What's wrong with you today?
missteps, mixes, and my friends the child brides
¿What you heard?
My sabar dance teacher is still learning English, so when she came up to me and asked “What’s wrong with you?”, there was a beat of hesitation before she remembered to append “…today?”, a lil addition that only somewhat alleviated the pointedness of her question.
But I was glad she caught me and called out my missteps because, now too nervous to mess up, I danced hard hard for the rest of class so much so that, when she pointed me out again, she exclaimed in Wolof this time, “Waaw! Waaw!” Yes! Yes!, which meant that I was doing a damn good job.
What you doin’?!
As I soft wrap the modeling phase of my Blender journey, I celebrated by purchasing a quintuple XL Blender Guru t-shirt.
Yet, at the crafting event where the shirt debuted, everyone mistook my Blender donut for a bagel except for one person who thought it was a donut getting an x-ray after accidentally swallowing one of its own sprinkles. :/
Next phase — animation.
In my newsletter for Gullah Binyah, my semi-documentary educational children’s show about Blackness, I briefly explain how I plan on incorporating Blender into the Unreal Engine-based workflow I used to animate the show’s proof of concept.
I was feeling pretty certain about this new workflow until, at the tail end of the crafting event, John Brennan, the man who taught me Unreal Engine, rocked up, and we talked until almost 3am (even though the event ended at 10pm) about AI, about Unreal, about Blender, and about how my instincts to combine all three are good but how the exact mix of the three should still be open for experimentation.
What you seen??
TALL AS THE BAOBAB TREE (2012) is a film about an 11-year-old child-bride-to-be. Most of the child brides and grooms that I know though are in their twenties.
Talk about adulthood puts way too much emphasis on pubes and periods and Adam’s apples. That’s all relevant to a degree, but it only pertains to our meat bodies.
As a screenwriter, the development that I emphasize isn’t meat development. It’s character development, and I know too many Meat 29-year-olds who are Character 11-year-olds, which to me means they really have no business signing any sort of lifetime contract about anything.
In one of its most impactful scenes, Tall as the Baobab Tree invites us to sympathize with someone in support of child marriage, and it’s interesting to note that the arguments this character makes, especially her closing statement about culture, aren’t too far off from what I hear my married or long-term monogamous friends say to justify their own relationships…