Felt so tired last night and slept early.
In my dream I was wondering outside in a grey urban area with no people, like a deserted carpark, outside a beauty therapy shop. There was a stone trough full of cold water, and on the floor were some letters like 'Rudolph Steiner', or a similar German name, a famous healer with odd techniques. I climbed into the trough of cold water, fully clothed, and got wet, noting that even my phone and watch got wet, but they still worked. I then got out, satisfied at this daily cold bath as a health cure. A curious and bewildered young face, a sickly looking girl, watched me from the dark shop window as I got in and out of the bath. I walked, dripping with water but slowly drying out, to the subway and it was from there that I entered my workplace. I was on my lunch break.
My workplace was a German engineering firm and I was a draughtsman drawing plans on drawing boards. Some of my colleagues had music on, cartoon music from the 1980s, and they were singing and making a noise, like a veritable school disco. The big boss came in and the music was hastily shut off in shame. He told us all off about the noise, shadows of the teacher telling the class off. I didn't really like the noise or party myself, but the boss looked at me and I felt that he falsely judged me as responsible, a feeling of false-guilt which I have felt before at school. I hate the feeling of being blamed for things which were not my fault and not to my taste or desire. My old school friend Simon Ladley was in the dream. He ordered lunch at this point, something from Burger King.
I awoke then. It was 09:30. I had slept for 11 hours and felt somewhat headachy and not very refreshed. Have felt somewhat weak and exhausted all day, but have got some work done. First I updated my website code to fix a few issues with the shopping cart and Google crawlers.
Then I updated Irfanview so that I could load Canon CR3 files. There's been a long-standing bug where holding Ctrl when dragging causes unpredictable results. This used to constrain the aspect ratio to a fixed amount; I set this to 1:1 which is very useful, square images are so common, with Instagram and for profile picutres, but the feature only half works. Well, the bug remains in the latest version, and, annoyingly, several plugins are now automatically removed when updating the program, so the only way to install plugins (why are these even separate!) is to remove the old program and install the new one, which deleted all of my settings. Sigh. This is the first time ever that an upgrade of this marvellous program has been worse than keeping the old version.
I also spent some time on sound effect work, working on some new military sound effects for The Game Creators.
This evening I went for a walk, still feeling somewhat weary. I thought about some sort of DSLR camera mount for photographing my paintings. Ideally, a rig which can smoothly move horizontally and/or vertically smoothly and quickly, be lockable, and move up to, say, 1M sideways and 2M vertically, and the rig must be easily dismantled and stored when not in use (I haven't space to keep it set up). Something with cables and bearings and weights. I can easily design something, but it's a lot of work and expense, which must be kept to a minimum.
Finally, I've noticed a few zines and other books on itch. I toyed with reviving my old software Fictive, which hasn't been updated in over 10 years. It's a system for writing (and playing) interactive fiction in the mould of those old 'Choose your own adventure' books, and it's sophisticated enough programmatically to support something like the Fighting Fantasy books verbatim. Itch might be a good platform for a book like this. Fictive would need a day of updating at least.
I remain feeling weak and weary but must battle on.
