Found in Wikipedia:
- Here lies one of the most intelligent animals who ever appeared on the face of the earth. (Mussolini, erm, you know who he is)
- Never Born, Never Died—Only visited this planet Earth between December 11, 1931 and January 19, 1990. (Rajneesh, Indian spiritual teacher)
- Finally I am becoming stupider no more. (Paul Erdos, Hungarian mathematician)
- Life's a jest, and all things show it.
I thought so once, and now I know it. (John Gray, English poet)
- Don't Try. (Charles Bukowski, drunk poet and novelist)
- The Best is yet to come. (Frank Sinatra, American singer)
Are you depressed enough now ? Oh, maybe you didn't understand anything. French readers, please, follow the guide. European readers, stay with me, the torture is not over (it's Halloween, remember). Let's focus now on the best dying words :)
- I am still alive! (Caligula, Roman Emperor, stabbed to death by his own guards)
- Ay Jesus. (Charles V, King of France)
- I'm bored with it all. (Winston Churchill, before slipping into a coma. He died 9 days later)
- I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring. (Richard Feynman, physicist)
- Why do you weep. Did you think I was immortal? (Louis XIV, King of France)
I don't know why I enjoy reading those kind of sentences. You may think I'm a weirdo but it really makes me feel better. There's so much peace when you give up… It's my own Prozac!
There are days when poking someone’s eyes out with a pencil seem like the natural course of action and somehow that would also fits the gruesome spirit of Halloween. While living this fantasy over and over again inside your own head is quite alright (maybe not quite sane, but alright!) hurting other people is never right. The next best thing to do is to get yourself a Living Dead Doll pencil sharpener pictured below.
Just stick your favourite pencil in the doll’s bleeding eye and it’ll gently push the shavings right out of it’s mouth. The experience itself is the key point of the whole deal but as an added bonus you get a set of sharp pencils. The sharpeners have already become collector’s items – they were sold for $2,99 and the price was so sweet that these are long gone by now.
The pic is from the site of Matthew James Taylor – a guy that has made an artform out of sharpening pencils among other things. Cheers!
Be scared, you small human beings. Today tears of terror will be crushed from your eyes, while Jouni and I will die… laughing. Halloween on laFraise is a serious topic. It means that the Beast itself takes possession of this blog. Its servants will post like slaves, every hour, from noon till midnight: thirteen posts, thirteen ways to thank Satan for being with us today (hi Satan, which of our tshirts do you prefer?).
Arioch, Mighty Lord of Chaos, Duke of Hell,
Aid me now ! I give you blood and souls and freakin' good new designs.
Erm. Sorry. So let's begin with a present to the lord of the Dark Side: dogs. Yep, dogs are man's best friends, but devil's best friends as well. Because they are so friendly, and never fear to appear ridiculous, they needed their own Halloween's disguise. And I know you want the same.
See you in one hour for the next scream… Jouni's already preparing it. Ha ha.
Today’s new shirt combines the qualities of Monday’s shirts – it’s cute and horrifying at the same time. Poor kitty has probably seen better days but at least the adorable puppy got the nutrition he needs to become a big and handsome pooch. “Oukilekitty” is one of Lufograf’s designs.
"Oukilekitty" (orange) in our store
"Oukilekitty" (cranberry) in our store
The winner from the “American Politics” theme competition we had here on the EU site a while back has now made it to a shirt and in a very special way, I might add. Since we are constantly trying to improve laFraise in all ways possible we’re also trying out new printing techniques whenever we have the chance to do that. The print on this shirt uses actually not one but two different new techniques never seen before on our site; “discharging” and metallic foil.
The main part of Conker’s design has been done using the “discharge” technique which essentially means that all color has been removed from that part of the shirt. The end result feels wonderful – there’s just the fabric itself and nothing else. Some details in “U.Scream” are done using gold foil to give a bit more bling. Personally I’m just all too excited about this to skip the shirt - My order’s already in!
If you have any questions about the new techniques just fire away. I’d be happy to answer them.
"U.Scream" (longsleeve) in our store
"U.Scream" (t-shirt) in our store
Today’s blog entries are purely about the shirts and new winners, bare with us and I promise you’ll get your fair share of other content starting tomorrow at noon. ;)
I’m happy to announce that we’ve got a new EU winner and this dude comes from Brazil – meet Bizparulz and his design “Curiosity ate the Cat.”
Since we still don’t get quite enough people voting on the EU competition this is a crew choice. It’s encouraging to notice that the numbers of votes for each design are going up and that we’ve actually knocked down the “100 votes” barrier on a few designs but it would be great to get more people into voting and writing critique. In the French competition each selected design needs to have more than 500 votes which somewhat makes sense since that’s how many shirts were making from each winning design. It also makes sense because when there are more votes sabotage on the voting has less effect – unfortunately there are people out in our community that are dropping 1’s on designs just for the hell of it and to be mean.
To give you an example; if you have 500 votes on a design it doesn’t really matter if 5 bullies are dissing your piece for no reason at all since those 5 are only 1% of the votes. Then again when you have 50 votes on a design the votes from those same 5 bullies are now 10% of the total and that has a fairly significant negative impact on the total score. Enough about the negative things though – this entry was supposed to be about celebrating!
“Curiosity ate the Cat” really hits my nerve when it comes to a sense of humor and the designer chose a nice color for the shirt too. Don’t think I have any on that color yet so this is a definite “gotta have” for me. Also the way tiny pink areas have been used is wonderful – you don’t need to put in a whole lot of all the colors you decide to use in your designs and little highlights do the trick at least for me. The designer hasn’t been contacted yet but I’ll do that right away after publishing this blog entry and we’ll probably get some comments from a fairly happy guy that just made 1000€’s.
New EU winner is also waiting just around the corner – we will select it in two weeks and if you “hurry up the cakes” (which is just a wonderful expression from the land of Engrish) it could be you!
Yesterday we released new shirts and this time the style between the two of them couldn’t really be much more different than this. After all, the first one is cute and the other demonstrates the final solution as the solution.
Cute stuff rarely is my bag of peanuts, so let’s start off with the suicide shirt. It’s in French and since the message is rather obvious I didn’t bother babelfishing the content. On the design the left frame is about making an individual initiative and the right one demonstrates the same thing in an collective scale. Depressing but funny in true “Save the planet – Kill yourself” fashion. 500 pieces of “Cours d'économie” are available in asphalt and the designer of this wonderful thing is Apo.
The cute one, “Absurde”, is another variation of the Pacman theme and it’s by none other than Pandaluna. The design kind of explains itself so there’s not much to write about it but have a look of this live version of Pacman while you’re here – the link was nicked straight from the frenchies, thank you very much.
"Cours d'économie" in our store
"Absurde" in our store
Today I had a nice little Skype discussion with Maïa and mentioned that I’d still be on the computer for a few hours at the time she was leaving the office. Recalling the actual words is too much of a pain in the butt right now but she said something like “it seems that you never stop… have a few beers and take it easy.” Somehow the conversation got to a point where I promised to drink beer AND write a blog entry. This entry is that entry – sponsored by the finnish Karhu beer.
Around 15 minutes ago I got an idea. Last week I made a blog entry about the Positivity blog and even though the concept is really nice it only covers a portion of human life. Not everything is always nice and sugar coated. Bitching and ranting about different things (which could also be called “being negative”) is one of the best things in life – it relieves tension and is quite often just plain fun. In case we were intended to be only positive why in the world would the negative spectrum of feelings even exist in the first place?
There’s a whole lot of power in being either angry, grumpy, sad, disappointed, furious or… well, no need to continue the list beyond this. Being negative enables the positive spectrum. There’s no being happy without being sad every once in a while, no being light hearted without being furious sometimes and no being satisfied without feeling quite the opposite on some occasions. No, I’m not feeling an intellectual high for re-inventing this wheel – after all this is actually a somewhat obvious statement.
So, where am I going with this? Well, I decided that from now on each week one of the days will be a “rant day.” I will rant about either a specific issue or the life in general. A list of things to bitch about is already starting to take form; the ridiculous Texas HoldEm-boom that has been going around for quite some time, the way TV-series these days start to suck at the latest after two seasons, the way our government is planning on raising beer prices to keep entries like this one from happening and so on.
Expect the first official rant next week unless I think the whole idea is retarted when I sober up.
Back in the days the ships were made of wood, men were made of steel and so were apparently the computer monitors. In the CRT-era it wasn’t unusual that a monitor intended for professional purposes weighted more than a sack of concrete powder and those are roughly 40kg each. They also hogged a nice amount of space from the office desk. At the very peak of NuMedia insanity I used to have 3 19” CRTs, two huge tower desktops and naturally a keyboard and a mouse for both of them on my desk. It looked like a command centre for a post nuclear war spaceship.
Most people have moved from those times and the kids these days won’t soon even know that monitors used to be heavy boxes that took roughly ½ cubic meters each. Well, I’m old school and still had those things on my desk two days ago. Last week the warped colors, crooked brightness and contrast settings and the rest of that shit finally got to me. The work I do besides blogging is pretty precise and having a meeting with a client about a web layout was the final wakeup call.
I went to the meeting feeling quite confident and presented the layout from my laptop just to notice that the shades that appeared nice and green at home were pure grey in reality. All I could really do was to wing it at the spot and tell them that “this is just the work in progress and minor changes are still to be expected.” Leaving the meeting feeling angry at myself resulted an instant order of new hardware. Now the old and crappy 19” CRTs have been replaced by new 22” wide & 17” LCD monitors. Thank god for that.
CRT? No more of that stuff for me, thank you very much.
Saturday was a day of positive surprises; the youngsters that participated on the DigiTaika-event were mostly very talented and the work they’re doing was very impressive considering their age and the limited experience they have. It’s nice to see that the future of creative professions lies safely in skilled hands already. Also it didn’t hurt much that city of Helsinki kindly offered a dinner at a fancy restaurant for the members of the panel. I was way too hungry to bother feeling out of place eating grilled reindeer on skewer and reindeer ribs with honey flavoured rosemary sauce in my baggy pants and a laFraise shirt (Radiogirl was the choice for that day, by the way) while most of the other people in restaurant Lasipalatsi seemed to be of slightly higher social status.
The most positive surprise of the day was noticing that the guys of Graffiti Research Lab Europe were in town for the event. I didn’t know it beforehand because I had been way too busy to care about anything else than work (I’ve started to notice that being a blogger is not really an easy task – one should have an actual life to be able to write about stuff that is even remotely interesting) but when we visited a youth center with a friend there they were demonstrating laser tagging and putting led throwies together. 3000 of them to be exact.
Having a nice little chat with the guys about the current state of street art and comparing the local scene to their’s (they’re from Vienna) while making led throwies until the tips of my fingers were near to bleeding was a blast. Unfortunately my schedule didn’t allow me to hang around with them for the whole night and I headed back to my little hometown. I didn’t go empty handed though – my left jacket pocket was filled with throwies and as I’m writing this the streets of Kerava have already enjoyed those for two nights in a row.
Sorry about the picture quality. 300D really isn’t suited for shooting at ISO800 or ISO1600.
