View from the Lake @viewfromthelake - Tumblr Blog

Posts

Notable blog post categories: My Posts (Meaning original posts, not reblogs) | Art Newsletter | Comics Reading |Doctor Who marathon | <3<3<3<3<3

#pinned post

fforsythiaaa

Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as “problematic” in class and our professor was like, “That’s cool, but ‘problematic’ doesn’t really mean anything. It means that the thing you’re describing has a problem, and in and of itself that’s not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else it’s not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like you’re trying to say that this is bad, but you don’t want to say ‘bad.’ Is that right?”

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I can’t help but think of this professor being like, “Good starting point, now let’s get specific.” I think when we have to commit to saying “that’s ___” it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever we’re claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes it’s art, and it should be full of problems, because that’s what art is.

boomer-mythology-destroyer

petrapixel

indie web resources for making your own website! :]

decided to make a little masterpost of all my resources. if you like, follow me on neocities / buy me a coffee!

First Steps

How to create your first website

Common Questions

Common Mistakes

Code Quality Guide

Troubleshooting Guide

Neocities Tips

Beginner Tutorials

How to load the same layout on every page

CSS Positioning/Layout Tutorial

Cachebusting

Custom Font Tutorial

Tools etc.

Layout Generator

Widgets for free Neocities accounts

Cheatsheet

Helpful Sites

Self-study Checklist

Coding Quizzes

Code Snippets

CSS Image Filters

My VSCode Setup

Preview Plugin

List of Cliques

List of Webrings

Webring Script

Advanced Tutorials

Git Tutorial

node/npm tutorial

Webpack Tutorial

Eleventy (11ty) Tutorial

Google Sheets API Tutorial

I know HTML, CSS, and JS. Now what?

Let's reclaim the web together! :)

legacy-expo

Drew Struzan was probably best known for his movie posters, but we will always cherish his many, many contributions to our bookshelves - a master, and an inspiration.

beyond-andromeda

Mara 👏 Jade 👏 did 👏 not 👏 wear 👏 a 👏 catsuit!

From Heir to the Empire and Dark Force Rising

I will never forgive the artists of the Thrawn Trilogy comics for ignoring Zahn’s writing and giving Mara a skintight sleeveless catsuit.

Did you forget about her iconic tiny blaster???

The one that she conceals in her sleeves??

WHERE IS THE TINY BLASTER SUPPOSED TO GO?

Weather: June 1, 2026

Cat plays theremin

the sustained note with the big-eyed stare… like… yes that sound is a perfect auditory representation of what is going on in the cat’s brain

Dudes who want an A.I. girlfriend should instead be sold a wind-up mechanical sexy rabbit that struts back and forth and says "Come up and see me sometime! Come up and see me sometime!" in a sort of Mae West voice. It works without electricity and doesn't waste computer chips.

#my posts

lakechrisphotog

Farmer's Market, August 30th, 2025

In the short time since that all-purpose touchscreen computer that we’ve taken to calling a “phone” has appeared in everyone’s pocket, I feel like it’s been insinuating itself more and more into different areas of my life. I’ve happily collected a menagerie of convenient apps for different purposes. But for everything that you decide to manage with your phone, you increase the number of times you unlock your phone to look at it, and therefore you increase the opportunity to look at the various big tech social media platforms - all of them designed in the image of slot machines and all of them doing everything they can to anger the blood and increase “engagement.” I felt like this was doing a lot to not only waste my time but to numb my creative mind.

Over the last couple years, I’ve been starting to take steps to decrease my reliance on the phone and increase my sense of actually being an active participant in my life. This has, over time, added up to a stack of various notebooks with different purposes.

About two years ago, I felt like long spans of time could go by without me really remembering a lot of things that happened. Days were just coming and going. I decided to start keeping a small journal specifically dedicated to just jotting down little lists of things that happened in a given day, eventually settling on the format of each two-day spread being a week’s calendar. More recently, it occurred to me that the daily to-do lists, grocery lists, and other notes that I was using Google Keep for were causing me to unlock my phone many more times a day than I otherwise would, each time an opportunity to get stuck “just checking something” and waste time. So I evolved this little notebook into something I carried with my everywhere, with not only weekly calendar pages but various lists of information I wanted at my fingertips on post-it notes in the front and back of the book. This has been a big win. I love this little thing. The notebook itself is just a cheap thing they carry at Walmart that costs something like three dollars. I’m on my second one. It’s good to have something I can refer back to regarding little things that happened, things I did, people I talked to, etc. “When was that big hailstorm?” “What’s the name of that new neighbor up the street?” “Oh, so-and-so’s birthday is coming up next week.”

I had been tracking workouts in an app called FitNotes, but I got to thinking that it’s such a limited and specific amount of information that I’m tracking that it could just be a simple paper log. The main convenience of FitNotes is that you can set it up to calculate what plates you need to use to get a specific amount of weight on a bar, and that was actually pretty easily replicated by taping a couple of tables of information into the back of the book. I do also frequently copy this data over to a LibreOffice spreadsheet on my home computer, which also has the historical data I exported from FitNotes.

My sketchbook! I’ve actually been keeping a sketchbook for years, since roughly 1998. I have a shelf full of these. I don’t always draw a lot, so sometimes they fill up fast, and sometimes one book lasts three years. When I was in high school I either read or heard an interview with comedian Joel Hodgson where he recommended keeping a series of sketchbooks and numbering them so you have a place to put ideas as they come to you. This might have been my introduction to the concept of “catching ideas.”

This is my Commonplace Book. This was a new concept to me only recently. A recommended YouTube video introduced me to the idea of a commonplace book, which was described as a “journal of other people’s thoughts.” When I’m reading, or listening to something, or watching a movie - really whenever I’m exposed to anyone else’s ideas - if something jumps out at me I might put in a bookmark or jot a note somewhere and later put it in my commonplace book. This comes from a similar impulse to the one that inspired the first journal I wrote about up above. Often when reading, something will stand out to me, but later the memory of it will fade. This isn’t a log of every book I read (I have a LibreOffice spreadsheet for that), but rather a place to collect these things I encounter that I find to me meaningful or helpful or that I want to be sure to remember.

I’ve always been the sort of person who thinks new technology is neat, but it’s been nice to take stock and prune back some of the technology in my life that hasn’t actually been making a positive contribution, and to consider in what circumstances paper is actually better.

chrislakeart.com

Subscribe to my art newsletter at https://chrislakeart.beehiiv.com/

#art newsletter #journaling #commonplace journal #commonplace book #my posts

notaplaceofhonour

Ryan Gosling’s career has just been one long quest to climb the Warner Bros water tower

notaplaceofhonour

that man has been trying to climb this tower since he was 16. he has asked multiple times, and every time they said no, but now he’s famous enough & variety was able to convince them to do a shoot on the tower. it all led here. it was all for this.

notaplaceofhonour

I’m obsessed with the implication that this was a coming-of-age ritual where a boy becomes a man, like a bar mitzvah

viewfromthelake

Now let the Animaniacs out of there.

beautifulscreaminglady

derinthescarletpescatarian

Hero

Ten years ago I went to a temporary Star Trek exhibit at the University of Iowa Main Library. They are the keepers of Nicholas Meyers' papers, and they also have a massive collection of zines - Star Trek and otherwise. I got to see Nicholas Meyer talk in the auditorium. He shared a lot of great Star Trek memories as well as Iowa City memories. He had some mysterious project he had some sort of involvement in that he wasn't allowed to talk about called Star Trek: Discovery.