Comic for Monday, June 15th, 2020
Comic!
It was, admittedly, a bit of a journey to get here.
On Friday my computer kicked the bucket, notably my boot drive (one of my harddrives). This is sort of the end of a long journey of it slowly dying, but suffice to say it was a problem. In the end I had to replace that harddrive, which isn’t a huge issue as I have an online back up of my data… still a big problem as reisntalling the OS means that I lost basically all my software, including my drawing program which resulted in a grand search to find the liscence keys and things to make it work.
Ultimately Photoshop is still a lost cause so far (I used an ancient version of it as I dislike the modern subscription nonsense), and while I got my main drawing program back, this is like 5 versions later and it’s different… If you notice oddities, that’s why; this is 100% done in Clip Studio Paint rather than my usual combination of CSP and Photoshop (usually I do all the text and borders and scaling and stuff in photoshop).
Anyway, I think we are track for next week.
You may notice the text and boxes aren’t perfect… that’s not easy to fix right now. They are correct on the pre-downscaled image, but somehow the downscaling of the drawing program seems to have two settings:
Setting 1: Text does decides to not align properly to the image.
Setting 2: Text is blurry and hard to read.
I decided that the text being slightly out of the boxes was far less annoying that it being jagged and blurry. I will continue the quest to see if I can get a version of photoshop I don’t have to pay a monthly ransom for.
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Try using something like GIMP for scaling. If you are using Clip Studio Pro for scaling, it sounds like it is trying to scale the individual components and then merge them. Possibly some of the items are stored as vector, some are stored as raster, and the text may be stored simply as text to be rendered after scaling. So try converting the entire image to JPEG or TIFF at the highest resolution and then simply downscale the image.
Comic will be up on Friday (as well as a general update on things).
I take it comic’s running late?
Hmm. He must be a wizard. He is never late, only, he arrives with new pages precisely when he intended, which is to say: when it is least expected. Thus, every page is a surprise, simply adding another layer of obfuscated dramatic suspense and convoluted plot line.
I love it!
Meoi Lass
p.s., I hope the Adobe demons (because there is no way they are benevolent gods) are kind to you. Having a boot drive fail can be very sad. You have my deepest sympathies, and respect .
Our spotter on the next door rooftop says things look like they are all Standard Normality.
For the record, I never use the rooftop that’s nextdoor.
It is still Friday morning, it hasn’t even hit the “it’s still Friday somewhere” point yet. Give it some time.
Exactly.
Comic expected 7/10?
It’ll be late, yeah. Sorry, hopefully this weekend.
You might just figure that even if you have this done over the weekend that the one to follow will be for July 6th?
It will probably be up Sunday or Monday, but a change to the schedule (for the better, from the perspective of the comic leastwise 🙂 ) is coming soon, as will be expanded on during the update.
Woohoo! A movie deal has been struck!
I’m going to go camp for tickets Right Now!
I really hope filming goes smoothly, camping for years on concrete gets difficult.
Camping on abstract can be worse!
That’s only when you’re concretely camping on abstract. I only ever abstractly camp on abstract and concretely camp on concrete.
The abstractly camping on abstract doesn’t sound too bad. The concretely camping on concrete solidly sounds hard.
I’m sorry for the discomfort that life upheavals cause you, but will hope that the impending (or ongoing) transition brings with it greater comfort and leads to more satisfying days and more satisfying days.
And convoluted sentences, too!
(And… more comics would be nice, but not at your expense.)
A conversation between senior Kepler family members about Mium? This sounds like a conversation we want to sit in on!!
You feel safe being in a room with multiple Keplers? I might want to be a fly on the wall, but I would never want to be a human being in that room… And I wouldn’t bug it, either. That strikes me as being MORE dangerous than just being in the room.
Two Keplers and Mium. Definitely a higher than average chance of losing wardrobe pieces in an explosion.
Somehow, the addition of Mium (the one that hacked a tank because it was not military hardware) does not reassure me…
I don’t know what you guys are worried about. Mium has a pretty good track record of keeping civilians alive…..and mostly uninjured.
But yes, I do agree, Glider. Bring a spare change of clothes.
Due to the “family and friends” exceptions of the A.A. system, and the fact that this body probably has an edos drive card(not to mention the one sitting in quirys corpse), and Peter’s own ability to somehow not get hurt by other people or things: it is an unlikely matter that any clothing worn to such a meeting between two Kepler’s and Mium would in anyway be damaged. It’s a better idea to have multiple off-site backups, like Peter learned to do.
Also, I somehow suspect with both the information Mium has, and the abilities of the edos drive hardware and localized programs, Mr Effiate can, in all likelihood create dimensional gates, small, and localized to his body and the immediate vicinity surrounding it.
So… you’re telling me he might be able to teleport my heart or my kidneys to another dimension? And that’s supposed to reassure me?
Look, I ain’t spyin’ on him. I ain’t that stupid. You’ll have to get yourself another idiot.
I am assuming he bought the tank, and it WAS decommissioned. He did put a remarkably powerful bomb in it though, but not powerful enough, given Atter needed later smiting with a dragon.
As I recall, it was old and decommissioned , and therefore not military hardware. He then upgraded well past military capabilities.
Aaaand scene change.
This comic really has a unique “tell, don’t show” approach to the narrative that ensures that a lot more happens than if every blow and reaction were drawn out individually. It takes what could be long and drawn out confrontations (such as the Mium-vs-Rovak fight or Elisibeth-vs-Camilla) and instead relegates them to a couple pages of mostly dialogue and usually a pithy mention later (IE: “the confrontation at site 2 has devolved into a high energy conflict, collateral damage is substantial” when referring to the second fight (between the Monster Hunter, Tactical Class Mage vs the infamous “Doll of Destruction” who was powerful enough to fight armies as either a child or pre-teen)).
The thing is that the common wisdom is to go purely by a “show, don’t tell” approach. For most stories the common wisdom is correct, since the action is the main point while the results and greater importance only adds weight to what happens and the actions are drawn out of the characterization. In this story, however, the action takes a back seat to the greater results of the confrontation while the weight is given to the societal changes behind the action’s results and the actions are drawn out of the deeper philosophies held by the people taking the actions. This is a very different sort of an approach to the story that is more focused on the philosophical without loosing individual characterization but still recognizing that individual characterization, in the long run, may not matter as much as it may seem at first. In essance the individual events may be given in a “tell, don’t show” approach, but the higher level aspects that are the true focus of the story are very much “show, don’t tell”.
In this way almost every character is some sort of a stand-in and, despite personality differences, are still playing to the same overarching tune that their overarching philosophy requires.
For instance: the Consul and the Kokato, despite their personality differences, are mostly identical. Both are essentially puppet leaders given a certain amount of autonomy so long as they look after the interest of the Family mages with the ego and drive that would be expected of someone in that position. The only real difference is their willingness to respect the ability of those under them. Kokato didn’t and so his influence was easy to remove when Peter needed him gone. The Consul did, which led to her underling (Tyler Webber) interrupting her misguided attempt to bring in the exiled families without knowledge of how deeply they were working against Malsa.
Yet in the end, the personalities don’t really matter as much as the philosophies behind them. Put Kokato into the Consul’s place along with what had been her willingness to respect her underlings, and his abrasively jaded personality would not have changed what happened in the Families meeting because the power of the underlying worldview was strong enough to force the issue by itself. Also his attitude would have painted him as a realist closer to Colonel Richi. Put the Consul into Kokato’s position, along with what had been his lack of trust of his underlings, and her charismaticly flippant attitude would have made no difference in the choice to ensure that the country could not run without her (leading to the affair at the meeting where the gate scanner was revealed), or the choice to steal IDS tech to make magic tanks, or really any other major decisions that were made. The real difference would be that the Consul leader of Aarpon would have come across as a sharp witted b**ch rather than how she is portrayed in the actual story.
This is an interesting way of approaching what is essentially a “morality story” that acknowledges the differences in character but essentially, through the focus on the higher level of what is going on, seems to recognize that the characterization is less impacting on the overall story than the worldviews that drive the use of that characterization. Morality stories in the past have been generally focused on making characters that are caricatures of their wisdom or follies (think “Goofus and Gallant”) without acknowledging personality differences not related to their main aspect. The other direction most stories go in is to over-focus on personality differences as the main driving determiner of outcome, leading to a lot of underdog and hero’s tale stories where the person with the personality that better appeals to the audience ends up winning even if it must be through Deus Ex Machina like circumstances in order to make a “good story”.
To go back to the earlier example between the Consul and Kokato, if this were most other stories things would have played out very differently. First the characters might end up charactures, in which the Consul’s flippant attitude would have been completely gone and replaced with a more businesslike CEO or focused delegater type personality. Kokato’s jaded pessimism that led to some paranoia would have been replaced by turning him into a complete control freak with heightened levels of paranoia (since he would be a characture of a leader who doesn’t trust his underlings, with no necessary personality beyond that) and without the dismissive attitude that allowed a simple grab-and-drop to turn into an international incident. But while personality changes the story, it doesn’t change the higher level of what happens. Tyler still intervenes and Kokato is still grabbed.
The other direction it could take is to focus more completely on the individual personalities of the characters. The Consul’s attitude, while it appeals to higher level individuals, lacks the steadfast firmness to appeal to the more common man. Meanwhile Kokato’s strict demeanor gives resolve to the regular troops, but makes him seem stuffy and inflexible to the more powerful individuals who simply work around or ignore him. If this were a traditional story these character differences would have outright determined the course of the war, highlighting either the strength of friendship with one’s peers or the strength of group cooperation and unity in the face of great threats. Instead their two forces ended up in something of a stalemate; right up until the emergence of a third participant who was playing both sides (Atter) and a fourth side came in direct opposition to the third (Callisto and her Dragon). The results, while not coming down to individual personalities, also highlight other longstanding themes such as “equilibrium of opposing powers causing a stalemate”… something that we have seen multiple times before with everything from IDS-vs-Cor World involvement on Malsa to the attempt to snatch up Peter at the train station near the beginning of this story.
And yet, while this is a compelling story and one that highlights the realities of politics and competing worldviews, its focus on successful competition that leads to a stalemate mostly ignores the results of unsuccessful worldviews or the nature of prolonged peace that allows less capable worldviews to survive simply as a tool of politics to oppose some other more capable worldview. How long would Bianna be able to get away with her backbiting politics if Kor’s World were actively attacking? Either she would be forced to focus her energies on the real enemy, she would be put down (if not outright murdered) for the sake of everyone if she tried continuing, or else the divisions she sowed would have caused her own side to fall in front of a more unified enemy if she was allowed to continue unrestrained.
So far not a single worldview in this story has been out-competed into irrelevance or outright silenced through more violent actions. Almost nobody has died, with the one standout exception having done so in support of others with a similar worldview in an act of sacrifice that motivated her allies into action where they might otherwise have delayed. Similarly only one person from the IDS side of things has been locked up to prevent them from taking general activity, that being Sophie, but her status as being the Anchor for Atter and connections with Bianna and Bianna’s supporters means that she and her worldview are still a relevant force within the story. Similarly with the more purely Malsan conflict there have been the arrest of some of the Exiled Families, but not all of the families were taken and their influence and power (not to mention their magical powers) mean that their worldview still has a strong effect within the setting.
So what will come next? Will the story ever reach a conclusion on any particular conflict of worldviews to the loss of one as a viable alternative or will increasing complexities introduced by outside forces allow every worldview to remain simply as a possible tool to use against any number of enemies? We know that in the author’s original notes Tyler Webber was supposed to die, which would have been the death of the main person holding a “subordinate worldview despite having power” ideology, but he was saved from instant death by the intervention of his own subordinate and then rescued by the best friend of one of his other subordinates. Perhaps the taking down of Sophie will result in putting her down, despite her her expectation that her strength and the possible need for it in the future will keep her safe (if not comfortable)? Maybe the jailing of Sophie will allow a military solution for the problem of Bianna without giving the IDS an excuse to invade Malsa to “rescue” her? Perhaps Aaron Kepler’s visit to Central will turn public opinion and diplomatic support against Bianna by revealing that she called down a HVW strike on a civilian population?
There is plenty that /could/ happen but what actually /does/ happen, if not directly impacted by the background beliefs of the character or the circumstances, ultimately comes down to what the author may want to say with his story.
… … … that… that’s pretty deep man. You a literature professor or ‘sumthin? ‘Cause that seems like the kind of analization that happens in a college literature class.
Not the OP, but I started reading this comic when I was in the middle of a lit/writing major focused on creative writing, and part of what sucked me into it is that this comic just totally ignores literally everything writing and literature courses will tell you about writing, and I still love it.
This comic would make literature professors I know foam at the mouth. At times I have suspected the author is deliberately making fun of the general advice on what makes good story telling. But I like it not just because it is unique, but because telling the story the way it does makes the world the story is in far more interesting and believable, because it has none of the conceits to storytelling you normally expect, it makes it feel like things are happening because that’s what happened, not because that’s what worked for the story.
I used this comic as an example in more than one college paper for my classes, as I feel it is a unique approach to story telling. As I learned more about the author (and started playing table top RPGs partially as a result of that), I feel like I’ve understood the comic a lot better though. This is the style of writing that comes from someone that is used to being a game master for table top gaming.
The emphasis is on the world building, and the characters will always act believably and in character because they are more akin to NPCs in a TTRPG than they are characters in a story. The emphasis of the world development is on the backdrop and setting making sense and feeling like a real place, because it’s written like a setting, not a story.
This comic is an interesting thing to analyze for college literature classes, because I think it is a side of writing that said college literature and creative writing classes frequently ignore or frankly don’t understand, but is a style of writing that I find far more appealing than a “tightly constructed” narrative story.
Of course, in many creative writing or literature classes the idea that comics or manga are real story telling mediums is a controversial opinion, because they are so far up their own ass that anything that isn’t a classic is automatically wrong.
The Far Side of Utopia keeps true to a number of literature rules most of the time:
– It usually notes time skips. Most if not all non-chronological content is in interludes, rather than the main story.
– Most characters stick close enough to grammar guidelines that people can mostly understand them. No character competes with Ol Foul Ron in any way.
I think there’s a few others, but it’s been a long time since I was in a literature class. That said, I recall most of my literature teachers and professors had a stick up their bum that was longer than they were. This subset all hated the works of numerous successful authors, such as Samuel Clemens, Piers Anthony, Robert Heinlein, and Terry Prachett. Even the one who actually liked Mark Twain would fail anyone who wrote in his style. I think there was only one of them who recognized the quoting exemption for proper grammar.
(For clarity, I also had one literature instructor who was a fan of those works as well as many others that most literature instructors typically hold in disdain, and even gave an assignment which we were supposed to produce something written in the style of such an author. This is in sharp contrast to the stick up his bum Mark Twain loving prof who told us to write something like Mark Twain, and then graded us harshly for all of our grammatical “mistakes”.)
English and literature profs are in interesting bunch.
I had one (a creative writing class I think?) who gave the entire class a zero for failing to turn in a project that he’d forgotten to assign. No joke. Not one of us knew about the assignment, but he refused to accept that he simply had not mentioned it prior to asking us to turn it in.
Later we found out:
1. His frequent absences from class were due to the class schedule conflicting with his interview process. He was hunting another job.
2. He hadn’t mentioned that assignment to ANY of his classes. Despite not one single student turning it in, he remained convinced that we were all lying about him not having given it to us.
3. The University administration was after him because they audited him, and he had next to nothing concrete to grade us on. We knew he didn’t give many assignments. We didn’t know that he frequently lost the ones we turned in.
Good times, good times.
Then there was the world cultures Prof who told us not to worry about student loans. Just tell the bank you couldn’t pay them, and eventually they’d negotiate with you to settle the loan for pennies on the dollar. Back then that really was true.
No wonder I ended up going into hard sciences. With that much BS floating around the humanities you’d think they would all be gardeners. Or sewage engineers.
“With that much BS floating around the humanities you’d think they would all be gardeners. Or sewage engineers.”
Why I haven’t gone back to school. Most of the professors couldn’t find their own butts with both hands.
I’m not a literature prof, I’m a Psych nerd. Psychology, Philosophy, Comparative Theology; that sort of thing. Literature is just an example of “show don’t tell” of our worldview and either our hopes or expectations within a world designed to showcase them. It is interesting stuff, really.
Someday I should tell you guys about the Professor that I got fired by proving that his grading was determined by how much personal information you included (it increased the score) and how well you agreed with him (you failed if you didn’t). Or the other professor whom I blackmaled into giving me a B in the class because otherwise I promised that I would retake the class with the same professor (he was a government teacher who liked to look smarter than everyone else in “class discussions”, and I actually understood the BS he was shoveling). Or the other professor who liked to hand out his personal views on history, till I asked a question that showed the class how full of BS he was. He tried to fail me but it was already too late.
All that to say that I’ve seen my fair share of bad teachers and there is a reason why, despite my above mentioned “nerd” status in certain areas, that I don’t and never have worked in the humanities.
Very long—and a very enjoyable read!
Ironically, I encountered your comment this morning, and was so long it derailed my intended comment—on the length and nature of the dialog!
I had to come back and finish.
The dialog is lengthy and incongruously rational, and I find I love it!
It tells the story far better than emotional reactions to e.g. Mium’s intrusion. It also suggests that the major characters think rather differently than the usual—and are more interesting as a result.
It’s like we get to see some of their internal dialog and reasoning, in a form that goes beyond the random thought bubble, and also moves the story along by providing for the transfer of information and intentions between characters.
I don’t think I’ve seen dialog like it anywhere. And that’s a strength, not a weakness.
Did you find your keys?
What version of Photoshop did you have? I have some old versions of Photoshop that might work.
Nope; still reviewing. I used CS 4 I believe, though I don’t recall. I’m looking into if upgrading would matter, or if I should be trying to find my old version, or something between.
The main thing I need is the ability to use custom brushes and “save for web” functionality, as those are the two things I primarily used it for. I think both of those functionalities go way back, but it’s possible the save for web has been improved in later versions.
Isn’t there free software (perhaps GIMP) which has the features you need?
I’ve been dying to say Gimp!
Here’s the thing though. To Photoshop experts, offering them Gimp is like having a CEO order a scotch and instead you offer them bathtub gin.
In might be REALLY good bathtub gin, but they’re still going to be insulted.
That said, I love Gimp. It is every bit as confusing as Photoshop to me, and at a fraction of the price!
This. I feel your last paragraph especially sums up the photoshop v gimp situation exactly, at least for people like me.
I’ve apparently tried Krita, for about 4 days, back in 2018, but found it too difficult to get even basic functionality to work. With Gimp, I can at least get some kind of image editing thing going, even if it’s not what I want. While it refuses to admit that saving the results in the file formats I prefer are actually saving the results, it gets the job done about as well as any image editing program can in my inept hands.
All of that said, I’d generally expect someone who actually can do something decent with an image editor to know better what software to use than I would, regardless of whether they were doing stuff at Randal Monroe’s level or Aaron Diaz’s level, or something in between. (For anyone unfamiliar with one or both artists, that’s a pretty extreme range. Back when I did art regularly, I could have imagined myself getting to the point that Randal Monroe is in his graphic arts capabilities, even if I couldn’t dream of touching his communication skills or wit. Aaron, on the other hand, is about as good as they get while things are still very clearly being hand-drawn rather than computer generated. Which is, incidentally, while I picked him over Dave Barrack or Holly Laing for the upper end of the range. They may hand draw, but it’s really hard to tell that’s not rendered much of the time.)
I hadn’t really noticed Dave Barrack’s skills, because his story and character are so weird. Thanks for reminding me.
But Holly Laing’s work I really can’t see mistaking for rendered? She can really draw, and she *loves* playing with dramatic lighting (exploiting her signature color scheme). I love her work, but I wouldn’t mistake it for rendered; her choice of what detail to include is quite different than a render.
I was unaware of Aaron Diaz’s work, but i took a break in the middle of writing this and now I’m all caught up and Dark Science is on my reading list. Thanks much for the intro! I really like his strong use of caricature.
The choice of what to draw, and what to not draw; what to minimize, and what to exaggerate, are a big part of an artists style.
The same principle applies to storytelling, and in visual storytelling, to the balance between the visual art vs the story.
And sometimes it’s neither, but rather something else, and you get Randall Munroe… 🙂 I think xkcd would be diminished by either art or story.
Different render artists focus on different details. There are several different camps with quite a few followers each, and someone only familiar with artists in one of those camps could have the mistaken idea that they’re all the same.
But there are also people who don’t follow a camp, which have very different ideas on what to focus on. I’m blanking on the web comic I’m trying to think of at the moment, but I’m pretty sure I followed a rendered web comic for a while that updated monthly and sometimes not even that, where the artist focused on all kinds of painful little details. It didn’t look traditionally rendered, because they mostly used custom models, and they included details such as “poorly constructed wooden chairs” that looked like the products of actual unskilled carpenters. Also, they had a room with half a dozen such chairs, and they had half a dozen custom models for them, rather than just using the same chair everywhere. They had a bunch of creatures that were clearly neither standard library things, nor built up from a base of simple 3D objects.
I’d guessed that it was a super-talented, exceedingly obsessive traditional artist, drawing on A1 paper and scaling down when digitizing, until someone asked them how they drew such incredible pictures, and they named some standard 3D rendering tools.
As far as Randall Monroe’s work being diminished by story… you know, he’s certainly included stories in some of his work. Like, you know, the one about the barrel? And then there’s self-contained stories, and of course the webby award one. It’s just that they’re usually fairly short, simple stories, almost but not quite entirely unlike this one.
I find Gimp to be unusable. I’ve never accomplished a single useful thing with it. And my history with computer graphics goes back 40 years. So I pay the Adobe ransom (does ANYBODY like their revenue model???).
I figure if I can’t figure out Gimp even a little bit, there’s something wrong. Photoshop I was able to figure out a lot on my own—and there’s a vast wealth of tutorials that make me a lot more effective than I have any right to expect given I only play with it occasionally.
My favorite source of PS tutorials is PixImperfect, Unmesh Dinda’s YouTube channel. Unmesh is amazing at explaining things, and the production of his videos is spot-on. He deals with how to make quite advanced tasks easy by really leveraging PS’s power. (And that power has advanced an amazing amount over the past decade).
BTW, the source for the 1.0.1 version is available from the Computer History Museum. Not that I think anyone should spend time trying to get it to run on anything modern…
Of course, PastUtopia doesn’t need advanced PS.
Looks like you have a good number of other leads but for completeness, in case you do find your keys, the Internet Archive (AKA Wayback Machine), has quite a collection of old software, including CD 4:
https://archive.org/search.php?query=cs%204
The CS4 linked is just a torrent feed to the open source software collection, and possibly an Arabic version. The actual CS4 software is not open source. If the file is available, it is unlikely that an English version key would activate it since adobe has gennerly been smarter about that over time. In the early 90’s they were not, and all versions actively advertised their serial numbers on the local network. It was how their and several other applications enforced the single license usage. Later versions connect to an adobe hosted license server. and refufsed to run if that connection was not available.
Adobe’s marketing pushes educational (discounted pricing) use as a way to get lock in from users and sells corporation/individual licensing at a premium because corporations are looking to hire educationally trained staff who are now more effective with software. I fault the educational institutions for not stepping away from the corporate feeding trough. It is not just Adobe, but Microsoft, Apple, or anyone else who plays the ‘special educational pricing’ game.
Have you considered something like Krita? Programs designed explicitly for drawing instead of photo editing. If you’re having fo learn new tools anyways, might as well check out some of the free ones.
Meanwhile, the Keplers continue to show that scary competence that everyone else is concerned about. Calling Peter hard on political carriers is saying something. How many politicians has he ruined before this latest jaunt?
I use a drawing program for the actual drawing – Clip Studio Pro; it plays nicer with my pen tablet than photoshop.
Photoshop was the best tool I’d found for things like effects and for exporting. The text tools in my drawing program are… okay, but it’s ability to export the image is terrible (as we can see from the above comic… the text does not stay in the bubbles when it’s being exported, which is sort of a deal breaker unless I can solve that.
As for the comic, there’s been a few references to Peter’s various previous exploits. There was a reason he ended up in Palindra away from politicians… and that didn’t really helping as much as some hoped.
Adobe made Photoshop CS2 available for free, if that version works for you. There is a fudge with the license code, if memory serves well, which makes using it a legal gray area if you didn’t have a license before. But you did, so that shouldn’t be a problem.
You might also consider Affinity Photo (I am just a happy customer of theirs). For text and resizing, tt’s as good as Photoshop, compatible with it, and considerably cheaper, especially now that their took 50% off.
That’s good to know; I’ll take a look.
Maybe I’ll took a look at Affinity. Is it a one time fee, or monthly? The monthly is the part of photoshop that I object to. I don’t mind paying for a program, but paying every month isn’t great.
“Ultimately Photoshop is still a lost cause so far (I used an ancient version of it as I dislike the modern subscription nonsense)…”
I feel your pain. That subscription nonsense is ridiculous. If I have any say, I’ll boycott any and all such products purely out of principle, even if I find it affordable.
Anyway, if Photoshop CS2 doesn’t pan out, there are still alternatives. I know a lot of people swear by GIMP. Myself, I’ve been using Paint.Net, though it requires a lot of plugins to be installed to get decent functionality.
PS: Inkscape is an awesome – and free – vector graphics editor. I’ve had fun using it, even if it requires a bit of learning.
> Adobe made Photoshop CS2 available for free,
It looks like that was back in 2013 (from the hits I find with a search) and they afaict they’re no longer available from Adobe.
If you can find your keys, I’m sure the install disks are available on the torrent sites, but you’ll have to virus scan them carefully.
Otherwise your best bet is probably ebay.
Typo for either today or for May 25: On May 25 (Panel 5, bubble 2), Mium’s last name is spelled “Efiate”. Today (very final word) it’s “Effiate”. (It can be excused by claiming that Mium doesn’t particularly care about the spelling of his moniker, but that might require taking the time to actually state that.)
Good point; I should correct that 🙂
Glider told us that the last comic would be a doozy. With all due respect, I think he was off by one. Mium pretty much drops a bomb on Kyle in Panel 6. BTW, Lily is a wonderful character. Another case of the comic being well worth the wait.
I cheated. They’re all doozies.