corvi

Queer ASL class #2

Sat, 11 Nov 2023 06:31:06 GMT

Second class! This one we learned colours (most colours are just the initial letter made as a signed letter, then rotated away from yourself), clothing items (mostly easy-to-remember pantomime-ish things), and how to ask questions along the lines of "who is the person in the red shirt?"

Fun things:

ASL has grammatically-meaningful facial expressions! Eek! I have a hard time remembering to do various things with my eyebrows when signing. I hope that starts feeling more natural at some point.

ASL has loanwords from English. Initially, the word would have been signed by fingerspelling individual letters, but over time it evolved into a sign sort of blended from the various letter shapes, with of them dropped or not entirely formed. Makes sense; it all seems pretty similar to the way English adapts loanwords to its own pronunciation; I doubt the way I say "corsage" is at all like a French speaker would. When writing ASL these are sometimes indicated with a # in front of the word, like #ALL, which is distinct from ALL.

We did an exercise describing what we were wearing. My answer was HAT BLACK SHIRT BLACK PANTS BLACK BOOTS BLACK and the instructor said #ALL BLACK? and I wish I'd had the presence of mind to spell G O T H, I think it would have been pretty funny

ASL doesn't really have pronouns, you just point to people.

This class is philosophically opposed to any gendered signs, so we just refer to everyone as PERSON. I appreciate the convenience.

juli and I are making good use of ASL's WHAT. We signed it at an unknown mushroom today while we were out walking

Here's the unknown mushroom, an Apricot Jelly, Guepinia helvelloides.

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The Secret Beach

Thu, 09 Nov 2023 05:05:02 GMT

One of our neighbours allows local residents to walk along a path on their property to reach a hidden beach. A different neighbour showed us the way Sunday, and we trudged down to the sea in the autumnal wind and rain and were initiated. This is the best secret society. Benefits include:

The Seal of Approval, a seal that inspects you from the ocean and decides you're all right after all.

Forbidden Refreshments: an extremely baffling willow tree that appears to be growing berries. Actually infected by an insect, Rabdophaga rigidae, that produces plant hormones and tricks the willow tree into growing it a cozy sturdy little red house to live in all winter.

Shivering and getting rained on, but in a new and interesting place!

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Queer ASL class #1

Sat, 28 Oct 2023 06:45:33 GMT

juli and I are doing a queer ASL class! First class was last night, on zoom. I was a little nervous because I forgot to watch the pre-class lessons, and during the beginning part of the call I often felt like I was looking at the wrong little zoom portrait because the instructor was silent and zoom kept automatically highlighting people rustling papers or something. Class was slowly paced and repetitive so neither of those things really mattered.

Things I liked:

For a zoom call with ASL, you point your camera differently, showing your head and torso down to your waist, so signs are fully visible.

juli and I were once in Ukraine and encountered a merchant selling puppets who, despite not sharing a language with us, was extremely easy to understand, and extremely persuasive (we bought a hedgehog puppet). I had previously thought of pantomime and something people just sort of did when circumstances called for it, I hadn't realized it was a skill you could learn, and I'm honestly not sure how to learn it, unless perhaps your job involves working with puppets and communicating with clueless tourists who don't speak a local language. The Deaf sign language instructor is the second person I have encountered. who was Skilled At Pantomime - after all, we don't speak her language yet.

We did finger spelling, a couple of sign useful to class flow, and numbers, culminating in a fun activity where you had to describe a monster to your partner ("5 E Y E S, 2 W I N G S") while they drew it, and then compare your drawings at the end. So I can also sign "draw" and "monster" which honestly seem like they might be useful in my life.

double letters in finger spelling are interesting. You can sort of make the letter shape and slide it along, or bounce it up and down. For Z, which is drawn in the air with a finger, you can draw it in the air with two fingers.

juli and I did a silent video call today while she was on break at work (the walls are thin at her workplace, so talking is out) and signed "L O V E J U L I" "L O V E C O R V I" at each other. Silent communication is very practical (we could have just texted, but looking at each other was nice!)

It's fun to be in that stage of learning a skill where you're looking out over a vast plain and seeing how the sun falls over it. You look forward to knowing those paths, studying hillock and tree, but for now, you're just struck by how lovely and vast this new land you've entered is, and how golden in the dawn.

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Marble Dust Mountain

Fri, 20 Oct 2023 06:48:40 GMT

My Chinese brushpainting instructor gets irregular leftover chunks of marble from contractors who do marble countertops for fancy kitchens. She grinds them up with a mortar and pestle. She mixes the opaque shimmering marble dust with translucent vegetable pigments to allow light colours to be overlaid on dark colours without the dark colours completely bleeding through. The effect is almost luminous, like clouds of lighter foliage on tree:

Las week in class we experimented with marble dust to create texture, not colour.
( to make a mountain out of marble dust )

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Eclipsn't

Sat, 14 Oct 2023 19:37:10 GMT

Today's annular eclipse path ran through Oregon, to the south of us, but we were projected to see the sun 75% occluded. Unfortunately it was thickly cloudy and I could not have even told you where the sun was.

It got cold, though, sudden and eerie, even in the house. I wrapped a blanket around my shoulders and watched the dark sky.

Anyone else have better eclipse luck?

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fruit-related question meme

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 22:43:15 GMT

From here. I just wanted to post about hala. ( fruit opinions )

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A word written on the sea

Fri, 21 Apr 2023 05:53:46 GMT

( image-heavy post about duck art )

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Sat, 11 Mar 2023 07:33:26 GMT

February 24 we were under a polar vortex. It was windy, cold and dry. The trees creaked, the ground clinked, the boards on the deck cracked underfoot. The sky was very bright blue, and looking at it was like meeting an unfriendly gaze. Everything felt thin and sharp and fragile. There was no softness in the world.

So I was surprised, driving past the tiny beach down the hill from our house, to see what looked like snow heaped on the beach, fifteen centimeters deep in places.

It was frozen sea foam! Never seen that before. Up close, it looked like piles of thin flat ice chunks, like a hoard of glass pennies.

The tide was out, but I wish I had heard what sort of noise the sea made splashing against the piles. Slithery, maybe? Jingly? Both?

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2022 Colour Journal Part 1

Sun, 29 Jan 2023 22:25:04 GMT

I keep a colour journal. Every-day-ish I answer each of a list of questions about my day went with a colour. At the end of the year, I put all the colours in a row and admire them, look for patterns, and wish I had a way to make a scarf out of them. 2022 was chaotic, and "every-day-ish" turned out to be only 75 days.

The most interesting and fun are the colours that describe the protean world: the sea, the sky, the forest. That's another post.

This post is the subjective colours, the colours that try to document my own experience of each day. It's been hard to come up with questions that are 1) answerable with a colour, 2) that colour is different on different days, 3) say something interesting about the day.
( colours )

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brave at the beginning, and gentle at the end

Fri, 30 Sep 2022 07:37:52 GMT

Let's just ignore the fact that I last posted six months ago.

Today in brush-painting class, we worked on pareidolia, looking at random jumbles of ink and loosing the pattern-hungry human brain to see something meaningful that can be developed. I really like a lot of art made this way; you don't tell the ink what to do, you move with it, like aikido.

( orogenics )

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vulturefall

Mon, 07 Mar 2022 02:26:07 GMT

Yesterday, the turkey vultures came back. For months, there'd been no vultures, but yesterday juli saw one in the backyard, and then I saw one in the backyard and two on the way to the cell phone repair shop. It was like someone had suddenly thrown a giant knife switch from No Vultures to Vultures and they all just appeared. There was nothing gradual about it.

Our vultures spend the winters in Venezuela. They're gliders, not really flappy endurance fliers, so they don't like to cross the sea until conditions are perfect. All the vultures from all their various islands congregate at the southern end of the Big Island and wait until the wind is good, and then they all launch themselves off to the mainland at once. Some October I'd like to go see them there, hundreds of vultures, spiralling over the stony beach, watching and waiting, a tower of wings and eyes.

They must do the same thing on the way here, circling over the shore on the mainland, waiting and watching for the winds to open the way here. They crossed Monday, maybe. We saw one on the Big Island Tuesday, and now they're here on Salt Spring Island, all at once, like magic.

They have an extra tendon in their wings they can use to lock their wings open and hold them without exerting any effort, and they mostly find the places where the air rises and just spiral upwards there, for hours.

Watching them, you can see: there are huge columns of uprushing air, strong enough to lift a massive bird with a two-meter wingspan. They spiral around one column for a while, and then glide over to the next one and spiral there. If you watch them for long enough, you get the sense you're in an invisible structure of vast pillars, like a henge or a temple, kilometers high, made of air and warmth. It's eerie and incredible.

One of the columns rises from the rocky mossy ridge our house is perched on. The sun warms the rock, and the rock warms the air, and the air goes up and up, and the vultures circle above us.

Yesterday the sky was gleaming blue, nearly cloudless. There were just a few faint streaks and smears of cloud, like the sky was a bright glass that had been cleaned rather half-heartedly. Looking up felt oddly like making eye contact with something. And then there were the vultures, new-arrived, sharp and ink-black - except sometimes a little gold where the sun comes through their feathers - sketching out the invisible architecture of the sky.

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Mon, 07 Feb 2022 00:39:56 GMT

A rare sunny day in February, and sunlight reflecting off the door of the dryer is haunting the laundry room with this excellent rearing skeletal horse ghost!

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radio silence

Sun, 21 Nov 2021 19:06:55 GMT

I thought it would be fun to take some classes and get a graduate certificate while everything was online and I wouldn't have to go anywhere or disrupt my life to learn cool stuff.

Buuuuut it turns out that one online reading-heavy graduate class plus one 37.5 hour per week job is approximately all the time in the entire universe, so I haven't been able to read or post here (or anywhere else) for a while. I miss getting to see the world through other peoples' eyes a little, and I look forward to being back.

A tip of the hat to all the actual grad students and professors; I have no earthly idea how you manage it.

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Indigo Resist 3: raindrops

Wed, 18 Aug 2021 02:50:15 GMT

Brush painting classes have resumed! The first new class was on the same topic as the last old class: indigo resists. This time we painted the alum in thin lines, so that when we added indigo, there were pale streaky lines in the blue, to represent raindrops.
( how to paint a downpour )

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Mon, 14 Jun 2021 01:06:25 GMT

Some days you wake up and you need to paint a vulture and plum blossom monster even though it's not a traditional Chinese brush painting subject.

( image )

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Mysteries of the Snow Rose

Thu, 18 Feb 2021 06:02:14 GMT

We have received our once-a-year pile of snow, which means I will soon be making my once-a-year post containing a pile of snow photos.

( mysterious snow objects )

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The Ever-Changing Brush

Sun, 17 Jan 2021 00:05:25 GMT

(I actually have not had brush painting class for quite a while, due to COVID concerns, but I am still catching up on summaries from when I did; writing them helps me remember what I learned. I hope.)

One of the other students asked the instructor to teach us how to apply colour. She has done small demonstrations of colour here and there before, and I've done some colouring extrapolating from what she's said, laying down multiple thin layers of different colours, but today she explained how to do it right. I was not doing it right.
( drills and dots )

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Sun, 01 Nov 2020 03:37:02 GMT

The neighbour kids like cats, so we made feline jack o lanterns. Meow! Happy Halloween!

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Painting: autumn motifs

Tue, 20 Oct 2020 04:39:15 GMT

The instructor had us paint crabs and shrimp. Crabs are a traditional autumn motif, but there's not much in the way of traditional symbolism or rules. They're considered freeform and improvisational.
( vice admiral pinchy and a handful of nebula )

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old things meme

Sat, 17 Oct 2020 06:47:05 GMT

1. What is the oldest thing you own?

This ammonite fossil juli gave me. The smooth outer surface of the shell has been polished away, making visible the seams between plates. I love the autumnal oak leaf pattern of the shell seams. The ammonite is what inspired me to answer these questions in the first place.

2. What is the oldest home you've lived in?
I think it would be the farmhouse I lived in until I was two, which only had electricity in a couple of rooms, though I don't remember it very well or know exactly when it was built.

3. What is the oldest book you've read?
After consulting Wikipedia's list of ancient literature, I have determined that the oldest text I have read is portions of (in translation) is some of the later-written parts of the Rigveda, from which I read a dozen hymns for a college class on the historical development of Indian philosophy. We focused on the more philosophical ones, like the Nasadiya Sukta, which discusses what things were like "before" the beginning of time and the universe:

Then even non-existence was not there, nor existence,
There was no air then, nor the space beyond it.
What covered it? Where was it? In whose keeping?
Was there then cosmic fluid, in depths unfathomed?

As far as old physical books, I bought a tattered copy of Washington Irving's The Bold Dragoon at a yard sale for five cents as a kid, thinking that "dragoon" was an old-timey way to spell "dragon" and that this book would contain some scaly mayhem. Alas, my young self was very disappointed. Looking at pictures online, I think it was the 1931 edition. Apparently it is a comedic ghost story, so I might have actually enjoyed it if I'd ever been able to forgive its lack of dragons.

4. What is the oldest electronic device you still use?
Leaving aside things like cars (2006) and the oven that came with the house (1990s), probably the laptop I'm typing on right now, from 2011. Fan very loud all the time, sometimes too warm for laps. Two of the arrow keys unresponsive. Haunted trackpad. Only about half a working USB port. Periodically have to delete files to make disk space. Overdue for replacement, but it has a Japanese keyboard layout I really like and can no longer get, so I've been putting off the inevitable.

5. What is the oldest work of art/architecture you've seen?
I once ended up on a field trip the see the Dead Sea Scrolls with a bunch of seminary students, and the exhibit had been supplemented with a large collection of personal document seals that were about the same age. I got the impression that one's choice of seal was mostly down to personal aesthetics. There were signs explaining grand trends in seal design, but also signs explaining how this or that one was eccentric, or copycatting Assyrian designs, or similar to some more prestigious person's personal seal, or otherwise influenced by the owner's weirdo opinions and aspirations. Like visual screen names. The seals gave me a happy sense that humanity hasn't actually changed that much in the last two millennia.

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Painting: bamboo

Tue, 11 Aug 2020 02:25:14 GMT

Painting class restarted yesterday! I have become quite unused to being around people, and that part was rather intimidating.

Surprisingly, I was the only returning student; there were also three new students. We painted bamboo, which is the traditional first step to learning the traditional flower school of brush painting. Since I've been studying the mountain school, I hadn't done bamboo before.

.( notes from class on how to bamboo )

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neowise

Mon, 20 Jul 2020 21:16:58 GMT

My parents took me to see Halley's comet when I was a kid; it's one of my earliest memories. The newspaper printed an astrolabe sort of thing you glued onto cardboard and cut out (I think we used a Raisin Bran box), then knotted on a string with a washer to be the vertical reading. They showed me the comet with binoculars - one parent would find the comet using the Raisin Bran astrolabe and binoculars, then tried to hold the binoculars perfectly still while the other parent picked me up and tried to put my face up to the binoculars.

It looked like every other star to me; I have no idea if I was looking at the right one. Did I even see it? It was not a great viewing setup, the comet was far away from earth, on the other side of the sun for the whole apparition. I was cold and tired and much more interested in swinging the astrolabe washer in front of the flashlight as a shadow puppet.

Last night juli and I went out to look for comet Neowise. We live surrounded by mountains and some forest, and the sea is the wrong direction, so we poked around various locations looking for a clear view and watched the owls, bats, satellites, shooting stars, and humans smoking weed. I thought about Halley's Comet a lot. Would we know the comet when we saw it? Or would it just be another star, of no particular distinction without a telescope or a long exposure photo?

We knew it immediately when it came into view. It was like something out of a fairy tale. It looked like a luminous milkweed seed, drifting stationary against the dark sky. It looked like a comet.

juli took this photo of it. There were no surprises revealed by camera cleverness: the photo was brighter, but undeniably the experience of looking at the photo was the experience of looking at the sky.

Look at it in the next couple days if you get a chance!

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Beneath a Kinder Sky

Mon, 06 Jul 2020 02:06:07 GMT

This year, there was no night from June 11 to June 27.

After the sun sets, there is civil twilight, which lasts from when the sun sets to when the sun is six degrees below the horizon: the sun is down, but shapes of objects outside can still be distinguished. Then there is nautical twilight, which lasts until when the sun is 12 degrees below the horizon: stars begin to appear, and sailors can make navigational sightings. Then there is astronomical twilight, the last whisper of sunlight, still enough light to wash out faint stars and distant galaxies.

After the sun is 18 degrees below the horizon, it no longer lights the sky at all. This is true night. But from June 11 to June 27, it never gets that low here. The sky is always lit, however faintly, by the sun, which goes down in the west, scoots just under the horizon around to the east, and rises again, without ever vanishing all the way.

(my colour journal entries for what colour night was each day of June)

This is normally an extremely difficult time of year for me. Our house is perched on a lump of rock and has skylights and windows in every direction. You drown in light, and there is no escaping it. This year, though, June was very cloudy, and the moon was new on the solstice. A kinder sky, a darker night. Still a tired and dream-wracked time - it's hard to sleep deeply enough to forget your dreams - but it felt much less like being put through a pasta roller than June last year.

(the colour of the moon each day in June)

There's something almost enjoyable about the thrumming energy of that specific time of year where you feel like your skin is sewn to the sky, but I'm happy it was kinder this year.

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Depixelating Soup Nose

Sun, 28 Jun 2020 16:36:12 GMT

Someone has made an AI that "depixellates" human faces (invents plausible details it learned form its training data of thousands of photographs of human faces). Some of the results are incredibly funny:

There are times of absolute moral clarity in one's life. This was one of them. I knew what I must do, and that is: depixellate Soup Nose the Goat's Creepily Human Smile:

So I pixellated it:

And the result:

Tada! A Soup Nose-coloured human, complete with toothy smile!

It pretty much had to make up the eyes from nothing; I think Soup Nose's actual eyes are so far away from what it expected it didn't register them; they ended up part of the stripy black and white hair. The edge of the window got turned into a shirt collar. It assumed her horns and ears were part of the background. Still, a pretty good attempt!

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Talking Meme: Competition Categories The Fall Fair Should Have

Sun, 03 May 2020 23:13:43 GMT

Topic suggested by yam . The full topic suggestion, Competition Categories the County Fair Or Whatever It Was Called On Salt Spring Doesn't Currently Have But Which I Would Totally Win, didn't fit in the title box

The Fall Fair is a huge old-timey harvest fair on the island, featuring competitions like "Biggest Maple Leaf", "Funniest Vegetable Shape" (butt-shaped tomatoes, butt-shaped potatoes, butt-shaped pumpkins...), betting on where cows will poop, judging bouquets of poisonous plants, watching people fail to convince chickens to race, and various cooking, pickling, brewing, and handicraft competitions. Also dancing, fried food, and a huge tent selling forty kinds of pie as a fundraiser. It's pretty great! But obviously it would be even better if there were more competitions I personally was guaranteed to win, such as:

Inedibly Spicy Pickles
Best Tiny Velociraptor in An Unconvincing Chicken Costume
Preserve Or Jelly That Really Shouldn't Have Cardamom In It, But Someone of Poor Judgement Put It In Anyway
Longest Jump Made By An Origami Frog Folded From A Tax Document
Photographs of Floating Logs That Look Vaguely Like Seals
Best Swears To Shout At Deer Eating What They Shouldn't (actually, this would be a pretty difficult competition; I'm not confident even my very best swears would win)
Stinkiest Chicken
Baked Good Made From Purple Potatoes That Most Resembles The Flesh Of A Corpse

I have so many unrecognized skills. :)

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