Linus; Tumblr.
My favorite thing about Linus' website is when someone new signs up as a follower, and then proceeds to go through the whole post archive and hit the like button on every single picture.
Tumblr recently did a couple of things:
1. They shifted the stats to the dashboard (instead of having to click on the "Tumblarity"). This is a little strange because now the follower count is RIGHT THERE. I kind of hate looking at it, because I get a tiny pang of sadness if I lose one - even if I have no idea who it is and I wasn't following them anyway.
2. Messages. This is kind of awesome, because I'd set up a Linus email account on squishythings.com but couldn't get it to work with Mail - I assume this is because I already download one squishythings.com account to there, and it didn't like it when I tried to do two (did not care to investigate). But really I got about four messages in it ever, so it didn't matter. (Luckily 1and1 just revamped their webmail from THE SUCKIEST EVER to THE SECOND SUCKIEST EVER so it's been easier to manage.) BUT, then the Messages happened. Now I get requests and questions right there! It has been excellent. And a couple messages have just been about how people love Linus, which makes me feel WAY better about all the time I've spent on it. phew.
3. They just opened a Directory of popular stuff, and included Linus in the cute section. So now part of my concern of #1 has been a little bit decimated - the number has gone up a rather large jump in just a couple of days. UNSETTLING!
epiphany
You know at the end of Pee-Wee's Big Adventure where he wants to leave the drive-in, and Dottie's like, "Don't you want to see the rest of the movie?" and Pee-Wee is all, "I don't have to see it, Dottie.. I lived it."
That's how I feel about The Big Bang Theory.
A list of unread books on the nightstand
The Hour I First Believed, Wally Lamb
Craft, Inc. - Turn Your Creative Hobby Into a Business, Mateo Ilasco
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson (reread)
Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art, Lewis Hyde
Palm Sunday, Kurt Vonnegut
Our Band Could Be Your Life, Michael Azerrad
The Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
(Read all the poems and a couple of the stories last October, haven't moved on since)
Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
Pride & Prejudice, Jane Austen (no zombies)
the Chronicles of Narnia, C. S. Lewis (crammed into one volume in reading order; technically a reread but I was very young and don't remember much)
Altered Carbon, Richard K. Morgan
Master of Reality, John Darnielle (33 1/3)
Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
To Have and to Hold: an Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting, Philipp Blom
The Pirates! in an Adventure with Napoleon, Gideon Defoe
Jimmy Corrigan, Smartest Kid on Earth, Chris Ware
The Science of Harry Potter, Roger Highfield
Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums, Stephen Asma
I don't know what to read next.
A beastly thing..
My friend Aaron asked me to make something for his girlfriend's birthday. He asked her to pick an animal off the Annelids CD list, but she couldn't decide and picked five.
Sooo what happened? Oh, this.
15x15", direct application of fiber reactive dye on canvas, lots and lots of freemotion embroidery!
the original idea sketch.. and how it looked after I painted on the dye.
Some sketchbook pages.
A local bookstore was selling a 12x12 sketchbook filled with awesome paper (possibly meant for scrapbooking?) for FIVE DOLLARS. It's the hugest I've ever had, and I keep compartmentalizing the pages to make smaller areas - I put boxes around everything and fill in extra space with repetitive drawing, and then go back later to color it in with watercolors, colored pencil, ink, etc. Here are a few pages.
(The grids on each page are the rubrics I use to keep track of how many answers I get right on Jeopardy!)
Toaster
I love toasters, especially the iconic shiny chrome ones. I've drawn lots of them over the years (just looked at a bunch of terrible Photoshop-modified drawings from like 2002, ack). They're one of my fallback "I CAN'T THINK OF ANYTHING TO DO!!!" things.
So this guy now exists:
I am most proud of the plug - embroidery thread twisted to make the cord, knotted to make the plug, and sewing thread knotted up to make the prongs.
other details
Sink or swim sheep
My friend Amanda and I traded notes every day for at least half of high school. She was a grade ahead of me and I guess we became friends toward the end of my freshman year. We wrote a lot of stories and made up sort of fantastical adventures (that mostly involved invading Canada and taking a boat to Europe). One of the inside jokes that came out of that was sink or swim sheep. I'm not exactly sure about the premise anymore, but I was thinking about it the other day. I am terrible at staying in touch with everyone I miss, so I made her this sheep in a life preserver and went to visit her.
