Friday, January 03, 2020
2019: The year in Five-Minute Photoshop. Ah, how great is freelancing – I worked right up to the afternoon of Christmas Eve and am technically meant to be back at work now. But I am sneaking some time to do one of my favourite New Year rituals: collating all my stupid sweded imagery of 2019.
Here's the original Five-Minute Photoshop post, from March 2012. Then I decided to make it into an annual tradition: here's my round-up of 2013 in Five-Minute Photoshop, 2014 in Five-Minute Photoshop, 2015 in Five-Minute Photoshop, 2016 in Five-Minute Photoshop, 2017 in Five-Minute Photoshop and 2018 in Five-Minute Photoshop.
Now that Australia is actually on fire and Prime Minister Scott Morrison actually ignored the issue (he refused to meet with firefighting organisations that tried to warn him months ago that this would happen, and fucked off on holiday to Hawaii as Sydney suffocated in smoke haze, and then just offered unwanted handshakes rather than, you know, the money and resources needed to support firefighting efforts and disaster relief), the "this is fine" meme doesn't seem nearly as hyperbolic.
But anyway, this is a version I made after learning that there'd been an outbreak of bubonic plague in China. God, can you imagine how shithouse Morrison would be if there were a pandemic in Australia?
I don't know why people were talking about author Elizabeth Jolley on Twitter. Maybe they were misspelling her surname, but it inspired me to swede this pic of her in Angelina Jolie's famous 'leg dress' as "Elizabeth Jolie". Can you believe it only got three likes? Well of course you can; this is my unpopular sense of humour we are talking about.
In February, I left the room for five minutes and returned to find that Graham had somehow opened up a new Word doc and typed in it. I was so impressed that I made a jokey tweet that Graham was writing a novel – which got some minor likes. Kudos to the Microsoft Office socials team, they were happy to join in.
Of course, then I had to swede the cover of the novel. It's meant to look like a hipster-lit kind of cover, hence the all-type cover in Futura, and the millennial pink.
This is when I realised that while I feel like I have basically good taste and an okay sense for design, I just don't have that flair that sets apart an actual book cover designer, and if I ever self-publish, I should never design the cover myself as it will never look professional. It just looks like an okay amateur design.
In March I wrote an article for Guardian Australia about why people dislike the Shepard avocado, and it went viral (well, as viral as anything of mine ever goes). I personally like the Shepard; although it takes forever to ripen, it stays ripe and green for ages whereas the Hass avocado turns brown and slimy if you get distracted for five minutes. But this seemed to be an unpopular opinion, so I sweded this for all the Hass lovers out there:
It was really hard to get the colour gradient right – I ended up doing the WordArt in Word and then screencapping it and then cutting out the letters and pasting them in. I can't believe I wasted so much time on this.
After the article went up, I was quite excited to receive an email from Avocados Australia offering me a free tray of Hass avocados when they came back into season. To be honest I would have liked a free tray of Shepard avocados just as well, but as avocados are really expensive for someone on a freelance income, I replied most enthusiastically, but NOTHING! They never sent my avocados!
And then, the ultimate insult: I saw on social media somewhere (I forget if it was Twitter, Instagram or Facebook) another journalist showing off the tray of free avocados she had just received! I got really angry because as far as I know, she and the outlet she works for did not write anything about avocados that went viral, now did they?
Then after seeing this tweet:
I was legitimately so angry about this snub that I did not purchase avocados for a really long time. I've since caved, of course. I've also successfully raised two avocado plants from seeds, although they have been buffeted about by the heat, which has seared their tender leaves, and the fact one of them fell over and smashed its pot, and I found another pot but didn't have enough potting mix so I wonder if the roots are going to be okay.
Game of Thrones had its final season, and I left it too late to pitch a recap column anywhere, I ended up recapping each episode on my own sadly neglected site, The Look. This mashup of The Simpsons and Game of Thrones took me ages to do and I resented it a lot. Very tedious to find so many pics of Arya in the Hound era.
The recapping got to be really onerous labour by the end and I felt very resentful I was doing it for free, but people really seemed to like my recaps, and some of them were picked up by Medium, so I got heaps of readers. Also there were some Thrones Bros who liked to badger me and other non-male Thrones fans and reviewers. The one I made this meme about literally was called Dave.
I suppose it's safe to reveal that when I had to move house in the middle of the year, I turned to Witch Shit. On a logical level I know that witchcraft is nonsense, but if ritual soothes me and makes me feel more in control during a period of my life in which I was grieving the loss of my home of 14 years, then why not?
I really loved living in Carlton, so I cast a spell to help me find another home in the same area. The red dots on this map depict the locations in Carlton where I picked up stones. No logic to which ones; just whichever ones caught my eye as I was there. I called them my Stones of Carlton, and I reasoned to myself that when I charged them all under a full moon with the purpose of finding me a new home, gathered together they would form a grid within which my new home would be located.
Well, I am currently typing this from my new home in Carlton, 350m from my old home and less than a block from where I gathered one of the stones.
This is a subtle one. I was looking at the Twitter trending topics and saw "Pensioner Dental Plan", which of course made me think of The Simpsons. What a tragic Gen-Xer I am that my pop-culture references are basically The Simpsons and The Late Show.
Yes, it's the traditional Secret Film Critics Thread end-of-year drinks swede! I always look forward to these because it involves choosing one of the worst films of the year. This year the obvious frontrunner was Gemini Man.
One thing that irritated me in 2019 was that Pixlr Editor, my traditional sweding app, has binned the version I used in the past, whose interface was a lot like Photoshop, and has created this stupid new version that I find really unintuitive to use. Worst of all you can't use your own fonts; you have to use their deadshit fonts. This was the best option for the Gemini Man poster typeface.
One of my friends thought that Richard Watts (left) looks like a koala (right), so I sweded this as a joke.
Here's the original Five-Minute Photoshop post, from March 2012. Then I decided to make it into an annual tradition: here's my round-up of 2013 in Five-Minute Photoshop, 2014 in Five-Minute Photoshop, 2015 in Five-Minute Photoshop, 2016 in Five-Minute Photoshop, 2017 in Five-Minute Photoshop and 2018 in Five-Minute Photoshop.
Now that Australia is actually on fire and Prime Minister Scott Morrison actually ignored the issue (he refused to meet with firefighting organisations that tried to warn him months ago that this would happen, and fucked off on holiday to Hawaii as Sydney suffocated in smoke haze, and then just offered unwanted handshakes rather than, you know, the money and resources needed to support firefighting efforts and disaster relief), the "this is fine" meme doesn't seem nearly as hyperbolic.
But anyway, this is a version I made after learning that there'd been an outbreak of bubonic plague in China. God, can you imagine how shithouse Morrison would be if there were a pandemic in Australia?
I don't know why people were talking about author Elizabeth Jolley on Twitter. Maybe they were misspelling her surname, but it inspired me to swede this pic of her in Angelina Jolie's famous 'leg dress' as "Elizabeth Jolie". Can you believe it only got three likes? Well of course you can; this is my unpopular sense of humour we are talking about.
In February, I left the room for five minutes and returned to find that Graham had somehow opened up a new Word doc and typed in it. I was so impressed that I made a jokey tweet that Graham was writing a novel – which got some minor likes. Kudos to the Microsoft Office socials team, they were happy to join in.
— Microsoft Office (@Office) February 1, 2019
Of course, then I had to swede the cover of the novel. It's meant to look like a hipster-lit kind of cover, hence the all-type cover in Futura, and the millennial pink.
This is when I realised that while I feel like I have basically good taste and an okay sense for design, I just don't have that flair that sets apart an actual book cover designer, and if I ever self-publish, I should never design the cover myself as it will never look professional. It just looks like an okay amateur design.
In March I wrote an article for Guardian Australia about why people dislike the Shepard avocado, and it went viral (well, as viral as anything of mine ever goes). I personally like the Shepard; although it takes forever to ripen, it stays ripe and green for ages whereas the Hass avocado turns brown and slimy if you get distracted for five minutes. But this seemed to be an unpopular opinion, so I sweded this for all the Hass lovers out there:
It was really hard to get the colour gradient right – I ended up doing the WordArt in Word and then screencapping it and then cutting out the letters and pasting them in. I can't believe I wasted so much time on this.
After the article went up, I was quite excited to receive an email from Avocados Australia offering me a free tray of Hass avocados when they came back into season. To be honest I would have liked a free tray of Shepard avocados just as well, but as avocados are really expensive for someone on a freelance income, I replied most enthusiastically, but NOTHING! They never sent my avocados!
And then, the ultimate insult: I saw on social media somewhere (I forget if it was Twitter, Instagram or Facebook) another journalist showing off the tray of free avocados she had just received! I got really angry because as far as I know, she and the outlet she works for did not write anything about avocados that went viral, now did they?
Then after seeing this tweet:
I obliged:I demand a follow-up meme of Cersei wanting elephants except it’s you wanting avocados— Lisa (@lisaslifelately) May 8, 2019
I was legitimately so angry about this snub that I did not purchase avocados for a really long time. I've since caved, of course. I've also successfully raised two avocado plants from seeds, although they have been buffeted about by the heat, which has seared their tender leaves, and the fact one of them fell over and smashed its pot, and I found another pot but didn't have enough potting mix so I wonder if the roots are going to be okay.
Game of Thrones had its final season, and I left it too late to pitch a recap column anywhere, I ended up recapping each episode on my own sadly neglected site, The Look. This mashup of The Simpsons and Game of Thrones took me ages to do and I resented it a lot. Very tedious to find so many pics of Arya in the Hound era.
The recapping got to be really onerous labour by the end and I felt very resentful I was doing it for free, but people really seemed to like my recaps, and some of them were picked up by Medium, so I got heaps of readers. Also there were some Thrones Bros who liked to badger me and other non-male Thrones fans and reviewers. The one I made this meme about literally was called Dave.
I suppose it's safe to reveal that when I had to move house in the middle of the year, I turned to Witch Shit. On a logical level I know that witchcraft is nonsense, but if ritual soothes me and makes me feel more in control during a period of my life in which I was grieving the loss of my home of 14 years, then why not?
I really loved living in Carlton, so I cast a spell to help me find another home in the same area. The red dots on this map depict the locations in Carlton where I picked up stones. No logic to which ones; just whichever ones caught my eye as I was there. I called them my Stones of Carlton, and I reasoned to myself that when I charged them all under a full moon with the purpose of finding me a new home, gathered together they would form a grid within which my new home would be located.
Well, I am currently typing this from my new home in Carlton, 350m from my old home and less than a block from where I gathered one of the stones.
This is a subtle one. I was looking at the Twitter trending topics and saw "Pensioner Dental Plan", which of course made me think of The Simpsons. What a tragic Gen-Xer I am that my pop-culture references are basically The Simpsons and The Late Show.
Yes, it's the traditional Secret Film Critics Thread end-of-year drinks swede! I always look forward to these because it involves choosing one of the worst films of the year. This year the obvious frontrunner was Gemini Man.
One thing that irritated me in 2019 was that Pixlr Editor, my traditional sweding app, has binned the version I used in the past, whose interface was a lot like Photoshop, and has created this stupid new version that I find really unintuitive to use. Worst of all you can't use your own fonts; you have to use their deadshit fonts. This was the best option for the Gemini Man poster typeface.
One of my friends thought that Richard Watts (left) looks like a koala (right), so I sweded this as a joke.
