Leif's CyberPunk Space Ship Drawings - Group 3

The top drawing has the most complete labeling of the nine space ship drawings in this series. It is the "S.S. Sorchalynn Fulcrum Class Corvette" commanded by "Captain Cailus Brietei. It is 90 meters long, 65 meters wide, 20 meters high and the cargo capacity is specified. It carries a crew of 30 and has 2 ion cannons, 2 laser cannons, 6 double laser cannons, 6 medium laser cannons, 1 tractor beam projector, and 2 proton torpedo launcher.

The middle and bottom ships are of a very different design than any of his other ones, following a curved motif. The middle one is the "S.S. Soriano, a Tomahawk Class Destroyer," and the bottom one is a "Barbier Class Scout," showing side and back views as well as the view looking down on the top of it.

Last night we saw the new Star Trek movie. We all (Peter Anthony and Darren were with us) commented on how Leif would have enjoyed it, wished we had his opinion of it, and I was also thinking about how his space ships corresponded to those we saw in the movie.

Leif's CyberPunk Space Ship Drawings - Group Two

Here are three more of Leif's CyberPunk space ships. The top one has three decks and features top, side and rear views. It is labeled with functions and crews quarters.

The middle one is called the "Stiletto" corvette blockade runner.

The bottom one is the "Painkiller" MedEvac ship.

Leif was meticulous about details and scale. He wanted his ships to be "playable" in the scenarios he created as gamemaster, and he carried those kinds of specifications over into his later association with ZAON and his desires for the development of that game.

Leif's CyberPunk Space Ship Drawings - Group One

I found nine drawings Leif made of space ships for his CyberPunk games. Each was designated with a name and attributes. He drew them in pencil on notebook paper and they are quite precisely drawn. It's interesting to me to compare them to drawings he made when he was in kindergarten. I think these are quite elegant designs.

The top one is designated as a "Raven Class Long Range Heavy Bomber." There is a small figure of a man at the bottom with the legend "= 6 feet" in order to indicate size.

The middle drawing is the "Night Hawk Heavy Fighter," and the lower one is a "Sparrow Class Fighter." I am amused by that name, as it makes me think that it is a small, light, and not very deadly "bird."

I think he did these drawings in 1998 but I can't be sure of that.

Leif's Kindergarten Art - Spring 1981 - Age 6

Leif had a lot of art talent, but he didn't pursue it. As I've written before, as a child he was immensely frustrated when he couldn't make his drawings look like they did in his head, or build models perfectly. He did a lot of drawing in elementary school, but less and less of it as he got into the later years of elementary school and junior high school. He started drawing again when he was in college and after the army while working on developing cyberpunk games with his friend Jason but other than that, he didn't spend time sketching or drawing.

When he was in kindergarten, his teacher and the art teacher thought he had a great deal of ability in art. Not only could he draw much better than most kindergarteners, he could portray motion and action, something extremely rare in young children's art, which is generally quite static. His kindergarten teacher at Sagamihara Elementary School, Mrs. Snell, collected about a dozen of his drawings for a portfolio which was displayed at a school open house. I kept it all these years until we were moving to Florida. It was done on large sheets of coarse manila paper which had begun to oxidize badly. Leif seemed to have no interest in it. I had thought I'd save it for him and for his children, but it wasn't going to last a lot longer and there wasn't anyone to give it to, so I scanned the drawings and very reluctantly discarded them. I'm so glad I have the scans.

In one of my posts in June 2008 I posted one of the drawings, of the Spaceship Enterprise from Star Trek. If you want to see it, look for the "drawings" keyword in the list at the bottom right.

These drawings had captions on them which Leif dictated to Mrs. Snell. I think they are too small to read here, but I'll put a list of them in order below. They are quite sophisticated for a six-year-old.

1. A secret gun I designed. You can click on a part and make it a laser. The view finder is really a finder, but push a button under the trigger and the finder shoots. The locking button is another trigger to shoot. The gun is now being charged with lasers!
2. Colonial Vipers (green) are exploding Cylons (black). Ion cannon shooting.
3. My own designs after the USA Enterprise space shuttles.
4. Some ships are disintegrated. Red lines are explosions.
5. A space cruiser and armed scout ships. The cruiser has a magnetic field.
6. Space cruiser (blue) exploding another space cruiser (red/black) and two asteroids.
7. Space shuttle -- my own ship. Smaller than the Enterprise. The cockpit holds nine people. It has three rockets but the big storage tank for fuel is smaller.
8. UFO

Leif's 9th Birthday - Honolulu, Hawaii - January 28, 1984 - Age 9

No broken arm in this one. :) This was Leif's first birthday in Hawaii. He was in third grade at Red Hill Elementary School and had a couple of good friends, Michael, who was a terrific artist, and Joey, with whom he could play GI Joe stuff. He was growing up fast.

He was in a special, very small class for gifted underachieving boys. Leif never liked academics. He could just listen and get it all, and could see little reason to bother with exerting himself to prove it in written work. The young man who taught this special weekly class did a fantastic job with those boys. He had them designing board games and writing the rules for them . . . and they had to be actually playable.

Leif took judo classes for the first time, tried a pottery class, and enjoyed going to the beach. We went to many different beaches in Hawaii, but our favorite was Bellows Beach. Later I'll post some photos taken there.

I have to smile when I see this cake. Another example of my less than expert cake decorating ability, but I think I had some Leif help with this one, which features some kind of space ship, something he spent a lot of time drawing then. At that age, he liked doing this kind of thing. Remember the giant R2D2 cookie he made and decorated at about the same age, that I posted before.

You can see that he is growing and changing, not a little boy any more (though he was always tall), and there is a sort of seriousness and tentativeness about him.

Happy Birthday, Leif!

Leif at Work a Year Ago - Age 32

Last December 20, 2007, Leif took this photo of himself at work. I found it on his computer after his death, yet another photo he had not shared with us. He rarely emailed photos to us. He was a telephone customer service agent for Medicare Part D and spent his workdays logged in on a computer and phone system accepting calls. Leif was good at his job and prided himself on his ability to explain things to people thoroughly and compassionately, but he came to abhor the US health care system because of its unfairness, with some people unable to get care without insurance and enormous amounts of money. Leif had health insurance because he was a military retiree and had VA benefits as well as health insurance from his job, and he was adamant about the need for universal health insurance. He felt terrible about having to explain to those who did have health insurance why something that was critical to their care wasn't covered.

I remember when Leif first came home from the army and wasn't yet permanently medically retired so the possibility of him losing his military benefits and health insurance was real. Even though he had asthma, he had the youthful expectation of good health and couldn't see why he should be concerned about finding a job with health insurance and benefits. Later, as his health deteriorated, his medications grew more expensive, and when he had to have the collarbone operation in July 2007, it became very important that he had health insurance. The bills for his operation alone totalled over $50,000, though they were greatly reduced by the limits the insurance had negotiated. Even so, he had out of pocket expenses that ruined his budget.

It's hard to believe Leif took this photo just under a year ago, and now he's gone. We never saw his workplace. After he died, we picked up the few belongings he had there in a box brought to our car by his team leader. There weren't many, but the box was heavy, mostly with the big jug of pennies that he had used to build the copper penny space ship in his cubicle. I posted a photo of that before. There was also the headset he's using in this photo, certificates of training, a one-year service award and commendation certificates, pens, pencils, and that's about all. You can see one of the commendation award certificates in the photo.

It would have been healthier for Leif to be in a job where he interacted directly with people. He was too isolated, both at work and at home. It might not have made a difference, but I think he would have been happier if he had had a job dealing with people and ideas and more activities with friends outside of work.

Leif - Enterprise Drawing - Kindergarten

Unlike some kids, Leif's interests were remarkably consistent throughout his life, although he didn't always express or pursue them in the same ways. One of his enduring passions was space ships, which of course went along with his passion for science fiction. He was a young child when the Star Wars and Star Trek movies were coming out, and they affected both him and his brother deeply.

Leif had a great deal of artistic talent and mightily impressed his kindergarten teacher with a series of drawings of space ships in motion and in battles and space guns firing. She had him make a portfolio of them for display.

His talent was particularly noteworthy because most children at the age of 5 or 6 are drawing very simple figures, often stick figures, and don't have any idea how to show motion or draw complex objects.

This drawing is one he made of the Space Ship Enterprise, and he drew it from memory when he was only five years old, which is even more impressive. We were living in Japan at that time and he was also influenced by the Japanese children's shows on TV, which were not broadcast in English, so he had to pay close attention to the graphics. He loved playing with his Japanese toys, which were incredible sci fi toys that transformed from robots into everything from planes to trucks.

Leif drew often, expressing ideas about space ships and space weapons, until he was in about six grade when he became more or less obsessed with radio controlled cars and also got very interested in music and playing electric guitars. He pretty much dropped drawing until he was in college and playing CyberPunk with his friends.

He took an art course in college to fulfill an arts requirement for his liberal arts degree and again showed some remarkable talent with the things he produced for the class, but didn't have the interest to pursue it further.

I treasure these drawings and will post a few more . . . the antecedents of the copper penny space ship I posted yesterday.

Leif's Copper Penny Space Ship

Leif had his iPhone for about 5 or 6 months. The only photos I could find that he took with it were of his car, his motorcycle, himself (in cycle gear and in his work cubicle) and this space ship me made of pennies on the desk surface of his work cubicle at the Humana call center where he worked.

Leif loved science fiction and was absorbed in such sagas as Orson Scott Card's Ender series (books beginning with Ender's Game), and Battlestar Galactica. He played Planetside and other online games, and as I've written before, was deeply involved in the development of the ZAON game.

Leif needed to be in a job where he dealt face-to-face with people and wasn't confined to a cubicle on the phone, but he never had that kind of job, unfortunately. This space ship is something he carefully and exactingly constructed while doing customer service for Humana Medicare clients on the phone.

I never would have known about it if I hadn't been able to access the photos on his iPhone, but when I first saw the photos, I didn't realize where the space ship was or that he had built it. I thought it was something he photographed elsewhere.

Then, when his dad and I picked up his belongings from Humana, among them was a very heavy, huge Alltel drink "jug" that was full of pennies. Those were the pennies he used. There were over $16.00 worth of pennies in that jug.

That reminded me once again how small things add up. They say most people these days won't even reach for a penny on the sidewalk or parking lot. Not worth their time. I always do.

I tried his whole life to teach Leif to save money, but I never succeeded. Intellectually he knew he needed to do it, but he was unable to resist cool cars, motorcycles, computers, phones and gadgets, and as soon as he got a bit of money, he spent it on some new cool thing he just had to have, though it was truly an unnecessary luxury. I understood that because he didn't have a satisfying home life, was lonely, and didn't have the kind of job he needed, he found his pleasure in these things and in pasttimes like online gaming, riding his cycle, and movies, but ultimately, his spending got him into debt too many times. He then had trouble paying his bills or handling an unexpected expense like a car repair.

Saving pennies by throwing them in a jug netted enough for a couple of decent meals (more if it was home cooking), and I found coins all over his apartment that he could have thrown into a jar as well. It's true that these small amounts wouldn't have solved his financial problems, but the willingness to save even small amounts here and there (like taking a sandwich to work instead of buying lunch, for instance) could have added up substantially in the long run.

I have learned since Leif's death that compulsive overspending is also a sign of depression, a form of "self medication" to bring the depressed person some brief happiness . . . yet eventually, that same spending brings more depression because of the debt incurred.

How I wish Leif had gotten help for his depression and had been able to curb his spending.

How I wish his talent for artistic design and precision had been put to some creative uses. He had remarkable artistic talent as a child, but it wasn't something he chose to pursue.

More about art and choices later.

For now, imagine a beautiful copper space ship rushing through the universe, carrying Leif into the sci fi adventures of which he so avidly dreamed.