Technology gives me a headache. The older I get, the harder it is to adapt to new systems. I feel like I’m bonking my forehead into brick walls with each choice clicked. I get frustrated. Then I get mad. Then I just want to run away. I can't decide whether to hope it’s a function of my age, or a function of the way my brain has reacted to chronic illness. I don’t even know it matters. I just know it’s exhausting to feel dumb like that.
I went on a website today that should have been super easy. It is for the giant majority of people who go there, I have no doubt. It was a place to design a custom miniature figurine for games like Dungeons and Dragons. They either 3-D print them and mail them to you, or you can download the file and print it yourself. That was the part that tripped me up. I was supposed to buy the file, download it, and email it to my foster daughter so she could print it while she had T’s 3-D printer at her house. Ah, but it was not so straightforward. I had to try every option I could think of, starting over from scratch four times because the website reset every time I walked away in my uncertainty. When I finally thought I was ready to move forward, I freaked out a little when I had to create a login for the site. (Not sure why that gave me such anxiety.) Then I was just sure if I downloaded it to my device and then emailed it, it wouldn’t work, as if there were some sort of self-destruct switch in the code once you opened the file. It doesn’t work that way. I got the file eventually, but when I tried to email it, my gmail account refused to find the file on my iPad, where I had put it. Just didn’t bring up that folder at all. I was sure it was unattainable at that point, and I was ready to start breaking things I was so mad. I stomped around, got myself some dinner, and then reconsidered my options. It was then I remembered I had other emails available on this device. I opened up clunky old aol, and guess what found and attached the file with no problems! Old people’s email for the win!
When T first showed us the 3-D printer he got as a Christmas gift to the whole group, I couldn’t imagine what I would make with it. Ideas eluded me for weeks, until my foster daughter started calibrating and tweaking it. She sent me to this website, Hero Forge, and told me what to do, in a vague sense. I wanted to totally pull the I’m Old, I’m Your Mother, You Do It card, but she wouldn’t let me get away with it. Once I got going on picking features for my figurine, I kind of liked it. They didn’t have a base model that was an Amazon (my character’s race). I selected half-giant, and went from there. My Miriam looks like Barbra Streisand around the What’s Up, Doc time period, but those facial features just weren’t available. I did the best I could. I remade her costume a dozen times over until I got as close as I could to what survived the shipwreck, and what she has picked up thus far. (I cheated and gave her nice boots that she isn’t currently wearing.) She fights two-handed with a glaive, so she’s holding that, in a “heroic pose.” It irritates me that all female characters in these sorts of fantasy games are expected to look like strippers, so I was glad there was a slider bar to lower her bust size. I didn’t make her quite as flat-chested as Brienne of Tarth, whom she is also modeled after, but she definitely doesn’t look like she consumes hormone-enhanced meats and dairy, like modern girls do. And key touch: I put a cat by her feet, as Miriam has all but adopted Oliver, our shape-changing sorcerer, who we think is really a cat who pretends to be a boy, not a boy who pretends to be a cat.
I did manage to get the file to my daughter with the printer, so hopefully when she comes over tomorrow it will be done. Once I persevered through the hurdles of the website, I wanted the instant gratification of printing it myself. There was enough of a snowstorm raging tonight to keep me from venturing out to nag the kid about printing it right away. I have to just review the pictures I took as I was describing to her what I was choosing. And yes, these are camera pictures of my iPad screen. Look, it’s what old people do when technology confounds them. They make do.
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