It's a shame "make the editor stop being a piece of shit that gets in your way all the time when you're trying to work, and occasionally corrupts your source files" never seems to be in their plans for the future. I gave up hope after they went out to various animation studios, asking for input on the UI, claiming that 8 would be 'focused on the animators again' - and when it came out, the editor's workflow was broken in EXACTLY the same way as 6 and 7 were. Yeah, you can put a blur on stuff now, whoopty-fucking-doo, it still takes about 4x as many mouse clicks and 10x as long (due to waiting for those extra clicks to register, and swearing when things go wrong) to do a simple piece of lipsynch as it did in 5.
I keep ending up with work that needs to be delivered as source files for this piece of this, too. Can't get away from it.
Is highbrow merely a synonym for "pretentious and boring"? I can't find it in me to cry about "pretentious and boring" not being well represented in gaming.
So you've never played anything from Square, then.
I'm not a little girl; I'm tall and long and thin, with hands to match. The DualShock has a lot of area for the fingers that're only being used to grip it to rest; the Gamecube controller felt tiny to me because it had such short 'horns', IIRC.
My all-time favorite game controller is probably the big ol' Wico bat-handle sticks I had on my VCS and C64. But you need more buttons than that nowadays...
I only ever had a half-dozen or so DVDs. Not enough to bother investing in a device whose sole purpose is to play them!
I think my PS2 was what I used for DVD watching. I don't have enough to bother spending money on a stand-alone DVD player.
And the controller was one of the best, IMHO. The N64 had this weird thing that looked more like a spaceship than a controller, the Dreamcast had those huge, chunky, closed-off things that my long-fingered hands never really fit around (especially since I'm a girl, and have fingernails). The XBox had a Dreamcast-duplicate controller (and no exclusives I wanted enough to overcome the 'Ew, Microsoft' reaction, so I never actually got one); the Gamecube's controller was small, and oddly asymmetrical.
If a game was on multiple platforms, I'd get it on the PS2, because I knew that the other systems were more likely to make my hands hurt. Eventually I got converter boxes to let me use my Dual Shocks on the Gamecube and the Dreamcast.
In the case of this video gamer, the Dual Shock did make a difference. My dollars voted for PS2 versions of games.
I just spent a week and a half comparing a dozen various CMSs for a web comic I'm starting. I have my geek moments too!
I think most people going through the kinds changes I am have certain parallels. There's a handful of stories we fit ourselves to; so far mine's been a happy ending.
I'm a professional artist. I just carry around a sketchbook, and have a handful of pencils and pens rattling around in the bottom of my purse or in a pencil case.
It's US$30 if you really splurge on a sketchbook, usually more like $12-$15 for a perfectly functional Canson black-cover book. Anywhere from $5 for an interesting pen down to $1 for a twelve-pack of Ticonderoga 2.5B pencils. You can go spend hundreds on a Fine Writing instrument, and I've enjoyed and cherished $80 fountain pens myself, but it's far from necessary.
Add in an eighty-dollar Canon LiDE scanner at home, a few Photoshop macros I've made for cleaning up the scans based on what medium I used (nothing smart, just a pile of ones with names like 'sketchbook pencil', 'sketchbook mech pencil', 'sketchbook pen'), and a bookmark for the management page of my website's gallery.
Sure, new pencils and pens and sketchbooks add up over time. But even at my most prolific, I'll completely fill a book in about two months at most (one month if I only draw on one side of the leaves). No upgrading, no glare issues, no worrying about losing the stylus.
I can't play movies or browse the web with a sketchbook, but hell, if I'm doing that, I'm not drawing, am I?
If I go on an extended trip and draw a lot, then I have a larger sketchbook dump than usual when I get back. Checking my mail can wait until I'm home, too.
If it's running on top of Linux boxes instead of Windows, that's one less Windows license they had to buy. Multiply it by however many machines they have, and you might be talking real money - enough to pay a staff coder or two to keep WINE working.
Also I'm not sure, but I think their custom ink-and-paint system runs on Linux. So you might well have a situation where people have that on their secondary desk*, and sometimes need to use Photoshop. Dual-booting is a pain in the ass.
*the primary desk of course being an animator's desk, with an animation disc and cubbies for lots of paper - people have experimented with paperless animation, but sometimes you just need to grab a crayon or something and scrawl out super-crude roughs!
Try opening a savings account. Also try considering the luxuries you do have, which ones you really enjoy, and spending more money on them.
Have you considered a vacation?
"sometimes it's hard to stay focused for more than 5 or 6 hours at a time."
Yes, this is why we have lunch hours, and why crunch time mostly just results in frazzled developers and probably less actual work done, once you factor in fixing your mistakes.
I'm not a programmer - I'm an illustrator and animator. I work in a fairly technical fashion, and I've had issues in the past with my attention span. Know what's done the most to increase my attention span for stuff I really don't care to work on that much?
Estrogen.
Seriously.
I'm somewhere in the middle of a male-to-female gender transition. When I was a boy, I simply could not make myself focus on something I didn't want to. All kinds of distractions presented themselves, constantly. Now that I'm on the other side of things, with a brain floating on estrogen, I have a lot more ability to just make myself shrug and work on something that's bringing in bills, and then guiltlessly go work on something for myself once that's done. And stuff gets done on time when the deadline and/or my estimate is sane. When something goes wrong like a file corruption, instead of flying off in a storm of annoyance, I can calmly assess the damage and recover what I can.
And when I forget to order more in time, or when my supply's interrupted by customs siezing a shipment of hormones or whatever, it becomes a lot harder to focus.
Now, I'm not saying you should dose yourself up on estrogen! But... chemicals can have a powerful effect.
Oh yeah, and caffeine never helps me. When I try to use caffeine to stay up and work longer I just end up tired for longer 'cause I can't go to sleep.
Mostly, though, in your case? Examine this urge to work more. You're working twenty hours a week and making more than you need. Invest, help out your friends, have some fun. If you want to work more, start playing around with personal projects. Nothing huge and ambitious, just stuff you want to make. Tools that scratch your itches. Games you think are fun to play. Maybe not even code - ever wanted to be a painter, a potter, a musician, a writer? Buy the tools you want. Buy the tools your previous line of work didn't pay you enough to afford. And use the time you have for yourself, not as a contractor.
You're not gonna lie on your deathbed saying "Man, I wish I'd spent more time being a consultant and enhancing b2b synergenizitation of widgets".
I used to have a half-dozen consoles on a small shelf unit next to my TV. The shelves were from Ikea, though a different line. Then I moved a couple times.
I found it easier to just sell the damn things, in the long run, They took up space, the cables were an eyesore no matter what I did, I got tired of swapping the inputs on my switcher... and I realized I was tired of most of the games I had, with little desire to get new ones.
1. image->adjustments->posterize 2. filter->stylize->find edges 3. image->adjustments->desaturate 4. image->adjustments->levels, pull the leftmost triangle all the way to the right
You can skip the first step, but then it'll be reeeeally complex.
You might also want to scale your images up a lot before processing them.
Or you could use autotrace tools like Streamline, or the "LiveTrace" feature built into Illustrator.
Or you could pop up another layer over it and trace the image by hand, then turn off the original image layer and print it out.
Or, yeah, you could just go buy some coloring books, they're reeeeeeally cheap!
I haven't played with Inkscape (I probably will once I finish my current project, this release looks interesting), but the usual way to do this in Illustrator is a "blend" - you draw your inner shape, then draw your outer shape, then select them both and do object->blend->make, which causes the program to interpolate between them. Every vector package I've played with has blends (except for Flash, which goes to great lengths to completely disguise its vectorness) - I'd hope Inkscape has them as well.
Or you could do a bitmap blur in AI. I know AI offers a couple bitmap effects that it claims are SVG-related, so Inkscape might have these too.
A touchscreen is going to cause a lot of arm stress in the long run!
I recommend one of the two smaller sizes of Wacom tablet. Avoid the Graphire line nowadays unless you can find a used G2; if the current drivers detect a G3, they will not let you have different button mappings on a per-program basis. As long as you don't lose the pen, these suckers will last for years - I'm still using a Graphire2 I bought five or six years ago. The only thing a mouse is superior for is FPSs, and I've never cared for that genre.
Learning to draw with your arm, rather than your wrist, will also reduce the RSIness. We're just not built for lots and lots of little movements of the wrist, and yet our computer interfaces really encourage this.
I ditched my mouse years ago (I was starting to feel advance twinges of RSI in my clicking finger) and use a smallish Wacom for everything. Including filesystem navigation. Works great.
This is what Snapzilla is for. Or an image gallery on http://pics.livejournal.com/shatterstripes/gallery /00006bp6>Livejournal or Blogger or whatever you prefer, or on your own website. Fickr is for photographs, not general image hosting. Screenshots of a video game are not photos - if they were, we'd call them that.
New Orleans. Oh, yeah! Lets design and build a city with an ocean on one side and a lake on the other and - heres the clincher - well make it below sea level! Yeah, baby! Party on! Enough said.
Um, yeah. The core of New Orleans is marginally above sea level, if I recall correctly. The city started on some of the last decent ground around the mouth of the Mississippi; its a logical place to put a port - you want to minimize how much navigation ocean-going ships have to do in the tight, shallow confines of a river, and you want to not have it out in the deltas swamps.
Now, expanding to the size it grew to was a problem. So was keeping the river from wandering across the delta and dumping soil here and there - that land would have buffered Katrina. So was underfunding the levees. Those last two are arguably engineering mistakes; perhaps bureaucratic mistakes are more to the point.
(I'm from New Orleans - I grew up in a home that was actually about one foot above sea level.)
Prettyish terrain. Got no idea how appealing the characters might be, and that's what's important - WoW has these kinda-cartoony characters. (The gallery didn't work on Safari; I got the bg image overlapping the links and images and everything!)
Oh yeah, Mac client on launch might be part of why WoW did well too. Every single Mac gamer could get in on the ground floor with their friends instead of coming after their friends had already burned through it all.
I don't play MMORPGs except for the occasional dip into SL. Most of my friends are aware of MMORPGs, maybe half of them played them before WoW.
I think nowadays pretty much everyone I know who plays these things is on WoW and/or SL. People fool with other games, but it's these two that they keep mentioning regularly....that, or Endless Forest.
It's like looking at a fantasy painting. A storybook illustration. All pretty and soft and pastel. Every other MMORPG screenshot I've seen is harsh and gritty and unappealing compared to the smooth pretty of WOW.
And it also got big enough that it has the social network effect. Wanna try one of these MMORPGs you keep hearing about? You probably want to play one your friends are on! They'll help you out and you can play with them.
*shrug* The capsule description in this story immediately put me in mind of 'Masquerade' and the dozen or so other treasure-hunt books that followed. I'm sure Perplex City is a fine example of this kind of narrative experiment, but like all the other ones I've heard of, and like 'Masquerade' and its ilk, I just look at them with faint bemusement and go back to storytelling modes whose entire story is there in one place, and doesn't require me to solve acrostics and crunch numbers and suchlike to get the next nugget of narrative. Adding in a collectible card wrinkle is a nice financial touch, too.
I do wonder how large the audience for this form of narrative is; my brief glimpses at things like the tru7h behind iLoveBees suggests that they attract a dedicated community, who loves solving it, and leaves behind a record that's pretty impenetrable to a casual passer-by. I'm not sure I could go try and read the ARG promoting AI if I wanted to, now - how many of the sites it was in are still around>
(Disclaimer: I have not looked at Perplex City. I've seen it mentioned on BoingBoing a couple of times. I've lost enough time to my own shared narratives lately without poking at someone else's.)
Why, it's Masquerade, the collectible card game! There were about a dozen of these treasure-hunt puzzle books back in the eighties. Now they're just coming in different media.
Also heavy re-use in Flash makes for shitty cartoons. By the time you polish up re-used assets you might as well just have animated it for real. This is experience speaking - I worked in the US animation industry during the period when "Flash was going to save us all and let us do all kinds of wonderful work and have more domestic jobs for animation!". A season after it trickled up to TV production, there were Flash shops in India most everything got shipped out to.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a shame "make the editor stop being a piece of shit that gets in your way all the time when you're trying to work, and occasionally corrupts your source files" never seems to be in their plans for the future. I gave up hope after they went out to various animation studios, asking for input on the UI, claiming that 8 would be 'focused on the animators again' - and when it came out, the editor's workflow was broken in EXACTLY the same way as 6 and 7 were. Yeah, you can put a blur on stuff now, whoopty-fucking-doo, it still takes about 4x as many mouse clicks and 10x as long (due to waiting for those extra clicks to register, and swearing when things go wrong) to do a simple piece of lipsynch as it did in 5.
I keep ending up with work that needs to be delivered as source files for this piece of this, too. Can't get away from it.
So you've never played anything from Square, then.
I'm not a little girl; I'm tall and long and thin, with hands to match. The DualShock has a lot of area for the fingers that're only being used to grip it to rest; the Gamecube controller felt tiny to me because it had such short 'horns', IIRC.
My all-time favorite game controller is probably the big ol' Wico bat-handle sticks I had on my VCS and C64. But you need more buttons than that nowadays...
I only ever had a half-dozen or so DVDs. Not enough to bother investing in a device whose sole purpose is to play them!
I think my PS2 was what I used for DVD watching. I don't have enough to bother spending money on a stand-alone DVD player.
And the controller was one of the best, IMHO. The N64 had this weird thing that looked more like a spaceship than a controller, the Dreamcast had those huge, chunky, closed-off things that my long-fingered hands never really fit around (especially since I'm a girl, and have fingernails). The XBox had a Dreamcast-duplicate controller (and no exclusives I wanted enough to overcome the 'Ew, Microsoft' reaction, so I never actually got one); the Gamecube's controller was small, and oddly asymmetrical.
If a game was on multiple platforms, I'd get it on the PS2, because I knew that the other systems were more likely to make my hands hurt. Eventually I got converter boxes to let me use my Dual Shocks on the Gamecube and the Dreamcast.
In the case of this video gamer, the Dual Shock did make a difference. My dollars voted for PS2 versions of games.
Breaking games news: Some guy on About.com thinks Nintendo is really cool.
Breaking games news: Some guy on About.com has the scoop on how Super Mario 2 .
Breaking games news: Some guy on About.com thinks the Wii's controller is really cool.
I just spent a week and a half comparing a dozen various CMSs for a web comic I'm starting. I have my geek moments too!
I think most people going through the kinds changes I am have certain parallels. There's a handful of stories we fit ourselves to; so far mine's been a happy ending.
I'm a professional artist. I just carry around a sketchbook, and have a handful of pencils and pens rattling around in the bottom of my purse or in a pencil case.
It's US$30 if you really splurge on a sketchbook, usually more like $12-$15 for a perfectly functional Canson black-cover book. Anywhere from $5 for an interesting pen down to $1 for a twelve-pack of Ticonderoga 2.5B pencils. You can go spend hundreds on a Fine Writing instrument, and I've enjoyed and cherished $80 fountain pens myself, but it's far from necessary.
Add in an eighty-dollar Canon LiDE scanner at home, a few Photoshop macros I've made for cleaning up the scans based on what medium I used (nothing smart, just a pile of ones with names like 'sketchbook pencil', 'sketchbook mech pencil', 'sketchbook pen'), and a bookmark for the management page of my website's gallery.
Sure, new pencils and pens and sketchbooks add up over time. But even at my most prolific, I'll completely fill a book in about two months at most (one month if I only draw on one side of the leaves). No upgrading, no glare issues, no worrying about losing the stylus.
I can't play movies or browse the web with a sketchbook, but hell, if I'm doing that, I'm not drawing, am I?
If I go on an extended trip and draw a lot, then I have a larger sketchbook dump than usual when I get back. Checking my mail can wait until I'm home, too.
If it's running on top of Linux boxes instead of Windows, that's one less Windows license they had to buy. Multiply it by however many machines they have, and you might be talking real money - enough to pay a staff coder or two to keep WINE working.
Also I'm not sure, but I think their custom ink-and-paint system runs on Linux. So you might well have a situation where people have that on their secondary desk*, and sometimes need to use Photoshop. Dual-booting is a pain in the ass.
*the primary desk of course being an animator's desk, with an animation disc and cubbies for lots of paper - people have experimented with paperless animation, but sometimes you just need to grab a crayon or something and scrawl out super-crude roughs!
"I'm making more money than I need."
Try opening a savings account. Also try considering the luxuries you do have, which ones you really enjoy, and spending more money on them.
Have you considered a vacation?
"sometimes it's hard to stay focused for more than 5 or 6 hours at a time."
Yes, this is why we have lunch hours, and why crunch time mostly just results in frazzled developers and probably less actual work done, once you factor in fixing your mistakes.
I'm not a programmer - I'm an illustrator and animator. I work in a fairly technical fashion, and I've had issues in the past with my attention span. Know what's done the most to increase my attention span for stuff I really don't care to work on that much?
Estrogen.
Seriously.
I'm somewhere in the middle of a male-to-female gender transition. When I was a boy, I simply could not make myself focus on something I didn't want to. All kinds of distractions presented themselves, constantly. Now that I'm on the other side of things, with a brain floating on estrogen, I have a lot more ability to just make myself shrug and work on something that's bringing in bills, and then guiltlessly go work on something for myself once that's done. And stuff gets done on time when the deadline and/or my estimate is sane. When something goes wrong like a file corruption, instead of flying off in a storm of annoyance, I can calmly assess the damage and recover what I can.
And when I forget to order more in time, or when my supply's interrupted by customs siezing a shipment of hormones or whatever, it becomes a lot harder to focus.
Now, I'm not saying you should dose yourself up on estrogen! But... chemicals can have a powerful effect.
Oh yeah, and caffeine never helps me. When I try to use caffeine to stay up and work longer I just end up tired for longer 'cause I can't go to sleep.
Mostly, though, in your case? Examine this urge to work more. You're working twenty hours a week and making more than you need. Invest, help out your friends, have some fun. If you want to work more, start playing around with personal projects. Nothing huge and ambitious, just stuff you want to make. Tools that scratch your itches. Games you think are fun to play. Maybe not even code - ever wanted to be a painter, a potter, a musician, a writer? Buy the tools you want. Buy the tools your previous line of work didn't pay you enough to afford. And use the time you have for yourself, not as a contractor.
You're not gonna lie on your deathbed saying "Man, I wish I'd spent more time being a consultant and enhancing b2b synergenizitation of widgets".
I used to have a half-dozen consoles on a small shelf unit next to my TV. The shelves were from Ikea, though a different line. Then I moved a couple times.
I found it easier to just sell the damn things, in the long run, They took up space, the cables were an eyesore no matter what I did, I got tired of swapping the inputs on my switcher... and I realized I was tired of most of the games I had, with little desire to get new ones.
You're off by an order of magnitude; Photoshop's list price is $650. You're also not done!
It's called Photoshop.
1. image->adjustments->posterize
2. filter->stylize->find edges
3. image->adjustments->desaturate
4. image->adjustments->levels, pull the leftmost triangle all the way to the right
You can skip the first step, but then it'll be reeeeally complex.
You might also want to scale your images up a lot before processing them.
Or you could use autotrace tools like Streamline, or the "LiveTrace" feature built into Illustrator.
Or you could pop up another layer over it and trace the image by hand, then turn off the original image layer and print it out.
Or, yeah, you could just go buy some coloring books, they're reeeeeeally cheap!
Hell, I saw someone walking around that con with a RL version of that business' product.
I haven't played with Inkscape (I probably will once I finish my current project, this release looks interesting), but the usual way to do this in Illustrator is a "blend" - you draw your inner shape, then draw your outer shape, then select them both and do object->blend->make, which causes the program to interpolate between them. Every vector package I've played with has blends (except for Flash, which goes to great lengths to completely disguise its vectorness) - I'd hope Inkscape has them as well.
Or you could do a bitmap blur in AI. I know AI offers a couple bitmap effects that it claims are SVG-related, so Inkscape might have these too.
A touchscreen is going to cause a lot of arm stress in the long run!
I recommend one of the two smaller sizes of Wacom tablet. Avoid the Graphire line nowadays unless you can find a used G2; if the current drivers detect a G3, they will not let you have different button mappings on a per-program basis. As long as you don't lose the pen, these suckers will last for years - I'm still using a Graphire2 I bought five or six years ago. The only thing a mouse is superior for is FPSs, and I've never cared for that genre.
Learning to draw with your arm, rather than your wrist, will also reduce the RSIness. We're just not built for lots and lots of little movements of the wrist, and yet our computer interfaces really encourage this.
I ditched my mouse years ago (I was starting to feel advance twinges of RSI in my clicking finger) and use a smallish Wacom for everything. Including filesystem navigation. Works great.
This is what Snapzilla is for. Or an image gallery on http://pics.livejournal.com/shatterstripes/gallery /00006bp6>Livejournal or Blogger or whatever you prefer, or on your own website. Fickr is for photographs, not general image hosting. Screenshots of a video game are not photos - if they were, we'd call them that.
Um, yeah. The core of New Orleans is marginally above sea level, if I recall correctly. The city started on some of the last decent ground around the mouth of the Mississippi; its a logical place to put a port - you want to minimize how much navigation ocean-going ships have to do in the tight, shallow confines of a river, and you want to not have it out in the deltas swamps.
Now, expanding to the size it grew to was a problem. So was keeping the river from wandering across the delta and dumping soil here and there - that land would have buffered Katrina. So was underfunding the levees. Those last two are arguably engineering mistakes; perhaps bureaucratic mistakes are more to the point.
(I'm from New Orleans - I grew up in a home that was actually about one foot above sea level.)
One of them could grow into alien life we made ourselves.
Prettyish terrain. Got no idea how appealing the characters might be, and that's what's important - WoW has these kinda-cartoony characters. (The gallery didn't work on Safari; I got the bg image overlapping the links and images and everything!)
Oh yeah, Mac client on launch might be part of why WoW did well too. Every single Mac gamer could get in on the ground floor with their friends instead of coming after their friends had already burned through it all.
I don't play MMORPGs except for the occasional dip into SL. Most of my friends are aware of MMORPGs, maybe half of them played them before WoW.
...that, or Endless Forest.
I think nowadays pretty much everyone I know who plays these things is on WoW and/or SL. People fool with other games, but it's these two that they keep mentioning regularly.
It's like looking at a fantasy painting. A storybook illustration. All pretty and soft and pastel. Every other MMORPG screenshot I've seen is harsh and gritty and unappealing compared to the smooth pretty of WOW.
And it also got big enough that it has the social network effect. Wanna try one of these MMORPGs you keep hearing about? You probably want to play one your friends are on! They'll help you out and you can play with them.
*shrug* The capsule description in this story immediately put me in mind of 'Masquerade' and the dozen or so other treasure-hunt books that followed. I'm sure Perplex City is a fine example of this kind of narrative experiment, but like all the other ones I've heard of, and like 'Masquerade' and its ilk, I just look at them with faint bemusement and go back to storytelling modes whose entire story is there in one place, and doesn't require me to solve acrostics and crunch numbers and suchlike to get the next nugget of narrative. Adding in a collectible card wrinkle is a nice financial touch, too.
I do wonder how large the audience for this form of narrative is; my brief glimpses at things like the tru7h behind iLoveBees suggests that they attract a dedicated community, who loves solving it, and leaves behind a record that's pretty impenetrable to a casual passer-by. I'm not sure I could go try and read the ARG promoting AI if I wanted to, now - how many of the sites it was in are still around>
(Disclaimer: I have not looked at Perplex City. I've seen it mentioned on BoingBoing a couple of times. I've lost enough time to my own shared narratives lately without poking at someone else's.)
Perplex City has a treasure and prize at the end?
Why, it's Masquerade, the collectible card game! There were about a dozen of these treasure-hunt puzzle books back in the eighties. Now they're just coming in different media.
Also, I call slashvertisement on this post.
Mickey wasn't ever all that funny to begin with.
Also heavy re-use in Flash makes for shitty cartoons. By the time you polish up re-used assets you might as well just have animated it for real. This is experience speaking - I worked in the US animation industry during the period when "Flash was going to save us all and let us do all kinds of wonderful work and have more domestic jobs for animation!". A season after it trickled up to TV production, there were Flash shops in India most everything got shipped out to.