Safe as Milk

What was I smoking?

March 12, 2008 9:40 am Dave Neary freesoftware, gimp, libre graphics meeting

That’s the only question I can think of when I come across this gem, from the wiki page collecting demos for Libre Graphics Meeting 2006 (I’ve put an archive of the old LGM page back online, minus the MySQL database which had the news items):

So, you’re an artist, and your favourite program (or combination of programs) isn’t in the programme. Why not offer yourself up as a sacrificial lamb on the altar of demos?

In Greek mythology, Deimos was the god of dread or panic, which seems strangely appropriate.

The word demonstration comes from the latin demonstrare, to explain completely. Monstrare in turn comes from monstrum, meaning “divine omen or wonder”. So we can think of a demonstration as a demystification.

The word shares its roots with monster, meaning something we don’t understand.

So demonstrations are dreadful affairs where we demystify monsters.

If you feel up to the task of scaring off other people’s monsters with a big flashlight, sign up here to give a demo. It could be as simple as using Blender to create an animation, or as complicated as drawing a square in the GIMP.

Can’t remember what I was up to when I wrote that, but it must have been late…