Colors of the World

Hey there! So I've had a project in the works that I debuted on Monday: Colors of the World! It's an artistic project exploring different cultures around the world, looking at traditional arts, textiles, patterns, culture, language and much more. Each month I'll be working on a new culture or country, posting a photoshoot at the beginning of each month and following it up with blog posts over on the website, so check it out! It's in its beginning stages still, but by the end of the month there'll be something of interest for everyone, and I'd love to have your feedback and support! Here's the LINK, and a sneak peak...

The Board Game of Thrones

Anastasia and Marius playing the Game of Thrones board game; Dominic was sitting outside the frame. 5 hours later, they're still working on it! What an involved game. They seem to be enjoying themselves, though!

Fac Ut Ardeat Cormeum

Yesterday at choir practice I just couldn't get this song out of my head. Fac ut ardeat cormeum, part of the Stabat Mater by Pergolesi, is a beautiful piece I learned years ago and never forgot.

You can view the sheet music here - I sang the second voice, and it continues to lie beautifully in my range.

Tax Return for Foreign Income

I'm a dual citizen of Germany and the United States of America, and to my eternal joy, that means that I get to file tax returns in both countries. I have yet to deal with the German one (keep forgetting), but the US one has been dealt with - and thank goodness I've already gone through it once and it'll all seem much simpler next time.

I hope.

This blog post is basically going to be about what I did to get this done, and I wanted to write it right after I filed my tax return so that I wouldn't forget any details, but... oops? Here we are, about three weeks later, and I've forgotten all the numbers of the various forms I had to fill out. However, I still have a LOT of tabs open as reminders! Joy.


So. Over the IRS website I chose the free online filing service taxactonline, and found that service extremely well-chosen. It takes you through the steps one by one, basically putting you through a questionnaire instead of making you fill out the dry forms yourself. Also, the customer service was very prompt, genial, and helpful - so, thank you, taxactonline!

The big, BIG point I struggled with was Form W-2. As in 2014 I was employed in Germany by a German institution, I did not receive a Form W-2 from my employer, and for a long time it seemed as though I couldn't file my return without one. After many struggles and internet searches and conversations with customer service at taxactonline, I realized I could indeed file my return without one.

I went through the Step-by-Step Guidance and simply skipped all the questions concerning the Form W-2. More interesting than this, however, is the feature "Forms & Topics" near the top of the page - which lets you find the precise forms you need. Let's see if I can get together which forms I needed, and why.

Form 1040, U.S. Individual Income Tax Review - the basic form that everyone has to fill out.

Form 2555, Foreign Earned Income Exclusion. I had to fill this out because I earned all my income in a foreign country. IMPORTANT: You'll need to enter all your earnings in US dollars, and you have to use the yearly average currency exchange rate. Find it on the IRS website here, and figure out all your sums up-front!

Form 1116, Foreign Tax Credit - this was the important one for showing that I was taxed for my foreign income!

FinCEN Form 114, Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts - for the obvious reason.

There are a few forms I think I was led through as part of the quiz that ended up being unimportant, such as Form 5405 (Repayment of the First-Time Homebuyer Credit), Form 6251 (Alternative Minimum Tax), and Form 8960 (Net Investment Income Tax). I did, however, have to fill out Schedules B and D (Interest and Ordinary Dividends, Capital Gains and Losses) because of the stock I have in the US. Those were easily dealt with - my investment management company, Vanguard, sent me the information up-front and I just had to enter the sums. Easy!


I think those are all the forms I had to fill out - but you wouldn't believe how difficult it was to figure that out! Seriously, check out all these links I went through before somehow figuring out what I needed. (And there were many more; those are just the ones I still have open. *sigh*)

Hopefully, though, this can help others with the same problem - I certainly wished, while dealing with it, that there was one simple blog post explaining it! So, here it is.

Oh! One last thing - deadlines. The general deadline is April 15th, but according to the IRS website, "If you are a U.S. citizen or resident alien residing overseas, or are in the military on duty outside the U.S., on the regular due date of your return, you are allowed an automatic 2-month extension to file your return and pay any amount due without requesting an extension.  For a calendar year return, the automatic 2-month extension is to June 15." Handy!

Let me know if you have any questions, and I'll do my best to help. I don't anticipate this being a problem till next year, though! Good luck.

Paper Trash Collection

Yesterday (March 31st) Anastasia and I helped collect paper trash to raise funds for TüMo (Tübinger Modell), the club we're a part of due to our volleyball activities! We spent nearly two hours tossing paper and cardboard into a big trash truck, braving wind and rain to do so. It was a lot of fun! We also got to ride on the back of the truck, which was a novel experience. Here are some photos!

We were six people in total - not counting the driver and the young boy visible in the second photo - with the other members in our group being a volleyball coach, a teacher, a lady affiliated with our high school, and our former principal. It was the latter who snapped these shots of us!

So that was a fun experience, despite including some serious winds (and let me tell you, paper trash and wind don't really mesh well) and rain (again, not nice when gathering paper). Everyone was in good cheer, and we got a lot done! Anastasia and Sophie Lupas, the trash collectors for a day.

Watson Personality Insights

"The Watson Personality Insights service uses linguistic analytics to extract a spectrum of cognitive and social characteristics from the text data that a person generates through blogs, tweets, forum posts, and more", it reads on the website http://watson-um-demo.mybluemix.net/.

Go to the website, and you'll find a mostly blank page telling you to "try the service", under which is a box full of text. Delete that text, and you'll be prompted to enter an English text of 100 words, minimum. Hit "Analyze", and the website will assign a number of personality traits that you supposedly possess based on the text you entered. Deciding to test it, I entered three texts and had them analyzed.


The first time, I entered my two latest blog posts (The Economist and Japanese Tea Ceremony), totalling some 1000+ words. I received a short summary of my main personality traits and a visual map of the percentage of certain traits I displayed in my text.

The summary was thus:
"You are shrewd, skeptical and tranquil.

You are independent: you have a strong desire to have time to yourself. You are empathetic: you feel what others feel and are compassionate towards them. And you are authority-challenging: you prefer to challenge authority and traditional values to help bring about positive changes.
Your choices are driven by a desire for prestige.
You are relatively unconcerned with tradition: you care more about making your own path than following what others have done. You consider independence to guide a large part of what you do: you like to set your own goals to decide how to best achieve them."

Top values: Openness (98%), Imagination (97%), Intellect (96%), Authority-challenging (98%), Cautiousness (91%), Sympathy (99%), Openness to change (91%)

Secondly, I entered an excerpt from a story I wrote some time ago. (Fan fiction, to be precise. I enjoy playing around with characters from Harry Potter.) I got, perhaps predictably, quite different results from this text.

"You are social, unpretentious and informal.

You are confident: you are hard to embarrass and are self-confident most of the time. You are laid-back: you appreciate a relaxed pace in life. And you are assertive: you tend to speak up and take charge of situations, and you are comfortable leading groups.
Your choices are driven by a desire for discovery.
You consider helping others to guide a large part of what you do: you think it is important to take care of the people around you. You are relatively unconcerned with taking pleasure in life: you prefer activities with a purpose greater than just personal enjoyment."

Top values: Extraversion (98%), Assertiveness (98%), Outgoing (93%), Challenge (90%), Curiosity (100%), Excitement (99%), Harmony (92%), Ideal (100%), Practicality (95%), Self-transcendence (93%)

For a last test, I wrote a nearly 300-word long text about myself in a very informal style. Again, there were some notable differences.

Summary:
"You are guarded and excitable.

You are empathetic: you feel what others feel and are compassionate towards them. You are calm-seeking: you prefer activities that are quiet, calm, and safe. And you are independent: you have a strong desire to have time to yourself.
Your choices are driven by a desire for self-expression.
You are relatively unconcerned with taking pleasure in life: you prefer activities with a purpose greater than just personal enjoyment. You consider achieving success to guide a large part of what you do: you seek out opportunities to improve yourself and demonstrate that you are a capable person."

Top values: Authority-challenging (94%), Cautiousness (94%), Orderliness (90%), Sympathy (99%), Self-expression (100%), Self-enhancement (94%)

It's intriguing to compare the three results, seeing where they differed and where they remained the same. The first and last result are visually more similar than the second result to either of the other two, since in the second result nearly all values in the "Needs" section spiked dramatically. In the other two results, I am honestly shocked to see how low my percentage for Cheerfulness is! I consider myself a very cheerful person, and am considered to be so by most people I know, so to have gotten first 5%, then 8%, is honestly shocking! (Also, I got 82% for Cheerfulness when I entered a text that is, while not depressing, not particularly cheerful. I set the beginning of that story after Sirius Black's death in book 5 of the Harry Potter series. How I managed to score so highly in Cheerfulness, Outgoing, and things like Harmony is beyond my understanding. I suppose the results are based not on the general mood of the text, but on things like writing style and vocabulary.)

My Gregariousness is also surprisingly low in the first and last result. Why? Not sure; I love spending time with others (though I enjoy solitary pursuits very much). Love and Hedonism also have very low results based on my short autobiography. Hm.

If I had to summarize myself using only phrases from the three summaries above, I think it would look something like this:
"You are social, unpretentious and informal.
You are empathetic: you feel what others feel and are compassionate towards them. You are independent: you have a strong desire to have time to yourself. And you are assertive: you tend to speak up and take charge of situations, and you are comfortable leading groups.
Your choices are driven by a desire for prestige.
You are relatively unconcerned with tradition: you care more about making your own path than following what others have done. You consider helping others to guide a large part of what you do: you think it is important to take care of the people around you. You consider achieving success to guide a large part of what you do: you seek out opportunities to improve yourself and demonstrate that you are a capable person."


I'll be playing around with this a bit more, and I'd love to hear whether your own attempts gave you results you feel match you! On the website it says a minimum of 100 words, but on the website I found the link (cracked.com) they say that the demo "needs a thousand words to confidently assess your intelligence, willingness to challenge authority, trust of others, susceptibility to stress, and need to feel loved." Perhaps my last sample was too small. Let me know whether you feel your results are accurate or not!

The Economist, March 7th - 13th 2015

From economist.com.

Today I did something that I admittedly do not do as often as I should: I read the Economist cover-to-cover.

Reading about politics was as depressing as always (gotta love potential nuclear conflicts), but there were some other, very interesting posts that I would like to share here.

The first is the article Silicon Valley gets a taste for food, which is all about creating realistic "fake" meat and dairy products out of plants. It's an extremely fascinating article, and definitely worth the read! Personally, I really want a taste of that burger.
"For meat, the aim is to recreate its key components—muscle, connective and fat tissue—using suitable plant materials. [Impossible Foods'] first product, a hamburger patty, already looks and cooks like meat, and will taste as good or better by the time it reaches the shops, Dr Brown promises. (...) The company has also spent a lot of time working out what gives meat its unique flavour. According to Dr Brown, the secret to a burger’s taste is haem, a compound found in all living cells, including plants. It is especially abundant in haemoglobin in blood, and in muscle tissues as myoglobin. It also gives a burger its red colour. During the cooking process haem acts as a catalyst that helps transform the amino acids, vitamins and sugars in muscle tissue into numerous volatile and flavourful molecules, he explains. To create the meaty flavour in its burger patties, the company uses a heme protein equivalent to one found in the roots of legumes." (Text from economist.com)


Then, there's the short article Particulates matter, which briefly addresses an amazing presentation by Chai Jing that went viral. Already the video has been removed and hidden - censorship at work, one assumes - but I found the video with English subtitles, and HIGHLY recommend it. I started watching thinking that I'd get bored within five minutes and skim over the rest, but no. I was captivated, watching the entire 1 hour, 44 minute long video with mounting incredulity and disbelief. It's... frightening, to be honest, and amazingly presented by Chai Jing. Please take the time to watch it.

Lastly, I found to my surprise an article on fashion - to be precise, one concerning the late Alexander McQueen and John Galliano. A recently published book is mentioned, and I've already added it to my shopping cart on amazon - Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano. It sounds excellent.
However, of particular interest in the article was the mention of an exhibition to take place in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, starting this Saturday. A retrospective of Alexander McQueen's creative work up till his suicide in 2010, it's an exhibition I don't intend to miss - since I have the great fortune of being in London right in time for it! (Unfortunately, it says on the website that sketching is not allowed within the exhibit. Phooey.)

Speaking of my trip to London, however, I'll be there for just under a week, and already have quite a few things planned! I'm going with my best friend, and she has a very good camera, so you can look forward to a few photos posted either during or after the trip - and don't worry, I won't fill the blog with tourist photos (those can go on facebook, thank you very much), but some more artistic shots might find their way onto this blog. Some sketches, hopefully, too, but those will have to wait till I'm back in Germany and can scan them in!

That's most of what I did today - what about you?

Chinese New Year

I live in Tübingen, a rather international German city despite its relatively small size, and there are a number of Chinese families living in our area. With my mother’s help, these families got together and organized a New Year celebration on the 21^st of February that we were all invited to attend!

At midday on Saturday we made our way over to the gathering place to find it overrun with adorable, cheery-faced Chinese kids – I don’t think a single one of them was over the age of eight! So sweet.
The parents were either hanging up decorations (like this, for example) or preparing dough and fillings for dumplings, which would then be prepared by everyone together – guests included!

Just before we started making dumplings, I realized I hadn’t thought to bring a camera and instead drew this with the only pen I could find. There were a lot more tables and a lot more people than pictured here!

Then people started gathering around the tables with mounds of dough and minced meat or carrot fillings; chopping, rolling and wrapping, and I joined some of my siblings at a table with some Chinese ladies. It was my first time wrapping dumplings, and a lady I already knew from one of Mom’s English groups, Dan (yes, that’s her real name), showed me the trick to wrapping Chinese dumplings. I tried to draw the process, but was unsure how to properly show the trick to folding over the dough. You can check out a blog post with many excellent photos here!

One of the Chinese ladies liked it so much that she took a photo. It’s so poorly drawn, though!

There were so many dumplings to be wrapped that finished and cooked (boiled) dumplings were being brought out even as we wrapped more – but oh, were they good! The meat filling had celery in it, which I typically don’t like but enjoyed in the dumpling, and the carrot filling was equally delicious. To dip we had what I believe was a soy sauce and vinegar dip, with garlic added for a bit of extra zing. There were side dishes of radish salad and cold rice noodles.

In Korea, they say that wrapping beautiful dumplings for the New Year means that you’ll have beautiful daughters; I don’t know if it applies to Chinese dumplings wrapped shortly after the New Year, but Anastasia and my dumplings were very beautiful indeed! Interestingly, Chinese dumplings supposedly symbolize wealth because their shape is similar to that of a Chinese sycee – a gold or silver ingot currency used in China until the 20^th century.

After lunch we were in for a little show – some members of a nearby Wu Shu academy came by to do an authentic dragon dance and various fight sequences with bare hands (and lots of kicks) or a variety of bladed weapons (with very flexible metal blades). The teacher that accompanied the (clearly not Chinese) students was Master Zhuo Haojun, who is a highly qualified Wu Shu trainer. Having not only won the Wu Shu World Championships (back in 1994), he has worked as a professional stuntman in Kung Fu movies (doubling even for such well-known names as Jet Li) and is the trainer of the German national team. We didn’t know all that in advance, but as soon as we first saw him move it was clear that he was extremely competent, and we would have loved to see more! I think his sister, who is equally well-qualified and founded the academy in Tübingen, was also there, but she mainly remained in the background, letting her brother take the spotlight. 

That’s the two of them there!

I think Dominic and I are both tempted to join a course at their academy – I particularly liked the loud slaps and stamps, especially when they’d do a high kick, slapping their foot loudly as it sped over their head, then bring it down with a loud stamp. It made for a very powerful rhythm.

That was my experience at the Chinese New Year celebration! 2015 is the year of the goat – or the sheep, or ram, depending on region or preference. The Chinese word yáng refers to both goats and sheep, and apparently the zodiacal yáng is more likely to be thought of as a goat in the south and a sheep in the north in China. 

The Year of the Sheep is believed to be a year of promise and prosperity, and the Sheep reflects the Earth and Yin: A passive or female principle, covert and shaded, soft and yielding. This year is considered a good one for family and creativity. Sounds perfect to me!

The Ears and Years of Van Gogh - Part I

Source

It started at the dinner table. 

We were discussing Mozart and his compulsive gambling that ended up bankrupting him. My father said something along the lines of it often being unclear precisely what kind of obsessions such people used to have, and I laughed and said, “Unlike Van Gogh and his obsession with cutting off ears!” Immediately after I apologized unrepentantly for the terrible joke, but somehow we ended running with the concept of Van Gogh collecting ears. “Left ears!” my sister specified pointedly, and with a grin we agreed. 

Christopher was confused, so Dad explained gravely, “He was a time traveler and went to the future to cut off Van Gogh’s ear.” 

We all turned and blinked. Then someone laughed. “Why would Van Gogh have to travel to the future to cut off his own ear?”

“No, Mozart,” Dad disagreed, and I grinned in amused bemusement. 

“Why Mozart?”

“Weren’t you discussing his obsession with cutting off ears?”

A pause. Then laughter. “No, not Mozart! We moved on from him and were talking about Van Gogh cutting off his (and other people’s) ear!” However, as is our wont, the discussion deteriorated into humorous silliness concerning Van Gogh time traveling, and Dominic  expressed curiosity over what would happen if Van Gogh travelled to the past and cut off his past self’s ear – would the future version suddenly find himself missing that ear, or would nothing happen?

“Ah, but time travel is simply to alternate dimensions,” Dad waved it off, and Anastasia parried with a cocky grin, “So there are Van Goghs with more or fewer ears? Some with only one ear and some with three?”

“Three??” Mom exclaimed, and Anastasia explained that if Van Gogh went back (or forward) in time and cut off his alternative self’s ear, then one Van Gogh would have only one ear and the other would have three: two on his head, and one in his hand! In fact, she thought it such a brilliant concept that she declared laughingly that she’d write her bachelor thesis on the topic, titling it “The Ears and Years of Van Gogh”. (Most of us ignored that she would find it very hard to get a bachelor in Korean and Japanese Studies with such a topic.)

I laughed as well and said I’d quite like to title a blog post that way, and she enthusiastically encouraged me to write a blog entry with a silly tale of a time-traveling, ear-cutting Van Gogh. I agreed that it would be hilarious, though I was thinking more along the lines of a serious summary of the true man (which she pouted at slightly). So I thought, why not do both? In a manner of speaking. Today I’ll post this silliness, next I might post a part II consisting of a silly short story (entirely fictional, of course), and then a proper blog post on the real man and his work. Should be fun! (Though obviously, I’ll have to read up on the man before I can write anything silly involving him. Wouldn’t be right otherwise.)

...Thus ends The Ears and Years of Van Gogh, Part I!

Webcomic?

My cousin "Xander" commented on my last post asking if I've ever considered drawing a webcomic. I have to admit that the thought never crossed my mind, and I figured the best way to decide on my answer would be to draw a comic strip as a test. I ended up illustrating my thought process instead... (Click on the images to enlarge; the text is illegible otherwise, I fear! To see them even bigger, right click and open the image in another tab, and then you can enlarge and scroll.)

Concerning the interruption in the first page - I was at our apartment to let workers in to deal with the damage the leaks caused to our wall, and man, their accents... So hard to understand :(  Let me translate for you... (And I apologize for my atrocious spelling of the Swabian accent!)

"I' komm glei nommal g'schwind" - Ich komme gleich nochmal geschwind - I'll come back in a moment quickly. (Lovely translation, huh?)

"Könnet Sie amal komma?" - Könnten Sie mal kommen? - Could you come for a sec?

Yep... I just said things like "Yes, of course!" "Thank you very much!" and such. Ah well.

Funny thing about the comic is: I didn't even realize that I drew myself without glasses until I stepped in front of a mirror. Weird, huh? You'd think that I would remember to draw the object that is always on my face, but apparently not! Though I have noticed that even when I look in the mirror, I tend to overlook my glasses - maybe because they're rimless and thus less obtrusive, but I can ignore them quite easily. (Not that I don't like my glasses! I am, however, prettier without. In this, I'll choose ease over beauty anyday!)

So yep. That was fun! Gotta work on drawing expressions. Thanks for the suggestion, Xander!

New Computer!

One really great thing about living in Germany is the postal service. 

How come? Well, let’s put it this way: On Tuesday I ordered a new laptop, and it arrived the next day. Woo!! Of course, I immediately had to set it up and play around with it until I had it more or less at a customized state I’m happy with (don’t understand why they put Windows 8 on it, but maybe it’ll grow on me?). By then it was unfortunately too dark to take proper photos (I don’t have a great camera, and the lighting in my room is not the best), so photos had to wait for today!

I got a Medion Erazer X7829 (MD98774), which is a gaming laptop with the stats I wanted for a work computer. Since I’ll want it mainly for heavy Photoshop use (think many layers and different brushes), a bunch of RAM was a must, but hard to find. Most gaming laptops don’t have much RAM, contenting themselves with 8 or even 4GB – definitely not enough for my purposes! 

Luckily, I did find one or two laptops that had 16GB RAM, and settled on this one. It has great stats, and a big screen (17,3”), and though there are a few small things I don’t like, in general I’m pleased with it so far. 

The things I don’t like: 

1) The touchpad buttons are really hard to press (which hopefully will get better with use)
2) The touchpad itself is a bit rough and hard to use (which will also hopefully improve)

3) When I hooked up my tablet, Windows for some reason thought I had a touchscreen and gave me pop-up instructions to swipe my finger in from the edge to switch between applications – and the window wouldn’t go away unless I unplugged my tablet! And then it reappeared nearly each time I did something else with the tablet! I’m thinking I’ll only hook up the tablet when I already have Photoshop or whichever application I’ll use open, but it’s a hassle.

4) I’m not sure why, but today my computer had everything in Spanish. Probably because I added Spanish to the list of keyboard languages, but the language should still have been English, since that’s the language on the top of my list! So strange. Guess it’s a good thing I do actually speak Spanish.

5) There are a bunch of “apps” and programs on there that needed to be uninstalled or deleted, but there remain some that I can’t get rid of before I’m completely sure what they are. I have a feeling they’re useless, but gotta check first.

6) I’m a bit annoyed that the apostrophe key is so far on the right – I’ve gotten used to it being to the left of the Enter key, not over it! That’ll take some getting used to. (Photos of my otherwise awesome German keyboard below!)

Those points aside, I am really happy with the computer. It was easy to set up, fun to play around with, didn’t take long to get used to Windows 8 (though I still prefer previous versions), and the computer runs quickly and silently. It even came with a really neat drawing/painting app, which of course made me happy! Also, I liked being able to set a full-screen image for my lock screen, though I wish I could do the same for the menu screen. I guess the blue swirls aren’t so bad. (It’s the icons that are.)

It also seems like Photoshop and other applications will be really easy to use – playing around with the tablet yesterday was tons of fun, and I’m looking forward to doing more! I’ll have to get used to using a laptop at a desk, though – I’ve gotten so used to having my laptop in my lap, but the new notebook’s a bit big for that! I still have my first laptop for that, though – and this one will probably remain my computer for browsing purposes. The other one should be mostly reserved for work. 

We’ll see how long that resolution lasts! 

See what I mean about the apostrophe key being over the
Enter key?

This beautiful image (which I'm using for my
lock screen) is by Kirk Quilaquil.

And my current desktop image is a gorgeous
shark mermaid by Neolucky.

Seriously cleaned up the Start menu until only the most basic 
applications are shown there: Microsoft Word, Skype, Notepad...

In fact, my computer also has a name. I never named my first laptop, not having seen a need, but when I first turned on the Medion computer it actually asked me to name it! That started a frantic search for a suitable name. My first thought was "George", because that's Mom's go-to name for everything, but my sister's computer already has that name - then I thought "Nuria", because that's a name I've considered my "Spanish name" since I first started learning the language (Thank you, Frau Ortleb!), but I didn't really think it suited the computer. I couldn't quite decide whether a male or female name would suit, so I turned to the internet - this list of Shakespearean characters, to be precise. I thought an S name, to suit my own, would be nice. 

Scrolling through, I soon found myself drawn to the name "Lord Saye", and thought that "Saye" was an appropriately genderless name when the "Lord" was removed from it. Thus, my computer was named Saye. Here's to a long and fruitful partnership!

Welcome To My Blog!

Having just finished my job at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, I decided to take some time to work on all the ideas I didn't have the time for while employed, as well as brush up on some creative skills that need polishing. So, for the next few months, I hope to post on this blog once a day on a variety of subjects as I work on my projects! The main two topics are art and fashion, but I also want to work on my language skills (particularly Russian and Korean), read those books and watch the movies that I really should have seen by now (I'm getting very tired of telling people, "Oh, I've heard it's very good! No, I'm afraid I've never seen/read it,"), and educate myself on assorted things like history, politics, and philosophy.

Each different topic will have its own tab at the top of the blog, and topics such as history and literature will fall under 'culture', with special tabs reserved for art projects, fashion projects, and languages. 'personal' will be reserved for announcements, special posts, and the like, and 'featured' is where posts about other artists, shops and more will end up.

If you like, you can get email notifications for posts by entering your email address into the "Follow by Email" box at the top of the page, right under the "About Me" section. --->
That said, let's get right to it!

Cheers,
SOPHIE