@nlowell Absolutely 🙂 And my dream is to combine the two and maybe get to the point where I can do my own covers. As to whether I'll get there, the fun is in the trying ... at least for me.

As a child I really wanted to be able to draw. I tried to teach myself drawing by tracing over artwork I liked, looking at stuff and drawing etc. but I was never very good at it.

As I grew older, I found others at school who could draw effortlessly. I joined up with them and wrote books where they did the artwork. But I still wanted to draw.

A while back on Mastodon I discovered @MichaelWhelan and his feed. I already knew Michael Whelan from his book covers but his feed made me realize the scope of how many of the book covers I remembered from over the years were by him.

The most memorable for me personally will always be "Destiny's Road". The book itself is very memorable for some reason — I remember how I felt when I read certain passages, how the sun felt on my skin that day, where I was and so on. But I picked up that book from a second-hand store over 30 years ago because of the cover and I still remember Michael's cover notes in the book describing the various elements like the fool cage.

So, seeing all the great covers that Michael has created over the years has made me want to try art in some form again. I know that I'm not very good at drawing/sketching, but I thought I might be better at painting perhaps?

So I gave it a try with digital painting and I discovered that I loved oil painting on the computer 🙂For some reason, I really like how the oil paints "feel" on the screen and how it works when you mix paints.

I created my first painting yesterday. It's not very good and I hadn't actually looked at techniques or tutorials when I did it. But I think I'm going to give this a go and see if I can get better at it.

At worst, I'll have fun trying all this out. And that's not a bad thing, right?
A digital oil painting showing …

@Perrin42 If you do, let me know what you think 🙂

I'm trying to get the audiobook out at the moment, but it's slow going ...

@Perrin42 I have a couple of books in a series which I hope are fun 🙂Wordplay, all sorts of cheeky references, and poking fun at humanity in general. The books are not connected, but it's a series because they are set in the same universe ...

Here's the blurb for the first book:

In a post-apocalyptic future where humanity has gotten a new lease on life via a technology infusion from alien visitors, a man who sold his wife's dog to a Martian scrambles to get the dog back before his wife's wrath catches up with him. He'd better hurry, because Martians love dogs — as a delicacy.

https://books2read.com/b/4E9lME

Ever get the feeling that macOS (and the Apple ecosystem in general) is slowly slipping away into a bog or something?

Switched over to Sequoia several weeks ago and suddenly yesterday my Remote Desktop app keeps disconnecting after being up for a few minutes.

Check online and people are like "This is a known issue with Sequoia". Someone mentioned turning off teh built-in firewall fixes the issue. Somebody else comes in and says "Oh no, that's too drastic. Just add an exception for Remote Desktop".

Try that and the issue keeps on happening — as others mentioned in the same thread. Others mentioned that Remote Desktop is now Windows App and updating fixes it. For me, it doesn't.

Somebody else mentioned that allowing the app to browse the local network fixes the issue. And the latest update to Windows App suggests that they'd left out this option. But my local network setting is correct and updating to the latest Windows App didn't fix the issue either.

So, I've finally turned off the firewall on macOS. So far, no issues with Remote Desktop/Windows App since then.

And that's not all of it.

Try to build something on device using Xcode and Xcode wants to connect to your device and get info. But this connection doesn't always work. So it'll sit their churning its wheels but doesn't time out. So if you don't notice this is happening, you'll have no idea why nothing is building, or is taking way too long.

You have to disconnect and reconnect the cable to (possibly) fix it. And don't even get me started if you want to build on Apple Watch.

All I can say is that things are getting just too annoying at this point for me with various bits of the Apple eco system and I don't like it.

#Apple #macOS #RemoteDesktop #WindowsApp #Connections #Firewall

After some thought, I decided to leave Automattic last week. It's the first time I've been without a job, and while I'm excited for the chance to rest and focus on personal projects for a while,

I'm also a bit anxious about finding a new position in these uncertain times. So, if you're looking for a remote Product Designer who can also code and illustrate, or if you know someone who is looking, I'd love to hear from you.

I'm looking for a student for an M.Sc. in Computer Science at the University of Calgary. *This is a fully funded position.*

The project: building tools to help understand how "retro" video games were made under amazingly constrained circumstances. While it's a CS position, this is interdisciplinary work done in collaboration with archaeologists and others.

Needs: strong coding skills, good writing abilities. Ideally: low-level, reverse engineering, or compiler experience.

@pixiewhitechapel I like Scrivener too. I think of moving to something else sometimes but then I realize that I'd miss being able to organize everything to do with my world, lore, characters etc. in one document way too much and shelve that thought away for some other time 🙂

@Legit_Spaghetti P. Djèli Clark? If you haven't read any of his work before, try his "The Dead Cat Tail Assassins" (it's short — 10 chapters I think) and decide ...

@davemark All I basically did was create a menu, set up menu options and then add actions to the same shortcut and drag those actions under each menu option, or rather, the menu option preview in the lower half ... That was it 🙂

@davemark Here's what my menu looks like ...
An iOS screenshot showing the e…

@davemark If you're just trying to create a list of simple toggle actions (like turning WiFi on/off etc.) that seems easy enough?

I have a menu for the action button which lets me turn WiFi on/off or mobile data on/off.

Would be happy to talk through if the result you're trying to achieve is something like that. If it's a bit more complicated set of actions, I might not be in a position to help but still willing to talk through 🙂

@TriflingTree I figured 🙂The edit didn't show up at my end and so thought I'd point it out in case you missed the typo ...

@TriflingTree Far "Our" Man or Far "Out" Man? 😛

@elysegrasso Subterfuge? Strategems?

@kagan Agreed about the context 🙂Anything set in the present day, especially if it touches on race politics, would need to talk about colour. I write SciFi set in a far future where I like to imagine that humanity has gone beyond racism to specism — so my own stuff doesn't rely so much on race/colour as on what species you are and how humans still cling to the old race/colour biases but in a new bottle (or glass), so to speak 😛

@crcollins

@kagan Yep, that makes it clearer and you are right, I don't like that either. If you're going to mention colour, then mention for all, don't assume a default.

@crcollins All I can say is, "Me too" 🙂 I like giving readers the option to imagine a character as they might want to because that's what I do when I read. So I stick to the bare essentials and try not to get too descriptive.

I'm still not sure if that's a good thing or bad thing, but that's what I do.

@kagan

@kagan I'm not white, and most of my characters are not white either. When I write, I consciously do not mention colour because I don't think colour is relevant. They are just people.

Of course, this is not what you are talking about with the writers who don't mention their characters because there, I'm fairly certain that at least a good portion of those writers (consciously or unconsciously) don't think there's anything other than white people 🙂

But personally, I don't think we should be focusing on colour in general because that too leads to rascism, just in a different way because we are saying it matters what colour a character is. And it shouldn't.

Sri Lanka has a million problems but I'm glad functioning democracy isn't one of them. A peaceful transfer of power is taking place following a peaceful election.

Sep 21: Presidential election
Sep 22: President (1st leftist President) elected
Sep 23: former PM resigns
Sep 23: New President sworn in
Sep 24: New PM (3rd woman PM) sworn in
Sep 24: Cabinet appointed
Sep 24: Parliament likely to be dissolved (with general elections planned for November).
#SriLanka