I’ve been bitching and moaning about how Adobe decided to move all of their software to the cloud, and make people pay per month forever to use their stuff. I’ve also been bitching about how Apple decided to kill off Aperture, which happened about ten minutes after I imported and tagged 50,000 pictures, and would probably require me to spend six months of my life migrating to Lightroom.
Well, fuck it, I decided to give up and get a Creative Cloud membership, while Adobe is trying to court Aperture users and is quoting a lowball price. I joined with the photographer’s membership, which is ten bucks a month, and includes Lightroom, Photoshop, and 2GB of cloud storage. There’s some other junk that I don’t need or understand (Typekit? Bridge?) and there’s a ton of “try this!” links everywhere, to get you to upgrade to a full-blown membership. But I don’t need Illustrator or InDesign this second, so I’m fine.
I have not used Photoshop in a long time. I’ve been using Pixelmator for a while, to do book covers and whatnot. (Here is my latest.) And I make endless stupid things like the above drawing I re-captioned. But I haven’t used Photoshop in forever. It’s interesting to see how much it changed.
Back in 1991 when I returned to Bloomington after a year at IUSB commuter college hell, they had a shit-ton of new computer gear, because they’d recently tacked on a technology fee to tuition and were in a mad rush to spend it. The Fine Arts college had this cluster of brand spanking new top-of-the-line Macs, which I think were the IIfx at that time. Each one had a gigantic color monitor, probably 20 inches, but about a yard thick, plus a second paperwhite portrait screen, along with a scanner and a Jazz drive, which used those insanely expensive removable hard drives that could hold something like 100 Megs, which was pure science fiction at the time. Anyway, they had Photoshop 1.0. I recently found a color printout me and my buddy Ray did when he visited once, an Ann Geddes overhead shot of nine babies in a nursery, but we’d horribly mangled them all: one beheaded, another eating that head, one with a swastika on its forehead, one spitting blood, etc.
That was my first exposure to Photoshop, and the new version makes the 1.0 version look more primitive than MS Paint. I am absolutely amazed by all of the retouching and healing tools, and how you can do stuff like move parts of an image and it will automatically fix the background. The $10 a month is well-spent on getting more book covers done. (And of course, photoshopping dicks into the mouths of various Facebook friends.)
Speaking of books, I am almost done with the next one. I’m in the last sprint of edits, and I have a roughed-in cover, and I’m maybe a week from entering production drudgery. This book is so amazingly different from anything I’m written, I’m not sure what people will think. It’s absurdist, but it has an incredibly plotted story, like Michael Bay plotted. I think it will really show readers that I have the ability to do more than just stories about taking a dump at the county fair. But, I’m anxious to get it done, so I can get back to writing stories about taking a dump at the county fair. Anyway, stay tuned.
I wanted to write something about Amazon Unlimited, and about the huge pissing contest between Amazon and Hachette. But I really do not have the energy to care. It’s billionaires fighting billionaires, and every move Amazon makes to make you think they are on your side or they’re saving you money is really one they’re making to increase their monopoly. Amazon Unlimited is nothing but a race to the bottom, creating the equivalent of a thousand-channel cable TV plan that will cause readers to read five pages of everything and enjoy nothing. And Hachette charges too much for ebooks, but Amazon is only bringing that to your attention because they want more of your money.
It’s all bullshit. I’m still selling on Amazon, but eventually, their monopoly will squeeze out small authors, and I’m waiting for the day when they start charging KDP writers insane prices to list their books, or drop their royalties, or start an inane approval process for self-pubbed books “to increase quality to customers” (i.e. make it impossible for anyone they don’t like to publish weird stuff.) It will happen. But I’ll still be here. If I have to photocopy my books at the local Kinko’s and sell them out of the trunk of my car, I will. If I have to memorize them and go town to town reciting them like one of those poor fuckers with The Iliad, fine. If I was here to make millions, I would have started selling penny stocks back in 1997.
OK, back to editing. What’s up with you?
