art – dangermouse.net

D&D prep minimisation; planning to sketch

Tomorrow I am running the next session of my current Dungeons & Dragons game, so I used some time today in between teaching online ethics classes to do some prep work. I’ve recently read a friend’s copy of Sly Flourish’s Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, which I found really awesome. It gives advice on how to prepare for a D&D session in a very fast but effective way, concentrating on things that will have high impact at the table and not end up being wasted effort. I liked the book and its advice so much that I went and bought my own copy.

As it turns out, I didn’t need to do a lot of prep anyway, as the party are currently partway through a dungeon, and I have the remainder of the adventure to get through, which will probably take up most or all of the session. But I also did a bit of work on codifying my own variant of Dungeon Crawl Classics‘ Mighty Deeds of Arms that I mentioned two days ago. And I glanced at another adventure which I’ll be ready to run in case the party gets through the current one in quick time (or potentially chooses to flee in fear and seek out something easier to do…).

The weather continues cold and dry. Scully was very insistent about lying in my lap for most of the day to keep warm. Normally she’s content to do her own thing, but not today.

I also talked with my wife about getting a sketchbook to take on our trip to Europe. She’s taking a watercolour book and some watercolour pencils and paints to do sketches and paintings, as she’s come to love her new hobby. I thought I may as well take a sketchbook and do some drawings of scenes in Europe while she’s painting – we can spend some time sitting al fresco at cafes or whatever and draw our surroundings. I said I could go to the art supply shop and buy one for myself, but she had some suitable A5 size books and gave me one. It’s 150 gsm cartridge paper, not watercolour paper, so is not ideal for her work – she uses 200 gsm watercolour paper now and has bought a book of that for her travel workbook.

I haven’t done much sketching in the past, but I think I’d be at least semi-okay at it. I guess we’ll see! Better to try things rather than die wondering. I’ll share some of sketches, maybe during the trip, or maybe when I get back home.

Incognito Art

Friday I had my regular ethics classes, and in the evening board games night with my friends. We assembled at one guy’s place, and the five attendees played games such as Knarr, Faraway, Landmarks. Knarr was new to me, and really enjoyable. But we only played once as it’s only up to four players and our fifth arrived partway through the first game. We played Landmarks I think four times, since we were all keen to give a go at being the clue giver in the game. It’s a frustrating role, but in a socially fun way.

Today I did my 5k run and I managed to record my third best time! 26:26. My second best is 26:24, just two seconds faster. The best is a strangely anomalous 25:59, which I set on a much flatter route that I’ve only ever tried once. And to be honest I’m wondering if the tracker GPS got the distance right. Perhaps I should try that route again some time.

This afternoon my wife and I took Scully for a ride on the ferry.

We headed into the city. The day was cool and cloudy.

From the ferry terminal at Circular Quay we walked up past the State Library, through The Domain (a park) to the Art Gallery. Nearby is a gate into the Royal Botanic Gardens, where there was an art exhibition on at the Garden Gallery: the Incognito Art Show (which I mentioned previously). My wife had submitted three pieces for the show and wanted to see what else was available, and if any of hers might be on display at the moment. They weren’t, but they probably will be at some point over the next month or so that the artworks are on sale.

We stopped afterwards at the nearby restaurant in the Domain to have a drink and a snack before heading home. We walked back and had a quick look around The Rocks while waiting for our ferry. Then we hopped on the ferry and headed home.

The sun had come out and was just setting as we travelled back.

A nice day out, but after that run in the morning and all the walking, I’m pretty exhausted!

No water supply; D&D artwork

I’m sitting here wondering when our water supply will come back on.

Roadworks began out the front of our place yesterday—to replace the dangerously ineffectual speed bumps and pedestrian island, which I’ve commented on twice before. They carefully spray painted markings all over the road and footpaths to indicate buried phone lines, water pipes, drains, gas pipes, and so on. And then today they dug things up and promptly broke a water main.

I’ve had no water since at least midday, possibly earlier because that was when I tried using a tap and nothing came out. And it’s now just gone 8pm, so it’s been out at least eight hours. And with no notice before the outage, our supply of water is limited to what was in the kettle, and in the cold water jug in the fridge.

When I came back from walking Scully at lunch time I wanted to wash my hands, and squeezed some liquid soap onto my hands before realising there was no water to wash it off with. So I had to use paper towels to wipe the soap off. And I’ve wanted to wash my hands several times since, but have had to make do with some COVID-era hand sanitiser.

Ah…. as I write this the water just came back on! I could tell because the toilet cistern started filling up. Phew, that’s good. My wife did indicate when she came home from work that there were workers from Sydney Water outside trying to fix things.

In other news, one of my friends playing in my Dungeons & Dragons campaign drew this:

This is the entrance to the latest dungeon adventure. We play theatre of the mind – no pre-drawn maps or props. So my friend did the whole thing based on just my verbal description of the landscape during the game. I thought it was so cool I had to share.

Sunday brunch and Incognito art

This morning I got up a bit early and did my 5k run. I needed to go early because I had to cool down and have a shower and change in time to walk up the street with my wife to meet up with her mother and brother for a morning tea at a local cafe. Although I’d had quick breakfast before my run, I was hungry after the exercise and turned it into a brunch by ordering the French toast, which came loaded with maple syrup, berry compote, and melted white chocolate. My brother-in-law joined me for a substantial brunch as he hadn’t had breakfast yet, while the others had lighter snacks.

When we got home I did some comics stuff and got ready for my ethics classes, beginning from 4pm today. And I made some green curry broccoli and rice for dinner.

My wife has been making some artworks to send off for an anonymous fundraising art event, called the Incognito Art Show. Anyone can register and submit up to three pieces of original art, which are then displayed online, and selected works in a public display gallery. People can buy the art without knowing who made it, which is only revealed after purchase. You can view and buy art online if you wish, and they ship internationally, so if you’re interested you might want to check it out. The artworks aren’t viewable or buyable yet because they’re still accepting submissions, but they will go on display from 26 May and on sale from 31 May.

Pretty cool!

Taking Scully’s prints

It was the usual busy Monday with plenty of online classes today. I didn’t do much else of note, except for one thing this evening.

My wife found a jewellery maker that does silver castings of custom wax moulds that you make. They suggest doing fingerprints of yourself or loved ones, or nose or paw prints of pets. So my wife decided to get one and make a wax impression from Scully. We did it together, heating up the small wax balls supplied by the jeweller with a hair dryer, then squashing them down and then getting an imprint by pressing them onto Scully’s nose and paw. They give you two wax balls and you send them both back, labelled in order of preference, and they decide if the first preference is okay to use, otherwise they use the backup.

She’ll send them back tomorrow and I guess she’ll have a Scully imprint bit of jewellery within a few weeks. I’ll see if I remember to take a photo to share when it arrives.

New content today:

Games and art

Friday was online games night with my friends. I had a pretty standard day except for trying to troubleshoot my web sites. I still couldn’t log in to the server via SSH. Support from my webhost was not very helpful and I sent several messages back describing the problem and what I’d tried. A friend helped me and said it sounded like the machine was out of processes, so couldn’t launch a shell process when I tried to log in, nor processes to do various tasks.

Besides that I had my usual ethics classes. After the last one, I went out for dinner with my wife to a local Indian place. The samosas there are always good, and this time I tried a pepper chicken dish which I thought I must have had before, but it was different to what I expected, with a creamier sauce, and very nice.

At games night we played Space Base, then Wavelength, and Just One. I think that’s kind of all we got through – everyone seemed to be tired and wanted to end early.

Today I went for a 5k run. it was only 13°C when I went, which is too cold for me! But I managed a good time, just over 27 minutes. After that I cleaned the bathroom and shower cubicle, then worked on some comics for a bit.

After lunch my wife and I took Scully on a long walk over to the Coal Loader, where the local council was holding a local art exhibition and competition. There were mostly sculptures, with a few paintings and audiovisual installations. Some really interesting ones, and some a bit strange – a good mix for art, really.

In good news, it looks like my web server issues have resolved today!

New content today:

An expedition to art

Today is Anzac Day, Australia’s public holiday of remembrance for war dead. I still had ethics classes in the morning, and my wife went out with Scully for a bit while I did those.

When she got home and I’d finished teaching, we went for a drive out to Concord to the premises of the Drummoyne Art Society. The reason was to go see an exhibition which included a couple of works by our ex-neighbour – the one who owns Luna, Scully’s best-poodle-friend. She has an Instagram here where she posts a lot of her art. She does abstract watercolours and told us about the show, so we were keen to go have a look.

My wife had called up yesterday to make sure the exhibition was open on the public holiday, and had been assured that it was. But when we got to the gallery, it was closed. She phoned up to see if anyone would answer and got onto someone who was confused when we said we were at the gallery and it was closed. Eventually they worked out that we had gone to the wrong place! The exhibition was not at the Art Society’s gallery in Concord, but instead at the Drummoyne Civic Centre, a couple of suburbs away! So we drove over there.

It was close to the Drummoyne Bakehouse and we were hungry, so we stopped in there first for lunch. Then we walked back to the Civic Centre and went into the exhibition. There were a couple of hundred or so artworks: oils, acrylics, pastels, pencil, watercolours, and also some digital art. We spent time looking at all of them and there were some very good ones in there. We also got to vote on a “people’s choice” award and picked our favourites.

Then we headed back home and I had a bit of time to do some comics work before my evening ethics classes began at 5pm. I made lentils and rice for dinner during an hour break between classes.

Oh! And I also had time to do stage 6 of the Lego Dungeons & Dragons set build. This is a new section, and so far it’s just the base, which is much larger than the previous building.

New content today:

Ethics of waste; and Stable Diffusion

Today was the start of a new ethics topic for my online lesson: Waste. I wrote my lesson plan this morning, and did the first three classes tonight. It runs through a series of questions for the kids on: how we handle our waste, is it ever okay to litter, is it okay that some people make a living by waste picking, what can or should governments do to encourage/force people to produce less waste, and whether the global waste trade is okay or not. Towards the end we talk about whose responsibility it is to ensure that toxic waste (including domestic toxic waste such as batteries) is handled correctly, and then talk about nuclear waste. I leave them to think about the problem of designing effective long-term nuclear waste warning messages for future civilisations.

Also today I signed up for another AI art generation application: Stable Diffusion. I spent a bunch of my free credits experimenting with it, and I think I’m of the opinion that it’s not as good as DALL-E, at least for generating the sort of medieval fantasy scenes that I’ve been trying to produce these past few days. No matter what prompt I tried, I simply could not get Stable Diffusion to generate a picture of a castle drawbridge.

New content today:

Double naughty lunch

In a terrible confluence of events:

The last two times I walked to our favourite bakery for lunch, I actually got my meal from the fish & chip shop next door (rather than get a meat pie from the bakery like I have normally done in the past). The fish & chip meals are big, so by the time I finished, I was too full to consider a cake or other sweet treat from the bakery. (Normally when I have a pie, I can have a treat for dessert.)
I went for my 2.5k run early this morning.
So by the time we got to the bakery for lunch I was super hungry.
I said, “Sod it, I’m getting two cakes for lunch.”

This was sheer decadence and probably inadvisable, but I really wanted to do it. I got an apple crumble pie, and a slice of carrot cake. Yep, that was my lunch today.

While eating them, I asked my wife, “Is it okay that I have two cakes for lunch?”

She replied, “Sure! You should do whatever you feel like!” Then a second later she added, “You’re really asking the wrong person, you know.”

I said, “No, actually, I’m asking exactly the right person.” I love that my wife supports me in doing crazy, inadvisable things.

In other news, I spent some time today using all my DALL-E credits before they expired. I decided to use them to make some illustrations for some D&D writing that I have on the back burner, in case I ever find the time to publish it. I gave DALL-E the following prompt:

digital art illustration of a narrow causeway with medieval car traffic, leading to a small island with a castle on it to the coast, like Saint Michael’s Mount, daylight

Now, you may notice the typo: “car” instead of “cart”. I wanted medieval carts. What I got was this:

DALL-E image of cars on a causeway

🙄 That wasted one of my credits. Oh well.

New content today:

Thinking critically about art

I spent much of today writing the new week’s lesson for my online ethics & critical thinking classes. This is more on the critical thinking side – the topic being Art.

I start by showing the kids a picture that “I made”, and I ask them if they would call it “art”. In the three classes I ran tonight, everyone said yes. Then I reveal that I made it by using the online AI art generation program Craiyon. I share the web page live and type in a prompt and show them how it generates pictures. Then I re-ask the question – now that they know the picture was produced by an AI system, is it still “art” or not? Can a computer program produce something that we’re happy to call art”?

Then we talk for a while about the meaning of art. I show a Picasso painting from the Spanish Civil War period, when he produced a lot of artwork with sad imagery. I ask them what feeling they get from it, and many of the kids so far have said sadness. Then I explain why Picasso painted such images, because of his reactions to the war. And ask if knowing that makes them appreciate the art any more. Most of them agreed that it does.

Then I go back and ask is there any possible meaning behind the AI-generated art? If not, does that automatically make it inferior to human-produced art, or not? What if you can’t tell the difference? Does it matter?

And then I go into some possible uses for AI-generated art. And ask the kids what they think it means for the future of human artists.

There’s more to the lesson, diverging into a few other different themes, about destroying art, and whether famous/historical/significant art should be free for the public to view or not. I think it’s a good lesson, and it’s more fun and less stressful for me to teach than last week’s topic on cloning.

New content today: