Words, Art & Science by Anthony Francis
Well, logically speaking, if I want to "plan for success" in my art, and I've drawn a centauress with some hooves that I don't like, I should focus on getting better at drawing hooves. From Foster's "Drawing Horses" book, sketched in my little "One Trick Pony" sketchbook.
-the Centaur
P.S. I am totes going back and renaming the last art post "a second pony trick".
One of the productivity tools I use is a technique called "plan for success." I mostly use it for todo lists, and for that topic it's worth a blog post of its own, but, briefly, when taking on a task, I like to start off with a "plan for success" sheet where I list:
Once I have that, I start listing todo items, then categorizing them into the four Stephen Covey quadrants - Urgent and Important, Not Urgent yet Important, Urgent yet Unimportant, and Not Urgent and Not Important. Making sure that the "Not Urgent yet Important" stuff gets done is the hardest part, so I usually tranche the TODOs into "do immediately, do today, do before I leave".
But the whole "plan for success" idea came from an artist - I don't remember who - talking about the difference between professionals and amateurs. An amateur may produce great art, they said, but on accident, even if they're skilled, because they don't know how they're doing what they're doing. A professional, on the other hand, makes a plan to ensure that their art piece succeeds. They may not always succeed at it - plenty of professional artists have to start pieces over - but they don't paint themselves into a metaphorical corner as much because they've taken steps to ensure the piece comes out well - for example, by getting reference art, doing perspective or construction lines, or practice drawings.
I wonder if this idea also works for learning art? Let's find out.
-the Centaur
Pictured: My drawing desk and books on drawing.
Let's see you do that, ChatGPT / DALL-E! Wait, what happens if we try it?
Ha-ha! Three strikes, you're out! (ChatGPT tried and failed three times to generate this image). DALL-E may be a better renderer than me, but it isn't better at imagining the things that I want to imagine.
No plans on giving up drawing soon.
-the Centaur
P.S. This is Porsche the Centaur again, this time with construction lines drawn in pencil, later erased. The upside-down nature made it hard to get the hooves right, and I didn't want to re-draw it, so it could have come out better. But! It went much faster practicing in the smaller "One Trick Pony" notebook. Onward!
Okay, I'm going to start out with the best of the images that I produced trying to create Porsche the Centaur using ChatGPT's DALL-E interface. The above is ... almost Porsche, though her ears are too high (centaurs in the Alliance universe have ears a little more like an elf, but mobile like a dog's). And, after some coaxing, the ChatGPT / DALL-E hybrid managed to produce a halfway decent character sheet:
But both of these images came after several tries. And when I tried to get ChatGPT / DALL-E to generate a front and back view of the same character sheet, it just disintegrated into random horse and human parts:
Similarly, the initial centaur image came only after many prompt tweaks and false starts, like this one:
There are legitimate questions about whether the current round of AI art generators were trained on data taken without permission (they almost certainly were), whether they could displace human artists (they almost certainly will), and whether they will have destructive effects on human creativity (the jury is out on this one, as some forms of art will wane while new forms of art will wax).
But never let anyone tell you they've worked out all the bugs yet. These systems are great renderers at the image patch level, but their notion of coherence leaves a lot to be desired, and their lack of structural knowledge means their ability to creatively combine is radically limited to surface stylistics.
One day we'll get there. But it will take a lot of work.
-the Centaur
The Neurodiversiverse submission window has finally closed, Liza and I have triaged the art and assigned the stories, and I'm now digging into my first chunk of the slush pile. Onward!
-the Centaur
Pictured: A universe of science fiction books from nearby Angel's bookstore.
Porsche the Centaur. The joke is, I spent some time organizing my drawing materials, collecting books of exercises to work through, and finding appropriate materials - and she's drawn in a sketchbook which was made from a children's graphic novel called "One Trick Pony".
Quick sketch of Ruby Sunday from "The Church on Ruby Road".
Extra challenging as I am just freehanding this and not using construction lines. Bleh.
-the Centaur
Now, it's not true that I have writer's block: I wrote +600 words on a new story, "Plains of Deathless Ice", a sequel to my recently-submitted story "Shadows of Titanium Rain". But I do seem to have blogger's block, as I had two or three ideas for posts but had great difficulty writing them.
This is not one of those post ideas.
Pfui on you, writer's block.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Some books from my "books wanted" album.
Drawn from a paused frame of "The Church on Ruby Road", the first full episode of the 15th Doctor.
-the Centaur
P.S. I apparently was wrong: I thought I had kept up Drawing Every Day for 103 days in 2021, but actually it was 205 days that started in late, late 2020, with a brief spurt in 2023. So this is the third time I've tried it! Best of luck Dr. Francis on beating your past winning streak.
Welcome to 2024, everyone! This year, I plan on resuming my aborted "Blogging Every Day" and "Drawing Every Day" experiments (and, perhaps, even "Music Every Day"). But let's focus first on the blogging. I really enjoy reading the blogs of people who regularly take out the time to comment on the world, because it gives me a view not just into their thought process but into the gears of the world as they grind.
As for my gears grinding, this first day of the new year has been quite busy! It feels like I did nothing, as there were things that I had planned to do this morning that never happened. But, actually, I spent a few hours managing (counts them) 8 research projects and 2 nonfiction book proposals, met with a friend/research colleague online, did some prepwork for the Neurodiversiverse, helped my wife with some plane tickets, resolved issues with some online systems, and hung out with a cat.
Little of that was on my agenda, but it all has to get done. And it's easy to forget that. One way I've been using to track that is Clockify, which I started using when my consulting business picked up a bit. It really helps you see what you've been spending your time on - or neglecting - if you remember to use it.
Of course, one of the things I had wanted to do this morning was enter my hours for the weekend. Time to get to timing it.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Downtown Greenville's Falls Park.
Wow, what a year. I'd love to say it had its pros and cons, but the stark reality of it is that the one bad thing - getting laid off, not just years before I wanted to retire, but one day after we successfully showed our new project was working, thus throwing me years off course in my research - overshadows all the good stuff. As I was describing it to my wife, it's like falling down into a well and finding some shiny rocks down there. They might be nice rocks - heck, they might even be gold, and worth a fortune - but you've still got to cope with falling into the well, and figure out how to climb back out again, before taking advantage of the good stuff.
And, I have to admit, there was a lot of good stuff. We submitted a great paper on social robot navigation and held a great workshop on embodied AI, which was renewed for next year. Thinking Ink Press published a new book, was chosen for the Innovative Voices program and launched a successful Kickstarter. We proposed the Neurodiversiverse anthology, announced it at Dragon Con, and have almost a hundred submissions as of the close of the year. That inspired me to write two new stories, "Blessing of the Prism" and "Shadows of Titanium Rain", which I think are some of my best work. I even started a robotics consulting business and got a few clients, which is helping to reduce the uncertainty.
But 2023 was the worst year for me for a while. There have been bad ones recently - in 2016 we elected a wannabe dictator and many of my friends and family seemed to lose their minds; in 2019 my mother died; and in 2020 I had the double whammy of the pandemic with the most stressful period of my work life. But, like 2023, each of those years had ups with the downs: in 2016, my current research thread started; in 2019, we proved that our research ideas were working (for all the good it did us); and in 2020, we moved back to my hometown into what we hope is our forever home.
And yet, with the exception of the loss of my mother, none of those seemed quite as life changing as getting laid off. Even for Mom, I was somewhat prepared: my father had unexpectedly lost one of his siblings early, and our extended family had developed a kind of shared knowledge of how to cope with loss. I had already lost my father and grandmother, and knew that Mom, while healthy, was in her mid-80s, and could pass at any time; so I was spending as much time as practical with her. I spoke to her the day she died. And so, after she was gone, I started down a road that I had been preparing for mentally for a long, long time.
But I wasn't in the mindset that Google would kill off half its robotics program just in AI's hour of triumph. We were even working on a projects directly related to Google's new large language model focus. It made no sense, and left this strange kind of void, creating a severance I didn't expect for another decade.
Despite all of what happened this year, I keep coming back to one thing:
Was it worth it if I wrote those two new stories?
Yes.
So, farewell, you crazy year you: thanks for all you gave me. My wife even said "Supposedly what you do on New Year's Eve is what you'll do for the rest of the year," and today we worked on our businesses, worked on writing and art, met friends old and new, and even moved furniture (which, metaphorically, is her new business venture). So's here's to more writing, more art, more friends, and more business in 2024!
-the Centaur
P.S. I see that I kept up "Blogging Every Day" in 2023 for 91 days, almost a quarter of the year; my earlier attempt at "Drawing Every Day" in 2021 lasted 103 days, a little over a quarter of the year. Let's see if we can break both those records in 2024, now that I have far more free time (and flexible time) on my hands!
Still at the Conference on Robot Learning. LOTS of robot dogs were about, lots of diffusion model and transformer work, and lots of language model planning. More later, gotta crash.
-the Centaur
In ATL for the Conference on Robot Learning, very tired after a long day, please enjoy this picture of a Page One from Cafe Intermezzo. Actually, today was a really good example of "being where you need to be" ... I ran into a fair number of colleagues from Google and beyond just by being out on the town at the right time and the right place, and was also able to help out a fellow who seriously needed some food. And when the evening was ending ... three more Google colleagues appeared on the street as I sat down for coffee.
I don't actually believe we live in a simulation, or in the Secret, or whatever ... but if you're doing the right thing, I find that Providence tends to open the doors for you right when you need it.
-the Centaur
P.S. Being in the right place DOESN'T mean you get all your nano wordcount done though. I am making progress on "Blessing of the Prism", my Neurodiversiverse story, but on Dakota Frost #7 I found myself spending most of my writing time sorting chapters in the big manuscript into sections, as I realized that one of the ungainly sections I didn't like was actually a coherent start for Dakota Frost #8.
P.P.S. On my blogroll, I saw someone say, "no writing is wasted", and in a sense the chapters I just saved are not wasted. In another, and I say this as a bloviating maximalist, a big part of writing is selection, and sometimes having too many versions of a thing can make it hard to pick the right one and move on.
Okay, really going to crash this time, peace out.
So the turkeys are out again! Love to see these fellas in the yard. But they're not the only big ungainly birds out there. I've been reading a lot of writing books recently, and some of them have really great advice. True, in each good book there is, usually, at least one stinker.
But most of the good ones build on the two related ideas that "whatever works, works," so you can adapt their advice to your own needs - HOWEVER, "some things usually work better than others," so if you are having trouble, here are some tools you can try.
One thing I draw from this is a refutation of the idea that if an artist achieves their artistic vision then there's nothing wrong with that piece of art. Phooey. It may be great for them that they achieved their vision - heaven knows, I so rarely do that - but what they envision itself may be flawed.
Dwight Swain, who wrote Techniques of the Selling Writer, talks about this in audio courses built on his book. As a novelist, he claims you often don't know how good an idea is until you get a chapter or three into the story, and that if you find your idea doesn't work (or that you don't care about your protagonist), quit.
There's no shame in this. But if you've got the time, talent or treasure, you can sometimes push a bad idea to its logical conclusion without ever questioning the foundation. For example, hiring Samuel Jackson, but directing him to act woodenly as if he's in an old Republic serial (I'm looking at you, George Lucas).
What you focus on as your artistic vision is itself a matter of choice, and achieving your artistic vision does not mean that you'll end up with something that is aesthetically effective. Hey, as always, you're free to do you, but that doesn't mean that the rest of us are going to get what you've got.
-the Centaur
When I was a kid, I read an article by Isaac Asimov complaining that the pace of scientific publication had become so great that he couldn't possibly keep up. When I was an adult, I realized that the end of the article - in which he claimed that if you heard panting behind his office door it was because he was out of breath from trying to read the scientific literature - was a veiled reference to masturbation. Yep, Isaac is the Grand Dirty Old Man of science fiction, and, man, we love you, but, damn, sometimes, you needed a filter.
Well, the future is now, and the story is repeating itself - sans Isaac's ending; my regular fiction is a touch blue so there's no need for my blog to get prurient. I'm a robotics researcher turned consultant, focusing on, among a kazillion other things, language model planning - robots using tools like ChatGPT to write their own programs. As part of this, I'm doing research - market research on AI and robotics, general research on the politics of AI, and technical research on language models in robotics.
A good buddy from grad school is now a professor, and he and I have restarted a project from the 90's on using stories to solve problems (the Captain's Advisory Tool, using Star Trek synopses as a case-base, no joke). And we were discussing this problem: he's complaining that the pace of research has picked up to the point where he can no longer keep up with the literature. So it isn't just me.
But the best story yet on how fast things are changing? Earlier this month, I was going through some articles on large language models my research - and a new announcement came out while I was still reading the articles I had just collected that morning.
Singularity, here we come.
-the Centaur
So! National Novel Writing Month is here again, but I haven't finished my story for the Neurodiversiverse. So I'm working on two stories at once. Hopefully this will not become confusing.
But, if you see something from me in which space centaurs fight werewolves, or Dakota Frost goes to space, you know why - hang on, wait a minute, I already had those storylines going.
Hmm ... this might be trickier to debug than I thought...
-the Centaur
Zonked because I was up early trying to get something resolved with my passport. Crashing early, still not certain what project I'm going to pick for Nanowrimo tomorrow.
Until then, enjoy your magic salad!
-the Centaur
Had a great day with a buddy from grad school who drove up so we could bike the Swamp Rabbit Trail. During that, I had a great idea for a blogpost, which has completely evaporated on the bike back.
So, please enjoy this picture of a pizza instead!
Bon appetit.
-the Centaur
Continuing on the forest theme, sometimes you come across a tree that you think is just dead. This is a good time of year for it: the foliage is falling, so you can more clearly see all the trees, but some of them still have leaves, making the ones which are completely barren stand out. Often the bark is black and cracking, or all the small branches have fallen off, leaving just a stick. I've twisted a fair few of these out of the ground with one hand and added them to the growing border that is creating our path.
But others are bigger - the kind that tree experts call "widowmakers". You can walk up to one, and just push on it, and it may start to fall - but you get more than you bargained for. The tree's momentum, once started, cannot be stopped, and its weight - even if rotten - is enough to cause a cascading chain reaction, breaking off healthy limbs and knocking over other trees on its way down. These slender systems, dead but balanced in a semblance of life, crash with unexpected impact, ringing out through the forest as they land.
It may be fun to knock over a system you don't like, but the crash can kill you, and it can do a lot of damage to other people as it falls to rest.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Well, I don't have pictures of the trees that fell over, but I do have vines that I've pulled down, which looked twenty feet long but proved to be fifty feet of falling debris that also could kill you.
Sometimes when working on a vast project it transcends "you can't do it all at once" and moves into the territory "it's hard to know where to get started". One such project is trying to bring the woods in our house under control. Apparently the previous owner's yard folks had been trimming the landscaping around the house and throwing the cuttings into the forest, so an entertaining variety of invasive ivy, grapes, something like holly, and other vine-like things were progressively destroying the trees of the forest.
It's been a process. The yard looked like wilderness once you got past the landscaping and was nearly impassable. But, after we were forced to take out the first of our dying trees (NO, well, full disclosure, a delivery truck took out the FIRST of our trees when it ran into it) when it got consumed by ivy one year and threatened to fall on the driveway, we decided to start the multi-year project of rehabilitating the yard.
We took out that tree, then took out another half-dozen. We hired goats that year to eat the vines down to the ground, then followed up with chainsaws and clippers to sever the roots of the vines climbing the trees. The goats decided they were done with it and didn't eat any new growth that came back up, so the next year, we hired a guy to bring in a "mulcher" (really, a bobcat with a giant grinder on the front of it) to clear out runways through the landscape, leaving islands of greenery for the deer and other animals.
Then, we started on the paths.
Our idea - and I'm not saying it's a good or feasible one - is to have paths running through this forest. This would take way, way more money than we want to spend on it - but we're patient, and have time. So, slowly, step by step, we've been taking fallen tree limbs and creating borders for the paths.
Drawing that line is an act of magic - even if it's just with an old rotten piece of wood thrown onto some leaves. As soon as the line is drawn, you know what's inside it, and what's outside it. You know which plants you can leave alone, and which weeds need to be pulled up. And once you've done that, you have an even larger area of order, which brings increased clarity, which brings more opportunities for order.
I don't know if we will ever complete our plan to rehabilitate the forest.
But at least now, there are paths we can walk.
-the Centaur
