One Thing I've Been Coming Back To A Lot Recently Is A Song By Information Society Called "Where The

My Mother the Matchmaker

I made this comic for /r/behindthegifs, a subreddit where the idea is to take a GIF that's going around and make a comic that tells what led up to it.  I'm pretty happy with how this turned out after scratching it together at stupid o'clock in the morning.

Here's the Reddit post, and here's the Imgur gallery.

Drawn in MyPaint, lettered and laid out in GIMP.

Alexander Graham Plane 1978

As the era of novelty telephones took hold in the 1970s, third-party phones of all shapes and gimmicks began finding their way into homes.   Most telephone companies were still discouraging the practice of customers connecting third-party phones to their lines, but interestingly-shaped phones caught on regardless.  Canadian phone company Northern Telecom addressed the issue with their own cute airplane-inspired phone.

The Alexander Graham Plane, part of Nortel's “Imagination” line of contemporary telephone designs, was one of very few novelty phones of the period to be actively manufactured and made available by a telco.

Acrylic on canvas, 7x5″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.

I did a rotten thing.

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.

I could explain that this is a photo of Walt, my character in the surreal dark comedy theatrical musical Aisle Six, who long ago had Hondo the hand puppet as his best friend and co-conspirator in mischief such as trying out the toilets at Home Depot, and this image was among those used in the show during a flashback slideshow of Hondo explaining his and Walt's storied past.

I could justify posting this to my art blog by pointing out that I did a serviceable photo manipulation job; at the photocall I was actually seated in front of a plain wall on a plastic chair.

I could reinforce this picture's value as a portfolio piece by pointing out the fact that I sourced a copyright-free public domain image to use as the background, so as not to cause the production any potential problems or costs.  I could then invite the viewer to hunt down and examine the aspects of the original I had to manipulate to get a usable background.

But I won't do any of that.  Instead, I'll just announce that this will probably be the most awesome photo I'll ever appear in and leave it here.

Carmen "humdog" Hermosillo (d. August 10, 2008)

Artist, writer, researcher, and poet Carmen Hermosillo was a participant in online communities, from BBSes, the WELL, and other early electronic forums to modern social networks and virtual worlds, and studied their place in our lives.

Hermosillo is portrayed here with one of her many virtual avatars.

Acrylic on canvas, 7x5″.  From my September 2015 set Luminaries of the Hacker World.

This is a digital painting of Mrs. Ho, the Cook from the wonderful film Clue.  Mrs. Ho was played by Kellye Nakahara, and her only line of dialogue is represented here.

I scratched this out with the classic/modelling brush in MyPaint.

Daily doodle number four is a quick sketch of the main character from La Linea (”The Line”), an Italian cartoon which as a child I thought was the greatest thing ever.  Now, as an adult, I still think it’s the greatest thing ever; this little long-suffering gibberish-spouting cartoonist-pestering guy is just as wonderful to watch today as he was when I was a toddler.

Search for “La Linea” on your video site of choice to watch any of his excellent shorts.

This is a quick five-minute doodle of everyone I've ever seriously dated, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, in no particular order, for no apparent reason.  While some of you who know me might also know one or more of these individuals, I'm not naming names and will not comment on which squiggle is meant to be who (unless you are one of the squiggles, in which case feel free to ask me privately which one you are.)

No idea why I felt the need to get this out of my head and onto pixels, but I do know I'm grateful these individuals will probably never end up gathering in a group like this in real life.  I'd be doomed.  DOOMED.

Steve Wozniak (b. August 11, 1950)

The old-school hacker and phone phreak known as "Woz" is celebrated worldwide for his co-founding of Apple Computer, his pioneering achievements in the hardware field, his work with the EFF, his love of pranks and good humor, his enduring hacker spirit, and - in some circles - his dancing ability.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my September 2015 set Luminaries of the Hacker World.