hmpf

Discovered this game beta a couple of days ago and found it so thoroughly enchanting that I've since played it three or four times (it's only about 10 minutes long). It's a totally unique concept, and the artwork is utterly beautiful. If you need something that'll put a smile on your face, go download this:

Gorogoa

Short impression of the gameplay: Video

Sometimes it really is true that a picture says more than a thousand words. Chris Jordan makes the argument for a radical change of our throwaway culture more convincingly than any essay, no matter how passionate, could:

http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php?id=11

Why are game genres that I really don't like beginning to look so damn gorgeous nowadays?

This makes me want to learn how to play airborne shoot'em-ups (or whatever you call that genre). Check out the trailer, the screenshots don't do it justice.

There seems to be, nowadays, a subset of computer games/video games that are mainly about navigating a work of art, rather than about accomplishing any kind of directive. I hesitate to even call what's happening there worldbuilding, although that's a somewhat related phenomenon. But it's really closer to painting and sculpture than to worldbuilding and storytelling. Or maybe there's a bit of all of these in there. Anyways, this is nearly utterly about a new kind of aesthetic experience. 'New' in that you don't stand in front of the work of art, but walk/fly/jump around in it. Strangely enough, even with a 2D game, the fact of being able to 'walk around in it' changes the aesthetic experience, in ways that I find difficult to explain.

I've already begun to learn to love platformers. Will I learn to love other previously unattractive genres, too? (But my reflexes are crap! I'll never get good enough to really experience these games! *cries*)

Here's another example.

**

Here, have two short, artistic online platformers:

Shy Dwarf
Seven

So, for the past several days I've been doing the following:

- make a photocopy of a pencil sketch
- paint over the dark areas of the copy of the pencil sketch in black ink
- paint over the light areas of the copy of the pencil sketch in white paint
- photocopy the result
- repeat.

The aim of the exercise is getting something that will consist only of uniform black and white areas - something that may be printed on t-shirts. However, no matter how many times I repeat the process, I can't seem to get the drawing cleaned up enough. I.e., the photocopier produces irregularities - turning the dark areas lighter, turning the light areas darker; and the painted-over versions are not clean enough, either.

I suspect I'll need to learn how to scan this and do it in a graphics program?

Only, I've no idea how to do this. Neither how to achieve a good-quality scan, nor how to clean it up in Paintshop Pro.

Any pointers?

nager recently asked for more art. So, here's more ancient Hmpf art.

Another strongly celtic inspired one.

Shameless historical eclecticism

The Big One. Took one year to paint. Colours didn't come out very well in the scan. And it's so large I had to scan it in two parts, and I couldn't be bothered to find out how to use Paintshop properly, so what you get instead is just the two scans cropped to vaguely the same size, on a web page. All that yellow, btw? Is gold. As in, *real* gold. This painting cost me a fortune...

Detail from the above, slightly larger, so you can see some of the finer details.

All of this, btw, was done with a brush. Yes, even the tiny dots and lines everywhere. I never used a pen; just insanely tiny brushes. For the dots I cut off the tip of one of those brushes.

... were the two seemingly antithetical results of my short but 'intense' trip to Britain. The physical exhaustion, a result of travelling 18 hours by coach, showed as a desire to sleep through all of Monday, interrupted only by two hours of work in the evening. The - unexpected! - mental relaxation showed as sudden inspiration to vid and make jewellery. Granted, not the most intelligent thing to do when you have a deadline for your thesis and still no idea what to write, and I would probably have appreciated a sudden *thesis-related* inspiration more... But, having stifled most of my creative impulses for months now, until I eventually nearly lost them, I decided to give in to them this time.

Vidding didn't go too well (see previous entry *g*), but jewellery making did. I've started making a necklace for my mother, one I promised her so many years ago it's not even funny. She had these labradorite beads, and I wanted to make something really nice from them, but wasn't really happy with any idea I had over the years. I've now ended up using a very simple idea that came to me literally in my sleep. It truly is ridiculously simple, but I think that's why I like it - all the more 'sophisticated' ideas I had earlier just didn't fit the beads very well, but simplicity does. Plus, I get to melt lots of little blobs of silver for this design, and there are few things more relaxing and satisfying - nor more foolproof! - than melting metal. (Seriously! You try it! *g*) And then I get to hit the blobs with a hammer a lot - also foolproof and relaxing. (This is what goldsmithing-as-therapy would look like, I tell you.) The only thing about this necklace that may get the least bit tricky is the clasp, but I'll manage that as well, I'm sure. Maybe I'll think of a very simple mechanism for it... *g*

Oh, and I still haven't told you about the insane trip *to* Britain, have I? That really deserves an epic poem... I'm not sure I'm up to that today.

... while surfing the jewellery web in the last couple of weeks or so:

- Every good idea I've had, someone else has had, too.
- The same goes for every bad idea.
- Most jewellery out there I find vaguely uninteresting.
- A fair percentage I find ugly and/or *profoundly* uninteresting.
- A small percentage I find intellectually/artistically interesting but otherwise unappealing.
- A very small percentage I actually like. This is mostly stuff that looks like something I have made, was planning to make, or might have thought of but haven't yet.
- Even some of the stuff I like I find vaguely 'boring' - because it, too, has been done before/is being done all over the place.
- So far I haven't discovered anything that gives me the kind of feeling of desperate inadequacy that the best writing I read gives me. When reading, I often get a painful reaction of "I wish I'd written that/I'll never be able to write like that." Not so with jewellery, even though I am *not* a technically very accomplished goldsmith, thanks to lack of practice and experience.

So, to sum it up:

1.) Originality probably doesn't exist - or if it exists, is such a rare stroke of luck that putting it at the top of your priorities is a recipe for making yourself unhappy.
2.) My ideas are neither better nor worse than those of most other goldsmiths out there.
3.) When it comes to jewellery, I may actually value useability and aesthetic pleasure slightly higher than originality and artistic value.
4.) I think I can actually live with being average, in this area of my life. I have absolutely none of the (unhealthy?) ambition here that I have when writing.

Also:

If I'm completely honest with myself... I don't think I care about university half as much as I care about goldsmithing. Considering I've almost completely abandoned goldsmithing in the last few years, (at least nominally) for the sake of university, that is an alarming thing to realise. (I already knew that I cared about writing far more than I cared about uni, which is also alarming.)

One conclusion to draw from this that I should abandon any idea I still have of doing a Ph.D.

The other conclusion is that I need to find a way to integrate goldsmithing into my life again, and to keep it a part of my life - as I need to keep writing a part of my life; both of which may be difficult or even impossible to accomplish, considering I also need to start earning money reliably and in sufficient amounts very soon now.

I had a dream two nights ago (two days ago). I was on my way to work, with a taxi driver. At some point we stopped in an area where there were lots and lots of artist's studios. I went into one, randomly, struck up a conversation with the guy inside; I didn't want to leave. But the taxi driver kept tugging my arm, telling me I had to go to work.

So, eventually, I left. And went to work. Which was my current job at the library, with some bizarre dream features but mostly recognisable. I felt a great sense of loss.

That's an amazingly clear dream, going by my subconscious's standards.

*

He picked the chain up; one end chuckled and flickered down the stone. He turned with it to catch the orange glimmer.
Prisms.
Some of them, anyway.
Others were round.
He ran the chain across his hand. Some of the round ones were transparent. Where they crossed the spaces between his fingers, the light distorted. He lifted the chain to gaze through one of the lenses. But it was opaque. Tilting it, he saw pass, dim and inches distant in the circle, his own eye, quivering in the quivering glass."
- Samuel R. Delany: Dhalgren

*

I'm meeting my old teacher tomorrow. This may be the worst possible time in my life I could pick to get started again. Still...

Well, asking a few simple technical questions isn't exactly getting started again. But I worked some today, and became aware I'm beginning to forget essential steps of the most basic processes. If I wait much longer, I may have to start again at zero... if I ever start again, that is.

My hands are horribly weak. I should do something about that. Half an hour of filing something, per day?

*

My clutter problem? Seems to be common among metalworkers. Maybe I'd get more work done if I adopted this kind of setup? *g*

I just solved a mystery that has been bugging me for five years. Five years ago I saw these little white tents all over the city, in random places - tiny tents, about knee-height, made from white tarpaulin and tree branches painted white. The last I found out about them made them out to be a bit of a mystery to everybody - there was an article about it in the newspaper. Then, as suddenly as they had appeared, they were gone, as if a tribe of invisible miniature nomads had struck camp and moved on.

I've now found out that they were part of an art installation that apparently belonged to (or at least was timed to coincide with) a week-long festival in 2002. Unfortunately information about them on the net is next to non-existent, but here's what little I found:

http://www.ap-interactio.net/p_site/ARTEP_TEMPO.HTML

And I also found out today that someone has done what I've been meaning to do for years, and taken loads of photographs of my favourite recurring graffiti here in the city. I'm always cheered when I discover a new one of these guys:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tijuana/sets/72057594088109720/