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urlocalcyb.org
ur local cyborg
@urlocalcyb.org
120 followers 350 following 79 posts
language artist, software dev, spec fic enjoyer, painter, marylander 👾🦀 she/her

https://caroldinh.github.io/ + http://seenby.urlocalcyb.org/
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urlocalcyb.org
Fan-made book cover of Kate Wilhelm's post-apocalyptic cloning novel, "Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang." Watercolor & colored pencil on paper, 12"x18". #Watercolor #SciFi #SciFiArt

This piece (+2 more) will be on display at @rhizomedc.bsky.social in December as part of the "STEAM Engine" exhibit!
Fan-made book cover of Kate Wilhelm's 'Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang' in watercolor. In the horizon is the silhouette of a windmill over a red starry sky. A tunnel beneath the windmill opens into secret rooms illustrated as an underground map, depicting men working at large computers, students in a classroom, a line of pregnant women, men building canoes, and clone fetuses in tanks. Overlaid in each room are the words "WHERE LATE THE SWEET BIRDS SANG" with the author's name, "KATE WILHELM" at the bottom. Same as the previous image but without the typography: fan-made book cover of Kate Wilhelm's 'Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang' in watercolor. In the horizon is the silhouette of a windmill over a red starry sky. A tunnel beneath the windmill opens into secret rooms illustrated as an underground map, depicting men working at large computers, students in a classroom, a line of pregnant women, men building canoes, and clone fetuses in tanks.
November 29, 2025 at 3:53 PM
urlocalcyb.org
(Loki voice) I've been INSTALLING... for THIRTEEN MINITES
November 18, 2025 at 2:55 PM
urlocalcyb.org
My preliminary review of Guillermo del Toro's #Frankenstein. I have more thoughts than can really be said in an appropriate length for a Letterboxd review (cross-posted to my blog: seenby.urlocalcyb.org/2025/10/26/g...) but overall, I enjoyed the movie but wasn't particularly surprised by anything
Screenshot of a blog post that reads: Frankenstein (2025) dir. Guillermo del Toro Date seen: October 24, 2025 Date reviewed: October 26, 2025 SPOILERS for both Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation ahead. Image of Victor beholding the incomplete Creature in his lab. In directing Frankenstein, Guillermo del Toro knew he had one chance to get it right, and that’s why he waited so long. I read del Toro’s introduction to THE NEW ANNOTATED FRANKENSTEIN, written in 2017, and gleaned his connection with with Mary Shelley’s original tale profoundly. And indeed, his adaptation brings to life the grandiosity that is Romantic prose, with rich and indulgent color and costuming, and formidable sets that capture the extravagance of aristocratic wealth, the sublime of the natural world, and the spectacle of mad science in the popular imagination. Like Shelley’s novel, the true horror lies not in the blood and the gore but in the humanity (and lack thereof) of monsters and the men who make them.
October 30, 2025 at 1:46 AM
urlocalcyb.org
Painted the cover of David Grann's "The Wager" for a birthday gift! 12" diameter; acrylic on canvas #acrylicpainting #booksky #history
June 23, 2025 at 10:36 PM
urlocalcyb.org
there was an instant (the very last one)
#crimeandpunishment #booksky #classiclit #artsky #digitalart
3 illustration panels of scenes from "Crime and Punishment." Panel 1: Rodya and Dounia stand in Rodya's room, clasping hands. Text: “Dounia, good-bye,” called Raskolnikov, in the passage. “Give me your hand.” “Why, I did give it to you. Have you forgotten?” said Dounia, turning warmly and awkwardly to him. “Never mind, give it to me again.” And he squeezed her fingers warmly. Panel 2: Rodya and Dounia stand in Rodya's room, this time facing away from each other. Rodya faces into the room; Dounia has turned towards the door and is leaving. Text: “But what does it mean, brother? Are we really parting for ever that you... give me such a parting message?” “Never mind.... Good-bye.” He turned away, and walked to the window. She stood a moment, looked at him uneasily, and went out troubled. No, he was not cold to her. There was an instant (the very last one) when he had longed to take her in his arms and say good-bye to her, and even to tell her, but he had not dared even to touch her hand. Panel 3: Rodya and Dounia stand again in Rodya's room. Dounia embraces her brother. Text: “It’s late, it’s time to go! I am going at once to give myself up. But I don’t know why I am going to give myself up.” Big tears fell down her cheeks. “You are crying, sister, but can you hold out your hand to me?” “You doubted it?” She threw her arms round him.
April 18, 2025 at 10:10 PM
urlocalcyb.org
Review of Cai Guo-Qiang & cAI's "Interspecies Love Letter" @ the Kennedy Center up on my blog! Some thoughts on AI, documentation, and violence as medium. I also just changed my domain so hopefully it still works. seenby.urlocalcyb.org/2025/04/16/c...
April 16, 2025 at 11:57 PM
urlocalcyb.org
Are you a writer who got their start writing Percy Jackson fanfiction? I'm interested in curating a zine of mythology-inspired art and writing from our generation & am gauging initial interest here: forms.fillout.com/t/5m1v6fPTwwus #callforsubmissions #callforart #booksky #artsky #percyjackson
LEGACIES ZINE: from the Percy Jackson generation; mythology-inspired stories by Generation Z writers. Call for Interest. Seeking: Explorations of mythology & language, & place, & identity, & futurism, & planet, & self, & history, & resistance, & family, & diaspora, & memory (& beyond)
April 13, 2025 at 12:05 AM
urlocalcyb.org
losing it over two different translations of the same line #booksky
April 11, 2025 at 2:40 AM
urlocalcyb.org
i just read crime and punishment
April 7, 2025 at 11:36 PM
urlocalcyb.org
fan-made cover of ted chiang's short story collection "exhalation," part of a personal challenge to paint a book cover for something i read each month! #tedchiang #scifiart #sciencefiction #artsky #booksky #watercolor
Fan-made book cover of Ted Chiang's "Exhalation" done in watercolor. A humanoid figure manipulates two levers, his head and chest cavity open to reveal tubes of air. He is looking up at several rings that appear as portals to other worlds, filled with imagery from Chiang's novel: the skyline of Old Baghdad, fossils beneath a wave, steampunk cogs, parrots flying, a Victorian-style robot, a lion cub, two prism-shaped computers, Data Earth, and floating video player and photo gallery interfaces. cover illustration for "exhalation" by ted chiang and entry #2 in my personal challenge of painting a cover for a book i read every month. if i was sticking perfectly to schedule, i should have finished this in march, but the detail and perspective were a huge challenge; i spent at least two weeks scribbling concepts and crossing them out, and when i was finally ready to transition to The Big Paper, i sat on the sketch for like two weeks struggling with the symmetry and geometry. which is precisely the point of this challenge; i'm trying to push myself more with my traditional art but also allow myself to take the process as slowly as it demands, and spend time on a painting rather than rush it out. which incidentally is one of the reasons why i have so much respect and admiration for ted chiang as a writer - each one of his stories is so tightly written and thoroughly researched; each story is a product of the time he puts into it. despite all his accolades he has published <20 short stories in a 30-or-so year career; he said on an interview at some point that he spent seven years researching linguistics and developing his craft to write "story of your life," which got adapted into the movie "arrival" and which i would say is one of the best science fiction stories i've ever read. i've been picking at a sci-fi short story for about four months which feels like a lot of time but really isn't, in the grand scheme of things. in a world that demands creatives to churn out their work like a factory in order to make a fraction of a living (indeed, ted chiang i believe makes a living on technical writing, not fiction writing), ted's stories are such a refreshing reminder that good art takes time. i can only dream of one day being able to write like him.
April 7, 2025 at 10:19 PM
urlocalcyb.org
ahhhhh #gothiclit #booksky
April 3, 2025 at 1:28 PM
urlocalcyb.org
i am so done y'all, this is taking forever #watercolor #artsky
April 2, 2025 at 11:40 PM
urlocalcyb.org
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro - I love how KI's science fiction feels so grounded and human, rather than indulging on the technicalities of things - also I like the sense of anonymity where you only knew the first letter of the character's surname, I'm stealing that for one of my stories rn
March 6, 2025 at 1:16 AM
urlocalcyb.org
1. the house of the spirits / la casa de los espiritus por isabel allende - probably my favorite book! i read it when i was... 17? 18? just barely old enough to appreciate it and i'd never read anything like it. my favorite character was jaime. (+ some art of the characters that i made a while back)
March 3, 2025 at 2:13 AM
urlocalcyb.org
non-text version:
February 16, 2025 at 11:09 PM
urlocalcyb.org
cover illustration for mary shelley's second sci-fi novel "the last man." there is an unfortunate dearth of cover art for this novel, since it is so seldom published, but i wanted to capture the beauty and grandiosity of her environmental prose! #maryshelley #classicliterature #booksky #watercolor
watercolor illustration of "the last man" by mary shelley, featuring a lone figure flying in a steampunk winged hot air balloon, over a forest, hagia sophia in Istanbul, and the roman ruins, with astronomical formulas and diagrams written in the stars. excerpt from "the last man" by mary shelley: "Early in the morning Adrian brought me the welcome intelligence that the wind had changed: it had been south-west; it was now north-east. The sky was stripped bare of clouds by the increasing gale, while the tide at its ebb seceded entirely from the town. The change of wind rather increased the fury of the sea, but it altered its late dusky hue to a bright green; and in spite of its unmitigated clamour, its more cheerful appearance instilled hope and pleasure. All day we watched the ranging of the mountainous waves, and towards sunset a desire to decypher the promise for the morrow at its setting, made us all gather with one accord on the edge of the cliff. When the mighty luminary approached within a few degrees of the tempest-tossed horizon, suddenly, a wonder! three other suns, alike burning and brilliant, rushed from various quarters of the heavens towards the great orb; they whirled round it. The glare of light was intense to our dazzled eyes; the sun itself seemed to join in the dance, while the sea burned like a furnace, like all Vesuvius a-light, with flowing lava beneath. The horses broke loose from their stalls in terror—a herd of cattle, panic struck, raced down to the brink of the cliff, and blinded by light, plunged down with frightful yells in the waves below. The time occupied by the apparition of these meteors was comparatively short; suddenly the three mock suns united in one, and plunged into the sea."
February 16, 2025 at 11:09 PM
urlocalcyb.org
I love this meme template
January 31, 2025 at 7:01 PM
urlocalcyb.org
working at a startup while fresh out of college & lacking mentorship on industry practices be like
January 31, 2025 at 6:57 PM
urlocalcyb.org
🥹🥹
Over time, my brother abandoned his slides—moved on to other interests. But one day, years later, when I was eighteen and he was twenty-one, he told me that Comet Bennett would be visible in the night sky and we drove to the top of Mount Tamalpais and, with many others, viewed the comet. It didn’t flash across the night like a meteor as I’d thought it would. It stood in the black sky—frozen—spectacular. Soon our lives diverged. He moved east. I moved south. He gambled on stocks. I gambled on poems. We spoke by phone every couple of weeks. We didn’t have much in common, but we were constant. Like the planets. The stars. Not close—but constant. A couple of months ago, before his sudden illness, I thought of Comet Bennett and looked it up, wondering when it would return. I was shocked to see that it wouldn’t be back until the year 3,600. I called my brother and reminded him of that wondrous night so long ago. He remembered it vividly. I asked when he thought the comet might return. He had no idea. I told him. Then, as if his thoughts were flung from their orderly orbit, he said: We’ll find a way to be here, together again, when it returns.
January 27, 2025 at 12:52 PM
urlocalcyb.org
oh, congratulate me, hope is triumphant, and i have done some good 🥺🥺🥺

(tw for mention of suicide & slight spoilers for "mathilda" by mary shelley) #classiclit #maryshelley
December 25, 2024 at 9:41 PM
urlocalcyb.org
when you're a burnt out STEM kid but the cure to your burnout is studying the humanities and hanging out with your friends
December 14, 2024 at 2:20 AM
urlocalcyb.org
manuscript moodboard
December 13, 2024 at 2:07 AM
urlocalcyb.org
oh hey, my metallica story got an honorable mention!! thank you for the shoutout and the inspiration @puddingviz.bsky.social !!

🔗: caroldinh.github.io/metallica-bl...
December 11, 2024 at 3:24 AM
urlocalcyb.org
and so it begins... again
November 30, 2024 at 1:59 AM
urlocalcyb.org
This novel's on the back burner but the characters are always fun to draw! What hashtags are people using for this kind of thing? #artistsofbluesky #writersofbluesky
November 15, 2024 at 12:22 AM