It’s like Briana took the thoughts I’ve been thinking right out of my head, massaged them with her own knack for wordplay, and then shared them with the world.

More Adventures in Snobbery via Blisscovery

Especially this part:

In Sarah’s latest series about online rockstar-dom, she wrote:

The point, after all, isn’t to change yourself so that people will like you. The point is to gauge how accurately you are voicing your truths.

Ahhh, yes. That’s where 16 year old me got things very wrong. I’m pretty sure I was all about changing myself to get people to like me.

The only difference is, I’m way past 16 years old and STILL, at this very moment, trying to navigate the difference between getting people to like me and trying to gauge how to accurately voice my truths.

Oh, and Fred Hicks is just adding two gallons of fuel to this whole thing in terms of me pondering how my online persona (which I’m trying to make authentic to my everyday person) walks the very same labyrinth.

• Wait, hold up! Mandalorian dude is using a black-bladed lightsaber? From the Old Republic? Is this new or was that introduced previously? #
• J-Locke! Kagematsu! DresdenFilesRPG! Masks! So much to shout about, but all I have time to do now is tease you with it. Life dances on… #
• The writing & layout in the Dresden Files RPG is pure art. They use the voices of Butcher's characters to convey game concepts elegantly. #

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Debra Dean Murphy comes across with a potent indictment of both Wall Stree culture and Western religious culture.

I especially love the part where she mentions the Christian church “bedding down” with Emperor Constantine.

Corporations and the Corpus Verum « Intersections: Thoughts on Religion, Culture, and Politics.

I suspect a lot of my Christian friends – and my pro-capitalist friends – will get a bit bothered by reading this – or maybe they’ll just blow it off and ignore it. We LOOOVE to whitewash over the simple fact that both Jesus and the early Church were  advocates of what many people today like to call “socialism” and “communism”.  As Debra points out, Western Christianity is fond of doing the interpretive dance to try to get passages like Acts 2:37-46 to mean anything but what they actually say.

One of the new creative toys I’ve been playing around with is Apophysis, a free bit of software that lets you generate some pretty cool fractal-based stuff. Like this:

Apophysis is a program where it’s pretty easy to make some cool-looking stuff right out of the gate – there are some good tutorials to help with the basics – but it’s challenging to master.  And I have in no way mastered it. Depending on your personality it can be addictive playing around with the various dials figuring out ways to achieve interesting effects. I’m one of those guys who could get very addicted, but I’m going to try not to get too caught up in Apophysis because I don’t want one more computer-focused thing to distract me. I am, after all, trying to carve out time to be more creative away from the computer.

I’ll probably share some more of these along the way, though, and if you like one well enough to use as a wallpaper, contact me and I’ll send you one of the appropriate resolution. I make the originals at 1600 pixels wide, so that should cover it.

February 2nd. Brigid’s Day.

Here’s a photo of my mantle with a candle lit for Imbolc and below that, a digital painting I made last night with Painter X, based on a 3d render I worked up a couple years ago.

In honor of my muse, my Lady, my creative spark, my Empress, my mother, my anima, my tornado, my warm breeze, my protector, my instigator … sun of my morning, moon of my night, fire in my darkness.

I light a candle and create … and Possibility inches ever more closely to being born.

Step 1: Celluclay over a generic plastic face mold.

After letting my bag of mixed Celluclay sit untouched in the fridge for over a week, this weekend I finally decided to try to make my first venetian mask. I formed the stuff over a generic plastic face mold, then spent about an hour smoothing it around, filling in gaps, and adding some bulk to the nose and brows to customize the basic shape. Now it’s sitting on my oven drying – a process that’ll take about 24 hours.

Celluclay is a form of retail paper mache that behaves a lot like clay, then hardens into a solid form that can be sanded and carved and cut to a nice smooth finish, then painted or decorated. This is the first time I’ve worked with anything like Celluclay, and I think I like it, although I am definitely going to need to get a few masks under my belt before I feel like I have a good sense of how to work it and mold it to my satisfaction. This feels like a pretty good first try, though. I’ve made masquerade masks for theatre productions before, but it was over 15 years ago and back then we used different materials.

I’ll keep taking pictures and sharing what this process is like. I plan to make several masks in the future and I want to keep a record of what it was like to create the very first one.

Wherin we continue our discussion of the possibility of playing a Primetime Adventures series based on the following premise:

“a show about a time-traveling William Shakespeare and Abraham Lincoln zooming across the heartland of America in a stolen ‘67 Mustang with a goth-chick waitress who’s on the run from the Irish mob in Chicago.”

Daniel Perez, Chuck Hedden and I have been flirting with the notion of taking this seriously. Some ideas came up in another thread and this post is here to keep the pitch discussion going, should anyone wish to do so.