Jamie and I like Thought Bubble a lot. We’ve been there for each of its three years, and each year it’s grown gracefully and elegantly. It started small, and intimate and friendly. Now, it’s as big as any comics-specific con in the UK, without losing any of its positive traits - not least being organised with devastating effectiveness by the Thought Bubble staff. It’s not a con - for example - when a major guest misses his panel because no-one told him he was in a panel. I’m also a fan of its one-day structure, which rather than spreading it out over the weekend, it does in a single day - and then does workshop events on the days around it. In other words, you turn up on one day, and you see everything you want, and then get drunk with no worry that you have to move at all the next day.

So yes - Jamie and I sat at our table and dealt with a pretty much constant flow of human beings. Our positions changed a bit over the years too, of course. At certain times, we had to deal with a full on crowd of people. There really wasn’t a gap. Jamie drew all day. I talked all day. And the people visiting us were a mix of the new and the familiar. Having done this for a while, and seeing people change across the years is fun - seeing people we first met when they were in their mid-teens grow to adulthood in stop-motion photography is fascinating. Also, for the first time, we had significant amounts of people who primarily knew me from our Marvel work. Even had one chap who’d never read anything outside Marvel - the understandable “I had no idea where to start”. Of course, starting with Phonogram will doom him completely.

I didn’t do any panels, except the one I was chairing: Videogames and Comics panel, where I prodded Pete Doherty, Liam Sharp, Duncan Fegredo (who I only now realise I didn’t actually speak to outside the panel, which is a real shame) and my room-mate Antony Johnson. It seemed to go pretty well - I sort of was in full on dual-class mode, trying to balance being a journalist (i.e. Facilitating the discussion and getting everyone else to reveal juicy anecdotes about the two media) and being a creator (i.e. revealing juicy anecdotes about the two media, swearing, insulting Zelda and Modern Warfare 2’s writing). At the least, there were laughs in the right places. Hurrah!

The main event was in the evening. Lisa had somehow been convinced into letting us DJ. Abstractly, it was the Phonogram wrap party. While the issues wouldn’t be out, we figured that at least all the work done. Except, of course, that was over-optimistic, and Jamie still has to finish off the last one. Still - there were other reasons why we’d want to do DJs. Thought Bubble ties into our own personal Phonogram narratives. Last time, we’d just got the orders for issue 1, which were so disastrous we were scowling monsters. I missed the train and forgot to bring books. Jamie came close to losing art. It was a fucking disaster. And then Thought Bubble was Thought Bubble and we went away back in love with comics. In a real way, I sometimes wonder if Thought Bubble wasn’t there, whether we’d have just thrown in the towel.

A part of that for me - though Jamie was in the VIP bar for most the evening - was the dancefloor. Mikey Bennet improvised laptop DJing, crouching on the stage - the only place with a jack - and keeping a heaving crazy dancefloor seemed to be about as punk rock and joyous as anything gets. People trying to avoid dance too loud - while still throwing themselves off the stage - because the volume was too low. It inspired the final B-side in the final issue.

It made perfect sense for the circle to turn, y’know? We had to do something there. We had to DJ.

Problem: Neither Jamie or I had ever DJed. I don’t know about Jamie, but everyone’s always surprised when I say I’ve never done it. A few chances, but fate has always got in the way of it, and I never pursued. So in the true Phonogram spirit, we turned to our friends - wanting to both express our solidarity with everything and save our asses if we were shit.

In other words, half hour sets from assorted luminaries - but Jamie had 45 minutes, me an hour for reasons which I’ll explain later. First up was Penny B in absentia, playing her varied eccentric playlist (Disney’s Macho Duck to the Style Council to God Knows What). The first real set was the spikey-rush of Julia Scheele and Tom Humberstone (Who later coined the phrase “It’s all gone a bit phonogram” in response to everything going a bit Phonogram). Jamie went next with a cheerful array of synth-diffused music. I lead into Matt Sheret - and the Joy Division obsessive showed a fearless i’m-not-fucking-around best-indie-club-ever-if-you-like-people approach (You start with Hey Yeh, you know what the stance is). Though, of course, some Joy Division worked in. Adam Cadwell was balanced being worryingly cool with actual pop which lead from sixties motown and Northern Soul to end with… well, he was over-running. I was going to ask him to move on. He said he had one track left. I asked what it was. He told me. I said he could play it.

After all, I could hardly not allow a man to play Where’s my Jumper.

(Er… not that’s a good example of Cadwell being cool, of course. Some things are betond that)

Marc Ellerby played took the quality American Indie-rock card, with a splash of - er - other indie-rock, probably. Les Savy Fav, Pavement, et al. Mikey B made his return with a… oh, it’s all getting foggy now, but it inched more towards pop with a credible edge. And then, rounding off the evening, was Al Ewing. Who took pop, sheared the credible edge off and used it as a brutal bludgeon to mash the dance floor into a shape which amused him. Starting with Jazzy Jeff’s Boom Shake the Room, running through early nineties dance, German Abba versions, Come on Eileen and…. well, it’s nearly 3. People are going. Coats are on. Seeing this, we decide to wrap up. He drops the final count-down - and the wondrous sight of people trying to resist the sheer stupidity, and then submitting and dancing and screaming in their coats.

It only gets more stupid. He ends on Take That’s Never Forget. A scratch-comics Take That take the stage and lead the crowd in a micro-stadium gig. Heartwarming and stupid and… POP MUSIC, y’know? This is what it’s about.

I fear footage of this will emerge online shortly.

My set was simple. No room for improvisation. I just played the setlist for the Singles Club. The main core of the stuff that happens in the club happens within just beneath an hour. Also, notably, between 11 and 12. I threw a couple of relevant ones at the end, but otherwise it was just The Singles Club live, with me as Seth Bingo and Jamie on lights as Silent Girl. It went brilliantly, though obviously having to play a set list I wrote as a literary device lead to a few things I wouldn’t have played making it in… but nothing totally killed the dancefloor, and the best stuff was amazing. Seeing Can I Take You To The Cinema actually pack the floor after all this time’s a joy. And seeing what Pullshapes did… well, I actualy got a bit emotional. Not tears in my eyes, but an enormous feeling of love for pretty much everyone alive. Seeing a great mass of friends and friendly strangers lose themselves in all their glorious, individual ways, their natures showing with every step, all human life twitching before me… yeah, it felt amazing. I think it’s my new answer for “Where did you get the idea for the Singles Club from?” question. That moment was so profoundly beautiful it echoed back down the timeline to my earlier self, making me create something to create that moment, and incarnate it.

(Actually, that bit was so splendid, I ended up fucking up the next song and skipped Robyn’s Who’s That Girl. However, because in the comic the record skips, it’s actually appropriate. There No Accidents)

And, of course, I had people doing requests and me trying to remember what Seth would say to them. “No Oasis. The only monobrows we play are Le Tigre” is the only one which sticks in my mind. Though we were only like that to clear Phonogram readers - the party is upstairs in the Leeds Casino, so we got a steady trickle of general local people just wandering around. Trying to explain to people why we couldn’t play Release Me - not least that I didn’t have it - added another element of surreality to the whole thing.

Oh - as several people asked, I’m not planning on revealing the full set list yet. I suspect I’ll include it in the back matter for the trade, so expect it to make its way online around then. I’ll link my spottify playlist too. It isn’t actually possible to work out from the comics - there’s some songs which characters respond to but don’t actually get actually named. I was pleased to see the unnamed-in-the-comic track which dragged Kid-with-knife to the floor managed to do the same to a whole lot of people

In short, Thought Bubble remains Britain’s premier comics convention. I’m fond of them all. Caption is a micro-scene pleasure. Bristol has had a few rough years, but is still an institution. Birmingham is rock solid. MCM is enormous and splendid, but its comic section - while larger - is a side-event rather than the main thing. I could go on.

But Thought Bubble is the best. To use the line you always use if you want to be easily quotable in marketing: if you only go to one UK convention a year, go to this one.

I’ll see you there. Like, obv.

I’ve been threatening to DJ — well, “music select” — somewhere for a while now, and I’ve decided to finally make it happen this week. On Friday (November 27) I’m introducing something I’m calling PLAY, in which I’ll be setting up my laptop in a corner somewhere at Cafe Pause, and make people listen to a selection of tracks by me, from 21:00 until 23:00 (when the cafe closes). This is not an event proper, it’s just a casual invitation to come hang out and listen to (what I think are) some good tracks. I don’t know if this will become a regular thing, it might, and I may invite others to join me in the “selection” duties in the future.

If you’re wondering how I’m doing this, today I found what looks like the perfect software for my needs, something called Djay. All I wanted was something that would let me transition tracks, and also allow for pre-cueing, which I’ll be able to do courtesy of my ZOOM H2, using it as a USB audio interface. If this all works as well as I’m hoping it will, I can also see us recording a live episode of Radio OK Fred this way.

A few months ago, Jeremy Leslie over on his MagCulture blog posted a detailed — and crowdsourced — map of London’s best magazine stores. At the time I thought it was a terrific idea, and wanted to create something similar for Tokyo. Sure, I already have a few I know, but the best way for this to work is if I can get as many contributions as possible.

So please, let me know what your favorites are — either by leaving a comment or by emailing me. I’ll compile the results, and create a proper map on Google Maps, just like Jeremy did for London.

The French Embassy in Tokyo has recently moved to new premises, and to commemorate this is holding a special exhibition at the old location. “No Man’s Land” (November 26 to January 31) features a vertigo-inducing number of participants, including my fellow Radio OK Fred co-host, Audrey Fondecave.

And speaking of Radio OK Fred — on hiatus since the start of my health problems — I can tell you that we’re planning on recording a new episode soon-ish, and before that you’ll get to hear two episodes that were recorded (but not yet edited) earlier this summer. Here’s a link to the last episode that was uploaded (#14).

Following its debut at the recent TAB 5th anniversary party, Mammal — the band/dance unit composed of Ian Lynam and Mari Kojima — returns for another performance, this time during the upcoming PechaKucha Night in Tokyo Vol. 67, which happens December 2 at SuperDeluxe.

Dear Lazyweb,

When you go to the DNA Lounge Webcasts page and click on the "Video Webcast" link, it pops up a chromeless window with the Justin.TV Flash embed in it.

I'd like to make it so that when you resize that window, the embed resizes with it.

This is what I tried. It works great in Safari, but in Firefox, the embed is always 100% wide and 1 pixel tall; and in Opera, it's always 100% wide but about 200 pixels tall.

Ideas?

"Sixth Sense," my interview with NPR's On the Media, talking about augmented reality, went live this weekend. Here's the audio:

(MP3 download also available.)

Summarize your sex life with a Star Wars quote

Also: instantchewbacca.com (contrast with instantrimshot.com).

• I am so jealous! RT @waffles: Just bought tickets to see Magnetic Fields in March. So happy! #
• Thrill of the day: learning one of Fellini's first writing gigs was the Italian script for the Flash Gordon comic strip. [He did what I do.] #
• Traffic problems on the way to dinner; traffic problems on the way home. At least dinner was fun. (Ate too much, though.) #
• Oh, and let it be known that on this date my son made fun of me for the first time. (He imitated me shivering in the cold.) #
• Is going to take HL with me Christmas shopping today. Pray for me us. #
• HL wants to know, "Where is Christmas?" #
• NetNewsWire, I keep pruning and cleaning up the aggregator on my dsktp, then when I close & reopen, you sync to something older. STOP IT. #

Saying the world can seem both very large and very small is hackneyed; however, I believe we've entered a period of time when those two conditions are interdependent.

This is a discussion we have in new media all the time -- who is famous, and what use is fame now? Paul F. Tomkins (thanks Wil) is a fine comic and well-known, but I wouldn't call him famous. And yet, he manages to get enough people in major cities to pledge to see his shows that he can make a living travelling from fan-cluster to fan-cluster across North America, summoned by people's need to see him perform. He has the respect and appreciation of a large enough group of people to fill his perceptual horizon. Does anyone need more? Is it even possible to rationaly understand what more is? Is that why famous people go mad?

I'm getting to the movie, I promise.

So we have Steve Weibe, an average guy who takes to practicing Donkey Kong after he's laid off. Anyone who's spent any time hacking away at video games can understand the impetus -- you spend time, you attain a goal, and the goals come at intervals short enough to reinforce the adrenal hit. I've occassionally floated outside myself while playing a video game at 4am, asking "what are you doing?", and getting the answer "Not failing to solve that Act Two problem."

Weibe gets good enough to consider going for the world record. He needs a damn win, in a way that we all understand.

That's when we go down the rabbit hole. That's when we meet Billy Mitchell, the reigning champion of that particular 80's arcade game (among others). While Weibe comes across as a somewhat obsessed hobbyist, a character all we geeks count among our friends, Mitchell has parlayed mastery --

-- I want to back up and take a run at this. Mitchell has parlayed mastery of an thirty-year old arcade game into a business empire that has nothing to do with that arcade game. A small empire, but one that fills his perceptual horizon. He has used that arcade game world record to fuel his own confidence, his own drive, his own success. That record may only be acknowledged by a small world, but its power within that world gives Billy Mitchell the lodestone he needs to survive and thrive in a big world where others become lost. Every morning, he wakes up "Billy Mitchell, world record holder in Donkey Kong", and that sustains him with a fierce power that would shame the faith of a Jesuit priest. In a world of losers, the lost and the damned, Billy Mitchell is a winner.

And Steve FUCKING Weibe is not going to take that from him.

You know what that is? That is the recipe for great. goddam. drama.

The relentless grind of small indignities. The cumulative blessings of small victories. Honor, cheating, ego, sacrifice, suspense ... The King of Kong is available for your Netflix Streaming enjoyment even as we speak.