Posts Tagged ‘life’

Hey, Mickey you’re so… old

Monday, June 9th, 2008

Rarely in the history of cartooning have we ever seen a cartoon star fall so tragically out of the limelight as we have in the case of Mickey Mouse.

In a box by pier 23 he whiles away the days looking for his next smack fix and finding creative places to store his leavings. The once great star and spokestoon for the Disney corporation fell into trouble during the great depression of 2008.

An art community I used to frequent before I became so heavily ingrained in advertising was having an activity to re-interpret Mickey Mouse. This was my sarcastic little poke at wholesome family entertainment.

After about three months of nearly fully (at some points, almost every waking hour) dedicated time to my company and an incredibly fast paced project I’ve been allowed some vacation time. I’m only on day one of my 3 day vacation but it’s already been great. I feel like I’ve gotten so much done in terms of restoring order to my system. On top of that I’ve had a chance to work on my website design, visual identity, paint and be lazy. It’s pretty much everything I thought it would be and more.

miscellaneous pictures

Looking at this picture of my computer setup made me realize how out of date my technology is. CRTs? Old-ass 4.1 stereo setup? 4×5 intuos 3 tablet? $20 logitech mouse from 6 years ago? I need to upgrade. My hard drives are filling up like an overweight person in a buffet line. Maybe I’ll suddenly become rich…

I got a new plant to replace the one that died. It’s already helped to improve my mood.

Here’s another mood enhancer for me lately. This is one of the greatest parts about my place and one of the things I’ll miss the most if I ever move (I should say: when).

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Charity, Politics, Music and Miscellany

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

So it seems I’m tracking at about a post per month on average. I fully intend to blog a bit more but right now I’m involved in a lot of time consuming activities. The biggest of which is a project I’m working on for SAP. It’s been a lot of late nights, frustrations and stress but it’s really coming together and I can’t wait to share it. Other than that I’ve been working on freelance as well as my own visual identity system. My ultimate goal is to get things well wrapped up by June on all fronts so I can spend some time away from the computer screen. I’m actually thinking about traveling a little.

But I digress. Onto the substance. Last weekend I thought I would work on my karma a little and participate in some charity events. I have never been into the community service kind of stuff but after pushing myself to take part in all of that last weekend I felt really good about what I’d done. Friday I went to a cancer benefit put on by my company at the record bar. Saturday I got up and drove over to the Historic North East in KCMO and volunteered with AIGA to help design a chalk square with the Restart homeless youth art program. Sunday I got up early and ran the Trolley Run to benefit the Sabates Childrens center for the Visually Impared. I ran what I think might be my record Trolley Run time, in fact. Four miles in 27 minutes. A blisteringly fast 6:49 pace (maybe not blisteringly fast but pretty good for me anyway). I felt very fulfilled after it was all over.

I don’t have photos from it all but I do have photos from the chalk walk. Here is our square in construction. I will note Chi Hiu, my partner, and I were less concerned with design fundamentals than we were with making sure the Restart Kids had a great time. They were both a little reluctant at first but after we got started they really got into it.

They decided we should do a giant Pooh for our “growth” theme:

Other people had some really nice designs. Some of the local design shops/agencies were represented. Here are a couple that were pretty gnarly:


Willoughby design


Barkley Evergreen

Many many more photos are up in a flickr set.

Politics
Among other things I’ve spent my money on in the past week or two, I donated to Obama’s campaign. I guess I felt compelled to do something other than voice an opinion and vote for the guy. A friend at work has been trying to convince me that my vote didn’t count. This may have been what motivated the decision. I just feel that that sentiment is fundamentally wrong. A vote is a voice and without a voice we’re stuck with another dumb-as-mud pandering politician who will snake his way into the White House. Sure there are levels above the popular vote that we as US citizens cannot control. There is certainly no guarantee that your state’s delegates or electoral votes will go with the will of the people but to me it seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy to eliminate the possibility of that happening from the beginning by not voting. Where is the optimism? Maybe it is cynicism I’m hearing every time someone tells me my vote doesn’t count. I can’t really hold it against the cynics. Al Gore lost the election even with the popular vote. It’s certainly happened a number of times. We have the right as citizens though. Why not exercise it? Vote for whoever you want, but please vote.

Music
So I was working on some freelance tonight when my itunes shuffled to some tracks I’d composed about 4-5 years ago. To my surprise they still sounded descent! It made me want to dabble again and maybe polish them up but it’s probably one of my lowest priorities at the moment. I thought I would share one of my favorites for now. I used to put these together in my free time. Most are about half finished and pretty rough. They’re all instrumental and electronically composed. I got a lot of inspiration from movie scores so a bunch of them are a little slow and moody. I used give them whatever working-title name popped into my head as I was listening and on that note, here is one titled Riptide:
Riptide (mp3)

Cheers!
I hope to catch up again here before June but until then, see you around, internets.

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A little bit of everything

Monday, April 14th, 2008

So it’s been a while since I blogged. There are a number of solid excuses I can throw on the table but that just seems petty. Let’s let bygones be bygones and get on with the pretty pictures, shall we? Since a bit of time has passed and I haven’t gotten to blog about things I’ve wanted to blog about I will just combine several posts into one and organize it with subheads.

We gather here today…
I’ve had this plant for 5 years now. It’s survived a few wild college parties and a number of reckless room-mates. It’s always been my rock. I thought it would never die no matter how much strain or wear and tear I inflicted upon it. This is the plant as it sits in my living room today:

It was thriving before my trip to London. During my two week trip my parents came to my apartment occasionally to water the plants and make sure they were doing alright. It nearly croaked during that time. Luckily due to my father’s shrewd green thumb it narrowly escaped an extended period next to that cold window. It perked up for a while. I thought it was going to survive but I must have over watered it or under watered it. either way it’s been like this for a couple weeks. I keep hoping it’s going to spring back to life when the spring weather sets in but it hasn’t yet and the outlook is looking pretty bleak.

Is it dead? Can I revive it? I don’t want to throw it out before I know if it can be saved. It was such a trooper…

National Champs 2008!
If you don’t know, I’m a University of Kansas alum and although I’m not extremely plugged into college basketball every season, I do follow my hawks. This year they won! I was in Lawrence for the Final Four as well as the championship game. I’ve never seen that town erupt like it did. I was in town for our loss to Syracuse a few years ago and although the streets were flooded on that occasion it was nothing compared to our victories this year. Here are some pictures and a couple of videos I took during and after our NCAA championship victory:

Here’s a video of the final point, our victory and the flood of people into Mass St. Ignore me. I’d had a few beers at this point and got really excited:

And here’s a video from the crowd on Tenth street:

I’ve got a few more videos but I’m already clogging your internets so here are the rest of the pictures:

Life drawing
My latest life drawing semester is wrapping up. Unfortunately we had a majority of male models this semester. I don’t mind drawing male models but it would be nice if we alternated or had an even mix, know what I’m saying? I guess I got practice where practice was needed though. All are done with charcoal on 18×24″ newsprint. Some are done with pastel / conté as well. Here are some highlights from that:

Design
I’m hoping to blog about some design sometime soon as well. I’m just waiting for things to slow down a tad. There are definitely a few things I want to wax on about. That reminds me. I should be working on my site redesign and blog redesign still. I have to keep on myself about that. Keep on me about that if you happen to see me in real life.

Cheers.

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