Hungry Ghost Moon

Ohhhhh-ayyyyyy-kaaaah-keeee.

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 23:01:38 -0600

Ohhhhh-ayyyyyy-kaaaah-keeee.

Digital speedpainting practice. That sucks. From reference.

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:01:00 -0600

Digital speedpainting practice. That sucks.

From reference.

I don’t know. Trees.

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 18:19:13 -0600

I don’t know. Trees.

Story time.

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 21:19:00 -0600

I volunteer at a nonprofit yoga studio on Friday evenings, checking people in, doing administrative stuff, and cleaning up a little during the 5:30 class. Tonight, a girl who’d never been there before came in about three minutes before class would begin and asked if we still had the sliding scale donation system to pay for classes. I told her that the standard fee for a drop-in class was $15, but yes, we did have a sliding scale fee for people experiencing financial hardship. I handed her the laminated card that explained the scale, and gave prices based on income level. She looked at it and said she only had a couple dollars. Now, that’s fine! There are a number of people who come to the studio who can only afford that much. In fact, that’s why we have the system.

She said, “Well, I don’t even have a couple of dollars, can I just go in without a donation?” I explained that it was not donation (i.e., optional), paying something was expected, and if she wanted to waive any fee she would have to speak to the teacher. (I allow this because sometimes, if a regular guest is really hard up, the instructor may be willing to take an IOU or something.)

Ben (the instructor) was close by, so I waved him over and he explained that the scale had a pay what you can option at the lowest end: if that’s $5, great!, if that’s $.25, that’s okay too. “We just ask that you pay what you can.”

Digging around in her pocket, she said she had about $.40, and he told her that was fine. “Okay, yeah,” she said, avoiding my eyes, “I just don’t think this person understood.”

Reader, I remained civil! As she handed me the change, I smiled up blandly into her face. “I think you should know that you make people feel bad!” she told me, sniffling (from the damp weather or from turgid emotion, I’m not sure).

You know what would make me feel bad, you guys? Giving away someone else’s goods and services for nothing, without their permission, knowing full well that Ben makes far less teaching at a nonprofit studio than he does anywhere else. “It’s not my salary,” I explained to her.

She bustled out and came back a few minutes later with a $20 bill, grudgingly saying she would pay $5. So I guess she had the money after all. The fact that she thought I was deliberately shaming her probably says more about the state of her own conscience than my behavior.

Anyway. This is my long lead-in to saying that I resent people acting like, because the studio is a nonprofit, we owe them something. After all, what is a nonprofit for if not to provide them anything they want for nothing? 98% of the people who take classes at the studio are wonderful, polite, zen-like individuals. It’s probably the chillest “customer service”-type job you could ask for. But every so often, someone thinks I’m being unreasonable because I ask them to pay something. Anything. I have had people pay less than a dollar, and I accept that because I know Ben believes in the idea behind the studio and wants to help people even when they don’t have much to give. That’s the kind of person he is. Those are the kind of people who teach at this studio. And maybe I’m not as nice a person as any of them. But I have to draw the line somewhere.

The studio is not a nonprofit so you can get something for nothing. It’s a nonprofit because, among other things, it parters with other nonprofit and government organizations to provide services to at need populations: at-risk youth, senior citizens, the homeless, those suffering from illness and disease, those in residential treatment programs, and people with physical and developmental disabilities. Like, for example, The Tubman Foundation, which runs a shelter for battered women and families. Among other things. A percentage of the class fees funds these programs. Another part goes to keep the studio running, and the rest goes to the teachers.

The fact that you can come into the studio and get a 90-minute yoga class for, literally, one dollar (if you’re a person experiencing financial hardship) is extremely rare. It’s one of the few nonprofit yoga studios in the country. There are studios out in the suburbs that have a non-negotiable fee of $20 per drop-in class. Also, in this economy, the studio is struggling to stay afloat. But it continues to offer the pay what you can option, because it’s run by genuinely altruistic people who believe in it’s mission.

The people who work at this studio want you to come in, and want you to do yoga with us. But I, the person sitting between you and the yoga mats (free to borrow, no charge) wants you to be honest. Can you really, literally not afford to pay $1 for this class? If so, then I submit that tonight, your priorities should be elsewhere.

Someone, please put Jack Sparrow back in that locker.

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 14:18:00 -0600

It took me a couple weeks to formulate a coherent response to Johnny Depp’s defense of Roman Polanski. I kept trying, but every time I got more than two sentences into this quote, my eyes stopped focusing and steam began pouring out of my ears:

“Why now?” Depp asked rhetorically. “Obviously, there is something going on somewhere. Somebody has made a deal with someone. Maybe there was a little money involved, but why now?” Polanski, Depp continued, “is not a predator. He’s 75 or 76 years old. He has got two beautiful kids, he has got a wife that he has been with for a long, long time. He is not out on the street.”

“Why now?” Depp implies that there must be some ulterior motive for persecuting a convicted criminal who fled the county rather than serve his time for drugging and raping a 13 year-old girl. As if that weren’t reason enough?

But no, no. As a qualified and highly informed Hollywood gumshoe, Depp is too perceptive for that. He sees shenanigans afoot!

Of course, it’s sufficiently insulting that what Polanski did could legally be put in the same category as a 19 year-old boy having consensual sex with his 17 year-old girlfriend. But the fact that an actual human being (one with an 11 year-old daughter of his own) doesn’t seem to be able to tell the difference is really mind-boggling.

Possibly even more offensive is Depp’s assertion that Polanski’s status as a husband and father, and the fact that he’s not actively lurking in dark alleyways looking for victims, means that he can’t really be a predator. This implies that the only “real” rapes are the ones where some stranger jumps out from behind a bush and physically overpowers a woman. Forget the fact 77% of rape is acquaintance rape, and that this type of rape is horribly insidious, because less than 2% of acquaintance rapes are ever reported.

There is more than one type of predator. Predators are not always physically intimidating or overtly violent. Rape has many faces. All of them are ugly, all of them are wrong, and all of them cause their victims to suffer.

So… I guess I’ll continue to not see your movies. You smug asshole.

An experiment to detect gravitational waves may indicate that our universe is a holographic projection.

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 11:22:00 -0600

An experiment to detect gravitational waves may indicate that our universe is a holographic projection.:

Huh.

Started winter figure-drawing class last night.

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 02:06:15 -0600

Started winter figure-drawing class last night.

Just a sketch, but still pretty weak. I think it’s the...

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 01:28:00 -0600

Just a sketch, but still pretty weak. I think it’s the composition. (There’s something about the lower part, by his feet, that bugs me.) Also, the folds (simple as they may be) should have been done differently. Maybe I’ll try this again tomorrow.

she’s a maneater

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 11:31:01 -0600

she’s a maneater:

langwidere:

BECAUSE THE WORLD IS NOT NOW, NOR HAS IT EVER BEEN, FULL ENOUGH OF STUPID, STUPID CRAP.

Not just stupid, but utterly goofy. Most people with two working eyes in their heads know that Christina Hendricks would look good in a giant balloon made of potato skins. She looks good in both the distorted and original images, it seems like every morning I wake up to find that the NYT has again attempted to shit in my cereal, etc. I am tried of both of these things! I want to see one piece on Christina Hendricks, in anything, that (for better or worse) doesn’t make an issue out of her weight! Go out and look. You wont find one! It doesn’t exist! And my feelings on the New York Times are best summed up with an “AAGGGH.” A loud one, that comes from a place deep in my belly where I react to Rick Sanchez and people who regularly use the “poke” feature on Facebook.

Kick - Fest Hos Mig (Parka Late Night Remix) Swedish techno...

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 13:22:33 -0600

Kick - Fest Hos Mig (Parka Late Night Remix)

Swedish techno week here on Hungry Ghost Moon. Just sit back and enjoy it. I insist.

I did this for use as a deviantArt ID. I am a happy dinosaur.

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 01:45:00 -0600

I did this for use as a deviantArt ID.

I am a happy dinosaur.

I’m a bit late to the party on this, but Okami is a fun...

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 21:07:52 -0600

I’m a bit late to the party on this, but Okami is a fun game. Pretty colors. I like feeding the animals!

Study Question: What do you think could be wrong with a culture that sexually idealizes women who have no mouths? HINT: It wasn’t The Great Lipstick Shortage of 1549.

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 18:26:00 -0600

Study Question: What do you think could be wrong with a culture that sexually idealizes women who have no mouths? HINT: It wasn’t The Great Lipstick Shortage of 1549.:

OOH OOH. Me! I know! Pick me!

Tangentially: wouldn’t that make a good scary story? Creepy girl-creatures with giant eyes and no mouths (or having no mouth yourself, which I guess Harlan Ellison already did… but he used a male character). If someone (talented) would write that, we’d have some actual, new feminist horror, instead of Diablo Cody’s weak miscarriages*.

Also, it’s been awhile since I watched Mononoke, but I seem to remember the first and second stories pretty overtly addressing some women’s issues. I don’t know how hard they were trying to actually classify the show as a feminist one, but… something’s there! (Either way, it’s a good show.)

*Thin ice, there. Whoops. That movie was really disappointing.

Discocrew - Husvagn

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:48:23 -0600

Discocrew - Husvagn

This season, like last season and the season before that, I looked up premiering anime in case...

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 11:03:58 -0600

This season, like last season and the season before that, I looked up premiering anime in case there’s something I have even a vague interest in watching. But as with last season, every single show looks like the worst show ever. 90% of what’s produced now is light novel adaptations (bleh), moé game adaptations (ugh), moé porno game apaptations (bitch please), and anything that deserves the label of moé (ARRGH).

Moé apologists (i.e. perverts) often like to define moé as a “burning affection” and desire to “protect,” inspired by cute characters. Or something. They also maintain that the feeling isn’t necessarily sexual in nature. To anyone with the ability to see past the end of their own nose, this is clearly bullshit. But either way, this is the kind of stuff that they can market the most overpriced wank-material out of, and the kind of stuff that the most fetishists will hemorrhage money to get ahold of. So that’s what’s getting produced.

I find moé lazy, predictable, and viscerally offensive. Emma has written a few entries lately about the tendency to attach sinister -isms to anything someone doesn’t like, for any reason. Which is true! For the record, I think James Cameron probably doesn’t hate women or minorities. Do you want to see something that’s really questionable? How about, I don’t know, Kodomo no Jikan. Or, to pick a more “mainstream” and less blatant example, Macross Frontier. In fact, pull the name of any anime series produced in the last three years, there’s a good chance you’ll come across something where female characters are less intended to be “human” (literally or figuratively) and more intended to be “a unification of popular stereotypes to create something that is the most likely to be attractive to sexually frustrated mouth-breathers who will be willing to pay sticky fistfuls of money for creepy PVC figures.”

I could go on, but it seems unnecessary. Colony Drop already has a good post about it, and either way, this should all be pretty obvious to anyone who doesn’t consider Love Hina or Sister Princess “works”. Unless they mean “works of crap.” (Haw haw.)

“URGH. I AM A TERRIBLE ARTIST. Why did I apply to art...

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 15:42:40 -0600

“URGH. I AM A TERRIBLE ARTIST. Why did I apply to art school? Why didn’t one of you guys stop me?! I might as well not even have hands. I am shaming my family.”

That’s what my brain said to me today. There’s mutiny afoot!

Kat DeLuna - Como Un Sueno [Am I Dreaming]

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 13:45:25 -0600

Kat DeLuna - Como Un Sueno [Am I Dreaming]

Physical Cosmologies: The Shining

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 15:20:00 -0600

Physical Cosmologies: The Shining:

I read the book yesterday (for the first time) and then re-watched the movie, which has been one of my favorites since I did a project on Stanley Kubrick in a high school film class. Kubrick is like crack for a young asshole infatuated with their newfound ability to read things like “color symbolism” and “visual metaphor” into a movie. In 10th grade, that asshole was me. Kubrick was actually not a hack, though (at least less of one than, say, that guy who made Donnie Darko). There’s some interesting stuff going on in that movie. Beyond the trite insights I came up with six years ago, I mean (“They’re talking in a red bathroom! What does the color red remind you of..?!”).

It’s easy to see this article as an over-conceptualization, being so enchanted with the piece and the man itself that the author starts seeing a million unintended complexities. And there’s probably some truth to that: I’m not 100% convinced the film was intended as “a careful satire [refutation] of Indo-European text-based knowledge encryption.” I mean, at least not a careful one. But I also think the idea is that it doesn’t matter so much if it’s completely intentional: since the language and techniques are often subliminal ones, the messages can be received whether or not they were deliberately designed and constructed by the creator.

I wanted to post this link though, particularly because much of the “next-generation, post-structural,…’language’” of film this guy is talking about can also be applied to comics and (as he mentions) video games. Comics lack the auditory and true motion aspect of film, (although I think motion, particularly, can be demonstrated more authentically than in strictly the written word… outside the reader’s own imagination, that is). But I think what the author is referring to as motion-glyphs is totally doable in the picture-plus-word-bubble medium of comics (“interplays of shadow and light that connect, overlap, blend, and contrast symbols and signs into what might be perceived as new-fangled sentences made of light: concentrated summaries of paradox projected onscreen composed of seemingly mundane {most of it is hung on walls} and unrelated forms of two warring continent’s mythological systems”).

…which I think is really cool! And inspiring! Doesn’t that just make you wanna draw pictures?!

:)

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 19:48:00 -0600

I got accepted to MCAD.

(To celebrate, I finished peeling some garlic and then made spaghetti. Later, I bought three books and video game for myself off my wishlist. Weeew.)

kafuka: flycatcher: playwithdinos: yerawizardharry: vivalamar...

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 19:17:15 -0600

kafuka:

flycatcher:

playwithdinos:

yerawizardharry:

vivalamary:

flyicarus:

Pleasing!