Every time you emulate, God kills a cabinet.
Above is my remix of the classic “masturbation” meme. I made another one (below) with those same old watercolors I keep talking about. I want to the second one, because Joss knows I’ve put a ton of work on it, but the photo version is obviously superior.
BTW, if I haven’t mentioned it already, I created a new flickr set for all my watercolor illustrations.
My 404 Failephant image is getting kicked around the internet like a simile at a metaphor convention thanks to the Scott’s post on Laughing Squid. It’s spreading quickly via Twitter and blogs, and everyone seems to be properly attributing it, which is a pleasant surprise. Thanks all.
It even showed up on Buzzfeed.com in a post about “Awesome Error Messages” in which a commenter points out that technically my error message would be a 503, not a 404. I fail at failing… Success!?
All these posts got me thinking about one of my favorite gifs of all time:
What are some of your favorite error gifs?
My grandpa was a maker. Whatever the family needed, he would whip up in his basement workshop. He built the house he lived in as well as most of the other houses on the block. I remember seeing his workshop as a kid and realizing for possibly the first time that everything had to come from somewhere. Grandpa loved making and modifying things, even with his limited tools, in fact, sometimes he would make his own tools if the job required it. I remember he kept his wrenches in a cloth wrap that he made, with twine around the outside to keep it all together.
17 years later, I bought a coloring pencil set at Otsu that had a similar cloth carrying wrap (see it here). It’s a classic case design, that’s easy for anyone to make as a first project. It was a good case, but a unnecessarily large for carrying pens and mechanical pencils (my tools of choice), but I just never got around to making my own until last night. There was a cool thread on Superfuture regarding one of a kind denim items, such as coats and shirts. After collecting samples of some of my more unique denim projects (here) I suddenly had the energy to finally make my own denim carrying case or art supplies.
I made two of them, one with 13 pen slots and one with 14. The “cuff” of the cases is chainstitched on my Union Special, but I used a regular sewing machine for all the rest of the work. The denim is 14 oz raw shuttle loomed denim and I used a durable strip of faux suede for the strap. The denim’s selvage line makes the perfect slot for the pens because it’s so thin… If I had cuffed the area where the pens go instead of using he selvage, it would have been too thick. I can’t wait to see how these break in, but I already love them. They fit in my bag much better than my older case and should last for 5-10 years of heavy use. Although grandpa’s wrench wrap was made out of some sort of tarp material, this little carrying case reminds me of him, like, if he was an illustrator instead of a carpenter, I would have found something just like this in his basement.
I decided to design a new logo for John McCain while he puts his campaign on hold for a while.
Failephant is the new Fail Whale. BTW, rejected captions include; “Bring that GOP back”, “We’ll be right pachyderm”, “Our trunks are packed, but we’ll be right back”.
I’ve always been behind the technology curve. It was 1986 when I finally talked my parents into buying an NES, that’s two and a half years after most of my friends got theirs. My next console was a Sega Genesis in 1991, again, two years late again. I still am pretty behind technologically, rocking an old ass mac laptop and a borrowed PS2. In fact, the only time I felt as though I was standing on the cusp of video game technology was when I managed to find a Sega Mega-CD on discount from a toy store in Columbia, TN and a 32X in a thrift store in Lewisburg, TN. I was the only kid on the block with either, as most of my friends were moving on to the brand new Super Nintendo, but I thought they were suckers.
Even though very few people bought the Sega add-ons, there was somehow a surplus of used Mega-CD games, and at surprisingly low prices too. Before I knew it, I had almost collected the entire Sega CD collection (although I could never find Penn & Teller’s game). Looking for more to do with my new cd-rom drive I decided to buy my first CD. Even though this was my first compact disc player, I felt that normal CDs just weren’t enough for such a cool machine, luckily there was a handful of CD+G discs that had already been available for years for me to choose from. The first CD I ever bought was Information Society’s self titled album from 1985 (reprinted into a CD+G sometime later).
CD+Gs were audio cds encoded with extra data, to be displayed visually. The Mega-CD was one of the few machines that could play these types of discs properly. CD+Gs were really just glorified karoake cds. As the music would play, the lyrics could be displayed below, accompanied by very low definition graphics that would slowly wipe or fade away every 15 seconds or so.
Honestly, I had not previously been an Information Society fan, it was just fate that I would purchase their CD+G before I bought Fleetwood Mac’s or Little Feet’s. Through the infographics I learned dozens of InSoc trivia including James’ favorite chili recipe and that Kurt’s smock once belonged to Tesla.
So it was rather by chance that Information Society would be the first CD I would buy, but as I think back on it now, it was the free Sub Pop compilation that really made an impression on me. The disc, which was titled “That Virtua Feeling” for absolutely no reason, really opened me up to new music. Although it had stand out tracks by The Hardship Post and Six Finger Satellite, it was the last track on the album that really blew my fucking mind. That track was Sebadoh’s “Rebound” from one of my still favorite albums “Bakesale”. So, uh, thanks Sega and Sub Pop for including that regular CD to promote your high tech CD+G enabled console.
Anyways, I also ended up enjoying the Information Society CD for years and years. I’ve never seen them live, but reading a recent post on Game Music 4 All about an upcoming Information Society/8bit Weapon show reminded me of buying my first cd to listen to on tech that was already obsolete when it came out.
Here are two new and seemingly random watercolor pieces I did. I don’t know why they both happen to be of sumo wrestlers.
Since I’ve been so obsessed with those cheap Crayola watercolor sets recently, I decided to create a new set on my flickr page. You can see all my “cheap watercolor” pieces here.
You can tell you’ve reached some sort of success when your album ends up in a thrift store. At least that’s how I’ve always felt.
Last week my mom found a 12 year old copy of Yim, Yam, and Ram’s debut album in a Salvation Army in Nashville, TN. Yim, Yam, and Ram was my second band, but it was the first band I sang in (I was Yam). This album was when I first started singing, instead of just playing guitar, and I obviously did the artwork too (note the cool illustration, but terrible lettering). Even we didn’t know why we called ourselves YY&R, but we thoroughly enjoyed making up a new reason every single time someone asked. IE; “Oh, it’s from an Edgar Poe poem. He said, ‘You are in my yogurt and my rats are mad’, so we just turned that into an acronym.”
Of course I would be a little more excited if the previous owner hadn’t recorded a 311 album over ours, but at least they hung onto the cover!
Here is a quick screen shot I took last night to show the games I’ve currently been playing the most. Not really a scientific breakdown or anything, but of the 20 or 30 games I’ve downloaded, these are the only ones I’ve actually been playing:
Mote-M
Galcon
Spore Origins
Radius
Toy Bot Diaries lite
NES emulator (via Installer)
Enigmo
Lumen
Toy Bot Diaries
South Park IL
Star Trigon
Bloxor
Subway (can’t find the phobos address for this puzzle game).
Now that I’ve typed these all out, I realize I don’t even play that many of these games. None of the $10 games were really worth the money. I’d say the pricing on most games is %40 over what it should be (ie, Enigmo, Galcon, Spore, and South Park are close to $6 games… Toybot should have been $3).
By far the best game for the money is Mote-M. This desktop tower of defense game is a total steal at $1!
Toy Bot Diaries Free is also worth the download since it includes new art and levels that don’t appear on the full retail version.
I’ve always wanted to recreate fabric patterns with mixed media. I finally tried it, and it was just as big of a pain in the ass as I expected it to be. This is my water colored tartan tile:
Here it is on my Twitter:
And here it is in Spore:
On wednesday I did a piece for a local NBC affiliate that was a lot of fun. You can see it here. I mess up a bit (even fudging Skin The Gerbil), but that’s what happens when you try to yo-yo and talk at the same time.
I was also supposed to film for ABC7 this morning, but there was a breaking news story and the crew never showed up. I got bumped for a story about trees!
