Frugality, Fooling Fun and Finish Lines

The word of the week is paucity.

March 26 ­- What else?

I often, as part of my daily organizing, ask myself "What else?"

It's a mental habit, to see if I've forgotten to do anything, or to ensure I know what I'll be doing later on so I don't waste time if it's a busy day or week.

Apparently, that's a bad thing...

My takeaway from the article is that, indeed, I need to stop to celebrate my accomplishments... because if I don't, then there's no point in making them.

Food for thought: what else can I do to get to that point?

Oh, dang...

March 27 - The Temple Of Knowledge

What would it be like to live in a library?

As a kid, I loved the library: a trip downtown was always an opportunity to grab a half-dozen books to devour that week, along with a few new ones from my school library( which had beanbags, but they were almost always taken at recess )which was surprisingly well-stocked thanks to Mr. Edwards( with an awesome beard! )

I also wondered now and then what it would be like to grow up surrounded by books, to have all that knowledge and magic at your fingertips. Thanks to the wonders of animation, and the recollections of a wonderful childhood, we now have an answer to that question:

March 28 - Uncanny Andy?

CGI, for all its overuse in cinema, keeps getting better.

Real-time CGI, for example, has improved to the point where it's hard to tell if you're looking at a live person, or a motion-capture model. It's still not-quite-there, but certainly good enough to pass inspection by a casual viewer:

We first saw this incredible footage on Twitter thanks to eSports commenter Alex Mendez. It features Serkis reciting MacBeth’s “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” speech with a wide range of facial expressions. The footage—which, again, was created in real time—is nothing short of amazing, both because of how close it captures the nuance of Serkis’ performance, and also because it avoids the dreaded “dead eye” trap of motion capture. This behind-the-scenes video explains how and why this is such a literal game-changer.

That’s what you call the “canny alley.”

According to Unreal Engine, this “breakthrough digital human performance” was made possible by combining their real-time rendering with “3Lateral’s Meta Human Framework volumetric capture, reconstruction and compression technology.”

“The volumetric data was generated by capturing a series of high-quality, HFR images of Andy Serkis from multiple angles under controlled lighting. 3Lateral’s process involved various capture scenarios, some focused on geometry, some on appearance and others on motion. All of these inputs were applied to generate a digital representation of Andy Serkis, and to extract universal facial semantics that represent muscular contractions that make the performance so lifelike.”

As moviegoers well know, seeing Andy Serkis’ actual face is not necessary for some of his best performances, which is why we’re even more excited by what this means for creating realistic looking video game characters of different species, like 3Lateral’s Osiris Black, who here does Andy's speech again, only with more creepy:

March 29 - Frugal Forums

Tip: you can always be better at finances.

For those folks with less to throw around, like myself, it pays to hunt down good advice for stretching your dollars. I'm always looking for articles that give tips and tricks for where to shop, what to buy and what to try when it comes to making ends meet a little easier at the end of the month.

Turns out this kind of thing is really catching on of late, especially on Reddit, where a new forum has appeared with the unfortunate title of 'Poverty Finance' :

Since it's just started this week, the forum's going to be a while sorting itself out, but I've already found a few good bits of advice I hadn't heard before. It's heartening( yet disturbing )to know that there's more people out there like myself trying to make ends meet; I get depressed when constantly seeing articles like "How to invest your Million Dollars for Retirement Wisely" or "Should your Second Home be a Condo or Rental Income Property" and the like, leaving me feeling like an indebted piece of crap for not being wealthy and wise at my age.

Whatever. It is what it is, and I'll learn what I need to, to just get on with things.

March 30 - Eerie, IN

Geez, has it been 26 years...?

Back in the early 90's( Sept 1991, to be exact )a strange... no, eerie little show hit the airwaves: Eerie, Indiana. I tuned in simply because it was a name similar to a town in the USA the other side of nearby Lake Erie, also named Erie, and the premise sounded cool:

Last month, Nerdist ran an article that looked at the 7 best episodes ofthe show( which out of 13 + a Special, is a short list )that's worth checking out. To my delight, they also mentioned that the whole series is available on Amazon Prime in the USA, to which I have a subscription still, so guess what I'll be watching this coming week?

March 31 - Baen Books Contest        

Well, I did it...

I submitted my novel to a publisher today, though it was by an unexpected method.

Last week, I learned that US-based Baen Books, who publish more than a few of the authors I admire( like David Weber, Kevin J. Anderson and David Drake )is running a 'Slush Reading' contest in a month's time, where submitted manuscripts( sans author's names )are critiqued 'live' by a Baen editor, to live or die as written. Deadline? April 1st, no joke!

It's a rough way to find out if you're up to par as an author, but since the normal 'processing time' for a slush-submitted manuscript is 9-12 months, getting one's work looked at in a month, live or not, is worth the risk of getting it shredded.

So for the last ten days, I've been doing nothing BUT edit my novel, morning and night, to the point where my eyes started hurting tonight despite my precautions - but I was right on schedule! I finished up my last edits around dinner, re-worked my 800-word synopsis and tweaked my cover letter with the help of my amazing girlfriend, then submitted everything a little after 10pm tonight - HURRAH! 

I'm pleased with the way the edits turned out, especially the synopsis and cover letter, as those will serve well for future submissions. I'm taking the coming week off editing to give my eyes a chance to recover; while they're not feeling nearly as painful as they were three months ago, they are certainly ouch-level 4/10, which is well above 'uncomfortable' in my books - and I listen to those kind of complaints.

As for Baen, they'll be holding the 'Live Slush Session' in May 2018, and I'll update things here once that happens. Wish me and the other authors luck!

April 1st - Not Fooling Around

Not much save relaxing going on today, after editing all week long.

My lady and I spent the day out, which to both our surprise was pretty darn bustling-busy everywhere this Easter Sunday. It was exactly the relaxing I needed, with some solid conversational range, as well as some beverages:

Cheers to us, and to submitting my novel!

It's also April Fool's Day today, and it seems that plenty of companies have started embracing the spirit of the joke in the last couple of years, creating some really funny fake products. Such as:

My enjoyment of the beers this afternoon was to be shorter than I'd imagined: the weather's changed just today, and by the evening my head had started to hurt, which it hasn't done for a while... so I guess I'll have to be more careful about watching pressure changes when it comes to alcohol. So it goes... but at least the week ahead is a short one: only three working days, as tomorrow's a holiday for me AND I have Friday off. W00t!