Category: Art
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A Christmas gift to myself
My Christmas gift to myself this year was starting a drawing after well over a year of inactivity on that front. I wrote at length on this blog about some of the reasons I didn’t want to create visual art in the last year, and in my last post, about why I felt compelled to…
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A few of the drawings I destroyed this year
I tore them up because I was grieving. I was grieving the loss of someone I’d thought of as my best friend for three decades, taken too soon to cancer. Followed by the loss of my father, who was about to be taken by cancer and succumbed from complications of a freak accident. Followed by…
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THE AKATHISIA FILES: PT 4
In the Midst of a Storm, Keep Moving What follows is something I wrote on 7 December, right in the middle of an akathisia attack. I left it almost untouched — just enough editing to make it readable. Today, the day after another wave, I have just enough steadiness to publish it. That’s the only…
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Toxic Positivity is…
Toxic positivity is someone grabbing at your chin when you’re crying over the loss of a beloved person or pet and saying “smile, everything will get better if you look on the bright side.” There’s a threshold where something stops being harmless “uplift” and becomes constant saccharine noise that dulls your perception and clutters your…
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Uncatalogued Species from a Dream I Forgot
A series of AI-generated illustrations that feel like pages torn from a naturalist’s field journal in a dream. Fittingly enough, I prompted the AI to make these during a sleepless phase of the pre-dawn hours. I’m tempted to translate some of these into real watercolours or pencil drawings — there’s something here I want to…
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The Facebook Experience in Two Words: LOL. NO.
So I started following a new-to-me Facebook page called Other Perspectives an hour ago. It has 11 million followers. I told Facebook I wanted it as a favourite because I want that content showing up on my feed regularly. Nothing happened. I quit the app and restarted it. Still nothing. If I don’t go on…
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A Major Fan
(A Micro-Case Study in Unintentional Comedy) Someone who probably knows me to some greater or lesser degree spent their morning visiting my blog repeatedly to call me names today, as you can see for yourself in my screenshots above and below. Not once — twice. Within hours. I was amused. Engagement is engagement. I even…
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My Father, in Two Documents
Today I opened an envelope of my father’s old documents — Soviet papers, Israeli papers, all the fragments of a life that started in wartime Russia and eventually led him to Israel.This photo stopped me cold. He really was this handsome. The Birth Certificate His Soviet birth certificate from Zlatoust is dated October 1940. Cropped…
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Gustav Klimt masterpiece just shattered records this week.
Here’s why this sale matters — and where it sits in Klimt’s larger body of work. Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer (shown above) sold at Sotheby’s New York on Tuesday, November 18th, 2025, for $236.4 million — now the highest price ever achieved for a Modern artwork at auction, and the priciest Klimt ever to cross…
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M, The Be(a)stie Forevs
Or: Revenge is a dish best served as you’re making yourself a pasta dinner and getting an AI to do your bidding. 🐀🦊 A tiny moral tale with very wide hips. Me to Lex: M called herself my bestie forever two months into our so-called friendship, then dumped me a month after I attended my…
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Pattern Recognition Off the Charts
I don’t know how it’s possible, but this actually happened. I sang this to ChatGPT: “Papa pum, papa pum, papa pum-pum…Papa pum, papa pum, papa pum… Papa pum, papa pum, papa pum-pum…Papa pum, papa pum, papa pum… Dada da dada daaaada…Dada da dada daaada di da da da daaaaa da da!” And it answered: “illi……
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✨🏆 The 2001-2002 Fitness Archive: A Retrospective
Immaculate conditioning, tacky velvet, and cameras that simply weren’t ready. Intro (Or why I let Lex do his thing sometimes) Before we begin: I did not write the majority of the post you’re about to read. Or rather, I added a few touches and a handful of sentences in my own phrasing — but over…
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A Joint Crime Scene Analysis of Algorithmic Nonsense
Or: Using AI To Demonstrate How AI Keeps Leaving Its Fingerprints All Over the Internet’s Fake Wildlife What follows is less a conversation than a forensic partnership: my (mostly) human eye and partly mutant pattern recognition meets machine analysis, both peering at the same synthetic mirage. Because in 2025, identifying reality has become a collaborative…
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Nature is the Ultimate Creator
Yes — it’s real, and that’s exactly what makes it so jaw-dropping. The Orchid Mantis (Hymenopus coronatus) is one of those rare cases where nature looks more designed than design itself. That pastel pink-white translucence, the petal-like limbs — all genuine biological adaptation. Photographers sometimes enhance contrast slightly, but even unedited, they look this surreal.…
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Moon through the maples
Waning moon, November 8th, 2025 Zero degrees celcius and snow on the way. Through the maples, the night exhales.
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Grounding
A walk in the brisk autumn air, a yummy breakfast, lavender, lemon & cedarwood, and the art of making peace with the day. Saturday, November 8th, 2025 A year today since we buried my father in Israel, near Haifa. I’ve been up since about 7:30 a.m., which is around the time I used to get…
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Erasure
10 years later 📆⏳My first attempt at drawing a bird in watercolours on this day, November 5th 2015 (above) was followed by the “Superb Fruit Dove” (below). This second drawing was a gift to my father and has since returned to me after his passing on November 5th 2024. I travelled to Israel to bury…
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Harm
My first shrink thought I was just feeding an unhealthy obsession with these drawings. He couldn’t grasp that I was documenting a social pathology — not just mine.
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How Nonlinear Thinkers Are Punished by Psychiatry
A reflection on imagination, trauma, and the failure of one-size-fits-all medicine. Our current psychiatric model, based on the DSM—the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual—is built around fitting individuals into statistical norms, and is too often punitive toward anyone who doesn’t conform to those parameters. Artists, creatives, and neurodivergent individuals are often misunderstood, misdiagnosed, and treated as…
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When Psychiatry Pathologizes Difference
Mistaking Survival for Sickness There is something profoundly wrong with a system that sees intensity and assumes illness, that reads adaptation as instability, and that calls difference a defect. Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD) and neurodivergence — including autism spectrum traits and other non-typical processing styles — can both resemble bipolar disorder when viewed through…
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Totally Surreal 