Graphic Tribe Tattoos

IAQ 1 : Professionalism and Preconceived Ideas

Dali Rău — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 02:14:56 +0000

IAQ, the “Infrequently Asked Questions”

Infrequently asked questions and the infrequent answers given to them, as an addition —hopefully useful but, most likely, just entertaining— to the more conventional FAQ about tattooing and everything else pertaining to the graphic tribe.

Things like “Why is it that you don’t wear silver jewelry on your left hand?”, “Do you have any opening on the next Saturday?” or “Who is Tyler Durden?” :)

This being the first one in this series, I don’t know yet how exactly it’s gonna work, but I guess I’ll stick to the plan and do the customary “question/answer” thing; that should work best.

So enough with the intro, let’s get to it.

Professionalism and Preconceived Ideas

Seldom, but with some kind of quasi-frequency that makes it almost inappropriate for the IAQ category, I get these questions about the way my personal opinions affect my work. More exactly:

Question:: I would like to get a cross/angel/portrait of Jesus Christ/virgin Mary icon/other christian symbol. Is that OK with you, would you do it?
Short answer:: Yes, without hesitation.

Long Answer

While it is true that I am against religion and I believe all this thing about supernatural, almighty beings is just a malevolent bedtime story, this is my personal opinion and this is as far as it goes, at being “personal” and nothing more. I do not try to make it popular, I do not try to make others share it and I never let it come between me and the people with whom I interact professionally.

Tattooing is my best way to express my feelings and views and my work carries a lot of this “personal” in it. Being subjective —whenever possible— allows me to create the best works I’m capable of at the time.

However, tattooing is also my job, which requires a great deal of objectivity and what I call “professionalism”. I don’t always do only designs I like and I don’t always reject designs I don’t like. I am trying to be a professional and this requires a little more than proper sterilization techniques and eye-to-hand coordination.

A cross is just another symbol, like stars, Japanese kanji, Buddhist svàstikas, electric chairs, gallows and so on. I don’t remember ever refusing to use any of them in my designs, I have absolutely no reason to refuse to do a cross, upright or upside down. An angel is just another humanoid, like Spiderman, Tinker Bell, pin-up nymphs or dragon-fighting samurai. Again, absolutely no reason for me to refuse doing them; after all, as far as I’m concerned, they’re all fantastic characters, they’re all supposedly having supernatural powers. And I like fantastic, not to mention that I love drawing human beings. Same thing goes for portraits of Jesus Christ or his mom; they’re nothing but portraits and I love doing portraits! Oh, I loooooove doing portraits!!! Refusing to do a portrait of Jesus Christ would be equal to refusing to do a portrait of Yukio Mishima or Karl Marx or Adolf Hitler or even George Bush, Bill Gates or Steve Jobs… and I can’t think of any good reason —from a professional point of view— to refuse them.

My personal opinions are mine and —if conclusions based on a lifetime experience can be called “preconceived ideas”— my preconceptions too are mine alone and they stay that way. I’ve been doing this for 15 years and —although, in the past, I used to reject certain designs based solely on my feelings toward them— I believe I’ve grown up enough to be able to stay objective and focused, like a pro ought to.

So yes, if these things have a strong enough meaning to you that you wish to express through wearing a cross or the face of Jesus Christ on your skin, by all means, ask me without hesitation. I will not mock, nor make a long face and you can definitely be sure that I will give 100% of what I have to do the best design —and ink it accordingly— for you. As far as you —my precious client— are concerned, you’ll simply be asking me to tattoo you and my feelings toward the theme you choose don’t really matter, as long as I do my job properly.

Just don’t ask me to what church I go, OK? >:)

Cretins of the World Wide Web • Part IV • Special Edition

Dali Rău — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 13:45:48 +0000

Special Edition

The first shared award in history —at least 26,000 winners and counting— and the first one that’s going to keep being awarded, continuously, to everyone who joins the fortunate mass.

Very easy to become a winner too. No special web design or marketing talents needed, no Windoze box required (on the contrary, all you need is a Mac —which is exactly what makes this a “special edition”— and a torrent client), no outstanding skills necessary. Just follow these easy, simple steps:

Launch your favorite torrent app. Anything will do.
Download bootlegged software, like “iWork ’09” or “Photo$hop ¢$4”. It’s free —fuck Appl€ and Adob€, they’re not gonna get your money today— and you can start using it right away, no authentication required.
Install the downloaded software on your machine and make sure you give your admin password when required by the installer. This is important!
Go to your preferred discussion forum and complain about the trojan you’ve just installed on your machine. Breathe through your mouth while observing that you’re not the only one; at least 26,000 other people are on your side, breathing through their mouths exactly like you do, hating everyone who trolls your threads with flames like “you had it coming to you” and worthless comments like “you can’t fix stupid”.
Panic and buy antivirus software. Or better, download pirated copies :)

And then come over here to get your award.

You don’t even need to drop by, actually; the award is yours automatically. How’s that for convenience?

For a bonus prize, spreading the word about the Mac finally becoming as vulnerable to viruses as Windoze will do. No need to know the difference between a virus and the trojan freshly installed on that box; let the pros at SecureMac and the likes worry about the details, that’s their problem ;)

Calibrated RGB Colorspace PNGs in Firefox 3.1 β2

Dali Rău — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 11:11:53 +0000

I was mentioning the other day the latest Firefox beta and the cyan-tinted, monochrome PNGs ~~fuck-up~~ bug that had managed to sneak in.

Here’s what it looks like in Firefox 3.1 β2 under OS X 10.5.6 {left: PNG saved with a “Calibrated RGB Colorspace” profile; right: the same PNG saved with a “sRGB” [sRGB (IEC 61966-2.1)] profile}:

The obvious workaround is to make sure PNGs —and I assume JPEGs as well, but I’m already too bored to do a test case right now— are not saved with a “Calibrated RGB Colorspace” profile embedded. No apps that I know of do that by default —maybe just Preview.app in older versions of Leopard and Tiger— but a double-check before uploading the images won’t hurt.

Of course, this is going to be fixed sooner or later and this “workaround” won’t be needed for too long, so I guess it’s not such a big deal anyway… But it’s good to know how to avoid the bug or —worst case scenario— if it never gets fixed, how to prepare for the cyan-tinted future :)

This minor snafu aside, the latest beta brings in a lot of the good stuff so I’m really looking forward to the stable release to hit the “market”… maybe then I can finally get rid of the redundant -webkit-/-moz- shit bloating my CSS ;)

iWork ’09 Trojan • CLIX to the Rescue

Dali Rău — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 03:57:38 +0000

I don’t care if one downloads music or movies or bootlegged software over P2P. Good for them! They probably have their reasons and —to tell the truth— I’d most likely agree with most of them too.

But if one does download pirated software from a random —untrusted, untraceable, unknown— source, gives their admin password too when installing it and then ends up with a trojan in their /usr/bin and a bunch of other shit all over the place, then I think one had it coming and should be ostracized and ignored when complaining about it.

Fortunately, there are good people out there willing to help regardless of the great stupidity that caused one’s terrifying “computer infected” experience. Although I still believe kamikaze free-loaders shouldn’t get any help —at least not for free— I have to agree that there might’ve been some sound justifications that led them to get the trojan-infected iWork ’09 package and, subsequently, fuck up their Macs.

So —just because I do envy these generous people willing to help out simply because they’re good— here’s a link to the easiest, safest, least technically challenging method: iWorksServices.clix. Your’re gonna need CLIX —if you don’t already have it— and you’re probably gonna need to do a little reading before anything else, but it’s worth it and will definitely save you a lot of trouble.

If you’re one of those affected by this trojan, do it now!

And next time you get something from BitTorrent and the likes, think twice before giving your admin password. Being on a Mac makes you a lot safer than being under a Windows box, but it doesn’t do it magically ;)

Update: 6000 More Idiots

There’s aanother one… and it doesn’t come as a surprise at all. There will definitely be more and more, as the number of free-loader idiots is growing (currently, a little over twenty six thousands and counting).

I am Jack’s total lack of surprise.

iPod Kaput

Dali Rău — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 11:56:24 +0000

Hard drive failure. iPod kaput. Need new one :\

And my PowerBook doesn’t feel so good either… Misery does love company :\

End–of–January Notes

Dali Rău — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 16:03:33 +0000

As they keep saying, verba volant, scripta manent and —you know— later on I might wanna have a link to point to when I do the “told you so” taunt… so, what better way than to just write ’em down and slap an URL on top? >:D

Web Design Stuff

First things first, yeah, the redesign for this blog is done; it’s been done for quite a while now but I forgot to tell about it. The header graphic is still a place holder —couldn’t come up with anything shiny and cute— but it’s just eye candy, so it can wait until I find something better. I think I managed to clean up all the posts too, no more XHTML stuff to fuck up the validation —if that matters anymore. Bottom line, the redesign is done, everything’s black and sexy, all tags are closed and the CSS purrs softly ;)

And since I was at fiddling with them anyway, in the process I managed to redesign the portal, the photo archives and some of the other projects too. Just because I was feeling bad for neglecting them for such a long time :)

Fooled around with this old–new thing called HTML 5 too —out of curiosity mostly— but decided against it for now; it’s not ready for proper use. I mean, it might be ready, but the browsers aren’t ready yet, so that’s something I’ll postpone until the internet grows up.

Speaking of browsers, the two main dissidents have just released pre-release previews [sic!] of their next versions, namely Firefox 3.1 β2 and Opera 10.00 α. To which —for a change— I actually have something nice to say :)

Both, a massive improvement to the current stable versions, both a definite step forward… at least as far as CSS support goes (which is pretty much all I care about when I talk about web browsers).

Firefox 3.1 β2

Among others, finally support for web fonts, through the @font-face thing and proper display of text-shadow, which I applaud :)

Then, the implementation of shadows for block elements, which is another thing only Safari has been doing so far. A little half-assed though, since it’s being done via the proprietary -moz-box-shadow (exactly in the same half-assed way Safari uses App£€’s proprietary -webkit-box-shadow) but at least they got it right. Opera is not there yet, but hopefully one day they’ll catch up too… Anyway, proprietary, standard, it doesn’t really matter right now; the feature is there —which shows it can be done— and I’m pretty sure these details will be polished later on, once 3.1 exits “beta”.

To my surprise —well, not really, but I didn’t expect Firefox to beat Safari at this— there is now support for the “nth” family of selectors (:nth-child, :nth-last-child, :nth-of-type, :nth-last-of-type, :first-of-type, :last-of-type, :only-of-type and the likes). Pretty neat; this —in theory— will be a great deal of help in getting rid of a ton of markup bloat; Opera does it too —incompletely, but accurately for the most part— so, as soon as the WebKit team catches up, I guess this is really gonna mean something.

One blooper though… Not CSS-related, but immediately noticeable: certain PNGs are displayed in a cyan-tinted monochrome. Something to do with the graphics engine —I don’t know for sure— but it’s definitely a fuck-up and I hope they fix quickly.

Opera 10.00 α

One major thing and, as far as I’m concerned, the most important on the list, is the ability to display alpha transparency through RGBA and HSLA color values, via the […]color:rgba([…] and, respectively […]color:hsla([…] rules. This is awesome and it’s one of those “what the fuck took you so long?!” things, since Safari and Firefox have been doing it for quite some time now and translating RGBA values to RGB just for the sake of Opera was time consuming and pretty frustrating :)

They’ve got support for web fonts too now (same @font-face as above) and this is cool, but I wonder, how long before copyright lawsuits will make these browser makers “fall back” to not supporting this feature?

Anyway, the new Presto 2.2 has got other tricks up its sleeve, but most of them don’t interest me yet and —for what I care— I’ll soon be able to design my websites to look pretty in Opera too.

So it’s all good.

Except, of course, for that piece of shit Int€rn€t €xp£or€r, which brings me to: