live laugh blog

candle math

a couple of weeks ago i started spending a lot more time on candle-making, which had me working on a couple of apps to help me, and perhaps other candle-makers, to do their craft.

ten years of cattoo, or a comparison of a tattoo i got 10 years ago and what it looks like today

*that's going to age poorly* is a common refrain that's projected by people - who themselves are probably aging poorly - in the comments of any videos or photos of tattoos. or *you'll regret that* and (my favorite) *what does your mother think of those*. my tattoos are pretty innocent, i only have a handful of them, and they're all on my shoulders and above the elbow so they're often not even visible. i love them and i'll get more.

the pee-hole post or a quick fix if your air compressor's drain valve is leaking and other sidequests

i mentioned having drama with my air compressor in my last post. the issue was that the compressor's drain cock valve - the pee-hole, on this blog - was leaking air. notice how i said 'the issue was' and that's because i fixed it. to celebrate, as well as deliver on my promise to jenn nation, here's...

my airbrush library

if you ever read anything about airbrushing on a technical level, you'll be told that it requires immense patience. there is nothing more truer in this world! it can be quite unforgiving and needs a lot of setup and cleanup, but the results are really beautiful and it's such a versatile tool. one of the things testing my patience with airbrush right now is that my compressor is leaking air from the drain valve. instead of shutting a window onto my neck about it, i figured to step away from the tank and show you my humble library of airbrush books. i've been collecting them for education, inspiration, and to feed my innate urge to buy used hardcover books that cover my somewhat niche and outdated hobbies.

brighton boobs

november the first be with you, my friends. i have done a lot these past few weeks, and naturally i have started to feel crushed by the five unfinished drafts of blog posts i've been writing on paper, screen and in my mind. because i caught myself feeling bad for not publishing anything, here i am 31 minutes before a zoom call sharing with you some of my bathroom art.

ten years ago i let people fuck up my 8-bit art

releasing an editable document on the web for anyone to edit in any way is terrifying but exciting. that's in part why i worked on glitch for so long - letting millions of developers run arbitrary code, more often than not for free, allows incredible viral moments to happen that shine brighter than any of the bad stuff (spam, phishing). this facilitation of web building always comes with its moments of noticing someone is doing something you didn't intend and you immediately thinking 'oh, that's it, we're fucked' but more often than not the next moment you're tearing up because the web can be so beautiful.

kissy lips again, this time about an art residency i did at the ace hotel in 2015

in my last blog post i talked about the kissy lips mac osx icon and how reactions of my use of it shaped the direction i took a lot of my art going forward - essentially, if i choose to express myself in a way and people tell me it's not professional simply because of misogyny, i'm going to double down. it was in september of 2014 when ben sisto, artist and expert on the song who let the dogs out, reached out to me about an art residency program he was running at the ace hotel, 24 x 36 - where 36 artists spent a night at the ace hotel in nyc over the course of 24 days.

kissy lips won't delete 💋

since the dawn of time, mainstream operating systems would offer a set of default avatars to choose from when creating your user profile. these avatars often had no context related to the software they came with – last night i learned that andy's old xbox 360 avatar was a pair of lemons. naturally, i had to introduce him to the iconoclast, my own founding mother of default avatars: the macosx kissy lips.

last week i learned cpr and now i've got a new personality

my employer hooked us up with cpr/aed/first-aid training so you should let me perform cpr on you, it would be real, certfied, fresh and fun.

the intersection of candles and code

last month i said i'd be experimenting with more sculptural candles and that's exactly what i did this weekend. and because i had also recently finished my three.js journey certificate, i figured that starting this weekend's session by rendering the candle on the web first would be a good practice and a cool way to show off the candle i had floating in my mind for weeks.

category: art