Rex Paste - The joy of wallpaper.

Right click to save PNG with alpha.

Lazy annual post of this type - Pointy Tree Day Gift Tags!

As we all prepare for Annual Gluttony Day, and as we gird our collective loins for Seasonal Retail Atrocity Day, I think it's only proper that we keep in mind the real reason for the holidays: buying stuff for people and hoping they don't judge us for getting something they hate and thinking we're a terrible friend / sibling / parent / romantic partner / spouse / stalker.

So, now comes the time when everyone here at GO! Tower wish you and your family the most financially brutal Seasonal Retail Atrocity Day possible. To make the ordeal slightly less horrible to trudge through, please take comfort in the fact that it's stupid to buy cutesy tags to stick on all your Pointy Tree Day gifts, when we have tags right here for you that are better in every way than the maudlin crap at the store... except that you have to cut them apart yourself after you print them. Oh yeah, and you have to print them. But they're free, at least. Jeez, whattaya want for nothin'? A rubber biscuit?

Vaseline Hair Tonic - Dandruff shaming.

Hey, well-groomed citizens! If there's one thing worse for the consumer than waxy yellow buildup, it's a dry, flaky scalp! Do YOU know the state of YOUR scalp? Vaseline does, and the state of your scalp is not having enough Vaseilne gooped onto it! They don't even need to check.

This ad comes to us from the 1948 issue of the American Legion Magazine. Back then, advertisers weren't shy about scaring readers that they would lead a life of barren virginity unless they had a nice, shiny helmet of Devo hair that basically looked like a plastic hat. See for yourself!

Of course, Devo was using the plastic hair as a satire of 1950s conformity, brought to you by, among others, the good folks at Vaseline!

In all fairness, dandruff is still a turn off for anyone not living under a bridge. You know who I mean. That one guy who looks like Aqualung? What's his name? Chuck Bridge? I dunno. I know him when I see him. He always knocks over my trash cans, looking for nearly-empty bottles from Vaseline hair tonic. Beat it, Chuck! This is a Vitalis house, and don't you forget it! Scram!






Anyway, the guy in this ad is pretty boring, and not just because of the dandruff. The girl, however, could be used for a bunch of stuff. Let's have a bored intern pop her out of the background and drop her on a nice, transparent field of alpha channel. Randomly Chosen Intern, warm up your pen tool. You're going in! Readers, get your rude finger ready to right-click this lady onto your hard drive in three, two, one... Phil Are GO Graphic Blandishment and Photoshoppery Brigade, Deploy!!!!

Click it to big it, baby.

There she is. Lookin' good, toots. Tell you what, though. She'd also be useful with her thought balloon in place. Get on that shit, PAGGBPSB!

This thing ain't gonna click itself bigger, man.

Right on. Either version of her could be used to politely nag people about most anything, with some light Photoshopping, or just print her out and write her thoughts in with a pen. Here's a serving suggestion:

See? It's just that easy. You could have hours of fun nagging people with Vaseline Vicky... and possibly the prostate, if that's what you're into. If you are, I don't wanna hear about it.

You're welcome!

Imperial Whiskey - Pointy Tree Day Graphic GIfts

It's the Just-after-Thanksgiving season, citizens, and you know what that means! It's time to figure out what the hell your Pointy Tree Day card is going to look like. No, not the one you get from us (which, by the way, you can get completely for free like thisaway). Those are all locked, cocked, and ready to rock, so send us your address for a free Pointy Tree Day Card and nothing else.

So, yeah, you might be looking for something to help design your HannuChristmaKwaanzaDan card. We might can help with that. But first, here's a 1950 ad for Imperial. "What the eff is Imperial?" you're probably screaming at your laptop. "The frikkin' margiarine? That's dumb!", you probably continue shouting at the screen. Well, it's a whiskey, which is something you can figure out by squinting at the label on the bottle in the ad. Apparently, in 1950, their brand was something they felt safe in assuming everyone knew. Well, get with it, Imperial! Nobody's heard of....

https://www.thewhiskyexchange.com/b/40/imperial-single-malt-scotch-whisky

Oh. Wups. Uuh, well, anyway, here's the ad.

The cartoon men in this ad are super cranked about Imperial whiskey. Note that "cranked" could be interchangeable with "from buzzed-to-drunk". Oh, how those festive holiday revelers love to evangelize about Imperial whiskey to their neighbors and stuff. It's like they just found out about drinking, they're so excited. Why no ladies in the ad? Because Imperial was going after the super lucrative "Alternative Lifestyle" market in 1950? Heh, yeah. Nah. It's probably because in 1950, whiskey wasn't marketed to women.What did women drink? I dunno. Nectar, from the first posies of dawn, I guess.

Tell you what, though. If some industrious P.A.G. intern were to  pop these guys out of their background and delete the Whiskey (where convenient), you could maybe use these guys for YOUR Pointy Tree Day card, and you could make up whatever narrative you want to explain why these guys are doing their holiday prep work in "guys night out" style.

Hey! Look at that! One of our interns must be bucking for a promotion! These festive chaps are all PNG images on a transparent alpha background, so's you can easily drop them into whatever image you want. You think that was easy? I dunno, maybe it was. Ask the intern.

So maybe you're stuck for an idea what these guys are up to? Fine, we'll help you with that too, your majesty. They're getting together all the presents for their wives. Anything else???? Jeez!

Bisquick - Pancake it till you make it.

Breakfast. For some people, it's the first meal of the day. And yet, for millions of Americans, they run out the door without taking the time to have a healthy, well-rounded - oh fuck that. Look at this groovy picture of pancakes from The Seventies.

By the early The Eighties the airbrush would sweep across the advertising world as the unheralded messiah of lazy, cheesy commercial art. People would love the hell out of  airbrush art, and it would later come to typify The Eighties so much, that by The Nineties, it would be (thankfully) played out, and regarded as lame as a pair of parachute pants.

In 1984, if you carried this Trapper Keeper, you were the coolest kid in homeroom. By 1990, you were a big lame, and maybe still sitting in homeroom.

An airbrush, in the hands of a really skilled airbrusher, is an amazing wondertool. Like any other media (you know: oils, pencil, etc. Not "media" as in "television" or "newspapers"), a master will make it hard to tell what they used to create the artwork. You'll hear people say things like "That's colored pencil? You're kidding me!".

So, yeah, an airbrush is not inherently stupid. It's just a tool. However, like any other annoying fad, like autotune, lens flare, or sampling, if it makes things easier to do, you can rest assured it will be wildly overused by way too many people people who use it as their shortcut to being "a artist". If they couldn't be an artist without their favorite gimmick, they're not an artist. They're a lazy fraud and a hack. There will always be a market for work like this. So, yay for lazy hackfrauds.

What's the airbrush of today? Hmm. Pick one. Computers have made it pretty easy to do nearly anything by clicking a few keys. Photoshop, for example. What's that other thing where you can replace people's faces in video and create fake revenge porn? Something like that, probably.

Okay, rant complete.

What's with the airbrush talk, anyway? This 1976 breakfast illustration looks kind of like it started with some airbrush to get started, and then maybe some watercolor or guache over that. You can see some brush strokes in the details at the edge of the plate, for example. Then there's the texture of the pancakes, which looks a lot like colored pencil. See? A good artist can work with a number of different tools and make it hard to tell how they did it.

Look at that breakfast, all shiny and glistening, like it's covered in rich, delicious vinyl. I don't know what this style would be called, but it's very Seventies. Someone should probably harvest it, pop it over an alpha channel background and save it away for a rainy day. Maybe someone will have a The Seventies-themed pancake party (god help us all)?

Hey! Look what a randomly chosen P.A.G. Graphic Blandishment and Photoshoppery Brigade staffer has done! Popped this groovy breakfast out of the ad and onto a nice transparent layer and saved it off as a PNG! Neat! Thanks, P.A.G.G.B.P.B. staffer! As for the rest of the ultranet... you're welcome! Graphic Gift incoming!!!

Click for 1600px.

Mimeograph - Heeyyyyyy, huffin' copies!

Ow!!! My frikkin' pen tool! Okay, you better appreciate this. It's another ad from a 1935 issue of Fortune magazine - the daily news for the guy on the Monopoly cards.

Mimeographs. If you're Of A Certain Age, you'll recall that, before photochopiers were cheap,reliable, or even existed, if you wanted a duplicate of a document, you had a Mimeograph machine in your office. They printed in purple, for some reason (or, at least the one at my grammar school did), the copies came out really warm, and while they cooled, you could smell the solvent evaporating from the ink. When the teacher handed out new, uuh, "handouts", as she called them, you could whiff the solvent, and for some reason, most kids enjoyed that smell. It was probably benzine or something that slowly causes drain bamage or something. Anyway, muy broin forls foine..... guh.

So, yeah. Mimeograph.

Anyway, this ad is all about decorative frames and ornaments. Something like that could come in handy down the road. It had damn well BETTER, after all the selecting and pen tooling it took to extract the elements for harvesting. You're goddam welcome!

Click for 1600 px.

Pointy Tree Day Gift Tags... again!!!! Easy lazy jerk reposted existing content post .

Everybody loves those mornings when you don't have to scramble to try and think of something funny at six in the goddam a.m., am I right, people? Here are our free Pointy Tree Day gift tags for you to print and put on your gifts and probably explain to your baffled family! Hooray!

PTD gift tag FAQ:

Q: "Are these new ones?"
A: Nope! Sure aren't!

Q: "Aren't these the same ones from a couple of years ago, and probably a few years before that?"
A: Boy, are they! 100% completely recycled post-consumer content!

Q: "Isn't that kind of lazy?"
A: You bet! You're welcome
Q: "Uuh, I didn't thank you."
A: That's okay! You're welcome!
Q: "Are you even listening to me?"
A: Shut up! You're welcome!

U.S. Gypsum - She's impressed.

Aaaah, gypsum! Is there any part of your life that hasn't been improved with the miracle of gypsum? While you're working on that question, here's a free Graphic Gift of an impressed lady!

Yep, she's blown away by the smoothness of her new walls, since they're not plaster applied to a wooden lath substrate with a trowel. Wow! Such dirty talk for so early in the morning!

Anyway, she's pretty funny. She could probably be a nice addition to your ever-growing Graphic Gift collection on your hard drive of choice. Howzabout we pop her out of her ad and give her an alpha channel background?

Click for 1600 px PNG.

Yeah, there we go. She could be impressed with just about anything you care to position her next to. With her original word bubble in place, she could even deliver a compliment to a particularly deft bit of public grace. See?

So, we'll also need to have a version of her with her "smooth" in place...

Click for 1600 px PNG.

There. Oh, she could have ever such wonderful adventures in your Graphic Blandishment application of choice. What will you do with her?

Honor House Products - Records your voice at home!

You might think, at first glance, that this record recorder was made by Hohner, the famous musical instrument company, but nope, there's no "H". It's "Honor". Also, there's a "House" after it, so, really "Hohner" doesn't look much like "Honor House" at all, really.

Anyway, yeah, recording records at home  sounds kind of fun, if you're stuck in 1964 and there's three channels on your TV. But just like your inkjet printer, they could give you the device for free and still make money off of all the ink / blank records you'll be buying over the next three years until the thing breaks.

I have a bunch of old radio recordings downloaded from Archive.org, and I now have to wonder how many of them still exist thanks to nerdy people with home record recorders like this one, sitting next to their radio, with the mic' shoved up against the speaker. Plenty of those old radio shows definitely sound like they were recorded not from an original broadcast master, but rather from an inexpensive microphone inside a plastic bag stuffed into a dead raccoon... shoved up against the speaker.

Anyway again, hey, clip art lady! She has a sassy attitude and deserves to sass around on your hard drive for a rainy day. Here you go. I need another coffee you're welcome or whatever grumble grumble.

Karate - Demolish anybody!

In 1974, Hot Rod magazine chose to offer to pretty much anyone with  a stamp the secrets of complete violence and personal demolition. A reckless decision, I think you'll agree.

Wow. We can't have this kind of power fall into the hands of just anybody, can we? I mean, what would the world be like if every man became aware of the destructive forces they already possess?

You hear that? "Demolish anybody"! What are you waiting for? You've got lots of demolishing to do!

And, then there's the national nightmare of guys scoring with any woman at will. What kind of dystopian hellscape were Hot Rod magazine and Universal Self Defense trying to create?

Click for 1600px PNG with alpha channel background.

If the dystopian hellscape on offer in this ad sounds like your kind of dystopian hellscape, there's good news! The Phil Are GO! Graphic Blandishment and Photoshoppery Brigade have whipped up a new T-shirt design from the art in today's ad. It's up at our Spreadshirt shop right now. Loads of  color options available, too. Just imagine all the cool fights you can have while wearing this shirt...

https://shop.spreadshirt.com/PhilAreGo/1012335010?q=I1012335010&noCache=true

That's right! He's doing the famous Dynamite Punch, right in your face! Yeah! Either nobody will mess with you, or everyone will mess with you. Don't you want to find out? And don't forget about the babes you'll score with. We can't promise you that, but we totally promise you that.

You're welcome!!!

Couple clip arts - The deadly art of persuasion.

These three little ads come from the dirt-cheap-to-buy-space-and-claims-are-never-verified section way at the back of the September 1957 issue of Popular Science. Can recycling their clip art make you richer, smarter, and more persuasive? Of course! But not really!! Let's get started!!!

You don't have to go back to icky boring school for losers to get English more good! Get yourself some learn, stupid! But at home! Do today! DOOOO! 

With this 1000x1000 px profile picture at the top left corner of your Popular Online Or Professional Communications Application, you'll have all the credibility of a person whose just whipped off their glasses to make a key point! What else are you gonna do? Go get some glasses and just remove them whenever you want? HAH! I'd like to see you try! Stop being a sucker and use this guy as your profile picture! ... IF you can handle all that credibility.

This version is a PNG clip art. As you know, "PNG" is an acronym for Probably No Goddam opacity on the background. That means that, apart from the black pixels, the image is transparent. Trust me, I just took off my glasses.

Do you know the secret to passing the civil service test? Ben Franklin knows. It's having big, chunky hands grafted onto your arms from a different drawing. The Franklin Institute is not government sponsored. There is a test for that, but they couldn't figure out how to pass it.

And now Ben can point at two things for you, with some other drawing's hands. What happened to Ben's real hands? He broke them off in the ass of the last jerk who asked him where his hands were, that's what!!! Get with it, turkey! Right-click Ben Franklin and his borrowed maulers onto your hard drive for when you need to do some persuading with a transparent background in your image. He's a PNG, he's only made of black pixels, and he's gonna beat some truth into you with someone else's hands. He's Ben Franklin and he's comin' to your town!

Yeah! Now we're talking! Casting! Just look at that babe, all eager to get cast in some kind of movie and she'll do just about anything to get the part. if only there were some way she could convince you she's the right one for the - Wait. What? Casting plastic? Like molds and stuff? Sonofabitch.

Okay, fine. I guess we're to believe you can cast yourself a new plastic girlfriend. Just be sure to trim off the flash around her edges where the mold came together. Nothing ruins an intimate moment like scraping yourself on a poorly dressed mold seam.

Ooooh, yeah, baby. You know I like it when your white pixels are transparent. I wanna see right through to your alpha channel. Come over here and make yourself comfortable on my hard drive. Just let me right click you a little bit. Don't pay attention to those car pictures or other clip arts you might see in there. They mean nothing to me. Yeah, Uh huh. Right. Got it. Right. Yeah. Sigh...Oh for the love of god, shut up. This relationship is suffocating me already.

Miss Mopar - So tell me, is there a "Mister Mopar?"

"Mopar or no car" is something you may see on a bumper sticker, proudly worn on a Chrysler pickup truck from the Carter administration, covering one of the larger rust holes on the bumper. Let's see if Miss Mopar can get you to wear her proudly in a nice, safe corner of your hard drive?

Here's a fun fact from Wikpedia.

"The name derives from a combination of letters from the words 'MOtor' and 'PARts'."
Really, guys? That's how you came up with the name? Well, I'd call that "frame", which is an adjective that derives from a combination of letters from the words "FRikkin" and "laME".

Here's a funny thing I just noticed about the illustration in the ad. Look at the feet of Miss Mopar, and then look at the bottom of the stack of batteries that she's leaning on, all sultry-like. According to the rules of perspective, her feet are about six inches closer to us than the batteries are, yet her hands are squarely centered on the top battery. That sounds either really uncomfortable, or physically impossible.

That means it's up to us to put Miss Mopar in a more spatially plausible situation! Phil Are GO! Graphic Blandishment and Photoshoppery Brigade, ASSEMBLE!

Pen tool!... DEPLOY! Pkshow!
Create selection!.....Zam!
Copy.....Plowsh!
Paste on new layer!.... Thooom!

Here she is, all PNG'd on a trabsparent background, ready to lean on whatever you think would look best. Why not give her the right-click she deserves and save her for a rainy day? Be sure to click through to her full-size 1600 px version first, though.

But what could you use to replace that questionable stack of batteries? Oh, so many things. here are a few serving suggestions to get the ball rolling.

A very large Twinkie.

A slightly enlarged Tom Cruise, who's not sure he gets the joke.

See? It's easy! You're welcome!