Sunday, August 6, 2000

 

1:33 p.m. I don't know whether to be happy or sad. I do know that I've certainly been busy ... breaking the code, so to speak. Up until a few hours ago, I was totally fascinated by those little gif animations ... so much so that I have actually spent a certain amount of time, staring at them, amused as all get out.

All that will change now, however. I've stumbled onto the keys of the kingdom -- I've finally found a copy of an old program that used to be a very popular piece of shareware and which, for reasons I don't understand, suddenly disappeared from the face of the earth, almost.

It's called GifBuilder, and I think its creator, Yves Piguet, simply removed all the copies he knew about from the various servers and download places because he went on to build bigger and better programs. But you would be surprised how hard it's been to find anything to replace it for the Mac. For the PC -- no problem.

Well, a few days ago I found a copy of the program on a site in Japan, and now suddenly I can open the animations I've collected and I can slow some of them down and -- that's about it, really. I can also sort of make my own, sort of.

In order to really make cool animations, you have to have the heart and the soul of a cartoon being, and much as I admire them, I just don't have what it takes to make something like this:

Admire it -- that I can do. Slow it down and speed it up -- now I can do that, too. Other than that, I can scrawl some words on a wall and call it a day. It's a start. If I could get my brain around the mysteries of Flash and that insane timeline thing with the tweens and the eyeballs and the thousand and one options, maybe I could move into the 21st century of web wonderment.

But I feel strange now that I've looked behind the curtain and I know a little more about how this bit of magic is performed. We really need our wizards, and I really shouldn't be going around digging into programs where I don't belong. I want to remain surprised, I guess.

Meanwhile, I think I'll stick to stringing the words together and let someone else set the pixels in motion. No matter what, you can only stand in one line, after all. You can fool everybody into believing (for a time) that you belong in the designer's line or the manager's line or the nurse's line. You can wear the costume and you can carry the tools -- but in the end, you know what happens.

You can't fool yourself.

You know you're in the wrong line if you always find yourself looking around at the other ways that people can make a living. You know you're in the wrong line if you think about time all the time -- how little you have, how long things take; free time, overtime. People in the wrong line are always trying to jump the queue.

You know you're in the right line when all you want to do is talk to the other people ahead and behind you to compare notes, swap war stories, make friends. You know you're in the right line, and doing the right thing, when you lose all track of time. When you look down and see that your hands are scratched up and your shirt is dirty and your hair is snarled -- and you don't remember exactly when your shoulders started to ache and you hate to quit for the night.

It's a little bit of heaven, right here on earth ... the right line.