Thank you, Mr. Goldman, for sharing this mnemonic for understanding the lengths of the parts of the hand. This has helped me more than anything I can think of to understand how the hand works and how to draw it. Knowing that the length of the fingers is half the length of the hand - and that the knuckles of the middle finger are half that, and half that again - has taught me more about the hand than anything I can think of.
Also, and not explicitly said in your breakdown - but something anyone can confirm, by placing one hand over the other at a 90 degree angle, or placing the middle finger over the back of the opposite palm - your diagram taught me that the WIDTH of the hand is half the LENGTH of the hand. This has been equally useful in setting proportions so, again, Mr. Goldman ... thank you.
So I'm done with the bulk of my first-round edits for The Neurodiversiverse, and I can report that you can't predict how long an edit letter is going to take. The easy ones end up with a hundred line edits, and the hard ones go smooth as glass.
So, those are construction workers loading a bobcat onto a flatbed on our driveway.
Except, they're not our construction workers.
Our neighbors are building a big, nice house, but have not been respecting our land while they're doing it. And many people I know have been telling me to give them hell for doing so - in fact, this picture is an example of that, as I was feeding my cat in the morning and saw these guys loading up on our driveway, blocking our housekeeper from getting in (you can barely see her car in the distance) and, generally, making a mess on our property like the neighbors owned it - so I zoomed down there to take these pictures:
But, frankly speaking, I worked for 17 years at Google, and over 25 years in technology, and I quite frankly don't need any more stress trying to solve problems like this. I'm done with the bullshit - I've heard the sob stories too many times, whether it's "oh, we're doing it just using your driveway as a one-off" (no, it's a ten-off at this point) or "no, this obviously dumb thing is actually a good idea" (no, the obvious problem that I just pointed out in your plan will quickly come to pass, like it always does) - and don't need any more.
Yes, I could get mad. (And I did, a little bit). But what good would it do me - or them?
If all goes well, we'll be living next to these neighbors a long, long time. And they've been trying to work with us, quickly responding whenever one of their workers starts parking their cars there (because when one does it, the rest see it, and start doing it as well). Getting angry just escalates the situation, and creates opposition where it doesn't need to exist. Instead, by practicing radical forgiveness, we can de-escalate the situations, and find ways to work together - like alerting my neighbor to the erosive damage done by the torrential rains last month, so they can save the trees they planted as a visual barrier:
Forgiveness isn't just for the forgiven person. It's for the forgiver - it helps us not just set aside the harm done, but also the anger that arises from our perception of injustice. Anger is like an alarm - the first thing a smart person does with an alarm is turn it off, and investigate the situation that the alarm caused. If you don't forgive, slights from the past can live on forever - taking us further and further away from the harmony on Earth that presages the harmony that should become our forever home.
When we finally get superintelligence, I want it to explain to me what cats are thinking. Loki clearly wants something, but it isn't clear what it is. He wants your attention, he wants to go outside, he wants to go somewhere not too far from the house, but he doesn't seem satisfied with you just standing there, nor with you bending down to scratch him, nor with you going anywhere else.
What do you want, for me to just stand here, so you feel safe rolling in the dirt?
There's no pleasing some people.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Loki, in the external cat condo which we got as part of our successful "cat sitting solution".
Me drawing from yet another Midjourney character sheet for Porsche. Misproportioned, and I am still having trouble on the eye placement and face proportions, something I've seen on a fair number of old drawings; once I finish the hands and feet book I think it's probably time to go back to practicing faces.
This certainly is rendered better, but if you look closely at the edges of the hair, especially where it meets the armor, it doesn't make too much sense. Oh well, it's still inspirational.
So I recently came across a tutorial for game development that seemed pretty interesting, so I decided to give it a try. The tutorial was in Rust, a new language that I’d been hearing about, and so I thought it would be a good idea to learn that too.
I even found an online playground, https://play.rust-lang.org/, which lets you try out the language in the browser, much like the Go playground: https://go.dev/play/. I quickly started trying out some simple functions that I use a lot in a variety of languages …
… and got stuck right away on Rust’s lack of function parameters.
There’s a whole blogpost https://www.thecodedmessage.com/posts/default-params/ on why this antifeature is actually, in the minds of “Rustians,” is a good thing, but even that admits that the alternatives that the language provides “might seem worse than useless.”
I’m sorry, I’ve gone through this kind of Stockholm Syndrome thinking before, where users held hostage to the good features of a language start coming up with excuses for its warts. For example, take the Go programming language. Programming Go felt like a breath of fresh air, but it was literally worse than useless for my use case - I had to write the software I wanted in C and then call it from Go. And the language itself had terrible warts from the terrible choices made by the core Go team - at the time I used it, no support for generics, endless proliferating error checks, and worst of all, an overly verbose unit test style which threw out everything we’d learned from Java and Python about how to write tests using semantically meaningful methods like assertIsNotNone or assertIsEmpty.
I’m not saying I’m not going to not learn Rust, nor that I’d never use Go again. Hey, one day I may be a convert! But, based on what I know now, I would never recommend these languages to anyone. My recommendations for programming languages remain the same "Big Three, Plus One":
For most tasks, use Python.
If you need speed, use C++.
If you work with a very large enterprise, consider Java.
If you’re working with a system that uses a specific language, use that language: C in the Linux kernel, Javascript on the web, Swift in iOS, Java in Android, PHP in WordPress, C# for Unity, and so on.
Many of the alternative languages that you can use - Go, Rust, Scala, Clojure, even my beloved Mathematica, Common Lisp, or J - are actually worse than useless for most tasks, for two reasons.
First, most of them are less baked than the Big Three, and are less ready for developing real applications; they’re not chosen for their fitness to purpose, but instead chosen by zealots who are trying to make a point. Don’t be a zealot trying to make a point.
Second, working on these other languages actually detracts from making the Big Three better. The C++ of today is almost unrecognizably usable compared to when I first started using it, and Python and Java are rapidly adding new usability features as well.
That doesn’t mean we don’t try new things. C++ has mostly replaced C, and TypeScript is edging out JavaScript; who knows, perhaps, one day some variant of Go or Rust or Swift will become the dominant paradigm. (But, honestly, I hope not).
Nevertheless, I remember talking to a programmer friend about a refactoring I wanted to accomplish, and he angrily sketched out a better build system which could have solved the problem using a Turing-complete constraint language to figure out the dependencies.
I just remembered the famous quote from the creator of ANTLR - “Why program by hand in 5 days what you can spend 25 years of your life automating?” - and handwrote a script to solve the problem in an hour, and got on with my life.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Some of the older programming language books that I have in my stacks, most of which are now worse than useless for getting things done nowadays - though if you really love programming languages and learning how things work, they're more than priceless, now and forever.
Which is not actually true at all. What I am ACTUALLY doing in "drawing every day" is drawing several day's worth of drawings all at once, then posting them one at a time, trying to keep a large enough buffer that I am always drawing when I have time to sit down and really draw, and am not scrambling to sketch at 2AM.
More Goldman studies. Drawing sort of every day, at least rate-wise.
So this is the second 2010 Toyota Prius we've owned that reached 100,000 miles. The one we still have on the Left Coast is closing in on a quarter million miles, if it isn't already there - far enough to reach the moon, if one could drive it (and even if you could, it would take half a year, and +5000 gallons of gas.
We got this car when we moved from the Left Coast after all the drought and the fires and the burning, but needed to leave the old Prius out there as I was still working for the Google remotely, visiting several times per year to perform on-robot experiments and sync with the team.
Now that's up in the air. 200,000+ miles, maybe closing in on 250K - even though we had to rebuild the whole engine at around the 100,000 mark. That gave us the confidence to purchase this used Prius at the 80,000 mile mark - we knew what this type of vehicle is capable of.
This is a completely different strategy than my father used. He used to buy a new car every two to three years, like clockwork, to try to preserve as much trade-in value as possible - and to ensure that the car was reliable. Perhaps this made sense back in the day, when cars didn't last as long, but I'm not sure.
I think it was just a strategy. He enjoyed having new cars, and could afford it. I enjoy having new cars, and maybe we could afford it, but I enjoy being environmental more, and getting a very efficient hybrid car and running it into the ground to recoup the energy that went into its manufacture feels like the way to go.
Now, I told myself that I'd consider trading in the California Prius when we'd driven it to the moon - but my experience is that cars eventually do give up the ghost, either from sheer mechanical weardown (my old Isuzu Rodeo) or from collisions (my first car, the Mustang, and my last SUV, the Pathfinder).
So I'm in no rush, here or in California.
So, congratulations to your first 100K, East Coast Prius. Here's hoping you make it 100K more.
A brief thought today, as I'm trying to get back on an even keel after a weekend of draining stuff. I found this "alphabet of goodness" for a few bucks at a nearby Restore, and recently hung it where I could see it before walking into my office, to help remind me to have the right attitude towards the world.
But it reminds me of the unnecessary opposition many Christians have towards the good things of this world. Many of the Christian authority figures I grew up couldn't admit that something that they'd heard from our culture was actually a good thing, and would invent reasons why it was bad.
Even recently, a priest at the local Church was complaining that "Jesus wasn't asking people to go live their best lives, but to get out of the boat and follow Jesus." Well, in one sense that is true, but in another sense, it isn't. When Peter got out of the boat and walked on water, he soon was floundering.
Self-care is an important thing. It's possible for people to literally work themselves to death if they aren't careful - either by causing themselves long-term health problems that shorten their lives, or by causing them to take risks that cut their lives short more abruptly.
Taking care of yourself is important. Jesus didn't give us a spirit of fear - nor did he wish us to cultivate habits that cause fear in ourselves. He told us to repent from our evil ways, yes, but also to be not afraid - and that following Him could be an easy burden if we took up his yoke.
It's not wrong to take care of yourself, even if you are a Christian trying to serve Jesus. If your body is a temple, it should be a well-tended place, one that functions. If you are God's instrument, you should make sure that instrument is in good condition.
Yes, sometimes following Jesus is a difficult path, but we don't have to make it harder than it already is by embracing bad choices - or ignoring good advice just because it's not coming from a church leader.
-the Centaur
Pictured: A nice framed inspirational stone I found for something like 3-5 bucks at Restore.
When it rains, it pours. I missed a few meetings last week due to work on the Neurodiversiverse - we were working through edits, and needed more time, and decided to extend our meeting, ultimately taking three and a half hours. But I had an afternoon meeting I was supposed to schedule - we hadn't put it on the calendar yet, and were going to schedule it over email after my Neurodiversiverse meeting. But since that scheduling hadn't happened yet, I didn't see it on my calendar when we were deciding to extend the NDV meeting, and since that meeting didn't end for several hours, I completely missed the window my colleague and I were planning to meet in.
What's worse, I forgot what evening of the week it was, and completely spaced on the Vestry (church board) meeting scheduled for that night. I've added a recurring meeting for that, but the damage is done - and cascading. Since I missed that meeting, I missed the discussion at the Vestry meeting of when we were supposed to meet with the bishop - a retreat that I just found out is scheduled in just thirty minutes, when I had already booked this time to work on Neurodiversiverse edits, which are time urgent.
Sometimes I think it would be easier to be a cat.
However, I feel the need to point out that our capabilities often exceed our estimation of them. I was wondering how I was going to get everything done. Well, now, I am still going to get everything done - I'm just, somehow, going to do more than I thought I was capable of. Funny how that happens. We often imagine that we have less resources available to us than we do - this is an adaptive self-defense mechanism that keeps us from burning out. But it can make us feel that we can't handle things - when we can.
-the Centaur
Pictured: a cat, in comfort. Actually Loki had a very terrible, no good, bad night as he wanted out around midnight, right when I went to bed, and was forced to sit on his warm heating pad, unable to get crunchies for SEVERAL HOURS while his human slept. Imagine the injustice! When FINALLY let in, Loki went to every bowl in the house in turn, sampling each one, before finally settling down to warm and fuzzy sleep.
Back when I worked on-site, I used to keep a lot of genre toys on my desk - Oreius the centaur, a plush Cthulhu, a Star Trek Enterprise I used as a fidget - and I told myself that I was doing so to remind myself why I was working: not just to pay for food, clothing and shelter, but to pay for fun and entertainment.
But I had too much stuff, too poorly organized, to the point that I didn't want to come home and spend time in my own library. It got ridiculous at one point. My wife and I talked about it and I took on the big project of turning the library into something that I could REALLY use, from organized files to library style aisles.
But also, it meant having a place for everything. If I was to own the genre toys, if I was to keep them, I needed to SEE them, not just store them, and, ideally, have them be a part of my day-to-day life. This meant crafting a space, and, ultimately, building custom structures which enabled the toys to go on display. This became even more urgent in the pandemic, where we built out a lot of structure to enable us to put almost EVERYTHING on display, down to Porsche's scythe hanging over my desk.
But, as I said before, after we moved away from the drought and the fires and the burning, we left the swords lying around and the hardware to hang them in the metaphorical junk drawer. It's easy to put self-care chores like this on the back burner, as they are not "urgent". And they're not even really "important", in the grander scheme of things. But they are fulfilling, on two levels: first, in that they make your environment nicer; and second, in that they involve making and building things, which is an accomplishment of its own.
Well, now, we have assembled the things that we made to make Excalibur and Kylo Ren's lightsaber an integral part of my environment. They are no longer easily visible behind me when I'm on Meet or Zoom, but they are at last up on display again. And one more piece of the library falls into place.
All I need now is to find the jade monkey, roadmaps and ice scraper before the next full moon ...
I do like the fact that Loki is spending more time in the library (especially while my wife is gone on a business trip, so he's been getting less attention due to having fewer attendants) but I sure hope that none of the things on my whiteboard desk were important TODOs, because they're TOSMEARS now.
Again from Goldman. You know, I've noticed that in a sense I've become less ambitious this year: when I look back at the early DED posts, I see things like the following - Dad drawn on toned paper:
Or this, done on my Wacom Cintiq and Photoshop:
But the more methodical approach I'm taking this time seems to be having more effect on my drawing skill: I feel more confident about some of the things that I'm drawing, even if they are less ambitious.
So, I think I'm going to keep up the methodical approach and hope it goes somewhere! Wish me luck.
So once again I'm taking something good on for Lent - continuing my series on "Jesus and Godel". To get started, I want to talk a little about the approaches that Jesus and Paul take to conflict.
Jesus reassures us a lot - he frequently tells us not to be afraid or to worry. But he also says that he's here to divide people from each other. Paul, in contrast, is an authoritarian: most of the rules that make up modern Christianity come from Paul - yet he admonishes us not to separate into factions.
These messages are actually complementary. Jesus is the messenger of truth, which on the one hand is nothing to be afraid of - but can cause conflict when people do not agree on the truth. Paul, on the other hand, suggests that we should not separate into factions because of our disagreements.
Jesus taught with authority, but Paul admits that sometimes he's speaking for himself - and both suggest that we should be peacemakers. We are fallible, which means that we can be wrong, and the people we interact with can be wrong - which can lead to division, as we stand up for what's true; but that fallibility means we cannot rely on our own authority, but must instead turn together towards Jesus.
I think these ideas are worth unpacking further - but, in the spirit of "drawing every day" and "blogging every day", I did not want the quest for perfection to get in the way of starting on the path towards it.
So back in the day (and on the Left Coast) I had a couple of swords mounted on my bookcases. We hadn't done that here because we were busy ... but two years is too long to be busy, so my wife and I decided it was time to set up the swords again, starting with the Kylo "Kylo Ren is Best Sith" Ren cross-lightsaber.
Only ... it ain't that simple. We had to buy new brackets as the previous ones disappeared in the move. We found those at Lowe's, but it turned out that we could not install the mounting diamonds as the old bookcases were solid wood and these were hollow - the screws would have pulled straight out.
Eventually we used bolts and washers and I was able to finish the installation after my wife left town.
A little duct tape and an old Amazon delivery bag protect the books in the case. There's only one problem:
Despite our careful measuring, it was not possible to make it both level (up-and-down) and even (side-to-side) at the same time. It may be that the bookcase itself is leaning (see the top of the previous picture) and since it is screwed into the bookcase next to it for stability, well, we're stuck with that.
