Last Tuesday I Worked As An Election Inspector, Which Meant A Long Shift Sitting In The Gymnasium Of

Motorola DynaTAC 8000x 1983

The Motorola DynaTAC series was the first commercially-available, completely-handheld cellular phone.  A full charge of the brick-style phone's battery took ten hours, and offered half an hour of talk time.

The phone has since become iconic to the 1980s in general, and Yuppies in particular.  DynaTACs are used by characters of privilege in productions such as Wall Street, Saved By the Bell, and American Psycho.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.

A charming and familiar-looking Renaissance lady I digital-painted, with Leonardo's original open in another window.

Konrad Zuse June 22, 1910 – December 18, 1995

In May, 1941 German inventor and civil engineer Konrad Zuse secured his place in computer history with his Turing-complete Z3, the world's first working programmable computer.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my set Luminaries of the Hacker World.

In today’s daily doodle, President William McKinley wishes he had a Nintendo Game Boy.

In the rootin'-tootin' Old Days of the World-Wide Web, it wasn't uncommon to see websites with notes that they were intended for viewing with one particular web browser or another.  "This site is best viewed on Blah."  "This site is enhanced for Blah Blah."  Say "Netscape Now!" to any Internet veteran; the longer and more pained their responding groan, the more old-school and worthy of your respect they are.

When I started building my first terrible late-1990s website, I took a different approach.  Visitors to my site were greeted with the message "This site is best viewed with a Browser."  Below that appeared the buttons shown here.

First commenter below to correctly name all the browser buttons I spoofed gets a free emoticon! Edit: Tottenkoph got it!  I was wondering if anyone would get Lynx.  I've also wondered exactly why Lynx even had its own graphical button.  Even ancient Internets make no damned sense.

This doodle came about because I’m excited for the upcoming album by those fine folks at Information Society.

I started drawing it right after pressing play on “Dominion,” a track to which those who preorder the album have been granted access, and stopped drawing when the song ended four minutes and twenty-one seconds later.

The Next HOPE conference badge, for which I did the graphics.

These badges didn't just grant admission to the conference, they served as fully functional and hackable tracking beacons for its Attendee Meta-Data project.  (There's a video explaining the basics here, and more hardcore hardware info from the extremely neighborly Travis Goodspeed here.)  After the electronics were laid out and finalized, I was given the badge files so I could scrawl like a madman all over graphically enhance them.

I used what space and resources I had to bring the badge in line with the conference's retrofuturistic design theme, while highlighting and playing with some of the text labels and gadgetry within.  I even snuck in a silly little detail only a few people ever found and called me out on; the grid above the arrow logo makes use of a method I came up with in elementary school for hiding messages in notebook sheets, and contains the conference's initials.

This is the first thing I ever made completely in Inkscape.

My "Save the Clock Tower" flyer prop replica from Back to the Future.

A couple versions of the actual canonical flyer prop, as used in the film's production, have been in general circulation for a long time; you can grab them and other free printable BTTF props here.  I had one on my wall for ages, but was never really satisfied with it.  It's filled with placeholder text, unreadable on-screen but nonsensical in real life, and certain other details don't ring true; there isn't a date on the newspaper's front page, for one thing.  So, I created a new flyer from scratch, correcting errors and replacing the filler text with original newsprint written by myself.

This was made without re-using anything directly from BTTF; even the photo is something I heavily 'shopped from this free one.  I wrote the article text with lots of nods to BTTF continuity as well as some other obscure references and in-jokes, friends' names, etc.  (There's a secret signature of mine hidden somewhere which isn't the "Rob Vincent, Dot Net" or "R.T.F. News Wire" bits, which nobody to my knowledge has found yet.  If you see it, contact me or leave it here in a comment and claim some geek points!)  If you wish to customize or replace the article text, the font is Times New Roman 18pt bold.

Printed up at 300 DPI on the right shade of pale blue paper, these result in a prop replica which I feel is a lot neater in real life than the genuine prop.  Alternately you could print it on white paper, photocopy it, copy the copy, and so on to soften the edges and approximate that 1980s multi-generational xerox look before finally getting it copied onto the blue paper.

There's still a bit of work to do on this before I'll consider it finished.  For one thing, I had to improvise the masthead text with a calligraphy font that isn't all that good a match if you look closely; if I can't find a closer font I'll have to remake the text from scratch someday.

These were a big hit when I dressed as the "Save the Clock Tower" lady for a Halloween parade.

2021 edit: Wow, this blew up. Nowadays around half of the Clock Tower Flyers for sale online by shady prop dealers are my version, which you can still get totally free here. If you paid anyone for a copy of this flyer, you were ripped off.

This did, however, lead to something nicer; my version was found by actual Back to the Future licensee Doctor Collector, who were impressed enough by my work on it that they negotiated my services to rewrite the news text from scratch once again for their authorized version of the prop which is part of their “Back to the Future Time Travel Memories” box of replica items from the BTTF universe. If you have that kit, which is full of so many very cool things any BTTF diehard would enjoy, you have an all-new and official version of this flyer which was written by me.

It wouldn’t have been cool on either of our ends for Doctor Collector to just reuse my free fan-art in their version and sell it, but through their very kind efforts at reaching out to me I found myself actually writing authorized BTTF-universe material. That’s an achievement I won’t soon forget.

My Mystery Science Theater 3000 computer monitor, circa 2003.

Materials:

Clunky old-school beige CRT monitor

Sharpie marker (black)

Desire to have all one's computer activity heckled

Leeloo from The Fifth Element wearing a pith helmet.  I’m not sorry.