and just like that, they're married
9/1 '22
Our son married his sweetie, who wore a dress made by my sweetie.

Our son married his sweetie, who wore a dress made by my sweetie.
In "Odd Thomas" (2013), Anton Yelchin (1989-2016) says "I'm sorry your life was so short" but it might have been said by anyone, and about anyone.
I did a little experimental thread over on my Twitter stream. I wanted to encourage a couple of things - namely audience interaction and I wanted to provide them an actual reason to share the thread.
Simply put: I provided a series of polls for folks to vote on to determine how I constructed a monster.
Here's a link to the thread in case you're curious.
The results to the first poll (bipedal or quadrapedal) was:
The second poll was what kind of terrain the creature spends its time in. The audience chose subterranean so I added digging claws and narrowed the torso to make the creature more wedge shaped.
The third poll was how many heads the creature has. Crowd said 2.
And the fourth and final poll was what kind of tail to give it (or to give it none). The crowd picked a long straight tail with a club end.
After the final poll, I finished the tail and posted it and then felt like I should go ahead and paint it. Since I was already in an experimental mode, I took the sketch, blurred it a bit, and then mixed the sketch lines in with the digital paint layers. The final results are at the top of the post.
Here's the process video if you enjoy that.
I really need to get back to the work for my Patreon page, but this was an excellent little experiment and I plan to do it again in the near future.
This is the character I'm currently working on for Patreon:
I am not particularly a tea snob.
In fact, for my morning jolt I prefer Stok cold-brew coffee. But, I do like an afternoon tea on occasion--a big cup that I can slowly sip over a period of hours. So, I have certain tea requirements. It can't go bitter; it has to have that muscatel taste; it has to be forgiving to varying preparation techniques; it must be loose leaf. It must stand up without milk or sugar. Today, I ran out of my secondary backup tea and had to switch over to my tertiary backup tea. Ugh. Some cheap and nasty Assam blend. About half way through, I had already ordered $75 of tea, which seems like a lot but it's probably four years worth of tea. But still, this cup is that bad.
Maybe I am a tea snob.
If you offer me a cuppa Earl Grey, you *will* get a tea lecture.
Midjourney created this image, given the prompt "white cat named Spike in the style of Marvel." If you've seen my cat, and if you haven't you must be new here, this is pretty amazing. I picked my favorite of the four initial images and upscaled it. I didn't do any further refinement.
Not a real photograph. Dall-E created this image, given the prompt "a big white cat named Spike with stripes like a raccoon and spots like a cow photorealistic."
My privacy-minded partner thought at first this was a photo of our cat.
So Dall-E is just better, right? It depends. The above was Dall-E's best effort on the same Marvel Spike genre prompt Midjourney nailed so well. I attempted to refine this with the words "Marvel cinematic universe" and so on, but it didn't get any closer to the concept.
Midjourney created these images from the prompt "Midjourney's mother." I didn't pick a winner or do any further refinement.
It is difficult not to read into this. But is it just telling me what I want to hear? And if it is, so what?
Midjourney created this image from the prompt "the true purpose of Midjourney." Three of these can be understood simply as riffing on the word "journey." The one at upper right is perhaps just riffing on images frequently associated with the words "true purpose." So as lovely as they are, they don't make me go "hmm" as much as the previous set.
"Dall-E's mother photorealistic" yielded this image, and other images of animal mothers. One was a chimpanzee. If they were all chimpanzees, it could be considered a little cheeky. But emphasizing one chimpanzee out of four images would just be cherry-picking on my part.
Dall-E generated these images for the prompt "the true purpose of Dall-E." There's a theme, at least for three of them, but if there's a message here this monkey isn't clever enough to figure it out.
A Google employee who claims their text-generating AI is a sentient being has been fired. On the whole, I tend to agree with those who say that particular AI (not Dall-E or Midjourney) is probably not a sentient being. And yet, I also agree with those who have serious questions about our ability to judge that. This will be more of an issue as the line gets fuzzier. And it's getting fuzzy pretty fast.
The second piece of tape is my doing...
11:00 all hands at work -- Didn't pay attention; pre-coffee. Virtual meeting anyway. Grab some lunch.
12:00-15:00 work - Determined that yesterdays mini-project was completely unneeded as I was testing the wrong thing. Also, determined that third-party test team isn't going to test much with their firewall blocking important stuff. Let's see if they bluster or just admit fault and get on with it.
15:00-16:30 overview of new security project - Guess into whose lap this is getting dumped. Correct, it's me! It should be easy-peasy because there is no deadline and this project is mostly an extention of stuff I already wrote. I can't decide if should be offended that I wasn't in on the design and planning.
16:30-17:30 digital ad pitch - Will my county's Democratic party buy some targeted ads for the primaries or the general? Probably, but as a technical advisor, this doesn't put anything else on my plate. Yet.
17:30-18:30 work - Find a comment I wrote that's cut off in the middle. Did I do that? Why wasn't it caught in a code review? Because as a senior guy, no one challenges my code. Fix the comment, I think. I think someone besides me changed the code since I wrote the comment. Too lazy to verify that theory and also I don't want verification that I'm losing it.
18:30 commute - note: I work from home.
19:30 - singing lesson. My drummer is really hyped about improving our background vocals, so here I am. Now, instead of struggling to find my pitch while playing my bass, I'll be thinking about the shape of mouth and how I'm using my diaphram while struggling to find my pitch while playing my bass. Ultimately, this could pay off but as a noob vocally, it's fairly overwhelming.
20:30 commute - note: forty minutes is too long a comute for sixty minute lesson
22:00 work - Decide I'm too tired to properly review my own code so I just test some boundary cases to make sure nothing is broken. Nothing seems broken, almost too quiet... Suddenly, the network at work goes down. Enough for today...
Just a super rough series of sketches (done separately and then laid out together) and there are plenty of issues, but I really enjoyed doodling these while playing D&D tonight.
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It's going to be pretty much the same as my Arizona entry. I.e., I drove through it, ate fast food, slept in a rest stop. Unless I remember anything ANYTHING else. It's very possible I've been to Little Rock for some software training and just don't remember. I think maybe MAYBE as a newly minted graduate in 1993 I stopped in the town of Hot Springs and couldn't figure out how to engage with tourist trap spas. But I'm not sure
So yeah, been to Arkansas. Kinda.
So it turns out I don't have many memories of Arizona. I've driven through it enough to see just a wee bit of it.
In May 2021, while driving back from Utah hikes with my brother, we stopped at the Le Fevre Overlook in the Kaibab National Forest and gazed at the Vermillion Cliffs. We stopped and got gas in Tuba City. We drove through Hopi reservation and then in Navajo land. We got McDonalds at Window Rock right before we crossed into New Mexico.
In a similar underwhelming way, in September 2020 driving back from the proto-renegade burn in Nevada, I slept 5 hours in a parking lot behind a closed perhaps abandoned Chevron just off I-40. I remember being aggravated by not being able to find a proper reststop on I-40 after many many hours of driving. In the predawn I started driving again, then got gas & breakfast at 6am at a truckstop an hour down the road, before driving straight through to New Mexico.
I have Monument Valley on my short list, but it was pandemic closed in 2020 and 2021. And yes, I do realize there is a Grand Canyon there, as well as I'm sure other interesting things to see/do. I just haven't done them.
But it still counts as having been there! I both ate and slept there! So yeah, I've been to (mostly through) Arizona.
Very lovely indeed.