Ramblings and Wanderings

[Notice: flashing images!] I wandered around San Francisco’s Chinatown this past week with tiny horse silhouettes to make this labor of love stopmotion. 🐎🏮 Happy Lunar New Year and Year of the Horse everyone! 🥰🧧 May the new year bring you lots of happiness and fortune. ❤️

Some behind-the-scenes: - Some aunties saw me taking photos and invited me to their Chinese New Year celebration next weekend. 😆 - I tried not to get in the way of any stalls or customers, so I didn’t take many photos inside the various markets or bakeries (although I did get a pineapple bun and tangerines while I stopped by)! - I texted Cuddly Potatoes to see if she had time to help me cut out horses on her die-cut machine, and she immediately said yes. ❤️ - I used tape on my phone screen to line up the paper in the same spot every time! I can finally remove it now! 🤣

Happy lunar new year everyone! I started off the year scared of drawing dragons, and now I kind of want to draw more noodle buddies. 😆

WE SHRIMPLY LOVE YOU—so much so that we made you these Shrimp Week Valentine's day cards to share with *your* very shrimportant person!!

We also made some templates to add your own shrimp art to—can’t wait to sea what you come up with!

Happy Lunar New Year!! I hope you have whatever kind of year you want- exciting and adventurous, relaxing and restful, or anywhere in between. ❤ Thank you all for sticking with me while I took a small vacation from posting- I probably haven’t taken such a long break from posting new art in years! 

It’s one of my all-time favorite books.  It’s called Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn.  He describes it as an “progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable.”

It is written in the form of letters between the citizens of the fictional island of Nollop, an independent nation off the coast of South Carolina and home of Nevin Nollop, who invented the phrase “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.”  That phrase is written in tiles over a statue of Nollop in their town square, and when one night a storm causes one of the tiles to fall, the council decides that it’s a sign from Nollop that they are no longer allowed to use that letter, in speech or writing, on pain of progressive punishments including public beating and up to banishment.

Then another tile falls.  Then another.

The citizens, who are all very attached to their words and writing, mount a campaign to come up with a phrase that uses all 26 letters but is shorter than Nollop’s, thus proving that he was not divine and negating all the edicts.

Because the novel is told in the form of letters the citizens write, and this is the genius part…the author must also stop using the letters as they fall.  So the book gradually stops using letters until at one point I think they’re down to just five.

The resolution literally made me get up and dance around the room.

It’s clever, creative, and a not-really-veiled-at-all parable about monotheistic oligarchy.  It’s not a long book, you can read it in an afternoon.