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A Very Happy Birthday to scribeoflight.

Indispensable for lolcats and bringing down governments

Photoshop is 20 years old today. Its creators first thought it might appeal only to a very small number of users, maybe a few hundred of the world's top ad agencies, but today probably tens of millions worldwide find it indispensable (including myself) and it's also one of the world's most pirated pieces of software. So far I haven't really used Photoshop in any way that approaches the full kind of range it's capable of, but I still find it invaluable when editing photos and I probably use it for a few hours almost every day of the week.

( Some creative stuff, mostly for fanzines. )

2010 books

12) Philip K. Dick, Our Friends from Frolix 8, 1970
Thors Provoni goes out into the galaxy in search of a Deus ex Machina to liberate ordinary humans from the dominance of a cabal of genetic freaks, the New Men and the Unusuals. He finds it in the god-like beings the Frolixans, but bringing them back to Earth begs the question of just how friendly they might be. Meanwhile an ordinary guy called Nick Appleton who's going through a separation from his family (his wife's called Kleo, also the name of Dick's second wife), falls in with some anti-government types that get him into a mountain of trouble. Dick spent too much time working on the background canvas instead of giving us much of a foreground thrill even though the pace does pick up towards the end. Another character going through a divorce is the despotic leader Willis Gram, probably the story's best-drawn character although Frolix 8's 'dark-haired girl' this time is Charley Boyer, who's unintentionally responsible for the break-up of Appleton's marriage, and the reasons behind that split are not particularly convincing at all. Frolix 8 has an interesting and well thought out ending that explains what PKD was trying to get at all along (the question of where we may find God) and it's certainly the best thing about the entire book, which otherwise plods around not going very far for way too much of the journey.

2010 books

13) Jeff Burk, Shatnerquake, 2009
William Shatner checks in as Guest of Honour for the first ever ShatnerCon, but after a reality bomb goes off all the characters ever played by Shatner are suddenly sucked into our world to seek out and destroy the real Shat. I loved this rather libellous idea particularly as the book itself was not sanctioned by Shatner, and it's actually prefaced with a plea that Shatner doesn't sue. I hope he doesn't and doubt he would, because this novella just adds handsomely to the Shatner mythos even though he's portrayed as thinking his fans are a bunch of "sniveling little sycophantic shits" in the opening sentence. Wonderfully bizarre, and 10/10 for concept.