Into the Last Quarter

2015 has gotten away from me, I realized when seeing October arrive so quickly. Last year was difficult due to my father’s travails, but still, things got done. Not so this year and I find myself trying to play catch up while falling further behind.

My health hasn’t been catastrophically bad, however it has been bad by even my lowered expectations. Nothing I planned for the year has been accomplished or will be before 2016 rolls around. Simply there is no energy to go around with too many things needing doing.

Between that becoming glaringly obvious and the rather somber tone of General Conference this weekend, I’ve found myself less than motivated. Plowing on is the only plan with no real hope of progress in this desolate world filled with superficiality dominating the culture.

Ah well.

More Hammer Studios movie reviews are being worked on as I take a break to compose this post. The focus will be on the 1960s flicks including one of my favorites. How many get done before Halloween is up to how things work out.

Perhaps the new TV season will provide some distraction from the world’s ills. Anime has gone downhill this year, especially in the latter half, so older classics will be explored through Hulu and Crunchyroll if time permits. The current trend of hyper encephalic little girls in school uniforms needs to die an ugly death, but shows no sign of abating due to the emotionally arrested perverts who make up the majority of the audience in Japan.

The arrival of Earth-2 characters in The Flash live action series is something I’m excited about since I’m a huge Justice Society of America fan. The Jay Garrick Flash costume is nearly perfect and it is somewhat surreal to finally see that character adapted at last.

Fighting problems with software refusing to work correctly with hardware has been a running theme of the year. Lately, it is the inability of getting a Huion 580 pen tablet to work correctly with Corel Photo-Paint. No configuration works properly with pressure registered negatively instead of positively or if Pen and Touch enabled the lag becomes impossible to use.  Corel has an opportunity to steal most of Adobe’s customers, yet has managed to put the most buggy and crippled version of their CorelDraw suite in years with X7.

Consequently, I’m trying out Photoshop Elements for the 30 day trial period while debating whether getting the $10 a month rental version of Photoshop with Lightroom is worth the hassle. Rental software as a concept sticks in my craw, so it is a bitter thing to contemplate. Replacing the replacement tablet with a Wacom Intous in the same category would cost me nearly $200 that I simply don’t have.

So far Elements works with the tablet well including pressure levels. If Photo-Paint would work even without pressure levels, it would be satisfactory. Given that even the pen pressure control panel being open trick only lasts about ten minutes before the program flakes out it isn’t viable.

I miss the old days when there was real competition in software with multiple vendors putting out good products. Along the way, I’ve lost all my favorite graphics editors including Aldus Photostyler and Micrografx Picture Publisher. The latter was superior to Photoshop and was a real tragedy to lose.

Low energy levels has killed most socializing this year, so relatively unimportant things like pen tablet woes are more aggravating than they should be. Essentially, my social life has ceased to exist with no sign of ever coming back. Not much can be done about it since health rules all existence for a person and if you don’t have any, you don’t have a life. For some of us, enduring to the end is all there is.

Trying to do that graciously is the challenge.