Scribbles and Bits

Okay. It's still November for 45 more minutes, so I'm still technically within deadline for this! (Our desktop broke. Those posts you've seen the past week were made on a broken old smartphone. Today I got a new desktop and frantically tried to finally get up the Patreon writing I've owed y'all all month.)

Many-Selved Family Portraiture has been uploaded to archive.org, in textual transcript form (of what I originally hoped to make, and then due to technical lack of savvy had to cut down), plus the 78 slides. The files are big!

I swear I will upload them to hm.com later. I am so tired.

EDIT: the alt-text apparently didn't export to EPUB and was lost in the save. -_- I'm sorry. I will have to redo it manually BUT NOT TODAY.

The Hands of a Dozen Strangers: My Experience at a Compassionate Touch Workshop
Summary: “Loving, consensual touch can be a deliberate religious practice.” —Christine Hoff Kraemer, Eros and Touch from a Pagan Perspective, pg. 122.
Series: Essay
Word Count: 2700
Notes: Winner of the LiberaPay/Patreon fan poll! A lot of these ideas I originally got from Eros and Touch from a Pagan Perspective, especially chapters 1: “Divided for Love’s Sake: An Erotic Cosmology” and 4: “the Sacrament of Touch.” The author has generously uploaded it to archive.org; check it out!

Unsurprisingly to anyone familiar with my history, I (Rogan of LB) have trouble being physically close to people. So what was I doing going to a compassionate touch workshop in a mysterious half-renovated warehouse with a dozen strangers, most of them men? Well, I wanted a change. I wanted to change.

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Rogan: Hey guys! I felt so crummy about missing out on all the Pride business opportunities this month that I've decided to throw a special art commission thing for the next month: The Queer Canoodling Commission Special!

I will draw your headmates, OCs, etc. kissing, cuddling, and kanoodling, in a limited palette of the pride or system colors of your choice! $30 for two figures, $50 for three, other options available if you ask. Unlike my normal (more expensive) commissions, these come with zero rounds of edits unless I decide I've made a mistake. What you get is what you get.

Some examples! (If nothing else, this can be an excuse to post rainbow pics of us being sappy together!)
( There's room for everyone under this rainbow! )

Interested? DM us, email us, or leave a comment (anon comments are turned on, so no Dreamwidth account is required)!

Original posts by Phosphor of Hungry Ghosts here, used with permission: https://nightfeather.cafe/notice/AuOng8NknA7IRvgusi

Rogan: I love drawing handwraps, they're so aesthetically appealing, but it's also tricky to find good reference for them! Fortunately, the largest, HEAVIEST book I own is Howard Schatz's At the Fights, an ENORMOUS photobook of boxers. I regret the Brobdignagian size of the thing (and the WEIGHT, oof, that book must weight close to ten pounds) but I had fun pulling it out for reference sketches on this month's Patreon postcards...

( pic behind cut! )

Pluralstories: Why We Did It Like That
Summary: "Librarians are the secret masters of the universe. They control information. Never piss one off." --Spider Robinson
Word Count: 3450
Notes: Winner of the fan poll this month and sponsored by our fans at LiberaPay and Patreon! Derelict from a "plurals in video games" academic paper that didn't end up happening.

We first got the idea of making a catalog of plural stories in 2009, back when we were in library school. People seemed to want one, and we heard plenty of complaints along the lines of, "I just want to read a story about people like me!" but at best there were lists of a few favorites on a blog or (later on) in an itch.io collection. Arguably the closest thing to a comprehensive catalog was Nita and Anita's now-defunct Multiple Personality and Dissociation Book List, which after a decade in existence listed 161 books with keywords and reviews. However significant, it had major flaws: it was limited to books from a medical standpoint, used only vague keywords like "fiction" and "psychiatry", gave no description of what the books were actually about, and kept the reviews (the only place to find content descriptions) siloed off and organized by reviewer name, rather than book title. Something more comprehensive and searchable was needed.

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This was the comics winner for this month's poll! Before I share it, let me tell you how it got made.

Recently, my local senator had a Town Hall meeting, and I was determined to go. I ran the gauntlet of Trumper protesters ranting about trans athletes (I recognized them from the library bomb threat back in October and waved to them), suffered through two plus hours of technological difficulties and clustering around smartphones in an overflow room, and then had to deal with one of my fellow citizens ranting about how she didn't want trans people around her children, we were just going to kill ourselves anyway.

The feelings that meeting gave me, I could not express. So I went home and drew all the genderful people who came before and alongside me, and I wrote their words instead--their joy, their survival, their power. And I converted that rage into fierce joy and shoved the local free libraries with them, and sent them to Florida, and disappeared into the night.


( 'This is the issue that we need to deal with in this century: what are we going to do with difference on this planet?' )

While at Boskone, I bought two very useful photo books from Laurie Toby Edison: Women En Large: Images of Fat Nudes, and Familiar Men: A Book Of Nudes. I have been wanting fat reference for ages, and so my Patreon postcard folks have been getting round ladies in their mailboxes the past month or so (and they will surely be getting more). Because I am proud of the work, I've chosen to scan and upload it here!

A New Kind of Intimacy: 8-page sketch comic about Rawlin and Mori getting closer after a presidential election and a muscle spasm. 2025. Text-only version here.

This was the winner of the fan poll this month! Enjoy!

EDIT: we have also added to the many-selved PDF bookscan hoard Theodore Schroder's 1931 mouth-breathing fanfic about Ida Craddock, "One Religio-Sexual Maniac". Many thanks to Orion Scribner, who compressed a 27 MB file into a HUNDREDTH of its original size and made it screenreadable!

(made thanks to beepbird)

This is a post on how to make a zine when you are working on paper, as compared to digital. It goes into how to lay out your pages for easy printing, how to scan and do post-production, and how to keep it easy on yourself, especially for a first go. You will need:

• paper
• stuff to make black marks on said paper (pens, markers, coal, cut-out newspaper text or magazine pics...)
• a scanner (arguably you could use a public library or something, but it's a paaaaain)
• a computer with an image-editing program (for this post, we use GIMP, which is free and open-source)
• (optional) scissors
• (optional) printer + ink/toner
• (optional) long-arm stapler + staples
• (optional) bone folder