Let’s start this post off with a solid “fuck you” to www.photobucket.com. For many bloggers during the Myspace years, Photobucket was the easiest free way to upload photos that you could link to from third party sites. However, Photobucket recently decided to do a ransom-ware style “pay us a small fee or you can’t link to your photos anymore” terms of service change that broke the image links to any website active before 2010. And, their small fee? $400 a month! Luckily, I only hosted my photos on Photobucket for the first 5 years of this blog (2005-2010), so, while daunting, the task of manually uploading all those photos to my own personal website was doable. It took some hard work, but now you can experience all the old www.isleyunruh.com classics like “Kristmas Movie-watchin’ Kumite” and “Unholy Black Metal and Hardcore Gangsta Rap–Strange Bedfellows” without seeing that bullshit Photobucket ransom-ware picture that had taken over my entire back-catalog of posts.
While going through and manually downloading (their bulk download button was suspiciously broken) my old Photobucket pictures, I came across a large number of Photoshop birthday cards. I used to make a silly little Photoshop birthday card for people’s birthdays whenever I got the chance (something I don’t do as much anymore due to not having nearly the amount of free time I used to have–and what time I do have is spent going through my old posts and fixing broken Photobucket links). So, today, in a farewell “fuck off” to Photobucket, here is a little collection of some of the birthday cards I’ve designed over the years.
The very first card I ever did was a simple screenshot of Conan the Barbarian…though I did spend a fair amount of time going through the scene frame by frame to find the point at which his eyes were the biggest:
Up next we we have a card I made for Chris. Chris liked Flex Mentallo before it was cool, so I thought he might appreciate a card from the comic:
Natalie didn’t actually like John Wayne, but she’s heard me do the voice enough that I’m sure this card wasn’t wasted on her:
For some reason I kept missing Leah’s birthday, so she got a couple of Twilight-themed (a book that she’s read more times than she would like to admit) belated birthday cards:
Honestly, they turned out pretty well even if my use of the smudge tool was a little primitive. Also, I swear I just googled all those Twilight birthday quotes instead of recalling them from memory:
I did catch Leah’s birthday one the actual day-of one year, but was stuck at work, so had to use MS paint to make her this card on the fly, featuring me, on my greatest birthday ever:
Leah’s husband Jon wanted in on the fun, so, considering his name was the right amount of syllables, I made him this Judas Priest inspired card:
Not that I was done with Twilight–my brother Silas looks just like Jacob from the movies, so I took the picture of him getting a Mortiis poster for Christmas and made it a bit more fitting:
Silas is also a metal head, so I made my fair share of metal-related cards for his birthdays, starting with this card featuring a Nifelheim poster I gave him:
However, my favorite metal card for Silas has to be this take on the classic Havohej Dethrone the Son of God album cover:
Of course, as fun as the metal cards were, trying to embarrass my brother on Facebook was more fun, starting with this adorable picture of him pretending to be a secret agent as a kid while sporting one of my mom’s classic haircuts:
Or this adorable picture of him pretending to be a batman as a kid while wearing his favorite robe+underwear combo and making the toughest face of all time:
I wasn’t above using his adult pictures for sources of embarrassment as well, like this picture of him in a pool that made him say “oh goddamnit, did you Photoshop a fucking treasure trail on me??”:
I kept up the rainbow theme for this card of Lase in her happy place:
Of course, Lase has a lot of happy place fantasies, including joining the X-Men:
And fighting back to back with Bruce Lee:
And being a pira…actually, for this one, I didn’t have any good ideas and just went with the picture she had of herself with a parrot on her shoulder, added a bad pun, and called it done:
Speaking of phoning it in, this one of my sister Kamielle was a little uninspired…basically she was dog-sitting like 5 dogs over her birthday weekend that year, and this was the best I could come up with:
This one I think I just wrote happy birthday on Kamielle’s Facebook itself, so I don’t know what kind of awful pun I came up with for this card:
Here is Kamielle in her favorite princess dress from back in the day:
I imagine this is exactly the face Kamielle would make if she were to win ANTM:
My dad isn’t on Facebook, but I even made him this film-snob themed card for the birthday I got him Fassbinder’s 16 hour epic film Berlin Alexanderplatz:
This was the first birthday card I made for Laura, showing her unleashing the flame of Anor from beneath her brassiere to stop a Balrog:
Sadly I was not at a computer for her next birthday (on account of us being busy horseback riding on a beach and stuff), but I managed to squeak in a quick one before the deadline this year, the deadline being when the new Game of Thrones episode started, of course:
That takes us up to August 2017…I know I’m missing a lot of cards, but they might just be lost for good since I didn’t see them on my facebook or Photobucket. I really don’t do these cards much anymore, but maybe I’ll bust out a card or two down the road…until then:
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