Putting the ‘I’ in ‘merchandise’
Personally, I think my favorite is just the plain black type on white — which
means you could just as easily put it on a shirt or bumpersticker yourself and
save the royalties. But do remember, your fifty cents enables a weasel to
buy a can of store brand kidney beans!
January 9, 2013 — 3:29 pm
Comments: 9
So, this is legit. I guess.
There’s a bit of a mystery and a bit of a buzz here — Adobe appears to have released the entire CS2 version of its Creative Suite, legal serial numbers and everything, for free. That’s Acrobat 3D 1.0, Acrobat Standard 7.0, Acrobat Pro 8.0, Audition 3.0, GoLive CS2, Illustrator CS2, InCopy CS2, InDesign CS2, Photoshop CS2, Photoshop Elements 4.0/5.0 and Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0. Either all together in a big, fat suite, or à la carte. Nobody is sure why.
Each of those programs alone was hundreds of dollars new. The catch is, “new” was 2005. While this may cause problems for Mac users, not so much for Windows users. I know several people still using the CS version of Photoshop, so CS2 should be a doddle to run.
As y’all know, I’ve just expensively upgraded my Photoshop from CS3 to CS6 and, while there are lots of incremental tweaks and improvements, the difference is hardly dramatic. Before that, I had CS, and before that Photoshop 6. Frankly, the basic guts of the thing haven’t changed in…ever, really.
So I downloaded and installed the Illustrator and InDesign components this afternoon (two excellent bits of Adobe kit I’ve used in the past and couldn’t afford to buy for myself). They installed fine, accepted the serial numbers and appear to be running with no problems. I registered them to my official account as if they were legitimate, because as far as I’m concerned, they are…until Adobe tells me otherwise.
This could be a clever bit of marketing from Adobe. You know, get people hooked on an old version and hope to make a customer for life. But if that’s the case, why aren’t they advertising it at all? The download page is just sitting there, no promotional blurb, no index page, no link of the front…nothing. I have no idea who discovered it and started spreading the word.
This could be a stupid move on Adobe’s part, as these versions are probably good enough for most people. In which case, I’d expect them to recant real soon now.
Zo! If you’ve ever wanted Photoshop (or any other Creative Suite component) but gagged at the price, I’d scoot on over and grab this. Quick. Before they change their minds.
(Thanks to Don for the heads up).
Update InDesign and Illustrator seem to be working okay for me, Windows7 64-bit professional. Photoshop crashed thrice for Uncle B, running XP on a ThinkPad, so he’s uninstalling it. So. Word to the wise.
January 8, 2013 — 10:48 pm
Comments: 32
Are you ready for some ar-che-ology?
These days, the Thames is one of the cleanest urban rivers in the world. Once upon a time, though — and for hundreds and hundreds of years — it was London’s toilet, wastebasket and repository of unwanted dead hookers rolled into one. If you have the stomach to go looking, some of the junk thrown or lost down there is incredibly cool.
“Mudlarks” are people who traditionally combed through the shit on either side of the river looking for stuff worth having. Historically, it was neither nice nor lucrative. These days, mudlarks are armed with metal detectors, and it’s…well, actually, it’s still not nice and not often lucrative, but they find some unbelievable stuff.
To metal detect along the Thames, you need a license from the Port of London Authority. And to get that, you need the approval of the Museum of London. Which is excellent, because the museum does analysis on their finds and buys the very best specimens for display. There are only about fifty people with a license at the moment.
Okay, hang on to your retinas, I’m about to send you to the Mudlarks’ official site, or as I call it: The Worst Site on the Internet. I mean it. Not because it’s ungrammatical, scatological, politically incorrect, half missing and keeps pointing you to the awesome new site that doesn’t seem to exist. No, because MY EEEEEEEEEYESSSSSSSSS!
But it’s totally worth the risk of nausea, shortness of breath, incontinence and temporary color blindness, just to browse through what’s left of the pictures of all the cool things they’ve dug up.
Would I lie?
Update: oh, their new website is MUCH easier on the eyes! Thanks for the tip, Carl!
January 7, 2013 — 11:49 pm
Comments: 31
Bacon Eiffel Tower!
Yes! YESSS!!! I have made it through another week without blogging politics!!!
Oh, god <sobs into her hands>.
We’ll get through this. We’ll get through it together.
More people playing with their food here. Looks like a decent righty blog, if you fancy poking around. And you think you can read financial prognostication right now without popping a blood vessel.
Try to have a good weekend, everyone!
January 4, 2013 — 11:51 pm
Comments: 27
We’re winning ONE of the culture wars, anyway
With all the (perfectly justified) handwringing about the culture wars and how we’re decisively losing them, I’d like to point out one battlefield that right-libertarians have absolutely PWNED!!: computer games. Particularly first-person shooters.
Partly because geeks trend libertarian. Partly because you’re, you know, shooting stuff. Partly because these games tell stories, and dystopian, Road Warrior-type stories are a fun and obvious way to tell stories about, you know, shooting stuff.
Most games of this kind are, I reckon, 80/15/5 libertarian/conservative/sociopath. Varies, depending on the game and your own playing style.
In most of them, government is either useless or actively working against you (not necessarily counting the military in a military game). And while Black Mesa or Aperture Science have a shockingly lax attitude toward employee health and safety, nonetheless it looks like corporate labs are the only player up to inventing a portal gun. You’re the lone, heavily-armed, super-athletic Randian bad-ass that’s single-handedly going to save the frickin’ world (or the embers of it, anyway) whether it likes it or not. You are capital-I Individual.
Even cooperative games, you’re cooperating to throw pipe bombs at hordes of onrushing fast zombies.
Don’t underestimate this. Playing 8 or 20 or 300 hours worth of game is an incredibly vivid and personal experience, and an awful lot of kids are playing an awful lot of games. It’ll be hard to make a liberal out of anyone who grew up being Gordon Freeman, the one free man.
Curious? Sure you are! The mega games distributor Steam is having their annual holiday sale. Up to 80% off a lot of great games.
I think I’ve scooped up about ten games for under £20. Total.
January 3, 2013 — 11:09 pm
Comments: 36
Okay, then. How about this?
I tried to dabble a toe back into politics today, now that the holidays are pretty much past. Read a few headlines, browse a few articles.
No. No no no. No, sorry. No.
So, screw that noise. Let’s do something else. Again.
I give you — the largest coffee pot and coffee cup in the world. From Stanton, Iowa — “the White City” (I didn’t ask why it’s called that; it didn’t seem right). They are, of course, cleverly disguised water towers.
The pot is 36 feet high and 20 feet wide. It holds 640,000 cups or 40,000 gallons. The cup is 96 feet tall, holds 2,400,000 cups of coffee or 150,000 gallons.
In 2001, the cup tower was entered in the trade association’s national “Tank of the Year” competition and won first place. The makers of the cup, Phoenix Fabricators and Erectors, Inc., had entered the contest every year since the beginning — that’s fifteen years! — and this was their first win.
If I told you they were a Swedish coffee pot and cup, would that give the game away? Of course it would! Stanton, Iowa is the birthplace of Virginia Christine — but you know her as Mrs Olson!
So join me in hoping everyone in DC dies horribly in a fire and goes straight to hell!
January 2, 2013 — 10:47 pm
Comments: 22
Have you ever heard a chicken sigh?
Oof. Sorry. Got all jammed up today. So please enjoy this snapshot of my chickens.
It’s been raining for weeks here. Raining and windy. We’ve had floods and villages cut off and everything.
Rain means chickens don’t come out. “Mad as a wet hen” is a real thing. I tiptoe out in my silly rain hat, open the chicken house…and there they are, glowering back like the Four Chickens of the Apocalypse.
But today, it was sunny! And, oh – the time they had. They went places they aren’t supposed to go and ate things they aren’t supposed to eat (styrofoam, poisonous rhubarb leaves and bits of coal, mostly). It was chicken heaven.
It’s back to chicken apocalypse tomorrow.
— 12:04 am
Comments: 42
Good riddance.
That’s how it works, right? The New Year strangles the Old Year to death in a fit of psychotic rage?
I suppose I should be grateful. We’re doing fine, Chez Mustelid. But we’ve seen a lot of misery around us this year. And even though the prospects for the coming year aren’t exactly bright, I think I speak for all of us when I say, “fuck you, 2012!”
On a happier note, I finished the Portal franchise games, and yes…they were completely awesome right to the end. I was a little bummed, because Portal 2 includes a neat two-player game and I hasn’t got a gaming buddy.
So I went to YouTube, and sure enough, found an hilarious walkthrough (“an hilarious” – I insist). Now, you might think watching somebody else play a game would be a colossal bore, but you would be WRONG. These guys are funny, and it’s a relief not to have to solve the damn puzzles myself.
Even if you don’t like games, try watching the first installment and see if you don’t enjoy it. If you do, you’ll be pleased to know there are 16 more installments to go. (Yeah. They play the whole game through in 15-minute YouTubes). Make sure to HD and full-screen it for added enjoyment.
Now, it’s a vile, windy night, but we’re walking to a neighbor’s for a little light socialization, so y’all take care. Remember, the roads are brimming with drunks.
Happy New Year! We get to play with it first. (But Oceania got it before us. I hope he didn’t…get anything on it).
December 31, 2012 — 5:37 pm
Comments: 38
Technology’s here!
My copy of Photoshop CS6 arrived today. Yes, physical disk in the mail, if you please. For that kind of money, I want something made of atoms AND electrons. Why they chose to illustrate the box with an alopecia sufferer covered in Stridex acne pads, I have no idea.
This might be my last upgrade, depending on the direction Adobe goes.
To recap, for anyone interested, Adobe products have always been a bit expensive (but generally worth it). About ten years ago, they decided they wanted people to buy their products in whole suites, rather than individually. So they started giving individual packages eye watering prices.
So let’s say you’d pay $600 for Photoshop and $600 for Illustrator and $600 for Flash, but you’d only pay $1,500 for a suite that included those three products and three or four others. Great deal — provided you needed all that stuff and $1,500 wasn’t a whole shit-ton of scratch to you.
Then, a couple of years ago, they had a new idea. Instead of buying software, you could rent it. Yay! You’d pay a fee every month (currently $29 a month if you sign for a year), in return for which the software package (or suite of packages) on your computer was continuously updated as they improve the software. It’s called the Adobe Creative Cloud.
Does anybody like this? I don’t know. I sure don’t. I won’t have it.
Anyhow, they’ve made another change. Used to be, you could get the new software at the upgrade price for three versions. That is, if you had Adobe Shitmonkey1 you could buy Adobe Shitmonkey4 at the upgrade price. Now they’re saying they’ll make you make the jump every time. Every time. Honestly, there’s a new version every 18 months, and not a whole lot changes even in most major releases.
Adobe must be banking that thousands of sales to big fat corporate clients at ass-raping prices will make them more money than millions of sales to individual schmoes. I hope they’re wrong. Painfully wrong.
So. Upshot. I had until December 31 to upgrade my CS3 to CS6, after which I’d have to buy the full version at the full price. English prices are no joke (it’s the VAT, people!): upgrade £196 ($314), full version £608 ($973).
Ow.
Feel free to keep talking about video games, anyhow. That’s a lot more interesting than software upgrades. It’s the last weekend of 2012! Let’s get this evil fucker of a year over with, hm?
December 28, 2012 — 11:10 pm
Comments: 65
My weighted companion cube
Before I euthanized it, obviously.
Playing my way through Portal and Portal 2 for the first time this Christmas. I know, I know…they’re getting on for six and three years old, respectively. I was a huge fan of the HalfLife games, but I put off playing Portal — mostly because I knew it was a puzzle game, and puzzles enrage me. I’m bad at puzzles, but I think I should be good at them on account of I am a smarty pants.
It makes me sad when things demonstrate that I am stupid.
BUT, as it turns out, the puzzles in Portal are highly visual, so I’m really pretty good at them. Yay!
Two things I want to mention. First, computer graphics have developed to the point that a six year old game still looks spectacular. The three year old game looks better, but only just. So we don’t have to chase that technology so hard at the moment.
And second, I am blown away by the maturity of the story line. I don’t mean mature like PG-13 mature; I mean it’s funny, subtle, clever and unexpected. The dialogue is wonderful, the plot is complex. It is not by any means just a puzzle game — or a shoot-em-up, for that matter.
This is as engaging as any movie or novel.
I know, I know…a certain percent of my readership hates computer game posts, but I am loving this thing so much. And I am positively determined not to talk current events until the New Year.
December 27, 2012 — 11:50 pm
Comments: 30