5/365: Pinned Fly

Drawings from Gas and I. We made them today while waiting for Bart to show up for practice. Tomorrow we will be performing at a singer/songwriter contest in the Cultural Center, starting 9pm.

Last night I dreamed that I threw a throwing knife at a tree. When I went to
recover my knife, I found that I had split a fly in half.

I finally finished Blink. I thought the book was quite nice, especially as a complement/counterpoint to Fooled by Randomness which I read earlier this year. The first was about how mental heuristics are a powerful engine for understanding the world in a flash, but also how these processes are unconscious and therefore unpredictable to the uninitiated. The second is about how the same mental heuristics can lead people to interpret the world as more causal than it actually is. I recommend both, but especially Fooled. Blink was fast and easy to read, but didn't really present that much new information.

2/365 Days: A Match

May 02, 2009

Following the theme of dreams, I drew a scene from one I had this morning...

I was in a large hall with a sparring ring. A multitude of scissors were suspended from the ceiling at different heights; they were very sharp to the touch and I already cut myself several times on them before the match had even started. My friends and I were evenly matched, but I was chosen to go represent us against our mysterious rivals.

It was customary to eat a bowl of rice with tea before starting. As I gulped down my rice, I saw my opponent watching me avidly. That was when I sensed something was wrong. There was poison in my food...but that wouldn't affect me. I communicated with my eyes to let my opponent know that I knew about his tricks, and that he was still going down. I ended up winning, but the thugs weren't satisfied. As they pressed in on our small group, we dashed out of the hall and and drove off into the horizon in a stolen car...

Part 2 of this post:
I spent my whole day in R'dam today biking around with Inga searching for a new house. Afterwards we had tea with Tessa (where I bumped into Gas and told him about the 360day project), checked out the state of our garden (we saw bunnies!) and went to a dinner with MoMo guides. The dinner was delicious and in the studio of 2012Architecten. We then biked back through the fog to Delft in time to see Alex play at Ciccionina. When I got home just now, I found this in my mailbox...Gaspard submitted a drawing for this project!

1/365 Days: On the Run

May 01, 2009
Inspired by a chat with Loucas over coffee, and by an old photo taken by Marcos I stumbled across from way back when, I decided that I want to draw and post a picture everyday (no matter how crappy) for a year. It has been a long time since I sketched or drew for fun, especially now that I have no more lectures to sit through. This will be an extreme exercise in self discipline for me...and I'm starting now!

Yesterday I continued my marathon of barbeques with one on Hoi-kee and Loucas's roof. Drawing the awesome scene there was way too complicated (I have some wads of paper to show for that), so I ended up drawing something I dreamed about the night before. I was driving a bus or truck of some sort, on the run from some unknown danger with a bus full of people I didn't know.

Funny that I dreamed a variation of that same dream this last night as well, but this time it involved orcas, karate, poisoned rice and scissors...

Heroes Dream

This dream will only make more sense if you have watched the series Heroes. Otherwise, it's just gory and weird. Basically the whole plot of the show was altered and none of the original characters were in my dream:

In my dream I had powers like Peter Petrelli from Heroes. That meant I could collect all sorts of powers by being exposed to other people's abilities. In this dreamworld, there were two main factions factions. The first was the "company," that was represented only in my dream through an eevil guy who was once a normal person. This once normal guy had gone through a lot of painful surgery and treatment to become this deformed, partly robotized, Sylar-like, power stealing machine*. He once had been part of this evil conglomeration, but had gone renegade by the time my dream started. This guy had a powerful injection and pill form drugs (to slip into people's drinks) that could disable one's powers just long enough for him to slice off your brain. The second faction was a fanatic and crazy group of powerful people who wanted to purge the earth/use their powers for genocide/conquer the world. Between these two groups there was me, other people with powers, and other people with various agendas.

I pretty much spent my whole dream running from the scary dude who wanted to slice my brain and staying away from the crazy people who wanted to recruit me. Since I was very powerful, this should have been an easy task... however, everywhere I turned, people's brains were getting sliced off right in front of me. Every time I tried to help someone else with abilities, they ended up dying. I spent half of my dream invisible, but this guy was somehow could track my movements (even through a surreal Chinese grocery store).

At some point, I went to a lecture by some researchers of the mutant phenomenon. It was a lecture given by a fringe group that was highly secret and mobile. In the seminar, we learned about a hidden lake where people with abilities could adapt to live underwater. I was very inspired by the whole talk and made it my mission to set off towards said lake. With my flying friend we set off towards our new destination. After narrowly escaping once more from the grasp of bionic dude, we flew off hand and hand against the backdrop of a city nightscape.

Soo, I really just wanted to remember this dream for that last part when I flew off. It's weird but sometimes in dreams I have stronger feelings for people and things than I would in real life. At that moment there was nothing better than being in love with faceless flying dude, the cold night air, and the city spiraling smaller and smaller as we flew away. Then I really had to wake up and pee.

*he cuts off people's skull caps to steal their powers.