“What is the nature of evil,” the caller asks.
July 3, 2024 9:54 AM Subscribe
@clipart.bsky.social is the Bluesky account for Corel Gallery Clipart, which is slowly posting all 10,000 files from a 1994 Corel Gallery CD-ROM. But within the alt-text of each image, narratives begin to emerge, stories of a vigilante seeking justice against Corel itself, of the many design studios who subcontract for Corel, of a man and his grandson traveling across a post-apocalyptic United States, and so much more.
Credits: clipart from Corel; conversion, curation, code, and alt text by
@samplereality.bsky.social
Credits: clipart from Corel; conversion, curation, code, and alt text by
@samplereality.bsky.social
The link about a vigilante seeking justice just links to a bad clipart image of a truck.
posted by GoblinHoney at 10:05 AM on July 3
posted by GoblinHoney at 10:05 AM on July 3
You gotta hold it in your lungs longer, George. I mean, click the image.
posted by credulous at 10:08 AM on July 3
posted by credulous at 10:08 AM on July 3
At least it's not Hawk Tuah, so there's that.
And if you don't know what that is, DO NOT. LOOK IT UP. YOUR LIFE WILL NOT BE IMPROVED IN ANY WAY, WHATSOEVER.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 10:47 AM on July 3 [3 favorites]
And if you don't know what that is, DO NOT. LOOK IT UP. YOUR LIFE WILL NOT BE IMPROVED IN ANY WAY, WHATSOEVER.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 10:47 AM on July 3 [3 favorites]
A tangle of yellow flowers growing wild. I tell my grandson you used to only see flowers in weddings, funerals, and gardens. Now you see patches like this in the most unexpected places...
posted by HearHere at 10:48 AM on July 3
posted by HearHere at 10:48 AM on July 3
I was watching this twitter account for months and never tried the alt text...... what stories I must have missed....!!
posted by panhopticon at 10:53 AM on July 3 [1 favorite]
posted by panhopticon at 10:53 AM on July 3 [1 favorite]
So 90s I had audio hallucinations of a modem connecting (the images, not the alt text).
posted by tommasz at 11:04 AM on July 3 [1 favorite]
posted by tommasz at 11:04 AM on July 3 [1 favorite]
GoblinHoney: you have to clickthrough the image to get to the alt-text.
posted by slogger at 11:08 AM on July 3 [2 favorites]
posted by slogger at 11:08 AM on July 3 [2 favorites]
Wow. I'd forgotten how bad Corel clipart was.
(truth is, I prolly bought that CD and many more like it, when I sought fame and fortune as a web developer in the mid 90's. I think I still have them somewhere. Now suitable as coasters)
posted by Artful Codger at 11:15 AM on July 3
(truth is, I prolly bought that CD and many more like it, when I sought fame and fortune as a web developer in the mid 90's. I think I still have them somewhere. Now suitable as coasters)
posted by Artful Codger at 11:15 AM on July 3
I loved CorelDraw! and I actually used to pay my rent with it, and even made some pretty serious art with it.
Even back in the 90s from, say, CorelDraw! 4 or 5 it had a bunch of features that Illustator did not have as recently as about CS 1, maybe even to this day.
One feature was all about total document size, scale and precision. My memory is foggy but even back as far as CorelDraw! 5 it supported truly massive document sizes and scales with something like 5 decimal points of precision all at 1:1 inch or cm scales on documents that could be something totally ridiculous like 25 to 50 miles square.
And single vector/Bezier objects could be something on the order of 1 million to even 10 million nodes and several hundred thousand subpaths. I'm not even sure what the limit is here but I had some complicated vector/optical art experiments I did back in the day that were above a million nodes and they scaled accurately whether they were a square mile or a singe square centimeter.
Like even building shapes with vectors where you use basic shapes as tools to build up more complicated shapes with cutting and welding curves (known as "Pathfinder" in Illustrator) was way, way faster and more powerful in CorelDraw! I remember going to Illustrator to do similar work and I'd forget every time that it didn't have a "Boolean complete" stack of tools for combining or cutting vectors.
Meanwhile Illustrator had document sizes limited to about 24 feet wide. Max. I think that held true well into the CS 1 era, and not sure about now because: fuuuuck Adobe.
Anyway, I'd try importing those large node count vector grahpics in Illustrator for pre-press and sending to a RIP for printing posters and Illustator would just fall over and die. Illustrator also had huge issues with arbitrary precision for vectors especially with small dimensions or large document sizes/scales.
I remember trying to do some of the same kind of work in Illustrator and watching it arbitrarily move my nodes for me because I was trying to be too precise at too small of a scale, and, no, this wasn't a snap to grid setting or issue. It's just how Illustrator was if you zoomed in too far and wanted to nudge a bezier control point a very small amount.
This actually mattered if you were trying to lay out a billboard or a vehicle wrap for a bus or a truck or something, because you couldn't fit the whole image into a single document and you'd have to do weird hacks like tiling the image, which totally sucks and breaks everything if you're doing vinyl cuts or something where you actually need to have a well-ordered and structured vector graphic for the cutter to work efficiently and not break or freak out, and while you can tile a raster image for, say, a large format inkjet, it doesn't work like that with vinyl cutting or laser cutting and other X-Y CAD/CAM applications.
But it might be one of the only programs that ever existed where you could conceivably lay out an entire sububurb or small city complete with houses (with blueprints down to lumber and nails!), streets, curbs, infrastructure like power, water and sewage and even landscaping all in the same document as layers, and then use the same exact program to lay out a printed circuit board, or even the mask of a relatively large/crude microchip AND do a manual four color process print design complete with vector spot colors and other features.
Like it was probably accurate enough for some basic to advanced CAD/CAM machining, or architectural blueprints or other high precision tasks.
Over the years I saw CorelDraw! in some pretty wild places, like shops that laser-cut metals, shops that did woodworking and CAM routers, laser engraving and etching shops, t-shirt shops, automated cloth cutting shops that did things like cut cloth parts for sails or parachutes, embroidery shops and more.
But, oh, man is CorelDraw! ugly.
Getting CorelDraw projects to look good was a whole black art in itself. Anything involving gradients or special fills was usually just gross.
And the clipart libraries were really terrible, too. I mean really terrible like it would look bad on junk mail or yellow pages ads terrible. My dad's screen printing shop had a whole stack of CorelDraw! clipart CDs and I don't think I ever used any of the clipart for anything serious.
Even for basic symbols or dingbats or whatever it was usually cleaner and faster to just build your own, because even the super basic shapes and symbols usually had weird errors in them or weirdly ordered groups of vectors, or way too many nodes that needed weeding and cleaning.
I'm pretty sure it's all of this bad clip art that gave CorelDraw! such a bad rep as not being a "serious" vector art program in the design and print industries because it was definitely used for a lot of total garbage cheap and quick design work like junk mail, flyers and yellow pages ads even though it was - technically speaking - the more "serious" vector art program for high precision vectors.
posted by loquacious at 4:14 PM on July 3 [1 favorite]
Even back in the 90s from, say, CorelDraw! 4 or 5 it had a bunch of features that Illustator did not have as recently as about CS 1, maybe even to this day.
One feature was all about total document size, scale and precision. My memory is foggy but even back as far as CorelDraw! 5 it supported truly massive document sizes and scales with something like 5 decimal points of precision all at 1:1 inch or cm scales on documents that could be something totally ridiculous like 25 to 50 miles square.
And single vector/Bezier objects could be something on the order of 1 million to even 10 million nodes and several hundred thousand subpaths. I'm not even sure what the limit is here but I had some complicated vector/optical art experiments I did back in the day that were above a million nodes and they scaled accurately whether they were a square mile or a singe square centimeter.
Like even building shapes with vectors where you use basic shapes as tools to build up more complicated shapes with cutting and welding curves (known as "Pathfinder" in Illustrator) was way, way faster and more powerful in CorelDraw! I remember going to Illustrator to do similar work and I'd forget every time that it didn't have a "Boolean complete" stack of tools for combining or cutting vectors.
Meanwhile Illustrator had document sizes limited to about 24 feet wide. Max. I think that held true well into the CS 1 era, and not sure about now because: fuuuuck Adobe.
Anyway, I'd try importing those large node count vector grahpics in Illustrator for pre-press and sending to a RIP for printing posters and Illustator would just fall over and die. Illustrator also had huge issues with arbitrary precision for vectors especially with small dimensions or large document sizes/scales.
I remember trying to do some of the same kind of work in Illustrator and watching it arbitrarily move my nodes for me because I was trying to be too precise at too small of a scale, and, no, this wasn't a snap to grid setting or issue. It's just how Illustrator was if you zoomed in too far and wanted to nudge a bezier control point a very small amount.
This actually mattered if you were trying to lay out a billboard or a vehicle wrap for a bus or a truck or something, because you couldn't fit the whole image into a single document and you'd have to do weird hacks like tiling the image, which totally sucks and breaks everything if you're doing vinyl cuts or something where you actually need to have a well-ordered and structured vector graphic for the cutter to work efficiently and not break or freak out, and while you can tile a raster image for, say, a large format inkjet, it doesn't work like that with vinyl cutting or laser cutting and other X-Y CAD/CAM applications.
But it might be one of the only programs that ever existed where you could conceivably lay out an entire sububurb or small city complete with houses (with blueprints down to lumber and nails!), streets, curbs, infrastructure like power, water and sewage and even landscaping all in the same document as layers, and then use the same exact program to lay out a printed circuit board, or even the mask of a relatively large/crude microchip AND do a manual four color process print design complete with vector spot colors and other features.
Like it was probably accurate enough for some basic to advanced CAD/CAM machining, or architectural blueprints or other high precision tasks.
Over the years I saw CorelDraw! in some pretty wild places, like shops that laser-cut metals, shops that did woodworking and CAM routers, laser engraving and etching shops, t-shirt shops, automated cloth cutting shops that did things like cut cloth parts for sails or parachutes, embroidery shops and more.
But, oh, man is CorelDraw! ugly.
Getting CorelDraw projects to look good was a whole black art in itself. Anything involving gradients or special fills was usually just gross.
And the clipart libraries were really terrible, too. I mean really terrible like it would look bad on junk mail or yellow pages ads terrible. My dad's screen printing shop had a whole stack of CorelDraw! clipart CDs and I don't think I ever used any of the clipart for anything serious.
Even for basic symbols or dingbats or whatever it was usually cleaner and faster to just build your own, because even the super basic shapes and symbols usually had weird errors in them or weirdly ordered groups of vectors, or way too many nodes that needed weeding and cleaning.
I'm pretty sure it's all of this bad clip art that gave CorelDraw! such a bad rep as not being a "serious" vector art program in the design and print industries because it was definitely used for a lot of total garbage cheap and quick design work like junk mail, flyers and yellow pages ads even though it was - technically speaking - the more "serious" vector art program for high precision vectors.
posted by loquacious at 4:14 PM on July 3 [1 favorite]
I have not used BlueSky much. It seems like it won't display the alt-text unless I click on the image. That seems like bad UX. Is is a bug or done on purpose? Generally I expect the alt text to appear on hover. The mastodon version of this thread does indeed show the alt text on hover.
posted by mrgoldenbrown at 5:06 PM on July 3
posted by mrgoldenbrown at 5:06 PM on July 3
The one I miss is Freehand. I still think it was superier to Illustrator.
And I like the Affinity series more than I like the Adobe stuff now.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 8:35 PM on July 3 [1 favorite]
And I like the Affinity series more than I like the Adobe stuff now.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 8:35 PM on July 3 [1 favorite]
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posted by credulous at 10:04 AM on July 3 [4 favorites]