Author: splicer

In the long-stand­ing tra­di­tion of launch­ing ecom­merce web­sites with incom­plete fea­tures, min­i­mal con­sid­er­a­tion to user expe­ri­ence and inad­e­quate test­ing, I bring you the new incar­na­tion of the old Paroxysm.com.

Sad­ly, you won’t find the adven­tures of ‘Zoop’ Dubin, Pri­vate Eye there any longer, but maybe that can be added at some lat­er date. What you will find is a col­lec­tion of my pen & ink draw­ings, pho­tographs, and lux­o­graph­ic prints, and a shop­ping cart for pur­chas­ing prints … Read the rest

A recent debate/poll in The Econ­o­mist end­ed with a tal­ly of 71% to 29% declar­ing that copy­right laws do more harm than good. While I’m the first to admit that there are seri­ous prob­lems with the exist­ing han­dling of intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty, I’m appalled at the seem­ing­ly wide­spread notion that cre­ativ­i­ty should not be legal­ly pro­tect­ed and encouraged.

Last year, only the $700 Bil­lion bailout dis­tract­ed the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives from pass­ing the Orphan Works Act, which would … Read the rest

I’ve spent the bet­ter part of the after­noon in the stu­dio work­ing on the sec­ond in my series of draw­ings of San Fran­cis­co land­marks (if I’ve start­ed the sec­ond it’s offi­cial­ly a series, right?) I’m in the ear­ly pen­cil phase, doing a lot of study of ref­er­ence pho­tos and cre­at­ing a lot of out­lines, not attend­ing to ques­tions about texture.

One of the fas­ci­nat­ing things about the human mind is its capac­i­ty to cre­ate con­nec­tions from total­ly dis­parate fields, and … Read the rest

In a pre­vi­ous post I explained the basics of Lux­og­ra­phy, my dig­i­tal print­mak­ing process. As Spring Open Stu­dios (and the dead­line to get into the cat­a­log for Fall Open Stu­dios) looms ever clos­er, I’m work­ing extra time to fin­ish a few pieces, and that means build­ing new pat­terns to use for screening.

My lat­est vari­a­tion on the theme is to break up the lines into hatched rows, which is how I hatch in pen and ink. The goal con­tin­ues to … Read the rest

It’s been a while since I pro­vid­ed a peek at what’s going on at my draw­ing table. There are a cou­ple rea­sons for that: first that I’ve been work­ing more on the lux­o­graph­ic prints, which requires a lot of work on the files at home. Sec­ond, and on an hour-by-hour basis prob­a­bly the big­ger rea­son, I’ve been hav­ing to pick up the income slack with more hours of Web­site devel­op­ment. For­tu­nate­ly the hours are there for me when I need … Read the rest