etherbrian

Fiery Week of the Wheel, Day 5

The nano had just hit the market, one had just landed in my hot hands, and my desire to slip the little black beauty into a protective skin was lesser only to my desire to find a protective skin for cheap or free. I fulfilled my own wish by creating a cut-and-assemble solution. When I mentioned what I'd done to Firewheel's Chief Flame, he suggested I create a few skins for site visitors to download. Dig the idea I did, and I immediately began work up a few different versions. But you know what they say about the best laid plans of mice, men, and MP3 player skinners. This thing, that thing, and the other thing (all of which were probably paying client projects) delayed the process. In fact, I completely forgot about them until a second generation nano came along. You should have seen me blush.

This, gentle visitor, concludes my graphical recollection of the company formerly known as Firewheel. On Monday we return to our regularly scheduled programming. But before I say good-bye, I'm sure the management of the company formerly known as Firewheel would want me to encourage you to play PackRat.

Fiery Week of the Wheel, Day 4

Though such an enterprise was sometimes the subject of daydreams, it was never the intention of Firewheel to evolve into a purveyor of screen-printed purchaseables. There were, however, occasions that called for ink to be applied to 100% cotton upper garments, and we were quick to answer that call. Perhaps you recall the fiasco involving Sony and the secret anti-piracy software it hid on various audio CDs. It was the next day that I concocted i heart rootkit and within a week (give or take seven days) the shirts were put up for sale. I don't know how many sold. I don't know how many people out there have an ardent, slightly irrational hatred of all things Sony. The only other shirt offered as Firewheel merchandise was the fire wheel, which was created while I was still ignorant that a firewheel is a flower. It was assumed that the tee could grant you access to a lot of places where really tough, really mean guys are commonly found, nerd you may be. Unfortunately, no data to support that idea was available. Hopefully nobody got hurt. fanboii seemed like a clever notion for an item to be made available by a group of guys with an ardent, slightly irrational adoration for all things Nintendo. Yet it fell through the cracks, likely in no small part because no suitable feminine alternative to the term could be coined. Universal Serial Bus as United States of America never adorned a shirt because it could generate fervors neither patriotic nor geeky enough to override an ardent, by no means irrational fear of a lawsuit. Never offered for purchase and printed in only a small number, shirts ablaze with The Firewheelers were designed for Firewheel staff to wear to a bowling tournament at last year's SXSW. I was the highest scorer of the team for the first round. When I am the highest scorer on a bowling team it means the only thing on fire is the graphic on the team's shirts.

Fiery Week of the Wheel, Day 3

Yesterday I mentioned ye olde Firewheely linking. As time kept on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future, the bloggy stuff was stowed away into archived pages. Each page was adorned with an art header remotely associated with its month/season (often startlingly remotely):

Fiery Week of the Wheel, Day 2

Besides accepting legal tender for assorted design services, Firewheel maintained a two-fold blog. Lengthy articles which welcomed reader comments were called Sparks. I didn't create many Sparks. Brief, linkable descriptions of random niceties, nuttiness, and nonsense were called Plugs. I made lots and lots (and lots) of Plugs. Just a few of the webular wonderments to which I pointed were: Atari 2600 game manuals, the girl that looks a lot less like Leia and a lot more like somebody's second cousin once removed, Elton John's call for the internet to be shut down, famous 1947 comic strips drawn blindfolded, Embroidered Plush NES, bad Spock drawings, Gundam head speakers, 21st century pocketwatch, Mars Attacks, unidentified flying humanoids, the Bollywood Bigfoot, Pac-Crochet, Dali playing cards, the digital Dali timekeeper, Wickerpedia, Super Mario Life, far-out paper toys, Romanian Vampire Killing Kit, the true origin of "w00t", Cultural Revolution-era 10"records, LEGO armaments, playing Pac-Man with a nickel, the Tardis MAME console, Star Trek Phaser Universal Remote Control, wonderful animated 1931 weirdness, Japanese military anime makeover, the iceberg lettuce safe, Making Fiends, World of Mr. Toast, the mindbogglingest of papercuts, the iNoPhone, a helpful Cold War how-not-to video, The Periodic Tabe of Comic Books, the H-Wing Car Fighter,the Battle of Helms Deep in candy, old(est) school cinematic special effects, personalized action figures, the Commodore PDA, every-piece-an-edge-piece brownies, confidential Russian fighting robot, proof that Steve Jobs is evil, Super Mario Towels, The Society for the Protection and Preservation of Fruitcake, the 'smiley' intervention, Hungarian Monkey Planet (Planet of the Apes) comic, the Dreamcast wristwatch, the modular pie-cosahedron, Jim Kalb's Palindrome Connection, Artist of Other Worlds!, Horror Movie Titles on a Three-Letter Budget (and Subsequent Blurbs), Nintendo pre-1980, Captain Haddock's curses, Confessions of a Hollywood Gorilla, thought screen helmets that prevent alien abduction, AdVerbatims, Elvis Trooper, the Mickey D that never came to be, the toy piano band, Miracles You’ll See In The Next Fifty Years (as poorly predicted in 1950), the personal snail shell, the time-traveling chiropractor, people taste like bacon to robots, The Grand List of Overused Science Fiction Cliches, cow abductions to date, DIY Altoids tin MP3 player, 12 famous dreams, The Most Complicated Video Game Controller Ever Devised, the secret Walt Disney commercials, music to shop by, first person shooter spectacles, the record store cats, sugar shot to space, rejected Google holiday logos, Elliot the AstroCat (and Julie), 787 pieces of clip art in one minute and five seconds, the King of Kustomizers, 1981 Atari game catalog, anthropology of a trend, car window dust art, pinball POV, winning at video games instructional audio, DIY six-player chess, the sub-$10 MP3 player, Outer Limits monster bubblegum cards, how to pirate a vinyl record, Daily Paintings, System 7 Simulation, PixelBlocks, rock & roll Peeps, DIY laser eye surgery, Match Your Mood, Las Onomatopeyas, Plan 59, Sock Master's Game Console Controller Family Tree, Hebraic martial arts, Tronman for Atari 2600, the $1 FM radio station, debunking the myth that Betamax was superior to VHS, the Monkey Phone Call, NES ROM art, 120 years of electronic music, the world's smallest website, Super Mario Brothers Audiosound Super-Synthesizer, ray gun patents, minifgs build a PC, Reefer Madness, World Livestock Auctioneer Championship past champions, Video game sound fx quiz, an open letter to Mr Paul Reubens, Blue Demon, Mazinger Z in Madrid, Steven Hill's Movie Title Screens Page, PIXEL [WEBCOMIC], liquid cereal, a history of video game lawsuits, Samorost, Mecha-King Menorah, The Picture of Everything, 1960's Japanese garage-psych sampler, the top 20 geek novels, singing horses, b&w LOTR noir, Start-Up Sound, E-SHROOMS (seizure alert!), Costco's Picasso, airborne cats, Celebriducks, TV-B-Gone, Haunted Paper Toys, 1968 Mazda 110S brochure, AgeMaps, Slane's Privacy Cartoons, moss graffiti, online Adventure, the Trunk Monkey, The Cubes, The Rock Balancing Art of Bill Dan, The Abston (LEGO) Church of Christ, the true story of Audion, Scopitones, Sita Sings the Blues, Predicta TV, Ultrainteractive KungFu Remixer, mechanical marvels of the 19th century, 317X, adieu, amaztype, Father Alfred Juliano's Aurora, and a tribute to Ray Harryhausen (sort of).

Fiery Week of the Wheel, Day 1

This fine week of summertime hot heat is dedicated to the little company where I could once be found. Actually, I'm still ever so closely associated with the groovy gang, but the company is now less little, has embarked on a new mission, and trades under a new flamey name. I begin this walk down a memory lane hot enough to fry an egg on with the splash that once emblazoned the site's front page. The graphical amalgumation you see above served to give a vague taste of the various and sundry voodoo the company could do. It also appeared on company stationary and business cards. I still have a box chock full of those cards. They so pretty! I'll mail you one if you want.

Golly!

the savings account faerie

persian power pop not precisely

the return of the lapsidasical memory motorized mystery

I'm not the kind who forgets things. Not forget them entirely, at least. Yes, there are those occasional lapses which afterwards result in a sudden pang of fright and a mad scrambling to handle whatever it was that slipped from my mind at the most inopportune moment possible. But to forget something entirely and never again be able to deduct what it was that was going down? Never! Yet .......... I admitted previously having stumbled upon a logotype-ish something of which I had zero recollection, neither of its purpose nor even of having created it. And now it's happened again! And it concerns the same confounding locomotion conundrum! Weird, otherworldly forces seem at work here. Cue the B-movie theremin.

horror vacui