Gnomish
Author: ian™
The right answer
When you’re younger you often search for a right answer, as if there was some universal truth… eventually you find there’s a right answer for YOU.
Joy
I watched my son draw his full page comic with glee, filling the page with bold words and dynamic drawings crafted with an oversized black sharpie. Then came the smile of self satisfaction, the look that yelled to the skies,
I did that.
It felt as if he had pulled me back down and saved me from floating away into the dark. This is why I make things, too. Certainly I hope that others enjoy it. But even if no one does, at least I did.
I too often forget that is what matters the most.
Digital Blending #1
Learning from ctrlpaint.com — practicing my digital blending. I want to get better at painting one way or another.
Curious
Halloween feels like century ago and thanksgiving is next week.
I am an integer
(please consider donating to iO: their week long Write a thon!)
https://www.mightycause.com/story/Hcvcdf
One. Three. Five. Seven. Eleven. My son is fascinated by number sequences, ever since we pointed out the fibonacci series (If you’ve forgotten, 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 21…) He started with letters, and even as early as two I told him about how computers think in numbers and that ASCII is a subset of integers that map to letters. For some reason I always recall the number 65 is “A”. As a kid, I never really questioned or knew why until much later when I discovered that there was a whole range of number reserved for cpu operations.
Thirteen. Seventeen. Nineteen. Twenty Three.
I have never really gotten into the quantified self movement. Even though I have a smart watch and its motivated me to run every morning, I still don’t assign a ton of value into “making my numbers go up”. A faster pace. A greater distance. Make those integers increase and decrease. It makes for a better life, or so some say.
But I am not a computer, always crunching and thinking in numbers. THere’s more to life than that.
But I am an integer, whole and complete, just as you are, every day.
https://vss365today.com/view/2020-08-22
(If you’re wondering, my words spell out prime numbers.)
three
I write this week for iO:
https://www.mightycause.com/story/Hcvcdf
It’s been three years since you’ve been gone. That thought still derails my thoughts, decoupling them from their direction, remembering just how tentative everything really is. I wonder how much of this is just an illusion, a whisper thin mirror with a hairline waiting to shatter, showing us all what really is.
At times I feel like i have it in my grasp, things make sense. Words and voices glow, while others everything is as dislliusoning an empty cabinet that still reeks of vinegar.
I return to that texting thread, the one where you never answered, where I may as well been shouting into the ground. I don’t know if you ever even read my words, and yet I return to that thread still, still hoping you might hear me.