Don’t tell anybody, but I’m actually writing this in the past. I’ve been busy enough during my work day lately that I’m taking a few minutes while waiting for a download to complete to jot down my Wednesday post on Tuesday night. I don’t know that it really goes against the spirit of my goal to blog every day in 2023. I mean, i’m drafting this now, but who knows, maybe I will add to it more tomorrow. Any blogging should help habit form, right?

Anyway, here are miniatures 1 and 4 for the year. The dragonborn paladin on the left is my player character in my buddy Elwood’s D&D campaign, and the dwarf on the right is just something I thought would be fun to paint, taking a break from the goblins. Love that orange hair. Ginger dwarves are cool.

On the reading front, I finished Book I of the Bobiverse series today. I’d been seeing this self-published SF novel mentioned all over the internet for a few years, so I thought I should have a look and see what the fuss was about. If Andy Weir and Earnest Clines had a baby, that baby would write something like We Are Legion (We Are Bob). A software engineer’s brain is cryogenically frozen, then scanned and used as an artificial intelligence to pilot von Neumann probes in the future. The protagonist is a big nerd and one of those omni-compentent engineers that have a solution to everything. The first chapter is pretty laughably bad, but like many of these novels, when it got down to the central conceit, it was very readable and easy to see why it is popular. No real ending to speak of, though, so maybe I’ll have to read the second one. I would only recommend this to people who have a tolerance for engineers that love the smell of their own farts like myself. I mean, I have a high tolerance, not that I like the smell of my own farts. Well, I’ll let you be the judge of that.

The book itself isn’t as important to me as much as the fact that I read it and finished it in two days. It’s been at least six months since I finished a book, possibly more. Something went weird in my brain after I had COVID and I just found it incredibly difficult to focus on books. I think it’s what freed me up to have so much time to paint, honestly. To get myself to build back up a reading habit, I’m giving up trying to force myself to read “great literature” and letting myself read utter trash all year. Nobody cares but me, and reading is such a pleasant pastime in the cold winter months. Given the brain struggles, I don’t need to make it harder for myself by assigning myself intellectual broccoli.

That’s all for this one. See you in the future!