you only need the light when it's burning low

I have a four hour headache that won't go away and is just low grade enough to mostly ignore but distracting enough that sleep and functional concentration are out of the question. This is the kind of night where I read up on the history of Dadism versus Surrealism because why not?

Brief Diegression

This has to do with something I read that threw out Dadism as a movement that encompasses the idea that the world doesn't deserve art. Or maybe just western civilization, because nothing like exoticism of the east to really round that out.

(Note: I'm saying that was the impression I got from what I read first. I'm still processing what I've read since then.)

And because the connection between art and social movements fascinates me. Not so much each of them in themselves, but because of the arguments that pit art-for-art's-sake against art-for-politics and art-for-social-movement and art-for-propoganda and the idea of dishonest art. Or for that matter, to jump mediums dramatically, poetry versus prose. I think I fundamentally lose the argument since I wasn't socialized well as a child when it comes to the fine arts and creative process and art to me was always filed away under communication of an idea; you can do it badly in a variety of ways, granted, but you can't do it wrong. I sometimes come out of intensive reading feeling this is the equivalent of someone saying French is better than Greek and everyone should speak French; that's as close as I've ever come to getting a handle on the idea; it always comes across as depersonalization and homogeneity of something that should be intensely personal and idiosyncratic at its most ideal.



In college, my BFF was taking a course in pencil sketching, which I was only attracted to because she had a case of like, five billion different kinds of graphite pencils and she indulged me by giving me some paper and let me entertain myself writing my name in every one of them one day at our kitchen table.

(In case this is relevant, I used to practice calligraphy in my teens, though I lost most of my muscle control to do it well now, this does remind me I want to order a kit. This was useful when I was taking Russian; I was the first in the class that had no problem with the difference between print and script. All I had to do was write out the alphabet once and my memory nailed it. Calligraphy trained me better than cursive to recognize letter equivalents that look absolutely nothing like each other even by accident.)

(This next part is relevant; I have the bare minimum of spatials so I can't actually draw accurately, or even at all. When I was in Finland, I had to take a required course in drawing, for reasons, and that was both enlightening and horrifying, because I could not grasp conceptually a lot of what seemed to be the basis of accurately drawing the equivalent of a vase (it was not a vase; I don't remember what it was that floored me so completely in that class, but suffice to say, I walked out of it vaguely convinced I'd been dropped on my head as a child or something and broke the part of my brain that could do that kind of thing.)

BFF, however, after watching me get my fingers covered in graphite dust for an hour, shoved a sketchbook in front of me and decided I should draw something for her. Which is what I get for wanting to play with her pencils.

I don't remember what exactly she said, because this was a very long time ago, but when she finally translated my various explanations about how I couldn't do this (brain damage as a child theory did not cut it), she cut me off and--I seriously don't remember anything about this conversation--talked me through something something something, and I surfaced with my hand killing me and a portrait of her an indeterminate period of time later (more than 1 hour, less than 1 day). It was not great or even good art or anything, but people unaffiliated with the entire thing actually recognized it as her when they ran across it in her sketchbook. There was shading involved and I think I used like, ten pencils, and my hand was killing me for two days after that.

Every time I remember that, I think about the people who speak in tongues and transcendental meditation and fugue states and how hard it is to dismiss that when I still don't understand how I drew that. I don't even know why I drew her and not the bowl on the table (there was not actually a bowl on the table, but there were things on it that were not portrait shaped that would have made more sense to pick, and probably with significantly less hand pain). I remember most of the drawing though, and the feeling; its' the same feeling I get when I write, but not just any kind of writing: the kind where I can't stop or slow down or think or do anything else but that, and honestly, given a choice between writing or breathing, I'd stop breathing first. It's that utterly consuming.

I have never been able, even as an exercise, to do anything that isn't the equivalent of stick figures since then, just like before then.



the dangers of headache-induced night surfing

I don't have any idea how I ended up reading about the etymology of y'all on wikipedia. I can't even blame wikisurfing; I was nowhere near wikipedia last time I looked. Yet.

Souther American English/Grammar

Y'all

Specifically, Y'all all which finally nailed down something I'd tried to explain about when you throw in that extra all because usage is contextual in the extreme.

A very specific example from experience that isn't covered in the wikipedia article:

To my aunt, referring to her family that was there with us: Are y'all going to the thing?

To my aunt, referring to her entire family both present and not: All y'all are going to the thing?

I feel validated by wikipedia, yes, so am sharing my feeling of triumph.

Cracked is cracky

If Classic Holiday Movies Got Gritty Reboots - for the record, most were awesome, but number three both fascinates me and freaks me out in equal measure. Instantly, I can see the trailer for it: the childish sing-song voice chanting Frosty's "I'll be back again someday" while in the snow-distorted distance, we see the vague shape of a snowman dragging a hammer behind him slowly approaching the oblivious group of children who watched the agony of him slowly melting and did nothing. Oh, they should have known, known the warning when they heard it: I'll be back again someday to destroy you all!

So I'm never sleeping again. Well done, me.

The 7 Most Elaborate Dick Moves in Online Gaming History and The 7 Biggest Dick Moves in the History of Online Gaming - the runescape massacre in the first one just kills me, but in the second link, number 5.

It forced the three top guilds to co-operate, which makes herding cats look easier than getting Bollywood extras to move in step. It was Sesame Street by way of Lord of the Rings, specifically the end of the third movie, since for over three hours, 180 players turned themselves into a Sisyphean Zerg horde. Resurrecting each other faster than the monster could kill them, they put in Herculean feats of teamwork that cruelly mocked the concept of "fun." They fought like warrior poets, they fought like Scotsmen and eventually ground the boss down to 22 percent health -- at which point Sony turned the whole thing off and acted like it was the players' fault.

Fun is for those who have not been playing the stupidest bubble app in history that you have spent three days on the same ridic level. This is war. Not that I'm talking about myself here or anything.

Comments

[ratcreature]

Being able to draw stick figures probably just hinders being able to draw realistically. Basically the biggest obstacle to realistic drawing is that humans tend to think abstractly, have preconceived notions on how things should look based on how they work, are put together, or how important parts are to us, and that hour brain very heavily process what our eyes receive into what we "see". To draw realistically you sort of have to draw a 2D version of the "pre-processed" image of reality like it arrives in your eye, so that if another human looks at it, their brain translates it the same as the real thing.

It is most obvious with color. We recognize the color of a thing in all kinds of different light conditions and next to other colors in relation, because the brain tells us something is a certain color, but it isn't. Same for light-dark values, perspective, and so on. All the "optical illusions" depend on this. So with that sketch you apparently just turned off your brain processing to just draw what your eyes saw.

There are actually several training programs for learning to draw that have exercises that attempt to teach you do that on command.

[seperis]

I may have to go look that up. I've never been visual at all, but now I'm curious to see how those programs work.

So with that sketch you apparently just turned off your brain processing to just draw what your eyes saw.

Your explanation is really easy to follow. Thank you.

[ratcreature]

The most famous one of those is probably "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" by Betty Edwards. Personally I couldn't stand the book at all, because it has lots of pseudo-scientific babble about "brain modes" and you could cut about 200 of the 300 pages and still have the relevant drawing exercises, but a lot of people like it, and some of the practice makes sense.

[ellixis]

Yeah. The biggest part of learning to draw is learning to turn off that bit of your brain that is telling you that x object SHOULD look like THIS. Music can help sometimes; before I got to the point where I could consciously activate that switch, I found that keeping the language-symbolism part of my brain busy with music it could sing along to while I drew helped me.

[libitina]

Have you tried glitch.com? It's the most bizarrely friendly MMO. And getting the players to work together to accomplish massive feats of grinding is actually one of the goals of the game creators, and I'm fascinated by this opposite case where the united effort is expressly not wanted.

Sometimes I think I should put a little time into getting good at calligraphy. Then someone writes something that reminds me it wouldn't just be a little time. Yeah. No. Thanks for the reality check, though.;

[seperis]

Learning calligraphy for me had the same effect as when I'm programming or scripting; it's very zen and relaxing and focusing. It doesn't take any time at all to learn the shapes of the letters or get off a decent facsimile; I got that down in like, a day.

It's building the muscle memory to do it easily and correctly without running out of ink in your nib too soon if you're using too much and taking too much time per letter. And not hurt your hand. And not breaking the nib of your pen, which if you do it wrong, you will do very quickly. Again, learning it isn't hard, but it takes a lot of unfamiliar muscle control to get off more than a few words, and you have to learn a specific way of holding your pen and a very, very specific way of creating each stroke (hint; stroke up with pen, never down).

(Note: If you use calligraphy markers at first to learn the strokes and then move to the pen nibs and ink pots, it might actually be easier for a beginner.)

I do want to start again next year to help combat strain from typing, which is also the reason I do crochet. Plus, my normal handwriting has degraded to below that of the average doctor, and calligraphy is good discipline for rebuilding my hand muscles and getting the finer control back.

[seperis]

Oh! I'm on glitch under seperis! synedochic sent me a link and I just started playing!

[libitina]

I am Bleppo

[petronia]

Drawing is the best flow state ever. I don't do it much these days, but it is way more reliable than writing.

[seperis]

I'm always kind of awed by people who can draw like that.

[petronia]

The interesting thing is that the instinctive human mode is symbolic, not realistic (kids' drawing and cave paintings have stick figures in common). Gingerhaze on Tumblr had a story some time ago about how when she was very young (kindergarten? elementary?) she realized that the sky goes all the way down to the ground, and so when you coloured, you had to make the entire area blue, not just the very top of the paper. I had similar experiences. I'm pretty sure the difference between people who end up drawing and people who don't come down to these arbitrary mental breakthroughs that happen at age 4-5, and not to "talent."

[blackonice]

God, I need to thank you for those Dick Moves Links because I think I sprained something by laughing so hard I almost fell from my chair.

Years and years of playing MMORPGs make it easy to recognize certain behavioural patterns and the "let's see how I can screw everyone over, again and again" is one of the most common ones. The bad side of this is that if that's directed at you, you can probably have daily rage blackouts and make up insults that would make a hardened pirate blush. The good side is that (as we are cruel, cruel creatures, us online gamers) if the douchebaggery is not directed at you, it can make you laugh yourself sick.

So thank you, thank you, thank you for making it possible for me to learn about the Harry Krishnas. Tears are still drying on my cheeks from so much laughter :)

[seperis]

I LOVED ALL OF THESE. I even googled to read more about some of them, it was just that awesome.

[everbright]

Art Trance! I love hearing about fugue states and trances, since being able to do it on command seems to enable all kinds of creative behavior. Do you know that little kids are in light trances when they are at play? They are literally somewhere else for a little bit!

[concinnity]

It's bubble pop, isn't it? I refuse to start after a friend spent three weeks on level 64 (I think. I had to stop listening after a bit).