Amid all the voices shouting just what the president wanted to hear, why couldn’t someone have stood toe to toe with him, and said this?
Mr. President… don’t do it. You’re considering authorizing a massive commitment of troops and throwing in our lot with torturers and panderers. Leaders without principle and soldiers without conviction with no clear mission, and no end in sight.
- The war at home
There’s a lot of multi-fandom apocalypse!fic going around lately, which it seems I’m going to have to add to the list of things that I Like But Are Bad For Me. ‘Cause it’s not like I don’t get depressed at the drop of a hat *anyway* - it seems I should really stay away from fic that’s gonna give me the mopes in spades.
My department needs a FAQ for all the graphics questions the customers don’t actually *ask*, but assume they should be helped with anyway. A FAQ for everyone who wouldn’t read it, seeing as they don’t read the painfully obvious file guidelines and upload instructions that we have up there already
It should be noted that this FAQ doesn’t actually exist. We’re not going to add yet another block of verbiage on the company site that the customers will invariably ignore. This is just me grouching off.
I uploaded a ZIP/SIT file. Why can’t you use it?
Nice answer: The file within the archive still must be of a type that we accept. For example, a zipped Microsoft Word file will upload succussfully, but we will be unable to do anything with it upon arrival.
My answer: Sorry, you are not so special that the rules we have in place for everyone else will be waived just for you. As soon as I see the extension .doc or .rtf or .wpd or ANYTHING ELSE that resembles a word processing file, I toss the whole thing into the bit bucket. You can either email it to me as good old fashioned plain text, or print and fax it over. In spite of what the spiked kool aid is telling you, MS Word does not produce graphics files.
Can you take my logo from my website?
Nice answer: Web graphics are good for on screen display, and often print tolerably from home printers, but will not print acceptably from a professional press. Unless you also have a high resolution version of your logo/graphic on your website for download, you will need to upload a print quality graphic to us.
My answer: What am I - your trained monkey? I’m not hunting through your site hoping to find the correct unusable image. The web is not print, and print is not the web. Not that you’ll have any idea what I’m talking about here. No - your cheap ass web graphic looks bad *now* and will only look worse if we sent it to press. That is, if it ever got on press, since I’m certain that the pressmen would look at it and fall down laughing.
I sent a TIF/EPS/etc… file - why you can’t you use it?
Nice answer: Regardless of file type, the graphic still has to be of the correct resolution and quality. We cannot take low resolution images or poor quality scans “as is” although we may be able to clean them up to an acceptable standard for an additional charge.
My answer: You moron. Saving that logo from your website in a spiffy new format does not change the fact that is is still a web graphic. Please reboot your brain.
I’m using MS Publisher/Photo Impact/MS Word/PowerPoint/etc… Can you help me export the correct file?
Nice answer: We do not offer tech support for software. The only software that we can “walk you through” for basic problems are the following titles:
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Illustrator
WinZip
Stuffit
My answer: Do I *look* like tech support?
If you had all the money in the world:
1) What would be the first three places you’d visit and why?
Ireland (and I’m actually going *there* in a month), London (or anywhere in the UK), California (because I was there for an entirely too brief time when I was younger and I want to see it Big Sur really is as beautiful as I remember it).
The foreign travel will surprise *no one* who has known me for a while.
2) What would be the first change you’d make in your own life?
Pay off all my buggering student loans.
3) What would be the first change you’d make in someone else’s life?
Pay off all of my brother and sister’s student loans. And clear out my mom’s debt (though I might have to get sneaky about that one. Is it possible to wire money into someone’s account with out their knowledge?) And then I’d attack Bill’s debts. (Mom would be practice for this one, ’cause I’d have to be *really* sneaky there.)
4) So you’ve decided to become a lifelong student - what sort of courses would you take?
What *wouldn’t* I take would be more apt.
Lit and media studies, for the fun of random bullshit.
PoliSci, ’cause I never did, and the way the world is going, it seems like a useful thing to know.
Art History, ’cause I actually like it. (As opposed to most of the actual art students I know, who loathed it. I was a communications major. Go fig.)
5) Where would you make your second home?
Branchville. I was born there and I firmly plan to retire and die there.
Blogging this now for future reference in case I ever have to deal with this particular PS quirk again.
The direct link for the discussion is over here, but seeing as message boards are ephermal, if you’re running Windows XP and PS decides it just doesn’t want to initalize, try this solution:
It seems that the ‘Preferences’ file can become ‘corrupted’ if you have more than one version of Photoshop running (and under other circumstances) and the solution is to delete the preferences file.
This can be achieved by holding down the ‘Ctl-Alt-Shift’ keys when starting PS CS and then replying ‘yes’ to the prompt.
Seems to work fine now except got to set up preferences again!
And in that vein, if you’ve installed fonts and Photoshop decides that it doesn’t want to acknowledge their existence, the solution’s over here. (Adobe’s support knowledgebase, so I have more faith in the permanance of the link.)
Yes, in spite of alreday reading Troy in 15 minutes. Or maybe because of it. Because I was depressed, and wanted to look at teh pretty. And there was quite enough of it to go ’round. I can ignore the plot through a blender treatment because hello? It’s a hollywood movie. When I get a hankering for a faithful adaption of anything I’ll go to PBS or A&E. Or maybe the history channel. But hollywood gives good pretty.
I’m adding Sean Bean to my list of sexy guys with really sexy voices.
Yes, I wish they hadn’t chickened out re: the great gay love that is Achillies and Patroclus, but really, was not expecting anything different. I don’t care how sexy and sensitive they re-wrote him to be, (I amy not be a huge Brad Pitt fan, but there was some serious sexy going on there.) he’ll always be my favorite psycho bisexual godspawn.
The women… aren’t actually *there* much, so not much to say, other than that they too, were much the pretty.
Installing Linux on a dead badger: users notes. It’s reads completely straight. Link credit goes to dad.
I’ve often had cause to be embarrassed about my country. America, the home of trailer park chic. Where we revere the myth of the founding fathers and preach the idea of the self made man, while teaching in every schoolyard and every boardroom the power of mob rule. Where we are loud, ignorant, arrogant, prideful, and xenophobic.
But until Abu Ghraib, I was never ashamed to be an american.
I have no words, no bile strong enough to condemn the soldiers who committed these acts. I have no punishment fitting for the commanders who ordered it, or their commanders who turned a blind eye, or *their* commanders who squinted long and hard at the Geneva conventions and decided that there was plenty of wiggle room here, and even if there wasn’t any room over there, well, it just meant that that part couldn’t possibly apply to *us*, now could it? We’re americans, we make the rules. Doesn’t mean we have to follow them.
I have no fitting words for anyone who would try to justify these actions. You never want to believe that someone who looks and sounds just like you could do something like this. Like a small child, you refuse to look at it, wiping it out from your own personal reality. And when there are no places left to look that are not crammed full with the images of ugly truth, well then - someone must’ve made ‘em do it! They *deserved* it, didn’t they? ‘Cause of those airplanes and those suicide bombers? ’cause they’re out to get us, an’ we gotta get them first!
It’s ugly, isn’t it? And now, it’s never going to end. They did to us, we did to them, and now they have to go and do to us again. And again. And again.
The last comfort some had was in the idea that even though the country was going to hell in a hand basket, even though our government was clinically insane, we could look at the next person, even some stranger who just happened to be passing by; and know there was an even chance that they were, at heart, a decent person.
No one wants to believe in that ugliness, believing opens the door for the awful question “If that person, who looks and talks just like me, could be party to these awful things, what does that say about me? Do I have that same ugliness buried inside me?”
Yes. You do. You feed it with every denial, every protest, every attempt to turn the blame or hide behind rules of procedure.