The Portuguese public TV station has a show called "Depois, Vai-se a Ver e Nada." Last night they did a segment on our axe-throwing venue in Lisbon! We were under construction at the time, but it's still a fun peek at the experience we provide. We're hoping it will give us a little boost in popularity :-)

Here's how the restaurant booths look today:

Want to eat there and throw some axes?

Wow, a lot has happened since my last post... we LAUNCHED Castle Crashing the Beard HD!!!! If you've been living under a rock, plz go play it right nao!

Check out this awesome piece of fan art:

And my own art pieces I released as teaser previews before launch (shoutout to @Deathink):

There have been a ton of streamers playing it, but my favorite so far is this guy who had no idea what it was. He has some great lines throughout the video as he's not sure whether he likes it or wants to find something to hate... "Tom Phillip" lol:

@Luis, @Pyragmus, and I are quite proud of it. I'm especially proud of a couple things:

1. It's HTML5: I made a finished game without FLASH! (that can still be played on the web!)
2. It's pretty mobile-friendly: If you've got a decent phone, you can play this game from ANYWHERE! This was actually a lot harder than it seems because Game Maker Studio's HTML5 coordinates are all jacked up (known bug) - so I ended up writing my own pure Javascript overlay for properly detecting touch events and passing their coordinates into the GMS2 game coordinate space.
3. 2 player mode: This is dear to my heart because most of the testing was with my 2 boys playing together

One thing I'm disappointed about:

1. No one mentioned the falling leaves in the game! I thought that was a nice touch...

The game was super well-received. That felt really nice cuz we weren't sure how it would do. We totally lucked out (and played around a bit intentionally) with all the tension around Friday Night Funkin's week 7 release (hopefully you saw our cheeky banner on the front page). Little could we have suspected that week 7's release would crash NG, and while NG was coming back online with the huge surge of traffic, those FnF fans were largely funneled to play our game!

I realize we were riding a wave built by other people, but dang it was FUN while it lasted. I was nervously checking reviews and messages every couple minutes and the feedback was just CONSTANTLY rolling in. It reminded me a bit of the hectic feelz when we launched Abobo's Big Adventure. 100k plays in 24 hours nearly gave me an ulcer.

I kept a video dev log of the development process (if anyone's interested in some behind-the-scenes footage). I broke them into the results of approx. 8-ish hours of dev time chunks. We were working on it in our "spare time" but, if we had been working on it full time, it would have taken about a month. Each vid is 1-2 minutes long. Crazy to me that it started with just a black screen:

[ CLICK FOR WHOLE PLAYLIST ]

One cool thing that happened post-launch was that @mike played it and was annoyed that there was pixel "shimmering" on his 4k monitor. He's gotten pretty adept at manipulating HTML5 Canvas pixels on displays from his efforts with Ruffle. So, he took some time and messed with the GameMaker rendering code packaged up from GMS2 and made it so the game runs PIXEL-PERFECT on all resolutions now. It's a small thing, but it makes a big difference to me. It's so cool to see it looking "right" on my iPad retina display.

One bi-product of Mike's efforts was the discovery that if you browser "zoomed" the old version of the game, all the pixel art would be rendered in SUPER CHUNKY low-res blocks! This seemed a lot more like a feature than a bug to me, so I made a video of me playing it in that mode (unfortunately you can't do this anymore, but if there's enough demand maybe I'll ping Mike to help me implement it as an alternate game mode):

So what's next? Well, I'm going to be focusing on USAxe Club for a while. The construction of our new venue in Lisbon, Portugal is pretty much done, and we've opened our doors not only for axe throwing, but as a real American-themed restaurant. It's doing pretty well, but we went into a LOT of debt to get it where it is now. Fingers crossed it gets as popular as we think it has the potential to.

I finished the conversion of our axe-throwing web-socket gaming system to Flash/Ruffle for much more rapid HTML5 Canvas development and easy animation of the axe-throwing game pieces. So far it's made development about 100x faster for me, which is exciting because it means I get to make some new, never-before-seen, axe throwing games soon! Here's a vid of me demoing the Ruffle-based websocket system:

Eventually I'm gonna need to go to Portugal so I can see this place with my own eyes...

In home-renovation news, we finished the concrete pour for the retaining wall, found the matching wall blocks (a whole fiasco in and of itself), built the wall, and went ahead and splurged on replacing the mostly-dead grass with new sod:

I read a pretty interesting book called "In the Beginning was the Command Line" by Neal Stephenson. Besides being mostly about the history of personal computers, it had some interesting philosophical chapters about the nature of "user interfaces" and what we potentially lose by representing very complex things simply (and what we gain by doing so).

Stephenson wrote another book that's pretty famous called "The Cryptonomicon" which came bundled as a recommendation from a co-worker with the command line book. I'm currently chewing, slowly, through it... no real opinion on it yet tho...

I got a raise at work for being a total hardworking badass, so that felt good to be recognized. Other than that, I've also very hesitantly picked back up eating right and exercise. Hopefully that lasts for a while so I'm not such a "fat ass" in addition to being a "badass" at work.

I updated my website http://www.pestoforce.com to have CCTB HD and a new section for some of my more experimental/quirky games. I also made it mobile "responsive" so you can actually look at it on your phone now.

Luis, Pyragmus, and I have been tossing around some game dev ideas. One idea in-particular, we feel pretty good about and want to work toward it once we've all recovered a bit from the launch of CCTB HD.

What do you think that idea might be? If you could have us work on something new and BIG, what would you want us to focus on?

Most of my efforts outside of regular work lately have been toward finishing up the game @Luis and I have been working on for longer than we'd like to admit... as-usual the last 20% of polish takes up 50% of the time and effort!

We're now officially in the beta-testing phase though, and have an official release date (April 16th), so here's a teaser:

And here it is in .gif form for the lazy:

I made a piece of fanart for it!

And some other artworks too!

Chef Zakarian is the Pink Knight of Chopped:

And I was reminded of this AMAZING artwork by @Deathink for the release of Super Chibi Knight:

For Pi Day we tried something new, I made "Shepherd's Pi" :-P

You excited for CCTB? HYPE HYPE HYPE!

TYPE HELP

I made a game for the NG Flash Forward Game Jam!

Here's some background about the genesis and execution of the TypeHelp game:

I recently read a bunch of books about game designers which got me thinking about my default game-design approach. My buddy shared this quote about writing from the Game of Thrones author:

“I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows. And I'm much more a gardener than an architect.”

― George R.R. Martin

My "default" game design approach is much more "gardener" than architect. I've never really built a "level design engine," but tend to fly by the seat of my pants. This can make some pretty fun games that have surprising twists and turns, but I wondered what it would be like to be more "architect"-y about my design.

One of the books I read was about the history of Sierra Online and had a neat section about how Roberta Williams was very interested in text-adventures when they were the newest, freshest, thing. She didn't have any coding ability, but wanted to make one herself. Her husband, Ken, was a coder and wrote an "engine" that Roberta could use to fulfill her creative dream. In the book, Ken outlines some of the design approaches he used to make the text adventure engine (their engine was actually the first to combine rudimentary graphics with the text).

When I heard about the Flash Forward Jam, I wanted to do something experimental (not my typical action-game fare). I decided to try my hand at making a flexible, text-adventure engine. I wanted to make everything "text based" as a fairly significant design restriction (so it would feel like what you might see if you went back in time to early 80s computer hardware, but somehow, miraculously, had the easier internet access of today). One reason for this is that Ruffle doesn't have great text rendering and text-editing support yet, and I thought doing something ALL IN TEXT would be a fun challenge to address and be impressive to anyone familiar with Ruffle's limitations.

This text-only (no graphics, flowcharts, wireframes, or even drop-down menus/form elements) restriction, led me to settle on a command-line-like terminal interface... a-la Linux or DOS.

I put most of my development time into making the command-line-interface (CLI) very robust and enabling lots of flexibility in what it allowed the user to do, game-structure-wise, using the engine. I also decided, early on, I wanted to enable people to create and share their creations via the same CLI.

At some point, I decided it would be really cool, and "meta" to obscure the game engine within a text-based narrative. This way, the player would think "oh I'm just playing a text adventure game", then be slowly led to discovery of the CLI and, in fact, be forced to use the CLI to complete the "baked in" text adventure. I had recently re-watched "The Matrix" and wanted to try capturing that "the world around you is a sham" feeling, and the "you are actually a GOD here if you learn the right tricks" feeling.

In the end, the real design challenge was how to have the baked-in game fun and engaging and intuitive enough, while also slowly revealing the CLI, and not just DUMPING a HUGE game engine on the user all at once. For the record, I don't think I solved this design problem very well...

Most players just skimmed and bounced off the surface of the game, never realizing the real "meat" underlying it all. Those that did discover it, felt it was too cumbersome to use very intuitively. I attempted to help resolve some of these concerns by implementing a JSON export and import feature, but even that is probably too esoteric for the average player.

If I would have allowed myself to use graphics, and showed a flowchart of "rooms" and the various kinds of objects and their linkages (and let people click into nested object structures and edit them in a smoother navigation structure), I think it would have gone a long way to helping people get more immersed in the creative side of the game.

I only ended up with a handful of "user-submitted" adventures, even though I expected a lot more when I first launched it (I set up a website and server and everything to support my predicted influx of games... http://typehelp.org). WOMP WOMP...

Overall, though, I'm really proud of what I made and of myself for taking my personal challenge to be more engine-focused and "architect-y" to heart.

The recently-submitted game "B"-Al-Zebub's Rest Stop is a fantastic example of the kind of adventure game I was hoping people would make with the engine. If you want to check it out, load up the Type Help game and type:

cmd web play 5

I still hope that there will be a day, in the future, when the stars align for the right people to uncover what the game offers and get excited about it... kind of like how "Frog Fractions" took some "soak time" for people to really "get it."

MY GAMES ARE NOT DEAD

In really good news, Ruffle has made lots of progress on as2 support, and pretty much 100% emulates, in-browser, all of my as2 games. Most important to me is the ability to play Abobo's Big Adventure (since that is, so far, my magnum opus):

For the Abobo 10 year anniversary this coming January 2022, Rog, Pox, and I are going to get together and record a video of us playing through it with "Creator DVD Commentary" and put it on YouTube.

But also important to me is Portal Defenders:

I made a little video of the Portal Defenders ending as emulated in Ruffle to celebrate:

AXE AUTO-DETECTION SOFTWARE

I decided to revise my axe-gaming web-socket system to use RUFFLE as the rendering engine. I was going crazy hand-coding animations in HTML 5 for the axe games, so when I started fantasizing about using Flash to do all the animations and FX, it was just a pipe dream... then RUFFLE!

I've done tons of testing, and I officially believe that everything I need to do for the axe games can be done via Ruffle. Most-recently I tested Ruffle's support of as2's "External Interface" API - which allows Javascript commands to call functions within Flash and allows Flash to call Javascript functions on the page containing the swf embed. Here's a demo of all that working: https://usaxeclub.com/test/

Importantly, this means our games can step up to a more-modern standard of game visual FX and animation.

In other great news, my business partner has been working on a system to very precisely detect where an axe hits our projected targets using Python and MACHINE LEARNING AI MODELS!!!

I set up an API to send the auto-detection data through the web-socket system, and it's actually working! This video shows an early test where the lag was significant, but currently the "lag" is down to about 500 milliseconds, which seems near-instant.

This is opening up a lot of axe game possibilities... including DUCK HUNT (with axes)...

The Portuguese "national" tv service also did a report on our store!

My day job as a software developer has given me a lot more confidence in trying new things with code. Now that Type Help is in-the-bag, I'm turning my focus back to the Castle Crashing The Beard HD Reboot project, which is insanely close to being done... keep an eye out for that later this year.

Overall feeling pretty good about everything. I hope 2021 has a lot of good things in store for me, and YOU!

Thanks for reading, leave me a comment about what you're excited about in 2021!

If you're interested in beta testing my Flash Forward game jam game, please DM me!

Update: It's live!

Happy New Year!

Here's a project I thought would be small, but turned out to take a good bit of effort. I wanted to build an axe throwing target to test the games I’ve been making for usaxeclub.com.

One goal was to make it easy to disassemble and assemble so it could be stored in the garage. Another goal was to allow the blocks to be swapped around and flipped as they wear out.

I achieved both with varied levels of success... I’m not a great structural engineer yet! But I learned a lot!

On social media we tend to all end up breathing the same air as things go "viral." Half of my conversations with people go in the direction of "Oh, ha ha, yeah, that was good, I just saw that the other day!" The unique, "underground," feel of Newgrounds is one of the things that's kept me coming back here after all these years.

Every once in a while I stumble on something that deserves virality, but isn't quite there yet (I know... "what a HIPSTER!").

In this news post I'd like to share one such under-appreciated person with you (I just wish NG had a higher file-size threshold for animated .gifs so you could see the samples larger).

KUSHIRO (https://twitter.com/kushirosea)

From what I can tell, this guy is developing a tool/plugin for Blender (free 3D modeling software) that allows you to draw primitive shapes on a "grid" and then extrude those shapes into existence.

"Grid Modeler" $10 Blender Plugin: https://gumroad.com/l/VthLyO

This may not sound very revolutionary, but just check out the samples below.

The way he can rapidly "sketch" 3D mechanical models makes me drool... not to mention his solid design instincts for extruding, beveling, slicing, and notching everything in just the right way to make it look high-tech/futuristic but also convincingly-buildable/functional. I was not previously aware that this kind of rapid ideation was possible in 3D, the potential gets me kinda excited!

It's been fascinating to see Kushiro add new features to Grid Modeler over the last few months (like quick-tubes/pipes).

When I get some time I'm definitely going to delve into learning his tools in blender to see if I can develop some of the facility demonstrated in these samples.

Space Ship

Engine

Motorcycle

Enemy Mech

Future Sword

Give Kushiro a follow! https://twitter.com/kushirosea

I've been playing a lot of Spelunky with my boys lately. We finally completed the secret ending by defeating Yama in Hell, then did "Speed-lunky" where you beat the game in under 8 mins. All this gave me a lot to consider about the core tenets of "Rogue-likes" and compelling game design in-general.

Naturally, I wanted to try my hand at making a Roguelike for my latest axe-throwing project, which led to the creation of "Corona Rogue" at USAxeClub.

You get a randomly generated set of 15 "rooms" of 3 types:

1. Randomly placed coronavirus molecule you have to hit with your axe
2. Item room (various permanent and non-permanent upgrades like: Vaccine [revives you if you miss], Hand Sanitizer [gives you a point multiplier for successful target hits], Quarantine [lets you skip a round], Face-mask [multiplies the # of options available in item rooms], Microscope [zooms in on the COVID-19 molecule making it easier to hit], etc.
3. Boss room (there's a mini-boss somewhere on floor 2, then a final boss in the final room)

To simulate "perma-death" (a roguelike staple) any misses make you start the game over (unless you have a vaccine).

The coolest thing, though, is that there's a "secret ending" where, if you have the right item, and do things in a very-specific order, you get caught in a time vortex and travel through time back to November 2019 to slay "Patient Zero" aka: "The Wuhan Bat" who shows up with a bunch of armor layers for you to knock off with your axe. Essentially, you can prevent Coronavirus from ever happening! This is a very cathartic experience, trust me...

This is the first "original" axe-throwing game on my web-socket platform and it feels like exploring a new frontier. I can't wait to have time to make another game...

Speaking of games, I saw another developer post that he really enjoyed the book "The Making of Prince of Persia" - So I went to buy it and found a bunch of other "History of Video Games" books. I just finished "Where Wizards Stay Up Late" about how Al Gore definitely did NOT create the Internet. I'm half-way through "Masters of Doom" about John Carmack and John Romero (creators of Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3d, and then Doom). Then it's on to Sid Meier's memoir "A Life in Computer Games" about the creator of Civilization. Then "Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings" about the rise and fall of Sierra (some of my favorite games ever).

Finally, I'm about to pour CONCRETE in my front yard for a retaining wall foundation. There's so much to learn about doing this "right" - and I'm sure my pour will be pretty sucky... but this is how we learn right? Me and the fam dug out where the previous wall was collapsing, then I built the wooden "forms" and I just dumped a bunch of gravel into the bottom of the forms as a barrier between the concrete and the ground. Next is to mix the concrete and dump it in (with some rebar bars to reinforce it horizontally), level it, wait for it to partially set, take off the forms, smooth it out, backfill around the concrete and wait for it to fully set up. Then I'll have a foundation I can stack retaining wall blocks on that will, hopefully, be perfectly flat and easy to stack on and never fall over again...

Thanks for dropping by!

P.S. I'm still finishing up the Castle Crashing the Beard remake, just need to finish the achievements system which requires me learning a bit about the Newgrounds API for Javascript, then putting in all the SFX, Voice-acting, and music (hopefully that goes quickly). I want to dedicate most of my Christmas break to it... ideally release it before 2021, but we'll see!

This was kinda buried in my last news post, but I've been working on a web-socket-fueled IRL axe throwing game. Whatcha think? It's like "Among Us" but with axes!

I also did some designs for custom axes to be water-jetted out of steel and sharpened to use at the venue... I'm stoked to see how they turn out!

Last of all, I've been working on a "league" system that tracks axe-throwing achievements and ranking among players (as well as their game stats).

Here's a clip from a marketing video:

I also did a quick facelift on our website: http://www.usaxeclub.com

LMK what you think!

The gap between this and my last post is larger than usual, but not for lack of news... in fact I've felt very busy, nearly overwhelmed, with everything going on. To mitigate that overwhelmed feeling I stopped working out... it helped a lot with my productivity, but I'm feeling quite fat and out of shape :-/

Here's the latest scoop:

1) Music: I'm no musician, but I went through a phase where I messed around with garage band and made a couple tracks... what do you think? It feels like the musical equivalent of "paint by numbers" using all the GB built-ins, but I tried searching for some unique "me-ness" within the constraints.

I like the buildup and the confident ending to this one, but the middle goes off the rails with freestyling a bit.

I was kinda vibing on the uniqueness of the Metroid intro music for this one, with distinct tones separated by lots of space. I think the timing is ok, but someone left a review saying the notes were out of place/off-beat...

This is probably my favorite. I really dig the classical "bass" strings as the underlying rhythm. The core melody really reminded me of the sounds of "Bollywood" movies (not that I was intentionally going for that though...). Again, I like the "wind down" ending stripping away tracks back down to the melody.

I tried telling a story with this one. I explain it in response to one of the comments but, it's like: Evil lurks, Heroine attempts to confront it, Heroine is defeated and her heartbeat extinguished.

It was a fun experiment, but I feel somewhat handicapped by not having real good musical foundations. If I did, I could see myself getting heavily into music creation.

2) Art! I sketch on my iPad to decompress sometimes. Also, on days where I feel like I haven't accomplished anything, or I've failed, or I'm frustrated, completing a drawing gives me a boost of that "accomplished" feeling I crave.

A friend on FB requested this and I really like how it turned out. Having a bit of direction and forcing myself to use some reference really paid off in the final product. It's one of my more original/interesting/technically adept pieces of late.

Crabs will always be one of my favorite things to draw. I love the crunchy, alien, shell texture and odd proportions.

Oh, I also like drawing turtles and tortoises for the same reasons :-D

Here's another tortoise-ish thing. This reminds me of "Slash" from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

This jellyfish was a crowd favorite. I really enjoy "line" in my art (if you hadn't noticed!) and while I was perusing google images, the reference for this jellyfish "spoke to me" about the potential to do interesting things with "lines." I think the unique coloring also appealed to people. This one pushed me out of my comfort zone a bit.

This was my attempt to ride the "wave" of crowd approval from the previous jellyfish... but this one was not as well-received even though I think the transparency had a lot of interesting challenges in the rendering process.

This was another attempt to push myself out of my comfort zone of human faces, blobby cancerous tumors (aka: COVID-19 pre-cognition), and crabs... It was a real challenge, but it was ultimately very fulfilling to see it all come together. I could really dig a job just drawing people's food for their mommy food blogs.

I had to get in on the political waves. I ended up really emphasizing Trump's jowls and his "deep fried" skin tones. But, one element I think really interests me, is the BG. It's very "golden" and feels almost old-world religious gold-leaf to me. It also reminds me of the cubist aesthetic depicted in Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase

Gotta even out the political spectrum! If you cover each half of his face his expression changes! (Unintentional, but somewhat appropriate...)

3) Immersive Bible App: I finally finished my work with the Immersive Bible app! I'm proud of the art direction I did and the logo/brand I created. Unfortunately, I did it so well (and charged so much) that they just took my style guide and hired a college design student to do all their day-to-day work. That's ok though, I've been up to my chin in projects and was glad to have this one off my plate. If you recall, I put out a search for an animator to do one of those new cool "After Effects" animated logos that you see on just about every insurance company commercial or tech company commercial nowadays (oh, also the "loading" screen to Gmail).

I found someone, a girl who recently graduated from design school. I liked her portfolio and saw a lot of potential. However, when I started giving her feedback (in a direct, but not mean way) - she got offended and bailed from the project (this was pretty stressful cuz I was sub-contracting to lighten my heavy work-load). Sooooooo... finally I just bit the bullet and did it myself. I learned a TON in the process!

The idea is that you have a light-weight, vector, html-5 animation, that is cross-platform-friendly. Here's the final web-friendly "Lottie" file I created: https://lottiefiles.com/share/k7CEPh

4) USAxe Club: My biggest side-hustle has been USAxeClub. If you haven't heard yet, Axe Throwing is this trending thing that's like bowling, but more edgy and cool. Axe Throwing venues are springing up all over the US in bigger cities. I have a friend who served an LDS mission in Lisbon, Portugal. He decided to move back there and open an Axe Throwing business because the fad hasn't caught on yet in Europe and he wanted to be the first!

I offered to be his partner and do the business branding/marketing materials, and be the CTO (mostly in charge of the website). However, here's the cool part: We've made a mixed IRL/Web game MMO around the sport!

So, we're using projectors to display digital targets on the IRL boards where the axes are thrown. What this lets us do, though, is project all kinds of stuff, like zombies, tic-tac-toe, duck hunt, etc. But you're throwing REAL axes at the game. The cool thing is that I recently learned to use "Web Sockets" (which requires a node.js web server) for real-time, instant, chat-like, communication between web browser windows (using https://socket.io/) - SOooooooo, you can control and see aspects of the game on your cell phone which can also be connected to everyone else's cell phone/device in the group. It's a lot like the "Jack Box" games that have been trending in popularity recently, but with IRL AXE THROWING! Some of the game concepts are similar to Nintendo DS games because we have multiple screens to work with for showing game state/hud elements/secret info, etc.

Basically, we have this unique axe-throwing gaming platform that now I get to develop a bunch of real-time web-socket apps for. This is like a dream come true for me because the games are simple, but the IRL element makes them SO fun! Kinda like Wario-ware with axes. Oh, and what I'm working on right now is a "league" system that will have user accounts where people can challenge other "league" members for rank positioning, earn achievements, level up, etc. It's a really cool mix of a real-world skill with digital motivations... afaik we're the first ones in the world to be doing this... The first location in Lisbon is doing really well so far, but I think we're sitting on an idea that, if we can pull it off, will be huge.

It's funny because when I was teaching game development, one of the projects I had the students work on was a similar idea where there was a "public," projected, game board that everyone could see, but also private "phone" instances that were communicating with it in real-time. We weren't using web-sockets (just doing delayed polling) but the idea is the same. Basically, I feel like a lot of my experience in life (the Woogi World MMO, my game dev hobby, my teaching experience, my job as a web-developer, etc.) has prepared me for something like this.

Here's a demo of the tic-tac-toe game running between the "projector" (which is full-screened on the axe-throwing wall) and a couple instances of "phones" logged in. This is actually up and running in the Lisbon location and people LOVE it :-)

5) Castle Crashing the Beard HD: This is still moving forward! We're actually really close to being ready to beta test and add sfx, music, and voices. There's a lot of cool stuff I could show you, but I really don't want to spoil it... If you must see something, then look at this intro that I ended up having to hand-code all the animations for so it would still work on mobile devices:

6) This grape from my yard caught COVID-19, and my olive tree grew some olives!

7) We did pancake art one Sunday morning, and I think I could make a career out of it...

8) My boys have been playing Alien Hominid and demanded we 3D print the Alien's blaster, and the final boss' blaster. I had fun modeling these trying to invent geometry from Dan Paladin's loose art style:

8.5) My son, not to be outdone, made a papier mache "Hebi" beast from Super Chibi Knight... I was pretty impressed!

9) Fire: My brother and his girlfriend had a fire at their house. I spent a good amount of time and $ helping them clean up from the damage. One of the big projects was helping them find a travel trailer to live in while they rebuild. It would have been a fun challenge at any other time in my life, but it was "one more thing" added onto my mental queue to deal with. Everything worked out well though and we were able to raise enough money via GoFundMe for a nice trailer for them. They're not totally out of the woods yet though, so if you feel inclined to help out, please make a GoFundMe donation:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/ben-and-annettes-house-fire-relief

10) Family Reunion: About 3.5 years ago my dad committed suicide. I never knew him very well, but I've always resented the abandonment. His suicide contributed to a bit of a tailspin that I've been slowly recovering from over the last few years. Part of that recovery has been a growing desire to connect with my half siblings from his side of the family that I've never really known. Well, I finally bit the bullet and reached out to them and we had a family reunion last month at the Oregon Coast (where they spread his ashes). It was very cathartic and I feel like a piece of me has been restored. I learned a lot about him and his life and personality and his interactions with his relationships and his kids. Let's just say that "genetics are a helluva thing!" He and I are very similar in a lot of ways, but I feel that one major difference is my willingness to confront and work through my demons rather than run from them. Mostly, where my siblings feel a deep loss at losing their father, I feel a "filling in" at having a new family. My new sisters were especially welcoming, and my brothers made me get in the freezing Oregon water with them as a "baptism" into the family. Here's a pic of the last time I saw my dad (I was 15 yo) along with 2 of my half-brothers, and a couple pics with my "new old" sisters from the reunion:

11) Reading: You knew you wouldn't get away without a word about my reading materials! With COVID I haven't been doing audiobooks during my commute at all, so my numbers are way down... I'm reading "Maps of Meaning" by Jordan Peterson which has a lot of great stuff and is helping me re-frame my relationship with spirituality, the divine, the unknown, my higher power, "Big Good," etc.

One thing that's particularly-relevant is how Peterson talks about the Biblical name "Israel" which was given to the patriarch "Jacob" as a new name after he had a spiritual experience at a place he named "penu-el" or "face of god" because it's where Jacob saw god "face to face and yet was spared" - and also had an experience wrestling with "the angel of the Lord." The interpretation of the Hebrew word "Israel" is apparently debated!

One group believes it directly relates to the story of Jacob's "wrestle with God" in which he ended up winning! This group interprets "Israel" to mean "one who prevails with God." And that Jacob's wrestle and renaming is a metaphor for the injunction that everyone needs to wrestle with their relationship with God and win - and thus earn a new name/identity - That we should not just "shelve" the hard questions we have about divinity, but engage with them and even be a bit antagonistic in our search to see "God's face." This video encapsulates that view nicely:

Another group believes that "Israel" means: One who lets God prevail. This is an interesting point of view because I do agree that there is a component of "surrendering" involved in faith. An acceptance that some knowledge is beyond our abilities to perceive/comprehend and the decision to "let go of the rope" in certain tugs-of-war and to cease "kicking against the pricks" (Acts 26:14) This was particularly highlighted in a recent LDS General Conference speech from the LDS Prophet Russel M. Nelson: https://www.thechurchnews.com/leaders-and-ministry/2020-10-04/general-conference-october-2020-sunday-morning-president-nelson-193989

I am fascinated by the two, seemingly-opposite, interpretations of this important Hebrew title. I think it's possible that the ambiguity is intentional as I've learned that Hebrew is a semantically rich language that is often used to highlight double meanings and word-play. Perhaps there's a balance between engaging in the battle/taking responsibility for the search for truth, while also tempering it with a measure of surrender.

The other book I've been reading is "Lord of the Rings" to my boys for bedtime stories. I'm reminded about how very good that book is!

Here's a quote I liked where Aragorn (an unknown ranger/Dunedain, who is actually the future king) puts Boromir (a proud member of the current ruling family in Gondor) in his place after Boromir grand stands about all he has done for the good of Middle Earth:

"If Gondor, Boromir, has been a stalwart tower, we have played another part. Many evil things there are that your strong walls and bright swords do not stay. You know little of the lands beyond your bounds. Peace and freedom, do you say? The North would have known them little but for us. Fear would have destroyed them. But when dark things come from the houseless hills, or creep from sunless woods, they fly from us. What roads would any dare to tread, what safety would there be in quiet lands, or in the homes of simple men at night, if the Dúnedain were asleep, or were all gone into the grave? ‘And yet less thanks have we than you. Travellers scowl at us, and countrymen give us scornful names. “Strider” I am to one fat man who lives within a day’s march of foes that would freeze his heart, or lay his little town in ruin, if he were not guarded ceaselessly. Yet we would not have it otherwise. If simple folk are free from care and fear, simple they will be, and we must be secret to keep them so. That has been the task of my kindred, while the years have lengthened and the grass has grown."

Here's a random, non-LoTR quote for fun:

"Anyone can love a thing because. That's easy as putting a penny in your pocket. But to love something despite. To know the flaws and love them too. That is rare and pure and perfect"

- Patrick Rothfuss

12) Worthwhile Follow: The creator of "Inktober" has come under attack recently amid allegations of plagiarism/reselling of Inktober art. However, I really like the guy and read his explanation of the "controversy" and accept his innocence. I subscribed to his email newsletter and have really enjoyed his updates. He always has really unique visual references he shares as well as inspirational quotes from his readings. I'd highly recommend following him and subscribing to his newsletter!

A quote from his last newsletter:

"I decided to take up the practice of Kaizen. This is the Japanese practice of resisting the plateau of arrested development. The literal translation is "continuous improvement." One who practices kaizen isn't satisfied with taking on a new art piece or a project that they've done before, but is consistently putting themselves in uncomfortable situations where they must learn something new in order to get out of it."

https://www.mrjakeparker.com/

13) FINALLY, check out this amazing student animation. We need to get this school, GOBELINS, aware of Newgrounds so they can start uploading here:

"I am a nexus of universes. I belong to a class of people--I’m not alone in this--whose hand and eye are antennae, sensitive to a certain type of reality"

-- Jean Giraud (AKA: Moebius)