James Paige

Breathing Flowers (Painting)

Shapes in the clouds,
breath in and out again.

Current mood: Rejuvenated

Knife on a Hamster on a Snake on a Plane!!!

Current mood: Stabby

Exhibit 1: (Not my artwork, this was a source of inspiration)

Exhibit 2: (Not my artwork. Fenrir-Lunaris drew this. It was a source of inspiration)

Exhibit 3: (Yeah, this one is mine!)

Bob the Fighting Machine will cut you! Ya! Ya! Ya!… Can’t… quite… stand… up… *Rrrgh!*

Current mood: spirally

I have been terribly neglectful of posting pictures of my sculpture work. For more than a semester I have been taking pictures, but not posting them. Here is a piece I started a little more than a month ago and finished last week (most of that time was waiting for drying and firing) The clay is Black Mountain Sculpture Mix fired to cone 10 with no glaze.

Almost everybody who sees this piece says something about Yoga although I was just thinking of angles and curves and spiraling of limbs, and I do not believe she is in anything close to any known real Yoga position.Nevertheless, I hereby award 100 genuine curvyness-points to any real person who can get themselves into this position.

Current mood: decelerating

Gravity has been bothering me a lot lately. It’s always there, pulling at me, so persistantly that I forget about it. I get stuck in a mindset of thinking that gravity is inevitable– part of life. I allow gravity to dominate my every motion, and act as if there is nothing I can do about it. What bothers me most is that everybody else seems to have accepted gravity. Are we to be defeated so easily? Can’t we fight back against it? Is there no solution to the gravity problem?

Current mood: shamelessly self-promoting

I re-colored one of my Bob the Hamster drawings this morning, and slapped it on a couple dozen cafepress products, in order to satisfy your adorable-hamster-apparel needs!

more…

Current mood: Not Groggy

The unusual thing about motorcycles is that they don’t fall down. (I’m not saying they can’t, it’s just that they typically don’t) How does a motorcycle stay up? I mean, when it is standing still, it is really hard to balance. You have to use your feet or the kickstand or it will just topple over. (This is true for bicycles too, for those of us who haven’t actually ridden a motorcycle) But when the motorcycle starts moving, it stays up. It feels like magic. If it falls down when it is standing still, why should it be any different if it is moving?The answer is time dilation. As a moving object (the motorcycle) approches the speed of light, its mass increases, as predicted by special relativity. In four dimensional terms, the motorcycle compresses, bringing a little more of the future motorcycle into the present (or to put it another way, the motorcycle in the present catches up with the part of itself that is already in the future) This coexistance of present and future in the present is what prevents the act of “falling down”. If the motorcycle were to start to fall, it would have already started to fall, thus getting in its own way and propping itself back up.It doesn’t have to be a motorcycle. Any moving object approaching the speed of light can reproduce this effect. Try it yourself by running really fast and then trying to fall down.

See? It can’t be done.

Current mood: out-of-sync with something

I usually like to post here about art, and that art is usually in the form of drawings. But I also believe in games-as-art. For something crazy like 9 years now, I have been working on a program called the OHRRPGCE which lets you make your own game with minimal programming knowledge. It is only good for old-school console-style RPG games similar to the NES and Super Nintendo Final Fantasy games– so if you are not into that you won’t be interested– but if you ARE into that, by all means, do play with this new toy.

People don’t often thing of game-making as art, and I think that is partly because the tools of the medium are so hard to pick up, let alone to master. You don’t have to be Rembrandt to pick up a paintbrush and slap some paint on a canvas. Most art is very approachable, even if it isn’t easy to do well. Programming games on the other hand requires you to spend hours, days, weeks, even months reading tutorials and manuals before you can even learn and understand enough to blit your first pixel. That is part of why I do this. This is not the same kind of tool the professionals use, but it is a tool that anybody can pick up.

My game maker used to be a DOS program, but yesterday I released a version that runs natively on Windows, making it that much more approachable for average non-programmers. If you want to try it out, you can download it from http://HamsterRepublic.com/dl/ohrrpgce-win-installer.exe

Current mood: 12 percent dead, 70 percent really really good

About a month ago, a nice stranger named Erin noticed this drawing in my gallery, and asked me if I would draw a fairy for her to use in a tattoo. The finished product deviated greatly from what she originally described to me, so much so that I would be really surprised if it is of any use to her at all, but nonetheless, I did enjoy drawing it. It is nice to be inspired by someone else’s ideas once in a while.If any of you reading this would like to commission me to draw them a picture, just let me know (with the understanding that after you tell me what you want me to draw, I will then go and draw whatever I feel like drawing instead ;)

Current mood: Wise

Re: So what are you up to these days, Gilgamesh?

Oh, you know. The usual. Mostly just working on rebuilding Ninlil’s sanctuary in Nippur (you know, the one in Tummal that the mesopotamians razed?)I haven’t seen much of Enkidu lately, he’s always been too busy ever since he hooked up with that harlot Shamhat, but this weekend she is out of town, so he and I were gonna get together and I was thinking we would go to the Great Cedar Forest and try to kill the demon Humbaba.And Ishtar keeps calling me, so I have stopped answering my phone. Sorry if I missed any of your calls because of that. Last time I checked my voice-mail there were like 50 messages, and the first three were nothing but her going “Oh, Gilgamesh, I love you, I need you! Call me back or I will call upon the divine wrath of my father Anu!” I just deleted the rest. I don’t know what I’m going to do about that girl. So needy.