Waiting for My New Toy

One of the recommended budgeting strategies for couples is what is known as “mad money”, or money allocated to each spouse that they don’t have to account for. They can spend it on anything they want^* without recriminations from the other spouse. I have always said there are two different types of discretionary purchases — “mine” and “stupid”.

What I do with my mads is save it. Usually for some big technological marvel down the road. I spent my last accumulated money on an iPad Air 5th Gen, (circa 2022) gently used/refurbished. It does a good job of most of what I need, which is composing novels on Scrivener and surfing the net. It does sometimes seem a bit slow when I’m posting pictures for social media on Loomly, but I’m not sure if that’s my iPad or the wi-fi at Starbucks.

I have had that iPad for 15 months. I know this because I started saving my mads as soon as I bought it, with my goal again being “something technological”. I’m at the age where my knick-knacks are barely contained by curio cabinets, and I am fashion-backward. Therefore my reward to myself will always be technology, something useful and cool.

When I heard of the new iPads coming out, especially that it was going to be an exciting product revamp, I listened for the rollout, and — wow. The new iPad Airs with the M2 chip, the better display, the landscape front camera …

And then, I looked at the iPad Pro with its M4 chip, clearly overkill when it comes to my needs. All the features of the iPad Air, with a few more, and a faster, more powerful chip. Way overkill.

Way within my budget, given that I would be selling my old iPad to my husband and getting a bit of technology budget money. In fact, I thought I’d be paying Pro prices for my new Air. Rationally, the Air was the better choice.

Or was it?

I had been replacing my technology at a rate of once every two years because I found myself up against a slight slowdown and my expectation of needing power for graphics (Photoshop, Canva, Loomly) applications. If I could draw, I would be doing the artwork for my book covers, and I delve in Sketchup to draw maps of my settings.
I was losing money due to depreciation of the machines (the $600 iPad I bought being valued a year or so later at $180)
Because of the prior point, I wanted to keep the iPad for longer, maybe four years, before upgrading and get all the value out of it. The iPad Pro with its M4 chip, from what I could tell from iPad upgrade cycles, would be as good or better than the subsequent iPad Air for at least three years. If the Pro had contained the M3 chip, I probably would have stuck with the Air.
Only $150 of the difference between the Air and the Pro of similar specs was paid by my savings.
I had saved my money for the new big thing, and the Pro is definitely a new, big thing.
I value performance. If I can afford performance and delayed obsolescence, I’m going to go there.

I bought the Pro. It might be that this is my mid-life crisis sportscar, I don’t know. This post might just be wild justification, and in the long run I may regret spending so much on what is, basically, a tool for my writing and an adjunct for my leisure.

It’s supposedly coming in on Wednesday. I’m looking forward to it!

^*Except maybe drugs and prostitution, but those aren’t a budget issue per se.

Technology Hates Me

I have so many things I need to do today — put up a TikTok video, insert some front and back matter into the latest book, and tweak the cover for the same novel (which will be a Christmas novel, It Takes Two to Kringle, out October 1).

But technology hates me today:

Atticus (a book formatting app) keeps stalling out.
Atticus also is missing its back matter section so I can’t put in an afterword, acknowledgements, or disclaimers in my novel.
Photoshop (where I design my covers) won’t let me copy and paste a picture.
Crazy Video Maker will not let me stretch out the time pictures stay on screen for as long as I need them to.
ProWritingAid thinks I am making run-on sentences. (I am not).

At least WordPress is not throwing hitches in my writing.

And, to be honest, Photoshop functioned well when I figured out I used the wrong command.

But the level of frustration! I had hoped to have my book ready on Amazon (just in case) this weekend, and that will not happen. I hate being derailed.

Oh, well, need to find something to keep me occupied.

Tik Tok

They told me it would be good for me

@lleachie
An introduction to the love of my life
♬ original sound – Lauren Leach-Steffens

Some romance writers turned me on to Tik Tok, where they told me I could use it to make connections for future book sales. I’m not so sure about that, but I decided to try anyhow.

So far, I have posted 23 Tik Tok videos of various visual quality (I’m struggling with the lighting thing) and on various topics, with cats and coffee winning out over books.

I feel like a boomer.

I have so many questions about Tik Tok:

How can I use a ring light without the big glare in my glasses? Furthermore, why a ring light? Wouldn’t a work light work? Or a spotlight? Or a traffic light?
How do I duet?
Why can’t I do a true portrait-oriented clip on my computer? Instead it crams the landscape video into a portrait frame with lots of black area at top and bottom.
What, really, is the purpose of Tik Tok?
Editing software. What is the best editing software? I use Crazy Video Maker 2 on my computer.

For you

If any of you use Tik Tok, please submit advice of any sorts as to how to use it better. This Boomer needs your help!

Struggling with Technology (again?)

I used to be good at technology

I used to be good at technology. Honestly, I used to be the person who introduced new technology to my colleagues, who stared at their mouse as if it would yield answers on its own. The irony is that it would have yielded those answers if they only used it to search menus and drag objects.

It’s not my fault

I find myself worse at technology than I used to be, and I refuse to say it’s my fault, because I’ve been using the same techniques to teach myself new software. It’s not working. I have decided it’s not me, but the software available to me.

It was inevitable that the increasing complexity of programs and apps would result in some inscrutability. My first experience on a computer was a DOS machine. The entire WordPerfect program sat on a 8″ floppy disk (1.2 MB storage) and I had room to store my homeworks. Now we download megabites of code, invisible to us, and store programs on our terabyte hard drives, and our documents in the cloud.

Increasing complexity

Why has the size of programs and apps increased so greatly? Because progress demands programs be increasingly complex, doing more things, and doing them beautifully. I demand this myself; it’s always a bonus to me when I can type myself rather than using a secretary; format my own books; develop my own videos. Some of these programs are not made by big companies, as is evidenced by the Apple, Android, and Microsoft Stores.

The consequences

The consequences of increasingly useful and complex programs and apps are threefold:

Increasing margin for mistakes
Increasing difficulty in making logical and intuitive interfaces.
Information overload

I’m running into these, but usually the latter two. I do, however, occasionally run into buttons that don’t work, captions that float over other essential functions, and other errors. (WordPress, why do I have to click twice on “Select” to get into the photo archives like Pexels?)

Logical and intuitive interfaces — menus and buttons where the function pops up when you scroll over it; context-sensitive menus. Learning Photoshop has been challenging due to its many, many menus where menu options are not always intuitive. In these cases, a robust help menu helps, especially for those of us new to the program and not so new to the world. WordPress, on the other hand, has context-sensitive menus, although it took me a bit to figure out which menu to seek — is it the plus sign or the menu on the right?

The last is information overload. This is where you see so much on the screen that you can’t focus. Photoshop again is a good example of this. Numerous menus with numerous options — don’t get me wrong; I’d rather that than a plethora of programs that are less complicated.

I don’t want to throw away functionality, especially as I am a DIY person. Maybe better help and more consumer testing and some idea of the language used on Photoshop.

But I have a question for you:

Do you know any good books on Photoshop? On WordPress? Please let me know!

Technology in the background

When I was five years old, the object that most epitomized the grownup life I wanted to live was this:

This is a Western Electric circa 1965 Princess phone in its dial configuration (I thought touch-tone was so ugly). For some of you, many of you in fact, “Western Electric”, “Princess phone”, and “touch-tone” are terms you’ve never heard, and the term “land-line” is a term you’ve heard of and consider an archaic technology.

This was the phone I got:

My first cell phone looked like this:

No putting it in a pocket like I’m used to now.

Technology anchors the story in time and place — a protagonist can call someone on the phone, but describing the phone ever so briefly reminds the reader of when the story takes place. Describing can be succinct, like “She called on the bag phone”, or more interactive, like “she unzipped the vinyl bag, raised the antenna, and put the headset to her ear.” To a reader who has never seen a bag phone, the description will give them pause.

In actuality, there is no era without technology, no matter how primitive that technology is. Technology is simply “the collection of techniques, skills, methods, and processes used in the production of goods and services or in the accomplishment of objectives” (Wikipedia, 2017). Therefore, fire, torches, Betty lamps, tallow candles, lanterns, gaslight, incandescent bulbs, fluroescent bulbs, halogen bulbs, and LEDs are all light technologies depending on the era.

My current work in progress is set 15 years in the future after a national economic and governmental collapse. The country, now countries, have lost electricity, gasoline (petrol), and long-distance trucking of food and supplies. Their technologies, therefore, have been created from knowledge, ingenuity, and scavenging. The main fuel used is bio-diesels made from rendering of dead cattle, plant matter, and sewage. Wood, of course, still work, as do scavenged stores of gasoline and kerosene, but these are rare. Solar installations and wind turbines supply power until parts need to be replaced, because machining has not yet converted to diesel-generated power. People have developed diesel generators and kerosene/diesel refrigerators. They have begun to pick up old arts like weaving, hand-sewing, and preserving food by smoking. Economies are very localized, and trade is done by barter.

That is their level of technology. It’s not as advanced as ours, but it may help them crawl upward to their own technologies, developed from the available materials, mimicry of the scavenged goods, ingenuity, and need. Without me writing about it, however, nobody will understand how different their world is than ours.

*********
I’m writing pretty fast — my goal today is 32,000 words total, or 3000 additional words for today. If I have to take a break, I have a wide cushion.

Extrapolating the Near Future

If I wrote my books to take place in the 25th Century, extrapolating the future would be easy — I could make ships fly, fill them with artificial gravity, and use technobabble —

“the core elementals are based on FTL nanoprocessor units arranged into twenty-five bilateral kelilactals with twenty of those units being slaved to the central heisenfram terminal …”

Star Trek: Next Generation, “Rascals”.

To be fair, this passage segment was written purposely as technobabble. Let’s try this:

“No, sir. My brother’s positronic brain has a Type L phase discriminating amplifier. Mine is a type R.”

Star Trek: Next Generation, “Time’s Arrow, Part 1”

I write about the near future. Most of my books take place between 2020 and 2065. I’m told I need to describe these better by my new editor — actually what he said was “You’re too f’n smart”. It’s true, because I feel no need to explain “TEM” (tunneling electron microscope) and the like. Bad me.

To write the technology for my stories, I need to do the following:

Think about what technology is needed in the story
Research the current state of technology in that area
Think about how much that technology might have progressed or regressed since now, given the increase in climate change, the eventual collapse of the United States (yes, that’s part of my future scenario) and the scarcity of some materials and plants.

For example, in 2025, we see the beginnings of food scarcity and economy collapse, and the technology will evolve toward low-tech growing techniques such as permaculture and low use of pesticides, and house building methods such as earthbags — building walls of earth-filled bags, and cob (mud and straw hammered into compact units.)

In the year 2035, the US has collapsed due to some of the forces we see in play now — domestic terrorist groups allowed to proliferate as the foreign terrorist threat was trumped up (see what I did there?) Materials are often scavenged or created in small amounts in low-tech settings. The commune has adopted low-tech techniques from earlier days. They started early — 2020 — and laid down underground dens with above ground greenhouse domes and moisture-reclamation systems. All their technology is currently available or in development. They garden low-water vegetables and keep desert goats. If something breaks, they try to fix it themselves, do without, or materialize the part in InterSpace, but only if they’ve encountered the item before and understand it thoroughly. This is the last resort for these Archetypes, because they’re considered renegades from their own habitat, which is why they’re Earthside. If they get caught, they may be arrested and sent to NoSpace, the sensory deprivation chamber, for many years.

It is necessary to devolve as well as evolve technology. In 2065, the world has fallen into complete disrepair as there is not enough food for anyone. Many have died; the cities have turned to city-states; the rich hoard most of the resources and live in underground bunkers. Most of the cities have been bombed in skirmishes between the desperate and the cops, with the cops having the bulk of the power. There are buses, and electricity and electric burners, but little other technology.

To develop this understanding of the technology, I have to do a lot of research before I write. Over the last couple of days, my search terms have included: high desert, desert farming, desert goat breeds, jatropha biodiesel (did you know you can make biodiesel from an easy-to-grow tropical nut?), edible jatropha, jatropha meal cakes for animals, atmospheric water generator, DIY shade paint, limestone mining Idaho, limestone to calcium chloride, how to make slaked lime, Navajo-Churro sheep, growing catfish with aquaponics, and underground desert living units. This is why I couldn’t write this book 30 years ago, because I couldn’t get hold of this research easily

Now, according to my editor, all I have to do is actually describe it to other people in my writing.