03 August 2007

Friday blether

Home from work - I took "flex time", also known as "summer hours", also known as "they let the animals out early on Fridays". (If, of course, you've previously arranged with your boss to leave early AND you've made up the time, which sort of destroys the spontenaity of it ... but I left early on a Friday, so I'm not really bitching.) Except I'll bitch about the heat. It is fucking hot. About 95 here in my un-air-conditioned apartment, and just the act of sitting up and typing is making sweat bead on my forehead.) The cats are all sprawled on the hardwood - they got briefly excited to see me home so early and Zoe actually wanted to be picked up and purred (I think she just wanted to lick the salt off my forehead, though.) That didn't last too long, since she's a Maine Coon and heavy and hot. Cuteness can only get you so far. The humidity is only about 40%, though, so that's not so bad.

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A quick technical note: not getting any more comment spam for a while, I removed the sign-in thingie. If spam gets to be a pain in the ass I'll put in a prove-you're-human validifier (that's the technical name for it) but for now I'd rather have anyone able to respond. (Plus that's how all the pro bloggers do it - manage comment spam manually - and if they can moderate eleven billion comments then I can manage a couple.)

Also technical, sort of: since the cell phone photo quality looked fine on my phone screen and AWFUL on my work monitor, I resized the pictures for the post below in Picnik - I fucking love Picnik, it's able to handle about 95% of what I'd like to do with image editing with no learning curve at all, and 4 of the other 5% is probably just making lolcats ... so really it may be best for the world that I don't, actually, have Photoshop.

My only current burning desire for Photoshop is because I'd like to design my own wedding invitations ... Dave called me this morning and said he wanted to make punk rock wedding invites, and maybe to make it look like a ransom note, the old-fangled kind with cut-out letter from the newspaper (from back in the day when mechanical word processing wasn't widely available and one's handwriting was recognizable.)

I love the punk rock idea; I think maybe it should inform the whole wedding theme (apart from the venue, the music and my dress, we haven't made any firm decisions.)

I'd totally use the newspaper cut out ransom note mock-up for the Save the Date notices (if we decide to go with those) ... or we could make those look like a band flyer advertising a show, which would also be cool. Or kind of like the sex pistols

But for the invitations themselves I think I'd like to go with distressed font.
Not anything too crazy like this nail scratch one or anything illegible (but hilarious!) like this Max Rhodes one, just something a little grungy-looking, like misproject or horse puke. (heh on the name.) Or even something fairly pretty, like this porcelain. I suppose the challenge would be making it obvious that you've done it intentionally and it's not all a horrible gaffe on the printer's part. (I really like all the collage-y stuff on that site, too. Funny and well-chosen.)

And maybe some blood spatters here and there, I really like the AngryBlue stuff. (Scroll down for it.) Okay, just kidding about the bloody fingerprints, I don't think they'd really say "wedding", or at least, I don't think I want to use that to say "my wedding". But! Some splattery stuff might be cool.

Now that I've taken hours writing this with my slow home internet connetion (I am spoiled by the blazingly fast one at work), Dave is home and I oughta go see him. (Even he, the King Of Hot Days, was a little wilted after his walk home and immediately retired to the bedroom - with Inty, who follows him around like Mary's lamb - and turned on the a/c. And brought the bong.)

6 comments:

Lisa said...

I think Porcelain is a great wedding font. But then again, I'm probably not the best judge of that.

seppaku said...

You should check out GIMP for your digital photo manipulation needs:

http://www.gimp.org/

Free, runs on any OS, and has plenty of functionality.

Anonymous said...

lolcat functionality coming soon!
-team picnik

katybee said...

I recently bought Photoshop Elements and while I"m still learning to use it, I'm pretty pleased with it. And at $90, it's a whole lot cheaper than Photoshop. I was worried about it because it hasn't been updated for the Intel Macs but it works fine on mine. (kate)

Kaethe said...

I like the Sex Pistols idea. Hell, I like the blood spatters. Think of it as a return to the traditional: it's a symbolic deflowering.

Cara dB said...

Best comments on a post ever!

I actually have Gimp, but I don't really know my way around it very well. I used it to make a lolZoe once. Possibly if I knew Photoshop I'd be better able to look for the equivalent function in Gimp (I am also not sure I'm good enough to be able to change those free brushes and fonts from Photoshop to Gimp) ... which is why Photoshop Elements is an awesome idea.

And, heheheheh blood spatters = symbolic deflowering. And enabled on the porcelain font, as well. Cool.

And, lolcats are coming to picnik AND someone from picnik read my blog! (Which I assume is probably the result of checking out the link trackbacks. Coooool.)

I'll know I've made the big time when I find that my blog is getting pirated. I figure that's a while away, though.