IanRowan.com

I recently ordered two custom iPhone cases from UNCOMMON a really cool case manufacturer I found poking around in some design blogs.  The uploading/order process was amazing and the site is extremely nice and intuitive.  There was an issue with the content of one of my designs due to the art being a naked woman.  I got a fast email telling me to call, and I did and it was approved for print and the representative was very helpful.  I am guessing that if your designs have more nudity or a more suggestive tone containing nudity or sexual situations, you may not be able to get your image printed onto a case through this company.  So that is the only blemish on what was otherwise an awesome experience doing business with Uncommon.  The cases are $40 + shipping and your art simply has to be at least 2000×2000 pixels.  The rest is up to you.

Well it is Christmas again and that means an epic Christmas card!  This year was a pretty crazy card with all sorts of inserts and wildness.  Sara and I did the photography and of course, the rest is the result of my madness.  Enjoy!

If you poke around FFFFound or visit a lot of artsy fartsy blogs, you will undoubtedly find a variety of “random text on background” images.  Personally, I think they are lame as hell.  Do you hate them too?  They are everywhere these days and are usually attached to some hipster nonsense.  Shallow empty phrases on meaningless backgrounds to accent their materialistic hollow lives.  Good times.  They are the “Successories” for the new generation of idiots, but instead of horribly cheesy corporate motivational art, it is just dumb.

So LK and I are chillin’ here at the command center and I decided we needed to scheme up some T-shirts.  Being that we are lazy and stupid, we thought drawing black and white designs with a mouse in photoshop would be the best way to go about this.  Here are some of the results.  The “I MEAN BUSINESS.” dude in color is nice because I re-drew it on my new cintiq 21UX.  But you can see the original for the full comedy magic.  So far, we have decided to print the “Real Talk” design as a shirt since a few people have requested it and it is just stupid enough to be fun to wear.  We might make the “I MEAN BUSINESS.” design as well.  We shall see.

Notes from the creator:
This was shot at the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium in Japan.
The music is “Please don’t go” by Barcelona.
The main tank called the “Kuroshio Sea” holds 7,500-cubic meters (1,981,290 gallons) of water and features the world’s second largest acrylic glass panel, measuring 8.2 meters by 22.5 meters with a thickness of 60 centimeters. Whale sharks and manta rays are kept amongst many other fish species in the main tank.
This was shot using a Canon 5DMKII with a 28-135mm lens.

Let me preface this by saying I am rambling a bit below.  It is 4:42 a.m. and I am about to pass out.  Enjoy.

I am in business in the very unfortunate music industry right now.  The internet in all of its connected glory has torn the bottom out of most traditional business models and left everyone wondering what to do.  We can’t sell music as fast as it is pirated and stolen, but we are taking what little we can get from those charitable or blissfully unaware enough to buy it in 2009.  It is simply a means to sell tangible goods now, tickets, merchandise, etc.  The music has become the advertising and not the product.  In my opinion, as infrastructure spreads to rural communities in the U.S. and the general public becomes more and more web-savy, the tide of pirated music will reach a plateau resulting in it being entirely free.

The RIAA can try to bully people with absurd $1.9 million dollar fines all they want… no one cares.  In fact, I bet after seeing that article, more people uploaded to torrents and file sharing sites in defiance of the stupidity of the RIAA and the courts.  You are never going to get the public to feel sorry for a bloated label executive who is being stolen from as he pouts from the window of his Bentley.

Stealing music/software/movies/ebooks/etc. is so easy and wide spread because it is effortless and victimless in the eyes of most people.  If something is infinite, as digital media is, how can it be stealing when what you took is still where you stole it from but also in your pocket?  What is the difference?  Sure doesn’t feel like stealing.  The only reason you know I stole it is because it is in my pocket, but it is everywhere else at the same time for anyone else to take.  As a society we have not been faced with the philosophical question of stealing from an infinite source until the internet came about.  This is new territory in the history of man.  That is why everyone, including law makers, just sort of look at each other and shrug when confronted with the question of legalities with internet content.  It is also why I am not angry when the music my company puts out is being downloaded by people who didn’t buy it.  I don’t blame people for doing it at all.  It is not like any law could be enforced anyway.  Those crazy Russians will just throw it on some servers in siberia where no one is going to stop them and give everything away for free.

The fact is, the cumulative result of all this stealing is that people are losing their jobs.  Labels are shutting down which means distribution centers are laying people off and closing, retail stores are closing, bands are having to sign worse and worse deals in an attempt to get their music heard.  An entire multi-billion dollar industry is falling apart very rapidly.  The ease of recording music at home for free is putting recording studios and producers out of work and CD replication and printing plants are dead.  Once all of the physical production and retail places close, the music is strictly digital.  Once that occurs, all the strain of pirating falls on the digital distributors to compete with free music.  Prices get lower to do so, itunes all ready offers a variable pricing scale now where most music will be less than 99 cents per track in the future.  Bands and labels selling digital content on their own will price it even lower than itunes because they still get a better profit.  Once the majority of digital music is priced around the $0.30 a track mark, it starts to really feel like you aren’t stealing because the perceived value has dropped so low.  This will either level out or just lead to all music being free.

There is a new band every second debuting on the internet with music and they will have no way to get it out to the world as it is rapidly buried in a sea of the same.  The playing field is completely level in a game where no one wins.

I suspect that photography and design is headed in a similar direction when no one can fetch a dime for licensing since anybody can duplicate the shot with free photo-stock, minimal photoshop skills, or a cheap DSLR.  Or when “non-commercial” blogs are posting your work faster than you can track it down.  Plus just like music and video, high res still images are being pirated for free all over the place for download from well known artists and photographers.  Online photo labs don’t make sure it belongs to you.  They just print it, so there goes your print selling revenue.

Hardware gets cheaper and easier allowing more people access to professional results right out of the box for music, video and photography.  Software, well lets be honest about it, is free (just like stealing a car is technically free).  So for about $1000 for a cheap PC  you are ready to go.  There are endless free samples, sounds, brushes, actions, and tutorials for your new toys so with a bit of common sense, a total amateur can make some pretty nice stuff at least by the general public’s standards.  These people aren’t confident enough to charge money, and they shouldn’t be, but consumers see that the amateur quality level is good enough in some cases and will choose that free “decent” content over expensive “great” content.  This results in not only people’s work being downloaded for free, but people actually working for free.

And this is where the internet has delivered us.  We either choose to or are forced to work for free to make products that other people use for free.  I think there is a term for that, it is either called charity or slavery.  I can’t figure out which.

Fortunately (sarcasm), I own a record label and a design/printing studio and do photography in my free time.  Literally everything I do is in jeapordy due to the internet.  Yet all of it has thrived like never before due to the internet.  The cost of free exposure is quantified in the decreased value of your work.  The easier it is for people like me to create, present, and sell our content, the less it is worth.

I should have been a Veterinarian.

March 17th and the 5th of May are days I’d like to see removed from the calendar.  Lets go ahead and add them to the end of February so it can have the correct amount of days.  I always feel bad for that dude.  (yes February is a dude, his nickname is Chad and he dances at La Bare)  Holidays based exclusively on getting wasted at a theme restaurant all need to die in a fire.  Except of course June 9th for “Hexo Nona” a.k.a. “69 Day” where people congregate in massive crowds at Chuck-e-Cheeses and do black tar heroin while the robot band plays Usher’s “Make Love in this Club” on repeat for 24 hours and the crowd has a massive upside-down orgy.  I will leave you with a video of one of the annual performances.

Peep this trailer for Ong Bak 2.  The first one was pretty rad and pretty cheesy.  It appears they took a more serious route this time, a bit more gritty and cool.

Tonight’s UFC is pretty, Meh.  Seeing Rampage fight the Techno Viking aka Kieth Jardine will be sweet though.  I was looking at the fight card and saw that one of the dudes, Tamdan McCrory, is called “The Barn Cat”.  That is hilarious to me.  The other dudes are shit like “The Barbarian”, “The Immortal” or “The Lion”.  Dude is a mangy little cat in a barn that you’d toss a boot at and tell it to GTFO whilst milking your cow.  So we are going to have a little UFC get together as usual despite the boring fight card.  Maybe “The Barn Cat” will hack up a furball or piss on some hay and make everyone sick.

*Update:  UFC was actually very good despite the line-up.  Tons of great knock-outs made it way better than the last 5 UFCs.  I am bummed that Jardine lost because I think Evans can take out Rampage but Lyoto Machida would whoop Evans.  And I want to see Evans lose.  He reminds me of Omar Gooding in Jerry McGuire for some reason and it irritates me.

Earlier today I acted in a commercial for Aaron and David.  I got to be a redneck dude.  Not sure how it is going to come out since it was in a fairly busy part of town that looked nothing like a place where a redneck would be chillin’ outside cleaning a big gun relaxing.   There were also homeless squatters that had broken into the house we filmed infront of and had apparently been pissing or dumping piss in the dirt where I was sitting.  I had it all over my hands and wheels so I came immediately home and had Sara hose my chair off while I took an anti-bacterial shower.  Hopefully the commercial turns out good.  Once it is done I will be sure to post it here.