Like a Phoenix

Love1st

Like a Phoenix

“Who ever lov’d that lov’d not at first sight?”

    Phebe in Shakespeare’s As You Like It (III.v.78)

Messing around with the quote from Shakespeare, generating a large-small graphic file to accompany the quote, and then stepping through the hoops to get it ready for a web display, prioritized, caramelized, and optimized? So to speak?

At the dawn of this career, I recall, sitting in front of a 13” color RGB Cathode Ray monitor, watching as a 2400 baud modem received an image transfer of a picture that was about the same size as that graphic I just hammered together. My current image, used for this post, same width, if not wider.

Love1st

Still using industry-standard jpg format, although, I think it used to be jpeg. Don’t hold me to that fact.

I spent a few moment, and I triggered a series of commands that sliced, spiced, spiked, and spread that image into a usable, universal format.

The promise of the new era is here.

Like a Phoenix

How’s that working out?

My interest, purely historical and maybe sociological, about how this rapid growth and shifting policies changed the the very face of the world where I work.

All because I was looking for a “Love at first sight” quote from Shakespeare. Getting ready for the next set of holidays.

The Pisces horoscope captures an idea, and explains some of the notion of size. The original horoscopes themselves were written to fit on a single page, and the first of the weeklies themselves, I budgets 75-100 words per sign. Did not always work out that way, but it was the target. An earlier collaborator in editorial design suggested that the horoscopes didn’t need to be limited or contained in length.

That bit of wisdom? Both good and bad.

The good part? I got to expand, tease nuance, and find delicate shading in some of the scopes with added padding. But in others? I tend to hemorrhage words when a more concise delivery might be best. How’s that old quote go?

Like a Phoenix

“If I had more time, I would’ve written a shorter letter.”
(cf. Pink Cake for sources.)

The point was the size of the file itself, its apparent digital footprint, which, in a previous era, would’ve been prohibitively large, and by current web standard, just about right. We regularly post images, files, and stream A/V files, all day long now. So it seems.

All for a quote about love at first sight.

Like a Phoenix

“Who ever lov’d that lov’d not at first sight?”

    Phebe in Shakespeare’s As You Like It (III.v.78)