halfcactus

I feel like this book could have been 50-70% shorter? Love that the women are both competent, but apart from the general romance and Wen Nian, not a single storyline is justified... It feels more like snippets about someone's OC than a full novel. Scenes are perfunctory, abruptly dropped as soon as their purpose is served, and there's no sense of continuity or thematicness, and consequently, no momentum.The author doesn't seem actually interested in the characters—all the side characters are props and even the main characters themselves don't feel quite like people. Jiang Ci is a piano tuner and a scuba diver but you don't really see any of this affect her worldview in any way, so all these elements feel very artificial.

In terms of reading difficulty, the abruptness and lack of context-building made this pretty difficult for me to read and follow (as a non-native reader who's still learning Chinese :P)...

Vocabulary log:

antler, headbank, cookie, draft, stockings

Tried to make a graphic out of my doodle (with the vector tools in Affinity Designer) but it doesn't seem crisp enough? Maybe I messed up my export:
vector graphic of a reindeer headband

More Affinity notes:

Affinity Designer is meant to be an Illustrator alternative in the sense that it's a vector drawing program, but I can't find the Pathfinder features, which really limits my already basic shape manipulation abilities ;___; This is potentially a dealbreaker, but idk, I'll need to try it out some more and also try out the desktop version in case the commands translate more intuitively there. EDIT: Affinity Photo seems to have a Geometry feature under the Layers menu which has Add/Subtract/Intersect commands; I'll try finding it in Designer.

I'm having a hard time working with layers on Affinity Photo. Layer via Copy and Layer via Cut with the marquee selection tool aren't available, so you have to rasterize layer, make selection, and then duplicate. Similarly, to crop to selection, you select your crop area with the marquee then click on the Crop tool.

I probably just need to play around some more, but: Affinity Photo's paintbrush tool is ridiculously jagged at 100% hardness?? There's no anti-aliasing at all and there's no option to turn on anti-aliasing which ??? Do I have to draw with my phone/tablet's native photo editing app or—

-

In other news, my phone's having problems charging and I fear it's a hardware issue. :') Fingers crossed it's resolvable because I can't deal with the anxiety, especially because I basically live on my phone and don't even carry cash anymore ajk;jdapf;

*shoves failed Rubik's cube illustration to a corner* Affinity practice—Designer for the vector shapes and Photo for everything else, though technically I think I could have done everything on Photo:

Based on the following journal doodles:

she belongs to me chapters 102 vocabulary log

I guess I'm warming up a little to Affinity... Photo feels closer to AI and ID than PS, which means it does have a lot of features if you adjust your expectations of its controls, but also that it's not exactly a PS substitute. I'm really struggling with placing images/objects (typically I only use Place when I'm using InDesign; most of the time I drag objects around from canvas to canvas because that's how my brain works) + gradients... I kind of get it conceptually, but for some reason I get a prompt asking for screenrecording permissions which I deny on instinct lol.

Paintbrush works pretty smoothly if you set the hardness to 99% (instead of 100%)~ There's a built-in line stabilizer that you can toggle on and off.

Type tools work well. Same shortcuts as PS + has opentype features, but doesn't take into account other languages yet, I think? No vertical text orientation button that I can see.

In this latest episode of "tools I can't figure out", I don't know yet if Affinity has a blend tool or more customizable stroke brushes, which is what I'd want to try for the fishbones? (They'd still be tricky to control, but at least I don't have to manually align anything haha.)

Inexplicably, Affinity also has a cat tool:

Which can only generate one kind of cat shape:

All of this may be an exercise in futility considering the Canva acquisition, but idk, I presume we'll be able to keep the non-subscription version... So far Photo is less laggy than my half-broken Photoshop ahaha.

Jun. 13th, 2024

Jun. 13th, 2024

她属于我 She Belongs to Me

hmm

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