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Thursday, January 7th, 2010
queer_punks
[ faggosaurus ]
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4:21a
Back Roads Zine - needs submissions
x-posted to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) alternatrans, queer_punks
i neglected to post about this when i first found out about it. emailed the person who's behind it and they said the submissions deadline has been pushed back to February i think. something like that.
If you are a transsexual, transgender, or gender variant person who has physically transitioned outside of the traditional route, WE WANT YOUR STORY!
For people who wish to physically transition - to change their body in ways related to their gender - there is an established route - a highway if you will - that we are expected to follow. The highway first passes through a place called "therapy" where you are supposed to talk to a shrink and get a diagnosis of "Gender Identity Disorder". Then, the next stop is a doctor (maybe an endocrinologist) where you can get a prescription for hormones and tests to follow up on your hormone levels. Next, you are supposed to drive endlessly through a land called "real life test" before you are able to reach a surgeon who can make certain changes to your body. If you make it out the other side of surgery, you are finally able to access rights such as a legal gender change, access to single-gender spaces, etc.
Of course, this highway is filled with roadblocks, checkpoints, and toll booths that serve to prevent people from proceeding along it. Many folk who wish to reach the end are stopped in their tracks, and cannot proceed further. This could be because they are short on funds, because they work in the sex industry, because they have a medical or psychiatric diagnosis that prevents them from accessing hormones, or because they simply are unwilling to pass through some of the stops on
the way to get where they're going. Thus, many of us end up taking detours and back roads in order to get where we're going. We forge letters from doctors or psychiatrists; we access hormones via the internet or the street; we find non-medical ways to alter our body.
My goal in this zine is to provide people with a map of these back roads. While it is fairly easy to find quality information on what we can expect while travelling along the main highway, there is a distinct lack of information about the more minor routes. It's not clear which routes are safe, or even which routes will actually get us where we're going. That's where you come in. If you've traveled one of these minor routes, and gotten where you're going, tell us about it so that more
can follow behind you. If you've tried to venture off the highway and gotten
stuck in a ditch, tell us about it so that others will not follow in your path. If you've deviated at all from the main highway, others will want to know how that went.
Send your submissions to back.roads.zine@gmail.com. We will make every effort to make sure that your contribution remains anonymous, and will publish your submission without your name or any other identifying information, unless you wish to be identified. Please send submissions before November 1, 2009, although late submissions may be accepted.
Email back.roads.zine@gmail.com if you have any questions about this project.
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eyeteeth
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1:01a
Holy crap, it's Phineas Gage!
Sometimes when I obsess at people about Walter they obsess back about Phineas. I'm always sorry to have to tell them that there's no evidence his story had any effect on the history of psychosurgery. In fact there's not a lot of evidence for the story itself as it is usually told: the part about Phineas's getting a tamping rod through the head in a freak railway accident is undisputed, but the part about his personality changing afterward dates to 1868 -- twenty years after the accident. The primary doctor in the case, a guy named John Martyn Harlow, doesn't say anything about this at all. In fact he attributes Phineas's amazing recovery in part to his "iron will." Personally I rather like the idea that Phineas took a tamping rod through the eye -- and out the back of the skull, leaving a two-inch hole that never healed -- and remained more or less mentally intact. Harlow reports that when he arrived on the scene Phineas was, incredibly, conscious, and said to him, "Doctor, here is business enough for you."
By the way, if you were wondering about another connection with dubious, soul-crushing science, I don't think John Martyn Harlow was related to Harry Harlow. Harry's real last name was Israel: he changed it so no one would think he was a Jew (which he wasn't, so fair enough).
Lastly, as of last weekend it is no longer my secret shame that I have never seen the Bela Lugosi Dracula. And I was surprised to learn that the best thing about it isn't Bela. The best thing about it is Dwight Frye as Renfield, a part the writers had the good sense to expand until it's considerably larger than Harker's. This is what I'm talking about. Ooh, Mr. Renfield!
Oh, and for what it's worth, ooh, Mr. Gage!
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(4 comments | comment on this) Wednesday, January 6th, 2010
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cathyr19355
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9:35p
Decoration news
My neighbor down the street--he who decorates his home for each and every holiday, no matter how minor--has already taken his Christmas decorations down.
This might seem a bit surprising, since many of my other fellow Malvernites still have their Christmas lights and decorations up (including yours truly). However, my neighbor has not left his home undecorated. Oh, no.
He has merely replaced his Christmas tree, and other Christmas window decorations, with large snowflake-shaped decorations studded with white Christmas lights. Since his bushes were already covered with white Christmas lights, he has left those lights up. The effect is rather pretty. Though if we get a heavy blizzard in the next few weeks, his neighbors may well be cursing his foray into sympathetic magic. :-)
current mood:  amused
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teratomarty
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5:00p
Soviet cellular phone
A thing of beauty and a joy forever, from 1963 or there about:
Province of the Party elite, the Soviet Union had the first system of mobile duplex communication (talking and listening at the same time) supported by a network of radio towers. That's what makes it a cellular phone, rather than a radio-phone or walkie-talkie. So it took up the entire passenger seat. It's gorgeous.
From EnglishRussia.com.
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evandorkin
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2:00p
San Diego Comicon Artists Alley - 1987
Been meaning to post this for some time, never got around to it, kept misplacing the page. This is the Artists Alley list for the 1987 San Diego Comicon. Click on it once or twice to read it clearly.
I find this list fascinating for a number of reasons, one being the memories it triggers. This was my first Comicon, I went to promote Pirate Corp$! #1 from Eternity Comics, which debuted at the show (to no fanfare, as deserved). My friend and Eternity publisher Brian Marshall took care of my hotel room (the Eternity folks crashed together, iirc, it was Brian, Tony Eng and I) ) and my mom paid for my flight as a gift (because I never went on family trips and couldn't afford the airfare myself).
I was 22 years old, still very green, I'd never been to a non-hotel convention. I don't remember how I got on the Artist Alley table list, things were very different back then for newbie/fan artists, and you can see by the list how much smaller the space was. The convention was still helfd at the old convention center, across from the Westgate Hotel. We stayed at the San Diego Hilton or something like that, it was by the shore where the old tourist schooner boats are, and there was a liquor store next door, that I do remember , because we were in and out of there quite a bit. It was the first time I had a Cornoa beer, which at the time was very exotic, and not all over NYC as it soon was. It was also the first time I was away, on my own, and it was a very heady experience, meeting professionals, selling work, getting very drunk veery night, sketching with a hangover, trying to find work and a place in the scheme of things.
I could dredge up a few pages worth of SDCC memories from that first year, and that's not what I intended to do. I just wanted to show folks the Artists Alley list, and marvel at who was sitting there in 1987, sketching away and trying to sell their comics. And marvel at who is still around, 22 or so years later, and who isn't, and how the fortunes of the cartoonists exhibiting that week have gone. Some of these folks are quite well off now, many are household names, if your household is a comic shop. How much was a Mike Mignola sketch in 1987? How many people passed Jim Lee's table without a look? Who knew Laird and Eastman would become multi-millionaires? Crazy, huh?
I never met Mark Badger, but we ended up hanging out as part of the Instant Piano gang years later. I never met Jill Thompson, but I still remember noticing her across the aisle (how many flame-haired gals were drawing in that room? In that industry, at the time? Interesting that the ladies are all scheduled for one table. Fellowship? Choice? Protection?) Years later Jill and I would become friends after I crashed at her place on the way back from a Detroit Convention, and years after that we'd start working on Beasts of Burden. Crazy. And We'd both do strips for a MIke Mignola Hellboy anthology. And I'd finally meet Mike at MOCCA decades later.
Look - Dark Horse Comics and SLG are both in Artist's Alley, not at booths. I'm affiliated with both companies nowadays, and ended up working with both outfits largely because of events that happened at this show. Look -Sam Kieth, way pre-Maxx, etc. Look - you could've badgered Steve Purcell all day without a ton of Sam and Max fans bothering you yet. Look - Paul Chadwick. Scott McCloud. Future Fish Police tv show, future Image guys, proto-manga proponents, future video game artists, webcomics artists, editors, publishers, creators of characters that will be turned into movies and toys and franchises. Future Chuck Austen, even. Who the hell knew? Everyone was just trying to make comics, get their comics on shelves, get a mention in CBG or maybe The Journal. Get a free drink at the bar. Who knew how big things would blow up for some of the people on this list, who knew it was even possible to achieve some of the things they achieved? From comics? Small press comics? That most people weren't looking at in that small-ish section of that small-ish convention center? Crazy.
I wonder what the goals were amongst those folks in those days, mine were to make comics, and keep making comics. In that I've succeeded. My dreams were small. Was anyone thinking Turtles empire, designing motion pictures and video games, optioning their properties for films that would actually get made? Never passed my mind, that's for sure. I was praying for a penciling gig on a DC back-up feature. Anything.
And, of course, some of these folks disappeared, some to move on to other fields, some burnt out, some faded away from credit boxes, solicitations and artists alley lists. And some of them are still chugging away.
Chug...chug...chug......
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megatexas
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2:11a
A minor Threat 09 and 10
Thanks to the timely intervention of John David Brown, the whole story is inked and scanned and needs only assembly.
Only five pages left to finish, I could get it done at any time. Which is good, because the deadline was five hours ago. I bet...twenty hours of work, that's my guess. And then the inevitable revising. Let me know if you see anything to improve -- I'd like this story to be amazing.
The dialogue on 09 bugged me for the longest time but I think I finally grokked it out. The key phrase was "It goes bananas." Takes it from sonorous and trite to goofy and weirdly real. That guy's based on my old co-worker Jessie, who had a very high-pitched voice.
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(comment on this) Tuesday, January 5th, 2010
rkimedes
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11:08p
Turn About's Fair Bathe
Quietly Tilt surveyed his domain, satisfied that all was right with the world. The Grey Beast Noodge eyed him speculatively, a determined glint in his eye. He knew that Tilt had staked out the prime lazing location, and he knew that it would not belong solely to Tilt for long. He quickly evaluated and discarded several strategies for the siege he was about to undertake, but his plan of action quickly became clear. Corporal Bathing was to be the order of the day. Little did he know that the doughty Tilt would soon turn his plot against him. We join the gripping action in progress...
( Gripping action )
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