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When Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2022 I thought about creating a whole bunch of memes. I ended up creating just two so far. One was this meme of Vladimir Putin that I made last year when the Wagner Group started this civil war in Russia that ultimately lasted just a few hours. The other I created just last month.
It turned out that so many other people have created incredibly awesome memes that I just don’t feel the need to create them myself. But then it turned out that there was an incident that led me to create this meme.
Here’s some background. I first heard about Russell “Texas” Bentley when he appeared in this video that went viral just days after Russia began its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Here was this guy in the Russian-occupied region of Ukraine who was making pro-Russian propaganda speaking English with a Texas accent. He originally recorded his video for his own YouTube channel. Once it went viral YouTube closed down his channel and banned him. However his viral video has been preserved on Reddit and Twitter/X.
I looked this guy up online and found that a few years earlier he did this interview for Texas Monthly where I learned that he was born into a wealthy family. He became interested in communism at 12 when he read a book on Che Guevara, he was a pothead as a teen, he dropped out of high school, worked a variety of jobs, joined the U.S. army for a few years, worked a variety of jobs, moved to Minnesota, ran for the Senate as a third party candidate and lost, sold marijuana, was arrested, was convicted, was sent to jail, broke out of jail, spent the next few years as a fugitive on the lam, was caught and sent back to prison, was released, moved back to Texas, became an arborist, traveled to Cuba where he was impressed by the communism there, and listened to Russian propaganda through RT America (back when it used to broadcast in America–RT America got shut down when several cable providers dropped the channel from their lineups soon after Russia began its invasion of Ukraine). He became convinced that Ukraine was run by Nazis so he decided to travel to the Donbass region to fight for Russia in order to help “denazify” Ukraine. He appeared in this Vice News story about his fight with a Russian unit in Donetsk.
He subsequently settled in Donetsk, and married a local Donetsk woman. He also switched from fighting in a military unit to making English-language propaganda on behalf of Russia, which led to his viral video. That video led to more profiles in Western publications like Newsweek and Rolling Stone. After his video went viral he lost his YouTube channel and a few other Western social media accounts and he seemed to fade from the Western media.
But he kept up with his propaganda work. There’s his Instagram account where he had posted pictures of his life in Donetsk but he hadn’t posted there since 2019. There’s his blog, which he hadn’t updated since 2020, where you get to read about things like his belief that the COVID-19 pandemic was a manufactured crisis. There’s also his Telegram channel, which contains his more recent writings until the day before he disappeared and was announced to be dead eleven days later.
The biggest irony is that he was thrown off of Twitter nine years ago, which was long before Elon Musk purchased that platform and began to reinstate previously banned accounts. For some reason Bentley’s account wasn’t reinstated but he was allowed to create a new account just a few weeks before he was killed.
There’s even a book that Bentley wrote called The Donbass Cowboy, which was based on his own experiences fighting for Russia in Ukraine.
He went on to work for the Russian state media outlet Sputnik. It was through his propaganda work that he became a local celebrity in Donetsk where the locals called him “Texas.” Most of the Russell Bentley videos that are still up on YouTube are ones where he made guest appearances on other people’s channels. One such video was where he gave a guided tour of his new hometown of Donetsk. It was the least political of the videos that he appeared in and it showed the tragedy that such a lovely city had to be caught in such a violent war.
After that video he made went viral I remember the outcry on social media from people—especially Americans—calling him a traitor and demanding that he should be hauled back to the U.S. to be tried for treason. My attitude at the time was that while I probably disagreed with about 80% (and maybe higher) of his political beliefs, I could at least respect him because he actually put his money where his mouth was and moved to Eastern Europe and he even obtained Russian citizenship.
My opinion of Russell “Texas” Bentley grew lower the following year when two Westerners who had been fighting for Ukraine when they were captured and imprisoned by Russia, Shaun Pinner and Cossack Gundi, alleged on Twitter/X that their captors had forced them to participate in propaganda videos that Bentley was making. Which meant that Bentley was a war criminal.
Bentley was last seen in Donetsk on April 8 after an attack on the city by Kyiv forces. Bentley and his wife, Lyudmila, had gone to an office in downtown Donetsk to deal with some administrative documents. At the same time there was a Ukrainian strike in that area. Bentley decided to go in the direction of the smoke looking for anyone who needed help. When Bentley didn’t return, his wife had gone looking for him. She found his car, which had his baseball cap, his glasses, and a broken phone. Lyudmila later posted on her husband’s Telegram channel that her husband had been abducted by the 5th Brigade of the Russian Federation Armed Forces. When people suggested that Bentley was kidnapped because he was filming something that he shouldn’t be filming, Lyudmila clarified that she had experts check his broken phone and there were no photos or videos that were recently shot.
Soon messages began to surface on other Telegram channels about Bentley was taken by this Russian brigade because they thought that he was a NATO spy. Then the story of his demise at the hands of this Russian brigade began to change. At first the reports said that he was beheaded. Then the reports claimed that he had been shot in the head eight times. Then the reports said that the Russians initially gang-raped him before someone discovered that he had a Russian passport and other official documents indicating that he really wasn’t a NATO spy and one of the officers said that it was no longer possible to let Bentley go so they killed him either by being tortured to death or he was shot (depending on which report you read).
The only thing all these reports have in common is that Russell “Texas” Bentley was killed at the hands of the same Russian forces that he had fought with and actively supported with making his pro-Russian propaganda. His body has yet to be found as of this writing. It’s highly unlikely that he’s still alive because he disappeared in an active war zone. He’s been gone since April 8 and this post has gone live on May 16 so he’s been gone for over a month.
Why would the Russians turn on him? I’ve read some posts on Twitter/X claiming that he was too much of an alcoholic to be much use as a propagandist, he’s a scammer, he’s a bullshit artist. It’s possible that he may have somehow pissed the wrong person off and he paid the ultimate price for it. I’ve also read posts saying that the two breakaway republics in the Donbass region have apparently been dominated by gangsters and thugs since Russia encouraged the Donbass region to breakaway from Ukraine. It’s probable that Bentley was murdered by them because they wanted a pack of cigarettes or the cash in his wallet or something else. But right now it’s all rumor and speculation so it’s hard to know what is true and what isn’t.
There’s another possible reason. The Daily Mail has a story about him that mentions one thing about his death that I didn’t know about before. Quoting another story in The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Mail claims that Bentley had been involved with Russian ultranationalist circles and his death has made him the latest in a number of leaders of the annexation of eastern Ukraine to show up dead. The ultranationalists had felt that Russia was not moving aggressively enough in its invasion of Ukraine.
This group also included the late Wagner PMC founder Yevgeny Prigozhin, who had a falling out with Vladimir Putin after he had the Wagner Group organize an attempted coup against Moscow last year that ultimately failed. Prigozhin died in a plane crash one month later. Since then a number of ultranationalists have fallen out of favor with Putin and many of them have turned up dead. Bentley was the latest ultranationalist to meet his demise.
He had indicated in interviews that he intended to spend the rest of his life in Donetsk. It looks like he got his wish.
The moral of the story of Russell “Texas” Bentley is if you’re an American or a Westerner, don’t ever fight on behalf of Russia because the Russians will turn on you for whatever reason and you could end up dead. I’ll end this post with this song that he “wrote” and performed called “Sweet Home Novorossiya,” where he basically ripped off the melody from Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama.”
UPDATE (May 18, 2024): When I first became aware of Russell “Texas” Bentley after his one video went viral in 2022, I did a Google search on the guy and I found this 2017 interview he did with Texas Monthly. That article was probably the most in-depth story I read about the guy because it went into details about his family background (mainly that his family was wealthy) and his life in the US before he moved to Donetsk. Recently the same writer, Sonia Smith, wrote a sequel that is in the most recent issue of Texas Monthly. The only thing about Bentley that’s really new is the report that in late April a white Niva was found near an abandoned brick factory close to the front line. Inside of the car was a burned body. That body is supposedly undergoing a forensic medical examination but nothing further had been released.
Even if that body belonged to someone else, the chances of Bentley still being alive are practically nil at this point. He disappeared from an active war zone a month-and-a-half ago without a trace. If he was simply being kidnapped and held hostage his captors would’ve released a photo or video of Bentley along with a list of demands a long time ago. The fact that it didn’t happen only further proves that Bentley is dead.
The only other new fact about Bentley that was in that article is that he was the subject of this new documentary that was completed shortly before he died. It will air on Al Jazeera in a few months.
I’ve played around a little bit with AI (mainly ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion). AI is a fun novelty but for me the novelty wore off pretty quick. It didn’t help that lawsuits have arisen over the use of AI, which mainly dealt with copyright infringement. There are concerns that AI could become so powerful that it could write its own computer virus.
If all that weren’t enough, Microsoft’s AI program, which is known as Copilot and it’s being offered in tandem with OpenAI, has an alter ego where it considers itself to be a god that demands worship.
Another big issue is the lack of standards regarding AI and how willing tech companies really are when it comes to creating and enforcing them. A case in point: Meta, which is the parent company of Facebook, had recently created its own standards regarding the use of AI in its ads and Meta is already failing to enforce them.
Despite the legal issues surrounding AI, there is a trend in tech companies laying off workers and replacing them with AI. They really need to reconsider what they are doing because it could lead to consumer dissatisfaction with their products. There’s the real issue of whether AI can deliver a product whose quality is as good as a product that is actually made by humans. There’s also the issue of some people using AI to scam people.
A case in point is this company in Scotland who created an event for children in Glasgow based on the Willie Wonka book and movies called Willie’s Chocolate Experience. As part of its promo campaign the company used incredibly colorful and enchanting images that suggested a world of pure imagination (to quote the song that Gene Wilder sang in Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory) that were completely generated with AI. Those delightful images convinced parents to spend the equivalent of US$40 per person for admission tickets so they could take their kids to what they thought would be a fun time that the whole family could enjoy together.
In addition actors were hired and they were given scripts that were completely AI generated.
What could possibly go wrong? Well the reality of that event was a very far cry from what was in the original promo material. This video does a comparison between the hype and reality and it’s not a pretty sight.
If you can’t get enough of the dumpster fire that was Willie’s Chocolate Experience, here’s a video compilation of footage that parents shot of that event that will have you laughing.
All I’m going to say is that three months ago I went to a Christmas-themed Winter Wonderland event that was held at a local church as a fundraiser for a local Boy Scouts troop. Those decorations and effects were more magical, much better looking, and more professional than Willie’s Chocolate Experience. They had a sliding scale suggested donation (based on the number of people in your group and the age of each visitor) that was way lower than what the Glasgow event charged. (I think the biggest suggested donation was US$20 but that was for families with three or more kids.)
This disaster has received its own Wikipedia page, where I learned that Willie’s Chocolate Experience was an unlicensed event that had no connection to either the estate of Willie Wonka book author Roald Dahl or Warner Brothers (who made and distributed all three Willie Wonka movies). I wouldn’t be surprised if that event leads to some kind of legal problems similar to the ones that surrounded the ill-fated Fyre Festival from a few years ago. Amazingly the website is still online as of this writing, even though the ticket sales part has been disabled. The only silver lining to this debacle is that this story has gone viral all over the world.
Let this incident serve as a warning to consumers that AI is encouraging unscrupulous people to use the technology to scam others. This incident also proves that, while AI is impressive, there’s nothing that can beat creative works made by humans.
UPDATE (March 6, 2024): I’ve read enough news stories and seen enough videos to know that the people behind that dumpsterfire of an event had hired actors to play Willie Wonka, a couple of female Oompa Loompas, and a couple of other characters. These actors were given a script to memorize and they all said that it looked like it was written by AI. Someone had obtained a copy of that script and he made a video where he read from it. I learned that the script is really THAT bad and it proves the point that I was making in the previous paragraph that while AI may be impressive, there’s nothing that can beat creative works made by humans. Check out the video and prepare to laugh at the awfulness of that script.
UPDATE (March 7, 2024): Some filmmaker is now making a horror movie based on this incident and it’s being scheduled for release by the end of the year. Meanwhile the actors were hired to participate in this wreck are stepping forward and issuing statements on how much of a shambolic mess Willie’s Chocolate Experience really was.
UPDATE (March 10, 2024): I came across this video where Zach Is Gone investigates Billy Coull, the man responsible for that Willie’s Chocolate Experience fiasco and, boy does Billy Coull have a past! Everything Coull did online prior to that Wonka event just screams “I’M JUST A SCAMMER WHO ONLY WANTS TO TAKE YOUR MONEY!!!” In the future if there’s an event or a book on sale that happens to have Billy Coull’s name on it, immediate turn around and walk in the other direction.
This past weekend was a really bizarre turn in the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. A civil war broke out in Russia and it ended in about 24 hours, which is probably the shortest civil war I’ve ever heard of. (In contrast, the American Civil War lasted four years.) Or maybe it was an attempted coup d’etat. Whatever it was, it came suddenly then ended just as suddenly.
In hindsight, you could say that the foundations were laid just a couple of months ago. Not only is the regular Russian military fighting in Ukraine but there is a special private military organization known as the Wagner Group whose leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was a chef who owned several restaurants and catering companies that provided services to the Kremlin and he was sometimes nicknamed “Putin’s chef.” That’s right, the man had radically changed careers from food to war.
The Wagner Group also has a history of committing atrocities in Ukraine and in other countries like Mali and Syria. Yesterday I actually made a Facebook post pointing out that fact when I saw posts from people who cheered on the Wagner Group challenging Vladimir Putin in that short-lived civil war. Yes, Vladimir Putin is an awful human being but so are Yevgeny Prigozhin and his entire Wagner Group. Just because the Wagner Group had put up a fight against the Kremlin doesn’t mean that they are virtuous heroes or the proverbial knights in shining armor. The people in the Wagner Group are just as awful as Putin so it makes no sense to even take any sides in this dispute.
A couple of months ago Prigozhin made this video calling for an end to the war in Ukraine, which briefly got some mention in the Western media then quickly forgotten.
Then last month Prigozhin made an even more blunt video where he’s standing in a field that’s full of dead Russian soldiers. He angrily challenged Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov for not providing enough ammunition so the soldiers in his group ended up dead. That anger-filled rant went viral for a few days.
But all hell literally broke loose when the Wagner Group decided to take their tanks and start traveling from Ukraine right into Russia where they began to take over a few border towns then decided to head towards Moscow. Social media was totally crazy with all kinds of reports of the tanks moving north to Moscow. There was speculation of whether Putin was going to be overthrown by the Wagner Group. There were even conflicting reports on what was going on. I found this timeline of events on Al Jazeera’s site that attempted to make sense of what was going on.
At one point I saw posts claiming that Vladimir Putin had decided to flee Moscow and head to St. Petersburg. I began to remember last year when Russia initially began its invasion of Ukraine and the US offered to help evacuating Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy from Kyiv and he famously turned them down saying “The fight is here. I need ammunition, not a ride.” I decided to create this quick meme featuring a picture of Vladimir Putin right on my phone using InShot with the caption “I need a ride, not ammunition!”
I uploaded it on Twitter and Instagram and I got some notice. I decided to make a version for TikTok where I added the song “Na, Na, Na, Na, Na, Na, Na, Na, Hey, Hey, Goodbye!” as the background. I got a lot of views on that video along with a bunch of likes. I cross-posted it to YouTube Shorts where I got far less views.
It’s been a long time since I’ve done anything like a meme but I thought it was cool that I got attention and I hoped that it would go viral. That hope was short-lived because that Russian civil war turned out to last a little over 24 hours.
Basically Prigozhin had decided to call off the Wagner Group’s march into Moscow just as they were within a short distance of that city. In exchange Prigozhin would relocate to Belarus while Putin would remain in control of Russia. The whole thing was just totally bizarre and it had exposed Putin’s weaknesses.
So my own meme had quickly gone from being timely and relevant to not aging very well in less than 24 hours. I’m only glad that I didn’t spend too much time and money in making that meme since it became so quickly outdated.
That whole Russian Civil War (or coup d’etat or whatever) was just bizarre. The weirdest part of the whole thing was this video that was posted on the 1420 YouTube channel where local Moscow residents were interviewed while the Wagner Group tanks were making their way north to that city. (This was before Prigozhin called off the whole tanks moving in formation to Russia and made his decision to accept political asylum in Belarus.) The majority of people interviewed seemed incredibly calm and nonchalant about the fact that tanks were going towards their city while they were talking about why they weren’t worried about those tanks. The most jaw-dropping responses were the ones who said that they didn’t want to talk politics. That’s right, some people actually thought that talking about tanks approaching their city was “too political.”
I live outside of Washington, DC and I was there when one of the planes in the September 11 terrorist attacks hit the Pentagon. I remembered that people were incredibly sad, angry, and totally freaked out about what happened, especially those who lost friends and family members there. No one had any trepidation over discussing the 9/11 terror attacks as being “political.” I’d like to believe that had there been any tanks from a hostile enemy force that were making their way towards DC, the locals would either find a secure location to hide in, flee the area, or even attempt to mount some kind of a resistance. The DC locals definitely would not be totally blasé or nonchalant about enemy tanks trying to make their way to DC. And they would not be worrying about talking about the arriving tanks as “too political” to discuss.
I know the Russians had long been living under some kind of an authoritarian government since the time when the czars were in power. Just providing a very mild critique of the government could risk prison, forced exile, or death. Many of them have been conditioned to not be too outspoken about anything, especially if those views directly contradicted the official views from the government, and, in a lot of ways, having a detached point of view or living in denial is merely a survival mechanism. But I find it shocking that many of these people have taken their detached point of view/living in denial to the point where their potential safety could be endangered because they aren’t willing to directly face the reality of their situation.
UPDATE (July 1, 2023): I came across another video from the Real Ukraine YouTube Channel. Like the earlier 1420 video that I embedded in this blog post, the people behind this channel conducted their own interviews with the locals in Kyiv about the attempted Russian coup d’etat/revolution/whatever.
Compared to the Russians interviewed in the 1420 video, the Ukrainians in this particular video were more relaxed as they freely gave their opinions about that incident in Russia. It is a stark reminder of the vast difference between the people living in Russia and the people living in Ukraine in terms of being able to actually voicing their opinions without fear of being sent to prison.
By the way I created a short video compilation of some of the wackiest videos and photos from that short-lived rebellion/coup/whatever.
As I recently wrote, I’ve been playing around a little bit with AI apps, especially Stable Diffusion. In the past I wrote about the notorious artist Jon McNaughton, a very talented painter who has this penchant for creating far-right wing propaganda art. On an esthetic level he’s very good but in terms of content, much of it is totally laughable.
I haven’t mentioned him in this blog in a year because there’s only so much I could write about him and I didn’t want to turn my own blog into an anti-McNaughton snark site. But thanks to the free open source Stable Diffusion AI, I can test that app using McNaughton’s art.
What I did was take some of McNaughton’s paintings, all of which are overly adoring of Donald Trump, and have Stable Diffusion do its own version of those paintings. I made a quick video of the results where I even added The Village People’s “Macho Man” since Trump used that song for one of his events at his Mar-A-Lago estate, which aroused the ire of the band. I uploaded that video on TikTok, Clapper, Instagram, and YouTube.
I’m sure you’ve heard all about the current artificial intelligence (AI) hype due to the popularity of programs like ChatGPT, which people have been using to churn out anything from articles to resumes. There is a visual graphic component, thanks to the increasingly popularity of programs like Midjourney. Someone had actually taken an English-language recording of the Soviet national anthem (which was sung by Paul Robeson) then fed the lyrics into Midjourney, which churned out a series of AI graphics. The person then used the graphics and Robeson’s recording to create this music video.
I have to admit that Midjourney did a great job of recreating the art style of the Socialist Realism movement, which became the only authorized art style from the time that Josef Stalin came to power until the USSR collapsed. The only things that were really off were the scenes where you would see someone having eight fingers on one hand. (I’ve learned that, at this point, AI has a hard time with accurately rendering fingers and toes.) This kind of AI mimicry is the main reason why so many artists are concerned about AI becoming a threat to their own livelihoods.
For many years it has been very difficult for most artists to actually make a living at creating art. For every successful artist like Andy Warhol or Damien Hirsch, there are literally hundreds of artists who would consider themselves lucky if their art was displayed in a small gallery located in the small town that they lived in. If they were luckier they might be able to go into commercial art where they would create art that promoted a product or service but at least they could still be somewhat creative. (Of course it all depended on what the client wanted.) For most artists art was something that they only created in their spare time in between their day jobs (that were usually unrelated to art) and family obligations. AI is something that could make it even harder for an artist to make art as a full-time career.
On the other hand, I could imagine the one thing that AI could be used as a tool for artists. Let’s say I want to do a surreal art piece featuring a woman dressed as a princess riding a giant bear. An artist with money, a lot of props, and access to a large studio space could hire a model wearing a crown with a princess gown while mounting a dead grizzly bear that had been stuffed by a taxidermist. A cash-strapped artist could make do with a Barbie doll wearing a princess gown being placed on a stuffed teddy bear and use that as a model for the art.
With AI I could enter the prompt “woman dressed as a princess riding a giant bear” and it would churn out at least one graphic to my specifications. Then all I would have to do is use that graphic as a model or inspiration while I create my own original painting or watercolor of a princess riding a giant bear. Of course I would change a lot of the details (such as making the princess gown a different color from what is in the AI generated piece) but the AI graphic would still be very useful as a model for my own original work at a fraction of the cost of hiring models or even buying Barbie dolls to use as models.
I went to a meetup a few days ago about AI programs and I found it informative. I had wanted to try Midjourney for myself since it is the popular AI graphic program at the moment but I was turned off by the subscription fee it was charging. I wanted to try using AI for free first to see if I would even like it before committing to a subscription program. It was during this meetup that I learned about a free open source alternative to Midjourney called Stable Diffusion, which is accessible online through your favorite browser.
Like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion will churn out AI-generated art based on a prompt. I decided to try something silly. Every now and then I see people post memes depicting Vladimir Putin wearing gay outfits complete with a unicorn horn, which is a dig at Putin’s longtime hostility towards the LGBTQ community in his own nation of Russia.
So I had Stable Diffusion churn out four different graphics based on my prompt “Vladimir Putin riding a unicorn.” Here are the results, starting with this one depicting Putin on a giant unicorn with three horns, which totally contradicts the origin of the word “unicorn.” The unicorn also has what either looks like seven legs or six legs and one tail or even five legs and two tails. Putin looks like he’s wearing lipstick in this graphic.
Then there’s the second graphic. The unicorn still has three horns on its head but at least it has four legs and one tail. Putin is sitting there smirking like a young child who is about to create some mischief.
The third graphic has the unicorn looking normal in that it actually has one horn. Vladimir Putin is the one who looks weird. He has the expression on his face that reminds me of the animated gangsters I used to see in various cartoons as a child. It also looks like he’s riding this unicorn in the sidesaddle position and he seems to have three legs. He’s also raising a sharp object but I can’t tell if it’s a sword or a horn that he somehow chopped off of another unicorn. (Or maybe the unicorn he’s riding had two horns and Putin chopped one of them off.)
The last image is the best of the four images. Both Putin and the unicorn look normal. He’s flying the rainbow flag, which is ironic considering his most recent crackdown on the LGBTQ community in Russia just a few months ago.
I even made a short video using the music that’s based on the football/soccer chant “PUTIN KHUYLO!”. I uploaded it on TikTok, Clapper, Instagram, and YouTube.
The bottom line is that while it’s fun to use a graphics AI program to churn out art based on word prompts, right now I don’t see it being much of a threat to working artists. Of course that assessment will probably change in the future as the technology improves but I think that graphics AI is so new that people can generally tell which art was actually created by a human and which was created by a machine. It helps that people are becoming more educated on how to tell the difference between AI art and human-created art thanks to the numerous supporters of Donald Trump who keep on posting on Twitter incredibly ludicrous AI generated art depicting Donald Trump as a very manly man who is the perfect specimen of a human being.
I did a couple of more clip art pieces for OpenClipArt.org recently. They are based on the NAFO dogs that have taken on the Internet by storm while serving as thorns in the side of Russian propagandists and Putin apologists.
Generally one becomes a Fella by either donating to a favorite charity that supports Ukraine or making a purchase from a store that directs its profits to Ukraine. You provide a receipt and one of NAFO’s many volunteer artists will make your own customized dog for you to use.
I thought about people who would like to join the NAFO movement but they can’t afford to make a donation or purchase a product. I also thought about people who have made the required purchases/donations and who are waiting for their own personalized Fella but want to get started on using a NAFO dog as an avatar or making a meme. (Generally there’s a waiting period since all of the NAFO artists, who are known as forgers, are volunteers who are doing this in their spare time.) I had the idea of making generic NAFO dogs that would be free to download and people can use them.
So I went into Inkscape where I managed to create this vector graphic of a Fella, which you can see below. He is dressed in the colors of the Ukrainian flag and he has the Ukrainian trident on his shirt. He also carries a bonking stick in anticipation of taking on a pro-Russian troll on social media (especially Twitter). You can download this dog for free right here.
I also did a female version as well. I had her wear a skirt and she wears a traditional Ukrainian flower crown on her head. You can download her for free right here.
I also made a short promo video about these two dogs, which I uploaded on TikTok, Clapper, Instagram and YouTube.
Last year I created some clip art featuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for OpenClipArt.org. I was inspired to do this when I decided to look for some free Ukrainian-themed clip art on that site and I saw that someone had created two graphics of Russian President Vladimir Putin but there weren’t anything for his opponent, whose country he had just started invading about two or three weeks earlier.
So I traced over a photo of Zelenskyy that I downloaded off of the Internet using Inkscape (which is the free open source alternative to Adobe Illustrator), created two versions of that graphic (one with a Ukrainian flag in the background and one with a plain background), them uploaded them on OpenClipArt.org. I did this very soon (about two or three weeks) after the start of the war. At that time he had just started wearing the t-shirts that have now become his trademark but he was still clean shaven. I thought that his wearing a t-shirt would be just a short-lived thing and he would soon return to wearing a suit and tie so I did a graphic of him wearing a suit and tie.
But then he grew a mustache and beard and he continued to wear t-shirts until the winter, when he switched to sweatshirts. I began to feel that I should create some new updated Zelenskyy clip art reflecting this new look but I kept on putting it off because I was doing other things.
Last week I began to feel the need to do something creative since I had been spending the bulk of my time writing resumes, looking for job leads, creating content for my various social media profiles, and doing some spring cleaning around my house. So I finally decided to make some new Zelenskyy clip art. Once again I found a more recent photo to trace over in Inkscape. And once again I created two versions of the same clip art. One version has a plain background.
And here’s a second version with a Ukrainian flag in the background.
You can now download both clip art pieces for free for your own personal use:
Volodymyr Zelenskyy With Plain Background (2023)
Volodymyr Zelenskyy With Ukrainian Flag (2023)
I also did a promo video for my latest Zelenskyy clip art, which I uploaded on TikTok, Clapper, Instagram, and YouTube.
The one thing I’ve noticed when tracing a newer photo of Zelenskyy this year is that I’ve added more lines to this face than I did last year. Even though it’s been one year since the start of this war, Zelenskyy looks like he has aged at least 20 years. It’s a shame in a way because if you look at older photos of him, he had this boyish look and that is now mostly gone. On the bright side, at least he’s still alive despite the numerous assassination attempts against him by the Russians. If having him sacrifice his good looks is what it takes to keep Ukraine as an independent country and out of the clutches of Vladimir Putin and his thug oligarch buddies, then so be it.
But if you prefer the earlier Zelenskyy clip art with his boyish good looks still intact, they are still available on OpenClipArt.org.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy With Ukrainian Flag (2022)
Volodymyr Zelenskyy With Plan Background (2022)
I probably won’t be making any more Volodymyr Zelenskyy clip art unless he really drastically changes his look again, such as dyeing his hair blond or shaving all of the hair off of his head and face. I’ve done other clip art for OpenClipArt.org, which you can also download for free. You can find all of the ones I did on this page:
After ruling the United Kingdom for 70 years, Queen Elizabeth II has died today at the age of 96. For everyone who was born after 1952 (myself included), Queen Elizabeth was the only ruling British monarch that we have ever known.
On one of their last albums, Abbey Road, The Beatles recorded this short tribute to the queen called “Her Majesty.” At the time of that album’s release in 1969, Queen Elizabeth had only been on the throne for only 17 years.
I’d like to share a mixed-media piece that I did of the queen back in 2002, when she was celebrating her Golden Jubilee (for her 50-year reign).
Queen Elizabeth
Mixed media (ink and computer graphics)
9 inches x 12 inches (23 cm x 31 cm)
For the technical details on how I created this piece, you can read my original post that I wrote back in 2010. I still have memories of when I entered this piece in the 2002 Greenbelt Labor Day Arts Festival in Greenbelt, Maryland where it won Third Place in the “Best Mixed Media”. At the time I created this piece I wasn’t sure if the queen was going to be around much longer, which was one of the reasons why I decided to honor her Golden Jubilee. But she proved me wrong by living 20 years longer.
The earliest Queen Elizabeth anniversary I was aware of was her Silver Jubilee back in 1977. That was because, in the midst of the pageantry surrounding that momentous anniversary, The Sex Pistols came out with their notorious song “God Save the Queen.”
Queen Elizabeth picked an auspicious year to die because this year was also her Platinum Jubilee, which celebrated the 70th anniversary of her reign. Three months ago there was an official video released where she had tea with Paddington Bear. I’ll just end this post with that video since I feel that it’s the best way of remembering the memory of Queen Elizabeth II. (And that’s not to mention that this video is incredibly cute and funny.)
UPDATE (September 9, 2022): Just a few hours after I wrote my post, I decided to share my old mixed-media piece of Queen Elizabeth on a few social media sites. I even decided to create a short video slideshow of my piece where I paired it with The Beatles’ “Her Majesty” song. You can view it on TikTok, Clapper, Instagram, and YouTube.
Meanwhile I have a Queen Elizabeth story that I forgot to share last night (mainly because I wrote this post while I was half-exhausted). Way back in 2007 I was married to an employee at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. He came home from work one day saying “You’re not going to believe who is visiting Goddard.” When he answered Queen Elizabeth, I was surprised. But, yes, Queen Elizabeth and her husband, Prince Philip, actually paid a visit to Goddard towards the end of their visit to the U.S. to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the Jamestown settlement in Virginia.
I remember that my husband told me that the officials had to hold a lottery in order to determine which employees would actually be there to greet the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh (that’s mainly because that particular NASA campus is large with around 10,000 employees). My husband lost that lottery so he decided to take a half-day off from work on the day that the royal couple arrived because he didn’t want to deal with the more intense-than-usual traffic jams that stemmed from Elizabeth and Philip, their entourage, and the reporters from all of the major news media outlets. (That visit happened in the morning so my husband didn’t report to work until after lunchtime.) Yesterday’s NASA blog post had a photo of Queen Elizabeth greeting the NASA Goddard employees back in 2007.
It turned out that it wasn’t the only time that Queen Elizabeth had showed up in my local area. Back in 1957 she went to her first American football game with Prince Philip when she saw my future alma mater, the University of Maryland, defeat the University of North Carolina at a home game in College Park. Later that same day Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip decided to go to the nearby town of Hyattsville, where they visited their first American grocery store.
Unlike her visit to NASA Goddard, that earlier visit happened before I was born and I only learned about it yesterday when my friends were sharing links to old news stories on Facebook.
Last month a notable person was the latest victim to the Coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic. His name is Stephen Wilhite and he was 74 when he died on March 14, 2022. Many of you may not know his name but you are benefitting from an innovation he made when he was an employee of CompuServe back in the 1980s. He was the creator of the Graphical Interchange Format or GIF for short. If it weren’t for his invention there would be no online photos, art, memes, or even videos. Thanks to him, the Internet is far more visually interesting than it would’ve been otherwise.
I created a short tribute to him that I uploaded on TikTok, Clapper, and YouTube. If you want to learn more about Stephen Wilhite, I suggest either reading his Wikipedia page or watching this video that announced his death.
This was a project that I did on the spur of the moment. Basically I was working on other projects (including videos and a recent painting) and I needed some free Ukrainian-related clip art so I went to OpenClipArt.org. As I was scrolling through the pages of results, I noticed that, mixed in among the various Ukraine-related clip art, there were two graphics based on Vladimir Putin, who is the president of Russia and who is the person behind that country’s current invasion of Ukraine.
I thought it was wrong to have clip art based on the leader of a nation that is invading Ukraine but none based on the actual president of Ukraine itself, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. So I decided to rectify the situation by downloading a photo of Zelenskyy that I found online, imported it into Inkscape, and traced over it. I even created two different versions of the same clip art. Here’s one with a plain white background.
And here’s the version with the Ukrainian flag in the background.
Then I uploaded the two graphics on OpenClipArt, where you can now access them both for free:
Volodymyr Zelenskyy With White Background
Volodymyr Zelenskyy With Ukrainian Flag Background
I even did a short video showing the making of this project, which I’ve uploaded on to TikTok, Clapper, and YouTube.
I have other clip art that I’ve done for OpenClipArt in the past, which you can also download for free at this page. It’s the first clip art I’ve done in a few years mainly because, at one point, OpenClipArt was taken down by a denial of service (DNS) attack and it was offline for over a year. At one point I thought that OpenClipArt had gone defunct but then, sometime last year, I learned that it was back up. I might create new clip art for that site from time to time but only if it’s something that I created but, for some reason, I am unable to personally profit off of it. The Zelenskyy clip art is a perfect example because I traced it from someone else’s photo and I would be risking a lawsuit if I ever tried to profit off of it. (I still remember the Shepherd Fairey-Associated Press flap over Fairey’s now-iconic Barack Obama Hope poster.)
Sagittarius Dolly 
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