bestof/digital_art

This is an old attempt to gather the most interesting bits of kirk.is in an easy-to-browse format.

If you like kirk.is mostly for the quotes and links, it might not be the "best of" per se, but overall these pages represent a big part of my creative output so far in the 21st century. The "best of" parts are shown in their natural habitat, often accompanied by the typical quotes and links and asides.

I've divided the work into various categories, and tried to sort each page into roughly descending order of "interestingness". Sometimes there's a particularly chosen closing entry.

So I've kind of "invented" (though it's not very original) a new photo technique. There's probably better technology to help out, it's pretty labor intensive, but it's basically tracing the major contours in a new layer in Paint Shop Pro then using flood fill of a single color from each region. I thought it would help me learn to draw a bit better, but actually it's taught me more about color; for instance, in most pictures, especially those taken inside, caucasion skintone doesn't look like skintone out of the context of the picture.

Anyways, I like how some of these came out.

Hints if you want to try this yourself: learn how to use layers in your paint program. You'll generally want to go for the lightest shade in any given region. I used a 2-pixel solid brush for the lines, though for Mo's head in the final picture, I had to do it with a 1-pixel brush, then retrace. And, as always, work on a larger image, and then shrink it down.

Clockwise from Top:   Me, Post Party Mo, and the Demon Lupschada.

Ocean Grove, New Jersey, November 1999

So I'm starting this diet Mo's been on for two weeks with pretty good results, Fat Flush. It's not just weight loss, but nutrition and detox. One of the newer generation of plans, like Atkins, that's more aware of carbs and insulin levels than at least some fats... Mo's and my holistic-minded doctor (and, er, current yoga instructor) thinks Anne Louise Gittleman, the program's maker, knows what she's talking about, so that's a good sign. Though (and some of this come from trying to avoid anything many people might be allergic to) it has some weird restrictions; like the only vinegar you can use is apple cider vinegar, stuff like that. Drinking dilute unsweetened cranberry juice, jumping jacks on mini-trampoline (the idea being the lymphatic system has no circulatory system of its own, so needs to be shaken up)...the kind of stuff that strikes me a little odd but I don't know the science well enough one way or the other to really object.

So, in yesterday's Comments (mm, love that feedback) people A. told me those pictures look a lot like the film Waking Life, B. identified the source of the quote (Chasing Amy, where a guy is ragging on a comicbook "inker" which he calls "tracing") and C. Pointed out it's kind of like Rotoscoping, but with one frame. All of which is true.

Oh, and I put some hopefully not too obnoxious ads on Love Blender from Google's program. We'll see how that goes.

Image of the Moment

Ok, probably the last one of these for a while; but this one uses a slightly different techniue that tries to use color boundaries rather than exact contours. Looks a bit like paint-by-number, but I think the effect comes out well, at least for the right images. Takes even more time though.

Image of the Moment

--More fun with yesterday's Scale2Xd filter. I have to get some new base images to play with, I use this one way too much...and now it's even worse, because I'm less inclined to use some of the nice shots of Mo I have. I'm not sure why I like this one so much...I guess having my eyes covered make it easier to mess with, plus it has some bold colors and an interesting pose.

Hmmm. Thinking about this now, I guess I'm kind of like some photoshop n00b just discovering filters...the fact that I have to do some semi-clever steps (reduce in size, tweak the palette reduction, saving as a .PNG, then running a command line program for the atual filtering) doesn't really change that...

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Poem of the Moment

I phoned from time to time, to see if she's
changed the music on her answerphone.
'Tell me in two words,' goes the recording,
'what you were going to tell in a thousand.'

I peer into that thought, like peering out
to sea at night, hearing the sound of
waves breaking on the rocks, knowing she
is there, listening, waiting for me to
speak.

Once in a while she'll pick up the phone
and her voice sings to me out of the past.
The hair on the back of my neck stands up
as I catch her smell for a second.

I adore the line "tell me in two words what you were going to tell in a thousand".

(2019 UPDATE: this poem really hits me as an example of how even our relationships are changed by the technology of the day. There's nothing quite like this with today's cellphones - and most people would prefer you'd text anyway...)

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News of the Moment
Texas...what a bunch of Yahoos. They want to deny the Unitarians tax-exempt status because it "does not have one system of belief". Jimminy frickin' crickets. Heaven forbid people be able to admit something besides blind "I just KNOW this is right" faith. Image of the Moment

--Ksenia at her school's graduation... going back to that old flat color photos technique (tutorial here) It's not quite accurate, but not too bad... I like the kind of irritated expressions of of the classmates in the background.

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Exchange of the Moment

"It's this great shoe store, you have to check it out."
"Where is it?"
"You know West Newton? It's just east of West Newton."
"Err, isn't that just...'Newton'?"

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Link of the Moment
I'm sure I'd feel differently if I cared one iota about the show, but VoteForTheWorst.com, where they try to get everyone to vote for Scott Savol, far and away the worst contestant, is clever pranksterism.

Pixeltimes of the Moment
So, I've been thinking about possible substitutions for Ranjit's beloved and defunct Pixeltime. I've already posted about tilemachine. It's pretty good, though its obsession with tiling, designs that can seamlessly repeat, is a little odd. guestpixel isn't bad, though it has a weird "select a (small) palette" thing I'm not crazy about, though it makes for some nicely mood-ed images. The newest entry seems to be blograffiti. It uses Pixeltime's 45x45 size, but it does by letting you paint big, and then shrinking it down.

None of them capture that Pixeltime magic for me. Few of them respect individual pixels the way the Pixeltime did. None of them have a mascot like the good old Pixel Master, and all the images end lumped in a single giant gallery, there's no sense of themes, and no judging. (And one thing I learned from loveblender is that a selection by some kind of judge adds a nice structure to a site, and at least for pixeltime, gave me something to shooot for, goaded me into trying to be more creative.)

Anyway, I guess I like tilemaster the best of those. Here are four from my gallery at tilemachine (each is a 3x3 version of the thing I actually made.) The last two are video games, Pac-Man and Zaxxon, respectively.

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Fotolog of the Moment
Ethan Kavet is a medical photographer in NYC, and he has an amazing fotolog Fire..Cuffs and Guts with medical photos, fights, car accident scenes, and the like. You can follow that link for the most recent photo, or start at the first image.

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Quote Article of the Moment

As for the famous passion that used to motivate so many worker bees, a guy in the weight room at the Pacific Athletic Club in Redwood Shores said it best: "How many people can honestly say that they are really passionate about selling 'ERP software solutions to Fortune 100 enterprises'?" People are working, and working fairly hard, but most would rather be doing something else, if they weren't afraid of living on half the income.

Ain't it the truth.

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Thought of the Moment
Been reading a lot about the Matrix today, various reviews, going to see the new movie tomorrow. One point; in the first movie, the big "kill all the soldiers in the lobby" seemed kind of ok, because it was "only" happening in the Matrix. I never really connected that scene with the previous scenes showing how when you died in the matrix, you died in real life. And one of the reviews pointed out the trouble with imagining anyone as fundamentally "soul-less"...it makes it possible to justify killing them by the truckload. You know, reading how about rather than demote Pluto from planethood they're going to be adding in 3 more planets, and how that's going to mess up the mnemonics (especially "Xena", though at least for a while that should be a wellspring of "Warrior Princess" jokes) I just had to say... I think the mnemonic I learned, "My Very Educated Mother Just Showed Us Nine Planets" is far superior and appropriate than ones that have her serving pickles or nine pizzas or any of that.

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Project of the Moment
So last weekend I finished up my Where The Heart Is Reclamation Project with easier all-on-one-page views and a calendar application. I almost doubt that anyone will use it, not to mention all the customization features, but... it's there. It was the feature on this month's very late Blender of Love.

I also sent it to BoingBoing but it didn't seem to attract any interest. I think I've gotten BoingBoing'd twice, the gamebuttons link ("just about the coolest goddamned webthing, ever") was sent in by Eli the Bearded, who I think is a friend of the site but I know from alt.hackers, and then my laser sloths book ("Killer!") was an add-on to a previous entry. Anyway, I think that it's tough for someone submitting something they've done to get attention from the posters there.

Hmm, maybe I shoulda been trying my luck as a Metafilterer. Or admit I'm not always the best judge of what other people will find fascinating, though it's only every once in a while that I have something I feel is boingboingable.

Art of the Moment

--Hmm. Maybe I shouldn't use this image for online personals after all, huh? The first 3 sentences I got from someone's .sig file on Usenet (later I found out it was from "Illuminatus!") the rest I made up for a poetry class in college.

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Site Update of the Moment
I decided that that whole "you need time to judge your work" stuff is over-rated, so I added 2004 to my best of kisrael.com page now, rather than wait 'til the end of the year. (Like it says, it's not "best of", it's "Kirk's online arts and crafts", and so I can pretty easily predict what will make the list.)

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Flash of the Moment
A day (and a year) late, a Flash Valentine from Chaoskitty with love.

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Quote of the Moment

Lee's Law: Mother said there would be days like this, but she never said that there'd be so many!

Art of the Moment

--"Cider, Redux". I made an artsy, morose sort of valentine for Mo using this technique, but it ended up to be more than I wanted to share here, even though it came out better than my second use of the technique, an old prose poem I made, and an earlier unrequited romance. UPDATE: I did two more that I sent into the loveblender, Accuse, Redux which came out well and To Sleep, Redux...plus I made a larger version of this one.

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Geek Love Poem of the Moment

Roses are #FF0000
Violets are #0000FF
chown -R you ~/base

select text(or hit Ctrl-A) for translation:
"roses are red, violets are blue, all my base are belong to you"
(funny, that's two days in a row I've posted 'L33T-speak)

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Quote of the Moment

"Men want the same thing from their underwear that they want form women: a little bit of support, and a little bit of freedom."

They say there's gonna be some bigtime snow.

I remember the blizzard that helped to welcome 1996...I had just done Times Square New Years with Veronika who was visiting me from Germany. I remember the big problem snow plows had moving snow piles that turned out to have a car underneath...

What do you guys think of the directional areas, trying to get people to associate the comments link with the correct day's entry? And should I ditch the guestbook form, and have everything piped through the comments system? "Bozo", I'm surprised you haven't switched over...you post very topical guestbook entries, the kind of thing I had in mind when I put the system into place.

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Blogs of the Moment
Bostonworks (part of the Boston Globe's website) is starting a jobfinding blog. Might be an interesting thing for people who are looking to keep up with.

Another funny idea for a themed blog: Cooking Loser, bachelor boy cuisine. Maybe I should send in my various recipes for Tuna ala Kirk (with grey poupon style mustard, with salsa verde, and the most high class, the one with ginger soy sauce.)

ASCII art of the Moment

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--A study I did in preparation for Pixeltime. I think I ended up using dithering to get in a few more shades of grey, though. You can see the final result or the source jpg (from my pixeltime tribute and photobook, respectively.)

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Game of the Moment
The poor man's typing of the dead. (The real Typing of the Dead is an odd game, an older lightgun shoot-the-zombies converted so you have to type words quickly and accurately to blow off zombie bits instead of just shooting them.) Still, as far as typing drills go, this one has some nice aesthetic qualities.

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Quick Article of the Moment
Slate has a good explanation of Modern Arabic, the old form that has remained constant, and the way telecommunication is causing some dialects to thin out a bit. Job interview today.

My neck issue seems to be going away. The trouble is that by the end I was trying multiple strategies and now I'm less certain about what's most useful to do.

Professional massage only seemed to help for a short while. I'm still less certain about my old stand-by of strict back sleeping. An anti-inflammatory Advil before bedtime seemed correlated with the improvement, along with finally getting around to using that grinding/kneading massage chairback cushion My Ever Lovin' Aunt Susan gave me a few Christmases ago. Possibly it was just a matter of time, though the discomfort level fluctuated before this.

My Doctor/Yoga Instructor gave his blessing to popping a bit of Flexeril if I thought it would help. I was thinking that the way it both lets muscles relax and fuzzes you out might help me sleep, but by the time I saw him to ask about it, other stuff was working, and it seemed like overkill.

The funny thing is my doctor doesn't think the scattershot approach is such a bad thing... he says that the goal is to just be feeling better. Still, I'd not to develop a ritual of 5 things to do every time I get this kind of pain, if only 2 of them really help.

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Project of the Moment
Ok, admittedly this is nothing innovative, but assembling my "bestof" pages, plus this one montage wall I'm working on for in front of my desk made me look into making a few more of these:



The photo is in the old, Taxware parking lot, but I got clever with layers, and was able to extract this version as well:



I do dig the shot, strength with a hint of whimsy. I'm not sure which version I like more.

(I may also have been reminded of these things by a similar project by local SmartRoutes reporter Jeff Larson. At Krazy Karry's (local burger place), he has some posters up advertising his Toons for Miracles fundraiser for Children's Hospital.)

It was a lot easier using a tablet PC for this one, drawing directly on the screen, but I've been messing quite a few up, and realizing that most photos don't convert well into this format, and even when they do, I really need to think carefully about penwidth and stuff like that. So I'd say my works take a tad more skill than just tracing, but not much. (Larson's stuff is making more sophisticated use of color boundaries.)

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Anecdote of the Moment

Launching a new children's book, Dr. Dan the Bandage Man, Richard Leo Simon decided to include a free gift of six Band-Aids with each copy. He cabled a friend at the manufacturer Johnson and Johnson: "Please ship half million Band-Aids immediately." Back came the reply: "Band-Aids on the way. What the hell happened to you?"