So, Wednesday night, I crammed to set up my booth at Hair Fair. Pulled a 24 hour thing and dozed off a bit at the PJ party but still managed to take ample paparazzi photos and also to spend about 8 hours browsing all the HF booths thoroughly. FINALLY organized my photos in my main flickr account and also my raw snapshot/postcard account into sets and changed the layout to collection + photos. Just saw S3 for the first time. Spiderman 3 is totally the type of movie I like - lots of action and subplots concisely woven in a significant way. So, I analyzed it.

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So much wisdom in Anita Amirrezvani’s Blood of Flowers, and especially pp 350-351:

“I did not reveal that I was the carpet’s designer and knotter. I thought if she saw my callused fingers or looked closely at my tired red eyes–if she understood the fearsome work that a carpet demanded–its beauties would be forever tarnished in her eyes. Better for her to imagine it being made by a carefree young girl who skipped across hillsides plucking flowers for dyes before settling down to tie a few relaxing knots in between sips of pomegranate juice.”

My personal analogue: Delivering custom art creation orders on Second Life, and the sort of prejudice that often comes with the package… “Oh, so you’re proprietor-creator (pity tone)?”

“I knew otherwise: my back ached, my limbs were stiff, and I had not slept enough for a month. I thought about all the labor and suffering that were hidden beneath a carpet, starting with the materials. Vast fields of flowers had to be murdered for their dye, innocent worms boiled alive for their silk–and what about knotters? Must we sacrifice ourselves for the sake of rugs?

It’s for the obsession.

“I had heard stories about women who became deformed by long hours of sitting at the loom so that when they tried to deliver a child, their bones formed a prison locking the baby inside. In such cases, mother and child would die after many hours of anguish. Even the youngest knotters suffered aching backs, bent limbs, tired fingers, exhausted eyes. All our labors were in service of beauty, but sometimes it seemed as if every thread in a carpet had been dipped in the blood of flowers.

“These were things that Maryam would never know…”

And similarly, these are things that most people would never know… synthetic beauty is created not only at a price, but at the expense of life — the devotion of an individual to the solidification of an abstract image, the enormous amount of self discipline involved to not only work on the task but to continue–instead of running around out in the physical open… sometimes just for the heck of it and sometimes because you’re living in poverty and do need the money or because you’ve foolishly wound yourself up in demanding financial obligations…

In many respects, I’m lucky that I get to take time out to experience this sort of self-imprisonment and to explore its potential as a creative outlet. I think my ideal fate would doom me to “luxuriate in the most immaculate of prisons (358).” As I’m doing now in my YoS… carpeting weaving in a digital world in my own prison.

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The Blood of Flowers (hardcover, reviewer’s ed, sent to me par avon ages ago), as I was reading about a somewhat stereotypical scenario of sweatshop worker-carpet children-weavers, how their hands grew disproportional and their legs became un-useable due to how they spend their whole days knotting carpets… for some reason I thought of the similarity between that and computers, the whole modern analogue of chained to a terminal. I’m also starting to realize I’ve put myself in a self-ordained sweatshop in my YOS. I literally wake up, turn on the computer (or screen), spend outrageous hours glued to the terminal, and sleep maybe 3 days later, and cycle-repeat +5 hours later.

Incidentally, as with most of my blog postings, the YoS list is totally ephemera… must have written it and totally forgotten about the list. Some things on the list I haven’t even touched, while others not quite at the originally planned dates, and then others have evolved into something totally different.

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Ina Hotshot - Nash, New Place,

Ina Caudron - Garrick, Harvard

Ina Clawtooth - Shakespeare’s Birthplace

Ina Hermit - Anne Hathaway’s Cottage

Ina Turbo - Palmer Farm

Ina Hereter - Mary Arden

Ina Nestler - Misc

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Writing this near the end of Season 8, after “Alone”. I think that they’ve actually got it–I am seriously starting to sympathize with Dogett, and M & S seem like a retired couple. Doggett has this quintessential frailty about him — you see it earlier where he’s walking next to both his old friend at the CIA/army(?) and Mulder - he’s shorter than both, and he appears frail and the other two buff… almost like the other two could hurt him too easily. But, he’s an outsider in knowledge (can’t compare with Mulder, Oxford ed) and belief, and the fact that he both suffers and appears frail… I guess those are the two key elements in creating a new character to replace old beloved cult megaseries characters. Ah, actually there’s also the way Scully and the other characters treat him. In “Medusa”, Scully basically let him go off by himself almost treating him as a casualty - she would have totally risked her life and gone down the tunnels with the excavation team - and there’s his naive willingness to help, when she says she needs him to be her “hands and eyes,” he doesn’t question her further. Skinner’s take on Kersch wishing to thwart his advancement by assigning him to the X-Files doesn’t help either.

…

Season 9 started out weak even with the extra funding. It felt like a soap opera at times, and it really didn’t help that the new agents were not on the same par in education and experience as the former - but you do get to sympathize with them by the end of the series. Series finale was interesting alluding to the geomagnetic shift imminent on 12/22/2012 as Doomsday.The movie “I Want to Believe” was a total disappointment in that it alluded to no mythos at all! Whatever happened to the driving fount of governmental conspiracy that drove the series forward? Why resort to something as hackneyed as illegal organ transplantation, something that an earlier episode with Lucy Liu had already sufficiently summarized?!

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Shooting stars are brilliantly beautiful, and the aphorism is more often a praise than the fatality it represents… It’s the death of a celestial body in the truest of sense–at its end it spontaneously decomposes into things that don’t even represent its brilliant existence before its fall.

I wish I have the time to develop this motif in more detail. But, alas, too many earthly tasks take their toll on my time…

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Thank you for purchasing a skin created by Ina Centaur.

Although, our skins are optimized for fast loading and quality the following tricks may help:
1. edit > preferences > graphics > custom
* bump maping and shiny
* basic shaders
* TURN OFF atmospheric shaders
* Lighting Detail: Nearby local lights

2. Wear a face light

3. Press Ctrl alt R to rebake a few times if needed. (This is especially useful if you are on a wireless or old connection, where your face de-rezzes a lot. Your face should rez a few seconds after ctrl-alt-R depending on the lag at your sim.)
* Note, you must have Advanced/Debug mode activated to use the above shortcut. If you see an “Advanced” menu on your SL toolbar, then you have it activated, and should be able to rebake using Ctrl alt R.
* If you do not have Advanced mode activated, Press Ctrl Alt D to toggle it on. (If you press Ctrl Alt D again, you will turn it off.)
* Press Ctrl Alt R to rebake! (A couple of times, if needed.)

And you should look dazzling. As good as the ad pic, but as yourself! I promise!

We’re in here for the art more than the commerce, and thus unlike other skin stores, we rarely tint a skin and call it a “new” product. None of our skins look generic. Each has its own distinct look because each one is made from scratch. Each purchase helps fund the creation of a new skin. And, we believe that each purchase helps make another avatar on Second Life look more unique. Thank you, once again.

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