I know from experience how relieving it is to have a big buffer of artwork in my Drawing Every Day queue - I couldn't have gotten through GDC without it - but I also know it takes time.
More time than you expect; it was already getting dark by the time I finished this (compare with Day 97). Though, now that I think about it, I took a call with a potential sponsor for the Embodied AI Workshop, so I guess it is to be expected for it to get later if thirty minutes gets snapped out of drawing time like that.
Trying desperately to get ahead prior to the eclipse. More Goldman studies.
I really think these methodical studies help, and so does the mobile studio, but I also feel that a solid series of practice on ink rendering, also done in a larger format, would do me good as well.
Ah well. One (sub) project at a time, or even three at a time, but not five or ten.
You know, Lisp was by no means a perfect language, but there are times where I miss the simplicity and power of the S-expression format (Lots of Irritating Silly Parentheses) which made everything easy to construct and parse (as long as you didn't have to do anything funny with special characters).
Each language has its own foibles - I'm working heavily in C++ again and, hey, buddy, does it have foibles - but I always thought Lisp got a bad rap just for its format.
-the Centaur
Pictured: a Lisp function definition (with the -p suffix to indicate it is a predicate) with the side effect of printing some nostalgia, and executing that statement at the Steel Bank Common Lisp command line.
So I don't completely burn out on arms and legs, I'm building out my buffer with sketches based on a completely different anatomy book, which has very good planar breakdowns to help analyze shapes:
Well, I guess you can't see it well in that view because I put a clear plastic library-style cover over the book to protect it, but I also guess you'll start seeing more closeups from this book as we move forward, so you'll get the gist eventually.
What you see there is ONE issue of the journal IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles. This single issue is two volumes, over two hundred articles, comprising three THOUSAND pages.
I haven't read the issue - it came in the mailbox today - so I can't vouch for the quality of the articles. But, according to the overview article, their acceptance rate is down near 10%, which is pretty selective.
Even that being said, two hundred articles seems excessive. I don't see how this is serving the community; you can't read two hundred papers, nor skim two hundred abstracts to see what's relevant - at least, not in a timely fashion. Heck, you can't even fully search that, as some articles might use different terminology for the same thing (e.g., "multi-goal reinforcement learning" for "goal-conditioned reinforcement learning" or even "universal value function approximators" for essentially the same concept).
And the survey paper itself needs a little editing. The title appears to be a bit of a word salad, and the first bullet point duplicates words ("We have received 4,726 submissions have received last year.") I just went over one of my own papers with a colleague, and we found similar errors, so I don't want to sound too harsh, but I still think this needed a round of copyedits - and perhaps needs to be forked into several more specialized journals.
Or ... hey ... it DID arrive on April 1st. You don't think ...
-the Centaur
Pictured: the very real horse-choking tome that is the two volumes of the January 2024 edition of TIV, which is, as far as I can determine, not actually an April Fool's prank, but just a journal that is fricking huge.
Out of time due to working on Camp Nano and lots of other stuff, so here's a quick sketch of Viv from Legends and Lattes. It was surprisingly hard to get the hands right without prior pencil sketches, so that's still an area I need to work on practicing.
So today, I found out that Uncle Paul back there is the same age my dad would have been, were he living - forty years older than me. But Dad died almost twenty-five years ago, and Uncle Paul looks younger than my dad did when he died. Which is amazing, because Uncle Paul is about to turn ninety-five. And he's still clear, active, getting around - and even driving. As my Uncle Bill put it once as we were leaving a Thanksgiving dinner, "Wait up. You're ninety, and I'm seventy, and I can't keep up with you? This is bullshit."
No, this isn't an April Fool's joke: I'm the Author Guest of Honor at Clockwork Alchemy 2024! In recognition of my steampunk novel and many steampunk stories, my long association with Clockwork Alchemy, and the fact that they were not able to chase me away (even with a broom), the Clockwork folks have honored me with even more programming than normal! More seriously, though, there will be an author tea, presentations on neurodiversity, an audio reading of Jeremiah Willstone and the Choir of Demons, and even the obligatory airships panel (though this year it will be a more general panel on steampunk vehicles).
Tabbouleh has indeed been made from the tomatoes. I have always been self-conscious about what I cook - I rarely do traditional recipes on the nose, for example using heirloom tomatoes and cinnamon, cumin, allspice and nutmeg in addition to salt and pepper - but I do work at them. I'm using Aunt Nagla's parsley cutting technique and chef Nicola's lemon-soaked bulgur wheat technique and my wife's green onion recommendations to leave in the leafy greens and the traditional lighter olive oil that my parents used. And I spice to taste before finishing - the last bite of which literally made me stagger, it was so good, to me at least.
But whether people actually like it is an open question. This time, for Easter, on the potluck planning thread, someone asked for it specifically, someone else gave me the thumbs up when I said yes, several people complimented me while we were eating - and the family ate almost the whole bowl.
So they didn't NOT like it, impostor syndrome be damned.
Super quick sketch of Cinnamon, as I was in food coma after Easter dinner, then had to write a long review for a journal - which I was already a day late on.
And, counting "a day late" as "missed a thing", I once again "missed a thing" because I was in a meeting which we decided to let run long. Which made the next meeting run long, and we extended it even longer. And because there wasn't a specific thing on my calendar for Saturday evening - it was just on my list of things to do in my todos - I said, "eh, let's let this go long and get this done."
And then something else didn't get done.
I've learned to watch out for this zealously, because for me, at least, going long on a meeting is a dangerous prescription for screwing up your next task. If you think you can go a bit longer ... what are you missing?
Actually, it will become tabbouleh, vegan kibbey nayye, tomato sandwiches, crazy susan salad, and maybe burger garnishment.
But the principle stands: I am creating some buffer, as I had before GDC, in case Easter goes kazoo. So, please enjoy this variety of tomatoes (heirloom NC, heirloom Mexico, on-the-vine stripped of the vine, and conventional slicers).
Ran out of time to postprocess this due to prepping for Easter dinner.
Actually, I got kicked out of the library because Loki is already having his midnight snack prior to going to bed, and it is best not to (literally) open the door to another round of zoomies. The mobile studio to the rescue!
So! You take one of those double-row brushes (see detail below) ...
... and apply it to one of these fuzzy creatures in shedding season (see detail below) ...
... and, violin, you get a tribble:
As far as I can tell, these artisan, hand-crafted tribbles are, unlike Dr. McCoy's version, not born pregnant.
If only most problems we face in this world could be solved as easily as "stop feeding the invasive species without natural predators." And, in fact, like not feeding the trolls, many of them can.
However, cat fuzz is not one of those problems. For decades, I put up with my pets getting horrible tangles and mats during shedding season, great lumpy wads which had to be cut or picked off - almost like tribbles.
But, when my wife and I got those double-pronged brushes and began brushing the cat every day, the mats went away. Though we do have now a tribble proliferation problem, we don't have unhappy cats.
Solving some problems requires disengaging the behavior that creates it (like passing on chips, margaritas and dessert for your problem waistline); others require active maintenance to prevent them from happening (like brushing for the problem of keeping your teeth).
What problem are you facing that would go away if you stop feeding it - or start brushing it?
I didn't manage to keep up with Jesus and Godel this year - best not to take on a third project when you already have two daily projects running - but it did serve as a lot of food for thought, and helped keep me on track in Lent. Learning to give things up can become a powerful tool that we can use elsewhere in our lives. Case in point: today was Good Friday, when Catholics are traditionally supposed to fast.
But a funny thing happened: by preparing simpler meals, I got more done in the day. After fasting on the first one, it was easier to skip the full dinner and just repeat fresh fruit and toast. Which also saved me more time - and helped me go through the fruit in the fridge before it went bad (don't want to go through that again).
Many traditional Christians seem to view religious observances as a stream of gotchas and a chance to be accusatory. But the Sabbath was made for Man, not Man for the Sabbath, and the Law is the same. Even when we go beyond the Law to adopt other religious practices, they, when done properly, can be good for us, giving us the resources to treat others and ourselves better.
At least, that's what I take away from how I observe Good Friday.
And if my hungry belly stings a little, I always remember ... this probably feels better than nails.
... your contributions to my productivity are invaluable.
I do not know how I could remember to get everything done without you.
-the Centaur
Pictured: my whiteboard desk, after Loki sat on it; and while I didn't catch him in the act this time, I have caught him doing it previously, and there we are.
I have been doing a lot of art today, but mostly in Photoshop and Illustrator. Regularly scheduled drawing every day will resume tomorrow, or even tonight if I can finish up my other tasks.
Or, you know what? I have a test image right there. I could draw THAT.
Bam. On one of my "todo" pieces of paper sitting nearby. Take that, autistic inertia.
Thank goodness! At last, I'm happy to announce the Fifth Annual Embodied AI Workshop, held this year in Seattle as part of CVPR 2024! This workshop brings together vision researchers and roboticists to explore how having a body affects the problems you need to solve with your mind.
This year's workshop theme is "Open-World Embodied AI" - embodied AI when you cannot fully specify the tasks or their targets at the start of your problem. We have three subthemes:
Embodied Mobile Manipulation: Going beyond our traditional manipulation and navigation challenges, this topic focuses on moving objects through space at the same time as moving yourself.
Generative AI for Embodied AI: Building datasets for embodied AI is challenging, but we've made a lot of progress using "synthetic" data to expand these datasets.
Language Model Planning: Lastly but not leastly, a topic near and dear to my heart: using large language models as a core technology for planning with robotic systems.
The workshop will have six speakers and presentations from six challenges, and perhaps a sponsor or two. Please come join us at CVPR, though we also plan to support hybrid attendance.
Presumably, the workshop location will look something like the above, so we hope to see you there!
-the Centaur
Pictured: the banner for EAI#5, partially done with generative AI guided by my colleague Claudia Perez D'Arpino and Photoshoppery done by me. Also, last year's workshop entrance.
