TET.Life (The Extraordinary Tourist Life)

Blue Sky, Butterfly, and JAC by TET Acrylic on Canvas. WIP of a New Whimsical Cat Painting by TET. O ver the Christmas and New Year holidays I spent a lot of my time reflecting on where I'm at as an artist and content creator, torn between the need to at least make some kind of regular income, and the need to just create art. Possibly controversially, while I am an early adopter of generative image and video AI creations, and would say they are an art form, they're not a very fulfilling art form for myself. A useful tool, yes, but even when used with my own art, they're more interesting than anything I would stand by and say 'that was a satisfying creative journey' I just made. Creating with generative AI is more like being a director of a film, where all the actual art is being done by everyone else, but you get a say in the direction and output. It's still a creative endeavor but it's a very hands off, upper management form of creativity (making a somewh...

T he relatively new relationship term ' dry begging ' is one I came across recently in a random article, What is 'dry begging'? Potentially Problematic Relationship Term Explained , served up to me in Microsoft Bing's mobile app. Gaining in popularity on TikTok and YouTube where the term has been analyzed to death by content psychologists because... Of course it has. It's content. Dry begging is a new term for an age-old concept of your partner indirectly asking for something without actually asking, and even potentially manipulating you into giving them what they want. It's this aspect that has likely given rise to, what I think is, very passive aggressive terminology, identifying it as a bad or negative behaviour. For example, say you make plans to go out and meet up with some friends for drinks, and your partner doesn't want you to go. They might sigh and say something like "I'll just stay here by myself then." in an attempt to guilt tr...

J ames Cameron's Avatar movies are one of the few I'll pay to watch in a cinema without knowing anything about the story. Largely because I know they'll at least be visually interesting and worthy of seeing on a big screen.  That was the case for the third installment,  Avatar: Fire and Ash . I may have seen a trailer at some point in the lead up to its release but I'm not sure? All I could definitely tell you is, in the second movie we were introduced to water tribes, and in this movie we were going to be introduced to fire tribes. Which is really all you need to know in hindsight. The movie does get you up to speed with the key throughlines from Avatar: The Way of Water pretty quickly (well quickly for a three hour Avatar movie). You may even be able to watch this without seeing the first two because it's not entirely necessary to know the history of the characters for this installment. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and his family are still being pursued by Colon...

President Maduro in US Custody. O n the same day the US Administration decided to kidnap Venezuela's President and his wife, I happened to catch a 20 minute video overview on the history of Venezuela from about the time President Maduro came into power to days before his 'capture'. The 20 minute video by Australian ABC News called, What's Going on in Venezuela? , may sway your thought process on Maduro's kidnapping - if you're highly opposed to that action - because it give the impression President Trump might actually be the lessor of two rogue idiots when it comes to running a country. I highly recommend you give it a watch if the link still works, and you want to get up to speed fast on events in Venezuela. President Maduro has run Venezuela so far into the ground it can't afford the supplies it needs to export its major income stream, oil  (though his predecessor, President Chávez, should get much of the credit). So bad that their currency is devalued t...