Oh No, More Damn Joe Stuff!

I've been busy, mostly learning new programs. But a friend, and an MDJS supporter, posted something on Facebook that sparked something in me about taking advantage of the COVID-19 confinement for parents to teach their children little lessons that are off the scope from the usual school lesson material. Little real world lessons to be done through example and building from zero. I had finished a PowerPoint sketch exported to a video with some music, and YouTube stomped on it for rights violation with the music. I didn't mind - it was just a sketch for my purposes that I thought some of the Patreon sponsors would like to see. The sketch had no voice - just text. But I really want some clip videos with a narrator. So, with this months payment from Patreon I decided to invest in purchase of a Speechelo license. Speechelo is an A.I. voice generation with some options for voices and tones. I tried an adolescent boy for the narrator and was very pleased with the result. I ran a

For me, aside from fewer visitors, it is life as normal. I'm home in my command chair, on the computer with PBS or YouTube in the background. Sometimes I'll watch a show on Netflix, but not often. The second season of Altered Carbon has been a slow building fireball. As I type I am watching Blood Sugar Rising on PBS - an excellent documentary on the rise of diabetes in this country (and the results). But I continue working on the juggle. As I've said before, I use the juggle to keep from going into another multi-year "writer's block" and remain productive. It results in a sudden burst of releases as things ripen together. Kind of like an orchard, when the fruit comes ready for picking. Light, Slenderella cover LIGHT This will be the most political novel I've written. More on the lines of my 1984. Like , it demands my time, dictates new scenes. To this point I have not given the lead character a name. It has been told from a personal, third perso

(I found this under "drafts" from the beginning of the confinement. I decided to post it, despite being over a week late.) I'm trying to get rolling for production. The Confinement has me living in solitarty and getting judgemental a**ho**s judging my reaction to it. The Lockdown is not really any different to me. I have only left my house one time in the past month, for a doctor's appointment. I have a long list of people who say they are "going to," but don't. Going to visit. Going to help me with a problem at the house. And they stopped appearing long before the threat of plague was on the horizon. i have someone who bring by groceries, once a week, spends 10 minutes talking and is sometimes back for a quick visit. it doesn't equal the "hour in the yard" and interaction with food delivery to a cell in real prison solitary. A friend had two of his sons come over to spend the night, twice in two weeks. They help with chores aro

Years ago, after ignoring the required reading in my High School English class, I read Daniel Dafoe's Journal of the Plague Year. Long before I met up with a small community of musical theater talents at a show called 3,000 Miles Off Broadway at Gio's in Hollywood, I wanted to make a musical of the book. I saw it as the last confrontation between magic and science. Science won, but it was a fight. I see many scenes from that book, which is a non-fiction reporting the tried to convince people there was a plague visitation in action, in the news every night. The denial, the hysteria, the required panic actions that were better than doing nothing... as if it was better to do something wrong than wait to see what would be effective. Sometimes the hardest action is to sit still. It seems to be genetically encoded. DO! instead of just Be! It is harder to be a human being than a human d oing. So I continue to sit and wait for clarification through meditation and listening

After almost two years of problems with Apple - both Mojave (10.14) and Catalina (10.15) - I have migrated to Linux to get things done. It means I will have to spend time learning how to learn the new software after 35 years using Mac. I'm and old dog and learning new tricks takes some time. But that is primarily with them document layout with Scribus. The shift from Pages to LibreOffice is not all that dynamic. From Photoshop to Kritta may take a bit. But I'm doing all that now. I'm on Ubuntu Studio 19.10, which should last for a minute. And I can get back into Jorune and my other projects. 2020 should be a good year.

The Guardian of Computer Hell I’m going through the change. The last few days made a decision for me. I am doing a full conversion to Windows 10 and Linux (Ubuntu Studio 19.04) as quickly as possible.  I discovered that the problem is not simply the conflict between the Apple and Adobe “phone home” requirements - checking through the internet to see if I am “authorized” to use that specific machine, that specific piece of software. It required delays at the start of every work session. Every time I used Adobe InDesign or Photoshop using the Macintosh with MacOS 10.15.2 there was a delay rom 15- to 45-seconds after my first mouse click or typing a single character before it had a response. The next few strokes or clicks had less delay and after a few minutes I was able to do my work.  The problem was not with “phone home” codes, but a new disk formatting schema that Apple instituted. APFS replaced the old options. You can no longer format using the previous standard Mac HFS