Every now and then I come across a new artist with an online portfolio and I end up spending a good deal of time checking out everything they’ve made available, some of them are better known than others, some are virtually unknowns out there.
This weekend I found Aimé Jalon’s portfoilio; he is an artist that seems to be garnering a lot of attention online, which is how I came across his work. What caught my eye was his piece called ‘Texas Gerilla‘ (today’s pic is a cropped portion of his work); it’s not flashy, but I really like the style and decided to check out his site.
His website is pretty simple; there’s a front page, a portfolio page, and a third page with information and links of interest for anyone wanting to see what Aimé Jalon is up to. Flipping through his portfolio, I soon realized that his work really appealed to me. I like his style of digital painting - it’s not over-produced, giving it a more speed-painting look, a style I am growing to like more and more.
Flipping through his work I’ve picked the following as some of my favorites, but I don’t want to ruin the fun of discovering his work on your own… so please head on over and check out his website.
I really do wish he had higher resolution images made available, but I understand that he is making a living at creating this art and cannot give away everything; it would be really slick to have some of these as my desktop wallpaper though!
When looking for a photo app, I’m not interested in one that let’s you edit or add effects to photos you take. I’d prefer to do that kind of stuff on my PC after transferring the photos. But, of course, I’ve been interested since day one in an app that can actually improve the quality of the pics I take with my iPhone. However, I’ve been very wary of purchasing such an app because there is so much utter crap out there. I think it’s pretty shitty that there are so many worthless apps out there for photographs that sold so incredibly well. I’m speaking mainly about those apps which promise “zoom” but really only enlarge a portion of the original photo and produce awful looking, pixellated pictures. You could do this kind of “zoom” yourself by cropping and enlarging and it’s really not what people are thinking the app will do.
But I actually did find an awesome photo app that really does improve the quality of my pictures. In my view, if you take photos with your iPhone, this app is actually a must. It’s called Darkroom Premium and the main reason I love it so much is that the Steady Mode works very well.
Today is my son’s 4th birthday. The little rascal is really growing up on me. It’s times like these that both sadden me and make me proud.
Why sad? If you are a parent, you certainly know what I mean. He is really growing up fast, and it’s hard to believe that he is starting Jr. kindergarten the first Monday of July. Well, it’s actually before and after school care, but it is open all summer long so the parents can work. In the fall he will begin actual kindergarten, but as far as he is concerned it starts this July.
He’s really looking forward to it too. He knows a couple older children that will be in the same class as him, and they are always telling him stories about big-boy-school.
So today’s a pretty special day for me and my family. We’ll be celebrating his birthday all weekend long - we like to spread the fun over a few days. Let’s hope the weather complies!
And with planning a weekend of fun comes a week filled with to-do lists that need doing, which left me little time to spend online. I did come across some great links though, here’s some of the fun I discovered this week:
Turning Left at Albuquerque is a new weekly audiobook podcast about a man named Jason, and he’s just been sacked from his job. Once he gets home, we experience Jason’s life as he goes through the paces of learning to deal with the whole situation.
Now, I gotta come clean; I have known the author Mary R Higgins through the internet for nearly a year now - I originally got to know her through our shared fandom of The Guild, the online web series. I follow her on Twitter and FriendFeed, and I get a charge out of her wry wit and silly humor - but I did not know that she was an author until recently.
This spring I learned that she was working on releasing her latest book in audiobook format for free consumption as a promotional medium for her work. At first I was not exactly sure what she was talking about when she started promoting a chapter from something she called “Turning Left at Albuquerque”, but as usual my curiosity wins and this time I struck gold - I am really enjoying this series.
… no worries folks, there are no spoilers beyond the jump.
Hmm, let’s see, what should I write about today. Oh shit, when I was typing I accidentally hit control-V! Damn…what the heck? How did that picture get in my clipboard…I never even saw it before! Let me get rid of that right now - okay, now this is getting crazy. Wordpress won’t let me delete the image for some reason! Man, I don’t know what’s going on here. Guess I’ll just have to leave this totally image in my post.
Okay, okay, so I didn’t have anyone else to brag to. Yep, that’s me on the iPhone app Rogue Touch Leaderbord, rocking it out at number 11. Level 26. Two. Six. Hell yeah. Just your average every day floor, right? Oh yeah, except the freaking Amulet of Yendor happens to be chilling there.
The other day I realized I didn’t have an app to check showtimes for movies and buy tickets, so I ended up having to use Safari to do it and that was hardly optimal. So I grabbed the Fandango and Flixster apps (both free). Flixster’s app is actually called “Movies” but I”m going to refer to it as Flixster because Movies is confusing when you’re writing about movie apps. I figured they would end up being pretty much exactly the same…but I was wrong. Fandango is much better at the core functionality, but Flixster has some nice features that Fandango doesn’t. If I could add the good features from Fandango to Flixster I’d be set. But overall, Fandango just blows Flixster away. Since my comparison is crazily long, I’ll sum it up here:
Fandango sold tickets to 10 out of 10 of the closest theaters to me playing Hangover. Flixster sold tickets to one. Two movies differed on each app’s list of 10 but Fandango sold tickets to the two theaters Flixster included in the top ten (Fandango had them a bit lower on the list). Flixter did not.
I looked for showtimes for two obscure movies. Fandango showed that each was playing in a theater in Manhattan. Flixster had the movies playing in zero theaters.
Fandango let’s you purchase tickets right from the app and can store your credit card. Flixster opens Safari and takes you to MovieTickets.com, which is ridiculous.
Flixster has some features that Fandango could really use: searching and sorting the list of movies, snippets of reviews and average scores from users and Rotten Tomatoes. They also provide a link to the IMDB page for each movie and more basic info on each movie.
Flixster has a bunch of advertisements and they are really annoying ones too. Fandango is ad free.
Fandango’s launch page is more useful because it shows the movies playing in your area, while Flixster shows a general list of movies.
Flixster does not utilize GPS, as Fandango does. You have to enter your zip.
Flixster has a lot of social networking features and Facebook connectivity and Fandango doesn’t.
Now here’s something a little different - a video I came across tonight made me laugh. It’s pretty damned funny. This guy goes by the name UuUuUuUuUuU on YouTube, and he’s got a few videos that he’s made… but this one caught my eye - Quake Radio.
It’s a video using chopped up pieces of Rage Against the Machine’s Guerrilla Radio music video, but everyone’s head in the video has been overlaid with the Quake I Marine’s head. And the music? Well, it sounds an awful lot like Guerrilla Radio at first… but it is definitely not!
The genius that is UuUuUuUuUuU created his own version of Guerrilla Radio, but swapped in sounds from the original Quake and Doom to make up the music. There are no lyrics, the vocals are all jump and grunts sounds from the space marine.
Now, I played me a lot of Quake in my day, and I love Rage Against the Machine - and with the two mixed together so expertly? All I can say is puuuure genius!
Sadly, UuUuUuUuUuU’s video is getting very little exposure; it is currently sitting at 566 views. I would hope that more people out there eventually get to see this video, it is too good to not be seen by more internet eyeballs.
I’m not even sure what else there is to say, so I’ll call it a wrap - I loved the video, check it out, it’s quite a laugh:
Every now and then I come across a new artist with an online portfolio and I end up spending a good deal of time checking out everything they’ve made available, some of them are better known than others, some are virtually unknowns out there.
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