My application for Facebook…

So Facebook just rolled out an announcement for an upcoming feature that would provide answers to life’s questions. They’ve listed a number of unanswerable questions on their website like “What are women looking for in a relationship?” and “How did the Beatles reach their success?”

Posters are asked to include “Where relevant, cite and link to third-party sources such as Wikipedia.” Wikipedia! the golden source of all information that is reliable and correct. You all knew Scott Baio was the anti-christ right?

I’ve applied. Here’s the questions and answers I’ve submitted:

What are women looking for in a relationship?
Clearly all women are the same and are looking for the same things. The answer is this:

1 – Money
2 – Babies
3 – Driving Men Crazy.

Anything else is a lie. If you hear anything different on the subject, about how it is possible for women to want different things or that not all of them are the same, they are liars and trying to manipulate men into caring about them. See: Sex and the City.

What are men looking for in a relationship?
Men are all the same. They are looking for:

1 – Good Tits
2 – A great ass
3 – A woman who will please them sexually.

Just as all women are the same, all men are equally homogeneous. If they claim they are interested in anything other than football, they are trying to get laid. See: Men’s Health articles

Why is Facebook trying to take over the Internet?
Mark Zuckerburg is a sociopathic egotist. That is all. See: Wikipedia.

Think I’ll get an interview?

Jerk Magazine: Jan. 2009-March 2010

As my first full semester of graduate school was ending in December 2008, I heeded a call for staff members from Jerk Magazine. I wanted to test out my new skillz (yeah, I’ll use the z) in Search Engine Optimization and HTML/CSS and also get more of an opportunity to write, knowing that my next semester was relatively light in the writing department. I interviewed with Katie Allyn and other members of that semester’s hiring committee and I guess they loved me because they offered me the position of co-web editor with S.J. Velasquez (who now writes Religionisms).

In January 2009, S.J. and I were charged with moderating the Jerk Blog and uploading the content of the print issue to the Jerk Web site. Both used a Wordpress CMS, although the Jerk Blog is a simple Wordpress blog while the site, designed by the very talented Greg Laspina is actually hosted on GoDaddy.

The blog, boasting the Cutline Wordpress theme originally started as two to three blog posts per day by various S.U. students, including ourselves. I was tasked with approving Monday through Thursday posts and the other days of the week were covered by S.J. and our Editor at Large, Liam McCabe. The website hosted only content from the print issue and an occasional web exclusive.

That wasn’t enough. Continue Reading

Out the Other Ear

The summer before I started my first graduate degree, I was bored. Very bored. I was living with my parents for six weeks before the end of my “year off” I spent at SUNY Geneseo and the beginning of a brilliant new career as a journalist. The time was ripe for a political blog.

Starting one on my own didn’t seem so appealing, so I jumped on the bandwagon of a good friend, Marc at In One Ear, Out the Other. For a solid few months, until the strains of writing for class weighed too hard on my fingertips (and the election was over), Marc, Mike, Travis and I blogged about politics and culture, from Twilight to American entitlement. Serious posts concerning the future of journalism were decorated with absurd photos I found surfing the Internet. Marc affectionately referred to me as “The Gadfly” and categorized all my posts as such.

Unfortunately, In One Ear, Out the Other is somewhat defunct, but Mike recently commented on my facebook wall that he’d consider starting again. Maybe we will. I hear Marc is pretty bored in Alabama.

–Kate

Mr. Bubblehead Business Cards

I finally feel like a bona fide adult. I had business cards printed. They look just like my website, sort of.

I should probably explain my logo at this point. When I was a young and bored adolescent, sitting in my high school classes and fighting the urge to shoot spit balls into Eric Fritzen’s hair, I started drawing things–characters, actual people, weird swirly designs, etc.

Mr. Bubblehead dominated these drawings, even into college and graduate school (when I started fighting the urge to tweet during lectures). He’s been my good friend these past years I’ve been avoiding the real world so I thought “Hey, he’s cute. He’d make a good logo” and hence, Mr. Bubblehead went digital and is now on my business cards.

I intend to pass these cards out when I head out to the South by Southwest Interactive Festival with Andrew and Shay. We’re more excited than you can imagine. I’ll have entire post about that later and you can see the cards after the jump. Continue Reading

Movember

Previously, I had mentioned that I was conned into joining the iSchool Graduate Student Organization. One of the many events we sponsored was the Movember Day Gala. Movember is a movement that started in Australia to promote men’s health. Men do not shave their mustaches or facial hair for the entire month of November and we ended it with a gala. More information on Movember can be found here. The Daily Orange (the daily newspaper of Syracuse University) covered the Movember gala (with some slight factual errors) and the iSchool also wrote up a promo piece.

I designed the information posters to support the health of my bros using the official colors of Movember and some statistics I found about men’s health.

Continue Reading

iSGO event posters

One day, a friend of mine offered me a free lunch from King David’s, a Mediterranean restaurant in the fair city of Syracuse, if I would attend a meeting and vote for new officers of the iSchool Graduate Organization. Unfortunately I did not realize that no one was running for the position of Information Management representative. When it came time to announce the candidates, the aforementioned “friend” cleared his throat and looked directly at me, hence beginning my career on a student council, something I had managed to avoid throughout high school and college.

It wasn’t all bad. I got to play around with graphic design and make some event posters, of which I’ve included a small sample. I also learned that lunch is never free.

Continue Reading

Hello world!

I’m going to go with the Wordpress default on this one and say “Hello World!” This is my first post so I’ll explain a little about what I’m doing here. If you want my personal information, visit my bio page.

Since I have always loved writing and recently fell in love with graphic design, I’ve decided to start keeping a digital archive (ar CHive according to the wordpress tutorials I watched) of all my works in one place. Some of these posts will be reiterations of what I’ve written for Out the Other Ear and Jerk Magazine and you’ll be able to see them all by clicking on “Writing.” Some will be unpublished works.

I’ve also included random posters I’ve made for various organizations and other design work I’ve done. You can see those under “design” (see how user friendly I’m naming everything). If you click on blog, you’ll see ALL my posts, including the ones that don’t fit either category but are just my random musings. Resume has my resume, which should have the fun little apostrophe over the last e, but alas, I don’t want to spend that much time trying to figure out how to get an apostrophe (and yes, I’m aware that is not its real name).

Well, that’s all for now. Stay tuned for my awesome updates.

–Kate/Katie Punkin (whichever name you prefer)