A great Twitter thread on character-driven stories, character arcs, and agency by Naomi Hughes
(The link she referenced is this article)
(Source: twitter.com, via sparklermonthly)
lothlenan - https://www.achubbyunicorn.com - https://www.redbubble.com/es/people/chubbyunicorn - https://twitter.com/lothlenan?lang=es - https://society6.com/chubbyunicorn - https://www.instagram.com/lothlenan
Sparkler Update: Wednesday, August 23rd
Orange Junk: http://sparklermonthly.com/oj/orange-junk-chapter-28-page-636/
Lettera: http://sparklermonthly.com/lt/lettera-chapter-16-page-485/
Magical How?: http://sparklermonthly.com/mh/magical-how-chapter-06-page-139/
Sunshine Boy: http://sparklermonthly.com/sb/sunshine-boy-chapter-03-page-143/
Heart of Gold: http://sparklermonthly.com/hog/heart-of-gold-chapter-03-page-085/
(Hooray for Year 5 of Sparkler Monthly!! Couldn’t have done it without all you fans. :-D )
Our latest new addition to the magazine, Null Point came to us through our latest submissions process! At long last, we finally get to do a sports story!!
Sparkler’s Year 5 Kickstarter is here! Just a few hours to go!
The more you look at this picture, the more anxious it becomes.
this is just a normal waffle house
there is a bloody handprint on the door
There is somethung under the counter with the cups
A normal waffle house
is that a tentacle wrapped around the little boy’s arm
(via msmoderndaymuse)
I’ve been a fan of Tacto since back in my TOKYOPOP days when she submitted a story to The Rising Stars of Manga contest! It’s so great to finally get to work with her on “Firebird”!
We’d been following Knights-Errant almost from the start… Bringing the revised version into Sparkler was like a dream come true!
Sparkler’s Year 5 Kickstarter is here! We’re so close to our goal!!
timelapse of the total eclipse from the woods!
(via dogzi1la)
Orange Junk was one of the first titles we brought over from Ink-Blazers/Manga Magazine, and we couldn’t have been happier to have it join Sparkler! Heldrad is a shojo-romantic-comedy-making machine. :-D
Sparkler Monthly Magazine: Year 5 by Lianne Sentar/Rebecca Scoble —Kickstarter »
Less than 5k to go! 😁😁😁 If you can, please contribute to the kickstarter to keep Sparkler going and reblog to spread the word! 😊
Hello hello, Sparkler Fans!
This is it–the final week of our Year 5 Kickstarter, and to be honest, it’s going to be a nail-biter…
We’ve got cool plans for Year 5, and we’re really excited about our expanded line-up, but we can’t continue without your help! We pay all our creators for their pages that run in the magazine, and the additional costs of staffing, servers, and maintenance do add up. If you haven’t had the chance to check out our Kickstarter yet, it’s not too late! If you’ve already donated, please consider sharing with like-minded friends who love comics, light novels, games, and the Female Gaze. <3 We’ve still got some great rewards tiers available, from ebooks and paperbacks, to being able to read all 5 years of Sparkler in magazine form, to amazing commissions from some of our favorite creative partners. You won’t want to miss out!
And this final issue of our Summer of Sparkler promotion is another great one, in our humble opinion. We have the long-awaited and exciting start of Windrose Vol. 3–with daring escapes, and even more daring rescues! Welcome back, Windrose! :-D Plus, don’t forget to check out the Windrose Volume 2 ebook, which is now available! We also have new updates for Heart of Gold, Uncanny Valley High, Sunshine Boy, Decoy and Retrofit, Firebird, and…
We’re proud to welcome yet another new addition to the magazine: straight from the submissions pile and onto this month’s cover, the first installment of the drama-romance-sports comic “Null Point” from creator Amara Sherm! We’ve been dying to do a character-driven sports story for ages, and this one hits all the right buttons with a mighty backhand! Check it out. :-D
XOXO,
The Sparkler Team
Monday reblog! Just over a day left on the Kickstarter! We’re getting so close!!
we probably lost a lot of medical knowledge during the witch hunts because of how many mid wives were persecuted, and how men took over the field of medicine. I bet a few hundred years ago a mid wife might actually have some kind of knowledge about conditions that affect women exclusively which we still haven’t bothered to research in our modern society.
ok now I’m fucking mad
how many got killed cuz of witch hunts seems like youd have to kill a lot
“It is estimated that at least 1, 000 were executed in England, and the Scottish, Welsh, and Irish were even fiercer in their purges. It is hard to arrive at a figure for the whole of the Continent and the British Isles, but the most responsible estimate would seem to be 9 million. It may well, some authorities contend, have been more. Nine million seems almost moderate when one realizes that The Blessed Reichhelm of Schongan at the end of the 13th century computed the number of the Devil-driven to be 1,758,064,176. A conservative, Jean Weir, physician to the Duke of Cleves, estimated the number to be only 7,409,127. The ratio of women to men executed has been variously estimated at 20 to 1 and 100 to 1. Witchcraft was a woman’s crime.
Men were, not surprisingly, most often the bewitched. Subject to women’s evil designs, they were terrified victims. Those men who were convicted of witchcraft were often family of convicted women witches, or were in positions of civil power, or had political ambitions which conflicted with those of the Church, a monarch, or a local dignitary. Men were protected from becoming witches not only by virtue of superior intellect and faith, but because Jesus Christ, phallic divinity, died “to preserve the male sex from so great a crime: since He was willing to be born and to die for us, therefore He has granted to men this privilege. ” Christ died literally for men and left women to fend with the Devil themselves.” (pg 129-130) Woman Hating, Andrea Dworkin
“The witches used drugs like belladonna and aconite, organic amphetamines, and hallucinogenics. They also pioneered the development of analgesics. They performed abortions, provided all medical help for births, were consulted in cases of impotence which they treated with herbs and hypnotism, and were the first practitioners of euthanasia. Since the Church enforced the curse of Eve by refusing to permit any alleviation of the pain of childbirth, it was left to the witches to lessen pain and mortality as best they could. It was especially as midwives that these learned women offended the Church, for, as Sprenger and Kramer wrote, “No one does more harm to the Catholic Faith than mid wives. ” The Catholic objection to abortion centered specifically on the biblical curse which made childbearing a painful punishment —it did not have to do with the “right to life” of the unborn fetus. It was also said that midwives were able to remove labor pains from the woman and transfer those pains to her husband—clearly in violation of divine injunction and intention both.” (pg 139-140) Woman Hating, Andrea Dworkin
“The magic of the witches was an imposing catalogue of medical skills concerning reproductive and psychological processes, a sophisticated knowledge of telepathy, auto- and hetero-suggestion, hypnotism, and mood-controlling drugs. Women knew the medicinal nature of herbs and developed formulae for using them. The women who were faithful to the pagan cults developed the science of organic medicine, using vegetation, before there was any notion of the profession of medicine. Paracelsus, the most famous physician of the Middle Ages, claimed that everything he knew he had learned from “the good women.” (pg 140) Woman Hating, Andrea Dworkin
****************get the PDF here *********************
Bolded sections are by me. Honestly I don’t think I need to explain much. We lost some of the most important women in the world, who were the pioneers of medicine for a “curse of eve”. Basically saying if you relieve another woman’s pain we’re going to call you a witch and kill you “in the name of god” because having a child is punishment upon women and relieving their pain is illegal because this book written by men told me so.
Also check out the part where men can’t be witches because jesus and his “phallic divinity” “preserve the male sex”.
Ever heard of the Voynich manuscript? Big, huge, herbal / medical / astronomical lexicon from the 1400s, depicting lots of naked women clearly performing rituals that serve medical functions, lots of them pretty clearly related to childbirth.
You know, this book that is written in a language that nobody has been able to read for 600 years, but nobody, and I mean NO MAN has ever even thought about the simple reality of WOMEN having written it.
I found one blog post by a woman about how this text is very clearly written by women, and the knowledge within it has been completely annihilated or co-opted by men who now don’t even consider the possibility that a woman, or multiple women, could have written something like this.
Seriously, look it up. Naked women. Fat, short, in baths, all of it. And the entire academic world is absolutely convinced this must have been written by a man. In the wikipedia article, only male linguists and historians are mentioned, because only they matter. And every single one of their theories is laughingly phallocentric and simply wrong.
They go so far as say that aliens wrote it before they consider that women actually had herbal and medicinal knowledge and passed that knowledge on, in secret, written in languages only they knew, so that no priest or holy man or inquisitor could read it and kill them.
Open your eyes. This has been going on for hundreds of years. Women had to hide in the shadows, had to invent languages, just to avoid being killed by men for trying to help themselves and other women. This is reality.
It wouldn’t be the first time women have had to invent their own language because of the rights men withheld from us.
Okay so I did a bit of my own research on this. Basically the Wiki page (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript) says a bunch of stuff that’s self-contradictory, but also not very well-informed. Wouldn’t trust it very much at all, so I’m doing my own digging.
Let’s just preface this by saying that A) I’m not in any way a professional cryptologist, just a normal person interested in the VMs with a very good handle on Google; B) I recognize that some of the links I provide aren’t from academic places, but all of them reference multiple sites and put the information in simple, accessible formatting, which is useful for many reasons, and; C) the only pictures of males (of which I know of) are most likely nymphs and only have to do with astrology (http://ellievelinska.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-voynich-manuscript-rolandus.html?m=1), so I’m basing all my research on the idea that everything in the VMs has to do with menstrual health.
Looking at the illustrations (https://archive.org/stream/TheVoynichManuscript/Voynich_Manuscript#page/n35/mode/1up) from the first pages of the first section, about herbs, reminds me of root vegetables because of the detailed illustrations of the roots, yet not so much of the foliage. Roots are a key player in maintaining menstrual health, mainly ginger, but wild yams are cited as helpful as well (https://www.google.com/amp/articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2016/02/08/amp/premenstrual-syndrome-herbal-remedies.aspx).
The next few pages of the first section show vibrant flowers with a less detailed root. A specific few stand out to me, with features of the viburnum genus. These are shrubs with small rounded fruit or white flowers, such as cramp bark (http://natural-fertility-info.com/menstruation-cramps-benefits-of-cramp-bark-and-black-haw.html). As the name suggests, this is an extremely useful herb for menstrual cramps and pain. These are notably similar (yet different genus) to cranberries, which have been speculated as helpful for health issues, such as UTI’s, for many years
Another interesting factoid I found was that the field peony is one of the only distinguishable plants from this manuscript (https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newscientist.com/article/dn24987-mexican-plants-could-break-code-on-gibberish-manuscript/amp/) I find that the peony is very intriguing to include in the book, simply for the fact that they’re extremely useful plants linked to pain relief and a cure for cancer, as well as a cure for PMS, excessive bleeding, and fertility issues even today across the world (https://www.honeycolony.com/article/white-peony/).
In the next section, about astronomy, I found an interesting diagram of the moon. Many women believe that periods are tied to lunar phases, which makes me intrigued as to why there’s an entire section dedicated to women in relation to the moon. Many of the illustrations highlight opening and closing flowers or varying amounts of stars, which leads me to believe that this section shows a common way to track periods (http://www.drnorthrup.com/wisdom-of-menstrual-cycle/ is a good link for a bit of pseudoscience based on history and biology which is very interesting, but http://www.cycleharmony.com/stories/menstrual-myths-a-rituals/menstrual-rites-of-the-native-americans is a good site explaining Native American rites in terms of periods). Sadly, we don’t have an abundant amount of information on this because of European iconoclasm in relation to Native Americans. However, the photos we are given throughout the astrological section include a thorough overview of women seen in varying stages of a cycle, most likely a menstrual one, since they show both pregnancy and non-pregnancy.
The next section, about biology, is honestly fucking baffling. The information I’m getting from this is observation and the Wikipedia page so I’m just honestly speculating on this one. It shows a lot of naked bathing women all connected through the section with one pipe. I can also observe specific plant-like drawings similar to the first section, which makes me think that this section is about cleanliness during different stages of menses. Women with red stains on the vaginal areas all share one bathing area, whereas pregnant women share another, and so on. If it really was written in the 1400’s, I can logically see a reason for needing to point out how to make sure you don’t infect other women with your blood, which could harbor diseases, and highlighting how to clean yourself and your blood-catching garments safely, where the plants might come in. They didn’t have the same way to cleanse themselves as we do now, so communal showering and segregation of the different cycles was probably very advanced and helped women not die more frequently.
The cosmological section reminded me of the Isle of Lesbos, the community of gay women that Sappho wrote about (http://www.sappho.com/poetry/sappho.html). But that’s not the most logical explanation, so people have gone to all kinds of wild possibilities (too many to cite the ridiculousness) from aliens to nordic heavens. I personally believe it may be a description of the phases of menses yet again or another look at the stars affecting the female anatomy. Let’s just pretend it’s Lesbos for my gay heart, yeah?
There’s another account of herbs after that, then a huge collection of recipes(?) that may or may not have to do with the menstrual cycle whatsoever. Honestly, the book has a lot of theorization up until the biological section, then all the cryptologists gave up because wtf even is this book.
The book’s history is very lengthy and may tie in to the overall translation, but Wiki seems to have gotten this part right. The VMs was written in the 1400’s, around the time of the worldwide “witch” hunts and not found until the 1900’s. This means that a lot of the information the previous commenters have presented has a very high possibility of being not only correct, but an amazing insight into history and how iconoclasm has seriously messed up how we view history.
(via splitter-gires)
