Pass my goddamn bill, goddammit! -=hic=-
Heh. Right. Like I was going to ignore this article: in addition to giving up the smokes totally, Obama’s doctors also counselled “moderation of alcohol intake.” Which sent a titter through the blogosphere.
That’s actually just clumsy phrasing on the Guardian‘s part. If you read the report, it’s clear the doctors recommend continued moderation of alcohol. I don’t believe dude’s a drinker. But, hey — where would I be if I didn’t take the cheap shots?
Sometimes I feel bad about that. Particularly when I remember how fair and gracious the opposition was to George Bush.
Feel free to add to the Dead Pool thread. We don’t wrap that sucker up until somebody dies (and then we start all over again).
March 1, 2010 — 10:17 pm
Comments: 8
Happy b-day, P’shop!
Adobe Photoshop turns twenty today. And, oh, what fun we have had!
Actually, the image editing system I learned on predated Photoshop by several years. Several years was a millenimum in early computing days; desktop computers couldn’t do shit in 1987. They certainly couldn’t do shit graphically. But my machine was stuffed full of a hundred grand worth of special bits and it could do shit. The image editing software it ran gave P’shop a run for its money for years.
An important part of my job in those days was a sort of vaudeville routine where I demo’ed that big boy for clients in real-time. So they’d know what a righteous, bad-ass research and engineering firm we were.
Can you remember a time when people said things like, “photos don’t lie” (and really believed it) and Leisure Suit Larry was a cutting edge computer game? Well, that’s when I was taking snapshots with a video frame grabber, lassoing bits and moving them around before a customer’s very eyes.
You shoulda seen their faces! (Particularly after I erased their noses and replaced them with supplemental eyes). Many thought it was some kind of trick we were playing with video. Computers couldn’t do things like that!
Anyhow, I know I’ve told all my war stories before (blogger’s privilege, telling them again). Happy birthday, P’shop — and here’s to the next amazing technology nobody ever saw coming.
February 19, 2010 — 6:55 pm
Comments: 20
Nancy’s last chance to pass the health care bill
You are getting sleeeeeepy. Your eyes are getting heavvvvvvvvy. You suddenly cannot wait to vote for a career-ending massively unpopular honking huge entitlement program.
January 21, 2010 — 5:58 pm
Comments: 18
Wrong tree. Am I barking up one?
I’ve had requests to put poor old Zombie Reagan on stuff since I first posted him. Sadly, the original drawing is quite small. It would come out about an inch and a half wide printed at 300 dpi.
I have serious finaldraftophobia. If I’m too pleased with a rough idea, I will always fumble the final, for-reals version. So, rather than trying to redraw this illustration, I thought I’d try going back to the official portrait and do a Photoshop job. Fortunately, the photo is available quite large, and I doubt there are any copyright issues with presidential portraits.
The question is, is this creepier than it is funny? I can’t make up my mind. I haven’t invested a whole lot of time in it yet, and before I labor to overlay cobwebs and strings of executive beef jerky, I’d like a second opinion or ten.
You know that “line” people talk about? I can never see the damned thing for myself.
October 19, 2009 — 6:38 pm
Comments: 41
PleaseOHpleaseOHPLEASE rename the health care bill after Ted!!!
Ohhhh…that would keep me busy for WEEKS.
He liked a good Chappaquiddick joke, did he? Let’s send him out with some!
Slogans? Anyone?
August 28, 2009 — 10:51 am
Comments: 37
Don’t talk to me; I’m sulking
Rats! Damn! Pooh! Argh! Zounds! Piffle! My Photoshop has learned a new trick: shutting itself down without warning, dumping my work in the process. Bad, BAD Photoshop.
My boss is taking Fridays off for the rest of the Summer, so I spent today drawing you a pitcher. And it was coming out real good. Srsly.
No, I hadn’t saved. Don’t rub it in.
THIRTY people in this building are retiring today. The company isn’t in trouble or anything; it’s a boring artifact to do with how our pensions are calculated. After breakfast, I spent the morning drifting from cake to cake. And then it was time for lunch. After which, some vendor sent us steak sandwiches as a thank-you for some damn thing somebody in our group did. I’m unclear on the details.
…it was a picture of a great bloated sack of a weasel…
Anyhoo, one of the retirees is an engineer with almost 45 years with the company. I was once in his chain of command. Nice enough man, but boy — what an engineer. He sat down with my boss and me one day years ago and tried to come up with guidelines for the design of publications. I’ll never forget it. One of the questions he asked was, “what is the optimum percentage of white space on a page?”
In case thou art not graphically inclined, this makes as much sense as asking an engineer to write guidelines for composing pop music, including the optimum number of oh, babys per love song.
I know you guys don’t like to hear it, but there are problems for which an engineering approach is ill-suited.
There: time to slide down the brontosaurus. It’s Friday! Let’s go home and drink!
June 27, 2008 — 4:18 pm
Comments: 35
Fun with wallpaper
Click the images for the great big color wallpaper-sized versions. And if there are any P’shoppers who want the .psd file with the layers and the editable text to play with, lemme know.
May 21, 2008 — 8:07 am
Comments: 14
Islamic Rage Boy: the interview
Look what JW found: an interview with Shakeel Bhat, the Islamic Rage Boy. Who is, in fact, 31 and a “full-time demonstrator” (how do you say “lives in moms’ basement” in…whatever dialect they speak in Kashmir?)
Apart from drawing ridicule from bloggers, Bhat has even inspired one American neoconservative website to push “Rage Boy” merchandise — including T-shirts, beer mugs, mouse pads.
“I don’t believe this! I have no knowledge about all this. Why do they do it?” demanded Bhat, who says he has no idea how to use a computer and the Internet. [You don’t say? – ed]
Bhat also shrugged off his rather unflattering “Rage Boy” nickname.
“I don’t need any titles. I am a simple Muslim. Yes, I get enraged if someone, somewhere makes derogatory remarks about our religion or Prophet,” he said.
“Titles”? I wonder if he thinks he’s being honored in some way. It would really mean a lot to me if I knew he knew we were laughing at him.
Update: Oooo! And look at the cool picture Dawn found. Which I might possibly have tweaked just a little teeny bit. How does one get a nostril injury, anyhow?
July 5, 2007 — 3:27 pm
Comments: 54
Nineteen white, fuzzy cat bellies
It felt like Spring yesterday, which compelled Charlotte to leap out the back door, fall to the ground and wave her stuff around in the air. This is the tragic consequence of teaching your cat that her white, fuzzy belly is the most beautiful object in the whole wide world.
This was not at all the image I was originally going for. I was headed for a straight-up montage of cat belly photographs. But because she’s black and white, Charlotte is an especially strange and wonderful object to play with in Photoshop.
When you ctrl-click on an image layer, Photoshop automatically selects the brightest portions of the layer. So I did that and made a mask of the white parts and saved it, then I inverted the image and made a mask of the black parts and saved it. This theoretically gave me a combined mask that would cut around the outlines of Charlotte and save me the trouble of manually erasing or blending the backgrounds (on account of, I am lazy), since the background is largely gray. But, of course, the darkest part of the white fur and the lightest part of the black fur are gray, too, so when I subtracted the mask from the photo, this was what I got. Well, after some fussing.
It looks like one of those old masters drawings. The ones on gray paper with the ink and chalk. I tried adding a paper texture, which looked cool but not cool enough to justify tripling the file size. To be economical, .gif files rely on large areas of totally solid color.
Please enjoy my cat’s white, fuzzy belly nineteen different ways. She would want you to.
March 14, 2007 — 8:09 am
Comments: 3