On Playing Telephone
"Wherever we go, we are friends" -Sloth and Manatee
Sloth and Manatee
We are all playing a big planet-wide game of telephone, passing things on, and having them mutate just a little bit with each retelling. How fabulous is that?
I thought about that concept alot while reading this article, about how a romantic-era painting is informing the restoration of trees and plant life around a real-life mountain in the present in Australia. And then, how the painting has also brought forth new interpretations of the subject matter, made with new materials. By new people. It’s one big conversation about a mountain, taking place on all these levels, across centuries, amongst people who care.
That feels so important. It is how we evolved to be here, all these cells and creatures and water and air talking to each other, agreeing and disagreeing, bumping into one another, and new things resulting. That is beauty.
That conversation will not end, because it is amongst everyone and everything all the time.
Brainwaves
Best of Brainwaves Volume One: The Fountain of Stuff
Best of Brainwaves Volume Two: Mom, Dad, I'm a Cat
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Art!
Oh heck, some little friends are hanging out at the Orinda Library for the next show, they are very small and living in the protection of the glass cabinet. Capybara, Moose, and a coupla Dinosaurs.
Print Shop (which now has that lil drifting Capybara in there btw)
BunnyFrogCatSnake
I recently had the privilege to illustrate a book for my friend Margo Stern, who is a smartypants. The book is Good Job: Designing Interviews and Interviewing in Design. It flips over! It is two books in one! Bunny and Frog played the parts of a job applicant and a hiring manager. It was great fun. So much of it was about being thoughtful and communicating well.
It was so fun to give these fellows a star turn in a real live fancy book! Thanks Margo!
Things Of The Week
If you are doing an image search these days, you get a lot of AI slop mixed in there. But you can amend your search terms to exclude it - add “-AI” to the end of your search, and you should not see AI stuff. It turns out also, that you can search “before 2022” to get rid of it. Sigh. Here’s an article on excluding AI from searches.
Oh double-heck, this animated short on making it in a new town is just lovely.
Speaking of pre-2022 things, here’s a guy named Ozzie making rope by hand. What a cool gizmo! And I love how he gets out the twine and there’s tools in there and he’s like, “How’d that get in there?”
Okay! That's enough nonsense for now.
May you get a message from the past or the future or both, may you float through the mini-mart, won't you be my neighbor? - Betsy
HELLO AND THANKS FOR READING!!
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