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just an accident of my technique
Thursday, December 22 2016
I drank a cup of kratom tea this afternoon, and this helped with my work, though I did tend to obsess for a little too long about building out an editor for another set of bitmapped permissions (which I did based on the ordinal position of the bits instead of the value of two to that ordinal position's power, as it later seems I should've). Eventually I transitioned to painting yet another tiny painting on a decommissioned credit card. At first the plan was to paint another animal (perhaps another rhinoceros or an elephant). But then I remembered that crazy series of photos from earlier this week of the Russian ambassador to Turkey having been gunned-down by a smartly-dressed assassin. Normally in my tiny paintings I take a single subject and place them against a new fanciful landscape that I doodle-in free-form. Today, though, I executed a fairly faithful copy of the original photograph, at least to the extent I could given the size of my "canvas" and the crude pixel-positioning power of my brush (tiny though it was). In my painted version, it looks as if the assassin is holding guns in both of his hands, though in the original photograph the assassin's left hand is empty and is gesturing with a long raised index finger. The second gun is just an accident of my technique, but I decided to let it stay, since the photograph gives this impression as well if one just glances at it. Because of the talents of the photographer in cropping the scene, it lends itself beautifully to my double-flip technique, as you can see.
Later tonight, I watched (on the advice of my boss Da) the first half of the 2011 movie God Bless America. It's a satiric look at the dumbing-down of America in a world of vapid, exploitative reality shows, right-wing shock jocks, brand-obsessed brats, people talking in movie theatres, and douchebags occupying more than one parking space with their oversized vehicles. God Bless America appears to be set in the near-future, somewhere along the path to the world of Idiocracy. We view this world through the eyes of Frank, a schlubby middled-aged guy whose tastes and decency act as a proxy for those of the intended viewer (us lefty coastal elites). After suffering for two long listening to vile radio personalities and watching the mentally challenged mocked on an American-Idol-type "talent" show, he and a similarly-minded teenage girl hit the road, enacting the revenge fantasies all us lefties have simulated in our minds. They do so from cars bedecked in patriotic magnet ribbons and against a backdrop of cleverly-worded news scrolls. It's Ghostworld meets Idiocracy meets Natural Born Killers meets Monster meets "Fifteen Million Merits," the second episode of the first season of Black Mirror. [I didn't see this part tonight, but near the end of God Bless America, our antihero gives a speech that would have difficulty finding a time other than now to be so timely.]
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