Fantastica

Well yesterday was my second year on HRT, and like…I guess next month it’ll be three years since I started living as a gal.

Both years I’ve been extremely depressed and tried making a comic, and failing cuz it was too depressed.

I know it took me a while after realizing I was gay to not have some weekly panic of “What if I’m not a Real Lesbian™???” Sometimes I’d think no one would believe me if I came out to them, or even that I wasn’t “allowed” to be gay. 

In 2014, former Taito graphic designer Atsushi Iwata posted a picture of the device he used to create pixel graphics. This custom joystick was connected to a X68000, a computer which was used as a workstation by many Japanese video game companies until the mid-90s (although companies such as Sega and Westone used a PC-98 to develop some, if not all, of their games during this era). There is one button per function hence the 20 buttons featured on the control panel. The software used by Taito was called Taito Animator.

While it seems odd to use such a device, it wasn’t that uncommon. Hayato Takano (past works unknown) recently posted a picture of a similar device and added that some developers were still using the X68000 version of this device until 1998 (Windows 95 pretty much became the standard OS in the late 90s and Japan was no exception). A Windows compatible version was made as well as a PC-98 version.

A few years ago, Spoon, a member of The Madman’s Cafe, posted a message in which he recounted a story one of his co-worker told him: “The sprite editor used by artists for a number of SNK fighting games (Art Box) was written for the Neo-Geo, and uses the Neo-Geo as the interface. As in, you would use the joystick and the buttons to draw the sprite. He didn’t believe this when he started there, until one of the higher ups showed him by firing up one of the machines and drawing a kickass sprite of Robert Garcia in like 10 minutes”.

I don’t know why some companies decided to use a joystick to draw. It was probably faster than a mouse and less costly than a digital pen, but, as you may guess, it was pretty noisy.

On a related note, another developer (Tonya_Plan) posted a picture of a keyboard used to create graphics (circa 1992).

Any time you see a meme of some “bad” artwork, or a piece of “cringy fandom art with thousands of notes (that’s actually just an innocent drawing), some “poorly-drawn” sparkledog or fursona, it’s very likely it’s a kid’s drawing. And those kids WILL see it.

I especially see a lot of reposted artwork of sonic ocs and fursonas on tumblr just for people to laugh at, and when I trace the artwork back to dA, it was made by some 12 year old.

On a smaller scale: when I was a kid, I worked for hours and hours to animate some cute dogs, one with hovering with a little pair of wings, another to look like it was taking a nap and breathing serenely, but when I posted it, the site sped it up or something. I put it on deviantart, and someone older said it looked like something was trying to burst out of the dog, and everyone started making fun of it and laughing. I was 9. I went to my neopets pages and deviantart and deleted all of my animations and gifs in case any of the others were actually “bad” without me noticing.

I didn’t try animating again for a long, long time. And I didn’t post anything new to deviantart for years. Most importantly, I didn’t improve much during that time.

Later, when I made friends with supportive artists, I got better in a few weeks than I had in over a year.

When I was a wee thing, my parents moved out the the Highly dubious condo in East Palo Alto and into a relatively nice suburban neighborhood, into a house immediately across the street from my new elementary school.  Immediate, as in, less than 40 feet from the traffic circle.   Mom would wave at me from the driveway sometimes while I was in class.  This should have made getting me to and from school easy, but there was an issue:

I still had to cross the street, and because I was living in the over-caffeinated heart of silicon valley at the time, that meant dodging the local commuters barreling through the school zone at upwards of 40 miles per hour with no regard for the stop signs.

The flashing “School Zone” signs were ignored.   The city refused to put in speed bumps or devote extra patrol cars. One of my classmates grandmother’s volunteered as crossing guard, and some jackass in a BMW ran over her foot on the first day. Now, mom declared as we drove Mrs. Manchez to the hospital her foot in a beer cooler full of ice, Would be a good time to take the law into my own hands.

So after dropping Mrs. Manchez off at the hospital, we drove to the thrift store, where my mom found a navy blazer, aviator sunglasses, a pilot’s cap and an old, clunky-looking hair dryer.  

The next morning, mom went out to the sidewalk in her new “uniform”, with the hair dryer and a legal pad so she could write down the grocery list.  Every time a car would come roaring down the road, Mom would look up, point the hairdryer at them, and, and write something down.  

I remember listening to brakes squeal all day the first time she tried it, Mercedes and BMWs screeching to a crawl as they passed the school, glaring at her.   By that afternoon, cars were creeping along at an over-cautious 10mph, and I was able to get home without taking my life into my hands.

After that, Mom went out “in uniform” every couple of days, because intermittent re-enforcement is what REALLY gets a change in behavior going, and point the hair dryer at anyone speeding through the school zone, usually while writing down grocery lists or short stories, or drawing unflattering caricatures of the other PTA moms. Eventually, however, one of the cars that came through was a patrol car, and he slowly pulled to a halt in front of mom, glaring at her though his own reflective glasses. She smiled an waved the hair dryer.  “Good afternoon!” “…What’re you doing?”  he groaned, 3 in the afternoon entirely too early for this shit.

“Writin’ a grocery list.”  She beamed, and when that failed to satisfy him, she explained about the speeding problem and that if they couldn’t send a partol car out here to ticket people regularly, she figured that a hair dryer would be the next best thing.  Working like a charm so far.  They didn’t even notice the little airplanes on the Pilot’s hat.