It's a new week

I spent the weekend leisurely and visited the Yale Center for British Art, which had a special exhibit on William Blake’s work.

Blake’s printmaking technique was unparalleled. I loved looking at the use of complementary colors in each version of his prints; some were printed in orange ink and used blue watercolor, others were printed in green ink and used warm hues in the watercolor, still others created a rich medley of colors by printing the colors over one another again and again… It really inspired me. I’d like to use color that way in my own art somehow. Of course, that requires drawing something, and I suffer from a severe case of artist’s block. But maybe I could overcome it.

I’ve finally been accepted as a member of status.cafe and have added a microblog section to my blog! I used Bechnokid’s tutorial to embed the entries. Right now because I don’t have a lot of statuses to load, I haven’t restricted the number of statuses to anything, but if I continue to update my site, I’ll probably end up cutting the number of statuses displayed to 20 or so.

I’m having a lot of fun microblogging. I also have an account on moku.blog, where I will hopefully remember to update the foods that I eat, and on imood, where I update my mood. If you look up to the top of my website, I’ve put the imood status in a little corner.

I also watched two movies this weekend, both quite different in tone and content. The first was the 2025 version of Frankenstein, which made the creature quite understandable in his actions and to be quite honest, perhaps a little too nonviolent compared to the source material. But that’s just the zeitgeist for Frankenstein media these days, where the true monster is Dr. Frankenstein.¹ I think that’s a fitting interpretation for the modern era, though I would prefer to have a story where maybe there’s no villain at all.

The second movie I watched was the Holocaust film “Chicken Run”. Yes, it’s a Holocaust movie, just allegorical and for kids. I think if you watch it as an adult with this in mind, there’s really no other way to interpret it but as a heartwarming movie about escaping a death camp. It’s even based on a movie about escaping from a Nazi POW camp, but the rhetoric of total extermination takes it over the edge of “movie about prisoners of war” to “movie about the Holocaust” for me personally. I’m curious if the sequel has a similar theme. When I think about it, this movie was probably a large factor in my remaining a vegetarian for most of my childhood. (I eat meat now but sparingly and with a great deal of conflict and guilt about the conditions that the meat is farmed in and keep considering switching entirely to plant-based alternatives.)

A fun fact about Chicken Run is that one of the escape scenes is almost shot-for-shot replicated in one of the Star Wars prequel movies, so George Lucas might have been inspired by the movie. Or maybe there was something in the water?

I’ve been thinking of changing up the graphic on my homepage. But what should I change it to? Please let me know in the guestbook if you have any suggestions.