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The Valencia Street Swing

doc — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 03:37:51 +0000

Let me tell you about my love/hate relationship with the Valencia Street Swing. I love how elegant it is, and hate that I didn’t think of it first. A few weeks ago, some folks hung this swing from a tree branch across the street from Summit Cafe and it somehow managed to survive until late this afternoon.

I always seemed to see folks enjoying the swing, and was often happy to make eye contact or share a smile with them. Sometimes people would even ask for a push. It was awesome. When walking, I’d often go a block or two out of my way just to see folks on it. As a matter of fact, I even spent my New Years morning hanging by the swing taking pictures and chatting with strangers, it was great.

I’m bummed to see it go, but wanted to share some of my favorite iPhone shots of the swing. I also wanted to remind folks that art doesn’t have to be complicated to connect with people. Thanks to the artists who put this swing up and hopefully you’ve inspired other acts of guerrilla goodness!

Un-Ironic Skate Night part II

doc — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 20:59:28 +0000

A week after I found a sexy pair of inline skates on Valencia St, my best friend Mer found a FANTASTIC pair for herself on Mission St. What are the fucking odds?

Which of course means we HAVE to do another Un-ironic Skate Night at CELLspace this Tuesday night from 7-10pm. Door is $10, rentals are $5, mention “instaskate” and get $2 off the entrance fee. It’s 21+ and the drinks may be free again. I’m looking forward to it!

Un-Ironic Skate Party

doc — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 02:41:49 +0000

So I recently got a pair of rollerblades (which are AWESOME) and now I wanna skate with some friends. We went out to Redwood City Roller Rink yesterday, and now it’s time to check out something in the city.

D. Miles is doing a skate night every Tuesday at CELLspace in the Mission, so I thought it’d be fun to check it out this week. I even got us a discount! Mention “instaskate” at the door for $2 off. Also, they have beer!

TUESDAY NIGHT SKATE
7-10pm @ THE CELLSPACE – 2050 BRYANT ST.

21 and over.

Last minute list of things to do in SF this weekend

doc — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 02:02:43 +0000

Of course there’s a ton of stuff going on this weekend that you may already know about, but if you are looking for more ideas, here are some of my recommendations.

Beetlejuice Live (at the Dark Room Theater)- I saw this last night and it was great. Small, intimate, and fun. $20 sat and sun.

Halloween events (at The Secret Alley)- The Secret Alley is always worth visiting, just to experience the sculptures in the space (which is designed to look like an actual alleyway). Unfortunately, the site is a little painful to gather info from, so here is a link to a flier for the Halloween events. Saturday’s event appears to be live music, but the Doomsday art show will probably still be up too.

Journey To The End Of The Night (around SF)- A live action scavenger hunt/role playing game… which starts in like 5 minutes… so… nevermind.

Pulsewave SF featuring Anamanaguchi (At Slim’s)- This show has a fantastic line up! I can’t wait to see Knife City too! Sunday October 30 @ 7:00pm $14.

24 Hour Comic Day… I’ll need your help!

doc — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 21:47:07 +0000

update #3: Finished!!! 24 pages in 24 hours, I hope to post them online soon-ish.

update #2 : You can see the #instahero photos online (without an Instagram account) here http://web.stagram.com/search/instahero/

update #1 : Today’s app experiment is pretty weird… I’m spending the next 24 hours drawing an entire comic book about super heroes, BUT I NEED YOUR HELP! It’s been 5 years since I’ve done a super-hero comic and I’m all out of ideas, so I’m super-hero ideas from Instagram! To help with this project, post a picture (or brief description) of you and your super-power and tag it #instahero as soon as possible. Super strong? Super small? Able to talk to fish? Post a pic and tag it and I’ll try to work it into my comic. Thanks for helping and please spread the word!

On Saturday September 24th I’ll be participating in the 24 Hour Comic Book Day challenge at Mission Comics in San Francisco. This will be my 6th 24hr comic! Looking back at some of my previous comics I realize that the one I had the most fun making was Robots Don’t Know Anything About Twitter, a comic created with the help of friends on Twitter. To this day, it’s still one of my favorite projects I’ve ever worked on.

I’m giving some serious thought to doing another crowd sourced comic for this year’s event, but I don’t yet know exactly how… 24HCBD is all about embracing spontaneity, so I haven’t decided what I’ll be making tomorrow, just that I’ll probably reach out through the typical social media channels and see what I can come up with. You’ll probably be able to follow the action via @docpop on Twitter and Instagram.

So please stay tuned starting at around 11am for some sort of announcement and details on how we can create a comic book together. I’m still feeling under the weather, but the goal is still to write and draw a 24 page book entirely within a 24hr period. I’ll probably just do pen (and brush) and ink, without any color, but who knows. I did really enjoy the year I did a watercolored 24hr book.

one note: The official national 24 Hour Comic Book Day is October 1st, which just doesn’t work for us San Franciscans, so we are doing our event a week early.

“Level Up” release party at Mission Comics (now with %99 more Vectrex)

doc — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 19:21:09 +0000

Mission Comics And Art is having a book release party for Gene Luen Yang & Thien Pham’s new book “Level Up“. It seemed like a good excuse to break out my Vectrex and let people play around with it. The party starts at 6pm (the Vectrex should be there by 7pm).

Paul Nosa’s “Sunday Streets” embroidery

doc — Mon, 16 May 2011 21:11:36 +0000

Every time my friend Paul Nosa is in town, I try to get him to add more embroidered artwork to this brown shirt of mine. When I bumped into him on Valencia street a few weeks ago, I asked him to do a “Sunday Streets” theme.

Mr. Nosa will also be at this weekend’s Maker Faire in San Mateo.

BAC yo-yo contest is this weekend

doc — Thu, 12 May 2011 21:39:57 +0000

This weekend is the Bay Area Classic! I’m really stoked. The event starts tomorrow at Cellspace in the Mission, which will be for the 1 minute preliminary freestyles, with the big event happening in Washington Square Park on Saturday. I’m not entering or anything, but I should be at Cellspace a bit tomorrow hanging out. I’m going to try to fill a box filled with old yo-yo company shirts that I’d like to get rid of too.

For more information about the BAC events check out their site. Saturday should be a lot of fun to watch if you are interested. If I get the chance, I may bike to North Beach for an hour or two on Saturday to hang out:

Prelims will be held on Friday, May 13th from 10 am until 4 pm at CellSpace in the Mission district. Prelims will be 1 minute freestyles.

Finals will be held on Saturday, May 14th from 10 am until 4 pm at Washington Square Park. Finals will be 3 minute freestyle.

The view from the Mission’s tallest building

doc — Fri, 06 May 2011 20:01:26 +0000

I had a fantastic day yesterday. It started with short visit to the Photojojo offices on Valencia street, then met up with my friend Brian Shih for some Ken Ken Ramen, and then I scored some good food from the Mission Community Market. The weather was awesome and I kept bumping into good friends, but the best part of the day was an impromptu visit to the new Typekit offices.

Typekit is a service that allows webmasters to embed non-standard fonts on a website. Similar to how we get my Hellavetica font to show up for blog headers on this site. They had recently moved to the top floor of the US Bank building (the tallest building in the Mission) on 22nd and Mission st. As a weird twist, their old office was at 766 Valencia, where Photojojos offices are now. I thought the view from Photojojo was sweet, but I’ve ALWAYS wanted to sneak up on top of the US Bank building to see the view from there.

I’ve posted a Flickr set of all my iPhone shots from the US Bank building (and Telstar Logistics has a stellar batch of photos from there too), but here are some of my favorites:

One more little cool thing you can find up here is MonkeyBrains‘s super-duper-laser-receiver. I’ve heard that this thingy has to be manually repositioned a couple of times a year because this building tends to expand a few inches during the warmer summer months. Neat, huh?

Yesterday was the best day ever. Also: I fucking love my neighborhood!

Mini-Instawalk in SF Saturday morning

doc — Fri, 06 May 2011 19:15:55 +0000

There’s an Instagram meet-up (“Instameet“) planned for tomorrow afternoon in Dolores Park. While I like meeting other Instagram users, I kind of prefer photo-walks rather than photography themed meets in bars or whatever. So are our Instwalk SF group is going to do an Instagram themed photowalk through the Mission before the Instameet.

We’ll be meeting at Dynamo Donuts (2760 24th Street) at 10:30 am, then end up at Dolores Park around 12:30 or so. Anyone is welcome to join us, or you can follow our progress on Instagram by following the #instawalksf tag.