Anyone?... Bueller?...

Still wanting a roommate for this flat.




Starting to feel the outside edges of panic, slowly getting closer...

Update:
That's three jiggles on the line in one day. The Roommate Fairy seems to have woken up from her nap.

Update again... that's four jiggles. Roommate Fairy must be feeling much better...


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Many thanks

to the Duckfan, a regular reader here since at least three blogs ago, for the books.

They arrived in good order at the office this week.

This, particularly, is helping.



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Also, I'm starting to think that the internet isn't very good for you

New states of mind the internet has created.

Any of this sound familiar?

(fixed the link...)

The state of being ‘installed’ at a computer or laptop for an extended period of time without purpose, characterized by a blurry, formless anxiety undercut with something hard like desperation. During this time the individual will have several windows open, generally several browser ‘tabs,’ a Microsoft Word document in some state of incompletion, the individual’s own Facebook page as well as that of another randomly-selected individual who may or may not be on the ‘friends’ list, 2-5 Gchat conversations that are no longer immediately active, possibly iTunes and a ‘client’ for Twitter. The individual will switch between the open applications/tabs in a fashion that appears organized but is functionally aimless, will return to reading some kind of ‘blog post’ in one browser tab and become distracted at the third paragraph for the third time before switching to the Gmail inbox and refreshing it again.

The behavior equates to mindlessly refreshing and ‘lozenging’ the same sources of information repeatedly. While performing this behavior the individual feels a sense of numb depersonalization, being calmly and pragmatically aware that they have no identifiable need to be at the computer nor are they gleaning any practical use from it at that moment, and the individual may feel vaguely uncomfortable or ashamed about this awareness in concert with the fact that they continue to perform the idle ‘refreshing’ behavior. They may feel increasingly anxious and needful, similar to the sensation of having an itch that needs scratching or a thirst that needs quenching, all while feeling as though they are calm or slightly bored.

Dear God...

Your brain is not your friend

It's a funny thing about depression. One of the things it does to you is make you think you don't want to feel better. Or maybe just can't be bothered.



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Someone said it!

In British politics no less!

Feminists are obnoxious bigots and men are getting a raw deal

Yay! there's still a man in the UK with a pair.

(Turns out he's already married though...dang)



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Anyone want to come and live in Santa Marinella?

My amazingly fabulous roommate has had a bad turn done to her and now has to go back to the US unexpectedly.

This sucks.

But it does mean that this place,



is available for the right person.



Also,

here's a baby porcupine eating a banana.




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At first I looked at this video and thought, "Yeah, a bunch of guys marching for unrestricted abortion...gee, look out for your own interests much boys?"

Then I looked again and saw that actually there were women present.

It was just hard to tell at a glance...



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Sure, just as soon as you can assure me that life will be better than the internet

Pope to bloggers: "Get your heads out of the internet and get a life"

I paraphrase, of course...



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Cat vs. Internet

Winnie is not this needy. But strangely, she's still this insistent.
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(Thanks John. Come home soon)

Sfumato

So, I have been using a Leonardo calendar to get large reproductions that are clear enough to copy in detail and I am learning a great deal about his techniques... enough to know that it will take a long time to reproduce it myself.

One of the big challenges is this thing called "Sfumato" or "smokey" which is the Italian word for his incredibly subtle shading. The blend of changes from darks to lights, and the overall gentleness of his figures is a result of this sfumato thing.

In one of his notebooks, he describes it as drawing "without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke or beyond the focus plane."

It's very much the opposite of chiaroscuro, the high-contrast light/dark juxtaposition that is so much in Caravaggio and later Italian painters.

Mastery of sfumato is going to take a while, but it is the reason I look at my version of his drawing below, and think, "Well, it's a pretty good drawing of a pretty woman" but I look at his original and think, "It's a magical depiction of a supernatural being". Orders of magnitude of difference.

I was grumbling about my frustration at not being able to do this and of course, when I articulated what the problem is, it sounded ridiculous. "My drawings aren't as good as Leonardo Da Vinci's!!! Wahh!"

...

Ah, yah.

Sometimes you have to say out loud what your brain is thinking to see how dumb you really are.



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