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Posts published in “Real Life”

It’s what happens when we’re not working or playing or thinking or doing. That thing we do that doesn’t fit into all the other categories.

Sometimes we call it living.

nineteen and twenty-three

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Sandi and Anthony at 23 years.

No, not 1923: the numbers 19 and 23: the number of years my wife and I have been married, and together! We met on September 13, 2002 and married a smidge over four years later on September 16, 2006. I always love the fact that we got married so close to the date that we met (I argued we should hold it on the same date, but everyone told me "we're not attending a wedding in the middle of the week" so, eh, the 16th).

Vegan cheese spread at Battery Park Books.

For our anniversary, we went to Asheville, North Carolina for the weekend, which we really enjoy due to its wide range of vegan restaurants, great bookstores, nearby hiking, and spectacularly walkable downtown. My wife and I really enjoy places where we can walk everywhere - New Orleans' French Quarter, San Diego's Gaslamp District, Montreal's Old Town, Monterey, even smaller places like Davis, and of course London.

Sandi in a long flowing dress in downtown Asheville.

So for the weekend, we walked, and walked, and walked, and walked. We visited all the bookstores and all the art galleries that we could, and looped around downtown maybe a dozen times. Unusually this visit, we chose to try to go hiking - we spent so much time our first five or six trips there in the downtown we rarely got out to do anything else. But we did the Blue Ridge Parkway and Catawba Falls, which has a truly epic staircase tracing its way to the top - 580 steps, which is more than enough to put a crimp in anyone's climb.

A small part of Catawba Fall's 580-step staircase.

No, that's not computer generated, but it did feel like I was in some infinite stairwell in a computer game after a while - it just kept going up and up and up! There's a tall observation tower at roughly the middle, which triggered my latent fear of heights - something I haven't quite debugged; it triggered leaning out over the Hoover Dam but not standing at the Grand Canyon, and leaning over the rail of the observation tower, but not leaning over the rail of the staircase just a few feet away. I think it has something to do with my body detecting "there's a big drop and it might be behind you" - or perhaps I'm just worried I'll lose my hat.

Anthony with a extra dirty martini

Regardless, the food was the real standout on the weekend. At two of our favorite restaurants - Mountain Madre and Strada - we found there were way more vegan items than were listed on the menu, which enabled us to get some really great things we'd never tried before - vegan nachos at Mountain Madre and vegan bolognese at Strada, both excellent. The Smokin Onion was a great new find - we went there for breakfast before our hike, and liked it so much we went back on our way out of town. The pumpkin spice "cruffin" was superb - yes, decadently sweet, but actually also fluffy and not overpowering.

A pumpkin spice "cruffin" - croissant muffin.

But the real anniversary dinner was at Plant, one of the best vegan restaurants we've been to - easily the equal of our favorite restaurant, Millennium in Oakland. At Millennium, we often get a high-top table near the front window, but at Plant, you can actually reserve a spot at the "mini-bar" - a two-top counter next to where the drinks are prepared, which feels really intimate even though it's right out in the middle of the restaurant. The waitress remembered us and hooked us up on our anniversary dessert!

Our anniversary dessert - vegan key lime cheesecake and vegan blondie sundae.

Here's to twenty-three more years.

-the Centaur

view of a hotel window

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Sometimes when I travel I include picture from my hotel room, but by chance my wife and I recognized and took a picture of our hotel room. It might not be immediately obvious to anyone else - except I'd looked out the window minutes before, we were one of the only hotel rooms with an open curtain in more or less the right place --- and, tellingly, I could see the same bags piled by the window. Even zoomed in it's pretty small, and I can't go and check right now to confirm --- my wife crashed out early while I took a West Coast church board meeting --- but as best I can reconstruct it, here's what I see in that window:

My laptop bag is what I call my "portable office" - containing the book(s) I'm reading, my writing notebook, my drawing notebook and tools and any reference materials, the top scientific folder and notebook I'm working on, and a bunch of laptop gegaws like a power supply and various USB plugs. I think this doesn't look like a laptop bag because my hiking shoes are piled atop that, but whatevz. The other half of the "portable office" is a stack of books and a clipboard with my "todo paper", a heavyweight copper parchment or blue linen paper I use to organize tasks, all shoved into a tote bag for easy transport.

Next to that are more creative piles - a tote with the portable music keyboard and some music theory books for my electronic music practice, and next to that is a larger tote with the "active pile" of the fiction, comic and technical books that are near the top of my pile. I don't always get to all those piles, but the longer I stay in any given place, the more glad I am that I've got that pile with me so I can quickly switch gears to whatever task that sparks my creativity in the moment.

All that seems a lot, but it's way downsized and organized compared to the stuff I used to carry around everywhere. Someone once said they thought I had some kind of caching system that I just can't quite turn off, and I agree - except the only way I seem to be able to do all the things that I do is to keep a big pile of stuff near me so I can turn spare minutes into accomplished tasks. I ... don't think I'm that great at it, honestly, but it does enable me to get closer to where I want to go, step by step, piece by piece.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Um, I said it already: our hotel in downtown Asheville.

how is this comfortable?

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Back from Dragon Con, but still scrambling from thing to thing due to our upcoming 19th anniversary. So, in lieu of a serious update, I present one of "the Originals" ... one of our three recently adopted kittens:

I understand cats are boneless, but this is a bit much! How does this not break something?

Anyway, lots of news, and hopefully getting back to it next week ...

-the Centaur

Pictured: either Lily(pad(ski)), or Luna(tic(les)). Can't quite tell from this angle, but I think Luna.

you don’t have to go home …

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Worldconners closing out the Fountain bar last night

Worldcon is over, and people are now returning to their lives. I've got a day and a half here to enjoy Seattle, but the funny thing is, right now I'm in the same hotel bar where the above die-hards were closing out Worldcon last night - it's got a great high-top table at the window, which is great for writing.

The window seat at the Fountain bar where I'm writing.

Which I need to do, after reading more of Dwight Swain's Techniques of the Selling Writer over breakfast. You'd think I'd have finished this book given that I lecture on Swain, but I got introduced to him through his audio lectures, so the lead up to my Worldcon talk was my first time to go through this book cover to cover, and even then I focused on the scene-and-sequel stuff that I was discussing. His discussion of openings - focusing on where, what's going on, and to whom, with what conflict, expressed with showing through immediate action - got my brain thinking about how to rework the opening of WATCHTOWER OF DESTINY. My room's being cleaned, so I decided to sit down and write my notes on these ideas right now.

Breakfast at Alder and Ash - smoked salmon omelet, dry toast and fresh fruit.

Even though I'm a night owl, sometimes it's good to start the day with food for body and mind.

It can inspire you.

-the Centaur

Pictured: The Fountain bar last night, the Fountain bar this morning, and yet another breakfast at Alder and Ash - smoked salmon omelet, dry toast and fresh fruit.

processing the past

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I'm a pack rat, and this tendency isn't helped by being an omnivorous author and researcher with a broad range of interests - nor is it helped by my tendency to let piles just pile up while I rabbithole on whatever major project I am working on at my primary work. But I'm between contracts right now, I survived the trio of ICRA-ConCarolinas-CVPR, and my wife's mother is moved into her new home, so I don't really have an excuse not to go through the piles and try to return them to some semblance of order.

Also, I'm tripping over stuff.

Now, I don't throw away things because other people want me to: I throw away things when I've decided to. Because my interests are, um, broad, and the projects I use to tackle these interests are even broader, I have a vast number of project folders and project stacks. But a stack isn't a pile: a stack is an organized collection of items of interest that enables you to make intellectual progress on a project, like the "storytelling and the sciences of mind" and "creative endurance" stacks I have to my left, the "mental models and explanation patterns" stack in front of me, and the "taido and jeet kune do" stack I have to my right.

A pile is something different - it's the detritus of "company's coming over and I gotta clear off this table" or "I need space to work on this important thing so these other projects gotta go on hold". Like the "robotics consulting" pile in front of me. It's not about robotics consulting. That's just the top action item on the pile. Below it are my theological studies folder, some bills, some items to file, Thinking Ink Press stuff, and more theology, which it looks like I put in the pile for this week's Saint Stephens in-the-Field Friday Journal entry that I have already written and submitted two days ago. It's a mess.

More specifically, a pile is a stack-like mess that hides its information and actionable content. You can't tell what you need to do to a pile just by looking at it the way you can a stack or a folder. (Folders are also dangerous for a similar reason if you're not strict about what you put into them, but that's a problem for another day). And so, the reason that I don't throw piles away without processing them is that it's all too easy to not realize what's in a pile, and to lose an opportunity - or even money - by chucking it prematurely. In the piles in the banner image, I found roughly $50 bucks in foreign currency and a stack of gift cards.

The rest was easy. 80% of that just needed to be filed (a less pack-ratty person would throw some of this stuff away, of course, but I genuinely enjoy reminiscing over keepsakes from old trips, especially abroad). 10% could be thrown away or recycled immediately. And only 10% or so were actually actionable items.

I learned a lot about my own past going through these piles. I recalled things I did, places I'd been, stores that had closed, people I talked to but had fallen out of contact with, people who had retired or died. The pile processing worked both against me and for me; there were a handful of "action" items that dated back to the last millennium, which was great to harvest for keepsakes, but meant that there literally were several inches of that particular pile that had repeatedly gone through a "company's coming, better move this aside" cycle over literal decades, yielding a stack that mostly just needed to be recycled or trashed.

There's a value to throwing stuff away. It keeps your environment clean so you can feel good about your space and focus on what's important. But if you're a pack-rat person, it's really important to make sure that the stuff you have around you are actual stacks and folders of actionable stuff, and not piles that have been piling on top of each other since the last millennium.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Remains of a pile spread across the kitchen table, exploded into stuff that will be filed into topical binders or trashed; and the sorted remains of the same pile spread over the nearby builtins, ready to be filed into my filing system (or trashed). Now I kinda wish I had also taken a picture of the pile itself ...

[twenty twenty-five day one oh four]: mischief in three … two … one …

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Almost fifteen years later, with a completely different set of cats who have not had a chance to learn these behaviors from the previous ones, it's somewhat comforting to see that cats do still remain cats.

gabby 5 seconds before whapping caesar just as he relaxes

Although the location of the malefactors has swapped from top to bottom ...

-the Centaur

Pictured: Loki above, being awoken from sleep by harassing kittens below; Gabby above, about to harass the sleeping Caesar below.

[backfilling twenty twenty-five day ninety-nine]: all cats, all the time

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So for a while all three of the kittens were a little skittish around me. Not that they didn't want to hang out, but especially when I would take a trip or something they'd get standoffish, hanging out more with my wife.

I do believe they have now "warmed up" to me.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Me taking a much-needed break from projects, and then attracting two (or three?) kittens. On that note, I was going to post this but got swarmed with work, taxes, writing, cleaning, and what have you, but I am not going to give up on posting every day this year, even if I have to backfill to get caught up.

[twenty twenty-five day one oh one]: there … are … four … cats!

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Lily, the collared one, chose to hide when a friend came by today, so they never saw more than three cats at any one time. With apologies to Captain Picard, here is visual proof that there are, indeed, four cats.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Top to bottom: Loli, Lili, Loki, Luna.

[twenty twenty-five day ninety-eight]: the appearance of done doesn’t mean you did it right

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One by one, trees and bushes on our property have been dying. The property is large - when we fled the fires in California during the pandemic, we lucked out in finding a large place that had been on the market for quite a while - so at first we thought that was simply par for the course. But they kept dying.

Eventually, what we discovered is that many of the trees on the property were planted without the removal of their transport cages. This can cause the roots to get choked, to turn back on themselves, and as the tree grows, the increasingly packed root ball topped by the increasingly heavy tree turns into a weighted ball bearing, waiting to tip over in heavy winds, heavy rain, or just from the tree's own starved weight.

But it's easier to not remove it, the problem is practically invisible, and the tree looks good for a while - and by the time the tree falls, it will be almost impossible to identify who made the initial mistake.

This is a beautiful house on beautiful land, but many of the things in this house are like that. Trees are planted with their transport cages still on, so they eventually fall over. Gutter drains were buried without covering them with fabric, so they fill with dirt. Soil pipes are buried without cleanouts. Drywall in access rooms has random holes punched in it.

And, most spectacularly, a door was installed in a storage room which was too small for the safe stored in that room to be removed. I mean, what were they thinking? I guess they weren't - or, perhaps that was a security feature, to prevent it from being stolen? Certainly, you can't sneak it out of the room, but, also, it likely weighs around a ton, so no-one can run off with it - they didn't need to wall it in.

But, regardless, hey! We get a safe.

Now, we were dealing with the problem with our drains, and the foreman told us he'd need to take up the last man standing in a row of bushes near one of the drains. These had been dying, one or two per year, since we arrived, and the last one was literally held together with zipties. So I agreed.

And when he dug it up, he found that it - and all the bushes in that row - had cages on their root barrels. You can see him holding one of these in the banner image from this post. The root system was so tight inside it that he was surprised that it had survived that long.

So my point, and I did have one, is that doing a job that looks right from the outside may not be doing it well enough for the job to be done right. And right, in this case, I define as not failing unexpectedly long before its time because someone simply didn't want to finish the work.

I suspect that the people who managed this properly previously were focused on forcing it, no matter how much money it took. As my wife put it, you put in a lawn, let it grow, then cut that growth and take all the nutrients that it harvested out of the soil away, forcing you to fertilize the lawn with chemicals to keep it alive. You can do that, but it's like driving down a mountain road at too high a speed, constantly riding the wheel, brakes and accelerator to keep yourself on the road. We prefer a healthier approach, where, when possible, things are left to biodegrade where they are, or you create compost out of the clipping.

That doesn't always work, and, in a way, it's a luxury all its own. But regardless of how you run your lawn, if you take the time to cut the root balls off and to properly wrap your drains, you'll find yourself spending less money in the long run fixing problems that should never have happened in the first place.

-the Centaur

Pictured: The cage that our foreman discovered once they dug up the bush, and the gutter downspout drain that our foreman replaced for us once we all figured out what drains needed to be replaced.

the trio

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gangsters, i tell you ...

-the centaur

pictured: left to right, it's luna(tic(les)), then (i think) loli(pop(kins)) and lili(pad(skis)).

[twenty twenty-five day sixty-eight]: step by step

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So I habitually bite off more than I can chew: at any given time I have 200 to 250 projects running, and no reasonable human being can keep on top of more than seven plus or minus two things at once.

Now, I know, I know, I know, I'm likely autistic, and am prompted to be WAY more explicit than most people about the projects that I'm ACTUALLY doing, whereas most people just fool themselves into thinking they're doing a few things when in reality they're relying on their well-trained autonomic adulting skills to keep on top of the dozens upon dozens of things they need to do to keep on top of just living. But, beyond, that, I have hundreds of creative projects that I want to tackle, so many that I often feel like I'm thrashing.

But if you focus - again, I know, I know, I know, I say I hate focus, and that focus is the enemy, but bear with me for a bit - I say, if you allow yourself to be creative, and imagine ALL the things you might be doing ... BUT then focus on a few of them at once, trying to make sure you make progress on just those, you can, step by step, move your way through those projects, get them done, and move on to the next ones.

I've been "reading and eating" for decades now as my way of consuming material, but only recently have I started using the "ten page rule," in which I break each chapter into ten page sections, and try to make sure I get through at least 5 pages of a section in each reading session (the whole ten, or to end of chapter, if the material is easy, or the book's pages are small, or the chapters are short; the five page grace period if it's a big fat textbook filled with details with which I am unfamiliar). But I've augmented that now - by focusing on the most important books first, promising myself I can read the others if I get through them. I'm almost done with Large Language Models: A Deep Dive, which has been very illuminating.

And now I've built on that, so at the end of the day, after reading my "chunk of the hard book at night with milk and pound cake" - which is usually a big fat textbook that requires reading and re-reading of sections over and over again until I get it - I say, after that, I pick up a by-the-bedstand novel and read a chapter. Just one chapter (again, less if it is big long fat chapters or something esoteric). I've gotten through The Cthulhu Casebook: Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows and Cthulhu Passant that way and am now digging deeper into my novel backlog, promising myself I can by more books as I finish them.

The same thing has been going on with various of my research projects: I have been building out various pieces of software, sometimes with a lot of thrashing. But I stuck with a project I had been tempted to abandon, and today got it mostly working, all unit tests passing, all code checked in and pushed to Github. I still have more features I want to add before release ... but it felt good.

While I don't believe in "focus" for focus's sake, I do believe focus is a tool you can use effectively. And if you prioritize your highest-value, lowest-remaining-work projects, and focus on getting done the next thing you have to do, you can, over time, walk that path that starts with a single step, and find yourself a thousand miles later standing atop your mountain.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Eating, and reading, at Panera.

[twenty twenty-five day sixty-six]: now this is real progress

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Normally Loki hates eating around the kittens, or they're so interested in his food that they ignore their own and cause him to stalk off in a huff - "Ruuude, duuude!"

But they're getting over it - I had to move a kitten, but after I did, the system remained stable for the remainder of the meal.

Baby steps are short, but they can carry you down a long road, if you just keep going.

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty-five day sixty-five]:i think they’re acclimating

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So our older cat and our younger cats seem to be tolerating each other more. Actually, the kittens have loved Loki from the start, but he had been solitary for so long that he didn't want any new cats in his home, thank you very much. Now he willingly goes into areas which have kittens, which is a big improvement.

As I keep saying, sooner or later he's going to learn that nothing bad happens when he hangs out with kittens.

-Anthony

P.S. A blogpost a day late, but, eh, we'll get there.

a process of occlusion

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It snowed, and while ice remained on the ground in some shaded areas for weeks, in others, the disappearance of the light dusting of real snow was swift and stark.

Above, the snow was gone from the courtyard by practically the next afternoon, burned off by the sun - except in the places the winter sun didn't reach, leaving a line as sharp as a ruler.

There's some deeper message in this somewhere, but I find it elusive. Oh hey, look the Author button has returned to the Post settings. Where did you go, little buddy? I missed you.

<click>-the Centaur</click>

Pictured: um, well, I said it. And sure enough, whatever bug caused the Author setting to disappear has un-disappeared. How nice. At least that hasn't turned permanently to molasses like so many other things ...

not quite blogging every day … yet

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So ... what the heck happened to this website for almost six straight months?

The TL;DR (too long; didn't read summary) is that moving the Library of Dresan to a new provider was a huge endeavor, so I prioritized clearing everything else going on in my life until I could focus on the move.

I had lost faith in my old web service provider. Emails delivered to centaur at dresan dot com were randomly dropped to the point I had to stop using it, and image posting was no longer possible because the provider was only giving me 25 gigabytes out of my 35 gigabytes of allotted storage. The Library had to go elsewhere.

But that involved finding a new domain provider, setting up hosting, transferring all the files, transferring the database, getting the Library's WordPress installation running on a new site with new rules and a new version of PHP, and, as a bonus, transferring all the email addresses and lists to the new domain.

And, if you've never tried to transfer 25 gigabytes of files off a remote website, you can't just "do" that. A copy of that size off a consumer-grade website will just randomly fail at arbitrary points during the transfer. I had to write an entire program to help me track this (which I plan to clean up and release on Github).

But while all that was going on, I had to replace my laptop, volunteer at the Unsolved Problems in Social Navigation Workshop, launch The Neurodiversiverse, attend Dragon Con, attend the Milford Writing Workshop, clean up after a hurricane, start mushroom farming with the logs fallen from the hurricane (which had a clock attached to it), quixotically try to get some stuff prepared for GDC 2025, prep for EAI #6, handle submitting a +66 page paper with +30 authors, and prepare for the largest Christmas ever (where we hosted two parties with almost 20 people each, and had three separate groups of houseguests).

When Christmas was finally in the rear-view mirror, I then turned my attention to webworks - first fixing the Logical Robotics website, then fixing my wife's website, and finally fixing the Library itself. It was ... exactly the ordeal that I feared it would be. Actually the WordPress part, that part, it worked fine - I had already copied the files, and had frozen the database as of my July 26, 2024 post, and ... miraculously, the website was working to serve the pages with very little issue. But posting did not work (a permissions issue). And then logging into the website quit working (an SSL issue). And then posting images quit working (which turned out to be, indirectly, an SSL issue, due to the firewall bundled with the SSL).

And so on. And so on.

Yes, yes, yes, bla bla bla, you've heard all this from website developers before. But there's a very important insight I have to share with you. Yes, we are finite creatures with limited powers, and yes, sometimes we run into problems, and yes, sometimes, we run into problems that seem beyond our abilities to solve.

But, just as we are finite, so our problems are finite. Yes, yes, yes, it's important to understand the difference between a solvable problem (cleaning out your storage unit) and an unsolvable one (as when the legendary King Canute apocryphally tried to back the tide, which is actually a dirty lie given that he knew better and was just trying to stick it to his flatterers in his court, but, whatever). But as long as you are not actually trying to turn back the tides, your problems can be solved by focusing on them, one by one.

And so that's what I've been doing for the past several months since I came back from the Milford Writing Workshop. My 2024 was hectic - because we wanted to launch The Neurodiversiverse in time for Dragon Con 2024, and because I chose to do a lot of publicity for it at the Nebulas, Con Carolinas, and Dragon Con itself, but because I chose to not cancel many other events, like the Fifth Annual Embodied AI Workshop, or the Workshop on Unsolved Problems on Social Robot Navigation, or my attendance at the Milford Writing Workshop itself - requiring me to plan it down practically to the week.

After Milford, however, I had a few months until Christmas ... and I vowed to start "clearing the decks" of my massive todo lists. So I've spent the past three or four months methodically identifying things, working to eliminate them, and moving on with my life.

It has been refreshing and freeing. I have far to go - my todo list needs a fricking one inch binder clip, and I am not exaggering one bit - but, already, many things that have been bugging me are gone, just gone, leaving me with ... that ... much ... more ... free time and ... that ... much ... less ... mental load to carry.

So, this is a very long-winded way of saying, soon, I'm going to resume blogging every day.

But ... I wanted to clear the decks, and get off my chest why I haven't been.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Snow, in the "French Quarter," our tiny little courtyard.

[twenty twenty-four day one seven two]: i prioritize my marriage

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SO! I am behind on blogging. But my wife and I have been traveling so much this year (near constantly for five months between the two of us) that, frankly speaking, we need to focus on us time more than I need to focus on the blog. So it's going to take a little longer to get things rolling ... because other things come first.

-the Centaur

Pictured: an anniversary picture, from years ago (since the blog image uploading is still borken).

[twenty twenty-four day one seven one]: better late than never

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Welp, by my calendar, I'm about two weeks behind on blogging every day posts, but better late than never, eh? The Embodied AI Workshop went off quite well - we had standing room only three deep by the end - even though I was frazzled from 7am to 10pm trying to make sure things went off as planned.

And the next day, we had CVPR, which was quite the fun adventure! But, then, that evening, I spilled water onto my laptop. It promptly rebooted, then shut down, never to turn on again. Not only did that make me feel like an idiot, it put a serious crimp in the work I was planning to do during the conference.

Including blogging! Not only was it difficult to post on my phone, it was also practically impossible to start down the path of upgrading the dresan.com backend to deal with the file storage issue - and what computing time I had needed to be spent on The Neurodiversiverse. So everything ground to a halt.

So I'm not dead. But it is taking a bit of time to get things back on track. By my count I'm about two weeks behind on blogging and a week behind on art, and it looks like it will take several weeks to get caught up, back up to speed and on a regular posting schedule.

Stay tuned.

-the Centaur

Pictured: The backdrop for Embodied AI #4's scheduling poster, produced with several layers of generative AI combined in Photoshop and extended with Photoshop's own generative fill tools into the poster size. While I'm convinced we don't want to use generative AI for regular art, for this client, which was a workshop on AI featuring generative AI, we wanted the generative AI look.

not dead, still just recuperating

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yeah, it turns out spilling water into your laptop is not great for your productivity. back at home, still working through recuperating from all the travel (including some unexpected bits there at the end).

more soon. i go zzz now.

-the Centaur

Pictured: me from a decade and a half ago, because blog images are still down. Hard at work on Jeremiah Willstone and the Watchtower of Destiny though, and am making progress.

still not a real blogging every day post …

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... trying to catch up on the to-do list, stay tuned.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Past to-do lists, since one of the things to-do is to fix the blog backend.