Larry Hosken: New: Tag: art

Rachel Petterson was lead costume designer 2020 MIT Mystery Hunt.* Apparently, she was overqualified for that role, seeing as how she was the Judges' Winner at the 2023 Her Universe Fashion Show for fan fashion/geek couture at San Diego Comic-Con for her "Totally Minnie" dress, which is somehow both definitely a fashion-y design-y dress and all about Minnie Mouse.

a fashion runway with many people in snazzy outfits. in the foreground are two winners, one whose outfit evokes Storm from the X-Men, the other's Minnie Mouse

Her blog post links to a video of the whole fashion show. If you want to see just the fashion-y/design-y parts of the show while skipping over the parts where the emcees raffle off gifts to audience members, then here are some links that fast-forward to those parts:

I recommend that video (well, I recommend it if you skip over the raffle-handout bits, somehow less compelling seeing as how it's after the fact so you can't win); all of the outfits are impressive, and some of them were wild. Like there was this pair of trousers covered with eyes that were unmistakably Miss Piggy's eyes. And watching it, you just get a mental image of a combination Miss Piggy+biblically-accurate angel appearing to Kermit the Frog. Like, she's saying "Be not afraid." And Kermit is of course terrified and waggling his arms in the air and screaming "Aaaaaaa" and she's aggravated and aggrieved and saying "Kermieeee, c'est moi. I said Be not afraid." The designer said, “The Muppet eyes are so iconic—so weird. They’re just silly-looking, but that’s what the Muppets are” so you know she gets it.

These works are all fashionable, fannish, and very personal. E.g., Rachel's dress isn't just about Minnie Mouse, but specifically about this one music record she listened to back when she was a kid in the 1980s, so the dress refers to Minnie, to 1980s fashion, to the record… Anyhow, pretty neat, check the video out and prepare to be impressed.

*She also contributed to a couple of puzzles and an event and furthermore staffed etc., but the costumery seems like the relevant thing to mention.

Shim to add images to Lemmy RSS Feeds

I use a RSS feed reader to view some image meme forums on Reddit. Reddit's CEO recently changed some policies, and those changes alienated many Reddit users, inspiring them to move to Reddit's rival services. So, uhm, recently I use a feed reader to, uhm, periodically confirm that there's not much happening on Reddit anymore, yep.

OK, I can adapt. I found some meme forums on some of those Reddit's-rival-services. Some of these are built on a service called Lemmy, and Lemmy provides RSS feeds, so I can tell my feed reader to read those. Yay! But but but Lemmy's RSS feeds don't show images. If some meme artist posts an image on a Lemmy forum, Lemmy users see it fine but the RSS feed just shows address text like https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/298ceeb9-2d62-43fd-bea6-2044cbcf81a7.png.

So I wrote a little script that hourly fetches some Lemmy feeds, unimpressively-but-usefully finds those image-address-text thingies and makes actually-displays images for them, and saves the resulting feeds. Then I pointed my feed reader at those feeds instead, and now I'm back to viewing memes in my feed reader.

Some links:

If you'd like to suggest some other feeds to fetch-and-add-images-to, let me know. I doubt I found all the best forums; these were just the easiest to find.

Walking in San Francisco's Inner Richmond neighborhood, I wondered which portmanteau folks had settled on for Sushi Bistro's Castle Cagliostro-themed mural: is it Caglibistro or Cagliobistro? Google turned up neither.

"Caglibistro" mural featuring Castle Cagliostro-inspired art with a sprinkling of Sushi Bistro logos

"Cagliobistro" mural featuring Castle Cagliostro-inspired art with a sprinkling of Sushi Bistro logos

Anyhow, I guess I'll try making a blog post that uses both portmanteaux and see which one gets more web search traffic.

I should probably mention that mural's by Fred Goykhman for Crimson 22.

Some weeks back, I saw a post on the New Bohemia Signs tumblr, a picture of art&artists, students in a sign-painting hand-lettering class.

smiling artists holding up hand-painted lettered signs

Beyond admiring the handiwork, I also was interested in the sign that said "Haight," since I live near Haight. Spelling out the Japanese phonetic characters カメレオン, I figured it was for a shop called Chameleon… which was confusing since I didn't know about any such Haight-area shop.

Then I forgot about it until my exercise walk this morning. Suddenly, a new shop appeared: カメレオン, at 1605 Haight.

locked-up storefront; you can see part of a hand-painted sign behind the bars

Sorry I didn't stick around to take a clearer picture; it was raining.

MemeC, the Meme Composer web app

I made MemeC, a web app to ease creation of captioned image memes. These apps abound on the web; but the easily-found ones insist on stamping the created image with a "Made with app" blurb. I don't want such a blurb on my memes, so I was pretty happy when I figured out it wouldn't be so hard to write such an app for myself. Anyhow, go play with the app or read the source, or whatever.

[captioned image meme: Success Kid says: New Year, New Me- -me composer]

[captioned image meme. computer console shows the user attempts to 'sudo make sandwich' but gets error message. Caption says I don't have admin access anywhere that matters]

[captioned image meme. in the background, the Titanic sinks. In the foreground, Elmo the muppet is on fire. Caption reads: My new favorite anagram is Sunk Elmo]

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