Collage

I accidentally saved this as a draft. This is the first homework assignment I did for my photoshop class. The assignment was to a make a collage with two photographs, one supplied by me the other by someone else in the class. I'm noticing that most of my work so far has been fairly simple, and in keeping with that trend, this one isn't very complicated, but I'm happy with it.

Absolut Pseudopod

This is the godawful Absolut Vodka ad I made for my Art and Digital Tech class this week. I'm really disappointed with it. And myself. I had a bunch of other ideas, which I may still follow through on, but this one I was able to throw together fairly quickly. I'm depressed now and wish to sleep.

EDIT: Boredom + Photoshop = More ABSOLUT ads!


Off center a bit. I'll fix it in the morning.

Amateur / Professional

Here's a clever idea with some really fun results. Little kids' pictures were reinterpreted by various artists. This would make a wonderful art exhibit. I'd also like to see the kids redraw something that the artists create. You can see the full gallery here.

Customer Service

This is a wonderful little conversation between a customer service rep and someone who bought a car. As an added bonus, it's set up as if the person bought a car the same way most people buy a computer. It makes me wonder how after 20 years of PCs showing up in more and more homes, people still know less about the computer they use daily than they do about something ultimately irrelevant like the number of RBIs of every pitcher in major league baseball.

Helpline: "General Motors Helpline, how can I help you?"
Customer:"Hi! I just bought my first car, and I chose your car because it has automatic transmission, cruise control, power steering, power brakes, and power door locks."
Helpline: "Thanks for buying our car. How can I help you?"
Customer: "How do I work it?"
Helpline: "Do you know how to drive?"
Customer: "Do I know how to what?"
Helpline: "Do you know how to DRIVE?"
Customer: "I'm not a technical person! I just want to go places in my car!"
[more here]

Your Doctor is In Another Castle

Next time you go in for a checkup, ask you doctor what his high score is in Tetris.

"According to a new study published in the Archives of Surgery, surgeons who put in their downtime playing video games proved to have considerably higher surgical skills than their non-gamer co-workers, in particular when it came to laparoscopic surgery, which involves manipulating instruments while staring at a monitor." [source]

Basically now my dad's obliged to pick up a Wii. It will help him help children.

Wetsuit

This ad campaign is wonderfully obscene. The tagline "Not as thick. Just as warm. All the rubber you'll need." is pure genius. Kind of a shame the models aren't any prettier than they are. The first guy doesn't look like he has a nose and his woman bears an eerie resemblance Jackie Kennedy. Eek.

24 Hours of the Half Hour News Hour

Ho. Lee. Shit. Fox is going crazy. Apparently Bill-O couldn't cut into Jon Stewart's ratings so now the Fox News Crew is trying to compete! The Half Hour News Hour is being advertised as "the Daily Show for conservatives." It's being produced by the creator of everyone's favorite over-
the-top drama, 24. It looks like it's going to be just what he says it will; a horrible rip off of a good show. The promo for the show reveals nothing except for the fact that Fox News is finally being honest about the people they'd love to see deported. What I am still a little confused by is the fact that it's being aired not on Fox, but on the Fox News Channel. Can they accurately call themselves a news channel now that they're offering entertainment in addition to their news? I guess they could argue that's never stopped them before. Anyway, here's the bland aforementioned promo which reveals little to nothing about what the show will actually look like.

Hop on Pop

I made this faux CD cover art for my art and digital tech class. It's obviously based on the cover of Dr. Seuss's Hop on Pop. Not very creative but the best I could do given the time constraint of about an hour. As an afterthought, I wish I had put on an explict content warning.

EDIT: Something like this, perhaps.

Like Dolphins with Stingers

No one knows why they do it, but apparently manta rays fly out of the water ever once in a while. Here's a collection of photos and videos of flying mantas. They pictures look eerily beautiful but the video reveals a much less exciting manta belly-flop.

Your pets will LOOOOOK at B'owl

This fake ad is incredible. And not just because it has little children talking about how pretty their b'owls are.

Busy Day

I got an email today from Style.com which contained an interesting fact. On Valentine's Day, according to Lifestyles Condoms, 87 condoms are used per second. Pretty fucking incredible.

Snakes on a Plane

This is why I love the BBC. Specifically, the first image accompanying the article. Someone deserves a Pulitzer.

Ricky Gervais on Genesis

Ricky Gervais is the genius behind both US and UK versions of The Office and this faux MS training video. He also has a show on HBO called Extras where he has celebrities come on as guest stars and parody themselves. Anyway, he's one of my favorite comedians, so I thought I'd share this delightful clip of Ricky taking us through the book of Genesis.

The Day the Music Died

Anyone reading this should be familiar with my feelings for the recording industry. (Anyone who doesn't feel similarly is wrong.) Anyway, I was delighted to see Ars Technica posted a study into the effects of P2P on music sales. Their findings effectively refute everything the RIAA has claimed about the insidious internet pirates.

"Using detailed records of transfers of digital music files, we find that file sharing has had no statistically significant effect on purchases of the average album in our sample," the study reports. "Even our most negative point estimate implies that a one-standard-deviation increase in file sharing reduces an album's weekly sales by a mere 368 copies, an effect that is too small to be statistically distinguishable from zero."

The report claims that the decrease in album sales is caused by a decrease in demand on the part of retailers who don't want a surplus of CDs sitting on their shelves any more. People are also buying more DVDs. (Suck on that, move industry.) The most interesting fact from the study, however, is that for popular music, increased P2P downloads also increased album sales.

Speaking of music downloads, a super hot new blog seems to have shown up on these intertubes. Check it out here. Many fun things to be seen, and of course, free music.