Archive for 2005

     We’ve put the annual Suburban Sprawl Music Holiday Comp up for download over at suburbansprawlmusic.com. This is the fourth year we’ve put the comp together, and all four year’s worth of MP3’s are available for free download. Some highlights…

     Plenty has been written online about ’socially conscious’ clothing company American Apparel, their risque advertising, and their sexual harrassment-happy CEO of late (link, link, link, link). I’ve been ‘not a fan’ of their ads on…

     I haven’t sunk to the level of posting an IM conversation for quite awhile, so I figure I’m about due.

Zach: “performances from breathing underwater, broken sunday, autumn and wasp, pillar of autumn, forever in a day, between broken

     Among really nerdy dudes who obsess over things like the beginnings of Chris Ware’s career, the primary representation of his early work has long been ‘Floyd Farland: Citizen of the Future,’ an out-of-print collection of College-era strips featuring…

     While shopping at Target the other day, I was pretty excited to discover that they are selling Murakami-esque ‘eyeball’ throw pillows as halloween decorations. Since I fervently peruse Target’s halloween section every year (The design is

     The Cardhouse robot recently pointed out this article, which discusses the cover art for Kate Bush’s forthcoming album “Aerial,” correctly asserting that it is “right up my alley.” The central image of rocks reflected in water…

     Remember last November when I proposed a superbowl commercial treatment? Somebody has made essentially the exact commercial I was envisioning. Michael spotted it here — anyone have any idea where it originated?

     At the beginning of 2005, I resolved to spend much of my free time figuring out how to run a tiny indie label by actually doing it. In the past eight months or so, I’ve learned:

  • …the nuts and bolts

     A few years ago I got way into arcade game restoration. Let me tell you, it really wooed the ladies. One of the most interesting aspects of that diversion into nerdery was the insight into the commercial end of the…

     The work of Jason Shiga first came to my attention in 2003, when he won an Eisner award for “Talent most deserving of wider recognition.” A few months later, I read a write-up on his then-current interactive comic book, ‘Hello…

The Short Version:

     I wrote an application for OS X 10.3+ that rips the audio from DVD’s to your iTunes / iPod. I use it to listen to commentary tracks – it could concievably be used as a language-learning tool…

     I’ve recently come across references to two video games that interacted with the player in a pretty unique way. I’ve never experienced either of these first hand, but I’m intrigued, and curious if other such examples exist.

     The first example…

Scene: A few years ago, driving on I-96 towards Detroit.

     Motorcycle comes screaming up behind me on the left. Swerves into my lane, cutting me off in ridiculously-close, Hollywood-novelty style. Is that enough? No, that is not enough. Said

     A Link to Tristan Perich’s forthcoming ‘One Bit Music‘ project made the rounds of the nerdy music blogs last week. If you mouse over the image below, you can see my assumptions as to the basic breakdown…

     This isn’t a life-changing application or anything, but I was pretty thrilled to discover RetroPlayer – an OS X gramophone emulator. Launch the program and you get a top-down view of a gramophone, sans record. Drag any audio…

     Valentine Hellman checked in today with easily the best email I’ve received in a long time. Valentine, you see, OWNS a platinum record. He’s taken it upon himself to play it and determine what exactly the grooves of a default…

     Ever since Readymade Magazine got my brain churning on the possibilities of DIY clocks, I’d been toying with the idea of having the minute and hour hands rotate entire transparent clock faces — to create some sort of…

     Shortly after posting my round up of vinyl video implementations, the eBay market price for the carousels used to view Red Raven Animation records dropped significantly, and I was able to pick one up for far cheaper than…

     In the comments to a previous entry, someone pointed out that this week’s ‘This Modern World‘ strip contains a coded message. This past Friday, while killing time at a bar before a show, I accidentally opened…

     George Hotelling pointed out in the comments to my post on the Coldplay coded cover that someone has written a javascript tool to encode the text of your choosing into colored Baudot (AKA the coldplay code).

bland

     I have a short review of Gakken’s Berliner Gramophone and Edison Cylinder kits in the ‘Toolbox’ section of the second issue of Make Magazine. If you aren’t familiar with Make Magazine, it’s basically a comprehensive quarterly…

     Awhile back I wrote a post on albums with coded messages hidden in their liner notes (here). One of these was an Ozzy Osbourne LP (‘Speak of the Devil’) which I was unable to find reference to deciphering on…

     I picked up ‘Britpop!‘ by John Harris for a couple bucks at one of those book liquidation-type places, and have been pleasantly surprised by how awesome it is. Well written, thoroughly researched, and comprehensive! In addition to couching the…

     I installed iTunes 4.9 (The one with podcast support) and blindly downloaded a few of the ‘recommended’ podcasts this week. One of the first ones I played was an episode of a show called Cinecast, which I had…

     When I went through the initial information-gathering that ended up producing the sadly neglected Acme Novelty Archive site, I contacted the student newspaper at the University of Texas to see if they had archives of back issues available…

     I have about 30 emails which date back to February rotting in my inbox, under the pretense that I’m somehow going to find the time to ‘properly’ research and present the information contained therein. Since it’s becoming increasingly obvious that…

     I pulled up to a stoplight behind the pick-up truck pictured below yesterday, and was just DUMBFOUNDED by the text on the back, so I took a photo with my cell-phone. Let’s dissect it, shall we? We shall.

     Not really update worthy, but I read that the Charles Schulz Museum is producing T-shirts based on Seth’s artwork for Fantagraphics’ ‘Complete Peanuts‘ Series. The only image of these shirts is buried…

     Oh man, I just saw Batman Begins at our local Imax Theatre. I don’t know if it’s because I was Batman-obsessed in my youth and haven’t been satisfied by the last 2.5 Batman movies (3.5 if you count Catwoman), or…

     I just saw Neko Case at the Majestic Theatre in Detroit. In the middle of the set, she mentioned that she had heard that Houdini had died in the theatre. I’ve heard the same story a number of times…

     Several months ago, I gathered a bunch of examples of coded messages hidden in liner notes. Presuming that such passing involvement qualified me to identify examples of such, I was positive that the hideous coverart for Coldplay’s latest album contained…

     The artwork of Marcel Dzama (which I was first exposed to via McSweeney’s) has seemingly been everywhere lately – most prominently on the cover of Beck’s latest album, ‘Guero.’ There was a good metafilter

     Based on the obsessive-compulsive nature of my previous postings on all aspects of vinyl technology, several people have recommended that I check out Vinyl Video, an artistic venture by a collective of European artists, who encode…

     From this week’s New Yorker:

JOE HELLER

True story, Word of Honor: Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer now dead, and I were at a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island. I said, “Joe,

     Someone at Northeastern State University in my home state of Oklahoma left the following comment on the HIGHLY CONTROVERSIAL tulip entry below. I deleted it, because it has absolutely nothing to do with tulips, but I wanted to preserve…

     A one-act play starring several tulips.

April 23rd, 2005

April 24th, 2005

The Chosen:

UPDATE!

     Up-to-the-minute coverage of Michigan-area snow-covered tulip photography available here (Thanks, Scott).

Garage Sale find:

     Four volumes from the “Moody Youth Library.” What a great name. They appear to be vaguely Hardy Boys-ian, (Titles include ‘Scotty and the Mysterious Message,’ ‘The Case of the Dancing Fire,’ etc.), though my brief googling has…

     There was a really good article on the Guardian website this past week which summarizes my ‘disconnect’ from the sprawling worlds of most current ‘blockbuster’ video games. Part of the reason I’ve embraced the Gameboy Advance and the Nintendo DS…

     I recently received the following message regarding the “Robin Williams’ joke thievery” bit I put together last year.

     ”I am sixteen years old and have grown up watching Robin Williams. I look up to him. These “comments”

     Geoff sent me a link to this Music Video / Mosaic, directed by a guy named Thomas Hughes. The site describes it as: “A video mosaic constructed from the puzzling elements of a girl named Mandy.” It’s worth…

     Several years ago, my girlfriend Sarah bought me a notepad, which I promptly put into a pocket of my bag and forgot about. I unearthed it a few days ago, and noticed some of the ridiculous details for the first…

     In December 2004, I was forwarded the following article about a fellow bottlecap mosaicist. I’ve pasted the relevant bits of the now-unavailable-online article below. The fulltext of the article, which was published in North Carolina this past November, is preserved…

     French television channel ‘Arte TV‘ has been running a series of behind-the-scenes documentaries on various Comic Book creators throughout the month of January. One of these episodes focuses exclusively on Chris Ware. The website for the…

     I got this email Yesterday. Totally great.

     Hey I wanted to thank you for inspiring me. Your ridiculous mix CD packaging gave me an idea for a Valentine’s Day gift. - Clint

cdinspire.gif

     When I first read about the touchscreen and wireless capabilities of the Nintendo DS, the first thing that crossed my mind was how perfectly suited it would be for mimicking those touchscreen games that litter bartops across America. This probably…

     A band called The 8 Bit Construction Set is getting a touch of internet publicity by claiming that their record is “the first ever use of the vinyl recording medium for software distribution.” Not so.

Spoon Live @ Howard's, Fall 2002

     In late 2002, I took several photos of Spoon at a show in Ohio. I did this using my girlfriend’s 35mm camera, which was loaded with black and white film. The following week, this…

     I’ve lately gotten into the bad habit of drawing faces on each milk jug I come across, as seen below.

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     I was taking a picture of my latest effort in his natural environment (The fridge) when…

     After reading this Ask Metafilter thread about life-altering experiences in childhood, I was reminded of the first book I was ever able to read on my own – or more specifically, the book I was perusing when the…

     This one requires more explaining than the others, as it ended up being a ‘failure’ in some respects. Having exhausted my supply of nerdy reading material on automated music machines in early 2004, I moved on to reading / learning…

     Yet another in a long series of ridiculously packaged mix CD’s. Check out the three-tiered pop-up text! NERD.

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     Around December 2003, I discovered the Encyclopedia of Automatic Musical Instruments, and got it in my head that I should learn to make music boxes. What little information I was able to turn up on this archaic process…

     One of the great features of Flickr is that you can subscribe to be notified via RSS whenever someone posts a photo tagged with a search term of your choosing. One of the tags I subscribe to is…

     I’ve been obsessed with those 3″ mini CDR’s ever since I realized you could buy them in bulk. Unfortunately, the sleeves that are available for CD’s of this size all have some sort of aesthetic imperfection that drives…

     I got an email a few days ago with the subject line “This is not spam.” Naturally, I assumed that it was spam. I let it sit in my inbox over the weekend, and in the midst of my weekly…

Eating Dudes

     On the grassy part of a beach in Ann Arbor during the Summer of 2002, I suddenly grew to gargantuan size and began eating oblivious sunbathers.

     I just posted this to my flickr account

     Lessons of the internet: If you’re looking for something, put up a webpage asking for it. Eventually someone who can help you will stumble across it and get in touch. That’s what happened with this particular song. I…

     Amazon launched a new feature today that is impossibly cool: They’ve integrated their yellow pages and Mapquest with a database of images enabling users to visually scroll up and down the block. You can see an example of what I’m…

     From the cover of Marvel Comics’ ‘Sleepwalker’ #4:

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     More on ‘Bookworm’ here.

     Animated Christmas edition (Circa 2002):

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     Previous installments: one, two.

     I’m what you would call a casual sports fan. One of my roommates, however, is always watching ESPN. I wandered into the living room on Sunday while “Sportscenter” was on and saw the BEST THING EVER.

     First, some background. My…

Vincent Marquardt writes:

     ”When I was about 10 years old, someone gave me a bunch of 45’s, all lousy no-name performers; No wonder they were giving them away!”

     ”Anyhow, one of them was a female singer singing a song called

     You may have read about the recent discovery of a bit of animation on an ancient Iranian goblet, said to be the first recorded example of man-made animation. The article that’s been making the rounds (I first saw it on…

     Indie Comic artist Johnny Ryan, known for his ‘Angry Youth‘ Comics and general poor-taste, has been skewering the elder statesmen of indie comics in his ‘Shouldn’t You be Working?’ strip. These strips are mostly…

     So, I finally got around to seeing Spider-Man 2. It was pretty fun, even if it did seem to hit the same notes as Spider-man 1, in roughly the same order. One thing about it has been bugging the CRAP…

     I added two videos to my Zumpano page: “I Dig You” and “Behind the Beehive.” They appear to have been encoded using some archaic codec, so quicktime chokes on the sound. Until I find the time to re-encode…