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:
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!
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.
Real talk: dating sucks. Barring hitting the genetic and/or financial jackpot a la, say, Ryan Gosling, walking up to complete strangers and asking them to join you one-on-one for a meal and/or some sort of social activity is probably the least-natural thing in the realm of human interaction. The fact that this initial interaction only begins as a means to seeing the other person naked—and that said other person is FULLY AWARE OF THIS—just makes it even more awkward.
Thankfully, even with the glut of online dating sites, smart people are still coming up with innovative variations on the theme. To wit: DuoDater.com
Based on the premise that it’s harder for serial killers to off two people at the same time double-dating is way more fun than one-on-one dating (at least at first), California-based dating site Duo Dater allows users to link up their profiles with a friend’s and then find matches with other friend pairs for double-dates.
It’s actually a brilliant idea—it diffuses the pressure of the date and distributes it among four people instead of two, and allows two other people to pick up the slack and speak while you think of the next inoffensive, superficial question to ask the person sitting opposite you.
Trading under the name DWITT, David Witt is a Minneapolis-based illustrator who is in the midst of a pretty awesome series, both in terms of concept and execution: Last Words.
Basically, he does quasi-caricatured portraits of famous dead celebs paired with the last words they uttered before shuffling off to the Great Cocktail Party In The Sky. I really hope he continues the series; his most recent addition is Bob Marley, though besides Bogey (pictured above), my favorite would have to be Groucho (of the human variety—not the canine). You can check out his full portfolio, including posters and other design/illustration work, here.
Even if this story is completely fabricated and the photo-bombing completely doctored, I don’t think any of us would put it past a shark to pull this shit just for its own murderous giggles.
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