If Looks Could Kill - Graphic Art & Design

In Japanese culture, they focus on eyes to determine the mood of others. In America, they look at mouths, according to tests. It even plays out in the emoticons favored.

Japanese Happy Face (^_^)

American Happy Face :)

Theoretically, it’s because the Japanese are more guarded with emotion, less apt to smile. One side note, is that Americans are more prone to prolonged eye contact, which is considered very rude and intrusive in Japan, yet this is how they read one another.

I am amazed that Americans would gauge mood based on lips. That would never occur to me. Explains a lot of gullibility in this country, if all it takes is a smile. Suckers!

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Related:
Face Reading
Understanding Facial Expression

3 years gone. I can’t say that I miss him any less, Squee McGee, my little deed… Hellee!

Intently destroying the camera strap as I photographed him.

Doing the march-march dance on my lap and purring, as he did each morning.

He was fucking beautiful, my little familiar. I still love and think of thee.

*solemn devil-fist salute, pourin’ out liquor, et al.*

“A process at the interface of the medical discipline of anatomy and modern polymer chemistry, Plastination makes it possible to preserve individual tissues and organs that have been removed from the body of the deceased as well as the entire body itself”

The Bodyworlds exhibit was unreal, spectacular!

Points of Interest:

• Organs look much smaller plastinated than when soaking in formalin.
• Everything is so fibrous - Tissue, muscle, tendons, even bones - they look like coral, with tiny pockets when processed this way
• No ghostly activity, which I was hoping for, considering all of the deceased present. ;)
• I found the Horse the most compelling out of all. Magnificent creature.

A very sterile installation, all of the souls seem to have long since departed. Logically, if there were to be ghosties, it would center around an area or individual, instead of the body left behind.

Which raises another point, made more readily apparent by this exhibit, that the spark that makes you, you, lies in the energy of the being. How the skin hangs on our bones, how it’s weathered, how we decorate it, the tension in one’s muscles that shape the flesh - the exact same thing that’s missing from CGI - that which departs when we do.

We saw it in Dallas, thanks to Angel of Malevolence! :D Be sure to listen to her station, Redemption Radio where she serves up metal just for you, Ren, for yooou.

Not one of my personal favorites, but there’s no denying his talent, the misunderstood Vincent Van Gogh fancied himself a realistic painter, rather than the expressionistic one he was labeled as due to his complementary colors and pronounced strokes.

Though “tragically brought down by incomprehension and madness, Van Gogh himself aspired to serenity and happiness.” It eluded him. He snuffed himself at 37, suffering from the seizure disorder and hallucinations, exacerbated by alcohol and probably syphilis as well.”

(Source) - Slideshow on Van Gogh with detail

Of further fascination to me, is the fact that if people were eventually “scanned” for perceived mental illness, we wouldn’t have work like his. The line between madness and creativity is hardly there - afflicting not just artists, but scientists, raising the question:

Do the mad have access to hidden worlds of imagination, denied to the sane? Is madness the final frontier of art and science? Is genius only a step away from insanity?

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Better organized and far easier to navigate, I present my overhauled Gallery - thou shalt go stare.

• Illustration
• Paintings
• Miscellany
• User Icons

Over & Out!

Perpetually fascinated by the subconscious, this intrigues me:

• Rats deprived of sleep die faster than rats that are deprived of food
• Some sadist actually implemented and tested the aforementioned bullet to the point of death.
• Memory consolidation takes place (defragmenting)

…if our brains did what they do during dreams while awake, we would be diagnosed as mentally ill. Yet we enter into this cousin of delirious insanity every night. “Do we go mad at night to prevent ourselves from doing so in the day time?” Hobson has asked. “Or do we go mad because the brain temporarily gives up certain of its controls in order to regain them, in better order, when sleep ends?” - Harvard sleep researcher, J. Allan Hobson

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