Some bad ass visuals by my friend Ine. You might get the wink to the roots of VJ’ing. Well… not really wink, rather a 21st century interpretation.
Tunnel by Ine & MRRK.

Find the easter egg.
www.gldnbnns.com

That’s my nick name at work. Or at least one of them (besides Waffles, Moon Rocket, Smoo and Huearbueeaar (from my last name) (yes I’m really using brackets-inside-brackets (here, a 3rd level, bitch))). Anyhow.

So I have that name because I give developers shit if a button is misaligned with one pixel or, worse, when other designers make shapes that are not snapped to the pixel. Jesus I hate that so much. If I ever see that in one of your designs, my respect to you goes down with a decent average of 23.7%. Not to mention that, if you would work for me, you would be fired instantly. Just kidding. You would never ever get to work for me.

My Photoshop (and computer in general) is like a well oiled machine set up with all my brushes and shortcuts and preferences just how I like them, and a good way to fuck me over really bad, is by deleting my preferences, actions or any other setting. Which was EXACTLY what some idiot freelancer did (probably because he didn’t know how to change some setting to the default) while I was away.

And then suddenly it happened: vector rectangles didn’t snap to pixels anymore. It’s something that happened in CS4 and I was convinced that I hacked that Photoshop flaw by setting my grid to 10×10px grid with 10 subdivisions, which would make it snap anyhow. But this didn’t do the trick, unless I turned on the grid each time I used the rectangle tool (annoying).

So I filed a bug report with Adobe, asking them to fix it — and guess what! There was actually a little long-forgotten rectangle shape option box. The guy at Adobe was so kind to point it out to me, and I’m sure there’re are enough pixel nazis out there whose day might brighten up when they discover what I just (re)discovered:

Thank you, Jeff at Adobe. And please delete that option in CS5 because there is really no possible reason anyone would want to create an blurry anti-aliased rectangle. Protect us from ourselves.

Roses are #FF0000
Violets are #0000FF
All my base
Are belong to you

Main character designer for Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland.

Me: Pain au chocolat.

J: You know, I’m not a chick, you don’t have to use your french on me.

Me: I know, you Americans call it chocolate croissant, but technically speaking it’s not a croissant.

J: So how do you call it in Dutch?

Me: Chocolade koek

J: Chocolate cock?!

Can I have your account number please.

73582049

- silence -

Who am I speaking with?

Moenen Erbuer.

Ok, Moenen, my name is Jack. How can I help you?

Hi. I bought a domain name just 2 minutes ago, but I need to cancel it.

Ok Moenen. I will help you with that tonight. What is the reason for your cancelation?

I misspelled my domain name.

You misspelled your domain name.

Yes.

You misspelled your domain name.

Yes Sir.

I will help you with that problem, Moenen.

Thank you so much.

So it’s about the domain name G. L. D. N. B. N. N. N. S. dot com. Is that correct?

Yes that’s correct.

So what do you want to change it to?

G. L. D. N. B. N. N. S. dot com.

Let me repeat that. G. L. D. N. B. N. N. S. Is that correct?

Exactly. Like in Golden Bananas.

Ok Moenen. That will take a minute. Please hold.

Thank you for helping me out, and for being available at this time in the night.

No problem.

Every time I see a plastic bottle of mineral water being sold in NYC, my heart sinks a little deeper. Not only because of the massive amount of plastic waste being produced (the plastic island the size of Texas in the North Pacific, anyone?) but because most of it is bought in utter ignorance of the fact that NYC has one of the cleanest, natural drinking water in the United States. Over the course of its short history, New York City was equipped with one of the most extensive municipal water systems in the world, bringing 1.2 billion gallons of clear, natural spring water to our tabs every day (95% of that just by gravity). The pipes might leave a soft taste but use an average water filter and you’re drinking pure, fresh and strictly monitored spring water right from your kitchen tab.

Alas, because the store around the corner sells water in a plastic bottle with some empty phrases on it (Extra Pure! Reverse Osmosis Filtered!), people think it’s cleaner and fresher and healthier, while it really is water from the same reservoirs, only less monitored, bottled by Nestlé or Coca-Cola and sold at a 10,000% profit. It’s sad.

While the majority of New York citizens still doesn’t have half a clue of how they are wasting billions of dollars on a bottled joke from the beverage industry, there’s another industry eager to jump in and fuck it all up. The oil & gas industry is making plans to drill for gas in the Marcellus Shale, a huge geological formation that stretches over a bunch of states, including New York, and that holds our drinking water. Drilling doesn’t sound scary, until you read about it. The controversial (but far from new) technique they use for this is called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and it involves injecting toxic chemicals, sand, and millions of gallons of water under high pressure directly into the ground to release natural gas in shale deposits. (read more here)

See it as a big pile of gold lying miles under the earth, and the gas executives can’t wait until they can go dig it out (there would be enough gas down there to satisfy the US demand for at least a decade). Unfortunately, fracking caused many environmental problems in the past, often related to the drink water supply (one extreme example here – wtf!). You can get away with that pretty much anywhere in America, where Big Oil and Big Cash can buy and do pretty much anything they want (don’t get me started on that). But luckily there’s enough people who care here, and a big enough mass that can be engaged. So let’s hope it doesn’t get that far, and if you care, support the DON’T FRACK WITH NEW YORK campaign. By spreading the word and show that, every once in a while, the little man can make a case against the overpaid lobbyists in Washington.

Now I’m totally into blogging terribly long posts, here’s another great read:
The Comic Sans Monologue.

It’s not that long though. But fucking funny. Via J.

That’s my wall by the way.

‘You know what is good about the documentary? It makes me think about art.’

I started chuckling but on the inside I was banging my head against the wall. We just watched ‘Exit through the gift shop’, an amazing documentary by street artist Banksy about the amazing story behind Mr. Brainwash. If you haven’t seen it, make sure you do.

T didn’t understand why I was being cynical about what he just said. And so I went off in one of my rants that I involuntary have rehearsed multiple times throughout my life. Because that kind of rants doesn’t mushroom in your head after reading a book or having a dream, it slowly and steadily grows over the years. Like a big oak tree rooting in your brain until the furthest root tentacle locks deep under your cerebellum. It grows proportional with the amount of bullshit that is rubbed in your face over the course of time. The rant is just a fruit of a big fucking tree and that tree is an opinion. I have more of these, but this one is about art.

Already in my second year of college, after 4 years of intense art history being shoved down my ears and eyes, I constructively summarized my main opinion about art in a four page essay. It was for a class called ‘esthetic experiencing’ and I wanted to title it ‘Why Art Sucks’. But if you want to get an intellectual point across you better strip your title of any irony or you loose all hope of being taken seriously. So I called it: ‘Who’s Afraid of Modern Art? Indoctrination, Contamination and Mental Masturbation’ and the cover page held a big print of a Mark Rothko painting, the one you see above.

I fully realize this is an immensely boring topic if you’re not neck-deep in it, but why I’m writing this is because the whole problem with the modern art industry (yes I’m aware of that word choice) reflects on other, more recent and honest expressions of art. So I will try to keep it short (fail) and to the point.

There’s three kinds of interest in art: a pragmatic interest (as investment, as decoration for your apartment or store), the naturalist interest (art as a reflection of reality) and then the formalist interest, where we cultivate the intellectual joy of an esthetic experience. This way, I have been thought and millions of others are being thought right now, is the only right way to look at art, and is only available to the more intellectual human being who has been trained to cultivate that experience. With other words, an experience not available to the plebs.
Note that the word ‘intellectual’ got involved, one of the by me most despised words in the semantic multiverse. Intellectualism is in lots of cases merely an effective armor to cover the bullshit behind, because if-you-don’t-get-it-it’s-because-you-don’t-understand. Most people will just back off there, but over the years I DID the effort to break through the armor, and ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you, at the other side there is no thing like esthetic orgasms if you stare long enough at some concrete blocks of Joseph Beuys or a whole museum of Kandisnky or Paul Klee paintings. There is nothing but a sad view of self-declared intellectuals mentally masturbating with the idea that they are intellectual and they ‘understand’ that Rothko painting because it has over 30 carefully applied translucent layers of paint, and it’s huge and it’s genius and it makes them contemplate various values in life and the universe.

Fuck them.

Ninety three years ago Marcel Duchamp put an urinal in a museum, called it Fountain and said it was art. It was part of a huge fuck you sign to the intellectual art movement with its stuck up elitist crap. I have respect for that first act of counter-art, just as I have respect for the Dadaists who were, along with Duchamp, part of a time movement that wanted to get rid of the ridiculous intellectual occasion art had become and question the real meaning of art and its place in society. I don’t blame them for not knowing what would happen. It only took a few decades and the honest middle finger became PART of the art industry, and today Duchamp’s fountain is just like thousands of dadaist paintings and sculptures, worth millions. The fuck you got forever lost in the noise of all art created in the century after that.

That is the great defense mechanism of modern and contemporary art. It doesn’t deny its enemies, it absorbs them. When in my final year of Art History I confronted my teacher on my verbal exam with my conclusions on art, I expected her to be at least pissed. But instead she smiled, and said it was the beginning of wisdom. There’s no point in beating an enemy if you join him by the mere act of attempting to beat him. The critique on art becomes part of the art, and that is, finally, my whole point of this post. Because almost hundred years later, the majority of contemporary art is still reflecting about the place of art in society and so on. Art schools are still teaching students about how the formalist way of appreciating art is the only way. If teachers believe in it so hard, how would you want the students to find out any better for themselves?

The art industry became, apart from being an absurd financial investment tool 100% based on speculation, a sad wanking perpetum mobile, a mirror in front of a mirror, from Duchamp over Manzoni, Andy Warhol to the Jan De Cocks, sadness endlessly questioning itself till the end of time.

What is art?

Street art has been a more honest expression of art and ideas. Going straight against the movement is impossible, because you will become the movement. So street art, for years, was underground art. Adoring nor criticizing what was happening in museums, because it just didn’t give a fuck. The streets of world cities are by far the most honest canvas you will find, only equaled by online art, a completely new concept of art that is not yet considered art by most people. Because they’re with their noses right on it, and most people need that museum (how ironically) before they can realize and appreciate the fact that they are confronted with art. Anyhow.

The reason why ‘Exit through the gift shop’ is such an amazing documentary, is because it’s illustrating the beginning of the end, and while doing that, it becomes part of the end of street art itself. Because it raises that one question that I really hoped never to hear in this context…

‘You know what is good about the documentary? It makes me think about art.’

If you don’t work in my domain: that means Search Engine Optimization. But then, if you don’t work in my domain, you might not give a damn.

We just got the 2011 goals for one of our clients I’m working on, and one of those goals was: ‘SEO so we get in the top-10 ranking under ***** ******’ (censored for the client’s integrity). A day later and completely coincidental, one of our lead developers sent out a little summary of the whole SEO sadness and I think I do a good thing by sharing it here with his exact same words:

if you never read anything else on SEO, read this article:
http://powazek.com/posts/2090

‘Where I grew up, there was not even a McDonald’s.’