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I also wasted yesterday making yet another variation on the Arlo  WDC doesn't give a very high resolution copy of the image. Here's a close-up of the crew pod, which is marginally better.  |
| Very creative! |
Reply| Nice balls! |
Reply
I made a variation on beef stew yesterday, based on a recipe in my mother's 1950s Presto Pressure Cookier cookbook called "Swedish Pot Roast." As nearly as I can tell, the recipe has exactly nothing to do with Swedish cuisine, but it does have an interesting flavor profile. I used this excellent recipe  for a base recipe, and then tweaked it with the flavors from the old Presto cookbook. The resulting recipe is on my blog. in case anyone is interested. It's easy and pretty tasty. |
| Today's version of the Arlo. This one combines ideas from all of the prior versions. (1) cylindrical pressurized crew area with a shuttle bay (2) reaction drives for maneuvering in normal space (3) ring that contains the hyperdrive shunt for FTL travel (4) lots of tacky things added on for carrying cargo--appropriate for a tramp trader (5) I added spherical fuel tanks, also pressurized  |
| I love "lots of tacky things added on for carrying cargo--appropriate for a tramp trader." That's fabulous! This thing wouldn't fly in atmosphere with all that wind resistance and I suspect it catches a lot of tiny meteors and other trashy bits floating around in space. But the design also makes sense as you describe it. And since there's no atmosphere in space, I think it's fine. You put so much effort into everything and it really shows! |
Made chicken chowder tonight...chicken, mirepoix, red pepper, jalopeno, yukon gold potatoes, bacon, sweet corn, chicken stock, and heavy cream. Topped with cilantro. It was good, but it made enough for six, so I'll be having leaved-overs all week.  |
| If you wouldn't ind I would love to add thos recipe to my blog just post it I'm my forum or provide a link to it if it is in your portal and I will add it |
Lizzie Basking in the Sun  - Done. I also added my slight variation on the recipe and an amazon link to a useful tool for dusting flour into gravies and sauces. |
Another Arlo doodle. It occured to me that it would have conventional rocket engines for moving in normal space, but the "ghost engines" that move it FTL might be a ring that generated a spherical bit of hyperspace surrounding the ship...which resulted in this sketch.  |
| That is nice! It's unique, but it makes perfect sense. I think an envelope of hyperspace is the basic principle of Star Trek's warp engines. A sphere, generated by a circular engine, makes more sense to me. I read somewhere of a RW theory that basically involves 'warping' space so that time collapses space to make vast distances 'shorter' so that, for instance, a ship could travel a lightyear in a few hours. I suspect, though, that when we reach the Milky Way Malt Shop we'd still be asked to "pull into Space 1 and we'll send your order out in a shuttle when it's ready." |
One of the ways I didn't write anything this week was watching a telecourse on airplane design. It turns out airplanes are big tubes because that shape provides structural stability for the pressurized cabins that are required for high-elevation flight. That means that spacecraft should have cylindrical crew spaces for the same reason. The Apollo program LEM, for example, was a big tub on top of the propulsion system. Anyway, that meant that the passenger parts of the Arlo (remember the Arlo?) need to be cylindrical. So, the way I didn't write today was in drawing a new version of Arlo with cylindrical crew areas and tacked-on square cargo spaces.  |
| Having just finished reading the submissions for the Spring 2026 issue of Tales from the Crosstimbers, here's a link to an article I wish the authors had read: https://www.sfwa.org/2005/01/04/mistakes-in-writing/ It's Roger MacBride Allen's essay The Standard Deviations of Writing in which he lists some basic and easily fixable errors that authors make. Error #6, nameless characters, and error #5, needless flashbacks, are the two that most particularly caught my attention for this particular set of submissions. His essay is a more detailed discussion of some of the things covered in my last newsletter, "For Authors Newsletter (January 14, 2026)" . |
Raven  - That's more or less the reaction I got from the author I mentioned--she said she'd deliberately chosen nameless characters and a nonlinear timeline and under no circumstances would she change it--despite the fact that it was confusing to read on both counts. She obviously didn't want to hear that. |
Max Griffin 🏳️🌈  - There's ALSO a whole long post that could be written about "I want to do this Arty Art Art thing with my story, but readers don't get it! Who is wrong?" (Answer: well Writer, uh, you. Sorry.) In my opinion this kind of comes down to a failure of theory of mind. I as the writer feel like surely any good-hearted reader will be able to pick up what I'm laying down. I forget all the times when I'm the reader, when I quickly get frustrated with confusing prose or structure and give up. (And I am actually a fairly patient, close reader compared to most people in my cohort, I think.) Readers are mostly on the same team as the writer, but they're tired, man. The kids are yelling and the dog is being weird. They're just trying to read something while the pasta boils, you know? It's possible to do very elegant, experimental story art without forgetting that the reader can't see into your mind, although it is, of course, more difficult. There are strategies to getting a reader to follow you into an unusual story structure, for example, that involve demonstrating to the reader that they can trust you. (I.e., if you want them to trust that you'll eventually answer a big question, like Who Shot The Mayor, you first answer a smaller question in the beginning of the story, like Why Is The Mayor's Shoe On The Roof?) Learning about and practicing these techniques is part of what lets you figure out how to pull off your Arty Art Art piece. |
| I've had a few non-linear (flashback heavy... sort of) and nameless character stories published, but I also worked with the editors in those cases to clarify things. But I do think some writers get way too precious about their works and so refuse to change. I like to think I am easy to work with, but I also write what I like to read, so the stories are 95% of the time, pretty straight forward. It is fine to write how you want; you are, after all, a writer. But it is also perfectly valid for others to "not get it" at the same time. Experimental writing has very few markets. I know I got lucky a couple of times. But I also know what editors and publishers like by now. Maybe these submitters just need a few more rejections and reality checks before they get into the swing of what will be accepted and what won't. Experience can sometimes breed better habits... |
| My tale of woe for today. I decided to configure Alexa so I could say, "Watch cable," and she would turn on the TV, turn on the amplifier, set the TV to HDMI2 and set the amplifier to CBL/SAT. Should be simple, right? A five minute task with my old Harmony remote. Alas, Harmony remotes are toast and they're not making them any more. WIth Alexa? Well, I started this at 7AM, it's now 3:30 and I just *now* finished. At least it's done. But now I can't make a "Watch Roku" command work, even with it set up in *exactly* the same way. This isn't good for my blood pressure. I think I'll take a break...if anyone knows of a good reference on Alexa/home assistant interfaces, let me know. |
| Raven - We've got a 300 disk DVD changer and a 400 disk Bluray changer, both full of disks. We never watch them...they are painfully slow to load. I do like the extras that come with disks, though. |
| Max Griffin 🏳️🌈 - I suspect you would recoil in horror from our setup, which is "old school blu-ray player and a cabinet full of DVDs, yes, literal DVDs in plastic cases that we rifle through when we want to watch one". We also stream, at the moment, but for movies I really love I want to actually own physical copies. I've been burned too many times by Amazon or Neftlix deciding they just don't want to give me something I've paid for anymore. |
Based on comments/feedback, here's the latest version of the Arlo. It's supposed to look like a random coolection of parts and shipping containters, with no streamlining since it'll never operate in an atmosphere and certainly never land on a planet. There are supposed to be bays in the lower parts for cargo and shuttles that do land on planets.  |
Max Griffin 🏳️🌈 - That's good. As long as you can see a more detailed image and it doesn't present that way, all is well. But if that's the first place my mind went, you can bet I'm not alone. The last thing you want is readers mentally turning your hard-worked illustration into a half-assed joke... J  |
| Phantom Reviewer - There's a higher resolution image here, where I've also added doors to the shuttle/cargo bays. https://maxgriffin.net/drawing-spaceships/ |
Another day wasted playing with Blender, and a radically different idea for what the Arlo might look like. This looks more like a spaceship (the other looked more like a space station). It's got Star-Trek-style engine nacelles, cargo containers strapped on the sides, and a kind of dirty surface for the big cargo cylinders. I tacked on cargo bay doors and a radar dome, and gave it three crew decks in the core, along with the three huge cylndrical cargo areas. The hardest thing was making the nine cargo containers inside a lattice frame.  |
| S🤦♂️ - That was my initial impression when I first saw the first design. Then I thought the idea might be for a colonization ship which, I thought, would be likely to be configured that way. I honestly like both designs, though I agree that the cube-shaped sections do look a little incongruous with the rest of the ship. |
Ðåvê R¥åñ  - My brother, who did amazing carpentry work and house remodeling, always said, "On a lot of things, if it looks right, it is right." A cargo ship would make best use of cubes, but they don't have the aerodynamic look we tend to associate with air- and space-craft. Aerodynamics would be a silly consideration though, in the airless vacuum of space. So, as my brother also said often, "It's six of one, a half-dozen of the other." |
Arlo 7.0  Another wasted day...I've been telling myself that learning new stuff is good for me. In the last ten days, I've learned an entire new software package, Blender, along with a new way of thinking about the composition of three-dimensional images. Blender has an insanely complicated interface, and I've only used maybe 10% of it. But it was still a stiff learning curve. It was easy finding videos on how to do stuff--there are tons of them. But...they all kind of start in the middle of how to do something. That means stopping the video and asking things like, "where on blender is the materials properties tab?" More often than not, you get an answer for, say, Blender 3.2, but the interface *changes* with each version--they are up to version 5 now. It's like they all learned how to program from Microsoft, which does exactly the same thing with Office products. But...this is MUCH worse, because the interface is so complex. If you're interested in HOW complex, I blogged about the detials: https://maxgriffin.net/blender-basics/ |
| To be clear, my complaint has more do with the interface changing and not the comlexity of the task. Indeed, the task of creating a 3D object is inherently complex. Learning that task is a challenge for two reasons. The first is, of course, the complexity itself, which is what makes how-to videos useful. The second reason is that interface changes make how-to videos interface-dependent and hence version-dependent. That's especially challenging for beginners, even beginners like me with lots of exerience in learning new software. In fact, how-to videos are useful for even simple tasks--I used one this morning to remind me how to descale my no-longer-new espresso machine. Badly written instructions would say, "push the descaling button." But which button is that? There are lots of buttons on my expresso machine. Better instructions might say verbaly describe the location, the kind of verbose gobbledy-gook instruction you get on most written instructions. Better would be a picture with the correct button highlighted--show, don't tell, right? But a video is all show, hence videos are useful even for this kind of simple task. But now imagine that every time I wanted to descale my machine (every six months or so), the company changed the configuration of my espresso machine and the "correct" button moved from the front of the machine to behind a panel on the back of the machine? That makes the original how-to video (or my memory) useless since I can't find the right button. Sure, such move might even make sense in a way, since I only need to push that button every six months or so, but reconfiguring the location would make finding it a challenge. Of course, the company can't change the configurition of my espresso machine--it's hardware, not software. But programs like Word or Blender are software, and configurations get changed. Sometimes the changes make sense (although why Microsoft turns off useful features by default escapes me). Sometimes they just seem capricious. But they change. Where things are located in prior (or just different) versions of Word changes, so you have to find a video that matches version you're using. The point is that (a) the software is complex because it's doing complex things; and (b) the interface changes from version to version, which makes learning the necessarily complex tasks more difficult. |
| Max Griffin 🏳️🌈 - Max, thanks for your explation. Always appreciate hearing about what you do as it helps me learn more about current technology. It seems things that work well are always changing. You just get learn or get use to an item and they improve it, so they say. I am pretty good at figuring out things, worked in various businesses during my life and usually the is more than one way to do something. I so appreciate videos. Even the worst seem to have something of value to offer. Thanks again for sharing your tech struggles and overall knowledge. |
Yesterday, sǝlɹɐɥƆ   challenged me to write a blog that listed six things people don't know about me. Of course, there are lots of things people don't generally know about me. Some of them are things better kept secret. Most of them are things not worth knowing in the first place. Finding six things in the intersection of "not embarrassing," "not boring," and "not generally known" turned out to be more of a challenge than I'd expected. But, did come up with a list. It's kind of rambling, but that's a hazard of old age. Did you know I'm 75? If not, that makes seven things. Anyway, here's my list. "Six Things You Don't Know About Me" |
| Latest version of the Arlo...Lots of little tweaks to this one. My idea is that ships in the class are modular, depending on the attached pods. Also, the pods are themselves detachable and separately maneuverable, so each ship in the class can be reconfigured. In particular, ships could be mixed cargo and passenger (like the Arlo), or just cargo, or all passenger, or troop transport, or even a hospital ship.  |
💕 Ninjas 💕  - Pay for play? That's odd. You can get the free version of Blender here: https://www.blender.org/download/ No pay-for-play, not to download and not to run the program. However, the interface is...complex. |
| 💕 Ninjas 💕 - I cobbled something together on the basic interface, with screen shots. It's so much easier to do this kind of thing on my website, so I put it there. https://maxgriffin.net/blender-basics/ Is this what you were looking for? |
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