Andi James Chamberlain’s Zombie Apocalypse Prepared apparel:

White Ring. Growing quite fond of them.

(Yes, I know where the, ahem, "repurposed" video footage is from (IRMA VEP), so let’s not fill up the comments thread with telling me things I already know, again. Ta.)

Colleen Doran just asked me to reprint this:

My office cleaning binge uncovered an original manuscript to Neil Gaiman’s short story “Murder Mysteries”. Neil sent it to me about fifteen-years ago on the off chance that I might adapt it for comics. Or illustrate it. Or something. I never got the chance (curses,) but this ancient document appears to have been printed out on some dot matrix word processor or something. Those were the days.

It has all the usual freelancer stains, like pizza and coffee. And I have defaced it with a number of scribbles. About 20 of them. Also, I’ve a small assortment of loose sketches for this project. All drawings are previously unpublished.

With Neil Gaiman’s kind permission, this autographed manuscript, along with all of my sketches for the project, will be auctioned off to benefit the Hero Initiative, an organization which aids veteran cartoonists in need. This donation is in memory of freelance comic book and animation writer Steve Perry. I hope you’ll take the time to click both links to learn more about Steve and The Hero Initiative.

The auction begins on eBay on June 18, and it’ll run for ten days. Either watch eBay or Colleen’s blog, I guess..

(Jeff Kocan)

(mostly absent today, I think, as I believe I have things to attend to in London today)

*  Gah. England vs US game not being videostreamed anywhere I can find. #eng #nationalisticbollocks #yankbeating #fail

* Found a stream, just in time.

* Note to #USA players: YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO MOVE YOUR LEGS

* Rooney pauses at the touchline to sniff the air, make fire with sticks #eng

* get up you poof he only kicked you in the lung

* England apologises for fielding a goalkeeper who quite clearly took rather a lot of heroin before the match commenced.

* Dangerous tackle, my arse. In Millwall they call that "foreplay."

* Ah. The England team appear to have gotten drunk during half-time.

* Rooney confused by round thing flying through air. It am not bird. Maybe still good to eat? Rooney try to kill with head.

* I wish to assure our American friends that, for this performance, the England team will in fact be executed.

* Jesus. That was like watching two dozen fraggles wrestling in a pit of molasses.

Over an hour long: a witch house/drag/ghost drone mixtape by Mater Suspiria Vision. It includes drag (drag = chopped and screwed and spooky) remixes of… some things you might not expect to hear. Except for that witch house is very inclusive of 80s pop/club music, no matter how nightmarish their choices may seem to people who were there at the time. But, on the whole, people who like Pocahaunted are okay with me.

Mondo Apocalypticum – The Blitzkrieg Mixtape by Mater Suspiria Vision by matersuspiriavision

I watched part of a recent episode of CRIMINAL MINDS this evening, and I swear to god, when Fat Tony, Forest Whitaker and him from DHARMA AND GREG weren’t on screen, it looked for all the world like the cast of FRIENDS standing around wearing stab vests. Fighting crime, feeling pretty: law enforcement never owed so much to Bare Escentuals. Also, note to producers: a character who is cast as "British" does not have to speak with English, Irish, Scots and Welsh accents in the same sentence.

I’m cheating a little bit, but what the hell:

Neighbors first alerted police to Dale Warren Graham when he was reportedly found in someone else’s garage with a vacuum cleaner attached to the front of his pants, Payson police Chief Don Engler said.

Sent by Gypsythepunk, with the note "the second coming of Joe Strummer." Shirt by IEU.

The 100th episode.  That’s 600 bloody pages of this thing.  Hard to believe.

(image by Evan Pettit, who adds: "I sometimes write odd poems and stories. My latest works, ’Gold Dust City part 1’ and ’On Sleeping’ can both be found on http://lunastationquarterly.com, who were kind enough to include them.")

So I looked at this clever new thing called Square, that’ll let you accept and make card payments on your phone. It comes from a good place: the inspiration was an artist who couldn’t sell a piece of art because he couldn’t process card payments on the spot. I like their intent a great deal. And I was picking through the terms of service, to see if this was a US-only thing, because obviously I know a bunch of people who might find Square useful. (A simple mobile card processing solution would be a boon for creators working tables at conventions.) And I found this:

You represent and warrant to us that… (j) you are not engaged in and will not accept payment for any of the following: (1) any illegal activity,

Well yes sure if you insist.

(2) adult entertainment oriented products or services (all media types; internet, telephone, printed material, etc),

So I know a few people who now won’t be selling their panties using Square. Okay.

…(7) occult materials

Hold on. Can someone explain this to me? What defines an occult material? I had a quick Google. According to Fox News, a pink ouija board made by Hasbro is an "occult material." Informed Christians tells me that Harry Potter and Pokemon are occult materials. Are Tarot cards occult materials? Divining rods? Alan Moore books and CDs?

I’m presuming this is just some kind of weird boilerplate text they’ve picked up from somewhere, and that in America credit card processors don’t like you rubbing the spooky stuff. And someone will educate me on that in the comments. But "occult materials" would seem to me to be so ill-defined as to cover an awful lot of things. So, if you fancy the sound of Square, but perhaps sell things like books or garments or goat heads consecrated in Satan’s piss, you might want to drop them a line first to get their definition of "occult materials."

• Broken20
  New netlabel and a new podcast, too. Yum. "Broken20 is a new label from ruaridh/The Village Orchestra, with assistance from production unit and erstlaub. Broken20 will release all sorts of music. Rather than be genre-tied, we will be releasing music rooted in a particular aesthetic ? releases concerned with decay, erosion, entropy, mistakes and errors, line noise and tape hiss, hum and buzz."
  (tags:netlabel podcasts )
• NASA aircraft to track Japanese spacecraft re-entry
  A NASA flying observatory has left California on a mission to track a Japanese asteroid-sampling spacecraft as it returns to Earth on a course for Australia.
  (tags:space )
• Entropy study suggests Pictish symbols likely were part of a written language
  A new study has shown that concepts in entropy can be used to measure the degree of repetitiveness in Pictish symbols from the Dark Ages, with the results suggesting that the inscriptions appear be much closer to a modern written language than to random symbols.
  (tags:history language )
• Internet memorial site launched in Hong Kong
  Even Hong Kong's dead cannot escape the Internet after the government Thursday opened the electronic gates on a brand new virtual graveyard.
  (tags:net death culture )
• Formation of Saturn’s ring moons explained
  New computer simulations based on data collected by the Cassini spacecraft mission suggest five of Saturn's moons may have been formed only 10 million years ago, and researchers in France and England think new moons could still be formed because the processes that created the ring moons are still active.
  (tags:space )

More acid-etched summer glo-fi dreampop. Gorgeous.

One of my favourite labels, Highpoint Lowlife, is closing this summer: but not before reading a couple of fine-sounding spooky records from Roof Light that you can sample here.

Following these releases we have three artist albums due from Depakote, Erstalub and The Village Orchestra, then the label will close with an epic DVD-r compilation featuring pretty much everyone who was ever released on or worked with the label.

Thorsten Sideb0ard, who runs the label, will moving on to focus on writing and drawing a graphic novel entitled "74", which is set in a near future post-industrial northern UK city. The book takes a similar form to The Wire television show where the main character is that of the city itself, and where the chapters/seasons focus on the differing individuals and communities who make up the life and colour of the city, communities such as skateboarders who find much freedom in the abandoned concrete and industrial sttures of a once thriving city centre; A burgeoning club and music scene build around the abundance of unused venues and warehouses and lack of police intervention; anarchists and anti-capitalists looking to build a viable and alternative live to that of mainstream life; and of course, the criminal underground and those seeking to evade censorship and the law.

Will really miss hpll, but am really looking forward to seeing this book.

What it says on the tin. This video’s more than a year old, but this is still happening.  It’s not “ha ha those wacky Kenyans.”  And if you think it is, watch the video.  It’s something else entirely.

meant to post this earlier, oops

I wrote a little book once (amazons – UK – US – CA)

Doug McCune:

I’ve been playing with different ways of representing data (see my previous night lights example) and I decided to venture into 3D representations. I’ve used a full year of crime data for San Francisco from 2009 to create these maps. The full dataset can be download from the city’s DataSF website.

An example — many more, and more details, at the link –