The first time I laid eyes on a computer it was the hottest thing our combined meager fortunes could buy. It was 1991 and Multimedia was the latest and the hottest thing with bells and whistles like CD-ROMs and sound cards. What lay before me on our make shift computer desk had been custom made by Tandy and came loaded with DOS 5, Windows 3.0 with Multimedia extensions and an incredible 170MB hard drive. It had color and it made noises and, in the full glory of my ignorance, it appeared to be an over wrought typewriter.

But Barbara, who had cut her teeth on a VIC 20 and later moved up to a Commodore 64 (thank you Toys R Us) in order to play Ultima, knew exactly what could be done with our new acquisition. And that was PLAY GAMES! which we did a lot. For me it was like having many of my childhood fantasies come right back home. So we played these games- mostly role-playing and mostly together- and embarked on a journey that would take us beyond the lost arcana of DOS into marvelous realms like Ultima Underworld.

Somewhere in the middle of the story I finally began to realize there was a lot more that I could do with one of these things and soon downloaded my first copy of Paintshop Pro. I had by now become pretty internet savvy and just as we acquired a new Pentium machine something happened that set my course as far as graphics is concerned. That something had to do with our local public radio station KPFA- a long story detailed elsewhere in these pages- but the bottom line is that I began to make graphic thingies which I emailed like mad to the local good guys.

I was like a kid in a candy store who was like a bull in a china shop- out of control. And the quality of my early graphics bear this out most painfully (they can all be found @ savepacifica) although a couple of them were keepers. And so things went through the KPFA crisis and along through the presidential elections until the present which has been a temporary state of equilibrium.

Below you will find the detritus of my explorations into things graphical pulled from various projects that have popped up along the way.

When Dubya came into power it seemed only fitting to commemorate the occasion with this collage image derived from Michaelangelo, a Texas oil field and images of father and son in patriotic regalia. The dangling dollar signs were a special touch meant to remind the viewer of what authority had actually sanctioned this turn of events.

I recently found this image featured @ about.com and also on a French site called Winstars.

When it became apparent that the Bush administration was going to pursue the 'Son of Starwars' scenario I got to thinking of making an image of a 'realistic' nuclear strike somewhere in America. This quest brought me eventually to Lansat where I found this image of the San Joaquin Valley in California and later combined it with a couple more from a DOE information site and a bit of graphical tweaking to produce the image above.

Recent news of the Bush administrations' willingness to use first-strike nuclear capacities inspired the above image. Whatever rationalizations the hawks use to deny it, the threat of nuclear war is the greatest threat to Liberty.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who failed to resist temptation upon seeing this photo of George at Mount Rushmore.

Okay, time for a break from awful stuff. It's Christmas 1999, that wonderful time before the dreaded Y2K and the more dreaded elections to follow, and Barbara is making Christmas cookies as usual. Decided to make photographs of her cookies, along with portraits of all of us in Santa hats, to be included in our yearly email Christmas card.

The people of Renewed HOPE Housing Advocates saw a future for the stock of existing housing at the former Alameda Naval Air Station. They saw it as an opportunity to provide badly needed affordable housing to working people who live in our city. We read an announcement of a march they were going to make to City Hall and decided to join in. Awhile afterwards I got to thinking about what a huge fantasy home ownership has become for most people in the Bay Area and the idea inspired this little poster- made with an image of a doll house. Their organization is alive and still working on their mission of housing equity in Alameda.

Finally we come to a couple of animations. The one on the left was made for the Nader campaign, sent all over the place, but never to my knowledge used for anything. The other one will be published in still form in the next issue of our local Green Party newsletter. One thing I discovered when I first started making these things is that it's easy to get lost in creating huge animations because the opportunity to make something like real film is really seductive. No one will wait to download your epic- ever. Brevity is, as far as I can tell, the key to web animations.

I made this poster in the midst of the KPFA crisis after hearing of KPFT calling itself something like the 'Cowboy Jukebox' or some such. Now at this particular time the people at KPFT were counted among the 'bad guys' so we weren't supposed to help them in any way, but I couldn't get this concept out of my mind. It didn't take long to find the right jukebox, but the longhorn cow was another thing.

After the situation with Pacifica sorted itself out I contacted KPFT about the graphic and now the cow has a new home on their Playlist Page.

This last image is something silly I made after finding some character templates online for Baldur's Gate, a very popular role-playing game. Our pictures came of course from photographs. Mine was taken in the bathroom mirror.

Well, that's it. Follow the link below back...

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