Sunday, July 29, 2012

Issue #1, Debating Misogynistic Creationists, Debating UFO Nuts, Feminism, & Some Zappa Sprinkled On Top

Issue #1 (official) is coming along nicely. I've been a little slower in the process of making it though due to other things occurring in my life.

Last Sunday July 22, I went into a local store in downtown Normal called "Acme Comics" and I talked to an employee about ideas on how to present my story to the Internet. He suggested the idea to post 1 page from my an issue in my series every week. Hopefully, this will bring people back to this blog and it would certainly give me enough time to write and draw the next stories.

Anyway, I just recently learned the hard way NOT to try to defend reason against superstitious misogynists on Youtube when I spent a long time debating idiotic pro-life (otherwise known as Anti-Women's Rights) activists under a video titled "5 Questions About My Abortion." Ugh!! First of all, the woman in the video explains that women should NOT be shunned for getting an abortion. There is no reason why a woman should be treated like a murderer or be ashamed just for taking control of her body. The misogynistic ass-hats in the comments under the video offended me greatly and so I began picking certain ones out and trying to reason with these people. I became sucked into their bewildering black hole of militant raging caveman stupidity for hours and I eventually just demanded EVERY person to give me an actual argument against women's rights. Not a single person even attempted to give me a coherent argument. I kept seeing people say silly things such as "because it's murder," "the unborn child has rights that override a woman's rights," "she should keep her legs closed," "adoption is an alternative," and I even heard the most absurd "that baby could've grown up to cure cancer." One of the most annoying people was an extraordinarily immature, uneducated, volatile, irrational lady who uses the name Meghan Kathleen Schuler. This person had no understanding of science, logic, history, politics, and somehow her own misogyny. I debated her until she said something like "it's okay to kill cows because they don't have souls, but fetuses on the other hand..." If someone is going to base their political views on their bizarre beliefs in the supernatural, then they immediately lose the debate. Two more stubborn ignorant people kept battling me until they were cornered. I made an ally for a time named "Miss Greta" who attempted to battle the wave of utter misogyny with me. Either she had less tolerance for extreme pro-life stupidity, or she was participating in the arguments long before me and ran out of fuel just after I arrived. Users called me things such as "ignorant twat," "murderer," "dyke?," "idiot," "insanely evil (in all caps)," "sadist," and much more. I suppose name-calling is the most sophisticated argument a pro-life person can make. It's disheartening that so many people think they have the right to tell adult women what they can do with their bodies. Eventually, three evangelical Christians who opposed me politically decided to send me personal messages. Two of them were proselytizing and the third seemed to just want to understand me. A user named "rebekahcochran" began trying to convince me that the biblical Genesis story of creationism is 100% accurate along with Noah's flood. I don't understand why this person wanted to talk to me about THIS subject after meeting me in the comments under the abortion video. They didn't understand that Biology, Geology, and Astronomy are three separate things and they didn't even know how to spell EVOLUTION even when I corrected them, along with many other words. They had NO understanding of science and when I sent them links to websites like talkorigins.org, they claimed that the site was a website for streaming movies, which means this "rebekahcochran" person was being dishonest. This user admitted that they follow Kent Hovind, the nut-job and convicted crook who believes dinosaurs walked with humans who also believes aliens are visiting us... and that the aliens are simultaneously demons. "Rebekahcochran" eventually accused me of buying into the "evolution conspiracy" without thinking critically about it. How ironic.
The funniest thing that "rebekahcochran" sent me was this: "One of the things that suggests to me that evelutionists are wrong is commet ages. According to evelutionists commets should be around the same age as the solar system which is said by them to be 5 billion years. However, the orbit it has with the sun has a maximum age of around 10,000 years which is fare less than 5 billion. Evelutionists try to account for this claim with, "oort cloud," which has never been proven true and has been proven false with mathmatical calculation." This is a copied and pasted quotation and is only a segment of several paragraphs of absolute nonsense. This argument is so nutty that I suspect that this person is a fake. I eventually confessed that I believed they were a phony and they became very offended. If they're not a fake, then I really hope they're opposed to voting.

During these infuriating debates that took place over multiple days, I visited my Freethinkers\skeptics group and the lone alien\Uri Geller\conspiracy\self-proclaimed ghost & Sasquatch hunter who visits us occasionally began proselytizing at us. I couldn't believe the timing. This person has admitted that their beliefs are faith-based when cornered in the past, but then recently began asserting he had evidence, but he conveniently didn't "feel like revealing it to those of us who insist that he bring it to the group." He then claimed his evidence was being suppressed by invisible agents, so I wonder how he acquired his "evidence" and why he won't expose it to skeptic (the people who care about truth the most)? Everything he said is stuff I and other members of the local freethinkers group have refuted multiple times previously over the past year-and-a-half of arguing with him. After he insulted me and talked down to me for asking for his evidence, then talked over me when I was trying to reason with him, I lost my temper and yelled "Shut the fuck up" at the lunatic. He claimed my reaction meant I "lost" the argument, and I explained that he was wrong and that the way to lose an argument is to provide really bad arguments while being immature and deceptive about it. I felt better after venting at him though and he deserves no apology. The good thing about debating online through private Youtube messages is that the person you're talking to cannot interrupt you.

"5 Questions About My Abortion" http://youtu.be/A16lmX4dP0c

This is a video called "#3 The Smurfette Principle (Tropes vs. Women)" by Feminist Frequency. http://youtu.be/opM3T2__lZA
I'm posting it because first I like this series and second after I watched the whole six-part series I was delighted that my female protagonist doesn't fall into any of the bad stereotypical female tropes. Since I picked video number 3, "The Smurfette Principle," I will talk about that. The series protagonist is Sawaporn, a young independent foreign heterosexual atheist woman from Bangkok, Thailand with a real personality. She is not a smurfette in a social group of males, like the Rosebud character (1 female out of a group of 5) in the silly talking-puppy "Buddies" movie series. In fact, the few friends Sawaporn eventually makes throughout the series so far are all female. All of the surviving males and almost all of the surviving females in the full story are terrible, hyper-masculine, violent, irrational, racist, superstitious, homicidal, monstrous scum. She is not a sexual and ironic symbol of "female empowerment" like Halle Berry in the ridiculously awful Catwoman movie. She is not a hollow romantic support for a male protagonist (and remains single mostly by choice), she is not a seductress, nor does she get impregnated by a mysterious entity. These were natural elements in my story that developed throughout time. I wasn't actively trying to avoid the stereotypical tropes, but coincidentally I wrote a character that was unique. There has always been subtle feminism in the series, but lately I've felt like pumping more into it after learning more feminist concepts from feminism blogs and having wild and long debates with a feminist friend.

This is a Zomgitscriss video called "Childfree" that I appreciated.
http://youtu.be/UqKG-Djfk5w

Anyway, here's a song called "Real Hymn" by Modern Eon from the 1981 album Fiction Tales.
http://youtu.be/bUoB1FNYqLc
Modern Eon was a somewhat obscure, short-lived UK-based band with five members that combined post-punk\early Gothic rock\early new wave. It's been in my head for the last few hours.

For fun, "Hong Kong Garden" by Siouxsie And The Banshees. This was their first single before their premier album. http://youtu.be/JfSSdisC3Hc

Also for fun, "Exploring The Secrets Of Treating Deaf Mutes" by Severed Heads (1983). http://youtu.be/__gj9XQqUOo

Last weekend, I saw Dweezil Zappa play live at The Castle Theatre in downtown Bloomington on July 14, so I'll post this video randomly. "Dancin' Fool" by Frank Zappa performed on Saturday Night Live in 1978. http://youtu.be/dI0SIg4njx0
The Zappa Plays Zappa concert was the best live performance I've seen in my life. The band showed that they were there to have a good time and Dweezil even began making small introspective speeches with the audience between songs occasionally. I talked to Dweezil, Sheila Gonzalez, Kurt Morgan, and a vocalist whose name I didn't catch. I even had them sign a dollar bill when I had nothing else for them to sign. I eventually left the Castle Theatre and returned so that they could sign an empty page in the book that contains my two newest Sawaporn issues, which are issues #7 and #1. I saw Type O Negative perform at the Riviera Theatre in Chicago back on November 22, 2003 and though it was a good performance, Zappa Plays Zappa was definitely superior because this was a small venue, which made it more comfortable and after the show, the band socialized with the audience and told stories and jokes, unlike Type O Negative. Type O Negative played their songs and then just left the stage immediately. Also, the Type O Negative show was shared with two shitty bands Moonspell (lame) and Cradle Of Filth (fucking annoying).

And finally, congratulations to my friends Brett Smith and Cassandra Fortney on their wedding July 27. I had a good time.

Meow!

Edit: According to the automated spellchecker, the words "Hong" for Hong Kong and "Bloomington" are somehow misspellings. Weird.

Sunday, July 8, 2012

Introduction

I started my Introduction issue June 12, 2012. Issues 1 through 6 are now regarded as 2 through 7. The story starts with the protagonist Sawaporn stepping off of a train in Normal, Illinois in the month of August in the evening. I have had a lot of fun creating this issue. I plan to post at least some of it when I finish all of the illustrations.

Here's "Watching The Dancers" by Modern Eon: http://youtu.be/-tVZeIslc68

Here's "Partys Fall" by Siouxsie And The Banshees http://youtu.be/x4hgU2FpuBU