My snowy house of snow (that got snowed on)

We had a couple big blizzards in Seattle this February! While the snow didn't stick around too long IRL, it made a big impression on our collective imagination. My house got a beautiful white blanket, worthy to be memorialized. 

Snowstorm in Seattle

Seattle just got smacked by the snowiest February in 50 years. Panic in the streets, grocery stores looted, cats marrying dogs, and this little sketch I drew while sitting by the fire.

Book Thoughts - Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

TL;DR: I adore and admire Elizabeth Holmes.

JK, LOL. You won't find a less sympathetic character in any book this year. J-Law is going to play her in a movie? Welp, I hope they fluff her up a bit or they've got a paper-flat villain.

But the book Bad Blood is a nice tick-tock, true-crime thriller. If that's your jam, get on this. Since there are a lot of great reviews already by people smarter than me, but I won't reinvent that particular wheel. But I do have some thoughts to add (in addition to endorsing the obvious* themes):

• Unlike so many of our top-name grifters, Holmes is not lazy. Sure, she was way overconfident and lacked a compass (moral or otherwise), but she busted her ass creating Theranos (and its $900m of funding) out of an original idea, thin air, and a billion hours of midnight oil. She pulled a LOT of very talented people into her wake and demanded the same level of sweat from them. It's snake oil for sure, and criminal, but not lazy.

• If I pray hard enough, will Ms. Holmes tell her side? I would love to understand how she saw this playing out, especially once Carryou was on her tail. It's one thing for the Theranos board to get all dreamy eyed, but I cannot understand what kind of gear-grinding was going on in her OWN head while the avalanche of devastating reporting went to print.

* Theranos was the quintessential IRL house of cards: delusions of grandeur by the kids, lack of oversight by the adults, wholesome sunk cost effect leading to criminal conspiracy... Jeezy Petes, read this book.

Book thoughts: American Kingpin

TD;DR: Buy this book. I devoured it in about three days.

If you're unfamiliar with the story of Silk Road and Ross Ulbrecht, think Breaking Bad but sub in a nice, quiet physics grad student for Walter White, and a darkweb contraband Amazon for Walter's blue sky meth.

This is a super compelling heart-of-darkeness journey with a true-crime tick-tock element that would make an amazing movie (please cast Robert Pattinson, who could be Ulbrecht's twin). Apparently there is a documentary out, if I find it I will update and link to it here.

Twisty road + GoPro + Hyperlapse = barf

(Work in progress disclaimer :D)

On Mercer Island (a fancy-pants neighborhood a few miles from Seattle) there is an absolutely primo road for motorcycles and scooters, called E. Mercer Way: two miles of uninterrupted, linked, beveled, 180° turns. 

As an experiment, I captured a run on my BMW GS with a GoPro on the "beak" and then 2x'd it in Hyperlapse, which you can see here.

Fort Worden and the Triangle of $#@*&!

Fort Worden, Washington is one of my favorite places, for a LOT of reasons. It's got an amazing history, it's haunted as hell, there are super cool military ruins that you can explore at will. I recently submitted an article to Atlas Obscura, and did this illustration to show how Ft. W. worked with other nearby artillery bases to form a triangle of fire that protected military assets in Puget Sound from seaborne invasion (this was in the days before air superiority in warfare).

Drawings with 50 strokes of the brush :\

Many, many years ago, as a young graphic artist working in an ad agency doing line art, I fell in love with the usual heroes: Durer, Hokusai, etc. I particularly loved Hokusai's crane drawings with one stroke of the brush.

Flash forward to yesterday, and I'm messing about with my Windows Surface Pro ink stylus, with a new app called Bamboo Paper (made by the folks at Wacom who know a thing or two about inking). Well, the pressure effect between the Surface screen and the Bamboo app was pretty great, so naturally I decided I would try to do a one-stroke drawing. Of course, it was super easy and worked out perfectly the first time! (I gave up on the one-stroke bit quite soon after I started)

The drawing was inspired by a one of my favorite photos: Elspeth Beard, the first British woman to ride her motorbike (an old BMW boxer!) around the entire globe, pulled over to chug warm water in a smoking hot desert, probably in someplace that ends in -stan. I can only explain a bit of why I love the photo so much: the figure she cuts is Wonder-Woman-style bad ass AND don't-care simultaneously. And I love the romance of old adventure photos. 

Here's the actual:

I'm not sure if it's wise to try to sketch one's favorite photo, but there you have it. The brush app worked great, anyway :D more to come, as it was fun!