#metacreations

Messing around with the watercolor tool in Painter 6, which appears to be a close relative of Painter Classic 1, and is old enough that a) Corel doesn't seem to care it's available for download abandonware-style and b) it horks up a not enough memory error and won't run if you have more than 512mb of RAM. Which is easy to pretend is all the RAM one has if one is running it in a virtual machine with XP, but I'd like to be able to give Jack more RAM than that when I'm running him on a host with 16GB of it. Unfortunately, the fix that used to exist for this issue now seems to only exist as dead links to a domain that now shows as a possible malware-dropping one in Firefox--anyone out there still have said fix or info on what to prod?

This is Melonsnope (as in Melons + nope, but I suppose she could also be some sort of debunking cat if she were not busy tearing around the countryside trying not to die and smiting those who take the freaking comfrey plant before she can get to it AGAIN), a small and perpetually-wideeyed orange cat who is the result of me playing Warriors: Untold Tales, badly. My battle strategy for a long time consisted of mostly going AAAAAAAAA away from things...and still often does, at least when I'm not using things like the killing bite (apparently, little pixel cats make me be an asshole Nethack style--The tiny feral cat bites! You die...), so I picture her as looking eternally a bit fluffed up and licked a funny stamp/wideeyed with a perturbed sort of terror (or, perhaps, the other way around), and furthermore actually entering/fleeing battle going AAAAAAAAA--

L: In some cases (such as Bryce 2), you have used a pre-release version of the tool to design the very interface for the final tool itself. This behind-the-scenes production fact seems to capture something essential about creativity in a digital age. The possibilities of infinite regression make one giddy. KK: Recursive fun, yes. Nice that you caught that. We did indeed often render the entirety of a new interface with our own products, and sometimes in the one we were actually designing at the time. This is not just an intellectually tickling concept, it is a basic part of pushing the envelope, much like machines making machines: what we're doing simply has not been done anywhere else, since we're inventing how to do it as we do it.

The most unimaginative misuses are visible from ten yards away, while the subtle little glow and soft texture may be almost completely invisible. With Bryce [the 3-D tool orginally designed for generating synthetic landscapes] we've had a chance to observe users for more than three years, and it has not led to "more of the same." In fact, we were amazed: at first nearly everyone used the basic textures and primitives to make all the standard Bryce clichés -- chrome balls on mountains, pyramids in water, and so on. Yet soon users began sending us the most amazing contraptions: photo-realistic guitars and trucks built out of many little shapes that were technically "mountains" but that produced audio knobs or rubber tires. Surely the tools have a certain look and that can lead to sameness, but that's actually more of a social problem than one of technology: conformity in style and flat emulations of the existing stuff are the common practice in 95 percent of all books or movies or records. Sad, yes. But I am always happy to see the best escape over the top.

KK: We cannot even grasp what will happen here. It used to be that you could look ahead in military machines to see the curve. When I had a 128 x 128 Compucolor with 8k of RAM in 1979 I saw a 1024 x 768 ultra-killer dream of a machine at a military convention. Now I am sitting here with Sony's 1920 x 1280 HDTV tube and I cannot easily look over that horizon.

Rather than waiting for computers to talk to us, I wish the damn things would just simply work right and not crash. We have had ten years of eight-character filenames and are even now only an inch away from that era. It seems unrealistic to jump over so much basic interface territory when it is still in need of improvement. Clearly I can only attack a small portion of these things myself with my merry band of MetaTools specialists. But we have set our sights pretty high on making a dent out there. As we always say: We are the dentists. . . .

The box to my copy of MetaCreations Painter Classic is…very late 90s. Look! Tiled background patterns for the web!! And just, the overall design. It’s dated 1998. This used to be one of /the/ cool inexpensive things to art with, and those kinds of backgrounds were all over the place.

This was before Corel ate Painter, and actually a pretty good stripped-down version, other than the lack of layers other than the separate watercolor one.

Download MetaCreations Kais SuperGOO Retail Version 1.0 (ISO)