That statistic about ten percent of people buying ninety percent of the books may be about me.
There… was a book sale in a bookshop-turned-different-bookshop (popup, maybe?), and I did not resist. Plus, a special order came in for me at Dog Eared Books, where I shop and take friends visiting from out of town (and where most of my recently reviewed books came from).
I’m currently making very loud, positive sounds while reading Elie Mystal’s Allow Me to Retort. Snyder’s thoughtful and ominous book is too heavy for me this week – I’m too busy being angry about the Supreme Court to cope – but was already growing heavy with ‘bookdarts’ until I switched, as even his introduction brilliantly encapsulates alarmingly relevant ways of viewing our current political crises.
There are more books virtually in this stack: I have a digital stack of purchased audiobooks from libro.fm awaiting my attention also.
Do I have time to read these? No, I don’t even have time to get seven hours of sleep each night, don’t be silly. I will find/make the time, eventually.
The last time I made a small watercolor painting, it turned out badly. Like the normal, totally well-adjusted person I am, I decided it turned out badly because I am a terrible painter, no matter how many decent paintings I produced in the past, and so I avoided watercolor painting for several years.
Most of this was based on a misunderstanding.
Back when I was a starving architecture school student, I could only buy small amounts of paint at a time. A tube of transparent watercolor here, another tube there, a lot of skilled mixing, and I could get by. I experimented and made some decent paintings with my mismatched tiny tubes, and I was happy.
My first FULL boxed set of watercolors YEARS later was Holbein’s Iródori Antique Watercolors. I had been a regular user of Holbein’s regular watercolors (they released colors that matched the landscape of my trips to Japan SO PERFECTLY!). I liked colors in traditional paintings, so I thought this was the right choice for me. Yet, my paintings with these colors all… lacked something. I blamed myself, put them away, and moved onto other things (including watercolor pencils, and a travel set of a different brand of watercolors, which I worked more effectively with). Years passed, I brought the set out again, painted a rather muddy painting of a Japanese scene form one of my own photos, blamed myself, and put them away again. I was already so familiar with Holbein, I couldn’t figure out why I’d become so RUSTY.
YouTube sorted me out. An artist with a shop called Hino Art Materials in Vietnam reviewed Holbein’s new sets of Iródori GOUACHE. Yes, Holbein re-relased the colors as OPAQUE watercolors, to giddiness from YouTube. She recommended not mixing these paints (they are very saturated, and muddy easily) and showed off a lovely gouache painting on a dark blue background. She showed off that some colors have been reformulated, but not all of them. Perhaps my existing set, even before this re-release, could be used like opaque paints?
So today, a precious day off work, I broke out BLACK WATERCOLOR PAPER (a thing that wasn’t available when I first purchased these paints so long ago) and white watercolor paper, and tested the paint out.
Casual testing of Holbein Irodori Antique Watercolor on Clairefontaine mixed media black and Arches hot press white papers.
Oh, YES. So many of these colors are HIGHLY OPAQUE and look great on black paper. The great colors and saturation on white watercolor paper had fooled me! If only I’d had more experience with gouache when I purchased these, I could have put these to better use, and stuck to transparent colors for those other projects. Now that I understand their opacity, I can use them like gouache (and mix them with opaque white as needed when they need an opacity boost), and perhaps resist buying those French and German gouaches a bit longer… And actually get to enjoy these without fear of failure built in.
(Oh, that Antique Bronze Blue in particular is the color of the sky hours after sunset… I could USE that…)
This year it has been all German. I have travel plans that require another language, and my reluctance to study that language has me doubting whether I will really go…
The Witcher published by Netflix 2019 (Season 1), 2021 (Season 2), 2023 (Season 3)
The Witcher is a “fantasy” TV series, set in a ‘feudal Europe-type world’ (kings, queens, elves, fairies) world in which magic and its related technologies are real. Notable characters include Geralt, a feared, modified person with beyond-human abilities capable of defeating monsters; Yennifer, an abused girl who transforms into a powerful mage, and is constantly involved in political mage warfare; and Ciri, a princess who is accidentally tied to Geralt by fate; and a collection of well-dressed villains and allies.
The stakes are survival: humans versus monsters, army versus army, and gloomy empire versus other kingdoms.
The series starts very strong in separate character development for the leads and world-building to establish the forces of mostly-good and mostly-evil. As the series progresses and the lead characters connect and become involved with each other, the emphasis switches to the fight for the continent and the sacrifices each side makes to win the battles. The battles are more visually dramatic and satisfying than the manipulation and politics, but the action-to-exposition ratio is good for much of the series. The first two series were especially clear in narrative.
Geralt and Yennifer are both active, motivated, and interesting characters. Jointly and separately, they have more going for them than Ciri, who is a child struggling with her (really interesting) mothers’ death, the destruction of her hometown, being hunted by obvious villains, abstract prophecies about her role, and trying to grow up in this chaos.
The complexities of mage life were of special interest (flunking out is… pretty dire), and the idea that powerful people with strong rivalries becoming political enemies seems completely plausible. The ethics of creating Witchers are pretty dubious, though the results are compelling!
I enjoyed it, though any additional series will need to offer tighter narrative structure (and perhaps fewer characters?) to satisfy me as much as the first two seasons did.
