I am deeply anxious and because it is rational to be this anxious, I don't know what to do about it. I can't control the pandemic. I can't stop the secret police. I can't prevent the coming wave of evictions, foreclosures, homeslessness and unemployment. I can't protect the polls, the protesters, the people in need. I cannot make anyone who could protect them listen to my voice; I can't make them act.

I call. I write. Although I haven't marched in months, I donate to BLMChicago, Good Kids Mad City, Assata's Daughters. Chicago Service Relief, the Greater Chicago Food Depository. The National Women's Law Center, Planned Parenthood, Medical Students for Choice. The Working Families Party. The Justice Democats. The Hispanic Federation. Other places, when they have a specific call out to meet a need.

I remain anxious. I know what I do is not actually meeting a need or saving a society in collapse. 

I am deeply anxious and because it is rational to be this anxious, I don't know what to do about it. My tricks for naming and defending against disordered anxiety don't work. 

We walk to the park and I am anxious. I try not to mutter. I try not to panic. My voice raises and Spouse asks why I'm angry. But I'm not angry; I'm anxious and I don't know what to do.

No less angry today. Much less confident in my own general competence. Just generally exhausted. Hopeless.

But it was a perfectly pleasant day. I suppose that makes it worse.

I worked in the sewing room today. I'm making this 1970s McCall which really does not look like much on the envelope. The layout and cutting was a pain because it's a maxi, cut on an angle from the selvedge and I had a directional print. I ended up cutting the four main head-to-toe pattern pieces one at a time and could not even pretend to pattern-match.

I did not make a test which was probably foolish. Hopefully, the fit will be good enough. I picked this pattern after watching Caitlin Doughty's brief YouTube on shrouds. I'd like to make myself a burial garment and I think this one, if adapted to open along the front center seam, would be nice. I have a particularly lovely black floral voile which would suit the purpose.

I don't have many wishes, honestly. We've got no kids, and though many of my cousins are 20 or 30 years younger than I am, I don't really expect many mourners, should I die in 30 years of old age (rather than shortly, of the pandemic or fascism or failures of American health care or society in general). Still, while I'm alive, I like to think someone will care for me when I'm dead, if only long enough to put me in the burial dress I made for myself before cremating me.

Read an essay about how usage of the term "LatinX" can lead to erasure of Chicano/Chicana activist history which I saw in a tweet from an historian. Learned some stuff about Mexican history and was introduced to a new perspective about terms for groups of people.

I listened to some Coil and some Skinny Puppy. I fretted about putting my literal house into literal order. I avoided the internet. The world is horrifying and I did not want to face it.

I am not facing today with equanimity.

We're selling the rental. When I called the recommended painter, he asked me to text him the details, so he could send a quote and a schedule. He never replied to my text, so when I followed up, asking for a quote and a schedule his reply was "Sounds good" so I don't know where we are with that. He can't get into the building to work without all sorts of bullshit with the management office. But fuck the management office, honestly. They're a huge reason why we're selling.

I'm also having trouble getting information about a furniture delivery--with a phone tree that kicks you out for any option other than cancel  and an online information system which only accepts inquiries to cancel and an FAQ that does not say anything about how you'll know when your actual delivery is scheduled--just that if you have a freight delivery (I do), it will be contracted with a moving company and per COVID, they won't come inside, even with face coverings (great /sarcasm).  I've hired moving companies many many times in my life--often with half-truck and smaller loads. I know the logistics are complicated. I also know that you should get confirmation sooner than 48 hours out. So I am assuming this means I don't have a delivery coming? But I don't know and can't find out. There is a date on the order, but there's no confirmation and it's a Sunday, so I think it might just be a auto-generated estimate. Don't know--can't find out.

My boss also booked me into a meeting (during a time I already had a meeting scheduled) without giving me documents or a log in or anything that would allow me to actually participate in the meeting. I have meetings today for 7 hours, with brief moments in between. The neighbors, also, have workmen directly under my window. 

Thus, today is . . .  not great. I know that everything is impossible for everyone right now. I'm trying to extend lots of patience and accept that no-one is working at their best quality right now. But it's hard to extend that patience when I have so little reserves.

I took this day off from work. Spouse did not. He got up; made coffee; went to his work desk in the basement. I got up. Ate left-over biscuits and (veggie sausage) gravy, played video games. Watched The Assistant--which was brilliant.

Finished a test-run of Vogue 7759. Looking forward to running it up in the chosen fabric but mostly I was glad I was able finish something in less than 12 times the amount of time it should take. The test is a completely terrible fabric, but the pattern is good and I made the right adjustments to fit it properly. I'm hopeful.

Mostly, I put the sewing room in order. I am supposed to get office furniture from Ikea this weekend, but I've not gotten an actual delivery confirmation, so I'm skeptical. I plan to turn the corner of the room into a work space because I've working in the dressing room, which annoys spouse, because I get grumpy working at the sewing table and I don't want to work in the dining room. 

I should probably work in the dining room. There's lots of room. There's not any more street noise there than there is in the back by the alley. I could even finally do something nice on the front porch and taking meetings out there. I don't know why I'm being stubborn about it. But I am. I think if I got rid of my sister's piano, I'd be more interested in using that corner of the front room, but I'm not sure I'm ready to go there.

It was neither a good day, nor a bad one. We're privileged and our lives have been minimally disrupted, not only by the pandemic, but also by the U.S.'s unchecked slide into tyranny and corruption. I don't know how much longer both will remain true. 

I've decided to expand my creative frontiers. Being practical, I figured I'd start small. I'd recently acquired a sewing machine to repair jeans. Since I don't believe in buyinng cheap tools that need replacing, I of course, bought a Singer made in 1950 without plastic gears. 

When I decided to try my hand at small leather goods, I hit the internet to see if my sewing machine would sew leather. It will, but it is not recommended for a steady diet. Or thicker leathers in any quantity. But I did find a recommendation for an affordable machine that will sew any leather that will fit under the presser foot.

As purchased for a whopping $60.

It's a Singer 127, made in 1923. I spent 3 1/2 hours bathing it in mineral oil to remove the accumulated petroleum oil (Bad owner! Bad! No cookie! Sewing machines are oiled with mineral oil, only)  I was pulling dust bunny mummies out of the insides. Bits of lint that had soaked in the oil and then hardened into nightmarish tar balls.

Have you ever wondered where your industry got its start? Since a lot of us are in IT, I bet you're thinking WW2 and the codebreakers at Bletchley Park, Alan Turing and all the rest.

Would you be surprised if I told you it was the loom? Or even further back, the water wheel?

In the 1970's the BBC produced an absolutely brilliant documentary series call Connections, hosted by James Burke. It had a wonderful way of showing technology advancing, not by a solitary inventor, but by taking the work of someone else, often in a completely different field and applying it to the problem they were working on. It's absolutely mind blowing.

Fortunately the internet archive has all three series available to stream, for free. Each episode is about 45 minutes long. There's a lot of anachronisms, the World Trade Center towers make a frequent appearance, for those touched by the events of 9-11, be warned. But, if you have the time, I promise that it will not be wasted.

https://archive.org/details/ConnectionsByJamesBurke/Connections/

And if you want to see the origin of IT.

https://archive.org/details/ConnectionsByJamesBurke/Connections/Season+1/Connections+S01E04+-+Faith+in+Numbers.mp4

...the virtual kind.

So I've had DragonBones.Net since 20200928. After a blank page with just simple hypertext in the center which read 'dragonbone.net' and you had to click to enter, you came to a page which looked like this according to the WayBackMachine.org:

That seems about right, though I can't remember any reason for making you click on a link once you had arrived at the site in order to enter the site. It's not like it was a gateway guarded with a password or anything. If I remember correctly, the text was even grey on black, so it wasn't super easy to see.

I'm guessing I thought it was stylistically cool or something. Functionally annoying in hindsight, but hey - I was new to website building (more or less) and I probably stole the idea from other site I thought was cool at the time.

Those frames may have even been frames - remember those?! Maybe it was a table. Not concerned enough to really check.

Anyway, it wasn't too long until I added some more content, including some art, and (probably) an animated gif or seven of flaming torches in sconces because c'mon... DRAGONBONES.

Also, the size of that graphic demonstrates just how drastically the resolution of our monitors has changed over the years. That 'frame' pretty much filled my screen at the time.

Just a few short months later, and the WayBack has another capture. This one mid December of the same year, and I'd done some significant work on the site.

A lot more art, and that menu at the top was... *chef's kiss*. I mean, I was really proud of it. Why? Well...

1. Each of those skulls was based on an actual dragon illustration from the current Monster Manuals for D&D with the exception of the center skull - one of my own design and still the site logo today. If I recall correctly, two were evil dragons and two were good - with 'my' dragon in the center. Don't think I ever told anyone that. It was just interesting symbolism for me to think about when I opened the site.
2. Each skull was an animated GIF triggered by a mousover event. That took... a lot to the n00b that I was. I was using a pirated copy of Dreamweaver at the time to help me over the humps that I couldn't bash my way through when it came to code. I was completely ignorant of anything past rudimentary HTML, so that was a significant amount.
   1. The page displayed a default static image (as you see in the screen cap).
   2. Thanks to some 'onMouseOver' code from Dreamweaver, I figured out how to go from that static image to an animated GIF  that went from that same static image to a shaded / rendered / sorta 3D version of the same skull at the same size with a color tint and highlighted text over the image which said where the link would take you (same as the labels under the graphics - just in case the graphics didn't show for any reason).
      
   3. The image would return to a static image once you moved the mouse away from the image. Each graphic only changed once, so it created a feel like 'you changed the icon' by mousing over it to something 'more real'.
      
   4. I remember getting the sizing just exactly right so there was no 'flexing' of the table it all sat in took me 4-ev-ah.
   5. How did I get the animated GIFs of each skull? Well, I used some kind of 'morphing software' which took one image and morphed it into something else. Usually, this was done with faces. Think of the tail end of Michael Jackson's "Black or White" video. (Side note: do yourself a favor and watch that if you haven't in a while.) Anyway - I did two versions of each skull - one 'flat' and one 'rendered' with a tint' and fed them into the software as 'start' and 'end'. If either image was off by a single pixel? It would 'flex' the table holding the menu. That took some time.
   6. I managed to crunch those menu graphics down small enough that the load time was... reasonable. Back then, that was FAR more worrisome than it is these days thanks to X baud modems.

And look at that news feed! If I remember correctly, that was an RSS feed from my LJ account. I think. It miiiight have even been for only 'public' posts which I treated as a new feed for my site so folks could get the info in either place.

Lastly, I have no idea when I actually started drawing digitally, but I was definitely doing so by this point. St. Nick there as well as the aforementioned menu items were all done digitally. In 2003. That feels a little like having a cell phone when most folks didn't have a wireless land line in their house.

20080505 - It looks like I finally found out about this funky thing called 'WordPress' and switched over to GoDaddy.

In related news - holy hell with the dbn logo/crest. Calm down, dude. I'll say that it was a sign of the times and NOT my lack of good design skillz. For srsly.

20090303 - Some changes to layout (though that's almost meaningless with WP) and mention of 1100. There was one previous episode, but this is the first instance that the WayBackMachine caught.

20130602 - Thanks to Jill "xtingu" Knapp 's better sense of style, this is the first appearance of the billyBoldHand font (in the logo). I like it so much that it's become a staple and gets used in most everything I do if I can manage it.

20141217 - Pinterest style 'brick' theme. While the site has undergone some minor changes since this point, it's more or less stayed like this - a 'brick' theme (like Pinterest) so that I can show off more art thumbnails directly on the front page. This seems the most sensible layout for the most part, so it's stuck for years.

So why am I telling you all this?

I'm thinking about pulling the plug on Ye Olde Bones of the Dragon as well as a number of other sites I own / host. It's doing nothing for me other than being a vanity site at this point.

No one gives one rat's ass that the site exists. They certainly don't go to it.

According to Google's Analytics for the last 9 months:

It seldom goes above single digits and they're almost entirely 'new visitors' which makes me think that most of those are web crawlers, bots, and the like.

The site's been taken over more than once, and I'm not even certain that it's 100% clean now (which would help to explain some of the low stats since the Almighty Google would likely not rank a 'dirty' site highly).

You've Made It This Far, So Here's the Honest Truth

I put a lot of hopes and dreams into this site, and it's gone no where in all these years.

The analogy that keeps popping into my head is the lame horse that you deeply love, and don't want to see suffer anymore.

Well That Escalated Quickly

Yup. I can't imagine that you've made it this far down my meandering along Memory Lane, so it's time to just get to the fucking monkey.

She won't die completely. I'll likely keep the url and point it to a subset of posts or a page on mrlich.com.

Hell, I'll probably do that with most (all?) of my other sites - rideoffintothesunset.com, libriexmachina.com, lightinthewoods.com, matt-works.com, etc.

Same reasons. No one gives a shit, and I'm spending... well, not a lot per year, but over time...

Have you somehow managed to make it all the way down here? Well shit, you must have some kind of opinion on the subject - please tell me. I'm all ears.

In honor of Independence Day we watched a mockbuster and played an American history trivia game.  Due to a fluke of randomness almost every correct answer was...

Google sends you a monthly map of everyplace you've been the previous month. If you're like me, and based on experience, you're probably not, this has always struck me as a little big-brother-ish. Hmm, thinks I. Can I add navigation to my truck? Sure enough, there's ways. Now usually when I'm adding a factory option that didn't come with my vehicle I will ply one of my favorite you-pull-it salvage yards. But it seems that Ford used a module that is coded for the VIN of your particular vehicle. And to get a used module re-coded, requires you to bring a large valise full of money to a dealer. Or just getting a Ford dealer to install a new module requires a foot locker full of money.

TO THE INTERNET!

Yes, as it turns out, there are a multiple companies who sell the module, cutom coded to your VIN. Although you have to do the installation, it lands somewhere between a valise and a footlocker. Call it a large suitcase full of money.

What ho, let's check Ebay. And again, there are plenty of people selling the module. Some as low as $100. But excluding anybody not in the US (easier to wrangle a refund if the part is bogus) The lowest price was still above walking around money, but about one third of the price that Ford would want to install their component. After receiving a windfall from the department of unclaimed property, I pulled the trigger, bought the part and sent the seller my VIN.

The part arrived in five days. I had taken the time to review the installation procedure. Fairly easy, no special tools required. One heartening sign, when I opened the box the seller had included a printed out copy of my truck's build sheet. Obviously the seller has an in with Ford technical support. The process was supposed to take an hour, I had it installed in half that time. Nav works great. I didn't even lose my radio or satellite presets. All I had to do was re-pair my phone to the truck and join my home wifi.

I am sure my descendants will be Morlocks, maintaining machines and popping up to the surface to have the Eloi descendants of politicians, phone sanitizers and marketing wonks down for dinner.