I’ve just had a fantastic day at the Pictoplasma conference in NYC watching hours of character art and design, from the rampantly hallucinogenic visions of David Oreilly and Friends With You to the simplified forms of Akinori Oishi and the prodigious output of Studio AKA.

One of the more interesting talks was David Oreilly’s, where he showed a number of unseen animations and outed himself as the creator of the Octocat meme, before showing us the final episode. I won’t give anything away, but try see it if you can.

And I thought he was just the guy that created the fake iPhone hologram video:

iHologram – iPhone application from David OReilly on Vimeo.

BONUS: Alba and I scored a box made by Motomichi for the apartment – sweet!

May I take your order?

Probably one of the best examples of Engrish / Manglish I’ve ever seen. Classic.

As is my habit, I woke up this morning and reached for whatever new iPhone pr0n was available. Luckily for me, Apple had just thrown up a lengthy (20 mins) new “documentary”/feature propaganda (20 mins) featuring a friendly Apple designer/model/actor.

One thing that stood out for me, in between high contrast video of the phone merrily multi-tasking it’s way on to being the ultimate device ever, was the Google search demo. The guy, let’s call him Bob, opens up the iPhone and initiates a search by typing a few phrases into Safari’s search field, then hitting the “google” button. Very interesting.

Subversion, reappropriation and modification of key terms and phrases are some of the hallmarks of the current US administration’s communications and the previous two Republican campaigns and as they’ve proved, he who controls the language, controls the universe [sorry Frank Herbert!].

It seems awkward to talk about yahooing for something, but googling has become synonymous with searching for – and finding – information and that may be the subtle difference that means everything, especially as searching and finding heads mobile. This is all pure speculation, but I wonder if the iPhone will change the action button to “yahoo” if you switch to using their search? Time will tell. I’ll let you know on Friday.

pantsketch: Battlestar Galacticsimpsons

Luckily for me – he took some video of a demonstration of my instruments – the Stranglophone and the Pierrophone.

Stranglophone Demo Video
Pierrophone Demo Video