Retro Bowl Color Picker

Do you enjoy designing custom uniforms for your Retro Bowl teams, but get frustrated entering in a million hex codes?

If so, this is a tool for you!

HELMET

FACEMASK

LOGO

JERSEY

SLEEVE

PANTS

STRIPE

SOCKS HIGH

SOCKS LOW

 
 

Retro Bowl is a fantastic football game that is developed by New Star Games and available on the following platforms:

• iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/retro-bowl/id1478902583
• Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.newstargames.retrobowl
• Nintendo Switch: https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/retro-bowl-switch/

The color picker functionality is built around code from Kyle Wetton: https://codepen.io/kylewetton/pen/OJLmJoV

Updated Jan 2026: Now includes editable facemask colors!

A Chart of Olympic 400m Hurdles Finals Since 1948

Another Olympic event that was fascinating this year was the 400m Hurdles — both the Men and Women races had some very impressive world record times!

TOOLS

Numbers app, Illustrator, After Effects, Google/Wikipedia

SOURCES

Olympic finals results:

• https://www.olympedia.org

World Leading Times and World Records — I was unable to find the world leading times for the 1955 & 1958 seasons:

• https://www.worldathletics.org/records/all-time-toplists/hurdles/400-metres-hurdles/outdoor/women/senior
• https://www.worldathletics.org/records/all-time-toplists/hurdles/400-metres-hurdles/outdoor/men/senior
• http://trackfield.brinkster.net

Edwin Moses:

• https://olympics.com/en/video/edwin-moses-the-unbeatable-hurdler

A Chart of Men's Olympic 800m Finals Since 1948

I was fascinated by the relatively slow times in the men’s 800m final this Olympics, and went down a rabbit hole looking through the history of the men’s 800m. Then I figured I might as well put my graphic designer knowledge to good use and share my findings!

Of the Olympics finals since 1948, the 800m final in 2000 had the most comparable result to the 2020 final — both had relatively slow winning times and very narrow range of times (less than 1.5 seconds difference between the first and last place runners):

• Tokyo 2020 fastest/slowest times: 1:45.06 – 1:46.53
• Difference of 1.47 seconds between 1st & last (9 runners)
• The average of the Olympic final times is 2.92 seconds slower than the world leading time for the year
• Sydney 2000 fastest/slowest times: 1:45.08 – 1:46.24
• Difference of 1.16 seconds between 1st & last (8 runners, including one disqualified runner who finished around 1:45.60)
• The average of the Olympic final times is 2.35 seconds slower than the world leading time for the year

TOOLS

Numbers app, Illustrator, Google/Wikipedia

SOURCES

Olympic finals results:

• https://www.olympedia.org/results/358610

World Leading Times and World Records — I was unable to find a few of the world leading times in years prior to 1966:

• https://www.worldathletics.org/records/all-time-toplists/middlelong/800-metres/outdoor/men/senior
• http://trackfield.brinkster.net

Pixel Fun

Hey, what d'you know, in a world full of super-accessible social media, Patreons, and too many streaming services to keep track of, Google Blogger somehow still exists, for god-knows what demographic. And I'm back here as bored and insane as ever!

I've been playing with some pixels because sometimes simple is what we need. Sometimes simple is comfort. And in a world of constant chaos, uncertainty, and unrest, one thing still holds very true — people are suckers for nostalgia:

Minimalist Monsters T-Shirt
by PearBoy

Video Game Pixel Heart Button
by PearBoy

Existential Crisis

If you can't have a little fun, what's the point?

SLO Half Marathon 2016

You win some, you lose some.

Veloci-rooster

I may have been so preoccupied with whether or not I could that I didn't stop to think if I should.

New Thoughts for a New Year

The New Year has arrived like a big, blank, sparkling clean whiteboard, ready to be defaced and discolored by malodorous streaks of rainbow color. You know some idiot is going to use a goddamn permanent marker again, after you spent all that time cleaning it off last time. "Sharpie" looks nothing like "Expo" — learn to read, assholes!

What I mean to say is, today is a natural time for both reflection and resolution.

Unfortunately, even with considerable reflection, I have no recollection of making any resolutions a year ago. I either completely neglected to make any resolutions at all, or I failed so spectacularly at resolving myself that I have willfully forgotten any ever existed. In either case, I am not making any resolutions this year.

What I will be doing, is writing this post.

Look at that. I already finished it! 2016 is off to a great start.

Fifteen Puzzle Game

My friend and I made our first app — a puzzle game for iOS and Android:

Download Fifteen for iOS:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fifteen-puzzle-game/id974511729?mt=8

Download Fifteen for Android:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.RobertBurton.Fifteen&hl=en

Stay tuned for more games at apartment-five.com, and maybe some more posts on this ghost town of a blog!

Music Time, Part II

Well, it looks like I went an entire year without blogging any posts (or would it be 'posting any blogs'?). I guess I didn't have anything remotely interesting to write or share for over 365 days.

Here's some more musical malarkey I made during my year away from boredom and insanity:

Music Time

Now that I'm a full-time designer, I spend much less of my free time doing anything design-related. In fact, I tend to squander the majority of my free time watching South Park and mindlessly browsing Reddit.

Lately, I've managed to stay somewhat productive with audio experimentation— despite having a very tentative understanding of music theory:

Here's a track from a couple years ago. My musically-talented friend once said he liked it, which was really all the encouragement I needed:

Combined Effort

Honey the Badger

After publishing my stress infographic in 2011, I began researching and sketching for TWO brand new infographic ideas.

Since it has become increasingly clear that I will never complete either of those infographics, I would like to share some small pieces of what I have created in sporadic fits of inspiration over the past two years.

Enjoy these meager offerings— they are a sad, but necessary farewell to abandoned ideas:

An Ode to Modern Art

I made a video.

I don't even know why.

Rise.

I saw The Dark Knight Rises last weekend— a fantastic end to a superb trilogy!

Major props to Hans Zimmer, who has very decisively become my favorite movie composer in the last few years (He also worked on Inception and Pirates of the Caribbean).

Best track from the score: Rise.

Ambidexterity in Progress

For those of you who don't know, I have been training my non-dominant (left) hand for quite some time, in the hope that I will one day be ambidextrous. It has been an interesting journey.

Bucky and Satchel have been less than supportive.

Also, if you don't know what Get Fuzzy is, GO READ IT, NOW.

Update 6/30/2012
I got a request for some Pearls Before Swine:

You should be reading this strip, as well.

(And speaking of left-handed drawing, this is a peculiar coincidence)

I Still Haven't Been Invited to Dribbble.

While I have been patiently waiting for some awesome person (yes, YOU!) to invite me to Dribbble, I have been pondering alternative methods to display my design work on the internet. Only today did I realize that I can just pretend my blog is Dribbble.

So, here is a shot of my latest school project— a redesign of Eye of the Hawk Select Ale:

An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge book design

I designed, printed, and hand-bound another book!

An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge is a short story set during the Civil War:

Special thanks to Brian Schoneberger for the photography.

Bored and Insane mobile is here!

The Bored and Insane mobile site has officially launched! Bookmark the blog on your iphone homescreen and feast your eyes on the new webclip icon!

Grab your nearest mobile device and check it out:

Oh, and let me know if anything is broken. I created and edited quite a bit of CSS code to get this to work— both for the mobile site and the full site— so there is a good chance that something went horribly wrong somewhere.

Disqus Commenting Might Be Down For A Bit

I've been having difficulties with Disqus syncing for awhile, and I'll be doing some major troubleshooting in the next couple days. So if you're leaving an extended critique of my work and the comment system starts acting inexplicably retarded, it's probably because I've fucked up the code really, really badly.

Come back in a few days, and you should have no trouble posting disparaging insults all over my blog posts.

Update May 2012:
I completed scrapped Disqus and just customized Blogger's native comment system. Now I don't have to worry about syncing at all!