¡Adios!

Well, it has been a long while since I’ve posted on here. But, although I have not spent eleventy-one years here, I shall quote Bilbo: “this is the end. I am going. I am leaving now. Goodbye!

However, while I shall not be seen in this Shire again, I do not intend to leave off blogging; indeed, I hope to blog more often and better: just not here. Instead, I shall be found at How the Sun Rose, where I already have my first post up.

Thank you, dear family, for your kind and helpful reading and commenting on here. While I have—mainly to leave behind an awkward name—decided to immigrate, I hope to see you all over at How the Sun Rose!

Back to School, Cum Cumulonimbus

We’ve (at first leisurely and fragmentedly) started off school over the past month… so I’m a sophomore. I’m still trying to wrap my head around this. I’m in my second year of high school? I’m in double-digit grade numbers? I only have three years of homeschool left? Yikes!

But we’ve started school, so I thought I’d kick off (approximately a month late) on my blog with a science notebook entry from Chapter Two of The Cloudspotter’s Guide, by Gavin Pretor-Pinney. This book is science as it should be taught, or maybe as everything should be taught: through story. It is well-written and amusing, presenting memorable details instead of lists of facts. There are stories of mythology, history, of Air Force pilots (one, at least; he fell forty-seven thousand feet through a cumulonimbus cloud and survived) and even—occasionally—of weather.

It isn’t a good idea, for various reasons, to put a full-size image in a post; but if you’d like to see a larger version of this photo, you can find one here.

Too Much French!

I call you to arms against the strange ascendency of French in our land, in our education, in our upper classes. This tongue is itself an invader, brought in the villainous ships of the scoundrel Norman conqueror. It is the tongue of Napoleon, the tongue of bloody and anarchious revolutionaries against monarchy, the tongue of a people renowned for their loose morals. And yet, despite all this, despite that we are near the beginning of a new and enlightened century, despite the fact that technological innovation is skyrocketing, despite the fact that unprecedented quantities of pea soup are being dished up to Londoners, we persist in the absurd habit of making instruction in French, of all languages, an integral part of our children’s education. No longer must this be so, no longer must this invading tongue be taught to our children from infancy, no longer—

Oops. I’m off by about a century, a continent, and an ocean.

But I do have a problem: my characters keep speaking French.
(more…)

The Townships of Aiken and Riversbend, an Area that May Look Familiar

About a month ago, I posted some shots of a digital map that I was working on.

It wasn't really a map, though… more of an illustration.  Sure, there was some forest, a river, cliffs, lakes, and a town—but there were no labels.  As anyone who has ever tried using a map knows, those tend to come in handy.  There were were also no farms.  Those come in handy too.  I had thought about these things, but found some satisfactory rationalizations (just a fancy word for excuses, I know), for leaving my map like it was.  Among them:

"I just made this map for practice in illustration.  It doesn't matter if it isn't really finished."

"I don't even know or care anything about this place.  When I make a map for fantasy places that are real official, I'll label them and all that."

"How do I illustrate farms?  If I try to draw fields on there, I'll probably just mess up the artistic unity of it.  The same goes for labels—those would totally clutter up my nice, neat illustration."

"I don't want to come up with that many names, anyways.  I'm so bad at names that the secondary villain in the book I'm writing doesn't even have a name, and place names are a step worse than people names."

These are all nice, devious, insidious rationalizations.  But, as I observed, rationalization is effectively synonymous with excuse, and the term excuse carries some justifiably negative connotations.   (more…)

Backpacking to Fordyce [River]

On Sunday and Monday last, Dad took Nathan, Gregory, and me on the first backpacking trip of the season.  Leaving the house in the morning, we arrived at the rather nondescript Lake Spaulding trailhead a bit before noon.  From there, we set out on a (rather hot) hike to Fordyce Creek.  Around twelve forty, we stopped at one of the powerhouses on Lake Spaulding for lunch—and, of course, pictures.  There was a good view across the lake, and I was able to identify several of the features we could see. (more…)

More Digital Art—Cartography, This Time

Jonathan Roberts' blog, Fantastic Maps, is a gold mine filled with fabulous tips, tricks, and tutorials on digital cartography of fantasy worlds.  Inspired by his beautiful maps, I've been trying some digital cartography myself in the last few months.  I did my first trying at fully digital maps in Adobe Sketch, but have been much happier with Procreate—which I think is, right now, The Art App for iPad.  Procreate is awesome, and in it I have made my first completed fully digital map.  Why all the "first completed fully digital"?  Because I've tried drawing a map physically and then tracing it into the iPad, where I colored and finished it—and, of course, I have some unfinished digital maps. (more…)

¡Vive el Rainbow!

In my physics readings recently—from For the Love of Physics, by Walter Lewin—I've been reading about how rainbows are formed. More specifically, one lesson was about how light is refracted and split inside a raindrop. In For the Love of Physics, Lewin included a diagram showing this refraction, and the study guide (by Nicole Williams, for the record) recommended copying the diagram into my science notebook. I decided that I wanted to do a digital reproduction of the diagram, mostly because I felt like doing the art on my iPad, but with the excuse that I wanted to do a written narration with the diagram embedded in it. Art looks a lot better when it has not been mediocrely photographed from paper, as a physical reproduction would have been.

Well, I got drawing—and I kept drawing. And it looked pretty good. So I started writing on it, and I wound up with a full-on digital science notebook entry about how rainbows are formed. And no, I'm sorry, it's not interactive.

This digital science notebook entry was created in Paper by FiftyThree using a capacitative stylus.

Tribulations of an Amateur Apprentice in Soup-Craft

I do not often feel that I am a lone, lorn creature, and everything goes contrarywise with me, but I did during the latter part of cooking dinner yesterday evening. Everything went all right until I began cutting up the bell peppers. The butternut squash, potatoes, and carrots stewed nicely, and the sausage was cut into uniform pieces. Then I put the sausage into a pot, and being pleased with my successes regaled Justin with Rapunzel while cutting up bell pepper.
Unfortunately, I was so intent upon my story and peppers that I forgot to stir the sausages. Consequently, although they acted out of the mere nature of sausage and not out of malice aforethought, the sausage burnt. Not wishing to set burnt sausage before my family, who will in all likelihood suffer enough at my hands in the way of cookery without the addition of unusually unnecessary amounts of carbon, I fished out the burnt pieces after finishing up cutting the peppers. Feeling that it would be the worse part of thrift to throw away completely the burnt pieces of sausage, I carefully cut off the burnt parts. The sausage returned to the pan and the bell peppers and frozen spinach added, I turned again to the soup. But, alas! The root vegetables had been enjoying themselves so much with the chicken broth I had allowed them to share their pot with that they had imbibed every last bit. That was the point at which I began to feel that everything I put my hand to did the reverse of flourishing, and though not exactly unhappy, I became rather low in my spirits and felt tired. Anyhow, since this seems to have turned rather to the fate of this evening's supper than to my lornness, I had best conclude the story as I may.
Dad, upon seeing the vegetables in their state of liquid-less yet decidedly not arid mush, declared himself baffled as to what I ought to do, but told me that that was not how butternut-squash-soup-in-the-making was supposed to look, a fact I was already cognizant of. (I may take this opportunity to remark that the vegetables were at least not much burned—small comfort, but comfort still.) Well, Dad consulted with Mom, who recommended the addition to my pot of four cups vegetable stock, that being the identical quantity of broth as I had used before, when adding chicken broth and naively thinking all would go as prophesied by the recipe. Having mixed my four cups of stock from a mingling of cool tap water, warm tea kettle water, and the prescribed amount of vegetable-flavored “Better Than Bullion,” a thing like condensed stock, and of a texture somewhat thicker than toothpaste, I added the new-formed stock to the pot. The mess did not look solved when the inexperienced stock and veteran vegetables were gently coaxed to make friends by the means of a spoon, but I resorted to sterner measures and by the end of a course of immersion blending, all the ingredients were very good friends, indissoluble and quite inseparable. A can of coconut milk, some curry powder, and salt, that indispensable sodium chloride of cookery, finished the list of ingredients, and I had a soup quite nicely rounded off, if not exactly what Mom's rendition of the same recipe turns out as.
How the soup was a little too cool when served and the bell peppers not quite sufficiently cooked are tales for another day; I shall end now on the happy note that the soup was really quite good in the event.

How Sir Thomas Green Won His Spurs—A Short Story

During the fall semester this year, I took an online class about fantasy writing and some of J.R.R. Tolkien's lesser-known works. The assignment at the end of the class was for each student to write their own Faerie story. Now that I've finished mine up, I'd like to share it on here. I have the file in two formats, as a .pdf and as a .docx document. You should be able to open either file on any computer, but if you are unable to open the file or would like it in another format, please tell me in the comments.
 
My tale is set in the usual realm of the Faerie-tale, a place mostly like England in the medieval period, with a few anachronisms added in for interest and because they flowed nicely into my narrative. There are the standard evil wights in the forest, and the hero is, as so often, unlikely. I make no claims to originality, but I will say for myself that I love words and writing, and very much enjoy the creative process. I think I did a decent job on this story, and can recommend it to you. Wait—that's a lot of talking about my writing. Show, don't tell, is a piece of advice given to aspiring authors much more often than they forget it, so I might as well follow that injunction. Instead of just telling, let me show to you the hero of this story as he is described in the opening paragraph.
 

His very prosaic name was Thomas Greene, and his very prosaic self was a farmhand, and—I cannot for the life of me understand how he was chosen to be mixed up in such things. But mine is but the post of chronicler, to record faithfully what is done and question not. Still, even with all that is was against him, for his hands were large and his bearing undistinguished and his boots deep in the farmyard mud, he loved tales of adventure; and had the choosing been his he would have been the bonniest knight in shining armor that ever drew sword from sheath. Also he had an “e” at the end of his name, and knew to be proud of it, and his dog was named Galahad. These things, perhaps, cover a multitude of offenses.

To find out what happens to the farmhand named Thomas Greene when he becomes lost in the woods at night, finds himself trapped in the aforesaid gloomy forestland by a magical hedge, and begins an adventure such as he has only dreamed of (in day-dreams, as Narnia readers know to be very different from night-dreams), read the story!
 
You can download the .pdf file here.
And you can download the .docx file here.

Muddled—A Poem

I read some Kipling and I thought
That Kipling's way was how I ought
To make my verses all the time –
And yet – I couldn't make mine rhyme.
 
And Beowulf – oh my poor head!
“What happened to the rhymes?” I said.
Alliteration's good, it's true –
But I must have a rhyme or two.
 
Shakespeare's sonnets far beyond
My little rhyming powers yawned.
And what is left he didn't say?
I really thought of naught that day.
 
Hiawatha (how to pronounce?)
My Indian names made readers trounce
Me, so I thought I'd leave alone
Adventures of “Turrintelone”.
 
Befuddled, muddled, and bemused,
I can't make poems as they used.
And so I really must just now
Use styling of my own, I trow.
 
n.b. – This is not autobiographical.