A crowdfunding attempt to produce a Professor Elemental video series.  You remember Professor Elemental and his “Cup Of Brown Joy,” don’t you?  Course you do.  Behold.

Ryan Kelly is the artist on the new DC Vertigo comics release SAUCER COUNTRY and the webcomic COCOTTE.  Oh, and here’s the Flickr link for this image.

And that’s it for me this week.  I’m going to go away and see if I can remember how to emblog, because I do seem to have totally lost it…!

Have a good weekend.

(Ellen)

My old mate Garth Ennis is Kickstartering a children’s book, to be illustrated by Rob Steen:

ERF is the story of four friends at the dawn of time; Figwillop, KWAAAH!, the Booper, and Erf himself, and their adventures in the primordial world of long ago. The four take their first nervous steps out of the ocean and onto the shore, and are soon exploring the exciting new lands beyond. But danger lurks in the prehistoric jungle, and soon our heroes come face to face with the mighty and terrifying Colossux . . . An evolutionary tale of love and loyalty for children aged four and up.

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A new game produced by Big Robot, the dev project run by writer Jim Rossignol, whose name should be familiar to regulars. AVSEQ works like this: connect atoms, play music. Look:

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Melissa Dowell is offering pre-orders on this… item.  Get an order in by the 9th and they should be with you for Xmas.  Because nothing says Xmas like getting your nose nipped.

Hand silkscreened in a glow-in-the-dark AND blacklight responsive water-based ink, this detailed design of a row of x-rayed teeth go down the front & onto the crotch of black American Apparel cotton spandex hot shorts. Never fear dancing on a mirrored surface in a skirt again. Perfect for deterring up-skirt photographers and disturbing your lovers!

A still from "How To / Internet" by Jaakko Pallasvuo, as captured by James Bridle of RIG, who also tells me RIG have a FRSTEE for me.

Post-novel, I find myself still mostly in recovery: one of those disturbing “not as young as you used to be” moments.  Compounding this concern was the recent worry, introduced into the household by the arrival of two bottles of Shackleton whisky, that I was having blackouts and going internet-shopping for alcohol and not remembering a thing about it.  Thankfully, today, the fine people at Whyte & Mackay contacted me to ask if I’d received the bottles and the note.  There was no note.  I’ve been enduring days of people telling me I drink until I don’t remember ordering more drink.

This is a meticulous recreation of the whisky Shackleton took on his ill-fated trip to the South Pole: there’s a website (has an age-check gate) that explains it all.  The original whisky was a Glen Mhor, now a silent still.  I opened a Glen Mhor of some forty years’ age the other month, and it was frankly astonishing.  Very much looking forward to this younger, yet historic bottling.

(Whyte & Mackay just told me in email that there’s a scavenger hunt in the UK for smartphone users.)

The important takeaway from all this is: I am not having blackouts.  Or, at least, if I am, I can’t operate my credit card during them.

Now look at these: a photographer from Seoul using the name “komeda” on Instagram releases a new shot every day or so:

Something sadder, here’s Brian Wood talking about how Dark Horse Comics were essentially menaced into upping the prices on their digital comics.

And here’s Bruce Sterling at his most Bill-Hicksesque.  Back later.

Years ago, I blogged some notes by Matt Webb & Jack Schulze, back when they were Schulze & Webb, on the notion of a “social letterbox.”  Later, Schulze & Webb and Matt Jones fused into the creature known as BERG, and became a company that did all kinds of interesting stuff, including publishing SVK.

Hello Little Printer, available 2012 from BERG on Vimeo.

Hello Little Printer, available 2012 from BERG on Vimeo.

BERG Cloud, and The Little Printer. Or, as Jones put it to me last night, a node for the papernet. 

It ties together a bunch of ideas from the last few years: the social letterbox, BERG’s notion of the receipt as the “paper app", Tom Taylor’s microprinter. 

And in 2012 it’ll be a thing you can have in your house.  It comes with a cloud-based control system to allow you to precisely control what’s printed – therefore, what enters your home or office – and when.

Little Printer, a thing that makes the vague and numinous ideas of the papernet concrete, would appear to be just the start.  BERG Cloud, the thing that makes it go, is scaleable and adaptable:

Our technology means we can focus on great design for connected products, rather than programming chips to make them work. We have a list of products we’ll be making next, but if you have a need for anything from prototype Web-enabled clocks to smart infrastructure for a new city block, we’d love to hear from you.

And that is all kinds of interesting to me.

My friends amaze me.

1. #occupylsx, 2. Occupy Legoland!, 3. Deptford estate recycling bins, 4. genoa19, 5. Tentilla, 6. Untitled

As always, highly recommended.

I don’t want to be That Guy, but Xmas is in seven weeks and my friend Eliza Gauger is selling prints of her wonderful work via dA.

And you can buy it here at an absurdly reasonable price.

Things that are always guaranteed to make me smile: my friends getting together to make things. Molly Crabapple by Ellen Rogers:

[link]

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Free chunk of book?  Course you bloody do.  Cherie Priest:

Everybody loves free stuff, right? Right. And I’m reasonably sure that everybody (or if not “everybody” then probably “a lot of people”) loves one or more of the following: dirty jokes, drag queens, magic, or kittens.

So here’s some excellent news for those of you who fall into the category of “everybody” (as defined in the parentheses above).

Right now, over on Scribd.com, you can read the first 50 page of Hellbent for FREE, baby. And those first 50 pages – up through the end of chapter three – include all of the aforementioned elements.

And I will save you the energy of clicking through by sending you straight to the goodies.

Her book BLACK AND WHITE is still available here. She tumbls here.

I used to post her photos regularly here. She doesn’t take a lot of photos these days — or, at least, not in the volume she used to. I haven’t seen her in the flesh in a few years. We are still friends. We don’t talk for a few weeks at a time, sometimes. But when we do talk, it’s like we talk every day.

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Molly Crabapple