On this blog, we don’t discuss weirdness of politics. Instead, below, find weirdness as a result of photoshopping:
Moonlight:
A&P upgrade update
You may notice a few differences in the appearance of the Art and Perception web pages. For the most part, the changes should be minor, but please comment here if there’s anything amiss or that you’d like to see altered, and especially if there are display problems. We are now running on the latest version of WordPress, version 2.6.1. This has improved features for authors (including easy adding of video and audio content), as well as better security and maintainability. But the upgrades to the core software and to the theme (Basic2Col) that the A&P theme is based on mean that some things will remain different, even as I continue to tweak towards our standard look and feel.
Feel free to ask any questions you may have about creating posts. Hopefully the new Write Post console will make sense with a little experimentation. I recommend enlarging your set of functional icons to two rows by clicking on the rightmost “Show kitchen sink,” and availing yourselves of the new Preview button. I also recommend limiting images to 450 pixels in width, though it appears larger ones will not break the display as in the past. However, depending on the browser, oversize images may look distorted in some way, as well as taking longer to load. If you save a post to come back to later, you’ll find it in the Drafts section of the Posts console.
We have collectively written nearly 600 posts and over 9,000 comments in about two years of operation. Carry on!
Word play
I recently came across an amusing web site called Wordle. It produces visualizations of the words making up a piece of text, with the size of a word in the picture reflecting its frequency in the text. I used it to create the representation below of what my previous post, “The Place of Story” (including comments), is about. (Clicking on the image will take you to a larger, more readable version in the Wordle gallery.)
Mentor
Much of this molten electricity passing for a lake has been by Birgit’s dunes. Quickened by her lament about passed opportunities, we made our way this evening to the headlands.
This image barely captures a brief interlude as the sun rests upon the horizon and the water becomes a great shimmering expanse. An air of reverence descends upon the beach.
I would imagine that much the same happens in Michigan.
soft curvatures
Sand makes for soft curvatures.
Close-ups of the dunes show more… »
The Place of Story
When we think of story we think first (at least I do) of short stories or novels. Of course, movies and theater and opera tell stories, and music and dance can also. Melanie’s Moby Dick series of fabric panels is closely tied to that story, though, as she says, not as conventional illustration. I’m beginning to think that story is a notion not at all confined to the literary arts. In fact, I suspect that stories don’t even require language–though it’s pretty hard to communicate about them without it.
Moby Dick series (guest post by melanie)
These are most of the completed panels in my Moby Dick series. They’re not exactly illustration — at least, I don’t think of them that way — but the people who’ve seen them always ask about the text that prompted the image, so I’ve included the relevant excerpts from the text.
The Pequod (Chapter 16)
All round, her unpanelled, open bulwarks were garnished like one continuous jaw, with the long sharp teeth of the sperm whale, inserted there for pins. To fasten her old hempen thews and tendons to.
