Thursday, August 15, 2013

2 Vision Paintings

More vision paintings.  These will be included in my art display at the Center Camp Cafe at Burning Man. 

Rainbow Maze
Rainbow Path



Wednesday, August 14, 2013

I leave for Burning Man in 10 days.


I'm kind of freaking out.
I have a lot to prepare and not a lot of energy to do it all.
I'm fairly confident that my survival and comfort will be provided for, but I just never seem to finish very many of my big projects for the burn, like new outfits, a pimped-out bike, a more finished shrine.
As it is, my shrine will at least be somewhat finished.
I have to check out my dome to make sure it is fully workable before I get out there.
I have to shop for food and other random supplies.
I have to get drinking water, which I go to fetch down in Carlsbad.
A lot of things, but it's all worth it, because I'm going Home!
Can't wait to see that wide open playa at dawn, with my all stuff unloaded and ready to get set up.
The playa on Saturday before the gates open. Construction vehicles, half-completed installations, and no parties to speak of.

Tuesday, August 6, 2013

Sketchbook Page 22: Vision sketches, birds

 The top part of the page shows some patterns I saw in my inner eye, the middle left is a vision I had  after watching my nephew play Minecraft for an hour, which is a game with very blocky graphics.
The rest was drawn sitting at Zinc's or at the beach in Laguna Beach, observing mostly pigeons, but some crows and sparrows, a eucalyptus tree and a man.

I CAN HAZ BRED CRUM?

Monday, August 5, 2013

11 more people who inspire me.

More sketches of inspirational figures who will appear in a collage on the back of my shrine for this year's Burning Man Festival.


6 saints
top row left to right: Graham Hancock, Dennis McKenna, Terrence McKenna
middle: Rupert Sheldrake
bottom: Jacques Fresco, Elizabeth Warren


5 saints
top row, left to right: Jerry Garcia, Vandana Shiva, Eckhart Tolle
bottom: Kurt Vonnegut, R. Crumb





Sunday, August 4, 2013

The Screamer: Acrylic on Driftwood

This piece of driftwood I found on the beach already had black burn marks in the right places for the eyes and mouth of this character.  I just added the nostrils, whites of the eyes, teeth and tongue.  Sealed it with Mod Podge.


The Screamer
acrylic on charred driftwood

Friday, August 2, 2013

Rebuttals to Common Prohibitionist Arguments 4

"Cannabis is correlated with schizophrenia."

This line of argument is an insidious attempt to convince the ignorant that cannabis causes schizophrenia. In fact, there is no scientific evidence to support this.  Correlation does not equal causation, but this distinction is too subtle for the average person who reads the above headline.
There is evidence to suggest that those who are prone to schizophrenia will more likely use cannabis, likely because the cannabis eases the negative symptoms of the schizophrenia.

The rate of cannabis usage has gone up tremendously in the last forty years. If cannabis were truly a cause of schizophrenia, we would have seen schizophrenia cases increase at a proportional rate.  What we see instead is that rates of schizophrenia are steady for this period.  Therefore, there is no causal link between cannabis use and schizophrenia.

What prohibitionists who use the above argument will never do is to compare that correlation to that of alcohol and all manner of mental health problems. No, they always insist on looking at cannabis in isolation, never mentioning that alcohol has a much clearer causal link to mental disorders than cannabis ever could.  The same is true for countless other legal substances and risky behaviors.

Finally, citing any specific harm of cannabis as a reason to keep it illegal is just specious.  If it is truly harmful, then there is all the more reason to bring it under the control of a legal and regulated system. Leaving its trade to organized criminal cartels allows it to cause so much more harm than it otherwise would.  Countries that have enacted policies of Harm Reduction over prohibition have seen their rates of usage decrease, even as harms associated with drug use and the illegal drug trade have all but disappeared.

Thursday, August 1, 2013

Random Doodle Collage

Another collage I made using random doodles which I had drawn in the margins of notebooks full of bug reports that I wrote at my old game testing jobs.

1829
Collage of random doodles, textures, magazine clippings