Words, Art & Science by Anthony Francis
A sketch based on the "Morpho" series of drawing instruction books - I think "Simplified Forms". I've also worked from their "Mammals" book but I put that on hold to dig more into the human form, which is where I think my greatest need for artistic instruction lies as of late Q1 2025.
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur
SO! If I got my blog running back in January, and planned to blog every day, why haven’t I been posting?
Because I also wanted to draw every day … and wanted to build a buffer.
Why? Well, let’s break it down.
First, I want to draw comic books. Yes, yes, yes, I have a webcomic called f@nu fiku, but after I broke my arm, and got my laptop stolen, and found my hand-crafted blog software stopped working, and got swarmed trying to crank out my first four novels … well, after all that, I found my confidence in my drawing had collapsed.
I never was that great at drawing, frankly, but when I was working on f@nu fiku with the goal of cranking out a page a week, I never let my drawing limitations stop me. If I wanted to have an image in my comic, I had to figure out how to draw it, no matter what. But even though I wasn’t that great, I had a level of self-confidence that let me tackle whatever I had to.
But I never gave up on comics. Not only do I want to finish f@nu fiku, I have other comics I want to draw, from Cinnamon Frost and Serendipity the Centaur stories up to and including becoming the writer-artist for Green Lantern. Obviously that last one is aspirational, but I can’t frigging aspire to become the writer-artist of anything if I am not creating comics at all.
But, I not only love comics, and want to work on comics, I study comics. I know, for example, that Jim Lee spent a solid year teaching himself to draw after college in an attempt to break into the comics industry. Now, I can’t yet put in 8-10 hours a day drawing like Lee did, but I decided I could at least draw every day.
But it’s hard to draw every day if real life intervenes (like Dragon Con, for example). According to my records, I’ve tried the “Drawing Every Day” project 3 times in the past, and never made it through the full year once - I lasted 215 days in 2021 (through Dragon Con), just one day in 2023 (the layoffs), and 135 days in 2024 (through the Embodied AI Workshop).
I find it really disheartening to hit the end of the year and to be that far behind. But I also know that professional comic book artists who do daily strips build up a buffer to keep themselves ahead - Bill Holbrook, the author of Kevin and Kell, built up 30 strips before launching what is now one of the longest running webcomics in history.
So, I decided to do a buffer for Drawing Every Day 2025.
So, for the first part of this year, I leaned into drawing, trying to get ahead. I decided that I wouldn’t start blogging every day until I built up a buffer of drawing every day, and in an act of quixotic hubris, I also decided to start retro-drawing the missing drawings from 2024 so that I would finish those drawings as well.
But, I wondered, how far ahead should I try to get in my drawings? Following Bill Holbrook, I guessed a month, but once you’re out of January, you need a tool to keep track of what day of the year it is. I wanted something simpler … so I started to think in terms of a simple formula I could keep in my head.
Fortunately (thanks, passage of time!) months are ordered, thus can be numbered. Call the number of the month in the year “m”. Months have a notch over 30 days on average, but for a mental formula, you want to round to even numbers to keep the math simple. So 30m is a good quick overestimate of what day it is in the year.
But 30m is a variable, vulnerable overestimate, as it is more ahead at the start of the month almost 30 days less at the end of the month. You could add 30 days, but even 30(m+1) still has this variable property. So, call the day “d” and add that to the formula: 30(m + 1) + d. And that sounds great. 30(m + 1) is guaranteed to always be more than 30 days ahead.
And … 30(m+1)+d is a treadmill. Every day, you’re just at your buffer, and every day, you can’t fail to lose focus, or you eat into your buffer. That’s no good: the point of the buffer is to get your back when major life events (like Dragon Con) happen, not to put you constantly on edge that you’re about to lose your buffer.
So I decided to add a few more days to the formula. I know I typically draw two to four drawings in a session (sometime as few as one if I am busy or have chosen something complicated, sometimes as many as five if I am sketching). So adding two more to the formula gets us to 30(m + 1) + d + 2 … a number I can easily calculate in my head, and, what’s more, add to my drawings, even if I don’t have internet where I am.
It’s not perfect - when transitioning from a short month, you can find yourself a few days behind - but it’s a number so far ahead that I can skip a day whenever I have to, confident that I will be able to get back on track with the typical number of drawings I do per day. And if I am at my buffer, I can do a “retro 2024” drawing or sketch some idea not on my drawing plan (which is a whole nother topic for a whole nother post).
So. Anyway. My point, and I did have one.
Today, I reached 30(m + 1) + d + 2 in my drawing buffer.
And so today is the day I resume Blogging Every Day, with this post.
It’s good to be back.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Where I am, drawing, and writing, and one of the drawings. And unfortunately, it's too dim to do my normal photo of my drawing for today, so I'll have to scan that when I get home.
So at last the kittens get to go outside! The adventurous one, Lily, took to it immediately, but the other two were terrified, squeaking, their tiny hearts pounding ... for all of five minutes. Within ten, they started exploring, and within twenty, they were actively playing.
For now, we've turned this courtyard into a catio, because these kittens have never been outside, have almost no experience other animals other than friendly humans and our scared indoor cats, and still are pretty tiny. Our property, on the other hand, is crisscrossed by other cats, occasionally aggressive turkeys, and a fox willing to take on prey twice its size. There's also a hawk, which my wife is concerned might carry off the cats; as they get larger, I am skeptical, but there's no need to risk it until they get more street-smart.
Be patient, Lilipadski. Your time will come.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Cats in the catio, AKA the courtyard we call "The French Quarter."
0 
Welp, I gaffed, thinking my last "blogging every day" post, #172, published on July 12, 2024, was published on time, so I should look for pictures from July 13 to reconstruct what I was doing. And so, I was going to start a "retro 2024" series of blogposts to get back on track.
BUT, post 172 was late, so it ACTUALLY should have been posted on June 20th. But, IT WASN'T, so, WHATEVER, I had already pulled up images from July 13th and sketched out a blog post in my mind, SO, here we go, NOT QUITE RETRO 2024 yet.
Wait, why am I doing this, other than my obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which really should be "compulsive disordered obsession" (CDO) so not only would the acronym be alphabetical, but also the phrase would no longer need a hyphen as it was no longer a compound-word adjective?
Because it gets be back on track, that's why! Don't bother me, don't bother me.(*)
Anyway.
Back in July of 2024, my wife and I were on a trip to downtown Asheville. Before Magneto destroyed it (oh, wait, my fact checkers are actually saying it was ravished by a hurricane) Asheville was one of our favorite getaway destinations, being only an hour and a half from our home in Simpsonville, South Carolina.
And there, we found Cary Gray's Poetic Experience, where "he asks, you share, he writes." After walking past it half a dozen times, I decided to sit for a session, where Cary asked questions about me that revealed my interest in robotics, my history of love for science going back to the Greenville County Library and their great big spinning globe, and my neurodivergent social anxiety disorder.
Cary ultimately put that into a poem, which he later physically mailed to me, laser-cut onto a set of boards that I have hanging in places in my Library. I apparently don't have a picture of one of these, and am not going to hold up this blogpost, but I one quote sticks out in my mind:
"Who do I look in the eyes, and for what length of time?"
That's the story of my life, I think, or at least the story of my inner mental life when I'm interacting with other people. I loved having eyes with lenses flexible enough to support the use of contacts, but now that I'm on progressive lenses, I enjoy taking them off when I'm talking to people, so their eyes blur out just enough that I don't have to be self-conscious looking at people and can just be there present in the moment.
And I'd never have gotten a laser-engraved plaque bearing the words "Who do I look in the eyes, and for what length of time," a plaque that now hangs in a place where I see it almost every day, unless I had stepped outside my circle for a little poetry reading.
So. Step outside your circle. You never know what benefits it might bring.
-the Centaur
Pictured: The Poetry Experience, in Asheville.
Looks like "blogging every day" bombed out around July 12, 2024 ... so let's pick up with July 13, shall we?
Picking up with blogging every day almost half a year later? Oh yes, I am.
-the Centaur
Pictured: A sign, likely from Asheville. Also, bonus points if you can figure out what the title riffs on. [Oh, all right, I know it's too hard, it's from a sample in "You are Here" off of John Tesh's Tour de France album.]
Long day. But I had yet another victory with "push it just a little bit farther" combined with "nailing down the carpet", applying them together to successfully complete a data loader for my latest machine learning project. It was quite the mess at first, with loose wires and dangling bits all over the place, and while the high level concept of what I wanted to do was clear, some of the next steps were elusive.
But "nailing down the carpet" means methodically going through a project and eliminating everything that can trip you up - formatting files, turning on the linter, resolving lint issues, refactoring code, and, sometimes, just moving code to its proper place. And when I was done with that, my data loader class was practically empty, just waiting for a suggestion from ChatGPT to flesh it out.
I had to adapt that code to my use case, of course, but I successfully loaded my data (into a Colab which was now a third of its former size thanks to my aggressive moves of code into reusable libraries) and managed even to cut the proposed loader to half its size, again due to the reusable libraries I had just built. The code worked in Colab. And I wanted to check it all in - but the unit tests suggested by ChatGPT no longer passed after all my code changes. It was late and I was tired, so I decided, yeah, time to hang it up.
But I was so close. And so, I decided to "work a little bit harder," and fix the unit test. Once I dug into it, I realized the problem was the synthetic data that the generative AI had proposed in the unit test, so I replaced that with real data, using the librarized code I'd just refactored. And then I realized the data was too big, so I used ChatGPT to write, on the fly, some code to squeeze the data down to size as test data.
That extra work took less than an hour - maybe less than thirty minutes. But it meant I was able to package up a report to my team and toss it over the virtual cube wall, confident that I had a clear picture of the data they were sending me and a clear set of tools to deal with it. And my next step, after a couple of minor refactors, is to finish the data loader so it can look at sequences of frames - something that we strongly suspect is needed to solve this machine learning problem.
So, once that's done tomorrow ... it's on to learning.
Don't jinx it, Francis.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Loki, being very comfortable in the Captain's chair. And so my point, and I guess I had one, is that by pushing it a little bit farther, almost past my comfort zone, I in turn made things so much more stable that I am actually more relaxed and calm than I was when I was planning to turn in early. So I find the tools that I'm developing - "nail down the carpet", "sharpen your saw", "work a little bit harder", "clear the decks", "find the price and pay it", and "be gentle with yourself" - continue to reap greater and greater rewards.
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 ...
...but I'm still going to try to get at least one thing done before I go to bed.
Because, even though it's been a rough few years, and sometimes I want to give up ...
I still believe you just need to work slightly harder than you want to in order to really get things done, and if you do, you'll often find that your efforts are more greatly rewarded than you might have imagined.
I'll go further: if you work just a little bit less than you need to, it's often a net negative: you expend effort without reaching the goal, so all you're left with is the cost. But if you put that slight extra effort in, right when you think you want to give up, that's when everything can flip from negative to positive.
We often think in terms of a simple linear model of effort to results - we do a little work to get a little reward, and we're often taught in economics class that there's a law of diminishing returns, so if we do even more work, we get proportionally less reward.
But that little bit of extra effort right when you want to give up flips that script: it doesn't give you a little bit of extra reward, approaching zero the more effort you put in; because it can turn a loss into a win, it effectively has an almost infinite relative payoff.
So: Don't give up. Because, when you feel you want to ... that's when you're close to victory.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Pound cake, deep learning, and art practice.
Had another weird uploading thing yesterday, but it seems to have resolved with a Chrome restart.
Please enjoy this picture of a cat taking a nap in the "Captain's Chair", my favorite reading area.
-the Centaur
... but it sure is pretty.
-the Centaur
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.
is it ... is it WORKING now? <relieved sobs>
-the Centaur
i live
run run run
i am sinistar
first, let's try to add an image that failed previously ...
yep, it fails.
now, let's add a whitelist entry for the path that failed, and try again ...
SHAZAM! it worked.
let's see if we can publish the post ... NOPE!
so let's add THAT url to the whitelist ... nope, not that one ... YESSSS
... but a jpeg image just worked fine.
heisenbugs!
it may have been cached data in chrome ... investigating ...
some vicious bug is making random images not upload and random posts not save.
ugh
... i hate heisenbugs.
still not back in business.
... so, whatever was causing images not to upload on the NEW website has just stopped happening, without me ever quite being to nail down what it was.
charming.
no, well, actually, frustrating, but, i suspect we will be back in business soon.
-the centaur
pictured: the old library, posted on the new library blog
did it work this time?