A.C. Flory's Blog, page 39

Research, research, research…

https://youtu.be/UzrZ_s3_jRQ

That incredible musculature belongs to a gymnast by the name of Yuri van Gelder. His nickname is ‘Lord of the Rings’ because of this:

Not the best picture, but it shows van Gelder doing the ‘Iron Cross’ on the rings. If you watch the video these still images came from, you’ll see that the rings just hang there so the resistance they provide is minimal. And that means that holding that pose, or any of the poses in that family, is down to pure will, training and strength.

To me, the most interesting thing was that the pectoral muscles are not that big. Not like this guy:

https://www.muscleandfitness.com/workout-plan/workouts/workout-routines/6-week-program-bulging-pecs-broad-shoulders-and-bigger-legs/

I admit the guy in that pic has a better body than most extreme body builders, but what I needed to see were muscles that actually work hard. That’s why I gave up on the body builder pics and went looking for gymnasts.

Oh, you want to know why I’m perving on, I mean researching, muscles? For the Vokh, of course. They’re flyers so the muscles across their chests have to be insanely strong, but I didn’t want them to look like birds:

So now, I have to create flight muscles that are kind of in-between the muscles of a gymnast and those of a bird. I love research.

cheers
Meeks

What not to do with egg whites :(

Or the glitch that ate Christmas.

I got up early this morning to bake the sponge component of my chocolate mousse cake, but as I reached for the first egg, I discovered that one of them must have leaked into the container because all the eggs on the bottom layer were stuck.

I managed to rescue enough eggs to make the sponge, but what was I going to do with the other eight?

Once the cake was in the oven, I tried soaking the eggs in cold water. Nope….

Next, I dragged out a big pot, poured in some water, placed the container in the pot and heated the whole thing:

I thought the hot water would dissolve the egg white, but no dice. When I tried to pull one of the eggs free, part of the shell stuck to the bottom. Luckily, by this time the eggs had half poached so I waited a bit longer and pulled the others off as well. Each one left a bit of its shell behind:

I finished boiling the rescued eggs in another pot, and this is what they look like:

Not sure what I’ll do with so many boiled eggs, but at least only two were wasted. And lesson learned: egg white makes a great glue. So great, in fact, that I had to excavate the bits of shell from the inside of the container. The cake turned out well though.

Hope you enjoyed this Christmas Glitch and have none of your own.

Hugs,
Meeks

Meeka says, “Merry Xmas!”

More importantly…stay well!

love,
Meeks

Omicron – data from South Africa

Important!

Dr John Campbell goes through the latest scientific data about the effect Omicron is having in South Africa:

There is too much information to reduce it to a few dot points so I strongly recommend that you watch the whole video.

cheers
Meeks

When one thing leads to another…

I bought a super dooper video editor from a trusted brand, and it’s turned into my bête noire. But I paid for it, right? So I set about learning it and finding workarounds for its…idiosyncracies.

To learn the features I most needed to use, I began a project in which I had to weave bits of video with still photos that I could pan and zoom. How in heck can a simple zoom be so hard? But I digress. One of the still photos I wanted to use was a pic of an iVokh except…you guessed it. The more I looked at that pic in unfamiliar surroundings, the less ‘right’ it looked.

The perspective was the problem. For reasons known only to my subconscious, I began work on the iVokh body from a three-quarter perspective. At that kind of angle, the bits furthest from your line of sight appear smaller. Or at least, they’re meant to.

Now, I don’t know about you, my friends, but I tend to create images by feel. I keep tweaking them until they feel right. The one thing I don’t do is set up a vanishing point with lines to show where the tricky bits are meant to go.

Sadly, there’s a first time for everything:

So I managed to get the perspective more or less right, but then I faced another huge problem – how to represent light and shade. In the previous iteration of the iVokh, I’d cobbled together scraps of images to get both the texture and lighting effects I needed to create something approaching 3D. Now I had to do most of that again.

Digital collage is complicated by the fact that every piece has to blend in to the pieces around it. Trust me, that’s hard because even in what amounts to black and white, there are almost infinite shades of grey:

There’s no real explanation for what happened next though. Once I had all the shades of grey playing nicely, I thought, “Hmm…maybe it’s time to finally create the cilia!” So I did:

I did hunt for images I could use for ‘cilia’…

…but none of them worked, so I ended up creating a vector ‘cilia’ that I could resize, deform, and orient however I pleased. One by one….

I must admit I’m rather proud of the cilia I created. When your alien doesn’t have eyebrows to frown with, or nostrils to flare, or a mouth that smiles, smirks [hate that word], pouts, and droops etc., you really need some way of describing emotive facial expressions, so the cilia do a heck of a lot of work. Kahti peers through the ‘fringe of its cilia’, and sometimes its cilia ‘go rigid with dread’ or shrink, or droop, or wave around… You get the idea.

Oh, and while I was at it, I realised that the image needed to tell a story, so I changed the figure’s posture and gave it a starrock bead to stare at. Oddly enough, the bead and its leather thong were the easiest objects to create:

An acolyte’s starrock bead with a slight pinkish tinge

In the story, only metal objects made in the south of Vokhtah have a pinkish colour. This becomes a rather important plot point so I added the bead to the image as well.

The one thing I have not done is finish that video. Maybe tomorrow.

cheers
Meeks

Insect bites, and how to ease an inflamed itch

I’m not talking about your common, garden variety mosquito bite here. I’m talking about the kind of bite that becomes swollen and red and itches more than you thought possible. The kind of bite that drives you crazy.

Two days ago, I was working in the garden, pulling weeds from one of the flowerbeds when I felt a couple of stings. One was inside my gardening glove, and I think it was an ant. The other three were one my torso, and I have no idea what bit me, or how. I took an anti-histamine when I went inside and it seemed to be okay. By the next day, however, all the bites had turned nasty.

I tried vinegar, my normal go-to, but it only eased the itch for a short time.

Then I tried making a paste out of bi-carb and spreading it over the bites. It did work for a while, but once the paste dried the itch returned, plus I was covered in dried bi-carb powder.

By this time, I’d taken Telfast during the day and Polaramine at night, but nothing much was working. In desperation I looked up cures for ant bites and found a post that recommended placing something cold on the bite…

It worked!

That first moment when the cold pack touched bare skin was pretty intense, but after that the itch disappeared like magic.

It’s not a permanent cure, but each time you do it, the angry, swollen flesh around the bite shrinks a little more. And it doesn’t make a mess, or smell like fish-‘n-chips.

Later me lovelies. Time to do some more gardening.
Meeks

Salt – a review

Apologies for the cryptic title but the fantasy novel I just reviewed is called just that – salt. Much like Dune and Wool, Salt [the mineral] is the backbone of its world:

I gave Salt 5/5 stars, and this is the review I left for it on Amazon.com:

I stumbled onto Salt and fell in love.

The story alternates between two, very different protagonists – Tanan, the second son of the King, and Sukhetai, the first son of the Warchief of a powerful nomadic tribe.

Tanan is thoughtful and smart. Sukhetai is impulsive and quick to anger. They could not be any more different, yet right from the start, their destinies slowly intertwine, helped along by a couple of old women who speak to the grass.

One of the most interesting fantasy elements in the story is the idea of the Change, and that some women who have gone through the Change come into an earth-based kind of power. This power allows them to ‘ride the wind’ on the wings of their special bird-familiars, or to get a feel for things far away by listening to the grass. This special power gives women a stronger position in society than is normally the case in many fantasy settings.

Another thing that really impressed me was the authors’ courage in giving the characters names that are hard to pronounce. Some roll off the tongue while others make you stumble, yet the very otherness reinforces the fact that ‘we’re not in Kanvas any more’. I love that.

On a technical level the story is well-written and well edited. Quite frankly, it was a joy to read. Very highly recommended.

https://www.amazon.com/Salt-Barbarians-Book-J-Lowell-ebook/dp/B09C6PZS3J/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=Salt&qid=1638758411&s=digital-text&sr=1-3

I’d never heard of the authors; I just liked the look of the cover and the blurb so I thought I’d take a chance. Sometimes you really do get lucky.

Have a great day everyone and stay well.
Meeks

How many writers/poets also love creating visual art?

The idea for this question arose from a conversation I had with Chuck Litka, about typos.

I find typos very distracting when I’m reading as they seem to leap off the page at me. And I can’t ‘not see them’.

I hypothesized that the reason might be because I do digital graphics where I’m used to working at the pixel level. The more I thought about those typos though, the more I saw a pattern emerging. And it had nothing to do with typos.

See what you think:

Chuck Litka is a writer and painter.

I love words and digital graphics.

Diana Peach loves digital graphics too.

So does Audrey Driscoll.

Chris James is a writer and photographer.

Frank Prem is a poet and photographer.

Yorgos writes and draws.

Candy Korman is a writer, lover of art, and dances the tango.

Robbie Cheadle is a writer and creator of art with fondant.

And my crafty friend Anne is a botanical artist who paints and embroiders whilst also writing interesting posts on her blog…

And those are just the creatives I can think of off the top of my head. Apart from Anne and Candy, I believe we all create our own book covers, so there is an element of functionality about our art, but I suspect we’d want to be involved even if we weren’t DIY Indies.

So I’m throwing the question out there:

Is it possible that wordsmiths need to create some form of visual beauty in order to recreate it with words?

Or is there something even more fundamental going on?

Is it possible that wordsmiths are also into music? Or dance? Or food?

Food is such an elemental part of life. Do you have to be a good cook in order to write convincingly about food?

Lots of questions and not a single answer, so I’d really like you to share your thoughts in comments. And by ‘you’ I mean Indies, traditionally published writers, photographers, painters, graphic artists, musicians and cooks. If I’ve missed anyone please share that too.

-hugs-
Meeks

Howard Springs as ‘concentration camp’??

What a bloody nerve! I’ve come to expect all sorts of misinformation from social media, but this really takes the cake. Apparently, we Australians are ‘hunting’ down Indigenous people from remote communities and forcibly vaccinating them. Or locking them up in our own home-grown concentration camp at Howard Springs….

My thanks to Steve Bero for forwarding me the following article which refutes the nonsense going viral on the internet: https://quillette.com/2021/11/28/an-outback-conspiracy/

It’s a long article, but well worth the read, if only to counter the insidious and potentially lethal disinformation being spread by unscrupulous media personalities overseas. The Australian government deserves utter condemnation for its inaction on Climate Change, for blatant pork barrelling and a host of other issues, but this is not one of them.

Why? Because there are deeply committed Aboriginal groups who are doing everything possible to keep remote communities safe. The conspiracy theorists demean and insult the vital work they do.

Please pass the Quillette article on to everyone you know because the lies are literally killing all of us.

Meeks

Omicron may be the successor to Delta

I first heard about the Omicron variant last night, from Dr Norman Swann:

Little is known about the Omicron variant of Covid19, but it is being blamed for a sudden, sharp spike in new infections in South Africa:

Dr John Campbell explains what we know about the new variant, and what it may mean for the pandemic in this must see video:

The dot points I took from the video are:

Omicron has 32 mutations which may make it more infectious than Delta,The mutations may allow it to elude the immunity supplied by vaccines [ALL vaccines],No one knows whether Omicron will make you more sick or less,It has already escaped from South Africa into Hong Kong and Belgium,Most of Europe and the UK have just banned travel from South Africa,The travel bans are to give scientists time to find out more about Omicron, and for Pharmaceutical companies to tweak existing vaccines to be more effective against the variant,Both the US and Australia have adopted a ‘wait and see’ attitude, By the time we ‘see’ how dangerous Omicron can be, it may well be too late.

On a personal note, I’m booked in for my second AstraZeneca jab this Monday. I was hoping to enjoy a latte before Christmas, but I guess I’ll ‘wait and see’ how bad Omicron gets before the Offspring and I emerge from self-isolation. I really, really hope this variant does turn out to be a ‘storm in a tea cup’.

Meeks