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Lostblogging (spoilers)
The "end of Dharma" had real power but the leader of the Others is...a chair? Actually the latter revelation had a nice "hold a flashlight up to your face and tell a ghost story" quality to it (a la Jin on the camping trip a few shows back) and shouldn't be knocked too much (That baritone "H-ee-elp me-e"--OMG). Great to see Dharma spokesman Marvin Candle (aka Mark Wickmund) back again on tape explaining the compound's security perimeter. And all the weird class issues raised by the Dharma initiative: Ben's dad as a frustrated "work man," the "hostiles" excluded from the compound, etc. Left hanging after the mass murder of the hippies by poison gas: one guesses this means Ben killed his girlfriend. I kept thinking he would find her body, heightening the tragedy of his betrayal. But we never saw what she looked like as an adult so that wouldn't have worked. Expect more Ben back story.
I've been joking about the free music sites linking to my .mp3 output, some of which are a trifle skanky (pop up heaven). This one is pretty handsome, though. I can remember a day when musicians had to join .mp3 sites and upload to them, hoping someone would stumble on their "wares" in those individual archives. (I suppose MySpace still operates that way--with added social networking functions--but I chafe at the format.) My tunes are definitely getting "out there" despite the randomness of the context, judging from the downloads, particularly in Asia, it seems, and all I'm doing is making tracks and posting them. Money would be nice but "airplay" is great, too--as long as the bandwidth stays manageable (which it has so far). This is niche music anyway and will remain so unless vocals are added and stories of heartache and pain are told.
Can't stop watching the video of earth compared to VV Cephei, an enormous star that if placed where our sun is, would be as large as the orbit of Saturn. The popular computer graphic shows earth next to Neptune, Neptune next to Saturn, then Jupiter, the Sun, Sirius, Pollux, Arcturus, etc all the way up to VV Cephei, like a procession of bigger and bigger schoolyard bullies. It's absolutely humbling to think of that of all that size and power. Astronomers say VY Canis Majoris is even larger. By the way, congratulations to Robert Quimby, a grad student working at the McDonald Observatory in West Texas for spotting the largest supernova yet recorded, fortunately in a galaxy 240 million light years away and therefore during the Permian era of our own history. The exploded star was hypothesized to be 100-200 times heavier than our sun.
I've said this before.
I hate the MSPaint spraycan tool.
Even though I learned some new tricks from Travis such as how to make the spray a wider range of sizes, it doesn't change the fundamentally unaesthetic look of that dot dispersion pattern.
After the subtleties of MSPaintbrush (Paint's superior predecessor that Microsoft ruined), it's like painting with acrylics after learning oils.
With the previous drawing I did everything I could think of either to use the spray proactively or to divert attention from it.
1. Made the surface illusion very flat since you can't depth-model convincingly with that uniform fake pointillist pattern.
2. Tried to think of a surface that's naturally granular, such as "lunar dust."
3. Varied the width of the spray and used some big, fanning sweeps as kind of a wash or glaze--fuggedaboutit.
4. Saved it as a .GIF from the native .BMP to add more of a "grid feel" via the dithering of those grays.
5. Used a blue "intrusion" pattern (an homage to Houston painter Perry House) to confuse the read of the image.
I'm still stuck with that dead-ass, rectangular dot grain. Yeuuchh. (I like the drawing, though.)
