a little poker action

I like to gamble! There, I said it. But sometimes it’s better to watch the action rather than play the action, so check out the Zynga Poker Final Table Shootout. My buddy narrates the action. Game on!

Hello, Yoshi.

Hi Everyone!

I haven’t blogged in almost a year! Can you believe it? I can. Oh my. Well I’m back in action!

As a special hello, I’d like to share an arts and crafts project I just finished:

I was inspired by this cardboard animal head that I saw in a sweet urban interior design store. I thought, “I have got to have that but I’m not loving the price”. So, with the boxes I had from a recent apartment move, I decided to make my own.

Let’s just say it’s a fairly simple project that can be satisfying with the proper amount of patience. Maybe I’ll attempt to sell them on my Etsy page, but after the labor and time spent on it, I can see why such a product has a high asking price. (But hey, mine isn’t laser cut—just my own two hands!)

Global Geek Week Winner!

Last month I posted my Geek Art YouTube video.  I’m super happy to say that my video won the Global Geek Week YouTube video contest!  Thanks to Mashable, The Society for Geek Advancement, @GuyKawasaki, @ShiraLazar, @ecogeek, @hotforwords, Wei-Hwa Huang, and Lisa Donavan for putting up the opportunity and judging my video the winner.

To see the announcement of the winner, check out the Vlogbrothers video below, at the time stamp 3:06:

In other sweet news, Moxie the Maven pointed out to me that my Dream Captcha coverage on Apartment Therapy’s Unplgged blog is the #1 Top Post today. That article is a year old. Why the sudden interest? Perhaps a correlation with the YouTube contest? Who knows, but thanks for all the views folks! Be sure to check out my Etsy shop for more information regarding all things Dreamy Captcha.

Global Geek Week Video

It’s Global Geek Week! I like the idea of this week, brought to you by The Society for Geek Advancement and the Summer of Social Good.

Well the week starts off with a bang, and that bang is a fun YouTube competition. How do you use your inner geek to spread love and joy around the world? Well, check out my response!

The Day Celebrity Died and Resurrected on Facebook

It’s been a bunch of hours now since the news broke of Farah Fawcett and Michael Jackson’s deaths. I’ve been glued to Facebook and Twitter like they were the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Summer Olympics. I even got a call from my mother, being the saint that she is, to pray for them.

This unprecedented activity on both social networks was instigated by news websites reporting unconfirmed gossip that, in the end, was true. The frenzy of condolences, humor, and plain confusion from users mimicked a public rally of a swarm of voices all yelling at once. Who’s voice was the loudest? Well of course it was the next buzz worthy gossip: the death of Jeff Goldblum and Harrison Ford, too! (As of writing this, Jeff and Harrison are alive and well.)

When Farah’s death was confirmed, there was minimal activity on Facebook with respect to my 500 something friends. When Michael’s death was announced and confirmed a few hours later, the Facebook activity was phenomenal. Personal messages of grief and witty remarks of humor blended into a surreal home page where I could not distinguish friends who were genuinely upset from friends who were simply playing around with another piece of entertainment news.

The day a celebrity dies social media must commit to a resurrection. After Heath Ledger and Natasha Richardson’s publicized deaths, I thought “I can’t handle social media’s expressions of grief anymore”. I have all but confirmed my personal feelings with today’s news of two celebrity deaths followed by two more unconfirmed.

My Facebook and Twitter home pages are bombarded by news of terrible tragedies. I grow accustom to the information and experience each stage of grief and loss in less than half an hour. I get pissed off when someone disturbs this feed with unrelated information like a new mobile picture of a cat. Then I realize the absurdity of my attention span and revert to blogging about my suffering.

So the moral of the story is that Facebook and Twitter feeds are organized chaos. It’s a sea of voices that, unfortunately, individually manage to hook my attention. Each second I spend on each voice adds up to minutes and then suddenly I realize I’ve been refreshing my feeds for an hour. An hour of “RIP MJ” and “I’ll miss you, King of Pop” and “this is a sad day” has numbed me. This sea of voices also reminds me of a sculpture I created titled Tagged 4.0, which you can see below:

Tagged 4.0
2008
paper
each square is 1 3/4″ squared (4.46cm squared)
13″ x 12″ x 12″ (33.0cm x 30.5cm x 30.5cm)

The artwork reveals a ton of iconic Facebook photo ‘tags’ in a beautifully organized yet chaotic mess. Each tag climbs on top of another, pushing other tags out and down, just to be heard at the top of a social ladder. It becomes a hypnotic experience to weave your eyes in and out of each square much like my eyes wandered throughout my social media feeds this afternoon.

Bye Bye Craigslist Erotic Services

Today, I read on JoeMyGod that Craigslist is dropping their “Erotic Services” category:

Online classified ads service Craigslist will get rid of its “erotic services” category that critics called a front for prostitution, replacing it with an adult category that will be reviewed by Web site employees, state attorneys general announced Wednesday. Pressure to remove the category increased this spring after a Boston medical student was charged with killing a masseuse who authorities say he met through Craigslist. Two months ago, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart filed a lawsuit alleging that Craigslist allowed the solicitation of prostitution and had created the “largest source of prostitution in America.” Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan and the attorneys general of Connecticut and Missouri met with Craigslist officials last week seeking an end to ads they contended were advertisements for illegal sexual activities. Madigan’s office said Wednesday such existing ads on the Craiglist Web site will expire in seven days. –Associated Press

What y’all do behind closed doors, especially with sex, is none of my business. It’s terribly unfortunate that people are abusing the system and others are being attacked and killed as a result of this kind of instant access to one another, but I don’t think that removing the category will change anything. There will be a new way to present a for-profit sexual service, through some acronym like P2bD (Payment to be Discussed), in another category like the personals section.

Craigslist Ads: 23 (detail)
2008
book, edition of 23
7 1/2″ x 5″ x 5/16″

Perhaps Craigslist will just have to be a place for furniture and freelance work, and we’ll all have to get used to it being a platonic site. As if.

That’s an AAA Wrap!

April has come and gone and that means the first ever April Art Attack! has wrapped up. I want to thank all the artists who took the time to share a little bit about themselves and their artwork. It was cool to read the great variety in answers to the simplest of questions: I wouldn’t expect anything less from a bunch of creative individuals!  And thank you to all the readers out there: I hope you enjoyed these voices as much as I did.