Thoughts, stories, musings, and meanderings.
I had not seen this artwork by Michael Whelan before. In the explanation for the painting, he says that he sees manmade structures as being part of nature, because we are part of nature.
My immediate impression on seeing the painting was a different one … but then again, it probably stems from the fact that I see humanity as a blight on nature 🙂 We take, destroy, consume, but don’t do a lot to give back or to replenish.…
When I wrote the post for Footsteps, I mentioned that I had not read “Brightness Reef”. The original art by Michael Whelan looked so gorgeous that I decided to go ahead and read the book and see if it matched the visions my mind evoked, based on just the cover.
I was disappointed to see that the book cover itself didn’t highlight the gorgeous art as I would have hoped.…
So far, I’ve mostly written poems about Michael Whelan’s artwork that I was familiar with. It’s been mostly artwork that I knew either from his posts, or from his book covers.
This time, I decided to pick an artwork at random — just because it appealed to me 🙂 And what I ended up picking was “Brightness Reef”.…
This is one of my favourite paintings by Michael Whelan 🙂
I love greenery and the colour green — I can’t tell you why. But I find looking at greenery soothing and when you have golden light running through the green, I find it especially calming/enticing. So, I love how the sunlight plays over the grass in this artwork, and the slight golden edging to the slit in the wall towards the top right seems magical to me.…
I’ve talked often, and in many places, about Michael Whelan and his cover for “Destiny’s Road“.
Larry Niven’s book has had a lasting impact on me because any time I think of wistful, nostalgic science fiction, “Destiny’s Road” is the book that comes to mind. I can feel how I felt when I read it, almost taste the air from back then, each time I think about the book.…
In Efflorescent I wrote about Michael Whelan and his creative writing contest and my submission to the contest.
That poem was the first one I’d penned in 10 or 15 years. The last one I recall writing before that was one in a series that I called something along the lines of the “science of poetry” or the “physics of poetry”.…
Yes, I know, I have not posted here in a long time 🙂
I’ve been doing some writing but that too was in fits and starts. That might be changing again, but there’s a story behind it…
A few weeks back, Michael Whelan posted this.
I can’t believe that there are people who don’t know who Michael Whelan is — well, at least not people I know since most of the people I know tend to be SF/fantasy fans.…
I’ve always loved words and reading. In fact, some of my earliest memories are of wanting to read but not having the words — once when I was about three and wanting to read a comic in Sinhala and a couple of years later, discovering English comics (TinTin and Marvel comics on two separate occasions) and not knowing English.
I sometimes feel like that these days, when I try to read technical papers on Stable Diffusion and other related areas of deep learning 🙂 Sure, I can read the words, but they (or their meaning) don’t quite make their way to my brain.…
I have been developing software for over thirty years and for around 20+ of those years I have been involved in open source and free software. In fact, for most of my software development career, I’ve released software for free because I believe that if it is something I like and find useful, then it might help others too. In fact, I think the only exception has been my mobile software for iOS, but that’s a different story.…
At this point in time, there are a lot of Stable Diffusion codebases and GUIs out there. But, as far as I know at least, there aren’t a lot of GUIs for macOS. In fact, getting Stable Diffusion working on macOS is itself problematic for two reasons: