So it was around 2000 or so, and Marie and I were living in our second apartment, and our VCR was either dead or dying. And I remember thinking to myself, this is it. This is our last VCR.

It was kind of an odd thought. Not sad or exciting; just odd. I’m not sure I could say I’d bought my last anything before that. But it made sense. Our next VCR wouldn’t be a VCR; it would be a DVD player.

Technologies come and go. Historically I’ve kind of blasé about it. But lately I’ve been thinking about this stuff a lot.

* * *

I’ve been without a pen tablet for about a year now. You’d think I would have rushed out and bought a new one as soon as my latest one failed, but for some reason I didn’t. All the Scopa cards I’ve been posting, the Girl Wonder submission, those were all done with a mouse.

Maybe the pen tablet will be replaced with a tablet computer, maybe not. Drawing directly on screen would be awesome, but I can’t say I’ve really warmed up to tablets yet.

* * *

I haven’t updated my Adobe products in four years. Photoshop,Illustrator, Flash — I’m several versions out of date now.

I may never buy another Photoshop or Illustrator.

Ever.

This thought kind of scares me. I’ve been using Photoshop since around 1992. I’ve invested a lot of energy into learning to use these programs as efficiently as possible, and would probably take a pretty big productivity hit if I switched products. I can open things I haven’t touched in a decade and start working on them without missing a beat.

But I don’t do freelancing anymore, and Adobe’s flagship products are expensive. There’s also a lot I don’t like about these products, not that I’ve tried anything else lately.

* * *

This wouldn’t be that much of an issue, except that from what I’ve read, my versions of Adobe’s products won’t run on the newest version of Windows. When my current laptop dies — and from the looks of things, that’s going to be pretty soon — I’m going to have a bit of a problem.

My strategy right now is to continue working on my own illustration program, and just keep my development tools up to date, which is relatively inexpensive.

We’ll see how sick I get of development after a while I guess. 🙂