Grim up North Heath

Author: Fraser Steele

  • Terry Pratchett and unconsidered trifles

    Terry Pratchett and unconsidered trifles

    Today is the eleventh anniversary of the death of Sir Terry Pratchett (aka Pterry, STP) (GNU).

    I wrote one of my first blog posts about him a year ago. This shares my connection with Pterry’s work and how I met my wife through his work. There’s also a reflection on his death and the death of my dad, both as consequences of dementia.

    But the main reason for reading and re-reading his books is the joy they give. I recently quoted from Lords and Ladies when I was writing about fate and destiny and how I don’t believe in them. I’ve read L&L maybe three times, but I flicked through afterwards and found so many funny bits that Mrs S and I started re-quoting bits.

    Unconsidered Trifles

    The line about being a picker-up of unconsidered trifles came to mind when I was reading Michael Palin’s diaries from 1999-2009. Palin’s quote is in reference to the original line from Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale:

    My father named me Autolycus; who
    being, as I am, littered under Mercury, was likewise
    a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles. 

    Being the ignoramus that I am, I didn’t know the origin of this1, but I was familiar with the expression.

    Pratchett introduces this expression early in the book. Death, making a cameo appearance2 to claim the soul of the poacher William Scrope, tells him:

    I LIKE TO THINK I AM A PICKER-UP OF UNCONSIDERED TRIFLES

    Death grinned hopefully. Scrope’s post-physical brow furrowed.

    ‘What? Like… sherry, custard, that sort of thing?’

    Death sighed. Metaphors were wasted on people.

    Much later, we get this scene, where Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg have just left the wedding feast of King Verence (previously the Fool) and Magrat (former witch):

    Nanny Ogg produced a wooden spoon from somewhere in her apron. Then she raised her hat and carefully lifted down a bowl of cream, custard and jelly which she had secreted there.

    Footnote: Nanny Ogg was also a great picker-up of unconsidered trifles.

    Much of the book is a spoof of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with the Lancre Morris Men performing a play written by Hwel the playsmith3, Casanunda the world’s second-greatest lover4 and Pewsey Ogg, the world’s stickiest child. And, that greatest of all terrors, Nanny Ogg’s bathtime.

    This is one of the early golden age Discworld books. I’d consider this to cover from Wyrd Sisters5 (1988) to Thud! in 2005. He wrote ten books after this, but these were very good, rather than magical.

    1. I studied MacBeth at school, which helped when I was reading Wyrd Sisters. Most of the rest of my knowledge of Shakespeare is through cultural osmosis. ↩︎
    2. As he did in all the Discworld books except Snuff. ↩︎
    3. Who’s too good a writer to ever put a donkey in a play. ↩︎
    4. He tries harder. ↩︎
    5. Which was my favourite for a long time. ↩︎
  • Why do the Danes say “Tak for kaffe”?

    Why do the Danes say “Tak for kaffe”?

    I’ve been learning Danish for a few years, mainly through Duolingo. Why? Because I used to work for an Anglo-Danish company and thought it might help. It didn’t, really, but it did help sometimes when I was over there to be able to read signs and notices.

    Like any language there are many idioms, some explicable (det blæser en halv pelikan- it’s blowing half a pelican; it’s very windy) some a bit more specialised (der er en Ko på isen – literally “there’s a cow in the ice” meaning this is a tricky situation).

    One of the odder Danish expressions is “tak for kaffe”, which literally means “thanks for the coffee”, but is also a slightly old-fashioned expression of surprise. Since I heard this I’ve wondered how this came about, and I recently found out.

    Danish hospitality can often mean coffee and cake or biscuits. When you leave a house, saying ‘tak for kaffe’ would be polite. So this came to mean ‘goodbye’.

    It might have ended there, but ‘goodbye’ turned into ‘I’m out of here’ when a situation gets tricky. In Denmark, when the going gets tough, the tough get coffee.

    From there it’s a short step to saying ‘goodbye’ (or ‘tak for kaffe’) when you’re in a situation you don’t want to be in, such as being surprised or frustrated.

    “Get me out of here!” becomes “I want to say goodbye to this!” and so “Tak for Kaffe!”

    There are similar expressions in English. My mum would say “Well, I’ll go to our house,” when she was surprised. This really confused me when I was little, especially when she said it when we were at home. “You’re already in our house,” I’d say. I could be very literally-minded.

    This is similar to “I’ll go to the foot of our stairs”, which I’ve never heard except in a Monty Python sketch set in a language lab. (Michael Palin, an actual Yorkshireman, being given direction from Graham Chapman, from Leicester).

  • I learned it’s called a shock mount

    I learned it’s called a shock mount

    What is the last thing you learned?

    I’m learning all the time, but this is the most recent thing that’s been kind of useful.

    I can’t now remember why I was watching the video this still is from. It’s about The Beatles and I am having one of my periodic bouts of listening to Les Quatres Fantastique1 a lot.

    Blogger David Bennet inspiring a t-shirt design.

    What struck me was the image of the presenter’s t shirt with the mike in front. It looked like he had a microphone print on his top. Would there be a market for such a design?

    The only way to find out is to do it.

    So I had to find a good image of this thing to act as a reference without knowing what the cage thing around the mike is called. After a bit of searching on the Google I found out: it’s a shock mount.

    Its purpose is to absorb knocks and bumps and so reduce noise while recording. There’s a metal or plastic cage and the mike is held in a cradle of elastic to keep it in place. Hooks keep the tension in the elastic and reduce movement.

    So it was into Blender I went to model the shock mount and a microphone. I’d made a microphone before for Steve the stand-up orc. This mike is a simpler design, it’s the mount that’s the interesting bit.

    One of the models I made in Blender as part of a course. This is Steve the orc, moonlighting at the Mordor Improv.

    I think it took me an hour to get the shapes done and looking satisfactory. Not bad. Then shading was fairly simple, block colours except the mike sponge2 which has a noise texture added to the displacement to give it some texture.

    How the sponge texture is added to the sponge bit. A bit of noise is added to the displacement (how far each bit is from the median surface) to create the effect of a sponge.

    The final version needed a background. If it’s printed as a dark object then it won’t look good on a dark t-shirt, so I added a plane behind the microphone and worked out how to give the plane a blue colour in the centre and fade to transparent at the edge. That way there’s a colour behind the mike whatever colour the t shirt is.

    How the microphone looks in Blender. The flat plane is there to make a vignette effect in the final render.

    I’ll probably do a couple of other colours as background. The brown on the original presenter’s t-shirt might be a good option, as used in the featured image.

    Shader settings for the vignette effect. The ‘Alpha’ in the Principled BSDF controls how transparent the object is. The rest of the nodes control where the object is opaque and how see-through it is.

    It’s up on RedBubble as a T-shirt with the blue background. I’m adopting the motto ‘real artists ship’, so I don’t sit on designs hoping they might mature and improve.

    RedBubble Shop
    White t-shirt
    Microphone design on a white t shirt.
    1. As they’re known in France. ↩︎
    2. Also known as a pop shield or spoffle. ↩︎
  • If Leonardo da Vinci played board games

    If Leonardo da Vinci played board games

    Meet the Meeple

    The meeple is an iconic object within the board gaming community. They are a stylised humanoid figures, used as a playing piece in board games. Slightly fancier than the pieces we used in Cludeo all those years ago, but not much.

    I’ve taken the outline of the Meeple and made a version of Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Vitruvian Man‘, and called it ‘Vitruvian Meeple’. It’s available as a t-shirt and printed on other things (click the button to go to the shop).

    White print Vitruvian meeple on black t-shirt.
    Black print Vitruvian meeple on white t-shirt.
    Vitruvian Meeple white print
    Vitruvian Meeple black print

    Meeple differ wildly from the pieces used in role playing games, which are detailed metal sculptures and often carefully painted by players.

    Painted figures, as used in table top role playing games. You wouldn’t normally see such models used in board games. No reason you couldn’t, though.

    The design came to me after I’d spent a day at a board games convention in Worthing. My main reason for going was to get inspiration and to see if there were any other people selling printed goods to board game enthusiasts. I’d seen the meeple design before, and it has been used on t-shirts. I don’t want to do things that someone else has already done, so I know what to avoid.

    Design process

    The idea of the Vitruvian Meeple came to me while I was sketching out another idea – The Village Meeple – so I sketched the idea (see below).

    Original sketch for the Vitruvian Meeple.

    I used Inkscape to do the design after I tried to get the design made in Canva and Blender. With Inkscape I could control and edit curves a bit more easily than in either of the other two apps. Colour changes are easy, too, so I could do the design in black, white, or any other colour for a good contrast if I want to specify a t-shirt colour.

    Adding a circle (actually an ellipse, the meeple dimensions aren’t perfect) and a square was easy enough, then all I had to do was export it and do the keywords and description in RedBubble. I still find these bits difficult to do, I don’t like relying on AI to do this.

    I may do another version with reverse script above and below to make it look more like the da Vinci original. This will be the deluxe version.

    And as for The Village Meeple? Watch this space…

    Coming soon – The Village Meeple!
  • Things happen

    Things happen

    Do you believe in fate/destiny?

    I don’t think fate or destiny are real. Where you are in life is subject to so many variables that to believe is fate is egocentric. You are where you are, things could be better and they could be worse.

    This is a very British atheist view of life. It might be comforting to believe in fate and be helpless to its whims, but that abdicates responsibility and it’s no better than believing your horoscope. There are also many factors outside your control, billions of people and many millions of things that can fail, fall or fuck around with your life.

    Could things be better? Yes. We could have a bigger house that’s less of a mess and more money because we worked harder or we took an opportunity that we missed. We could also still be renting a grotty flat in Bootle because that’s as far as our ambitions and opportunities took us. Or Mrs S could have got into Bristol Old Vic – which would have been a big win for her – and we’d never have met.

    How to explain it? Through Terry Pratchett, of course.

    Terry Pratchett’s gods

    The Discworld is ruled over by gods who are at a loss to know how to pass a wet afternoon. Fate is real in this world. In Lords And Ladies the wizard Ridcully suggests to Granny Weatherwax that if they’d stayed together then their life would have been very different. What if they’d settled down and had children, grandchildren. She responds:

    What about the fire? … Swept through our house just after we were married. Killed us both.

    This is Pratchett’s ‘trousers of time’ multiverse theory, where you go down a different leg and there’s continuinuums all over the place where everything and everyone bifurcates1. I’m not sure I believe that, either. That would mean there’s a universe for every decision everyone ever made. There’s loads of them – where do they keep the ones we’re not using?

    I suppose it could be that there’s an omniscient and omnipotent controller who guides the destiny of us all. That’s a cop-out, or perhaps extreme solipsism if you think only you matter. I believe there’s one universe and I don’t believe in any gods.

    Celebrate your wins, be annoyed at what goes wrong if that helps. Don’t sweat the missed opportunities. And remember, you can’t control other people.

    1. The trousers of time have more legs than a centipede dry cleaner’s. ↩︎
  • Hey – I’d love a Babycham!

    Hey – I’d love a Babycham!

    Old advert brought back to mind.

    I don’t look on LinkedIn much, but a recent article on how Babycham was advertised from the 1950s onwards interested me.

    Babycham is still available, it’s a perry – like cider, but made with pears rather than apples. At 6% it’s on the lighter side of cider-perry drinks and the little bottles it used to be sold in wouldn’t get you very drunk. From its introduction in the 1950s it was marketed at women, a departure from how alcohol had previously been advertised.

    It was also the favourite tipple of Vyvyan out and off of The Young Ones. He once declared that “one glass of that and I’m anyone’s”.

    Vyvyan from The Young Ones was partial to the occasional Babycham, as well as Hawk lager (100% alcohol).

    The advert that comes to mind first when I think of Babycham is one from 1986, set in a low bar playing loud, industrial music1. Two posh couples come in and one of the woman – to the consternation of the barman – says she’d love a Babycham. A deep-voice dude2 clicks his fingers3 and says “Hey! I’d love a Babycham!” And then everyone in the bar wants a Babycham.

    What’s memorable is the guy at the end of the bar. In this two-bit sleazy dive is a very polite young man who looks around at everyone else ordering Babycham, puts his finger up and says “Yeah, I’ll have one!”

    So I did a remix of the advert

    1. Literally, hammering on pipes. Not Killing Joke or Nine Inch Nails. ↩︎
    2. Charles Augins, who was also Queeg 500 in the Red Dwarf episode ‘Queeg’. ↩︎
    3. Which you should never, ever do to any bar staff – unless you’re being played by Charles Augins – if you still want to be able to count to ten. ↩︎
  • Logo cloth reveal in Blender

    Logo cloth reveal in Blender

    I’ve had the Heath Way Prints logo for about a year, and I’m happy with how it looks. In a recent advert I used a spinning version of the logo as the end scene for the carousel I made using CapCut.

    Making and ident

    How to expand on this? One thing I saw a few months ago was a cloth reveal. You start with cloth over an object then pull it away using ‘hooks’. In the display, the crosses are hooks, and pull at two parts of the cloth to reveal the monkey head.

    This works well, it can be used for revealing cars and big bits of machinery as well as logos and monkey heads. But I wanted to have the HWP logo suspended in air and then have the cloth be whipped away. Using the ‘hooks’ method wouldn’t work. I couldn’t find a way to animate the influence the hooks have on the cloth, which would mean I could turn off the hooks, so I’d have to get the hooks in the right place on the draped cloth. This is possible but not elegant1.

    Getting the cloth on top of the logo involved adding a plane to be the cloth, subdividing it and then giving it cloth physics. The logo had to have physics, too, otherwise the cloth would drop through the logo.

    What I found was that the logo didn’t interact very well with the cloth. So I added a cylinder the same size as the logo and used that as the collision object. That worked. Then the cylinder is adjusted so that it doesn’t appear in the final render and I still have a logo that has three dimensions.

    Another option I considered was adding a cylinder and ‘painting’ the logo on this. I could then alter the shading of the cylinder so that only the logo would appear. But this would be less satisfactory because I’d end up with a 2D logo rather than the 3D object that reacts to light and looks real. Having a 3D logo means I can animate it or move the lights and the surfaces react to changing light.

    Cloth draping on the Heath Way Prints logo. But how to take it off again?

    So we have a cloth draped on a thing. How to pull the cloth off without using hooks?

    Gravity!

    Changing gravity

    Unlike the real world, you can control gravity in Blender. It is a fun thing to do, you can make a pendulum simulation under various gravity fields to simulate Earth, the Moon, and Jupiter.

    Pendulum simulation with different gravity values. The Moon (1.6 m/s²), Earth (9.8 m/s²) and Jupiter (25 m/s²). The pendulum swings once on the Moon for every 2 ½ swings on Earth and four times faster on Jupiter than on the Moon.

    You can also change the direction of gravity. For this animation, I animated the gravity to change from -9.8 m/s² in the Z direction (down) to 20 m/s² in the Y direction (behind the logo) for two seconds so that the cloth fell from the logo. This is just like tipping the logo up, same way you might tip a table up to remove the tablecloth, if you were so inclined.

    Logo reveal in Boho colour scheme.

    Colours were taken from a ‘boho’ colour palette. I gave the logo a brown colour from the collection, the background green and an off-white for the cloth. The cloth also has a metallic sheen to it, to add a bit of class.

    Sounds were from Pixabay, sliding cloth effect fitted the bill nicely.

    Next: I’ll put the logo on some dice of various shapes and see what can be done with that.

    1. I’ve since found a way of doing this, but I like the effect I used. ↩︎
  • Sour sweets and dark chocolate

    Sour sweets and dark chocolate

    What’s your favourite candy?

    I’m using the definition of ‘candy’ to mean anything in the confectionery aisle of the supermarket.

    Current favourite sweet is probably Tesco’s sour rings. They’re sherbet coated fruit jellies, and even though they’re a supermarket own brand, they do hit the spot. I’ve tried various Haribo and Bassets sour sweets but they don’t pack the same punch. They also hide cherry flavoured sweets in there and that’s something I don’t want.

    Current favourite sweet.

    Dark chocolate is my favourite. Green and Black’s dark mint, Lindt dark mint or chilli, Hotel Chocolat’s various dark offerings… all good. Saying that, I’d not refuse a Double Decker or Mars Bar.

    Green & Black’s minty dark chocolate.
    Spicy chocolate! It was a surprise the first time I had chilli and chocolate together how well it works.
  • ‘Tinterweb

    ‘Tinterweb

    The most important invention in your lifetime is…

    I am just older than the internet. The first linked computer system (ARPANET) went live in October to December 1969, when I was a few months old.

    All the trouble started here.

    As a tool for spreading information and knowledge the internet is up there with agriculture, written language and the printing press; I might be old but I post date both those things.

    I first encountered the web (invented in 1989) in 1993 when I worked at Liverpool University. I think I knew of it, probably from Tomorrows World, but had never used a web browser. I used it mainly for research since the original users of the web and internet were academic and military.

    There have been many other great inventions in the last few decades; some of the advances in medicine are frankly astonishing. The invention of MRI and DNA fingerprinting and the continued development of computer storage and quantum computing spring to mind.

    But the fact of the internet and the ease with which ideas can be shared and communication can occur has enabled these advances in the same way that the printing press ushered in The Enlightenment.

  • Food, science & architecture

    Food, science & architecture

    Describe your most ideal day from beginning to end.

    This day is a patchwork of highlights. I don’t know if there is any one place that this could really happen, but ‘ideal’ has to be able to include the impossible.

    Mrs S is with me throughout, the kids join us for lunch then do their own thing after dinner.

    Wake up about seven, in a big hotel room with a massive en suite.

    Full English breakfast – local butcher’s sausages, back bacon, two fried eggs, black pudding, fried potatoes, toast, coffee. Or steak and potatoes if FEB isn’t available.

    Walking tour including local architecture, industrial, religious and civic. A lot of pointing at ceilings and mulling over the fact that we’re lucky we don’t have to work in those conditions at the mill/ mine/ factory/ farm that is now a working museum.

    Lunch is fish and chips by the sea, where the kids have joined us after a morning shopping. There is a magic seagull exclusion zone so we can eat them undisturbed and the chippy has saveloy for Mrs S.

    Afternoon at a bookshop where you can get lost among the shelves, the type Terry Pratchett described as ‘a genteel black hole that can read’. Someone magically comes and takes our books and other purchases back to the hotel for us.

    Coffee and cake (fruit cake or tiffin) to tide us over.

    Evening session at an observatory or other science museum where we will again do a lot of pointing at stuff and talk about science and the like.

    Late dinner. Italian restaurant overlooking a scorched valley in Tuscany, the evening has cooled enough that we can eat comfortably, but a cold Peroni or three is welcome. I’m not driving, so what the hell. A selection of charcuterie to start, then something involving gnocchi, a spicy pizza and gelato for dessert.

    After dinner, stand up comedy at an upstairs cellar with acts I’ve never seen before but leaving me exhausted with laughter. The fortifying pint of Guinness at the interval will see me through.

    A couple of whiskies as a nightcap. Something floral for preference, a Speyside single malt or a selection of whiskies from around the world.

    Then bed.

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