My Online Life:

For the last few years I’ve been using several services like social networks, but lately I’ve been expanding to move work to “the cloud” and take part in more online services and networks. So today, I just wanna talk about what services I use and what I do with them.

Social Networks:

This is a heavy hitter, Facebook was created in 2004 by the now famous Mark Zuckerburg. I joined around 2006 and honestly this is a very addictive website. I used Myspace for a while, but as everyone knows it became completely infected with spam and annoying 14 year olds. With the newly redesigned interface, posting things is now incredibly easy with a mostly Flash and Javascript site. It has problems still sure, but this social site is almost always open in a tab.

Twitter is a microblogging and social network site that lets user create up to a 140 long character post and answer the question “What Are You Doing?”. This site is equally addictive as Facebook, and with the addition of tech gods Leo Laporte(leolaporte), Kevin Rose (kevinrose), and Alex Albrect (alexalbrect) to President-Elect Barack Obama (barackobama). Mr. Obama used Twitter to anounce his VP nominee before it was released to the media way back when. Yeah, it’s that important. I love this site, its simplicity and ability to accept such volumes of information in small chunks is amazing.

PS-my user name is matty_s

Tumblr is a relative newcomer in the Microblogging trend of Web 2.0. At this site you have the ability to post text, photos, videos, links, chat with friends, and even upload one audio file per day. You can also import feeds from Twitter, Digg, and other social sites, making it a great all in one stop. This site also recently went under a redesign and it’s even easier to use now. Although it has a small number of users right now, I have the feeling this site will catch on quickly. I don’t use it as frequently as some of the others, but still it is a valuable addtion to my social networking sphere.

Though perpetually in ‘beta’ Gmail is now my main mail client. Along with Gmail comes Google Documents, Calender, Reader, etc. The functionality of Google Mail is endless and with the recent addition of themes, it’s more beautiful than ever. Ample space, easy UI, fast service. What more could you ask for? Enough said.

Other services I don’t have time to write about:

Flickr

Blip.fm

 

Why I’ve been essentially dead

Well there’s several reasons for that. My upcoming show? Yeah definitely. My new client? Absolutely. School? Yeah, it’s been a really tough semester. But, for an update, here’s a few things I’ve been doing, with more on the way since it IS Thanksgiving break. OH, and I’m seeing somebody now. She’s amazing.

And, yes, I know it say’s “student’s” in the poster. That’s not my fault.

There’s more to come I promise.

 

To everyone: I’m sorry

Ok, so if anyone actually ever came here, or put me in their blogroll, I’m really sorry. I haven’t been able to update since May, things have been insane to say the least. I won’t delve to deeply into it, but 2 summer classes, a lost scholarship, tickets, and work have ultimately led to the static state of my blog. But alas! I hope to be updating a lot here soon. Also, it’s going to mainly turn into a place for me to post updates on artwork for typography, illustration and stuff like that. So stay tuned, kids! More Matty S is on the way!

 

I’m on Google!

Well, not this blog, but my new one Aliens! Monsters! and Robots! is!…That’s a lot of exclamation marks, anyhow, if you search for that it comes up, and to prove it and also because it’s possibly the coolest thing ever, i took a handy screenshot:

So yeah, I thought that qualified a post.

 

New Blogcomic

Is that a word? This is the internet, I’m sure noone will notice.  Anyhow, I’m starting up a webcomic and I just posted the first one. I think it’s pretty funny, but we’ll see if I’m just crazy. You should go check it out, bookmark it, leave a comment, whatever. It should be updated about once a week, so stop by every now and then.

I think it’s gonna be a lot of fun to do and I hope it gets a fair amount of traffic, if not, I’ll probably keep posting anyway.

 

Finals Week

Has me in it’s nerve-racking, teeth-grinding, hair-pulling grip, so that, if you actually come here regularly(and why wouldn’t you?) is why I haven’t posted in so long and with such spottyness. The only actual finals I have are French and Speech, but I have 3 portfolios due in 2 days along with those finals….yeah, I’m a little stressed. The folks are coming down tomorrow to pick up some sculptures and other big stuff I can’t fit in my car. After all that though, count on being able to view my portfolio and get regular posts.

PS- If you’ve bookmarked my blog, leave a little comment and let me know, it would mean the world!

 

It’s been 4 days

Four whole days of worrying about whether my bowels will be perforated or not. All my friends keep telling me to calm down when I bring it up…they have obviously not ingested a soda tab before. I mean maybe I’m being hypochondriac about all this, but I mean, I read people have died from this kind of thing (thanks for the encouragement WebMd!…). When I’m not dead in a week I’ll assume nothing bad will happen and the threat level will decrease; until then, everytime I go I have the hospital on speed dial.

 

Reminiscing and Moving Forward with Photography

Growing up my dad was always such a camera guy and of course I wanted to be just like him, so I don’t think I’ve ever not had a camera. The one he always used was an old aluminum canon warhorse that could probably withstand several hundred feet of drop, and later a newer one, with the warhorse being passed to yours truly. Now I wish I’d listened more about the fstops and apeture and whatnot but I guess thats why I’m at school for art. I’m not supposing he knew an enormous amount about photographers but the one he always talked about was Ansel Adams; now, I know now he’s more popular than I ever imagined, but all through childhood, I idolized the man. My shelves at home are stuffed with biographies and photobooks and I completely fell in love with the B&W medium. For a few years as a young teenager I refused to put anything else in my old Canon and shot everything I saw burning my summer work money like wildfire.

Now, looking back I really am glad that I did all that. I suppose I was an artist, I didn’t think of myself as one, heck, I wouldn’t have been able to define art if you would’ve asked me. I probably still couldn’t actually. But now when I look at Adam’s work, I get so much more out of it than just the beautiful scenery and perfect composition, I see a man who was so absolutely in love with his camera that he knew every possible thing about it, so as to make the perfect shot, with the perfect focus, perfect everything. There are few contemporary photographers that I get that same feeling from, that immense passion that bleeds all over the image. But, as the title suggests, I have a few:

Sam Jones for one, he doesn’t do landscapes, and he’s a pretty high profile photographer, which some people hate, but it doesn’t bother me much. His photographs really speak for themselves, as they are just portraits, but portraits in a way that you can really see the person that the actor/muscian/athlete is, not just who they are on stage or on screen. I couldn’t use any of his images sorry, but I did link to his site.

Amy Stein is another photographer I’ve been really into lately. Her photos have this very ethereal, narrative quality, that always calls for a second look, and that’s something I really love. I especially love her “Stranded” series, it really has this very emotional punch that you just wonder about these people and what they’re thinking. Also, you owe it to yourself to check out her blog.

One more photographer I’ve been telling all my friends about is Corey Arnold. This guy is really what it means to be a photographer in my eyes. In his bio he talks about how he’s a fisherman and photographer and how they correllate, but I’ll let you read all that for yourself. At any rate, His photos are pretty amazing, and it was really hard to pick just 2 to put on here. I really love his “People Animals” series and his “Fishscapes Finmark” series, they’re really moving I think.

 

This is not good…

Last night I was at a friends apartment hanging out and listening to music. I had a can of coke and I inadvertantly dropped the tab in when I took it off…no big deal right? Well not when I was hurried at the very end to get going and took one monstorous swig to drain it and swallowed, yes, swallowed the pop tab. I’m no medical professional, but I can tell this is going to be ugly. In case you’re wondering, updates are absolutely coming.

 

Another New Piece for Class

So I would’ve posted this yesterday but I was just so damn tired! So here’s what happened: I put off doing this project for weeks and didn’t do much in class, then it comes down to it and I’ve got to 1)Finish the project, 2)Upload it to be graded, 3) Print it (on the new Canon that takes 20 mins for hi-res prints), and 4) Mount it. Well I stayed up until 7 in the morning working on the thing and I actually really like how it turned out; I got to sleep a fantastic, whopping hour and a half until 8:30, when I absolutely had to get up and get advised. So my adviser also teaches our “Computer Skillz for Art” class, and I’m telling him what happened and after advising he’s gonna let me print before the lab opens up at 10. Well, I was terribly unprepared (it was just too late to look for classes) and by the time I got over there, the queue had 5 or 6 frantic, also procrastinating people in it, so I put in my project and he didn’t care if I sat around during his class to wait for it. So I sat and the printer messed up all of like 3 times and everytime those bastards were like buzzards and I always got last in the queue, which equals out to around an hour of wait time. Needless to say I had to throw in the towel, take my harddrive and go to class. I never got it printed, but after an hour of sleep, I had class till 6…I’ve learned my lesson on procrastination….forever. At any rate, I’m all refreshed now and without further adue, yar he blows:

Done entirely with Adobe Illustrator using tiny vectors over, and over, and over….
Here’s the original image:

We were’nt supposed to smile, but I snuck a smirk in haha