As My Follower Count On Twitter approached 400, I Mentioned That It Might be Cool To Do A Drawing

Bell “Gallows-Frame” telephone 1875

Alexander Graham Bell's original telephone prototype used a single magneto-based device as both transmitter and receiver.  The user spoke into the single orifice, and put the device to their ear to hear the response.

The device, which gets its nickname from its elegant mahogany frame, was the first with which Bell demonstrated transmission of voice-like sounds.  Intelligible speech would be transmitted by Bell with a redesigned unit the following year.

Acrylic on canvas, 7x5″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.

fuckyeahtrollface:

Trollface stencil.  U jelly, hand-painters?

I stencilized Trollface.  It was my first shot at making a stencil out of someone else's image and it came out ugly as hell, but the original Trollface is also ugly as hell and that has done nothing to diminish my eternal love for him.

More info on Trollface for the uninitiated:

Encyclopedia Dramatica (NSFW)

KnowYourMeme (SFW?)

Trollface fans new and old should be following these tumblrs (all NSFW):

fuckyeahtrollface

trollphysics

fuckyeahtrollphysics

Grace Hopper (December 9, 1906-January 1, 1992)

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, USN, Ph.D., or "Amazing Grace" as she is often known to her admirers, was a computer scientist and programmer whose pioneering work on early computers as well as her amiably no-nonsense attitude when teaching continues to inspire.

She is known for distributing "nanoseconds," lengths of wire spanning the distance light travels in that amount of time, at her speaking engagements.

Acrylic on canvas, 7x5″.  From my September 2015 set Luminaries of the Hacker World.

K2 Red Telephone Box 1926

The noble Red Telephone Box is a British institution, inspiring warm thoughts and a distinctively British style across the generations.   Britain's very first red booth design was the cast-iron K2, which very quickly became ubiquitous throughout London and the surrounding areas throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

Britain’s Red Telephone Boxes continued to take inspiration from the K2 throughout the entire payphone era, and copies and tributes to the design can still be found in phone booths around the world today.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.

Alan Turing (June 23, 1912-June 7, 1954)

Turing was a pioneering scientist in the fields of mathematics, logic, cryptography, and more. His work was fundamental in the development of computer science and artificial intelligence.

Prosecuted and ostracized for his homosexuality, then a criminal act, he has been posthumously pardoned.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my September 2015 set Luminaries of the Hacker World.

I'm taking my Doctor Who Facts! project to a few new places.  I'm doing cartoons like this for some of the facts; also, there's a @WHOFAX Tumblr now!

A fact from the @WHOFAX archives, illustrated.

Way back in 1999, I was attempting to capture frames from a video file on a Playstation 1 disc; I no longer remember which game it was.  The process of accessing video from a PS disc in a regular CD-ROM drive was unstable to begin with in those days, and it didn’t help that I really wasn’t sure what I was doing.  Instead of grabbing usable screenshots from the video, my wonky software (which I seem to remember being in Japanese with no translation available) and wonkier settings generated four 320x224 bitmaps which, while unrecognizable, were surprisingly pretty.

I’ve been saving the images ever since, hoping to find something to do with them.  I haven’t managed to find anything yet, so I stitched the four frames together into one image and am posting it here.  Instead of using the Creative Commons License I normally apply to my work, I’m posting this graphic entirely public domain and free of any restriction in hopes that folks might get some sort of use out of this old accidental digital art.

Joybubbles (May 25, 1949-August 8, 2007)

Joybubbles (born Josef Engressia) was an early phone phreak.

With perfect pitch he was able to control the phone system by simply whistling the tones normally generated by Bell's systems, an ability he accidentally discovered at age seven.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my September 2015 set Luminaries of the Hacker World.

Callie and Izzy is an upcoming webseries it’s been my pleasure to be part of.  The show is by Nicola Rose, with whom I’ve previously worked on The Media Show and the musical Aisle Six.

More info coming soon, keep an eye on it!

My homemade Tom Servo hanging out at the movies in 2004.  This display seemed to catch his interest for some reason.

He's a totally functional puppet, built out of most of the same parts as the MST3K crew used (or, where unavailable, fan-made replicas of same.)  I'll put up some clearer pics of him soonish.