Chirography

It’s been seven months since my last exam. Seven months since using a pen was compulsory. Tomorrow afternoon could be interesting… at least it should be relatively warm due to the time of day. I’ve studied a little but not absurdly lots. Not too stressed, truth be told. Apparently arts degrees are a waste of time, anyway, so I have no reason to bother myself. I need to disappear for a while and work a lot, but that would close so many doors and I just know I’d never come back (to most of them). That moves from the realm of “miss” into “lament”. I came across a wonderful word in the marginalia to a certain poem of Eliot’s, wherein “high sentence” is explained as “sententiousness” (ironically, I had to find a definition for the explanation). The OED renders it thus:

1. Full of meaning; also, of persons, full of intelligence or wisdom. Obs.
2. Of the nature of a ‘sentence’ or aphoristic saying.
3. Of discourse, style, etc.: Abounding in pointed maxims, aphoristic. In recent use sometimes in bad sense, affectedly or pompously formal.
4. Of persons: Given to the utterance of maxims or pointed sayings. Now often in bad sense, addicted to pompous moralizing.
5. Of a symbol: Expressive of a whole sentence; opposed to verbal. Obs.
6. Of composition: Consisting of detached sentences. Obs.

This word must get more of a workout. But if I weren’t studying arts, obscurantic cant would be altogether frowned upon. I was reading someone’s blog the other day (in a fit of procrastination, no doubt) who held Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises to be a complete waste of time on account of the message of the book boiling down to “Humanity, you all suck and are powerless, etc.”. The blogger in question held it to be utterly redundant on account of Hemingway’s failure to offer a solution. It begs the “so what” question in its failure to propose action. Perhaps said blogger would do well to be a little more existentialist about literature. Literature serves as social entertainment at least as much as it serves as an avenue for problem resolution. And, if it’s any consolation to you, dear reader, if I were really feeling like a wanky arts student I would have made the word “problematise” (or one of its derivatives) a part of the previous sentence. There is hope for me yet (if only in that I loathe that word with a passion that escapes language itself, and along with that most who use it).

*tags under “long and wordy sentences”, as if there were ever a non-wordy sentence*

Wild weather at Bronte

Lolwtf?

Sony Ericsson v630i camera-phone snap in low light… Photoshop redeemed it a little. Geek numberplates rock (as does the black-on-black Mitsubishi logo!).

Adam’s last week running Tackles

I don’t have any good wedding photos (well, might do on the two miniDV tapes, but… you know) so nothing to share there. Mark and I are appreciating Adam even more now he’s gone gallivanting off on a honeymoon a few thousand kilometres from Paddington School. He’ll be back on and off throughout the year, which is definitely a good thing. The photos above are from his farewell inside the church, during which Warwick got myself and Mark up and tried to interview us without our prior knowledge (or, more accurately, being expressly told we wouldn’t be…) and accordingly managed to make complete asses of ourselves. It was one of those situations where you’re balancing between answering seriously and giving fluff responses because you don’t want to get too drawn into things (on account of this not being intended as an interview in the first place)… I ended up alluding to something we’re running in about September, and then neither of us could even remember when it was… a fantastic first impression. :/

All that aside, God was pretty good to us the first week we were on our own, despite a school fête being held simultaneously in the rooms we normally meet in! We’ve got a social coming up this Friday and the last week of term is on Sunday (but I’m bailing on account of not being able to do maths and consequently having said yes to a study camp that begins a little too early).

And yes, the sword did get passed on.

Why no, vector artwork is not universally superior for lines

I’m cooking up a booklet for a study camp at the minute that has a simple grid-lines (ruled maths paper) background and initially traced it with Illustrator because it looked, err, linear enough to be a fair candidate for such work.

The trace had to be a little eclectic for realism’s sake, so I didn’t just do the redraw with Ctrl + D transform ninja skills, but let the software trace it. Big mistake.

It was one of those things that InDesign got a little upset about the complexity of — which is okay — and had to import as encapsulated postscript instead of as native vector data — which is also okay. Trouble was, it wasn’t just borderline too-complex, it was stupidly over the edge. I stuck it on the A-Master (which keeps me sane and the .indd filesize down) and got to work for about a week on the rest of the content and so forth. As we get closer to press (I was aiming for today… others apparnetly have different ideas) I’ve started doing the Indd->PDF shuffle and discovered the absolute pain of waiting for it to “render” (basically that’s what it’s doing) the EPS onto every page as it creates the PDF file.

I endured this for about two days and then finally snapped this morning, went back to Photoshop with the source image and processed it to make it look similar enough before pasting the raster scan into the A-Master in the traced thing’s place.

As if by magic, the generated PDF size dropped from 55MB to under 4MB.

Raster images are your friend.

p.s. hopefully I’m back here now. Am away next week with GPRS Internet only, then in New Zealand (with Internet, albeit with uncertainty about having a computer in the accommodation). Yes, busy as ever. On Facebook quite a lot, because status updates are more managable than full blog posts!