How to make a fairy fly
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Movie remakes starring the Invisible Man
This was just going to be a Photoshop Friday blog post but I’ve entered it into a competition instead. Most clicks wins lots of cool stuff. So feel free to share!
Here’s the link:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/johnb3/movie-remakes-starring-the-invisible-man-bbd
Current leader has 53,000 hits though. So there’s slim chance.
The king of Comic Sans
I read this over a year ago but it’s a great story I find myself posting it in various places every now and then. It originally popped up in a thread about fonts on metafilter. The King of Comic Sans…
Every month or so, we then decide who has spotted the most unexpected and/or inappropriate usage since we’d last judged it and they’re declared the current “King of Comic Sans” – complete with a certificate and free booze for the evening (yes, unsurprisingly, this competition is generally carried out in a pub).
Anyway, about three months ago now my mother passed away. She’d been battling cancer for about two years but it finally won. Mercifully, she lived a relatively full life until virtually the very end – it was only in the final month, after the cancer spread to her brain, that she detoriated seriously. Then, after a couple of days of serious pain, she slipped into a sleep from which she never regained consciousness and died about three weeks later.
As it happened, I was the only family member with her when she died – it was very early in the morning and we’d been operating a “shift” system during the nights to ensure there was always someone with her.
I took a minute to compose myself (okay, maybe more than a minute) and then went and woke my dad and the rest of the family. Whilst they were having their own moments, I went to look for the little booklet that said what you had to do next. Towards the end, when it had become clear that she didn’t have much time left, the charity people had given her this – it said who to ring, what to ask for etc.
She wouldn’t show it to us at the time (said it was “too morbid”) but told us it was in the top draw of her bedside cabinet.
Now, as the others had their own moments, I remembered about the booklet and opened the draw. It was there, just like she said it would be.
It was a little A5 booklet with a Lily on the cover. I opened it up and inside it listed in great detail and in formal yet understanding language, who needed to be called and what could be done when.
It was also written entirely in Comic Sans.
Of course I wasn’t really thinking entirely clearly at the time and this completely passed me by. At least it did until the very last page. There, scrawled in the corner in my mother’s shaky handwriting, complete with an arrow pointing at the printed text below, were the words:
“Comic Sans!!!!”
My mother had known about the competition – I’d told a story about it last year during Christmas Dinner. She also knew that I tend to deal with grief by just getting on with things, and so probably guessed I’d be the person who read the booklet.
We don’t give out a certificate to the “King of Comic Sans” anymore. By unanimous decision we have a little plastic silver cup called “The Garius’ Mum Memorial Trophy.”
I think she’d like that.
Sketches of the kids
I haven’t really used my graphics tablet properly since I got it last Christmas. Mostly just use it as a regular input device. But I only got around to figuring out the pressure settings in photoshop recently so it can mimic a real pencil. It’s so much easier to copy a photo and the freedom of editing is great. I rarely draw so well on paper without an undo command! The rubber doesn’t quite cut it.
One more step
“The world’s a headmaster who works on your faults. I don’t mean in a mystical or Jesus way. More how you’ll keep tripping over a hidden step, over and over, till you finally understand: Watch out for that step! Everything that’s wrong with us, if we’re too selfish or too Yessir, Nosir, Three bags full sir or too anything, that’s a hidden step. Either you suffer the consequences of not noticing your fault forever or, one day, you do notice it, and fix it. Joke is, once you get it into your brain about that hidden step and think, Hey, life isn’t such a shithouse after all again, then BUMP! Down you go, a whole new flight of hidden steps.
There are always more.”
— David Mitchell, Black Swan Green
Social media is such a crap name
Social media is such a crap name.
I’ve been dossing on the Internet since I first heard about it. Mailing lists, discussion groups, forums, usenet, whatever. Discussing common interests. Sharing links. Talking shite. Forming relationships. Meeting new friends online and off. And fueling my social life. Hear that? Not substituting my social life with a synthetic one – fueling my real one.
The tools have changed in the last few years now and they have an unfortunate collective title. Social Media. So now every day I have to listen to some expert tit on the radio, or read a quote from some other gobhole who really has no idea what they’re talking about. They see a title ‘social media’, assume the rest, and make total tits of themselves. It’s getting more boring by the day. And the flocks of tits are getting bigger.
It’s exactly like the IDM (Intelligent Dance Music) débâcle years ago. Brilliant music but scoffed at by many because it garnered an unfortunate name that stuck.
Bah, here’s some classic IDM presented to you by the magical tools of social media;
Fish spotting
Lunch time. Full tide at Clontarf bay. Spotted lots of fish; large Roach right in against the wall swimming in couples and threesomes. Busy shoals of silvery fry trying to stay away from the Roach, and even some jumpers farther out clearing a few feet out of the water and making a big splash like something from an old irish coin.
I can’t quite remember which came first. Being obssessive about trying to spot wild fish whenever I’m near water. Or those weird recurring dreams where I’m obssessively trying to spot wild fish whenever I’m near water.
I honestly can’t remember whether some memories, like spotting a big carp in the Liffey, are actual memories or just memories of dreams. But spotting fish is a bit of an odd experience these days; I have so many strange dreams about fish-spotting that when it actually happens for real, like at lunchtime, I feel a little dizzy, as if I’m half transported back to dreamland for a few seconds and have to look away from the water to get head back to reality. But I never can tear myself away, and have to wait for the fish to swim away before I come back to reality.
Yes – definitely one to be filed under waffle.
The Ambassador’s skull
You know that famous anamorphic painting The Ambassadors?
I was messing about with it in Flash and it’s very easy to show the distorted skull morphing into the image you’re supposed to see from an angle. Have a look see.
Yesterdays news
30 September 2010. Toxic bank cement truck crashed into the air just in front of the gate at Dail Eireann, while Google street view went live in Ireland.
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