I'm Not Dead. How About You?

Apart from the Game Of Thrones comments, things have been pretty lifeless around here lately. Basically, I'm still spending every second of my free time with my nose buried in old British sci-fi comics. Not that I've had an abundance of free time to begin with. Work is piling up and there's been family things going on. Not bad things, just time-consuming things. I was thinking recently about when I was a kid, and how sometimes there would be days when I had nothing to do and I would have to find ways to amuse myself. Now I've got a fucking to-do list that never stops growing, and I just know there's no way I'm going to get through everything on it before I die.

But enough of that crap. Since I don't have the time or the energy to compose a proper post at the moment, I thought I might spare my decent material and tap out a quick ramble about some of the superficial shit that's been going on.

Election is coming up quickly. Haven't been paying too much attention to it this time around. I've done the round trip from ignorant twat to political tragic and back again in less than ten years. I keep hearing that Turnbull is a shoo-in. I intend to preference Labor, but am looking at third party options. I don't like the bloke who's leading The Greens at the moment, and I've never felt completely at ease with The Greens in general. Am seriously looking at Xenophon. Desperate for Barnaby Rubble to begone from public life, but sadly (or perhaps happily) am not in his electorate. How 'bout the resta yez?

Krita—one of my favourite sketching programs—successfully completed their latest crowd-funding campaign. They're going to put the money into re-writing the text tool, which is fantastic news, since the current text tool is fuckin' shithouse. They also just released a new major version of the program, which incorporates some basic animation tools; which is great if you're an animator, but doesn't do much for me. Still, there's a lot of small improvements in there as well. Also, they've started packaging their releases in "run anywhere" executable archives, which means that now you can just download and run the program without needing to install it, or any of the libraries it depends on. Hooray!

Krita's sketch tool is supposed to make it easy to draw nice pictures fast; but all I did was make a big scratchy mess.

I'm sure nobody remembers this, but at the start of the year I said that one of the things I wanted to do in 2016 was take the new Perl v6 scripting language for a test drive. Well, I haven't gotten around to doing that yet, but I would just like to take a minute to acknowledge how wonderful Perl v5 still is. Sure, it's as old as the hills, and it can turn out fuckin' unreadable if you're not careful (or don't do comments), and yes everybody wants to do everything in fuckin' Python nowadays; but when it comes to pumping out quick and dirty scripts that involve complex text manipulation, I'll take shitty old Perl any day of the week, thank you very much. It's not called "The Swiss Army Chainsaw" for nothing, ya know.

And while I'm praising things, can I just point out how wonderful the Matroska multi-media container format is. One day I might write more about it, but if you don't know, its most common form is those video files you see with the ".mkv" at the end. It was originally intended to give you all the features of a DVD (and more) in a single file. It can hold virtually any type of audio/visual stream; it allows multiple video streams per track (alternate angles), multiple audio streams (languages, stereo vs surround, etc), and multiple subtitles; you can embed multiple fonts for the subtitles, just in case you want every character's speech to look unique; pickies can be embedded as "cover art"; and you can make chapter-points and virtual-tracks that play bits of different tracks together in any order; you can even put every episode of a show into a single file, along with only a single instance of the shows opening and closing credits, but then program the file to play that opening and closing at the beginning and end of every episode. It's just a shame the specification for the menu feature was never finished. It's also a shame that nobody's ever made a nice easy tool for creating files that take advantage of all these features … or a player that can handle them all.

I spent a good amount of time learning about Matroska files back in the days when I was doing video production. See, I had this crazy idea that when the world moved away from CD/DVD/etc and into online media distribution, MKV was going to be the vehicle of choice. Well, I guess it is for pirated content, but most legitimate sources have eschewed downloading altogether, in favour of streaming; and those that don't seem to have settled on MP4. Shows what I know, 'ay? Still, a fine format.

So, what rubbish have you had on your mind lately.