In a Metafilter thread about losing cats and other pets, somebody linked to the above Weakerthans song about the death of a cat, as sung from the cat’s perspective. Hence “and I can’t remember the sound that you made for me” as she no longer recalls the name her owner called her. It goes to the heart of what makes dealing with the death of a loved pet so different from dealing with losing people. Pets can’t understand what’s happening to them, not like humans can and it feels more like you are abandoning them, than that they’re leaving you.
There’s this dream I have occasionally, where Sandra turns up still alive and I accept in the dream, though at the same time in the dream I still know she died, but something happened that had made it all a misunderstanding, she was alive all that time, I just had not been seeing here. That’s that same feeling of abandonment, of having let her down.
Windsor McCay was one of the first superstars of the American comics strip, a pioneer in both cartooning and animation, massively prolific. All of his work is in the public domain, but where to start? Over at Robot 6, Chris Mautner provides the lowdown in the first installment of a new series of Comics College, “a monthly feature where we provide an introductory guide to some of the medium’s most important auteurs and offer our best educated suggestions on how to become familiar with their body of work”. The previous thirtytwo installments profiled the following cartoonists and writers:
It’s a decent list, one that’s clearly the work of one particular person’s tastes, but which is also partially driven by which creators are currently relevant for one reason or another. The one thing that’s a bit of a disappointment is the lack of female creators, only four in a list of thirtysomething.
When Brown Lady Shepard is rude, or curt, or dismissive, the reactions she receives from others are not to her gender or her race, but to her words. Why? Because the character was written with the expectation that most people will play it as a white dude … In Mass Effect, no matter what my Shepard says or does, not only is the dialogue the same as it would be for the cultural “default”, but the reaction from the other non-player characters is the same … Brown Lady Shepard waves her intimidation up in a dude’s face and he backs the fuck down, just like he would if she were a hyper-privileged white guy. My Lady Shepard faces no additional pressure to prove herself because of her background; if she is dismissed, it’s on the basis of her assertions, and not because she’s a queer woman of color from a poor socioeconomic background — even though that’s exactly what she is.
[…]
We don’t need Lady Shepard to verbally eviscerate a racist or punch an ass-grabber in the face to know she’s tough. We know she’s tough by her non-explicitly-gendered actions — the same way we know Dude Shepard is tough.
Yes, I’ve been playing Mass Effect this weekend, about five years behind everybody else. And like everybody sane, I’m playing FemShep, as who’d want to play an overmuscled meathead if they don’t have to? To be honest, I usually play as a female character if I get the opportunity; gaming after all is as much about being somebody else than your normal self as it is about anything else.
Underneath the surface FemShep, the female version of Mass Effect’s hero, is quite literally the same as her male counterpart: they share the same animations, the same dialogue trees, etc. Which means, as Lesley Kinzel explains above, that female Shepard is treated the same as male Shepard and people respond to her personality and actions, rather than to her gender or race. This is interesting, rarer than it should be in pop culture, let alone real life. It’s not completely unproblematic, still a standard sort of sci-fi adventure, but the ability to play a competent, tough female action hero and it’s no big deal, is worth it.