General Interest

More Succulent Flowers!

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A few more of my houseplants decided to flower in the last couple months!  Here are a Gymnocalycium pflanzii v. albipulpa, Anacampseros rufescens, and Gasteria glomerata in various stages of blooming.  I also had a Phalaenopsis orchid in bloom but forgot to take photos; another one's been growing a flower stalk though so I should be able to photograph that one in a couple weeks.

My Pet Anole Marvin

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I previously wrote a post about my pet crested gecko Lex.  She was an intentional pet - I researched the species and care requirements and decided that we would be a good fit.  I also have an unintentional pet, however.  His name is Marvin, and he is an anole lizard. 

There's a fair amount of backstory, so if you just want photos, go ahead and scroll to the bottom. 

While I was pursuing my MFA at LSU, I spent my final two years in the program obsessively researching, painting, and sculpting anole lizards.  I even contributed to a zoological research blog called Anole Annals about anoles.  Viewers of my work would frequently ask me if I had any as pets or if I was intending on bringing live anoles into my gallery installations.  To the first question, I responded that I preferred to see them thrive in their natural environment - I had kept a couple anoles as pets when I was younger, but I did not have the type of setup to keep them well and as I matured I felt ashamed of my poor treatment of them.  Anoles are surprisingly complicated pets in that they require a heat lamp, frequent misting, and fairly continuous access to live insects.  They are also more skittish than other types of lizards including bearded dragons, iguanas, and crested geckos, and that causes them stress when forced to interact with humans in captivity.  To the second question, I answered that I also didn't want to bring cages or the idea of pets into my work because my focus is on nature and ecological balance.  And I wasn't going to harm anoles by releasing them sans cages into the gallery to desiccate/starve/be poisoned/etc.

After completing my MFA and accepting the job offer at USM, I began to pack up my belongings for the move.  I would need to drive myself up to Kansas from Baton Rouge because of my houseplants (many of which lived on my porch due to the tropical weather).  I had slightly fewer than I have now, but I still had around 70, and the movers wouldn't take live plants (and I didn't want them to as they really weren't equipped to transport them safely within the contract structure we negotiated).  So I Tetris-ed my plants into my car and drove north.  When I arrived at my house, I unpacked them all and left the bulk of them on my new porch for the rest of the summer.  It was July.

Come late October, the seasons were switching and a frost was forecast.  I pulled all my houseplants inside to wait out the winter.  A couple days later, I was tidying the houseplants up (bringing them inside invariably also brings in dead leaves and grass, stinkbugs, spiders, and so on) and I heard a rustle and then an anole popped out of one of my larger bromeliads and ran partially up the leg of my drafting table.

I stood frozen for a minute, wondering how in the world I was going to catch a wild anole in my house who was already nervous enough to hop out of his plant instead of nestling further down.  I went into the kitchen and got a thin glove so as not to let him spook me into dropping him if I did manage to catch him, and then began what I assumed would be a very protracted and ultimately futile attempt.  I slowly walked up to the drafting table and then shot my hand out... and caught him immediately.

I popped him into a plastic storage container and then looked up pet stores in Leavenworth.  There was one less than ten blocks from my house, so I drove there right away and bought a cage and coir bedding for him.  I happened to own a heat lamp already, and over the next few weeks I added driftwood, a sunning rock, a live Haworthia, and other accoutrements to his cage.  I had a new pet.  There really wasn't another option; he would have desiccated or starved left to his own devices in my house, and he would have frozen or starved if I put him outside.  And really, this felt fated - he was more than a pet, he was a totem.  The odds of him safely and successfully hitchhiking a ride up to Kansas and then living all summer without moving out of my porch plants only to reveal himself fairly quickly and allow himself to be caught when he needed assistance... the way in which he entered my life as a bridge between my graduate studies and my broader subject matter and between the two geographic locales... I was meant to care for this anole.

Probably due in part to having been wild, I learned in those first couple weeks that though our situation was fated, he wasn't too happy with such a fate; he was constantly brown despite being a green Anolis carolinensis and preferred I not look at him.  Because he was such an audacious hitchhiker (and because I love Douglas Adams), I decided to name him from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  A grumpy, constantly-unhappy-but-required-to-stick-around male companion - clearly his name was Marvin.

I'm not sure quite how old Marvin is now, but he's definitely reaching the upper range of his projected lifespan.  Given that he was hitchhiking in July 2013, he's likely at least three years old already, but he could be even older than that.  Captive anoles can live to be five to seven years old, so I hope he has another several years in him, but he did have enough of a wild life prior to living with me that he could have picked up parasites or similar stressors that contribute to the shortened wild anole lifespans that rarely top three years.  Last summer, I had to bring Marvin to the vet to have a cyst/tumor aspirated that had grown on his neck; I was pretty certain he was going to die from either the cyst/tumor or an infection introduced by the aspiration or from the stress of it all, but he seems to have rebounded.  How he got the cyst/tumor in the first place, though, is unclear and it already seemed to recur once but fortunately then went back into remission.

Though I didn't set out to have an anole, this anole set out to have me and I will be very sad when he passes.  For now, he's still being his adorable, grumpily-brown-90%-of-the-time self.  I did manage to sneak a couple photos of him in his green state over the years as you can see below, but the middle photo is more representative of his general mood.

My Pet Crested Gecko Lex

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I've had a pet crested gecko for a little over a year.  Her name is Lex (though I'm not 100% certain that she's a female yet, since juvenile crested geckos don't develop visible sexual organs until they are typically a little larger than she is - but since she presently lacks the visible sexual organs of a male, I'm going with female for now). 

She's really a fabulous pet for me - Lex requires very little effort in the way of care (no augmented temperature requirements, likes to live in a vivarium that dovetails nicely with my interests in keeping houseplants, primarily eats a reconstituted powder which minimizes the need to buy/keep insects) and is great fun to watch.  She has a surprising range of colors and is gorgeous in each of them.  And she will, with good care and some luck, live a long time - the average lifespan of captive crested geckos is estimated to be 10 to 20 years!

Yellowstone Bison Culling

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A great op-ed, "The Bison Roundup the Government Wants to Hide," was just published in The New York Times about the politically motivated annual bison cull that takes place in Yellowstone National Park at the taxpayer's expense.  I'm all for the suggestions of the author, Christopher Ketcham, with the clarification that I'd like any seasonal hunting to be restricted to that which encourages an ecological balance as opposed to one based on farm/ranch priorities, fear, or the desire for trophies.

Printing Online - A Review of Overnight Prints, AdoramaPix, Fracture, and Moo

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Printing can be a particularly fraught experience for artists.  We care more than most about print quality, color accuracy, paper texture and weight, reflectivity, and so on.  Admittedly I haven't tried an exhaustive range of companies providing this service, but I always appreciate others' reviews so I figured I'd detail my own experiences here.

Overnight Prints

I used to order from Overnight Prints for business and greeting cards; they had decent quality products at the low end of the price range when printed well, and though their color calibration/correction was often off (thus not printed well), they would reprint if asked when a batch was unacceptable.  Their online software was quite easy to use and their item creation instructions were very clear.

However, the last time I used them they wildly oversaturated the color on about 80% of my products, and this time when I requested a reprint they told me that the pieces were within the range of acceptable variation and refused to replace or refund the pieces.  I had to eat the loss, and it was a fairly sizable order for me (though I'm sure it was a drop in the bucket for them).  Since they have always been so hit or miss in terms of quality and have now changed their customer service policy and are unwilling to reprint poor quality runs, I will not be using or recommending their services again (I also made this politely but firmly clear to the customer service representative, who did not care).

My original rating for Overnight Prints: B- (moderate-to-low erratic quality, low cost, good software, good customer service)
My revised rating for Overnight Prints due to refusal to reprint poor runs: D (moderate-to-low erratic quality, low cost, good software, poor customer service)

AdoramaPix

While I was futilely arguing with Overnight Prints about that last order, I happened to need to make a photo book for an upcoming exhibition.  I'd never made one before, and after doing extensive online research I ended up going with AdoramaPix.  They had a reputation for providing a reasonable price point, high quality pieces, and fairly accommodating online software (which was particularly a relief in the face of a couple companies that required you to download complex proprietary software).  The process of creating a photo book with AdoramaPix was quite smooth, and the end result was even nicer than I had anticipated. It looked professionally printed and bound despite the fact that it was a single book run, and the price was lower than I expected for such a high quality item.   I will note as my one negative regarding the book creation process that their FAQ and online forums on photo books are quite out of date, though, and none of their contact points for their FAQ/forums/Facebook responded to me when I asked a couple questions.

Next, a student of mine wanted to print photos onto glass.  I told her the few reviews I could find online of the company she wanted to do the latter with, Fracture, weren't so hot.  She ordered a couple samples from them just to see, and it turned out that the panning of the technique online due to high noise in the end imagery was justified.  The Fracture prints were not acceptable for exhibition.  I recommended she try AdoramaPix to test out their aluminum prints, which I thought might be similar aesthetically to what she was going for but with improved quality.  She ordered a couple samples of the aluminum prints, and they were much better than the Fracture pieces.  She then ordered a large batch, and again the quality was high.

Then AdoramaPix decided to branch their business out into printing greeting cards.  I was in the market for a new printer for these since I'd decided not to do business with Overnight Prints anymore, so I gave them a go.  Their online software for greeting cards was atrocious.  It wasn't even functional in Chrome, and in Firefox it was still a huge mess - it randomly readjusted the size, typeface, and placement of text on the card; wouldn't display the software correctly in any browser such that I had to zoom out to about 50% scale to access necessary tools that I then had to try to use properly while tiny; and some other similarly frustrating issues.  I decided to risk trying the cards out anyway since my other experiences with the company had been so positive and left a long comment in the order asking for their review and oversight since the software was so glitched out.  I also asked them to review the paper choices I'd made as inexplicably they don't have images of all their papers viewable online (and in many cases the few viewable ones they do have must be independently found in videos on YouTube as opposed to through the building process on their own website).  Dealing with all this grief paid off in a big way, though, when I received my order: these greeting cards also exceeded my expectations and knocked even well-printed items from Overnight Prints out of the water in terms of their professional, high-end appearance.  The printers had clearly read my requests as not only did the cards turn out great despite the software, but they also adjusted the paper type of one of the cards to better suit the product.

I recently reordered some cards, and it appears that they're working on the greeting card software as it was less broken than before - I could use it in Chrome this time - but it does still have some fairly major issues in terms of image and text placement, image rotation, and text size.  I just keep leaving them notes in the order section asking for their review, since that seems to have functioned well so far.

I have now expanded into ordering aluminum and paper photo prints from them as well as the occasional framed print (the framed print software also suffers from weird problems; their online software/site issues are really their Achilles' heel).

I did have to request a redo on a framed print I ordered as there was a scratch/dark hair-like mark on the photo paper (not an actual hair though - it was part of the paper itself).  They requested photo documentation of the problem but then sent me a whole new framed print at no charge.  That means that so far, their customer service is great too, and when I got the new framed print I was happy with the quality.

My rating for AdoramaPix: A (great quality, moderate-to-low cost, poor software/online support, good customer service)

Moo

 I recently had to print off a new batch of business cards, and I needed to move on from Overnight Prints due to their lowered standards.  Honestly, I've been so impressed by AdoramaPix thus far that if they did business cards, too, I would have gone with them.  AdoramaPix currently doesn't offer business cards as an option, however, so I went with Moo.  They have a reputation as being one of the best companies for artists, and I liked that they let me use multiple backs with a consistent front.  Their cards are quite pricey - they cost a little over 35 cents per card at the current size of order I'm making.  For comparison, Overnight Prints charged me around 10 cents per card.  I may end up trying out more printers to see if I can find a more affordable printer, but in the meantime, the cards from Moo are beautiful and I've been asked several times about them by people who have admired their quality (and design, but that's my own!). 

My rating for Moo: A- (great quality, high cost, good software, customer service thus far unnecessary)

Parrot Intelligence

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I'm now more than halfway through Carl Safina's Beyond Words (I discussed my interest in the book previously in this post) and the experiences and information he relates are very powerful messages about animal intelligence.  A much shorter but no less potent read is one of this week's The New York Times Magazine articles entitled "What Does a Parrot Know About PTSD?"

I've long believed that many people, either consciously or subconsciously, choose to deny the breadth and depth of animal intelligence out of guilt about their own practices and values.  Eating meat, supporting factory farming, purchasing leather/ivory/horn/bone products, damaging the environment, keeping pets in traumatic conditions as per the article (and judging animals solely as property in the eyes of the law) - these types of decisions are easier to explain away when the victims aren't sentient.

Sempervivums & Sedums

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Sempervivums and sedums can be quite cold tolerant.  Both my sempervivum collection and my Sedum dasyphyllum 'Major' are spending almost every day outdoors.  The sempervivum winter coloration is especially compelling; the Sedum dasyphyllum 'Major' is a more attractive plant in its fresh juvenile form but it has an oddly compelling noodle-like appearance as it ages and winterizes.

Domestic Terrorists Currently Occupying Unprotected Wildlife Sanctuary in Oregon

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From the Audubon Society of Portland:

The occupation of Malheur by armed, out of state militia groups puts one of America’s most important wildlife refuges at risk. It violates the most basic principles of the Public Trust Doctrine and holds hostage public lands and public resources to serve the very narrow political agenda of the occupiers. The occupiers have used the flimsiest of pretexts to justify their actions—the conviction of two local ranchers in a case involving arson and poaching on public lands. Notably, neither the local community or the individuals convicted have requested or endorsed the occupation or the assistance of militia groups.

Apparently a set of keys was found outside by the "militia" thus letting them inside the small, unprotected bird sanctuary.  This ingenious hostile takeover is made even more impressive since while they are claiming to have 150 occupiers, journalists on scene are reporting only 6-15.

The real problem is that these terrorists' repeated claims to federal land are damaging the environment.  From the Center for Biological Diversity on the 2014 Cliven Bundy illegal grazing debacle in Nevada:

"The Gold Butte area south of Mesquite is officially designated as critical habitat for the tortoise – an area essential for its long term survival. But the BLM continues to allow grazing by trespass cattle.
... 
Despite having no legal right to do so, cattle from Bundy's ranch have continued to graze throughout the Gold Butte area, competing with tortoises for food, hindering the ability of plants to recover from extensive wildfires, trampling rare plants, damaging ancient American Indian cultural sites and threatening the safety of recreationists."

The United States needs to step up on federal land management so this type of terroristic action doesn't become seen as a viable option.  These armed sovereignists want to become martyrs or messiahs, but what they really need is to be imprisoned and fined.

Artfunkel Game Developer Using My Imagery

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This is neat - a developer in the very, very early stages of creating an art collection game called Artfunkel asked me if he'd be able to use my artwork.  I checked the game out, and it's educational and attributed, so I said sure!  Here are a few of his initial Prindaville card tests.  I'll update as the game build progresses.

More Plant Blooms

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I love watching my plants flower - it's both a pretty spectacle and also typically a sign they're being well cared for.  So far this month I've got a Neoregelia 'Golden Chalice,' Rhipsalis mesembryanthemoides, Mammillaria plumosa, and Gasteria liliputana in flower!

If you recall, my Rhipsalis pilocarpa was in bloom a few weeks ago and its flowering somewhat coincided with my Rhipsalis mesembryanthemoides flowering - so I cross-pollinated (and also self-pollinated) and have some seed pods growing!  I'll be interested to see if anything ends up germinating.

Climate Science in the Public Eye

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I was sick recently, so I had the time to watch the television series Newsroom.  One clip really stuck with me:

Now given that this is from a fictional television series, viewers could be forgiven for thinking it an exaggeration.  But the facts check out, though sadly a few are outdated and have increased negatively in the meantime.

What really interests me apart from the immediate content is that the whole reason it's funny (admittedly in a macabre sense) is because most scientists are a little less depressingly stark about our situation.  Why is that?

It turns out that a recent paper "Duality in Climate Science" published in Nature Geoscience takes scientists and the media to task for underselling our ecological position due to fear of politically and professionally calamitous ramifications.  The paper summary reads:

Delivery of palatable 2 °C mitigation scenarios depends on speculative negative emissions or changing the past. Scientists must make their assumptions transparent and defensible, however politically uncomfortable the conclusions.  

What that's saying is that unless we can time travel backwards or develop technology in the future that we don't know exists yet, we're screwed.  Here's another not-at-all-comforting review of this and other papers saying in part, "The latest installment of depressing news is the delightful prediction that dozens of American cities are at risk of drowning before the century is out, turning places like New Orleans and Miami into the lost kingdom of Atlantis."

Blooming Cacti

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I've had a few cacti blooming lately - my Rhipsalis pilocarpa, Schlumbergera truncata, and one of my two Gymnocalycium friedrichii.  Here are some images of the beauty!  Unfortunately I don't have a good photo of the Gymno because its bloom was infested with aphids - in spraying it with neem oil, the aphids have died but the bloom is also not doing so hot.   I'll get a photo to share at some point, though!

 Interesting things to note about the below two plants: the R. pilocarpa flowers apparently have little scent but what there is smells like a musty basement; the S. truncata is a very difficult plant for me to grow and this is the first time I've gotten one to flower; the S. truncata was purchased on sale without flowers and I did not know it had two different bloom colors.

Carl Safina’s Beyond Words Is on My Reading List

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I've recently placed an interlibrary loan request for Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel by Dr. Carl Safina based on both the Jezebel interview and the New York Times review; I've always felt that while there may well be alien life in outer space, there's certainly alien life here.

Golden OPEN Acrylics

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I am not a fan of using normal acrylic paint in a fine art context.  Obviously other artists use them well, but I find they dry way too fast and permanently for my liking and additives like retardant and unlocking sprays don't do enough to mitigate that.  I've always loved watercolor paints, and also am quite fond of oils, so I used to think I just wouldn't work with acrylics and that'd be that.  

Then I started doing short-term artist residencies.

While some of my residencies had subject matter perfectly suited to watercolor, others had subjects that seemed to call for a more heavy-bodied paint... but the timeline of the residencies meant that oil paints wouldn't dry prior to transportation.  I happened to have been gifted a full boxed Modern Colors set of Golden OPEN Acrylics at the 2010 College Art Association (CAA) Conference from a very nice representative, and so while on residency in 2014 when faced with one of these subjects that wanted a more substantial paint, I tried the OPEN Acrylics out.  It was a revelation.  These acrylics feel like what I always wanted the medium to be: they dry much more slowly than normal acrylics but much faster than oils, and yet still have the ease of normal acrylics, too - they can be thinned and cleaned up with water.

My previous dislike of acrylics was so strong that it took a while for this new world order to sink in, but there's really no denying it now - OPEN Acrylics are one of my favorite mediums.   

This is not a sponsored post.

Octopodes

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I learned about the existence of the word "octopodes" yesterday and had to go on a research spree.  Here is what I've gathered: octopuses, octopi, and octopodes are all acceptable pluralizations of octopus.

  • Octopuses is the English pluralization.
  • Octopi stems from a popular misconception that octopus was originally a Latin word - it's actually Greek - and used to be considered grammatically incorrect but has since been used enough to become a viable option.
  • Octopodes comes from the original ancient Greek pluralization.

I have also just learned that despite the accuracy of the above statements, my spell check firmly denies the existence of both octopi and octopodes (and, in fact, pluralizations).  Nevertheless, I'm going to be testing out octopodes as my preferred pluralization for a while.  It has a nice sound.