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Way back in my sophomore year of college, I competed against some fellow hipster comic artists online in a game we called Photoshop Street Fighter. While I knew the game existed outside of our insular nerd world, I did not realize it was so embraced by the artistic nerd world in general until a few months ago when I came across Adobe's Layer Tennis. Yes, Adobe, the studio that makes such essential graphics and communication software as Flash, Photoshop, After Effects, and Acrobat, among others.

Layer Tennis works as such: two artists take turns altering the same composition, passing volleys back and forth in 15-minute intervals. After the tenth volley (five each) the match is over and it's up to the audience to decide who "won", but in reality it's all just good fun regardless.

The last few weeks (it happens live every friday afternoon during the "season") have been particularly interesting. Two weeks ago, Jason Santa Maria and Derek Powazek decided to up the ante by including a game of "Three Truths And A Lie" within their bout of Layer Tennis. One week ago, British cartoonists Rex Crowle and Simon Cook took things to a whole new level by ignoring the typographic prowess and verbose technicality that has become standard in Layer Tennis for a straightforward cartoon war. And then, this past friday, Sam Brown and Ted McGrath did battle in a round of Layer Tennis that, aside from being laugh-out-loud hilarious, will go down in the history of my personal opinion as the very definition of Punk 2.0. The match-up was particularly exciting as Sam and Ted have sort of defined popular alternative art for the better part of the past decade, so seeing them go toe-to-toe was rather thrilling.



I don't want to spoil any of the madness that occurs, so the image above is just the very first volley by Sam Brown. I just about fell out of my chair in amazement at round 4.

Speaking of things I liked in my naive college years, Mates of State have a remix album coming out soon, and I wouldn't care, but Pitchfork posted this totally sweet version of "You Are Free" remixed by The Mae Shi. It's completely awesome.