So This Is a Thing, Apparently

So, today...
Today hasn't been all that great; I've slept most of it away, and just generally not felt like making anything. I was going to belt out a quick webcomic I'd been tinkering at for a few weeks, but that managed to fall through in the worst way. It was about a Craigslist ad I saw years ago. It was in the personals section, and most of you can probably already guess where this is going. In short, it was the kind of "offer" that just makes you hate everybody. It was so spiritually bereaving at its demonstration of idiocy and depravity.

I look around for it today and it's gone. I should have realized it wouldn't stay up forever, but I couldn't really find anything quite like it. I could have recreated it, but that would have hurt the impact a little. You really can't make this stuff up; It was about 26 "words" from a girl (and I say "girl" because I don't think she was even half the age she claimed to be, which is another matter altogether) seeking a guy with a truck. Why a truck? Because it's the best place to... yeah, it was one of those ads.

I'd practiced the reaction panel on a note pad we keep on our refrigerator for grocery lists, after some modifications by my roommate (who I admit must have been very puzzled by an image of someone staring at a computer screen with a look of utter anguish), I tore the page down and set it on my table, thinking I'd upload it for a laugh later on.

This morning, before my fruitless search for the "truck" ad, I saw this weblog entry linked in the European Paper Company's Twitter feed: [link] about crossed letters. It's also known as "cross-hatching" but not like the hatching that we artists know. It's a way of saving paper (back when it was expensive and postage rates weren't much better) where you turn the paper sideways and carry on writing. Most of the examples were borderline illegible, but that's the Catch 22 of cursive longhand; it lets you write faster, but chances are you're the only one who will be able to read it unless you slow down. After browsing a few other journals of people talking about this little oddity, I wondered if maybe the "crossed text" would be easier to read if it were a different color. That little scrap on my table would now fulfill a different, yet hopefully more interesting, task. In the end, I think the black is a little easier to read. If nothing else, you can just use a red filter to hide the crossed text, like the character stats on old Transformers boxes.

The scan was frustrating. Albeit I can hook my scanner into my computer now (since I'm back to using Windows), I ended up trying the "scan to card" function. Because it saves it as a low-res JPG, it makes it very hard to work with in post. At least my camera is high-res and much more adjustable by comparison. Nothing I tried really made the red pop. The "auto enhance" function came close, but I don't like relying on those. I ended up compromising, and this was the best it turned out.