If you’ve followed Paradise Syndrome you know that I’ve had issues with my scanner. I bought the thing in like, ’96 or ’97 or something and it is huge and loud and takes forever but damn it’s an excellent machine. It still works ten years later and works as well as it did the day it came out of the box. But being old school technology, it functions through a system of levers and pulleys and not the new fangled dilithium crystals so ubiquitous in computers of today. When I got a new computer I went through a bunch of hell (as did my brother and bf) to get the old scsi scanner to work with the new usb system because I simply wasn’t willing to let go of my precious old-timey scanner. I mean it cost like 1000$ or something! And 600$ of those dollars came out of my pocket (which was a big deal back in the day when I was an unemployed student). So have I gotten 600$ worth of scanning out of the sucker? I don’t know. That’s a difficult question to answer if you’re as cheap as I am. I’m still reeling about penny candy costing more than a penny. And back in my day we walked uphill in the snow both ways to get to our factory jobs plucking chickens and whatnot. Hey, did you know calls on payphones now cost 50 cents? 50 cents dude! wtf?!?/1?!)

Well, wanting to post some art on this site, I recently I went to scan something with the old behemoth and for unknown reasons it didn’t work (even with all the adaptations to the new comp it was always buggy) and I just flipped. I immediately logged on to FutureShop.ca and ordered a new scanner. After doing a modicum of research on what’s good these days in scanner land). So the next day I stopped by the store on my way home from work and set it up and… it didn’t work. After much fretting and visiting the Vista tech support page (all those Mac commercials about how Vista/Windows suck? Totally accurate) I finally figured out that it just wasn’t plugged in all the way. Doh! But now that it is working I am floating on a cloud of scanner ecstasy. I have named it Sam (my laptop is named Dean, so the scanner is the laptop’s younger, taller, more emo brother). Sam is truly made of teh awesome. In fact, it might be too awesome. It scans at such high quality that you can see the grain of the paper and you can see writing on the other side of the sheet… no more drawing on used paper for me.

It’s still a rather large scanner, by today’s standards, (I wasn’t about to cheap out on some tiny piece of shit that would break down after two scans) but damn is it light and damn is it quiet and damn is it fast. I am now free, free as a bird, to scan all my art to my heart’s content and then photoshop that little heart out and post the results on this very blog you’re reading right now. Now I’m all set, good to go and other expressions from the ‘90s. With my drawing table, my pencils, my pens, my laptop, my scanner, my digi-cam, my photoshop, my drawing mouse, my regular mouse and Kebes’ server I can conquer the world (of art blogging)! Whee! Which is exactly what I will do… at some point… I guess.