Author: Matt

Well, last week I managed to finish the rough pencils for the final part to Surfing The Deathline. It’s a pretty momentous occasion for me, given how long the project has taken. Most satisfyingly, I was able to see the conclusion, which has been kicking around in my head for a number of years, finally out on paper.

The last couple of days I’ve be reacquainting myself with my 3D toolset, and having finished the first major shakedown, I finally have the first panel of the new cyberspace-type sequence set up.

Bringing many of the old textures across from the software I used back in book 2, I’m quite pleased that the new models still look like they’re from the 80s.

Here’s an interesting comparison of PDF rendering between Apple’s Preview and Adobe’s Acrobat Reader. The text shown has a drop shadow applied to it in InDesign. It looks correct in Acrobat, looks correct when rendered in Photoshop, and looks correct on the iPhone. Preview seems to render a different black point or something, because the drop shadow ends up looking like an outer glow when applied over a dark background.

Oh yes, and that’s the copyright for Surfing The Deathline book 4. More about that to come. :)

In the past 48 hours, Paypal, Visa, Mastercard, Switzerland Post Finance & the Swedish Prosecutor’s Office have all been taken offline to varying degrees by DDOS attacks.

This is a true seismic change we’re witnessing in activism. The entire protest culture from the 60s to the present has really had debatable achievements (civil rights being a notable, if slow exception), and in the post-September 11 era has been almost completely impotent. Some of the biggest protests in history were against the Iraq war, and they had not the slightest effect on the policies of elected leaders.

Now we are seeing real action. A distributed group of people in their bedrooms are able to wage information war against governments and major corporations, at zero cost to themselves, and with no reactionary-propaganda-friendly bloodied policemen or smashed plate glass.

More importantly, this has all been done with tools that are packed with memetic humour. I mean just look at it.

The thing that’s most amusing about this, is it proves yet again the most important rule on the internet. You don’t fuck with 4Chan. I suspect eventually, 4Chan will be appraised as one of the strongest influences of our era in Western, and indeed world culture.

Interesting times are ahead.

Well, finally another year of college is over, and the task of updating the site begins. For now, there’s a new gallery with all the lifedrawing from 2010 in chronological order.

At the end of the week I’ll put in posts for the individual drawings, as well as the sculpture from the past year.

Finally, with college out of the way, I can get back to work on finishing Surfing The Deathline.

On June 22nd, my first solo show opens. It’s an exhibition of photography at St Vincent’s Hospital, in Darlinghurst, Sydney. Works on display are photographs in the 24×36″ range.