Art on Janusworx

Make Bad Things

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 10:54:10 +0530

Amanda says,

“Make bad things, instead of making nothing”

Something similar that’s been drummed into my head innumerable times over the years, by many mentors:

“If you cannot do it well, do it badly.” :)

If you love doing something, if you want to do something … do it.
Does not matter how poorly or badly its done.
You’re going to love it nonetheless.

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Ursula Vernon on Unrealistic Expectations and Eating Bread

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 12:50:35 +0530

If you’re ever feeling guilty about not cooking a fresh home-cooked meal, a reminder that people in cities historically either had cooks or ate at food stalls, going back to Ancient Greece. Ancient Egypt, too, although since everybody ate bread, beer, and onions, less of a thing.

It’s a weird quirk of our obsession with nuclear families that everybody is expected to have time, skill, and equipment to cook daily and that if you’re a woman, particularly, you are a lesser person if you aren’t casually able to cook every day with random fresh ingredients.

Don’t buy into that. People since forever have hired cooks, gone to inns, lived in extended families where it wasn’t always your turn to cook, or ate such simplified diets that it was less of an issue.

You haven’t failed at a normal human task,
you have been sold an unrealistic expectation and told it was a normal human task.
Go get takeout.
Or beer, bread, and onions.
Eat cheese and some dates.
Relax.

— Ursula Vernon via, Diane Duane

I stumbled across Ursula from her art.

Art courtesy, Ursula Vernon

And then I realised she is an accomplished children’s author

And she does not stop there, she writes Hugo award winning books for adults across genres; horror, fantasy and romance.¹

And talk about making art from pain, she fucked cancer right in the eye!

Read all about her long journey here!
And if it does not inspire you, and make you shed a tear, I’ll eat my hat.

I’d say she’s a female Neil Gaiman. But let’s face it. She’s far more talented and kicks ass. Gaiman is the male T Kingfisher! ↩︎

Poor Ceres Always Gets the Short End of the Stick

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 08:08:52 +0530

Courtesy, NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA, Public Domain, via Wikipedia

I just finished Tamsyn Muir’s Nona, last month.
And of course, I’m now stuck along with the rest of the world waiting for Alecto to come along.¹ In the meanwhile I’m having fun with the rest of the world, dissecting the old books to pieces with various pieces of headcanon and wild theories, one of the popular ones being trying to find analogies between the houses of the books and our solar system

And then I ran into this little head exploder² …

Which made me remember this, on the Expanse³ …

And all I could then think of, was Aww, poor Ceres!
No matter what universe, dimension or time period, it’s always oppressed and languishing.
Here’s to me finding some piece of fiction, someday, where Ceres is all powerful!

Tamsyn, please give us the book now! I kid, I kid! If I can patiently wait for the old man across decades as he weaves his saga, I can just as patiently wait for you ↩︎
via sentientcitizen on Tumblr ↩︎
the best scifi I’ve read ↩︎

On How the Kubernetes v1.29 Logo Came About

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 17:00:20 +0530

Kubernetes v1.29 was released a couple of days ago.
And just like every other release before it, it has a distinct name and theme (Mandala) as well as its own unique logo. In whose creation, I’m proud to say, I had a part to play!

The logo! Look, how pretty!

It all began when I helped the v1.29 Release Lead, mentee and trouble-maker in general, Priyanka Saggu set up her blog in 2018. I taught her all about CRAP¹ and I think all those crappy lessons lingered and made an impression.
So when it came time to design the release’s logo, she asked me if I could pitch in and help, because she was running short on time. It sounded like fun, so I said, Hell Yeah!

Partners in Crime aka Spitballing aka Brainstorming
#

Priyanka was very clear headed on her brief for what the logo was to be about.

Universal: We need to celebrate the fact that this project has folks all over the world, working on it.
Singularly Recognisable: It had to be recognised as the 1.29 logo at a glance at various scales

Everything else was up for grabs.
Thoughts meandered from parodying popular memes, like we do in our talks …

to cheeky play, with popular media like the old folks did, to seeking inspiration from music lyrics and nature patterns.
Priyanka then hit upon something else she wished to incorporate in the design. Could it have Indian elements? That led us down more fun alleys in the beautiful maze that is Indian Art. Across the length and breadth of our multicultural nation; we checked out everything …

from Warli art,

courtesy, Wikipedia

to Kalamkari

courtesy, Wikipedia

through Madhubani

courtesy, Wikipedia

before we settled on Mandala

courtesy, Sambeet D, Pixabay

Why Mandala?
#

Because it satisfied both the conditions of the brief, beautifully and succinctly.

Nearly every culture, from Hinduism to Buddhism to Mayan to Christianity, has some spin on the patterns and the symbols that make up the Mandala. It represents the cosmos and is used across the world. To our minds, nothing could be more universal than this art form
And because it is singularly recognisable.

Here it is in a slack chat, as an emoji²

It’s pretty distinctive! And as you look at it, at ever increasing sizes, more details emerge.
The midsized image I posted above is pretty detailed, but you can go watch it in all its uncompressed glory here³

Putting It All Together
#

The rest was then, figuring out the details.
Since one of us has quite limited design skills, that were rusty to boot⁴ and the other one had no time⁵, we decided to go look for a liberally licensed Mandala image, that we’d use as a base. We went through quite a few images, before we stumbled across Fibrel Ojalá’s beautiful creations.
And once that was done, it was just a matter of structuring it, the way we wanted it to look. We used Annapurna SIL⁶ for the text and Inkscape to put it all together.
The whole process took us a week, from start to finish.
It was both, a joy and a privilege to contribute to this release.

P.S. The Easter Egg
#

I thought it’d take a little longer than it did, but you folks are more eagle eyed than I thought possible!
Yes, that’s my little homage to Devanagari, the script lots of Indian langugages use for their writing. If you read the symbols in the diamonds clockwise, beginning at nine o’clock, they’re Devangari numerals that read 1.29 🙂

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P.P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list!
Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe!
P.P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

I know very little design, but what little I do know is burned into my psyche because of Robin Williams and her CRAPpy principles, I learnt in the late 90s ↩︎
apologies for the potato quality of the screenshot ↩︎
You’ll need Annapurna SIL for the text to render right ↩︎
Me ↩︎
Priyanka. She really can draw, though. I mean, have you seen her sketches? ↩︎
I saw it used in a hymnbook, a decade ago and loved it at first sight ↩︎

Free! Not Cheap.

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 02 Mar 2020 05:45:00 +0530

I found this image on Austin Kleon’s blog a few days ago, and it set me to thinking about these newsletters of mine.

I would love to think of them, the same way.
They are free, but definitely not cheap :)
Not to toot my own horn, but for all their recent brevity, it still is a process that involves a lot of reading, and thinking and curating and writing. (and a whole lot of slogging)

So yes, in that sense, it’s an expensive labour of love.
I’d like to think of it as something more than free, definitely not cheap but a gift, my gift to you.
Like Seth writes,

A gift costs the giver something real. It might be cash (enough that we feel the pinch) but more likely it involves a sacrifice or a risk or an emotional exposure. A true gift is a heartfelt connection, something that changes both the giver and the recipient.

So true! It works because you accept my gift with grace.
Like our traditional “Namaste” or the Zulu, “Sawubona”, you truly see me.
You acknowledge me and give of your time and your attention and your insight.

And most importantly, you push me to do more.

More Seth,

The key is that the gift must be freely and gladly accepted. Sending someone a gift over the transom isn’t a gift, it’s marketing. Gifts have to be truly given, not given in anticipation of a repayment. True gifts are part of being in a community (willingly paying taxes for a school you will never again send your grown kids to) and part of being an artist (because the giving motivates you to do ever better work).

Plus, giving a gift feels good.

Yes, it does. And I’m grateful you choose to love this craft of mine.

Art on Janusworx

Make Bad Things

Ursula Vernon on Unrealistic Expectations and Eating Bread

Poor Ceres Always Gets the Short End of the Stick

On How the Kubernetes v1.29 Logo Came About

Partners in Crime aka Spitballing aka Brainstorming #

Why Mandala? #

Putting It All Together #

P.S. The Easter Egg #

Free! Not Cheap.

Partners in Crime aka Spitballing aka Brainstorming
#

Why Mandala?
#

Putting It All Together
#

P.S. The Easter Egg
#