Nick.

I recently posted about our failed attempts at DIY screen printing, but I also mentioned that everything did actually work out in the end. So the question everyone probably wants answered is: “what happened in between!?”.

Following guides such as (the very loud or excited) “HOW TO SILKSCREEN!” No Media Kings’ “How to Silkscreen Posters and Shirts“, we decided that we had to get ourselves some photo emulsion. I won’t repeat the steps involved in using the emulsion here (as they are explained in both linked articles and in many other places as well), but here is the end result:

Now that‘s a nice screen. Looks great doesn’t it! Much better detail and much less effort than what we tried before! Keep reading for more photos and descriptions of the actual printing process.

Continue reading “DIY screen printing (success!)”

Every now and then I stumble across something on YouTube that seems to have a huge group of followers… that nobody else knows about. I previously posted about Ramady’s Michael Jackson dance lessons, Pui City Basement’s beatboxing tutorials, YouTube community in-jokes, and Terri Naomi and the number of covers of her song “Say It’s Possible“. I think all these groups really reflect the sort of interactions that a personal Internet can create.

One community that really struck me was the group that formed around MadV, an illusionist and entertainer who seemed to capture the imaginations of a lot of people looking for something amazing. He wears the same stylised Guy Fawkes mask as the character V as portrayed in the V for Vendetta movie (based on the comic by Alan Moore).

MadV left YouTube over six months ago (to pursue a career in television) and a lot of fans mourned his departure. Recently, he returned to start a “One World” video contest in which people wrote messages on their hands and submitted videos of themselves showing their hands to the camera (“speak to the hand!”)… not sure it did much for me… a little too melodramatic. Anyhow, the response was impressive. Here’s a video compilation of his videos that he uploaded as a goodbye message to his fans:

A number of people have tried to pick up the MadV mantle. A lot of people replicate his floating card tricks, but few try new things with the same style. The most prominent is probably MadVapprentice (he wears the same mask, but a black hoodie instead of a grey one). He seems to have a similar flair, but I haven’t found his tricks as appealing. This card trick (labelled “one of the best card tricks today”) is a little too obvious to me. This ring trick is neat though. I look forward to more from him in future.

I have a huge list of draft posts that I have never gotten around to completing. I’m going to try to post something “from the backlog” each weekend… so expect regular personal thoughts on news that is most likely grossly out-of-date!

I’m also going to bust out a few posts today before taking some time off for the holiday season. See you all online again late next week!

Probably to curb initial problems with broken wrist straps, flying remotes, and the resulting property damage, Nintendo Australia is replacing Wii remote wrist straps. Apparantly this only affects people who got one of the first batch of consoles released in Australia. That means… me and Jason!

I know that the remote that came with my Wii has one of the older (thinner… more flimsy) straps, because it really stands out when placed side-by-side with the Wii remote that came with Wii Play. In fact, it looks pretty much just like the picture in this screengrab of the strap replacement information website:

Guess I’ll be asking for a replacement… or I’ll just not bother. I still don’t have my replacement XBOX power supply (on account of my inaction… I always turn it off at the wall anyway).

Motionographer recently posted this music video by Director Koichiro Tsujikawa for “Fit Song” by Japanese recording artist Cornelius.

It’s beyond awesome. Everyday objects float around in formation; all perfectly synced and complementary to the music. It’s also constructed so that it can be looped indefinitely (restart the video after watching it once).

Went the Nullarbor Mixer today. Here’s a quick photo of the stickers on my shirt:

“ORGANISER”; Oooooh yeeeeeah! I’ve posted a wrap-up of the event to OneTwenty Events.

Note: The OneTwenty Events site is currently down.

I have a surprise visitor and I (generally) will not be posting until late Sunday. It’s a very, very good surprise visit! 😀

As evident in my last post, we successfully screen printed our own OneTwenty shirts. However, it was a learning experience, with a number of failed attempts along the way. Here I’ll detail what not to do when trying to make your own screen printed shirts.

We knew that we wanted shirts for a quite a long time, and we wanted nice printed shirts rather than cheap-looking iron-on transfers. Our enthusiasm was buoyed by this cheap screen printing tutorial by craftgrrl, but our initial attempts didn’t really work out.

We bought the fabric paint from Jackons in Shafto lane. They have a nice shelf with a whole range of water-based fabric paints. They also sell squeegees and silkscreens, but we figured that at $20 and $40 (?) each, we could try to do without for our first go.

Continue reading “DIY screen printing attempts (failure!)”

OneTwenty decided to make shirts so that we could all match at tonight’s Perth Massive. It turned out to be a real learning and bonding experience; staying up until 4:30am waiting for the screen to dry after your second attempt at making a stencil failed will do that to you!

I’ll post more details on our failures and successes in future, but for now behold the majesty of one of our OneTwenty shirts:

Ah the majesty! But how much did it all cost?… probably too much. Although we do now have the equipment and skills to make as many shirts as we want. We’ll have different shirts for every event! He’s a discussion of costs that I had with spinboy:

Check back in the next few days for the making-of pictures. Also, stop by the Massive and say hi to all the OneTwenty members modelling these shirts!

Thanks to everyone who made these shirts happen. In particular: Minh, Mash, Jason, and Jim!

Yesterday, Phil sent me an image link via Jabber (our preferred instant messaging system). I clicked on the link and what I saw kinda freaked me out. I asked where the photo was from and he directed me to this user profile page on the Eurasian Nation forums.

Here’s a screengrab of the image on that page:

I’ve shown this image to a few people and this guy apparantly looks just me. From the eurasian look and long hair, down to the aviator sunglasses and the slim-fit green shirt. Spinboy even thought it was me until I mentioned otherwise.

Continue reading “Apparantly I live in Canada (look-alike found)”