29jan10

Technically, this is yesterday's post.

I made another fairy, a green one (etsy) (artfire) this time. She's a bit bigger than my other ones, and I'm pretty happy with her, even if photographing her did give me fits. I also managed to make the bead without cracking it once, or breaking off the release, go me. (One of the great things about glass is that if it cracks while it's still in the flame, you can melt that back together. Actually I know people who stick their cracked beads in the kiln, ramp ’em up, and fix ’em by re-introducing them into the flame, which I perfectly understand if you've sunk 2 hours into a bead, but I'm not quite that determined.)

So, not a lot to say except I'm enjoying this series, and will probably make these fairy heads in a lot of different colors. Plus I think I want to start exploring murrina eyes again, but that's for the future. But the variations I've been pursuing does bring up another topic about human subjects that an online acquaintance were discussing, which has to do with how you draw the line about objectifying people.

Some folks are very comfortable with complements; others are not. I'll never forget walking down the main street of Albion, wearing this rather tight embroidered top that had come from Greece or somewhere—it was blue and white, and as an embroideress I really liked it, even though it was closer fitting around the bust than I'd normally wear. Anyway, it was a nice day, I was happy, I was walking down the street like I owned the world, and some guy called out ‘Looking good!’ —Now, here's the thing: I don't think he was cat-calling or being nasty—I think he was honestly paying me a complement.

But I just shrank into myself; I hunched, scurried away, and I don't think I ever wore that top again. Gradually my clothes, which I never wore skin tight, ever, got looser and looser and now f2tY excoriates me for my horrible fashion sense and ill fitting clothes. The wizard calls me a bag lady. (Which in the winter is just about right—I have on three sweaters, a wool shirt, two hats and hand warmers, and with the addition of mittens and a change from slippers to shoes, I can step outside into 15 or 20 degree weather in perfect comfort. Other buildings, however, are way too warm.) But, see, when I'm walking down the street, as a rule, I don't want people to notice me, and I surely don't want them shouting remarks, no matter how well-intentioned: I'm usually in my own little Walter Mitty fantasy world, slaying riding dragons and the like, and would just as soon not be interrupted, thank you very much.

So round about when I discovered Miss Manners (whom I adore for her snark) I absorbed the ‘no personal comments’ without any difficulty whatsoever: people can't help, really, how they look. Until we achieve that utopian universe in which you can simply program what your flesh is gonna look like, and it expresses your individuality the way clothes theoretically do, it just seems unfair to draw attention to something people can't change and owe to luck. (And even in the utopia, the richer folk are gonna be able to pay for prettier designs, so not only do we need to be able to change at will, but all have roughly equivalent resources to carry out those self-expressions.)

Now, people being what they are, one is allowed to admire particularly beautiful specimens of humanity, so long as the objects of that regard remain blissfully unaware of one's scrutiny. As people choose to some extent their clothing or hairstyles, saying something flattering about those is ok too.

The difficulty with this entirely sensible stricture is that as an artist, objectifying people is exactly what I do: my original training was in life drawing, because I love drawing animals, especially my own species. And even when I'm not drawing them, I still quite often drool. Which rather conflicts with my efforts to be mannerly.

The specific example I'm thinking of has to do with a friend of this acquaintance, who, through no fault of his own, was, er, gifted with a certain level of notoriety. My acquaintence felt that complimenting him on what she was pleased to call his devastating beauty was right and proper, because this helped combat the other; my attitude was that, as his friend she could be expected to know what would or would not be acceptable to him, but I, personally, would be intensely uncomfortable having perfect strangers making judgements, even favorable ones, about my appearance.

I went on to say that while I was perfectly happy to fantasize (or objectivize) characters (say, in a televsion program or film) but I always made a sharp distinction between the character and the actor portraying that character. My friend disagreed: she felt the particular actor (we were discussing this topic with regard to a sf&f in general and a popular book/movie franchise in particular) I cited was beautiful when young, and wouldn't’ve gone on stage if he didn't want that appreciated. (To be clear, she makes the distinction between ‘appreciation’ and ‘drooling’ as well.)

It's true that actors are often handsome, and certainly f2tE and hir best friend both enjoy being appreciated for their looks; at the same time, f2tE's significant other, a musician, is not particularly comfortable being stared at or photographed, though ze tolerates it. Both actors and musicians are entertainers and popular ones tend to be good-looking, but it seems to me they should be admired primarily for their performances; not their looks. (And again, when we to the point that capture of the sort done for Avatar becomes inexpensive, then there's no particular reason for actors to look any way at all. Which in my view would be a good thing, like evaluating orchestral musicians behind a curtain—after which practice became common, women's success shot up, because they were evaluated on their musicianship, rather than their sex or appearance.)

To be sure, entertainers often do capitalize on their appearance, and as they wish to be successful, one can hardly blame them. (I still think being followed by paparazzi is a terrible price to pay, though; even while recognizing that for some people it's a rush.) Two classes of people who come to mind as being in the public eye but are not actively expected to be pretty are athletes, whose careers dispose them to looking handsome anyway (at least from my point of view), and politicians, for which rather the reverse is probably true. I don't follow sports, much, as a rule; nor politics.

However, having heard that our president gave a State of the Union speech I thought perhaps, as an US citizen, I ought to listen to it, and conveniently enough (since by choice we don't have television or cable) it was available on youtube. And though it is certainly not part of the President of the United States’ duties to model for artists badly in need of drawing practice, I figured as an experienced politician, being sketched in a representative manner would be so far down on the list of objectionable behaviors he'd hardly care—especially if I listened to the speech (I felt less guilty not working, when, in fact I was sharpening up some skills, see).

It was quite an inspiring speech, and for all the carping, I do truly believe that he managed to avoid a 1930s Great Depression, which to my mind is quite a feat. (I read somewhere that the stock market actually dipped more during oughts than it did during the Great Depression, which strikes me as a convincing indicator). I'm assuming that part of his goal was to sell the health care plan, while still assuring people that jobs are critically important. Certainly those two items are on the top of my list: health care is a major, major problem for us starving* artist types, who, as not-really-important part of society, can economize on food and housing, but are kind of stuck as to medical costs, which are sort of inelastic. And if people aren't working, they're not buying art.

*Why yes, I do think art is a public good on which more money should be spent. It ought to be easier to make a living in the arts—we'd live in a more beautiful, and I believe, happier, world if that were the case.

Not that today's piece is exactly gorgeous, mind, but, you know, practice...

27jan10

So, sorry about the lack of posting yesterday, I just was sort of out of it. To make up, I have two new goodies for etsy/artfire.

So we're gonna move forward in time a bit, to things I'm doing right now, as opposed to twenty years ago, since I've finally got to the point of having something marginally interesting to show in my current work, which would be these acid etched fairies in blue (artfire) and er orange, I mean pink (artfire).

One of the things I was using my rather limited energy for yesterday was giving the wizard feedback on the work he's been doing on my site—he's been working like a demon to do some stuff on the back-end, which we both hope will improve the functionality. You know your site needs some help when you its creator have to resort to search tools not available to your users to find your own posts. Just going through this or that random testing I found a lot of old posts I'd forgotten I'd made. Not to mention a lot of half-broken links, unfinished and sometimes half-cannabalized pages that were driving the poor wizard crazy because he couldn't figure out where this crap was coming from. So one minor benefit I will appreciate is that all the litter that I had a hard time ‘seeing’ will now be obvious and go away.

Yay, for tidyness. And if things work out the way we hope, in addition to better navigation and search features, there will be some cool new tools. I might even get off my ass and make a new skin for the site—I love the Viet Nam picture, not least because it was part of my real, authentic experience—but I suppose, if I'm promoting beads and stuff, the front page oughta feature...beads and stuff.

Though I kind of like its being all weird and quirky like that.

And speaking of weird and quirky...

25jan10

Trusting you had a nice weekend; it rose above freezing, and rained, which meant I was over-warm, a bit. (Yeah, I've been perfectly happy with temps in the high twenties and low thirties. Not too cold, and avoids the freeze-thaw cycles that are so hard on my plants, especially my hydrangeas;)

So, I promised more blathering about Avatar, specifically about the beadwork. As I said last time, the red beaded cape the love interest's mother wears is taken right off the back cover of the classic book about African beadwork, and is Dinka beadwork. Similarly the corsets the male Na'vi wear on their torsos—you'll note, Jake gets one towards the end of the movie: it's that wide brown belt thingie with the cream colored swirlies that he wears around his middle—is also Dinka in its shape; however, those do not appear to be beaded (as in the originals), but rather fabric of some sort. And they all looked like they had the same design. (But then, I thought all the Na'vi were the same shade of blue, and second time around I spotted at least one that was darker.) The same basic concept is also used by the Dinka to make handsome collars, and these also make an appearance in the film. The red-painted folk in the neighboring tribe could have been inspired by any of several depicted in the same book.

In other words, these items tended to be inspired rather than directly swiped. I still haven't remembered where that rectangular yellow pectoral, which looked like wired beadwork, that Neytiri wears towards the end of the film, came from, but my gut intuition is that it's African also.

The stuff with the bear claws and the feathers has a definite American Indian flavor to it, but none of it looked exact; for example, bear claws in the book I have are necklaces, not headbands or chokers. The armband of alternating round and tubular turquoise Jake wears, or the macrame choker with three green beads that Neytiri has on are sort of ordinary, ho-hum stringing that anyone playing with beads and string would generate pretty quickly. And, on the whole, I thought the pieces directly swiped were more interesting looking.

But here's my beef with the claws and feathers, over and above appropriation issues; they don't make sense in the context of the story. I already explained that it would be unlikely that anyone would have time to get his hair totally redone with feathers at regular intervals on the eve of a large battle. (That particular style, if not its individual components, actually looked more modern.) But the other thing is, there aren't any bears, let alone birds, on Pandora. The claws should've looked the like the claws (and teeth!) of the indigenous fauna; at minimum, they could've had different sizes or colors to indicate this.

There are no birds (that I saw) just lots of flying lizards; the only feather-ish thing I saw were these bright, huge magenta and purple things that were a display on the world's equivalent to elephants. Oddly enough, no Na'vi wore any of those. Given all those brightly colored animals, one would've expected more items of cool colored and patterned leather, and I don't remember seeing much of that, either.

Then I began wondering where all those beads came from. I don't think the Na'vi were set up to manufacture glass beads, though they certainly could've made stone or wooden ones. They could've traded the humans for them, I suppose, but the beadwork struck me as an awfully mature tradition for the relatively short time the Na'vi and humans were implied to have been interacting. (Grace, who is not that old, ‘wrote the book’ on Na'vi, suggesting that she's been at the forefront from the get-go—so perhaps 20 years or so?)

Don't get me wrong: I'm absolutely thrilled to pieces that the most popular film currently in theatres is full of beads and braids. (Worn by men no less.) I think that's fabulous. (See the rejiquar skipping down the street, shrieking, it's fulla beads and braids! Yippee! Beads! Braids! Patterns, oh my...) It's just that I wish they'd gotten a real bead stringer to contribute some real, striking designs, instead of just copying African pieces and bastardizing American Indian ones. There's lots of interesting stringing going on out there in the world! —Alas, stringing tends to get short shrift, because it looks so easy; I remember thinking, when I saw this gorgeous headdress of Arwen's on LoTR, ah, if only they'd put the same effort to the beads hanging off it—the work was nice enough, but nothing like it could've been. That's the same argument I'm offering here.

Yeah, I know; there's only so much you can do. World building is hard, even on a half-billion dollar budget. I think it's fabulous they hired a real linguist, Paul Frommer, to develop the Na'vi language. (And just as with the character design, he was requested to make it pretty sounding, so as to be more appealing. Well! Beads and braids are pretty! Please, more pretty beads and braids.)

One thing I don't recall seeing were buttons, so I guess it's appropriate that today's etsy and artfire goodie is a button, the first one I've made in awhile: a tiger.

Continuing on with the feline theme, today's post hearkens back to those most elegant (and beaded!) of cats, Egyptians.

22jan10

Hi all.

Usually when I disappear for days (or months) on end it's nobody's fault but my own, but this week I plead plumbing problems and sick kids. Both the pipes and the child are doing fine now, but it's never good to start your day with a call from the high school informing you that the ambulance will be there shortly to transport your kid to the hospital. (Moral of the story: low blood pressure has its downsides.)

So not a lot of blathering and no friday fugly—I figure I'm doing good to get something listed at all;) —I will say I totally screwed up on the braid comment—turns out three strand braids are, like some other flat braids I've made, asymmetrical but not obviously so, meaning, the direction of the braid goes opposite ways front to back. You'd think, after making these 4-odd decades that I would've picked up on this, but, obviously not. And looking at a hairdresser's shop photos, with samples, I noticed the braids in those ran the way they do on Avatar characters, which makes my humiliation pretty much complete.

If you're really wanting to indulge in some Avatar-love, I think this thread on Whatever was the most interesting I've encountered; my favorite two comments (which I can't find now) are the ones that suggest what the humans had to offer the Na'vi was space exploration and another, later one, who noted his wife wondered if the Na'vi could leave their planet, given the interconnectedness (my take? brilliant insight, but actually, they could; they'd just want to travel in a very large, asteroid sized ship, that's all;).

In other news, I screwed up the links to the various necklaces two posts down. I fixed ’em, but in the interests of saving the hassle of scrolling down, here they are again, this time with functionality! Necklace with lion pendant etsyand artfire; one with a lotus etsy and artfire, and one with a brass-bead focal: etsy and artfire.

So, moving on to subjects on which I do show some expertise, today's goodie is a fairy head, cased in clear like the felines. I really liked the way the lips came out on her—though beadmaking is always a process, I do finally feel as if I'm starting to make progress in that area. So here she is, etsy and artfire listings.

Or if blue doesn't do it for ya, some old dragons in a nice warm brown:)

19jan10

Today's geekery intro shall be about Avatar. I'm a sf&f fan, so, actually I'm guessing the next two or three days’ worth of commentary will be about Avatar.

And since actually I'm thinking many of my thoughts about Avatar aren't really germane to a website whose main function is supposed to be about marketing my work, it could be lots worse—most of that stuff will probably go into the apa. Must get the Apa page back up, we need new members.

In my view, Cameron made a furry-tail fairy-tale. (Oooh, bad pun.)

I love fairy-tails:) My very first purchase from the SFBC was Charles Harness’ time-travel retelling of Tristan and Isolde, with a cat (and starship) cast, Firebird and the reason I stayed in the club as long as I did. (Which also introduced me to the original sexy vampire, the Count St. Germain. So sue me.) Yeah, no point in denying it, I loved this movie. And it does have one, actually at least two, elements which I feel are relevant to the site, and for which I have some expertise, relating to the adornments the Na'vi wear, which consist primarily of a) beads and b) braids.

I know there's at least one American Indian commentator who isn't too thrilled about the braids, because she felt they were appropriation. Well, actually, the Na'vi wear two sorts of braids: a long, usually single, hip-length one, to support (and presumably protect) their planetary interface, and multiple short decorative ones purely of their hair, that are about shoulder length. I think the shorter ones can be absolved of this charge: I don't ever remember seeing anything like that on American Indians, but scalp braiding, as my kids and their friends call it, is real popular amongst contemporary blacks.

As for the longer one, I'm assuming that the director went with braided hair, rather than the sheath we see in other Pandoran fauna is because Cameron was concerned about the average movie-goer identifying with the Na'vi. (He said he put tits on the women for that reason, even though they're not mammals. Given those narrow hips, one would assume their offspring are born even more prematurely than ours, so what then do they eat? Do they regurgitate their food like birds? Now that would be appealing to the average film-goer, I'm sure;) Certainly they don't have two pairs of arms, as you might expect.

Well, in my view, since it was CGI anyway, why didn't they do a four strand braid? Four-strand round braids can be woven around a core (though 8 would be even better, and pick up nicely on the fact they have 8 digits on their hands, and, one assumes, a base 8 numbering system), and would certainly make more sense in the protection context. And if the rest of their hair was braided up the same way, it would look way cool, because you hardly ever see four strand braids done in hair, especially the round ones. Not only would such have evoked both Amerindian and African culture without copying their most common braid structures (South American, e.g. Peruvian, braids are very complex and include a lot of round braids) but it also, in the context of the logic of the film, have made more sense.

Of course, looking at the stills (as far as I could determine) they had the direction of the (little) braids backwards (as if the the braiding had started at the end, instead at the scalp) so perhaps a 4 strand round is asking a bit much. Of course me-so-expert didn't happen to notice this anomaly until examining a paper-printed out still, which doesn't say a whole lot for my powers of observation.

So one friend was wondering how Jake had the mental capacity to interface with the planet's network. That, in my view, was legit, and could've easily been overcome by showing the mechas interfacing directly to the soldiers: then Jake could've just used that part of his brain for the communication, his Na'vi body providing the alternate OS interface, so to speak. But where my suspension of disbelief got its hardest workout was the bit where he got whirled around by his braid and the hair didn't rip off his head. Well, okay, if the hair they're braiding around the equivalent of part of his spinal cord is protective—and you would expect it to be—mebbe that would work, given the lower gravity: super strong hair and scalp! But then you'd wonder why holding a knife to it would be equivalent (almost) to slitting one's throat, which is the assumption I made near the beginning of the film when Jake is being frog-marched by a Na'vi holding a knife to his braid.

Then there's the problem of prep. Our hero wakes up after a night of fun and games with all of his shoulder length braids undone. I'm thinking that Neytiri's may've been undone too, and hers, unlike his, were much more numerous and neater, meaning a greater investment of time. Um, why? It takes hours to braid that stuff up. Unbraiding it is a little faster process, but still time-consuming. In fact, that was my other little suspension of disbelief: these people were swapping out their braids and other decorations and they should've been, for the 24 hour (or less!) period been much too busy with more important stuff, like prepping for battle.

There was a lot of other braiding/weaving, of what looked like leather, but most of it went by so fast I only got glimpses. Tsu'tey's cool looking red macrame collar he wears late in the film (to the climatic battle), ferex, looked fairly modern and rather fun but I don't know that I can say much more than that without a decent still.

Hint for the commentator (on some blog or other, long since lost track which) who wants to identify the origins of all the beadwork: I'll talk about that more next time, but I can say unequivocally (cuz I looked) the many-stranded red torso thingie Mo'at wears near the beginning when she's evaluating Jake is right offa the back cover of the dust jacket of Angela Fisher's classic, Africa Adorned.

Continuing on with this, today's etsy item is rather avatarish as well, since it's a bright blue cat head (etsy) and artfire listings. I actually meant to make a fairy—she'll be showing up tomorrow, but I was all about cats before I went and saw the film, and now if anything the obsession is worse. (I mean, I thought the Na'vi were rather feline in terms of their noses, but didn't realize they had tails till I saw the film.)

And if that doesn't do ya for, today's post is also about kitties, in this case scrimmed kitties I made about twenty years ago. Striped kitties, even. See? Toldya I was into this stuff...

Enjoy.

17jan10

Well, here it is noon, and I haven't even started to make beads, nevermind having at least one done and in the kiln—I've spent most of the morning looking at leopard pix, trying to find some big enough to print out for photo references while I make beads—I moved my corkboard just to the left of the torch, but since I make beads glasses off, the pix need to be fairly large. It turns out there's an amazing variation in the way these animals’ faces are spotted, even within species (e.g. snow leopard) let alone across.

So it's gonna take awhile to internalize how those patterns move across the animals’ heads. In the meantime, I started writing this long review rant about a book f2tE had recommended, a fantasy that's been bugging me for the last several days. I can't honestly call it a review because I gave up after 35 pages, which is a shame because really, this thing should've been right up my alley: historical fantasy set in an exotic land (ok, probably Petersburg or some variant, but that's pretty exotic from my point of view;) with magic, swashbuckling, steampunk, dragons, romance...what was not to like?

Well, erm, the misogyny. And I do mean straight out misogyny, not just merely sexism. I can't say I was angry—irritated, and more than that, baffled. I can sort of get why an older or male author might not identify with the female segment of his potential readership. But these authors were women. Young women, in fact, who came out of the fanfic tradition (which has more than a strong strain of feminism running through it). With female agent and editor. Not to mention female influences (I'd say Rowling, McCaffrey, and Novik at a minimum, possibly Kushner as well. Oh, and possibly Jay Lake, who definitely writes from a feminist perspective.)

Writing a gay romance. You'd really think they'd get it, but evidently not. F2tE and I exchanged a bunch of emails which basically went, ‘what about x?’ ‘Oh, well, yeah, that character really is a sexist asshole.’ ‘Fine, but what x’? or x”?’ And so on and so forth till finally f2tE cried defeat with, ‘But mom! Clockwork dragons!’

I'm still working on the scrimshaw posts, but back in the day when I drew pictures, most of it was dragons and cats. I get it. But being older and wiser experienced, I just don't have the patience for that crap any more: after slogging through 35 pages, I went to the Amazon reviews, hoping against hope that the authors, a la JKR, were gonna pull a fast one and suddenly all would be turned on its head. Nope. The female characters were either ‘absent or stereotypes.’ (Now there's an understatement!) These folks are new authors, so I hate to get really nasty (it's a pleasure I think I'll reserve the Apa—and btw we have slots open if you'd like to join;) but they've now managed to publish two books in hardcover—more than time for them to clean up their act.

I don't like hammering on people, which is why your Friday fugly frustrating is showing up 3 days late. Yeah, it's taken me three (ok, 2...I spent most of yesterday visiting my friend who treated me to Avatar and dinner at the always fabulous [and fabulously named] Ashoka) days to spit out the above. Because, like f2tE I would like to read books with romance and four guys who become friends and magic and clockwork dragons but alas, these I can't.

But I can end this on an upbeat—I was reading a slacktivist thread (once again about romance in the Left Behind world) and I toddled off to read someone's recce, a webcomic called Chester5000xyv which is a very sweet (and feminist!) romance, set in the Victorian times, with a robot, which makes it proper steampunk. It's also extremely racy. As an artist, I loved the art noveau curliQ panels, and also the sepia toned washes. But I think one of the things that most appealed to me was the happiness and friendship that develops amongst the principals—*all* of them, in fact. Despite the graphically depicted sex on nearly every page.

This is also the reason I really like the new Sherlock Holmes film: I was afraid I'd find the changes to canon too annoying. (I gathered, from someone who is a lot more of a canon nerd than I am—the always entertaining cleolinda—that the bulldog in the film was canon. Sort of. The author put it in an early story, then forgot about it. As she says, they're paying attention, and because they were paying attention to the original, I was happy to let'em get away with changes.

One of the biggest, and to mind most welcome was that the all the (good-guy-type, which includes low-lifes locked up, btw) characters in general and Holmes and Watson in particular were partners. They respected each other's talents and worked as a team (to the point one reviewer said rather derisively that the actors could've swapped roles every other scene) and I really appreciated that. Even when various characters were (somewhat) at cross-purposes, they still seemed to respect each other's talents. I've been in a mental space where that hasn't been the case, and it's refreshing to be in that happier place;)

So now having worked myself back into a good mood, our fridayfugly is technically a friday (ok sunday) frustrating—the beads aren't failures because they're ugly, precisely (though I realize that is open to opinion!) but because of technical issues. Which I will go into in great and boring detail in the page.

Or, you can look at pretty etsy listings—today's goodies featuring stringing in turquoise and cinnabar: a necklace with lion pendant etsyand artfire; one with a lotus etsy and artfire, and one with a brass-bead focal: etsy and artfire.

Enjoy.

14jan10

Well, since I didn't really have time to make posts (or anything to post about) yesterday I figured I'd showcase two etsy items today, a leopard (etsy) head(af), and also a side drill white tiger head.

I'll be writing about my various (mis)adventures with the big cats for the friday frustrating post;), but in the meantime I finally got around to photographing some gorgeous pendants by fellow etsy seller Melanie Brooks/Earthenwood (who I note is featuring the very same goodies in her header:)

Enjoy.

12jan10

I've been having sort of an adventurous week.

First, a bunch of beads cracked. Then today I finally managed to make one that didn't crack. So, of course, my kiln died. Well, both Arrow Springs and especially the wizard are Teh Awesome, and the fried wire was duly stripped and hooked back up, and now I have a working kiln, and, with luck, will tomorrow have a new listing and mebbe even a post to go with it.

However, I had some photography to do for the fabulous Kristin Perkins, who will have a number of very cute new mini-heart studs on etsy, just as soon as yours truly gets off hir ass and photographs ’em. Which, really I was all prepared to do, except that my black plexi had this horrid, propagating crack that I figured I'd better fix.

I tried epoxying it, but my studio is so cold the epoxy wouldn't set up. So after an hour or so I took a heat gun to it, and that did set up the leftover epoxy on the paper where I mixed it, but not on the plexi. So finally I taped it and decided that yes really truly I was gonna have to find a new piece of plexi, which admittedly has been on my to-do list for about, oh, the last five or six years.

Well, then the white foam core on the wall and ceiling fell down and didn't want to stay. More futzing around, along with the realization that it's time to replace those too. So I'm thinking I'm gonna start on Kristin's pix and my kid requests my help for hir Early College Alliance essay, so we worked on that till dinner... and finally after dinner, I started shooting the earrings, which are majorly cute but so very tiny they're difficult to style. Plus having the usual assortment of dust, hairs, crud, etc. After two sessions I concluded the quality of my work would substantially improve if I finished this up tomorrow.

So today's post is something out of the archives, and with luck, things will be back on track tomorrow, or at the latest Wednesday. But for now, I leave you with a tiger, and a wish for sweet dreams.

11jan10

Since it's snowing out there, what could be more appropriate than for today's etsy item to be a leopard, denizen of warm, tropical climates? This is my my first attempt, but I'm pretty happy, so s/he's on etsy and artfire.

I think it's great that etsy is featuring so much wonderful art, even though it means I never did see my ’pard come up in the listings. However, looking did mean I got to enjoy a lot of other artisan's work, including these handsome pewter measuring spoons with a classic sakura pattern on ’em; my opinion is that one can never have too many sets of measuring spoons, but then I like baking;)

Glassact had their January meeting yesterday, and we had a huge turnout. Darlene D. demonstrated coiled wire beads, and as wirework is an interest of mine (not to mention the French-beaded flower subindex disappeared off the wirewrap index and needs to be put back) I'll have a nice fat post, with lots of links to some fabulous wire and bead artists I found on the web while brushing up for the meeting later on. (I'd say, later on this week, but that would jinx it...)

In the meantime enjoy the snow or the warmth, as the case may be. Today's post features a dual dragon and seahorse, both of which, like the leopard are warm weather critturs.

08jan10

Fridayfugly is baaaaack!

And going along with that, some humor, at last after all that angsting and ranting and whatnot.

So while I was reading about the infamous duck penises (via Pharyngula, of course, and I have to say, I thought it way cool that the researcher was using lampworked glass tubes to conduct her research—go us:) I followed to the author's previous post, a happy story in which blogosaurus that is, a scientist and his blog, and the ordinary readers thereof managed to convince the producer of a science show to correct some egregious errors—what a lovely, unusual, and happy ending, since the usual fate is to be ignored, of course—which had a little link about wikipedia.

Now, I love wikipedia. I even donated money (it was my xmas prezzie to myself, cuz really, I use wikipedia just about every day. Srsly.) So, anyway:

I'll start with a story. Some time ago, I went out for a drink with a paleontologist and a journalist, both good friends of mine. The journalist in question was a science writer - a very, very good science writer, who spends most of his time talking to scientists and translating their research into langauge that a moderately well-educated layperson could understand. He does this so well that he wins awards for it. The last time I won an award for anything was for my Samuel Pepys costume at the Queen's Silver Jubilee party in 1977 (and no, I don't have photos). So, after we had gotten our drinks and sat down at the table, and swapped a little small talk about families and stuff, the journalist says to the paleontologist "hey, what're you working on at the moment?"

About an hour later, as I picked surreptiously at the blood that was beginning to leak from my ears, I realized that was having an out-of-body experience. My paleontologist friend was leaning across the table, face alight with the joy of science, finger waving animatedly as he explained the nuances of the intracranial joint in the neurocranium of fishes and its role in cranial kinesis. On the other side of the table, my journalist friend was sitting frozen with a horrible blank look on his face, like someone had just told him his entire family and most of his friends had been slaughtered by a mad axeman and life had suddenly lost all meaning. I, meanwhile, felt like I was floating several feet above the table, inspecting my surprisingly large bald spot.

OK, so I exaggerate. But only a little. The point is that this scientist (who, BTW, is smart, articulate, and a very good teacher) was speaking to an interested, engaged, well-educated, and sympathetic audience. And he totally killed us. It wasn't that it was a bad summary of cranial kinesis in fish. It's just that it was too much to absorb over a quiet beer.

See, this is pretty much the way I feel all the time around smart people. So I was rolling, because here's this guy, the type that makes me feel outclassed, just as much so. It's not just me, it's notjustme, ohmahdawg, it's not just me.

Anyway. The moral of the story was, you want to snag the folks who are willing to learn a little bit beyond your pretty flashy tv presentation (science, history, even gasp art technique) put something up on wikipedia for them to dig into. Sounds good to me. I spent a lot more time than I really care to admit looking for some docs on osibin marvers, and while I did find a few things, I surely could do with a pic, or even better, a youtube demo. No such luck, alas. Really it ought to be a rule: if you're going to invent, or at least market, some sort of exotic lampworking gizmo (or any other type, really) you should put a howto video on youtube. Just sayin’.

In fact, the horribleness of today's post comes directly out of lack of such research on my part. But I'll get back to that.

This is, you'll recall, a commercial site, and I gotta get the shilling out of the way. Yesterday I was virtuous and made some more heads. After all those snape scaramouche heads, I figured I should do some women, and hence this series of three brunettes, which I guess could be considered a white girl(af), a white woman(af) and a black woman.

This is first time I've tried using murrina (pre-made cane) eyes, and it was pretty interesting, except the part where they slipped out of the grip of the tweezers and disappeared into the mess on the table or floor while I was in the middle of making a bead.

The hearts, alas, which are made with inspiration tools, were not nearly as successful. In fact, they're majorly fugly.

But that's the point of friday fugly, right?

07jan10

I'm in cleanup mode, sort of. Etsy is self-cleaning, so to speak, because listings only last for four months, but in artfire they hang around as long as you keep coughing up your subscription payment. Seeing as it's the beginning of the year, I wanted to tidy up a bit: for one thing, there's nothing like clearing out old stuff to get me to make new stuff, which is sort of the point of being an artist.

Well, I've never used artfire's coupon or tagging features before, and I got confused by what I suspect was a bit of a lag for the changes to show up. First I tried making all the sea creatures—large, free form focals in BE stained glass—buy one get one free. That tag only seemed to show up on the first bead I edited. So then I noodled around and made ’em half off and removed the bogo (buy one get one) tagging; except it's still showing. For the savvy customer, I guess that means you could potentially do both!

Well, I did want to tidy up:)

So far as etsy is concerned, I haven't got any new etsy listings, but I did resurrect this very pretty blue chiming abstract; it's already listed on artfire.

I've got a whole section on the website about abstracts, which are one of my oldest and a definitely beloved style of bead to make, so if you want to learn more, well, there you go. —Today's post features scrimshaw, something I haven't done in years (though its siren song still calls) featuring the symbols for the middle and east kingdoms, who battle annually at the pennsic war, another event that seems very far in my past.

06jan10

Well, I guess today's theme is gonna be sf. But it will wend its way back to beads, I promise!

After boring myself nearly out of my mind trying to tidy up my faq page (don't click, don't click, it's dull, aaaargh—I warned you!!!) I was cruising about and found a recce by John Scalzi. Well, I rather admire John Scalzi, and, you'll remember I was attempting to procrastinate. So off I went. I don't think I'm giving away too much by saying the linked story is horror as well as sf; so if you enjoy that sort of thing, by all means go and read it; in everyone's opinion (but mine), it's great fun, and besides, I hate to rain on people's parade; I'll wait. If horror is not your thing, then you may wish to continue on here, if you're in the mood for a juicy rant.

(If not, just click on the pretty bead icon;)

Ok. So here we are, with a retelling, from the point of the view of the monster, of either the Campbell classic, or the 1982 Carpenter film adaptation (more likely the latter). Back in the mists of time, because I've been reading sf&f nearly four decades now, I almost certainly read the original novella, which I imagine I encountered via The Science Fiction Hall of Fame (still a great intro to the golden age...wonder where mine got off to?); I can't otherwise account for almost immediately recognizing the setup (besides recognizing 3/4 of the other novellas in the volume). However, I'd already had the bejeezus scared out of me when I went to see Alien, which is probably the single most frightening film I've ever seen and since I had no desire to repeat that experience, I didn't see the ’82 film.

But here's the deal: after you read enough in any genre, certain themes start to pop up fairly regularly, and mankind turning into a giant sentient goo—Greg Bear's Blood Music particularly comes to mind—is one of them. I'm watching my kids encounter some of these tropes for the first time, and it's fun to see them playing, mentally, with all these new ideas. But from my point of view, something has to be pretty much way out there in terms of concept for it really to surprise me: I'm more likely to be engaged by compelling characterization, or really sharp dialog, or intricate plotting.

Now, for the guys (and as far as I could tell, it was all guys) that read this little apertif, it was absolutely delish, because it had this delightful layer of turning things on their head, particularly, I imagine, after the movie in which the monster was (to judge from the critics’ reception in the wikipedia entry) really horrific.

Believe me, I understand the appeal: I wasted spent my summer head down in a (media) fandom (for the first time, really, since ST:TOS pulled me in to begin with all those years ago) precisely because a buncha ficcers turned some of the original tropes on their head, and I really appreciated it. Think of Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, ferex. I get it, fellas.

So, ok, I'm reading this story, by a guy whose “most recent [novel]—a rumination on the nature of consciousness which actually became a required text in occasional undergrad courses on philosophy and neuropsych.” In other words, someone who can be presumed to know something about human nature. Very good. I went to check it out cuz Scalzi makes a real effort, in my opinion, to appeal to broad range of fen, and because he highly recommended it. Since part of the appeal was the discovery that the story hinged upon a film, I don't blame Mr Scalzi for not warning me that it wouldn't be as meaningful for non-fans of the cult(ish) film.

I don't expect the story to have that extra layer it does for the almost-cult-status film fans. I do, however, expect it to be well-written, which for the most part, I thought it was. Till nearly the end, when one of the dying humans, enraged by the viewpoint character's stealing his body, accuses it of being a rapist.

Wait, what?

Where did that come from? Rape is perversion of sexual congress; and very much a woman's issue. Campbell was rather famously uninterested in either, and this story is no exception. There are no female characters, at all, not even, so far as I can tell, the sled dogs, the first animals infected. The thing consumes its victims, replacing their tissues with its. The viewpoint character is a metaphor for parasitism (or creeping communism, if you like—that was the assumption behind the first, less faithful movie adaptation, anyway). Thus, the dying human's fury excited in me not a resonating pity, but a rather cynical ‘welcome to my world, bud.’

When the story ends, the creature, now having been sinned against and ingested the concept of violence just as it ingested the men whose individuality it barely understood, promises to rape salvation into them. Or us. Or rather, not us, cuz now the story wasn't about humanity anymore: it was about men. Oopsie, half your readership's just gone buh-bye.

So yeah, the ending struck me as sexist. Worse, it struck me as bad writing (a much greater sin). For most of the story, the monster is a disease, a frightening one, say, like ebola (or at least, the way I expect a lot of temperate climate dwellers like myself think of the disease), that incites creeping dread, because their humanity is being subverted. Not their sexuality.

My conclusion, therefore? The author wanted to shock, but evidently didn't feel the disease metaphor would be sufficiently awful, so he borrowed one he thought would have more punch, stepping (awww) on some feminist toes in the process. Now if the viewpoint monster had been the alien in the eponymous film, I really could've seen it, cuz that film is full of icky sexual subtexts. I mean, it's probably the midwife, if not the mother of all that mpreg slash the kids keep telling me about (in the up-to-now failed hopes that they will manage to shock the older generation ).

I doubt very much the original Campbellian characters had much of much of a sexual identity, and more to the point, neither did the characters in Watt's recasting, till we get that rapist comment out of left field near the end.

IOW, what I'm saying is that the author failed to set up his imagery properly.

And that's why I'm not buying it. And not one of 19 other commenters before me, on either Clarksworld or Scalzi's blog, perceived this failure. (Guess I didn't totally waste my time in fandom this summer: I've evidently honed my critical responses/ability to pick up on this stuff, and articulate why it bothers me.) Let alone the author, who is supposed to be some sort of philosophical wunderkind. —I suppose if I had more energy, I'd go back and argue at Scalzi's place, but frankly, I'm tired. I don't wanna. And I've got better things to do.

Like some beeeeeaaaaaads.

Via sf&f.

Well, we're broke, so I've been getting my fix at the library, and recently checked Watt-Evans’ fantasy, A Young Man without Magic. Who is not the same author as above, that guy writes hard sf. About the kindest thing I can think to say about this book is that authors have to eat and pay their rent too, but it did have the happy effect of causing me to check out the original on which it's based, Rafael Sabatini's Scaramouche.

Which is what I'm calling my latest etsy listing, not to mention today's post, which goes into the history and some construction details.

Hm. I seem to have my ability to rant back, not to mention making fairly complicated beads. Things must be looking up;)

(minor mods, 7jan10.)

05jan10

Happy New Year, all.

I actually have a ton of posts—well, 4 or 5, which for me is a lot—in the pipeline, more or less ready to go up; but the wizard and I have decided what with the new decade (more or less; depending on how old-fashioned your feelings on enumerating such things are) that it really is time to clean this site up.

A little, anyway.

Or, rather, I asked for some changes, and he put a lot of effort into revamping the code, and things are sort of in transition. (I strongly suspect most if not all of the pages will have to be rerun, and all the half-finished, partly-archived, and otherwise broken ones need to be shunted off into their own little corrals.) So things may be full of busted links more than unusually untidy for awhile. However, we're far enough into the transition that I can put posts on the public site, and with luck, etsy listings will be joing the fray tomorrow.

In the meantime, wishing you weather that's at least pretty, if not warm;)

26dec09

Hi all.

Though I gather certain parts of the world have been getting astonishing (and unusual) amounts of snow for the holiday season, for xmas we got... rain all day, to the point that I worried about the basement flooding. (Yes, we really must do something about the broken sump pump.)

Yeah, I had a week's (four days, since I figured I could take the 25th off) worth of scrimshawy post written, ready to be posted. Didn't have the energy to do it. Still don't; I'm thinking, perhaps I want to tone down some of the rants.

(Speaking of which, one of the things I meant to put in the last post, that I didn't, both from laziness and increasing desire not to mess about with posts more than a day old, at least not without indicating it: the reason I was suspicious of that urban legend from the get-go is that I'd expect an atheist not to petition for hir own holiday, but rather, simply request that religious holidays be decoupled from government-authorized ones. That is, it makes more sense to me that New Years, or the Fourth, or Labor Day, be official holidays; but so designating xmas, otoh, not so much; atheists, of course, are free to call it Newtonmas or Solstice-three-days-late, but it's kind of hard on folks with all those other religious designations. Or put another way, they didn't convincingly depict their atheist.)

But the one thing I really asked for xmas was one of those miniature flexible bendy ball tripods, and. . . I got it!

But today we got some snow, I tried playing a bit with my new toy.

Enjoy.

19dec09

Recently I read a rather interesting novella, Wake by Robert J. Sawyer (it's serialized in Analog, and finished up in the Mar09 ish.) Though the story has some problems---rather flat characterization and a dangling plot thread (what, wait? What happened to the chimp subplot?) it centers around a rather cool what-if: what if you gave sight to a blind-from-birth internet user? And what if, instead of seeing people and rocks and buildings and trees, her new-found vision mapped out the connections of the internet? If she perceived it in a more direct fashion, in the way bats' sonar makes sound pictures for them?

I thought this very interesting (if not earth-shattering).

That's the problem of getting old, see. When you're just starting to read this stuff, you're impressed by all these cool new ideas, and the sense-of-wonder is the appeal. But people have been telling stories for as long as we've had speech, and after awhile, certain tropes tend to emerge.

So much as I appreciated the concepts the story explored, it was a reference near the end that hooked me in an unexpected way; a sense of how the world has changed since I was a child. In the story, an AI, (all too similar to one in Gibson and Sterling's excellent Difference Engine), says:

"I searched: Earth, space, 1968, astronauts.

"And I found: Apollo 8, Christmas Eve, Genesis.

"`In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth...'''

I remember, dimly, seeing the apollo moon landings, in fuzzy black and white television, accepting this wonder as a birthright. My children, for all the techy toys and fabulous resources available to them, are bereft, however, in a way that I was not: though I was not then reading sf, I could believe that we would go to the stars in my lifetime---accept that we would continue to explore space, boldly go where no-one had gone, discover wonderful new things.

Those astronauts, it seemed to me, were attempting to express their wonder at the ineffable beauty of the world, and they borrowed a story, a narrative that they felt (and rightly too, I believe) that would resonate with their audience. But it's difficult to imagine, four decades on, them doing that today: such a reference would be too fraught with political overtones.

And I think that's a pity.

People find all sorts of ways to access altered states; though art, through nature, through science, through drugs...even through religion. The first two, I've been lucky enough to experience myself, and I could imagine the third. The fourth strikes me as problematic, and the last is obvious to anyone who's taken art history or bothered to look at cathedrals, which were the Middle Age's answer to the immersive experience.

But space exploration as I expected it to continue back then has not been a viable dream for a very long time now. Nor does it look to be happening any time soon; not least, because we have very little will to leap out into those vast dark unknowns. We as a society seem to be huddling down, struggling with economic and global crisis. I know that scrabbling for resources---fear---brings out the worst in people.

But it seems a shame that, instead of acknowledging that different people take different things from, say, the book from which that quote is taken, we instead have self-important, smug screeds.

You know those forwarded emails, the kind your dad or the cousin who has the whole extended family on their mailing list sends---well, my froshie college roomie fills that role in my life. Most often they're some sort of microsoft-only files I can't or can't be bothered to open; usually they're just inoffensively cute, of fluffy animals or sidewalk chalked in trompe l'oeil; many of them are syrupy appeals to the almighty, which I generally ignore.

Every once in awhile, though, they stray into really offensive territory, like the one about the judge and atheist's lawyer. Here's the version I received, which starts by trumpeting the good news:

Florida Court Sets Atheist Holy Day! Gotta love this Judge!

(I'm dubious already.)

It continues by exhorting the faithful:

You must read this . . . a proper decision by the courts. . .for a change.

(Oh, oh.) It continues, following the usual pattern for these lil' heartwarming screeds:

FLORIDA COURT SETS ATHEIST HOLY DAY

In Florida, an atheist created a case against the up coming Easter and Passover Holy days. He hired an attorney to bring a discrimination case against Christians and Jews and observances of their holy days. The argument was that it was unfair that atheists had no such recognized days.

The case was brought before a judge. After listening to the passionate presentation by the lawyer, the judge banged his gavel declaring, ``Case dismissed!''

The lawyer objects, saying, "Your Honor, how can you dismiss this case?'' And goes on to enumerate Christian and Jewish holidays, finishing with, ``My client and all other atheists have no such holidays . . .''

The judge leaned forward in his chair saying, "But you do. Your client, counsel, is woefully ignorant. "

The lawyer said, "Your Honor, we are unaware of any special observance or holiday for atheists.''

The judge said, "The calendar says April 1st is 'April Fools Day'. Psalm 14:1 states: 'The fool says in his heart, ``there is no God''.' Thus, it is the opinion of this court, that, if your client says 'there is no God', then he is a fool. Therefore, April 1st is his day. Court is adjourned.''*

And then, of course, we get the obnoxious commentary:

You gotta love a Judge that knows his scripture!

This is too good not to forward.

The introductory and closing remarks particularly illustrate the smug, condescending attitudes, both of the email's creators and enablers. I'm certain you could make a cute joke about atheists and `holy-days', and in fact the original proposed by snopes, in which the atheist's friend suggests April Fool's, is not half-bad.

It's the mean-spiritedness I loathe.

Now, fifteen seconds of googling shows this is an urban legend, which didn't much surprise me. One could therefore make the case that what this email really represents is both the fears and wish-fulfillment of the fundamentalists who wrote and forwarded it. So why not let these poor, deluded fools off the hook?

I'm no historian, but I'm presuming emails like these embody, on the one hand, the fears that Christianity is losing its hold on the US populace; in fact, there are those who argue that the whole "fundementalist" movement is a reaction to the lessening influence of religion in people's lives. (And to those who say it isn't, um, one word: cathedrals. In the middle ages their construction snarfed up a third of the local GDP. Or so claimed my art history teachers.)

Because their bigoted attitudes have real-life consequences, I'm less inclined to be charitable: I'm well aware that living in a liberal college town protects me from this sort of prejudice.

It's this sort of attitude that hardened my agnosticism into straight out atheism---for years I used to fence sit, mostly out of politeness, because as long as everyone was polite about their feelings, what did it matter? Folks got along. But then this vocal contingent came along, bleating and angsting that theirs was the one, true way to know god, as if we weren't all different, with differing pathways to live our lives and experience the ineffable, that which some choose to call divine.

Well, I want the kind of tolerance implied in that 1968 greeting back. ---Perhaps there's no way it can happen. Mebbe too much has happened; not least that those of non-Abrahamic faiths, not just atheists (who after all can and do appreciate the bible both as a historical, if not inerrant, document and great literature) who would feel unfairly excluded by such.

But I can dream, can't I? Especially with the winter holidays coming up.

Which brings me round to today's post, a fairy. (It should be noted: I like fairies; just as I like the idea of a loving god or heaven. I just don't feel any evidence for their existance. Plus, xmas trees. Love'em:) Interestingly enough, the piece, made in '88, is almost exactly a midpoint between the moon landing and now.

However, if real rather than fantasy creatures are more likely to appeal I did manage to find my caliper. (Actually I found two pair. It never rains but pours, except we've snow.) Since I've been trying to promote my Etsy and artfire listings, the goal is to post mon-fri, but as I failed signally yesterday, I provide the goodie for your edification a day late; or you can check out some engraving done a one and score years ago.

*But at least this rant presents a rare opportunity to show off my knowing how to nest three levels of quotes:)

18dec09

Oooh, I shouldn't try to write posts at one in the morning. One of the threads I was checking on making light discussed author meltdown in the face of negative reviews: in fact this behavior is alphabet souped into ABM, the author's big mistake. I hate watching people make fools of themselves, so I have yet to bring myself to go see this train wreck (and I understand the particular example cited is nearly a textbook perfect case fandom wankery but the part about `everyone's guilty at some point' ---that I definitely get.

Lucky for me, this website isn't set up for comments, mostly because it's hand-rolled and adding that feature---most especially the moderation---would be extremely difficult and time-consuming. However, I have (in my head, and we all know that works so well, too) been practicing how to be gracious when folks tell me I suck.

So, since you can't tell me yourself, I'll do it for you: yeah, that was sort of an incoherent essay, made worse by the need to lay the transitions more clearly. (always a weak point in my writing---just about the only criticism I can recall from my high school and college days was `needs more transitions') But as the lady said any publicity, (or in my case, semi-conscious rambling) is better than none;) and the actual links were decent, even if my connective material wasn't.

Yeah, I'm in a good mood. It's about time, too.

So anyway, my caliper has disappeared again (actually all three of 'em have vanished) so though I've got another tigerhead ready to go for etsy, I haven't made a listing for it yet. Bother. Also honesty compels me to admit that today's listing is not a true fridayfugly, only something tending in that direction.

C'est la vie. And a happy weekend to you also.

17dec09

I spent much of the day helping a friend pack up her lampworking studio; it will be awhile until the new studio is up and running, so in the meantime she loaned me some of her cool tools, including a number of sculptural tools, which, as I've been on a people heads kick lately, is very timely.

She also has several interesting shaping tools, some presses, and some unusual mandrels, so I should have plenty to keep me busy over the next few weeks.

One of my absolute fave bloggers---Sara Robinson---is back to posting after taking several months off to work on her PhD. Her current article is about the way societies go through the decision making process, for she which uses global warming (or, more accurately, climate change) and breaks down into six stages. It's fascinating, and I recommend it highly, but the upshot of it is, the consensus part of the process cannot be rushed. If your community has not really adjusted to the idea of jumping genes or plate tectonics or global warming or even (sigh) sustainable lifestyles, then they cannot be made to adopt the belief or practices to implement a strong response. And no amount of prescient screaming or pleading or tearing of hair will force 'em.

Personally, I figured we'd have to have two or three majorly catastrophic happenings before folks really sit up and take notice that [human-driven] climate change is a problem; but perhaps we'll be lucky and and get a series of smaller wake-up calls instead. ---My mom, over the thanksgiving holiday, asked me how I thought the new president was doing. I looked at her blankly, since I'd spent the summer in obsessive-writing mode, and barely looked at any blogs. I hadn't the foggiest what our president was doing.

To be blunt the progressive blogs I'm now back to reading are pretty frustrated, both on the war, and most especially the health-care front. (Never mind climate change, about which significant proportions of the US citizenry is still convinced is the fault of volcanoes, or something.) Allow me to digress just for a moment: health-care currently is the number one thing locking people into jobs they hate---you want to be a starving artist, you can live in a dingy apartment living on ramen, beans and rice. But health care is a nearly unelastic expense, and not one easily obtainable on the sales of your beads or drawings or music or whatever. I recently read some pie-in-the-sky fella who says unemployment could soar to 30% as more and more work becomes ever more automated (once we can no longer exploit the third world), and that one of the big societal changes we'll have to make is finding a way to feed and shelter these folks.

Personally, I don't think we'll ever have 30% unemployment, long-term, any more than we were gonna have electricity so cheap they wouldn't even bother to meter it, which my dad claimed they predicted back lo these many years ago when something-or-other ---nuclear power, perhaps? came online. But in the unlikely event, the obvious thing to to do with all those people is put them to work making public art, cuz there is a lot of uglinesses in the world. But I digress.

Scalzi, who is a centrist and deeply pragmatic, weighs in with this comment on health care, which I found very encouraging: "Beyond this, at the end of the day, as I've noted before, the actual big win for the Democrats (and for Obama) is not whatever bill passes but the fundamental concept that every American under the law should have access to affordable and comprehensive health care. Everything else is squidgy bits and details which can be fiddled with and modified at later dates. The fundamental concept, that's the thing I'm interested in seeing if they ultimately pull off."

In other words, we've reached stage three of Robinson's process, where we've acknowledged it's a problem, and are gonna try and fix it with the ole-tried-and-true (aka bandaid). It's not fun being in the half-broken stage, but that's life. Besides which, as this fellow (whose article I think I found via Making Light? Pandagon? who knows?) says, you need a variety of approaches because you don't really know which ones are ultimately gonna work.. For health care, climate change, or sustainable lifestyles.

So to answer my mom's question: I figured if we were lucky the economy would start to recover in a couple of years, and what I've been hearing is, the job market, which trails, should start looking better by end of 2010.

Which is two years.

Two years to even sort of get the economy back on track is in my view fantastic. My guess is Obama probably doing the best he can, given the dire mess, not to mention the political realities, he's facing. He's smart, he's got a lot of smart people around him, and he's got a decent track record. Just have to keep our fingers crossed, I guess and keep plugging along.

Having to plug along is something being an artist really drives home. Today's beads (particularly the color combo, since I've made this style of bead in the past) came out of fiddling about a number of times, and tomorrow we'll have the return of friday fugly---that is, the way I got there. It's much worse for the heads, because I'd never tried to get a consistant look before, and it's, um, hard. So I'd just keep making the same awful bead, over and over and over again, until finally some slight change or idea would occur to me---after I'd made the same error about 20 times. I envy the folks who figure it out after 1 or even 5 tries, but I simply don't learn that fast. (And, I guess, neither do most other people.)

But with persistance, I do usually manage something decent.

15dec09

Yeah, this post was supposed to appear last Friday. Oopsie!

So, messing about with gimp (or rather, failing to mess about with gimp) I was reminded there was another open source graphics program, krita, and I thought mebbe I should look at that well. At first glance, it looks really promising: built in tools for perspective! And I like their transparency background better: the squares are lighter, which means you can draw over them and still see what you're doing, and they're also big enough to serve as a handy grid (gee, did I put the eyes in the middle of the face? Is one higher than the other? ---One of my eyes is in fact very slightly higher than the other, and I tend to that error; also the making them too high thing. Yeah, if you hadn't already encountered this handy proportion, your eyes really truly are centered, from top to bottom. Honest.)

Alas, I'm really hard on software. Even after the wizard installed the new version, it didn't work very well. The multi-layer drawing I'm working on in gimp wouldn't import in gimp's native file format, xcf; a simple low-res photograph-y type image would import as an xcf, but after a few changes (e.g. scribbing on it) it refused to export as an xcf.

The wizard was terribly frustrated by how slow it was. It did at least support (some of) the tablet's features, but it didn't take me long to crash it completely: I may be mediocre in many ways, but I'm given to understand that I'm truly gifted at breaking software. It's a bummer, because it's specifically targeted to drawing as opposed to image manipulation, though I notice it seems to have more photo-y stuff than last time I checked it out. That's not to say it'll never be good, of course; it is actively being worked on, after all. And I have quite vivid memories back when gimp was fairly new. It had to mature considerably before I could use it, too. So I'll give 'em another year or so, and check back, I guess;)

I also thought I'd check back to that other piece of graphic open source I've just barely touched in the past, inkscape. It also had a perspective tool: you can very easily build all these 2-d looking rectangles, all in perspective to each other! I was pretty impressed.

Upshot: gimp is good. Inkscape is in the queue. Krita is not ready for the awesomeness-that-is-me, aka the software smasher'n'crasher. Yet, anyways.

On other fronts, I'm very pleased that one of my "olive wallhangings artfire and etsy listing is being featured in Maykela's etsy treasury.

Maykela does some very nice pieces, such as this citrine pedant in what I think of as the wirewrapped faceted bead genre; I featured several etsy artists working in this style in the past---you can check my favorites to see them;)

And here's a link to the other wall hanging in the series, etsy and artfire. (And oh man, figuring out a way to plug in all these links is definitely something I'd like to speed up. Takes forevah!)

But if olive ain't your thang, you can check out the fifth spacerbar charm in the round robin bracelet project, which is in the ever popular pinks & purples;)

10dec09

Well, lessee, I found this absolutely fascinating webpage while trying to figure out how big a community really was necessary for an intellectual renaissance---I know it's surprisingly small; after all, think about those famous `schools' by painters: the Group of Seven had mebbe nine or ten people, ferex.

At any rate, besides a nice structured way to roll up (literally!) your very own fantasy kingdom, the guy also notes that universities will not be located in the largest cities, which if you stop and think about it is the case---the colleges making what up Oxford aren't located in London, after all.

Plus, the wizard found the pressure and tilt settings in Gimp for the graphics tablet, hip hip hurray. And showed me how to make a brush, too. Though the usual problem---getting mentally exhausted after struggling with the new medium/equipment for 45--60 minutes---is still an issue. I've found the secret is try doing a little every day.

I'm still enjoying following the protocols in the Williams book, even if I am convinced he failed to follow his own advice with regard to his perspective lines: he's got this group of people plopped in this beautifully rendered perspective, but then didn't draw the (bottoms, at least, of their) feet to match. (Granted feet, being sort of wedge shaped, are hard to draw in perspective.)

But the idea of covering masses of area with a leaf brush that varies the orientation with jitter, and the size with pressure on the stylus, giving this very organic field of leaves, grasses etc...oh, be still my beating heart. Add in the gorgeous curliques one could do with a vector program (inkscape) and oh, my goodness.

Yum.

I'm also still trying to ramp my beadmaking skillz back up after more-or-less taking the summer off, but once the temps dropped to 10 d F, and the cold air cut thru even my coat, I stopped. I know I can make beads reasonably comfortably down to 20 or so---the studio is space heated, but the cold air intake is located about 18" behind my back. Brr.

TDftY was ill, and since my photography studio is also her bedroom, I didn't manage a new etsy item for today. However, I do have another post in the spacerbar charm bracelet series.

Enjoy.

09dec009

Today, I gave the wikipedia people ten bucks, since it is a resource I use, pretty much, every day. They had a post about a woman who could only afford $1.95 on their banner, and I figured if they thought that was good enough, then my almost-as-pitiful effort would also be acceptable. (I use google even more, but they don't need money;) The wikipedia folks had a bunch of icons on the thank you page, none of which I bothered to save, because I didn't decide they'd be of any use till I actually sat down and wrote this post and now, of course, I can't get at em. Oh well, suffice it to say, I have read, written for and now donated to wikipedia (however lamely niggardly [yeah, sometimes I feel like I've just about had it with political correctness---substitute your own $#@ adverb, I can't be bothered*])

Yes, I'm aware of the charges of inaccuracy, poor focus, etc. Certainly I don't agree with all the changes made to the one article I attempted to write, but it's reasonably accurate; and here's the thing---it's not as if the Encyclopedia Britannica, my go-to source as a child, is without flaws either. I rather like the wikipedia model, and after reading about all the destructive things people do, I could do with seeing co-operative, useful creations.

And yes, for the USians, they are a 501(c)(3).

Today's etsy and artfire item is a flat-backed white tiger head; it's very reasonably priced at a mere $16! How can you beat that? And, um, it snowed last night, making everything white. So a white tiger seems appropriate, hm?

This week's series on spacerbar charms continues apace, with one pretty in pink.

*Most of the time I don't mind. It's unfair and a bummah that niggard, which doesn't have the same etymology (or even meaning) as the epithet is misunderstood by virtue of its similar phonological structure, but it's not a word I use often, though I find it delightfully onomatopoeiac; I was sorry to give up `el cheapo', a favorite phrase of mine (and my father's) for many many years but easily understood, once I read a latin@'s objection to it, why it's so offensive, and kicked very little...but the lame and limping are proving to be hard. Really hard, because internally, that's how I perceive my own mental and artistic processes: hampered but not completely broken, in much the way I feel when I have, physically as opposed to merely metaphorically, limped my way through life.

The person writing that we all should just suck it up and discard a goodly portion of pithy vocabulary for the longer, less punchy terms was willing to concede that said substitutes were not as effective, but just basically shrugged their shoulders at the resulting anguish of desiring to write cleanly and well. That lack of sympathy, I have to say, majorly pissed me off; though two wrongs never did make a right.

But I've been in a foul mood for weeks, so there: I'm cranky. ---As an antidote, I once again offer today's post, which is a very cheerful and sweet color---far nicer than I am.

08dec09

I haven't been doing much with my life, so yesterday's post pretty much exhausted all the interesting things I have to say. The wizard checked out Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, for which I had high hopes, after hearing so much buzz about Pride & Prejudice & Zombies. However, this book is by a different author, and his prose just doesn't stand up to Austen's. (Starting reading the original and concluded I'm overdue; I was having difficulties parsing some of the more difficult sentences, which is pretty embarrassing, since she's absolutely my favorite prose stylist, and inspiration for my own [fiction] writing.)

Ok, if I wanted to be cruel, I could inflict my thoughts about the parallels between (my perceived lacks in) a real-life US subculture and a set of fantasy novels I'm reading (listening to on tape---while I make beads, even!)---both seem to abhor any kind of fine art, music, dance, drama or even novels---but I won't. I have been thinking about the problems inherent in world-building, and my opinion of the process---it's darned hard---hasn't materially changed in the last three decades I've failed utterly attempted any.

Anyway. Today's etsy listing is a set of three pink bicones, and I continue with this week's theme of bracelet charms for the glassact round robin project---this time, with the charm I made for my own bracelet.

Enjoy

07dec09

Last time I said I would talk about these splendid library finds. Like a lot of folks struggling with the current economy, the rejiquar household isn't spending money on books, so I'm even more thrilled we have a local, public, and quite decent library. My overall feelings about robber barons tend to be negative, but I've always had a soft(er) spot for Andrew Carnagie, who basically founded the public library system in the US.

So somewhere on the intertubes I found a (or several) recces for 1491, and lo and behold our library has it, so I checked it out. And yes, it's splendid. One of the overriding themes of this book---which I'd already encountered, a bit, in Jared Diamond's splendid Guns, Germs and Steel, was that a huge proportion of the first Americans were killed off by European disease. That is, that our school-taught picture of those folks that lived here before whites were all living in tipis or huts, hunting and fishing (and, from my point of view, beading), was all wrong, because their complex societies collapsed, mostly in the 1600s, ravaged by animal-bred disease; notably, smallpox.

This is why you, or at least I, have heard epidemiologists worry about nasty flu bugs coming out of China: because there are still a lot of small farms, where people and pigs and chickens all mix, swapping germs with wild abandon (so I'm told: I saw small family farms, but in Viet Nam, but I believe most Chinese also still live in the country). It's also, I suspect, the reason for this quote, ``For example, ingredients in Chinese dishes are required to be cooked; a raw dish like a green salad violates the structures of the cuisine.'' that I found on an absolutely fascinating food blog. Chinese cook everything, even unto boiling their water before drinking it; and I strongly suspect health concerns are the underlying reason why (also, I gathered, why Europeans drank beer or other alcohol in preference to water during the middle ages). I discovered this more-or-less intuitively, when I took a Chinese cooking class that used an authentic Chinese cookbook (i.e. written by and in Chinese, printed in China---fortunately with English translations!) as its text.

(As an aside, the Great Influenza of 1918 originated in the US.. When, of course, most people in the US still lived on small farms... It was called Spanish Flu because they were the only ones not clamping down on the press about it, not because they were responsible. And yes, I once again thank the intertubes for the recce, and my public library for having this book.)

Even the fact that the early Europeans admired and found beautiful, tall, healthy and handsome the natives was pretty much scrubbed out of the narratives I'd absorbed as a child. (Um, Europeans didn't in that era believe baths were healthy. Indians did. With whom would the average bath-obsessed USian wanna hang out, do you suppose...?) I love reading how these folks' roads were stepped cuz llamas climb stairs so much better than horses, or that this culture was on the verge of developing a textile-based (non) writing system that was visually and tactilely based. I mean, utterly unlike anything else in the world, and done with string and knots---how cool is that? So the conquerors burnt all but 600 of these records because they presented a differing picture than the story they wanted to present. Thanks, guys.

But it seems that any history book has to be full of the ways people, especially powerful men, jockey for power and status, i.e. are determined to slaughter each other. This trait cuts across all human cultures, and reading about the ways in which the various politicos, spanish, inka, english, etc all schemed is profoundly depressing. This is why I hate reading history. That need to pound everyone else down in order to win one's own place, the opportunities and lives wasted, just is painful.

And it's universal, just about. Politicians are the worst merely because they have the greatest opportunity, but read up about scientific or artistic squabbles, and it seems that folks act just as bad.

But, given the caveat that people act like monsters, yeah, this is (so far---I'm roughly a third of the way through) a great book.

Ok, onward and upward:

Yippee hi ho, I finally managed new etsy listings. They're both tigers. They're also both listed on artfire. And, yay, artfire, they made it so I can import etsy listings, which is nice. Now if only they had glass and bead categories; I had to shoehorn this stuff in as accessories and beadwork, which as they're focal lampwork beads, isn't really a good way to categorize 'em.

Well, that's about it, I guess. The plan is to do a series on these charm beady objects during the week. We'll see how it goes.

04dec09

Hi all.

No, I haven't died. I haven't even given up on beads, though it probably looks that way, from the outside.

There's nothing like taking the summer off to write (extremely useless fiction) for letting one's skills get rusty. (The last tiger I made was positively embarressing.) Then I fell into sort of a funk for the last couple of months. I count myself extremely fortunate that I've never suffered severe, soul-sucking life's-so-gray-I-can't-get-out-of-bed depression, but I've had enough episodes when I can't cope with seemingly simple, even pleasurable, activities to realize after I've pulled out of them that I must be suffering some mild form of the condition. Or so I assume, when I look back and think, gee, really, it wasn't that hard to call the orthodontist, email my friend, find the sculpey (which was exactly where it was supposed to be, with the rest of the pmc stuff) clean my office enough to find the stylus to my tablet, even water the frickin' plants.

Um, or make finish web pages. (I thought I'd posted this page in October. Oops.)

Currently I'm reading a couple of excellent books, both courtesy of our wonderful local library branch. One is Freddy Williams' The DC Comics Guide to Digitally Drawing Comics which focuses not so much on how to draw nor even how to draw comics, but how he uses his tools---software and hardware---to speed his workflow. This rather corporatist term is one I've been familiar with for some time, though more as a photographer; I've been meaning for awhile to clean mine up.

Specifically, workflow is the algorithm artists use for specific, repetitive tasks. My workflow for making these pages, ferex, starts with an item to photograph---in today's case, the collaborative piece Wendy and I made. After I shoot it (using a 500w photoflood, a diffusing cube with flecked background paper and my coolpix 8400), I transfer the files from the compactflash to the computer.

I use a converter between the card's interface and the computer's usb port called a jumpshot which lucky for me, plugging the card in automagically puts up a file manager called dolphin, which I use to create a directory (i.e. a collection of files, what's called a folder in windoze land, I believe) with the day's date, eg 20091204. I make this a subdirectory of the year 2009, which in turn is part of the DigitalCamera directory. In a perfect world I'd have some cute way of tagging my pix, but I just have a flat text file called directory.txt in /DigitalCamera with rough (and often un-updated) descrips of my pix. Needless to say I do have to rummage around sometimes, which is a major pita. So that part of my workflow---archiving---is rather unefficient.

After transferring the files, unmounting the card (yes, I use linux, which has some of these historical artefacts) I load them in gqview, an image viewer, and since I bracket, select the best exposed one of a grouping I like and launch gimp (open source image processor; like photoshop) from the image which, again, automagically loads the desired pic.

I rotate it if I've shot it crooked (this happens perhaps once in every 10 or 20 pix) crop it, lighten it if necessary using the curves tool (necessary roughly 50% the time; because too-dark images are easier imho to fix than too-light ones, and it's almost as easy to fix the pic in gimp as to take another bracketing shot, and sometimes I'd rather fix it upstairs than stay in the basement photographing one more minute) scale it to 512 pixels, save and name in the home/sandbox (sub)directory for the website, undo to get it back to full size, name and save, crop a 100 pixel version and save.

The 512 is what you see in the body of the post, the 100pixel is for the thumbs on this intro, or on the subdirectory pages that collect the posts, and the full-size is linked to the 512, for those of you who want to see everything all up close and dusty:) Though I use the mouse to position the crop corners and bend the curve tool I use keyboard shortcuts for much of the rest, which saves a lot of time. I suspect with thought I could automate even more of this...

Next is to load up xemacs (which again I mostly manipulate with the keyboard) with the file name (which will match the picture, to make moving the related files and pix with wildcards simpler, e.g. 2009WendyZollars.st goes with 2009WendyZollars8218.jpg), insert the template, write the main post, then write this intro, then run the wizard's perl script that converts the file from an .st (written my my pseudocode) to a .html, check the post on the copy of my website at home, and then, after it looks ok, scp the associated files (there are 4 of them, including the rss feed) over to name server 2 (again, using the command line interface---admittedly that was how I was taught, but it's also faster, I think); and ta-da, a new post.

All this takes me, perhaps, an hour or two to do. Creating etsy listings is somewhat similar, and is definitely ground that is ripe for workflow improvement, as is some of the photography stuff. Number one: learn to make etsy listings using conkeror, so's I can use emacs to compose the blurbs. I loathe writing in other text editors, because none of my keyboard shortcuts work.

So what this guy, using a wacom tablet, monitor, keyboard, computer and scanner, goes about showing you the reader to do, is how to take a basic sketch, made on your wacom, and turn it into a file of finished line art, ready to color, complete with cut lines and all the rest. He gives concrete and specific examples for his efficient methods for incorporating visual refs, perspective, reusing backgrounds, logos and the like. He also discusses duplicating textures and repeating units, such spatters and leaves and other organic shapes. He even touches upon using 2d programs (specifically google's sketchup) for making architectural backgrounds ("stats") you can rotate as needed.

Way cool.

Plus, it cuts his work time in half (8--9 hours per page versus 17) and allows him to do cinematographic shots of cityscapes (which if you're drawing superhero comic books, that tend to be set in places like New York city) is very handy indeed. He also discusses his backup routine, which is four-staged. Mine isn't nearly as robust: raid at home, and of course, really critically important files I transfer onto the same server where my website is. But if my house burnt down, yeah, I'd lose 95% or more of my digital images. Of those probably 50% (or more) ought to be pitched. (That said, the guy needs to learn about raid. Disk media, such as the cd/dvds he relies upon are not particularly long-lived, I understand.)

I've had a wacom for years and made mebbe three drawings with it. (I know, painful.) Now I have a sort of beginner's template I can follow. I suck at drawing buildings and other perspective stuff, but I absolutely adore it and have always wanted to incorporate it into my drawings. I suck somewhat less at drawing flowers and leaves and whatnot, but it takes forever to duplicate 'em...computers are great cloning tools. This guy doesn't get into vector-drawing programs (that would be inkscape for me) but between that the google thingie...well, my goodness.

But oh, the learning curve. Ow, ow, ow. This isn't the first time I've attempted this; but I have a real gift for locking up the screen and becoming hopelessly frustrated. I suppose this is the silver lining to a very dark cloud: the currently unemployed wizard is available to help me out of these computer-induced sucking bogs. Perhaps, between the inhouse help and the fairly precise practice protocol I'll actually learn enough to keep going on my own: that initial barrier has always done me in, before.

Anyway, if you're wanting a peek into how a professional, production-oriented artist uses computer based tools to do his work, this book is great. Also, my thanks to the [female] editor, the author's own sensibilities, or whatev, for not putting any of the truly obnoxious boobage that's on his site or, presumably, in his books, in this one. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Oh, I've been practicing beads, too. But this has gotten rather long; so I'll talk about that, and the other excellent book I'm reading, next time.

In the meantime, take a gander at Wendy's wonderful piece.