April 13, 2012

Friday Cat Blogging – 13 April 2012

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As promised, today’s catblogging is done entirely from my iPad, a task that’s fantastically more difficult than it should be thanks to the usual Apple attitude of walling off their products and insisting that everyone either do things the Apple way or no way at all. In particular, Apple has chosen not to expose any of the iPad file system in a standard way, which means that web browsers can’t upload files to a remote site the way they can on any other platform. So I had to figure out some other way to get my cat photos from the iPad to the MoJo server. It’s not impossible, but it sure is a major pain in the ass. Thanks, Apple!

(I like the iPad a lot. But this ubiquitous Apple attitude is the reason I consider it a starter tablet. More than likely, a year from now I’ll trade it in for an Android or Windows 8 tablet, which will allow me to decide for myself how I want to conduct my online life.)

Still, at least I could upload photos, even if the process was a muddle. The other problem with catblogging from the iPad has to do with Photoshop Touch. In a word, it sucks. On today’s photos, I attempted a grand total of three operations:

  • Resizing the images to fit the column.
  • Sharpening the reduced images.
  • Lightening Inkblot’s eyes in the photo on the right.

Every single one of these operations worked poorly. The resizing produced the pixelated whiskers that you see in both pictures. Regular Photoshop doesn’t, which means the Touch version has some kind of crappy, scaled-down resizing algorithm. Sharpening, which normally works fine, produces almost comically crude results on Touch, so I abandoned it. And lassoing an object to lighten it is tough going because fingers are crude pointing devices and Touch has a maximum zoom level of 400%, which doesn’t make small objects big enough to work on.

So maybe I should try some other photo editing tool. There’s always iPhoto, of course. Anyone have any other recommendations?

Oh yeah, and today’s theme is cats in both the foreground and the background. Not sure why. It just turned out that way.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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