Posts tagged as “We Call It Living”

[twenty twenty six day one seven seven]: today i learned …

Published June 27, 2026 by centaur

... which is great, because when you stop learning, you're dead.

Even for someone like me, who periodically takes wrong turns on purpose just to see where the roads go, you spend most of your time going over the same routes in the same ways.

And - forgive me for being a navigation researcher - if you primarily walk walk or drive purposely, rather than for recreation or exercise, those routes will make a branching tree coming out of your primary residence, with rings of cross-routes between frequent destinations. The grocery store, the office supply store, and the dump; church, a brunch joint, and again the grocery store.

This habitual spiderweb means we rarely explore intersections in a systematic, exhaustive way, except when walking or riding for recreation, or doing some kind of specific neighborhood patrol. Area rises as the square of distance, but we only have so many hours in the day, and so many trips in each neighborhood we live in in our lives; some intersections will naturally get left out.

My wife took a wrong turn coming back from the dump (we live on a "flagpole lot" with an extremely long driveway, so having garbage service would involve carting the garbage can 1000 feet and back every week, which not only I don't want to do, but also I think would wear out the wheels on the garbage can, which is not a long distance vehicle, but I digress), I SAY, she was coming back from the dump and missed her turn onto our street ... and made an interesting discovery.

She didn't have far to drive to the next cross street, and quickly made it home ... but as she did so, she found a fire station with aluminum can recycling three minutes from our house. She'd already told me about another fire station, ten minutes away on the drive to the airport, that accepted aluminum cans for recycling as a fundraising effort; this one was far closer.

We had a microwave die recently, and our mother-in-law did too; so after I took them to e-waste recycling at the Enoree dump, I then followed the same wrong turn my wife had. On the way, I saw the backsides of many landmarks that I knew from the drive. I soon found the fire station, three minutes from our house as predicted, but when I got there, I found something else: the local cell phone tower, looming over an empty lot with an excellent view of the nearby region. No wonder the cell phone coverage is so good where we are.

And on the drive back, I passed an Anglican church, in walking distance of our house. I'm kind of aggressively Episcopalian, and go to the church where I was married and whose rector buried my mother - but this Anglican church had a prayer labyrinth, also within walking distance of home.

I like where we moved to during the pandemic: we now live on the road my father taught me to drive, forty years ago. But today I took a turn that I rarely did, because I listened to my wife; and so today I learned that the place where we live is filled with amenities - a fire station, recycling, a cell tower, a church, a prayer labyrinth - that make it even better than I thought it was.

-the Centaur

Pictured: The cell tower, the fire station, and the recycling bin.

[twenty twenty six day one seven six]: my gosh, they’ve leveled up

Published June 26, 2026 by centaur

Truly epic vegan dessert pairing at Maestro's Entre Nous speakeasy in downtown Greenville. Probably our third favorite vegan-friendly restaurant in Greenville after Sunbelly and the 07, but tonight's menu they really leveled up. This was a vegan chocolate torte - much creamier than in the past - and a really great sorbet with fresh fruit, all paired up with great sauces and yin-yang plates for date night with my lovely vegan wife.

-the Centaur

Pictured: um, I said it.

[twenty twenty six day one seven five]: greens a bit too deep

Published June 26, 2026 by centaur

We had a wonderful hike in Asheville last Friday, though we had to keep the pace manageable due to my broken toe. After breakfast at The Smokin Onion - and those great croissant muffins - we decided to work off the dessert on a nearby trail attached to the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Our hike began at the Folk Art Center, which unfortunately I didn't get any pictures of, because I was doing quite a bit of limping. Even though I switched to normal shoes to protect my toe, I brought my flat-bottomed shoe just in case the pain got too much and we had to turn around.

There was no need. We had a long hike, with a nice Lovecraftian green tunnel (up top) and despite getting turned around a bit when we turned around, we nevertheless made it back in time to get a cocktail at Battery Park, a fantastic wine bar and bookstore in downtown Asheville, before going to the even more fantastic vegan restaurant Plant for a wonderful dinner and even more dessert.

It was a pretty good day.

-Anthony

[twenty twenty six day one seven four]: that’s not a donut

Published June 25, 2026 by centaur

The above amazing example of a vegan dessert is a close relative of a "cronut" - where a cronut(TM) is a croissant donut, this is something like a croissant muffin, and it's a decadently delicious dessert often found at The Smokin Onion, a vegan restaurant in Asheville that my wife and I like. Once I suggested that we split one of those desserts, and she's like, "get your own!"

Now, I thought THAT was a donut(-like food).

But that's not a donut.

THIS is a donut.

These are apparently from Parlor Donuts in Greenville, SC, "made in small batches every day." They are absolutely not vegan in any way, shape or substantial form. They looked beyond delicious; they looked Cinnabon levels of absolutely unhealthy, and I declined to wreck my blood sugar with them.

What even is that atop the upper two donuts? A fried egg?

Blogging every day, not eating those every day, that's for sure. Would you like a wafer-thin mint?

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty six day one seven one]: functionally weeds

Published June 20, 2026 by centaur

So in our mushroom farm, some of the logs are producing shiitake mushrooms, some are producing oyster mushrooms (not pictured as something ate the latest buds), some produced nameko (which I was not fond of), there was a fourth variety that didn't come up, and I think we have recently buried some maitake mushrooms logs which won't come up for a few months.

But that doesn't stop other organisms from trying to colonize the logs.

On the right is I believe turkey tail, which some people make into a tea (if it's the right variety) but which we don't eat (and didn't plant, so I don't trust it). On the left is allegedly not a mushroom, but a giant false-puffball slime mold. I did not cut it open to find out.

I believe these are chicken of the woods on the lower center, and possibly another slime mold atop. Again, this isn't what we planted in this log, so we're not going to risk eating them (at least not until we are much, much better at identifying species, which will take a long, long time).

On some of these colonized logs, we can see clear signs that the shiitake mycelium is still colonizing the logs, so we'll give it time. After a year, however, we might pull some of the logs if they are not producing (normally it takes six months to start to fruit, but we're deliberately experimenting with much larger logs, hoping to pay a longer onset to get a longer producing period).

We'll see.

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty six day one six eight]: anatomy of the toe

Published June 17, 2026 by centaur

It may not look like much, but it smarts where it counts, kid. One of our coffee tables decided to make some special modifications to my middle toe, including a lot of soft-tissue soreness and a tiny chip in the bone which took four X-rays to fully figure out. Flat-bottomed shoes make the world go round ...

-the Centaur

Pictured: Broken right ... there.

[twenty twenty six day one six seven]: adult me, bro

Published June 16, 2026 by centaur

Adulting is one of the most important, and pernicious, tasks adults are called upon to undertake. The laundry must get done, after all, but if it's a choice between doing the laundry and maintaining your marriage or caring for your children or loved ones, the hamper can just continue to fill.

In this case, adulting is rather simple. My wife and I use the "80-80" rule: a partnership is not a 50-50 proposition, because we're rarely operating at 100% of our capacity. Even if your partner is awesome and pulls off a 90% success rate, if you rely on your partner to do half the work, inevitably that truly awesome partner will only deliver 45% of the needed work, falling short of your expectations.

If, instead, you ASSUME your partner will sometimes fall short, and take on MORE than 50% of the effort - and they do too - then everything is fine. Your partner's turn to toss the compost on the heap, but you're standing in front of it? Toss it. Your turn to fold the laundry, but your partner sees the laundry in the dryer? She does it. And then everything gets done, and you both feel great.

So my wife mentioned that we're out of litter, and I volunteered to go while I was having lunch at Panera in Greenridge, next to a PetSmart that has our two cat litter brands. Since I knew I was going, I asked her to let me know if we were low on anything else, and she pointed out we were low on 2 of the 9 (!) cat dry food brands we use to distract our very finicky cats.

I was there, I got it done, it all worked out great, while she had folded the laundry I had run last night.

80-80 for the win.

-the Centaur

Pictured: the empty bags/cans of the two cat food brands we were low on.

[twenty twenty six day one six six]: i hunger

Published June 15, 2026 by centaur

As good as I try to be about my weight, sometimes I can't seem to help myself. Especially if I find myself super hungry at the start of a three-hour artist date at Barnes and Noble's cafe, and they've got a lone croissant sitting there with my name on it, waiting to be heated up.

-the Centaur

Picture: um, I said it.

[twenty twenty six day one six five]: drawing subtracts from writing

Published June 14, 2026 by 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.

[twenty twenty six day one six three]: helpful

Published June 12, 2026 by centaur

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.

[twenty twenty six day one six two]: sunrise

Published June 12, 2026 by centaur

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.

[twenty twenty six day one six one]: home again home again jiggity jig

Published June 12, 2026 by centaur

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.

[twenty twenty six day one six zero]: forget me not

Published June 11, 2026 by centaur

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

[cvpr]: beautiful sights not even counting the mountains

Published June 10, 2026 by centaur

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.

[cvpr]: i feel these bookshelves were put here for me

Published June 9, 2026 by taidoka

"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.

[cvpr]: this feels like a 70’s bond villain headquarters

Published June 8, 2026 by centaur

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 ...

[cvpr]: michael, might i remind you goliath is invulnerable

Published June 7, 2026 by centaur

"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!

[embodied ai seven]: it’s over!

Published June 6, 2026 by centaur

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.

The Embodied AI Workshop Starts … Now

Published June 4, 2026 by centaur

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

[blogging a to z 2026]: v is for viiiictory, forty-five times

Published April 30, 2026 by 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.