This has happened so often it’s almost routine. Someone comes into my life in an unexpected way, something cool start up, we start collaborating on ideas, and just when things are about to take off, it falls apart. If you only knew how often this has happened, how close I’ve come to getting something great going, only to have the wheels fall off right at the starting line. It’s laughable, it has to be laughed at, because it’s so absurd, and I’m tired of crying over what could have been, what might have been.
The latest Thing that came along was exciting, it was about to be a life changing gig. I can’t talk about any of it due to a non disclosure agreement that was signed. The upside- I sold a piece of artwork outright, with all reproduction rights forever. In return, I was able to buy a computer I’ve only dreamed of for many, many years. I have a shiny new quad core machine that can grind out artwork so fast it’s scary. It’s allowing me to do something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, so now I’m hand rolling high resolution 1080P fractal animations. The previous computer would take around 2-6 hours per frame to render. This machine can render those same frames in around 20 minutes a frame. And cooler- I can run 3 instances of the software needed to render, so I can render THREE animation frame sets at the same time. And I can still open and work with other programs at the same time, 8 gigs of ram is a glorious thing.
The person I’d teamed up with has vanished without a trace. I haven’t heard back since the first of the year, and there was a mention in the last email that they were going to the doctor to get a heart valve issue checked out. Since then, all emails have gone unanswered. I’m quite concerned about their health, I’m surprised no one’s dropped me an email to tell me what’s going on. I hope it’s just a temporary thing and they’ll be back in touch soon.
But- if nothing further happens, well, I can deal with it. I’m looking at it as a wonderful thing, that a patron of the arts came along, and was able to provide me with the tools I’ve sorely needed for a long, long time, and for that, I’m grateful. It’s allowed me to take my art to a new level, to finally be able to create things I’ve only dreamed of all these years. But I am sad to have lost track of my partner like this, as what was being planned was going to be mighty spectacular and cool.
People come into your life for a reason, and they leave when whatever it was they were there to do is finished. I need to figure out how to accept this without questioning it.
Tell me something
that will make me happy
I’m tired of hearing things
that make me sad.
Tell me a story that will turn me to loving
’cause I’m hating this world
and it’s getting bad.
I’m looking over
the edge of the world
And all that I see is sorrow.
I don’t know what the next day will bring
but I’m deathly afraid
of tomorrow.
© Steven Lareau
these darkened halls
are my refuge in the night
as I look for a hiding place
from this demon pain.
my mind flips
it’s dead on this other side
created out of the darkness
that churns within
burying me alive
Wow. It just turned 2010. It was just ten short years ago that our good friends Rick and Julie were here celebrating the new year with us. 2010. That sounds so far into the future, but it’s here right now, right now is 2010. Amazing. Time is flying. 2009 was a nightmare for numerous friends. It was a year filled with pain and suffering and illness and stress and death and financial ruin. I don’t know how this happened, but a lot of it evaded my wife and I, knock on wood.
This new year has a lot of promise in store. An incredibly cool project has presented itself to me, and I’m jumping in without hesitation. I’m going to rock this new project, I’m primed and ready to roll. I can’t talk about anything yet, but it involves me and my artwork. I’m going to be making my artwork for one of a kind items. If it goes as well as it appears it will, I’ll be spending my days and nights making artwork. Read the rest of this entry »
People scare me anymore, they really do. They can see stains on an iron and claim it’s Jesus. They actually believe Jesus is giving the a sign of some sort. Yet these same people don’t believe in fossils, nor global warming is taking place. How on earth can someone put their faith into something so absurd, yet they can’t believe things that are scientific? Honestly..
Mary Jo Coady walked into her daughter’s bedroom Sunday afternoon and noticed a familiar image on the bottom of an iron sitting on the floor.
“I see his eyes, his nose, his whole face and I was like, ‘That’s Jesus looking at us,’” Coady said.
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about this subject, even more with Thanksgiving approaching. It’s an annual feast, where people eat and eat and eat until they’re ready to pass out at the table. And there are so many people in this country, and around the world, that would give anything to be able to eat a full meal, much less an opportunity to eat your fill. And that’s what this is about, a simple enough idea for people to help someone else with very, very little cost and effort. All it takes is a bit of compassion for someone hungry and the time it takes to pick a few vegetables and drop them off at a neighbor’s house.
Joan, a friend of mine, posted she’d just run into some cool geometric 3D goodies that are printed on a 3D printer, a rapid prototype machine. There’s a woman, Bathsheba Grossman, who’s been doing math model artwork for many years, someone I’ve run across a few times over the years. Go feast your eyes on her work, it’s amazing. Bathsheba Grossman
Some of you who are new to reading me missed this, but years ago, I had made available some 3d geometric meshes I’d created for3D artists to download and play with in their 3D software. Take a look at some of what I made available here.
HEAVY IMAGE POST BEHIND THE CUT, but one you might be interested in seeing.
Bipolar Disorder can really, really, really suck the fun out of life. A few days ago, I cycled from middle of the road world to a bad, hard core manic wall slam, and back, within about a 5 hour span. I’m still wiped out from it. I rarely get manic, I usually get highly agitated and irritable, but I don’t get the typical manic thing. It’s usually internalized and it doesn’t manifest itself for others to see. But this last bout, man.. my hands were shaking, I was doing crazy hard body rushes from it, waves of manic spazzitude washing over me.
I cycle way too fast. I do in hours what most manic depressives do over the course of months, or weeks. By the time I figure out what’s happening to me, I’m flying towards the other direction. It’s exhausting. But it makes me who I am, there’s not much I can do besides taking my happy little pills and riding it out. But there are days it’s hard to convince myself that this is just lies my brain is telling me, it’s not real, none of it is real, it’s all the result of bad chemical balances, it’s bad, shorted out wiring in my head that makes me feel this lousy. But that doesn’t diminish the impact it makes on your life, and those around me, when a bad day hits.
It’s a really stupid thing to have to deal with. And in the last hour, I started to feel manic waves starting to wash over me again. I’m going to try to crawl into bed now, before it roars to full volume, and sleep through it. Hopefully I’ll wake up without it hanging over my head. What a life..
Science rocks. This is an Xray photo of a gaseous nebula nicknamed The Hand Of God. Spectacular. Click the image for the larger version.
I own one of these very things seen below, a Lichtenberg figure, created by irradiating a block of clear acrylic with a beam of electrons from a 5 million volt particle accelerator. Mine is a small flat cube of acrylic, and the pattern is nowhere as complex as this one, but it’s still cool to own what is essentially a fossil of lightning.
Photo from http://capturedlightning.com/
You can see how these are made here, spend some time digging around the web site, there’s videos of these being made, once the initial discharge, bolts of lightning keep flashing and etching paths inside the block for minutes afterward. It’s very cool. Captured Lightning.
The image above is an example of the path of lightning captured in a block, and now researchers are using it to create a template upon which an artificial organ can grow.Researchers create a template upon which an artificial organ could grow. They can grow blood vessels close to the natural patterns of blood vessels, which are fractal patterns to begin with. Link
This is some sort of crazy mold that appeared in the garden. It wasn’t there one day, then this bright yellow patch appeared the next day. The day afterward, it was this white foamy weirdness. A couple of days later, it had gone to spores. I hit it with the hose to try to wash it away, and instead, it blew spores 20 feet high, there was a big brown cloud of this crap flying around the yard. Click em for the full sized images, the second one has an amazing texture to it. Blue pushpin for size reference.
Tonight I looked up an old Brycer friend’s web site to see what she’s been up to lately, as it’s been a couple of years since I lost popped in to see what she’s been creating.
I just learned that my friend Jo, aka Skydancers, passed away August of 2007. I knew it had been a few years since we last tagged bases, but I’m shocked and saddened that she’s no longer with us. She was an amazing, amazing artist. She never headed down this way, so we never did get a chance to meet after all the years of mutual admiration and fun email exchanges. Her daughter has kept her web site up as a memorial, go take a look at the work of a brilliant friend. http://www.ashenwings.com/skydancer/
A local artist friend, Zophia, is creating some cool metal sculptures, the proceeds going towards a friend’s medical costs for chemo treatment for stage 3 breast cancer. Each one is unique, made to order. Go take a look, they’re very cool. Link
Opie, the 3 legged wonderdog, was listening as I was playing a video clip of coyotes howling. Ain’t he just adorable?
Opie hears coyotes wmv video file
This is pretty cool, a short video clip of an a capella group Vocapeople. Nothing but human voices.
Vocapeople.wmv Download
I got a midi keyboard for Christmas. I’ve always wanted to try keyboards, so I figured out where the notes were and was surprised at how rapidly I was able to pick it up. I play entirely right handed, I’m not sure yet what the left hand should be doing, but even one handed, I’m thinking I’m getting it to sound pretty good.
There were 6 previous incarnations of this song as I was developing it, but here’s my final mixdown, I’m calling it quits on this tune. This will do for now, until I can get more proficient playing. The difficult thing for me is getting notes to hit on time, and keeping a steady pace, as my fingers aren’t used to this yet. Harder still was doing quick hits on the keys, to keep the staccato feel to it.
So, this is it, it has the bits in it I wanted to have, so I’m done and moving on to the next ideas. Enjoy.
During the winter, I grind to a halt. My body goes into a bad state, arthritis and stuff just gets nasty this time of year. My online life does the same, it slows down, the holidays are usually hectic and I get lost for a while. It was a very low key Christmas this year, but as the years go by, that suits me just fine.
We have a brand new president, and the guy, his wife, and his kids are cool. What a refreshing change of pace, a guy I feel comfortable, a guy I feel I can trust, a guy that’s walking the walk, a guy that’s breaking down the barriers of business as usual in DC. I love it, I’m glad he’s in charge, I can’t bear to think of McCain and Palin muddling and bluffing their way through what this country is facing. Barack must be nuts to take on the job he’s tackling. That’s a hell of a man that is willing to face such insane obstacles.
It’s been a bad week, my sister has been hospitalized and is fighting for her life, and it’s not looking good. What makes this more difficult is that what’s left of my family are all in California, and I’m in East Tennessee. I can’t travel via airplane due to medical stuff, riding in a car that long is out of the question, and a hospital is filled with sick people and diseases, which is the last thing I should expose myself to. So I’m trying to get through all of this via random phone calls day and night, at all hours. We’re all trying to get through this as best we can, but it’s been rough, to say the least. Being the oldest of 4 kids, it’s sort of my job to be there during a crisis, especially one like this. But it’s just not possible to be there, and that’s hard to swallow.
I’m working on some art projects, a new set of animated fractal videos to be marketed as relaxation or meditation videos, as I’m going to record a music track for them with the midi keyboard I bought a few months ago. I’m going to send a couple out to The Square Room on Market Square in Knoxville, so they can use them to project onto the big screens and backdrop behind the stage of this new music venue.
I’m also working on releasing a CD of my artwork to be used for computer screen wallpaper, or in digital picture frames. They’re being rendered in a wide format, so they’ll fit nicely onto laptop screens or the big monster monitors some people have. I’ve been rendering thousands of pieces of artwork for over a year now, Frankenputer in the corner has been rendering day and night rendering large artwork.
I need to do another show for 2009, so I’m taking stock of where I might be able to do a show without paying a lot of money to hang on the gallery walls. Last show left me $100.00 poorer to hang for a month, and I had zero sales. It’s not good business when things don’t pan out like this. I’m going to make a pitch to a gallery that I enjoy, and seeing if I can do a solo show. I’ve got more than enough framed and finished artwork to do a solo show, and it’d be cool to see it all in one place.
I just spent over an hour surfing news web sites, here and around the world, and I’m stunned.
The world, except for Russia, is happy about this guy making it into office.
I was digging through photos of people around the world, seeing photographs of people reacting to his victory last night. And all across the board, all around the world, there are people SMILING. Not a quick smile as a reaction to something, but a deep seated, I am really happy right now sort of smile. World leaders are using this election as a vehicle for patching up bad relations with America.
One country leader after another said things along the lines that they’re happy Americans have shown that they can affect change, that they needed someone they can believe in and trust, that they’ve elected someone with intelligence and grace, a man with a commanding presence, a man they think they can have much more meaningful conversations with than Bush and company. They’re happy to see that Americans disprove of what America represented to the world for the last 8 years.
The world, no, really, pretty much the world just changed last night. For the better. We have not just a new president, but a new leader. A decider with enough intelligence and sense to decide things.
We have a new and greatly improved Decider.
Decider 2.0
I can’t help but to feel proud of the people in America. However it was done, people got together and worked hard for an important, common goal. The election of this man to office won’t erase the evil and bad karma of the last 8 years, I honestly don’t think that can, or will, ever happen. But this man has just stepped up to the plate to tackle the worst mess I dare say, that this country has ever been in. I mean, we just elected an ANTI WAR guy in the MIDDLE OF WAR! As far as I can think, I don’t think we’ve ever done that before.
Hope. The man has just given all of us an amazing gift, the gift of hope, real hope, at a time where so many people have lost hope, or are standing at the edge, ready to tumble into the darkness of despair. Barack’s Hope is not a dimwitted, hollow, and empty half hearted speech to tell us that everything’s gonna be fine, just for the sake of making the effort to at least look like he’s concerned.
Real Hope. We can all feel it. It’s tangible, it’s in the air. And it’s not just here, but it’s world wide. The world is joyously celebrating the man we just elected, against all odds, to the most powerful position in the world, the President of the United States of America.
Tonight, when my wife gets home, I’m going to do something I haven’t been able to bring myself to do ever since George W. Bush declared we were at war with Iraq.
I’m going to unfold our flag of the United States of America, I’m going to attach it to the pole in front of our home, and display it again, with pride. I have wanted to do this for quite a few years, but I just hated what this country had turned into, as far as our countries values and reputation in the world. Don’t get me wrong. I love this country, and always have. What I hated is what a group of evil, greedy ideologues had turned this country into. We deserve better than what the last 8 years has given us.
Tonight, our flag will fly once again, and finally, after too many years of absolute heartbreak at what she had become, I’m happy, genuinely happy, to be an American, and thrilled to know that as of last night, we’ve got someone at the helm that will put us back on track. All I ever wanted from a President is the America that is promised to me by my country.
Last night, the world just changed for the better.
What an amazing, amazing moment.
I KNEW she looked familiar!
Life imitates art?
There’s some very cool surreal artwork found on this web site, a lot of it is very fractal and organic in origin. Go get lost for a while in these galleries. beinArt Surreal Art Collective
Wishful thinking…
While calling around to art galleries here in Knoxville, I had a cool conversation with a guy that was right in the midst of packing up to hit the road, and he gave a link to the blog he’ll be keeping, and now you can follow a cool road trip. americanoutsiderart.com Blog.
With the uproar from the Right over Obama’s pastor being over the top, why the hell isn’t this being discussed at the same level?
I’m sorry, this woman is filled with bizarre.
New Video of Witch-Hunting African Pastor’s Prayer Over Palin.
Sometimes you run across someone doing amazing artwork. This is one of those people.
A poll just released is distrubing as hell. One-third of polled white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks.
When Barack first appeared on the horizon, I pondered if this country had advanced enough to put a black man in the white house. Then I thought that it had to be true, we’ve come a long way as far as racial issues in this country. It couldn’t possibly be that people in this day and age would harbor ill feelings for a candidate that has black skin. Certainly there are still a lot of people in the South that were still of the mindset that blacks were subhumans. But I never, ever thought it could be this big a number.
One in three. One in three Democrats mind you.
Mind blowing.
Deep-seated racial misgivings could cost Barack Obama the White House if the election is close, according to an AP-Yahoo News poll that found one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks — many calling them “lazy,” “violent” or responsible for their own troubles.
Full, disturbing article is here.
I have a feeling we’re screwed again.
I’ve started a new site. Mostly because my name as a dot com domain finally became available, so I snatched it up. I’m goofy that way.
So.. with all the sites I currently own and run, why a new one? I have a web site set up for all the artwork I’ve done over the years, from 3D to animations to videos to music to fractals. I built a separate site to work as a place where artwork for sale can be found. And yeah, I know, I really need to update that site and list the artwork that’s been accumulating here in my home. I built yet another site to promote the art scene in the Knoxville area, which is more of a service to the community, even a blog hosting links to the cool, strange, weird, and amazing that I’ve found online. You can get an idea of who I am, what I’m all about, but you’d be guessing a great deal. On all these web sites I run, you’ll find very little about me, personally. So, this new site, bearing my own name, will fill that vacancy in my online presence. Now you can get to know me, the guy behind all this stuff.
