No Strings Attached

Posted By Kathleen David on March 25, 2016

Ariel has been living down here for a while now and since she is due to have a baby shortly, I decided to make a visit to see her. What she didn’t know at the time was that I was bringing Caroline to visit as well.

We did it for both girls who have been video chatting just about every day for weeks now. They needed to see each other and Caroline’s Easter Break was just the time we needed to do it without it being a less than 24 hour visit. Considering that the drive take 12 to 13 hours to get here, that’s sort of important.

Caroline and I listened to a number of the Big Finish Dr. Who adventures along with the River Song Diaries on the way down. We have Sir Apropos of Nothing for the trip back. Thumbs up from Caroline on everything she heard and way up on the River Song set. I’ll give them points for finding a way to integrate the 8th Doctor with River. The John Hurt War Doctor series is my favorite so far. Gives you some serious flavor of what it would have been like for Hurt to play the Doctor more than just the 50th anniversary special. It’s the same thing for Paul McGann. The audio plays give you all kinds of ideas of what he would have been like as the Doctor and I adore what he did.

Today is going to be a rather lazy day of watching the last season of Doctor Who since Ariel and Anthony haven’t seen it.

I am grateful for trips that were uneventful.

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Posted By Kathleen David on March 24, 2016

I am driving to Knoxville to visit with Ariel who is due in a month.

I started last night to avoid the traffic mess that is Long Island and it was pretty much a good idea. Only downside was the roadwork in Pennsylvania which knocked a good chunk of the road from three to one lanes. Got through that and am staying just outside of Hersey. I plan to make it the rest of the way today.

I have Peter’s Apropos of Nothing audio plays and a lot of Big Finish Dr. Who to keep me amused and focused.

May be more later but no promises.

I am grateful for being able to get off the Island with only one real jam up when they shut down the upper level of the Verrazano so everyone had to go to the lower level

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Posted By Kathleen David on March 23, 2016

In Caroline’s school there is this habit that if you say the word black or white in a sentence, someone immediately calls you a racist even if you are in an art class talking about light and shadow in a painting. This also goes for saying Latino too usually when the other kid knows that they are losing the argument. So Caroline and I found other words that mean black and white and she had been using those.

Another word that has been bandied about recently as an excuse for bad behavior is discrimination. Discrimination means the act, practice, or an instance of discriminating categorically rather than individually. You are not being discriminated against if you don’t get your way, which is how some people are using it these days. But then some people will try anything so they can discriminate against people they don’t like and hide behind the idea that they are being discriminated against.

I know I was lucky that I grew up in an area that looked like we are the world so I encountered lots of people with different beliefs and customs. And I think that made me a more rounded person. My parents raised me to be a moral person who sees beyond the surface of a person and I believe they succeeded. I will admit to a prejudice against stupid.

Fandom has some strange practices of discrimination. I use to call the non-fans mundanes and we would giggle at their responses to the convention around them. A phrase I still hear said at conventions is “don’t tease the mundanes” or more recently you can substitute muggle for mundane.

There is the geek hierarchy, which has changed over the years but there is always some form of fandom that everyone looks down on and wonders why “they” are at the convention. You can find a version that has been floating all over the internet here at The Brunching Shuttlecocks. Personally I think the more the merrier at a convention and if you keep cutting people out because you think less of their fandom, your convention is going vanish from the face of the earth eventually because you aren’t trying to see what they next generation might be interested in but this is a whole other discussion. For saying that fandom is all inclusive, it can be down right discriminatory when it wants to be and racist too.

I am grateful for the inclusion of people in fandom.

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Posted By Kathleen David on March 22, 2016

And it is not the set I thought I would be building

Hook is done and on his way to his owner.

I have two on the table I need to get done before I move onto the next three that I have to have done by May 10th. One is a puppet I promised someone and Peter will be in a position to get it to her. The other two are part of a weird on going set I have which already has a number of components in place.

Then there is Shoreleave, Dragon Con and the Puppet Slam.

I started sorting out the puppet slam the other night.

I need to learn to make puppet armor that will work for a project.

And then there is Warlock the new mutant version. I got to talking to Bill about the character and we brain stormed ways to make it a really cool puppet. I think that one will be done by NYCC if not DragonCon.

Still sorting out Dragon Con this year. May be sets of hand puppets. Or fuzzy monsters. Or? All I know is that I have less time than I think I do.

And I promised Caroline to have her Rey outfit done before Shoreleave.

There is time but I need to use it wisely.

So there are skills I need to improve and skills I need to learn along with all the usual stuff that goes on around here.

But right now I am in the planning stages of a couple of puppets. Then onto the build.

I can do this and I will do this.

I am grateful that I do have so many ideas.

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Posted By Kathleen David on March 21, 2016

Today is World Puppetry Day! A bunch of my friends were in Time Square with the Avenue Q cast to celebrate the day this morning.

Puppets have very deep meaning for me. I honestly can’t think of a time in my life that there wasn’t some form of puppetry in it. For me puppetry is like breathing, it is just something that I do.

Puppets have taken me on some interesting journeys over the years and I have made many incredible friends through puppetry.

So today I celebrate the puppet by working on a puppet.

Behind the cut are photos through the years that are puppet related and kind of special to me.

(more…)

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