Interview Meme, from ![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
yunatwilight
Mar. 1st, 2007 12:47 pmWhat are your favorite and least favorite notes for perfume?
This one's easy, since I've been doing questionnaires for BPAL swaps recently. My favorite notes include amber, woods, brown spices, jasmine, honey, fig, smoke, grass, and rain. My dreaded notes include cherry/almond (though I love it in food), vetiver, most heavier florals, lotus, and lemon. The BPAL dragon's blood (see cherry) and ice/snow notes are hideous on me, though I've liked that kind of thing elsewhere.
Oh, and ambergris. I know, I know, both commercial amber and commercial ambergris are complex bouquets or synthetics, trying to approximate kind of similar things. Still, whenever something is billed as ambergris, it gives me a headache. This is actually pretty unfortunate as ambergris bouquet is a major component of a lot of the magical oils in the Tradition I belong to.
Is there any material you wish you could work with in incense, but can't?
Pretty much any floral ingredients. Generally, burning flowers does not equal something that smells like flowers. Some of them can be used in incense in essential oil, absolute, or concrete form, but it's expensive and not really a good use of the oils compared to throwing them in a oil burner or in perfume. And of course, some of the most beautiful flowers in the world, like lilacs, can't really be extracted well at all.
If you were given $10,000 and let loose in an typical art supplies store with the single restriction that everything you buy would have to be used in a single project, what project would you do?
Depends if I can cheat and only use some of the money for supplies, and some of the money to set up the rest of the project. :P I'd love to paint rocks along the coast of one of the Greek Islands, or to sponsor a one-shot art program for an underprivleged group of kids in New York City. And if the "typical" art store could instead be someplace like Metalliferous, I'd probably buy myself a metal kiln and somehow figure how to make myself some sort of an idol in semiprecious gems and silver. But if we're talking buy out A.C. Moore, don't get given a lot of extra resources elsewise, and go for it? Buy whatever the most expensive piece of equipment they had in stock was – a kiln, a lathe, whatever – and learn how to use it to make some kind of full-body adornment for myself.
If you had the option to live in a naturist colony, would you?
I think I would, if only because I'm actually really craving more of a communal living situation in general than I have right now. I'd like to live in a place where there was an opportunity to be social available just by walking into a shared space. I haven't had that since college, and I miss it a lot. I've hung out with a lot of nudists in the past year or so, and much as I really like running around without clothes, it still feels like a silly sort of thing to be passionate about. But if it were otherwise a functional community, it had a critical mass of kids in it, and if it could work with the rest of my life, it would definitely have some appeal.
In your opinion (not necessarily from experience) what is the single most important thing to keep in mind when dealing with nonhuman sentience?
I'd think that especially if you're talking about something limited in scope, like a spirit guide, dragon, faery, or angel, but even if you're dealing with something big like a godform or archetype, the most important thing to remember is that everyone has an agenda, and that their persepctive may be so different than yours that it may be really unclear to you what that agenda is. But you need to take information and advice or evaluate behavior from them through the same kind of filters you'd use when dealing with a human being, not take it as something somehow perfect or unbiased because it may come from a realm in which you don't live in the everyday.
(I'm not super into asking other people questions, but if you want some, please comment. I'm willing to do my part if you need the focus the way I do.)
This one's easy, since I've been doing questionnaires for BPAL swaps recently. My favorite notes include amber, woods, brown spices, jasmine, honey, fig, smoke, grass, and rain. My dreaded notes include cherry/almond (though I love it in food), vetiver, most heavier florals, lotus, and lemon. The BPAL dragon's blood (see cherry) and ice/snow notes are hideous on me, though I've liked that kind of thing elsewhere.
Oh, and ambergris. I know, I know, both commercial amber and commercial ambergris are complex bouquets or synthetics, trying to approximate kind of similar things. Still, whenever something is billed as ambergris, it gives me a headache. This is actually pretty unfortunate as ambergris bouquet is a major component of a lot of the magical oils in the Tradition I belong to.
Is there any material you wish you could work with in incense, but can't?
Pretty much any floral ingredients. Generally, burning flowers does not equal something that smells like flowers. Some of them can be used in incense in essential oil, absolute, or concrete form, but it's expensive and not really a good use of the oils compared to throwing them in a oil burner or in perfume. And of course, some of the most beautiful flowers in the world, like lilacs, can't really be extracted well at all.
If you were given $10,000 and let loose in an typical art supplies store with the single restriction that everything you buy would have to be used in a single project, what project would you do?
Depends if I can cheat and only use some of the money for supplies, and some of the money to set up the rest of the project. :P I'd love to paint rocks along the coast of one of the Greek Islands, or to sponsor a one-shot art program for an underprivleged group of kids in New York City. And if the "typical" art store could instead be someplace like Metalliferous, I'd probably buy myself a metal kiln and somehow figure how to make myself some sort of an idol in semiprecious gems and silver. But if we're talking buy out A.C. Moore, don't get given a lot of extra resources elsewise, and go for it? Buy whatever the most expensive piece of equipment they had in stock was – a kiln, a lathe, whatever – and learn how to use it to make some kind of full-body adornment for myself.
If you had the option to live in a naturist colony, would you?
I think I would, if only because I'm actually really craving more of a communal living situation in general than I have right now. I'd like to live in a place where there was an opportunity to be social available just by walking into a shared space. I haven't had that since college, and I miss it a lot. I've hung out with a lot of nudists in the past year or so, and much as I really like running around without clothes, it still feels like a silly sort of thing to be passionate about. But if it were otherwise a functional community, it had a critical mass of kids in it, and if it could work with the rest of my life, it would definitely have some appeal.
In your opinion (not necessarily from experience) what is the single most important thing to keep in mind when dealing with nonhuman sentience?
I'd think that especially if you're talking about something limited in scope, like a spirit guide, dragon, faery, or angel, but even if you're dealing with something big like a godform or archetype, the most important thing to remember is that everyone has an agenda, and that their persepctive may be so different than yours that it may be really unclear to you what that agenda is. But you need to take information and advice or evaluate behavior from them through the same kind of filters you'd use when dealing with a human being, not take it as something somehow perfect or unbiased because it may come from a realm in which you don't live in the everyday.
(I'm not super into asking other people questions, but if you want some, please comment. I'm willing to do my part if you need the focus the way I do.)
