Category: Other Media

Gremlins …

How I imagine the pesky little critters, by Rita de Heer

Despite the Rebuilding the Hardware Store post being downloaded nine times, no one has commented on the irritatingly small size print in the second slide, first slide of the story. Maybe when you download it, it isn’t bothersome?

It’s a puzzle to me that something that seems fixed in a supposedly published text nevertheless changes size when transferred to another platform. Why? Why? Why? And the rest of the slides are fine. Must be a gremlin in the system. One of them above. Painted with watercolors, outlines with black ink.

Wait now, I was going to try a different font.

I see that just talking about it caused the gremlins to cut me down to size by cutting the Albert Sans font down … yet not down to the ‘small’ size mentioned in the box to the right, headed by ‘Typography’, but a size intermediate to ‘small’ and ‘medium’ as the size I’m typing in now is ‘medium’.

Yep. OK. I just customized my size. And so we will type at 20 px forevermore. It looks the same size as the paragraph above. So, something I learned. M is 20 px. I hardly dare to click anything else on the right today.

I was meant to go out … look at this! WTF! I’m not in the habit of swearing out loud but this is very irritating! Small, again. Probably 15 px. I don’t like it.

I was meant to go out today for a medical appointment, a yearly heart check-up. So at nine A/M sat on my couch and fell asleep. Dreamed even. A pair of sharks, visible only by their fins, swam from a moat into a water channel running through a medieval castle. As witnessed by a couple of guards on a pedestrian walkway adjacent. Their surprise woke me.

By about 9.30, with four more completely unrelated dream scenes, I decided a coffee might wake me. Uneventfully washed out my coffee plunger, put in the ground coffee, poured on the not-quite-boiling water. Let it steep for five minutes while I gathered up a load of washing and started the washing machine.

Stirred the plunger with my wooden stirrer, pressed down the plunger and poured the coffee into my favorite mug. As I went to sit back on the couch at the same time setting the mug beside me on a little table, I naturally spilled the coffee all over me and the couch. When did I ever try such a crazy move?

Mopped up. Decided there and then to either have the couch cut apart so I could in a next similar instance–it’s bound to happen again–dry the cushions in the sun; or get a new, different couch. Or probably a different secondhand couch.

I was to leave for the appointment at 2 pm. Plenty of time to get my act together, I thought. With half an hour to spare, it started raining. I had to haul in the washing drying out on the washing line, hang in under the patio. My big plan of catching a bus, walking through a park, catching another bus went out the window. Dithering was my next strategy.

Time went by while I figured out how to get there instead. On foot, rain-coated, walking four kilometres? Not an option while I’m so tired. Cab? None to be had at short notice. Uber? Uber has a problem with my email address that I’ve never been able to fix. Call it an Uber gremlin. Bus the whole way? Four hundred metres to the appropriate bus stop? Don’t think so.

At 1 pm, I called the place to reschedule the appointment. Got to believe I’m ‘sickening for something’ … what I used to call it when I had kids around. I’m fiddling around on this when normally I’m out walking this time of the day. No energy.

Gremlins love it when I’m not well enough to be sharp. What about you, Readers? You have run-ins with gremlins?

I never did get to try another font, either.

Cute, Wayne Thomas!

[Wayne Thomas is my latest follower, for those of you not graced with his cheery first page, though I expect his first post to be a mass mail out situation]

Where’s the Comments section?

How can we talk about this initiative? I’ve got questions.

Are you a wetware entity called Wayne Thomas pretending to be a software entity called AICHATBOT? Or are in you in fact the aforenamed software entity? Or are you that software entity pretending to be the Wayne Thomas entity?

There are more possibilities but those will do as it is still before-breakfast in my house.

About Blogging …

Canteen scene with Drew barely visible on the left, washing dishes; Tim and Trish in the right foreground, sharing their stories; and Wendy, in the right-side rear having a break from the cooking.

About Starting a Second Blog

Inevitably, when an activity starts to take more of the hours in my week, more of the effort I have available, more space on my dining table, it starts to look like an obsession. I’ve been there before. Twelve years ago I lost a beautiful tung nut tree in my backyard to an excess of rain. As the rotting trunk was chopped down, I comforted myself with the idea that I’d be able to see a parade of fungi taking hold of the wood one after another.

The rain continued. Dozens of fungi species helped rot that stump down. I learned about fungi wherever I could find the information. Over the wet months of the El Nino weather pattern, more than a hundred species helped me become obsessed. I took my camera out for walks and recorded the ‘chitinous critters’ wherever I walked.

Chitinous critters?

Fungi cell walls are made of the same stuff as insect exoskeletons. Fungi have more in common with animals than with plants, despite having been umbrella’ed by ‘Flora’ since Linnaeus. Fungi have no chlorophyll, they need plant food to survive. They don’t move around in the same way that sponges don’t. I could go on and on. Have, in fact, given talks about them; walks and talks; I’ve done guest speaking at high school science classes; written articles; IDed fungi on FB, entered fungi sightings on ALA and iNaturalist. Citizen science stuff.

But I’ve probably only seen about four fungi species in the last two years. I have much less energy. More sedentary time. I’ve become rusty on names. Chemo fog didn’t help. It was the right time for a new obsession.

So. Lego seems to be it. With so many platforms where I could post up my finds, I never hankered to set up a separate blog for my fungi finds. Although there are quite a lot of platforms for Lego too, they don’t tend to encourage what I’m interested in. Stories. I like to write about my discoveries while building, and I like to write stories from within the building process.

Though I could write on this blog about my discoveries, I haven’t found a good way to format the stories in this blog’s existing structure. Hence. Designing and planning a second blog.

But keeping this one going is a thing. Usual stuff. Life and about life. Fiction and about fiction. Earth versus World. About media and about reading. Blogging and about blogging.

4, About the Lodestar Series

Representing ‘The Lodestar’ by Rita de Heer
an image sourced from light shining on stainless steel

Although I began writing this series well before the others, the Lodestar featuring was always the alien spaceship. The people making Souzadelay Island their country had no inkling of the Lodestar’s reality. They saw it as a peculiar stationary star that sometimes grew bigger, as when it came nearer to Earth, and sometimes shrank.

At the end of the Back to Earth series, the alien spaceship-in-a-doughnut situation resolved itself the hard way. It was Kosi Lionhair’s uploaded mind, you may recall, who in a moment of boredom, wedged the alien spaceship in the center of the Ark Ship’s torus.

When the amalgamation touched the Earth’s atmosphere, the torus tore loose. Parts of it burned, parts fell to Earth. Jeb and some of her people landed on Aerk Island in the Australia Archipelago where they then lived for millennia, watched over by Kosi in the starship that, with time and forgetting, became known as the Lodestar.

Remember that this is all imaginary, Space Opera ‘science’? Though Earth is, of course, a real planet!

The series begins with the SkinGifters, an unfortunate people who had to make more and greater sacrifices than seem possible for them to continue to exist.

I: Ahni SkinGifter is the main character, as well as the title of her story.

1.-a-dark-fate-1Download

Installment 2

Dryad after the Clear-felling, mixed media by Rita de Heer

This gig … of dumping 20 years worth of my work online … is turning out to be harder than I thought it could be. I had real trouble today just going to a File, saving it as a pdf, then inserting it here. This morning I first trapped myself thinking up a good title for this project. “A Broken Universe” sums it up quite nicely, I decided, since I could never get the timeline to gel.

I spent a couple of hours chasing through my Documents File for the long version of the Half Shaman in Space for Installment 3. As if it matters whether I post long or short, or anything in the order of the events, or anything.

But it does. There seem to be a few readers out there. Installment One did quite well.

Could only find a very short version. And I edited a couple of Files. And I did Delete a few odds and ends. Not a wasted day. Finally found what I was looking for in the Trash. Did retrieve it.

But anyway … installment two of the whole story is Half Shaman. One of the two published volumes, as it happens. Go to this Page for the details. https://wordpress.com/page/ritadeheer385131918.blog/1007