the ♥ tag doesn't show up on a lot of macs.

so in relation to scaff's article, i'm pretty sure most of us are familiar with deviantart.com (online art gallery for the uninitiated; home to a few million galleries all of varying skill--seriously, anyone could get a devart account). anyway, on the topic of art and authenticity on the internet? you're lucky if you can get it to exist, because you can have an extremely difficult time enforcing it. there are so many "art thieves" out there, and devart has more than its share of them (hopefully i don't have to explain what an art thief is). you see people's works with the signature/watermark cropped out, pictures where the thief has mspainted over it so it looks like someone has a different hair color (god, they always do a shitty job, too), and one time i came across a person's gallery where one of their "art pieces" was a desktop wallpaper i'd used ages ago that came from another website. it was an actual screenshot of a cartoon character from a tv show, and they were trying to pass it off as their art. WOW. IDIOT. i'd been up late that night and feeling pissy and sent her a really nasty e-mail, and later the gallery was gone. wow, i don't think the internet could be any safer without me around.

anyway, it's gotten to the point where a lot of artists just plaster their signature or watermark right in the middle of their art because they're so fed up with it. other people have done something to their html code for their site that prevents you from saving or hotlinking their images. that creates an accessibility problem, because most internet surfers don't have the know how to adjust their internet/firewall settings to get these images to show up. that, or their desire to see a particular artist's work is not so great that they want to take half an hour trying to configure their internet settings right. and everyone has the art thieves to thank!

there are a few devart galleries i frequent (mostly cartoony artists who are currently studying animation or applying to work at some major comic book industries) that i'll link to later.

walter benjamin is making my head hurt.

first, however, here's a link to a game a friend of mine mentioned to me: you're an elite ROFLer who needs to destroy wave after wave of LOLLERskaters and LMAOplanes by dropping WTFbombs and OMGmissiles. comes with very own 80s power ballad music to add to the 1337ness.

now, the business. so i can better retain the info mr. benjamin is relaying to us, i'm going to try a tactic my bf (hereafter known as "the sheepman" need i ever reference him again) recommended, which basically entails writing a sentence about what i got from each section.

I
art and its complexities becomes more accessible to your average joe with the introduction of first lithography and later photography (essentially methods of mechanical reproduction).

II
reproductions of the original work of art serve to deteriorate the authentic beauty of said original at its exact moment of coming into being, sometimes referred to as its "aura."

III
SOCIALISM BAD (in that it dictates the replication of an original is as equal as the original; neither is superior nor inferior to the other. this section gave me a mountain of trouble, so i could be way off the mark here).

IV
art was first produced for religious purposes and has now evolved to the point where many operate under the idea of "art for art's sake," where no underlying purpose or meaning exists.

V
reproduction of art increases its accessibility.

VI
the meanings of reproductions are constructed by their context (?)

VII
some believe films have a spiritual nature to them that is either unrecognized by the audience or the actual filmmaker (not likely...).

VIII
in film the performance that the audience perceives is the camera's rather than the actual actor's.

IX
film is not as artistic as stage acting--the film actor approaches his work in disjointed pieces rather than the stage actor, who approaches his work as a whole.

X
as it becomes more accessible and widespread, the "art" now constructs the artist, rather than vice versa. (still could be totally off the mark...)

XI
film, as opposed to arts such as painting, creates the illusion of reality by diminishing the distance between the creator (the equipment) and the audience.

XII
the "mechanical reproducibility" of art (in general) allows for a public to come together (right now...) in a shorter period of time.

XIII
essentially, film allows us to see things in ways we wouldn't otherwise.

XIV
film can be seen as a form of dadaism, one that bombards their audience with images/ideas constantly, with no time allowing for contemplation on the image.

XV
films distract their audience, then deliver their message verrrrry stealthlike. also, duhamel hates movies.

ok, so what i gathered about the 3rd section way back there is now nullified. btw, this is no attempt to provide anybody w/a sparknotes version of the article; it's mostly for my own benefit since i appear to be cursed with a less than stellar memory.

now i am off to celebrate with watching american dad, recently bequeathed to me thanks to the beauty of the internet. internet, i ♥ you. (fyi, it is now 10:30 in the evening. i read this article in pieces. or i could just be lying about the whole "it took me over 9 hours to read this, WEEP" thing.)

my photoshop collage! 11 minutes late, but i can explain.

some girl dinged my car (otherwise known as the T3 (not a reference to the latest terminator movie with that hot kristanna lokan chick in it, but the toyota corolla '03 model)) at the arboretum where i was parked (YES, only semi-legally, but come on, t.g.i. friday's doesn't exactly need all that extra parking space), and i got home around 10p and went through the process of contacting her to get the insurance info and everything. so that set me back a bit tonight. ANYWAY.

so instead of doing a photo, i went with a wallpaper from cartoonnetwork.com, because hey, i love cartoons, and, um... well, mostly i love cartoons. this particular cartoon is foster's home for imaginary friends, created by craig mccracken, the almighty father of the powerpuff girls. (someone humor me and guess what the subject of my blog layout will be. no, really.)

first, the original image:


and now, the altered image:


read top to bottom for the first column, bottom to top for the second, then top to bottom for the last two (i'm a confusing person sometimes).

1) ocean ripple. pretty much self explanatory; you'd use it if you wanted to emulate looking at an object underwater.
2) craquelure. it gives the image the look of being painted on stone, as if it were a mural. it kind of reminds me of chris' wiener car pic, only in color.
3) solarize. i pretty much think you'd use this effect if you were passing out flyers to a lot of high people.
4) lens flare. i've seen this used for cheesy images where you put a sparkle in someone's eye or smile, or add it to text to make it look "cool." i like to think that mac (the boy in the picture) has his own little zelda game fairy or something. but i can also see where this effect/filter, if used correctly, would give your image some depth... ok, maybe not.
5) charcoal. i really dig the color, and the effect. what can i say, simplicity gets me. i can see personal website owners utilizing this to make a simple splash page or background, so it doesn't really interrupt the content of the site. it'd be cool if someone did this in chalk on the street, or in their driveway!
6) diffuse. it takes the sharpness off the image and gives it a really soft look, like you were working with old crayons. i like this a lot too, it looks like you'd use it to emulate a kid's drawing.
7) wind. i picked it because wilt's running, and hey, i might as well add in a ridiculously cheesy effect to make it look like he's running REALLY REALLY FAST. although i'll admit, i have seen people use this effect well to give their images (usually icons or avatars) some style. but for the most part, i think it's kind of lame. since the bg is affected too, it looks more like you're driving by wilt really fast, rather than him running. then again, i guess there's something else you could use this effect for: emulating driving in a car. and, um, taking pictures while you're driving in that car.
8) clouds. this has got to be the crappiest filter ever. they don't give you an option to mess around with the filter's opacity unless you put it on a separate layer altogether, and it can be used for one thing only: putting clouds in your damn picture. so half of wilt's leg is lost in the sky.
9) shear. this lets you not only give the image some curves, but it repeats it on either side. kind of neat stylistically, but all it really seems good for would be to muck around with a photo of someone you don't like. it might make an interesting bg for a site, though, if you toned down the opacity and added a few other filters. actually, i just realized it's good to use as a tiled background for a website, since you can line it up after itself (going left to right, in this case) and the continuity of the image isn't effected.
10) fragment. kind of hurts my eyes, to be honest. good to use to basically make any picture look like it's out of focus, almost to an excess. could be utilized well if you wanted to drown out the background of an image and bring out the object in the foreground more.
11) lighting effects-omni. i'd never been aware of this effect till now, and i have to say, that is sweeeeet. i love how it gives you a light source and manages to do a decent job of shading accordingly (at least omni and spotlight do; directional seems pretty useless). this does a much better job of giving your image depth than the lens flare i used in mac's section.
12) texture-canvas-scaling at 141%-relief at 9-light direction at top left. the filter says it all--it gives it a texture, in this case, canvas, and sort of gives it the look that you might've painted the image on an artist's canvas. i don't think it does a particularly good job of emulating an artist's canvas, though; the colors seem to go down too deep and the edges are too clean. it's pretty easy to tell it's a photoshopped image.

readings response and the color pink

no, i hadn't forgotten about my blog, i'd just put off posting anything in here for awhile. then we got the reading assignment for this week, and my brain said, "hey! that's right! you're supposed to post things about the readings here!" henceforth, i ventured bravely back.

i've always liked webmonkey, but i can't help feeling i would've gotten more out of that (thankfully short) article if i had a better background in .css. same with the second article, although i think it did a better job of relating .css to accessibility. matt's article (i just realized both the author's names were matt, in this case i'll clarify by christening them "matt 1" and "matt 2")--matt 1's article basically seemed to talk about things you could do with stylesheets: doing this brings up a picture, doing this brings up sound, doing this prints something, etc. etc.

matt 2's article was more straightforward, and less about how you can control what your site looks like and more about, well, website accessibility. it's obviously geared toward non-personal websites, because personal websites would worry less about accessibility. wouldn't they? it seems to be the natural order of things. no, i suppose it's debatable. if, you know, a personal website owner was trying to get famous/popular via the internet by detailing every facet of his life, ahem. accessibility would be an issue in those cases, but as for people who are catering to a specific audience, accessibility would be less of an issue.

example: a girl makes a webpage about the color pink. she's crazy about the color pink. she belongs to a web ring (do people even join those anymore?), she puts up photos of pink things, and she blogs about dying her hair pink and all her misadventures about shopping for pink panties that match her entire pink ensemble. she's got a pink layout, with hot pink on pastel pink or vice versa if she wants to spice things up a bit. pink girl isn't going to be worried about the purple guys or the blue meanies (HAHA IM SO KEWL) enjoying her site. worldwide accessibility isn't an issue with her. at least i hope not. website makers hankering for as wide of an audience as possible would hopefully have the sense to not make every bloody thing on their site in pink. it's not impossible, of course, but so very few people do it well. neon colors are bad for the web, mmkay?

matt 1's article will probably make more sense after we've had a little .css experience (which i'm sure a handful of people in the class have had already, though i'm not one of them).

my "personal relationship" with .css is just fiddling around with and changing colors of my lj layout, but ever since livejournal implemented system 2 for changing your layout, i don't mess around with the raw stuff anymore. well, wait, that's not true. i continued messing around with the raw code until my birthday last year, when one of my friends bought me a paid lj account. now that i have access to all the cool paid account layouts, i don't mess around with the raw code via system 1 anymore. alack and alay!

that was probably more info than anyone wanted to know about my piddly little ".css experience via livejournal." cooler stuff next time, maybe.

i will say that i'm looking forward to playing around with .css! html wasn't that big of an issue with me, but .css always tended to leave me stumped. probably because i was too lazy to try and pick that up after screwing around w/html so long. some of the prettiest websites i've seen have been made with .css (though no links immediately come to mind), so i've always admired people that can use it well, but loathed it when i tried to do ANYTHING with it.

in extra non-related news, xin nian kuai le! (like a week ago.) and happy early ♥ day, too.

whoo, webpage!

so the webpage is up and running. also, not to denounce chris' color picker or anything, but my personal favorite for html related stuff is visibone.com's, because it allows you to click on multiple colors so you can see how text in a certain color will look on a bg of a certain color. not trying to undermine your authority or anything, chris. do not take offense and unleash your rage in unmitigated fury upon my final grade.

where's the super happy funshine?

upon reading i decided my blog for this class sounded a little too deadpan and not very super, happy, or fun. this needs to be remedied, ASAP!

ok, so links! i get a ton of these from popculturejunkmail.com, so if you already frequent Gael Cooper's little mish mash of pop culture news complete with links (and it's got some really cool links, let me tell you), whatever i link here may very well be things you've seen/heard of already. well, you'll learn to deal with it, i guess :D (see? i put a smiley there. that's happy and funshiny, isn't it?)

that's a link more related to last week's readings, particularly ms. blood's article.

anyway, in regards to the html portion we hit on today in class, i dug up (not really, it was right there in my bookmarks) one of the first links i hit when i started reading the feed for her blog in my lj (yes, i have a livejournal. feel free to ph33r m3 (we'll get to the 1337 link later!)). unfortunately, the link was down. FORTUNATELY, i located another one!

for any of you familiar with Billy Joel's lyrical amalgamation of political references spanning roughly 40 years, We Didn't Start the Fire, this page has not only the lyrics, but links to each and every reference mr. joel makes with a token amount of background information. there's a hell of a lot of links in there, and maybe next time i'll upload the song, provided i can find a copy (shh, don't tell anyone about the music piracy, man!).

finally, my boyfriend sent me a link earlier in the evening, and i thought it would be a neat way to introduce some of the n00bs in the class to 1337, the Language of the Internet. more like the Language of the Internet Geeks, but anyway. this is inspired by chris' changing of "hyper" to "hyp3r"--i noticed half of us laughed, and the other half made confused faces. anyway, hopefully 1337.org will serve as an adequate explanation.

i only just realized it was tuesday roughly an hour ago, for anyone who's interested. WHOA! HAPPY FEBRUARY!

edit: i just realized the billy joel page? yeah, it links to everything, but unfortunately, the pages it links to belong to the original link, the website of which seems to be down. mmyep. sorry folks. i guess that wasn't a very funshiny thing.