Framed I tell ya!!! FRAMED!

I finished building and painting a nice custom frame for my recent dream-inspired painting that you’ve already seen in detail. Right now it’s hanging over the door to our walk-in closet. I’d hoped to hang it at eye level because it’s quite detailed, and you’d think that in a 4000+ square foot studio it wouldn’t be too hard to find the perfect place, but there’s already so much art (and bookshelves) blocking the walls that it wasn’t so easy. You can zoom this picture and all the others as well, as always. I don’t know why I even bother saying that.

I want to also mention that there is absolutely no image processing done on the picture above other than cropping and sizing. It is exactly as it came off the camera and a true representation of the painting (what looks like hairs or scratches are highlights from the flash hitting the texture of the paint). It is approximately 20″x16″. I mention all this because since it did end up turning out after all, if someone wants to make me a reasonable offer on it, I’m willing to sell it.

I made the frame out of some wood molding that I picked up at Home Depot. My electric miter saw is at Ryan’s farm, so I cut it by hand which wrecked my arms for a couple days and they’re still a bit sore, although I’m keeping my fingers crossed that no permanent damage was done. I glued the four edges together with wood glue plus a belt-clamp to hold it together, and when it was dry, I used epoxy clay to quickly sculpt four comical snakes to sit on the corners. These serve the dual purpose of being decorative and also covering up the points where the patterns carved/pressed into the wood don’t quite match, as well as any minor imperfections in the joint. I think I’ve only made five or six frames myself in the last decade, and I’d like to think they’re still improving.

The frame was first hit with a primer coat of flat black (the gloss — which really pumps up the saturation — is a top layer of sprayed clear acrylic) and then painted it with colors to echo the painting and highlighted each “scale” to give the painting the illusion of glow. Like I already mentioned, these scales are actually three dimensional as they’re part of the molding design. You wouldn’t believe how long it took to do this — each tile painted a base color, then about half of them have a yellow glow highlight, and all of them an off white highlight on top of that, and then the black lining between and around them. The time passed quickly without me noticing because I was listening to imagination inspiring press conferences from The Disclosure Project (various “qualified” government and military personnel whistle-blowing about UFOs and bases on the moon and other things dear to my heart) — you can find those for free on their website (scroll down to “Press Conference Overview”). I can’t prove to you it’s not a big hoax (definitely their witnesses range from über-reliable to extremely flaky to obvious liar — you can read an arguably overly skeptical debunking here) but it was enormous fun.

But I digress… A few more pictures of the frame:

I’ve written quite a few times here about the economics of space travel. Really, really scratching my head about why we’re spending a hundred times what we should on rocket launches… There are two very obvious explanations as to why we spent $50 million on a launch that should be half a million: first, it could be that the military-industrial complex is overly vulnerable to profiteering and we’re seeing the big spender version of the $500 toilet seat. That’s the explanation I usually assume is the right one. But the real reasons behind the $500 toilet seat bring me to the second reasonable possibility: that this massive overcharging is a way of laundering money into black projects. A way of moving taxpayer money in massive quantities into secret projects that can’t be publicly funded. That turned out to be a lot of the story behind the government paying silly amounts for mundane objects. They weren’t really buying a $500 toilet seat. They were buying a $10 toilet seat, and quietly putting $490 into the funding for a stealth bomber with every toilet seat. Now, the average person knows what a toilet seat or a hammer should cost. They do not however know what an advanced high-tech rocket should cost, so maybe it’s a lot easier to do it that way?

Oh and since people always ask me this, I do not believe that UFOs are visitors from other stars. My personal guess is that it’s a mix of misidentification of natural and man-made phenomena, including military black projects from multiple nations. I suspect that those running these black projects from time to time have encouraged the “alien” hypothesis because it serves both to distract and discredit the witnesses who might otherwise be credible. And if I’m wrong, I’m more likely to believe that the aliens are time-traveling humans, humans visiting from a planet Mars settled by a previous advanced Earth civilization prior to the last ice age (a la the ancient UFOs in Vedic poems, which may or may not be early sci-fi), or even some non-human cephalopod intelligence that lives deep under the ocean (sailors regularly see pink elephants UFOs — about 50% of UFO sightings according to the Russians). I just am not convinced that we are going to solve the problem of superluminal travel, which is required for “casual” travel between star systems. Without that, it’s going to be either slow communication between distant civilizations (imagine a fifty year delay in your phone call rather than half a second of latency), or at best gigantic generational arks moving between stars. Not the sort of thing that you can hide.

To be honest, I’m much more interested in hearing what’s at the bottom of the Baltic sea (sonar picture above — and again, here’s a skeptical take to cruelly kill your fantasies). If I had to guess, the safe money is that it’s a round Russian ironclad boat, although that would require explaining why it’s twice as big as any known ship they built, to say nothing of the fact that those ships were not known to have been in that area, and the fact that whatever it was hit the bottom of the ocean fast enough to “scrape” a half kilometer long straight gouge before coming to rest. So many interesting things under the sea (including a great many things that were once on land when sea levels were much lower, like the Yonaguni monument). As I’m sure most of you know, we have far better maps of the moon than we do of the bottom of the ocean, and more people have been on the moon than have been in the deepest parts of the ocean. Who knows what’s down there?

I have more important things to do today than ramble about UFOs but I think that the interesting things about the UFO phenomena is not “aliens”… The interesting thing is the “U”. That something is there, and that it’s unidentified, and it’s always fun getting to the bottom of mysteries whether the explanation ends up being mundane or extremely surprising. The world is a bizarre and fascinating place without having to dip ones toes into what amounts to the paranormal.

A definite dream improvement

Got up this morning, read the majority of DC’s short-lived — cancelled after 19 issues — supernatural prison comic Hard Time and enjoyed it. It seems that everything I enjoy ends too soon <insert sad ironic laugh here>. Then Caitlin and I watched the Walking Dead from last night (and Comic Book Men). She thinks it’s too slow moving and isn’t as sold on it as I am (it’s not as if the comic isn’t a bit ponderous at times as well — but such is war, even zombie war: long periods of boredom punctuated with brief moments of extreme terror and danger), but for me it’s a close competitor for the top slots of my favorite TV of all time along with Breaking Bad. Speaking of “cancelled too soon”, I was also a fan of The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the TV spinoff from the Terminator movies (whose latest installment was beyond terrible). My afternoon was supposed to be to go to the post-office to send the stack of ModCon books (see entry before this one) that sold over the weekend, only to discover that because it’s a holiday here (“Family Day”) I can’t go to the post office, let alone buy envelopes at the stationary store, also closed. So for those of you expecting books, they’ll ship tomorrow.

I did however do one productive thing, and that’s adding some transparent layers on my dream painting, selectively highlighting and shading it to give it a bit more depth. The colors were totally flat before that — although now that I’ve added flourescents, it’s difficult to photograph even in perfect light (I took it outside) because it’s too bright. Anyway, here’s an animation of the changes I made and you can click on it to view the current version in high quality (the image shown inline suffers a lot because of the animation compression, but it gets the changes across nicely).

Be warned that the click-through is a one meg image because it seems JPGs fall short in the color scheme I used and I had to set the quality setting very high to keep it from being blocky.

Other than making a frame for it (which I guess I’m not doing today either since the lumber store is also closed it seems) I think I’ll freeze it where it’s at because I’m not in love with this enough to beat it into any semblance of perfection. I got a request to make a zombie bracelet charm in silver, so I may work on that. I’m struggling with getting up to speed with silverwork, although I did make Caitlin a nice charm/pendant of a little fellow holding a heart for Valentine’s day that I think turned out nicely. Which reminds me, she just posted a picture of the beautiful painting that Nefarious painted her for Christmas. Oh, and I’ve also been converting Ryan’s blog (which I still have a link to, I know, but has been down since October) to a book for him as well, so my blog-to-book software is getting more mature as time goes by. It will never be a release-candidate but I will probably post the source code and some resultant XML, HTML/CSS, and PDF files since I can see them being useful to others…

Old Pictures VS living in the moment

First of all, by request I have posted some of my last remaining ModCon books to Etsy. These are the original prints, not the second edition ones printed through Etsy. You can grab them via my Etsy store, or click the thumbnails to jump right to their pages. I have more copies than I’ve listed (five) but not many more. No idea how many people there still are that want a copy that don’t already have one (or the free PDF, which you can download from the link in the sidebar), but here you go:

To catch the eye… MODCON BOOKS AVAILABLE AGAIN!!!

Speaking of books, I just got an email from Lulu that all eleven volumes of my blog have been printed and shipped, so I should have them at the start of the week. I’m quite happy with how quickly that went, and it’s nice to have a very significant step in my project to permanently archive my digital life in the physical world complete. I’ll post the PDF files and upload them to various services soon as well, to enhance the chances even more of the survival of this information.

For the last few days I’ve been going through my huge collection of personal digital photos, which on this computer is about 40,000 photos, so it’s a large and time consuming project. The plan is to take them and build a series of photo albums. I just looked at a friend’s similar project but much smaller project encompassing the first year of their child’s life. Given how easy it is to lose digital photos — although with the advent of the cloud at least there are viable protective backup insurance schemes — I am surprised more people don’t make photo albums. Maybe with all the services that make it easy these days that will change. Personally I know I far prefer the experience of paging through a photo album than looking at them on a computer screen.

That said, it has been enormously personally difficult to do this. I can’t begin to explain how heartbreaking it is for me to see how happy I used to be, how much I was capable of, all the fun I had with my friends and family, and how strong and healthy I was. I guess it’s like aging prematurely at an abusively accelerated pace. Flipping through photos — flipping through time — I can’t live in the moment and just deal with how I feel right now and just survive another minute. I have to have it spit in my face how much worse things have gotten. The last thing I need is to be reminded how little I want to keep doing this, to say nothing of how much everyone around me gets their life drained because of my illness, how hard it is on Caitlin and Nefarious most of all. There are many times that I think that after the mourning wore off, they would be much better without me although I know they would protest the untruth of that statement and maybe even believe it consciously right now. I am reminded of my grandmother telling me how much happier and free she was after my grandfather decided to die. That doesn’t belittle the life they had, it simply accepted that it’s value not only ended before his heart stopped beating but that the negative sphere of influence affected more than just him, which I think is not entirely uncommon. On one hand I have so much that I want to do and see, but on the other hand, I’ve endured more than any person should be asked to endure. Every day for the last last ten years things have gotten worse, and every day for the last three years, things have gotten a lot worse, and there hasn’t been a single bit of meaningful help or hope from the medical community even though some of them have tried very hard. And the fact that the disease kills slowly is perhaps its cruelest aspect. In any case, as important as this archival task is for me, it is one of the most difficult tasks that I’ve undertaken, because it takes away one of my biggest defense mechanisms — the ability to live in the moment, day by day, and accept that I can survive another minute without considering with objectivity how the experience compares to some semblance of an acceptable quality of life.

But I really do have a lot of stuff to do!!!

Fun and half-truths from the UrbanDictionary

I can agree with this…

…but not so much with this…

It’s probably because it’s spelled wrong, right?

Well, I’m going to go have a Larratt. See ya.

Dreamy

I didn’t paint this for it to be particularly appreciable as a piece of art. It’s overbusy, has no pleasing layout or overall aesthetic, and just generally fails all around. Perhaps I could fix it if I felt like it, I don’t know. But it’s really only a doodle I did because I thought it might be therapeutic to try and paint my dreams. I may have mentioned this before but in general I live in two worlds — the real one, and the dream world, and my dream world is consistent from night to night. That is, when I fall asleep, I re-enter an environment that is the mostly the same as it was the night before, with the same geography, history, people, physics, and so on. Maybe that makes me a boring person because I feel like most people get to have a wider range of dream experiences? I worry though because my dream world is sort of like a modified version of this one I’m in right now, but then I realized that it could just as easily be the other way around, that this is the dream, and this is the modified version of the other. Either way, these worlds are siblings, and they leak into each other. Earlier today I bumped into someone at a computer store while picking up a wireless router, and I was wondering where I recognized them from, and I realized that I know them from the dream world. I wonder how that happens, because it happens all the time. If I had to make a neurological guess, I’d say that it comes from the same place as deja vu.

You can click to zoom if you’d like.

I’ll probably still do a top-coat glazing, tinting, and lighting parts of it but I don’t expect significant improvement. Perhaps I am only feeling down about it because I was at the hospital this morning and that always wrecks my day. My primary doctor is upset with the remainder of the potential “team” treating me because it’s been months of him asking them for their expert help, and while they tell him to his face that they’re very interested, it seems like they lose that interest the instant the conversation ends and so far have not followed up. Given the rarity of my genetic condition, it’s not like I can see just anyone, so it’s a little disheartening and makes one feel like the safe bet is to give up on any hope of treatment. Next week I should be having a bunch of different kinds CT scans, mostly of my brain to try and get a better handle on the brain damage, which at least I hope will give me some interesting data to look at, as I always enjoy seeing the output of those machines.

OH. One other thing. I made the covers for all my “blog backup books”, which I hopefully will send off to print in the next 48 hours. So again, click to zoom (warning: big), and here are the eleven cover images for 2001 through 2011.

Other than that I am just waiting for Caitlin to get home from work so I can give her the Valentine’s present that I made her, my first “real” piece of silverwork. Caitlin actually asked me if that painting was her present, and I am happy to say it is not. That would be a crummy present.