2jan2025

Happy New Year.

I did not expect my retirement years to be, um, so excitingly...chaotic. I have fond hopes that the current turmoil will be a turbulent prelude to an ultimately better, kinder, more just world; but I'm not a fan of the idea of hitting bottom before coming back up. Wages were depressingly flat during my working years, but things seemed relatively okay; I do wonder what sort of impact all this is gonna have on young people growing up in it. I worry about them.

I want to make more art, and spread more beauty and kindness in the world. To that end, here's a webpage of a drawing I made to bring in the new year—it's imperfect, but then, so are we; and nevertheless it can still have some value.

Take care.

5dec2024

Well, yesterday? we were all s'posed to post this ‘LGBTQ+ People Are Not Going Back’ meme, which as a bona fide non-cis person you'd think I could get right, but nooooooo, cuz I'm always behind.

Currently reading a m/m reinterpretation of Pride and Prejudice as recommended by NPR, Gabe Cole Novoa's Most Ardently, which for obvious reasons needed to be relocated to London (Longborn, Elizabeth Bennet's home, is nowhere near London) in order for there to be enough of a queer community for the characters to interact with, but the author could've stood to have done a better job to make alternate-history geography apparent: as it was, I was scratching my head wondering how Oliver (the Elizabeth character) could go to a big fair, then an impossibly large bookstore while living near a tiny village, then wait, wut? only Darcy could afford more than one book? Did the author not realize Jane Austen and her family, despite their finances (probably) being about the same (or worse) than the Bennets’, were all ‘great novel readers’? By the time we got to the Watiers invite, I'd concluded the Bennets were not living in the country, but couldn't help wondering whether they even let minors in the infamous gambling club, let alone have a special night for them?

The author also refers to Oliver Bennet and Darcy as ‘boys’ which was super grating, because the original characters were very much adults—legally and emotionally. In this version, only Bingley (& mebbe Jane?) seem to be grown-up, which comes off very strange, as Darcy is the elder and Bingley's mentor in the original, whereas here the roles are sort of reversed...?

Plus, I don't think regency era people ‘processed’ their feelings. Reviewed, examined, considered, perhaps—but not processed, which strikes me as corporate-speak escaped into the wild. I mean, here's Elizabeth, frex, after receiving that pivotal letter from Darcy that flipped her opinion prejudice of him:

After wandering along the lane for two hours, giving way to every variety of thought, reconsidering events, determining probabilities, and reconciling herself, as well as she could, to a change so sudden and so important...

—Austen, Pride & Prejudice, end of ch 36

But I'm only a quarter of the way in, so the story could very much improve!

But keeping with the Janite theme, here are some comments on two Austen related stories I did finish; and in the meantime, stay strong, everyone, cuz I don't really think the world is gonna be a better place if we return to a state in which a reasonably liberally reared teenager could be unaware of gay people's existence. (Why yes, that was me, half a century ago. The 70s wasn't weren't all peace and love.)

UPDATE: fixed link, minor formatting & grammatical errors

18nov2024

Ok, nobody needs to read yet another political rant, so I kinda buried that. On to linkies.

• the physics of curly hair. (With chemistry;)
• Boing boing, to use Cory Doctorow's phrase, has become entirely enshittified, but here's one of the very last interesting posts, about the highest order rubik's cube that's been built—it weighs (iirc) nearly a hundred pounds and requires a supporting frame to reposition. Somebody did a lot of 3D printing to make this thing.
• Fabulous and ferocious feminist northwest coast's masks
• A US sitcom (that I never watched) converted to an even more successful Russian one. Superb casting, copying the script but subbing in localized jokes made this show about a dysfunctional family work.

That you could just straight-ahead convert a script was not something that would occur to me. I s'pose this was the equivalent of that famous comic artist who said, never draw what you can copy, never copy what you can trace, never trace what you can just sub in. Or more charitably, don't reinvent the wheel.

So, here's a new gifwrap that riffs on designs I've been doing for awhile. But it's the first non-doodle art I've made since the election, so I'll take it.

5nov2024

I'm one of the 60 million people who voted early in the US election, along with my entire family, including f2tY, who express mailed their ballot all the way from Japan, and yes, all of them have been received by our City Clerk. I realize I'm extremely lucky, as we have liberal absentee and early voting options, which are not available to everyone.

Nevertheless, me and mine would take it kindly if you made whatever effort you could.

Others have made a number of far more cogent arguments than I ever could, but the thing that gets me is that one candidate has promised there will be another election in 2028.

The other has not.

Pretty stark choice, if you ask me.

Nothing, nothing, nothing can be fixed if we do not have the right to keep voting.

Please choose wisely.

Thank you.

28oct2024

Heh, finally ran down the subject of today's post, casually hanging over a tack on a beam that frames the entry to my office. Yay. Now I could finish documenting it & kick this page out into the world...

What else? The weather has been spectacular—the norway maples and tulip tree were nearly pure gold, a real treat, as the former often gets those unsightly black tar spots on it. A couple of other linkies:

• A Sherlock Holmes recce, The House of Silk. One of the things I feel Doyle did really well was the atmospheric quality—the mood—of London, and a lot of modern Holmes authors don't get that. This one seems to, so I wanna check it out.
• Though better known as a superhero, Batman's also a detective, and here's a link exploring the changes of his logo over the years. I knew ears on his hood grew and shrank but hadn't realized the chest logo varied that much.
• Speaking of mysteries, here's one solved: those ancient peruvian structures managed water —in one of the driest places on earth. Centuries ago. Impressive.

And here's that kumi, about which there is no mystery at all.

22oct2024

The linkies, they are piling up, even with closing a bunch of tabs.

Leading off, yeah, Rule of Law is important. Vote, early if possible, please.

• hm, psychedelics (mushrooms) continue to show a lot of promise for folks with that constellation of conditions of interest to me—depression, ADHD, OCD, etc...
• Zoe Bee has been busy while I wasn't paying attention. Here's a juicy 90 min one on the death of media literacy. Still need to set some time aside—say a deep clean of my studio, but this is one of many takes, I'm guessing, on the flood of misinformation currently poisoning online discourse.
• In the genetics and human variation is fascinating & unexpected department, via a FTB discussion on sex and gender, a link to a story about children who “change” from girls to boys at puberty. Has to do with a broken protein, ofc. Genetics and human variation is fascinating!
• Haven't found the definitive video on training a cat not to walk underfoot, (why yes I'm catsitting and this morning I stepped on the kitty's paw as he begged for his morning wet food, why do you ask) but here's a good review on walking on a lead which we're currently working on. Kinda curious to see how his super scary session this morning affects his desire for an afternoon session—up till now he's been crying for outdoors. Fortunately my yard is very overgrown, so we can step back to that:)
• Instagram has been feeding me a lot of feral kitten rescues, and this book about the rehabilitation of Michael Vick's pit bulls —which, teal deer, was when saving rather than killing these animals became the norm, looks to scratch (heh) the same itch.
• BB has a recce for several good looking graphic novels: Indigenous People's History; a story set during the Satanic Panic; and JH Williams’ gorgeous interpretation of Dracula.
• Pushback against the backlash against Twilight. Well, I don't ever remember the critiques I enjoyed being particularly sexist, but that's because they were mostly written by women who enjoyed Twilight (at least on some level) but also were very aware of its problems. Amazingly enough, the links I gathered a decade ago mostly still seem to be live. Reading all this stuff my take is how fast history seems to move—Twilight became huge recently enough that it was big amongst the f2’s generation rather than during my own childhood, and now has come and gone long enough to trigger these sorts of retrospectives. Good lord, whatever happened to all those other internet memes? I can haz cheezeburger? Ceiling cat? Charlie the unicorn? I felt out of touch when this stuff was new, and now it's old and out of date as I am, seemingly. (It's also very weird to read people saying how queer-unfriendly and sexist the 2000s was. I mean, 2000s? What about the 1970s or 80s? Let alone the 50s or 60s...)
• I've been enjoying Wired's ...[x] Support series. This one on the ‘Wild West’ got my support for the guy's framing of Custer's Last Stand. I knew, frex, that there were a lot of Black cowboys (about 25%, actually) but hadn't realized you had to check your guns when entering town. It's more than a little odd (sad, frankly) that the ‘wild’ west had stricter gun laws than we do in modern civilized days.
• Eating and sleeping affect each other, whatta surprise. Not. Especially to anyone who's ever eaten, especially starches, to try and stay awake. I've found that the reverse is also true: I need to stop eating about 4–5 hours before sleeping.
• Speaking of sleeping, yes, you can become a back sleeper. Aside from the backpacking/camping applications, I expect it would be a handy skill for anyone recovering from top surgery.

art...

• this looks to be a good primer on jelli printing;
• And this looks to be a good primer on lino cuts.
• the beautiful four bugs problem from an old Scientific American —my parents subscribed to this mag when I was a child, and it had a big impact on me, even though it was way above my level...also, I find it interesting how a pattern originally featured as a mathematical thing has now become a favourite of zentangle doodlers, in much the way dada collages has become popular amongst scrapbookers:)
• Speaking of change, Daisy Stalls seems to be the it horsie repainter right now...but what was especially intriguing to me was the shift in model availability: when I first got interested in horse model repainting (not counting childhood efforts), it was pretty much breyers or nothing; then folks started creating artisan models to be cast in resin—those are still a thing, but now 3D printing has become good enough that people are modeling the horses in 3D programs (the 3D equivalent of using photoshop/gimp) which means they can print out in a variety of sizes, including some barely an inch high—that's D&D castings size! This means there's a variety of styles out there, some of which I like better than others. Pretty cool!
• This small scale manufacturing also means projects such as open source full frame cameras are becoming more feasible.

Speaking of cameras, the photography (& admittedly, a few of the beads) were my only contributions to this wonderful charm bracelet by Page. Enjoy.