I stayed obsessed with the Max game board, so here is another version, with 1.5″ squares, which is a better fit for our pieces from Animal upon Animal.
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Iron and Bronze clashed as Jade reigned supreme.
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Red and pink foot mittens were scattered in the corridor.
I made a game board for Max to play with my Animal Upon Animal pieces. Originally it was hand drawn, then on legal paper in AutoCAD, and finally now in lettersized format. This is version 9. Lots of little tweaks here and there, but I’m happy with it.
I’ve never been a great graphic designer, but a some time and many iterations makes me passable.
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The grim giant hopped over the fluffy pink goat.
Big Fish Eat Little Fish, a 1557 engraving by Pieter van der Heyden (from Pieter Bruegel’s 1556 drawing) Serpens ni edat serpentem, draco non fiet
(A serpent, unless it devours a serpent, will not become a dragon)
Adagia, Erasmus -
The cool greys of dawn erupted into color when his eyes fluttered open.
Zhongxing, Magong, Taiwan, Mark 高維隆, 22 June 2020 -
He discovered the Valley of Mattresses.
Between taxes and other obligations March will be “get real” month. My commentaries will most likely be much shorter or I may rely on random public domain photos to fill in the body here, but this one sentence experiment is worth at least two more weeks.
Beyond that, who knows, but I’ll make sure to give this a proper passage if I decide to move on.
Claddau Valley, Fiordland NP, NZ, Bernard Spragg, 4 Dec 2015 -
The presentation froze, but the clock kept ticking.
And it didn’t effect the quality of the teaching.
There must be a better way to do professional continuing education.
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Be careful, there’s a god in every corner.
One of my main takeaways from reading the Chinese classic Journey to the West was being immersed in a polythesistic mind set. My brief looks into Taoism and Hinduism laid the groundwork for this experience, but it took the extended daily readings of this fantasy novel over a couple of months to create the mindshift where it was psychologically plausible to see random monsters and spirits hiding around every corner.
Don’t worry, I’m still an athiest – mother nature is weird enough without supernatural help – but at least I now have a passing familiarty with that mindset.
On a completely different note, here is the Ruthie Foster cover of “War Pigs”.
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The gears seized in a bath of saffron gum.
I did my initial newsletter culling last week, but I’ve been working through all my unread messages in my “newsletter” email inbox. It is a slightly more productive (and less distracting) use of my phone than social media.
It has confirmed my instinct to cut down on news. Even the essays from my favorite authors feel much less urgent only a couple of weeks after they were posted.
Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourself to Death makes a good point that we can do absolutely nothing about 99% of the stuff we read. While the occasional issues bring up a question worth pondering, the vast majority is glorified entertainment that leads to distraction and anxiety.
Not that my other main diet of random youtube videos is much better, but at least it isn’t pretending to be anything other than mere dross. On that note, I’ve been having a lot of fun being “meta” – watching videos about why movies do (or don’t) work. Both at a storytelling level and at a VFX level.
Watching such fare makes me feel slightly more sophisticated than spending 90 minutes watching an actual movie (because I feel like “analyzing” the content). I don’t know how the algorithm is great at creating new fancies to tickle but damn it’s good at its job.
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Twin tears of light rolled down the mini-blinds.
Last month, I played around with with Instagram. I’m good for now, but here are the photos from January 2022 and from the period in 2014 when I was last on that app.
As much as I dislike social, I guess it’s not the end of the world if I pop onto that platform and mess around every few years for a limited period.
As might be assumed (given this blog), I am a believer in slightly oversharing on the internet. If anyone looks me up (as I do them), I want to control the narrative of myself if anyone looks me up (as I do them). Of course this is a sculpted image, but I’d rather have someone see my current conception of self instead of old xanga postings and photos from my college days <eek>.
while I’m at it, here are the images from 2014.
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The boy gently hugged the southwest leg of the dining table.
Yesterday I found out that the architect who was going to review a couple of my healthcare projects suddenly passed away. I didn’t know him well, just a few emails and phone calls over the years.
It threw me for a loop. I didn’t get anything done that afternoon.
Was wasting half a day the proper way to honor the passing of a tenuous acquaintance?
Carpe Diem.
Alas, I’m only human.
Then again, the best way to honor the dead would be to live even more fully.
I’ll try to do him right today. Rest in peace Gordon.