I recently lost my salaried gig due to budget cuts.

Now I'm staring down the barrel of freelance employment and all the uncertainty of paychecks that that offers.

I live in Superior, WI, but will take most of my work from the VERY nearby town of Duluth, MN.

Duluth is one of the larger cities in Minnesota besides St. Paul and Minneapolis. Because of it's "small town, but not bumpkin" status, I need to figure out what to ask for an hourly rate for freelance work.

An example of the contrasts between Duluth and the Cities would be salary.

Duluth Designers $25 - $35k
Cities Designers $35 - $80k

What do you other freelancers ask, and what's your city like so I might compare and contrast?

I was trying to avoid American iconography when making a Democracy loves submission, but I liked this idea enough in my head that I set that aside long enough to create it.

I can't seem to get out of the American Iconographic mindset. This is probably too abstract a concept for me to nail down. Anyone else having a problem with this one?

a friend and I are trying to use iChat.

he has a regular email address, and I can only figure out how to add buddies with .mac accounts or AIM names.

He was able to add my name from a .com account to his buddy list, and has sent me a chat request, but I can't see it.

I found out how to send a chat request to him, but it says he is in another conference.

We can't figure out how to stop his "waiting for authorization" so I might try to contact him, as when he tries to contact me, I'm getting zero notification.

and I can find NO help with my googlde fu

For all those that have voted on bowler 2:



might I suggest Gobble?:

Lately, I've been noticing Wotto's designs pop up everywhere. Proof that Wotto isn't human, but a brand.

I figured this would be a good place to post all the Wotto brand sightings you see.

I found 3 this weekend. 2 in ads and 1 on a trailer dealers car lot.

This one in a western wear ad in Great Northern Monthly magazine:


This one was in a Kmart ad from sunday:


and this is the trailer I spotted this weekend:

The first time I saw a trailer for this movie, I wanted to fill anyone associated with it's pant's with molten lava.



then I saw it a second time, in a less annoying spot that had a little call back to shepard fairey's Andre the Giant OBEY campaign, with a chihuahua head and the word HEEL (keep in mind, that logo appearing at the beginning of the video posted above was not in the theatrical trailer).

I thought that was a clever touch and gave them credit for that.

Now I see that they've turned it into a major portion of the marketing campaign... and I've lost all faith in humanity all over again.

During my job hunt, I hooked up with a local screen printer who handed me a bit of commission work. I was left unsure wether I was to be paid in cash, or in T-shirts.

If the latter, I was wondering how well some threadless designers have been able to sell their own merchandise through their websites / blogs / whatever.

The shirts will be "free" to me, so sitting on extra shirts for a long while won't really hurt me any, but I still wanted to guage how well other designers have done.

Also, what have you set up for international shipping requests etc.?

We lost our car recently, here is video of it and a brief story:

I put together a very short vignette of our roadtrip from Wisconsin to Montana starring my daughter and featuring music by the Gorillaz.