Head for Analytics

Friday, July 27, 2012

Quotes - Steve Grand

“Life is not made of atoms,it is merely built out of them. What life is actually 'made of' is cycles of cause and effect, loops of causal flow. These phenomenon are just as real as atoms - perhaps even more real. If anything, the entire universe is actually made from events, of which atoms are merely some of the consequences.”
― Steve GrandCreation: Life and How to Make It

Secret - Draw Something

A secret.

Every time I open my phone, I deliberately don't address the the little indicator at the top that mentions you have sent me a poke regarding our Draw Something game.

Because every time I see it, I smile a little inner smile for the memories of a time gone by.

And miss you and those days.

Monday, July 23, 2012

Drabble - Dust

Dust is the indicator in our lives of the slow passage between now and then.  It builds up in the corners and shares the world we live in, turning everything to grey.

Sunday, July 22, 2012

Painting - Good Women Hue Study

For my colour theory class, I am working on doing a hue study.  Taking a photograph, reducing it to 9 hues and then painting the shaded declinations of such.  It's pretty interesting, albeit I immediately wanted to do a Good Woman piece and the difficulty of painting such fine details is almost inarticulate.  Also Alida, your hair is exhausting to sketch out.

Just sayin'.

Anyway this is ongoing this week, I'll post more as I finish sections.






 This one is the initial trace sketch, with just a little bit of black painted in the corner (because I forgot to take the picture before I started with the black.


This one is with the black shadow areas filled in.



The finished painting, the light makes it look pretty wonky and it's much darker than it seems....but oh well.  The painting was supposed to be split in half with one side in grey scale, and the other in a single hue (in this case blue). 

Here's the original photo by Marc Chalifoux here:

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Quotes - Adventure

"The state of mind of a kid when he enters a cave alone must be realized in the game.  Going in, he must feel cold air around him.  He must discover a branch-off to one side and decide whether to explore it or not.  Sometimes he loses his way."

-Shigeru Miyamoto

Monday, July 16, 2012

Dream - Vault Valentine

I walked as a ghost through your life.  A strange thing with empty thoughts, passing through corridors of perhaps and maybe.  Equally on both hands, the possibility of what was and could have been.  I saw the friends, the trials, the mundane and the lovers.  I felt little, for we were but passing friends as children, I had no investiture in what you were or what you were becoming.

It was a casual kind of interest, a curiosity without caring.  Moving through places I'd never been before, how our lives had diverged!  What to say though, should ever we meet, what could I possibly comment on or think to mention.  But silence as we passed, strangers to one another on the train.

Am I so different?

Are you?

I came upon a place I'd never been, passing through walls.  It was dark and smelled of old cardboard, dusty and damp, faded around the edges.  I poked at a few boxes, walked across the concrete and thought what might have brought me here when I came upon a sealed case.  Sharp iron edges adorned it, and a heavy steel ring of numbers on the front.  Curiosity warred within me, and experimentally I spun the dial.  Two clicks to my ear where I should have heard four.

I ran my fingers over the cold metal, and then on an impulse lifted the heavy thing up and on its back.  There taped to the bottom, a faded brown piece of paper with the numbers scrawled in your handwriting.  With a casual twist, the safe opens and inside are shoeboxes filled with paper.  Statements, forms, invoices, information.  Uninteresting, a canvas of normality to life.  Tucked away in the back, a small plastic bag with a handful of scraps in it.

I pause then, without knowing why.

A tiny, faded little red piece of paper.  My handwriting there, and a little glittering sticker.

The memory is elusive, I cannot remember making it, but it sits here alone in your world.

I shut the safe, and vanish though shadows into waking.

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Reflections - NY Cab Driver Story

Below what follows is a story, that has been circulating around the internet for some time.  I read this story a few years ago, thought "that's nice" and then that was it.  I mean, as a writer, it's altogether too easy to fall into a peculiar trap of disregarding everything you read.  You understand the essence of story, the construction of fiction, and how it makes you and your audience feel.  But to immediately disregard everything does something to the soul...it taints it, depresses it, shades it in greys.

So I try not to ask myself too much about whether something is 'real' or not, and just enjoy a good story for what it is.  But then people attacked its legitimacy, people who are more cynical than me, and there's something inherrently desparaging about that.  To say that someone is outright a liar.  There's a difference between attacking and searching for truth, one is pursued for intrinsic gain, the other is an assault on intellectuality.  So Kent Nerburn wrote a follow-up.  Which I would like to archive here to think more on.


Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Drabble - Memory Glass

A memory held in the fingers.  It's edges worn and soft with age, but the colours still vivid as if yesterday.  I traded my memory of you to a wanderer, and I can't remember why.