Friday Q&A

Questionable Direction

Greetings, crickets and trolls. Welcome to another fine edition of the Friday Q&A. This blog has always been about keeping track of the cutting edge when it comes to image mangling. To that end, this week I'll be taking a look at some of the ways we might be pushing pixels in the not-too-distant future.

Q: Is image mangling dead?

A: Talk to any Photoshopper for about five minutes, and it's a sure bet they will mention the decline of image mangling no less than a dozen times. We PSers have a lot to say on the subject, and can often chart the demise of our community to the advent of some random and seemingly minor cliche.

Q: How much time do we have left?

A: No one knows. Fark is a bit like an old grandmother. In that I've listened to it complain about its health to the point that I'm ready to push it down a flight of stairs to put it out of everyone's misery. There's a good chance that things will keep on chugging along there forever, barring closure of the site or some blatant mismanagement of the contests. What concerns everyone is not so much the death of Fark, but the death of public interest in our pastime. Personally, I couldn't care less what the average idiot thinks of how I spend my time. Losing some votes is an acceptable trade off to being free from the slack-jawed gawking of the general public.

Q: What will be the successor to image mangling?

A: This is the question everyone is asking. Some people might tell you that video editing is the wave of the future. Those people are ignorant fools. We're way past the point where video lost its wow factor. And the other stuff is still too inaccessible. Don't look for daily Flash contests to show up on the main Fark page any time soon. My money is on scrimshaw or daguerreotype making a big comeback, but that's purely speculation on my part.

That's all for this time, gentle reader. As always, thanks for stopping by. I think Photoshop's throne as official time-waster of the Fark domain is safe for now. But you never know. Maybe the doomsayers are right, and all the cool kids switched to video, and to then something else because video is obviously not cool anymore either. If we Photoshoppers truly are lumbering dinosaurs of a forgotten past, I get to be the Triceratops.

Stay tuned for more paleontological preferences from the Doctor!