And today we have a rant to go with our (very) old-timey fridayfugly post (the stub dates from 2007!). Over at pandagon (for which I seem to be having no luck either accessing my old login or creating a new one, which is why you're being burdened with my rant here) Amanda Marcotte uses the lightbulb thing obsession to illustrate the sort of issue that has the wingnut brigrade up in arms.

Now, as it happens, I know some republican-identified folks reasonably well; at least a couple of them either attended or seriously considered attending a teaparty rally when it was first getting going, so I think it's safe to say they're ‘real’ republicans. As far as I can tell, they're perfectly happy to use fluorescents and save money (even if they do drive the SUVs). Here, on the dem side of the fence we do the same.

I still hate ’em, though. (And for real detestation, one phrase: sodium street lights. The newer, bluer ones are ...better, but still, just ugh.) As for the light pollution they produce, not even going there.

But they're cooler in summer! They're more energy efficient! They save money! The light is closer to natural light!

Um, yeah. It is. My ott-light is unabashedly fluorescent, and like a lot of other bead artists I paid a lot of money for it, not least for its ‘true color’, cuz beaders are all about color. When CRI ratings first started to be put on 4’ fluorescent tubes, the sort we used in the basement, back when my studio was in the basement, I bought every variety I could find, trying to find one that was more tolerable. (Higher ratings didn't necessarily correlate to a higher appeal.) Currently, we put the fluorescents where they fit (we have a lot of those chandelier light fixtures that really only take flame shaped incandescents) EXCEPTING my major work areas—my office, studio and night-time light.

Even when the sun's out, I vastly prefer the color of light near dawn and dusk, which has a highly yellow component. As fluorescents continue to improve, I find myself tolerating them better: I think the early ones simply very obviously artificial, and distressing on that level. But I still vastly prefer the quality of incandescent light, even though it too is not, technically natural (perhaps because it falls in the spectrum between dawn sunlight and fire? Hm, and what color would the coleman lamps be...? I went camping practically from birth, so I grew up with this stuff.)

Granted, not all artists are sensitive to light and color; but there is a significant percentage of us who are. I can't help but wonder if this is true for the general population, who, particularly if they're older, have formed an emotional attachment for the yellow light that resonates.

Now, as it happens, I'm perfectly willing to pay a premium for incandescent lights: in fact, I already do, and I've no problem with a greater one. In that sense, Marcotte's argument is valid: it's the ‘oh these old people, move with the times’ impatience I'm having trouble with. Just as an example, I use photofloods in my studio photography, and I'd be pretty screwed if they were banned, cause finding 500w equivalently bright lights is tough (without spending hundreds of dollars, that is.) Now, should I be learning how to use flash instead? Sure—far more efficient. It's also technically more difficult, and on my list of things to do—right after I master gimp, inkscape, perspective, practice my life drawing, transfer my writing skillset from the novel to comic book form, learn to blow boro, make a french beaded flower bouquet for the dining room chandelier...what was that again?

Yeah. There's only so many hours in a day. One of the reasons old folks resist new technologies is because there's a learning curve, and we have less time remaining and fewer elastic brain-cells to take on the task. For things that work well-enough, the temptation is to leave them alone, in favor of putting scarce resources toward technologies and skills where the old ways don't really work so well.

I guess what I'm ultimately trying to say here is that I get when you're writing polemics, it pays to have a clear, unambiguous message. However, while I might agree with it (fluorescents really are cheaper, and for circs where they just won't do, you can still have the incandescents) I think it pays to remember that the situation is always a little more complex (strong emotional connections to the older ways).

Plus, of course, LEDs. Currently those bluish xmas lights look awful. However, you can buy LED fixtures that change color. How cool is that? And how long before you can just punch in the exact temperature (light color is specified in ‘temperature’) —thus, 6000 for close work, and my beloved 2000 for mood?

That, perhaps, the best of all: time and technology will make this fight go away. Hurrah.

Ok, break time's over. Back to taxes. Oh, yeah, today's post.

Hey, today I've actually got something besides ‘look at meeeee’ for the intro: the Thread for Thought blog via this pandagon comment is pretty darned interesting, even if your requirements for clothes basically resolve to ‘comfortable natural fibers, warm in the winter and cool in the summer’.

Also in the category of making statements, Boingboing has a post on marking your tools. Never is this more important than when you all get together at a workshop (such as the one where I made today's featured item.) The most important bits, I would say (from experience): a) use a combo of two or more colors and b) make it loud. A little dab, even in lime green, really isn't as effective. And speaking of loud'n’ugly, we have today's post...

I think we are finally to the last of the scrimshaw that's been lying around. Well, unless I start posting bad scans of some actually pretty cool stuff, but, I dunno. Resolution's pretty lousy.

So hurray, one little bit of this website properly tidied up;)

The first step for most posts is photographing (or scanning) the item. Today's post is kind of interesting because the pix to illustrate it were shot nearly two years apart. In a way, this underlines how patchy my efforts with this site have been: after being laid off, to sharpen his skills (and possibly have something to show off to potential employers) the wizard commenced a major upgrade for this site.

Its prior upgrade resulted in dynamically loading pages. This one, still somewhat incomplete (because he got a paying job on the other side of the state, and is now only home on weekends) now has images and posts in a database, which has allowed for very much easier indexing—now, I simply add a given tag, and the page is automatically indexed— provided, of course, I've created an indexing page! (Yesterday's page, frex, was one such that was sitting in the queue, waiting to go live, for two or three years. Le sigh.) Editing in a browser and clicking ‘update’ is pretty sweet too;)

However, subsequent versions of ubuntu/perl/other libraries kind of broke the automagic propagation of posts from the sandbox to the live site, which meant I couldn't update pages myself. —After sulking about this for a couple of years or so, (not to mention both of us getting phones with texting, which makes it easy for me to let him know there's a new page, and for him to move it over) I finally seemed to have got comfortable with this new system.

And perhaps some day, it will will go through another round of improvements.

In the meantime, cleanup continues, and we have another old piece.

And with this post we should have a functioning scrimshaw index again—it's actually been queued up, ready to go, sometime since the end (or mebbe beginning) of 2009, sigh, so it's only taken me, um, a little over two years to tidy this up.

Ah well. You do what you can.

Ok, I'm on a roll here.

My darling wizard did indeed set up this website so's I can make a buncha posts ahead of time, postdate them, and they don't show up till the proper date. Yessss!!!!!

Anyway. I'm trying to clean up the indices of this place a bit (because I ought to be doing entries for taxes, blech) and some of them are actually created, but still privatized. So, here goes, I'm gonna try and throw some of that stuff in the queue up.

Today's post is about a piece I made about, um, about a quarter century ago. (Yikes...)

That weird little pic is a reflection of yours truly, attempting to photograph today's item...I was cruising through the archives, and thought, hey, mebbe I should write a post on that project I finally finished and recently photographed (i.e. only about three weeks ago, which for me is pretty quick).

So, hey, today's post is just a bit of mystery:)

Sort of without really meaning to, my great work—after, perhaps the rearing of the f2 generation—has ended up being this website. (Next biggest thing might well be the bead-curtain, which again, wasn't really planned, just something to use up all those bad beads piling up...)

It's my profound hope that people have found what I have to say, and even more, what I've made and documented, interesting, useful, perhaps even inspiring. That has been my goal from the get-go.

I never planned for my greatest piece to be a disparate collection of stuff on the internet; but it is. I've mentioned it before, but in the wake of this recent kerfluffle over SOPA and PIPA, I think it bears repeating: these laws are not our friends. They are not for the benefit of us little artists, we individuals wanting to show, share or even sell our work on the internet.

As always, I'm late, but in this case it doesn't actually matter, because in the flush of the (temporary) victory over their defeat, I think it's all too tempting to feel we can sit back and relax.

THIS FIGHT IS NOT GOING AWAY.

I love the internet. I especially treasure it because I'm old enough to remember a world without it. In a very real way, it's allowed me to think my life matters. —It's not as if my art supports my family, nor even if I formally teach, much. But while I dither and waste my life away, what I've done so far sits there, available, 24/7 to whomever wants it. And people find astonishing things of interest. (For a long time my posts on pysanky were the most popular, bar none. Not something I could've ever guessed.) During the last two years, particularly, as I've struggled with my health issues, I've made precious few beads. I have, however, been practicing photography and writing, and I don't think the latter would have been possible without the research available on the internet. Oh sure, I can (and have!) checked out books from the library, but like all artists I've been plagued with self-doubts: why would anyone want to read my stupid little cross-genre alternate universe romance starring a pair of (shudder!) furries?

Yet, I do take pride in my work, and without the ease of internet research I think I would've given up on this stupid frustrating novel a looooong time ago. Not to mention reading sites like Making Light and their ilk, which have given me hope that, perhaps, someone might buy this thing. (Never mind the reading—and writing—the fanfic which got me seriously writing again.)

The internet has something for everyone, for every interest, precisely because people like me—and you—have shared their efforts. All of us can be artists on the internet! SOPA and PIPA, in their efforts to “protect” big money interests, will take that away. It won't matter if, as on my site, everything is my own work, or legally reproduced; the-powers-that-be don't care about my free tutorials and inspiring pictures—indeed, why have me giving this stuff away when they'd so much rather charge for tuts on how to make beads or bake bread or whatever? Even those of us who are entirely innocent are still their enemy, or at the very least, civilians caught in the cross-fire.

But you needn't take my word for it: there's plenty of good info out there on what these laws are, why they're so bad and why they're not going away. Or, yanno, check out something I made a decade ago, but that the internet's low cost of sharing allows me to show.

This post is going up a bit late (so what else is new?) only partially because the link for today (via Alas) was down for awhile. It's an excellent reposting by a fella named Hamden Rice discussing what MLK really accomplished but here's the money quote:

My father told me with a sort of cold fury, “Dr. King ended the terror of living in the south.”

The whole thing is worth reading (most especially to would-be novelists attempting alternate history/fantasy set in that period... why yes, some day I'll be done with those kitty-cats) but a couple of additional points: the elaborate submission rituals he and his father employed to help keep themselves safe still persist, if not in as a direly awful way. —As late as the 2000s,* in a liberal college town, a black man wearing business casual told me that he would apologize to white women for running.

Because he was late.

He did this, he told me, because he didn't want to make them nervous.

Post racial, my arse.

The other point, brought up in comments (that I now cannot find) was that though the narrative was of black guys preying on white women, the reality was, of course, exactly the opposite.

So I suppose it's sort of apropos that today's bead is black and white.

*Update: Um, I didn't mean to imply this stuff has now magically stopped! My bad—in one of those synchronicities life occasionally offers, I found an excellent post on this very topic the day after I wrote this post (though itself actually went up a day earlier, and now has a follow-up.)

Fred over at slacktivist had a post on the upcoming superhero movie; it's a good one, with lots of good comments and recces for comics fans—some of which I'll have to try and find at the library.

But one comment particularly grabbed my attention: J Egnima urged Fred to check out Kingdom Come, saying he would love it. Well, it just so happens my comics teacher, who is a big superhero fan (John Constantine is his fave, and boy, did I give my poor teacher the what-for about his conception) and he thought I would love it, given the great art, loads of symbolism, and layers of meaning.

Well, I did love it, if not quite as the Kiera Smith one and for most of the same reasons. I'd be curious indeed to see what Fred would make of it, but in the meantime, here's my reaction, in which I attempted some of the sort of thing Fred and Ana Mardoll do so well. x-posted, LJ;tumblr

So yesterday, I made a new facebook account for Rejiquar Works and as a sample post,I threw up a picture of these beaded hardware rings. I'm trying to be better about cross-posting to the tumblr and livejournal accounts, so I figured I might as well turn this into a real post. Still quite not back up to posting stuff on my etsy shop, but now that I think I've finally gotten my shoulder issues fixed up, that should be happening soon.

Real soon now. In the meantime, enjoy.

Today's post is one of those blasts from the past—I've been meaning to write a post about this little lot of stripe-bubble lampwork beads for probaby at least three years—but as part of my goal of tidying up for the new year, I cleaned up the photography area (aka my giftwrapping table) and decided it was time and past to photograph some of the stuff that's been hanging around.

Including these beads. To go along with the Sinitic theme, a link to an interesting article by Victor Mair, who teaches Chinese. (In China, no less.) He's rather saddened by the fact that the Chinese are losing their ability to generate kanji—one quick trick many of them have resorted to is typing the pinyin into their phones to generate the character.

I think kanji are absolutely gorgeous, and as a calligrapher, I'm sad to see them replaced by a mix of romanji/numbers to represent words. That said, it's a major commitment to memorize those many and complex symbols, and people simply aren't going to do it if there's an easier workaround. Mair notes it's a ‘complex neuromuscular task’. Um, like making beads. Each variety requires what I call ‘ramping up’, and to be able to make them well requires a significant, daily time commitment. So too, I imagine with the Chinese. The difference is that I'm an artist, and it's what I do. The average Chinese, however, isn't interested in making gorgeous calligraphy; ze wants to write something down.

I don't happen to find the roman alphabet particularly beautiful; though the IPA makes it look elegant by comparison. Perhaps someday we'll come up with a really gorgeous, cohesive, universal writing system, in which the symbols are cohesive (not a bunch of alphabets cobbled together) with the representations of related sounds being visually linked (i.e. for example p and b are unvoiced and voiced versions of the same sound.)

Oh, dear, more failure in posting. Well, here's something that's appropriate in theme and color for the holiday. (And if my idea of gift decorating looks like waaaaaay too much effort, then perhaps you'll sympathize with this woman (via Jennifer Geldard, who is not only my fave beadmakers, and who not only has really been going gangbusters in her work—she's evolved more than just about anyone I know—but whose sense of humor evidently aligns with mine more than I ever realized;)

I've actually thought of lots of rants, but here's here's a little bitty one. Let's say you decide to make cookies, it being the holiday and all. Great! If there's one time one should feel free to indulge, the short dark cold winter days are it.

And I certainly get that if a little is good, more must be better. (Says the one who is always adding half again or even double the nuts a typical cookie recipe calls for.)

However.

If you decide that your basic sugar cookie recipe would be ever so much better with dried fruit and jam and chocolate and caramel... please, for the love of FSM, reduce the sugar in the dough to compensate. Pretty please? Otherwise you get a sweet mess with no contrast, no bite. (This is why things like chocolate dipped pretzels are tasty: the salt contrasts with the sweet. It's not just that walnuts are cheaper than pecans; the slight bitterness helps to set off the sugar and spices in cakes and cookies.)

Thanks!

The technical issues are still...technical. (No, you're not crazy. The june post has been sitting in the sandbox till now, and it's september. So, yeah, keep trying the lj. Some day I will get this mess straightened out. Meanwhile, we limp on.)

And why is a glass flower the icon for a kumi post? Well, because, um, I'm addicted to shallow depth of field, and, seeing as this is a gift that went back to Japan, um, three months ago, I can't reshoot. Oops.

Which more or less seems to be the state of my life these days, general all-over half-assedness. But I thought the necklace wasn't *too* bad.

So, yeah, sorry about the no posting for six months. Obviously, I still can make posts, but the problem is that, like the average two-year-old, ‘I wanna do it myself!’ —Which for technical reasons I can't currently do.

Eventually the wizard will get everything working again, but in the meantime, I figured I'd post essays to my livejournal, and images, perhaps, to tumblr in the meantime.

After I get my site back I'll move the content back over. Since Artfire has discontinued their free accounts, I've replaced that link with a handy button to my livejournal, which is named rejiquar, whatta surprise. Thanks go to quaqe9 who kindly provided the cute little button;)

Today's test post, which I'm putting here and there is about some beads I made as gifts for f2tE to take to Japan.