Category: Canada –

Monday, February 26th, 2018 —>-2˚C / +28˚F with light snow falling on crunchy overnight quarter inch of white stuff at 7:16 am in Atlantic Canada —> On Aunt Reggie’s Birthday 🙂 —

– “Twilight over the Half-Elf Valley ” –

— The actual sky was more orange – As the sun set through a temperature inversion. But when I had to adjust the print so “TaleRocker” was almost visible – the process gave us a much more yellow sky.

– “Midnight In Keltic Valley” –

— This {above } shot is modified too – but in order to capture the feeling, I let it stay a bit dark.

– “TaleRocker” – According to Doug Otterson –

— Doug Says in a text message on the iPhone, “Hey look, I gave you glasses :)” – I was guessing that – on one of his infrequent nights off when he couldn’t sleep he spent a couple hours trying to modify one of his Builder characters. But then I realized that one of the times when he stayed with us in order not to upset his New Brunswick sweetie’s son, he signed on to my account and modified one of mine. On his last visit { Saturday } – He looked at what we’d done in the past week, looked at me, laughed and asked my permission to try to fix something when I was succumbing to complete burn-out – He gave ‘TaleRocker’ a pair of glasses – & after admitting that he gave him glasses, ‘messaged’: “I tried to get him to look a little more like you without chancing anything catastrophic” — Silly me, next time I logged in I had to use one of the tools that can modify characters to turn this guy around to see his face and yup, he’s got glasses.

– Doug’s ‘Highe Elf’ builder character – Guarding the gate to our new and improved (?) Keltic Valley. –

— I should make him explain his own inspirations – But Doug told me this guy { above } gave him the confidence to try to get a character to look something like the ‘real me’ { After one of my attempts to come up with a replacement for a female builder character who suffered a catastrophic failure and fell out of the world and never came back – Actually looked like his daughter, Rachel as she’d grown up – & I hadn’t seen her since she was about 9 years old – & after he says spent about three hours messing with the facial morphing tools, he thought this one looked a little like me as  tall blond elf  { ‘Highe Elves’ see themselves as being more intellectual than Forest Elves? } & He said he saw me more as a Bard than a Ranger – { We met at a writer’s workshop at Cornell U. in Ithaca, New York } When I whined and didn’t think this guy quite looked like me, he spent more like five hours working on a Ranger and I’ve been using that guy’s screen shot as my Twitter profile for a couple years now –

– Adjusted { Exposure } and Cropped – Icon sized image of TaleRocker with his glasses. –

— This is probably okay for an ‘effbook’ profile picture, but there isn’t enough contrast to make it a really good blog icon.

— Doug dared me to use it as my profile picture. I have to think about that. While I hedged and ‘thought about it – he said, “Take his hat off -” So I did and he has bangs that don’t quite fall in front of his eyes and they’re edged in a near indigo blue colour.

— And I’m not going to sit here and type until I wake up with my nose on the keyboard and find fifteen pages of “Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa” – or something. But I plopped that image to the left because Xhyrean wants to know how that might format things in this blog.

— “Argh”?

— But in all fairness, we got a lot done over the weekend. And I actually felt good about walking out into a beautiful new world before dawn this morning to put out the garbage, walking on the crunchy new quarter-inch of snow with a tiny bit of freezing rain on top of it.

— & Yes, Xhyrean, Everything does look amazing after staring at a computer screen for eighteen hours trying to fix unexpected catastrophes. & Hey guys, we have a tool to save what we have as it is and come back later to restore it if somebody else falls asleep at their computer and wipes out half the universe — 😉

— “Set and Save Checkpoints!”

~~~~~ Jim