I was exclusively concerned with Peewee Herman, Batman, and Edward Scissor Hands at the time the Gulf War was happening, but as I grew to learn about it as a teenager and further as an adult, the photographs of the burning oil fields always struck something in me. Towering columns of fire shooting up from the Earth, speckled across an endless horizon, burning day and night. I sometimes feel how those images look. Particularly, the unseen part. I feel like that oil deep beneath the surface. Not knowing how much is under there, but only that it’s being violently spent every minute of every hour of every day.

Della’s first Six Foot Giraffe. Love how her little hands appear to be proudly presenting her limited edition, Six Foot Giraffe Della Anthem Onesie. Can’t wait to meet her, but truly I can’t wait till she’s old enough to sneak and share candy with until we’re both sick to our stomachs. Everyone needs that aunt or uncle, and hell, I think it could be me.

Headed up to Big Bear for a long weekend getaway with the Boggs’. We did some light hiking, set a few smoke detectors off cooking, some hot tubbing, some card playing, some star gazing, and gathered around some candles and a fireplace wondering when the power would come back on. We also taught the kids how to play Roulette, for better or for worse. Spencer and Nikki, please, please don’t grow up to be degenerate gamblers. The house always wins.















I don’t typically have a problem with mindless phone scrolling at night. By day’s end I’m tired and ready for sleep. The morning can be another story though. I’m awake by 7am somedays, but sometimes not “up” for another hour or even more. Usually because I’m mindlessly scrolling through my phone. News, stocks, social media, wikipedia rabbit holes, whatever. Even though this doesn’t happen all the time, I don’t want it to happen at all. It’s not how I want to spend what time I have, so I decided for all for February to make a hard rule to not touch my phone in bed. Morning or night. Unsurprisingly, it was a great idea.

Alexis is usually still sound asleep when my watch silently buzzes on my wrist at 7:30am, and I open my eyes. It’s here where I would usually reach for my phone and scroll from anywhere between 5 minutes to an hour and a half. But now that I couldn’t do that, I really only had two options, go back to sleep, or get up and get going. I almost always got going. I don’t start work till 10am, and working remotely means no commute, so everyday I had a good chunk of time to do the things I wanted to do, just for me. Man, does that always feel good. Doing what you want to do, before the day has any opportunity to dictate what you have to do. I’ve known this, and that’s why I like waking up early nowadays. Sticking to this hard rule for the month helped me protect some of my most valuable time by making sure it wasn’t being siphoned off by my thumb and my phone.

There was a small downside. I really only read the news at night or the morning, and usually in bed. So cutting that out maybe meant being a little less informed at any given moment. Though, I find a lot of news is just the same story everyday with a few more details than the day before. In the end then, I have to guess I wasn’t missing too much by only catching up on the weekends.

All in all, I’m glad I took the time to do this, and I’m going to keep it up. It was a good reset. I know that old habits die hard though, so I took it a step further and have since permanently moved my phone and charger across the room. Can’t reach it from bed at all anymore. I’d go even further and set my phone to blast Eye of the Tiger across the room at 7AM, but I’m afraid that could land my wife in prison for attempted murder.

More world and puzzle building for Greenfield.

It was a good day exploring the Venice canals. She swears she’s smiling under there.

Well over a day had passed before I even realized I got a very, very small feature on the Unreal Engine Twitter account this weekend. I was pretty surprised. It means this image hit the eyes of somewhere in the neighborhood of half a million people. Don’t really know what that equates to, if anything at all, but I know it felt good to be acknowledged even if in the smallest way by the very people connected to the software I’ve been trying my hardest to learn.

They made a one day only Mars donut to celebrate the Perseverance Rover touching down on the Martian surface. It’s been so awesome to hear about my buddy Mike’s experiences and insights over his past several years working on the project at JPL.

Can’t help but feel pretty cool being able say I know someone who works at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and yet even cooler to be able to call him a friend. Congrats Mike, and thanks for any excuse to have a donut.

Building out some environmental puzzles while I continue developing the art direction for Greenfield. Feeling momentum now. Making an image in your mind’s eye visible to anyone, takes time and takes effort. When you can get it right though, and seen just the way you see it, it’s really something.





More scenes from quarantine. She’s not actually playing anything, but she sure looks cool doing it.

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