Some years back I had commissioned a friend of mine to design a “brand mascot” for my Twitch channel. Part of the package he gave me is my user icon/profile picture in places. Unfortunately, he didn’t design a 3D model version.
Then a couple years later I stumbled upon a reddit post of someones Forest Dragon they had printed and painted, which led me to the My Mini Factory listing linked here. I eventually purchased the STL files (need to support people appropriately for the amazing work they do!) And earlier this week, after a year or so of dawdling, I finally printed my own.
Base, Head, Torso pieces, and Tail pieces being printedFreed from the supports, washed, and curingTest assemblyWings at 65%Wings at 88%Final assembly
This one was just for fun and to see the result. I shared this with some friends and they gave me some great ideas that are leading me to plan out additional prints. One of them might become the Official Unofficial Blog Mascot.
Hopefully I’ll remember to share progress regularly, so look forward to the future creative process posts!
Can you share a positive example of where you’ve felt loved?
Positive and negative emotions are wildly different. Recognizing some of them can be difficult sometimes, and that includes love.
So, trying to pick out an example, a specific memory, when I can tell without a doubt that I felt loved by someone else, was a challenge. For the most part, its a semi-constant state of how people relate to each other, and not a strong burst of an emotion. It’s subtle. Subtle actions, kind words, can often be taken for granted and the recognition is missed.
Thinking about this prompt was difficult, if only because within my family we take care of each other and never really think anything of it. It’s all a matter of course. I did eventually pick one moment out.
Right about my 26th birthday was when I received the news that I was being layed off. Two weeks later I had appendicitis. Having just turned 26 meant I no longer qualified to stay on my parents insurance, and I was a contractor through a third party organization that didn’t offer health insurance. So, ER visit into an appendectomy without health insurance!
The pain was almost tolerable and I had debated on just trying to sleep through the night, but eventually I just couldn’t take it. I lived alone at the time, and I was kind of a recluse with almost no friends in town at that point, so I drove myself to the hospital.
I got admitted sometime around 10pm and placed in a room. They did some scans of my abdomen, and they found that my appendix was in an odd position so they almost missed it. It hadn’t burst yet (they used the term “perforated”) but it was definitely getting closer to that. They promptly scheduled my surgery for the morning and wheeled me back to my room.
At this point, knowing what my situation was, I had texted my (local) siblings and my parents to give them the emergency update. After that, I posted about it on Facebook and got an exasperated text message from my sister (who lived six hours away) about how she was finding out about it this way. Oops. I had initially planned on telling her in the morning afterwards because I didn’t want to worry her when she couldn’t really do anything in her situation, but the jig was up.
Lots of text messages back and forth between me and my family, and then I finally got some sleep before surgery. I get through surgery just fine and I’m taken to recovery. I eventually get back to my phone and text everyone the update. Later that day, my parents drove up from the farm (they were only 30 minutes away) and they picked me up. We run by the Walgreens where I get my prescriptions, me riding with my Dad and my stepmom driving my car, and we get everything the doctor’s said I needed. Eventually we make it back to my apartment, my parents drop me off and make sure I’m okay, checking again if there was anything else I needed before they left.
I was on my own again, recovering from my surgery, but I was home with no fussing or frustration. Except, obviously, from my sister.
I look back on this moment (and one other involving my Dad and stepmom) and think about how much it meant that they came to help me out like that. The whole drawn out situation, all the time spent with them making sure I had what I needed was a large but subtle showing of how much they loved and cared.
I had a conversation with a friend about this last year. We were talking about our personal writing goals and the things we were going to try to do to stick to them. The discussion eventually leaned towards the subject of working spaces.
Technically you can write anywhere, so long as you have a writing utensil and paper (traditionally). Every writer is, however, different in their needs. Working space, atmosphere, location, background noise in a public area. You get the idea. Well, for my friend and I, we had different needs in those categories for what would help us be productive. The one thing we really had in common was the overwhelming need to declutter our preferred working spaces.
My dilemma when it came to decluttering was a combination issue. I have a wide variety of hobbies, which means having a lot of stuff, and not a lot of space to call my own. Naturally this means spillover. Currently, I’m doing my best to keep myself and my stuff contained in one of two places, either my bedroom or my little corner of the basement. My space in the basement is where my gaming and crafting/painting spaces live. That space is less important for today’s topic. My bedroom is where I have a separate computer I use for writing, but I often also use it for researching deck building tips and ideas for Magic. That little desk gets cluttered with stacks of Magic cards. It also becomes the collection space for other odds and ends that I haven’t decided where they belong.
Back to the original conversation about decluttering, I had already done this a couple of times over the course of last year. It also desperately needs to be decluttered again so I can use that computer for its intended purpose. Guess I know what I’m doing this week!
I answered a similar prompt back in late November, but rather than being the singular ‘animal’ that one was plural. You can read my answer to that prompt here if you like. It’s a quick rundown of the progression of my favorites over time.
For this prompt I’m going to dive a bit deeper into the history of why my favorite (mythical) animal is the dragon.
If you were a kid growing up in the 90’s and early 2000’s then you probably watched, or at the very least heard about, a little cartoon show called Jackie Chan Adventures. This was probably my earliest encounter with the Chinese Zodiac that I can recall, and is how I began to learn about the different animals of it.
Shortly thereafter is when I learned that I was born in the Chinese year of the dragon in 1988, so between that and other popular/mainstream uses of dragons in storytelling is how I started to develop an interest in dragons (but funny enough, that year is an Earth Dragon year, and I didn’t know that until about ten years ago when I was first figuring out a new handle for Twitch, which ultimately led to the artistic theme of my channel and naming inspiration for my blog).
As an additional side note for the element of Earth, a few years prior to Jackie Chan Adventures was when I had a brief encounter with the Five Elements Theory (Wuxing) of Chinese philosophy via the live-action fantasy martial arts film Warriors of Virtue where five anthropomorphic kangaroo warriors represent each of the elements of Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water. I wanted to mention this because, again until about ten years ago, I had no idea that Wuxing and the Chinese Zodiac were tied together.
Alright, so that should cover my connection to dragons, but not why they’re my favorite.
Dragons are incredible things in so many ways, and their existence somehow spans hundreds of years of history and multiple continents. They’ve taken on slightly different forms but always have similar features. Huge, scaled, magical lizards that breathe the elements as weapons? AND most of them fly? Awesome, sign me up. Their portrayals in stories were always fascinating to me. There are even some who were amazingly intelligent and manipulative, either sending a mortal human being on a quest for glory or to simply be rid of them and watch them die.
If you’ve read Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card then you’ll probably recall there was a Dragon Army at the Battle School that Ender gets sent to, so there’s another reference for you (the first time I read the book was probably 98-99). Again, I didn’t make the mental connection to the (potentially symbolic) importance of dragons, but it’s another source that most likely influenced my future interest in the creatures.
Okay, I think I’ve rambled enough about dragons and why I like them so much.
This seems like a fairly straightforward prompt that doesn’t need embellishment.
I use a wide variety of ways to communicate online. Discord. Facebook Messenger. Instagram. Twitter (I refuse to call it by its current “name”).
Technically, using your cellphone over WiFi makes SMS/text messages “online communication” rather than just over the cellular networks, but even those are now connected via major high bandwidth backbones.
I guess I should also include my blog! There’s really just too many ways I use the Internet to communicate, and somehow I’m doing alright.
That about sums it up. No need to really dive in too deeply on this subject so I’ll end here. We’re about halfway through Bloganuary, and I hope everyone is doing well with trying to build up that consistent writing habit.
Have you ever had a road trip where your vehicle broke down? Have you been on multiple road trips, along the same route for several years, and one particular vehicle seemed to break down near the same place for different reasons? That’s what this prompt makes me think back on.
My parents have had to have a truck for a long time now because of their horses. One of the trucks in particular, a red Ford, was a troublemaker. It broke down on us at least twice, and needed multiple things fixed on it that most vehicles never have issues with.
The two times it broke down on us happened just outside of a place called Big Springs, Nebraska near the northeast edge of the Colorado border. I was present both of those times, and it’s one in particular that always comes to mind.
My older brother and I had been asked if we would trailer a horse back to Colorado for one of my Stepmom’s friends, which wasn’t a problem. I had made the trip several times, both solo and as a passenger/back-up driver, but this would be the first time I drove with my older brother. The trip down was mostly uneventful but we were kind of on a tight schedule. We made it to Colorado and dropped off the horse, no issues. My brother had some things he wanted to pick up from an old friend of his, and we both wanted to eat some of our favorite foods from our hometown.
The trip home was a little nerve-wracking. We got done with everything we wanted to do a little later than we intended, but we were confident we could handle the 12 hour drive home just fine. The truck, however, had other plans. A couple of hours of driving later we made it to Big Springs. We got a couple miles further down the interstate when the truck decided to break down. The lights were dimming and flickering, and we used the momentum carrying us onto an exit ramp to help us turn around. We had hoped we could just turn on our flashers and limp the truck back to the truck stop at Big Springs, but it couldn’t handle that so we stopped. We called our parents to let them know what had happened and they made some calls for us while we checked the truck and trailer. I should probably add that at this point it was night time on a dark country road in what was effectively the middle of nowhere. This made my brother anxious and paranoid.
After a while we saw some headlights coming up from behind us, and my brother’s anxiety made him take some cash and stuff it in his sock for fear that we might get robbed or something. Thankfully it was a tow truck that our parents had called from a small town just inside the Colorado border. We explained the situation further to the nice tow truck driver and he knew just what we had to do at this point. We disconnected the horse trailer, he loaded the truck onto his flatbed, and then I watched something I didn’t know was a thing. He lowered this hydraulic powered towing hitch and connected it to our trailer! I had never seen that before, and it set me at ease that we wouldn’t have to just leave the trailer on the side of the road.
By this point it was a little after 10pm, and we were worried about where we would stay. The tow truck driver surprised us again. He had called ahead to the Motel 6 at the truck stop and made sure they would let us have a room. Which, thankfully, they did despite it being well after check-in time. So we had that problem covered. We thanked the incredibly nice tow truck driver for his help, checked into our room, and then made for the bar that was attached to the motel. The bar was mostly empty for a Saturday evening, but it was a truck stop and the actual town of Big Springs was further off the interstate by a couple miles.
Anyways, we had a couple drinks, chatted with the bartender, and joked about how this was our new life so we better see what kinds of jobs there were in Big Springs. The next morning we walked over to the truck stop proper and had breakfast while we waited for an update. It turned out that the tow truck driver was able to figure out the part we needed, a new alternator, and was able to track down a rebuild kit which was apparently hard to do because there was a big car show over where he was and all the other mechanics were busy. Regardless, he got the truck fixed and brought it back to us. We thanked him profusely for all the help on such short notice, made sure he was paid for the tow and the repairs, and then we were off.
After that ordeal, the rest of the trip was fine. We made it home with no other issues, and told ourselves we weren’t doing that trip again in that truck. This was probably about ten years ago now, and since then he and I haven’t hauled horses again. The truck eventually got to a point where my family didn’t want to take anymore chances and they got it replaced.
Now that I’m typing this all out and thinking about it, I don’t think I’ve spoken to my older brother about this incident ever since it happened. Almost like we silently agreed to never bring it up again, at least to each other.
Today’s Bloganuary prompt is one of those that you can’t think too hard about, just go with whatever pops into your mind first. Which for me was nacho cheese Doritos. I could eat those every day.
Unfortunately, I don’t think I have any on hand, and I’ve made it a point to avoid buying them when I go grocery shopping. I could probably demolish an entire family size bag in one sitting of steady snacking for an hour, which is most definitely not healthy for a multitude of reasons.
I’ve also gotten good at avoiding them at my brother’s house. Maybe a handful of chips over the course of an entire visit (which ranges from four to eight hours). It also helps that usually, when I do discover an open bag over there, the bag is almost entirely demolished already by my nieces and nephews.
Great, now I really want some, and it’s a grocery day. Might have to get one of those big boxes of assorted snack size bags of chips, and I do need snacks for work. Guess I know what I’m adding to my grocery list!
Thinking back over the last 20 years or so, I’m trying to recall all the things that have come and gone for business ideas and products that seemed wild and unthinkable prior to their arrival. Things that were innovative.
Walkman/Discman into MP3 players, where physical media transformed into a digital and subsequently into streaming subscription services. Brick phones into smaller form factors and eventually into the touchscreen designs. Home console and portable video game advancements into the digital library of Steam and other services.
Granted, those are major technological advancements in the realm of consumer entertainment. There’s also the advancement of food services and transportation. Depending on where you lived a car was a necessity of life. Now you can pull up your phone and hit some on-screen buttons to summon a vehicle through apps like Uber and Lyft, or rent an electric scooter. Food delivery used to be limited to specific things like pizza. Now if a restaurant is set up for it you can use apps to order just about anything and have it be delivered to you at home or work.
So, bearing those kinds of things in mind, what can you even come up with these days that could be a feasible (if crazy) business idea?
Not that I want to get too serious and be realistic, I just want to think of something that makes sense. Not like combining skydiving with laser tag, because as cool as that sounds it just doesn’t sound like it would work the way we imagine. So, why not the next best thing?
Crazy business idea: combine snowboarding and paintball! You could have parallel courses down a variety of slopes, each offering different cover environments for different skill/experience levels. One game style could just be a race down to the bottom with as many survivors as possible. Another could be a race to the bottom while also leaving an object in a safe spot halfway down, tag in a teammate or group at the bottom that climbs up with their boards to that certain safe point to retrieve the object to bring back to the bottom. All while trying to hit the opposing team to knock them out of the game. Of course, it wouldn’t be normal paintball paint because that would freeze, but maybe a dry paint powder style paintball. Operations would be similar to regular paintball courses, offering rental gear and scheduling. Unfortunately, this would likely have a very small subset of interest for people who like both snowboarding and paintball, so a very limited number of people would be interested, meaning business wouldn’t be great.
Describe an item you were incredibly attached to as a youth. What became of it?
This is a tough one to answer! I literally had to sit and stare at a wall trying to think back through my childhood and early teens to find something that I felt great attachment for, and I don’t think I had anything special like that that was solely mine.
Growing up I shared a room with my younger brother. We had a bunk bed, shared most toys and the television (when our parents finally let us have one) to play games or watch movies. We definitely had our own things based on individual interests, but they were still shared to some degree.
Except for the “LEGO Bin” that we shared.
We had a clear plastic tote with a white plastic lid, not small but definitely not large, and whenever we got new LEGO sets that was ultimately where they would end up. We would put the sets together by the instructions, play with them as designed for a bit, and then tear them apart to rebuild and customize. My brother and I shared that for a very long time.
Eventually, in about late middle school or early high school, I took over my older brother’s bedroom (which was right next to ours) when he moved out. I had a few things of my own that came with me and slowly replaced what I had left in my old room with my younger brother. Despite that, we still shared some things even if they had essentially become his by virtue of my moving rooms. The LEGO Bin being one of those things we continued to share.
Whenever we would hang out and play video games in my younger brother’s room, if it was a single player game, we would typically have the LEGO Bin out and be messing around with it while we took turns watching each other play.
Amazingly enough, roughly 18 years later, my brother still has our LEGO Bin. It survived the move from Colorado to South Dakota when we were in high school, and it has further survived since my brother got married and started his family. Whether or not it’s still the same plastic tote I don’t recall, and I don’t think it matters anymore because we’ve collected more and more sets to the point that it couldn’t hold them all anyway, but it’s still there and the nieces and nephews get to play with them now.
Some days I miss having all those LEGOs to play with, to flex the creative side of my mind and just snap together pieces to make something random. I would totally just buy my own sets at this point in my life, but my hobbies take up the bulk of my “fun money” and I wouldn’t have enough space to store everything I want, so for now I’m just going to have to be content with reminiscing. Maybe someday, though.
Have you ever gone to some kind of working professionals seminar? Project Management, Entrepreneurship, TEDx, any seminars that are similarly along those lines? If you have, then you probably had someone speak about mission, vision, and goals.
Depending on where you work you probably had some kind of orientation session that included those same kinds of topics. What is the company’s mission?
Those seminars, when they do talk about mission, try to get people thinking about how you as an individual should see and act out the mission of whatever your chosen career path is or for whatever company you are working for. It’s always business/work focused. The same obviously applies to new employee orientation sessions.
So, when I see a prompt like today’s, I’m going to take the “your” part more seriously as an individual OUTSIDE of work, because when I’m not on the clock I do not represent the company that signs my paychecks. Unfortunately, in today’s hyper connected social media landscape, people will throw you under the bus if you act like a jackass (at a minimum) and report you to your employer which likely ends with you getting fired. It is important I preface this because, again, I as an individual outside of work do not represent my company, however, my personal values and “mission” line up fairly closely with those of my company. I do my best to be a good person, so I have little to be concerned with in that regard.
With all of that out of the way, I can talk about MY mission. Which, honestly, I’ve never given too much thought! I just try to be a good person, helping my friends, family, and even strangers when they need it, passing along good vibes and just rolling through life. I’ve never stopped and thought to myself “Yes, this is my purpose in life. My mission. My calling.”
Reading today’s prompt actually did that, and I’m struggling to properly define my mission. It’s all well and good to say “My mission is to be a good person, yada yada yada.” But that doesn’t really count as a mission. I’m not actively seeking out things and working through life to consistently accomplish things for any sort of personal mission.
I think that needs to change.
What SHOULD my mission be? If I enjoy writing and hope to someday get published, then maybe I could say my mission is to write stories that other people will appreciate and enjoy. That they can relate to a character sometimes and be able to do some measure of introspection and help themselves become a better, happier person. My mission could be to write stories that have a positive impact on the lives of readers and the people they interact with every day.
Perhaps, through my blog, I can share my thoughts and make a positive impact in that space as well.
Sounds like I have a long road ahead of me, and I appreciate every encouraging comment I’ve received so far when talking about these kinds of goals, so maybe, just MAYBE, I’m on the right track. Just need to keep up the effort towards this “mission”.
The Dragon's Grove 