Month: March 2023

Yes, it’s no easy task – dragging a hippo out of the swamp…

Please provide the text you want to be translated.(Sure, please provide the text that you would like to have translated.)

Tenth attempt at oil painting. Various abstract citruses. If the weather is sunny and the mood is right, I’ll hang it somewhere in the kitchen.

That’s how we live. It turned out to be a whole short film

Suddenly, this mandarin turned out to be the most complex thing I had ever worked on. Mainly in conveying volume. So that it didn’t resemble a cross-section. It’s still in process, about 30% done. I need to somehow make it not flat, but volumetric, plus finish drawing the peel. For now, they are just roughly sketched.

It’s spring here, the birds have arrived

(EN is below) My eleventh attempt at oil painting. This is supposed to be me and Nadezhda Shulga. I’m not sure if I captured the likeness (Nadya, of course, is a million times better in real life). I guess I will probably continue to work on the painting, but someday later, when I feel confident that I can add something new without spoiling the old. Or maybe I’ll start painting again, but with the accumulated experience. Also, I missed the tenth attempt; I’ll publish it in a couple of days.

Thanks a lot to Marcia Klioze for invaluable advice and guidance!

It’s so annoying how the touchscreen fails to function properly under light rain. It just glitches wildly. I see that Apple is trying to find solutions (attach).

And here’s an interesting thought, is it possible to create a film for the screen that would convert mechanical pressure into capacitive input? Basically, a sandwich of layers a-b-c-d, where d touches the screen. When pressure is applied to the outer layer, b touches d, and the screen detects the change in capacitance. Layer a is insulating, so that the fingers remain undetectable to the screen. Layer c essentially acts as a damper. Yes, and all four are transparent. I have no idea if this can be done.

Lately, I’ve been pondering, looking at hundreds of new bloggers, whether I have anything substantial to share in the form of a lecture or a course. And with each passing year, I’m increasingly convinced that I don’t. Yet, over the past few years, I’ve learned more than I did in the same period before, which was more than I did before that. Back then it seemed like I could start my own school. But now, I can’t think of anything at all.

The reason is that with experience, the representation of meanings shifts to references to their storage places, while the space of that knowledge in the brain is filled with skills that are quite hard to verbalize. It seems that the actual application of skills, rather than knowledge, brings the most joy and benefit. You see something clumsily done and understand why it’s clumsy – and it’s not some rule from a book that comes to mind, but the experience of how you did something just as clumsily twenty years ago. Meanwhile, ask me half an hour before about what I would explain to a beginner on the topic, and that case wouldn’t even come to mind.

At work, it looks like “you quickly get the hang of a new area and swiftly understand what’s wrong and how to make it right.” That kind of clashes with knowledge, because I occasionally have trouble recalling the “theory,” but with the help of the internet, everything I need can be found in minutes.

The second interesting skill is the ability to quickly consume and process information. It’s like when you look at a page on a screen and without reading, you understand whether it’s not right or right. And eventually, you sift through much more in five minutes than a person without this skill. Many people, for some reason, start to actually read the text there and take another few seconds to digest what they’ve read.

I hope it stays this way for a longer time 😉

Yuki, almost every time hearing the sounds of the piano, brings a ball and insists that I play with him. Politely insists. It’s unclear why his desire to play is linked to the sound of the piano. I think the logic is something like, “Ah, master, you seem to have nothing to do. Well, in that case, you have your beloved dog.”

“… at the sound of the flute — loses his will”