The Pedersen bicycle, also called the Dursley Pedersen bicycle.

Wow, this thing is freaking nutso. A bike based on suspension bridges. From the Wiki.

“Pedersen wrote that he developed the hammock style seat first. It provides suspension from road imperfections with much less weight, 4 ounces (110 g) instead of 3 pounds (1.4 kg) of traditional leather and steel spring saddles of the day. Pedersen then developed a frame, a truss assembled from several thin tubes, around his new seat design. He attributed his inspiration to the Whipple-Murphy bridge truss. The design initially did not support seat height adjustment, and even after some adjustability was added, required the manufacture of eight different sizes. The non-standard frame design would not accommodate a traditional front fork. Instead, Pedersen developed a fork that also consisted of thin tubes assembled into a truss, which was attached to the frame with bearings at two distinct points, instead of through a traditional head tube. Pedersen also received patents for a chainwheel and bottom bracket combination and lightweight pedals.[2]”

tumblr wisdoms

Just some rando screen grabs from tumblr that are pretty spot on I thought I post.

The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age

“You should do that for money.” LeSigh… Everything is a commodity. Good long read here. Sorry for the wall of text, but it’s complicated to break it down to a blur. Just go read it, lol!

“There must exist professions that are free from capture, but I’m hard pressed to find them. Even non-remote jobs, where work cannot pursue the worker home, are dogged by digital tracking: a farmer says Instagram Story views directly correlate to farm subscriptions, a server tells me her manager won’t give her the Saturday-night money shift until she has more followers. Even religious guidance can be quantified by view counts for online church services, Yelp for spirituality. One priest told the Guardian, “you have this thing about how many followers have you . . . it hits at your gut, at your heart.”

But we know all this. What we hardly talk about is how we’ve reorganized not just industrial activity but any activity to be capturable by computer, a radical expansion of what can be mined. Friendship is ground zero for the metrics of the inner world, the first unquantifiable shorn into data points: Friendster testimonials, the MySpace Top 8, friending. Likewise, the search for romance has been refigured by dating apps that sell paid-for rankings and paid access to “quality” matches. Or, if there’s an off-duty pursuit you love—giving tarot readings, polishing beach rocks—it’s a great compliment to say: “You should do that for money.” Join the passion economy, give the market final say on the value of your delights. Even engaging with art—say, encountering some uncanny reflection of yourself in a novel, or having a transformative epiphany from listening, on repeat, to the way that singer’s voice breaks over the bridge—can be spat out as a figure, on Goodreads or your Spotify year in review.

I tell you all this not because I think we should all be very concerned about artists, but because what happens to artists is happening to all of us. As data collection technology hollows out our inner worlds, all of us experience the working artist’s plight: our lot is to numericize and monetize the most private and personal parts of our experience. “

High-resolution image of The Night Watch

Man they are not kidding. You can really punch into this thing.

“The new high-resolution image of The Night Watch represents a major advance in the state of the art for imaging paintings, setting records for both the resolution and the total size of the image. The sampling resolution is 5 µm (0.005 mm), meaning that each pixel covers an area of the painting that is smaller than a human red blood cell. Given the large size of The Night Watch, this results in a truly enormous image: it’s 925,000 by 775,000 pixels – 717 gigapixels – with a file size of 5.6 TB!”

Just some upcoming shows.

Some recent quick and cheap band posters for upcoming shows.

Nick Cave interview

Nick Cave get heavy here.

Not a lot of posting lately, been busy with lots of stuff. Hopefully I’ll pick it back up in Sept.

Portfolio Updates!

Just dropped a bunch of new imagery into the portfolio. Lots of renders and retouching to check out.

Nike Pledged to Shrink Its Carbon Footprint. It Just Slashed the Staff Charged With Making That Happen.

Ouch. Gnarly reporting by ProPublica here.

“So it came as a surprise one Sunday night in December when the dozen or so people on the team got summoned to a mandatory meeting the next morning. In a Zoom call before sunrise, they learned why. The team was being eliminated. The vice president who ran the team was gone. The call lasted less than 10 minutes.

It was the first in a series of deep cuts that one former Nike employee called “the sustainability bloodbath.”

With sales flatlining, Nike executives in December announced a plan to cut costs by $2 billion over three years. Those cuts have dealt a big blow to Nike’s sustainability workforce.

Nike has laid off about 20% of employees who worked primarily on its sustainability initiatives, The Oregonian/OregonLive and ProPublica found. Roughly another 10% left voluntarily or were transferred to other jobs. The cuts to its sustainability staff of about 150 people were far deeper than Nike’s 2% reduction companywide and 7% reduction at its Oregon headquarters.”

Cool animation though.

Revised doodle from yesterday

Hmm… the render from yesterday was bugging me a bit so I went in and revised it a bit.

This is a composite of these three renders now which I think is more interesting. I dialed down the LUT a bit as well.

Houdini Doodle

And todays doodle sticks with motion blur as the primary component with some volumetric scattering added in.

New Work in the Wild: Specialized Stumpjumper 15

Oh man, this is rad. Did these rendered sets and retouching on the bike for the Specialized Stumpjumper 15. Renders were super fun! I really enjoy it when I get to create digital sets.