• 14:38 ..32 plus year-old clam and Salmon chowder at Pudgy's at Seaside myloc.me/1Phf5 #
• 14:38 ... darn good chowder! myloc.me/1PhgL #
• 15:18 .... New hat! tweetphoto.com/5676862 #

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• 20:51 ... aftermath of a long, enjoyable day with Ami'd family in Long Beach ... Phew. myloc.me/1Ndya #
• 14:40 ... Back home with Ami, Ami sister & nephew... Off to SakeOne for the tour & tasting... mmmmm sake ... myloc.me/1O7rS #
• 14:43 ... Occasionally... I want to join the Masons... #
• 16:22 ... Sake sake sake ok I'm fine now <3 #
• 18:40 ... Woo! Party of 24 at Yan's ! Welcome to the rare yet busy fambly reunion! myloc.me/1OiKD #

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Dreaming, near the edge of awakeness.

I pushed a button on Rik's computer for some reason, and then I heard the 'beep' of it resetting. Opened my eyes and it was, indeed, going through the reset sequence.

Doublecheck that it wasn't a dream: I just got up and woke the thing up, and there it is, sitting at the login screen.

Weird.

Just testing to see if my photos post... nothing to see here.. move along.

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open.

- Martha Graham

* * *

Well, I've got Yule cards done for my family and most of my friends, as well as half my pen-pals. I've set aside the ones for work, which don't have to go out until next week at the earliest. My plan is to have all of my pen-pal cards done tonight and paired up with the letters they've sent me over the past few months. I'll spend much of my free time this week catching up on said letters and getting them ready to mail. I've also got to pair up the small presents so that I can send them out with the cards and letters. Not an entirely huge task but a bit daunting. Plus make sure the birthday cards, both current and past due, are done as well.

What a decadent day. Paul took off to spend the day ATV'ing in Vantage, so for the first time in god knows how long I'm alone in the house. Well, not really alone due to ten feline companions. But they've burrowed in for a long winters nap, so I be contentedly alone. At least for a moment, that is.

After a leisurely and lazy lay in, I got up to begin my day and get a start on my Yule cards. For the past several years I spend the day after Thanksgiving at my kitchen table, writing out Yule cards and getting packages ready to mail. This year I decided to sleep the day away instead and yesterday I worked, so today I put on my Action Pants and made a start. I've not counted how many I have to do this year but it's got to be somewhere between 60-80. No complaints, really- doing cards is one of the traditions that I've carried throughout my life and I still really enjoy it. It's getting the gumption to begin that's sometimes difficult, but once I'm started, look out post office!

So in the spirit of the holidays, if anyone here would like a Yule card, please drop me a line with your address. I check my LJ mail regularly and I have a gmail account as well, which is listed on my info page.

And that's my plan for the day, working on pen-pal letters and Yule cards. I've put in my non-traditional holiday music in the disc changer, including Sting's new CD If On a Winter's Night, which is fabulous btw. I've a tendency to avoid most syrupy Christmas music and prefer things like Loreena McKennitt's To Drive a Winter Cold Away and Telynor's Off the Beaten Path. I have a bunch of Windham Hill's Celtic Christmas and Winter Solstice CD's and just pulled out an Anonymous 4's CD to check out. Not exactly the Christmas music I grew up with. I will admit to two CD's that are more "traditional", at least to American Culture: I have one each of Frank Sinatra and Beach Boys CD's. And a Barbara Streisand but only for "I Wonder as I Wander" because it makes me ache with longing, tho I don't know exactly why...

Off I go to write some more...

• 18:32 @hodgman viaea ? myloc.me/1LL43 #
• 18:38 ... A mini vacation with Ami's family in Wa. Back to post-Thanksgiving home Monday night... #

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Late birthday present.

( NSFW )

Just a little warm-up, and an experiment with something different from my usual look. Based fairly closely on what I see in some frames of this blurry, decaying copy of Dr. John performing his song of the same name.

I've been listening to a lot of Dr. John these past few weeks; I'm not sure why. I just snagged a few of his early psychedelic albums off of the net. Really, this stuff was just sort of... the background of my youth, in a way that I never really noticed it. That particular New Orleans variety of funk was all around me growing up, in local commercials and tv shows.

I do not know enough hoodoo to know how inappropriate the title of the song is for this image I plucked from that decrepid video. All Wikipedia tells me is that there's a town way the hell out in the sticks of LA called Mamou, currently billing itself as "The Cajun Music Capital Of The World"; Dr. John is many things but he sure ain't "cajun" - that's a different mix; he's distinctly a New Orleans brew.

Yesterday, on the bus, I halfway listened to a couple of college kids flirting by discussing what music they listened to. And I had this sudden realization: the Art of Noise, one of those acts that changed my idea about what music could be, is now further in the past than the Beatles were when I was introduced to them in my teens.

This made me feel old. Not horrible about being old, just... amazed at where the time's gone.

And nowadays, if you haven't heard either of those acts, it's trivial to hit up the torrents to find a collection of all their albums. You can have the complete career of almost any moderately popular recording artist in a matter of days. We're just swimming in this stuff, and I really look forwards to the eclectic music that'll be produced by some kid who's absorbing all kinds of crazy corners of music right now.

You can do the same with other media, too. I'm watching a progress bar crawl as I copy a huge pile of Matt Howarth's comics to my own machine; I'll get to re-read some of this stuff for the first time in years - my collection of Savage Henry is one of the things I still miss out of my hurricane-destroyed library. I snagged a torrent of every single Asterix album a while back when I was playing with reskinning a card game. Just about anything from the past sixty years or so is out there on the net, somewhere. Maybe not in pristine condition, maybe not in the resolution you'd get if you found a physical copy - but it's good enough to have a real taste of it, and for the ideas and influence to persist.

There's still the moral issue of properly reimbursing creators for the time they spent, of course. I'm on both sides of the fence here. But, geeze, we swim in this ocean of culture and it gets thicker and thicker all the time. What can we build out of it? Where can we go next?

1. Block out fifteen minutes of your life without distraction.
2. Queue up all three of these videos in their entirety.
3. Start watching the first one. Go on to the second and third one as they end. Enjoy.

Lazy roleplaying: Kalinda, my serpent character, delivers a lecture on How Magic Works.

Kalinda exhales slowly, smoke swirling out in strange sigils, and smiles. "Half of it is simply gaining and keeping that narrative trust. I sit around pulling things out of the air - and that establishes me as a sorceress, without me ever stating, baldfacedly, 'Kalinda is a powerful sorceress'." She licks her lips with a pointed tongue. "So disbelief loosens around me, and I can... get things done."

Kalinda waves a hand carelessly, and your chair rises into the air. "Edit too much, take too many liberties, and it all comes crashing down." The walls fall away, like stage flats losing their props, revealing a black, empty space behind; off in the distance, things flicker fugitively. "When do you stop believing my story?" And quicksilver rains down from the midnight sky. "How far can I go? How far can I weave my words?" Columns of light burst all around, coalescing into strange angelic beings, their countless arms swirling and drifting; they precess clockwise, singing. "And can I break my own spell?" Pickles fall out of the angel's mouths, shimmering with notes.

How much this applies to reality, in less ostentatious ways, is left as an exercise for the reader. Experiment!

So it's the meme where you get five questions is someone. If you want some from me, the first five people to reply saying "Resistance is futile" will get five questions. Given how spacey I am they may or not actually have something to do with you so be warned. (Normally the meme doesn't limit the requests but I think it sounds sensible.)

These came from paka.

1. I pretty much think of your art as being synonymous with Illustrator especially, so I'm curious if you've worked much with traditional media for colors - and if so, which you really enjoyed, preferred, or found interfaced best with your computer work.

I have not, really. Until I came to Illustrator I really kinda avoided color a lot; most of my old color work was done in Deluxe Paint. I guess I am just a digital artist at heart.

Media I've tried in the past with some modicum of success - or at least I thought so at the time - are watercolor, colored pencil, gouache, acrylic, and cel-vinyl on acetate. The last was the closest I ever came to the flat colors I love without going digital; most of my influences are from people working at the early intersections of art and printing technology, who'd just lay down a flat chunk of rubylith or something to call for a swath of color on the blue plate or whatever. I keep thinking I want to get around to getting a new set of colored pencils; I miss them just enough for quick color comps, and the prospect of picking out details over gouache.

But mostly I am a digital artist. When I work with physical medium I get very different results, a little crude and unskilled from lack of practice, deliberately full of the marks of the tools. Nothing's really quite gelled into a look for me the way AI has.

2. Who're your favorite artists these days?

I don't think they've changed lately; nobody's really come into my world who can override what running into people like Winsor McCay, Walt Kelly, Phil Foglio, Matt Howarth, and Carol Lay at earlier points of my life did.

3. Is there anything in your personality, or worldview, that you think is very specifically New Orleans - stuff you wouldn't have if you were from a different part of the world, or even a different part of the south?

Mm. I've always felt like I'm a bit more laid-back than a lot of people I know. Relax, it's not worth fretting over, we'll work it out sometime. Later, it's hot, let me have a nap first. Sure, there are "type A" personalities around New Orleans, but it's just not a tense, high-speed city. And I took that attitude to LA, and to Boston; I didn't let these more high-speed cities change my ideas of how urgent things are. I don't know if that's a Southern thing or a New Orleans thing; I've never really spent much time in the rest of the South.

I also feel like my attitude towards politicians is shaped by growing up in Louisiana: there, we expect them to be using their position for personal gain to a certain extent. "He's a crook but he's our crook", with a certain sense of obligation and a sense of what's going to far - sure, steal a little off the top and enrich your cronies, but spread the wealth around and do some good for the poorest parts of your constituency, too. Most American politics of the past years gets it the other way around, with a lot of stuff off the top for the wealthy and next to nothing for the people at the bottom.

I suspect being open to weirdness may also be partially due to growing up in a cosmopolitan, crazy, decadent city like New Orleans.

4. What were your favorite books and TV programs as a kid?

...This one draws a blank, at first. I watched an awful lot of awful 1970s Saturday morning cartoons. My parents regularly watched M.A.S.H. I vaguely, vaguely recall loving Captain Kangaroo though not much of it, and I dimly recall tuning in early every Saturday for a version of Mighty Mouse that was a continuing cliff-hanger set in space. Books? Well, the one I learnt to read with was The Little Red Caboose - my mother tells me I made her read that one over and over, and one day she found me with it on the sofa, reading it out loud; she thought I'd memorized it but it turned out I was simply reading it, once she tried getting me to read other things. Favorites, it's hard to pick now that my library is gone; I'd be able to look at it and say "oh, this, and this, and this". There was a lot of Larry Niven on my shelves, later on - my library quickly became mostly fantasy and SF, with a bias more towards the latter than the former.

Mostly what I watched was cartoons. Tiny Toons, the Bakshi Mighty Mouse, stuff like that. 'Star Blazers' intrigued me a little but it was on at a weird hour I could never catch; if I'd seen it regularly my style might have taken a different direction. Or not; I watched 'Speed Racer' regularly too and mostly just found it delightfully weird. Especially its insane end credit sequence. And, damn, I thought of some live-action show for a moment, but now it's gone. Oh! Yes. Of course, Doctor Who on the local PBS station, usually followed by the intense weird of Monty Python. Which is less weird now that I've learnt a bit more about the culture it was in, but...

Also, we had an encyclopedia, and I'd devour chunks of that like any proto-geek. And browse the dictionary looking for Interesting Words.

And I had "The Smithsonian Book Of Newspaper Comics", which was just... amazing. So many beautiful things to look at.

5. Why do you think your relationship with your mother is that healthy and supportive?

She's told me stories about her relationship with her mother, and it boils down to this: Grandma M. was not a very good mother, and rather than carry the misery along, she made an explicit choice to use her as a bad example. I have a feeling that in many cases, she said to herself "How would Madge react to this?" and then made sure that whatever she did, it wasn't that.

And then, Rik and I curled up in front of his computer and watched this strange little movie called "Reiner Brockhoff Loves Los Angeles", in which a professor drives around LA and talks about how wonderful it is. It hit my nostalgia buttons hard; I paused the movie for a discourse on the "Thomas Guide" - the giant book that constitutes a map of LA, so embedded in the culture that people tend to give out addresses with their page and grid reference in the Guide now and then, for a tour of certain parts of Hollywood via Google Maps, and a dig through Street View to find my apartment in Glendale and the anonymous building Spümcø occupied when I first worked there.

It was incredibly, weirdly romantic. Other people watch love stories about people; we watch love stories about cities.

Today, Rik and I slept in until about one. When we finally got out of bed, we decided to go for a walk. The city felt almost empty; almost everyone must have been in various houses doing their family get-togethers. Us? We walked around for a while in the unusually balmy fall weather, looking at trees, and talking.

It was pretty nice. I can even finally see why people like "fall"; so far I've mostly hated it because it's just been a short precursor to the half of the year I spend huddled under the blankets, but it's been lingering a lot this year and it's rather nice. The only thing that would have made it better would have been if Kin had been around as well, but he's off in Seattle having fun with other friends.

Then we came home. I'm going to make some pizza in a little bit, and I finally got around to downloading the source to Adium - I'm giving serious thought to using it as the base for making a Mac muck client that has features like "nice typography", since it already has infrastructure for tabbed windows and HTML views with user-selectable styles. Savitar is stuck in OS9 land, and Atlantis is nice but is really... clearly not designed by a visual person.

( basic muck client features... )

When opportunity knocks, open the door even if you're in your bathrobe. - Heather Zschock

Today I'm thankful for...

... my inner resiliency.
... movies that Paul and I can enjoy together.
... funky dreamings.
... a perfect cup of tea. Today's was Snow Leopard blend from the Teacup.
... knowing when I have a bad attitude, gritting my teeth and shifting it.
... dealing with guilt in as healthy mannner as possible, at least at this time.
... kick ass music.
... having some time to myself this morning, even if it means getting up early to have it.
... having beautiful friends in my life who make it more vibrant and wonder filled.

Off to get a sekret surprise for after dinner. It's going to be a quiet affair, only our household and a couple friends. Just exactly what I want and need after running full-bore the last year, especially since we're moving into the madness of the holidays. This holy-day season I'm going to attempt again to keep a balance between quiet introspection and celebrating with friends and family. I've a bunch of spiritual stuff in the works too, which I'll post about some time in the future.

For now, I wish everyone a blessed and delicious food-filled sort of day. May you find love, laughter and quiet contentment this day and always!

So many of my selves are gone, fallen victim to idle purges on mucks. I just found out that a few on Puzzlebox are gone, something I never expected to happen until the whole place is dismantled.

A brief moment of silence, then, for:

( Read more... )

• 15:48 www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgbNymZ7vqY - YOU. WATCH THIS NOW. #

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