The only good thief is Aladdin

I really, really hate thieves, of pretty much any kind. Except MAYBE the fictional ones, and those only rarely.

Several talented Sailor Moon fanartists have had their work stolen by this person on DeviantART. I've already begun reporting the Deviations, but I could use your help locating the original artists of many more of these works--I honestly don't believe very many of this user's deviations are theirs at all, and if you happen to recognize another artist's work in this person's gallery, I'd appreciate you either reporting the deviation or supplying me with a link to the original art so I can.

One such artist is Alan Guiterrez (stardriv on DA), and what I find especially laughable is that some of the "Artist's Comments" for the stolen paintings (which Alan did as a commission and charged $2400 for the whole series, so some diehard fan is considerably less wealthy after getting these paintings and deserves to have them indicated as FOR HER BY HIM on HIS terms) try to "credit" Alan by a) spelling his name wrong and b) not even bothering to link to a site where his work can be found, such as...uh, his DeviantART account?

Now, I'm not the biggest DA fan in the world, since they've got a pretty lousy policy on fanart as it is, and don't tend to consider Senshi edits as anything but "Scraps," but that's a post for a whole other day and time.

Your help is appreciated, Sailor Moon fans and artists!

The Next Step

CS4 finally arrived. I attempted to install it yesterday (which took a while) and was told that it was done BUT it needed me to reinstall anyway, because some components or whatnot were missing. Made sense, considering I'd had the CS4 trial on here and the CS3 Clean Script the "wonderful" folks at Adobe had me run removed some vital CS4 components, too. So I restarted, turned off all the extra bells and whistles running in the background, and reinstalled.

It said done! Successful! Hurrah!

And then I ran Photoshop.

I waited.

It crashed.

AGAIN.

Also, because it crashed, I thought I wouldn't be able to register the applications in-program, so I did so online, at Adobe.com. Apparently that means I don't get my free benefit!? But I tried opening Dreamweaver CS4 and registering through there, and that seemed to go smoothly, except I still didn't get my benefit email. I want that damn benefit, especially after all the BS I've been through with this.

Dreamweaver isn't crashing at all. It's sitting pretty, which is nice and a bit of a relief. But I still need Photoshop. I need it soon, for my class. And because Corel and the Citrix plug-in were both crashing with the same (looked the same, anyway; an error that long, I'm not exactly going to read it line-by-line, although I could always compare them using TextWrangler...hmmm...) SIGTRAP error too, I've determined this is a system error and I need to do something about it.

LIKE, YESTERDAY.

So, I'm going to do an Erase and Install. But not on my own, no. Because much as I love software and think I'm pretty spiffy with it, something as large as this requires the "delicate" hand of a so-called Genius (a.k.a. someone to walk me through this whole mess). I'm going to go there, at my appointed time, bring my Time Machine drive, tell them the last schmuck at the downtown store told me to do something that's not possible with my OS version and he should have known that, and I want them to FIX the issue however they can (and for free, because dammit, it wasn't doing this before, I haven't changed anything, and this isn't fair!).

I pray that this will:
a) fix the problem with the crashing, because it's caused by occasionally corrupt files that can't be repaired the usual way
b) allow me to restore all my applications, or at least the ones I really, really need and paid money for
c) not take more than one to two days, because frankly, I have homework to do and trying to do it on a PC is nearly as agonizing as thinking this is fixed and then finding out it's not

*pray pray pray*