Art: Payne’s Grey Dragon

Blue grey ink strokes depicting a large dragon in front of a small girl with arm raised. I wrote underneath a birthday greeting in French for my 16 year-old son.

For my son’s 16th birthday, I painted a dragon. Adrien wanted me to paint some version of Toothless and Light Fury from the movie series “How to train your dragon”. I had intended to paint them in gouache. But in the meantime I discovered the Sennelier Payne’s Grey ink brushpen.

This is after a digital artwork sketch by William Morris-Julien who is creative director in the video games industry.

Finished piece framed in white wood and white mounting mat

Resulting painting framed in white wood. The picture mount hides the birthday greeting.

He liked it well enough.

Dream: V Wing AirPods

In a dream that felt particularly real, a kind and good looking stranger arranged my Apple AirPods into a V Wing…

I had no idea this was even possible! I was in a diner in a busy and dark megalopolis, minding my own business, when this guy eyes me, leaves his young companion at adjacent table, sets himself in front of me and deftly handled my Apple AirPods and case. His fingers and hands were like those of Rubik’s cubes players. The next moment he set on the table what looked like a small V Wing Star Wars spaceship. He said, “there, now you have your own portable loudspeakers” and left.

I looked at the beautiful object in front of me, and thought I needed a second pair to use in-ear, because I would never be able to arrange them this way again.

I also tried to think of what to tell the stranger to hold on to him longer, but nothing came to mind and I was disappointed. That’s it.

I woke up wondering just how loud the small device would be 🙂

The good things about my Mastodon clients

For a few years I was a happy and fulfilled user of the iPhone app Metatext, a client for the federated social network Mastodon. When Metatext stopped being developed, I spent days reading comparisons, trying other clients, and settled on two which eventually matched all of my criteria:

  1. Ice Cubes for Mastodon (free), an open source, collaborative, SwiftUI Mastodon client made by @dimillian
  2. Ivory for Mastodon by Tapbots (subscription), a Mastodon Client for iOS & Mac.

I donate 0,99€ per month to the developer of Ice Cubes for Mastodon, and I pay the yearly subscription for Ivory (which costs 1,50€ per month.)

There are a 8 features specific to #IceCubesApp and 7 features specific to #ivory that I am really keen about. Since neither implemented them all, I continue to use both.

Ice CubesIvory
Quote post transforms the quoted post into a card with embedded contentBoost/favorite from/as a different account
Featured hashtags surfaced on our own profile + clicking them filters only our own posts using that hashtag (Ivory’s implementation in v. 1.7)Label in the timeline to denote posts displayed as a result of following a hashtag (Ice Cubes implements it as of 2023-12-04)
Add/edit filters via our own profileApp-integrated statistics for the rolling week, with bar graphs, directly in the tray
Private messages button in the trayUngrouped notifications
Filtering notifications in the notifications paneDate format choice between relative & absolute (I’m a sucker for the latter)
Collapse long postsOption to get a missing Alt text reminder
Auto-detect language when postingCan send iPhone “stickers”
Displays all posts for a given followed hashtag (whereas Ivory apparently displays only a portion)
comparison table of features I love that are specific to each application