magnusjnorgaard: things do feel easier
because i'm less attached to the ease itself
it's kind of like getting direct deposit
you no longer look forward to your paycheck as much, or have the thrill of depositing it, but it's better because there's less of a hassle and it doesn't distort your perceptions as much
i had this realization while reading dilbert, for what it's worth
what do you think the next comic i write will be about?
 
 
Ashley: Hmm
Hmmmmmm
The cartoonist could pull away to a different plot, hitherto unseen, that would actually be really funny to me given the context
 
 
magnusjnorgaard: what do you mean "pull away"?
 
 
Ashley: I don't know why I put it that way, I just meant switch, change scene or act
 
 
Sent at 4:44 AM on Saturday
Ashley: The comic in which the green king orders nørgaard to choose simple storylines with solid cause and effect and the good guys winning with their pluck etc didn't even look to me like it was meant to be taken seriously
 
 
magnusjnorgaard: that's a bit of a caricature of what he said
i did actually mean for it to be taken seriously, and for nørgaard to take it seriously, but things went off the rails, both for me and for her
it's not an easy thing to do
 
 
Sent at 4:48 AM on Saturday
magnusjnorgaard: i realized something about comics the other day
it's not just the narrative medium that's the easiest to put down and pick up again at arbitrary points, or to do other things while experiencing, it's the most prehensile medium
because, as scott mccloud says, the pictures and the text are so close together in terms of abstraction
the spacialization of time which is inherent to consciousness is represented the most transparently in comics, of any medium
only in comics can a character simply point at the future or the past or the space between moments, or their own thoughts
 
 
Sent at 4:53 AM on Saturday
magnusjnorgaard: what i'm actually doing right now is making a new template of character poses and such, getting rid of the ones i don't use and putting in new ones i've drawn but didn't include in the template
this includes all the new judy poses
this is something i've known i should've done for ages, but i never got around to
suddenly there's nothing stopping me
because even though i intend to make a comic, there's nothing that pulls me to do so immediately
and that little bit of slack is all that's necessary to do the little things that i would've been doing all along if i'd been more objective
 
 
Sent at 4:59 AM on Saturday
magnusjnorgaard: once again pointless perfectionism seems to be reduced another notch or two, also
this time from the other side
less desire for the ideal vs. less aversion to the reality
 
 
Sent at 5:03 AM on Saturday
magnusjnorgaard: judy now has the most poses of any of the main characters in the green strip, which is not ideal
ludolph is cut and paste and nørgaard is nearly cut and paste
oh, wait, rodney has a lot
 
 
Sent at 5:06 AM on Saturday
magnusjnorgaard: here's an interesting sign that i'm in review rather than equanimity
i have a song stuck in my head
it doesn't bother me, though
tip: always save PNGs twice in paint
it messes up the colors slightly the first time you save a PNG, but if you simply hit CTRL+S to save it again, it'll fix them
 
 
Ashley: That's... Why?
 
 
magnusjnorgaard: "I'll spell it Micro$loth Winblow$ in a delicious twist"
hey, here's a good helping thing you could do
see if anybody's made a clone of MS paint that has less bugs or more undo layers or a customizable initial palette
i actually use the windows 95 version, which has only three undo layers, instead of the windows 98 version with i think 10
because it has an initial palette with primary colors in it
the non-primary colors used for the red king and his advisor's skin tones are from the '98 palette
 
 
Ashley: Can't you import and export palettes in both versions
 
 
magnusjnorgaard: no! you can't in either one
what an absurd notion
 
 
Ashley: Oh
 
 
magnusjnorgaard: no, you can pick new colors individually with the eye dropper or by double clicking a palette entry
and it switches back to the default palette every time you save, so.
actually that's not true
but it does something like that, i forget what
 
 
Ashley: I see
 
 
magnusjnorgaard: ah, ok, it does it every time you save a file as a new file
so, every time you save as
but regular save doesn't make it happen
 
 
Ashley: Well, I will look around, after work, which you miraculously woke me up in time for
 
 
magnusjnorgaard: you're welcome!
 
 
Ashley: I'm already there though, feel free to keep talking
 
 
magnusjnorgaard: ooh, big lessening in the urge to go on tangents starting with "remember x"
that's going to change things
you might have to program a good paint clone from scratch, i've never seen a paint program that was an improvement on ms paint for windows 95, even though it really seems like one would exist
they always lack some essential element, like color erase, or moving selections around and being able to change what color is transparent, or ctrl+dragging a selection to copy it
or more commonly, they have anti-aliasing on everything
often they lack the 2x2 pixel brush, which is crucial
 
 
Ashley: Yeah, MS Paint had good tool metaphors and stuff going on, I can't tell if they were uniquely well thought out/intuitive or they're just the default we grew up with, though
 
 
magnusjnorgaard: well, like, irfanview has a paint toolbox, and it's not terrible, but it has some issues
for instance, with the brush tool, it does the correct thing where you can draw with the left button to use the foreground color, draw with the right button to use the background color
but with the line tool, only the foreground color is available
there's no color palette, either, you either use the eye dropper or you pick colors through the dialog box every time
which essentially puts you in the absurd ZZT situation of being motivated to stick an STK board into your picture temporarily so you can eye-dropper from it
 
 
Ashley: People do that all the time in all kinds of applications, interestingly
 
 
magnusjnorgaard: while drawing lines, you don't see the result, you see a 1 pixel XOR line until you release the button, whereupon it's replaced with a line of the width and color you specified
to be fair, it doesn't fuck up the ends of the lines, and MS paint does
 
 
Ashley: Perhaps because it better approximates the use of an actual palette
 
 
magnusjnorgaard: rectangles are slightly rounded on the corners and there's no option to make them behave otherwise
but by far the kiss of death for the irfanview editor is that the selection tool is the default irfanview mouse pointer, which means selections cannot be dragged about, at all
this makes it utterly unusable to construct comics with
 
 
Sent at 5:33 AM on Saturday
Ashley: Is it so implausible to just learn the methodology in gimp or something, since it's at least capable of everything you've described given only a few more customizations or key presses
Andrew hussie had to do that
 
 
magnusjnorgaard: is it, though?
i suppose i could write an autohotkey script that would flatten the image after every operation
the gimp has lots of little issues everywhere from square 1
for instance, i open the comic template in ms paint, and i'm ready to use it
i open it in the gimp and it's zoomed to 25% because it's too big for the screen, so i have to hit the zoom menu, pick 100%, then resize the little window to be big, then move all the toolbars and crap out of the way
 
 
Ashley: Well, it's got a single window now now
Mode
That doesn't reset every time you open it
 
 
magnusjnorgaard: you might think since i use so much copy and paste that layers would be helpful, but they're not, because which set of objects i want to treat as a unit during any particular selection, cut, copy, paste, or move operation is always changing
 
 
Ashley: Also changing the zoom level to 100% is one hotkey, 0 or something
 
 
magnusjnorgaard: i'm just saying, it's not a good sign
 
 
Ashley: Hmmm
 
 
magnusjnorgaard: the real problem with using the gimp is that my workflow is extremely organic, it's not as though i draw out the panels, then do backgrounds, then place each character where they go within the panels, then draw the custom elements of the scene, then word balloons, then the text in them, i'm constantly, CONSTANTLY moving things around after i put them in, and if i want to move "a panel", and "a panel" consists of parts of 18 separate layers, that's a bit of an ordeal
 
 
Ashley: You'd think someone would have just programmed a comprehensive open version of ms paint with some obvious improvements
 
 
magnusjnorgaard: and moving a panel is actually an optimistic example, usually it's things the gimp does even worse, like moving HALF a panel, to make it wider, or moving the left end of a word balloon, and then in order to connect the lines across the gap, i stretch one end of what i separated
in ms paint, this requires doing the following 1. drag a selection box around the half a panel to be moved 2. drag the selection 3. drag a thin selection box around the frayed end of what was moved 4. drag the appropriate handle of it until it stretches across the gap
in the gimp, i don't even know how many operations that would take, even assuming your panel was all one layer
when you draw a selection box around something in the gimp, then try to move it, it doesn't even do that, it just changes what you're selecting, which is idiotic default behavior
instead, you have to manually switch to the move tool
then you have to switch back to the selection tool to do your next selection
and i hope you have the right layer selected, because otherwise when you switch to the move tool and move your selected section, the wrong thing will get moved
this is a mode error, which is one of the signs that your interface is a piece of shit
the thing is, these days you could have your cake and eat it too, there's no reason the gimp couldn't have an MS paint toolbox in addition to the regular one, which would manipulate the image as if it were all one layer
selection would slice through the entire stack, etc.
but they don't
conversely, MS paint could secretly put every brushstroke, line, shape, and text object on a different layer, and only treat them differently if the user specifically requested it
but it doesn't
it wouldn't actually be that different from having unlimited undo
in terms of what would need to be stored
every operation on the image would simply be a separate layer, transparent aside from the pixels which updated (not just the pixels which changed, though, because then if you drew two red lines crossing each other, and moved the first one, there'd be a gap in the second)
actually, it'd be better if some things produced more than one new layer, like copying and pasting a section of image, and some things changed existing layers, like the erase and fill tools
but the crucial thing would be to make the layered nature of the image something which could be utterly ignored if the user so desired, not impacting their workflow in any way
unrelatedly, something that could be fixed in an ms paint clone is that when you ctrl+drag a selection to quick copy it while leaving the original in place, that operation is lumped together with whatever came before it in the undo stack
this is a bug
i assume no one noticed it because the ctrl+drag operation is a secret
like the shift+drag operation, which uses the selection as a brush, essentially
i never use that, because i don't do that kind of art
mm, actually i used it a bit in one of the jonny comics recently
but it's quite rare
it is a secret though, you don't even see it mentioned in most of the MS PAINT SECRETS guides
another one i use fairly often is CTRL and the plus sign or minus sign to make a copy of the selection which is twice as big or small
one thing ms paint is clumsy at, which it could easily be made much better at to everyone's benefit, is rotating or flipping the image or selection
you have to go image, flip/rotate (or CTRL+R), then hit OK for horizontal, down arrow for vertical, down arrow twice for 90 right, or down arrow twice, then tab, then once or twice again for 180 or 270
i don't use ms paint's flipping and rotating functions unless it's important that the selection i'm changing remain in the same spot
if that's not an issue, i cut it, ALT+TAB to irfanview, hit H or V or R or some combination of those, then CTRL+A, CTRL+X, ALT+TAB, CTRL+V
it's actually somewhat more keystrokes, but i already know them, and hitting RRR to flip something 90 degrees three times is more intuitive than hitting DOWN DOWN TAB DOWN DOWN
if you could simply hit H or V or R in ms paint itself, obviously that would be the best
 
 
Sent at 6:11 AM on Saturday
Ashley: In one sense I agree with what you're saying, and in another I think ms paint's featureset arose from its algorithmic simplicity, and your particular workflow and attendant problems with other applications are an outgrowth of that featureset
 
 
magnusjnorgaard: i disagree, i think the liquidity of the WYSIWYG editor is a critical factor in the comedic flexibility of semi-improvisationally making a comic
part of why scribbit's comics often don't work is that he makes them in the gimp, so if at the last minute he realizes a different, funnier way he could do something, but there's not enough space in the word balloon in panel 2, he just doesn't do it
you don't make pokey the penguin in the gimp
as funny as homestuck is, the drawings are stiff, stiffer than they were in problem sleuth
in fact, scribbit is at his funniest when he makes comics without editing at all, essentially rendering all the complex editing features of the gimp irrelevant
layers just aren't funny, for the exact SAME reason that they lend themselves to a "professional" workflow
poorly planned comics is ABOUT layers colliding in unintentional and catastrophic ways
 
 
Sent at 6:30 AM on Saturday
magnusjnorgaard: i'm actually tempted to defend having only 3 levels of undo as well
it leads to having to juggle things between the undo buffer and the clipboard and the canvas in such a way that you can track them in your short term memory, which forces you to actually see them
if you have unlimited undo, you can sleepwalk through the process
but i wouldn't quite come down in favor of 3 levels, unlimited would be better
it's more of a tradeoff than people appreciate, though
i often think of the achewood strip where they're trash talking some vaguely defined "people from webcomics", and roast beef says "your activities are so poorly conveyed!"
not having layers or unlimited undo pushes toward drawing in a minimalist style with very little visual noise, because noisy complicated scenes with elaborate backgrounds are much harder to pull apart
and this has a side effect of making them more readable
 
 
Sent at 6:39 AM on Saturday
magnusjnorgaard: if you're doing a strip about dark luigi shooting mario and crying, that might not be important, but if you're depicting a five-layer simulation loop between alternate universes, it will be utterly unreadable unless you can boil it down to the essential elements
 
 
Ashley: Well! What additional features would improve paint's improvisational capability
 
 
magnusjnorgaard: mm, easier flipping and rotating, fix the undo buffer for the ctrl+drag operation, easier zooming, perhaps with the mouse wheel since currently that does nothing useful
dynamic guessing as to what color to consider transparent in a selection, based on the color of the pixels in the border
so if i'm moving somebody's mouth on their face, the background color becomes the color of their face, etc.
fix the wonky ends on the line tool, and make the lines drawn with the line tool look as though they were drawn with the brush tool by someone with remarkably steady hands, currently the 2 pixel line and 2 pixel brush produce diagonals of different widths
fix the fact that rectangles and ovals are off by a pixel from where you start dragging
make the eraser bigger
allow the text tool to be used when you're zoomed in
let the user customize the palette, and make the palette have more squares, right now it has 28, it could easily have 100, instead there's just wasted space
(customize the default palette, i mean)
fix the thing where if you use the line tool immediately after saving an image, the program crashes
make it so copying a large selection doesn't take O(N^logN) time
allow the user to set all the defaults in terms of brush sizes, whether selections are treated as though they have transparent parts, filetype to save as, etc.
and make the default defaults less stupid, default filetype is currently 24-bit bitmap
fix PNG saving, obviously
add a magic wand tool and a select by color tool
primitive strict ones would be fine
one useful thing would be to have, rather than layers or undo history, a clipboard history, a library of everything that had been copied or cut to the clipboard from paint
this would best be persistent across sessions and pooled across instances
and actually, being able to through the clipboard history would be a better use of the scroll wheel than zooming
*to flip through
actually, is that true?
probably not
make that CTRL+SCROLLWHEEL instead
by "flipping through the clipboard history", i mean like, you paste a new floating selection, but then keep CTRL held down and scroll, and the floating selection changes to the thing you copied before the current thing, then the thing before that, etc.
whatever you ended up leaving on the canvas, if anything, would be shuffled to the top of the clipboard history