I’m trying to get in the habit of doing a daily ACEO card.
I used smoke brushes made by ro-stock on Deviant Art, and I think I got a bit carried away. But oh well. Maybe it’s just a particularly foggy day!
Inspired by the Grateful Dead song “Truckin’” which I listened to a live version of this morning after I tracked it down as a reference in the MST3K short “Posture Pals.” I was watching that short and the one titled “Speech: Platform Posture and Appearance” (riffed version in the Red Zone Cuba episode) as references for a silly forum art piece I did to entertain my fellow MSTies. If you’re curious about that, it’s here: pretty funny 
if you have noticed the posture of the Titans as they riff movies in the shadowrama theater.
Designing favicons is harder than you would think. A favicon gives you only a 16px X 16px square to work with, and it can be quite difficult to fit any sort of design into that small of a space. I totally sympathize with the guys at Google and their pretentious new lowercase Web 2.0 “G” logo. They’ve gotten a lot of negative criticism on the new logo, but think how hard it was to come up with that. The letter G is their only identifying symbol, and they’d already gone through so many iterations of it, and by making it lowercase they hoped to project an image of being less corporate. Not to mention the fact that its infinity symbol appearance symbolizes the huge amount of data their site helps to organize!
I got lucky with my hippo icon. I just used an online site to convert it to an .ico and amazingly, the vector graphic is still legible even at that small a size.
The Cinematic Titanic logo was much more difficult. The show’s logo has the silhouettes of five people and the time tube in it around the show’s title. That is waaay too much information to fit into 16px square. Just the scaffolding gets blurry and distorted beyond recognition at that size.
I tried a lot of variations on the letters CT, and on just Joel Hodgson’s head in silhouette. But just the letters were too simple to be a logo, especially since the show logo’s font is just a plain sans serif. And just Joel’s head looks like a dot, which is boring. And just the time tube looks like a hamster dropping. Sigh.
Several other people submitted designs too. They all had something good going for them, but none was quite right. Just letters are boring, but there aren’t any good singular icons to represent the show and its shadowrama style and movie content.
Time was running short, so I tried just one more time to incorporate everyone’s opinions into one logo design. And apparently 8th time’s the charm! My final logo submission was the one chosen to represent the Cinematic Titanic website in people’s bookmark lists and browser tabs. I am very proud of this tiny pixel graphic! The logo looks like this: 
and is viewable as a favicon at the Cinematic Titanic website.
it brought me much joy today when I mentioned to an online friend that I was watching Glitter and he had no idea that that was a movie. Sometimes the short cultural memory and short attention span of my generation is a good thing.
For the record, I am not brave/stupid enough to watch Glitter in the raw. I paid $2.99 for a RiffTrax mp3 to make it watchable and soothe my morbid curiosity. But I need to stop there so I don’t become addicted to the microtransactions. This is pushing the Movie button in the same way that visiting the Papa John’s website is pushing the Pizza button. But I kinda want to watch one more terrible/pretentious movie that I would never ever pay to see in a theater. Like maybe Saw. Hated Saw. Took pictures of Japanese classmates being scared/depressed/bored by Saw. Or the Wickerman. Avoided that one like the plague when it came out, but that’s exactly the sort of movie that makes for a great RiffTrax.
I also watched X Files: Fight the Future, which was waaay more mockable than I remembered from the past decade when I saw it in the theater and bought the action figures. It was still a complex plot, but now I realize that it was complex in a boring and stupid way as opposed to a clever and insightful way. As a two-hour season finale for the TV show, it works ok, but it could never stand on its own as a movie. And it *is* easier to call both agents “Mulder.” And they *do* mumble a lot so it’s hard to make out their lines. And there are a lot of cheap deaths. Especially the bomb scene in the beginning.
I am already realizing the benefits of being both a Cinematic Titanic fan and a RiffTrax fan. Cinematic Titanic is more creative, and still funnier in my opinion. They make references to older things, which makes it the homeschool equivalent to film school for me. I always try to look up the jokes I didn’t initially get, and I usually learn a new bit of pop culture trivia in the process. RiffTrax, on the other hand, is a bandage for box office shlock. It makes terrible movies like Glitter less of a waste of time, and it puts huge successes like Jurassic Park in perspective. Though I am less likely to watch the ones for the movies I liked when they were originally released. You *can* make fun of good movies too, but it’s really not my style. Additionally, RiffTrax could potentially make things better when one of your friends wants to put on a movie you really don’t want to watch. You could listen to the RiffTrax together or just you could put on a headset to hear the mp3 so no one’s good taste has to be compromised and both people can have a good time.
And on the blogs, the writers in both camps are talking to the fans occasionally. The RiffTrax team is inviting the Titans to collaborate too. So of course all the fans are hoping for a Joel vs Mike riff off.
It’s a good time to be a MSTie.
