This comic was originally posted in 2012.

Thoughts from 1/23/2020: It's a living.

I only had one newly born baby at the time of this comic. Remember people asking for updates about Cannonball as we were doing our best to keep her from arriving early? Now she's got a sibling and Cannonball is almost 8. Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.

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This comic was originally posted in 2013.

Thoughts from 1/24/2020: One of my students, the semester this comic was released, drunkenly typed this up and submitted it as a comment in my course evaluations, which means the text here has been a part of every promotion dossier I've had to submit.

Oh, look, you can see I'm kneeling, like I was in about 60-70% of all the comics I made. That's just bad cropping, there.

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This comic was originally posted in 2008.

Thoughts from 1/25/2020: I did this far more often than I should have and was a terrible example of safety - to be fair, I was following the culture that was set at the time. Now I teach safety and so it's very much a case of "Look at me, kids, do you want to be as pathetic and awful as me?"

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This comic was originally posted in 2017.

Thoughts from 1/26/2020: Continues to apply in all things.

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This comic was originally posted in 2008.

Thoughts from 1/27/2020: There were three comics of this "Sports vs." theme. This is probably the best of the three? I used to play several sports in high school for my Catholic high school, and they would want us to pray as a team before each game, and then we'd usually follow with someone saying the name of a saint, and then the rest of the team responding "pray for us". Usually someone would say "St. Sebastian", who was the patron saint of sports, so the "pray for us" made sense. There'd be a "St. Bernard", since that was the name of our school, and the "pray for us" was obvious. And since we were terrible in almost all sports, I'd throw in a "St. Jude", and everyone would readily respond with a "pray for us", as a matter of practice ... not knowing that St. Jude was the patron saint of hopeless causes. It is fair to say that St. Jude did not come through for us in most cases, or perhaps he stayed true to his cause and thus did come through? Anyway high school sucked.

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This comic was originally posted in 2010.

Thoughts from 1/28/2020: The dumbest thing I did was ending recitations on the site, and I did that just 2 or 3 years in. At that point, I was getting 10 to 20 emails a day from people trying to get a question on the site, and when I ended it, that dropped off completely. Ah well! Of course, I realized this and tried to recapture the connection not long after with 'homeworks' or 'big questions', but it was too late. On the other hand, my actual students would have had a field day with recitations if I was still doing these by the time I became a professor.

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This comic was originally posted in 2018.

Thoughts from 1/29/2020: The day after STW ended, my youngest child, Torpedo, lectured the hungry hungry hippos on making sure to share the food. I remain endlessly delighted by this memory.

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This comic was originally posted in 2018.

Thoughts from 1/30/2020: I think this came out the day after my joke about Batman and Conditioner Gordon that continues to pop up and send out Google alerts with my last name that continue to irritate my Dad.

A few months after STW ended, I did a way-too-long thread on Twitter that ran with and completely beat into the ground this rhyming wordplay scheme.

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This comic was originally posted in 2012.

Thoughts from 1/31/2020: This seems like the totally mature comic that a person would publish just two months before they became a dad. Setting a strong example for the youth of near-tomorrow!

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This comic was originally posted in 2008.

Thoughts from 2/2/2020: The first raptor impression on the site! I totally stole the whole raptor thing from a guy I knew freshman year of college, and he was perfect at the noise and movement, but he transferred out after that year anyway.

There was no re-run yesterday because I briefly participated in Hourly Comic Day. Here are eight I made before giving up on it. Not sure I'll do it again, unless I start actually drawing.

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This comic was originally posted in 2017.

Thoughts from 2/3/2020: This was very hard to make, given a 10-second timer on the camera, and needing to get the book prepared in-between my monkey toes, let alone raising everything to the right height. Also no one appreciated how clever this was, because, alas, that's the way of things.

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This comic was originally posted in 2016.

Thoughts from 2/4/2020: There is a real problem with making endless comics for ten straight years that have your face in them, as you will get set in your mind that is what you look like, and anyway I'm 37 today and I'm now trying to remind myself that that's the way of things. The sad thing is I know I somehow got a little more mature along the way, and that's the real depressing thing. Hurray!

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This comic was originally posted in 2016.

Thoughts from 2/14/2020: Westley was a good dog and he was forced into a labcoat far too many times.

The 'roses are red' rhyming scheme joke is my favorite part of this stupid holiday.

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This comic was originally posted in 2014.

Thoughts from 2/16/2020: This comic was made in honor of my sixth wedding anniversary. I then self-plagiarized it for when I officiated my friend Ron's wedding this past summer, and then self-plagiarized it again for when I officiated my sister's wedding last fall. And now I'm posting it on the day of my parents' 40th wedding anniversary. I have better comics about love but this one kind of drives the message home better than any of them.

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This comic was originally posted in 2017.

Thoughts from 2/18/2020: I just spent my weekend grading 148 exams for two classes and I'm brain numb right now. So here's an old comic about grading.

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This comic was originally posted in 2018.

Thoughts from 3/8/2020: It's International Women's Day so let's destroy the old system, if that's okay with all of you.

Both Torpedo and Cannonball seem likely to continue on this path, as most people of their generation will be, I assume.

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This comic was originally posted in 2014.

Thoughts from 3/10/2020: I remember making this comic six years ago but I did not remember that 'file under' tag, I must have been feeling particularly blasphemous that day.

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This comic was originally posted in 2012.

Thoughts from 4/12/2020: I remember this comic coming out just days before Cannonball was born and even though I was hallucinating to the point that the chair I was sleeping on was literally talking to me, those were certainly simply times than right now.

I hope that all of you and your families are healthy, both physically and mentally. May we all make it through these times as best we can.

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This comic was originally posted in 2010.

Thoughts from 4/13/2020: This was originally thought of in 2003 after a bad summer camp experience, and was developed in response to dumb political talking points in 2010. I have no possible idea why I've been reminded of it now ...

I hope that all of you and your families are healthy, both physically and mentally. May we all make it through these times as best we can.

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This comic was originally posted in 2017.

Thoughts from 5/8/2020: Hey, it's my mom's birthday! Happy birthday, mom. Thanks for not throwing me into the sun.

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UPDATE: Both workshops filled very quickly. I only do these about once a year; apologies for the imbalance. I have set up a system so people who are potentially interested in future small-class lighting workshops can receive advance notice. More info here.

__________
I'll be teaching two, full-day lighting workshops in the suburban Baltimore/DC area on December 6 and 7.

They are two separate one-day events. These are small-group workshops, with a maximum class size of 12 people each day. These are shooting workshops, and you'll be behind (and/or in front of!) a camera for most of the day.

Assuming you arrive at this class with a basic understanding of f/stops and shutter speeds, you will leave with a strong foundation in the fundamentals of off-camera lighting. You will be comfortable using single and multiple lights both alone and/or balanced with a mix of ambient lighting.

All lighting gear will be provided. We will also provide lunch.

You will need to bring a camera that is adjustable in manual mode and has a hot shoe connection for a flash, a lens that covers normal and/or portrait range, one or two fully charged batteries and an empty storage card. Maybe a notebook and pen if you like.

That's it. Just show up ready to learn and to have fun. Leave the rest to me.


Details

Dates:
December 6 and 7, 2019

Time:
9:30am - 5:30pm

Price:
$259

Location:
Sandy Spring Friends Lyceum
17715 Meeting House Road
Sandy Spring, MD 20860


Note; These are the only small-class lighting workshops I'll be teaching in the US this year. In the past, these have tended to fill very quickly. So if this is something you'd like to do, I'd suggest signing up sooner rather than later.


Sign-Up Links

Friday, December 6 [FRIDAY'S CLASS HAS BEEN FILLED]

Saturday, December 7 [SATURDAY'S CLASS HAS BEEN FILLED]

rickowensonline:

LAS PALMAS AVE, HOLLYWOOD, 2002

Next quarter, starting March 30, I will be teaching “Math 247B: Classical Fourier Analysis” here at UCLA.  (The course should more accurately be named “Modern real-variable harmonic analysis”, but we have not gotten around to implementing such a name change.) This class (a continuation of Math 247A from previous quarter, taught by my colleague, Monica […]

At the most recent MSRI board of trustees meeting on Mar 7 (conducted online, naturally), Nicolas Jewell (a Professor of Biostatistics and Statistics at Berkeley, also affiliated with the Berkeley School of Public Health and the London School of Health and Tropical Disease), gave a presentation on the current coronavirus epidemic entitled “2019-2020 Novel Coronavirus […]

A piece I finished five years ago today, on April 15, 2012, for the blog of Gollancz, my UK publisher: Triggers, FlashForward, and Me by Robert J. Sawyer Thanks to the good people at Gollancz, I was recently interviewed in SFX, the world’s top-selling English-language magazine devoted to science fiction. I spoke in that interview […]

Darth Sidious’s master plan becomes reality, and the galaxy will never be the same.

Luke Skywalker discovers a powerful lesson that can be valuable to your own younglings.

In the chilling series finale, Ahsoka and Rex try to survive Order 66 and plot one final escape.

The pandemic is putting America’s deepening class divide into stark relief. Four classes are...

U.S. Financial System “Monitor” Failed to Flash Warning as Fed Pumped $6 Trillion Emergency Liquidity into Wall Street

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 8, 2020 ~  The Office of Financial Research (OFR) was created under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010 to keep the Financial Stability Oversight Council (F-SOC) informed on emerging threats that have the potential to implode the financial system — as occurred in 2008 in the worst financial crash since the Great Depression. The Trump administration has gutted both its funding and staff. One of the early warning systems of an impending financial crisis that OFR was supposed to have created is the heat map above. Green means low risk; yellow tones mean moderate risk; while red tones flash a warning of a serious problem. On September 17, 2019, liquidity was so strained on Wall Street that the Federal Reserve had to step in and began providing hundreds of billions of dollars per week in repo loans. By January 27, 2020 (before … Continue reading →

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Sbírají jedno ocenění za druhým. Nejvíce si ale váží ocenění zákazníků. Své mošty a přesnídávky rodinná firma vyrábí v Bílých Karpatech, v místě, kde je příroda takřka nedotčená a čistá. Takové chtějí i své produkty.

Good things: jack and I went to see the Troy exhibition at the British Museum. With a bit of time and energy left after that, we also visited the Aztec room. And then we went out for pancakes at my favourite spot. And it was generally lovely.

Then we had a go at some tabletop roleplaying, with OSOs and their younger two. jack had put together a cut-down system, roughly D&D based but a lot lot lot less complex and fiddly. And a delightful little one-shot story about saving a baby giant turtle from a suspicious sea captain, set in an archipelago of islands on the back of giant turtles. jack really encouraged us to develop fun characters, and we're all excited to play more in this setting.

I have plans for an exciting date with ghoti_mhic_uait next week, and I think after that no more travel for fun. Honestly I'm not sure about this week either. Maybe it isn't morally or safety-wise sensible to visit a huge tourist spot in the capital. I'm expecting several months of somewhere between boring and terrifying, and I'm not really impatient for that to start.

ghoti_mhic_uait bought me and jack an annual membership of the British Museum for our birthdays. And it was a really good time to visit as members; the Troy exhibition, in its last weekend, was completely sold out for non-members, plus it was lovely to be able to go to the museum semi-spontaneously rather than having to plan for a particular time and buy tickets. I probably wouldn't have made a special trip or paid lots of money to see Troy, but when it was low pressure it was worthwhile.

Basically what they've done is presented objects that represent the myth as told in Classical literature, so lots of vases and friezes and so on, arranged to recount the story of the fall of Troy. And then they have a gallery of Renaissance responses to the Trojan myth, and then a gallery of modern (ish) responses. Nice curation, lots of ideas about how the myth was interpreted through the culture of the time. And a marvellous collection of objects, the BM has really a lot of good blackfigure vases and beautiful neo-Classical objects. There is also quite a lot of commentary about how war is actually bad rather than epic, and thoughtful stuff about attitudes to women, and it's 2020 so we're no longer doing the ridiculous 'no homo' thing about Achilles and Patroclus.

My favourites were this gorgeous little bowl with a really sweet picture of Eris:


And a stunning pre-Raphaelite portrait of Clytemnestra immediately post-murder, which I couldn't photograph due to the lighting, and can't find an image of online.

Then we went to have tea in the special members' room. The main advantage is that it's quieter than the main tea-room, as it isn't in a huge echoing hall. We reckoned we had enough time and energy left to look at one more thing, and Jack was excited to see the famous double-headed turquoise snake from the meso-American gallery. I fell slightly in love with this grumpy woman who shares the room with it:


On the way we wandered past a staircase with some cool mosaics, the Wellcome gallery with has a Moai that they're in the process of returning to the Rapa Nui peoples they stole it from, and the gallery of indigenous North American stuff, much of which is again, stolen. Also the Enlightenment room, which I'm interested to go back to with more time, partly because it contains more stuff that the British Museum actually has a right to than a lot of the galleries!

Dinner was pancakes and mango lambic beer at My Old Dutch in Holborn, which has been a tradition since I visited the BM with my friend MK and his then two-year-old.

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It's a new month, and that usually means I'm supposed to write a monthly update on the progress with Kandria. Thinking about that though made me feel very depressed because I realised that I hadn't really done anything at all for the game, all of April.

I can blame however much I want of that on the quarantine and university stress, or whatever else, but it won't change the fact that there has not been much progress on any front. While I have been slacking a lot, it's not like I haven't been working at all - plenty of time has gone into Courier, after all.

When I had this realisation yesterday, I tried my best to push myself to work on the game any way I could, but I failed to find anything that I could actually convince myself to do. That isn't to say that there aren't things to do; god forbid there's a tonne of things! Tuning combat, drawing animations, writing the UI, fixing dialogue, starting on enemy AI, optimising performance - just to name a few. And yet, despite the breadth and depth of things to do, there was absolutely nothing that looked appealing to me.

This kind of feeling is nothing new to me. It's a creative block, and happens more often that I'd like to admit. It's also why I often don't like to start long running projects, because I'm afraid of a creative block that would ruin it. The worst part about the creative block is that there's no remedy for it. You just get stuck in a rut, and it sucks a whole lot for a completely unpredictable amount of time. Often what I end up doing, whether consciously so or not, is switching to another project and just working on that.

So far that project has been Courier, but that's at its end and I'm also starting to feel burnt out on it, too. I don't have any other projects queued up that I'd like to tackle, or new ideas on what to do at the moment, so I'm just... stuck.

I suppose the right thing to do in this situation is to take it easy and not fret too much over it, since that's often one of the many factors causing the block. I've never been good at actually doing that, though. Maybe I should try to take a break from programming in general? I don't know.

You may be wondering why I'm writing this all to begin with. Well, partly I feel like I promised to do monthly and weekly updates, and I really hate to break that promise without notice. Another part is that I just feel like I owe you the discretion to tell you what's going on with me. I'm very thankful for the email replies and general responses I've gotten for Kandria so far, I really am! Because of that genuine interest, I feel all the more pressured not to disappoint. Since I have nothing to show though, I thought the only proper course of action is to just be open and direct about it. So I'll just say it again: aside from updating the public demo, no progress has been made at all.

Maybe it would help me to have a more open discussion about this topic in general, instead of just it being me telling you that I'm in a bad place. So please, let me know: have you been in similar situations before? What helped you deal with them? Is there something in Kandria I could try to focus on that you, personally, would like to see?

You can reach me at shinmera@tymoon.eu.

Last Five Minutes of Fame

To what lengths does one have to go in order to achieve fame? It wasn’t until years later that by simply sucking on someone’s cock (Monica Lewinsky and Kim Kardashian) that the distance one had to go to achieve fame was not that far at all. The only distance they had to go...was down.

I Mean…What?!?

Man die fietspad bezaait met prikkeldraad, spijkers en glas praat zichzelf aan de galg tegen visser die stiekem filmt  Het Laatste Nieuws

Flushed with the feeling of success that comes from having cleaned my office to such a degree that the rugs are now visible, I thought today that I would take on the problem of excess books. Surely there are some I don't actually need. So I chose a shelf at near-random (it was one of those actually accessible without moving the boxes of books stacked before it to another location), and started going through both rows (the shelves are double-stacked, of course) to see what they contained.

Only to discover that the shelf was stocked with books placed there at seeming random. Mr. Evelyn's diary lies cheek-to-jowl with Gertrude Stein's Picasso. Jeff Danziger's Teed Tales abuts, appropriately enough, a history of Vermont. There is a collection of stories by T. Corgahesson Boyle, Zora Neale Hurston's autobiography, a novel by Sean Stewart, and a collection of essays by Ursula K. Le Guin. These last two, by the way, are misfiled since I have a science fiction section arranged almost alphabetically by author and a designated place for stacks of SF criticism and related essays. Which is where Gwyneth Jones' Joanna Russ should be as well.

Here's T. H. White's wonderful collection of mythical animals from medieval bestiaries, The Book of Beasts. The Return of Fursey! Mosses from an Old Manse. Flann O'Brien's The Best of Myles reappears from hiding; after I've obsessively reread it a few times,  I'll have to hide it somewhere else among my books, if I'm ever to read anything else. Oh, but there's also John McPhee's The Pine Barrens, which some of us persist in thinking his best book. Though it has competition. And here is a battered but charming old hardcover of Charles Fort's The Book of the Damned. I have a biography of Fort around here somewhere, though I doubt I'll find it today. Some few of these I haven't read--Fishing from Earliest Times is one example, though I'm sure I'll get to it soon. But I've read every story in The Corrector of Destinies, Melville Davidson Post's extremely odd collection of detective fiction (sort of), and I'll have to blog about it here someday.

There are thirty shelves of books on one wall of my office and my first attack upon the one provided me with nothing to cull,  And I've put aside a short stack of books to read or reacquaint myself with. Not have I done much to organize it--but wait! Here, just one shelf below is Damon Knight's Charles Fort. Up it goes, alongside The Book of the Damned, so nobody could say the last hour was wasted. Though it came close.

Nor was I able to impose a theme upon the shelf, other than Books I Am Delighted to Possess. But maybe that's enough.

In any case, it will have to do.


Above: For technical reasons, I'm having difficulty uploading a picture of the wall of books in my office. So here's a pic of part of the wall of books in my bedroom. 

The mayor's list of ideas to alleviate crowding offers little relief in the short term.

Mayor John Tory announced a ten-point plan to fight congestion and delays on the TTC at a press conference just before Toronto Council began its final debates on the 2018 budget. Through the entire budget process, starting with Tory’s cohort on the TTC Board and continuing through the City Budget and Executive committees, transit has […]

The post A Last Minute Ten, Nine, Eight … Point Transit Plan appeared first on Torontoist.

Keesmaat’s Next Venture, Shitty Architecture Men, Mod Squad, Presto Problemo, Bench Press, and more in this debut edition.

Another Glass Box is a weekly roundup of urban design news in Toronto (and occasionally beyond), in bite-size pieces. It’s curated by Dan Seljak, who’s done marketing and communications work for architecture and construction companies for the last seven years—and who still loves this city enough to line up for brunch.  Content warning: some of the […]

The post Introducing: Another Glass Box, a new weekly architecture feature appeared first on Torontoist.

Mayoral foibles, Google's urban charm offensive, finalists for George Brown's new wood building, and how many avocado toasts will you need to give up?

1 Please don’t poke the mayor – Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson found himself criticized in light of calling George Bemi’s award-winning Ottawa Library a “Stalin-ist bunker”. Watson’s rebuke wasn’t so elegant, but the following debate explored how contemporary ideas of wellness and accessibility requires real investment in restoration and renovation. Here in Toronto, Mayor John […]

The post Another Glass Box: The Stalinist “Bunker” Edition appeared first on Torontoist.

Today I watched two movies The Last Exorcism and Case 39. Here are my thoughts and review of both movies.

1. In pictures: Last supermoon of 2020 rises on a world grappling to overcome pandemic  DAWN.com
2. May's flower moon lights up the sky around the globe  ABC News
3. Hurry up: Last chance to see a supermoon this year  Euronews
4. Last supermoon of the year, Photos News & Top Stories  The Straits Times
5. Stunning supermoon lights up New Zealand's skies overnight  New Zealand Herald
6. View Full coverage on Google News

1. Researchers build the world's fastest 'soft' robot, THREE TIMES faster than the last record holder  Daily Mail
2. Soft robots can now run like cheetahs and swim like marlins  Engadget
3. Inspired by cheetahs, researchers build fastest soft robots yet  Tech Xplore
4. Meet the world's fastest soft Robot!  NEWS9 live
5. Fastest Soft Robots To-Date Developed by Researchers  Unite.AI
6. View Full coverage on Google News

What's your grandma cooking for Thanksgiving? These lucky people are dancing, parodying and rapping about all the delicious potential for tasty holiday foods.

Keep up with all of the games and fun right here!