On and off this past week or two, I’ve been working my way through “The Road To Amber”, the last volume of NESFA Press’ collections of all of Roger Zelazny’s short stories. It’s a mix of standalone stuff, several fragments he wrote to tie up some loose ends of Amber and figure out where he’d go with a third series, and some nonfiction essays of his, and some stuff about his life.

There was a bit in there about his writing practice: every work day, he would require himself to sit down and write at least three sentences, and he would require himself to do this four times a day. If all he got out of a particular day was twelve discombobulated sentences, that was okay. And something in me said, huh, that sounds like an interesting exercise. So instead of closing the book and going to sleep, I got up and went to the computer, opened Illustrator, and doodled something using the same vibes as that Piranesi-inspired image I did a couple months ago. And then I made a new artboard, and thought I was going to do another take on that image, but instead I found myself making a big text box and just… typing. No editing, no rephrasing, whatever comes out of my fingers is what I have to work with, typos and all. Well, maybe a couple of typo fixes. But not many.

man what the fuck. That sure was a transmission from Death’s Radio right there. I’m going to bed. I gotta get up tomorrow morning and try to take a cat to the vet to have her persistently scabby nose looked at. Maybe I’ll look at this again tomorrow and it’ll suck. Midnight free-writing is allowed to suck.

A few days ago, Patreon’s social media folks posted this in the Discord chat as a “Thursday Thought Starter”

And I kind of went off on this. Because I am a person who has spent a lot of time, effort, and money on organizing my life such that my creative work is a major part of it – but holy shit there are so many other things that make me happy:

Cuddling my SO. Reading a good book, whether it’s an old favorite or something new to me. Going out to see some live music (really a thing I gotta start doing more again now that the pandemic’s over). Dancing. Riding my bike aimlessly around the city and the park. Sitting outside a cafe nursing a drink and watching tourists. Answering questions on the Illustrator subreddit and having people say “holy shit that not only solved my problem but showed me new ways to work much faster, thank you”. Eating a good meal. Getting cross-faded and having some Adult Fun, solo or with a friend. All of these are things that contribute to “creating” being maybe about a quarter of a realistic graph of “things that make me happy”.

Today a friend posted a lengthy rant about how her buying into the idea that studying hard, then working hard, would be the key to a happy and successful life left her her frazzled from overwork and almost completely lacking in any kind of friend circles: constantly turning down social invitations in college because she had to Study Hard Tonight eventually resulted in the invitations stopping, and it hasn’t gotten any better in the ensuing years after ending up at various toxic workplaces that loved to take advantage of her immense guilt around never feeling like she’s working hard enough. She’s making enough money to live comfortably in one of the most expensive cities in the US but on the rare occasions she has any time to herself she has no idea what to do any more because so much of her energy’s gone into work, work, work.

Whatever the hell you are doing, however much you love it, there is a whole bunch of other things that you need. If you can find a way to get some of these things along with your work, great – now that the pandemic’s over I need to start scheduling time to hang out with art friends working on various projects together, for instance – but always remember to make room in your life for things that are Not Work.

If you are working for someone else, be wary of their attempts to get you to spend more of your time working for them for less money. And be wary of demonization of things like unions, too.

This goes for me, too: I am a freelance artist who derives a large part of my current income from drawing whatever the fuck I feel like drawing and keeping a tip jar out – but that tip jar is on Patreon, a website run by a corporation based in one of the most expensive cities in the US, with multiple millions worth of venture capital dollars pushing them to find ways to increase the revenue stream from supporters to creators that they take 5-12% off of. The graph I opened this post with is one of many bits of messaging they send people like me, some more subtle, some less, all focused on what worked to get their biggest earners to the point where their life is completely consumed by cranking out content a lot of people are willing to pay for.

I think this is the point where this little rant trails off. I will close with a link to one of the other things that sparked these thoughts today: an article from 2008 on the origins of modern consumer society about a hundred years ago, and the efforts by various coalitions of manufacturers to sell work as the center of life. https://orionmagazine.org/article/the-gospel-of-consumption/

Or Illustrator 2021 if you want the marketing name. Or 25.3.1 if you want to be precise – 25.3.0 came out a few weeks in ten countries, none of which were the US; a couple weeks later, 25.3.1 fixed all the killer bugs that early adopters in those ten countries found and screamed about. Experience has taught me to avoid releases of AI (or any major software, to be honest, but especially AI) that end in .0, so I wouldn’t have been one of those anyway even if it had been available globally.New splash screen. Don’t love it. Don’t hate it. Will probably replace it soon. I’d been seeing the splash screen credit for “Jade Purple Brown” next to the betas and thought that was just a placeholder fake name but evidently that is the name/alias of an actual person who has their own domain and everything. It’s a decent piece of flat art, which sure does beat that one year the splash screen was a creepy drowned-looking face. (Also I have noticed that the anti-aliasing between the purple and red/yellow shapes is completely fucked up and that is gonna drive me crazy until I change this image, so I guess replacing it just went up my priority list…)

seriously I can’t unsee this

Anyway. In terms of features this one is both really small and really huge – the detailed feature summary lists all of three things. I think that might be a record. But two of these things are actually huge changes that probably ended up with touching every single part of the program: they finally added the ability to rotate the canvas view like I’ve been asking for since I first found the old feature request form in like 2007, and they updated it to work on the new Apple CPUs.

My last version was 24.2.3 so there’s also all the changes from 25.0 (a new Recolor Artwork that probably doesn’t play well with global color swatches so I’ll never use it, cloud document upgrades I won’t use, and some minor type handling changes that sound vaguely nice to have), 25.1 (simplified repeat/mirror stuff that I might use, if I can actually apply it as an effect instead of it being a new kind of weird object that I have to use Isolation Mode to dig into – I hate how Isolation Mode dims everything else so I generally avoid it), and 25.2 (more cloud document stuff, minor type handling changes extended to Japanese glyphs, a very annoying “system compatibility report” that tells me to update my perfectly-functioning Wacom drivers every launch, and “stability and performance fixes” which are always a good bullet point for a feature list in my book)

seriously this is annoying, at least it doesn’t actually disable the driver like it implies it has done. I am reluctant to update my Wacom drivers because I am using old tablets and there’s always that risk of them deciding to end support for stuff that still works perfectly fine…

(edit: yep. new driver is 6.4.43, last driver that supported the Intuos 4 in my laptop bag is 6.3.41-2, so even if I upgrade I will keep getting this every time I restart my computer or restart AI after it crashes. Yes, Illustrator starts when I boot up my computer; I know I’m gonna be using it on a pretty much daily basis.)

Anyway. Rotate view works.

Fuck I could have used this so much when I was working on this spread. Maybe I’ll go back in and add a little more love to it now that I can easily rotate the canvas.

The default hotkey for canvas rotation is of course already assigned to something else. I’ve assigned it to J, one of the few hotkeys left – but I’ve also read the section of the manual about it and discovered that shift-space will summon it from any tool. Which is a little awkward as shift is also used to constrain its angle, so there is a little dance I may end up doing a lot: shift-space to summon rotation, let up shift for a second, which thankfully does not shift into canvas panning, then hit shift again to constrain the angle. For something like the spread above, I may also consider making a few reference shapes somewhere and using the new “rotate to object” menu item. Which maybe merits a hotkey. Dunno. We’ll see how it shakes out.

Initial tests are that everything looks good, I know Astute worked really hard to have all their plugins ready for rotate view/M1 compatibility before the initial AI25.3.0 launch so there’s not much fear on that front – their suite is pretty essential for my current workflow. Time will tell if there are any serious bugs lurking in this upgrade.

More on the tablet situation:

Huh. I don’t think the current medium Intuos Pro is gonna fit in my laptop bag, either.

Well. I’ll worry about it when I finally have to lose the current drivers because I bought a new machine that they won’t work on. And make sure I budget $2-600 more for one or two new tablets – I wouldn’t be surprised if the Intuos 5 on my desk stops working in a year or two.

I am really not happy about the way modern Wacom styli no longer seem to be compatible with the spring nib, I love those things and loathe all the varieties of solid nibs that you have to constantly gouge into the surface of the tablet with. Solid nibs, IMHO, are a subtle but definite contributor to hand strain. Blaaagh. I wonder how insane it would be to try and turn a modern solid nib into a spring one. Probably very.

A couple days ago, the rear tire on my bike went flat. I had to walk it home from the park.

Today, I was feeling lazy: I walked it out to the bike shop and bought a couple of new tubes, and had them put one in for me. I then hopped on the bike and went to the park again to ride around and enjoy feeling like the rear of the bike had a nice, firm grasp on the pavement, instead of mushily slewing around all the time.

On the way out, I suddenly heard a loud PSSSSSSSH. At exactly the same corner my tire went flat on two days ago. Complete and total deflation.

Really all I could do was laugh. I’ll take it home tonight and have a look at it. Might actually use the patch kit I have sitting in the under-seat bag instead of being lazy.