The Mad Devil

Back to greenway this AM. Forgot about time change, but that just meant I missed peak sun rise that I saw yesterday. Things go much better when you remember your shoes. 20 miles. No speed records broken, but power meter worked. I need to reposition the computer so I can see it better when I am riding, but it worked. It also beeps when there is a sharp turn ahead on greenway. Was not expecting that, so it took some time to figure out what it was fussing about. But now I

As a few of my regular followers know, when I turned 40, I started doing triathlons with my sister. She was a great training partner. We started with sprints, and did a few international distances. We also did a fair number of marathons (qualifying for marathon maniacs, albeit at the lowest tier) and graduated into the iron distances, where we did a family relay for Bone Island half iron distance; Iron Man New Orleans 70.3, Beach to Battleship half iron, relayed Iron Man R

This morning after biking I finished the last of the picture taking for all the minis I have here in NC with me. At least the ones I painted and are not terrain. I have a variety of Necromunda stuff painted by Joe P's wife and a variety of terrain that I have painted for Necromunda and some random stuff (a bridge, some Necromunda stuff, and maybe a couple of DF pieces, but it is not a lot). About the only thing I have no taken a new photograph of that falls under this curr

I am pretty sure I have discussed that I am using Wix to assist in giving me a WYSIWYG tool to make this website. All of the pictures are mine. All of the text is mine. I have generated with the AI some text here and there, but it is really not at all on point, so I have deleted it every time. I am reduced to saying things like "create blank page entitled x"; "link page entitled x to button with text x inside"; "delete x from top menu bar" because for some reason it wants

Life remains somewhat borked in my personal life. But the new reality is starting to feel like a new normal. It is not what I wanted, but it is what I have. I have not been working on this for a variety of reasons. Mostly related to the changes from this past three months. I have made huge strides in making this house fit me. The upstairs is pretty settled. I need to move of the kids' stuff to the basement, but their bedrooms are set up, my bedroom is set up, the living

I still am underwhelmed by the AI that wix has. You would think it would be able to automate use of some of the tools to eliminate the need to do things manually, but that is not how it is 'programmed.' For example, if I want captions under all the pictures, it seems like I should be able to say - add a blank caption box under each picture that I can click and fill in. I got garbage. There are other examples. I pay for a moderate level (not the cheap level and not the su

So I started listening to Mary Chapin Carpenter thanks to Molly P in college. I bought the CDs (as one did back in those days) and played them regularly. This play cycle carried over through lawschool and, while she did not speak to me in all of her songs, the portfolio had man catchy songs like Passionate Kisses and I Feel Lucky . My musical tastes shifted away from country and she faded into a sometimes revisit when I would come across her CDs. Fast forward to this past

I think I have said that I have painted a lot of miniatures and built a lot of dwarven forge and had a lot of dogs. The end result is I have so many pictures spread over so many sources - phone, old laptops, old flash drives, and so on. I am slowly collecting into a single place, reducing duplicates, trimming, and slowly, o, so slowly, uploading them. So, you may see pictures uploaded with no explanations. You may see hobby adjacent pics and explanations uploaded. You ma

So things have not been all roses and sunshine since we finished the move. Reversing the "finality" of the move, I am back in KY indefinitely. In essence, as I said last year, taking this job was the beginning of the what tore the family apart. Whether it is fixable remains to be seen. Two stubborn people don't help.

As we learn more about the space we have in the new place and the constraints therein, I am realizing that this is not a location where I will game and further, it is not really a location where I will paint. The latter realization is based in part on the nature of the paint space adjacent to where the boys play their PS5/Switch/whatever it is and the general daily flow of returning to living with the family. I just dont have big blocks of time to paint. So...beginning to

I have a lot of miniatures to paint. I have been buying and receiving miniatures since about 1980. You know what you need to paint miniatures? Paint. I have a lot of paint. I have been buying paint almost as long as I have been buying miniatures. I have accepted paints as a form of barter for commissions. I have also inherited at least two paint collections from people that have stopped painting miniatures. I have collected different brands, which, in turn, means that

Still trying to optimize the space I have. I tried putting a 4x4 piece of plywood on a table to see about a wargaming surface. It feels too big. I want to try a 3x3, but Lowes in Selma did not have one. I feel like the Raleigh Lowes had that size, but maybe it is custom. I have been itching to get the Necromunda terrain out and see how damaged it got in the move. Nothing like a build to show you where things went sideways/need repairs. We are getting the basement in ord

So, I did some in person gaming yesterday. In keeping with commentary about isolation, I drove 55 minutes to someone's house in chapel hill and played Draw Steel. First, that is a long ass drive. I am not saying it was not worth it, that is 3 gallons of gas and $20 in tolls, adding $35 on top of the time. Second, I am not sure Draw Steel is for me. I get what it is trying to do. I just don't know that its end goals are what pushes my fun button. It is VERY crunchy. Ver

Got back on the Peloton this morning. First bike since move. It is not set up optimally, but give me an hour and it will be in good shape. I opted for a low impact ride with CDE for a variety of reasons. One, it has been over a month since I rode and I am not ready to get back to crushing hard rides. Two, I tweaked my back lifting something. Stubborn me has not taken the time to let that recover fully, but realist me says don't push it too hard. Three, there is just a

Lots to unpack, I will start with the state of Denmark. Given that my current reader pool is people I know and see on a regular basis, most of you know that in March, we bought a new house, sold my long time backup house, and moved into the new house completing a nine part move spread out over 11 months. It was unpleasant by almost any metric. This last push is complicated by a number of factors. The first and hardest is learning to live with each other after so long apart

I can't say that I love Wix. The engine wants to infer too much and seemingly forgets instructions. Example - I told it not to crop photos when it rearranges. Yet, it still crops. It also can't do some things that seem like they should be possible. For example, if you upload a bunch of pictures, the image data set gets cluttered. You can put in folders and organize, but when you go to add from the image data set, the folders are not present. It can't automatically rena

When I first did this page, back in like 2006? I used Microsoft Front Page. The page was still all about miniatures, dogs, and my love for TTRPGs, but from the point of view of 2000-2010 The Mad Devil. Frontpage was a wysiwyg type program that was good enough. I don't claim to possess a good graphical design eye, so it was fairly rudimentary. It also took forever to upload pictures and there was a lot of formatting that I had to do "by hand." That is, I could point and cl