Daniel O'Brien's Blog, page 9

THE TED CRUZ PHOTOSHOP PROJECT: DAY 2[Ted Cruz’s face is very...

THE TED CRUZ PHOTOSHOP PROJECT: DAY 2

[Ted Cruz’s face is very interesting to me. I’ve decided to do an apolitical photoshop to it once a day, every
weekday, from now until I don’t do this anymore. I will post the
pictures, as well as what I learned about myself in the process, here
exclusively on tumblr as well as via the US Postal Service for anyone who has signed up to my snail mail newsletter.]

Hundreds of people wrote letters to me wondering if I was going to keep doing this project even though Ted Cruz dropped out of the race literally hours after I’d posted the first installment. I’ll admit I was frustrated and was ready to halt the project delete my Tumblr burn the world to the ground and go home early, but the tremendous outpouring of support from all over this great planet of ours overwhelmed me, and I decided that the project had to continue. Art is too big to be stopped.

Today I made Ted Cruz’s mouth much smaller than the one nature had given him. It’s still his mouth, you understand, but smaller. Christina, my post supervisor, said “Is that his mouth?” I didn’t like what I did at first, because I realized the small mouth made his eyes and ears look bigger by comparison, almost cartoonishly so, and I didn’t like that he was starting to look like a Disney character. I started seeing Ted Cruz as the human form of a Disney character that, due to a misunderstood witch’s spell, had been previously turned into a mouse.

I do not like thinking of Ted Cruz this way.

To offset the cuteness that was settling in as a result of his small mouth and naturally silly ears, I went in and delicately removed the light from Ted Cruz’s eyes. This, I felt, downplayed any sort of whimsy that wanted to creep in. Ted Cruz without light in his eyes is, to me, the truest form of Ted Cruz I’ve seen anywhere.

What Did I Learn Doing This:

In Art, there is God. You need to know that you’re ready for that power, for what you can do with that power and for what having that power will do to you.

Did This Make Me Like Ted Cruz More:

Not particularly, no. It did not.

thisdanobrien:THE TED CRUZ PHOTOSHOP PROJECT: DAY 1[Ted...

thisdanobrien:

THE TED CRUZ PHOTOSHOP PROJECT: DAY 1

[Ted Cruz’s face is very interesting to me. I’ve decided to do an apolitical photoshop to it once a day, every weekday, from now until I don’t do this anymore. I will post the pictures, as well as what I learned about myself in the process, here exclusively on tumblr and unexclusively on Tidal.]

For my first installment, I decided to start small and just switch Ted Cruz’s eyes around, to put the left one where the right is supposed to go and the right one where the left is supposed to go. Ted Cruz’s eyes, which are IN MY OPINION the window to the soul, have always been very unsettling to me. I thought maybe if I switched them they’d look more appropriate, or perhaps serve has windows to a different, better soul. That did not happen. This photoshop does not make me see Ted Cruz in a different or better light, but a strange thing did occur. I found that if I stared at his face long enough, it DID start to look normal. It didn’t look like Ted Cruz’s original face by any means, but I did start to accept that this COULD be a person’s face.
A person COULD look like that.

Which is to say, if I stare at this long enough, it no longer looks like a photoshop to me even though I distinctly remember making it. Christina, my post supervisor said “Oh god, is that how his eyes are” when she saw me making it and Rosie, my head of production, suggested that I work on blending the colors better. The advice was unsolicited and in actual point of fact I hadn’t even started working on the colors when she saw it and I obviously was GOING to (making her advice wholly unnecessary) but I understand that she was just trying to help.

What Did I Learn Doing This:

The world is a scary place made scarier by loss and loneliness. It’s important to surround yourself with people who want to support you. Learning how to appreciate the advice you didn’t ask for is as difficult and important as learning when to ask for advice in the first place. There are lessons and gifts everywhere, in everything, but you’ll miss them if you don’t keep your eyes open (even if those eyes are on the wrong sides).

Did This Make Me Like Ted Cruz More:

Not particularly, no. It did not.

Oh fuck you Ted Cruz the second I start a fun little stupid art project about you you drop out of the race you stupid dumbshit alien you don’t know anything about comedy fuck you.

THE TED CRUZ PHOTOSHOP PROJECT: DAY 1[Ted Cruz’s face is very...

THE TED CRUZ PHOTOSHOP PROJECT: DAY 1

[Ted Cruz’s face is very interesting to me. I’ve decided to do an apolitical photoshop to it once a day, every weekday, from now until I don’t do this anymore. I will post the pictures, as well as what I learned about myself in the process, here exclusively on tumblr and unexclusively on Tidal.]

For my first installment, I decided to start small and just switch Ted Cruz’s eyes around, to put the left one where the right is supposed to go and the right one where the left is supposed to go. Ted Cruz’s eyes, which are IN MY OPINION the window to the soul, have always been very unsettling to me. I thought maybe if I switched them they’d look more appropriate, or perhaps serve has windows to a different, better soul. That did not happen. This photoshop does not make me see Ted Cruz in a different or better light, but a strange thing did occur. I found that if I stared at his face long enough, it DID start to look normal. It didn’t look like Ted Cruz’s original face by any means, but I did start to accept that this COULD be a person’s face.
A person COULD look like that.

Which is to say, if I stare at this long enough, it no longer looks like a photoshop to me even though I distinctly remember making it. Christina, my post supervisor said “Oh god, is that how his eyes are” when she saw me making it and Rosie, my head of production, suggested that I work on blending the colors better. The advice was unsolicited and in actual point of fact I hadn’t even started working on the colors when she saw it and I obviously was GOING to (making her advice wholly unnecessary) but I understand that she was just trying to help.

What Did I Learn Doing This:

The world is a scary place made scarier by loss and loneliness. It’s important to surround yourself with people who want to support you. Learning how to appreciate the advice you didn’t ask for is as difficult and important as learning when to ask for advice in the first place. There are lessons and gifts everywhere, in everything, but you’ll miss them if you don’t keep your eyes open (even if those eyes are on the wrong sides).

Did This Make Me Like Ted Cruz More:

Not particularly, no. It did not.

"So Bob said, ‘How would we do it?’ and I said, ‘What if a baby hatched right out of the egg and..."

“So Bob said, ‘How would we do it?’ and I said, ‘What if a baby hatched right out of the egg and started talking?’ And Bob immediately said, ‘Not the mama.’”

-

Entertainment Weekly’s Brief History of the TV Show Dinosaurs

According to the Multiverse Theory there exists infinite and finite parallel universes in which anything is possible, and in every single one of those universes I immediately click on this article about Dinosaurs.

We’re Coming to See YOU, Calgary!

Hey all! We did this last year and it was a lot of fun. We’re coming back to the Calgary Comic Expo this weekend!

On Friday, 4/29, we’ll be doing the After Hours panel (featuring me, Soren, Katie, Michael and Cody). We’ll workshop future episodes in real time, read the script for a never-before-seen episode, and then take your questions/episode suggestions. That’s Friday at 4:30 in Palomino D.

On Saturday, Soren Bowie will be interviewing Alan Tudyk live on stage That’s Saturday at 11:00am in the Corral.

On Sunday, I will be interviewing Stan Motherfucking Lee live on stage. That’s Sunday at 2:45pm in the Corral.

Come to any or all of those things. We’ll also just be generally wandering around the convention center floor. Let’s all be friends!

Who should win a Webby for Online Film & Video / Entertainment? Vote now.

Who should win a Webby for Online Film & Video / Entertainment? Vote now.:

The Cracked YouTube channel is nominated for a Webby and I’m so stoked. The site’s been nominated (and won) before and After Hours won for writing and I’m obviously proud of and thankful for those wins, but I’m so excited about this particular nomination because so many people put so much work into ramping up this channel over the last few years and the recognition of those efforts means a lot.

There are two different “wins” for this award, one is a critic’s choice and one is the People’s Voice version, which anyone (you!) can vote for. If you’ve seen a bunch of ads and banners saying “VOTE FOR CRACKED” lately, this is what we’re referring to.

We’re currently in second place to The Late Late Show with James Corden right now. There is a camp of people at Cracked who will think and say that it seems strange that a team of friends who write sketches and web shows are competing against a full-time staff of television writers and special guest celebrities for the same award. 

But there’s a SECOND camp of people that sees Cracked competing alongside some of these huge channels and staffs and says “Yep, that’s exactly where I want us to be.” I’m in that second camp, humbled and thrilled to be in the same intimidating category with these talented, hardworking people while screaming internally because I really believe we belong here. I remember when Cracked Video wasn’t even officially a department and was just a few buddies making videos on the weekends when they were done with their NORMAL Cracked responsibilities. And now we have a channel that’s nominated alongside The Tonight Show and The Late Late Show (I’m also thrilled for CollegeHumor, our buddies for life).

Anyway. I hope the raw, genuine graciousness that oozed out of this post has been earnest-sounding enough to trick you into believing I’m a sweet, humble man who deserves your (yes, YOUR. Yes, I’m talking directly to YOU) vote.

So vote for Cracked, because gosh darnit, we’d feel really special because WINNING IS EVERYTHING TO ME.

shelbyfero69:cozyqueen:fka twigs & choreographer Kash...

shelbyfero69:

cozyqueen:

fka twigs & choreographer Kash Powell dancing to “On Fleek” by Cardi B

the second before&after she starts dancing is God

Follow up to your last answer: How did you come up with the name Jacker?

First of all it’s “The Jacker.”

Second of all, I don’t want to talk a lot of shit, but I’m incredible when it comes to coming up with nicknames for people. It’s a gift.

Why does Jack call you "an all-round-big-swinging dick" and how do you feel about that?

I mean, gun to my head, the “why” is probably related to how rad (by which I mean “swinging”) my dick is.

In all seriousness, this is a weird thing! For those who don’t know, my boss, Jack O’Brien, has introduced me as “all-around big-swinging dick Daniel O’Brien” on every single live podcast/panel we’ve done and we’ve never once talked about it. There wasn’t even a moment early on where Jack was like “Hey, I’m going to introduce you as ‘the big-swinging dick;’ is that okay with you?” He just started doing it one day.

Full Disclosure: Around the office, I call Jack “The Jacker.” Every time he hears it, he says “I fucking hate that” and one time “Don’t ever fucking call me that again” and you can tell that he genuinely means it. (This usually leads to me saying “Would you say that ‘The Jacker No Likey?’” which is a catchphrase [for him] that I’m trying to make stick.)

The real-life Jack legitimately hates the nickname that I’ve created for him at work. Longtime devotees of the site will understand just exactly how special this is for me.

Dear Mom, It’s Zombies

Dear Mom,

Hi! I hope you’re doing well. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to write back but there’s just so much going on and Chicago still feels very much like a “new city” to me and I’m still getting acclimated and work is just as demanding as we expected, and I guess you heard that there’s zombies now, but still there’s no excuse for lateness!

I got your last care package— THANK YOU!!! — the cookies were great and the old pictures really took me back. I already framed them and hung them up. The walls in my new place are still looking a little bare, though. I want to hang up some cool art or something but there’s not really a particular art that “speaks” to me, I guess. And have you priced art lately? Oof! It’s so expensive for just some splashes of stuff on a thing. You’d think artists would come down on price a little bit now that zombies are covering the city, the government’s fled and the gangs pretty much run things now, but nope. Artists are still like “We need art now more than ever, so pay up.” Must be nice to be able to dictate the market like that. We’re in the wrong business, Ma!

Work is good I suppose. I’m doing less of the creative work that we initially talked about and am instead mostly focused on either keeping watch (at night, always at night, because I’m new) or fortifying our defense walls. I tried to (respectfully!) talk to my boss about how this isn’t what we talked about [re: my job] and he said that it doesn’t matter now that there are zombies and that everyone’s only “job” now is to stick together and survive, and I said (respectfully!!) “That may be, but we signed a contract and a contract’s a contract, and if we don’t honor our contracts, well we’re no better than the zombies” (who, I don’t know if you know, don’t honor contracts because all they do is want brains). And anyway to that he didn’t say anything because he’d already sort of checked out of the conversation. I guess the worst part is feeling like my strengths aren’t being utilized? Still, it’s only been a few months, maybe it’s just growing pains and I know a LOT of people in my graduating class who DON’T have jobs in their field and even MORE who are dead from zombies, so I guess I’m lucky. They say the first six months of living in a new place are the hardest so I’m at least gonna give it that.

You asked about girls… So far, no steady girlfriend to speak of but I did go on a date with this girl Jocelyn I met on Tinder and it went really really really well! We texted every night for a while and I’m trying not to get ahead of myself (because I always do that) but I like her a lot (she’s also a transplant [our word for “person who recently moved to the city”] and she plays piano!!). Don’t get too excited because it’s still early, we’re both pretty focused on our careers and also she’s a full-blown zombie now. So if there’s it turns out a cure for zombies, definitely (maybe!) get excited, but if not maybe I’ll have to “finish” (our word for “kill” now) her. The only reason she’s still alive is because she was at my apartment building eating a person and my landlord was about to finish her and I said “Hey wait a minute, don’t! I like her” and he said “Maybe you should get your head checked” and I said “Maybe you should get bent, buster,” since we were giving out free advice, and he didn’t like that at all, but he still let me keep Jocelyn around on the condition that I keep her chained up in my apartment.

So that’s where she is now.

My landlord’s kinda funny that way. He really hates zombies, it’s all he talks about, but also his ex-wife is a zombie and he’s open about the fact that he already hated her before she was a zombie, so he knows he’s not the most objective guy on the subject. So he has his point of view but he won’t force it on anyone else. Like I said, he’s funny like that. He has us bring him zombies that look like his ex-wife now instead of rent. I don’t love that but, again, six months.

How is Dad? I saw he posted a picture of his new Apple watch on Facebook. Is he actually using it? I wish I was there to help him set it up and everything. I swear he’ll really like it if he actually can get it up and working.

I finally got around to seeing The Revenant. I have a LOT of conflicting feelings about it. You know I like Leo, and I think he deserves an Oscar, but I don’t totally know if he deserved it for THIS movie. It might be one of those cases where the Academy just gave him the thing because, like, “Hey, you’re good, you deserve a statue at some point, so, here” even if maybe this wasn’t his best performance IN MY OPINION.

I might also just be biased because I saw the movie after living with a zombie outbreak for many weeks. Like, I know a lot of people watched the movie and were drawn into his survival tale, but for me I was like “Wow, only ONE bear and ONE Tom Hardy? Must be nice” as I’m fighting off, like, a MILLION ZOMBIES.

Tom Hardy was great, though.

That’s probably it as far as “What’s new with me” news goes. How’s the hometown? I was texting with some friends who said they turned the Nobody Beats the Wiz into a J Crew? That’s insane! But that was a while ago. You know, I don’t actually know if the zombies are also happening back home. How crazy is that? (I mean, it’s not crazy because the News has mostly been cancelled here and we don’t have internet anymore so it’s actually pretty understandable, on my end.)

Anyway, I hope this letter finds you in good health and you’re not a zombie. And if this letter is the first you’ve heard about the zombie outbreak happening in Chicago, DON’T WORRY- I’M FINE! but also maybe tell the government? Tell Dad I said hi and I can’t wait for you to visit in June (bring guns and supplies).

Love you lots,
-Jeremy