Antarctica Starts Here.

Life's busy right now. I'm being pulled in several different directions, sometimes simultaneously, which hasn't left a lot of time or compute cycles to do any writing. What I have had time for lately has been a lot of "fire and forget" stuff, which doesn't really do anyone any good. Failing that, long hours at my day job doing what I do best. I don't think any more need be said on that point.

The next release of Byzantium Linux (v0.5b) is due in five days, so that's where most of my spare time goes - knocking out the next milestone takes priority over a lot of other stuff that's not my day job.

Some weeks ago a good friend of mine got me reading the web comic MS Paint Adventures by way of one of her fanfics (note: some NSFW content, use discretion), which has been a fun and somewhat addictive way to kill time while code is compiling and modules are compressing (everything, as always, is a trade-off; in this case, build time for disk space). If you have a month to spare it might be worth taking a look at - it starts slow but builds fast once the mechanics of the world are explained, and I find it very thought provoking. I'm also a sucker for stories that involve the intracies of time travel and the consequences thereof (as if this comes as any great surprise).

I now have a two month old nephew whom I'll be meeting in a few short weeks. This'll be the first time I'll get to meet him since his birth about two months ago. So, I decided to revisit an old hobby and sew him a stuffed animal, something I haven't done in years. For reasons yet unclear I find the scalemates from MSPA unbearably cute, so I resolved to see if anybody out there had figured out how to sew one. Predictably it took all of thirty seconds to find a pattern and instructions. Off to the printer and the fabric store, followed by a couple of hours at the dining room table. Total time: About seven hours. I wanted to make a prototype first because I figured that I'd mess up the first time (I haven't sewn seriously in several years and wanted to make a good first impression, after all) so I made a blue and black Scalemate that I've decided to dub Senator Wyrmser. On the whole I don't think it turned out too badly, and I've been working on a more brightly colored Scalemate that I think the little one's going to like.

Either that, or he'll flip out and scream his head off. He's only two months old, after all, and babies are nothing if not mercurial.

Here are some pictures of my first Scalemate. I'm not completely satisfied with how the ladder-seams at the neck and paws turned out but I think I know how to improve them, so the scalemate that I'm actually going to give my nephew is going to look a lot nicer, and will probably be sturdier. When he gets a little older maybe I'll add some button eyes; right now I think he's young enough that they'd be a potential hazard. I'll post some photographs of that one when it's ready.