Hey, mostly this is a check in with everyone to see how you’re doing, what you’re occupying your time with, and a general state of the world.

We’re all still healthy in Nördhöll, as the Martian spells it, knock on wood. Although we’re playing everyone’s least favorite game show right now: Is It Seasonal Allergies or Coronavirus?

Our house is surrounded by pine and cottonwood trees, which is pretty, but also leads to the concrete floor of our porch turning yellow-green every year around this time, with fluffy drifts of cottonwood “cotton.”

I have discovered a couple of cool apps to help me with my Quarantine Resolutions of draw and write more.

Nebo is a writing to text note-taking app that converts your writing into text for you. It copes fairly well with my “beautiful hieroglyphics” as a friend called them. It has a couple of simple motions for inserting and deleting spaces, deletes things you scribble out, and allows you to edit before exporting. I like it enough I dropped the nine bucks to upgrade it, which just gives you more “notebooks.” The free version still has all the functionality of the upgrade, but you really only get the one notebook. I like sorting my stuff into different notebooks so the upgrade was worth it to me.

I also feel pretty strongly that if you enjoy something free you should kick the creators at least a little money.

The second app is ProCreate. I may be adding some capitalization there unnecessarily. It’s a drawing app with a ton of brushes and effects, and the ability to record what you’re doing. I spent an hour just playing with the brushes last night. I still do better drawing on paper, because I’m used to it, but ProCreate is definitely winning me over to the digital side of the Force. Also, watching the neat shit the folks on Drawfee do with their digital art is teaching me a lot of neat tips and tricks. Pretty happy with this one.

It does cost, again, around $10, but it’s definitely a good value if you want to do art on a tablet.

I’ll try to come back in and add links later. I’m typing this on my tablet in bed. Yesterday was a terrible, horrible, very bad day, and I just wanted to space out after I logged off for the day.

The world is very weird and scary right now. Do what you have to to feel safe and ok.

What are you doing to occupy yourselves right now?

If you like what you read here, or want to help fund more art supplies (electronic and otherwise), please consider donating using the link at the top right of the page:  Keep Us Geeking, or checking out my Patreon.  Thank you!

Also, if you’d like to see what sort of fiction I write when left to my own devices, please feel free to check out my fiction Patreon, Nothing Nice Comes Out of My Head.