i know this is redundant, but whathefuckever:
let’s change that from “i’ve found that people who are overly concerned with the way they smell…” to “i’ve found that people who are overly concerned with changing the way they smell…”
not to counter the bear princess at all. the correction’s more in line whith what she meant.
right, furball?
i completely forgot about the poster that the miguels and i made to commemorate my lectures in portugal.
god, i miss that country.
why is everyone going so crazy over jennifer sterling‘s work all of a sudden..?
i don’t get it. she’s good and everything, but i don’t see the controversy.
harshy redesigns hellcouncil. i’m stoked. but what i really wanna know is when’s he gonna finish up gutterlife? promises to be some of the best visual commentary goin’ with some hot hot hot precedents.
72 degrees, windy and sunny in chicago. beautiful. just listen:
snapshot of my work as it progresses: my deep content page is prettier than yours. so’s my model.
you windows people may disregard this post.
i don’t know how often i’ve found myself double-clicking a downloaded file only to have it open in an application i’m not interested in. this handy little gadget is a contextual menu item to change a file’s creator. unstuff the file, drop it in contextual menu items in your system folder. once you restart, select a file, hold down the control key, select “web file types,” and change the file type to whatever you need. sounds petty, but it’s a lifesaver.
example: you’ve downloaded a total bohunk who’s perfect in every way except you’d rather he have luke perry’s head. you double-click, expecting photoshop to open so you can make the adjustments necessary to your fantasy but dammit the file’s associated with internet explorer and you’re stuck, seething and horny, waiting for a goddamned browser to open. hold down your control key, select your file, drag down the list of contextual menu items to “web file types,” associate the file with photoshop and…it’s a native photoshop file. you’re in the character defamation business!
don’t say i never gave you nothin’.
ain’t nothing more heartwarming than booting up a browser to check in on your best girl - who’s been busy, and so have you, so your communication’s dropped off to dada emails and voicemails recently - only to discover that he’s redesigned everything…using your typography and illustration.
of all the honorable company i’ve shared, none has made me happier. ever.
another snapshot of work, revised from yesterday. better typography, further resolution of major content types and areas, and clarification of visual clutter. still problems with definition between content areas.
(i’m assuming there’s someone out there who’s interested in progress sketches. if not, say so and i’ll shutthefuckup. unless you’re a print-only designer who still clings to desperate notions of your own superiority.)
next challenge : examine functionality of a dynamic navigation piece with four levels of depth, the worst-case scenario being fifteen items. my goal is to eradicate list items, if at all possible.
but first, may i have an advil..?
a small breakthrough pointing to better things, pointed out by two pounds above organ failure (my information architect of choice) : “why the fuck are we looking at four levels of navigation when the goal is to simplify the content? let’s prune this bush, sister.” well spoken. i have a meeting on thursday.
every morning i wake up and thank the lord for making me the tackiest creature on the planet.
equal parts latoya jackson, lucky charms, dragonball, pokemon, scooby doo, precious moments, xanadu, studio 54, and legion of superheroes. part of a client piece in progress. no kidding.
okay, i’ll come clean : i installed mac osx on heaven (my g4) the other night.
1) overall os operation feels like a bizarre combination of windows, macintosh, and epcot. motherfucker started up with speech turned on, which freaked me : i always have that shit turned off, off off. it’s so hal9000.
2) networking services seem to make the assumption that everyone has either dsl or cable modem (i do not). took me forever to find ppp and tcp/ip settings (because they call it something else now).
3) despite being able to use your os9.1 system folder as a startup system, there is weirdness : when switching to the osx system folder in the startup disk control panel, the machine must invalidate the os9.1 startup folder. back up your existing system. mine crashed twice in the switch.
4) the apple menu is now ridiculously nonfunctional. the dock now operates as a holder for aliases to commonly-used applications and running processes. not a big deal, but makes me wonder why they even bothered with the apple menu.
5) no more control panels or extensions. everything’s run from one centrally-located system preferences control panel holding various modules.
6) in terms of functionality : you can write email, browse the web, write text documents, acquire digital images, and that’s about it.
7) stuffit and bbedit are both native to osx, thank the lord.
8) “classic mode” (emulates older mac os for non-ported applications) is a total pain in the dick.
9) “mail” is a thinly-veiled version of outlook express. it’s also really crashy, and sucks you into opening some weirdo email account at mymac.com without even realizing it. great : another email account. just what i don’t need.
10) column views of windows makes no visual sense at all.
11) the desktop now belongs to each individual user rather than the entire computer. i find this incredibly annoying; why would i want to call a folder in a deep directory my “desktop?” i’m assuming they’re planning on phasing the desktop out anyway.
12) the interface operates beautifully from a visual perspective and doesn’t get in the way as much as one might think. my one gripe is that resizing a window is chunky. it skips cycles to catch up with your input. feels kludgy.
13) no support for usb stylus input. this is a huge problem for me; i hate mice and don’t own one. had to steal one from the office.
14) internet explorer 5.1 is okay. imports previous settings easily.
15) mail claims to import settings and mailboxes from previous versions of outlook express, eudora, and claris emailer…b s’help me, i couldn’t make it go.
16) the finder and core services haven’t crashed a single time in four days.
so if you’re considering buying it, go crazynuts. it’s fun. but don’t expect to do much with it for a few months. give yourself time to get acquainted with the system; it’s very different from the existing os. it should be incredibly useful a few months down the road. but for right now, it’s just fun to have an application bounce happily up and down when you open it, y’know?
“jitterbug perfume is an epic. which is to say, it begins in the forests of ancient bohemia and doesn’t conclude until nine o’clock tonight [paris time]. it is a saga, as well. a saga must have a hero, and the hero of this one is a janitor with a missing bottle. the bottle is blue, very, very old, and embossed with the image of a goat-horned god. if the liquid in the bottle is actually is the secret essence of the universe, as some folks seem to think, it had better be discovered soon becaused it is leaking and there is only a drop of two left.”
i got yer remedy for new orleans clichés right here, baby. one of my favorite books ever.
“gareth used to prefer funerals to weddings; he said it was easier to get enthusiastic about a ceremony one had an outside chance of eventually being involved in. in order to prepare this speech i rang a few people to get a general picture of how gareth was regarded by those who met him. “fat” seems to have been a word people most connected with him. “terribly rude” also rang a lot of bells. so “very fat” and “very rude” seems to have been the stranger’s viewpoint. on the other hand, some of you have been kind enough to ring me to let me know that you loved him, which i know he would have been thrilled to hear.”
hopefully a bit of a smile for wonderfulheadhurt, whose father passed on this morning.
jason, i hope you’re doing well as you fly to knoxville to be with your family today. love you much.
it’s been forever since i’ve done this:
the desktop picture as mental barometer. current selections (download these if you wish):
[01] [02] [03] [04] [05] [06] [07] [08] [09] [10] [11] [12]
[13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24]
seems this time to be mostly my own work, works by friends, and reminders of friends.
new peeves with osx:
1) some clever child has decided that list items need not have lines to divide grouped items. any information architect could tell you how wrong that is…especially on a semi-opaque background. messy.
2) adding an address from mail to addresses don’t work.
3) copying and pasting urls from ie5.1 also don’t work.
4) the wristwatch icon is now a spinning gay frisbee. feels like pride day. get rid of it, stat.
5) anything removed from the dock explodes in a little cloud of white smoke which matches nothing else. ridiculous.
6) item operations from the dock are inconsistent: closing a “system preferences” window closes the window. closing an “addresses” window quits the application. irritating.
as if that wasn’t bad enough, it looks like the next season of buffy will suck, suck suck.
this geekpost brought to you by our kind patrons at zdnet.
there’s going to be another major blog slumber party happening in a couple of weeks. maybe i’ll luck out and not miss a connection i wanted to make in april.
trashy image from the other day (the reason i’ve been so quiet) is getting close to done. kinda nice: first time in a long time an image has truly kicked my ass. i must be growing.
“i’m not a red-hot lesbian witch, but i play one on tv.”
got this email from my roommate this a.m.
backstory : the imposing bald queen owns a marketing agency two doors down from what just became the real world house for season 11. the kids just moved in last weekend, and there’s been much hubbub since filming began.
to: patricking
from: imposing bald queen
subject: funny lady
i was walking down north avenue to work this morning, across the street from the real world house - and on the side walk is written in chalk: “mtv real world chicago. shhhhh it’s a secret!!” with an arrow pointed across to the building.
i thought that was funny - until i got to my office, and written on the sidewalk directly in front of our office door - also written in chalk: “sex in the city chicago. shhhhhh” with an arrow pointing at our door.
-boo!
now you’ve got an excuse to punch santa over the holiday season.
if living in chicago, i highly suggest donating to the howard brown foundation rather than the salvation army. all their resale proceeds directly fund local gay and lesbian healthcare foundations.
“i was in the cereal aisle the other day, looking for lucky charms, and it occurred to me : why are cereal box mascots always male? and if there was a breakfast cereal marketed directly toward young girls, what would it be? what would it tell her?”
it would teach her to be the perfect woman.
i finished this illustration last night at about 4am.
here are details not readily apparent in the low-resolution versions [1] [2] [3].
despite its apparent silliness, there are dark things in this image:
the cereal name is a double entendre on the world’s most innocent fairy, twisted to become a commentary on body image issueshttp://www.patricking.com/lost.and surgical procedures to correct perceived physical imperfections.
the cereal itself is made of broken hearts and amplified bodies.
the side panel lists fears amplified by body image issues.
the mascot is a re-engineered woman. her body is twisted and broken, marked with a meat-cutter’s diagram to indicate surgical procedures, her hair a perfectly molded veil ending in a devil’s tail: her true nature revealing itself without her awareness. she holds a magic wand/scalpel, drawing a dotted line on her little friend’s nose to show where the first operation - the first step on the road to perfection in mens’ eyes - should occur.
the girl shares the same coloration as the mascot to indicate possible relationships between the two. the fairy could potentially be an embodiment of the girl’s desire to be “perfect,” or maybe she’s a manifestation of her fears regarding her own perceptions.
the kitchen wall in the background is sickly artifical feminine pink. it is also a double entendre: this wall would exist either in a kitchen or in a surgeon’s clinic.
i’ve learned that things marketed as “pretty” dig much deeper into the psyche than simply pretty.
metafilter‘s apparently been spending its free time trying to break mister spielberg’s toys today. hootenanny!
bald queen tells me the real world kids got their first taste of chicago reality yesterday: apparently there was a drive-by shooting in a parking lot two blocks from their house. the driver evidently flipped, grabbed the victims, stuffed them in the back seat, then tore off looking for the cops. first ones she found were…the off-duty officers guarding the front door of the real world house. of course.
welcome to chicago, kids. y’all go home now, hear..?
i was considering a move to new york in the next few months. but it appears i may not have much fun if i take the plunge.
similar issues have popped up in chicago as of late: private-invitaion parties busted left and right, increased control over cabaret rules (strip joints are no longer any fun), and the closure of club after club after club. owners are an interesting target…considering the characters who invariably ruin the fun come in from the burbs.
maybe i’ll concentrate on the more intimate places i’ve been so into lately…
new illustration for espn, formerly frustrating as hell, is coming along delightfully. bought a cute lil’ ibook to facilitate lying about and writing whilst canoodling with rarely-seen friends next week. and just got home apres the sweetest, most animalistic, erm, date i’ve ever had. ever.
a satisfying couple of days. i’m a happy camper. but busy. details soonish.
last week, i was somehow commissioned as a stylist for some gents visiting small, arty movie studios (i can hear it now: “he’s a fag…he’s gotta have taste”). like i’ve ever been a stylist. but when in doubt, fake it.
so armed with $5000, i stuck the suit guys in burberry (thanks for the tip, skinnybitch), paul smith, and armani. but the fun part was a die-hard jeans and t-shirt guy. it’s all he’ll wear. with his lanky frame and shaggy blonde hair (which we got re-shagged and highlighted last week)…classic california sexy. never thought jeans and a t-shirt would be so much fun to do: i threw him into worn 501’s (replete with hot wallet silhouette on the back pocket), a sleeveless tee for flashy contrast (hangs loose on him), black sandals, and retro shades.
my guarantee: if the clothes don’t get them laid at least once, i won’t charge. end of story. get beautiful, boys. protestant dowdiness is out out out.
chicagoans’ reactions to mtv’s real world points to a bigger issue: what happened to wicker park, anyway? (metafilter discussion is also pretty interesting).
sad to think this is what my beloved old neighborhood‘s turned into. at least the imposing bald queen’s managed to stick it out there. wish i’d known how to defend myself when i got booted out by real estate developers: 200% rent increase in 48 hours, hostile takeover of my building, destruction of my verbal agreement with my landlord of four years. anyone else who lives in a “hot” neighborhood: watch your backs. i’ve since moved to a quiet little blue-collar puerto rican neighborhood far enough off the beaten tracks to avoid danger. but i’m seeing more faces like mine in the past year…
i need approvals on the dylux. did i send you my printing budget? it’s changed. can you send me a cd? my internet connection’s down. our homepage ia has changed to one major and two sub news items. will that fuck up the database? can i add one more piece to my print run? i forgot you were going out of town tomorrow. it’ll just take a second. i need you for a conference call on friday. are you going to be available?
no. i fucking well won’t be available.
home, at last. older sisters (and now accidental yentas) wistfully hugged goodbye. lipstick secrets hidden for blogstalker. a long kiss goodbye at terminal b with the boredinsomniac. and then an unexpected extra night spent at the nola airport hilton (on american airlines’ tab due to storms in chicago). time to be alone, think, get it back together.
some pleasant unexpected surprises. details later. i have some idea what the boredinsomniac was supposed to learn (see 7/24/2001).
bye, boys. love you all.
(or, “god save my fragile ego.”)
i’ve noticed some bizarre misspellings of my name lately. i’m not pointing fingers. but i must protest: it’s spelled “patricking” if one word and “Patric King” if two.
why the lowercase and no spaces? because, silly, it’s fun being an intransitive compound verb. why is the “k” amputated from my first name? because dad thought it looked better. note that his name is “jon.” not “john” or “jonathan,” just “jon.” you do the math.
“Even by day, and in a place of public resort, when her lover shows her any mark that she may have inflicted on his body, she should smile at the sight of it, and turning her face as if she were going to chide him, she should show him with an angry look the marks on her own body that have been made by him. Thus if men and women act according to each other’s liking, their love for each other will not be lessened even in one hundred years.”
and let’s not forget other highlights:
getting unexpectedly made out with not three hours after arrival
popping su‘s tekka maki (he’d not had sushi before.)
endless references to “the hot lebanese boyfriend”
coordinating a shopping expedition to ensure jonno and i didn’t buy the same slutty t-shirts (which was a huge risk)
jonno rolling his eyes so far back into his head he swallowed them upon the realization that a size 28 pair of ridiculous tiger-striped pants was a little baggy on me (granted that 28 was made for a wishful thinker)
su and i having our secret dot.identities blown by a total stranger who seemed to be somewhat of a fanboy
two (two!) emotional meltdowns
sharing cockring purchasing tips (“we used to just have leather, rubber, and steel! this is so comfy!”)
proudly noting su’s the only person who can safely hold his own against me on a dancefloor
paloma singing macy gray on her back with legs skyward and jonno’s head buried in her crotch
flynn murdering “baby got back”
and, of course, the aforementioned duet between jonno and jason*, thereby destroying my childhood memories of “total eclipse of the heart” in a ball of flames as i snorted vodka out of my nose.
but all in all, i prefer to think of it as “visiting friends” rather than a “blogmeet.” we’ve shared more than bytes.
*jason: jonno and i have a suprise for you.
peekay: tell me it’s not bonnie tyler.
jason: blank stare
peekay: i’m going to be scarred for life. buy me another drink.
“no selection would be complete without little my. what would we do without her imperturbability-good word, what! good girl, goodbye for now.”
rest in peace, tove jansson. thanks for making childhood a great place to be.
demeter fragrances, which monstress raved about months ago, just released a new fragrance. it’s the scent made for me me me: hairspray, cigarette smoke, whiskey, and cheap hotel rooms. the name? you guessed it, you strange rock’n’rollers…hedwig. now if you’ll excuse me, i’ve just washed something trashy and have been summoned for the evening. au demain, mes enfants.
ingredients for a contemplative saturday evening: one font collection previously abandoned in mid-progress (now reconceptualized), one cranky font editor unsupported since 1997 (save early, save often), one brilliant font editor currently supported, one pot of coffee (served americano), one 5-disc changer humming in the living room playing this, this, this, this, and this, and one content orange tabby purring himself to sleep on my desk.
dust off those credit cards, ladies. it’s leo season, you know.
soopaspecial shoutouts to the imposing bald queen, who’s thirty-one as of two days ago. a finer best friend couldn’t be had.
“you should use a comma whenever you have a need to pause in a sentence. example: ‘so me and tiffany were at the mall and she ate like four of those big fudge squares which is why her butt is the size of a volkswagen jetta i don’t know what jason sees in, wait a minute i’m getting another call.’” -dave barry.
courtesy not a real blonde.
it seems i’m going to the naras membership party in a couple of weeks. anyone have any choice words they’d like me to spit at mariah?
