OUTPUT
As I regress more and more into past forms of communication before the little black mirrors in our pockets I’ve put together a post card design that celebrates snail mail. You can order them in multiples of 5 from my store.
One of our friends runs an instrument repair workshop locally, this month I got them some more files so that they could do some advertising with. This is where I got my amazing tuba from.
And the piece that took up most of my time this month is a hyper colour monster that I’m pretty proud of. Cypher Brewing Co. has a beer festival in August based around the expanded concept of the Chaos Realm. This was based on a beer design I wrote about in my July 2024 blog post. I took inspiration from a few places, art from Hieronymus Bosch:
The circles of hell and ideas from the first part of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Dante’s Inferno:
And of course as should seem obvious to anybody who is a fan of the TV show Adventure Time, the art style I’m going for is the same. The brewery got a different bloke to animate sections of the artwork and it turned out pretty great. Here’s a couple of process pics and then the finished piece:
INPUT
These are the best three movies I watched this month:
Kneecap was special, it hit all the right notes: class warfare, colonisation, pursuing risky creativity rather than a safe wage. And the music is genuinely great. “ Every word of Irish spoken is a bullet fired for Irish freedom”. Preserving indigenous languages is an act of defiance against colonisers. Without your language you lose your culture. Ireland stands apart as a West European country that was historically a victim rather than a perpetrator of imperialism.
I finally got around to watching Gattaca after lots of recommends and enjoyed it. Its a cautionary dystopian snapshot of 90s sci-fi taking swings at the scientific headlines of the time. I like that the pacing was slow and a lot of the movie was setting up an ambience of dread and control. Pretty funny that the entire movie was white people, apparently racism isn’t a thing in the future because it’s all about the genes, and then the plot was that two white men couldn’t be told apart even with a photo.
I didn’t give lego batman the love it deserved when it came out. Now that I am older and wiser I would go as far as to say that this is the most accurate representation of batman throughout all of his iterations. It takes elements from silly 60’s batman, the 90’s trilogy, the comics, the cartoons, and Nolan’s trilogy. Here are some of the obscure characters this movie had the balls to include: Catman, Killer Moth, Clock King, Crazy Quilt, The Calculator, Gentleman Ghost, Mr. Polka Dot, The Condiment King etc. It hits the overarching theme of batman’s torment in all of his stories: family. And not just the loss of his parents but him building a messed up child soldier familial structure held together with the glue of trauma. Chefs kiss.
Click image to listen to a track. This is the first new vinyl I have bought myself rather than getting second hand pieces from op shops. I love this album, I think it’d be described as blackened deathcore with symphonic elements. I probably sound like a wanker but it does hit different when it’s physical media playing through a custom set up.
Click image to listen to a track. I’ve been having a rough time figuring out work life balance as I navigate new work environments. I always return to this album Wildlife by La Dispute. It’s an emotionally charged delivery of interwoven stories from different perspectives with each story having a loose theme of mental health and resilience. I think I like it so much because I see it as a meditation on empathy and also articulates the fear that creeps up regarding the strength of our own resolve.
Click image to listen to a track. This new one from viagra boys does a fantastic job of being superficially silly and groovy while touching on deeper themes. The track I’ve linked is an absolute earworm, catchy as hell, and is also an exploration of imposter syndrome. There’s a slower track ‘medicine for horses’ that’s got some nihilistic / self destructive themes while sounding depressing and downtrodden and somehow like Arcade Fire. It is such a nice contrast to the rest of the album.
I’ve only read one book this month. My god is was a wild one. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. Here’s the blurb from Goodreads cos I really don’t know if it can be summarised in any meaningful way. The bastard is non-linear and has over a hundred pages of endnotes you have to keep flicking to cos a good portion of the story is hiding there. The first 900 pages are a bit of a slog but then it really doesn’t go anywhere, and that’s a good thing.
A gargantuan, mind-altering tragi-comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America.
Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are.
Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human—and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do.
I think reading this has been very much worthwhile but this book also seems to be idolised for the wrong reasons sort of like Fight Club and the first Joker movie. My biggest criticism isn’t that it’s an unfulfilling ending and largely pointless (I quite like that); it’s that it’s obvious written by an insecure man. The limited female characters are 2D stereotypes, sexualised and objectified with very clear gendered power dynamics. I guess this could be seen as a choice by the author in depicting toxic masculinity in this fictional historical projection. However, there’s a distinct lack of exploring the patriarchy further while he bangs on about the evils of late stage capitalism, the two go hand in hand in my opinion.