Amy VanHym

It is difficult to assess the motivations of someone simply by their decision to drive a car into a crowd of people when the relevant politics are not regularly associated with vehicle attacks. The driver could have been someone on the right retaliating against Antifa. Or, it could have been a driver scared or angered by aggressors who were attacking the car. It could have been a skilled driver hired as part of an organized scheme. It could have been someone thinking they were attacking Unite the Right rather than Antifa. This may have been a premeditated political strategy, or it may have been a mad moment of overwhelming frustration. At time of writing I don't know.

More important to public discourse is the atmosphere surrounding the crash. The way power was exercised by the people who have it -- that is, police, judges and politicians -- is what matters here. Once violence starts, it doesn't matter who has the right political ideas. What matters is minimizing violence first, and maximizing the freedom to express ideas in very close second, including the ideas we hate the most, so they can be defeated using better ideas. What interests me is whether politicians and police performed their duties well.

( I've listened to several interviews with eyewitnesses... )

Today I'm coming to terms with what a consumer I am. Every morning (read: early afternoon, fuck) I'm chugging my coffee with my nose to the memeosphere. So I'll be honest with myself and collect the best of it. Today's topics: Game of Thrones, science & tech & business, freedom of expression

( ARRR )

William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway: “He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”

Ernest Hemingway on William Faulkner: “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”

Poor Hemingway.

I read the first two chapters of A Farewell to Arms today. The drivellingly passive circular paragraphs and embarrassing run-on sentences put my mind out of breath, so I put myself out of my misery by throwing the book across the room. What an empty load of nothing to say.

Full-size | Progress shots | Tin Cup

I've been called crazy for this, but I don't like it. I spent too long, six hours, and didn't learn much. I didn't apply much comprehensive or three-dimensional thinking, I made her hair look like worms, she's not very lifelike and the likeness is lacking. Some of this may be because the source I chose did not have dramatic lighting.

I also tried an experiment: before starting, I altered my source image to black and white and increased the contrast. I thought it might make it easier, and in a way it did: it stopped me from having to think very hard. And because I had to digest less in translating the image onto the page, I think I lost something. I should redraw it sometime later, from the color source image, and see what changes.

All of this really makes me want to get back to work on my YouTube lessons. The last one was really hard and scared me away, but I need to do it. I am not satisfied with where I am and I'm hitting walls when I try to improve on my own.

I've also been browsing through DeviantArt's best pencil artists, so I'm more aware than ever of the breadth of the gulf between myself and serious skill. Some of these people are tear-jerking, jaw dropping masters, the artists who do what I wish I could: their drawings look more beautiful and more real than photographs.

It's trendy to coddle aspiring creatives by saying "Don't compare yourself to other people." But you know what? Fuck that. I see beauty and skill, I see admirable work, and I want to emulate it and grow to sit beside it by improving my own style. Comparing oneself to others only hurts you if you're a pessimist.

Music: Listened to more Nightwish off-and-on.

Room for Improvement:
~ Do moar Proko lessons.
~ Study hair. I hate it because I don't understand it.
~ Study facial expressions, the skull, facial musculature, anatomy.
~ Get better tools. Blending stub, dry brush, white pencil.
~ Vary the subject matter. Draw objects, draw from life. Take a break from photo-portraits.

Wattpad is testing my patience again. "Inline commenting," what a terrible idea.

Imagine writing your emotional reactions in the margins of the only copy of a book -- the one copy that everyone is reading. It tramples on subtlety and ambiguity, it destroys immersion. What an ego a person must have to be willing to shove their way between author and reader in the middle of a piece to shout, "THIS IS WHAT I THINK." Guess what: it doesn't matter what you think right now! Shut up and read! If you want to write about what you think, go write your own story and put some actual thought into it.

It's heckling, it's vandalism, it's unbelievably rude, and it's ubiquitous on Wattpad. There's apparently no way to disable it. I'm going to have to delete all inline comments manually as they appear.