After jettisoning the news for 3 weeks, I’ve started a YouTube channel and produced 1.5 videos.
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Confession: I had to abandon Ubuntu
I tried. I really wanted to go with a free, open-source operating system and programs. There were clear benefits, including not having to worry about viruses and anti-virus software. I wouldn’t have to locate and disable hidden options that compromise privacy, including the “keylogging” option [checked “on” by default] that sends your every keystroke to…
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Confession: I Converted ~ Open and Free
Windows my friends, Microsoft itself, Adobe and its Photoshop, are no longer an integral part of my waking existence. You could say that they can join Facebook & Twitter in the hell-o-sphere. I fooked off the proprietary, pay-to-play, hold-you-hostage platforms, and am now smooth sailing with all free, open source programs. I would have done…
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Tricking Americans into Hating Each Other for Profit and Political Gain
I vowed on September 26th not to say anything on my blog about politics until the election was over. I succeeded, and it’s a lot harder to NOT speak out than it is to vent. The election lingers, but the voting is over. I just have a small observation or two. The vast majority of…
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Our Orb Comes to Land in a Snowy Forest
If you missed the introduction of the tree orb in my last post, here’s a gallery: I kinda’ surprised myself here. I didn’t intend to create these images, or make a sequence out of them. I just woke up this morning and wanted to try combining a few different Blender files I’d produced. After rendering…
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Blender: God’s Free Gift to Visual Artists
Blender is a completely FREE powerhouse of a digital sculpting and animating program. It downloads and installs so fast it’s a miracle. That lets you know that somehow, this software that can do so much — you can even make animated movies with it — is lean and clean. For me the biggest blessing is…
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Hyper-moralization & the art world
We live in a time of extraordinary moralizing. You may have noticed a no-holds-barred competition to see who is the most morally pure, and who isn’t, either by birthright or by belief. There’s always some of that going on. When I was growing up it issued from the religious right. Nancy Reagan famously advised to…
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Fish & Plant Pots
A little something different today. One of my hobbies when I’m more settled is keeping fish and plants. Plants I’m not so good at, and I am perpetually overwatering or underwatering them, and when they start to suffer and I look up what’s wrong with them, it’s always that I’m over or under watering: one…
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WIP: Adding local color
Think I’m gonna’ go for blue skin with pink details, yellow-orange irises, and a dark red/purple ball of the eye. It’s a bit saturated right now, but after I add modeling, lighting, shading, and texture, it should be pretty cool. The gif animation has nothing to do with it. It’s just a snappy way of…
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Dangerous Crackpot Covid-19 Conspiracy Crap [with custom graphic]
“There is no covid-19” ~ David Icke These days we all have to deal with conspiracy wackos, some merely eccentric, and then there’s the ones that call you “sheeple”, tell you that you “believe everything your government tells you”, and “you don’t know the truth”. We learn to avoid certain topics: the shape of the…
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Freedom and Independence Versus Free will
More thoughts after days of ruminating on this topic, and various challenges to my arguments on my blog and elsewhere. Note that if you disagree with me, or have in the past, that’s perfectly fine. I’m more interested in understanding reality than I am in being right. If I were to suddenly switch my pro-free…
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Learning from Aaron Blaise
Can you guess which one is my version? Have a look, and you can find out if you were right down below. If you don’t know already, I have a contemporary art / fine art background, and have been making digital art starting around 20 years ago. I’ve given up on the contemporary art world,…
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Runaway Rant: Justice, Caring, the Golden Rule, and the Social Contract.
Suddenly I realized how ridiculous it is to expect people to care. People are too subsumed in their own lives, responsibilities, worries, and so on to be expected to even have the wherewithal to care about you or me or this or that person, or group of people. Asking people to care is like asking…
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Runaway Rant: Mo Pollution Blues
Gotta’ love me some pollution! I’m an expat who’s lived in Asia for about 15 years, and in some of the more polluted parts. I’m also rather health conscious and trying to level up my diet and exercise regimen. I feel like I’ve got some obstacles that might be making that a bit more of…
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Why People Hate Contemporary/Conceptual Art
Lots of people hate conceptual art. It’s really quite remarkable, and possibly unfortunate. Ostensibly, artists make art to engage, entertain, and inform people, in which case hatred is an extreme response. Though it does occur to me that the kind of art that is most disliked might be the variety that tries to “challenge” the…
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Runaway Rant: I am NOT an artist!
Everyone is an artist, and anything and everything is art (except painters and paintings)! Words have come to mean, if not their precise opposite, something quite different from what is or was in the dictionary. Literally now means figuratively (ex., “It was literally raining cats and dogs!”). Random means all sorts of things, like cool,…
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The Ugly Truth: It was Beauty all Along
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald [Here I present an argument that art must be beautiful. Note that beauty signifies being visually captivating, compelling, or interesting, and doesn’t mean it’s…
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Runaway Rant: What isn’t art?
[I use “rant” to designate posts where I just write extemporaneously, usually over a cup of coffee or two. They have an advantage of sorts, in that the flow is uninterrupted, and I can only talk about what I already know.] This is one of those things where we just look at one side of…
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Runaway Rant: Is Facebook/Instagram Going Too Far With Censorship?
If you can’t beat ’em. Ban ’em! While Facebook and Instagram ostensibly banned “far right extremists”, banning people one doesn’t agree with itself resembles a “far right extremist” tactic. Banishing the opposition grates against my more progressive sensibility. Censorship is a tool historically associated with abuse of power, silencing dissent, and squashing the underdog. The…
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Before and After Process
One of the oldest techniques I use to invent imagery is to just make a bunch of marks and see what I see. I sometimes make a bunch of thumbnail sketches, and then choose whichever one inspires me at the moment. I made about a dozen thumbs before making my most recent piece (above right…
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Runaway Rant: the Danger of Opinion
I wrote this days ago, and then just sat on it, because, an opinion piece about why opinion is inherently an insufficient projection upon reality is self-cancelling. On second thought, that was the point. Reality is boundless and unfathomable, hence any opinions, beliefs, and conclusions about it are mere projections upon it, something to tether…
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Parody Articles Published in Prestigious Academic Journals, And Why The Art World is in Denial
[When you know what you are supposed to think, it means that you aren’t supposed to think.] I wrote a whole article about this, and then decided I don’t want to engage or react to the radical left (or right) ideologues, or poison my peace of mind with their neurosis (anymore), if I can help…
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Schoolmarmy Regurgitation of the Correct Political Opinion is Not Performance Art
Righteous political posturing is not synonymous with significant artistic achievement. The art world is so afraid of the political moralists that it is compelled to make any trivial political protest into front-page art news, and refuses to criticize it, even as art. Allow me to put a little perspective on this boring-ass, preachy, completely unoriginal…
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What Is the Secret to Making It as an Artist? Bad News, Folks….
According to an article in artnetnews, the key is merely to be picked up by a big name venue early in your career. Sorry everyone else, your actual art is irrelevant, and THAT is F’ing pathetic. This is super depressing shit, and stupid. News flash: terminal myopia is not the right metaphor for visual art…
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Julian Schnabel’s Clueless Self-Indictment
This photo makes me angry. I haven’t seen or suspected anything could be this delusional in the art world since Jeff Koons claimed he improved upon old-master paintings by affixing a gaudy, blue gazing ball to assistant-painted copies of them. It’s not just that Schnabel had the arrogance to curate his own work next to…
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New Art: SFAU # 29 [Complete]
If you are new to this series all the images are based on recent photos of me after basically being fed through a neural network (which can change age, gender, etc.), then edited and painted using various programs. None of the people actually exist, and thus they are like self portraits from alternate universes. This…
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Runaway Rant: A New Paradigm of Art Connoisseurship
The current paradigm is Investment, which is cynically boring in terms of art appreciation, and tragically myopic. Art is reduced to objects with price-tags on them that investors gamble on, while also trying to influence the market by promoting the artists they invest in, and so on. The end result is a handful of superstar…
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Runaway Rant: Morality is the Enemy of Art
Anything that opposes art is probably immoral, even or especially when it wraps itself in the cloak of morality. The least we can ask of moral crusaders is that they are fighting for the highest good, and not merely advocating for their own special interests and personal benefit in and through alienating and disenfranchising others.…
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