I, Frankenstein...

He lives! He lives! Bugbones lives! I, Frankenstein, have created this thing. I had conquered the Yahoo sign-up, the Angelfire sign-up, the Hotmail sign-up, the log-in fury. No longer the newbie! begging the definition of "cookie"... struggling with the concept of "upload." I was an old hand. I could use Web Shell. I could use an on-line FTP. No clip-art from a gallery for me! I uploaded my own GIFs. I had gritted my teeth, tackled HTML, and come out of it alive (though somewhat the worse for wear). By Web Monkey's advice, I had simplified my logo design... mastered Paintbrush, drew my bug, tweaked him with freeware, smoothed him with the elegant money-bought LViewPro... This I did amid crashes that threatened the extinction of stone-age dinosaurs (myself and my ancient PC). I had pored over Webmonkey tutorials, scanned my Dummy book, deciphered the Rosetta stone, cracked the code. And by God, I had my webpage, topped with my fine Bugbones GIF, of the coveted transparent background, not to be achieved with mere Paint. Survived the Webshell Upgrade, adopted the WYSIWYG editor, created my Sizzzlinks page of the weird fonts. Wow! What a journey. Now it was time to add content. I didn't think of it in those terms. In 1999 the eternal "Content" wasn't yet the god of the Internet. I wasn't thinking "Content." I just wanted stuff on my page.

The perils of Bugbones.

Algebra and Pizza

It's a sad thing to be geekless in a geek-driven world. I had so many questions. Technical forums were above my head. I learned not to post as a newbie (no need to be the butt of jokes). Sitting back and quietly waiting for the right answer to come up wasn't much help, either. Tech discussions, to me, always looked like those algebra problems Mr. Leonard used to put on the board. "If Train A is going X miles per hour on a zigzag railroad track and Train B is going Y miles per hour in the opposite direction, and the bridge is out at Point C... then who gets to order pizza?" (Mr. Leonard was a schizophrenic. I'm sure of it.) My brother wasn't much help. He thought I knew more about computers than he did. My niece, who seemed to be a whiz on computers, had a slight attention-deficit problem. She could hack away at the keyboard all right, but she rarely slowed down enough to find out what I actually wanted her to do. I wanted doublespacing in my text documents. "Here, look at all these cool fonts I downloaded for you," she would say.

"Uh, thanks," I'd say, "but I really liked Times New Roman better without those little cactus spines." There was another side effect to that particular brand of tech help. At the end, my machine would quite likely be reduced to a pile of rubble. Her professional philosophy pretty much fit in with all those Terms of Use documents you sign daily. "When it breaks, you're up the creek without a paddle and we're not liable. Oh yeah... and your machine will be reduced to a pile of rubble..."

Fat Shirley's Tech-Support Hotline... ?

Yes, humor had definite possibilities for a website. And I was already in humor mode. I was still an e-mail newbie. I was in joke-hog heaven! My mind was racing ahead to all the funny things I could write for Bugbones. And I could enlist my brother's help. He was in a funny band. They did skits, they had gigs. (It's what led to him being a woman in Fat Shirley's: A Trailer-Park Opera. That came later.) In fact he was also itching to do a site. He'd already started a small one. I helped. I helped him with opening an e-mail account and logging in and setting up a site. He helped me with which plug went in which socket, what the heck was a USB port, and did I have one? (I didn't) We were the amateur tech-support in our neck of the woods by now. All of our friends came to us. Professional tech support was available, but expensive. They had two answers to every question we asked: (a) we can plug in this disk and reinstall Windows; and (b) we can sell you this new PC ~ it has more megahertz. We did attempt to branch out and network among friends. To each of our questions, they had this response: 'I don't know nothing. All I know is WordPerfect.'

The Perils of Bugbones...

Technology was Devouring My Life

So now Bugbones was officially a cartoon site, a fun site. That might do do for graphic art, fun and frivolous illustrations, and humor. Bugbones, as barren as it was, had been a lot of work. I could still imagine great things for it. In fact, the doing of a site was now a goal in itself. Maybe it was even an obsession. This World-Wide-Web thing was aptly named. It was a giant web and I was caught up in it. I was a hapless fly. Technology was devouring my life. Here I am, ten years later, still struggling to keep up with technology. But I am not alone. I am one fly of over 108 million.* So, in 1999, with Bugbones barely off of the drawing board, I began to conceive of my "real" site. An art site. Not fun art. My art. But could a tired, frustrated non-techie aspire to having two sites? She thought she could. Barely a glimmer of an idea, this second site. A glimmer of light. And I was a moth to it...

The Perils of Bugbones.
Annals of Southern Muse begin.


*As of 2007, according to Boutell.com, there were over 108 million websites, sporting more than 19.2 billion pages, on the World Wide Web. And growing. No, I am not alone. Reference: "WWW FAQs: How many websites are there?" URI <http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/misc/sizeofweb.html>. Boutell.com. Accessed 30 December 2008.

Easter Bunny Ears on John Wesley

By now my brain had switched gears and I was ready to do a humor site. Humor wasn't new to me. I had done my own cartoon strip for my high school paper. In college, I had had a high old time with humorous graphics and illustration, along with my true love, fine art. Not to mention, I'd done my fair share of gluing shoes to the floor, smearing Vaseline on doorknobs, hoisting underwear up the flagpole, and carrying of the roommate's bed out to put on top of the breezeway. Of painting the breaker-box covers with naughty little cartoons in the middle of the night. (It was artfully done.) Of putting Easter-bunny ears and a basket of eggs on the statue of John Wesley. (The dean of students just smiled ~ he was an old friend by then). It hit the morning papers. We had no idea someone had called them. The reporter was highly amused. The college president, much less so. I don't think he ever did get over it. Later he crankily accused us, the art students, of stealing a statue of a little boy with a thorn in his foot. We didn't. Or at least I didn't. That's real vandalism and theft. I don't go in for that. You know, that college president and our dean of students retired the year I graduated. I don't know why.

Bugbones, a fun site. Our new theme.

Oh, the perils of bugbones...

Screechy Modems and 8-inch Screens

I wanted elegantly themed pages of subtle colors and artistic backgrounds and loads of images. But I accepted Webmonkey's advice and designed my Bugbones page to conform to something less than state-of-the-art technology. Users were running obsolete dinosaurs, said Webmonkey. That meant Windows95 and 8-inch monitors and 19kb dial-up modems. If broadband was around, nobody I knew had it. In fact, it was all I could do to understand the definitions of these terms when I ran into them. What's DSL? What's broadband? I tore up my keyboard up trying to get an answer to these questions. I knew what a modem was: the thing inside my PC that made a horrid screechy sound when I clicked the Internet icon. A modem sounded like fingernails on a chalkboard, and if I was lucky, I got a growl and hiss that told me the hookup was complete. It's not a friendly sounding thing. Perhaps we should have taken that growl as an omen that the Internet did not want us. But we ignored the screech and growl and waited the slow, slow wait for our browsers to load. As for my page design... I had no trouble, beyond mere thoughts of rebellion, to restricting my layout to stay within the limitations of dial-up modems and 8-inch screens. That's what I was running. It was all I knew.

The perils of Bugbones.

Changing Page Themes

Before long, I would be plagued with upgraded web shells, bloated templates, faltering dot coms, and vanishing hosts. But enough of that for the moment. Right now, I had my logo and I had a web page to fill. I had taken Webmonkey's advice: Keep it simple. Keep it cartoony. I felt sure that that little monkey knew more than I did. I was hip to it! I was well-read and in-the-know. Not for me, the newbie webmaster's mistake, of fancy, airbrushed graphics. Primary colors, bold outlines! That was the key. But a cartoony logo meant a cartoony site. Somehow, the idea of it didn't fit in with my paintings. I was torn between what I read and what I actually wanted to do. I had to admit, I didn't have the tools to or knowledge to do a fancy art site. So, here I was, rethinking Bugbones. My site would have to have jokes and chatty newsletters. Why not? Everyone else on the Web had them! My limitations as a non-techie were already changing the theme and future content of my website.

Oh, the perils of Bugbones!

Dump the Images, They Say...

Judging by what I saw of on-line content, smileys were what people wanted. Charlene wasn't the only one who resented this. Over the years, I found that Web technicians deeply resented the demands of page designers. The Web (they said) is for the presentation of information, of words, of ideas. Not for pictures of your family pet or your Aunt Sally. But, as an artist, I have to say that images are ideas! Images are content! I was trying so hard to conform to what technicians wanted. "Dump the images," they insisted. "Get rid of flashy gimmicks and scrolling marquees! Don't load your page with pictures. Users hate fancy airbrushed backgrounds that are slow to load." Excuse me! My eventual goal was to get my paintings on line. This is not the family pet. My art is not a little white rat! But if it were, who are these scientists to tell me not to love it? Not to express my creativity? I grew angry at technicians who demanded control over my content. Before long I got a frightful lesson in how the arbitrary decisions of nameless, faceless technicians and corporations play a vital role in how you, the user, will interact with the world; how, and whether, your content will be presented.

(Confessions of a fearful geek).

I Drew Smileys Because I Could.

Here was left brain meeting right brain. And they clashed. It's not exactly true that Charlene hated color. She appreciated art and had a better understanding of it than some of my fellow artists. What she resented was the intrusion of pop-culture into a medium that had heretofore been reserved for scholars, librarians, and scientists. Important exchanges of information were being overrun with games, idle chitchat, and SPAM. I can empathize with that. Smileys do abound ~ as do ads for Viagra, ad nauseum. Bugbones "fun stuff" wasn't a world-class contribution to the body of human knowledge. It could only be called cheerful pollution. I was a child to the world of computers. The Internet was a new toy for me. I drew smileys because they were all I could manage at the time. It bespeaks the level of my technical expertise. Windows Paint was all I had. And building a page was my way of tackling the Internet. I did it because... it was there. Why do people climb Mount Everest?

Information? Or Pinball?

Early on in my web-page-editing days, I complained to my friend Charlene about how disappointed I was in the Information Superhighway: how hard it was to create a page, what a difficult time I was having with the art tools. She said to me, glumly, "I don't like this new icon-based Internet." I didn't quite know what she meant. I knew what icons were: small symbols, like red-ball Gifs and little blue mailboxes. You clicked on them and they brought you stuff. True, the Web was overrun with smiley faces... Was this her gripe? a grudge against frivolity? I could empathize with that. The 'Net was supposed to be every scholar's dream, and here it was turning into one big pinball machine. I couldn't get Charlene to commisserate with me over how hard it was to layout a page of my own design and theme, and upload my art. I came to realize that her complaint went deeper than than just a dislike of smileys. It was images she despised! Charlene was used to a text-based Internet. She'd had a taste of early DOS. A black screen. Simple lines of plain text in the old Courier font. Catalog cards all numbered and indexed. She resented the intrusion of color!

(Confessions of a fearful geek).

Bugbones, Computer Envy, and Columbo.

What a chore the Bugbones logo was to create! A task that would have been a breeze using colored ink and brush was torture using that MOUSE. My hand nearly froze into a permanent claw. In fact, I made the rare (for me) accessory purchase afterwards, my first in a succession of attempts to find the perfect MOUSE. Where was the intuitive pencil-MOUSE? Where was the Star Trek inspired, user-friendly wizard of a machine that would suck in my drawing, let me punch in a couple of plain-talk commands, find the contours, smooth them, and auto-morph those crude Paintbrushy pixels into the cute little Bugbones that I could see on my paper and envision on my 8-inch screen? Would this ever, ever be the future of technology? For all I knew, it was the current state of technology. Just not here in the big woods. Meanwhile, I'm punching a keyboard that looks like something off of an old Columbo show.

"What is this machine?"

"That's a computer, lieutenant."

"Where do you put the ribbon?"

(Confessions of a fearful geek).

Voila! Bugbones...

So after all that work, was my final Bugbones worth it? The homely creature that metamorphosed from bug-gnawed skeleton, to desert-dried fossil, to goofy little cartoon guy? Well, I have to say, "yes!" Bugbones is me! He's simple, really. Take a bug. Give him startled yellow pop-eyes and crumpled antennas. Toss in some silly little dog-biscuit bones and a plump, round belly. Voila! There you have him. A little sick, maybe, but highly representative of the artist's devilish mind. Through blood, sweat and tears, I drew him ~ my computer-generated masterpiece ~ using a MOUSE and Windows Paintbrush. With LView Pro I tweaked him: softer tones, hints of airbrushing, smoothed edges, and (important to me) a transparent background, achievable only through those deluxe art-editing programs. My original cheesy, jagged, flat little lime-green bug was now a softly curved, pleasantly colored, fairly elegant little guy. Bugbones had style, he had personality. He had guts. And they were splattered all over the windshield. By now, I knew how that bug felt.

Oh, the perils of Bugbones.

Fractals, Straight Lines, and Curves

Yes, something clicked in the brain of the fearful geek. It's funny how that happens. I had recently discovered an on-line game that drew fractals. I had never heard of fractals, but the site had an explanation of the phenomenon of structured growth patterns in nature, and a fun little program that let you play with fractals. Now, just after I'd seen fractals in action, here was a guy saying he used the straight-line tool to draw curves. My brainwaves did an electrical arc. It was a quantum leap for me. I suddenly envisioned how I could use a straight line to draw curves, like the sculptor who takes a block of marble and chips away everything that doesn't look like a horse. I would use the straight line to cut away the part of the curve that isn't needed. I would pull each line out at a tangent from the curve, as the line of a fractal coming out from a central point. I now saw that I could use LView Pro to create the highlights and shadows that I needed on Bugbones, then use Windows Paintbrush to trim and smooth the contours of the main shapes. It was a strange workaround, no doubt, but one that I still use today.

"I'm gonna make some art."

...so she said. LView Pro was a challenge. Their icons were good, especially compared to the generic interface of the standard Windows programs I was used to. You didn't have to sort through dozens of generic labels like "File" and "View." If you wanted a paintbrush, there was a nice icon of a paintbrush. Simple. LView Pro had an excellent tutorial, and most of the tools were self-explanatory. But good art editing software is necessarily complex, and some things just can't be explained in words. A video would have been nice. Masks were impossible for me. Curves, too. (My Bugbones sketch was full of curves.) I had the devil of a time getting my MOUSE to behave. I would start drawing a curve, but couldn't figure out the right succession of clicks to pin the darn thing into place. One wrong click and my excellent curve would simply disappear. When I complained of this, one artist told me that he used the straight-line tool in Paintbrush to draw curves. I took this as a flippant remark. Techies are always throwing out flippant remarks ~ just enough to clue you in to their superior knowledge, but rarely in a way that actually helps you learn a thing. This time, though, something clicked.

But, back to LView Pro...

Confessions of a fearful geek: LView Pro presented another great learning curve. I installed it by myself, with a great deal of cursing. Since I already had a trial version installed, it was hard to make my machine recognize the paid version of LView Pro. I'll say this for Windows: it has the memory of an elephant. Once a registry key is in there, it's in there! You delete it? Windows recalls it. I got on-line at LView's support forum and found that I wasn't the only one who had that gripe. I sorted through copious numbers of rants, whines, and curses and finally found a halfway answer to my question. It took half a dozen tries, but in the end, LView Pro was installed. Time to make some art!!!

Wires, Chips, Woes, and Klingon...

No, of course LView Pro wasn't a Microsoft program. That's not what I meant. But I'd already had a taste of what software manufacturers could do to you, and that was Microsoft. Their hi-tech promises expire overnight. Bill Gates could pull the rug out from under any software company any time he wanted. But my feet were also on that rug. One Microsoft upgrade and my hard-bought PC ~ the obsolete dinosaur ~ was a worthless pile of wires and chips. Half of my gadgets would fail. Oh, sure, most of the software makers would scramble around and come up with a new driver or something. But I was the user who had to figure out what made my gadget quit working, what a driver was, where to find one, which one to download, how to install it (and don't even get me started on installation woes). Finding drivers and fixes took searching and searching, poring over smirky tech-forum posts, trying to figure out who knew what, and reading between the lines of a mish-mash of tech jargon that was as incomprehensible to me as Klingon. nuqneH!

Confessions of a non-techie.

(Thanks to Wikipedia for the Klingon word.)

LView Pro... Send me a Disk!

The LView Pro program itself had some great tools and it was comparatively cheap. Only $50. Compared to Corel and whatever Microsoft offered of the same, that was an incredible bargain. I even paid the extra fee for them to send the software on a disk. I didn't know much about the software game, but I sure didn't quite trust some tenuous string of code to be sent through e-mail. If I was gonna pay 50 bucks, I wanted a solid piece of plastic that I could store in a box on my shelf. If I ever needed it again, I'd know where it would be. You couldn't lose it by hitting 'delete' one too many times. They couldn't log you out of it and refuse to recognize your password. Besides, I knew I could reinstall a really old disk even after software manufacturers called it obsolete and quit supporting it. I didn't trust their judgement on deciding when my property was obsolete. My machine was an obsolete dinosaur. So was I. And I was getting cagy. It was me against Bill Gates. I had been the victim of one too many Microsoft upgrades.

Trying LView Pro

I agonized over the decision of whether to download LView Pro. The problem was, I could find nothing in the documentation to tell me whether my antiquated system could handle the imaging software. All other graphics editors called for superfast processors. I was short on something: RAM, megahertz, CPU... who knew? These terms were always a little fuzzy in my mind. I took a chance when I downloaded LView Pro. I liked it right away, though. First, it changed the graphical settings on my computer to a much finer resolution. I didn't know how it worked, but I did know that even Windows Paintbrush was suddenly capable of handling tiny little pixels and a blue million colors. I was in graphics-hog heaven. It was Bugbones makeover time!

The perils of Bugbones.

Aspiring for Better Images

LView Pro came into the picture when I'd just about had enough of Windows Paintbrush. The excitement of using Paint to make big, spidery squiggles was long past. I had conquered the computerized crayon. By hook or crook, over a period days, if not weeks, I had scraped out my flat, ugly little cartoon bug. Bugbones wasn't perfect, but he'd do in a pinch. I uploaded him to my site, rough and unfinished. But I aspired for better. What Bugbones needed was beyond the capability of Paintbrush, default settings or no. My little bug didn't have the polish of nice icons that I saw on other sites. And logo or no, if I meant to have an art site, even a cartoon one, then images were everything. Clearly Paintbrush wasn't gonna cut it. It was time to get down to brass tacks. I needed an art editor. Freeware and shareware were everywhere, but I knew nothing about them. Oh, I had played with shareware that came pre-loaded on my computer. But none of it would work to really tweak and fine-tune images. Through my friends at The Artist's Exchange art forum, I found out that new programs were on-line and free for the taking. LView Pro was the best value, they said.

The perils of Bugbones.

Bugbones and LView Pro

Making little red balls was an amusing distraction, but soon the new wore off. Besides, the little red balls looked spiffier than my logo! Surely I must rework my logo, in keeping with the three-dimensional sophistication and fine resolution of little red balls. Regrettably, the freeware wouldn't do my Bugbones. It would only do balls. For my next free trial, I muddled through a sea of convoluted and conflicting advice and settled on LView Pro.

The perils of Bugbones.