The Afternoon Tea Break Art Critic.
Back in the days before Picasa, Flickr, and even the dreaded Google Image Search made things a little too easy for anyone to source an appropriate image to accompany a block of otherwise unillustrated text on the Internet, there was a Game. Less a "point-and-click" affair, it was more a "point-and-laugh" indulgence. On the much-missed NTK blog (http://www.ntk.net) the Game became highly specialised, with the BBC website's often unintentionally hilarious "clipart-of-doom" selections a regular source of competitive amusement. The Millennium Bug coverage (1999-2000) was - naturally enough - a highpoint of the era, and bonus scores went through the roof, as contributers found increasingly outlandish examples of hastily cobbled-together, over-pixellated .GIFs used to embellish "nightmare scenario" news stories, solely designed to make readers shit their pants through fear, all generated courtesy of unwarranted speculation and misinformation doled out by alarmist hacks with deadlines to meet, but bugger all copy.
Time has moved on, and things (generally) are a little slicker all round, so it's always a pleasure to stumble across a blast from the past, however unlikely the source. In this case, it's the following illustration, used to portray the Conficker worm, and one of its variants:
Source: http://www.ereads.com/2009/03/doomsday-worm-dud-but-chinese-version.html (artist unknown).
I'm not even sure where to start with an attempted deconstruction of this sadly unattributed beauty. Ignoring the blatant "Yellow Peril" overtones of a Chinese-influenced dragon used to represent a worm, there's the fact that it appears to be attached by a cable to a workstation from the late 1980s. So that kind of rules out the possibility of it being some kind of big, exotic USB "Tamagotchi"-style pet*. And why does its mouth resemble a SCART plug? F*ck knows...
Overall: Nil points.
Potential for being printed out as a template, and thrust under the nose of some poor tattoo artist by a delusional techie with more money than sense: Immense.
*Unlike... http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/usb-pet-rock.html (Kidding.)
Time has moved on, and things (generally) are a little slicker all round, so it's always a pleasure to stumble across a blast from the past, however unlikely the source. In this case, it's the following illustration, used to portray the Conficker worm, and one of its variants:
Source: http://www.ereads.com/2009/03/doomsday-worm-dud-but-chinese-version.html (artist unknown).
I'm not even sure where to start with an attempted deconstruction of this sadly unattributed beauty. Ignoring the blatant "Yellow Peril" overtones of a Chinese-influenced dragon used to represent a worm, there's the fact that it appears to be attached by a cable to a workstation from the late 1980s. So that kind of rules out the possibility of it being some kind of big, exotic USB "Tamagotchi"-style pet*. And why does its mouth resemble a SCART plug? F*ck knows...
Overall: Nil points.
Potential for being printed out as a template, and thrust under the nose of some poor tattoo artist by a delusional techie with more money than sense: Immense.
*Unlike... http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/usb-pet-rock.html (Kidding.)