Just playing around a bit with a demo version of Sketchbook Pro…
It even seems to smudge like real pencil. But that was all done in the computer, using a Wacom pad. I’m getting a better feel for using that pad to sketch with. It still doesn’t feel quite right…I’m so use to the feel of real lead on paper…but I’m getting to the point now where I’m feeling comfortable enough doing this, that I want to settle on a good all around tool for it. Photoshop really isn’t it. At least, not for me. And the sense I get is that’s not what Photoshop wants to be. Photoshop doesn’t even try to emulate what real artist’s tools behave like on paper or canvas. It’s just a really powerful bitmap editor.
There’s a bunch of tools out there like Sketchbook Pro that try to emulate the tools. Coral Painter even goes so far as to emulate many different kinds of artist’s papers. So far I’m finding that they all have their good points, but they’re all missing something too. I love the way Coral Painter emulates charcoal on paper. But I’ve never been able to get it’s pencils or brushes to feel right on my Wacom tablet.
I’m downloading a trial version of Manga Studio next. It’s the only tool I’ve seen that lets you turn the "paper" this way and that as you draw on it (as opposed to actually rotating the image On the paper). It also allows you to create perspective grid layers you can adjust the horizon line and vanishing point(s) on. Manga Studio also lets you convert bitmap layers to vector layers…which makes resizing line artwork much, Much cleaner.
But I really like the way Sketchbook Pro lets you select and adjust the tools you’re using with tablet pen gestures. It’s quick, and less concentration breaking. There’s a floating tool for resizing your brush/point that’s perfect. It works like you’re dipping your brush or pen or pencil point into a well and then dragging the point in or out to whatever size you want. It’s a snap to do while you’re busy drawing. I wish they all had that.
One of my co-workers, who is also a cartoonist, is involved in an open source artist’s tool project, Inkscape. It’s a vector based drawing tool along the lines of Adobe Illustrator, and it looks really nice. Alas, as of now it’s still lacking Mac tablet support. But if you’re using Linux it’s worth a look.
Note: I changed the IP address below...obviously...
From: <pannunzio@ucdavis.edu>
To: <bruce@brucegarrett.com>
Subject: Funny postcard
Good day.
Your Father has sent you Funny postcard from deepestfeelings.com.
Click on your card's direct www address below:
http:/127.0.0.1/
Copyright (c) 1992-2007 deepestfeelings.com All Rights Reserved
Oh how nice…dad sent me a postcard. Except dad’s been dead now for over three decades. And so has Rod Serling so I doubt that’s a link to a web site running on a server somewhere in the Twilight Zone. Nice idea for a story though. But no…what’s waiting for me on the other side of that helpful link is some sort of spam, probably along with some sort of malicious javascript attack.
Deepest Feelings is it? I have some Deepest Feelings all right. You have to really loath someone who exploits other people’s affections, whether it’s for profit or just because it gives them kicks. In case you haven’t heard or seen one yourself yet, there is a pretty major spam/malicious software attack on people’s computer’s going on now all over the Internet, that uses this greeting card ploy. I’ve seen plenty of others that use some form of intrusive tactical syntax on your feelings. Just as computers are susceptible to malicious code, humans are susceptible to malicious words, the right combination of which can expose all our root functions to other devious humans. To compromise a computer, first you compromise the human controlling it. Oh…dad sent me a card…
But then…when aren’t our feelings under malicious attack these days. Karl Rove. James Dobson. Exodus International. Talk Radio. Family Values. Defend Marriage. Support Our Troops. Question Homosexuality. Don’t you want America to win in Iraq? They’re Taking Christ Out Of Christmas. Save Our Children. About 98 percent of everything you read and hear in the popular media these days is tactical syntax, cynically designed to get past your defenses and into your core where you can be easily manipulated. You’re lucky if it’s only your money they want once they’ve gotten in. The people who write malicious software are just doing to our machines, what we do to each other every day anyway.
We have two flocks of barn swallows that nest each spring and summer in our triple deck parking garage across the street. One flock makes its nests in the second level east side of the garage, and the other on the second level west. Every winter I find myself anxiously awaiting their arrival, as a signal that spring is near.
Well…it looks like summer’s end is on the way. Maybe. Possibly. At least, that’s the mixed message I’m getting from the swallows. It looks now, as though the west end flock has already skedaddled for its South American nesting grounds. But the east enders are sticking around for now. They’re still busily darting around the grounds, their noisy chatter still filling their end of the garage. So someone got the cue to split and someone is still waiting for theirs I reckon. I wish I knew what it was they’re listening to. It’s still hot as blazes out there. You’d never know to be walking out in it, that summer was already throwing out signals that its time is fleeting…
Leroy Greer is a bit of a romantic. He sent a dozen roses and a teddy bear to his girlfriend, with a card reading "Just wanted to say I love you".
Unfortunately the florist sent the receipt to his wife.
How…romantic…
Now the luxury car salesman from Missouri City is suing the firm for $1 million for "mental anguish" caused by the mix-up and his resultant divorce.
The affair was laid bare after his wife received a receipt from 1-800-flowers.com.
Bereft of bouquet, she called the company and requested more information, which not only included the damning card message but the girlfriend’s name and address.
She faxed the receipt to her husband at work with her own note: "Be a man! If you got caught red handed then don’t lie."
Divorce proceedings followed swiftly.
Ya think?
Mr Greer blamed the florist for his divorce and insisted it had told him no receipt would be sent to his home.
No Leroy…it wasn’t the flowers. It’s the thought that counts.
Lifted from Peterson’s comment to his own blog post Here…
Peterson now wants to help others that are referred to the clutches of Exodus. He invited all ex-gay survivors, as they call themselves, to a conference in opposition to the ex-gay movement. They can learn how one can be gay and nevertheless lead a godly life. Michael Bussee co-founded Exodus 30 years ago but came back out of it because he found the methods of the organization questionable. Today he participates in the ‘counter’-conference: “One day a young man came to me. He explained that he’d had anonymous sex and felt so guilty afterward that he mutilated himself. At that point I came to the conclusion that I couldn’t preach against homosexuality anymore if it causes such damage.”
Emphasis mine. You folks who say "love the sinner, hate the sin"…? There’s your love.
An Australian farmer who thought he’d found his perfect soulmate online got a nasty surprise when he travelled to Mali to meet his fiancée – a reception committee of "machete-armed bandits" who held him for almost two weeks demanding an AU$100,000 ransom.
Des Gregor, 56, flew last month to the impoverished African nation’s capital Bamako in search of "Natacha" and a dowry of AU$100,000 in gold bars, Reuters reports. However, he was picked up at the airport by a carload of ne’er-do-wells who whisked him to an apartment full of armed men.
The kidnappers gave Gregor "a good belting" and threatened to chop off his arms and legs unless his family coughed the aforementioned ransom. He recounted: "I was tied, bound by the legs, and that was only probably for a couple of days because they knew that I was going to cooperate. There was always one bloke sleeping at the door, there was no way out."
The gang’s plan unravelled after 12 days when Oz and Mali police duped them into letting their hostage enter the Canadian embassy to collect the cash.
Tales From The Best Health Care System In The World…(continued)
Funny how the same people pushing "free market" solutions to the health care crisis in the U.S. are also the same ones pushing these Religious Exemption laws that allow individuals to refuse to give health care regardless of what their employer’s policies are…
A federal judge’s ruling this week upholds the right of Illinois pharmacists to refuse to dispense emergency contraception.
…
Several pharmacists employed by Wal-Mart and Walgreen Co. have been disciplined for either refusing to dispense Plan B or for refusing to promise that they would dispense emergency contraception if asked.
U.S. District Judge Jeanne Scott denied a request Tuesday by Wal-Mart to throw out a lawsuit filed by pharmacist Ethan Vandersand. Scott sided with Vandersand, who had claimed he was legally protected from discipline by the Illinois Health Care Right of Conscience Act when he declined to dispense Plan B.
Vandersand, who lives in Bluffs, formerly worked at the pharmacy in Beardstown’s Wal-Mart. He was put on unpaid leave after he refused to fill a Plan B prescription requested by a nurse practitioner at Springfield’s Planned Parenthood on behalf of a female patient in February 2006.
Wal-Mart had contended the state’s right-of-conscience law doesn’t cover pharmacists. Walgreen Co. has made the same argument in other Illinois lawsuits filed by fired pharmacists.
But Scott wrote in her ruling, "The statute prohibits discrimination against any person for refusing to provide health care because of his conscience."
Emphasis mine. Note that the law doesn’t limit a person’s right to refuse to give health care to contraception. It can be health care for Anything, according to this judge. Picture someone who has AIDS and needs their medication to keep their viral count low. Picture some religious right bigot behind the counter turning them away because those medications enable homosexuals to escape the consequences of their sin.
Picture that happening to…hell…just about anyone who isn’t living their lives according to the god of the fundamentalists: who isn’t one of their tribe.
You need to keep something in focus here. Take a look back on the history of the rise of the religious right. Abortion was one of their hooks to get votes and money, when school desegregation wasn’t cutting it anymore. Then Anita Bryant showed them how much more effective the homosexual boogyman was, and they’ve been running with it ever since. But this fight has been going on for decades now, and the religious right got involved in politics along with the secular right over school desegregation…and more specifically, loosing their tax exemptions for their segregated private schools. That’s the mindset here. You have to keep that in focus. Abortion…The Homosexual Menace…these are just tools to keep the voters angry. The real agenda, is dividing America into haves, and have-nots. Guess which side of that fence you’re on.
These conscientious objector laws are ultimately about building that fence of have, verses have-not. It isn’t just contraception, and it isn’t just health care. It’s about building that fence. Everything is about building that fence.
Because we don’t deserve the American Dream. This is not our country. It’s theirs. We just work here.
Pissing On The Grave Of Edward R. Murrow…(continued)
Regarding This Post I did a little while ago, on the Ken Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon media bullshit circus….it gets even better…or the stench much worse depending on whether you feel more like laughing or crying. Glenn Greenwald has the goods …
But the far greater deceit involves the trip itself and the way it was represented — both by Pollack/O’Hanlon as well as the excited media figures who touted its significance and meaning. From beginning to end, this trip was planned, shaped and controlled by the U.S. military — a fact inexcusably concealed in both the Op-Ed itself and virtually every interview the two of them gave. With very few exceptions, what they saw was choreographed by the U.S. military and carefully selected for them.
…
The entire trip — including where they went, what they saw, and with whom they spoke — consisted almost entirely of them faithfully following what O’Hanlon described as "the itinerary the D.O.D. developed."
But to establish their credibility as first-hand witnesses, O’Hanlon and Pollack began their Op-Ed by claiming, in the very first sentence: "VIEWED from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel. . . . " Yet the overwhelming majority of these "Iraqi military and civilian personnel" were ones hand-picked for them by the U.S. military:
Dig it. Two war supporters go over to Iraq on a trip planned, shaped and controlled by the Pentagon, and when they come back to the U.S. to present their pre-packaged findings they’re lauded by our feckless corporate news media as former war critics who went to Iraq to see for themselves what the conditions there were and then became believers in Bush’s policies. It isn’t just that not a word of it was true…it’s that everyone writing those editorals about how Bush’s policies were winning over the war critics knew goddamned well that none of it was true.
WASHINGTON (AP) – Americans are living longer than ever, but not as long as people in 41 other countries.
For decades, the United States has been slipping in international rankings of life expectancy, as other countries improve health care, nutrition and lifestyles.
Countries that surpass the U.S. include Japan and most of Europe, as well as Jordan, Guam and the Cayman Islands.
Jordan. Guam. And…the Cayman Islands.
– A relatively high percentage of babies born in the U.S. die before their first birthday, compared with other industrialized nations.
Forty countries, including Cuba, Taiwan and most of Europe had lower infant mortality rates than the U.S. in 2004. The U.S. rate was 6.8 deaths for every 1,000 live births. It was 13.7 for Black Americans, the same as Saudi Arabia.
Next time you hear a republican yap, yap, yapping about Roe v. Wade and how abortion is murder, ask them how they feel about universal heath care for children.
If Only They Had PSAs Like This For Gay Teens Back When I Was One Myself…
I might have actually done something like this…
This touching little video is from a TV commercial for the Norwegian Lesbian and Gay Rights movement (LLH). The text at the end, according to one commenter on YouTube (who presumably reads Norwegian) says “You don’t have to be THAT brave.” The number is for a information hotline for gay youth.
And before you ask…I did a lot of digging around for the background song on this. Apparently a lot of other people besides me would love to have a copy of it. But don’t go looking around on iTunes because it’s not there, or anywhere else. It was recorded especially for this PSA, and so for as I can determine, has not ever been released for purchase by the general public. Here are the lyrics…
Were dancing you and me its our destiny
Baby you and me
Make up your mind
Like I told you a 1000 times
Everything will be just fine
If I can’t see you tonight
I know my love will grow stronger
(chorus)
I’ll be dreaming of you
Like everything is bright and blue
And I’ll be here waiting
But not for so long (so long)
If I could have one song for my comic series A Coming Out Story, this would be it. I doesn’t become an obvious match though, until the last half of the series, and I’m only still in the beginning of the first half.
(Frederick, Colorado) A Catholic priest faces an indecent exposure charge after jogging in the nude about an hour before sunrise.
The Rev. Robert Whipkey told officers he had been running naked at a high school track and didn’t think anyone would be around at that time of day, a police report said.
He told officers he sweats profusely if he wears clothing while jogging. "I know what I did was wrong," he said in the report.
So he’s a Catholic priest…and he’s jogging…naked…in the predawn twilight…Around A High School Track… Yeah…I’ll just bet he has a sweaty little problem alright…
GRAND PLAINS, NE—A tight-knit rural Midwestern farming community commemorated the demonization of homosexuality Sunday with its annual Gay Shame Parade, a three-decade-old tradition that has become a cornerstone of the town’s cultural identity.
…
Despite the pageantry, parade organizers stressed that the event has a serious message
"Everyone loves a parade," PTA chairwoman Agatha Buell said. "But it’s about a lot more than the clowns, the decorations, and those Shriner fellows in their tiny cars. It’s about making folks feel sickened by the deviant homosexual lifestyle, like God wants us to."
Spectators couldn’t help but be delighted by the parade’s surprise finale, when, after dutifully leading the marching band for the entire mile-long parade route, local music teacher Colin Atherton was marched past the county line and told never, ever to return.
…has become a cornerstone of the town’s cultural identity. Well…considering the rhetoric coming from the radios and pulpits these days, you have to figure a lot of people might read this and wonder what the joke is. You watch…somebody somewhere is actually going to organize one of these…
I’ve been meaning to post about this since I saw it last week, but I was on the road and I just don’t blog well when I’m flitting down the highway from one motel room to another. But I figured last week that when I got around to it, I’d begin the post with something along the lines of…
I hate these motherfuckers! We have goddamned freedom of the press in this country, and our newspapers resemble something out of the cold war Soviet Union…
On the July 30 edition of the CBS Evening News, CBS News national security correspondent David Martin falsely described Brookings Institution senior fellow Michael O’Hanlon as "a critic" of the Iraq war "who used to think the surge was too little too late, [but] now believes it should be continued." In fact, while O’Hanlon has been critical of the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq war, he supported the invasion and argued in a January 2007 column that President Bush’s troop increase was "the right thing to try."
Additionally, during the July 30 broadcast of Fox News’ Special Report, while introducing a report on a July 30 New York Timesop-ed by O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, director of research at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy — in which they asserted: "We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms" — host and Fox News Washington managing editor Brit Hume suggested that O’Hanlon and Pollack were longtime Iraq war critics. Hume described the two as "[a] pair of longtime opponents of President Bush’s policies in Iraq." The same night, ABC’s World News anchor Charles Gibson began his show’s report on O’Hanlon and Pollack’s op-ed by describing the authors as "long and persistent critics of the Bush administration’s handling of the war." But in focusing only on O’Hanlon and Pollack’s criticisms of the "handling" of the war, the news broadcasts failed to note that O’Hanlon and Pollack were influential proponents of the Iraq war before the invasion, leaving viewers with the impression that the two were war opponents who have now become more supportive of the war.
Sweet, eh? When you can’t find a critic of the war who supports the surge, you simply recast a couple old supporters of the war as opponants and…Voila! Proof that the policies of president I’m The Decider are winning over even his toughest critics.
It is difficult to remember a media spectacle to match yesterday’s [July 30, 2007 -Bruce] grand pageant where Ken Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon were paraded across virtually every network and cable news show and radio program and heralded as "war opponents" and "Bush critics" who nonetheless returned from Iraq and were forced by The Truth to admit that we are Winning. For sheer deceit and propaganda, it is difficult to remember something quite this audacious and transparently false.
As was demonstrated yesterday, O’Hanlon and Pollack were among the most voracious cheerleaders for Bush’s invasion and, as the war began to collapse, among its most deceitful defenders. But it goes so far beyond that.
Even through this year, they have remained loyal Bush supporters. They were not only advocates of the war, but cheerleaders for the Surge. They were, and continue to be, on the fringe of pro-war sentiment in this country. And yet all day yesterday, this country’s media loudly hailed them as being exactly the opposite of what they really are. It was 24 hours of unadulterated, amazingly coordinated war propaganda that could not have been any further removed from the truth.
…
I spent yesterday and today reading through virtually all of the writings and interviews of these two Brookings geniuses over the past four years concerning Iraq. There is no coherence or consistency to anything they say. It shifts constantly. They say whatever they need to say at the moment to justify the war for which they bear responsibility. It is exactly like reading through the writings of Bill Kristol, Tom Friedman and every other individual who flamboyantly supported this disaster and — motivated solely by salvaging their own reputations — are desperate to find some method to argue that they were right.
Even though I write frequently about how broken and corrupt our establishment media is, witnessing these two war lovers — supporters of the invasion, advocates of the Surge, comrades of Fred Kagan — mindlessly depicted all day yesterday by media mouthpieces as the opposite of what they are was really quite startling. After all, there is a record as long as it is clear demonstrating what they really are.
But in order to maximize the potency of their propagandistic Op-Ed, they proclaimed themselves to be "analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq" and — just like that — Americans hear all day about the magical and dramatic conversion of these deeply skeptical war opponents who were forced by the Grand Success they witnessed first-hand in Iraq, as much as they hate to do it, to admit oh-so-reluctantly that the Surge really is working! Well, if even these Howard-Dean-like War Opponents say it, it must be true. That was the leading "news" story all day yesterday.
Nice. This is the kind of crap I was used to seeing in the state controlled press of totalitarian states like the Soviet Union. But they all bought into the war…hell, they all bought into George Bush…early on, and now they don’t dare admit that they’ve brought an unmitigated catastrophe down on their country. In an editorial titled, Iraq Hasn’t Even Begun, contributing editor to the Los Angles Times Timothy Ash writes…
So Iraq is over. But Iraq has not yet begun. Not yet begun in terms of the consequences for Iraq itself, the Middle East, the United States’ own foreign policy and its reputation in the world. The most probable consequence of rapid U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in its present condition is a further bloodbath, with even larger refugee flows and the effective dismemberment of the country. Already, about 2 million Iraqis have fled across the borders, and more than 2 million are internally displaced.
Now a pained and painstaking study from the Brookings Institution argues that what its authors call "soft partition" — the peaceful, voluntary transfer of an estimated 2 million to 5 million Iraqis into distinct Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite regions, under close U.S. military supervision — would be the lesser evil. The lesser evil, that is, assuming that all goes according to plan and that Americans are prepared to allow their troops to stay in sufficient numbers to accomplish that thankless job — two implausible assumptions. A greater evil is more likely.
In an article for the Web magazine Open Democracy, Middle East specialist Fred Halliday spells out some regional consequences. Besides the effective destruction of the Iraqi state, these include the revitalizing of militant Islamism and enhancement of the international appeal of the Al Qaeda brand; the eruption, for the first time in modern history, of internecine war between Sunni and Shiite, "a trend that reverberates in other states of mixed confessional composition"; the alienation of most sectors of Turkish politics from the West and the stimulation of authoritarian nationalism there; the strengthening of a nuclear-hungry Iran; and a new regional rivalry pitting the Islamic Republic of Iran and its allies, including Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas, against Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan.
For the United States, the world is now, as a result of the Iraq war, a more dangerous place. At the end of 2002, what is sometimes tagged "Al Qaeda Central" in Afghanistan had been virtually destroyed, and there was no Al Qaeda in Iraq. In 2007, there is an Al Qaeda in Iraq, parts of the old Al Qaeda are creeping back into Afghanistan and there are Al Qaeda emulators spawning elsewhere, notably in Europe.
Osama bin Laden’s plan was to get the U.S. to overreact and overreach itself. With the invasion of Iraq, Bush fell slap-bang into that trap. The U.S. government’s own latest National Intelligence Estimate, released this week, suggests that Al Qaeda in Iraq is now among the most significant threats to the security of the American homeland.
The U.S. has probably not yet fully woken up to the appalling fact that, after a long period in which the first motto of its military was "no more Vietnams," it faces another Vietnam. There are many important differences, but the basic result is similar: The mightiest military in the world fails to achieve its strategic goals and is, in the end, politically defeated by an economically and technologically inferior adversary.
Even if there are no scenes of helicopters evacuating Americans from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, there will surely be some totemic photographic image of national humiliation as the U.S. struggles to extract its troops.
Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have done terrible damage to the U.S. reputation for being humane; this defeat will convince more people around the world that it is not even that powerful. And Bin Laden, still alive, will claim another victory over the death-fearing weaklings of the West.
In history, the most important consequences are often the unintended ones. We do not yet know the longer-term unintended consequences of Iraq. Maybe there is a silver lining hidden somewhere in this cloud. But as far as the human eye can see, the likely consequences of Iraq range from the bad to the catastrophic.
Looking back over a quarter of a century of chronicling current affairs, I cannot recall a more comprehensive and avoidable man-made disaster.
This is the basic point, but it’s also something that has not penetrated the brains of the Very Serious People who rule our elite discourse. They fucked up. Lots of people died. Lots of people continue to die. Each of them, in their own little way, contributed to this "comprehensive and avoidable man-made disaster," and most of them are unwilling and unable to face up to that fact. This is truly the era of Bush, where accountability is for suckers, and I’ve come to conclude that’s pretty much the dominant cultural fact of elite Washington.
Our corporate news media served the voters up this disaster on a silver platter of dollar store bullshit, jingoism, and their drunken bar stool conceits. They hated Bill Clinton, they hated the democrats, they hated the liberals, and most of all they hated the Dirty Fucking Hippies Who Made Us Loose In Vietnam. Bush was their hero, their knight in shining armor, their exoneration. Pusillanimous, pampered, petulant, with a abundant sense of his own entitlement to match his grotesque self righteousness. He was their hero, the hero they all knew they were deep down inside. And when terrorists killed over three-thousand Americans on 9-11, they figured their moment of glory had arrived at last. Along with their hero, they were going to remake the nation…and the world…in their own image.
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