Sketching Software Wanted

 I like to sketch my dreams. A picture can indeed say more than a thousand words, and sometimes looking at a sketch can instantly bring back the memory of the dream. This can be very handy if I don't wave the time to write it out in detail in the morning. Some dreams feel like long stories, or they have interesting world-building ideas. I want to save those memories, and sketching works well. Free, online software has been the way to go, especially the ones that work in the web browser independently of OS.

The first software I used was something called ArtPad. The site has shut down, and every sketch that was saved on the site went down with it. I did download a few images so that they could be posted to forums, only a handful survive now. 

This was what ArtPad looked like. This dream gave me inspiration for a real life floral arrangement.

After ArtPad went down, I started using DeviantArt's built in sketcher "muro". It worked well, but both the painting app and the site itself has become increasingly more bloated over time, so I have drifted apart from it. Some of my more memorable dreams have been illustrated in this app, and I have many good memories of the site. If it would ever become more lightweight in use, I would probably start using it regularly again. 

This is drawn in DeviantArt Muro, and depicts a dream about the afterlife. I have had several dreams about this transitional stage. The surface they walk on is snow.

Sketch.io seems promising with its multi platform support, but something about it just doesn't sit right with me. I miss the simple and intuitive transparent layering of the two previous platforms. 

This was drawn very quickly. I can't remember if it was made in sketch.io or on a sketching app on the phone. 

Lately I have had the guilty pleasure of using Microsoft Copilot, a generative AI, for generating quick sketches of dream scenes in the morning. I understand that this isn't sustainable. Sometimes it is spot on, but about half of the prompts I have given it has just not been drawn right. It seems to especially have a problem with getting the number of characters right in scenes. Comic book styles are rendered very well. The image to the right is the most successful one so far. The dialogue was added later by me in Photoscape X.

What else is out there? Am I missing something? I'm not looking for smartphone only apps. I'm looking for simple apps, that work on a Windows computer, where I can draw with a map. It needs to have an easy to use way to adjust opacity, so I can use transparent layers to mix colours like I'm used to.

Virus Diary, three weeks later

 Isolation ended on the 3.september, ten days after I got sick. I was back at work the following Monday, 6.september.

Even if I was no longer dangerous, and no longer had a fever, the world still wasn't right. Both of my ears were blocked, and any up/down and sideways motion was likely to make me dizzy. I had to take frequent breaks, because my work includes a lot of bending down and lifting up. All noises were muted. It felt like there was a distance between my ears and my head. I hadn't felt like this since I was a child and had the flu.

My sense of smell is still heavily influenced. The sense of taste is back, but in a weaker form, and some spices and aromas are simply not there anymore. Most spices in curry aren't noticeable. We ate pasta with cheese and herbs sauce a few days ago, and the sauce tasted like boiled milk. Apple pie tastes sweet and tart, and I can notice the dryness in my mouth from the cinnamon, but not its actual flavour. Coffee tastes bitter, and it is still hard to tell different hot drinks apart.

Most things that used to have a smell has a smell now, but I need to be very close to it in order to actually smell it. The most noticeable exception is coffee. It is simply gone. Some smells can be "smelled" through the mouth. I can taste the smell if I inhale through the mouth at close range. 

The overlay of Wrong 1 and Wrong 2 have mostly faded, but I have noticed something interesting. The smells that come close to those smells have come back, while unrelated smells are still gone. I can for example smell and taste vanilla, some soaps, some fruits, wine, and carnation flowers because they are sweet like Wrong 1. Wood smoke, burnt oil, whisky, eucalyptus, sesame oil and black pepper (weakly) come close to Wrong 2. 

It is still hard to tell different fruits apart. It is impossible to know when something stinks and needs to be thrown out. Sometimes I get the subconscious idea that there is "something" in the air, for example when the supermarket has thrown out large amounts of spoiled food or when my partner is seasoning a cast iron pan. I get the "gut" reaction to it, but not the conscious knowledge of which smell it is.

I have been doing daily smell training, but the progress is slow. At this point, I doubt that my sense of smell will ever return to normal. 

Virus Diary #9

Day 9

Something peculiar has happened to my nose.

It started with a weird background smell. Not the "pus" smell that is common in colds, but a sickening sweet, putrid smell. It reminds me of cheap air fresheners, ear wax remover, baby oil, a cat (or me!) giving birth, or the wrong flowery smell of something dead. I have named this smell Wrong 1.

After I discovered that I could very faintly smell vinegar and vanilla, I started sniffing everything. This was how I discovered Wrong 2. This smell reminds me of burning plastic or rubber, burnt paprika or garlic, and the smell that comes when you heat up a dirty plate. When it isn't intense, it reminds me of an overheated computer or hot dust.

I can somehow taste a bit now. I can recognise the taste of ginger in tea, and I can taste the difference between my own minty toothpaste and LO's fruity one. (The last one tastes of nothing and smells of Wrong 1) I can taste the difference between mustard and ketchup, but not between tea and coffee.

Everything that has a smell, smells like either Wrong 1 or Wrong 2. Not many things have a smell at all at this point, and I can smell Wrong 1 simply from drinking water, but there seems to be some kind of pattern to it.

Things that smell of Wrong 1:

• Vanilla soap
• Fruity soap
• Yoghurt
• Cranberry tea
• Cheese
• Laundry detergent

Things that smell of Wrong 2:

• Minty soap
• Adult toothpaste
• Thyme
• Alcohol
• Soy sauce

Things that have absolutely no smell:

• Urine
• Faeces
• Mould
• Onions
• Garlic
• Bread
• Sandalwood soap
• Humans

Virus diary #8

 Day 8

Wednesday, 1.September. In two days, it will be our last day of confinement. We don't need to test again, but we need to go for 24 hours without any paracetamol or ibuprofen, and make sure that we don't have a fever in those 24 hours. I don't feel like I have a fever today, but my head is still spinning strangely, and it feels like gravity is affecting me differently. My ears feel blocked, but there is nothing blocking them. I can breathe perfectly well through my nose, but my sense of smell is broken.

Something really strange happened today. My SO was cleaning a pan with vinegar. When I entered the kitchen, I could taste the vinegar. Not smell, but taste, and it was very faint. The air was sour. Maybe this means that my sensory cells are starting to slowly regenerate.

I immediately started running around smelling everything. No luck. I think I can maybe smell vanilla, but it could also be that I just remember what vanilla is supposed to smell like. 

Little one is bored and irritable. We don't have a lot of energy to play with him, and that unfortunately means that he ends up watching YouTube between lunch and dinner most days. This means that he doesn't get to burn his energy. SO takes him into the bedroom to play rough for some time; they push each other around, jump on the bed, etc. The loud laughing and screaming makes my head and ears hurt so much that I cry while I wash up. There is just so much housework and so little energy. I try to wear my best face for the sake of my dear two boys.

Virus diary #7

Day 7

This is the point where the disease gets dangerous for those who are so unlucky. I'm lucky. Nothing seems to be happening to my lungs, apart from some coughing. I think the single dose of vaccine that we did get, offers us some protection about the serious illness. Our bodies were able to recognise the virus and start fighting it properly before it could do any serious damage.

Taste and smell are still out of commission. I couldn't eat much food. I can't remember if it was my appetite, coughing, some disagreement or simply not making enough. I think we ate spring rolls? The days are all the same now that we are in house arrest. We wake up, use the computer, do housework, cook and eat a tasteless meal, and after that one of us takes a nap. We measure our temps twice a day. It is now at 37,5-38C. I would have taken a paracetamol and gone to work with this before the world got strange.

I seriously miss going outside. My SO has made it into a habit to throw out the bin bags and check for letters late at night. We are allowed to go out into our own garden, and the bags do need to go out, but it still feels like both a crime and the highlight of the day. Our energy is low. He gets winded from those few steps. 

I can't see anything in the dark, can't hear well (and my hearing has become one dimensional...I can't determine where sounds are coming from), can't smell or taste anything, and my sense of touch is still strangely disconnected. It is almost like walking on new snow. We can't feel if it has grass or sheer ice under it, so we need to walk carefully. I feel like a 90 year old woman. In fact, i know an actual 90 years old woman who is complaining about the same disconnect and numbness, and how it is affecting her hiking in the mountains...

I was able to concentrate enough after dark that I could play some Mario Kart. My mental energy is gradually improving, but with that comes the restlessness too. I keep myself from crying most times that I'm not distracted, from feeling trapped, the stomach pain, and the idea of never smelling again.

Virus diary #6

 Day 6

The night was full of nightmares, about being stuck somewhere, hiding, or not being able or allowed to speak. I didn't sleep well at all and woke up with a headache. Coffee tastes hot and bitter, but it works.

I had ordered groceries to be delivered from the local supermarket today. My request was spamfiltered, but when they did find my order, the service was excellent. 

Little one is completely OK now. SO and I are still having low fevers, but his has gone considerably down. He doesn't seem to be as affected by the sensory "wrongness" anymore, but he is irritable and quick to make angry and upset. He coughs all the time and has a headache.

It could be that men and women handle illness differently, or that the two of us simply have different instinct around illness. When I don't feel well, I withdraw and typically become oversensitive to noises and other stimuli. This has also happened with COVID, even more than with normal colds and flus. He, on the other hand, becomes very vocal. There is a constant stream of noises that indicate pain or discomfort. The noises make me want to escape up through the ceiling. It takes more and more mental energy to keep a straight, compassionate face on. 

I don't like the idea that loss of smell can be permanent. I don't want to never again be able to smell and taste food, grass, rain, the flowers at work. Most of all I don't want to lose the smell of my loved ones. I was one of those mothers who sniffs my child's hair every day. Now even he doesn't have a smell. It is heartbreaking, and I'm not allowed to talk about it at home as it makes my SO feel bad. He believes he was the one who infected me. I don't think so. I think we both got infected at the same time.

I tried taking a nap in the afternoon, and got a dream about pulling up mutant, half-human fish. This is a classic nightmare that I often get from feeling sick!

Virus Diary #5

 Day 5

As expected, the results came back positive for both SO and LO. We had to have that difficult conversation all over again, only that SO's list was much shorter. He is a stay at home dad. I had to list everybody at work as well. It felt like we were talking to investigators trying to solve a mystery. In a way, we were. They thought that the virus had most likely come from a customer at work. We suspected the nursery. After all, media keeps reporting that the virus is spreading wildly among school children now. Going there was the only unusual thing we had done lately. LO had only gone there for a week when we got sick.

I still can't smell or taste anything apart from the most basic sensations of bitter, sweet, and spicy. I feared that salt didn't taste like anything either, but plain salt still tastes salty. Spicy is weird. I seem to be a lot more sensitive to spicy now than before. The thai chili tuna, which usually is one of my favourite foods, burns my mouth now. I still ate it.

My stomach is upset. I keep running to the bathroom, and it feels like I had eaten fire noodles the day before. It burns. The cramps were so bad that they woke me up in the middle of the night. I had dreams where I was curled up in pain on the floor, crying and breathless. I woke up feeling almost like that. This reminds me of the pain from ovarian cysts, or labour, or the worst periods when I was full of polyps and myomas. To be fair I have an appointment scheduled in early September to check for cysts and myomas, but this came out of nothing.

We are now confined to this apartment until 3.September. I called my father yesterday. He thought that sounded like something I wouldn't like at all. He is probably right, but going out is still not too tempting.

Virus Diary #4

 Day 4

My test coming back positive for COVID meant that the little one also had to get tested. His result would determine if all the other children in the nursery also needed a test. My SO, not having received his result yet, was technically not in isolation (even if he fell into the "Suspected COVID" category at this time), so he was allowed to come with him to the test station. Little one and I had woken up at 6. SO at 9. Their appointment was today at 17.

SO had the foresight to fill our freezer and fridge with easy food that night of day 2. I did some housework while they were at the test station, and wanted to have some lasagne ready for them when they came back. My sense of smell was now completely gone. It had started with the smell of "pus" or "crusts" that usually comes at the end of a common cold, when the nose has started to dry up a bit and the sense of smell is returning. Now this smell came before a total loss. I couldn't smell anything. Not even frying onions smelled of anything. Everything smelled as neutral as air coming out of an air purifier. I could still somewhat perceive if the air was hot or cold, humid or dry, but the sense of smell was just completely deleted from my nose.

The lasagne was hot, and I could taste some acidity from the tomatoes and some saltiness from the cheese. We had some ice tea with it. I could taste sweetness and some astringency from the tea, but apart from that, nothing had a smell or taste.

I still had a fever. For me, it never moved away from the 38-38,5C area. This isn't a high fever, and it felt strange that it could affect my sleep, dreams, and senses so much. I was dizzy, and it was hard to tell directions and temperatures apart. The only touch that didn't get translated into WRONG was the little guy's hugs and kisses. Even my husband's touches came through as WRONG, which i found very disturbing.

Testing positive means that I'm not allowed to leave the house for at least 10 days. That thought wasn't welcome, but I was still too sick to enjoy going out at this point. I tried to distract myself with some games, mostly Ingress and Pokemon go, but those games require walking in order to be played properly and I just couldn't concentrate. 

Virus Diary #3

 Day 3

I got up at 8. I hadn't slept well and my dreams had been weird. My test result wasn't in yet. My head started spinning as soon as I got up, so my boss got another call. She made it clear that I can't come to work in this state. 

My entire body felt weird. Now I understood what my SO had been complaining about a couple of days ago, that his nerves was oversensitive and even wearing clothes was uncomfortable. Almost all sensation of touch was translated into "WRONG" by my brain. It was hard to feel the difference between hot and cold. My head was spinning, in the same way as it does if the ear canals are blocked by water, ear wax or a sinus infection. It wasn't hard to breathe or anything, there was just sort of a disconnect between my senses and my consciousness.  Worst of all was sticking my hands into water of any kind. It gave almost a fight or flight reaction. This was inconvenient, because housework still needed to be done, and it is important to wash our hands often when we are sick!

Making and eating dinner was exhausting. I was sweating, shivering, and constantly feeling like all my hairs were standing up. I couldn't decide if the feeling was pleasant or uncomfortable. My feet felt like they weren't fully in contact with gravity. This can be compared to the first sign of a THC high. I decided that I just wasn't used to having a fever.

The little guy seemed a lot better, his fever was gone, and they had gone out for a short trip to a park while I was busy with housework. After eating, I wanted to lie down for a short while to gather energy for the little boy's night routine. Exactly when I put my phone away to drift off, I got a message. My test came back positive.

This wasn't the message I wanted to give to my boss. She took it well. The nursery manager had just left for the day, so I sent a message through their app. After this I got a phone call from the city's health authorities, asking me to list every person I had been in contact with this week. With my head swimming from fever and lack of sleep, this wasn't an easy task. There was no nap. The rest of the evening was spent on phone calls and emails.

Virus Diary #2

Day 2

I woke up at 5.30. The agreement with my boss was that I would check my temp, and if it was back to normal and I was feeling better, it would be OK to come in. Unfortunately, it was still high. Not bad, just slightly high at 38,5C. I booked a COVID test because the workplace requires it, and went back to sleep.

A couple of hours later, I woke up from a smell. It was difficult to make out just what it was I was smelling. Was it coffee? A fart? Mature cheese? Feet? The smell was musty and brown, and could fit any of those things. If my brain would have been fully awake, I would have made the logical conclusion that it was cheese. My SO was eating breakfast next to me. He doesn't like coffee. A headache and cough had woken him up. 

I sat up, and my head started spinning. "Wow. It has been a long time since I felt like this!", I exclaimed to my SO. I had indeed not felt this bad since the flu in 2008. A tiny alarm in the back of my head was saying something about my sense of smell being off. My phone showed that my test was scheduled in a few hours.

"Have you taken this test before?", the nurse asked me, fully covered in gloves, plastic clothes, and a face shield. "Yes", I replied, and tried to think of something distracting and peaceful while I first opened my mouth, then tilted my head backwards so she could reach my nose. It was over quickly. My stamina was so bad that I decided to rent a scooter for the way back home. Walking is usually one of my favourite things.

We didn't get the test results this day. We all still had a fever. The little one had also developed a nasty diarrhoea, which my SO got the unfortunate task of dealing with while I was at the testing station. He took a walk late at night to get some groceries and fresh air. I put the little one to bed in the mean time, which took a while, since he was restless. His nose appeared to be stuffed.

Virus Diary #1

Media (at least in my country Norway) has been full of stories about the pandemic. The focus has been on the serious cases, the horror stories from hospital units where unlucky patients fight for their lives with severely damaged lungs.

I got a mild case of COVID. Maybe reading one of these blog posts will make someone recognise the signs of the infection, and decide to get tested. If only one person does that, then these posts will have served their purpose. I know that the infection is different from person to person; as a Reddit user put it, "Breakthrough COVID is a disease with random symptoms".

I'm vaccinated. My country has had a good supply of vaccines, and I'm in the age group that didn't come completely last in the queue. Unfortunately, the virus caught up with me before the second shot did.

Day 1

I picked our son up from the nursery at 3 in the afternoon. He was tired after playing outside, and he had completely refused to take his thick jacket off in the warm late summer day. When I arrived, he was sitting in the kitchen eating a snack. This must have been the first time he would rather be inside than outside. I asked the employee if she thought he was getting sick. She assured me that it was completely normal for the newcomers to get tired easily, their senses can be overloaded from the new situation with other kids everywhere.

I was also feeling tired and cold. My SO had been feeling unwell for a couple of days and didn't want to go to the nursery in case he had an infectious cold or something. When the little one just wanted to spend the rest of the day curled up on my lap, we decided to measure his temperature. We all had a low fever.

Now I had to contact the nursery and tell them that the little one wasn't coming in tomorrow, as well as my boss. She told me to stay away from work for as long as I have a fever. I asked if I could still come in and do something that didn't directly involve customers, but that was also not allowed.

Still hoping that I'd get up for work at 5.30 the next morning to go to work, I went to sleep on the sofa, to not disturb the others that early in the morning...

Playing dress up with dream costumes

This image is hosted here just so I can post it on LD4all. I used Azalea's Game of Thrones scene creator to illustrate two costumes from my dream last night. These character creators can be a nice and quick way to make dream illustrations without spending too much time and effort on it.

When the mind wanders, it sees faces...

A few days ago, I had the unfortunate experience of being stuck for a while in a room that was in need of renovation. There was nothing to read, nothing to do, and I couldn't move. My eyes had nothing else to look at than the stains and holes in the floor. Before long, the shapes started to take on meaning. There was a baboon, there was Mickey Mouse, and right before me was a fire-breathing dragon!

Mickey Mouse

It is interesting how we all see patterns in random things like clouds and stains. Who has never looked at clouds drifting across the sky, and seen people and animals? I often see maps of familiar countries and fictional worlds in the clouds. Trees and mountains can have faces and bodies, so clear that I can clearly understand where the myths of Trolls come from. 

This is called pareidolia. It is what happens when the brain interprets a random image as a familiar pattern. The single most common pattern generated in this way is a human face. Pareidolia is the phenomenon behind the "face of the moon", the inkblot test, and some say it is the reason why we can see a smiley icon as a smiling face. 

Naked woman throwing a hammer

There are many communities and blogs out there dedicated to pareidolia. All of them, at least the ones I have found, are filled with images of things that look like faces. All it can take is a pair of dots, and the human brain will interpret it as "looking at you". Even the word "look" contains a pair of eyes when we look closely at it! 

When I was a child, my bedroom had curtains with large brown flowers on it. That pattern gave me nightmares, because my young eyes saw a witch in the flowers. She was wearing cat eye glasses and a scarf. I couldn't understand why my parents' couldn't see the witch, when she was clearly staring at me from every flower on those curtains. In fact, I couldn't even see the flowers back then. I could only see the witch and some random swirls. 

Dragon breathing fire on the ground

A couple of years ago, my parents were cleaning in their basement and found those old curtains from the 70s. They took them up and draped them over a chair in the living room, because they thought I might be interested in taking them with me. There was the witch, staring at me! 

I don't have a picture of the curtains; they are in my parents' house. I do have pictures of the stained floor and its strange inhabitants. 

Pareidolia wikipedia article

Photo collection on Google+

The Tetris Effect stole my sleep

The bedroom is quiet and cool, the bed is soft, the sheets are smooth. I lie down and relax, so sleepy that not even a daydream will stay in my head. I drift off...only to see the game I played before bed vividly in front of my eyes. It repeats over and over and over again forming the same patterns.

I have been playing a clicker RPG on my phone for the last few days. It is a game where your damage is determined by how fast you can tap the screen, and you have a team of followers who deal constant DPS. The numbers rise exponentially with each new follower. Last night, I entered an in-game tournament. This made me spend more than an hour on it directly before going to sleep.

It looks like that the pattern of taps and numbers has gotten stuck in my brain. All night, in the non REM sleep stage, where I should have been comfortably unconscious and resting, has this game been playing in my mind. Where I should have seen random scenes and lines of sleep, I have seen coins explode out of beaten enemies. Even in my dreams, things kept increasing exponentially; tens, then hundreds, then thousands, then millions...

Yesterday's game isn't the first game to cause this for me. The most annoying side effect was from Diablo 1. I was constantly going down to lower levels for several nights. Ingress has also had a strong effect. I was making lines and triangles not only in my half sleep hallucinations, but in my nightly dreams.

This is called the Tetris Effect. It isn't limited to computer games. My mother has told me about how she has spent entire nights with visions of knitting after learning new patterns. Psychologists think this has something to do with learning and subconsciously forming memories. I think it means that I played that game too much yesterday.

That isn't yellow! That's blue-orange!

LED lighting has become hugely popular. I can understand why. They consume little power, and come in all kinds of sizes and colours. LED bulbs can even replace "old fashioned" bulbs in any kind of lamp. After my country banned the sale of incandescent bulbs, LED replacements are sold everywhere.

Most of them come in the colour "warm white". It is warm, that can't be denied, but it isn't white.  It is a combination of blue and yellow. The LED itself produces blue light. It is covered in a yellow fluorescent material, and the mix between the yellow and the blue wavelength is ideally seen as white by the human eye.

Humans, on the other hand, come with different colour vision. Some are colour blind. Others, like me, have a more sensitive colour vision. I'm especially sensitive when it comes to tones of yellow. Very few sources of artificial light can produce a true yellow colour, and that is especially true for LEDs. The yellow component of cheap warm white LED light lies on the orange side of yellow, so the mixed colour comes out as "orange-blue". I can see both the orange and the blue in it. "Yellow" decorative LEDs are even worse. To my eyes, they are orange-blue, similar to a street lamp. It is an interesting colour, but it is far from yellow!

I have great difficulties explaining this to my SO. To his eyes, white LEDs are white and yellow LEDs are yellow. There is no such thing as yellow-blue or orange-blue to him. I call street lights purplish orange. To his eyes, they are orangeish yellow. This comes from a passionate hobby photographer, who is far from colour blind!

To make matters worse, my phone camera can't capture yellow-blue, orange-purple or any of those mixed colours. On the picture of Christmas tree lights above, the light to the left is a blue-orange LED and the one to the right is a beautiful yellow incandescent bulb. My phone camera captures both of the colours as "yellow".

The photo of the building was taken in bright purple-orange light. It shows up as yellow in the photo. The phone's "eye" has a colour vision more similar to my SO's eyes than to mine. This could be part of the reason why he is a so much better photographer. (No, just joking, it has something to do with talent too)

The painting below gives a better idea of what street lights look to me. It shows both the purple and the orange, although in real life the purple also shines through the bright orange light from the bulbs. It is impossible to mix this colour in a digital painting, because the screen can onyl produce red, green, and blue wavelengths. It can't do purple-orange.

Playing with the AP score in Ingress

I enjoy playing Ingress. The game has both a global score based on how large an area each faction controls and how populated those areas are, and a personal score called Activity Points (AP). This works just like experience points in any RPG. You need them in order to level up.

Everything you do in Ingress awards AP. Recharging a portal gives a tiny amount, building a field gives a large amount. Taking down a portal with multiple fields attached to it gives the most AP of any single action in the game.

I sometimes play with the AP score, aiming for funny numbers. The key to this is watching the last digit of the score. When I wanted to aim for exactly 28 million AP, like in the screenshot, I first did the actions that gave large chunks of AP until I was getting close. A few thousands away from the goal is usually enough to fine tune the last digit.

The action that gives the least predictable amount is glyph hacking. The score is based on how fast the glyph hack is done. When I was getting close to the goal, I glyph hacked until the last digit of my AP score was 0. Then the rest was easy. Placing a mod gave 150 AP. Placing two mods on two portals gave 300. With only a few hundreds left, I recharged a remote portal until the score was right.

Actions that will leave the last digit intact:

Quick hacking an enemy portal (100 AP)
Glyph hacking and not getting all the glyphs right (50-200 AP)

Actions that will increase the last digit with 5:

Placing a resonator (125 AP)
Upgrading somebody else's resonator (65 AP)
Destroying a resonator (75 AP)
Placing a mod (125 AP)

Actions that increase the last digit with 3:

Making a link (313 AP)
Making a field (1563 AP)

Destroying links and field also gives a variable amount of AP based on how many you destroy at the same time. I usually don't include destruction in the last part of aiming for a certain score, because it is so unpredictable.

The tea that tastes like WoW

I recently wrote about how smells can instantly trigger memories, and wondered if the same was also true for tastes. The two senses are after all closely related, large parts of what we perceive as taste comes from the nose.

I enjoy playing games, and while games like Ingress and Pokemon Go makes me go outside every day, it is more comfortable to sit inside and play World of Warcraft on a freezing October day like today. (Don't worry, i DID hack a portal today.) I have played WoW on/off since the beginning of the game, and often keep a cup of hot tea next to the computer while I play. Especially in the Burning Crusade area, I consumed large amounts of Chinese smoked tea.

Until this day, the taste of this tea makes me instantly think of WoW, especially a zone in Outland. The connection is so strong that when Warlords of Draenor came out, playing in the remade zone made me crave the same tea again.

When I sat down to play the game today, my SO made a cup of smoked tea for me and placed it next to my computer. It made the experience perfect. I believe that the familiar tea made me immerse myself even stronger in the game.

Chaotic randomness

I have been going through my image files lately, making backups and gathering files together on my computer. Among all the photos of flowers and the sky, I found some half forgotten "art". I call it "art" and not art, because these are randomly generated fractal images. I must admit that I know very little about fractals, but they are still fun to play with, The program I used to use is called Chaotica. It is free. In fact, a lot of the "artwork" on this site is made in Chaotica.

The way I use it, the first step is always a random flame. The program presents you with nine different random outputs, and you choose one. I usually choose the one that looks the most calm and ordered. From there, I tweak individual settings until it looks like I want it to.

This is the Blue Planet Eater. It is inspired by a terrifying dream about exactly that: a planet eater. It looked vaguely snail-like and was the size of a planet.

This is called "Fire Dragons", because after I adjusted the palette, the dragons stood out to me.

I couldn't call this anything else than the Rainbow Nebula.

This one doesn't have a title yet. This one has less randomness and more manual tweaking than most of my images so far.

All of these were made a couple of years ago. I have recently rediscovered and reinstalled Chaotica, because of the backup work. The resolution and size is limited in the free version, but it works well enough for me. 

"The summer we played Pokemon"

This summer, I came over a blog post on a Norwegian news website. It was written by an adult man (I'm roughly 40 years old, and he was older than me, but I hesitate to use the word "elderly")  and complaining about how popular augmented reality games had become. This post, which I can't remember the URL to, came out when the popular game Pokemon Go had been out for a couple of weeks.

There was one sentence in this post that stuck in my mind. "I don't want to remember this summer as the summer we played Pokemon". I have thought about this, and can't find anything wrong at all with the idea. How is "the summer we played Pokemon" different from "the summer we played frisbee golf"? When I have spent summers with my family on my parents' rural property, there has always been some outdoors game or activity that has been this year's major hit. One year frisbee, one year badminton, one year football...

To put this into perspective, the summer of 2015 was the summer we played Ingress. 2015 was not a good year for us. We needed an excuse to get out and focus on something else than the Big Bad Thing that was going on. Ingress was invaluable.

Ingress has a function that tracks the number of unique location visits. The summer of 2015, we made it our mission to increase that stat as much as possible. We went exploring in towns and cities close to where my SO grew up, visiting parts that even he had never seen before. With our phones in our hands, we learned so much about this area's culture and history. We also went on a fielding op with other people. How many games bring people together, physically, like this? When we need to stand on a real, physical location in order to do our thing in the game, we are bound to sooner or later meet other players. We are still in contact with those people, even now that we live in another country.

Pokemon Go appeals to a younger audience than Ingress, in average. Most Ingress players I have met average around 40 years old. Pokemon, on the other hand, has attracted large groups of teenagers on bikes. Many players have been even younger, even if the game has an age limit of 13. My point is: It makes people go outside. It makes people walk. In fact, in Pokemon Go, walking several km is the only way to hatch eggs.

I travelled in time through a smell

I walked into the shop and got my things. The radio was playing a well known song from the 80s. I know this song very well. A local radio station used to play it several times a day through the early 90s, when I was a teenager and often getting some privacy in my bedroom listening to the radio. It made me smile because of the memories.

I queued up behind an older woman. The smell of her perfume instantly hit my subconscious. It was the same one as my grandmother used in the 90s. The combination of sound and smell was so powerful that I could vividly remember not only the look and layout of my bedroom, but the mood it had at night.

In our brain, the area that is responsible for the sense of smell is directly connected to parts that control emotions and memories. Scientists have proven this connection.  Only the sense of smell has this direct connection, the other senses have to be processed through the consciousness first, if I read these articles right. Since much of what we perceive as taste really comes from the nose, it is easy to think that eating certain foods can also bring back powerful memories.

I was originally in that shop to get a bag of coffee, but I walked out with coffee and a chocolate bar. The same brand as I used to get in the small town I grew up in. The memory faded quickly as my mind focused on playing Ingress, and I can't even recall exactly what that perfume smelled like now.