Me and Julio, up in the Battlestar...
06.03.2026 22:45
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Me and Julio, up in the Battlestar...
My friend Piper really needs help with her medical costs. She has advanced cancer and is trying to get some quality of life as her time runs out (yep we're there)
Please consider supporting:
Link to her Patreon: www.patreon.com/piperjdrake
Buy her books if you can, or RT this?
The architecture in this town is house-sized domes on cylindrical buildings, so the street lamp needed to match.
A screencop from a comic book panel in progress. Two streetlamps are on either side of a bridge. Feathered dinosaurs are walking around. The lamps appear to be glowing, but the rest of the scene isn't reacting to that glow yet. Lots of painting still to do.
Here's what the lamps look like in place. I did a little highlight/shadow with the little tunnel, and that's just the beginning of the very many highlights, shadows, and (ugh) reflections on water I'll need to really sell this.
A comic-book illustration of a street lamp. There's no background, but lots of gradient glow effects making it look like a flame under an opaque, mirrored "frisbee" shaped dome is casting light down, and illuminating from within a smaller, more spherical glass dome atop the frisbee.
Anyway, I drew a street lamp I can re-use. It's a gas-powered lamp, yellow-orange light, and I designed it so I don't need to draw flames or nozzles or wicks.
Drew it once, pasted it twice. I might need to adjust the curves of the hood for perspective/angle changes if I use it a third time.
One of the easiest ways to do this is to show that one of the townscapes is experiencing sunset while the others are in full daylight. Of course, by "easiest" I mean "nobody will miss the fact that this panel is a different place." It's not actually EASY to draw low-angle + gaslamp lighting.
This page needs to do some seriously heavy lifting. There are four panels, about half the page, showing different scenes in different locales. Using a combination of color palettes, townscapes, and lighting I need to sell the idea that these locales are part of a global, multi-cultural civilization.
Quoting before I get to the end because I already know this'll be awesome.
It's a blessing to all of us that you've been living long and prospering. Thank you!
That's not true. But in February of 1846 the Mormons of Nauvoo began fleeing the city across the perhaps-miraculously frozen-over Mississippi River to avoid an interview with Chotiner.
Of course, once you take that step you've moved fully out of "Theater of the mind" and into "my D&D game looks like Paper Mario." :-)
It's one reason I loved the "cardboard heroes" set from @stevejacksongames.bsky.social. Little cardstock stand-ups for your PCs, all at the 25-30mm scale used in gridded TTRPG combat. As easy to deploy as coins or poker chips, but it's your PCs picture.
If the GM has basic art chops, and if there's room to lay flat one of those poster-sized newsprint easel pads, you can play a pretty amazing game with Sharpie.
I believe the biggest problem with Theater of the Mind is that folks on the low end of the aphantasia/hyperphantasia scale don't get to see anything cool in their minds' eyes.
(aphantasia=no mental pictures, hyperphantasia=fully-rendered world in the mind's eye)
Yoda + Lion is basically Aslan. Charlie Brown pulls it back from the brink though.
Recent debacles aside, I've been quite happy with Discord, too. We manage a Discord Community Server for Schlock Mercenary fans, and it's SO NICE to be able build a community of friends out from under the various algorithms.
Cartoon by
Jeff Stahler
🎯🎯🎯
tl;dr - rotator cuff pain is like the canary in the coal mine.
The rotator cuff is built from attach-points for the deltoid, tricep, bicep, pectoralis, lats, and trapezius. There are *so many* muscles that go into that little knot. You can (for instance) imbalance it with a weak delt, and end up with neck/back pain from compensation stress in lats/traps.
Speaking from experience - it sounds like the thoracic outlet nerve might be impinged by inflammation in the rotator cuff. I had this on the right arm. Shoulder pain, plus tingling in my thumb and outer two fingers (ring and pinky), with added weirdness in the carpal area (but no carpal tunnel).
Hey, now. Tolkien spent like forty years creating languages before he wrote books about the people who used those languages. Who the Hell am I to think I can go faster than Tolkien?
(obligatory sarcasm tag goes here)→→→ <*>
The #mecfs #LongCovid slows the healing process, but I've figured out how to walk the (currently quite narrow) line between "frozen shoulder" and "torn shoulder."
Sometimes you can sail safely between Scylla and Charibdis, and sometimes they're in bed with each other and the ship won't fit.
I also owe future-Howard an apology, because in my ill-tempered efforts to scrape speedbumps out of my workspace I successfully deleted a bunch of tools. Reloading/refreshing the workspace didn't bring 'em back, so now I get to make a list of what's missing before I try to rebuild.
I can count on one hand the number of people who have to deal with me in person today (Sandra & 2 kiddos) and it's a good thing, because I should be able to keep track of this.
Three. THREE. Just three people to whom I will owe apologies for my (pain-induced but not really excusable) irascibility.
My left rotating shoulder cuff is misbehaving, delivering stabs of startling pain when I do stuff like reach for something on my left side.
Dunno what I did to injure it, but now I'm on the DIY Phys therapy track again with penetrating lotions, anti-inflammatories, and very slow stretching.
Democrats may not be able to prevent Mullin's confirmation, but they can certainly turn his track record of offense and stupidity into two days of televised humiliation so spectacular that he is wounded in Trump's eyes from day 1. That is the job.
If not then it should be. :-)
(I have a Nuka Cola bottle that glows when plugged into USB. I no longer find it as cool as I used to so thanks for that.)
