Category Archives: Review

Rant, Review

Alternates to Adobe Photoshop

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I’ve never been a big fan of Adobe, never liked Photoshop (to me, it was a giant mess of user-unfriendly gui and unintuitive options), but also was considering finally jumping the bridge to start using it in various ways in my art, using Manga Studio if I ever actually decided to draw a comic.

With the recent purchase of my new drawing tablet, I quickly realized my old go-to, Paintshop Pro 7, which I’d been using for years and pretty darn good at it nobody actually realized I wasn’t using Photoshop, wasn’t up to the task of modern drawing tablets. That’s fair, I hadn’t been in drawing form since I left college and stopped modding.

Shortfatotaku recently (rightfully) criticized Adobe for it’s subscription plans and at one point was like he was perfectly fine with his license of the older version until it became obsolete.

Days later Adobe comes out with that absolutely insane announcement previous licenses are void and companies/studios can be sued for using old software and are doubling their subscription prices.

Needless to say I won’t be hopping on the Photoshop bandwagon and it kind of needs to learn a lesson, so I’ve been collecting alternatives, some free, and some not, to Photoshop in the hopes of getting the word out and breaking the monopoly Adobe has on the digital illustration world.

Autodesk Sketchbook went free recently, entirely. I’m currently trying it out.
https://sketchbook.com/

MangaStudio/ClipStudio is the same program but recently had a name change. CD versions are still called Manga Studio. I bought my license a while ago for Manga Studio 4 on sale for $25. It seems to have a learning curve but I was able to do good looking line art with itrecently. It’s geared toward making comics and manga. You can get a trial. There’s several different programs and there’s a 3D modeling studio in the set.
https://www.clipstudio.net/en/dl

GIMP. When on Linux I tend to use GIMP, though I find it almost as irritating to use as Photoshop in a lot of cases. It has some useful features. There’s a version for Windows.
https://www.gimp.org/

Paint.NET is one of my favorites, and a must for modders of Skyrim or similar games. It handles DDS files natively which was a big bonus considering I refused to use Photoshop and everything else I had at the time I was modding required plugins. It’s free. It’s a bit like GIMP but in my opinion, easier to use.
https://www.getpaint.net/

Procreate was recommend by a friend of a friend, though I have not tried it. It seems geared toward computer tablets and things in the Android/Iphone nature. I may have tried it if my Galaxy Note 4 hadn’t been broken by obvious deliberately broken patch.
https://procreate.art/

Drawpile is for multiple people to draw on the same canvas, which sounds like a fun time with friends.
https://drawpile.net/

Affinity is a low cost alternative to Adobe. I know little about it but the price tag seems reasonable. It looks very well put together and the gui looks somewhat close to Paintshop Pro and somewhat userfriendly and I’m downloading the trial for Designer now. (It requires an account ??? and email verification ???? to download a trial since it counts as a “purchase.”)
https://affinity.serif.com/

Full disclosure: I’m not being paid by anyone to list these programs in any way. So yep, these are my actual opinions.

Considering there are a lot of free, really good programs out there to try there’s no reason not to try them or keep them around unless space is an issue. Sometimes I’ll load up a program just for one specific process it handles better than my usual and it’s worth it when doing a lot of drawing.

For the moment I’m going to stick with my good old Copics until I get a new workflow set up.

Rant, Review, Star Trek

We Meet Again

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After my last I wound up being swept into the vast world of the Witcher and never got around to actually play Fate/. And I gotta say I’m still brilliantly yellow that *some ports* got all the dlc *for free* after we all went and bought the *limited edition*.

I could go off on a tangent for a million pages why *certain companies* current practices dlc are absolutely disgusting and designed just to milk just that bit more money out of people, and I can’t believe why people buy into them, but I feel lucky in Fate/’s case that the dlc seems mostly to be additional content like outfits and junk, unlike some others where the actual end of the game is hidden behind an “expansion.”

Anyway, after the Witcher, my beloved cat died suddenly of cancer we all thought she had been bouncing back from after her treatment. Not more than a month later, I finally, finally got a surgery appointment myself. Which is great! Because I’ve been waiting two years for a surgery that many people get the second they’re diagnosed with the exact same problem. What’s not so great? The massive cut in my side is just as annoying as the issue I had surgery for. And it’s taken forever to heal. And it could totally have been done with less invasive means! So now I’m stuck with a huge, bloated, painful red scar on my side. Yay.

That was my year in a nutshell.

As for what I’ve been playing recently… I’m not sure I get it. Akalabeth seems to be purely dungeon crawling, occasionally surfacing to buy the massive amounts of food you need to not instantly starve. Gog help you if you encounter a thief because it can steal the axe right out of your hands.  For 1979 I wasn’t expecting an epic, but maybe just a little direction other than “go kill all the trolls in the dungeon.” Very different experience than Might and Magic 2 that way. I think I’m going to skip a couple of the other early Ultimas.

Maybe it’s just me and early video games. Many of them I found impossible to play- in the 80s. I remember trying to play Frogger and the damn thing zipped by in two seconds flat, making it impossible to guide the frog across the road, just because I was trying it on an early 1990 Windows machine. All that memory! It made things so fast. But that’s what happens when you design a game to be as fast as possible by using up every scrap of memory it can. There was no real solution for that back then, other than using a slower computer or something that used up the extra. Of course, these days you can just fiddle with settings in DosBox. Lately, I’m finding Might and Magic 1 impossible because of the interface and the fact it’s way more difficult to tell where exactly you are than MM2. Crappy controls, interfaces, barely there physics on platformers- why do I play retro again?

Other games I’m playing right now are Shadowrun, and just trying to clear out some of my backlog. Who knows, I might start making headway with HumbleBundle falling to the dark forces of IGN.

Other things are, oh boy I have a lot to say about Star Trek Travesty I mean Discovery. The story of how the humans of Middle Earth went to war with space faring orcs!!!1! Add in tons of DRAMAAAZZZ ala Star Gate Universe and really obnoxious characters and really bad dialogue and it makes Enterprise look halfway decent, even with the huge “XINDI XINDI XINDI XINDI XINDI!!!” arc in the middle. Man, I got really tired of hearing Bakula saying Xindi, Park’s wibbling and Blalock’s lips, and it still did a better job of being a Trek than… this.

Star Trek was always about ‘things will be better, look at this better future we can make together, look at the discoveries and things we could be doing’ and it came in the middle of the Cold War. I don’t know if anyone’s noticed, but TV has become super dark, 2edgy4u, depressing, and dramaoverclocked in the last, oh, 17 years. I was looking forward to the new Trek as another beacon, and all I got was more conflict, Klingons that make Worf, B’Elanna and K’leyr unviable (and, well, icky) in the new universe, and ridiculously placed Alice quotes and Beatles songs.

Although that part is a bit hilarious because I was browsing a forum post somewhere last week that discussed the various songs and movies shown in the Trek series and someone went “Public Domain. That’s why everyone loves Mozart and Shakespeare, and hates Beatles and movies.” And then later that night suddenly Beatles song.

The one good thing about Discovery? They obviously have the budget to do good visuals. It’s just too bad the camera work is utter crap so you can’t see it more than a second, barely getting focused on it, before it flips to something else. Flip. Flip. Flip. Flip flip. Flip flip flip flipflipflopflipflipflipfilplfiplfiplfkjlakj.

Review

Return, Switch, and unboxing Fate

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It’s been a while. Still struggling with my health plus all the points of settling in a new country. Looking at my post lists seems to have a few missing that were supposed to go up a while ago, but I’m not too bothered about a couple of posts yakking up the differences in gaming services in different countries. Let me just sum it up: being an expat in another country is a pain in the ass and region restrictions need to die a hard, hard death because I completely missed out on the stupid code-only Pokemon this last year. Do you know how annoying it is trying to get one from overseas?!

Secondly, just let me say that, in the wake of the Switch reveal Nintendo is cutting their own nose off to spite their face because the one perk of gaming on a Nintendo console was the free online play. It’s utter BS, especially considering you can get better service for free from places like Steam, which I’m not that particularly fond of either. Nah, my go-to place for old games is GOG. Also, if we’re seeing the end of the 3DS life what the heck does that mean for the recently released Pokemon? Are we going to get an even shorter lifespan for them than Black & White? I doubt a lot of kids will want to pay for battling and trading when they’ve been enjoying that for free all this time.

Anyway, the important subject: Fate/Extella. I just got the limited edition for my birthday from Marvelous! and couldn’t wait to unbox it, so I thought I’d share.

View once it popped out of the shipping package. Excuse the camera, my phone’s on the fritz (the Galaxy Note series is not doing very well lately) so of course my webcam is doing it’s best to be obnoxious. It does not deal with moving very well, so you’ll have to deal.

The box is covered with a plastic sleeve with the characters printed on it. For a moment I thought that was the front of the box. Digging Cu Chulainn’s look this time around.

Opening the box, you get a cloth poster, with handy rings for hanging on the wall. To be honest, I thought it would be slightly larger, but it’s nice quality for a cloth poster. Although, next to Tamomo’s head there’s a area where it looks like the printer ran out of reds right at that point, but I think I saw the odd color change on the original image too.

The Material book, in full English. It would be better than it is if they hadn’t translated Arturia as “Artoria” and I’m still scratching my head that they decided to use that for the English versions of Fate/s, the feminine forms of Arthur is Arthurine and Arturia. After how many years of fan translations, I’m pretty darned tired of the overly literal Japanese to English. (If you’ve ever tried to read the Fate/Zero translations, you probably know where I’m coming from.)

The illustrations are nice and clear, and there’s information on the characters in the back. It’s pretty thick for an extra in a box set. Now if only they’d give us an English option on Grand Order.

The game itself, pretty standard PS4 case.

And lastly, the character cards. There’s a range of all the Servants involved starting with Nero. The cards themselves are plastic and slightly translucent which gives the image a cool effect. On the back you see a white silhouette of the character in reverse.

I’ll have to review the game itself later on, when I’m not trying to finish up belated Christmas presents.

For about 65 pounds, not too bad a deal on a collector’s edition, though I’m still miffed we didn’t get the Nero figure I was hoping for (and not even the oppai mousepad, buuuut honestly I’d rather have had a Cu mousepad). On the bright side, the poster will look nice next to my /Zero posters.