In the heat of summer day
Walks the Lady of Decay.
Her skin is pale like gone-off milk,
Her clothes are made of rotted silk,
Millipedes surround her face,
Her dress is trimmed with dirty lace.
With maggot pet and fungi’d hair,
She parades around the square.
She’s a sight from head to toes,
But whilst you look, hold your nose!
For nothing festers like Decay
In the heat of summer day.

14  colours, and the poem was written spur-of-the-moment when submitting to PixelJoint ;)

Not a fan of Lady Gaga, but I found her new video strangely interesting, and made a quick painting.

Not intended to really be a likeness, by the way.

Is this the first man I’ve drawn in ages?  I do believe it is!

Notice what he’s eating :|

Will my next painting contain hands?  I hope so! ;)

First, a little beagle puppy holding a Cintiq stylus I made for Captain Binky’s birthday! (waaaay back in April!)

And now some minis, which I’m showing at 2x here so they can be seen more clearly :)
Ghostbusters for Nickenstien’s birthday! (also waaaay back in April!)

Some Dan and Ben sprites from Time Gentlemen, Please! (with accurate walkcycles! ;) )

And some Muse fanart! (made before my disappointment with their last album :(  Giving it another chance as I type)

Richard Tull and Gwyn Barry: friends/enemies since university; both writers; the first an unsuccessful, unreadable experimental novelist, the second a bland, populist millionaire.  Perhaps, given this is an Amis book, it is inevitable that Tull realizes what he must do: “a literary endeavor, a quest, an exaltation–one to which he could sternly commit all his passion and his power.  He was going to fuck Gwyn up.”  And so it begins.

The Information contains Amis’ usual staples of black humour, strange characters, and idiosyncratic dialogue, written in Amis’ distinct style.   Also similar to his other books is that it is hard for me categorize.  Like Amis’ London Fields, it incredibly unpleasant, but in some ways, even more so: Richard Tull is pretentious, jealous–his attempts to ruin Gwyn run from writing articles to smear his reputation to getting him beat up–but is also, quite simply, just pathetic.  Gwyn Barry, on the other hand, is no better; his success and boyishness barely masking his egotism and petty, controlling nature.  As off-putting as these characters are, the book is still compelling, and perhaps that’s a bit of the point.

“What’s this?  The History of Increasing Humiliation.  Nonfiction, right?” [...]

[Tull] said, as he had said before, “It would be a book accounting for the decline in the status and virtue of literary protagonists.  First gods, then demigods, then kings, then great warriors, great lovers, then burghers and merchants and vicars and doctors and lawyers.  Then social realism: you.  Then irony: me.  Then maniacs and murdereres, tramps, mobs, rabble, flotsam, vermin. [...] The history of astronomy is the history of increasing humiliation.  First the geocentric universe, then the heliocentric universe.  Then the eccentric universe–the one we’re living in.  Every century we get smaller.”

Tull’s actions mean nothing, his betrayals, and others’ betrayals to him, mean nothing–not in the scope of the universe.  Planets do not collide, the stars do not explode.  Yet ultimately is the realization that Tull himself means something; as a husband, a father, and a human*.  That, or perhaps I came away with the wrong interpretation of this book as I attempted to inject some humanism into something that, it seems, is quite misanthropic ;)

A hesitant recommendation if the above sounds appealing.  To be honest, looking back at this over a month after I read it, I’m still not sure if I even liked it… but I don’t regret having read it.

*after thinking about it, I’m making this sound waaaaaay  more sentimental than it is ;)  It’s definitely not that kind of book.

I’m a bit sad he seems to wear less purple in his newer stuff.  Magicians should always wear some sort of purple ;)

Making this reminded me of some of my old celebrity portraits I made last year that were a bit on the more serious side.  I still have some fondness for them, so I thought I’d put them up :)  Click on the jump to see!

Radiohead’s Thom Yorke:

Sally Field (bizarrely, this is the person my sister thought of when I asked her to name someone for me to draw.  She has no idea why).

These were based on refs that I’m too lazy to dig up again, but they should be on the first or second page of Google images, if you want to see the originals.

Next update soon :)

This may surprise anyone whose only exposure to me has been through my generally art-related (and/or ditzy posts) on internet forums–not to mention, this blog–but my background is science.  For true!  An Hon. BSc and everything ;)  And from my time at university, where I dabbled in areas from neuroanatomy to insect biology, it became easy not only to lose the forest for the trees, but to lose the trees for leaf spiracles.   Things have a way of getting dreary.  Sometimes, even now, I wonder how I ended up there… but Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything reminded me :)A Short History is an account of the history of scientific discovery; and since science, really, describes our physical world, it really is a history of  everything as far as we know it: the origins of the universe, the nature of the atom, evolution through natural selection, and so on.  However, one large difference between this book and my university texts is that while the information is gathered from scientists, it’s  written by a layperson for laypeople.

How many people have been turned off of science because it’s boring?  Many, many and more many, I’m sure, and yet science, at its core, should be extremely interesting.  In his introduction, Bryson relates his own experience as a child, when he first opened a geology textbook and saw the common globe-with-a-wedge-cut-out, showing the layers of the Earth, and felt a sense of wonder:

Excited, I took the book home that night and opened it before dinner–an action that I expect prompted my mother to feel my forehead and ask if I was all right–and, starting with the first page, I read.

And here’s the thing.  It wasn’t exciting at all.  It wasn’t actually altogether comprehensible.  Above all, it didn’t answer any of the questions that the illustration stirred up in a normal enquiring mind: How did we end up with a sun in the middle of our planet and how do they know how hot it is?  And if it is burning away down there, why isn’t the ground under our feet hot to the touch? [...] And how do you know this?  How did you figure it out?

But the author was strangely silent on such details–indeed, silent on everything but anticlines, synclines, axial faults and the like.  It was as if he wanted to keep the good stuff secret by making all of it soberly unfathomable.

Hmm, sounds like my experiences with geology too ;)

Bryson addresses this problem by conveying how knowledge doesn’t just appear, it’s built upon discoveries; discoveries that are made sometimes through years of careful research and sometimes through serendipitous luck, but always by people.  Scientists, as you will learn, can be as petty or as high-minded as anyone, and by telling the stories behind them, Bryson adds that little bit of anecdotal spice that addressed my need for gossip ;)  Bryson’s writing itself is easy to read and engaging, and entertaining while still being informative.  You can feel his enthusiasm for the subject.

One drawback to the book is that I personally wished it could have gone into more detail, at times.  While I realize it’s not a textbook, sometimes Bryson would mention laws or details in passing that I would only vaguely remember, and it would have been very handy to have had some more heavy explanations in the footnotes, so things would feel less glossed over, and would explain more of the “how” Bryson speaks of.  Also, speaking as a project manager for a company that does scientific art, I think a few more diagrams would have helped at times, too ;)

However, those complaints are really about something the book is not trying to be.  As it is, A Short History of Nearly Everything can be taken as a fun starting point to further exploration; a spark to rekindle your  sense of wonder in the world that surrounds us, and the scientific curiosity that makes us strive to understand it.

(Cheers to CaptainBinky for the recommendation and book :D)