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A little project I thought would take a few days ended up taking all Summer and into the Fall, but now it’s ready to go into the world.

Here is my “Recovery Glovery”, art gloves for dermatillomaniacs, trichotillomaniacs, and everyone else. They’re lightweight stretchy cotton-spandex, designed for indoor use but can be used outdoors too; I’ve been wearing mine on bike rides.

In addition to the highlights below, I continued to co-host the Heterodorx podcast with Corinna Cohn, and make $150 Drawings.

January

My 2023 started with crowdfunding platform IndyGoGo retroactively canceling my independent comic book Agents of HAG, automatically refunding all the backers and denying me access to all records.

I traveled to New Orleans with my pals Corinna Cohn and Shannon Thrace to attend a Quillette Social. It was a fun trip, my first flights since 2020’s COVID pandemic shutdowns, and I didn’t die.

February

I flew again with Corinna to Ireland, to visit our friend Alasdair who ...

GENDER WARS Playing Cards were a hit of 2023, and I intended to make a 2024 edition. But recent schisms in the gender world have put me off, so I’m pivoting. I got into the gender mess because of my interest in Free Speech, and would rather focus on this subject. Therefore, I request your nominations for CANCEL CULTURE Playing Cards:
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When a friend recently suggested a deck of playing cards featuring major players in the “gender wars,” I knew I wanted a set. I tried to find other ways to make it happen – photographs? Filters? AI art generator? – but decided the most expedient option was to just do it myself. Which isn’t particularly expedient, as a deck requires 54 designs (if you include 2 Jokers).

I generally suck at caricatures, but decided my limited skills would have to be adequate. I Can Do Hard Things, just not perfectly.

Everyone deserves a second chance — even me!

The post Compliance Comix appeared first on Nina Paley.

Agents of H.A.G. continues apace…

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I don’t want to promote $150 Drawings right now because I really need to focus on another project, so please don’t order any. Nonetheless, I have done a few recently:

What is this other project I need to focus on? A new comic book, Agents of H.A.G., starring Menopausal Woman and Sidekick:

So please don’t distract me. I have some weird starting-a-new-project anxiety and am procrastinating too much already.

I’m exploring custom lenticular prints of loops from ApocalypseAnimated.com. I still don’t have them in hand; the first tests arrive in hand next week. Here’s a preview video from the printer of the design below:

But I’m so excited I’m already setting up designs for 6 more, to make a set of 7 lenticular prints (7 seems to be the most fetishized number in the Book of Revelation). Because I want to look at them adjacent to each other, I’m posting them here!

I’ve revived my temporarily-abandoned Apocalypse project, which now lives at apocalypseanimated.com. Instead of a movie, I’m illustrating the Book of Revelation with animated gif loops, in the tradition of Medieval and post-Medieval Apocalypses. Except instead of being hand-lettered and painted on parchment, it’s all digital. Still, the gif is the 21st Century’s equivalent of the woodcut, as I discussed 6 years ago:

…the advent of the printing press led to the explosion of a unique kind of illustration: the wood-cut. Since…the internet is in many ways analogous to the printing press, I saw a ...

MysticSymbolic has a long way to go, but continues to improve! We now have a rudimentary mandala generator, a Randomize Colors button, and an easier-to-remember work-in-progress URL: mystic-symbolic.art

Though primarily a collaboration between me and outstanding code genius Atul Varma, we now have a “team” including Dave Weaver of Webaissance, and my old pal Maneesh Yadav, who will hopefully dial in the colors. I’ve always scorned work-culture ideas like “team” and “meetings,” but I must say these are making the project better.

Speaking of colors, I am amazed at how well purely random RGB colors are working. I ...

I continue to design and upload more symbols for MysticSymbolic, finessing most, deleting many. We now have a “Randomly invert symbols” toggle, which I recommend to get a nice balance of black and white. I also recommend a complexity setting of 2 (the slider goes from zero to “bonkers”).

Sometimes I take screenshots and name them.  Here’s my latest gallery:

The post ...

On January 27 I awoke with an idea for a mystic symbolic art generator. I immediately sketched copious notes and put out word I was looking for a coder to collaborate with. By some miracle, Atul Varma responded within an hour, which makes me believe this project really wants to exist.

My plans are vast and sprawling, so we’re starting simple. And by simple we mean bonkers:

Atul and I are on the same page regarding Free Software and Free Culture, so we’re both happy to share as we go along. You can generate your own strange images ...

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I don’t want to have to animate a hand by hand. So I made this articulated “bone” model. Problem is, it’s a little stiff, and there’s no way to make the white outlines smooth and even. It seems like a nice smooth hand would be easy enough; the problem is when the fingers go in front of each other, as in the making of a fist. Then you need layers, where each part of a digit that obscures any other part is on another layer. This model has 16 layers: one for each “bone” of the fingers ...

Many battles, much polarization; we are splitting into sides. Online especially, there is right and wrong, good and bad, the “right side of history” and the wrong. Even saying “the right side of history” implies petty, idiotic opinions are of world-altering significance.

The Book of Revelation is the ultimate story of Good vs. Evil, black vs. white. It’s also the ultimate revenge story. John of Patmos was a persecuted early Christian, exiled to a penal colony, expelled from society; cancelled, as we’d say today. He was righteous and angry. He had time to imagine, in elaborate detail ...

I’m now on my third set of laser-cut acrylic printing plates. Third time’s a charm. Even if it’s not, I’m not going through this again.

Below is design 3 (top) vs design 1 (bottom).

The Angel O’ Death face has become smaller still, so the wings could become proportionally bigger. Honestly I’m not sure I like this, but I’m tired and don’t want to go through yet another design iteration, so this may be it.

Momz sewed this new mask prototype, but I sewed the center seam, because it has to be sewn ...

“Show more wing,” said the peanut gallery on fecebook. To make the Angel O’ Death’s face slightly smaller to make room to show a little more wing, I had to make all these paper prototypes. Each one is different. Resizing the image is an extraordinary PITA because the distortion increases at the center seam and I have to manually adjust it, print it, cut out the pieces, tape it together, turn it inside out, and then look at it head-on to see how bad the distortion is. The smaller Death’s head, the wider I have to make it ...

My guilloché simulation experiments came from animating stars. Last night I realized a cross is a 4-pointed star. And voilá.

I’ve been collaborating with Alex Gleason on a new social media website, and he proposed a background of the animated fish from Seder-Masochism:

But how to scale it up for a full background? The gif above is 1.6 MB, it can’t be any larger without significantly slowing loading times (and eating up data on mobile devices). I thought I could maybe make a tessellating animated gif tile, and so did Alex, but it turned out to be much trickier than I’d anticipated.

In a way, a looping gif is a tessellation of time: it seamlessly begins ...