if you haven't heard Nicolas Cage as the text-to-speech on your phone while you scrape silica gel off a chicken nugget so you can feed the nugget to your cat, you haven't lived*

*-had the dream I just had

search the tag "#cherrydish1" to read about this project from the beginning. or don't. see if i care.

The Striptease

or "A Case For Decay"

every step in exploratory turning reveals more of what i'll be working with in the next step. the main thing i fell in love with about turning weird/mysterious material is the sense of discovering something concealed. you strip back the rust of time and reveal what the surface bleaching and oxidation hid. in this case it was a huge range of colors. pinks, browns, reds, yellows.

if you want to see them most brilliant sunsets on the planet you have to go to lantau, across the estuary from macau, near hong kong. this is just what i've heard, i've never been. but the reason the sunsets are so beautiful there is that macau, just to the west, is that it's one of the oldest consistently operating industrialized port cities on the planet, and has had almost zero air quality regulations in that long history.

the sky between lantau and macau is full of poison that catches, refracts, absorbs and separates the sun's light like a toxic prism, scattering supersaturated hues that bleed together like superman ice cream over the water for a couple hours before dusk. it's supposed to be breathtaking. during wildfire season here on the west coast of the usa we'll sometimes get a taste of that asphyxiating, hyperchromatic show on late summer evenings.

rot in wood is like smoke in atmosphere. it lowers quality and reliability and safety by every practical measure, but damn. in the right sort of light it's kinda pretty, right?

you might or might not notice that, unlike the last few projects i've posted on here, this one's small enough in diameter (18"/45cm) to be turned inboard (over the bed of the lathe, where those shavings are collecting). one nice thing about working smaller is that inboard turning is right in the middle of all the machine's tolerances. when turning inboard i can relax a little or, since i'm not good at that, turn iffier/more challenging material.

hollowing this dish (if, indeed, that's what it turns out to be) was without complication, which is more the exception than the rule for this thing so far.

more forthcoming. thanks for reading.

-AW

[31/1] - Started Persona 3 FES, using several mods to make the experience a bit more tolerable. Since I've heard FES isn't a very good port gameplay wise.