Heart of Gold : Neil Young || It Gets Better : fun. || All On My Own : Anna Nalick || Steel : Charlotte Martin || Enough to Go By : Vienna Teng || Nicest Thing : Kate Nash || The World Will Never Do : Cobra Starship ft. B.o.B || Spectrum : Florence & the Machine || Little Black Submarines : The Black Keys || Someday Soon : KT Tunstall It’s All Your Fault : p!nk || Machine Gun : Sara Bareilles
oh
gosh
Click “read more,” please, because this person didn’t just make a mix, they pulled out appropriate lyrics.
I’m gonna listen to these songs when I get home, and I’m gonna have a good long cry about how great my readers are.
I would really, really like a fanmix for O Human Star.
Obviously, there are a few songs referenced in the comic itself that would be great for it…but, beyond that, I don’t really have a broad enough knowledge of music to make one myself.
Are there any fans out there who would be willing to do this?
I, too, would be very interested to hear what people can come up with for this.
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Drawing Al and Sulla indulging each other’s goofy behavior is quickly becoming my favorite thing in O Human Star.
Hey, so
if I got the chance to draw another comic for Smut Peddler, it’s gonna be about these two, probably.
Time to spend hours figuring out what their names should be! And maybe draw them making out!
Forgot I’d written this as a follow-up to my first character design post, but here are some other thoughts I had about character design!
There are a lot of ways in which your characters may behave differently from each other, and by consciously employing differences in posture, gestures, and speech patterns, you can give characters another dimension of realism. Certain things may be unrelated to a character’s personality (like Brendan being left-handed) while others are more indicative of how a character expresses themselves (Readers have started noticing that when Al is embarrassed, stressed, or ashamed, he “hides” his face with one or both hands).
SPEECH PATTERNS
Speech patterns can also be really fun to play with! Think of how your characters would respond to the same question. Al speaks in short, terse sentences, and he often cuts other people off. Brendan, by comparison, is very talkative, and he tends to repeat phrases twice to emphasize a point. Sulla is influenced by both - she often has a quick, blunt response, and then she clumsily tries to explain herself. (Go back through the archives and notice how many times she says, “I mean -“)
NAMES
Names! I love names. I used to collect interesting or unusual names and make long lists of them. I would come up with characters just to give them interesting names. What do your character’s names say about them?
Alastair Sterling: I liked the repetition of the S-T-R sound, but calling him “Al” made him sound more like an old-fashioned, blue-collar guy. “Sterling” makes me think of metal - appropriate for a roboticist - but it also gives a false notion of strength, impenetrability, and flawlessness.
Brendan Pinsky: To me, “Brendan” sounded like a more youthful, gentler, softer name, and it’s contrasted with the sharpness of “Pinsky.” (More metal words!)
Sulla Pinsky: Sulla’s name is a reference to the very first character in literature explicitly described as a robot. That character is female but was mistakenly given the male name of a Roman general, which was too perfect for me not to use again. Someone also noticed how the sounds in Sulla’s name can be reversed to begin “Alastair.”
On today’s O Human Star, Al does his best to dispense some wisdom.
On today’s O Human Star, Sulla’s on a mission. And Minneapolitans, this library is a place you can actually go to. Just sayin’.
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