Trump Not Guilty

Trump was exonerated this week of the charges that he was in some kind of nefarious conspiracy with the Russians. Back in 2017, I made a post discussing why the Russia story is fake news. Now that the investigation is over and everyone can see the accusation was always fake, let's expose the lie behind it.

Before he left office, Obama investigated Trump to see if he had conspired with the Russians to change the results of the election. His administration found that there was nothing to the accusations. Trump was not connected to the Russians. The accusations continued. They were a political tool and nothing more. There was never any evidence whatsoever to support them. The Democrats knew and still know that the accusations were made up.

Why did the Democrats use the Russians? Why not the Chinese or some other country? Democrat leaders are generally old. The grew up during an era called the Cold War. During that time period, the Soviet Union, generally referred to as "the Russians" in that era, was the enemy of the United States. Remnants of that continue in our culture today. Having been humiliatingly defeated in 2016 in one of the most amazing political victories in American history, the Democrats were in a panic. They were weaker than they've been since the 1920s. That's so long ago that the KKK was an official wing of the Democrat party and people still remembered that the Republican Abraham Lincoln "freed the slaves". The old-timey leadership fell back into some kind of knee-jerk reaction to Cold War thinking and blamed Trump's victory on the Russians. It was a lie, but it was all they had. They put everything into it.

Now that Trump has been proven innocent, the Democrats and their media puppets are railing that it's not true. They're still fighting the bad fight. No matter what has been, is being or will be said, the truth will always be obvious by one fact: If the Russians had tampered with the elections, the results would have been thrown out. That's a big fact that cannot be gotten around. Even if they couldn't connect Trump to some nefarious tampering, the government would still have been obligated to nullify the results and hold new elections. That did not happen, because there was never any evidence of tampering. It was all a false accusation from the very beginning. There was never more than a pro forma look at the election results. The likely reason for that is that the only tampering that would have been uncovered would have been Democrat and Republican tampering, but that's a blog of its own.

Think about this. The Democrats don't need evidence of Trump's involvement with tampering. All they need is evidence of tampering. Why didn't Obama produce it? Why do they never produce it today? If they're so convinced that tampering took place and that Trump was behind it, where is the evidence? Where is the evidence? They never show any, because they don't have any. All they have are sour grapes after a massive rejection of their candidate by the American people. All they have are lying accusations.

The entire Russia accusation is a political tactic. It always has been. It always will be. If the Democrats wanted Trump gone, all they had to do was bring out their evidence of tampering. The courts would have done the rest. Where is the evidence?

There will be clouds and clouds of distraction from the Democrats in an attempt to smear Trump. Enough of accusations. They either need to show us the proof or sit down and shut up.

Have a great weekend.

French Update

This was not a stellar week on the book cover front. I made a small amount of progress, mostly educational. I did put some time into thinking about my books in general. It could take a while to get a decent cover done. I don't want to put the books on hold any more than I have to. I need to figure out a schedule in which I can split time between the covers and the books. I also need to prioritize the books. The B'Vellah War series needs to be finished. The Avatars series needs to be worked on. The non-fiction book needs to be finished and out the door. Non-fiction is where the real money is, but I like doing fiction more. At the moment I don't see myself doing more than the one non-fiction that's in progress, although hypothetically there could be one more after that. I have no idea what it would be. The bottom line is that I need to focus more on the business side of writing. I need to take it from hobby to business.

This week I did proofreading for a friend of mine on a small book. It didn't take overly long, but it took longer than I thought, because it wasn't ready to be proofread yet. Not nearly enough editing work had gone into it. There's a lesson in that about only putting your best work forward and not getting trapped in an artificial deadline. This person had rushed the project based on a deadline that wasn't real. I've done that, too. It's something to learn from and not make that mistake again. It did inspire me, however, to think about my own work, which is why I was thinking so much about it this week.

I've been wanting to do an update on my French progress, but every week something else comes up. This is my week. Around December I had a bad month with my French reading. Part of it was because of how slowly I read it. I can make it through a paragraph and feel good about myself only to hit a sentence that makes me look up three words to even get the gist of what it says. I can muddle through that. The side effect is it's harder to want to put time into passages in books that are largely filler. Dead spots. Slow spots. Spots where the reader is waiting for something to happen. When I'm in one of those places and have to look up a lot of words on top of it, it's hard to grind through it.

I haven't been pushing myself very hard. French is a hobby not a job. For reading, I was trying to read every day when I had a few minutes of down time. Sometimes, I made extra time, if the book was a page-turner or if I wanted to get farther along. Weekdays were easier than weekends. I don't feel like working on the weekend. Weeks and weeks ago, I made a change. I had this idea before that I could read a million words and gain a certain fluency. I passed that a while ago and surely two million. I read Hunger Games and Divergent last year. Those alone were at least 1.2 million words. I don't feel fluent. My reading is much improved, of course. I finally decided a million words to fluency isn't realistic. It might take closer to ten million.

In English, it takes about 12 science fiction books to hit a million words. That's for a word count of 80,000 words. French is much wordier. I don't know how many it takes in that language. The change I made was to give myself a minimum page count per day of what I need to do in order to read at least one book a month. That gives me well over a million words a year. I check the number of pages and divide by 30. For one book, it was 12 pages a day. For another it was 11. I find that in reality I read more than that. Instead of stopping cold, I'll finish a section or a chapter, if I don't have far to go.

By making a schedule of pages, I find it easier to get through those slow spots. I just stop at my page count, and I'm done. :) If the book is interesting, I can keep going. It hasn't been too long, but I'm seeing an improvement in my reading speed and an improvement in my listening comprehension on YouTube. Last year it could take three weeks to get through a book. The book I'm on now is going very fast. It might take two. My feel of the sentences is changing. My understanding of the words is changing. It's hard to explain. It's slowly starting to feel more like it does when I read in English. I'm hoping to get up to a book every two weeks this year. That would give me at least two million words.

By making that small change with the page count, it took a mental pressure off that I was feeling. I felt like I wasn't reading enough. Some days I wasn't, but I know that feeling is wrong. Now I can relax and try to enjoy it rather than seeing it was a chore I have to get through to reach fluency.

Have a great weekend.

Drawing Inspiration

Work continues apace on learning how to do digital painting. I still haven't "solved" the finer points of Corel Painter, but I did have an inspiration on the drawing process. I've been doing things like drawing circles and heads. When I started doing circles, I remembered doing the same thing years ago but couldn't remember when. I've practiced drawing at other points in life, too. I'm not great at it, but I'm not the worst. In all that time I've always carefully watched what I was drawing trying to get it right. It seems logical to watch what you're doing. This week something inspirational happened.

There's a verse in the Hebrew Bible that says God knows the end from the beginning. While I was drawing one of the circles, I did something I'd never thought of doing before, and it wasn't a conscious decision. It was like a true inspiration. Instead of watching the circle form, I found myself looking at where the pen would end up, which was the beginning of the circle. That's exactly where the pen went. I discovered that I don't even have to look at what I'm drawing as long as I know where the end is. My hand automatically goes to where I'm looking. As far as circles go, I know the end from the very beginning of trying to draw it. It's almost trivially easy to draw a good circle. And I didn't have to draw 1,000 of them like I had already started doing.

I think I know how this works. I think it's a form of muscle memory. As humans, we touch hundreds of things per day. We have hundreds of practice sessions doing that. When I pick up a cup, I don't watch my hand. I look at the end point. I look where my hand is going, the cup. Sometimes, I don't even look at a cup. I just reach for it. And I do touches like this hundreds of times per day. For the sake of simple math, let's pretend I touch 100 things a day. Over the course of a year, that's 36,500 times I've practiced muscle memory for that action. Realistically, it's far more than 100. I wouldn't be surprised if we touch over 100,000 things per year. That's a lot of practice.

When I started looking at the end of the circle from the beginning of trying to draw it, I found that I could get the line to perfectly overlap the beginning of the circle. It's amazing. Straight lines aren't as easy, but I can get a far straighter line more consistently now. It's a very nice breakthrough and one that I've never seen taught. The art school way is to draw 1,000 circles being careful to deliberately try to improve with each one. When I do that, I think my muscles are making an untold number of adjustments trying to memorize every point of the circle. Looking at the end, I can do the circle in one motion just like I pick up a cup and get it right.

The especially sweet thing about learning how to draw a circle was that it took fewer than five minutes. I had what I thought was going to be almost an hour of time to practice with Painter. I ended up having to do laundry, etc. I had five minutes of time. I thought about skipping it but decided to go ahead. Five minutes is five minutes. I knew it wasn't enough time to get anything done, so I decided to practice circles instead. Sometimes, it's that last little bit of effort that pays off.

I'm not automatically a super drawer, but now I have a much easier and looser way of approaching it. I've already started using it Painter with painting with the stylus. I'm going to have to learn and adjust over time, but wow is it so much easier to approach now.

Have a great weekend.

More About Cover Progress

The other day I mentioned I bought Corel Painter 2019 at a good discount and was looking for a graphics tablet to replace my Wacom Bamboo, which had too small a screen for even a 640x480 painting. It took a while, but I picked up an XP-Pen tablet big enough to work on. Between waiting on that to be back in stock and since getting it, I've been watching digital art videos and drawing videos to refresh myself on anything I've forgotten since I painted more regularly and to better understand drawing.

I've been drawing circles and heads and stuff. My drawing skills have never been great. I can do limited things. I had to drive with someone to drop off a car at a mechanic one time after hours. To go with the note about the symptoms, I drew a rough picture of the part that needed looking at and the parts around it. It was very rough, but later, when I took the person back to pick up the car, the mechanic was interested in the drawing and said he found the part right away. It wasn't a great drawing at all but good enough for that situation. For doing cover art, I don't have the polished skills I need yet. I'm looking at drawing 1,000 circles, 1,000 heads, 1,000 figures, etc. Twenty a day until I learn how to do it right. I haven't started that yet, just a little.

Now that I have Painter and a tablet, I've been trying to learn how Painter works. During my search for a digital art program, I kept seeing comments that Painter was hard to learn. Yes. Yes, it is. I'm still trying to figure out how the brushes function and how to do things like layers and masking. This is a crude drawing/painting I did to try to learn how to do some things. It's not a finished piece of art. The shadows are wrong, and other things are wrong. But it's part of learning how to make the program work. This could be something that would go in a background and not be too detailed to distract from the real focal point.

What I was working on before this footlocker(using the gradient tool) wasn't working the way I needed it to. I decided to do a simple box that would look amazing. I ended up running out of time to work on it. The colors are Burnt Umber, Titanium White. Yellow Ochre, Cadmium Yellow Light(?), Cadmium Orange and the closest green Painter offered me to Hooker's Green or Forest Green. I forget their name for it, but it looked about the same. There might be a few other colors picked up accidentally from having a dirty palette. There was one drop of purple at least. Why don't they have Dioxazene Purple?

Painter has several ways to make squares. I couldn't get the two main ones to work, even after looking up the help file of one of them, the Select tool. It worked as far as it would make a great rectangle, but the white dotted line wouldn't go away after I finished using the tool and moved on to a brush. There was no unselect option for it. I tried everything I could think of inside the program and the help file. I ran out of time. I'll have to find a video on it. The way I got the box to look almost accurate was to activate a grid and trace over the lines and measure out the offset lines. It more or less worked. I used a real life ruler for some of it and ran the stylus along that.

The other part of this learning exercise was figuring out brushes. I used three main ones: a glazing brush, an opaque brush and a detail brush. I tried one or two others, but they didn't really work for this. The brushes work a bit differently at different sizes. Changing sizes and experimenting was part of the process. A lot of the brushes have different names but seem to do the same thing, make a blurry line. Remember that other blog where I mentioned that so much digital art has that bad, fake look to it. The airbrush look is a factor in a lot of that. A lot of Painter's brushes seem to be the airbrush with a different name. They sell scores and scores of other brushes as add-ons, but they're very expensive. I'll probably end up buying maybe one pack, if I find one that I need. Otherwise, my plan is to make my own based on my own needs. In real life I use four types of brushes in about half a dozen sizes. It's not many at all. A hake brush, a few bristles, a sable or two and a liner brush. I have palette knives, but I've never gotten into them. I need to. I want to in Painter. A sub-goal is to stick with a limited number of brushes but learn how to use all the effects. The effects and tools are the real things to learn. I think that will simplify my efforts.

Overall it was a very time-consuming effort for very little result. But it's progress in learning how the program works. Why a box? Mostly because I thought it would be easy to get something that looked good. I was so wrong. But also because everything in life can be broken down into simpler shapes like circles, squares and triangles. Arms and legs can be roughed in with cylinders, which are rectangles with ellipses(form of a circle) at the ends. Heads are more or less circles. And so forth. One of my concept ideas for the cover for AoE is a cityscape. This footlooker helps me get a feel for doing buildings later, if I go that direction. I'm also thinking about a street scene.

I was hoping I could get up to speed and running in a month or so. I'm not sure how long it's going to take now. Learning Painter is a huge task. Off topic, Autodesk Sketchbook Pro is a free download now. I got that, too, and dabbled with it. It's interesting and easy to use. Anyway, no matter how hard it is transferring my real life experience to digital form and getting up to speed is, it will have great advantage. I'll be able to Undo things and Zoom the canvas in to work on details. I can tweak and tweak and tweak a work until it has the look I want. If I'd had more time for the footlocker and my goal had been to make it a real art piece, I could have applied textures and highlights and scratches and worked the shadows, etc., until it had the right look. I can't zoom in a real painting or tweak it to death without overworking it.

This is a long blog this week, but this is what I'm doing and what I'm up against. A lot of things I simply don't know how to do in traditional art. I'm also going to have to learn how to do those things and do them in digital form. The silver lining in all this is that not only will I be able to make my own book covers, I'll be able to do them for other people for money.

Have a great weekend.

Stuck in the Slow Lane Part 3(The End)

Stuck in the Slow Lane

Stuck in the Slow Lane Part 2

I didn't think I'd have an update so soon. To recap, my ISP, Windstream, recently lost a major court case involving a breach of contract. They promised in a legal contract not to do something and then went ahead and did it anyway. A vulture company, Aurelius, discovered the breach, bought assets that would give them a legal footing and then sued Windstream. Aurelius was not involved in the breach, which happened in 2015 and seemed to hurt no one. Aurelius's actions were immoral but not illegal.

It was thought that Windstream's appeal would take years of legal fighting. It turned out that they rolled over and filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Here's a breakdown by an analyst of  how the recovery could go. I saw another analyst report on Uniti, the company at the center of the breach of contract, that expected Windstream's upper management to lose their jobs.

Here's how it looked in one of the local papers:

Windstream didn't only break their contract. They've been lying to me for years about upgrading the internet switch that serves my area. We're all stuck at 1.5Mbps even after Windstream received a $175 million dollar federal grant to upgrade switches. After that in 2015, I believe, they were seeking another grant from the state of Georgia to upgrade switches specifically in my area. I used to go into the office every 2 or 3 months or more and ask about the upgrade. "It's on the schedule," they would tell me. One day they finally told me it wasn't on the schedule. I'm reminded of a Bible verse.

 Genesis 12:3a I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you;

Windstream has been cursing me for years. I was too small to fight them. Nevertheless, in one hour my enemy was destroyed. Even the office I used to go into to check on the switch was closed down a while back. It's really amazing how this bankruptcy came out of nowhere and stopped the mouths of the liars.

Have a great weekend.