Friends

http://coilhouse.net/2009/11/the-dole-banana-man/

http://coilhouse.net/?p=11037

Is it even necessary to discuss the utter insanity of Japanese media? I mean by this point I think it has been firmly established that, to the Western sensibility, their commercials are bat-shit crazy; 30 second recordings of spectacularly horrible acid trips. The Japanese version of Mad Men would require the talents of David Lynch and Takashi Miike working in concert. To stare into the mind of the ad man of the Far East is to stare into the face of God. We blink, for our feeble brains cannot process its wonder.

This ad for Dole bananas is no different. The Dole Banana Man struts down the street as people accost him; demanding satisfaction, which he obliges. A woman sitting on a bench despondent, it seems, from a lack of bananas. Not for long, however, as the Dole Banana Man comes upon her and, smiling at the camera, his bananastache atwitter, he bestows on her a bounty of fruit sprayed forth from one nostril; a potassium rich snot-rocket. In doing so he joins the ranks of other, food-bestowing characters like the Cheese Man who shills for Nissan, assaulting people in their homes in order to add cheese to their cups o’ curry. He even has a love interest now. No doubt Dole will do the same and give the Dole Banana Man a female counterpart; someone who he can grope with his sweet, fleshy digits.

I fear what the future holds.

Post tags: Advertising, Crackpot Visionary, Drugs, Horror, Japan, Madness

http://store.dieselsweeties.com/

The end is nigh! This is the last new stuff I'm unleashing on you, dear Internet, until after Christmas.

Zaggy Starbucks is a shirt that I've been working on for over a year and my Christmas gift to myself. (Happy()Sad) Diagram is a masterstroke my friend Ariana made. And people keep asking for "Best Before December 21, 2012" shirts so I brought it back for the season.

Top it off with the half ton of fresh pixel squid and skull socks that just landed on my door step and you've got a party!

http://feeds.penny-arcade.com/~r/pa-mainsite/~3/rB06h0EE1d0/

I’m not sure how the universe has withstood Rich Stevens (DIESEL SWEETIES) and Ariana Osborne (SHIVERING SANDS, this site, designing various things of mine at Avatar) teaming up to produce a t-shirt, of all things… but this is the result.

Available to order now, ships in 1 - 2 weeks.

Simon Reynolds is one of my favourite writers. It’s funny, really: I agree with what he writes maybe half the time, at best, but he says it so fucking well, and in such a way that I always have to think about the subject again.

He’s now doing notes on the decade at the Guardian, beginning with a piece on "beard rock." I was, I admit, hoping for a clue as to why I find Will Oldham so inexplicably creepy, but, you know, it’s a fun piece anyway:

…beardedness is tantamount to a visual rhetoric, almost a form of authentication, as though the band are wearing their music on their faces…

So, one week later. Copies of SHIVERING SANDS are now starting to arrive with people — I found this on Kat Foisy’s blog this morning:

(If you want to send me a photo of you posing with SHIVERING SANDS? Email it to my dump address at warrenellis [at] gmail dot com, along with your website address or twitter ID or whatever, and I’ll run it and your link here)

A week since launch of the book. We’ve sold, I believe, a little over four hundred copies. Given that the production of the book involved 1) me culling from seven years of jabbering and sticking it all into a couple of RTF files 2) Ariana flowing all that into a single file and spending a couple months’ worth of spare moments fiddling with it 3) Ariana uploading the thing, ordering a proof and spending an hour checking it over… we were well into any definition of profit by the end of day one.

It is, of course, the long game that pays off. It’s interesting to look at the first week, but it’s not defining.

A persistent criticism of my interest in POD has been that only writers at my level of cultural awareness can make any kind of success out of it. And some of them will now be saying, well, even Warren Ellis can only move 400 copies in the first week of a POD project. But, for one thing, it is about the long game. For everybody. The book doesn’t go away. And, for another, if I’m not aware enough of you to order that POD project — whose fault is that, really? Because, I’ve got to tell you, I wasn’t born with a book deal in one hand and an exclusive comics contract wrapped around my other flipper. Hell, when I was starting out, there wasn’t even an internet.

SHIVERING SANDS is published through Lulu.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DilbertDailyStrip/~3/SI72zwnll9I/

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-11-11/

http://xkcd.com/661/

http://www.dieselsweeties.com/archive/2412