Folks familiar with the El Paso Museum of Art (EPMA) are used to being greeted by Gaspar Enriquez’s monumental portraits in the massive foyer. Now, upon entry, a bold and intriguing scene of the Reuben Salazar Apartments by El Paso artist Marianna Olague enlivens the space. 

Olague’s mural sits across from Enriquez’s work — he is a friend of her father’s, a mentor figure, and the man who once painted her into one of his own paintings. “Even though we’re not related,” Olague says, “I feel part of the artistic legacy he helped build.”

For Olague, seeing her work on the walls of EPMA has been nothing short of “a dream come true.” 

Olague has a stacked CV: an MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, a recent residency at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, work in the Smithsonian Museum’s National Portrait Gallery, and she was a finalist of the 2022 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. 

She’s also got the chops: her larger-than-life, luscious oil paintings are some of the most masterful, intriguing portraits and vignettes around. Keep an eye on her juicy, incisive, relatable, humorous work. 

Olague is familiar with Segundo Barrio, where she attended Hart Elementary and Guillen Middle Schools, in one of the historically poorest zip codes in the United States. Her father, himself an artist, studied under Enriquez and now teaches art at Bowie High School. That background infuses her work with an intimate sense of place.

A mural by Marianna Olague at the El Paso Museum of Art. Image courtesy of the El Paso Museum of Art

The Reuben Salazar Apartments inspire her mural; they are located in Olague’s childhood friends’ neighborhood. She rendered it in a bright Juárez-inspired yellow. Windows and porches fill with familiar characters: her nephew Sebastian, her sister Maya, her father under a truck, and even herself gossiping at a doorway.

“Even though we grew up in what was technically poverty, it was colorful and full of life,” she reflects.

The mural has already become a teaching tool. During EPMA’s summer camps, students added dialogue bubbles to the figures, imagining conversations and everyday moments. As EPMA Senior Curator Michael Reyes points out, “It creates empathy — kids and visitors see themselves, their families, reflected on the walls of a museum.”

“When I visited Olague’s studio,” Reyes remembers, “I immediately saw how resonant the work was for our community.”

This summer, Reyes displayed four of Olague’s works, and EPMA members voted to add Spare, Olague’s most recent painting and self-portrait, into the permanent collection. The four proposed works balance landscapes and portraits, with each subject closely tied to her family — her sister, and herself.

An installation image of four works by Marianna Olague at the El Paso Museum of Art. Image courtesy of David Davis

Olague’s distinctive color philosophy is central to her hyperrealist style. Rather than reproducing the muted earth tones of the desert or neighborhood streets, she pushes them into hyper-saturation. “I take the colors that are already there and elevate them to a level that immediately grabs attention,” Olague says. “It marks ordinary, fleeting moments as very important. That’s what art should do: make us pause and really see.”

Marianna Olague, “On Transmountain Drive”

For On Transmountain Drive, Olague paints teal shadows darker than red skin tones, inverting light and shadow while preserving a believable realism. “It tricks you into seeing more light than there actually is,” she notes.

The colors in this work bring the heat, as does the expression of the portrait’s subject, Olague’s sister, who casually sits on the hood of a car with a near-scathing, transfixing gaze directed at the viewer. 

Marianna Olague, “Customer Service Representative,” 2020, oil on canvas

Customer Service Representative, a searingly realistic portrait of Olague’s sister Maya as an essential worker in a Food King grocery store during the pandemic, takes the opposite approach. Here, the supermarket’s drab, unavoidable palette dominates, with vibrancy appearing only in Maya’s jacket and makeup. Maya’s glazed-over gaze is fixed beyond the viewer. 

“She would rather be anywhere else,” Olague laughs. “But that’s the point: she’s just a teenager carrying a responsibility far too heavy for her age.” That work, loaned by a local collector, is currently on view at EPMA.

Marianna Olague, “Spare”

In Olague’s addition to the EPMA’s permanent collection, Spare, she recreates a flat tire scene at a gas station, an homage to her father teaching her mechanical and household repair skills usually reserved for sons.

“I feel fortunate,” she explains. “My dad never taught us differently based on gender — whether it was fixing a tire, an AC, or a sink. That kind of scrappy independence is part of border culture. We learn early on how to take care of ourselves.”

In the painting, Olague hefts a spare tire — the idea of “spare” as self-portrait is wonderfully tongue-in-cheek. The gritty, heat-soaked palette radiates the discomfort of a dry triple-digit high desert day. This piece is Olague. And El Paso. 

According to Reyes, Olague’s acquisition wasn’t a top-down decision, but one chosen by the community through the museum’s Members Choice Program, an annual acquisition initiative running since the mid-1990s with support from the Lipscomb Foundation. Recent acquisitions include Laura Turón in 2024, the De la Torre brothers in 2023, and Vanessa German in 2022.

“It’s truly democratic,” Reyes explains. “We send physical invites and artist information to members about a month in advance. Then at the summer event, around 150 members come together to vote. The turnout is beautifully diverse — steadfast museum supporters, emerging professionals, local artists — all with a voice in shaping the collection.”

The museum’s purchase of Olague’s work has drawn strong community attention. El Paso’s Mayor Pro Tem, Alejandra Chavez, attended the voting event and became a member; board members joined in selecting the works alongside area artists. 

For Reyes, Olague’s addition to the collection fills a long-standing community request: “People wanted more voices from this region, and Marianna delivers that with authenticity and sheer talent. She’s already in multiple private collections and now in three museum collections, including ours. I see her having a lasting place in El Paso’s cultural history.”

The post Self in Community, Art in Place: Marianna Olague at the El Paso Museum of Art appeared first on Glasstire.

A few weeks ago designer James Barnard made this TikTok video about what seemed to be a few mistakes in HBO’s logo. He got a bunch of crap from commenters arguing that they weren’t mistakes at all. Then he heard from the designer of the original version of the logo, from the 1970s.

This all works fine until they go to the car wash.

How is it? IT’S TERRIFYING!

TORONTO – Reporters have gathered at Toronto’s Yorkville Subway to witness the sandwich company’s latest breakthrough in the field of ladling a bunch of sauce onto some salty meat crammed in a tubular hunk of bread.  “Thank you all for coming to see the Great North Chicken Lover, which oozes more liquid than three of […]

The post Subway unveils latest sloppy food tube  appeared first on The Beaverton.

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I keep trying to make people leave my instagram but they won't STOP.

There heads dropping foward, every muscle relaxing, relaxing, until finally they're in deep, deep sleep. #CowboyWho

My part for the collaboration “Everything is fine!” by the Livingtombstone remix of Qbomb song!

Really thankful to be part of it!

Posted as a gif since the video got too blurry!

I noted some time ago that Windows 95 Setup was actually three programs running under three different operating systems. The first part was an MS-DOS program, which was used if you installed Windows 95 from MS-DOS. It installed a miniature version of Windows 3.1 and then used it for the next part. The second part was a 16-bit Windows program, which was the starting point if you installed Windows 95 from Windows 3.1 or Windows 95. This second part did most of the work. The third part was a 32-bit Windows program, which ran inside the inewly-installed Windows 95 to carry out some final steps that must be done inside the installed operating system.

Some people wondered if the MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 versions could install a miniature Windows 95 rather than a miniature Windows 3.1. That would allow the bulk of the work to be done in a fully 32-bit operating system and take advantage of new Windows 95 features.

I guess you could do that, but there are problems with that design, both from an engineering and a user experience standpoint.

From the engineering side, it would mean having to develop a miniature version of Windows 95 in the first place. Using the miniature Windows 3.1 didn’t incur any extra engineering cost because there was already a fully-debugged miniature Windows 3.1 that could be pulled off the shelf and pressed into service. The Windows 95 project was notoriously behind schedule, and adding a “Develop a variant of Windows 95 for the sole purpose of running Setup” would be a large work item that would instantly get pushback. “Can you find a quicker and less expensive way of doing this?” Especially since Windows 95 itself was still under development, so you would be chasing a moving target. Everybody working on a new feature would have to remember, “Oh wait, but what if we’re running in miniature mode?”

Even if you decide that creating a miniature version of Windows 95 is feasible within the desired timeframe, there is the user experience issue: That miniature version of Windows 95 is probably not going to fit on a single floppy disk. It appears that somebody managed to strip it down to around 7.5 MB, with a remark that 5 MB “might” be possible.

Now, the MINI.CAB that comes on the Windows 95 Setup Disk 1 is 441,905 bytes in size, and it expands out to 815,307 bytes, a compressed size of 54.2%. Let’s be nice and call it 50%.

This means that a miniature install of Windows 95 might fit into 2.5 MB, which is two floppies. That’s not so bad.

So now we have this:

MS-DOS user		Windows 3.x user
↓		↓
MS-DOS file copy		Windows 3.x file copy
	Reboot
	↓
	Main setup		← Windows 95 user
	↓
	Reboot
	↓
	Final setup

One catch is that we have to write two versions of the code that copies the miniature Windows 95 to the system, depending on the starting point. That is a little bit of code duplication, and it’s a little more complex than the file copying code that Windows 95 actually uses for copying the miniature Windows 3.1 since there is a floppy swap involved.

Another catch is the need for a reboot into the miniature Windows 95, since the Windows 95 file system takes over operations from the MS-DOS file system that booted the system. In order to do that, they need to agree on the internal MS-DOS data structures the track the open files, and the MS-DOS side needs to provide the necessary hooks for the Windows 95 virtual machine manager to take over from it.

After the main setup is done, we do another reboot, this time into the real copy of Windows 95 (not the temporary one), and let the final setup delete the temporary copy and finish setting up the real copy.

Now, this design does impair the user experience.

The preferred workflow would be to get the user quickly to the point where they are answering questions about how they want Windows to be installed, and then go off and do the work and then finish in Windows 95 with a single reboot.

With this alternate design, the MS-DOS and Windows 3.x cases now do a lot more work before the user can start answering questions. This is frustrating because it means that the user can’t just start Setup, answer some questions, and then walk away and get some coffee. They have to babysit the Setup past the initial file copy (that includes a floppy swap) and sit through a reboot, wait for BIOS to POST, then wait for the miniature Windows 95 to boot itself up and get to the point where it can ask questions.

Furthermore, we now have two reboots, which breaks the “only one reboot” principle.

The staged version where the MS-DOS Setup program quickly installs and runs a miniature version of Windows 3.1 lets us get the user into the “asking questions” stage faster, and it also avoids the double-reboot.

¹ Another suggestion I saw was to install Windows 3.1 with Win32s so that the main setup program could be written as a 32-bit program. Unfortunately, there are a few problems with this proposal. One is that Win32s itself requires a reboot after installing, so you haven’t solved the double-reboot problem. Also, Win32s is itself 2 MB in size, so that adds to the amount of stuff the user has to wait for before they can start answering questions. And this extra 2 MB is used only by Setup; it isn’t going to be reused by the real Windows 95, so this adds to the number of floppies that need to be used.

Furthermore, Win32s requires Enhanced Mode Windows 3.1, so the miniature Windows 3.1 isn’t good enough, since that is just Standard Mode Windows. You now need to include a miniature Enhanced Mode Windows 3.1, but nobody has made one of those yet. The ready-made miniature Windows 3.1 is Standard Mode, not Enhanced Mode. And the Enhanced Mode Windows 3.1 will probably be a few more megabytes, adding to the amount of “dead weight” on the Windows 95 installation floppies.

The post Why didn’t Windows 95 setup install a miniature Windows 95 so that it could be written as a 32-bit program? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

In brief: Invest 94L was reclassified as Potential Tropical Cyclone 9, meaning it is likely to become a tropical storm within the next 24 to 36 hours and produce tropical storm conditions in the Bahamas. We discuss the rain risks there and in Cuba. We also take a closer look at the current forecast goalposts of rainfall for coastal South and North Carolina.

We wanted to add a post this evening to highlight that Invest 94L has been designated as Potential Tropical Cyclone 9, meaning that the National Hurricane Center expects it to develop within the next 36 to 48 hours, requiring tropical storm watches and warnings. In this case, those warnings are presently limited to the Bahamas.

PTC 9 is expected to become a tropical depression tomorrow and a tropical storm tomorrow night as it moves into the Bahamas. Heavy rain is likely in the Bahamas, along with increasing winds and seas as the storm moves through.

Some intense rain is likely over the eastern tip of Cuba as well. Rain totals may reach as high as 16″ or more in the higher terrain there leading to dangerous flooding and landslide risks.

From there, you can see the National Hurricane Center track above. It shows a hurricane and eventually a tropical storm approaching the coast of South Carolina by Tuesday night or Wednesday. There is a tremendous amount of uncertainty on exactly where this system will go, and if you look under the hood and read the NHC’s discussion, they make this clear as well. It’s possible that a landfalling hurricane or tropical storm hits the South Carolina or North Carolina coast early to mid-next week. It’s also possible that this thing just taps the brakes and meanders offshore for a few days. Both scenarios deliver impacts, including torrential rain to the Carolinas, particularly in the Coastal Plain between the Lowcountry, Pee Dee and southeastern North Carolina.

Rainfall scenarios

So let’s lay out a couple of the rainfall scenarios. First, here’s the current official forecast. Consider this the best estimate of how much rain may fall, on average, across the region over the next 7 days.

So, officially at least, the current thought is 4 to 8 inches with isolated higher amounts at the coast.

Let’s say the system never really makes landfall and approaches the coast but probably stays offshore and drifts eastward. The GFS model shows this fairly well today. Its rainfall totals are still impressive.

But they’re also notably lower than the current official forecast. This feels like a nice “floor” for how much rain could occur. I would anticipate at least this much. There will obviously be ways this could change, but given the scenarios in play, that’s where we are right now.

Now, let’s say the storm comes ashore or just hugs the immediate coast for a couple days. This is sort of what the European model showed this morning. How much rain falls in that scenario?

Well, the Euro represents an extreme example at the moment but one that cannot be entirely ruled out. In this scenario, rain totals of 20 inches would be possible on the coast between Charleston and Wilmington with a wide area of 5 to 15 inches in the Pee Dee and southeastern North Carolina. This would bear some similarities to Matthew or Florence in that scenario in terms of the rainfall. Both of those storms were terrible flood producers in this region. To be clear, no one is forecasting a Matthew or Florence redux. But on the higher end of the spectrum of realistic possibilities, we can’t adequately rule the Euro model’s scenario out yet. Same goes for the less problematic GFS, of course.

But in addition to the “there’s a storm coming” mindset, we want folks on the coast and inland in the coastal plain to prepare for the potential for a long-duration rain event and the potential for flooding as well. There will be much to monitor this weekend, and we’ll be back in the morning with the latest.

Already there’s too much Piercing in this movie.

NEW YORK – In a speech before the UN General Assembly, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu declared that Canada officially recognizing Palestine as a state is worse than anything else he could imagine happening there. Canada, along with several other Western countries, recognized Palestine as a state as of Sep 21st, a move which Netanyahu described […]

The post Netanyahu calls Canadian recognition of Palestine the worst thing anyone has ever done to Palestine appeared first on The Beaverton.

The Supreme Court pulled off another shadow docket masterpiece this week, granting Trump’s request to keep FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter fired while simultaneously pretending they haven’t already made up their minds about whether presidents can ignore 90-year-old Supreme Court precedent. What makes this particularly brazen is that the Court is allowing Trump to violate existing law while his challenge to that law is still pending—exactly the opposite of how preliminary relief is supposed to work. It’s a neat trick: use the emergency docket to give Trump exactly what he wants, then schedule oral arguments in December to maintain the fiction that this is all very serious legal deliberation.

As we covered earlier this month, the DC Circuit had the audacity to follow binding Supreme Court precedent when it reinstated Slaughter to her position. The court’s mistake was apparently believing that Humphrey’s Executor v. United States from 1935—where a unanimous Supreme Court told FDR he couldn’t fire FTC commissioners at will—remained good law until explicitly overturned.

Silly lower courts, thinking precedent means something.

The Supreme Court wasted no time correcting this error in judgment, issuing a stay Monday morning with zero explanation, effectively telling Rebecca Slaughter she’s out of a job until the Court gets around to formally trashing nearly a century of precedent sometime after December oral arguments.

Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson, wasn’t having it. Her dissent cuts right to the heart of what makes this so legally absurd:

On top of granting certiorari before judgment in this case, the Court today issues a stay enabling the President to immediately discharge, without any cause, a member of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). That stay, granted on our emergency docket, is just the latest in a series. Earlier this year, the same majority, by the same mechanism, permitted the President to fire without cause members of the National Labor Relations Board, the Merits Systems Protection Board, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Kagan points out that Congress explicitly prohibited each of these removals. The FTC Act bars the President from firing commissioners “except for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” Trump fired Slaughter because she’s a Democrat, not because of any of those reasons. Under current law, that’s illegal. Full stop.

But the majority doesn’t care about current law when Trump wants something:

Yet the majority, stay order by stay order, has handed full control of all those agencies to the President. He may now remove—so says the majority, though Congress said differently—any member he wishes, for any reason or no reason at all. And he may thereby extinguish the agencies’ bipartisanship and independence.

The legal principle at stake here is pretty basic: when you’re challenging existing law, you don’t get to ignore that law while your challenge is pending. That’s the whole point of courts being able to issue stays. You maintain the status quo until the court decides whether the law is constitutional.

But apparently that principle doesn’t apply when Donald Trump really, really wants to fire someone:

I dissented from the majority’s prior stay orders, and today do so again. Under existing law, what Congress said goes—as this Court unanimously decided nearly a century ago. In Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, 295 U.S. 602 (1935), we rejected a claim of presidential prerogative identical to the one made in this case. (Indeed, the suit emerged from a discharge at the very same agency.) Congress, we held, may restrict the President’s power to remove members of the FTC, as well as other agencies performing “quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial” functions, without violating the Constitution. Id., at 629. So the President cannot, as he concededly did here, fire an FTC Commissioner without any reason. To reach a different result requires reversing the rule stated in Humphrey’s: It entails overriding rather than accepting Congress’s judgment about agency design. The majority may be raring to take that action, as its grant of certiorari before judgment suggests. But until the deed is done, Humphrey’s controls, and prevents the majority from giving the President the unlimited removal power Congress denied him.

The only thing that’s different from when Humphrey’s Executor was decided is that this Supreme Court apparently thinks Trump should get whatever Trump wants.

The most damning part of Kagan’s dissent is how she calls out the majority for using the emergency docket to reshape constitutional law:

Our emergency docket should never be used, as it has been this year, to permit what our own precedent bars. Still more, it should not be used, as it also has been, to transfer government authority from Congress to the President, and thus to reshape the Nation’s separation of powers.

This gets to something we’ve been tracking all year: the Court’s systematic use of the shadow docket since the inauguration to hand Trump unprecedented power over the federal government. They’re not just breaking precedent—they’re breaking the normal process for breaking precedent.

As Madiba Dennie at Balls and Strikes puts it:

In more and more decisions, the Supreme Court is overruling judges who are literally just applying the law as it is written, and has long been interpreted; Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh are even scolding judges for failing to anticipate which precedent the Court will stuff in the garbage next. The justices’ handling of Slaughter is again telling lower court judges not to do as the Court has said, but to do what everyone knows the Court wants to say. And increasingly, what the Court wants to say is, “Whatever Trump wants goes.”

Mark Joseph Stern at Slate captures the broader implications nicely:

It is bad enough that the court is clearly planning to let Trump construct the most submissive executive branch in history by purging his opponents from federal agencies. What’s worse, though, is that the supermajority has ushered in this new era of autocratic presidency over the shadow docket, offering almost no public explanation for its radical moves.

Here’s the thing that’s particularly galling: the Court could have easily said “we’re taking this case and we’ll decide it quickly, but in the meantime, existing law applies.” That would have meant Slaughter keeps her job until they rule (as both lower courts said, following the precedent). Instead, they chose to give Trump exactly what he wants while the case is pending, effectively deciding the case before they’ve heard arguments.

The stay also raises another troubling question. The Court asked the parties to brief whether federal courts can even “prevent a person’s removal from public office” at all. If they rule that courts lack this power entirely, then Trump could fire anyone from any agency and the judiciary would be powerless to stop him, even when the firing clearly violates federal law as per Congress.

As Stern writes, this would complete Trump’s takeover of the administrative state:

Should the supermajority strip courts of this authority, then the Fed’s independence will vanish completely: Even if Trump fires its members illegally, the judiciary will have no ability to put them back in office. It is increasingly difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Supreme Court is dismantling every guardrail that separates democracy from dictatorship.

The DC Circuit got this right in their ruling two weeks ago. They followed binding precedent and put Slaughter back in her job, while acknowledging that the Supreme Court would probably reverse them soon. They did their job—applying the law as it exists, not as they think it might exist after Trump’s Court gets done with it.

But apparently following binding Supreme Court precedent is now grounds for immediate reversal by… the Supreme Court.

The Court will hear arguments in December, and everyone knows how this ends. They’ll almost certainly overturn Humphrey’s Executor, give Trump the power to fire any federal official he wants, and pretend this was all a very serious exercise in constitutional interpretation rather than a predetermined outcome delivered through procedural gamesmanship.

Until then, Rebecca Slaughter remains illegally fired, and the Court’s emergency docket continues to serve as Trump’s personal fast-track to unlimited executive power.

Precedent was nice while it lasted.

The most disturbing part isn’t even that they’re planning to overturn Humphrey’s Executor—it’s that they’re so eager to help Trump that they can’t even wait for the formality of actually doing it.

#KRyo #RoninWarriors

I'm going in here horsey, so you stay here and don't move. #CowboyWho

The Man of MATA

pt2

The brothers are bickering.

"If you don't stop whining, I swear to whatever god is left alive-"

"Boys!"

The brothers arrive to Libton, a trading outpost. Many critters run about.

One brother goes to a food stall - Warm Worms, the other two go to Mercury's Tech Junk.

Mercury: "Three corpboys straight out of pre-war propaganda. Did you rob a tomb?"

"Excuse me, bird, we're actually CEOs of MATA!"

Mercury, laughing: "Yeah, and I'm a majority shareholder. You're excused, human.

The brother sits down at the food stall. It's very small and he struggles.

He orders warm worms. A penguin child asks him to pass a napkin. The brother notices the napkin dispenser is a dead CRT.

Mercury: "Cactus pot? Necklace? Whatever this is?"

"Do you have anything that powers up?"

Mercury: "I mean... yeah. But why?"

Brother pulls out a memory stick: "A miracle."

The brothers are using a computer, browsing MATA_database.

"THERE! STOP! What is that?"

An unrealized prototype... MATA AI powered MilTek exoskeleton."

"Mercury, do you have any miltek prosthetics?"

Mercury: "I guess.."

Mercury digs up his stash of back scratchers.

The brothers and critters of Libton assemble the first MATA_BOT.

Girl: "One please!"

Mata_bot ice-cream vendor: "Coming up!" It's an ice cream with worms.

Girl, Fish and Penguin look at a statue in the center of Libton. It's surrounded by tall skyscrappers.

Girl: "What is that?"

Fish:" The three brothers memorial. It was here they built the first MATA_BOT."

Penguin: "Very post modern."

https://analognowhere.com/_/nciios

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Suddenly regretting not doing a run of plush glock-cats.

How am I related to him again?