Today my students taught me how to dance

In addition to playing with the new old My First Sony Electronic Sketch Pad I brought them

I made them laugh

And they liked the sketch pad

It will serve them well when they do visuals at the 80′s party this Friday

(I will bust the moves they taught me)

And tonight I worked on a patch to share with them: an exquisite corpse maker

It’s coming along

Also I am webcasting a nifty event on Thursday

Last couple thoughts for the night:

• i’ve finally got time to play around with a media-textured avatar (think video skin)
• i want to make an avatar (in SL) that moves like Duchamp’s Nu qui descend un escalier #2 (nude descending a staircase #2)
• I learned a lot about texturing from the SL fora today. Check the end of the GIMPshop texturing tutorial I wrote last week for some illuminating reading on the subject.
• i made a couple ringtones last week — one of the tiny projects I squeezed in to entertain myself after long hours of teaching — in GarageBand and easybeat was very handy in the mastering stage*. Recommended.

* that is, playing it on my phone and transposing it in nudges until it sounded good.

Things are going very well.

We students and teachers are making lots of stuff for the island.

I made something today that gives me great pleasure. I took a photo of one of the Lawrence Weiner manhole covers and made it a 3D texture in Second Life. Click the pic for full effect.

Spam is the I Ching of our millenium.

I had a fan moment today. A friend of mine is working with a hiphop artist I really, really dig. I ran into them today and told the artist I liked his music. So fumbly, these moments. I tend to think back on the lack of eye contact. Why? To be seen; to speak; to see; to be heard. Which of them is the operator in these encounters with recording artists? To be present; to be in the presence of.

Darrah and I are in roommate search hell. We’ve offered it to at least 5 people, for whom it was:

• too far west
• too dark
• too small
• too expensive
• too I-already-found-a-place-sorry, mainly.

Bargh. If you know anyone cool who’s looking for a sublet starting around July 1st or a long term place, let me know.

In my desolation, frustration and boredom-nation, I cut a sketch out of my new sketchbook (thanks again to Ilan for the Rapidograph pen recommendation and printed it on an iron-on.

I’ll post a picture of the shirt later.

Later

The shirt. The iron-on turned out great. I did a quick color correction on the photo to match the pink of the shirt but as you can see, it looks like I’m standing in a pink light.

Here’s a valentine for you, my lovely internets. I’m going to pour some champagne on my keyboard now. Ready thy lusciousness. Eat, drink and be Gary. Oh, Gary.

Here’s the Photoshop file if you’d like to make your own valentine.

Found it! The map is from Paul Anderson’s map projections site.