Hi, I’m Bill. I’m a designer, illustrator and photographer, working on the web since 1997 and writing online since 2001. I’ve had a pretty varied career, including contractor, print designer, game artist, webmaster, consultant, design director, head of my own small studio, Creative Director, and adjunct professor. I graduated from MICA at the exact moment paste-up and rubylith gave way to Quark, which meant I was trained in the old ways and the new.
In 2001, I looked around and saw that other folks were starting weblogs, and I decided to give it a try. For the first couple of years I coded and posted everything by hand, uploading via FTP, because I didn’t have database or CGI access on the server I was using. In the middle of March 2005, on or about the fourth birthday of this weblog, I bought a domain and hosting plan and switched over to Moveable Type to maintain the site. After searching for an available domain name, I finally settled on Idiotking, a shortened version of one of my favorite Soul Coughing songs and also something separate from my namesake site, which I was using for commercial purposes at that time.
I used Movable Type for a couple of years until I got tired of the increasing complexity of redesigns and upkeep. In 2008, I migrated to WordPress in search of more flexibility and ease of use.
This weblog is a dinosaur in the age of Facebook and Twitter, but the purpose for this site hasn’t changed since the day I started writing it. The whole point was to have a single place to keep all of my writing, pictures, and links instead of spreading them out across different sites, so this remains the best place to find me.
My wife, daughter and I live outside Baltimore in an ex-doctor’s office/housewith a hillbilly cat two cats, an insane dog and a truckload of plaster dust. I’ve been brewing beer for about eight years now, and while I’m by no means an expert, I can brew a pretty decent IPA. I’ve owned two International Harvester Scouts over the course of twenty years. My current Scout is ugly now but is being slowly restored as time and money permit.
I’ve had a goatee since 1997 and a full beard since 2015; my chin has not seen sunlight since the Clinton administration. Streak broken; I shaved everything off after chemo in December 2017.
I hate Pearl Jam.
I drove a tow truck to high school.
I performed on stage in 1987 at Carnegie Hall in a tuxedo and checkerboard Vans.
Well, that fucking blows. Amazon is announcing all kinds of cuts across the board, and one of them affects a site I used to use quite regularly: Digital Photography Review was bought by Amazon back in 2008 and has an incredible archive of detailed reviews spanning 25 years. They will be shutting down, offering the archive for a short while, and then…?
I remember when it was a viable business model to start up your own review site, get a foothold on traffic, and make a living off of it. And companies would send stuff to you for free! So it goes.
The Verge: Best Printer 2023: just buy this Brother laser printer everyone has, it’s fine. I have a Brother printer in the same basic family; it scans, it prints. It’s a pain in the ass to connect to the wi-fi correctly. In the comment section of the post I found this on, a helpful user goes through the steps for setting up a fixed IP address and most crucially, setting up the printer correctly to pick that IP address up. I figured this out myself several years ago after wanting to throw the fucking thing out the window. Whatever happened to HP printers? they used to, um, just work.
This is a lovely rememberance of the hugely influential graphic designer/printmaker David Lance Goines, someone we studied in art school for both subjects. His was a singular visual voice, and he had a passion for typography (as most printmakers do).
Here’s how art is supposed to work: Someone writes a book. They write it with passion, with abandon, with honesty and lyricism and even a bit of recklessness. It is of their time, using the words of their time.
Readers respond to this recklessness, this abandon, this rawness, this timeliness. The only books that ever mattered to anyone are raw, are unbridled, are risky, and timely. Then, if a parent or teacher reads the book to a kid, and there’s a part that’s risky or controversial, discussions can be had. If the book is old, then the words and sentiments of that time can be taken into account.