@AngelaPreston Sorry about the tangent on "No Man's Sky" ... just thinking out loud 🙂I like exploration games but "No Man's Sky" is huge and all you do is explore. It just gets a little unfulfilling after a while.

But I'm hoping that "Planet Crafer" will prove more satisfying with the terraforming aspect. I just need to find the time to play now 😛

@BobWilliams Yeah, you can't beat them for the price .. and (mostly) features 🙂I think we bought v1 about 7 years ago and we got updates for all those years for that one single payment ...

But I am in the same boat as you when it comes to using it 🙂I forgot everything I knew after the last time since I didn't use it for several years. Now re-learning since I want to do some stuff at the moment but it's already very easy to get back into ...

@BobWilliams Us too .. I mean happy with Affinity 🙂 We used to use it all the time for personal projects and then I got really busy and personal projects tapered off.

So we didn't upgrade to v2 when it came out. But we realized yesterday that we can get a universal license at the moment for like $60 (with upgrade pricing + discount) and be able to use the whole suite on macOS, Windows, and iPad. Seemed like a great deal. So we went for it 🙂

@AngelaPreston Just based on your previous description of the game, I was intrigued 🙂 Of course, at that point I didn't have a good Windows machine to try it on ... We just have this tiny miniPC that we use as a NAS, but that probably won't cut it for playing games.

We just got a cheap Windows tablet to do art on and I'm hoping that it can handle the game since it sounds interesting — sort of like "No Man's Sky" but with a lot more building/crafting than exploring. Though that's not totally fair to "No Man's Sky" since it does have building but I like the idea of bringing a dead planet to life ...

So, hoping to try it out some time soon. Thank you for the recommendation 🙂

@BobWilliams It's always a good day when you get work done, right? 🙂 Or at least, that's how it feels to me.

I've been dithering about doing artwork for a few days now and I finally got something done yesterday and I feel great about it. So I think I know how you feel 🙂

@BobWilliams Coincidentally, I was almost on the verge of getting back into Adobe apps till yesterday 🙂

I haven't used Adobe apps in ages — probably 15 yeras? But Fresco looked very good for drawing on a tablet and I was tempted. Was about to pull the trigger when I tried Affinity again (which I hadn't for a while) with v2 and I went back to Affinity and I guess I'm punting Fresco?

@BobWilliams Hope the COVID goes out of your system soon. That's a lot to deal with — the COVID, the sleep issues and so on.

My day's not too bad. Trying to learn how to do basic art work since I want to try out my hand at a comic based on the characters from the novel I'm writing. Not sure I'll get there but it's always fun dabbling with this stuff 🙂

@BobWilliams For me, 4:00am is generally the time I wake up, but I'm sorry that you woke up so early ...

We go to sleep by about 8:30pm and so I guess 4:00am isn't so bad. Today, woke up at 4:30 or so. So really an improvement on most days 🙂

@BobWilliams I know how that feels 🙂Had one of those weekends — noisy AirBnB neighbours waking up every night multiple times. Was running on like 4 hours of sleep but then come bedtime, don't feel too sleepy.

Hope you got some work done 🙂

Better poll than the last one!

Which do you prefer? 📚

Boosts welcomed! 🔁❤️

@AngelaPreston I'm sorry you're not feeling well. My personal opinion about the work part is always "put yourself first because work generally will not". Even at the most understanding/flexible companies I've worked at, there's always somebody who wants work to be put before yourself. And I've never agreed with that.

But that's just me 🙂Hope you feel better!

@dyani @elysegrasso eBooks for me too 🙂

Back in the day (before ebooks) I loved paperbacks because I could carry more of them with me. Plus, hardbacks were more expensive.

Once ebooks became an option, I switched my entire collection to ebooks. We used to have to move boxes and boxes of books each time we moved. Now I have all my books on my phone. So much easier to take your entire collection with you wherever you go 😀

Are you working on a Mac or iOS open source project? Do you want end user documentation written for it? Hit me up 😊

I want to give back to the open source community in a way I can.

I’m a technical writer by trade, and a lot of projects lack good end user documentation. If you have an open source project of a reasonable size, I’d be happy to work on it with you to create documentation for it 😉

I’d really appreciate a boost so developers can see this

#OpenSource #BuildInPublic

@johnhowesauthor Thanks, will take a look 🙂

Now is your best chance to find my book, "Honest, the Martian Ate Your Dog" available for a promotional price at @Smashwords as part of their Annual Summer/Winter Sale!

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/7491

#SWSale2024 #Smashwords #ScienceFiction #Humour #SciFi #BookPromo #SupportIndieAuthors #FediBooks #Author #Bookstodon #Writing

@johnhowesauthor Interestingly, I was looking at the same images on Pixbay a couple of days ago — I distincly remember the first one, might even have saved it 🙂

I am kind of in the same boat — I can't justify the cost of an illustrator. My wife, who does art wants to do the cover, but her health isn't the greatest and she's going through some challenges at the moment. So it'll probably be something from Pixbay or a similar place ...

@AngelaPreston I'm glad you're feeling better 🙂

@aurora My experience is mostly with Sri Lanka and that too not in the literary magazine sector. It was easy (or at least it seemed easy back then) to find writing gigs in English, but they paid very little 😛

So I guess it all depends on country, sector, and a few other factors. But getting back to the original discussion, @johnhowesauthor, if you really feel like writing for a magazine, I think you should give it a shot and see how it goes?

But I do realize that it might not be as easy as just wanting to do it and being able to get in if there are other barriers where you are, as per Aurora's point.

I have this Fedi-client which does everything that I want that's customized to fit my needs. But it's so molasses-stuck-in-the-mud slow at times 😛

I have a newer Fedi-client which doens't have all the features but is so much faster. While it's great for reading posts on here, if I try to do anything besides read (or write anything besides a post with text) it isn't very useful.

I want to update the new Fedi-client but I'm also trying to write a novel at the same time. Don't you wish you had more time?

I wanted less time as a kid since the days seemed to stretch on to infinity. But now, I want more time all the time 😛

@johnhowesauthor @aurora As somebody who never went to uni either, I’ve never felt as if I missed out on anything 🙂

I’ve always felt that by-rote memorisation was not the way to learn anything. I learnt more from books in my early years than I did through the conventional education system … But I’ll get off my soapbox now 😛