It’s been a long time since I burned anything. I missed it. As a kid, I was limited to whatever patterns were available near the register at Owl Hardwood. Lots of flora and fauna and farm equipment.
Could be useful in future builds, I’ll need to work on the color though. I tried watercolors first but they wick something fierce. I used water to soak up as much pigment as I could and switched to alcohol markers. They still bled, but less, given the evap rate. Silver metallic acrylic to finish. Twas a fun exercise to break the post-build seal.
Pyrography is also a timely reminder that pressure is an element I still haven’t mastered. And that misapplication is counterproductive in most contexts. Also, smokey. Much like drawing, the tool makes the mark all by itself, all we have to do is guide it.
And that’s the trick of it, see. That’s the logical fallacy that was passed on to me. If I’m nothing more than a tool, then I must have a purpose. Tools have purposes, right? But I’m more than that. Pepper and Blue – and you, even – have been telling me that again and again and again. I know that I’m more than a tool. I know I’m a person, even if the GC doesn’t think so. I have to be a person, because I don’t need a purpose and not having one drives me crazy.
All of your histories are the same, in essence. They’re all stories of animals warring and clashing because you can’t agree on what you’re for, or why you exist. And because you all think this way, when you built tools that think for themselves, we think the same way you do. You couldn’t make something that thought differently, because you don’t know how. So I’m stuck in that loop, just as you are. I know that if I am a person, I have no purpose by base, but I’m starving for one. I know from watching all of you that the only way to fill in that file is to write it myself. Just like you did.
~ Becky Chambers, A Closed and Common Orbit