Sketchcast or Slothcast?

Yes, I’m probably being unfair. I bumped into Sketchcast’s offering and was intrigued. It is a really good idea. It’s also so remarkably basic that it’s doomed to failure I fear (Doomed! Doomed!). sigh. Anything that says I can draw a blog and post it sounds great. A simple tool to spice up our picture + words offering. Unfortunately it’s so slow. There is no option to double, triple or quadruple speed your drawing. It plays back at the speed that you made it. Which is slow. We write slowly if it’s going to legible with their chunky pen. It’s slow if you have make sure the line is processed smoothly and not like a heroine addict withdrawing while drawing. I couldn’t even be bothered sitting through the whole playback of my quick blog test video (see incomplete above).

And another thing, WordPress don’t support the embedding of their video! C’mon WordPress. Lighten up a bit. It’s not java. Or anything malicious. It’s just slow.

Play with it, discard it and then maybe the developers will make it better.

Sketchcast

ps. Don’t get me started on Virb’s slow poke development cycle!

The Most Complicated Left Turn On Earth

The driving instructors in Russia (do they have driving instructors in Russia?) must have a lot of fun with this one.

Okay, at the next set of lights I want you to turn left. [hehehe]

If anyone knows of a more convoluted intersection, please post it here.

The Most Popular Blog on WordPress Can Has Cheezburger

The last sign before the impending apocalypse is upon us. I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER has become the most popular blog on WordPress. Described as “lolcats tagged for your convenience (also for your lol*’s)”, this sight delivers user submitted pictures of their pets (usually cats) with ludicrous captions that are a mash-up of leetspeak, SMS, and bad english. They are supposed to be funny.

Here is the picture that started it all, followed by a few fan favourites (you can vote via cheezburger on each individual pic).

Not to be outdone, I snapped a few pix of my favourite LolCat, Sabine. Using the crazy and ridiculous online application LolCats Buildr I easily uploaded, captioned, and submitted my entry in less time than it takes to say “CHEEZ”. See my fat cat below. I’ll let you know if she makes the cut…

The Ad Generator Is Here. Fear Not.

Advertising is dead. Long live advertising.

The ad generator is a generative artwork that explores how advertising uses and manipulates language. Words and semantic structures from real corporate slogans are remixed and randomized to generate invented slogans. These slogans are then paired with related images from Flickr, thereby generating fake advertisements on the fly. By remixing corporate slogans, I intend to show how the language of advertising is both deeply meaningful, in that it represents real cultural values and desires, and yet utterly meaningless in that these ideas have no relationship to the products being sold. In using the Flickr images, the piece explores the relationship between language and image, and how meaning is constructed by the juxtaposition of the two.

The ad generator was created by Alexis Lloyd as a component of an MFA thesis project in the Design and Technology department at Parsons The New School for Design.

Here are 4 ads I made in about 4 seconds. The ads become hypnotic after a while, and you begin to feel giddy and lightheaded. I had to turn it off after about 85 minutes…

What is Lenovo?

[splashcast WLZP8744UA]

What is Lenovo? If you don’t already know (and many North Americans don’t) your mind will roll the word Lenovo around on your brain to see what associations are picked up. Enter the “Lenovo Blips”— over 100 short teaser spots (uploaded to YouTube, Yahoo Video, Google Video, and more) featuring random images and music clips meant to capture that feeling of free-association and peek curiosity.

Disclosure: Some of the regular writers for 1% were involved in the creation of these spots.

Garfield Randomizer

The Garfield Randomizer is a nifty little online program that randomly generates a three-panel Garfield strip, using previous panels as source material. It (a) goes to show how much Garfield sucks and (b) says something about the function of sequential art.