Yay Internet.

I have Olfaction in Kingdom of Loathing now! It took the better part of a year, since you need 200 filthy lucre and I kept missing days, but at last my task is complete! Now I guess I can just go back to grinding up to level 30 for the Disco Bandit trophy. *cries forever*

I had forgotten about the "blog" of "unneccessary" quotation marks! This is HILARIOUS. Thank you, Cake Wrecks, for reminding me.

Finally, I heard a reading of On Cartography And Dissection by an "E. Rose Sims" (possibly the author?) on the student radio station last week, during the hour that's a spoken-word/poetry/whatever show. It was actually a very good reading, and there are some lines of the piece that I really like. Open letter to the Monsters That Here Be of the world: I will not take your treasure! Come on over and we'll watch Star Trek. We can point and laugh every time William Shatner shows off his "acting" "talent".

Now I am going to go watch mecha play with the new coleus he just bought. Would you believe that almost every single one in the picture I posted a while back has died? Crazy! I guess that's what happens when you buy a few colei and then also take home a dozen "please take them they're so sad-looking that we're pretty much going to throw them out anyway" other ones. The sad ones die, then some of the other ones snuff it out of solidarity. Or something.

Oh, wait!

I forgot! Mecha finally took pictures of the art we got at the Art Fair On Your Mother. (who is a square.)

The first thing we bought was this little doohickey, by Jerry Berta:


Berta's thing is ceramics repeatedly glazed to have this awesome mottled metallic look. Epic loves his artwork; if you go to his (sadly not nearly as beautiful and well-done as the art) site and scroll down to the image under the "beaded lady" and "beaded flower", you'll see a kind of crazy neon-toothed robot dude, and a neon-fronted "Star" theater. That actual robot is in Voyager Hall at work, and either that theater or one just like it is in Andromeda. It actually has a DVD player and a tiny screen at center bottom where you can watch the movie of your choice, and you can change out the marquee and posters. While we were at Berta's stall at the Art Fair, he told us that Epic had just bought a third piece, a sort of drive-in theater with little cars. I believe the theater pieces run two grand, so it is expensive artwork, but if I were to win the lottery I would be buyin' one the very next day. Probably a fish diner as well (I don't see it on the site, but he had one at the fair that would've been at home in Deepest R'lyeh.

Mister Roboto's arms are a video-to-S-video converter cable, btw. He had siblings with USB cable arms, and CAT-5 arms, and the like, but Berta recommended mecha get the one whose arms were most obsolete. Also, Jerry Berta himself? Totally awesome dude.

MOVING ON FROM THE ROBOT.


These are my evil owls! They are by a guy named Jay Long, who has this absolutely wonderful kind of creepy storybook art style. It's only a print, although the original was there as well. It was about five feet on a side and probably cost like three grand! Someday I really really really want a print of this as well, but they were $100 a piece so I had to kind of pick one. And the owls were definitely the best. (Also sweet: The Outing.)

I'm going to have my evil owls professionally framed at some point, since I'd want them in a square frame, but they were printed on a rectangular piece of board. I do not trust myself to do the cutting on that one. Straight lines are... not my friends, as followers of my artistic career can perhaps attest. (Holy crap, when did Elfwood change to having URLs that you could actually remember?)

The title of the owls, for the record? "Vetiver." Not sure what owls have to do with "a perennial grass of the Poaceae family, native to India", but whatever.


This is one millionth of a painting.

No, really. Matthew Adelman is working on creating a painting made up of a million one-inch blocks of wood. He glues them together (usually 6,000 at a time, according to his website), paints on them, then separates them out and sells them for ten bucks apiece. When you buy a piece, or pieces, he writes down which pieces and where you live, so that, eventually, I could go to his website and look up whether the people with the pieces from next to mine live in Madison, or Chicago, or Wasilla, Alaska. If you install Silverlight you can play around with a section of the painting on his website; it's pretty fun.

I, of course, have the prettiest one-millionth of the whole painting.


Finally,

Xavier Nuez is a guy who has gone around taking pictures of, well, basically urban blight. The full-size print of this one is utterly breathtaking, but also like six hundred bucks; even at the little bitty ten-ish-inches size, it's quite nice. It is apparently the "Goast Pier" in San Francisco.

For the record, he has a much better picture of it in a blog post about the pier (click the thumbnail, although it'll resize your browser), and pictures of it one year later than in the print.

That's it! Yay art.