A long and tiring day. I feel I've worked non-stop, always banging my head against some wall, usually a technological one. Each wall gave way slightly.
It began with a many vivid dreams, which at least involved inventing an acrylic plastic laser-cut jigsaw (I remarked in the dream that jigsaws are names after the tool used to cut them, and that the blade was quite wide). I reasoned though that people would pay £30-£40 for a top of the range 3D jigsaw, but not more, even for a transparent acrylic plastic one.
The dreams after that became more vivid, hy head pounding with a strange feeling, and my self leaving my bed-bound body as often troubles me. I dreamt of a young woman, and perhaps her family or mother, with a small white horse, walking down a main street at night, on her way home. The horse was tired and rotted to some extent, it was ill and had a foul smelling wound. I passed her and went to a lit garage, where my mother, looking old, was there, and Cat, my beloved (now dead) companion. In another part of the dream I explored deserted city streets, again at night. There were a few young people with skateboards, or playing or gathering on various corners. Gates swung on old hinges. I entered an empty shopping centre.
The portents are not good.
Then I had to catch a train to a holiday destination, with Deborah, or my mother, and brother, though the people were not quite right. At some point my mother turned into an afro-Carribean woman. We rushed to make the train, we were late, I knew it would be close, but we missed it. I hoped for a bus replacement, or other train, and we went to sit in a waiting room. Suddenly, it moved and we were on a train again, but going somewhere else.
The day started with tidying the upper room, the filming room. This alone too over an hour, and I prepared some folders to record some lyric videos for The Golden Age. I then started to record, but this was so difficult due to the wig, which I wanted because it matched the general look of the album art, something I've aimed to do on each album and set of videos. In the end, I re-took each video at least twice, but up to 5 times, and I am still unsure of the look.
This was only the start of the problems. Freemake started to crash and make the CPU fan spin to crazy levels, blasting air from the back. The conversion was unreliable, then Avisynth refused to play the files, and I needed to install both the latest K-Like Codec pack and the XVid codec. Video is so idiotic on computers. Almost nothing plays or can be edited without installing tons of codecs. This is fine, but Windows doesn't seem to care or make this easy; some software still won't load videos correctly, and even seeing what codec a video is encoded with is almost impossible.
In the end I installed and learned to use 'ffmpeg essentials', a brilliant command line video converter that's better than almost any, but the x264 conversions refuse to play in Windows Media Player. It's hardly a surprise as Windows-anything tends to be rubbish, but YouTube and everything else I use (even Irfanview) process these fine, so this will do.
So everything I've done today has gone wrong, and I've slowly found a fix for it, but after 8 hours, not one video is made or even half complete.
My anxiety is becoming overwhelming, a constant stinging, my heart constantly fluttering. This has not happened for many years, and was devastating then. Half is worry, half energy for new ideas, an overwhelm of what I need and want to do. For now, I must pause. We have two days of trips. ArtSwarm is Saturday, and many people have cancelled, so we will see how many come. Onwards.
