This is all sorts of nerve-wracking. Even though it's only a very, very small simple thing I'm working on. But hey, I'm started! And being started is better than being all paralyzed and miserable and hiding. Or so I tell myself. The Professor has started calling me Boss Printer, which makes me laugh.



So, all you lovely internet people out there: send me your current address, if I don't already have it, and I'll mail* you a thing. Unless there are too many of you, and I run out, in which case I may have to mail you a different thing, some time later. (I'll screen comments in case you want to post addresses here.)

. . . . . . . . . . .

* No purchase necessary. Some restrictions apply. Void where prohibited. I reserve the right not to mail you things if you seem like you might be a creepy stalker who's just trying to get my return address or something.

Happy Roasted Bird Corpse Day Thanksgiving!

We've devoured our birds (Cornish hens, which seem to be turning into quite an ongoing tradition), but haven't gotten as far as eating pie yet. We gave the cat a few token bits of meat, and she seemed content, although I suspect she wishes we'd make sushi instead.



So that's pretty much the state of the household.

This is probably the most awesome use of knitted blanket-squares ever.



The card says it's a housewarming/wedding anniversary/birthday/attainment of degree/other festive event present, which means it's probably in honor of the Feast of Boris. Not only that, but it came with balloons! Everybody knows what you're supposed to do with a lovely soft wool blanket and some balloons, right? Aww yeah.

Thank you, Chronographia!

Insight of the day:

The making-of-things (mainly art, but really any kind of creative endeavor) is a fussy and demanding process, sometimes. It's like cultivating a garden full of extremely specialized plants, that will only thrive and bloom in very specific conditions. So you coddle them, and adjust the temperature and the humidity and the soil pH and so on, and you weed and mulch and water and put up sun-shades or windscreens or protective glass cloches, and you nurse your plants along so that they will produce flowers and fruit.

And then some asshole comes along and throws a bunch of beer cans and cigarette butts into your garden, and maybe takes a pee in the corner. And he thinks this is hilarious, or at least not really a big deal.

The people who make snide remarks about the things I'm genuinely interested in, and that I spend time pursuing, are throwing beer cans in my garden. And I need to remind myself that I am fully justified in disliking them for it, and avoiding their company.

I've just thought of an exciting(?) new geeky game. Fun at parties! All you need is a group of people wanting to be entertained, and access to Wikipedia. Here's how it works:

Divide into two teams, as you would for charades. The people on each team write down some names of well-known people, fictional characters, or other entities, and put them into a hat or other suitable vessel (one hat for each team). One of the teams pulls a name out of their hat, and looks up that person on Wikipedia. They tell the other team all the categories listed at the bottom of the Wikipedia entry, and the other team has to try to guess who the mystery person is. There should probably be an option of leaving out categories that would make it too obvious, or reserving them as possible hints, or maybe different numbers of points could be awarded based on how many categories it took for the other team to guess.

So, for example, given the categories "Fictional characters from Iowa," "Fictional captains," "Fictional admirals," and "Starfleet officers," the answer would be Captain James Kirk.

Then the other team pulls a name out of their hat, the the first team has to guess.

If somebody manages to come up with a name that everyone agrees is reasonably famous, but doesn't have a Wikipedia entry, their team should probably get some bonus points. And then have to add a suitable entry.

It wouldn't have to be limited to guessing at people, either; you could open up the field to all sorts of irritatingly obscure minutae, depending on the temperament of the crowd. I suspect that the game would rapidly degenerate into all sorts of argument, but that might be okay.

I seem to be cross-posting links all over the internet, so I might as well stick this here as well.

My poor neglected fractal gallery has been overhauled, and is now an exciting brand-new shiny fractal gallery. It looks mostly the same, but all of the behind-the-scenes parts have been completely re-mangled so as to make it easier to add new things. And it is indeed really easy! So much so that I'm starting to worry that I'm in danger of including way too many lame old pictures that would be better left in the hypothetical sock drawer of my hard drive.

The only stuff on there right now, though, is a bunch of really early images from my first year and a half of fractal-making. I figured it might be fun to start at the very beginning, and then add things in more or less chronological order over the next few days or weeks.

It makes me all weirdly nervous to have it actively running again, instead of just moldering in disregarded stasis. But it's also been somehow soothing to look at all my first fractals, the ones from the time when it was all still new and exciting and hadn't gotten all tangled up in lots of extraneous stupidity. I liked fractals then purely because I thought they looked cool, and I still think so.

I've just gotten back to town, and have internet access for the first time in several days. I didn't miss it as much as I might have expected to.

My cousin's wedding was quite the deal.

The cat seems happy to see us.

I don't know if I'll be glad to be back and check on how the local hobos are doing, or if I'll just be annoyed that now it's too noisy to sleep again. Sleep would be good.

It seems like I've spent all of August fretting over NaArMaMo on my fractal journal, and now it's over and it's the time of year when school starts only I'm not going back to school and aaaaaaaarghh. It's really weird. And of course I still haven't figured out what to do with myself, but I sure did save a lot of fractal parameters this month.

A number of the ones I like best didn't get posted, because I'm still trying to decide if I should enter them into the contest.

Also, it seems pretty clear to me that I'm spread too thinly over too many blogs, and that I really only have the time and energy and interest to keep up with one. I've been wondering if I should try to consolidate them all into some conglomerated thing, and put it on my website, and stop trying to keep the fractal stuff separated from the boring weather and furniture-moving stuff I generally post on here. (Update: we've been moving the chairs and tables around again!)

It has also become increasingly clear to me over the last month that I would like to be able to either a) be more comfortable calling myself an artist and thinking of myself as such, or b) figure out what the hell else it is that I am, so I can tell people what that is. Also I would like to be able to think of my chosen art form as a good and legitimate and worthwhile art form, instead of as some kind of embarrassing red-headed stepchild of a half-assed art form. I'm not entirely sure how to be less defensive about the fact that I spend a lot of time thinking about fractals, and making pictures with fractals. You never hear about the early photographers feeling like this.

Dear self,

GET A DAMNED JOB.

It would get you out of the house, provide some income, and give you a reason (or at least an excuse) for never doing anything art-related anymore. I know your resume is pathetic, but it would probably be passable with a bit more bashing. And seriously, how much qualification does any prospective barista or fry-cook need?

And then you can stop pretending to yourself and the world that you have the slightest interest in what's current in the horrible, horrible world of art.

Love,
Mr. Velocipede

Arrgh, my brain is completely freaking stuck on fractals.

The Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest 2009 is happening, and so I'm wondering what I should enter. Something I already have? (Not recommended, according to the entry rules.) Something I'm currently working on? (None of it seems good enough.) Something entirely new, then. Better get on that, and quick. Although there's more than a month before the entry deadline.

So that means I have plenty of time to think about it, work on pictures, obsess over minutiae, fidget, second-guess myself, look at the previous winners, look at the previous non-winning entries, contemplate color, muse about monochrome, and generally drive myself insane.

It's one of those annoying things where I feel like it shouldn't be all that big a deal, but somehow it is anyway. Also, it's making the NaArMaMo posting more difficult, because I don't want to put stuff online if it might turn out to be contest-worthy in some future adjusted version.

I'm so stupidly much in fractal-mode that when the Professor and I passed a gallery today, and noticed some large paintings with nice clouds, and then went in to look at them more closely, I was disappointed that they didn't have infinitely much more detail when seen up close. Just rather large brush-strokes, that seemed to dissolve into indistinguishable blotches when you got within eyeball-range. (Good colors though.)

There are probably other things going on in my life right now, but I can't remember what they are.

Hey, internet! I'm NaArMaMo-ing, over at Form Follows Function. Or at least I've started. We'll see how long I can keep it up.

After further consideration, I have thought of a counter-argument for myself. Given how much trouble I occasionally have convincing people that I'm not a crazed psychedelic all-night-raver (what with the making fractals and collecting crystals and liking shiny holographic optical toys), do I really want to have yet another strong stereotype to fight?

I know there would be days when I would enjoy it, looking like an acid-shaman-in-training and then settling in for a quiet evening with a nice book and a cup of tea.

But I'm also pretty sure that there would be lots of times when it would cause people to make completely wrong assumptions which would irritate me. Not just the ones deciding I was crazy/stupid/dangerous/in need of punishment, but also the ones wanting to be friendly/social/supportive for all the wrong reasons. I don't want to have to fend off random passers-by trying to sell me weed, in addition to the ones who want to sell me RealChange or who want me to sign their wretched clipboards.

And I could definitely use fewer encounters with those in need of a light or some rolling papers, not more.

So, on the whole, I will probably give it a miss for now.

I've been wondering if maybe I should try having dreadlocks.

No very coherent reason for this notion, except that somehow they seem like they might be good in hot weather. And I've spent so much of my life fighting my stupid hair, and being unhappy about it, that the idea of an extremely-low-maintenance style, that's supposed to look random, is awfully appealing.

After a fair amount of Googling, I'm both more interested and more hesitant. It seems like it takes many months for the (felting?) process to get going properly. Many of the pictures I found were decidedly unattractive, but it's hard to tell how much of that is due to the apathy of the person in question. Possibly, with a certain amount of fussing and maintenance, the mess can look at least a little more intentional, even in the early stages. And some versions look pretty amazing.

If I had really bizarre hair, would I be willing to wear more of my jewelry? I might. I often try putting on some beads or something, and then end up feeling completely overwhelmed by them because my face and hair are so bland. I like putting my hair into braids and buns and coils, but it ends up looking too formal sometimes. Hmm.

There is also the fact that it would almost certainly horrify my poor father. I can't decide if that's a plus or a minus.

It has been unpleasantly hot here for the last several days, and is apparently supposed to keep on being the same, or more so, for the rest of the week. I feel like I'm back in Pittsburgh.

The weather must be triggering some old pieces of Pavlovian conditioning, because I keep wanting to go shopping for impractical clothes with Aunty Deluvian. It was one of our usual hot-weather things to do, partly because late summer is one of the times when lots of stuff is on sale, and partly because being in a store means taking advantage of corporate air-conditioning.

Instead, I've been bashing at fractals with the kind of single-minded focus that probably counts as unhealthy obsession. I've learned a fair amount about iterated function systems. The huge deep-zoom render I started three days ago says it has less than sixty hours still to go. And I've got started with lining up a project to make proper archival prints.

I'm terribly nervous about the prospect of prints. How do I price them? How do I market them? For that matter, which of my enormous backlog of images should I start with? My poor website is suffering badly from neglect and ongoing indifference, and getting it into workable shape seems like a thankless and miserable job. (Ugh, I hate how much of my past internet efforts were fueled by having a particular kind of audience. It made me stupidly dependent on that audience as a motivating fuel, and as soon as the supply vanished, so did the website. It makes me completely ashamed of myself, and even less likely to put work into the damned coding and design.)

There's Etsy, I suppose. It was cumbersome and somewhat off-putting when I experimented with it before, but maybe I just need to work on becoming more familiar with the system.

Urrgh, but even then I will no doubt need to have my own website as well. I really just want to go into hiding and stay there. Don't look at me, internet! Don't even read this message.

Some time ago, I found a set of instructions for making gummy Legos. It was while I was still in school, so I mentally filed it away under "awesome" and forgot all about it.

I re-discovered it while cleaning out my bookmarks, and realized that I suddenly have lots of free time, and could use a project. So I ordered some food-grade silicone mold-making materials. Today I spent most of the afternoon and evening messing with weird rubbery goo of various kinds. There's the silicone, which resembles Silly Putty until it cures, and becomes rubbery. And there's the gelatin, which I flavored with Gatorade powder because I didn't have any good flavors of Jello handy.

So far I've made two molds: a large bolt and a small Buddha. Now I'm going through all my boxes of random stuff, wondering which of my ten thousand things I need to use as the next mold-form. Hee hee.



There are a few more pictures on Flickr. And I'm also wondering how this would work with chocolate.

Lately I've been learning to make a fairly plausible cheese sauce, suitable for putting on pasta. Tonight I was stirring sauce, and thinking about a time in my childhood that my parents had made macaroni-and-cheese. Usually they used orange cheese (Cheddar? Colby?) for that, but the particular time I'm thinking of, they'd used some kind of white cheese instead, and I thought it looked completely creepy and wrong, and refused to eat it.

My dad was annoyed and offended at my refusal, and tried various tactics to persuade me to eat the stuff, but I was a horrible stubborn child. So he decided that the best answer would be to "fix" the macaroni-and-cheese with food coloring.

It would have been a plausible solution, maybe, only it turned out that we only had red food coloring. The result was an unnatural sort of sickly pink, about the most un-cheese-like color you can possibly imagine. And there was much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.

So tonight, as I ate my appallingly grown-up cheese sauce (with multiple cheeses, herbs, and capers, such as my younger self would consider entirely abominable), the burning question in my mind was what kind of cheese was that?

I don't remember us having very many kinds of white cheese around when I was a kid. It wouldn't have been mozzarella, because that's all wrong for sauce. What in the world would it have been? I suppose at some point I'll have to call my mom, and ask her if she remembers.

I am slowly coming to the conclusion that I dislike how Twitter wants you to reduce and condense your life down to simplified, 140-character sound bites. I suppose there must be some amazing and Zen-infused people out there who can write graceful poetic marvels in that space, but apparently I'm not one of them. I like being able to ramble on pointlessly for several paragraphs at a time.

Also, the only status updates I ever seem to have in mind are along the lines of "Here is today's exciting new flavor of screaming suicidal depression," and those never get me a response I'm happy with.

(Insert obligatory post-traumatic art-school bilge here.)

One particular difficulty that art school seems to have amplified to the point of near-psychosis is that when somebody says "Hey, I like this thing you have made, and might like to own it," my instant, straight-from-the-spinal-cord response is "ARRGH ARRRRGHH FUCK YOU DIE DIE DIE."
. . . . . . . . . . .

If I think of various internet gathering-places as being analogous to kinds of real-life social events, Twitter seems like a cocktail mixer, with lots of people who don't know each other, babbling inanities and one-liners, trying to be clever enough to catch someone's attention, and clustering around celebrities. It's probably possible to make a real connection there, but it doesn't seem like there'd be any good way of following up on it.

Facebook is more like a huge frat party, increasingly taken over by annoying games. There are people there who you might like to talk to, but they're all lurking around the edges, being inconspicuous wallflowers, their conversations drowned out in the screaming of people passing each other drinks.

There used to be bits of LiveJournal that were like a convention, and in some places people would give long speeches, followed by discussion among the audience or panel members. And there used to be bits of LiveJournal that were like a dinner party, where people would sometimes run into their friends' friends and strike up a conversation. I miss those.

Yeah. Damn. I really suck at writing anything for the internet, these days.

I've been messing with flame fractals, and can't decide if this counts as a complete waste of time.


Peacock Nautilus by ~mrvelocipede on deviantART

I am trying to figure out the source of my increasing paralysis and despair. It seems to be the result of a long series of difficulties having to do with art, the making of things, and my own damaged personality.

To begin with, I do make things. There seems to be no getting around that. It's not something I do because I enjoy it, it's more a waste product of being alive, or at best a by-product. It's roughly equivalent in my mind to exhaled carbon dioxide, or (when I'm in a still more dismal state) a strictly literal pile of crap.

It is important to be very clear about this point: I do not see any value in the things I make.

Generally, it is expected that someone who makes art will sooner or later want to sell it. I've never, ever had the slightest interest in selling the things I make. Nearly everyone I've tried to explain this to has said something along the lines of, "Oh, you still think everything you make is incredibly precious and you can't bear to let it go. You'll get over that once you get hungry enough and have bills to pay!"

This is wrong, and completely misses the point.

I don't want to sell my things because I see them as worthless, and I can't bring myself to ask for money in exchange for some vague cloud of exhaled carbon dioxide, or indeed for a smelly pile of crap. People often tell me how cynical I am, but dammit, I'm not that cynical.

However, without some means of getting rid of the stuff, it accumulates around me, and slowly suffocates and poisons me. Indeed, I would love for someone to take it away, so that I wouldn't have to think about it anymore. If the removal process somehow involved the poisonous waste products turning into money, that would be okay with me. I just don't want to have to engineer the transaction myself.

I guess what it comes down to is that I know I need help, but I'm not sure whether I should be looking for an agent, a salesman, or a night-soil collector.

Arrrgh, must drag myself out of the summer fractal-sink and do something useful. Like unpack the last of my horrible boxes. Or sift through some of the piled-up e-mail. Or find a damned job.

It's likely, however, that I'm going to keep fractaling for at least a few more days.

Since school ended, I've been thinking about all the many things I should be doing, and that I'm mostly not doing, and wondering what, if anything, I want to be doing. I had gotten pretty good at doing assignments and homework and such. It took a certain amount of strategy, because I'm astoundingly bad at doing things I'm not at all interested in, so I would play these mind-games with myself, where the idea was to find something about the assignment that counted as legitimately interesting. That way, I would have some reason to actively pursue the thing, instead of having to force myself kicking and screaming. (I really hate when I have to do that.)

So I've spent five years being artificially interested in things that were more or less arbitrary, and that came from outside myself. Mostly the interest only lasted long enough to get the work handed in or presented, and then vanished as though it had never existed. And all the time, I was ignoring the things I wanted to do myself, because I knew I didn't have enough time or energy to juggle everything and still get my schoolwork done. It's been a constant denial of an awful lot of my own instincts and impulses.

Now, suddenly, the whole structure of things has altered, and I'm awfully disappointed to discover that there's practically nothing I genuinely want to spend my time on. I worry that I've learned the lessons of ascetic rule-following and deadline-meeting a little too well.

But it turns out that I (apparently) want to spend a lot of time and energy figuring out how to write fractal coloring algorithms. And making fractal pictures. At least, that's what I've been doing for the last several days. I can't decide if that's reassuring or not.