Monday, November 28, 2005
 many of you know that i'm a great fan of mike mignola's hellboy character, to the point of having gone to great lengths to put together my halloween 2004 hellboy costume. the movie earlier that year was pretty great too. now mignola is working on a new hellboy animated series, with a totally new look! very. excited. haven't been posting here too much of late because my creative energy has been pointed in other directions, i guess - i've been trying to do as much extracurricular design and illustration work as i can lately as part of re-working my portfolio and trying to just get out there and be part of the online design community. besides illustrationfriday, which i talked about last week, i've got a few other things going: first, there's a new collaborative image posted every day at anexquisitecorpse.net, which i've mentioned here before, it's based on the surrealist's "exquisite corpse" game where they'd draw something on a piece of paper, fold it over so only the bottom bit showed, and the next person would continue it from there, resulting in a weird continuum of random images. only, we do it in photoshop. anyway, i've contributed to three images since the storm, though none of them have been posted yet to show you. till then you can check out previous images i've been part of (click on the numbers at the bottom).  over at bran-man.com, they have a little character template, and different designers and illustrators create character designs based on that template, or squeeze classic characters to fit into that mold somehow. i've done a few of the latter - here and here and here - not as original as some of the others up there, but it's been fun and challenging in it's own right. also, at istockphoto.com - where i get most of my stock photography for insanely cheap, btw - there's a thing called the istock steel cage, which is basically just like coudal design's famous photoshop tennis - a photoshop battle between two designers, where one posts an image, and the other has to create a new image building upon his opponent's work, ie. retaining at least a few of the previous image's elements. well, i got challenged to a steel cage match, which you can see in progress here, or if you just want to get right to the images, you can check out my flickr slideshow of the match - (odd images are mine, even are my opponent's.) Monday, November 21, 2005
this i believe: there is no god. the inimitable, outspoken penn jillette (of penn and teller fame) takes a hell of a brave stand in today's climate of blind faith. Saturday, November 19, 2005
still enjoying my car. :) still taking requests for photos of specific places in new orleans. i've gotten some of the ones people have asked for, but... since i'm between cameras at the moment, i'm having to borrow, and don't have quite so much control over when... hopefully i'll have enough to make a gallery by monday. also, on another creative note, i found this site called illustrationfriday.com, which is pretty much what it sounds like: every friday, they give a one word theme, and people illustrate it and post links to their illustrations of that word. kind of like the old friday five, but with illustrations instead of questions. anyway, i'm going to start trying some of them, and posting them on my little auxilliary blog, unapologetic blogspot, which has been sitting idle and looking for something to do for (literally) years anyway. feel free to check it out if you're interested. the word this week was "free". i'm also totally captivated by the goings on at learningtoloveyoumore.com - which i have yet to participate in myself, though i will at some point, i'm sure. anyway, you can spend many wonderful hours just looking through the site. real people really are the best art. Monday, November 14, 2005
a done deal:  kind of a good compromise between "fucking cool" and "practical adult vehicle." and it's a seriously nice car. best of both worlds, even. only there's no cd-changer or ipod hook-up-ability, which, stupidly, i just kind of assumed there would be, somehow or other, or maybe just convinced my self it wasn't a big issue, which, well, it's not, right? right. and anyway, the deal was WAY too good to pass up, and time was a factor, so whatever. i like it :) drove it home tonight. now i just have to give it a name. Thursday, November 10, 2005
so the fact is, all you new orleans expats out there, you just can't understand it without being here. you just can't comprehend the scope of what we've lost and the enormity of the road ahead. so what i'm going to try to do this weekend is be your eyes. send me requests for photos of specific places in the city you'd like to see in their current state, and conditions permitting, i'll try to get by and take a picture of that place. you can give me an address or a street or even a whole route - and i'll do what i can to document it its current state. what do you say? i'll post the pictures next week. speaking of photos, i recently saw a gallery of some good photos taken in town in the days immediately following the storm - on the Ochsner hospital website. worth taking a look if you're interested. Also, since they've gone off the page and into the archives already and i've had some people looking for them, i'll re-link my own galleries here: Lakeview Gallery  Refrigerators Gallery  Saturday, November 05, 2005
getting over this cold, finally, feeling better today. better enough to go back out and continue my search for the perfect motor vehicle, at least. or, well, the car to replace the perfect motor vehicle, which is now the perfect flood-totalled vehicle. looking for a new car just really sucks. i've narrowed my search primarily to hondas - generally safe, reliable and reasonably priced, and if i broaden my focus too much more, i'll never make a decision. i'm thinking i want to lease, and i've found some good deals - which have forced me to confront certain realities about myself and the world around me. i've driven an SUV for the past nine years, and i loved my mountaineer, but i really don't need that space. That excessive roominess only did two things: made me the default driver/ mover/ hauler for every social circle of which i've been a part and allowed me to create a burial midden for random detritus, whose strata i would semi-annually excavate in search of this speaker cable or that owners manual or any of about eight umbrellas. not only that, but in this three-dollar a gallon day and age, fuel milage is also a concern, and i'd like something on the upside of 20/mpg at least. so i decide i don't need an SUV. well, of course the corporate powers that be realize these things, and offer the best deal on earth on a big honkin' honda pilot SUV. definitely the most car for the money. grrr. the next best deal is on a honda accord, which is really nice and fits all my major critera - safe, good stereo, adequate horses, very fuel efficient... but it's a friggin' honda accord, the definition of blah-design cookie-cutter automotive ubiquity. and i'm an individual, damnit! i'm a designer! i need a visually interesting car! (hadn't realized that i even cared about what kind of statement my car made until faced with the prospect of a car that says nothing but "i conform.") so what it now comes down to is that i really want a honda element - interesting design (which i really like), unusual colors, good fuel efficiency, amazing stereo, etc.. which is reasonably priced enough, but no sweet deals like the other two. so it's the age old battles of form versus function, pride versus pragmatism. and it's difficult. i'll be alright with either of the three - you learn to like what you drive - but right now i'm just disappointed in all the reasons this choice isn't easier for me. gah. so, you out there - any input? Thursday, November 03, 2005
ugh. i feel like *crap* today. so much so that i just called in sick to work, which is something i hate doing. i guess i sort of felt this coming on halloween night, and then it was a sore throat, and yesterday it was clearly coming on and now... ::blows nose on t-shirt designated for nose-blowing:: ugh. i'm going back to sleeeeeeeep for a bit, then maybe i'll get up and crawl around and use the sick time to do stuff around the condo. --blech-- (i'm sorry. but cotton t-shirts are so much kinder to the nose being blown than tissues could ever be...) Tuesday, November 01, 2005
sorry to go political here for a moment, but the issue bears discussing: i think sam alito will make a good supreme court justice. yes, it should have been a woman or a hispanic; and obviously i disagree with the guy on, well, almost everything, and the appointment of a hardcore conservative ideologue will do no favors to many of the rights that make this country a better place to live than most. yes, he scares me on the substantive issues - scares me a lot. but i won't go there lest this become an angry post and i lose track of what i want to say here, which is:
rationally speaking, i have to say that alito is (sadly) EXACTLY the kind of person, everything else aside, that the president should be appointing to the court. he's an accomplished scholar, an experienced jurist, respected by his peers, a major-league legal mind, which is what i want in my supreme court justices - not dubiously qualified neophytes who happen to be in the president's pocket, like miers. Ideologue though he may be, the arguments that will happen in a court with alito on the bench will be vigorous ones, well fought, as they should be in the highest court in the land. Presidents appoint justices in line with their own ideologies - it's what presidents do. this is exactly the way our government is supposed to operate; surely, in the future, better, smarter presidents will balance this out with more liberal or moderate appointments; until then, life will go on. unfortunately, i think that competence, in this case, is paramount, and in the long run will serve the nation best. (still, i can't help thinking there must've been some equally comptetent ultra-con women or latinos he could have chosen. i love how they keep referring to alito as an 'italian-american' as if that makes him a minority.) that being said, I think it’s exactly the place of the Democrats in Congress to vigorously challenge Alito every step of the way, to make sure that he is as squeaky clean as he needs to be, to be sure that he’s consistent and intellectually honest, to scrutinize his record in painful detail, and to make a public issue of exactly what this appointment means to the future of the country and our rights. If in that process they are able to gain the votes of moderates against his confirmation, it will be a great success. if not, so be it, but they will have done their jobs - again, this is the proper operation of government, and i for one will be satisfied. in the short term (like, the next decade or so)... fuck. this is gonna suck. |