taking the long nap

When I asked Ms. Dyer if she could tell me which industry served as Glitterex’s biggest market, her answer was instant: “No, I absolutely know that I can’t.”

I was taken aback. “But you know what it is?”

“Oh, God, yes,” she said, and laughed. “And you would never guess it. Let’s just leave it at that.” I asked if she could tell me why she couldn’t tell me. “Because they don’t want anyone to know that it’s glitter.”

“If I looked at it, I wouldn’t know it was glitter?”

“No, not really.”

“Would I be able to see the glitter?”

“Oh, you’d be able to see something. But it’s — yeah, I can’t.”

i was talking about them with my uni’s paleobotany dude (a retired professor) a couple months ago and he was like “you know whats weird about lepidodendron spore fossils? we find them all the time and we never find any embryos.” 

apparently, when paleobotanists dig these spores up and cut them open, they can’t actually see any fossilized embryos of these giant Units despite the outside being perfectly preserved. the common explanation for this is ‘well, maybe fossilization was favorable of protecting the outer coat but not protecting the actual plant inside’, but he’s skeptical of this. “you would think,” he said, “that someone would find something. we’ve found them in all kinds of environments. you would think that of all of them being dug up, someone would find at least one that survived fossilization.”

he died cuz he was an idiot who jumped out of a fucking plane during a rain storm in the middle of the night

Alrighty!

So to make a repeating pattern: 

1. Open a canvas and draw in the center WITHOUT touching any of the edges. 

2. [Below: Light cyan lines] Divide your canvas into four equal parts.

Make four guides framing the canvas, and two across the middle. 

For the ones in the middle, View > New Guide > Horizontal or Vertical for needed orientation > type in 50% to get the exact middle of your canvas. These are photoshop shortcuts, may be different on your programs. 

3. [Above: Yellow arrows] Make sureyou have ‘Snap’ checked under View > Snap, then select each quarter of your piece > layer via cut > move diagonally to the other side.  

After you’re done moving things diagonally, you can either turn off Snap so your doodling won’t stick to the center lines, or toggle the guide visibility off (Ctrl+;). Merge the layers back together. 

4. Draw in the middle without touching the borders, color the entire thing if you plan on doing that.

5. Setting your image as a pattern After your image is done, merge all layers into one > select the entire canvas (Ctrl+A) > Edit > Define Pattern

Open a new canvas bigger than the one you made the pattern on, and paint bucket it in! (Instead of the Foreground button at the top when paint bucket is active, select Pattern then your pattern)

If you aren’t using a program that lets you define patterns, merge everything into one layer and duplicate & tile them manually.