a few of you, dear friends, have been subjected to many a glorified chat between chance and I about the many MANY plotlines of Degrassi: the Next Generation. As their wikipedia page can tell you, the theme song was “…written by Jim McGrath, Jody Colero and Stephen Stohn”, aka the three most genius people on the planet.

Now, while you go go watch youtube videos of the theme song in various states, why not listen to this version recorded by bill and myself, with chance as the special guest star? I promise it has ten time more voice cracks and ten times more johnny woods in the background.

BE THE BEST!!! from Emma Brown on Vimeo.

I’m making some birdie drawings and shapes for a pattern.

This is really awful, but I decided to invert my laptop screen today (ctrl+option+apple+8) to see how my digital world would look. It’s… pretty bizarre. It’s kind of an exciting change, although I’m not sure if it’s going to affect my eyes in some sort of awful way.

I then decided, that I would see how my website artwork looks. Mostly, it’s really hokey and stupid. BUT IT LOOKS SO…. what’s the best word to use in high school terminology….

…SWEET.

That’s the only word I can think of to describe it. I selected my favorite inverted pieces, all you have to do is hit those amazing set of keys to live the magic.

CTRL+OPTION+APPLE+8
One special bonus, I found a picture of myself on a website (which will not be named). MY HAIR USED TO BE SO LONG. It was actually inverted on said website, so you’ll have to see it normally to appreciate how long my hair was. I think this was either Junior or Senior year of high school.

IMAGE OVERLOAD:

A bonus fact: I painted this exact inverted self portrait to put in my portfolio, to bring to National Portfolio Day, to show to MCAD. I’m 100% sure this piece is why I got accepted. It obviously proved that my level of creativity was through the rough.

have you guys noticed these iq test ads on facebook? Whenever I see them they always seem to pick specifically from the shambot group of friends. ISN’T THAT STRANGE? And recently instead of posting fake iq test scores, they’ve started NAMECALLING:

HOW DOES IT KNOW THAT BILL IS AWESOME?!?!?

p.s. if you see a good one, screen cap it and we’ll add it to this post!

The title of this post comes off a little sarcastic, but it is NOT meant to be! I spent some time this afternoon and this evening working on a card for my relatives back in Michigan. I actually got birthday cards this year from two aunts and uncles, so I figured I should make them a card in return (my birthday is in May, I’m ridiculously late making these).

I’m going to print one out for each of my aunts and uncles though. Just to let them know I’m thinking about them and let them know how I’m doing, without mentioning my unemployed status. I think I’ll steer clear of that subject.

I basically copied took quite a bit of inspiration (QUITE a bit) from this book cover. I just couldn’t resist! The color palette, the typography, the imagery- all beautiful. The cover was illustrated by Will Staehle, who is an amazing-amazing-amazing artist/designer/illustrator. My piece comes NOWHERE near the incredible-ness of his book cover. But I do like it; very chilly and winter-y. Maybe it will keep my relatives in a cool state of mind so they don’t overheat this summer.

I really like those balloons- how cute! I also am pretty fond of the font: Museo. It’s a really fun style to work in, silhouettes and outlines with flat colors, I’m curious to see if I can somehow work it in with my drawing/painting style. Perhaps an experiment!

Today Emma and I did a photoshoot for the next update to our Hello Ladies Vintage Shop! Chance decided to help by being the offical balloons-holder. So of course. after the shoot, we had to take some silly portraits and jumping pictures. I am sure Emma and I will have all of them uploaded to our Flickr’s before too long. CHECK IT OUUUUT.

We were all online and video chat seemed to be the only option. Did you know you can share pictures and videos via iChat? I (joel) DID NOT AND IT IS AMAZING! Also, we danced:

Also, we Photoshop’d our eyebrows off. Gross! Thank god we all have eyebrows. Don’t you think that Chance looks like Old Biff from Back to the Future 2?


(Old Biff from Back to the Future 2)

thanks to my lack of a full time job, I managed to catch the trailer for Spike Jonze’s film adaptation of Where The Wild Things Are on… of all things… the Ellen Degeneres show? She’s awesome, no doubt, but it really caught me by surprise! Either way, I will be sad if this movie doesn’t make me cry from start to finish like the trailer made me want to. Once the it hits the web you should all watch it, it gave me goosebumps for realsies! HERE IT IS OKAY GO WATCH IT NOWWWWW

To tide you over while the hackerz are doing their business, here is an early animation test, film stills, and (in honor of Lady Degeneres), Dennis Quaid making a fool of himself… DENNIS QUAID IS HERE.

This is a cool thing: http://www.atomictoy.org/365dudes/

It’s a blog by a guy who draws a different character every day. SEE IF YOU CAN NAME THEM ALL!

There is some cool stuff on his regular website, too.

Hey, Shambot. Er…

Hello everyone! I was going to keep this a secret, but I figured it would be better to involve everyone so it’s not a selfish way for me to get you guys to like me (even more! :D)

I’m putting together a book of the best Shambot posts to date. At first I just wanted this project to be a way for me to practice my typography. I thought our blog is a good source of text and image so I was going to lay out a few spreads and play around with things. But I actually think it would be a super fun project for us all to come together and work on. I’ll be doing the layout of the book, but if you guys want to contribute photos, descriptions of older photos, drawings, maybe footnotes? (like what happened after this post was initially written) that would be really awesome.

Right now the images above are just some dummy spreads I put together. Although, I do like the cover since it is our logo/fav icon. The five names that I have in the ‘table of contents’ at this point were the authors of posts that were my initial pick. They weren’t necessarily my favorite but they all had a good amount of text and some cool images. For example, here is the spread I made for Ben (using the original title of the blog post):

It still needs a bit of work. I’m not sure how I feel about the images lining up directly with the grey box. But it feels like… kind of cool and hip to me. Not sure if that’s a universal feeling. You will also notice the comments section over on the right side!

If you guys are interested, I guess we need to go through and pick everyone’s favorite posts. Seeing as we all have quite a few pages of history, don’t go crazy with it. Just kind of browse around and let me know if you find anything that absolutely needs to be in the book. And when I say book, I do want to get this printed somehow. We can all have a copy and reflect on how cool we are. Maybe there could also be a bio section. Who we were when we first started the blog and what we’re up to now. INTERESTING.

Also, if we did a yearly collection HOW FRICKIN’ COOL WOULD THAT BE? I think everyone needs to start posting on Shambot MUCH more often. Me included. Then we’ll have more to choose from in the future for our anthology.

EDIT:// Help me write the intro thing on the table of contents! I’m bad with words. I forgot to change Cedar Rapids to Iowa City. Listing the cities might not even be important.