Catagraph.us

My thanks to everyone who stopped by to browse and comment on the small collection of “good things” here at catagraph.us over the past year.

Doom knows about your freshly-stocked cupboard.

Rest well, meine kleine Katze.

I will miss you.

Did you remember? Yesterday was Calliope’s Birthday!

(Special thanks to Dornick for the cupcake idea.)

Good friends Kate & Sam recently sent me a little surprise in the form of an Outlaw Cat figurine — along with some small pieces of their excellent rendition of Lost Dzimba. Since both the figurine and the buildings were of the same scale, I was compelled to combine them, leverage my newly acquired Strobist skills, and take the picture above.

(For the curious: here’s a quick shot of the setup. White balance was set to daylight. Two flashes gelled with CTO (full and half) were firing from camera left. One was bounced, and the other snooted to provide a directional light down and across the scene. To highlight the star at the end of the fishing pole, I held a flashlight against a flash grid and directed the light just over the star’s face.)

Outlaw Cat can’t help himself around shiny things… like, you know, stars.

(Personally, I always preferred the red or green ones. Could use a few of those right about now.)

Just got into Singularity Sky by Charles Stross. I love the style of his work — the subtle humor, the plotting, the legal entanglements of super-intelligences. Cutting edge work. Cutting things up generally.

Should get back to posting daily sketches — and maybe a new painting — within the next week. With that, allow me to usher you toward the myriad delights to be found at Street Photography In Paris.

Go on. See what you’ve been missing.

* Please reference tweet #788432399 for a further explanation of the post title. Patent pending.

** Intolerable Threat To Peace would be a good name for a battleship, don’t you think? Very modisch, very Iain M. Banks.

This week’s New Yorker cover was painted by artist Jorge Colombo entirely using that spiffy iPhone/iPod Touch app named Brushes which I wrote about in early January.

Steve Sprang — the developer of Brushes — also put together a neat companion application named Brushes Viewer which allows the replay of the process of painting.

Even though I’m still not used to painting on an iPod with my knobbly, misshapen fingers, I put together a little demonstration of this amazing software just for you. Take a look.