Madagascar, Tsingy. These Knife-like Limestone Formations Stretch Over 70 Meters Into The Air. Known

Marie Equi died on this day in 1952.

When I wrote that initial tweetstorm, I hadn’t finished all my research into her. It’s important to not leave out: Marie Equi was physically abusive and she almost certainly either cheated on her wife or went outside the bounds of their non-monogamous agreements. She was a deeply difficult, very flawed, very human person and one shouldn’t lose sight of that when talking about her.

And yes, I cover her in my second book.

Holy crap - why, YES, Luke Cage, yes I do!

Nanny of the Maroons, as the show goes on to say, was a leader of a city of formerly-enslaved Africans in Jamaica. They regularly raided plantations to liberate others. Rumors swirled that she was royalty, but her origins are a bit unclear - the show says she was Asante, but I think that’s still uncertain?

She beat the hell out of the British for years, and was reputed to have magic powers. She fed her people with quick-growing pumpkins, made the British ill with her herbalism, and camouflaged warriors so well, British soldiers would hang their coats on them, thinking them trees. Said soldiers would then decapitate the British and vanish into the forest. She could supposedly catch bullets with her bare hands.

To this day, the site of old Nanny Town is a place where unwelcome visitors reputedly go missing. 

And yes, I cover her in my first book. 

(she’s so cool! so glad her story is suffusing its way into pop culture! she fits in perfectly with the storyline they have going in Luke Cage.) 

“Two Female Moonshiners arrested by Federal Agents near St Paul,” 1921. You can tell they are contrite from their expressions. ;)

Found here: https://mobile.twitter.com/flanjanette/status/933032325113315329

The National Gallery Acquires Its First Painting by a Woman Since 1991

The London museum's acquisition of what is believed to be a rare Artemisia Gentileschi self-portrait demands a closer look at the world the artist inhabited in 17th-century Florence.

And the painter they chose was Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1653), whose first art show wasn’t held til 1991. Famously, she painted herself as Judith, beheading her rapist (as Holofernes). She also took her rapist to court and won - in the 1600s!

I cover her in book one. Here she is, painting her famous rendition of Judith and Holofernes.

RECON is a queer, crowdfunded web series dramedy about a group of queer college freshmen and their attempts to balance their personal lives and relationships – while training to be spies. Set at the mysterious, ancient Academy, the show follows Ava, a skilled hacker from the Midwest who’s finally able to come out and make friends at her new school. While she’s able to make friends quickly, everything falls apart when she finds out that her entire life is being recorded and posted online in neatly edited, five- to ten-minute episodes.

Can I talk for a moment about visual storytelling, cause, I feel like it’s something that a lot of adaptations forget about in lieu of trying to replicate their source material.

It’s a problem you see most often in anime derived from manga or light novels, but it’s also present in movies based on YA novels, and you gotta know what I’m talking about, start on black, opening narration, fade in as the main character explains the world and environment. This works in a book since the reader can’t see anything, they need the specifics of the world explained, but it feels like the movies are just like “well it worked for the book, it’ll work for us right?

I’d say it’s worse in anime, where characters will go on long internal soliloquies trying to explain their thought processes and complex emotions, which again, works for the manga, in a manga movement is very expensive, every single motion requires it’s own panel, which takes up the artist’s time, printed space, and a moment in the narrative, so it’s important to only show what absolutely needs to be shown. But animation is different, it’s all movement and the details are what sells it more than the dialogue.

The reason I wanted to make this post is because of one scene in One Punch Man that perfectly exemplifies how to translate a written thought process into visual storytelling. After getting punched to the moon (err, spoilers), Saitama has this thought process

and it’d be easy to translate that entirely literally in the anime, Saitama crouches, has an internal monologue as he tries to figure out how much force he needs to put into his jump, and then he launches. Instead though, the scene is done completely silently, to sell the fact that he’s in space, but the thought process isn’t removed, it’s just show visually.

He throws a bit of moon rock to gauge the moon’s gravity, then launches, it’s a much more thoughtful approach to the scene and the audience’s ability to interpret visual information.

I just, really wish more adaptations realized the inherent strength of the visual medium instead of relying entirely on the source material’s structure and reliance on its own medium.

I’ve wanted to do this for a really long time, but after finishing the art institute I finally got the courage to do it! And also because I’m down on my luck because unemployment…

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