Art

I thought I’d put out another collection of tidbits I ran across that give me ideas of things I might want to do or create. There are lots of other preoccupations in my mind besides these, but I prefer to collect the ones worth keeping around

• Every night we are witnesses to a bigger bunch of explosions than anything ever shot up into the sky, though we don’t get to hear the sounds of all that energy being released. Some observer looking at our galaxy from outside might notice this as the only interesting thing going on in our little patch of stars.
  The Great Orion Nebula Is Even Greater Than You Know
  
• From your browser you can dive down and down into the centuries-old canvas and wonder how little flecks of pigment end up assembling into full-blown forms in your mind. It’s like a different kind of space exploration
  HIROX - GIRL WITH PEARL EARRING - GIGAPIXEL PANORAMA
• I guess by now “impartial” has completely taken over the former meaning of the word and isn’t going to give up its place, no matter how old fussy pedants like me say they don’t like it.
  Disinterested or uninterested? How long we should cling to a word's original meaning.
  And similarly with the phrase that describes a circular argument.
  Beg The Question // Get it right.
• This game is a little like that cake cutting problem in mathematics, but rather than wanting to make the pieces equal in size, you need to partition it using only a few straight cuts. After a while I was starting to formulate a kind of strategy when faced with something that looked impossible to solve at first. Slices
• I will always love Japanese poetry, aware that it really cannot be rendered into English.
  Wim 🅾: "Here is an amazing poem by the Buddhist priest M…" - Octodon

© publicdomainstockphotos Free photo ID 84930337 | Dreamstime.com

This is the third year I engaged in the discipline of writing and posting a poem on the Yahoo groups Scifaiku list I’ve been a member of for a dozen years or so. In past years I maintained a scifaiku writing timetable. One year, I wrote a new poem every single day for the entire year to see how much of a challenge that would be for me. Two other years, I kept a five month long, twice weekly schedule on the mailing list, which I repeated in much the same form this year, from January till the end of May. In the end, I had generated a total of forty-four stripped-down verses, either a single nine syllable lines or a three-line stanza of twelve syllables. Additionally, the verses portrayed some topic drawn from either science fiction, fantasy, or horror. On our Yahoo list, the members adhere to the Japanese renga convention of posting answering verses linked to the preceding one and yet shifting the emphasis to a greater or lesser extent. True to our haiku roots, the verses we write are as short as possible, forcing the writer to omit anything unnecessary while still trying to remain intelligible. With each linked contribution, the thread as a whole is apt to veer quite a ways away from the idea that sparked things in the first place. Plus, the vagaries of email communication with its unpredictable delays can also bring about forks in the chain which can co-exist side by side following sometimes very different paths.

© Peter Mautsch / Maranso Gmbh ID 1268669 | Dreamstime Stock Photos

One of the things I like best about the end of the year has to do with music, which is one of the main ways I pass the time all year round. Now, I don’t hang around in places featuring non-stop Christmas carols on loop so that is not the kind of thing I’m referring to. I am also not big on the music countdown segments that certain DJs like to put out during the last week of the year. It is a different kind of nostalgia that gets me in the last days of the calendar that I want to talk about for a little.

I’ve been thinking for some time now of what I’d like to do once it’ll be no longer viable to continue working in the tech industry. I’ve dropped out and made my way back in, but do not have high hopes for being able to do that again ten or more years closer to retirement age. I keep coming back to the idea of making a radical change going into creative writing.