misfiled as "Keet, Electric" @ElectricKeet@awoo.space

@xinjinmeng This makes me think of when X (from Mega Man X) gets Sting Chameleon's weapon, charges it to full, and gains the power to palette-cycle just like that!

Also, intangibility for the duration, but whatever. Rainbow palette-cycling is the real power there!

I'd love to know why this keeps happening.

Adobe Illustrator lets me make my own toolbars!

They don't have the concept of separators. Grouping tools either involves making a separate toolbar for them, or stacking several tools in one button that, when pressed and held, pops the stack out so it can be dragged off as its own pseudo-toolbar.

The catch is that these pseudo-toolbars only have two options for resizing: single column or single row. They can be snapped together horizontally, but not vertically.

In fact, standard toolbars also only have two size options: single column or double column. They can't go horizontal. Worse, when switching from double to single, the column isn't merely split in half to keep both halves in order; the buttons are reordered in horizontal pairs, essentially requiring relearning the positions of every button but the first. These toolbars also only snap together horizontally.

Then there are the utility panels: one for setting text properties, one for manipulating object appearance, one for managing layers, and the like. Some can be resized freely for both height and width, some have multiple fixed size modes, and all can be reduced to tabs or even buttons. These can be stacked into little tab groups like the pseudo-toolbars, and those can also be attached vertically into columns which can be snapped together horizontally.

None of these can be pinned to the top or bottom of the window, only left and right or free-floating.

Oh, but there's also the "control bar" which can only be docked at the top or bottom of the window and, when free-floating, always takes the entire width of the screen and cannot be resized at all.

This product has been in constant development for 35 years and its UI is still baffling and inconsistent yet I persevere because (despite the existence and usability of Affinity Designer and the existence... of Inkscape) so far Illustrator is still the best tool for how I want to do things.

Computer bad. Rant done.

I've recently set up my personal computer to run Folding@Home, the distributed computing platform dedicated to medical research – specifically, modelling the different ways protein molecules can "fold", which is a big part of finding ways to stop a variety of diseases including a rather urgent one I needn't mention.

Protein folding simulation turns out to be the sort of brute-force problem at which computers excel. Furthermore, it's the sort that a graphics processor is much better at than a general CPU. So my setup is such that the software ignores my laptop's processor (it has enough heat issues, thank you very much) but when my system's at home – and lately, that's almost all the time, go figure – I leave it hooked up to an external GPU that Folding@Home can use to grind away. Thus, my studio (yeah, let's call it that) almost always sounds like there are four small fans running because that's the total of the graphics card and the enclosure. Also, the room's been a couple degrees warmer than usual, because at full blast the setup is basically a 100W infrared light bulb.

But when the fans spin down because a work unit has been completed, I get a tiny little rush of satisfaction. In one more way, I helped. I contributed to solving a huge and difficult problem that's actually important.

And you know what? There's another little rush when the fans spin back up, because I know that work's getting done again.

If you have hardware – especially an AMD or nVidia GPU – and you don't mind heating up a room with some heavy math, check out https://foldingathome.org/ and set things up. Be patient, as it can take a bit for a work packet to show up... but once it's going, you'll be helping too.

Cut me some slack. My nervous system was wired together by monkeys.

As the duo 8 Bit Weapon explain:

"We all need to stay safe and relax, with that in mind were are giving away free downloads of both of our C64 relaxation albums Disassembly Language Volumes 1 & 2"

Vol 1: https://8bitweapon.bandcamp.com/album/disassembly-language-ambient-music-for-deprogramming-vol-1

Vol 2: https://8bitweapon.bandcamp.com/album/disassembly-language-ambient-music-for-deprogramming-vol-2

I like this stuff. Give it a try!

tired: &​nbsp​; for non-breaking space

wired: &​nbsp​; for non-binary space

@xinjinmeng Er....

That last is supposed to be "Electric​&nb​sp;​Keet" but it got auto-parsed. Zero-width spaces to the rescue?

@xinjinmeng My favorite is when a web-form accepts and escapes something in a way that gets passed through systems that just don't understand it.

For example, as a result of my desperate attempts to get my name accepted in web-forms, I've gotten mail and packages addressed to "Electric Keet _", "Electric", and my personal favorite, "Electric Keet".

@Leucrotta Here's hoping it's no worse than a cold! And yeah, I feel like there'll be a lot of healing travel when things stabilize.

Someday I'll figure out how to monetize my ability to grotesquely mistype words, but I still won't because fkuc catpailmsm.

@Taylor Yeah. Ugh, I hate when they do that.