Tatto For You

I just have to acknowledge the stellar and utterly deserved success of a fellow Aussie, a fellow creative and some-time fellow spec fic con panelist, Shaun Tan , who today was announced to have won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Prize ! WOO-HOO! And this on the back of an Academy Award [TM] in Animated Short for the Lost Thing . Wonderful, wonderful... Well done, sir.

Well, I just formulated a reply to a certain lady in the USofA only to have the email bounce. So, I thunk to myself, how can I get the response to her. Well, my thunking proceeded, hows about making it a blog post, that way she just might stumble upon it. So here it is... (apologies to long time Sundergirdians if I repeat myself) Dear Caroline, I have indeed read your email and here I am replying (at last!!!) just cause I can and, well, because more importantly you had the goodness to write so a reply is the least I can do. As to advice about writing, I always find this a perplexing question - I am not a product of some tribe of formal training, it is an intuitive process for me, learning by doing, rather than the application of set rules. I am sure there are rules rolling about in this great intuitive blob but they are not what I am most aware of (argh! I ended a sentence with a preposition!!!) Probably the best formal "rule" given by another author is: Plot is Character i...

from: JAMES H. to: tiangotlost@gmail.com date: Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 8:15 AM subject: Young & Dumb A friend got me this tattoo years ago and I was told it meant "fear no man". Being young and dumb as most 18 year olds are, I didn't bother to make sure. Now after looking into it a little more, I'm not sure what it is. Please help!! 棺材佬 means "coffin man". However, the middle character of 木見才 or 木貝才 does not exist in Chinese character list. Tattoos with exact same error can be seen here & here .

How does one go on after a silence of two months? A strange thing it is to disappear so abruptly - all I can say by way of some manner of compensation is that there has been A LOT of good work going on for the next Half-Continent story (rather than the much anticipated Harlequin romance set in outback Australia... sorry about that folks, I know you were all longing for it so :) - a synopsis written, various passages penned and muchas muchas muchas research and invention going on. The upshot right now of this is that in going much deeper into the construction and function and crewing of a ram I have discovered that some of the information about gastrines and rams given in MBT is now revised. I must confess myself a tad perplexed: how am I to proceed? The normal process is to present your world full-formed upon the world, an unshakable rock of continuity and consistency. Yet here I am tweaking and changing and - more properly - refining ideas all the time, as I have always done. What con...

from: Nick to: tiangotlost@gmail.com date: Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 10:56 AM subject: unknown calf Hi there, My brother got this tattoo on his calf many years ago, has no idea what it means. Can you help???? Thanks, Love the blog. Nick First of all, the character is not correct. It is either missing a stroke in the left radical or having one extra. The intended character could be: 枠 means "frame; spindle, spool, reel". or, 粋 means "pure".

This was posted in Checkoutmyink.com: http://www.checkoutmyink.com/tattoos/inkdazfukaz/tattoo-3 Too bad 愛 is mirrored.

from: Pat B. to: tiangotlost@gmail.com date: Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 6:34 PM subject: Brad the Art Guy : Business is steady. I'm in Hong Kong now and in my class we're looking at Chinese folk religion at the moment, so I went looking for a picture of Laozi and found this ... thought you might enjoy it. Blog: Brad the Art Guy Post: Business is steady. Link: http://bradtheartguy.blogspot.com/2010/10/business-is-steady.html "There was a man in North Carolina who got me to draw a portrait of Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, which he had transferred to his arm by a talented tattoo artist." Brad the Art Guy's rendition of 道德經 looks nothing like the real thing .