Back

kjbishop — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 03:37:08 +0000

I got back from Ireland and London this week. Very glad I went — Ireland was great, very green as everyone says, restful, great people, good food. I’ll write more about places we went when I get around to uploading photos.

It was nice being in places where you could go for an invigorating walk. I don’t think there’s any such thing as an invigorating walk in Bangkok. If I walk fast I come home feeling like a piece of chewing gum squashed on the bottom of a shoe. If I walk at regular Thai pace, which is slightly faster than standing still, I come home feeling similar, but without the benefit of exercise. I don’t think I’d have liked the Irish winter, but the Irish summer was very refreshing. The rain it rainethed pretty well every day — all that green comes at a price, I guess — but not very hard or for very long.

My flowering vine isn’t flowering. It flowered when it was just a plant in a pot, no doubt regularly pruned, but once I let it grow it stopped making flowers. So I’ve stuck some ‘flower spike’ fertiliser sticks in its pot to encourage it. Its companion didn’t grow at all, due — I think — to a weed in its pot that turned out to be a chilli plant. I’ve repotted the chilli and we’ll see if vine #2 recovers. None of my plants are really enthusiastic flowerers, except for an ylang-ylang I picked up in a street market. The flowers look weird, like rather ratty yellow sea anemones, but they certainly smell good. Maybe the others aren’t getting enough sun on the balconies, or maybe they need more fertiliser. I bought some bat guano to try — how could I resist a bag of bat shit?

And randomly, some Winnie the Pooh mental disorder gifs by Matthew Wilkinson.

Art Bits III

kjbishop — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 01:02:31 +0000

I recently got my author copies of the Traditional Chinese edition of The Etched City. Fab artist Wang-Tin (Andy) Lin has posted some info on his blog about how he created the awesome cover art. (Google Translate helps a bit if you want to read the text). The sphinx’s face looks rather like me, but Andy says he’s never seen my photo, so it’s (maybe!) just a coincidence. And the crocodile fetus and lotus man are on the back! The old parchment look on the cover is reproduced on the title page of the book, and the cover has a finish I’ve never seen before, matte but kind of grainy, almost like a sort of plastic, which looks good and feels as if it might be more durable than regular cardboard. I’m grateful to Andy for the artwork and to the publishers, Fullon, for doing such a lovely all-round job.

Speaking of art, the eye candy’s been piling up in my Firefox again.

Artists:

Stacey Rozich

Tiffany Bozic (found via Wurzeltod, major love for The Silent Dredge)

Anna Lukashevsky

Sam Wolfe Connelly (interior contents not as sweet as the front page pic!)

Zhou Fan (artist’s website here.)

Jon MacNair (I like the “fine art” section)