Time to rebuild my follower base from Twitter on Mastodon!

I’m Vidar, founder of Street Art Utopia, curating the most inspiring street art from around the world.

Every new follower who comments here will receive a high-quality street art photo as a thank-you reply! Feel free to request a specific theme for your photo!

Editing a book on iOS development (using UIKit) at the moment — 1100+ pages. But for some reason, it has made me think about writing a book on #Flutter development 😛

Should I do it? I don't know ... But thinking about it.

#Writing #Programming #Books

Hey friends, if you see this, could you introduce me to someone worth following on this app?

After fifteen years on that other app, it feels daunting to start again from scratch.

In Telugu cinema, Suhas seems to be so good at picking roles that are not run-of-the mill. I first noticed him in "Writer Padmabushan" which I absolutely loved. Since then, I've watched any movie that has Suhas in it. None of them have had the overly macho, beat-everyone-up-without-raising-a-sweat type of characters. Instead, they generally are different shades of the everyday-man.

"Janaka Aithe Ganaka" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32843331) is another Suhas starrer that I absolutely loved from the beginning. There's so much humour and sentiment in the movie. The family dynamics, the relationship between Suhas' character and his wife, and his friendship with Vennela Kishore — it all worked so well to make this an interesting movie.

Then came the core of the story. That too worked for me in terms of Suhas questioning the system. There were a few melodramatic moments which had me rolling my eyes, but overall the story worked for me.

And the ending? Priceless!!

#Movies #Indian #Telugu #Comedy

Haven't done much painting recently. Without too much warning, I find myself in the middle of editing the third edition of a massive 1000+ page book that I last edited 3 years or so ago. Plus, we've had to move suddenly too.

So I'm writing (or at least editing) but probably won't get back to the painting and writing till next year. I guess that's how it goes sometimes?

#Writing #Painting #Life #Busy

I'm thrilled to announce that the audiobook version of "Honest, the Martian Ate Your Dog" is now available on Audible 🙂

https://www.audible.com/pd/B0DL7S8Q24/?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-418986&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_418986_rh_us

If you want to listen to a sample, you can do so on the Audible site.

#Audibook #Writing #Bookstodon #Fedibooks #SciFi #Humour
Audiobook cover for "Honest, th…

Up at 4am after the time change because I'm too stressed out to sleep.

Please please send work my way. I'm super talented and experienced in Python, data, and ML. I'm talking decades. It makes zero sense that my family and I should be on the verge of going hungry. I guess I just don't have the magical keyword combination to get the LLMs to pick up my resume. This is the dystopian future we were warned about. I'm certain of it.

#GetFediBHired
#MachineLearning
#Python
#DataScience

I'd heard good things about "Lubber Pandhu" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27007466) but since it's a cricket movie, I wasn't sure if it was going to be just a sports movie or something else. The beginning seemed to indicate that it was going to be more than "just" a sports movie 🙂

One thing I loved about the movie was the little bits of old Tamil songs that they play every often through the movie. The selections were super!

And the other thing was the humour running through the movie — not the usual slapstick comedy track which doesn't always work, but genuine moments of humour.

And the slow build up to the confrontation between the two players is really enjoyable. On one hand, you keep waiting for the confrontation, and on the other, you keep watching it build up and laugh at the little tiny events that are made so huge due to ego conflicts.

Once things erupt, the tug-of-war between ego and love is just so very beautifully depicted. The whole experience is so totally engrossing. Basically, I feel that the movie played on so many levels and it was excellent in all those levels.

With this movie and with "Meiyazhagan" it almost feels as if we are back to the heyday of Tamil movies when they actually were worth watching and were all not about shedding blood by the buckets and beating up baddies. Will the trend continue? I'd be be interested to see how this goes ...

"Black" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt33298502) is interesting both in terms of being a Tamil science fiction movie and because this is probably the first one where the time travel logic actually worked 😛 There have been multiple others with time travel/time loop stories in Tamil, Telugu etc. but most of them didn't get the time travel logic right. But "Black" succeeded there and the overall story is interesting.

What I have a problem with is that the characters, as is usual in time travel movies, are idiots. They keep taking actions that move the story forward and creates conflict instead of just not doing something which they can see will cause the future that they've seen. But then again, I guess that's a fault with most time-travel movies in one way or anotehr?

#Movies #Tamil #Black #TimeTravel #ScienceFiction

"Meiyazhagan" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26758372) is a beautiful movie.

It starts out with so much sadness — the achingly beautiful song which accompanies the protagonist as he leaves his hometown, the little touches like the lights being turned off in the house, the protagonist picking up a leaf as a momento — these and so many other little touches contribute to the beauty of the opening.

I've lost the feeling of sadness you feel on moving house. We've moved around so much that it has become commonplace to me. But this movie brought back that feeling in spades. It was nostalgic, and a little sad.

Then there's the relationship between the protagonist and his wife. It feels so true. So close to life. I just enjoyed the conversations between them so much.

Add to that the greenery of the village, so different from all the recent movies about city life. It almost feels like a different time, a different place. So familiar, and yet not something that I can find today.

The whole movie has so many little touches which make it flow so beautifully and stirs up sentiment.

Maybe you have to be a certain age to enjoy this movie. I don't know. But I certainly did enjoy it.

#Movies #Tamil #Sentimental #Memories

I call this one "Not Just Another Brick in the Wall" ... Or maybe you'll call it a "square peg in a round hole" — even though there are no holes or pegs in view 😛

I was trying to get the idea of non-conformance to the status quo in while also getting some more practice on light and shading. Done using Adobe Fresco on an iPad.

#Painting #DigitalArt #DigitalPainting #AdobeFresco
A digital painting of a brick w…

This one feels sloppy to me 🙂 There's so much more I can improve upon but after spending three days on this one, I felt that I needed a break. So moving on ...

What I wanted to do was try my hand at doing a landscape and I learnt a lot of things that I should improve upon and a few things that would be useful. But overall, I don't feel as if I did the idea justice.

#Painting #DigitalPainting #DigitalArt
A digital painting of a river w…

Sometimes I'm not sure if art/entertainment is used to try and mould people's thinking, or if movies (and other artwork) simply reflect the biases/prejudices inculcated into the general populace...

I'm watching "Kadaisi Ulaga Por" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32991468/) at the moment and it does make me wonder about how the everyday Indian, or specifically Tamilian, on the street views the world. Is the movie a true reflection of how they perceive the world? Or is that how they are meant to think the world is after watching the movie?

The movie is set in the near future and sees India as surrounded by enemies. China, Russia, and the Middle East breaks away from the UN and sets up their own rival organiztion. Sri Lanka and other nations join them. India stands as the last holdout in the region.

In several scenes, they have a "war criminal" from Sri Lanka attacking and killing Indians as this new group invades India.

I have to wonder — is this how India sees itself? The one lone holdout against enemy forces in the region? Or is this propaganda to get people to see themselves as such?

If this was one single example, I wouldn't have thought so. But in addition to the constant anti-Pakistani imagery in Indian movies, I've seen emerging anti-Chinese messaging in Indian movies in the past few years.

Sure, this also mirrors what you see from the US, which also appears to be upping its anti-Chinese messaging.

But in a world where everybody seems to think that getting the message out to the most number of people, whether it's true or not, is the most important thing, how do I determine what really is true? How does the general person on the street learn to differentiate between propaganda and entertainment?

And how much do these entertainers care about the messaging they disseminate?

#Movies #Tamil #India #PropgandaOrEntertainment

This one's called "Lonely Planet" 🙂

Again, mostly playing with shapes, colours, lights, and perspective.

#Painting #DigitalArt #DigitalPainting
A green grassy field with rows …

I call this one "Mysterious Pyramid" 🙂

My main aim was to explore shadow, lighting and colour, but I didn't want to just do plain geometric shapes. I wanted something a litlte more interesting.

Hence, the fog shrouded pyramid.

#Painting #DigitalArt #DigitalPainting
A digitial painting of a stone …

I finished my third painting over the weekened. I am much happier with this one since the columns in the painting turned out like I'd hoped they would.

There are a few things I probably still would want to improve upon but I guess that's the point right? To continually strive to improve upon what you do? 🙂

I am happier at my ability to transfer images in my mind on to digital canvas and I think this is something that'll I stick with this time around.

#Painting #DigitalArt #DigitalPainting
A digital painting of four marb…

I finished my first digital painting a few days ago. It was a quick painting but even as I did it, I knew it had certain shortcomings 🙂

I moved on to my second painting to try to improve upon these.

The first issue I noticed with my first painting was that it was flat — it had no depth. So, with the second one I tried to introduce that. I succeeded in some cases, but feel I failed in others 😛

The other things I wanted to do was give some texture to different elements and to add a sense of light and shadow. While I did a few things to add this, I feel I did very badly at those things.

I've been watching videos on how to draw and one thing which struck me was that a lot of the videos out there tell you how to do one thing — like draw an apple — but not why you do certain things a certain way.

Now this is by no means a slam on those people who put out "how-to" videos. Any information that anybody creates, especially the free resources, to help others learn how to do something, is a great service in my opinion. But I do wish that people added a bit more of the concepts to some of these videos 😊

What I'm saying is, if you simply show how to draw an apple, then at least some people (like me) only learn how to do that one thing. But if you tell them, "this is why you do such and such a thing", then I can formulate a process (or workflow) that I can use to draw other things.

Maybe this is self-evident to a lot of folks. I don't know. But I don't get some of this straight away 🙂 For example, I do understand that you need a source of light and that an object needs to show the light and shadow in order for it to appear three-dimensional. But I don't always put it together with somebody saying "place a lighter colour splotch here and a darker shading here".

One of the best examples I saw explainig this was this free Udemy video course:
https://www.udemy.com/course/art-fundamentals-in-one-hour/

(I have no affiliation Hardy Fowler but that course was helpful in filling in some gaps and so I'm linking to it in case it helps somebody else on the same journey. Also, he has some interesting tutorials on YouTube.)

So I'm doing a lot more reading on the subject of light and shadow and how to add texture to shapes and am preparing to work on the next painting ...

#DigitalArt #Painting #DigitalOilPainting
A digitial painting showing som…

As a child I really wanted to be able to draw. I tried to teach myself drawing by tracing over artwork I liked, looking at stuff and drawing etc. but I was never very good at it.

As I grew older, I found others at school who could draw effortlessly. I joined up with them and wrote books where they did the artwork. But I still wanted to draw.

A while back on Mastodon I discovered @MichaelWhelan and his feed. I already knew Michael Whelan from his book covers but his feed made me realize the scope of how many of the book covers I remembered from over the years were by him.

The most memorable for me personally will always be "Destiny's Road". The book itself is very memorable for some reason — I remember how I felt when I read certain passages, how the sun felt on my skin that day, where I was and so on. But I picked up that book from a second-hand store over 30 years ago because of the cover and I still remember Michael's cover notes in the book describing the various elements like the fool cage.

So, seeing all the great covers that Michael has created over the years has made me want to try art in some form again. I know that I'm not very good at drawing/sketching, but I thought I might be better at painting perhaps?

So I gave it a try with digital painting and I discovered that I loved oil painting on the computer 🙂For some reason, I really like how the oil paints "feel" on the screen and how it works when you mix paints.

I created my first painting yesterday. It's not very good and I hadn't actually looked at techniques or tutorials when I did it. But I think I'm going to give this a go and see if I can get better at it.

At worst, I'll have fun trying all this out. And that's not a bad thing, right?
A digital oil painting showing …

Ever get the feeling that macOS (and the Apple ecosystem in general) is slowly slipping away into a bog or something?

Switched over to Sequoia several weeks ago and suddenly yesterday my Remote Desktop app keeps disconnecting after being up for a few minutes.

Check online and people are like "This is a known issue with Sequoia". Someone mentioned turning off teh built-in firewall fixes the issue. Somebody else comes in and says "Oh no, that's too drastic. Just add an exception for Remote Desktop".

Try that and the issue keeps on happening — as others mentioned in the same thread. Others mentioned that Remote Desktop is now Windows App and updating fixes it. For me, it doesn't.

Somebody else mentioned that allowing the app to browse the local network fixes the issue. And the latest update to Windows App suggests that they'd left out this option. But my local network setting is correct and updating to the latest Windows App didn't fix the issue either.

So, I've finally turned off the firewall on macOS. So far, no issues with Remote Desktop/Windows App since then.

And that's not all of it.

Try to build something on device using Xcode and Xcode wants to connect to your device and get info. But this connection doesn't always work. So it'll sit their churning its wheels but doesn't time out. So if you don't notice this is happening, you'll have no idea why nothing is building, or is taking way too long.

You have to disconnect and reconnect the cable to (possibly) fix it. And don't even get me started if you want to build on Apple Watch.

All I can say is that things are getting just too annoying at this point for me with various bits of the Apple eco system and I don't like it.

#Apple #macOS #RemoteDesktop #WindowsApp #Connections #Firewall

After some thought, I decided to leave Automattic last week. It's the first time I've been without a job, and while I'm excited for the chance to rest and focus on personal projects for a while,

I'm also a bit anxious about finding a new position in these uncertain times. So, if you're looking for a remote Product Designer who can also code and illustrate, or if you know someone who is looking, I'd love to hear from you.