I use a drawing and painting app called procreate on the ipad that is really by far the best in its class in terms of offering brush config and reasonable layering and media effects on the tablet. one of the reasons the app is the best is that it doesn’t waste time trying to emulate non-digital tools, which is great.

unfortunately, the dev team also uses this digital-centric design orientation to exclude crucial digital image-work features, such as crop, and to consistently rely on a user-interface philosophy which is grounded in minimalism, in removing discoverability wherever possible. combine the two tendencies, exclusion of standard digital graphics features and hiding access to others, and it produces a near-canonical user-punishment experience. the end result? i hate the developers and designers of the app, and opening it to do some work is an experience i dread and loathe.

It’s been historically hot here the past few weeks, most days easily topping ninety, and it’s miserable. I have a skin allergy that worsens in sustained direct sun, so as you might imagine I have been doing my best to ignore the weather, impossible though that is.

In mid-June I bought a new PCIe video card naively assuming that it, as a PCIe card, would work with the PCIe systems I have in house, and since then I have been engaged in a delightful (well, no, that’s more or less the opposite) self-education odyssey.

The upshot is that *probably* if I roughly double the potential power output of my actual-built-that-way PC I might be able to get the card to boot, or maybe, *maybe*, I can get it to work under Bootcamp Windows on a Mac Pro. Today, after being quite directly informed by the manufacturer that the card is unsupported on a Bootcamp Mac Pro, I was able to bring it up on that system.

This is probably good news as it likely means I can dump the actual built-that-way PC. I still have a few days of tinkering to satisfy my curiosity but that does appear to be the resolution.

As I was going through this research process I was constantly running into end-of-life support issues directly tied to my determined insistence on doubling the active service life of my hardware. With luck, every unit in the house will see at least ten years of use and I don’t anticipate a main-unit refresh on any single device for another four years, cell phones possibly excepted.

One aspect of the rollover to shorter-life hardware in the industry is the shift away from flat-fee software to subscription-fee software. I’m just not gonna do that. Even seeing the pricing model makes me kind of angry at the business offering the terms. I suppose that one could make a case for per-use pricing but this in essence is nothing more than the traditional variable-pricing model, a model that actually actively locks out certain classes of buyer including the profoundly parsimonious and the low-information low-income buyer. It’s classist and exclusivist and I hate it with a bitter rage.

I suppose in the long run this shifts me completely off computer use. Not by any means a negative outcome.

An article in the New Yorker makes me think, sadly, of my late friend Caleb.

Yesterday was a hectic day, with several chores running concurrently in various locations around the house and record-breaking heat all day. the animals were whiny and uncomfortable and my sweat-slicked nose couldn’t hold my glasses in place. Often when I perform a task I need to take my glasses off in order to see detail over a larger area of my field of view. For example, attaching computer cables under a desk, or doing accounting data entry and record keeping.

Therefore, all day, in seven different areas of my house, I was taking off and putting on my glasses. When Viv arrived home, I believe I was wearing them, but by the time I served dinner, they were misplaced. Viv and I looked all over the house twice yesterday and in the end did not find them. All I want to do today is look for them, but I have several things I must do today and devoting time to looking for the specs is not on the list.

I am very irritated.

I have a ringlike swelling on my left achilles tendon, about an inch above my ankle. It hurts mildly. Looks like I’m off running for a while. Shit.

today I learned that Tolkien had an Elric analogue character in his mythos, in material only published posthumously.

Turin Turambar is described as a dark-complected man. So that’s not a join. But here, in number 12, his death is summarized as follows:

Túrin committed suicide by impaling himself on his sentient black sword, a sword forged from a meteorite by a Dark Elf. That is metal. He did so after killing the first dragon, Glaurung. That is really metal. Unfortunately, Túrin gets points docked since the main reason he killed himself was that he realized he’d married his own sister. Granted, he’d been tricked into marrying his own sister by a dragon, but still. Accidental incest is not metal.

I mean come on. A sentient black sword from another realm. Incest and traitorous woe! Granted, MM and JRRT are looking at common sources but MM is at pains to invert, flip, remix and otherwise FSU, and the dude claims to literally hate JRRT’s stuff. And certainly he didn’t see this until something like thirty earth-human years after our beloved albino first blinked up at the light falling onto him thru a filtered scrim of leadtype and newsprint.

Anyway, so that was my mindblow for the day.

DS9 sure is obsessed with Las Vegas. It’s weird. I wonder if it’s because of the Star Trek Experience going in during the show’s run, or if the Experience led to plot directives to the writer’s room to feature gambling, Vegas, and Vegas-like settings at least X times per season. I suppose it could just reflect the culture of the lot, too, like if the cast and crew spent time there frequently.

I guess knowing what we know about other Vegas-related Trek projects, like the never-realized full-size Enterprise hotel, that it’s likeliest to be some sort of crossmarketing campaign. But it sure is weird. Vegas is what it is, and I just don’t care for it – it just seems out of place in Trek.

This also seems to possibly stem from some of the Moore-Berman-Braga efforts to move Trek away from the famous Roddenberry dictums making human imperfection and foibles largely out of bounds for at least Starfleet personnel.

I’m glad to be finally watching the whole series through, but I think in the end I’m unlikely to alter my personal preference ranking of the series which places DS9 as third-best after TNG and TOS. So often in DS9 the proto-grimdark elements seem just as gimmicky as the comedy bits on the silly episodes.

did not pick up a stringed instrument today, a direct consequence of laziness. i regret it.

I would have thought running eight miles wouldn’t have been a distance I notice having run a few hours later. i am incorrect.

Sunday we went to see the Cleveland Indians take on the Mariners with my dear Uncle Hank and Aunt Leana. Leana’s my mom’s older sister. Hank was in the Navy and stationed in Bremerton when they met at an Elvis concert here in Seattle. He went on to a career as a welder and lived and worked in Alaska for a long stretch of the seventies building the Alaska Pipeline. He’s from Ohio and that’s where they settled and had kids. It’s been more than thirty years since I saw any of my cousins on that side.

I saw Hank and Leana out here for the first time in many years just about ten years ago when my folks treated them and my mom’s other sibling and his wife to an Inside Passage cruise up to Alaska. Hank has always reminded me (and my mom) of my grandpa Richardson, my mom’s dad. He’s a big, gentle man who literally always has a joke on his lips.

Sometime in the past five years as I got interested in baseball Hank caught wind of this or I was reminded of his interest or something and we started texting each other during the season during games we know the other guy’s watching. We went to a game together here, Indians at M’s also, a couple years ago with his son-in-law and had a great time. Hank had a ball unfurling his at-least seventy-year knowledge of baseball to me and I loved hearing very second of it. I’m delighted to have found a way to connect with him and Leana like this at this stage in their lives. Tomorrow we’re gonna try to take the ferry over to Bremerton to see what we can see with regard to Hank’s base and so forth, and later take a look at something at Seattle Center.

It’s keeping me pretty busy because I’m still trying to cram in running, walking the dog, taking care of the house stuff, and running errands that crop up like this craigslist pickup I had today out in Maple Valley. I’m hoping to be able to hit the Yankees midday game on Wednesday too, but want to be oriented to their wants and needs while here. The Wednesday game is a Tanaka start and it will positively kill me if I can’t make it. I could with ease convince them to go, but they will want to buy god tickets and the whole MLB ticket-price scam revolves around charging more for the Yankees than anyone else and I am resistant to involving them in that. Now if I see 3 or four tix on craigslist for under $30, that might work.

But of course I’m going to be away from computing devices all day on Tuesday so…