I Tried to be Creative Today

I'm currently in the middle of a two-week work trip and it's defiantly a lazy Sunday for me. Yesterday I hit up a local game store, bought some stuff (some minis and a small video game machine), did my laundry, etc., so al I have on my schedule today is to finally sit down and finish the d30 Foraging/Hunting table I had been working on since two weeks ago.

Of course I left on this trip with my table notes at home, but no biggie because I pretty much remember everything I'd come up with so far....

....but I cannot actually start the project because my layout software decided it doesn't have to work anymore. Evidently everything BUT Adobe InDesign CS5 wants to work on my computer. I tried reinstalling so many times. Looked up the error codes, went through with the suggested Microsoft C++ updates, but......nothing.

Ok now I'm pissed. I've been using Adobe CS5 Suite because I'm not spending a metric buttload of $ to rent the current cloud version with the bells and whistles I'm not going to get much use out of. I went ahead and looked at some alternatives, and I think I might have found something I'll like using (even if I have to cough up $70 to do so), but great..........I literally cannot open .indd files outside of InDesign.

FFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUU......you get my frustration, hopefully.

After a bit of online running around I decided to just download Adobe's Creative Cloud app and then Adobe Illustrator on a free trial. No, you didn't read that wrong (well somebody didn't really read it at all), I downloaded Adobe Illustrator and you can imagine how frustrating it was when Illustrator simply wouldn't load InDesign files......

Now, to be fair, if you don't use the products everyday you probably don't see that one logo is "Id" and the other is "Ai", especially if you only downloaded one......so you see "Ai" and that feels right for "Adobe InDesign".

One uninstall, cancel the free trial, and a different download and I finally am able to look at my files. It's been hours since I started this ordeal.....and you know, $22 a month....a FREAKIN MONTH to use Adobe InDesign, no thank you. I went ahead and opened up every file I could and exported it to a INDL file which allegedly could be opened with a newer design\layout program.....that is not Adobe.

At this point I feel like I've wasted a significant portion of my day and I don't feel like screwing around creating a new d30 table. Clearly I am not a fan of subscription models for basic stuff and while I don't mind paying for the likes of Netflix of Disney+, I'm not going to pay a lot of money (I shit you not, $90 a month for updated software) to essentially rent software. Now if I was a professional artist (imagine that with a snooty accent, 'cause that's how I said it in my mind) and needed the newest toys to increase productivity and bring in more $$$, then I'm sure I wouldn't mind the business expense, but my ham-fisted attempts at hobby "writing" doesn't warrant such an expense.

It's probably easy enough to see the connection I've made between a subscription model and the OSR gaming hobby for me, but as I'm typing this out I have this nagging recollection in the back of my mind that there is something I'm missing.....

.....that's right! Hasbro was trying out a subscription model with D&D Beyond.

Oh no, eff that noise.

Later Evening Edit: I decided that instead of playing video games or watching a movie, which I really wanted to do, I better take advantage of the trial period on one of the new InDesign alternatives and while Affinity Publisher 2 might have a few issues, if I save as a PSD file and then use Photoshop to create the PDF it works. Don't ask me why I just cannot print to PDF directly, but whatever. I'm clearly rusty AF, but I did get my table done: d30 Foraging & Hunting Table. If you hop over there from here, put in $0 in the Pay What You Want amount and do so guilt-free 'cause I just told you to!