L. Shelby

My son went to the library the other day, and came home with a particular book because “I saw it and I thought of you.”

Which book makes him think of me?

The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure: Classic Tales of Dashing Heroes, Dastardly Villains, and Daring Escapes, edited by Lawrence Ellsworth

I would guess that this isn’t what reminds most college students of their moms, but Vive la Difference!

And, in other news, I have been slowly revamping the “Art” area of my website into the “Arts and Crafts” area of my website, so that I would have a place to put my tatting patterns. I also included a link to the instructions for the origami fold from Across a Jade Sea, but it looks kind of lonely as the only “craft design” that isn’t tatting. Clearly I need to figure out what else I’ve invented over the years that is worth posting instructions for. My bead dragons, maybe? Or “How to sew your very own Coral Palace gisgir”?

Mirrored on My Website.

I’ve actually been doing remarkably well this summer… as compared to, say, last summer and the summer before that. I’ve been hoping this was because I’m stronger and fitter than I was last summer, but it might just be because this summer has been cooler, or something.

But although I’ve stayed pretty active (for me) for most of the summer, for the past couple weeks my energy levels dropped severely, and so I feel like I haven’t been getting anything done.

This is slightly illusory. I do get some stuff done, just not as much, and not the stuff I feel like I’m supposed to be doing. For example, I have set up worldbuilding databases for three of my daughters. The databases have places to store characters, events, and locations. And include the capability to show dates according to an imaginary calendar (assuming it’s not too complicated… no leap days, for example), to display character images on character sheets, to place locations on a map by clicking on it, to assign certain events and characters to certain stories, and to dynamically build family trees and personal timelines.

(This isn’t as impressive as it sounds… I already had created those capabilities for myself, so all I had to do was alter the website code I was already using, so that it would work for multiple people each with their own separate database.)

But even so, I’ve been spending far more time watching tv and playing solitaire than I’m really happy with, and it’s been a bit of a relief that I’ve actually managed to get work done on my primary project these past two days. Yay!

As a final aside, I think I’ve figured out why sometimes my post cross-poster doesn’t cross-post. One of my other plugins was conflicting. Apparently all I have to do to fix it, is to repost the post… but sometimes I forget.

Mirrored on My Website.

I haven’t been paying as much attention to the rest of the world (outside my family) as I probably should recently, because I’ve been absorbed with a project. I’ve been coding an online electronic pet breeding game (and creating the artwork for it), where you breed finger-sized dragons (called jewelwyrms) for color and pattern, much as people breed koi. (Except that my jewelwyrms are way prettier than koi.)

I was explaining the game concept to my girls, and when I got to the bit with the mutations, they sat up and said, “that’s new!” So my breeding game is special because it has mutating color genes. (I didn’t do the game because my concept was new or different, I did it because I got the idea, and then somehow it took over all my brain-space, and I couldn’t seem to push it out of the way, so I finally just said, ‘alright, already!’ and made the game. Now, hopefully, I have that idea mostly exorcized and will be able to think about something else again.

Mirrored on My Website.

Yesterday I was doing something on my website.

And while I was working I realized that only half of the links on my A Writer’s Sketchbook page actually led somewhere, and so I started to fix that. And while I was fixing that, I realized that I had created a link to a Sketchbook page for “Ink” and I didn’t actually have any artwork done in ink on my website anywhere to be displayed on that page. So I went and added some “Ink” art to the website. And since I don’t have a lot of ink art, most of it ended up being the line drawings of the Borgim signs of the Zodiac, that I had inked and scanned, but never incorporated in the site in any way. (I was actually hoping to use the inks as the starting point for something much fancier done in Photoshop, which would end up on the Get Your Personalized Borgim Horoscope page, but that’s going to have to wait a bit longer.)

Because it seemed silly to have art that only showed up on the sketchbook page (which nobody in their right mind would ever look at anyway), in addition to putting them up on the server, and getting them into the database, I also added the drawings to the page that lists the signs and their major meanings. And I created an Art Gallery Page that would show images from the entire site all together, instead of only being able to see the ones from each different world.

Finally I went back and finished fixing the Writer’s Sketchbook (I hope!).

But I can’t remember what I was doing BEFORE that. Which means I can’t go back and finish it. Which means that in order to fix one half-done page before I forgot again, I have probably created another! Waahhh!

Mirrored on My Website.