Damned Biological Accuracy

You don't have to know me very well to know that I love dinosaurs. I loved Land Before Time, I loved Jurassic Park, I didn't love Dinosaurs, but c'mon. It was terrible. I still thought it was pretty though.

One of my favorite little doodles is a raptor guy I made up after I had a nightmare (well anxiety dream, not so much a nightmare) about being stranded in the desert outside Las Vegas and being chased by raptors. In my dream they were extinct everywhere except right outside Las Vegas and when I woke up I wasn't sure if they still existed or not. It was a unsettling at the time. Anyway, this guy is the result.

Try as I might, for some reason I'm having formatting issues with him and his colors will not come out right. But this is the basic guy. Body of a turkey, hooked claw, lots of fangs. Adorable mostly. Here's his film debut...





This piece was my first experiment with soudn effects in my intro to 2D animation class. I like the stick figure version of this guy. So, everything was great. All was well with the world. Until I saw this episode of Nova. The episode surrounds the discovery of the four winged dinosaur.


Now the awesome thing about this guy is he pretty much proves (though there are still doubters, see the episode) that birds descended from dinosaurs. The awesome(est) thing about this is that it indicates that dinosaurs, at least of the carnivorous two legged variety, had feathers. Which is really cool. The downside is that it means every portrayal of raptors in the media from Jurassic Park on down to my little guy, is wrong. They should have feathers. Which means I need to do a total character redesign. Well, not total. The shape is the same, but instead of buttery leather skin or rough scales, he needs downy mostly useless chicken feathers.

So now I am toying with ways to convey this killer flamingo but still retain a little of that reptilian dignity. It's pretty hard.

But I'm working on it.

Politics; Old and New

I just watched 1776 a few days ago. For those of you unfamiliar with it, it is a musical about the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It is really good, despite the fact that most of the musical numbers are tedious (the only really good ones are the one about how John Adams is obnoxious and disliked, and the first one between John and Abigail Adams). 

What I like about it is the way that it portrays the characters who made up the Continental Congress. Names we've heard of and sometimes know anecdotes about but that mostly remain shrouded in a dull textbook fog. I think (hope) everybody knows that Benjamin Franklin was a hell of a character, but what does anybody know about John Hancock except that he had a large signature? And the thing seems to be sunnily patriotic, just as you'd expect. 

Thomas Jefferson, for instance, is portrayed as a distraught lover pining for his bride. And while that's entirely believable, you can't help but think of Sally Hemmings, the slave with whom Jefferson had six children.

But the film gets to that. Because of course it would be impossible to skirt around the issue of slavery in a discussion of the founding of our nation. The turning point of the film comes when the issue is forced by the southern representatives. Jefferson included a passage in the Declaration that declared that slavery was a violation of the inalienable rights of man. Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson (perpetually tortured by the fact that he owned slaves while believing that it was a reprehensible practice that should be outlawed) were staunch abolitionists, but were forced to concede on the issue of slavery because otherwise the South would never have agreed to the revolution.

As the film ends you are infused with a patriotic pride at the high ideals of our founding fathers, and the simultaneous awareness that the issue of slavery will come to a head only a few decades later and split the country in a bloody civil war. And you sort of wish that those high ideals could have been a little higher, that we hadn't made that first concession, especially in the name of freedom.

Over the past couple weeks more and more evidence has been coming to light about the U.S. use of torture on Guantanamo Bay detainees. Remember months ago when it there was a debate about whether or not waterboarding even "counted" as torture? Then debates about whether or not torture could be "legal," Geneva Conventions not withstanding.

Most recently has been the position (usually voiced by somebody on Fox News in a spooky voice) that, "If Your Family was In Danger and you had A Scary Forgiener with Information about the next 9/11 wouldn't you be morally obliged to torture that guy?" The answer is no. Torture, like slavery, is wrong. Period. No matter what the extenuating circumstances. Plus now we have people testifying that first of all torture doesn't really work, that conventional non-illegal interrogation techniques work a hell of a lot faster, and most recently, that people were being tortured (after it had become clear that there was no link between Iraq and 9/11) for information that would tie al Qaeda to Iraq, rather than (as has been claimed) for information about other imminent terrorist attacks. And our Brave New White House, the one that has inspired so much hope and optimism, seems to be adopting the stance that we just shouldn't think about it. "Look to the future," not the skeletons in our national closet, even the ones so fresh they're still kicking.

Simultaneously, there are stories about mistreatment of our soldiers in Iraq by the companies that the government is paying to take care of them. Rachel Maddow has reported two stories recently that I found deeply disturbing. One was about servicemen being electrocuted by their tap water, because of some incredibly shoddy electrical work. The other was about servicemen (in the desert mind you) not being rationed enough water. The water they had was over treated with chemicals and made them nauseous. When they drank local water they got dysentery, and when they appealed to their superiors they were instructed to get it from the supplier, and were forced to steal it.

This is outrageous and disgusting on so many levels. I'm sick of it. And I know lots of people are sick of it. But we can't just shut our eyes and hope this goes away. We have to own this, as a nation. This war, the treatment of our prisoners, the treatment of our own soldiers, is a new national scar. We can ignore this, we can pretend that it didn't happen, but we'll be betraying the core principles on which this nation was founded. We're still struggling with the wounds left by the civil war, the repercussions of that very first betrayal of principle, before the ink was even dry. 

We're supposed to be better than this. We're supposed to be a shining beacon of truth and justice and freedom. We screwed that up, and if we're ever want to represent that again (even just to ourselves) instead of towering hypocrisy, we have to admit our own fallibility,  and we have to do what we can to make sure this never happens again.

I don't know yet quite what this means for me personally. I expressed myself through my ballot last November, and I'm doing it again now. I could buy a bumper sticker, or protest on street corners in my safe and liberal city and be reasonably sure that most everyone who saw me would agree with me and that those that didn't would ignore me, just like I do when I see protestors or bumper stickers. The only thing else I can think of is to donate money, because that's what talks. But I don't have any. So I don't know what else to do besides point these things out. There are lots of other people, more articulate and with louder voices, but my hope is that every voice helps. That if we keep shouting, "We are here! We are here! We are here!" that something will get through. 

Shoes and Ships and Ceiling Wax

I've been putting off an update for about a week. I wanted to write about my birthday, which was two weeks ago, but in retrospect I don't think there's a whole lot there to tell after all.

I went home to visit my family, and let me tell you, the drive down the Columbia Gorge is gorgeous. No pun intended. It beats the old drive from Seattle across Washington hands down. Of course every single time I drive that way (which I have many times since I was a child, but not recently enough to appreciate it) I am reminded that I have still never been to the Maryhill Museum. My mother is a huge Pacific Northwest history buff and consequently so am I, but we've never been. The museum was founded by Sam Hill, as in "what in the!" He had this crazy idea that the Queen was going to come sailing up the Columbia and he put together this elaborate museum in, what was then and is still, the middle of nowhere. That's the abridged version of the story of this guy. There's also a (non working) full scale replica of Stonehenge for some reason.

So on the plus side, my drive is exactly the same length (about six hours) and much more pleasant. On the down side...Oregon is much much stricter about enforcing traffic laws that Washington. It may be that the drive across Washington sucks, so people are more easily forgivin their agregious speeding. The point is that I go pulled over on the way down. There wasn't much I could say, I had been agregiously speeding, so I just handed over my liscense and registration and all that and was polite because cops get too much shit for doing their jobs already. But since I was nice, have a clean record, and it was the day before my birthday I got off with a warning! Hurrah! It surprised me when he wished me Happy Birthday too. I mean, I knew he was looking up all my records back there but it hadn't occured to me that he'd figure that out for some reason. Go figure.

In my hometown it was Giant Yard Sale Weekend and I bought a blender that turned out not to work, and a waffle iron that turned out to be pretty awesome except the waffles always stick to the top no matter how much butter I brush on and I think I'll try Pam next time. Sorry for the run-on. But I paid $4 for both of them so it wasn't too disappointing that the blender had to be thrown away. Especially since the day was miserable and everything got rained out and I was roped into helping my mom at her church's yard sale and by the end they were giving stuff away. I got a really cool (hideous/retro) slow cooker and assorted crockery and a rug, and a TV. The TV wasn't part of the yard sale, it belonged to some friends of my mother's who are working on starting a B&B and they had purchased TVs for the rooms but that was before everything was flat screen, so now they need to rebuy TVs. But this one is pretty new and in good shape, and while it's small, it's a free TV so I'm not complaining.

Speaking of TV. I saw the coolest thing ever. Ever. In the history of Everything. My roommate was watching Nova on Hulu and this episode was on the rotation.

Have you clicked on it yet? No?! The episode title, just to give you a taste, is Astrospies. It's about Spies. In. Space. (Can you hear the "Piiiiiigs iiiiiiin Spaaaaaace" commentary?) Apparently during the height of the cold war, while the Space Program we all know and love was going on, staring all those big names from The Right Stuff, there was this whole other thing going on.

Both Russia and the U.S. were in a race to spies into manned space stations orbiting the planet armed with high tech cameras with computers! in them, if you can imagine such a thing, that would have a high enough resolution to make out the models of cars being driven around on say...top secret military bases. Also, they wanted to shoot enemy satellites out of the sky.

Now of course we all just go to Google Earth and it seems not that impressive. I mean, if you have no appreciation whatsoever for history. But this was such an amazing story I was vibrating in my seat watching it. Also, one thing that was awesome and sad was that one of the Astro Spies in training was/would have been the first African American Astronaut (which has a ring to it) but he was killed in a practice flight which just sucks beyond the telling of it. All of this stuff has just recently become declassified, and it would make a hell of a movie for Tom Hanks to Co-Star in.

And to end on a completely unrelated note, I have opened a store on Etsy! I'm on there as seespotbitejane which is an old name that only makes sense to a friend of mine (well, her and the owner of the racehorse...) because SoupyTwist was taken. I was late to the party I guess. But I've already put some stuff up and have ideas for more, because I like making crafty things but don't know what to do with them after they're made. I'll put up art as well, as I deem it saleable. And of course Astrospies has turned my desire to do one piece about the Atomic Bomb into a series about the Space Race and the Cold War. Because Sputnik was an adorable little satellite.

Awesome. My dog just puked on my bed. And on a treasured stuffed animal from Disneyland that she was using as a pillow at the time. So. I'm done. Have a good night.

Job Search

The job search for Portland is...going. It's hard. I mean, things are tough all over, but I'm almost qualified to do so many things, but not quite. Then there are the jobs that I could do, but they want someone with more professional experience. I'd have some if someone would hire me.

So far I've applied to a grab bag of things. Some I could get excited about, others that I could do really easily and really well but am not that interested in. Today I found The. Perfect. Job. It is tailor made for me. It's a position where I could use all my digital art skills and my audio/visual background, and my writing skills, and the subject matter is something I could get pretty enthused about.

But, it's a Craigslist job. I found it after it had been up for about three hours. That's pretty good in the real world, but in Craigslist job search time the inbox for that job could be flooded with good candidates a couple times over by the time my cover letter and resume reached them. So I do not want to get too excited. Or even excited at all. I've applied for many things and heard nary a reply.

You end up in a continual yoyo of emotion. "I didn't hear back from this job.... Oh hey! There's a new one! That looks good, I'll apply right now!... Oh, no reply from them either. But hey!"

I'm trying to maintain a state of cautious optimism. A sort of Pollyanna-ish attitude that everything will turn out all right in the end even if times are hard now. I think that's actually sort of our national attitude just now.

But it's so much harder with this new job, because it would be so perfect. It's like, it must be a sign, this job was tailor made for me! Except that's not how hiring works. I need to be tailor made for the company, not the other way around. So I return to the cautious optimism, because every now and then, I'll see a 'perfect job' posted somewhere. And eventually for one of those 'perfect jobs' I'll be perfect for them, even if it's not this current perfect job.

But I really hope it is.

Rational Argument

M&Ms.

The blue ones are the best. This is fact. The reason that the blue ones are the best is because they're blue.

The thing is people always want to argue about it for some reason. They'll say, "That doesn't make any difference. They all taste the same!"

Now if you have to be a jerk and argue about M&Ms in this way, the acceptable and logical argument would be something along the lines of, "No, the red ones are better, because they're red!"

That would at least be sensible, still wrong I'm afraid, but I can see where you're coming from. I'm aware that this may sound a bit harsh, but people who don't think the color of an M&M makes any difference have no soul. There. I said it. Now stop picking pointless arguments and just say you like green or something.

-Soupy Twist

Car De-stress, also Happy Easter

Taking your car in for repairs is a harrowing experience. At least it is for me. My last car was good, and ran solid until I hit a deer. After that it had constant weird electrical things wrong with it. Since it broke down in my small hometown over the summer we had only one choice of repair place. They took months to fix it, then it still wasn't fixed and we repeated that process a couple times. Also at some point during their 'repairs' they broke the lock on the trunk. Still not sure why they were even in the trunk.

After that the car continued to have weird stuff wrong with it every few months. The acceleration cut out on the highway, all the lights and dials on the dash would blink off and then refuse to come back on. The horn would blare for no reason. It happened once in the middle of the afternoon, then it began happening more and more frequently until I got a call from campus security at 5 am telling me that it was going off and that there had been quite a few complaints. I solved that problem by yanking the fuse to the horn.

But it jut kept coming. The alternator, then the breaks. It would be something serious enough that the car either wasn't working at all, or wasn't safe to drive. A couple times my only option was to take it to the closest repair place because that's as far as AAA will tow you. Every time they would tell me it was something dire that would cost a lot. I know that I got screwed repeatedly, and that some of these places made things worse. I finally sold the car after I took it in for an oil change and the guys at the garage told me it was leaking transmission fluid and that it was not safe to even drive it the couple miles home. I hadn't noticed a leak, but I had also felt that these guys were trustworthy. I talked to my grandfather about it and he said there was nothing wrong with the car and it was fine. After I got home I kept watching for the leak and it did leak a little bit like one time.  I just was done. I spent so much money that I didn't really have to spare trying to keep that car alive and I couldn't find anyone trustworthy to help me.

I love my new car. It is beautiful and fun to drive and awesome. I'm something of a petrol head despite knowing next to nothing about cars. I love them. My new (used) car has had a couple issues, but they have all been quickly and painlessly resolved by either the dealership where we bought it, or the Seattle dealership. So when I moved to Portland I did not worry. I figured I'd take it to the local dealership and things would be fine.

Of course as soon as I get to Portland some weird stuff goes wrong for no apparent reason. I can't afford costly repairs right now since I have just moved and have not yet found a job so I called the dealership and asked what it would cost to just get an estimate and whether or not they could do billing. The guy seemed irritated that I had called and irritated at my questions. I made an appointment anyway, but I couldn't shake the bad feeling so I went online to look up reviews of the place. They were almost entirely bad. The repairs tended to be dodgy and the customer service was incredibly poor. I was discouraged to say the least. So I googled around for a place that had good reviews, and I found one that had 5 out of 5 stars from almost everyone, except one guy who had called to make an appointment but was put on hold for too long and decided not to go there. I think somebody else didn't like their waiting room. 

Taking your car for repairs is like going in for surgery. Except if the doctor tells you that you need an expensive operation to fix your broken arm but nothing has happened to your arm and it works and feels fine and you came to the doctor in the first place because you had a stomach ache, you can be reasonably sure he's a quack. Not so with cars. 

So I decided to go ahead and make an appointment at the other place. They specialize in VWs and do performance alterations. It was worse than I thought, but they explained what was wrong and what they were doing and they prioritized the repairs. There's an issue with one of the front headlights that requires unsightly duct tape across the front of my car. One of the car's previous owners tried to change the headlight and broke the assembly, now it needs to be replaced and it's an expensive part. They discovered another similar issue, but they acknowledged that neither is an immediate problem. They also had to order a part and I was thinking that I'd be without my car for a week at the least, but I took it in Thursday and Friday morning about a half hour after they opened they called and told me it was finished. They had washed the car and thoroughly vacuumed the inside, and they left candy in my cup holder. 

I realize that candy in the cup holder does not equate to ability to fix my car, but it was quite charming anyway. I like this place. I feel like they were straight with me. I feel like they are trustworthy. They have excellent customer service, and I feel like I can take my car back there again with confidence. And that is a heck of a relief.

Portland!

I am in Portland now, and I have an internet connection. It fantastic. I really love the city already (of course it helps that the weather the last few days has been unseasonably gorgeous).

But I love it. I love my new apartment and my neighborhood and all the parks. There's an indie comic convention in I think two weeks, and one of my favorite comic artists will be there. I will try to go because it'll probably be awesome.

Then at the end of the month is a national ceramics expo, which will be really cool, plus maybe I'll run into my old Prof there.

I learned about the Ceramics Expo from a brochure someone left at the table outside the really good Bubble Tea place in the cool (relatively speaking) strip mall.

There was also a very friendly (but not in a creepy way) guy named Nick who runs the Karate school at said strip mall. He assured me that the sushi place next door was really good, and got me to sign up for a free karate lesson next Saturday.

I'm kind of an easy mark frankly. I try not to talk at all the the guys at mall kiosks because while I won't buy anything they shove at me, I look like a sucker and they usually refuse to let me leave. I'm just too polite. My last few encounters have made me less polite though. Sorry, no thanks, walk on by, shrugging off occasionally outrageous attempts to call me back.

But Nick was very nice, and I have nothing better to do. A free self-defence lesson sounds fun. I'd like to learn some self-defence. My total knowledge of the subject now is what I learned from watching Miss Congeniality, and a short lecture I went to in highschool where we were urged to jab at an attackrs eyes with our keys. If not the eyes, then go for the solar plexis because a guy on drugs might not even feel it if knee him in the crotch, but if you jab them in the diaphram they won't be able to breath and you can get the hell away.

I don't know whether I'll ever be able to afford actual lessons but it certainly can't hurt to test drive one.

I'm pretty much settled in now. There is still some stuff to put away, and the dog is having separation issues again, which is a pain in the ass. We had gotten over it entirely at the old house, but since the move she can't stand to be left alone all over again. I know how to fix it, but it takes time and neighbors tend not to be very understanding about yappy dogs, especially small ones. But. We're working on it.

But since I've goten here I've been all fired up about art projects. I finally began work on a painting that I've been meaning to start since December, and I worked on another project that has been spinning it's wheels for a couple years now. Part of this may have been a combination of boredom (from having no TV or internet) and procrastination about unpacking, but mostly I think it's that I finally have my own space. There is lots of room to work here and I can fill my space how I choose. I really like it, and I'm excited to see what I can accomplish.

Also, an UPDATE: on the positive reinforcement front! It hasn't been very long, but I really think some of this new enthusiasm has to do with the fact that I'm not constantly putting myself down anymore. It is a little inconvenient because my negative feedback has always been written down, so I've been writing my affirmations as well, so the charcoal sketch for my huge painting has little notes on it like "This is great!" and "Almost perfect!" This is especially problematic as the piece is about the atomic bomb.

Except that I might go ahead and leave them in, just for contrast. I'm a little hesitant about this piece because it's not so much about "The Atomic Bomb" as it is about my recent (last summer) trip to The Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas.

I won't go into the entire rehash of that trip, but it is a really really cool museum. The only problem I had with it was this weird cheerleadery vibe it gave off. There were a couple movies with guys who worked at the Yucca Flats testing facility for 30 or 40 years and they had the attitude that dropping the bomb at the time was the right decision. In retrospect, knowing what we know about its effects, it was still the right decision. We should never have stopped testing, we'd drop another one tomorrow if "we had to."

Now the guys who worked desperately through WWII and throughout the Cold War on these weapons are certainly entitled to their opinions, and they are coming from a much different perspective than I am. I don't even remember the Cold War, though I was born before the end of it. I've never had to know what the fastest route to my local bomb shelter is. But this pro-bomb attitude pervaded the entire exhibit, even the parts talking about all the innocent bystanders (sometimes literally) who were harmed by the tests, let alone the devestating and ongoing affects on Japan.

My painting is something of a self portrait. It depicts a figure standing with her back turned to a nuclear blast, with a hand raised to sheild her eyes. The title will be "Keep Your Back Turned Until The Shockwave Has Passed."

The tests in Nevada (where they were moved after the accidental radiation poisoning of a bunch of Pacific Islanders hundreds of miles away from the original South Pacific test sites) became a tourist attraction. People would stand a "safe" seven miles away from the blast. You had to either put on sunglasses or turn your back, until the shockwave passed.

It just blows my mind. There's a part of the museum where you can experience a simulated atomic blast. They blow wind at you, and it's loud but not loud enough to say, damage the hearing of the average museum patron. The white out is not searing light, it's just a white screen.

And I still thought it was terrifying. I think both my mother and I came out of that theater in tears. It's horrific enough that the government subjected our own service people to it, essentially to see what would happen to them, but these tourists were all civilians.

I also saw some footage of (I think) Nagasaki imediately after the blast. The main target had been (I think) a naval base that had housed something like 10 or 20 thousand troops. In the footage it was just a guy walking around a big empty field, marking out what used to be the perimeter. You just had to take his word that we were looking at anything.

You could see from the angles of char and the skew of windows where the blast had come from on the surviving structures. It was recently declassified film made by the war department, and devestatingly hard to watch.

Sorry, this has gone on a bit too long, like I always do when I talk about this museum trip, but the pervasion of Atomic Bomb imagery throughout our culture, and its history is a subject that is endlessly fascinating and chilling to me. It's terrifying, but also, so cool. It's because I'm a sci-fi geek. I mean, it all ties in with the Space Program, and Ray Bradbury, and pretty much every single one of my favorite B horror or science fiction films. Scarier in reality than it ever could be on film.

My fear with my painting is that the viewer will miss the layers of meaning that exist to me, and see it as yet another sensationalized image of a mushroom cloud. To my thinking, it is the shockwave, not the mushroom that is of significance to the painting, but the mushroom cloud is still in there. But dwelling on potential interpreations of your art works is never a good idea.

One woman I went to art school with was endlessly tortured by that subject. She had a dream of creating work with a universal audience, people from all social classes, all walks of life, from all around the world, would see and be moved by her artwork, and they would interpret it exactly the way she wanted them to.

Some people in the class became quite upset, even angry, when I suggested that such a thing was not only impossible, but that it was rather an offensive notion. That everyone had their own unique frame of reference whether the artist liked it or not. Quite a few of the more starry eyed students had visions of creating art that would move...well they didn't come out and say it, but low income, trailer trash, white bread, inner city, whatever 'afflicted' peoples were out there suffering from lack of art and culture and deep thinking. I suggested that maybe those people found art they liked and that moved them, and maybe it was in a museum, or maybe it was on daytime TV and that each was valid.

They didn't like that idea, but I didn't like their condescension. I make art to please myself chiefly, but with the hope that it will please others. I don't believe I'm bestowing a gift on anyone (except occassionally my mother). I don't expect them to be deeply moved (in a breathy voice). If anyone was ever deeply moved by my work I would feel humbled and grateful, but it's nothing that I except from my audience as my due.

Anyway, this started out as a cheery quick little post about how much I'm enjoying Portland now. It has rather outgrown that. Daresay it has become something of a monster. But now it is getting close to 2 am and I need to go to bed (not to mention give my wrists a break since I have yet to find and unpack my wrist rest thingy). I feel like something of this magnitude needs a snappy signoff. So I am stealing one from Messrs. Fry and Laurie.

Soupy Twist.