· r e j i q u a r · w o r k s ·
the various and sundry creations of sylvus tarn
21jan2020
Still old stuff, but at least it's beads!
I have been reading manga (in English) as part of my efforts to learn Japanese. (Reading manga in Japanese, even at the simplest level, is still beyond my abilities. Also, the library only has English translations;)
They have at least given me a bit of insight, even with the translator's remove, to Japanese culture. Going off some recces I found somewhere or other online I checked out Seiichi Hayashi's Red Coloured Elegy and—since our library didn't have Gold Pollen and Other Stories I got Cigarette Girl by the same author, Masahiko Matsumoto, instead: this is also a collection of short stories, for the most part young men and women meandering, perhaps, through their everyday lives in early 1970s Tokyo. The eponymous title character is the crush of a lovelorn young man who doesn't smoke(!) and cannot even bring himself, despite his friend's urgings, even to attempt to touch her hand during these transactions.
20jan2020
Today's intro is for clearing out a bunch of muffin recipe variations—the updated versions for triple ginger, double-double-choco-cherry, as well a ginger variation to use up stale, sweetened cereal (to go along with our stale, possibly unsweetened pages...)—not to mention the hot'n’spicy orangepeel and sriracha version depicted here, an original variation on cranberry orange muffins that are one of several family favourite muffin recipes.
I tend to group food and exercise links together, so here's one to a specific comment on John Scalzi's Whatever blog for achieving runner's high. I find I do much better with at least 15-20 minutes of yoga 4–5x/week and outdoor walks or cycling of 45min (esp this time of year, to combat the SAD); I get stiff when I miss too much of the former and cranky and generally out of sorts when missing the latter.
17jan2020
Well, here we are, at the end of a week of slightly used webpages. I gotta say, making fresh new ones is waaaaayyyyy faster'n’easier: with a little luck, I can churn out a week's worth for the queue in a few hours. This batch took two solid days. Talk about a ridiculous expenditure of effort for minimal return...
Yet I found it's kind of interesting how, in my usually erratic way (that is: waiting for the problem to go away) stuff does sometimes resolve: Frex, in 2014 I was all about:
Since today's page is lampwork technique related, for Yet another one of those selfish/info posts... possibly good news, I present the following lampwork-related vids, some or all of which are still available:
- Drew Fritts has a website,
butand it's currentlyunonce again available - Revere Glass has a wonderful series of boro tuts —that's still going strong. And now that I have two concentrators to power my torch, boro is hella more practical.
- The Flow mag's video of Boxfan's implosion floral marble. Guy is hell on his tools, but it's a pretty marble. There are at least two other flow mag videos of him making marbles. (Hey, I know a fellow guild member who might be interested in this!)
- How to soften up a GTT torch flame with air: first encounter
- wetcanvas has a writeup of someone's simplified effort (& Hallejuah, in 2016 I solved the whole GTT problem by getting a Bethlehem
BravoBrava, which I named Brega, and just love. Even got the lynx refaced, and it mostly works fine too.) - Drew Fritts talks about his marble making book in this thread...it's 400+ pages, and worth the money of the original cover price, but mebbe not the $200 they're charging on amazon! —But good news, he's selling an ebook version for $25 on his site.
- Some pix of his marbles, collected by a museum
- Fritts has a pintrest page
but his site is currently down, sigh.(see above) - Bullseye compatible schott tubing Link notes: Schott makes tubing in a multitude of sizes that fits Bullseye for torch and kilnwork (sort of, not Tested Compatible, but people use it). It's called AR 90 tubing (although the measured COE is 91). Also comes as rod. Read more at: english/download/arglase_secure.pdf In the US we've sold it through the RC (Bullseye Connection) in the past. Not sure if we still do...
16jan2020
Just for a change from old art, today I have an old review: a favourite comfort read, the self-published fantasy The Sorceress's Orc, by Elaine Corvidae. A cross-species romance featuring an older heroine, I found a lot to recommend it, despite some problems. If that doesn't float your boat, well I also have lots of nice, stale, 2016 linkspam for your delectation. Some are badly dated, only 4 years later. Others, sadly, are not:
- Vihart weighs in on a nice, sharp review of #BLM in her traditional style
- This is an interesting article about Hilary Clinton...everyone seems obligated to shrug off their support for her with all these disclaimers. While I think she can legitimately be dinged for her hawkish tendencies, I'm not exactly thrilled with Obama's drone strikes, and nobody's dinging him for that. The other scandal seems to be the mail server, but interestingly enough two different commenters on different blogs with backgrounds in the defense industry were remarkably sanguine, more or less excusing her on the basis that government secured servers are so far behind the times that she just went around them (in much the same way my spouse has used his own computers at work for years.) The rest...seems to be a whole lotta sexism. Here's some in-depth discussion of issues by Hilary Clinton, prompted by Ezra Kline (via bb);
- The 1 in 3 campaign collects stories of the approximately one-third of US women who have abortions. I s'pose some day I'll have to write my narrative out but the short version was, I was a starving artist whose spouse was making $6/hr with no health insurance. What if I had a hole in the heart baby, how would I pay for its care? That didn't seem very responsible! So we waited till we had the resources and were ready, then had our two. Who are splendid, and, I suspect, much happier than those other babies would've been.
- I wish I'd gone to this school. I wish my kids had gone to this school...
- I love this law prof's response to her whiny student(s)’ complaints about her BLM t-shirt. Beautifully argued (as one would expect from a law prof. Favourite line: Premise: You know more about legal education than I do. Critique: You don't.
- As the #BLM has been circulating that "15 things you can urge your police department to do" this PSA about transwomen also models how you could potentially stand ally to them. Nice!
- Car exhaust smells awful, and it's not good to breathe, but back in the day, one of the advantages cited for automobiles was that they would be cleaner than horses. What's interesting to me is that people just accepted horses dropping manure into the streets—there's no reason carriages couldn't’ve been required to collect their horses’ waste back in the day, but people just accepted it. Now, we clean up after our dogs. Makes we wonder what sorts of pollution we take for granted, that we really don't have to, merely because it's been historically acceptable.
15jan2020
I've known for some time (even as of roughly 4 years ago, when I wrote most of this page) that ‘addiction to illicit (hard) drugs is inevitably life-destroying’ is ...a very imperfect view of the situation. Frex, I'm familiar with the rat park experiment; that lots of soldiers in Viet Nam shook their (very cheap) heroin addictions after they came back from the American War; that crack babies were mostly a lie promulgated by Reagan and his ilk, an effective and mean-spirited way to avoid discussing how poverty, especially racist-induced poverty was—and is—the major detriment to a child's success. (This was also the era of the ‘Moral Majority’, ‘Satanic Panics’ —the ‘Me Generation’. I came of age in a selfish era, so it any wonder that my generation is doing such a crappy job running things now?)
14jan2020
Continuing on with the January website tidying, today's link via feministing via whizzpast is Sophie Scholl, the White Rose. Though I created this page in 2014, the efforts of a woman who gave her life to resist the nazis and their war(s) seems even more apropos now.
Oh. Also, a bead made from five years ago.
