Before safety regulations abandoned the practice, I knew several police officers who had to be Tasered in the chest for half a second before they could have it issued to them. One of them said he would rather force you to take ten steps backwards, run up to him, and kick him as hard as you can in the nuts than be Tasered again. That pretty much sums up my feelings towards this picture.
Which is a shame, because the picture itself is perfectly functional, if only in that high–school photography class kind of way where there's no cohesion to the piece besides looking cool. It depicts Ali "Dubfire" Shirazinia, the other Iranian–American half of the Iranian–American house duo Deep Dish, who I only know because of their remix of Sven Vath's Barbarella, which I don't want to describe as a gay club song… but let's be real. Nobody could listen to that synth and not think of fruity drinks under a pink haze.
I only bring up Iran here because only an Iranian immigrant could come up with something so masculine–feminine as the subject depicted in this photograph. I get that Iran has a reputation as being one of the most oppressive countries in the world by virtue of their theocratic dictatorship and the Iranian Revolution fucking everything up for them, but you have to understand it was a vastly different place before the revolution occurred, being the Egypt of the Middle East before Egypt was Egypt. I learned that from Persepolis!
But seriously, Iran hates gay people and executed 6,000 of us in fifty years. So fuck Iran. And fuck this picture, too. Photographs and PNGs… they don't get along, those two. PNG called a photograph a fatass once and got beat over the head with a chair, and the entire PNG clan blacklisted them from their homeland. Nowadays they only have a tenuous relationship for the sake of maintaining face, a bit like the United States and Iran.
What could I possibly do for this fine picture? Cut it down so it's illegible? Nuke all the colours and make it look awful? Do another pixel trace of the work and attempt to capture a subject which would take years of schooling to even begin to paint using traditional media? I suppose this photograph is a representation of how little you really can do to cut down on filesizes, where pictures are pretty much set when it comes to this thing, and all the content is in the writing and whatever I can placate my fans with.
Well, there is one other method. It turns out that JPEG and photographs go together really well. So well that they entered into a loveless gay marriage for tax benefits, because they were together so often that if you squinted a little you couldn't even notice the compression artifacts. And that's what happened here. In exchange for making an image that actually looks like the subject it's trying to depict, I had to do nothing more than save it as a JPEG. It works, doesn't mess up anything important, and isn't distracting.
But it's still lazy and looks like shit. Good thing that I couldn't find the artist. They would be ashamed of what I did to their work. Is this image even in the public domain, or was it uploaded illegally? Wait, that's a stupid question — nobody gives a shit.
Date: 2017–02–06. Size: 9,488 bytes. Colours: All.
Upscaled Dimensions: 359×428. Original Dimensions: 359×428.