The Skeleton without Bones

Water is not only tasty but also nuts.

2009-11-10T16:00:00.001-05:00

Tao te Ching, chapter 47

2009-11-09T17:49:00.002-05:00

Without stirring abroad
One can know the whole world;
Without looking out of the window
One can see the way of Heaven.

The further one goes
The less one knows.

Therefore the sage knows without having to stir,
Identifies without having to see,
Accomplishes without having to act.

From the D.C. Lau translation

Without opening your door,
you can open your heart to the world.
Without looking out your window,
you can see the essence of the Tao.

The more you know,
the less you understand.

The Master arrives without leaving,
sees the light without looking,
achieves without doing a thing.

From the S. Mitchell translation.

I like the first one better.

Pad thai

2009-11-08T18:59:00.001-05:00

Pad Thai experiments 001

Washington heights

2009-11-08T00:21:00.001-05:00

Roger Roger

2009-11-08T00:07:00.004-05:00

New phone; test email post...

Lorna visits

2009-11-05T12:47:00.001-05:00

Lorna came to town this week. We ate a lot of food and walked all around Brooklyn. One night, we ate hand pulled noodles in soup and a pile of dumplings. Then we walked to Brooklyn Heights, and looked out at the city.

Love What You Do: Slide 4

2009-11-05T10:43:00.001-05:00

Love What You Do: Slide 4, originally uploaded by frank-chimero.

mach workup

2009-10-30T18:47:00.001-04:00

working file, with some discarded marks and symbols and things. skulls are pretty common on these patches, but i couldn't make one that i liked so i stopped thinking about them. oh well.

mach-ers marks comp

2009-10-30T18:36:00.001-04:00

mach-ers marks comp, originally uploaded by wburkert.

this is an entry for the shirt.woot "flight" competition.

i like drawing little badges and insignia and such, so i made a couple for fake flight jackets. the bat one on the left is for a fighter jet squad called "the combats". other names, written on the paper next to me include "high five", "high plane drifter", "red six", and "flipped birds" which would be a blue-angels type group that flew upside down only.

vote on it here:

http://shirt.woot.com/Derby/Entry.aspx?id=36839

still life w/ cheese

2009-10-30T17:00:00.001-04:00

still life w/ cheese, originally uploaded by barnapkins.

saw this today, and forgot that i had seen it before. loved it then, love it now.

If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn.

2009-10-30T10:00:00.003-04:00

No curtains at my place anymore, so woke up at like 8:30. Making up flight jacket patches and listening to David Dondero. The sun shining in my window makes it hard to see the monitor. That's trouble.

pfs_gnome powered armor

2009-10-28T15:45:00.003-04:00

pfs_gnome powered armor, originally uploaded by wburkert.

in the fantasy worlds that i am pulling from for inspiration, gnomes are very clockwork/technology based. in PFS, i want to have hints of this technology, but not to the point where they have mastered it. I think that it should either be very very new, or so ancient that most of it is lost/broken/forgotten.

the pieces of remaining power armor are given to those in positions of defense. with the powered helms, the gnomes are free to communicate to each other. like walkie talkies. the lenses in these helms may also be of an advanced nature, but I haven't decided yet.

this guy is a gate keeper type guy.

--

i couldn't do an inked thing every day of october due to real life, so i stopped. but i like the format, and will keep exploring the PFS world in this way for now.

pfs_elf mage

2009-10-28T15:45:00.001-04:00

pfs_elf mage, originally uploaded by wburkert.

this is an elvish mage/wizard/caster of some sort. he is standing in the rubble/wreckage of an elvish building.

gnomes live underground, and in the past young elves would stumble upon entryways to the gnomish dwellings. the young adventuring elves would think these were dungeons and would enter them with hopes of treasure. the elves ended up killing many unsuspecting gnomes this way and the gnomes have never gotten over it.

gnomish strike teams sack elf homes/towns/caravans/anything to the point where it looks like obsession and fun.

Tumblr

2009-10-28T15:13:00.001-04:00

The other day I remembered that I had set up a tumblr awhile back. It was collecting the RSS feeds of my blog, twitter, and flickr. I deleted it last night, then regretted that, and set it back up. As I remember other things I've set up around the internet (like an internet Walter Bishop: Where did I store those files...), I'll make the feeds pull in to it as well. Think of it as a 1-stop what-am-i-doing kind of thing. If you are in to that.

withoutbones tumblr

I also set up a "swipe file" tumblr, where I'll be collecting images from around the internet/my hard drive. These are images where I like the shapes, symbols, compositions...anything. Inspiration stuff. I've got at least 30 gigs of this HD full of unknown things, and I don't even want to think about what's on my back-up HD. I am a pack rat in general, but when it's a digital file and I don't have to see it unless I go looking for it... well, in those cases I horde things faster and more often.

withoutbones swipe file

The Marker Mystery

2009-10-28T15:06:00.000-04:00

I was watching the most recent episode of Californication this morning (S03E05: Slow Happy Boys), in which Hank Moody's pal comes to visit from New Jersey. I just got done catching up on Fringe, and it is the same guy that works at the bowling alley in Fringe. Anyways, that doesn't matter. Near the end of the episode, Hank takes his friend to the airport. While saying his good-byes, something caught my eye. I really wanted them to touch on the subject, but they never did:

Why does his friend have an unopened 3-pack of sharpies in his bag?

To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.

2009-10-27T23:04:00.010-04:00

(by Chris Ware)

You can make more money than your grandparents did. You can also drive really fast, and you can change your sex. You can find friends without having to go to church, and you can see movies in your own house. You can get pictures of naked people almost anywhere, and you can curse out loud freely. You can buy dinner in a box and not have to wash anything after you eat it. You can fly to any city you want and meet a sexual partner, or you can talk to them on the phone. You can have bright light twenty-four hours a day without having to clean soot off the walls, and you can listen to any music you want anytime, anywhere. You can find people everywhere who like exactly the same things you do, and you can print your own books. You can buy vegetables from the other side of the earth, and you can build a house in a day. You can be perfectly warm or cool at every moment, and you can stay in school all your life. You can have sex fourteen thousand times and not have a baby. You can write with pens that don't dry out, or leak, or have to be plucked from a bird, and you can hear about people being hacked to death thousands of miles away. You can see pictures through telescopes almost to the end of space and from the beginning of time, and you can keep milk fresher longer than ever before. You can shit in a bowl and then whisk it away, and you can visit caged wild animals in the middle of a city. You can buy things to make you see and hear better, and you can live anywhere you want. You can get your face stretched tight like when it was new, and you can be sick and not die for a really really long time. You can even wash your clothes in a machine so why can't you figure out a way to be happy all the time?

saw this on the blog of johnny dale, a fella i used to work with. title is snagged from oscar wilde

Read today...

2009-10-26T18:18:00.000-04:00

A quick snippet of interesting things I read today (with links):

–

Re-re-re-re-reading The Invisibles right now. This morning I read issues 3-6 of volume 2, collected in Bloody Hell in America and Counting to None. There's a really interesting thing in here about "White Flame Meditation", which I can't currently find any links about... Anyways, in this particular scene we see Jolly Roger and King Mob (among others) being trained in this form of meditation. Jolly Roger's dialogue is in italics, and is only there to make the rest of the explanation make sense (since this is a conversation happening).

..."I am an optimist," we say. Or "I am unlucky." Or perhaps "I am an American,""I am a Jew,""I am a homosexual,""I am heterosexual." We call the following the white flame meditation.

There. Can anyone tell me exactly what this object is?

It's a chair.

Is that all? Does that describe the entirety of this object?

It's an object with four legs and a thing to hold up your ass so you don't have to sit down in the dirt like the rest of us dickheads. Chair.

Yes, a partial description. But if you were an antiques dealer you could also describe this object's agreed worth – somewhere in the region of a quarter of a million dollars.

If you were a specialist, you could describe the intricacies of the craftsmanship in detailed jargon.

If you were Van Gogh, you might attempt to describe its soul.

But where in all of this description is the essential chair? Have we yet come even close to a full description of it?

Ded we even mention that several hundred years ago, it wasn't a chair but a tree? Where is it now? Here? Or in memory.

We cannot even fully describe a chair and yet we say "I am." "I am...".

Understand. There is no "I am." Nothing "is."

Try to describe all that you are. Simultaneously discern the logical flaw in what I've just said. Now! Feel the white flame.

–

Currently reading through this slide show about time and this really interesting post about Lost.

–

Also, check out this map of a planned layout for London. I'd love to live there.

Walmart

2009-10-19T15:13:00.002-04:00

Today I was informed that some of the work I did for Walmart is live.

This one is on the MSNBC site, if you scroll down a little bit, it's on the right.It starts with a close-up of some candy. You can see it here: http://bit.ly/34AywQ.

The other is a landing page on the actual Walmart site, here.

On both of these, all the graphics were made by me, with type & animation done by R/GA.

inktober 12 of 31

2009-10-17T20:54:00.003-04:00

inktober 12 of 31, originally uploaded by wburkert.

this guy doesn't look happy at all. wanted to see if hatching used up less ink than fills. i'm still not sure. not my best protest.

inktober 11 of 31

2009-10-17T20:54:00.001-04:00

inktober 11 of 31, originally uploaded by wburkert.

john locke from lost, stalking in the woods.

inktober 10 of 31

2009-10-17T20:53:00.003-04:00

inktober 10 of 31, originally uploaded by wburkert.

flying fish for an upcoming story on nameyourtale

inktober 09 of 31

2009-10-17T20:53:00.001-04:00

inktober 09 of 31, originally uploaded by wburkert.

holy relics

inktober 08 of 31

2009-10-17T20:52:00.001-04:00

inktober 08 of 31, originally uploaded by wburkert.

2 more PFS gnomes. Fuffwin on the left and an unnamed guy on the right.

and a movie.

2009-10-17T17:45:00.001-04:00

_MG_4626, originally uploaded by PoliFolio.

by lex.

dear mom, i was messing with a toothpick, not biting my fingernails.

dinner

2009-10-17T17:44:00.001-04:00

_MG_4477, originally uploaded by PoliFolio.

by lex.