Grumble, grumble ... Idiots.

I encountered a poster today that annoys me, probably too much. the message of the sign was, verbatim, "If I graduate, it's like a part of my mom makes it too." I can't count the problems with this if it was supposed to be a professionally done thing, as it's production values implied.

Lets start with the fact that it backs the idea that parents unhappy with their own achievements should try to live vicariously through their children. Then there's the fact that it sets up the idea of graduation as a goal in and of itself, without any indication of why it would be desirable. Further, it not only reinforces the notion that men are not primary caregivers, but also that it is not a rewarding role. The picture involved is of a mother and son, so the message isn't one of feminist uplift, as I tried to think in search of a defense for this poster. Then there are all the little problems like how the use of the word "if" subtly and subliminally undermines their entire presentation.

This all leaves out the main problem the poster has: Their intended audience is going to take one look at that big block o' words with the picture as a fuzzy backdrop, and simply ignore it. There's also the fact that it was in english and within the borders of chinatown, but that's a separate issue. I'm sure that it was part of a larger project, and at least some of them were posted in places where my primary objection would hold sway.

Maybe the people behind this were trying to save money by designing it them selves, because I'm used to ad agencies knowing at least as much psychology as I do. I mean, I'm a computer geek. If even I have a better understanding of human nature than these people, I don't hold out much hope for their success rate.

I don't think I like Luna

Although that is no longer surprising, now that I've visited www.luna-books.com and found out that it is a division of Harlequin. I have read one and a half of Mercedes Lackey's A Tale of the Five Hundred Kingdoms books, and while they are decidedly not her best work, there is still quite a distance between them and bad. Even if they were bad, however, that wouldn't be the imprint's fault, it would be Lackey's. No, the problem I have with them is the cover flap descriptions. I know full well how bad those normally are, but these are worse than usual. In both cases, not only did they not describe the book well, but they made the works sound derivative. The blurb to One Good Knight made it sound like it was a cheap knock-off of Patricia C. Wrede's Talking To Dragons for example. Admittedly, I would have compared the two of them together in my mind, because they are set in similar worlds, but they're not that similar.

And beyond all that, I just found that the description of the one I'm currently reading is flat out wrong. About a detail of the sort an author would have had no reason to change from initial pitch to final draft, so the cover people don't even have the excuse of working from outdated materials. It's as if they were told the story they were going to write a description of one night in a location where they couldn't take any notes, possibly a bar, and then the next day they wrote it based on what they remembered, jumbled up with any similar books they'd read. The description of this one, by the way, reminds me some what of Diane Wynne Jones' Castle in the Air, although it's not shaping up very much like it.

Just wanted to let any other Lackey fans out there know that it is best not to read these descriptions at all. If the remain one in the series ever returns to the library, that's the strategy I'm going to follow.

A follow up thought on Luna

I just had a thought about why those cover blurbs might be so... inaccurate. Luna is a sub imprint of Harlequin, which is best know for romance novels. Now genre fiction like that sometimes has the publisher send the outline to the writer rather than the other way around. What if that is what is happening here? Since Lackey had one of her characters doing such work, it is possible that she might be no stranger to it herself. And if so, well that would explain why these books didn't quite feel the same. And the blurbs would then have been written based on an outline that the story... wandered away from in a few places.

Or Lackey could have just been off her game when writing One Good Knight. Fortune's Fool certainly seems to have come out better in my opinion, although this is the one where the blurb is flat out wrong in one place and only sorta true in another.

And again with image maniupulation

That first article I linked to, the one about resizing through seaming? Yeah, now not only has it been implemented, there is a website with a Flash version to play around with. It was much happier with an 84kb 400x300 jpeg than it was with a 172kb 1024x768 one, althought that's not a big suprise. Dimensions seem to be a much bigger factor than file size, also not a big shocker for something that works on the pixel level. Fun to play around with, though :)