Posts tagged as “We Call It Living”

nineteen and twenty-three

Published September 14, 2025 by centaur

No, not 1923: the numbers 19 and 23: the number of years my wife and I have been married, and together! We met on September 13, 2002 and married a smidge over four years later on September 16, 2006. I always love the fact that we got married so close to the date that we met (I argued we should hold it on the same date, but everyone told me "we're not attending a wedding in the middle of the week" so, eh, the 16th).

Vegan cheese spread at Battery Park Books.

For our anniversary, we went to Asheville, North Carolina for the weekend, which we really enjoy due to its wide range of vegan restaurants, great bookstores, nearby hiking, and spectacularly walkable downtown. My wife and I really enjoy places where we can walk everywhere - New Orleans' French Quarter, San Diego's Gaslamp District, Montreal's Old Town, Monterey, even smaller places like Davis, and of course London.

Sandi in a long flowing dress in downtown Asheville.

So for the weekend, we walked, and walked, and walked, and walked. We visited all the bookstores and all the art galleries that we could, and looped around downtown maybe a dozen times. Unusually this visit, we chose to try to go hiking - we spent so much time our first five or six trips there in the downtown we rarely got out to do anything else. But we did the Blue Ridge Parkway and Catawba Falls, which has a truly epic staircase tracing its way to the top - 580 steps, which is more than enough to put a crimp in anyone's climb.

A small part of Catawba Fall's 580-step staircase.

No, that's not computer generated, but it did feel like I was in some infinite stairwell in a computer game after a while - it just kept going up and up and up! There's a tall observation tower at roughly the middle, which triggered my latent fear of heights - something I haven't quite debugged; it triggered leaning out over the Hoover Dam but not standing at the Grand Canyon, and leaning over the rail of the observation tower, but not leaning over the rail of the staircase just a few feet away. I think it has something to do with my body detecting "there's a big drop and it might be behind you" - or perhaps I'm just worried I'll lose my hat.

Regardless, the food was the real standout on the weekend. At two of our favorite restaurants - Mountain Madre and Strada - we found there were way more vegan items than were listed on the menu, which enabled us to get some really great things we'd never tried before - vegan nachos at Mountain Madre and vegan bolognese at Strada, both excellent. The Smokin Onion was a great new find - we went there for breakfast before our hike, and liked it so much we went back on our way out of town. The pumpkin spice "cruffin" was superb - yes, decadently sweet, but actually also fluffy and not overpowering.

A pumpkin spice "cruffin" - croissant muffin.

But the real anniversary dinner was at Plant, one of the best vegan restaurants we've been to - easily the equal of our favorite restaurant, Millennium in Oakland. At Millennium, we often get a high-top table near the front window, but at Plant, you can actually reserve a spot at the "mini-bar" - a two-top counter next to where the drinks are prepared, which feels really intimate even though it's right out in the middle of the restaurant. The waitress remembered us and hooked us up on our anniversary dessert!

Our anniversary dessert - vegan key lime cheesecake and vegan blondie sundae.

Here's to twenty-three more years.

-the Centaur

view of a hotel window

Published September 11, 2025 by centaur

Sometimes when I travel I include picture from my hotel room, but by chance my wife and I recognized and took a picture of our hotel room. It might not be immediately obvious to anyone else - except I'd looked out the window minutes before, we were one of the only hotel rooms with an open curtain in more or less the right place --- and, tellingly, I could see the same bags piled by the window. Even zoomed in it's pretty small, and I can't go and check right now to confirm --- my wife crashed out early while I took a West Coast church board meeting --- but as best I can reconstruct it, here's what I see in that window:

My laptop bag is what I call my "portable office" - containing the book(s) I'm reading, my writing notebook, my drawing notebook and tools and any reference materials, the top scientific folder and notebook I'm working on, and a bunch of laptop gegaws like a power supply and various USB plugs. I think this doesn't look like a laptop bag because my hiking shoes are piled atop that, but whatevz. The other half of the "portable office" is a stack of books and a clipboard with my "todo paper", a heavyweight copper parchment or blue linen paper I use to organize tasks, all shoved into a tote bag for easy transport.

Next to that are more creative piles - a tote with the portable music keyboard and some music theory books for my electronic music practice, and next to that is a larger tote with the "active pile" of the fiction, comic and technical books that are near the top of my pile. I don't always get to all those piles, but the longer I stay in any given place, the more glad I am that I've got that pile with me so I can quickly switch gears to whatever task that sparks my creativity in the moment.

All that seems a lot, but it's way downsized and organized compared to the stuff I used to carry around everywhere. Someone once said they thought I had some kind of caching system that I just can't quite turn off, and I agree - except the only way I seem to be able to do all the things that I do is to keep a big pile of stuff near me so I can turn spare minutes into accomplished tasks. I ... don't think I'm that great at it, honestly, but it does enable me to get closer to where I want to go, step by step, piece by piece.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Um, I said it already: our hotel in downtown Asheville.

how is this comfortable?

Published September 10, 2025 by centaur

Back from Dragon Con, but still scrambling from thing to thing due to our upcoming 19th anniversary. So, in lieu of a serious update, I present one of "the Originals" ... one of our three recently adopted kittens:

I understand cats are boneless, but this is a bit much! How does this not break something?

Anyway, lots of news, and hopefully getting back to it next week ...

-the Centaur

Pictured: either Lily(pad(ski)), or Luna(tic(les)). Can't quite tell from this angle, but I think Luna.

Worldcon 2025 Day Five

Published August 18, 2025 by centaur

So! Worldcon 2025 is at an end! And what a wild blast it was. I enjoyed the previous Worldcon I attended in San Jose, but I wasn't really prepared to take advantage of it. This year, I couldn't swing a sonic screwdriver without bapping a friend or colleague, or without making a new business or academic contact. I credit at least some of that to the prepwork that I and the Thinking Ink Press team did, and at least some of it to having the Clockwork Alchemy / Milford Workshop table as a "home base" to go back to.

After the Hugos, the Fountain bar at the Sheraton was so packed they couldn't even take my order before close, but I wanted to get more writing done, and I was just up the street last year for CVPR 2024, so I remembered the Elephant and Castle bar, right up the street, open until 2. I got a goodly chunk of THE WATCHTOWER OF DESTINY done right here in the table in the center, until roughly 1am.

BUT! Even as a night owl, I understand the value of early to bed, early to rise, and to convince myself to do that, I try to get up for a hearty breakfast. I don't always make it, but I made it today. The TIP gang has been keeping tabs of each other on Signal, and so my colleague Liza Olmsted and I realized we were at the same restaurant, got together (as I was starting my breakfast and she was finishing hers) and during our discussions came up with the idea for a brand new anthology! Woohoo.

The simple expedient of bringing Clockwork Edgar (Sandra's messenger raven) attracted a lot of people to the Clockwork Alchemy table, and the backstory Sandra had built around Edgar's messenger bag (complete with spare gear, compass, message and a few other items) was very entertaining.

After a neurodivergence talk at noon, which was very productive for me and Liza, I returned to the show floor to close up and found that we had two more hours before close due to a typo in an email. So, I had one last chance to attend a talk by my new friend Dr. Paul Price, who lectured on "exponential plots" (think Goku getting more and more powerful in Dragon Ball Z) with a strongly evidence-based lecture built on a close read of old space opera.

Paul showed that cyclical (episodic) plots work well with no-growth (think Sherlock Holmes versus case of the week) or slow-growth plots (think a slowly learning protagonist) but can get out of hand if a ridiculous enemy attacks every week with a similarly ridiculous growth in the protagonist's power - nevertheless, if you build in humanizing elements from the start, it can still work.

The coolest thing in his lecture was his critique of gender roles in the old space operas - I don't remember the precise numbers, but the gist was, in an entire space opera series by John Campbell, there were 25 instances of the pronoun "she" - but 18 of those referred to a ship, 6 to love interests, and the remaining was a stenographer who was alien, but was nevertheless depicted in a stereotypical gender role.

After that, we did close, and even as we did so, I kept on making contacts, meeting people, and so on. Even trying to buy a last-minute gift from a friend ended up with a vendor taking my card and inquiring about my writing as they were a voracious reader and were interested in my series.

Paul and I, who just met, nevertheless found many similarities in our research styles, and got together tonight to discuss next steps on using his data in our corpus or our code to analyze his data. A laser-guided question from an audience member at my talk got me thinking about DEI issues with our corpus, and Paul's "usages of the pronoun she" analysis sounds like a perfect candidate for implementation by an LLM.

On the way back, we had an interesting conversation about religion, mortality, transhumanism, the weird giant statue we saw in front of an art museum, and the crowd of filkers still filking away in the hotel when we finally got back.

I ended up retiring to the hotel bar - which I interpreted as the right thing to do because on my way down there I ran into someone I had wanted to run into at the con but had only passed and waved. We had a great conversation, and I got a lot of work done at the hotel bar before closing it up.

On that note, that's a wrap for Worldcon 2025. I may have more to say about it ... but it's gonna have to be tomorrow.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Me at the photo booth, the courtyard of Elephant and Castle, fresh fruit for breakfast, Edgar the clockwork raven, Paul giving his talk at the academic track, packing up our booth at the con, a giant statue on the street, a giant crowd of filkers, and me and a giant tray of oysters - all rendered with my "make it look like an illustration" series of Photoshop filters.

Worldcon 2025 Day Four!

Published August 16, 2025 by centaur

Well, we made it through WorldCon Day 4! My talk apparently went well, as I was mobbed when it was over and a half-dozen people actually dropped by the poster session - some of them, interested in serious academic followup! And one guy said, "Your talk was the fastest thirty minutes of my life. I loved it."

Mission accomplished!

Sandra Forrer talking to a steampunk fan

The Clockwork Alchemy contingent finally arrived in force, so we at last had a proper table setup!

So I got to head out to see the show floor, which was pretty amazing! There was a Star Trek Jack Skellington, holding what appears to be either a Babylon 5 Shadow Ship or a modified Klingon batleth sword.

A giant Jack Skellington in a Star Trek: The Next Generation uniform holding what looks like a batleth or maybe a Babylon 5 Shadow Ship.

There were too many cool things for this post, but, I always have time for ... robots!

Sonic screwdrivers!

Wand duels!

A wand duel with a cross-dressing Seventh Doctor facing off with an anime character

Our books continuing to sell! (The stack isn't shorter, but we've been replenishing it)

The Neurodiversiverse at the Liminal Fiction table

Later that night I attended the Hugo ceremony, which was pretty awesome, with singing by Nisi Shawl that is still echoing in my head because they did it as a "bit" between the different presentations ("Down, down, down the Hugo road ...) and a really funny video bit from the actual Hugo Best Novel winner.

Afterwards, some of the award winners came to the Fountain bar in the Sheraton for a victory lap!

Someone carrying a Hugo Award through the Fountain bar.

I also got to see a lot of friends at the con. All in all, a pretty good day!

-the Centaur

Pictured: The fan tables, me at my poster, Sandra Forrer talking to a steampunk fan, our table, the giant Jack Skellington in a Next Generation uniform, a youth robot team, a sonic screwdriver collection, a LARP wand duel, the Neurodiversiverse at the Liminal Fiction table, the Hugos, and the hotel afterparty.

Worldcon 2025: Day Three

Published August 15, 2025 by centaur

Not a lot of pictures from today proper because our Friday volunteer had an unexpectedly rough trip in, and I'm again stuck at the Clockwork Alchemy / Milford Workshop table:

But the costumes have been great! I've seen a fair bit of Oz this year ...

Some Star Trek / Steampunk riffs:

And whatever these folks sitting at the far table are:

My buddy RM Ambrose gave a good talk on framework for discussing violence and nonviolence in fiction:

I have even finished a rough cut of Saturday's presentation, and despite the fact that it is +110 plus slides, because many of my slides are sequences that add elements to existing slides, there are only like 30-40 content slides, and I was consistently able to get through it in ~20 minutes, well under time.

Don't you think he looks a little tired?

-the Centaur

Pictured: The WorldCon Bar, our table, various costumes, Ralph's talk, my slides, and the Centaur, sleepy.

Worldcon 2025: Day One

Published August 13, 2025 by centaur

A tiki Dalek, an old-school Dalek, a modern Dalek, and the TARDIS.

SO! We're out at Worldcon. I've already run into fellow TIPster Betsy Miller, author Clara Ward, and several other folks who either knew me or I knew them.

Anthony at the Clockwork and Milford shared table

Today and tomorrow I am volunteering at the Clockwork Alchemy / Milford Workshop joint table! Compared to the GeekGirlCon and LARP booths around us, our table display is a little underwhelming as a lot of the Milford and Clockwork contingent either couldn't make it or were delayed. So we just have the brochures and stands I could fit in my suitcase, which was a fair trick as I brought 30 books to the Book Nook!

Anthony with his book FROST MOON at the Book Nook table.

I'll be signing there today at 3pm. Then on Saturday at 11, I'll be in Room 320 presenting on "The Cognitive Science of Scenes and Sequels," joint work with my colleague Kenneth Moorman of Transylvania University. The poster session will be from 12-1 on the fourth floor Paramount Lounge:

Anthony standing in front of his "Cognitive Science of Scenes and Sequels" poster.

I hope to see you there! You'd appear somewhere in the image below ...

The view from behind the Clockwork Alchemy / Milford joint table.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Some Daleks and the TARDIS, the Clockwork Alchemy / Milford shared table, my book at the Book Nook, my poster up at the Paramount Lounge, and the view behind the table.

The Lorentzian Argument and its Impact on Transgender Narratives

Published August 5, 2025 by centaur

I'm working on a paper on "The Cognitive Science of Scenes and Sequels" with my friend Kenny Moorman. We're attempting to harmonize "scenes and sequels" from professional writing craft with the findings of the cognitive science of story understanding ... and I'm presenting it at WorldCon in a little over a week.

It's been slow going due to the amount of research involved---at least seven narrative disciplines affect our work, and relevant papers and projects go back fifty years---not to mention my periodic struggles with writer's block whenever I switch projects (as two other writing deadlines are overlapping this one).

SO! I've been working on the paper a lot of late, scribbling on printouts over coffee, then editing over dinner, staying up late at night to harmonize details. And I was plugging away at the "WC:AD" (WorldCon ACademic) paper when I hit a new section my collaborator had added on "the Lorentzian Argument."

Huh, I thought, I've been working on general relativity, where Lorentzian metrics show up; I wonder if this is the same Lorentz? Surely, I thought, I could take a stab at the section. Then I saw Kenny had moved the section on "Implications for the Transgender Narrative" to just after "The Lorentzian Argument."

He'd done so on purpose. There were notes there. There was a deep connection between them.

I realized there was no way I could fill out this section; I had to move on.

Then I woke up.

-Anthony

Pictured: Working on WC:AD at Monterey by the Mall. I wonder if the strength of the margarita has any effect on the bizarreness of the dreams?

P.S. In case it wasn't clear, our paper doesn't have implications for the transgender narrative, nor is there a Lorentzian argument in narrative theory---at least, that I am aware of. My brain made it all up probably because I'm also studying general relativity and transgender issues in the background for other projects.

processing the past

Published June 27, 2025 by centaur

I'm a pack rat, and this tendency isn't helped by being an omnivorous author and researcher with a broad range of interests - nor is it helped by my tendency to let piles just pile up while I rabbithole on whatever major project I am working on at my primary work. But I'm between contracts right now, I survived the trio of ICRA-ConCarolinas-CVPR, and my wife's mother is moved into her new home, so I don't really have an excuse not to go through the piles and try to return them to some semblance of order.

Also, I'm tripping over stuff.

Now, I don't throw away things because other people want me to: I throw away things when I've decided to. Because my interests are, um, broad, and the projects I use to tackle these interests are even broader, I have a vast number of project folders and project stacks. But a stack isn't a pile: a stack is an organized collection of items of interest that enables you to make intellectual progress on a project, like the "storytelling and the sciences of mind" and "creative endurance" stacks I have to my left, the "mental models and explanation patterns" stack in front of me, and the "taido and jeet kune do" stack I have to my right.

A pile is something different - it's the detritus of "company's coming over and I gotta clear off this table" or "I need space to work on this important thing so these other projects gotta go on hold". Like the "robotics consulting" pile in front of me. It's not about robotics consulting. That's just the top action item on the pile. Below it are my theological studies folder, some bills, some items to file, Thinking Ink Press stuff, and more theology, which it looks like I put in the pile for this week's Saint Stephens in-the-Field Friday Journal entry that I have already written and submitted two days ago. It's a mess.

More specifically, a pile is a stack-like mess that hides its information and actionable content. You can't tell what you need to do to a pile just by looking at it the way you can a stack or a folder. (Folders are also dangerous for a similar reason if you're not strict about what you put into them, but that's a problem for another day). And so, the reason that I don't throw piles away without processing them is that it's all too easy to not realize what's in a pile, and to lose an opportunity - or even money - by chucking it prematurely. In the piles in the banner image, I found roughly $50 bucks in foreign currency and a stack of gift cards.

The rest was easy. 80% of that just needed to be filed (a less pack-ratty person would throw some of this stuff away, of course, but I genuinely enjoy reminiscing over keepsakes from old trips, especially abroad). 10% could be thrown away or recycled immediately. And only 10% or so were actually actionable items.

I learned a lot about my own past going through these piles. I recalled things I did, places I'd been, stores that had closed, people I talked to but had fallen out of contact with, people who had retired or died. The pile processing worked both against me and for me; there were a handful of "action" items that dated back to the last millennium, which was great to harvest for keepsakes, but meant that there literally were several inches of that particular pile that had repeatedly gone through a "company's coming, better move this aside" cycle over literal decades, yielding a stack that mostly just needed to be recycled or trashed.

There's a value to throwing stuff away. It keeps your environment clean so you can feel good about your space and focus on what's important. But if you're a pack-rat person, it's really important to make sure that the stuff you have around you are actual stacks and folders of actionable stuff, and not piles that have been piling on top of each other since the last millennium.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Remains of a pile spread across the kitchen table, exploded into stuff that will be filed into topical binders or trashed; and the sorted remains of the same pile spread over the nearby builtins, ready to be filed into my filing system (or trashed). Now I kinda wish I had also taken a picture of the pile itself ...

it’s a nice feeling …

Published June 26, 2025 by centaur

... when you're a publisher and you get a book proposal that makes you feel: "This is an important book and I want to publish it." No more details for now - don't count your chickens before they're hatched, and all that - but that feeling, I just wanted to share.

-the Centaur

Pictured: my portable office, with said book proposal on display, and a nice pair of drinks at Brixx. Full disclosure: I had made that decision about the book before the drink arrived. ;-)

with bread, please

Published June 24, 2025 by centaur

Speaking as a technically-oriented software engineer who's built some pretty crappy interfaces in my day, it continues to surprise me that people build interfaces without thinking through how people will use them.

For example, Panera Bread has a "you pick two" order, where you can get two half-orders of a sandwich, salad or soup, along with a side like bread, chips or fruit. One would naturally think that the interface where the cashiers would enter your order would allow you to specify the two halves, then the side. Logical, yes?

But if you order that way, the cashiers often seem a little thrown off. And if you give your order slowly - rather than just rattle it off because you've probably ordered it a thousand times at this point - they'll ask a stereotyped series of questions which I impute are being presented in this order by the interface:

(1) Is this for here or to go?
(2) What do you want on your You Pick Two?
(3) Would you like anything to drink?
(4) What do you want as your side?

Now, note that a You Pick Two doesn't come with a drink (like Captain D's or Chic-Fil-A's value meals). So the interface. The drink isn't part of the You Pick Two order. Yet if you try to specify your side, the cashiers will have to do a little fiddling in the interface. It's easier just to present information in the order above:

"(1) This is for here. (2) I'd like a You Pick Two, with (2a) a Bacon Turkey Bravo and (2b) a Strawberry Poppyseed (2b1) with Chicken Salad. (3) I'll take a large beverage. (4) Bread as the side. (5) [wait 5 seconds] I don't need the cup - I already have a to-go cup, I just need to pay for the drink."

Note that in (2b1), even though the Strawberry Poppyseed salad normally has chicken on it, if you don't specifically emphasize the fact that it has chicken, sometimes they'll ask if you want to leave it off, and in (5) you have to wait 5 seconds for them to complete the order, or they may delete the drink.

[Why insist on paying for the drink? Because I eat out a lot, and use insulated to-go cups to save on the waste of buying and discarding a cup once or twice a day. But once I was at Panera in Campbell and the Panera district manager complained to me that if I was using a to-go mug I should be paying for my drink. I insisted that I did and showed my receipt ... and found the cashier had taken the drink off the order without telling me. The manager took my word for it, but it made me feel both embarrassed and unwelcome, which is not why I go out to eat - I have work to do, damn it, and need to do my reading in a place where I can't be distracted by doing laundry or whatever - so I always insist on paying for my drink.]

Anyhoo, weirdness of interfaces can be found everywhere. Just today, I was trying to log into a website, and the website authors had put the login button in a popup that disappeared when you hovered over it. Presumably it was meant to go away if you didn't click on it, but the actual effect was, you couldn't log in on the company's home page and had to hunt through pages to find a login button that was a real button.

As another example, the interface for AT&T's voicemail in my area recently changed. Instead of saying "end of message" and giving you an opportunity to delete a message, it just goes straight to "saving message", which means if you got a spam call which hung up rapidly - and silently - there's no way to delete the message before it gets saved. If you try, it will delete the next message in your messages. So this "update" is strictly worse than the previous interface, making you hear each message a minimum of twice.

So, I guess what I'm trying to say here is, don't fall in love with your new interface before thinking through - and testing out - how people will actually use it, OR, as we used to say back in my day:

Old man rants at cloud.

-the centaur

rainbow kitten surprise at ccnb amphitheatre …

Published June 23, 2025 by centaur

Still not running at full thrusters, but my wife and I did go see Rainbow Kitten Surprise at the nearby CCNB Amphitheatre at Simpsonville's Heritage Park. They were good! Sandi's description made me think they'd be more electronic dance music, but actually they reminded me more of prog rock viewed through an indie lens, with surprising influences from both rap and metal - four, sometimes five guitars were on stage at any one time, and the lead singer memorably rocked a day-glo electric guitar for one number. The opening band was also memorable - Michael Marcagi, a good singer whose band was pretty tight.

The best part was the company, of course.

Moments. Seize them when you've got them. Because one day, they'll run out.

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty-five day ninety-eight]: the appearance of done doesn’t mean you did it right

Published April 8, 2025 by centaur

One by one, trees and bushes on our property have been dying. The property is large - when we fled the fires in California during the pandemic, we lucked out in finding a large place that had been on the market for quite a while - so at first we thought that was simply par for the course. But they kept dying.

Eventually, what we discovered is that many of the trees on the property were planted without the removal of their transport cages. This can cause the roots to get choked, to turn back on themselves, and as the tree grows, the increasingly packed root ball topped by the increasingly heavy tree turns into a weighted ball bearing, waiting to tip over in heavy winds, heavy rain, or just from the tree's own starved weight.

But it's easier to not remove it, the problem is practically invisible, and the tree looks good for a while - and by the time the tree falls, it will be almost impossible to identify who made the initial mistake.

This is a beautiful house on beautiful land, but many of the things in this house are like that. Trees are planted with their transport cages still on, so they eventually fall over. Gutter drains were buried without covering them with fabric, so they fill with dirt. Soil pipes are buried without cleanouts. Drywall in access rooms has random holes punched in it.

And, most spectacularly, a door was installed in a storage room which was too small for the safe stored in that room to be removed. I mean, what were they thinking? I guess they weren't - or, perhaps that was a security feature, to prevent it from being stolen? Certainly, you can't sneak it out of the room, but, also, it likely weighs around a ton, so no-one can run off with it - they didn't need to wall it in.

But, regardless, hey! We get a safe.

Now, we were dealing with the problem with our drains, and the foreman told us he'd need to take up the last man standing in a row of bushes near one of the drains. These had been dying, one or two per year, since we arrived, and the last one was literally held together with zipties. So I agreed.

And when he dug it up, he found that it - and all the bushes in that row - had cages on their root barrels. You can see him holding one of these in the banner image from this post. The root system was so tight inside it that he was surprised that it had survived that long.

So my point, and I did have one, is that doing a job that looks right from the outside may not be doing it well enough for the job to be done right. And right, in this case, I define as not failing unexpectedly long before its time because someone simply didn't want to finish the work.

I suspect that the people who managed this properly previously were focused on forcing it, no matter how much money it took. As my wife put it, you put in a lawn, let it grow, then cut that growth and take all the nutrients that it harvested out of the soil away, forcing you to fertilize the lawn with chemicals to keep it alive. You can do that, but it's like driving down a mountain road at too high a speed, constantly riding the wheel, brakes and accelerator to keep yourself on the road. We prefer a healthier approach, where, when possible, things are left to biodegrade where they are, or you create compost out of the clipping.

That doesn't always work, and, in a way, it's a luxury all its own. But regardless of how you run your lawn, if you take the time to cut the root balls off and to properly wrap your drains, you'll find yourself spending less money in the long run fixing problems that should never have happened in the first place.

-the Centaur

Pictured: The cage that our foreman discovered once they dug up the bush, and the gutter downspout drain that our foreman replaced for us once we all figured out what drains needed to be replaced.

[twenty twenty-five day ninety-six]: tax me bro

Published April 6, 2025 by centaur

It's late and I've been up cleaning house, cat wrangling, working on Camp Nano for April, and trying to finish taxes, so I has the tired. Please enjoy the following "Mezcalita" from La Parrilla.

the trio

Published April 5, 2025 by centaur

gangsters, i tell you ...

-the centaur

pictured: left to right, it's luna(tic(les)), then (i think) loli(pop(kins)) and lili(pad(skis)).

[twenty twenty-five day sixty-eight]: step by step

Published March 9, 2025 by centaur

So I habitually bite off more than I can chew: at any given time I have 200 to 250 projects running, and no reasonable human being can keep on top of more than seven plus or minus two things at once.

Now, I know, I know, I know, I'm likely autistic, and am prompted to be WAY more explicit than most people about the projects that I'm ACTUALLY doing, whereas most people just fool themselves into thinking they're doing a few things when in reality they're relying on their well-trained autonomic adulting skills to keep on top of the dozens upon dozens of things they need to do to keep on top of just living. But, beyond, that, I have hundreds of creative projects that I want to tackle, so many that I often feel like I'm thrashing.

But if you focus - again, I know, I know, I know, I say I hate focus, and that focus is the enemy, but bear with me for a bit - I say, if you allow yourself to be creative, and imagine ALL the things you might be doing ... BUT then focus on a few of them at once, trying to make sure you make progress on just those, you can, step by step, move your way through those projects, get them done, and move on to the next ones.

I've been "reading and eating" for decades now as my way of consuming material, but only recently have I started using the "ten page rule," in which I break each chapter into ten page sections, and try to make sure I get through at least 5 pages of a section in each reading session (the whole ten, or to end of chapter, if the material is easy, or the book's pages are small, or the chapters are short; the five page grace period if it's a big fat textbook filled with details with which I am unfamiliar). But I've augmented that now - by focusing on the most important books first, promising myself I can read the others if I get through them. I'm almost done with Large Language Models: A Deep Dive, which has been very illuminating.

And now I've built on that, so at the end of the day, after reading my "chunk of the hard book at night with milk and pound cake" - which is usually a big fat textbook that requires reading and re-reading of sections over and over again until I get it - I say, after that, I pick up a by-the-bedstand novel and read a chapter. Just one chapter (again, less if it is big long fat chapters or something esoteric). I've gotten through The Cthulhu Casebook: Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows and Cthulhu Passant that way and am now digging deeper into my novel backlog, promising myself I can by more books as I finish them.

The same thing has been going on with various of my research projects: I have been building out various pieces of software, sometimes with a lot of thrashing. But I stuck with a project I had been tempted to abandon, and today got it mostly working, all unit tests passing, all code checked in and pushed to Github. I still have more features I want to add before release ... but it felt good.

While I don't believe in "focus" for focus's sake, I do believe focus is a tool you can use effectively. And if you prioritize your highest-value, lowest-remaining-work projects, and focus on getting done the next thing you have to do, you can, over time, walk that path that starts with a single step, and find yourself a thousand miles later standing atop your mountain.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Eating, and reading, at Panera.

[twenty twenty-five day sixty-six]: now this is real progress

Published March 7, 2025 by centaur

Normally Loki hates eating around the kittens, or they're so interested in his food that they ignore their own and cause him to stalk off in a huff - "Ruuude, duuude!"

But they're getting over it - I had to move a kitten, but after I did, the system remained stable for the remainder of the meal.

Baby steps are short, but they can carry you down a long road, if you just keep going.

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty-five day sixty-five]:i think they’re acclimating

Published March 7, 2025 by centaur

So our older cat and our younger cats seem to be tolerating each other more. Actually, the kittens have loved Loki from the start, but he had been solitary for so long that he didn't want any new cats in his home, thank you very much. Now he willingly goes into areas which have kittens, which is a big improvement.

As I keep saying, sooner or later he's going to learn that nothing bad happens when he hangs out with kittens.

-Anthony

P.S. A blogpost a day late, but, eh, we'll get there.

[twenty twenty-five day sixty-four]: echoes

Published March 5, 2025 by centaur

SO! I went "outside my circle" today and did something different, and was about to blog about "if you do what you always do, you'll get what you've always gotten" ... but as I started to write, I had this funny feeling that I'd written about that before, and sure enough, I'd blogged about it almost exactly a year ago.

Now, I was outside of my circle today because of Lent - it's Ash Wednesday, and I decided to drag myself out to an Ash Wednesday service at the church I got married at, Saint Peter's Episcopal (the "rapture-ready" church on Hudson Road, complete with to-go box handle on top). That put me in a different physical location than normal, but it took God sending me a firetruck parked in front of one of the restaurants I would have normally fallen back to before I tried a new place - the Lost Cajun, itself part of a chain I'd been to before, but for some reason I ordered something different than normal, and got the amazing blackened catfish dish above which was far better than the things I'd previously tried there.

And, weirdly, my previous "if you do what you always do" post was also right around the start of Lent. So I wonder if there's something about the spiritual earthquake that Lent is supposed to inspire that also had sent me climbing out of ruts and seeking new experiences a year ago - or, whether that experience left echoes of memory that prompted me to try the same thing again this year.

Who knows? It was a good dish of fish.

-the Centaur

Pictured: um, I said it already.