Last month, Chris “powerpig” McVeigh uploaded this image to his flickr account:
Yes, this is Darth Vader riding a chipmunk. In the days of yore, one would say that the image was edited, tampered with, or fake. Today, we say that it has been photoshopped (or shopped). This goes a long way to show how iconic Adobe’s software has become. I still remember the early days of Photoshop 6.0, when the splash screen still showing the 33 authors and 14 patents of the software.
Except that this image is not photoshopped. Chris McVeigh uploaded a video a short while later to explain this fact:
I understand that my chipmunk photography can seem unbelievable at times, and I’m used to getting questions such as “How did you do that?” and “Is it all Photoshop?”
As this video will show, it’s all happening right there in front of the camera. I get no satisfaction out of a composited photo—the challenge for me is to capture the chipmunk engaged in a real and rather extraordinary situation.
The challenge. If you’re in my generation, you’ve been in school at a time when only the nerdy computer users ever managed to print the papers they handed in. And other people looked at them and said «wow, this is so cool, you must have used a computer» with a tinge of admiration in their voice—or was that fear? Back in the 90s, using a computer to print documents was surprising for a 14-year-old.
And now, the magic is gone. Kids look at you in disbelief when you suggest they write their paper, then go back to copy-pasting Wikipedia articles.
People used to be amazed when they saw an actual programmer. Software was some kind of magic resource that appeared in the bowels of huge mega-corporations with thousands of engineers and millions of dollars in budget. A few people had heard about shareware, yes, but those were the exception. When you showed people that you could program computers, they would all go «oooh» and «aaaah» and beautiful young girls would ask to have sex with you (or at least, that’s what the pictures in the pop-ups said).
That magic is gone as well, with the rise of the reclusive anti-social geek stereotype.
And yet… A few days ago, I was commuting in the Parisian subway. Next to every subway door, there’s a map like this one:
Sitting next to the door was a young girl with an HTC smartphone I did not recognize. Her head was literally inches from the map on the door, at a perfect reading distance. And yet, she fumbled around the cell phone interface and launched a subway map application that, for all practical purposes, was just an on-screen version of the map next to her. And then, she fingered the screen some more to scroll her current position into view.
Such a reliance on magic technology can only mean one thing — the geeks have won.
Hi. I'm Victor Nicollet,
Well, I still think computer programmers are sexy. Don’t I qualify?
The geeks might have won but the alphas are still signing the checks.
To be exact, the people signing the checks are still, mostly, alphas. There’s a lot of alphas out there who sign less checks than the average geek.
Or it might simply be because we hate spending money