I’ve actually done multiple drawings, I just haven’t been happy enough with them to post them.
But today I present a grumpy-looking broccoli. I like his little feet. I imagine him moving kind of like a Goomba.
Month: August 2022
From Six Colors to no color at all
On the same day that Pixelmator announced that its Pixelmator Photo app was switching to a subscription model (with a “lifetime license” option that raises the app price from $7.99 to $59.99), Jason Snell also announced some pricing changes on Six Colors. But he anticipated what people might be thinking:
I know where you think this is going. You think I’m buttering you up before announcing that I’m raising the price of a Six Colors membership, which has been at $6 a month (or $60/year) since the very beginning.
I’m not.
Instead, we’re doing here what we did over at The Incomparable from the very beginning (and what my pal David Sparks did with his website recently), and adding multiple membership tiers.
The “More Colors” tier is $10 a month, and it includes these things (descriptions excised for space, but check here for full details):
- Regular video reports and Q&As
- A special section of the Six Colors Discord for More Colors members
- Six Colors podcast live stream and bonus material
The third item posted after this announcement is shown in the screenshot below:
Now, I can’t say for sure what kind of content this is, because I can’t see it (or even who the author is!), but it looks like a blog post, which is not one of the perks mentioned as part of the $10 More Colors tier. Bonus posts are specifically a part of the now basic $6 a month tier. Except maybe not so much anymore? (I am subscribed to the $6 tier, which until today was also the only tier.)
My reaction was to ask myself a few questions:
- Do I have more content to sift through that I can reasonably manage? Yes.
- Do I need to pay for the privilege of reading a site that regularly exhorts me to pay even more? No.
And so, while I enjoy Jason Snell’s and Dan Moren’s site and have been a paying member for a while, I found it surprisingly easy to turn off auto-renew on my sub. As of September 12th, I’ll no longer be paying and will eventually probably remove the bookmark. It’s ironic that Snell specifically mentions David Sparks’ multi-tier membership approach, because it was when his site started getting riddled with PAY PAY PAY TO SEE SEE SEE that I opted to DELETE DELETE DELETE the bookmark.
I’m not saying what Six Colors is doing is wrong. I’m saying that I’m not fond of paying and then being presented with locked links saying PAY MOAR. It makes me feel like I’m being squeezed. If they need the money, good luck to them. But they won’t be getting any more from me.
Walk 78 and 79: Sweatin’ to the walking
I did a walk instead of a run yesterday and forgot to record it on this very blog. Insert screaming emoji here.
So today you get a double bill.
Conditions were similar for both yesterday and today–sunny, humid and hot. Today’s walk was brisker even though it was a little bit warmer, thanks to heading out a wee bit earlier and a more prominent breeze blowing. Plus, I just think I was feeling more energetic for whatever reason.
The last time I had a walk like this was on June 28 when it was also 31C (hot), but the humidity was only 28%. The difference between 28% and 45% humidity is palpable.
Tomorrow’s high is forecast to be a mere 29C, so I may try running as per usual for a Friday. We’ll see!
Stats, Part 1:
Walk 78 Average pace: 9:20/km Location: Brunette River trail Distance: 7.70 km Time: 71:54 Weather: Sunny Temp: 31ºC Humidity: 42% Wind: light BPM: 105 Weight: 160.7 pounds Devices: Apple Watch Series 5, iPhone 12 Total distance to date: 572.05 km
Stats, Part 2:
Walk 79 Average pace: 9:12/km Location: Brunette River trail Distance: 7.46 km Time: 68:40 Weather: Sunny Temp: 29-32ºC Humidity: 45% Wind: light BPM: 111 Weight: 160.6 pounds Devices: Apple Watch Series 5, iPhone 12 Total distance to date: 579.51km
Google promises to make search results useful (yes, this is a 2022 post)
It shouldn’t surprise me that in 2022 this is a news headline, but Google is now saying it will prioritize real reviews over clickbait, something you might have assumed they’d be doing all along. But apparently not!
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for my interweb searches for a few years now, and it’s fine. A lot of the results are still clickbait and garbage, but that’s because companies have spent years investing in gaming all search engines, it’s just Google still dominates search, so it has outsized influence.
One day, the elders will gather round to tell their grandkids how they would search (“What’s a search engine, Grandpa?”) for “best toaster” and get actual results comparing toasters, instead of thousands of pages of SEO-optimized garbage posing as information on toasters. And then the grandkids will go back to hunting mutant cows across the radioactive wastelands.
At long last, FIRE DANGER is back
Today, with a projected high of 34C, I decided to postpone my run until tomorrow (the forecast is for the same high temperature, but I’m going to try getting up super-early to compensate. We’ll see how that goes!) and instead took a brisk walk up and down the river trail instead, about 7.7 km in total. While I sweated reasonably profusely, it was not nearly as much as the recent soakings I’ve gotten when running.
And after having spent the previous paragraph talking about hot, dry weather, it may seem surprising that these signs just went up on the river trail, the second latest in the season I’ve ever seen them appear (the earliest is May and the latest was never, in 2019):
The FIRE DANGER sign this year is actually new–they added REPORT FIRES TO 911 and removed the line about staying on trails. And actually, it appears they kind of merged two signs into one, maybe because all fire danger is now considered EXTREME. Here’s a shot of the two previous signs from 2017:
This concludes The History of the FIRE DANGER Sign in Metro Vancouver.
Drawing of the day, August 16, 2022
Yes, I’m going to have to admit I have missed a day. Maybe I’ll try to do two in one day to catch up, but if not, here’s today’s all the same.
I’m looking to expand my collection of evil vegetables and as a kid, Brussels sprouts were regarded as quite evil. As an adult, I mostly still feel the same way.
I give you a Brussels sprout you never want to cross. I mostly like the look, but I’ll probably end up tweaking some aspects over time.
One odd bit is I decided to shift the bottom (the brown part) up, so it’s more visible. Logically, this makes the veggie look a little lopsided, but I kind of like the contrast it adds. I may change it later!
Drawing of the day, August 14, 2022
Yes, I’m a day late again. I really need to start these earlier.
Today it’s a spooky tree because that’s what popped into my head.
Run 705: One does not simply walk into humidity
I won an award for today’s run. Hint: It wasn’t for the fattest pace ever!
Now, my pace today was 6:10/km, which is fine, but far from spectacular. It’s a full 16 seconds off last Wednesday’s pace, in fact, so how did I manage to burn a record number of calories? Well, there are a lot of factors involved–hydration level, amount of sodium I’ve ingested recently and so on. And then there’s that one persistent thing that has accompanied me on pretty much every run this summer:
HUMIDITY
Go ahead, pretend I somehow re-enabled the <BLINK> tag on the above, to get the full intended effect.
Once again, high humidity plagued my run, and I have resigned myself to facing it for the rest of the summer. I’ll probably have to wait until the cooler temperatures of fall before it no longer factors into how my runs go. Today felt like a slog, due to the combo of warm temperatures, sun and the H-word.
That said, I did manage a full 10K and the left hip started out fine, then started being a mild bother about 2K in before settling down and not particularly being an issue for the last few km. What kind of threw me was starting farther up from my usual spot today due to trail work. Every time I’d expect to hit a milestone, I would still have a ways to go, and I ended the run right at the dam, instead of well before it. It felt weird and made the whole thing feel even more slog-like.
My pace was actually pretty consistent, though. Observe:
| Kilometer | Pace per km |
| 1 | 5:50 (zippy start) |
| 2 | 6:13 (slow to 150 BPM) |
| 3 | 6:13 |
| 4 | 6:12 |
| 5 | 6:12 |
| 6 | 6:12 |
| 7 | 6:04 (boost from Cottonwood Trail) |
| 8 | 6:17 (course becomes more technical, I slow down) |
| 9 | 6:17 |
| 10 | 6:05 (sprinting to make it all end sooner) |
Also contributing to the slog-like effect today was the return of the No-wind. This is another peculiar phenomenon that has only occurred this summer. I mean, here we are two-thirds through the season, with little precipitation in the last month, and the forest fire danger is still only Moderate (one step above the lowest level, which is cleverly called Low).
Anyway, enough kvetching, here are the stats:
Run 705 Average pace: 6:10/km Location: Burnaby Lake (CW) Start: 9:58 a.m. Distance: 10.02 km Time: 61:47 Weather: Mostly sunny Temp: 22-24ºC Humidity: 51-59% Wind: nil to light BPM: 152 Weight: 161.1 Total distance to date: 5172 km Devices: Apple Watch Series 5, iPhone 12, AirPods (3rd generation) Shoes: Brooks Caldera 5 (280 km)
Drawing of the day, August 13, 2022
Another late night entry, so technically not actually late (I think).
I asked Nic for a prompt and he suggested a killdeer, since we saw killdeer on our Saturday birding. My photos were merely okay because the killdeer were pretty far away, so I used one as reference and did this quick sketch:
Drawing of the day, August 12, 2022: A line
Yes, I’m a day late to posting this, but I did it very late last night, so technically this may actually have been done today. As per this post, here is my first daily drawing. It’s a line. With commentary!
Unless otherwise stated, all of these daily drawings are done using Procreate on my 2020 12.9″ iPad Pro.
Well, I couldn’t let it go. Here’s an updated version with consistent Canadian spelling and “artisanal” spelled properly, too:
My Demotivation Pal
When logging into My Fitness Pal to record my food and exercise for the day, I see this under the section for food entries:
The idea that I’ve earned one whole extra calorie to burn as I see fit amuses me. I could make a list of things to do with that single, precious extra calorie:
- Exhale
- Blink my eyes once or maybe twice
- Shift slightly in my chair
- Think hard for several seconds
(After a minute or so, MFP synced with my watch and bumped the calorie burn up to something with four digits instead of one.)
Run 704: The internal battle
Quite often I will think about what I will write about a run while I’m still actually out running. For example, I knew that today’s entry would be titled “The internal battle” shortly before the running part ended (and when the internal battle also ended).
When I went out today, I was planning on taking it a bit easier, because I was expecting it to be warmer and still humid. In fact, the forecast this morning even specifically mentioned it would be humid:
When I left it was 22C, but it rose to 24C by the time I got to the lake and ticked up another degree during the run. Humidity was in the mid-60s, which is gross, but if you look at the previous run, you might be thinking, “Humidity was even higher then, yet you did a lot better. Why? Has science been lying to us all this time?” And the answer is: I don’t know why, exactly!
But there seems to be some magic line where if the temperature is X and humidity is Y, then the run will be POO. Today it reached into the POO zone. I did handicap myself a bit by running counter-clockwise, which is the “harder” route–it starts out all technical and windy and doesn’t offer any nice straight stretches until you get to the Cottonwood Trail about 3 km in. Conversely, running clockwise starts you on the Avalon Trail, which is perfectly straight, save for one gentle curve. After that, the trail tends to slope gently downhill for much of the way.
So, there was that. But I started out okay. The hip was fine for the first few km, then when I could feel it, it was muted, not really a factor. But the humidity really wore on me. By the sixth km, the bottom began to fall out, with a pace of 6:22/km. After 7 km, it had fallen further to a yuck-o 6:32/km. This is where the internal battle began and while it lasted only a few moments, it went something like this:
Sensible Me: You’re not going for a personal record, you planned on taking it easier today, there’s no shame in ending the run a bit earlier than planned!
My Ego: Do you want to be a quitter? You can make up time on the Avalon Trail. If you stop now, you’ll only have done one measly 10K this week! Sure, no one will really know or care, but YOU’LL know! Keep going, hoser!
My Ego, after some more thought: You know, if your pace continues to flag, it’s going to drag down your average and look bad. Maybe cut your losses now and look better!
Yes, in my mind, my ego calls me a hoser.
The call was pretty easy to make. My pace was falling off a cliff, so I listened to both Sensible Me and Me Ego, after some more thought. To prove the hip was fine, I did run a decent amount for the remainder of the 3K around the lake and felt fine.
However, when I was trying to do the same on the river trail, I started experiencing stomach cramps and about half an hour after getting home had to make a beeline to the bathroom to attend to an urgent nature call. So the roiling of my gut may have had some impact that I was not fully aware of, too. At least that’s what My Ego is telling me!
In the end, it was not a bad effort and I think if I’d run clockwise and conditions had been better, it would have been perfectly fine. But I’m content with settling with “just okay” after Wednesday’s faboo run.
In fun resurfacing news: I was surprised and delighted to see that they have done some patching along the trail that borders the athletic fields. As I’ve noted before, the trail here is narrow and floods even when they just run the sprinklers on the fields, due to strangely poor drainage. Sometime in the last two days workers came in and did a couple of things: they filled potholes, shored up parts where the trail is a bit sunken and laid down what appears to be a preliminary section of new gravel along the eastern part that right-angles past the row of trees that you can see in your favorite map software:
I’m hoping this is all leading to a Grand Resurfacing™. I should know the next time I am on the trail. It may seem weird that I am kind of obsessed with this, but until you’ve had to choose between going through a long, deep puddle in the middle of your run route or detour into a marshy field that will have you sink into water past your ankles, you just can’t appreciate the anticipation of this being addressed after more than ten years.
Stats:
Run 704 Average pace: 6:14/km Location: Burnaby Lake (CCW) Start: 11:30 a.m. Distance: 7.02 km Time: 43:44 Weather: Partly cloudy Temp: 24-25ºC Humidity: 54% Wind: light to moderate BPM: 151 Weight: 162.2 Total distance to date: 5162 km Devices: Apple Watch Series 5, iPhone 12, AirPods (3rd generation) Shoes: Brooks Caldera 5 (270 km)