Could have just as easily just said “Quark sucks”

This is a good article that pretty much gives a detailed explanation of Quark’s monumental fall off of graphic design software food chain, and how they’ll pretty much never recover from it.  They should probably liquidate their assets and curl up into a ball and die, or at least try and rip off InDesign and make a cost-efficient alternative that addresses the things about InDesign that people don’t like, but then again Quark was no bulletproof vest at avoiding irrational crashes in their own right, so they should probably stick with the former idea.

It’s a decent read, and way better of an explanation than I could give, because my disdain for Quark runs so deep and exhaustive that I’m pretty much only capable of simply saying “Quark sucks,” which isn’t incorrect, but is devoid of specific details.

Seriously, there is nothing on the planet that was made in Quark that I couldn’t rebuild faster, more efficiently and less resource-intensive in InDesign.

Because Quark sucks.

The Big 10’s logo sucks

The Big 10 is a pretty big deal in the world of collegiate sports; it’s no secret that amongst all college sports, football and basketball reign supreme in terms of popularity, and the Big 10 represents strongly in both.

But when the day is over, I can’t take the Big 10 conference seriously. It has nothing to do with the fact that it’s been over ten years since any sort of National Championship has been brought to the Big 10, or that Ohio State has turned into the Buffalo Bills of college sports, or sour grapes at Michigan for getting a referee-aided victory over Virginia Tech in the Sugar Bowl.

No, I can’t take the Big 10 conference seriously, because their logo is absolute rubbish.

I mean seriously, look at it – it sucks.

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Georgia Tech’s logo is flawed

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  To someone like me, there is beauty in symmetry; my personal view on aesthetics is typically favoring towards things with good balance.  I like the concept of balance outright, usually believing that a life well lived is a life that’s simply got good balance throughout the numerous aspects of living.

Working where I do, I see the Georgia Tech logo pretty much every single day.  Unfortunately, due to the fact that I support Virginia Tech and that without fail I will get stuck behind a deliberately troll-driving GT shuttle on a daily basis, I have grown to have a negative connotation whenever I see the GT logo; which is everywhere.  Which has made me become critical towards it, naturally.

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Writer’s funk ain’t no fun

I’m still in the midst of this writer’s funk, where I feel like I want to write something, but I simply don’t know what I want to write about lately.  It’s hard to explain how I’m feeling these days; I can’t say that I’m in one of my bouts of depression or being all ronery-emo, because I don’t really think I am.  Work is boring and stagnant, but it’s not like I didn’t know this was going to be the status quo when I took this job.  I’m working out and exercising along the same clip, and I feel physically fine, and mentally too, for the most part.

Yet, I can’t really find or think of anything remotely interesting to write about these days, to which that puzzles me a bit.  Usually, I lean onto local news, or try to find something remotely interesting on the internet to spark some train of thought worthy to put into words.  But Atlanta news is pretty stagnant and predictably boring, and nothing makes me want to write about racist agendas and the obvious racial bias that “my fair city” exhibits on such a regular basis.  Not to mention the fact that all the local Atlanta news outlets are money-grubbing rags that recycle the same news anyway.

The Atlanta Braves blog I occasionally write for, I’ve been informed that there are going to be some changes with.  Although it’s nothing really that serious, it does make me wonder if I want to continue to obligate myself with writing about baseball on a weekly basis.  Obviously, my fandom with baseball has grown a little disenchanted over the last three seasons, but I kind of wonder if this was an opportunity to dive head-first into trying to re-invigorate it, or if I just want to stop outright.  Sometimes I think that my position of floating in the middle isn’t necessarily the best idea.

Speaking of baseball, it’s not that I don’t love the game any less than I used to, but here’s an interesting fact: I’ve been to one Braves game all season.  I’ve been to more baseball games at Coors Field in Denver, than I have at home in Atlanta.  I’ve seen as many games in Detroit and Miami as I have at home in Atlanta.  It’s not that I don’t enjoy going to the ballpark, it’s just that the idea of going alone isn’t what it used to be.  I tell you, one of these days I’m just going to have to buckle down and get on board with an 81-game plan, and make my damndest effort to do an entire 81-game season.

Maybe this is the kind of slump that happens when I don’t really do anything in my spare time.  I’ve been spending a lot of time reading lately, and I have to admit that since I started using my iPad as a Kindle, I’ve been reading a ton of books, and I’m finding it more of a bear than anything else when I force myself to read a physical book again, but my declaring particular authors as “physical book only,” it’s something that I’m not going to abandon any time soon.

But my list of options of things to do when I’m at home is a little stale, and makes me think that it’s contributing to my overall mental stagnancy lately.  All I do when I’m at home as of late is either read, play LoL, or watch DVR’d shows.  I could be a little bit more productive and try to do some cleaning, but when 95% of the clutter in the house isn’t mine, it’s somewhat unappealing and unrewarding to even fathom, let alone do, especially when it feels like it’s just going to have to happen again in a week.

Perhaps I need more activities to do in my spare time, to stimulate my brain into wanting to write about something.  That’s usually what normally happens, when I really find inspiration to write, while I’m doing something else, creating the false conundrum that I need to address and write about something while the iron is hot, but oh noes, I suddenly don’t seem to have the time to do such.  Perhaps I should actually address these projects for Dragon*Con while there’s still plenty of time in advance, as opposed to trying to get everything done in the month of August like I ended up doing last year.

But until then, this writer’s funk blows.  I like having something a little more focused to write about.

Golf drivers kind of ruin Golfs

I like the Volkswagen Golf.  I’ve liked just about every iteration of it, even when it was called the VW Rabbit.  Ultimately, it was the reason why I ended up liking hatchbacks in the first place, and it’s that bias that led me to driving the 5-door hatchback I have now.  I would most definitely would own or would have had a Golf at some point by now, except for the fact that its price point has always eluded me by putting itself into a range that I just simply couldn’t justify for a means to an end like a car.

But it doesn’t mean that I can’t still be an admirer of the car still.  I like its fairly modest appearance, while having a good deal of performance as well as the practicality of spaciousness and storage that most hatchbacks afford.  During the riceboy days, most VW Golfs could compete or best most of their Japanese competition out of the box, provided the levels of trim were appropriately compared.  And the aftermarket part culture was just as favorable and customizable to Golfs as they were anything made by Honda or Nissan.

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The disillusionment towards design

Anyone who’s ever gone inside a Walmart might be familiar with their private label products; the Great Value name that Walmart uses as their store brand.  Fairly easily identifiable by the uniformity of white packaging or labels, and their minor variation of colors based on the product.

It’s clean and it’s simple, there’s absolutely no denying that.  It’s exactly what Walmart wishes their own brand to appear, despite the fact that their name is synonymous with lower-class America, but I’m straying from the point.  For its efforts and objective, the current iteration of the Great Brand identity has won a couple of design awards, and received lots of accolade from the general design community.

It is that part of the story, that I cannot necessarily agree with.

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This is not how business is conducted

There is this guy at my office that doesn’t like me.  Now I’m not saying that in that teenage kind of way in which I’m just speculating, because I have every reason to believe that this guy just does not like me.  He’s significantly older than I am, and kind of symbolizes the old world.  He was once in a position of managerial power, but was demoted at some point.  My peers here who remember his regime of management cite that he was the utmost of micro-managers, and describe the kind of authority that would have made me quit, had I been present during that time.

But anyway, it’s very obvious he doesn’t care much for me.  On the hierarchy of the office, he and I are essentially on the same plateau, and that has to bother him a great deal.  He has his own office solely based on tenure, but the truth of the matter is that doesn’t really do much different work than I do; if anything at all, he gets more shit work than I do.  But if that’s not enough justification, the fact that he won’t ever look me in the eye, and on several instances, in the office and at the one out-of-town work conference I attended, he flat out refused to get on the same elevator as I was on.  As in, he is waiting for an elevator, but when he sees me show up, he will not board the elevator if it means having to share it with me alone, and will blatantly stand put and wait for the next one.

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