July 9, 2024 · 1:19 am

Dragons

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Dragons in the Dungeons and Dragons role-playing games are the central monsters of the story.  In our Eberron campaign they not only rule an entire mysterious continent, but they are credited with the very creation of the world and everything.  Not only monsters, but also gods, is a pretty big order for a   character to fill.

Skye, the Blue Dragon to the left above is a dragon who believes that human people are the most important part of fulfilling the Dragon Prophecy.  Therefore the characters can rely on him as an ally, and sometimes even a patron.  He is a blue chromatic dragon with lightning breath, and the Blue Dragon Aureon, his great great grandfather,  is an important leader of the god-dragons worshiped as the Sovereign Host.

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Phaeros, the great crested red dragon, is a servant of chaos who actively opposes all that is good.  He works with orcish dictators and priests of the Dark Six to accomplish vast swaths of damage, destruction, and war.

He is a big bad villain that has to come at the end of a campaign, because dragons are not only powerful fire-breathers with monstrous monster-damage capability, they also know far more magic than even the wisest of wizards.  My players have not crossed him yet, but if they start finding the missing dragon eggs, that will happen soon.

You may notice that my dragon pictures are mostly coloring-book pictures repeated with different colors, but in many ways dragons are like that.  They all have the cookie-cutter qualities of a dragon, but with different-colored personalities and powers and ideas of good and evil.

Penny Dragon

Pennie is a copper dragon with divided loyalties and the soul of a clown.  She never takes the adventure at hand too seriously.  But if she decides to help the player characters find the missing dragon eggs, no ally will prove stronger and more helpful than her.  And she knows things that the players need to learn from her to find the missing eggs.

So dragons come in many forms and personalities.

In fact, the search for the missing dragon eggs will be critically affected by the fact that the eggs have all five hatched and dragons instinctively protect themselves when young by using their polymorph self magic to become some other creature.  And someone has implanted the idea of using human form as the default even though the wormlings have never actually seen a human being in real life.

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This is a double portrait of Calcryx, both as a white dragon wormling and a young girl.

So, playing games with dragons is fun and archetypal story-telling, and I will continue to do it, even if it means getting burned now and again.

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July 8, 2024 · 1:32 am

Goofy Experiments

I have been playing with what it is possible to create with the AI tools I paid for. I am using the various features of both AI Mirror and Picsart AI Photo Editor. It is a blast. I have been doing way more artwork of the cheap and easy AI kind than is even close to reasonable.

It is possible to take a photo of a Barbie Doll (or let’s call it a Skipper doll) and use an AI Mirror to turn the picture into a realistic anime girl on a Picsart background.

And then I can turn that picture back into a plastic doll again, though much more realistic than the stiff-jointed plastic doll I started with.

I can take a goofy-looking picture of a girl’s face and turn that into a plastic doll.

And then do a number of goofy-looking variations of that doll face.

Or edit together a picture of me as a nudist on a Florida beach.

Or goofy-looking variations of that face.

And you should thank your lucky stars that I am not showing you all of the variations I did. It does indeed get worse… much… much worse.

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July 8, 2024 · 12:59 am

Holding Patterns

Sometimes you have to fly in big circles waiting for terrible things to pass.  If you don’t wait… if you rush in unprepared… then you go down in flames.

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The problem is that the pirates from Bank of America finally came through with their offer to settle my debt.  (This is a repost from 2017) Sixty percent of $T13,000 in four payments over the next four months.  I have an appointment tomorrow to talk with my lawyer about bankruptcy.  It is expensive in this country to become poor.  And if you are poor, you have no other option.  At least, if I can manage three more bankruptcies by the time I’m 70, I will be qualified to run for president.

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Life is definitely a lot like Moose Bowling.  It is a simple game.  In order to win, you only have to knock down all ten pins in one throw.  The hard part is that you have to throw a moose to knock the pins down.  Did you know that the average weight of an adult moose is 1800 pounds, or 820 kilograms?  That’s a lot of moose meat to fling with my arthritic 60-year-old moose-throwing muscles.  My flabber is totally gasted by that.

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So, as I swiftly rise from prosperity to poverty, the ultimate fate of most old school teachers, it is probably a good thing that I have decided to become a nudist.  At least I will save money on buying clothes.

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July 7, 2024 · 2:21 am

Picsart

This self-portrait of me is made from several of my old selfies fed through the Picsart AI Photo Editor app.

It is my way of getting to Florida in spite of my health problem and ill fortune. Picsart synthesized a picture of me in front of an AI-Generated background. Picsart is not really intelligent. The app creates an image based on what you put into it. It can generate images in the same way that other infamous AI art apps do it, scraping images from the internet, mixing it all up,, and rawlfing out a picture based on a sentence or phrase. But it also works as a very good Photoshop program, allowing you to remove backgrounds, isolate images, paste them in new surroundings, and adjust colors… far better than the cheap-o little Photoshop clone I was using before.

I can take a colored pencil drawing (which is increasingly hard for me to do) and put it on computer to use digital tools.

I can draw and color more easily on a touch screen with a stylus, once I learn all the computer controls.

I can finish the drawing by hand and put in a background that matches the style of my drawing using Picsart Smart Backgrounds. But you can see the creeping crudity of my hand-drawn work. So, I can also go back and put it together again with even more AI help.

I can use AI Mirror to put the original drawing through a realistic anime style format that redraws my drawing, including all the flubs that AI is heir to. Crooked fingers, changing the gender of the subject, shrinking the nose, crossing the eyes, and a total misunderstanding of clown paint.

Using Picsart again to put in the Martin Bar and Grill background.

And then I make final corrections with the digital pen and paintbrush to turn Francois back into a boy wearing clown paint while he sings sad songs.

And so, as I get more and more familiar with the things I can do with Picsart, I let it turn me into a Jimmy Buffett clone again, sending me back to Florida where my heart is this weekend.

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July 6, 2024 · 1:19 am

Trouble at the Troll House

You can control who lives in a doll house pretty easily. The behavior of Trolls and Wishniks and My Pretty Ponies is rather placid and easy to manage. They are all mere lumps of cold plastic given shape by Mattel, Hasbro, Marx, or some other toy factory corporation.

Jade, the family dog, originally supposed to write this post for me, has passed away. Of course, she would’ve pressed the keys with her tongue, so the laptop is grateful that I am doing this post tonight. The dog left me alone in the house on a weekend when I should’ve been able to go with the rest of the family to Florida to see my son’s graduation ceremony from his Air Force special training course. I can’t tell you what he trained in because he is not allowed to tell his family. Probably secrets about aliens and spies from outer space and some junk.

It is possible that Rarity Pony murdered that fallen Troll as baby Cookie Monster and Claypants Troll looked on. Well, it could happen… if somebody had been playing with them.

The fact remains, however, that I had to stay home alone like some kind of over-aged Macaulay Culkin to be near the hospital I want to be admitted to if the no-peeing problem I had earlier this week in the middle of the night suddenly gets worse. It is painful to have a full bladder you can’t empty for some unknown reason. And it is potentially life-threatening. Something similar killed Jim Henson. And Florida hospitals are not the place to be when we have a perfectly good ER that we’ve used before when I feared I might be dying only a few blocks up the street.

So, the only badness I had to deal with turned out to be a bit of loneliness… the blues. The no-peeing problem did not haunt me again on either of the last two nights. I usually like being alone, but not when I am missing out on an important family moment.

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July 6, 2024 · 12:30 am

Magnificent Maisey on the Mound

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Okay, I am taking over this danged silly old blog today to talk about something important!  Baseball!!!  Yeah, and even more important, I wanna talk about how girls can be good at baseball.

My name is Maisey Moira Morgan.  I am a left-handed pitcher for the Carrollton Cardinals.  That’s a boys’ Little League team, in case ya didn’t know.  I ain’t the only girl in boys’ Little League, but I am the only girl on the Cardinals’ team.  The only girl pitcher.  The only WINNING girl pitcher.  I woulda been an undefeated winning girl pitcher if Tyree Suggs hadn’t dropped that fly ball in the bottom of the ninth inning out in right field two weeks ago.  I ended my season at 3 wins and 1 loss.

You see, the thing is, I know the secret to striking out boys at the plate.  First of all, I am a left-handed pitcher.  Those danged boys are all used to seeing the ball flung at ’em from the right side.  Ninety-nine and two-tenths per cent of all pitchers in our league are right-handed.  So are most of the batters.  So that futzes them up right there.  And on top of that, Uncle Milt taught me to throw a knuckle-ball two years ago.  That is one amazingly hard pitch to hit square if you do it right.  You curl your fingers on the ball and give a little sorta push-out with your fingertips as you let it go.  And you try really hard to make the ball not spin as you push it towards the batter.  It can do amazing things after it leaves my hand.  Uncle Milt swears that he saw one of my pitches double-dip and then corkscrew as it went across the plate low in the strike zone.  A mere boy can’t really get a good swing at a pitch if it flutters around like a crazy bug with butterfly wings.

But that ain’t even the real secret to my baseball success.  You see, them danged boys all think they can step up to the plate and put their bat on any ball thrown at ’em by a mere girl.  They are not afraid of me, even the third time they get up to bat after striking out twice before.  My uniform is not exactly sexy, but all I really have to do is wiggle my behind a little and smile at them, and they don’t even seem to be thinking about hitting the ball any more.  I get an even bigger smile on my sweet little face when strike three flutters past ’em.  I always take ’em by surprise.

I expect to be the first woman pitcher in the major leagues one day.  Remember my name.  Maisey Moira Morgan.  Future Hall of Famer.

(Disclaimer; Maisey might actually have a hard time claiming her place in the Baseball Hall of Fame, not because the major leagues don’t have any women in them, but because she is an entirely fictional human being, only existing in Mickey’s stupid little head.)

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July 5, 2024 · 12:22 am

Doodle-Bop!

Sometimes the only thing you really want out of life is just to get by. You get tired of always having to climb the danged highest mountain.  You get tired of trying to swim the danged deepest sea.

16750_102844509741181_100000468961606_71393_6278100_nSometimes all you want to do is doodle-bop!…  To draw in pen and ink and post your derfiest doofenwacky doodles so you can just make your way through another danged day.

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You aim a lot for different, and undeniably original… because no one thinks like you… certainly no one who is real and has a real brain.  You are gifted with an “other-ness”, a sing-songy simpering something that makes you want to doodle and do what no man has done before.  (Does that sentence exist anywhere else in all of literature?  Even if there is some alternate dimension with infinite monkeys typing on infinite typewriters?  What’s a typewriter, you say?  Danged millennials!)

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I really can’t help it, you know.  I was a middle school teacher for 24 years.  That sort of thing has mental health consequences.  And if you wring the sponges in your stupid old brain hard enough and long enough… doodle-bop! comes out.

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Turtle boy’s magic iron of irony!!!

And you have to wonder why some of the stuff that is in your stupid old head is even in there.  Why is it that sometimes the words “Argyle socks are filled with rocks” are drifting through the vast empty spaces in the logic centers of your brain?  There has to be a reason for everything, doesn’t there?

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I do believe I have made myself chuckle at least a dozen chuck-tacular times in the chuck-a-tational crafting of this cheddar-cheesy post.  But it only really counts if I can make you girlishly giggle or guy-like guffaw with my word-munching and cartoony paffoonies.

Wild Ride

The terror-filled cartoon car chase that is life as usual.

You may have noticed that everything is black and white, even though it doesn’t have to be.  Good versus evil, hot versus cold, everything can be divided up simplistically… but the really profound part of simplicity is vibrating reverberations of complexity that lie just underneath.  Words have meaning, even though they are just a bunch of crooked squiggles marked on a page.  (Yes, I know… “or typed on a computer screen”.  Danged millennials!)

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And so, this is my doodle-bop!  Probably not the doodliest or the boppiest doodle-bop! I could have bopped… but there it is.  I have made it through another sorta creative post without losing my mind…  Honest!  I did not lose it.  It is merely temporarily misplaced for a moment.  It will be back in its proper place tomorrow… probably.

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July 4, 2024 · 2:25 am

Dows, Iowa

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Bustling downtown Dows with the grain elevator in the background

There are many simple truths to be gleaned from a simple visit to the scene of your childhood.  You need every so often to get in touch with where you came from and the roots of who you are.  Dows is not the town where I grew up.  But we played them in 4-H softball, and we won almost as much as we lost to them.  It is a town near enough to my little home town to be a place that impacts who I am.

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You have no idea what this is, right?

Day before yesterday we went to Dows for a dinner with relatives.  My cousin and her second husband were there.  Her parents, my uncle who still lives on Uncle I.C.’s farm place that has been in the family for more than a hundred years, and my aunt who is going bald a bit, were also there.  We ate in a totally Pepsi-Cola-themed restaurant and had a Rueben pizza with roast beef and sauerkraut on it (talk about your total cultural potpourri!)  The experience taught me a simple lesson.  We come from a bizarre mixture of themes and things cooked together in a recipe for life that can never be repeated and cooked again for our children.

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You don’t order Coke here.

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We avoided talking about politics because Iowa is very conservative and none of us enjoy yelling at each other about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton using fact-free Fox News talking points and cow poop about how building a wall that Mexico pays for will cure all our economic problems because we all think we know how Hispanics moving into Iowa are ruining our lives.  So, instead, we talked about how Eaton’s machine tool manufacturing plant in Belmond is facing more lay-offs.

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The restored and re-purposed Dows’ Rock Island train station.

We talked about businesses that have gone out and not been replaced in the little Iowa towns around us.  We talked about how no one walks beans any more, walking the rows of soy beans to pull button weeds and cockle-burrs by hand and chop rogue corn with hoe.  We talked about how farming has gone to spraying weed-killing chemicals and factory-farming pigs instead.  It is a simple lesson in how ways of life come to an end and are not necessarily replaced with something better.

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There is an artist working on a patriotic project to put one of these in every county in Iowa.

We constantly remake ourselves as the world changes and ages around us.  Nothing lasts forever.  Life is a process of growing and withering and regrowing.  A simple word for that is “farming”.  Who we were impacts who we have become and will affect what comes after.  But we learn simple lessons from going to the places we love best and doing our dead-level best to get from there to here and move eventually to someplace beyond.  And Dows, Iowa is just one of those places… I guess.

 

 

 

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July 3, 2024 · 12:57 am

Spotted Trains

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I have had a practically life-long fascination with trains.  Where did that come from?  It came from a Methodist minister who once upon a time saved my life.

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Reverend Louis Aiken (in the cowboy hat) was a lover of HO model trains, as well as country music… and, of course, God.

My best friend growing up was a PK, a preacher’s kid.  And as we hung out and played games and got into imaginatively horrible trouble, we invariably wound up in the basement of the parsonage where his father kept his HO train layout.   I learned lessons of life in that basement in more than one way.  I have to explain all of that somewhere down line.  But for now, I have to limit the topic to what I learned about trains.  They are a link to our past.  They are everywhere. And they do far more for us than merely make us cuss while sitting and endlessly waiting at the railroad crossing.

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When visiting Dows, we absolutely had to stop and take pictures at the train station.

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This is, by my best guess, an SD40 locomotive parked at the restored train station in Dows, Iowa.

Spotting trains to take pictures of, gawk at, and totally make cow-eyes over has become a way of life to me.  When visiting Iowa, especially Mason City, Iowa, we always have to stop at the engine on display in East Park.

When I was a kid, this old iron horse was not fenced in to protect it from kids, weather, and other destructive forces.  Now, however, it is fully restored and given its own roof.  This is a 2-8-2 steam engine with two little wheels in front, eight big wheels in the middle, and two little wheels at the back (not counting wheels on the coal tender).  I have ridden on trains pulled by such a behemoth.  I love to watch the monkey gears grind on the sides of the wheels forcing steam power into the surge down the tracks.  And I can’t help being a total train nut.  Of course I don’t deny being more than one kind of nut.  But being a mixed nut is another post for another day.

 

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July 2, 2024 · 3:38 am

Cissy Moonskipper Meets the Nebulons

The First Sighting

Cissy had changed the name of the family starship. Dark Moon’s Dreaded Luck was now Heart Moon’s Happy Luck. Of course, it was only changed on the log book. On the ship’s hull outside, the ship’s name still read Dark Moon’s Dreaded Luck FT-645-00-X5015-A606. But in creepy Imperium-style letters. She carefully copied Crocodile Guy’s heading coordinates into the log book of the Happy Luck.

“Captain Cissy, scanners are picking up a large group of objects just coming into scanner range.” The glowing holographic form of Steve Irwin, Crocodile Guy, stood beside the Captain’s Chair with a concerned look on his face. He was basically an AI education program, but his AI addiction to absorbing new knowledge had changed him into the far-trader starship’s science officer, engineer, translator, and all-around indispensible right-hand man for Captain Cissy. He even stood in for the ship’s computer, David, who became deceased in the escape from the Stardog pirates.

“Are they hostile? Do you think?” Cissy looked up at the viewing screen. Little red blips were swarming in the upper right corner of the screen.

“Dey maybee bee Pie-rats! Maybee dem Stardogs again!” said the terrified voice of little Friday, the Lupin child that had become more like a little sister to twelve-year-old Cissy than the family dog she distinctly resembled. Friday was out of sight at that moment, hiding behind Cissy’s Captain’s Chair.

“What course do I set, Captain?” asked Suki, the blue-skinned Nebulon pilot.

“They are currently in a position where, if they are indeed starships, they can scan us just as clearly as we can scan them. If they are are space buccaneers, they will make for us any moment now.” Crocodile Guy sounded more calm than any of the rest of the crew. Of course, being a hologram AI program, he was also not as easily killed as the rest of the crew.

“Well, if they are coming to get us, we are way outnumbered. We might as well meet them head on and see for ourselves what they are going to do.” Cissy’s expression was one of stiff-lipped defiance.

“Well, they could be space debris or a group of deep-space asteroids going nowhere,” said Suki. setting the controls on an intercept-course heading. Cissy marveled again at how fast Suki had picked up Galactic English from Crocodile Guy’s tutorials. She sounded like a spacer from the Imperium now. No trace of a Nebulonin accent remained.

The Happy Luck closed the distance rapidly. The red dots did seem to be headed towards them as well.

“I can put the image on screen now,” said Suki. “Do you want to see them now, Captain?”

“Yes, please.”

Friday peered out at the screen from behind Cissy. “Wowz! They iz space fishes! Reelie big space fishes,” said Friday.

“Yes, they are big. In fact, five hundred to a thousand meters in length each. Those are space whales.” Suki was grinning as if she were immensely pleased. “And not just any space whales. Clan Vorannac space whales. My clan.”

“Those are what your people use as starships?” Cissy gasped. They were easily as immense as Imperial dreadnoughts.

“Yes. Those big space fish are hollow and contain entire ecosystems inside them… entire worlds.”

“So, they are friendly?” Cissy hoped aloud.

“If we are lucky and have found a good warlord… rather than a bad one.”

“We iz aboutta fine out,” declared Friday. Her canine eyes grew larger as the looming space whales came towards them, swimming stately and regally amongst the stars.

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