The childhood fear

A few days ago, I was driving past the airport.  It was night time, and the sky was filled with the lights of airplanes that were either descending into Atlanta Hartsfield, or circling and awaiting their turn to begin touchdown of their aircraft.  Seeing all these blinking lights cutting through the dark night sky made me think about my childhood, and how when I was a kid, such a sight would have been more than sufficient at giving me nightmares for a week.

When I was like 9-10 years old, I remember watching television, and seeing a commercial for either Unsolved Mysteries or Sightings; that part I can’t recollect specifically, but the advertised episode was one that of UFOs and alien abductions.  I vaguely recall the commercial having all sorts of amateur footage of people filming lights in the sky, unorthodox flight patterns of lights floating around in the sky, lots of people gasping and exclaiming their surprise at seeing clearly an alien spacecraft, and the kind of phenomenon that would be more ridiculed and laughed at today, than it would have back in like 1991.

That commercial itself didn’t necessarily scare me as much as it kind of fascinated me, but that night, I had the mother of nightmares involving invading UFOs and alien abductions from little green creatures that were closer to Mars Attacks! than Aliens, and my life was not the same for about the next two years.

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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.