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the various and sundry creations of sylvus tarn

magic window

29sep2023

cropYup, still digging out old stuff.

Well, here's another blast from the past, a bracelet made in 2009, for which I finally got around to making a page in 2012, stuck it in my queued-up and ready-to-go...aaaaaaand, because I generally use the unfinished tag nowadays, lost track of it.

For over a decade.

And people wonder why I think I'm going senile.

It's kinda ugly, so I decided to post it on Friday:) “Enjoy.”

28sep2023

cropSo here we are, with the penultimate entry in the 2009–2012 series of charms I'm made for the guild's round-robin bracelet series. As I recall, this project was supposed to take six months, it ended up taking three years.

In celebration of today's blue (water) colour scheme, here's one of those me-me-me set of links:

  1. how to fold a dry suit compactly, so as not to damage the zippers. Aaaaaaand, with a surprisingly similar approach,
  2. how to fold wasou (Japanese clothing, e.g. kimono) (well, rats I can't find my fave step by step set of instructions,) but this is a good approach for beginners (Shotwell-san's 30 second version is better once you have a handle on the technique). In either case I have a bunch of summer yukata, jimbei etc that needs storing, and yes, after you do it enough, it does sort of become intuitive.

more...

27sep2023

cropSomeday I will start my day, fill my day, spend my day making art. Instead of reading crap on the computer. But in the meantime, the unread linkies have been piling up...

my parents’ stories of driving on two lane roads (& getting stuck behind slow moving trucks on the hills, a common occurrence in, say, the Ozarks where my mom grew up) and how Eisenhower and the interstates changed all that is perhaps why this story especially interested me; interestingly, what they cast as an unapologetic good is now being debated as the interstates have strangled rail, induced sprawl and just generally re-inforced our now-understood-to-be-problematic car culture.

Getting old...is weird. I guess in normal people seeing this shifts in public perception is how you get wisdom, but to me it's just sort of strange and humbling.

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26sep2023

cropToday's blast from the past features a Day of the Dead theme, and ISTR being a touch uncomfortable about appropriating this holiday—think it was more a controversy back then—Disney's wonderful (&, afict, respectful) Coco did a lot, I think, to smooth down the understandibly ruffled feathers of a community that often is horribly exploited in the USA; or mebbe the mainstream news milked the outrage and moved on.

Anyway. I'm not as up on Latinex issues as I am, say, of those in the Black community, e.g. why POC in general and that community in particular thinks of white supremacy a a structural problem (cuz I grew up in, and still live in, areas with significant Black populations) or Japanese related issues (again, cuz I have a kid who is and plans to live there for the forseeable future) but I would like to think that we could add one of their festivals to our bag of holidays, along with Chinese New Year, St Patrick's Day, etc.

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25sep2023

cropHappy Autumn Equinox (a couple of days late—it was Saturday;)

Some day I'll put up some relatively new content, or even stuff I've been working on for awhile, but here's a nice, fall-colour-schemed necklace in the meantime.

To go along with, some comments on a couple of older anime: I just discovered, via bb a full-on (45–60min) interview (in Japanese, with English subtitles) about the making of Akira provided by a commenter.

Rewatched this classic (which I believe I originally had the luck to see on the big screen) on crunchyroll in prep, and wow, this 1988 film (set in an apocalyptic 2019[!]) really holds up. Also the colours are fantastic—pretty sure there was a restoration. I mean, those vivid reds and pinks...Some day I'll have to read the manga, but one difference I really appreciate between the original and the animated version (both written by the same author, who made some 700 pages of storyboards for the film) is that the antagonist, Tetsuo, is humanized a good deal, and thus, so is his relationship with his friend Kanada, which to me is the core of the film. Another nice touch is that the luckless Kaori is Tetsuo's girlfriend (rather than sex slave).

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4aug2023

cropHave a fridayfugly:) Haven't done one of those in awhile!

I'm gonna be kinda busy during the first half of August, but with any kind of luck will be back to posting incomplete series and tag-ends of this'n’that in the second half of the month.




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