How To Draw A Horse by Emma Hunsinger in this week’s New Yorker magazine.

My adaptation of the God of Arepo short story, which was originally up at ShortBox Comics Fair for charity. You can get a copy of the DRM-free ebook here for free - and I'd encourage you to donate to Mighty Writers or The Ministry of Stories in exchange.

Again it's an honour to be drawing one of my favourite short stories ever. Thank you so much for the original authors for creating this story; and for everyone who bought a copy and donated to the above non-profits.

It never gets old and it always makes me cry.

@ilgalantuomo ❤️

Re: this it is also very character-appropriate that the only hobby we see Kira Nerys engaging in enthusiastically without being roped into it by her friends is springball. She does not really know how to approach imaginative scenarios and has no aptitude for art, and it figures that she would be more interested in sports and recreation - very physical and embodied and instinctive rather than contemplative or creative, taking her out of her thoughts rather than immersing herself in them.

Anyway, since several male characters get episodes devoted to them having a goofy silly time with their hobbies (like Sisko building an ancient spaceship from scratch or Bashir LARPing as James Bond), I think there should have been a low-key episode about Kira participating in a springball tournament.

There’s a post about how we need more female characters who genuinely care about people but are really bad at caregiving, and honestly that fits Kira Nerys really well. I’m thinking of Starship Down where she’s tasked with looking after Sisko and keeping him conscious when he has a head injury, and she just starts visibly flailing despite making an effort to hold it together. “Listen up…. because there’s going to be a test later” and then trying to keep him alert by droning on about duty rosters because she gets Task-Oriented when things are in dire straits and does not know how to scale things to a more personal level with someone she has a working relationship with.

Like, so much of how she deals with emotionally fraught situations is by getting up and doing something about them (even so far as traveling back in time) or just keeping busy to avoid dwelling on the matter at hand. When her father was dying, her response was to go out and kill some Cardassians about it, and then order another attack upon his death, rather than sit by his bedside. When Bareil died (pre-resurrection via mad scientist noodling) she went right back to work despite Bashir telling her she didn’t have to. It is a trauma mindset from someone who witnessed a lot of death and suffering and had no choice but to pick up and keep moving and keep fighting. And when she has to sit down and really focus on someone else’s vulnerability, it’s very uncomfortable for her. She cares very deeply about the people around her but she’s clumsy about it.

trip x t'pol // supercut by lorde

saw this today

idk why everyone always points to sisko punching q as an example of how great he is when honestly that doesn’t even rank in the top 10 most impressive things that sisko has ever done. like, anyone could punch q. i could punch q. sisko deserves to be remembered for something actually noteworthy, like his cool pajamas 

Congrats to Dave Karofsky for being

He did some really fucked up things! He was a bully! He was dealing with a lot of trauma! He had a pretty impressive character arc with some major personal growth! Whether you love him or hate him, it's hard to feel so-so about Karofsky.

More tournament results here!

there’s a scene in fat albert 2004 where live action kenan thompson fat albert, who has accidentally escaped the fictional television world of his cartoon series and become real à la barbie, meets his creator, bill cosby.

it’s a unique film. i’ve seen it about thirty times. the opening credits are in comic sans.

it’s the worst film in the tiny but horrible microgenre of films in which an established, questionably marketable character with diminished cultural relevance is mysteriously transported to our reality. rocky and bullwinkle, harold and the purple crayon, garfield, enchanted (it’s disney, which at the time was only beginning to toy with the cloyingly affectionate self-awareness that has since swallowed it whole, so an expy blend of all stock princesses is used in the place of any particular ip). if you loosen up the parameters of that definition a smidge you can easily come up with another fifty or so awful, bizarre live-action adaptations of various properties with similar narrative structures and plot beats, but i’m curious about this very specific type of hyper-meta fish out of water isekai movie, stories that are less interested in the characters they are ostensibly about and more about the modern world’s current reactions to those characters, and choose to discuss that in the most convoluted, literal way possible.

this type of story is simultaneously extremely high-concept postmodernist analysis and the laziest paint by the numbers shit it’s possible to create. live-action adaptations even at their best betray an inherent disrespect for animation, implying it to be a secondary medium that exists as a temporary placeholder or poor man’s substitute for reality, that characters are only worth caring about if they look as real as we do or exist in a world like ours. there’s no genuine artistic reason to make a woody woodpecker movie, an avatar movie, a death note movie, a live-action pinocchio, they’re all cynical soulless cashgrabs but they at least do attempt to adapt and actually BE what they purport to be. dan aykroyd yogi bear and light turner and matthew lillard william afton for the five minutes they wanted to pay him to be in the fnaf movie are simply poor facsimiles of themselves and they suck because of that bad mimicry, we see and hear the contrast and know immediately it’s not the same. the project of live-actionization is misguided because even before awful executive-driven creative decisions (which all these movies have in spades) very often whatever is being adapted simply can’t be translated properly to its new medium. you could give a film a 500m budget and airbending will still not look as good as it does in 2d, where one can easily and stylistically show the movement of invisible wind and have a character float and defy gravity in a way that is instantly believable in a way that a real human being moved by CGI is not. neil patrick harris and hank azaria as hard as they try, as talented as they are cannot legitimately sell me on the idea that they’re actually being hardcore smurfed in the way that an animated gargamel can. these movies reach for a perceived authenticity and fail to reach it, not understanding that the mediums they are stealing from almost always allow for a greater seeming realness than live-action can, especially when portraying the fantastical.

the isekai movies go one step beyond this disrespect because they refuse to even play the part. yes we’ll make a rocky and bullwinkle movie but we cannot simply DO rocky and bullwinkle, we can’t do a scooby doo and just make a bigger irl version of the formula, we must have this elaborate meta routine so we can continually point to the audience and share a laugh together about how dogshit and unimportant rocky and bullwinkle are. the people who make these movies are so embarrassed by the concept of taking these ideas seriously that they must even in-universe create further removal from the realness of this to insulate us from the possibility of caring. rocky and bullwinkle must be a fake tv show even in the movie, even in pretend land they must be from a deeper pretend land. it’s fine if you want to do commentary on the property (preferable, in fact, that makes it more interesting!) but this commentary is almost never allowed to extend beyond the singular joke of every gamer webcomic ever made: wouldn’t it be fucked up if fictional thing were REAL?

wouldn’t it be fucked up if rocky and bullwinkle were in a REAL car? you bet it fucking would be. (robert de niro produced this movie and plays the main villain)

obviously we’re in a post-barbenheimer world and the only movie of this kind worth comparing fat albert to is barbie, which is notable for being the only good execution of this premise (i would call enchanted competent; it’s funny but a mess). the barbie comparison is especially interesting because fat albert is a cracked mirror to barbie.

like barbie, fat albert and the cosby kids exist in a cartoon world where characters are simultaneously performers and platonic forms of themselves, and where they operate with an unspecified degree of awareness of their own fakeness; a background character in fat albert’s philadelphia mentions having done guest spots on the jetsons. like barbie, al is snapped out of his usual routine by the personal crisis of one of his fans, when her single live-action tear falls on the remote as she watches his show and magically falls into his fictionalized philadelphia. the magic tear allows him to hear her crying and a portal is rended between the two worlds; he enters reality, naively tries to solve her social and emotional problems with platitudes, and is forced to grapple with the tenuous nature of his existence and mortality and the complexity of the real world. 

i’m just ken is replaced with fat albert performing an extended rap cover of his own theme song. fat albert spends as much of this movie trying to help the main character make friends as he does trying to fuck her adoptive older sister (“my big al”, she calls him).

without getting into “barbie politics” barbie works because it wants to be a movie about barbie, the thing it’s named after. it takes “barbie lore” seriously. at least half of barbie actually takes place in barbieland, a world that the movie cares about making authentically fake and different and weird. the mechanics and nature of barbie’s existence and barbieland are the most important part of the movie. all of these bad adaptations have the obligatory familial infighting/accidentally thwarting a jewel heist/stopping the evil CEO from demolishing the neighborhood to build a megamall/helping larry bird get his basketball talent back from the aliens plot and so does barbie but it’s an excuse to talk about more interesting abstractions. there is a subplot dedicated to barbie helping to reignite a mother and daughter’s bond but this isn’t the core of the movie, it really is about barbie, literally and metaphysically. fat albert too isn't "about" helping a girl make friends and find herself, it's about fat albert, but it resents that about itself.

fat albert 2004 has about six minutes of actual animation, it rushes to get kenan thompson on screen as quickly as possible and stays there as long as it can (presumably a factor of cost more than anything else, as with all of these films). in barbie the ideas and philosophies of barbieland and real life both naturally affect each other, are reflections of each other, which is an obvious worldbuilding choice that makes intuitive sense; the media we consume is a reflection of the real world and vice versa. there is nothing inherently wrong or bad about the link between the two worlds, says barbie, though it is often the conduit for harmful ideas.

fat albert’s philadelphia and our philadelphia do not share this connection, albert’s intrusion in the real world is a perversion of the natural order and, we later learn, a physical impossibility in the long term. halfway through the movie, the cosby kids begin to be influenced by the real world: mushmouth gains the ability to speak coherently (“don’t call me mushmouth anymore! just call me… mouth!”) and dumb donald removes his ski cap, learns to read, and goes to the library and speeds through 22 volumes of african-american history. this is portrayed as profane; as dumb donald says before jumping back into the TV halfway through the movie: “"i've become smart enough to understand that... we've entered into a world where we do not belong. if you try to become something that you're not, you lose the essence of who you really are."

albert, still on his love quest, at first refuses to rejoin them; he goes off on a date with protagonist’s older sister, which goes well until a child recognizes him and shames him for not being in the tv where he belongs. “we need you! what would mr. cosby think if you don’t go back?” al’s stunned by this; he has no response, but it inspires him to seek answers. in the next scene he decides to find out. he walks up to bill cosby’s house and knocks on the door.

in barbie the discussion barbie has with her creator, ruth handler, is the emotional climax of the film. when barbie tells her she wants to stay in southern california, ruth warns her of the dangers of being human, but does not ultimately stop barbie from doing so; she points out that she is incapable of doing so even if she wanted to.

fat albert mirrors this discussion; albert is told of his conceptual origins. as barbie is based on ruth’s daughter, he is based on a deceased childhood friend of cosby’s, the grandfather of the girl he is trying to help (which is why the movie is careful to repeatedly stress the point that the older sister he’s fallen in love with is only his granddaughter by adoption). there isn’t a parallel moment to the one in barbie where handler winks to the audience about her criminal conviction but that’s probably in the film’s best interest.

albert pleads with cosby in the same way as barbie. more than anything, he wants to stay in the real world. cosby, like handler, encourages him to recognize his own power as an icon, but informs him that his fate is inescapable. if he stays in the real world, his colors will begin to fade and he will soon “turn into celluloid dust” and die. how cosby knows this is not explained; presumably little bill also visited him in the past and suffered a similar fate.

even when done cynically (as it always is) to adapt or remake anything to reject the source material in some way. it’s a paradoxical relationship, because to do it you have to both like (or at least be interested) in what you are recreating but find some aspect of it unnecessary or outdated or lacking or worthy of change. the animation to live-action adaptation often must navigate the additional paradox of wanting to make the unreal real, and the end result, formed by people who don’t care and are only in it for a paycheck, is usually bad art.

in the end fat albert acknowledges his own unreality and crawls back in the tv. the final scene is a saving private ryan style ending where all of the real life elderly inspirations for the cosby kids leave flowers on the real fat albert’s grave. here it hits you: the only moral of the live action fat albert movie is that a live action fat albert movie is a really shitty idea that would kill fat albert.

i agree.

Nothing prepared me for how insane Quark and Odo are for each other. The entire popularion of the deep space nine refers to them as archenmies but when Odo is the last official person left able to operate the during an epidemic Quark shows up immediately like "you need help?" Odo gets falsely accused of murder and Quark starts investigating immediately. Odo's quaters get trashed by anti-shapeshifter racists and Quark is the first person there to be with him. Meanwhile Odo is complaining about Quark's dubiously legal business practice while also spending his entire free time in his bar. Yes what Garak and Bashir have going on is cute but it's nothing on whatever the hell is happening between these two old men. Forget romance true love is about being ride or die for your nemesis.

that "most fanfiction that gets published as a novel is bad because it's always the weirdest people writing it" post is so fascinating in the way it very clearly eschews any traditional definitions of words to simply use 'normal' as shorthand for 'good' and 'weird' as shorthand for 'bad'

like. i think boring heterosexual women writing boring heterosexual romance novels with standard tropes is extremely 'normal' actually by any meaningful definition of the word. it is literally one of the most conventional, mainstream forms of publishing that exists. there's nothing 'weird' about it, or the people doing it, by any societal standard. what they mean to say is that those books and fanfictions are bad. (which, for what it's worth, i agree - they largely are bad.)

it invokes 'normality' as a moral framework while completely detaching it from its descriptive meaning. it's using these terms as pure value judgments to disguise what's essentially just taste-based criticism.

so the real subtext is about 'weird' secretly meaning 'people I don't respect' rather than anything related to statistical prevalence or social conformity.

dose anyone else think it's significant that in the ascent odo was reading a romance scene that takes place during a thunderstorm in a boat while ferenginar has near constant thunderstorms and is primarily wetland or am I not getting enough sleep