A post via Sketch cast....

There could be something to this sketch cast thing. I'm not sure how I feel yet, but it would obviously lend itself to a different form of drawing then I may be used to. Maybe it will lead to a sort of graffiti like short hand of drawing, in which much information is conveyed in small sketches. Here's my first post with a semi review.

Great little video find - The Unicorns...

I would noramlly brissle at the thought of this subject matter. Perhaps because it reminds me of horrible airbrushed Trapper Keeper notebooks, and D & D kids. This I like though...

I Love Process Part 3

My web cartoonist hero, Adam Koford, has posted this fantastic tip (no pun intended) about getting the most out of your pens. I have been trying to figure out what type of pens he uses for his comics, and this clip tells you that he prefers the Faber Castell PITT brush pen. Enjoy!

The Littlest Wings

I will probably elaborate on this at another time when I am not so tired and buzzing on the adrenaline that follows a child being born, but I am proud to introduce the newest member of our family, Elisabeth. She was 4 days late, but we managed to have a very stress free 5 hour delivery at home with a wonderful and skilled mid wife. We are elated that our family has grown +1. I sat down realizing that a couple of my favorite songs for baby’s are more boy oriented (“Beautiful Boy”, and “Stay Up Late”). So when I sat down and heard this beautiful version of Neil Youngs “Little Wing” by Elizabeth Mitchell, I nearly cried all over again. Feel free to post some of your other favorite songs you might play for that little special someone.

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Omnikrom "ÉTÉ HIT"

I don't understand a thing they are saying, but I love the use of green screen and the "neon" graphics. Plus Hip Hop from other countries sometimes just seems cooler then the tired out stuff played here.

Parts and Labor's "The Gold We're Digging"

I believe all rock videos should be of limited budget, funded by the band, and be done as much as possible by the band itself. Well. that might be difficult for some, but at least employ some one who is willing to work with the simple premise of putting visuals to your music. And for god sake, stop trying to make videos look like a blockbuster movie!

That being said, here is a perfect example of a great looking video, a good song, and rather simple idea (no matter how complex the actual execution was). I compare it to a cross between Wang Chungs video for Everybody Have Fun Tonight and The White Stripes Fell in Love with a Girl.

Satyricom International's Latest Press Release...

Over on CNN Money there was a article about CEO's salaries are 364 x's more than the average worker. Not one to let news like this get to their employees, Satyricom has released a statement to clarify their own CEO's (Dr. Skinny) value.

Pathetic Attempt To Start A Meme #1

Words are great. I love stripping them down, rubbing them with oil, dicing them up,
and combining them with parts of other words. So I propose to you a new word that I hope sweeps the Internets. Just remember you read it here first.


Gregarian Societies - From the word gregarious "living in contiguous nests but not forming a true colony". In the post MySpace era, where user blogs are the new web page, there will be all these small colonies of users with similar interests congregate but basically form clicks rather than communities.

I have Wired to thank for putting this idea in my head.

I Love Process - Part 2

Today's chronicle of process comes from Evan Dorkin of the great comix Dork! and Milk and Cheese. Evan and his girl Sara Dyer are regular contributors to all the creative shows on TV such as Space Ghost coast to Coast, Yo Gabba Gabba, and even as I have found out Nick Magazines Fairly Odd Parents. Here's a link to his layouts for The Fairly Odd Parents comic in Nick Magazine. Click the image of Evan for a link to his Live Journal blog.

I'm Ape, Lad - Over Adam Koford's work...

Adam Koford is one of my new heroes. He is doing something so basic and simple in his drawing of comics, but utilizing all the best things about the internet, to do what he likes to do. Quite simply, he will draw a drawing for you for $20 B&W, $50 color. But he's used the web, blogs, Flickr, and YouTube to promote himself, and it's brilliant. It helps that he is so damn talented to boot. Anyone who ever had a knack of drawing silly little pictures was surely asked at some point in school to draw a picture for someone. Perhaps you refused, feeling a bit like you were being treated like a monkey for someone's amusement (I know I did). Sometimes though, people will offer you money for your work. I may have been offered money too a couple times (and I'm sure I took it).

What Mr. Koford does with the internet really hits me deep inside as just an unbridled desire to do what you love, on the simplest terms, and make a little money doing it. In these times of "e-commerce" his approach resembles such a basic structure of economics that seems forgotten in this ad supported content world, where everything on the net is free for a price. Koford's work stands on the most basic desire any of us creative types would ideally like to live by - I draw you a picture, you give me money for it. Koford dictates the style, the characters, and even allows your input, but everything he produces, whether you own it or not, is still his by execution. I am adding a link to my side bar so that you may check out his work yourself. For Adam Koford, the internet is the lunch room, and he'll gladly sit next to you and doodle what you like, if you have $20.

Laugh-Out-Loud Cats is Adam Koford's fictitious depression era comic strip by his Great Grandfather Aloysius "Gorilla" Koford. The comic is actually consists of "found" panels that are posted everyday - simple punch lines existing without previous panels set ups, is both very post modern (in a good way) and of the moments (now and of the great depression). They slyly reference the I Can Has Cheezburger phenomenon of the LOL Cat memes, and create an alternate comics history by recycling these memes as final panel punchlines. Kofords style for these addicting little comics is very much in the vein of classic cartoonists such as George Herriman's Krazy Kat. The absurdity of it all, the grass roots growth in popularity of Laugh-Out-Loud Cats which itself references a on going internet joke, is perplexing yet has been born a new with its self reference. Check out this little Boing Boing post that shows how many levels a Laugh-Out-Loud Cats comic works.

1977 Article on the 25th Anniversary of Mad Magazine...

Mike Lynch, a gag cartoonist, has a reproduction of a New York Times Magazine article on the 2th Anniversary of Mad Magazine on his blog. I've sited Mad Magazine as my first corrupting influence, and I didn't even read it in it's golden era, when Harvey Kurtzman was at the helm, and it really was innovative. Needless to say, the seed that Kurtzman planted also warped my perception of everything, and for this I can only bow to the master.

Who we're not...

I named my comic/website Satyricom after reading Petronius' Satyricon - as much as one can read a book that doesn't survive in the complete form. Sections are missing but it doesn't really detract from the over all story, which is one of the first examples of a novel. Satyricon succeeds in that it seems to lambaste everything about the time it was written, and exhibits subject matter that would no doubt incite cries of objection, from many different circles of belief and morality, if it were released today. In a nut shell, it's parody, and it's satire - and thanks to the schmucks (said with reverence) at Mad Magazine, satire and parody are a big part of what I look for in humor to this day.

I am also a sucker for puns and playing with words and phrases (perhaps this can also be attributed to those afforementioned schmucks.). What name could possible lay it out better for my cartoon world's multinational, trans-global, all encompassing corporation than the simple word - Satyricom?

So perhaps you came across this post through google, or you miss typed the Norwegian Black Metal Band Satyricon's name, if that is the case, I'm sure you are thoroughly disappointed by all of this, and I apologize, because if there is one thing I could possibly say that my site is guaranteed to not be similar too, it is Norwegian Black Metal. But hey, too each their own. Please don't hurt me, or dig up my ancestors.

We are also not to be confused with is Italian Director Fredrico Fellini's Satyricon of which I have not seen, nor can I offer any insight into the differences between his version of Satyricom and my cast of characters that make up a completely unrelated web comic/comix that goes by the name Satyricom. <---That should bode well for a confusing search engine quote.

I'll routinely update this site with further reminders of who we are not.

E - Meat - The Power of the Internet, now in thin, easily digestable slices...

This will be premiering soon on the Satyricom Global Concern blog, once we figure out the logistics and our marketing demographics. Bandwidth issues are only a problem depending on what thickness slice you prefer. This solves one of the (at least) three problems some of us who are stuck in front of our computers have daily. I'll let you guess what the others are...

Much thanks to fistula spume!

Playing Ketchup

I Love Process Part 1

If there is one thing I can't get enough of on the web, in magazines, on T.V. is an sort of behind the scenes, detailed looks at how artists, musicians, writers, or just plain do their work. I love anything - pix of tools, desks, computer set ups (drool). Today's post will take you over to Craig Thompson's blog Doot Doot Garden. Craig Thompson is author/illustrator of the fantasctic illustrated (or graphic novel, if you will) Blankets.

Plastic Bags...Everywhere....

So this is slowly becomig a "Your Environment Friday" here at the Curmudgeon. Two news items in particular caught my interest while doing my usual troll of the internet. The first was rather depressing (perhaps I should say sobering). The second, much more inspiring.

There is a really informative article over at Salon regarding Americans somewhat ubiquitous use of the plastic bag. A lot of this is information we've known - plastic bags are wasteful. But, there is always something about numbers to kind of smack you across the face. Americans throw out the equivalent of 12 million barrels of oil a year in tossed plastic bags. According to Slate, a barrel is about 42 gallons. It's amazing to me that something that has become so superfluous in our shopping experience, can just accumulate to a breaking point. We really have to do something fast to stop producing these needless things. Here's some information on a The ERF's Campaign Against the Plastic Plague.

(link via Boing Boing)


The second item of interest was on Talk of The Nation's Science Friday show (podcast). The issue was using tidal energy to produce electricity. I had heard about this vaguely in science class in high school, but have never seen it demonstrated. As someone who is interested in alternative forms of energy, this is very interesting. Here is Ocean Power Technology, one of the people interviewed for the show. They use a tethered buoy that works on the same principal that states moving a magnet on a wire creates a electrical current. My apologies for not knowing the precise name of the law I am referring to. Listen to the show, they'll explain it.



And I'll leave you with a link to artist Chris Jordan's site, whose work "looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 426,000 cell phones retired every day. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs." (quote and picture from artist's site)

Want!

Okay. Mindless promotion time (as in I'll send people to the site in hopes that one of these bags will come to me some how - even though they aren't paying me). This bag from Timbuk2 looks friggin' awesome - The Hacker! I learned about it from the great Bay Area site, Laughing Squid, and I definitely want one (preferably with all the stuff Scott Beale has in his). So if anyone out there is feeling altruistic, email me, and I'll give you shipping instructions.

R. Mutt, We Hardly Understood Ye...

Marcel Duchamp may be one of my all time favorite artists. Let's face it, he basically invented Post Modernism. His early painted work was considered cubism but was more on the futurist tip - and some how existed as neither. Duchamp's amazing Nude Descending A Staircase (1912) took elements from cubism, but at the same time represented movement - something that the cubist failed to do with their static still lives and portraits. One of the greatest interpretation's of this piece is in the book Art and Physics by Leonard Schlain (website here, author's blog here). The book links ideas in art to ideas that were taking place in science at the same time. He uses the painting to illustrate Einstein's Theory of Relativity, basically stating that it illustrates if one were to travel faster than the speed of light, they would see the past, present and future at the same time. I could be very off on this simple explanation that Mr. Schlain more eloquently describes, but I unfortunately no longer posses the book (liberated in a move), but still highly recommend it. If you are like me, a visual learner, it's a wonderful compendium to understanding the field of physics a little better, through the use of well known art works.

Learn more about Duchamp at this wonderful site, Understanding Duchamp, that is free of art world hyperbole

Boycott Regal Cinemas

So here's one of the many things that get under my skin - when corporations abuse the very people who pay their salaries - the consumer. Apparently Regal Cinemas had A 19 year old girl named Jhannet Sejas arrested for recording a 20 second clip of the Transformers Movie. She now is facing $2500 in fines and up to a year in jail. This is absurd since this is obviously not your evil pirate or bootlegger in their "PSA's" that they make us watch before you can get to the menu of a DVD. Apparently, we as consumers are not able to decifer between a 20 second clip of the transformers movie, shot by a shitty camera phone, from the actual movie. I see the film industry is following the lead of the music industry, and we know how well that has worked.

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