A rasterbated poster of the Kool-Aid man busting through bricks hung up on the wall next to my office door.

Every quarter we hang up student artwork on the walls of our floor. The wall next to my office door is pretty pockmarked from all the push pins used to hold up said work; it’s pretty ugly looking. Ricky thought we should cover the wall with posters, which I agreed was a great idea. We both came up with the idea of a nice big rasterbation. We both wanted something universally recognizable with a bit of pop-kitch. After a bit of brainstorming and image searching, I put together an image of the Kool-Aid man busting through a brick wall with his trademark yell of “OH, YEAAHH!”

What’s a rasterbation? Rasterbation is a process that takes an image and allows you to scale it to any size via a halftone reproduction and then tile the result across several sheets of paper. The name comes from “The Rasterbator” a popular free online program that will create an easy-to-print PDF out of any image you upload to it. Assembling the rasterbation is easy; simply cut out and arrange the tiles in the proper order.

The wall poster is pretty neat because it’s both a cool art piece and an educational tool. I’m teaching the Electronic Print Production class this quarter, which goes into detail about the ins & outs of how printing presses work. The poster is a great example of how a halftone produces an image, as well as a useful example of imposition and pagination.

Calvin's dad explains the history of color.

The next time I teach Photoshop class, I’m somehow going to work this Calvin & Hobbes comic into the explanation of how to add color to a black & white photo.

I remember thinking the exact same thing when I was a little kid. My childlike logic deduced that black and white photos were really old, therefore I should ask the oldest person I could find about them. I went to my grandma and asked her what it was like living in black and white times. I got a very grandma-ish answer about how it wasn’t really black and white back then.

Now, my adult logic dictates that since photos & TV both started off as black & white and eventually became color, holograms must also start off as black & white. I suppose that science fiction works aren’t too far off the mark when they have a mono-chromatic hologram, like Cortana in Halo.

Anime conventions are great places to people-watch. You see so many interesting, funny or just downright weird things. A few weeks ago I went to Ohayocon up in Columbus, OH with Ricky Henry. He dressed up as Speed Racer. I dressed up as me. We met some furries. The dealer room smelled funny.