Here it is on my Twitter:

And here it is in Spore:

The basic purpose of having a Documentary Club is to be able to find and watch new documentaries, and then discuss them with friends. To run a group like this, we would need to figure out a few things;
1. where the group is located on the web and how we communicate
2. selection process
3. how can we ensure that everyone can see a film
4. what is the best way to get enjoyment out of the whole group process

I’d like to hear suggestions and ideas from everyone interested in the comments below, but here is one way I see this going; We create a yahoo group as a hub for conversations. Anyone in the group is allowed to suggest any documentaries for the whole group, if anyone else seconds a suggestion we add it to a poll. At the end of each month the two highest polled films will be the films for the following month. Each month we have two suggested films for discussion, but nobody is expected to watch both films. Then at the end of the month we start sharing our thoughts on the films (production, story, charm, filmmaker’s bias, etc). An alternative to the yahoogroup thing would be doing a live chat thing once a month and discussing the films on there. Somebody please give out some better ideas on what they’d like to see for a documentary club. If there is still enough interest, and we all seem to be on the same page, then I’ll start the process up and we’ll pick some movies.

edit: Thanks to the work of Scott Stead and many others, The Documentary Club is no online. Stop by DocumentaryClub.ning.com to sign up!

Cupcakes have totally jumped the shark, but I don’t mind ’cause they are so fun to draw. I feel like I’ve been ignoring my drawing side this year, so I decided to get some practice. I don’t do much computer art, but I’ve always wanted to create a style that sort of mixes my pen and ink art with a vectorized look, but I don’t really want to use Illustrator. I think recently I’ve sort of hit the look I wanted, especially when creating the “cloudcake” pattern that I use for my Twitter background.

The Cloudcake was a design I whipped up as a mockup logo for Ariel Weldman’s Cupcake camp thingy. The image is hand drawn, then scanned and uploaded to VectorMagic.com, before coloring it in photoshop. I thought the basic logo would look sweet as background on twitter, but I was wrong. The tiled image just looked really boring and perfect, and obviously just a bunch of tiles. So I figured out a “trick” (to me it was a trick, but I’m web stupid… to anyone else it would just be how you do it) to creating a dope tile pattern (as seen in the image above). I started with an image (cloudcake), then cut it in quarters and arranged them so the middle of the image was now spread out to the edges. I then added another image in the center, like this:

Now when the pieces are lined up it makes the overall pattern:

To really keep it Twitter oriented I snapped a screen shot of my basic Twitter page, and used the same colors they used for my logo. Using this same technique, I also created a LaughingSquid pattern:

Update: Scott Beale from Laughing Squid has given me permission to post my Squid pattern for folks to download and use on their Twitter pages. Follow this link to go the Flickr page and download the size image you want (below is the 100 pixel one).