A measure of social progress finds that the quality of life has dropped in America

New York Times piece on the decline of America.

“The newest Social Progress Index, shared with me before its official release Thursday morning, finds that out of 163 countries assessed worldwide, the United States, Brazil and Hungary are the only ones in which people are worse off than when the index began in 2011. And the declines in Brazil and Hungary were smaller than America’s.

“The data paint an alarming picture of the state of our nation, and we hope it will be a call to action,” Michael Porter, a Harvard Business School professor and the chair of the advisory panel for the Social Progress Index, told me. “It’s like we’re a developing country.”

Trash By You

New work in the wild making the rounds on some of the design blogs. When I get some free time I’ll update the portfolio with the process. Nike - Trash By You.

Photography by Unruh Jones as far as I know.

I did all the comps and post-production and even had the chance to shoot the sail-like flower arrangement for the comp. Fun stuff.

Flamethrowers and Fire Extinguishers – a review of “The Social Dilemma”

Interesting essay about the Netflix show, The Social Dilemma that gets into some aspects about the current public discourse that is troubling. This paragraph really hit home to me.

“The Social Dilemma clearly wants to avoid taking sides. And in so doing demonstrates the ways in which Silicon Valley has taken sides. After all, to focus so heavily on polarization and the extremism of “both sides” just serves to create a false equivalency where none exists. But, the view that “the Trump administration has mismanaged the pandemic” and the view that “the pandemic is a hoax” – are not equivalent. The view that “climate change is real” and “climate change is a hoax” – are not equivalent. People organizing for racial justice and people organizing because they believe that Democrats are satanic cannibal pedophiles – are not equivalent. The view that “there is too much money in politics” and the view that “the Jews are pulling the strings” – are not equivalent. Of course, to say that these things “are not equivalent” is to make a political judgment, but by refusing to make such a judgment The Social Dilemma presents both sides as being equivalent. There are people online who are organizing for the cause of racial justice, and there are white-supremacists organizing online who are trying to start a race war—those causes may look the same to an algorithm, and they may look the same to the people who created those algorithms, but they are not the same.”

The Attention Economy

interesting short on something I have been spending a lot of time thinking about. We are just in a firehose of information and a major part of the modern economy is built on TAKING that attention from us and our goals.

“When information becomes abundant, attention becomes the scarce resource. “ - Herbert Simon

Another interesting point is that the whole point of the internet was to be decentralized. But now it’s in the hands of very few gate keepers. Facebook and Google do not have peoples best interests in mind.



Still lifes by Rebecca Ritchie

Was digging on these oil paintings by Rebecca Ritchie. I am such a sucker for this kind of lighting style.

Seriously, quit Instagram.

Good lord, seriously, just quit Facebook AND Instagram already.

“Facebook Inc. is again being sued for allegedly spying on Instagram users, this time through the unauthorized use of their mobile phone cameras.

The lawsuit springs from media reports in July that the photo-sharing app appeared to be accessing iPhone cameras even when they weren’t actively being used.

Facebook denied the reports and blamed a bug, which it said it was correcting, for triggering what it described as false notifications that Instagram was accessing iPhone cameras.

In the complaint filed Thursday in federal court in San Francisco, New Jersey Instagram user Brittany Conditi contends the app’s use of the camera is intentional and done for the purpose of collecting “lucrative and valuable data on its users that it would not otherwise have access to.”

Keep in mind this is after all this shit I posted about before when I quit these apps. They are cancer on our society. Stop contributing.

“At some point, I wanna write something up about me leaving instagram, but I just don’t have the focus or mental fortitude to dig up all the links on the evil crap Facebook is pulling. Suffice to say that they are stealing all your biometrics, actively promoting Trump in has tags over Biden and straight-up promoting Conservative views. That’s just for starters and all from the past month. Yeah, no shit. So they can eat a bag, I’m done. Need to just put something on there to explain it and point to the blog. Instagone. “

Moon Hooch

I keep trying to come up with a better name for this one, but “Moon Hooch” seems to be the one that sticks for some reason, lol! More of the “jar” series I am messing with.

Continential Breakfast, by Niall McDiarmid

Found this series of photographs by Niall McDiarmid on This Isn’t Happiness. The color and composition is pretty awesome. Really would like to try something like this in CG. That lighting is so spot on.

Pandemic blues....

We have gone from, “Remember when we used to go out to eat?” to just, “Remember when we used to be able to go outside?” here. It’s pretty god damn bleak. Anyways, trying to dive back into some creative projects and this quote kinda sums up my scatter brain creative thinking.

“Whatever I know how to do, I’ve already done. Therefore I must always do what I do not know how to do.”

-Eduardo Chillida

This is probably why I am so drawn to working in CG. It’s a truly limitless medium and there is always something new to learn and explore. Anyways, stay safe out there and keep your shit together.

So, yeah.

This is where we are now I guess.

Have a few box fans with air filters on them running on high and an air purifier going full blast with some windows and doors taped up but the smoke is still getting in. Before this, at least we could all go outside and do stuff there. Now, we can’t even go outside because the air is freaking toxic. It’s getting loony tunes out here…

Home Studio Setup Costs Compared - 1980s And Now

I have been dabbling in home recording for about 25 years now and this article is a really fun read.

“As you can see, the cost of entry to get the same, if not better results than those afforded by recording setups of the 1980s, is around a 10th of the price, as a community member pointed out, if you account for inflation then the cost today would be an eye watering £33,580.65. Furthermore, modern systems are more flexible, take up far less space, burn far less electricity and use far fewer user serviceable parts.

Gear has never been cheaper or been as flexible and powerful. The next time you want to moan because a piece a software or a plugin doesn’t do everything you wished it did then you may want to remind yourself of how lucky we are to record and mix today!

Modern recording gear is a bloody miracle, there is no other word to describe it. Now go and make some music!”

Check out this awesome UI!

Live Dangerously

I don’t think I have had a “no Issue: update this year. Pen jumping, hand tool not working with space bar, pressure not working with size, UI glitching out….. Lets see what fresh hell this brings this morning.

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Principles for better design

Crazy, windy, smokey weather here and not enough time to continue with the Jar project. I did start to play with adding more jars and getting the boolean dirt to work with them before I got busy again though. Found this good article on Design though.

“The moka coffee maker may not produce perfect coffee, but it requires so little maintenance compared to a large coffee machine with radiators, pipes, grinder, etc. that it makes the compromise “complexity / coffee taste” great.

Remember the Pareto principle: in general 80% of a things can be done in 20% of the total allocated time. Conversely, the hardest 20% left takes 80% of the time. Perfection requires infinite time and energy. This is impossible and therefore should not be part of your design.”

And here is where I left off with the jars. Need to tweak the UV’s on the far left and do all sorts of other stuff, but it’s coming along.

Not a Drop to Think.

Water, water everywhere….

Newest little jar study I worked on over the weekend. Pretty happy with the sand texture I was able to come up with. The water itself works but is a hacky bit of shading held together with duct tape and chewing gum. I did one version where I punched in with a 110mm lens instead of a 90mm like in the first and added some volumetrics to the lights, but It kinda broke it out from the series too much. So now the whole series will have the same lens and light settings. I don’t even think I’ll rotate the jar. Just change up floor textures along with what’s in the jar. Might drop some cloth in the background for some texture and see if that works though. The light rig is basically a room with a slight gap to the “front” and two windows on the side. It’s giving it that nice classic still life look. As always, click the thumbnails to see bigger images.

Pretty happy with this series so far. Next one will be fire.

Been enjoying staying off of social media and my very limited news diet. Highly recommend a news detox to anyone. Also, facebook is mostly made of evil. Check the links on the right for non, “Walled Garden” content. 3 Quarks always has some good long reads to check out.

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Photoshop 21.2.1 not recognizing Pen Pressure in Windows 10

So yeah, Adobe’s newest update to Photoshop fixes the pen pressure bug that made you have to include that PSUserConfig.txt file in your Photoshop Settings and turning off Windows Ink in Wacom Prefs.

So with this update you need to DELETE that file from

C:\Users\(your pc name)\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop 2020\Adobe Photoshop 2020 Settings

Then turn Windows Ink ON in your Wacom Prefs.

Snaps from Manzanita

Couple frames from a family trip to Manzanita Oregon we just got back from. Did all the edits in Luminar again. No Photoshop used at all.

Luminar is pretty interesting. I am hammering these pretty hard and not getting a ton of artifacts or issues. The one-button AI sky swap is pretty fun to play with as well. All shot on the new Fuji 100v which I recently picked up.