I can’t decide if this is awesome or creepy:

(Via Topless Robot)

This is pretty cool. Makes me wish I was better at/more willing to learn about animation:

keep drawing from studio shelter on Vimeo.

(Via LikeCool.com)

It’s no small secret that the punditocracy feels pretty dismissive about the whole Occupy Wall Street movement. Even those on the left-ish side of things always sound like they’re sort of grasping at straws in an effort to articulately defend the movement. Unfortunately, a lot of that is because those that are actually doing the occupying have difficulty doing that as well.

In a twist of irony that any young hipster can appreciate, credit bank behemoth American Express is promoting Small Business Saturday, the Saturday that falls between Black Friday and Cyber Monday. This year, that’s November 26th. It’s a pretty cool initiative to urge consumers to spend at their favorite local, independently-owned shops as an alternative to the big box stores this holiday season. Check it out:

(Via ForkParty.com)

We recently discovered JLE’s channel on YouTube, and it is excellent:

OK, the title is a bit misleading, in that I (and I imagine a lot of us) already think of our iPhones as robots. And with the release of the iPhone 4S and its introduction of Siri, the already-amazing devices certainly became much more robotic. But they still count on you for gettin’ around.

Peter, Phu and Keller at Romotive would like to put a stop to that. They’ve developed Romo, a mobile platform and app network that turn your iPhone into a moving, talking robot. For funding, they launched a Kickstarter page, and based on the response so far, it looks like they should be able to expand Romo’s capabilities a lot in the coming months—their goal deadline is Nov. 21st and they’ve already more than doubled it. This is good news, because in theory, the more money they receive, the more command apps they’ll be able to develop, as well as new hardware modules to attach to the basic base to enlarge Romo and (ideally) increase its functionality.

See, Japan? Not every robot has to be man-sized and terrifying. Ease us into the future…baby-steps!

(Via Thrillist.com)

Saturday was the first annual Baltimore Run For Your Lives zombie 5K obstacle race, and this guy had a front-row seat!

The race was very much a full-day affair, with the first group of runners heading out into the course at 8am and the last one crossing the finish line around 6pm, followed by live music until midnight! This of course meant that Meredith and I had to get to the event around 5am to finish setting up our booth before the attendees showed up for registration at 6am—which meant a 3am wake-up to load the car up for a 4am departure time!

Totally worth it, though—a very fun experience, and a great place to meet new fans and make new friends.

I even snapped some pictures throughout the day, though I had to wait until around 7:30 or 8 for the sun to come up and get over the treeline. Here’s the booth in the early morning—we were soooo excited to see the sun, and big-ups to the folks in the Funtastic Foods tent for keeping us warm with a steady stream of hot chocolate!

The event area itself was the perfect setting for a mock-zombie apocalypse: remote, lots of forest, and very cold and overcast for much of the day. Our stuff went over really well, and it was especially gratifying to see my newest designs get lots of love from the crowd, though pretty much every design I’d brought with us carried its weight—it’s always nice to see that Fuzz has still got it! Even nicer to see older fans already in-the-know:

I love this sort of thing—I imagine it’s a lot like being a musician and never getting sick of hearing your song on the radio.

All in all, it was a great day, but really long—the booth pretty much looked like this from 8:20am (around the time the first survivors made it to the finish line) until we started packing up around 8pm:

And sad as I was initially that I had to work the booth instead of run the course, I eventually realized it was definitely for the best; way too many reports of broken legs, serious cuts and gashes, and sprained ankles, not to mention that fact that there were two water obstacles that necessitated running around in soaked shorts & tees in sub-55˚ weather, followed by a thorough hosing down to remove caked-on mud. The weather was miserable enough being dry and fully-clothed, thank you very much!

But ultimately everyone seemed to have a blast—especially this guy:

Many thanks to all the new fans I met this weekend! And those of you who couldn’t make it, fear not and remember, you can take 10% off your purchase now through the end of October by entering the coupon code HALLOWEEN10 at checkout! And Philly fans—we’re coming back up in December for R5 Productions’ Punk Rock Flea Market! $3 gets you inside to shop for awesome holiday gifts from a variety of vendors, and I’ll be there with new stuff on shirts, bags & belts! Even better: it’s indoors! Hope to see you all there:)

So I apologize in advance for all the Australia-related posts coming down the pike in the next few days—it’s just that it’s very exciting to be able to blog about weird stuff I’ve experienced first-hand, as opposed to mining the web for content. To that end, please let me introduce you to SYN.

SYN (Student Youth Network) is a youth-run media organization that operates and broadcasts out of Melbourne, Victoria. A lot of their marketing mentions it’s for young people aged 12-25, which is a pretty wide spread. The cool thing is that it’s 100% true—over the course of the week and a half I was there, I heard DJs in various time-slots that were anywhere from 12/13 to 25, with shows ranging from mall-punk music and horror movie critiques from 14 year olds to sex advice from 25 year olds. Among other show themes, there was a time-slot focused on Formula 1 racing, stand-up comedy, Korean pop, Cantonese pop, Japanese pop, a show devoted entirely to Radiohead (cleverly titled Radiohead to Tail), and even a show hosted by a pair of dudes with mental disabilities discussing their favorite cars and music. But the show that really caught our ear as we were driving around the Yarra Valley looking for good wineries? Happy Hour at the Cantina.

HHatC, sadly, was broadcasting their final show of the season (possibly ever?), but nothing quite prepares you for turning on the radio to hear adults (or close to it) discussing the pros and cons of living with an ewok housemate (“Well, you’d have to have a treehouse in the back yard for it to live in.” “CORRECTION: you’d GET to have a treehouse in your backyard for it to live in!”), and how unfair it is that outside of Wicket and the Chief, none of the other ewoks were given names. This went on for the better part of an hour, interspersed with Star Wars-themed songs, like a Russian klezmer jam about how Boba Fett and Grand Moff Tarkin were childhood friends but had a falling out. REAL. TALK.

And this is just the DJ’s conversing—by and large, the music on SYN is top-notch, and we were exposed to a lot of cool Aussie indie-rock that we otherwise wouldn’t have ever heard of (it seems like Pitchfork et al only champion a few Aussie bands a year). And the great thing is, you can stream it live online! I highly recommend tuning in periodically to get a taste. Just remember—they’re on the other side of the world, so the best time to tune in is in the evening for their morning programming, being broadcast from the future!

In case you hadn’t noticed, shizz just got a whole lot more orange up in this biatch: I’ve been furiously adding a ton of Halloween-themed designs to the collection of late, and not to get all sales-y on ya, but now is the perfect time to order your “I’m too old/un-creative to wear a costume on Halloween” costume!

Let’s see what we see, shall we?

Wow, that’s a lot! Sure, there are some classics in there, like Werewolf Bar Mitzvah, Ghost Whisperers, Zombie Boyfriends Bite, Classic Movie Monsters, and All My Friends Are Undead. But check out all that new stuff! Death Takes A Holiday, Zombie Dance Party, Sugar Skull Pin-Up, Ghost World, Transylvania Is For Lovers…even our pal the victorious yeti is getting in on the action with his alpine resort shirt, and, along with the Creature from the Black Lagoon, on his very own belt!

And if you feel like picking one of these up in person, stop by my booth at the zombie-themed Run For Your Lives 5k in Darlington, Maryland on October 22nd! It’s bound to be awesome—I mean, c’mon; WE’LL be there—and we LOVE meeting fans!

And hey, those of you too busy or too far away—we get it. Life is busy. October is cold. Zombies (even fake ones) are scary. So to show we have no hard feelings, stay safe and warm at home and take 10% off your purchases now through the end of October by entering HALLOWEEN10 at checkout. Because 3-D or purely digital, we love you guys!

This is a fitting post, considering that I’m blogging at you FROM THE PAST. Real talk: I’m currently somewhere over the Pacific hoping I don’t pull an Oceanic 815 on the way to Melbourne. So Mystery Monday is actually Straightforward Saturday. But this is still very cool.

By “this”, I mean f@#king REPLICATOR TECHNOLOGY.

According to a story in the February 2011 issue of The Economist (seriously, how was I not aware of this for the last 8 months?), we (that is, humans) have been dabbling in “additive manufacturing”, which is just an extremely fancy way of saying “3-D printing”.

It works like this. First you call up a blueprint on your computer screen and tinker with its shape and colour where necessary. Then you press print. A machine nearby whirrs into life and builds up the object gradually, either by depositing material from a nozzle, or by selectively solidifying a thin layer of plastic or metal dust using tiny drops of glue or a tightly focused beam. Products are thus built up by progressively adding material, one layer at a time: hence the technology’s other name, additive manufacturing. Eventually the object in question—a spare part for your car, a lampshade, a violin—pops out. The beauty of the technology is that it does not need to happen in a factory. Small items can be made by a machine like a desktop printer, in the corner of an office, a shop or even a house; big items—bicycle frames, panels for cars, aircraft parts—need a larger machine, and a bit more space.

What. The. F@#k.

You know, when the first Iron Man movie came out, and Tony Stark tells his AI butler J.A.R.V.I.S. to fabricate his Mark II armor, and J.A.R.V.I.S. says it’ll be complete in something ridiculous like 9 hours, I chalked it up to interesting future-tech that some fanboy writer made up to make Stark and his resources seem cooler. I did not think for even a second this shit was real.

Now, about the asterix in the post title—there are two big limitations to this form or manufacturing at present:

1. The fabricators can only reproduce objects comprised of inorganic material. Hence starvation still existing and people still dying of exposure. Trust me, if these things could do cotton, every single one of the shirts you guys buy from me would be made with one.

2. They’re not exactly priced to own for everyone, but they’re surprisingly inexpensive (given that we’re talking about rudimentary Star Trek technology) at around $7000. You could buy two of these things for the same amount of money you’d spend on most sub-compact cars.

So while we still can’t get a cup of tea out of thin air, we’re a lot closer to it than I ever thought we’d be in my lifetime.

Your usual director of diversions and amusement is on a plane to Australia right now, so one of his helper elves found this little optical illusion to keep you amused:

via Top Cultured