One of the themes in my life of late is to try to get as many folks as I can to see the illustration stuff I'm doing. In an era of "you don't see everything from everyone you follow" social media, this is... more challenging than seems reasonable.

I understand that mailing lists are the way to go for that, but the problem with mailing lists are two fold: 1. You have to get people onto them, which many folks are loathe to do. 2. Once they're on your list, many folks ignore / delete the emails because they're 'extra'.

Which isn't to say I'm not going that route. On the contrary. I probably will. I've started to before, but never really finished (see all my previous commentary on ADHD).

Even if / when I DO manage to create a reasonable email list, that still doesn't get around issue 1. The vast majority of the internet using world won't be on it. And dragonbones.net is accessible to pretty much everyone who has access to the web.

Shut up, man. Get to the point.

Okay, okay. Sorry. Verbose Guy here.

I thought I would start doing a monthly summary post on dragonbones about the sketch work that I did the month prior.

It's a good art-news system, it gives folks a taste of what's in the Patreon page if they might be interested, and it keeps dragonbones fresh(ish).

So here's the first one: The Sketchy Stuff from December 2022.

(Dwarf at the top of the page is just something I was noodling on... yesterday? This is at about the 1/2 hour stage.)

Unexpectedly, my New Year's tradition became wearing my grandmother's wedding tiara. 

Some years, my sister would steal it away, but most years, I wore it.

My grandmother was born in 1918 and I'm not sure exactly when my grandparents got married, but she was 25 when my dad was born, so 1938? 1940?

It's gotten too fragile too wear. It still has all its sequins but it wilts and one of the spires is now cracked beneath the surface. Perhaps I'll try to repair it this summer.

Happy new year.

In vaguely alphabetical order:

Baby Velvet, Please Don't Be in Love With Someone Else — Hannah Crofts from All Our Exes Live in Texas has her solo debut.  Lovely, sightly neurotic pop.

Andrew Bird, Inside Problems — What more can i say?  Bird always brings the goods.

Dead Engine, Brake — (EP) Another small set of power trio rock.

Guilhem Desq & Sébastien Gisbert, Storm — Desq's manic electric hurdy gurdy is joined by Gisbert's thrumming percussion.

50 Foot Wave, Black Pearl — (EP) There was always a clear stylistic break between her two bands as well as her solo work, but the latest Throwing Muses, 50 Foot Wave, and Kristin Hersh releases sound very similar.  Sludgey, abrasive, sometimes it feel like i'm still listening out of inertia.

Florence + the Machine, Dance Fever — A fuller and broader work than her previous album.  Her voice is still a marvel to behold.

Grieflines, Fathoms — (EP) Electronica side project for I Like Trains guitarist Guy Bannister.

Imogen Heap & Dan O'Neill, Chordata Bytes I — Heap has taken a library of oceanic sounds from marine biologist O'Neill and turned it into electronic music.

Jean-Michel Jarre, Oxymore — Jarre had been collaborating with Pierre Henry, musique concrète pioneer, but he died in 2017.  That work is now finished.  It's a... grimier work, but still very Jarre.

Zola Jesus, Arkhon — Spooky, haunting vocals are her bread and butter.

Rokia Koné & Jacknife Lee, Bamanan — Malian pop, a Bandcamp suggestion that hit me right away.

Midnight Oil, Resist — My album of the year, everything the Oils are known for, a massive comeback album.

Sea Power, Everything Was Forever — Their soundtrack to Disco Elysium (an amazing video game that is accessible to any level of gaming skill) piqued my interest.  A few of the DE tracks resurface here with lyrics.

Tears for Fears, The Tipping Point —Another comeback album, this one where an old rift between the band members was repaired.  It's a lovely work.

Yes, we get it. You made an ebook. 

Sorry - I know you've probably seen me posting about it elsewhere. Thing is, you can have it for free, if you like, and I want as many people to have access to it as possible.

Didn't get anything for your neice for the holidays? Bingo. Grandson's into fantasy / D&D? Sold. They can print the pages out and color them as many times as they like.

I won't tell if you're there coloring alongside them. ;)

Anyway, if you haven't picked up a copy yet, it's available on my site / Gumroad here: 

If you do download / gift / check it out, I would love to hear what you liked or disliked about it! (I'm planning to do more like this in the future, so all feedback helps.)

What's the opposite of a Wizard?  A Barbarian!  Two promising barbarians were killed by things they shouldn't have angered, but eventually one became buff enough that he could SURVIVE angering things he shouldn't have.  Once he got that far without happening to genocide anything, he took that on as a voluntary challenge and succeeded!  There were many times when he regretted choosing that option, though.  Another challenge he completed was not changing form, which is not much of a problem if it doesn't happen accidentally.  Time to rest...

Goodbye Ferret the Demigod...

You went to your reward with 3496590 points,
Frost Brand (worth 3000 zorkmids and 7500 points)
The Book of the Dead (worth 10000 zorkmids and 25000 points)
The Candelabrum of Invocation (worth 5000 zorkmids and 12500 points)
Grimtooth (worth 300 zorkmids and 750 points)
Magicbane (worth 3500 zorkmids and 8750 points)
Cleaver (worth 1500 zorkmids and 3750 points)
The Bell of Opening (worth 5000 zorkmids and 12500 points)
The Heart of Ahriman (worth 2500 zorkmids and 6250 points)
      14 dilithium crystals (worth 63000 zorkmids),
      10 amethyst stones (worth 6000 zorkmids),
       8 emeralds (worth 20000 zorkmids),
       7 rubies (worth 24500 zorkmids),
       7 opals (worth 5600 zorkmids),
       5 turquoise stones (worth 10000 zorkmids),
       5 obsidian stones (worth 1000 zorkmids),
       4 diamonds (worth 16000 zorkmids),
       4 citrine stones (worth 6000 zorkmids),
       3 jet stones (worth 2550 zorkmids),
       3 chrysoberyl stones (worth 2100 zorkmids),
       3 garnet stones (worth 2100 zorkmids),
       2 jacinth stones (worth 6500 zorkmids),
       2 black opals (worth 5000 zorkmids),
       2 jasper stones (worth 1000 zorkmids),
       1 topaz stone (worth 900 zorkmids),
       1 agate stone (worth 200 zorkmids),
       1 jade stone (worth 300 zorkmids),
       1 amulet of reflection (worth 150 zorkmids),
       1 amulet of magical breathing (worth 150 zorkmids),
and 10002 pieces of gold, after 57152 moves.
You were level 25 with a maximum of 449 hit points when you ascended.

Sorry for the late notice, but if any of y'all are around York, PA (or willing to go there) tonight at about 7pm, my buddy Brad and I will be demoing Maze of Minos at Brad's FLGS - The Gamehaven Cafe and Bakery.

We're going to demo the game and I'm going to record the process so I can  practice and take a copy with me on the road and do demos in the various game shops I come across while traveling.

To my astonishment, I've actually finished my first pass of converting the entire back end code base of one post wonder to modern async/await syntax. What does this mean for you? Absolutely nothing, except that it will be easier to maintain in the future, and I will hopefully be better able to get others to consider assisting in that task.

I'm making other changes as I go along that aim toward maintainability, and just making it hard to write bugs in the first place.

I reached a point where all I'm doing is testing and debugging, testing and debugging, until it actually works again, and I can think about pushing it as the new current release.

After that, it will be time to think about refactoring the front end code. Refactoring is a fancy word for rewriting, or at least restructuring. All I have to do is choose a front end framework so the code will be more maintainable for other contributors, easier for everyone to understand. All I have to do is choose a framework. Like, insert a list of at least 1000 possible choices. Of course, there are just a few well-known ones. If I go with React, people will know that word 10 years from now when they try to contribute to my code. This does not necessarily mean that what is called React in 10 years will look anything like it, but they'll know the word.

Seriously, I can see that I write software with very long release cycles. This makes me an excellent candidate to maintain the software stack for the interstellar multigenerational probe. Just slow me down and run me as a low priority process.

Since some of us have been talking about Ye Olde Birdsite, I thought I would make sure y'all saw that there's been a breach, so you might want to reset your passwords and / or add two step authentication if you hadn't already.

You may feel 'done' with the site, but just remember that things can be done in your name if someone gets ahold of your account.

(Okay, I'll stop telling you all things you already know. I just worry about my peeps.)

For reference: (the teaser text is a little misleading - this is a recent breach)

I'm trying to figure out what to do with my Band Name Server, now that I've taken it off the birdsite. Or, at least, stopped posting; I haven't deleted its tweets or anything. Perhaps I should, though quite frankly it never did get much engagement (except from Gooley and kodiak, and occasionally my wife) so I don't feel like it's going to be enriching the Muskrat too much.

But anyway, what to do with it. Because the ideas are still coming and I'm still writing them down. So, what to do...

1) I could post them on Mastodon. I don't know the community guidelines about multiple accounts, or bots, since I haven't seen nearly as many of them, but I'm barely scraping the surface right now. The standard app/web interface doesn't seem to support scheduled post but the Tusky app does, so I guess probably it can be done somehow. I could sound out the moderator of the instance I'm on (a fairly small one run by some friends) and see what they think.

2) I could post them on Tumblr. I've been mostly lurking there for a few years. I know having multiple blogs is a thing, and post scheduling. But posting single lines with no explanation seems like something that might confuse people (though if the blog is called "band-name-server" probably people would figure it out). I've heard that tumblr is supposed to linking with the fediverse so maybe it could also be followed by mastodoners, too.

3) I could post them on Facebook.  ...Yeah, no.  Instagram seems like it would make even less sense, and other social media sites are just not on my radar right now.

4) I could post them on my Wordpress blog or some other blog.  I've considered doing that, actually, having my own bandnameserver blog, maybe posting a day's worth at a time and even maybe including where the names came from. This would involve extra work, including me trying to remember/keep track of where the names came from.

5) I could try to resurrect the actual server.  The original one was written in Perl, using Common Gateway Interface and reading from/writing to text files back in like 1995 or something, and hosted on the University of Alberta student web server back when nobody was scared at the idea of having a web service writing to a file on the server. I managed to find a couple of homes for it after that but I suspect that's not going to fly these days. So I'd need some other host for it, and probably have to recode it in something safer like PHP+MySql or something. It wasn't terrible complicated, and having a database with like one table (for reading from) or two or three (if I wanted people to submit their own) probably wouldn't be too demanding. Probably I'd have to pay for it. Would I still post all the new names, or just dispense random ones with periodic updates to the underlying tables?

Tumblr is seeming most attractive to me right now, but I haven't made a decision yet.

I've been seeing a lot of talk about how many Twitter users are trying out Mastodon (and others on the Fediverse) but that they find it too difficult to use.

While I realize that the crowd here tend to be a bit more tech savvy than the mean, I was wondering if any of you had that experience?

Rest assured, I won't judge - I'm just curious where the tricky parts are and if I could offer any help. I'm guessing that if any of you had challenges with some or all aspects of Mastodon, there's certain to be others.

So far, I'm finding it really tough to find anyone who will say "I had trouble with x, y, and z aspects." There's just a lot of hand waving and 'generally too complex'.

That's hard to help with.

(Image selected because it's the closest to Mastodon of the things I've done.)