ArtLung LiveJournal

The aghast prose in this article is really something: Punks invade Williamsburg as heroin-addicted hobos set up shop in trendy Brooklyn neighborhood.

The newcomers, who call themselves "gutter punks," [...] "The girls here like it that I'm dirty and I ride trains," he added. [...] "This is not Haight-Ashbury," said Community Board 1 member Evan Thies. "This is a family neighborhood."

Also: Before shaving off both eyebrows, we suggest doing just one to see if it suits you.

Starting next month, I'm a "faculty mentor" at my alma mater, the MFA program in Creative and Professional Writing at Western Connecticut State University.

Mostly this means correspondence with one-three students a semester with them doing assignments and writing stories and whatnot.

See? An article in the paper about gyros. Yeah yeah, Greek people eat gyros, I get it already.

Now quit it.

New Features:

• Added optional location identification when creating a new entry or editing an old one. The user can push the “detect” button and it will automatically fill in general location based on IP. For more detailed location Google Gears, Wi2Geo, or a Wi-Fi connection is required.
• Paid users can now create a nickname or "Note" which only they will see when viewing the "lj user" tag or when viewing the other user's profile.
• Pingbacks will now be enabled for Basic and Plus accounts. Pingbacks are currently only available for use for LiveJournal entries and links; external pingbacks have been disabled until they're able to be used correctly (we're waiting for other pingback-enabled sites to upgrade to the newest version).

Bug fixes:

• Cyrillic MSN interstitial disabled for Opera users
• Improved performance of admin/schools/pending.bml so that it should no longer time out when called with arguments (LJSV-653)
• Made all content on create.bml https instead of mixed secure/insecure content
• Fixed bug that prevents some users from accessing their message center inbox (LJSV-351)
• Fixed bug that incorrectly routes http requests with a trailing period after livejournal.com
• Updated http://www.livejournal.com/bots to point to the current atom stream at http://atom.services.livejournal.com/atom-stream.xml
• Corrected typo on sponsor.bml page (LJSV-632)
• Made change to handling of javascript/html cleaner

Enhancements:

• Embedded videos now show up correctly when viewing entries in a moderated community queue (LJSV-363)
• A community maintainer can now see if an entry is marked explicit while it is still in the moderation queue (LJSV-617)
• Changed the MSN icon and alt-text in user's profile
• Video placeholders now have an alt tag for accessibility

Here's my full appearance schedule, including signings and panels. I'll be signing only at the Oni Press booth, #1833.

THURSDAY
12:00 - 1:00 Spotlight Panel (I'm interviewed on stage by Scott McCloud)
3:00 - 4:00 Oni Press Panelmonium!
5:30 - 6:50 Signing

FRIDAY
2:30 - 3:50 Signing
4:00 - 5:00 Graphic Novels Panel (w/ Tom Spurgeon and a passel of geniuses)

SATURDAY
1:00 - 2:20 Signing
5:30 - 6:50 Signing

I will not be attending the show whatsoever on Wednesday or Sunday, sorry.

Here's what we'll have at my Oni signings: two new t-shirts, new button packs, limited-edition prints from TCAF, all the books, and I'll bring as much artwork as I can.

(If you have specific page requests for original art, leave them in the comments or hit me on Twitter and I'll try to accomodate you! Note that a lot of the "good" pages from vols 1-3 have been sold over the years. Prices will start from about $200.)

Things I'm not sure we'll have: last year's colour specials. The big posters. Anything else that we've had in the past in limited quantities.

I'll show off the new t-shirt designs hopefully by the end of the week! (Waiting for photos of the finished shirts.)

J'aime la langue française.

(Et creme brulee.) :D

( in english )

http://www.boygirlparty.com/wordpress/archives/128

a quick update as i battle the worst flu i’ve ever known (but thankfully not the fllu of swines)

the artwork from “Draw 4″ at art star philly is available here, here, here, and here. Enormous Tiny Art is here, and I’m currently in two shows: “Printed Matter” at GR2 in Los Angeles and “Dime Bag” at GRNY in NYC - links forthcoming when artwork is available. Oh, but one of the prints in “Printed Matter” looks like this.

Well, its nerdblog did:

-- Also I have to read either some of, or more of, or all of, the work of Elizabeth Hand, Greer Gilman, Catherynne Valente, Jedediah Berry, Michael Cisco and Michael Burstein ASAP (this is not an exhaustive list)

I agree with most of those!

Last night I did a chat with the members of the Snutchlabs writing workshop, speaking mostly about the stories in You Might Sleep... (which you should buy, as thanks to the Wildside/Prime split I'm forced to repeatedly mention the book myself like a Whole Foods employee who for an hour has to pretend to be very excited about chicken apple sausages). We also discussed MFA programs, the alpha brainwave state, how to begin and end stories, and how Kurt Dinan's new haircut makes him look like a stick of roll-on deodorant.





I'm just sayin...

Read the chat here.

When I was a kid, I remember reading in The Weekly Reader or some other free periodical handed out to schools of the horrors of the Soviet Union. In one story that listed many terrible absurdities, I read that a person with mild retardation was sent to prison for spilling ink on a newspaper that had featured a photo of Stalin. (This wasn't a story contemporary to the 1970s or early 1980s, when I read it.)

Meanwhile, here in 2009 in the US:

On Oct. 15, 2004, Mary Elizabeth Schipke entered the Oracle post office to buy a 47-cent stamped envelope. When she got frustrated with the clerk behind the counter, she told her: "God, I pray a bomb falls on your stupid, fucking head."

Almost a year later, Schipke was convicted of threatening a federal facility with weapons of mass destruction. Schipke describes what she told the clerk that day as an "imprecatory prayer"—basically, a simple curse—but that defense didn't keep her from serving a four-year prison sentence, with the last two years at Carswell, a women's federal medical prison outside of Fort Worth, Texas, that has been the subject of allegations about the questionable care of prisoners with physical and psychiatric conditions.


One of the things I noted immediately: "WMD" has been dialed down to apparently mean any bomb at all. That'll be handy for the next round of preemptive invasions, eh?

A couple of other interesting things. Schipke is kook in her own right (see November 7, 1998). Also, she looks forward to the day when the Chinese military frees their children from George Washington since the American people are utterly brainwashed by their masters. She certainly seems to count as mentally unbalanced, perhaps in a way not so dissimilar to our poor Soviet ink-spiller.

But real threats with WMDs? Nah.

I squished some of my fingers an hour ago, so typing sucks right now!

We're going to San Diego Comic Con next week! I'm a "Special Guest" this year, for the first time, which means I get to do some panels, and maybe you'd be so kind as to attend one or more of them.



Here they are, all three of them:

THURSDAY 12:00-1:00
Spotlight on Bryan Lee O'Malley: Comic-Con special guest Bryan Lee O'Malley (winner of the Doug Wright, Joe Shuster, and Harvey Awards) talks with legendary comics scholar Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics, Zot!) about Bryan's groundbreaking slice-of-life graphic novel series Scott Pilgrim. From its genesis to the production of the upcoming film version, O'Malley speaks frankly about where Scott Pilgrim came from and where the series is going from here. With a fan Q&A to close the discussion, this is the must attend event of Comic-Con 2009! Room 5AB

(I hear "Room 5AB" seats 500. I have a feeling more than 500 people will show up. Get in early. Me, McCloud, comics, and maybe if you're really good I'll say one or two sentences about this little movie adaptation.)

THURSDAY 3:00-4:00
Oni Press: Panelmonium 2009: Get up close and personal with trend setting indie comic powerhouse Oni Press. Join in the Q&A with your favorite Oni creators, including Ross Campbell (Wet Moon), Jamie S. Rich (You Have Killed Me), Greg Rucka (Whiteout), Bryan Lee O'Malley (Scott Pilgrim), and Chris Schweizer (The Crogan Adventures). Get sneak peeks at upcoming Oni projects, news on Oni Press fan initiatives, free Oni comics, prizes, and more! Guaranteed by Oni Press's totally biased employees to be "the most fun you'll ever have at a panel." Room 10

(I will be on this panel somewhat briefly and probably will not say anything important about anything, so if you're just looking for MOVIE INFO, go someplace else! This one's about comics!)

Here's the wild card:

FRIDAY 4:00-5:00
Graphic Novels: Moderator Tom Spurgeon (ComicsReporter.com) talks to some of the superstars of graphic novels in this lively panel discussion. Joining Tom are Lewis Trondheim (Kaput and Zosky), Bryan Lee O'Malley (Scott Pilgrim), Seth (George Sprott 1894–1975), Gene Yang (American Born Chinese), Jason Lutes (Berlin), and Derek Kirk Kim (Eternal Smile). Room 8

(It's me, with acknowledged masters Trondheim, Seth and Lutes, plus comics' two other Asians! Oh my god, what? I have no idea what this panel is going to be like. Probably very interesting for you and terrifying for me.)

I don't have my signing schedule just yet, but I think it's going to be something like: late Thursday, midday Friday, and both of those periods on Saturday. I will be leaving on Sunday, and I won't be attending Preview Night on Wednesday, but you've got three days and approximately 5 1/2 specific hours in which to get stuff signed.

As I may have said earlier, there are going to be a few new t-shirt designs, hopefully, and new button designs which I've already shown you, and the rest of the TCAF prints, and I'm not sure what else is left over from olden times. I will be signing whatever you throw at me, but probably not sketching at all due to time and volume.

Charles Brown has passed. I remember my one time at Locus HQ on Haikasoru.

I was interested to see that Permuted Press got a co-publishing deal for several of their books with Pocket. You know, "interested."


Meanwhile, another new micropress with a zombie theme, "Living Dead Press", makes their profits the old-fashioned way: What you get:
$25.00 flat fee and a copy of the book. This price is reflective to this anthology only, usually we pay going rate, but we feel there are many writers out there who would love to see their name in print and really are doing it for the love of it, not for the cash.

That's what this anthology is about.

Uh-huh.

Obviously the workaround is to stay away from Fisherman's Wharf.

Zipping past Fisherman's Wharf, Chris Paget's scanner downloaded to his laptop the unique serial numbers of two pedestrians' electronic U.S. passport cards embedded with radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags. Within an hour, he'd "skimmed" four more of the new, microchipped PASS cards from a distance of 20 feet.

"There's a reason you don't wear your Social Security number across your T-shirt," Albrecht says, "and beaming out your new, national RFID number in a 30-foot radius would be far worse."

But Gigi Zenk, a spokeswoman for the Washington state Department of Licensing, says Americans "aren't that concerned about the RFID" in a time when "tracking an individual is much easier through a cell phone."

It's a podcast, see!

It's like this: beep beep beep beep beep beep beep

Sound familiar?

Poll #1428331 What's that beeping?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

There's a distant beeping. What is it?

Over at Haikasoru, my pal Eric is blogging about "light novels" and whether Haikasoru titles are light novels or not.

Check it out!

http://www.haikasoru.com/?p=251

And leave some comments!