In memory of...

One's a job... the other is a mental handicap.

The Cookbook 4th Edition

As some of you may already know, I am a very large fan of Lore Sjöberg and his latest piece for Wired is absolutely great... especially since I both cook and play DnD. Also this gives me some ideas for the cookbook I am planning on putting together ((^_^))

Hardcore Gamers

...this is a must have! The original DnD dice!

And so...

Life has begun to calm down... amidst all of this I am going to be out of the country for most of July, so I will ramp up the drawings again when I return... in other news... this has got to be one of the best commencement addresses I've heard in a long time, given to Harvard's graduating class by J.K. Rowling.... here's a passage I particularly enjoyed...

"However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown academically.

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life."

This Pain...

...I know it well.