stephbg | Unscheduled post (Reply)

This is a frivolous post. I have not assigned spoons for this, nor is it anywhere in my various lists of priorities. My lists of priority tasks are long; my spoons are short. I can't really afford this. But sometimes you just have to kick over the traces and do whatever you damn want to. So I'm going to ramble for a bit.

tl;dr I ramble for quite a bit.

I'm not being a complete rebel here, because I do have a standing order of "When in doubt, photograph a rock." It's a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card that I'm allowed to play any time I want to, because it's healthy for me in all sorts of ways. Lately, however, I've not felt able to photograph rocks, or even process and post one of the dozens of perfectly good shots waiting in the wings. I blame Christmas.

Anyone following me online will probably (I hope) have noticed that I've been promoting Pretty Rock Designs stuff for Christmas. Hell, why miss an opportunity – the post in questions is here. That kind of marketing and business stuff has been pretty thin on the ground this year, because I've not had the spoons for it. Those spoons have been becoming less and less easy to find as each year goes by. I have an impressive list of website and marketing things I would be doing if Pretty Rock Designs were an actual business and I were a functioning human being. I have only myself to blame for very thin sales. At least I'm getting some sort of critical recognition for the art on Redbubble if the number of group features is any indication. Can't for the life of me win a group challenge though – the art groups don't do them, and I suppose my pictures don't look natural enough to win votes in the nature groups. As for macro groups, Pretty Rocks are neither bugs, flowers, bark, rust, nor dewdrops, so I'm doomed there too.

Last year around this time I made a big commercial push and set up the CafePress shop, but it broke me in more ways than one. I've neglected it pretty thoroughly for the better part of a year and haven't really added anything new. Did a few research runs with new products but was exhausted and enraged by the crappy and infuriating interface. If there's a demand I'll go in and do something, but I'm not about to generate dozens of items on spec. Actually, I was thinking of deleting a whole bunch of stuff, despite the effort it took to get it there in the first place. It's a shame, but the Spoonflower site for Pretty Rocks On Frocks is similarly irritating to work with, although to a far lesser degree thank heavens. Designs can be added to one of many collections, but only one. Most of the fields and menus are too narrow to display names of things properly so it's hard to pick the right thing the first time. And the whole thing is slooooow. But the business is growing fast and they've been investing in new fabrics and print equipment so maybe their IT department will get some love soon too.

So I find I can't take rock pictures for now. The current cheapo digital microscope has had a loose power cable for a while now, and though I stabilised it with an elastic band, if it gets out of kilter it takes ages to correct and relocate the stable position because it tends to cause a BSOD and sometimes a couple of reboots to reset and clear the pitiful cries from my USB ports who insist they've been overloaded. Not encouraging. However! I have a newer and better microscope and funky all-direction retort stand on semi-order. This required actual human contact and I can't even direct you to the specs online because there aren't any yet. I don't even know yet if I'll be getting a 5MP or 8MP sensor, but either way it will be an improvement over the current 2MP I get (I carefully scale and smooth to get higher resolution images for bigger prints, but naturally everything gets a bit softer). I have learned to my detriment that when camera gear of any sort advertises the resolution of the image, you have to dig deep in the fine print to find out if they mean actual pixels or interpolated (zoomed) pixels. Bastards.

A while back I slowly and painfully assembled a rig out of a stereo microscope, secondhand Canon DSLR, lens adaptor, LED ringlight, and some bits of gaffer tape. I'd hoped to get images of the 10MP (or so) resolution offered by the camera, and I did, sort of, but the images were very poor quality compared to what I could already achieve. I didn't exhaust all possible lines of enquiry to improve the picture quality but I had to retire the project before it made me cry. It's possible I just need a lot more light and a better understanding of the camera settings, but it's also quite likely that the chain of optics are just not up to snuff. I had ideas to fine tune the focus but that required building something that could rotate/spread/hold two other things apart. Needed just way too many spoons when all I wanted was to take pretty pictures. At any point I could have thrown many thousands of dollars at the problem and had much less trauma, but even then when I tried to research a within-reason fantasy camera rig I got hit in the face by the huge variation in prices for apparently the same specs (I'm assuming the price difference came down to quality of optics and assembly, but I didn't know). And a lot of those specs were features I just didn't care about anyway. The mental effort was too great for my poor wretched sick brain and I had to let that project slip too.

Mental spoons are so hard to come by I've been spending weeks just doggedly working my way through one set of forms, or just doing my pitifully small tax.

I went looking for a fantasy version of the digital microscope I currently use, which retails now for a whopping $65. Frustratingly I couldn't find much of anything useful to me in the sweet spot around $300-$500 where I was prepared to go. Image resolution, again – few models are designed to capture at higher resolutions than those needed for on-screen display. Found one in the end but it was up around $1150. I started to seriously contemplate going there but in the process got to speak to An Actual Human Being Who Knew What He Was On About And Not Some Damn Lying Idiot Salesperson about my requirements and he told me about the new models he was assessing in that price range that he thought would suit. I liked him because his company sold the super expensive one but he told me it was over-priced and not to buy it. Well, they've been assessed, he's getting them in stock in the next couple of weeks, and I get first go.

In other art news I've been taking advantage of Snapfish's canvas print sales and have acquired 13 large 100cm x 75cm canvas prints for some theoretical future exhibition. I would really like to exhibit one day but by golly the spoons! Urgh. In theory I can work on labels and listings for the ones I have so it doesn't all come up as a huge task at once. I need to print up a book with those images as a sort of pre-catalogue, and that's about 20% done... It goes on.

My hands are *much* less painful in the warm weather, which is good, but the encroaching humidity is killing my knees. Oh well.

The cats are still the cats. Buffy charms the socks off all visitors. Boris Giles grows more enormous every day. Cally and Princess still hiss at each other. Cat medical update posts go elsewhere.

Husband is very busy with work and gigs, but is having fun with it and I'm so glad. He's even turning down the odd gig to be with me, or if it's too routine a gig and likely to be more of a chore than a pleasure. I've not been able to drive further than the local shops for a long time so he's been my driver and cabin fever doctor for a long time now. Hopefully with the improvement in my hands I'll be able to drive further and be a bit more independent again. I don't get to see nearly enough of Mum.

I've been reading a bit, usually in the bath. After Iain M. Banks passed away I completed my collection of Culture novels and worked through them all in order. The last I read was Surface Detail and it was probably his best, made so much more poignant by the themes of death and rebirth. Could only read those in very small chunks at a time. Lately decided to seriously hunt down the Liaden books and started with Fledgling which I'd borrowed from L&R several years ago and remembered fondly. Happily read the sequels Saltation, Ghost Ship, and Dragon Ship. Much easier to flit through these, and just the kind of space adventure I really enjoy. The postal fairy has brought me the pair Crystal Soldier and Crystal Dragon so those are the next off the rank, with another handful on their way to me.

The purple hair is currently blue, as that's how this batch has faded rather than the usual pink. I had actually planned to try blue so this is serendipitous. I really like it and will try to get a picture before it gets done over on Thursday. I'd have kept it for longer as the colour is great, but because the bleaching has grown out there isn't enough of it, and there are timing issues in the next few weeks so it's now or mid December. I might try to get them to apply both blue and purple next time, if it won't break the bank.

Well, that's enough fun for now. By golly my hands hurt, but I'm glad I tell you! GLAD!