March 15, 2006
LC Toolbox #2: The Blogger's Awesome Person's Guide to Impressing Your Friends and Minimizing Your Acquaintances

chappelle_cross_full.jpg

Wow, look at that! Look, look, right there, up above! Why, it's me, Jean-Paul Tremblay, standing with genuine, honest-to-god famous person David Cross, and photographed for all the world to see.

That's some fucking posterity, right? The sort of posterity that can only come through posting this photo on Friendster, Flickr, and my personal space on MySpace. We awesome types put that shit up in all those media, because someone who consorts with celebrities is clearly stellar enough to show their lesser friends just what it is that makes this particular fellow here (me!) so goddamned great. In this case, it's all about proximity...to the star! (Let's not mention proximity to that obvious hanger-on next to him: That loser wishes he were as close to The Crossroad [as friends call him] as I am.)

This here's a degree of familiarity that shows one isn't just a conventional starfucker, but a straight-shooting celeb-consorter. A friend. A brother-in-famous-arms. And it's important to not distract your acquaintances or peers or friends with cluttersome non-celebrities.

That's where a handy knowledge of Adobe Photoshop and the specifics of image-doctoring come in. (I use Adobe Creative Suite 2 because it's piracy-proof. Take that, you license-stealing BitTorrent users!)

(Continued after the jump.)













chappelle_cross_cut1.jpg OK, good thing we got that jump out of the way, and you made it this far. And now for the lesson.

First, get to know the cropping tool. Most image-editing applications have this sort of apparatus, and if you want to get ahead in the realm of showing off your star-partying chops, you'll need to familiarize yourself with the ins and outs of removing non-celebrities from your photos.

In this case, I removed the annoying black fellow who kept popping into conversations around the room saying, "I'm Rick Jameson, bitch!" (I assumed it was a pretentious Frederick Jameson reference; social climbers can be so pretentious.) I don't know his name, but get a good look at him above, because that's the last you'll see of that guy in the course of this particular lesson plan.

chappelle_cross_cut2.jpg Next, make sure you're well-versed in the various brushes available to you. You'll need them to remove additional hangers-on, such as the curly-haired idiot in the beret who somehow managed to squeeze the back of his head into my moment of glory with The Crossroad. It's like he heard the photographer asking, "Hey, David, smile! Let's get this on film!" and knew that this was his moment to finagle his ugly neck and mini-mullet into the shot.

Well, look over here on the left. By matching the brush's paint color with that of the dark, shady background behind David, and delicately skirting the top of Cross' shoulder, I've certainly showed the mysterious El Beret Assholia a thing or two about the perils of working your way into the limelight. And this particular fucker's been removed — for posterity.

chappelle_cross_cut3.jpg So, here we are. Me and The Crossroad. As you can see, I also made usage of the lasso tool and various distortion filters to better convey my newfound cheery demeanor. It's like it's just me and David, and he's just gotten his drink from the server in the jean jacket next to him, and he's turning back to face me, but I've just said something really fucking funny, and he's laughing at it, he's clutching his drink, he's eagerly waiting for me to deliver another great one-liner...

We're buddies, Dave and I. No, you know what? We're more than that. We're friendsters. Which is where you can find us trading jokes and LOLing all day long, losers.

Because that's one thing I'm not: a loser.

Posted in a Desperate fashion.

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jean-paul tremblayJean-Paul Tremblay written-ed, directed and co-produced a bunch of so-called "comedy" and "video" content, is notoriously competitive, and nonetheless settles for bottom-tier tokenism. Repped by John Herndon at Grape Dope Entertainment. Thrill jockey!
matt haberMatt Haber has written for The New York Times, Esquire, and The New York Observer. He is not allergic to pet dander and can do "ethnic" accents if the part calls for it. He is repped by Candy Addams at Entertainment 4-Every-1. Feeling special?
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