Sandra Fikes

Want to help Smokey, you can lurk on my Twitch stream or donate to his GoFundMe - Or both, both is good! gofundme.com/f/aid-smokeys-o…

It's over a week into November, do you have snow where you live? This is what my part of Alaska looks like right now.

Cappuccino with mini marshmallows and added coffee... almost 9pm, but I will have no regrets.

Leo watching me work.

If you can't pop open a can with a P-38, you are missing a vital life skill. Could not find can opener, so got doggo's afternoon Gravy Train opened with my dad's old Gerber fence fixing tool that my dad used to carry on his belt.

Snow in Alaska today. I can think of better ways to start the day, but there are worse ways too.

Long ago, in a different lifetime, I had a home office with a full set of encyclopedias. They were the massive leather-bound school Encyclopedia Britanica ones and needed a shelf end or a good sized bookend to support them on the shelf. Thus I had a pair of metal bookends. I found them in the shed and have upcycled one of them by bending it slightly backward. And since my Kindle Scribe that I use for editing is pretty much a large magnet for some reason, it does not even need a tab to prevent it from slipping. Now I can have it set up for editing, use it for cue cards when making a video, or have a book open on the scribe while working on the computer.

Artifacts from another time... my original patch and hat pin, given to me by the RPGA Network long ago to show my membership from the days before Wizards of the Coast bought Dungeons and Dragons from TSR.

Muggy rainy day in Alaska today. Yesterday had been so nice, but the rains are back and it looks like they plan to stay for a bit.

Why do people think lying in the article title is the only way to get people to read? The news can't be trusted because the news relies on clickbait headlines like this. Or does the writer just not know that my V has a Witcher 3 t-shirt and a Witcher 3 leather jacket, and if you play CorpoRat there is a game magazine in the drawer of V's desk with The Witcher 3 on the cover. msn.com/en-us/gaming/game-re…

Should we explain to the wool haters that the wool needs removed from the sheep because the majority of domestic sheep need to be sheared or the sheep gets various health issues. Wool is one of the best materials of your intent is to help animals be happy and healthy. msn.com/en-us/news/news/cont…

Leonidas is why I can't get much work done. He loves laying on my arm when I am trying to work.

Alaska is a great place to live. People keep asking "where's the flying cars, we were promised flying cars..." well... Alaska has them! Used to have someone that would land a plane out on the street in front of my place all the time.

The eyes have it! I have decied that my eye was finished enough to make it a pair of eyes with a good ol' copy/paste to make the other eye. Wonderful thing about eyes seen from the front, you can copy/paste to have both, then minor edits to make them not look like mirror images of one another. (Not done yet.) You can see the layers of the left eye, the separate pieces I divided it into while working on it. That's 24 separate layers for both eyes (12 each).

People often ask where writers get their ideas, well... ideas are literally everywhere. I can think of quite a few ideas from this article; including a few horror stories of the AI getting revenge, an AI that thinks torture is the right way to talk to humanity, and several ideas that involve people or other AIs launching a rescue operation. Ideas are easy to find; it's the turning them into a story that makes a writer an author. msn.com/en-us/technology/art…

Roughing the first pass design of eyelashes on a project I am hoping to have finished by the end of the month. That eye has about a dozen layers on it, and it's far from done. I hate trying to create colored images, when I learned drawing in the 80's I could make very realistic eyes in grey pencil tones, but have never been as happy with the look when coloring the eyes. I think it's because I spent so long perfecting the smudged softness vs hard defined lines in pencil art.

Catnap. Woke up to see Jackie dozing contently on the window perch.

Leonidas is not being creepy at all while watching me work. He's one of those cats that knows when he's doing something goofy and just waits for the human to notice. Right after I noticed him he stayed there for just a bit longer, then laid down to nap.

Termination dust has reached me... I expect the yard will be white by tomorrow morning. Currently there are scattered snowflakes mixed into the light rain that is falling.

Playing with my Phantascene logo and some design ideas. I decided to build a design that I might have put on a desk pad or perhaps turn into a poster or something that shows my logo's black unicorn shillohetted against the full moon with a part of the world of my fantasy settings shown as the backdrop. Still trying to decide if I want to reduce the sprawl of the city, or leave it spread out along the hills and shore. The city would be the one where my novel On The Run is going to take place, so I guess I will get a better handle on the layout as I keep writing on it. For now I just know the city is built on either side of a river, connected by a bridge, and located in the north-western region of the Kingdom of the South.