Net art

I live about two years behind the rest of the internet class, so it was about time that I discovered a web-based comic entitled Questionable Content. It's a soap opera featuring 20-somethings, indie music, a majority female cast, coffee and some robots. Verily.

I found the author's description of how he constructs the artwork particularly interesting. The comic looks hand-drawn but synthetically colored; in fact, it's drawn directly into Photoshop using a pen-on-tablet type interface, then shaded in using some semi-automated image processing. That's right, my image processing aspires to find its way into papers in low-impact engineering journals; this guy retires on it.

A few people I know use similar tablets for note-taking during class or meetings. There are some like this one that are less clumsy than carrying around a tablet PC but hold memory for several 'pages' of notes before plugging them in and dumping them to a workstation for storage. I tend to take notes in graphs, figures and concept maps rather than text, so a keyboard doesn't do me much good (although a guitar-synth might), but one of those would be a quicker interface into basketnotes than my current method of running ink-on-vellum through the office scanner.