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Posts published by “centaur”

[drawing every day 2024 post one oh six]: more sticks

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More stick figure studies from "Wizard: How to Draw". They look simple, but part of "planning for success" in drawing is creating rough sketches to help find the right composition of the piece - and you can't do that if you have to do a full drawing every time, or if you don't know how to draw a simplified sketch.

Drawing every day.

-the Centaur

[drawing every day 2024 post one oh five]: footbones

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Another study from Goldman. It's interesting how different the structures are INSIDE the body from the landmarks they create OUTSIDE the body. So much complexity, in something as simple as a heel and its joint to the rest of the foot - a joint that enables you to waggle your feet independently of the positioning of your ankle and the wriggling your toes (try it). Yet all that complexity must exist inside for us to achieve something as simple on the outside as stretching your feet a little bit.

Drawing (on average) every day, posting every day if I can.

-the Centaur

The Neurodiversiverse Kickstarter – and Clockwork Alchemy Author Guest of Honor!

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Hey folks! This is a "sticky" post up for the next week or so to remind you that I will be Author Guest of Honor at Clockwork Alchemy - and that we're running a Kickstarter for The Neurodiversiverse! Please check out the Kickstarter - and click to be notified when it goes live, I'm told that helps "the algorithm" when it launches.

I was selected as Clockwork Alchemy GOH not just because of the Jeremiah Willstone steampunk series, comprising one novel and a dozen stories featuring the rayguns-corsets-and-aliens world of Victoriana, but also because I've been involved in Clockwork Alchemy since its inception. Please visit us at the con!

At Clockwork Alchemy, I will be joined by my Neurodiversiverse coeditor and friend Liza Olmsted. Our schedule at the event is the following - including a Tea with the Author on Friday and the debut of the audio drama "Jeremiah Willstone and the Choir of Demons" on the anthology panel on Saturday:

Friday, April 19

  • Own Voice Stories - 2:30pm / Synergy 5 - Liza Olmsted, M.D. Neu, Sumiko Saulson, Emily Flummox
    Why promoting and celebrating 'own voices' stories is imperative!
  • Tea with the Author Guest of Honor - 4pm / Synergy 2-3 - Anthony Francis
    Come have tea with me! Ask your questions. I don't promise enigmatic answers!
  • Author Signing with Anthony Francis - 6pm / Convene Lobby
    Come get your books signed!

Saturday, April 20

  • Steampunk Vehicles - 1pm / Inspire 1 - Anthony Francis and Michael Tierney
    We'll talk about airships, land walkers, behemoths, and time machines!
  • Author Signing with Anthony Francis - 4pm / Convene Lobby
    Buy more of my books in Author's Alley, and I'll sign them too!
  • Bringing Anthologies to Life - 5:30pm / Synergy 5 - Anthony Francis, Liza Olmsted and Dover Whitecliff
    We'll discuss the challenges of bringing anthologies to life, and debut the very first Jeremiah Willstone audio drama, "The Choir of Demons"

Sunday, April 21

  • Favorite Steampunk Books - 10am / Synergy 5 - Anthony Francis, Madeline Holly-Rosing, Dover Whitecliff
    What are the greatest steampunk books and series? We have opinions! And will share.
  • Author Signing with Anthony Francis - noon / Convene Lobby
    Buy more of my books in Author's Alley, and I'll sign them too!
  • Author Signing - Last Call with the Author's Alley - 4pm / Convene Lobby
    Buy more of ANYONE's books in Author's Alley, and we'll all sign them! Or sign our own. Whatevz.

Finally, for the duration of the campaign, neurodiversiverse.com will link through to the Kickstarter! We're campaigning to get enough funds to pay our authors full "pro" SFWA rates, and if we surpass that, the funds will go to the planned second book in the series: The Neurodiversiverse - Binary Stars! Back and share, folks!

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty-four day one oh five]: going back to victoriana

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Hey folks! I've got just a quick post for you now, because I need to go heads down on Jeremiah Willstone #2, CITADEL OF GLASS, for Camp Nanowrimo. Prepping to be Guest of Honor at Clockwork Alchemy next week - and creating the Kickstarter campaign for The Neurodiversiverse, which we want to go live before CA - has put me behind on my word count for the month ... so I need to make a few changes.

In "normal" circumstances, I have a pretty simple day: take care of food, cats and laundry, work for several hours on the project of the day, and then break - on Mondays and Wednesdays, a late break for dinner where I catch up on reading, on Tuesdays and and some Thursdays, an early dinner break before writing group and the church board meeting, and on Fridays and Saturdays, an early break for coffee and drawing / writing before a late dinner and more reading (with date nites with my wife thrown in). This structure makes sure I'm both making progress on life and work projects during the day, and creative projects at night.

But you can't do that during Camp Nanowrimo or regular National Novel Writing Month - at least, not if you get behind, because if you do, you will fall farther and farther behind. Writing in Nanowrimo actually makes it easier to write more in Nanowrimo - generally, you can raise more questions for yourself than you can answer in a writing session, creating the fuel for future sessions. But once behind, that can jam up - stuck in "writer's block" where you haven't raised enough interesting questions for creative mind to answer, or not thought through the answers enough when you get to the point of writing the outcome of a confrontation.

When I'm behind on Nano, I have to drop my normal "read and eat" strategy in favor of "crack open the laptop at every available opportunity". And I won't limit myself to "write and eat" during meals and "laptop in the coffeehouse" sessions: at the very end of the day I'll set up the laptop in the kitchen , sitting down to bang out the day's wordcount before I let myself crash for the night, where both I and the laptop recharge.

"Autistic inertia" is the way many autistic people describe their inability to start or stop tasks, and some feel it is one of the most disabling aspects of autism. I don't have a formal diagnosis of autism, but informal tests put me on the spectrum - and being aware of your own neurodivergence and the experiences that other people have with the same neurodivergence can help you find strategies that work for you to cope.

For me, I can work on tasks for hours and hours on end - but if I don't have a long enough block to do a task, I tend not to start a task. Now that I understand that I may be struggling with autistic inertia, that helps me understand what may be going on. The feeling that I won't be able to get anything done if I don't have time to get everything done is just that, a feeling. In reality, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step towards it ... and the journey towards 50,000 words in a month begins with one word on the page.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Normally, there should be an open book or sketchbook next to those delicious fish tacos.

DON'T FORGET: Please sign up for our Kickstarter at neurodiversiverse.com - my understanding is that the more people who sign up to be notified when it goes live, the better the campaign will go on launch day! And if you're in the Bay Area, please come see me at Clockwork Alchemy where I'm the Author GOH!

[twenty twenty-four day one-oh-four]: he’s doing it again

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Okay, it wasn't a fluke: Loki sought me out, meowed for attention, climbed up into my lap ... then moved to the nearby table and deliberately turned his back to me.

Now, it is true that he wanted more scritches, but just a little, and it was just as clear that he wanted his large primate to be near enough to protect him, but without a lot of interaction.

He is a weird little cat. He often meows that he wants something, but can't seem to walk in the direction of what he wants, and you need to trial-guess it by walking in several different directions until he follows.

He clearly wants something though ... he just can't make it clear.

What, you expected my behavior to make sense?

-the Centaur

Pictured: that guy, yes, that guy, rocking the golden hour.

[drawing every day 2024 post one oh four]: all my berks cards

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Alright, one more not-drawing drawing while I am scrambling to get ready for Clockwork Alchemy. If you're not using the Internet in its most basic form, it resembles a countryside where roads to infrequently-visited towns frequently get torn up and you have to either reroute - or build your own.

Case in point, link shorteners. Google used to have one called "goo.gl" - used to have, before Larry Page took over at Google and led it through the Google Plus debacle, where Google really started to get the reputation for killing products that ultimately led to it being called the Google Graveyard.

But, before they killed it, I used it on the book cards that I hand out at conventions! I had been using that shortlink to point to my Amazon "Anthony Francis" author page, but I don't trust link shorteners anymore. So I created a new link, dresan.com/blog/books, which has all my books on it (now in the top menu):

But, that means my book cards needed to be updated. I of course updated the link, but also took the time when I was in there to enhance the contrast on the top title so it was more legible. Hopefully these cards will arrive in time for the Clockwork Alchemy convention next week, where I will be Author Guest of Honor.

Drawing (or graphic design) every day.

-the Centaur

Pictured: the back of the "book cards", and the "book page" which also shows the book card fronts.

[drawing every day 2024 post one oh three]: the neurodiversiverse kickstarter cards

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So, no drawing-drawing today, as we needed to complete the Kickstarter for The Neurodiversiverse, which goes live early next week - and we (and by we, I mean I) had to ALSO complete the graphics for the book cards we will be handing out at the Clockwork Alchemy and Con Carolinas conventions. Have a look!

While Photoshoppery isn't the artistic skill I wanted to refine when I started Drawing Every Day, it is a skill that also needs to be perfected. I had to generate a LOT of graphics by today so we could submit the Kickstarter, and then these two cards - by TONIGHT, to get the order into Moo in time.

But, we did it! Hopefully the cards will arrive in time. Cross your fingers!

Drawing (or Photoshopping) every day.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Front and back of the Kickstarter cards, based on a draft of our cover, itself based on art from Barbara Candiotti, one of the contributors to The Neurodiversiverse. More information on The Neurodiversiverse Kickstarter will come shortly before it goes live next week.

[twenty twenty-four day one oh three]: more t-shirt tests

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Zazzle for the win. I think this rendered pretty well (the color difference is in the lighting):

Admittedly, Zazzle were late shipping this to me, but this t-shirt design came out better than the Cafe Press take on the Embodied AI Workshop t-shirt:

Even though both shirts are fairly dark, and both of these images are drawn from the same Adobe Illustrator template, the text on the Cafe Press one came out a bit grey and worn ... and actually a bit small, whereas the Zazzle one looked white and solid and was sized pretty much like the text on the preview image:

I wouldn't close the door on Cafe Press - the t-shirt itself was solid, and I've used them successfully in the past. But I think for this iteration of t-shirts I'm going to go with Zazzle.

Onward!

-the Centaur

[drawing every day 2024 post one oh two]: jeremiah willstone logo sketches

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What a long fricking day. No real drawing for you ... just sketches of a proposed Jeremiah Willstone logo. I created these as feedback to a fellow artist I'm working with who will design the actual logo in a form suitable for putting on pins and stickers. We started with an old logo idea I had a few years back:

But that's kitbashed together from a number of different public domain images and my own quickly hacked logo designs in Photoshop and Illustrator. However, Kimchi Kreative did such a good job with the Neurodiversiverse logo I asked her to apply some of her magic to Jeremiah. We're iterating on it now, with super rough sketches to bounce ideas back and forth.

You know, it's great to learn to do things on your own - and I focus on doing most of the work that I can myself, especially for my own creative projects. But when you have access to an expert, it's foolish to forego that for things in their area of expertise - and learning how to work with others on creative projects is a skill all its own.

Drawing (and learning) every day.

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty-four day one oh two]: sit close enough to ignore

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Loki has asked me to pass on this public service announcement for cat partners everywhere: "Please, sit close enough that we may ignore you. We can't very well ignore you if you aren't there, now can we?" I suppose this is a security blanket thing, though later in the day he changed tactics on maintaining proximity of his human and went for "doing cute things, please pay attention to me."

I picked him up recently for one of the back-stretches he enjoys, and I swear he yawned when he did it.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Loki, trying to ignore me, but from a comfortably close distance, then attracting attention.

[twenty twenty-four post one hundred and one]: failed to terminate program, force quit?

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So I saw two make turkeys posturing outside, and carefully stepped to the French doors to take a picture. But what I assume was the female they had been courting had been on the other side of those doors, and decided to book it. Yet, even though their audience was gone, the two males didn't stop posturing.

I feel this make some subtle point about continuing the fight after the prize is gone, but it eludes me.

-the Centaur

[drawing every day 2024 post one hundred and one]: stick figures

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Back in the day, I felt embarrassed about practicing with stick figures, always wanting to move on to the actual drawing. But now, I see real value in learning an approximation, so you can test ideas out and get proportions right with rough sketches, rather than ending up with an unbalanced or malformed drawing.

Drawing every day.

-the Centaur

[drawing every day 2024 post one hundred]: footbones

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More Goldman studies. Interesting how many fiddly bits there are in something as basic as the heel of the human foot, much less all the bones that make up the rest of it.

How much of this do you really need to know to draw? Conversely, how much does knowing this at a muscle-motion, stone-cold sketching level give you an invisible substructure that helps you get the shape of the outer structures correct?

Time will tell. Drawing every day.

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty-four post ninety-nine]: that’s not a moon, that’s a gas station

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Buc-ee's (hyphenated like Spider-Man) is the largest gas station I've ever seen, outside and in:

Which is apropos, I guess, because the largest gas-station in the world is a Buc-ee's. Actually, reading the article, it appears that several of the largest are all Buc-ee's.

When stopping, my buddy commented "it was a gas station as if done by Pixar." After seeing it, I said "It's like Pixar had done a theme park for their movie entitled 'Murica'."

His response? "They already did that movie. It's called WALL-E."

Truly this is a disturbing timeline.

-the Centaur

[drawing every day post ninety-eight]: foot bones

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A comparison of hand and foot bones from Goldman. Interestingly, the big toe and thumb both seem to have lost one bone compared to the other fingers / toes. I wonder whether that happened as an evolutionary convergence, or whether they're controlled by the same homeobox or something and were both lost at the same time.

Did I get that word right? Huh, homeobox is the right concept. But, strangely, I remember last thinking about it in a place which I thought was a dream place - a road leading to a bookstore - but now I recall several visits to that bookstore, including a visit to a nearby mall to eat. Huh. I wonder if that was real.

Drawing (and reminiscing) every day.

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty-four day ninety-eight]: no, the anthill doesn’t come back stronger and better designed

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Above is what looks like a massive anthill at the border of the "lawn" and "forest" parts of our property. It's been getting bigger and bigger over the years, and that slow growth always reminds me of Mr. Morden's comments in Babylon 5 about the Shadows' plan to make lesser races fight:

JUSTIN: "It's really simple. You bring two sides together. They fight. A lot of them die, but those who survive are stronger, smarter and better."
MORDEN: "It's like knocking over an ant-hill. Every new generation gets stronger, the ant-hill gets redesigned, made better."

Babylon 5: Z'ha'dum

But the Shadows were wrong, and what we're seeing there isn't a redesigned anthill: it is a catastrophe, a multigenerational ant catastrophe caused by climate, itself brought to light by a larger, slow-motion human catastrophe caused by climate change.

Humans have farmed, built and burnt for a long time, but only now, in the dawn of the Anthropocene - that period of time where human impacts on climate start to exceed natural variation of climate itself, beginning roughly in the 1900s - have those effects really come back to bite us on a global, rather than local, scale.

For my wife and I, this took the form of fire. Fire was not new in California: friends who lived on homes on ridges complained about their high insurance costs as far back as I can remember. But more and more fires started burning across our area, forcing other friends to move away. Then three burned within five miles of our home, with no end to the drought in sight, and we decided we'd had enough.

We moved to my ancestral home, a place where water falls from the sky, aptly named Greenville. And we moved into a house whose builders knew about rain, and placed it on a hill with carefully designed drainage. They created great rolling lawns, manicured in the traditional Greenville "let's fucking force it with chemicals and lawnmowers to look like it was Astroturf" which we are slowly letting go back to nature.

In this grass, and in the absence of pesticides, the ants flourished. But this isn't precisely a natural environment: they're flourishing in an expanse of grass that is wider and more rounded than the rough, ridged forest around it. In the forest, runoff from the rains is channeled into proto-streams leading to the nearby creek; at the edge of the lawn, water from the house and lawn spills out in a flood.

Each heavy rain, the anthills building up in the sloped grass are washed to the mulch beds that mark the boundary of the forest, and there the ants start to re-build. But lighter rains can destroy these more exposed anthills, forcing them to slowly migrate back up into the grass. That had already happened here: that was no longer a live anthill, and unbeknownst to me, I was standing in its replacement.

No worries, for them or me; I noticed the anthill was dead, looked down, and moved off their territory just as the ants were swarming out of their antholes, fit to kill (or at least to annoyingly nibble). But the great red field there, as wide as a man is tall and twice as long, was not a functioning anthill: it was the accumulated wreckage of generation after generation of ant catastrophes.

In the quote, Mr. Morden was wrong: knocking over an anthill doesn't make it come back better designed. Justin got it a little better: the strongest and smartest do often survive a battle - but they walk away with scars, and sometimes the winners may just be the lucky ones. Conflict may not make people better - it can just leave scarred soldiers, wounded refugees and a destroyed landscape.

Now, the Shadows were the villains of the story, but every good villain needs a good soundbite that makes them sound at least a little bit good, and it's worth demolishing this one. "The anthill comes back better stronger and better designed" is designed to riff on the survival of the fittest - the notion that creating survival pressure will lead to stronger, smarter, and better individuals.

But evolution doesn't work that way. Those stronger, smarter, and better individuals have to have existed in the population in the first place. Evolution only leads to improvements over time at all if the variation of the population continues to yield increasingly better individuals generation after generation - and that is not at all guaranteed. The actual historical pattern is far closer to the opposite.

Now, people who should know better often claim that evolution has no direction. I think that's because there's a cartoon version of evolution where things tend to get more complex over time, and they want to replace it with another cartoon version of evolution which is blind and random - perhaps spillover from Dawkins' attempts to argue with creationists using his Blind Watchmaker idea.

But that's not how evolution works at all. Evolution does have a direction - just like gravity does. Only at the narrow level of the fundamental laws operating on idealized, homogeneous substrates can we say gravity is symmetric, or evolution is directionless. Once the scope of our investigation expands and the structure of the world gets complex - once symmetry is broken - then gravity clumps matter into planets and gives us "up", and evolution molds organisms into ecosystems and gives us "progress towards complexity".

But the direction of evolution is a lot more like the gradient of air around a planet than it is any kind of "great chain of being". Once an ecosystem exists, increased complexity provides an advantage for a small set of organisms, and as they spread into the ecosystem, a niche is created for even more complex organisms to exceed them. But, just like most of the atmosphere is closest to the surface of a planet, most of the organisms will remain the simplest ones.

Adding additional selection pressure won't give you more complex organisms: it will give you fewer of them. The more stress on the ecosystem, the harder it is for anything to survive, the size of the various niches will shrink, and even if the ecosystem still provides enough resources to support complex organisms, the size of the population that can evolve will drop, making it less likely for even more complex ones to arise - and that's assuming it doesn't get so rough that the complex organisms go extinct.

Eventually, atoms bouncing around in the atmosphere may fly off into space - just like, eventually, evolution produced a Neil Armstrong who flew to the moon. But pouring energy into the atmosphere may slough the upper layers off into space, leaving a thin remnant closest to the planet - and, so, stressing an ecosystem will not produce more astronauts; it may kill them off and leave everyone down in the muck.

Which gives us a hint to what the Shadows' real plan was. They're portrayed as an ancient learned race, so presumably they knew everything I just shared - but they're also portrayed as the villains, after all, and so they ultimately had a self-serving goal in mind. And if knocking over an anthill doesn't make it come back better designed, then their real goal was to keep kicking over anthills so they themselves would stay on top.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Me, near sunset, taking picture of what I thought was a live anthill - until I looked more closely.

[twenty twenty-four day ninety-seven]: internal screaming

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There's a lot to do on that boat. And, despite expectations, it looks worse once transferred, because while I had crossed off some items, the act of writing them down reminded me of more things to do ...

Clockwork Alchemy is just a notch over two weeks away (actually, a notch less, by the time this scheduled post goes up) and may I say AAAAAAH!

But we'll get there.

-the Centaur

[drawing every day post ninety-seven]: more on the feet

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I know from experience how relieving it is to have a big buffer of artwork in my Drawing Every Day queue - I couldn't have gotten through GDC without it - but I also know it takes time.

More time than you expect; it was already getting dark by the time I finished this (compare with Day 97). Though, now that I think about it, I took a call with a potential sponsor for the Embodied AI Workshop, so I guess it is to be expected for it to get later if thirty minutes gets snapped out of drawing time like that.

Still ... drawing every day.

-the Centaur

[drawing every day 2024 post ninety-six]: a solid foundation

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Trying desperately to get ahead prior to the eclipse. More Goldman studies.

I really think these methodical studies help, and so does the mobile studio, but I also feel that a solid series of practice on ink rendering, also done in a larger format, would do me good as well.

Ah well. One (sub) project at a time, or even three at a time, but not five or ten.

Drawing Every Day.

-the Centaur