I don’t what to say about the show as I’m not entirely sure what it is all about. Oh, sure, I know the basics. EPIX created a 1980-based show, with a group of mainly-white college grads ready to take on the world, figuring out their lives post-high school, post-college. They seem way more like high-schoolers than college grads, but whatever. Officially, it is a “dramedy” and if you watched the first EP, you would see it basically means a drama at sitcom length. No laughs, lots of young adult angst. Fabricated drama, not real drama. Their entire drama seems to be related to “now what?”. Yawn.
No, seriously, I was waiting for a car accident. A pregnancy. An overdose. Someone with AIDS symptoms, some THING to care about other than “will they or won’t they”, which was answered in the first 30s.
Maybe drama kicks up when the Bridge and Tunnel set hits Manhattan from Long Island, but why would I care? Perhaps the acting?
Let’s start with the actresses. Caitlin Stasey is the lead, a wannabe fashion designer, and she seems familiar, but I haven’t seen her in any of the credits listed in IMDB. Which means I’m thinking of an older doppelganger, and while I can’t place the original, neither are a bonus. She comes off as a 12yo pretending to be 30, so she has to be brash and smoke aggressively. It looks ridiculous, but at age 52, I’m not the demo they’re going for either. Although I’m not sure WHO they are going for — the young millennials won’t be able to relate either. Seeing her with a big cordless phone in the backyard with an antenna was painful.
Her posse is made up of Gigi Zumbado (nothing remarkable in her credits or her performance) and Izabella Farrell (basic credits). Gigi is basically a parrot for Caitlin, maybe it will end up as some sort of romance thing, while Izabella is the no-nonsense “thinker” who will tell them what to do, despite feeling inferior as she couldn’t handle college.
For the boys, we have Sam Vartholomeos as the lead, Jan Luis Castellanos as his athletic friend, and Brian Muller as the analytical guy who talks too much. Sam was on Star Trek Discovery, and I don’t even remember him. Here? Even less memorable. No drive, no ambition, misses his GF, but his father tells him to keep his eye on the prize and not get distracted, but who knows what the prize is as he was talking mostly about hitchhiking around the country. WTF? Jan Luis has a few more noteworthy credits but still nothing big either. Don’t know him, don’t care. Same deal for Brian. Nothing in the past, nothing in the show.
Oh look, creator Edward Burns plays Dad. How exciting! Snore.
I want 27m of my life back. I have no idea why anyone is funding this other than it was Ed Burns, I guess. EPIX is outside of the normal funding bubble, but I’ll still predict cancellation.
I like to give all new shows a shot, and if you tell me there is a remake of the Equalizer show from back in ’85, I’m going to watch it. If you tell me it’s Denzel as the Equalizer, I’m a bit skeptical. Not because he’s black, that part doesn’t matter, but because he comes off too soft-spoken in just about every role I’ve ever seen him in. I need to feel a sense of caged menace, someone who can unleash a can of whoop-ass. Now Matt Damon doesn’t have it, but did an awesome job as Jason Bourne, creating a whole new genre of secret agent movie options in the process. It’s a good predecessor for shows like Hanna, where you see a young girl, seemingly incapable of such violence, exploding with force and technique. And yet, I watched the two Equalizer movies and I yawned. I felt like Denzel was a terrible choice. Too much Crimson Tide, not enough Training Day or the Book of Eli. Don’t get me wrong, I watched the second movie even after I didn’t like the first one. It’s still a great character, helping the little guy or gal.
Then I saw the big announcement that The (new) Equalizer would be on after the Super Bowl. And I thought, “Oh right, I remember hearing it was coming back as a show. Who’s the star?”. Queen Latifah. WTF? This is the EQUALIZER, not LIVING SINGLE WITH GUNS! But you know, I like to enter open-minded. Sweet innocent Ali from God Friended Me is the new Batwoman, and she’s doing a great job. Nothing about her previous “soft” role suggested to me that she could do action sequences, and I’m still enjoying it, so maybe QL going from comedy/sitcom to action will be fine, right?
And in every scene EXCEPT the action scenes, she’s great. She has fantastic presence, a nice sense of warmth, the mom-bordering-on-grandma vibe reminiscent of the grandfatherly vibe of Edward Woodward in the original series. Truth be told, his action sequences weren’t anything amazing either.
But this is the Equalizer. And what I need to see is that this amazing CIA operative is so much better than everyone else. I don’t need to be told it, I need to see it. Yet in the one big action sequence, she’s slow as molasses. They use quick cuts to speed up the action, but it seems like she’s moving in slow motion. The ads for the show made this big deal out of her riding a motorcycle, and it seemed very action-packed. Nope, she rode up. She got off slowly. She walked over to a van, she walked back to the bike, got on with someone, spun the wheels and drove off. No sense of urgency, no smash and grab. Nothing anywhere in any of the scenes suggests quick, decisive, violence, the stock in trade of the ex-operative who is the best of the best.
In lieu of high-octane, or anything resembling the origins of Death Wish, Sudden Impact, Dirty Harry, Jason Bourne, it was a PG episode looking like a Stephen J Cannell production of the 1980s with nobody getting more than a bloody nose except for the first victim.
However, she has some good characters around her with decent acting. Adam Goldberg plays a computer hacker she helped in a past life, and I could NOT place him at all. Not as Simon Hayes from God Friended Me, not as Private Mellish from Saving Private Ryan. But he’s great. His wife, a sharpshooter, is played by Liza Lapira and I had the same brain freeze on her…I would not have figured out it was Ivy from Dollhouse, or Michelle Lee from NCIS, or even Yuki from Dexter. She’s decent, not much to do.
Most of the rest is window dressing. She has a daughter, who’s okay, and her mother is played by…wait for it…Lorraine Toussaint with about 3 lines in the whole episode. I’m assuming that changes later, but whatever. There’s a victim of the week and a bad guy of the week, they do alright.
But the “presence” is a police detective played by Tory Kittles. He has been in lots of stuff over the years, none of which I’ve seen, but he has a nice, quiet presence. It will be interesting to see what they do with him.
More unusual is her former training officer at the CIA, now in the private sector, played by Mr. Big himself, Chris Noth. I loved him for most of the Law and Order original run and here he’s playing a relatively nice guy, who’s seen some stuff, might be a bit ethically challenged here and there, but generally a good guy. And will provide backup to McCall when needed. I like him, good addition.
But will anyone watch?
QL is a good actress, and if she was about 15y younger or more athletic, I’d say sign me and a bunch of other people up to see a black woman kick ass and take names. But this is not a superhero show, and she has no amazing skills to show off. It’s watchable, but I’m not sure anyone will show up. It simply wasn’t exciting enough.
Yet I still love the premise. I always do. Give me a lone crusader helping people, maybe a throw-back to old style Westerns where the gun-fighter rides into town, cleans up a mess, and rides on. So I’m probably going to watch, at least for a few more episodes at least. Hopefully the action will pick up. If they had a bit more budget, it would be great to see her take on a young partner who needs some seasoning. And if things get too big for her? Maybe she can hire the A-Team to back her up.
A friend shared an article this week from the Atlantic written by Amanda Mull (The Pandemic Is Resetting Casual Friendships – The Atlantic) about the impact of the pandemic on social ties. The content isn’t revolutionary, cutting-edge, or original, but I really like the way she explains the breakdown. In essence, she uses the standard sociological explanations of people having different types of friendships, acquaintances, etc. radiating out from your “self” and talks about the tier 3 and beyond links that have been severed due to the isolation.
Tier 1 is your immediate social network and would normally include your family and best friends. In short, the ones that you likely included in your “bubble” or “pod”.
Tier 2 is your expanded network of friends, family and all your immediate coworkers. Some people put coworkers in Tier 1 since you see them every day, but one thing the pandemic has made clear is how those coworkers are different from people who are in your pod.
While Tier 1 is still restrictive, it mostly remains “in-person”. People you still see and interact with in-person, albeit in different ways. Tier 2, by contrast, has almost entirely gone digital with Zoom calls. Everyone knows about the impacts on those groups, it’s very clear, no big surprises left there.
Tier 3, by contrast, is the “extended” friends who might not even be considered “friends” in some cases, merely people who are regular acquaintances with whom you are friendly (the “weak ties” of social interactions in your normal in-person day to day life). Mull uses the example of a social group she used to see regularly at a bar to watch football games with, but lots of people have these groups. Trivia friends. Hobby or association friends. Another example from the article is the barista who knows your favorite drink and has it ready for you when you get to the counter. The little added touch that someone a bit distant socially says, “I see you”.
While Mull calls them “casual friends”, I often think of them as almost transactional friendships. For me, some of my best examples coalesce around food service.
When I was away at university out West, and living in residence, we had a small crew who regularly ate together. As we would go through the dining line, we would occasionally chat with the cashiers. We didn’t know them well, but if we were about to line up, we would often move to the line up of the one we knew, if she was working. For me, it was a bit of comfort too. The sense of familiarity. Our conversations never even progressed to names. We just said “hello”, or maybe if the line wasn’t too rushed, maybe we’d talk about the weather, or plans for the weekend. Idle chatter.
Later when I was living out of residence during the summer, and working full-time while most of my school friends had moved back home, I found dinner time a bit lonely. I didn’t want to go home, I wanted a bit of social interaction, and I would frequently go to a local family restaurant where there were about 30 tables, and a small set of waitresses, five or six regulars. While I liked all of them, I would frequently choose to sit in a specific section of one of the waitresses. Sometimes I would even ask to sit in Kat’s section. I didn’t know her well, it was just that we would normally chat for 2-3 minutes while I was ordering. Sometimes it was about law school — her father taught at the university, and she was thinking about trying for it, but she wasn’t sure if it was what she wanted to do. Sometimes it was about books, as I usually had one with me for reading. Or the weather, whatever. I suspect too that her coworkers likely teased her about me, because I would request her section. They likely assumed, incorrectly, that I had a romantic interest in her. I didn’t, I just liked interacting with her. I found her refreshingly lively when I was feeling a bit lonely. One night, our conversation seemed to have a different edge to it, almost like she was leading it somewhere. Since I’m generally dense about women, any thoughts I had at the time were likely to have been erroneous but there seemed to be a different feel to the conversation, including four or five directed comments that seemed to lead to her telling me what time she got off work. I suspected, but had no way of knowing, if she was hinting I should ask her out, which I did not do. Ironically, I would have been happy to have gone for a drink or something as a friend, just to get to know her better, but I wasn’t in a mental place to be dating anyone, if even that was what she was suggesting, if she was suggesting anything at all. I also know the limitations of friendships that start the way they did.
Amanda Mull’s article, though, suggested she does go deeper with her interactions:
Of the dozens of fellow fans and bar employees I’d greet with a hug on a normal fall Saturday, I follow only a handful of them on social media; for most of the others, I know only their first name, if that. But many comforted me through mutual, bone-deep disappointment, or sprayed champagne at me in exhilaration.
I did not, of course, ever greet the serving staff with a hug. Nor was I greeted by the regulars in the bar with a round of “Norm!” when I entered Cheers. And yet, I have had a similar “Cheers” experience of sorts, of being the regular barfly.
When I was still in the office, I would frequently stop by the restaurant downstairs multiple times a week for lunch. Some of that is laziness in that I don’t like heating up leftovers at work, but I do like hot lunches, and some of it is that I like the comfort of people being around without having to interact with them very much.
For work, I would go in, sit at the small bar with about 8 other rotating regulars, and eat my lunch. Usually I was also reading something, news or a book, or working on something from my website sometimes. The “buzz” around me was soothing, like being part of something without being part of something. It’s the same experience most people get in going to a coffee shop. There are people around but you don’t have to interact with them if you don’t want to do so. And if you do, well, most of them will quickly move away from you. 🙂
Anyway, back to work. For my regular visits, I would see 2-3 regulars fairly often, enough that I got to know their names and generally where they work. One is an IT guy named Chris, another was a lawyer. There were others, but they never said much. I’ve had regular conversations with Chris over, say, a five year period. I don’t know his last name, and outside of knowing he’s into Star Trek, most of our conversations were mostly superficial. If he died, I wouldn’t go to his funeral, I didn’t know him that well, but it would make me sad, and I would miss him.
For the workers, there were 2-3 who always had a friendly smile, a warm welcome, maybe an extra dose of fries when something in the kitchen was taking too long. They’d refill my drink faster, they’d stop by to chat, they check in on me. Friendly, sure, and attentive.
But, again, there are two giant factors in those interactions.
First and foremost, and going back to the example out west of the waitress who may or may not of been suggesting I ask her out, the entire relationship is, well, fake. She (and it is often a she) is literally paid to be nice to customers. Is she nicer to me than someone else? Maybe, or maybe she likes bigger tips, or it’s just because I’m low maintenance as a customer. I don’t make inappropriate comments, I don’t freak out if she forgets my drink, I’m not pissed if the kitchen is taking longer than normal. I don’t go for drama, and I don’t create drama. In, eat, get out. I want the noise and buzz around me, not a problem.
Second, and perhaps equally important, there is nothing invested in the relationship. Its nature, aside from being transactional, is also superficial. Who is going to get angsty about a passing comment about the weather? Like most people in casual situations, you don’t openly start conversations with strangers about income, politics or religion. And if there’s a drunk sitting next to you at the bar, they tend to shut up if you ignore them enough. So they are “problem-free” friendships because, generally-speaking, you don’t interact deeply enough for anyone to HAVE a problem.
And yet…
Even if I discount commerce-based friendships as real friendships, I miss them. I stopped in to work back in June to pick some gear up, and top of my list for the visit was to swing by the restaurant to see what was going on. I remember back in March, just as we were debating what was going to happen, the one waitress was asking what we thought would happen. And I said quite openly that I thought we were going to get sent home, and likely for an extended period.
Which of course was devastating news for her. She worked in a restaurant that mainly served people who worked in the building. If the building closed down, she would have no customers; no customers, no work; no work, no hours; no hours, no pay. The restaurant was still open in June, but there were no serving staff, they were let go long before then. It was the owner and a cook, that was it. And I wonder how she’s doing.
When I visited Victoria a couple of years after I was in Ottawa, just back for a visit, I made a special point of going back to the restaurant just to see who was still there. I knew nobody who was working, and it made me sad. More than a lack of connection at the university, more than the loss of friends who had all moved away, I was saddened by the thought that these “fake” commerce-based friends were gone. The sense of comfort of eating there was also gone. It was just food.
While I wish the article delineated between different types of those friendships, I feel the burn of the rest of the losses.
I miss a few coworkers from around work, not ones who are in the same team, but who are part of the broader work environment. Most of them were of the type where if we ran into each other in the hallway, we would stop, step off to the side for a few minutes and just chew the fat for a few minutes. Nothing deep, just catching up on each other’s lives. People who I don’t feel that I know well enough to follow on Facebook unless we were both accidentally on the same friend’s comments list. That would be a step too far, too regular of contact, too personal. True work-only friends. The ones who I will no longer see when I retire, unless I bump into them in a department store.
And I say this even though I’m an analytical introvert. I miss that social connection, however casual it might have been. I don’t necessarily need it at work, it could be through a community group, or a restaurant, or a coffee shop. Maybe an outing for breakfast with other retired people from work (a group I would like to join one day).
But I feel it. And felt it. I would regularly wander around the floor, just going for a walk to stretch my legs and get out of my cubicle. Experts would call it networking, but it wasn’t really intended that way. I would just wander. A DG or two that I knew, I would stop by and say hi. Maybe chat for 5m, just catch up. A director or four or five that I know, one in particular that I’m thinking of who I used to see once a month or so in his office at the end of a day. Just quickly catching up, nothing big. He retired last fall, and I don’t really have a connection to keep interacting with him. Facebook or a Zoom call would be “too personal”, too intrusive. We were drop-by friends, like chatting with a neighbour while walking to the mailbox. Okay, maybe a little more than that, but still, a somewhat contextual or transactional friendship.
And the article is right. We can’t replace those Tier 3 connections with simple digital options. We’ve boosted the FB connections, we have found some communities online, but generally speaking, we haven’t replaced those moments of personal connectivity that was part of our day. Sure, maybe you COULD phone them, but it would be weird to do so, for both of you. It’s why many people lament the loss of church — that WAS their community of Tier 2 and 3 connections, separate from the spiritual component.
I also think sometimes it is the biggest threat to people following isolation protocols and rules. When Tier 1 and 2 are insufficient, people crave Tier 3. Or without Tier 3, they need more Tier 1 and 2 to compensate, and suddenly you have large family get-togethers. Not because they’re disrespecting the rules, but because they feel the need and it helps them rationalize their choices.
Either way, I like the way the article explains it and how it made me think about more things today.
So last week was a mixed bag for my wound care. On Monday, my legs were itching like crazy, so I took off my compression bandages at lunch just before I had my appointment, had a full shower, and went to my appointment. My wound-care nurse was NOT happy with me. Literally, it was off for about 20 minutes, and in her view, was long enough to completely undo all the compression up to that point. Hence my brain being kicked around that this is my new normal and I’ll never be able to take them off for life. Not completely rational, perhaps, but there it is.
On Wednesday, we changed the bandages, things were looking really good for my small wound / gash on my left leg (we started treating it just in case it got worse), and we increased the compression on my right leg from 20-30 units to 30-40 units of compression. Basically? We used a wrap that squeezes the leg more when it contracts. The goal was to see if I could tolerate it.
I couldn’t. By that night, it had to come off, my leg just hurt too much with the higher compression on. So on Thursday, I called the clinic to see if I could get in. But I never heard back (they’re not sure what happened with the message as they never got it nor is that usual, even though I was coming in Friday anyway, and they felt I should have got a call…me too, to be honest). So on Friday, with only one wrap still on my good leg, I attempted the infamous “shower with garbage bag over it” technique that didn’t work worth a damn. The top seemed pretty sealed, but alas, no, when I got out, there was water pooled in the bag and my toes were soaked. Ergo, if water comes in from above, and reaches my toes, you can bet everything in between was soaked. I cut it all off so I could get the leg dry, and had it rebandaged at my appointment. It was a new nurse, and she didn’t beat me up about having removed it Thursday or Friday, all par for the course, and I was in a pretty subdued “life sucks” mood anyway, so I was likely giving off a “don’t crap on me” vibe.
On the positive side, things were still progressing, the left leg looked healed so no need for any more wound care on that, not really, just the compression bandage. And the right leg? There was still one small area that needed to still close, but the rest was “closed” with new skin having formed. From looking down on the wound from above, i.e., upside-down, the wound looked like a map of Africa and Niger was still an open wound, Algeria and Chad were states in transition, and the rest of the continent was poised for recovery. I had no idea what was happening in a little area near Madagascar, but then again, nobody ever does.
The big news? I could move to three-day care instead of every other day. So Monday, Thursday and then, exciting isn’t it? Valentine’s Day. Maybe I’ll show my leg some love, although after each appointment of scraping and peeling off dead skin or scabs, I already have the red roses covered. My wounds always look very angry with me.
Today was my new appointment, so in I went. The Rx from the doctor’s office for custom socks has still not arrived, so I had to call again. Not a giant deal, but it delays again my referral to the place that will actually do the custom socks in time so that when the wound care is over, I can just use them at home. I phoned around town to try to get proper cast covers for my bandages so I can shower more easily (we used them before for Jacob when he was doing serial casting) but ended up having to buy them online from Amazon. I ordered two, one for each leg, and they’ll be here tomorrow. Great! But then my appointment removed the bandages from my left leg entirely and so now I only need one for my right leg. Grrr…She gave me a tube sock to cover the left leg for now, open-toed, but still doing basic compression (around 10-15 units, over-the-counter grade). And my right leg? Niger is still a war zone, but Algeria and Chad show signs of transitioning to recovery. The Northern coast experienced Tropical Storm Tweezers today to get rid of skin that failed to grow, and that was a new level of fun. My wound showed me the redness of its love again.
So, definite progress, at least physically. Mentally? Not so much.
I’m coming to grips with it a bit, but we were out on the weekend as Andrea wanted to go tobogganing at our friend’s place in Manotick. They even got to try out this Finnish kick-sled that looked like a bit of fun to try. But I couldn’t do any of it. I can’t afford to fall, for one thing, or even bang my leg on something. Plus, I’m wearing bandages that make it hard to even get my regular boots on while having a thin cover on my toes (i.e. VERY cold), and I can’t even put my big warm boots on with the wraps still on. So I had to drop Jacob and Andrea, and go do something else for an hour.
When I’ve missed out on some activity in the past, even if it was semi-health related, there was always a combined “failsafe” for my mental side that the reasons were either at least partly choice (I was choosing for mental health reasons, for example, knowing I COULD do it but it was a bad idea to push myself that way right then) or temporary (my knee was sore from something else, or my back was out and needed chiro), and often a result of having done something else earlier in the week.
This time? It’s not temporary, it’s not choice, and it’s not a result of some trade-off of another activity earlier in the week. Just as with my stupid decision last summer to jump off a dock and almost permanently injure my calves and knees, there’s a degree of disability here that prevents me from doing what I want to do. I really wanted to try the kick-sled. Ironically, I didn’t even have to address the question if I was too heavy for it or might damage it, because it wasn’t even an option to consider, not while protecting my leg from future damage.
I’d like to think that I’ve worked too hard already, although that wording doesn’t feel right. It’s not hard work, it is just time and energy devoted to having my legs wrapped and then sitting. So it is more like I’ve invested too much time in the current healing process to risk a new injury that will set me back.
What will I think a month from now? Will I have some basic compression socks that look okay and I’ll think it’s no big deal? Will I adjust to it like my CPAP machine where I was thinking, “Okay, for the rest of my life, this is my nighttime”? But I know it helps, so I use it every night, no big deal. I’m better with it than without, most of the time. I do, still, occasionally sleep downstairs or take a nap without it. In the right position, I can sleep just fine without it, albeit not sustainably. So I take a break. But if I go to the cottage even for a weekend? I take the machine. I know I’ll sleep like crap without it in another bed. I do the work because the benefits are immediate and I can see them.
Will the benefits of compression socks motivate me somehow? Will I embrace it the same way? Or perhaps it is something that I’ll simply tolerate because I have no choice. Time will tell.
In the meantime, I’m down to one leg wrapped and I can take the sock off my left leg tonight. Progress of a sort.
I like running my blog, but I confess, I’m not a big fan of the upkeep behind the scenes. Basic stuff is fine, it goes with the territory. I could pay someone to maintain my site, but since my site does not and will not ever generate revenue, I need to keep the costs as low as I can.
But some of the overhead is of my own making, sure. Or perhaps even a result of my own ambition. I’m not satisfied with using some site like Amazon Photos or Flickr, I want my own site to host my pics.
And so I have some extra admin headaches managing a large collection of photos and galleries. Like the fact that I noticed that some of my Galleries had inconsistent structures to the weburl. What does that mean? It means that the right setup is supposed to be, say for my seventh gallery of my wedding collection from 2008:
URL: http://www.polywogg.ca/pandagallery/yr2008/w07-bachelor party
Page title: 2008-W07 Bachelor Party
Gallery: 2008-W07 Bachelor Party
The URL had yr2008/2008-w07 (2008 listed twice), the page title was fine, and the gallery in some cases was messed up and said 2008-2g Bachelor Party because that was the old filenaming I did, and it hardcoded it into the directory structures. Is it a problem?
Yes and no. It starts off no but quickly becomes a yes when I start linking to things, and suddenly something that should link just fine, instead has a really weird file structure to it and a picture doesn’t load when it should. I was ducking and covering, letting it go, until I hit a snag tonight reading where the WordPress environment is going and realizing my little booboos are going to become bigger booboos later and it is better to fix them now.
Okay, it’s annoying, but an hour or two of quality control has me having corrected some past mistakes and I’m good to go again. Except I’m not.
I’ve got a gremlin. I don’t know what’s causing it, I don’t know when it started, I just know that for some reason, a gremlin is visiting my website.
Here’s the deal. For my gallery, I basically say “CREATE NEW GALLERY”, type in a gallery name, press enter, and then drag and drop all my photos for that gallery into the browser window. I press UPLOAD, and it puts everything onto the server and into the gallery for me. Easy peasy lemon squeasy.
It has worked this way for years. And now it doesn’t.
For some reason, my website has decided to time out in the middle of file uploads. Oh, no, not consistently. Just enough to be a PITA. It gives me an error message, saying out of 21 photos only 16 uploaded. So I note the five that it says didn’t upload. I reupload those. And it rejects one as already uploaded. Hmm…Okay, whatever, it took the four. So I go to the gallery and it says I have 24 photos. Wait, what? I had 16, I added 4 new ones, I should have 20 perhaps or 21 if the duplicate was an error. But how did I get 3 more than I started with?
Oh, right. Not all of those errors were actual errors. In fact, of the 5 it said it didn’t upload, it actually uploaded 4 of them. So I was only missing 1, right? Nope. Another two didn’t upload. No error, should have worked, but when I look at the photo, it is blank or incomplete. Umm, okay.
Plus, for some weird and wonderful world, one of the pics that didn’t upload, and isn’t in the directory, did upload the second time as it should have, but for some reason and some how, WP decided it was a partial duplicate. Not enough to block it, but enough of a duplicate to rename my filename to something like 1_image_xxxx.jpg.
Son of a firetruck.
Deep breath, dive into the rabbit hole.
Generally speaking, a problem with uploading pictures is USUALLY a problem with certain settings. And there are sites that list what the most common problems are for that error, and 8 different ways to fix them. Except none of those 8 ways apply to me. I know, because I had another problem back in December that WAS of that type and I fixed it. Or so I thought.
The app that is giving me errors is one I actually paid for, including support, so I’ve reached out to them for official suggestions. They gave me two solutions, I tried both, seemed okay, thought I was sorted, but tonight, it started throwing errors again.
Okay, debug time. What is the first step? Deactivate a bunch of other plugins to see if they’re conflicting. Yes, it works without them. Great, slowly reactivate them one by one until you find the one that’s a problem. It isn’t usually necessary to literally go 1×1, I find 5×5 is a good enough sort technique, reminiscent of advanced sorts in programming. I got about halfway through my list of plugins and hit a conflict. It stopped working. Great, that’s the problem.
Oh wait, I put another 5 in with no problem and then the next 5 conflicted again. Wait, there’s more than one conflicting? That’s unusual. Particularly for the narrow area I’m having the error in. Most plugins would never conflict with that. Weird. Okay two conflicts.
No, wait, a third. And a fourth? WTF? A fifth and a sixth? That is NOT possible. The plugin works normally, it’s a simple upload feature. It’s used by hundreds of THOUSANDS of people around the world. I know it works. WTF????
Okay, so it isn’t a real conflict. Maybe it’s a load issue? Like if I load 20 plugins, the server doesn’t want to run 20 anymore? I have 40 in total, mostly light load. They should run fine.
Sigh. Okay, I’m out of options. I reached out to the plugin again to see if they have other suggestions, and to my official server support to see if they know what would be causing it to time out after 30s when every variable in the system is at least 60s and I’m not over any obvious memory load. Hmm…
Why is this a big problem? Because it means I can’t easily upload my pictures right now.
Don’t get me wrong, there are other ways to put them on the server, including the most obvious one is to do a side-load equivalent to upload them using better software directly to the server and then have the app “copy” them from the server into the gallery. It adds about four steps to my workload to do all that, and it’s a totally separate PITA.
I can do it, but I sure don’t want to. I need to fix the original problem.
The plugin support did mention they have a beta app coming soon which would potentially indirectly fix my problem, it would just potentially slow the upload to a crawl. I CAN do that, I don’t know if I WANT to do that.
Did I mention that some days I think it’s a dumb website?
