
More from Wizard How to Draw. These stick figure exercises are starting to prove very effective in helping me break down human figures so I can draw them more accurately, so I guess I'll keep doing them.
Drawing, on average, every day.
-the Centaur
Words, Art & Science by Anthony Francis

More from Wizard How to Draw. These stick figure exercises are starting to prove very effective in helping me break down human figures so I can draw them more accurately, so I guess I'll keep doing them.
Drawing, on average, every day.
-the Centaur

Yay! The Neurodiversiverse Kickstarter funded, with two and a half days to go! And it has been amazing, after a month of slow but steady growth, that the Kickstarter continues to now rapidly fund even as we're trying to publicize it! A shoutout to Cat Rambo, who graciously let us do that guest blogpost! Let me shout back, with the story card we came up with for Cat's story, "Scary Monsters, Super Creeps"!

Now that we've met our funding goal, we've announced our stretch goals, which include cool things like bookmarks and postcards and, if we really stretch, an audiobook of the anthology.

But we've also been posting about our process, talking about how we selected our stories for the anthology and how we organized them into our current table of contents - which required setting up a Kanban board in Airtable to help us organize it quickly, efficiently, and, most of all, understandably.

Airtable is a system that looks a lot like a spreadsheet, except it's actually a database under the hood, enabling you to build different views of the same data; a Kanban board is one such view, with rows turned into "cards" organized into "stacks" by a given field - and as you move cards about in the stacks, the field changes with it. This helps visualize the flow of, well, many things - including stories in the editing pipeline, or stories in the table of contents; I'm even using it for tracking the writing of new stories. But for now, the most important thing is that it enabled us to put together this:

We're proud of the table of contents - but also, pleased with the process that got us there, and hope other people find it as useful as we did.
So please, go check those posts out, and maybe even help spread the word so we reach our stretch goals!
-the Centaur

Somehow I'm feelin' "intrinsic plantar foot muscles" a little bit less than "palpable bony landmarks".

Still, it gives me more idea what's going on beneath the bottom of the foot.
Drawing every day (on average).
-the Centaur

It's been a long day dealing with a whole sequence of guff, so here I present to you Loki, taking a nap after his hard work on reconciling large language models with classical symbolic artificial intelligence.
-the Centaur
P.S. The Kickstarter is almost there! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thinkinginkpress/the-neurodiversiverse-alien-encounters-a-sci-fi-anthology ... 94%, with ~3 days to go! Like, back and share!

More Goldman studies. I don't know about you, but "palpable bony landmarks" sounds vaguely salacious or Lovecraftian, and I can't pin down which. It certainly is a phrase that writers would put in their folder of "neat sounding words and phrases that someday I hope I can do something with".
Drawing every day (on average), posting as regularly as I can.
-the Centaur
Hey folks! I have a guest post on The Neurodiversiverse up at Cat Rambo's blog! Check it out:

In it, I talk about the aliens in science fiction, the origin of The Neurodiversiverse, about neurodiversity and representation, and about some of the cool stories that we are featuring in the anthology!
Cat is not just an author in The Neurodiversiverse, she's also the author of the space opera You Sexy Thing and lots of other cool stories and novels. Thanks to Cat for the opportunity!
The Kickstarter runs for just 3 more days, so please read, like, back and share!
-the Centaur

For some reason the shapes of this countertop remind me of a maze - strange little pathways leading towards a drink. I have a fairly strict one-drink-per-day limit (with the sole outstanding exception to that being that you can have a "nightcap" if you drank your one drink much earlier in the day and aren't driving anywhere, but in practice I have only exercised the "nightcap exception" one or two times in my life).
And I have this limit because, at one point in my life, my father started drinking too much. He never got violent or abusive - he actually just got, well, unpleasantly silly. But, for a period of time, my mother and I had to rush to get chores done and dinner ready because my dad loved Canadian Club, and if he had more than one after he got home, he would dissolve into silliness and be unable to talk to over dinner.
That doesn't sound so bad, but that was the worst period of my youth: several years where I essentially didn't have a dad in the evening. And, according to my late Uncle Boo, it sounds like we were lucky; he recounted a story of Dad, drunk, deciding to pick a fight with a man sitting at the third barstool of his favorite bar, just because. (Though I don't know how much to trust this story, as - God bless them - some of the older generation of the family seemed to love to lie to me for some reason, and I have later found out that many of the stories about the family were either exaggerations or straight-up false).
Alcohol seems to affect me differently than Dad. For one, I don't want so much of it: while I love one strong drink, I almost never want more. On the extraordinarily rare occasions (twice?) that I have more than one, or just if the drink is too strong, it gives me a headache, makes me feel nauseous, makes me feel like shit, or all three. And, two, it doesn't seem to make me silly: it makes me, for the lack of a better word, blurry. I have to pick and choose my words with care, and the headache is sitting there, waiting to drop.
But we're different in another way as well: a drink seems to reduce my anger against the world, rather than enhance it. I can't see myself deciding to attack the person who happens to be sitting at the third stool of a bar, just because they're there. In fact, after a good drink, I find myself critically reassessing my internal mental dialogues rattling around in my head about other people - stopping the tape loops, stepping back, and remembering that everyone around me is a person, not a character in my internal narrative.
This may seem odd to some, but one of the persistent elements of my (social) anxiety disorder is stressing out about real and imagined issues with people around me, near and far, past and present. It was an important part of the therapy I took up during the pandemic to deconstruct those narratives, to stop the catastrophizing about potential failure modes, and to learn to move on with my life.
Cognitive behavior therapy helped with this, up to a point. But, I recently noticed, sometimes the narratives tend to stop after a good drink, replaced by a warm, magnanimous feeling. And that can be useful, either when reviewing a situation you've just been in, or fortifying yourself to go into a new situation, so you can build new positive experiences with the people you interact with.
Now, all that being said, I can't recommend drinking. From a scientific perspective, my understanding is that many of the supposed health benefits of alcohol don't really exist, or are outweighed by the negatives of alcohol. The public health recommendation for it is that if you don't drink, don't start.
And my understanding is that alcoholism develops from a combination of predisposition and exposure to alcohol over time - so I really have to dis-recommend drinking alcohol unless you use a structuring tool like my one-drink-per-day limit.
I like to joke that, if you can get drunk on one drink, then, well, it's a really good drink. But, actually, it is possible to get drunk on one drink - and that's too strong. If you have a strict limit of one drink per day that isn't strong enough to get drunk on, I think it would probably be challenging to develop alcoholism.

And so, while I can't recommend alcohol, I can certainly appreciate it as a tool to help chill out about life.
-the Centaur
Pictured: An Ardbeg scotch, I think BizzareBQ, which, despite the gimmicky name, is peaty and rather nice.

more from "wizard how to draw basic training", drawing (on average) every day.
running out of buffer here, good that tomorrow is a catch-up day
-the centaur

Yeah, he's up there. Not sure how, but he is. Hope he's not stuck. Ah, just went out to check, and he's gone, so I assume he moved on. Come to think of it, I wonder if he's the same as this guy:

This little guy got in and disappeared into the fireplace - I assumed he fell from the chimney, but he's thin enough maybe to have wormed in a windowframe perhaps? Not sure, the other guy looks thicker about the middle, but it may be the case that he ate something.

Hypothesis is, the little guys are immature versions of this handsome fellow, a rat snake perhaps, who is also a climbing mofo ...

Snek!
-the Centaur

More Goldman studies. Drawing every day.
-the Centaur

A relatively simple-looking drawing from Wizard How to Draw, but deceptively hard to get right.

Drawing every day.
-the Centaur

So Liza and I have been working on the upper reward tiers for The Neurodiversiverse Kickstarter (we're so close! almost 85% of the way there!) and we think we have a solution for producing the limited hardcover edition. Unfortunately, the bindery that produced Thinking Ink's limited edition of The Hereafter Bytes has gone out of business, but we found a few similar options (and may even be able to reduce the price). Above is a mockup of what it might look like, and below was the actual original for The Hereafter Bytes:

Hopefully some people will buy this reward tier - it is pricey on purpose, in the hopes that backers will back this because they want to support the project (and just in case something goes wrong with the printing costs). Just a few of these will take us over the top, so please pledge ten of them! :-D
-the Centaur

Hacking away at publicity for the Kickstarter for the Neurodiversiverse, which is at +80%! But that means we have almost a thousand dollars to go, and we're really far from our stretch goals. So I'm working to publicize it further with guest blog posts and such, as well as pushing further on social media.

You can support it as simply as pledging for a book or an ebook (or a sticker or pin or even $1 for no reward). But you can also get reward bundles that have lots and lots of Thinking Ink Press books in them:

Or an awesome tote bag and pins and stickers and such!

And if you REALLY want to help us out ... you can get your name in the book. Just sayin'.

Onward!
-the Centaur

Dorsal, meaning the upper part, foot, meaning that thing you stand on.
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur

This is it. Today, the 4th, is the last day to submit papers to the Embodied AI Workshop 2024, and we are not going to extend this deadline because we've gotten enough submissions so far that we, um, don't need to.
One more last time, the CFP:
Call for Papers
We invite high-quality 2-page extended abstracts on embodied AI, especially in areas relevant to the themes of this year's workshop:
- Open-World AI for Embodied AI
- Generative AI for Embodied AI
- Embodied Mobile Manipulation
- Language Model Planning
as well as themes related to embodied AI in general:
- Simulation Environments
- Visual Navigation
- Rearrangement
- Embodied Question Answering
- Embodied Vision & Language
Accepted papers will be presented as posters or spotlight talks at the workshop. https://embodied-ai.org/#call-for-papers
Papers are due TODAY "anywhere on Earth" (as long as it is still today, your time).
Please send us what you've got!
-the Centaur

Yes it will. Though it may be a while, the entire point of Drawing Every Day is to restore my confidence in my drawing so I can resume my webcomics.
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Part of Xiao's work outfit from her summer job, resting atop Xiao's supercomputer.

Hey folks! Today (Saturday May 4th) is the last day to submit papers to the Embodied AI Workshop 2024!
Call for Papers
We invite high-quality 2-page extended abstracts on embodied AI, especially in areas relevant to the themes of this year's workshop:
- Open-World AI for Embodied AI
- Generative AI for Embodied AI
- Embodied Mobile Manipulation
- Language Model Planning
as well as themes related to embodied AI in general:
- Simulation Environments
- Visual Navigation
- Rearrangement
- Embodied Question Answering
- Embodied Vision & Language
Accepted papers will be presented as posters or spotlight talks at the workshop.
https://embodied-ai.org/#call-for-papers
Please send us what you've got! Just between you and me and the fencepost, if we get about 7+/-2 more submissions, we'll have enough to call it done for the year and won't need to extend the CFP, so we can get on with reviewing the papers and preparing for the workshop. So please submit!
-the Centaur
Pictured: the very nice logo for the Embodied AI Workshop, a joint effort of me, my co-organizer Claudia, and I think one of Midjourney or DALL-E. Yes, there's generative AI in there, but it took a good bit of prompting to get the core art, and lot of work in Photoshop after that to make it usable.

When I sat down to draw today, I realized I'd never filled in the frontispiece and first page of my sketchbook because I was intimidated. SO! I set out to overcome that today. What you see above is as good as I can reproduce this without actually running it through a scanner - I am currently capturing these drawings by photographing them with my phone and then Photoshopping them into shape, not because I'm opposed to scanners, but because I'm trying to eliminate sources of friction that might prevent me from drawing and blogging the drawings every single day. Below is a closer picture of what the original looked like:

The red of the notebook front makes it hard to scan, but I think you get the gist. I used to do this with all my notebooks, but when I broke my arm (almost two decades ago now!) it broke my confidence, and eventually I stopped doing it. But the solution is to keep doing it - and to carve out enough time to draw so you have the time to do it, and not to feel bad about the time you have to take to do it.
Drawing every day, and getting confident enough at it to personalize my notebooks.
-the Centaur
Xiao, the protagonist of my stalled webcomic f@nu fiku, out for a jog.

Our Kickstarter for The Neurodiversiverse is over 75% now! And my co-editor Liza put together a wonderful video for the project, now available on the Kickstarter page (just click the header image you see below):

I already posted about this on social media but not here I think, so ... we've also gotten the molds for the neurodiversity rainbow infinity symbol pins, and expect to get a look at pin prototypes real soon now!

So, if you love science fiction, neurodiversity, pins, or science-fictiony neurodiverse pins, in celebration of an #ownvoices anthology about neurodiverse encounters with aliens, please back us and share!
-the Centaur

More Goldman studies. Interesting how complex the foot is - in some ways, even more so than the hand, though that its deceptive (the hand's quasi-regular structure contributes to its flexibility).
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur