An Artist's Life...

Cell phones weren't a thing even in college for most of us. My roommate had a first generation IBM with Prodigy as their dial-up internet connection. My college bestie was still working on a computer requiring a 5¼ boot drive disk. That is - the computer didn't work until you put the boot disk in... Then you put in the OTHER 5¼ disk to save your document work. That's all it did. It allowed you to write documents.

Cell phones were available when I was in Jr high (1986), but they were huge things - attached to a battery the size of a standard kleenex box.

I didn't get a cell phone until 2004 - it was a Nokia "candy bar" phone. You had to click through the keys to get words, had one game (snake), couldn't access anything but news headlines, and most plans had a 25 text message/month limit, before you were charged 25¢/text...

That's not what was happening. Not at all. Yet until I moved out, and started meeting people, talking with them about their experiences, and de-codong what I was raised with vs reality, I simply accepted my mother's statement as true.

If you haven't started down the path of discovering America's consistent doubling down on racism, classism, and the splitting up of citizens into an "us vs them" mentality, designed purposely to remove all opportunity to rise up against a corrupt and unjust government, this is the book to read.

This book is the first to read. There are others, including ones about Redlining, the histories of indigenous people in America, and the experiences of AAPI in our country's expansion into the west. If you're white, and you're still clinging to what school taught you about America, it's going to be uncomfortable. It should be.

History isn't comfortable. It's not always pretty. The books that are deemed "acceptable" and "appropriate" for school don't include what actually happened, and they leave you with a warm, fuzzy feeling about how our country was created.

You may need to learn how to set up your paints and such… but this is what people did, live, while the show aired. That’s what the show was for. I had family members create lovely works of art they enjoyed, which I still have on my walls, because William Alexander and Bob Ross both said:

SCREW METICULOUS CLASSICAL ART PRACTICES — JUST GRAB A PALETTE KNIFE AND BIG OLD BRUSH AND PAINT!

They freed a whole generation of people who were taught to paint detail and realism and exact representation of reality — people who largely gave up this kind of thing because it got tedious.

I watched the joy of family members as they rediscovered art as a messy fun spontaneous half hour activity.

and this has created the funniest neocash chat board ever

A 6th-level Disintegrate spell... that does 75 damage on average. Bolaire, you go for the Phantasmal Force. It's batted away. Termina moves around, hits you with a Disintegrate, does not hit you.