"How to keep going"

This is a video from the perspective of
a) an artist / a creative person making a living from that work
b) someone who thinks things aren't getting any better (and probably are getting worse)

I dont necessarily share these perspectives, yet I found the video had some very helpful advice. A lot of which (but not all) I relate to, and agree with. When he uses the word 'Art', I substitute 'Life'. Works mostly...

Most important, he made me think, and rethink things a bit, quite a bit at times.

Re Creativity:
I see creativity as being relevant to business, of all kinds; to relationships (of all kinds) -- creativity is really the business of life. Artists forget this, and think it just belongs to them. Keep that in mind when watching the video.

It's a long video, by my standards anyways -- so, below the video, I include notes I made re highlights

• 1:00 'if the CIA did Haiku...' Black-out poems -- I enjoyed this work
• 5:40 Groundhog Day: "What would you do if you were stuck in one place, and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?" 'How you answer this question is your art' (as suggested above, substitute 'life' for 'art').
• 9:17 "Forget about being a writer, follow the impulse to write" [Ann Packer]
• 10:40 'we're trained to heap praise on our loved ones in market terminology. We used to have hobbies, now they're called side-hustles.' Touches on the dangers of turning what you love into a career.
• 11:30 leads nicely into inspirational robot drawings by five-year-olds :-)
• 14:06 'she thought "the uncommon" was a better phrase than "art"' -- nice example of an artist getting us to look at the 'common' as if with eyes that haven't seen it before.
• 17:45 'you are allowed change your mind'
• 19:38 'when in doubt, tidy up' (but not otherwise!)
• 22:16 looking closer at slogans, e.g. "make your mark on the world!" [I think this from Steve Jobs, but not 100% clear from video]. This especially interesting to me -- there's a lot of what I consider BS being traded on the internet as wisdom, and being simply taken for granted by a huge number of people out there. (FWIW I find the conclusion here a little weak.)
• 23:00 'Demons hate fresh air' -- walking, getting out there, as opposed to being 'plugged-in'. Might seem a little twee, but true in my experience.

via incredible doom email-newsletter

So, what's going on with Java?
Updated Java and got shown this page:

Oracle Java SE 8 Release Updates

Public updates for Oracle Java SE 8 will remain available for individual, personal use through at least the end of 2020.

Public updates for Oracle Java SE 8 released after January 2019 will not be available for business, commercial or production use without a commercial license.

If you are a CONSUMER using Java for individual, personal use, you will continue to have the same access to Oracle Java SE 8 updates as you do today through at least the end of 2020. In most instances, the Java-based applications you run are licensed separately by a company other than Oracle (for example, games you play on your PC are likely developed by a gaming company). These applications may run on the Java platform and be dependent on Oracle Java SE 8 updates beyond 2020. Accordingly, Oracle recommends you contact your application provider for details on how they plan to continue to provide application support to you.

If you are a DEVELOPER, Oracle recommends you review the roadmap information for Java SE 8 and beyond and take appropriate action depending on the type of application you develop and your distribution model.

I did a search but didnt find anything relevant.

(I am pretty ignorant of Java, what it does, why I even need it: I did uninstall it for a while a couple of years ago or so, but eventually reinstalled it because it was required for some software I was using. Cant even remember which software it was :-[  I really have to start keeping a computer diary)

EDIT//
Bad news:
Google has disabled Picasa's ability to upload / download / sync photos to google photo.

The Picasa Desktop application will no longer support uploading or downloading photos and videos, creating online albums, or deleting online photos, videos and albums...
If you want to upload photos and videos to Google Photos, you can use Backup and Sync at photos.google.com/apps.

https://productforums.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!topic/picasa/brvRowxSDcM
//EDIT

Sharing scanned photos:
from Picasa to google Photo (& back again) and related stories...

Goal:
to upload / share a large collection of scanned (family) photos, ideally allowing others to comment;
also to be able to share subsets of same images, (ideally via albums created in picasa)

Uploaded 1500 family photos to google Photo (henceforth 'gphoto') over the last couple of months. It's been a challenge, to say the least, and not at all as successful as I would have hoped. But the photos are up, and shared, so I'm happy to have gotten that far.

Here some info about the problems, in the hope that it will help anyone else trying to do something similar.

Google photo will only sort photos by the date the picture was taken.
This is logical for photos, but not so much for scans -- even if you are super-organised it's difficult to get the correct sequence before scanning.
Summary of solution:
make date-time the same for relevant photos; sort by name; re-upload -- there are very important details below: read on if you're going to do this.

I went to a lot of effort (to be described below: with the help of dc user Lintalist) to manually sort the scans locally using my filemanager, and rename them according to a correct timeline. You upload your images to gphoto and they are only sorted by date, so you need a workaround. You can manually move an image in gphotos, but it is not a particularly user friendly process, and not really feasible for hundreds of pics anyway.
The workaround is to change the date field to the same date-time on all relevant files:

• in Picasa:
  First turn off the sync button for the album in Picasa.
  Then select all images in the relevant album or folder that you want to sort by name in gphoto. If focus is in the album or folder, Ctrl+A will do the job.
  menu: Tools > Adjust date and time -- add your new date, and select "Set all photos to the same date and time"
• in google Photo:
  select your images - in the top right corner click the three dots menu: >Edit date and time

Unfortunately, if your pics are already uploaded, they will not resort in gphoto (way to go google):
Then you will have to delete the images online (ensure the sync button is set to 'off' for the album in Picasa first) -- I deleted the online album too (there may be a workaround for this, but if you dont delete the album, and turn on sync for the album in Picasa -- the photos are also removed from the album in Picasa -- the pics were not deleted locally, but I would be very careful here in case: !!backups!! ).
=>
The Picasa album remembers the older date sort, and may default to it, so make sure the album is sorted by name before you turn sync on.
menu: Album/Folder > Sort by name
Then, when you do sync, they will sort by name on gphoto.

To be continued with the topics:

• showing related info (metadata) in the online image (description / caption field)
• face recognition not recognised in gphoto (but album can be downloaded to a local Picasa to read this info - mostly works...)
• manually sorting and renaming photos
• recovering info added in the info panel in google photo (i.e. info added online: this is not synced back to Picasa) [ => see following post ]