I Could Explain That This Is A Photo Of Walt, My Character In The Surreal dark Comedy theatrical Musical Aisle

Linus Torvalds (b. December 28, 1969)

Finnish-American software engineer Linus Torvalds is the founding developer of Linux, a free and open-source operating system kernel which led to countless implementations and derivatives and grew into the system driving an ever-increasing amount of public, professional, and private computing work.

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

They have lots of new gTLDs you can put a website on nowadays.

I acquired ascii.bike and put an ASCII bike on it.

This past Wednesday I volunteered to add something unique to the thank-you gifts we gave to Off the Hook listeners who pledged their support during our final fundraising episode of the season.  During the show I drew a series of telephones, all different, all off the hook, one after another in a live marathon.  Everyone who donated to WBAI during the show's live broadcast will be receiving a random one of these.

This was lots of fun.  I did better than I thought I might both time and quality wise, and the fundraising was successful with many awesome folks supporting our listener-funded exploits.

You can listen to the episode by going to this archive page and selecting the May 18, 2011 link.

Signed, dated, and numbered series. Archival ink on heavy paper, 7x10".

Studio photos by Mike, first-five photo by dot.ret

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

It's National Draw T-Rex Day, as started by crashsuit and spread around by nedroid over on Twitter yeterday.  For my contribution I riffed (very badly) on this guy.

Edward Snowden (b. June 21, 1983)

Technical expert Edward Snowden once felt something to which he had access contained evidence of something he felt was deeply wrong, in a way the public had a right to know about.  The echoes of his actions continue on the world stage, and have left him exiled with no current possibility of fair trial.

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

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.

K2 Red Telephone Box 1926

The noble Red Telephone Box is a British institution, inspiring warm thoughts and a distinctively British style across the generations.   Britain's very first red booth design was the cast-iron K2, which very quickly became ubiquitous throughout London and the surrounding areas throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

Britain’s Red Telephone Boxes continued to take inspiration from the K2 throughout the entire payphone era, and copies and tributes to the design can still be found in phone booths around the world today.

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

I liked basing a drawing on the userpic of my 400th Twitter follwer so much that I decided to make it a habit for every hundredth follower after that.  Here's a fifteen-minute sketch of my 500th follower, who just happens to be my old pal @jayeennenn.  Jenn's an old-school telephone enthusiast like myself, among other things she archives old telephone company recordings, so I dug up the last telephone book left in my house and doodled her on the telephone page.

I must point out that Jenn is more attractive than her userpic or this sketch of her userpic would suggest.  I'd snark at her extreme-eyeball-close-up avatar and tell her to go back to MySpace with that stuff but, well..

Ballpoint pen on telephone book page, 9.75x6.5".

I started playing with recording over my own voice in multitrack, and after about an hour and a half this accidentally happened.

If you're one of the poor unfortunate souls who haven't experienced the glorious original version, here's the video and here's the Wikipedia article.  I put together these lyrics based on multiple English translations floating around out there; I think I've kept the basic gist of each line intact.

I have no regrets; if nothing else, at least I actually hit every sour note without pitch-bending or autotuning of any kind.

Download this track here if you're unwell enough to want to do such a thing.

There's a music video now as well.