bytheletterc

[bytheletterc]

Landlord wants the grass cut in the middle of a heat wave ohh my god THE GRASS KEEPS THINGS COOL

our yard has more fireflies out of the entire neighborhood, it attracts flycatchers and several insectivorous species I fucking hate lawn culture so much

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I want to tell a story to the artists and would-be artists out there.

When I was 19, I made a large oil painting of the nerd I would eventually marry. I poured all my attention and care into this painting. It's the only art I have from back then that still holds up as a work I'm proud of today.

I entered it into a judged show at the local art center. It got an honorable mention. I went to see the show with my beloved model. One of the judges came up to talk to me, and highlighted that all the judges really liked the painting. It would have placed, except, you see, the feet were incorrect. They were too wide and short, and if I just studied a bit more anatomy-

I called over my future wife, and asked her to take off her shoe. Being already very used to humoring me, she did. The judge looked at her very short, very wide little foot. Exactly as I'd lovingly rendered it. I would never edit her appearance in any way.

The judge looked me in the eye, and to his credit, he really looked like he meant it when he said "Oh I'm so sorry."

Anyways the moral of the story is that all of those anatomy books that teach you proportions are either showing you averages, or a very specific idea of an idealized body. Actual bodies are much more varied than that.

So don't forget to draw from observation, and remember that humans aren't mass produced mannequins. Delight in our variation. Because it's supposed to be there.

[bytheletterc]

Possum is life

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[“Seeing the indigent as wastrels, as the dregs of society, was certainly nothing new. The English had waged a war against the poor, especially vagrants and vagabonds, for generations. A series of laws in the fourteenth century led to a concerted campaign to root out this wretched “mother of all vice.” By the sixteenth century, harsh laws and punishments were fixed in place. Public stocks were built in towns for runaway servants, along with whipping posts and cages variously placed around London. Hot branding irons and ear boring identified this underclass and set them apart as a criminal contingent. An act of 1547 allowed for vagrants to be branded with a V on their breasts and enslaved. While this unusual piece of legislation appears never to have been put into practice, it was nonetheless a natural outgrowth of the widespread vilification of the poor.

By 1584, when Hakluyt drafted his “Discourse of Western Planting,” the poor were routinely being condemned as “thriftless” and “idle,” a diseased and dangerously mobile, unattached people, everywhere running “to and fro over all the realm.” Compared to swarms of insects, labeled as an “over-flowing multitude,” they were imagined in language as an effluvial current, polluting and taxing England’s economic health.

Slums enveloped London. As one observer remarked in 1608, the heavy concentrations of poor created a subterranean colony of dirty and disfigured “monsters” living in “caves.” They were accused of breeding rapidly and infecting the city with a “plague” of poverty, thus figuratively designating unemployment a contagious disease. Distant American colonies were presented as a cure. The poor could be purged. In 1622, the famous poet and clergyman John Donne wrote of Virginia in this fashion, describing the new colony as the nation’s spleen and liver, draining the “ill humours of the body . . . to breed good bloud.” Others used less delicate imagery. American colonies were “emunctories,” excreting human waste from the body politic. The elder Richard Hakluyt unabashedly called the transportable poor the “offals of our people.”

The poor were human waste. Refuse. The sturdy poor, those without physical injuries, elicited outrage over their idleness. But how could vagabonds, who on average migrated some twenty to eighty miles in a month, be called idle? William Harrison, in his popular Description of England (1577), offered an explanation. Idleness was wasted energy. The vagabonds’ constant movement led nowhere. In moving around, they failed (like the Indians) to put down healthy roots and join the settled labor force of servants, tenants, and artisans. Harrison thought of idleness in the same way we might today refer to the idling motor of a car: the motor runs in place; the idle poor were trapped in economic stasis. Waste people, like wastelands, were stagnant; their energy produced nothing of value; they were like festering weeds ruining an idle garden.”]

Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400 Year Untold History Of Class In America

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[bytheletterc]

giant redwood trees really are so cool, they just have something incredibly special going on. it's hard to describe if you haven't seen them

[bytheletterc]

IG@lo.pony

[bytheletterc]

Sharing space is nothing new. Sharing bathrooms is nothing new. The reactionary outrage is so manufactured.

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so i wore a pride flag pin to work the other day and the kids were all interested (obviously) (find me a classroom of preschoolers who are not obsessed with rainbows) (i'll wait) so they crowded around to see.

"aww!" they said, "it's a flag!!"

but the thing is: they're little. a lot of them don't really have a handle on all their mouth sounds yet.

such as, notably, that tricky tricky "L" sound.

[bytheletterc]

Along with ornaments, there will also be 3D rainbow laced Wyandotte ladies in next week’s update 🐓 🌈

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Fledgling (9/14)

Preorder my new book here (for USA, Canada, and UK). While you're there, you can sign up to receive a free digital signed print of one of my comics!

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Reverse Mulan about a young man who disguises himself as a noblewoman and has to learn how to do passive-agressive politicking at dinner parties.

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While I'm on a posting roll, can I interest you in some Perfectly Normal Crows? As you can see, there definitely aren't multiple weird things about any of them!!!

[bytheletterc]

A note, because not everyone knows this: if you're driving and another driver flashes their brights at you, this is a signal to be on alert and slow down. There may be debris in the road, a cop out of sight, or an animal crossing ahead of you. (Or, alternatively, your brights are on and they're getting blinded.) Whatever the reason, it's a signal that you need to focus and reduce speed. And possibly turn your own brights off.

This PSA has been brought to you by the four fawns and does that ran out in front of me at various points on my drive home.

Let's court death with mama!

[bytheletterc]

Penguin escapes killer whales by jumping onto a boat.

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Everyone shut up and look at this carving of a whale from the 1200-600 CE Chumash culture