Kate Bush - The Sensual World

The Sensual World was actually always one of my least favorites of Kate's albums, one of the less accessible of an often little-accessible artist's works, but the title track doesn't suck (and neither does A Deeper Understanding).
And the video is pretty. (First time I've seen it, gotta love youtoobs.) Lawd she was hot too.




The cover was striking though. She has been very well photographed.

Pleasing folks

If an artist has no desire at all to please people, he loses his audience. If he has nothing but desire to please people, he loses himself.

Fingertip gloves

Thanks to Russ for recommending Freehands gloves for optional bare fingertips (two on each hand) for cameras and phones. Just got mine, they are nice quality for a reasonable price.
The tips fold back with the help of little magnets, a very nice touch.

A Fine Frenzy

Update: Russ recommended this:

Yahoo groups

I've found Yahoo Groups very useful over the years. Probably greatly aided by using ad-blocking software in my browser!

But I'm told that these days to sign up for a yahoo group, one needs to provide a zip code, birth date, and needs to get a yahoo email address.
Can anybody confirm this?
(And can it be fake ones? Surely they can't check?)
(It seems one can add other email addresses to use, later, but it still seems a bit silly that one has to get a yahoo one (although I'm sure it boosts their prestige to advertisers).

Some people hate all this, but considering what I hear from professionals of the difficulties of running mailing lists with tens of thousands of addresses, and the spectacular cost of professional services (Lyris which I'd been using, just boosted their *minimum* fee to $1250 per month!), there must be some downside to the highly flexible and free service Yahoo provides. I've been a member of several groups for many years, and find them very useful and even comparatively user-friendly, and with an ad-blocker in place, I'm not bothered. (I had actually expected ads to appear in the emails themselves, but I don't seem to get that. I think that shows restraint.)

Merry eks-mas to all

Aaaaaanyway... I have decided to take it very easy from now on until a few days after new years at least.
How this will impact my blogging is anybody's guess (I don't tend to plan). But I just wanted to wish you all a very happy and pleasant holiday season, and thank you so much for being with me in the past year(s).
Love, Eolake

Leaf-cuts by Lorenzo Duran

... Case in point. Pleasant art. (While admittedly also on the decidedly mild side, but no harm in that.)

Seoul-based artist Choi Xooang

Seoul-based artist Choi Xooang, more.
I always preferred art which, while it might be challenging in different ways, at least had a core of being aesthetic, or appealing. So it always puzzles me a little when we see the artists who seem to specialize in art which is, well... less so.

Snapseed play

Snapseed (Not surprisingly from NIK*) is an iPad app which has become very respected and popular, and I can see why. It has one of the easiest learning curves I've tried, and yet you can do a lot with it. (Some brief demo videos.)
Here is just the first experiment I did.

This was some of the more Effect-y settings, the app will also do basic things like contrast and cropping, of course.

By the way, I hope to take some portraits around new year, that should be fun.

*NIK has some unique filtering techniques so you can apply adjustments to only the sky or a blouse, without a lot of fiddly masking-off. It's pretty amazing when it works best, and I don't think anybody else has anything like it.

Street art mixed

More photos.

A really nice guy...

Full comic here.


UPDATE:

An attractive woman pretty much has every man she meets wanting her, so her choices are either to boff them all and making them all ticked off soon (and getting VD), or making most of them sad.

But many men really feel that it's disingenuous of a woman to hang out with him if she doesn't want to sleep with him. That's nuts, and hardly her problem.

Missing vital info

This is just one of the things which bugs me about our whole society: it's a widespread tendency in books, in comics, and in television, that when something is in a series, publishers/broadcasters do NOT inform their customers where in a series a particular title is placed. I look at my Tivo with ten episodes of TBBT recorded, and there's no way to tell which ones I've watched or what seasons they are from.

Haven't these people heard of basic, vital information? This is like selling food stuffs without labelling content and quantity. It's insane and I don't get why it's so widespread as to be near universal.

J. Cameron's Speaker For the Dead

J. Cameron's Speaker For the Dead, no, Avatar.

Well, it's hard to make up new stories.
(I don't recall any of that from Orson Card's Speaker for the Dead, but then it was a very complex and wordy novel (Card said it was nick-named "My Dinner With Ender".)

BTW, I have tried twice, but I never even reached the middle of Avatar. Does it get better?