Never before, and never since, I promise, will the whole world be warm as this. -- 10,000 Maniacs, These Are Days
A Mind Occasionally Voyaging

An Art! Downy Ocean

Here’s a serving tray and coaster set I made as a Christmas present for some friends of the family. The sand was sourced from the beach outside their house.

I still struggle with the clear pours, but I’m improving.

Happy New Year. Or “New Year” at least. I guess “Happy” will take some work.

An Arts! Because it’s time to be happy or sad.

This is a scheduled post, because I got a bottle of champagne and a bottle of draino, so I’ll be ready to toast either way. Anyway, I haven’t been writing much as you can tell, but it’s because I’ve been putting a lot of time into my art. I finally built up the nerve to start working with resin. Results are mixed.

 

Resin Art
This was an attempt to do a dirty pour from a kit. It didn’t work out; the colors mixed instead of staying separate the way acrylics do. Not sure why; it was supposed to come out as purple and green swirls instead of an even sort of purply-green mess. Also, there’s gold flake in there, but they all just clumped at the top.

This an acrylic pour from another kit. There’s a layer of textured paint on the bottom that is supposed to give it depth, but I don’t think they provided enough to have any effect. I like parts of this, but there’s too much black and the cells didn’t open up the way I wanted.

I like how wavy this is, but I was going for something more spacey with these colors. I’m going to try a resin surface treatment on this one.

These are going to be gifts. They’re order-of-play markers for boardgaming. The charms around the outside indicate the direction that play proceeds, and the center charm points to the current player, first player, or dealer. They’re reversible to accommodate games like Uno where the direction of play can change, and designed to be placed on a lighted pedestal. These are photographed in the counterclockwise orientation just because I couldn’t get the lighting right to photograph the other side.

See, here’s one lit up and oriented in the more common clockwise position

I made a soap dish! Functional art. It also glows in the dark. Very slightly, just enough to help you find it during an overnight bathroom break.

Okay actually I made two. I kinda want to make a third one in green, but green doesn’t match any of my bathrooms.

 

Good luck and god speed.

“Alpha”

An unattributed list of how I think about various media figures who believe themselves qualified to pass judgment on what it takes to be manly and expect me to follow their advice lest I will be considered no-true-man:

  • Twink Lumberjack
  • Ventriloquist’s Dummy who needs to claim 3 more human souls to become a real boy
  • Literal sack of bees
  • Real estate developer who’s going to bulldoze the goondocks at noon
  • Satan from that weird Mexican Santa Claus movie has really let himself go
  • A penis which, despite being the size of a man, still seems really, really small
  • The dude who stole Pee-Wee’s bike
  • Pillsbury Dough-Bigot
  • Ripped Lex Luthor, the only person on this list where I can actually understand why people listen to him even though he’s a monster.

I’m not going to say who’s who, so if you are upset about how I’ve described your favorite manosphere figure, just assume I’m talking about some other twink lumberjack.

Just a Dandy-Lion

Last week, my daughter performed in a production of The Wizard of Oz. She was a member of the Lollipop Guild. Also the lead apple tree. Also a denizen of the Emerald City. Also a Winkie. I get the impression that as an actress, she is “good, for a little kid”

Anyway, for some reason, she asked me to AI-enhance a photo I took during the performance, and what came out was kinda wild, like some sort of surrealist interpretation of The Lion King, so I thought I’d share it with you.

She’s the one with the nightmare face half out-of-frame.

Never Forgot What They Took From You

And yeah, I am so happy that they’re leaving Calypso in the canon. Yes, we don’t know what could possibly justify them retrofitting Discovery back to its 23rd century configuration, but it was hilarious to watch them scrubbing the “-A” off the hull.

(Just off the top of my head, Craft appears to come from a time when the Federation has degenerated into an imperialistic state. Perhaps Kovitch anticipates that a symbol not of the 32nd century but of “The Long Ago” would be required)

Also, now that we know that Discovery’s state is a cover, it’s possible that Zora’s claim to have been abandoned for a thousand years is also not entirely honest – that she was ordered to claim to have been left there in the 23rd century. Better still, “Calypso” ended on the sad notion that Zora would probably remain alone forever, but now we know that she isn’t lost: they put her there deliberately, and made plans to retrieve her. Might not pay off, but it seems a lot more plausible now to imagine that she’s recovered not long after those events, given that we now know that it was Craft she was waiting for all along.

Anyway, here’s me being angry about the new Taco Bell architecture.

Stock Photo of a '90s Taco Bell
Stock Photo of a ’90s Taco Bell

Taco Bell Construction Site
My Local Taco Bell Mid-Upgrade to Modern Grey Cube.

An Art! Death!

I know, I know, right? Kovitch being Daniels feels so utterly random. But still, him being a time agent was apparently the plan even without the series coming to an end. I like that he’s a time hoarder, with Sisko’s baseball, Geordi’s visor and Riker’s Risan Sex Statue on display in his office.

I also really like the surprise twist of Discovery zapping the Breen out of the plot. It’s a good way to do a big surprising reveal in this situation. We’ve never seen that Discovery can separate, and we’ve never seen that it can jump other things. But we have seen that it can detach its nacelles, and we have seen that some ships can separate their saucers, and we saw back in season 3 that it can take other things with it when it jumps. So it’s new, but not outside the parameters previously set.

Anyway, here’s Death.

Death. Encaustic collage
At least he’s not a dog.ath

 

An Art! The Magician

I really do want to have my say about the aftercare at the end of Discovery and the interesting implications of its ending and the extent to which some of the final reveals feel tacked on despite apparently being an abbreviation of their aborted season 6 plan. But I have not had a complete thought in a month, so instead, here’s another encaustic.

Encaustic Collage: Rider Waite Tarot 1 - The Magician
Wish I could find a darker frame that wouldn’t break the budget.