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the various and sundry creations of sylvus tarn
It's not just artists that like to be helpful!
Why yes, I am going to write about vacuum cleaners. It's my blog and I can write what I wanna. (Yeah, the wizard picked up the Scalzi top tier bundle, even though we already have most of the books, one we didn't was his collection Your Hate Mail will be Graded, aaaaaaaand evidently, though we both started our websites at roughly the same time, I didn't discover Whatever after a lot of these were written, even though it's been a favourite for years.
And wow, he's changed in interesting ways, mostly—I'd say—in the ‘yanno, life's too short to waste my time arguing with ijits’ kinda way. Though I would like to know whether he still feels Dubya is the top contender for worst 21st ca president, or whether that orange guy supercedes him. I mean, by Scalzi's lights, Dubya succeeded in overturning an election, whereas TFG only attempted it; otoh, Orange, with his vaccine denial, has gotta be responsible for more deaths, right? I'm really not jaqing off, I'd be honestly interested.)
Yesterday, as a treat for doing all the items on my list of things to do, (something I accomplish on the order of 1–4x/yr, mebbe?) I settled in for a deliciously long plagiarism video by one of my favourite youtubers, HBomberguy. I watched the nearly 4 hour epic in one go, but it's helpfully marked in chapters, and has a quite natural division point at the half way mark. Or you can watch this 20 minute out-take to get the general flavour, if not the righteous fury Brewis brings to the table.
Two things really stood out to me, or mebbe three:
1. as an aside, HBomb told a story about riding with some much-bigger-names in the video-logger world than him in a uber, going to a conference about their profession. He made a clever, relevant joke, and $Bigger said casually, ‘I'll have that’ and tweeted the joke to her following as her own, without credit. Bomb was a bit steamed, but didn't feel getting into a war with her much bigger following was worth the pain.
Like the assortment of beads featured yesterday, this week's gonna be a grab-bag of various topics—yesterday, lampworking, today, gift-decorating, tomorrow, well, check in and see!
Speaking of various and sundry, f2tE expressed an interest in making linocuts together.
It's one of the many media I've always wanted to try but never got around to attempting. Now that the internet exists, my first step in researching something about which I'm ignorant is to hunt around and find someone into $whatever-topic and see what they have to say. (The biggest difficulty is filtering out all the links whose goal is merely to sell you something, as opposed to actually just teach you out of the goodness of their hearts. Fortunately, artists—genuinely passionate ones about their craft, anyway—tend to be generous souls who enjoy gaining converts to their particular discipline, and that, I can generally identify.)
Whoops, sorry about the no-posting last week, I was kinda busy, among other things, actually making beads. (Go me;)
So, ofc, it's times to clear out the odds and ends of linkies...
Heh. I gots stuff to do, so today's just linkies. That I would like to clear off my virtual desktop, so it's as nice and clean as my physical desktop, which I tidied up yesterday after months of letting it go (I even wiped off keyboard, and my goodness it was grosssssssss—so nice to the touch now;) Enjoy.
Well, I only managed three pages last week, which means...I've got a couple ready to go for this one!
Finally listened to that NPR essay on sitting (specifically in front of a computer...which I'm doing right now, ofc) and why it's so toxic. It's about a 20 minute listen (if you skip the ads and ending credits) but the single most fascinating bit came along at the 18:30 mark, in which the reporter was found to have dropped her blood sugar by her whopping 42% just by taking a 5 minute walking break every 25 minutes; her fatigue increased and mood/productivity dropped substantially when she wasn't able to get up for 8 hours; similarly her blood pressure was 4–5 points lower when she took breaks.
Soooo, just between one day and next, there were huuuuuuge benefits for getting up. Perhaps part of the reason the pomodoro timer method (where you do 20 minutes of something, then go to something else) works is that you get up to change stuff up.