BalloonsBunny

Felicity’s story was set in the beginnings of the American Revolution, and addressed the conflict that she faced when her loved ones were split between patriots and loyalists. It also covered the effects of animal abuse, and forgiving those who are unforgivable.

Samantha’s stories centered around the growth of industrial America, women’s suffrage, child abuse, and corruption in places of power. Also, it emphasises how dramatically adoption into a caring family can turn a life around.

Kit’s story is one of my favorites. Her family is hit hard by the Great Depression, and they begin taking in boarders and raise chickens to help make ends meet. Her books include themes of poverty, police brutality, homelessness, prejudice, and the importance of unity in difficult times.

Molly’s father, a doctor, is drafted during the Second World War. Throughout her story, friends of hers suffer the loss of their husbands, sons, and brothers overseas. Her mother leaves the traditional housewife position and works full-time to help with the war effort. They also take in an English refugee child, who learns to open up after a life of traumatic experience.

And then there are the later dolls, that kids younger than me would have grown up with (I was just outgrowing American Girl as these came out), like Rebecca, the Jewish girl who dreams of becoming an actress in the budding film industry, or  Julie, who fights against her school’s gender policy surrounding sports in the 70s, or  Nanea, the Hawaiian girl whose father worked at Pearl Harbor.

Nah.

OP (of the tweet thread) was either a actively trying to start shit or is just a huge fucking moron. Probably both.

I’d like to point out that the company that makes American Girl dolls actually doesn’t skimp when doing their research and they don’t make the dolls with the intent to be offensive in any way:

Cows reaction when they see grass after being shut down indoors for 6 months. 

No more melted tomblerones or mising skulls, yyeann!

This is my basic process for pretty much everything I draw. The key is understanding the shape of the garment you’re trying to draw and the shape of the body part you’re putting it on.

Drawing the body first forces you to make the shoe, hat, or clothes fit that body. With practice you’ll be able to skip some steps. This method works the same no matter the perspective or pose. It just relies on your knowledge of what a hat looks like from above, or what the bottom of a shoe looks like. When in doubt, just google refs. Don’t necessarily need the exact angle you’re trying to draw. Look at different pics to give you an idea of how it works in 3d.

Shoes are always a bit tricky because feet are a stupid ass shape.

One across the country who I have a lot in common with but never reach out to her because obviously she is too cool.

One in Texas, who is getting married soon judging by the confirmation of a bridal shop appointment I got this month.

One in the northern middle US who keeps signing up for BeachBody and other health/diet stuff and one time I got a Macy’s email with her physical address in it but didn’t find it until too late and when a sent her a letter it got to returned to me.

And now there is one in Canada. I know this one has kids because is started getting emails from their school (I replied right away to let them know because holy crap privacy issues, and they were really great about responding and delisting me). I have also reaponded to emails from their employer. Always the same stuff, really, just letting them know there was a mistake in the address, I live in the US so really they don’t want me responding to scheduling stuff. But today I got included on a family email blast about the matriarch’s impending birthday and also hip replacement.

Little girl teaching her cats how to draw a flower 

This is the only Alice adaptation I’ve ever seen that doesn’t cut the caucus race

The mad hatter wears taps throughout and it’s so jarring and surprising it’s perfect

The executioner shadows almost everyone who dances with the Queen

Lewis Carroll is a character in the ballet and becomes the white rabbit who leads Alice into wonderland which is bad and wrong because Carroll is the dodo but does work very well

They started dropping rose petals from the ceiling onto the audience when Alice looked through the door to the garden and it was utterly magic

The Cheshire Cat is made of about 10 different puppets that dance around the stage

Which reminds me Alice is styled after Alice Liddell rather than the John Tenniel illustrations

I don’t think the king of hearts actually dances he just wanders around looking confused

the Caterpillar is pretty neat too

AKA

the “eeriness of empty city streets”, the curfews, the panic buying, the movie theatres closing, the inability to travel to be with family, or even to walk in the street without a written attestation (Ausweis)

French people from the cities being asked by the government to go help farmers with harvest due to a shortage of seasonal labour, just like we are seeing now

(Of course the situation was incomparably worse—I’m not equating the two, I just didn’t expect to find all these parallels)

The most striking similarity is in the way they feel about the events: they both write about how the uncertainty of these times produces a strange mixture of stress and morbid fascination. My grandmother describes the first time she saw the Nazi flag flying above the City Hall, saying she felt “distress, and an incongruous curiosity—how will all of this end?” My grandfather, writing about the dangerous process of changing his identity and obtaining fake documentation to avoid being deported to Germany, says “Tout cela est très éprouvant pour les nerfs. Malgré tout… quelle année intéressante nous traversons.” (“This is all very nerve-wracking. Nevertheless, what an interesting year we are living through.”)

My grandmother writes about how stunned she would feel if “myself from not so very long ago” could get a glimpse of her current life: all of her projects frozen in time, her studies interrupted (“I wish I had been able to finish the year—they’ve had such trouble organising the classes and exams, they gave the Baccalauréat almost to everybody!”), her wedding cancelled, “I am now hiding people in my basement”, and her fiancé, “formerly fond of insect collecting”, now “keeps himself busy planting bombs on railway tracks” to stop freight trains going to Germany.

(She uses a lot of breezy euphemisms; at one point she briefly mentions being interrogated by Nazis re: her fiancé travelling to the ‘forbidden zone’ then starts the next paragraph with “Despite this contretemps—” and moves on to how she still had time to fill her purse with dead leaves on the Champs Elysées so she could light the stove.) 

She writes about the difficulty of getting accurate information amidst all the contradictory news sources (Resistance radio broadcasts, rumours around her, German propaganda, lies from her own government), and about how unsettling it feels “quand la vie ne va plus de soi” (“when life no longer goes without saying”)

I saw French people on twitter joking about how “after coronavirus, we won’t bring back cheek-kissing, okay?” and was amused to find an entry in my grandmother’s journal saying in the middle of all this turmoil, she & her fiancé have started using the informal “you” with each other, and she hopes that when the war is over, French society won’t go back to expecting people to use “vous” until marriage. 

The very beginning of the war, around her 19th birthday, also presents interesting parallels: she is frustrated with her mother who is planning a holiday trip and acting like nothing serious is going on, and is simultaneously still confused about “the events” and wondering if she is misjudging their severity

In April 1944, as she finally hopes to see “this nightmare end soon”, she speculates on what aspect the future post-crisis society will take, when will normal life resume and what will ‘normal’ be? Then she says making conjectures is futile for the time being because “we cannot measure the depth of a derangement that is still under way.”

According to a few colleagues it’s either a plant, an algae, or a fungi. So that’s been helpful.

After a day with some sunlight I think I might be seeing some chloroplasts.

Aaron Earned An Iron Urn