Well, hello there...

Been a hot minute with no updates here, sorry about that, but between all the election crap and a boat load of work landing I have not had much brain power at the end of the day. Anyhoo, here is a bulk dump of some more mirror balls and other studies I was working on. Just tinkering with some ideas here.

Jar Studies

Here are the three jar images all finished up and in one post to check out.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

-cough.

I Lived Through Collapse. America Is Already There.

Woo boy, pretty heavy read here.

“Today I assume you went to work. Bad news was everywhere, clogging up your social media, your conversations. Maybe it struck close to you. I’m sorry. Somewhere in your country, a thousand people died. I’m sorry for each of them. A thousand families are grieving tonight. A thousand more join them every day. The pain doesn’t go away, it just becomes a furniture of bones, in a thousand homes.

But that’s exactly how collapse feels. This is how I felt. This is how millions of people have felt, including many immigrants in your midst. We’re trying to tell you as loud as we can. You can get out of it, but you have to understand where you are to even turn around. This, I fear, is one of many things Americans do not understand. You tell yourself American collapse is impossible. Meanwhile, look around.”

“Collapse is just a series of ordinary days in between extraordinary bullshit, most of it happening to someone else. That’s all it is.”

via- Kottke.org

This Machine Kills Fascists

Inspired by the Great Woody Guthrie, I made a new piece of artwork  this weekend in response to the Alt-Riot / Proudboys coming into our town from out of state to cause havoc. Get out and Vote people. It’s pretty bleak out there, so do what you can.

FlowerPower Blue- Robert Peek

Amazingly cool technique on this series by Robert Peek. I was pretty sure they were paintings when I first saw them. Check out the full series on Behance, FlowerPower Blue.

Working on a little something something.....

Just mashing some stuff together for a new piece I am working on and this little graphic I wanted to drop as a preview. These two were kinda fun. The “eyes image” were scrapped form the internet but the game graphics style of “VOTE” was done in C4d.

As Their Numbers Grow, COVID-19 “Long Haulers” Stump Experts

More info is coming out about the long term effects of COVID and it’s not looking good.

“Anecdotally, there’s no question that there are a considerable number of individuals who have a postviral syndrome that really, in many respects, can incapacitate them for weeks and weeks following so-called recovery and clearing of the virus,” Anthony Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in July during a COVID-19 webinar organized by the International AIDS Society.

…

In the study of Italian patients, the most common symptoms reported at follow-up were fatigue, shortness of breath, joint pain, and chest pain, in that order. None of the patients had a fever or other sign or symptom of acute illness, but about 44% of them had a worsened quality of life.

Tape Op!

Just got my new issue of Tape Op magazine and if you are into any kind of recording this is a must have. So many great interviews and stuff to check out all about studio recording, home recording and more. Plus, the magazine has a FREE subscription. If you play any music, it’s a no brainer to subscribe. Tape Op!

The Social Dilemma

Watched the Netflix documentary “The Social Dilemma” the other night and while I think all the criticisms in this essay are spot on, I still think it is very much worth watching. It will really give you a clear picture on how much your devices are actually manipulating you. My news blackout now is expanding to keeping devices at bay. Blogging is a bit different as this is a sit down workstation for “doing shit”. Not just that addictive mindless scrolling, searching or playing mobile games like what happened when one uses any portable device.

Engineers produce a fisheye lens that’s completely flat

K, this is nutso, future stuff here. Think of the possibilities.

“Now engineers at MIT and the University of Massachusetts at Lowell have designed a wide-angle lens that is completely flat. It is the first flat fisheye lens to produce crisp, 180-degree panoramic images. The design is a type of “metalens,” a wafer-thin material patterned with microscopic features that work together to manipulate light in a specific way.

In this case, the new fisheye lens consists of a single flat, millimeter-thin piece of glass covered on one side with tiny structures that precisely scatter incoming light to produce panoramic images, just as a conventional curved, multielement fisheye lens assembly would. The lens works in the infrared part of the spectrum, but the researchers say it could be modified to capture images using visible light as well.”

“In one demonstration, the new lens is tuned to operate in the mid-infrared region of the spectrum. The team used the imaging setup equipped with the metalens to snap pictures of a striped target. They then compared the quality of pictures taken at various angles across the scene, and found the new lens produced images of the stripes that were crisp and clear, even at the edges of the camera’s view, spanning nearly 180 degrees.

“It shows we can achieve perfect imaging performance across almost the whole 180-degree view, using our methods,” Gu says.”

A measure of social progress finds that the quality of life has dropped in America

New York Times piece on the decline of America.

“The newest Social Progress Index, shared with me before its official release Thursday morning, finds that out of 163 countries assessed worldwide, the United States, Brazil and Hungary are the only ones in which people are worse off than when the index began in 2011. And the declines in Brazil and Hungary were smaller than America’s.

“The data paint an alarming picture of the state of our nation, and we hope it will be a call to action,” Michael Porter, a Harvard Business School professor and the chair of the advisory panel for the Social Progress Index, told me. “It’s like we’re a developing country.”

Trash By You

New work in the wild making the rounds on some of the design blogs. When I get some free time I’ll update the portfolio with the process. Nike - Trash By You.

Photography by Unruh Jones as far as I know.

I did all the comps and post-production and even had the chance to shoot the sail-like flower arrangement for the comp. Fun stuff.

Flamethrowers and Fire Extinguishers – a review of “The Social Dilemma”

Interesting essay about the Netflix show, The Social Dilemma that gets into some aspects about the current public discourse that is troubling. This paragraph really hit home to me.

“The Social Dilemma clearly wants to avoid taking sides. And in so doing demonstrates the ways in which Silicon Valley has taken sides. After all, to focus so heavily on polarization and the extremism of “both sides” just serves to create a false equivalency where none exists. But, the view that “the Trump administration has mismanaged the pandemic” and the view that “the pandemic is a hoax” – are not equivalent. The view that “climate change is real” and “climate change is a hoax” – are not equivalent. People organizing for racial justice and people organizing because they believe that Democrats are satanic cannibal pedophiles – are not equivalent. The view that “there is too much money in politics” and the view that “the Jews are pulling the strings” – are not equivalent. Of course, to say that these things “are not equivalent” is to make a political judgment, but by refusing to make such a judgment The Social Dilemma presents both sides as being equivalent. There are people online who are organizing for the cause of racial justice, and there are white-supremacists organizing online who are trying to start a race war—those causes may look the same to an algorithm, and they may look the same to the people who created those algorithms, but they are not the same.”

The Attention Economy

interesting short on something I have been spending a lot of time thinking about. We are just in a firehose of information and a major part of the modern economy is built on TAKING that attention from us and our goals.

“When information becomes abundant, attention becomes the scarce resource. “ - Herbert Simon

Another interesting point is that the whole point of the internet was to be decentralized. But now it’s in the hands of very few gate keepers. Facebook and Google do not have peoples best interests in mind.



Still lifes by Rebecca Ritchie

Was digging on these oil paintings by Rebecca Ritchie. I am such a sucker for this kind of lighting style.

Seriously, quit Instagram.

Good lord, seriously, just quit Facebook AND Instagram already.

“Facebook Inc. is again being sued for allegedly spying on Instagram users, this time through the unauthorized use of their mobile phone cameras.

The lawsuit springs from media reports in July that the photo-sharing app appeared to be accessing iPhone cameras even when they weren’t actively being used.

Facebook denied the reports and blamed a bug, which it said it was correcting, for triggering what it described as false notifications that Instagram was accessing iPhone cameras.

In the complaint filed Thursday in federal court in San Francisco, New Jersey Instagram user Brittany Conditi contends the app’s use of the camera is intentional and done for the purpose of collecting “lucrative and valuable data on its users that it would not otherwise have access to.”

Keep in mind this is after all this shit I posted about before when I quit these apps. They are cancer on our society. Stop contributing.

“At some point, I wanna write something up about me leaving instagram, but I just don’t have the focus or mental fortitude to dig up all the links on the evil crap Facebook is pulling. Suffice to say that they are stealing all your biometrics, actively promoting Trump in has tags over Biden and straight-up promoting Conservative views. That’s just for starters and all from the past month. Yeah, no shit. So they can eat a bag, I’m done. Need to just put something on there to explain it and point to the blog. Instagone. “

Moon Hooch

I keep trying to come up with a better name for this one, but “Moon Hooch” seems to be the one that sticks for some reason, lol! More of the “jar” series I am messing with.