nolanfa

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a smoke-grey panther, with white patterns, leaping. I'm very happy that one is stable on three points, which allows for the back legs to not touch the ground.

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Water-themed glazed medaillons: a leaping gray ray, and water surface in green and gray glaze, over red clay.

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Oh, indeed. Thank you for your answer!

I made air dry clay magnets

you can. buy them. if so interested

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a darkly smoked panther, sleeping curled up. It's about 10x10x5cm.

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symbols medaillons (blue and grey glaze over red clay, with eyes, circle, fire, and stars patterns)

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based on this picture of Chicago by Bob Ward

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a playful panther (smoked almost black)

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based on this picture of an unidentified forest by Luca Dross

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I really like the smoking on that one (a dark panther with white patterns, sitting hunched over).

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based on this picture of the Dolomites by Michal Kmet

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Always a good time to burn down yet another village!

Patreon

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So I watched a couple episodes of the Murderbot series and I'm… not impressed? I feel like it takes the rough facts of what happens in the books and they phrase it in a way that makes it mean something different. And lesser, obviously. (spoilers under the cut for both show and book, up to, say, half of it)

Stuff that's plain wrong:

The series' introduction feels like a gross mischaracterization of the book's Murderbot: in the book it does not fantasize about killing humans but about it not being its job anymore to keep them alive: because it wishes they had better preservation instincts. Because it wishes them alive, not dead. The only time it threatened violence was just that: a showy threat display. There was absolutely no intent to follow through and absolutely nobody was the least bit hurt. It specifically hacked its governor module so it would not kill people against its will/by accident! It gets attached stupidly fast! Also, from a storytelling point of view, the series insistence both that Murderbot would like to kill annoying/inconvenient people and that it is deeply traumatized by memories of having killed people kind of. Weaken each other.

in the series, Dr Mensah's team are incompetent and careless. They repeatedly disregard their security consultant's warnings (Murderbot, who, may I remind you, they believe to be human, or human enough), even once they know there's dangerous fauna. In the book, they're good at their jobs! What put them in danger was that their intel was sabotaged.

In the series' intro again, the trigger to its imagining violence is humans deliberately hurting it: in the book, violence being done to it by humans is not a very important part of its mental landscape. Violence being done to humans by other humans is.

in the series, the first time we see Dr Mensah's team they take a strong stance against SecUnits, likening it to slavery, and then immediately fold. In the book they also get forced to accept a SecUnit by the company even though they consider their employment immoral, but… there maybe could have been a way to show that in the series that did not make them seem so spineless? The book's point, when telling us they think it's slavery, is not "we'll never use a SecUnit, it's a question of principle!" but "we don't have SecUnits at home so we don't know how they work (and can't spot a malfunctioning government module); also we'd rather not have one now" which is absolutely not the same.

in the series, the crew oscillates weirdly between, on the one hand, "it's obviously human and should be treated as such" and "making it obey orders against its will is slavery", and on the other hand "it's shitty company equipment" and "we can't trust it because it's a machine". Pick one! In the book, the humans consider it human, and Murderbot considers itself shitty company equipment. Even Gurathin! The issue book-Gurathin has is not with it being a machine but with it being heavily armed!

series-Gurathin forcing eye contact was… bad? I like the scene; it gave us insight into Murderbot's characterization, it had a couple of funny lines, and seeing people who hate each other interact while having to pretend to be at least half-polite creates interesting tension. But book-Murderbot hates Gurathin because Gurathin does not trust it. Book-Gurathin does not, afair, deliberately force Murderbot to do against its will something it's clear it is uncomfortable with. He's not that kind of asshole, no matter Murderbot's personal hang-ups, and that's important!

the reason show-Mensah doesn't want to go back (when they first see something's wonky) is… pride? So the company doesn't think free planets can't handle themselves? Wtf? "Oh no I'll risk the life of my crew so I don't seem incompetent" is the worst incompetence.

Ratthi asked Murderbot whether it had feelings and then said that was treating it as a person. For reference, book's Ratthi said "it's clear you have feelings", and "this is no more a machine than Gurathin is", which is very different.

why do they keep thirsting at it. Why.

stuff that's badly done:

the constant references to media feel, imo, after a bit, very heavy-handed (I like that we have a visual for Sanctuary Moon now! I don't like how we have five references to media, half of them unnecessary, in one twenty-minutes episode -I did not count but it sure did feel like that)

the constant contradictions mentioned above (Murderbot's view on killing humans, the crew's opinion on whether Murderbot is human)

There are fun parts! The "oh no, he didn't fall for my fool-proof excuse to go be somewhere else"; I like the helmet design; I like how they frame Murderbot's close-ups and the direction it looks in.

There are also changes that I don't have anything against! If you want the crew to be much more suspicious of Murderbot, that's kinda weird but fine! If you want Dr Mensah to have debilitating panic attacks, fine! If you want the romantic subplot to be much more important (unsure whether it even exists in the book tbh), fine! If you want to remove one character or add one, cool!

But making Murderbot bloodthirsty and the team incompetent is going against their core characterization.

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Alternate colors for bird-themed medaillons (owl faces, one grey one green, and the side flying raven in grey glaze, all on red clay).

I love the old corroded copper look of the green glaze.

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I finished the fish installation! Even got exhibited, yay! The way it works is that there's only about half a dozen different drawings, but you can print several of each and mix and match them to make whatever shape you want, however big you want, whatever the shape of your space.

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That one has the same white-ish overlay as the sugar one, and I did smoke it at the same time, but I had not put sugar on this one (salt, though, I did). So the white-ish overlay is either sugar fumes that, because they're in the air, touched both, or has nothing to do with sugar. As often so far, more testing is necessary. This is also a smoking where I had sawdust (if you read this, thank you, sawdust provider) so it may have behaved differently than usual (where I use mostly newspaper scraps).

(Ooooh white eyes! I gotta try to get white eyes)

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I participated in the Women In Comics reverse Bang @womenincomicsminibang for which I did this art above and @sisaloofafump did this fic (<- link)

It's about Kate! And Lucky! And a road trip! Go read it!

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Blue-glazed bird-themed medaillons (a pigeon roosting, a raven flying seen from the side, a pigeon flying from the top) on red clay.