metabuzz

in these dark times it is important - vital, even - to heartily award oneself for the glimpse of even the most minor success.

that said, my work for the boutique hygge and west has been published in this blog. that's cool!

further, my custom pedal work, some of which is viewable at my website, can be seen in its rough entirety at the new custom pedal page at z vex's website.

spread the hype. we need work.

bitrated

check out 8bitpeoples. it's a record label that promotes musicians that either program or emulate 8-bit chiptunes. (plus they have free downloads.) i don't know if any of you are at all interested in the 8-bit music style, but if not, now's the time to start. i've already mentioned the high voltage sid collection; that's a collection of emulated c64 music - some of it from c64 games, some of it original work by the composers for those games. regardless of the application, most of it's great. the composers (at least the bigger names) were/are a group of very talented guys. same is true of the artists on 8bitpeoples, although they draw additional inspiration from, and directly utilize, the sound chips of the nes, atari 2600, and game boy.

oh, and in other news: i'm in a show next weekend at the cpop gallery in detroit. road trip!

noelyoungstudio.com updated

check it out! there's a fair amount of new stuff on display.

http://noelyoungstudio.com

guns for eyes

i've been a devoted fan of the webcomic achewood since sometime in 2004, and i'd always felt satisfied by the daily portion of online cartooning it offered up. however, recently, achewood author chris onstad has become increasingly sporadic in his publishing between increasing familial demands and touring the nation to tout his new book. good for him; he absolutely deserves all the laudations and doting a cartoonist could hope for. as i've said at nearly any opportune moment or lull in conversation, achewood is basically one of my favorite things, period. still, this is all apropos of describing that, with less daily achewood to read, i've begun to divert my attentions elsewhere in order to plug the gap between the second cup of coffee and actually beginning the workday. for while achewood used to be my one and only, i try to be a realist in our dismissive and fleeting generation, and "out of sight, out of mind" is our neglectful and shoe-gazing motto. (what the fuck?)

anyway, so i stumbled upon scary go round recently (which, by the way, is now linked in that sidebar to the right, along with achewood), and it is awesome. while much more innocent than achewood - or maybe just more british, substituting achewood's depressive and vulgar characters for a set of depressive but whimsical ones, and hip hop slang for a cockney slur - scary go round author john allison is equally engaging as onstad if not as consistently hilarious.

thematically, the two are similar as well. each features a diverse and idiosyncratic cast of characters, and story arcs in both strips seem to teeter innocuously on the borderline of the surreal before dropping off the face of reality entirely, and then resolving as if nothing ever happened. in short, they both work wonderfully in the format of a daily serial strip. what's so excellent about scary go round, though, is the way it further resembles a favorite television sitcom. it's tamer than achewood, but without losing any of its bizarre appeal; and while achewood has some characters to whom we can relate on an emotional level (specifically, the near-suicidal cat roast beef), john alison writes an entire cast for a generation of twenty-somethings who spend too much time at a computer. there's everything from high school playground angst (the young couple of dark esther and football hooligan eustace is especially nice) to nearing-thirty unemployment (and nearing-thirty unemployment as a merman).

it's touches like that - like adding a merman to the primary household in the comic's world - that make scary go round so great. i've gone through and read most of the archived strips, and my favorite plotline follows eustace and some classmates on an exchange in france as they try to thwart the new easter bunny that french president sarkozy has brought to france from canada - it's established early on that it is actually a ferocious wendigo, and it is devouring the countryside while speaking in verse. (as an aside, part of the strip's appeal for me might come from a shared interest with john allison in cryptozoology - another plotline has the characters searching for a series of old-world gods in order to save the planet.) this mix of the unbelievable with the everyday provides the perfect backdrop for good writing. look at, like, anything joss whedon has ever done, and you can see why this formula, when mixed with a bunch of snappy banter, works so successfully.

finally, the art is really good. look back to the first scary go round strip in the archives and you'll realize this hasn't always been the case, but it looks like john allison has come into his own. basically, go read it. it's great.

hey kid, you wanna make ten bucks?

something to meditate on:

somefield

i stumbled upon barnaby ward's website earlier today. take a look; his work is incredible.

the beast

i found this on a blog concerning the "great apostasy" of the american people, as foretold in the scriptures of blah blah blah. basically it's a rad collage of the beast (who appears to be dressed as an 18th century american statesman with some kind of zohar-illuminatis pyramid attached to his forehead) holding uncle sam, douglas macarthur, and a naval officer on strings and leading them after a dinosaur-headed chimera around which is orbiting a fiery psychedelic planet earth.

if this is what happens when we americans have strayed from the flock en masse, i'm all in.