Starting with those in my car...just went out in the dark and the slick rain  to go buy cat food and discovered my battery is dead.  I never leave the lights on...I even manually turn off the one in the roof.  Whatever, it's dead. 

But I'm having a strange problem with some shots.  NB shots taken in the dark result in what looks like streetlights on every single square.   They're not.  If I'm in a lot and take a shot down the street, the lights line up properly.  Not that big a deal since I rarely use NB shots but it's odd and I don't like it.

After 6 weeks of pitched battles with my computer, Vista, tech support staff, people at alienware who kept telling me they were sending things they didn't send, and evil CC...I think I finally have TWO shots that are not distorted and the constant crashes are gone.   The nVidia GeForce 9800 graphics card is definitely better than the ATI HD4870 card -- the one I didn't want to begin with.

The widescreen monitor that came with the alienware package, the samsung 953BW, is now disconnected and sitting quietly on a shelf.  I could never figure out how to use it without distorting my shots.  I grabbed a 3 year old Sony SDM HS75P off the shelf in my storage closet, 17 inches but still a flat screen, plugged it in and now I have shots that are not warped like a fun house when I try to resize them to fit a 2 column template.

I'm not sure where I went wrong in this whole process, but there has to be an easier way.    I'm brain dead at this point.

Since I've been struggling with crashes and "access violation" errors for some time, I decided that my 2 yr old Dell wasn't up to TS2 anymore and bought a new one.  Which came with...cue scary music...Vista.

And I've been fighting with it for 4 days now.  First it wouldn't load the games.  Once I figured out how to jigger the compatibility in properties, I could force them to load.  Then the real fun began.

They would load up to the "twisting spiral staircases" script in the load screen, then the graphics went totally insane.  Like a strobe light, flashing black then the screen then black, so fast that I could hardly find the icon to quit.   The game isn't crashing, it's just not useable.

I've spent hours on the phone with tech support for alienware; uninstalled and reinstalled I don't know how many times (holding my breath that SecuRom wouldn't freak out on top of everything else); updated drivers; and ordered a different graphics card since I didn't want that ATI Radeon HD4870 thing to begin with -- maybe it will help when I install the nVidia card.

The only thing that seems to help a little is installing directx 9.0c on top of directx 10.   The crazy flashing seems to have stopped, although I'm scared it's going to return, but I get trembling fluttering graphics on the lots.  Changing the graphics all the way down doesn't help.  

Anyway, at several points I told myself that it wasn't the computer, it was me.  Total delusions that I was going to be able, somehow, to make this thing work.  I've made small progress but it's been a long, hard, stressful climb.

First, what is Writer's Block?  Why does it pop up on me?  Like a ghost.  Boo.  I must have punched into something I don't remember doing.  But that's ok.  Nice ghost.  I'd like to spend my time on a desert island (which is another questions) contemplating where you came from.  

Not really.  Unless you're cold.  I do not like heat, so a cold ghost on a desert island wouldn't be such a bad thing.  Boring as hell but the temperature change would be welcome.

I got a lot of help from a couple of people and finally figured out how to do something so utterly mundane in Photoshop CS3 that my cat could probably master it.  I actually made a blurry border around my screencaps!  And recolored it!  Giving myself a cat treat.  I must have some sort of genetic anti-Photoshop mutation.  But I did finally do it and the shots are up on my blog for everyone to admire the blurry borders.   

which are here...and they are definitely blurry.   Lucidity

Many thanks to gfitz. And Mao.  

   




Inspiration is low, like the water in the creek behind my house.  

I blew up a main character trying to delete clones in SimsPE.  Lost some old family photos I can't replace (ok maybe they're not lost, just misplaced.  Somewhere.)  And facing a visit to my mother, who has Alz and won't know who I am, on her birthday Saturday.  

At least I figured out how to fix what I messed up.  And I like rain, so anytime it rains, I'm happy!

I have no idea what I'm going to do with this thing.  Whether I'm going to just write about the bats flying around in the dark or the fireflies over the water behind the house or the dog that poops on the floor.  Or nothing.