Random thoughts...

[zacharias]

On that note I can highly recommend ceramics (in particular throwing on the wheel) to anyone if you are the type of person who enjoys regularity and discipline in art or craft making. We really should have a clay thread here one day..

[Tocky]

I just see it in my head and wonder if I can do it. Even if I'm drawing a person I may look at a picture but actually draw a different angle or pose. I just need the picture to remind me of them. It helps for reminding me of spacing of eyes or why the structure of their face makes this or that expression. If a scene and scenario is something I have in my head then I may start out with that and change mid drawing if I find I like another idea better. I'm the opposite of structured. I'm whimsical. But I do lose myself in what I'm doing. Drawing in pencil helps. Once I get used to all proportion and angle and perspective I may switch to pen. I used to favor that. Each medium has it's own quirks though. Each has it's own cheats and tricks. You can't carry what you learned doing in pen over to watercolor or watercolor to acrylic. And you learn as much by accident as on purpose.

Mostly I just want to have fun with it. Here is one I started and thought I would let sit till I decide how to do the details like stars and sun angle. It's not high art anyway.



I may try to add a refection of a woman in the capsule pointing at him or just move on to something else. It's silly anyway.

P.S. I would like to see your ceramics, zacharias.

[Tocky]

One I did of my daughter. She is always surprising me with paintings of me so turn about.

[Thor]

In absolutely no way whatsoever. Just because you lose an argument does not mean the other side are Bolsheviks or whatever other straw man you wish to throw up. He starts out calling people things which he does not support with fact and ends with saying people are scornful of him because of his beliefs. Ever think maybe it's the unsupported argument he started out with in the first place? No? Not a clue? Can't figure that one out? You see, when you are wrong and you name call without evidence, nobody is going to like you. Of course people are scornful of unsupported statements. It's hilarious to think anyone should listen to you when you start with a scornful lie about them and end with umbrage that others are scornful of you. Can you not see the hypocrisy? I don't even consider myself left and it insults my sense of what is right and true that he takes the high ground while pulling the low ground up with him.

I don't frequent ttlg these days, but I thought this one might have triggered a few as I didn't give the most open-hearted context (I've learned the hard way that it's less than pointless to try to discuss here with an open heart).

Ironic to call out name-calling/insulting someone when that's the basis for the argumentation culture here. Sure, it doesn't necessarily resort to swear-words, as you've mastered a more subtle/feminine/w/e way to insult others, as you display in this very post, but even when actual arguments are involved (and that isn't super often), it is nearly always undermined by the weight of the insult preceeding/following it. The thing that has always been off-putting to me about this place in particular (commchat, not the Thief fans part, it's like two entirely different worlds - one of flowers, other of toxic herbs, somehow coexisting side by side) is the sheer arrogance and intolerance of any diversity [of opinion, anyway].

[Tocky]

If your opinion is insulting and not just insulting to our intelligence then you are damn straight it won't fly here. Here we require fact and opinion don't mean shit. Make no mistake that is why you can't handle it here. All you have is opinion. Big deal. My dog has that. Also you come into MY thread and start your shit, a thread which has been nothing but light hearted, then speak of toxic. YOU ARE THE TOXIC ONE. You fall at curbing your own behavior yet tell others to curb theirs. Then for icing on your shit cake you have the nerve to call my forbearance feminine. Son I would kick your ass for that in person but what the hell weight does just saying that have here? Here you have to think and support your arguments with truth and you just don't have what it takes in that department. Hell, any department. That masculine enough for you?

[Tocky]

I mean who the hell comes into your house, smears their shit everywhere, then complains about the smell? It takes a truly obtuse asshole. I get along with nearly anyone so if it is me telling you what a ball sucker you are then you best look into a mirror and figure out whose balls you are sucking.

Ruin my damn day with your BS.

[Tocky]

Here is a stick Richard left me that he never finished. He made a mistake in his carving and it is Hickory and hard as hell once it cures so he never went back to it. I have a Dremel so I finished it for him. Not very detailed but I gave it what it was trying to be and thus I don't think it was wrong. Also Lana wanted a ball on top so I took the one with the scorpion in it held by metal skeleton hand and drilled a hole for it to sit atop. Later I used hot glue to seat it better and made the top like it was a candle melting off the sides. I may shellac it.

[Tocky]

Looks more like a vampire turtle than a snake.

[Tocky]

I have made a fabulous stick. Nobody has made a more fabulous one. Just the other day I was having tea with the queen and showed her my stick. She blushed and admitted to having nothing comparable. I proclaim it the Bedazzler! I will only use it for knighting worthy people and never shall I whack anyone atop the head with it unless absolutely necessary.





I never did show the rest of my vacation pictures. Maybe next time.

[Tocky]

The real reason for fabulous. She has inherited my crazy I think. I have most of my canes for walks with the kids just like I have my hat collection for them. I have everything from London Bobby to east German military. Seriously, marching band with huge plume to sombrero. Pirate to ship captain. Pith helmet to Nazi helmet. Top hat to bowler. Chef to knight helm. They can be anything. I don't think I've done so bad. Almost as good as my dad in my own way.



Mothers day tomorrow. Go see her and love her. She wiped your ass. That is love.

[Tocky]

I have a parlor trick for you. My grand Lana told it to me and we had fun with it at the fathers day gathering. It takes two people and she chose me to be the assistant. It's called Black Magic. One person leaves the room while the others choose an object in the room. Any object or any person or article of clothing or pet or anything really. It doesn't matter if it's big or small. Then when the person comes back into the room their assistant calls out the names of objects and asks if it is the chosen object. No order, no hand signals, no eye movements, no tells of any kind, and yet the "magician/medium" can always guess when the object has been named. The hilarity comes from the guesses as to how it's done. The funny part is the secret is really simple and they try to make it complicated. Really simple. It's in the name even.

Happy fathers day guys. I had to go put flowers on the grave of mine. I hope you don't have to. And if you do I hope it works out better than this at least.

[Tocky]

We buried my cousin Bonnie Gail yesterday. Uncle Bill used to call her Kit Bunk. I have no idea. He had a weird nickname for us all. The last time I saw her was at a funeral. I forget which one. They all run together when you get my age. I'll never forget the story she told of my dad when he died. Just one of those things that stick in a kids mind she said. My dad was bush hogging on the old place one spring and went over a rabbits warren. Bunnies everywhere. Dad caught one and put it in her hands. Sheer delight for a little girl to hold a bunny. Just a little thing the size of her little palm. She wanted to keep him. Dad said she could but if she did it likely wouldn't live. But if she put him down he could go home to his mother and be with his brothers and sisters. She put him down. That was quintessential dad. Able to talk a little girl out of a bunny with tenderness. I was grateful for that story.

Bonnie was big. She had been since her teens and if anyone had a hormone problem it was her. She just kept getting bigger. It didn't stop her from meeting a man and sharing their lives together though. Her husband was inconsolable and I don't think he heard anything but the tone of the words of sympathy. His eyes were wet and his hands cold and he nodded as if to say he knows. He looked so old. I wish I could have spoken to him longer but there was a line and my mom doesn't need to be on her feet long. They came to ask if I would be a pall bearer. Of course it's always my honor to do one last thing for someone I care for. I think we were all a little worried though because it was an extra wide casket such as I had never seen and Bonnie must have been near six hundred pounds.

We got her in the hearse with no trouble. I think everyone was putting a full effort into being careful. No hands released until absolutely necessary. After we arrived I saw that we would have to take her maybe fifty feet. Oddly she seemed light. Lighter than my wife's stepdad and he was only half as big. I guessed all the strapping lads were making it easy on the old guy so I lifted harder. We had no trouble setting her on the lowering straps either but I noticed they had iron pipes to roll along the side braces. They weren't taking any chances. It was a nice service. One of her favorite church singers sang Amazing Grace. He had a beautiful voice.

Funerals linger with a melancholy and this evening I'm looking for things to lift my spirits so I watched a Bill Burr comedy show on Netflix. He was at Red Rocks talking about doing mushrooms and getting into a funk of feeling unloved and abandoned and realized it was how he felt growing up. It was then I thought of the bunny story again and knew how lucky I am. Some have a past to overcome. I am just the total of the people who were good to me and there have been so many.

[rachel]

I'm coming back to France on Saturday, for the first time since my dad passed. By coincidence, it will be five months to the day. I don't know how I'm gonna react. Living abroad, I'm used to not seeing him, but when I'm there... He won't be anymore.

Five months ago, I was passing Huesca down the Spanish Pyrenees, on my way to the Pourtalet pass, like I often do to go home. Up there, at the border, I stopped. The peaks were covered in snow. The sky was a light grey, with only a few golden sun rays touching the slopes below. I saw a group of hikers leave the shelter there, and walk along the river to get back to their cars. It was all very peaceful, and the view was magnificent. I stopped, because for a moment, I couldn't continue. I was overwhelmed by emotion. Because as I watched this beautiful view, these mountains that my father loved so much, the thought came to me that, in a way, I was saying goodbye to them on his behalf. Even then... while lately we were preparing ourselves for the inevitable, we did not know that our own, terrible farewell would come so fast. I arrived home. My father passed the next day.

I didn't know how to say goodbye, and I still don't. Life is such that, by my character, and by his, I didn't open up that much to my dad, nor him to me. But underneath that surface, the heart was there. Love.

I miss my dad terribly.

In a few weeks, we will gather at the edge of a lake he loved, and spread his ashes, and he will be resting in his beloved Pyrenees.

And I'll see him every time I pass that Pourtalet road.

[Thirith]

I'm so sorry about your loss, rachel. My dad died a little over two months ago, and since we were never a very close family, there's something abstract to him not being there any more. I can only imagine what it's like to have such a loss and to feel that absence as acutely and concretely when you return and he's just not there.

Your dad does sound like an amazing man, the kind of person who deserves a memorial the size of the Pyrenees. Take care.

[rachel]

Thank you Thirith, and my condolences to you too. <3 It's kinda surreal at times, but what else can we do but go on...

[Tocky]

Be thankful we had the ones we did and pass it on in some way. Losing a good one never goes away.

[Qooper]

Random thoughts?

- Autumn is like another dimension that intersects with ours once every year and paints everything orange, cozy and oddly Victorian. When the intersection ends, we're left with grey weather and brown mush on the ground.

- Modern architecture has got it all wrong. Sure it's cheap to build from concrete and just slap some painted metal and darkened glass on top, but time is not kind to such constructions. However, any construction made out of stone ages like fine wine. The older it is, the more moss it attracts, and thus the more ornate it becomes, until we're back in "another dimension" -territory.

- Soon it'll be September. I think I hear a fireplace crackling, and the pages of a good book rustling. Someone is looking through a monocle. He has a rather striking mustache, and a top hat too. Goodness gracious! Is that a crumpet on the table?

[Azaran]

- Modern architecture has got it all wrong. Sure it's cheap to build from concrete and just slap some painted metal and darkened glass on top, but time is not kind to such constructions. However, any construction made out of stone ages like fine wine. The older it is, the more moss it attracts, and thus the more ornate it becomes, until we're back in "another dimension" -territory.

Thank you.

Not a fan of modernist architecture. Many of the principles it's founded on are nonsensical. Most people prefer ornate, traditional architecture, but nu architects insist on building the exact opposite; deliberately bland, barren designs, devoid of ornament, and often provocative - it seems they never grew beyond the 'edgy teenager' phase. And they'll use any pretext to criticize traditional design (including going as low as politicizing architecture).

There's also a lot of hostility toward anything that smacks of 'traditional' in most architecture college programs; I've read about teachers failing students for submitting projects that are too traditional (symmetry, ornament, and reasonably sized windows are capital sins apparently).

This also reflects in modernist interior design. 'Open concept' interiors destroy the individuality of different parts of a home, and with the obsession with having everything a harsh white (doors, walls, furniture, &c) it appears designers' intentions are to make everything as barren and bland as possible (under the pretext of 'airy, spacious, light-filled interiors')

With 3d printing and moulding, the old argument that ornament is expensive and 'we no longer have enough skilled craftsmen' goes out the window. Traditional architectural design is aligned with human wellbeing and the natural world, and this is has been confirmed by science.

Ornament and function go together. There is no structure in nature that can be classified as pure ornament without function. In traditional architecture, which was more tied to nature, such a separation never existed. The breakdown of the human adaptation of architecture can be traced to the forced conceptual separation of ornament from function, a relatively recent occurrence in human history. [...] Even less known outside scientific circles is the existence of a large number of cortical neurons inside the brain that are triggered only by ornamental elements. These include specific responses to crosses, stars, concentric circles, crosses with an outline, and other concentrically-organized symmetrical figures with some complexity. These patterns are therefore built into our cognitive neural structure. Since those neurons are there for a reason, we should be stimulating them

[henke]

Had piccnic with friends in the park.
Friend gives me a ride home
I play some Stray on the PS5, its quite good!
wait wheres my phone
look all over
hear neighbor in stairway, pop my head out and ask him him to call me
no ringtone
panic a bit
I got everything in that phone case, man, EVERYTHING! drivers license, Visa card, keycard for office!
use Samsung's FindMyPhone website
ok, it's showing an address. but it's an address I know and I've been at before. decide it's probably just some old GPS-signal that's gotten stuck in the system, no way it's there!
go to bankwebsite to temporarily block credit card purchases
realize I can't do that because I need the verification app on my phone to even get INTO the bank website
panic some more
my phone must've fallen out in my friend's car! RIGHT? I mean it didn't fall out in the PARK, could it?
send messages to friend on twitter and discord. no replies.
try to contact mutual friends and have them call him. no replies, it's too late, everyone has the good sense to be off social media by this time.
panic!
drive to the park, look around, no phone, come back home
no messages from friend
try to find his phone number online, find one, but it's an old one. get neighbor's phone, call it, no answer
look at FindMyPhone site again. now it's showing the house next door to the one earlier. hmm...
hmm!
what say I drive out there and check it out?
WHAT SAY INDEED
drive out, look around. buncha dark cars in the parkinglot, one of em kinda looks like my friend's.
look at mailboxes, by god, that's his last name! appartment 1!
go knock on door, his wife answers, I explain what I'm looking for
dude comes out, we check the car, the phone is there.
FIN


I need an editor to format this TRUE STORY into a book. We'll call it Henke's Wild And Wacky Adventure. Together we can make millions! MILLIONS! ok goodnight

[Starker]

That's the best review of Stray I've read so far, tbh.

[Pyrian]

go to bankwebsite to temporarily block credit card purchases
realize I can't do that because I need the verification app on my phone to even get INTO the bank website

Heh. Gotta love it when your security is preventing your security.

[Tocky]

This heat is sapping my energy. I come home and sit on the couch to watch some Stranger Things and I've slept through three episodes before I know it. It has to be hard on the English. I can't imagine this heat without cooling units. On the other hand those stone houses retain some coolness. We worked on the windows of the second underground house I've seen recently. What they do is find a hill, preferably with trees, bulldoze off the top level, and build a block house as they want. Then they pile the dirt back over it so that it's sort of a ranch style Hobbit. Cooling it is easier that way.

We are going to have to think of new ways of beating the heat. There is an old Arthur C. Clark story about the end of the earth when the sun has swollen and life failing where there is no escape but underground. I think of that in times like these. I also think of Canada and the blessed dearth of evangelicals there. What will we do when there are only the thought police usurping bodily autonomy in a heat wave that drives folks mad, folks with guns?

Autumn seems so far away.

At least I know where my phone is.

[Starker]

But do you know where your towel is?

Funny how we seem to have once in a lifetime weather events on the regular now.

[Oceanstorm]

I play some Stray on the PS5, its quite good!

God I want to play Stray but my gpu died & I'm saving to get a new one *me sobbing cause I wanna play it so bad*
On another random note, my black moggy is losing a patch of fur just above her bum at the base of her spine.
Bit concerning but we'll see how it goes

[Tocky]

My daughter was on the evening news hawking T shirts for North Pontotoc school Choir to fund their activities. It's a bit surreal to see your daughter on TV but also a proud moment for her cause. She is an artist much better than her old man and uses her talent to create some of the most wonderful things. She has created a stamp image by hand that combines the Viking logo of the school with the Grateful Dead logo so that she can create T shirts to sell for the funding of choir activities of which my grand Lana is a very vocal participant. Her voice is my daughters made over. When she hits the Freddie Mercury highs I'm so proud. I hadn't the courage to tell Samantha that the lightening bolt in the skull bit is for acid though. Not that it matters. Dear lord she even managed to double entendre a bit about rubbing the image onto the shirt with the newscaster. Oh shit she is me made over. They both broke up over that one.







Notice how there is no space for anything but pictures on my wall? It's that way all over the house. I don't believe in bare walls. Every inch of my whole house is pictures or art or posters. Mostly pictures.