Year: 2020

Probably 🙂

Oh ! Just spotted that WordPress allows captions on images. That’s new … never had that on Blogger. And there I go with the opening up a post and goi…. SQUIRREL !

To be honest though, I should probably have what amounts to the Cone of Shame from the same movie that made the Squirrel joke thing popular. Up was a remarkable film, one of the best to come out from Pixar. Going from heartwarming to heart breaking, all in the intro before the main body of the movie kicked off. I should watch it again some day.

Some of you may be coming here via a Work Thing that’s probably been published by now. HI THERE ! And welcome. I try to keep this as a place where I talk about what I’m thinking and things I’ve been doing. Like the internet spaceships :

There we go. New toy played with.

If I’ve been someplace, I’ll usually talk about that as well although I do notice that I didn’t put anything on the old blog about a trip around SS Great Britain that happened almost two years ago now. That was a good little walk around the ship and I’d thoroughly recommend people going for a look when things are less scary out there than they are now.

I’ll have to post the rest of those pictures some day. And then there’s the Lego and other building things I’ll do. I like how they steadily come together. Sometimes the designers of the model will hide little Easter Eggs away inside as well, which is something I like a lot.

The art is something that’ll appear when it’s done as well, although there are limits on what I can post here. Some of what I do is modifications made to other people’s work. Typically emotes … those will appear on their discord servers and I’ll send them on to other people I know as well. But it’s a Really Bad Thing to essentially copy someone else’s art and take it as your own. That’s one reason I’ve been looking to acquire an art style of my own, that way I own more of I post here. (I note that WordPress has added a (C) to the bottom of the page too !)

I try to keep this space relatively free of current events and what’s happening in the world. You’ll see far too much about what’s happening in other spaces and I find it a massive drag on the psyche … especially as you have to apply a heavy quality filter to everything you see because pretty much everything posted is bent one way or another. But yeah, there’s far too much of the bad stuff out there, I like to keep this space free of it unless there’s something I really have to get out of my mind and into typed in thoughts.

The blog template as a whole is something that still needs more work. The blogger version has a couple of lists of links and I want to bring that back too. It also has a blogroll where I can see if people have posted new stuff recently. That’s an excellent thing to have. But I’ll look to keep the white text on black basic format. Heavily contrasting colours aid readability and dark mode is easier on the eyes, it means you don’t have Big White Background blaring out at you. Black text on white paper works for books but I’m a convert to dark mode for screens.

I haven’t done anything really new lately with the art (outside of posing screenshots), it’s all been modifications. Spooky emotes are in and I’ve spookified three of them. One got adopted and is on the lovely Margaret Krohn’s discord (website link). I didn’t like the middle one and I don’t know whether the recipient of the third liked her one. But I was very happy that the animation conversion of another thing for Maggie K’s discord got adopted.

It’s one thing getting positive feedback, that’s always awesome especially to someone who lives on that like me. It’s a whole other thing having your art adopted for someone else’s posts or pages. That goes far beyond “I like your stuff”. People from work may vaguely recognise another one :

That was a fun little one that I did a little while ago. I’ve been finding that taking of pictures of what’s on the paper using a camera does odd things to the colour balance and it can turn the paper into grey, which the image disappears into.

That’s my current avatar, edited and updated to bring him out of the page some more. I left the grey down at the bottom to show him sitting on something. Oh and I still have the awkward feelings about how his knee is bending the wrong way :-D. The book needs tidying as well, I deleted too much when removing the grey.

That’s the kind of style I’m aiming for with my own drawings. I was a big fan of Garfield and Calvin and Hobbes as a kiddie. Those were very simply drawn cartoons that were absolute genius. If you look up close at a lot of drawn cartoons or animations, it’ll probably surprise you how simple they actually are. Simple works !

But simple also needs precision that I don’t have yet. The artists I like tend to have very precise lines and curves, which they then fill with colour. I’m sure the process behind the image is a bit more complex than that.

I’m a bit limited though by my body … I’m having a fair few upper body issues at the moment. My neck and shoulders are suffering in particular from stiffness that’s getting more and more uncomfortable. The shoulder issues extend down my arm into my right wrist as well. It was with a fair bit of relief at work when I was able to shift from doing written meeting notes and into things I’d type into a Word document or a draft email. Typing is way easier for me than writing or … drawing.

That said, the graphics tablet I have is great for doing those sketches. And I need to draw more of my dwagon alphabet and the dwagon rock band. Maybe next year’s April Fool will be setting up a rock band, although I did that already in 2015. Gosh, that’s longer ago than I thought.

And this post has gone on a bit longer than I thought it might too !

Physically – struggling. I need to greatly reduce how much of certain games I play. I haven’t been back to Final Fantasy XIV and may have to add Star Trek Online to that danger list as well. Elite has been on a bit of a break due to being disillusioned with the combat side of it.

Motorsport Manager has been a great one as it’s mostly hands off with occasional intervention for tactics. I may well see if I can lead 3 teams to success this time around, swapping from single seaters to GT cars and then into Endurance, with the switch happening when the team wins.

I haven’t written about music for a while either, that’s overdue ! I can happily report that my ears are back to normal again, which came as a bit of a surprise because I didn’t get that POP feeling from them. I suffer with tinnitus as a baseline (which is probably why I like multiple sound sources going on) but had a blocked ear for a few weeks too which was affecting me more than I’d like (headaches as well).

Wrap up time I think … for any new people, this is a fairly typical post where I’ll start out with one idea, go SQUIRREL, talk about something else for a bit and maybe, just maybe get back to the original theme.

I’ll hopefully see you next time !

PS There’s a few extra posts around in that archive too, I need to delete them ! The proper import tool didn’t work, so I had to use a messier alternate. Instead of a little over 1650 posts, it added in 2841 … I need to get deleting !

PS2 I just had a mental image of a Dwagon holding a big eraser too. So that may happen if my hands are up to it.