Weekly thingy and Three of Wands/Hans My Hedgehog
Wands, wands, wands. I went with Hans My Hedgehog for this card, which some of you may actually know from Jim Henson’s Storyteller for a change! But basically it’s a Beauty and the Beast variant – Hans is top half hedgehog, bottom half man, so like the Cat’s ideal mermaid from Red Dwarf but, y’know, pointy and fuzzy.
He makes a deal with two different merchants that the first thing to greet them on their return home is his. Merchant A gets greeted by his daughter but just nopes out of the deal, and so Hans pokes the poor girl with his quills and excuse me, she did not make this dumbass deal with you, go stab her father you half-hedgehog dick.
Merchant B, to his credit, doesn’t WANT to send his daughter to marry this weirdo but she insists. Naturally once she comes to marry him he whips off his hedgehog pelt, tosses it in the fire, and is revealed as a handsome dude and they theoretically live happily ever after. Clearly they have a similar sense of what constitutes a binding agreement so I guess that’s something?
Also I changed the bride’s height several times because I intended her to be a trans woman (as usual that’s mostly in my head because all of my characters look fairly cartoony and femme regardless) so I thought about making her taller, but also I didn’t want to reduce the impact of Hans looming over her. If you kind of measure out where a human head would land on him without the hedgehog body they’ll be close to the same height post-transformation, which I find really nice with a partner personally.
Places to buy stuff!
- TEEPUBLIC: mostly t-shirts, a few other products. Watch for sales, when shirts drop from $20 to $14!
- REDBUBBLE: Just, I don’t know, a ton of different stuff. T-shirts are more expensive than Teepublic, but there are a lot more options.
- AMAZON: Home of the Geeky Gals Coloring Book! Daydreams and Whimsies! AND NOW, The Neurotic Owl Compendium!
- ETSY: paper dolls, a knitting bag pattern, and a bunch of vintage dolls of various sorts from my collection
Did I miss something? I think that’s everything.
What’s making me happy this week:
- If you, like several people I know, are a non-Jew who only just discovered the history of Jewish Catskills resorts through watching Mrs. Maisel, I just watched a really nice documentary about the longest lasting one (and the inspiration for Kellerman’s from Dirty Dancing) on Prime. (I know, ugh, Prime, but yeah, I have it.) ‘Welcome to Kutsher’s’ was a real delight to watch and gives a little of the background about how the Borscht Belt began, highly recommend.
Neurotic Owl 
I like that several things are making you happy this week. While I came to comment on the joys and frustrations of graphic designing for others (whose taste, as my mother used to say, is in their mouths), I was delighted to see your comment about the Catskills. I wish I could have experienced it. Doesn’t it sound like just so much fun? Sort of like summer camp for the whole family, but with better food.
PS. I have a thing for hedgehogs.