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Integrated Tech Solutions

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I’ve been wanting to show this stuff for a while now! Yet and other collaboration with my dear rapper friend Aesop Rock, but this time I feel like we’re really able to take the concept further than we have previously.

Was involved pretty early in on, and was able to have a hand in developing the concept of this fake technology company, and just generally the flavor we were going to go for. I’ve worked in the “tech” industry for years, which made it really fun to come up with phrases and silly stuff. Most of this came from late night spitballing ideas and it’s honestly pretty hilarious now knowing this thing exists.

Started both with some sketches and logo designs. Wanted everything to feel really authentic, so I looked at lots of defense contractor and manufacturing logos and tried to channel some of that into the ITS logo. We honed in on this blocky orange and white one that just felt “on brand”. Not flashy, not trying to be too hokey or dorky. just straightforward. Like, exactly what you’d expect.

Had a pretty clear idea of where I wants to go for the cover image. Wanted it to look like the cover illustration to a training manual or calendar or something. Wanted to channel guys like Drew Struzan, Bob Peak and Bernie Fuchs, those natural media montage guys of the era. Found that stock image of the man and woman at the computer, and we both just fell in love with it. From there,  I built the montage around them, exploring themes of science and spirituality. The lab equipment, the circuit boards, the spade shuttle, all pretty obvious tech touchstones. Then the last corner gets a little weird with the yoga lady, the twilight zone style clock, the Apple which has both scientific and religious connotations, the Easter Island guy and that eyeball pyramid thing to sort of hint at the supernatural or occult, and then a kitten because it’s cute. I went ahead and purchased the stock images for the major elements, montaged it all together in photoshop, then blew it up and did a 24×24 inch pencil drawing of it to serve as the base.

It was important to me that the execution would look legit as possible, so I took my time on the pencil drawing, really paying attention to the line work, trying to really channel the period. Once it was drawn in, I shot a nice photo of it and then rendered it out digitally. I used procreate on my iPad to do most of the rendering because they have some really nice looking natural media brushes that worked well for the hand drawn look I was going for. In the end I used photoshop for the final color corrections and touch ups. The whole image probably took about 2.5 weeks of work from sketch to finish, spaced out over the course of about a month and a half. I got a lot of creative freedom on this, which made it really fun to work on. It’s the best when a client trusts you and lets you do your thing.

The deluxe edition of this album is a technical achievement in and of itself. It plays an array of light patterns and a special ITS jingle when the contact points are engaged. The ITS logo is laser cut with a frosted translucent overlay so the ENTIRE logo lights up! It’s rare you get to make a piece of art for art’s sake, and I believe this is about as close as I’ve gotten to being able to make a piece that speaks beyond just the promotion of an awesome product. Its like this absurdist living commentary on technology AND the possibly the most technologically advanced cover art ever produced. It took months of back and forth prototyping, drawing little diagrams to figure out the lighting pattern and light-boxing. I think the manufacturer probably thinks were all nuts. But it’s so over the top. It has a usb-c charging port so you can get years of use out of it.

For the interior, I wanted to dig into the corporate identity stuff more and make it like this crazy montage of graphs and charts about ITS. Used a lot of canva templates as bases and tweaked things to feel more “of the period”. Aesop wrote up a ton of technical copy that I laid into the charts and graphs, along with the actual album track listing and album credits. There’s so much weird hidden shit and jokes in here. Even though it’s light on the actual drawing and painting, it’s probably one of my favorite album interiors I’ve made because it’s so weird and on brand with the album concept.

The back cover was pretty straightforward, wanted it to feel like a table of contents in like an old science textbook or something. The image again, I tried to be earnest in the execution while being absurd, with the dump truck, plate of spaghetti and sea turtle somehow tying into this scientist looking through a microscope.

Making album packaging has become sort of a routine, predictable process. What made this one different was that I also signed on to tackle the first music video as well! I have a general working understanding of video compositing and animation, but have never done a lot of it in a professional capacity. So I decided to make this as hard as possible on myself by making the entire thing animated.

Actually, it wasn’t that bad. I wanted it to feel like some weird retro schoolhouse rock fever dream, which kept the bar achievable quality-wise. I haven’t really animated much 2d animation, so I started by filming myself or my kids, and drawing from video frames for reference. Eventually I figured out a decent workflow, again in procreate on my iPad, where I’d animate out short loops and sequences, output them as GIF’s and then cut/composite them together in aftereffects. heres a link to the actual video:

Once again I got a lot of freedom to develop the idea, then storyboard it out. Once I got sign off on the boards, I animated them to the song, then used that animatic as the template I would drop finished animations into. It ended up being I think 80 something shots. I outsourced 5 of the cg shots to my friends over at heroic pictures, but was able to do the rest myself.

I used some aftereffects templates as the bases for the motion graphic sections and in the hook sections which saved a lot of time, but all in all it probably took about 3.5 months total from start to finish. This was about as far out to sea as I’ve ever been on a gig, animating to music working in a completely different medium and in an unfamiliar style…there was a learning curve for sure. Was a ton of work and sort of stressful at times, but I love jobs like this that push you completely out of your comfort zone because you learn the most from them.

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digdoug
3 days ago
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This is wild. I'm not -not- a fan of Aesop Rock, but I've only ever heard his stuff when other people put it in front of me.. I went ahead and pre-loaded this one though.
Louisville, KY
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Second, older Roman fridge found in Novae

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This year’s excavation of the Roman legionary camp of Novae in Bulgaria has uncovered a second Roman refrigeration chamber very similar to the one discovered last year. It too is made of flat ceramic slabs inset in the ground, but this one has an extra feature: a lead water pipe running along its long side to provide additional constant cooling. It is also older, dating to the earliest phase of the camp’s occupation.

The Roman castrum (military camp) of Novae was founded in 45 A.D. as a defensive fort on the Lower Danube border of the province of Moesia Inferior. Its builders and first occupants were the soldiers of Legio VIII Augusta. Legio I Italica replaced them in 69 A.D. and settled in for the long-term, only leaving in 441 A.D. when the Huns forcibly showed them the door.

The refrigeration chamber unearthed in last year’s dig was found under a floor in the stone headquarters of Legio I Italica. This year’s discovery was made in the wood and earth barracks of Legio VIII Augusta, built in the first phase of construction of the camp. The remains of drinking cups, bowls and animal bones were also found inside the Roman fridge. The food remnants will allow researchers to recreate the last meal preserved in the cool chamber.

Archaeologists also uncovered the earliest known well in Novae and a water network of ceramic and lead pipes. From the later period of occupation, the excavation of a 4th century ceramic furnace revealed a set of intact vessels, including a wine drinking set, in a rare black surface glaze decorated with a smooth finish alternating with concentric circles. These vessels are rare finds on the Danube border, and the chronology of their production is still subject to scholarly debate. The Novae set will be radiocarbon dated to answer some of these long-standing questions.

Injecting a note of whimsy into this year’s extraordinary inventory of finds is a silver mouse. It is a pendant, its tail forming the hanging loop. It is carved in fine detail down to the hairs, and holds a round piece of food (cheese?) in its wee front paws.

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digdoug
6 days ago
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Well, I've now thought about the Roman Empire several times today. I should let my wife know.
Louisville, KY
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A Portrait of Tenochtitlan • 3D reconstruction of the capital of the Aztec empire.

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digdoug
16 days ago
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Louisville, KY
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The Louisville Slugger factory, ten years apart

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Yesterday, I went on the Louisville Slugger factory tour, mostly to enjoy the smell of fresh wood bats in their factory. After I got my tickets, I realized I also went on the very same tour the first time I visited Kentucky back in 2013.

On the 2013 tour, pro bats were 100% handmade and we had to interrupt workers at each station in the process of making major league bats (any Louisville Slugger you buy in a store was made in the same factory, but instead using automated machines for all production). The workers were operating lathes and cutting shapes into the bats by hand, then hand-sanding all their work. The smell of fresh maple, ash, and hardwoods being sanded was unforgettable. One weird aspect of that 2013 tour I still remember is that we spent about ten minutes of it talking about how aluminum bats suck for baseball (according to the wood bat company, even though aluminum bats last much longer than any wood and are cheaper), and they talked about how MLB rules basically gave this company a monopoly by requiring only wood bats in pro baseball, effectively banning aluminum bats.

The 2023 tour started with a whole section dedicated to their love of the environment, about how they practice smart forest stewardship and hand select each tree that becomes bats. It was a weird bit of greenwashing because honestly, among all products made from trees in our forests, I never really thought baseball bat production was high enough to even make a dent in our annual US logging numbers. It felt like the whole “we love the earth” addition was in response to maybe a few weird comments on Yelp or something, but it felt entirely unnecessary, insincere, and tacked-on.

The next big thing I learned is the 2023 tour is much more video heavy, and each station had a short 2-3min video to explain the next step of production, so tour guides basically just introduce the video, make a few jokes, and make sure we’re walking to the next station at the right time. The goofiest aspect of tour was one video showing a great-great-great-grandson of the founder hand-selecting all the trees to cut down, but later in the tour we learn they do a lot of actual scientific hardness testing so only about 10% of the selected trees are good enough to make pro bats used in the MLB. The video reminded me of my tour of Tabasco factory about 25 years ago, which was high on folksy family stuff because one family has run the company for over 150 years and only blood relatives of the founders tell everyone when to pick the peppers used in their sauce (as opposed to say, a trained botanist).

The CNC machines get signed whenever Major League Baseball greats show up for a visit

One thing I really missed in the present-day tour was seeing happy employees doing all the little jobs around their factory as they worked on pro bats. Instead, the pro bats are all now made on an automated CNC lathe, which on the one hand is good for the consistency of bat performance in the pro game, but I missed seeing guys hand sanding and shaping bats. We watched two big CNC machines cut bats in 30 seconds, each loaded with a dozen bat-blanks like a cylinder of an old west gun. In the ~30min tour we only stumbled on one guy actively working on a weekday, as he was painting bats, but again, most of it was automated and he just had to swing a paint sprayer around a bit and check the work before things went into a drying room.

The 2023 tour felt a lot different. Gone were the wonderful smells of an active woodshop, now replaced by automated machines with better ventilation and dust removal. The videos took away all the personality and basically made the tour guides’ job a menial task.

I think I liked the old tour better.



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digdoug
17 days ago
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My office is 1 block behind this building. I haven't done the tour since the early teens, and I guess I won't do it again. That's damned sad. I knew something was afoot when they replaced some of the floor space with a fake distillery/restaurant called "Bourbon & Billets"
Louisville, KY
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By Pyry in "Recycling and other myths about tackling climate change" on MeFi

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The way we reduced the amount of lead in children's bloodstreams was by banning most uses of lead, rather than by individuals carefully researching the 'lead footprint' of every product they buy.
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digdoug
24 days ago
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Louisville, KY
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Utopia Clicker

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Darius Kazemi made a clicker game #
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digdoug
26 days ago
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hah.
-chef's kiss emoji-
Louisville, KY
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