At last! Thanks to Bing, I found an online calculator whose numbers confirm the calculation I did on my own for the interplanetary distances from my story "Shadows of Titanium Rain"!
I can't tell you how frustrating it is for Present Anthony for Past Anthony to have set up a single place where all tax forms should go during the year, except for Past Anthony to not have used that system for the one paper form that cannot be replaced by looking it up online.
I'm sure it's here somewhere.
-the Centaur
Pictured: I have been working on taxes, so please enjoy this picture of a cat.
For years I've been carrying about the book The Best of Wizard Basic Training: How to Draw: Getting Started, trying to make progress in it, and failing. But, my new methodical approach based on Goldman's book seems to be working, so I'm going to add the Wizzes into my drawing rotation. Let's see how it goes.
Frankly speaking, if I was to do it all over again, I'd start with the hands and feet, as they're the hardest part, and when you start trying to draw a person but can't finish it due to the hands and feet, it's hard to really feel that the drawing is done. I don't really feel that anymore, though I know I have a long ways to go.
Drawing every day, methodically, through a set of exercises.
Unabashedly, I'm going to beef up the blog buffer by posting something easy, like a picture of this delicious Old Fashioned from Longhorn. They're a nice sipping drink, excellent for kicking back with a good book, which as I recall that night was very likely the book "Rust for Rustaceans."
Now, I talked smack about Rust the other day, but they have some great game libraries worth trying out, and I am not too proud to be proved wrong, nor am I too proud to use a tool with warts (which I will happily complain about) if it can also get my job done (which I will happily crow about).
-the Centaur
Pictured: I said it, yes. And now we're one more day ahead, so I can get on with Neurodiversiverse edits.
So, this is worthy of a longer blog post, but the short story is, looking under the streetlight for your keys may provide visibility, but it won’t help you find them unless you have reason to think that you dropped them there.
A lot of time in software development, we encounter things that don’t work, and problems like stochastic errors and heisenbugs can lead software developers to try voodoo solutions - rebooting, recompiling from head, running the build again, or restarting the server.
These “solutions” work well enough for us that it’s worthwhile trying them as a first step - several times recently I have encountered issues which simply evaporated when I refreshed the web page, restarted the server, retried the build, or restarted my computer.
But these are not actual fixes. They’re tools to clear away transient errors so we can give our systems the best chance of properly functioning. And if they don’t work, the most important thing to do is to really dig in and try to find the root cause of the problem.
On one of those systems - where I literally had tried refreshing the web page, restarting the server, refreshing the code, reinstalling the packages, and rebooting the computer - the build itself was something that you had to run twice.
Now, this is a common problem with software builds: they take a lot of files and memory, and they can get halfway through their builds and die, leaving enough artifacts for a second pass to successfully solve the problem. I had to do this at Google quite a bit.
But it isn’t a real solution. (Well, it was at Google, for this particular software, because its build was running up against some hard limits that weren’t fixable, but I digress). And so, eventually, my build for this website failed to run at all, even after a reboot.
The solution? A quick search online revealed it’s possible to change the parameters of the build to give it more memory - and once I did that, the build ran smooth as glass. The “run the build again” trick I’d learned at Google - learned where, for one particular project, it was not possible to fix the problem - had led me astray, and overapplying this trick to my new problem - where it had partial success - kept me from finding a real, permanent fix.
So, if a fix feels like voodoo, stop for a minute - and search for a better way.
-the Centaur
Pictured: What do you mean, you haven't updated the package configuration for THREE YEARS?
SO! I’ve spent more time than I like in hospitals with saline drips restoring my dehydrated blood after food-poisoning induced vomiting, and pretty much all of those episodes followed me thinking, “Huh, this tastes a little funny … ehhh, I guess it’s OK.”
That led me to introduce the following strict rule: if you think anything’s off about food, don’t eat it.
Now, that seems to make sense to most people, but in reality, most people don’t practice that. In my direct experience, if the average person gets a piece of fruit or some soup or something that “tastes a little bit funny,” then, after thinking for a moment, they’ll say “ehhh, I guess it’s OK” and chow down straight on the funny-tasting food. Sometimes they even pressure me to have some, to which I say, "You eat it."
Honestly, most of the time, a funny taste turns out fine: a funny taste is just a sign that something is badly flavored or poorly spiced or too ripe or not ripe enough or just plain weird to the particular eater. And in my experience almost nobody gets sick doing that, which is why we as humans get to enjoy oysters and natto (fermented soybeans) and thousand-year eggs (clay-preserved eggs).
But, frankly speaking, that’s due to survivor bias. All the idiots (I mean, heroic gourmands) who tried nightshade mushroom and botulism-infested soup and toxic preservatives are dead now, so we cook from the books of the survivors. And I’ve learned from unexpectedly bitter-tasting experience that if I had been a heroic gourmand back in the day, I’d have a colorful pathogen named after me.
So if anything tastes or even looks funny, I don’t eat it.
Case in point! I’m alive to write this blog entry. Let me explain.
When I’m on the high end of my weight range and am trying to lose it, I tend to eat a light breakfast during the week to dial it back - usually a grapefruit and toast or half a pummelo. A pummelo is a heritage citrus that’s kind of like the grandfather of a grapefruit - pummelos and mandarins were crossed to make oranges, and crossed again to make grapefruit.
They're my favorite fruit - like a grapefruit, but sweeter, and so large that one half of a pummelo has as much meat as a whole grapefruit. I usually eat half the pummelo one day, refrigerate it in a closed container, and then eat the other half the next day or day after.
You can see this saved half at the top of the blog - it looked gorgeous and delicious. I popped into my mouth a small bit of meat that had been knocked off by an earlier cut, then picked up my knife to slice it ... when I noticed a tiny speck in the columella, the spongy stuff in the middle.
Now, as a paranoid eater, I always look on the columella with suspicion: in many pummelos, there’s so much that it looks like a white fungus growing there - but it’s always been just fruit. Figuring, “Ehh, I guess it’s OK”, I poke it with my knife before cutting the pummelo - and the black specks disappeared as two wedges of the fruit collapsed.
A chunk of this fruit had been consumed by some kind of fungus. You can kinda see the damaged wedges here in a picture I took just before cutting the fruit, and if you look closely, you can even see the fungus itself growing on the inside space. This wasn’t old fruit - I’d eaten the other half of the fruit just two days before, and it was beautiful and unmarred when I washed it. But it was still rotten on the inside, with a fungus I’ve not been able to identify online, other than it is some fungus with a fruiting body:
I spat out the tiny bit of pummelo meat I’d just put in my mouth, and tossed the fruit in the compost. But the next day, curious, I wondered if there were any signs on the other half of the fruit, and went back to find this:
Not only is the newer piece visibly moldy, its compromised pieces rapidly disintegrating, the entire older piece of fruit is now completely covered with fruiting bodies - probably spread around its surface when I cut the fruit open. From what I’ve found online, the sprouting of fruiting bodies means this pummelo had already been infested with a fungus for a week or two prior to the flowering.
So! I was lucky. Either this fungus was not toxic, or I managed to get so little of it in the first piece of fruit that I didn’t make myself sick. But it just confirms my strategy:
If it looks or tastes funny, don’t eat it.
If you don’t agree with me on a particular food, you eat it; I’m going to pass.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Um, I think I said it. Lots of pictures of bad grandpa grapefruit.
Trying a continued focus on the shape of faces and position of eyes. I think it's getting better, though the tilt of the face is off a bit; at least it is decently proportioned and the eyes aren't all over the place.
This is the last of the Porsche character sheets in this series, and I'm going to dive in to finishing the hands and feet Goldman book before switching gears to faces. Still, this exercise turned out not too bad ... and I am now seven days ahead on drawing every day AND scheduling them for posting.
Drawing every day, on average, posting as far ahead as I can.
Next up: editing work on SPECTRAL IRON, Dakota Frost #7!
The title was supposed to say "that blog buffer" but I'm going with the misspelling. The critical thing to do with the buffers it to get far enough ahead that you can not just coast for a day or two, but take out the time to do more ambitious projects, like "fix it the way that it works" or "33 44 55", two posts that I've been putting off because I haven't been giving myself enough time to blog.
Well, according to the NOAA's day-of-year calendar, post sixty-eight needs to go up Fridya, so once I schedule this post, "the buffer" will give me until Saturday to come up with a really good idea.
I'm working on it, I'm working on it!
Blogging every day.
-the Centaur
Pictured: A few screencaps: the "The Blog Dashboard" Google Sheet, the NOAA Day of Year Calendar, and "Blog This or Code It!", the Google Doc where I dump ideas that I hope to turn into blogposts.
In theory I should be writing tonight, but I'm so close to being a week ahead on drawing (meaning, tomorrow I can fully coast if I want to) that I feel like I should just power on through. More Goldman studies of how the hand flexes towards the radius or ulna.
Drawing every day, with a buffer; posting in advance when I can.
Another study of a Midjourney-generated character sheet for Porsche the Centaur. (All of these similar-looking ones were generated using variations of a similar prompt; they never got much better, but they're good variations on a theme). Overall, getting better on the eye placement, now that I'm focusing on it; also the head to hair ratio is better but not great; also the shoulderpads are high or the chin is low ...
Drawing more or less every day; posting as regularly as I can.
SO! I am the proud owner of ... an Atari 2600+! This console, a re-release of the original Atari 2600 from 47 (!) years ago, only a notch smaller and with USB and HDMI outputs. It plays original Atari cartridges, though, which shall be my incentive to hop on my bike and visit the retro game store in nearby Traveler's Rest which has a selection of original Atari cartridges among all their other retro games.
The first game I remember playing is Adventure, which came out in 1980, and, while I can't be sure, I seem to remember first playing it in my parents' new house on Coventry Road, which we didn't move into until early 1979, just before my birthday.
In fact, as I dig my brain into it, we played Breakout in the den of my parents's old house on Sedgefield Road, so we must have had access to early-generation Atari. Our neighbors when we moved had a snazzier Odyssey 2 :-), and a few years later another friend from school had an even better game console, though none of the second-generation units I looked up online seem familiar to me.
Therefore, by the process of elimination, either my parents got my Atari 2600 for Christmas for me sometime around 1977 or 1978, or one of our relatives or babysitters loaned us one when we lived on Sedgefield. I have distinct memories of getting a Radio Shack Color Computer in Christmas of 1980, a grey wedge of plastic with a massive 4K of RAM, and remember programming games on it myself - perhaps because I didn't have an Atari to play with; this makes me think that, at least at first, the Atari was actually the "better game console" my other friend from school had, and that I went over to their house to play.
Regardless, I solved the first level of Adventure in minutes after cracking open the Atari.
No big challenge, but apparently I still got it.
-the Centaur
Pictured: the box, and the unboxed start of Adventure.
"There's no man so self-made he bore himself in the womb."
No, I don't really have any deep thoughts here riffing off "an individualist so rugged ..." ... I just thought of the turn of phrase (when thinking about the same people) and thought it went well with this book I saw.
-the Centaur
Pictured: a book I found in a nearby Barnes and Noble, and a picture taken and sent to friends who heart heart reduplication.
SO! I am still chasing down places in my life where I have been “letting things pile up” and, as a consequence, causing myself stress down the road when I have to clean it up. And I found yet another one - tied in with my drawing / blogging projects.
I have a tremendous complexity tolerance compared to some of the people I’ve worked with, to the point that I’ve been repeatedly told that I need to focus the information that I’m presenting in a way that more clearly gets to the point.
But when piled complexity passes even my tolerance level, I get EXTREMELY stressed out. I knew I got stressed from time to time, but as part of examining my behavior and mental states looking for triggers - inspired by Devon Price’s Unmasking Autism - I zeroed in on dealing with the piles as the actual problem.
Online files aren’t quite as bad - I think it is the actual physical piles that become intimidating, though I think any task too big for my brain to wrap around all the things that need to be done, like editing a novel, may cause the same problem - and so, as part of working on Drawing Every Day, I decided to clean up those files.
I already had a good system for this, broken down by day and year … which I was not using. Now, in theory, you could throw all these files into a bin and forget about it, or even delete them, but I hope to use my files for a deep learning project, so it will likely benefit me to categorize the files as I go.
But, as part of trying to “get ahead”, I’d been working fast, letting the files pile up. This, I realized, easily could turn into one of those aversive pile situations, so I dug in today and fixed it. As a result, I didn’t get to all the things I wanted to get to over lunch.
For decades I’ve had the habit eat-read-write, and my weekend lunches and brunches are a particularly precious writing / coding / thinking time for me. I gets a sad when I don’t get to fully use that time, as today where I spent time on cleanup and I have remote meetings with my friends and my small press in the afternoon.
But this work has to get done sometime, or it won’t get done. And for this project, my collected files for Drawing Every Day will become useless if they aren’t organized - not just for the hypothetical deep learning project, but also for me, in reviewing my own work purely artistically to decide where I should put my learning effort next.
For me, I’ve had to learn not to be so hard on myself. By many metrics, I get a lot done; by other metrics, I feel unproductive, disorganized, even outright lazy. But the truth is that there’s a lot of groundwork that needs to be put in to make progress.
I’ve been trying to teach myself game development since, hell, the early 2000’s. Most of the time, other than a little side effort on interactive fiction, I didn’t make any progress at this, because it was always more important to code for work, to draw, and then, after I got my drawing laptop stolen and got a novel contract not too far apart, to write.
After I got laid off, I decided, “now’s the time! I’m going to do games!” Of course, that didn’t happen: I and my research collaborators had a major paper in flight, a workshop to plan, and I had to launch a consulting business - all while still writing. While I did read up on game development, and spent a lot of time thinking about it, no coding got done.
But most of your learning is on the plateau: you don’t appear to be making progress, but you’re building the tools you’ll need to progress when you’re ready. So all the work I’ve been doing on consulting and for the research projects is looping back around, and I’ve used what I learned to start not one but three tiny games projects.
It’s not likely that I’ll release any of these - at this point, I am just futzing around trying to teach myself - but it is striking to me how much we can accomplish if we put in continual effort over a long period of time and don’t give up.
I can’t tell you how many people over the years have told me “well, if you haven’t seen progress on something in six months, you should quit” or “if you haven’t worked on something in two years, you should get rid of it”. I mean, what? This is terrible advice.
If you want to be productive, don’t take advice from unproductive people. Productive writers and artists typically have apprenticeships lasting anywhere from a year to a decade. It can take years of work to become an overnight success.
And many of the steps leading to that success are unglamorous, tiresome, unsexy scutwork, like organizing your files so you know what you have, or reviewing them so you can decide the next learning project you need to take on to master a skill.
The work has to be done sometime. Best get on with it.
-the Centaur
Pictured: the Drawing Every Day project files, post-cleanup and organization. There’s still a bin of files that need to be filed, but they’re a very contained bin, compared to the mess there was before. Also, a picture of this essay being composed, at my precious Saturday lunch-read-and-write.
Reviewing my past art, I noticed that mis-aligned and mis-spaced eyes, and generally poorly placed and scaled faces, were a problem. So I tried to focus on that problem this time, and ... it didn't turn out bad.
As usual, it's Porsche the Centaur, via a Midjourney character sheet, again. Though her hair is WAY too huge ... I guess I really do romanticize big hair.
