Apparently, Wales has a growing game development industry but they need more talent.
Steffan, Elanor, I’m moving in.
Charlie Chu at his first convention in his first cospaly: Big WOW Comic Fest, dressed as Mr. Mxyzptlk!
Con going with an infant isn’t the easiest of things but it is possible. We’re all exhausted after such a fun filled day - there were so many great cosplayers out and about and they were all lovely.
Guys
no guys
guys seriously
this is fucking amazing.
BEST COSPLAY EVER
I SALUTE YOU, GOOD PARENTS
Did anyone accuse him of being a fake geek baby? I imagine he’s read all of the relevant issues, mind.
If I ever breed I’m totally going to dress my offspring as Pikmin.
becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys:
And that’s all of them! Quite disappointed by Eurovision this year. I feel there was a higher than usual quota of bland normal songs and a shocking lack of clowns being shot across the stage out of cannons vomiting rainbows. Thank goodness for Romania’s vampire man and Greece’s glowy folk instruments.
I predict Greece, Romania, Netherlands, Ireland, Denmark, Norway and Georgia will do well. So whichever of those countries has the most mates. LET THE VOTING COMMENCE.
There wasn’t nearly enough men in dresses and leather bondage gear and skirt rips this year.
I quite agree. I mean, I realised we’ve all become spoiled these days; it’s hard to go back to bland pop when transvestite unicycling gnomes have graced your screen, or at least that excellent Ukrainian version of Xena. But really. Germany didn’t even write a new song, they just pinched last year’s winner and cut bits off.
And I’ll admit, as FABULOUS as Bonnie Tyler is, I was gutted we didn’t shove those terrifying glowy-eyed angels from the Total Eclipse of the Heart video into the background to chase her again.
Ah well. Barefoot Danes have won. Well done them.
OH MY GOD WAIT what is this glorious Swedish intermission song??????!!??!! WHY DIDN’T THEY SUBMIT THIS.!?!? This is genuinely more Eurovision than the actual bloody entrants!!!
THE MEN DON’T HAVE TITTIES
And that’s all of them! Quite disappointed by Eurovision this year. I feel there was a higher than usual quota of bland normal songs and a shocking lack of clowns being shot across the stage out of cannons vomiting rainbows. Thank goodness for Romania’s vampire man and Greece’s glowy folk instruments.
I predict Greece, Romania, Netherlands, Ireland, Denmark, Norway and Georgia will do well. So whichever of those countries has the most mates. LET THE VOTING COMMENCE.
Cry havoc and let slip the bands of waaaaaar!
ARE WE READY FOR THE GRAND FINAL?
EUROVIIIIISIIIIIIIOOOON!
THERE WILL BE BLOOD AND HOPEFULLY LESBIANS AND BAD DRESSES AND DRAG ACTS!
I am so excited I can not, as they say in the popular vernacular, even. As ever, I have kept myself pure of hearing any of the prospective songs ahead of time, even the British entry.
Nevertheless, here is my Eurovision 2013 prediction:
Greece and Cyprus will give each other 12 points.
This may sound like politics, but actually it keeps the kraken beneath the Med between Greece and Cyprus sleeping for another year.
I rang the literary editors of a few ‘respected’ papers and asked them how much space they were giving to women writers in their ‘review’ sections. Perfectly predictable response. They all said the allocation was fair. One said it was equal, and one prominent editor went so far as to say women are dominating the reviews!
… What happened when I asked who was doing the talking in mixed sex conversations? Well, it was the women of course. And then when you get to measure it you find that women get to talk about 10-20% of the time in conversations with men. A woman who talks about a third of the time is seen to be dominating the talk.
And what happened when I asked teachers who got their attention in class? Well, it was all equal, wasn’t it? No preferences there. And you measure it and find that girls get about 10-20% of the teacher’s attention. Any more, and the boys think it unfair - and go into revolt.
So what do you think I found with the reviews?
I would have predicted about 10-20% of the space went to women’s books. Well, it is less than 6% of the column inches. And the reasonable editor who thinks that women are getting more than their share is one of the worst offenders. Poor boys! It really tells you something when they think only 94% of the review section is not enough, doesn’t it? When 6% for women is too much you get some idea how much men think they are entitled to - as a fair deal.
Dale Spender, correspondence, in Dale and Lynne Spender, Scribbling Sisters (Camden Press, 1986), pp. 31-32 (via radtransfem)
I’ve talked about this on this blog before, but it’s nice to have another independent set of statistics into it.
“world of averages” - composite images culled from thousands of individual portraits resulting in symmetrical average faces.
I was curious, so I went to the website and this is Wales:
becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys:
I’ve been drawing these for two weeks to avoid revising, so I can’t remember why. But probably after reading something about limited female character designs on, oh, let’s say, Escher Girls; when compiling a team for a video game you’re normally looking to create a balanced one, and a lot of the…
These are awesome! Can I be Rogue/Infiltrator? (Because, you know, we really need one more fantasy world to inhabit.)
I mean, another word for that class is basically ‘spy’, so technically I’ve already written you as one, although admittedly there’s more of a Victoriana vibe to these.
Around about my fourth bitten pencil I wished bitterly that you were here, actually, so you could model the Rogue for me. Tru fax. It would have saved many pencils.
Steampunk Character Class Designs
I’ve been drawing these for two weeks to avoid revising, so I can’t remember why. But probably after reading something about limited female character designs on, oh, let’s say, Escher Girls; when compiling a team for a video game you’re normally looking to create a balanced one, and a lot of the time there are only one or two women available for some specific roles, and the rest have to be men. Or, alternatively, you can have either gender in each role! But the women will have elected to wear two hankies and a string of tooth floss while the men get armour. Or will be in sexualised or submissive poses, or will all have exactly the same body while the men come in different shapes and sizes… etc, yeah, if you’re following me you already know all these arguments, I post them often enough.
So I decided to make my own! I decided to create six classes and have women of different body types in each; I’ve also included different racial phenotypes, since I wanted to avoid a Greg Land-style white-features-coloured-brown thing, but I’ve not coloured any of these yet so those might not be quite so obvious. And after I started I decided to go steampunk in tone, because (a) I like steampunk, (b) it allows for both science and magic comfortably, (c) it was helpful to have a unifying theme when creating outfits and (d) I like steampunk.
The classes themselves are a sort of amalgamation of the most common ones you find. Also IMPORTANT NOTE a few design elements were inspired by others I found on the internet and I kept the links to give proper credit… and then the computer crashed earlier, so I’ve lost them. If you recognise/are reminded of anyone’s work you know, therefore, please tell me so I can credit appropriately, thank.
So! On with the show!
Leader/Warrior
A generic warrior/fighter was the idea here, but those are usually the leaders of teams, so yeah. In case it’s not clear owing to a lack of colours, she’s wearing a full breastplate there, not a metal underbust corset and then just cloth over the soft parts. Inclusion of Big-Ass Sword is for Richard and Steff, who very much lament the loss of Red She-Hulk from Marvel’s publication list.
I went for a nicely-muscled athletic body type here; male equivalents are usually nicely muscled but not wildly so.
I think this one is my second favourite design, I’m very keen on her.
Mage
My representative of hourglass figures. She looks less like she’s about to fall over in the original - the scanner has tilted her slightly, sorry about that. I thought I’d go with a Victorian magician kind of feel because steampunk and also excuse for top hat, but I’m very torn as to whether or not I should have given her a long skirt - mages do normally wear robes even when male, after all. Consequently this one is my least favourite. I like her, I’m just… not convinced.
Engineer/Technomancer
The pretty, pretty gauntlets… have I mentioned I love steampunk? It’s the mecha. Anyway. This is the scientist or technician type and bugger I’ve just realised I meant to give her a tool belt and have forgotten. Er… imagine one. Anyway, I could find very few pictures of even male archetypes of this class, and I really wanted to include a curvier body type because they’re pretty much invisible in these things, so here we are. I really like this one, forgotten toolbelt aside. I think she’s my third favourite.
Barbarian/Bruiser
I wasn’t sure what to call this class, because it’s another one with multiple names - basically, it’s the class belonging to the massive dudes with the massive axes. Unlike the warrior, these guys are physically exaggerated into these behemoths of men, and are given weapons that have no finesse but destroy EVERYTHING when used. I couldn’t find a single female example, personally.
Since the idea is over-exaggerated size and power, though - and it is very much the case that even men can’t attain that size in nature - then why not have a female version? So she’s sodding enormous. There’s a lot of muscle there.
She’s covered in a shit-ton of armour, so I really enjoyed giving her little feminine touches, like the frill on the bottom of her skirt/cape, and the winding mechanism on her helmet looking like a corsage, and her hair, and also by the way, did you know that rivets are sexy? YOU DO NOW.
Rogue/Infiltrator
The obvious role to put a petite woman in. This is the only one done from a Real Human Being, because I had another design but it kept going wrong and forcing me to bite my pencils in half, so in the end I decided to change tack and also to save my remaining pencils. That’s supposed to be a safe she’s examining. Shut up.
This is probably the design that could most do with colouring in to bring it to life - it’s less complex or detailed than the others, so it’s less inspiring. But I like it. Fifth favourite.
Flyer/Archer (Ranger?)
Favourite. I expect you can tell why. An hour, before you ask. Per wing.
I think she’d be called a ranger, but being woodsy and also Lord of the Ringsy that’s a word that means something too different to me. But, you know - the one who hangs back and fights from afar.
Anyway, she got to be the tall-and-slim-with-few-curves body type, because lanky tends to be the toneword for male examples of this sort of class. If I were to play this game I’d pick her. Or maybe the barbarian. Not sure.
If I get a break in revision I might get round to colouring these, but it’s not too likely for the forseeable future, so instead anyone who cares will have to view these in rough-sketch-mangled-by-my-crappy-scanner form. Sorry about that.
