Friday 15^th December 2023

Me again. With more...news, or something.
A couple years ago, I randomed my way into discovering some cool software—almost something of a software toy, like SimCity or whatever—and grabbed it instantly. And then actually mentioned it here on the site, though that was [presumably is] trapped in the database for the CMS I recently removed because it was bad.
Specifically, it was Rebelle5. More specifically, it was apparently Rebelle5.1.5...if it matters.
What matters more, in any case, was that the software was pretty cool. A bit like Photoshop, but able to mimic realworld things like oil paint and charcoal and the effects those things undergo when they become wet. So: software toy—it produced things, as software should, but it also gave me neat effects to play with.
I liked it well enough that, the instant Rebelle6 came out—which was actually Rebelle6Pro [6.0.0]—I grabbed it as an upgrade to Rebelle5. Rebelle6Pro added a lot of new elements, like a sorta LoD zoomy thing kinda fractaling the illusion of paint on textured paper damned near down to the molecular level.
Then, this year, without a lot of advanced warning because I'd got Five just before Six was released so I'm not sure how often these updates happen, Escape Motions announced that Rebelle7Pro was coming out on December the Fourteenth for $149.99 but I could preorder it for pretty much zilch—I think it was about thirty bucks, six weeks ago.
Okay: givit.
And that was the whole story for a while: I've preordered Rebelle7Pro—which, looking at my Order History, was actually a standalone instead of an upgrade to Six—and now I just wait for November to end and December to begin and December to get right on the edge of the end of the beginning and the beginning of the end. Meaning about yesterday.
And then yesterday happened.
Knowing for the last six weeks that the new software toy was meant to come out yesterday, I started keeping an eye on EscapeMotions.com. The backend. Where I'd eventually be able to download the new software toy I'd preordered....

I'm calling this a receipt.

And then the Order History just looked like that for most of the day. Here in the US, anyway. In Slovakia, where Escape Motions live, it became Midnight, and then the Fifteenth, and it was still just Coming Today! for a few hours.
I reloaded the Order History a couple times an hour, until....

Victory.

So, let's download that and install it and—

Unvictory.

That was actually the eventual outcome, after I tried every possible combination of three different usernames and their three different passwords. Because, at some point, I'd bought different things at different times and somehow wound up with three different accounts.

I did, incidentally, click there.

So this is a problem. Because, officially, I've got Rebelle7Pro—whether it cost me a hundred and fifty bucks, or thirty, or whatever. Functionally, I've got a trial version with thirty days to—

So, I just hafta let it add a day per day for a few millennia....

Now my plan, if I've got one, is to go find out why this is happening. First by EMailing support@escapemotions.com and mentioning what I've got instead of the software toy I'd preordered [I copypasted in the Invoice Number for the preorder, incidentally] and then by tracking down the fanpage for Escape Motions at facebook.com. Just as this came up, at 3.46PM in Denver and 11.46PM in Slovakia:

It was probably after midnight somewhere in the world....

Then I got there at five minutes to midnight in Slovakia and five minutes to teatime in Denver and I responded with this:

If I sound snarky, this was half an hour into trying to get the software toy to acknowledge any of nine possible combinations of usernames and passwords.

And then, before I could so much as blink, Escape Motions leapt into not responding to me at all. Not on their fanpage; not to my EMail: nowhere.
So I waited for a while.
Some guy who'd also preordered the software toy responded to me with a MeToo Post: the same thing was happening to him. Which didn't precisely surprise me: I was just mentioning the other month that Future Motion [no relation] were pretty stupid to issue out a firmware update at dusk on September the Twenty-ninth—a Friday—just before leaving the office for the weekand and letting twenty to fifty percent of people trying to sideload the firmware update brick their OneWheels and have no one useful to talk to about that for a good sixty hours.
At 9.46PM in Denver, and 5.46AM in Slovakia, some other random guy replied to my post with: they may be trying to fix the problem and may be getting a lot of emails.
Indeed they may. For they may have released a software toy buggy enough to allow this to happen, as they were leaving for the day in Slovakia.
...is what I didn't respond. Actually, I responded with this: That Escape Motions haven't even acknowledged the EMail I wrote to report the problem three hours ago assures me that mine isn't an endorsement they value.
And, man...did that get a response....
That was actually a rhetorical question; and the answer is No. No reponse from Escape Motions. Arguably, there's still no response to that, specifically.
Instead, at 11.06PM in Denver, and 7.06AM in Slovakia, Escape Motions responded with this: Anyone experiencing a problem with downloading or activating Rebelle, please send us an email at support@escapemotions.com. If you already did, please do not send another one. We are getting through them as fast as we can and will reply to every single one of them.
All things being equal, I'd have found that response to be both reasonable and satisfactory. But all things aren't, at this point, equal. At this point, I've been waiting six weeks for my new software toy, and another eight hours for—as I'd mentioned in the thread—any indication that anyone had even seen that there was a problem.
Like, imagine if, instead of a big buncha text you're reading through at your own pace, this were an audiobook. And then imagine that, right after So I waited for a while, the audiobook just played eight hours of pure silence. Then, around midnight wherever you are, it suddenly moved into Instead, at 11.06PM in Denver....
That wouldn't be reasonable. That would be annoying. It would be infuriating. You'd shut off the audiobook and conclude that I wasn't taking any of this seriously. You wouldn't wait the eight hours [or know that it would be eight hours] until I came back in with the punchline to this whole mess.
Which is one of the reasons I don't record audiobooks: they're impossibly slow to listen to, relative to the rate at which bipeds can read.
So. All things being equal, I get it: someone did something wrong; lots of people were affected; some of those people, by now, at 8.19PM the next day, might have got an EMail back addressing the problem and maybe even solving it; but, on my end, there was eight hours of silence which ended twenty hours ago with the message that I'm only being ignored about this until it's my turn to get told how the hell to fix something.
There are other options, of course: they could just fix the .exe I downloaded and let me, and anyone else who'd preordered this thing, download the newer version—call it Rebelle7Pro [7.0.1] or whatever—to fix the problem most obviously. But that's not happening. What's happening is that I'm looking at the Order History on my second monitor as I write this, and it's just encouraging me to download Rebelle7Pro [7.0.0] and accomplish nothing new.
So, yeah: I'm a little snarky about this. It's what I do when I can't actually care enough to get infuriated by eight hours of silence in an audiobook, followed by the socialmedia equivalent of hang on a sec, followed by more silence for another twenty hours.
Which segues into a new question: Now What.
I dunno. I'd sorta hoped to write this about twenty-four hours ago, and mention what I thought of the new version of the software toy. But all I've got to test with is a Trial Version which I'm not convinced looks all that much like the actual release of Rebelle7Pro. Based on the videos I've seen from Escape Motions, there may be some differences:

So, instead of a cool new software toy to play with and talk however enthusiastically about, I've got...today's webcomic, from a parallel universe in which people stop throwing broken software at me in the final seconds before they disappear for a couple days:

More later....
—Gremlin