azurelunatic

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Draw. Draw what you see. Draw what you don't see. Draw any time you think of it, whenever you put pen to paper to do something else. Draw in a sketchbook. Draw on the corners and margins of your shopping list. (If you get a good one, paste it in your sketchbook to look back on later.) Draw elementary geometric shapes and solids. Draw bent sheets and banners. Draw perspective. Draw a thousand roads disappearing into the horizon. Draw a thousand castles with crenelations and gates and towers and a flapping banner on top. Draw an apple, an orange. Draw texture. Look at the way the light hits something and reflects. Study shadow. Study how everything on your desk is made up of the elementary shapes you learned. That's a cylinder. There's a plane, and a box with rounded edges, and that's a box that got itself confused and got sent to the cone factory, with little fiddly bits. Discover the drape of cloth. Discover the drape of this cloth vs. that cloth: how lightly cotton lies, how stiff suits wrinkle despite themselves, the drape and swish of heavy knit. Draw motion. Watch the blur of this into that, figure out how to draw the transition, which things are necessary to convey the whole and which you can leave out. Draw cartoons. Draw the realistic, every little grain of sand. Simplify. Exaggerate. Study. Work from a photo. Work from life. Learn the face, the body, all the different eyes and noses and ears and chins you can find. Learn all the colors of every part of your own skin. Learn someone else's. Find work you admire and reverse-engineer it. Find an artist you admire, find five, and watch them work if you can. Learn your tools. Stretch their limits. Make printer's ink work like watercolor. Stack watercolor like tempera. Try acrylic, oil, oil pastel, crayon, highlighter, whiteboard marker, pencil, your own blood if you have nothing else. Distinguish the constructive from the non-constructive, and discard the latter. Is "that sucks" really "that's not to my taste" or "your execution was poor", or both? Don't stop. If you stop, start again. Start with something elementary and simple and stupid if you have to. Go back to basics. Draw what you see. Draw something else. Look at the others in your field. If "[you] could do better", do it. Start over. Throw it all out if you have to (and give some to somebody who won't, and scan it first in case you change your mind). Keep going. Plop some up on the internet. Figure out what tools you're missing and save up for them. Blow too much of your grocery money on art supplies and decide you like the taste of ramen this week. Try not to do that again too often. Accept a commission or two. Figure out what they can't pay you to do. Struggle with a dozen different art programs. Learn how to scan. Learn how to modify something you sketched up into something with colors that nature didn't make it easy to get to.

But draw. Draw. Draw.

I've been having trouble writing. (This is not new. This has not been new for a year. Between everything, and the slightest suggestion that I oughtn't to be writing to my passion, that I haven't the authority to be doing so, and my self-protective function declares that I shan't do that in public, then.)

In the absence of eloquence of the written word, my pen hasn't stayed still. At chicken camp, I started doodling. I started sketching the chickens, because it had been too long since I'd been in the presence of chickens to draw them, and I'd forgotten basic facts of chicken anatomy, like the eyebrows, and exactly where to draw the ear.

I started, and I found myself unable to stop. Soon enough our trainer had started putting some of them into the presentations. I was drawing again, and it was wonderful.

I went to court to watch history for myself, because you never do quite get it right in your own head when you've had it through a filter, not just exactly so, not unless you know the quality of the lens that the observer's bringing to bear and how to run the transform algorithm to skew it back to true. I brought along the sketchpad on a whim.

I showed you what happened. The creativity went WHAM again, and took me bowling along with it.

Today was the last day for the witnesses. It'll be a month before closing arguments. Tonight was the President of the US's State of the Union speech. I watched him on my little computer screen, streaming CSPAN, and my fingers twitched. There, that angle of head, that quirk of mouth, that moment, that one, that repeated pose. Capture them. Make them mine. I didn't fetch my pen and paper, but I wanted to, and given more time I might yet have.

I'd not been seriously drawing since high school, since the doodles at the call center.

If I can't write, I'll draw. Creativity must have its outlet.

I've found that when I'm deepest in concentration, music will sometimes take up attention that I needed to use on whatever it was that I was trying to do. So from that, I tried concluding that actually music was a detriment to my productivity.

However, sometimes I found myself craving music when trying to get settled into a grove. At first I thought that it was only mood, but then I realized that it was more than that.

My brain needs the music sometimes to provide a distraction for me when I'm not settled into the deep kind of concentration that precludes any distractions at all. The music is enough distraction, and the right kind of distraction, that I can stay focused on the creative task at hand and not go haring after IRC, or that post I saw two minutes ago, or any of the other things that try to steal the bits of my attention when I'm trying to focus.

Music with a good solid structure is the best. I can't listen to unstructured music when I'm trying to sleep, and when I'm trying to concentrate, if I don't know the music or if I can't predict the structures of the song to some degree, it will distract me more than I plan to be distracted. Baroque is good. Things with the structure stretched out too far are bad. Techno is good. Techno that fuses a techno beat on a classical framework may have been made for the specific purpose of keeping my brain in one piece while concentrating. It's really lovely.

Current Location: 94044
Current Music: TMBG, "Hope That I Get Old Before I Die"

The more I talk about things that don't matter at work, the more I smile and gleam and shine, the more I shut down quietly inside and don't talk to anyone but just the few on the things that do matter, and matter the most.

This past 24 hours has already seen two e-mails sent off in the general direction of my favorite-most Blonder Half. Those still weren't private enough to discuss the deep things. I'll have to write more on paper, later.

My 2005 Petridish.net album has bits and pieces of my random life. Right now I have to convince the camera to release the next set, which involve "wearing my new hat to town", some dangling network jacks, and the lurkingest little harlequin-masked stray calico cat.

Anyone managing the hurricane disaster relief efforts at this point is in the un-enviable situation of a ghem-general succeeding a number of others in the ultimately ill-fated Barrayaran invasion. Fucking up is a group effort, and it does not take a negative hero to solely stage-manage a disaster, but no matter how good or bad you are, it still sucks to be in that position. You surely did not get there by yourself, and you're not going to get out of it by yourself, not unless you have the tactical skill of a Vorkosigan.

Work is reaching a consensus that I need to get my little work cartoons scanned and uploaded somewhere so that they can get shared with the whole class. Eeep. The thought both thrills and intimidates me. Today (Sunday evening) I left the binder with the cartoons on the desk, and the supervisor who's recovering from the broken back picked it up and started reading and howling with laughter.

My apartment is still a housekeeping storm watch area: not a warning, quite, and not a disaster area, but it could become one with very little help. There is a laundry queue. Yay weekend.

I wished the LF a happy birthday, and got back a message wishing me the same. (The 11th is his birthday. Not mine. But it's the thought that counts.) Happy (belated) birthday to

cindygerb as well; happy Orgasm Day. My finest refrigerator-dregs to the Shrubbery, like those tomatoes that aren't much good for eating anymore, at a suitable velocity. (We actually don't need a Shrubbery. Ni! Ni! 'Ni!)

I've been awake for about 23 hours at this point, because I woke up at 6 on Sunday morning. Saturday night was not exactly a good night for sleeping either -- I came home from work, collapsed, slept for two hours, woke up to the telephone ringing with a familiar caller ID, talked with Darkside for a few minutes (this does not count as him calling me: it was his mother calling me back and passing the phone over to him) then stayed up wired until midnight or after, then crashed until 3:45, then stayed up until 5-ish, and then got an hour of sleep... no, not a good night for sleep.

The alarm clock gets switched OFF now, and sleep gets priority until distinctly after noon.

Current Mood: dizzy
Current Music: the Alan Parsons Project in my head, following up the Winamp

It makes me feel a bit guilty, after, when I come out of an intense session doing things in Fuzzy's creative world. Fuzzy can make me see his worlds through his eyes, and I'm the one with the words to come back out of his segment of the Before and describe these things.

You see, my heart belongs to me, but it's on long-term loan to Darkside. So when I go into a place with Fuzzy that's nothing like anything I've been able to share with Darkside, I feel guilty -- not because I shouldn't be doing this project with Fuzzy, because that's not it -- Fuzzy and I have been meant to work together since we met -- but because I should be able to do this with Darkside too, and ... so far, we haven't.

I want to be plunged so far into Darkside's world of creativity that I have to consciously remind myself to breathe the Earth air -- and not just as an observer, but as a co-creator. I want to see Darkside's eyes glowing as he emerges from diving into one of my worlds with the details of something I've missed that he's been able to see for me. That is what I want.

And until we have it, it's silly -- even wrong -- for me to put my brain on hold to wait until we can be together. It would be very wrong of me to tell Fuzzy that I cannot do this with him because it compromises a relationship that doesn't technically exist. It would compromise everything more to deny the creative bond that exists. It would be a betrayal of self and other, and I'd forever regret it. It might -- would -- hamper the creative bond between Darkside and me.

That doesn't mean it's comfortable, though.

Current Mood: guilty
Current Music: R.E.M. - Electrolite

Still with Atlas Shrugged. I really would like to hit the fellow who proposed that genius be abolished, that genius greedily hides away information that would otherwise be available to the rest of the populace. [Insert rant about pet peeve: populace is the people. Populous means that any given place that is described as such has a lot of people living there. I am to the point of giving usagesmacks for that error.]

There are things that everyone may know by simple observation: that thing is red; this thing is brown; cacti are sharp if you touch the spikes with your bare finger: any information conveyable in by the senses is available to anyone who has the sense to experience it, and the mind to remember it.

The value of raw information is inversely proportional to the ease with which it may be gathered, and directly proportional to the value of the use toward which it will be put. Say that it is sunny outside today where you live. Any person with access to the outside who is capable of noticing sunny/not sunny can gather this information. But is it sunny on the direct opposite side of the world? That'll take a little more doing. Note for the pedants: yes, in some cases, it is easier for a geek to search up something at the computer than to travel the maze of twisty little passageways to spend some time in the Big Blue Room.

Of what worth is information about the weather? Sometimes it's something to chat about when there is need for conversation-filler, and other times it is mission-critical, in the case of hurricanes and floods, or even whether to hold the party indoors or outdoors.

Rare information, information of high difficulty to gather, is valuable when it will be used for something of value. If the person gathering the information puts a high value on "Because I want to know," then it's valuable, by gods!

So, you've got information. Say it's information about the weather. You have two users of the information. One user notices that it is rainy today, and notes, "I will get wet if I don't bring my umbrella." Another user notices the same information, and looks at patterns in weather, and notices that it gets abysmally rainy every year at about this time, and will mark it on the calendar for next year, so that the household will have all roof leaks patched and umbrellas deployed before the rainy season hits again.

The distinction was not in information available: it was what was done with that information. Phillip Morris paid me $8.50 an hour, indirectly, to sit in a relatively comfortable chair and gather well-organized, clearly categorized information on whether people in any given household smoked and did a few other common activities, sorted by gender, age, income, and education level. Mind, $8.5/hr was my cut of the racket. I didn't get very many people to talk to me for numbers dialled/time spent on phone. I have some very interesting journals from that year, where I was basically getting paid to sit still, behave, and talk to people from the quiz on my computer screen every now and then. They're all on paper, though. (I need to transcribe them one of these days...) Evidently they were doing something very valuable with that information; also evidently, it is more difficult to extract information about what people are actually doing in relation to their demographic information than it seems to the layman.

Two people with identical inputs and different processing facilities available to them will come to different conclusions based on the inputs. The one with the better processor will likely come to results that are more interesting, and more adaptable for further use.

"Nobody invents anything, he merely reflects what's floating around in the social atmosphere. A genius is an intellectual scavanger..." --Atlas Shrugged

So far as that goes, there is a point. It's all out there. A genius is the sort of intellectual scavanger who can see things floating around that haven't been put together yet, but really should be, and has the wit and the craft to combine them in ways that no one (or relatively few) have thought to do. Scavangers make creative use of bits that others think worthless.

The continuation of the quote goes, "...and a greedy hoarder of the ideas which rightfully belong to society, from which he stole them." Um, no. The raw ideas that were out there are still there, for use by anyone who sees how to use them. Unless you delete all reference to and knowledge of your source material, you have not "stolen" (made unavailable for use by its rightful user) anything. The source material is still there for anyone who needs it. You have an improvement, or an innovation, giving proper propz to the original ideas.

The concept that the new idea formed from the bits of the old ideas is rightfully belong to society is a laugh. This is quite like saying that since the person of Ms. Society gave some bits of cut-up wood to a master carpenter, and the master carpenter crafted them into a chair, since all the raw materials were Ms. Society's to start with, Ms. Society should have the chair for free. Certainly, since the materials were hers, she is due a fair exchage for them if the master carpenter does not give her the chair, but if the master carpenter gives her the chair, she should rightly give to him fair exchange for his time and application of expertise.

The greedy hoarder of ideas is the inventor who drafts beautiful things but never looks into how to make them so that the public may have a chance at buying them and thereby benefitting from them. The greedy hoarder of ideas is the one who surpresses ideas from public release lest people learn and make more new ideas from the scraps of the old.

Furthermore: society? Who is Society? I know! You are society! Oh, you have never even heard of that idea that was the key one that sparked my inspiration for the invention? So sorry. Oh! You! Are you Society? You must be Society.... no? You learned about it in school, though. Getting warmer.

Notice, that in math, it's difficult to divide by zero or infinity...