Spoiler Alerts and Gray Areas

FYI: I’ll be mostly offline for the next few days to avoid spoilers for both Star Wars and the Collector Appreciation Surprises. My surprise(s) are allegedly arriving tomorrow. Can I hold out a week, or will the anticipation drive me mad(der)? We’ll see!

(For the record, I’d be happy with either an AQHA Horse or – yes, even – the Autism Horse. Again, folks, it’s not a horse designed for hobbyists per se, and that’s okay.)

How did I spend a small chunk of my Monday? Determining that I’ll likely be adding Tuesday Morning to my list of places where I can’t/won’t go looking for horses anymore. That was a lot of hard driving to see so very few horses!

My no-shop list also includes auction sites in languages other than English, Facebook, and Ollie’s. And after this year’s washout I’d add Tractor Supply to that list, if it wasn’t for the fact that my local one is located literally next door to the (much more fruitful) Salvation Army.

It’s interesting that the stores most hobbyists find their treasures are precisely the ones where I strike out – and vice versa! (Things might get interesting on that front later this week, incidentally.)

But anyway, getting back to spoilers and such… apparently a blurry photo of next year’s BreyerFest Horse – a gray Mangalarga Marchador by the name of Imperador das Aguas – has “leaked” online. It was possibly a blown up and slightly manipulated version of a thumbnail that can be found on the Breyer web site under your order history, if you ordered BreyerFest tickets this year.

It really is the size of a thumbnail, and even my prodigious Photoshop skills can’t render it into anything presentable without taking generous liberties with it. So I won’t.

There’s been some discussion of the ethics of distributing an image of an item that has not been “officially” released: does this thumbnail constitute an official photo release?

Yes and no. It can be found without resorting to nefarious or dubious means, so it’s not technically illegal to look at it – or point others in the same direction. But from its size and image quality, it’s definitely not meant to be a “best” look.

Whether Reeves meant to do it or not, I don’t know. I guess it could be interpreted as a “soft launch” – in other words, a quiet or discreet releasing of something without any fanfare. And even if not, I’d hardly call the image’s release evidence of some sort of failure on Reeves’s part.

It just is.

What I do find a little dubious are the snap judgments based on the thumbnail. Judging Breyers based on their official photos is dodgy enough, but on an image that’s only 80 x 64 pixels? Anything more than “Gray Horse, Action Pose” is a stretch.