kollektief

I just realized that i missed the 1 year anniversary of kollektief starting. just think of all that stuff that we packed into the last 12 months. it always feels like such a short time, but so much changes every year when i think about it. i hope you all are doing well, and that the frequency of posting keeps picking up, i’ve been really happy to get updates and learn about what people are thinking or doing, and i especially love reading everybody’s comments. i think the conversations that happen in the comment sections are my favorite part of this site. and for those of you on the west coast i hope to be out there sometime between the 10th and 15th. i might try to post some pictures of the room i’m leaving behind sometime soon.

I’ve started colleting an archive of old pokernight emails and putting them on line.  I’ve only got a handfull of them up so far, but wanted to solicit comments on what people think of the site.  It’s your standard sort of WordPress deal.  The neat trick is that I’m making each email an individual post which I’m back-dating to the time the email was sent, so WordPress’s built in archiving system takes care of sorting and navigation.  You just click on “October 2002,” for example, to get all the emails from October of 2002.  I’m also trying to apply relavent tags.

It’s located here:

http://www.infinitydayweekend.com/pokernight/

I came back to boston this winter and my dad came down with pneumonia, so i’ve spent the past month in and out the hospital with my family.  here’s a picture of him and my mom which i took there:

it’s funny how times of crisis can focus your life into a few small moments of intense feeling and meaning.

now that the worst has passed, i’m thinking of doing an art piece about this sense of crisis– a big dark bowl holding tiny glass cups with magnifying lenses on the bottom that make windows to images,  translucent and lit from behind to make tiny glowing points in the darkness.

anyone have ideas on how to affix magnifying lenses to cups without leaving much of a seam?

Hi, guys. I’ve spent a lot of time recently hiking in the Rattlesnake National Recreation Area. It’s just 4 miles north of Missoula, where I live these days. Usually when I go out here I don’t see anybody for hours. It’s awesome. Here are some photos.

This picture was taken on June 9, 2006.  Ah, the good old days.

Ok, I increased the font size by 25%.  Is this a comfortable space between being hard to read and stupidly big?

I got tired of having to resize all my images down to a measly 400 pixels wide, so I got Dan to let me mess around with the site’s style template.  Now the main body area for the site is 700 pixels wide, meaning your pictures can be much bigger.  What do people think?  Do you like it better this way, or the old way, or do you think it would be better somewhere in between?

I spent the long weekend in Iceland.  It was great.  I think that when we break off from mainstream society and form our own self sufficient artists’ compound we should do it near a coast in Iceland.  The weather is milder than Boston’s in both directions – or at least it was not as cold there as it was in Boston while I was there.  I was comfortable going around without a hat, scarf, or gloves, where I feel like I need all of those things right now in Boston.  In addition, the place has these other great things going for it:

* Free geothermal power, just drill down and piping hot water comes spraying out of the ground.

* Plenty of pristine fresh water available in the form of glacial run-off.

* Both Europe and North America accessible via longboat.

* Lots of tasty fish.

The way I figure, it would be pretty easy to set up a base near one of those glaciers, tap it for water, get some geo-thermal action going on, and set up a big old hydroponic farm.  There is plenty of natural sunlight in the summertime, and the vegetables would probably grow to be huge (the place where I grew up in Alaska is at a similar latitude to Reykjavik, 64.44°N vs  64.08°N, and I recall tomatoes that grew to be the size of a bowling ball).  In the winter just fire up the metal halides and sodium vapor lamps.

Here are some pictures, there are a few others located here.

The bay in Reykjavik:

The city pond in Reykjavik, with funny Icelandic Geese:

Lava formations and hot spring water outside of the Blue Lagoon:

The landscape as seen from the bus on the way to the Blue Lagoon:

i am debating about the usefulness of rss feeding a bunch of friends’ blogs into one central location such as this: http://nervenet.papercanary.org/. or would it be a good idea to drag other peoples’ feeds onto kollektief? blake worries about lost traffic and ad revenue, i worry mostly that i like the discussion that happens in the comments section here and i wouldn’t want to take that away from other people’s websites.

Leslie drew a really great comic about the perils of having too many penguins.  She said I could link to it here.  Enjoy!

http://web.mit.edu/ldewan/Public/hug_a_penguin.jpg

Hilda asked in a comment if I’d been dressed up as a Roman statue recently.  The answer is yes, back in June.  It was for Amanda’s concert with the Boston Pops at Symphony Hall.  The building has these recesses built into the facad which were intended to hold statuary but when the budget got tight the statues were cut (seems odd to me that they still put in the fifty odd statues around the ceiling of the hall itself which most people never notice but couldn’t afford to put in the four outside the building that everyone would see).

This is the only picture I have of me.  I think it makes me look chubby.

Chubby Statue

And here are all five statues posing with Amanda:

And this is us drinking wine in the Green Room between statuing outside and doing a silly little skit as part of the show.  Somehow we didn’t figure out until the last day that you could just ask the people in suits wandring around back stage for a bottle of wine and they would say, “red or white?”

Drinking and Miming

Oh.  This reminds me that it is January and I should go get a street performer’s permit from the city.

I’ve finally got my web comiking site up and running! The layout and such is mostly just standard Comic Press and could use a lot of love, but it works! Expect daily updates:

http://www.infinitydayweekend.com/