Phillip Winn @pwinn@qoto.org

I don’t think I have enough time today to finish another book, or even start one, so my count for the year stops at 128.

More pages but fewer books than last year.

That’s an average of 2.85 days per book, which seems amazing even to me. I know some books took much longer than that, but I also remember a few days in which I read multiple books back-to-back, reading from morning until night.

31 of the 128 were audiobooks, and two were graphic novels.

I read so many good books this year! In 2022 I finished Ada Palmer’s fantastic Terra Ingota series, discovered the wonderful books of Diana Wynne Jones, and met the wonderful Leonid McGill character of Walter Mosley.

I started a new job this year, and the increased demand on my brain meant I read more in the first half of the year than the last half. Then again, I think that seems to be true every year. Still, I’m tempted to lower my target for next year.

I am far behind most of my friends and family when it comes to movies and TV shows, but I think I probably read more than average.

#books #blog #personal

My final breakfast of 2022 seems happy.

I finally managed to get my daughter interested enough AI art enough to try some prompting of her own, and she immediately put Midjourney to the task of creating a new profile picture for one of her many online accounts.

#AIart #midjourney

On this fifth day of Christmas, I hope Santa is taking time for himself. Maybe relaxing, maybe getting some sun.

I asked Midjourney what that might look like.

#AIart #midjourney #Santa #Christmas

Courtesy of Marco d’Alfonso, a very Marvel Christmas book that never was.

Source: https://www.deviantart.com/m7781/art/how-the-grinch-almost-stole-sweet-christmas-749755064

#nerdery #marvel #LukeCage #Grinch #christmas #blog

Catching up on “Work Later, Drink Now” inspired a powerful craving for Korean fried chicken today.

#kdrama #bonchon #personal #FoodPhotography

I spent Christmas with my family, and had a lovely time. My Christmas list had only one thing on it, but I was still delighted to receive it.

This Hobonichi Techo 2023 notebook is where I plan to note my #dungeon23 progress in the coming year. I hope.

#blog #facility23 #MothershipRPG #Mothership #Mosh #ttrpg

At my house for the Winter Solstice Festival (in Chinese: 冬至 Dōngzhì), we enjoyed hotpot. Very spicy hotpot!

#blog #food #photography #dongzhi #solstice

I’ve posted a couple of Fiat-related things recently, so why not one more? I asked MidJourney to give me an image for “fiat 500e gran prix hyperrealistic” but it was four months ago, so I’m not exactly sure which version of the model was active at the time. This was the result.

#AIart #midjourney #fiat

I’ve had this picture on a series of computers for a few years now, but before posting it I tracked down where I originally got it from, and dimensions.com is pretty amazing. It seems like a person could spend a lot of time poking through the site looking at the size of things.

https://www.dimensions.com/element/fiat-500

For an arbitrary comparison, the 2023 F-150 King Ranch edition with SuperCab is 6.36 meters long, 2.43 meters wide, and 1.96 meters tall. Its wheelbase is 4.17 meters, which is quite a bit longer than the Fiat 500’s entire length! This helps to explain why I’ve seen trucks like this try to make U-turns and block traffic for a while.

I’m not sure I’d be able to drive something that big safely. Perhaps others can.

#blog #fiat

Apropos of nothing, here are a few recent screenshots from #GenshinImpact that I took while playing.

I noticed my daughter’s screenshots tended not to have the controls overlaid, so I poked around and realized I could have my character carry a “kamera” and take unadulterated shots.

I know my Fiat 500e is small, but every now and then I walk out of a Waffle House and see a stark reminder.

#blog #fiat #photography

Today’s #GenshinImpact screenshots involve fireworks. Two of these shots are from a story that involves a fireworks show. One involves a character who launches fireworks as a skill.

I’ve posted a number of screenshots from #GenshinImpact because it’s a beautiful game. But I’m going all-text in this post, because it’s not just a visually stunning game, but also features some excellent and moving stories.

Early this morning I completed a quest that started out as observation of a child who seemed to be playing with an invisible friend, and ended up focusing on a man wracked with overwhelming guilt and feelings of worthlessness, trapped by a lie he couldn’t let go.

I’m trying to avoid spoiling anything, but he did find some relief, and the story ended with a beautifully-animated reminiscence by a character who isn’t what they seem to be.

My middle-school daughter has her favorite stories, one of which involves a character who survives childhood trauma but struggles to see herself as a person worth valuing many years later. That one closes with a Chinese opera, again beautifully animated.

Okay, maybe just one screenshot, from the closing poem of reminiscence.

This is not a commercial for Dave’s Hot Chicken! I have been enjoying their sandwiches and decor, is all.

#corporateArt #photography

I finally put up the holiday tree on Saturday, so it’s starting to seem a bit more like the holiday season.

Not too much, just a bit.

The artificial tree is pre-trimmed with lights and even artificial pine cones and berries, and it looks so good just out of the box that all we’ve added to it is the traditional star on top. We have traditionally bought one new ornament each every year, and we’ll do that again this year, but those will likely be the only four ornaments on the tree, other than the topper.

I don’t think there’s any “right way” to celebrate holidays, although I suppose there are plenty of wrong ways. Don’t be hateful, be kind. Be gracious to others, and accept with gratitude when others are gracious to you. Be gracious to yourself. Beyond that, you can light candles or cut down a tree or pull a tabletop artificial mini-tree out of a box, and decorate your living space however you wish, and if it works for you, I think that’s all that matters.

Whether you mark Christmas or Hanukkah or Festivus or some other event this time of year, I hope you can take a moment to be grateful for having survived another year on this planet.

#blog #christmas #holidays

My audience here is probably in the single digits, and yet still somehow I’m in my own brain, putting pressure on myself to do things “well.” For example, I’ve been thinking I should post more Genshin impact screenshots, because that game is beautiful, and because I’ve been playing it quite a bit lately. But one thing led to another and now I have 48 images in a folder and still haven’t posted any of them.

And this software only lets me post four in a single message! I’m not going to post 12 posts in a row of video game screenshots, am I?

Am I?

To justify the hashtag (see, there I am overthinking again!), I’ll at least add some here. My dealer^h^h^h^h^h^h daughter sent me a few she has taken, so I’ll post some of those.

The first is from the Inazuma region I recently unlocked, which is based on Japan. The others are a nice set of three nearly-identical images from three times of day in the same spot in Liyue, which is based on China.

#thoughts #GenshinImpact

I asked MidJourney’s v4 model to generate some images, then grabbed one of the four results for each prompt and upscaled it. Horrifying things happened to the number of fingers, and I would definitely need to keep working with this prompt to come up with something I would be willing to show in public as anything other than an AI art experiment.

#AIart #midjourney #volleyball

It’s that time of year again, when music streaming services provide stats that should be more interesting than they are.

So far this year (it ain’t over yet!) I’ve spent 59% of my listening time on the weekly “New Music Mix” playlist. So I’ve spent 11,513 minutes listening to 1801 songs by 882 artists, but only 37 albums and 21 playlists.

For your cheering or jeering or both, here’s my top 100 songs of the first eleven months of 2022: https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/replay-2022/pl.rp-a77XCJ4bEx

My daughter’s Spotify Unwrapped says she has listened to 115,667 minutes, top 1% of Americans, but that’s more than five hours every single day, and so it clearly includes overnight streaming. Which explains why her phone is usually playing music when we wake her up in the morning.

#AppleMusic #replay2022 #spotify #unwrapped2022

I am surrounded by artists, while lacking either the talent or the motivation (or possibly both) myself. I marvel at the level of effort involved in isometric pixel art, for example, which this essay gives a great explanation: https://www.slynyrd.com/blog/2022/11/28/pixelblog-41-isometric-pixel-art

#art #pixelart #nerdery