Masks

Finally finished finishing (applied a couple layers of Tung oil to protect the wood) the Congolese mask i bought in Uganda last year and placed it next to the mask i bought in Costa Rica this year. On the left is a mahogany fertility mask from the Songa tribe in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (possibly this place?). On the right is a Boruca ceremonial mask carved from balsa wood by Gonzalez. The Boruca mask was used in the "Danza de los Diablitos" ceremony which reenacts the European invasion and repression of the natives, and as the ceremony is very physical, the mask is missing a tooth.

Morale Milestone

Yesterday - pay day - and my paycheck finally exceeded one of my self-imposed meaningless milestones. As i walked downtown to celebrate last night, and being rather tired of all the past weeks' work, i threw my pocket change into the streets, hoping to speed on the inevitable, but today awoke to find our collective face still covered. Perhaps, given the last few weeks' long hours, Bosch would argue that i'm rather close to the right-side of some of his drawings, and thus my money-throwing was a little late.

After the night's celebration, had some trouble getting back to business today, as i've had all week. Pondering my morning breath, i realised i might be using my spices the wrong way. So while watching football this afternoon, i came up with a solution - a banner to boost my morale and willingness to work:



If this helps, perhaps i'll come up with a series of encouraging slogans and change it up once a month or so.

Sunny Times

Spent the weekend making sun jars. I found the components for a total of just under $15, and they are quite addictive to make, so i made 7 of them and have 6 more in the works. And am broke.

Ceilings

By request, a few shots of the unfinished mural.

 
 

Food

Spent the night cooking a week's worth of meals for a low-income friend. Not quite like my father's many claims to fame, but i'm not quite like my father. Made a couple of the zero-day classics - Plantain Yellowmess and Czech Surprise (the surprise would be if it actually had anything to do with the Czech Republic) - as well as some lesser named beasts. If you like spicy (digo picante y sabroso) fried food that tastes like it was thrown together on a whim (forse alla putanesca?), then you may like my cooking.

Meanwhile, tonight i dined on vodka tonic and Flintstones. As i was hungry i had two of each.

Paint

The latest purchase my parents have made for me (via the gift card they bought me) is orange paint. I used it to paint the living room walls. These are a couple photos of what it currently looks like - i still don't have all the stuff i want on the walls, nor is the mural finished, so things may yet change.


At 2am i decided the chimney oven cover (the coloured circle in the corner) could use some other paint, i may have to commission a Special Painting in the middle of it. The red and gold remind me of the paint job on traditional Peruvian mirrors.

And in case you were wondering, biking home with a couple gallons of paint is decidely fun.

Daily Drudgery

The river sang to me today, a song of broken dreams and future warmth, of distant places, lost friends, dead ends, new beginnings, and common routes - typical nature gooseshit, a windy treat played through nameless instruments. The day's warmth and wind had cracked the thick riverside ice into a thousand fist-sized pieces, and the wind and waves jingled the ice-xylophone through a one-time tune. Sometimes the wind was too strong, overwhelming the ice pieces tingling against eachother, but when i stopped and listened for a while, the high, frozen notes drifted through an amazingly resonant, surround sound performance.

Makes a good memory; the wind writes ever more in the increasingly deep wrinkles on my face.

James Burke

A short conversation about this photo led me to design this shirt. I doubt i will ever print it.

1997 VRML

Thoughts of MCMOGATK inspired me to finally put up the vrml scripts i wrote in 1997. For the most part they are unchanged, i only removed a few links that no longer exist and added correct paths. Some of the code is rather ugly and desperately needs cleaning, but i tested it out last night and the scripts do work, for the most part.

MCMOGATK

The calls to participate were like dreams, and in my sleep did i create my entries.
See if you can find them: 1996 1997

Did You-san (or is it Minowa-san?) know how exciting the possibility of participation was?

Years later, i am left wishing i had participated harder, as if that would have made a difference. I also wonder what this means: screen.

I had forgotten how much time i had put into that briefcase/city/torii. The billboards turn to face the viewer, the insides of the buildings have difference features, there's a car flying around (would have been more, and people too, but the moving buildings were already overworking my 1994-era computer), and it's a royal pain to try to navigate through. The influences are readily apparent - Blade Runner, Metropolis, etc.

And the meaning? If it ever existed, it's long since been lost in the mind of a young 21-year old.



p.s.: if you need a vrml viewer, Cortona seems to work ok in WinXP/IE.

shirt update, work, alternate reality

3 hours pathing out the original screen capture plus 2 hours fine tuning the image, and i have a final image of the shirt ready for printing. That link leads to a smaller version, but if you compare that smaller version to the link in the previous post, you'll see a difference in the sharpness (hair isn't filled in, i'm debating leaving it white in the final print, there are already so many colours that need to get done, and the image i'm working off of is about 5 times as big). I don't have enough materials to make the screens just yet, though, and i might have to order them, so it might be another week before i begin the laborious process of transfering ink onto shirt, but it'll be so worth it...

Last night i gave a tour of the server room for one of the compsec classes, kept me here a bit late. This morning got to do it again for the unix admin class. Kind of hoarse now, having to talk for hours over the roar of the HVAC and servers is something i'm not so used to.

Spent too much work time looking through the CIA World Factbook , one of my favourite pasttimes. If i could write, i'd write a book in which UofM (approx 50k students, $3.8 billion total revenue) invades Belize (68k available military manpower, $18 million military expenditure) and forms the Republic of the University of Michigan, or in which Bill Gates (net worth: $48 billion) hires 6 million Chinese men for one year (GDP per capita: $5k, total cost of $30 billion), spends $10 billion to equip them, invades North Korea (~6 million available manpower, $5 billion military expenditure), uses his remaining $8 billion to rebuild the country afterwards, and is hailed as the greatest US patriot ever for taking out one of the Axis of Evil countries- i'm sure either would be a best seller.
Thinking about war in terms of raw numbers reminds me of The Fog of War : in one part Robert McNamara describes more efficiently bombing Japan during WWII while numbers fall from planes in vintage footage - quite a disturbing scene.