iamnotagoodartist

My girlfriend’s birthday was earlier this month and I had no money to buy her something. So what did I get her? A book! That I made! With text I got on the internet! For free! Legally!

The book was Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, obtained from Project Gutenberg, a pretty cool resource for old things written by now dead people.

I laid it out in Word with a 5.5″ by 8.5″ page setup, the dimensions of a letter paper folded in half, so as to not waste any real estate. Then I exported as a PDF and used Acrobat to print it in booklet form with two pages on each side. This one turned out to be 208 pages original. With double-sided booklet printing, that’s 52 printed pages.

I took every five printed pages, that is, every 20 pages of the book, and bound them together with thread. This is called a “signature.” Here’s all 11 of them.

Then, using such professional tools as a ruler, a guitar capo, a pencil, and a clamp thing that came with a generic dremel tool, I clamped all the signatures together and glued them up with some binding glue.

After a whole bunch of coats of that stuff, it gets a cardstock cover.

Opened to a random page, in proof that it is, in fact, a real book.

Total project time: a solid 5 or 6 hours

This is actually the second Jane Austen book I’ve made for my girlfriend, the first one being Pride and Prejudice. To friends and relatives who may receive such an affordable (but thoughtful!) gift like this from me for Christmas, please forget everything you just read. Yay!!

Yes, that’s right. As of today, 10-2-08, I am the #1 large image Google result for “terrorism.”

Osama bin Laden? More like “Shmoshmama shmin Shmashen!” Am I right?!

Original post here. “Take That” tag archive here.

More specifically, companies using stock photography to represent themselves is face-punchingly lame. Nothing says “I’m really just one guy with a Dell” than a web design firm with any picture anything like this:

No, she does not work for you. You fail.

Also, I found this fun one on stock.xchng:

Something about that is so familiar…

Psshhh… Weak… Idea stealer…

Oh, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, you “Italian painter best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of such objects as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish, and books!” You really thought you could stand up against iamnotagoodartist.com?

Pshhah! Everyday, someone comes to my website instead of yours, probably looking for your content! You have got to work on your Search Engine Optimization, son!

I found this on my hard drive while looking for something to update the site with. It’s a scrolling image of a 360 panoramic of my old room, in the apartment before the apartment before my current apartment.

In other news, I am, as of the beginning of this month, now a college graduate. I’ve got a new apartment, a new kitten, and a new list of things to work on, including a new site design for the P! Company, a sketch comedy group from Austin.

Huzzah!