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1 48 am pst [ it all began with bananas ] Nancy has been nudging me today about creating a weblog* so I offer up this single link as my honorary weblog site of the day: Phone sex operator gets workers' compensation for masturbation injury I was in a creative mood this [technically yesterday] evening and thus I made some art. It all began with bananas. One of the most frustrating experiences of my life was to sit down in the livingroom as a pre-teen with paper, a pencil, and a banana. I remember this occasion very clearly, for that day I learned how little my hand wanted to obey my eye. Try as i might, I could not draw anything but a lumpy, mis-shapen banana. I have always since used bananas as my indication of sketching ability. Lord only knows what Matthew and I were talking about, but somehow we got on the subject of sketching with regards to my new Wacom tablet and I launched Adobe Illustrator and proceeded to whip out a pathetic banana quite reminiscient of my attempt so many years ago. Matthew, who is a wonderful sketcher, proceeded to spend more than a half hour creating his banana masterpiece. Here they are, at half size:
I am, in general, a perfectionist, but obviously not when it comes to bananas. After Matthew was finished, I was determined to make something lovely, so I began drawing a banana, realized that I would do much better drawing a carrot, and wound up with this (also half size):
It needs more texture, but I felt it was a good start. At this point I was inspired, so I whipped out my watercolors. I made some crack about Matthew painting a skiing scene (because skiing is one of his passions) and then decided that I wanted to do one myself. Here are my two skiing creations:
I would later resort to one of my traditional obsessions -- trees -- and do a nice watercolor with purple leaves. When I was again to use my computer, I tried to calibrate the monitor (LCD) so that the colors would show up right. I was utterly unsucessful. All of the calibration programs seem to be designed for regular, as opposed to laptop, monitors. Each program begins by instructing one to turn the contrast up to its highest setting. My monitor doesn't seem to have a contrast setting, only brightness... Anyway, perhaps my digital snapshot of my tree painting looks better on a regular monitor, but because I was displeased with it, I made two digital variations:
* A weblog ('blog for short; aka portal) is a list of interesting links with commentary. Dia-log lists sites with journals and web-logs. Go back up. 9 20 am pst [ STDs and Mars ] And now for the heinous truth: the reason I don't have a weblog is that I feel that this here diary is a decent place to post interesting links. On that note, one of my mailing lists has been entertaining a thoughtful discussion of HIV, AIDS, and STDs. In honor of the useful links being thrown around, here is a small collection: In totally unrelated news, the Mars Polar Lander is scheduled to touch down near the south pole of Mars at 12 14 pm pst today. I have a friend who is working on NASA's first manned mission to Mars (I think the first stage gets launched in 2012 and people land there in 2020). Her most recent project was redesigning space suits for women, since the normal ones are designed for people who are, in general, taller and differently shaped. I'll admit to taking notice of gender issues in general, but it never would have occurred to me that space suits need to be redesigned to accomidate women. Male designers are amazing! Actually, the related story that irked me the most was the first versions of voice recognition software. They were designed by men for men, and they tended not to recognize the higher pitches of female voices, because they weren't built with that in mind. The problem still persists today... 11 39 am pst [ may I sleep with your toothbrush? ] As the sexual discussion rages on the mailing list, someone has refered to "having sex with someone you wouldn't lend your tootbrush..." I sort of like that as an arbitrary indicator of comfort level with someone. I've never lent Matthew my toothbrush (because he's never wanted to use it) but I probably would. Of course, I'd rather not brush my teeth than borrow a toothbrush...Another totally arbitrary cutoff I made (when I was in college) was to never have sex with as many men as my age. Of course, I'm not even half way there, but it sounded so good at the time. Perhaps I should change it to half as many men as my age. Then again, if I marry M, I'll be at this number forever. I was on the phone with Ashley a few weeks ago, and he began a sentence by saying, "When you two get married..." No one has ever assumed our impending marriage before, and it startled me a little. We both think about it and we have both talked about it, but I can assure everyone that if it is to happen, it will not be any time soon... |
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