You're too Big to Carry!

Another picture I finished.
Katani and Tyra.

Tyra's getting too big to carry, but she still likes Katani to carry her.

Dumpster Diving

I just finished a surprisingly fascinating documentary called Dive.
What was it about? Dumpster Diving.
I hadn't thought much about it before. And although I doubt I'd ever actually do it, I think the people that do have a good idea.
So much stuff is thrown away. Perfectly good stuff.
Grocery stores throw away bags of food all the time. Food that is completely edible. They throw food away before the sell-by date, or they trash a whole bag of fruit because one piece of it is starting to go bad.
the amount of waste is pretty disgusting.
With thousands of thousands of people not knowing where their next meal is coming from, or starving, we have dumpsters full of food which is in perfect shape.
Although many of these stores donate food to food banks, still a lot of food ends up in the garbage.
Dumpster divers go into the dumpsters and salvage this food. And the guy said he'd never once gotten sick from it.
When you think about how many resources go into making food, and how much some people need food, it's disgusting how much is wasted.
It's not just markets. Households waste a lot of food too. And restaurants. People throw away leftovers. People eat out and don't bring home whatever food is leftover.
I've been raised to not waste food. So I'm always surprised when I see how much is thrown away at restaurants, or in leftovers.
Please, don't waste food.

Food is not a luxury that can be wasted. It's a necessity for life. And we shouldn't waste what we have. But we shouldn't waste anything. Our society is built on waste. And we can't keep that up. Our world has limits.

It takes 7 pounds of corn and 2,500 gallons of water to get one pound of beef.
40% of the world's grain goes to feeding meat animals.
19% of our energy goes into making food.
We waste about 96 BILLION POUNDS of food every year, which is worth $136 billion.

565 Gigatons

I just read this article for one of my classes.
It's called "Global Warming's Terrifying New Math," by McKibben. If you can find it, I recommend you read it.
There was one rather terrifying thing he talked about in it.
Basically, that atmosphere can only take about 565 more gigatons of carbon before it starts going into irreversible feedback loops that mess up climate.
The problem is that oil companies have almost five times that much that they are able to extract and sell.
These companies have a lot of power.
And that oil is worth a helluva lot of money.
How do you stop them from selling over 2,000 gigatons worth of carbon?

Fact of the day: It takes 75 gallons of oil to raise a steer to slaughter.

Don't Be Too Good

Hey, it's been a while, but I'm returning to the book Poemcrazy!
Don't always be good.
That doesn't mean that you have to be bad. All it means is that you can be not-good sometimes. If you always try to do the right thing, to please everyone, you could suffocate. Look at Yoko from the Twelve Kingdoms.
So, maybe when no one's around, go tearing wildly through a field, flapping your arms and howling. Or get into a wrestling match with your dog or cat (or mom). Do something that would make those refined, ladies wearing frilly collars gasp in horror.

Now tying that into stories! What does your character do to be "not good" when no one else is around?

Fact of the day: Lactose intolerant - when a person lacks the enzyme lactase, which is necessary for digesting milk and milk products. Though it may be hard to believe in today's society, people are naturally lactose intolerant. Which makes sense. Animals don't need to drink milk once they're old enough to eat solid food. If a human infant continues to drink milk as he/she grows, he/she is less likely to be lactose intolerant.

People That Aren't People

As I have said before on the blog, I love animal-people. Either shape-shifters, or people with animal traits (ears/tail/ex), or animals that take on human shapes.
This can be expanded to include plant people too. Like Cheza, from Wolf's Rain. And today, Mom and I went to see The Odd Life of Timothy Green in theaters. Timothy is adorable. And I'm not sure if I think that mainly because he's a plant person. But there's this one part where he's practicing soccer, and he keeps tripping over the ball. He stands up and grins. And the coach demands, "Why are you smiling?" And Timothy says, "I can only get better!"
:3
But my love of animal/plant people can be expanded even further in some cases. People that aren't people. The best example I can think of right now is FMA. The homunculus. In this case, Wrath. I don't mean the Wrath from the books or from Brotherhood. I mean the Wrath from the first anime. I modeled Hari (the boy in my Pokémon fanfic) after him. I liked wrath before he got brainwashed by Envy.
And then Greed too. Both Greeds, I guess.
Or Kurama and Hiei, from Yuyu Hakusho. I like to count Kurama as a fox, because then I can call him an animal person. But Hiei doesn't fall into that category. So he's a non-human human.

Emperor Kazuhi and the Lieutenant

Another picture of some of my characters. This time Emperor Kazuhi, the leader of Reyu. One of the characters in Katani's story.
The woman doesn't have a name yet. But she's a lieutenant (maybe) in the army and she eventually ends up marrying Kazuhi. Throughout the first draft the story, I had absolutely no plans for Kazuhi getting married. Mainly because I wanted to be lazy and have it happen mysteriously after the story ended.
Which is a terrible thing to do. And it must be fixed! So, I started trying to figure out who he'd marry. Some people might consider 38 a bit old to marry, especially for an emperor, but too bad! He had to find the right person. The wedding will probably still happen after the book, but I'll be including some of this woman in the book.

In the picture, she's saying that she's got Kazuhi on a short leash. Since at the beginning of the story, Kazuhi's dragon partner, Chao (must draw him) teases that everyone wants Kazuhi on a short leash.
I made Mom and Dad pose for this picture. Heheh.

Fact of the Day: A while ago in China, if anyone besides the emperor wore a five-toed dragon on their clothes, they would be put to death.

Jade

I don't draw enough of my characters. I really need to do concept arts for a bunch of them.
Here's one I drew a while ago, and finally got around to coloring it.
This is Princess Jade, one of the princesses of Draykia, the western-most country in Soreina.

This is probably a picture of her when she's living away from the palace.
Three or four people told me that she was leaning too far backwards. So, I used the amazing rotation feature on photoshop! Now she doesn't look like she's tilting backwards.

My scanner always screws up the colors...

I need to fix Jade's story. Sigh. Gotta focus on Katani's story first. And my application.