"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…

@phanjam I was working off a sketch from a book on oil painting but then went off in my own direction once I'd done the initial bits 🙂

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…

@nlowell Absolutely 🙂 And my dream is to combine the two and maybe get to the point where I can do my own covers. As to whether I'll get there, the fun is in the trying ... at least for me.

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 …

@Perrin42 If you do, let me know what you think 🙂

I'm trying to get the audiobook out at the moment, but it's slow going ...

@Perrin42 I have a couple of books in a series which I hope are fun 🙂Wordplay, all sorts of cheeky references, and poking fun at humanity in general. The books are not connected, but it's a series because they are set in the same universe ...

Here's the blurb for the first book:

In a post-apocalyptic future where humanity has gotten a new lease on life via a technology infusion from alien visitors, a man who sold his wife's dog to a Martian scrambles to get the dog back before his wife's wrath catches up with him. He'd better hurry, because Martians love dogs — as a delicacy.

https://books2read.com/b/4E9lME

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.

I'm looking for a student for an M.Sc. in Computer Science at the University of Calgary. *This is a fully funded position.*

The project: building tools to help understand how "retro" video games were made under amazingly constrained circumstances. While it's a CS position, this is interdisciplinary work done in collaboration with archaeologists and others.

Needs: strong coding skills, good writing abilities. Ideally: low-level, reverse engineering, or compiler experience.

@pixiewhitechapel I like Scrivener too. I think of moving to something else sometimes but then I realize that I'd miss being able to organize everything to do with my world, lore, characters etc. in one document way too much and shelve that thought away for some other time 🙂

@Legit_Spaghetti P. Djèli Clark? If you haven't read any of his work before, try his "The Dead Cat Tail Assassins" (it's short — 10 chapters I think) and decide ...

@davemark All I basically did was create a menu, set up menu options and then add actions to the same shortcut and drag those actions under each menu option, or rather, the menu option preview in the lower half ... That was it 🙂

@davemark Here's what my menu looks like ...
An iOS screenshot showing the e…