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.
Current mood: Patriotic, in fact, for the first time in a long while
Today at work, while I was eating lunch, I checked out the news stories about the immigrant rights protest marches going on today (Monday, May 1st 2006). An article said that approx 100,000 people marched at noon in Downtown L.A. It also said there was another march scheduled for 4:00.
The photos I saw of all those people filling the streets were so exciting that I took the rest of the day off sick, and took the Metro Blue Line up to L.A.
It was easy to figure out which way to go. I just followed this guy:
When I got up out of the metro station at MacArthur Park, this is the scene that greeted me:
It felt like the world’s biggest picnic. The air was full of waving flags, and full of noise. There were car-horns honking everywhere, motorcycle engines revving behind me, and drums playing in several directions. voices all around me, and drums playing ahead of me. Every time a new crowd of people would emerge from the Metro station, everybody would let out a cheer.
I went west, the direction that the crowd was flowing, and pretty soon I was marching down Wilshire with everybody else. Ninety-something percent of the marchers were Latino, and almost all the songs and chants were in Spanish, but I was not made to feel out of place in the least. I know this was a protest, but it had such an amazing positive vibe that it felt more like a celebration. Almost everybody had an American flag, and there were a lot of other flags too. Lots of signs and banners as well, about half-and-half English-and-Spanish. I was delighted to be able to read everything. Although I speak almost no spanish, I guess I read it pretty well.
It was really hard for me to capture just how many people were there using only my little camera-phone. I took a couple video clips, but even those do it no justice. Here try them:
Video Cliplet, from ground-level
Video Cliplet, from the top of some stairs
My phone creates dumb 3g2 files, but I am pretty sure they are just misnamed Quicktime MOV files, so hopefully y’all can view them.
If you Really want to get an idea of the size of this, I hope you were watching the news. There were a ton of helicopters circling the whole time, and I am sure they got better shots than I did ;)
I had a wonderful time, and I must say, that if every protest was as positive, and peaceful and POWERFUL as this one was, the world would be a better place. For all of you that stayed home, you missed out on one of the most wonderful parts of living in a free country.
Now, I am going to bed. I marched three miles today, and jogged two miles back to the metro station. I am exhausted :)
EDIT: And the girl I met on the metro on the way home turned out to be my love
Current mood: hurty but good
The debate in the scientific community rages on; Exactly how to classify the newly discovered endangered mammal recently sighted in Harbor City, on the campus of LA Harbor College.
The so-called “Harbor City Bushy-Tailed Rat-Bear” has not yet been given an official scientific name, as a specimen has not yet been captured and described in detail, nor, in fact, has one even been photographed yet. However, numerous descriptions from reliable eye-witnesses have been composited to bring you this sketch.
Conservationalists are already calling for legislation to protect this new animal. Although more study is required, the Rat-Bear’s habitat may already be in danger of being destroyed by the College’s construction and expansion work. Furthermore, the Rat-Bear’s proximity to Machado Lake Park puts it at risk for direct contact with Reggie the Alligator, Harbor City’s other famous exotic animal.
In an interview with naturalist Dr. C. Lynn Moon, she was quoted as saying; “We have a working theory that the Rat-Bear may be the product of hybrid cross-breeding between a wild animal like a squirrel, and an escaped domestic pet such as a cat or Shi-tzu. Imagine if this same animal became too ‘friendly’ with Reggie. The possible consequences are too terrifying to contemplate!”
Current mood: Lunching
This morning, a co-worker forwarded me an e-mail which included this photo, along with a heartwarming story about how a Tigress in a zoo, distraught over the loss of her cubs, was brought out of her state of feline depression when clever zookeepers brought her a litter of piglets to raise as a surrogate mother.
Current mood: numismanic
I was at the grocery store buying milk and bananas, and when I payed, the nice little robot that helps the cashier dispense the change gave me some coins. One of them caught my eye immediately. It was different. I immediately singled it out, and started babbling about it to the cashier, (delaying the line of people behind me) and nearly left without taking my groceries with me. Jefferson’s face had moved to a different place on the Nickel!
Besides being a little bit scary to see this face moving around the coin, I feel like it weakens the coin. I know the State Quarters were a big hit, but that was the backs of the coins, not the fronts. Now you could counterfit any slug of metal, and as long as you got the size right, it would not matter what picture you put on it, I would be willing to believe it was a legit coin.
I guess they don’t really care about coin counterfitting. Our currency has inflated enough that coins aren’t worth much of anything anymore. It would cost far more to fake tham than what they are worth. You know pennies are not made of copper anymore, right? Copper is way too valuable for that. Copper is extremely important for microchips and for wiring, and for all sorts of other important industrial uses– and there is a fixed amount of it available on earth. There will be no increase in the available global copper supply until after asteroid mining becomes feasable.
Perhaps that is why Abe Lincoln has been holding still. He is Thinking about the Future!
Current mood: decelerating
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!
Current mood: Not Groggy
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: dissemantic
EDIT: I wrote this post before “Xena” got its official name: Eris
I am a space nerd. Even before I started kindergarten, I had memorized the names of all the planets in the solar system. I was very excited back then about the idea of a 10th planet.
Depending on how you count, there are already 10 planets… or more… or less. The trouble is, once we got good at looking for small objects beyond Pluto, it started to become clear that the word “Planet” was becoming ambiguous. There is currently a debate in the space-nerd community over whether Pluto should lose “Planet” status, or whether a whole bunch of other big-balls-of-rock-and-ice should be added to the list of planets. Personally, I don’t care one way or the other, but the debate did get me wondering about exactly how big these objects are in a way that I can actually relate to the size. So I grabbed a screen-shot from google maps and made this diagram of how big the moon, Pluto and Xena would be if you placed them on the Earth’s surface.
