unripe

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To understand the original masthead you have to know how “Unripe” was born. Back during the height of the internet bubble, I read about how people were rushing to buy internet domain names that were dictionary words. By the time I finally got around to doing this myself, all the words were gone, except for “unripe”.  It was the last word picked. No one wanted it because “unripe” is a totally useless word, as far as Internet domains go. I bought it and it took 4 years for a use to come.

Finally the idea to publish obscure cartoons that had to ripen in the mind of the reader was suggested to me, I think as a joke. Such an approach would have to violate every known rule of humor. The challenge was to still try to be funny while breaking the rules.  I wish now the joke had to do with unripe wine vintages, or something like that. 

When it came time for the masthead I thought of the Droste Effect. This is an image that contains itself. This recursive process is a lot like the concept of thinking (ripening) and all that Hofstadter strange loop stuff. Of course, my first attempt to create the Droste style image failed miserably. The approach was to put the image on 2 mirror sites that referenced each other (well, the effect works with real mirrors). Finally, I had to resort to trial and error, with is probably the traditional method.   If you are wondering what the image is, those are supposed to be cartoons floating in a serial/cereal bowl (bad pun intended).  Droste is named after Droste Cacao. They used the effect on their packaging. See the link for a proper example of the Droste Effect. -Korba              http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droste_effect