Brock and awe: a little Shore Leave wordplay

who can kick ass with deadly sass? perhaps none more than Shore Leave of Adult Swim’s The Venture Bros. the closest you could get in real life would be if Louie Spence was a dual pistol-wielding agent of a super-secret American rogue spy organization.

from The Venture Bros., “Pinstripes & Poltergeists”

Shore Leave’s espionage and combat skills are second only to his sharp-tongued, laser-quick wit (and just ahead of his love of Jimmy Choo designs).  his special brand of ass-kicking homosexual machismo is just balanced by his (professional) partner Brock Sampson’s special brand of ass-kicking heterosexual machismo. initially presented as rivals, twenty years later they are fighting side-by-side against unchecked aggression – and have turned out to be an unexpected and satisfying comic duo.

Continue reading Brock and awe: a little Shore Leave wordplay

Fallout’s Vault Boy meets hi-fi marketing

Vault Boy in Hi-Fi

Maxell never existed in the alternate Fallout universe.  instead, the people that would have run their marketing ended up working for Vault-Tec.

(Maxell man from the web, isolated in Photoshop and Live Traced in Illustrator.  head splatter from a Fallout 3 screen shot, Live Traced in Illustrator.  Vault Boy hand traced in Illustrator from a 161×127 “Bloody Mess” perk image.)

i started one of these things

i hate blogs.  or rather, what blogs came to represent.

first, there was the Internet, and no one cared.  then there was the World-Wide Web, and folks scratched their heads over what to do with it.  geeks would write things on message boards or personal web sites, and the information flowed freely.

then regular people discovered the value of the internet (no more capital “i”) for commerce and socializing.  they then spent the next ten years discovering everything the geeks and nerds knew all along. suddenly it was cool to be doing everything the dorky kids had been doing – without, of course, acknowledging where it all came from.

so “blogs” came along – they weren’t anything special, just dumbed-down content management systems that mimicked the hand-coded or hacked-up CMSes the OGs (Original Geeks) wrote.  ah, but the response from the masses was “ZOMG!!!!1!!! U CN RITE ON UR WEBZ AND PPL CN REED IT?!?”  internet innovators world-wide collectively smacked their foreheads.

it was like coming out with “wraps” while all the Mexicans stand around wondering how people are charging $9 for a burrito.  or Twitter “revolutionizing” communication by hacking together a very poorly written way to broadcast text messages.

i didn’t want a part of it.  i was content with my work, my experience, remembering what things were like in the days of 1200-baud modems, usenet, gopher, and telnet (TELNET!  pre-SSH!  “hi!  sniff me!”).  but, hell, i had to break down some day.

a big chunk of the reasoning is that there are a lot of valuable things on the internet that i use or am entertained by every day.  sometimes i fix something after finding nothing helpful on the web – maybe i should add some contributions of my own. and, of course, there are also a lot of stupid things said on the internet, so why not cast my lot in, too?

things you can expect here:

  • pixels:  photos, photochops, UI topics.
  • tools:  software and hardware fixes, hacks, firearms, electronics.
  • commentary.
  • complaining.

– emilio