FOB

My friend Ethan Ham just pointed out an interesting "art" project around Wikipedia. Really, it's more an argument for Wikipedia social change, as near as I can tell. Of course, as such it fits well with my own views from previous blog posts [1, 2, 3]…

FOB Cow from Disney's Steamboat Willie. Thanks to cartoonreviewsite.com for the capture, and to my wife for tracking it down.

Raven Zachary started Portland On Fire at the beginning of January. It's a site that self-profiles a Portland tech-related person each day. I had my reservations, but it turned out it's quite cool. I'll submit my profile as soon as I can get a decent picture taken of myself.

One of the profilees, Craig Schwartz, posted a link to his new website toonlet, which promises to make it simple for anyone to put up a webcomic. It's a great idea, and he got some great art to work with. The editing is mostly pretty intuitive, and there's enough graphical elements available to make it possible to do some things.

In the end, though, the formatting proved too constraining and time-consuming, and I had to give up on reaching my dreams of having my own bad webcomic for now. You can check out my trial comic at the toonlet site.

So, a friend's project tried to blind me today with a hideous "random color" for a large area of text. The quotation marks are because it's hard to say what a "random color" even means. For most purposes, it means a color that is chosen solely as a label, and that therefore can be anywhere in the color palette. The usual constraint is that a set of labels need to be chosen, and so successive random colors should be easily distinguished…

If you select the "fobtest" theme from the box on the left of this site as I write (although it may not be by the time you read this), your eyes will be assaulted. Red-on-pink, with a red spray-painted logo. It looks like a joke, and it is. But more than that, it isn't supposed to be here…