How Software Updates Turn Creatives Into IT Departments

Fixing Fixes Instead of Creating

    Ever sit down to create… only to spend the next two hours fixing the thing that’s supposed to help you create?

That’s the trap of modern software...

One overnight update removes the export queue, the next update patch hides it behind an icon that doesn’t respond. Suddenly, you’re not an editor, designer, or storyteller; you’re a part-time IT department keeping your own tools alive, trying to figure out workarounds for an app that literally worked fine yesterday.

The irony? None of us asks for a smaller footprint or a faster workflow on paper. We ask for stability. For things to just work the same way they did yesterday, improve the features, but not at the expense of existing features that are necessary and in use. Instead, every other session seems to start with the same sort of ritual: drivers, reinstalls, toggles, resets, reboots. By the time it’s fixed, the creative spark has already flickered out.

The latest time vampire: Topaz Labs’ Video AI: a brilliant tool for upscaling and enhancing low-quality video, but their newest update flat-out removed the export queue. Why? No one seems to know. Topaz is already slow to render, and if you need to stop a process, you used to do it in the queue. Not anymore. Now, apparently, exports run blind; no control, no stop button. Meanwhile, my machine sits with all cores and RAM blazing away on a file destined for the trash. The only way I knew something was going on was that the fans in my laptop ramped up to 90rpm. No indicator. No progress bar. Just white noise that filled the room, that was my rendering indicator.

~

So here I am, forced to leave the room while my system grinds pointlessly, literally at 90-to-nothing, on nothing.   

~

🚨 Developers, stop stripping away what works and start building software that empowers creativity instead of burying it with your “improvements.”

#endofrant

PS... I wrote this all the while my laptop cranked away in Topaz. When I finished the rant, I force-quit everything and shut down for the night. This morning, Topaz's export window is back! I'm not going to ask questions, just happy it's back. (But I'm not going to let all those words above go to waste, the struggle is real.)

###

🧩 PART 1: The Phisher, the Pétrus, and the Pitch

This actually happened: a wrong number. A luxury wine order. A text exchange that spiraled into something… else...

   

    It started like any other phishing text: badly targeted, oddly polite, and suspiciously high-end. At 9:17 AM, during normal working hours, I received a message from someone named “Eliza.” She claimed she had ordered five bottles of 2014 Pétrus but had received 2004 instead.

Clearly, I’m not James.

But I let it sit...

Then, at the end of the following day, sometime around 8 PM, my wife was on a business trip (something to do with art), and I was home alone, slightly bored, having my one doctor-approved glass of red, I decided it was finally time to respond to that would-be wine phisher.

And I didn’t just reply Wrong numba...

I looped in ChatGPT to hone my prompting skills.

What followed was a surreal blend of luxury wine logistics, quantum investing, poetic metaphors, and escalating absurdity, all documented here, screen by screen. I call this: Front Stage. Everything Eliza saw.

Note: No names were changed, because none of them were real to begin with.

Whitepaper: Adobe Said No, So I Symlinked Anyway

When Adobe Decides Your Startup Drive Is Its Playground
Sometimes it’s not the crash that breaks you; it’s the slow, invisible clog you didn’t see coming.