21 March 2004. First of all, the explanation of yesterday's entry: I was tired so thought I'd just post and comment on an image I made during a practice session with Paint Shop a couple of days ago. After I checked to see how it looked, I'd decided not to comment on it but, as a kind of joke, make it my entry for the day. Another consideration was that I had little to say about the image. It was an experiment (for me) in making something more rectilinear than my previous Paint Shop images. I'm trying to break out of my curvilinear overlay routine. I think I'm slowly doing so

Today, I'm going back to the middle of January, 2003, when I thought of doing long divison of "poetry" and rapidly made a sequence of 11 mathemaku. Each of them has the same quotient and dividend, "words" (upside-down and distorted, or "slant"), and "poetry," respectively. the subdividend product in each example would be a variation on the one using "words" (rightside-up and not distorted) as my divisor. At the time, it looked like a great way to make graphic representations of poetry, and further suggest what poetry is, for me, through my choice of remainders. One, for instance, was "port," pun intended, but main meaning intended having to do with the safe home every poem, I think, should have somwehre in it.

When I later looked over my sequence, I decided I didn't like the first graphic all that much, and felt that some of my graphics, and word-choices for later frames of the sequence weren't quite right, either. I expected to rework, and extend the sequence soon after that but never got around to it until now, when I'm using Paint Shop a lot, and need material to expose and write about at my blog.

Today I spent a lot of time with my Primary Image, and still don't love it. (A problem is that I very much like some of the variations I did on the original, so can't change it too much for fear of losing them.) It may be good enough, or as good as I can get it. At any rate, here it is in the first mathemaku of the sequence, which is under my previous lead-off frame. While I was working on it, I did a variation I may like as much as it. Instead of going with just one of the two possible Primary Images, I decided to make a new poem using the second--and start a sequence within my sequence. This I'm pretty excited about right now. It should be just about all play, since I don't have to do anything but change one of the letters of the divisor, and fool around with details of my set graphic.*

*Ooops. The next day I realized that I can't keep quotient, dividend and remainder the same if I change the divisor. Well, maybe what I can do is make some minute change in "friendship," my remainder, as I add to this sequence within my main sequence. I'm not sure. For right now, though, I've junked the sub-sequence, and put my second Primary Image into the second mathemaku in my sequence, which needed a new subdividend product. (See my next entry.)

Note: Yesterday I got and installed Paint Shop 8. It seems pretty sophisticated, but it will take me time to adjust to it. One nice feature is that I got a handbook with it. I didn't have one before, and its help section is not all that wonderful.