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past!krad: oh it'll be fun doing anthology layout in krita as a crash course and getting a taste of what 1990's graphic designers had to go through.
present!krad: who hurt you, you motherfucker (lol)
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so i'm doing lay-out (text & images) of an anthology in krita.
and oh boy is it a study in masochism if it wasn't already apparent. but there's reasons why i'm doing this beyond 'editing an explicit naziexploitation anthology on the work mac's a no-no, and krita's honestly the best art program on linux and acceptable enough to scrape by with patience and stubborness'. and that is:
i feel like we're getting uncomfortably close to the point of no return when creative programs won't let you create specific artworks.
the thing is, the technology and the precedent is definitely there. adobe's limited what you can create in photoshop since the early 2000's (CS2 i think) when it wouldn't let you scan/edit/save US dollars, and maybe other currencies. google's deleted explicit works on gdrive/gdocs before (interesting tech support ticket from the IT director of the Tom of Finland organization < isn't it unhappily a bit on the nose for whose stuff gets deleted first?). and i would bet you dollars to donuts adobe does the CSAM/CSEM photography hashing on every subscription-based version of photoshop now, likewise some free tiers of creative programs online won't let you edit "hate symbols". i'm not arguing for/against any of these, just saying that the technology and motivation is reaching a tipping point.
and to loosely paraphrase from memory the words of a lolisho art creator friend, "we're one election cycle away from lolisho being effectively banned". i don't think that's alarmist either, given how that specific art's suddenly become a third-rail topic on a lot of platforms when it wasn't, even as recently as pre 2020.
if i'm being totally honest this -the concern about art content itself being blocked from digital tools- was a good 40% of why i jumped to linux (mostly other than being truly fed up with the enshittification of both win/macs).
i feel like the other big elephant in the room colliding with the other bits mentioned above is how AI generated images blur the lines of "art" vs "real photography" for the layman. one of the objective ways you could always say in defense of lolisho art is that it had to be drawn (or written); no matter how you "feel" about it, a drawing is a drawing. computers generating a drawn style from a photograph though... opens up a pandora's box that i think, frankly, none of us are ready for. and certinally not the various legal systems of countries already dealing with a moral panic. platforms already usually err on the side of "delete/block first, ask questions later" and... i'm not wholly unsympathetic to that (moderation is a herculean task), but as an artist who regularly draws taboo stuff (and with loads of friends also doing the same), it does put my teeth on edge of various canaries in the coal mine.
like most things in life - no easy answers. but i do feel like the linux+krita stack gives one a little more runway, a little more elbow room than corporatized software.
present!krad: who hurt you, you motherfucker (lol)
---
so i'm doing lay-out (text & images) of an anthology in krita.
and oh boy is it a study in masochism if it wasn't already apparent. but there's reasons why i'm doing this beyond 'editing an explicit naziexploitation anthology on the work mac's a no-no, and krita's honestly the best art program on linux and acceptable enough to scrape by with patience and stubborness'. and that is:
i feel like we're getting uncomfortably close to the point of no return when creative programs won't let you create specific artworks.
the thing is, the technology and the precedent is definitely there. adobe's limited what you can create in photoshop since the early 2000's (CS2 i think) when it wouldn't let you scan/edit/save US dollars, and maybe other currencies. google's deleted explicit works on gdrive/gdocs before (interesting tech support ticket from the IT director of the Tom of Finland organization < isn't it unhappily a bit on the nose for whose stuff gets deleted first?). and i would bet you dollars to donuts adobe does the CSAM/CSEM photography hashing on every subscription-based version of photoshop now, likewise some free tiers of creative programs online won't let you edit "hate symbols". i'm not arguing for/against any of these, just saying that the technology and motivation is reaching a tipping point.
and to loosely paraphrase from memory the words of a lolisho art creator friend, "we're one election cycle away from lolisho being effectively banned". i don't think that's alarmist either, given how that specific art's suddenly become a third-rail topic on a lot of platforms when it wasn't, even as recently as pre 2020.
if i'm being totally honest this -the concern about art content itself being blocked from digital tools- was a good 40% of why i jumped to linux (mostly other than being truly fed up with the enshittification of both win/macs).
i feel like the other big elephant in the room colliding with the other bits mentioned above is how AI generated images blur the lines of "art" vs "real photography" for the layman. one of the objective ways you could always say in defense of lolisho art is that it had to be drawn (or written); no matter how you "feel" about it, a drawing is a drawing. computers generating a drawn style from a photograph though... opens up a pandora's box that i think, frankly, none of us are ready for. and certinally not the various legal systems of countries already dealing with a moral panic. platforms already usually err on the side of "delete/block first, ask questions later" and... i'm not wholly unsympathetic to that (moderation is a herculean task), but as an artist who regularly draws taboo stuff (and with loads of friends also doing the same), it does put my teeth on edge of various canaries in the coal mine.
like most things in life - no easy answers. but i do feel like the linux+krita stack gives one a little more runway, a little more elbow room than corporatized software.
no subject
gosh, i really feel for those poor moderators having to deal with the AI of kids. :<
but i loved your moon phase story with you watching it with your mother, since it really is also a fantastic example of why all of these topics are so tricky to untangle or to flatten down into another "us vs them" debate when... yeah.
you mentioning affinity publisher makes me want to check into it again. having to rely on libreoffice for zine formatting's not fun XD
no subject
And for sure, glad that you understood where I was coming from. A few hours after I posted my comment, I went "oh dear, I went off too much" XD As someone who loves language, the flattening of topics gives me so much psychic damage. Having read Orwell's Politics and the English Language recently gave me back some brain cells. Nothing is ever as simple in life, even though it would be nice if it were lol.
NOT LIBREOFFICE FOR ZINE FORMATTING, WHEEZES XD I love LibreOffice but oh god, I don't know how that would work. I shiver in awe at your skills. xD
As for Publisher, I really like it! While I still have IND CS5 and did get to use IND CC, in the first thing I made in Publisher, I was able to do all the things I wish I could do in IND. Without the bugs either lol. Sometimes if you're not careful, an effect you did in CMYK would export very weirdly for a digital only copy--and well, of course, if you do the thing in RGB and export it to print, lord help you. There's still some things IND still does best, e.g. justify paragraphs and paragraph styles, but Publisher is a great program. Serif (the company that does Publisher) have been able to code so that Photo (=Photoshop) and Designer (=Illustrator) can open anything from their Adobe brethren but they still haven't been able to crack the IND code. That said, the program can still at least open IDML. So it's a workaround at least.
I will say that it's at least "buy once, it's yours forever" and they've recently upgraded to a "Version 2" of the suite, which features a universal license for all programs in the suite. The only issue I've had in V.2 that is exporting takes a looooong time, especially if you have more than....50 pages lmao. The beta version is a little better, but unironically, folks have recommended downsizing back to V.1 if the export is a big issue. (If you do a file in V.2 though, there is no backwards compatibility. I think they're still looking into that.)
I haven't tested these programs because money, but if you ever test Publisher again, some folks recommend PDFMarkz and IDMarkz if you want a bit more control.
...lol, this turned into a sales pitch XD
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holy shit 'politics and the english language' slaps so hard. ty ty again for reccing that, gonna be rattling around in the brain cells for a long time.