Words, Art & Science by Anthony Francis
A brainflash by my wife, turned into an out-of-nowhere concoction. Breakfast-burrito sized spring rolls, filled with almost entirely raw veggies, backed up by an amazing mix-and-match sauce, all entirely vegan.
We're going to have to add this to The Rotation.
-the Centaur
Eight pieces of sushi from P. F. Chang's. Sadly, even their "vegetarian" options have added fish flakes, making them not vegetarian, much less vegan - so me and my vegan wife no longer eat together there. Sad, because it was one of our favorite date night places until they updated their menu and she re-asked about whether her favorite dish was still vegan - only to find out that it had never been. :-(
-the Centaur
SO part of the reason we moved from California (other than the fires and the burning and the lack of water falling from the sky and all that stuff) to South Carolina was to reduce friction. Since here we can afford a house that has, like, floor area, my wife gets a big art studio on one end (spoiler: it's not enough - she's taken over the garage and living room too) ...
... and I get a big library at the other. In that library, I've been trying to remove creative barriers to all my different projects, which started me on the Drawing Every Day series earlier, and has been very helpful for research on my fiction and my science. One of those friction-reducing tools is a floating bookcase:
I got one of these from the Container Store to organize a set of books I had collected at work related to robot navigation (pictured up top), and since the piece of software that controls a navigating robot is called a "navigation stack", and it was a stack of books about navigation, hence, it is my, um, "navigation stack". (Hey, I never said it was a particularly clever nickname).
These have proved super useful to pull all the books on a given topic into a prominent place so it is easier to see, think about, and find them. I've been doing that to all the topics in my library just by organizing, but it is really useful to have some things much more clearly visible to kickstart that process.
During the pandemic, I ordered another one, but they shipped it without its heavy, sturdy metal base. Rather than give me a replacement base, they sent me an entire new floating bookcase - which was great, mind you, but that left me with the bunch of weird shelves above and the bookcase's long spine.
We're all about recycling here at the Boobie Hatch, so I started thinking about how to salvage these pieces and make a whole nother shelf. Unfortunately, the hard metal base is a carefully machined component. How to make a sturdy shelf when I don't have the ability to make what's arguably the most important piece?
Enter power tool girl.
Sandi and I have a great working relationship: I know how to design sturdy, offbeat pieces of office furniture, and Sandi has the woodworking tools to turn more of those designs into reality than I am able to do myself. After discussing it, measuring the quirky space it would have to go into, and designing the overall concept together, she cut the above wood to shape and painted it for me to match the other furniture.
Here I come back in. Often these pieces have something weird about how to put them together, and I take over the last mile of construction, using my careful, patented "measure several times, cut once, curse when it doesn't fit, then re-measure and re-cut again while grumbling under my breath" technique.
Getting this to work was tricky, because we had to ensure two kinds of stability. The spine of the shelf is a rectangular metal tube, designed to firmly bolt into a heavy metal plate to make sure the shelf stays upright; the edges of this tube would cut straight into an ordinary piece of wood, causing the shelf to sway over time. On top, we used two carefully aligned strips of metal to prevent the spine from cutting into that wood ...
... and on the bottom, we have two not quite so prettily aligned strips of steel, set at off angles so the screws do not collide with the ones coming from above (and are not co-linear, potentially causing splits in the wood). If I remember my geometry, these will prevent the bolts from pulling all the way through the wood. The result is a shelf that stands upright and is reasonably stable:
You may have been wondering what that weird notch is in the bookcase, and why the feet are so big.
The answer is this weird corner of the library, where a room divider and power cable can't be moved ...
... but a shelf can be designed and cut to fit. A small block of wood hides underneath there, to provide extra stability under the shelf; also we added felt so the floor would not get scuffed (though the wood the previous owners chose already looks pre-scuffed; go figure).
Now the shelves can be added back in ...
... and then, the books!
The navigation stack is reloaded!
Now I have three much more topical collections of books, far better organized and discoverable. (The three collections are Thomistic philosophy, consciousness, and the navigation stack; these are sandwiching bookshelves on AI, deep learning, free will and executive control, and sleep and dreaming, among others; all these topics are far more related than at first they appear, but more on that later).
One more project down.
1001 to go!
-the Centaur
7am fare at the Charlotte airport. Can't quite remember the name of the place, but one of the adventures of red-eye travel is finding a breakfast joint open at 7am (or earlier) on the Atlanta or Charlotte layover prior to the last leg back to South Carolina. There are a few good options in Atlanta - strangely enough, not the fast food ones, which often open a bit later, but as I recall Gordon Biersch is open at 6am, and there's usually some fun quirkly place which you can find to help take the edge off after the long overnight flight.
-the Centaur
I'm updating the site, which unfortunately means my beloved book banners need to change. The combo of banner, slider of featured posts, and sticky intro post meant the blog content was way, WAY below the fold, which I do not like (and is not recommended). I had plans to revamp the theme, but didn't find one that easily let me do what I want, and the best was becoming the enemy of the good.
So I fixed the glitch instead. I un-stuck the intro post and moved it into both the about sidebar and into the slider, and eliminated the banner, which now puts the recent content above the fold.
Hopefully this works for you. More updates will roll out as I think of them.
-the Centaur
Brands of cat food, that is. As I recall, the farther it is to the right, the more likely it is that Loki will eat it. The farther it is to the left, the more likely it is that Loki would rather go outside than even smell it.
Oh, I'm sorry, were you working here?
-the Centaur
I'm sorry, but that is NOT alcohol.
THIS is alcohol.
There, I fixed it for U. You're welcome.
-the Centaur
Pictured: (1): Wine leftover from the Edgemas party; it was not impressive. (B, or 2): Neil Peart's favorite drink, Macallan, bought special for the party; it was quite impressive. (iii, or C, or 3): the La Parilla Margarita, medium, on the rocks, extra salt on the rim; about the best drink you can get - locally in the Upstate, that is, not counting driving to Reposado in Palo Alto to get their Cadillac Margarita, again, extra salt on the rim.
Better late than never. I really should develop a Photoshop filter or macro (is there such a thing) for this lines-and-shading effect, but it does actually require some tweaking to get right.
-the Centaur
Four friends, thirty-five (plus) years after high school.
-the Centaur
Wow! 2023. What the hell? Seems like Blade Runner was just yesterday. But it was actually pre-pandemic! But in the real world, it's a "new year", as most Americans mark it, so it's time for New Year's Resolutions.
Or is it? As far as I recall, the science of New Year's Resolutions - whether it works or not to set new goals at the start of the new year - is decidedly mixed, and a brief check seems to confirm that.
But New Year's Aspirations, yes, I have those. For one, I'd like to start blogging every day. For another, it would be great to resume drawing every day. And Wednesday, my wife and I are going to buy bicycles.
For this year, though, I plan to edit my fourth Dakota Frost novel, SPECTRAL IRON, in the hope it breaks the logjam of the eight (8!) unedited novel drafts sitting on my hard drive, and to make progress on several other creative projects, at work and in life. To get started on that ... I'm now going to get back to work.
Onward!
-the Centaur
Pictured: an aspiration made real: the hand-me-down "comfy chair" from Francis Produce, which I have kept for 25+ years, now turned into a reading nook in my new library. That nook is filled with artwork and standees and books and novels and comic books, and in that comfy space there I have actually, like, started to read books again and stuff after years of and years of stunted fiction reading, post-grad-school.
Two tomahawks in all but bone for the high school gang's 30th annual "Edgemas" party, prepped with my own custom almost-dry rub and set aside to rest for 24 hours prior to a reverse-sear:
I hear it turned out pretty well. :-D
-the Centaur
It's a [re]start. Welcome to 2023, everyone.
-the Centaur
So I dropped in to Cafe Intermezzo near Perimeter Mall to get a little editing in on SPECTRAL IRON and realized that THIS was where I and my wife went for our first date, almost exactly twenty years ago! (I think we were sitting just out of view, not far from the chair you can see at the left of frame.)
I wasn't taking pictures as regularly then and selfies certainly weren't a thing, so the closest pictures I have of Sandi were from a photo shoot we did almost a year later when she needed reference images for some paintings she was doing. Many of those are just Sandi striking odd poses that corresponded to something that she needed to draw, but I think the one above turned out quite well.
Cafe Intermezzo will always hold a place in my heart as it's one of my best late-night thinking and writing places, but the one at Perimeter has an even more special place, as it's where Sandi and I, who had met at the Chamber a few weeks before, shared our first date and our second kiss.
Here's to another twenty great years!
-the Centaur
Well, it's that time of year again ... 65,000 of my closest friends have gotten together in five hotels and two convention halls in Atlanta to celebrate all things science fiction!
My schedule is below. I worked right up to the start of the con, so am just now posting this two days later, but for the benefit of the time travelers in my audience, I'll include the first two panels:
At each panel, I'll be giving away signed copies of the writing inspiration book Your Writing Matters by my friend Keiko O'Leary. This is the latest release from Thinking Ink Press, and we're very proud of it! No matter where you are on your writing journey, I think this book can probably help you, so come on by!
See y'all tomorrow!
-the Centaur
Well, after a long hard month and many ups and downs, I have successfully completed Camp Nanowrimo, one of the three yearly National Novel Writing Month challenges to write 50,000 words of a novel in a month - and this is my 32nd time claiming viiictory!
This was one of the more challenging Nanos for me, as April is our quarterly planning month, and on top of that we decided to switch managers within our team and to switch to semester planning in our org. So that led to a dip in the beginning, where it was hard for me to get my groove.
The blood on the deck continued almost to the end of Camp Nano. This month's project was my third go at JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE FLYING GARDENS OF VENUS, and I found it particularly difficult to get momentum as the story is more complicated than normal, with a new protagonist Puck taking center stage in addition to Jeremiah. You can see the dip compared to past Nanos:
I felt like I was struggling and stumbling with the story, writing and rewriting scenes, trying out different alternates (I count these as words written; editing can come later). However, as I rolled into the end of the month, these struggles started to pay off, as I understood better what was up with Puck, why so many weird things happened around her, and what role they played in the story.
Over the years of doing Nano, I've reached this particular point of the enterprise many times - a point which I sometimes call "going off the rails". This is the point where the story seems to gel, and I think it happens when I go from exploring the logical consequences of a set of characters in a situation - which is where I start almost all of my writing - to creatively injecting things into the story that could not be predicted from its beginnings. These still need to be grounded in the plot and consistent with the characters, but there's a difference between the things you typically expect to happen in a scenario and truly creative innovations which cannot be predicted from the setting alone - what the Mythcreants writing team calls Novelty in their ANTS framework (Attachment, Novelty, Tension and Satisfaction).
Over almost 20 years, I've had this creative spark, this "going off the rails" many, many times, and stories always seem better for it. I have tackled 16 Nanowrimos so far out of 34 monthly challenges (also counting Camp Nano and Script Frenzy) and have successfully completed it 32 times.
Each time for me, it's facing those middling slumps, facing the places where I've fallen out of love with my own story, that ultimately kickstart my creativity into high gear and make me fall in love with my work again.
That happened this time, even though I wanted to give up. I know Nano doesn't work for everyone, so your mileage may vary, but for me, as I've often found in other arenas of my life, you sometimes have to work just a little bit harder than you want to to reach an outcome which is far better than you have any right to expect. That was true with Cinnamon, originally a side character in the first Dakota Frost about whom I have now drafted three novels, and it is turning out to be true here with Puck as well, the Girl Who Could Wish, now turning into a truly interesting twist.
Oh, an excerpt. Let me see if I have some rough draftiness lying around here ...
“It’s an ecosystem,” Puck murmured. “There’s a whole ecosystem in the floatbergs—”
One of the jellyfloats wandered under one of the falls, and screamed, terrifyingly human-like, as it steamed and melted—and then Puck realized what the liquid was: sulfuric acid. This was an upper-atmosphere floatberg, its engineered bacteria designed to harvest sulfuric acid from the air—and as the floatberg disintegrated, the collected sulfuric acid which had not been processed was now spilling out in uncontrolled streams, destroying whatever had inhabited this cavern.
“I’m sorry,” Puck said to her little audience. “I … I think it’s too late.”
One of the bigger parakeys, with a crest, hopped up on her knee.
“Is that a vest?” she said, touching a bit of what looked like cloth. “You … you can’t be intelligent creatures, now can you? How could you start a whole civilization up here? Floatbergs only go back a few hundred years, and they don’t last for more than months, maybe weeks—”
The parakey chieftain, if that’s what it was, cheeped at her.
Puck drew a breath.
“I wish this cave could be saved,” she said carefully. The crowd of parakeys cheeped and beeped, and the chieftain pawed at her and cheeped even louder, like a little screech, and she relented. “Alright, a proper, non-conditional wish this time. I wish this cave would be—”
The bottom dropped out from beneath them.
Poor Puck! She can't seem to cut a break. But at least I know who and what she is now, and how she's related to Jeremiah, and can therefore move forward with this story with confidence.
Prevail, Victoriana!
-the Centaur
Snow in South Carolina! Or, as my friends in Boulder call it, Tuesday. It usually snows once or twice each year in Greenville, but we only get one of these big dumps of powder every 3-5 years or so.
In the moonlight, the neighbor's house looked as pretty as a Thomas Kinkade. Now, I've seen snow like this before, I've seen it before, and it's familiar to my wife, who works a lot in New York. But as for Loki ...
No sir, he didn't like it.
-the Centaur
Recall to memory the Sixth of January,
Riot, insurrection and plot
For no justification should the January Insurrection
Ever be forgot
A little over one year ago today, lame-duck President Donald Trump directed an unruly band of his followers to "fight like hell" to overturn the election of Joe Biden, in the hope of disenfranchising me and the 81 million other Americans who voted to bring to an end Trump's dyscivic reign.
"Dyscivic" means "antagonistic to civilization." It's a word coined by alt-right pundit Vox Day to disparage the aspirations of "social justice warriors" like myself. I am a writer, and I hereby confiscate "dyscivic" and repurpose it to mean "antagonistic to the civic structures of our society" - which Donald Trump was.
Of my good friends who voted for Donald Trump, at least two voted for him precisely because they expected he would be disruptive to our existing system. One specifically said, "I voted for Donald Trump because I hoped he would blow up the Republican Party, and I'm waiting for the Democrats to go next."
Keep waiting. Even though progressives like AOC and moderates like myself don't always get along, we recognize that we share the same end goals, that our principles are compatible, and they're worth fighting for together, even if we might disagree on methods.
I don't get the same sense from my most right-wing friends, who viciously lambast politicians from their own party for not "getting on the Trump train" in every possible respect - even when those politicians have multi-decade records voting for precisely the positions my friends loudly advocate for.
Reliance on trust is toxic to any organization. It encourages dependence on personal relationships - even friendships - developed over years or decades, and makes the organization resistant to new information delivered by new people. When that trust is in leadership, it becomes loyalty ... which is deeply dyscivic.
The purpose of government is to put the use of force under rational control. To prevent one man from using that force to execute their own personal will, we create civic structures that corral the use of power. We loan power, not grant it; and when you loan power to someone, you watch them.
Over four years, we watched Donald Trump demand loyalty on an unprecedented scale in American politics - from his followers, from fellow politicians, from the machinery of government. He turned on his appointees when their understanding of their civic duties conflicted with his own petty desires.
And when the American people had had enough - when even some of my Trumpian friends switched parties because they could not abide what he was doing to our political system - Trump spat on those of us who dared to vote against him, and then tried to pretend to his followers that we did not exist.
Well, sir, our voices were heard. And we won't be silent. We know that you and your followers are going to try again - I remember watching your suppoprters meeting in the dark in the months leading up to the insurrection (holding 10pm rallies in the parking lot of a nearby grocery store). We'll be watching.
For I'm not the only one. Here's a few quotes from my fellow Americans around the web:
http://wilwheaton.net/2022/01/one-year-later/
We all know how that turned out. All but seven Republican Senators — forty-three of fifty members in the upper chamber — protected him and embraced his Big Lie. In the year since, they have doubled down on it, and they have not stopped insisting that we did not see what we saw one year ago today with our own eyes.
And:
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2022/01/06/january-6-one-year-on/
And yet, after perhaps 48 hours of unrehearsed shock, the Republican party rallied around this traitor to the republic and the constitution, and tried to rebrand an actual coup attempt into overexuberant tourism.
And not about January 6th, but important all the same:
https://angrystaffofficer.com/2022/01/03/american-war-and-american-memory/
Why is this important? Because as we look ahead into another year at the beginning of a new decade of a constantly changing world, America needs to take a hard look at herself and ask whether we are remembering or forgetting the right things. This is not only vital to our collective consciousness as to who we are as a nation, but to the success of future military operations.
I assert that remembering the right things isn't just vital to our success in military endeavors, but to each of us personally, in the aggregate, as a nation, and as a civilization. If we don't remember the true story - good and bad and ugly - then those who make up stories for their own convenience will rule the day.
Remember, the Big Lie was the foundation for the Final Solution.
Let's make sure that doesn't happen here.
-the Centaur
What a year! Hard to believe 2020 is over. Well, now that we're moving on to 2021 ...
Wait, what? 2021 is over already?
-the Centaur
Out with October, in with November, and with it, a bunch of updates. Dragon*Con came and went and was a success. Our Kickstarter for Beyond Boots 'n' Bars was funded; thanks to everyone who participated! But most importantly, the move from California to the East Coast is mostly done.
That last I blame for my lack of posting (and drawing - sheesh, I am ~80+ drawings behind) but, ultimately, that was the most important thing that I and my wife needed to be working on for quite a while. Now, she's got a functioning art studio again, and my library is ... getting there.
But, now it's time to get back to it. I'll be doing Nanowrimo again - JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE FLYING GARDENS OF VENUS, something-like-book 2.75 on my original outline. Since Nano has been so great to me, I'm sponsoring it this year, which in turn, means you can find FROST MOON there!
Welp, back to it. Onward, fellow adventurers!
-the Centaur
a long day. but a good one. more tomorrow.
-the centaur
