· r e j i q u a r · w o r k s ·
the various and sundry creations of sylvus tarn
30jul2020
My stargazer lilies peaked this week, and I actually made some cards featuring watercolour sketches of them, as well as some other doodles—“art”, if relatively low key:) I might even post some of this stuff; at any rate, that's this week's excuse for the erratic posting.
Really, most of the stuff I do would be considered craft, and in order to show a giftwrap I did today, I need to backtrack to one from 2019.
Also, I enjoyed reading this history of Zork, though it dates back about 40 odd years, instead of 4–8 months; I never played that game, though the wizard enjoyed it, and purchased for me one of their other, easier (beginner) games,, which I'm sorry to say I never got very far into. Now he and f2tE are writing their own text game, and even though my memories are vague, the lineage seems fairly obvious.
24jul2020
I wanted something fun and fantastic, so today I'm celebrating the monarchs that have been visiting my garden. Part of the reason I wanted to document them was a request for panel decorations for a community little free library, in which I wished to incorporate orange flowers and butterflies (because the woman who requested the piece loves orange;)
Monarchs are pretty easy to sex—the males have this oval spot on a vein more or less in the middle of their lower wings—so I knew when a pair of them did that rising, helical dance that will be familiar to anyone who's ever watched butterflies for any length of time (you see it all the time in cabbage whites, which are our region's most common butterfly) that they were competing for resources, specifically the flowers in my yard rather than a romantic mating dance.
23jul2020
Okay, the links are piling up!
Besides the obvious victims of the War on Drugs, there are the subtler societal goods that get lost in the noise, such as the potential, just for example, for LSD as a therapeutic drug: because of its association with hippies, it could be safely demonized, and was. Now we're discovering that research is 50 years behind where it could've been because of this moral panic, le sigh...
Even abolitionists likely wore cotton clothing, which ultimately would've been produced by slaves. Outdoor gear companies—which make some of the very few types of clothing I tend to purchase new—despite their efforts, still are contracting with companies who mistreat their workers. Nothing short of worldwide equality of wages is gonna ultimately fix this sort of problem, but in the meantime, keep agitating...
22jul2020
Well, I was gonna follow up yesterday's link with this set of pointers on trying to pull people out the conspiracy theory well that's making the rounds. —The tips look remarkably similar to advice for dealing with folks embedded in hate groups and/or cults, and domestic violence situations. —I myself like lurking, which is sort of the ultimate low-stress version of wrestling with ideas without someone panting over my shoulder, which is, I guess, one reason I write and link the way I do (besides it being a sort of diary to track my reading habits and evolution of thoughts and interests.)
However, in view of the theme of today's page—getting the perfect red daylily photo—I can't help noting this Getpocket reprint about perfectionism. It's not that I don't agree with the sentiments, which is this hyperfocused attention to getting the ‘A’ instead of the joy of the process of mastery in which the ‘A’ becomes inevitable—but rather that the author (who clearly has issues addressed in the article), along, I suppose, with a cohort of researchers and the like, are calling this negative behaviour ‘perfectionism’.
21jul2020
Oh, goodie, deepfakes are being used to frame people for things they never did. —It's not that this sort of misinformation in particular dismays me, but rather that photographic evidence has so long been the gold standard that I think it will take people awhile to realize that it's not any more (and actually hasn't been, for a long time). As the article itself demonstrates, there are currently ways to detect this (interestingly enough, available to the trained naked eye, which despite my being a figurative artist, is not mine—a little scary!)
Basically, it's an ongoing competition, a digital version of the sort of evolutionary adaptation that, frex, makes our current pandemic so dire: the bats from which the coronavirus is thought originally to come (likely passed through some as yet unidentified? intermediate) have very strong immune systems, so wimpy-by-contrast human one is proving to be a cakewalk.
20jul2020
Oh joy, 45 is attempting to be a tin-pot dictactor. It's dreadful, but I am focusing on the “attempting” here: the one saving grace is the fact the guy's deep well of damage also makes him (not enough) incompetent. Yet, he couldn't persist without support, and figuring out ways to cut that down is crucial.
The link above is from a blog called We Hunted the Mammoth, and its focus is on assorted flavours of misogynistic men—MRAs, pickup artists, dark web types. Loathesome as these guys’ attitudes are—and they include sexism, rapine, and outright murder of a class of people they deem to be undeserving of the word—it's also critically clear that the leaders suck in (and suck out, as well...) their victims as so many hate groups do because their prey is lonely: desperate for connection.
