Last year, Chris Onstad (the sole artist, writer, and creator behind the strip) had his first book published by Dark Horse Comics: The Great Outdoor Fight.  This was a physical copy of his most popular story arc, involving a huge, sprawling three day brawl (“Three days! Three acres! Three THOUSAND men! Only one will win THE GREAT OUTDOOR FIGHT!”) along with notes on the (totally fictional, obviously) history of the fight.

Following on the success of his last foray into the non-internet publishing world, Dark Horse just released the first (second?) anthology of Achewood strips, starting from the very beginning: Worst Song, Played on Ugliest Guitar.  I received my long awaited, pre-ordered copy in the mail two days ago.  I eagerly tore off the Amazon cardboard to find a very handsomely put together little hard-bound book.  Not normally one to focus excessively on the external trappings of what I read, I can’t help but mention the excellent cover design.  This amazon picture doesn’t quite do it justice – the colour is pink, but much more of a deep, reddish one, while the layout is much less vertical than pictured.  As is obvious from the above sentences, I have no idea of how to describe design.  The overall effect is very pleasing, something you’ll just have to trust me on.

Inside Onstad opens with various origin stories about the characters (who are mostly stuffed animals and cats), explaining how each of them came to reside in his house.  A few pages of this, which is done in the voice he uses on his in-character blog, and the strips start.  A longtime Achewood reader might be a bit confused, as the annotated strips start here several months after the actual initial comic, Phillipe is standing on it.  He begins with the introduction of the three cats who, despite being minor characters to start, eventually come to take over the series.  Well, two of them do – the unnamed ‘middle cat’ (Roast Beef, the middle cat!  Not Ray, not Pat!), and Ray.  The strips go a little ways past the end of The Party, the first major story arc that really introduces all the characters.  Then we get a little more written stuff, followed by the missing initial few months.  Onstad explains that he didn’t want to turn off new readers with the bizarre, totally out-of-character pieces where he was floundering about and discovering the medium.  I’ve recently started doing the same thing, when introducing friends to Achewood.  I tell them to start with The Party, and then go back and cover the beginning once they’re hooked, as its strangeness often confuses people before they’re properly hooked (although I maintain that anyone who really, really reads it must get hooked).

While I loved re-reading the early strips again, all of this stuff is online.  Beyond the sexy presentation and visceral pleasure of a hardbound book, what an Achewood devotee really buys this for is the previously unpublished stuff, such as the character introductions and the annotation.  The text running throughout the book is a fun addition.  As mentioned above, Onstad never breaks character, fully maintaining that the stuffed animals he writes about are real and animated creatures.  This fits nicely with the content of the various blogs he wrote for both himself and several of the characters in his world, and further develops the already cult-like mythology of how it all came to be.

Even in the rare interview he grants, Onstad rarely, if ever, breaks out of this persona.  This is why the annotations running below many of the strips are such a treat, and also, by the end, somewhat of a disappointment.  In the first pages of the collection, the annotations mention the thoughts behind the strips.  Onstad gets into what he thinks of them now, and often discusses how this line or that action doesn’t fit with the current conception of that character.  It’s refreshing to get a glimpse inside his head, even if at such a minute scale.

However, these revelatory comments don’t last.  The annotations eventually slide into extended versions of his ‘alt-texts,’ sentences or phrases that appear with each comic as the reader hovers their mouse over it.  These often add to a gag developed in the strip, or make some reference to the real world surrounding the comic.  While the alt-texts are occasionally brilliant, and almost always add something to the reading, it’s a shame that Onstad breaks away from revealing a tiny, rare snippet of himself and simply tacks on more of the same.  I still thoroughly enjoyed reading these alt-texty annotations, but couldn’t help but feel slightly disappointed after his opening ones.

This complaint does feel a bit forced, as though I feel like I have to say something negative amongst the praise.  I loved this collection, and eagerly await the next volume, alluded to in the end of Worst Song.  We’re told that it will contain the origin stories of the cats, and that “A bright orange sticker, oval in shape, will aggressively proclaim “CATS!” on its cover.”  I’ll keep an eye out.

I came across this excellent new series of Scrabble ads on Boing Boing this morning.  Excellent attempt at turning Scrabble (which I love, although I’m terrible at it) into something much cooler and more exciting than it is.  Deliberating for 15 minutes over seven letters will, unfortunately, never be as awesome as these commercials make it out to be.  But they’re still great fun.

I do wonder, however, where these are running.  They seem a little too racy for US broadcast TV.  They must be for a European market.

Also check out the other two, Sumo and Yoga.

Television, as wonderful as it is, is an incredible time drain.  An appropriately sized drain for my Olympic pool sized bath of free time, almost all of which can be sucked away by a sufficiently large piping system (the internet!).  And now that this metaphor has gone on for way too long, I’ll end this post, still having said nothing of any interest to anyone.  I’m back, and will be trying to write much more regularly.  May involves living in a new house, moving stress dissipated, money from tutoring at the very least, and hopefully some sort of job-related schedule.  This will mean more posts, on a more regular basis.

I’ve been a pretty big fan of Girl Talk for some years now, particularly after seeing one of his live shows.  I love the mashup style, the level of artistry in mixing together other sounds to create something genuinely new.

But this blows him away.  Kutiman’s absolutely stunning YouTube mash ups are completely brilliant.  And so new, something impossible to imagine even five years ago.  He takes a series of amateur clips, tutorials and random bits of people singing – none of which would be worth watching on their own, and mashes them into genuinely great music.  The Mother of All Funk Chords is a great funk song, This is What it Became is excellent dub, while I M New, embedded above, is just… stunning.

I found this through Merlin Mann’s post about it on 43folders.com, which has a link to Jonathan Coulton’s post about it.  Coulton’s blog also has a great discussion running in the comments about the potential legality of what Kutiman is doing.

This is what I get for taking early March off the internet, due to an excess of late winter sunshine.  I missed this hitting Boing Boing, although looking back, it did so in a fairly unimpressive way, considering the implications of this for the future of creative work on the ‘net.

This post, while partially a warning about potential changes in the works, is also to ask for your help, elusive reader.  I need a good header, something appropriate for a blog about… whatever this is about.  Filling time, writing about things that interest me.  Often media, but mostly whatever grabs my attention.  If you have a suitable picture, or know of a Creative Commons one somewhere in the depths of the internet, please let me know by comment or Facebook, if you’ve got me.

Thanks!

(CC Licensed photo from AlwaysHallways‘ Flickr stream)

Two months ago I titled this blog based on my own unemployed status (as well as some imagined other associations of the word – media to disemploy you of your time – a bit of a stretch).  And, y’know, unemployed.wordpress.com was taken.  And never updated, as is most often the case.

I still, in fact, don’t have a job.  Over two months in.  Naturally, I’m starting to feel a little worried – is all the dire economic news really true for Vancouver, despite the supposed lasting power of the pre-Olympic boom?  Much of the news media I consume is American based, and therefore often much direr than Canadian news in terms of economic forecasts.  Regardless of how this might actually influence my own life, I’m left with a fairly bleak outlook for my short term monetary future.

Which, by way of a long-winded segue, brings me to my point.  Feeling pessimistic about money leaves me searching for different, slightly ‘off the grid’ ways of making a living.  In this spirit, I noticed the Boing Boing post about a Salon article about a new book (oh, the wonderous and convoluted internets), Scavenger’s Manifesto.  The book is by a pair of Berkley, CA residents who manage to live very cheaply through various forms of scavenging, from coupon clipping to snatching up curbside furniture to occasional (and only clean-) dumpster diving, while in the Salon article Katharine Mieszkowski joins the authors for a typical scavenging day.

Through these various sources, plus the comments following the Boing Boing article, I’ve become very curious about the world of scavenging.  The authors of Scavenger’s Manifesto argue that our society unfairly labels those who pick through trash as dirty – although this trash is often perfectly good, useful stuff that has outlived its usefullness for the original owners.  Inspired by my morning’s reading, I now plan to hit up some alleyways – see if I can find anything interesting, useful, or potential Craigslist sales to make a few dollars.

The only issue with this in Vancouver is the prevalence of full time scavengers.  With our mild climate, horrible governmental policies towards mental health and addiction issues, and a multitude of other factors, Vancouver has a huge population of homeless and very low income folks.  Some of these people scrape out a living by collecting bottles and whatever else appears in back alleys.  To scavenge I would have to compete, both making scavenging more challenging and making me acutely aware that I need these things far less than most.

However – people throw out so much, and particularly around this time of the month (moving day), that I’m sure there is enough to go around.  It’s certainly worth a try.  A recommended resource for free things is Freecycle.org, which allows users to post goods they don’t want, or a request for something they do want, all in the spirit of reusing rather than throwing away.  The Craigslist free section, more established in some cities (such as Vancouver), is also an excellent source of free things.  And, finally, a general resource site for scavenging of all types: Trashwiki.

That show, of course, was This American Life.  It gripped me immediately.  The show’s format is an hour long collection of stories, generally three or four with an occasional episode consumed entirely by a single tale.  These are usually non-fiction, but told in such a way as to create a real narrative arc complete with strong characters and an engaging voice.  Some are highly produced field pieces, where the producers go spend time with a group of people and edit the tapes into a complete story.  Others, such as David Sedaris’ (the author of Naked, Me Talk Pretty One Day, and his most recent When You Are Engulfed in Flames) semi-regular pieces, are simply a story read aloud, often with some scoring to heighten the emotional impact.  Similarly to The Moth, these can be touching, funny, or simply interesting, although they’re put together much more tightly than The Moth’s ‘live and without notes’ tales.

The stories are grouped by themes, with each episode exploring a central idea.  Some recent episodes explored a worst case parenting situation (Didn’t Ask to Be Born),  ‘human’ resources, or what happens when we switch to our secondary plan in life (Plan B).

It comes out once a week, and is definitely worth listening to.  They also have the entire archives of the show on their website, with an excellent favourites page giving a strong introduction (and a direct iTunes link).

Oh, and it has won awards.  Because that is all that matters.

Next: Radio Lab

Previously: The Moth, Search Engine, Podcasting

This is bad enough, telling people not to rely on their communities or the people they know – just report everything.  But to make it worse, the message is accompanied by two awful posters.

Thanks, London, for making me seem like a presumptious jackass.

(via Boing Boing)

What I really like about this ad is how they pay the slightest of lip service to avoiding overbearing, Big Brother-esque citizen surveillance.  This isn’t as bad as many of the London ads I’ve seen bandied around on the internet, but it’s most certainly a step in the wrong direction.  And, it doesn’t really make any sense.  The hastily shot photo, captured as I was getting off the bus with my awful cellphone camera, misses the text over the Bugs Bunny imprint, which read: “Call a cartoon channel.”  What is that even supposed to mean?  This very wishy-washy, ambiguous ‘strange vs. suspicious’ dichotomy wherein cartoon rabbits are the benchmark of strange leaves very little room for anything else in that category.  Thus everything becomes suspicious – a homeless guy sleeping in the back row, for example (which is a relatively common sight in Vancouver, what with our huge homeless population and very wet weather).

I imagine we’ll be seeing more and more of this as the Olympics approach, what with the huge security budget mentioned above and the endless vieing of real estate developers to fully sterilize Vancouver in making it the ‘perfect city.’

But now I’m back!  With a review of another of my favourite podcasts: The Moth.

There isn’t much more I can say to describe The Moth than their own brief description at the beginning of every podcast: “true stories told live without notes.”  These stories are selected entries from their storytelling evenings held in New York, LA, and occasional touring shows across the States.

Most are stories of regular life, the kind of stand-out moments we all repeat over and over again in our favourite personal anecdotes.  Some of these are told by celebrities or successful writers, some by random folks who’ve clearly never stood on a stage before.  The Moth is extremely hit or miss, with the occasional overly trite attempt at a tearjerker or the more common semi-successful comedic writer trying too hard to be funny.  These misses are usually just boring – but at a maximum of 15 minutes I never feel too put out.  However, when The Moth hits, it does so very hard.  Episodes like Jack Hitt’s recent “Slumlord” story, a story which slowly and intricately builds to a hilariously satisfying conclusion, make it all worthwhile.

While The Moth isn’t always great, it has enough excellent moments in its weekly updates (one 10-15 minute story a week) to make it a definite keeper on my podcast list.  If you subscribe, be sure to delve into the archives (which unfortunately only go back a few months) and download the aforementioned “Slumlord” story.  This alone, I’m fairly certain, will convince you to stick with The Moth.

The Moth (and a direct iTunes link)

Next: This American Life

Previously: Search Engine, Podcasting