Cory Greenspan / Alan Doctorow ? The CAPTCHA Did it!

cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine

For today’s ds106 Daily Create, Got CAPTCHArt? the challenge was to make some art out of those crazy “prove you are a human” devices.

Captchas are not quite as easy to find any more with interesting words. I have some in my flickr from the grand old days when you got real jumbled words, and sometimes freaky combinations, including this unlikely combination of names

cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine

I wonder what happens when one puts Cory Doctorow with Alan Greenspan? I used the portrait of Doctorow in his office that Jonathan Worth made available (creative commons) in the For the Remix project.

Wikipedia has a public domain portrait of Greenspan, at a very similar pose- in front of bookshelves.

Eerie.

I brought both into Photoshop and resized Greenspan to overlap Doctorow (with the transparency on the layer low enough I could see both). I did a bit of distortion on Greenspan to get his face to match up to the shape of Doctorow. I then split Greenspan’s image in half down the nose, deleting the right side, and did some more warp work to line up the glasses and the nose of the two men. On Greenspan adjusted the saturation down and tinged him a bit to match the sepia tones of Doctorow.

Weird.

But they were reverse in order from the captcha, so I merged them into a layer, and flipped it horizontal.

They eerily merge! I put the captcha on top, with some transparency.

To make it complete, I found a quote from Greenspan

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value.

and one from Doctorow

Put simply, I want to treat my readers as partners and not crooks. There is no future in calling your most active promoters crooks.

I mixed and matched the sentences to put words in their mouths.

In the absence of the gold standard, I want to treat my readers as partners and not crooks. Put simply, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no future in calling your most active promoters crooks; and there is no safe store of value.

Are you scared now? DONT MESS WITH CAPTCHAS!

I might have nightmares of the irrational exuberance of a kid who is time-rich and cash-poor.