No rendering for you - I got the line drawing finished just before my late-night walk with my wife, and was about 50-50 on whether I would shade this when I got back - but it was raining, and we did a short walk, and, to our surprise, after our short little walk, the fridge in the kitchen was leaking.
So! Instead of rendering this, I helped my wife move all our food out of the dying fridge and into alternate refrigeration - fortunately we had enough room to save everything except for some freezer-burned home-made ice cream that really wasn't ever good enough to eat anyway.
It's good to be home, but Loki sure doesn't make it convenient. Cat, I have work to do.
Still, I guess you're going to do you.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Loki, in my lap as I type this (likely because, right now, I'm not letting him sit on my recently-filled-in whiteboard desk) and Loki, eating with his feet in his food bowl, because ... ?????
I'd gotten out of the habit of doing these quasi-comic style art pieces based on photographs, but I've taken a few really good candidate pictures with the right layout for it, so I hope to get back into doing that. This is a picture of one of Sandi's art pieces she completed this weekend at Silicon Valley Open Studios, and it will now be on display at Kaleid Gallery in San Jose. Neat fact: this little guy is actually a cabinet!
Brief placeholder I'm scheduling for tomorrow, in case we get caught up with Silicon Valley Open Studios stuff. But what it strikes me is how animals behave differently when we're not around. Case in point, Loki is pictured here, sitting in my rocking chair - which he rarely does if I'm present, either sitting on my lap, or sitting on the table. But never in the other rocking chair. I wonder why that is.
Or maybe it's Heisenberg's Cat Principle: if you observe a cat, you have disturbed it.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Loki, on MY rocking chair, disputing that "MY" part.
Cue "It's Happening" meme: Silicon Valley Open Studios is this weekend, May 18th and 19th, where my wife Sandi Billingsley will be showing off both her paintings and mixed media including furniture!
Our friend Diane, a glass artist, dropped in to help us manage the day, bringing snacks and champagne!
Sandi has a lot of artwork and furniture on display today, including some very nice large-format art. Above you can see "Kirsten Piig" and "Jim Dairy" from Sandi's "Animals are People Too" series, and one of the geode tables (along with Diane on the left, Sandi on the right, and my toe at the bottom); on the other side is "Missy Elephant" and several of Sandi's other pieces with custom art boards made to look like stone:
Another room has more pieces and some works in progress:
Below you can see "Collie Parton", "Yeti White" and another striking geode table:
This is an open studio, so several of Sandi's in-process pieces are prominently on display, like this bar and chairs set (and also the finished art "Moo Paul" and "Mllama"):
In the back room, this enormous piece is going to be a conch-shaped day bed:
It is so big that Sandi's actually going to partially take it apart and make the top into a removable cabinet:
Not because it can't fit through the door or anything. Not at all. Sandi also let me have a space to display my books, since we needed to find a place to put that bookcase (which I designed and built, I'm proud to say). The giant egg creature is actually one of Sandi's furniture pieces - a hat cabinet!
At the back there is the final geode table, which I think I showed yesterday ... oh, no I didn't, here you go:
We will be here working on art today and tomorrow from 11-5, so please come on by!
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 ...
So I saw two make turkeys posturing outside, and carefully stepped to the French doors to take a picture. But what I assume was the female they had been courting had been on the other side of those doors, and decided to book it. Yet, even though their audience was gone, the two males didn't stop posturing.
I feel this make some subtle point about continuing the fight after the prize is gone, but it eludes me.
When stopping, my buddy commented "it was a gas station as if done by Pixar." After seeing it, I said "It's like Pixar had done a theme park for their movie entitled 'Murica'."
His response? "They already did that movie. It's called WALL-E."
Super quick sketch of Cinnamon, as I was in food coma after Easter dinner, then had to write a long review for a journal - which I was already a day late on.
And, counting "a day late" as "missed a thing", I once again "missed a thing" because I was in a meeting which we decided to let run long. Which made the next meeting run long, and we extended it even longer. And because there wasn't a specific thing on my calendar for Saturday evening - it was just on my list of things to do in my todos - I said, "eh, let's let this go long and get this done."
And then something else didn't get done.
I've learned to watch out for this zealously, because for me, at least, going long on a meeting is a dangerous prescription for screwing up your next task. If you think you can go a bit longer ... what are you missing?
So! You take one of those double-row brushes (see detail below) ...
... and apply it to one of these fuzzy creatures in shedding season (see detail below) ...
... and, violin, you get a tribble:
As far as I can tell, these artisan, hand-crafted tribbles are, unlike Dr. McCoy's version, not born pregnant.
If only most problems we face in this world could be solved as easily as "stop feeding the invasive species without natural predators." And, in fact, like not feeding the trolls, many of them can.
However, cat fuzz is not one of those problems. For decades, I put up with my pets getting horrible tangles and mats during shedding season, great lumpy wads which had to be cut or picked off - almost like tribbles.
But, when my wife and I got those double-pronged brushes and began brushing the cat every day, the mats went away. Though we do have now a tribble proliferation problem, we don't have unhappy cats.
Solving some problems requires disengaging the behavior that creates it (like passing on chips, margaritas and dessert for your problem waistline); others require active maintenance to prevent them from happening (like brushing for the problem of keeping your teeth).
What problem are you facing that would go away if you stop feeding it - or start brushing it?
... your contributions to my productivity are invaluable.
I do not know how I could remember to get everything done without you.
-the Centaur
Pictured: my whiteboard desk, after Loki sat on it; and while I didn't catch him in the act this time, I have caught him doing it previously, and there we are.
Apparently this wonderful phenomenon springs upon us, then is gone, almost entirely in the period when I am normally at GDC ... a transient frosting of beauty, dispersed by the wind almost as soon as it falls, like snow dissolved by rain ... but, for whatever reason, this year I got to see it. Cherry blossoms, I presume?
SO! I have no topical image for you, nor a real blogpost either, because I had a "coatastrophe" today. Suffice it to say that I'll be packing the coat I was wearing for a thorough dry cleaning (or two) when I get home, and I will be wearing the new coat my wife and I found on a Macy's clearance rack. But that replacement coat adventure chewed up the time we had this afternoon, turning what was supposed to be a two hour amble into a compressed forty-five minute power walk to make our reservation at Green's restaurant for dinner.
Well worth it, for this great vegetarian restaurant now has many vegan items; but it's late and I'm tired, and I still have to post my drawing for the day before I collapse.
Blogging every dayyszzzzz....
-the Centaur
Pictured: Green's lovely dining room, from two angles.
I really like this shot, and reserve the right to re-use it for a longer post later, yneh. But it captures the mood at the near-end of my trip to the Game Developers Conference: San Francisco, both vibrant and alive, and somehow at the same time a vaporous ghost of its former self.
Cats supposedly have brains the size of a large walnut, and are not supposed to be intelligent according to traditional anthropofallicists. But there's something weird about how Loki remains perfectly still ... right up until the point where you want to take a picture, at which point he'll roll over. Or how he'll pester you, right until you're done with a task, but when you are done and can attend to him, he'll walk away.
Almost like there's something devious going on in that aloof,yet needy little brain, some thought process like, I want you to pay attention to me, but I don't want you to think that I need it.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Loki, who looked just like a sphinx, until I pulled out my camera and he immediately rolled over.
I can't tell you how frustrating it is for Present Anthony for Past Anthony to have set up a single place where all tax forms should go during the year, except for Past Anthony to not have used that system for the one paper form that cannot be replaced by looking it up online.
I'm sure it's here somewhere.
-the Centaur
Pictured: I have been working on taxes, so please enjoy this picture of a cat.
Unabashedly, I'm going to beef up the blog buffer by posting something easy, like a picture of this delicious Old Fashioned from Longhorn. They're a nice sipping drink, excellent for kicking back with a good book, which as I recall that night was very likely the book "Rust for Rustaceans."
Now, I talked smack about Rust the other day, but they have some great game libraries worth trying out, and I am not too proud to be proved wrong, nor am I too proud to use a tool with warts (which I will happily complain about) if it can also get my job done (which I will happily crow about).
-the Centaur
Pictured: I said it, yes. And now we're one more day ahead, so I can get on with Neurodiversiverse edits.
SO! I’ve spent more time than I like in hospitals with saline drips restoring my dehydrated blood after food-poisoning induced vomiting, and pretty much all of those episodes followed me thinking, “Huh, this tastes a little funny … ehhh, I guess it’s OK.”
That led me to introduce the following strict rule: if you think anything’s off about food, don’t eat it.
Now, that seems to make sense to most people, but in reality, most people don’t practice that. In my direct experience, if the average person gets a piece of fruit or some soup or something that “tastes a little bit funny,” then, after thinking for a moment, they’ll say “ehhh, I guess it’s OK” and chow down straight on the funny-tasting food. Sometimes they even pressure me to have some, to which I say, "You eat it."
Honestly, most of the time, a funny taste turns out fine: a funny taste is just a sign that something is badly flavored or poorly spiced or too ripe or not ripe enough or just plain weird to the particular eater. And in my experience almost nobody gets sick doing that, which is why we as humans get to enjoy oysters and natto (fermented soybeans) and thousand-year eggs (clay-preserved eggs).
But, frankly speaking, that’s due to survivor bias. All the idiots (I mean, heroic gourmands) who tried nightshade mushroom and botulism-infested soup and toxic preservatives are dead now, so we cook from the books of the survivors. And I’ve learned from unexpectedly bitter-tasting experience that if I had been a heroic gourmand back in the day, I’d have a colorful pathogen named after me.
So if anything tastes or even looks funny, I don’t eat it.
Case in point! I’m alive to write this blog entry. Let me explain.
When I’m on the high end of my weight range and am trying to lose it, I tend to eat a light breakfast during the week to dial it back - usually a grapefruit and toast or half a pummelo. A pummelo is a heritage citrus that’s kind of like the grandfather of a grapefruit - pummelos and mandarins were crossed to make oranges, and crossed again to make grapefruit.
They're my favorite fruit - like a grapefruit, but sweeter, and so large that one half of a pummelo has as much meat as a whole grapefruit. I usually eat half the pummelo one day, refrigerate it in a closed container, and then eat the other half the next day or day after.
You can see this saved half at the top of the blog - it looked gorgeous and delicious. I popped into my mouth a small bit of meat that had been knocked off by an earlier cut, then picked up my knife to slice it ... when I noticed a tiny speck in the columella, the spongy stuff in the middle.
Now, as a paranoid eater, I always look on the columella with suspicion: in many pummelos, there’s so much that it looks like a white fungus growing there - but it’s always been just fruit. Figuring, “Ehh, I guess it’s OK”, I poke it with my knife before cutting the pummelo - and the black specks disappeared as two wedges of the fruit collapsed.
A chunk of this fruit had been consumed by some kind of fungus. You can kinda see the damaged wedges here in a picture I took just before cutting the fruit, and if you look closely, you can even see the fungus itself growing on the inside space. This wasn’t old fruit - I’d eaten the other half of the fruit just two days before, and it was beautiful and unmarred when I washed it. But it was still rotten on the inside, with a fungus I’ve not been able to identify online, other than it is some fungus with a fruiting body:
I spat out the tiny bit of pummelo meat I’d just put in my mouth, and tossed the fruit in the compost. But the next day, curious, I wondered if there were any signs on the other half of the fruit, and went back to find this:
Not only is the newer piece visibly moldy, its compromised pieces rapidly disintegrating, the entire older piece of fruit is now completely covered with fruiting bodies - probably spread around its surface when I cut the fruit open. From what I’ve found online, the sprouting of fruiting bodies means this pummelo had already been infested with a fungus for a week or two prior to the flowering.
So! I was lucky. Either this fungus was not toxic, or I managed to get so little of it in the first piece of fruit that I didn’t make myself sick. But it just confirms my strategy:
If it looks or tastes funny, don’t eat it.
If you don’t agree with me on a particular food, you eat it; I’m going to pass.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Um, I think I said it. Lots of pictures of bad grandpa grapefruit.
SO! I am the proud owner of ... an Atari 2600+! This console, a re-release of the original Atari 2600 from 47 (!) years ago, only a notch smaller and with USB and HDMI outputs. It plays original Atari cartridges, though, which shall be my incentive to hop on my bike and visit the retro game store in nearby Traveler's Rest which has a selection of original Atari cartridges among all their other retro games.
The first game I remember playing is Adventure, which came out in 1980, and, while I can't be sure, I seem to remember first playing it in my parents' new house on Coventry Road, which we didn't move into until early 1979, just before my birthday.
In fact, as I dig my brain into it, we played Breakout in the den of my parents's old house on Sedgefield Road, so we must have had access to early-generation Atari. Our neighbors when we moved had a snazzier Odyssey 2 :-), and a few years later another friend from school had an even better game console, though none of the second-generation units I looked up online seem familiar to me.
Therefore, by the process of elimination, either my parents got my Atari 2600 for Christmas for me sometime around 1977 or 1978, or one of our relatives or babysitters loaned us one when we lived on Sedgefield. I have distinct memories of getting a Radio Shack Color Computer in Christmas of 1980, a grey wedge of plastic with a massive 4K of RAM, and remember programming games on it myself - perhaps because I didn't have an Atari to play with; this makes me think that, at least at first, the Atari was actually the "better game console" my other friend from school had, and that I went over to their house to play.
Regardless, I solved the first level of Adventure in minutes after cracking open the Atari.
No big challenge, but apparently I still got it.
-the Centaur
Pictured: the box, and the unboxed start of Adventure.
SO! I am still chasing down places in my life where I have been “letting things pile up” and, as a consequence, causing myself stress down the road when I have to clean it up. And I found yet another one - tied in with my drawing / blogging projects.
I have a tremendous complexity tolerance compared to some of the people I’ve worked with, to the point that I’ve been repeatedly told that I need to focus the information that I’m presenting in a way that more clearly gets to the point.
But when piled complexity passes even my tolerance level, I get EXTREMELY stressed out. I knew I got stressed from time to time, but as part of examining my behavior and mental states looking for triggers - inspired by Devon Price’s Unmasking Autism - I zeroed in on dealing with the piles as the actual problem.
Online files aren’t quite as bad - I think it is the actual physical piles that become intimidating, though I think any task too big for my brain to wrap around all the things that need to be done, like editing a novel, may cause the same problem - and so, as part of working on Drawing Every Day, I decided to clean up those files.
I already had a good system for this, broken down by day and year … which I was not using. Now, in theory, you could throw all these files into a bin and forget about it, or even delete them, but I hope to use my files for a deep learning project, so it will likely benefit me to categorize the files as I go.
But, as part of trying to “get ahead”, I’d been working fast, letting the files pile up. This, I realized, easily could turn into one of those aversive pile situations, so I dug in today and fixed it. As a result, I didn’t get to all the things I wanted to get to over lunch.
For decades I’ve had the habit eat-read-write, and my weekend lunches and brunches are a particularly precious writing / coding / thinking time for me. I gets a sad when I don’t get to fully use that time, as today where I spent time on cleanup and I have remote meetings with my friends and my small press in the afternoon.
But this work has to get done sometime, or it won’t get done. And for this project, my collected files for Drawing Every Day will become useless if they aren’t organized - not just for the hypothetical deep learning project, but also for me, in reviewing my own work purely artistically to decide where I should put my learning effort next.
For me, I’ve had to learn not to be so hard on myself. By many metrics, I get a lot done; by other metrics, I feel unproductive, disorganized, even outright lazy. But the truth is that there’s a lot of groundwork that needs to be put in to make progress.
I’ve been trying to teach myself game development since, hell, the early 2000’s. Most of the time, other than a little side effort on interactive fiction, I didn’t make any progress at this, because it was always more important to code for work, to draw, and then, after I got my drawing laptop stolen and got a novel contract not too far apart, to write.
After I got laid off, I decided, “now’s the time! I’m going to do games!” Of course, that didn’t happen: I and my research collaborators had a major paper in flight, a workshop to plan, and I had to launch a consulting business - all while still writing. While I did read up on game development, and spent a lot of time thinking about it, no coding got done.
But most of your learning is on the plateau: you don’t appear to be making progress, but you’re building the tools you’ll need to progress when you’re ready. So all the work I’ve been doing on consulting and for the research projects is looping back around, and I’ve used what I learned to start not one but three tiny games projects.
It’s not likely that I’ll release any of these - at this point, I am just futzing around trying to teach myself - but it is striking to me how much we can accomplish if we put in continual effort over a long period of time and don’t give up.
I can’t tell you how many people over the years have told me “well, if you haven’t seen progress on something in six months, you should quit” or “if you haven’t worked on something in two years, you should get rid of it”. I mean, what? This is terrible advice.
If you want to be productive, don’t take advice from unproductive people. Productive writers and artists typically have apprenticeships lasting anywhere from a year to a decade. It can take years of work to become an overnight success.
And many of the steps leading to that success are unglamorous, tiresome, unsexy scutwork, like organizing your files so you know what you have, or reviewing them so you can decide the next learning project you need to take on to master a skill.
The work has to be done sometime. Best get on with it.
-the Centaur
Pictured: the Drawing Every Day project files, post-cleanup and organization. There’s still a bin of files that need to be filed, but they’re a very contained bin, compared to the mess there was before. Also, a picture of this essay being composed, at my precious Saturday lunch-read-and-write.
