As I've started spending more time and effort on making them, I've found myself going through old, uninstalled fonts and using parts of Photoshop (and the Gimp, and Illustrator, too) that I'd not used much of before. I've even re-done a few from before that looked, well, cheesy. I imagine this set will only grow as I mess with more of these.
What can I say? It's fun.
* I could finally create a third photo set having activated the "pro" subscription that Janice gave me for Christmas. Thanks Janice!
Making fake album covers is nothing new to me. Back when I was first learning Photoshop I'd made many a cover using stock photography for a fictional band called "Spontaneous Grape", going even as far as creating a fictional record label* to release them. But coming up with the titles was often the trouble, and moreover selecting photos that I thought would be interesting even more so. Without those aspects to worry about, I can crank these things out much faster.
Eventually I'll get them up on flickr, annotated and everything else. But I've got to take a break from making them first.
* The name of the label was Ludd Records, and it was rather a bit of a dumb in-joke. One of my many online identities was that of "Luddite Industries", which I thought to be a particularly sophisticated joke, in that the Luddites would not likely be operating a web site. Here's the logo, which I drew in AutoCad, knowing it better than Photoshop at the time.Someday I'm going to make a black t-shirt with this on it in white.
About four years ago I installed my first blogging software, and eagerly started up my first blog. My aim was clear, and almost noble: I wanted to make some sense of the years and years worth of pages and pages of online bookmarks*, I'd accumulated over a decade or so. Knowing my shortcomings when it came to keeping a regular online writing schedule, I figured I'd easily be able to stick to one post per day, about one interesting or noteworthy link.
I think I lasted three weeks before I started fudging the timestamps and changed it to one post per weekday. Then, at some point it was once a week, and then I just about gave up.
Over the ensuing years, I'd added the odd link here or there, usually just a draft, and made only the most necessary updates and changes. I did migrate it from Movable Type to Wordpress, and updated the theme based on one I'd made for a Blogger blog, but otherwise it sat dormant, save for the odd spammer or two. The real commenters stopped commenting years ago, so any new ones I was getting weren't worth keeping anyway. Turning off the comments option didn't seem to work, and neither did the few plugins I felt like messing with, so finally I just decided to archive it as static pages and get rid of that copy of Wordpress altogether. It was over a year out of date, and rather a bit of a security risk anyway.
So, for posterity, here is Ketchup. I'm not even sure if any of the links still work.
*Nowadays it's trivial to find a site to organize, share, and store one's bookmarks. I've even joined one or two of them, though I've found anymore it's easier to just, knowing something exists, search Google for it. Nine times out of ten that works.
This is the first* video I've shot with my mobile phone. I think I'll stick to using my nicer digital camera to take videos, a device intended for such purposes, and not something that ultimately is meant to be a phone.
So what's in the clip below? Natalya and I were running around some hallways, and I decided to shoot a little footage, for, um, posterity or whatever.
There isn't really any sound (if you can't see anything click here) - you can hear her laugh around seven seconds, but that's about it. The main highlight is around the fourteen second mark, when she stumbles sideways, notices something on the wall, and tries to shove whatever she's carrying into it.
Yes, that's an electrical socket, and no, the footage was not followed by her falling over, crying, with her hair all sticking up. The thing in her hands that is almost completely unrecognizable (due to the bad video quality) is a wooden puzzle piece, and fortunately not a conductor. So it's possible she learned about insulators, but not likely.
I almost learned something, though. Here I was holding the camera(-phone) and just letting her do whatever she wanted, safe or not, and I didn't even think to stop her. I'd often wondered why people managed to make all of those videos that show up on youtube or America's Funniest Home Videos of something painful or stupid, without dropping the camera and stepping in to help. Well, it seems to just happen that way, I guess. I'd like to figure out why.
Maybe it's because cameras aren't exactly cheap. I know I'd be in a lot of trouble if I dropped, and broke, my phone, though not as much trouble as an electrified toddler.
*To be fair, it's actually the first two videos I've taken, edited haphazardly together with Windows Movie Maker. I think if I intend to do any real video editing, I know I'll use a better camera and better software.
Though it coincides with the beginning of the new year, my attempt to post more frequently has nothing to do with any official New Year's Resolution. That said, if I have any chance of keeping it up, I'm probably going to need to have some drafts ready for future dates when I can't find anything interesting to post.
Which leads me to a fortune I recently found in a cookie:
Put your mind into planning today. Look into the future.
Which is rather relevant, I suppose, but I'm only posting it because it ties into a discussion I've had with many people over the years: I seem to be more likely than most people to get fortunes that don't gain a bit of double entendre humor by adding "...in bed" to the end of them. Like the one above*.
I do realize that it's probably statistically insignificant and that I get no more of them than any other person would from the same fine dining establishments, but I seem to notice it more.
So with the holidays lately I've had a few weekdays away from my desk*. As is often the case when this happens, I had some errands to run, and interesting stores in which to stop nearby. At one point I found myself wandering through a MicroCenter (though I bought nothing), and near the video game section I saw something I wish I could've caught on video (and posted to youtube). But I didn't have a good camera handy, and my phone's movie mode would've been rather a bit lacking. So it's time to dust off your imagination (take that, you click-happy tweens).
In front of me, there was a kid playing Guitar Hero. For those not in the know, Guitar Hero is a console video game that comes with a plastic guitar-like controller, and players push fret-like buttons while doing a motion similar to strumming, in time with popular rock and metal songs (or cover versions thereof). The kid appeared to have average skills, hitting the correct buttons at the right time. This was not the remarkable part, of course. Much more interesting than the player, was the kid standing next to him, fingers in the air, miming the same notes.
He was playing airGuitar Hero. There was, of course, a second guitar controller on the demo kiosk, but I think he was probably having more fun playing his fantasy version of the song than actually hitting the buttons. Or he was trying to be supportive of his buddy. Or perhaps he was doing a very convoluted form of mockery.
Anyway, I thought it was pretty funny. Guitar Hero, from my feeble attempts to play it, is already once removed from the actual experience of playing the guitar. This kid found a way to do it one better, I guess. And about 50 to 80 bucks cheaper, too.
* I almost wrote "...weekdays I wasn't working" there, but with something of a slowdown at work I don't know if I can count all the hours I was there as hours I really worked. I was there, and available for work, there just wasn't any to do at the moment. Hence the deathmatch tournaments of Nexuiz, and before that, Marathon Infinity (through the magic of AlephOne).
Someday I'm going to make a black t-shirt with this on it in white.