In The Rootin'-tootin' Old Days Of The World-Wide Web, It Wasn't Uncommon To See Websites With Notes

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.

Callie & Izzy Season 2 is coming soon, and here’s the trailer!

I performed voiceovers and served as an audio engineer on this show.  It’s really nuts and wonderful, and I’m ridiculously proud to be part of it.

If you haven’t seen Season 1 yet, binge on it here!

Over on Twitter, patrickfedo has been organizing a neat Ghostbusters fan-art collaboration.  I'm pitching in with this pic of one of my favorite ghosts from the series, the taxi-driving ghost from the first film.

Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, run through Google Translate from English, to Chinese, to Russian, to Punjabi, to Welsh, back to English and performed by myself.

Music: "Hail Columbia" by the US Marine Corps Band (public domain).

Original mistranslation:

5.87 years , and our fathers that all men are created equal , dedicated to freedom of the uterus and forth on this continent a new nation came .

Now we are engaged in a great civil war , that nation or any nation has been conceived, and so dedicated , can long continue . Battle of the big war . For us to survive here in this country and gave their lives as a final place of rest in this area has come to set aside part . This we should do , which is natural .

However , in a broader sense , we can not worship the earth , we can not dedicate , devote unable . Who struggle brave men , living and dead , surrender, or to add it to roam far above our power is poor . Note Small World , nor long remember telling us , but they can never forget. Dedicated to the work on the cross , our life , , , , , and fought heroically . None of the rest of them here so that we can complete their last full measure of devotion to die to become more committed to the work we have great honor to devote themselves to this is that we will not die in vain , because they are the very definition of it - the dead by God , freedom and government of the people, people , freshmen will , and will not destroy the earth .

This also exists on Soundcloud.

I’d recently come to the conclusion that I needed to do more regular artwork to keep the brain juices going, even if only one quick doodle per day.  To this end, I began privately doodling some of my friends’ Twitter userpics.

I’d done a few and realized that the best thing to do with my growing collection of userpic doodles would be to start posting them on their own dedicated Twitter account, and throw the general Twitter public into the mix.  Hence, twitter.com/RobDrawsYourPic.

Now friends, acquaintances, luminaries, and total strangers are all finding themselves receiving my unsolicited mutations of their avatars, and I’ve even fulfilled some requests.  It’s a good excuse to not only get some sort of drawing done every day, but to try out some different styles.

So far folks on the tweetybirds seem to be digging it, or at least taking it in stride.  A couple of people have even changed their userpic to my version, which is entirely wild.  I’m sure I’ll creep someone out eventually, though.

Images are scaled down here; hit twitter.com/RobDrawsYourPic and the subjects’ Twitter accounts for the bigger versions.  Original userpics remain the property of their owners.

One fine evening in the lobby of the radio station WBAI, where I work on Off the Hook, I was doodling in my sketchbook to kill some time.  I decided to draw the file cabinet, plant, and telephone which happened to be in front of me.

When the drawing was complete I stuck it to the wall behind the cabinet, natch.  It was suddenly inaccurate, though, so I added the picture on the wall to the picture, and so on.  It's cabinets, plants, and phones, all the way down.

I figured someone at the station would get rid of this before too long, but as you can see from this photo taken a couple of months later (note the plant's growth) it's still in place. In that time I've witnessed a few other denizens of the place notice, do a double-take, and get at least a slight chuckle out of it.  RESULT!

2013 UPDATE: The sketch, which I posted in November of 2010, surprisingly ended up staying on the wall for a couple of years.  It remained even after the plant had grown larger, the phone had been replaced, and the cabinet had been moved.  The lobby closed down, and the station and its contents hurriedly transferred to other facilities, when the building was damaged by Hurricane Sandy in October 2012; the drawing's fate remains unknown.

Me as world-renowned and universally-beloved superhero, Italian Spiderman. Unfamiliar?  Watch this, read this.

Thrift shop clothes: $8

Fabric paint: $5

Cut-up cat mask: $6

Bagged wig: $10

Dodgy pornstache: model's own

Unlimited admiration and caffè macchiato from every woman who happened to glance in my direction: senza prezzo

Photo by Sidepocket

The President's Red Phone

The Moscow-Washington hotline which existed during the mid-20th-century Cold War was a teletype-based affair, not a telephone, but that didn't stop the imagined concept of a red emergency phone in the White House catching on in popular culture.  One example of this is the Red Phone's starring role in the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb; indeed, the film's Spanish title is ¿Teléfono rojo?, volamos hacia Moscú, which means “Red Telephone?  We're Flying to Moscow.”

The iconic “Red Phone” image continues to grip the public imagination today, appearing regularly in fiction, art, and even Presidential campaign ads.

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

My "Save the Clock Tower" flyer prop replica from Back to the Future.

A couple versions of the actual canonical flyer prop, as used in the film's production, have been in general circulation for a long time; you can grab them and other free printable BTTF props here.  I had one on my wall for ages, but was never really satisfied with it.  It's filled with placeholder text, unreadable on-screen but nonsensical in real life, and certain other details don't ring true; there isn't a date on the newspaper's front page, for one thing.  So, I created a new flyer from scratch, correcting errors and replacing the filler text with original newsprint written by myself.

This was made without re-using anything directly from BTTF; even the photo is something I heavily 'shopped from this free one.  I wrote the article text with lots of nods to BTTF continuity as well as some other obscure references and in-jokes, friends' names, etc.  (There's a secret signature of mine hidden somewhere which isn't the "Rob Vincent, Dot Net" or "R.T.F. News Wire" bits, which nobody to my knowledge has found yet.  If you see it, contact me or leave it here in a comment and claim some geek points!)  If you wish to customize or replace the article text, the font is Times New Roman 18pt bold.

Printed up at 300 DPI on the right shade of pale blue paper, these result in a prop replica which I feel is a lot neater in real life than the genuine prop.  Alternately you could print it on white paper, photocopy it, copy the copy, and so on to soften the edges and approximate that 1980s multi-generational xerox look before finally getting it copied onto the blue paper.

There's still a bit of work to do on this before I'll consider it finished.  For one thing, I had to improvise the masthead text with a calligraphy font that isn't all that good a match if you look closely; if I can't find a closer font I'll have to remake the text from scratch someday.

These were a big hit when I dressed as the "Save the Clock Tower" lady for a Halloween parade.

2021 edit: Wow, this blew up. Nowadays around half of the Clock Tower Flyers for sale online by shady prop dealers are my version, which you can still get totally free here. If you paid anyone for a copy of this flyer, you were ripped off.

This did, however, lead to something nicer; my version was found by actual Back to the Future licensee Doctor Collector, who were impressed enough by my work on it that they negotiated my services to rewrite the news text from scratch once again for their authorized version of the prop which is part of their “Back to the Future Time Travel Memories” box of replica items from the BTTF universe. If you have that kit, which is full of so many very cool things any BTTF diehard would enjoy, you have an all-new and official version of this flyer which was written by me.

It wouldn’t have been cool on either of our ends for Doctor Collector to just reuse my free fan-art in their version and sell it, but through their very kind efforts at reaching out to me I found myself actually writing authorized BTTF-universe material. That’s an achievement I won’t soon forget.

My BFF Grey has a listing on the Internet Movie Database.

As you may know, if someone listed on IMDb wants to upload a photograph to their listing they need to buy a pro membership on the site.  While I couldn't do that for her, I did the next best thing: I redrew my Fairey-ish portrait of her in smileys, and posted it to her IMDb message board.

I can't help but think the potential of message board smileys as an artistic medium has barely been scratched.