Fear My Robot Brain

God help me, but I'm totally addicted to Photoshop. I think that I'm getting the hang of the basics, but it's seriously tantalizing knowing that there's so much more stuff to learn. I've got an Illustrator class this quarter which will hopefully shed some more light on the actual technical processes, but for now just fucking around on it to create random pictures has been sooooooo much fun.

For example:



I was bored at the airport over Christmas break, and wanted to do some kind of visual representation of what goes on inside my head. For some reason, what I ended up with was lots of ninjas, a bear with an eyepatch boxing a robot wearing a bowler hat, a Viking owl piloting a spaceship, and a karate penguin fending off tiny ice monsters. I'd say this is a fairly accurate cross section of my general thought process.



I kind of expanded on that idea here, mainly because of the lyrics at the top, which I love. And before everyone calls me out on it, I know. They're from a Death Cab for Cutie song, and fuck both yourself and your mother.



I really have no explanation for this whatsoever, except that pitting giant robots against giant monsters is pretty fun. Although in hindsight, the logo looks badly placed and the whole thing needs to move over about an inch to the left. Meh.

These next ones take a bit of explaining, mainly for anybody who reads this that isn't familiar with my group of friends.



This is Ian. He's been one of my best friends since my freshman year of college and my roommate for as long as two guys can live together and not be gay. He's a great guy, and seriously one of the smartest people that I know. For example, whenever we get together to play trivia at the Local, the trivia ladies will ask a question like "Who is the current king of the landlocked nation in Southeast Asia bordered by Tibet to the north and India to the south, east, and west?" While the rest of us are staring blankly at each other and trying to remember if Tibet is in Africa or Australia, Ian has written down "Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev" and turned in the answer. When he returns to the table, he'll look at us in mild disgust and say "What? He's the king of Nepal. You guys knew that, right?" And I'm really not exaggerating; I'm firmly convinced that if his head wasn’t stuffed full of so much useless knowledge he’d probably have developed fantastic mind powers and enslaved the world by now.

One of the side effects of his intelligence, however, is that he tends to be kind of neurotic. I’m in no way faulting him for this; his capacity to think things through from every conceivable angle is the reason that I’m living in the humongous house he owns instead of my own, as well as the reason he’s been forced to literally bail me out of jail or help to extricate me from whatever general stupidity I’ve found myself engaged in on a fairly regular basis.

So last Tuesday, still hung over from New Years Eve and with the majority of a keg to somehow drink through, my friends and I were all laying around watching football and trying to keep the room from spinning while he we somehow forced our screaming livers to process even more alcohol than the night before. Since I find watching football akin to having someone force thumbtacks covered in rubbing alcohol and salt into my urethra, and because I was probably a little drunk, I decided to while away the time by Photoshopping Ian into various situations, knowing that my doing so would probably make him more uncomfortably nervous than usual.



This picture has been affectionately dubbed the “iiiiiitttttttt’s IAN!!!!” picture, after I created a fake Myspace page for him without his knowledge a few years ago and used it as his profile image. When he found out about the page he immediately freaked out and made me take it down, but I’ve always harbored a certain fondness for it. I thought that it would be the perfect place to start the “iiiiiitttttttt’s IAN!!!!” Photoshop Madness Series, and promptly created these two masterpieces:


"It's Ian! And Jesus!"


"It's Ian! And Hitler!"

By the way, Ian is Jewish, which makes both of these infinitely more hilarious or anti-semitic, depending on your point of view. He’s fine with it; I give him shit because his people killed my Lord and he laughs and says it’s because my fake God was a pussy. It all works out in the end.

So once I had shown a few of my friends these, Jet Leigh issued me the challenge of combining the nervousness of Ian with the majesty of Chuck Norris. Here are the results:


Ian and Jeremy came up with this one, and thought it was hilarious. I agree.





Soooooooooo…yeah. That’s about it for now. School starts back this week, so once again posting will be sporadic to nonexistent. I’m going to create a Photoshop folder in my Facebook account and start stashing stuff there, if anybody wants to check that out. Peace, bitches.