[Meet Joy and her very talented pot bellied pig - Tootie! Ah, Joy's pages contain beautiful audioscopes - "Scope Paintings" and masterpieces of China Painting Art. Joy's art has been displayed in Seattle, WA, Carmel, CA, Portland, OR and Paris, France. She is also a published writer on art! Be sure to also visit Tootie's page and read how Tootie hacked into Joy's webpage!--ck]
Joy, aka MsSpiffy, is a very talented and very educated, young at heart, lady. What a journey we are about to take. Joy's house is situated in the middle of a 10 acre Wildlife Sanctuary. Here she enjoys living with her 30 birds, one dog, and TOOTIE, her pot-bellied pig! MsSpiffy taught art classes for many years and wrote articles for national publications. She also wrote a book on art that was published in 1986. Joy enjoys writing articles about TOOTIE who hacked into her Tripod website.
At Ms Spiffy's China Art painting, Joy shows her artwork and what she refers to as "Scope-Paintings." She continues to be a teacher by writing articles about Art and how to do audioscopes. She also plays several instruments and is learning how to play the dijiridoo. She enjoys photography and uses this in her work as an artist to reproduce her scopes and paintings.
I asked Joy why she decided on WebTV. She replied, "I purchased my WebTV and one for my daughter so that we could communicate by e-mail as she was attending college." Then Joy started "surfing" right away to find information on music and things she was interested in. The initial use for just e-mail was soon overshadowed by her other interests of finding information on the web.
Joy told us that she found out by pushing and clicking that our signature box could open up a new, interesting and varied world for her. She began searching the "how to" pages so she could add pictures and music to her e-mail pages. Somewhere along the line, Joy discovered audioscopes. This discovery would change how she would look at this little box. The audioscopes were perfect for her as they gave her an artistic outlet which also included music!! Joy plotted and figured out how to do "Scope-Paintings."
I asked Joy how she learned about HTML. She told me that she didn't know anyone to ask questions, so she learned HTML from reading posts in the various newsgroups and by using search engines. It took her about four hours of measuring - using her calculator and figuring before she developed a way to do the audioscopes in the way that she wanted to do them.
Joy's website was opened in August, 1999. TOOTIE hacked into her Tripod site around that same period of time. A few months later, she tells us, Tootie was asked to be the "Official Mascot" for the Homepage Opinions Newsgroup which Tootie said just showed their intelligence and good taste and open-mindedness. That is where Tootie hangs out when she can grab the keyboard from MsSpiffy.
Joy experiments all the time incorporating what she knows - what she is learning and how to achieve what it is that she is trying to do. She continues to add pages reproducing articles that she has written on art and related subjects. Joy is going to learn JavaScript and CSS. She told me that she doesn't know in what direction her pages will go next, but she does know that she enjoys helping people learn and has a plan sort of formulating in her mind although it is not advanced enough yet to disclose what it is.
TOOTIE has been trying to convince her that she should add an advice column for the "LoveLorn" to her website but Joy hasn't decided yet whether she really has the expertise to do this. Personally, Joy said she thinks Tootie should just stick to her recipes. Tootie calls herself "The Ambling Gourmand."
Many people do not realize that TOOTIE is very real and Joy tries to write her stories from a pig's point of view. Although in real life TOOTIE does not have a very good sense of humor, she does provide a way for Joy to express herself.
Joy told me that, overall, she does enjoy her WebTV. She was very disappointed that they took away our ability to do audioscopes in our e-mail. As an artist, she needs to create and the audioscopes provide this outlet. Joy does not personally care for the interactive television feature and would prefer that for those of us who do not have computers, but want to do some of the things that computers can do, should be given to us. She would like to be able to control more of what is loaded into her box with a choice as to whether she wants it or not. Joy also said, "More memory capacity would be wonderful as my scopes are quite large and it is becoming burdensome to produce them. It would be absolutely wonderful if computers could see the audioscopes and I wish there was a way provided for them so they could see this unique, colorful, and interesting art."
In closing, Joy added, "The WebTV community is very unique. We have many things to share with each other. In this vein, I hope that future upgrades will give us abilities to interact with each other as a community and as only WebTV can do." (Amen, Joy!)
[Community Editor's Notes: Joy, what masterful artwork on display in your homepage! Very impressive and so very lovely. My favorites were the "Flowers with Faces (pansies)," your animal portraits, the "Journey Home" and, well, I loved 'em all. The audioscopes were a special treat and Tootie was a hoot to read about in your articles, especially about the Christmas lights fiasco!! Just hilarious!--ck]
Joy aka MsMspiffy and Tootie too!
