Another study from "Morpho: Simplified Forms".
-the Centaur
A re-draw of the cover of The Lexicon of Comicana by Mort Walker, creator of Beetle Bailey. I picked this up on a trip to San Francisco for the Game Developer's Conference, and drew this in a coffee house attached to a Books Inc (now owned by Barnes and Noble) ... maybe this one. Can't remember if I found this book at that Books Inc or at nearby Russian Hill Bookstore, but I think it was the BI on Van Ness next to the Peet's, where I chose to draw after buying the book.
-the Centaur
I started to write "drawing DETRACTS from writing" but that's not true at all: I just finished a couple of drawings for THE LEGACY OF THE EXTRA CREDIT PROJECT that helped me understand my own characters - and now I've drawn all of the core six characters signed up for the Project. So drawing doesn't detract ... but it certainly can subtract from the time you'd spend on another endeavor.
Our heroes Q'yagon and Darina I most recently used Midjourney reference for, but I had previously drawn them myself; but now, without reference, I have drawn sketches of the stoneskin healer Orieos and his birchbark ranger squeeze Berrybelle, as well as Berrybelle's fire mage brother Sapforte and his ice dragon familiar, Frostthorne. All six are now rendered by my own hand!
But, normally, the Drawing Every Day project has relatively simple drawings - several of which have appeared recently, so you can see what I mean. But at the start and finish of every notebook, I do a more detailed drawing of ... SOMETHING ... related to my writing or comics, and those take longer.
Orieos and Berrybelle finished out a DED notebook (this one from Blick art supply, pictured above) and Sapforte and Frostthorne started a new one (not pictured). O&B took an hour; S&F took three.
In that time, I could have written 500 to 1500 words (more, or less, depending on inspiration and orientation to the text) or made progress on the Logical Robotics Harness, or done work on the FROST MOON re-release or the LCATS project.
But even though I could have spent those four hours writing ... I'm happy with the result.
So even though drawing (and blogging!) subtract from writing time, I'm glad I do them.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Just the notebook, as the drawings are for days 250-251, and we're only at DOY 164.
Vegan spread trio and vegan foccacia at The 07 on Laurens Road in Greenville. While The 07 is not all vegan, it is one of our most consistent fave vegan-friendly restaurants in Greenville.
And they often have excellent vegan desserts ... as they had at our meal yesterday.
-the Centaur
Pictured: um, I said it; an artichoke panini, and the vegan dessert cake.
More from Morpho's book of "simplified forms".
Drawing every day.*
-the Centaur
*on average, or better.
Normally when my wife's in town and we're not throwing a party, the above space in our living room is reserved for one of her art projects. But right now, she's focusing on painting in her studio, so I have set out my vast pile of piles which I have been trying to beat back with a stick.
The cats are helping. This task has seemed Sisyphean, but, actually, some of the piles have returned to the shelves, and others have dissolved into papers for recycling. The above matrix grabs a large amount of stuff which I think will shrink down with "the treatment". I feel like I'm making progress!
I've switched gears now back to the novel, coding, and blogging, but Loki is helping. You can't see him easily right now, so I've provided a reference shot of his helping style above.
Perhaps with that, you can see him helping at my desk.
-the Centaur
Pictured: The piles, exploded; Lily, I think, Loki outside, and Loki behind my monitor.
One of the delights of my life are redeye flights. The actual flight itself isn't usually that grand, but I really enjoy having a long day at a conference or vacation destination with nothing to do, followed by breakfast at the airport in the nearly inevitable layover before the final leg to Greenville.
This time, it was New Jersey, and I have never seen an airport with more food options than the New Jersey airport. Seemingly every 5 to 10 gates, there was a collection of restaurants which included a large, clean, well-organized center aisle counter, one or two large restaurants on the sides, and a quirky restaurant tucked away between them with some ethnic food.
All of these were almost certainly served by the same kitchen, as each cluster (except for the ethnic restaurant) had the same menu, and all had QR codes on each seat to order and deliver food directly. But there were still a large number of staff - one of which served me at a counter directly opposite my gate. It was a well-worked out, efficient, and yet still surprisingly human system.
The food was delicious. And so was the sunrise.
-the Centaur
Pictured: two shots of the sunrise that I saw on my way between gates, a smoked salmon flatbread, and a bowl of fresh fruit.
More "drawing every day" studies from the "morpho" book.
-the Centaur
A study from the very nice "Morpho" series of art books.
-the Centaur
P.S. My math seems right this time; day 161 is indeed (30(m+1) + 3w + d + 5) from 2026-03-16.
I carry a portable art studio - pencils, erasers, and pens, along with a sketchbook and some reference book for drawing - almost everywhere I go. Since this is a "carry it with me" sketchbook, I draw in pencil, then draw over it in pen, so the final drawing doesn't get smudged away by being carried around everywhere for weeks or months at a time.
ERGO, I care a lot about line quality of pens.
Pigma Micron are my current favorites, with 08 being used most frequently for heavy line work, 01-03-05 for interior work, and 10 for exterior lines on "artwork" as opposed to "practice sketches". Derwent Sketching 2B is what I use most frequently to sketch out the drawings I will later ink.
But for drawing one six one for 2026 (actually drawn on day 60, because I try to draw ridiculously far ahead) I was apparently testing out Sharpies, Pigma Brush, and Staedtler Mars Lumograph pens as well as some other Derwent pencils.
I still haven't found a portable brush pen that I like.
-the Centaur
P.S. My math seems off, it lists (30(m+1) +1w + d + 3), but I think that's probably actually m+2.
Back from the Embodied AI Workshop! And TIL (today I learned, though not the today of the blogging every day post) that "home again, home again, jiggity jig" isn't originally just a throw-away line from J.F. Sebastian's autonomous creations in Blade Runner, but actually is a centuries-old nursery rhyme called "To Market, To Market": https://poets.org/poem/market-market
To market,
To market,
To buy a fat pig.
Home again,
Home again,
Jiggity jig.
I may be a carnivore, but I find the treatment of animals in a lot of older literature ... disturbing. Regardless, I'm home again, and since another year has passed, that means there's a different car from the Clemson autonomous driving team on display in the Greenville-Spartanburg Airport:
On the theme of dubious autonomous creatures, I've said it before, but now I'll say it here: an autonomous vehicle without a physical steering wheel is a bug, just waiting to turn your car into a one-ton paperweight when the software inevitably bricks. Send an engineer out with a gamepad controller all you want: sooner or later you'll need a tow in an awkward situation (say, for example, an underground parking garage in Palo Alto which is too windy for a tow truck to get into ... yes, I do have personal experience with this, why do you ask?) requiring your new paperweight to be serviced in place.
Pull up your pants, turn your ballcap forward, and install a steering wheel.
-the Centaur
Pictured: A fountain in the Greenville-Spartanburg Airport, and the aforementioned self-driving car. I don't think it had a steering wheel, front or back, but perhaps that was just the angle I could see in.
One of the things they tell writers is "always write your ideas down". The truth is, natural language is so impossibly vast that every sentence we think or say, outside of boilerplate hellos, pleasantries, and goodbyes, could be unique. But our memories are NOT structured to retain unique information; instead, they integrate it into familiar patterns so it can be reconstructed - not exactly retrieved.
So if you hit on a bon mot, you're better off writing it down.
OR, put another way, I forgot to write down what I planned to write in this post, and it's GONE.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Vibe Coffee in Denver, where I am writing this ahead of time, as I will soon (as of this writing) be on a redeye flight, and then (as of this posting) be recovering from said redeye.
P.S. If you got a brief flash of this post on the 9th, ignore it. Wait until the 11th. :-D
Denver has impressed me with being clean and beautiful even before getting out of downtown.
The restaurants are great, the streets are clean, and there are many nice walking areas.
Overall it's been a fun place to hang out while attending the CVPR (especially since EAI is over).
And the skies too have been very beautiful ...
... especially the sunsets.
-the Centaur
Pictured: a smoked Old Fashioned at Ocean Prime, Ocean Prime's glowing bar upstairs, Larimer Square, the view from Ocean Prime's patio, the view from nearby Vibe Coffee and Wine, and the sunset I got on the walk from Vibe to Ocean Prime.
"Writing by writers on writing" indeed! From the Capitol Hill Bookstore, one of the many nice bookstores not far from the Colorado Convention Center, such as the Little Blue Pigeon:
Some nice finds, not far from the hotel, and one of the bookstores even had a book reading Sunday by a writer on writing dialogue. Nice ...
-the Centaur
Pictured: um, I said it already.
INT SOUNDSTAGE - CUBICLE FARM - LATE AT NIGHT
Programmers scramble about, trying to meet a deadline. CODEFINGER watches as an industrial coding AGENT creeps closer and closer to BOND's vital job functions.
BOND (nervously): Do you expect me to prompt?
CODEFINGER (laughing): No, Mister Bond! I expect your job to die!
The industrial coding AGENT cuts CODEFINGER in half with an industrial grade laser.
BOND (shocked): You killed him!
AGENT: You're right! Let me fix that ...
BOND (untying himself): I'll just show myself out ...
"I know, KITT, but let's try to take out his right front tire."
Technically it is possible to swing a stick at CVPR and not hit a self-driving vehicle, but our best VLA robotics foundation models only achieve 38% at this task, and even humans struggle to do it well.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Two companies inadvertently creating a classic scene out of Knight Rider, where KITT goes up against Goliath, a truck armored with the same invulnerable material out that KITT is:
I don't know. I enjoyed the scene as a kid, but I have a hard time thinking that Goliath would have done well in a collision against a barricade of a dozen or so cement mixer trucks, much less an actual tank, which typically weighs two to three times as much as a fully laden truck. Newton's a bitch!
You survived the Embodied AI Workshop and all you got was that lousy t-shirt!
I'm promising myself not to over-complicate this post, so here's the short story: it went well! But we were making changes up to the previous day, so between the time that we printed the above poster and the actual talk, two of the speakers had changed - one speaker replaced their own backup, and another speaker who had dropped out was replaced by a volunteer speaker the afternoon before!
As CVPR (our parent conference) said, "Printed materials may be out of date ... check the website!" Which we did keep up to date: https://embodied-ai.org/cvpr2026 ... overall, though, the workshop was well attended. The best attended talk was my buddy Lewis Chiang's, a roboticist at Google DeepMind who I always thought was a superstar and I guess he's well on his way:
Over 70 people attended the talk and at least a dozen people were remote. While there were a few open seats up front, it still created a standing-room-only vibe:
All in all we had nine speakers, two highlight sessions for embodied AI challenges and accepted papers, a poster session, and a concluding debate. The very first picture is me, Lewis and Dinesh, another speaker at the workshop, discussing the nuances and challenges of safety in long-horizon embodied AI - a fancy way of asking "how to keep our agents from killing us if we let them loose."
There's more to say about this - CVPR is huge, so huge that it perhaps it was a mistake to go see the Backrooms movie after wandering around the massive Colorado Convention Center:
But, the long and the short of it is, we survived!
And now it's time to enjoy the rest of the conference ... at a much slower pace.
-the Centaur
Pictured: the final debate, the image of the schedule poster, the schedule poster in action, Lewis's talk, the standing room only audience, the keynote rooms, the expo floor and CVPR's massive collection of posters, the EAI7 dinner, and me in front of the expo proper. Now it's time for a nap.
Well ... SOON.
The Embodied AI Workshop starts in just under an hour at Room 107 at the Colorado Convention Center! Hope to see you all there, or you'll all be square.
Well.
All of you wouldn't fit in the room, so I guess you don't have to be square if you're not there. But you can find out more about it here: https://embodied-ai.org/cvpr2026/
I hope you check it out! We've got a lot of great speakers and if you're registered with CVPR you can access it remotely here: https://cvpr.thecvf.com/virtual/2026/workshop/36064
-the Centaur
SO! My fiendish plan to drill in on finishing LEGACY OF THE EXTRA CREDIT PROJECT, rather than Blogging A to Z, has paid off in the nick of time: I just completed my forty-fifth successful Nanowrimo challenge, out of fifty total attempts over the past quarter century.
You have to look closely to see all the failures, but they're the ones that go down and to the right below the midline of the diagram you see above. But this time I made it, and just in the nick of time.
You see how steep it gets near the end? That's me doing a full court press, right in the last week. That's always a less fun experience than I like, but I have to say, sometimes wonderful things come out of it - in this case Kassandroc, a "prophecy bird" who popped into Novella 7 in the sequence in rather late and complicated it in some very delightful ways.
But getting there required putting in several 5000+ word days, including staying up to six in the morning the night of the 29th (which basically was today) to make sure that I had fewer words remaining on the 30th than I had written on the 29th, essentially knowing "I can do this!"
And I did. I've hit 292K words in the manucript for LEGACY, which has turned into a trilogy at this point, divided into roughly three to four novellas per book. That makes LEGACY my largest writing project, longer than the MACHINERY OF THE APOCALYPSE, another unpublished trilogy which I am looking forward to getting back to once I finish LEGACY and release it to the world.
And now, I have a very late IROS review to do, which I just found out about because apparently the reminder emails were ending up in my spam folder. More in a bit!
Oh! An excerpt. Context is for wimps:
Like so many names in Arcadia, the Origami Gryphon was both a shop and a person.
The Gryphon’s shop was located on the intersection of Fourth Spoke, Fifth Ring, not too far a walk from where Darina and Q’yagon first met. Then, as now, the Origami Gryphon was a sprawling scrollarium, a vast disc-shaped building wider than Helixium. Three steaming water towers surrounded a central rotunda filled with books, slates, scrolls, and encyclitomes.
Inside the main entrance hung a massive, ornately engraved sign—the original sign for the shop, a millennium old, now roped off with its own historical marker, but still legible in pre-post-post-post-post-modern-styled ornate Roman English lettering:
Welcome to the Origami Gryphon
Books Eaten, Scrolls Written
A Million Books of Lore
Ready to be Regurgitated
All You Need is a Question“And some coin,” Q’yagon cracked, patting Darina’s arm.
Onward!
- the Centaur
Pictured: a statue I found at SC Comic Con, which, I swear, looks almost like the ice dragon Frostthorne from LEGACY, complete down to standing on a modified globe which had some of the features of the post-continental-shift world of the Spookymurk.
So my next thought on the Blogging A to Z Challenge for 2026 was, if I failed at that challenge but succeeded at my National Novel Writing Month challenge to write 50,000 more words on THE LEGACY OF THE EXTRA CREDIT PROJECT, what would happen?
Why, I'd notch one more victory on the above diagram. Specifically, that dark line going down and to the right would tilt up until it intersected the convergence of lines above - which would put me at something like 290,000 words on LEGACY OF THE EXTRA CREDIT PROJECT.
Nanowrimo, for those just joining this blog, is a challenge to write 50,000 words of a new novel in the month of November. It expanded into "Camp Nano" challenges in April and July, and I personally, since I write long novels, use it to add words to manuscripts in process.
About ten years ago, I started doing the Camp April and July Nano's, since I wanted to finish my books before I die, and last December, I started doing the challenge full time until the end of the LEGACY OF THE EXTRA CREDIT PROJECT ... which is turning into a damn trilogy.
So far, approximately 10% of the words I've ever written in Nano were on this one project. I have a lot of work to do - I'm just finishing Novella 5 out of a project 10-12 novellas, and boy does it need editing - but I'm very proud of some of the work that I've done here.
So if you don't see me blogging, that's because I'm writing, drawing or coding.
Mostly writing.
-the Centaur
Pictured: My "the reason you're doing this" shelf - a collection of genre toys and personal keepsakes I use to remind me of why I work. Also pictured: my Nano yearly stats for the past quarter century or so, and the plaque I got from the now-defunct Nano organization when I cracked 2 million words.