created with gimp, then photoshop. Because gimp’s filters ROCK

Katie Sexton is a freelance developer, designer, and wearer of many hats. She currently works as Associate Publisher of One Story Magazine, and resident Guru of music&art sites big and small.
Her experience spans such fields as database creation/info culling, all the way to non-profit literary magazine circulation. Along the way she has used like so many stepping stones technologies such as: MySQL, perl, php, MSVB, Access, Open Office, DBD::Excel, Svg, and more.
At times, she has even been employed as copyeditor (wherein she found TWO class-A typos for a globally-distributed lit rag), copywriter (her so-called elegant copy could use some work), and even–writer.
You have stumbled upon her newly-conceived personal playground. You will find links to professional work, the occasional project, tutorials that should be easier to find on google, eventual explanations of why posting a tutorial would make it easier to find on google, warm-up doodles, and more.
Katie can be reached for all personal and professional inquiries at katie@phobo.us.
ONE LINE DRAWING
What is the deal with the “one line drawing” all over the art section? This would probably be the most frequently asked question about phobo.us, were explanatory questions routinely asked.

large-scale One Line Experiment via maedastudio.com
One line drawings are simply an art exercise as old as the hills, requiring the artist to create a complete picture without lifting the pen. From the point of view of one k. sexton, the one line drawing is the perfect warm up for the day: manual dexterity and creative visualization are both required to make a one-liner of any quality. The trickiest part of the one-line drawing would have to be maintaining proper perspective–lifting the pen allows the brain an additional vector to organize the transformation from 3->2d, giving the mind more space in which to “see” the compacting of the curves.
Is there something or someone you’d like to see done in one line? Send an email and you may be pleasantly surprised.

(more…)

Everyone’s favorite seminal protopunk rocker!

or, Everything I learned from Life, I Learned First from Cartoons


Today the Times presented us with an interesting dilemma: the person most to blame for your weight is not yourself, not your mother–but your friend.
The study followed thousands of family members, friends, and other relations for three decades, and tracked the yo-yoing weights. While your same-sex sibling can increase your risk of obesity a whopping 50%, this is nothing compared to the 150+% increase in the risk of obesity when a close friend becomes obese.
Now, before you get all dubious–these results come from another study entirely, relating not to socially-induced obesity but to heart health. So had the researchers been skewing the data for the three decades in which the subjects were tracked, I would be basically as impressed as I am with these statistics, due to the sheer power of foresight.
The best part about these results, is that even from miles away, you have the power to make your close friends fat: “It did not even matter if the friend was hundreds of miles away, the influence remained.” Now that’s a spooky action–from a distance!

"So guys, what are you in for?"
"Free breakfast"

I don’t know much about how reddit works (what is up with your lack of navigation for subdomains, guys?) but I have used it for a while, and I am very proud to say that yesterday, I was reddit’s most CONTROVERSIAL user.

Thanks to my friend Dan for the heads up!