There's a passage in the Bhagavad Gita that reads,
You have a right to your actions,
but never to your actions' fruits.
Act for the actions sake.
And do not be attached to inaction.
It goes on later,
It is better to do your own duty
badly than to perfectly do
another's; when you do your duty
you are naturally free from sin.
Ghandi summarized the above as “do your allotted work but renounce its fruit”. One of the reasons that I help fund events and projects, have sponsorships, internships, and so on — and never (I think?) do paid advertising of any sort — is because I believe it runs contrary to what BME stands for and what I stand for. BME is a community project, and while I think I deserve to do alright, I also feel I have give something back to the community that built it.
I know a lot of you are already aware of this, but instead of running advertising campaigns and paying money to corporations, and doing the normal “business growth” stuff, I want to this year start officially sponsoring athletes and others in the public eye. The very first person to make this list is MMA fighter Mike McQuade who you can check out at IAM:beenthroughit and also at the July 7th RING OF COMBAT 11 a the Tropicana in Atlantic City (and future fights of course).
We're working on a shirt for his team right now; here's the first draft. As soon as it gets his OK, it'll be run, both for him and his team and family, and will be added to BMEshop — and $10 from every shirt sold goes to support his training. Anyway, here's the draft:
Front |
|
Back |
Ironic that I would use a quote from the Bhagavad Gita to explain sponsoring a fighter, ha. Oh, and I will need someone who can donate some time to help maintain a
Team BME page of various past and present sponsorships. Write me at
glider@zentastic.com and remind me how our lives overlap and what your skillset is please if you have the time.
Other than that, I'm probably going to have to reboot IAM briefly in a little while.
It now just sends JPG files (not a giant RAR file). More info here.
PS. Wow was this a long time ago… So much has changed in so many ways!
And yes, mix up Charles Manson, John Lennon, and Tommy Chong and a baby if you want to reproduce this photo.
Because of my textural experiments with encaustic (wax) work, I've decided to completely change my method of work. I'm now “painting” with a gluegun, both in a “natural” mode and then painted with a combination of wet and drybrush work, as well as some new experiments with custom hollow gluesticks impregnated with dry pigments and injected with wet acrylics as well…
The painting currently weighs about thirty pounds and because not only are there various polymer-based paints (quite solid), but also a great deal of wax and other fragile substances… I'm worried that with too much motion it could be damaged, so tomorrow I'm going to fiberglass the entire back of the canvas. Anyway, after that I'm going to repaint the entire background (the water), then the background schools of fish, and then lay down an immense forest of kelp using the gluegun technique (which you can see in the left picture). This painting is going to be three inches thick in areas!
Emphasis: this is still undercoating! The final will look very different!
This is one of those
“learn as you go” paintings (story of my life), but I predict that it will either be one of my best paintings ever or… well… take me a long, long, long time to get it to that point (and I anticipate it will have a 60+ pound final weight). As I said in the title, at an utter minimum I have another twenty or thirty hours of work left.
EOF.
Jon and Nefarious and I just got back from the local sports bar for lunch and while there caught the end of the Liverpool versus West Ham United game. I think Nefarious enjoyed the screaming British fans more so than her meal!
Anyway, I did a little work on the Encyclopedia today, updating the entry on transdermal implants a tiny bit and adding a few risks to it including deep placement, inward-travelling infections, and some general notes on the difficulty of transdermal removal. If any of the editors would like to copy-edit or improve these, be my guest!
Now I'm going to do some painting.
Why am I up this late? I have no good explanation… But I want to try and take tomorrow off as much as possible to paint and spend with Nefarious.
Oh, and does anyone in the Toronto area want to split a drive in a rental car (mine take too much gas) to the
Carlisle Nationals for a couple days and then
NYC for a couple more days (ie. May 19-23 or something)? If you do, please IM or write me. Normally I'd fly, but I'm so paranoid about saving money right now because there's a lot of work to do on BME and we had some processing problems that set us back…
