As I was painting today at my in-laws' sunroom here in France, a small sparrow bird hit its large window. I held it in my hand for a few seconds, to place it under protection from the rain, such a fragile little thing. Soon after I got some bird food that my in-laws had around, and by the time I went close to it again to leave the food with it, it flew away. Hopefully it will survive this coming winter without problems.
The two paintings were painted with artist's crayons, and watercolors.
J'ai fait #inktober en dessinant un clown tous les jours. Ensuite j'ai fait un cahier de coloriage ou devrais-je dire CAHIER DE CLOWNORIAGE que j'ai mis ici à disposition :
But... but... the important thing is right behind you, Mulder!
Was trying to have a bit of fun with watercolors tonight, but I really couldn't bother to develop this further. I was more interested in watching youtube videos about the end of capitalism.
Two gouache paintings I made for an online challenge sometime back.
Continuing my tech-related post from yesterday, I'd say that my dream computer these days is a capable Risc-V-based mini computer running Debian. The Risc-V is the only open source ISA architecture today, but it is not 100% there yet in terms of speed: it gets about 500 points in the CPU score, while an M1 Macbook Air gets about 14,000 points, and Ubuntu with Gnome to run well-enough it needs about 3500 points. Video codecs are an issue too. It still runs well-enough Debian with XFce though. So we aren't there yet, but its time will come.
I haven't painted much lately. I mostly sit down and watch 1980s videos on youtube about vintage computing (e.g. the "Computer Chronicles" news show, that was apparently shooting very close to where I was living for years in California, but didn't know about it). I've decided that if this was 1977, and money wasn't an obstacle, I'd get a TRS-80 computer rather than an Apple II. And that I wouldn't get a PC until 1984, until the Tandy 1000 came out. In between, I'd get probably an Atari 800, and a C64. By 1985, I'd get an Atari ST, an Amiga, and a Mac 512k. Then an Apple IIgs in 1986, and a NeXT in 1988. After that, in the 1990s, Windows takes hold and it all becomes more mature in terms of tech, and honestly, kinda boring. The early days of personal computing were the exciting ones!
The only exception I'd do is to get a BeBox in 1996, which ran my favorite OS of all time, BeOS. In fact, that's how I met my husband, he was a graphics/kernel/build engineer for Be Inc, and I was a news reporter, and games porter for BeOS. Shame how this amazing OS went down, with Microsoft killing it.
As for Linux, I never found it interesting in its heydays of late 1990s to early 2000s (despite reporting on it a lot for OSNews.com, and testing/reviewing every distro under the sun), because it never worked well on the desktop back then. Not by my standards anyway, for a desktop market that was already maturing fast with Win2000/XP, and OSX. It just never worked right apart from the server sector back then. Linux is more mature now on the desktop, which is why I use Linux a lot more now, than then. I have 5-6 computers dedicated to it (mostly Debian or Ubuntu -- but I'll be moving Ubuntu to Mint), only 1 Windows, and 2 Mac.
This month with one more highlight color that now entered my standard palette: earth yellow joins sky blue, grass green, and sun orange.
Please boost! I’m publishing these with some hope that others may start #bestthingtoday sketchnotes: it’s a great way to build and strengthen positive memories.
"Cleaning the Pond". Another cottagecore themed watercolor painting, painted with handmade paints. I avoided using cool colors in it, to give it a vintage vibe.