(Well, yes, a birthday penis for me to enjoy, so this posting isn’t suitable for kids or the sexually modest)
This year’s birthday card for me from my old friend Vadim Temkin (old friend, but one generation younger than me), a digital artist whose work has often been featured on this blog — playful, clever, homosexy, and with a style of its own. He creates well-designed characters that don’t pretend to fool the eye, but live in a parallel reality — in the case of this year’s card, what looks like a world of slickly made plastic figures, from which comes the smiling Dick, who is completely naked except for a white collar and black bow tie where his rather large head attaches to his body, giving him the appearance of a bobblehead doll. (I don’t think Bobblehead Dick was Vadim’s intention, but it’s what I see, so I’m going with it.)
Meanwhile, his penis is on display, except that it’s awkwardly attached to his body; I’ve had to fuzz it out for WordPress modesty, but it’s an imperfection in the figure, and an annoying one, because of course the bobblehead’s penis — Bobblehead Dick’s dick — was a significant part of Vadim’s gift to me. Among other things:
(#1) The penis and the penguins: the figure’s body, the sign, the balloons, and of course the colony of penguins
VT’s design notes. From Vadim in e-mail:
The newest AI can do excellent hands and feet (which they couldn’t do even a year ago). Penises — not so much. And I can’t blame AI. I tried to train models (the previous generation, not the one I used here). While erect penises with their variety still look more or less the same, the flaccid penises for AI (or E.T.) would look like multiple different species. The only [thing in] common is the place they are attached to. I collected a huge trove of visual materials and have done training a few times in the last two years. This particular image is directly from the newest Public Domain model (all the commercial ones are censored, of course), with the male bits trained by some volunteer (I usually do my stuff when all the processes are well-established and easy enough) and was not touched up at all.
Background: bobbleheads. From NOAD:
noun bobblehead (in full bobblehead doll): noun US a figurine with a disproportionately large head mounted on spring so that it bobs up and down, often made as a caricature of a famous person: the first 20,000 fans at Saturday’s game were given bobbleheads of his likeness | the former goalie was honored with a bobblehead doll.
And a previous VT birthday card. From 2022, using another one of my totem animals:
(#2) [AZ:] Woolly mammoth with two penguins; in a Freudian reading, my gigantic gay id is being critiqued by my chilly ego and super-ego; in another reading, two sweet twinks stand in awe of Biiig Arnold; you can probably think of other interpretations (sometimes a mammoth is just a mammoth)
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