Oh, Damian.
… hey. Wait a second-
Is that-
Dustin
You wonderful man
When I was a little kid, my favorite book was “Cars and Trucks and Things That Go” by Richard Scarry. The best thing was, on every page you could find Goldbug hidden somewhere. (It was also better than “Where’s Waldo”, which came out years later, because there was an actual plot.)
I love how one can enjoy “Li’l Gotham“‘s stories, but can also play “Find the Steph Reference”. Steph is Goldbug!
Anonymous asked: I'm so sorry to hear about your cat. I can't imagine how devastating it would be. If that happened to me, I would worry that it would ruin the relationship with my friend. Do you blame your friend? How can you not?
You know, I wondered if it would hurt our relationship, too, but I don’t blame her, even in my heart of hearts. She’s a mother, too, and she gave me a bouquet out of love. It was a kind, loving thought. She had no idea that it was a danger, in fact, she had a similar bouquet in her house and we called her to let her know to get rid of it, rather than put her cats at risk. It could just as easily been her cats as mine - how could I possibly blame her?
In truth, I blame myself. I saw that my cat had knocked over the vase and picked it up and re-filled it. Later I noticed that she’d taken a bite out of one of the flowers. I even thought, “I should double-check that and make sure it’s not going to hurt her,” but I was in the middle of making my daughter’s lunch and afterward I forgot all about it. I mean, cats eat plants all the time, right? I hadn’t the slightest inkling that she’d been poisoned until it was far too late, but if I’d stopped a minute to look it up, I could have gotten her treated in time and probably saved her life.
[video]
Please, if you have a cat, be very careful about what flowers you bring into your house. Even the pollen from lilies is deadly to cats.
And please, please pass this on. Please.
honestly just dont let your cats eat ANY PLANTS
unless its catnip or something(really now)
my mother loves star gazer lilies, i get them for her every chance i get
i have 3 cats
train your cats not to eat them
Please be aware, even lily pollen that is scattered and licked off a cat’s fur can kill it. Pollen on a ground or table that’s picked up on a cat’s paw and cleaned off can kill it, too. A petal or leaf fallen from a lily that a cat plays with and chews on? Will kill it. If you think it’s worth the risk, that’s up to you, but I hope you never have reason to regret it.
If I’d had the opportunity, I certainly would have trained her - but I didn’t “let” her eat my flowers, she got into them while I was asleep (this was the first time we’d had flowers in the house since we got her).
the inspiration for this poem: PSA: The deadly flower in my Mother's Day bouquet. -
I want to write a quick note to everyone, because this is something I didn’t know, and I really, really wish I had.
A dear friend gave me a lovely bouquet for Mother’s Day. Included among the flowers were a couple of stargazer lilies. You all know what lilies look like, they’re…
There are a TON of plants/fruits/vegis that you wouldn’t think twice about that are toxic to pets. Check out the ASPCA for a pretty comprehensive list
Reblogging for this useful info. Pet owners, please check out this list. It may save your pet’s life. Thank you so much for sharing.
Amy sells out: Please help me save my cat. -
Hey everyone. I’ve been super busy working, and now I’ve hit another snag.
This is my kitty. He needs some major surgery to correct urinary issues he has been having. If he doesn’t get them fixed, he will either be put down, or will die from associated complications.
For…
After today, how could I not reblog this?
I got word from the vet about an hour ago.
My cat’s kidney numbers are “off the charts”. In every other way, she is fine - heart, lungs, even her empty little stomach, but her kidneys are failing, even as I type this.
The *only* possible treatment would be a full dialysis - the same kind humans get. It would cost $10,000 for the *first* week, and last, oh, three to five weeks, depending on how she responded. Even then, it would only give her a slim chance of survival…*if* her kidneys aren’t too damaged to recover. Apparently they’ve saved cats before, but…
So, yeah. Tonight my husband, daughter and I will be going and saying goodbye to her.
I hate this.
She’s only a little over a year and a half old. And she’s just the best cat. The *best* cat. I’ve had several cats in my lifetime, but never have I bonded with any of them the way I bonded with her. She is so smart, so sweet, so loving. We believe she’s part Burmese, due to her narrow little face and long body, coppery eyes and the fact that she never set off my allergies. I could rub my face right up against hers and it never once made my nose itch or my eyes burn. We got her from the Humane Society when she was about six months old.
She would play fetch, but only on her terms. She loved those plastic eggs you would get around Easter. If you took half of one and threw it, she would chase it around, then pick it up in her mouth and bring it back to you…sometimes.
I tried to do everything right with her. She’s an indoor cat, and we have a Loc8tor on her collar - an expensive investment, but well worth it. We fed her the best raw food, grain free diet we could afford. We used corn-based litter (which was much better for me as well, and worked far better than the clay kind, we found).
And now…now she’s going to die. And I have to be the one to say to the vet, “kill her”.
I can’t even imagine what it would be like to go through this with a child. But at least with a child, there wouldn’t even be a question of whether I should try to save her. At least I could start a fundraiser, or beg friends and relatives for help, even if the chances were slim. But $30,000 for the *chance* to save a cat…there’s no way.
I used to make (gentle) fun of people who called their pets their “babies”. But she was a little bit my baby, the second child I chose not to have, but a small part of me craved. I spoiled her, and snuggled with her, and loved her very, very much.
And now I have to kill her.
Please, if you have a cat, don’t bring lilies into your house. Don’t take the chance. Don’t give bouquets containing lilies to friends that own cats. If you think there’s even the slightest chance that your cat might have taken a bite out of a lily, or even licked lily pollen from her fur, please, take her to the vet. Don’t wait. Don’t wait to see if she shows any symptoms, because it *will* be too late. I had no idea lilies were poisonous, but if I’d looked it up as soon as I’d realized she’d taken a bite out of my Mother’s Day bouquet, if I’d double-checked then and there to see whether she might have eaten something dangerous, she might be fine right now. We might have been able to save her.
Instead, I have to kill her.
Please, let your cat-owning friends know: don’t keep lilies around. Put them in the trash, covered, where neighborhood cats can’t get to them. Don’t keep them in the house. I don’t want anyone else to have to go through this.
Please, tell everyone you can.
I want to write a quick note to everyone, because this is something I didn’t know, and I really, really wish I had.
A dear friend gave me a lovely bouquet for Mother’s Day. Included among the flowers were a couple of stargazer lilies. You all know what lilies look like, they’re those trumpet-shaped flowers in pink or white or orange, with lots of pollen. If you’re not positive, google “lily” in google image search.
What I didn’t know is that almost all kinds of lilies are deadly to cats. Even a small amount of one will cause massive kidney failure. My cat took a bite out of one of them and now she’s dying. She’s suffered through lethargy, vomiting, and even seizures, and we had no idea what was wrong with her. She’s at the vet now, getting treated, but it’s probably too late, because we weren’t able to get her treatment until the critical initial 18-hour window had passed.
Please, if you have a cat, be very careful about what flowers you bring into your house. Even the pollen from lilies is deadly to cats.
And please, please pass this on. Please.
I recently posted a link on Facebook to this petition regarding the redesign of Merida from “Brave” that Disney is reportedly doing to include her in the Disney Princess line and I got this response.
> “I don’t get the hoopla over this. Apart from wearing a different outfit and being drawn by a different artist, I don’t really see a difference. Is it that a woman without a weapon is weak?”
Character design matters.
If there’s one thing the character design class I took in college stressed more than anything else it’s that a good character design informs the viewer who the character is, what they are like. What they wear, how they stand, how they do their hair, the shape of their face, their standard expressions, what they carry with them, these are all vital decisions in a good design.
Few have embraced this philosophy more wholeheartedly than Disney. Take a look at some of these designs and think about how well the designer conveys the basic concepts of the character through the design alone.
Disney knows how to do this and their choices are deliberate. A misstep in the design of a character can make the difference between one that is marketable and one that is not. That’s extremely important to Disney, and a task that they do not treat cavalierly. If you have to sum up the character in just one image, like you often have to do with marketing materials or toys, qualities like the ones listed above are the only tools you have.
Artistic Interpretations
The argument that a character always looks somewhat different when a different artist draws them doesn’t apply when your’e talking about Disney. If you think I’m wrong, think of how many drawings you’ve seen Disney publish of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Aladdin, or Woody that look exactly like they did in the movies. While things like comics have some leeway to veer off model a bit, marketing materials need to match as closely as possible to key images and are scrutinized by Disney for inaccuracies. I’ve had friends who have drawn licensed properties professionally and, in general, if you aren’t able to keep your drawing “on model” you aren’t going to keep working on the project.
An Experiment
Think about the choices that were made in designing the original Merida and the ones that were made in the redesign.
If you were asked to design a character that was a beautiful, rough and tumble, scottish adventurer who was technically a princess but rebelled against the frill, pomp, and sexisim that came with her post, what are some good choices you could make?
- You could dress her in a plain green wool dress that fits with her earthy surroundings.
- You could give her a wide, plain face, and the expressions of a normal attractive girl; likely avoiding the full red lips, thick eyelashes, or pointed jaw that you might find on a princesses such as, say, Cinderella.
- You could make her standard postures and facial expressions defiant, strong, and powerful.
- You could give her a weapon and you could make it one of her defining characteristics. If you really wanted to drive the point home, you could make her weapon a defining element of the plot and marketing of the film.
Now, let’s say you were given the task of taking the established Merida design from the film and re-imagining her to more closely resemble the typical damsel in distress that the Disney princess line seems to champion. What choices could you make given that she still needs to be recognizable as the character from the movie?
- Perhaps you could take her plain wool dress and make it a beautiful gown. You could take the earthy green color and change it to a shimmering turquoise, cover it with sparkles, and drop the neckline over the shoulders.
- You could add intricate gold embellishment wherever possible including an elaborate foot wide band around the hem of her dress.
- You could drastically thin her waist and face and thicken her eyelashes.
- You would have to remove her bow and pouch full of arrows, replacing the strap that held the arrows in place with a wide belt and giant gold belt buckle.
- Attached to the buckle you could put a shimmering turquoise scarf.
- You could change her standard postures and facial expressions from aggressive, assertive, and defiant to sassy, cute, and submissive.
Do the above descriptions sound like something the character from the film would be excited about?
Who would win in a fight, Bruce Wayne or Disney Princess Merida?
Now, you could point out that the redesign isn’t that much of a stretch. Merida does wear a more glamorous gown in the movie that does, with the help of an excruciatingly painful corset, make her appear much thinner. She is sometimes sassy. Both points are true and a good choice for the filmmakers to have made. Allowing a character to have multiple different qualities, sometimes contradictory, can make a story better, but we’re not talking about a story in this circumstance. We’re talking about marketing.
When you market a character you have to boil them down to their essential elements. Take Batman for example. Bruce Wayne can sometimes be dressed to the nines; handsome and glamorous, but when you choose the images you’re going to use to market Batman those qualities don’t come up so much. You want Batman to be strong, heroic, aggressive, adventurous, and sometimes menacing. That’s why the children’s section at Walmart has a lot of things that look like this:
and less that look like this:
Merida was originally marketed similarly. She was depicted in trailers and posters as strong, determined, adventurous, beautiful, and heroic.
This redesign de-emphasizes those qualities and pushes for a Merida that is more glamorous, sassy, and passive.
I drew a brief sketch of a corresponding version of Batman:
This is FANTASTIC, especially that comparison with Batman at the end. Brilliant.
So, I haven’t been around much, but I had to share this, because it looks AMAZING.
Greg Pak and Jonathan Coulton have teamed up to make a graphic novel based on some of the characters from the songs of Jonathan Coulton.
Which is totally awesome, but not even the most awesome part.
The stretch goal, if they reach $250,000, will be to turn Coulton’s song “The Princess That Saved Herself” into a children’s book. Is that the BEST STRETCH GOAL EVER or what? I’d have participated in a Kickstarter just for that!
