rinsemiddlebliss
"At the mercy of the geography"
Recent reading
by AK Krajewska
Last weekend I went to a wedding that had a Wolf Hall book club as part of the celebrations. The other conversations also, naturally, drifted to books more generally. As I enthusiastically swapped book recommendations with people, I thought, not for the first time, that few things are as... Continue reading (1489 words)
Expansible Egg and Leomund's Tiny Hut
by AK Krajewska
The Dungeons and Dragons spell Leomund's Tiny Hut bears a strong resemblance to the the Expansible Egg artifact in Jack Vance's short story "Guyal of Sfere." I think it's likely the latter directly inspired the former, and while I couldn't find a direct quote from Gary Gygax saying so,... Continue reading (1655 words)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
