikipedia the show was “an example of deep-ecology science fiction” - it was about two boys (both named, as the captain formally addressed them, “Master Bates” I am not kidding) whose mother’s job as a marine biologist demanded that they move to an under-sea research dome lab run-like-a-ship thing. They have to learn to get along in their new environment, in the cramped quarters with the other kids whose parents are ‘on-board’, with having left their friends, with their dastardly father’s absence, blah blah.. but then they also meet Neri, who is magic.

Course, she isn’t just a wizard did it-style magic. She lives alone on an Island, and can talk to a whale (Charlie) and swim underwater for extended periods and is terribly curious about the boys’ world whilst also fearing outside influence. Pretty straightforward Pocahontas-arc stuff, only eventually it turns out that Neri is actually an actual alien, from space. By the end the elder boy and she fall in love.

When it’s written down like that it sounds like just my kind of thing. Emotional drama on a backdrop of futuristic science fiction, with no gratuitous tit-flashing (because, For Kids), with a basically ridiculous premise played straight. Dark Angel, The Tribe, Dekaranger, Buffy, Kamen Rider Anything, The Girl From Tomorrow, classic X-Men, etc etc. And the costuming was good too - Neri wore a dressthing made out of what looked like natural fibres and fishing net, which was perfectly evocative of ‘ocean’ and ‘girl’ and even ‘alien’, really. The boys (and the other kids on the station, who were the gang in the background for use when needed) wore variations on a basic lab-base uniform which got across the whole “suddenly trapped in a military-style world away from home, grasping for identity and personal connection” thing. But somehow.. somehow it never really became “mine”.

You know what I mean when I say “mine”, right? It’s the difference between being a fan, and just tuning in or picking up. You know what I mean.

It kind of bugged me, what was so-called ‘wrong’ with Ocean Girl. It did. It went off-air in 1998 and I think I stopped watching before it finished, but it stayed at the back of my head somewhere. I was curious! But I watched the first eight or so episodes recently, and I think I figured out what my problem was.

Wikipedia, again, says that the show was set “in the near future”. We all, I think, know how poorly vague that can be. But that wasn’t the point here - the point was that the show never contextualises itself that way. That’s not the whole point, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

In August 1994 I was seven, and as a seven year old it didn’t occur to me that underwater bio-dome laboratory stations didn’t actually exist. I didn’t know - I lived in inland England, and I was seven, and I had heard about Atlantis. I knew that science was pretty amazing, and that people had been to space. Sure, people could live underwater. Why not? With that as the only solid suggestion that the timeline on Ocean Girl and the timeline I was living on were out of sync - because I definitely never noticed any dates referenced the first time around, and I gotta say I never noticed any this second time around either - there was no reason for me to think Oh yes, of course, this is set next Sunday A.D. Of course! Culturally, things may be a little different!

That was a problem, because the hairstyles on the base-bound girls in this show were fipping wacky. I’m serious, I am fairly sure that this was the basic reason why I could never really get into OG’s groove. I can’t quite believe how small-minded that makes me look, either.

But see, at seven one is old enough to know about “normal” and “weird”. Honestly I don’t think this is a parental-fail thing - parents don’t know about which trainers are cool, and my parents raised me to not see “cool trainers” as something I was entitled to, but I still knew which ones were cool and that people valued them based on that. I may not have been completely down with omgtrainers or omgcool, but I still felt the pull of cool trainers. Y’know? Am I sounding totally well excuuuse me princess about being a judgemental asshole (at seven)?

It’s nice to see that the [whatever they call character designers on liveaction shows] were doing their job, being creative, experimenting. It’s good that they tried to do a bit of extra world-building. But the script, alas, completely let them down.

In Dune, things are different to now and nothing is explained; it’s just written as if what’s everyday to the characters in their weird drugged-up space-future is everyday to you, the reader - and that’s cool, it’s good, it makes the story larger and realer and engages you all over the shop. But in Dune, it’s more than just “Paul woke up in his perfectly normal bed, put on his perfectly normal trousers and shirt, went through the perfectly normal automatic door to the bathroom and looked in the mirror at his COMPLETELY BATTY ENORMOUS SQUARE BOUFFANT WHICH LOOKED CRAZY. He mused on how utterly usual everything was, especially his hair, which he never mentioned to anyone ever.”

Do you get my drift Ocean Girl?

I’ll show you pictures, now.

Mark, please - there are three characters here. One of theme is batshit bonkers in the locks department, two are merely real-world unusual and what you might call bold. If I saw them alone, or in real life, I wouldn’t squint at them or wonder what their game was! I’d think, you rock that puff lady, right on. They wouldn’t unsettle or throw me out of a story in just about any other circumstances. It’s just the volume of unusual that’s here, all crammed together, never mentioned, discussed, spotlit or even lampshaded.. there’s a kid with a fringe cut in steps, too, and a boy whose details I have forgotten but who again alone would look interesting and individual, but packed with the rest makes/made me want to shout EXPLAIN! EXPLAIN! TELL ME WHAT IS GOING ON because I know that that isn’t what you’d get if you just took a bunch of people!

It’s a SQUARE, just on her head. Why.

If you are going to evidence cultural shift, even ‘just’ visually, you need to note that your story is not set now or kids like me, who pick up on patterns but are too young to quite articulate or realise the questions forming due to them will just not be all that into your show. And it will bug them to all heck, maybe for twelve years.

Then I guess they’ll write a blog post about it, and maybe someone will read that and think “I remember that show, I loved it. I think I will buy the dvds RIGHT NOW” let me know if that’s YOU, so maybe my tirade is all in vain, and it’s actually a pretty good long-term marketing strategy.. ..?

It’s still really annoying though.

Happy watching, ocean girls and boys.

Y’all, I know I haven’t written anything very thinky for an age, and it’s not that I have not been thinkING or that I have changed focuses here on this blog! I am just (always have been) really bad at finding the focus/botheration to start my brain firing into TextEdit when I’m all “but i HAVE BEEN to work today, give me a BREAK, I need to find BALANCE and I have MY OWN THINGS TO SORT OUT” in the back of my head. Just ask my old teachers how often I gave them finished homework. I’m sorry, my old teachers. That, and the fact that everything I’ve been working on when I can find the motivation is long-term stuff that isn’t finished yet!

Don’t lose your faith in me. I’m unemployed again (nobody needs a Dinner Lady when all the kids are on holiday), so lots of time to feel like I need to do at least something for society at large.

I’m working on things to make you ponder or inform you, honest. You will get them eventually.

..Not next week though (probably), because I get to go to the beach!

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; 
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him;

Bury him in advice!

Advice the first:

When you are cycling through fields in summer you DEFINITELY need to wear a face-protecting neckerchief. You see how many bugs are on this sleeve? The black specks. Imagine that many bugs flying into your face. That’s no fun. Only once I forgot my necker, and it.. was pretty terrible. You can feel them hit your lips.

Advice the second:

Even if you buy a second-hand, vintage item that has surely been washed MANY times before - if it is a deep colour.. wash it alone or with (very) like shades. I know, I know! Obvious! But not obvious enough, for me!

Things that used to be white:

This shirt - luckily the only non-pants item that wasn’t something of mine - used to be a delicate pink to match the buttons.. I’m sure my dad likes lilac, though. Probably.

There was a pair of pants in this was that went from green to purple. That was a strong purple pill!

Advice the third:

When a nine year old peels off from the pack of nine-ten-eleven year olds who have already sassed you several times and runs across a field apparently expressly for the purpose of telling you you should “get a better hat”, Caesar, I want you to remember this - you should drink down that fine old vinegar-wine of oh yes, that’s how it feels to know that people want to belittle you because they’re uncomfortable with your wardrobe. I remember and savour the fact that it’s a vintage unpleasantness. Not one that can currently spoil your day. In a minute, you’ll catch a glimpse of your reflection in a french window and you’ll think DAMN, I’m looking GOOD.

And you’ll be right!

Oh, and don’t forget to bend down to his or her eye level, give him a Paddington stare, and say “And maybe YOU shouldn’t be so rude“. If you don’t tell them, how will they learn? That is the kind of thing you need to nip in the bud.. before they grow up into full-blown users of “negging“. That would really make the world a poorer place.

Wise words from a decent dude. You seem pretty great, Jay Smooth.

You seem like a fugitive rapist, Polanski.

Yesterday I was a jailbird, today I am the fuzz. American fuzz, anyway. Highway police? Or something? Do they (you?) say “the fuzz” there? Well I am, because then I get to be the “peach fuzz”. Because of the colour of my shirt. My beloved said, before I doctored the picture, that I looked like I had been raised to kill by Jean Reno. But I only loose my bullets if the crims shoot first, man.

For comparison, please see Nicholas Cage in the beginning of this review. Then watch the rest, because it is funny.

You’re welcome.

(No I didn’t have it tied in a knot when I was at work)

Wikipedia says that the claim to ‘care’ is sarcastic, and then it quotes Chuck Mosley as saying Well, ah Roddy wrote all the things that he cared about and I just wrote the part that says, “it’s a dirty job but someone’s gotta do it” ’cause I figured that’s just the feeling I got, which sounds the opposite of sarcastic to me.

But when I listen to this song, I just take it straight because it’s how it always sounded to me. I care a lot. This song is the sound of me, having been in charge of twenty-one four and five year olds who just don’t care to be nice to each other, or to listen to me, or to be safe, or to take turns at needing a grown-up because I CAN’T BE EVERYWHERE AT ONCE - thinking it is fucking hard to set a consistent good example. But since I only have them for an hour and twenty minutes every day there is really no excuse for letting things slide, letting them off from bullying and endangering and exclusion and disrespect and all the worst things about current society’s interpersonal relations.

It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it, and I care a lot.

Here’s a Mike Patton-led version, because.. why not? I like them both.

Here is the old (”Classic”) version; ‘the bathing suit’:

Here is the new (”boring”) version; ‘the Chick in early 90s gritty cartoon’:

And here is my (”I just drew this in Pixen whilst waiting for my communication technology to work”) version; ‘wrestling is a Greek thing, right?’:

Soooo here is my “me”, from the Scott Pilgrim avatar creator(thanks for the tip, King!). It’s actually not at all bad! No glasses, and not quite enough hair (there were no solid fringes), but! Mix up the three following real-me photos, and what do you get? Pretty sure I have worn this formation at some point. And if I haven’t yet, I will.

Whaddaya think? Bruce?

I show you this because though I haven’t read the Scott Pilgrim comix (yet) (I’ve seen scans, it’s honestly not quite my kind of alley, bookwise) I think the film looks pretty interesting. And definitely the kind of movie that should be encouraged! It looks more fun and honest-hearted than most of the Big Two comic movies, f’rex. I like how.. semi-crappy it looks? And a romantic interest/leading lady with hair that an on-the-street Average can achieve (as long as she has the texture for it) is a big plus. Trailer:

So there you go. This movie has the IllusClaire nod of considered approval. Go see it; demand funk the music* instead of funk the smell.

*Not implying that there will be funk in this movie

I just want you to know that even though having weighed the fact that I’m not belittling anyone, or insulting anyone, or demanding anything and that hearing someone say that they also have these problems would have meant something to me when I was younger (or now, actually) - and the encouragement to bite the bullet from my honey and some of my fine twitter peeps - posting this makes me feel very very guilty. Because.. the stereotype goes, women are supposed to ‘want’ to be ‘thin’? Because being ‘a thin person’ I have, like, the metaphorical official celebrity/body image media seal of potential approval? Because of fucked up insecurity-sells ingrained societal bullshit, basically. I would never, ever, ever post this unsolicited in size acceptance forums. I’m not including demonstrative pictures because I’m wary of becoming ‘thinspiration’. If I sound like a major jackass? Please, tell me. Right. Here goes.

Let’s talk again about how I hate summer clothes, shall we? Because they don’t fit me? Good. That will be fun.

I am never going to try to convince anybody that people individually and ‘the fashion industry’ at large treat thin people (or genetically average short people) worse than fat people*, or people with bodies that otherwise differ from the so-called norm. That would be ridiculous and cruel. I’m not suggesting that my problems are worse than anyone’s. But since this here is my space, I do get to tell you about how it sucks to be too small to find clothes that fit. You can listen or not, as you please. Please beware of triggers if you’re susceptible; female body image stuff can be volatile.

The gist of it is: it sucks to be too small to be able to find clothes that don’t say to your body “Oi oi, fellas, you’re not quite right here. I think I’ll swamp you and drag you, and make you feel like you’re treading water in your own garments.”

Going on clothes alone - the societal judgement aspects can probably wait for another day, I am way to zoned out to dip my toes in that acidic pool just yet - I’m pretty sure we can all relate to not being able to find an item of clothing that fits. You know, that doesn’t restrict or choke you, doesn’t bunch up in uncomfortable places or blouse out where it would feel and look better to cling, doesn’t need to be tugged down or hitched up, doesn’t get in the way of your other clothes, doesn’t ride up/down/around.. clothes that work for your body and your psyche, not against them.

It’s hard for an industry to predict, of course - people are of all different dimensions. And it’s probably hard for most people a lot of the time- truly, I don’t forget that.

But I’m talking about me, and I know for a fact that it’s hard, for me! Very almost ALL of the time! So quit rolling your eyes and let me vent, OK?

No matter how much I like and enjoy and feel lucky and thankful to be in the body that I have - and believe me, I do - the fact remains that mainstream, highstreet clothes (or.. any clothes I have ever found when I say a thing “fits perfectly” I mean “it doesn’t cause me extreme irritation the minute I put it on” aren’t made for me. It’s worst in summer, because nothing is as stretchy and forgiving as a knitted sweater (FUCK T-SHIRTS and their rigid ways!). And that pisses me off! Not that I feel personally slighted, exactly - I know it’s not done specifically to defy me. Nevertheless, it does defy me, and puts me out, and like any thwarted warlord that makes me shout.

When I was in the first few years of high school, it was just that I was littler than the average range of women and teens, so to find clothes that didn’t make people mistake me for an actual nine year old - I also look young in the face, yay you may think this would be flattering or whatever but when you are twenty two and multiple (multiple!) people TELL YOU they mistook you for twelve, well, get back to me on that, and try not to look sour) - I mostly wore tops designed for kids aged four to six, so that they were tight and my belly showed. “Like a teenager”, 1998 - 2001. That just.. didn’t feel good, you know? When all your friends are talking about their bras and buying things from the shops in J17 spreads and saying “I feel so fat” like it’s a badge of grown-up womanhood’s honour.. “Hey, look at me, I’m a tiny stunted juvenile weirdo”. Only I didn’t HAVE to say look at me, because people were already saying “you’re so small, wowww!” and “she’s so thin, look” and “God, you’re so skinny, it’s not fair”, and “whisper whisper whisper *point*”.

No, it isn’t fair - I can’t do anything about it any more than you can. It’s not my fault and it doesn’t get me anything. It doesn’t mean you don’t hear the adverts saying “you could be slimmer!” or that you don’t have to teach yourself not to think “I look bulgy” or “I should be more streamlined” - because literally every healthy body has some skin or fat on it that can form folds no matter how small, and folds, sez lying traitorous ladymedia, R BAD. You get quotes from Gwyneth Paltrow** or Eva Mendez*** about how “even I feel fat sometimes” and people become so scathing - yeah, I am a little too, because that’s a cack-eyed harmful way to say it when you’re in the public eye (and lauded as being so beautiful). But I understand - the current capitalist world is built to make everyone feel like they aren’t good enough, that every bloat is death fat, that if you fail at meeting these mad stats of perfection for even a second then you fail forever. I remember thinking that way. There’s no haven for thin people in the world of celebrity diet judging; every one of us needs to work honestly at making our own republic of heaven.

The only times I heard about those paragons of thinness, professional models, back then in school, was when people (real people, TV, magazines) talked about what a bad influence they were what with their attractiveness and necessary eating disorders and all - because people can’t naturally be that thin!

Hearing that your natural body essentially enforces the patriarchy and apparently causes your peers to feel inescapably inferior and that you’re unnatural and freakish is, actually, not all that fun. FYI.

Now I am big enough that I can wear clothes designed for average-range adults, by which I mean that they will not actually fall off of me if I put them on (and tall enough that I’m only an inch or so below the upper height requirement for ‘petite’). And that’s pretty nice! But it would be nicer if every shop carried ‘my size’ (they don’t; it’s nice (SARCASM) to know I’m still small enough to be weird), and hey, let’s go crazy - it would be SUPER nice if ‘my size’ fitted my lumpen protrusions in so that I could WEAR ‘my size’ instead of a size up which leaves me swimming and feeling like goblins are grasping my shadow. The back width, the arm circumference, the waist; when these are too wide, the excess fabric gets in the way and grinds. And honestly, to avoid that.. I’d really rather not wear an item that fits in the places I have bones but otherwise makes me look like I’m trying to spill my fleshy privacy all over your desk. Comparatively small stature’d people can have lumps and bumps and shapes of variety too, y’know? Bravissimo’s band sizes go down to twenty-eight, if you get what I’m saying.

Look, I’m not saying that this is the worst problem ever. That there are such things as the concept of “fit” and “clothing sizes” at all tells me I’m not capriciously making a mountain out of a molehill, though - you can feel it when something doesn’t fit you. It irritates all day in little ways.

Here’s some trivia: my Primary School nickname was “Titch”. Being small - but not medically small, because that would be a different matter altogether - is an unremovable part of my public identity nowadays; it goes without saying for me. Still not for other people, natch, but for me. It’s drummed in. I’m normal enough that I really can’t reasonably complain (berate me), but I’m too small for people I don’t know not to remark upon it. And for clothes to fit me! That’s what I’m talking about, right, right.

I guess by this point the being used to it works against me - I bring it (some of it) on myself: being a short person I should be buying from the racks marked “Petite”. My shoulder to waist measurement is fifteen inches. According to the internet, that’s shoulder to underboob on your average lady. Normal-people clothes are too long and shape-moulded in the wrong places, I really can’t deny that. But I have never bought anything from the short-person selection.

You see, even when they’re in evidence I have never taken Petite ranges seriously, because I have never passed a Petite rack or section that didn’t make me think “but I am not a forty-two year old physically graceful life-long academic with shoulder length honey brown hair who was born in Italy and is now married to an English (or, possibly, Welsh) policeman!”.

This lady that I see also wears minimal pink lipstick, and those necklaces made of coloured thread with small rock beads tied in various places; multiple-strand. She’s kind but stern, and speaks softy but with force, wears moccasins, and sometimes a headband. She’s middle-class rich and was a “bohemian” in her university years. I like her fine. She is nothing like me.

That is a trouble. I need to look harder if I want the right to rail against injustice knowledgably. I suppose I need to buckle down and do some in-depth research. It looks like Topshop has a short people range.. that’s made up mostly of tops.. which also feature in the normal-sized people ‘cropped’ range. Nice. Are they cheating by using the same garments for both(cropped for normal people, normal-length for short torsos?), or do they have a version that is petite-cropped too? Of course, either way, the size chart lines up crazy, they charge a minimum £18 for t-shirts embellished with old-t-shirt fake wear&tear, and everything I have bought from Topshop has gotten (non-purposeful) holes in quick smart. I wonder how easy it is to find petite stuff second-hand?

Wull, ’til I win the job lottery, guess I’d better get used to chopping the bottoms off of and sewing elastic into the back of my shirts.

That’ll look nice.

Fuckin’ clothes. What are they good for?

**I use the term “fat people” because that’s favoured by a lot of the pluz-sized size acceptance advocates that I read the most.
**This one from years ago I particularly, clearly remember, because I could see something wrong about it but I wasn’t sure what, and I compared my body to hers in the mirror afterwards
***I am actually not 100% sure on this. I like Eva Mendez, she seems a fun person. She was good in Hitch.

I live in England, specifically in Warwickshire. I have done since I was eight, and I love it here. It’s beautiful. Until recently, I hadn’t heard about the ‘controversy’ going on in another part of my county: Meriden. The ‘exact center of England’. Oh, and also the birthplace of Napalm Death! Nice. What’s happening there right now is that a great many of the villagers have “banded together” to protest a local-living man’s use of the land that he owns; he wants to build a permanent travelers’ camp. The land is green belt land.

You can read more about this here, here and here if you would like. There is also a very good report on the Travelers’ Times here.

Full disclosure: Every now and then, I think about movies I have seen that feature people credited as or referred to as “gypsies” and I think, wow, they were dressed in a way I found really cool. I’d like to dress that way. The fashion industry backs me up; ‘gypsy style’ is a periodical summer staple. And then I feel guilty and callous, for culturally objectifying and potentially appropriating the modes of a classification of people who are treated extremely poorly by people I know (please never say “gyppo” to or near me) and by my country (and just about EVERY country, it seems). Then I go online, and try to find out about the factual histories and present times of travelers.

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This time, I went through here, here, here and here as well as here which sent me to the Travelers’ Times Online, linked above.

In case you didn’t follow the TTO link before to the article about the situation in Meriden, here’s the video report:

Noah’s Ark from Travellers Times on Vimeo.

Natural beauty being bulldozed and planning permission laws being flouted are bad, or at least not good. That’s true. But do you know what is worse? RACISM. YOU FUCKS.

People can say “I’m not a racist” all they like. That doesn’t make it true. Even if, as a white person, having an asian dentist were proof that one had no prejudice at all against any kind of asians, that still wouldn’t be the final word on whether or not one was any kind of racist. I’m pretty sure that there are people who are totally great with, say, ethnic Jews and black Caribbeans but make foul remarks based upon their beliefs about, for example, Pakistanis or the Japanese. “Coloured people” (ouch) are not one monolith of unwhiteenglishness. And ‘being able to pass for white’ does not mean that a person is white, in the sense of being ‘not of another race’.

There’s also the arguable difference between racism and xenophobia and cultural prejudice and ethnic-religious prejudice. Personally I am not sure that there’s much use in differentiating, but as a white person raised atheist-Christian in Church of England schools, I may be missing something important in the distinctions. Is there sense in calling a white English geographically settled person racist for being against, say, white Irish travelers? I would say yes; I think that there’s enough of a similarity in the dismissal of a lifestyle and heritage someone is born to to make racism and ethnocentrism effectively synonymous.

But as - I just checked, I missed it the first time whilst chopping onions - it says in the video, the travelers in question are Roma. They are an ethnic minority here. They are an ethnic inority everywhere. They are members of a race that is not in power. So all quibbles here become moot.

Did you note the sentence structure and inflection in the woman’s interview section, in the video? The “them” and “us”? They should have to follow the same laws as we all have to. That’s some hardcore sub-radar othering, lady.

The first man interviewed really stresses the word “pretty”! He’s implicitly saying, with that and the rest of his speech, that these people will bring ugliness. Necessarily.

The old guy straight-up says that if it were he who had an identical planning permission overstep, there would not be this outrage. One of the news articles I linked noted that the villagers themselves were breaking laws with the placement of their protest - so it can’t be simple illegality which has got their goat about this settlement.

A year or so ago, I had discovered Yahoo! answers, and was going crazy with finding questions I could answer. Then I ran across a boy who was dating an Italian girl, and who wanted to meet her parents I think. Or, no, maybe he had met her mother and experienced a poor reception. His question was, he wanted to know, was it because he was Roma - did Italy have bad history with Roma people? Now I cannot resist the opportunity to help along a romance. So I googled, and I found this, where “Italy’s highest appeal court has ruled that it is acceptable to discriminate against Roma on the grounds that they are thieves”. And I found this; “Gypsies in Italy protest prejudice”. And I found out about the fire that was set to Roma settlements in Naples in 2008.

Later in the year I somehow ended up on ONTD reading through this thread. The subject of the original post is Madonna being booed for preaching equality and acceptance at a concert with Gogol Bordello in Bucharest. The subject of a lot, and I mean a lot of the comment threads are more detailed looks at how and why gypsies face prejudice in various parts of the world; a lot of these threads start or build with someone saying “but no you guys THEY LITERALLY ARE ALL THIEVES, so it is OK!”. Then these people get schooled by wiser members of their community, but often? They just keep on keepin’ on, ignoring the fact that blind prejudice makes you a dick, rather than your opponent a(n un)worthy victim. It’s an interesting thread. Horrifying, but interesting.

The point is, that all this information isn’t hard to find. Roma people (if I’m saying this wrong, please forgive me and if you’re willing teach me better) are subjected to widespread racism. They suffered pretty darn badly in the Holocaust too, did you know that?

Irish travelers are recognised as an ethnic group here and don’t fare well, either.

I have never, as far as I know, met anybody who lives either partially or completely nomadically or anyone with immediate Roma heritage - as I mentioned earlier the only reason I started thinking about their (your?) lives at all was because when I was maybe six I saw a movie where the romantic lead was ‘a gypsy’ I’m sorry - I really cannot tell if this is an acceptable word for me to use or not. I’m trying to use it only when referencing where it’s been used already and he, his sisters and ex-girlfriend all wore outfits that I wanted– and because Gogol Bordello seem like the coolest people in maybe the entire world. Nothing rests on my doing this research. I am not in the dilemma of “should I go and protest against people (who want to have somewhere to live) being allowed to have somewhere to live, or not?”. And yet - I found this information. In one afternoon, using one search engine, I found all of these news items about the victimisation of a race and of a lifestyle throughout the whole of Britain and mainland Europe. It was not hard; a non-computer literate person could go to the library and say “I need to find some information” and the librarian could point them towards google.

There is no excuse for these protesters.

You can’t gather a posse, saying “I don’t want these people here”, ignoring the persecution they and their brothers and sisters face in multiple countries (right up to government level!), and then fall back and say - “But I’m not racist. I’ve got nothing against them personally”.

You know what? I’m just going to go there and say it. If you can’t manage to not express this kind of wholesale rejection at adults? Think of the children. Please.

Do you care more about planning rules and a single field and, I don’t know, a slight potential fluctuation in property value (are you planning on moving? To a new home? Oh, lucky you), than in the right of a child to be brought up in a place that doesn’t treat her like an eyesore, a criminal and an unwelcome nuisance before they see her as a person? If you do, reader: I judge you.

“I don’t choose to live like this. I was born to live like this.” Said the man who owns the land in dispute.

This makes me feel like bursting.

I hope you win Meriden, travelers. I really really do.

Today what I did, was I sat in the garden watching Sweet Valley High and writing up blog posts for Waterscape and getting lightly sun-altered. Then, I removed a very young blackbird from my house,

..and let out a full-grown one from the living room. Which was exciting! And then, I watched some more Sweet Valley High and did drawing practice.. with some X-Men fanart. Including the below!

This is the series I want to be reading right now. Well, actually, I maybe want to be reading the new vampire X-Men arc? I do heaaaaaart Marvel vampires, generally. But I am unkeen to touch modern Rogue/Remy interaction, because they won’t let them be happy aughhhhh.

BUT MY POINT. My point is, my favourite type of Wolverine is kid-mentor Wolverine. Growing up with the 90s series — [pause for most excellent intro]

– I always subliminally knew that Wolverine was There For Me. Or, you know, would be if he were “real”. Jubilee was a character I resented and disliked at the time (love her now!), but she served her purpose for child-me - Logan was protective of her as a girlchild, and I was one too, so I related to the character of Wolverine as a protector. When I meet or walk past muscular hairy grouchy older dudes, I have in the back of my mind, he’s looking out for me rather than eee he’s maybe scary. That’s good. That makes me a more secure person.

So it makes me sad, and eye-roll-y, that Wolvie’s biological son (I’m not forgetting the adopted daughter, she’s there too, she and Laura are just out getting groceries in the pic above) is not someone with whom he has a loving and healthy relationship. I really want that to be so! I want all of Logan’s kids to be able to look up to him and live in some great hand-built cabin and BE A FAMILY, DARN IT. People are bored as shit with xtreeeeeeeeeeeeme on-every-team Wolverine - lets bring him back to his roots (kind of his roots). Just some guy, struggling with his past, trying to make the world better for the children who depend on him.

Also I just really enjoy Daken’s design (remember how I approve of Mohawks?), feel that bisexual characters need a wider and less evil-creepy representation, and HATE CHARACTERS HAVING “RAPE” AS THEIR SUPERPOWER.

He has pheremones, you know. That he manipulates people with. Sexually. Vom.

I just want my favourite characters to be HAPPY. Is that so much to ask?

Sometimes, you notice patterns.

And even if you don’t mind - or even like - the individual examples..

The trend (inclusivity and exclusivity) can really get your goat.

When this happens to me, I foight tha powahhh by setting up the H.M. Armed Forces: Enemy Fighter I gave my sister for christmas and doin’ this.

All I’m asking for is a little equality, world. I realise I shouldn’t have drawn him white.

—

Doodlebugs! Idle pen-movements whilst watching the StarTV Transformers dub and my X-Men VHS tapes.

For some reason I can only draw moomins if I make them really old and sinister!

“Life drawing” hahaha NOT EASY FROM VIDEO

So what happens if you’re drawing someone whilst gaming..

And then they start to be DEFIED by the controls and endess credits in place of story?

They like you to stop drawing, that’s what. :]

I’m offline! But I wrote this BEFORE I went offline, as a PLAN. Enjoy it now! Whilst I am not here!

“Naughty schoolgirl” is a concept that has been so porned out that it barely exists anymore. “Naughty schoolgirl”, someone will say to you, and your mind will reply “augmented woman in her late twenties wearing a bandeau “skirt”, fake tan, and white shirt tied so tightly I fear she may suffocate (on the shirt OR the cock you’re implicitly permitted to stick in her, come to think)”.

You know what? That sucks. Schoolgirls deserve to own their own sub-genres.

When I was a school-going girl and a Guide, in my early teens, my troupe picked the theme “St Trinians” for the parade we were in. We all wore rolled-up skirts, and tied up shirts, and ties tied around our heads or inappropriately loose. We wore knee-socks and fishnets and carried hockey sticks, and most of us had never heard of St Trinians before. This was the movie-verse St Trinians. Not nu-movies. The 50s-60s-1980 movies. I wore bunches.

It felt powerful and silly and fun, and I didn’t feel like I was giving anyone the right to touch me or fantasize about me or show me their genitals. I didn’t feel fake, I felt permitted to try out ‘loose’, in a socially permissive and/or “so in control of the situation that I don’t have to be in constant overwhelming control of myself” way rather than the hurrhurrvagina way.

Ronald Searle’s original St Trinians cartoons or comic strips, by the way, are really really good. You should read them.

Actually at the end of said parade, at the fair, a grown-up man I sort of knew (I think he was someone’s dad? maybe someone who knew someone I knew?) said to me, “Oh, I didn’t recognise you with your clothes on”. I don’t know if he meant “those dress-up clothes” or if he was purposefully implying he had seen me naked, but either way I felt like I wanted to punch him in the fucking face. Because whichever he meant, his words suggested that he might have seen me undressed, and I thought: how dare you do that to me. I did not want to hear about sex, in any way, from any guy. Especially an adult. Especially in such a brusque way. Especially when I was wearing an outfit I knew, vaguely, was sometimes used to mean “slutty!”.

If you don’t get this, or if you feel inclined to say I was asking for it, maybe imagine that you’re wearing an outfit you really like and often air, and then you get a CC’d-to-all-your-friends email showing someone who looks kind of like you, wearing that exact outfit, having something done to them that you’d never want done to you. Or imagine that you move to a new place, where you discover that your name is the same word as the locals use to mean “worthless” or “fucking disgusting” or “fart” or “incest”.

I didn’t punch him, I looked hard at the nearest non-human object very hard and pretended I hadn’t heard. I had no power there.

That was probably about ten years ago, and “naughty schoolgirl” has really gained momentum as a thing since then. What are real school girls going to do, when their forays into rule-breaking and cheekiness and physicality and their own relationship to their own sexuality* are already telegraphed, loud and clear, in town centers and internet side-bar ads and on tv and in magazines (I hate you, Nuts and Cosmo and your ilk) and in the general consciousness, as being a message of “yes, you may fuck”?

*No. Just because someone is exploring themselves and the power or effect they may or may not potentially have (and if they like or are comfortable with it or not), it does not give you permission to be a leering douche. If someone is dressed “sexy”, it does not mean you get to say HAY BABY, I SEE YOU HAVE SEXUAL CAPACITIES!!. Act as normally as you can towards them, and that will tell them what they want to know. Be respectful. Don’t assume that they want anything from you. Especially? Especially if they are or might be underaged. Gee whiz.

I started thinking about this because of this picture in the paper:

It’s Hit-Girl, from the film Kick Ass,which I do not think I would enjoy. I don’t like the comic and I can’t get behind eleven year old murderers played for awsums. I do have a soft spot for Nic Cage though. THEY’RE IN MY EYES!. She’s played by Chloe Moretz, who was born in 1997 (and who’s gonna be in the (actually really positive-sounding) re-make of Let the Right One In. Go Chloe!). So she’s twelve or thirteen in this picture. Do you see the differences, between Hit-Girl here and the average current “naughty schoolgirl”? Yes. Yes, you do.

This picture reminded me of another comicbook (as you wish, Stan Lee!) depiction of a schoolgirl gone wrong. Here’s Jenny, 15, from Grant Morisson’s excellent (excellent!) book The Invisibles. She appears on two pages as far as I can tell (does she return? I haven’t read every volume), and she’s pretty darn enjoyable, as a character.

Okay so I said above that I can’t get behind killer kids, true - but forgive me my over-generalising. Hit-Girl’s essentially a real-world fictional kid, albeit a highly skilled one, and she’s gonna have to live with being a people-chopper for the rest of her real-world fictional life. Jenny’s metafictionally one of the last survivors in a post-apocolyptic Enemies Exist world, born of a psychically well-protected mind being tortured. That changes things up. Am I a hypocrite? Bollocks.

The thing here, is that these are two internally enormous, badass, power-reaching characters who know how to do what they’re doing and who don’t do just what they’re told (or what we as viewers know they’re societally told), who are nevertheless currently encapsulated by the school uniform. They don’t fit, level-one semiotically; it’s still understood that school uniform means “be good”. That’s why school uniform, and the “schoolgirl” part of “naughty schoolgirl” matter: the goodness is there to be subverted. Whether you’re talking sex-play, or violence, or anything else.

>>Other objections aside, it is SO LAZY and missing-of-the-point to turn the school uniform into full-on erotic decoration. If you make it into a straight-up string-stripper outfit, you lose the reason you were interested in the first place! You lose the character, you lose the realness, you lose the honesty. All you’re left with is “isn’t screwing hot?”, which, wow. Fascinating.< <

Jenny and Hit-Girl’s skirts are short, and we can see Jenny’s knickers, and knee-socks have enough cultural-sexual baggage already that they can mean ’saucy’ by themselves - these outfits aren’t completely unsexualised or unsensualised. Like I mentioned, we tied up our school shirts and rolled up our skirts in the Guides parade (we rolled up our skirts in school - that’s a pretty culture-wide experience). I’m not arguing for the sterilisation of teens, image-wise or biologically!

I think that the photo of Hit-Girl is a good one, and I can dig those two pages of Jenny in Invisibles. Not in any way because I want to exploit them sexually, but because I can sympathise and empathise with these pictures. That’s a lot of what fiction is for, I think - more than just entertainment and escape. It’s not quite identification - it’s understanding what characters, as constructs before/as well as people, mean; Hit-Girl here and Jenny are about bursting out of your chrysalis - saying YEAH FUCK THAT, WHATEVER! and going really, really fast at your own discretion. Being aware of the body that you’re in, what it can do and what it means to you. Feeling that anybody who wants to appropriate any of that can go blow away to nowhere. They’re about moments of realisation that you’re god of your own damn universe, and you make the rules for you.

It’s easy to see how those sorts of thoughts can segue (for teens or between consenting adults interacting with this sort of imagery) into “let’s do it”. They don’t have to, but they can, and that’s fine! That’s nice, even! Know yourself, enjoy yourself, use symbols that you like or that speak to you (I’m not assuming I need to give permission here, I’m just hopefully making it clear that I’m not trying to somehow deny you permission to do what you want in private. I don’t want to know about what you do in private (or public, if it’s shaggin’)).

But these feelings, grown organically, are too necessary and vital to have them publicly and almost overwhelmingly equated with misogynistic, performative, no-strings intercourse.

‘Sex’, a lot of people seem to forget to remember, is not about what platonic-I can do for platonic-you. It’s not simply about places to put penises or things in vaginas. First of all, it is about what platonic-I can do for platonic-me, and basically, the rest of the world has no rights to that.

It just thinks it does.

No, Jerkface, she can’t. But you can empathise, or sympathise, or just allow her to enjoy it without trying to make it all about you. EMPATHY AND SYMPATHY. Do you speak them?

I kind of like Lady Gaga, maybe. Her costumes are often sexually coded, and then she outright says to her fans “it’s okay not to have sex if you don’t feel like it, no matter how you feel like dressing”. Anti-rape culture. That kind of stuff needs to be said.

So that’s what I think about “naughty schoolgirls”. That people should leave them alone, for goodness’ sake, and let the real ones be able to think that they (re-)invented the trope. Because you know what? If they did, they did.