I Stayed Up Late Last Night Painting This Portrait Of My Midwestern Hacker/artist Pal Sigflup Synasloble.

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.

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

Way back in 1999, I was attempting to capture frames from a video file on a Playstation 1 disc; I no longer remember which game it was.  The process of accessing video from a PS disc in a regular CD-ROM drive was unstable to begin with in those days, and it didn’t help that I really wasn’t sure what I was doing.  Instead of grabbing usable screenshots from the video, my wonky software (which I seem to remember being in Japanese with no translation available) and wonkier settings generated four 320x224 bitmaps which, while unrecognizable, were surprisingly pretty.

I’ve been saving the images ever since, hoping to find something to do with them.  I haven’t managed to find anything yet, so I stitched the four frames together into one image and am posting it here.  Instead of using the Creative Commons License I normally apply to my work, I’m posting this graphic entirely public domain and free of any restriction in hopes that folks might get some sort of use out of this old accidental digital art.

Another piece of captchart.

Nikola Tesla (July 10, 1856-January 7, 1943)

Tesla, a Serbian-American inventor never fully appreciated in his own lifetime, has in retrospect become known as one of the most important inventors on record. Much of our 21st -century technological environment has its roots in Tesla's work with electricity, radio, and more.

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

Callie and Izzy is an upcoming webseries it’s been my pleasure to be part of.  The show is by Nicola Rose, with whom I’ve previously worked on The Media Show and the musical Aisle Six.

More info coming soon, keep an eye on it!

This plant did not come out looking like the photo on the seed packet.

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.

As my follower count on Twitter approached 400, I mentioned that it might be cool to do a drawing based on the Twitter icon of my 400th follower.  Number 400 turned out to be an affable fellow known as @cjp, whose icon was a small photo of himself.

It was then that I realized randomly receiving an unsolicited portrait from some dude off the Internet he'd just begun reading might be perceived as a bit creepy, so of course I went ahead as planned.  He seemed to take it well, and I've received no restraining orders.

Felt pen on paper, 9x6".

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.