This Week in Leif & Thorn: Economically-disadvantaged people talk about the state of their health insurance during a virus outbreak. Peak fantasy comedy right here.
“A lot of times before they’re intubated — which means put on a ventilator because they can’t breathe on their own — when they’re still struggling to breathe, and they’re saying, ‘Well, I didn’t know COVID was real, and I wish I’d worn a mask.’ And then it’s already too late,” she tells NPR’s All Things Considered. “You can see the regret, as they’re struggling to breathe and it’s finally hitting them that this is real.”
Welp, it’s been a week since the election was called, and Trump’s been wildly flinging himself from “if I don’t concede that means I don’t have to leave right??” to “file 100 lawsuits against whoever’s handy, hope some evidence shows up later” to “flood my mailing list with begging emails, admit in the fine print that their $$$ will actually just be paying off my debts.”
Anyway, here’s another pile of links I’ve been sitting on for too long, about gun control & police brutality. (The really old ones I just discovered recently, and am gonna link anyway because they’re Still Relevant.)
August 2015 (NYT): “In the protests that have followed police shootings, demonstrators have often asked why officers are so rarely punished for shootings that seem unwarranted. Dr. Lewinski is part of the answer.”
That viral “top 100 reasons to vote FOR Biden” list is now “top 100 reasons you’re allowed to be happy about this, not just settle for it.”
Republican lawsuits against counting legitimate votes keep getting thrown out. Although Mitch McConnell sounds like he’s planning to try and Benghazi this — where they just keep launching new hearings no matter how many times they find zero evidence of wrongdoing, so the average person will think “there must be something to it, or why would they be holding all these hearings?”
We just got our first mixed-race Black + Indian + Jamaican woman elected to the White House. Nnnnnice. (One with a startlingly good record on trans rights, and a prosecutorial record that seems to be light on grand headline-grabbing progressive gestures, but heavy on slow concrete detail-oriented progress.)
…we might have a shot at getting back the Senate??
One person retired at an awkward time, so both GA senate seats are up for re-election this year. And both of them went into runoffs, to be held January 5, with one Democrat in the running for each.
Some of the groups that flipped the GA presidential race, who could use your support over the next 2 months:
Gonna spend the rest of 2020 contributing to as many of these as possible. Got recommendations for other swing-state groups to support? Drop some links in the comments.
New Computer was delivered on the 12th, and by this week I’ve finally got enough transferred/installed to do most of my work on it.
Old Computer never actually got a real name (Windows called it ERIN-PC by default, 9 years later and I didn’t change it), so it seemed like a good opportunity to name both of them together.
…the bigger, sturdier, older solid-black computer is Gideon, and the skinnier, more-powerful, younger solid-black computer that’s been busily absorbing Gideon’s settings/data is Harrow.
(Apparently not enough people in my internet circles have read the Gideon the Ninth series, but (a) you should do that, it’s great and (b) this is very funny on multiple levels that you will appreciate after reading.)
Had a brief scare with Paint Shop Pro not functioning — it installed, and seemed like it was running, but once I started trying to work on comics it became clear that a bunch of the tools weren’t working. Like…the brush. And the eraser. And the text creator.
Did a general uninstall/reinstall. It didn’t help. Did an uninstall, then a Google-assisted hunt through the registry to find all the places where Jasc would’ve put keys and delete them, then a reboot, then a reinstall. That worked!
Comparative screenshots:
Paint Shop Pro running on Gideon (Windows 7) at the left, Harrow (Windows 10) at the right.
(Gideon’s screen is physically larger, but Harrow’s is more pixel-dense, so it comes out to the same width and a tiny bit taller.)
There’s some minor display differences — e.g. the narrower bezels around the frame of each open file — and function differences — you can see the disappearing “expand/contract” button next to the “close” button on the Layer and Tool Options menus. (Haven’t actually used that for years, so no big loss…) And there are changes in “this window/option won’t be active unless the mouse cursor is Right Here” that are gonna take some getting used to.
But it works! I can brush and/or erase things again! The only remaining hangup was that it wasn’t registering “drag a file into the program window means open it” — and that comes back when it’s run on compatibility settings for Windows 7.
Really wish I could find the details of the specific coders who put together this release of Paint Shop Pro. You folks wrote a program so clear and solid that a machine from 20 years in the future, multiple generations of operating systems later, still understands how to pick it up and get it running. That deserves a shoutout by name.
Other little updates:
Having to switch every device between 1 USB port is annoying as expected — definitely gonna get some new converters — but in the meantime, it’s manageable
The power cord is USB-C, which means it can plug into any of the 4 existing ports; turns out it was easy to make my Executive Assistant lose interest, I just had to move it away from His Side
Forgot that World Community Grid doesn’t install with default limits; the poor fans on this machine went nuts a few times before I tracked down the problem and told it that no, it is not allowed to use 99% of the CPU when it has the chance
Used to be stuck in a 7-day trial window to give different filetypes more aesthetically-pleasing icons, but this time I did it with the freeware FileTypesManager
I have switched to making art over here, and ohhhh yeah, Harrow is noticeably faster
Photoshop opens in seconds, instead of minutes. Batch actions now get whipped through in the blink of an eye. PSP only took a couple seconds to save a file anyway, but now it’s half a second.
I am so looking forward to the most resource-intensive task in Harrow’s immediate future: Exporting A 192-Page PDF From InDesign
