David Sim

This is the "Glenn told me to download these movies, what the *heck*
do I do now!?!" file.

First, these are the files:

bar.qt.cpt.hqx     - "A Well-Equipped Bar" Cerebus animation (1.1MB)
bat.qt.cpt.hqx     - "Add One Mummified Bat" Cerebus animation (1.2 MB)
sword.qt.cpt.hqx   - "His First Sword" Cerebus animation" (1.1 MB)
ferret.readme      - this file

The qt stands for Apple's QuickTime (which I'll come back to) and cpt
stands for Compact Pro's self-extracting compacted files.  The hqx
stands for "bin-hex", which means the binary files have been turned
into ascii for safer downloading (you do practice safe downloading,
right?), but if you got this far, you probably already knew that.  So
you'll have to de-binhex, almost any compression program does this,
e.g. Stuffit or Compact Pro.  Ingenious naming conventions, eh?  These
were done in conjuntion with the creator of Cerebus, Dave Sim, as part
of his (promotional) Campaign '93, as a project called "Operation:
Crazed Ferret" by Glenn Carnagey, whose co-conspirators were Jim
Ottaviani and John Romkey.  I took old scans of the original
pseudo-cels of Dave Sim's "Animated Cerebus", strung them together at
3 to 4 f.p.s, and added some bells and whistles.

To keep from losing too many of Dave's Details (tm) I had to make the
movies large format and compress the holy heck out of them to get them
on a disk.  But these are huge honking files (an apparent prerequisite
of "multi-media"), they're 2 to 2.4 MB a piece, but hey, there's only
3 of them and they started out at better than 6MB a piece!  They
wouldn't fit on anything but a high density (1.4) disk, and even this
took great depths of deviousness on my part.  The minimum HD space is
between 2.5 to 3 MB, depending on which movie, and you'll need the
QuickTime movie extension and a movie player such as Apple's Movie
Player (you can get these from sumex-aim, ftp.apple.com or info-mac,
along with BinHex, if you *really* can't find them, e-mail me).
You'll need a Mac LC, Mac II or above to view, with greyscale or color
monitor.

You just download, de-binhex and dubl-click, and tell the window that
pops up to put the decompressed version somewhere on your HD.
cerebus.doc.cpt contains way cool Cerebus propaganda in the form of
Cerebus.doc (Microsoft Word) and Cerebus.txt (vanilla).  This is
mostly the work of Jim Ottaviani, who also brought us the most
wondrous "Usenet Interview", I just stuck pretty pictures in
Cerebus.doc, and added the odd word here and there.  I'll wait for you
to clap for a moment.

To view these marvelous masterworks, oops, uh, files of Most High
Hilarity, you need to drop something called QuickTime into your System
folder and restart (unless you've already done so).  This is Apple's
addition to its system for dealing with movies and other graphical
things.  In system 7.x, it will automatically put it in the
"Extensions" folder for you, otherwise you can do this yourself.  If
you don't have such a folder, put it where your Laserwriter and/or
Imagewriter driver files are, which will be somewhere in your system
folder, but may differ slightly from person to person.  These files
used to be called "INIT"s under system 6.xx and earlier.  For the
techies amongst us still running system 6.xx who use something that
does funky things with these files, say INIT/cdev or the like, let
these poor puppies know!  Otherwise you could crash, burn and die
horribly, alone and unloved!!  ("that's a joke, I say, a joke son!")
The version of QuickTime included is 1.5, the latest, and if you have
QuickTime, this may be a newer version.

Right.  That should do it, go get short grey and furry and have a ball!

Oh yeah, assume that things that belong to other people have their
proper (tm), Dave's Details doesn't count.  But Movie Player and
Quicktime belong to Apple, and Compact Pro belongs to Bill Goodman, to
whom you should send money for his indispensible program.  Cerebus, of
course, belongs to Dave Sim, but then you knew that.

In the immortal words of the Ramones, "Hey, ho, let's go!"