Before I became a musician, I was a glass sculptor. I didn’t melt glass and form it that way; I broke, cut, assembled, built. I’d use metal and plastics and silicon with the glass. I rose through the local neighbourhood show circuit and won some judge’s awards and got into galleries and then into a srs bsns downtown gallery, and sold a bunch of pieces. You can see photographs of many sold and unsold pieces here, but here’s a large one that sold at that last downtown show:

Gods at War

It was shortly after that – reasonably successful – downtown gallery show that when I realised… this just isn’t my art. Not in the sense of evoking passion, anyway. And the ideas just stopped.

Despite that, I kept the studio wondering if that art would turn itself back on. It didn’t. So, I’ve decided enough is enough: I’m not going back to this. I’ve found another glass artist who wants my raw materials; I’m turning the space into a rehearsal studio! This is awesome and exciting.

But there’s a lot of sculpture still sitting out there. CLICK HERE FOR PHOTOS OF THESE WORKS. If you’re interested in any of the pieces, make an offer. If you’re local or can get to Seattle, that offer can be a willingness to pick it up – tho’ I’d at least like to get materials cost back. I’d so much rather have them in someone else’s houses than gathering dust in an attic, there just aren’t words.

Remembering Someone Else’s Grandmother

A couple more are finished but not photographed; Water Dragon is the better example. Depending on how this goes, I’ll get around to that.

Many are too big to ship without hiring someone. Some smaller pieces (such as Breech and Remembering Someone Else’s Grandmother) should be fairly simple.

And then, there’s the unfinished All the Moons of Mongo:

All the Moons of Mongo

A huge piece, originally envisioned as a wall hanging; kind of a frieze. That was not a good idea. So in the end, it became a mobile assemblage – each moon (Frigia, Land of the Lion Men, Arboria, City of the Hawkmen, Mingo City/Ming’s Palace) is separate, with a metal grid base of aluminium. Each one is intended to be displayed individually around a large room, and they can be stacked as seen here – tho’ the wood blocks visible here would be replaced by glass brick I never bought.

It’s about 90% complete. I will finish this if someone wants it.

Otherwise, it’ll be disassembled.

This isn’t to say I dislike like the piece – or any of the work. I’m entirely fond of it. Of the ones that didn’t sell back when I was doing this for galleries, there several I’m just going to keep – they’re marked on their individual pages as collection-of-the-artist.

Tegami
(tiny and not available; it hangs in my house)

But of all this – there are just far too many, and they’ve been sitting far too long. It needs to get out and into the world. So if any of it strikes your fancy, make an offer. Even if that offer is just a willingness to pick it up – particularly in the case of All the Moons of Mongo. Yes, you, too, could have a kingdom of Mongo, to rule as your own. I’d much rather you had it in your house, than it be scattered…

…into atoms.

Vancouver has everything, including The Laser Cutter Cafe, which is what it says on the tin: tea and lasers. I think I’m in love and I’ve never even been there. Seriously, the supervillain trade alone will be…

<sunglasses>

…monstrous. Muah ha ha HA HA HA ha ha ha ha!

Here, this looks like magic, but it’s actually just copper being diamagnetic. Or magic. One of those. Anyway, check out what happens with a big copper pipe and a big, strong, neodymium magnet, it really just looks wrong:

Finally, two articles relevant to your interests. BECAUSE I SAID SO. First: How hackers make mincemeat out of your passwords. Passwords are just a problem; if you only have one and you use it lots of places… that’s not a good answer, no matter how solid it is. The game now is damage control, really.

Second: patent troll targets podcasting. No, it’s not new, but it’s ongoing, and honestly, it’s time to tear it all down and start over, because this is bullshit.

I’ve had a hoarse and horky weekend, thanks to forgetting my seasonal allergy meds on Friday – I must be the only serious supervillain who can be laid low by forgetting her antihistamines^* – and I’m pretty much thinking I want this retail therapy:

…on the T-shirt. I mean, honestly, the band name comes from the opening credits of this show. Well, of the show they’re parodying, The Powerpuff Girls. Who are they protecting Townsville from? Crime, and the Forces! Of! Evil! How can I not? XD

But I also have way too many T-shirts. I collect them for concert-wear, in form-fitting sizes (usually small), so I can show up on stage with a Fire Ferrets/Republic City T and things like that. It’s fun. 😀

But I do have an awful lot of them at this point.

Maybe I should get this one larger. It’ll probably shrink. Now, where did I put that Chemical X…

*: You know what’d be funny? If Poison Ivy^** had pollen allergies.
**: Strangely, I am not allergic to poison ivy. Or Poison Ivy, for that matter. But she’s got a girlfriend.

ps: I did a bunch more work on the website over the weekend. Little things. Did you know the albums on the blog can play while you’re reading the blog? Check it. 😀 And if you see any bugs, let me know!

If you remember dialup modems, you remember the series of tones you’d hear after the phone connected and the modems on each end of the line started synchronising so they could send data back and forth.

Here is a really quite pretty visual breakdown of what’s happening. Signal analysis can be surprisingly attractive, don’t you think?

Click to magnify

Mornings are for business and projects, which tends to mean more sitting than afternoons. Fred likes this because it means he can help. With the lying down part, anyway. The lying down part of sitting.

Do you have those traffic reports yet?

Also it’s nice that with the redesign I can post pictures at 640px width without the columns being screwed up anymore. ^_^

If you’re into the whole old-school SF idea of planned/constructed societies and all that -and if you haven’t read much SF of the 30s though early 60s, you’ve missed out – you really need to read about Synco (a.k.a. Project Cybersyn) in Chile during the Allende administration, before the Pinochet coup d’etat. Because they tried it, for industrial production.

The Wikipedia article gives you an overview, but THIS WAS REAL, NOT A MOVIE SET:

The Opsroom or Operations Room: a physical location where [nationalised industry] information was to be received and stored and made available for speedy decision-making. It was designed in accordance with Gestalt principles, in order to give users a platform that would give them a chance to absorb information in a simple and comprehensive way.

They didn’t get finished before the coup d’etat – the screens were used, but they had to have slides prepared each day rather than getting the data straight from the computer. But they were using the data – successfully, in many cases. All the major production facilities were, in fact, connected, via a massive network of telex machines, and data was flowing to the central computer, which was modelling and predicting based on daily data, and heuristic decisions were being made and acted upon and everything.

The goal was to have it all be realtime, as their computer capabilities ramped up. Keep in mind: this was in an era when moving this kind of data around and collating it within a single company in most countries could take took weeks, and decision-making could take even longer. They were doing it daily, with an eye towards continuously.

The difference between this and the Soviet and Chinese experiments is that it was intentionally decentralised. They were specifically avoiding those systems and trying to come up with something both socialist and rationalist and distributed – some of the factories had started setting up their own mini-facilities like this central one.

I’m fascinated by what they might’ve come up with, without Pinochet and his military dictatorship. They had the entire system destroyed – Pinochet was about authoritarianism, and had no time for this distributed-authority bullshit.

John Cleese gives a good lecture here on how to set up the opportunity to be creative. Not how to be creative, which he can’t teach, but how to set up an environment to let creativity happen.

His commentary also applies to trying to divide out creative-type-work time from bookkeeping-business time, which is difficult if you struggle with things like relative importance of art. (See also aftereffects of “Tiger parenting” and “Harsh parenting.”)

He also has some tips for PHB’s at the end, which you may find amusing.

From chichiri, who lives in Japan and I follow on Livejournal:

Apparently whether you can be a great violinist resides in large part in your left pinky finger. I mean, it’s the kind of thing that makes more sense once you read it, but who knew? I wonder how many serious violinists and fiddlers can’t do that. I’ve always had a large amount of “yeah? go fuck yourself” to “you can’t do that,” so I wonder whether this is one of those brick walls I’d throw myself against.

Tho’ not literally, because I have that left pinky finger property. Which clearly in and of itself does not make you a great violinist, because “Doctor, will I be able to play fiddle once the cast comes off?/Yes, yes, you’ll be fine!/That’s weird, I couldn’t play the fiddle before!” I guess you have to study and practice and stuff. But I do have the viLOLin – the $36 violin I picked up at a pawn – and I do want to learn to play sometime.

But that’s the thing, isn’t it? Too many pieces, too many parts, too many things to learn in not enough time. For me, it’s a bunch of music things, and languages. Now there’s a brick wall I throw myself against – I’m great at grammars, my accents are too good (in that people assume I’m fluent or even native-speaker and firehose at me), but I can’t learn vocabulary to save my life. As in, I’m so bad at it, my secondary school let me out of the language requirement, as long as I just kept trying.

Really, that’s what I need the brain enhancement for: memorisation. Particularly of language vocabulary, but not just that. If I could stick a chip in my brain and fix that? SIGN ME THE FUCK UP.

Should that be a poll? “What enhancement would get you to try it?” That might be fun. Suggestions in comments, if you got ’em.

For some reason, I feel like talking about photography.

Here’s a shot I took from Butchart Gardens, outside Victoria, weekend before last:

The Inlet

I was going for that kind of 40s or 50s-holiday feel, an older boat, a dock that’s actually pretty new but looks older because of the sepiatone, and all that. I’m pretty happy with it. It has a 1930s feeling that I get from looking at land photos from the era.

But all of that was post-photo, because this was originally a shot with different intent – an intent that didn’t work. At all. Here’s the original:

(Technically speaking, that’s the next shot, but it’s pretty much identical.) I was trying a couple of experiments that failed in the same way, but I didn’t delete the shots from my camera, and ended up with the sepia faux historical.

In terms of mechanics, getting to the above from the below was all in iPhoto, but it works the same in Photoshop. iPhoto has a lovely biased centre-of-brightness tool they call “Shadows,” and another one biased differently called “Highlights.” The first makes shadows brighter, the second brings down highlights, and in both cases, they’ll reveal lots of lost detail if you crank them way the hell up.

The problem with this approach is that no matter what, you’re missing a lot of colour data. You just don’t have it – at least, not in usable resolution. The resulting images often look washed out and/or really grainy. This original, treated thusly, looks really washed out:

“Shadows” and “Highlights” cranked way the hell up

…which is where monochrome comes in. I went with sepia/amber here to invoke a mood, but standard black-and-white would’ve worked about as well. If you merge the colour data to a monochrome palette, you get back to a similar amount of intensity data as you’d’ve had if you’d shot the image in black-and-white to start. It looks natural, within the artifice of photography.

I’ve pulled out a fair number of concert shots this way, and night crowd shots. You get this old-school newspaper/disco kind of look. I’ll even turn up the graininess on purpose, to drive that home. And with that, a shot that looked lost can be made vibrant and interesting again.

C.f. this crowd shot, at Strowler Nights, a few years ago:

That was basically a black rectangle with highlights, on my camera. But play with the levels, edit out a stray arm in the lower left, take out the colour, and: result!

If I’d left it in colour, it would’ve been – at best – a washed-out mess with hints of colour. But taken to monochrome, and kicking up the grain so it looks intentional, and you end up with a textured crowd portrait.

Which I guess really means I didn’t want to talk about photography, I wanted to talk about art, and intent. To wit: a lot of things you think of as flaws or problems can become assets, if you just turn them up to the point where they look intentional, then fine-tune them a bit. Not everything, gods know. But a surprising number.

If you’ve done something like this, post links or descriptions, eh? Share your mistakes-turned-successes. It might be fun. ^_^