Scribbles and Bits

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.

( Read more... )

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

Mori: There's a thing that some of us can do, with headmates we're on very close terms with, a sorta New Agey body scan where we can close our eyes and sorta see what's going on beneath each other's skins. Rogan can do it with Mac, Biff, Bob, and Grey--I expect he's better at it since he's blind in the first place and used to using other means of sensing. Rawlin's also good at it; she just closes her haws and sees things as glowing headspace threads.

I can do it with her. And where her chest scar is, I can feel abyssal water pumping away, taking over the functions her heart had.

It feels like good symmetry; she sacrificed her heart to revive and power the headspace, and now the abyssal water that makes UP headspace seems to power her. I would way rather her have the waters pumping away in her than the family god.

Anyway my girlfriend is cute and you should tell her she's cute.( Photographic evidence! )

Title: Strapping
Series: Infinity Smashed
Summary: Bob and Grey's relationship was supposed to be casual and short-term, but now everything falls apart... and gets rebuilt. NSFW.
Word Count: 3068
Notes: Uploaded in honor of Infinity Smashed's 25th anniversary! Also someone discussed the events of this story as "history" and I felt old. As a side note, I'm down to the last ten copies of the paperback of Found Wanting, and I don't plan to reprint it. If you want it, now's the time! (I will also likely be weeding the ebook as well. Sorry Infinity Smashed; you are not a hot seller.)

They’re down to Bob’s MISC boxes, never unpacked, when Grey finds a neon pink and purple dildo shaped like something from a tropical aquarium.

( Pegging and the Patriot Act )

This was the winner of the fan poll this month! This may well have been the first record of Feral Dumpster Rat, and the source of its name!

( images and context behind this cut... )

( ...and text-only transcript behind THIS cut! )

We're a Cyborg, and So am I
Series: Essay
Summary: "When I tell people I am a cyborg, they often ask if I have read Donna Haraway's 'A Cyborg Manifesto.' Of course I have read it. And I disagree with it. [...] The manifesto coopts cyborg identity while eliminating reference to disabled people on which the notion of the cyborg is premised. Disabled people who use tech to live are cyborgs. Our lives are not metaphors." --the Cyborg Jillian Weise, "Common Cyborg"
Word Count: 3100
Notes: Winner of the December 2024 fan poll by a landslide! If you want to support my work and help me keep uploading stuff, hit me up on LiberaPay or Patreon. Mentions of violence, ableism, and racism, but this isn't an intense essay.

Rogan: Our vessel became a cyborg when we were seventeen, more than half its lifetime ago. That was less than a year after my individual creation, so I have been a cyborg for basically all my life. My cyborginess is important to me, more so than the others here, because far as I know, I was the only one there for the whole process.