Sloth and Manatee

These days we have lots of People Who Stand To Profit whispering in our ear that we don’t have to wait, we can just get Answers from our Devices, just ask it a question and it replies instantly, no need to delay or think or ponder or mess up or figure out.

These Device Answerers can only look backward, because they are purely based on stuff that was already thought, answered, pondered, messed up, and figured out.

Super great if you need to sift through a bazillion documents or a genome or a map or something that already exists. But that’s not what’s being sold. What’s being sold is the idea of Instant (Non)Thought Gratification.

One of the places this really appeals is writing school papers. Those are famously difficult. They take a long time. Students complain about them so hard their eyes roll out of their heads.

That’s because they are heckin’ hard! They take effort. You have to do a lot of steps, and sit and think, and rearrange stuff, and do research, and have grammar, and all of this. The process of writing papers is a process of drawing you, step by step, across a bridge of thinking and doing for yourself. And it is ponderous and frustrating.

And, on the other side of that bridge of figuring stuff out yourself, is someone writing the song you will listen to in a few months. This is where you’ll find the person editing together the movie you will be watching. Building the skyscraper you will walk into. Developing the treatment for the disease you might get. Designing the bicycle you might ride.

Down below, there’s an animation that I’ve worked on for months. I’ve drawn, redrawn, erased, moved around, and generally made mess after mess. I’ve rethought and reworked and scribbled and tried different ways of doing the same thing. I’ve learned how to use things and done stuff the hard way.

But man, I wouldn’t trade that process for anything. That’s the good stuff. I hope that you have something in your life that is like this, the good stuff.

Sloth and Manatee Page

Brainwaves

Best of Brainwaves Volume One: The Fountain of Stuff

Best of Brainwaves Volume Two: Mom, Dad, I'm a Cat

License Cartoons from CartoonStock

Art!

One of the things I love most about making art with kids is that they will have a go, and when in doubt they will just add more, and that they will use any and all materials. These little fellows are just beautiful.

BunnyFrogCatSnake

In which here is the animation as mentioned above

Things Of The Week

Here is a big egg that people worked on for quite some time

This is a really great physics education site.

Here’s a fun thing if you are really, really into categorizing stuff.

Okay! That's enough nonsense for now.

May you do something ponderous, may you very much enjoy it, won't you be my neighbor? - Betsy