Once Upon a Time in Photoshop Elements

 So...I am watching Sergio Leone’s Once upon a Time in the West... well sporadically, off and on throughout my day. As of this writing There is still an hour of it left to see, streaming on Netflix. 

        I am watching because to be certain, it is great filmmaking. I am watching off and on because, it is slow ponderous filmmaking about people quick on the draw, and foul of temperament. Hair-trigger folk difficult for me to like much, and the much suffering woman at the center of the story of. Cinematic miracle, this classic Spaghetti Western made by Leone in Italy and based on a story by Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento is about our American west. Like so many male-centered stories of factions struggling to wrest control of their world at gunpoint...for me a bit like watching fingernails scratching the length of a long chalkboard, feels that natural and real, but that slow, even more nerve-wracking. Harsh, but I do not really want to know most of these people even in film fiction, don’t care about them, they are violent power-mongers, people who hold no interest for me. Too real. It is reminding me of other films, particularly Once upon a Time in America.

          Meanwhile, this meandering post is really on a wholly different topic, Leone’s films are a ruse. I am really here on the topic of Photoshop Elements, the supposedly much simpler, and def much less expensive version of Photoshop...back to that momentarily. 

         I was watching Once Upon a Time, and searching connections between the two Once Upon a Times, and discovering that both Once Upon a Times were indeed both films made by Sergio Leone, The West, and America. I had experienced exactly the same feelings when watching what must have been the american release of Once Upon a Time in America, and caught up in my world then, had gone to see it , was then scarcely interested or very aware of who had made this particular film, at that time a wish to escape was pervading life in general. 

        In between and as break from working in Photoshop...which is grueling in other ways. But I am learning, and as I learn I discover...three times now, twice gut-wrenching loss of digital life, precious hours and vision gunned down mercilessly for no reason in Photoshop Elements. Once it did not matter, it was a barely existing beginning, lost I cannot fathom why, barely off the ground, that little birdie was. Sudden violent death of my work in the program is random, it seems.

        Twice it happened after long laborious multi-layering work produced from the depths of my soul of souls...just as I am saving the work the program crashes, and poof, my long hours of work are gone, this time against the backdrop of a shoot-‘em-up of epic proportions, Once Upon a Time in the West. Close up and intimate knowledge in film of those to be avoided in life can perplex, sometimes feels to me more warrented. 

         Instantaneously lost to this world my work is, as if gunned down by a sharpshooter---that fast---a speeding bullet. So I search the question in my aching heart for an answer, ‘why does photoshop elements for apple crash just as I’m saving hours of art?’ i google. Something very close to that, and comes to me this answer at a list-serve,

“That is a well known bug in Apple's QuickDraw code, which Apple has said that they will not be fixing because they have deprecated QuickDraw.

In some cases, turning off GPU switching in the system preferences can avoid or at least reduce the occurrence of the bug.

But the only way to really avoid it is to update to a version of the software that uses the Cocoa APIs and not the Carbon/QuickDraw APIs.

Sorry I don't have better news.”

‘QuickDraw code?’ Really? That language is so very strangely coincidental as to seem much more synchronistic, almost;  the net and I are somehow in poetic sync. 

         So then I search the question, ‘what is the computerese definition of the word, ‘deprecated?’ Because I know the definition of the word in the English language, just...what’s it doing in this answer to my question?

“In dictionaries, deprecated is a term used to indicate a pronunciation or usage that is acknowledged but discouraged. In computer programming, a deprecated language entity is one that is tolerated or supported but not recommended. For example, a number of elements and attributes are deprecated in HTML 4.0 , meaning that other means of accomplishing the task are preferred. Deprecated features may become obsolete in future versions of HTML, though browsers that support the features may continue to support them. In the Java programming language, a particular method may be deprecated for a given class of object s.”

         I will continue to ponder the sadness attendant loss of work when that loss is beyond my own agency, my decision, my choice.  Ponder, and who knows? Maybe even fix. With a little tech help, that is.