Woodpress

My wife didn’t like the yellow line on the left of the parking lot oil picture, so I re-cropped it (and made some other minor adjustments).

When I got back to work yesterday after lunch, I noticed that the hill to the south of the office had some really interesting snow patterns. Since I had brought my nice camera to work, I went back down a little while later and took some pictures. This is one.

While I was out taking pictures, I noticed some other photo-worthy things.

This is a tree house near the office where I work.

I’m not really sure what this is. Some sort of antenna, I suspect. If someone wants to enlighten me, I’d appreciate it.

On the walk across the parking lot after taking some pictures, I noticed this oil in the parking lot. I think I managed to get a pretty decent photo of it.

I drew a flower on a whiteboard.

Politics. Ugh.

I’m not particularly anti-Hillary (or particularly pro-Hillary), but someone pointed out to me that “Vote for Hillary Online is so dedicated to making sure Hillary Clinton wins this election that [they’ve] started a program that rewards those of you who post positive replies about Hillary on political blogs.” Ouch. I realize that’s probably an attempt to use the usual press-bribing tactics in this new fangled Internet world, but I hope it fails to scale so we can finally get some real truth.

Maybe I’m a weirdo, but I like honesty and sincerity, and it bothers me that the word “politics” has evolved to have almost the exact opposite meaning. I don’t think I’m a weirdo though (in this regard). I think the Internet is increasing the availability of truth by creating a scale of publication where it’s less practical to control the “press” with money.

If this “getting paid to say good things” move actually goes forward, hopefully people will respond to positive comments about Hillary by pointing back to this offer, resulting in an overall negative impact.

Let’s promote politicians based exclusively on how well we think they can do the job.

While we’re at it, let’s seek to advance our own careers by seeking positions where we sincerely believe that we can improve things more effectively than the other candidates (whether we’re in politics or not), even if that means sometimes stepping aside for a more qualified person. Maybe that seems naive. I guess it depends on what you want from life.

My son is working on learning to do hand stands and hand walking.

This is the way the board looked at the end of a recent Banqi game I played with a friend from work (Brian Jarvis). I was red. I lost. I don’t think I’ve ever played or seen a game that involved worse luck than this one. It was remarkable. I still enjoyed playing it.

Today we had banqi lunch at Tucanos. The food was delicious (as always), and one of the servers was interested in the game, so I gave him the woodpress URL and told him to search for Banqi. Since it’s been a while since I posted this information, I’ll do it again for his convenience:

• The best place I’ve found for buying Xiangqi/Banqi sets is gamecenteronline. They’re excellent quality, suitable for both games, and cost only $5.
• For Banqi, I like to use a printout of a board I designed (see below) which is more decorative than a folded Xiangqi board and includes a table of pieces to simplify the learning process.
• The set from gamecenteronline comes with instructions for Xiangqi (and there is a Xiangqi wikipedia article). There is also a Banqi wikipedia article, which includes game instructions.

Here’s the custom Banqi board I use:

I painted this in openCanvas. In contrast to the “no reference” pumpkin, for this painting I loaded the original photo and painted over it, using it as reference. Some people might call that tracing. :)

Here’s the original photo, which I took:

You might wonder about the framing. There are multiple reasons it’s a little off: I took the photo in the dark (with flash), and the stems were kinda dried up. I really should have fixed the framing for the painting, but it started out as a lighting study that I had no intention of finishing.