Wait...what?

Over thinking is dangerous. I think my brain must be glitching, because I can't seem to stop thinking and over thinking absolutely everything. At this point it seems to be impeding my ability to actually do anything.

Well, that's not entirely true. I have been doing things, particularly drawing, it's just that my interests branch off into so many directions it is difficult to know the areas in which I should focus. So basically this past week has been spent doing something entirely different than what I was working on last week.

A creative block (esque thing) has sent me looking into the differences between languages and writing systems, rather than continuing the drawings of hands that I was working on for class last Thursday. I have found out recently that there is a distinction between the language associated with a specific culture and the visual system which is used to record the language on something more permanent (such as stone tablets or paper or the Internet). The ancient Egyptians seem to be one of the most interesting examples of this, because they of course used actual pictures to record anything that needed recording, but the way their language sounds, what they actually spoke, is completely different. The modern Arabic, Chinese, and Russian languages/writing systems operate much the same. At least as far as I understand, since I am not a linguist.  I could be wrong about any/all of this because I've just started looking into it.

This interest sprung from my interest in both the Internet, online communities, and (surprise) Doctor Who. A fellow Whovian (this is what Doctor Who fans are known as, collectively, to other fans) created an English writing system based off of a fictional language in the show that the show's canon tells us nothing about. In essence, we know roughly what the language's writing system looks like, but we know nothing about the language itself. It does not exist. But we do have images from the show which we know are associated with the language. Such as the following:

Since we have images like these, fans have come up with English writing systems based off of these examples here. One system has been adopted by the fandom as the "official" system. It has a "letter" that corresponds to every letter of the English alphabet, with rules as to how to combine them. Basically, it's just a way of writing English with circles and lines, and it looks like this:

This weekend I've been rather obsessed with the aesthetics of images like this, for whatever reason, and so have been drawing these sorts of images simply by writing English phrases. I have been figuring out the rules for writing with this system (and then breaking them because it makes for more interesting compositions). I've also been looking into writing systems associated with other fictional works. 

Aside from this I have also gotten really excited about this new PBS thing called The Art Assignment, run by Sarah Urist-Green, the former curator of the contemporary exhibits at the Art Museum in Indianapolis (And coincidentally the wife of one of my favorite authors). People using youtube for educational purposes is one of my favorite things in the universe, and since this is art related I thought I would share the trailer here. It is set to premier sometime early this year. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tonPbdR1Krs