The clouds were beautiful this evening, so I pulled out the DSLR and got some practice with some shots of the sky.

Originally published at EricAdams.net. You can comment here or there.

fun if it were easy. Writing time travel is challenging, but it wouldn’t be 

 

15,250 / 30,000 (50.8%)

1214 words today, which took all day. It has not been a day for flow. I was hoping to get closer to 2200. But sometimes you take what you can get and tomorrow is another day.

If the original poster hadn’t failed miserably himself, trying to post an image for others to mock/edit this thread would have gotten like 20 replies and been buried in a day.

Instead…

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showthread.php?t=197145

 

10th Kingdom Art Card 3 by =ArcanaJ on deviantART

Sally Peep from the 10th Kingdom!

Prismacolor, ink, acrylic 

This card is a reward for people who donate to the American Cancer Society's Relay for Life. 

Donate $5 and get a card! Just email me with confirmation of your donation (along with your address) and I'll send you a card. Donate $10 and get two cards! 

Be sure to specify if you want the card trimmed down to standard collectible card size, or with the borders left intact for matting/framing. 

More to come! 

email to: lrjonte at gmail dot com 

The Black Cat doesn't put up with any bull, and neither does Bahlactus.

Art by Lee Elias. Original source unknown, but it's reprinted in "Alfred Harvey's Black Cat: The Origins" #1, 1995.

Well, it's 97 degrees outside, and the air conditioning has been wonky at SLG headquarters! I'm sweltering inside, but I don't envy Bryan and the other guys because they're presently carting merchandise down the street to the McEnery Convention Center for Super-Con, which is taking place there there this weekend.

It seems to be a pretty superhero-y event, but we decided to make a try after the convention organizers asked us to attend. I will not be there, but Bryan Dobrow will be holding down the table, and Landry Walker will be joining him on Sunday.

Meanwhile, I am embarking on what I hope to be a blissful week off. I have much lolling around planned.

10th Kingdom Art Cards by =ArcanaJ on deviantART

Virginia and Wolf from the 10th Kingdom!

Prismacolor, ink, acrylic 

These cards are rewards for people who donate to the American Cancer Society's Relay for Life. 

Donate $5 and get a card! Just email me with confirmation of your donation (along with your address) and I'll send you a card. Donate $10 and get two cards! 

Be sure to specify if you want the card trimmed down to standard collectible card size, or with the borders left intact for matting/framing. 

More to come!

email to: lrjonte at gmail dot com

 

 

Almost time for my crazy hippy skirts and sandals.
Woo.

Just bought new sneakers. Really needed.

-Secondlina

[13:11] matociquala: what's a word for when something is absolutely covered in something else?
[13:11] hawkwing_lb: coated?
[13:11] matociquala: I'm thinking of a wet street when the rain is coming down so hard the water in the street is all interlocking ripples.
[13:12] hawkwing_lb: there should be a word for that.
[13:12] hawkwing_lb: but if there is, I don't think I know it.

"trust me on the sun screen"

So I just had one of those math moments where it takes me four or five hours to understand how to frame the question, then the answer turns out to be mind-bogglingly simple. The problem came because we're representing a 4x4 matrix (with no perspective transformation) as scale factor and a coordinate system.

Without going into the details, it took me all that time to figure out how to jump back and forth between the two representations -- basically, if S is the scaling transform and T the coordinate system transform, then we're look at S * T, which multiplies out very nicely. Once I had that figured out, I established that the intuitive way of handling additional scaling is correct (multiply old and new scale, multiply origin by new scale). I was considering all sorts of ugly programming tricks to handle transforming the (scale, coordinate system) pair by another coordinate system, when it suddenly occurred to me the problem was trivial. If I have S as the scale transform, and T1 & T2 as the coordinate system transforms, then then problem I was looking at was calculating (S * T1) * T2. But matrix multiplication is associative, so that's just S * (T1 * T2), and figuring T1 * T2 is something that's been in the code for years. Problems suddenly solved, and the solutions were much simpler than I had imagined possible. (Bonus: applying two of these things is (S1 * T1) * (S2 * T2) = (S1 * T1 * S2) * T2, that is, the first operation discussed here followed by the second. Everything neat and tidy there.)

I've been criticized for this one. Not because of the AMPLE AMOUNTS OF BLOOD in the illustration, but because it appears to be good advice. I like to think that all of my columns are chock-full of good advice and that the "man" had to give this the name "Extremely Bad Advice" because I am too real, and therefore too susceptible to litigation.


Anyhoo, as always, send me your problems and I will give you the best advice that I can muster. That's right: Muster!

Love,
Chip!

Poor Link had a rather frustrating day using a badly calibrated heat-sensitive device. 
Poor dude. He had to invent techniques to cool down his hands before approching the screen (*laughs*)

It's a useful thing to have in winter though.

Well then, i'm going off to my toronto trip next week. I'll be in toronto from the 21rst to the 26th and then in Disneyworld from the 29th to the 5th of june. (WEEEE!) Both trips are going to be expensive (just finished my budget...doom, dooom....) but so totally worth it. I want to find a present for my friend Tama in toronto (it's her b-day when I get back) and I want to buy a Jack Sparrow hat and a Cheshire cat plushy in Disneyworld. And maybe even an alice in wonderland clothes pin (eek!!!!). I don't really know what to buy Tama. She reads a lot of books and watches a lot of movies, but she has so many I don't even know what she has or not. It's also hard to buy her clothing because (like most of my friends) she has giganormous boobies which make evaluating how clothing fits her really hard for me, being a complete utter twig. I'll most likely go for shiny objects, they suit her well and she loves the shiny jewelry stuff. For some reason, I really wanted to buy her shoes. Maybe i'l lget her a little shiny thing and an Aldo gift certificate...

I need to buy shoes myself. My sneakers are poking out holes. I'd like some lime green shoes!

Oh! Good news then, i'm gonna be a part of another exhibit. Yay! That's 3 (and maybe four if I play my cards right) garanteed this summer!
This exhibit is going to be extra cool because i'm doing it with friends from the graduate show. It's actually organised by my friend Other Isabelle, who is amazing! It has a theme, which we are to discuss tuesday evening (right before I leave for toronto). The theme at the moment is something like "Things you always wanted to do but never did"

I don't know if i'm good with that theme, because I don't have that many "I wish I did." Sure, like everyone, I always thing about comebacks or things to do after the discussion is over, but when it comes to big life situations, i'm mostly satisfied. I also see why or why not I should do something, and tend to rationnalize the what if's. So I don't really know what to draw. 

Though just sketching out about the subject I came up with a lot of tree and list drawings... Check 'em out!





 Could be interesting...

I'm also completly obsessed with the sailor moon manga right now. It's so much fun! Just bought a bunch! Ooooh! Sailor Pluto is t3h awesome (even if she Is demoted)

-Secondlina

Okay, so, as nuriko_chan and thelastsong inspired me to do in my last post, I'm gonna open this one up a bit broader:

DARE ME TO DO SOMETHING.

Preferably something online, so that everyone can see. Dare me to draw something really titillating and scandalous - like Dontknoweither yaoi, yuri, ecchi, etc. (Not, that, like, I don't do that every weekend ANYWAY. I love abusing my characters.) Dare me to write about something unusual or startling. Dare me to, I don't know, don a little haltertop and eat produce and photograph it.

Put me up to something. DO IT. NAO PLZ.

I might not be able to do ALL of it, but I'll definitely pick and choose the ones that I find most outstanding and ludicrous. :) So make me a really awful suggestion and see if I carry through with it!

(Notice: I'm not going to do anything illegal or horrifically obscene. I will, however, flirt with the boundaries of good taste. Messily.)

Sliding towards Olympus

The age of the superman is at hand.
It will not come with bright costumes or capes
But it will come in a whisper and in hope.

We will rise into the sky unfettered
we will leap across stone cayons without fear
Lift steel and bend it with our hands
and bring just with our thoughts

The day will come soon when we will awake
Awake in darkness and fear
and man at his best will battle man at its worse

and all our dreams will be dawn.


I wrote this after seeing the rocket man fly and watching other
acts of Comic book like action in the real world on a Blog called Superhero watch.

where this guy posts acts of "real life super-stuff"

Good run this morning, or at least the first half was good, and the second half was acceptable. The uphill mile out in13:35, and I started running half a block early because I had the opportunity to jaywalk, due to traffic patterns. I got a late start today because I slept in until 8 (I've gotten addicted to Thursday night homicide documentaries on the Murder Channel. There's one pair of cops whose names I really need to steal and use in something.) but it's rainy, so though it was humid, it wasn't too hot.

The mile out was mostly easy and comfortable--I didn't even really notice I was running until the last eighth, and only the last tenth--coincidentally, some of the steepest uphill--was hard. While I was flopped down on the stone steps at the park entrance to gasp like a landed fish and listen to my heart thump, a nice Yankee in a pickup truck pulled over to shout and see if I was okay. (I said, "Yes, thank you for asking!") Nice guy; I'm glad he didn't actually discover a body on his way to work today.

Then I walked the half-mile around the park in 8:22, stretched out, and did intervals home, because either my allergies were acting up or my cardiopulmonary fitness was inadequate to the task (I was wheezing and coughing.) Because I only ran about half the distance, the trip back took 14:58.

I'm going to blame it on allergies, because I did well on the way out, and my entire neighborhood is fragrant of lilacs and pungent with marigolds currently. (I'm particularly enamored of a the dusty-purple-and-green four-color Victorian (It's not a Queen Anne: it's the other less fussy kind, without all the gingerbread) on the corner, about whose foundations some genius has planted lilacs and deep, deep purple irises that pick up all the colors of the paint and trim.

My left shoulder is still unhappy, which interferes with the climbing and archery both (I was having one of my best shooting nights ever last night, but my arm tired really quickly), but the left big toe which has been bothering me was very well behaved today. It was present, but not painful, and I'm calling that a win.

Last night, there were bats in the twilight. I like bats.

164.9 miles to Lothlorien.

According to the high-tech bathroom scale this morning, I am 239 lbs (17 stone 1 pound, because for some unknown reason it freaked out and gives me my weights in British now, and I can't make it go back). I've actually gained about twenty pounds (I was at about 15.13 last October, and I peaked up to 17.7, but some of that was bloooatttt.) since I started climbing (I'm a mesomorph, and I put on muscle like nobody's business given half a chance. Unfortunately, I'm also Ukrainian and have had a couple of bouts with crash weight loss due to major illness, and my body is very adamant about hanging onto those energy reserves In Case of Famine.) I'm still wearing the same jeans size I was in November, however, and if anything they're a little looser, and I think some of the fluff is starting to come off now finally. Which would be nice, because it's really not helping me on the overhangs. 

For those of you playing along at home, by the way, I'm around a size sixteen currently. (I have the bone structure of a plowhorse and ginormous tits, and start to look awkwardly thin and feel frail if I drop below 160 or so. If I'm in muscle, I should weigh around 175. So yes, of course, all the sports I love are the ones where it pays to be light and quick and strong for your size. Go figure.)

Now, I'm going to shower and make tea and toast myself a bagel and spend the rest of the day working on Seven for a Secret, because I have eaten my live frog and have no other plans, and nothing worse is likely to happen all day.

"RUN!"

http://www.webcomicsnation.com/jkcarrier/glorianna

BBC NEWS | Europe | Oldest known bust of Caesar found


First linked in a note in Google Reader, a bust of Gaius Julius Ceasar from 46 BC was found in the river Rhone in France. It looks a little different than more classical depictions I've seen (compare it to my icon, for example)

http://comicsworthreading.com/2008/05/16/men-of-the-dcu-contest-all-entries/

The contest to create a “Men of the DCU” fashion poster has closed. Here are all the entries I’ve received. However, I haven’t yet determined a winner; please see the end of this post for more on that.
From Philip Rice:

Left to right: Michael Jon Carter (Booster Gold), Jaime Reyes (Blue Beetle), Dick Grayson [...]

http://comicsworthreading.com/2008/05/16/two-mother-teresa-manga/

Review by Ed Sizemore
Covering EduManga: Mother Teresa and Great Figures in History: Mother Teresa.
The Life of Mother Teresa
Mother Teresa was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu on August 26, 1910, in current day Macedonia. Her parents were both devout Catholics. Drane, Agnes’ mother, constantly helped the poor with deliveries of food and clothing. She modeled for her [...]

Having Eddie Izarrd as Reepicheep almost makes up for being stuck with Liam Neeson as Aslan.

http://comicsworthreading.com/2008/05/16/honey-and-clover-dvd-out-this-week/

Honey and CloverBuy this DVD
Out Tuesday on DVD was the live-action version of Honey and Clover (subtitled). I’m curious about it. I enjoyed reading the manga, but I suspect seeing the characters “in person” would make them even easier to relate to (and distinguish).
The plot is the same — college students find love and [...]

Day 5

Still no stone. Pain and nausea was generally non-existent today, though. Went through the entire day and only took one Motrin 600 (instead ot the Vicodin) for pain. Took the opportunity to make a run to the post office and then spend the day playing some GTAIV.

Am still drinking so much water that I have to pee like every hour or two. Have started putting lemon juice in the water since it may help break up the stone and it gives it some flavor.

Thanks to everyone who has commented cheering me on through this. Living alone (when Flavia isn't here, which she hasn't been able to be here much this week) and unable to leave the house much due to painkillers and a fear of being far from home when a wave of pain hits has left me pretty lonely this week. However, seeing comments from folks reminds me that I have a lot of friends I will want to see when this is all over.

http://sw-inku.blogspot.com/2008/05/welcome-to-professional-hell.html

I got my work checked out by several editors, overall it was kind of like every discouraging comment I've ever heard rolled up into 4 hours. Nice, I also got the feeling the editor of DC's MINK line hated my work.

AWESOME.

From rstevens:

Lt. Worf Endorses Obama for President

Shit.  Who am I to argue with a Klingon?  I'm not suicidal.

Originally published at ElizabethGenco.com. You can comment here or there.

Wherein my piece goes live over at the IAF auctions:

“I have been fascinated with shape-shifting for a good many years, and ravens even more. Like most writers, I am also fascinated with symbols. Back when my husband and I lived on opposite coasts, his letters and emails were riddled with symbols and it wasn’t long before they began to arrive in the mail: a leather notebook that he made himself, a wishing stone, captain’s bars. “I’m very talismanic,” he said. I took that as a good sign.

So if I’d been the one gifted with a feather and a vision at the top of Inwood Hill (a perfect place for both, by the by, though I must confess that living in Brooklyn, I don’t get here nearly enough), you’d better believe I’d be searching for clues. Not having any raven’s feathers, I wanted to make a piece that evoked their essence. A piece that reminded me of raven’s wings, but left plenty of room for meaning.”

The price is already up to $62, over twice the opening bid. This kind of stuns me.

I love the design, though. As I mention in the Artist’s Statement (the rest of which you can read here), I first made this necklace about 10 years ago and haven’t since then, though I’ve thought about it many times. The knotting is a lot of work, but the end results are really worth it.

I think the next IAF auction should be knitted and crocheted accessories. There must be some fellow knitters in the interstitial crowd.

I’m feeling a little run-down lately. Lots of good stuff going on, but the minute there’s a void, something seems to rush in to fill it. The Newsarama retailer interview is getting linked around, which is nice. People have told me that they got a lot out of it, which was the idea.

What else? Started Barth’s Tarot novel, The Magician And The Fool. Is wicked good, as we say up North. I love the way he’s bringing Tarot’s Renaissance origins and its occult machinations (traditionally the cause for crankypants among purists, perhaps rightfully so) together in a big ‘ol lovefest. Brilliant! Being a huge fan of having my cake and eating it too, I daresay I’m smitten.

Years ago, Leland had a Queensland Bottle Tree. He really enjoyed growing it, so we bought some seeds on eBay. Things are coming along quite nicely; in fact, we now have two bottle trees growing:

Speaking of symbols, they seem to be a fine one for where we’re at right now.

Our anniversary is next week, right after the full moon. Ooo!

1750 words on Seven for a Secret tonight, to a total of 11,811 (or, if you prefer, 13,750 standard manuscript format.)

13,750 / 30,000 (45.8%)

You know, I might actually finish this thing on time.

And now for the lighter side...

What do you think Scott and Dani are saying? What caption would you use for this picture?

The Olsons love to grow peppers on the sill of their deck. This is one of their pepper plants, up close and personal.