On July 14, the second official day of my summer vacation, I went for a walk around Burnaby Lake. The weather was nice, I felt good. It was a long walk, around 19 km in total. At around the 17 km mark my left heel began to hurt for reasons unclear to me. Some possibilities that I came up with later:
Pulled muscle
Bruised bone
Broken or sprained bone
I managed to walk so wrong I damaged the heel
ALIENS
It is now August 12 as I write this, nearly a month later.
The left heel is still sore.
Is it better than before? I will say it is better than before, yes. And it may in part still be sore because I keep going for walks, almost every day, though the distance has shrunk from 19 km to 7-9 km. And I walk aggressively. The heel actually doesn’t feel too bad on these walks, as if I am limbering up the muscles and they feel better as a result.
But I’m not a doctor, so who knows. It could be ALIENS.
If my left heel is still sore when my doctor is back from his vacation (hopefully he does not hurt his heels), I will arrange an appointment to discuss possibilities, like resting the heel or getting a bionic replacement.
This concludes my August 2020 heel update. There may be a Part 2.
I should probably have been mentioning here that I ended my last week of vacation by going on roughly hour-long walks down the Brunette River trail in lieu of running (exciting heel update also coming soon). The weather has been fairly good for these brisk walks and I’ve resumed listening to music. I am now doing the walks immediately after work and they serve as a nice way to unwind from the day–and help get ye old blood circulating after spending most of the day sitting.
Normally I will listen to a specific album if I’m in the mood or just shuffle all songs and skip any that come up that I’m not in the mood for. Or just kind of suck, because let’s face it, not every album released is filler-free.
The last three walks I have done something different. I started listening to songs in alphabetical order. My song library consists of over 3,600 titles so it would take awhile to get through the entire alphabet (10 days if iTunes is right). That’s a lot of walking.
I am still on the letter A and it’s actually not a bad way to listen to music. I sometimes hear songs with the same title from different bands, I’ve discovered a lot of songs start with the word “All” and I’ve mostly not skipped any songs.
I may move to the B’s early, though, because I’d like to hear some other letters without having to necessarily commit to 240 hours of walking.
Tonight, I finally started doing actual exercises and actual drawing. Woo!
Specifically, I began Drawabox’s Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes and then started the homework. Much like in my school days, I did not finish my homework in one sitting.
The first section is on Lines and I did not quite make it through because I started late and don’t want to rush. I did finish the first two of three exercises on lines.
Superimposed lines
Two pages of lines where you start with a base line and then draw over it eight times, trying to achieve even, confident strokes that overlap as much as possible. My results are not exactly exact. I also noticed the copy paper I was using tended to almost create grooves, so if I got the pen tip into a certain groove, it was hard to get out of it. I switched to different printer paper after the first page.
Page 1:
Page 2:
The second exercise is Ghosted Lines, in which you trace out how you are going to draw a line connecting two points before committing to drawing the actual line. This is supposed to improve muscle memory, among other things.
Some of the lines are decent but I have a tendency to arc a little and overshoot the end point. The lesson addresses both of these things, so I am a bit of a noob here.
A few things I noticed:
The exercises are designed to get you to draw from the shoulder, not from the elbow or wrist. My worst lines were when I forgot this and drew from the wrist.
I often found I was gripping the ultrafine marker too tightly and would take a few moments to relax my grip before drawing. This definitely helped, but it is something I will need to keep on top of, since my natural tendency is to grip the marker like I must CRUSH IT TO DEATH.
Next up is the final Lines lesson, Ghosted Planes. I did a few as a finale for the night and my planes were not exactly air-worthy.
I need to better arrange my desk for drawing, too. Things are a little tight. I shall do so before completing the current lesson.
I have been delinquent in posting the past few days. I have no good explanation for this other than general laziness, so on with the lessons!
Having completed the Intro to Digital Painting 101 on https://www.ctrlpaint.com/getting-started I moved onto the series of videos on traditional drawing, in which Matt Kohr explains the tools to be used (mainly HB pencils and a combo of vinyl and kneaded erasers) and a few basics. The confusion came when he started referencing things in videos that I had clearly not seen. This made me check the user comments and for some reason, the videos are posted out of order. It wasn’t a huge thing, but it did not instill confidence in the rest of the material. I watched the following:
For those playing drawing along at home, the correct order as noted by a user, seems to be:
Welcome to Traditional Drawing
Crtl+Paint Unplugged road Map
The Pencil
Visual Measuring
Unplugged: Pencils and erasers
The first actual exercise is to draw soft, loopy ovals in pencil, to help train the use of shoulder movement and get away from the tight grip used when writing–and rarely for drawing.
After the confusion of these mis-sorted videos, I went over to https://drawabox.com/ and started their lessons. They take a different approach, swapping in ultrafine markers for pencils, with the notion that this is easier because it lessens the urge to fix mistakes (no erasing) and just focus on the exercises, and the pen produces a single thickness of line that requires no pressure (one of the things they emphasize is to not mix different pen sizes). With pencils, the pressure will affect the stroke, as will the tilt of the pencil. Pens keep things simple and presumably easier for the beginner.
I have completed:
Lesson 0: Getting Started, an explanation of the lessons and tools needed, along with an overview of the non-technical skills that will be needed and refined through the lessons (patience, spatial awareness, etc).
I have read through but not yet finished:
Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes. This includes the first actual drawing bits (homework, as the site calls it), requiring a total of five pages for the three subjects. Repetition is a key component here–getting better by doing.
I have not yet taken pen or pencil to paper, because I am pondering the following:
Try doing both sets of lessons together (potentially confusing/overwhelming)
Do one set of lessons first, then the other
Stick to one set of lessons, then only do the other if I feel it’s needed
I don’t want to turn this into an excuse for not diving in, so I will likely start doing both and see how it goes. It’s easy enough to drop one and go back later.
And by “great” I mean they do not have soothing, melodic voices or are obviously not professionally trained, but I love ’em anyway, because their voices have…yep…character.
You may disagree on the alleged vocal greatness of some of the people on this list, either thinking them good enough to not be on this list or maybe bad enough to not merit inclusion. I also did not set out to make an exclusively male list, but every female singer I like has a genuinely awesome-sounding voice. Women are just better.
Stephin Merrit (The Magnetic Fields). Merrit has this wonderfully rumbly bass that often feels like it’s on the verge of going off-key but never quite does. “Papa Was a Rodeo” from the album 69 Love Songs is a great example of it.
Roger Waters (Pink Floyd). I compare Waters’ vocals to the dialogue of David Lynch’s Dune, where everyone seems to either shout or whisper. Waters is very good at the shout/whisper thing. The period around his second solo album, Radio KAOS, is the “highlight” of this where he seemed to be especially struggling to just sing in a normal tone. But he is very good at getting across venom and anger.
https://youtu.be/l5MigxIKovI
Robert Smith (The Cure). I went to a Cure concert in 1987 with a couple of friends when they played at the Expo Theatre (RIP). At the time I had no idea who the band was, confusing them with The Cult. The show was pretty good, though I was not entirely sure why girls (and some guys) kept throwing themselves at the lead singer, an unimposing man who looked a bit like Edward Scissorhands minus the scissors. Smith’s vocals are well-suited to the goth dirges the band is famous for, but I especially like his takes on their lighter material like “Why Can’t I Be You.” The video below has a bit of everything, from the regrettable use of black face to Smith dressed as a proto-furry.
Bob Dylan. I’m not even going to explain this one. Everyone knows Bob. That said, his vocals on the two Traveling Wilburys albums are strong and he clearly had fun with the material. “Tweeter and the Monkey Man” remains a favorite of mine.
I am treating my art lessons as if I am a beginner, as my last instruction was in high school, which was…awhile back
I have chosen to start this particular adventure with Ctrl+Paint, a site featuring copious free lessons provided by freelance artist Matt Kohr. It helps that Matt has a really calm, soothing voice in the videos, as opposed to say, Bobcat Goldthwaite’s.
I have completed the first set of lessons, Digital Painting 101, which comprises six videos. It introduces you to some key functions, features, and handy shortcuts in Photoshop.
The Ctrl+Paint videos highly recommend using Photoshop for ease in following the lessons, so I have temporarily renewed my subscription. I also dusted off my Intuos tablet and so far things are working as expected.
In time I will drop Photoshop, and transfer what I’ve learned to Affinity Photo and Procreate on the iPad. For now, I am following dem rules to keep things simple.
The initial lessons are traightforward, but the next set is where it will get interesting, as it goes back into traditional drawing instruction–using pen, pencil and paper. I have all three, so I am ready to start scrawling. I never practiced much in school because my attention was split among a bunch of stuff (as I mentioned in a previous post), so I may get somewhat better results this time. Or at least know sooner when to give up and go back to writing haikus.
I plan to start the next lessons tonight, so another update should arrive soon™.
For awhile Scrivener was my favorite writing application. It does pretty much everything you could want in a writing program and has excellent organizational tools that really help in planning and plotting out novels (or other projects).
A major new update to version 3 was released for the Mac in November 2017, with an equivalent Windows update arriving in 2018, then by end of Q2 2019, then for absolute sure by August 30, 2019. All dates were missed, with contrite apologies from Literature and Latte.
After the last missed date, they stopped saying when it would release and version 3 for Windows has existed since then as a perpetual beta and now, a perpetual release candidate. Users talk about how stable it is, how perfectly usable it is, but it’s still not officially released. You can’t buy it.
I am not a developer so I can’t speak to the challenges the duo working on the Windows version of Scrivener is facing, but it does seem to me that as we draw ever-closer to three years since version 3 came out for the Mac, that the Windows version ought to have been ready by now. I mean, if you originally project a release in 2018, re-calibrate and say, okay, second quarter 2019, then re-calibrate yet again and say August 30, 2019, then finally go silent on a release date and then still have not released almost a full year after the last offered date, I would submit that you are bad at estimating software release dates, and also very slow at developing software.
I will buy version 3 when it eventually comes out, and I might try it again (I have version 3 already for Mac but I have switched mostly to using Ulysses for my fiction writing), but I must admit, the pace of the Windows version’s development instills me with little confidence in the product or the company. One of the main points of the version 3 release was to bring feature parity (as much as possible) to the Mac and Windows versions. That cannot happen if the Windows version is constantly lagging well behind. I have every expectation that should version 4 come out for Mac, it would be years before the same version released for Windows. I might be wrong. I hope I am wrong!
Anyway, I do hope the Windows version releases at least before the anniversary of the version 3 release for Mac. Looking over the current issues in the forum thread on beta releases, it feels a bit like they are striving for perfection and holding up release indefinitely as a result. They report a single crash bug:
We are aware of one bug (listed below) that can hang Scrivener, and zero bugs that cause data loss, so if you are aware of any other bugs that can hang Scrivener, or cause data loss, please let us know. The only crash bug we know about is:-
Merging cells in table can crash under certain conditions
I can’t speak for all writers, but I have very few tables in my novels, apart from the actual furniture in various scenes. This doesn’t seem like enough to hold up release. I mean, what if they can’t track down the cause of this bug? Just hold off release for another six months? A year? At some point you have to accept that you’ve done all you can and put your work out there–like any good writer would.
One of the things I didn’t expect to happen in the past year (other than things like, uh, a global pandemic) was my rekindled interest in drawing. I took drawing and painting classes through junior high and highs school (five years total) and my only regret is that I never really got better–I simply didn’t practice enough, partly because my attention was split among a bunch of things–drawing. writing, acting, an interesting and bizarre turn at doing hurdles, along with all the usual distractions of youth–riding my bike, playing games (video and board), hanging with friends, figuring out my sexuality, stuff like that.
But last October I pledged to do Inktober and, to my own surprise, I completed all 31 prompts, nine of which brought back the Gum Gum People, to the delight of myself as well as others. After Inktober I let the drawing fall aside again, but the urge renewed itself on my vacation and I started digging into online resources.
I’ve settled on a few sites and their respective lessons and one of the key parts of each is that they emphasize and even require that you ground yourself in traditional drawing first–pencil and paper, not tablet and stylus. I like this because it goes against my first impulse, which is to just blunder about on my iPad, and “fixing as I go” without learning the proper lessons because when you go digital, you can skip a lot of proper technique in favor of brute forcing things.
Anyway, I’m starting the lessons now and will occasionally post my thoughts and perhaps a few sketches over the next little while. If this all ends in terrible failure, I will report on that, too.
How many people would want to know when they will die if that information was available to them?
If the universe is expanding, it would only occupy so much space. What would you see beyond the edge of the universe?
Speaking of, what was up with the ending of The Black Hole, anyway? That was probably the most un-Disney ending of any Disney movie ever.
If there is “life after death” (a soul, etc.) why is it so hard for the two sides (living/differently living) to communicate with each other? Why *would* it be so hard? Is it because the living would be all, “Man, life sucks compared to the groovy other-side. I’m killing myself RIGHT NOW”?
What if we really are the only “intelligent” life in the universe?
What if we aren’t the only intelligent life in the universe but the other intelligent life finds it amusing to watch us screw everything up on our planet?
If multiverses exist, what are the other versions of me doing right now? Is at least one of them writing this same list, but maybe in some weird other dimension language? While waiting for his flying car to recharge?
What if we’re living a simulation and in a few short months we’ll find out that whole Trump presidency thing was just a test, haha. And all the horrible other things that have happened in 2020, too.
I meant to post this yesterday but got distracted by other things–including weird errors on this blog. So here is a flowery field a day late.
This is the “picnic” area at Burnaby Lake, near the Cariboo Dam. I put that in quotes because until this summer this small grass field was mowed regularly and used by people and poopmonsters alike. At some point, perhaps due to budget concerns in these pandemic times, they stopped mowing the grass and in a few short months it turned into a healthy mix of weeds and tall grass. But it looks pretty for now.
