howardtayler.bsky.social
Vaxxed & 7x-Boosted, He/Him, Husband to Sandra Tayler, Father of Four, #mecfs/#LongCovid, howardtayler.com, schlockmercenary.com, writingexcuses.com
4,131 posts
4,320 followers
229 following
Getting Started
Active Commenter
comment in response to
post
Four more things are ready to be plugged into it right now, but they don't currently (hah!) need charging.
comment in response to
post
Seen from below.
comment in response to
post
Goddammit I said not in the market and now I'm effing shopping and also I haz art jellies and it's not fair.
(tl;dr - wow your stuff looks amazing)
comment in response to
post
Because it really is a gorgeous picture, and I'll signal-boost any effort to make prints.
comment in response to
post
Were I in your shoes, I'd launch a modest Kickstarter. Offset print cost plus tube mailer plus postage, 50 units, with a markup for whatever you need to make it worthwhile. If it funds huzzah! There is interest, and I made money. If not, I learned a thing and spent time but not money.
comment in response to
post
It's lovely, but I'm not in the market for a poster right now?
comment in response to
post
This is a good time to deploy the Robert Coveyou essay title: "Random Number Generation Is Too Important To Be Left To Chance."
comment in response to
post
www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRqC... Sorry to make you wait. I couldn't deliver the goods until I was back in the exact place where I first watched it, because brains are weird yo.
comment in response to
post
I shot 75 seconds of video, but da Bloosk says it's too big to upload, so I had to put it on YouTube. Here's a link!
youtu.be/6vGP2AOXNJk
comment in response to
post
Cheese rods and cheese plates are (respectively) DSLR frame rods and mounting plates with lots of threaded holes in them.
DSLR rigs and c-stands are, to my mind, the *very best* Tinkertoy components for anyone who is trying to build a sturdy solution for mounting stuff.
comment in response to
post
Boutique, yes, but it's also been around longer. People were complaining about the digital amp harmonic sequence back in the 1990's. I don't know when fully computerized (rather than just an op-amp chip) amp effects became widely available, but I think it may have been more than a decade.
comment in response to
post
Dammit that idea is so good I'm surprised that it isn't a feature in every OS out there.
comment in response to
post
IIRC, the original guitar amplifiers, tube amps, had an overtone pattern that emphasized the odd numbered harmonics, giving a rounder sound. Then digital amps and effects pedals emphasized even-numbered harmonics, giving a fuzzier or sharper sound.
Modern effects pedals can do the tube harmonics.
comment in response to
post
There's a backswing to the pendulum, though. Eventually the enthusiasts and connoisseurs get ahold of the techbros, and we get an option to "downgrade" whatever the tech is in order to reproduce the original experience.
comment in response to
post
(This wouldn't do much to the hue, but it might affect saturation, and it definitely affects luminosity)
comment in response to
post
Are you watching it on a modern OLED/QLED television? It's entirely possible that the extreme orange-ness is an artifact of your screen being a light source rather than a reflection of a projected image.
comment in response to
post
I have a folder for wallpapers, and I have three monitors on my desktop PC. The wallpapers change every 15 minutes, so every 45 minutes the entire wallpapering will have changed.
comment in response to
post
ngl, it was cool to look at that graphic and immediately understand it.
comment in response to
post
Guessing: Yes, it did that, but once you've made everything orange, the accent colors over on the other side of the wheel are *really* tempting. It's been forever since I watched Oh Brother Where Art Thou, and all I remember is the orange-ness, so I could be completely off with this guess.
comment in response to
post
I would like to come over and watch. Are tickets available?
comment in response to
post
I don't have the time to draw all those glyphs, but this would be a FINE project for that infinite number of monkeys everyone keeps invoking.
comment in response to
post
Correct. Because there's no glyph for 4 or for 8.
comment in response to
post
No blegh required. You asked a good question. I represented their ordinal 1-10 series using glyphs available to me, but that's not how they'd do it.
comment in response to
post
I figure they have a ligature system to indicate whether the number glyphs are to be multiplied or treated as exponents.
It won't be easy to read, but that's okay, that's kind of the point. If it's human-readable it's not alien enough.
comment in response to
post
Aaaanyway, this has been a nice diversion from the stuff I really need to get done. I'm putting a pin in this ("ow not in my eye!" says the octo-logo) and getting back to actual work.
comment in response to
post
The mathematicians in the house are now up in arms about "glyph for every prime number" but hey, it's a horror story universe with elder godlike things in it. If an infinite number of glyphs doesn't horrify you with its incomprehensibility then I'm not worldbuilding correctly. :-)
comment in response to
post
Apropos of nothing in particular, I also got to musing on how the Elder Space Octopuses count. Base 8 makes sense, but it's insufficiently elder-godlike.
Primes. They have a glyph for every prime number. All other numbers are represented as factored primes.
1, 2, 3, 2², 5, 3*2, 7, 2³, 3², 5*2...
comment in response to
post
I told Sandra "It's like the eye of Horus, except the eye shape is formed by the head and tentacles of an octopus," and she did her usual thing which is to smile and nod and NOT say out loud "just show it to me when it's an actual picture I can look at."
comment in response to
post
Then I got to thinking about the Runewright/Runewrought stories, and realized that THEY needed a logo. Something that had runes, and a single eye, and probably tentacles.
And if you're anything like me you know the feeling that came next.
OMG I CAN SEE IT I MUST DRAW IT NOW
comment in response to
post
I have an outline for further Schlock Mercenary stories, but they're set pretty far in the future. Tagon's silhouette won't work for a logo for those. And the Shafter's Shifters stories, which are set in the Schlockiverse, also need something other than that silhouette for a logo.
comment in response to
post
So, yesterday I got to wondering about logos for my various story series. The Schlock Mercenary logo (Captain Tagon's head in profile, silhouetted, against an orange field) has been around for almost 20 years now. The Planet Mercenary logo is almost ten years old.
comment in response to
post
I don't have tattoos and *I* want a tattoo of that.
comment in response to
post
The stories feature a magic system in which rune-based technology must be built and maintained by people who always always always keep one eye covered. If you see the runes with BOTH eyes they do things to your brain.
The stories also feature Elder oh let's just call 'em "space octopuses."
comment in response to
post
And just yesterday I saw a short science presentation about why we count the way we do. tl;dr - we have dedicated neural structures for 1, 2, and 3. Beyond that it's pattern recognition and stuff.
Tangentially related, but definitely related.
comment in response to
post
LOL
comment in response to
post
I don't think I want the weight of an aquarium on the end of my boom?
comment in response to
post
In order for this arrangement to make me more productive I needed to *finally* get around to figuring out how shortcut keys work in Clip Studio Paint.
So I did, and within ten minutes I'd mapped my process's most tedious tool-swaps onto keystrokes, which I've now memorized.
NGL, this is fun.
comment in response to
post
LEFT: The keyboard and the Surface Pro, seen in context with each other. RIGHT: The keyboard mount seen from above. The mount screws right onto the end of the boom as if that's what the very end of the boom was meant for.
comment in response to
post
UPDATE: The installation of the shortcut-key keyboard arm went *very* smoothly. I attribute this to the following factors, listed in decreasing order of influence:
1) I'm using components that are designed for modular assembly of DIY stuff
2) An attachment point was already in place.
3) I'm clever.
comment in response to
post
He'd be a fantastic (ahem) Reed Richards, especially for one of the "mad scientist" FF stories where Reed blithely subjects everyone to his tech-bro-ish approach to whatever's going on.
comment in response to
post
And if that really is an actual brain thing, not a cultural framework thing, then our preference for sets of three, four, or five maps nicely onto lots of things.
Like four-panel comic strips, three-act plays, etc.
Anyway, if you want to lay Kishōtenketsu over 4-panel comics, you have the tools.
comment in response to
post
I'm not trying to lock the pendulum of literary philosophy in place over the Jungian or Campbellian realms, but there are reasons to at least glance over at that stuff.
Consider the PowerPoint advice to use between three and five bullet points per slide.
Our brains seem to like small sets.
comment in response to
post
The meta:
Story structures, poetic meters, musical tonalities, etc are all cultural constructs, yet many of them occur accidentally/independently *outside* their home cultures. Is this because these structures are reflections of something innate?
*Jungians gate-crash*
YES!
Stop that, please.
comment in response to
post
For word-nerds like me, this angle of analysis is fascinating. It won't work with all 4-panel strips, obviously, but it worked with the first three I applied it to.
No, I'm not telling you which three. I will say they weren't MY strips, though.