RIP, Microsoft Paint. MS Paint, the first app you used for editing images, will probably be killed off in future updates of Windows 1. There are many fan games based on The Legend of Zelda. Some games consist of entirely original. The Super-Powered Evil Side trope as used in popular culture. The fight's not going so well for our hero. He's wounded and at the end of his strength, and. ![]() ![]() Paint 3. D. Microsoft lists the 3. Windows 1. 0’s next autumn update, a little X marking the end of an era. The app is certainly a relic, from a time when the casual computer user couldn’t crack open Photoshop or Skitch or Pixelmator or thousands of web apps. MS Paint can’t save image components as layers or vectors; it’s for making flat static images only. It doesn’t smooth lines or guess at your best intentions. It does what you tell it and nothing more, faithfully representing the herky- jerky motion of drawing freehand with a computer mouse. It’s from a time before touch, a time before trackpads. As more sophisticated options appeared, Paint’s janky aesthetic became a conscious choice. Paint” became the metonym for that aesthetic, even if an image was actually created in another app. TV Tropes lists major limitations that came to define a certain look: the wobbly freehand lines, awkward color handling, and inappropriate export settings that give Paint its distinctive look. In 2. 01. 4, Gawker’s Sam Biddle noted Paint’s influence on conspiracy theory images, calling the form “Chart Brut.” In amateur detectives’ attempts at identifying the Boston Marathon bombers, the simplicity and jaggedness of Paint evokes the “crazy wall” aesthetic of red string and scribbled notes, apparently without irony. The same year, internet historian Patrick Davison explored Paint’s influence on the last decade of meme culture, particularly Rage Comics. The outsider- art aesthetic feels appropriate to the relatable everyday content, and makes the art form unthreatening. Of course, Paint offered a few features to smooth things out, like the circle and line tools and the “fill” tool, all used in the stoner comics of the early 1. Crucially, those circles still had jagged curves. The bright colors of stoner comics are flat, as MS Paint didn’t support gradients (without an elaborate hack). Contrast those pixellated lines with the slick, stylish face from this art tutorial: This slickness is built into Paint’s successor, Paint 3. D. From the moment you start sketching, Paint 3. D smooths out your art. It also supports automatic selection tools and content- aware fill to rival Photoshop’s.)By automatically improving art, Paint 3. D hides the process behind the image. Paint’s sloppiness is probably why rage comics got so popular. Looking at a rage comic, you can tell exactly how it was drawn, and how you might draw one yourself. By delivering exactly what the artist draws, MS Paint forms an image that the viewer can mentally reverse- engineer and imitate. Unless you go absolutely nuts with it. Reddit user Toweringhorizon painstakingly assembled the drawing “To a Little Radio” using MS Paint tools like the oil brush, stretching the medium while maintaining a pixelated look. It’s one of the top submissions to MS Paint subreddit, a beautiful collaborative art gallery. Scrolling through this art feels like flipping through the sketchbook of the most artistic kid in high school. There’s an accepted roughness, a desired minimalism. For example, the exquisite raindrops in the work above are reflected in a flat, featureless tabletop. Like a transistor radio, Paint might be showing its age, but this tenacious little gadget should not be underestimated.“To a Little Radio” doesn’t even come close to testing Paint’s limits. As we say goodbye to the app that shaped an era, let us watch this bizarrely soundtracked time lapse of drawing Santa Claus in MS Paint on Windows 7 over the course of 5. We can only believe this is real because faking it would be even harder. I’ll make this short: I’ve dropped the Dishes project because (1) I haven’t had enough time to work on it, and (2) someone else has already built Faye, which. The Case Against Twilight (Why Twilight Sucks)This post was originally published in November 2. Joe here. After I posted Confessions of a Guy Who Likes Twilight, Liz asked if she could post her rebuttal. I always enjoy sibling- like sparring with Liz, so I said yes. Here’s Liz with her vampirical rant on all things Stephenie Meyer. Saying that the Twilight books are a polarizing series is an understatement. As much as Joe enjoyed the books, I can’t stand them. Full disclosure: I haven’t read them. However, I’ve read enough excerpts from Reasoning With Vampires to feel like I can speak with at least a little bit of confidence.)I’m just going to say it. Stephenie Meyer is not a good writer. Cue the defensive comments below. Three Reasons Twilight Isn’t Well Written. I’m not talking about her storytelling. Like I said, I haven’t read the books. I don’t know how Stephenie (good lord, all those e’s) puts together her paragraphs to form a cohesive narrative. I’ve only read excerpts. But you know what? You don’t need to know the storyline to critique poor sentence structure. Here are my three arguments against Twilight. Misused Semicolons. Stephenie writes some weird sentences. And I don’t mean in the sense of, “Oh, Bella is experiencing vampires for the first time; obviously things are a little weird.” I’m talking about sentences that are like runaway trains that can’t be stopped, with semicolons as period placeholders. ![]() No, Stephenie. Finish the thought and be done with it already. Example: The dark road was the hardest part; the bright lights at the airport in Florence made it easier, as did the chance to brush my teeth and change into clean clothes; Alice bought Edward new clothes, too, and he left the dark cloak on a pile of trash in an alley. Don’t get me wrong; you know I love a well- placed semicolon. These are not well- placed semicolons. The smattering of commas thrown in for good measure does not help. Periods are good, everyone. Periods are your friends. Strange Use of Commas. And then there are things like this.“Stop!” I shrieked, my voice echoing in the silence, jumping forward to put myself between them. Anyone else think the visual of Bella’s voice leaping from her throat to break up a fight is amusing? It’s okay if you chuckled; I did. There are better ways to write this sentence that keep Bella’s vocal chords comfortably in her throat where they belong. Violation of Verb Tense Agreement. Finally, I present a violation of the most basic verb tense agreement rule. I couldn’t decide if his face was beautiful or not. I suppose the features were perfect. First of all, gag me with a spoon. Secondly, who let that present- tense verb (suppose) out past its bedtime? Narrative verb tense needs to be consistent. If you’re in the past tense, stay in the past tense (with the exception of dialogue). I will say this about Twilight: it gets people reading. For that, I will commend it. That’s about all the praise it’s getting from me. Do you have a case against Twilight? Share your case in the comments below. PRACTICEWell, since we’ve had our own rant today, why don’t you present your own case against about something you find particularly annoying. It could be about Twilight or rap music or bad drivers. Just let ‘er rip. Write for fifteen minutes, and then post your sparkly practice in the comments so we can watch the fireworks. Liz Bureman. Liz Bureman has a more- than- healthy interest in proper grammatical structure, accurate spelling, and the underappreciated semicolon. When she's not diagramming sentences and reading blogs about how terribly written the Twilight series is, she edits for the Write Practice, causes trouble in Denver, and plays guitar very slowly and poorly. You can follow her on Twitter (@epbure), where she tweets more about music of the mid- 9.
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