foolakadugie

Well, the applications I use are generally determined by the specific project. SOme things are just easier to do in Imageready, but alot of time I end up building GIF animations in Macromedia Flash. Basic animations are easy to do in Imageready and photoshop (the new Photoshop CS2 supports animation), especially since you can work in layers and stuff. It is sort of a hassle to bring the layers into other applications. I normally end up using Flash, though.

I try to stay away from using other people's brushes because many times when you uses free brushes out there your art/designs can start to look like other people's work, especially if they are popular brushes. I would suggest that you make your own. It is very easy to do and that way you have much more creative freedom. All you need to do is draw or find whatever you want the brush to be, turn it to grayscale, make a selection in the shpe you want the brush to be, then go to Edit > Define brush. Give you brush a name and it should appear at the bottom of your brush list. It is really simple, yet very powerful.

It is looking good. I think that you should make the legs a bit longer by lengthening the segments from the knee to the foot. Also I think that the foreshortening of the foot on the left is a little off.

I am not much of a poker player. It is fun to play tournaments with friends, but I don't play it in the casinos. I always hit up the Blackjack tables at the casinos. I usually end up winning about $100-$300 on the blackjack tables, so that is what I stick to.

Del the funky homosapien / Deltron 3030Gold ChainsBeastie BoysDalekAtmosphereI also really like the General Patton vs. X-ecutioners album. Mike Patton got a bunch of samples and pieces from the X-ecutioners and constructed his own songs from them. It is not, by any means, normal hip hop, but definitely fuses hip hop with other styles. It is very experimental. RJD2 has some nice musci too which borders on hiphop. It is mostly sans vocals. Dr. Steel is another cross genre artist that uses alot of hip hop in his music. It is a mix of many style including but not limited to electronic, industrial-inspired music, rock, metal, and forms of world music.

Thelelonius Monk is sort of a given. If you haven't heard Thelelonius Monk I would suggest that you listen.If you want to here something sort of quirky try listening to Thelonius Moog. ALthough influenced by Thelonius Monk, Thelonius Moog is jazz made primarily with moog synthesizers from the 1970's. Hiromi (Hiromi Uehara) is a nice jazz pianist. Some of her music also features drums and even some electronics sometimes.I like the more experimental spectrum of jazz. Sun Ra was a very interesting musician. Although he was sort of a crazy man, he had some very complex and unique music.There is a band called the Flying Luttebachers that started as a sort of avant garde free jazz with drums and sax. Over the years, their style has transformed into an interesting chaotic fusion of free jazz and heavy metal. Weasel Walter is an amazing drummer. Even after moving into the heavy metal scene, their song structure is still influenced and characteristic of jazz, not rock.If you are looking for something mellow, check out Portishead. She makes some very atmospheric acid jazz.

DOSbox is a DOS emulator that you might be able to use. It runs on linux.

I loved that game. I played it all the time as a kid. I should download it from that Underdogs site. I think I will. I think it was a great game to play as a kid to get kids thinking and solving problems. This thread brings back alot of memories. They have the Incredible Machine series on http://www.the-underdogs.org//?gtnjs=1 This is a great site with a bunch of outdated games and software.

Nice work. I like how you made it with a basic paint tool and refrained from applying all kinds of filters. Nice style. The only criticism I have is that I think that the nose is a little awkward. I think there is too sharp of an edge when the shading goes from dark to light. That enclosed light ares of the nose yanks my eye down into the corner of the picture keeping it from moving back through the rest of the image. Maybe add some more "scribbles" down there similar to the ones above the eyebrow to give it a bit of gradation..

Here are some preloader tutorials that you can look at. Depending on what you want to do there are a few variations in the list. Preloader tutorials

Are you exporting as an swf? If so, you can adjust the output compression (granted that this may reduce image quality). As suggested previously, you could try using Save for Web in the photoshop. If the jpegs have alot of flat color you might consider drawing in flash or illustrator as vector images. This may bring the file size down.

Well with a quick search on google it seems like a fair amount of tugzip users are experiencing similar problems. There is a mention in the official FAQ that problems like this occur after adding extensions/plugins. tugzip FAQ

Yeah I am not expecting it to be a replacement at all. I agree that it would be nice to see a competitor. Many times competition catalyzes innovation. It would be interesting to see what other companies could bring to the table. Although I do have to say that flash is quite flexible. Actionscripting opens up so many possibilities.

Curiosity is a strong drving force in my life. I am never really quite sure about anything and enjoy the feeling of discovery. I like to experiment. I will listen to the most atonal and obscure music sometimes, just because it is something that is unlike anything I have heard before. My philosophy is that everyone has something to offer. I can learn something from everybody (young or old). I would rather make friends than make enemies and keep an open mind with what they have to say. Much can be learned even from children.

I prefer coke. Pepsi is a little too sweet for my taste. I will drink either, but when given a choice I choose coke.

I have no problem with gays/lesbians. I am around them all the time and have quite a few gay/lesbian friends. Through artschool and jobs at design departments I have been around them for a while. There always seems to be more gays in the art/design world, or maybe they are just more accepted in those groupos and feel comfortable with comming out. I have always made an effort to accept people for who they are or who they want to be. It's their life. I don't like people telling me how to live my life and I have always stuck to my own values and ways of doing things. So, I can't really complain about others doing their thing.

That is what I use (SmartFTP). It has all my favorite/frequently used FTP sites saved and the some useful functions. I guess it gets the job done. All I really need it for is uploading and downloading things to servers and occassionally renaming and deleting files. Long time ago I used WS_FTP.

Wow, this looks like quite a step forward for 3rd party Flash authoring tools. I am downloading the demo now. Judging from the screenshots of the interface on the website, there seems to be alot of features. For the most part I have avoided third party programs because they never seem to bring anything new to the table except a easy, bland, dumbed down version of the real Flash. I remember downloading Swish when it came out and being very dissapointed. I like the idea of importing layered PSDs. That alone gets bonus points in my books. I am curious to see the what the actionscripting abilities are. I suppose I could always export an SWF and decompile it back to a FLA if I wanted to make more advanced changes in Flash.

I am new here, but bye bye. I hope all goes well in the moving process.

||| EXTREME COCOA ||| I like making homemade cocoa. I am not really a big fan of the prepackaged cocoa mix, because it's never choclatey enough. I am the type that likes bittersweet/dark chocolate and I drink my coffee black (with sugar). This recipe may also result in a good endorphin rush. I normally just sort of do it by taste without exact measurements, but these are approximated directions. Keep in mind that I normally use a fairly large mug for this (maybe 2 cups worth). aproximate prep time = 3 or 4 mintues - Buy some powdered, unsweetened cocoa (usually found in the Baking aisle). - fill a mug with maybe 2/3 milk and 1/3 water and microwave until hot (maybe 2 minutes for a big mug). - mix in cocoa powder. I usually put in about 5 (somewhat heaping) tablespoons. This usually gives you a rich, thick, cocoa. Depending on your personal tastes for flavor and consistency you may want to adjust this. - I will usually add about a tablespoon of sugar. I prefer to use light brown sugar, because it adds a bit more flavor. - Then I usually add a some vanilla extract. I usually use about half a capful fo those small caps that come on the tiny extract bottles. - stir it all up and you are done! Be careful, it may be hot!

I prefer Photoshop and Illustrator over fireworks, but I never really used fireworks all that much. I always found adobe products to be quite easy to learn. The first time I used photoshop I just made a huge mess on purpose and clicked everything to see what it did. When I was younger I used an adobe application that was sort of a primitive photoshop-esque application though so I learned how to use layers etc in that. WHen I got into photoshop I felt like I had already been using it for a while. WHat I like about adobe is that all of there programs work well from one application to the next. The work process just seems very fluid wheather you are going to weeb, or motion graphic or print, etc. I still use other macromedia programs like flash and dreamweaver quite often, though.

I use dreamweaver and flash and notepad primarily. Notepad is just quicker to make little changes on things sometimes. Occasionally I will use Imamgeready to slice things up and then bring that into Dreamweaver to clean things up. As far as graphics fo rthe sites, I use photoshop, illustrator and flash.

X-rays can expose film, but I have run it through with no problems. Hi ISO films might have more problems though. I remember they made me put it through the x-ray and told me that it should be fine. I think at the time I had 400 film on me.

I would suggest that you play with scale a bit to establish a hierarchy in the information. A very effective design will lead you eye brain in some order while "reading" the design. Make the masthead large and maybe scale down the other information a little. I think that information like the address can be smaller, because if you have got the reader's attention they should have no problem reading on to find the address. As others have said maybe if the background illustration was dimmed. You could go for a dark background with white text or a light background with dark text. I agree that you might try a different typeface that is more appropriate, but careful about legibility.

Check out flashkit.com. It has a ton of helpful tutorials for people of all levels and many of them have open source FLA files for download to help you out. That site is one of my favorite flash resources. Also Flash comes with it's own tutorials and help files.