Butterflies are monsters.

Butterflies are monsters. I first heard that in a line from 'Giant Ant' from the The Handsome Family's first album "Odessa". I had no idea what Renni is going on about here so I googled it and found a few interesting tidbits. First one is about the Pope. He is definitely not afraid of calling a spade a spade and has labelled certain priests 'Butterfly-Priests". When responding to a question he repleied“...What is the place of Jesus Christ in my priestly life? Is it a living relationship, from the disciple to the Master, or is it a somewhat artificial relationship... that does not come from the heart?....We are anointed by the Spirit, and when a priest is far from Jesus Christ he can lose this unction.... Those who put their strength in artificial things, in vanity, in an attitude... in a cutesy language... ‘This is a butterfly-priest,’ because they are always vain.” Food for thought. I was brought up Catholic but am at odds with some of the teachings of the Church and more specifically how some of the priests handle the responsibilities of the power of their position. I read into this butterfly-priest concept as validation that we must not blindly accept what a priest or minister tells us. Blind allegiance to anything can lead to trouble.

The second post that caught my attention, Butterflies are Monsters Who Drink the Tears of Turtles was the from The Mary Sue. It is a quick and interesting read but better than the real reason, it would be a great prompt for writers.

And that leads me to the drawing above. It is for this week's Illustration Friday prompt, Stomach. Most of us tend to get butterflies in our stomach when we think about starting something important to us. Whatever that is, the more difficult the task, the more anxiety we face. I've been struggling with finding time in my life for a few projects. I have come to realize that starting is not the difficult part. Finishing is but we cannot finish something if we don't start. So we all need to make the time necessary to start and finish the things that are important to us.

Space: Illustration Friday

Here's an illustration that I created for MOCA's education department for the School Tour brochure… perfect for Illustration Friday.

Over Snackarrinated

Last week the museum where I work, MOCA Jacksonville, held an opening for an amazing new exhibition called Imagination Squared. It was a huge collaborative effort by a wide cross-section of people. I participated, just barely, but I am so thankful that I pushed myself and got mine square in with only seconds to spare before the deadline. I am happy, too, not only because I am part of this great event, but also because this was the first time I used acrylics in over 20 years. I suppose it is a little like a bicycle… once you learn…

At any rate, this little painting seemed the perfect fit for this week’s Illustration Friday prompt. I would love to be saying that it is the start of a rededicated weekly practice, but life is still throwing fast balls and I'm still swinging. Soon, dear friends. Soon.

IF – Flying

No time this week but I did come across some very interesting work over here. I am continually amazed by people's creativity. Speaking of which, I have been having great fun participating in a project by BBC Audiobooks America. I saw a post that read "You can write an original audiobook story on Twitter with New York Times Bestselling Author Neil Gaiman!" and since I do like a good read, I couldn't resist. Neil started out the story and let the Twitterverse take it from there. I've even managed to add a number of tweets to the storyline. If you are interested, you can catch up on the storyline at their blog, head on over to @BBCAA and get in on the fun. The project runs through Friday. At least that is where they believe it will end. The response has been great and they have exceeded their limit a number of times. I look forward to hearing the final story. From a social media aspect, the project has been a great success as well. So far, they have almost quadrupled their followers! Hope to catch you all again real soon.

I Don't Deserve This

About a month ago, I posted my entry for Illustration Friday. My thumb has just about recovered from the abuse of all the carving it took. It is a lot of work but so worth it. It was a woodblock of an ox and offered the remaining few in trade. One of my IF friends, Susan Sanford of ArtSpark Theatre, took me up on the offer. I just received this amazing piece of art. I'm certain I got the better end of this deal.

As for Illustration Friday itself, hopefully, once tax season, Easter and spring break (whew!) are out of the way I can get back to being a bit more regular and friendly.

conTROLL

Yesterday, I posted about CHAOS so it only seems fitting that today should be about CONTROL.
Wired's Clive Thompson has a very informative article about moderating discussion boards in the April issue. The article covers troll control or how to effectively moderate open discussion boards. He starts out with “Obama sucks” and it’s all uphill from there with information on automated moderation like crowdsourcing and disemvoweling and selective invisibility. Take note that banning the offensive “miscreants” only “nurtures their curdled sense of being an oppressed truth-speaker.”

Slashdot uses crowdsourcing to keep thier boards civil. A very basic explanation is that it is a rating system derived from comments about particular posts. The comments come from randomly selected readers who have the this commenting ability only for a short time before others are selected to comment. Disemvowelling is Thompson’s favorite and I would have to agree. Vicious attacks are almost rendered useless by removing all vowels from an offensive post. Teresa Neilsen Hayden, a moderator at Boing Boing uses this method. Selective Invisibility is the most diabolical of them all. The software by Disqus (the company moderates 90,000 blog threads worldwide) is also a ratings based method. The difference here is that a troll with a lot of negative ratings is rendered invisible by everyone but himself.

This is what you get when you open your discussion boards to everyone. You can either hire an army to moderate your boards, eliminate those boards or employ some method to contain the damage. All of these methods walk a very fine line. One one side is a world where the very nasty troll reigns supreme. On the other is Oceania and Big Brother.