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.)

[sarcaustik.livejournal.com]

Spooked by dolls?

[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 ...

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

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

[reddragdiva]

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

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

find -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -name '*.tex' -print0 | xargs -0 rm

[reddragdiva]

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

[sarcaustik.livejournal.com]

There is something serenely disturbing (or disturbingly serene) about Arkady's little family, I suppose.

[reddragdiva]

There are any number of chainsaw blades to skin a cat.

[reddragdiva]

The dolls hit some people right in the uncanny valley, particularly the one-third scale ones. I'd rather my readers didn't leave.

[sarcaustik.livejournal.com]

Weird. Still, fair play for not wanting them to leave.

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

That's a full-color shot? Wow... That's some mad lighting sk1llz.

[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 ...

[vampwillow]

My ex did an interview (with photo) for femail some years' back for which £500 was offered (on a similar subject).

In the end they never used it, so money was never forthcoming. AIR payment is only made after publication ...

[redcountess]

purplerabbits mentions it in a comment on djm4's post, which was unlocked when I looked.

Btw,

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

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

[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!

[steer.livejournal.com]

Out of curiousity why not -exec rm {} \; rather than a pipe to xargs?

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

That starts one "rm" process per file, rather than one per ten.

Although actually, -exec rm {} \; is such a common thing to want to do that I wouldn't be surprised if modern versions of "find" silently replace it with an internal "unlink" call, which woudl be much faster. hang on...

[steer.livejournal.com]

That starts one "rm" process per file, rather than one per ten.

Good lord... really? How does this work then -- I mean the xargs part? I was hoping for some insight like that. Hope you don't mind me probing about this one. My xargs man page doesn't mention anything that would hint at this.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Nope, it runs "clone" for each file. Damn, "find" should support that directly, it really should.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I don't know what xargs's defaults are, but it's all controled by max-lines, max-args, max-chars and so forth. xargs collects *lots* of lines of output and feeds them all as arguments to each invocation of the related command. I thought it was ten args at a time, but a quick test indicates that it's much more.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

perl -le 'print $i++ while 1' | xargs echo | less

indicates that on my system it does 1024 at a time.