the butch of gévaudan

I opened my eyes and confiscated the biscuit before fully waking up, belatedly recognising it as a biscuit that I had perceived Mouse sneaking away the previous week, prior to our going on holiday, but which I had not followed up on. “Don’t drop crumbs in my BED,” I said, strongly.

“I have to be in your bed, mummy,” Mouse said, producing a biscuit in their other hand and eating it while speaking.

“Why,” I said - I was not fully awake, of course.

“Because mine is all dirty,” Mouse said, eating the second biscuit, which I did not recognise.

The sleeping situation in our house is complicated, but I spend most of the night nominally in a bed in Mouse’s room, while Mouse theoretically sleeps on a floor mattress beside me. In practice this is always scrambled up, and there’s no knowing who is sleeping where. I investigated blearily and found that Mouse had secreted a small stash of Mouse-snacks between their bed and the wall, cunningly concealed by BLÅHAJ.

Mouse had quite naturally woken up peckish, remembered their earlier brilliance, recovered the biscuits, and had filled their own bed with biscuit crumbs. All very sophisticated.

“I can’t sleep,” Mouse said, watching me with interest, “my bed is not good. It’s all dirty.”

“We don’t eat in bed,” I said, calculating how much I didn’t want to wake up at 5 am.

“Why.”

“It makes your bed not good,” I said, deciding to get back into my own bed.

“Mummy?”

“What.”

“Mummy.”

“WHAT.”

I have not managed to find anyone who thinks that in the wild, but it is so damn funny.

As a former music teacher, I can also say that "learn the fundamentals first" is the death knell for a vast percentage of beginners, especially adult learners.

I've run into this with drawing several times, where some well-meaning artist has lectured me on needing to study anatomy properly or not use shortcuts like CSP brushes. And oh, believe me, I know. I know exactly how to learn an artistic discipline in a structured way. I just...don't want to!

The thing is, I'm not aiming to be a professional artist. I want to draw my gay little anime guys. I would undoubtedly improve at art much faster if I approached every gay little anime guy drawing as a study exercise. But I would also have quit drawing a decade ago if I couldn't just let myself enjoy drawing imperfect fucked-up little guys with whatever shortcuts I needed to body myself across the finish line.

With my adult piano students, my approach was always "What's your goal?" If their goal was to learn exactly one Elton John songbook to play at parties, then...that's what we did. We'd put tape on the keys to label the notes, and just fuckin go for it. Learning exactly one Elton John songbook is a good and noble musical goal, full stop.

Some of my students needed and enjoyed a more structured approach to learning; if they wanted to be able to play classical music, then yes, scales were going to have to enter the equation at some point. And yet others would learn the Elton John songbook, catch their white whale, and realize they wanted to explore more of the ocean. The scales were still there for them to learn!

Often the choice isn't between "learn art well" and "learn art imperfectly" - the choice is between "learn art imperfectly" and "don't do art at all." To which I say, learn imperfectly! Or, what the hell, don't 'learn' art. Just do, and enjoy the doing of it.

Learning a little music theory or even just how to listen to music and pay attention analytically does so much. Music is a delicious lasagna instead of nice lyrics and a catchy melody. Plants all looked boring to me until I worked at a greenhouse and had to identify them by their leaves, and now I can look at wildflowers and weeds and forest undergrowth without getting bored, even if there are no interesting berries or flowers. Learning Japanese opened up a whole people group to understand, where before they may as well have been speaking nonsense (to me, anyway).

It's never done that before so I looked it up and turns out Roku TVs have added all sorts of creepy things in the privacy section since I last checked.

One of which being they take screenshots from what you're watching and send them to third parties to identify it.

Fucking hell! Remember when every fucking device in your life wasn't a spy implanted in your home and working against your interests to try and sell your data? Remember how nice that was??

Remember when the TV was just a tool that would play the things you plugged into it?

Shadow the Hedgehog: Interesting. It's as if you've been wearing limiters this whole time and you realizing you wanted to live as a woman was what broke the limiters.

Me: Yeah, it's a lot like that.

Shadow the Hedgehog: Hmmm... tell me about this "estrogen."

Caine and Gangle go outside and touch grass. I was thinkin too hard about their Parallels as self-destructive “failed” artists and this was the result.

Brad Bird once said that you can’t create the illusion of life if you haven’t actually lived one, and that’s a line I think about a lot around the Traumatizing Digital Circus. This comic was inspired by: the purpose of making your own art in a world where AI image generators can churn out endless content for you, the way 3D software makes it easy to create infinite spaces but hard to capture authentic hand-drawn human touches, the way all my college art teachers were skeptical of the students’ desire to make anime-inspired stylized 3D visuals right up until it became the new trend in the animation industry—- and how easy it is to get so lost in the technical aspects of art & the consequences of failure that you lose sight of what art is even supposed to be for.