rinsemiddlebliss

White abstract glyphs on black background

rinsemiddlebliss

"At the mercy of the geography"

Imaginary islands

by AK Krajewska

I've been painting imaginary lands and seas ever since I took the class at Case for Making in June. It's relaxing because I never have a particular landscape in mind, so there's no messing it up. It lets me play with color and wet-on-wet... Continue reading (527 words)

Watercolor painting of green headlands sinking into the sea, in the background an orange sun sets with a small slice of itself above it.

Second-rate synthetics

The uses and misuses of synthetic text

by AK Krajewska

A coworker asked me if I had found a way to get LLMs to generate good writing because he was not satisfied with what he was getting. Like pretty much everyone, we're under pressure to "leverage AI."[1] I looked around, saw... Continue reading (869 words)

The words Language and Violence over blobby colorful watercolor shapes

Ruth Asawa Retrospective at SFMOMA

by AK Krajewska

If you live in San Francisco, you've probably seen Ruth Asawa's artwork. She's best known for her woven wire forms, most often loopy enclosed spheroids, organic forms hung from above that evoke fruit or insect or bird nests. She lived most of her life in San Francisco and she was also commissioned to make many public artworks in San Francisco and the Bay Area. You can kind of come to take her for granted. Continue reading (871 words)

Close crop of a watercolor painting of a bowl of cherries by Ruth Asawa

Angel Island and Corona Heights

by AK Krajewska

I can't get enough of Angel Island. Some days fog obscures its feet, so it seems to float on a cloud in the middle of the San Francisco Bay. Sometimes it rises out of the blue-green water with barely any clouds above, and the white isosceles triangles of sailboats cutting up the waves with white... Continue reading (572 words)

Watercolor painting of Angel Island with mountains behind

Idli obsession

On a mission to make the deceptively simple South Indian breakfast

by AK Krajewska

Idli are an everyday breakfast food and anytime snack in South Indian cuisine. They're small disks of white fluffy dough, about the size of a person's palm and convex on both sides. The flavor is mild, a little bit tangy like a delicate sourdough bread. They serve a role kind of like bread or... Continue reading (2044 words)

A close crop of two bags of whitish grains, one labelled Urad Dal and the other Idli Rava.

Watercolor botanicals

by AK Krajewska

There's a beautiful hydrangea bush in my back yard, and I've been trying to paint it with watercolors. At first, I tried to use the same kind of wet on wet and layering techniques I learned in the landscape painting class last month. It just looked blurry and ugly, though part of that might have... Continue reading (1089 words)

An abstract painting of watercolor blossoms

Herding cats

Clicker training with my cat

by AK Krajewska

Ever since we adopted Shinjuku, I've been wanting to do clicker training with her. It was more of a fun thing than a necessity. She's a very good senior cat who doesn't require behavior modification. She already knew all the important cat stuff, like how to use the litter box and snuggle... Continue reading (1706 words)

A tabby cat looks at the viewer. She is resting on a colorful crochet blanked made of hexagons.

Red Cat Ramen

ラーメン赤猫 (Ramen Aka Neko)

by AK Krajewska

Red Cat Ramen is a gentle workplace comedy about a ramen shop run by cats and one human. Her job is to brush the cats. It's even cuter than it sounds. Because it's set in a workplace, they use mostly polite Japanese. It's about food and cats, two subjects where my Japanese vocabulary is best. Continue reading (956 words)

Drawing of a orange striped cat dressed as a ramen chef shaking out two mesh baskets filled with ramen noodles after taking them off the boil.

Curfews are stupid

The night belongs to everyone

by AK Krajewska

The stupidest rule San Francisco enacted in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 epidemic was a curfew. Many rules enacted then are silly in retrospect which at least made sense at the time based the available knowledge. But a curfew was idiotic. Like, what, do viruses wait until it's dark out to... Continue reading (1192 words)

Snufkin scares the crap out of some policemen with the help of the Groke who is standing right behind him.

Imaginary lands and seas

by AK Krajewska

Last weekend, I took a watercolor class at Case for Making. I waffled a bit if I should sign up for the class after I had already spent so much money on upgraded supplies, but ultimately decided that a 3-hour in-person class focused on the landscapes I keep trying to paint would be worth it. It... Continue reading (979 words)

A close crop of a watercolor painting, suggesting a big of land jutting into the sea