ManicKitsune Productions

Hey so I’ll be driving up to Colossalcon tomorrow!  I’m very excited and nervous as I’m still fighting off a stomach bug that sent me to the emergency room yesterday but I have meds and I’ll pull through.  Anyway I’m running solo cosplay wise at this con for the most part (Rein won’t be coming) so here’s a rundown of my weekend cosplays:

Thursday: Kimono Sakura (Naruto)

Friday: Luffy (One Piece, pre-timeskip)

Friday Formal Ball: Vulpix (Pokemon)

Saturday: Rei Ryugazaki (Free!)

Saturday Night: Punk Padme Amidala (Star Wars)

Sunday: Naruto (genin)

Finally after several months of procrastination and 1 solid week of editing I present to you: A Short Look at Cosplay, a short documentary by me for my commercial video class for college that I shot at Animarathon 2016.  I had a ton of fun making this and can’t wait to expand upon it!

I’m very excited to show you all my short documentary on cosplay that will be going up in 2 days (hopefully) on MKP’s channel.  Instead of shooting a usual vlog to put up on MKP like I do with all conventions, I took a slightly different approach and did some interviews with some friends on the basics of cosplay for my video class at school.

Updated cosplay timeline!  Probably finishing out the year with these cosplays as I’m not going to Youmacon this weekend and my next con after that is Ohayocon.

This is a classic `nude calendar´ when you extract everything which transparent to X-Rays, i.e. all the flesh, and therefore any remaining sensuality.

Many people of Appalachian origin are the descendants of Celtic, Irish, and Scottish slaves and indentured servants, which, in the words of Ohio University social work professor Susan Sarnoff, means that:

…white Appalachians share histories that are often closer to those of African-American slaves than of other white immigrants–they were brought against their will, without family, property, prospects or preparation for the changes they would face in this country. 

Historically speaking, Appalachia has also been the victim of a model of natural resource extraction that resembles what’s seen in third world nations, so much so that some scholars have even referred to it as an example of American colonialism. Coal was mined by workers in horrible working conditions and then exported to other parts of the nation for use by exploitative companies, with very little of the benefits ever returning to the workers in the form of either income or infrastructure and economic development. At the same time, there was also widespread extraction by the lumber industry. It’s no wonder that so much of American labor organization has occurred in the mining industry, in order to fight back against these conditions. 

As a result of this model of extraction, poverty has always been enormously high in Appalachia, and it remains so today: 16 of the 100 lowest-income counties in America are in Eastern Kentucky. I go to school in the North Carolina mountains, and my county has a 27% poverty rate, almost double the national average of 15%. I once drove no more than 20 miles off campus on some back roads and found a one-room shack that I believe someone was living in.

Appalachians who want to escape this poverty by moving elsewhere faced discrimination by others. According to historian Ronald Eller’s book, “Uneven Ground: Appalachia since 1945″:

Convinced that Appalachians were ignorant, lazy, unclean, and sometimes immoral, community leaders bemoaned their arrival as “a sore to the city and a plague to themselves” and blamed them for rising crime, congestion, and a host of other urban maladies. “In my opinion they are worse than the colored,” complained a Chicago police captain. “They are vicious and knife happy… I can’t say this publicly, but you’ll never improve the neighborhood until you get rid of them.”

Using imagery similar to that applied to other migrant populations, especially African Americans from the Deep South, northerners developed a repertoire of ethnic hillbilly jokes that reflected deep-seated fears and a misunderstanding of mountain culture. Many of the jokes poked fun at the lack of education, sophistication, and resources of mountain migrants; others cruelly implied immorality and ignorance.

Because of this, anti-Appalachian discrimination is recognized by the government of the city of Cincinnati, whose legal code explicitly includes discrimination against people of “Appalachian regional origin” in their legal definition of “discriminate”.

Discrimination of that sort, in fact, led to eugenics programs in this country getting their Constitutional justification. In the Supreme Court case of Buck v. Bell in 1927, a white 18-year-old rape victim and middle school dropout from Virginia named Carrie Buck was ordered to be forcibly sterilized due to her allegedly poor mental capacities (she was actually a woman of average intelligence from what I understand, but it doesn’t really matter). The Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that her sterilization was Constitutional and preventing what was seen as white trash from breeding was in the legitimate public interest of Virginia. In the ruling, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. commented that Buck, her mother, and her child were all “feeble-minded,” and that “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” The case upheld the legitimacy of sterilization programs all over the nation that inevitably went on to be used against women of color, and was even used by Nazi doctors to justify their actions at the Nuremburg trials.