Throb

I think it is good I am always I might be crazy

It's so nice to be working so hard again; I'm at a place full of fresh new ideas and it's got the spirit to chase them. Life is full of predators and competition and dirty nibbling bastards with noisome and poisonous beaks... but it's also full of promising new horizons and deliciousness and doggone it, people like me.

I've been working on a few things. One of them is my silly taking-forever robot project. The basic idea is to create armatures, systems, of counterbalanced springs and hydraulic or wire-tensioned levers to conduct organized work. I think, if carefully done, that even low powered motors and actuators and a simple PC brain can make such a machine perform elegant things in the world.

I went to Orcas Island last weekend and saw an incredibly inspiring sculpture park belonging to the artist Anthony Howe. Talk about a fresh vision. This amazing man lives super close to Seattle and, while there's some inspiring stuff in our sculpture park, very little of the the projects displayed come close to the evocative lusty and raw elegance of Mr. Howe's strangely natural creations.
All I want to do is take what Anthony Howe has done and goose it with a little technology.

That said, probably this robot project is taking forever because it has no clear goals or milestones: it's just a funky tinkerer's mirage. Like most of you I am a mostly blind blunderer intently focused on creating a knockout story in my own personal dreamspace.

Here's a good thing to watch instead of American Idol or whatever tonight: www.ted.net.

Flickr faves

Here they come again:

I'm so outta here

Taking off for a couple of weeks in sunny not-Seattle Mexico. This is the least prepared for any vacation I've ever had in my life. Trying to find a threeway balance between there's-never-a-good-time-for-a-vacation, my interest in seeing the projects that I've been working on kick ass, and the need for a chance to focus on something that's not made out of pixels, dollar signs or sugar and spice. So I'm going to Zihuatanejo to take pictures, buy stuff and chase girls.

I'll see you soon,
Rob

Bikes

Jason and I found matching $50 Goodwill bikes for our bike hammock project. We are currently ridiculously synchronisticized.

Happy happy joy joy

So far this young summer has been an absolute blast. Surfing, camping, drinking, goto line 10.
Jason has some potentially incriminating pictures.

Thumbdance, etc.

I submitted a cou ple of videos to the Thumbdance 30 second film competition. What a gorgeous website!

I wish I knew more about what Thumbdance is supposed to turn into. I guess I could ask Elaine, who seems to be behind this, but I've been avoiding talking about it with her while this competition was open. I signed up for Thumbdance email updates, so I guess I'll find out, even if I'm too shy or lazy to lean over at the bar (one of my sites!) and talk to her.

LiveJournal Moment

Mood: [insert mischievious grin emoticon here]
Music: [insert broken iPod image here] [insert Rhapsody here]
Book: The Evolution of Useful Things
In General: Kicking ass, thanks for asking.

Hey, another thing I wanted to mention at some point... RealNetwork's support site, which I designed and (mostly) built, now has a customer forum. Since I glanced at this I'm feeling a little guilty that there's a question or three there that I could answer, but I'm going to stubbornly pass until I'm extremely bored, which never happens.

How about a round of santorums?

Oh, one more thing...

In honor of Dan Savage's coining of the icky word "santorum" in dubious honor of the troglodytic senator of the same name, Rendezvous bartender Babe helped realize my dream of creating a cocktail version of santorum.

Layered, poured in order, and in equal proportions:

Grenadine
Jagermeister
Fuacca
Bailey's
Cream

Thank you, back to my hiatus.

2005 Predictions

I'll come back and check up on these at the end of the year:

• President Bush dies following a bomb attack.
• Civil war erupts in both the US and in Iraq.
• The Army of California takes the west coast and invades Mexico.
• The Internet fractures into dozens of disconnected walled networks run by corporations.
• Russia and China are admitted into the European Union.
• Mt. St. Helens erupts, devestating southern Washington state and Oregon and darkening skies worldwide for a matter of weeks.
• Hail the size of Airstream trailers pummels the midwest in a freak storm.
• I am abducted and sexually tortured by a team of elite models/sexual torturers from beyond our galaxy.
• Armies of zombies are awakened due to a secret military project and roam the earth eating the brains of the living.
• The Earth splits open, revealing a new species of crystaline creatures who devour everything in their paths and poop diamonds.
• Evangelicals mysteriously start floating toward Heaven
• Martha Stewart is released from prison.

Meet the family

My family photography project worked out, kind of. I should have used a film camera and much better lighting. Anyway, this was fun.

When You Die

... this will eat you

Photoshoppyness

Moments

Last night I met a charming woman who happens to be a lung doctor. We had a cigarette and talked.

I want to live in a deconstructivist log cabin that evolves as it rises into rusted steel and concrete.

This morning I rearranged my apartment so I have a better place to draw, but so far I haven’t been able to push away the demons of anti-creation. That first line is so easy to make, so agonizing to contemplate. I look at the lines in my rice paper shower curtains and see entire worlds of idols, characters, women. Drawing as realistic a vision is a confusingly daunting challenge.

I wonder if other people perceive me as a happy person. Is this perception more important than the reality, whatever that is?

What if I joined the military? I’m sure they would train me to be an officer. I did well on their tests. It would be refreshing to literally kill the competition.

I want to fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. But I can’t tell anybody and it doesn’t do any good and I certainly shouldn’t write that down.

The harbingers of change are meeting in my life like a murder of crows.

Pick an ending (apologies to Margaret Atwood’s Happy Endings):

A) Rob ends up happy and successful. He marries a nice girl, they move to a picturesque small New England farm where she rides horses and he makes extremely tall paintings in the barn. She kisses him tenderly when he comes in. They have stimulating conversation and vacation well together. Eventually they die.
B) Rob ends up happy and successful. Life, however, is unpredictable, just as he predicted. Women come and go, but none of them are as good as all of them. The best times are had behind a bar with a glass of scotch and a good book. Rob thinks of himself as a masterful consumer. And dies.
C) Rob becomes obsessed with his body mass index. He starts working out twice or three times a day and develops a jaw that looks as if it were chiseled out of marble. His pecs have a deeply expressive life of their own and could be poetically compared to the Rockies. You could straighten nails on his abdomen. Girls poke him in awe when he is sleeping. Various drugs serve to quell any pathetic urges for anything more. He is a living David-like vision of human potential and conquest over adversary. The steroids split his upper pallet and expose the empty chasm of his head to bacteria and mice. He dies and becomes his own tomb.
D) Rob is no longer the protagonist. The desire to find meaning in someone else overcomes him and his self gets lost in coaxing charming smiles out of his darling daughter and mousy wife. He is wealthy, and loved, but he isn’t personally expressive. Expression causes reflection, and reflection leads to regret. He dies and they write a nice thing on the rock.
E) Rob lives a long life in semi-satisfying roles as a creative professional. He can’t stand to make anything if there isn’t a commercial mandate. He stabs himself in the neck repeatedly as an old man and goes down as the awkward family secret and a short-lived wisp of stories about “that guy.”
F) Rob lets himself become a mumbling alcoholic and dies shivering under a donated blanket in a dark corner of the city.
G) Rob becomes an alcoholic but also becomes a uniquely expressive novelist. Everything continues as in A.
H) See G but replace “novelist” with “painter” or “performance artist” or “mime.”
I) Replace “alcoholic” with “heroin addict” or “flagellant” or “gambler.”
J) Writes the world’s greatest blog. Name is chanted at awards ceremonies. Is carried on shoulder-borne pallets through throngs of multinational devotees. Name becomes synonymous with “interesting life” and “perhaps the sexist human being that I’ve ever met in real life.”
K) Mediocrity.
L) ?
M) ??

persuade::change::influence

An old friend sends me a link in the first email I've gotten from him in memory. I've been found out. A link to this thing. With no explanation. What is a boy to do?

K____, the random friend in question, is sharply remembered at the height of all of our competitive industrial design scholarly nonsense, during which he changed the context of the word "Conforms" on one of my coveted sketch pads (which was part of a larger phrase "Conforms to blahblah standards") to say, simply, "Rob - Conforms," in a moment of cold creative inspiration. Embarrassingly, this has fucked with my head in a deep way ever since, mostly because I respect the man, but really because he was hitting the nail on the head... in the simple and pure way that is the collective driving force of our profession.
Don't we all? Conform? To something? Too much? To what purpose? and WHY?

Domestic Violence

Here's a good reason to cut me off after a few drinks. I can think of at least three times when I've nearly broken my friend Jody while drinking.

1) Hit a bump while pushing Jody on a shopping cart about a year or so ago. She sat on a pillow for a month.

2) Somehow knocked her lip piercing out while wrestling a while back.

3) Night of the last game of the World Series. I flailed or something, I don't really remember:

So at the exact same time one of my favorite female (friends? love-of my-lifes?) walks around the corner. I make a quick assessment of Jody's injury, try to stand there and talk to my friend while her mouth hangs open... then go make sure Jody's ok. I'm a bastard. I'm really sorry Jody.

Anyway, I think I have a fetish for injured girls. Or at least a healthy interest. Wow.

Me 'n my Mac

Angry and Hurt

I'm a crappy artist and the girl I like isn't returning my calls. This is as bad as it gets. Anyway, here's the progress on my latest overworked atrocity.

View this photo

Dare to be naive

Buckminster Fuller on ribs, Eve, and the design of boats:

For the miracle answer the kings, nobles, and merchants of Mesopotamia turned to the navigator-astronomer-priests of Babylon. To convince everyone in the new western world that accounts of any earlier religions or people elsewhere on earth were false, the priests said that the beginnings of humans in the Universe had occurred nearby to Babylon in a garden called Eden. Their story from then on is well known. What seems pure nonsense in the Garden of Eden story of the creation of a woman from a man's rib is explained as follows. Vessels of the sea are always female because they contain their crews in their interior wombs. The female "Eve" was the high-seas, world-around-sailable vessel; her great strength developed when navigators discovered the backbone-mounted rib cage employed by Nature in the design of whales, porpoises, seals and other sea creatures. So man built his high-seas vessel, "Eve," with strong wooden ribs rising sidewise from her keel, planked "her" in, then leather-thong-fastened the planks' edges together, tied them tightly into the ribs, and pitched her seams. Thus "Eve" the ship, built from Adam's rib cage design, was temptingly "led on" by Naga the serpent, god of the sea, around the world, with Adam aboard. Thus Naga showed Adam, by means of Eve, that the earth is as round as the apple.

Apparently he believes that the same rib cage structure employed in boats was flipped and used as the basis of building structures with "ribs" in the ceiling. Hence, you know, the beginning of the world and stuff. Neat. Thanks Steve.

And the world goes blind...

Yow

I'm stoked and smitten and it's brilliant and I have no words.

I will, however, share a smile as a complete stranger (no matter how well you know me) and let you delight in a deliciousness from my saved pictures..

Beautiful random foundnesses, how I (heart) thee...

Been there...

Pearl Jam

Went and saw Pearl Jam tonight. Crazy cool. The girl I adore from the coffee shop was really sweet. Thanks to the friends that helped me find my way in the door.

Below is the best picture I got. Apparently my photography skills need some honing. I'll ask Tara for help.

In other news...

Hot off the wire:

CNN is reporting that Lance Armstrong may be stripped of his 6th Tour
de France title.

In a random check for banned substances, 3 were found in Armstrong's
hotel room.

The 3 substances banned by the French, that were found in his hotel
room were as follows:

(1) Toothpaste
(2) Deodorant
(3) Soap

You see what I have to deal with?

All hell has broken loose.

Photoshoppin'

Here is a blueprint of a time machine.

Note: Apparently Typepad won't let me post pictures without spilling them over into the broader world. I have to put some text here to keep the kids in line. I will refrain from making broad metaphors.

Actually, I won't. If I post a picture without enough text around it, it spills over my date-posted stuff (see the babes pic in a previous post). Is a picture worth a thousand words? Why then the couple dozen associated with every painting in modern galleries? Here's a fun experiment: take a Rothko, stick a random noun on it in 720 point Garamond. The word becomes an emissary from some other language and implies meaning by correlation. Take it away and all of a sudden the image is as naked as a jaybird.