Euphoric Blog

 Ok! Back to happy upbeat things for a while!  Fun weird fact: while I was taking a bath this morning, Ennio Morricone’s theme from “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” got stuck in my head.  I haven’t listened to that in forever, and I don’t think I was thinking about anything related, so it’s kinda odd that the chanting Indians and whistlers and guitar players decided to join me while I was washing my hair.  Lol, I should draw that.  It would be a funny picture.

But on to the subject at hand– Photoshop sunrays.  You’ve probably seen this everywhere but haven’t noticed it but now will see it everywhere because I’m pointing it out:

It’s on the internet, in TV commercials, and on the labels of half the products in my kitchen and bathroom.  And you don’t even have to be able to draw to make this perfect design.  I made the above just by Googling the phrase “photoshop sunray tutorial” and following the first tutorial I found.  All it is is a linear gradient from two colors that is then altered with the wave filter and the polar coordinates filter.  I don’t understand the math behind it at all, so I’m glad my computer and Photoshop work out the wave functions for me!

If it’s this popular (just a little bit ahead of the ink blots and organic vine designs that I have yet to learn how to create) I wonder how much longer it will be cool to use such a trendy design.  But oh well, I’m not a graphic designer officially.  I just learn the tech and try to apply it appropriately to my own artwork.  I’ve temporarily lost access to the drawing that I wanted to apply this to, but after some noodling around yesterday and experimenting with the distort filters, I made this banner:

But I discovered a weird problem that I’m going to post to a Photoshop forum because I don’t understand what’s going on.  When I tried saving my distort filter experiment files using the “Save For Web” option to shrink the file size, the colors got all washed out!  Like this:

 Whaaaaaaa??? …the Hell?

But I could keep the intended coloring by saving the file as a giant .jpg without saving for web.  Weird.  I don’t like saving big images like the first one, because the file size is like five times what it should be and it takes twice as long to load the picture on a web page! Even Flickr gets tripped up.

It just goes to show, no matter how well you think you know your tools there is always something more to learn! 

I’ve mentioned before that I have muscular dystrophy, and I think this Sunday is a day I can write about it without getting all bitter and self-absorbed. I don’t want to talk about it when I’m feeling at all negative, because then whatever I write would evoke pity. And if I’m evoking pity, I’m misleading my sympathetic audience and furthering ideas that I don’t believe in. Disability’s just this thing, you know? It’s always a part of who I am, but I don’t think about it until I have to. And I certainly don’t feel bad about it except for when I’m already feeling sorry for myself about other things.

The particular type of muscular dystrophy that my brother and I have is charcot marie tooth, and the specific type of *that* is dejerine sotas. Those labels are worth mentioning only so you don’t confuse what I have with something more serious like multiple sclerosis or one of the many other types of muscular dystrophy. (MD is not MS, I’m a doctor not a missionary…if you need a mnemonic device to keep them straight) What it all means is that the nerves controlling my arms and legs are like unshielded power lines. The movement signals get there much slower than normal, so my reflexes aren’t so good and it takes more time and energy for me to move. My muscles aren’t used properly, and they weaken. I also have low endurance, poor circulation, and a poor sense of balance. I trip and fall a lot. It’s not fatal but is progressive– I may need to get a cane and/or a wheelchair in the future, but I’m hoping to have a career and family established before it gets to that point. At present I can walk (better) with or (worse) without orthotics, and I can still drive though I am considering applying for hand controls in the next car I get.

We returned to my uncle’s vineyard this week to help him harvest the last five rows of grapes.  This time it was just an intimate party with my aunt/uncle and several of their good friends.  For those of you playing along at home, the mystery of the mystery grapes  was simply that Uncle Bruce planted them thinking they were the same variety as the other grapes.  Then when they came up, they weren’t what the label on the seeds had said they were at all.  Moreover, even the university experts in Lexington were unable to identify them.  They must be some variety of wild grapes that got mixed in with his seeds.  Whatever they are, the bees love them.

This is the shed I’ve been sketching.  Um, it’s still not finished yet.  The sketch, not the shed.  The shed used to have a horse inside, back when my uncle tried to keep animals.

These are the grapes of wrath.  Harvested just before the onset of the winter of our discontent.

Everyone, meet Kate.  Kate was a major reason I didn’t finish my sketch yesterday, but she’s such a sweetie I have to forgive her.  During the bigger harvest party there were too many people and she hid in the barn the whole time.  I didn’t get to meet her until just yesterday.  Kate runs from people walking toward her, but she loved me because I was sitting still most of the time.  So she would follow someone out into the vineyard until she got bored or spooked and then she would come back to me for lovins.  If I didn’t immediately drop what I was doing and tell her what a good dog she is, she would push on my arm with one of her paws and get all up in my face with her doggie breath!

The fungus among us.  Aren’t they amazing? Click the pictures for a closer look.  These mushrooms and lichen were growing all over a stump near the shed.

The vineyard from far away.  I was distracted from my sketching and decided to go for a walk.

“In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”
- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 25

“Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe,
grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges
ahead of his accomplishments.”
- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 14

(I *think* that’s my uncle in that picture.  I don’t remember exactly.)

“Before I knowed it, I was sayin’ out loud, ‘The hell with it! There
ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do.
It’s all part of the same thing.’… I says, ‘What’s this call, this
sperit?’ An’ I says, ‘It’s love. I love people so much I’m fit to bust,
sometimes.’… I figgered, ‘Why do we got to hang it on God or Jesus?
Maybe,’ I figgered, ‘maybe it’s all men an’ all women we love; maybe
that’s the Holy Sperit-the human sperit-the whole shebang. Maybe all
men got one big soul ever’body’s a part of.’ Now I sat there thinkin’
it, an’ all of a suddent-I knew it. I knew it so deep down that it was
true, and I still know it.”
- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 4

“How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped
stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children? You can’t scare
him–he has known a fear beyond every other.”
- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 19

( Those are my parents, folks.  Dad says Durhey. )

“Whenever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there.
Whenever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there… I’ll be in the
way guys yell when they’re mad an’-I’ll be in the way kids laugh when
they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the
stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build-why, I’ll be there.”
- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 28

“Fear the time when the strikes stop while the great owners live -
for every little beaten strike is proof that the step is being taken …
fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for
this one quality is the foundation of Manself, and this one quality is
man, distinctive in the universe.”
- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 14

The barn Kate likes to hide in.  My uncle had a TV and mini fridge in there so the guys could watch the game.  UK vs. ‘Bama — we lost, but we played better offense than they did, or so I hear.  I’m not ready for some football.

The view from the back porch.  It’s times like these I think to myself… I gotta get me a piece of bottom land.

“Is a tractor bad? Is the power that turns the long furrows wrong? If
this tractor were ours, it would be good - not mine, but ours. We could
love that tractor then as we have loved this land when it was ours. But
this tractor does two things - it turns the land and turns us off the
land. There is little difference between this tractor and a tank. The
people were driven, intimidated, hurt by both. We must think about
this.”
- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 14

“The migrant people, scuttling for work, scrabbling to live, looked
always for pleasure, dug for pleasure, manufactured pleasure, and they
were hungry for amusement.”
- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 23

We grilled bratwursts for dinner, with baked beans in a metal crock, and my cousins’ grandmother made some amazing apple crumble and banana pudding.

And to finish, here’s some Autumn imagery for ya: some great pumpkins and a cute little jumping spider.

Before my uncle’s farm became a vineyard, he tried raising various types of livestock on his 10-15 acre plot in the Brown Valley out near Utica.  Horses are too much work, and goats have a nasty habit of escaping from their pens to eat garbage and climb on top of cars.  He may or may not have tried cows, I don’t remember.  I’m just glad he never raised pigs because I visited a classmate’s pig farm once and that smell is an affront to good sinuses.  Anyway, Uncle Bruce finally gave up the giant critters and started this grape ranch instead.  This weekend was the annual raisin roundup, and unlike the past three years, this year I was able to attend!

The grapes were especially sweet this year!  So sweet that the harvesters sampled them without a care for the amount of pesticide or fertilizer on the surface of each one.  Mmm, poison-y!  The honey bees didn’t mind the inedible coating either, and if one wasn’t careful, it was entirely possible to pick a bee instead of a grape.

Without the bees, there wouldn’t be any grapes.  But boy were they annoying!   As Uncle Bruce drove down the row on his tractor, my sister backed into a grapevine only to find she was mere inches away from being… wait for it… COVERED IN BEES!!!  They were especially thick on the “mystery grapes.”  (What mystery?  It was explained to me at one point but I immediately forgot.  Life is better with some mystery left to it anyway.  Feel free to comment with your own solution to the mystery of the mystery grapes.)  Sadly, my sister hasn’t seen The Wicker Man OR Eddie Izzard, so my goofy chanting of, “No! Not the bees! AAAAUUUGHHHH!” fell on deaf ears after she recounted her experience between the vines.  She did, however, find the Eddie Izzard reference funny after I explained that part of his routine to her.

The bees also wanted to cover my soda, as I sat by the barn sketching the small shed that once had a pony in it… until it died and my uncle decided to stop keeping horses since my cousin was allergic anyway.  It was a tiny shed but it had this awesome clump of trees and pot of begonias in front of it, and sketching is the best way for a shy person like meself to relax at a public event.

When you have an open sketchbook, you are freed from the pressure of finding things to talk about and people will come to you instead because they are curious. They have the security of the sketchbook as a conversation topic, plus the excuse of not wanting to disturb your work if they run out of things to talk about.

I was approached thusly by my boyfriend’s dad’s girlfriend, who wanted to know if I had heard from our sailor recently.  When it became clear that neither his dad nor I had heard from Eric in the past three weeks, we were all quite relieved because that just means he is busy and can’t contact anyone.  He didn’t die and he doesn’t hate me! Hooray! Now I just have to send a follow-up email apologizing for the nasty things I said in the previous one.  (Not really.  I just asked if I still had a boyfriend.  After all, one can’t expect to find one’s lover unchanged after not speaking to him for three days.  To loosely paraphrase Confucious.)

I didn’t finish the sketch because 1) I was taking my time since I’m relatively weak with pencils and often rush with them so I can get to the ink and the paint and the fun, and 2) there were people and chairs between me and the shed, so I would stop sketching and rest or eat whenever a large group of people blocked my view.  I also stopped to say, “Thank you,” and talk to the people who noticed what I was doing and wanted to talk about drawing.

I most enjoyed talking to George who is a friend of my uncle and who owns the local Greek bistro downtown.  His bistro catered the harvest party, and that Greek food is what is referenced in the title of this post.  George is a really nice guy, and he said he enjoys art as well.  He agreed with me that charcoal is much easier to use than pencils are, and he seemed excited when I told him how I usually prefer to paint on the computer.  “Photoshop…Photoshop…Photoshop…” he repeated so he could remember.  Who knows, maybe he’ll go buy a tablet now, when he has some time away from the restaurant.  I think that would be a rare occurrence though.

Anyway, I didn’t finish the sketch before it got too dark to see.  But we’re going back in a few weeks to help with the grapes again.  I’ll post the sketch here when it is done.

Amazing.  Practice really does make perfect!

I’ve been a huge Harmonix fan ever since Frequency, but on Frequency and Amplitude there was always a bar of difficulty I couldn’t cross.  I would ace the single player game on both easy and medium, and then hit the bar in the middle of Hard and progress no further.  In both Frequency and Amplitude, Hard mode meant there might be extra notes you could barely hear in the music, and you had to play 16th or 32nd notes on a single button.  That’s hella hard when pushing buttons on a PS2 control pad.  Also, if there was one especially hard part in the middle of the song, you couldn’t just practice that part of the song.  You had to survive the whole song to clear it, and play all the way through up to the point you were having trouble with to try that again.  It was really a shooter, albeit disguised as a music game, and eventually my reflexes just couldn’t take that much abuse anymore.

I haven’t had much time with Guitar Hero on the PS2, but the DS version has definitely fixed the game and made it more like playing a musical instrument.  When you fail a song in Career Mode, it gives you the option to switch to Practice Mode.  (The option is also in the main menu of the game, so you can start a play session with practice.)  In Practice Mode, you can choose any section of the song and have just that section play over and over until you hit Start to bring up the restart-or-quit menu.  And it tells you how many of the notes you played right!  So you know that practicing is actually helping!

Also notable:  playing 16th and 32nd notes doesn’t suck anymore because you can actually strum on the DS touch screen.  My wrists are most grateful, though my left hand is getting a little bit more exercise than it is used to from fingering all those chords.  I’ve gotten to the point where the game is giving me three finger chords and making me switch from 1st and 3rd to 2nd and 4th “frets” a lot.

Last week, I was stuck on “Breed” by Nirvana on Hard.  This week, I finished Bloc Party’s “Helicopter” and am currently working on “I Wanna Rock and Roll All Night” by Kiss.  I’m averaging one or two songs on Career Hard mode and a whole venue in Guitar Duels Medium each day.  I didn’t pass the Kiss song today, but I did go from 20% to 80% completion in just an hour.  So, I’m fairly confident I will clear it tomorrow.

Today I took a fully charged Nintendo DS Lite and played three games until the battery light turned red. Status of each game below:

I’ve reached the end of my sightreading streak in Guitar Hero: On Tour. Every music game I play, I measure how long I can breeze through the songs before I find one I have to practice to clear. This time, I cleared out all the songs on both Easy and Medium. Then I failed the OK Go song on Hard with 50% completion. Sigh. I am most comfortable playing on Medium, as the songs feel like the real guitar parts, just minus the complex strumming and using three or four fingers for chords. My favorite songs are Spiderwebs by No Doubt, Knock Me Down by the Chili Peppers, and the Stray Cat Strut. And I used to hate playing Blink 182 in Amplitude, but in Guitar Hero it is fun because you can actually strum properly rather than just pressing a single button over and over.

The DS is the perfect system to play Guitar Hero on, and I love the Guitar Grip because it fits my tiny left hand much better than the PS2 guitar controller ever did.  The only problem is that it is rather easy to slide it out of the GBA slot while playing, but that doesn’t happen too often.  I forgive the designers though, because it’s so nice ergonomically and now I can comfortably reach the blue fret.

Just when I was getting upset at hitting my own personal bar, I realized there is a whole other single player mode. Guitar Duels works like a battle of the bands, like multiplayer in Amplitude/Frequency but with a computer opponent. Some of the items are really creative too– set your opponents guitar on fire so they have to blow into the mic to put it out (this also ruins their guitar playing posture so they will probably lose the next phrase too), or send a crazed fan so they have to stop playing and sign an autograph on the touch screen (and it varies each time too! t-shirts, autograph books, purses…), or flip the screens so they can’t use their items and have to look at the other screen to read the notes. The most annoying item is the broken guitar string attack. There is nothing worse than having to stop playing to restring your guitar, which you do by touching the tiny circle at one end of the board and dragging it across the touch screen to the other tiny circle.

I was starting to get frustrated with the learning curve in The World Ends With You, but then I realized that you just have to take the time to level up your pins before a major battle. A lot of RPGs let you learn really slowly and just blindly use the same attack over and over for the first three levels, but this one expects you to put a lot of effort into leveling before the first boss battle. When you get a new pin, it starts out weak and you aren’t used to using it. But after it levels at least once it becomes really useful. I still haven’t gotten any A or S rankings yet, but I’ve gotten B a few times. I also really approve of the interface for switching pins and other equipment. It’s set up like a cellphone interface, and it just feels so natural to manage so much information that way.

And when my hands start to hurt, I switch to Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime. I’ve just gotten the pot that allows you to do alchemy, and I’m about to head back up the mountain to find the five slimes yet to be rescued. This game is way too easy, but the tank battles are so fun that I think maybe I should keep the game around and hopefully I will find other people who own it and want to play multiplayer with me. Someday… Sucks that it is multi-card. I think all multiplayer DS games should be either single cart or global wifi. Multi cart local wifi never gets used by me.

Whoa, check it out! Panoramic image of a Yayoi Kusama exhibit:  http://www.mediavr.com/kusamaqt.htm

(Try not to navigate it too quickly, it’s not for those who are prone to motion sickness!)

Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese artist who often uses multicolored dots as a repeating motif in her work.  She committed herself to an asylum and only leaves to attend her art show premieres.  She likes to wear bright colors and wigs to match her art.

I just watched Casino Royale. Not the Casino Royale you are thinking of, but the 1967 one with Peter Sellars, Woody Allen, Larry Niven and Orson Welles. Basically, the Austin Powers before Mike Meyers made Austin Powers. It’s up on Hulu, and it made me very happy.

Whether or not this movie would make *you* happy depends on two factors: 1) What generation you were born in, and 2) what your expectations are. If you are expecting either a serious James Bond movie or something as blatantly funny, lewd, and fast as Austin Powers, you won’t like this movie.

The comments on Hulu reflect this– half of them seem to be from boomers and other people older than me who thought Austin Powers was vulgar and stupid and Peter Sellars is God, and the other half are from whippersnappers who thought it was stupid and a poor excuse for either a Bond movie or a comedy. I half agreed with all of them. There didn’t need to be any sequels to Austin Powers, and Peter Sellars gave a brilliant performance in Casino Royale. But I laughed more at the first Austin Powers movie. Casino Royale is very much an old school madcap comedy, and I have mixed feelings about the genre. Madcap comedy as a style is beautiful to watch, and the gags made me grin. But most of the gags did not quite make me laugh, with the exception of the sock garter slingshot (resulting in Peter Sellars pants being down and him falling over them at the end of the scene). That is hilarious and amazing to me because that particular gag could not be used in a movie these days. But most of the physical comedy in Casino Royale is too much like the dumber Benny Hill skits that have been rerun too many times on Comedy Central.

This is not a funny movie, though some scenes are nearly as funny as the old Pink Panther movies. No, what I found amusing in this film were the characters created by Sellars, and by Woody Allen, who played the villain. Sellars turns James Bond into an elderly and celibate stutterer, while maintaining his elegant appearance to torture all female agents he meets, while Woody Allen takes the evil out of villainy as he plays Bond’s neurotic nephew who doesn’t want to take over the world so much as to just change the rules so he can get laid. A few of their lines were hilarious, and their entire delivery was brilliant.

There are also a lot of very beautiful women in this movie doing very silly things. I highly recommend it to anyone who has an appreciation for the psychadelic visual style and who can be patient with the over the top madcap presentation of the first half hour. After the introduction of the elderly retired Bond, and the weird Scotland castle bits, it just gets better and better.

The badge on the glass and bandana says “Don’t Pet Me– I’m Working.”

For today, from photo reference on Google Images:

More on the seahorse tomorrow, I think.

The background contains fluorish brushes made by user Nadnouda on Deviant Art, which I used as stamps.