Hello Hello!
This is what zen Jedi Samurai Art Guys do to unwind. We snark with ART. Creative endeavors that just don’t seem to apply to my regular Graphic and Web Design business. But still fun, none the less. Most images will have a bigger version for your clicky pleasure.
Waiting for Apple Silicon
When Apple announced they were putting their new custom chips, the M1, into Macs, – specifically the MacBook, Mac Mini, iPad Pro and a new 24″ iMac – we Creative Pros saw the stonking insane performance gains, and the hard limitations of the first round of the system-on-a-chip – in RAM, expandability, GPUs, Ports… and a lot of us are thinking, where’s OUR machine? Having danced with Apple’s love/hate relationship with Pro Users for the last two two decades – could be Christmas Morning, or could be crushing disappointment… again. We’re waiting.
Comcast – Time Warner Cable Merger
The announcement in February 2014 of a massive merger of cable giants Comcast and Time Warner cable was met with a bit of dismay and decided lack of enthusiasm in the tech community. Remember the overwhelming majority of Americans only have ONE choice for not only Cable TV, but also Broadband Internet, rapidly becoming a modern necessity. MS Seigler Weighed in on the topic, I made a snarky meme…
“Comcast is by far the largest cable company in the United States. The only other company even remotely close is… Time Warner Cable. After that, it’s Verizon FIOS, which is no longer adding new customers as the parent company has instead decided to partner with… Comcast.
“It reads like a joke. It is not.
“The strangest thing is that this deal isn’t actually anti-competitive — because there was never any competition to begin with. Time Warner Cable doesn’t operate in areas where Comcast operates. So, if this acquisition goes through, consumers will continue to have no choice in their cable operator. Hurray!” – MG Seigler
The proclamations from Comcast that the deal is “Pro-Choice, Pro-Competition and Pro-Consumer” were met with understandable skepticism. Hopefully the FCC and Justice Departments feel equal skepticism about the deal.
Doonesbury: Artz Pushb4ck
A little arts pushback for Donnesbury’s Gary Trudeau, who while commenting on the decline of print, casually dissed web comic artists. So a little pushback from the creative community ensued.
Deniers
I am with the Science on Climate Change and Sustainability issues. But sometimes I get tired of trying to reach out to people with reasoned arguments and pointing them at learned climate science articles and links. Sometimes you just have to resort to reaching for the lolz. With no particular apologies to George Lucas.
Design Force
On a particularly cool day in the Studio, I had my polar fleece warp and felt the need… ART SNARK! The Force, with me, it is. Turns out it’s not too out of line as a promo piece.
Design Force. Have it, we do. Yours, it can be.
FŌN
I don’t have a smartphone. Don’t really need one, spending most of my time here at this workstation. Mine’s merely clever. The iPhone is a lovely little brick of electric crack, and some Androids are pretty spiffy too; but sometimes I think people just get fed up with the complexity and the grinding COST of the gorram things. The carriers love ’em as users have to sign on with costly data plans just to get the things turned on, potentially adding thousands of dollars to the annual cost of owning one. But a lot of us just need to make calls. Remembering numbers might be okay too. That’s pretty much what I need.
Dumb phones. Smart Users.
Getting Pwned in HALO
A more fully realized version of the piece I tossed up for the Gaming post. I don’t play with my son’s XBox all that much, tho’ we do watch a fair amount of Netflix on it. But with my science fictional tastes, I do rather like the HALO games. My downfall of course is since I am a graphics geek, I get hung up on how gorgeous the games are. For most of my introduction to the Master Chief’s world, I tended to get blown away, a lot, while geeking out on the scenery.
But I had a bit of fun illustrating my typical experience over Bungie’s spiffy renderings.
Caprica
Anybody else find the proto-cylons on Caprica damn clanky? I do wish they could have finished telling that story, I was waiting for the “Chrome Toaster” models. And YES, I did build a GIF version as a Live Journal avatar where I animated the eye sensor diode. vruunnn… vruunnn…vruunnn…vruunnn…
More STUFF to come.