whiteout 12-step

I am trying out a new drawing rule. It is called “put the fucking pen down while you’re ahead”. I think it is working out well.

I might try watercoloring this thing….though that might be breaking the rule.

What I am really excited about right now is synthesizers. I figured out how to autotune on my laptop after I became the last technophile in the world to mess around with Garageband. The amount of buttons fills me with horror, and my robofolk schemes feel far off, but I can at least content myself listening to my squeaky little cyborg self for now.

Hello lunchbreak

Life is busy!
I have so many projects and jobs!
I am very fortunate.
But also quite tired!

I am also obsessed with scanners. Does anyone have recommendations? I would love to have something to go by other than “this is cheap” or “I used this one once and it wasn’t awful”.

Here’s some Remix lineart awaiting color that I tested the computer lab scanners with this morning:

I am trying to draw more dynamic figures! Thus awkwardly acrobatic fighting Remixes are growing all over my sketchbook.

Also here is a toy I made for my Flash final.

Scifi in design

An ad I accidentally clicked on today:

Blu offers an “E-cigarette” as an alternative to traditional cigarettes. As far as I can gather, it’s a cigarette-shaped vaporizer that comes with cartridges in various nicotiney flavors. The electronic tip lights up blue instead of red, they have a usb charging option, and you can supposedly smoke them in your own office. Which, in all, I find a wonderfully amusing image.

It feels like a prop out of a cyberpunk movie. In the future tobacco has been outlawed/gone extinct/purified into a cancer-free essence, so our hero smokes a rechargeable plastic tube under the neon of a gritty bar, longing romantically for the taste and feel of a leaf-and-paper concoction she can’t actually remember…

I didn’t even know 3d drawing existed?

I have a sneaking suspicion that figuring out the controls would be slightly harder for the uninitiated than this guy makes it look, but there is a fluidity to the relationship between the two-dimensional line and the three dimensional frame it creates in this that I just can’t even process.

check it out:
http://rhondaforever.com/

3d that’s really 3d.

I got into an extensive conversation today about the future of digital media, and I was directed to this video, which consequently blew my mind.

YouTube – Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the WiiRemote.

Check out more at Johnny Chung Lee’s website.

the technocalypse report

Diller Calls Free Web Content a ‘Myth’ (Bloomberg)
“We have ample evidence both in traditional and new media that people are willing to pay for quality, to pay for choice and to pay for convenience,” Iger said. “And they are willing to pay for what they perceive as value.”

The Coming Google Apocalypse (Hint: It’s Not Just About Media) (AdAge)
“…Annoyingly, it’s a cute monopoly — with a cute logo, a cute motto (“Don’t be evil”), cute executives and a cute corporate culture — that bewitches a lot of people into somehow doubting that it’s a monopoly, and prompts even otherwise cynical media people to be unnecessarily polite about it.”

Sometimes I am sitting at home, innocently writing some ideas for my science fiction grand opus, and the world decides to play along and tell me that the technocalypse is going to happen exactly as I fictionally predict it will.

Kindle is a fire-making term. Didn’t that make anyone else think “book-burning”?

Why 2024 Will Be Like Nineteen Eighty-Four: How Amazon’s remote deletion of e-books from Kindle paves the way for book-banning’s digital future. (Slate)
“If Apple or Amazon can decide to delete stuff you’ve bought, then surely a court—or, to channel Orwell, perhaps even a totalitarian regime—could force them to do the same.”

I knew it was a bad idea.

Okay I know, if I call myself a technophile, I shouldn’t really be championing the writen word, but I don’t trust any technology that only one company controls. Once there’s a couple cheaper kindle knockoffs out there and a bunch of pirated material (and I’m maybe off to grad school and don’t want to lug a text or two) maybe I’ll think about trading in paper for…e-paper. But don’t think just because I like technology that I trust it. I fully expect the world to end in technocalypse, thank you very much.

life in three dimensions

I tried getting back together with Vue for a hot minute, and broke up with it again almost as quickly as I ditched knitting.

Despite as of yet not really clicking with 3d myself, I have limitless adoration for those polygons, which is basically thanks to three sources of inspiration:

• Surprise surprise, Myst, which if you don’t already know because you haven’t been alive in the past couple decades and live under a rock, I totally recommend, provided you’re a pc user and can actually install the damn thing.
• The 5th Dimension, which is a video game no one else on earth has ever heard or made any records of and I may or may have not simply hallucinated as a child
• Patrick Farley’s utterly bizarre Delta Thrives (NSFW!), which fortunately still exists on the web archive of his old site, e-sheep.com.

And since I just uploaded a pile of stuff to the foolio, here are a bunch of sketchbook shots:

what.

Vacation in Space? It’s Possible … For The Rich (NPR)
“Virgin Galactic, owned by Richard Branson, is offering suborbital flights for $200,000. It hopes to have safe, regular flights within the next three years. Will Whitehorn, president of Virgin Galactic, says 300 people have already signed up. He likens the price to the cost of the first transatlantic airplane flights in 1939.

“A ticket in today’s dollars was $85,000 to fly across the Atlantic,” he says. “Now, it can be done for less than $800.”

It’s officially the future.