James Maybe

I will be stronger. Maybe.

Over the past few weeks I’ve dropped a couple pounds. Not much, but it feels good, like getting back into fighting shape. My one and only official amateur bout, 15-plus years back, I got creamed. Went up against a golden-boy with his own embroidered uniform and cheering squad. I had on a borrowed sweaty tank top from another fighter: my own shirt wasn’t regulation cut. I never went down, but at the end of three rounds the winner was clear, and it wasn’t me.

Nowadays boxing has no mojo; all the excitement in fighting has moved over to MMA. Can you name any boxer who’s held a title in the last 10 years? Strangely, even as the sport is waning, movies about boxers just keep coming out.

The most interesting fights, of course, aren’t boxing or MMA, but ideological battles, relationship dramas, and our own internal struggles. In the ring there’s always one official (if not always undisputed) winner. Outside the ring winners are harder to peg, especially so when we fight with ourselves. If we win, then who lost?

Excess weight has never been that big of an issue for me. I struggle with other kinds of flab and decay and battle a sweet tooth for mind treats. No matter. The fight goes on, long after our prime is over, and our big fat bellies (real or symbolic) hang out, with blood stains on our frayed shirts set in for good.

Digital artwork above from Chong Roden.

by Winnie Truong. Reminds me a bit of this piece by Deveras.

by Judson Huss

In cartoon land, with very few exceptions, the young are eternally young and the old never die. Celluloid images fade in color, but never in form; the zeros and ones of a JPEG keep their youthful appearance for as long as the files stay uncorrupted.

We tend to like the iconic images of our youth untarnished, unaffected by the natural cycle of decay. I suspect that aging cartoons would ruin the nostalgia felt by some, and that the added layer of realism gives others the queasy feeling of staring into the uncanny valley.

For my own part, I would love to see an explosion in artwork depicting aged versions of cartoon characters, to compliment the untooning phenomenon.

Supposing that Wilma Flintstone and Betty Rubble were 25 years old when The Flintstones made their TV debut in 1960, and if time and gravity took its normal course, they would turn 76 this year and no doubt look just like illustrator Matthias Seifarth portrays them.

by Niark1. For the francophobes the title translates to “Open womb”.

In the lonely images of John Brosio, indifferent everymen pose before backdrops of impending doom and supernatural horror. Tornadoes ravage suburbs and giant shellfish wreak havoc. My favorite is the image above, titled Fatigue. Lit like a Magritte and every bit as surreal, I imagine the octopus represents the worker’s inner projection on arriving home to his domestic life. Does he really want to go inside, does he have a choice?

Obviously I haven’t been posting much recently. I’ve got a problem. Others have written before about the perils of spending all your time connected to the internet. The NADD, the ADD, the email twitch. I have a related problem. Perhaps specific to the particular way I work online, but I suspect others might be having similar issues as well….

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David Jablow has a fantastic series of Do It Yourself Doodles at flickr. They all feature the same incomplete woman completed and woven into dozens of imaginative scenes. Shown above is my favorite detail from the set.

by illustrator Guilherme Marconi.

My Darlingtonia by Madeline von Foerster.

The image above is a small detail from a much larger wallpaper image I created. Click on the image to see the full size. I wasn’t able to find any nice wallpaper graphics big enough to span my three obscenely large computer monitors, so I created one of my own. I created it with the computer language PHP and carefully tweaked the random variables until I got an effect I liked. I spend the bulk of my days on arbitrage of one sort or another, which means that I spend a lot of time looking for patterns in the noise, or more precisely I spend my time trying to get a computer to find patterns in the noise. To really understand randomness, you have to spend a lot of time faking it. The same could be said about art, perhaps, which got me thinking about the intersection of art and computing…

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For Connected, Kasey McMahon fabricates a networked goddess out of Ethernet cables.