anna anthropy
Game developer, game historian
Who are you, and what do you do?
I'm anna! I makes games, write books, print zines, and try to document game history.
What hardware do you use?
Index cards, for mocking up card games. I have a notebook that I bought in an art store just cus it was a good size to fit in my purse. It has a patch of a knife mod podged to it. At some point I bought one of those graph paper notebooks because I thought it would be good for game design, but I ended up rarely using it.
I have a five-year-old HP laptop that somehow still runs and a scanner that a psychiatric clinic was getting rid of. I use a Brother black and white printer to print all my zines; I was able to get it used for fifty bucks and I can use generic toner with it, which saves me a ton of money.
And what software?
I mostly just use Notepad. My desktop is covered in folders fulls of text files of notes for projects and things. I use Wordpad if I'm going to be writing anything that goes in paragraphs. OpenOffice Writer for reviewing edits on drafts.
I use this totally inadequate but free program called Scribus to lay out text, but since the results are usually far from perfect I think use Paint Shop Pro 8 to correct them for printing. I don't know if Paint Shop Pro 8 is even available anymore, but it's what I learned as a teenager and I hate Photoshop. I basically only use Photoshop to convert things to CMYK. And I use GraphicsGale for animation.
What would be your dream setup?
Sometimes I think it would be an isolated old lighthouse, typing mystery novels on a loud old typewriter while the portrait of my late husband, lost at sea, solemnly looks on in the flickering candlelight. Other times it's a houseboat rocking on a gentle sea, charting sunken kingdoms on vellum scrolls with the feathers of ancient beasts for pens. I don't think my cat would be down for a life at sea though. So you can see I have trouble making up my mind.