Here in Playa del Carmen, there are about a dozen abandoned Maya-era buildings that you can climb over and into, of course free of charge and at any time. Inside one of them, in a small room, I found interesting termite mud tunnels, which I had never seen in person before.
On the shore, a lone woman was seen engaging in an unequal battle with the world ocean. Armed with a shovel, she heroically moved the sargassum two centimeters to the left, apparently to a place designated for them by feng shui. To the left and right to the horizon—nobody.
Door in the toilet stall
I think project managers can very well speak to developers in the words of Faust.
Well, here we go again, in the old manner
With you – all is uncertainty, all doubts,
In everything you create difficulties,
And for all, you wish for new rewards!
When will you, without any further talk, —
One, two: look, — and everything is ready soon!
(For context – this is Faust’s reaction to the refusal of the seemingly omnipotent Mephistopheles (Devil) to bring Helen of Troy and Paris from the realm of shadows to the stage for the Emperor’s amusement)
director
Don’t forget anything:
What can be done immediately,
Why put it off till tomorrow?
We must instantly grasp
All that is necessary and possible
(…)
“You have poorly executed it,
And left a gap in the corner”
And the designer might reply:
And you do not see, how vile and shameful
This craft?
Am I not an artist?
To the Manager:
“Fire! Help! Hell! We are all going to burn now!”
In the studio, we decided to switch from oil to pencil, which I hadn’t touched for years (and, frankly, never really knew how to use properly). But with practice, I understood just three and a half rules of good drawing.
1. Draw what you see, not what you think you should see if you look at the reference. This is the most difficult part because it involves fighting your own brain, which is convinced it knows what things look like.
2. Judgment of proportions. If something occupies a fifth on the reference, you need to distinguish it from a sixth or a fourth, and of course, see exact halves and thirds clearly. It’s like having a musical ear. If an imaginary line ends at a point on the ear, you need to see this imaginary line. It’s not hard, but requires practice, and it seems you need to practice it all your life. Interestingly, you are initially surprised at how wrong you are about proportions. There are many small optical illusions that one must get used to.
2.5. Angles. A continuation of judging proportions. You need to see the difference between, say, 45 and 40 degrees at least. And see where to turn the wrong line and by how much.
3. Ability to simplify. Any complex shape needs to be simplified in the mind to straight lines and shapes and draw those first, and also to reduce reality to spots of a maximum of a few shades (with white and black at the edges).
That’s all. If you master just these three and a half points, you won’t need anything else for a long time. No knowledge of anatomy, understanding of materials, or laws of perspective (all this is important, but comes later).
At 47, I finally got around to Goethe’s “Faust.” Ordered the book on Ozon, but it will only reach me in a month. So, I decided to start with the audiobook. And what a fabulous production it is! I’ve listened to eight out of sixteen hours, covering all of the first part and a bit of the second. Probably will spend another week chewing through the second part. And when the book arrives – I’ll read it all over again after the audio, which should go really well.
Trukhan’s performance is a masterpiece! The cello, the choice of voice actors, the intonations. I could not imagine a better “Faust” than the one voiced by Chonishvili. Highly recommend. Only occasionally there’s a bit too much with the musical numbers, but I need to check the text, maybe you can’t remove words from a song. The end of the first part in the prison is just fire.
Generated people are persuaded that everything around them is not real, and that they themselves are made of prompts, but they do not believe.
It turned out dystopian.
It would be funny if we also didn’t believe that we are living in a simulation.
Or is it not funny?
Dug up some pics from our 2012 trip on the “Kruzenshtern”, Warnemünde(Rostock) – Flensburg (12-17.08.12). It was a mixture of budget and premium vacation “in one bottle.” Five days on board cost 650 euros per person, but the price included accommodations and four meals a day, total freedom on the ship, all kinds of fun like heading out to sea in a dinghy and climbing the masts. Besides us, there were three other tourists like us, and a hundred crew members, mostly cadets. The barque isn’t stretchy, it fits only as many tourists as there are guest cabins (berths).
The Kruzenshtern was built in 1926 in Germany at the “Geestemünder Werft AG” shipyard and was originally named Padua — in honor of the Italian city of Padua. It was one of the legendary series of barques known as the “Flying P-Liners operated by the shipping company F. Laeisz. After World War II, in 1946, the barque was handed over to the USSR as reparations and renamed in honor of the Russian navigator Ivan Fedorovich Kruzenshtern — a participant in the first Russian circumnavigation (1803–1806). For decades, the Kruzenshtern remained the largest actively-sailed sailing ship in the world.
According to Vesselfinder, it’s somewhere around Cape Town nowadays, still alive and kicking.
Back in 2010, I devised the design for a leather case with a shoulder strap for the first iPad and had it custom-made from my sketches by a craftsman (Evgeny Lunin). The idea was simple—use it, then just toss it over your shoulder, hanging there, open or closed. It was insanely convenient. I’ve never seen such a thing on sale ever again.
(I found an old hard drive in the garage with lost photos on it. Just from the US, there are 82 gigabytes of photos from 2015, in Raw format, including several videos. And along with them, all sorts of other photos have surfaced too.)
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 