Puppy

It's day 23 of Thingadailies!

Foster Updates

Not much change from yesterday for anyone. I did convince Lulu to eat a little tonight, but there's still something not right about her. If she's not doing well in the morning, I'll see if I can bring her in with Gnocchi for an expert opinion (or at least drugs to make her comfortable while we figure out what's going on...)

Puppy Vectors

Today I wanted to see how hard it would be to convert a real life image into vectors. That way I wouldn't have to either create or purchase vector images, especially for things I already have pictures of. I don't mind purchasing vector assets, but it becomes a problem when they aren't all in the same style. If I create the vector assets, I can control that.

This was the picture I was playing with, a puppy named Taylor that I drove over to Sacramento last year:

So, how hard is it to vectorize an image? Not hard at all, but... It defaults to breaking it down to so many tiny vectors that it looks like a raster image, so if you put it in a book cover with a bunch of vector objects, it looks like a bad photoshop job. The image below is technically a vector, but it might as well be a raster image.

What I really wanted was a more simplified version of the puppy. I feel like there's probably an easy way to do this, but I haven't quite figured it out.

I ended up going over to GIMP and choosing Image->Mode->Indexed..., which will create a palette with however many colors you specify. Then I pulled that image with fewer colors into Affinity and vectorized it using Vector->Image Trace...

There are two settings in Image Trace which control how exact a copy it will try to make. I tweaked the dials until I could get something recognizable while also being simplified. I also didn't try to clean anything up afterward, so they could probably be improved.

Results

10-color palette:

12-color palette:

16-color palette:

32-color palette:

I think 10 lost definition of the nose, and 32 looked too close to a photo. I could probably live with either 12 (after some cleanup) or 16.

Anyhow, it was an interesting exercise, and probably the real message is that you should pay artists. But this is fun, too, and I can probably get reasonably results if I spend some time on it.

More Vector Fun

It's day 22 of Thingadailies!

More Vector Fun

I didn't feel like recording another video, so I went back to playing with covers.

I copied book one to use as the template and then started changing things for book two. There are still things I want to tweak, and I need more objects of the table, but the branding is strong.

This is where I'm at right now:

It's a work in progress...

Foster Updates

Gnocchi met with the people interested in adopting her — it went about as well as it could, given that we had five people crammed in my office. She hung out on the edges and allowed herself to be brushed, and then after thirty minutes deliberately walked over and climbed into her cave bed. I think they're going to adopt her as long as the vet appoint on Tuesday (because of her weird bald spot) doesn't turn up anything strange.

Lucy and Nova, the Maggot Muffins, are doing well. Nova is still kind of leaking poop, which isn't great, but hopefully things will go back to normal at some point soon. In the meantime, they're eating and playing and just generally being cute.

Lulu has seemed a bit off for the last day, and I'm trying not to panic. She got vaccinated Thursday afternoon, so maybe that's part of it? I don't think she ate anything today. This cat! I need her to be healthy, dangit!

Saturday Morning

It's day 21 of Thingadailies! (We may make it to the end of the month after all...)

Saturday morning is reserved for hanging out with friends at Morgan's Mill, my local coffee shop. They have a heated patio, which is great. This group started as a writing group, and I (and a few other people) still write, but some mornings the knitters outnumber us. It's a really nice way to finish up the week.

On the walk there and back, I started the audiobook of Null Witch by Maria Schneider. I've read the book before, so I knew I'd like it, but the narrator absolutely knocked it out of the park. Well done!

Oh, and it was newsletter day! If you aren't into signing up for newsletters (which I totally get), here's what it looked like: https://eomail5.com/web-version?p=cdab30d2-0aea-11f1-8a77-635443846407&pt=campaign&t=1771689994&s=32b53c6c72c167519018601532aed5af4848646abc19a13038168417283962a2

(Yes, it's technically my author newsletter, but the fosters tend to get more space than book stuff. We all know I'm terrible at marketing my books, but look at the kittens!)

Speaking of kittens, it's time for me to go clean up the poop twins and start another load of laundry, so I'll leave you with yet another AITA.

AITA for telling my in-laws to get over it when they complained about my vampire hunter Halloween costume?

I figured out how to fix some of the volume issues I've been having. I guess I really ought to record the AITA in the audio booth and edit with the real editing software, but that's a pain.

I Think It Was a Cabbage

It's day 20 of Thingadailies!

First, some silliness

My Mastodon feed is 80% cat pictures, but of the text, a significant portion is in Spanish (a language I'd like to speak) or German (a language I spoke 37 years ago and would like to refresh). Occasionally, other things get boosted onto my feed by people I follow.

(Mastodon has no algorithm — it shows you exactly what you asked to see, in chronological order, which seems like it shouldn't be as innovative as it apparently is.)

Today, I saw a post in French with a picture of bird legs coming out of a hole in a metal sheet. I was curious, so I clicked on the handy LibreTranslate link, and it included this section:

Original: 

Elle était trapue avec une tête ronde donc je pense que c'était une chouette, je sais pas si quelqu'un qui s'y connait en rapaces aurait une idée plus précise ?

Translation:

She was a trap with a round head so I think it was a cabbage, I don't know if anyone who knows about it in raptors would have a more accurate idea?

That's just a great sentence. She was a trap with a round head so I think it was a cabbage! That image will set your mind free.

(In case you're curious, it was a tawny owl.)

Foster news

Lucy is doing great. Nova is doing well except for her poopiness, which led to both Nova and Lucy getting bathed this morning. I did one load of laundry today and I'll probably run another in the morning.

Lulu climbed or jumped up on the couch today. Amazing girl!

Gnocchi continues to have a bald spot. It really doesn't look like ringworm — maybe she had a mosquito bite? Why couldn't this have happened two weeks ago? Oh well.

AITA for refusing to give up my job at a vampire club?

Geography

It's day 19 of Thingadailies! That means we have less than ten left. Woohoo!

As usual with the foster duties, there was a plan and then the plan changed. (That isn't a criticism of any shelter employee — there are a zillion things happening every day and plans need to be flexible.)

Nova's spay incision didn't need surgery, so she was ready to come home earlier than originally stated. So I dropped off Lulu along with enough meds to get her to Saturday afternoon, which was when I was supposed to pick her up. But that turned into Sunday afternoon, which was okay because they had enough of her drugs at the shelter. But then, someone decided that Lulu actually didn't need x-rays after all (which was kind of what I was hinting at yesterday when I sent video of her playing), so I drove back and picked her up again.

To recap: Gnocchi is here, Lulu is here, and Nova and Lucy are together again. (Also, Gnocchi has a bald spot on her forehead and it looks more like she scraped her head on something and not ringworm, but I will lose my mind if I'm wrong. I'm not sure how she would have picked up ringworm in the past six weeks though, so I'm thinking good thoughts and moving on with my life.)

Today I realized something about screen geography on YouTube shorts: The bottom 15% of the screen is covered by the video title/description and the controls, so if you put a title down there, it's impossible to read. Did I go back and fix it and re-upload? No, I did not. That's a lesson for future Theresa.

Anyhow, yes, it's another AITA Floodmouth Edition.

Now it's time to finish up my newsletter!

Just Keep Swimming

Welcome to day 18 of Thingadailies!

Yes, it's time for another episode of AITA, because this is quick and easy (the questions have already been written) and I haven't had the time to mess around with covers again.

Apparently I shall just keep banging my head against this until I improve.

But first, foster updates!

Gnocchi is still in my office and you can hear her purring as I was reading the AITA question.

Lulu is doing really well. She goes back to the shelter tomorrow for a couple days for x-rays that they scheduled last week. (The shelter can't take x-rays, so Lulu will be going home with a vet tech on Thursday evening, going with the tech to her other job where the x-rays will be taken, and then come back to the shelter on Saturday at which point I will pick her up again. Lots of traveling.)

Only one of the new foster kittens (Lucy) came home with me today. The other kitten (Nova) was spayed yesterday and her incision didn't look great today, so they are going to fix that tomorrow and I'll pick her up in the afternoon. In the meantime, poor Lucy has spent most of the afternoon crying because she's never been alone before.

And now onto the video!

(Once again, the foster kitten is the star of the show.)

Tada!

Welcome to day 17 of Thingadailies.

I'm tempted to say that these videos will continue until I'm comfortable speaking on camera, but clearly that is not on the horizon and I don't really want to extend Thingadailies into next year. Maybe I should write out a script or something. I don't know.

Anyhow, my breakthrough of the day was adding an image of my book in the editing stage. So now I don't have to hold it up and actually get it on screen. Progress!

Lulu is obviously the star of the show.

Now that Lulu is in the spare room, I took the time today to disinfect the bathroom where she'd been staying previously because... two more teenage cats are supposed to show up tomorrow! They just need to fix their GI issues and then they'll be off for adoption.

(I didn't take the 1-day-old kittens in terrible shape — I don't have an incubator, so other fosters are better equipped to give those guys the best shot at survival.)