doublefeh

I mentioned that yesterday was a good day for zeppelin sightings, right?

On our way to a Scandinavian Advent Party in the late afternoon, we ended up pacing the zeppelin along Junipero Serra boulevard. We were both going a touch over 35mph. It turned away when we got to our destination, but was still nearly overhead.

Yesterday was a good day for zeppelin sightings.

Just as Ben and I got out of the car up at the Russian Ridge open space preserve, we saw the zeppelin cruising over the other side of the ridge towards the ocean. It was an amazingly clear day, with visibility well over 30 miles. That second horizon above the hills is the Pacific Ocean, visible as far as the eye can see.

Nancy's family recently came into possession of Larry the turtle. He's really quite a charming fellow.

I've been trying for a day or so to come up with captions for them, but really all it boils down to it lovely Autumn leaves.

These things are just all over, aren't they?

I'm going to be up there the weekend of December 5th. Free for hangouts starting the Friday morning.

Ever since visiting Chicago in August, I can't help but compare every city's architecture to it. Unsurprisingly, none have yet measured up*. Toronto doesn't stand a chance, with its primarily modernist skyscraper blocks in the main downtown and almost entirely uniform '90s+ condo towers down by the waterfront.

Don't get me wrong, Toronto is a great city. I've enjoyed both visits, and would not mind living there some day. But Chicago is singularly impressive in its own way. I don't expect any city to impress me in the same way ever, with the possible exception of NYC if I ever go there.


(*Downtown Buffalo is actually surprisingly close. It manages to get some amount of the variety that Chicago has, only in miniature)

We ended up driving through a very impressive fog bank on our way down to Nerdly Beach Party. You'll just have to imagine the vast ocean and craggy rocks behind her.

The test run of printing with stencils cut with techshop's laser cutter. The precision of that device is quite something, even if I wasn't thrilled with the smoothness of the printing surface; that's more a function of the quality of the 1/16" planks I was able to get than anything to do with the laser cutter. I'm curious to try using the laser cutter to do the key-block/outline carving directly on to the block, though I don't have a workflow for that at the moment...

...and I still get that smile inside when I think about it.

From the SF Zoo on Labor Day. the SF Zoo has a wonderful lemur habitat, with plenty of ringtails, red-ruffs, and even a few black+white ruffs.

I was fairly pleased with how this print turned out. It's a print of a Temari, a brightly colored sort of handball. This particular one is one Nancy and I brought back from Matsumoto when we were there on our honeymoon. The registration is good enough, the blocks were fun to carve, and overall it looks nice. It did feel like it was missing something, though. So I decided to do a fourth block, just for the fun... ( Click through for version 2! )

Things are starting to come together for the Ultimate Gaming Con*.

We'll be camping at Plaskett Creek Campground, about 3 hours out from the Bay Area (at least as marked from Mountain View) and having a great time gaming just across the highway from the scenic California Coast.

We still have some space left. At $35 per person, including campsite, breakfasts, and lunches, NBP is one of the best convention deals out there. We're just putting the game schedule together this week, and signups will happen next week, so this is still a good time to get in on the action.

If you're interested in joining us, cruise over to the Google Group I'm using to organize it and poke around at the pages, or feel free to email me if you have any questions.

(*as the final convention in what I would consider the summer con season, this is a perfectly accurate description of the event)

I love how the perspective and distortion on this one makes it look sort of like three grasping fingers, as if Godzilla was approaching and Chicagotron is clawing his way up from his resting place under the Chicago River to do battle.

There's no single element of this picture that really struck me. Everything just seemed to balance correctly. The alternating heights of the building, the the assorted different textures of the skyscraper, the pale orange light and slight haze from the late afternoon...

It's too easy, when walking through a giant city like Chicago, to get lost in the scale of the place and turn all of the buildings around you into huge abstractions. This photograph contains (or at least implies the existence of) 328 windows. Even if there are two windows to an office, that's 164 offices. That's at least 164 people. Think about 164 people gathered in one place. And then remember that this is one corner of one vertical slice of a much, much larger building. And that even that building is just one among many. When does your brain lose track?

"Cloud Gate" (more commonly known as That Giant Silver Bean Thingy) is a lot of fun to take pictures around. I think my favorites were like this one (and this other one) which featured normal people in normal space as well as the distorted space in the sculpture, but without showing the entirety of the sculpture. Normal people in a distorted world, if you will.

One thing I loved about Chicago was the contrast between giant fancy skyscrapers and sinews of steel and iron. The skyscrapers are glorious monuments, but Elevated Railway and the bridges across the Chicago river are these hulking rusting masses of utilitarian iron and steel.

Finally got off my butt, pulled out my tools, and dashed through a bit of a print. I'm trying out a new kind of wood called Lauan wood, which has a very distinct texture to it. Unlike Shina, which tries to be as flat as possible, you only use Lauan if you really want the texture. I really wasn't quite sure what to expect. It's pretty neat.

I need to see if I can use it as a way to do rain.