Chore Day, August 3, 2019

As chore day rolls around again, I'm taking stock of this blog and how want to improve it.

  • As a writer I must create spotlessly clean text. I must make sure I don't have typos or grammatical errors. But, my posts are littered with typos and grammar errors. I write my posts in haste. To make my deadline every night (8 pm, sometimes earlier), I do a quick scan for obvious errors and then push the Save & Publish button. Then I move on and never look at the post again...until someone tells me, "You've got a typo in the blog post title!"

  • I resolve to write my posts using my text editor (I use Emacs), where I can run spell-check. Spell-check won't catch grammatical errors, so I'll be reading my posts aloud. Twice.

  • I'm tired of writing blog posts. Instead, I'm going to treat this blog as what it is: a Web log of my daily activities and thoughts. That is to say, I want my blog to be a daily journal, a simple diary of things I'm interested in. Nothing fancy. There’s nothing important here, just a record of what I’m doing. I’m writing this for myself, not for anyone else.

Enough of that…

Lately I've been obsessed with Open Source software and Linux. I'm going to shift my drawing from proprietary software (Photoshop, Procreate, etc.) and use open source graphics software whenever possible. I'll start with Krita. Krita is capable of professional quality work. Where there's no professional open source software for what I have to do, I'll use proprietary software on Windows or my iMac. I’ll use Artrage on my iPad because there’s not better way to get a painterly look. Yes, the iPad is 100% locked-down proprietary. Nothing is perfect.

This feast for the eyes was created by Arthur Rackam (1867 -1939).