I just learned I only have months to live. This is what I want to say. – The Boston Globe
What a storyteller. Boston Globe journalist Jack Thomas, who wrote about his impending death a few months ago, made me laugh out loud several times in this touching essay. Very powerful. He was 83. I’ve had the privilege of having spent more than 60 years working for newspapers. There was not a day when it…
Random #steampunk workstation with a porthole, because why not. Most of the surfaces are flat, with lovely details added through bitmap magic. Those curved stairs, when stacked, form a spiral staircase. #blender3d #blender3dart #design #aesthetics
Behind the art: The Westmoreland’s ‘Death of Elaine’ beloved of staff and visitors
I always slow down and spend some time with this painting when I visit my local art museum. This scene from the Arthurian legends has been out of exhibition for a while and will be back with a new frame Oct 16. A scene of mourning at Camelot, the castle of the legendary King Arthur,…
More #blender3d #cgi practice. Added workstations underneath the chief engineer's station. #steampunk #design #aesthetics #blender3dart #selfcare
Engrossing but difficult to watch: “Man in Cave” documentary on caver Floyd Collins
I’m conflicted. This is a very well done animated documentary, creating visuals that were not part of the original press coverage of Floyd Collins, the caver trapped in Sand Cave in 1925, and the subject of the first media circus, fed by the emerging new medium of radio journalism. The animation adds sight gags and…
First time experimenting with depth of field. The pilot’s perch in a fancy #steampunk cruiser. #blender3d #blender3dart #design #aesthetics
Between static hand-coded HTML pages and modern content-management systems, there used to be a wonderful bazaar of “mildly dynamic” websites
When I started my blog in 1999 (by adding a date to a “Link of the Day” archive I had been maintaining for a year or so), I coded everything in HTML, by hand. This was before Facebook, before YouTube, before Wikipedia, and around the time that the domain google.com first went live. Most of…
Combined, base color, roughness and metallic passes. #Blender3d steampunk control panel.
Many things in the world are awful. But creating this #steampunk #blender3d control panel helped me pass an hour or two quite joyfully. #design #aesthetic
No, this pie chart does not mean that anyone at CNBC believes the typical 25 year old earns a salary of $100k/y and spends $825/mo on rent
Tell me you didn’t click the link without telling me you didn’t click the link. I don’t watch any TV news and CNBC plays no role in my life, but come on. This post has gotten thousands of likes and generated hundreds of comments, many of them suggesting that CNBC is out of touch for…
The Lost Art of Paste-Up
When I started using a word processor as a middle schooler in the early 1980s, I recognized the editing commands “cut” and “paste” as metaphors. Here’s a short video showing the physical cutting and pasting that was required to arrange paragraphs of text prepare a document for mass production. According to layout rules, you’re not…
Past Tense, Part 2 (#StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch, Season 3, Episode 12) Sisko must channel social unrest on Earth in 2024
Rewatching ST:DS9 After the recap of Part 1, Sisko, in the persona of Gabriel Bell, reminds loose cannon BC (from the “ghost” gang) that they have to keep the hostages safe as their bargaining chips. Just when BC starts showing Sisko some respect, the veteran cop Vin tries to be a hero, and Sisko has…
Past Tense, Part 1 (#StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch, Season 3, Episode 11) Plot contrivance particles strand Sisko, Dax & Bashir on Earth in 2024
Rewatching ST:DS9 The Defiant is ferrying Sisko, Dax and Bashir to Earth for a Starfleet symposium. After a nice bit about how “There’s no place like home, no matter what color the water is,” and some social comedy about tonight’s formal dinner with an admiral, we get a video call from Quark that fills out…
More #steampunk #blender3d goodness. #design #cgi #blender3dart
Another social media post attacks journalists for doing their jobs — Updated Elijah McClain autopsy
If you’ve been following the sad story of Elijah McClain, a Black man who went into cardiac arrest and died in police custody in a Denver suburb in 2019 (after telling the officers who were arresting them that he was unarmed, that he doesn’t even kill flies, and that he loved them) you might know…
‘I saw the possibility of what could be done – so I did it’: revolutionary video game The Hobbit turns 40
.. Realising that statistics wasn’t for her, Megler answered a newspaper advert for a part-time programming job at a local software company called Melbourne House. It was 1980, and she was halfway through a course that focused on designing operating systems and developing programming languages. “The day I was hired, the first thing my boss…
Bilbo’s party sociological infographic.
Fascination (#StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch, Season 3, Episode 10) Comic crush after crush; that’s about it.
Rewatching ST:DS9 A character-driven farce, in which most of the major cast and several recurring characters get massive crushes and/or are comically crushed upon. Jake is sullen because his now-former girlfriend Mardah has left for school, but reluctantly agrees to attend the Bajoran Gratitude Festival with his Space Dad. O’Brien is jittery because Keiko and…
Defiant (#StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch, Season 3, Episode 9) Riker visits DS9, and it’s he who’s titularly “defiant”
Rewatching ST:DS9 After an overworked Kira snaps at Bashir, the good doctor’s prescription is an evening at Quark’s, which includes a chance meeting with Commander Riker, on leave from the Enterprise-D. The next morning when Dax pries her for details, Kira insists they just talked. That evening, Riker bumps into her on the promenade and…