Kids!

American comics circa 1979:

A generation using Robin as a role model. The horror.

2000AD the same year:

That’s how you grab a kid’s attention. I was seven years old when I started reading 2000AD.

And my favourite panels from The Judge Child Quest the following year:

The Joker was a fucking amateur.

Kafka Las Vegas, Baby!

I worked in book stores for many years. Best job ever. Everyone should work in a good book shop at least once in their life. Writing tiny reviews for customers in store kinda got me into blogging in a roundabout way. I was interviewed recently and thinking back at the crap I used to pull in bookstores made me realise I’ve been playing with social media since at least 1999.

But what I wanted to mention here was book advertising – on the whole it’s a mundane business. Book store advertising? Forget it. I remember when a new Thomas Harris novel came out and one of my colleagues emptied the shop window completely, made and displayed a Hannibal Lecter mask and then arterially sprayed red paint all over the display and the window. The locals thought we’d been targeted by anti-something protesters.

I immediately thought of that when I saw this series of ads (1, 2, 3, 4) for Filigranes, a book store chain in Belgium. Here’s my favourite (click to embiggen):

Kafka Las Vegas

The tag line reads Make your own movie: read a book. The irony is that Kafka Las Vegas should be a movie – or at the very least a heavy metal band.

I haven’t read Kafka in years. Gonna fix that this weekend I think. There should be a short made about a man turning into a bug in a Las Vegas motel though… don’t you think?

Carbon Black says: Find Me

Carbon Black is an Englishman well known for not at all acting like one. Nellie Bly

In 1909 French industrialist, banker and humanitarian Albert Kahn travelled to Japan on business and returned with many photographs of the journey. Having already used his unique peace garden as an example of diverse but unified life he turned his mind to the power of photography. His journey and the sights he captured on film prompted him to begin a new project collecting a photographic record of the entire Earth. He sent photographers to every continent to record images of the planet using the first colour photography, autochrome plates, and early cinematographic equipment. Between 1909 and 1931 they collected 72,000 colour photographs and 183,000 meters of film. These form a unique historical record of 50 countries, known as “The Archives of the Planet”. This endeavour and the resulting beautiful photographs and film were the subject of a BBC documentary series entitled Edwardians in Colour.

The archive is still in storage in Paris. Kahn died a ruined man and is now best remembered for the gardens he left behind rather than the dusty old photographs that are for the most part still locked away in his often overlooked museum. Meanwhile the exact art of capturing colour images using the same technique as Kahn’s photographers has been lost. There are, however, some beautiful examples of the results on Flickr.

In 1909 Kahn travelled from France to New York City via ship. The majority of passengers below decks were hoping to escape persecution and find new lives in America, but held on to centuries old beliefs and carried their superstitions with them. It’s on this journey that the story get a little curious.

Worried about the dangers that new life in America may bring and distressed by dime novel stories and rumours of the most rank kind, something was accidentally set loose aboard the ship. Originally brought about as protector whatever was released proved difficult to control. 16 people died before the ship came to dock in New York City.

By that time Albert Kahn had learned two things; the world was not as easy to collate as he had believed and evil does indeed exist. The only man he’d seen stand up to it was a British traveller with an unlikely name: Carbon Black.

In fact not only did Black face off against what the terrified crew were calling a golem, he scraped what was left of it off his boot, after a confrontation that left the rest of the ship’s contingent afloat in life boats, preferring the unknown dark water than the thing that Black happily met armed with only a single pistol.

The effect on Kahn was catastrophic. He’d been about to embark on a plan to enlighten the world around him, to once and for all show his fellow man that the far flung countries of the world held nothing for Europe to be wary of. He had in mind a grand exhibition that would reveal (and in colour no less) that we were all brothers under the same sky.

And yet before traversing a single ocean he’s been set upon by what he described in his diary as “a pure creature of darkness”. If one existed then there must be more. Suddenly his plan to send photographers out into the world seemed naive and worse still would obviously backfire as soon as his new technology caught one of these “beasts of the fantastic” in its stare.

It took him a week locked in a hotel room to fall over the solution. The Englishman who had so easily put down one menace had revealed himself to be some kind of mercenary. Kahn would hire him as trouble shooter for the many expeditions. As soon as the photographers ran into “something unnatural” then Black would be dispatched to dispose of it. And Kahn would document the destruction for future generations. A dark archive would be created that he would hide away until the world was enlightened enough not to be scared of such things…

And in the meantime his archive of light would speed on that happy day.

Extremely fictionalized events of Kahn and Black’s first encounter can be read in the now sadly very out of print ‘Carbon Black and the Unshaped Form’ (1944). Rumours and stories of Black’s exploits grew in a select circle of adventurers and academics, but the very real threat of a second world war soon dispelled what many deemed to be pure fantasy. By the time pulp authors such as Lester Dent were turning to these rumours for fodder for their own stories, Kahn was dead and Black was missing.

How a man born in a place so civilised could go on to live through so many fantastic encounters all over the globe only to be lost somewhere off the coast of Antarctica is a story that has yet to be told.

Over the last year I’ve been digging a little at a time through the history of Kahn and Black. Now after being in touch with the incredibly helpful people at the Kahn Museum in Paris I believe we may finally answer the plea scrawled in faded black ink by a ship’s telegraph operator. The message of unknown origin is now believed to be the very last words of Carbon Black:

Find me.

Note: This is obviously part of a much larger story, but also a little part of something far more important than the story of a man who may or may not have shot a Jiang Shi in the face. More to follow on all of this. But for now many thanks to the Moblog experts for helping me out with some coordinates for this post. Don’t forget to geolocate this entry.

The New Mediascape

Or How YouTube got its groove back (for me anyway).

These days I jump from one video platform to another and because it was Seesmic that first wooed me to the possibility of online video I’ve tended to ignore YouTube. I’ve just become convinced that this was a mistake. I did have a little alarm bell go off a while ago when I found out about this project to use a community to make a zombie movie. YouTube having a community was news to me. All I ever saw were a handful of good videos, a lot of mess and a truly anti-community inspired comment fueled torrent of badly spelled abuse. And yet here was Bryony tapping into her community on YouTube. I had to wait for Seesmic to come along and get in there early to find something similar.

One of several videos that I did first appreciate through YouTube was The Machine is Us/ing Us. I’ve been following Mike Wesch’s work since, as it taps into the reading I’ve been doing around Ken Robinson (I never bother linking directly to Ken Robinson’s website because ironically it’s hideous and a pain to use), the Network of Networks I’m involved with, the Cool Curve and a small large stack of notes I’ve been making. Today I saw a new video go up on the Digital Ethnography website and it’s a keeper.

It’s not short though. In fact it’s almost an hour long, but trust me. If you only watch one thing today watch An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube. Don’t be put off by the length or title. It’s important, funny and heart warming.

It covers the impact of YouTube and the importance of how we connect, the importance of Creative Commons and self generated organisation as the new model for a distribution network that we’ve created.

It also points out how all that money ($3.6 million) spent on Super Bowl ads was beaten by a guy in his basement in Kansas collaborating with another guy on the Ivory Coast for no money at all. This I think is key to what everyone involved in Web 2.0/New Media/Social Media is attempting to do. It’s not rocket science, it’s simply bringing the right people together at the right time regardless of geogrpahy and timezones, ignoring the traditional routes which usually hemorrhage money.

Mike defines media as the mediating of human relationships and that line alone made me happy to be working in this field. That he went on to talk about networked individualism and the importance of the invisible audience leading to context collapse was just gravy. This is really important observational work into a medium that is largely ignored, treated like traditional TV or just ripped off my marketeers.

Mike understands and more importantly manages to reveal the paradox that with online video everybody is watching at the same time that nobody is there, that the most private becomes the most public and how wonderful that can be. He also offers a very concise explanation of the ‘go die in a fire’ comment storms that put so many people off YouTube.

And despite the length and that this could have been a very traditional style TED conference video, Mike roped in his students and broke the talk up into endearing but important work culled from YouTube itself (and he even finds a way to allow his students some fun, extra credit and thanks).

I decided to forgo the PowerPoint and instead worked with students to prepare over 40 minutes of video for the 55 minute presentation. This is the result:

Crossposted on Network of Networks

Braaaains on YouTube and BBC 3

This is interesting:

This website follows Bryony as she attempts to make the world’s first UGC zombie movie.

What’s a UGC movie?

UGC stands for User Generated Content. That means it’s a film that’s made entirely by contributions from the online community…

So what’s the BBC’s involvement?

The Zombie movie is entirely up to Bryony – we’re just following her as she makes it…

The Beeb are actually doing a bit more than that. By choosing to follow the project and committing to having a documentary by the end of it the BBC are in many ways legitimatising what Paperlillies is up to. At least in the eyes of BBC viewers who think YouTube is nothing but a place to watch old episodes of Doctor Who or ‘that video with the monkey’ (take your pick).

It’s an interesting step for a channel like BBC 3 and I think the correct one. Just recently I watched Adam Buxton’s MeeBOX and while I’ve always enjoyed his work and he’s obviously very in tune with the Internet  this came across as a tad dated and way too obvious. Disturbingly he also suddenly looks a lot like Documentally.

The other show that promised to play in the world I live and work in was Delta Forever:

This was a pilot for a proposed show about an online community whose lives revolve around a very Harry Potterish series of novels. Some things the pilot got absolutely right (the Scottish character defending the original title of the first novel over the bastardised American version rang some serious bells for this Dark Materials fanboy), but the most obvious failure was the idea that these kids needed a visual cue to help them stand out as Internet nerds. The cast had to suffer a tedious amount of OTT makeup. Horrible to watch, which was a shame for the few good performances that got buried. But there was something there that to me at least warranted further viewing and I’d be interested to watch the concept develop if it gets picked up for a series.

That may of course have more to do with the pilot revolving around an advance geek screening of a film that the fans will either love or loathe. Something I have a certain familiarity with…

The zombie project though is an entirely fresher idea. First and foremost this is a project developed by an already popular online community member and something that was set in motion before the Beeb swung a beam on it. I think an organisation as big and respected as the BBC getting involved at this stage of an online madcap idea is very important and the payoff for everyone involved is accumulative.

There is of course the danger that if handled improperly the YouTubers will come off as a little irregular, but to survive on YouTube you need to be pretty thick-skinned so I’m not too worried with that angle. It should be win-win for the Beeb as this kind of thing makes them look web savvy at a time when they need a leg-up in that area. The worry is that they’ll cut corners on this in the way they have with the iPlayer (great concept, horrible realisation – note the two show links above now have nowhere to go which will now instead send you straight for a torrent).

What they could have on their hands is something as vital as say the upcoming We Are Wizards or at the very least an interesting companion piece to it. It also comes at a time when Joss Whedon is putting a fork in this space too.

Oddly enough this seems to be the summer for home-made zombie projects. I’ve been made aware of a small pile of them currently in production with budgets ranging from the very modest to the very respectable. This however is by far the most interesting. The plot for once is the least of my concerns as I’m far more interested in how a community comes together to pull this kind of project off.

It’s the kind of thing that was talked about a lot in the early days of Seesmic but it came to nothing. While some of my more succesful recent projects have been built in a similar way by finding the right people with the right skills in my own social media backyard (which handily stretches across the globe), but nothing quite on this scale.

Getting the right people together to land an interview with Stephen Spielberg is one thing. Beating him at his own game is quite another…

The Cool Curve

Toby Moore‘s Cool Curve presentation is now online:

This is the presentation he gave both at the Tuttle and Reboot from an original concept worked out with David Terrar and David Tebbutt. The video is a cleaned-up version of this talk, but now filmed (properly) by Laura Kidd, further tweaked and distributed just about everywhere by Phil Cambell.

The content of the presentation has been refined through lots of feedback, but this is the first chance to put it in front of as wide an audience as possible.

I’ve been hanging out with the Cool Curve for a couple of months now, testing it on people, catching reactions to it and generally building up a picture of what it covers and where it still needs a little TLC. I’m very interested to track the feedback on this so if you can free up 20 minutes and a coffee please give it a whirl and let me know what you think.

At 19+ minutes it obviously needs editing down and I also think there’s a couple of natural pauses in the flow that will allow us to split the presentation up. The latter part regarding Chris Brogan‘s “conversations are rivers” and how that should be developed feels like it’s going to grow into something that works as a stand alone piece. I’d love to see The Cool Curve refined a little more and given to the guys at Common Craft to play with.

That said, I’m a big fan of Toby’s drawing over powerpoint style and this makes a great jumping off point for conversation.

When I first started talking to DT and Sleepydog about the Cool Curve I was immediately struck by how my own creative (and not so creative) endeavours fitted within the structure. That’s something I want to discuss further as I’m not usually comfortable being pigeon-holed between two axis, but this is such a resilient little idea that it’s hard to dismiss, even for a contrary SOB like myself.

More to come once the video has been digested a little further… (it’s also up on Google Video and Vimeo)

Sir Ken @ the RSA

Sir Ken Robinson was recently given the Benjamin Franklin award by the RSA. They’ve put his acceptance speech online and although it’s a lengthy chunk of time at just under an hour it’s easily the best thing I’ve watched this week. You can watch the full video here.

He takes the opportunity to follow up his stunning talk at TED and again manages to entertain while breaking down barriers and boggling the mind as he goes.

Great stuff.

Photo credit: Sir Ken Robinson by eschipul (CC license)

Everybody Loves Somebody

Brain dumping at the moment.

I’m researching a lot of varied stuff, but rather than just dump stuff without explanation (which is what I used to do a lot) I’ll try and make some of this interesting for you poor bastards stuck on that side of the screen.

Today I’ve been listening to a lot of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, dipped into All In A Night’s Work, read up on the female participants of the Rat Pack and found this photo of Dino with a young Mia Farrow and the tragic Sharon Tate:

Fuck.

I also did a little digging into the history of the USO and then shoehorned in the steampunk robotic version of Toshiro Mifune from Samurai 7 and that very expensive diving helmet that was in Wired a month or so ago.

I’m working on a comic project that jumps titles from Slingers to Ratpackers depending what mood I’m in. If you’re a 2000AD fan think the satire of Robo-Hunter with Rogue Trooper as a backdrop.

This is with a little luck (and a lot of time and effort) the proof of concept that will kick start something bigger. I’m working on this with some very cool people and I’ve turned down a few gigs to make time for it so I’m hoping things will fall into place relatively quickly.

Famous last words.

Mentioning it at such an early stage is just a way of putting that first pin in the board and also a way to explain why I’m dumping stuff like this here:

But there will be a lot of the usual crap too.

Tomorrow, for example, I’ll have the details of a bloggers/twitter screening of City of Men I’m organising.

And I’ll probably talk about Oliver Reed a bit too. Business as usual.

Whedon’s Speed

Speed is a great movie.

Shut up. Dennis Hopper just one hair away from revisiting Frank Booth, explosions galore, FUCKING JEFF DANIELS and Keanu the machine – in his prime. Watch this and Point Break as a double bill and you can just about forgive those Matrix sequels. It’s also still the best thing that Sandra Bullock has been in (Bionic Showdown included)*.

Joss Whedon ‘interfered’ in what would have been just Die Hard on a bus without his uncredited input. A key change was Alan Ruck’s character being rewritten from a carbon copy of Ellis (“Hans, babe, put away the gun“) in Die Hard to the wonder struck tourist that almost falls under the speeding wheels of the rescue vehicle at the airport. Interestingly Whedon rewrote the character to be an audience favourite and then went ahead and killed him anyway. Whedon is a bad bad man.

The one chance I got to put a question to him in person I asked if killing off much loved characters was something that came easy. “Have you ever seen my stuff?” was the reply.

We’ll take that as read.

Now, I’ve seen Speed many times, but this time what really struck me was something in the final part on the subway train. I’ve always felt this sequence was needlessly tacked on and sure enough it was very much a last minute addition to the script and every time I’ve seen it it manages to push the movie from ludicrous-but-enjoyable to just the wrong side of dumb. However, this time my favourite part of the movie was after Hopper has been dispatched and Jack and Annie realise that those handcuffs just aren’t coming off. Jack has a chance to leave Annie, but of course this is SPEED so instead he just pushes the throttle higher.

And this is where things get interesting.

He puts his arms around her, gets between her and the cuffs and they sit down and wait for the thing to derail. There’s a small quiet moment in the movie just before things go all kablooy for the last time as they shoot along the tunnel holding onto each other as the lights flicker over head and I fucking loved that scene.

I wonder if that (last minute as it was) was another Whedon addition. It’s a great scene, Jack’s frustration at not being able to kick the pole from its fitting gives way to quiet acceptance as Annie pleads with him to leave and once the dust settles and you hear her joyous “You didn’t leave me!” you just know it’s the perfect ending.

Then they went and made Speed 2.

Fuckwits.

*Actually she’s great in Demolition Man too. Shut up. (Oh and the crappy screencap above is actually the results of me photographing the TV. Haven’t looked into screen capture from Blu-ray yet)

Something Whedon this way comes

Not one but two slices of Joss Whedon on the way. Dollhouse is the much talked up kickass girl series ala Buffy meets Alias with a little bit of Bionic Woman by way of Joe 90:

I loves me some Whedon, but I already feel like I’ve seen this, bemoaned its early cancellation, bought the DVD box set and am now waiting for the movie. If anyone can super-bitch slap me from left-field though it’s Whedon so I’ll put the over familiarity down to a weak trailer.

But this one has me super excited from the get go:


Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

Read more about it here, but if you’re interested in not only how new media disrupts the old, but also more importantly how to adapt to the new creative landscape that’s fast approaching then you may wanna keep a close eye on how Dr Horrible’s Sing-along Blog fares…

Fruit Fuckers and clown crotches

Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode I

Not being a gamer I’m not a huge fan of Penny Arcade, but I respect the “two douches from Spokane, Washington” behind the strip. I was re-reading an old copy of Wired and found an over view of the strip, its creators and the (then) forthcoming game Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode I.

What jumped out at me about the story was that Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins had no idea what they were sitting on even after they realised they were getting a million page views a month. Now it’s around 55 million page views a month. That’s staggering.

Happily now that the guys are creating their own games they’re still working outside of the more regular model and doing things their own way. The game, which seems to have more in common with Lovecraft and robots than the strip is released on a number of formats via episodic download only. Interesting.

“This isn’t a licensed deal like you typically do with a game,” says DeYoung. “Mike, who does all the art for the comic, is doing all the concept art. He has designed the characters and their look, designed the look and feel of all the levels in the game. Jerry has done all the writing, so that includes authoring the cut scenes, writing the overarching story, and writing all the interactive dialog. It’s authentic PA humor.” (via)

Gaming for me right now is too much of a time suck, but I’ll probably download the 1st episode because I’m interested in seeing if the guys have managed to pull it off. Normally anything that’s licensed (from a movie, a TV show or a comic) is fucking awful for a number of reasons. I’m really interested in tracking how something that is pushed into the world with a little love fares better than the usual crap that is rushed out to fleece the fans.

Shifting

Sometime in the last year ‘did you know’ became ‘you should know’ thanks to Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod’s Shift Happens presentation:

(That’s a slightly updated version – here’s the original).

The video does a great job of making the audience sit upright, but who is that audience? America? Perhaps. The presentation was originally for only 150 teachers in Colorado. So, the West? Certainly.

There’s a jolt around the 45 second mark when we’re thrown back to 1900 and Great Britain was the centre of the world. Do You Know? Asks questions in order to show that we have some work to do if we’re not going to get left behind again and pushed further back to become a footnote in someone else’s history.

It’s the ‘someone else’ aspect of the presentation that alarms me more than the statistics.

The overwhelming message as I hear it is that the near future is going to be a seriously interesting place to spend our time. For others, however, it’s all about not being swept away by India and China. I prefer to take the broader view that it’s remarkable that the human race is pushing forwards so quickly, but if India and China are going to be pioneering so much of that next frontier then we need to find a way to move our insular 20th century burdened brains towards a 21st century global perspective.

It’s not them and us anymore. It’s simply us.

Note: The randomly chosen frame that YouTube choose to represent the video speaks volumes. MySpace? No mention of Facebook at all.

GTA vs GTD

I’m still hovering around the purchase of a PS£ and GTA IV. I’m actually looking for a way to justify getting the game. I saw this a couple of days ago on Ivan’s blog which reminded me of something I saw in Borders the week the game was released:

Best book review ever

Another week thinking it through I think…

Out in the Blue

More Black Swannage:

Sir Francis Bacon commented that the most important advances are the least predictable ones, those “lying out of the path of the imagination”. Bacon was not the last intellectual to point this out. The idea keeps popping up, yet then rapidly dying out. Almost half a century ago the best selling novelist Arthur Koestler wrote an entire book about it, aptly called The Sleepwalkers. It describes discoverers as sleepwalkers stumbling upon results and not realising what they have in their hands.

I don’t like the idea of being a sleepwalker. I don’t really like the idea of sleeping full stop. But this accidental discoverer concept is very interesting right about now (and always has been – even when out of vogue).

I’ve been doing a lot of talking with Toby Moores of late which has lead to us working together on a number of ideas. Tomorrow we’re meeting at the Creative Coffee Club with more like-minded folk to talk about creating a Network of Networks. Come along if you’re free and in London – the details are here.

What interests me about Toby and relates indirectly to what Taleb is saying about inadvertent discoveries is the space we work in. Toby likes to think of traditional media as self contained silos – I prefer to call them islands. We have a slightly different vocabulary but we both end up at the same conclusion. Being secluded is not healthy.

This buildings of walls, these self imposed sanctions are ridiculously short sighted, but they do provide a fun space between these islands and silos for some of us to work in. Toby’s company for example, found a way for the music industry silo and the gaming industry fortress to overlap slightly. And everyone benefits. I’m doing my damnedest to bring the film industry kicking and screaming into the social media space. We both operate in the limbo between companies that is often seen as just that. A no mans land.

Here be monsters/flat earth etc… you can see why I prefer the islands analogy. There are even pirates and sharks out here, but the most interesting place to be is on the speedy little boats that operate out in the blue. And like Black Swans every now and again a couple of Black Ships drop anchor offshore and things change forever.

The important thing is to remember what Taleb warns about. There’s a lot of cool stuff out here. It’s difficult to instantly see the benefits of some of this stuff especially when great new apps, platforms and indeed people are added to the mix every day. The trick is not to get sleepy eyed.

Staying awake is a skill.

Better than a Jetpack

Future travel plans aside I wish I’d been in Toronto on Saturday for this:

Steven Shaviro’s presentation “’You Will Never Own a Jetpack’: Warren Ellis’ Science Fiction Comics”:

This paper looks at the science fiction comics of Warren Ellis: Transmetropolitan, Global Frequency, and the currently ongoing series Doktor Sleepless. These comics are about the social effects of new technologies. They bring us a wavering and uncertain vision of a highly technologized future, and ponder the possibilities of change in a world pervaded by a sense that the future itself has largely been played out.

I was lucky enough to meet and catch a talk by Steven Shaviro at Goldsmiths a while back. Parts of my brain still hurt.

Warren Ellis is partly responsible for the way I look at and more importantly use the Internet. I met Warren four years ago at what I think was London’s first flash mob. I also interviewed him a while back when Desolation Jones first came out. I’m not gonna mention the Japanese ass eels.

Meeting Warren (kinda indirectly) lead me to hanging out with John Rogers who still makes my fucking head spin (and for some reason known only to him continues to send too much traffic my way by mixing my name with Warren, David Brin, John Scalzi, Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow over in the sidebar on Kung Fu Monkey). He of course worked above and beyond the call on the doomed Global Frequency TV show (giving, I think, Michelle Forbes a push into BSG along the way).

Warren’s Global Frequency is still a touchstone for me and the way I work. This month I finally get to work on a project that has Miranda Zero as a kind of guardian angel.

Oh… Warren was the one who called me “nine kinds of wrong” and if you ever read the twisted stuff that Warren comes up with you’ll understand that that’s why it’s on my Moo card. Likewise it was John who outed me as a “tech hipster“. I think those lines in conjunction with Saying The Wrong Thing have landed me a lot of work.

I probably owe the bastards 10%

But seriously, with these guys still churning stuff out we don’t need no stinkin’ jet packs…

We were directors once…

… and young:

The new trailer for Indiana Jones & The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull popped up before Iron Man on Friday night and it’s the first preview in ages that had the audience cheering through it. There was some of this back before Phantom Menace but the demographic for that was always skewed away from the women folk, who just rolled their eyes at the nerds they were with.

Indy has a more unisex appeal.

In fact just today over lunch it was remarked to me that there’s quite a lot of expectation laid on Harrison’s shoulders from gals eager to see him don that fedora one last time…

For myself the excitement is growing after the initial ‘meh’ of the first trailer. There’s more than a glimmer of the old magic in trailer number two and I’m already tapping into a rich vein of fan excitement over this one.

Just watching the Twitter time line get all nostalgic over a screening of Raiders was a good gauge of the Indy love out there.

Fingers crossed…

Gag me with a spoon

My mother tells this story that when I first went to school, I thought I was going to help the teachers. I didn’t realise I was going to get educated.

Moon Unit Zappa

Paint it Black

Slowly building to something that spans numerous projects and oddly enough the colour black is offering a nice meat hook.

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Ships that signaled an end to Japanese isolation in 1853 and now (thanks to a nod on Twitter by Ben) Black Sheep:

We gave the black sheep a chance to prove their theories, and we changed the way a number of things are done here…

Great article that. Go read it.