etherbrian

Pocketommy

A year or so ago I stumbled upon Etsy ("Your place to buy and sell all things handmade") and quickly decided I'd try my hand at creating and peddling a few of my own made-with-my-very-own-mitts thingies. However, it wasn't long before I discovered that the design process was much easier - and, in fact, less painful - than actually bringing my notions into into paint/plastic/fabric reality. Sadly, it was the stitched critters that were the hardest to create, and they were the items I liked most. Sigh.

Anyways, there were several of these fiber-filled personas still on the drawing board when I abandoned my plans for stuffed toy world conquest. Periodically I'll post them here so that anyone who knows her/his way around a sewing box can, if she/he so desires, breathe the life into them which I was unable to provide.

precious parturitionish pixels

Cementimental

In response to last week's bookish post, Tim Drage (one half of Spite Your Face Productions and a fellow I've admired for years) dropped a line to let me know that he's published a book on a subject near and dear to my heart: Experimental pixels! Dig it!

Also Sprach Miyamoto

The Kubrikian Donkey Kongism pictured above actually began its life before it made its appearance as a Threadless tshirt submission. The purpose for which it was originally created didn't pan out (a long story featuring some odd people) so I hoisted the design up the tshirt design competition flagpole to see if anybody would salute it. Despite a rather high final score, it was never printed, likely due to a nagging fear of a legal response of barrel-throwing primate proportions. In the meantime, it attracted a great deal of worldwide geeky attention. On a regular basis throughout the 15 months since then, I've received email either asking whether the shirt has been printed someplace (anyplace!) or if x amount of dollars would entice me to sell the rights to it.

Because the dollar enticements all seemed kinda paltry, I decided I'd distribute the 21st century monkeys on my own. And because I wanted to stay on the legal straight and narrow, I made contact with Nintendo to get the skinny on the DK sprites regarding fair usage, parody, and the like. To be more precise, I attempted to make contact with Nintendo. And to be entirely precise, the only party making any attempt whatsoever at contact has been me. The silence from Nintendo has been deafening, and I'm taking that silence to mean "You're better off not waking the three-headed canine guardian of Hades" or some other metaphor of legal disaster like that.

So, to bring this tale to a close, it looks as if Also Sprach Miyamoto will be going into cold storage. Good night, apes.

Were you there, or were you square?

Y2K

Tippecanoe and Tyler Too

Yesterday in the middle of a conversation, someone whom most of you know best as the iconmaster made a little quip:

I chuckled. Then I brushed it off. But then those words returned to haunt me for the rest of the day. As the old saying goes, from small chatroom quips are born global political superpersons (or something like that). Stay tuned!

I'll be relieving you of those plush, piratey pixels. Savvy?

Book him, Danno.

Once every blue moon I make mention of my forthcoming book. Actually, said book has undergone several incarnations during this extended time I've been blue-moon mentioning it. The details of what it was supposed to have been - and how the art intended for it was snatched up and thrown at another project - is a long and uninteresting tale. Suffice it to say that eventually I settled on something and began production.

Zero Percent Cotton (subtitled One Man's Near Complete Failure as a Tshirt Artist) is an inventory of the beaucoup designs I submitted to the ongoing, unending tshirt design competition that is Threadless.com. Each page features a design, its score, and (with heaps of tongue in cheek) why it failed to be chosen to be squeegeed onto a shirt. But the book is not to be. Or very likely not to be. Or not to be at this time, its destiny perhaps being discussed once again next blue moon.

There are two reasons I've put the book on ice: 1) Of late I've been reaching into the cache of Threadless rejects in an attempt to actually bring some to torso-emblazoning life in other places. I'm not entirely comfortable asking nice people to part with cash to have art on their chests and then asking them to part with more cash just to see the same art printed on paper. 2) Though I pounded the podium and made the pronouncement that I'd no longer submit designs to Threadless (I'm getting too old, I'm becoming too freaky, etc.) today I scratch my chin, stare into space in deep thought, and hope there's no videotaped evidence of that podium pounding episode. There's a distinct possibility that the book would be out of date before it was even published (because, you know, I fully expect angry mobs of rejectors welcome my return with a barrage of zeroes).

In conclusion, good people, here's a sampling of what might have been:

CLARIFICATION

For those who may be wondering: NO, I don't live in the Czech Republic and, NO, I don't make money by redirecting web traffic to porn sites. To make sense of what I'm saying, let's travel backwards in time, shall we?

Beginning in the year 2000 I began maintaining a dot com portfolio (etherbrian.com to be precise) and kept it going until February of this year when I instituted this humble blog. I developed such a strong preference for this newer personal presence that when my dot com expired on September 30, 2007, I didn't bother to renew it. I didn't think that anyone who peddles cheap meds, hot stocks, enhancement miracles, and/or OEM software would find "etherbrian" to be a name which would have any sort of draw on potential dupes ... uh, I mean customers.

Imagine my surprise when I inadvertently learned that the dot com had returned! It was back with the same eyeball and info I'd put there in February, the eyeball and info that had disappeared at 12:01 a.m. October 1. I hadn't had a hand in it, so who had?

Enter someone from the Czech Republic with a mind to generate a few koruna by pretending to be me while embedding links to pornography. I'm doubting there's anything I can do about it other than let the world know (the world being those of you who know what an etherbrian is) that this is just more of the dirty underhandedness that regularly emerges from the foul underbelly of society.