Kleiner Eisbär

I wonder if this type of thing happens anymore. Something tells me that an artist becoming famous off of someone else’s IP or product would quickly receive a cease-and-desist (notwithstanding the arguments for Fair Use, etc).

Great and timely portrait from the always amazing Sam Spratt.

samspratt:

“Dan Harmon is Community” -Portrait Illustration by Sam Spratt

A quick tribute to Community’s lost showrunner. Brilliant mind. Can’t wait to see what he makes next.

We are going to mess around with claymation this summer. Krissy is planning on working it into the curriculum next year, and we wanted to experiment with it first at home to work out the kinks.

That said, if you have any helpful information or tips, feel free to send us a message on Tumblr, Facebook, or Twitter. We’d also be open to any suggestions since we have literally no experience and do not know what is easy or what is hard.

We plan on using plasticine (or something) clay and making do with tools we have around the “studio” already. This will be a pretty simple undertaking, so we don’t anticipate needing much in the way of tools.

We will photograph the scene with my Nikon mounted on a tripod and create a static scene. Any motion will likely be in the background and with the clay object itself. Perhaps drawing a background on a roll of paper and slowly moving it across the scene will be the best way to accomplish a “dynamic” background.

We will light the scene with artificial lighting to keep the color consistent across the frames, regardless of date or time. I’ll probably boom my monolight over the scene for this, but we’ll see. Maybe we can pull off something a bit more dynamic lighting-wise.

So, claymationers, do you have any tips for a couple of newbies?

Does it make me a bad person if I felt relief upon hovering over the text “RIP, Chuck” and realizing that this was not about Chuck Berry? 

Also, I have neither heard of Chuck Brown nor “go-go.” NPR tells me this is a percussion-heavy funk music, which makes sense as that’s not really my bag.

(On Tumblr Dashboard, the image is a fairly small thumbnail)

lookhigh:

RIP, Chuck

Photo: Avie Schneider

(via npr)

Captain Morgan Is Being Sued For Piracy

In other news, patent trolls are disconcerted that they didn’t think to patent the plastic bottle 100 years ago, or the glass bottle even earlier. Think of all the money they could have made from licensing!

It’s Thursday, which means Community is on NBC at 8.

Now enjoy the smooth sounds of ‘Daybreak’ and look at an out of focus pancake.

I’m sure plenty of people have seen this; but this is probably the greatest interview I’ve ever seen. Farewell to our resident real like Carl Fredricksen.
(If you’re viewing this through your Tumblr Dashboard, Click through to see the videos.)

Part 1

Farewell.

This is, apparently, what happens to your Amazon Quick Picks when you get married.

Oh good lord, this is too good not to share.

I can’t speak for Brioni, but I saw this via Dolbeau who make seriously awesome ties.

(via dolbeau)

I’m a big fan of Jonathan Coulton; I think he performed at Toad’s Place awhile back, but sadly we were unable to attend. While this may not be my favorite song of his (it’s up there though), I can neither deny its relevance today, nor can I listen to it without giggling. Ever.

So enjoy.

P.S., Jonathan Coulton is awesome. He used to be a programmer. He is now the contributing troubadour at Popular Sciencemagazine. He releases his music under Creative Commons. And he is one snarky son of a gun. So he’s my kind of person.

I don’t think Krissy is quite as fond of him as I am, however.

Cheers! 

Politics aside, I think “young” and “dynamic” are the last words I would use to describe Mitt Romney. For one, he’s just not young. Assuming you subscribe to time as a linear concept (you know, the way we all do), then Barack Obama will always be younger than Mitt Romney (by about 14.5 years).

And having watched several of the Republican presidential debates over the last eight months, dynamic is hardly an apt word for Mitt Romney. Although, maybe there’s some truth to it. After all, there was that whole Etch-A-Sketch fiasco.

(For what it’s worth, I think Newt was the most fun debater to watch)

officialssay:

“My guess is you’ll see a dramatic difference in the youth vote this time — part of it is you have a younger, more dynamic Republican candidate.”

—

Hank Brown, a retired senator, on 65-year-old Mitt Romney. John McCain was 72 in November 2008.

Put my temporary studio away today. It feels good not to have to walk around an ironing board every time I enter/leave my bedroom.

So I made one of these books around Christmastime last year on a whim. Basically, I felt like experimenting with something different and had recently learned about fusing plastic together. I figured, I’m something of a pack rat when it comes to mailers and such, and I’m pretty sure every house has at least a handful of plastic bags from the store lying around, so I went to work.

Note: Like most people, we tend to forget our reusable bags when we go to the store. Thankfully, we tend to make small trips, so we can usually carry our groceries out. When we can’t we get a paper bag, which we then put our recyclables in, and then they go into the recycling bin. I’m sure there are many of you out there who relate, and many more who have something resembling the Mount Everest of plastic bags in your closet or underneath your sink.

That is the eventual result of my experiment. It took a very long time for just one book, but experiments aren’t usually particularly quick anyway and it ended up going to Krissy’s brother as a Christmas gift.

Every year, our town of Woodbury, Connecticut has a large celebration for Earth Day. This has been going on for seventeen years or so (I looked it up, I thought it was five). Usually it takes place in the heart of town on Main Street, which can be kind of inconvenient. This year, they’re having it at a park, which makes a bit more sense, now that people know to expect it. The event is basically a day filled with various local-ish vendors who have Earth-friendly products. When you arrive, you are given a reusable bag, and you can go from booth to booth talking to owners of various businesses who offer up all kinds of freebies and samples, hoping to get you to buy their product.

It’s nice though, because most of the people are pretty passionate about what they do, and are more than happy to talk about what they do and why they do it. Our favorite booths tend to be the raw milk booth (tried it last year—delicious!) and the grass-fed cattle booth, because they cook up delicious burgers and let you try little morsels of them. (Review: so much tastier than any ground beef I’ve eaten before).

We tend to avoid all the weird supplements and uber-natural stuff, because that’s just not our bag; we’d rather bet the Jersey cow.

This year, our newest friend, Kate, who sells our books and prints at her shop informed us she’d have a booth and would like to bring some products from her vendors/crafters/artisans. I felt like making something different, and pretty much immediately thought back to the fused plastic book I’d made last year, asked her what she thought, and got to work. I knew we had limited time and the books tend to be pretty time-intensive and there’s always a bit of trial and error involved. Also, sewing machines can be really finicky and uncooperative making you want to throw them against a wall sometimes.

Nevertheless, I prevailed, and ended up making four books, despite an oddly busy schedule filled with little in particular and all four are really quite different. Here are some pictures.

Feel free to like us on Facebook or favorite us on Etsy. Things like that help me know that people still care about books, and enjoy what we put out there.

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In honor of tonight’s episode of Community, part two of the video I posted the other day.

Looking forward to the Dreamatorium.