Yeah I bought her in a show, I dressed her up in a cheap red cotton dress.

[reddragdiva]

On one UK poly mailing list, a Daily Mail journalist is so desperate to join this week's hot media buzz* that she is offering to pay people who will talk to her about polyamory. I must say the cash is profoundly tempting, if it weren't a sort of self-Godwination. Insert "house prices split between three" joke here.

Last night I visited arkady and worked on a shiny new business card for her while she sewed doll clothes. Everywhere she takes Ayame, people love her, so cards are needed in short order. VistaPrint will do two-sided full colour cards of anything you upload, total £64 including postage and VAT for 500 cards. Which is a great price. We'll see how the cards actually look, of course ... one error I've only just spotted is doing the back on an LCD and not checking on a CRT — looks a bit dull. But 500 cards should go in a couple of weeks.

I haven't done DTP with serious intent to print production in about nine years, and even battling OpenOffice.org didn't spoil it. At least one doll should be up on eBay this week, unless Arkady can make a sale through the doll boards.

Geeks: when you install MediaWiki and can't get texvc to work, you may have to do for i in 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9; do for j in 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9; do rm $i$j*.tex;done;done before /tmp is very usable again. Work out why you can't just do rm *.tex.

* Metro, Daily Telegraph, Sun, Scotsman, Times, Guardian, Independent. You may want the vodka to hand.

Comments

[redcountess]

that doll that Diva-kun is groping has no knickers, shameless hussy!

[reddragdiva]

She's just exuberant!

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

Wild guess says it blows up the shell's name expansion because there's just too damn many of them...

The card looks great designwise. Might want to tighten the sepia shot contrast a little to wash out the dark some more for a bit more period, and I think the group shot needs a background hanging to de-clutter it. (Even a white sheet would probably do, and it doesn't have to be particularly flat.)

[reddragdiva]

Got it in one!

The front is actually a full-colour shot using a halogen bulb and no flash. If you look, Arkady is really getting very good at doll photography ... the back pic is all we had to hand, and she really needs business cards on hand now; probably she should arrange the dolls against the blue silk backdrop she's been using for other things.

Of course, five minutes after she finalised the card order, she took a shot of Ayame as Galadriel an unspecified fairy princess who certainly isn't trademarked or copyrighted by the incredibly rich estate of a famous fantasy author, a shot which will be on the next batch, I can tell you. Assuming this batch come out okay, because I checked the online proof again this morning and there appears to be a spurious grey rectangular splotch on the front of the card. We shall see if any human bothers glancing at them before they send them ...

[sarcaustik.livejournal.com]

Spooked by dolls?

[reddragdiva]

I can just imagine that Zombie Britney doll with an axe in its hand.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Ask purplerabbits about her experience of selling her story. Verdict: they'd better offer a *lot* of money.

[reddragdiva]

Got a public link? If so, the list needs it. Was it the Daily Mail in particular?

[vampwillow]

re LCD -v- CRT remember that you will be *printing* thus a CMYK image will be used so you should check the gamut there not for RGB ...

[reddragdiva]

Way ahead of you. Unfortunately I couldn't get the CMYK plugin for Gimp to work and Arkady's inkjet is misbehaving, so I couldn't test directly, but I did take care to desaturate both images so as to try to avoid gamut issues. And I presume the online proofs have been put through RGB->CMYK->RGB. And this batch will go quickly enough. Collector's items!

Btw,

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

There are at least two articles in the Rocknerd submission queue.

Re: Btw,

[reddragdiva]

I saw the site was back up this morning, will be processing the queue this evening!

[steer.livejournal.com]

So if there's only 2000 poly people in the UK how come I seem to know so many. Guess I was born lucky. :-)

[steer.livejournal.com]

Actually, what's really amusing is that those articles about poly you link to have clearly freely been sharing the same limited fact pool amongst themselves (they all list the same number of people, the same vocab and have many other similarities). I just hope they did it in an ethical way.

[booklectica]

I think a press pack went round, so it's not entirely surprising...

[ashbet]

Links to articles, for the Atlantically-impaired?

The card looks great -- I've used VistaPrint before and have been really pleased with their photo-printing-on-cards services.

Heh, I'll talk to anybody about poly for money, I just don't know if they want to hear what I have to say . . .

-- A <3

[reddragdiva]

Those are the links at the bottom of the post!

The Daily Mail is a fascist rag of legendary blockheadedness. If they were American they would be worried that King George III was still alive in Argentina (as HST said about the Hearst papers). No-one would ever speak to me again. Like, even less.

[damned-colonial.livejournal.com]

argument list too long? I'd usually do something like find | xargs for that.

[heliumbreath.livejournal.com]

Oh, but you can use Perl for that!

find | perl -nle unlink

Or, of course, -ple if you want to watch those suckers die.

[davefish.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't mind having a look at a card when you get them back, as tis something that I've been thinking that I should get done.

[karen2205]

The cheapest way of producing business cards is to get specialist stationery from somewhere like Viking Direct (A4 sheets that are have perforations for you to tear into standard sized business cards) and to print your own. The print quality might not be so good, but the aim here is (AFAIC) is for Arkady to have business cards to give out to people who've already seen the dolls - rather than something to send out speculatively, where high quality images will be really important.

Also consider putting a telephone number on it (get a separate phone/sim card if you don't want to use your real one) - some people still aren't online and even more won't deal with someone who has an online presence but no other means of contact.

[reddragdiva]

Considered it, but, apart from the printer still not behaving, inkjet cards look home-made and the ink runs, which looks even more home-made and would be a major problem giving cards to people in, say, the Dev. The idea is to look like a real business.

You have a good point with the phone number. I've wondered before on this journal why there aren't more multi-SIM phones.

[arkady.livejournal.com]

Phone numbers will not be going on cards. This is an issue I will not be budged on, for personal reasons.

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

Vistaprint is still pretty good cheapness for quality. I use their cards myself - but not with my own artwork.

I also suggest www.streetcards.co.uk as I knew one of the organisers.

[excy.livejournal.com]

Can't you do "rm [0-9][0-9]*.tex"?

[reddragdiva]

Nope! That puts all FIFTY-FIVE THOUSAND files for deletion into the same rm command, and it gets upset. Same as rm *.tex .