Couture: Printer Complications

After finishing that Tilda Swinton Project yesterday, I didn’t have anything to do today, so I could either do something useful…  Or I could start screen-printing again.

So I went out and bought some new photo-sensitive emulsion, and some new inks, and off we go.

Just to get started, I printed this duo-tone George Herriman “x” from Krazy Kat:

DSC01704I used some old red ink, and I think it may have become a bit too thick.  I should get some thinner…

Then onto printing something a new design.  But *gasp*!  What’s happening!

DSC01705That doesn’t look right.  After experimenting a bit, I remembered that if I print with Cups with “-o fitplot” or “-o fit-to-page”, and the image has more pixels than the printer has, then everything goes all wonky.  My Epson Stylus Photo R3000 does 5760×1440, apparently.

Cups is supposed to rescale the images to fit the width/height of the printer, and it works well if the image is smaller than the resolution of the printer.  But scaling down just doesn’t work.

So I wrote this tiny shell script to rescale stuff before printing.

I think this really is a bug in Cups or something, but look how pretty:

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(That’s a Jimbo image by Gary Panter, by the way.)

The Tilda Swinton Project Redux

This spring I decided to see all films that Tilda Swinton had appeared in. It was a somewhat random decision, but I felt that I hadn’t seen her in any bad films ever, so perhaps she had exceptional taste?

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And perhaps that would lead me to see films I otherwise wouldn’t have seen?

I think her taste level turns out to be pretty good. Not all the films she’s been in are great (some are horribly awful, like Vanilla Sky and The Beach), but I can (sort of) see how they might seem like interesting films. At least at the script level.

Even participating in trainwrecks like Trainwreck is understandable: We all thought a film written by by Amy Schumer would be great. We just didn’t realise that Judd Apatow would be directing it.

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So here’s the conclusion: All her films are interesting. Most of them
are good. And some are amazing.

I mean. A. Maaaaazing. The Last of England, Orlando, Adaptation, The Limits of Control, Burn After Reading, Moonrise Kingdom, Only Lovers Left Alive…

The ratio of great films to duds is pretty exceptional.  So…  success!

TSP2015: Trainwreck

Trainwreck. Judd Apatow. 2015.

The Amy Schumer show is funny.  This film isn’t.

I haven’t seen any of the other Judd Apatow films.  My impression is that they are going for cringe humour, but this one just isn’t that cringe-worthy.  Instead it’s just slow.

It’s like a very, very, very long partially improvised HBO sitcom.

Me am disappoint.

And perhaps my hatred of Bill Hader is showing here, but this is how the die rolled:

This post is part of The Tilda Swinton Project.

TSP2013: Death for a Unicorn

Death for a Unicorn. Riccardo Bernasconi and Francesca Reverdito. 2013.

Geez. This short is only available on Amazon Prime? So I had to hook up my Ipod Touch again to the rest of my system, and then spend half an hour re-routing the HDMI through splitters and capture devices to do this blog post…

Everything is so much easier when it’s on DVD or PirateBay.

But I can totes VPN to the US so that Amazon thinks I’m in the US so that I can watch stuff. Hah!

Anyway, this is a short narrated by Tilda Swinton. The text is mostly in end rhymes, so to get

… races back home /
… stay in that catacomb

Which is… OK? I guess?

It’s a cute little movie, but I’m not quite sure what it’s about. But I was somewhat preoccupied with the technical bits just to be able to watch it, so I may have been a bit stressed.

This post is part of The Tilda Swinton Project.