From: owner-alloy-digest@smoe.org (alloy-digest) To: alloy-digest@smoe.org Subject: alloy-digest V7 #9 Reply-To: alloy@smoe.org Sender: owner-alloy-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-alloy-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk X-To-Unsubscribe: Send mail to "alloy-digest-request@smoe.org" X-To-Unsubscribe: with "unsubscribe" as the body. alloy-digest Sunday, January 13 2002 Volume 07 : Number 009 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Alloy: Re: alloy-digest V7 #8 ["Ian Gifford" ] Re: Alloy: Depressed Man Diagnosed as 'British' ["Blagg & Norling" ] Alloy: Bishounen Science Master Thomas Dolby ["Chris & Beena Cracknell" <] Alloy: Re: Alloy - (OT) Instrument Value Rating Web Site [CJMark@aol.com] Re: Alloy: (OT) Oberheim OB-1 [CJMark@aol.com] Re: Alloy: Forty Plus [Russell Milliner ] Re: Alloy: Bishounen Science Master Thomas Dolby [Russell Milliner ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 12 Jan 2002 01:53:06 -0500 From: "Ian Gifford" Subject: Alloy: Re: alloy-digest V7 #8 Hi all delurking here to say that I envy all of you that have been able to purchase the 40 CD so far... let me know how you like it... full out reviews would be nice (I may have missed some!) My computer is still dead but a new one is on it's way... I am now officially a working musician with about 70 to 100 gigs a year as either a drummer or a single act. I was invited to a studio for a free 3 day session so I am currently in rehearsals and arrangement mode. I am going to analogue tape and then to digital which will be interesting and all the sessions will be at least 80% live, so I am expecting some interesting stuff. The musicians penciled in so far are among my cities finest so I have great confidence in the performance. I hope to be able to share some stuff with you all in the next month or so... I think of You all and Thomas often and am ecstatic to know that the new (teaser) CD is out and I thank Thomas for thinking of us once again. I mean last year "Fever Pitch" and now... I Hope that you all are having as great a new year as I am having and wish you all the best. Ian _________________________________________________________________ Join the worlds largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. http://www.hotmail.com ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 12 Jan 2002 11:05:36 -0000 From: "Blagg & Norling" Subject: Re: Alloy: Depressed Man Diagnosed as 'British' My god, another article I can use in a buzz meeting when they are feeling down.... Even the name Frank Spencer starts to make me laugh! Cheers Brian! Trevor... - ----- Original Message ----- From: "Brian Clayton" To: Sent: Friday, January 11, 2002 11:14 PM Subject: Alloy: Depressed Man Diagnosed as 'British' > > Thought some of our Alloy members who hail from across the pond might get > a chuckle out of this one: > > http://www.thebrainstrust.co.uk/article.25.2137.html > > BC > > -- > "I remember thinking that Windows 1.0 was a joke. > Of course, that hasn't changed... the joke has only become more sinister." > -- from IRC ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 12 Jan 2002 18:06:17 -0500 From: "Mary A. Brown" Subject: Alloy: Forty Plus Well, I got my copies of Forty today and appropriately enough, my lowest number is 40! Yours may be a rarity, BC, since all four I received are autographed on both the sleeve and CD. TMDR looks fabulous on the cover, very svelte and debonaire. Hope I look that good at 40! What specifically is the cover art that you did, Robin, because stupid me doesn't get it. Did you make the lovely scarf that he's wearing? Nice job on the layout and graphics, Dave! I'm very pleased with the sound. I've got a bunch of Neil Finn live material that was taken from the soundboard which comes across as a little sterile but this really has a warm and intimate feel. What a treat to finally hear some tracks from A&H live, especially "I Love You Goodbye" which has special significance to me (I'll always remember getting caught in the rain on Bourbon Street with you, Paul). And what an inspired performance! Something tells me that's going to be the one that will have me reaching for the repeat button. When I read that "Hyperactive" was on the disc, I was sort of disappointed since it's one of my least favorite Dolby songs but it's quite a corker live. I'd like to say a belated thank to all of you who wished me a happy birthday. I've been dealing with multiple health issues over the past month (including finding that I'll need more surgery :-/) so I've been remiss in email correspondence. One last question, do any of the archivists in the group have a copy of TMDR's appearance on the late night show Joan Rivers had, circa 1986? I was a starving grad student at the time and didn't have cable so I never got to see it. Anyone? Russell? Bueller? I'm sure I'll have more to say since I've only given the Forty disc one spin but I anxious to hear what everyone else thinks. Mary ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 12 Jan 2002 21:38:05 -0500 From: "Chris & Beena Cracknell" Subject: Alloy: Bishounen Science Master Thomas Dolby Normally whenever I buy a new piece of hardware I ignore a lot of the "free bonus!" software that comes with it because 99% of the time it's total crap that has to be included as a "free bonus!" with something because nobody would every buy it. Well because of my artritis I had to replace my mouse with a graphics tablet not long ago to ease the strain on my wrists and hands as I do my graphics work. It came with a bunch of graphics software which I totally ignored because I've already got graphics software. I'm one of those fussy old stubborn-as-a-mule stick in the muds types when it comes to my software. I learn a piece of software, and then I stick with it and resist all efforts to change unless something really cool comes up. For all my graphics work I used Paint Shop Pro. Why? Because that's what I used when I had a 486. Of course my computer artwork skills were a big heap of suck until just a few months ago when after being forced to do four computer graphic comicstrip panels each week began to have the effect of improving my meager talents. Then around the end of november my computer graphics skills made a huge leap with the introduction of the graphics tablet. Holy crap! I can't stress enough how great it is, if you're doing any serious amount of computer graphics work, to have a graphics tablet. It takes a little getting used to, but once you do it's almost like working with paper and pen/pencil/brush. So it motivated me to look into more and more of that PSP does and experiment with all the different gizmos. Wow, you can do some neat things with that program. Then I discovered something that will suck up your free time like a blackhole... Oekaki BBSes. Oooh, Oekaki BBS + Graphics Tablet = No One Ever Sees You Again. An Oekaki BBS is like a regular BBS except that instead of starting a message thread by typing a post, you use your mouse and a very simple built in Java paint program to draw a picture. I became addicted to Oekaki big time. The PaintBBS Oekaki boards are the best, they've got this really sweet watercolour tool and I could do effects on this simple little software that I can't do with PSP. It's amazing. I've spent hours trying to duplicate the effect offline with PSP and I just can't do it. So Oekaki began to eat all my spare time, just churning out doodle after doodle experiementing with the different shading and colouring techniques trying to find out what works and what doesn't. Great fun! All the time I wished I had something like PaintBBS for offline to make pretty watercolour-type of drawings for that dramatic bishounen romance type anime/manga look. Well just the other day I decided to actually look through the software that came with my graphics tablet. Lots of cutesie little do hickies that I don't really need or will over use, but then I saw something that looked cool. It was a program from Corel called "Painter Classic" and it was a graphics program specifically set up for use with a graphics tablet to emulate traditional arts media like pencil and ink and opaque and watercolour paints and palletknives and all sorts of other fun. Oooh! So for the past two days I've been mucking around with this program and enjoying myself. It is so freaking cool. I actually like it better than PaintBBS. It's like methadone for Oekaki addicts. I no longer am consumed with the need to draw on Oekaki BBSes. Look! Look! My hands arn't shaking! And man, can you ever do stuff fast on it. The only problem is I haven't yet figured out a way to pencil a rough sketch, then ink it, then erase the pencil without erasing the ink the way I draw my comics regularily so I'm currently limited to doing rough sketches directly in ink and then painting. There's a feature called Tracing Paper that is supposed to let me do that but damned if I can figure out how it works and the manual is useless. Oh well, it's still fun. I've been experimenting by drawing watercolours of my comic's character as well as "gift art" for some of my friend's comics. I've been drawing a lot of pics of my one character Freddy. I really enjoy drawing hir. S/he's always happy no matter what, s/he just has this sort of blissful mindlessness about hir and I always find that if I'm feeling a little bummed out over something all I have to do is draw a picture of Freddy and suddenly I'm feeling better. Her manic blissfullness is contageous or something. Here's my latest Freddy pic. http://ghastly.keenspace.com/images/freddysit.jpg Anyways, then I got to thinking about Thomas's new album and all and I thought. "What would Thomas look like if he was a character in a japanese bishounen romance manga?" http://ghastly.keenspace.com/images/thomaswc.jpg The images might come up 404 when you click it. Keenspace is in the proccess of moving servers again so the service will be a little flakey at best over the next couple of weeks. So if you get a 404 just check back later. What's truly amazing about this Painter Classic software is how fast I can draw these pics on them. I can do the pics in less than an hour which is much faster than I could CG a similar pic with PSP or especially with the Oekaki programs like PaintBBS (plus I'm not restricted to a canvas of 350x350 like the Oekaki programs). Anyways if anyone here has used Painter Classic and knows how to get the damned Tracing Paper function to work I would be happy if you could give me a hand. I've tried doing what the manual says. Draw a rough sketch, clone the rough sketch, go to the clone and click on tracing paper. Draw my ink overtop it and click on tracing paper again. Instead of just getting a picture which is my inked drawing, I end up with a picture that is my ink drawing and the cloned image together. It's bugging the crap out of me. If I could get this feature working I might well start doing my entire comic with this program (no more sketchbooks). Crackers (Damn, I should have drawn in some blowing sakura petals from hell!!!) Ghastly's Ghastly Comic - http://ghastly.keenspace.com ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 12 Jan 2002 21:58:02 EST From: CJMark@aol.com Subject: Alloy: Re: Alloy - (OT) Instrument Value Rating Web Site Hi all.. Awhile back someone posted a link to a site that gave estimated values to used musical instrument.. mostly keyboards. It was a cool site.. and evidently I neglected to save it on my list of favorites.. Can anyone please send me the link again? Thanks!! Mark ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 12 Jan 2002 22:05:44 EST From: CJMark@aol.com Subject: Re: Alloy: (OT) Oberheim OB-1 Hi again.. I don't know who might be interested.. but I've got an old Oberheim OB-1 synthesizer that I ended up with after it sat in the attic for years. It doesn't work right now.. as far as I know. It would take a collector or someone who REALLY wants to dig into this thing to appreciate it. I'm trying to find out if it has any value in the world of old keyboards.. it's doubtful.. but if anyone has an idea.. or if anyone REALLY wants it.. let me know! Ciao for now.. Mark ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 12 Jan 2002 22:22:54 -0500 From: Russell Milliner Subject: Re: Alloy: Forty Plus Well, I just received my copies, and I have #30 & 31 (autographed on sleeve and CD). I am just listening to it now, and of course it sounds great. Believe me, I've been listening to all of you who received your CDs before me, and anxiously checking the mailbox each day! As for: Mary A. Brown wrote: > > One last question, do any of the archivists in the group have a copy > of TMDR's appearance on the late night show Joan Rivers had, circa > 1986? I was a starving grad student at the time and didn't have > cable so I never got to see it. Anyone? Russell? Bueller? Nope...I unfortunately do not have it. I doubt that this is something that will ever come out in repeats either. Maybe someone could contact the network that hosted it to see if there is anyway to get a copy of this? - -Russ ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 12 Jan 2002 22:53:09 -0500 From: Russell Milliner Subject: Re: Alloy: Bishounen Science Master Thomas Dolby Chris & Beena Cracknell wrote: > Well because of my artritis I had to replace my mouse with a graphics tablet > not long ago to ease the strain on my wrists and hands as I do my graphics > work. It came with a bunch of graphics software which I totally ignored > because I've already got graphics software. I have been using a 6x9 Wacom tablet for about the past 5 years, and I'll never have a computer without one again! Eventhough I do graphic work only occasionally, it is fantastic for every day work. I once heard someone say that trying to draw with a mouse is like drawing with a bar of soap. As for Painter..I used it years ago when it was known as Fractal Painter and came in a paint can which was neat marketing and packaging. I lost touch with the package after a few updates and changing company hands a few times. It definitely is the best package I have ever seen take advantage of the tablet. Unfortunately, I have pretty much no talent for drawing from scratch, so most of my work is a collage of scans and modifications of other works which lead me to use Photoshop much more often. > Anyways if anyone here has used Painter Classic and knows how to get the > damned Tracing Paper function to work I would be happy if you could give me > a hand. I've tried doing what the manual says. Have you checked around the net or on thier website? I know there are many tip websites for the app. Also there are some good 3rd party books on the app that you can go read and take notes at your local book/coffee shop. - -Russell Milliner milliner@pobox.com http://www.tmdrfan.com/ Wondering why so few sign his guestbook.... :( and why the wife's website (about eeyore) gets several signings daily for the past 5-6 years! ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 12 Jan 2002 23:06:51 -0500 From: Russell Milliner Subject: Re: Alloy: Thomas Dolby CD TextureWorld wrote: > I notice on the back the copyright specifically forbids duplication, > "ripping", and file sharing of the songs! First time I've seen that on > any album (probably not the first there is, but first I've seen it). > leave it to Mr. Dolby to always be on the cutting edge, even in the > mouse type. ;) Just receiving the CD...I have been curious to read this, and this is very interesting. It specifically says "Unlawful copying, "ripping", file sharing or redistribution..." Now this could be read in more than one way (at least the way I see it). Is it indicating that if you do any of those items unlawfully that is prohibited or is it saying that you cant do those at all? I would believe that I could rip these songs to mp3 to be included on my "fairly complete tmdr mp3 cd" which I listen to at work on a TDK Mojo CD MP3 player. It is much nicer to carry around a single cd than a large stack of cds and albums. One of these days I'll get a DVD writer and burn the TMDR videos/concert to DVD from the hideous laserdisc format! or maybe someday they'll release them to DVD. I know there isn't much TMDR can do about it since most of that is controlled by the conglomerates. - -Russell ------------------------------ End of alloy-digest V7 #9 *************************