Rather than go on a great long tangent about multiple artists that I would consider favorites, I’ll just stick with one because I find their style fun and unique.
If old-school/retro pixel style art is something you enjoy, then I highly recommend checking out Luiza Niechoda.
While not strictly “pixels”, the idea is there. Per their About page:
“Now my work is a mix of sharp lines and haziness, balancing between realism and hard-edged geometric abstraction. There is no digital process involved. Everything is made with paint, on canvas.”
For starters, green is my favorite color, and most of their works are in shades of green or accented with greens. Aside from that, what really draws me to their work is how a lot of it looks like you’re observing a pixelized world made real, or through some kind of magical pixel portal into a different reality. It’s like a combination of my love for digital media (video games) and science fiction/fantasy. The edges of reality, instead of going fuzzy and blurring, are made of hard edged lines that overlap in a way that might look almost like a whicker basket, but because of the colors it comes across like pixels. It’s almost mesmerizing!
I’ve purchased a print copy of one of their pieces, but someday I hope to be able to acquire an original piece. Although, I’d like to have a home to put it in first.
I want to throw out some clarifying information before diving into why I love video games. There’s a lot to be said about video games, and there’s always some kind of negative social commentary surrounding them, but those detractors are either isolated incidents with little supporting evidence or the issue is actually a symptom of something deeper.
What am I talking about? Well, lately, on social media (particularly Threads, for some reason) there’s this weird attention grabbing push from people who are asking questions like “Ladies, what’s a red flag/deal breaker for guys?” A lot of people are throwing video games under the bus here, and they’re saying things like “they’re a waste of time” or “they’re spending more time with games than with me/helping around the home” and things of that nature. (Ladies, I hate to break it to you, that’s an issue with the guy and his priorities, not the games.)
Video games have come so far from just being shapes on a screen. The stories and narratives. The interactivity and puzzles. It’s absolutely incredible! In many ways it’s better than just reading a book (I do love books, don’t come at me) or watching a TV show. There’s even a potential social aspect of them. Conventions, for in person stuff, or just online gaming in general. I know several people who met their spouses through online gaming.
The reason I love video games as a hobby is because in the same way I can get lost in a good book, I can get into the deep lore and narrative of a game. I can see someone else’s vision made manifest in a way that would be otherwise impossible, and further still I can take creative inspiration from them through this medium. (I know some people say video games aren’t art, and to you I say fuck off. The defining characteristics of “art” have changed over the centuries.)
So, excuse my rambling, but that’s I’ll leave you all with for today’s prompt. I hope you all have a wonderful Sunday!
Okay, don’t panic at reading the title of the post, I’m admittedly just being a shit attention grabber for today’s post.
However, it’s not entirely just for grabbing your attention. It’s honestly how I would ultimately feel if the prompt came true. Over the years, I’ve become a silver linings kind of person, and so I’m trying to approach this the same way.
What WOULD I do if I lost all of my possessions? Well, for starters, I guess it would depend on the circumstances. Did I somehow land myself in prison? I guess I wouldn’t be able to do much about anything at that point. Instead, I’m thinking that maybe everything burned up in a house fire (thinking of the unfortunate people and families affected by the wildfires here in North America) or maybe in a flood or hurricane situation (like those impacted by Hurricane Helene). They’re all being forced to face this exact situation.
Personally, I know for a fact that I would be rather depressed at first. I’d feel a little lost in the moment and during the immediate aftermath, but I know that eventually once I got myself situated I would be fine. Those first few weeks/months (and maybe even a year or two) are going to be tough.
Back to the hypothetical situation for myself, though, and my silver linings approach. If I did happen to lose all of my possessions, I would eventually look at it as a fresh start. I’d take stock of everything I had lost. I’d make a list to prioritize the most important things first. A home, a vehicle (sorry motorcycle, you’re a leisure item, so it’s the car), furniture and appliances, things like that. I think after I’d gotten my foundation re-established then I could start looking into the hobby stuff again. The computer would top that part of the list, but it would be a part of the appliances section as well because I would need to see if I can retrieve important documents and use it for work. From there would be things like my collection of Magic: The Gathering cards (which I think I would just write-off as a loss and move on for a while.) The hobby stuff could be picked up slowly again. Maybe invest in something new instead.
Granted, this would all take a lot of time and patience to get back into, and it’s entirely possible that I never get back to where I was mentally prior to losing everything, but this would be where I would go if I was trying to look at this as a “fresh start” kind of silver lining. Life keeps moving, and so would I.
What’s a topic or issue about which you’ve changed your mind?
I don’t want to start off by giving the wrong impression when I say something along the lines of “I’ve never changed my mind.” What I really want to call out is that I’ve never seen myself as, nor acted like I was, an absolute authority on a topic or issue only to be corrected later and have changed my mind. I might approach a situation with a measure of certainty, but I always leave myself open for constructive criticisms and conversations because I recognize that I might be working with incomplete information, and the only way to improve myself and my knowledge is to adapt and learn.
So, rather than answer the question relating to an external topic or issue, I’m going to focus on something internal to myself.
For a long while in my early to mid 20’s I thought I was good at a certain type of video game, First Person Shooters. I played a lot of Halo: Reach on the Xbox, and eventually switched to PUBG when I learned about the burgeoning genre of Battle Royale games. I knew for a fact there were always better players in the world, I had friends that would regularly stomp me in these games (not without a fight, though) so it wasn’t always surprising when I’d lose. That didn’t stop me from pinning my lackluster performance on strangers on the Internet by claiming they were cheating at these games, because that was still a rampant issue even back then.
At some point, though, I did eventually change my mind about something in this area. Not that people weren’t cheating and were just flat out better. Not that the developers had faulty matchmaking algorithms. Nothing like that.
What I did was change my mind on how much I staked my own internal self-worth on my skill at these games. I stopped treating it all like it was a big deal, because in the grand scheme of things in life, it’s not.
I changed my mind about this silly internal struggle with myself that I could do better at something that really shouldn’t be aggravating me, that I should be having fun and enjoying myself. The restraints were gone and this allowed me to explore new genres of games without feeling stuck playing the same one game over and over. I found new friends, new interests, new perspectives, and new hobbies. I was learning and growing as a person again.
A long time ago, in a city somewhat far from where I live today, sits a rather unassuming building. There are a couple of other buildings around it that look similar in every way, but this one particular building, sitting in the middle of all of them, held a secret.
The city, who originally owned and used the building, had outgrown it and moved everyone inside to bigger, newer offices in another part of its municipal territory. It sat empty for a while, until a group of teenagers from the local high school reached out to get permission to borrow some of its space. This group of teenagers included my sister, and their need for the space was storage of costumes and set pieces for their independent summer theater program. So, with the city’s blessing, they borrowed space on one of the upper floors.
I was still a kid, maybe 13 years old at this point, and had just started to be on the fringe of this theater group by following my sister around and learning a few things about production. Our Mom passed away about a year before, and so most of the time we had also brought my younger brother along to this building.
Being kids, it wasn’t particularly fun or interesting (at the time) for my brother and I to be around this group of teenagers who we didn’t know and basically had nothing in common with. This eventually got better the more time we spent around them, or at least for it did, as I can’t speak for my brother on this one.
We were only using a couple rooms on the top floor just off the western stairwell, and we visited this old office building a couple of times throughout the summer, each time feeling a little different than before. It started off being eerily quiet. It felt weird to be in there, in rooms that used to be full of the hustle and bustle of people working. The vibe of the building, empty except for a couple of teenagers, and two kids, working on theater costumes and props really felt bizarre. It didn’t dawn on me until the second visit that part of what made things feel so still in there was the lack of air conditioning. The city wasn’t actively using it, so of course they weren’t going to be running the A/C. I’m sure my sister and her friends were just glad they had electricity for the lights. The stifling summer heat contributed to the awkward stillness inside, making me feel more out of place than I already had been. Looking back on it now, it almost felt like visiting some abandoned building that people claimed was haunted.
But it wasn’t just all of this, the strangers and the empty building, that made me feel out of place. The vast majority of people in the city had no idea what was going on in this building, but I’m sure most of them (at least the adults, anyway) knew the history of it, and what else was in there.
On one of the last trips I made with my sister to the building, I had asked if I could go explore since I knew I wasn’t going to get another chance. She said no, because she didn’t want us messing with anything that might get the city mad at them, but her friend made a comment that caught me by surprise.
“We also don’t want you wandering into one of the jail cells and accidentally locking yourself in, because we don’t have the keys for those.”
Several trips to this building, and this was the first time I had heard any mention of jail cells in the building. It was then that I learned this wasn’t just some random municipal office building, and to prove it they took my brother and I down to the lower levels. It was warmer and stuffier down there, and they didn’t turn on the lights on the floor, only letting us see in a little ways with the sunlight that came in through the stairwell. They opened the door to let us peek inside, and when we looked down the hallway we could see the bars along one side.
I’m glad we didn’t go back after that, not because the existence of the jail cells made it seem haunted and foreboding, but because the whole building contributed to making me feel like I didn’t belong there. Thinking back on this now, that feeling was also rather thrilling.
Your life without a computer: what does it look like?
Just looking at my life and not considering the possibility that nobody has a computer, but only if I didn’t, I think things would be very quiet.
I’m also figuring in the idea that smartphones are computers as well, and I think about the idea of going back to a “dumb phone”. Only being able to make calls and basic texts. No picture messages, no fancy ringtones.
The world would seem much smaller. Life would seem quieter. Hobbies would be limited to things that don’t require the internet. Television programming would be limited to free channels or good old fashioned cable packages for news and entertainment. I’d have to go to the movie theater to watch new stuff, and buy the ones I like on DVD or Blu-ray.
In a weird sense, life would be simpler. It would feel a lot more like it did growing up in the 90’s.
Okay, so, technically, “Technomancy” isn’t real, but I thought it an amusing name to describe something that used to be limited to the imaginative worlds of science fiction.
You know those scenes in movies or shows where some hacker can take a bunch of seemingly random junk, like motherboards and other hardware, and create some kind of tool to solve their problem? That’s what I’m talking about. To know that I can take random parts, understand them enough at a glance and cobble something together.
I already have some of that kind of knowledge, or at least the way of thinking and processing, to make it down this path. I’ve patched together some scripting and automated flows to get the end results I want for reports. I just wish I could do the same with physical hardware. Thankfully, a lot of that is much more possible today than it ever has been. There are plenty of educational resources to learn the programming aspect on top of the electrical component pieces like a Raspberry Pi or Arduino board. It’s just a matter of taking the time to do it. Of course, it would also help to have a specific project in mind to motivate me down that path.
Sadly, I have so many other hobbies that I’ll likely just leave Technomancy in the “desired” category for a while longer.
What details of your life could you pay more attention to?
Among all the details a person can monitor in their life, sometimes I wish it were easy to stick to things that require tedious and consistent tracking, and to be more specific, what I eat.
I’ve used different apps to log my food intake so I can have a rough idea of how much I’m eating versus how much energy I put out. (Currently I’m using “Lose It!” to track my calories.) And sometimes I do good at tracking meticulously every single day, while other times I’ll use it for a day or two, maybe a week, and then fall off the wagon again.
The reason I wish I paid more attention to these details is because these food tracking apps are getting more sophisticated, and the more people that use them the better they get. There is a plethora of data to be found in them, although sometimes it’s behind a paywall. Calories. Nutrients. Macros. Fasting windows. Eating periods. There are details in there that take a bit to notice, but also require some out of the box thinking for the normal person and a little extra effort. What am I eating and when? How did it make me feel? Is there a pattern? If I eat specific things at specific times on a routine enough frequency, is there an explanation?
This is just an example of one thing I could do to pay more attention to the details, but it’s a good way of looking at things in other areas. Reading between the lines, so to speak, to figure out the causal relations between everyday choices and actions.
As of the time of writing my answer to the prompt, tomorrow is Monday. The start of a normal work week for me, since I don’t have the day off, and I don’t believe I have much special going on throughout the week to prepare for, so my top priority is just work!
Tomorrow also happens to be the end of the month, so if I look at just work I can pick out a top priority there. End of month checks to get ready for monthly stats and reports is going to be the thing that gets immediate focus tomorrow.
That may sound a little boring, but it’s important stuff that needs doing, and I happen to enjoy it for the most part. Plus, it pays the bills. Major plus.
In what ways does hard work make you feel fulfilled?
Self-fulfillment is a little different for everyone. Some people, like myself, when we’re helping other people and working hard, if we succeed, it feels great to see that the end result made those people happy.
Sometimes, though, I do feel a little sense of fulfillment when I’ve worked hard and spent a lot of time on my mini painting and someone compliments the end result. Not often, but sometimes. Honestly, it should feel more fulfilling most of the time, but you know the saying “you’re your own worst critic,” so I end up always looking at the little flaws, mistakes, and imperfections, and trying to figure out how to improve. It’s not always easy to acknowledge those things, but I know there are times I’ve seen the results of that hard work as well, and that does a little to help me feel fulfilled because I know I’m on the right track.
In the end, it’s always the results that trigger the sense of fulfillment, and I know some people chase that feeling, but I try to remind myself that life itself is hard work and every day is full of choices and little victories. It helps me keep moving forward to the next big, fulfilling thing.
The Dragon's Grove 