so it's xmas. i got lots of t-shirts. lots. & a couple other things, like a neat soviet "self-winding" watch....

at dinner we had a conversation about the discovery of mad cow in the united states. of course the people at pr watch have been predicting this for 6 years, since publishing their book mad cow usa (available as a free pdf on their site). they say our BSE testing isn't nearly strict enough & point out many disturbing facts about how livestock are forced to cannibalize by eating feed & formula containing animal protein.  ¶ 11:12 PM

update: TIF files are much more flexible... they're more resilient, easier to bend, & can reproduce a much larger range of results.  ¶ 9:05 PM

so last night i decided i should start working on artwork for the true data 12" & i started tinkering with databent images (specifically editing photoshop files in sound forge). most of my experiments resulted in pure noise but i did discover one nice trick (you can see some results in the new animated gif on the right side of the screen).

by carefully editing the RGB information in the image you can create an odd vertical "skipping" effect. in order to do this, you must use the "open" function, not "open as" because that will reinterpret the data. the trick is to leave the header untouched, then when opening the program will prompt that there are errors in the file. this means the program is very picky that you don't corrupt the wrong data. pretty much you can only jumble/process the data within each individual RGB channel. the amount of data in each section must remain the same, & it generally didn't like me cutting/pasting blocks from one section to the other, either.

unfortunately the images seem to skip at specific points, & in a shorter image there are only 3-4 "rows" total. furthermore the program seems to be picky about what images it will even open after they've been run through soundforge. i had no trouble editing a 640x480 snapshot (in psd format of course), but when i tried to edit my wrist brace devil horns, i kept getting an "unexpected end-of-file" error... i had to make a new image, with two copies of the brace image next to each other (on separate layers) to get it to work.

i need to experiment with more different images, as well as other image types (tiff, etc), to see if i can learn more.

of course, this doesn't do me much good so far for designing my label (which will be one-color)  ¶ 8:25 PM

ooh la la... who really caught saddam? what was he doing in a hole in the ground anyway?

the foreign press is reporting that the kurds really caught saddam, kept him prisoner, then negotiated a deal to turn him over to the us. and naturally the us media ignores the story. i was trying to search for news on my own, but this blogger has already done the research. lots of articles, so why aren't we hearing about it in the states?  ¶ 9:37 PM