Recently updated blogs

Get the higher resolution PWYW PDF here It’s been a little while since I made a Hex Flower, so I thought I’d make a new one. I’ve seen quite a lot of webposts looking for a good mechanic for mass combat, this is a Hex Flower version which I hope might be of interest to some. Mass Combat Victory Tracker Hex Flower – this Hex Flower is intended to be …

I have 4 (rounded up) beefs with language-y AI bots that have resulted in me sort of avoiding them altogether: They have the personality of a middle manager who writes Google Docs all day that nobody wants to read They’re reallllly good at guessing but not actually that smart, which leads to very convincing lies (see: the “how many Rs in strawberry?” saga). If I had the inclination to double …

Recently I took a trip down memory lane and explored my logo design archives from the ‘90s. I’ve been designing logos since then—almost 30 years ago, before the internet was even a thing. In this article, I’ve gathered some of those early logo designs, along with background information from the client projects I’ve worked on over the past three decades. Finding inspiration was perhaps more challenging then, but there was …

Today the postman surprised me with a card-backed envelope which contained a true ‘blast from the past’. The message came from a kind lady in Riegate, Surrey and contained a publicity leaflet of an advertisement in The Essex Countryside magazine from 1991. Sarah Ballingal wrote “My mother used to live in Walton-on-the-Naze and we have come across this article amongst my late sister’s belongings.” I remember the leaflet well and …

Dear Loiterers Its First Sunday, this Sunday – and blimey, its September already! We will meet for a wander at 2pm this Sunday 1st September outside Whitworth Art Gallery. It’s somewhat ridiculous but we have never actually started there before – our city is always full of places to loiter, and suggestions are always very welcome. This months launch pad is inspired by Dale. As ever all our welcome, with …

thejaymo:Turning Brownfields to Blooming Meadows, With the Help of Fungie360: How did the sites look different after the work that you did on them?Stevenson: They became basically beautiful meadows of native plants that were flowering, and now there are bees and birds and all sorts of life coming through. We had a very high success rate. In three months we saw a more than 50 percent reduction in all [petrochemical] …

This review was first published at Splice in October 2018. *** Meet Keiko Furukura. She has always found it difficult to conform to what her family and wider society consider “normal”. She once stopped a fight between a group of boys at primary school by hitting one of them over the head with a spade. She couldn’t understand what was wrong with this: “Everyone was saying to stop them, so …

Enemies to Lovers by Laura Jane WilliamsPublished: 15th August 2024 by Penguin BooksEnemies to Lovers by Laura Jane Williams is a sweet, fun read that I lapped up, especially given the perfectly matched setting—I read it on a beach in Greece, just like the characters’ family holiday destination! The novel is a delightful blend of summer vibes, humour, and romance that will satisfy any reader.As the name suggests, the plot …

This 1969 Ballantine edition of Clarke's celebrated 1953 novel is a curio. The cover art (the artist is uncredited, but may have been Dean Ellis) has taken the actual subject of the book—the coming of mysterious aliens to Earth to usher in a utopian new age, in order that a generation of ESP-gifted children can be born and grow safely to adulthood, so as to usher-in the next phase in …

Note: I’m compiling a tribute post in honor of Alain Delon but in the meantime, I thought I’d share this piece that I originally wrote for Turner Classic Movies. Before Richard Matheson etched out a name for himself as a popular writer of horror and science fiction he dabbled in crime thrillers and mysteries. His […]

Harnessing heat and pressure from deep underground to produce geothermal power is having a moment. Demand for electricity to support cryptocurrency mining and artificial intelligence endeavors is increasing enormously—by some estimates, data centers could double their current consumption and use up to 9% of total electricity generated in the United States by 2030. Meeting this increased energy demand with renewable, clean energy will require multiple power generation technologies. Fortunately, new …

The post August ’24 Studio Update appeared first on Schliefkevision - Paintings & Art Classes. Work on my series of paintings inspired by Greek mythology has been progressing at a decent clip. I estimate there’s probably only about a half or third of all the canvases I’ll paint even started at this point, but it feels like an exciting and fresh start to this body of work. The progress has… …

When it comes to interim stages of game dev, I am a bit of a packrat. I have paper maps from when I was doing Ultima Online, and UI sketches for Star Wars Galaxies… of course, for my current thing, Stars Reach, I have a whole pile of images and videos going back to the very earliest days of the project. I mention this because we just posted up a …

Remember when bookseller and collector Paul Dobish discovered that the Stanley McNail poetry collection Something Breathing was bound in two variants of green cloth? “Until recently,” Paul tells me, “all of the copies of the Arkham House first edition that I had handled were in either of two green bindings. “I just acquired — because it had a review slip with it — a copy in a third green binding. …

My new book, Be Extraordinary: Philosophical Advice for Photographic and Other Artists is now available for purchase and immediate download. (Note that you may also purchase the book from ebook sellers, such as Amazon, Google, or Apple Books. However, if you purchase the ebook directly from my website, you will receive both an EPUB version to use with your e-reader, and a PDF version with high-resolution images, formatted to match …