#Workflow break

[abuddyforeveryseason]

This is the Buddy for September 20th. It's a trace. Or, well, it's not even a trace - it's a recolored piece of art I saw when Firefox updated. I just copied the drawing on inkscape and changed the colors.

This is the original:

Man, I remember when I was just starting to figure Inkscape out. I thought it was so much fun, manipulating vectors, changing colors and applying filters. I actually wanted to use to draw a proper comic. Sounds naïve, looking back. I moved on to FireAlpaca eventually - at first, I'd draw on FireAlpaca and convert the image to a vector on Inkscape, which made it easier to manipulate. But after a recent update, it became much harder to change colors on Inkscape. I don't know why they changed it, but it broke my workflow so bad, I avoid using the software if I can help it now.

I don't know if there's a way to fix the change that I dislike so much, but, even if there is, it's a bit too late, I've moved on to different applications now.

Changing subjects, it's interesting how there seems to be some sort of collective unconsciousness that dictates what's popular nowadays - I'm a big Osamu Tezuka fan, and I make sure to read his manga whenever I found out a new one has been published, be it in English, Portuguese or Spanish. I don't know anyone else who likes him, and even in online reviews they don't seem to be too popular among the younger manga-loving crown who prefers more recent fare.

And yet, there seems to be a lot of Tezuka manga being translated nowadays! I guess there's more people who like it out there than I realize. And not only that, there's a new Phoenix anime out on Disney+, and an anime adaptation of the Astro Boy-inspired Pluto Manga coming soon to Netflix. It's weird that I've lived on this sort of Tezuka bubble for a while, and now there's a lot more variety than I thought I'd ever see.

[kazehita]

the colliny

[baketothefuture]

About to quit my job because of one (1) project I had to take over from the previous SE

[spinecutter]

its funny to me that tech companies keep advertisting NEW cutting edge AI ENHANCEMENTS AND TECH meanwhile almost their entire consumer base is just like. Well i dont really care about the ai at all actually. i think most people turn it off actually

[pawbeanies]

puppy has only been at work 2 hours and already he wants to go home i am not fit for offices im fit for looking up all cute and STUPID!!!

[kirstenly]

As a small expression of how detailed this whole thing has been, I've been meticulously rendering all manner of wood and such. I've hidden the layers with Feng Xin and a lot of decorative things in various states of finish. But I've been doing my best.

[llycaons]

omg I was like 'they have people coming in for relief, they don't need me' and this cns is like 'seems like a waste' and um. do you not want people to...eat...or be able to pee...?

[lucky-numberme]

guy who needs to just do a bunch of studies voice: "but why do I draw so slowww"

[lupinuslepidus]

last couple of weeks of fieldwork happened but were filled with chaos that included a crew of interns, hiring nonsense, permitting nonsense, and extreme weather including both a record-breaking heat wave and thunderstorms. we were bouncing up and down the east side of the sierra (at one point we crossed the CA/NV border, like, six times over the span of two days because the mountains we were in were very precisely bisected by it.) the epic highs & lows of fieldwork included:

sampling in Death Valley National Park during the heat wave. this was actually less bad than when we were sampling across the way from Death Valley, because 8000 feet vs. 5000 feet of elevation is a very noticeable difference when it's over ninety degrees out.

we had a team of interns who were remarkably good sports and helped tide us over when our crew was briefly down to just 2 people!

i later found out that the interns had been, uh, maybe misled about how much work they'd be doing, which went a long way to explaining why they had a chronically exhausted air about them. that's academia for you i guess

got to see the ancient bristlecone pine forest on our days off!

ditched some gear in the field at one point bc i didn't feel like carrying a long metal thingy through an Active Thunderstorm while we were a couple hundred feet off a mountain peak

ditched our camp overnight bc didn't feel like taking the car back up a muddy road following an Active Thunderstorm, since the tires had real bad traction on mud

got told by a motel manager the night that we ditched camp that i? smell like pine? which. was not the worst thing. and makes sense given my constant layer of pine sap residue. but sure was an interaction that happened

got to swim in alpine lakes on our days off!

stopped taking my lunch breaks because it was the only way to even slightly keep up once our crew was back up to 4 people

and by 'keep up' i mean i was still consistently finishing 30 minutes behind the other

i don't. recommend this

a couple nights in various spots, we heard coyote packs yipping somewhere around our camp, which is a haunting and unexpectedly lovely experience. genuinely highly recommend waking up to the sound of coyotes at three a.m.

[pewcat2]

My favourite part about switching from photoshop to corel painter essentials is how the official tutorials I get when I look up "how to do x" reference buttons and windows that just don't fucking exist

[direwombat]

y'know. most of my life i used "rough draft" and "first draft" fairly synonymously but i am realizing that for me they are in fact. two different drafts...

[moldwood]

drawing a comic 🤝animating

boy that was fun! i have to draw it again?

[mornyavie]

Wait huh.

The new update makes it impossible to click on a post and like. Actually see the original post.

Instead it takes you to the top of OP's blog (or whoever else in the post chain you clicked on).

Makes it difficult to impossible to check a circulated post for updates, to go to the post on the blog of someone who didn't add to it, or to go to a particular version of the post period if it has enough notes that the note scrolling thing is useless.

The only way I can find to actually get the link to the post is with the little menu in the upper right - and that only works for the particular blog you're staring at right now.

All in the name of making Tumblr navigation "more intuitive"??? How is it more intuitive to click on a post and not be taken to the post you clicked on? Hell this is even how twitter retweets work, if the goal is homogenization!

I hate this :/

[smulnsander]

Heyyyyyy am i the only one who hates the why drive boxes and just drives generally work in the new update or???

[hypnotides]

i really wanna work on my blender stuff but unfortunately i am plagued by the consumption and have been sleeping no less than 12 hours a day. literally obscene at this point

[ziggy-scardust]

CO-SIGNED

today was the day we finalized the migration of essential software at work from some old and busted shit that was ready to die at any time, to the new cloud version of the same software that we are no longer responsible for maintaining. which is good because no one was actually maintaining ours. it's just been slowly crufting into unusability for a decade. so anyway they set aside an hour for a teams meeting where they'd walk us through the different interface and how to go through normal processes.

"it's not that big a change," they said. "it's all the same stuff, it just looks a little different," they said.

they did not account for the fact that the primary user of this software is someone who doesn't actually know how it works or what it's doing. they learned how to do their job entirely through rote memorization. they know which buttons they are supposed to press in which order, and that is the full extent of what they know. they also did not account for the fact that this person's processes were learned thirdhand from other people who were not using this software normally to begin with.

it's like. imagine if someone had only ever used tumblr in the app. and you try to get them to use it in a desktop browser, but they cannot figure out how to post. and you go through explaining where the button is and how to format text and add tags, even though you could have sworn it was all the same in the app. but then they're like, "okay, but what's the phone number" and you're like "what" and they're like "the phone number to call to make a post?" and it turns out somehow they still had the ability to post by calling a phone number, and every time they posted on the app they called the post in first and then edited the audio post to transcribe it into text before screenshotting the text for a photo post. and nothing you can say to them will make them understand that none of that is necessary or correct. they shouldn't have even been able to do some of that. they can just type into the post box now, like a civilized person. "okay," they say, "but what is the phone number, though? because when i made my account my friend gave me this checklist and the first thing on it is to call the number."

so anyway we were on that teams call for almost three hours and they still don't have a handle on the new software