http://search.deviantart.com/?q=by:centaureg&section=today deviantART RSS for by:centaureg en-us Copyright 2009, deviantART.com Fri, 11 Dec 2009 20:00:41 PST deviantART.com http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss http://s.deviantart.com/minish/widgets/apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png http://centaureg.deviantart.com/journal/27172227/ http://centaureg.deviantart.com/journal/27172227/ Sat, 12 Sep 2009 14:39:29 PDT
]]> ~centaureg http://centaureg.deviantart.com/journal/26878063/ http://centaureg.deviantart.com/journal/26878063/ Fri, 28 Aug 2009 14:49:39 PDT
]]> ~centaureg http://centaureg.deviantart.com/journal/26808463/ http://centaureg.deviantart.com/journal/26808463/ Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:44:08 PDT
Then, around the time of my birthday when my pet lovebird died, I was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. Again the doctors said how important downing pills was for my survival and my body reacted by telling me if I continued taking the prescribed garbage death would always seem like a preferable alternative. The statin made me so sick I needed my friends to become caretakers. End of that drug regime.

After that, my diet was so negatively effected that I developed the horror of diverticulosis, an inflammation of the bowel that caused me to lose 40 pounds in 6 weeks with no effort on my part other than not having any appetite because everything I consumed made me sick. After struggling with weight concerns since I was 7 years old this was a really novel development. Like suddenly discovering your interpretation of reality is entirely wrong and needs to be tweaked rapidly.

On top of all this, I have severe sleep apnea that is probably responsible for the heart attack I had in 2002 and the subsequent congestive heart failure. The sleep apnea messes up my sleep to such a degree that every morning I wake feeling I haven't had any real sleep or rest. The drugs I take for my heart make me have really peculiar and sometimes downright unpleasant dreams that I would be happy not to have. Also, the sleep apnea has been discovered to make my chances of dying from any cause 46% more likely than it would be if I didn't have the condition. I can really empathize with poor Michael Jackson's plight.

Anyway, why am I describing my health woes to strangers? Do I want to solicit sympathy and/or empathy of sorts? Not really. I'm telling you this so that, if you have any bright ideas of responding to my former journal entry regarding "Centaurs Don't Have Bellybuttons!", you'll just forgo glib or lame responses and get on with other fun.

If you don't like my photo-manipulations and you feel compelled to diss them in an nonconstructive manner please do me the slight favor of ignoring them and go leave a compliment for something you do like instead.

I'm really not up to up to trivial dreck left to make tiny egos feel temporarily superior. Life is way too short. Have fun. Be loving. Make your dreams come true. If you have difficulty finding happiness maybe you can find a way to make others happy and catch the afterglow.

Thank you to all those cool folks who have been so nice as to give me faves or collect my PMs. I appreciate the positive attention. It seems to be such a rare commodity these days that any quantity received feels precious.

]]> ~centaureg http://centaureg.deviantart.com/journal/15856361/ http://centaureg.deviantart.com/journal/15856361/ Sun, 09 Dec 2007 00:55:59 PST
Centaurs look like they are a blending of Homo sapiens and equines; A sort of Homo equinus. That's fine, though, and I have given this way too much thought frankly, centaurs are neither man nor horse but an entirely different being that arose not from the Father of Greek mythology, Zeus, having his way with an unsuspecting mare while posing as a stallion, but from a lesser deity, Ixion, mating with the cloud-being Nemphale and producing male, bestial offspring. At least as far as I remember, that's the myth. I'm open for correction. (I haven't gone racing off to do research in Bullfinch's Mythology while writing this.)

Anyway, because of this difference, I would think that this fact---that centaurs do not possess a human umbilicus---would be fairly obvious. Yet, I find that even though that is obviously so, most accomplished artists like, for example, Boris Vallejo and his wife, Julie Bell, (IMHO, truly great illustrators) insist on giving centaurs a human navel.

Let's be a little bit realistic in our fantasy realm centaur creators, eh? I think most artists whose work isn't primarily abstraction or full of surrealistic symbols strive to present a realistic view of mythical beings. We try to make them look like they actually can and do exist. At least that is what I strive for, with frequently mixed results.

The centaur can be a very difficult subject because of the almost unnatural appearing division that can arise between the being's human-like torso and its equine-like trunk, that area that most artists fail to master when executing a centaur picture. Getting the musculature and hide covering those muscles at the blending point just right is really tricky. When it is achieved, it is a thing of beauty to behold. The realistic blending makes the mythical become, in effect, real.

You can say it is a matter of taste, but if a centaur were to actually be born of a centauress dam with two umbilical cords, the birth would be a nightmare of entanglement. There would be a lot of death during child birth. And what, pray tell, could be the reason for two umbilicals on any creature? Oh, you say, that the centaur has multiple stomachs and thus needs more than one umbilicus? Well, I really have to disagree for artistic and logical reasons with that thinking. I have read so many different interpretations of what a centaur actually might be it leaves my head spinning. I'm going with this overarching concept: The centaur is an animal that is mammalian in nature. Mammals have only one umbilicus and so too does this mammal, the centaur.

So there you have my reasoning for supporting a ban forevermore on depicting centaurs with flagrant midsection-marring bellybuttons. I don't care if they are "innies" or "outies" and whether or not they might appear as sexy as the cut and defined abdomen of a fit centaur, or the idea that the human torso looks somehow incomplete without that depression sitting there. A bellybutton doesn't belong there any more than horns do on the centaur's head. (Sue me, I'm a damned purist. Though I find myself far more tolerant of horns than I do the lowly and ineffective umbilicus.)

Please, in the future when creating more arguably realistic centaurs, try to correct this lamentable oversight. Deep six the damned navel. Put a second one on a satyr or a faun, it makes as much sense! Draw them on all your oranges. But don't ever do it on a centaur!

It's insulting!

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