Want to help Smokey, you can lurk on my Twitch stream or donate to his GoFundMe - Or both, both is good! gofundme.com/f/aid-smokeys-o…

Muggy rainy day in Alaska today. Yesterday had been so nice, but the rains are back and it looks like they plan to stay for a bit.

Why do people think lying in the article title is the only way to get people to read? The news can't be trusted because the news relies on clickbait headlines like this. Or does the writer just not know that my V has a Witcher 3 t-shirt and a Witcher 3 leather jacket, and if you play CorpoRat there is a game magazine in the drawer of V's desk with The Witcher 3 on the cover. msn.com/en-us/gaming/game-re…

Should we explain to the wool haters that the wool needs removed from the sheep because the majority of domestic sheep need to be sheared or the sheep gets various health issues. Wool is one of the best materials of your intent is to help animals be happy and healthy. msn.com/en-us/news/news/cont…

Leonidas is why I can't get much work done. He loves laying on my arm when I am trying to work.

Alaska is a great place to live. People keep asking "where's the flying cars, we were promised flying cars..." well... Alaska has them! Used to have someone that would land a plane out on the street in front of my place all the time.

The eyes have it! I have decied that my eye was finished enough to make it a pair of eyes with a good ol' copy/paste to make the other eye. Wonderful thing about eyes seen from the front, you can copy/paste to have both, then minor edits to make them not look like mirror images of one another. (Not done yet.) You can see the layers of the left eye, the separate pieces I divided it into while working on it. That's 24 separate layers for both eyes (12 each).

People often ask where writers get their ideas, well... ideas are literally everywhere. I can think of quite a few ideas from this article; including a few horror stories of the AI getting revenge, an AI that thinks torture is the right way to talk to humanity, and several ideas that involve people or other AIs launching a rescue operation. Ideas are easy to find; it's the turning them into a story that makes a writer an author. msn.com/en-us/technology/art…

Roughing the first pass design of eyelashes on a project I am hoping to have finished by the end of the month. That eye has about a dozen layers on it, and it's far from done. I hate trying to create colored images, when I learned drawing in the 80's I could make very realistic eyes in grey pencil tones, but have never been as happy with the look when coloring the eyes. I think it's because I spent so long perfecting the smudged softness vs hard defined lines in pencil art.

Catnap. Woke up to see Jackie dozing contently on the window perch.

Leonidas is not being creepy at all while watching me work. He's one of those cats that knows when he's doing something goofy and just waits for the human to notice. Right after I noticed him he stayed there for just a bit longer, then laid down to nap.

Termination dust has reached me... I expect the yard will be white by tomorrow morning. Currently there are scattered snowflakes mixed into the light rain that is falling.

Playing with my Phantascene logo and some design ideas. I decided to build a design that I might have put on a desk pad or perhaps turn into a poster or something that shows my logo's black unicorn shillohetted against the full moon with a part of the world of my fantasy settings shown as the backdrop. Still trying to decide if I want to reduce the sprawl of the city, or leave it spread out along the hills and shore. The city would be the one where my novel On The Run is going to take place, so I guess I will get a better handle on the layout as I keep writing on it. For now I just know the city is built on either side of a river, connected by a bridge, and located in the north-western region of the Kingdom of the South.

My everyday sewing kit is the same one that my mom used for years. I've used it for mending, quilting, and various crafting projects.

We need wrecking yards to put stuff like this along the edge of their parking areas! I seriously miss the days of carefully taking the parts off the tree while studying the instructions to make certain I was getting the correct part for that step. Used to be isles dedicated to boxes of models in every store (even had a couple shelves of the local grocery store dedicated to them!), but it feels like those wonderful kits have been lost to time.

Working on the Unreal Engine production studio setup for my Jack Frost stories and I have now got a dockable window in Unreal Engine listed under the Windows menu and fully dockable like a native editor panel. Have I said before how much I love the freedom I have to make Unreal Engine fit my needs as a developer?

If anyone is looking for me I now have two social media sites that I am checking daily: X and Pickax. Also note that I am not actually being paid, but it seems that X considers sharing links like this to be paid promotion, so there ya have it. Why am I posting something like this when it is not making me money? Becuse I made an account yesterday, I know a lot of others use multiple social media sites for marketing books or connecting with writers or other creatives, and this is the easiest way I know to let those who follow me here know that I am also over there. Am I leaving X? No. I don't think that people need to leave one social media location to use another one. I plan to maintain my same level of activity here on X, but can also be found over on Pickax under the same handle: Phantascene (I'm using my logo, attatched, as my picture over there for now.) Why now? I've been working on some stuff behind the scenes and expanding my social media presence is one of the things I've been planning as a winter action. More news coming soon... I think. pickax.com/?referralCode=e2j…

In 2010 I finally got an embroidery machine, fancy Singer one that could print any pattern. My first test of that was to design a custom dice bag for my D&D dice. Found bag in the shed, still can't find dice (think some kids took those), but got the bag. It does make me think, though... I don't recall anyone being upset that machines were able to create embroidery patterns back when those things came out. Seemed like almost every quilter and crafter I knew wanted one. Shame generative AI did not get a similar reception when it hit.

It's officially the strangest summer I've seen in years. Not sure when the last time was that I saw wild roses in bloom this late in the season, but there it is. An Alaska wild rose and a ripe rose hip on the same branch. Those roses usually bloom mid-June here. Lasting into early July. They might make it to early August... but this is late September. It is also September 23, 2026... this would have been my Mom and Dad's 77th wedding anniversary. And a wild Alaska rose is in bloom.