When stopping, my buddy commented "it was a gas station as if done by Pixar." After seeing it, I said "It's like Pixar had done a theme park for their movie entitled 'Murica'."
His response? "They already did that movie. It's called WALL-E."
A comparison of hand and foot bones from Goldman. Interestingly, the big toe and thumb both seem to have lost one bone compared to the other fingers / toes. I wonder whether that happened as an evolutionary convergence, or whether they're controlled by the same homeobox or something and were both lost at the same time.
Did I get that word right? Huh, homeobox is the right concept. But, strangely, I remember last thinking about it in a place which I thought was a dream place - a road leading to a bookstore - but now I recall several visits to that bookstore, including a visit to a nearby mall to eat. Huh. I wonder if that was real.
Above is what looks like a massive anthill at the border of the "lawn" and "forest" parts of our property. It's been getting bigger and bigger over the years, and that slow growth always reminds me of Mr. Morden's comments in Babylon 5 about the Shadows' plan to make lesser races fight:
JUSTIN: "It's really simple. You bring two sides together. They fight. A lot of them die, but those who survive are stronger, smarter and better." MORDEN: "It's like knocking over an ant-hill. Every new generation gets stronger, the ant-hill gets redesigned, made better."
But the Shadows were wrong, and what we're seeing there isn't a redesigned anthill: it is a catastrophe, a multigenerational ant catastrophe caused by climate, itself brought to light by a larger, slow-motion human catastrophe caused by climate change.
Humans have farmed, built and burnt for a long time, but only now, in the dawn of the Anthropocene - that period of time where human impacts on climate start to exceed natural variation of climate itself, beginning roughly in the 1900s - have those effects really come back to bite us on a global, rather than local, scale.
For my wife and I, this took the form of fire. Fire was not new in California: friends who lived on homes on ridges complained about their high insurance costs as far back as I can remember. But more and more fires started burning across our area, forcing other friends to move away. Then three burned within five miles of our home, with no end to the drought in sight, and we decided we'd had enough.
We moved to my ancestral home, a place where water falls from the sky, aptly named Greenville. And we moved into a house whose builders knew about rain, and placed it on a hill with carefully designed drainage. They created great rolling lawns, manicured in the traditional Greenville "let's fucking force it with chemicals and lawnmowers to look like it was Astroturf" which we are slowly letting go back to nature.
In this grass, and in the absence of pesticides, the ants flourished. But this isn't precisely a natural environment: they're flourishing in an expanse of grass that is wider and more rounded than the rough, ridged forest around it. In the forest, runoff from the rains is channeled into proto-streams leading to the nearby creek; at the edge of the lawn, water from the house and lawn spills out in a flood.
Each heavy rain, the anthills building up in the sloped grass are washed to the mulch beds that mark the boundary of the forest, and there the ants start to re-build. But lighter rains can destroy these more exposed anthills, forcing them to slowly migrate back up into the grass. That had already happened here: that was no longer a live anthill, and unbeknownst to me, I was standing in its replacement.
No worries, for them or me; I noticed the anthill was dead, looked down, and moved off their territory just as the ants were swarming out of their antholes, fit to kill (or at least to annoyingly nibble). But the great red field there, as wide as a man is tall and twice as long, was not a functioning anthill: it was the accumulated wreckage of generation after generation of ant catastrophes.
In the quote, Mr. Morden was wrong: knocking over an anthill doesn't make it come back better designed. Justin got it a little better: the strongest and smartest do often survive a battle - but they walk away with scars, and sometimes the winners may just be the lucky ones. Conflict may not make people better - it can just leave scarred soldiers, wounded refugees and a destroyed landscape.
Now, the Shadows were the villains of the story, but every good villain needs a good soundbite that makes them sound at least a little bit good, and it's worth demolishing this one. "The anthill comes back better stronger and better designed" is designed to riff on the survival of the fittest - the notion that creating survival pressure will lead to stronger, smarter, and better individuals.
But evolution doesn't work that way. Those stronger, smarter, and better individuals have to have existed in the population in the first place. Evolution only leads to improvements over time at all if the variation of the population continues to yield increasingly better individuals generation after generation - and that is not at all guaranteed. The actual historical pattern is far closer to the opposite.
Now, people who should know better often claim that evolution has no direction. I think that's because there's a cartoon version of evolution where things tend to get more complex over time, and they want to replace it with another cartoon version of evolution which is blind and random - perhaps spillover from Dawkins' attempts to argue with creationists using his Blind Watchmaker idea.
But that's not how evolution works at all. Evolution does have a direction - just like gravity does. Only at the narrow level of the fundamental laws operating on idealized, homogeneous substrates can we say gravity is symmetric, or evolution is directionless. Once the scope of our investigation expands and the structure of the world gets complex - once symmetry is broken - then gravity clumps matter into planets and gives us "up", and evolution molds organisms into ecosystems and gives us "progress towards complexity".
But the direction of evolution is a lot more like the gradient of air around a planet than it is any kind of "great chain of being". Once an ecosystem exists, increased complexity provides an advantage for a small set of organisms, and as they spread into the ecosystem, a niche is created for even more complex organisms to exceed them. But, just like most of the atmosphere is closest to the surface of a planet, most of the organisms will remain the simplest ones.
Adding additional selection pressure won't give you more complex organisms: it will give you fewer of them. The more stress on the ecosystem, the harder it is for anything to survive, the size of the various niches will shrink, and even if the ecosystem still provides enough resources to support complex organisms, the size of the population that can evolve will drop, making it less likely for even more complex ones to arise - and that's assuming it doesn't get so rough that the complex organisms go extinct.
Eventually, atoms bouncing around in the atmosphere may fly off into space - just like, eventually, evolution produced a Neil Armstrong who flew to the moon. But pouring energy into the atmosphere may slough the upper layers off into space, leaving a thin remnant closest to the planet - and, so, stressing an ecosystem will not produce more astronauts; it may kill them off and leave everyone down in the muck.
Which gives us a hint to what the Shadows' real plan was. They're portrayed as an ancient learned race, so presumably they knew everything I just shared - but they're also portrayed as the villains, after all, and so they ultimately had a self-serving goal in mind. And if knocking over an anthill doesn't make it come back better designed, then their real goal was to keep kicking over anthills so they themselves would stay on top.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Me, near sunset, taking picture of what I thought was a live anthill - until I looked more closely.
There's a lot to do on that boat. And, despite expectations, it looks worse once transferred, because while I had crossed off some items, the act of writing them down reminded me of more things to do ...
Clockwork Alchemy is just a notch over two weeks away (actually, a notch less, by the time this scheduled post goes up) and may I say AAAAAAH!
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!
