still eating oranges

Still Eating Oranges round-up #4

Sat, 18 May 2013 23:35:49 -0400

Back to Still Eating Oranges round-up #3

In only one year, Still Eating Oranges has achieved more success than we ever anticipated. Our members offer their deepest thanks to our followers. Below, our posts from the last several months have been organized for convenient browsing. The last such compilation may be found above.

Essays

An alternative way to live

BioShock Infinite, Tomb Raider and exploitation

The mechanical philosophy

Toward an experiential art

How we have progressed

Misc. art

Korra frame reproduction

Sailor Geras

Strawberry town

Square Face character designs

Recommendations

Return of the Frog Queen

Experimental writing

Photography

Humor

Thinking about Doctor Who

Inspirational message

Tuxedo Mask intrusion

Answers

On kishōtenketsu #2

On moe

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Return of the Frog Queen

Wed, 15 May 2013 17:34:16 -0400

As the frontman of the “emo” band Sunny Day Real Estate, Jeremy Enigk helped to create two classic albums—Diary and LP2—in the mid-1990s. After the band’s temporary breakup in 1995, however, Enigk created a classic of his own: the tragically obscure Return of the Frog Queen (1996). Here, Enigk abandons hardcore punk in favor of pop and folk music backed by a small chamber ensemble; and the results are both subtle and whimsical. The album owes more to Alice in Wonderland and The Beatles than it does to Rites of Spring.

From its title to its arrangement and its enigmatic lyrics, Return of the Frog Queen brings to mind a fairy tale. It is a careful balancing act of softness and edge, not only between tracks but within melodies, chord progressions and song structures. The album variously—and sometimes simultaneously—soothes and abrades. On “Explain”, overtop melancholy strings and guitar arpeggios, Enigk’s voice stretches from a high, poignant rasp into what might be called a beautiful scream; and one finds that the unique tension of the fairy tale has been captured in music.

The album is, in short, a small masterpiece. Yet, unlike the music of Sunny Day Real Estate, Return of the Frog Queen was and is largely invisible. It stood outside of every zeitgeist in the ’90s; it garnered little critical or commercial attention; and it exerted no influence on future music. Not even Enigk’s later solo recordings sound much like it. We at Still Eating Oranges hope to see the album get the recognition that it deserves. With that in mind, our readers may find selections from Return of the Frog Queen embedded after the break.

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Ice Queen. Still Eating Oranges

Sat, 11 May 2013 21:16:08 -0400

Ice Queen.

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Stylized sketches of live models. Still Eating Oranges

Sun, 05 May 2013 20:58:00 -0400

Stylized sketches of live models.

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How we have progressed

Thu, 02 May 2013 19:08:56 -0400

As George Orwell’s famous maxim goes, “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past”. Unless one accepts the most bizarre and nihilistic conclusions of Nietzschean logic, one must grant at least a moderate version of Orwell’s point. Consider first that we are what we repeatedly do; and that our possible actions are limited by our environments. That is, one could not have become a film director in the 17th century. Further, our environments are, in large part, shaped by culture and tradition—by the ways of living and thinking that have been passed down to us via record and memory. The past, by way of culture and tradition, thus sets out most of our possible choices ahead of time. To give a concrete example, most Westerners are raised in the tradition of the three-act plot structure, which determines our options and thereby influences our future output.

Although this train of thought can lead to a kind of historical fatalism, we need not endorse such extremes in order to acknowledge common sense: we can only choose what is available to choose. Our understanding of the past shapes us, for good and for ill, by shaping our knowledge of what may be chosen. One of the more terrifying examples of this process in Nineteen Eighty-Four is the Newspeak project, by which the Party gradually removes the possibility of dissent from language itself. The omnipotent state remains an impossible fiction; but cruder siblings of Newspeak—related to body image and consumerism, for example—exercise an insidious control over the day-to-day lives of most Westerners. Perhaps the deadliest and most intractable of these is the idea of progress.

The narrative of progress slips, often unconsciously, into much of our thought and language. As a basic example, consider that we live in the modern period—the epoch that comes after the ancient period. Each era stands on the shoulders of the last; society develops. As Michael Allen Gillespie points out in The Theological Origins of Modernity, this conception of history is peculiar to us. Most of the ancient Greeks and Romans saw history not as a linear progression, but as an infinitely repeating cycle, in which “earlier” and “later” were largely irrelevant denominators. We reinforce our progressive reading of history with our names for past eras, which are usually lazy, Eurocentric generalizations based on each period’s perceived technological or intellectual progress relative to our own. Consider the “Stone-Bronze-Iron” categorization or the “Dark Ages”, for example; or, in a more recent coinage, the “Mad Men era”.

Whether we realize it or not, belief in progress makes us optimists and utopians. Ours, as the most recent, is the most progressed civilization in history. Despite its flaws, our current society is built upon the achievements of its predecessors; and it outshines them. The inferior always gives way to the superior, as evolution confirms. Institutions like capitalism, democracy and modern science, therefore, have an intrinsic value. Those who question their validity would take us back to the Stone Age, to serfdom—to the cringing superstitions of our scientific predecessors. Each generation is wiser and less animalistic than the last. It is only right that we help to accelerate this process, and to modernize the “the developing world”—that amorphous, ideologically inconvenient group of backwards peoples that fall outside of our narrative.

Somehow, the 20th century did not shake these ideas out of us. Certainly the “inexorable march of progress” brought us improvements; but it also brought us eugenics, the Manhattan Project and the utopian dreams of Hitler, Stalin and Mao. For every Einstein, we had a Wirths; and, for every cured disease, we had a new social anxiety. Every richer man in one part of the world was counterbalanced by a poorer man in another; and every comfort brought a new kind of complacency. Food and electricity became more widely available, but via dangerous, unsustainable methods. Our dominance of nature destroyed landscapes, species and ancient ways of life; and it polluted the planet to a lethal degree. This should have been enough to remind us that evolution is a process without moral meaning. Yet, in the 21st century, we have continued: cutting-edge Apple products are built at Foxconn; the global discovery of quinoa has made it prohibitively expensive for many in its home countries.

As Gillespie notes, our progress-based reading of history originated during the Enlightenment. Its implicit voluntarism, then, comes as no surprise. The idea of progress rests on the identification of happiness with power: it is the belief that an increase in human power is inherently good. Thus, history is seen as a building-up of human power, a struggle from weakness toward strength, ignorance toward wisdom, war toward peace and so forth. As with every other voluntaristic project, progress expresses itself as violence. Progress is always “creative destruction”, to appropriate the economic term: it instates itself by displacing and destroying nature and “backwards” cultures. Thinkers of a Hegelian bent believed that this destruction would, in the end, result in the ideal society. The violence will have been justified. But are we still so naïve?

Civilization does not, strictly, progress: it changes. Every age and culture has positive and negative aspects, and no amount of “progress” can stifle the latter completely. There will never be a society without evil. Our attempts to create this society have, in fact, caused more evil than good. What modernism destroyed was far more valuable than what it created, or what it merely tried to create. The wiping out of landscapes during the Industrial Revolution, the Native American genocide that founded the US, the Holocaust intended to create the Aryan race, the Great Leap Forward of Mao—these are cousins. Many today respond to criticisms of the modern world by saying that we simply have not yet progressed enough; but this is suicidal. One does not escape quicksand by moving forward. Today’s most serious problems are the result not of a decifit but of a surplus of human power.

Yet, who controls the past controls the future. If we continue to see ourselves in terms of progress, then we will fall into the roles it provides. We will survey history and other cultures with a weary arrogance. After all, what do we have to learn from them? The Gandhians have always already lost to the Nehruvians; those who oppose progress will, inevitably, be swept aside. At this point in history, is it possible for us to fully reject the progress mentality? Even post-modern skepticism was, in the end, just another attempt to displace and instate—just another colonialism. But there may be a way out. The greatest weapons against progress are inquisitivity, empathy and dialogue. If we understand our convictions, consider alternative viewpoints and discuss openly—if we take a genuine interest in others—then, perhaps, we can avoid an encore of the modern project.

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Who wouldn’t want Tuxedo Mask to break into their room and...

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 22:34:01 -0400

Who wouldn’t want Tuxedo Mask to break into their room and throw a rose at them?

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Him on the warmlight park bench he scritched his head—and out from the scalp alteration tiny...

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 01:59:21 -0400

Him on the warmlight park bench he scritched his head—and out from the scalp alteration tiny birds flew out, blue and red tinybirds flowing out in spirals and in every-directionals out of his head, certain large birds also popping out and going to the fishtree branch, and he sat through this eruption. It stopped after awhile.

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Inspirational message. Still Eating Oranges

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 00:31:56 -0400

Inspirational message.

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Thinking about Doctor Who. More specifically, his...

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 00:09:48 -0400

Thinking about Doctor Who. More specifically, his mysterious blue eyes, his fashionable yet classic suit, his mischievious half-smile, his hair flipped so gracefully to the right, his perfectly defined jaw, and also his lips.

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Toward an experiential art

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 21:44:00 -0400

We have said that art does not exist. However, those works which are called “art” do exist; and, when we are immersed in them, we have experiences. The most honest aesthetic theory does not go beyond these immediate surface experiences, in which the viewer connects to the work intuitively, without attempting to take control via the ironic, critical eye. That is, every work is an experiential space: an un-dissectible surface that evokes from us feelings or emotions. The significance of a work is in this encounter; not in any hidden “subtext”. To dig for subtext is to destroy the work’s experiential quality—its core.

However, not all experiences are created equal. The traditional function of “art”, and its highest, is to elicit from the viewer an experience of near-religious wonder. As with all art-experiences, wonder begins in depiction: the bare facts presented on a work’s surface, to which we react. Depiction is the experiential space created by the artist for the viewer. When we examine the profound angles of a Bernini sculpture, or witness the spastic, urban energy of a Basquiat painting, we are pulled in. These works depict—they put forth displays—and we connect intuitively. We have immediate experiences. Yet, while it is relatively simple to make a depiction that, for example, surprises or thrills, it is far less clear how to create one that generates wonder.

We have addressed the concept of wonder—the “feeling of awe”; the “aesthetic response”—in the past. This experience largely has been tossed aside in contemporary Western art, in favor of the destructive goal of self-expression. One of the few advocates of its return has been John Cage, who argued that art should place one in a state of receptive wonder toward the world; a state in which “the ego does not obstruct the fluency of the things that come in through our senses and up through our dreams.” Art restores our fascination with existence-as-such. Similar comments have been made by the Radical Orthodox writer David Bentley Hart, who claims that wonder takes us outside of ourselves into an immediate encounter with being—an inexpressible mystery that most adults take for granted. Both men closely tie beauty and being to wonder: existence is beautiful; wonder is our recognition of this fact.

Neither Hart nor Cage, though, provides a workable method for achieving this experiential end. Cage’s best material from the late 1940s, such as Six Melodies and In a Landscape, suggests that he came close. However, after 1951, his obsession with self-removal resulted in work that was disturbingly similar to the Nietzschean affirmation of his self-expressive contemporaries. For an explication of the experiential method, we must turn to a far more unlikely figure: J. R. R. Tolkien. In his essay “On Fairy-Stories”, Tolkien provides a staggeringly complete account of the creation of wonder-generating surfaces. This account centers on the idea of recovering the “trite” from “possessiveness”.

According to Tolkien, we feel in everyday life a jaded ownership of those things familiar to us. The world becomes mundane: without surprise and beneath our experiential notice. However, as he writes, “Spring is, of course, not really less beautiful because we have seen or heard of other like events”. Events that are to us uninteresting are to others “the first ever seen and recognized”. Spring’s explosive beauty never leaves; but our egos suppress its “fluency”, in Cage’s words. With regard to literature, Saul Bellow pegged this phenomenon as a critical distance—a deadening of immediate experience—, which allows us to regain control in the face of the surface’s “passion and death”. Fairy tales, Tolkien claims, are a tool for breaking through our control and undoing our reduction of the world; but this is far too modest. Art in general is a tool for subverting our ironic defenses. Artworks are experiential spaces that magnify those aspects of the world which we have “appropriated”, so that our perception of them may be refreshed.

But what type of depiction allows spring to be spring again? Tolkien argues that it is fantasy. By this, one should not understand him to mean the use of orcs and elves. Tolkien writes that fantasy at its most basic is the depiction of something “not actually present”—something not enclosed by “the domination of observed fact”. For just this reason, it reminds us that “observed fact” cannot encircle the alien Otherness of our world. Fantasy restores the mystery on which all awe relies. According to Tolkien, the best fantasy depicts the “simple or fundamental” in uncanny situations, which reveals as “luminous” that which we have taken for granted. This returns to the trite an aura of unknowability and unmasterability, at which we may gape with child-like wonder. As he writes:

By the forging of Gram cold iron was revealed; by the making of Pegasus horses were ennobled; in the Trees of the Sun and Moon root and stock, flower and fruit are manifested in glory.

By depicting the “not actually present”, we subvert the illusion that we have seen it all—that we are the all-knowing possessors of the world around us. We are reminded that “all [we] had (or knew) was dangerous and potent, not really effectively chained, free and wild”. The “arresting strangeness” of fantasy breaches the walls of ironic detachment that we have built around ourselves, which have given us the comfort of experiential death. And it is for this reason that the fantastical and exaggerated have been put away in modern times. As Tolkien says, “Many people dislike being ‘arrested’.” Experiential works have been relegated to children and teenagers; and adults, when they pay attention at all, approach only as disinterested analyzers of subtext.

Yet, the failure to seek recovery has disastrous consequences. It leads to what Tolkien diagnoses as the modern “anxiety to be original”, which comes from the realization that “the colours from spring to autumn were all discovered by men long ago.” This anxiety drives us to abandon all taste and to create work that is “willfully awkward, clumsy, or misshapen”. That is, without the continuous renewal of our wonder at being, we resort to ugliness; to the “unremittingly violent”; and to the “delirium” of maximalism. The violence of the gut punch—the visceral reaction—is the only connection that the artist can make with the audience in a post-wonder world. The audience responds in kind by deconstructing art from an ever greater critical (appropriative) distance. Had Tolkien lived to see it, he would scarcely have believed the nihilism to which this “forgetfulness of being”, so to speak, has led.

We must, then, return to producing those unreal surfaces which seek “shared enrichment, partners in making and delight, not slaves.” After taking leave of the twin violences of realism and self-expression, we may create rich experiences suitable for Bellow’s “naïve” reading. We may write what Ernest Hemingway called “truer than true” characters; we may seek language that recaptures the “excitingness of pure being”, as Gertrude Stein put it. This reconstruction of the surface has already begun. For example, Wes Anderson’s best films present what is “simple or fundamental” to humanity in a ludicrous, exaggerated and “artificial” way. Despite what his critics claim, Anderson’s work is rarely smug or ironic: it is an attempt to jump into immediate contact via “arresting strangeness”. It is unsurprising, then, that his biggest successes in this regard—The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and The Darjeeling Limited—have received the worst reviews.

An experiential art returns, fantasy in tow, to the goals of ancient art. However, the results will differ. What is fantastical in one time or culture can, if viewed enough, fall into the oblivion of possession. Tolkien’s genius can at times be difficult to recall in light of his countless imitators; Stein’s “a rose is a rose is a rose” has, perhaps irrevocably, become gratingly obvious. No infallible, repeatable “science of wonder” is possible, because wonder is squeezed out, like water clutched in a fist, whenever one tries to take hold of it. The precise methods of recovery will always change. In every case, though, the goal is to create works that remind us that the world in its true form is fantastical.

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Character designs based on Square Face Icons. Original icons: 1,...

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 19:26:00 -0400

Character designs based on Square Face Icons.

Original icons: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

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Concept illustration for a comic project that includes a town of...

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 20:48:31 -0400

Concept illustration for a comic project that includes a town of strawberry people.

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"Now listen! Can’t you see that when the language was new — as it was with Chaucer and..."

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 18:49:12 -0400

“Now listen! Can’t you see that when the language was new — as it was with Chaucer and Homer — the poet could use the name of a thing and the thing was really there? He could say “O moon,” “O sea,” “O love” and the moon and the sea and love were really there. And can’t you see that after hundreds of years had gone by and thousands of poems had been written, he could call on those words and find that they were just worn-out literary words? The excitingness of pure being had withdrawn from them; they were just rather stale literary words. Now the poet has to work in the excitingness of pure being; he has to get back that intensity into the language. We all know that it’s hard to write poetry in a late age; and we know that you have to put some strangeness, something unexpected, into the structure of the sentence in order to bring back vitality to the noun. Now it’s not enough to be bizarre; the strangeness in the sentence structure has to come from the poetic gift, too. That’s why it’s doubly hard to be a poet in a late age.”

- Taken from a speech by Gertrude Stein at the University of Chicago. Recorded by Thornton Wilder in the introduction to Four in America (1947).

Sad Fire Elemental cannot enjoy his ice cream cone. Still Eating...

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 23:31:00 -0400

Sad Fire Elemental cannot enjoy his ice cream cone.

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Space opera. Still Eating Oranges

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 20:56:00 -0400

Space opera.

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The mechanical philosophy

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 12:46:00 -0400

In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

With the above statement—taken from River Out of Eden (1995)—, the anti-religious crusader Richard Dawkins intends to attack theism. His words, though, are more interesting when read as an illustration of the modern conception of nature. Here, Dawkins has described perfectly the mechanical philosophy, or “mechanism”: an ideology that dates back to the early modern period. In the pre-modern world, a contrary view that some today call organicism had flourished; but it was displaced by mechanism at the beginning of modernity. This transition from organicism to mechanism was, alongside the new idea of personhood, a key element in the invention of the modern world.

Today, we see nature as a collection of directionless, meaningless forces and particles: all is sterile, arbitrary and quantifiable. Rebellious phenomena like color and light, macroscopic entities like birds and trees—none of these are really in nature. Rather, they are appearances projected by the mind on to indeterminate matter in flux. Few realize that these “facts” are, in truth, beliefs derived from mechanism. They are an interpretation of data; not data itself. The same observations of nature, when seen through the prism of organicism, reveal a world teeming with life and meaning. The mechanical philosophy is a mutation of organicism, and its outlook of “blind, pitiless indifference” arises because half of its original constitution is missing.

In technical terms, mechanism and organicism are different understandings of causality. Mechanism posits two causes; organicism, in its most mature forms, posits four. What this means can be understood by way of a basic example. When we think of a cause today, we think, for instance, of a hammer smashing glass: one thing (the hammer) acts on another thing (the glass) and produces an effect (broken glass). Thus, two causes: the active cause (the hammer) and the receptive cause (the glass), which are combined to achieve an effect. These were known as the “efficient” and “material” causes, respectively, by the organicist pioneer Aristotle. Under mechanism, only these two causes—rudimentary and “mechanical” though they are—exist. This leads to a thoroughgoing reductionism.

Under organicism, active-receptive relationships are only half of the equation: they are buttressed by two additional concepts, which might roughly be called holism and “directedness”. (The technical terms are essence and telos, or “formal” and “final” cause.) It can be helpful to think of these four causes in terms of the why-how distinction. Mechanism, by describing nature as a series of interlocking gears, explains only how it operates as it does. In neglecting to answer why it operates as it does, mechanism depicts a natural world without “rhyme or reason”—a sea of “blind physical forces and [blind] genetic replication”. By combining active and receptive causes with holism and directedness, organicism seeks to explain both the how and the why of nature.

Organicism sees the action of one thing on another as more than a meaningless collision of gears: every active cause has a kind of unconscious “directedness”; or, to use stronger words, a “goal”. To use an example from physics, the gravitation of two objects toward one another is not simply a mechanical motion governed by the law of gravity—as if this law was not descriptive but, somehow, prescriptive. The objects have a mutual, unconscious “intention” to move toward one another, in accordance with their essences. Likewise, a tree that plants roots in some sense intends to absorb nutrients, so that it may complete itself. Planting roots is not just a blind and mechanical event that happens, by chance, to increase survival. Every active cause has a telos, a direction toward some end result.

Further, while mechanism reduces macroscopic objects and qualia (taste, color, etc.)—it’s gears upon gears all the way down—, both are considered real features of the world under organicism. They are holistic: irreducible and objective phenomena; not illusions that the mind casts on to amorphous matter. When one looks at a sunset, it is not really just a collection of meaningless particles that the mind imbues with color. The particles exist, certainly, and they are part of the color; but the color is an emergent feature of reality that cannot be reduced its parts. Likewise, water is not really just hydrogen and oxygen, and salt is not really just sodium and chlorine. It is the holistic essences of water and salt—not the components of water and salt—that determine how water and salt behave.

When all four causes are combined, a full explanation arises: the hammer (active cause) smashes the glass (receptive cause) because it is “directed toward” this end (telos), which arises from the kind of thing that it is (essence). If the hammer had a different holistic constitution, then the ends toward which it “inclines” would be different; and it might be incapable of smashing glass at all. Therefore, the reason why the hammer smashes glass is to be found in its telos and essence, while the description of how it does so is left to the active and receptive causes.

One might wonder why organicism was abandoned for mechanism, when the latter is incapable of giving a full description of the world. The reasons were largely religious. Mechanism is the result of William of Ockham’s ruthless anti-essentialism, with which he attempted to render the Christian God radically free. Ockham cut away the idea of essence and cast serious doubt on the concept of telos, which all but removed meaning from nature. (In Quodlibetal Questions, Ockham himself writes, “Someone who is just following natural reason would claim that the question ‘why?’ is inappropriate in the case of natural actions.”) With essence gone and telos at best suspect, there was no reason to ask why anything happened in nature: it just did happen.

Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Galileo Galilei and other early modern thinkers crystallized Ockham’s thought into the mechanical philosophy. Nature was now an arbitrary collection of forces to be harnessed; everything meaningful was evacuated to the mind. Even qualities like color, which Ockham had considered real features of the world, were reduced to mental projections. Thus, nature was only an impersonal, quantifiable set of gears. The mind (now mysteriously separate from nature) was the source of unquantifiable phenomena. Without irreducible essences, natural entities were reduced to parts composed of parts composed of parts; and so on. However, the early moderns did replace intrinsic telos with another kind of “directedness”.

Just as humans infuse their own creations with purpose, the early moderns imagined that the universe, now a large machine, was given purpose wholly from without by a Divine Artificer. The appearance of intention in nature was now quite literal, since it resulted from the prescriptive laws of nature imposed by a deistic God. Nature’s unconscious “intent” became a kind of design. Despite being an agglomeration of unrelated and inherently meaningless parts, the universe thus retained an impoverished kind of meaning. If a tree grew roots, it did so not because this end was part of its essence, but because God arbitrarily superimposed this function on to otherwise directionless matter.

Slowly, however, Western society decided that mechanistic deism was not scientifically or religiously compelling. More and more people came to think that the “laws of nature” were enough. Yet, robbed of their narrative of divine command, the laws became just as meaningless as the matter to which they were intended to give meaning. The idea of asking why something happened vanished completely: all that remained was a bare how—a “blind, pitiless indifference”. The living world of organicism had now fallen away. Mechanism, at last, had made nature sterile, arbitrary and illusory, just as Dawkins claims. This is the world that we have inherited.

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Moon Prism Power, Make Up! Still Eating Oranges

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 23:13:00 -0400

Moon Prism Power, Make Up!

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"Recovery (which includes return and renewal of health) is a re-gaining — regaining of a clear..."

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 07:14:24 -0400

“Recovery (which includes return and renewal of health) is a re-gaining — regaining of a clear view. I do not say ‘seeing things as they are’ and involve myself with the philosophers, though I might venture to say ‘seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them’ — as things apart from ourselves. We need, in any case, to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity — from possessiveness. Of all faces those of our familiares are the ones both most difficult to play fantastic tricks with, and most difficult really to see with fresh attention, perceiving their likeness and unlikeness: that they are faces, and yet unique faces. This triteness is really the penalty of ‘appropriation’: the things that are trite, or (in a bad sense) familiar, are the things that we have appropriated, legally or mentally. We say we know them. They have become like the things which once attracted us by their glitter, or their colour, or their shape, and we laid hands on them, and then locked them in our hoard, acquired them, and acquiring ceased to look at them.”

- Taken from “On Fairy-Stories” (1939) by J. R. R. Tolkien.

Cubella tells us about the benefits of reading. Still Eating...

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 00:23:32 -0400

Cubella tells us about the benefits of reading.

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To practice, our artist used a mouse and Photoshop Elements 1.0...

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 23:32:56 -0400

To practice, our artist used a mouse and Photoshop Elements 1.0 to reproduce this frame from The Legend of Korra.

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