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Caring About a Royal Family

posted by graham on

A photo I took of an albatross soaring over Taiaroa head, wings locked to show its entire wingspan

In college, I spent a summer doing an independent study on how to make a robot bird that could fly. I watched documentaries, I did wikipedia deep-dives, I learned musculoskeletal structures and how they varied across species, I studied the modes of flight among differently sized and shaped birds, and I looked at the state of the art in ornithopter-design at private robotics companies. I learned that the reason predatory raptors like vultures are often depicted circling overhead in cartoons was to do with the ways that they used static soaring from thermal gradiants to gain altitude without using much of their own energy. I also learned that the bird with the largest wingspan in the world[1], the albatross, used dynamic soaring to build speed from taking advantage of the boundary of wind gradients. I planned to use slope soaring as a means to achieve lift, since my college had a gradual slope with a prevailing wind, and because it seemed to have the least amoung of moving parts.[2]

A photo I took of an albatross soaring over a human on a grassy hill, where the human looks little because they're slightly in the background and the albatross looks large because its slightly in the foreground

As soon as I learned about the albatross, I was compelled: it's a bird that has trouble taking off compared to other flight-ful birds with smaller wingspans. For

The World's Littlest Penguins

posted by graham on

When I was planning this trip, I kept asking friends who had been to Aotearoa New Zealand for input on what to do. One of those suggestions was to "see the little blue penguins who come ashore around dusk on the East coast of the Southern Island." We had a few days in Kaikōura and a few more in Dunedin planned, so as soon as we arrived at the former, we began asking around for details on where to find the penguins.

The locals told us that there was a Coast Guard station that was open to the public and that if you went there around dusk, that's where some penguins usually arrived each night. While traveling, we had been sticking to a pretty early bedtime (8 or 9pm) because we also tended to have early mornings, but springtime in the southern hemisphere meant that the sun was rising earlier and setting later, meaning civil twilight wasn't usually until 8:30.

A picture of the sunset over the mountains in the background and the beach obstructed by bushes in the foregound

We bravely stayed up late and drove the car in the dark for the first time[1] to go to the coast guard station at dusk. It was a very small building[2] by a beach with some areas to

Listening on Hikes

posted by graham on

I like to go on easy, well-manicured hikes. My general rule of thumb when people ask if I want to go on a hike with them is I'm happy to for up to about three miles and a few hundred feet of elevation gain. I wish that I had the motivation to go on more of them and get better at longer ones. Too often, I find myself focusing on my own breathing, my nose running, my muscles aching, where I'm placing my feet, or how much I wish this type-2 fun was more type-1. But when I was hiking in Aotearoa New Zealand, I found it wasn't quite as bad as other hikes I've been on, and part of that was finding a new thing to preoccupy my senses: listening to birds.

A photo I took of the forest in Abel Tasman National Park where you can see through to the beach below

Along the Northern Edge of the South Island is the Abel Tasman National Park, named after Abel Tasman, the Dutch explorer credited with mapping out Aotearoa from his ship. There are a handful of hikes by the coast, and we selected one of the easier ones: a "seal view and beach walk" that we assumed would be a walk along a beach, perhaps in view of some

Rightsholders and Theme Parks

posted by graham on

As someone who went to Aotearoa New Zealand for the first time, and as someone who grew up with the books and movies, I had to visit Hobbiton.

A photo I took of the Hobbiton sign in Matamata, New Zealand

Or, rather, I should say I had to visit The Hobbiton™ Movie Set. When J.R.R. Tolkein died, his intellectual property (the books he wrote, the characters he created, and the settings therein -- including Hobbiton) were all overseen by the Tolkein Estate. We were surprised that none of the tour guides were wearing any styled cosplays or in-fiction costumes of any kind -- just matching, red-and-white checkered button-downs to help them stand out from the crowd. If this place was being called Hobbiton, if there was a Hobbiton sign, and if everyone was coming here because of having seen the movies, then why not dress up to sell the experience the way another theme park might?

On the Hobbiton Movie Set's website, there's a disclaimer at the bottom reading:

SHIRE TOURS, SHIRE’S REST, MIDDLE-EARTH, GREEN DRAGON, HOBBITON, THE HOBBIT and THE LORD OF THE RINGS and the characters, places, items and events therein, are trademarks or registered trademarks of Middle-earth Enterprises, LLC and used under license by Rings Scenic Tours Limited

Pre-human History of Aotearoa

posted by graham on

I keep saying "New Zealand has a lot of unique birds" but to really understand why, we have to go back prior to any humans living there. Sure, birds like the Eurasian Blackbird and the House Sparrow were eventually introduced, but there are plenty more species that are native to the area.

This post, I'm going to start with the bird photo instead of ending with it. Here's a Pūkeko | Australasian Swamphen (endemic to New Zealand and parts of Australia) with two of its chicks that we saw walking around in a public park in Rotorua:

A photo I took of three birds walking in the grass: one the typical black and blue and red, the other two still brown with their early feathers.

I'm no expert on this history, but from what I've read and heard from tour guides, the real history of Aotearoa started back when the Zealandian continent and the Australian continent both broke off from Gondwana some 80 million years ago and then subsequently began breaking apart from each other, finishing around 50 million years ago.

During that time, the K-T major extinction event wiped out all non-avian dinosaurs. Elsewhere in the world, some mammals were able to survive the event, but the story goes that bats were the only surviving land-based mammal of Zealandia.[1] All other mammals found today on the

The Layout of Art Galleries

posted by graham on

I arrived in Auckland at 6am local time and was determined to not sleep the first day of my trip away. After checking out the waterfront and the Sky Tower, it began to drizzle, which timed pretty nicely with our plan to visit the Auckland Art Gallery (AAG), a moderately large, public, free art gallery that's open every day in the heart of the city. The closest I've come to this level of convenience in going to museums was when I lived in NYC and could go to the Met for free.[1]

Exterior photo of the AAG downloaded from their website shows large concrete walls and an ornate wooden roof

From my experience with art museums, especially on the East coast of the US, I was expecting to see art from old Europeans chronicling the first times Europeans had interacted with the land or with the people who were already there. I planned on rolling my eyes at language around "tradition" and nationalism, the same way I would about portraits of the founding fathers in the US.

I remember visiting the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle in mid 2018 and finding an exhibit full of Native American art from local tribes that was tucked away in the basement where it seemed like the

I Went to New Zealand

posted by graham on

A photo I took of the New Zealand countryside with sheep standing in front of giant limestone boulders colloquially called 'the elephant rocks'

I just recently returned from an 18-day vacation to New Zealand (Māori: Aotearoa). The goal was to celebrate being with my partner for over ten years and also try our best to learn and experience as much of the country as we could in that time. Our trip began in Auckland, and largely consisted of driving to new places, adventuring in and around them, and then driving or otherwise traveling to the next one.

A photo I took from the Sky Tower of downtown Auckland

To help make the scope of NZ easier to grasp for a USAmerican, I also looked up the population size, rough geographical area, and latitudes for the Northernmost (Auckland) and the Southernmost (Dunedin) cities we visited. I'm using latitude because that helps define a feel for the length of days and nights, seasons, etc:

  1. New Zealand is roughly the population of Colorado[1]
  2. Its area geographically is very similar in size to Colorado[2]
  3. Auckland is located at 36.8509°S, which is about as far from the equator as the southern edge of Colorado[3]
  4. Dunedin is located at 45.8795°S, which is about as far from the equator as Portland, OR[4]

A photo I took of some of the mountains surrounding Milford Sound, featuring one of the touring ships in the foreground for scale

Throughout the trip's downtime, I often read the Timeline of New Zealand History for a

Phinks, the Racecar Driver

posted by graham on

A mustachioed Italian-looking man, wearing a stereotypical Egyptian Pharaoh headdress and a green tracksuit with red stripes, talks on the phone apprehensively

Continuing drawing hxh characters based solely on the descriptions of them from Media Club Plus by @friends-table. This is Phinks, member number 5 of The Phantom Troupe.

Jack: [...] Next to them is a fellow in a racing [unintelligible] outfit.

Sylvi: [laughs]

Jack: Green racing driver's outfit, uh, uh, white shoulders on his jacket, red stripes, green sort of track jacket, almost. Now, next to this person, this is interesting. This is a character I have seen before. I, I don't know anything about —

Jack: We have Phinks! With a P-H. P-H-I-N-K-S.

Keith: Yep. [Sylvia laughs]

Jack: Who is a grumpy racing driver. He’s a man in a sort of racing driver.

Sylvia: Oh, okay. That’s an interesting— I didn't get racing driver from him. I always got, uh, Chris Moltisanti.

Keith: But I get it from the jacket though. Sorry, you get who?

Dre: Yeah, I totally get it.

Sylvia: Chris Moltisanti from The Sopranos?

Keith: Oh, it is.

Jack: Oh, yeah. [Dre laughs]

Sylvia: The, like, tracksuit vibe?

Jack: Yeah, totally. It’s absolutely that tracksuit vibe. I also saw it as, like, a racing jacket or, like, racing colors.

Keith: Yeah. Yeah.

Sylvia: Yeah, no, absolutely.

Some Interesting Links From October

posted by graham on

I like reading about what other folks find interesting, but I often forget to write down what I myself have found. I've been meaning to talk about this first link ever since I came across it, but I kept forgetting to make time until now. I figure a new month is a good a time as any to make a link-retrospective post.

Video Games

This video is not only impressive on a technical level for being able to accomplish what it set out to do, but the animations and ways that the information is conveyed is on par with a pannenkoek video in terms of making complex ideas become understable.

Movies

I had never heard of this and it became the first RSS feed post that I've bookmarked since making the transition over from cohost to inoreader as my means of internet browsing.

Fashion

I had meant to share this CJ video because I think it does an incredible job of explaining fashion through the lens of "conversation with community identity," and I was reminded that I

How my friend and I became Lords of Oblivion

posted by graham originally on cohost.org on and reposted on

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion came out for the Xbox 360 on March 20, 2006 -- almost two decades ago. It launched during an era when there weren't really game wikis to google, which meant that most of the bugs and strange discoveries in the game for me came from word of mouth in my social circle.

A view of Frostcrag spire from above, pulled from the Oblivion wiki

Beyond the more widely-known "horse-armor" DLC launched in April of 2006, there was a number of other DLC items. The only relevant one to this story was the Frostcrag Spire quest for the "Wizard's Tower". I did not buy it, but my friend did and we would regularly hang out. We found that if my friend logged in while he was at my house, then I was able to download and play the DLC on my console. However, either because of limitation in the storage of our hard-drives or because you could only associate your Xbox Live account with so many Xbox 360s at once, we got into this mess where I kept having to re-download the DLC every time he visited if I wanted to play it.

This went on for a few weeks until one of us accidentally tried to load

Thought I Saw Someone I Knew

posted by graham on

I was walking down the street to get some takeout tonight, and out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a huge stuffed animal sitting in the front window of a toystore.

Closeup of a maroon face with black eyes and a black uwu mouth

And it reminded me of an old friend.

Closeup of eggbug from cohost doing the same face with the same sort of coloring

Until I looked again more closely.

Zoomed out stock photo of the stuffed animal from a product page

Bay Area Cohost Wake

posted by graham on

While cohost's users were mourning the loss of the website online, Natalie (and Liz and Zandra) organized a Seattle Cohost Wake that happened last week. Additional wakes popped up in Boston, Philly, and a few other cities. Today, I attended the San Francisco Bay Area Wake, cohost-(heh)-ed by Damien, Nicky Flowers, and Diane in Oakland.

We met, N95+ masks on, by Lake Merritt under the shade of a giant tree and sat in fold up chairs, on blankets, and generally about the grass. I brought my fish picnic blanket and an id I had printed out at the library the night before because I was worried people wouldn't know who I was without the swirly profile picture.

There were a solid 40 people at least, though I didn't get an exact count and it varied over the hours. It was nice to get to see people, but my biggest takeaway was just how tall everybody was. I don't know why but I had imagined everyone on cohost being just barely taller than Jae, when in actuality, many people there today were several inches taller than that.

It was nice to hear people suggest turning this into a

A Year of HxH Characters

posted by graham on

A short boy in checkered vans and a tall-collared jacket with a skull on it holds his hand out as if to manipulate a finger on the other hand into a sharp claw A hunched over Frankenstein monster wearing a suit and pointing one finger out in a finger gun Shizuku, a short woman with glasses, a turtle neck, and a gold cross necklace, looking off into the sky. And Blinky, her Nen vacuum, who has eyes and teeth and a tongue Owl, a gray-skinned man with a gargoyle head wearing sunglasses, who has a toothpick in his fanged mouth and a tan kerchief in his pocket Worm, a mostly nude man with a 💩 head bursting out of the ground as rocks and dirt fly skyward Rabid Dog, a man with spikey hair and sharp teeth running open-handedly towards the camera Leech, a Junji-Ito-style portrait that's zoomed in on the face and has lots of unsettling details, including a long and thick tongue that looks kind of like a slug Porcupine, a short bald old man with a giant mono-brow looking up at the camera and doing the 🥺👉👈 expression Very simple sketches of each of the other named shadow beasts, along with their names below each one A barbarian stepping with a boot on a canyon rock while catching a bazooka shell in one hand and a bullet in his teeth A man in a rocket-boosted wheelchair electrocutes Killua via long metallic snake wires A guy wearing a mask slamming his hand down in the air while a giant magical hand slams the ground in front of him A muscly guy with shoulder-length straight hair, a button-down, and a bow and arrow A man with a sort of pompadour haircut and a mustache and beard but no goatee crosses his arms and holds an ink brush in one hand. He wears no shirt, only a vest A woman with purple hair billowing out against gravity, and in a matching purple cocktail dress bends over and blows a kiss at the camera A short, androgynous looking woman with pointed buck teeth rolls up their sleeve while grass green musical lines swirl around her A shiny purple plastic box with a red lid, opened to reveal three sections, each containing one of the items listed in the quotes below An overhead shot of an old woman sitting at a table, holding a tea mug A three panel comic: 1. Ging Freecs wearing his animal coat and scowling while holding his hand out, 2. A zoomed-out view showing Ging riding atop the head of an enormous melting frog, 3. A further zoomed-out view of that melting frog riding an unfathomably large green dragon, all soaring above clouds over the open ocean An over-the-shoulder forced-perspective view of a guy sitting on a tree branch, curled up in a ball from recoil, with his hands out producing a hadouken of smoke that goes down to an acorn bullet zooming towards Kurapika on the forest floor A bored-looking lady resting her head on her hand on the front counter, while raising her other hand into the air with her pointer finger out, summoning a magical ghostly gremlin. She has lots of tattoos, including a forehead one that says HUNT A girl with dark purple hair hunches over with arms akimbo. She wears black and pink clothes that are both pink witch and a little bit spooky A woman in dark red scrubs patterned like a ninja and wearing a stethoscope holds her hand out towards the camera with an even darker red glow of nen around it Kastro and his ghostly imperfect doppelganger pose back-to-back as they each prepare to deliver tiger bite fist attacks A one-legged cloaked man holding a cane, with a tube coming out of the face-hole of the cloak, raises his hand as if letting three purple spectral beyblades be ripped towards the camera. He is flanked by two blueish ghostly silhouettes of the other two of The Chosen 3 in a forced 3-point perspective A tall, lanky man with messy hair wearing an untucked button-down stands looking slightly worried, but otherwise non-threateningly A little guy with tightly cropped brown hair in a dark gray gi with no belt, holding his hands in fists at his sides and slightly bowing as he says Osu The guy pointing at himself meme but it looks like nervous Killua with extra eye make-up and text at the bottom that reads Friends? A woman in an old formal purple dress, a bulky visor, and a big floppy hat stands fanning herself An old, hunched-over man wearing a cloak and a stole over it that says one kill per day A fancy looking man with Handsome Squidward's face sits in a blue chair next to a dog with human arms laying curled up on a throw rug A young black woman wearing a red hooded cape standing in a defensive pose with her cane in some sand An anime woman in bright clothing holding a small microphone and speaker gestures behind her to a mountain in the background An old, absolutely ripped man holding his lower back with one hand and leaning on the other arm bent over an industrial-sized trashcan on wheels A butler wearing a vest and tie about to flip a coin, with a menacing grin on his face Mike, a dog with arms that is the size of a house, squeezes a human like a stress toy with purplish haze clouding everything An illustration of a person kneeling as he digs furiously at the ground at dusk A low angle illustration of a buff man in a robe walking towards the camera with his left hand dragging through the gray brick wall as he moves An illustration of a cloaked figure next to a woman with thigh high boots, a skirt, and a crop top, with big poofy bright magenta hair in two ponytails An illustration of a muscular anime guy who is on fire from clenching his muscles so hard An illustration of a gangly guy with long dark hair holding two candles of different sizes A forced perspective illustration of a blue man punching the ground really hard so that it cracks An old woman holding a cane who is in a green dress with comically large black eyebrows An illustration of a lady with sunglasses, a vest, and a sniper on her back An over the shoulder illustration of a man with a grey moustache and no mouth while running mid-stride A bald old man with a white beard wearing a blue and white robe and geta sandals, holding a squash ball in his right hand A drawing of Menchi holding 9 knives on the left and a much taller Buhara holding a fork and wearing an apron on the right An illustration of a boy dressed in all green holding a fishing rod above his head and leaping toward the left. His outermost layer is a green camo-textured robe An illustration of a guy in red and blue spinning nunchucks in one hand while slightly crouching and guarding his chest with the other hand. Guy holding what looks like a bat attached to a beehive over his shoulder A drawing of a man smiling and pointing to a ninja mask that he's holding up next to his face An illustration of a buff, bald, shirtless male 90s action-figure with pins sticking of it A lad holding a skateboard while wearing a white t-shirt. Their white hair points up like a flame, and they drink a fowl-looking drink contentedly A Martin-Prince-looking kid sitting in front of a laptop like Schroder from Charlie Brown A drawing of a Jojo-looking person with a pale white face, pink hair, and a pale lime green doublet with playing card symbols on it A guy in a white button down and black pants sheepishly rocking on the heels of his brown oxford shoes with his hands behind his back A green green jelly bean man in a t-shirt that says GAY on it

A year ago, a new podcast came out, and with it brought me one of the silliest and most fun art projects I've ever been a part of. There's plenty more art to come, but I wanted to do a bit of a review as I migrated and archived the old art from cohost onto here. Rather than filling up RSS feeds with over 50 drawings one at a time that many of you may have already seen, I've opted for this grid approach. Each one is clickable to go look at the original cohost post. Maybe I'll update them to web-archive once cohost shuts down. Who knows?

Media Club Plus is a podcast by Friends at the Table and its premier season focused on Hunter X Hunter anime based on the manga by Yoshihiro Togashi. I've been listening to Friends at the Table for years, and I knew that the group behind Media Club Plus would be fun to listen to, even if I didn't know anything about Hunter X Hunter (HxH). Part of the conceit of the podcast, after all, was that Jack De Quidt had also never watched the anime nor read the manga, so we would

Wizard Sokoban

posted by graham on

Today, my friend and I launched another new version of our puzzle game named Wizard Sokoban (working title). You can play it on itch.io for free, though it works best on a computer using firefox:

I wanted to take some time to discuss the journey we've been through getting here because I'm proud of what we've made so far and I'm excited for what it'll be after we've applied another few rounds of polish.

Our second time game developing

In May of 2024, my friend Jules and I found ourselves simultaneously unemployed for the first time in our professional careers. With no structure to our days, we talked about some side projects that we'd been meaning to try out when we had more time. He mentioned wanting to try out Godot, and I mentioned that I had an idea for a puzzle game that could be pretty fun and simple to make.

We've been playing video games together for over a decade, and we most recently took on the idea of making our own when we went on a vacation to take part in Indie Train Jam 2017 from Chicago to Emeryville.[1] Surrounded by

Under Construction

posted by graham on

I've finally found the motivation to make a personal blog, and not a moment too soon. It's slow going, but the RSS feed should work. For now, the feed just contains every post with no filtering options, but I'll probably separate it out into individually-subscribable tag feeds before I post much else.

Part of why this all took so long was because I wanted to find a url that didn't include my full name and that did allow me to do silly stuff with it, like the blog link being at "graham builds a blog" when you read the url without punctuation.

tags: #meta