So, Corey asks me to write something for TFJ, and I find myself in an unusual quandary. I don’t know about what to write. I can’t seem to find my target audience. Do I write about Furman or TFJ or life in general? Should I be serious or humorous? Should I do poem or prose? Is it good to start off by analyzing the process by which I wrote the article or not? Questions, questions, questions. So instead here are pretty pictures I helped create.

This I call "Botticelli’s Birth of Melancholy". I took his "Birth of Venus" from artchive.com and made some images by switching the red, blue, and green channels around. Then I used the switched up images as a color layer over the original. After that I resized and gausian blurred it all. Boy, look at Venus/Melancholy’s face! Ain’t she something?

This is called, simply enough, "Communist Girl." I found a propaganda picture accompanying an article I was reading on the web. I forget where exactly, but probably Feedmag.com. After that I did a couple things all at once.The important things were I made layers with only two colors and pasted them atop the other layer to create the "pop art effect". I also used the cut out filter to reduce the image to a more cartoon-like simplicity. And to finish it off, I made the red and blue channels offset diagonally, creating the blue blur on the right edge. The idea is it looks like a newspaper in which the color plates don’t line up. I think this girl’s well on her way to becoming a hard working member of the proletariat!

This is called "Cloud sick (JPEG)". I took an image of a cloud, that is used in tiled wallpapers across the internet, notably winfiles.com and opendiary.com. I then fed the .JPG file into MS-DOS’ edit.com text editing utility. I saved the file, and in doing so irreversibly damaged it. Actually, I tried notepad and wordpad first, but they both scrambled the file past the point of readability. At any rate, Edit introduced subtle errors throughout the file and turned it into the mismash you see here. All for the want of a few bits, no?

This is called "Marla Noir Pop". Using PowerDVD and a friend’s copy of "Fight Club", I took a still of Marla talking on the phone to "Jack" after overdosing on Zanax. I then used the original image as a burn layer on top of itself (to brighten the image). Then I did the usual reduce to two color, paste as filtered layer trick, though it’s hard to tell in this scaled down version. If someone were to bottle the she is emitting and sell it, I believe I would purchase a bottle of the substance.

Well, I’m about tapped. I have a few more tricks up my selves, but not tonight kids. Enjoy!

Wait, wait, wait. It’s 4:15AM. Time for an annecdote.

Tanner Howell is a funny guy living on the fourth floor. He and other decide that streaking is cool. So he streaks, leaving his underwear in the fourth floor lounge. Later, he withdraws from the prestigous Governor’s School, but his underwear lives on, popping up under sofa cushions, on the TV, and in the microwave.

Young Deborah Derrick’s first day as DSS is marred by an accidental activation of a fire alarm. She gives us Govies huffy speeches about the importance of not pulling the fire alarm and following fire alarm procedure, blah, blah, blah. So, interim wears on and low and behold more fire alarm pullings. So she sits us down and makes a big deal out of how we ought never to do so terrible a thing, etc. Low and behold, late the night after her harangue a fire alarm goes off.

I’m going down the stairwell, like all law abiding Govies, and a senior tells me what happened. It seems he and a punk junior had been in the fourth floor lounge. Punk junior was microwaving something. Timer goes off and the senior opens the door only to find the smoking shorts of Tanner Howell. Needless to say, he was quite perplexed. I still don’t know what punk junior was doing nuking the shorts, but knowing something about the kid, I know it wouldn’t help to ask. So, we sat around in our pajamas and the DSS gave us guff, but in the end, we all kept our traps shut. You know why? ‘Cause the student code still held sway o’er my heart.

OK, bedtime now.