“The day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

~ Anais Nin

“Today is my day to blossom, like a majestic chestburster erupting forth from the ribcage of an unsuspecting cosmonaut!”

~ Marty Whitmore

We’ve only posted a few updates since getting to Aggiecon, and they’re both at Marty’s blog—a brief check-in after our first evening and a cryptic sketch addition.

Apparently the MSC —the building Aggiecon is held in—has been bugging Aggiecon for years to get rid of the nudity in the con art show. This year I guess they were extra insistent about it, because when we got there we found out we had to tape over exposed nipples. At a fantasy / SF art show, you can imagine how many nipples were floating around. A lot.

This is absurd for a whole string of reasons, but the short story is that we did it and felt bad for the art show staff, who were obviously stressed and flustered. We doubt there would have been censorship without that particular pressure from the MSC. We don’t blame the con staff, except that we think it’s better to stand up than sit down, especially in such a ridiculous situation. For this reason, Angel obtained a roll of the same blue tape used to censor most of the artwork, and proceeded to censor all willing nipples at con. Yesterday there were hordes of us walking around with blue tape X’s on our shirts, and more today. It’s more a joke than a protest, but there’s something to it. Todd was also supportive (as you can see), and Steve Brust was downright pissed. I can relate to that. If you take this sort of thing lying down too often, you get used to it. That’s not a cool thing to get used to.

In any case, we have our blue tape gang and our backstory. Steve sounds like he plans to write a letter. This con is turning out to be thoroughly weird and nifty. Anyway, I’m having a pretty good time. You can tell:

Update: By the way, Marty’s Iron Artist entry (or result?) touched on this particular issue—so if you enjoyed his pasties sketches, you’ll like the pictures of the competition. Well, with penguins.

If you’ve been wanting a Marty commission but didn’t quite have the cash, here’s your chance to get the next best thing for way less monies!

Marty is running a sort of community project. He’s raising pledges with Fundable, which is this neat service that lets people pledge to raise enough money for a project but doesn’t actually take the donations until enough pledges have been made. Once he raises at least $350 in 26 days, he’ll get started on the project, which is kind of a groupthink—the top donors get to actually tell him what to draw, and he has to incorporate all their input into the final product, which will be an awesome full-color work of Martyness. I can imagine this resulting in some pretty wacky things, especially considering the sanity of some of our friends… :P

In addition to that, he’s sending all the donors super awesome stuff like prints and postcards and Marty money and discounts on other prints. So if you were thinking of buying a Marty print, this might be even better: You get possible input on a new picture, you get to know that you helped support Marty in doing the thing he loves best, you got to play a fun game, and some of you will get to heckle him mercilessly in the process. It’s a win-win!

He also decided that for the first 48 hours only (until about 11pm tomorrow night) the $30+ donors will get input privileges like the $50+ donors do—so if you feel like bossing him around and working his fingers to the bone, you can do it pretty cheaply before tomorrow night. (Ha!)

Once he gets started on the actual picture he’s going to blog and post photos of the work in progress, so that we can all look over his shoulder while he works! I can see this being a lot of fun, and I would love to see him do several projects like these over time.

The project started last night, so you can go pledge now if you want! And the deadline for pledges is April 8th, a few minutes before midnight, so you have some time to decide whether the promised stash is worth it. ;}

You obviously don’t have to pledge money to show your support—I’m pretty sure he’d be filled with glee if you just posted some comments on the post he made. And whether you donate money or not, you can watch him work once the project starts after April 8th!

Go take a look at his post and leave him comments while the party’s still getting going. I haven’t seen anything quite like this before, so it should be interesting!!