Gracious Anthracite @anthracite@dragon.style

Today I was out walking
when I had a brief flash
and saw the people I was passing
as collections of cells gathered together into muscles
pulling against the bones that they grew for some cells to live inside
slithering against each other like a bucket of live eels

And it was kind of beautiful.

Is it #introduction time again? Sorta seems to be. I'd boost the old one but it's a little out of date.

Hi, I'm Peggy, and I run dragon.style. If "maintaining a Patreon to pay the hosting, putting off updating it for a year, and occasionally opening the place up for new users" qualifies as "running" it.

I am a trans lady who spends most of her time drawing complicated sci-fi comics and sort of earning a living doing that via Patreon.

Adobe Illustrator has been my main medium since 2000, it's a pretty unusual choice but it works for me.

I used to do burlesque, then pole dance, as a hobby and a way to stay fit. I miss it and should find something similar again.

You may know me from elsewhere as Egypt Urnash.

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Here is a programming project for someone.

1. Acquire a bunch of pre-transition photos of transes.
2. Jam them into a neural network alongside a bunch of photos of people who have not transitioned.
3. Do you now have a machine for detecting people likely to transition from a photograph alone?

There are probably as many ethical reasons to not do this as there are reasons to do this.

Five women with identical tank tops that say “Drinking MARGARITAS with my SENORITAS”. Three of them have Mardi Gras beads draped around their neck, five months after Mardi Gras.

I smell tourists.

(Flashback moment: Tass Times in Tonetown, a text adventure. Once you got to the titular Tonetown you needed to wear a certain amount of bling, or an alligator-man would leap out and eat you after a few turns. It felt very weird to be the Tourist instead of the Local in that.)

Awrite I think Ozymandias is done. Deadline's tomorrow so there's some time to just.. sit on it a little... and see if anything needs tweaking.

Sitting in Envie working on Ozymandias. Busman’s holiday again.

Workin' on Ozymandias. Ended up spending about two and a half hours on it; there's just one and a half panels left. Which is good because the deadline's Sunday.

I reworked the empty silhouette of the statue and like this a lot better. He used to just be standing there with his arms on his hips looking Important; now it feels like there are some extra layers being added by the art.

A little light breakfast reading

(Also Sugarfoot)

New page of Parallax up on Patreon, in which Noa smells something strange.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/29928031

I've got seven pages queued up on my computer, I might put them in the website's hopper soon.

Passing thought: nobody ever says “look at this thing Facebooker Susan Smith posted” or “check out what Twitterer Skinky Dumpawps posted”, but I constantly see “look at Redditor Throwaway477864’s insightful discussion” or “watch what Youtuber Spafford Spiderton has to say”. What makes a site wrap up it’s users’ identities that way, and is it a thing that should be generally cultivated or avoided?

If you can see an image here then the image drive has been resized. :)

Sorry I keep putting off trying to update the place in hopes it'll make the remote media purge command actually start working again. It's a big boring task and I'm terrible at those, especially now that I'm trying to keep my comic page output at a level that pays my rent!

Media drive is full, again. I've got an art deadline this weekend so I'm just expanding the drive a bit and putting this on Next Week Peggy. Hopefully she will not be dealing with a hurricane like the last time I promised I'd deal with this.

me: oh ughhhh fixing these three panels is gonna take forever, oh well, guess I'll start grinding on it

me a half hour later after some quick resizing and recomposing, and one total panel redraw: well that was easy

Hung around the park. Got another page nearly done. Can’t get up the energy to do its last panel so I pulled up another page that was just dialogue and did some roughs. Think I might be finished arting for the day.

#4styles

to be honest I've found my stylistic happy place, I've played with being much more abstracted than any of these in the past but this is where I'm most comfortable working. Cartoony but not too cartoony, no outlines, varying amounts of rendering depending on the project and my mood.

More Parallax on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/posts/29894322

Slamhound, slamhound, burning bright, in the gardens of the night.

I got two and a half hours done on Parallax and was thinking of putting some time into that adaptation of Ozymandias I'm pulling out of my trunk for Feast Yer Eyes 2020 but all I seem to have had the energy for was adding some titles and credits to the first page. There's only four panels left so I should be able to knock those out in a few hours before the deadline Sunday.

This morning I was musing about the small genre of Books That May Also Be Majgickqghxal Initiations. I can think of two offhand: Wolfe's Books of the New Sun, and Swanwick's Stations of the Tide. "Are there more?" I wondered to myself.

This evening I was reminded that Piers Anthony's Tarot trilogy exists and I think it is maybe his attempt at writing a book that is also a Thelemic initiation and there are just so many layers of COME NOT IN THAT FORM going on with that.

I am vaguely amused that (a) I didn't realize Apple was rolling out new things today until someone I follow started livetooting their response, and that (b) not a single one of the things Apple rolled out today makes me wanna replace my four year old phone, or my five year old ipad. Really I can't see replacing either of them until they break or get lost.

Or until e-paper gets to the point where Apple's willing to make things using it. I want to be able to sit outside without a shade hood so bad.

New page of Parallax up on Patreon! In which there is giant biomech pronking.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/29862061