Szerszeń

I finished Szerszeń today...again. Happy birthday to me!

This curved staff never had a name. Many of my weapons don't. It was inspired by nothing, commemorated no events. I already had The Nameless One, which I then entered into a contest and renamed Ruber Mors,  so I couldn't use that. It went for five years without a name, but I thought of a yellow jacket as soon as it was complete, though there are no stripes and it doesn't remotely resemble the insect. It must have been the black and orange (close enough to yellow) combined with the "stingers" in the rear and the aggressive look.  

But there was no way it was going to be called "Yellow Jacket." That's not a name. That's not interesting. I thought a simple translation might do, except I'd like not to translate literally to outerwear. So, I decided to go with a translation of "wasp," but nothing sounded right. Then I tried "hornet" in German. (I just needed a yellow and black insect. Any would do.) I liked "hornisse," but didn't love it. Spanish, French, Italian, Latin, Greek - none of them worked. Russian seemed to fit with "shershen'," but I wanted to see it in every language Google Translate has. I came across the Polish "szerszeń," which sounds almost exactly like the Russian word, and I knew that had to be it. My father's side of the family is Polish and Irish, so it works. And it doesn't hurt that I imagine it to make a similar sound when swept through the air. ;)

As for the design, some kind of grip or wrap was planned for the handle, but I like the pattern too much to cover it.  Since it's not real yet, it doesn't matter. So, I was done. I was about to send it to Dropbox and Photobucket. But suddenly a copy appeared. I thought I accidentally made a copy, which I've done a couple times before. Stupidly (because I know computers and software screw up all the time) I deleted what I thought was the copy before I saved it anywhere else. Then I went on a grand adventure trying to recover it. What happened was it was some kind of ghost and I deleted the original. I couldn't open the ghost. I exited and reloaded and they were both gone. For an hour I tried to find recovery software for just the one file, but the only one that may have worked wouldn't work with the newest iTunes.

I didn't realize I could back up my iPad to iTunes, because I hardly use iTunes. I never even synced after I upgraded my computer last summer. iTunes wanted to erase everything because the iPad was tied to the old library, so I haven't really played with it since. And I completely forgot that I set up iCloud to back up over Wi-fi when I charged it, so there was a save file from that morning. I then backed up everything to iTunes in case iCloud didn't work, saved the Art Studio files so I wouldn't lose the background, foreground, pattern, and the copy I had of the weapon almost completed (just not in a scalable vector file that's editable in iDraw), and then erased all settings and documents. That's the only way to get to the set up screen where it asks you if you want to recover from iCloud or iTunes. Why go through all this since, if I had to, I could finish it in Art Studio or start over in iDraw? I'd rather not have to, because it wouldn't be exactly the same and I spent too much time on it for that to happen.

Later that night... Well, even though the backup was supposedly from before the file was erased, the restore was definitely from a point after. I know this because I made a new file in iDraw with what I scavenged from Art Studio and that's the one that was restored. Yet the version of the background I had worked on a few hours earlier was not restored. Odd. No matter. I found out that iCloud was a good idea to set up. Though I didn't get back the one file I needed in this case, I learned that it does work, and not all is lost. I will now be saving revisions to my Dropbox or email. Nothing had ever happened with this app before and I got lazy. Never again. 

Original: September 6, 2007