Finding Miss Gardner

I have been continuing my series of colorized photos and posting before-and-afters in an album on my Facebook page. Yesterday I posted this one.

Elizabeth L. Gardner, Class 43-W-6

I think it turned out very well. The lovely lady pictured is Elizabeth L. Gardner of Illinois. She might be termed the face of the WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilots) because the photo is an official one and it turns up in many or most casual searches regarding the WASP. It also heads the Wikipedia article.

In the course of researching the proper colors of her insignia, I learned some of the relevant facts about this wartime effort to relieve male pilots of some of the non-combat flying duties so that more of them could be spared to the front line.

There were 1,074 women who graduated training. They flew 60 million miles while performing a number of non-combat roles. Chief among them was ferrying new aircraft from the factories to air bases or ports of embarkation. That is why I captioned the photo "WASP Ferry Pilot." In fact, my further research indicates that Elizabeth "Libby" Gardner performed her service towing targets for anti-aircraft practice. It is unlikely, therefore, that  the B-26 she is piloting in the photo was painted in camouflage colors.

President Obama presented the WASP organization with a Congressional Gold Medal four years ago next month. As the WASP was a Civil Service organization, its members did not initially receive the recognition that military organizations had. In fact, the 38 ladies who lost their lives in accidents were sent home to be buried at their families' expense and without even a letter of appreciation from the government. WASP was finally militarized after-the-fact in 1984 by an act of Congress, spearheaded by Senator Barry Goldwater, who himself had been a ferry pilot during the war.

I was curious to know if Libby Gardner had survived to learn of the Congressional Gold Medal and after a search I was gratified to find she had. In 2010 she was interviewed by StoryCorps, a public service that records the personal recollections of Americans - some 90,000, so far. Some of these interviews are aired on NPR's "Morning Edition ." I also discovered that the Texas Woman's University has many other images of her in its archives.

I am posting this as my salute to the WASP and Libby Gardner. Thank you for your pioneering service to our country and for providing can-do motivation for our young women.

Colorizing History

I recently became aware of a Facebook entity named "Colourising History". It's a site that displays historical B&W photographs "re-imagined" in color by people who digitally paint them.  I did this myself manually, with special tints, back in the day of actual photographic film and printmaking. It lends a peculiar aspect to the picture, since the palette is extremely limited and the technique relies on existing line and shadow, which show through the tint.

I actually found Colourising History through another entity, called "Tank Lovers." I've been a military history nut from of old, and yes, I love tanks! Tank Lovers shared pictures from Colourizing History that spoke to its focus area.

Since I like photography, tanks, and digital techniques (in that order, by the way), I resolved to try this out. A question regarding "how" was answered by this video:
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwnuhpI6c_I&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Armed with that and my copy of PhotoShop Elements, I've made these, among my first tries.

Abandoned StuG, photo by Staff Sergeant Robert E. Mingus

The photographer was the father of a longtime friend of mine, Scott Mingus, who, among his many attributes, is a Civil War historian & author.

I don't know the provenance of this photo, but the plight of these tankers spoke to me! I guess that since the
driver got them into this mess, he's elected to bail them out of it.

But he'll need more than his helmet!

Naked Politicians!

Now that I have your attention...  The title comes from yet another of my attempts to fix Congress all by myself. After all, none have worked, to date!

But the topic is more comfortable under my Opinion page, so it resides there. Quick-link to my ideas on Naked Politicians here:
 http://techsmithsopinion.blogspot.com/2013/06/fixing-congress-3-yeah-this-means-naked.html

Game Design Gets to Be a Habit

In my October post I showed a prototype for my MOVIE MAGNATE game. It turns out Version 3 still didn't get the job done. I needed to shorten the game, and I needed to recast one of the economic tables to encourage play oriented toward the bigger films. That's done, but it's still awaiting a new playtest.

In the meantime, I've been busy! I've invented six more games and I'm finishing up a prototype of one for a playtest next week. In addition, I prototyped and completely tested one of them, and it's in a finished state.

BOOM or BUST! - This game tracks two industrial activities, finding and mining iron ore, and smelting ore to steel. Each player commands one company in each industry, making the decisions for them during a full economic cycle. Secretly, each is accumulating stock and attempting to make money off any of the other players who may be captaining their companies better than they.  This is a fairly specialist game.

DROP TOWER - I'll not go into the details on this one, as it has a good chance of going commercial.  The idea came to me as I lay on my back, looking at scudding clouds. My initial playtest group suggested only one change to the rules, which I adopted. It's simple - I can teach the rules in under 2 minutes, and at Christmas I taught it to a 7-year old neighbor who then proceeded to beat a college-age girl! It handles 2-8 players, never plays the same, and takes (usually) 45 minutes to an hour, so it's great for parties. I've gotten enthusiastic feedback from my players.
I call it a "sofa table game." It's 3 feet tall, so the top is too high on a dining room table and the bottom too low on the floor, but a low sofa table is perfect.
I owe my handy neighbor Alex a lots of thanks for helping me with the construction.


WAR PROFITEER - Players are part of the industrial base that makes the weapons of war in World War II. Contracts come zooming from the War Department with tight deadlines and little concern for cost effectiveness. Players who research new military technologies are showered with orders from a grateful nation. Anyone can make scads of money in these circumstances, but who can do it best?


BUSINESS CONVENTION - This was a design challenge I set myself. My gaming group, The Greenville Mafia, started playing a newly-published game, Libertalia, which to my mind has an implausible backstory and major holes in the logic of how the character cards interact. I tried to think of a scenario that could correct these flaws but use the very interesting mechanics put forth in Libertalia. This design does it!


CITY-STATE - Players are knights in a province left leaderless by the deaths in battle of the King and the local Baron. As the Baron had no heirs, each of you attempts to mobilize enough of the local population (from Country, City, Church, and Army tracks) to become the obvious candidate for the next Baron. Or if the country stays politically unstable, you might carve out your own city-state. This is a Euro game with a lot of choices and no clear winning strategy, especially as you are each backed by a different local faction that throws its weight behind you at the end of the game. I'm currently preparing the prototype; the picture shows proofs of some of the cards. I'm excited by this; I think it will play well.


CAVE MINER - Players lead teams of miners into a dangerous gemstone mine which is being gradually flooded. The better stones are down deep - but the penalties for losing a miner will be prohibitive. How low do you go? I see two sets of rules for this game: one for kids that uses straightforward rules and another for adults that takes into account such things as the formation of air pockets that can allow a player to wrestle out more stones before abandoning a flooding gallery. This game came to me during a 10-minute break while I was photoshopping cards for CITY-STATE - then I had to take the rest of the afternoon to get it down on paper!

When I say I invented a game, it means I've written a document, usually 6 - 14 pages long, detailing the situation, the game mechanics, the charts and tables (if any), the sequence of play, special situations, a list of the needed game components, and enough notes to write a ruleset. I'll also list the areas that have to be felt out by the playtesting crew to see if the balancing and play mechanics mesh properly. In CITY-STATE, for instance, which has the 14-pg design document, I even have all the 268 cards (4 player decks and 2 game decks) detailed out, but on most of the others I only have general notes describing the cards and maps used. That work gets fleshed out during prototyping.

PhotoShop Project

As just a noodler, and neither a PS pro nor an artist, permit me my small victories when I learn how to do something new.
A project I've just finished is learning how to convert texture files from my library into 3D text. This isn't hard, and is potentially useful for titling a slide presentation.

This first one is from a close-up of the rusted steel on a bridge on the Virginia Creeper Trail near Damascus, VA. The Creeper is an excellent example of a rails-to-trails project. You can mount a bicycle at the upper end of the trail and coast virtually the entire 13 miles to Damascus. Of course, if you want to go the remaining 12 miles to Abingdon, you're going to have to pump hard!

 Buried in an old post on this blog is a 2010 story about my son Hunter and me helping the Greenville community attempt to persuade Google to do their 1GB/sec fiber optic test here. It failed, but it was fun! About 2,000 of us spelled out GOOGLE in their correct logo colors on a hillside after dark, by swinging lightsticks rapidly in circles while a helicopter filmed us.
This picture is of an arc of light from Hunter's lightstick while we were waiting for dark. The light looked solid and the picture resembled the edge of a china plate. I thought it really captured the essence of "Light Fantastic!" And after some experimenting, I was able to get the words to follow the same curvature.



It's unlikely you would guess the basic photograph for this image. It's a cropped selection of feathers from a picture of a peacock that Brenda took in Charleston, SC.!

But to me it looks kinda sea-floor-ish or maybe reminiscent of waves - hence the title.

This photo is pretty straightforward. I shot the blue, blue water as our cruise boat headed west around Kauai to the Na Pali coast on our trip there a couple years ago.

I made a nice title for the slide show of our trip, but maybe this one will replace it.

Doing Push-Ups - Not Pushing Up Daisies!

Thirty years ago this month - I graduated from Army boot camp/AIT at Ft. Benning, Ga. A couple days before, my company performed its final PT test. I maxed my score on the 2-mile run and sit-ups, but I fell 2 shy of a perfect 61 in push-ups.

That's always bothered me. So while running and sit-ups have fallen into my rear-view mirror, I've kept up the practice of "pushing away the planet."

And now, thirty years later, I can do 61. In half the allowed 2 minutes. Without breathing hard. 

Drill Sergeant: are you listening?!

And So, On...

My father died 28 years ago today, killed by his second heart attack. Because I was born on his 28th birthday, today I am exactly his age at his death.


It's strange to think that, tomorrow and forever afterward, I will be older than my father. I'm exploring uncharted lands.

I figure my genes have gotten me this far. To the extent my lifespan exceeds today, I count that a dividend of all my conscious choices for careful eating, weight control, exercise, and stress management.

I plan to enjoy it.

Game Designer

Return guests of this blog may remember that I'm part of a local boardgaming group of some notoriety: The Greenville Mafia.  (See http://techsmiths.blogspot.com/2010/08/world-boardgaming-championships.html) We play weekly in our own condo (well, technically it's owned by four of our members) and cycle through a lot of games.

You can't play forever without having some ideas of your own.

I drove home after gaming one night with an idea for a game that I bounced off Hunter. After some back-and-forth, a completely different idea emerged, which I developed over the next week into what I called "MOVIE MAGNATE."

Players assume the role of movie studios, charged with producing films and then marketing them to the public, in competition with each other.

It took me another week or so to prototype the game. (Yes, everyone who has seen it in person correctly deduced I raided a copy of "Can't Stop!" for some of the components!) Cutting and gluing cards consumed more hours than I care to remember!

Four of my buddies were good enough to be Play-Test Dummies and sit down to a game while I sat by, doing double-duty as scorekeeper/banker and as note-taker for problems and improvement suggestions. Version 1 actually required a calculator to determine box office receipts... Even experienced gamers can be naive about what players might put up with!

Play-test #1 was really helpful in sharpening my pencil. Aside from the embarrassing mistake of completely forgetting to make one of the decks of cards, the game had too many fiddles, even aside from the calculator. I wrote up my notes that night, and then I refused to think about the game for a week.

By the time I returned to the drawing table, my subconscious had worked out solutions to the objections discovered by my Dummies. Er, Buddies. I re-wrote the rules, developed new charts (bye, bye, calculator!), and replaced half the cards with new, improved versions (groan!).

I had a harder time coercing four to sit down at the table next gaming night, but after suitable application of wheedling & cudgeling, I had a crew. And I'm pleased to report that Version 2 was much, MUCH better! Most of my notes from that session involved play-balance tweaks and optional rules for experienced players.

So, right now I'm in another down-week of mental fermentation, before I prepare Version 3. That one will get an acid test - my wife Brenda has scheduled a family game when we journey to Atlanta to visit Dear Daughter later this month!

Book Planning

I have habitually kept a wish-list of public domain books to narrate as I think of them or discover them. (There's over 90 on the list at the present!) I normally make an attempt at ranking my wish list - at least for the top one to three books - so that I can forecast my activities ahead for a few months. I keep a spreadsheet of my readings, with a planning page that plumbs in my expected time commitment each day in order to fix a target for each book's completion.  Both of these I update upon completion so I can look back and see how well my planning process fared against Real Life.

That process has gotten more complicated by my shift to professional recordings. Since for the most part those narrations are the result of successful auditions and a negotiated contract for production, they must take priority over my LibriVox work. In a recent case, my audition was submitted a full year before the publisher awarded the book to me, and then they gave me 5 weeks to produce it.

So now when I slot time for a LibriVox recording, I go to the wish list and feel for which title is calling me the loudest. It's frequently not the one I had nominally placed at the top of the list.

In mid-June I had a pause between projects and I wanted to do something fun, with character voice work.  "The Adventures of Pinocchio" wasn't even on my list, but when I ran across it somewhere on the Web, it was an "ah-ha" moment - I knew I wanted to do it, and soon. I started it the day after finishing "The Enchanted Island" for Audiobooks by Mike Vendetti, had one week clear, and then had to share time with my next pro project, "A User's Guide to the Universe" (which is now in final approval); still, I finished it in three weeks.

I started my formal book planning process in 2008. I finished ten books that year, 11 in 2009, 15 in 2010, 16 last year, and this year I've done 9 through July.

Dabbling With Digital Effects

Last year, I finally caved to the idea that it's a PhotoShop world, stopped using Corel Paint Shop Pro, and picked up PhotoShop Elements. Now I don't have to translate "how-to's" from PS commands to PSP's.

Then I subscribed to Adobe PhotoShop Elements Techniques. It's a bimonthly magazine that describes and leads you through interesting projects, specifically in the PSE world, rather than its big brother's.

Recently I was introduced to OnOne's programs for extending and simplifying PS, and I invested in their PhotoSuite 6.1.  I have to say - I like it!  As a completely amateur photographer and digital noodler, I don't work with these tools every day, and I appreciate things that are simple enough to remember how to use between sessions. So I'll give OnOne some props: go check them out at https://www.ononesoftware.com/  I've watched several of their videos and attended four Webinars which add to my appreciation of what can be done and how to do it.

I'm also testing Photomatix, a tone-mapper that enables me to produce HDR (High Dynamic Range) pictures from a series of bracketed exposures. I've admired HDR for years, but my prosumer Canon camera doesn't support it, so being able to gin it up on the computer is a workaround.

So, herewith a few Before-and-Afters: (click on them for larger versions)

 Nandina Bush

Gargoyles at Biltmore House

Bridge Over the Reedy River

Barnegat Light

Entry Tunnel, Watkins Glen

Revolutionary War Encampment