I have been invited to be a guest at the MCM Expo in London's Docklands! They put Shelley and Amy on the front page of their website for a whole week, do they know what they are doing? YES THEY DO I AM THE GREATEST.
Since I did a show in London about a month and a half ago, I won't be wheeling out the giant guns of commerce, but it will be very nice to see you, it is lonely behind a table. There will be books to be had, and posters, and badges, and I can probably be relied upon to draw a thing or two. Plus I will be on a panel, holding forth and jabbing my thumb into my chest to emphasise my point. WOF WOF YES YES FLEETWOOD MAC'S TUSK &ETC.
This is all I have to say on the matter. GOOD DAY.
Oh wait here is my banner, there is a good 5 minutes of hard graft in this, can you tell I am woefully underprepared?
I have returned from All Tomorrow's Parties in Minehead a fragile man. I did not destroy my body like last year, when (as you may remember) I was forced to spend a week in bed being ministered to by a kindly nun. I would not mind such consequences if I was a furious drug monster but the closest I ever get to a hallucinatory experience is standing up too fast after kneeling.
I submit the following diagram of my current situation. The good news is that I have days off this week to allow me to recover and bring equilibrium to my mind.
I am still unsure about Monday night's stringed rhombus. However, I saw another one in the new Micachu and The Shapes video so maybe you can help me with a name.
Last night I had the great pleasure of seeing The Dø and Moriarty at the Deaf Institute. I went to this one on the off chance, not really knowing anything about the bands in question other than having a vague (and largely wrong) idea about what they sounded like. It turned out to be a rare opportunity to see two bands who are obviously much more successful in their country of origin playing in a very intimate venue.
I did predict prior to going that at some point The Dø would produce a mysterious triangular stringed instrument, and I was almost right - it tuned out to be a rhombus.
After many dull months I am suddenly faced with a glut of exciting releases! I am very taken with Laura Groves' Blue Roses, so here is a video straight outta Shipley.
Apparently the post below was the wrong "huge news". I was meant to post the picture below of the copies of my new book that I just got from the factory. They look wicked, I am the best. It will take a month on the slow boat from China for them to get to the shop but I will open up pre-orders once I have big boat details.
This entire misbegotten process has taken so long that I have almost finished book eight.
I knew that putting the commissions page back up would lead to a bit of work, but no one could have imagined that I would have been asked to direct, 20 years on, the follow-up to Pretty Woman! I've been working on some concept art and I will be popping in to 20th Century Fox in Royton later today with my preliminary sketch. Readers, you get a "sneak preview" - I know you're gonna love it!
I found a nice piece that had for some reason lingered unsold so I've put it on eBay. Bidding starts at £1 yes £1 ladies and gentlemen. You may just have found yourself a bargain.
A drawing! Good enough for the blog, then to be placed in a drawer. I like drawing geometric shoes!
I wonder why no one asks for commissions any more? When I drew Bobbins, people asked all the time! Draw my wife, they'd say, draw my wife. Draw a cover for this periodical! Draw "Rich Tweedy" in a hat. I guess my art has deteriorated a lot since 2000. But it is so versatile! Look! My compositional boo-boos are an open goal for opportunity!
The first part of this year was pretty bad for new records, so I went through my old CDs for things I had bought in "3 for £20" deals in 1997 (to get my money's worth, you understand) or remainder bins and filed away without really listening to. I was excited to see that I had not only "Different Light" by the Bangles (with Manic Monday on it) but also their 1984 debut!
Different Light is full of mushy 80s production which I quite like but only because it is the sound of my youth, but All Over The Place still has a bit of their Paisley Underground background left in it and holds up well as a post-New Wave trifle. Maybe their only essential release is the 1983 indie "Bangles EP" but god knows where you'd get that. It has a great kitchen-sink psych-pop sound.
One thing I forgot was that Susannah Hoffs doesn't sing lead on more than half the songs. She was, however, kept busy by being very pretty all time. Now it is time for my Bangles chronological music video parade in which you can chart the 5 years in which "stylists" became rich and strong. Watch it with your seeing eyes.
"Hero Takes A Fall" (1984)
"Going Down To Liverpool" (1985) with Leonard Nimoy woah
Susannah Hoffs is so pretty in this one with Leonard Nimoy that I stapled my hand to the desk and didn't notice!
If She Knew What She Wants (1986)
Hazy Shade Of WInter (1988)
In Your Room (1988)
I'm not sure about the lyrical content of this song, I think it might be mildly suggestive of home invasion.
I have completely forgotten what I was posting about when I started this, maybe I should press 'publish' and we'll not talk about the Bangles again.
One of the things I found frustrating about Tablet PCs was that I could never replicate the pen feel of my Cintiq 15X exactly. The input on tablet PCs often seemed a bit binary - there were 256 levels of pressure, but the gap between 1 and 256 is not enormous if you're using the Wacom driver! I like to lean in a little and even on the high settings it was a case of thin line thin line FAT LINE!
However, in trying to solve an unrelated issue, I found the Pen Tablet diagnostics panel! You press CTRL and "About" on the Pen Tablet Properties control panel and you get a whole new screen. Bottom right is a dropdown called "pressure offset" and if you experiment with cranking that up slowly in conjunction with adjusting the pressure sensitivity, you can get a nice pressure curve. It even gives you a numerical readout of your current pressure so you can tailor it, and it's realtime so you can doodle in the TIP, switch it up a bit, doodle again.
To get a feel like my Cintiq (and my old Intuos2) on its middle pressure setting, I set the pressure sensitivity to the second highest setting (on the right of the slider, that is) and set the pressure offset to 8.
I have a feeling the best setting varies from tablet to tablet but this made drawing varied, subtle lines a lot easier. Please let me know if this helps!
This morning I am excited about the Flaming Lips' cover of Borderline! They had worn out their welcome on me but if they can manage a few more jams like this, I will accept their welcome back with a glad heart.
Of course, nothing tops the Madonna original, one of the greatest pop songs ever
Using a slide rule, I have worked out when Madonna wore out her welcome on me. I think it was when she made that book where she was in the nack with Vanilla Ice. Robert Van "Winkle" ho ho etc.
There are always more jobs around the home than I can realistically complete. I have to paint three rooms, and soon. I can't even decide on a colour for them! Yes yes I know I can paint it bone white or magnolia, but that is not the answer. I'm a decision maker and my decision, firm and true, is not to think about this at the moment.
But it is not all procrastination around my house. Today in a flurry of excitement, I drew the mini-comic that is meant to accompany pre-ordered copies of my next book. It is called "Erin Winters and the bone throne (of bones)" and it is the most amazing* thing I have ever created. To be absolutely honest I drew it the wrong way round (I tricked myself into drawing it by pretending I was just having a laugh, otherwise it would never have got done) and now I have no idea how it will be successfully placed into an envelope without being crushed by the slightly larger book it accompanies. Oh dear.
If I had made all my Erin Winters stories like this one, I'd never have written her out! It's a new lease of life for an old face.
* As amazing as something 4 pages long can be under the circumstances. It is green!
I know that there is an error with the speech bubbles in the last panel of today's Scary Go Round. Unfortunately, due to the unique way Scary Go Round is funded, I can't FTP in to change it unless I am at home, and I am not. Do not burgle me! Here is the way it should have been.
(Also due to the unique way Scary Go Round is funded, Adobe Illustrator doesn't work on this machine for some reason so it is a bit rough, sorry excellence fans).
I have spent the last couple of days trying to make my international shipping prices in the shop fairer. I think I managed it, but it is not a perfect solution. In any case, I now need a rest cure so have a good weekend.
I am looking at my shop pages with a vexed eye today. I have had to jack up international shipping prices in line with the dollar to pound exchange rate, which is fine and good for one shirt. But because of the unique way Paypal's shopping cart is constructed, it means that international customers ordering more than one shirt are being overcharged. I have a terrible sense of deja vu as I attempt to bend this inflexible and ill-maintained shopping solution to my will, my will being that when a customer orders more than one tshirt design, the second design is charged at the lower "shipping2" price.
Paypal's cart is so ham-fisted that even if you order two of the same thing in different sizes, which is to say, the same item code, it still charges both at the full shipping price! I figured I could trick the cart this way by making all the items the same name and sticking the item code in the size variable. Well they bloody well showed me because you can't.
I didn't really care about this when $2 to £1 meant my shirts were cheap whatever. But now I have to do right by my countrymen lest I be burned alive by an angry mob. And I want to do right without having to install a whole different shopping cart solution.
(The other option is to have people add international shipping to their basket as a separate item. My experience is that a lot of people won't actually do this, or do it correctly.)
Anyway I am being transparent about this failing because I know it is not fair. I hope that someone can help!
A few months ago I staggered onto this blog openly weeping, wailing about how perhaps my comic was inaccessible to the newer reader; that I would slowly drift into obscurity read only by hardcore eyes eager for the fast-diminishing prize. Lots of people got together to rent a church basement for me at that point and I was talked down from my dudgeon.
In all honesty, that morning I had looked, for the first time in three or four years, at the website of [name of comic deleted]. Back in the day this had been an unstoppabable juggernaut, but now, despite what seemed to be still-healthy traffic, it was begging for money. It may still have been an unstoppable juggernaut, but it had failed any number of roadworthiness tests and now had a ghost instead of an engine.
After a couple of months of chin scratching, I think there is a future for Scary Go Round. Unlike my poor colleague mentioned above, I drag everything I don't want to write about any more onto the street every couple of years and set fire to it. There are certainly elements of my audience who expect me to bring old characters back, but they might as well stand on Elvis' grave and demand "Hound Dog".
One thing that this rigorous period of navel-gazing has shown me is the nature of popularity. When Scary Go Round was new, and even when Bobbins was around, I received a constant stream of reader emails and requests for interviews. These days I probably get one email from a reader every two or three days, and seldom does anyone want to know what I think about anything.
I suppose that when you're new and novel, you're like a couch that someone has just spent a lot of money on. "Come around friends and sit upon my new couch," you say, or you call the newspaper and demand that they write about your new couch and print a picture of it and you upon it. Five years on, the novelty has gone, and there really is no call to tell anyone about the new couch or to thank one's lucky stars that it exists. If it is a decent seat, the owner will still enjoy sitting upon it.
The only way that this chair would gain attention was if it were stolen and the owner was made to sit upon the floor. Which is why I occasionally start crying and demand that you tell me you like me or I will retire and become a bin man. Both greedy and needy, see?
In conclusion, I do not pay any attention to song lyrics, and hate to see them transcribed, but my favourite lyric of all time is "Outdoor Miner" by Wire.
I wish to report for public record my experiences with Twitter, namely writing the Shelley Winters Dr Ladysounds Twitter. The project got off to a flying start, I wrote some words and put them in the internet. It was fun! But as people started to comment on the posts I felt bad that they did not receive responses. At the same time I started to feel like some kind of cyber transvestite pretending to be a lady when I even thought about responding. It was too real. Much too real. So when an enforced break meant that I got out of the flow of posting, I could not continue. The sorry episode must be laid to rest in the cold earth.
The most exciting moment was when Chris Salt, winner of Adam and Joe's video wars competition, started following me. Chris makes amazing Lego films and I hated that all I could do was send him an in-character "direct message" in a manner that made me feel like a Bangkok ladyboy.
I think, following that last sentence, I will retire from the internet forever and become a bin man.
In retrospect perhaps I felt less like a Bangkok ladyboy and more like Hinge and Bracket but still. No more twitter, dear ladies.
1-800 Beard has sold like earwax on toast and will be retired shortly. I hang my head in design shame. I suppose I had better go down my list from the carnival of ideas and dig out another "winner". Perhaps I will also dedicate some time to prayer.
Nosferatu 28 What Me Pompous 16 Urchin 14 Jazz 11 Spanish Inquisition 8 1-800 Beard 8 ------THE LINE OF CONSIDERATION------ Next Pope 7 Gin & Tonic Camel/Ship Of The Desert 7 Stephen Harper 7 Cat Person 7 Action Badger 7 Jelly Time 6 ------ALL BELOW SHALL BURN------ Kerfuffle 5 Burgle My House 5 Whitey Sale 4 8-Bit Elvis 1 Bloody Hellfire 1
I have updated the 'about' page (including a handsome new self-portrait) and in doing so started thinking about a better introduction to the comic than the current cast page. Writing a cast page that somehow synopsises more than 1600 comics worth of appearances for new readers is hard to write and impossible to maintain. Surely all anyone needs to know is that Shelley is sweet but dangerously mad, Ryan is a sort of gentle savant and Amy is brilliant but slowed down by a thick crust of expensive hair wax? It's hard to write more than a couple of meaningless lines without making spoilers. I welcome your suggestions.
Dear reader, has it really been a week and a half since I last posted on "old bloggy"? A crime! A week and a half of Kevin Pietersen, I am so sorry. No one can deny KP's haughty arrogance at the crease but that was too long.
I should say a thing or two about the UK Webcomix Thing! The show grows every year and the mix of old hands and young firebrands is a pleasure to see. At just one day long, it can be a bit overwhelming, and after a very busy day of being "on" I find socialising afterwards difficult, but thank you to everyone who came by to see me, and everyone new who I met afterwards.
I will be back in London at the end of next month for the MCM Expo, where I expect to sell precisely three badges and nothing else to wild-eyed kids hungry for Manga and Colonel Tigh and frakking toasters. I don't know if Colonel Tigh will be there but if he is he better not do me any spoilers as I am just about to watch BSG season 4. I'm not sure what point I'm making here other than that I will be back in a month and three-quarters and therefore I had better make more badges.
Oh, I forgot, quite a few people asked me to draw characters from the Wire for them. I will practice a few more for next time.
There are many musical acts who I find personally uncompelling but whose life stories are fabulously bizarre and hard to ignore. The chances of me getting home from a hard day at the factory and putting on an Eric Clapton record are slim. So why have I spent the last two weeks obsessed with his 1987 hit "Behind The Mask"?
In this inexplicable outing, the white blues guitar legend covers a Japanese synth-pop instrumental, not a hundred miles removed from the sort of music you'd get when a C64 game was loading off a cassette. He adds some of his mega fog-horn vocals, puts on some vast shoulderpads and unleashes.
I love this song and particularly this video. It's a vision of a world as far removed from the modern musical landscape as the Beatles were from ragtime jazz. The anointed kings of the new CD format, Phil Collins, Elton John and Mark Knopfler, join Slowhand to rip it up then presumably drink money juice backstage.
Growing up in the eighties, these guys were like the Easter Island heads, they were monolithic. They were old men playing a young man's game and it's hard to imagine that there will ever be "legacy" acts, 20-year unit-shifters like these again. Part of me thinks this is for the best and that we never want to see a 48 year old Julian Casablancas and a fat, heavily bearded Jack White squeezing out a mod-ish, late period hit together in 2026. Part of me wants nothing more.
BONUS: Here's the original "Behind The Mask" by Yellow Magic Orchestra. Beep beep bip!
Well, Scary Go Round book 7 has been paid for and gone to the printers, so I must turn my attention to the accompanying minicomic, "Erin Winters And The Bone Throne (Of Bones)". The only rules of this comic are that it will comprise one sheet of A4 paper, neatly folded, and it will feature the much beloved Erin Winters, the character the public most want to see back on their screens.
What will this story involve? Exactly how small are the panels going to be? Do I really have to print 450 of them? How can the result possibly please anybody? I will report back once progress begins.
In what I can only describe as the greatest betrayal of my professional career, the below has happened:
If you imagine the volcano under Yellowstone, then imagine that the magma is drivel and then imagine that Yellowstone has erupted, that is how things are going to be from now on.
About once a day someone sends me an email asking me to start a Twitter account so that they can follow me. I regret to inform the interested that I find Twitter mystifying and dull. An astonishing wave of smothering triviality! I feel like Donald Sutherland in Invasion Of The Body Snatchers saying this though and by the time we next speak I will have opened an account, my head canted to one side, eyes wide, mouth open in a terrible smile.
Having done a few fancy prints for the few, I'm working on some new posters (sold at the right price to the common man in quantity). This one's not finished yet but I thought you might like to see it. It's Whitby, the spiritual home of goths. Again, it's big enough to make a wallpaper of.
I think the ghosts are on their way to a birthday party! I realise it is more commercially viable to draw a big crazy Amy bikini beach party but I have to draw what I feel in my mind.
This week I am trying to round up all the jobs I didn't do last week because I was on my death bed. First to order is my UK Webcomix Thing print for this year. I will do a run of 20 (I think) and what doesn't sell will be on the site. The only way I can gauge interest in limited items up front is if you let me know and the blog comments are the best place for that.
If you click on the image, it links to a version that is probably big enough for wallpaper needs!
The blog is ill-tended this week as I have a particularly virulent cold. It is hard enough to draw when you are wracked by coughs, let alone string a sentence together. I am on the mend now I think but it may be too late for my body, which is wan and weak. I intend to travel into the city this afternoon and one whiff of diesel may end my days.
The best cold I ever had was when I got a sinus infection. Once the malaise had passed, I would blow my nose and about two minutes later warm, thin, bright custard yellow goo would gush forth from my nostrils and have to be staunched mid-flow. Yes ladies and gentlemen, it was my brains leaking out which is why I am not allowed to marry, vote or drive a car any more.
This particular malady occurred after I spent two weeks in Brooklyn, which says plenty about the fine air quality in that neck of the woods.
What's the worst thing that's ever come out of your nose?
If you'd said to me that this would actually work as a piece of graphic design, I would have said "you are crazy like a fox." But guess what? Another hot nugget that you voted for from the Carnival Of Ideas!
Here is a sneak preview of a new print I'm working on. I haven't decided whether it will be a limited canvas for the UK webcomix thing, or a longer run poster, but it is another in my Oz series. I will post up a finished version once it is coloured in.
I wanted to write and say that I am really moved by the comments on my "state of the onion" post. I didn't write it to fish for compliments or to tease you with impending doom.
I was also very impressed by the standard of grammar, spelling and punctuation in those comments. I didn't realise that I had cultivated such an audience of upright citizens. I have issued each of you with a gold star.
I tried to address any questions when they were asked but I will answer the most frequently asked ones again.
Q. Will you reprint books 1, 2 and 3? Or do PDF collections like Diesel Sweeties did?
A. I just can't afford to. I only print 1500-2000 of my books at at time and it takes three years to get through a run. This is as true of original stuff as the reprint books. I don't want to make PDFs when you can read the whole archive on the website anyway, it doesn't make any sense to me - plus the bandwidth consumed would be huge.
Q. What about print on demand?
A. Print-on-demand means very high book prices and/or next to no profit for me. I typed in the specifications for "Blame The Sky" into Lulu.com's price calculator. The manufacturing cost was a very reasonable £37. I would aim to have it retail at around £100. I take credit cards.
Q. How about a top publisher such as Farrar, Straus & Giroux reissuing the early volumes?
A. Publishers lose interest when they find out that my ouevre is as visually consistent as a folk art jumble sale.
Q. Why don't you offer premium content on the website and charge people for it?
A. I put the fullness of my faculties into the daily comic and have little left over to generate phantasmogorias of walled-off content. Every time I work out a nice little ensemble for Esther, that is your premium content.
Q. (This was more of an accusation and it was not all that frequently asked) You dump characters all the time and introduce new ones! This spoils my enjoyment.
First the bad news: from next week there only be four comics a week (M-T-Th-F). I need a bit of breathing space to avoid burn-out. I'm sorry if anybody is disappointed.
Over the last few weeks I have been trying to make some decisions about Scary Go Round and where it is going. This is not meant to be some terribly dramatic news post where I bleat on about how hard it is to make a comic in the comfort of one's home day in day out.
I consider myself very lucky that tens of thousand of people read my comic every day. But it is a sad fact of long-form, story-based comics like mine that it is hard, after a certain point, to add new readers. The perception is that they carry a lot of history - even when like mine, the creator has been burning the history books every couple of years in order to survive.
In the last year or so I have tried to make the stories as stand-alone as I can, but the fact is that you lose readers over time and if you don't get new ones to replace them, slowly but surely you will go the way of all flesh! There are already a few webcomic ghost ships out there, long sunk by the weight of history. I am not keen to join them!
After 7 years it is probably time to replace Scary Go Round with something new. I have a pretty good idea about what to do next. But I still have a lot of SGR stories to tell and I don't really know what to do.
I was testing drawing on a smaller screen today as one day I might have to make my comics on it, so I redrew an old comic at random. I post it here for fun. I have to practice practice on different devices as I get thrown really easily by change, leading to gangling arms, mad proportions and big nutty heads. Even the above is barely consistent, I will have to do a dozen or more before I am actually comfortable.
There hasn't been a point in the last 17 years where this wasn't exactly what I wanted to hear but man, there really is nothing new under the sun is there?
EVERYTHING WITH YOU - The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart
Yesterday was hourly comics day! I thought I would join in for once which is something I never do, unfortunately I spent the whole day gripped by a powerful ennui, some would say "Weltschmerz". Do not worry for me, I have a robust character, the problem with verité is that it is still open to interpretation.
I have omitted, for art's sake, a very pleasant conversation with my mother and father, and an hour I spent ironing while watching an excellent episode of Grand Designs. The cheering effect of these wore off around 5pm and, as depicted, I reassumed my Edvard Munch position until nightfall.
And I spelled "inexplicably" wrong.
In other news, my great ally Marlo Meekins has asked me to tell you she has a new print on sale. If not us, who will keep her in felt tip pens?
I think if all my comics were about Fop Chaser I would be incredibly rich. Fop Chaser loves fops and she will not rest until she has captured every last lavender-smelling one of them. Her tactics are underhanded!
I am still in Canada. It is incredible. It is so cold. The Toronto public transport takes special coins. The coins are small. The cold has got into my bones. I cannot remember why I decided to come here in the coldest month of the year but it is certainly invigorating. And by invigorating I of course mean, cold.
You would not believe the people I have met and the times I have had but it has been star-studded. The glitterati! Below I will post some drawings which I cannot explain.
I return to the UK tomorrow to try and bring back some sanity but maybe the world will never be the same again!
The site is down and I don't know why, maybe it will be back up again later today, or maybe it is all over for me on the internet and it is time to dedicate myself to public service.
Here is today's comic to remind you of what it was like when I had a web site.
I will not be writing on the blog for the next week as I will be preparing for a trip to Canada the week after. I have to make sure that you are richly entertained in my absence, which means hard graft in the drawing area.
I'm excited about visiting Toronto (and points beyond), but of course there are fears too. Hopefully the diagram below will illustrate what is on my mind.
Thank you for all the posts in response to the carnival of ideas.
Here were the scores (nearly 100 people participated)
Nosferatu 28 What Me Pompous 16 Urchin 14 Jazz 11 Spanish Inquisition 8 1-800 Beard 8 ------THE LINE OF CONSIDERATION------ Next Pope 7 Gin & Tonic Camel/Ship Of The Desert 7 Stephen Harper 7 Cat Person 7 Action Badger 7 Jelly Time 6 ------ALL BELOW SHALL BURN------ Kerfuffle 5 Burgle My House 5 Whitey Sale 4 8-Bit Elvis 1 Bloody Hellfire 1
I've given up complaining about how hard it is to design tshirts and how there are no ideas left. I've realised that at 32, despite a keen eye on the scene at all times, I've outgrown the innocent impulse that forged my early, still-popular designs of 5, 6 years ago. I'm just grateful that I came up with them at all. They have put new school coats on my (non-existent) kids for the greater part of the decade.
That is not to say that I don't still have ideas. In a controlled experiment last night I sat down for an hour and had some ideas. I've marked the good ones with green spots, the awful ones with orange spots, and the truly hideous ones with red. I actively invite your input as I take you through them page by page!
A man doesn't look quite right with a tote bag. But top left is something that could change all that. I have also acknowleged that Tiny Stephen Harper with his spatula has something about him. The rest of the page should be burned.
Things progress fast. "Whitey Sale" must surely have its followers, those in the know. "1-800 How's My Beard" made me laugh but I am no gauge of these things. "Jelly TIme" is far beyond the pale.
"What? Me? Pompous?" may be the single greatest image I have ever drawn: get behind this one. The little camel has "gin" and "tonic" written on his humps. I like the tiny Spanish Inquisition but they will require some time in the design lab.
Out of strength and ready to rest, the lower common denominator is taken outside and shot. I liked cats, but not dogs (too demented?)
You may remember my wails of complaint a couple of weeks back about my tablet PC and the Manga Studio 4 ink blobs. I had the opportunity to try out a clean install of Windows Vista and it happened there too.
I did manage to make it stop though. If you switch Manga Studio to "Wintab" mode in the preferences from "Tablet PC", you don't get the 1 in 100 strokes that loses pressure sensitivity (though you can enjoy a great simulation of how you would draw if you were steaming drunk). I think it's a Wacom Penabled driver problem linked just to this one application. In any case, since this isn't the machine I draw the comic on (you may remember my ancient two-ton second-hand Cintiq) I will wail no more.
I would however feel a lot less mad if one other person on the internet reported having this problem. The problem being, apparently, a ludicrous executive toy for a computer and a nice piece of software the authors let you (me) have for free.
Thanks as always to the graphics department of the ITV chart show. Let me know in the comments if this is the sort of feature you enjoy, I am happy to round up my twenty favourite singles of the year this way too.
12 REAL EMOTIONAL TRASH - Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks
Well, Christmas is over for another year, Baby Jesus rides his unicorn into the distance and Krampus sleeps in the mountains. I am sure 12 months from now we will reunite and talk about what we did in the crazy, crazy month of December 2008. I hope all your Christmas dreams came true (provided they were within reasonable parameters).
Lest I forget, I have added Lizz Lunney to the links list on the right. Lizz has about 12 blogs, she doesn't mess around when it comes to getting information out there. I have said why I think her art is so good before and will not say so again without a considerable stipend.
Sometimes I don't get to see my shirts until months or even years after I design them (I only own a very few of them myself - I prefer a shirt with buttons). But occasionally people send me a photo. And as George Harrison might have said, my sweet lord:
Thank you Andrew Kozma, a man who is plainly some kind of self-styled lord of the moths.
