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Bicycle Four Seasons (KS)

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Bicycle Four Seasons (KS)
« on: March 29, 2015, 10:40:17 AM »
 

ddhburns

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Is anyone remarking on these and I've missed the post? I'd love to hear members' feedback on the cards, if anyone's interested in taking a look... Looks like they may juuuuust make funding in nine days...

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/399370135/the-four-seasons-bicycle-playing-cards?ref=nav_search
« Last Edit: March 29, 2015, 03:39:30 PM by ddhburns »
 

Re: Bicycle Four Seasons (KS)
« Reply #1 on: March 29, 2015, 11:46:50 AM »
 

Don Boyer

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It looks like you might be the first to post about it.  I'd swear there was a topic about these somewhere, but multiple searches haven't turned it up.  (Doesn't mean it's not there, just means I can't find it and our search function is acting "quirky" again.)

Go ahead, jazz it up!  Most people starting a new topic on a deck being sold or offered on KS will include some images from the project and a link to the project page.
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Re: Bicycle Four Seasons (KS)
« Reply #2 on: March 29, 2015, 03:41:47 PM »
 

ddhburns

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I gave it a shot (above); the art doesn't "pop" much in copies of a copy, but available in Hi-Res on the site, of course. Let me know if it didn't work. Thanks, Don.
 

Re: Bicycle Four Seasons (KS)
« Reply #3 on: March 30, 2015, 02:58:57 AM »
 

Don Boyer

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I gave it a shot (above); the art doesn't "pop" much in copies of a copy, but available in Hi-Res on the site, of course. Let me know if it didn't work. Thanks, Don.

The art is fine.  Why would it not "pop" just like the original image?  Copies of a copy are degraded in the analog world - digital copies are identical to the originals.  If they weren't, the music industry wouldn't have imploded a few decades ago when computers became sophisticated enough to copy music CDs.  Cassette tape copies of albums were sufficiently "degraded" that the cassette tape's invention wasn't the severe crisis that the burnable CD and the invention of the MP3 file were.
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Re: Bicycle Four Seasons (KS)
« Reply #4 on: March 30, 2015, 04:49:00 AM »
 

Leif

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It looks cool, I think. I'm afraid that the intricate pip design might get lost in the printing, at least in the indices. What do you others think?
 

Re: Bicycle Four Seasons (KS)
« Reply #5 on: March 30, 2015, 06:02:56 AM »
 

Don Boyer

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It looks cool, I think. I'm afraid that the intricate pip design might get lost in the printing, at least in the indices. What do you others think?

You raise a good point.  I'm using a Retina Display (I estimated the pixel count on it to be roughly triple that of HDTV) and I have a hard time seeing all the detail, even with my glasses on (they sharpen my vision up to 20/15).  It's distinctly possible that this would turn to mush by the time it reached the other end of the printer.  The larger pips in the body of the card designs stands a better chance, but those index pips have a lot of detail that will be lost, especially with a contrast that's so low.  Even the fine lines in the frames don't render well on my screen - they must be T-I-N-Y.

I knew I remembered this deck.  This was the design that had three different pip colors!  (Or at least one of them, anyway.)  Spring and Summer (the "red" suits) are a nice green, but Autumn is brown and Winter is bluish-blackish.  Bad choices.  He could have stuck with the brown for Winter by using bare branches to make up the pips.

The video they included is a waste of time.  It's an animated sequence of the still images of the card renders, all with some generic, "quasi-heroic" free-use music.  It's like when I see deck reviews where the reviewer reads every word on every surface of the box, despite the fact that his video is sharp enough that I can read it for myself.  Waste of time.  If you want to make a deck video, make a VIDEO, as in actual moving images - get your designer on-camera and have him or her talk about what's so great about the deck and what's the story behind it, etc.  As far as music, either go original or go silent.  (If you must use public domain music, use something worth listening to that DOESN'T sound generic, doesn't sound like every other video soundtrack on Kickstarter.)

The art is generally not to my liking, but that's just me - I can see the quality of the art; it just doesn't happen to be my taste, that's all.  I do kind of like the Winter courts, but that's about it.

I hope to hell Ace Collectable Cards plans on doing something more with that card back.  Black and metallic gold look awesome on a video screen - and look terrible in print because of lost contrast, especially with the gold lifework being so thin and fine.  Metallic gold ink isn't bright like a gold ring or a gold ingot - it's dark, like deli mustard that's got a little shine to it.  Fine yellowish-brown lines on a field of black will look more like mud puddle at night than a card back.  I actually do like the design itself - I'm kind of hoping they opt to make it a bright yellow instead of metallic gold, which is what it looks like in the rendered image.
« Last Edit: March 30, 2015, 06:09:38 AM by Don Boyer »
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Re: Bicycle Four Seasons (KS)
« Reply #6 on: March 30, 2015, 08:09:18 AM »
 

ddhburns

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I gave it a shot (above); the art doesn't "pop" much in copies of a copy, but available in Hi-Res on the site, of course. Let me know if it didn't work. Thanks, Don.

The art is fine.  Why would it not "pop" just like the original image?  Copies of a copy are degraded in the analog world - digital copies are identical to the originals.  If they weren't, the music industry wouldn't have imploded a few decades ago when computers became sophisticated enough to copy music CDs.  Cassette tape copies of albums were sufficiently "degraded" that the cassette tape's invention wasn't the severe crisis that the burnable CD and the invention of the MP3 file were.

While not a computer person by any stretch, I've done a bit of recording. I believe the answer is "lossy compression." If I speak to you over my phone, my voice is squashed into billion of bits of information. Many of those bits are then dropped in order to reduce the bandwidth needed to transmit that voice. When those packets reach YOUR phone, there's no way to recapture that info - it's lost. Likewise with Photoshop; if I work on a 40MB image and overlay a half-dozen masks, then merge them all, I can end up with an image which would take a very long time to transmit from computer to computer. I save them in a format which is much smaller "Lo Res," or "Web format" for web sites, meaning that much of that information has been discarded. What gets recreated at the other end is "good enough for gummint work," but not nearly as detailed as the original. I don't know whether that process repeats over and over as it is sent forward. My hunch is that it does, but we'd need a "computer person" to answer that.
 

Re: Bicycle Four Seasons (KS)
« Reply #7 on: March 30, 2015, 09:10:19 AM »
 

Don Boyer

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I gave it a shot (above); the art doesn't "pop" much in copies of a copy, but available in Hi-Res on the site, of course. Let me know if it didn't work. Thanks, Don.

The art is fine.  Why would it not "pop" just like the original image?  Copies of a copy are degraded in the analog world - digital copies are identical to the originals.  If they weren't, the music industry wouldn't have imploded a few decades ago when computers became sophisticated enough to copy music CDs.  Cassette tape copies of albums were sufficiently "degraded" that the cassette tape's invention wasn't the severe crisis that the burnable CD and the invention of the MP3 file were.

While not a computer person by any stretch, I've done a bit of recording. I believe the answer is "lossy compression." If I speak to you over my phone, my voice is squashed into billion of bits of information. Many of those bits are then dropped in order to reduce the bandwidth needed to transmit that voice. When those packets reach YOUR phone, there's no way to recapture that info - it's lost. Likewise with Photoshop; if I work on a 40MB image and overlay a half-dozen masks, then merge them all, I can end up with an image which would take a very long time to transmit from computer to computer. I save them in a format which is much smaller "Lo Res," or "Web format" for web sites, meaning that much of that information has been discarded. What gets recreated at the other end is "good enough for gummint work," but not nearly as detailed as the original. I don't know whether that process repeats over and over as it is sent forward. My hunch is that it does, but we'd need a "computer person" to answer that.

Ah, but you're not referring to simple copies - you're referring to compressed copies, or conversions from analog to digital.  If you simply copy a digital file in a straight-forward manner without changing anything about the file (such as compression), the duplicate is 100% identical to the original, bit for bit.

Regarding the telephone, it actually used a form of "compression" long before the network was digital.  While humans have a hearing range that runs roughly between 20 and 20,000 Hz, telephones only transmit a limited audio range, between 100 and 5,000 Hz - just enough for the human voice to be heard, understood and recognized, but not enough for replaying music accurately, which is why music heard through a phone always sounds terrible.  When phones went digital, they kept the range limitation because it reduced the amount of bandwidth a phone call required.  From there, they started using compressed data packets - they receive the data so rapidly, they can break it into discrete packets, compress them, transmit them over the network to the receiver, decompress them and play them back - and the gap in time is so negligible that the human ear can't detect it.  That allowed for the transmission of multiple calls in the same bandwidth that used to be required for a single, continuous transmission.

But back to the point - straight-up copies are perfect copies when it comes to digital files.

BTW: just as there is "lossy compression," there is also "lossless compression," at least for audio files.  For example, there's the DDA (digital disc audio) file format, used by compact discs.  There's also Ogg Vorbis and Apple Lossless.  The problem, though, is that lossless formats don't achieve the same levels of compression as lossy formats.  That's why a DDA file is usually about 10-15 times larger than an MP3 file of the same recording.  I'd wager something like that exists for image and even video files, but it's been a while since I've dug that deep into the file format world...  :))

We should be getting back to the topic...
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Re: Bicycle Four Seasons (KS)
« Reply #8 on: March 30, 2015, 10:58:20 PM »
 

ddhburns

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I cheerfully concede full ownership of the topic to the Master, and humbly accept the teachings! (How does Don KNOW all this stuff?!)

"You have to know these things when you're King..." (Monty Python and the Holy Grail)
 

Re: Bicycle Four Seasons (KS)
« Reply #9 on: March 30, 2015, 11:12:55 PM »
 

Rob Wright

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I cheerfully concede full ownership of the topic to the Master, and humbly accept the teachings! (How does Don KNOW all this stuff?!)

"You have to know these things when you're King..." (Monty Python and the Holy Grail)

Easy now! Don't talk like that too much, or we will need to add a few gigabytes of space for Don's head  :t11:
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Re: Bicycle Four Seasons (KS)
« Reply #10 on: March 31, 2015, 03:20:14 AM »
 

Don Boyer

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I cheerfully concede full ownership of the topic to the Master, and humbly accept the teachings! (How does Don KNOW all this stuff?!)

"You have to know these things when you're King..." (Monty Python and the Holy Grail)

Easy now! Don't talk like that too much, or we will need to add a few gigabytes of space for Don's head  :t11:

Well, when you consider that I first used a computer nearly 40 years ago, it's easier to understand how I might know so much about the topic.  I've seen machines with a "removable hard drive" that was twelve inches in diameter, never mind the 5.25" floppy disks and the 3.5" floppy disks.

In fact, the first computer I saw in action wasn't actually a computer - it was a terminal device for connecting to mainframe computers over the phone lines.  The Texas Instruments "Silent 700" used thermal paper as an output device and connected to computers using an acoustic coupler - two cups into which you'd jam the handset of an old-school landline phone; one for the speaker and one for the microphone.  My father was an electrician, but his experience level was more like that of an electrical engineer and he had some experience with early "microcomputers."  He was asked to testify before the US Congress about a computer he co-designed, the "Fuel Computer," back in the late 1970s.  The Fuel Computer was designed hot on the heels of the Oil Crises of the 1970s and was the first computerized control unit for an oil-burning furnace in a home or an apartment building, allowing one to use up to 25% less oil for heating their dwelling and producing hot water.

The first computer I used was at school, in fifth grade - A Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I.  It used a cassette drive to load software - it looks like a 70s dictaphone-style tape recorder and used high-bias audio tapes for storage, with audio cables for connection to the machine.  The machine used BASIC as its programming language (before the age of graphical user interfaces and operating systems, you literally had to program your own computer).  It had a whopping 64 kilobytes of memory and it took 30 MINUTES to load a 64-Kb program.  To put that in perspective, 64 Kb equals 0.0625 megabytes (Mb) or 0.00006103515625 gigabytes (Gb) - a typical smart phone today will have between 16 and 64 Gb of memory, while the typical computer might have 256 to 1,024 Gb of storage.  (So when the Internet is slow, perhaps that might put things in perspective for you!)  That 64-Gb phone has 1,048,576 times the amount of memory the entire computer I was using had!

I remember one program that I found in a computer magazine - it was called "Frightful Flight."  I read the code - it was all nonsense instructions that had no logic to them and would only crash when the computer ran it, but I programmed it in anyway, character-for-character exactly as it appeared in the magazine.  Things got really strange when I read the final instructions - save the program to a tape, disconnect the cables to the recorder, rewind the tape and play it.  My jaw nearly hit the floor when I heard a really bad but recognizable rendition of "Flight of the Bumblebee" playing out of the tape deck's speaker!  Some crazy programmer learned which commands used which audio frequencies when saved to the cassette, found the ones that corresponded to musical notes and "programmed" a song using a computer that had no audio capabilities and a black-and-white screen!

I could go on and on about this, but really - we're so far off-topic, we're not even on the same planet anymore...
« Last Edit: March 31, 2015, 03:20:55 AM by Don Boyer »
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Re: Bicycle Four Seasons (KS)
« Reply #11 on: April 01, 2015, 09:22:43 PM »
 

ddhburns

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Bwah hah ha, I've got you beat. I remember the shock when the 'Trash 80' came out, BECAUSE you could load onto a cassette tape, and it had an ONBOARD OPERATING SYSTEM! My God! The revolution is upon us! Blew the Atari (on which I learned Basic) out of the water.

I owned a KayPro 1 (6" green screen) which had two floppy drives - one for the operating system, one for "memory."  Weighed about 50 pounds, the size of a suitcase. No onboard ANYTHING.

My first real programs were in boxes of punch cards. Was there before dot matrix, daisy wheel, LEDs or pocket calculators. I suddenly feel the need to take some Geritol and buy some Depends... Sorry, we've now moved to a whose different solar system. Mea culpa.
 

Re: Bicycle Four Seasons (KS)
« Reply #12 on: April 02, 2015, 09:55:00 AM »
 

chas0039

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I kind of like it, but the hefty additional shipping cost turned thumbs down.  I'll probably wait for the secondary market here in the US.
 

Re: Bicycle Four Seasons (KS)
« Reply #13 on: April 02, 2015, 11:25:24 AM »
 

Don Boyer

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Bwah hah ha, I've got you beat. I remember the shock when the 'Trash 80' came out, BECAUSE you could load onto a cassette tape, and it had an ONBOARD OPERATING SYSTEM! My God! The revolution is upon us! Blew the Atari (on which I learned Basic) out of the water.

I owned a KayPro 1 (6" green screen) which had two floppy drives - one for the operating system, one for "memory."  Weighed about 50 pounds, the size of a suitcase. No onboard ANYTHING.

My first real programs were in boxes of punch cards. Was there before dot matrix, daisy wheel, LEDs or pocket calculators. I suddenly feel the need to take some Geritol and buy some Depends... Sorry, we've now moved to a whose different solar system. Mea culpa.

The original TRS-80s didn't have an OS, they had a programming language - in many ways similar to your Atari, but in black and white with giant pixels, the size of a kid's pinky finger.
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Re: Bicycle Four Seasons (KS)
« Reply #14 on: April 02, 2015, 01:06:03 PM »
 

chas0039

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The original TRS-80s didn't have an OS, they had a programming language - in many ways similar to your Atari, but in black and white with giant pixels, the size of a kid's pinky finger.

Got you beat, my TRS-80 model I had 4K.  Or maybe that is what I ordered, either the 8K machine or the 4K machine was not delivered.  Spent may hours debugging the programs I typed in from Byte magazine.  In the early 1980s I started building my own clones with MS-DOS 1.1.

But I digress.

Back to the 4 Seasons deck, I heard rumors that they were going to set up a US distributor, hopefully the shipping cost will drop.
« Last Edit: April 02, 2015, 01:15:17 PM by chas0039 »
 

Re: Bicycle Four Seasons (KS)
« Reply #15 on: April 02, 2015, 03:44:21 PM »
 

Don Boyer

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The original TRS-80s didn't have an OS, they had a programming language - in many ways similar to your Atari, but in black and white with giant pixels, the size of a kid's pinky finger.

Got you beat, my TRS-80 model I had 4K.  Or maybe that is what I ordered, either the 8K machine or the 4K machine was not delivered.  Spent may hours debugging the programs I typed in from Byte magazine.  In the early 1980s I started building my own clones with MS-DOS 1.1.

But I digress.

Back to the 4 Seasons deck, I heard rumors that they were going to set up a US distributor, hopefully the shipping cost will drop.

Yes, I'm beat, even as I just now recall that machine had 16K of RAM...  Yours was probably contemporary to mine - the one I used was a Model I and I don't recall a Model 0...  But I never used punch cards - saw an old punch-card computer in high school, but it was already decommissioned.

On the topic...  I'm still concerned about how detailed those pips are on this deck.  People love making these mega-baroque deck designs or design elements, but not all of them take the printer's capabilities into account.
« Last Edit: April 08, 2015, 12:20:27 AM by Don Boyer »
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Re: Bicycle Four Seasons (KS)
« Reply #16 on: April 02, 2015, 04:03:15 PM »
 

chas0039

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I see now what you are saying.  All those fine lines and filigree could get muddy.  Nice to have the resources here to point those things out.
 

Re: Bicycle Four Seasons (KS)
« Reply #17 on: April 07, 2015, 09:45:56 AM »
 

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