#[ what she is; murder nerd who likes art theatre and gardening ]

[spiderwarden]

In case you forgot it today. Minthara enjoys gardening.

[weirdlandtv]

When did you start your blog ? When did you start liking or being fascinated with the things you post ? haha i'm very curious because i really love what you share and blog !

First off, thanks for the compliment!

My blog started about two years ago. Brigitte Bardot and Marilyn Monroe are perhaps the most obvious recurring subjects, as they appear on my blog every day. I’ve posted the history behind my fascination for them before: click HERE for Brigitte Bardot, and HERE for Marilyn Monroe. Those are two actual Tales from Weirdland I suppose.

I can’t really analyze myself like a clockwork, where you can tell what every part is for and why it’s there, but from a very young age, I was exposed to many different forms of art. That was the birth of this blog basically. My uncle, though mostly an unemployed artist throughout my childhood, designed book covers and posters; his stylish Agatha Christie covers for example, with their lonely, curled up corpses and mysterious, half-opened doors, introduced me to dark themes of murder and mystery—and to the art of illustration—when most other kids were playing football outside.

My grandfather taped animated shorts for me, from classic Disney cartoons to Eastern European claymation, from the wild antics of Tex Avery to Spanish stop motion. I took it all in. I was always aching—ACHING—to make my own animated shorts, but was discouraged by documentaries that explained the process: it all seemed so elaborate and technical, it killed my joy. I eventually made my dream come true by creating my YouTube channel. I’m still proud of the stuff I put on there. I’ve never wanted to become a YouTube star with it or anything, I just wanted it to exist, for me. Someone asked me a while ago if I’m planning to upload more videos to it, as it has been a while, and the answer is yes. But I’m never in a rush. I like to do different things at different times. I could never be one thing, have one profession, one main interest (like my blog isn’t centered around one specific subject). I’m working on something quite ambitious now though, you’ll see eventually. The channel will exist for as long as I exist.

My mother took us to the theatre a lot, to museums, to theme parks. She was a generous supplier of toys, art materials, books. She gave me and my brother the freedom to explore and imagine; our childhood was free of restrictions and censorship. I don’t know the meaning of forbidden fruit. Our minds ROAMED, man. All my life, I’ve experienced everything with heightened senses, and with an unfiltered brain. Our antennas were picking up new signals, constantly.  Coming from a tiny, remote village, where the people were harsh and the winds blew unhampered, we mostly lived in books and on TV.

My father was a distant speck in my universe. He was busy, and not very talkative; I often felt like Cratchit to his Scrooge. Art had no meaning for him (he owned no records, no books, had no interest in films), but his practicality and tech-savviness were inherited by my brother, a real 1980s whizz-kid, a nerd with big glasses and a big digital watch that showed the different moon phases, so through him I became acquainted with the world of electronics, computers, video games, robots. A soft, feminine kid who had a doll’s house and liked Betty Boop, I found myself playing with Transformers, watching hard sci-fi films, understanding computers and their software; and becoming acquainted with hacking, pirate stations, strange frequencies, lone, eerie signals in the night... The mysteries of the universe.

In my post on Brigitte Bardot, I mentioned a secret garden that existed in a shadowy corner of my grandparents’ wild, lush gardens: that secret garden doesn’t exist anymore, but it lives on in my head: an endless well of impressions, colors, shapes, names, figures, sayings, pixels, puppets, magic, mystery, and myth. You receive reports from that place every day here on my blog.