Krita, Tablets, Rick Gervais, and Facemasks Oh My :-)

In the interest of keeping up with my relatively prolific posting frequency this year, and rather than wait for inspiration to strike, here are a few bits and bobs.

I ordered and recently received a Wacom Intuous Pro Medium graphics tablet. Why? Um… I need it for my work? (not really). But I am doing a lot of markups of PDF’s lately, thought using a tablet for those might be useful and I couldn’t find my old Wacom Graphire 3 (which I bought around 14(!!) years ago).

So it arrived and installed smoothly on both Windows 10 and Ubuntu 20.04 without a hitch. It connects via USB or wirelessly over bluetooth. Again, this works without issue on both OS’s. So while I did check to see how it would work with my marking up of PDF’s (it does), things got way more fun when I installed Krita. I’ve never really used Krita before. I think I likely installed it a couple of times over the years, but I had never attempted to really draw anything using it (Inkscape has always been my thang).

It’s very feature-rich and there are a TON of tutorial videos on YouTube. I quickly realized that the shortcoming would not be the tablet or the software - the shortcoming would be me. And while I haven’t found a huge amount of time to spend with it (my work and workload seems utterly unaffected and somehow bolstered by Covid and working-from-home), I already see improvements as I just practice sketching and doodling with it to learn how it works.

Over the years my creative output has waned. Severely. I miss it. I am finding I need the outlet. My brain is seriously tired at the end of each day and I need a way to switch off the engineering side of it. I’d rather do that by exercising the creative side sometimes rather than just always consuming tv and video content.

Speaking of consuming video content. I highly recommend After Life on Netflix. This was a huge surprise. It is hilarious, moving, and just wonderful. It’s not what I expected from Ricky Gervais, and I am impressed. It is not for everyone. There is a dry British subtlety and some shockingly dark humour here but the way it literally has me (and my wife) laughing and then suddenly tearing up 20 seconds later is absolutely magic.

So there it is. A post for June. Just in case you’re reading this years later - this is the point of the Covid story where people are realizing that many areas in the US did not take Covid seriously enough and now it may be coming back to bite them in the ass. It’s also the time where idiotic people (on both sides of the border) refused to or stopped wearing masks as if it was something they were making for themselves rather than contributing to the health of the society they live within.

Oh yeah… people are also getting booed for coming out and apologizing for racist, hurtful, and stupid things they’ve done in the past. A good thing in my books. But I think there are a lot of people (many of whom are very male and very white like me) who would just prefer that things stay as they were, crying out about the perils of cancel culture and the importance of historical recordkeeping. This is part of societal progress. It will necessarily piss off some portion. It has to. Progress is messy.

When I go down this road of ‘other things’ rolling around in my mind, the list keeps growing. Maybe I won’t have such a difficult time continuing to post here. :-)