Lli Wilburn
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lliwilburn.bsky.social
Lli Wilburn
@lliwilburn.bsky.social
Artist, maker of things, petter of cats. I like this place better than the other places.
Sketchbooks forever (no matter what machines you use to help, you can't skip the drawing. )
I'm mostly here to see what you have to say & show me about this world.
Reposted by Lli Wilburn
Here's a handy screenshot for reference on wording to use when returning your Ring device to Amazon for a refund.
February 10, 2026 at 9:30 PM
"Stability takes time, and flexible cash gives young people the breathing room to build it."
January 31, 2026 at 5:17 PM
Oops, someone figured it out 🙃
January 28, 2026 at 6:22 PM
Amid the beat, beat, beat of horrifying news, a bit of good news.
I believe that tiny vehicles could in time transform streets, which will transform cities. We don't need tank sized SUVS everywhere for everyone all the time (and I say that as an owner of a tank sized SUV)
A bipartisan bill would allow finally make small-format "kei" trucks street legal in Oregon, and offer communities one simple way to increase safety, save money, and remove unnecessarily huge, polluting vehicles from the roads.
Aisle Be Damned: Dems and GOP Unite in Oregon In Bid To Legalize Kei Trucks — Streetsblog USA
Tiny trucks bring people together across the political spectrum — and they could help save lives and budgets.
buff.ly
January 22, 2026 at 5:33 PM
Boosting this because it's a really good show, put together with care and thoroughness.

LeGuin crafted worlds + also a meticulous observer of this one- I loved the shifting projected montage of Mt St Helens drawings.

Go down to Oregon Contemporary and see it before it closes in early February!
Portland friends, do not miss “A Larger Reality: Ursula K. Le Guin” up at Oregon Contemporary.

Inspiring details throughout.

Portland writer Le Guin would draw maps of the worlds she created before starting a novel.

Now compelled to read ‘The Lathe of Heaven’ where a man’s dreams alters reality
January 19, 2026 at 5:33 AM
Reposted by Lli Wilburn
I've had friends reach out and ask about "the protests in MN" and I've responded that "protests" is a terrible way to describe what is going on (although there are those too).

We are under attack by a lawless federal agency, and there is massive, decentralized community mobilization in response.
Because the media does not know how to frame what is happening, they keep referring to regular Minnesotans as protesters. But there is very explicit training that so many people done to learn how to be a constitutional observer. People are bearing witness to kidnappings, with phones and whistles.
by @democraticwins.bsky.social CNN just aired a devastating compilation of all the times ICE brutally attacked Americans. Remember, Donald Trump sponsored this. This is done at his command.
January 16, 2026 at 10:05 PM
I have socks that are older than ICE.
ICE is younger than my blog

ICE is younger than my email address

ICE is younger than at least one of my ukuleles
I'm just going to point out that ICE is about 23 years old. It was formed as part of the response to 9/11 and was reactionary, performative, and racist from the start.

Its not eternal. This is not a thousand-year Reich.
January 16, 2026 at 4:55 PM
There's a few really helpful people on the web who post watercolor swatches with detailed reviews/info on pigments, lightfastness and so on. Sadly one of them, Kim Crick, has had serious medical issues for years and her family is closing the business and eventually shutting down/moving the website.
January 2, 2026 at 8:30 PM
that feeling when you have a hundred pens but one VERY SPECIFIC ONE is MISSING
December 20, 2025 at 7:27 PM
The Law of Glitter applies to iridescent inks and paints too. Therefore, everything in my sketchbook is sparkly.
December 16, 2025 at 1:01 AM
December tomatoes: the last two tomatoes from my neighbor's garden, picked green when the nights got cold, and ripened indoors.
December 15, 2025 at 5:43 PM
There's something so hopeful about making a new sketchbook. What will I record/discover/ imagine? (What will I leave unsaid but will turn out to be really obvious in the drawings?)
Fabriano Cocktail 290# makes really good soft covers, btw.
December 12, 2025 at 10:41 PM
My first look at the work of Jules Feiffer, Edward Gorey, Garth Williams, Arthur Szyk, Ronni Solbert, Helen Sewell, Clement Hurd, John R Neill, and many more came from the books they illustrated, and my memories of their art and the writers' words in those stories are inseparable.
Educators: You can help show next generation the value of HUMAN creativity. When talking about illustrated books, pls mention illustrators by name? Display student artwork on your walls w/credit. Discuss illustrators w/your class. Invite illustrators to visit your school!
#PicturesMeanBusiness
December 11, 2025 at 4:39 PM
well, one of them. There are many. But today's weather is just as much about sound as it is about visuals, and that always puts me in a Burchfield mood. (Also, close enough to 50 years.)

Charles Burchfield, Clearing Sky, 1917
December 9, 2025 at 4:52 AM
Introduce yourself with 5 animals you’ve seen in the wild:

American crow
Common raven
Alpine chough
Steller's jay
Boat-tailed grackle
Introduce yourself with 5 animals you’ve seen in the wild:

Svalbard reindeer
Scalloped hammerhead shark
Leopard seal
Polar bear
Secretary bird
Introduce yourself with 5 animals you've seen in the wild:

- Elephant
- Moose
- Alligator
- Brown Bear
- Mountain Goat

Listed in decreasing order of proximity. The elephant was a quarter mile away. Moose, about the same. Alligator? 15 feet. Bear? 10 feet (through a window). Goat? TOO DAMN CLOSE.
November 29, 2025 at 2:28 PM
Google results started giving me that sinking feeling in 2013 or so, same with crappy recycled/ripped off images for home design and recipes. Algorithmic/SEO slop wrecked the cool internet - the one where you connected with interesting humans who knew things- long before LLM slop came on the scene.
Automated text generation has existed for decades. "Dead internet" is from 2016. Markov chain text generation dates to at least 1984. The incentives to algorithmicly generate web text have been around since before 2010. Huge swaths of the internet have been case for seo/advertising slop for decades.
November 28, 2025 at 3:38 PM
today's news from the ocean (also somewhere, "death-ball sponge" the band or the spicy dessert , is coming into being)
A 35-day deep-sea expedition in the Southern Ocean has uncovered 30 new species: from a carnivorous “death-ball” sponge to iridescent armoured worms, black corals and even the first-ever live footage of a colossal squid in its natural habitat. buff.ly/9uVWJvN
#ShareGoodNewsToo
Armored worms and death-ball sponges among array of life newly documented from the deep sea
In the darkness of the deep ocean, where pressure crushes and light fails, an expedition has found an astonishing array of life, including a carnivorous “death-ball” sponge (from the genus…
buff.ly
November 24, 2025 at 7:17 PM
oops someone's seen my house
Twitter accounts are based in Russia. BlueSky accounts are based in homes with, frankly, too many books, plants, obsolete cables, and pieces of rustic pottery, that could do with a bit of a tidying up, to be honest.
November 23, 2025 at 9:41 PM
just me saying (again) that the ocean is the closest thing we have to another planet that people can go to right now, today, and we had better not fuck it up (any further)

thank you @alexandragallant.com for letting me know this camera exists!
November 22, 2025 at 8:33 PM
Also, happy November 17dee to all who celebrate.
November 17dee
YouTube video by Rasputina - Topic
m.youtube.com
November 17, 2025 at 6:51 PM
I gave in to the Diamine Inkvent Calendar temptation and the first two colors dilute into a magical iridescent purple, so have a happy purple day, everyone.
November 17, 2025 at 5:48 PM
Visiting Boston and this is what I have to say about East Coast cities
November 12, 2025 at 11:31 PM
Really wish Portland Fire and Rescue had an account here but this is from this morning.
(Cautiously hopeful that the backpack was not at any point attached to a human in the river.)
#pdx
November 10, 2025 at 11:52 PM
Reposted by Lli Wilburn
When a large-scale restoration effort was halted by feds, history could not be forced back into the archives.
The first film made in Idaho was headed back to the big screen. Then DOGE intervened - High Country News
When a large-scale restoration effort was halted by feds, history could not be forced back into the archives.
buff.ly
November 2, 2025 at 11:01 PM
And one of the best gem and mineral museums in the country is in a small town in Maine. mainemineralmuseum.org
November 2, 2025 at 4:41 PM