This is here mostly for me, so that I can easily find these links. Well over a year ago, a designer I follow, a wizard with Adobe Illustrator. posted a series of rants on LinkedIn about AI’s destruction of the arts. I commented that it was a tool that wasn’t going away and should be …
Author Archives: davidstong
nemesis
Recently, a facebook post led me to an interesting article from 2015: The 100 Greatest British Novels. I love lists like this. I’ve found some of my best reads from lists, Harold Bloom’s Western Canon in particular. Lists and friends, actually. Return of the Native, Daniel Derronda, Silas Marner, many that I should’ve-but refused-to read …
StarFishGourd
Kim gave me the pumpkin that I used in the last Halloween post. She also gave me a rather unique looking gourd that she thought might be fun to put a face on. It was. I looked at it and, possibly because I’m reading a book on fish intelligence, I immediately saw this sea creature. …
Pumpkin 2025, Happy Halloween
Personal AVIF experiment
I’m trying to see if the browser supports avif. If it does, an image of a demon provided by my granddaughter displays. If not, it shows my mousetoon honey logo. Hey, they’re what I have. The html looks like this: <picture> <!– use if browser supports AVIF –> <source type=”image/avif” srcset=”IMG_2027.avif”> <!– use if browser …
Birthday 2025
She was inspired by an eagle and had a tattoo of the bird put on her thigh. Knowing my daughter, I thought that eagle should have a tattoo of my daughter on its thigh. I actually drew the whole bird, it just wouldn’t fit legibly on the card.
earth day, 1970
I ran this first in my Penn State blog. Is this the fifty-fifth anniversary? Maybe I should just bring it forward every year? Anyway, I thought it deserved a retread. A student committee asked if I’d host the art room discussions about ecology. I was in the room practically all day anyway; it was my …
Holiday windows
Every year the local high school enables students to paint holiday scenes on shop windows throughout downtown. Typical pictures are of the Grinch, Charlie Brown, or Snoopy. Year after year the same sorts of images go up, generally inspired by holiday cartoons. Last year, the Black Diamond Barbershop, which is on the first floor of …
Second Life
I was sitting on the couch watching my ten-year-old granddaughter work in Minecraft. She enjoys creating in the environment even more than in real life. “It’s more creative, Grampop.” Her words. I started to tell her about Second Life and wanted to show her - but my Penn State work has been deleted and I can’t …
End of Second Life Recap
This is the first of two posts about the online 3D virtual world known as Second Life. It’s a re-posting of a Penn State blog post from 2010 I’d like to try to recap several years in Second Life. Brett asked how educators were using our environment, and not being an educator I thought I’d …