buffawhat.com

Wired 15th Anniversary: For the Love of PMS805

Wired has long been a fan of using neon inks for their magazine covers, and Pantone 805 Orange-Red Neon Ink is somewhat of a signature color. To celebrate, they doused the entire cover in PMS 805; I literally saw the thing sticking out of the mailbox from the other end of the driveway (and I live in a carriage house!). The articles are pretty swell too, a farewell to Bill Gates, BSG, and a bit about how to really cut down global warming…

Subscribe now (Only $10) and you’ll get this issue guaranteed, or go the the bookstore and look for the sore thumb… Its totes worth it.

• PS. CondeNast just acquired Ars Technica, meaning Wired has a geeky new brother in the Wired Digital family (Reddit, WebMonkey, HotWired, Wired.com, and more).

Bandits Take a Championship, I take pictures.

I’ll leave the sports coverage to Andy, but I wanna thank him giving me the opportunity to be a part of such an amazing affair. Running out on the field, bumping into very sweaty, adrenaline filled lacrosse players… dodging ESPN crews… pretty awesome.  I was a little hesitant to go and get my shots; I’m not used to press photography, or for that matter, much photography at all. I basically followed the pack and focused on the few players I knew were important. The Bandits 2008 MVP (which I got to cast a vote for) Steenhuis was pretty easy to spot, he sports bright orange Reeboks. I took some video too for WNYMedia, but I have absolutely no idea what Marc is doing with it. Hopefully he’ll put the mess of cloverfield-esque footage into something awesome.. like he always does.

I also decided to take advantage of the new Animoto service to make a little video below. Animoto is a web based photo montage service that uses a pretty sophisticated AI to arrange your photos into a music video, complete with beat matching and top of the line special effects. the service is free for 30 second clips; full length videos that you can dl are $3 a pop, or $30 for a year. Use this referral link and you can get a year membership for only $25.

click above to visit the flickrset

GTAIV: NYC and Liberty City Side-by-Side

John and I spent a good portion of our togetherness last weekend killing hookers, stealing cars and doing odd jobs for this fucked in the head Russian dude. Oh, and we also played GTAIV, the latest installment in the Rockstar platinum franchise. Everything is better: physics, npc interactions, mobility choices; but the Sentinal is still the best car to roll in. That being said, the game is a whole lot darker; morality is put in your hands and it can get frustrating at times choosing who lives and dies, who to bowl with and who to let get beat down….

Did I mention the game is frickin incredible to look at? Liberty City is modeled loosely after NYC, Algonquin being Manhatten, Bohan, the Bronx, and so on… but a few choice landmarks have been dropped in the game, and www.goodostuff.com has the flickr set…

So my story starts 2 years ago, March 2006, when I visit New York City. I take a bunch of photographs, do all the touristy things, fall in love with the city and then come home.

Flash forward to April 2008, a little game called GTA4 gets released, some of you might have heard it being talked about. It takes place in a kind of pseudo-NYC called Liberty City. I noticed that there were a lot of great similarities between the real life and the virtual city, so I set about putting together a short little photoset of virtual recreations of the real life photos I took. It was fairly easy, because all the buildings counterparts are basically in the same position, and a lot of care and attention has been paid to getting the details in the game really right.

These are awesome shots; it really shows how much work was put into the game, and how intense the realism can be at times. GTAIV almost has this muddy oil painting style effect added to everything… a beautiful blend of art and realism.

• Sighteeing in Liberty City [matthewj's Photostream]

8-Inch Ninja Dunny Protects Fine Child Labor

It seems that the theme for gifting Buffawhat this Holiday season has been vinyl. I’m not complaining.. less I have to buy for myself!

Kevin, my buddy from Singapore (he’s from Buffalo,but he sold his soul to a bank for two years and they promptly shipped him overseas) gave me the 8-inch Ninja Dunny by MAD. He’s kinda baddass, not so much for the paintjob — pretty basic in that aspect — but the ninja sword and star are really beefy and make the ninja Dunny a great collect.  There are two more colorways: a black chase and a exclusive red Ninja, but the standard white with blood looks better than the chases.

The dunny is standing behind something else that Kevin gave me: a gold and enamel embellished coffee cup with saucer and lid. The crazy thing is that its made in Thailand by little kids, because their hands are so small they can hold the tiny brushes to paint the fine details. Once they reach a certain age, they can’t hold the brushes steady any more and have to find another career. All this for rice and a few coins. Child labor has never been so pretty. I’ll try to post a better pic of it on flickr once I get out of my office.

Flickr: Scientific Ink

This brought my attention as I have most recently locked in an appointment with Randall at Divine Machine to get a tattoo for my birthday (Jan 16). I’m shying away from the normal tribal fare, and my goals are to get a design that matches what I am and what I do.  Possible choices are a copy of my Buffawhat logo, with a copyright tag, or perhaps the rooster from my favorite clothing line, Whiteboy. Whatever it will be, I completely identify with these science and Math geeks whose ink only further labels them into geekdom:

This flickr set stemmed from a old post by Carl Zimmer, as he was wondering “how scientists tattoo themselves with their science.” He got a great number of responses and a few months later dropped this set. I think I favor the DNA tattoos myself.

• via The Loom 

What the Hell happened?

I fell off the map for a few days. It happens, I had it coming. I say “fell” because it wasn’t intentional. First, the weekend blundered, Monday and Tuesday were consumed with social events that did no good but waste time and lower my immune system. Wednesday and Thursday were spent in bed with a fever, body fatigue and chills. But today is Friday. A good day, cause its the start of Christmas vacation! At work, nothing really gets done, i get lots of gaudy gifts and a popcorn tin, hopefully I won’t be forced into wearing the elf suit again:

I hate getting sick, more so now because I’ve turned into a workaholic. I’ve managed to ignore every bit of christmas cheer up till now, and gifting has been nothing more than a nonchalant with-recipient after-purchase hand-off. Doesn’t mean I don’t care, I just don’t care for the pomp this year. I don’t have time. It’s totally my fault and I’m sick because I forgot to relax this holiday season, and I should make the time. I’m not even going down to see my folks, we are postponing everything till February.

Weekend Update in Photos

Blogging was impossible last weekend. I don’t get out much, but when I do, it seems to be a weekend of it. Gotta get it out of my system I suppose, so I can go back to the stodgy hermitesque lifestyle that so fits me currently. And by hermit, I mean denning up in the office, chained to my desk, watching xtube, working on projects, and blogging.Since I know homo’s and blog readers alike enjoy shiny things, I’ve added a bunch of pictures to tell the story…
More »

Hot Bear du Jour

Happy Birthday LoLO! The Hot Bear du Jour is my buddy Lorenzo, who picked up and moved out of Buffalo to live in Las Vegas cause he’s crazy. Ok, so he got his teaching job there and loves it, but we misses him.

Hope your 29th Birthday is a good one.. go get your cakes iced!

• Photos via flickr {Laurencebear24}
• my photos tagged with “Lorenzo“

Polaroid And Zink create a Digital Instant Mobile Photo Printer

Zink is coming just in time for Christmas, neatly packaged in the form of the first Digital Instant Mobile Photo Printer from Polaroid. The title is appropriate because thats what it does: snap a picture with your camera phone or digicam, and send it over to the printer to get a quick but high quality borderless 2×3 inch photo printout. Developed by Polaroid, Zink (Zero-Ink), works with no ink and no toner. Instead, the paper holds tiny micro pigment crystals, that release their colors when heat is applied. This makes for a quick printout and the only refill is the paper.

Here’s a closer look at how Zink works:

No official word yet on a release, but clues point to an of 2007 drop (read: christmas). Zink mentions the printer could also come with an embedded camera, too, thus reestablishing Polaroid as the instant photo kings they one were.

• Via - Engadet
• Zink

Look what I FFFFound!

Seriously, I didn’t fall asleep on the keyboard, thats just how this new joyful addition to my RSS reader is spellllt.

FFFFOUND! is social bookmarking… FFFFor images. In private beta at this moment, FFFFound! brings all the mind blowing photos and graphics from the web to their own little sanctum via people who would rather look at pretty pictures than read an article. ie. ME.

Better than the Best Pic Ever, this is a smorgasboard repository of all the BPE’s, complete with tasty javascripty bookmarklet ease of submission.

So far, all 350+ pages of images are truly stunning, with links to the img source as well as the page it was found on.

Here’s to them opening it up a little more, like enough to let me in to submit fractal goatse’s and shots of my cat with a waffle on his head.

• via http://drawn.ca/