Sup Nerds

Here it is! Pretty much 100% of the art I’ve made for this game over the past two years!

If there’s anything that sticks out to you as particularly sticker/button/prints worthy, tell me! I’m gonna be printing Merch tomorrow and tonight!

Animation I made for my ““virtual environments”” ie make games w unity class (darin drew the crystals and I transformed the heck out of everything and drew the igloo)

Studio Ghibli’s animation software will be made available via open source this month. 

That’s right…💯% free.

Animation software is, by and large, very expensive and out of the range of most people seeking to get into animation.  As of March 26th, this software will become open source and available to all prospective animators!

Explicit Jewish representation in secondary-world fantasy

It’s not only possible but I’ve done it, in four books and several short stories. Perach, the made-up setting of A Harvest of Ripe Figs and my other books, is an imaginary Jewish Florida originally created out of my realization that if I wanted a queer Jewish Disney Princess, I was gonna have to invent her myself. (“Perach”, meaning flower, is my attempt at translating the word ‘Florida’ into Hebrew.)

The Jewishness of the characters is evident in their casual observance of Shabbat (there are usually pretty detailed Shabbat scenes in each book, since it happens every week), on-screen celebration of Pesach (Passover), Sukkot (in the next book, coming July 2016), and other holidays, and in the Yiddish spoken by the two transplant characters, warrior woman Rivka and wizard Isaac, who come from a vaguely Polish-German unnamed northern area far away.

The wine blessing on Shabbat, with the addition of a little wizard mischief

Here are some relevant quotes from my books. Take note of how I wove in cultural details that are normal experiences for me or my loved ones in the real world, translated into a sort of “Disney princess inspired” fantasy setting. Many of these techniques can be used if your fantasy setting’s Jewish characters are just walk-ons instead of leads; you can have a random man wearing a kippah or a woman who isn’t participating in the local religious tradition because she has her own.

Gluten-free challah at the royal Shabbat dinner for the first time (A Harvest of Ripe Figs):

The introduction of a challah that [Queen] Shulamit could actually eat caused quite the stir at the dinner table. Rivka’s mother Mitzi, who like many people had never entirely believed the queen’s claims of food-related sensitivities, asked the same questions over and over until everyone was relieved when Isaac just held up his hand and said, “Magic. It’s magic.”

“Oh, all right,” she said vaguely. “It’s not going to hurt me, is it?”

Another reference to the queen’s wheat problem, this time at the royal seder two months after she gave birth to the princess (Climbing the Date Palm):

“On all other nights, we eat all kinds of bread–” Here [Isaac] met the eyes of the queen, and chuckled sheepishly. “We would eat all kinds of bread, if we could,” he ad-libbed. From behind the look of harried happiness that enveloped her constantly in these early days of motherhood, she gave him a crooked grin. “And tonight, we eat only this stuff.” He held up a matzo cracker, and Naomi’s tiny hand waved in its direction.

“See that, little one?” Farzin murmured through a jolly smirk. “Someday, you, too, will be able to eat cardboard.”

Rivka in a foreign port town, about to enter a tournament to rescue a damsel in distress (who turns out to be a fellow Jew once they finally meet) (“Rivka in Port Saltspray” from Tales from Outer Lands):

There was a blast of trumpets, and then someone shouted, “Silence for the invocation!”

Rivka felt vaguely out of place as everyone else around her lowered their eyes respectfully and listened as a brass band began to play a local hymn. She knew this part of the world worshipped a pantheon of fascinatingly dysfunctional gods, at least, if the stories she’d picked up were any indication. Rivka usually didn’t care, but right now, when everyone else around her was engaged in group prayer, she felt her difference rather pointedly.

Her eyes happened to flicker over to the captive woman on the dais and noticed that she wasn’t praying, either.

At the very beginning of their friendship, a newly orphaned Baby Queen is confiding in her new bodyguard (from The Second Mango, and this scene is based on my own grieving for my father, who passed away in 2010):

Shulamit nodded, shifting positions within Rivka’s embrace so she could wipe her face clean. “Everyone around me, when they were mourning him, it was so wonderful to be surrounded by people who were sad about the same thing I was because I wasn’t alone, but it was also jarring because they were all talking about him as king, not as a father. When we put his kippah into the museum, everyone was talking about how much money it was worth and the embroidery by some famous artist and how it was a national relic, and all this – but I was just thinking of Shabbat, and seders, and – and it didn’t mean any of those things to me. It meant lighting candles. It meant he’d hid the afikomen in the palace for me and joking with his advisors as he waited around for me to find it so he could give me a new book. National treasure? I–” She blinked away new tears, but this time the look on her face was one of indignation.

Shabbat out in the wilderness, using “the sunset” as candles

You’d be right to be a little skeptical of a secondary world fantasy including real-world Judaism, because where did we escape from in the Passover story if there’s no Egypt? Who wrecked our stuff in the Chanukah story if there’s no Greece? To this I’d say: don’t squint at it too hard. For me, the ability to give myself and my readers a Jewish queen, Jewish warrior woman, Jewish wizard, fairy tales that normalize our lives and to show queer and blended families worshipping as we do in real life but with magic and palaces and swordfighting, too – that’s just way more important to me than making sure my worldbuilding is completely logical.

My main advice about this for someone not-Jewish is to repeat my preference for explicit Jewishness (rather than vague symbolic coding with room for plausible deniability or relies on one possibly insulting facet of our existence or reputation to stand for all of us) carries into secondary-world fantasy. If your MC’s aren’t Jewish it’s okay to say “and there are Jewish merchants over there” or “she lived in a little house across the street from where the Jewish neighborhood started”, or if you don’t want to use the words, having people be at rest from sundown to sundown one day a week or avoiding mixing meat and dairy might be a recognizable shortcut that’s a lot more literal and specific than phenotypes (which can be shared by many other cultures and often have Unfortunate Implications in fantasy lit) or reductive stuff about wandering far away from one’s homeland (which, again, is not specific to us.)

Remember, if a queen sitting down to a royal seder presided over by a wizard, or talking about how annoyed she is that she can’t eat sufganiyot (jelly donuts) at Chanukah any more because of her wheat problems, sounds too specific to you – that’s what existing fantasy lit has taught you, not the way reality works. Reality is that we all deserve our fairy tales, and fantasy as a genre is big enough and wonderful enough to have room for me and my folks, too. Harry Potter celebrates Christmas, after all.

If you’re Jewish and want to write stuff like mine, then you already know what to do. If you feel like you can’t, that’s the voice of marginalization lying to you. Create what’s in your heart and if you can think of a way to explain the worldbuilding better than I did, I wish you luck :)

Isaac’s rainbow-pride magic and rephrasing of Haggadah text replaces the typical lamb’s blood (or in my case, red yarn) put on doorways during Passover as protection

–Shira

people will accept you saying the word they in the singular form up until they know you’re talking about someone who’s trans or nb or intersex.  Like the number of times I’ve said they to my parents that I’m hanging out with someone and refer to them as them (I basically use it for most cases now) with them not raising an eye is incredible and I thought that they’d just accepted it.

But nah, I’m going out with my translady friend and I call them they and THAT’S when the jokes and the purposeful misunderstanding come in.

Friendly reminder not to harass Astruc about online episodes. Videos uploaded by fans are illegal and do not financially support the show in anyway. As such, he can’t even answer the questions without getting in trouble.

Broadcasters only buy shows that get watched. However they’re not counting views from an unofficial youtube video or an unofficial website. That’s not making them money. They’re counting the views from their own broadcast because that’s what’s making them money. You might call it greedy but it’s what pays the bills and the employees. Therefore if they’re not making money off a show, they’re not willing to buy more seasons.

This is why fans who watch subs, and even fansubbers themselves, have advocated watching the show as it airs in your country or buying episodes from itunes/amazon. Miraculous is amazing and it’s great that fans show their support through fan fiction, fan art, gif sets and all that good stuff, but we also need to support in a way that keeps it on air. This is just how the show gets funded, and how the show is able to be produced in your own language. It’s why Americans are currently freaking out about Nickelodeon suddenly dropping Miraculous for an unspecified about of time. We’re lucky it’s apparently not gone for good, but it’s not airing in English or from a source Americans can legally and supportively watch.

If the show isn’t currently airing in your country, then all you can do is NOT ask Astruc how to illegally watch the show. Please don’t bother him with questions he can’t comfortably answer. Also please watch the show when/if it airs in your country. Even if you don’t feel like watching it again and just play it in the background, you’re still compensating for the fact that you illegally watched it in the first place.

Also friendly reminder that episodes recorded on your DVR are tricky for ratings.  The longer you take to watch the episode, the less likely it will count. It also won’t count at all if you skip over the commercials, because then advertisers aren’t interested in what you want. It’s best to try and have it playing on the tv even if you’re unable to watch it. Nickelodeon started airing Miraculous at 11am, when I was at church. I’d record the show, leave the tv on, then watch the show when I returned home.

The world’s bee population is in crisis and Honey Nut Cheerios is coming to the rescue, minus its perky mascot.

The brand’s latest promotion, Bring Back The Bees, characterized as a cause marketing campaign, purports to inform Canadians about the global instability of bees, due to diseases, pesticides, flowerless landscapes and monolithic crop planting, and encourage them to plant 35 million bee-enticing wildflowers this spring.

Cereal lovers will find the brand’s longtime ambassador awol for the next six weeks.

“We took Buzz off the front of the box to bring awareness to fact the bees are disappearing and on the back we have a lot of information to help consumers understand why bees are important and what they can do and then driving them to the website so they can get their free seeds,” said Amanda Hsueh, Associate Marketing Director at General Mills Canada.

Recipients are encouraged to plant the wildflower seeds “anywhere where flowers would help beautify the space and make it a bee-friendly area,” she said.

“They provide not just honey, like in our Honey Nut Cheerios, but a third of our food supply actually depends on their pollination, such as, almonds, apples and even coffee.

“So they’re very important, but the bees are in trouble. We felt like we wanted to do something to help and we wanted to find a way to make sure all Canadians could do something to help.”

USING HONEY DOES NOT HURT BEES

Using honey ensures that bees are being (well)-kept and encouraged to propagate. You have to be very careful with your bees if you want them to give you quality products. 

Using honey puts more money into the honey industry, allowing beekeepers to keep more bees as well as do more to help, protect, and save bees. 

Conversely, if you stop using honey, not only is honey going to go to waste (bees produce more honey than they need), but people who currently keep bees are going to either turn to a different product (whether because want to make money or because they just can’t afford to keep the bees they love). Their bees are going to end up neglected and/or exterminated, and there will be fewer people contributing to the desperate conservation efforts. 

Travelling for pollination, incidentally, is much harder on bees than harvesting from one location year-round.

So if vegans want to avoid bee cruelty, they should stop eating all crops pollinated by bees. Here’s a convenient list:

Kiwis, watermelons, squash, zucchini, cashews, cucumbers, apples, mangos, avocados, plums, almonds, peaches, pears, blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries.

Only buy those crops from farmers who hand-pollinate their crops, like some farms in China now have to do. Keep in mind that thin upper boughs of fruit trees are flimsy, so they send children up to pollinate the top branches. Child labour in agriculture is another complicated subject, and one that I don’t think vegans even think twice about.

“Cruelty-free” is completely impossible, and people with a poor understanding of animal welfare tend to worsen it. Research how bees actually live and how beekeeping works and realize that there is zero harm done to bees by responsibly harvesting their honey.

I think there is a divide between those who were discriminated against and bullied and abused for being weird or “immature” or other things like that but were able to succeed academically and those who weren’t able to succeed academically and faced discrimination and bullying and abuse for being “stupid”. 

For the first person, when they’re being constantly knocked down by some jerks, being able to say “well, I’m smarter than you” is really empowering and liberating. And I’m not advocating for taking that away from anyone who has it now, I’m not. 

But where do the other kids go? The ones who can’t say “at least I’m smarter than you” because by every traditional definition of “smart”, they’re not. Their bullies are the smart ones.  

In my experience, telling a kid who is not succeeding in school, that “well really you are smart. you’re a good artist and thinker and all these things”, doesn’t help. Because the kid knows, they feel like they’re being placated. Okay, you say I’m smart, but I know I’m not what really smart is. I can’t do what being really smart means. Sure, I’m good at those things but I’m still not like the kids who are really smart. 

And that’s why I’m arguing that, going forward, if we continue to define intelligence by these specific, narrow things, people are going to get hurt by being told “you’re smart” with no other qualifier. The kids who can’t succeed in an academic environment, who are surrounded by this traditional idea of intelligence, aren’t going to believe you when you tell them they are, because in every other way they’re being told they aren’t. They’re going to lose out. 

And the “smart” kids may be even worse off. Because what if one day they lose the skills that defined them as smart, or their other struggles suddenly outpace their intelligence? They really lose out, cause in one fell swoop they lose the thing that defined their worth. 

So what I’m saying is, in the future, if we tell kids from the get-go, “intelligence isn’t something you are, it’s something you apply. to anything. and everyone has the ability to apply it to different things, because each of our brains have different blueprints, and no one thing is better than the other, and no one thing takes more or less intelligence,” then we’re going to be much better off.