Art by RTF

ms-prue: The Media Show - Content Farms and SEO (or: WTF is all...

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 11:46:13 -0500

The Media Show - Content Farms and SEO

(or: WTF is all this useless shit in my search results?)

Last Tuesday I worked as an election inspector, which meant a...

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 09:11:00 -0500

Last Tuesday I worked as an election inspector, which meant a long shift sitting in the gymnasium of the grade school I attended in the early 1980s. It was a slow election, so I had ample time to look around the place and trip out on nostalgia. I sketched this on my lap in short bursts over the course of the day.

I remember being fascinated as a kid with those basketball nets, specifically the collapsible framework of pipes and cables which held them to the ceiling. At the start of first grade gym class we were usually directed to sit in a group on the floor under one or another of the nets, and they always seemed impossibly huge and heavy hanging above me. I imagined they could fall down and squash me at any moment.

The basketball nets were noticeably less forboding this time around, but still interesting.

Pencil on paper, 8x10”.

A Media Show quickie: my compatriots and I take on the...

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 19:47:30 -0500

A Media Show quickie: my compatriots and I take on the phenomenon of “stocking.” For those unfamiliar it’s the practice of re-enacting your favorite overused stock photo cliches, like the cool kids over at Stocking Is the New Planking.

It’s a good thing our puppets always keep a few extra wigs stashed about the place for just such an occasion.

The Fifth of November, 1955 Remember, remember the Fifth of...

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 18:10:00 -0400

The Fifth of November, 1955

Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The scientist hanging a clock,
Who knew on that date,
That fortune and fate,
Would reveal so much more to the Doc.
Doc Brown, Doc Brown, he did invent
Such objects of folly, with good intent,
He tumbled and fell in his lavatory
But soon after took to his lab’ratory
For though he’d been woefully injur’ed
A vision unfurled in his bruis’ed head
Great Scott! Great Scott! From this disaster
Great Scott! Great Scott! The Flux Capac’tor!
And what did he do with it? Build it!

Archival ink on paper, 6x8”.
The original drawing is now owned by a private collector.
I’ve also done a reading of this poem on YouTube.

This is a quick five-minute doodle of everyone I’ve ever...

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 06:09:21 -0400

This is a quick five-minute doodle of everyone I’ve ever seriously dated, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, in no particular order, for no apparent reason. While some of you who know me might also know one or more of these individuals, I’m not naming names and will not comment on which squiggle is meant to be who (unless you are one of the squiggles, in which case feel free to ask me privately which one you are.)

No idea why I felt the need to get this out of my head and onto pixels, but I do know I’m grateful these individuals will probably never end up gathering in a group like this in real life. I’d be doomed. DOOMED.

Filmed in letterrama

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 17:04:34 -0400

The Mystery Science Theater 3000 seats, the most minimalist ASCII art I’ve ever done. Thanks, ISO-8859-1!

fuckyeahmst3k:

ooòôõ

Stupid Twitter trick:1) Crop an image down to 338x83px (or a...

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 20:43:00 -0400

Stupid Twitter trick:

1) Crop an image down to 338x83px (or a multiple thereof.)
2) Slice it out into four 83x83px blocks with 2px gaps in between (or your multiple thereof.)
3) Tweet the images via Twitter’s internal photo-uploading gadget, from right-to-left.
4) ???
5) Profit!

HALP! We at The Media Show have LESS THAN TWO DAYS to raise $4K...

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 07:23:47 -0400

HALP!

We at The Media Show have LESS THAN TWO DAYS to raise $4K and change to make our next season happen. Unless we hit our fundraising goal on Kickstarter, we don’t get any of what we’ve raised already. Our starter needs some serious kicking!!

Every bit of help, even $5 if you can spare it, helps us out more than just giving us a fiver to work with; more traffic gets us on Kickstarter’s front page, more interest means more word-of-mouth, and word-of-mouth is quite literally the most valuable thing we could ask for.

Whether or not you can help us by pledging, your help spreading the word is also extremely essential, now more than ever. Every last repost, reblog, retweet, regurgitation, etc. keeps us going in our mission to demystify mysterious tech, uncover shadowy media practices, and interview luminaries from all aspects of our crazy world WITH SNARKY PUPPETS. Please, help us by spreading this link and the word about what we do and how you can help us do it.

We’ve been posting on our show’s site with all sorts of reasons we think this show is an important thing to do. It’s also exceedingly important to me personally; The Media Show is a labor of love for myself and my colleagues, and the ability to keep doing it would really be a dream come true.

So for all of you superheroes out there who like to wait until the last minute, this is the last minute. Please help us out all you can with your pledges, your support, your spreading of the word, and your awesomeness. We honestly cannot do any of this without you.

"The Media Show" needs YOU!

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 08:01:00 -0400

"The Media Show" needs YOU!:

You may know about the long-running Internet TV series on which I work called The Media Show. For those unfamiliar, it’s an award-winning educational show focusing on media literacy starring snarky puppets who deconstruct, learn about, and play with the media landscape that surrounds us all. We tackle the various ways ads really affect us, the shadier uses some companies have for their own customers, how various aspects of the Internet can work for or against us, and much more. Here’s our trailer!

What you may not know is after a long and successful run at a now-dismantled production facility, we are producing the show entirely independently these days. We’ve got some great scripts in store for our next few episodes, more ambitious than any we’ve done before, and we need your help to make them happen!

We’ve launched a donation-crowdsourcing campaign on Kickstarter to collect donations to fund our access to production equipment and studio space. Backers of our project can receive exclusive goodies from the show as thank-you gifts! Here’s a behind-the-scenes video showing some of the reasons we really need your help with this.

Whether you can donate financially or not, we could also really use your help spreading the word about our show and our Kickstarter campaign. Please, spread the word and share this post with anyone you think might be interested!

My homemade Tom Servo hanging out at the movies in 2004. This...

Sun, 03 Jul 2011 22:19:00 -0400

My homemade Tom Servo hanging out at the movies in 2004. This display seemed to catch his interest for some reason.

He’s a totally functional puppet, built out of most of the same parts as the MST3K crew used (or, where unavailable, fan-made replicas of same.) I’ll put up some clearer pics of him soonish.

My BFF Grey has a listing on the Internet Movie Database. As you...

Sat, 18 Jun 2011 09:16:00 -0400

My BFF Grey has a listing on the Internet Movie Database.

As you may know, if someone listed on IMDb wants to upload a photograph to their listing they need to buy a pro membership on the site. While I couldn’t do that for her, I did the next best thing: I redrew my Fairey-ish portrait of h er in smileys, and posted it to her IMDb message board.

I can’t help but think the potential of message board smileys as an artistic medium has barely been scratched.

I was screwing around with the Doctor Who Red Nose Day special...

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 03:47:00 -0400

I was screwing around with the Doctor Who Red Nose Day special short “Space/Time” (see those first if you haven’t) and this accidentally happened.

Doctor Who ©BBC.

A rough Doctor Who sketch from 2000 or 2001, done to stave off...

Fri, 27 May 2011 17:28:00 -0400

A rough Doctor Who sketch from 2000 or 2001, done to stave off the boredom of the retail job I had back then. I wasn’t allowed to nap, so the Doctor got to instead.

I sketched this clandestinely behind the store’s counter in black ballpoint. This scan is color-corrected to counteract the old cheap ink having gone a bit violet over the years. Around 9x6”.

This past Wednesday I volunteered to add something unique to the...

Fri, 20 May 2011 19:41:00 -0400

Drawing during broadcast

Assimilating my cohosts' workspaces

Desktop artwork in the studio

The first five of the set

This past Wednesday I volunteered to add something unique to the thank-you gifts we gave to Off the Hook listeners who pledged their support during our final fundraising episode of the season. During the show I drew a series of telephones, all different, all off the hook, one after another in a live marathon. Everyone who donated to WBAI during the show’s live broadcast will be receiving a random one of these.

This was lots of fun. I did better than I thought I might both time and quality wise, and the fundraising was successful with many awesome folks supporting our listener-funded exploits.

You can listen to the episode by going to this archive page and selecting the May 18, 2011 link.

Signed, dated, and numbered series. Archival ink on heavy paper, 7x10”.

Studio photos by Mike, first-five photo by dot.ret

It’s National Draw T-Rex Day, as started by crashsuit and...

Thu, 12 May 2011 18:53:43 -0400

It’s National Draw T-Rex Day, as started by crashsuit and spread around by nedroid over on Twitter yeterday. For my contribution I riffed (very badly) on this guy.

Some more captchart. The 1963 Wostro, the herpderpiest...

Sat, 07 May 2011 20:41:00 -0400

Some more captchart. The 1963 Wostro, the herpderpiest automobile the swinging sixties and a wonky captcha had to offer!

Public domain source images: 1 2 3 4 5 6

In response to the current kerfuffle going on in Neil...

Wed, 04 May 2011 19:33:00 -0400

In response to the current kerfuffle going on in Neil Gaiman’s corner of the Internet, the affable @mistressmousey suggested her artist acquaintances draw this elusive creature known as the pencil-necked little weasel.

So sorry, etc.

Way back in 1999, I was attempting to capture frames from a...

Wed, 04 May 2011 06:43:00 -0400

Way back in 1999, I was attempting to capture frames from a video file on a Playstation 1 disc; I no longer remember which game it was. The process of accessing video from a PS disc in a regular CD-ROM drive was unstable to begin with in those days, and it didn’t help that I really wasn’t sure what I was doing. Instead of grabbing usable screenshots from the video, my wonky software (which I seem to remember being in Japanese with no translation available) and wonkier settings generated four 320x224 bitmaps which, while unrecognizable, were surprisingly pretty.

I’ve been saving the images ever since, hoping to find something to do with them. I haven’t managed to find anything yet, so I stitched the four frames together into one image and am posting it here. Instead of using the Creative Commons License I normally apply to my work, I’m posting this graphic entirely public domain and free of any restriction in hopes that folks might get some sort of use out of this old accidental digital art.

WARNING: Spoilers for the Doctor Who episode “Day of the...

Mon, 02 May 2011 22:08:14 -0400

WARNING: Spoilers for the Doctor Who episode “Day of the Moon” ahead.

I really liked the nanorecorders from the episode. I started wondering how cosplayers and such might emulate the special effect of the nanorecorder in a live setting, and thought of the UV-reactive invisible ink used in things like hand-stamps at concert venues and nightclubs. This is a quick-and-dirty sketch of how such an idea might be put to work.

If you manage to make this effect work, please let me know!

aikainkauna: WASSSSSSSSSSUUUUUUUUUUUPPP. (Dying of...

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 19:48:00 -0400

aikainkauna:

WASSSSSSSSSSUUUUUUUUUUUPPP.

(Dying of laughter.)

(by robtfirefly)

It amazes and delights me that people are still digging this ridiculous thing I made 11 years ago. That’s something like three centuries in Internet Time.

If you desire context and production details, click through to the YouTube description.