Ashley Wood is an Australian illustrator who has an interesting technique which combines traditional painting, digital photography and graphic software. He’s also quite a busy guy, working on the Official Metal Gear Solid comic and creatign works for major companies like Dreamworks, Random House, Marvel Comics, Warner Bros. and Konami.
You may recall how I ballsed up Christmas.
Audra and I decided to have a new year’s do-over.
I made breakfast in bed, we gave each other gifts, and had pretty much the greatest time that two people can have.
This is the singing bowl she gave me (like her, it is amazing):
2011 is going to be a great year.
…
During the solstice, a handful of us tried to watch the eclipse, but were thwarted by cloud cover. I’m not big on arbitrary holidays, but I love the solstice, and I love eclipses. Astronomical events bring me a kind of clockwork peace; a reminder that no matter how hard we might fuck things up, everything’s going to keep going. The solstice is when I think about what I’ve done in the last six months, and what I’m going to do in the next. A starting point and a finish line.
Eclipses are incredible, regardless of what kind they are. We are very lucky, on this island earth. Do you know how rare total solar eclipses must be, out there across the stars? They’re not a perfectly normal, common effect of planetary motion, like a sunrise, or the waxing of a moon. It just so happens that our sun is 400 times bigger than the moon, and 400 times further away. That’s why the disk of the moon covers the body of the sun almost perfectly, letting us see the corona. And in a few hundred million years, the moon will have moved far enough away from the earth that there will never be another eclipse.
Before then, remember to look up.
I don’t know how to deal with Christmas. Aside from some great hangouts with great people, the entire thing is just a disaster, and it’s still a better-than-average year. Every time it comes around, I think “well, maybe it’ll be alright this time”, and then it’s just catastrophe after catastrophe.
Usually it’s at least someone else’s fault. Family crisis, funeral, hospitals, cops, whatever. This year it was all me. I spent yesterday evening and today with Audra, and I’m so stressed out about the possibility of having a terrible fucked-up holiday that I have managed to:
Fuck.
…
A head full of noise and muscles singing like high-voltage wires; all I want for Christmas is to sleep until spring.
While garters are considered rather old fashioned, they can be quite useful if your socks keep falling down as they keep you from tugging them back up all day long.
Socks aren’t the first item in our wardrobe we give thought to; however, they are an important part of a man’s clothing. Like a weak link in a chain, poor quality socks matched with a high quality suit and shoes risks weakening the strength of your entire presentation. And they can keep your feet nice and comfortable whether you’re walking into a boardroom or hiking up a mountain. Understand your needs, work within your budget, and be prepared for whatever life throws at your feet.
Bad Astronomy presents The Top 14 Astronomy Pictures of 2010:
The Sun’s surface puts out light at all wavelengths, but the surface isn’t solid. It’s a gas, and it tapers off with height. Normally, a thin gas in space emits light at very specific colors as electrons jump from one energy level to another in the individual atoms. But compressed gas in the thicker, denser part of the Sun mashes together all those energies, spreading them out, so it emits white light (that layer of the Sun is called the photosphere). Above that layer, where the gas is thinner (in a layer called the chromosphere), the hydrogen does emit light at specific colors. One of these, Hα, is in the red part of the spectrum, and in fact hot, thin hydrogen emits very strongly in Hα.
Shigeru Miyamoto has always tried to re-create his childhood wonderment. He’s the closest thing there is to an autobiographical game creator, and shuns focus groups: “As long as I can enjoy something, other people can enjoy it, too.”
December Update: Winter has started to settle in, and I expect I should start to be able to feel my toes again sometime in mid-March.
Work is frustrating. I don’t feel like I’m adding to anything. All my initiatives have been stopped dead or put on indefinite hold. Most of the contributions I’ve made in the last two months are re-implementations of features and designs that were stripped out while I was away on tour. Plus, someone in security apparently has it out for me (if you’re reading this over a wireshark capture, let me know and I’ll buy you a coffee), and my boss has been uncharacteristically jerkish for the past week.
I’m frustrated at things going on in my personal life, but have nowhere to write about them.
I’m upset at things happening to people I care about, but can’t do anything about it.
Some great days in the last few weeks, but they’ve still been hard weeks.
Whatever. Trying to shake it off. Killing Joke tonight. Yes.
Day 06 – Your hobbies, in great detail:
I’ll be honest, I’m not sure what separates a hobby from something more serious. Is DJing a hobby? Baking? Gaming? Hacking? Fucking?
If you spend a few hours a week on something, is that a hobby? What if you’re passionate about it, if it consumes you and you spend all your waking moments in pursuit of it? Is it still a hobby then?
I’ve got a thousand records or so, but I wouldn’t consider it a hobby. I’m not a record collector. I’m just someone who loves music, and records are a very enjoyable means to an end.
I don’t paint miniatures or collect stamps. I write music, take photographs now and then, play video games, go through a lot of books, listen to a lot of music, and have a lot of things to say about copyright.
I’ve been doing the online journal thing for fifteen years or so, and on the rare occasion write other things too. I used to develop and teach web design and computer security classes (and I think I was Canada’s first Certified Ethical Hacker instructor), and spend waaaaay too much time on Wikipedia.
Do those count?
…
Postscript: According to Harris Interactive, these are the 25 most popular hobbies and leisure activities in the US:
- Reading
- TV watching
- Spending time with family/kids
- Computer activities
- Going to movies
- Fishing
- Gardening
- Walking
- Playing team sports
- Exercise (aerobics, weights)
- Golf
- Church/church activities
- Listening to music
- Watching sporting events
- Shopping
- Socializing with friends/neighbors
- Traveling
- Playing music
- Entertaining
- Renting movies
- Eating out/dining out
- Hunting
- Crafts (unspecified)
- Swimming
- Camping
Tonight’s fifteen-minute dinner for one: Fresh salmon in a brown sugar glaze, and delicious teriyaki rice.
Take that, Monday.
