Hugh Jackman

Dude, I totally forgot to post about this!
I got to see Hugh Jackman a couple weeks ago! He did a huge concert.
Massively huge.
And it was awesome!

Aah man, there was music from Greatest Showman and Les Miserables (One Day More!). He sang the Gaston song, because that was his first musical - the Beauty and the Beast stage play. Singin' in the Rain and Somewhere over the Rainbow. He can tap dance, and even drum!

Dude, he took his drumsticks and pretended like they were Wolverine claws.
He found a little old lady in the audience and pulled her on stage and danced with her.
And he thoroughly embarrassed his piano player for his birthday XD
And there was a beautiful part where he talked about some time he spent in the outback as a kid, and how it had been like a spiritual experience.

I didn't get many good photos because he's always glowing in my camera? Even during the videos I took XD I guess my camera was all starry-eyed.

I saw his show in San Francisco years ago. But that was before he did so many more cool musicals. I recognized a couple songs from last year though. Like Once Before I Go.
Whoo, it was fun though.

In Defense of Zoos

A few weeks ago, a few Korean students came up to me and asked me why our zoo was good.
I talked for a couple minutes while they recorded. But since then, I've been wanting to write a post about it. Most people don't realize all the important things zoos do. Well, some zoos are horrible. But there are so many great zoos that have very important roles in conservation.

(And now I have an excuse to shamelessly dump in a bunch of my zoo photos XD )


Here are three three big benefits zoos can have.

Education and Connection

One of the most basic things zoos do is to just show visitors how amazing, strange, and beautiful animals are. It's one thing to see a giraffe on TV. But when you're face to face with that animal, you get that connection that no TV or computer screen could ever give.


People don't care about protecting things until they feel a connection to them. So helping people to see and love animals is a great way to get them involved in protecting those animals.
Right up there in the same category is education. If a zoo is set up well, they'll have information about those animals for the guests to read. Including information about the threats those animals face, and what you can do to help.
That's most of my job. To talk to people about animals, and help with that "connect and educate" part.


Conservation
What most people don't realize is that good zoos are very important for conservation. On multiple levels.
They can breed and release endangered species (we do that with native frogs and turtles). But for many animals, it's not safe to release them into the wild. For example, tigers, giraffes, rhinos, and many other species are at huge risk of poaching. If we started releasing our tigers and giraffes, they'd just be killed.

We have to make it safe out there for our animals. Once that happens, we can start releasing more animals. We have some rare Mexican gray wolves, and their siblings actually were released to the wild, so it is doable.


We partner up with several different conservation groups which focus on different animals - rhinos, red pandas, giraffes, lions, etc. We do events with those groups and run fundraisers for them.


And finally, researchers can use zoo animals to learn about species that are difficult to study in the wild. For example, snow leopards are notoriously difficult to study in their natural habitat. People can search for months and never even see them. They have excellent camouflage in very remote and hostile mountains, and they do their best to avoid people. So researchers have used the snow leopards at our zoo to study what kinds of smells snow leopards like. It's Calvin Klein perfume, by the way. It's got pheromones in it. Why is this important? Researchers can use those perfumes to lure wild snow leopards to camera traps, which help them get pictures of these animals for identification, range, etc.

Rescue
So, good zoos don't take animals from the wild. The animals we get are born at zoos or similar institutions, and then traded to keep the genetics fresh.
But there is an exception. Rescue animals. We have a lot of them. Our educational section (which unfortunately I don't really have much to do with, because it's awesome) is largely made up of pets that people no longer wanted, or didn't take good care of. We also have a number of injured birds who were hit by cars, or ran into power lines, and can no longer fly. At least one bird was smuggled into the country illegally. All of our bears were orphaned and never learned to care for themselves. And we have a blind sea lion.

So we can also help provide for animals that have nowhere else to go.

So the next time someone tells you that zoos are just animals crammed into cages for people to gawk at, now you can tell them what's really up.

Cat

A while ago, I mentioned that I was debating about adding a certain character into Arrin's story. A cat. After thinking about it, I've decided to include him. He'll be a good balance to some of the character interactions. And he'll be able to help them as well.
Now I've got to design what he looks like.

Delivery Boys

For now, the characters mentioned in my last post are just going to be boring delivery guys. They'll take anything that fits in their wagon.
Though one of them may mostly just be along for the ride.
By the end of the book, I think I'll send them on their way to a different job. One of them is going to change a lot over the course of the story.

Job Description

Heh. This story has just been one snag after another. Although the moment I think that, it probably makes everything worse.
At least with each snag I get through, it makes it easier to sort the others into their places.
Still, this is the slowest I've worked on a new story. I have to stop thinking of the unusually high level of snags because it kind of saps my motivation.

There are no snags! The story is perfect!

Anyway, now I'm trying to think of an occupation for two of the characters. When I first created them, they were traveling salesmen. But even if I stick with that, that's only part of the story. What do they sell? Who do they work for? I doubt they make the stuff themselves, so where is it from?


This cutie is a toucan relative, called a curl-crested aracari.

Write for Everyone

Movies and books have such varied ways of including people with disabilities. If they're included at all.

Sometimes if someone has a disability, it's on;y there for show and doesn't really affect the character at all.
Like Hiccup. He's one of the only heroes in animated movies with an obvious physical disability - a missing leg. The scene where he finds out his leg is missing is so powerful. But in the following movies, you can never really tell that he's missing a leg.
But at the same time, you can never really tell that he's missing a leg. Only in the TV series would you see him stumbling and having trouble with it.

(Toothless does have quite a bit of trouble with his handicap though. I'm mostly discussing human disabilities here)

In a similar vein is Long John Silver. In some versions of Treasure Island, his peg leg slows him down. In Treasure Planet, not so much (except when the gears are wrecked). His cyborg arm, leg, and eye are all very useful. More so than a normal arm, leg, or eye would be. I don't think that really glorifies handicapped people, since he admits that losing those parts of himself was a sacrifice, and it definitely seems to be a painful memory. And his leg is messed up at the end of the movie too.


Also Ed and Al, from Fullmetal Alchemist. Ed has amazingly effective prosthetic limbs. Though they also have their downsides in extreme hot and cold weather. Even if they get damaged, they can be repaired.


On a side note, there's the Princess Kushana, form Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. She also seems to be missing both an arm and a leg, but it doesn't slow her down because she also has some remarkable prosthetics.

Then Hector from Coco has a distinct limp. It never really slows him down though. And it seems to have mostly recovered by the end of the movie. Or maybe his leg just got bandaged better.


In many cases, the people with the disability are magically healed at the end.

I think this was a made-for-TV movie, called Nico the Unicorn. During the whole movie, the boy has a limp. Other kids make fun of him, or talk down to him without meaning to (both of which are unfortunately common in real life)). And of course at the end of the movie the unicorn heals him.



rerrrr
(Okay, this is too funny. My cat just stepped on the keyboard and typed "rerrrr." I wonder what that translates to in feline)


Back on topic. Sorry.

In Avatar, Jake definitely has a disability. As long as he's human. The moment he's in his Avatar body he can run and climb and everything. Which is wonderful to him, of course. At the end of the movie, he abandons that human body and gets to live with the strong Na'vi body.

Professor X is also confined to a wheelchair (in the old cartoon version, he has a flying wheelchair?).


Are you sensing a theme? All of these involve missing or injured legs (sometimes arms).
But there are some that include disease too.

In The Fault in Our Stars, the two main characters have cancer. Hazel has to haul around an oxygen tank, and Augustus has a false leg (though you really can't tell in the movie version). That's for when they can actually get around places.


In The Wind Rises, Nahoko has tuberculosis.

And both of these stories have a very realistic portrayal of the disease. The people live and love, but they face the very real, serious consequences of what they have.


Finally we have people that are born different, but luckily aren't injured or sick. Some people might consider these disabilities, but I guess I'm kind of weird because I think it depends on how you look at it.
In Willow and also Game of Thrones, there are dwarf characters. Willow sometimes has trouble keeping up with the tall people who don't seem to care that he has shorter legs. And Game of Thrones does a realistic job of showing how many people relate to dwarfism. He also has to get special saddles for riding horses and such.
(And of course there's Bran - he's another realistic portrayal of someone with a disability).

In the anime/manga "A Silent Voice," there's a girl who's deaf. She probably could get along pretty well, if she weren't surrounded by so many nasty people. She is bullied very badly. And it takes an awful toll on her.


What's my point for this post?
Well, this is hardly a comprehensive literature review. And I'm not really sure what my point is. I think it's important to have disabled characters. Everyone deserves to see heroes like them. I also think there should be more variety than only people who have trouble walking. And if they have a disability, it should count (not, for example, a missing leg that never gives them any trouble at all).
Should a disability be glorified? Of course not. No one should glamorize suffering. But there are so many accounts of people with diseases or injures that have turned their lives around, whether or not they recovered. Just because a person has an injury or disease doesn't mean that they can't do amazing things.

Do your research, and use respect.

People have a lot of Character

When I start a new story, I sometimes get concerned that some of my characters are too similar to characters from my previous stories.
For example, in "Yuyu Hakusho" and "Hunter x Hunter" the four main characters are all mirror images of each other. Although considering I have a figure of Kurama on my printer, I guess that doesn't bother me too much)

(I took him outside for a photo shoot with the roses)

I know that I in particular have a handful of character types I seem to automatically draw from. I don't want characters of the same "type" to essentially become the same character.
In Arrin's story, there are three or four characters I'm specifically concerned about. But mostly two of them.
So I started making a list of all the different traits that could define them.
I have a couple books called "The Positive Train Thesaurus" and "The Negative Train Thesaurus." I went through and wrote down everything that seemed like it could fit them. And for each character, those words formed a solid chunk of paragraph. There were a lot of traits that could fit them.

People are complex and contradictory and amazing. And if you start listing out all of the little character features that define them, that complexity becomes pretty obvious.

Name Swap

I was curious, so I did a little word search in Arrin's story.
I've already called her "Evva" two times.
Aaargh!


(Who would have thought that gorillas like to sit in buckets?)

Fans

I recently got a message from someone who had read my old Pokémon fanfic, back when I was writing it consistently.
They said that ever since they read my fanfic, they've names their Gyarados and Alakazam after the ones in my story.
And they've gone back to read it again.
I was so happy to hear that that I jumped in to write my next fanfic chapter XD
(My Gyarados is Leviathan, and Alakazam is Kinesis. The name Leviathan starts out as a joke because she names her Magikarp Leviathan, and people think she's weird. Then Magikarp evolves and she goes, "Hah! See, he's a leviathan now!")


I also need to go back to my oldest Pokémon fanfic and rewrite the next chapter.

I Taste Cooked Meat

Well, today I got a chunk of my gum hacked out of my mouth. I hurt it months ago (I think I jammed it while flossing). And my retainers stopped it from ever healing (I thought I would never have to deal with retainers once I grew up but it turns out I grind my teeth when I'm asleep, so I have to wear them to stop myself from grinding my teeth down to stubs).
I tried a couple things to fix it, but today they took a laser and cut it away. It was remarkably fast. Though at one point, I couldn't avoid noticing that I tasted cooked meat.

Well, there's a weird hole next to my teeth for now. But for the first time in months, I can chew without it hurting! Yaay!


Silverback gorilla