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Art: Book on a Blanket

Page six that far in?

Another with a lot of rights and (probably more) wrongs to it. But still mostly hangs together as a thing.

Because alternate text is no place for two pages of text, I’ve elected to quote it here:

[Start of page six]

the bathroom, some laundry detergent, a case of lightbulbs, that sort of thing.

As he started to cross the store’s pharmacy rows, he heard the PA call out his name: “Mr. Ogden, please come to the customer service desk. Mr. Ogden, please come to the customer service desk.”

He paused for a moment. Maybe there was another Ogden there among the endless aisles. Nobody knew he was here, and even if they had known, who would try to call him while out shopping?

He turned his cart around and started for the front of the store, wondering if a friend had seen him as he shopped and then lost him. He had seen a few dozen people with their own carts as he’d gone down his list, but none of them had looked familiar.

At the front desk a curly-haired woman stood next to a teenage girl with brown hair and overalls who was crying in a chair. Before he could say his name, the girl looked up and called, “Dad! I was looking all over for you!”

Ogden turned his head to the side, expecting to see her father behind him, but there was nobody there. He pointed at his face in a question to the girl.

“Mr. Ogden?” the store clerk asked him.

“Charles Ogden, yes. But maybe there’s another man here by my name?”

“Your daughter, Ronda, couldn’t find you.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m sure her father will be here shortly. Must be we are distant cousins, sharing the name. And from her reaction, I’m sure that’s it. We must look quite a lot alike.”

“You mean you’re not her father?” asked the clerk. She turned to the girl. “Is this your daddy?”

“Course he is,” she said, her tears abated but her cheeks still wet. “He’s just kidding around.” Ronda got

[Start of page seven]

up from her seat and stood at the end of my cart. “Let’s go. I have a piano lesson today after we finish shopping.”

Ogden wasn’t sure what to do. “Are you sure you shouldn’t wait for your father?” he asked.

“Quit it,” she said. “It’s getting late as it is.”

He felt he should protest, but the clerk seemed satisfied that he was the girl’s father, and she did too, and so he figured he better talk to her alone, so he turned the cart back towards the pharmacy rows and the girl fell in beside him.

As they got out of earshot, he asked her, “What is all this about? You with the guy in the jeep from earlier?”

“Dad! Cut it out. It stopped being funny five minutes ago,” Ronda said. I asked where she got lost, to which she said, “I went to look at the magazines while you were getting those lightbulbs, and when I came back I couldn’t find you. I ran around half the store, and my anxiety got up. When I started crying the store clerk took me to the front and paged for you.”

“You really believe I’m your father? I bet he’s worried sick for you, probably will page you from the front any moment now. Must be a cousin. Let’s see, there’s Uncle Ernie, Aunt Jessie—though her last name’s not Ogden anymore. There’s that crew I don’t even know their names from down the shore. I met them once at the grands’ fiftieth. Lots of Ogdens aren’t even related enough to know, but some could still look like me.”

“Your Uncle Ernie had strawberry blond hair. I’ve seen the photos. And Aunt Jessie’s last name is Mares,” she said, as though it were recited from a family history book. I can tell you about yourself, too. You like to slap your knee when you laugh real hard, and you say to yourself, ‘Is it? It is,’ when you’re working on

From some thing I threw together to have text for the book image. 2023.

Art: Crayon Calendar Cartoon

Art was simpler as a child.

Somewhere I still have a Christmas plate from kindergarten where we had to draw a picture and they somehow turned it into a plastic plate. All the fingers of each hand come out of a single point. Spooky.

But this, it’s a simple word-replacement joke, instead of pencil you in it’s crayon. I like cartoons and jokes, but they’re tough to make art of, mainly because of the limitations of alternate text. Describing a joke feels wrong, but it also takes a lot of words.

There are lots of web comics, and as I understand it most don’t bother that much with alternate text because it’s sort of beside the point, but it also feels like:

  1. Lots of accessibility users miss out on some funny content.
  2. Having alt-text would make the future of AI-generating art from alt-texts way cooler.

Expanding on the second point, if I used those artificial intelligence image generator sites, I could pull my alt text for this image and see what they come up with. That could be fun, but it would also give some idea of their sophistication—whether their output even vaguely matches the described image.

It was also a lot of fun scribbling out the low-stakes stick-figure drawings, though I probably could have found a better way to give them that crayon-drawn texture.

Abstract Art: shaped figures

Sometimes a strange one slips through.

There’s an interesting article at Wikipedia: Bouba/kiki effect. I don’t know for sure which is which here. Probably kiki on the right, bouba in the middle (the green and red) and who knows what that one or two on the left are?

The diagonal lines and the border are so busy! They distract from the three figures. And they cover two of them. Is the third visiting the others in a cage? Or are we in the cage with that one?

The one on the right doesn’t seem as animate, though. It looks a bit crystalline. The middle seems to have sides to it, a facing side or belly and a backside. The one on the left has ends, but seems the most animate because it is kind of bent, though maybe it’s some kind of a plant-like creature? Growing out of thin air?

Art is weird! Why am I posting this hideous image?!