Wed Apr 25 16:45:00 +0200 2007
daBlog » Dutch Living
Rudi and I have been enjoying ourselves quite a lot lately, not just programming (although there’s certainly still a lot of that), but also doing art! Rudi began participating in an art group with Edgar Jansen (whose website I occasionally update) in January of this year, which features a nude model posing in the middle of a room for 10-15 minutes at a time while the group sketches or paints her. This particular group (with ever-changing members of course) has been around for 35 years and was recently featured in one of those homeless mags (like Street Sheet in the U.S.) with guess who’s art on the cover? Rudi’s!
What was originally considered a mistake – the elongated neck and misplaced head was not planned – has now been validated as a piece of art by the city of Amsterdam! Not bad for a guy who has been “studying art” for only a few months and sits down to draw once a week at most.
When I got back from my recent trip to San Francisco, Rudi was pretty anxious to have me give this nude-model thing a try. After all, he knew that sketching and drawing was something I loved doing long ago. Unfortunately, the art group is pretty crowded on the days he goes, so he and Edgar arranged for a model to come to our home to do a private session for the three of us. Ooooh, how fun and exhilarating. Yeah, you’re probably thinking, how else are you going to feel with a strange, nude woman in your living room? But, really, the process of drawing is as scary and exciting as a roller-coaster ride, and easily more satisfying. In those 15 minutes, several thoughts go through my mind: where the hell am I going to start?, i’m making her look too fat, now she looks anorexic, this is going to look like crap, this looks like crap!, there’s not enough time, maybe I can strategically hide this one when we show off our stuff to the rest of the group, and so on. Yet, even though I tend to torture myself during each pose, I somehow get passed that, turn the drawing around somehow, and I’m always proud of the final result. No, I don’t think I’ve created true works of art, but it’s extremely satisfying to realize you have created something out of nothing, in just 15 minutes no less.
So, yeah, this art thing is really fun… I started out doing pencil sketches, but after some research on the web, I wanted to try to work with pastels. Yesterday, I bought a set of soft pastels, for just 5 euros, and started playing around with them. Oh, what fun! I used to have a paint set when I was a teen, which contained acrylics and oils, but hadn’t the faintest idea what to do with them. I might have had pastels too, but I never touched them. I stuck to the oils, trying to do my best Bob Ross imitation, but I guess I just didn’t have the patience, and certainly not the focus, so my results were disastrous and debilitating.
Anyways, pastels are such an interesting medium. It’s all about the color blending, which is always done after the color is applied to the paper/canvas. Sounds a bit backwards, but it certainly works. In my “computer guy” pastel, I didn’t have any flesh tones in my palette. So I started off first with a mostly white face, then added a bit of brown, orange, yellow and red, blended it all together, and viola, got a tone that mostly resembles skin. Pretty neat.
This art thing is definitely something we plan to continue. We’re due to arrive back in the states soon, so we’re already on the lookout for nude women to come to our home.
Must See Banned Video
Fri Nov 24 07:38:00 +0100 2006
daBlog » Media
Here’s a video that MTV apparently banned.
From director Greenhalgh:
War infects all our lives; recently it feels that this has increasingly become ‘our way of life’. It is rare to be given the opportunity to shoot a video that is deemed controversial. All I tried to do was make people think about the everyday life we live in our comfortable existences, and the contrast to that through war.
Everyday + 2 years
Tue Oct 10 22:40:02 +0200 2006
daBlog » Media
Here’s another video of a guy who took a picture of himself everyday, but he’s raised the bar by doing it 2 years longer than Noah
A Man's World
Mon Oct 02 09:44:00 +0200 2006
daBlog » Tech
I’ve been spending a lot of time on digg and reddit lately, two sites where people can share interesting links/articles with one another and vote for what they like and don’t like. The most popular links, of course, appear on the front page so that any “digger” can find the ‘best’ links more easily.
There’s also a community aspect to these sites as well. Both sites allow users to comment on links, and create a friends list. digg, in fact goes one step further by allowing users to vote on each other’s comments, as well as give them access to what links other users have voted on.
Aside from the wealth of intriguing information and media on the internet, I’ve noticed a couple of things about these two sites and their readership:
The community is mostly male. Both sites are havens for geeks all over the world who happen to have, more often than not, a Y chromosome. Hence this derivative site http://nsfw.reddit.com/ (“Not Safe for Work”) which has basically become a porn portal but without the annoying popups.
Comments usually fall somewhere between the rude and the really rude category. Wisecracks, snappy remarks, insults – irreverence left and right. Perhaps this is not so surprising as most of us who read digg and reddit have either absorbed too much Buffy-type dialogue, or, though we do mostly see ourselves as liberals, secretly wish we could be as linguistically ‘gifted’ as Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter.
Aren’t you supposed to be in the kitchen?
Iron my Shirt Bitch!
I’d hack the one on the left…
What, you want to exploit a local vulnerability and inject shell code into her?
Is there going to be a swim suit calender coming out?
I personally think the idea that these girls came up with (a handbag which takes pictures and automatically blogs them) is a bit of a silly idea. I don’t like handbags. I don’t like serial photography or serial blogging. But I do applaud these girls. As my cousin once said, of the 4 weeks in the month, 2 of those suck: one week we’re depressed, tired, and irritable from PMS, and in the other we’re too annoyed and bothered by the logistics of handling our monthly cycles. So the fact that these women could jump over these technical hurdles, and still elicit illicit comments from the male population, is a pretty amazing accomplishment.
Strange Statues
Sat Sep 23 12:27:39 +0200 2006
daBlog » Linkables
Rudi once told me about a funny statue he encountered in Finland. It was of a Medusa-type character but with little penises in place of snakes. That was the my first thought when I saw this webpage of strange statues. Alas, no penis-riddled scalp on this site, but still amusing!
So, yeah, this art thing is really fun… I started out doing pencil sketches, but after some research on the web, I wanted to try to work with pastels. Yesterday, I bought a set of soft pastels, for just 5 euros, and started playing around with them. Oh, what fun! I used to have a paint set when I was a teen, which contained acrylics and oils, but hadn’t the faintest idea what to do with them. I might have had pastels too, but I never touched them. I stuck to the oils, trying to do my best 
Anyways, pastels are such an interesting medium. It’s all about the color blending, which is always done after the color is applied to the paper/canvas. Sounds a bit backwards, but it certainly works. In my “computer guy” pastel, I didn’t have any flesh tones in my palette. So I started off first with a mostly white face, then added a bit of brown, orange, yellow and red, blended it all together, and viola, got a tone that mostly resembles skin. Pretty neat.