Jason C Daniels

@jasoncdaniels

Disabled 54 yr old software engineer. I enjoy programming, TTRPGS, food & more! If you ever see me yell "I live!" I'm exaggerating. #spoonie #disability #ttrpg #programming #cartography #gamecartography #art Under 18? 🚫 DNI!

997 Following1,320 Followers12,497 Posts

Bluesky

Is this your profile?Claim it and jasoncdaniels.dirty.social is yours.Claim profile

Jason C Daniels@jasoncdaniels· Jun 10

Oops! I forgot to share this tidbit too. I'm back to comfortably wearing 36" waist pants (i'm 5'5") Here's a pic I took of my progress. (Yes that is a Xenomorph cane)

A picture of Jason in a mirror standing, face slightly turned to the right. He's wearing a short sleeved button up gray shirt, black slacks, a brown belt, brown loafers, and using a black cane, while holding his phone.

Jason C Daniels@jasoncdaniels· May 11

I limit mine to a bench in a Hosta garden. It's in a park across the road. Sometimes there are turtles and squirrels, mostly ducks and geese, occasionally a crane. (squirrels never sit still long enough for a pic) I did have one of these mistake me for a place to land, until it was almost on me!

A small white and gray bird with black and yellow markings sits perched on a branch surrounded by tree leaves.

Jason C Daniels@jasoncdaniels· Apr 19

Here are some photos I cleaned up and cropped. I took these this morning. The dog is the local "cute tax" collector. He's an 8 month old chow named Leo. All photos (C) Jason C Daniels, April 19 2026

Four mallards are shown in a murky pond. Three (two males, one female) have their butts up in the air as they feed. One is on lookout, glaring at me, secretly seething in a way that only ducks can.

Photo (C) Jason C Daniels, April 19 2026

The backside of a Canada Goose standing on a log in a murky pond, using just one leg.

Photo (C) Jason C Daniels, April 19 2026

Pictured is a chow named Leo, sitting on a concrete patio. He aggressively collects what is known as the "Cute Tax." (pets, he demands pets.)

Photo (C) Jason C Daniels, April 19 2026

Jason C Daniels@jasoncdaniels· Mar 22

Also, I joined Chess.com recently. After trying just the electronic board I found myself craving a real physical board. To help me walk through potential scenarios. Here's the board laid out for a current daily game (move as often as you like in a day, no more than 3 days wait, though) 1/2

A chess board with the pieces arranged according to a current game.

Jason C Daniels@jasoncdaniels· Mar 22

Here are the pics of the finished journal. (Interior pics omitted as there's no difference in page appearances)

The spine of the book. It has a label that reads "Personal Journal 2026" in black ink on light brown paper. The spine itself is a medium brown book cloth. A small part of the front cover is visible on the right.

The front cover of the journal. To the left is the spine, in brown bookcloth. The central part of the page is a fuscia- very dark magenta marbling with gold elements scattered throughout. The upper center portion has a label affixed, a mid-tone for the range in the marbling, bearing the text Personal Journal. The right edge is black with some gold marbling, with a tarnished brass strip separating the main body from the black edging and tucks under the tarnished brass corner protectors.

The back cover of the journal. To the rigth is the spine, in brown bookcloth. The central part of the page is a fuscia- very dark magenta marbling with gold elements scattered throughout. The left edge is black with some gold marbling, with a tarnished brass strip separating the main body from the black edging and tucks under the tarnished brass corner protectors.

Jason C Daniels@jasoncdaniels· Mar 6

While taking these pictures I noticed an issue indicating the press was pressed too tightly overnight. Glue didn't penetrate deep enough between the pages. I put it in the fancy press w/ hardly any pressure. Since it's hide glue, reapplying water will reliquify the glue to a degree. 2/2

A photo of page 1 of the daily journal section. It sports date, day of week, sleep related, and meals related fields in addition to standard journal lines.

You may note the page separating from the spine in the upper left. This is what I'm referencing for my motivation to rewet the spine and place it back in the book press, essentially redoing some of last night's work. (Except spreading the glue around, obviously.)

The intent here is that as a hide glue (homemade with pine rosin to help delay gelling) rewetting it should make it, more or less, runny again. This time the book press has hardly any pressure. This should allow the glue to penetrate deeper, hopefully correcting this issue.

In a couple of hours I'll tighten the press a bit. Then gradually tighten it every couple hours from there, then check glue penetration again this evening.

Jason C Daniels@jasoncdaniels· Mar 6

Things were dry enough for some handling this morning. Before bed I applied the headbands (bad idea) and bookmark ribbon. I THOUGHT things were aligned well enough to eliminate trimming. They aren't. But I can't trim w/ headands on. Here are pictures of the spine and some pages. 1/2

The book spine pictured in the heavy, metal, "good" book press, with spine cloth trimmed, headbands applied and a black bookmark ribbon glued in place.

An image of the title page of the journal. It reads "Personal Journal" in a fancy font and has two thick lines underneath it. (The intent is I'll write the year and my name in by hand.)

A photo of one of the contents pages (there are 4). The same font is used for the page title: Contents. And it has two columns: Page(s) and Date(s)/Subject(s).

The reason for the second column having dual purpose is I often make notes of hobbies and projects. As well there's a 27 page notes section at the end. (a-z,aa). I've not found many commercial journals featuring this, so I ensured mine did.

A photo of the Notes page. It's just lined paper with a page number and the title "Notes." The page number for this page is aa. (a-z,aa-zz...etc. is the numbering scheme I used for the notes section)

You may notice imperfections in the printing, arrangement...etc. I'm well aware of them. I just wanted to get this done. I'll very likely make another one or two versions with these items tweaked.

Jason C Daniels@jasoncdaniels· Mar 6

Oops I forgot to share pictures of the page layouts. I've also included a pic of the spine in the cheap book press. I'll use the fancy one for later steps.

A journal page with several fields at the top to fill in, including wake, sleep, pain numbers...etc. as well as date and day of the week. A second column is on the right side for half the height of the page to track meals.

This is a mockup of the title, contents and notes pages.

The title page reads "Personal Journal" in a fancy font with two thick lines beneath it.

The same font is the header for the contents page. There are two columns one for page numbers and one for the dates/subjects on the page.

The Notes page is just lined paper with "Notes" at the top.

A picture of a book being constructed. The image is of the text block (all the pages) in a book press, with the spine cloth being glued to the pages. I'm using grade 100 linen cheese cloth as the spine cloth and the homemade glue I posted about recent-ish. After it's fully dried I'll remove it from the book press, trim and glue the sides of the spine cloth in place. Then repress the entire block until it's a uniform width. Then reapply more glue. After that is casing it in (applying the cover.) I'll be doing hardcover on this one. I've not decided on actual wood or pasteboard. (I'm not a fan of the chipboard I've purchased. I'm probably doing something wrong when cutting it.)

Jason C Daniels@jasoncdaniels· Mar 1

You can do it with ALT+Scroll Wheel on Windows. You need to enable it in the settings dialog. The attached image has the option highlighted in yellow I still want a spot to directly edit the rotation, however.

The Affinity Designer settings dialog. I'm not transcribing it all. The important takeaway is that the setting I named is highlighted in yellow to make it easier to see.

Jason C Daniels@jasoncdaniels· Feb 3

This is who runs this account. See the ALT text for details.

Jason C Daniels@jasoncdaniels· Jan 19

Here's a random sketch I did between last night and today.

A 5"x8" pencil sketch of a mountainous landscape on a partly cloudy day with a floating island in the upper left. The landscape itself viewed through a giant eye shaped viewport within a giant metal structure.

The landscape has mountains framing a forested valley with two rivers and a gulch running up the center. The outer set of mountains generally curve inward with the most distant set appearing to touch curved peaks leaving an oblong hollow bit showing one final mountain far off in the distance. A bit closer to the viewer and in the lower right quadrant of the visible landscape is a lone mountain surrounded by forest.

The interior of the structure the viewer is in, is largely unfinished (in terms of the sketch) It features riveted panels generally forming the supporting structure.

The lower left, unfinished portion features my initials and date. The upper left features the tentative title: A View From A [Colossus]. (I'll correct the spelling in the next version.)

Jason C Daniels@jasoncdaniels· Jan 18

Here's a Red Backed Shrike. They're the cutest murder-bird you'll ever see. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red-bac...

A picture of a Red Backed Shrike sitting on a twig with an out of focus green background.

A red backed shrike is small and is light tan and white breasted, medium-gray headed with a black stripe over the eyes, having reddish brown wings and back, with brown wingtips and a brown tail.

They're a carnivorous bird found in Europe, the UK, Russia and as far south as Southern Africa.

Jason C Daniels@jasoncdaniels· Jan 11

I made another creepy doodle with the same fountain pen. Still lots of ink left in the stock cartridge. LOL.

This image features a view from the inside of a cave with a very large, and front-most radially symmetric, trilobal, alien looking creature rooted to the ground with two of the three "arms" at least partially visible. The one fully in view has two "fingers", one of which has a massive claw. The other "finger" has a broken claw. The second visible arm mostly extends off the page. The third is not visible. The creature faces upward as a matter of physical structure. It has three proportionately small chelicera and pairs of gill/breathing slits arranged roughly equally spaced around its body.

Behind the foremost creature is a natural stone pillar, where a stalagmite and stalactite that met, and a view out of the cave. In front and near the top of the pillar are a row of 8 paired fangs/chelicerae. These extend down towards the large, radially symmetric, creature.

The exterior of the cave shows a drizzly and overcast landscape with some clouds visible. The landscape features a tree, grasslands, a barely recognizable lake, some hills, and some distant mountains.

The doodler's initials and date are scrawled on the stone column in the cave. The title of the doodle, "Broodlings," is scrawled on the foremost creature.

NOTES:
This started as another attempt at using up the ink (still got some left) mentioned in the prior picture. I intentionally practiced drawing fangs/claws/chelicerae. I made a row of 4 rightward curving and one leftward curved chelicerae. When looking at it, I saw it could be a set of creatures suspended from a ceiling. So I went with it. The trilobal "brood tender" came about from a botched attempt at a clawed hand. (I intended to have what became the tender picking and eating the ceiling suspended critters.)

Jason C Daniels@jasoncdaniels· Jan 11

Here's a demented doodle I did on a sheet I previously used for lettering practice. I'm using up the non-waterproof ink that came in the pen (got a new fountain pen which only takes short cartridges). #art #artsky #ink #doodle #drawing

A demented doodle in black ink with some red and black lettering practice in the foreground. From the left, it has a bishop-like figure (chess) sprouting horns up top and tendrils from below. A demented jagged smiling face can be seen on its surface. The tendrils become other parts of the landscape.

Behind the "bishop" and right a little ways is a forest comprised of giant flora, possibly a mushroom forest. Beneath it are more tendrils and the doodler's initials (JCD) with the year (2026).

Above it are two flying spermatazoa-shaped creatures the leftmost of which has only its face visible. Immediately to the right of the "bishop" is a piece of landscape supporting a gigantic sphere, which itself shows a partial scene within it.

To just the left and below the sphere is a large and dark hill with markings that resembles the upper part of a skull or face, with hair.

The giant sphere's scene shows another, very small, flying spermatazoan-shaped creature towards the mid left. To its right a land based spermatazoan-shaped creature is balancing on its tail, apparently scrutinizing the scenery outside its domain, or something which is out of view of the observer. The background has a faint grid pattern and a shadow of the creature.

Beneath that sphere and cutting off view of the bottom of it, is a jagged mountain with another gigantic tree with shrubs beneath it. To the right most of the page is a gigantic hill or mountain topped with a demented sharp toothed half face (the rest is off the page). The hill looks almost like sloughing of flesh, or perhaps gills.

Above the rightmost hill are two more spheres. The topmost appears to be showing a view from inside a cave looking out at a mountainous landscape. The other is unclear, but could either have giant pockmarks, or show a top-down and close scene of a forest with a segment of river. (Intended, but not well executed)

I blame Stone Temple Pilots for this drawing. (I had their album "Purple" playing for most of it.)

Jason C Daniels@jasoncdaniels· Jan 10

Been offline more than usual lately. It all started with cooking on the 1st of the year. That, overlooking the HOW, it led into a homemade shelving project utilizing 1/16th inch basswood plywood sheets. Here's the progress as of last night. Interior view has description of the project in ALT text.

Exterior rear view of homemade hollow 1/16th inch basswood plywood panels (panels are 1/4th inch thick assembled)

Image: Interior view of homemade hollow 1/16th inch basswood plywood panels (panels are 1/4th inch thick assembled)

Project Description:
This is very much a work in progress, and early on in the process. And I experimented with a couple homemade texture pastes to fill small voids and imperfections, because I'm clumsy. They may not be all that visible unless you zoom in.

The basic construction of this is 12x8x1/4" and 16x12x1/4" hollow panels. I'm making the panels from 1/8th" square dowels and 12x8x1/16" and 16x12x1/16" sheets of basswood, plywood. The backs are just plain 1/16" pieces of plywood as are the front wood corner pieces. I'll be trying "wood flour" (ultrafine sawdust) based filler/texture paste as well. The wood flour arrives on Sunday.

And this is upside down. It's curing from the texture paste, of which the moisture caused some warping of the larger box. The weights are keeping it in position so it doesn't warp too badly. And I'm going to add another level between the two before its finished. And I might add "feet". I will add corner protectors to the finished shelving.

Before the corner protectors and maybe feet are added it'll be coated in primer and painted with acrylic paint. I ordered some 1pt bottles of cheap acrylic for this. I'm thinking about making a homemade primer/gesso (primer usually used on canvases, but also sees use on wood panel art).

Otherwise I should have enough store bought gesso.

Exterior right view of homemade hollow 1/16th inch basswood plywood panels (panels are 1/4th inch thick assembled)

Exterior left view of homemade hollow 1/16th inch basswood plywood panels (panels are 1/4th inch thick assembled)

Jason C Daniels@jasoncdaniels· Dec 28

Post a perfect [for you] album from the 90s that isn't Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, or Alice in Chains I bought this album on a road trip, for grins (I loved the cover art, never heard Fear Factory before). I loved it from the bombastic intro! And it's a concept album. (love those)

The album cover for Fear Factory's "Obsolete" [1]. It's central feature is a brain and spinal column rendered to resemble a spermatozoon against a brownish aged-paper effect for the background, with the color lightest near the center, getting darker in an irregular manner moving toward the edges. A blocky sketch of the Brain-spermatazoon is visible on the aged-paper, and a zoomed in, cropped, and rotated, slightly out of focus, version of the brain-spermatazoon is "closer" to the viewer,

Trivia:
A. The album itself is a dystopian story based on Burton C. Bell's short story "Conception 5." It doesn't end well for the protagonist.

B. The song "Timelessness" features Mario Savio's "Bodies Upon the Gears" speech as it's intro.

C. After the main story there are several "bonus" tracks, including an industrial remake of Gary Numan's "Cars" featuring Numan on vocals.

D. For further reading, Wikipedia has a very good article about this album.

End Notes:
1. The text for the album title is highly stylized using a degree symbol for the first O, Greek capital Omega for the second O, a plus sign for the t and a lower case e, all other letters are uppercase.

Jason C Daniels@jasoncdaniels· Dec 27

Here's a picture of it. The locations column on the left needs a title. And there are a few other spots that need fine tuning. The fountain pen kicked out a glob of ink when drawing the chasm, bleh. Materials: 8.5"x11" Strathmore Calligraphy paper with Kalour pastel pencils, ink #fantasymap #art

A practice fantasy style map made with pastel pencils featuring 23 numbered locations. The left has a column with space for the end user to name the various numbered locations on the map.

The artist's initials and year are in the lower right corner on either side of the simplistic compass rose.

Jason C Daniels@jasoncdaniels· Dec 20

When I see posts like this, I always think of this XKCD image: imgs.xkcd.com/comics/depen...

An image of a bunch of precariously stacked blocks with two text blocks describing the concepts represented by the blocks.

The top text (for all of the blocks) reads:

"All Modern Digital Infrastructure"

An arrow points at the most precarious spot in the stack of blocks, one that, if removed, would cause almost everything to collapse, and has the following associated text:

"A project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003."

Jason C Daniels@jasoncdaniels· Dec 14

This was my first video game console (whole family's) around 1978/1979. I was 7 or 8. So any video game was cool (or lame) my whole youth. I'm not sure "mid" was really a social concept for kids back then, either.

Jason C Daniels@jasoncdaniels· Dec 13

FYI, in case nobody told ya. Your handle is showing up as "Invalid Handle." I spotted this while catching up on your recent posts.

Jason C Daniels@jasoncdaniels· Nov 3

I filled in the scroll with notes for making the scroll. It's not the neatest for handwriting. I opted to use two homemade inks (bistre, and bistre mixed with blue watercolor) as well as one far too runny fountain pen. I *MIGHT* add simple illustrations at the bottom, later. #artsky #art #scroll

The scroll with instructions on how to make the scroll, with the closure string at the bottom. (I'll transcribe these later, my wrists hurt too much right now.)

The finished scroll, rolled up and closed with a string.

Jason C Daniels@jasoncdaniels· Nov 2

And here it is. The surface is quite smooth. And it should be easy to write/paint/draw on. I'm unsure which I'll do with it. This was really just a project exploring the question of "how might I make a scroll using sumi paper?" The answer: Back it with cheesecloth.

A smallish scroll (27cmx41cm writable surface) made from Shu (ripe/sized) sumi/xuan paper backed with grade 100 cheesecloth and two umbilici (dowels) attached at either end, place on an SI unit cutting mat. The right-most umbilicus has the ends capped with simple finials. The left-most umbilicus is trimmed to barely wider than the paper. The paper and cloth are thin enough so that the white grid on the mat is still semi-visible as is the wood color on the umbilici.

Jason C Daniels@jasoncdaniels· Oct 22

If you see this, quote with a vampire that isn’t Dracula.

A "strigoi" (vampire) from "The Strain" (2014) with blood running down its chin.

Jason C Daniels@jasoncdaniels· Oct 5

While I've not been feeling the best (have a lingering bug of some sort) I decided to doodle with pencils again. It's a planet with 2 moons in graphite: Tehvri IV. This picture started as marginalia on the various eyes/irises I was trying to draw.

A slightly cropped 8.5" x 11" pencil drawing of a planet with two moons on 5mm dotted-grid paper. The planet has a lot of surface water and polar ice caps. Each polar icecap is attached to a continent. There are 3 other continents visible. Most of the landmasses are on the night/shaded side of the planet.

Jason C Daniels@jasoncdaniels· Sep 27

I've added lashes and darkened areas with 2B and 6B lead. Not too shabby for a first go at this level of detail. I'll need some more practice to draw things to the way I want, tho.

$The (mostly) finished left eye drawn in graphite (HB, 2B and 6B mechanical pencils) on dotted grid paper. The iris is intentionally distorted to appear fractured.$

Jason C Daniels@jasoncdaniels· Sep 26

Here's an eye I'm working on with a graphite pencil (HB mechanical) on 1cm dotted grid paper. The iris is intentionally distorted to appear fractured. It still needs lashes, darkening, and a little cleanup. I am using this tutorial as for the basis of the eye. rapidfireart.com/2013/05/08/h...

$A left eye drawn in graphite (HB mechanical pencil) on dotted grid paper. The iris is intentionally distorted to appear fractured.$

Jason C Daniels@jasoncdaniels· Sep 13

I inked the title page of my gridded journal for compass roses. As you can see I don't yet have a very steady hand. 😆 The compass roses, are approximately scaled down versions of full page ones. I've got more purely digital and hand drawn ones to add to the book.

A hand drawn journal title page with "Compass Roses" in very large and fancy text, beneath are three scaled down compass roses and the artist's name (Jason C. Daniels) along with the word "sketchbook," all in black ink.

The pens used to ink it are to the right of the page, Pigma Microns, sizes 005, 01, 02, and FB (fine brush).

- The top-most compass rose is patterned after a handheld compass.
- The left-most compass rose is a squat broadsword with the point facing northward.
- The right-most is a 4 point star elongate on the N-S axis, superimposed on a ring with markers between the points on the star, every 22.5 degrees (approximately).

Jason C Daniels@jasoncdaniels· Sep 9

Here's the mandala, more or less finished. It's one of the many free ones available from mondaymandala.com

Pictured is a floral patterned mandala with concentric rings of color patterns. The inner most is a combination of yellow and orange with red highlights. The next ring is blue and purple with red highlights....etc. the outermost ring alternates between blues and oranges. Blues, greens, and oranges are the main colors used with red and yellow serving more as accent colors.

The colored pencils I used are from the 36 color June Gold mechanical pencil set I purchased in Nov of 2024.

Jason C Daniels@jasoncdaniels· Sep 7

Thanks! I did putz around for around an hour tonight. (Which was probably pushing it) And I came up with the following two rough draft quality items. I do need to figure out a better lighting situation for photos. 😆

Two very small "minimaps" on basswood. The leftmost is plain graphite and of a mountain range with some adjacent grtasslands and forests. The rightmost is in colored pencil and features a major shoreline, a lake, multiple rivers, forests, and mountain ranges. They're both "rough draft" quality.

The short edges are just over 4cm (just under 2 inches)

Jason C Daniels@jasoncdaniels· Aug 27

Here's the little box I made. It's a sturdy thing a roughly 4x4x6 inches. Each side wall and bottom is made of two plies of 1/16th inch basswood. The central plank is 3 plies for the inner portion.