Beauty in the absurd

Okay, maybe not beauty. Absurdity in the minimal?


Chainsaw Suit

I have long been a webcomic nerd, and I've been noticing somewhat of a trend in where my taste for webcomics is leaning. Stick figures. Either in the realm of the philosophical, as is the case of pictures for sad children, or else the absurd, as is the case of Chainsaw Suit above. Maybe with less focus on drawing there's a greater time to focus on the writing? There are lots of very beautifully drawn comics out there with terrible writing.



Some other comics in the stick vein are xkcd and Cyanide and Happiness. I'm consistently impressed with these comics. Are my expectations just lower?

Aggregate!

So here's the plan. I'm going to figure out how to pull updates from my flickr, twitter, miscellaneous blogs, youtube account, and so forth and have them all show up on MyrthCo's front page when I update. It'll be like Facebook's newsfeed, only all about me and my internet addiction.

It's going to be off the chain. As soon as I work out the details. I hope I can work out the details.

Let me show you what I'm working with

The past few weeks have seen me working on a few different web projects. I am putting the final touches on an artist portfolio site for my old painter professor Jen Dietrich. She does really amazing, textural paintings dealing with the themes of Americana seen through the lens of barns, baseball, and Kennedy. Her "Earthly Flesh" series is especially inspiring to me.

When not painting or teaching, Jen is also a filmmaker. I've been helping do a special site/blog for her documentary on Philip Pearlstein, entitled Not Made in Heaven, which is a reference to an article Philip wrote for ArtNews on figure painting in the age of Abstract Expressionism. I really like the simplicity of the film site I'm doing for them. The content is still being shuffled around somewhat.

The joy of social networking

After reading the New York Times's article Job Hunting Is, and Isn’t, What It Used to Be last week, I first felt extremely discouraged that a majority of my job hunting has been done through Careerbuilder and Craigslist, which due to the high volume of unqualified applicants, are mostly useless. Then I decided it was time to plunge into the world of adult social networking (no, I don't mean xtube). So... yes. I am now hoping to become linked in. On LinkedIn. Here's to another great social experiment.

A newfound love of gifs

Would it be amiss for me to say I miss animated gifs? The internet of my youth was littered with them. I suppose I should be looking in the darker halls of MySpace to find them again. Our dear once-clean Facebook won't animate them.

The reason I bring this up is that I was without internet at the laundromat yesterday and decided to investigate whether Photoshop could make gifs. I was pleased to learn it can.

Naturally, this lead to a few quick experiments.






The first two feature my sister and the last two are from childhood home movies. The last one is my father in boxers and monster mask. More on those home movies in the future.

In order to feed my new old obsession, I stumbled across Loopable, which is a blog devoted to gifs. Sadly it hasn't updated since July.

The archives, however, yield amazing results:

The joy of leading

Kerning inaction, originally uploaded by tofu mugwump.

An entire day spent Googling™

That subject line could imply some extreme narcissism with ™ being my initials and all, but that's not what I was doing today. For once. I instead have been streamlining my life and entering all relevant marketing information into the Google Cloud. I think I read putting all my cyber eggs into one basket was an excellent idea.

I could claim by consolidating I am becoming more efficient, but all that I've really accomplished is making my procrastination more efficient. All of my design blogs are now in one place! Wowee. I am one of the many people with multiple Google accounts, which is annoying since there is no way to currently merge said accounts. There are ways around thankfully, so now I am redirecting, forwarding, or associating my Google and other e-mail accounts into one consolidated, folder-less lump. Yeah, labels. Thanks for the future on that one. 

Speaking of the future (and websites I can consolidate under the Google Cloud...)

Content Aware Image Resizing (Seam Carving if you're nasty). This is practically the rotational/enhancement that is featured so prominently in Bladerunner and CSI. Not quite, but having never heard of it before today  and then discovering it might be an included feature in Adobe Creative Suite 4.

I think my awe over this new technology and the ability to post on blogger from my other gmail account have overridden my usual eloquence. Yes. I am very eloquent.

Oh, and I Twitter now. I'm not really sure why, other than it is a good way to feed my internet and social network addictions.