Sounds pretty cool. Nice setup. And I love the patterned cloth in the background.
Makes me want to pull out my 30-year old Roland. lol If only I had a few more lifetimes. I could do all the things!
<3 
<3
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No Cool like the Old Skool 
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@kerdorin - nice gear
@TravelEcho - I’ve been lucky enough to pickup some vintage gear over the decades, i still have a tb-303, and cr8000 analogue gear.
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TB 303… I remember the big brother of a friend who had one with a TR 707 (how can I forget this orange machine 
) middle of the 80’s. I can understand how people can have a museum as home studio.
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Wait! I only see two arms! 
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As a fellow bedroom musician - hopefully not former bedroom musician 
that’s some neat stuff.
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ScienceAlert: Mutant Bacteria Accidentally Recreated One of Van Gogh’s Most Iconic Paintings.
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Well, I mean, recreated is a bit of a strong word…
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Wait wait… I’m sure I’ve seen this exact scene as a Van Gogh, at least online. I think he titled it, " A mixture of two strains of myxobacteria."
Or maybe I got up too early and I’m full of ornery beans. 
By the way, I’m trying to overcome my fear of art this weekend, and tear myself away from my sex romp - I mean my story, to really bear down some paint with vigorous force. Also, is there a way to make a bold line across the screen? I know all I need are three asterisks to make a thin line.
Edit: rather than make a new post to draw attention to myself - and God knows I never try to draw attention to myself, guffaw - I’ll make a little P.S.
Art is some kind of curse. A Purgatory, a Dantean Inferno, a weekend with your mother-in-law, which thank Tanri I’ve never had the pleasure. But it’s like that. Maybe with ice cream.
Musicians will understand this, particularly the keyboard synthesizer players, particularly the prog rockers of which I pretend greatly to be one. We are also arrangers, and engineers if we make our own sounds and effects, and producers after a fashion. We essentially produce a song with a band, particularly if we’re the main song writer, and definitely do if we are the one-man band, which is also my private curse. I’m also the recording engineer / producer and gofer for myself. And I need milk and creamer, but I digress.
Writers, of which I also pretend to be one, are historians, and sociologists, and psychologists, and counselors, and architects, and strategists, and scientists, and it never ends as we’re the Builder of Worlds. And I have the good fortune to try and fit two worlds together, mine and Team Mercury’s quaint little universe, with it’s tidy 70 trillion some odd visitable worlds and then some, maybe way then some for all we know.
Artists are in that same Purgatory-resistant lifeboat, as we find ourselves to be botanists, and zoologists, and historians, and architects, and landscapers, and meteorologists, and color matchers and you get the idea. We’re slaves to pigments and thinners and mediums and groundings and surfaces and brushes, and it seems like we always want something else to add to our arsenals, at least I do. And we have our favorite media we like to paint in, and we might experiment and pull our hairs out one by one with trial and error and comedies of error, and we might learn something and we might throw it in the trash, depending on how happy we’re feeling at any given moment.
So I’m trying to turn Liquitex and Master’s Touch acrylics into Golen Opens with their incredible secret ingredient, sold separately, enabling any acrylic to become an Open Acrylic. And it kind of sort of works, as long as you get the mixture right, and don’t forget that you must add as you go as you add more paint, and I always forget and I’m adding more and the stuff that’s lean is already drying out, and I add some water to bring the lean stuff back from near death and it sort of works but not completely and GRAH! 
Acrylics are their own blessed curse. So darn convenient as they’re like oils you clean with soap and warm water, except they lie to you, they’re their own special pocket universe of Purgatory, where if you don’t learn how it wants to behave you’ll end up with less hair that isn’t turning gray and more hair that is. And it fights me and protests “Oh I thought you wanted me to dry out in five minutes,” except no I didn’t and why aren’t you like oils, and of course silly Human I’m ACRYLICS doncha know. Well GRAH! 
So my sky is… well, I don’t hate it. Much. It’s dark, and nighty, and I managed to get the horizon sort of the light shade I want, and the sky is kind of the right shade of brownish-greenish-pththalo blue I want, though blending it right was its own frustrating Purgatory and I should probably have used a larger brush and just cleaned the darn thing between shades rather than use the canvas as a palette like only idiots do. But I did and now I’m grumpy and will either go back to my sex romp - I mean story, and fall in love with what I remotely know I’m doing, or fire up Desert Combat and kill miscreant militants. Killing bad guys sounds like fun right now. GRAH! 
I wonder if I’m actually an oil painter and a watercolor artist, with occasional flings with acrylics. I managed to resist throwing open the Dick Blick and Jerry’s Artarama sites to the Golden Open pages and ordering $300-plus worth of paints. Again! For Hirk’s sake, I’ve probably got a gallon of oils to work with that are slow drying and keep their colors near perfectly when dry, and at least half a liter of watercolors which are a dream to work with compared to acrylics, may they… not seduce me too much… oy. I think I have a gallon and a half of that…
Maybe I should try interpretive dance. 
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Fascinating for sure, and a bit of a stretch even for clickbait. lol
A;though I find your struggles highly entertaining (especially the way you express them in writing), I think you should stop beating yourself over the head because you are MENSA (if I read you right above somewhere) and therefore should immediately do everything perfectly, and just do what fires you up and makes you happy and deeply satisfied with yourself and the world. The deep joy of the journey; not the destination.
I’m happy to know that you restrained yourself from spending even more money instead of giving yourself the time and space to learn. That can be a hell of a trap. 
When we come from the space of curiosity and focus and realise that the creation of art is a lifelong journey, an apprenticeship that never ends (thank heavens!) no matter what the medium, we can relax and choose to create what we want, or even not do anything from time to time.
Personally, I have realised that my Studio is in too much of a chaotic state at this time for me to continue painting in there. Though I am still sketching daily (inks and watercolours), I have begun the enormous task of re-organising and de-cluttering the Studio. Slowly. It may take months before I feel excited to get in there and pick up my oils again. If I don’t feel excited to paint there is no point to picking up a brush.
It has been a long time coming this idea that things don’t have to happen instantaneously; that everything true and good in life happens slowly over time.
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Yeaahhh… yeaahhh… That would definitely be me. And your advice would definitely be good advice. And I should take it to heart. I really should. Really…
Meh, being a Human is hard. We’re complicated. And those “instruction manuals / handbooks” sprinkled all through our cultures are helpful. Somewhat. The problem is we’re complicated. We’re even self-complicating. Meh. I’m going to be venting my frustrations at myself through Nigel in upcoming chapters of my story, because being Human is a weird thing, full of pitfalls and complications and contradictions and failings and… stuff. My complication is that I’m demanding of myself and others, but moreso myself. So it’s not the acrylics’ fault as it’s actually a fairly benign paint with qualities that really aren’t arcane or anything. Frying bacon right is death defying in comparison. Unless you’re among those oddballs who like crispy salty charcoal.
As any wife would say, “Honey, you’re obsessing” Contrary. Stubborn. Petulant. There are all kinds of words for it, and I’m all the above. Remember, I’m a Human, I’m complicated. What a predicament. I definitely shouldn’t be having such angst over something so fun and cool. Especially since I know how to darn well paint. With acrylics no less, my medium of choice for decades. Except it’s really watercolors now. And oils. Which actually are only marginally better, and have their own issues. Which are easy to ignore when I’m not using them. Human nature again.
But using this place as a blog and impromptu psychobabbletherapy is kind of fun and stress relieving, even when I’m not actually all that stressed. It’s just that… Human nature thing, it’s weird. Eh, I’ll get over it. Someday.
Now where are those interpretive dance videos? 
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“Meatbags”
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What did you capture it with? That’s an extremely dense starfield.
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Captured it with Canon 350d, lens - jupiter 11 (135mm) 1600 iso, 29x5 min
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Seriously nice. I am impressed! 
Though I have a 10" newtonian, I have never attempted photography. My youngest brother dabbles in it. I will have to share that pic with him.
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You’d better start doing astrophotos! Then you can really understand how tiny your problems are, that makes your relatioship with life more simple and clear
A sort of self-help therapy
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Oh yes, I often walk out at night and look at the stars to put everything into perspective. I find it very calming…until the coyotes start yipping about 20 yards away… Then I go back inside.
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What’re they gonna do, blow themselves up in your face?
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