Emblems
A reference to the sacrament. The square represents the bread and the body of Christ; the circle represents the water/wine and the blood of Christ. Painted in Procreate Pocket, textured in Photoshop.
Blog
First Vision IX
Painted in Procreate Pocket, textured in Photoshop.
First Vision VIII
Made in Illustrator, textured in Photoshop.
Nom Nom
Painted in Procreate Pocket, textured in Photoshop.
I’m reading Daniella Martin’s Edible, on how eating insects is good for humanity, and I’m pretty close to ordering some wax worms for eating (both live and fried, because I may as well). The thought of it all makes me somewhat squeamish, but that squeam is obviously learned — there are other cultures that don’t have the same hangups — and it’ll be interesting to see if I can unsqueam myself in this regard.
I used to keep track of genealogy research todo items in an app of my own make (Gent), but lately I’ve had better success with a combined todo/notes approach using Google Docs. (I create a document for each family I’m researching — or for groups of families when I feel like it makes sense — and pretty much just use lots of bulleted lists.)
As for the research itself, I recently made compact family charts (I’ll blog about those sometime soon) and have been filling in the gaps in my lines. As part of that, most recently I’ve been sourcing everything on my Iorio line in Morrone del Sannio, since I did most of the research on microfilm back before sourcing was easy. (Sidenote that’s probably also a post for another day: in the last month or so I’ve found that I can now do pretty much all the research on my phone, which has led to a fairly big increase in how much time I spend doing genealogy.)
Continuing along the lines of what I wrote on Friday: I’ve gotten into a bad habit of releasing new work the moment it’s finished. While I like getting feedback immediately (which can absolutely be useful in some cases), for me I’m finding that a slightly more delayed approach is better.
More specifically, there’ve been several times where I’ve released a painting and then shortly thereafter regretted it, suddenly seeing flaws in the work that I hadn’t noticed when I was in the thick of it. (I tend to take those paintings down.)
My new rule: wait at least a week.
A week gives me enough time to see the work with (somewhat) new eyes and to fix any newly evident dealbreaker flaws. If the piece still looks good after a week, then it’s ready for release.
President Eyring has an exhibit of watercolor paintings opening tomorrow at the Church History Museum. (I don’t think I knew that he painted, but I really like his work.)
On Muslims at BYU, from The Christian Science Monitor:
Like Islam, the LDS Church has at times been one of the most popularly reviled religions in America—with early criticisms of founder Joseph Smith, in fact, comparing him to Muhammad, and not as a compliment. Today, that legacy has informed a quiet but firm defense of religious freedom, particularly for Muslims in the United States.
On ebooks
For a long time I couldn’t really get into ebooks (in spite of publishing dozens), primarily for nitpicky typographic reasons and because of availability/selection. Over the last few years, however, things changed, and my reading is now pretty much all ebooks.
For EPUBs, I use Marvin on my iPhone and couldn’t be happier with it. (Also, I’ve written a personal-use Python script that replaces f-bombs and other strong profanity in EPUBs with bullet points. Came in handy for Worm, Ra, and UNSONG, all of which I really enjoyed.) In fact, as near as I can remember, reading HPMOR on Marvin was what convinced me ebooks were great. HPMOR also convinced me that fanfiction done well can be amazing. (I liked it better than the originals.)
I’ve also been reading loads of books on Libby, and it’s been great — my public library has a fairly good selection of books on it, and the app itself is far better than the old Overdrive app.
To my surprise, I’ve also started buying books on Kindle. I used to be hesitant to do that (walled garden and all), but I’ve come to terms with it. (To the point that I’ve bought around, uh, 300 books since the beginning of the year. I may have a problem.) (Also, it’s crazy how many books go on sale for a couple dollars. I use eReaderIQ to watch for those sales.) While I do have an old Kindle, I use the app on my phone, since I always have my phone with me. Oh, and the Prime reading library usually has some interesting books, too.
Last but not least, for print books (primarily nonfiction), I tend to scan a chunk of forty to fifty pages using my camera app, turn it into a PDF with Readdle’s Scanner Pro app, and read it using Readdle’s Documents app. That way I can make an “ebook” out of pretty much any print book, letting me read it anywhere without having to lug the physical book around. This method catapulted my nonfiction reading forward, and it’s been great. The only downside is that the scanning takes time, but it’s been worth it. I estimate I’ve read at least 15,000+ pages this way over the past five years.
Overall, I love ebooks. Having them with me all the time is unbeatable. In fact, I just checked and it looks like I haven’t read a print book in over six months. I still love print, but ebooks are the future, at least for me.