What animal represents my personality? My wife suggested a cat. “They’re generally intelligent, but somewhat aloof.” Buddy is friendly and apparently doesn’t mind spiders.
I wrote about the owl already. That it’s graffiti makes it kind of hoodlumish.
I liked this turtle that I found. It was by far the largest I’ve ever seen outside of a zoo. Something about tentatively coming out of a shell seems appropriate to the assignment.
I have been looking for a way to use my two headed snake picture, although I’m not sure how much it relates to my personality. Snakes like to keep warm, and ones with two heads are unusual.
I didn’t take this picture – my friend Crazy Joey posted it to Facebook, but I like the cats. They rock.
Archive for the ‘magic’ Category
A menagerie that represents my personality
Friday, July 27th, 2012It’s a remix and a mashup
Sunday, July 22nd, 2012So the Remix Generator gave me the Music Mash assignment, which I suspect is very difficult to by itself, with the Pretty in Pink remix card: Molly taught us all that everything is prettier in pink, so make that assignment more pink somehow, either literally or metaphorically. It’s interesting that I got a mashup and a remix, given cogdog’s Twitter question and blog post about the difference between the two.
Pink Floyd immediately jumped to mind, and the singer Pink, but that’s too obvious. Pink Panther? That would go well with some Pink Floyd. I’d be surprised if that hasn’t been done already (to death, even). There’s the Pink Fairies (SLYT), who I only know about because the Rollins Band covered “Do It.” That might be something to work with. I looked for some Pinky Tuscadero, but didn’t have the stomach to sit through more than a few seconds of Happy Days. Maybe I’m looking at pink the wrong way. There’s Music from the Big Pink, and Never Mind the Bollocks had a garish pink cover. There’s author Daniel Pink. I listened to his audiobook Drive a year or so ago. What if I used a bunch of them – like in that six songs in six seconds assignment? Or take ten seconds each from six songs, to get the 106 thing in there, if in an obscure way. So break out the Audacity and do something audacious. Don’t write about it – do it!
Credits:
Pink Floyd – Time
Sex Pistols – Pretty Vacant
Pink Fairies – Do It
The Band – Chest Fever
Pink Panther Theme Song
Dan Pink – Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us
A shining example of parenting
Thursday, June 14th, 2012
Inspired by Groom’s animated magazine cover, I decided to try my own. I thought of those creepy Jack Nicholson GIFs from The Shining, and how they really belong on the cover of Parenting magazine.
So I did a search for Shining GIFs to find the right one, then did an image search for Parenting magazine to find a good one to work with. I picked this particular issue for the pixel dimensions. (If you hover over one of the search result thumbnails, you’ll see the size. This one was something like 1600 pixels tall. Most of them were 200-400, which wouldn’t give very good results.) It was a nice bonus that it had an article about tantrums. I tried using Select-Color Range to pull out the type, but wasn’t too happy with the results.
Instead, I used the rectangular selection tool to replace most of Kourtney with the background color from the cover, and then used the paintbrush tool to clear up the parts where her sweater gets behind the type. I duplicated the second “n” to fix the part of the title covered by her hair, and had to do a little more manual work to fix the “e”. It was a little tedious, but not too much.
Then I used Select-Color Range to grab the background color, played with the fuzziness a little, and inverted the selection. A flash of insight told me to change the Image Size of the GIF to match the height of the cover before trying to put the two together.
I pasted it in as the top layer, and the animation plays underneath. I didn’t like the way the GIF aligned with the type, so I undid my pasting and cropped off some of the right side to bring Jack’s head more towards the center. Repasted the type layer and cropped the whole image to magazine proportions, then reduced the image size to make the resulting GIF under 1 MB.
Slide guy saves the Dutch
Monday, June 11th, 2012
Steklenberg thought he was beaten… but Slide Guy comes in to make a crucial save! And laughs mockingly at the Danish midfielder.
