Feb 19> It's bin almost a week since our last confession, dear Inurnet... probly a record for 2020/2021. Bin busy "writing" a 26 pg chapbook, Codamundi #2 in D♭ miner, that BWR solicited from us... hope they accept it cuz not sure what else we'd do w/ it! Codamundi is based on an unifinished story we wrote decades ago called "A Wake Full of Weeds" that has gone thru various permutations, changing + adapting to the various forms of technology used to write it, a veritable technotext where the message is the medium... @ 1 point we onely had a hard copy + scanned it in + tried to recover it w/ OCR + it morphed into a mangled mess of txt. We rolled w/ it + continued skeumorphing th technotext + adding images, working on it solidly for the last 2 weeks... then last night we were going thru final edits when InDesign crashed.

This is nothing new, a lot of our Adobe products just crash w/o warning but usually @ least our work is auto-recovered. This time however, every time we tried to open this Codamundi.indd document we had 2 weeks invested in it kept crashing. We tried updating our InDesign software since we're running an old (2017) version, but we kept getting errors installing it, as we did the last few times we tried updating it (hence why we're still stuck in 2017). So we called Adobe. We couldn't undrstand a thing the 1st agent said (we're all for giving folks w/ disabilities jobs, but ain't there there sumping bedder suited for sum 1 w/ a speech impediment than talking on the phone?) + they claimed we din't have an account after we repeated our email like a dozen times + they repeated it back D-D-D as in delta, D as in del-del-delta, dub-dub-dubble-U as in whiskey, H as in ho-ho-hotel... before transferring us to "accounts" + then they just hung up on us after 15 minutes on hold. Fortunately the 2nd agent we called was more w/ it + understandable but he basically took a slash + burn approach. We relinquished control over our iMac + he remotely changed all the permissions on all these hidden files (more then a 100,000+ of them) + deleted everything on our computer that had anything to do w/ Adobe.

Around this time last year we were having similar issues w/ InDesign in the final throes of Textiloma... maybe it's cuz we're pushing "word processing" to the limits in the dead of winter? Our solution then was to go thru + delete a massive amount of files + move all our music + movies to an external drive to free up space. We noticed then that ½ of our TB of memary was allocated to a gray area of "system files" which is always unsettling. We'd uninstalled ± deleted all the old instances of Adobe applications, but evidently there's all these hidden files everywhere that build up... we're talking like 300+ GB of space this Adobe agent cleared up! He was laughing at how much history we had, legacy files from CS3 or Photoshop Elements, versions dating back to the '90s (which is funny cuz this is sort of what Codamundi is about). And every time ID crashes (which is often) it generates log files that build up on your hard drive. Had we known we would of deleted all these files but they are hidden deep in invisible folders that u 1st have to find + then assign yourself admin privileges so u can delete. Maybe we shd do the same next on this laptop we're typing on, then maybe DreamWeaver won't crash so much? He even went thru our fonts + deleted sum he said were corrupted, including a few we custom made for A Raft Manfest + some of the (paid for) Eduardo Recife fonts that we've had for decades.

To make a long story (he was remotely driving our computer + on the phone for ~2 hours) he wiped out any vestige of Adobe on our machine then redownloaded everything + all seems to work fine now, except for that dam Codamundi.indd file that started this hole mess. It opens + seems OK for a few seconds but then that color wheel starts spinning endlessly + only thing u can do is force quit. Funny thing is this is th pg it happend to be on as we were both watching th colur wheel go round to giv u an idea of wut we're talking a bout (+ dont ask what was on our desktop):

... sure the guy (whose name we cant remember but of course he was Indian) thought we were coo-coo for coca puffs. Din't help our case when we said we were just typing in a document when it crashed, cuz obviously what we're doing is not exactly normal usage. We sent him the corrupt file (or rather he sent it to himself since he was still driving our computer) to see if his "technical team" could salvage the file + said he would email it back to us if he did. This was around 10 pm last night. We woke up at 1 a.m. + checked our email but no dice. Then we couldn't get back to sleep + got to thinking that even if they did salvage something we didn't know if we wanted to risk diving back into it when the deadline to submit this chapbook is 3 days away. We did retrieve a stable version from the night before that BackBlaze backed up, but we spent probly 12 hours working on it yesterday + there's no way we could remember everything we did. Fortunately we PDF'd a version an hour or 2 before it crashed that was near to final. So what we did was write a 1 page intro to the piece, a sort of dog-ate-my-homework justification as to why the piece had all the typos + was unfinished mostly just recounting the above story w/ the slight embellishment that this Indian guy was able to recover this corrupt file + possibly even made modifications to it so in a sense is co-author (the author name used for this piece is "0x"). Anyways, hope BWR accepts it + hope we didn't ruin our chances by posting the above page. Also funny how they solicited us, they saw our work from A Raft Manifest + The Becoming online + contacted an editor who'd published an excerpt asking if they knew who these Rem + Rom charactors were + eventually that word got passed onto us + we confessed we was the spokesperson for Rem+Rom.

Input-wise, movie-wise, on Feb 13 we saw Stories We Tell, which was an intresting documentary that has us really confused @ 1st given dat we're always cognizant of whose doing th filming... the description of the film made it seem like it was pieced together from existing super 8 footage this Candadian family had (like our one super 8 footage we were blogging about a few posts ago) + we were thinking it was nuts how much footage this family had, not just of the family but also periphery people (don't want to give too much of the plot away) but ends up most of it was footage they fabicrated to look like old home movies. They had us fooled had we not been wondering who was doing the filming cuz @ a few points they're all in the picture which is never the case in true home movies cuz sum 1 has to be behind the camraw. We also finely finished season 6 of Schitt's Creek (we thought it sort of fizzled out twards the end + was wrapped up way too neatly) then started on The Durrell's in Corfu, based on My Family and Other Animals + other Gerald Durrell books (which we devoured in high shcool + collage when we thought mayb we wantid to be a biologist), about his upringing in Corfu + also his brother Lawrence (what's w/ these Brit familiies where 1 brother is a naturalist + the other a writer, see also the Attenborough's).

Bookwise, almost finished w/ Eat the Document by Dana Spiotta, about counterculture activist types in '70s + '90s, contrasting th 2 eras. It really peaked our intrest @ 1st tho then our intrest started to wane but now that we're back in the '70s (part 5) + back into it (what does that say about what decade we think is most intresting?). As we mentioned in post 820 when we came across 1 of her other books that prompted us to get this 1, we met her once + actually now that we think about she's sorta responsible for us meeting Chiara Barzini cuz we met her right before we moved to Rome + she told us we shd look up Chiara (or maybe she told Chiara to get in touch w/ us, we forget).

As u can see, weather-wise another dud of a snowstorm yesterday... like in the last post they predict 6 inches of snow + we get ½ an inch of shitty ass ice/sleet/frozen rain + now it's snowing tho they didn't predict it (tho not sticking). That path shoveled in front of our neighbor's place all the way to the coroner is our doing, you're welcome Inurnet.