Gratitude
The only appropriate response to today is gratitude.
Pacem
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
Monday, December 9, 2013
Skybox
I recently did a collaboration with two talented mapmakers, JohnnyEnglish and iynque, to create a new map for Urban Terror. I did the skybox (the land and sky outside the playing area). Here is a YouTube video walkthrough.
http://youtu.be/PylxBGEWvrc
http://youtu.be/PylxBGEWvrc
Tuesday, December 3, 2013
Tuesday, November 26, 2013
Ice, Man.
Chicago is sheathed in ice.
Enrobed in the gentle purring of cars, bikes, people.
Moving as shadows like woven threads between muted buildings.
You walk with your head down and your shoulders up. Listening to your breath. Seeing it condense in front of you in the breezeless night.
Enrobed in the gentle purring of cars, bikes, people.
Moving as shadows like woven threads between muted buildings.
You walk with your head down and your shoulders up. Listening to your breath. Seeing it condense in front of you in the breezeless night.
Monday, November 18, 2013
The Summer Crawlers
A fat and noisy bottle fly has been dive-bombing my screen in the
darkened room for some minutes now and so I rise with a quiet creak
coming from my knees in order to fashion an escape through an open door
for the creature.
The freeing of the fly reminds me of my youth when I would steer my car around the late summer wooly worms as we drove along gently rolling country roads boarded by corn and bean fields. You remember, the caterpillar that comes in brown and cream colors - the ratios of which are, famously, predictive of the severity of the upcoming winter. Well, it's fun to pretend.
Once, a friend remarked that there was no way that I could see wooly worms from the driver's seat. But it was true. That's the kind of thing I notice.
And there was lots to notice where I grew up. I remember the great mats of algae that formed in the farm ponds during late summer. This was my favorite trick: take a bucket down to the lagoon, fill it with algae and upon returning to my bedroom, dump the entire contents into an aquarium that I kept there. After a while, the sheer number of creatures settling out and visible in my miniature glass-enclosed world could keep me busy with tweezer, eyedropper and microscope for days. Nymphs would hatch - dragonflies mostly - and they would end up on the inside of my bedroom window screens. Naturally, I would let them out.
Of course, the algae mats were grown thick from runoff farm fertilizer - a fact that I did not appreciate until much later. Still, in a county where the only real, unspoiled land was the thin prairie remnants extending along abandoned railway tracks, farm ponds seemed to be rich and fun places to explore. It was only later that I realized that the place where I was brought up and thought of as full of wild things was mentioned, not in a good way, by Rachel Carson in "Silent Spring." There is Irony for you.
It was astonishing how much life you could find in a bucket. E. O. Wilson once reported that in a single gram of soil there might be as many as 6,300 species of bacteria. Think on that for a moment.
Imagine what it would have been like growing up in a place where most of the living things had not been systematically snuffed out by herbicides and pesticides.
The freeing of the fly reminds me of my youth when I would steer my car around the late summer wooly worms as we drove along gently rolling country roads boarded by corn and bean fields. You remember, the caterpillar that comes in brown and cream colors - the ratios of which are, famously, predictive of the severity of the upcoming winter. Well, it's fun to pretend.
Once, a friend remarked that there was no way that I could see wooly worms from the driver's seat. But it was true. That's the kind of thing I notice.
And there was lots to notice where I grew up. I remember the great mats of algae that formed in the farm ponds during late summer. This was my favorite trick: take a bucket down to the lagoon, fill it with algae and upon returning to my bedroom, dump the entire contents into an aquarium that I kept there. After a while, the sheer number of creatures settling out and visible in my miniature glass-enclosed world could keep me busy with tweezer, eyedropper and microscope for days. Nymphs would hatch - dragonflies mostly - and they would end up on the inside of my bedroom window screens. Naturally, I would let them out.
Of course, the algae mats were grown thick from runoff farm fertilizer - a fact that I did not appreciate until much later. Still, in a county where the only real, unspoiled land was the thin prairie remnants extending along abandoned railway tracks, farm ponds seemed to be rich and fun places to explore. It was only later that I realized that the place where I was brought up and thought of as full of wild things was mentioned, not in a good way, by Rachel Carson in "Silent Spring." There is Irony for you.
It was astonishing how much life you could find in a bucket. E. O. Wilson once reported that in a single gram of soil there might be as many as 6,300 species of bacteria. Think on that for a moment.
Imagine what it would have been like growing up in a place where most of the living things had not been systematically snuffed out by herbicides and pesticides.
Monday, November 4, 2013
Reunion
Weekend spent with Khalid Al-Naif, Ron Crawford and Rob Reents. Khal and Ron were my roommates and Rob was one of the other of the mixed nuts on our floor at Bradley University. So many memories, so much fun.
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