I had several fantastic dreams last night, one of which involved me doing a ritual to Dionysos. During the agon one of the things I did was take pieces of wild-harvested grapevines and processed them into charcoal in the tripod. After the ritual, I took the charcoal and set the best pieces aside for ritual drawing purposes. The other pieces, in ( Read more... )

In ancient Greece, the Hestia (sacred fire) was sometimes kindled with a parabolic mirror -- this is how the fire was kindled for the ancient Olympic games, and the tradition lives on even today.

( Notes about today's kindling rite... )

Aaahhh... Thanks to triadruid, I have figured out how to edit the css of my journal layout, and now it pulls some images I've hosted on my own website, rather than the LJ defaults. I like this much better.

Also, I've just finished a frenzy of phone calls and appointment-scheduling, so Plans continue apace.

This is one for the Hardcore Vast Unpaid Research Department ( Read more... )

I was baking cookies, and accidentally spilled blackberry jam on my shirt as I was filling the cookies. So, once I popped them in the oven, I peeled my shirt off and tossed it in the laundry.

I thought to myself, "Oh, great, this'll be when orcjohn rings the bell to pick me up for gaming ( Read more... )

I've been going through my archives and adding tags like I mean it. (In-between baking, painting, cleaning, doing wicker work, and editing music for this Sunday's rave ritual at Gaia.)

I would like to point your attention to this postOh, the irony. I had no idea that within a couple of years, I would actually have a mental breakdown, quit my job ( Read more... )

More language-fu ahead. featherynscale and triadruid were kind enough to work through my pouting to help me improve the alphabet so it looks less like Tengwar. I've got a baby lexicon of about 50+ words, a rudimentary grammar system, and even some punctuation ( Read more... )

( Cut becuase nobody cares but me )

I have a love-hate relationship with documentation. I'm not the best at remembering to comment my code, but after working in a documentation-free environment for three years, that bad habit is not just broken, but is huddled in the corner crying, begging for the pain to stop, oh God, I'll be good, I promise, just make the bad coders go away. Erm ( Read more... )

So, I found a bunch of new-to-me widgets in the GIMP. I found the custom palette tool, and built a couple of palettes, one for painting, one for traditional portrait drawing. I wanted something that would approximate conte crayons and pastels on medium-tone paper. I think I got it to work okay for a first try:

Arrrchimedes, Pirate Philosopher - ( Read more... )