Blog Archive
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Digital Ways of Seeing and a call for Serendipity
Lately, I’ve been really interested in how we create and share information (and truth) across the web.
Did you know that more than 180,000 of the items in the New York Public Library’s Digital Collections are in the public domain? It’s true! My friend, Aaron Cockle, showed me that a year ago, the NYPL had announced this new part of their digitally accessible collection. Thanks Aaron.
Now everyone has the freedom to enjoy, modify, reuse and share the materials in almost limitless ways! NYPL now makes it possible to download these items in the highest resolution available, directly from the Digital Collections website. They’re BIG files.
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Thinking the Unthinkable
This weekend Jenn and I took a trip to visit her parents in Garrettsville. It was quiet little weekend. We got in late Friday night as we usually do, traveling from Pittsburgh via the Turnpike. The sunset was especially glorious that night. Clouds tipped with fluorescent pink.
On Saturday, Jenn and Joyce went out to Goodwill, as they are want to do. The thrift store goods shown their light on Jenn. She found pair after pair of pants, exactly her size. Great brands. All for around $3 each. Ace. I spent some time walking around outside while they were gone. I poked around in the garden. Joyce’s garden is bursting, though a little overgrown at the moment, it’s full of life. In the nearby coop she has new chickens that she and her neighbor have been incorporating into their flock. They seem to be getting on well. Saturday saw 5 eggs. Sunday just 1.
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Up all night
It’s difficult to get things done after work as an adult.
And I want to do so much. I need to do so much. This isn’t me being overly ambitious. I need to do so much if I want to be able to change the material conditions of my life and those of those around me.
Capitalism is a bloodthirsty vampire. It wants all of me. It sucks. The society we live in is trying to extract as much out of me as a worker and consumer as it can, and in that extraction there is so little room to breathe. It doesn’t have to be this way. But at the moment the self perpetuating system that benefits few at the cost of many wants to keep it that way.
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Back in the Saddle
I’m back on campus at Carnegie Mellon University. Can you believe it? It’s really strange to be back here. I rode the bus from where I live, in Greenfield, and to my surprise I wound up catching the ending of the Freshman Orientation Event. There were hordes of 18 year olds. Loud, overly peppy, semi-euro sounding pop. Bright lights, big sounds.
I was hoping to get to the Hunt Library after work, but alas, it seems that they aren’t open late this week. During the school year they are open 24-hours a day. It’s a little unhealthy… But it is good to have a space like that here, where people will wind up all night anyway.
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What a mess.
This blog is such a mess. The category organization is a mess. The tags are a mess. Mess. Mess. Mess.
And yet, it’s still here. That’s comforting. It’s nice to still be here.
That said, I’m changing things up a little. From this point on this is just going to be a 100% catchall blog, channelling the spirit of the early 00’s. This used to be a space for me to put out things related to my comics making and exploration of the medium, but that bandwidth is too narrow. I think about too many things nowadays. I can’t stay on a single topic for too long. I have more to say. (That said, visual language and self-authorization of expression via drawing and publishing of comics and zines and jpegs and gifs and pngs is something that I engage with practically every day.)
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Lenticular Sources
This is a sneak peak at the files I’m using to print a new series of comics!
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The Idea Factory + PZF 2018
Last weekend was a brilliant doozy here in Pittsburgh. I mentioned that it was a busy one, so you knew something was coming!
I was programmatically double booked, with a cartooning program, the Idea Factory, from 10am-4pm at the Children’s Museum on Saturday and Sunday, and then as one of the head organizers of the Pittsburgh Zine Fair the zine fair’s annual mixer and reading from 4pm-7pm and the main zine fair event from 2-8pm. Combining the setting up, the striking, the picking up of a U-haul and tables Sunday morning at 6am… It was a lot. Thankfully, I wasn’t afraid to ask for help and got the much-needed assistance from the cartooning team that I scheduled at the museum, and my fellow zine fair organizers. Thank you so much.
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Comics Corner #1
This activity originally appeared on BeetleToothRadish.com, a source for simple living and creative, frugal activities.
_Time to settle in and make some comics! _This should take a little over an hour and a half, so give yourself some time to be present!
To start, here’s a thought: Comics is the visual language of encoding and decoding realities. Nibble on that for a little while you work on this week’s excercise.
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Inaugural Mini-market @ Pullproof
The weekend before last I sold and shared comics during the Penn Avenue _Unblurred _gallery crawl. I set up shop at PULLPROOF Studio’s inaugural Mini-Market. All in all, it featured zines, prints, and jewelry by a local crew of great artists. It was really nice company. Among us were Jenna Houston, Lizzee Solomon, City Slicker Press, Max Emiliano Gonzales, Jerome “Chu” Charles, Asia Lae, Lilian Kababa!
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what is a blog? (2018)
Oh boy, the last post here is from, what, two years ago? Oof, these past two years have been a bumpy ride.
Life has gone in a lot of directions and I’ve had to let go of a lot of things for my own mental and emotional health. I’m now 27 and the flow of time is getting weird. I’m not old, but I’d be lying if I told you I had the energy I had when I started this blog six years ago. Maybe that’s a blessing in disguise, though. The past 2 years have seen me double down on the things that actually matter. Not just pissing away tons of energy in 8 directions at once, to no noticeable effect.
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